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Local Actions and Campaigns: Good Anti-War Calendars: Next BAUAW Meeting: |
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Thursday, December 30, 2004
BAUAW NEWSLETTER-THURSDAY, DEC. 30, 2004
NEXT BAY AREA UNITED AGAINST WAR MEETING:
SATURDAY, JANUARY 8, 11AM
CENTRO DEL PUEBLO
474 VALENCIA STREET
(NEAR 16TH STREET IN SAN FRANCISCO)
Message to the Antiwar Movement
From Carole Seligman, BAUAW
In a message dated 12/29/04 4:09:45 PM, caroseligman
writes:
"We should be in the streets demanding billions for relief,
not a penny for war!
ESPECIALLY as all predictions are that the death toll could
double without adequate relief. Tens of thousands of lives
could be saved.
We could call on the international antiwar groups who linked
up twice around international antiwar days to call coordinated
pickets at every US embassy demanding transfer of funds from
bombing Fallujah [and the war on Iraq as a whole] to tsunami
relief, and on the same day(s) picket Federal buildings around
the U.S."
[Note: the above is a section of an email sent to me with
exactly what I think we should do. The national antiwar
organizations could set it in motion on an emergency basis
and I'll just bet that antiwar people all over the U.S. and the
world will adopt it as their own and build it actively.
Carole Seligman]
---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
STOP THE WAR ON IRAQ! BRING OUR TROOPS HOME NOW!
ALL OUT JANUARY 20TH, 5:00 P.M., CIVIC CENTER, S.F.
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Kkk1928.jpg
This link brings you to a photo of the KKK marching down Pennsylvania
Avenue in Washington, DC in 1928. Evidently they were able to get
a permit.
(With many thanks to Kwame Somburu for supplying the link. This site
has a plethora of information about the KKK.... Bonnie Weinstein, Bay
Area United Against War)
The U.S. government is not allowing antiwar/anti-Bush protestors
onto Pennsylvania Ave. along the inauguration route Jan. 20th.
We have a constitutional right to protest the inauguration. BAUAW
encourages all to show up in DC and come to Pennsylvania Avenue
with your signs and banners and express your opposition to Bush
and to the War.
We demand equal access along the rout for all. We have a right to
protest our government or any of its official representatives.
Nothing gives the government the right to disallow legal and
peaceful protest.
If you can't go to DC, come out Jan. 20, 5pm, Civic Center, SF. in
solidarity with all protestors in Washington and everywhere who
oppose this war.
We are encouraging everyone to participate somehow by wearing
buttons and signs at work, at school and on the bus; hold
banners at freeway entrances, and crowded shopping areas etc.
on Jan. 20. Students should hold rallies and march to the
Civic Center.
Come to our next meeting and pick a place to flyer or table
for Jan. 20 or hold a sign during the day, on Jan. 20 if you can.
---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
Let's Hit the Streets
To Defend Abortion Rights!
Saturday, January 22
Emboldened rightwing abortion foes have had the nerve to
announce a march in San Francisco on the anniversary of the historic
Roe v. Wade decision! Show them that San Francisco is
a reproductive rights town -- save the date and plan to
attend a counter demonstration!
What is needed in response is a multi-issue, militant, united
front of women, people of all colors, queers, immigrants, workers
and everyone targeted by the rightwing to show that the anti-
abortionists are not welcome in San Francisco!
Make your opinion heard!
Details of assembly time and place will be announced soon.
---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
PICTURES OF WAR
PLEASE ACCESS:
** Dahr Jamail's Iraq Dispatches **
** http://dahrjamailiraq.com **
I have obtained the originals of the photos I recently posted which were
taken from inside Fallujah.
These are of much higher quality.
Some of the comments have been updated, and there are some additional
pictures added which I did not have before.
http://dahrjamailiraq.com/gallery/view_album.php?set_albumName=album28&page=
1
More writing, photos and commentary at http://dahrjamailiraq.com
You can visit http://dahrjamailiraq.com/email_list/ to subscribe or
unsubscribe to the email list.
(c)2004 Dahr Jamail.
All images and text are protected by United States and international
copyright law. If you would like to reprint Dahr's Dispatches on the
web, you need to include this copyright notice and a prominent link
to the DahrJamailIraq.com website. Any other use of images and
text including, but not limited to, reproduction, use on another
website, copying and printing requires the permission of Dahr
Jamail. Of course, feel free to forward Dahr's dispatches via email.
Iraq_Dispatches mailing list
http://lists.dahrjamailiraq.com/mailman/listinfo/iraq_dispatches
http://dahrjamailiraq.com/gallery/
view_album.php?set_albumName=album28&page=1
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/coalitionforfreethoughtinmedia/message/26138
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/coalitionforfreethoughtinmedia/message/26138
Virginion Pilot via AP - Photos - click here
http://home.hamptonroads.com/stories/story.cfm?story=79598&ran=187050
---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
ITALIAN.QUEER.DANGEROUS
a one-man show featuring Tommi Avicolli Mecca
directed by Francesca Prada
(The most important thing is for folks to make reservations ASAP.
Seating is limited. Please take a moment to call 554-0402 if you
plan to come to the show.)
JANUARY 14-29 (Friday and Saturday nights only: 14, 15; 21, 22; 28, 29)
JON SIMS CENTER, 1519 Mission/between Van Ness and 11th
8pm, $5-10 sliding scale (no one turned away)
seating is limited, for reservations: 415-554-0402
to volunteer to help with the show, call 415-552-6031
Through monologue and spoken word, well-known San Francisco queer
activist and writer Tommi Avicolli Mecca tells his story of growing up in
South Philly's working-class Little Italy. At age 19, fired up with new
pride in being gay, he came out to the world--and his traditional
Roman Catholic southern Italian famiglia--on a TV talk show. The
rest is history, and the subject of this performance.
---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
SATURDAY, JANUARY 8, 11AM
CENTRO DEL PUEBLO
474 VALENCIA STREET
(NEAR 16TH STREET IN SAN FRANCISCO)
Message to the Antiwar Movement
From Carole Seligman, BAUAW
In a message dated 12/29/04 4:09:45 PM, caroseligman
writes:
"We should be in the streets demanding billions for relief,
not a penny for war!
ESPECIALLY as all predictions are that the death toll could
double without adequate relief. Tens of thousands of lives
could be saved.
We could call on the international antiwar groups who linked
up twice around international antiwar days to call coordinated
pickets at every US embassy demanding transfer of funds from
bombing Fallujah [and the war on Iraq as a whole] to tsunami
relief, and on the same day(s) picket Federal buildings around
the U.S."
[Note: the above is a section of an email sent to me with
exactly what I think we should do. The national antiwar
organizations could set it in motion on an emergency basis
and I'll just bet that antiwar people all over the U.S. and the
world will adopt it as their own and build it actively.
Carole Seligman]
---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
STOP THE WAR ON IRAQ! BRING OUR TROOPS HOME NOW!
ALL OUT JANUARY 20TH, 5:00 P.M., CIVIC CENTER, S.F.
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Kkk1928.jpg
This link brings you to a photo of the KKK marching down Pennsylvania
Avenue in Washington, DC in 1928. Evidently they were able to get
a permit.
(With many thanks to Kwame Somburu for supplying the link. This site
has a plethora of information about the KKK.... Bonnie Weinstein, Bay
Area United Against War)
The U.S. government is not allowing antiwar/anti-Bush protestors
onto Pennsylvania Ave. along the inauguration route Jan. 20th.
We have a constitutional right to protest the inauguration. BAUAW
encourages all to show up in DC and come to Pennsylvania Avenue
with your signs and banners and express your opposition to Bush
and to the War.
We demand equal access along the rout for all. We have a right to
protest our government or any of its official representatives.
Nothing gives the government the right to disallow legal and
peaceful protest.
If you can't go to DC, come out Jan. 20, 5pm, Civic Center, SF. in
solidarity with all protestors in Washington and everywhere who
oppose this war.
We are encouraging everyone to participate somehow by wearing
buttons and signs at work, at school and on the bus; hold
banners at freeway entrances, and crowded shopping areas etc.
on Jan. 20. Students should hold rallies and march to the
Civic Center.
Come to our next meeting and pick a place to flyer or table
for Jan. 20 or hold a sign during the day, on Jan. 20 if you can.
---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
Let's Hit the Streets
To Defend Abortion Rights!
Saturday, January 22
Emboldened rightwing abortion foes have had the nerve to
announce a march in San Francisco on the anniversary of the historic
Roe v. Wade decision! Show them that San Francisco is
a reproductive rights town -- save the date and plan to
attend a counter demonstration!
What is needed in response is a multi-issue, militant, united
front of women, people of all colors, queers, immigrants, workers
and everyone targeted by the rightwing to show that the anti-
abortionists are not welcome in San Francisco!
Make your opinion heard!
Details of assembly time and place will be announced soon.
---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
PICTURES OF WAR
PLEASE ACCESS:
** Dahr Jamail's Iraq Dispatches **
** http://dahrjamailiraq.com **
I have obtained the originals of the photos I recently posted which were
taken from inside Fallujah.
These are of much higher quality.
Some of the comments have been updated, and there are some additional
pictures added which I did not have before.
http://dahrjamailiraq.com/gallery/view_album.php?set_albumName=album28&page=
1
More writing, photos and commentary at http://dahrjamailiraq.com
You can visit http://dahrjamailiraq.com/email_list/ to subscribe or
unsubscribe to the email list.
(c)2004 Dahr Jamail.
All images and text are protected by United States and international
copyright law. If you would like to reprint Dahr's Dispatches on the
web, you need to include this copyright notice and a prominent link
to the DahrJamailIraq.com website. Any other use of images and
text including, but not limited to, reproduction, use on another
website, copying and printing requires the permission of Dahr
Jamail. Of course, feel free to forward Dahr's dispatches via email.
Iraq_Dispatches mailing list
http://lists.dahrjamailiraq.com/mailman/listinfo/iraq_dispatches
http://dahrjamailiraq.com/gallery/
view_album.php?set_albumName=album28&page=1
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/coalitionforfreethoughtinmedia/message/26138
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/coalitionforfreethoughtinmedia/message/26138
Virginion Pilot via AP - Photos - click here
http://home.hamptonroads.com/stories/story.cfm?story=79598&ran=187050
---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
ITALIAN.QUEER.DANGEROUS
a one-man show featuring Tommi Avicolli Mecca
directed by Francesca Prada
(The most important thing is for folks to make reservations ASAP.
Seating is limited. Please take a moment to call 554-0402 if you
plan to come to the show.)
JANUARY 14-29 (Friday and Saturday nights only: 14, 15; 21, 22; 28, 29)
JON SIMS CENTER, 1519 Mission/between Van Ness and 11th
8pm, $5-10 sliding scale (no one turned away)
seating is limited, for reservations: 415-554-0402
to volunteer to help with the show, call 415-552-6031
Through monologue and spoken word, well-known San Francisco queer
activist and writer Tommi Avicolli Mecca tells his story of growing up in
South Philly's working-class Little Italy. At age 19, fired up with new
pride in being gay, he came out to the world--and his traditional
Roman Catholic southern Italian famiglia--on a TV talk show. The
rest is history, and the subject of this performance.
---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
Tuesday, December 28, 2004
BAUAW NEWSLETTER-TUESDAY, DEC. 28, 2004
NEXT BAY AREA UNITED AGAINST WAR MEETING:
SATURDAY, JANUARY 8, 11AM
CENTRO DEL PUEBLO
474 VALENCIA STREET
(NEAR 16TH STREET IN SAN FRANCISCO)
---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
STOP THE WAR ON IRAQ! BRING OUR TROOPS HOME NOW!
ALL OUT JANUARY 20TH, 5:00 P.M., CIVIC CENTER, S.F.
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Kkk1928.jpg
This link brings you to a photo of the KKK marching down Pennsylvania
Avenue in Washington, DC in 1928. Evidently they were able to get
a permit.
(With many thanks to Kwame Somburu for supplying the link. This site
has a plethora of information about the KKK.... Bonnie Weinstein,
Bay Area United Against War)
The U.S. government is not allowing antiwar/anti-Bush protestors
onto Pennsylvania Ave. along the inauguration route Jan. 20th.
We have a constitutional right to protest the inauguration. BAUAW
encourages all to show up in DC and come to Pennsylvania Avenue
with your signs and banners and express your opposition to Bush
and to the War.
We demand equal access along the rout for all. We have a right to
protest our government or any of its official representatives.
Nothing gives the government the right to disallow legal and
peaceful protest.
If you can't go to DC, come out Jan. 20, 5pm, Civic Center, SF. in
solidarity with all protestors in Washington and everywhere who
oppose this war.
We are encouraging everyone to participate somehow by wearing
buttons and signs at work, at school and on the bus; hold banners
at freeway entrances, and crowded shopping areas etc. on Jan. 20.
Students should hold rallies and march to the Civic Center.
Come to our next meeting and pick a place to flyer or table for
Jan. 20 or hold a sign during the day, on Jan. 20 if you can.
---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
Mass Mailing for January 20th Counter-Inaugural
Tonight, Tuesday, December 28, we will have a mass mailing for
Jan. 20th a potluck dinner at the ANSWER office at 2489 Mission St,
Rm 30 in San Franciso. The mailing will start at 1pm; we will eat at
6pm and continue the mailing through the evening.
To subscribe to the list, send a message to:
>
---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
Let's Hit the Streets
To Defend Abortion Rights!
Saturday, January 22
Emboldened rightwing abortion foes have had the nerve to announce
a march in San Francisco on the anniversary of the historic Roe v. Wade
decision! Show them that San Francisco is a reproductive rights town --
save the date and plan to attend a counter demonstration!
What is needed in response is a multi-issue, militant, united front of
women, people of all colors, queers, immigrants, workers and everyone
targeted by the rightwing to show that the anti-abortionists are not
welcome in San Francisco!
Make your opinion heard!
Details of assembly time and place will be announced soon.
---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
PICTURES OF WAR
PLEASE ACCESS:
** Dahr Jamail's Iraq Dispatches **
** http://dahrjamailiraq.com **
I have obtained the originals of the photos I recently posted which were
taken from inside Fallujah.
These are of much higher quality.
Some of the comments have been updated, and there are some additional
pictures added which I did not have before.
http://dahrjamailiraq.com/gallery/view_album.php?set_albumName=album28&page=
1
More writing, photos and commentary at http://dahrjamailiraq.com
You can visit http://dahrjamailiraq.com/email_list/ to subscribe or
unsubscribe to the email list.
(c)2004 Dahr Jamail.
All images and text are protected by United States and international
copyright law. If you would like to reprint Dahr's Dispatches on the
web, you need to include this copyright notice and a prominent link
to the DahrJamailIraq.com website. Any other use of images and
text including, but not limited to, reproduction, use on another
website, copying and printing requires the permission of Dahr Jamail.
Of course, feel free to forward Dahr's dispatches via email.
Iraq_Dispatches mailing list
http://lists.dahrjamailiraq.com/mailman/listinfo/iraq_dispatches
http://dahrjamailiraq.com/gallery/
view_album.php?set_albumName=album28&page=1
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/coalitionforfreethoughtinmedia/message/26138
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/coalitionforfreethoughtinmedia/message/26138
Virginion Pilot via AP - Photos - click here
http://home.hamptonroads.com/stories/story.cfm?story=79598&ran=187050
---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
ITALIAN.QUEER.DANGEROUS
a one-man show featuring Tommi Avicolli Mecca
directed by Francesca Prada
(The most important thing is for folks to make reservations ASAP.
Seating is limited. Please take a moment to call 554-0402 if you plan
to come to the show.)
JANUARY 14-29 (Friday and Saturday nights only: 14, 15; 21, 22; 28, 29)
JON SIMS CENTER, 1519 Mission/between Van Ness and 11th
8pm, $5-10 sliding scale (no one turned away)
seating is limited, for reservations: 415-554-0402
to volunteer to help with the show, call 415-552-6031
Through monologue and spoken word, well-known San Francisco
queer activist and writer Tommi Avicolli Mecca tells his story of
growing up in South Philly's working-class Little Italy. At age 19,
fired up with new pride in being gay, he came out to the world--
and his traditional Roman Catholic southern Italian famiglia--on
a TV talk show. The rest is history, and the subject of this performance.
---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
1) Rebels Strike Iraqi Forces After Bin Laden Call
By Aimer al-Aimery
TIKRIT, Iraq (Reuters)
Tue Dec 28, 2004 09:20 AM ET
http://www.reuters.com/newsArticle.jhtml?type=topNews&storyID=7192277&src=eD
ialog/GetContent§ion=news
2) Asia Struggles with Tsunami Death, Destruction
By David Fox
Tue Dec 28, 2004 07:32 AM ET
http://www.reuters.com/newsArticle.jhtml?type=topNews&storyID=7191565&src=eD
ialog/GetContent§ion=news
3) U.S. to Pledge $15 Million for Tsunami Aid
WASHINGTON (Reuters)
Tue Dec 28, 2004 12:42 AM ET
http://www.reuters.com/newsArticle.jhtml?type=topNews&storyID=7188968&src=eD
ialog/GetContent§ion=news
[With almost 40,000 deaths, so far in Asia, the U.S. government is
willing to spend a paltry $15 million for Tsunami Aid. Yet the U.S.
has spent $200+ billion to kill over 100,000 Iraqi's in their quest
for oil!...bw]
4) Israeli Missile Hits Car, Militants Escape
GAZA (Reuters)
Tue Dec 28, 2004 08:13 AM ET
http://www.reuters.com/newsArticle.jhtml?type=topNews&storyID=7191853&src=eD
ialog/GetContent§ion=news
5) US, Britain holding 10,000 prisoners in Iraq
Last Update: Tuesday, December 28, 2004. 11:42am (AEDT)
ABC News Online
http://www.abc.net.au/news/newsitems/200412/s1273053.htm
6) Homeland Security education at Community Colleges
A consortium of community colleges in various states across
the country are planning to offer programs in homeland
security leading to professional certificates in that area.
7) COLLEGES LAUNCH NATIONAL HOMELAND SECURITY EFFORT
First-Response Experts to Lead Coordinating Task Force
"A consortium of community colleges in various states across
the country are planning to offer programs in homeland
security leading to professional certificates in that area..."
8) Supermarket Giants Crush Central American Farmers
THE FOOD CHAIN | SURVIVAL OF THE BIGGEST
By CELIA W. DUGGER
December 28, 2004
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/12/28/international/americas/28guatemala.html?ex
=1105243990&ei=1&en=31a0faebf603a8ca
9) Being Sold a Bill of Goods: (very interesting...bw)
10) How Nonprofit Careerism Derailed the "Revolution"
Greens and Greenbacks
Counterpunch, December 27, 2004
By MICHAEL DONNELLY
full:
http://www.counterpunch.org/donnelly12272004.html
11) Bob Herbert: How the Iraq tragedy is hitting home
Bob Herbert The New York Times
Monday, December 27, 2004
http://www.iht.com/articles/2004/12/26/opinion/edherb.html
12) A Third of the Dead in Undersea Quake Are Said to Be Children
By SETH MYDANS
COLOMBO, Sri Lanka
December 28, 2004
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/12/28/international/asia/28CND_quake.html?hp&ex=
1104296400&en=eee9dda7fec47a7a&ei=5094&partner=homepage
13) That Line at the Ferrari Dealer? It's Bonus Season on Wall Street
By JENNY ANDERSON
December 28, 2004
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/12/28/business/28bonus.html?hp&ex=1104296400&en=
9dbbb1a2157e9ffa&ei=5094&partner=homepage
14) AIN'T WE GOT FUN?
Words by Gus Kahn and Raymond B. Egan
Music by Richard Whiting,1921
http://www.rienzihills.com/SING/aintwegotfun.htm
---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
1) Rebels Strike Iraqi Forces After Bin Laden Call
By Aimer al-Aimery
TIKRIT, Iraq (Reuters)
Tue Dec 28, 2004 09:20 AM ET
http://www.reuters.com/newsArticle.jhtml?type=topNews&storyID=7192277&src=eD
ialog/GetContent§ion=news
TIKRIT, Iraq (Reuters) - Insurgents overran a police post near Saddam
Hussein's home town on Tuesday, hauled 12 men outside and shot
them in a dramatic show of force, a day after Osama bin Laden declared
holy war on the U.S.-backed election.
The dawn massacre in Tikrit, where the guerrillas also blew up the
police station, was the bloodiest in a spate of attacks in Iraq's Sunni
minority heartlands north of Baghdad; at least five other policemen
were killed and several National Guards.
In Samarra, U.S. forces imposed an immediate daytime curfew after
an attack on a police station and a car bomb attack on a U.S. convoy,
residents said. A suicide car bomber failed in a bid to assassinate
a National Guard general in Baghdad.
The timing of the attacks and broadcast of the al Qaeda leader's
audiotape seemed coincidental but together they racked up the
pressure on Iraqi voters to stay at home on Jan. 30 and seemed
aimed to instil fear in Iraq's new security forces.
Both have grave implications for U.S. prospects in Iraq.
Bin Laden's call for a boycott of the election and his endorsement
of Islamist ally Abu Musab al-Zarqawi's campaign of bombing and
kidnap will find few willing supporters in Iraq. But the threat of
being killed will put many off voting anyway.
The most prominent party from Saddam's long dominant Sunni
minority already pulled out of the election on Monday, saying
violence in Sunni areas meant the vote could not be fair.
The chances have risen that an assembly will be elected
that gives Shi'ites an exaggerated majority, and so finds
little legitimacy among Sunnis. That will upset Washington's
hopes for a representative government that can handle its own
security.
Security may also have to remain in U.S. hands if Iraqi
forces succumb to the relentless intimidation of the insurgents.
EXECUTION-STYLE KILLINGS
Hours after the purported bin Laden audiotape was broadcast
on Al Jazeera television, calling anyone who voted an
"infidel," gunmen swarmed over the Mukashifa police compound,
just south of Tikrit, after dawn, police and a U.S. military
spokesman said.
Rounding up the dozen officers in the compound, they shot
them execution-style, gunning down one who tried to flee, a
police source told Reuters. They then blew up the station.
Five other policemen were killed in four other attacks
south of Tikrit around the same time. At Baquba, northeast of
Baghdad, a suicide car bomber killed five people and wounded
22, most of them National Guards attending the scene of an
earlier bomb.
"Jihad in Iraq is a duty and shirking it is baseless," a
voice, apparently bin Laden's, said, calling also for financial
contributions to flow in to back Zarqawi's al Qaeda operations.
"Happy is he who takes part in this war with his wealth or
his body," he said. "As ... the expenses of al Qaeda in Iraq
are 200,000 euros ($272,800) a week, not counting the expense
of other groups."
At Samarra, where clashes have resumed since a major U.S.
offensive in October, two civilians died and eight were wounded
when a suicide car bomber hit a U.S. convoy, witnesses said.
A policeman was killed and four wounded when rebels then
attacked a police station in broad daylight. U.S. vehicles and
mosque minarets announced an immediate daytime curfew.
At Sineeya, near the northern oil refining town of Baiji,
the town council resigned after the assassination of its
leader.
POWELL CAUTION
The day's bloodshed was a reminder of the potency of the
alliance between international Sunni Islamists, like Zarqawi
and Iraqi nationalists from the 20-percent Sunni Arab minority,
who see elections handing power to the 60-percent Shi'ite
community.
If Sunni areas fail to vote, Secretary of State Colin
Powell said the resulting assembly should at least give a nod
to the Sunni minority when it appoints a new government: "For
the government to be representative and for the government to
be effective, the transitional national assembly would
certainly have to take into account the ethnic mix," Powell
said.
U.S. officials, including Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld
on a Christmas visit to soldiers in Iraq last week, stress the
need to expand and improve Iraq's security forces as a means of
ensuring U.S. troops, now numbering 150,000, can go home.
But the performance of Iraqi forces has been patchy and
they are prone to infiltration by militants like the suicide
bomber who killed 21 people in a U.S. mess hall in Mosul a week
ago -- the bloodiest single incident of the war for the Americans.
Large, paramilitary assaults on police posts have become a
feature of the increasingly sophisticated insurgency in recent
months. In the northern city of Mosul, most of the U.S.-trained
police fled and many stations were destroyed last month while
U.S. forces were fighting in the rebel bastion of Falluja.
That has left Iraq's third largest city in near anarchy,
making elections there highly problematic.
The attack on Falluja was intended to quell the insurgency
before the election. But though statistics are not easily
available, rebel attacks appear to have picked up after a lull.
(Additional reporting by Sabah al-Bazee in Samarra, Faris
al-Mehdawi in Baquba and Khaled Yacoub Oweis and Alastair
Macdonald in Baghdad)
($1=.7332 Euro)
(c) Reuters 2004
---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
2) Asia Struggles with Tsunami Death, Destruction
By David Fox
Tue Dec 28, 2004 07:32 AM ET
http://www.reuters.com/newsArticle.jhtml?type=topNews&storyID=7191565&src=eD
ialog/GetContent§ion=news
GALLE, Sri Lanka (Reuters) - Survivors in seven countries
on the shores of the Indian Ocean scrabbled frantically through
debris and devastation for their loved ones on Tuesday as the
death toll climbed inexorably toward 40,000.
The scale of the destruction caused by Sunday's monster
tsunami left governments helpless and groping for succor. On
coastline after coastline, the sea disgorged the dead and
rescuers fought through a morass of wreckage, mud and body
parts.
The United Nations said the disaster was unique in
encompassing such a large area and so many countries.
Aid agencies struggled to cope with the enormity of the
disaster. The International Red Cross said it may have to
treble its appeal for funds.
"The enormity of the disaster is unbelievable," said Bekele
Geleta, head of the International Federation of Red Cross and
Red Crescent Societies (IFRC) in Southeast Asia.
The United Nations said hundreds of relief planes packed
with emergency goods would arrive in the region from about two
dozen countries within the next 48 hours.
Authorities waited in trepidation for the outbreak of
diseases caused by polluted drinking water and the sheer scale
of thousands of putrefying bodies.
Many of the dead were children, and television screens and
newspapers were full of images of grief-stricken parents.
Sunday's giant 9.0-magnitude earthquake cracked the seabed
off the Indonesian island of Sumatra. That tectonic movement
triggered a tsunami that raced across the Andaman Sea and
struck Sri Lanka, southern India, the Maldives, Malaysia,
Myanmar and resorts packed with Christmas vacationers in
Thailand.
In Sri Lanka, which appeared worst hit, the government said
more than 18,700 people were confirmed dead and officials fear
the toll will hit 25,000.
Indonesia said the death toll on Aceh island had reached
7,072. Along Khao Lak beach on the Thai mainland north of
Phuket island, a magnet for Scandinavian and German tourists,
miles of shattered hotels began yielding up their dead,
bloated, gashed and mangled bodies -- at least 770 dead, many
of them Thai.
Officials fear the figure could rise above 60,000.
Indonesia said its toll could hit 25,000, while Sri Lankan
officials warned up to 25,000 people may have died there.
Thailand said its toll may exceed 2,000.
"There are lots of dead foreigners because it is during our
high season and Christmas. It is a family vacation time," Thai
Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra told reporters.
Only 112 dead foreigners had been identified. They included
22 French people, 13 Norwegians, 12 Britons, 11 Italians and 10
Swedes, 9 Japanese and 8 Americans, as well as tourists from
Austria, Australia, Belgium, Canada, Denmark, Germany, New
Zealand, Singapore, South Africa and Taiwan.
CATASTROPHE EVIDENT AS RESCUERS REACH NEW GROUND The extent
of the catastrophe and the human toll became clearer as rescue
teams began to reach remote areas.
On some of India's Andaman and Nicobar islands, located
almost atop the epicenter of Sunday's earthquake, rescuers
found only a third of inhabitants still alive. A hundred air
force officers and their families vanished from one island
base.
Police say at least 5,000 people are confirmed or presumed
dead in the group of more than 550 islands bordering Myanmar
and Indonesia. The death toll across India is estimated at 9,500.
On the island of Chowra, rescuers found only 500 survivors
from 1,500 residents, the territory's deputy police chief, C.
Vasudeva Rao, said. "We thought the entire island was washed
away. But we found 500 survivors."
Residents in Sri Lanka's southern port city of Galle,
strewn with the twisted wreckage of buses, toppled buildings
and the debris of people's lives, surveyed the scene in disbelief.
"Look around," said jeweller Ifti Muaheed, who lost tens of
thousands of dollars' worth of precious gems to the deluge and
faced restarting his generations-old business from scratch.
"This will take months, maybe years to sort out."
Bodies littered the streets in northern Indonesia, closest
to Sunday's giant earthquake. About 1,000 people lay where they
were killed when a tsunami struck as they watched a sports
event.
"I was in the field as a referee. The waves suddenly came
in and I was saved by God -- I got caught in the branches of a
tree," said Mahmud Azaf, who lost his three children to the
tsunami.
"This was the worst day in our history," said Sri Lankan
businessman Y.P. Wickramsinghe as he picked through the rubble
of his sea-front dive shop in the devastated southwestern town
of Galle. "I wish I had died. There is no point in living."
"The cost of the devastation will be in the billions of dollars,"
said Jan Egeland, head of the U.N. Office for the Coordination
of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA).
"However, we cannot fathom the cost of these poor societies
and the nameless fishermen and fishing villages ... that have
just been wiped out. Hundreds of thousands of livelihoods have
gone."
ARC OF DESTRUCTION
Thousands of miles of coastline from Indonesia to Tanzania
were battered by deadly waves. Fishing villages were
devastated, power and communications cut and homes destroyed.
Dozens perished in Malaysia, Myanmar and the Maldives and
in far-away Somalia, 6,000 km (3,600 miles) to the west of the
epicenter, 38 people were killed. At least 10 people were
killed in Tanzania.
"My son is crying for his mother," said Bejkhajorn
Saithong, 39, searching for his wife at a hotel on Khao Lak
beach. The hotel had been knocked off its foundations and
a few body parts jutted from the wreckage.
"I think this is her. I recognize her hand, but I'm not sure,"
Bejkhajorn said.
Television pictures taken from the air showed bodies
tangled in debris littering a beach. Other bodies floated in
the sea.
In Sri Lanka about 1.5 million people -- or 7.5 percent of
the population -- were homeless, many sheltering in Buddhist
temples and schools.
Throughout the region, people fearing another wave
sheltered in public buildings, schools and on high ground.
There was a shortage of clean water and provisions. Those not
searching for survivors hastened to bury the dead.
The U.N.'s Egeland said there could be epidemics of
intestinal and lung infections unless health systems in the
stricken countries got help.
Countries on the Pacific Ocean have tsunami warning systems
but those on the Indian Ocean, where tsunamis hit about once a
century, do not.
Sunday's huge waves were tracked by U.S. seismologists who
said they had had no way of warning governments in the region.
(c) Reuters 2004
---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
3) U.S. to Pledge $15 Million for Tsunami Aid
WASHINGTON (Reuters)
Tue Dec 28, 2004 12:42 AM ET
http://www.reuters.com/newsArticle.jhtml?type=topNews&storyID=7188968&src=eD
ialog/GetContent§ion=news
[With almost 40,000 deaths, so far in Asia, the U.S. government is
willing to spend a paltry $15 million for Tsunami Aid. Yet the U.S.
has spent $200+ billion to kill over 100,000 Iraqi's in their quest for
oil!...bw]
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The United States expects to provide an
initial $15 million in aid for victims of a devastating tsunami in Asia
and has already released $400,000, a top U.S. aid official said on
Monday.
"You also have to see this not just as a one-time thing. Some
20,000-plus lives have been lost in a few moments but the lingering
effects will be there for years," Secretary of State Colin Powell said
at a news conference with the assistant administrator of the U.S.
Agency for International Development, Ed Fox.
Powell said $100,000 had already been given to each of India,
Indonesia, Sri Lanka and the Maldives, and the United States was
in talks to contribute $4 million to the International Red Cross.
"It's anticipated that we'll add -- at least immediately -- another
probably $10 million for a total of about $15 million in our initial
response to this tragedy," Fox said.
He said it was still unknown how the aid would be disbursed.
President Bush, who is vacationing at his Crawford, Texas, ranch
had been monitoring the tragedy in Asia, White House spokesman
Trent Duffy said.
"The United States, at the president's direction, will be a leading
partner in one of the most significant relief, rescue and recovery
challenges the world has ever known," Duffy said.
Powell also said the United States Pacific Command had
dispatched P-3 Orion long-range maritime surveillance aircraft
from Kadena, Japan, to Thailand to take part in damage survey
operations. He said the Pacific Fleet was examining "what else
they might be able to do to help in this situation."
Lt. Col. Bill Bigelow, a spokesman for U.S. Pacific Command,
said separately the U.S. military was loading six large C-130
Hercules cargo planes with relief supplies including food,
clothing and shelter at Yokota Air Base in Japan, headed for
Thailand.
He said Pacific Command was also assembling three teams
of about 10-15 people to fly to the region to assess disaster
relief needs in the wake of the deadly earthquake and tsunami
that slammed coasts from India to Indonesia, killing more than
22,700 people.
(Additional reporting by Caren Bohan, Will Dunham, David
Morgan and Saul Hudson)
(c) Reuters 2004
---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
4) Israeli Missile Hits Car, Militants Escape
GAZA (Reuters)
Tue Dec 28, 2004 08:13 AM ET
http://www.reuters.com/newsArticle.jhtml?type=topNews&storyID=7191853&src=eD
ialog/GetContent§ion=news
GAZA (Reuters) - An Israeli drone aircraft fired a missile
into a car carrying two Hamas militants in Gaza on Tuesday but
both escaped without serious injury, witnesses said.
Some passersby suffered minor wounds, they said, in the
incident in the city of Khan Younis, a bastion of militants who
often fire mortar bombs and rockets at nearby Jewish
settlements in the occupied territory.
Palestinian militant sources said the Hamas men were
apparently en route to staging an attack on part of the
fortified Gush Katif settlement bloc nearby when they were
spotted by a patrolling drone and targeted.
In a statement, the Israeli army said aircraft had fired on
gunmen blamed for mortar attacks from Khan Younis, including 40
in the past week.
Israeli tanks and troops have raided Khan Younis repeatedly
to kill or capture militants behind constant rocket and mortar
salvoes against settlements.
But the attacks by the elusive, mobile mortar squads have
persisted, although they only rarely cause casualties.
Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon intends to evacuate all
8,000 settlers from among 1.3 million Palestinians in Gaza next
year under his plan to "disengage" from conflict in some
occupied territory, but vows to smash militant groups first.
(c) Reuters 2004
---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
5) US, Britain holding 10,000 prisoners in Iraq
Last Update: Tuesday, December 28, 2004. 11:42am (AEDT)
ABC News Online
http://www.abc.net.au/news/newsitems/200412/s1273053.htm
Over 350 foreigners are among about 10,000 detainees being held
in US-run prisons in Iraq, Iraq's Human Rights Minister Bakhtiar
Amin Over says.
"US forces told us on December 23 that they are holding 353 foreign
terrorists," Mr Amin said.
He says they include: 61 Egyptians, 59 Saudis, 56 Syrians,
40 Jordanians, 35 Sudanese, 22 Iranians, 10 Tunisians,
10 Yemenis, eight Palestinians and five Lebanese, among others.
US military detainee operations spokesperson Lieutenant
Colonel Barry Johnston refused to comment on the figures.
"I will not confirm numbers of specific nationalities held among
foreign fighters," Lt Col Johnston said.
"As a matter of policy, we only share those numbers with
government officials."
Both the Iraqi and US governments blame foreigners mainly
from Syria and Iran for much of the violence in the country.
Mr Amin says 4,691 prisoners were being held in Camp Bucca
near the southern port city of Umm Qasr, 3,411 in Abu Ghraib
west of Baghdad and 818 in Al-Shuaiba British controlled Basra.
He also says that 104 are being held in Camp Cropper, near
Baghdad's airport, where Saddam and other so-called "high-value"
detainees are located.
Lt Col Johnson says the numbers were "generally correct" except
for Abu Ghraib where the number is "closer to 2,500 at the moment".
Following revelations about prisoner abuse earlier this year in
Abu Ghraib, the US military instituted several changes in the way
detainees are held and interrogated.
The ranks of prisoners may have shot up again after hundreds
were detained during major operations against insurgents south
of the capital, in Samarra and Mosul, north of Baghdad and the
massive assault on the former rebel stronghold of Fallujah,
west of Baghdad.
-AFP
(c) 2004 Australian Broadcasting Corporation
Copyright information: http://abc.net.au/common/copyrigh.htm
Privacy information: http://abc.net.au/privacy.htm
---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
7) COLLEGES LAUNCH NATIONAL HOMELAND SECURITY EFFORT
First-Response Experts to Lead Coordinating Task Force
"A consortium of community colleges in various states across
the country are planning to offer programs in homeland
security leading to professional certificates in that area..."
A consortium of community colleges in various states across the country are
planning to offer programs in homeland security leading to professional
certificates in that area. Borough of Manhattan Community College (BMCC),
which is part of the City University of N Y (CUNY) is a member of that
consortium. (see the press release, included below, for more information on
all the participants) At BMCC a "letter of intent" supporting the program
was originally passed by the Faculty Council, but students and some faculty
(especially members of the campus chapter of the PSC, the CUNY union) have
been organizing opposition to the program. Thus, when the matter was fully
debated at a Faculty Council meeting this past week, the result was the
postponement of a decision about implementing the program. The matter of
course is not settled. It will be presented to the trustees of the Bd. of
Higher Education (in February probably) and then will come back to the BMCC
faculty for a final decision. The program might be defeated entirely, or it
might be modified. Those of us who are involved hope for defeat. And we are
hoping that activists around the country will initiate research into the
programs at the other campuses -- and, of course, actions opposing those
programs.
The program in Homeland Security has some very disturbing aspects to it, as
noted in the following excerpts from a talk given by a member of the
International Committee of the union:
"The task force has a Homeland Security Management Institute at Monroe
Community College near Rochester and is headed by Colonel John J. Perrone
Jr. who previously commanded the Joint Detainee Operations Group in
Guantanamo Bay.
On the Advisory Board for the BMCC program, William J. Daly represents the
British Control Risks Group, which has offices in several parts of the
world, notably Iraq and Colombia. It recruits from BritainÂs Special Air
Services, which is reputed to have operated as assassination squads in
Northern Ireland and North Yemen. An Israeli firm, International Security
and Defense Systems affiliated with Smith & Wesson gun makers, is
represented on the BMCC Advisory Board by Leo Gleser, formerly a MOSSAD
operative. A Chilean news magazine has linked him to the training of death
squads of the Honduran Army in the 1980s."
"Some troubling topics include: natural surveillance, interrogation,
profiles of terrorists and their organizations. The course on Terrorism and
Counterterrorism defines terrorism as "any violent act against persons or
property to intimidate or coerce a government, the civilian populations, or
any segment thereof, in furtherance of political or social objectives."
This is a very broad definition indeed. It could include a student
overturning a military recruitment table.
A career ladder is offered in the field of private security that is
expected to grow faster than all other occupations due to the threat of
terrorism,and to duties formerly handled by government police officers and
marshals. HereÂs another example of the public sector being handed over to
private industry. "
press release from the AACC on the formation of the "Ad Hoc Task Force on
Homeland Security"
COLLEGES LAUNCH NATIONAL HOMELAND SECURITY EFFORT
First-Response Experts to
Lead Coordinating Task Force
Washington, D.C. - In response to a growing national need to develop better
training and new programs related to homeland security, the American
Association of Community Colleges (AACC) announces the appointment of a
21-member task force to define a long-range strategy for the nation's 1,173
two-year colleges.
The AACC Ad Hoc Task Force on Homeland Security comprises 18 community
college presidents and three senior specialists at institutions with
advanced programs and demonstrated expertise in defense and security.
Members were also chosen based on well-established relationships they have
built with four-year colleges and universities, as well as with state and
local security providers.
Community colleges represent the largest, fastest growing sector of higher
education, currently educating the majority of the nation's
"first-responders." Over half of new nurses and close to 85 percent of law
enforcement officers, firefighters and EMTs are credentialed by the
colleges. In addition, the colleges are rapidly establishing or expanding
programs to prepare professionals in related fields such as environmental
safety, cyber security, power grid management and emergency response
management.
"Because of their numbers and their close collaboration at local and state
levels, community colleges represent a tested resource to help the nation
ramp up its security effort in the most cost-effective way," said AACC
President George R. Boggs. "This new, strategic collaboration will
significantly accelerate our national preparedness."
The AACC Task Force began its work this week to prepare for a Feb. 8
meeting in Washington, D.C., to coalesce and coordinate extant homeland
security efforts already well underway at community colleges around the
nation. The group will also draw on the expertise of a newly-created
Homeland Security and Public Safety Network, made up of community college
faculty/staff specialists nationwide. Task Force members will serve for
approximately two years; the Network will be ongoing.
Task Force members include the following community college
presidents/chancellors: David Buettner (Fox Valley Technical College,
Wis.), Vernon Crawley (Moraine Valley Community College, Ill.), Larry
Devane (Redlands Community Colleges, Okla.), Mary Ellen Duncan (Howard
Community College, Md.), Thomas Flynn (Monroe Community College, N.Y.),
Margaret Forde (Houston Community College System - Northeast College,
Texas), Herlinda Glasscock (Dallas County Community College District -
North Lake College), Patricia Keir (San Diego Miramar College, Calif.),
Carl Kuttler (St. Petersburg College, Fla.), Antonio Perez (Borough of
Manhattan Community College, N.Y.), Donald Snyder (Lehigh Carbon Community
College, Penn.), Mary Spangler (Oakland Community College, Mich.),
Gwendolyn Stephenson (Hillsborough Community College, Fla.), Robert Templin
(Northern Virginia Community College), Frank Toda (Columbia Gorge Community
College, Ore.),Steven Wall (Pierce College, Wash.), Frances White (Skyline
College,Calif.), P. Anthony ("Tony") Zeiss (Central Piedmont Community
College,
(N.C.).
Also selected to serve on the Task Force are: George Coxey, chair, Criminal
Justice/Fire Science Technologies (Owens Community College, Ohio); Douglas
Feil director, Environmental Health & Safety Training (Kirkwood Community
College, Iowa); and Arthur Tyler, vice president, Administrative Services &
Budget (Los Angeles City College, Calif.).
The current AACC Board Chair, Jesus ("Jess") Carreon (chancellor, Dallas
County Community College District, Texas), Chair-elect Henry Shannon
(chancellor, St. Louis Community College, Mo.) and AACC President George R.
Boggs will serve as ex officio members of the Task Force.
<*> To visit your group on the web, go to:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ufpj-rights/
---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
8) Supermarket Giants Crush Central American Farmers
THE FOOD CHAIN | SURVIVAL OF THE BIGGEST
By CELIA W. DUGGER
December 28, 2004
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/12/28/international/americas/28guatemala.html?ex
=1105243990&ei=1&en=31a0faebf603a8ca
PALENCIA, Guatemala - Mario Chinchilla, his face shaded by a battered
straw hat, worriedly surveyed his field of sickly tomatoes. His hands and
jeans were caked with dirt, but no amount of labor would ever turn his
puny crop into the plump, unblemished produce the country's main
supermarket chain displays in its big stores.
For a time, the farmer's cooperative he heads managed to sell
vegetables to the chain, part owned by the giant Dutch multinational,
Ahold, which counts Stop & Shop among its assets. But the co-op's
members lacked the expertise, as well as the money to invest in the
modern greenhouses, drip irrigation and pest control that would have
helped them meet supermarket specifications.
Squatting next to his field, Mr. Chinchilla's rugged face was a portrait
of defeat. "They wanted consistent supply without ups and downs,"
he said, scratching the soil with a stick. "We didn't have the capacity
to do it."
Across Latin America, supermarket chains partly or wholly owned by
global corporate goliaths like Ahold, Wal-Mart and Carrefour have
revolutionized food distribution in the short span of a decade and
have now begun to transform food growing, too.
The megastores are popular with customers for their lower prices,
choice and convenience. But their sudden appearance has brought
unanticipated and daunting challenges to millions of struggling,
small farmers.
The stark danger is that increasing numbers of them will go bust
and join streams of desperate migrants to America and the urban
slums of their own countries. Their declining fortunes, economists
and agronomists fear, could worsen inequality in a region where the
gap between rich and poor already yawns cavernously and the
concentration of land in the hands of an elite has historically fueled
cycles of rebellion and violent repression.
"It's like being on a train with a glass on a table and it's about to fall
off and break," said Prof. Thomas Reardon, an agricultural economist
at Michigan State University. "Everyone sees the glass on the table -
but do they see it shaking? Do they see the edge? The edge is the
structural changes in the market."
In the 1990's supermarkets went from controlling 10 to 20 percent
of the market in the region to dominating it, a transition that took
50 years in the United States, according to researchers at Michigan
State and the Latin American Center for Rural Development in
Santiago, Chile.
Brazil, Argentina, Chile, Costa Rica and Mexico are furthest along.
While the changes have happened more slowly in poorer, more rural
Central American countries, they have begun to quicken here, too.
In Guatemala, the number of supermarkets has more than doubled
in the past decade, as the share of food they retail has reached
35 percent.
The hope that small farmers would benefit by banding together
in business-minded associations has not been borne out. Some
like Aj Ticonel, in the city of Chimaltenango, have succeeded.
But the evidence suggests that the failure of Mr. Chinchilla's
co-op is the more common fate.
Its feeble attempts to sell to major supermarkets illustrate how
the odds are stacked against small farmers, as well as the uneven
effects of globalization itself. Many small farmers in the region
are getting left behind, while medium-sized and larger growers,
with more money and marketing savvy, are far more likely to benefit.
Most fruits and vegetables in the region are still sold in small
shops and open-air markets, but the value of supermarket
purchases from farmers has soared and now surpasses that
of produce exports by two and half times, researchers say.
The bottom line: supermarkets and their privately set standards
already loom larger for many farmers than the rules of the
World Trade Organization.
Still, stiff competition from foreign growers is also quite real.
To enter the supermarkets of Guatemala's dominant
supermarket chain, La Fragua - part of a holding company
one-third owned by Ahold - is to understand why Professor
Reardon likens them to a Trojan horse for foreign goods.
At La Fragua's immense distribution center in Guatemala City,
trucks back into loading docks, where electric forklifts unload
apples from Washington State, pineapples from Chile, potatoes
from Idaho and avocados from Mexico.
The produce is trucked from here to the chain's supermarkets,
which now span the country. Scenes at a mall in Guatemala
City anchored by Maxi Bodega, one of the company's stores,
suggest the evolving nature of grocery shopping for Latin
America's 512 million people.
On the ground floor was a sprawling, old-fashioned produce
market. At the entry, there was a shrine to its patron saint,
the Virgin of Rosario, who had plastic flowers sprinkled at
her queenly feet.
The sound of women patting out tortillas and the sweet smells
of ripe tropical fruits drifted through the market as people
stopped to squeeze the avocados, sniff the pineapples and
haggle for cheaper oranges.
To go upstairs was to leave Guatemala behind and enter
a mall that could be in Bangkok or New York, with its synthetic
Christmas wreaths, cheap clothing stores and oversized discount
packages of napkins and symmetrical tomatoes in plastic trays
at the Maxi Bodega.
The Baldetti family exemplified the generational change
unfolding here.
Delia Baldetti, an 81-year-old housewife, will only shop for
produce amid the heaps of tomatoes, chilies and papayas where
she can bargain to her heart's content. Her daughter Elsa,
a 56-year-old painter, shops both here and at Maxi Bodega,
while Elsa's daughter, a 36-year-old business administrator,
only has time for the supermarket.
Elsa wistfully predicted that while the country's fragrant, raucous
markets will never disappear, they will diminish. "We'll lose
some of our identity," she said. "We're copying the foreigners."
Farmers who do not or cannot afford to change fast enough
to meet the standards set by supermarkets are threatened.
The tiny farming community of Lo de Silva clings to a steep,
verdant hillside. Slanting cornstalks look as if they would slide
into the valley if they were not rooted to the earth.
Some of the more than 300 farmers who originally belonged to
Mr. Chinchilla's co-op, the Association of Small Irrigation Users
of Palencia - known by its Spanish acronym, Asumpal - were
from this village. Only eight remain. The only product they still
sell is salad tomatoes - and they sell to middlemen, not supermarkets.
José Luis Pérez Escobar, 44, a member of the co-op, scratched
out a living for 20 years from his small field, perched in the
clouds here.
But after his potato crop failed last year, he migrated to the United
States to save his land from foreclosure by the bank, leaving his
wife, MarÃa Graciela Lorenzana, and their five children behind.
He now works the graveyard shift at a golf course in Texas for
$6 an hour so he can pay his debts.
He had dreamed his cooperative would help him escape poverty by
selling directly to the supermarkets. "It would be magnificent,"
Mrs. Lorenzana recalled of that more hopeful time. "The small
farmer would not need a middleman. But he was never able to
achieve it."
A Transformation Begins
The transformation of Latin America's food retailing system
began in the 1980's and accelerated in the 1990's as countries
opened their economies, often to satisfy conditions for loans
from the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. As
foreign investment flooded in, multinational retailers bought
up domestic chains or entered joint ventures with them.
Most concern about the perils of globalization for local farmers
has focused on unfair trade competition from heavily subsidized
American and European producers.
But increasingly, supermarkets also leave small farmers exposed
as the stores spread from big cities to small towns, from well-
to-do enclaves to working-class neighborhoods, from richer
countries to poorer ones.
The chains now dominate sales of processed foods and their
share of produce sales is growing. In Guatemala, supermarkets
still control only 10 to 15 percent of fruit and vegetable sales.
But in Argentina, their slice has grown to as much as 30 percent,
while in Brazil they control half the market, according to
Professor Reardon.
As the chains' market share expands, farmers who are shut
out find themselves forced to retreat to shrinking rural markets.
The changes would not be so troubling if the region's
economies were growing robustly and generating decent
jobs for globalization's losers. After all, supermarkets are
providing consumers with cheaper, cleaner places to buy
food, economists say.
"It would be an appealing transformation of the sector if
alternative jobs could be made available," said Samuel Morley,
an economist at the International Food Policy Research Institute
in Washington.
But economic growth has not kept pace with rising populations.
The number of people living below poverty lines in Latin America
has risen from 200 million in 1990 to 224 million this year.
More than 6 in 10 people living in rural areas are still poor.
Given the difficulties small farmers face in doing business
with multinational corporations, traditional strategies,
like providing peasants with fertilizer and improved seeds,
now seem quaint here.
Professor Reardon and Julio A. Berdegué, an agronomist
who heads the Latin American Center for Rural Development,
are collaborating with supermarket researchers across Asia
and Africa, as well as Latin America, to document the trends.
In addition, a team at Michigan State has financing from the
United States Agency for International Development to help
small farmers in Central America, India and Kenya sell to
supermarkets. They and other development experts are
brainstorming about what to do.
Among the ideas: Regulations requiring that farmers be
paid promptly. Enforcement of laws meant to curtail
monopolies and oligopolies, including mergers of supermarket
chains. Improved security and cleanliness at open-air markets.
Infusions of credit and technical expertise for co-ops.
But while such cooperatives are almost certainly necessary
if small growers are to amass the clout and scale to sell to
multinational chains, they have been a disappointment so far.
Even in economically vibrant Chile, which has invested
$1.5 billion in small-scale farming since 1990, a study of
750 farmer organizations found that 8 of 10 had failed or
survived only with continuous infusions of government aid.
Mr. Berdegué, author of the Chile study, had sought to make
the associations work in the 1990's when he was a senior
government official there. The pressure from the I.M.F. and
the World Bank to allow greater foreign investment was
intended to make Latin American economies more competitive.
"But the model did not have a social dimension at the real
center," he said. "It was trickle-down economics."
An Experiment Disappoints
Mr. Chinchilla, 46, drove his battered, 20-year-old pickup,
laden with crates of tomatoes, into his cooperative's spacious
packing shed. The building and the business are in decay.
The water had been cut off. Toilets no longer flushed. The
roof was missing over the bathroom, its floor covered with
bird droppings. The live-in caretakers who sort the co-op's
tomatoes had only an open pail of rainwater to wash their
hands. They wore no gloves while handling the fruit.
Typically, each farmer is growing less than an acre of salad
tomatoes in rustic greenhouses that are fast deteriorating.
Their production has plummeted because of the blight that
dries out the plants, which then yield very small tomatoes.
"We haven't found a solution," MarÃa Antonietta Muralles,
a co-op member, said with a shrug. "Maybe it's the water."
Mr. Chinchilla treated his plants with pesticides to no effect.
"You can't fight it with chemicals," he said. Maybe the soil itself
is infected, they speculated.
"Everything costs money," he explained - money he does not
have and cannot afford to borrow at the going rate of 21 percent.
"When you don't have access to credit, you can't expand," he said.
"We don't want anything given to us, but we need a hand."
As the farmers talked, two workers separated tomatoes by size,
with the shrunken ones far too numerous. But their co-op's hopes
of selling to big supermarket chains withered well before the plants.
The co-op got started in the late 1990's, with a small grant from
the government to upgrade the packing shed. An agronomist,
Candelario López, was given a two-year contract, also at
government expense, to advise them.
Over the next couple of years, Mr. López helped the co-op get
its foot in the door with La Fragua and C.S.U., another major
supermarket chain. The chains have since united to become
the Central American Retail Holding Company, with 332 stores
and almost $2 billion in sales in 2003. It is one-third owned by
Ahold, which had more than $68 billion in sales last year.
But the co-op did not manage to supply the big chains for long.
The farmers themselves were uncomfortable with the rules of the
supermarket game. They found it difficult to wait weeks to get
paid. They did not want to sell their vegetables on the books
and pay taxes that sharply cut profits. And some of what they
supplied was rejected as too bruised or too limp or too ripe.
The co-op's leaders said they quit selling to C.S.U. through its
dedicated wholesaler in 2000 after two container loads of
vegetables got held up for days at the Nicaraguan border,
severely damaging the produce. "We weren't prepared to absorb
that kind of loss," said Marco Tulio Alvizures, who then headed
the co-op.
Perhaps more fundamental, co-op members had trouble
consistently delivering the quantity and quality of produce
the supermarkets demanded, a problem Mr. Chinchilla readily
acknowledged.
In the case of La Fragua, Mr. Alvizures contended that the
chain never gave the co-op a chance to sell the amount it was
capable of. But Jorge González, the chain's manager for vegetables,
said the small orders likely reflected La Fragua's judgment, based
on weekly evaluations, that the co-op was not up to the task. The
co-op was such a small supplier that Mr. González could not recall
all the details of their dealings.
The corporate imperative is to reward suppliers who consistently
provide what the chain requires. If the vegetables do not arrive,
shelves stand empty. "We punish farmers very hard if they don't
deliver what we order," said Bernardo Roehrs, a spokesman for
the chain.
As the co-op members sought to navigate the difficult new world
of supermarkets, they lost the critical guidance of Mr. López, the
agronomist, when his contract expired in 2001. He is now
a salesman for a company that makes high-tech greenhouses
the co-op's farmers could never afford.
A Rare Success Story
Not too far from Palencia, in the city of Chimaltenango, is Aj Ticonel,
an association of small farmers that has thrived because it has
something Mr. Chinchilla's co-op lacked: a shrewd and enterprising
businessman to run it.
But even for a savvy company like Aj Ticonel, success came not
from supplying choosy supermarket chains but rather from its
ability to exploit a global market.
Aj Ticonel sells three million pounds of mini-vegetables and snow
peas for export to the United States, but only 80,000 pounds to
supermarkets. Alberto Monterroso said he gave up on growing
broccoli for La Fragua. He found the chain bought inconsistent
amounts. "There are a lot of competitors here," he said, "a lot of
small farmers trying to sell to them, so the prices are low."
The company's success has been built instead on sales of pricey
vegetables for export. It now sells the same to La Fragua, and its
membership has risen from 40 families in 1999 to 2,000 today.
Its plant sparkles. Its 53 packers wear gloves, face masks and
hairnets as they sort slender French beans on stainless steel tables.
Each box produce is marked with a bar code traceable to the
family that grew it.
Aj Ticonel sold $2.5 million worth of vegetables last year, but
Mr. Monterroso, a sociologist and deal maker with a passion for
justice, paid himself only $18,000. Most of the company's profits
are plowed back into the plant, marketing campaigns and
agricultural education for the farmers.
"I want a different country for my sons," Mr. Monterroso said.
"I'm trying to redistribute the wealth so people will live in
harmony."
One recent afternoon, a big Aj Ticonel truck took a meandering
path into the hilly countryside, stopping for peasants waiting
roadside with crates of vegetables to load.
Many of them grumbled that Aj Ticonel does not pay enough and
rejects too many of their vegetables, but most had been selling
to the company for years. The evidence of their profit could be
seen in new roofs, freshly painted homes and well-clothed
children.
Still, Mr. Monterroso acknowledged how hard it will be to replicate
Aj Ticonel. Three times, the company loaned money to farmers
to clone itself. Three times the farmers went out of business.
For Latin America's millions of small farmers, he offered this
sobering fact of life: "The client buys from us not because
poor people produce it, but because it's a good product."
Copyright 2004 The New York Times
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9) Being Sold a Bill of Goods: (very interesting...bw)
Derek Seidman
Richard Ohmann's Selling Culture is a rigorously intelligent study of
the emergence of a national mass culture in the United States at the
turn of the nineteenth century as seen through the rise of
widely-consumed popular magazines. Ohmann argues that the economic
crisis of the early 1890s compelled the capitalist class to devise new
and more stable profit-making avenues, and that this was done through
orchestrating the emergence of a consumer culture targeting the rising
"professional-managerial class" (PMC). At the vanguard of this project
was the rise of cheap, mass-circulated magazines, and this story is at
the center of Ohmann's work: "I propose to consider what conjunction of
interests, needs, activities, and forces led to the invention and
success of the modern magazine industry" (32). Not only were magazines
the vehicles for advertisements (both direct and indirect
profit-makers), but more importantly, they helped to solidify the
identity of the rising PMC and generally shape a new consumer-oriented
mass culture.
Here's a good companion volume:
The New York Times
December 1, 1993, Wednesday, Late Edition - Final
Books of The Times;
The Department Store and the Culture It Created
BYLINE: By MARGO JEFFERSON
Land of Desire
Merchants, Power and the Rise of a New American Culture
By William Leach
Illustrated. 510 pages. Pantheon. $30.
Like No Other Store . . .
The Bloomingdale's Legend and the Revolution in American Marketing
By Marvin Traub and Tom Teicholz
Illustrated. 428 pages. Times Books/ Random House. $25.
To mark the start of the holiday shopping season, some stores are opening
their doors at 7:30 A.M., earlier than most schools do, and others are
offering free massages to overstimulated patrons. One is providing callers
with a "Santa's Hotline," and another is supplying non-English-speaking
shoppers with translators.
This is consumer culture operating at full blast, and it is a culture made
in America just a century ago: a vast network of department stores, mail
order catalogues, credit services, advertising and public relations, all
set in motion by a group of businessmen who saw themselves as explorers and
empire builders. As one of the savviest, John Wanamaker, put it in 1906
when the store that bore his name was taking off: "Everyone who starts a
new thing has to stand where Columbus did when he set sail. Few had faith
that he could ever reach the Land of Desire."
Wanamaker is a pivotal figure in William Leach's history of this ruthless
and dazzling new world. Wanamaker's of Philadelphia was quickly joined by
Marshall Field of Chicago, May's of St. Louis, Filene's of Boston,
Bullock's of Los Angeles and Macy's of New York. Like nation-states, they
competed and collaborated to gain financial power, social influence and the
loyalty of their public. All were beneficiaries of a post-Civil War shift
that had turned a largely agrarian economy into an industrial behemoth.
With this economic shift came equally potent shifts in people's habits,
tastes, wants, needs and pleasures.
"Land of Desire" follows these changes with scholarly exactness and
writerly elegance. Mr. Leach takes in the full range of motives and
responses at work in consumer culture, from greed and manipulation to
idealism and inventiveness.
These men were nothing if not inventive. They devised bargain basements for
"the masses" and upper-floor salons for "the classes." They cultivated
friendly relations with museums and hired designers who used painting,
sculpture and theater decor to create show windows that were visions of
color, fabric and light. They lobbied city governments for favorable zoning
laws, easy-access mass transit stops and high-visibility signs and
billboards. They mined the worlds of the exotic and the primitive to stage
fashion shows with "Garden of Allah" themes and Mayan "motifs."
By World War I, these stores had all the services a town or small city
could offer. A shopper could purchase clothes, furniture and housewares;
mail letters at an in-house post office; lunch in a tearoom; send the nanny
and the children off to a Happyland and refresh her spirit in a meditative
"Silence Room" before rejoining them.
Department store founders, as Mr. Leach perceptively notes, like to speak
of their business in religious terms: Wanamaker called his store the Garden
of Merchandise and his goods "beautiful fields of necessities." Designers
liked to invoke art: L. Frank Baum, the most influential window designer in
the country (before he wrote "The Wizard of Oz" and retired), said that
lamps and tin pots must be made to come alive as if they were figures on
the stage.
Advertising experts preferred a political or psychological discourse. The
ability to want and choose was an equal right for all citizens. Public
relations was, as Mr. Leach puts it, "a nonjudgmental technique similar to
psychoanalysis, to be applied to any institution, person or commodity that
needed its 'image' (ego) refurbished in the public arena." Even the 1928
economic study produced by Herbert Hoover sounded Freudian when it declared
that the economy had proved conclusively the theory that "wants are nearly
insatiable." In "Civilization and Its Discontents," published two years
later, Freud wrote that humans are ruled by the pleasure principle, and by
desires that can never be met. The merchants of consumer culture set out to
prove that those desires can, should and must be met -- or at least lived
out fully -- at the department store.
In this light, Marvin Traub's "Like No Other Store . . .: The
Bloomingdale's Legend and the Revolution in American Marketing" makes very
interesting reading. Mr. Traub came to Bloomingdale's in 1950, a year out
of the Harvard Business School. His goal was to give "the chic woman" a
reason to shop there: at that time it was known as the store where the
maids of chic women shopped.
Mr. Traub made his way from the bargain basement to the company presidency,
and this book explains the merchandising techniques he used so well. When
business got slow in the basement, he and a fellow employee would put on
their coats and hats, rush to the bargain counter tables and pretend to be
customers, "tossing through them as if there was hidden gold. Once we
attracted a crowd, we would quietly slip back to our offices."
By the 70's and 80's, Mr. Traub was concentrating on boutiques that
featured the ready-to-wear clothes of Yves Saint Laurent and Ralph Lauren,
and mounting updated "Garden of Allah" spectacles titled "India: The
Ultimate Fantasy," "Israel: The Dream" and "China: Heralding the Dawn of a
New Era." A hostile takeover and a declaration of bankruptcy forced him out
of Bloomingdale's in 1991. He now has a consulting firm involved, among
other things, in the fast-developing cable-television shopping networks.
Mr. Traub is cheerfully and egotistically convinced that every trend, from
high-visibility advertising to the hard sell of women's cosmetics, began in
the 60's when he came to power. Perhaps he and Mr. Leach should exchange
books for Christmas. "Land of Desire" will show Mr. Traub the history that
made him. "Like No Other Store . . .," with sales advice and
self-congratulation on every page, will show Mr. Leach what a very good
social historian he is.
Marxism list: www.marxmail.org
Marxism mailing list
Marxism@lists.econ.utah.edu
http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism
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10) How Nonprofit Careerism Derailed the "Revolution"
Greens and Greenbacks
Counterpunch, December 27, 2004
By MICHAEL DONNELLY
full: http://www.counterpunch.org/donnelly12272004.html
My good friend Lisa Goldrosen is a veteran of many left causes. Lisa has
spent her entire adult life working in various coop endeavors. She has a
wonderful collection of buttons and posters from back when America rose
from the slumber of the Eisenhower years. She has buttons from the early
days of the clean-up of the Hudson River - Pete Seeger's precursor to
Greenpeace. More are from the early Civil Rights Movement. Others are from
the anti-Vietnam War effort and the SDS era on campus. She has one anti-war
poster that could be recycled as is and still be useful today.
Lisa has arranged them all in a wonderful historic collage. She regularly
uses it to give history lessons to young radicals here in Oregon. Someone
always asks, "Why didn't I ever hear about this in school?"
Being a 60s activist myself, having grown up in Flint -- steeped in the
history of the Labor Movement, a Civil Rights activist at fourteen, a UAW
member at eighteen and a draft resister/ Conscientious Objector/anti-war
activist later -- I always enjoy my discussions with Lisa.
Recently, she put my frustrations with the current state of activism in
full perspective.
The Three-legged Stool of Counterrevolution
Lisa notes, "The Revolution was derailed by three things: the end of the
draft; Roe v. Wade and the rise of the nonprofit sector. Once the children
of privilege were no longer subject to any personal pain, it was over. It
was a brilliant strategy by predatory capitalism."
While I'm not sure if Revolution, or even Reform, was/is inevitable, I
agree. Once the draft and the possibility that middle-to-upper class kids
would be sent to fight Imperial Wars was over, it's easy to see how the
bottom fell out of the anti-war movement. Recent Imperial Wars, fought
predominantly with "volunteers," are just as heinous as Vietnam, but with
few highly-educated, comfortable kids' lives being on the line, we have yet
to see anything approaching the across-the-board, massive opposition that
Vietnam engendered. (Astonishingly, this very year during yet another
ill-fated Imperial misadventure, we saw the "Peace" Movement line up
vociferously behind a proudly-stated "I'll hunt 'em down and kill 'em"
warmonger for president!)
Same with Roe v Wade. A whole lot of steam went out of progressive social
efforts once this same socioeconomic group could gain access to affordable,
legal abortion. (It appears to be the sole bottom line litmus test still
applied to the Democratic Party.) Remove the pain and the rulers gain.
It really did become -- remove the personal pain from these me firsters and
the hiccup of resistance vanishes. I already felt that way about these two
issues. But, Lisa's expansion of the concept to include the rise of the
"Nonprofit Sector" put the final piece of the puzzle in place.
Nonprofit Careerism
Back there in Eisenhower days, an educated, middle class American youth
could look forward to a future laid out lockstep towards either a position
in the "Private Sector" (read: corporate drone) or in the "Public Sector"
(read: political hack).
Those who got too far out there protesting the War or Racism or any other
outrage soon found themselves with a blot on the resume. Not to worry; soon
corporate America set up the "third" leg of the stool. The entire domain of
nonprofit institutions (arts, culture, environment, etc.) found and
embraced a collective identity as the "Nonprofit Sector" sometime in the
early 1970s. Ludicrously, their self-declared title has recently become
"The Independent Sector."
Prior to that time, most of these types of organizations, were for-profit
entities. With the advent of tax incentives, a plethora of corporate-funded
grant-making foundations arose as companies morphed from private to
nonprofit to take advantage of the tax rules. For example: In 1930, only a
quarter of hospitals were nonprofit, about 35% government run and another
40% were private for-profits. By 1970, over half were nonprofit and just
12% privately owned.
Entire college programs have sprung up, such as Wayne State University's
Nonprofit Sector Studies Program (NPSS). The NPSS mission sates, "The
nation's fastest growing sector needs administrators, policy makers,
program managers, and advocates who will guide them into the future"
According to The NonProfit Times survey, the mean salaries for top
nonprofit employees for 2003 were:
Executive director/CEO/president- $88,749
Chief financial officer- $60,675
Program director- $52,253
Planned giving officer- $62,019
Development director- $55,807
Major gifts officer- $56,850
Chief of direct marketing- $52,812
Director of volunteers- $35,267
Webmaster- $38,498
Chief of technology- $58,595.
Lisa is correct. People could have their little impact antiauthority flings
as a college youth and still have a well-compensated career as one of those
administrators, etc. And corporate America could continue its depredations
and whitewash its impacts by sending out an army of increasingly
ineffective nonprofit professionals.
Louis Proyect
Marxism list: www.marxmail.org
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11) Bob Herbert: How the Iraq tragedy is hitting home
Bob Herbert The New York Times
Monday, December 27, 2004
http://www.iht.com/articles/2004/12/26/opinion/edherb.html
NEW YORK 'It's like watching your son playing in traffic, and there's
nothing you can do." - Janet Bellows, mother of a soldier who has
been assigned to a second tour in Iraq.
Back in the 1960s, when it seemed as if every other draftee in the
army was being sent to Vietnam, I was sent off to Korea, where I was
assigned to the intelligence office of an engineer battalion.
Twenty years old and half a world away from home, I looked forward
to mail call the way junkies craved their next fix. My teenage sister,
Sandy, got all of her high school girlfriends to write to me, which led
some of the guys in my unit to think I was some kind of Don Juan.
I considered it impolite to correct any misconceptions they might
have had.
You could depend on the mail for an emotional lift - most of the time.
But there were times when I would open an envelope and read, in the
inky handwriting of my mother or father or sister, that a friend of
mine, someone I had grown up with or gone to school with, or
a new friend I had met in the army, had been killed in Vietnam.
Just like that. Gone. Life over at 18, 19, 20.
I can still remember the weird feelings that would come over me
in those surreal moments, including the irrational idea that I was
somehow responsible for the death. In the twisted logic of grief,
I would feel that if I had never opened the envelope, the person
would still be alive. I remember being overwhelmed with the desire
to reseal the letter in the envelope and bring my dead friend back
to life.
Last week's hideous attack in Mosul reminded me of those long
ago days. Once again American troops sent on a fool's errand are
coming home in coffins, or without their right arms or left legs,
or paralyzed, or so messed up mentally they'll never be the same.
Troops are being shoved two or three times into the furnace of
Iraq by astonishingly incompetent leaders who have been unable
or unwilling to provide them with the proper training, adequate
equipment or even a clearly defined mission.
It is a mind-boggling tragedy. And the suffering goes far beyond
the men and women targeted by the insurgents. Each death in Iraq
blows a hole in a family and sets off concentric circles of grief that
touch everyone else who knew and cared for the fallen soldier. If
the human stakes were understood well enough by the political
leaders of this country, it might make them a little more reluctant
to launch foolish, unnecessary and ultimately unwinnable wars.
Lisa Hoffman and Annette Rainville of the Scripps Howard News
Service have reported, in an extremely moving article, that nearly
900 American children have lost a parent to the war in Iraq. More
than 40 fathers died without seeing their babies.
The article begins with a description of a deeply sad 4-year-old
named Jack Shanaberger, whose father was killed in an ambush
in March. Jack told his mother he didn't want to be a father when
he grew up.
"I don't want to be a daddy," he said, "because daddies die."
Six female soldiers who died in the war left a total of 10 children.
This is a new form of wartime heartbreak for the United States.
We have completely lost our way with this fiasco. The president
seems almost perversely out of touch. "The idea of democracy
taking hold in what was a place of tyranny and hatred and
destruction is such a hopeful moment in the history of the
world," he said last week.
The truth, of course, is that we can't even secure the road to
the Baghdad airport, or protect our own troops lining up for
lunch inside a military compound. The coming elections are
a slapstick version of democracy. International observers won't
even go to Iraq to monitor the elections because it's too
dangerous. They'll be watching, as if through binoculars,
from Jordan.
Nobody has a plan. We don't have enough troops to secure the
country, and the Iraqi forces have shown neither the strength
nor the will to do it themselves. Election officials are being
murdered in the streets. The insurgency is growing in both
strength and sophistication. At least three more Marines and
one soldier were killed Thursday, ensuring the grimmest of
holidays for their families and loved ones.
One of the things that President George W. Bush might consider
while on his current vacation is whether there are any limits
to the price our troops should be prepared to pay for his
misadventure in Iraq, or whether the suffering and dying
will simply go on indefinitely.
Copyright (c) 2004 The International Herald Tribune | www.iht.com
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12) A Third of the Dead in Undersea Quake Are Said to Be Children
By SETH MYDANS
COLOMBO, Sri Lanka
December 28, 2004
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/12/28/international/asia/28CND_quake.html?hp&ex=
1104296400&en=eee9dda7fec47a7a&ei=5094&partner=homepage
COLOMBO, Sri Lanka, Dec. 28 - Survivors of the gigantic undersea
earthquake on Sunday that swallowed coastlines from Indonesia
to Africa - which officials now describe as one of the worst natural
disasters in recent history - recovered bodies today, hurriedly
arranged for mass burials and searched for tens of thousands
of the missing in countries thousands of miles apart.
The reported deaths from the disaster - which climbed today to
about 44,000, with many still unaccounted for, as Sri Lanka and
Indonesia increased their confirmed tolls - came into sharper
relief on a day when it seemed increasingly clear that at least
a third of the dead were children, according to estimates by aid
officials.
The International Committee of the Red Cross and government
officials here, as well as those in Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand,
India, the Maldives and as far away as Somalia, warned that
with hundreds of thousands of people stranded in the open
without clean drinking water, epidemics of cholera and other
waterborne diseases could take as many lives as the initial waves.
Images from around the region presented a tableau of
unrelenting grief. Fathers and mothers wailed over drowned
children. Bodies were arrayed in long rows in hastily dug
trenches. Villagers sat by ruined homes, stunned. Hotels in
some of Thailand's most luxurious resorts were turned into
morgues.
"This may be the worst natural disaster in recent history
because it is affecting so many heavily populated coastal
areas," said Jan Egeland, the emergency relief coordinator for
the United Nations, speaking at a news conference in New York.
"Usually a natural disaster strikes one or two or three countries,
not eight or nine enormous coastlines like they've done here,"
he added. "Bigger waves have been recorded. But no wave has
affected so many people." Nearly half the reported deaths were
here in Sri Lanka, where estimates jumped Monday to more than
12,000 killed, and where more than a million people were
reported to have lost their homes.
Today the estimate of deaths jumped even higher, with an official
with the state-run National Disaster Management Center, D. N.
Wanigasooriya, telling Reuters, "At the moment they have
recovered 18,706 bodies."
The realization began to emerge today that the dead included
an exceptionally high number of children who, aid officials
suggested, were least able to grab onto trees or boats when
the deadly waves smashed through villages and over beaches.
Children make up at least half the population of Asia.
On the western tip of the Indonesian island of Sumatra, the
destruction was doubly fierce, caused by both the earthquake
itself 150 miles away and the tsunamis that followed.
Emergency workers who reached Aceh Province found that 10,000
people had been killed in a single town, Meulaboh, said Purnomo
Sidik, national disaster director at the Social Affairs Ministry, news
agencies reported.
Another 9,000 were confirmed dead so far in the provincial capital,
Banda Aceh, and surrounding towns, he said. India reported more
than 4,000 dead on the mainland. Hundreds were dead or missing
in the southern resort islands of Thailand, many of them foreign
vacationers.
Mr. Egeland said the big problem now was to coordinate the huge
international aid effort, a particularly daunting challenge given how
widespread the devastation is. He said the total damage would
"probably be many billions of dollars."
"We cannot fathom the cost of these poor societies and the
nameless fishermen and fishing villages and so on that have
just been wiped out," he said. "Hundreds of thousands of
livelihoods have gone."
Amateur videotape played on television showed terrifying scenes
from several countries of huge walls of water crashing through
palm trees and over the tops of buildings and roaring up coastal
streets with cars and debris bobbing on the surface.
To backdrops of screams and shouts, people were shown clinging
to buildings, being swept away by the current, running for their
lives, weeping, carrying the injured and cradling dead children.
As the water receded, almost as quickly as it had arrived, bodies
were seen in the branches of trees, and broken cars and houses
littered the shores as if a tornado had struck. Some of the bodies
and debris were sucked back out to sea.
Fears of thousands more deaths on India's Andaman and Nicobar
Islands, where most communications have been cut off, came
closer to being realized today, when Indian officials said at least
7,000 people may have died.
The territory administration's relief chief, Puneet Goel, said
20 percent of the 30,000 people living on the island of Car
Nicobar are feared lost, Reuters reported.
Smaller numbers of deaths were reported in Malaysia, the Maldives,
Myanmar, Bangladesh and the Seychelles, as well as along the
distant African coastline, particularly Somalia, where entire
villages were reported to have disappeared.
"All of the fishermen who went to sea haven't come back," said
Yusuf Ismail, a spokesman for the president.
In Thailand, the government put the death toll at 1,516 and said
8,432 people were injured. About 200 people are confirmed dead
in Phuket and 950 in Phangnga, two resort provinces. Prime Minister
Thaksin Shinawatra said the number of deaths might rise to 2,000.
Thousand are missing, mostly on small resort islands or among
boatloads of recreational divers who had headed out to sea in the
morning before the wave struck.
Many of those killed there were foreigners, but the most prominent
of the dead was Poom Jensen, 21, the Thai-American grandson of
King Bhumipol Adulyadej.
The smaller island of Phi Phi Lei, which was the scene of the movie
"The Beach," starring Leonardo DiCaprio, was reported to have been
mostly leveled. On another small island, the proprietors of the elite
Phra Thong Resort said only 70 of 170 guests were accounted for.
Apart from the huge death toll, it was the presence of large number
of foreign tourists that distinguished this disaster from the many
floods and typhoons that take a heavy toll in the region every year.
Sri Lanka's air force evacuated former Chancellor Helmut Kohl of
Germany from the hotel where he was stranded in the hard-hit
south to the German Embassy in Colombo. Mr. Kohl, 74, was
vacationing and escaped injury, a spokesman, Ulrich Pohlmann,
told news agencies in Berlin.
The Sri Lankan government said as many as 200 foreign tourists
had been killed. In Thailand, an official estimated that 20 to 30
percent of those killed were foreigners, but that estimate is
expected to grow. The victims were reported to include people
from Germany, Japan, Italy, Sweden, France, Britain, the United
States, Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Finland, Hungary, the
Netherlands, Norway, Switzerland, Turkey, Spain and Russia.
The number of Americans dead stood at eight.
Sweden's foreign minister, Laila Freivalds, said at a news
conference in Stockholm today that 1,500 Swedes are missing.
"We are afraid that we will never find many of them," she said,
declining to give a clearer estimate of how many died.
Those numbers were tiny, though, compared with the
devastation suffered by the mostly poor fishermen, farmers
and laborers who populate the low-lying coasts of these
South Asian and Southeast Asian nations.
In Sri Lanka, Susil Premajayantha, a senior minister, said
the homes of about 1.5 million people had been destroyed
or damaged. Few have the resources to resume their lives
without help.
He said 890 miles of railway track running south from the
capital, Colombo, had been washed away. Local officials told
The Associated Press that some 1,500 passengers had been
trapped in railroad cars as an entire train was caught in the
rushing tide and swept away.
At least 400 prisoners were reported to have escaped during
the chaos from two jails in the southern area, and officials
offered them an amnesty to turn themselves in. Across the
region, police officers and soldiers patrolled in an effort to
halt looting. The United States Geological Survey said the
9.0 magnitude earthquake on Sunday morning was the
fourth-largest in a century and the largest in the world
since 1964, when an earthquake measuring 9.2 hit Alaska.
A number of strong aftershocks have followed. "We have
ordered 15,000 troops into the field to search for survivors,"
said Edy Sulistiadi, a spokesman for the Indonesian military,
which is fighting separatist rebels in the area. "They are
mostly retrieving corpses."
Warren Hoge contributed reporting from the United Nations
for this article, and Wayne Arnold from Lhokseumawe, Indonesia.
Copyright 2004 The New York Times
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13) That Line at the Ferrari Dealer? It's Bonus Season on Wall Street
By JENNY ANDERSON
December 28, 2004
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/12/28/business/28bonus.html?hp&ex=1104296400&en=
9dbbb1a2157e9ffa&ei=5094&partner=homepage
Samantha Kleier Forbes, a 30-year-old real estate broker, was
getting ready to leave for a vacation to Florida with her mother
and sister when she got an urgent call. It was a client who had
spent the summer scouring the Upper East Side of Manhattan
for an apartment priced between $4 million and $5 million.
The client insisted on seeing more apartments that day, but now
she wanted to look in the $6 million range. Her husband, a banker
at Goldman Sachs in his late 30's, had just received his year-end
bonus.
"Normally this time of year is dead," said Ms. Forbes, a vice
president at Gumley Haft Kleier, a residential real estate brokerage.
But this winter there is unusual buying interest that she attributes
to rich Wall Street bonuses. She is cutting her end-of-the-year
vacation short, so she can prepare for an onslaught of clients
eager to see apartments.
The year-end bonus is a Wall Street tradition, and for a second
consecutive year, the amounts are significant. Three major Wall
Street firms - Goldman Sachs, Lehman Brothers and Bear Stearns
- have reported record profits for the year and all are said to have
given out handsome bonuses.
The totals in 2003 were already impressive: Lloyd S. Blankfein, the
president and chief operating officer of Goldman Sachs made $20.1
million, of that only $600,000 was salary; and E. Stanley O'Neal, the
chief executive of Merrill Lynch , received a bonus of $13.5 million
and restricted stock worth $11.2 million on top of his $500,000
salary. At the other end of the compensation spectrum, an
investment banking analyst right out of college would have made
a $65,000 salary and a $35,000 bonus last year. An associate just
out of business school might have made $85,000 in salary and a
$115,000 bonus.
This year, investment bankers are expected to see gains in bonuses
of 10 to 15 percent, amid a year-end flurry of mergers. Fixed-income
traders, who have been the best compensated Wall Street
professionals in recent years, will also be amply rewarded, but
their percentage gains may be smaller than those of bankers.
Bonuses, of course, vary by bank, by division and by individual.
They reflect the firm's profitability and the group's performance,
as well as the individual's contribution.
This year's bonuses do not quite reach the heights touched by star
bankers and traders in the heyday of the late 1990's technology
bubble. But they are rich enough to persuade many of Wall Street's
elite to rediscover conspicuous consumption.
One senior trader is building a sports complex for triathlon
training at his house in upstate New York. It will include a swim-
in-place lap pool, a climbing wall and a fitness center. Another
bought an Aston Martin. For some, upgrading real estate is the
first order of business.
But many Wall Street professionals are urging caution, given that
the bonus typically constitutes the majority of their compensation.
More than a dozen bankers, all of whom would talk about their
spending only on the condition of anonymity, said they were all
too aware that the good times could end as quickly as they did
after 2000, when a $2.5 million income could turn to $800,000
overnight.
"Given the last two to three years when people figured out that
this business is pretty volatile, they are going to try and bank
a lot of their bonuses," said one managing director at a firm where
bonuses have been announced. "They've seen too many people
laid off and they realize they can't just spend all their money."
It should be noted that this same banker just bought a $150,000
Aston Martin to park in his garage in Greenwich, Conn.
Another senior banker at a different firm, who is set to receive a
$2.8 million bonus, said he had bought his wife a mink coat and
was planning a weeklong skiing vacation out West. But he also
said he intended to save most of the money. "We're not buying
homes or boats, we're not spending on the big things," he said.
"We are more relaxed and generous on the small things."
Of course, small is in the eye of the beholder. While the Maybach,
an exclusive line of luxury cars made by Mercedes-Benz that starts
at $315,000, appears on the wish lists of many bankers, relatively
less expensive models from Aston Martin, Bentley and Maserati
have also been popular. Michael Parchment, general manager
for Miller Motorcars, a luxury dealership in Greenwich, said
demand had been soaring.
"It's probably up 20 to 30 percent from the same time period
last year," he said. "Unfortunately, production isn't up." The
result, he said, are some unhappy bankers.
Wall Street bonuses are expected to total $15.9 billion in 2004
- second only to $19.5 billion in 2000- according to Alan G.
Hevesi, the state comptroller of New York. In 2003, bonuses
totaled $15.8 billion. Mr. Hevesi said bonuses of that magnitude
were "good news for New York."
"It's all taxable income and it means that folks have more
disposable income so they will spend money," he said.
Bonus season is always a particularly angst-ridden time for
Wall Street. Managers haggle for more money for their employees,
divisions fight for a bigger piece of the pie and bankers try to
portray themselves as indispensable. In the end, few admit to
being happy, at least to their bosses.
"We used to say there's no amount of compensation that amounts
to people saying thank you," said Roy C. Smith, a former Goldman
Sachs partner who is now a professor of finance at New York
University. "They are either sullen or mutinous, but never quite
happy."
Midlevel employees did especially well this year. Three senior-
level managers at Wall Street firms said that the people who were
enjoying the biggest percentage increases over all were second-
and third-level associates and junior-level vice presidents.
The ranks of those managers had been thinned after the stock
market bubble burst. But this year, a reinvigorated market meant
there were too few associates and managing directors to put
together client pitches. At least three banks had to guarantee
bonus increases of 25 to 50 percent to prevent defections to
other firms. The result is that a third-year associate who might
have made $200,000 in income last year could receive
$350,000 this year.
The manager with the Aston Martin said that last year's
compensation packages for associates were ridiculously
low. "You had third-year associates making $210,000 to
$225,000; a lot of these guys are married and have young
kids and they are working" very hard, he said.
Many of those associates are expected to use their new wealth
to pay off debts incurred from three years of relatively meager
bonuses.
But real estate will draw, as usual, a significant portion
of the bonuses.
"Usually we get five phone calls a week," said Richard Steinberg,
a managing director at Warburg Realty Partnership who shows
apartments priced from $10 million to $20 million. "Since
bonuses, we've gotten double that from hedge funds, Wall
Streeters and money managers. I've gotten more phone
calls since Dec. 15 than from any other year."
Late-night entertainment may also benefit from the rise in
bonuses, given Wall Street's reputation as something of
a boys' club.
"Certainly the Wall Street crowd is very special to us," said
Lonnie Hanover, a representative for Scores, a high-end
strip club in Manhattan. "December is an amazing month
for our business, but it's everything, it's Christmas bonuses,
Christmas spirit. They have their official parties and then the
unofficial party here."
Even the cautious are probably going to treat at least part of
their bonus as play money.
One senior investment banker at a big Wall Street firm said he
was putting this year's money "directly into the bank."
"I have a sailboat, a motor boat, an apartment, an S.U.V.," he
said. "What could I possibly need?" After brief reflection,
however, he continued: "Maybe a little Porsche for the Hamptons
house, but probably not."
Copyright 2004 The New York Times
---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
14) AIN'T WE GOT FUN?
Words by Gus Kahn and Raymond B. Egan
Music by Richard Whiting,1921
http://www.rienzihills.com/SING/aintwegotfun.htm
Bill collectors gather 'round and rather haunt
the cottage next door,
Men the grocer and butcher sent,
Men who call for the rent.
But within, a happy chappy, and his bride of only a year,
Seem to be so cheerful,
Here's an ear full of the chatter you hear:
Ev'ry morning
Ev'ry evening
Ain't we got fun?
Not much money,
Oh but honey,
Ain't We Got Fun?
The rent's unpaid dear,
We haven't a bus
In the winter, in the summer,
Don't we have fun?
Times are bum and getting bummer,
Still we have fun.
There's nothing surer:
The rich get rich and the poor get poorer
In the meantime,
In between time,
Ain't we got fun?
Just to make their trouble nearly double,
Something happen'd last night.
To their chimney a gray bird came,
Mr. Stork is his name.
And I'll bet two pins
A pair of twins just happen'd in with the bird.
Still they're very gay and merry,
Just at dawning I heard:
Ev'ry morning
Ev'ry evening
Don't we got fun?
Twins and cares dear, come in pairs, dear,
Don't we have fun?
We've only started,
As mommer and pop,
Are we downhearted,
I'll say that we're not!
Landlords mad and getting madder,
Ain't we got fun?
Times are bad and getting badder,
Still we have fun!
There's nothing surer,
The rich get rich and the poor get laid off
In the meantime,
In between time,
Ain't we got fun?
When the man who sold 'em carpets told 'em,
He would take them away,
They said "Wonderful! here's our chance!
Take them up, and we'll dance!"
And when burglars came and robb'd them
Taking all their silver, they say.
Hubby yell'd "We're famous,
For they'll name us in the papers today!"
Night or daytime,
It's all playtime,
Ain't we got fun?
Hot or cold days,
Any old days,
Ain't we got fun?
If wifie wishes,
To go to a play,
Don't wash the dishes,
Just throw them away!
Street car seats are awful narrow,
Ain't we got fun?
They won't smash up our Pierce Arrow,
They've cut my wages,
But my income tax will be so much smaller,
When I'm paid off,
I'll be laid off
---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
SATURDAY, JANUARY 8, 11AM
CENTRO DEL PUEBLO
474 VALENCIA STREET
(NEAR 16TH STREET IN SAN FRANCISCO)
---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
STOP THE WAR ON IRAQ! BRING OUR TROOPS HOME NOW!
ALL OUT JANUARY 20TH, 5:00 P.M., CIVIC CENTER, S.F.
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Kkk1928.jpg
This link brings you to a photo of the KKK marching down Pennsylvania
Avenue in Washington, DC in 1928. Evidently they were able to get
a permit.
(With many thanks to Kwame Somburu for supplying the link. This site
has a plethora of information about the KKK.... Bonnie Weinstein,
Bay Area United Against War)
The U.S. government is not allowing antiwar/anti-Bush protestors
onto Pennsylvania Ave. along the inauguration route Jan. 20th.
We have a constitutional right to protest the inauguration. BAUAW
encourages all to show up in DC and come to Pennsylvania Avenue
with your signs and banners and express your opposition to Bush
and to the War.
We demand equal access along the rout for all. We have a right to
protest our government or any of its official representatives.
Nothing gives the government the right to disallow legal and
peaceful protest.
If you can't go to DC, come out Jan. 20, 5pm, Civic Center, SF. in
solidarity with all protestors in Washington and everywhere who
oppose this war.
We are encouraging everyone to participate somehow by wearing
buttons and signs at work, at school and on the bus; hold banners
at freeway entrances, and crowded shopping areas etc. on Jan. 20.
Students should hold rallies and march to the Civic Center.
Come to our next meeting and pick a place to flyer or table for
Jan. 20 or hold a sign during the day, on Jan. 20 if you can.
---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
Mass Mailing for January 20th Counter-Inaugural
Tonight, Tuesday, December 28, we will have a mass mailing for
Jan. 20th a potluck dinner at the ANSWER office at 2489 Mission St,
Rm 30 in San Franciso. The mailing will start at 1pm; we will eat at
6pm and continue the mailing through the evening.
To subscribe to the list, send a message to:
---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
Let's Hit the Streets
To Defend Abortion Rights!
Saturday, January 22
Emboldened rightwing abortion foes have had the nerve to announce
a march in San Francisco on the anniversary of the historic Roe v. Wade
decision! Show them that San Francisco is a reproductive rights town --
save the date and plan to attend a counter demonstration!
What is needed in response is a multi-issue, militant, united front of
women, people of all colors, queers, immigrants, workers and everyone
targeted by the rightwing to show that the anti-abortionists are not
welcome in San Francisco!
Make your opinion heard!
Details of assembly time and place will be announced soon.
---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
PICTURES OF WAR
PLEASE ACCESS:
** Dahr Jamail's Iraq Dispatches **
** http://dahrjamailiraq.com **
I have obtained the originals of the photos I recently posted which were
taken from inside Fallujah.
These are of much higher quality.
Some of the comments have been updated, and there are some additional
pictures added which I did not have before.
http://dahrjamailiraq.com/gallery/view_album.php?set_albumName=album28&page=
1
More writing, photos and commentary at http://dahrjamailiraq.com
You can visit http://dahrjamailiraq.com/email_list/ to subscribe or
unsubscribe to the email list.
(c)2004 Dahr Jamail.
All images and text are protected by United States and international
copyright law. If you would like to reprint Dahr's Dispatches on the
web, you need to include this copyright notice and a prominent link
to the DahrJamailIraq.com website. Any other use of images and
text including, but not limited to, reproduction, use on another
website, copying and printing requires the permission of Dahr Jamail.
Of course, feel free to forward Dahr's dispatches via email.
Iraq_Dispatches mailing list
http://lists.dahrjamailiraq.com/mailman/listinfo/iraq_dispatches
http://dahrjamailiraq.com/gallery/
view_album.php?set_albumName=album28&page=1
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/coalitionforfreethoughtinmedia/message/26138
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/coalitionforfreethoughtinmedia/message/26138
Virginion Pilot via AP - Photos - click here
http://home.hamptonroads.com/stories/story.cfm?story=79598&ran=187050
---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
ITALIAN.QUEER.DANGEROUS
a one-man show featuring Tommi Avicolli Mecca
directed by Francesca Prada
(The most important thing is for folks to make reservations ASAP.
Seating is limited. Please take a moment to call 554-0402 if you plan
to come to the show.)
JANUARY 14-29 (Friday and Saturday nights only: 14, 15; 21, 22; 28, 29)
JON SIMS CENTER, 1519 Mission/between Van Ness and 11th
8pm, $5-10 sliding scale (no one turned away)
seating is limited, for reservations: 415-554-0402
to volunteer to help with the show, call 415-552-6031
Through monologue and spoken word, well-known San Francisco
queer activist and writer Tommi Avicolli Mecca tells his story of
growing up in South Philly's working-class Little Italy. At age 19,
fired up with new pride in being gay, he came out to the world--
and his traditional Roman Catholic southern Italian famiglia--on
a TV talk show. The rest is history, and the subject of this performance.
---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
1) Rebels Strike Iraqi Forces After Bin Laden Call
By Aimer al-Aimery
TIKRIT, Iraq (Reuters)
Tue Dec 28, 2004 09:20 AM ET
http://www.reuters.com/newsArticle.jhtml?type=topNews&storyID=7192277&src=eD
ialog/GetContent§ion=news
2) Asia Struggles with Tsunami Death, Destruction
By David Fox
Tue Dec 28, 2004 07:32 AM ET
http://www.reuters.com/newsArticle.jhtml?type=topNews&storyID=7191565&src=eD
ialog/GetContent§ion=news
3) U.S. to Pledge $15 Million for Tsunami Aid
WASHINGTON (Reuters)
Tue Dec 28, 2004 12:42 AM ET
http://www.reuters.com/newsArticle.jhtml?type=topNews&storyID=7188968&src=eD
ialog/GetContent§ion=news
[With almost 40,000 deaths, so far in Asia, the U.S. government is
willing to spend a paltry $15 million for Tsunami Aid. Yet the U.S.
has spent $200+ billion to kill over 100,000 Iraqi's in their quest
for oil!...bw]
4) Israeli Missile Hits Car, Militants Escape
GAZA (Reuters)
Tue Dec 28, 2004 08:13 AM ET
http://www.reuters.com/newsArticle.jhtml?type=topNews&storyID=7191853&src=eD
ialog/GetContent§ion=news
5) US, Britain holding 10,000 prisoners in Iraq
Last Update: Tuesday, December 28, 2004. 11:42am (AEDT)
ABC News Online
http://www.abc.net.au/news/newsitems/200412/s1273053.htm
6) Homeland Security education at Community Colleges
A consortium of community colleges in various states across
the country are planning to offer programs in homeland
security leading to professional certificates in that area.
7) COLLEGES LAUNCH NATIONAL HOMELAND SECURITY EFFORT
First-Response Experts to Lead Coordinating Task Force
"A consortium of community colleges in various states across
the country are planning to offer programs in homeland
security leading to professional certificates in that area..."
8) Supermarket Giants Crush Central American Farmers
THE FOOD CHAIN | SURVIVAL OF THE BIGGEST
By CELIA W. DUGGER
December 28, 2004
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/12/28/international/americas/28guatemala.html?ex
=1105243990&ei=1&en=31a0faebf603a8ca
9) Being Sold a Bill of Goods: (very interesting...bw)
10) How Nonprofit Careerism Derailed the "Revolution"
Greens and Greenbacks
Counterpunch, December 27, 2004
By MICHAEL DONNELLY
full:
http://www.counterpunch.org/donnelly12272004.html
11) Bob Herbert: How the Iraq tragedy is hitting home
Bob Herbert The New York Times
Monday, December 27, 2004
http://www.iht.com/articles/2004/12/26/opinion/edherb.html
12) A Third of the Dead in Undersea Quake Are Said to Be Children
By SETH MYDANS
COLOMBO, Sri Lanka
December 28, 2004
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/12/28/international/asia/28CND_quake.html?hp&ex=
1104296400&en=eee9dda7fec47a7a&ei=5094&partner=homepage
13) That Line at the Ferrari Dealer? It's Bonus Season on Wall Street
By JENNY ANDERSON
December 28, 2004
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/12/28/business/28bonus.html?hp&ex=1104296400&en=
9dbbb1a2157e9ffa&ei=5094&partner=homepage
14) AIN'T WE GOT FUN?
Words by Gus Kahn and Raymond B. Egan
Music by Richard Whiting,1921
http://www.rienzihills.com/SING/aintwegotfun.htm
---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
1) Rebels Strike Iraqi Forces After Bin Laden Call
By Aimer al-Aimery
TIKRIT, Iraq (Reuters)
Tue Dec 28, 2004 09:20 AM ET
http://www.reuters.com/newsArticle.jhtml?type=topNews&storyID=7192277&src=eD
ialog/GetContent§ion=news
TIKRIT, Iraq (Reuters) - Insurgents overran a police post near Saddam
Hussein's home town on Tuesday, hauled 12 men outside and shot
them in a dramatic show of force, a day after Osama bin Laden declared
holy war on the U.S.-backed election.
The dawn massacre in Tikrit, where the guerrillas also blew up the
police station, was the bloodiest in a spate of attacks in Iraq's Sunni
minority heartlands north of Baghdad; at least five other policemen
were killed and several National Guards.
In Samarra, U.S. forces imposed an immediate daytime curfew after
an attack on a police station and a car bomb attack on a U.S. convoy,
residents said. A suicide car bomber failed in a bid to assassinate
a National Guard general in Baghdad.
The timing of the attacks and broadcast of the al Qaeda leader's
audiotape seemed coincidental but together they racked up the
pressure on Iraqi voters to stay at home on Jan. 30 and seemed
aimed to instil fear in Iraq's new security forces.
Both have grave implications for U.S. prospects in Iraq.
Bin Laden's call for a boycott of the election and his endorsement
of Islamist ally Abu Musab al-Zarqawi's campaign of bombing and
kidnap will find few willing supporters in Iraq. But the threat of
being killed will put many off voting anyway.
The most prominent party from Saddam's long dominant Sunni
minority already pulled out of the election on Monday, saying
violence in Sunni areas meant the vote could not be fair.
The chances have risen that an assembly will be elected
that gives Shi'ites an exaggerated majority, and so finds
little legitimacy among Sunnis. That will upset Washington's
hopes for a representative government that can handle its own
security.
Security may also have to remain in U.S. hands if Iraqi
forces succumb to the relentless intimidation of the insurgents.
EXECUTION-STYLE KILLINGS
Hours after the purported bin Laden audiotape was broadcast
on Al Jazeera television, calling anyone who voted an
"infidel," gunmen swarmed over the Mukashifa police compound,
just south of Tikrit, after dawn, police and a U.S. military
spokesman said.
Rounding up the dozen officers in the compound, they shot
them execution-style, gunning down one who tried to flee, a
police source told Reuters. They then blew up the station.
Five other policemen were killed in four other attacks
south of Tikrit around the same time. At Baquba, northeast of
Baghdad, a suicide car bomber killed five people and wounded
22, most of them National Guards attending the scene of an
earlier bomb.
"Jihad in Iraq is a duty and shirking it is baseless," a
voice, apparently bin Laden's, said, calling also for financial
contributions to flow in to back Zarqawi's al Qaeda operations.
"Happy is he who takes part in this war with his wealth or
his body," he said. "As ... the expenses of al Qaeda in Iraq
are 200,000 euros ($272,800) a week, not counting the expense
of other groups."
At Samarra, where clashes have resumed since a major U.S.
offensive in October, two civilians died and eight were wounded
when a suicide car bomber hit a U.S. convoy, witnesses said.
A policeman was killed and four wounded when rebels then
attacked a police station in broad daylight. U.S. vehicles and
mosque minarets announced an immediate daytime curfew.
At Sineeya, near the northern oil refining town of Baiji,
the town council resigned after the assassination of its
leader.
POWELL CAUTION
The day's bloodshed was a reminder of the potency of the
alliance between international Sunni Islamists, like Zarqawi
and Iraqi nationalists from the 20-percent Sunni Arab minority,
who see elections handing power to the 60-percent Shi'ite
community.
If Sunni areas fail to vote, Secretary of State Colin
Powell said the resulting assembly should at least give a nod
to the Sunni minority when it appoints a new government: "For
the government to be representative and for the government to
be effective, the transitional national assembly would
certainly have to take into account the ethnic mix," Powell
said.
U.S. officials, including Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld
on a Christmas visit to soldiers in Iraq last week, stress the
need to expand and improve Iraq's security forces as a means of
ensuring U.S. troops, now numbering 150,000, can go home.
But the performance of Iraqi forces has been patchy and
they are prone to infiltration by militants like the suicide
bomber who killed 21 people in a U.S. mess hall in Mosul a week
ago -- the bloodiest single incident of the war for the Americans.
Large, paramilitary assaults on police posts have become a
feature of the increasingly sophisticated insurgency in recent
months. In the northern city of Mosul, most of the U.S.-trained
police fled and many stations were destroyed last month while
U.S. forces were fighting in the rebel bastion of Falluja.
That has left Iraq's third largest city in near anarchy,
making elections there highly problematic.
The attack on Falluja was intended to quell the insurgency
before the election. But though statistics are not easily
available, rebel attacks appear to have picked up after a lull.
(Additional reporting by Sabah al-Bazee in Samarra, Faris
al-Mehdawi in Baquba and Khaled Yacoub Oweis and Alastair
Macdonald in Baghdad)
($1=.7332 Euro)
(c) Reuters 2004
---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
2) Asia Struggles with Tsunami Death, Destruction
By David Fox
Tue Dec 28, 2004 07:32 AM ET
http://www.reuters.com/newsArticle.jhtml?type=topNews&storyID=7191565&src=eD
ialog/GetContent§ion=news
GALLE, Sri Lanka (Reuters) - Survivors in seven countries
on the shores of the Indian Ocean scrabbled frantically through
debris and devastation for their loved ones on Tuesday as the
death toll climbed inexorably toward 40,000.
The scale of the destruction caused by Sunday's monster
tsunami left governments helpless and groping for succor. On
coastline after coastline, the sea disgorged the dead and
rescuers fought through a morass of wreckage, mud and body
parts.
The United Nations said the disaster was unique in
encompassing such a large area and so many countries.
Aid agencies struggled to cope with the enormity of the
disaster. The International Red Cross said it may have to
treble its appeal for funds.
"The enormity of the disaster is unbelievable," said Bekele
Geleta, head of the International Federation of Red Cross and
Red Crescent Societies (IFRC) in Southeast Asia.
The United Nations said hundreds of relief planes packed
with emergency goods would arrive in the region from about two
dozen countries within the next 48 hours.
Authorities waited in trepidation for the outbreak of
diseases caused by polluted drinking water and the sheer scale
of thousands of putrefying bodies.
Many of the dead were children, and television screens and
newspapers were full of images of grief-stricken parents.
Sunday's giant 9.0-magnitude earthquake cracked the seabed
off the Indonesian island of Sumatra. That tectonic movement
triggered a tsunami that raced across the Andaman Sea and
struck Sri Lanka, southern India, the Maldives, Malaysia,
Myanmar and resorts packed with Christmas vacationers in
Thailand.
In Sri Lanka, which appeared worst hit, the government said
more than 18,700 people were confirmed dead and officials fear
the toll will hit 25,000.
Indonesia said the death toll on Aceh island had reached
7,072. Along Khao Lak beach on the Thai mainland north of
Phuket island, a magnet for Scandinavian and German tourists,
miles of shattered hotels began yielding up their dead,
bloated, gashed and mangled bodies -- at least 770 dead, many
of them Thai.
Officials fear the figure could rise above 60,000.
Indonesia said its toll could hit 25,000, while Sri Lankan
officials warned up to 25,000 people may have died there.
Thailand said its toll may exceed 2,000.
"There are lots of dead foreigners because it is during our
high season and Christmas. It is a family vacation time," Thai
Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra told reporters.
Only 112 dead foreigners had been identified. They included
22 French people, 13 Norwegians, 12 Britons, 11 Italians and 10
Swedes, 9 Japanese and 8 Americans, as well as tourists from
Austria, Australia, Belgium, Canada, Denmark, Germany, New
Zealand, Singapore, South Africa and Taiwan.
CATASTROPHE EVIDENT AS RESCUERS REACH NEW GROUND The extent
of the catastrophe and the human toll became clearer as rescue
teams began to reach remote areas.
On some of India's Andaman and Nicobar islands, located
almost atop the epicenter of Sunday's earthquake, rescuers
found only a third of inhabitants still alive. A hundred air
force officers and their families vanished from one island
base.
Police say at least 5,000 people are confirmed or presumed
dead in the group of more than 550 islands bordering Myanmar
and Indonesia. The death toll across India is estimated at 9,500.
On the island of Chowra, rescuers found only 500 survivors
from 1,500 residents, the territory's deputy police chief, C.
Vasudeva Rao, said. "We thought the entire island was washed
away. But we found 500 survivors."
Residents in Sri Lanka's southern port city of Galle,
strewn with the twisted wreckage of buses, toppled buildings
and the debris of people's lives, surveyed the scene in disbelief.
"Look around," said jeweller Ifti Muaheed, who lost tens of
thousands of dollars' worth of precious gems to the deluge and
faced restarting his generations-old business from scratch.
"This will take months, maybe years to sort out."
Bodies littered the streets in northern Indonesia, closest
to Sunday's giant earthquake. About 1,000 people lay where they
were killed when a tsunami struck as they watched a sports
event.
"I was in the field as a referee. The waves suddenly came
in and I was saved by God -- I got caught in the branches of a
tree," said Mahmud Azaf, who lost his three children to the
tsunami.
"This was the worst day in our history," said Sri Lankan
businessman Y.P. Wickramsinghe as he picked through the rubble
of his sea-front dive shop in the devastated southwestern town
of Galle. "I wish I had died. There is no point in living."
"The cost of the devastation will be in the billions of dollars,"
said Jan Egeland, head of the U.N. Office for the Coordination
of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA).
"However, we cannot fathom the cost of these poor societies
and the nameless fishermen and fishing villages ... that have
just been wiped out. Hundreds of thousands of livelihoods have
gone."
ARC OF DESTRUCTION
Thousands of miles of coastline from Indonesia to Tanzania
were battered by deadly waves. Fishing villages were
devastated, power and communications cut and homes destroyed.
Dozens perished in Malaysia, Myanmar and the Maldives and
in far-away Somalia, 6,000 km (3,600 miles) to the west of the
epicenter, 38 people were killed. At least 10 people were
killed in Tanzania.
"My son is crying for his mother," said Bejkhajorn
Saithong, 39, searching for his wife at a hotel on Khao Lak
beach. The hotel had been knocked off its foundations and
a few body parts jutted from the wreckage.
"I think this is her. I recognize her hand, but I'm not sure,"
Bejkhajorn said.
Television pictures taken from the air showed bodies
tangled in debris littering a beach. Other bodies floated in
the sea.
In Sri Lanka about 1.5 million people -- or 7.5 percent of
the population -- were homeless, many sheltering in Buddhist
temples and schools.
Throughout the region, people fearing another wave
sheltered in public buildings, schools and on high ground.
There was a shortage of clean water and provisions. Those not
searching for survivors hastened to bury the dead.
The U.N.'s Egeland said there could be epidemics of
intestinal and lung infections unless health systems in the
stricken countries got help.
Countries on the Pacific Ocean have tsunami warning systems
but those on the Indian Ocean, where tsunamis hit about once a
century, do not.
Sunday's huge waves were tracked by U.S. seismologists who
said they had had no way of warning governments in the region.
(c) Reuters 2004
---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
3) U.S. to Pledge $15 Million for Tsunami Aid
WASHINGTON (Reuters)
Tue Dec 28, 2004 12:42 AM ET
http://www.reuters.com/newsArticle.jhtml?type=topNews&storyID=7188968&src=eD
ialog/GetContent§ion=news
[With almost 40,000 deaths, so far in Asia, the U.S. government is
willing to spend a paltry $15 million for Tsunami Aid. Yet the U.S.
has spent $200+ billion to kill over 100,000 Iraqi's in their quest for
oil!...bw]
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The United States expects to provide an
initial $15 million in aid for victims of a devastating tsunami in Asia
and has already released $400,000, a top U.S. aid official said on
Monday.
"You also have to see this not just as a one-time thing. Some
20,000-plus lives have been lost in a few moments but the lingering
effects will be there for years," Secretary of State Colin Powell said
at a news conference with the assistant administrator of the U.S.
Agency for International Development, Ed Fox.
Powell said $100,000 had already been given to each of India,
Indonesia, Sri Lanka and the Maldives, and the United States was
in talks to contribute $4 million to the International Red Cross.
"It's anticipated that we'll add -- at least immediately -- another
probably $10 million for a total of about $15 million in our initial
response to this tragedy," Fox said.
He said it was still unknown how the aid would be disbursed.
President Bush, who is vacationing at his Crawford, Texas, ranch
had been monitoring the tragedy in Asia, White House spokesman
Trent Duffy said.
"The United States, at the president's direction, will be a leading
partner in one of the most significant relief, rescue and recovery
challenges the world has ever known," Duffy said.
Powell also said the United States Pacific Command had
dispatched P-3 Orion long-range maritime surveillance aircraft
from Kadena, Japan, to Thailand to take part in damage survey
operations. He said the Pacific Fleet was examining "what else
they might be able to do to help in this situation."
Lt. Col. Bill Bigelow, a spokesman for U.S. Pacific Command,
said separately the U.S. military was loading six large C-130
Hercules cargo planes with relief supplies including food,
clothing and shelter at Yokota Air Base in Japan, headed for
Thailand.
He said Pacific Command was also assembling three teams
of about 10-15 people to fly to the region to assess disaster
relief needs in the wake of the deadly earthquake and tsunami
that slammed coasts from India to Indonesia, killing more than
22,700 people.
(Additional reporting by Caren Bohan, Will Dunham, David
Morgan and Saul Hudson)
(c) Reuters 2004
---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
4) Israeli Missile Hits Car, Militants Escape
GAZA (Reuters)
Tue Dec 28, 2004 08:13 AM ET
http://www.reuters.com/newsArticle.jhtml?type=topNews&storyID=7191853&src=eD
ialog/GetContent§ion=news
GAZA (Reuters) - An Israeli drone aircraft fired a missile
into a car carrying two Hamas militants in Gaza on Tuesday but
both escaped without serious injury, witnesses said.
Some passersby suffered minor wounds, they said, in the
incident in the city of Khan Younis, a bastion of militants who
often fire mortar bombs and rockets at nearby Jewish
settlements in the occupied territory.
Palestinian militant sources said the Hamas men were
apparently en route to staging an attack on part of the
fortified Gush Katif settlement bloc nearby when they were
spotted by a patrolling drone and targeted.
In a statement, the Israeli army said aircraft had fired on
gunmen blamed for mortar attacks from Khan Younis, including 40
in the past week.
Israeli tanks and troops have raided Khan Younis repeatedly
to kill or capture militants behind constant rocket and mortar
salvoes against settlements.
But the attacks by the elusive, mobile mortar squads have
persisted, although they only rarely cause casualties.
Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon intends to evacuate all
8,000 settlers from among 1.3 million Palestinians in Gaza next
year under his plan to "disengage" from conflict in some
occupied territory, but vows to smash militant groups first.
(c) Reuters 2004
---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
5) US, Britain holding 10,000 prisoners in Iraq
Last Update: Tuesday, December 28, 2004. 11:42am (AEDT)
ABC News Online
http://www.abc.net.au/news/newsitems/200412/s1273053.htm
Over 350 foreigners are among about 10,000 detainees being held
in US-run prisons in Iraq, Iraq's Human Rights Minister Bakhtiar
Amin Over says.
"US forces told us on December 23 that they are holding 353 foreign
terrorists," Mr Amin said.
He says they include: 61 Egyptians, 59 Saudis, 56 Syrians,
40 Jordanians, 35 Sudanese, 22 Iranians, 10 Tunisians,
10 Yemenis, eight Palestinians and five Lebanese, among others.
US military detainee operations spokesperson Lieutenant
Colonel Barry Johnston refused to comment on the figures.
"I will not confirm numbers of specific nationalities held among
foreign fighters," Lt Col Johnston said.
"As a matter of policy, we only share those numbers with
government officials."
Both the Iraqi and US governments blame foreigners mainly
from Syria and Iran for much of the violence in the country.
Mr Amin says 4,691 prisoners were being held in Camp Bucca
near the southern port city of Umm Qasr, 3,411 in Abu Ghraib
west of Baghdad and 818 in Al-Shuaiba British controlled Basra.
He also says that 104 are being held in Camp Cropper, near
Baghdad's airport, where Saddam and other so-called "high-value"
detainees are located.
Lt Col Johnson says the numbers were "generally correct" except
for Abu Ghraib where the number is "closer to 2,500 at the moment".
Following revelations about prisoner abuse earlier this year in
Abu Ghraib, the US military instituted several changes in the way
detainees are held and interrogated.
The ranks of prisoners may have shot up again after hundreds
were detained during major operations against insurgents south
of the capital, in Samarra and Mosul, north of Baghdad and the
massive assault on the former rebel stronghold of Fallujah,
west of Baghdad.
-AFP
(c) 2004 Australian Broadcasting Corporation
Copyright information: http://abc.net.au/common/copyrigh.htm
Privacy information: http://abc.net.au/privacy.htm
---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
7) COLLEGES LAUNCH NATIONAL HOMELAND SECURITY EFFORT
First-Response Experts to Lead Coordinating Task Force
"A consortium of community colleges in various states across
the country are planning to offer programs in homeland
security leading to professional certificates in that area..."
A consortium of community colleges in various states across the country are
planning to offer programs in homeland security leading to professional
certificates in that area. Borough of Manhattan Community College (BMCC),
which is part of the City University of N Y (CUNY) is a member of that
consortium. (see the press release, included below, for more information on
all the participants) At BMCC a "letter of intent" supporting the program
was originally passed by the Faculty Council, but students and some faculty
(especially members of the campus chapter of the PSC, the CUNY union) have
been organizing opposition to the program. Thus, when the matter was fully
debated at a Faculty Council meeting this past week, the result was the
postponement of a decision about implementing the program. The matter of
course is not settled. It will be presented to the trustees of the Bd. of
Higher Education (in February probably) and then will come back to the BMCC
faculty for a final decision. The program might be defeated entirely, or it
might be modified. Those of us who are involved hope for defeat. And we are
hoping that activists around the country will initiate research into the
programs at the other campuses -- and, of course, actions opposing those
programs.
The program in Homeland Security has some very disturbing aspects to it, as
noted in the following excerpts from a talk given by a member of the
International Committee of the union:
"The task force has a Homeland Security Management Institute at Monroe
Community College near Rochester and is headed by Colonel John J. Perrone
Jr. who previously commanded the Joint Detainee Operations Group in
Guantanamo Bay.
On the Advisory Board for the BMCC program, William J. Daly represents the
British Control Risks Group, which has offices in several parts of the
world, notably Iraq and Colombia. It recruits from BritainÂs Special Air
Services, which is reputed to have operated as assassination squads in
Northern Ireland and North Yemen. An Israeli firm, International Security
and Defense Systems affiliated with Smith & Wesson gun makers, is
represented on the BMCC Advisory Board by Leo Gleser, formerly a MOSSAD
operative. A Chilean news magazine has linked him to the training of death
squads of the Honduran Army in the 1980s."
"Some troubling topics include: natural surveillance, interrogation,
profiles of terrorists and their organizations. The course on Terrorism and
Counterterrorism defines terrorism as "any violent act against persons or
property to intimidate or coerce a government, the civilian populations, or
any segment thereof, in furtherance of political or social objectives."
This is a very broad definition indeed. It could include a student
overturning a military recruitment table.
A career ladder is offered in the field of private security that is
expected to grow faster than all other occupations due to the threat of
terrorism,and to duties formerly handled by government police officers and
marshals. HereÂs another example of the public sector being handed over to
private industry. "
press release from the AACC on the formation of the "Ad Hoc Task Force on
Homeland Security"
COLLEGES LAUNCH NATIONAL HOMELAND SECURITY EFFORT
First-Response Experts to
Lead Coordinating Task Force
Washington, D.C. - In response to a growing national need to develop better
training and new programs related to homeland security, the American
Association of Community Colleges (AACC) announces the appointment of a
21-member task force to define a long-range strategy for the nation's 1,173
two-year colleges.
The AACC Ad Hoc Task Force on Homeland Security comprises 18 community
college presidents and three senior specialists at institutions with
advanced programs and demonstrated expertise in defense and security.
Members were also chosen based on well-established relationships they have
built with four-year colleges and universities, as well as with state and
local security providers.
Community colleges represent the largest, fastest growing sector of higher
education, currently educating the majority of the nation's
"first-responders." Over half of new nurses and close to 85 percent of law
enforcement officers, firefighters and EMTs are credentialed by the
colleges. In addition, the colleges are rapidly establishing or expanding
programs to prepare professionals in related fields such as environmental
safety, cyber security, power grid management and emergency response
management.
"Because of their numbers and their close collaboration at local and state
levels, community colleges represent a tested resource to help the nation
ramp up its security effort in the most cost-effective way," said AACC
President George R. Boggs. "This new, strategic collaboration will
significantly accelerate our national preparedness."
The AACC Task Force began its work this week to prepare for a Feb. 8
meeting in Washington, D.C., to coalesce and coordinate extant homeland
security efforts already well underway at community colleges around the
nation. The group will also draw on the expertise of a newly-created
Homeland Security and Public Safety Network, made up of community college
faculty/staff specialists nationwide. Task Force members will serve for
approximately two years; the Network will be ongoing.
Task Force members include the following community college
presidents/chancellors: David Buettner (Fox Valley Technical College,
Wis.), Vernon Crawley (Moraine Valley Community College, Ill.), Larry
Devane (Redlands Community Colleges, Okla.), Mary Ellen Duncan (Howard
Community College, Md.), Thomas Flynn (Monroe Community College, N.Y.),
Margaret Forde (Houston Community College System - Northeast College,
Texas), Herlinda Glasscock (Dallas County Community College District -
North Lake College), Patricia Keir (San Diego Miramar College, Calif.),
Carl Kuttler (St. Petersburg College, Fla.), Antonio Perez (Borough of
Manhattan Community College, N.Y.), Donald Snyder (Lehigh Carbon Community
College, Penn.), Mary Spangler (Oakland Community College, Mich.),
Gwendolyn Stephenson (Hillsborough Community College, Fla.), Robert Templin
(Northern Virginia Community College), Frank Toda (Columbia Gorge Community
College, Ore.),Steven Wall (Pierce College, Wash.), Frances White (Skyline
College,Calif.), P. Anthony ("Tony") Zeiss (Central Piedmont Community
College,
(N.C.).
Also selected to serve on the Task Force are: George Coxey, chair, Criminal
Justice/Fire Science Technologies (Owens Community College, Ohio); Douglas
Feil director, Environmental Health & Safety Training (Kirkwood Community
College, Iowa); and Arthur Tyler, vice president, Administrative Services &
Budget (Los Angeles City College, Calif.).
The current AACC Board Chair, Jesus ("Jess") Carreon (chancellor, Dallas
County Community College District, Texas), Chair-elect Henry Shannon
(chancellor, St. Louis Community College, Mo.) and AACC President George R.
Boggs will serve as ex officio members of the Task Force.
<*> To visit your group on the web, go to:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ufpj-rights/
---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
8) Supermarket Giants Crush Central American Farmers
THE FOOD CHAIN | SURVIVAL OF THE BIGGEST
By CELIA W. DUGGER
December 28, 2004
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/12/28/international/americas/28guatemala.html?ex
=1105243990&ei=1&en=31a0faebf603a8ca
PALENCIA, Guatemala - Mario Chinchilla, his face shaded by a battered
straw hat, worriedly surveyed his field of sickly tomatoes. His hands and
jeans were caked with dirt, but no amount of labor would ever turn his
puny crop into the plump, unblemished produce the country's main
supermarket chain displays in its big stores.
For a time, the farmer's cooperative he heads managed to sell
vegetables to the chain, part owned by the giant Dutch multinational,
Ahold, which counts Stop & Shop among its assets. But the co-op's
members lacked the expertise, as well as the money to invest in the
modern greenhouses, drip irrigation and pest control that would have
helped them meet supermarket specifications.
Squatting next to his field, Mr. Chinchilla's rugged face was a portrait
of defeat. "They wanted consistent supply without ups and downs,"
he said, scratching the soil with a stick. "We didn't have the capacity
to do it."
Across Latin America, supermarket chains partly or wholly owned by
global corporate goliaths like Ahold, Wal-Mart and Carrefour have
revolutionized food distribution in the short span of a decade and
have now begun to transform food growing, too.
The megastores are popular with customers for their lower prices,
choice and convenience. But their sudden appearance has brought
unanticipated and daunting challenges to millions of struggling,
small farmers.
The stark danger is that increasing numbers of them will go bust
and join streams of desperate migrants to America and the urban
slums of their own countries. Their declining fortunes, economists
and agronomists fear, could worsen inequality in a region where the
gap between rich and poor already yawns cavernously and the
concentration of land in the hands of an elite has historically fueled
cycles of rebellion and violent repression.
"It's like being on a train with a glass on a table and it's about to fall
off and break," said Prof. Thomas Reardon, an agricultural economist
at Michigan State University. "Everyone sees the glass on the table -
but do they see it shaking? Do they see the edge? The edge is the
structural changes in the market."
In the 1990's supermarkets went from controlling 10 to 20 percent
of the market in the region to dominating it, a transition that took
50 years in the United States, according to researchers at Michigan
State and the Latin American Center for Rural Development in
Santiago, Chile.
Brazil, Argentina, Chile, Costa Rica and Mexico are furthest along.
While the changes have happened more slowly in poorer, more rural
Central American countries, they have begun to quicken here, too.
In Guatemala, the number of supermarkets has more than doubled
in the past decade, as the share of food they retail has reached
35 percent.
The hope that small farmers would benefit by banding together
in business-minded associations has not been borne out. Some
like Aj Ticonel, in the city of Chimaltenango, have succeeded.
But the evidence suggests that the failure of Mr. Chinchilla's
co-op is the more common fate.
Its feeble attempts to sell to major supermarkets illustrate how
the odds are stacked against small farmers, as well as the uneven
effects of globalization itself. Many small farmers in the region
are getting left behind, while medium-sized and larger growers,
with more money and marketing savvy, are far more likely to benefit.
Most fruits and vegetables in the region are still sold in small
shops and open-air markets, but the value of supermarket
purchases from farmers has soared and now surpasses that
of produce exports by two and half times, researchers say.
The bottom line: supermarkets and their privately set standards
already loom larger for many farmers than the rules of the
World Trade Organization.
Still, stiff competition from foreign growers is also quite real.
To enter the supermarkets of Guatemala's dominant
supermarket chain, La Fragua - part of a holding company
one-third owned by Ahold - is to understand why Professor
Reardon likens them to a Trojan horse for foreign goods.
At La Fragua's immense distribution center in Guatemala City,
trucks back into loading docks, where electric forklifts unload
apples from Washington State, pineapples from Chile, potatoes
from Idaho and avocados from Mexico.
The produce is trucked from here to the chain's supermarkets,
which now span the country. Scenes at a mall in Guatemala
City anchored by Maxi Bodega, one of the company's stores,
suggest the evolving nature of grocery shopping for Latin
America's 512 million people.
On the ground floor was a sprawling, old-fashioned produce
market. At the entry, there was a shrine to its patron saint,
the Virgin of Rosario, who had plastic flowers sprinkled at
her queenly feet.
The sound of women patting out tortillas and the sweet smells
of ripe tropical fruits drifted through the market as people
stopped to squeeze the avocados, sniff the pineapples and
haggle for cheaper oranges.
To go upstairs was to leave Guatemala behind and enter
a mall that could be in Bangkok or New York, with its synthetic
Christmas wreaths, cheap clothing stores and oversized discount
packages of napkins and symmetrical tomatoes in plastic trays
at the Maxi Bodega.
The Baldetti family exemplified the generational change
unfolding here.
Delia Baldetti, an 81-year-old housewife, will only shop for
produce amid the heaps of tomatoes, chilies and papayas where
she can bargain to her heart's content. Her daughter Elsa,
a 56-year-old painter, shops both here and at Maxi Bodega,
while Elsa's daughter, a 36-year-old business administrator,
only has time for the supermarket.
Elsa wistfully predicted that while the country's fragrant, raucous
markets will never disappear, they will diminish. "We'll lose
some of our identity," she said. "We're copying the foreigners."
Farmers who do not or cannot afford to change fast enough
to meet the standards set by supermarkets are threatened.
The tiny farming community of Lo de Silva clings to a steep,
verdant hillside. Slanting cornstalks look as if they would slide
into the valley if they were not rooted to the earth.
Some of the more than 300 farmers who originally belonged to
Mr. Chinchilla's co-op, the Association of Small Irrigation Users
of Palencia - known by its Spanish acronym, Asumpal - were
from this village. Only eight remain. The only product they still
sell is salad tomatoes - and they sell to middlemen, not supermarkets.
José Luis Pérez Escobar, 44, a member of the co-op, scratched
out a living for 20 years from his small field, perched in the
clouds here.
But after his potato crop failed last year, he migrated to the United
States to save his land from foreclosure by the bank, leaving his
wife, MarÃa Graciela Lorenzana, and their five children behind.
He now works the graveyard shift at a golf course in Texas for
$6 an hour so he can pay his debts.
He had dreamed his cooperative would help him escape poverty by
selling directly to the supermarkets. "It would be magnificent,"
Mrs. Lorenzana recalled of that more hopeful time. "The small
farmer would not need a middleman. But he was never able to
achieve it."
A Transformation Begins
The transformation of Latin America's food retailing system
began in the 1980's and accelerated in the 1990's as countries
opened their economies, often to satisfy conditions for loans
from the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. As
foreign investment flooded in, multinational retailers bought
up domestic chains or entered joint ventures with them.
Most concern about the perils of globalization for local farmers
has focused on unfair trade competition from heavily subsidized
American and European producers.
But increasingly, supermarkets also leave small farmers exposed
as the stores spread from big cities to small towns, from well-
to-do enclaves to working-class neighborhoods, from richer
countries to poorer ones.
The chains now dominate sales of processed foods and their
share of produce sales is growing. In Guatemala, supermarkets
still control only 10 to 15 percent of fruit and vegetable sales.
But in Argentina, their slice has grown to as much as 30 percent,
while in Brazil they control half the market, according to
Professor Reardon.
As the chains' market share expands, farmers who are shut
out find themselves forced to retreat to shrinking rural markets.
The changes would not be so troubling if the region's
economies were growing robustly and generating decent
jobs for globalization's losers. After all, supermarkets are
providing consumers with cheaper, cleaner places to buy
food, economists say.
"It would be an appealing transformation of the sector if
alternative jobs could be made available," said Samuel Morley,
an economist at the International Food Policy Research Institute
in Washington.
But economic growth has not kept pace with rising populations.
The number of people living below poverty lines in Latin America
has risen from 200 million in 1990 to 224 million this year.
More than 6 in 10 people living in rural areas are still poor.
Given the difficulties small farmers face in doing business
with multinational corporations, traditional strategies,
like providing peasants with fertilizer and improved seeds,
now seem quaint here.
Professor Reardon and Julio A. Berdegué, an agronomist
who heads the Latin American Center for Rural Development,
are collaborating with supermarket researchers across Asia
and Africa, as well as Latin America, to document the trends.
In addition, a team at Michigan State has financing from the
United States Agency for International Development to help
small farmers in Central America, India and Kenya sell to
supermarkets. They and other development experts are
brainstorming about what to do.
Among the ideas: Regulations requiring that farmers be
paid promptly. Enforcement of laws meant to curtail
monopolies and oligopolies, including mergers of supermarket
chains. Improved security and cleanliness at open-air markets.
Infusions of credit and technical expertise for co-ops.
But while such cooperatives are almost certainly necessary
if small growers are to amass the clout and scale to sell to
multinational chains, they have been a disappointment so far.
Even in economically vibrant Chile, which has invested
$1.5 billion in small-scale farming since 1990, a study of
750 farmer organizations found that 8 of 10 had failed or
survived only with continuous infusions of government aid.
Mr. Berdegué, author of the Chile study, had sought to make
the associations work in the 1990's when he was a senior
government official there. The pressure from the I.M.F. and
the World Bank to allow greater foreign investment was
intended to make Latin American economies more competitive.
"But the model did not have a social dimension at the real
center," he said. "It was trickle-down economics."
An Experiment Disappoints
Mr. Chinchilla, 46, drove his battered, 20-year-old pickup,
laden with crates of tomatoes, into his cooperative's spacious
packing shed. The building and the business are in decay.
The water had been cut off. Toilets no longer flushed. The
roof was missing over the bathroom, its floor covered with
bird droppings. The live-in caretakers who sort the co-op's
tomatoes had only an open pail of rainwater to wash their
hands. They wore no gloves while handling the fruit.
Typically, each farmer is growing less than an acre of salad
tomatoes in rustic greenhouses that are fast deteriorating.
Their production has plummeted because of the blight that
dries out the plants, which then yield very small tomatoes.
"We haven't found a solution," MarÃa Antonietta Muralles,
a co-op member, said with a shrug. "Maybe it's the water."
Mr. Chinchilla treated his plants with pesticides to no effect.
"You can't fight it with chemicals," he said. Maybe the soil itself
is infected, they speculated.
"Everything costs money," he explained - money he does not
have and cannot afford to borrow at the going rate of 21 percent.
"When you don't have access to credit, you can't expand," he said.
"We don't want anything given to us, but we need a hand."
As the farmers talked, two workers separated tomatoes by size,
with the shrunken ones far too numerous. But their co-op's hopes
of selling to big supermarket chains withered well before the plants.
The co-op got started in the late 1990's, with a small grant from
the government to upgrade the packing shed. An agronomist,
Candelario López, was given a two-year contract, also at
government expense, to advise them.
Over the next couple of years, Mr. López helped the co-op get
its foot in the door with La Fragua and C.S.U., another major
supermarket chain. The chains have since united to become
the Central American Retail Holding Company, with 332 stores
and almost $2 billion in sales in 2003. It is one-third owned by
Ahold, which had more than $68 billion in sales last year.
But the co-op did not manage to supply the big chains for long.
The farmers themselves were uncomfortable with the rules of the
supermarket game. They found it difficult to wait weeks to get
paid. They did not want to sell their vegetables on the books
and pay taxes that sharply cut profits. And some of what they
supplied was rejected as too bruised or too limp or too ripe.
The co-op's leaders said they quit selling to C.S.U. through its
dedicated wholesaler in 2000 after two container loads of
vegetables got held up for days at the Nicaraguan border,
severely damaging the produce. "We weren't prepared to absorb
that kind of loss," said Marco Tulio Alvizures, who then headed
the co-op.
Perhaps more fundamental, co-op members had trouble
consistently delivering the quantity and quality of produce
the supermarkets demanded, a problem Mr. Chinchilla readily
acknowledged.
In the case of La Fragua, Mr. Alvizures contended that the
chain never gave the co-op a chance to sell the amount it was
capable of. But Jorge González, the chain's manager for vegetables,
said the small orders likely reflected La Fragua's judgment, based
on weekly evaluations, that the co-op was not up to the task. The
co-op was such a small supplier that Mr. González could not recall
all the details of their dealings.
The corporate imperative is to reward suppliers who consistently
provide what the chain requires. If the vegetables do not arrive,
shelves stand empty. "We punish farmers very hard if they don't
deliver what we order," said Bernardo Roehrs, a spokesman for
the chain.
As the co-op members sought to navigate the difficult new world
of supermarkets, they lost the critical guidance of Mr. López, the
agronomist, when his contract expired in 2001. He is now
a salesman for a company that makes high-tech greenhouses
the co-op's farmers could never afford.
A Rare Success Story
Not too far from Palencia, in the city of Chimaltenango, is Aj Ticonel,
an association of small farmers that has thrived because it has
something Mr. Chinchilla's co-op lacked: a shrewd and enterprising
businessman to run it.
But even for a savvy company like Aj Ticonel, success came not
from supplying choosy supermarket chains but rather from its
ability to exploit a global market.
Aj Ticonel sells three million pounds of mini-vegetables and snow
peas for export to the United States, but only 80,000 pounds to
supermarkets. Alberto Monterroso said he gave up on growing
broccoli for La Fragua. He found the chain bought inconsistent
amounts. "There are a lot of competitors here," he said, "a lot of
small farmers trying to sell to them, so the prices are low."
The company's success has been built instead on sales of pricey
vegetables for export. It now sells the same to La Fragua, and its
membership has risen from 40 families in 1999 to 2,000 today.
Its plant sparkles. Its 53 packers wear gloves, face masks and
hairnets as they sort slender French beans on stainless steel tables.
Each box produce is marked with a bar code traceable to the
family that grew it.
Aj Ticonel sold $2.5 million worth of vegetables last year, but
Mr. Monterroso, a sociologist and deal maker with a passion for
justice, paid himself only $18,000. Most of the company's profits
are plowed back into the plant, marketing campaigns and
agricultural education for the farmers.
"I want a different country for my sons," Mr. Monterroso said.
"I'm trying to redistribute the wealth so people will live in
harmony."
One recent afternoon, a big Aj Ticonel truck took a meandering
path into the hilly countryside, stopping for peasants waiting
roadside with crates of vegetables to load.
Many of them grumbled that Aj Ticonel does not pay enough and
rejects too many of their vegetables, but most had been selling
to the company for years. The evidence of their profit could be
seen in new roofs, freshly painted homes and well-clothed
children.
Still, Mr. Monterroso acknowledged how hard it will be to replicate
Aj Ticonel. Three times, the company loaned money to farmers
to clone itself. Three times the farmers went out of business.
For Latin America's millions of small farmers, he offered this
sobering fact of life: "The client buys from us not because
poor people produce it, but because it's a good product."
Copyright 2004 The New York Times
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9) Being Sold a Bill of Goods: (very interesting...bw)
Derek Seidman
Richard Ohmann's Selling Culture is a rigorously intelligent study of
the emergence of a national mass culture in the United States at the
turn of the nineteenth century as seen through the rise of
widely-consumed popular magazines. Ohmann argues that the economic
crisis of the early 1890s compelled the capitalist class to devise new
and more stable profit-making avenues, and that this was done through
orchestrating the emergence of a consumer culture targeting the rising
"professional-managerial class" (PMC). At the vanguard of this project
was the rise of cheap, mass-circulated magazines, and this story is at
the center of Ohmann's work: "I propose to consider what conjunction of
interests, needs, activities, and forces led to the invention and
success of the modern magazine industry" (32). Not only were magazines
the vehicles for advertisements (both direct and indirect
profit-makers), but more importantly, they helped to solidify the
identity of the rising PMC and generally shape a new consumer-oriented
mass culture.
Here's a good companion volume:
The New York Times
December 1, 1993, Wednesday, Late Edition - Final
Books of The Times;
The Department Store and the Culture It Created
BYLINE: By MARGO JEFFERSON
Land of Desire
Merchants, Power and the Rise of a New American Culture
By William Leach
Illustrated. 510 pages. Pantheon. $30.
Like No Other Store . . .
The Bloomingdale's Legend and the Revolution in American Marketing
By Marvin Traub and Tom Teicholz
Illustrated. 428 pages. Times Books/ Random House. $25.
To mark the start of the holiday shopping season, some stores are opening
their doors at 7:30 A.M., earlier than most schools do, and others are
offering free massages to overstimulated patrons. One is providing callers
with a "Santa's Hotline," and another is supplying non-English-speaking
shoppers with translators.
This is consumer culture operating at full blast, and it is a culture made
in America just a century ago: a vast network of department stores, mail
order catalogues, credit services, advertising and public relations, all
set in motion by a group of businessmen who saw themselves as explorers and
empire builders. As one of the savviest, John Wanamaker, put it in 1906
when the store that bore his name was taking off: "Everyone who starts a
new thing has to stand where Columbus did when he set sail. Few had faith
that he could ever reach the Land of Desire."
Wanamaker is a pivotal figure in William Leach's history of this ruthless
and dazzling new world. Wanamaker's of Philadelphia was quickly joined by
Marshall Field of Chicago, May's of St. Louis, Filene's of Boston,
Bullock's of Los Angeles and Macy's of New York. Like nation-states, they
competed and collaborated to gain financial power, social influence and the
loyalty of their public. All were beneficiaries of a post-Civil War shift
that had turned a largely agrarian economy into an industrial behemoth.
With this economic shift came equally potent shifts in people's habits,
tastes, wants, needs and pleasures.
"Land of Desire" follows these changes with scholarly exactness and
writerly elegance. Mr. Leach takes in the full range of motives and
responses at work in consumer culture, from greed and manipulation to
idealism and inventiveness.
These men were nothing if not inventive. They devised bargain basements for
"the masses" and upper-floor salons for "the classes." They cultivated
friendly relations with museums and hired designers who used painting,
sculpture and theater decor to create show windows that were visions of
color, fabric and light. They lobbied city governments for favorable zoning
laws, easy-access mass transit stops and high-visibility signs and
billboards. They mined the worlds of the exotic and the primitive to stage
fashion shows with "Garden of Allah" themes and Mayan "motifs."
By World War I, these stores had all the services a town or small city
could offer. A shopper could purchase clothes, furniture and housewares;
mail letters at an in-house post office; lunch in a tearoom; send the nanny
and the children off to a Happyland and refresh her spirit in a meditative
"Silence Room" before rejoining them.
Department store founders, as Mr. Leach perceptively notes, like to speak
of their business in religious terms: Wanamaker called his store the Garden
of Merchandise and his goods "beautiful fields of necessities." Designers
liked to invoke art: L. Frank Baum, the most influential window designer in
the country (before he wrote "The Wizard of Oz" and retired), said that
lamps and tin pots must be made to come alive as if they were figures on
the stage.
Advertising experts preferred a political or psychological discourse. The
ability to want and choose was an equal right for all citizens. Public
relations was, as Mr. Leach puts it, "a nonjudgmental technique similar to
psychoanalysis, to be applied to any institution, person or commodity that
needed its 'image' (ego) refurbished in the public arena." Even the 1928
economic study produced by Herbert Hoover sounded Freudian when it declared
that the economy had proved conclusively the theory that "wants are nearly
insatiable." In "Civilization and Its Discontents," published two years
later, Freud wrote that humans are ruled by the pleasure principle, and by
desires that can never be met. The merchants of consumer culture set out to
prove that those desires can, should and must be met -- or at least lived
out fully -- at the department store.
In this light, Marvin Traub's "Like No Other Store . . .: The
Bloomingdale's Legend and the Revolution in American Marketing" makes very
interesting reading. Mr. Traub came to Bloomingdale's in 1950, a year out
of the Harvard Business School. His goal was to give "the chic woman" a
reason to shop there: at that time it was known as the store where the
maids of chic women shopped.
Mr. Traub made his way from the bargain basement to the company presidency,
and this book explains the merchandising techniques he used so well. When
business got slow in the basement, he and a fellow employee would put on
their coats and hats, rush to the bargain counter tables and pretend to be
customers, "tossing through them as if there was hidden gold. Once we
attracted a crowd, we would quietly slip back to our offices."
By the 70's and 80's, Mr. Traub was concentrating on boutiques that
featured the ready-to-wear clothes of Yves Saint Laurent and Ralph Lauren,
and mounting updated "Garden of Allah" spectacles titled "India: The
Ultimate Fantasy," "Israel: The Dream" and "China: Heralding the Dawn of a
New Era." A hostile takeover and a declaration of bankruptcy forced him out
of Bloomingdale's in 1991. He now has a consulting firm involved, among
other things, in the fast-developing cable-television shopping networks.
Mr. Traub is cheerfully and egotistically convinced that every trend, from
high-visibility advertising to the hard sell of women's cosmetics, began in
the 60's when he came to power. Perhaps he and Mr. Leach should exchange
books for Christmas. "Land of Desire" will show Mr. Traub the history that
made him. "Like No Other Store . . .," with sales advice and
self-congratulation on every page, will show Mr. Leach what a very good
social historian he is.
Marxism list: www.marxmail.org
Marxism mailing list
Marxism@lists.econ.utah.edu
http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism
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10) How Nonprofit Careerism Derailed the "Revolution"
Greens and Greenbacks
Counterpunch, December 27, 2004
By MICHAEL DONNELLY
full: http://www.counterpunch.org/donnelly12272004.html
My good friend Lisa Goldrosen is a veteran of many left causes. Lisa has
spent her entire adult life working in various coop endeavors. She has a
wonderful collection of buttons and posters from back when America rose
from the slumber of the Eisenhower years. She has buttons from the early
days of the clean-up of the Hudson River - Pete Seeger's precursor to
Greenpeace. More are from the early Civil Rights Movement. Others are from
the anti-Vietnam War effort and the SDS era on campus. She has one anti-war
poster that could be recycled as is and still be useful today.
Lisa has arranged them all in a wonderful historic collage. She regularly
uses it to give history lessons to young radicals here in Oregon. Someone
always asks, "Why didn't I ever hear about this in school?"
Being a 60s activist myself, having grown up in Flint -- steeped in the
history of the Labor Movement, a Civil Rights activist at fourteen, a UAW
member at eighteen and a draft resister/ Conscientious Objector/anti-war
activist later -- I always enjoy my discussions with Lisa.
Recently, she put my frustrations with the current state of activism in
full perspective.
The Three-legged Stool of Counterrevolution
Lisa notes, "The Revolution was derailed by three things: the end of the
draft; Roe v. Wade and the rise of the nonprofit sector. Once the children
of privilege were no longer subject to any personal pain, it was over. It
was a brilliant strategy by predatory capitalism."
While I'm not sure if Revolution, or even Reform, was/is inevitable, I
agree. Once the draft and the possibility that middle-to-upper class kids
would be sent to fight Imperial Wars was over, it's easy to see how the
bottom fell out of the anti-war movement. Recent Imperial Wars, fought
predominantly with "volunteers," are just as heinous as Vietnam, but with
few highly-educated, comfortable kids' lives being on the line, we have yet
to see anything approaching the across-the-board, massive opposition that
Vietnam engendered. (Astonishingly, this very year during yet another
ill-fated Imperial misadventure, we saw the "Peace" Movement line up
vociferously behind a proudly-stated "I'll hunt 'em down and kill 'em"
warmonger for president!)
Same with Roe v Wade. A whole lot of steam went out of progressive social
efforts once this same socioeconomic group could gain access to affordable,
legal abortion. (It appears to be the sole bottom line litmus test still
applied to the Democratic Party.) Remove the pain and the rulers gain.
It really did become -- remove the personal pain from these me firsters and
the hiccup of resistance vanishes. I already felt that way about these two
issues. But, Lisa's expansion of the concept to include the rise of the
"Nonprofit Sector" put the final piece of the puzzle in place.
Nonprofit Careerism
Back there in Eisenhower days, an educated, middle class American youth
could look forward to a future laid out lockstep towards either a position
in the "Private Sector" (read: corporate drone) or in the "Public Sector"
(read: political hack).
Those who got too far out there protesting the War or Racism or any other
outrage soon found themselves with a blot on the resume. Not to worry; soon
corporate America set up the "third" leg of the stool. The entire domain of
nonprofit institutions (arts, culture, environment, etc.) found and
embraced a collective identity as the "Nonprofit Sector" sometime in the
early 1970s. Ludicrously, their self-declared title has recently become
"The Independent Sector."
Prior to that time, most of these types of organizations, were for-profit
entities. With the advent of tax incentives, a plethora of corporate-funded
grant-making foundations arose as companies morphed from private to
nonprofit to take advantage of the tax rules. For example: In 1930, only a
quarter of hospitals were nonprofit, about 35% government run and another
40% were private for-profits. By 1970, over half were nonprofit and just
12% privately owned.
Entire college programs have sprung up, such as Wayne State University's
Nonprofit Sector Studies Program (NPSS). The NPSS mission sates, "The
nation's fastest growing sector needs administrators, policy makers,
program managers, and advocates who will guide them into the future"
According to The NonProfit Times survey, the mean salaries for top
nonprofit employees for 2003 were:
Executive director/CEO/president- $88,749
Chief financial officer- $60,675
Program director- $52,253
Planned giving officer- $62,019
Development director- $55,807
Major gifts officer- $56,850
Chief of direct marketing- $52,812
Director of volunteers- $35,267
Webmaster- $38,498
Chief of technology- $58,595.
Lisa is correct. People could have their little impact antiauthority flings
as a college youth and still have a well-compensated career as one of those
administrators, etc. And corporate America could continue its depredations
and whitewash its impacts by sending out an army of increasingly
ineffective nonprofit professionals.
Louis Proyect
Marxism list: www.marxmail.org
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11) Bob Herbert: How the Iraq tragedy is hitting home
Bob Herbert The New York Times
Monday, December 27, 2004
http://www.iht.com/articles/2004/12/26/opinion/edherb.html
NEW YORK 'It's like watching your son playing in traffic, and there's
nothing you can do." - Janet Bellows, mother of a soldier who has
been assigned to a second tour in Iraq.
Back in the 1960s, when it seemed as if every other draftee in the
army was being sent to Vietnam, I was sent off to Korea, where I was
assigned to the intelligence office of an engineer battalion.
Twenty years old and half a world away from home, I looked forward
to mail call the way junkies craved their next fix. My teenage sister,
Sandy, got all of her high school girlfriends to write to me, which led
some of the guys in my unit to think I was some kind of Don Juan.
I considered it impolite to correct any misconceptions they might
have had.
You could depend on the mail for an emotional lift - most of the time.
But there were times when I would open an envelope and read, in the
inky handwriting of my mother or father or sister, that a friend of
mine, someone I had grown up with or gone to school with, or
a new friend I had met in the army, had been killed in Vietnam.
Just like that. Gone. Life over at 18, 19, 20.
I can still remember the weird feelings that would come over me
in those surreal moments, including the irrational idea that I was
somehow responsible for the death. In the twisted logic of grief,
I would feel that if I had never opened the envelope, the person
would still be alive. I remember being overwhelmed with the desire
to reseal the letter in the envelope and bring my dead friend back
to life.
Last week's hideous attack in Mosul reminded me of those long
ago days. Once again American troops sent on a fool's errand are
coming home in coffins, or without their right arms or left legs,
or paralyzed, or so messed up mentally they'll never be the same.
Troops are being shoved two or three times into the furnace of
Iraq by astonishingly incompetent leaders who have been unable
or unwilling to provide them with the proper training, adequate
equipment or even a clearly defined mission.
It is a mind-boggling tragedy. And the suffering goes far beyond
the men and women targeted by the insurgents. Each death in Iraq
blows a hole in a family and sets off concentric circles of grief that
touch everyone else who knew and cared for the fallen soldier. If
the human stakes were understood well enough by the political
leaders of this country, it might make them a little more reluctant
to launch foolish, unnecessary and ultimately unwinnable wars.
Lisa Hoffman and Annette Rainville of the Scripps Howard News
Service have reported, in an extremely moving article, that nearly
900 American children have lost a parent to the war in Iraq. More
than 40 fathers died without seeing their babies.
The article begins with a description of a deeply sad 4-year-old
named Jack Shanaberger, whose father was killed in an ambush
in March. Jack told his mother he didn't want to be a father when
he grew up.
"I don't want to be a daddy," he said, "because daddies die."
Six female soldiers who died in the war left a total of 10 children.
This is a new form of wartime heartbreak for the United States.
We have completely lost our way with this fiasco. The president
seems almost perversely out of touch. "The idea of democracy
taking hold in what was a place of tyranny and hatred and
destruction is such a hopeful moment in the history of the
world," he said last week.
The truth, of course, is that we can't even secure the road to
the Baghdad airport, or protect our own troops lining up for
lunch inside a military compound. The coming elections are
a slapstick version of democracy. International observers won't
even go to Iraq to monitor the elections because it's too
dangerous. They'll be watching, as if through binoculars,
from Jordan.
Nobody has a plan. We don't have enough troops to secure the
country, and the Iraqi forces have shown neither the strength
nor the will to do it themselves. Election officials are being
murdered in the streets. The insurgency is growing in both
strength and sophistication. At least three more Marines and
one soldier were killed Thursday, ensuring the grimmest of
holidays for their families and loved ones.
One of the things that President George W. Bush might consider
while on his current vacation is whether there are any limits
to the price our troops should be prepared to pay for his
misadventure in Iraq, or whether the suffering and dying
will simply go on indefinitely.
Copyright (c) 2004 The International Herald Tribune | www.iht.com
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12) A Third of the Dead in Undersea Quake Are Said to Be Children
By SETH MYDANS
COLOMBO, Sri Lanka
December 28, 2004
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/12/28/international/asia/28CND_quake.html?hp&ex=
1104296400&en=eee9dda7fec47a7a&ei=5094&partner=homepage
COLOMBO, Sri Lanka, Dec. 28 - Survivors of the gigantic undersea
earthquake on Sunday that swallowed coastlines from Indonesia
to Africa - which officials now describe as one of the worst natural
disasters in recent history - recovered bodies today, hurriedly
arranged for mass burials and searched for tens of thousands
of the missing in countries thousands of miles apart.
The reported deaths from the disaster - which climbed today to
about 44,000, with many still unaccounted for, as Sri Lanka and
Indonesia increased their confirmed tolls - came into sharper
relief on a day when it seemed increasingly clear that at least
a third of the dead were children, according to estimates by aid
officials.
The International Committee of the Red Cross and government
officials here, as well as those in Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand,
India, the Maldives and as far away as Somalia, warned that
with hundreds of thousands of people stranded in the open
without clean drinking water, epidemics of cholera and other
waterborne diseases could take as many lives as the initial waves.
Images from around the region presented a tableau of
unrelenting grief. Fathers and mothers wailed over drowned
children. Bodies were arrayed in long rows in hastily dug
trenches. Villagers sat by ruined homes, stunned. Hotels in
some of Thailand's most luxurious resorts were turned into
morgues.
"This may be the worst natural disaster in recent history
because it is affecting so many heavily populated coastal
areas," said Jan Egeland, the emergency relief coordinator for
the United Nations, speaking at a news conference in New York.
"Usually a natural disaster strikes one or two or three countries,
not eight or nine enormous coastlines like they've done here,"
he added. "Bigger waves have been recorded. But no wave has
affected so many people." Nearly half the reported deaths were
here in Sri Lanka, where estimates jumped Monday to more than
12,000 killed, and where more than a million people were
reported to have lost their homes.
Today the estimate of deaths jumped even higher, with an official
with the state-run National Disaster Management Center, D. N.
Wanigasooriya, telling Reuters, "At the moment they have
recovered 18,706 bodies."
The realization began to emerge today that the dead included
an exceptionally high number of children who, aid officials
suggested, were least able to grab onto trees or boats when
the deadly waves smashed through villages and over beaches.
Children make up at least half the population of Asia.
On the western tip of the Indonesian island of Sumatra, the
destruction was doubly fierce, caused by both the earthquake
itself 150 miles away and the tsunamis that followed.
Emergency workers who reached Aceh Province found that 10,000
people had been killed in a single town, Meulaboh, said Purnomo
Sidik, national disaster director at the Social Affairs Ministry, news
agencies reported.
Another 9,000 were confirmed dead so far in the provincial capital,
Banda Aceh, and surrounding towns, he said. India reported more
than 4,000 dead on the mainland. Hundreds were dead or missing
in the southern resort islands of Thailand, many of them foreign
vacationers.
Mr. Egeland said the big problem now was to coordinate the huge
international aid effort, a particularly daunting challenge given how
widespread the devastation is. He said the total damage would
"probably be many billions of dollars."
"We cannot fathom the cost of these poor societies and the
nameless fishermen and fishing villages and so on that have
just been wiped out," he said. "Hundreds of thousands of
livelihoods have gone."
Amateur videotape played on television showed terrifying scenes
from several countries of huge walls of water crashing through
palm trees and over the tops of buildings and roaring up coastal
streets with cars and debris bobbing on the surface.
To backdrops of screams and shouts, people were shown clinging
to buildings, being swept away by the current, running for their
lives, weeping, carrying the injured and cradling dead children.
As the water receded, almost as quickly as it had arrived, bodies
were seen in the branches of trees, and broken cars and houses
littered the shores as if a tornado had struck. Some of the bodies
and debris were sucked back out to sea.
Fears of thousands more deaths on India's Andaman and Nicobar
Islands, where most communications have been cut off, came
closer to being realized today, when Indian officials said at least
7,000 people may have died.
The territory administration's relief chief, Puneet Goel, said
20 percent of the 30,000 people living on the island of Car
Nicobar are feared lost, Reuters reported.
Smaller numbers of deaths were reported in Malaysia, the Maldives,
Myanmar, Bangladesh and the Seychelles, as well as along the
distant African coastline, particularly Somalia, where entire
villages were reported to have disappeared.
"All of the fishermen who went to sea haven't come back," said
Yusuf Ismail, a spokesman for the president.
In Thailand, the government put the death toll at 1,516 and said
8,432 people were injured. About 200 people are confirmed dead
in Phuket and 950 in Phangnga, two resort provinces. Prime Minister
Thaksin Shinawatra said the number of deaths might rise to 2,000.
Thousand are missing, mostly on small resort islands or among
boatloads of recreational divers who had headed out to sea in the
morning before the wave struck.
Many of those killed there were foreigners, but the most prominent
of the dead was Poom Jensen, 21, the Thai-American grandson of
King Bhumipol Adulyadej.
The smaller island of Phi Phi Lei, which was the scene of the movie
"The Beach," starring Leonardo DiCaprio, was reported to have been
mostly leveled. On another small island, the proprietors of the elite
Phra Thong Resort said only 70 of 170 guests were accounted for.
Apart from the huge death toll, it was the presence of large number
of foreign tourists that distinguished this disaster from the many
floods and typhoons that take a heavy toll in the region every year.
Sri Lanka's air force evacuated former Chancellor Helmut Kohl of
Germany from the hotel where he was stranded in the hard-hit
south to the German Embassy in Colombo. Mr. Kohl, 74, was
vacationing and escaped injury, a spokesman, Ulrich Pohlmann,
told news agencies in Berlin.
The Sri Lankan government said as many as 200 foreign tourists
had been killed. In Thailand, an official estimated that 20 to 30
percent of those killed were foreigners, but that estimate is
expected to grow. The victims were reported to include people
from Germany, Japan, Italy, Sweden, France, Britain, the United
States, Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Finland, Hungary, the
Netherlands, Norway, Switzerland, Turkey, Spain and Russia.
The number of Americans dead stood at eight.
Sweden's foreign minister, Laila Freivalds, said at a news
conference in Stockholm today that 1,500 Swedes are missing.
"We are afraid that we will never find many of them," she said,
declining to give a clearer estimate of how many died.
Those numbers were tiny, though, compared with the
devastation suffered by the mostly poor fishermen, farmers
and laborers who populate the low-lying coasts of these
South Asian and Southeast Asian nations.
In Sri Lanka, Susil Premajayantha, a senior minister, said
the homes of about 1.5 million people had been destroyed
or damaged. Few have the resources to resume their lives
without help.
He said 890 miles of railway track running south from the
capital, Colombo, had been washed away. Local officials told
The Associated Press that some 1,500 passengers had been
trapped in railroad cars as an entire train was caught in the
rushing tide and swept away.
At least 400 prisoners were reported to have escaped during
the chaos from two jails in the southern area, and officials
offered them an amnesty to turn themselves in. Across the
region, police officers and soldiers patrolled in an effort to
halt looting. The United States Geological Survey said the
9.0 magnitude earthquake on Sunday morning was the
fourth-largest in a century and the largest in the world
since 1964, when an earthquake measuring 9.2 hit Alaska.
A number of strong aftershocks have followed. "We have
ordered 15,000 troops into the field to search for survivors,"
said Edy Sulistiadi, a spokesman for the Indonesian military,
which is fighting separatist rebels in the area. "They are
mostly retrieving corpses."
Warren Hoge contributed reporting from the United Nations
for this article, and Wayne Arnold from Lhokseumawe, Indonesia.
Copyright 2004 The New York Times
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13) That Line at the Ferrari Dealer? It's Bonus Season on Wall Street
By JENNY ANDERSON
December 28, 2004
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/12/28/business/28bonus.html?hp&ex=1104296400&en=
9dbbb1a2157e9ffa&ei=5094&partner=homepage
Samantha Kleier Forbes, a 30-year-old real estate broker, was
getting ready to leave for a vacation to Florida with her mother
and sister when she got an urgent call. It was a client who had
spent the summer scouring the Upper East Side of Manhattan
for an apartment priced between $4 million and $5 million.
The client insisted on seeing more apartments that day, but now
she wanted to look in the $6 million range. Her husband, a banker
at Goldman Sachs in his late 30's, had just received his year-end
bonus.
"Normally this time of year is dead," said Ms. Forbes, a vice
president at Gumley Haft Kleier, a residential real estate brokerage.
But this winter there is unusual buying interest that she attributes
to rich Wall Street bonuses. She is cutting her end-of-the-year
vacation short, so she can prepare for an onslaught of clients
eager to see apartments.
The year-end bonus is a Wall Street tradition, and for a second
consecutive year, the amounts are significant. Three major Wall
Street firms - Goldman Sachs, Lehman Brothers and Bear Stearns
- have reported record profits for the year and all are said to have
given out handsome bonuses.
The totals in 2003 were already impressive: Lloyd S. Blankfein, the
president and chief operating officer of Goldman Sachs made $20.1
million, of that only $600,000 was salary; and E. Stanley O'Neal, the
chief executive of Merrill Lynch , received a bonus of $13.5 million
and restricted stock worth $11.2 million on top of his $500,000
salary. At the other end of the compensation spectrum, an
investment banking analyst right out of college would have made
a $65,000 salary and a $35,000 bonus last year. An associate just
out of business school might have made $85,000 in salary and a
$115,000 bonus.
This year, investment bankers are expected to see gains in bonuses
of 10 to 15 percent, amid a year-end flurry of mergers. Fixed-income
traders, who have been the best compensated Wall Street
professionals in recent years, will also be amply rewarded, but
their percentage gains may be smaller than those of bankers.
Bonuses, of course, vary by bank, by division and by individual.
They reflect the firm's profitability and the group's performance,
as well as the individual's contribution.
This year's bonuses do not quite reach the heights touched by star
bankers and traders in the heyday of the late 1990's technology
bubble. But they are rich enough to persuade many of Wall Street's
elite to rediscover conspicuous consumption.
One senior trader is building a sports complex for triathlon
training at his house in upstate New York. It will include a swim-
in-place lap pool, a climbing wall and a fitness center. Another
bought an Aston Martin. For some, upgrading real estate is the
first order of business.
But many Wall Street professionals are urging caution, given that
the bonus typically constitutes the majority of their compensation.
More than a dozen bankers, all of whom would talk about their
spending only on the condition of anonymity, said they were all
too aware that the good times could end as quickly as they did
after 2000, when a $2.5 million income could turn to $800,000
overnight.
"Given the last two to three years when people figured out that
this business is pretty volatile, they are going to try and bank
a lot of their bonuses," said one managing director at a firm where
bonuses have been announced. "They've seen too many people
laid off and they realize they can't just spend all their money."
It should be noted that this same banker just bought a $150,000
Aston Martin to park in his garage in Greenwich, Conn.
Another senior banker at a different firm, who is set to receive a
$2.8 million bonus, said he had bought his wife a mink coat and
was planning a weeklong skiing vacation out West. But he also
said he intended to save most of the money. "We're not buying
homes or boats, we're not spending on the big things," he said.
"We are more relaxed and generous on the small things."
Of course, small is in the eye of the beholder. While the Maybach,
an exclusive line of luxury cars made by Mercedes-Benz that starts
at $315,000, appears on the wish lists of many bankers, relatively
less expensive models from Aston Martin, Bentley and Maserati
have also been popular. Michael Parchment, general manager
for Miller Motorcars, a luxury dealership in Greenwich, said
demand had been soaring.
"It's probably up 20 to 30 percent from the same time period
last year," he said. "Unfortunately, production isn't up." The
result, he said, are some unhappy bankers.
Wall Street bonuses are expected to total $15.9 billion in 2004
- second only to $19.5 billion in 2000- according to Alan G.
Hevesi, the state comptroller of New York. In 2003, bonuses
totaled $15.8 billion. Mr. Hevesi said bonuses of that magnitude
were "good news for New York."
"It's all taxable income and it means that folks have more
disposable income so they will spend money," he said.
Bonus season is always a particularly angst-ridden time for
Wall Street. Managers haggle for more money for their employees,
divisions fight for a bigger piece of the pie and bankers try to
portray themselves as indispensable. In the end, few admit to
being happy, at least to their bosses.
"We used to say there's no amount of compensation that amounts
to people saying thank you," said Roy C. Smith, a former Goldman
Sachs partner who is now a professor of finance at New York
University. "They are either sullen or mutinous, but never quite
happy."
Midlevel employees did especially well this year. Three senior-
level managers at Wall Street firms said that the people who were
enjoying the biggest percentage increases over all were second-
and third-level associates and junior-level vice presidents.
The ranks of those managers had been thinned after the stock
market bubble burst. But this year, a reinvigorated market meant
there were too few associates and managing directors to put
together client pitches. At least three banks had to guarantee
bonus increases of 25 to 50 percent to prevent defections to
other firms. The result is that a third-year associate who might
have made $200,000 in income last year could receive
$350,000 this year.
The manager with the Aston Martin said that last year's
compensation packages for associates were ridiculously
low. "You had third-year associates making $210,000 to
$225,000; a lot of these guys are married and have young
kids and they are working" very hard, he said.
Many of those associates are expected to use their new wealth
to pay off debts incurred from three years of relatively meager
bonuses.
But real estate will draw, as usual, a significant portion
of the bonuses.
"Usually we get five phone calls a week," said Richard Steinberg,
a managing director at Warburg Realty Partnership who shows
apartments priced from $10 million to $20 million. "Since
bonuses, we've gotten double that from hedge funds, Wall
Streeters and money managers. I've gotten more phone
calls since Dec. 15 than from any other year."
Late-night entertainment may also benefit from the rise in
bonuses, given Wall Street's reputation as something of
a boys' club.
"Certainly the Wall Street crowd is very special to us," said
Lonnie Hanover, a representative for Scores, a high-end
strip club in Manhattan. "December is an amazing month
for our business, but it's everything, it's Christmas bonuses,
Christmas spirit. They have their official parties and then the
unofficial party here."
Even the cautious are probably going to treat at least part of
their bonus as play money.
One senior investment banker at a big Wall Street firm said he
was putting this year's money "directly into the bank."
"I have a sailboat, a motor boat, an apartment, an S.U.V.," he
said. "What could I possibly need?" After brief reflection,
however, he continued: "Maybe a little Porsche for the Hamptons
house, but probably not."
Copyright 2004 The New York Times
---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
14) AIN'T WE GOT FUN?
Words by Gus Kahn and Raymond B. Egan
Music by Richard Whiting,1921
http://www.rienzihills.com/SING/aintwegotfun.htm
Bill collectors gather 'round and rather haunt
the cottage next door,
Men the grocer and butcher sent,
Men who call for the rent.
But within, a happy chappy, and his bride of only a year,
Seem to be so cheerful,
Here's an ear full of the chatter you hear:
Ev'ry morning
Ev'ry evening
Ain't we got fun?
Not much money,
Oh but honey,
Ain't We Got Fun?
The rent's unpaid dear,
We haven't a bus
In the winter, in the summer,
Don't we have fun?
Times are bum and getting bummer,
Still we have fun.
There's nothing surer:
The rich get rich and the poor get poorer
In the meantime,
In between time,
Ain't we got fun?
Just to make their trouble nearly double,
Something happen'd last night.
To their chimney a gray bird came,
Mr. Stork is his name.
And I'll bet two pins
A pair of twins just happen'd in with the bird.
Still they're very gay and merry,
Just at dawning I heard:
Ev'ry morning
Ev'ry evening
Don't we got fun?
Twins and cares dear, come in pairs, dear,
Don't we have fun?
We've only started,
As mommer and pop,
Are we downhearted,
I'll say that we're not!
Landlords mad and getting madder,
Ain't we got fun?
Times are bad and getting badder,
Still we have fun!
There's nothing surer,
The rich get rich and the poor get laid off
In the meantime,
In between time,
Ain't we got fun?
When the man who sold 'em carpets told 'em,
He would take them away,
They said "Wonderful! here's our chance!
Take them up, and we'll dance!"
And when burglars came and robb'd them
Taking all their silver, they say.
Hubby yell'd "We're famous,
For they'll name us in the papers today!"
Night or daytime,
It's all playtime,
Ain't we got fun?
Hot or cold days,
Any old days,
Ain't we got fun?
If wifie wishes,
To go to a play,
Don't wash the dishes,
Just throw them away!
Street car seats are awful narrow,
Ain't we got fun?
They won't smash up our Pierce Arrow,
They've cut my wages,
But my income tax will be so much smaller,
When I'm paid off,
I'll be laid off
---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
Monday, December 27, 2004
BAUAW NEWSLETTER-MONDAY, DEC. 27, 2004
---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
STOP THE WAR ON IRAQ! BRING OUR TROOPS HOME NOW!
ALL OUT JANUARY 20TH, 5:00 P.M., CIVIC CENTER, S.F.
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Kkk1928.jpg
This link brings you to a photo of
the KKK marching down Pennsylvania
Avenue in Washington, DC in 1928.
Evidently they were able to get a permit.
(With many thanks to Kwame Somburu
for supplying the link. This site has
a plethora of information about the KKK....
Bonnie Weinstein, Bay Area United Against War)
The U.S. government is not allowing antiwar
/anti-Bush protestors onto Pennsylvania Ave.
along the inauguration route Jan. 20th.
We have a constitutional right to protest the
inauguration. BAUAW encourages all to show
up in DC and come to Pennsylvania Avenue
with your signs and banners and express
your opposition to Bush and to the War.
We demand equal access along the rout for all.
We have a right to protest our government or
any of its official representatives. Nothing gives
the government the right to disallow legal and
peaceful protest.
If you can't go to DC, come out Jan. 20, 5pm,
Civic Center, SF. in solidarity with all protestors
in Washington and everywhere who oppose this war.
We are encouraging everyone to participate
somehow by wearing buttons and signs
at work, at school and on the bus; hold
banners at freeway entrances, and crowded
shopping areas etc. on Jan. 20. Students
should hold rallies and march to the Civic Center.
Come to our next meeting and pick a place
to flyer or table for Jan. 20 or hold a sign
during the day, on Jan. 20 if you can.
NEXT BAY AREA UNITED AGAINST WAR MEETING:
SATURDAY, JANUARY 8, 11AM
CENTRO DEL PUEBLO
474 VALENCIA STREET
(NEAR 16TH STREET IN SAN FRANCISCO)
---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
Let's Hit the Streets
To Defend Abortion Rights!
Saturday, January 22
Emboldened rightwing abortion foes have had the nerve to announce
a march in San Francisco on the anniversary of the historic
Roe v. Wade decision! Show them that San Francisco is
a reproductive rights town -- save the date and plan to
attend a counter demonstration!
What is needed in response is a multi-issue, militant, united
front of women, people of all colors, queers, immigrants, workers
and everyone targeted by the rightwing to show that the
anti-abortionists are not welcome in San Francisco!
Make your opinion heard!
Details of assembly time and place will be announced soon.
---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
PICTURES OF WAR
PLEASE ACCESS:
http://dahrjamailiraq.com/gallery/
view_album.php?set_albumName=album28&page=1
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/coalitionforfreethoughtinmedia/message/26138
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/coalitionforfreethoughtinmedia/message/26138
Virginion Pilot via AP - Photos - click here
http://home.hamptonroads.com/stories/story.cfm?story=79598&ran=187050
---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
ITALIAN.QUEER.DANGEROUS
a one-man show featuring Tommi Avicolli Mecca
directed by Francesca Prada
(The most important thing is for folks to make reservations ASAP.
Seating is limited. Please take a moment to call 554-0402
if you plan to come to the show.)
JANUARY 14-29 (Friday and Saturday nights only: 14, 15; 21, 22; 28, 29)
JON SIMS CENTER, 1519 Mission/between Van Ness and 11th
8pm, $5-10 sliding scale (no one turned away)
seating is limited, for reservations: 415-554-0402
to volunteer to help with the show, call 415-552-6031
Through monologue and spoken word, well-known San Francisco
queer activist and writer Tommi Avicolli Mecca tells his story of
growing up in South Philly's working-class Little Italy. At age 19,
fired up with new pride in being gay, he came out to the world--
and his traditional Roman Catholic southern Italian famiglia--on
a TV talk show. The rest is history, and the subject of this performance.
---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
1) Living in Garbage
** Dahr Jamail's Iraq Dispatches **
** http://dahrjamailiraq.com **
December 26, 2004
2) Dear Friends of the Cuban Five. René González has sent the following
greetings for the 2005 New Year on behalf of the Cuban Five to their
supporters around the world:
3) Newfield Wielded Mighty Pen
New York Daily News -
http://www.nydailynews.com
Thursday, December 23rd, 2004
http://www.nydailynews.com/news/col/story/264864p-226848c.html
4) The cost of Christmas
£30bn: The amount Britons will spend celebrating
Christmas this year
Compiled by Cahal Milmo
24 December 2004
http://news.independent.co.uk/uk/this_britain/story.jsp?story=595883
5) Ten more years?
Senior MPs warn British troops will be in Iraq for a decade,
as Blair in Baghdad proclaims: 'We are not a nation of quitters'
By Donald Macintyre in Baghdad and Colin Brown
22 December 2004
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/middle_east/story.jsp?story=595356
6) A System of Injustice
America Locked Up
By PAUL CRAIG ROBERTS
December 21, 2004
http://www.counterpunch.org/
7) WHEN THE MEDIA MANAGES US
[Col. Writ. 12/5/04] Copyright 2004 Mumia Abu-Jamal
"The medium is the massage." -- Marshall McLuhan (1911-1980)
8) AN APOLOGY & A REVIEW
[Col. Writ. 11/25/04] Copyright 2004 Mumia Abu-Jamal
9) WARS FOR THE WHITE NATION
[Col. Writ. 11/28/04) Copyright 2004 Mumia Abu-Jamal
10) Martha Stewart's Christmas Message: Prison Reform Now!
Yoshie Furuhashi
Saturday, December 25, 2004
http://montages.blogspot.com/2004/12/martha-stewarts-christmas-message.html
11) An Open Letter from Martha Stewart
This is a personal statement from Martha Stewart.
It is not issued by or on behalf of Martha Stewart Living
Omnimedia, Inc.
http://www.marthatalks.com/
12) Big Farms Reap Two Harvests With Subsidies a Bumper Crop
By TIMOTHY EGAN
December 26, 2004
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/12/26/national/26farm.html?oref=login
13) Affirmative Action, Cuban Style
By Fitzhugh Mullan, M.D.
New England Journal of Medicine
Volume 351:2680-2682 December 23, 2004 Number 26
http://content.nejm.org/cgi/content/full/351/26/2680
14) 4/28/05 Mass Protest Of Injured
and Disabled Workers Called In
California
http://www.workersmemorialday.com/sflcresolution.html
15) A scientific inquiry into the existence of Santa Claus.
(This was sent to me by my thirteen-year-old grandson,
Dominic...BW)
---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
1) Living in Garbage
** Dahr Jamail's Iraq Dispatches **
** http://dahrjamailiraq.com **
December 26, 2004
The dump is a dusty wasteland. Heaps of Baghdad's rotting wastes are
strewn about several square miles of the battered capital city. Engaged
in their futile battle to remove the endless amounts of garbage from
streets, blue garbage trucks
rumble through the stinky dump, adding their loads of filth.
32 year-old Hattim lives in this wasteland with his family
"We are living in a dump. We are living a bad life. We have children,
and no school. We have nothing. We are asking the new government to take
small care of us. Not big things, just small things. We are transporting
water with animals, with donkeys, and it's not clean water. It's not
clean water at all and we have a lot of diseases."
Hattim's family, along with 35 other people, live in houses they've
built out of old cans of cooking oil
Dried mud is packed between them to keep out the wind and dust
Inside their makeshift home flies cover everything. A 10 day old baby
sleeps
nestled in dirty blankets as flies buzz over her tiny head.
Hattim continues, "We lived in the marshes and when Saddam dried the
marshes he took our farms and everything and made military camps there.
And now, we are living in a dump. The human, which is this holy
creature, you can't imagine living in a dump. Even God doesn't accept that."
Flies cover the walls, the ceiling
and buzz incessantly around the family of 6. Hattim's 40 year-old
sister-in-law, Rana, lives in another home made of cans and mud. She
enters Hattim's to ask for some bread.
She holds her hands up towards the flies and says, "The flies are always
with us. We have some animals and they live on things in the dump. We
have no electricity and no water. Nobody is helping us and we don't have
salaries. Our parents had a farm and they lived in the south. But when
they cut the water from the marshes, we started our problems."
Outside Hattim collects small wood scraps
and pieces of plastic from the refuse in order to make a small fire to
warm his home. Two little girls, his nieces with dirt caked on their
faces
play with an old piece of tire, throwing it back and forth.
He looks up at them playing before lamenting over his situation.
"My brother has many kids. Some are five and six years old. I don't have
any documents for anything and don't even have a food ration card. I
have an Iraqi identification, which is of course worth nothing."
One of his relatives, despite the horrible living situation, is happy to
have his photo taken
while Hattim pauses his discussion.
Hattim says the interim government promised great assistance for his
family three months ago.
"They said wait three months and we'll send you to Mars," he says to
underscore the big promises made by the interim government to help the
poor in Baghdad, "No, we don't want to go to Mars, we just want a place
on this earth."
More writing, photos and commentary at http://dahrjamailiraq.com
You can visit http://dahrjamailiraq.com/email_list/ to subscribe
or unsubscribe to the email list.
Or, you can unsubscribe by sending an email to
iraq_dispatches-request@dahrjamailiraq.com and write unsubscribe in the s
ubject or the body of the email.
(c)2004 Dahr Jamail.
All images and text are protected by United States and international
copyright law. If you would like to reprint Dahr's Dispatches on
the web, you need to include this copyright notice and a prominent
link to the DahrJamailIraq.com website. Any other use of images
and text including, but not limited to, reproduction, use on another
website, copying and printing requires the permission of
Dahr Jamail. Of course, feel free to forward Dahr's dispatches via email.
Iraq_Dispatches mailing list
http://lists.dahrjamailiraq.com/mailman/listinfo/iraq_dispatches
---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
2) Dear Friends of the Cuban Five. René González has sent the following
greetings for the 2005 New Year on behalf of the Cuban Five to their
supporters around the world:
December 2004
Dear Brothers and Sisters:
Another year of struggle for our freedom has gone by; one in which the hopes
of winning justice didn't seem unfounded, judging by the oral hearing for
appeal just three months into the year.
At the end it hasn't happened yet, and at least for us these twelve months
have gone by like a whisper. I hope it hasn't been like that for you, and
that
you have been able to live each moment free from the speedy pace imposed
on us by the monotonous jail life.
Anyway, faster or slower, it's been another intense period, during which we
have been part of the prowess of our people in its irreducible fight for its
sovereignty, and its unceasing struggle to build out of ours the humane
society which inspired, first and foremost, the magnificent event that was
the
Cuban Revolution.
Our people, for its part, hasn't taken a step back in its fight for justice
for us;
nevertheless, this has been a journey that neither the Cuban people nor we
have made alone.
In these twelve months your support has been with us. Your letters and
messages of encouragement have reminded us every day that love knows
no borders, that it is worth being defended and that everywhere in the world
there are human beings who justify our sacrifice. In a universe upon which
ignorance, insensitivity, violence and egoism are imposed by atrociously
sophisticated means, people like you remind us that the gift of reason and
of
applying that reason to human betterment is not a wasted miracle.
That's why I haven't wanted to let the opportunity of the new year pass by
without writing to you this humble message of gratitude and appreciation,
gratitude and appreciation that will never be enough to express the high
esteem you deserve from me, but that come sincerely from my heart, to
endure forever.
I wish you a very happy 2005, full of joy, of happiness and personal as well
as
familial accomplishments but, above all, full of the unique satisfaction
which -
a privilege that generous souls enjoy - grows from the pleasure of doing
good
and of fighting, with courage and sensitivity, for a better and possible
world.
A big hug and my best wishes,
René González Sehwerert
Gerardo Hernández Nordelo
Fernando González Llort
Ramón Labañino Salazar
Antonio Guerrero RodrÃguez
---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
3) Newfield Wielded Mighty Pen
New York Daily News -
http://www.nydailynews.com
Thursday, December 23rd, 2004
http://www.nydailynews.com/news/col/story/264864p-226848c.html
The woman's name was Brenda Scurry. She was poor and black and on
welfare, and she lived in a top-floor tenement apartment on Tiffany St.
in the South Bronx.
One day in 1969, a young reporter with thick black glasses knocked on
Scurry's door. He said his name was Jack Newfield from the Village
Voice, and he had come to ask about the death of her 23-month-
old daughter, Janet.
Scurry invited him inside. In the next issue of the Voice, Newfield
vividly described the crumbling plaster in Scurry's apartment and
gave the mother's chilling account of how her daughter had stopped
eating that April and "started trembling and couldn't breathe ...
and started to change color."
"A neighbor called a policeman and we took her to Morrisania
Hospital," Scurry told Newfield. "A doctor looked at her and told
me to go home, that she would be okay. They asked me if Janet
ever ate paint or plaster and I told them yes.
"I went home but her temperature kept going up and down. After
five days they gave her a blood test for lead poisoning. And then
she died the next day. The day after she died, the blood test
came back positive."
Newfield went on to produce a stream of articles that laid bare
the epidemic of lead poisoning in the slums of New York.
The series so shocked the public that Mayor John Lindsay launched
a massive lead paint removal program.
If Newfield, then 31, had crawled into a hole and done nothing else
for the rest of his life, those lead-paint articles alone - with the
countless children they saved - would be enough to enshrine him
in some journalism hall of fame.
But Newfield was no ordinary muckraker. He was a brawler from
Bed-Stuy who never stopped swinging the pen in defense of underdogs.
It was that way to the end, which came on Monday night, when
at the age of 66 he lost his last great bout, this time with cancer.
At the funeral service on Manhattan's West Side yesterday, Wayne
Barrett, his longtime colleague at the Voice, called Newfield a
"father to a generation of journalists."
Mario Cuomo, whom Newfield befriended when the future governor
was a little-known Brooklyn lawyer, called him "one of this era's
most courageous champions of justice."
In his pursuit of justice, Newfield violated many of the rules they
teach in journalism schools.
For one thing, he actually cared about the people and the issues
he wrote about. He deeply believed that journalists have a bigger
responsibility than merely to report facts or entertain the reader.
He believed they must also use their skills to make the world
a better place.
Fifteen years ago, Newfield and I were colleagues at this paper and
became friends. One night in late 1990, I called him at home.
The unions at the Daily News had been locked out and forced into
a strike by the former owner of the newspaper, the Tribune Co.
At the time, Newfield was part of News management and was still
working to put out the paper, while I was chairman of the Newspaper
Guild's strike committee and was walking the picket lines with the
other reporters, and pressmen and drivers.
Newfield was a longtime union supporter and I knew it was breaking
his heart to have to cross our picket lines each morning.
So I told him it would be a big shot in the arm to the strike if he
would resign and refuse to put out a scab paper.
Newfield had been at the paper only 18 months. After decades at
the gadfly Voice, the job at The News finally had put him in the
spotlight of mainstream journalism.
I was asking him to give it all up.
"Jack, you can always find another job," I told him in that call.
He asked for a night to think about it. The next day, he called
and told me he was ready to quit and to hold a press conference
condemning the Tribune Co. actions.
A few days later, at a strike rally, Newfield read his resignation
as thousands of union supporters cheered.
Within a week, he had found another job.
In some journalism circles, they say Newfield crossed a different
kind of line at times, getting too cozy with some politicians,
and no doubt he did.
But for 40 years he churned out investigative pieces, hard-hitting
columns, books, even television documentaries on the life of this
great city, and few reporters ever did it better or with more impact.
---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
4) The cost of Christmas
£30bn: The amount Britons will spend celebrating
Christmas this year
Compiled by Cahal Milmo
24 December 2004
http://news.independent.co.uk/uk/this_britain/story.jsp?story=595883
The cost of Christmas
Why they wish it could be Christmas every day
Matthew Norman: Let's all celebrate Festivus this year
Raj Persaud: Stress, suicide and spending time with the family
John Bell: At Christmas we can dream and imagine how the
future should be
Leading article: Festive cheer
SPENDING
£4.2bn: The amount Britons spent on cosmetics this Christmas
£4.14bn: Britain's aid budget for the developing world in 2004
£813: Average spending per adult on celebrating Christmas
(£55 less than last year)
£50: The per capita annual income in Ethiopia
£20m: Amount made by Mark Tilden, British robot expert
who invented Robosapien, this year's hit toy
£20m: Amount nations of sub-Saharan Africa are paying in
debt to developed world every 16 hours
EATING
7,000: Average calories consumed by Britons on Christmas Day
780: Minutes running needed to burn off 7,000 calories
7: Number of days a child refugee in Darfur could survive
on 7,000 calories
£12: Average cost per head in UK of Christmas lunch
£12: Cost of a month's supply of grain for a family in
drought-hit Malawi
30,525: Number of miles your Christmas dinner will have
travelled to reach your table - vegetables alone are likely to
have come 15,800 miles
4: Miles walked daily by families in developing world
in search of water
HEALTH
5m: Britons will suffer a stomach upset over festive season
2.1m: People in developing world killed this year by
diarrhoeal disease
CRIME
244,000: Homes in Britain likely to be burgled over festive season
75,058: Britons spending Christmas in prison
4.2%: Rise in murder rate over Christmas
ENVIRONMENT
83 sq km: Amount of wrapping paper used (enough to
cover 33 Hyde Parks)
3,000,000: Tons of extra rubbish generated - enough to
fill 120m wheelie bins
(c) 2004 Independent Digital (UK) Ltd
---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
5) Ten more years?
Senior MPs warn British troops will be in Iraq for a decade,
as Blair in Baghdad proclaims: 'We are not a nation of quitters'
By Donald Macintyre in Baghdad and Colin Brown
22 December 2004
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/middle_east/story.jsp?story=595356
Ten more years?
Amid the screaming, soldiers use their lunch tables as stretchers
French journalists released after 124 days in captivity
Johann Hari: Why are we inflicting this discredited market
fundamentalism on Iraq?
Tony Blair flew into Iraq yesterday, promising democracy. But,
outside the ring of security that escorted him, another day of
gruesome violence was unfolding - including a rocket attack on
a US base in Mosul that claimed at least 24 lives.
And, against a backdrop of continuing carnage, The Independent
has learned a cross-party group of MPs has returned from Iraq
convinced British troops may have to be deployed there for at
least another 10 years.
Unlike the Prime Minister, the Commons Defence Select Committee
was unable to visit Baghdad because the security situation was
too dangerous.
One senior member of the committee said: "It will take 10 to
15 years at least [before troops can be fully withdrawn]. It is
another Cyprus. The Iraqis just cannot cope with the security
situation and won't be able to for years."
As Mr Blair was proclaiming Britain would stay the course,
a bloody illustration of the dangers encountered by US and
British troops was playing out in the northern city of Mosul.
At about noon yesterday, insurgents hit a dining hall tent at
a US base, killing at least two dozen US and Iraqi soldiers and
contractors and injuring 60. Amid the screaming and smoke
that followed, quick-thinking soldiers turned their lunch
tables upside down, placed the wounded on them and carried
them to the car park.
At a press conference with the Iraqi interim Prime Minister,
Iyad Allawi, Mr Blair declared that Britain was not a "nation
of quitters". He was speaking after becoming the first foreign
head of government to visit Iraq since the installation of the
interim government in June, and the first British premier to
go to Baghdad since Winston Churchill.
Mr Blair said that he would not be deterred by the recent and
lethal wave of suicide bombings. He declared: "What I feel is
that the danger people are facing is coming from the insurgents
who are trying to destroy the possibility of the country having
democracy. Where do we stand in that fight? On the side of
democracy.''
Asked how he felt about his entry under maximum security,
20 months after the fall of Saddam Hussein, Mr Blair acknowledged:
"Security is very heavy. You can feel the sense of danger,
people live in here.''
But he added: "What I feel more than anything else is coming
from the terrorists trying to stop this country becoming
a democracy.''
Congratulating Mr Allawi, United Nations personnel and other
international staff for working towards next month's elections,
Mr Blair added: "I just feel that people should understand how
precious what is being created here is.''
He added: "Whatever people feel about the conflict, we British
are not a nation of quitters. What is obvious to me is the Iraqi
people are not going to quit on the task either. They are going
to see it through.''
Officially, the Government has continued to raise hopes that
normality is returning to Iraq with the clear implication that
after the UN mandate runs out with more elections in December
next year, the foreign troops may start to be withdrawn.
But MPs who have visited Iraqsay such hopes are wildly optimistic.
Mike Gapes, a Labour MP on the committee, used a pre-Christmas
debate in the Commons yesterday to warn it could "take years"
before British troops could be withdrawn, in spite of the progress
he claimed he saw in Iraq.
Mr Gapes said: "My assessment is just as in Kosovo and Bosnia,
we are not talking about a commitment of one or two years, but
several years. We have to honestly say that we started this business
and we have to see it through."
A Tory member of the committee, Richard Ottaway, said: "There
will need to be a continuing commitment from foreign forces for
10 years at least." An anti-war Labour MP Alice Mahon said:
"I don't think there is any hiding place from this. The Prime
Minister is there today but there is bloody chaos in Iraq."
Later, on a visit to the Shaiba army base in Basra the Prime
Minister climbed on a table to tell about 1,000 assembled British
troops: "A big thank you to you all. I know you are going to be
away from your family and loved ones over Christmas. I am sorry
about that but, my God, it's a job worth doing.'' Mr Blair added
that all the troops could be "very proud of what you are doing''.
(c) 2004 Independent Digital (UK) Ltd
---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
6) A System of Injustice
America Locked Up
By PAUL CRAIG ROBERTS
December 21, 2004
http://www.counterpunch.org/
At the same time that the Black Communities have been scattered
throughout this land as gentrification of the cities proceeds.)
A System of Injustice
America Locked Up
By PAUL CRAIG ROBERTS
While enjoying Christmas, good food and drink with family and friends
in the warmth and comfort of your home, take a moment to remember
the falsely imprisoned. Think about how your own family would handle
the grief, because wrongful imprisonment can happen to you.
In a just published book, "Thinking About Crime,
"
Michael Tonry, a distinguished American law professor and director
of Cambridge University's Institute of Criminology, reports that the
US has the highest percentage of its population in prison than any
country on earth. The US incarceration rate is as much as 12 times
higher than that of European countries.
Unless you believe that Americans are more criminally inclined than
other humans, what can explain the US incarceration rate being so
far outside the international mainstream? I can think of the
following reasons:
(1) In order to prove that they are "tough on crime," politicians
have criminalized behavior that is legal elsewhere.
(2) Many innocent Americans are in jail.
There is enormous evidence backing up both reasons.
Professor Tonry notes that during the past three decades the
number of Americans in prison has increased 700%. Imprisonment
has far outstripped the growth in the population. Subtracting
children and the elderly, one in eighty Americans of prison
eligible age is locked up.
America's privatized prisons have to be fed with inmates in order
to maintain their profitability. Prosecutors need high conviction
rates to justify their budgets and to build their careers. Taken
together these two facts create powerful incentives to put people
away regardless of crime, innocence or guilt.
Consider the case of Charles Thomas Sell as recently told by Carolyn
Tuft of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and by Phyllis Schlafly on
TownHall (Dec. 13). Mr. Sell, a dentist, has been locked up for
almost 8 years without a trial. Allegedly, Sell is guilty of Medicare
fraud, but with no evidence or witnesses against him, the virtuous,
just, democratic, moral US government tortured Mr. Sell in an
effort to make him confess. Now they can't bring him to trial where
he will talk. So Mr. Sell is kept locked up under the pretense that
his unwillingness to admit his guilt is evidence that he is mentally
incompetent.
Schlafly asks the correct question: "Is there no accountability for
this type of government misconduct?" The answer is NO. Mr. Sell
might as well be in Stalin's Gulag or in the hands of the Waffen SS
or US captors at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. No one will do anything
about the crime that the US government has committed
against Mr. Sell.
No one will do anything to help William R. Strong, Jr., another victim
of our heartless injustice system. Strong has been in a Virginia prison
for a decade on false charges of "wife rape." Mr. Strong has been
trying to get a DNA test, confident that the semen in the perk test
is not his but that of the lover of his unfaithful wife. But since Strong
was convicted prior to the advent of DNA testing, prosecutors argue
that he has no right to the evidence.
Another innocent victim of "Virginia justice" is Chris Gaynor, who
my investigations indicate was framed by a corrupt prosecutor
with the connivance of a corrupt judge, who intimidated Gaynor's
witnesses by jailing one of them. Only liars were permitted on the
witness stand. I brought the facts to light in the newspapers at
the time, but the Arlington, Virginia, criminal injustice system did
not let facts interfere with its show trial.
Government routinely breaks the laws. So says Judge Andrew P.
Napolitano in the current issue of Cato Policy Report and in his
book, "Constitutional Chaos: What Happens When the Government
Breaks Its Own Laws." Judge Napolitano reports on cases of torture,
psychological abuse, and frame-ups of innocents that he discovered
as the presiding judge. Any American naive enough to trust the
police and prosecutors should read what Napolitano has to say.
Torture has become routine in American prisons. The goal of the
torturers is guilty pleas and false testimony against innocent
defendants. The torturers succeed. Napolitano reports that "fewer
than 3 percent of federal indictments were tried; virtually all the
rest of those charged pled guilty."
Does anyone seriously believe that the police are so efficient
that 97 out of 100 people indicted are guilty?!
The cherished code, "you are innocent until proven guilty," no
longer holds in America. You are guilty when charged. You will
be tortured or abused and threatened with more charges until
you agree to a plea bargain.
Diane Lori Kleiman is an attorney who has worked in a district
attorney's office and for the Treasury Department's Bureau of
Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms. She says prosecutors have little
concern with real crimes, preferring to target high-profile individuals
in order to garner headlines and create a political career for
themselves.
Martha Steward is a victim of prosecutorial ambition as was Michael
Milken, whose false imprisonment created a political career for
Rudy Giuliani.
Kleiman says that prosecutors look for high-profile targets.
"It isn't necessarily an issue of right and wrong. It's an issue
of taking the case to trial and getting the publicity. That makes
your career."
The Martha Stewart case, Kleiman says, "is the first time in history
where they charged an individual with false statements, without
her signing the statement or without a tape recording that she
even made the statement. And not under oath." Kleiman is referring
to US history, not Soviet or Nazi history, histories that our criminal
injustice system now mimics.
The US criminal justice system is bereft of justice and accountability.
It only serves the ambitions of prosecutors. In America, criminal
"justice" operates like a Stalin-era street sweep in which hapless
citizens instantly became "enemies of the people" simply by
being arrested.
Paul Craig Roberts is coauthor of The Tyranny of Good Intentions
, a
book which documents the destruction of the legal principles that
protect the innocent.
---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
7) WHEN THE MEDIA MANAGES US
[Col. Writ. 12/5/04] Copyright 2004 Mumia Abu-Jamal
"The medium is the massage." -- Marshall McLuhan (1911-1980)
Everyday, when we watch the day's news, listen to the hourly
update, or read the nearest scandal sheet, we are being managed
by the nation's powerful media machines.
Some of us, who believe we are well-informed, will doubtless
dispute that claim, and point, perhaps, to the number of papers
we read, or the number of news shows we watch, as proof that
we consume a wide range of news, and therefore are able to
escape the claws of the news managers.
Perhaps they are right. Let us see. I'll bet that it is rare
for most of us to see, or hear, or read of the continuing Iraq
War, as an "occupation." We also rarely hear about Iraqi
fighters against this occupation as anything but "terrorists",
or perhaps, "insurgents."
Indeed, the very words, "Iraq War" are rarely used, at
least in the present tense, for, according to the bought-and-sold
voices in the corporate press, the war *is* over, for hasn't
the Grand Lord Emperor, George W., so decreed it? And, lo
and behold, like the meanest serf in feudal Saxony, like
scribes to ancient princes, -- voila! -- so be it. It is fact.
It matters little that, if deaths, of either Iraqis or even
Americans count, the war, a guerrilla war, rages in a dozen
cities in Iraq.
The media manages us with words; like 'coalition forces',
like 'terrorist', and finally, and perhaps most fatally, like
'democracy.'
Not since the Vietnam War have we seen such myth-
making by the media, for did they not then try to spin the
web of 'democracy' over the eyes and minds of millions?
Did they not then proffer assorted imported toadies to act
as presidents and prime ministers, that the Vietnamese
people regarded as strangers and, worse, traitors?
Only in the rare, underground and radical press could
those truths be spoken, for the major dailies, the three big
networks (back then, there were only three), and corporate
radio told the government's side of the story. And that
story was a lie.
Americans weren't told that it was a People's War; that
everyone from children in the villages, to prostitutes in the
hootches, to guerrillas in the jungles, to intellectuals in the
cities, was waging a war against the Yankee foreigners,
as they had waged against the French colonialists a
generation before, and the imperial Chinese centuries
before. They were people who fought for their own
country against the U.S., and those the U.S. imposed.
They were fighting for the right to decide for
themselves what kind of government would rule.
The Big Secret today is that, increasingly, the same
thing is happening in Iraq. It's not exactly the same.
It never is.
They know that the 'freedom' promised by the
Americans and the British isn't their freedom. And
they know, all too well, that Americans don't give a
hot damn about them; they have seen the pictures
from Abu Ghraib (and perhaps, hundreds more that the
U.S. government and American press hasn't allowed
you to see!). They know, in their guts, that the Anglo-
American objective is the black crude that courses
below their dry earth.
They know that the [Ahmed] Chalabis, and the
[Ghazi] Al-Yawers, have sold themselves, to the CIA or
M16, and are there to sell the wealth of the nation.
But most Americans don't know, and don't want to
know.
'Americans are fighting for freedom.' Uh-huh...
It is their corporate, sell-out media that is
responsible for these public illusions. They have
betrayed their craft as journalists, and signed on, to
the highest bidder, like slaves, who sell their faces
and their words, to power.
Luckily, as in the '60s, there exists a growing
alternative media, that *is* performing its function,
and driving the big TV and cable networks, into
irrelevancy. May it only grow.
Copyright 2004 Mumia Abu-Jamal
---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
8) AN APOLOGY & A REVIEW
[Col. Writ. 11/25/04] Copyright 2004 Mumia Abu-Jamal
This is an apology, and a book review (or perhaps, an
apologetic book review). The apology, first off, because it
comes now, when it can have little real impact on the
world in which we live and struggle for life, for love, and
for our communal well-being.
The review is of the brief, yet excellently heartfelt
book by journalism professor Robert Jensen, entitled
*Citizens of the Empire: The Struggle to Claim our
Humanity* (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 2004).
Jensen writes, with passion and clarity, as if the world
is on fire, and admits to a deep, pervasive feeling that
men rarely admit to: fear.
His is not the voice of the academic, stiff, stilted,
and removed from one's audience. He writes as if it
is his duty to awaken others to the unleashing of 'the
dogs of war' from the neocons in the White House:
...[B]ut I fear they have unleashed something
far worse than any war we have ever seen ...
But this feels different. This feels far worse.
This doesn't feel like a war. Let us name what
has happened: Not just a war, but a new insanity
has been unleashed upon the world. An unlimited
war that our leaders counsel could go on
indefinitely. A war against enemies in the
"shadowy networks", which means we will never
know when the shadowy enemy is vanquished.
This is quite possibly the policymakers' shot at the
final, and permanent, militarization of U.S. society.
Add to that the possibility of more terrorist attacks
from the fringe of the Arab and Muslim population
even more convinced of the depravity of Americans,
and the possibility of entire countries destabilized.
Are you scared? How can you not be? [p.xxi]
Jensen skillfully confronts many of the easy, facile lies
which are used to stifle public debate, and enforce conformity
on millions of Americans to accept, unquestionably, the
State's assertions about this eternal war. He warns of the
many traps that lie ahead of people who wanted to oppose
the war, but didn't want to seem, well -- unpatriotic:
I am against nationalism, and I am against patriotism.
They are both the dark side. It is time not simply to
redefine a kinder-and-gentler patriotism, but to sweep
away the notion and acknowledge it as morally,
politically, and intellectually bankrupt. It is time to
scrap patriotism.
More specifically, it is crucial to scrap patriotism in
today's empire, the United States, where patriotism
is not only a bad idea but literally a threat to the
survival of the planet. We should abandon patriotism
and strive to become more fully developed human
beings not with shallow allegiances to a nation but
rich and deep ties to humanity. [p. 39]
This is hard stuff. I apologize for not sharing it with you earlier.
Jensen's is a rare, and often unsung voice in what passes for
public discourse in America. He cites a rare quote from the
great labor leader and Socialist presidential candidate (while in
prison for opposing World War I), Eugene Debs for a kind of
internationalism that he clearly shares. Debs, in 1915, proclaimed:
"I have no country to fight for; my country is the earth, and I am
a citizen of the world." [p. 51] Jensen criticizes the loss of
democracy and the failure of the nation's universities to serve
as places where important social questions (like war and peace)
could truly be argued. He is also critical of the state's use of
the media machine, which issues, in his words, a form of
'corporate propaganda.'
He is both critical and surprisingly hopeful, for the mass
demonstrations of February and March, 2003, revealed a broad
base of anti-war spirit in the nation. Yet he is almost stunned
by the reported response of President Bush, who belittled the
demonstrations of millions of people as a mere "focus group."
Jensen, in his preface, replies:
A focus group? Perhaps the leader of the free world
was not aware that a focus group is a small number of
people who are brought together (and typically paid)
to evaluate a concept or a product. Focus groups
are primarily a tool of businesses, which uses them to
figure out how to sell things more effectively.
Politicians also occasionally use them, for the same
purpose. That's a bit different from a coordinated
gathering of millions of people who took to the streets
because they felt passionately about an issue of life
and death. As is so often the case, Bush's comment
demonstrated his ignorance and condescension, the
narrowness of his intellect and his lack of respect
for the people he allegedly serves. [p. xxi]
From the book: *Citizens of the Empire*, by Robert Jensen.
Better late than never.
Copyright 2004 Mumia Abu-Jamal
---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
9) WARS FOR THE WHITE NATION
[Col. Writ. 11/28/04) Copyright 2004 Mumia Abu-Jamal
We Americans claim to be a peace-loving people. We hate
bloodshed; we are opposed to violence. Yet we go into
spasms of joy over the possibility of projecting dynamite
bombs from flying machines upon helpless citizens ...
Yet our hearts swell with pride at the thought that America
is becoming the most powerful nation on earth, and that
it will eventually plant her iron foot on the necks of all
other nations. -- Emma Goldman, Radical Emigrant & Activist
"Patriotism: A Menace to Liberty" (1908) (Fr. Howard
Zinn & Anthony Arnove, *Voices of a People's History of
the United States* (N.Y.: Seven Stories Press, 2004), p. 271]
In light of the recent election, these coming four years promise to
be ones of continuing war. Nor will it end, no matter who is elected
in 2008. That's because the major allegedly opposition party, given
its deep corporate funding, will not dare to truly oppose the
Administration. They fear being targeted as 'unpatriotic,' or, even
worse, 'soft on terrorism.'
That's because, they know, at some level, that millions of Americans
rally to the martial strains of war. Even a 'bad war.' Even one based
upon false pretenses. Even one based upon that most ulterior of
motives -- greed.
Some thinkers believe that Americans were perhaps too stupid
to see past the Administration's smokescreen for the War on Iraq.
I am not so convinced. I think many people simply didn't care.
Where, as here, the 'enemy' were nonwhite Arabs, and mostly,
folks of an alien faith, it was easy to project them as fair game --
even if Iraq actually hadn't a thing to do with 9/11.
There's simply something about the allure of war, that writer
and social critic, Randolph Bourne, put quite nicely, in his 1918
essay, "The State":
War is the health of the State. It automatically sets in
motion throughout society those irresistible forces for
uniformity, for passionate cooperation with the Government
in coercing into obedience the minority groups and
individuals which lack the larger herd sense. The
machinery of government sets and enforces the drastic
penalties; the minorities are either intimidated into
silence, or brought slowly around by a subtle process
of persuasion which may seem really to be converting
them. [From Zinn & Arnove, *Voices of a People's
History ...*, p. 299.]
War, Bourne explains, creates such wrenching social divisions,
that fellow citizens often turn on fellow citizens, with one side,
usually the pro-war side, demeaning the other, antiwar side, as
traitors to the nation -- as if the nation is the political
leadership!
While Bourne was describing the events around World War
I, his insights reflect our present, under the power of this
"wartime... uniformity of feeling" [p. 299].
Bourne tells us:
Not for any religious impulse could the American nation have
been expected to show such devotion en masse, such
sacrifice and labor. Certainly not for any secular good,
such as universal education or the subjugation of nature,
would it have poured forth its treasure and its life, or
would it have permitted such stern coercive measures to be
taken against it, such as conscripting its money and its men.
But for the sake of a war of offensive self-defense,
undertaken to support a difficult cause to the slogan of
"democracy," it would reach the highest level ever known
of collective effort .... [p. 300].
We are conditioned to, for the most part, quietly accept it;
to not rock the boat; to go with the flow.
Yet it's also true that Americans, by their millions, all across
the country, came out to oppose the war -- before a shot was
fired!
Perhaps it reflects a deep-seated distrust of political promises
and claims to justify wars. Certainly, American presidents
throughout the 20th century, have given people enough reason
to be skeptical. Perhaps they came from families where men
returned, in shattered bodies, or fractured minds, from glorious
wars past. Perhaps people simply knew that *this* war had
nothing to do with *that* war.
It is a good start, and would've been far better if people really
continued to protest, in great numbers, throughout the election
year. But, of course, this didn't happen. But people learn,
especially if the lesson is a painful one. Perhaps, in the future,
they will not stop, until they force the politicians to hear them.
Copyright 2004 Mumia Abu-Jamal
---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
10) Martha Stewart's Christmas Message: Prison Reform Now!
Yoshie Furuhashi
Saturday, December 25, 2004
http://montages.blogspot.com/2004/12/martha-stewarts-christmas-message.html
Martha Stewart, whose trial brought the problem of 18 USC 1001
to our attention, calls for prison reform in her Christmas message :
So many of the [1,200] women here in Alderson will never have the
joy and wellbeing that you and I experience. Many of them have been
here for years -- devoid of care, devoid of love, devoid of family.
"I beseech you all to think about these women -- to encourage the
American people to ask for reforms, both in sentencing guidelines,
in length of incarceration for nonviolent first-time offenders , and
for those involved in drug-taking . They would be much better
served in a true rehabilitation center than in prison where there is
no real help, no real programs to rehabilitate, no programs to educate,
no way to be prepared for life "out there" where each person will
ultimately find herself, many with no skills and no preparation for
living.
Stewart's opinion is shared by many. A poll conducted by Peter D.
Hart Research Associates, Inc. shows that public attitudes toward
criminal justice have changed dramatically: "In 1994, . . . 48% favored
addressing the causes of crime and 42% preferred the punitive
approach. . . . The public now favors dealing with the roots of crime
over strict sentencing by a two to one margin, 65% to 32% "
(emphasis added, Changing Public Attitudes toward the Criminal
Justice System ,February 2002 ). What is most heartening is that
rehabilitation and reentry programs have surprisingly broad-based
support:
Americans strongly favor rehabilitation and reentry programs over
incapacitation as the best method of ensuring public safety. Nearly
two-thirds of all Americans (66%) agree that the best way to reduce
crime is to rehabilitate prisoners by requiring education and job
training so they have the tools to turn away from a life of crime,
while just one in three (28%) believe that keeping criminals off the
streets through long prison sentences would be the more effective
alternative.
This idea has broad-based support, with solid majorities of whites
(63% / 31%), fundamentalist Protestants (55% / 36%), and Republicans
(55% / 38%) supporting rehabilitation over incapacitation as the best
way to reduce crime. Interestingly, the 23% of Americans who report
that they or a close family member have been the victim of a violent
crime endorse rehabilitation even more strongly than the general
public, by a decisive 73% to 21% margin . (emphasis added,
February 2002 )
Perhaps, Stewart's call for prison reform won the hearts and minds
of many incarcerated women and their families, and she found
herself in their prayers:
Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia Inc., among the biggest U.S.
targets of "short selling" last month, rallied amid optimism that
the company can rebound from its namesake's jail term and return
to profitability.
Shares of the media and housewares company rose 43 percent
during the past six weeks in New York Stock Exchange composite
trading and reached $30.05, a four-year high, on Dec. 15.
Thirty-one percent of the New York-based company's shares
available for trading were sold short, or borrowed and sold to
profit from lower prices, as of Nov. 9. The figure was in the top
5 percent for U.S.-listed companies. (Laure Edwards, "Martha
Stewart Living's Shares Gain, Thwarting 'Short Sellers,'"
Bloomberg.com, December 21, 2004)
Let's make sure that no prisoner will be sold short and that all
prisoners -- especially incarcerated women, more than 70 percent
of whom are nonviolent offenders and almost all of whom are
classified as "low risk" (Vincent Schiraldi and Judith Greene,
"Cutting Prison Costs is Tempting in Times of Fiscal Crisis,"
San Diego Union-Tribune,February 27, 2002 ) -- will be able
to rebound more strongly than Stewart's company did.
#posted by Yoshie : 11:10 AM
---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
11) An Open Letter from Martha Stewart
This is a personal statement from Martha Stewart.
It is not issued by or on behalf of Martha Stewart Living
Omnimedia, Inc.
http://www.marthatalks.com/
Dear Friends,
When one is incarcerated with 1,200 other inmates, it is hard to be
selfish at Christmas -- hard to think of Christmases past and
Christmases future -- that I know will be as they always were for
me -- beautiful! So many of the women here in Alderson will never
have the joy and wellbeing that you and I experience. Many of them
have been here for years -- devoid of care, devoid of love, devoid
of family.
I beseech you all to think about these women -- to encourage the
American people to ask for reforms, both in sentencing guidelines,
in length of incarceration for nonviolent first-time offenders, and for
those involved in drug-taking. They would be much better served in
a true rehabilitation center than in prison where there is no real help,
no real programs to rehabilitate, no programs to educate, no way to
be prepared for life "out there" where each person will ultimately find
herself, many with no skills and no preparation for living.
I am fine, really. I look forward to being home, to getting back to my
valuable work, to creating, cooking, and making television. I have had
time to think, time to write, time to exercise, time to not eat the bad
food, and time to walk and contemplate the future. I've had my work
here too. Cleaning has been my job - washing, scrubbing, sweeping,
vacuuming, raking leaves, and much more. But like everyone else
here, I would rather be doing all of this in my own home, and not
here -- away from family and friends.
I want to thank you again, and again, for your support and
encouragement. You have been so terrific to me and to everyone
who stood by me. I appreciate everything you have done, your
emails, your letters, and your kind, kind words.
Happy holidays,
Martha Stewart
P.S. I thought you might be interested in the brief my lawyers
filed with the Court this afternoon. (The brief can be found at
the link above...bw)
---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
12) Big Farms Reap Two Harvests With Subsidies a Bumper Crop
By TIMOTHY EGAN
December 26, 2004
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/12/26/national/26farm.html?oref=login
GURLEY, Neb. - The roadside sign welcoming people into this state
reads: "Nebraska, the Good Life." And for farmers closing out their
books at the end of a year when they earned more money than at
any time in the history of American agriculture, it certainly looks
like happy days.
But at a time when big harvests and record farm income should
mean that Champagne corks are popping across the prairie, the
prosperity has brought with it the kind of nervousness seen in
headlines like the one that ran in The Omaha World-Herald in
early December: "Income boom has farmers on edge."
For despite the fact that farm income has doubled in two years,
federal subsidies have also gone up nearly 40 percent over the
same period - projected at $15.7 billion this year, and $130 billion
over the last nine years. And that bounty is drawing fire from
people who say that at this moment of farm prosperity, the
nation's subsidy system has never made less sense.
Even those deeply steeped in the system acknowledge it seems
counterintuitive. "I struggle with the same question: how the hell
can you have such high government payments if farmers had such
a great year?" said Keith Collins, the chief economist for the
Agriculture Department.
The answer lies in the quirks of the federal farm subsidy system
as well as in the way savvy farmers sell their crops. Mr. Collins
said farmers use the peculiar world of agriculture market timing
to get both high commodity prices and high subsidies.
"The biggest reason is with record crops, prices have fallen," he
said. "And farmers are taking advantage of that."
A farmer can sell his crop early at a high price, say, in a futures
contract, and still collect a subsidy check after the harvest from
the government if prices are down over all. The money is not tied
to what the farmer actually received for his crop. The farmer does
not even have to sell the crop to get the check, only prove that
the market has dropped below a certain set rate.
"For those who can milk the system, it's been a great year," said
Kent Miller, whose German great-grandparents were pioneers near
this tiny town. Mr. Miller is a small operator who says he barely
made a profit this year on his 3,000 acres of wheat and millet.
Still, while Mr. Miller is a critic of the system, he is not forgoing
aid. Here in Cheyenne County, in the wind-raked western edge
of Nebraska, the fields are slumbering for the winter. Most of the
harvest is in. Mr. Miller was one of the farmers going into the
federal agricultural office to register for fresh checks from recent
swings in the market.
"I just signed up for new government payments today," Mr. Miller
said, standing inside the federal agriculture office for this county.
He described the subsidies as little help for ailing family farmers.
"It's a Band-Aid on a large wound."
Farm groups say the subsidies provide for a stable food supply,
and ensure that major sectors of American agriculture will be
competitive on the global market.
"When people ask me what the justification for this is, I point
out that in nearly every country in the world you find government
involved in the food supply," said Bob Young, an economist at the
American Farm Bureau Federation, the powerful trade group for
major agricultural producers.
But because nearly 70 percent of the subsidies go to the top
10 percent of agricultural producers, the recent prosperity is
not seen or felt among many small to medium-size growers
who keep the struggling counties of the Great Plains alive.
Though some retailers in places like Iowa and Kansas say that
the boost in farm income promises a good Christmas season,
merchants here say they are not feeling any uptick. All around
western Nebraska, in places like Chappell or Lorenzo, storefronts
are boarded and the merchants who remain complain of the
difficulties of surviving.
Even though Cheyenne County is one of the few bright spots
in the economic desert of the rural Plains, its recent job boom
has nothing to do with agriculture. A major outdoor goods
company, Cabela's, has its world headquarters in Sidney, and
its giant retail store is a draw off of Interstate 80.
"It's been real slow, and usually December is a good month for
us," said Brian Thacker, who sells new trucks and cars in Sidney,
the biggest town in the county. But he said farmers complain
about not having enough money even in good years.
"If it's raining, they complain; if the wind is blowing too much,
they complain," Mr. Thacker said. "It just seems like they're
never happy."
Ed Miller, who owns a family feed and seed store in Sidney that
caters to small farmers, said his business was not up despite
the increase in farm income because most of the big corporate
farms that are doing particularly well do not buy from the local
seed dealers.
So it is not surprising that the current subsidy system is drawing
home-grown criticism from people like Senator Chuck Hagel,
Republican of Nebraska, who says it is only widening the gap
between large and smaller farmers, while not helping rural
America.
The subsidies have also drawn criticism from farmers who grow
fruits, vegetables and nuts - nearly half of American agriculture
- but have nothing like the elaborate safety net in place for corn,
cattle, wheat and hog producers.
"We don't get payments, and we don't want them," said Tom
Nassif, president of the Western Growers Association, which
represents farmers in the nation's biggest agricultural state,
California. "We believe the marketplace should decide who
stays and who goes. And we certainly shouldn't be paying
people not to grow."
Farm production has doubled over the last 50 years, while the
number of farms has fallen by two-thirds. Economists say
about 150,000 of America's 2.1 million farms produce
70 percent of the major food crops. But only certain crops -
wheat, corn, cotton, soybeans and sunflowers among them -
qualify for subsidies.
Every subsidy payment in the country can be found on a Web
site put together by the Environmental Working Group, which
advocates an overhaul of the farm payment system. The site
has become a must-read for farmers, and receives about
a million hits a day, the group says.
According to those records, which are supplied by the
Agriculture Department, Mr. Miller, the small wheat and
millet farmer, received $18,449 in subsidies last year,
and a total of $189,254 over the last nine years.
His neighbor down the road, a wheat farmer named Ronald
Jessen, was paid $424,387 over the last nine years, according
to the database. Mr. Jessen's father, Raymond, got $485,096
in government money, and his brother, Michael Jessen, got
$356,769. They are among the 10 biggest recipients of wheat
subsidies here in Cheyenne County, which is the state's top
wheat county.
Over all, Nebraska got $7.5 billion in government farm payments
over the last nine years.
The Jessen family wheat farm, despite getting more than
$1 million in subsidies in that time, is not a gold mine, Ronald
Jessen said in an interview. "You've got to look at all the expenses,"
he said. "A new combine can cost $200,000. When I do my taxes,
the crop breaks even. My profit is what I get from the government."
Still, Mr. Jessen said he was not proud to be harvesting so much
from taxpayers.
"Most farmers will tell you they would rather get paid for what's
in the elevator rather than from the government," he said.
Other farmers and some critics say that corporations, extended
families and partnerships are taking advantage of a system that
has little relationship to the ebbs and flows of food supply, and
rewards them most in times like now, when farmers should
seemingly be able to get by without government help.
"It's shocking the extent to which taxpayers subsidize this select
group of people whether they're having a good year or bad," said
Ken Cook, director of the Environmental Working Group. "I call
them the red ink states."
Any farm entity - often a corporation - can collect up to $360,000
per year. Some of the biggest checks are direct payments to
farmers who can show a "historic pattern" of having grown one
of the big commodity crops. In a system that supporters say is
intended to ensure economic stability from year to year, farmers
do not actually have to grow the crop to get the money. For other
payments, a farmer is required to show involvement helping to
run or manage the operation.
Mr. Miller, who is struggling to run his family farm on his own,
says that big farms will line their subsidy payroll with family
members who have minimal involvement.
"Typically, you get 10 relatives who all get the payments, but
maybe for 6 of them, the only time they come out to the farm
is for Christmas," Mr. Miller said.
While the big farms are having record years, much of rural
America is continuing to decline.
Senator Hagel voted against the 2002 farm bill that is the
framework for the current subsidy system. At the time, he
said, "these lopsided payments encourage and subsidize
overproduction" and would "only widen the disparity gaps
between large and small farmers."
In a hearing last August, Mr. Hagel said the Great Plains was
in a continued downward spiral, even with record farm income.
"Half the rural counties in America lost population in the 2000
census," Senator Hagel said in the hearing. "And three out of four
rural counties experienced below-average economic growth,
despite the record level of farm subsidies."
The highest single year for subsidies was 2000, when farmers
got $22 billion in payments. But their income was only
$47 billion that year. This year, with farm income at $73 billion,
is the first year when farmers set a record for earnings, while
subsidies were still among the highest in recent years.
This record year raises the question of what would happen to
American agriculture if government stopped making such large
payments. Mr. Collins, the chief economist at the Agriculture
Department, said it was possible that farmers would produce
the same amount of food in a pure free market.
Some farmers say they could go cold turkey, and make it on
their own. Others say they would go under. But the thing many
agree on is that working the land, even in good times, is not
something they would recommend to their children.
"Out here, the joke is that anyone who tries to get their kid
to go into farming is encouraging a form of child abuse,"
Mr. Miller said.
Copyright 2004 The New York Times
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13) Affirmative Action, Cuban Style
By Fitzhugh Mullan, M.D.
New England Journal of Medicine
Volume 351:2680-2682 December 23, 2004 Number 26
http://content.nejm.org/cgi/content/full/351/26/2680
(Sent by David McReynolds
What an irony that poor Cuba is training doctors for rich America,
engaging in affirmative action on our behalf, and - while blockaded
by U.S. ships and sanctions - spending its meager treasure to improve
the health of U.S. citizens.)
Affirmative Action, Cuban Style
by Fitzhugh Mullan, M.D.
"I feel as if I'm standing on the backs of all my ancestors. This is a
huge opportunity for me," Teresa Glover, a 27-year-old medical student,
told me during a recent visit to her medical school. "Nobody in my family
has ever had the chance to be a doctor." Glover's mother is a teacher, and
her father a dispatcher for the New York subway system. Her background is a
mix of African American, Barbadian, and Cherokee. She graduated from the
State University of New York at Plattsburgh. "I wanted to be a doctor, but
I wasn't sure how to get into medicine. I had decent grades, but I didn't
have any money, and even applying to medical school cost a lot."
This young woman from the Bronx may be helping to rectify the
long-standing problem of insufficient diversity in the medical profession
in the United States. Twenty-five percent of the U.S. population is black,
Hispanic, or Native American, whereas only 6.1 percent of the nation's
physicians come from these backgrounds.1 Students from these minority
groups simply don't get into medical school as often as their majority
peers, which results in a scarcity of minority physicians. This inequity
translates into suffering and death, as documented by the Institute of
Medicine.2 Poorer health outcomes in minority populations have been linked
to lack of access to care, lower rates of therapeutic procedures, and
language barriers. Since physicians from minority groups practice
disproportionately in minority communities, they are an important part of
the solution to the health-disparities quandary.
In her third year, Glover is negotiating the classic passage from the
laboratory to the clinic. But her school isn't in the United States. She is
enrolled at the Latin American School of Medicine (ELAM, which is its
Spanish acronym) in Havana - a school sponsored by the Cuban government and
dedicated to training doctors to treat the poor of the Western hemisphere
and Africa. Twenty-seven countries and 60 ethnic groups are represented
among ELAM's 8000 students.
Glover's mother heard about ELAM from her congressman, Representative
José Serrano (D-N.Y.). "Mom calls me. 'I have news. There's a chance for
you to go to medical school.' She waits for it to sink in. 'You'd get a
full scholarship.' She waits again. 'But it's in Cuba.' That didn't faze me
a bit. What an opportunity!"
The genesis of Glover's opportunity dates to June 2000, when a group from
the Congressional Black Caucus visited Cuban president Fidel Castro.
Representative Bennie Thompson (D-Miss.) described huge areas in his
district where there were no doctors, and Castro responded with an offer of
full scholarships for U.S. citizens to study at ELAM. Later that year,
Castro spoke at the Riverside Church in New York, reiterating the offer and
committing 500 slots to U.S. students who would pledge to practice in poor
U.S. communities.
That day, 26-year-old Eduardo Medina was at his parents' house in New
York, listening to Castro's speech on the radio. "Castro announces that
Cuba has started a new medical school and has invited students from all
over Latin America to come, train, and return to treat the poor in their
countries. Then he starts quoting figures about poor communities in the
U.S. 'We'll be more than happy to educate American medical students,' he
says, 'if they'll commit to going home to take care of the poor.' The place
went nuts. I'm standing in my basement saying, 'Yes! Yes! Yes!'"
Medina was raised in Brooklyn and Queens, the child of a Colombian father
and a mother of Puerto Rican, Jewish, and Irish descent - both
public-school teachers who pushed their children to work hard in school.
"When I was little, they sent me to a summer enrichment program in
Manhattan," recalls Medina. "I would travel on the subway every day with
this huge book bag. I was young and it was hot. But I was excited." The
work paid off, and Medina won partial scholarships to a boarding school and
to Wesleyan University. "There weren't many students of color at either
private school, particularly in the sciences," he says. "Culturally,
economically, ideologically, it was a real culture clash for me, but the
education was good."
Medina was found to have diabetes when he was 12 years old and spent a
week in the hospital. "When I saw what the doctors could do for me, I knew
I wanted to be a doctor. In college, I spent a year in Ecuador, and I knew
I wanted to practice community medicine." But medicine wasn't going to come
easily. Medina had a mediocre grade or two in science courses, a middling
score on the Medical College Admission Test (MCAT), and $45,000 in student
debts. He worked as a research assistant to buy himself time to retake the
MCAT and organize his medical-school campaign. After hearing Castro, Medina
applied to ELAM and happily grabbed the chance to attend. "I didn't know if
I'd get into U.S. schools, and if I did, I had no idea how I was going to
pay."
There are 88 U.S. students at ELAM, 85 percent of them members of
minority groups and 73 percent of them women. Recruitment and screening are
handled by the Interreligous Foundation for Community Organization (IFCO),
a New York-based interfaith organization. Applicants are required to have a
high-school diploma and at least two years of premedical courses, to be
from poor communities, and to make a commitment to return to those
communities. Students who don't speak Spanish start early with intensive
language instruction. Glover and Medina get home about once a year. They
report that living conditions are spare and English textbooks hard to come
by, but they are well taken care of and the education is rigorous.
The Bush administration's restrictions on travel to Cuba have been a
thorn in the side of the program from the beginning. Since the Cuban
government pays the students' room, board, tuition, and a stipend, the ban
was not initially applied to them. But the administration's further
attempts this summer to curtail Cuban travel threatened the students and
sent their families scrambling for political help. Representatives Barbara
Lee (D-Calif.) and Charles Rangel (D-N.Y.) led a campaign of protest, and
27 members of Congress signed a letter to Secretary of State Colin Powell
asking that the ELAM students be exempted from the ban. In August, the
administration relented and granted the students permission to remain in
Cuba.
The Cuban health care system in which these students are working is
exceptional for a poor country and represents an important political
accomplishment of the Castro government. Since 1959, Cuba has invested
heavily in health care and now has twice as many physicians per capita as
the United States and health indicators on a par with those in the most
developed nations - despite the U.S. embargo that severely reduces the
availability of medications and medical technology.3,4 This success clearly
plays well at home and has enabled Cuba to send physicians abroad to Cold
War hot spots such as Nicaragua and Angola. Yet Cuba has also sent
thousands of physicians to work in some of the world's poorest countries.
Since 1998, 7150 Cuban doctors have worked in 27 countries - on a
proportional basis this is the equivalent of the United States sending
175,000 physicians abroad.5 In the same spirit, ELAM trains young people
from these countries and sends them home to practice medicine. Although
these programs make political points for Cuba, they also represent an
extraordinary humanitarian contribution to the world's poor populations.
The U.S. students face a hurdle that their classmates in Cuba do not. To
obtain residency positions in the United States and uphold their side of
the deal with Castro, U.S. students will have to pass two steps of the
United States Medical Licensing Exam (USMLE) and the new Clinical Skills
Assessment test. The first large group of ELAM students will take Step 1
later this year, and the results will be critical to the future of the
program.
The ELAM invitation is not limited to minority students, although the
emphasis on coming from and returning to poor communities has naturally
selected students of color. Physicians from minority groups accounted for
only 3 percent of U.S. doctors during the middle years of the 20th century.
After the civil-rights movement, the number of minority medical students
increased steadily, rising to 11.6 percent of medical school graduates in
1998. Schools used scholarship money, academic enrichment programs, and
special admissions criteria to increase minority enrollment. In recent
years, such initiatives have flagged - victims of court decisions opposing
affirmative action, continued escalation of medical-school tuition, and a
supply of minority students that, in the judgment of some medical
educators, is tapped out. Today, roughly 11 percent of graduating medical
students are members of minority groups.1
Glover, Medina, and their schoolmates have gotten into and mastered
strong academic programs despite their disadvantaged backgrounds. However,
half of all applicants to U.S. medical schools are rejected. By the
unforgiving standards of the application process, a C in a science class or
a so-so MCAT score dooms an applicant. Castro has removed the financial
barriers and bet on motivation to overcome any educational liabilities that
students bring with them to ELAM.
Which brings us back to Castro's gambit. Why is he reaching out to U.S.
students? What an irony that poor Cuba is training doctors for rich
America, engaging in affirmative action on our behalf, and - while
blockaded by U.S. ships and sanctions - spending its meager treasure to
improve the health of U.S. citizens. Whether one considers this a cunning
move by one of history's great chess players or an extraordinary gesture of
civic generosity - or a bit of both - it should encourage us to reexamine
our stalled efforts to achieve greater racial and ethnic parity in American
medicine. If Castro can find diamonds in our rough, we can too.
Marxism mailing list
Marxism@lists.econ.utah.edu
http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism
---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
14) 4/28/05 Mass Protest Of Injured
and Disabled Workers Called In
California
http://www.workersmemorialday.com/sflcresolution.html
Resolution of the San Francisco Labor Council for a State Wide Protest
of Injured and Disabled Workers On Workers Memorial Day April 28, 2005.
Whereas, injured and disabled workers are under growing attack in their
efforts to receive healthcare for their injuries and their disabilities
and,
Whereas, some workers injured on the job have committed suicide as a
result of not receiving medication for their injuries and,
Whereas, the right to a healthy and safe environment and the enforcement
of CAL-OSHA regulations is also threatened by the proposed
"restructuring" proposals of the State Administration and,
Whereas, the right to have healthcare for injured workers and disabled
workers in California is a basic human right of all working people and,
Whereas, the state administration is seeking to undermine the protection
of injured and disabled workers by the complete deregulation of workers'
compensation and total subservience to the insurance industry and,
Whereas, the corporate media has ignored and censored the stories of
injured and disabled workers who face the loss of their healthcare and
the destruction of their lives and the lives of their families and,
Whereas, the need to unite all injured and disabled workers in
California is critical in order to meet the challenge that they face and,
Whereas, the issue of healthcare is a right for all working people union
and non-union in California and,
Whereas, the collapse of the privately run healthcare system and the
escalating costs of healthcare insurance premiums threatens the rights
of healthcare to all working people,
Therefore be it resolved this body support the call by the California
Injured Workers Coalition, UAPD/AFSCME, The Chelsie Group and other
injured workers organizations and health and safety groups as well as
the San Francisco Labor Council to support the statewide protest on
Workers Memorial Day April 28, 2005 at the capital in Sacramento for the
defense of all injured and disabled workers and,
This body will support the demand healthcare for all working people by
the implementation of Single Payer and,
Finally, this union or council will circulate this resolution to all
California Labor Councils and Building and Trades Councils and all other
affiliated bodies for concurrence and will seek to reach and support all
injured and disabled workers so they can join this historic action to
protect their rights.
This resolution is endorsed and supported by the following groups and
organizations:
California Injured Workers Coalition, Inc.
UAPD/AFSCME
San Francisco Labor Council
The Chelsie Group
Labor Action Coalition
Million Worker March
Labor Video Project
FACE Intel.
Dr. June Fisher
Dr. Larry Rose
The next meeting of the N. California organizing
committee is Saturday
January 8, 2005 at 9:30 AM at the Blue Muse
Restaurant at 409 Gough near
Hayes St. in San Francisco.
For further information call:
California Injured Workers Coalition (415)928-9343
samg@injuredworkerscoalition.com
Labor Video Project (415)282-1908 lvpsf@labornet.org
Northbay Area Contact (415)332-9675 fight4yourlife@aol.com
Sacramento Area Contact friends@faceintel.com
ActionLA
Action for World Liberation Everyday!
Tel: (213)403-0131
URL: http://www.ActionLA.org
e-mail: Info@ActionLA.org
Please Donate to ActionLA!
Send check pay to:
ActionLA/SEE
1013 Mission St. #6
South Pasadena CA 91030
(All donations are tax deductible)
Please join our ActionLA Listserv
go to: http://lists.riseup.net/www/subscribe/actionla
or send e-mail to: actionla-subscribe@lists.riseup.net
[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
15) A scientific inquiry into the existence of Santa Claus.
(This was sent to me by my thirteen-year-old grandson,
Dominic...BW)
No known species of reindeer can fly. But there are 300,000 species
of living organisms yet to be classified, and while most of these are
insects and germs, this does not completely rule out flying reindeer
which only Santa has ever seen.
There are 2 billion children (persons under 18) in the world.
But since Santa doesn't (appear to) handle the Muslim, Hindu, Jewish
and Buddhist children, that reduces the workload to 15% of the total -
378 million according to Population Reference Bureau.
At an average (census) rate of 3.5 children per household, that's 91.8
million homes. One presumes there's at least one good child in each.
Santa has 31 hours of Christmas to work with, thanks to the different
time zones and the rotation of the earth, assuming he travels east
to west (which seems logical).
This works out to 822.6 visits per second.
This is to say that for each Christian household with good children,
Santa has 1/1000th of a second to:
park,
hop out of the sleigh,
jump down the chimney,
fill the stockings,
distribute the remaining presents under the tree,
eat whatever snacks have been left,
get back up the chimney,
get back into the sleigh and move on to the next house.
Assuming that each of these 91.8 million stops are evenly
distributed around the earth (which, of course, we know to be
false but for the purposes of our calculations we will accept), we
are now talking about .78 miles per household, a total trip of
75-1/2 million miles, not counting stops to do what most of us
must do at least once every 31 hours, plus feeding and etc.
This means that Santa's sleigh is moving at 650 miles per second,
3,000 times the speed of sound. For purposes of comparison, the
fastest man- made vehicle on earth, the Ulysses space probe, moves
at a poky 27.4 miles per second. A conventional reindeer can run,
tops, 15 miles per hour.
The payload on the sleigh adds another interesting element.
Assuming that each child gets nothing more than a medium-sized
lego set (2 pounds), the sleigh is carrying 321,300 tons, not
counting Santa, who is invariably described as overweight.
On land, conventional reindeer can pull no more than 300 pounds.
Even granting that "flying reindeer" could pull ten times the normal
amount, we cannot do the job with eight, or even nine.
We need 214,200 reindeer. This increases the payload - not even
counting the weight of the sleigh - to 353,430 tons. Again, for
comparison - this is four times the weight of the Queen Elizabeth.
353,000 tons traveling at 650 miles per second creates enormous
air resistance - this will heat the reindeer up in the same fashion
as a spacecraft reentering the earth's atmosphere.
The lead pair of reindeer will absorb 14.3 quintillion joules of
energy. Per second. Each. In short, they will burst into flame
almost instantaneously, exposing the reindeer behind them,
and create deafening sonic booms in their wake.
The entire reindeer team will be vaporized within 4.26 thousandths
of a second.
Santa, meanwhile, will be subjected to centrifugal forces 17,500.09
times greater than gravity.
A 250-pound Santa (which seems ludicrously slim) would be
pinned to the back of his sleigh by 4,315,015 pounds of force.
In conclusion - If Santa ever did deliver presents on Christmas
Eve, he's dead now.
STOP THE WAR ON IRAQ! BRING OUR TROOPS HOME NOW!
ALL OUT JANUARY 20TH, 5:00 P.M., CIVIC CENTER, S.F.
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Kkk1928.jpg
This link brings you to a photo of
the KKK marching down Pennsylvania
Avenue in Washington, DC in 1928.
Evidently they were able to get a permit.
(With many thanks to Kwame Somburu
for supplying the link. This site has
a plethora of information about the KKK....
Bonnie Weinstein, Bay Area United Against War)
The U.S. government is not allowing antiwar
/anti-Bush protestors onto Pennsylvania Ave.
along the inauguration route Jan. 20th.
We have a constitutional right to protest the
inauguration. BAUAW encourages all to show
up in DC and come to Pennsylvania Avenue
with your signs and banners and express
your opposition to Bush and to the War.
We demand equal access along the rout for all.
We have a right to protest our government or
any of its official representatives. Nothing gives
the government the right to disallow legal and
peaceful protest.
If you can't go to DC, come out Jan. 20, 5pm,
Civic Center, SF. in solidarity with all protestors
in Washington and everywhere who oppose this war.
We are encouraging everyone to participate
somehow by wearing buttons and signs
at work, at school and on the bus; hold
banners at freeway entrances, and crowded
shopping areas etc. on Jan. 20. Students
should hold rallies and march to the Civic Center.
Come to our next meeting and pick a place
to flyer or table for Jan. 20 or hold a sign
during the day, on Jan. 20 if you can.
NEXT BAY AREA UNITED AGAINST WAR MEETING:
SATURDAY, JANUARY 8, 11AM
CENTRO DEL PUEBLO
474 VALENCIA STREET
(NEAR 16TH STREET IN SAN FRANCISCO)
---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
Let's Hit the Streets
To Defend Abortion Rights!
Saturday, January 22
Emboldened rightwing abortion foes have had the nerve to announce
a march in San Francisco on the anniversary of the historic
Roe v. Wade decision! Show them that San Francisco is
a reproductive rights town -- save the date and plan to
attend a counter demonstration!
What is needed in response is a multi-issue, militant, united
front of women, people of all colors, queers, immigrants, workers
and everyone targeted by the rightwing to show that the
anti-abortionists are not welcome in San Francisco!
Make your opinion heard!
Details of assembly time and place will be announced soon.
---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
PICTURES OF WAR
PLEASE ACCESS:
http://dahrjamailiraq.com/gallery/
view_album.php?set_albumName=album28&page=1
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/coalitionforfreethoughtinmedia/message/26138
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/coalitionforfreethoughtinmedia/message/26138
Virginion Pilot via AP - Photos - click here
http://home.hamptonroads.com/stories/story.cfm?story=79598&ran=187050
---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
ITALIAN.QUEER.DANGEROUS
a one-man show featuring Tommi Avicolli Mecca
directed by Francesca Prada
(The most important thing is for folks to make reservations ASAP.
Seating is limited. Please take a moment to call 554-0402
if you plan to come to the show.)
JANUARY 14-29 (Friday and Saturday nights only: 14, 15; 21, 22; 28, 29)
JON SIMS CENTER, 1519 Mission/between Van Ness and 11th
8pm, $5-10 sliding scale (no one turned away)
seating is limited, for reservations: 415-554-0402
to volunteer to help with the show, call 415-552-6031
Through monologue and spoken word, well-known San Francisco
queer activist and writer Tommi Avicolli Mecca tells his story of
growing up in South Philly's working-class Little Italy. At age 19,
fired up with new pride in being gay, he came out to the world--
and his traditional Roman Catholic southern Italian famiglia--on
a TV talk show. The rest is history, and the subject of this performance.
---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
1) Living in Garbage
** Dahr Jamail's Iraq Dispatches **
** http://dahrjamailiraq.com **
December 26, 2004
2) Dear Friends of the Cuban Five. René González has sent the following
greetings for the 2005 New Year on behalf of the Cuban Five to their
supporters around the world:
3) Newfield Wielded Mighty Pen
New York Daily News -
http://www.nydailynews.com
Thursday, December 23rd, 2004
http://www.nydailynews.com/news/col/story/264864p-226848c.html
4) The cost of Christmas
£30bn: The amount Britons will spend celebrating
Christmas this year
Compiled by Cahal Milmo
24 December 2004
http://news.independent.co.uk/uk/this_britain/story.jsp?story=595883
5) Ten more years?
Senior MPs warn British troops will be in Iraq for a decade,
as Blair in Baghdad proclaims: 'We are not a nation of quitters'
By Donald Macintyre in Baghdad and Colin Brown
22 December 2004
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/middle_east/story.jsp?story=595356
6) A System of Injustice
America Locked Up
By PAUL CRAIG ROBERTS
December 21, 2004
http://www.counterpunch.org/
7) WHEN THE MEDIA MANAGES US
[Col. Writ. 12/5/04] Copyright 2004 Mumia Abu-Jamal
"The medium is the massage." -- Marshall McLuhan (1911-1980)
8) AN APOLOGY & A REVIEW
[Col. Writ. 11/25/04] Copyright 2004 Mumia Abu-Jamal
9) WARS FOR THE WHITE NATION
[Col. Writ. 11/28/04) Copyright 2004 Mumia Abu-Jamal
10) Martha Stewart's Christmas Message: Prison Reform Now!
Yoshie Furuhashi
Saturday, December 25, 2004
http://montages.blogspot.com/2004/12/martha-stewarts-christmas-message.html
11) An Open Letter from Martha Stewart
This is a personal statement from Martha Stewart.
It is not issued by or on behalf of Martha Stewart Living
Omnimedia, Inc.
http://www.marthatalks.com/
12) Big Farms Reap Two Harvests With Subsidies a Bumper Crop
By TIMOTHY EGAN
December 26, 2004
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/12/26/national/26farm.html?oref=login
13) Affirmative Action, Cuban Style
By Fitzhugh Mullan, M.D.
New England Journal of Medicine
Volume 351:2680-2682 December 23, 2004 Number 26
http://content.nejm.org/cgi/content/full/351/26/2680
14) 4/28/05 Mass Protest Of Injured
and Disabled Workers Called In
California
http://www.workersmemorialday.com/sflcresolution.html
15) A scientific inquiry into the existence of Santa Claus.
(This was sent to me by my thirteen-year-old grandson,
Dominic...BW)
---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
1) Living in Garbage
** Dahr Jamail's Iraq Dispatches **
** http://dahrjamailiraq.com **
December 26, 2004
The dump is a dusty wasteland. Heaps of Baghdad's rotting wastes are
strewn about several square miles of the battered capital city. Engaged
in their futile battle to remove the endless amounts of garbage from
streets, blue garbage trucks
rumble through the stinky dump, adding their loads of filth.
32 year-old Hattim lives in this wasteland with his family
"We are living in a dump. We are living a bad life. We have children,
and no school. We have nothing. We are asking the new government to take
small care of us. Not big things, just small things. We are transporting
water with animals, with donkeys, and it's not clean water. It's not
clean water at all and we have a lot of diseases."
Hattim's family, along with 35 other people, live in houses they've
built out of old cans of cooking oil
Dried mud is packed between them to keep out the wind and dust
Inside their makeshift home flies cover everything. A 10 day old baby
sleeps
nestled in dirty blankets as flies buzz over her tiny head.
Hattim continues, "We lived in the marshes and when Saddam dried the
marshes he took our farms and everything and made military camps there.
And now, we are living in a dump. The human, which is this holy
creature, you can't imagine living in a dump. Even God doesn't accept that."
Flies cover the walls, the ceiling
and buzz incessantly around the family of 6. Hattim's 40 year-old
sister-in-law, Rana, lives in another home made of cans and mud. She
enters Hattim's to ask for some bread.
She holds her hands up towards the flies and says, "The flies are always
with us. We have some animals and they live on things in the dump. We
have no electricity and no water. Nobody is helping us and we don't have
salaries. Our parents had a farm and they lived in the south. But when
they cut the water from the marshes, we started our problems."
Outside Hattim collects small wood scraps
and pieces of plastic from the refuse in order to make a small fire to
warm his home. Two little girls, his nieces with dirt caked on their
faces
play with an old piece of tire, throwing it back and forth.
He looks up at them playing before lamenting over his situation.
"My brother has many kids. Some are five and six years old. I don't have
any documents for anything and don't even have a food ration card. I
have an Iraqi identification, which is of course worth nothing."
One of his relatives, despite the horrible living situation, is happy to
have his photo taken
while Hattim pauses his discussion.
Hattim says the interim government promised great assistance for his
family three months ago.
"They said wait three months and we'll send you to Mars," he says to
underscore the big promises made by the interim government to help the
poor in Baghdad, "No, we don't want to go to Mars, we just want a place
on this earth."
More writing, photos and commentary at http://dahrjamailiraq.com
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or unsubscribe to the email list.
Or, you can unsubscribe by sending an email to
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ubject or the body of the email.
(c)2004 Dahr Jamail.
All images and text are protected by United States and international
copyright law. If you would like to reprint Dahr's Dispatches on
the web, you need to include this copyright notice and a prominent
link to the DahrJamailIraq.com website. Any other use of images
and text including, but not limited to, reproduction, use on another
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Dahr Jamail. Of course, feel free to forward Dahr's dispatches via email.
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http://lists.dahrjamailiraq.com/mailman/listinfo/iraq_dispatches
---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
2) Dear Friends of the Cuban Five. René González has sent the following
greetings for the 2005 New Year on behalf of the Cuban Five to their
supporters around the world:
December 2004
Dear Brothers and Sisters:
Another year of struggle for our freedom has gone by; one in which the hopes
of winning justice didn't seem unfounded, judging by the oral hearing for
appeal just three months into the year.
At the end it hasn't happened yet, and at least for us these twelve months
have gone by like a whisper. I hope it hasn't been like that for you, and
that
you have been able to live each moment free from the speedy pace imposed
on us by the monotonous jail life.
Anyway, faster or slower, it's been another intense period, during which we
have been part of the prowess of our people in its irreducible fight for its
sovereignty, and its unceasing struggle to build out of ours the humane
society which inspired, first and foremost, the magnificent event that was
the
Cuban Revolution.
Our people, for its part, hasn't taken a step back in its fight for justice
for us;
nevertheless, this has been a journey that neither the Cuban people nor we
have made alone.
In these twelve months your support has been with us. Your letters and
messages of encouragement have reminded us every day that love knows
no borders, that it is worth being defended and that everywhere in the world
there are human beings who justify our sacrifice. In a universe upon which
ignorance, insensitivity, violence and egoism are imposed by atrociously
sophisticated means, people like you remind us that the gift of reason and
of
applying that reason to human betterment is not a wasted miracle.
That's why I haven't wanted to let the opportunity of the new year pass by
without writing to you this humble message of gratitude and appreciation,
gratitude and appreciation that will never be enough to express the high
esteem you deserve from me, but that come sincerely from my heart, to
endure forever.
I wish you a very happy 2005, full of joy, of happiness and personal as well
as
familial accomplishments but, above all, full of the unique satisfaction
which -
a privilege that generous souls enjoy - grows from the pleasure of doing
good
and of fighting, with courage and sensitivity, for a better and possible
world.
A big hug and my best wishes,
René González Sehwerert
Gerardo Hernández Nordelo
Fernando González Llort
Ramón Labañino Salazar
Antonio Guerrero RodrÃguez
---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
3) Newfield Wielded Mighty Pen
New York Daily News -
http://www.nydailynews.com
Thursday, December 23rd, 2004
http://www.nydailynews.com/news/col/story/264864p-226848c.html
The woman's name was Brenda Scurry. She was poor and black and on
welfare, and she lived in a top-floor tenement apartment on Tiffany St.
in the South Bronx.
One day in 1969, a young reporter with thick black glasses knocked on
Scurry's door. He said his name was Jack Newfield from the Village
Voice, and he had come to ask about the death of her 23-month-
old daughter, Janet.
Scurry invited him inside. In the next issue of the Voice, Newfield
vividly described the crumbling plaster in Scurry's apartment and
gave the mother's chilling account of how her daughter had stopped
eating that April and "started trembling and couldn't breathe ...
and started to change color."
"A neighbor called a policeman and we took her to Morrisania
Hospital," Scurry told Newfield. "A doctor looked at her and told
me to go home, that she would be okay. They asked me if Janet
ever ate paint or plaster and I told them yes.
"I went home but her temperature kept going up and down. After
five days they gave her a blood test for lead poisoning. And then
she died the next day. The day after she died, the blood test
came back positive."
Newfield went on to produce a stream of articles that laid bare
the epidemic of lead poisoning in the slums of New York.
The series so shocked the public that Mayor John Lindsay launched
a massive lead paint removal program.
If Newfield, then 31, had crawled into a hole and done nothing else
for the rest of his life, those lead-paint articles alone - with the
countless children they saved - would be enough to enshrine him
in some journalism hall of fame.
But Newfield was no ordinary muckraker. He was a brawler from
Bed-Stuy who never stopped swinging the pen in defense of underdogs.
It was that way to the end, which came on Monday night, when
at the age of 66 he lost his last great bout, this time with cancer.
At the funeral service on Manhattan's West Side yesterday, Wayne
Barrett, his longtime colleague at the Voice, called Newfield a
"father to a generation of journalists."
Mario Cuomo, whom Newfield befriended when the future governor
was a little-known Brooklyn lawyer, called him "one of this era's
most courageous champions of justice."
In his pursuit of justice, Newfield violated many of the rules they
teach in journalism schools.
For one thing, he actually cared about the people and the issues
he wrote about. He deeply believed that journalists have a bigger
responsibility than merely to report facts or entertain the reader.
He believed they must also use their skills to make the world
a better place.
Fifteen years ago, Newfield and I were colleagues at this paper and
became friends. One night in late 1990, I called him at home.
The unions at the Daily News had been locked out and forced into
a strike by the former owner of the newspaper, the Tribune Co.
At the time, Newfield was part of News management and was still
working to put out the paper, while I was chairman of the Newspaper
Guild's strike committee and was walking the picket lines with the
other reporters, and pressmen and drivers.
Newfield was a longtime union supporter and I knew it was breaking
his heart to have to cross our picket lines each morning.
So I told him it would be a big shot in the arm to the strike if he
would resign and refuse to put out a scab paper.
Newfield had been at the paper only 18 months. After decades at
the gadfly Voice, the job at The News finally had put him in the
spotlight of mainstream journalism.
I was asking him to give it all up.
"Jack, you can always find another job," I told him in that call.
He asked for a night to think about it. The next day, he called
and told me he was ready to quit and to hold a press conference
condemning the Tribune Co. actions.
A few days later, at a strike rally, Newfield read his resignation
as thousands of union supporters cheered.
Within a week, he had found another job.
In some journalism circles, they say Newfield crossed a different
kind of line at times, getting too cozy with some politicians,
and no doubt he did.
But for 40 years he churned out investigative pieces, hard-hitting
columns, books, even television documentaries on the life of this
great city, and few reporters ever did it better or with more impact.
---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
4) The cost of Christmas
£30bn: The amount Britons will spend celebrating
Christmas this year
Compiled by Cahal Milmo
24 December 2004
http://news.independent.co.uk/uk/this_britain/story.jsp?story=595883
The cost of Christmas
Why they wish it could be Christmas every day
Matthew Norman: Let's all celebrate Festivus this year
Raj Persaud: Stress, suicide and spending time with the family
John Bell: At Christmas we can dream and imagine how the
future should be
Leading article: Festive cheer
SPENDING
£4.2bn: The amount Britons spent on cosmetics this Christmas
£4.14bn: Britain's aid budget for the developing world in 2004
£813: Average spending per adult on celebrating Christmas
(£55 less than last year)
£50: The per capita annual income in Ethiopia
£20m: Amount made by Mark Tilden, British robot expert
who invented Robosapien, this year's hit toy
£20m: Amount nations of sub-Saharan Africa are paying in
debt to developed world every 16 hours
EATING
7,000: Average calories consumed by Britons on Christmas Day
780: Minutes running needed to burn off 7,000 calories
7: Number of days a child refugee in Darfur could survive
on 7,000 calories
£12: Average cost per head in UK of Christmas lunch
£12: Cost of a month's supply of grain for a family in
drought-hit Malawi
30,525: Number of miles your Christmas dinner will have
travelled to reach your table - vegetables alone are likely to
have come 15,800 miles
4: Miles walked daily by families in developing world
in search of water
HEALTH
5m: Britons will suffer a stomach upset over festive season
2.1m: People in developing world killed this year by
diarrhoeal disease
CRIME
244,000: Homes in Britain likely to be burgled over festive season
75,058: Britons spending Christmas in prison
4.2%: Rise in murder rate over Christmas
ENVIRONMENT
83 sq km: Amount of wrapping paper used (enough to
cover 33 Hyde Parks)
3,000,000: Tons of extra rubbish generated - enough to
fill 120m wheelie bins
(c) 2004 Independent Digital (UK) Ltd
---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
5) Ten more years?
Senior MPs warn British troops will be in Iraq for a decade,
as Blair in Baghdad proclaims: 'We are not a nation of quitters'
By Donald Macintyre in Baghdad and Colin Brown
22 December 2004
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/middle_east/story.jsp?story=595356
Ten more years?
Amid the screaming, soldiers use their lunch tables as stretchers
French journalists released after 124 days in captivity
Johann Hari: Why are we inflicting this discredited market
fundamentalism on Iraq?
Tony Blair flew into Iraq yesterday, promising democracy. But,
outside the ring of security that escorted him, another day of
gruesome violence was unfolding - including a rocket attack on
a US base in Mosul that claimed at least 24 lives.
And, against a backdrop of continuing carnage, The Independent
has learned a cross-party group of MPs has returned from Iraq
convinced British troops may have to be deployed there for at
least another 10 years.
Unlike the Prime Minister, the Commons Defence Select Committee
was unable to visit Baghdad because the security situation was
too dangerous.
One senior member of the committee said: "It will take 10 to
15 years at least [before troops can be fully withdrawn]. It is
another Cyprus. The Iraqis just cannot cope with the security
situation and won't be able to for years."
As Mr Blair was proclaiming Britain would stay the course,
a bloody illustration of the dangers encountered by US and
British troops was playing out in the northern city of Mosul.
At about noon yesterday, insurgents hit a dining hall tent at
a US base, killing at least two dozen US and Iraqi soldiers and
contractors and injuring 60. Amid the screaming and smoke
that followed, quick-thinking soldiers turned their lunch
tables upside down, placed the wounded on them and carried
them to the car park.
At a press conference with the Iraqi interim Prime Minister,
Iyad Allawi, Mr Blair declared that Britain was not a "nation
of quitters". He was speaking after becoming the first foreign
head of government to visit Iraq since the installation of the
interim government in June, and the first British premier to
go to Baghdad since Winston Churchill.
Mr Blair said that he would not be deterred by the recent and
lethal wave of suicide bombings. He declared: "What I feel is
that the danger people are facing is coming from the insurgents
who are trying to destroy the possibility of the country having
democracy. Where do we stand in that fight? On the side of
democracy.''
Asked how he felt about his entry under maximum security,
20 months after the fall of Saddam Hussein, Mr Blair acknowledged:
"Security is very heavy. You can feel the sense of danger,
people live in here.''
But he added: "What I feel more than anything else is coming
from the terrorists trying to stop this country becoming
a democracy.''
Congratulating Mr Allawi, United Nations personnel and other
international staff for working towards next month's elections,
Mr Blair added: "I just feel that people should understand how
precious what is being created here is.''
He added: "Whatever people feel about the conflict, we British
are not a nation of quitters. What is obvious to me is the Iraqi
people are not going to quit on the task either. They are going
to see it through.''
Officially, the Government has continued to raise hopes that
normality is returning to Iraq with the clear implication that
after the UN mandate runs out with more elections in December
next year, the foreign troops may start to be withdrawn.
But MPs who have visited Iraqsay such hopes are wildly optimistic.
Mike Gapes, a Labour MP on the committee, used a pre-Christmas
debate in the Commons yesterday to warn it could "take years"
before British troops could be withdrawn, in spite of the progress
he claimed he saw in Iraq.
Mr Gapes said: "My assessment is just as in Kosovo and Bosnia,
we are not talking about a commitment of one or two years, but
several years. We have to honestly say that we started this business
and we have to see it through."
A Tory member of the committee, Richard Ottaway, said: "There
will need to be a continuing commitment from foreign forces for
10 years at least." An anti-war Labour MP Alice Mahon said:
"I don't think there is any hiding place from this. The Prime
Minister is there today but there is bloody chaos in Iraq."
Later, on a visit to the Shaiba army base in Basra the Prime
Minister climbed on a table to tell about 1,000 assembled British
troops: "A big thank you to you all. I know you are going to be
away from your family and loved ones over Christmas. I am sorry
about that but, my God, it's a job worth doing.'' Mr Blair added
that all the troops could be "very proud of what you are doing''.
(c) 2004 Independent Digital (UK) Ltd
---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
6) A System of Injustice
America Locked Up
By PAUL CRAIG ROBERTS
December 21, 2004
http://www.counterpunch.org/
At the same time that the Black Communities have been scattered
throughout this land as gentrification of the cities proceeds.)
A System of Injustice
America Locked Up
By PAUL CRAIG ROBERTS
While enjoying Christmas, good food and drink with family and friends
in the warmth and comfort of your home, take a moment to remember
the falsely imprisoned. Think about how your own family would handle
the grief, because wrongful imprisonment can happen to you.
In a just published book, "Thinking About Crime,
Michael Tonry, a distinguished American law professor and director
of Cambridge University's Institute of Criminology, reports that the
US has the highest percentage of its population in prison than any
country on earth. The US incarceration rate is as much as 12 times
higher than that of European countries.
Unless you believe that Americans are more criminally inclined than
other humans, what can explain the US incarceration rate being so
far outside the international mainstream? I can think of the
following reasons:
(1) In order to prove that they are "tough on crime," politicians
have criminalized behavior that is legal elsewhere.
(2) Many innocent Americans are in jail.
There is enormous evidence backing up both reasons.
Professor Tonry notes that during the past three decades the
number of Americans in prison has increased 700%. Imprisonment
has far outstripped the growth in the population. Subtracting
children and the elderly, one in eighty Americans of prison
eligible age is locked up.
America's privatized prisons have to be fed with inmates in order
to maintain their profitability. Prosecutors need high conviction
rates to justify their budgets and to build their careers. Taken
together these two facts create powerful incentives to put people
away regardless of crime, innocence or guilt.
Consider the case of Charles Thomas Sell as recently told by Carolyn
Tuft of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and by Phyllis Schlafly on
TownHall (Dec. 13). Mr. Sell, a dentist, has been locked up for
almost 8 years without a trial. Allegedly, Sell is guilty of Medicare
fraud, but with no evidence or witnesses against him, the virtuous,
just, democratic, moral US government tortured Mr. Sell in an
effort to make him confess. Now they can't bring him to trial where
he will talk. So Mr. Sell is kept locked up under the pretense that
his unwillingness to admit his guilt is evidence that he is mentally
incompetent.
Schlafly asks the correct question: "Is there no accountability for
this type of government misconduct?" The answer is NO. Mr. Sell
might as well be in Stalin's Gulag or in the hands of the Waffen SS
or US captors at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. No one will do anything
about the crime that the US government has committed
against Mr. Sell.
No one will do anything to help William R. Strong, Jr., another victim
of our heartless injustice system. Strong has been in a Virginia prison
for a decade on false charges of "wife rape." Mr. Strong has been
trying to get a DNA test, confident that the semen in the perk test
is not his but that of the lover of his unfaithful wife. But since Strong
was convicted prior to the advent of DNA testing, prosecutors argue
that he has no right to the evidence.
Another innocent victim of "Virginia justice" is Chris Gaynor, who
my investigations indicate was framed by a corrupt prosecutor
with the connivance of a corrupt judge, who intimidated Gaynor's
witnesses by jailing one of them. Only liars were permitted on the
witness stand. I brought the facts to light in the newspapers at
the time, but the Arlington, Virginia, criminal injustice system did
not let facts interfere with its show trial.
Government routinely breaks the laws. So says Judge Andrew P.
Napolitano in the current issue of Cato Policy Report and in his
book, "Constitutional Chaos: What Happens When the Government
Breaks Its Own Laws." Judge Napolitano reports on cases of torture,
psychological abuse, and frame-ups of innocents that he discovered
as the presiding judge. Any American naive enough to trust the
police and prosecutors should read what Napolitano has to say.
Torture has become routine in American prisons. The goal of the
torturers is guilty pleas and false testimony against innocent
defendants. The torturers succeed. Napolitano reports that "fewer
than 3 percent of federal indictments were tried; virtually all the
rest of those charged pled guilty."
Does anyone seriously believe that the police are so efficient
that 97 out of 100 people indicted are guilty?!
The cherished code, "you are innocent until proven guilty," no
longer holds in America. You are guilty when charged. You will
be tortured or abused and threatened with more charges until
you agree to a plea bargain.
Diane Lori Kleiman is an attorney who has worked in a district
attorney's office and for the Treasury Department's Bureau of
Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms. She says prosecutors have little
concern with real crimes, preferring to target high-profile individuals
in order to garner headlines and create a political career for
themselves.
Martha Steward is a victim of prosecutorial ambition as was Michael
Milken, whose false imprisonment created a political career for
Rudy Giuliani.
Kleiman says that prosecutors look for high-profile targets.
"It isn't necessarily an issue of right and wrong. It's an issue
of taking the case to trial and getting the publicity. That makes
your career."
The Martha Stewart case, Kleiman says, "is the first time in history
where they charged an individual with false statements, without
her signing the statement or without a tape recording that she
even made the statement. And not under oath." Kleiman is referring
to US history, not Soviet or Nazi history, histories that our criminal
injustice system now mimics.
The US criminal justice system is bereft of justice and accountability.
It only serves the ambitions of prosecutors. In America, criminal
"justice" operates like a Stalin-era street sweep in which hapless
citizens instantly became "enemies of the people" simply by
being arrested.
Paul Craig Roberts is coauthor of The Tyranny of Good Intentions
book which documents the destruction of the legal principles that
protect the innocent.
---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
7) WHEN THE MEDIA MANAGES US
[Col. Writ. 12/5/04] Copyright 2004 Mumia Abu-Jamal
"The medium is the massage." -- Marshall McLuhan (1911-1980)
Everyday, when we watch the day's news, listen to the hourly
update, or read the nearest scandal sheet, we are being managed
by the nation's powerful media machines.
Some of us, who believe we are well-informed, will doubtless
dispute that claim, and point, perhaps, to the number of papers
we read, or the number of news shows we watch, as proof that
we consume a wide range of news, and therefore are able to
escape the claws of the news managers.
Perhaps they are right. Let us see. I'll bet that it is rare
for most of us to see, or hear, or read of the continuing Iraq
War, as an "occupation." We also rarely hear about Iraqi
fighters against this occupation as anything but "terrorists",
or perhaps, "insurgents."
Indeed, the very words, "Iraq War" are rarely used, at
least in the present tense, for, according to the bought-and-sold
voices in the corporate press, the war *is* over, for hasn't
the Grand Lord Emperor, George W., so decreed it? And, lo
and behold, like the meanest serf in feudal Saxony, like
scribes to ancient princes, -- voila! -- so be it. It is fact.
It matters little that, if deaths, of either Iraqis or even
Americans count, the war, a guerrilla war, rages in a dozen
cities in Iraq.
The media manages us with words; like 'coalition forces',
like 'terrorist', and finally, and perhaps most fatally, like
'democracy.'
Not since the Vietnam War have we seen such myth-
making by the media, for did they not then try to spin the
web of 'democracy' over the eyes and minds of millions?
Did they not then proffer assorted imported toadies to act
as presidents and prime ministers, that the Vietnamese
people regarded as strangers and, worse, traitors?
Only in the rare, underground and radical press could
those truths be spoken, for the major dailies, the three big
networks (back then, there were only three), and corporate
radio told the government's side of the story. And that
story was a lie.
Americans weren't told that it was a People's War; that
everyone from children in the villages, to prostitutes in the
hootches, to guerrillas in the jungles, to intellectuals in the
cities, was waging a war against the Yankee foreigners,
as they had waged against the French colonialists a
generation before, and the imperial Chinese centuries
before. They were people who fought for their own
country against the U.S., and those the U.S. imposed.
They were fighting for the right to decide for
themselves what kind of government would rule.
The Big Secret today is that, increasingly, the same
thing is happening in Iraq. It's not exactly the same.
It never is.
They know that the 'freedom' promised by the
Americans and the British isn't their freedom. And
they know, all too well, that Americans don't give a
hot damn about them; they have seen the pictures
from Abu Ghraib (and perhaps, hundreds more that the
U.S. government and American press hasn't allowed
you to see!). They know, in their guts, that the Anglo-
American objective is the black crude that courses
below their dry earth.
They know that the [Ahmed] Chalabis, and the
[Ghazi] Al-Yawers, have sold themselves, to the CIA or
M16, and are there to sell the wealth of the nation.
But most Americans don't know, and don't want to
know.
'Americans are fighting for freedom.' Uh-huh...
It is their corporate, sell-out media that is
responsible for these public illusions. They have
betrayed their craft as journalists, and signed on, to
the highest bidder, like slaves, who sell their faces
and their words, to power.
Luckily, as in the '60s, there exists a growing
alternative media, that *is* performing its function,
and driving the big TV and cable networks, into
irrelevancy. May it only grow.
Copyright 2004 Mumia Abu-Jamal
---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
8) AN APOLOGY & A REVIEW
[Col. Writ. 11/25/04] Copyright 2004 Mumia Abu-Jamal
This is an apology, and a book review (or perhaps, an
apologetic book review). The apology, first off, because it
comes now, when it can have little real impact on the
world in which we live and struggle for life, for love, and
for our communal well-being.
The review is of the brief, yet excellently heartfelt
book by journalism professor Robert Jensen, entitled
*Citizens of the Empire: The Struggle to Claim our
Humanity* (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 2004).
Jensen writes, with passion and clarity, as if the world
is on fire, and admits to a deep, pervasive feeling that
men rarely admit to: fear.
His is not the voice of the academic, stiff, stilted,
and removed from one's audience. He writes as if it
is his duty to awaken others to the unleashing of 'the
dogs of war' from the neocons in the White House:
...[B]ut I fear they have unleashed something
far worse than any war we have ever seen ...
But this feels different. This feels far worse.
This doesn't feel like a war. Let us name what
has happened: Not just a war, but a new insanity
has been unleashed upon the world. An unlimited
war that our leaders counsel could go on
indefinitely. A war against enemies in the
"shadowy networks", which means we will never
know when the shadowy enemy is vanquished.
This is quite possibly the policymakers' shot at the
final, and permanent, militarization of U.S. society.
Add to that the possibility of more terrorist attacks
from the fringe of the Arab and Muslim population
even more convinced of the depravity of Americans,
and the possibility of entire countries destabilized.
Are you scared? How can you not be? [p.xxi]
Jensen skillfully confronts many of the easy, facile lies
which are used to stifle public debate, and enforce conformity
on millions of Americans to accept, unquestionably, the
State's assertions about this eternal war. He warns of the
many traps that lie ahead of people who wanted to oppose
the war, but didn't want to seem, well -- unpatriotic:
I am against nationalism, and I am against patriotism.
They are both the dark side. It is time not simply to
redefine a kinder-and-gentler patriotism, but to sweep
away the notion and acknowledge it as morally,
politically, and intellectually bankrupt. It is time to
scrap patriotism.
More specifically, it is crucial to scrap patriotism in
today's empire, the United States, where patriotism
is not only a bad idea but literally a threat to the
survival of the planet. We should abandon patriotism
and strive to become more fully developed human
beings not with shallow allegiances to a nation but
rich and deep ties to humanity. [p. 39]
This is hard stuff. I apologize for not sharing it with you earlier.
Jensen's is a rare, and often unsung voice in what passes for
public discourse in America. He cites a rare quote from the
great labor leader and Socialist presidential candidate (while in
prison for opposing World War I), Eugene Debs for a kind of
internationalism that he clearly shares. Debs, in 1915, proclaimed:
"I have no country to fight for; my country is the earth, and I am
a citizen of the world." [p. 51] Jensen criticizes the loss of
democracy and the failure of the nation's universities to serve
as places where important social questions (like war and peace)
could truly be argued. He is also critical of the state's use of
the media machine, which issues, in his words, a form of
'corporate propaganda.'
He is both critical and surprisingly hopeful, for the mass
demonstrations of February and March, 2003, revealed a broad
base of anti-war spirit in the nation. Yet he is almost stunned
by the reported response of President Bush, who belittled the
demonstrations of millions of people as a mere "focus group."
Jensen, in his preface, replies:
A focus group? Perhaps the leader of the free world
was not aware that a focus group is a small number of
people who are brought together (and typically paid)
to evaluate a concept or a product. Focus groups
are primarily a tool of businesses, which uses them to
figure out how to sell things more effectively.
Politicians also occasionally use them, for the same
purpose. That's a bit different from a coordinated
gathering of millions of people who took to the streets
because they felt passionately about an issue of life
and death. As is so often the case, Bush's comment
demonstrated his ignorance and condescension, the
narrowness of his intellect and his lack of respect
for the people he allegedly serves. [p. xxi]
From the book: *Citizens of the Empire*, by Robert Jensen.
Better late than never.
Copyright 2004 Mumia Abu-Jamal
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9) WARS FOR THE WHITE NATION
[Col. Writ. 11/28/04) Copyright 2004 Mumia Abu-Jamal
We Americans claim to be a peace-loving people. We hate
bloodshed; we are opposed to violence. Yet we go into
spasms of joy over the possibility of projecting dynamite
bombs from flying machines upon helpless citizens ...
Yet our hearts swell with pride at the thought that America
is becoming the most powerful nation on earth, and that
it will eventually plant her iron foot on the necks of all
other nations. -- Emma Goldman, Radical Emigrant & Activist
"Patriotism: A Menace to Liberty" (1908) (Fr. Howard
Zinn & Anthony Arnove, *Voices of a People's History of
the United States* (N.Y.: Seven Stories Press, 2004), p. 271]
In light of the recent election, these coming four years promise to
be ones of continuing war. Nor will it end, no matter who is elected
in 2008. That's because the major allegedly opposition party, given
its deep corporate funding, will not dare to truly oppose the
Administration. They fear being targeted as 'unpatriotic,' or, even
worse, 'soft on terrorism.'
That's because, they know, at some level, that millions of Americans
rally to the martial strains of war. Even a 'bad war.' Even one based
upon false pretenses. Even one based upon that most ulterior of
motives -- greed.
Some thinkers believe that Americans were perhaps too stupid
to see past the Administration's smokescreen for the War on Iraq.
I am not so convinced. I think many people simply didn't care.
Where, as here, the 'enemy' were nonwhite Arabs, and mostly,
folks of an alien faith, it was easy to project them as fair game --
even if Iraq actually hadn't a thing to do with 9/11.
There's simply something about the allure of war, that writer
and social critic, Randolph Bourne, put quite nicely, in his 1918
essay, "The State":
War is the health of the State. It automatically sets in
motion throughout society those irresistible forces for
uniformity, for passionate cooperation with the Government
in coercing into obedience the minority groups and
individuals which lack the larger herd sense. The
machinery of government sets and enforces the drastic
penalties; the minorities are either intimidated into
silence, or brought slowly around by a subtle process
of persuasion which may seem really to be converting
them. [From Zinn & Arnove, *Voices of a People's
History ...*, p. 299.]
War, Bourne explains, creates such wrenching social divisions,
that fellow citizens often turn on fellow citizens, with one side,
usually the pro-war side, demeaning the other, antiwar side, as
traitors to the nation -- as if the nation is the political
leadership!
While Bourne was describing the events around World War
I, his insights reflect our present, under the power of this
"wartime... uniformity of feeling" [p. 299].
Bourne tells us:
Not for any religious impulse could the American nation have
been expected to show such devotion en masse, such
sacrifice and labor. Certainly not for any secular good,
such as universal education or the subjugation of nature,
would it have poured forth its treasure and its life, or
would it have permitted such stern coercive measures to be
taken against it, such as conscripting its money and its men.
But for the sake of a war of offensive self-defense,
undertaken to support a difficult cause to the slogan of
"democracy," it would reach the highest level ever known
of collective effort .... [p. 300].
We are conditioned to, for the most part, quietly accept it;
to not rock the boat; to go with the flow.
Yet it's also true that Americans, by their millions, all across
the country, came out to oppose the war -- before a shot was
fired!
Perhaps it reflects a deep-seated distrust of political promises
and claims to justify wars. Certainly, American presidents
throughout the 20th century, have given people enough reason
to be skeptical. Perhaps they came from families where men
returned, in shattered bodies, or fractured minds, from glorious
wars past. Perhaps people simply knew that *this* war had
nothing to do with *that* war.
It is a good start, and would've been far better if people really
continued to protest, in great numbers, throughout the election
year. But, of course, this didn't happen. But people learn,
especially if the lesson is a painful one. Perhaps, in the future,
they will not stop, until they force the politicians to hear them.
Copyright 2004 Mumia Abu-Jamal
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10) Martha Stewart's Christmas Message: Prison Reform Now!
Yoshie Furuhashi
Saturday, December 25, 2004
http://montages.blogspot.com/2004/12/martha-stewarts-christmas-message.html
Martha Stewart, whose trial brought the problem of 18 USC 1001
to our attention, calls for prison reform in her Christmas message :
So many of the [1,200] women here in Alderson will never have the
joy and wellbeing that you and I experience. Many of them have been
here for years -- devoid of care, devoid of love, devoid of family.
"I beseech you all to think about these women -- to encourage the
American people to ask for reforms, both in sentencing guidelines,
in length of incarceration for nonviolent first-time offenders , and
for those involved in drug-taking . They would be much better
served in a true rehabilitation center than in prison where there is
no real help, no real programs to rehabilitate, no programs to educate,
no way to be prepared for life "out there" where each person will
ultimately find herself, many with no skills and no preparation for
living.
Stewart's opinion is shared by many. A poll conducted by Peter D.
Hart Research Associates, Inc. shows that public attitudes toward
criminal justice have changed dramatically: "In 1994, . . . 48% favored
addressing the causes of crime and 42% preferred the punitive
approach. . . . The public now favors dealing with the roots of crime
over strict sentencing by a two to one margin, 65% to 32% "
(emphasis added, Changing Public Attitudes toward the Criminal
Justice System ,February 2002 ). What is most heartening is that
rehabilitation and reentry programs have surprisingly broad-based
support:
Americans strongly favor rehabilitation and reentry programs over
incapacitation as the best method of ensuring public safety. Nearly
two-thirds of all Americans (66%) agree that the best way to reduce
crime is to rehabilitate prisoners by requiring education and job
training so they have the tools to turn away from a life of crime,
while just one in three (28%) believe that keeping criminals off the
streets through long prison sentences would be the more effective
alternative.
This idea has broad-based support, with solid majorities of whites
(63% / 31%), fundamentalist Protestants (55% / 36%), and Republicans
(55% / 38%) supporting rehabilitation over incapacitation as the best
way to reduce crime. Interestingly, the 23% of Americans who report
that they or a close family member have been the victim of a violent
crime endorse rehabilitation even more strongly than the general
public, by a decisive 73% to 21% margin . (emphasis added,
February 2002 )
Perhaps, Stewart's call for prison reform won the hearts and minds
of many incarcerated women and their families, and she found
herself in their prayers:
Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia Inc., among the biggest U.S.
targets of "short selling" last month, rallied amid optimism that
the company can rebound from its namesake's jail term and return
to profitability.
Shares of the media and housewares company rose 43 percent
during the past six weeks in New York Stock Exchange composite
trading and reached $30.05, a four-year high, on Dec. 15.
Thirty-one percent of the New York-based company's shares
available for trading were sold short, or borrowed and sold to
profit from lower prices, as of Nov. 9. The figure was in the top
5 percent for U.S.-listed companies. (Laure Edwards, "Martha
Stewart Living's Shares Gain, Thwarting 'Short Sellers,'"
Bloomberg.com, December 21, 2004)
Let's make sure that no prisoner will be sold short and that all
prisoners -- especially incarcerated women, more than 70 percent
of whom are nonviolent offenders and almost all of whom are
classified as "low risk" (Vincent Schiraldi and Judith Greene,
"Cutting Prison Costs is Tempting in Times of Fiscal Crisis,"
San Diego Union-Tribune,February 27, 2002 ) -- will be able
to rebound more strongly than Stewart's company did.
#posted by Yoshie : 11:10 AM
---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
11) An Open Letter from Martha Stewart
This is a personal statement from Martha Stewart.
It is not issued by or on behalf of Martha Stewart Living
Omnimedia, Inc.
http://www.marthatalks.com/
Dear Friends,
When one is incarcerated with 1,200 other inmates, it is hard to be
selfish at Christmas -- hard to think of Christmases past and
Christmases future -- that I know will be as they always were for
me -- beautiful! So many of the women here in Alderson will never
have the joy and wellbeing that you and I experience. Many of them
have been here for years -- devoid of care, devoid of love, devoid
of family.
I beseech you all to think about these women -- to encourage the
American people to ask for reforms, both in sentencing guidelines,
in length of incarceration for nonviolent first-time offenders, and for
those involved in drug-taking. They would be much better served in
a true rehabilitation center than in prison where there is no real help,
no real programs to rehabilitate, no programs to educate, no way to
be prepared for life "out there" where each person will ultimately find
herself, many with no skills and no preparation for living.
I am fine, really. I look forward to being home, to getting back to my
valuable work, to creating, cooking, and making television. I have had
time to think, time to write, time to exercise, time to not eat the bad
food, and time to walk and contemplate the future. I've had my work
here too. Cleaning has been my job - washing, scrubbing, sweeping,
vacuuming, raking leaves, and much more. But like everyone else
here, I would rather be doing all of this in my own home, and not
here -- away from family and friends.
I want to thank you again, and again, for your support and
encouragement. You have been so terrific to me and to everyone
who stood by me. I appreciate everything you have done, your
emails, your letters, and your kind, kind words.
Happy holidays,
Martha Stewart
P.S. I thought you might be interested in the brief my lawyers
filed with the Court this afternoon. (The brief can be found at
the link above...bw)
---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
12) Big Farms Reap Two Harvests With Subsidies a Bumper Crop
By TIMOTHY EGAN
December 26, 2004
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/12/26/national/26farm.html?oref=login
GURLEY, Neb. - The roadside sign welcoming people into this state
reads: "Nebraska, the Good Life." And for farmers closing out their
books at the end of a year when they earned more money than at
any time in the history of American agriculture, it certainly looks
like happy days.
But at a time when big harvests and record farm income should
mean that Champagne corks are popping across the prairie, the
prosperity has brought with it the kind of nervousness seen in
headlines like the one that ran in The Omaha World-Herald in
early December: "Income boom has farmers on edge."
For despite the fact that farm income has doubled in two years,
federal subsidies have also gone up nearly 40 percent over the
same period - projected at $15.7 billion this year, and $130 billion
over the last nine years. And that bounty is drawing fire from
people who say that at this moment of farm prosperity, the
nation's subsidy system has never made less sense.
Even those deeply steeped in the system acknowledge it seems
counterintuitive. "I struggle with the same question: how the hell
can you have such high government payments if farmers had such
a great year?" said Keith Collins, the chief economist for the
Agriculture Department.
The answer lies in the quirks of the federal farm subsidy system
as well as in the way savvy farmers sell their crops. Mr. Collins
said farmers use the peculiar world of agriculture market timing
to get both high commodity prices and high subsidies.
"The biggest reason is with record crops, prices have fallen," he
said. "And farmers are taking advantage of that."
A farmer can sell his crop early at a high price, say, in a futures
contract, and still collect a subsidy check after the harvest from
the government if prices are down over all. The money is not tied
to what the farmer actually received for his crop. The farmer does
not even have to sell the crop to get the check, only prove that
the market has dropped below a certain set rate.
"For those who can milk the system, it's been a great year," said
Kent Miller, whose German great-grandparents were pioneers near
this tiny town. Mr. Miller is a small operator who says he barely
made a profit this year on his 3,000 acres of wheat and millet.
Still, while Mr. Miller is a critic of the system, he is not forgoing
aid. Here in Cheyenne County, in the wind-raked western edge
of Nebraska, the fields are slumbering for the winter. Most of the
harvest is in. Mr. Miller was one of the farmers going into the
federal agricultural office to register for fresh checks from recent
swings in the market.
"I just signed up for new government payments today," Mr. Miller
said, standing inside the federal agriculture office for this county.
He described the subsidies as little help for ailing family farmers.
"It's a Band-Aid on a large wound."
Farm groups say the subsidies provide for a stable food supply,
and ensure that major sectors of American agriculture will be
competitive on the global market.
"When people ask me what the justification for this is, I point
out that in nearly every country in the world you find government
involved in the food supply," said Bob Young, an economist at the
American Farm Bureau Federation, the powerful trade group for
major agricultural producers.
But because nearly 70 percent of the subsidies go to the top
10 percent of agricultural producers, the recent prosperity is
not seen or felt among many small to medium-size growers
who keep the struggling counties of the Great Plains alive.
Though some retailers in places like Iowa and Kansas say that
the boost in farm income promises a good Christmas season,
merchants here say they are not feeling any uptick. All around
western Nebraska, in places like Chappell or Lorenzo, storefronts
are boarded and the merchants who remain complain of the
difficulties of surviving.
Even though Cheyenne County is one of the few bright spots
in the economic desert of the rural Plains, its recent job boom
has nothing to do with agriculture. A major outdoor goods
company, Cabela's, has its world headquarters in Sidney, and
its giant retail store is a draw off of Interstate 80.
"It's been real slow, and usually December is a good month for
us," said Brian Thacker, who sells new trucks and cars in Sidney,
the biggest town in the county. But he said farmers complain
about not having enough money even in good years.
"If it's raining, they complain; if the wind is blowing too much,
they complain," Mr. Thacker said. "It just seems like they're
never happy."
Ed Miller, who owns a family feed and seed store in Sidney that
caters to small farmers, said his business was not up despite
the increase in farm income because most of the big corporate
farms that are doing particularly well do not buy from the local
seed dealers.
So it is not surprising that the current subsidy system is drawing
home-grown criticism from people like Senator Chuck Hagel,
Republican of Nebraska, who says it is only widening the gap
between large and smaller farmers, while not helping rural
America.
The subsidies have also drawn criticism from farmers who grow
fruits, vegetables and nuts - nearly half of American agriculture
- but have nothing like the elaborate safety net in place for corn,
cattle, wheat and hog producers.
"We don't get payments, and we don't want them," said Tom
Nassif, president of the Western Growers Association, which
represents farmers in the nation's biggest agricultural state,
California. "We believe the marketplace should decide who
stays and who goes. And we certainly shouldn't be paying
people not to grow."
Farm production has doubled over the last 50 years, while the
number of farms has fallen by two-thirds. Economists say
about 150,000 of America's 2.1 million farms produce
70 percent of the major food crops. But only certain crops -
wheat, corn, cotton, soybeans and sunflowers among them -
qualify for subsidies.
Every subsidy payment in the country can be found on a Web
site put together by the Environmental Working Group, which
advocates an overhaul of the farm payment system. The site
has become a must-read for farmers, and receives about
a million hits a day, the group says.
According to those records, which are supplied by the
Agriculture Department, Mr. Miller, the small wheat and
millet farmer, received $18,449 in subsidies last year,
and a total of $189,254 over the last nine years.
His neighbor down the road, a wheat farmer named Ronald
Jessen, was paid $424,387 over the last nine years, according
to the database. Mr. Jessen's father, Raymond, got $485,096
in government money, and his brother, Michael Jessen, got
$356,769. They are among the 10 biggest recipients of wheat
subsidies here in Cheyenne County, which is the state's top
wheat county.
Over all, Nebraska got $7.5 billion in government farm payments
over the last nine years.
The Jessen family wheat farm, despite getting more than
$1 million in subsidies in that time, is not a gold mine, Ronald
Jessen said in an interview. "You've got to look at all the expenses,"
he said. "A new combine can cost $200,000. When I do my taxes,
the crop breaks even. My profit is what I get from the government."
Still, Mr. Jessen said he was not proud to be harvesting so much
from taxpayers.
"Most farmers will tell you they would rather get paid for what's
in the elevator rather than from the government," he said.
Other farmers and some critics say that corporations, extended
families and partnerships are taking advantage of a system that
has little relationship to the ebbs and flows of food supply, and
rewards them most in times like now, when farmers should
seemingly be able to get by without government help.
"It's shocking the extent to which taxpayers subsidize this select
group of people whether they're having a good year or bad," said
Ken Cook, director of the Environmental Working Group. "I call
them the red ink states."
Any farm entity - often a corporation - can collect up to $360,000
per year. Some of the biggest checks are direct payments to
farmers who can show a "historic pattern" of having grown one
of the big commodity crops. In a system that supporters say is
intended to ensure economic stability from year to year, farmers
do not actually have to grow the crop to get the money. For other
payments, a farmer is required to show involvement helping to
run or manage the operation.
Mr. Miller, who is struggling to run his family farm on his own,
says that big farms will line their subsidy payroll with family
members who have minimal involvement.
"Typically, you get 10 relatives who all get the payments, but
maybe for 6 of them, the only time they come out to the farm
is for Christmas," Mr. Miller said.
While the big farms are having record years, much of rural
America is continuing to decline.
Senator Hagel voted against the 2002 farm bill that is the
framework for the current subsidy system. At the time, he
said, "these lopsided payments encourage and subsidize
overproduction" and would "only widen the disparity gaps
between large and small farmers."
In a hearing last August, Mr. Hagel said the Great Plains was
in a continued downward spiral, even with record farm income.
"Half the rural counties in America lost population in the 2000
census," Senator Hagel said in the hearing. "And three out of four
rural counties experienced below-average economic growth,
despite the record level of farm subsidies."
The highest single year for subsidies was 2000, when farmers
got $22 billion in payments. But their income was only
$47 billion that year. This year, with farm income at $73 billion,
is the first year when farmers set a record for earnings, while
subsidies were still among the highest in recent years.
This record year raises the question of what would happen to
American agriculture if government stopped making such large
payments. Mr. Collins, the chief economist at the Agriculture
Department, said it was possible that farmers would produce
the same amount of food in a pure free market.
Some farmers say they could go cold turkey, and make it on
their own. Others say they would go under. But the thing many
agree on is that working the land, even in good times, is not
something they would recommend to their children.
"Out here, the joke is that anyone who tries to get their kid
to go into farming is encouraging a form of child abuse,"
Mr. Miller said.
Copyright 2004 The New York Times
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13) Affirmative Action, Cuban Style
By Fitzhugh Mullan, M.D.
New England Journal of Medicine
Volume 351:2680-2682 December 23, 2004 Number 26
http://content.nejm.org/cgi/content/full/351/26/2680
(Sent by David McReynolds
What an irony that poor Cuba is training doctors for rich America,
engaging in affirmative action on our behalf, and - while blockaded
by U.S. ships and sanctions - spending its meager treasure to improve
the health of U.S. citizens.)
Affirmative Action, Cuban Style
by Fitzhugh Mullan, M.D.
"I feel as if I'm standing on the backs of all my ancestors. This is a
huge opportunity for me," Teresa Glover, a 27-year-old medical student,
told me during a recent visit to her medical school. "Nobody in my family
has ever had the chance to be a doctor." Glover's mother is a teacher, and
her father a dispatcher for the New York subway system. Her background is a
mix of African American, Barbadian, and Cherokee. She graduated from the
State University of New York at Plattsburgh. "I wanted to be a doctor, but
I wasn't sure how to get into medicine. I had decent grades, but I didn't
have any money, and even applying to medical school cost a lot."
This young woman from the Bronx may be helping to rectify the
long-standing problem of insufficient diversity in the medical profession
in the United States. Twenty-five percent of the U.S. population is black,
Hispanic, or Native American, whereas only 6.1 percent of the nation's
physicians come from these backgrounds.1 Students from these minority
groups simply don't get into medical school as often as their majority
peers, which results in a scarcity of minority physicians. This inequity
translates into suffering and death, as documented by the Institute of
Medicine.2 Poorer health outcomes in minority populations have been linked
to lack of access to care, lower rates of therapeutic procedures, and
language barriers. Since physicians from minority groups practice
disproportionately in minority communities, they are an important part of
the solution to the health-disparities quandary.
In her third year, Glover is negotiating the classic passage from the
laboratory to the clinic. But her school isn't in the United States. She is
enrolled at the Latin American School of Medicine (ELAM, which is its
Spanish acronym) in Havana - a school sponsored by the Cuban government and
dedicated to training doctors to treat the poor of the Western hemisphere
and Africa. Twenty-seven countries and 60 ethnic groups are represented
among ELAM's 8000 students.
Glover's mother heard about ELAM from her congressman, Representative
José Serrano (D-N.Y.). "Mom calls me. 'I have news. There's a chance for
you to go to medical school.' She waits for it to sink in. 'You'd get a
full scholarship.' She waits again. 'But it's in Cuba.' That didn't faze me
a bit. What an opportunity!"
The genesis of Glover's opportunity dates to June 2000, when a group from
the Congressional Black Caucus visited Cuban president Fidel Castro.
Representative Bennie Thompson (D-Miss.) described huge areas in his
district where there were no doctors, and Castro responded with an offer of
full scholarships for U.S. citizens to study at ELAM. Later that year,
Castro spoke at the Riverside Church in New York, reiterating the offer and
committing 500 slots to U.S. students who would pledge to practice in poor
U.S. communities.
That day, 26-year-old Eduardo Medina was at his parents' house in New
York, listening to Castro's speech on the radio. "Castro announces that
Cuba has started a new medical school and has invited students from all
over Latin America to come, train, and return to treat the poor in their
countries. Then he starts quoting figures about poor communities in the
U.S. 'We'll be more than happy to educate American medical students,' he
says, 'if they'll commit to going home to take care of the poor.' The place
went nuts. I'm standing in my basement saying, 'Yes! Yes! Yes!'"
Medina was raised in Brooklyn and Queens, the child of a Colombian father
and a mother of Puerto Rican, Jewish, and Irish descent - both
public-school teachers who pushed their children to work hard in school.
"When I was little, they sent me to a summer enrichment program in
Manhattan," recalls Medina. "I would travel on the subway every day with
this huge book bag. I was young and it was hot. But I was excited." The
work paid off, and Medina won partial scholarships to a boarding school and
to Wesleyan University. "There weren't many students of color at either
private school, particularly in the sciences," he says. "Culturally,
economically, ideologically, it was a real culture clash for me, but the
education was good."
Medina was found to have diabetes when he was 12 years old and spent a
week in the hospital. "When I saw what the doctors could do for me, I knew
I wanted to be a doctor. In college, I spent a year in Ecuador, and I knew
I wanted to practice community medicine." But medicine wasn't going to come
easily. Medina had a mediocre grade or two in science courses, a middling
score on the Medical College Admission Test (MCAT), and $45,000 in student
debts. He worked as a research assistant to buy himself time to retake the
MCAT and organize his medical-school campaign. After hearing Castro, Medina
applied to ELAM and happily grabbed the chance to attend. "I didn't know if
I'd get into U.S. schools, and if I did, I had no idea how I was going to
pay."
There are 88 U.S. students at ELAM, 85 percent of them members of
minority groups and 73 percent of them women. Recruitment and screening are
handled by the Interreligous Foundation for Community Organization (IFCO),
a New York-based interfaith organization. Applicants are required to have a
high-school diploma and at least two years of premedical courses, to be
from poor communities, and to make a commitment to return to those
communities. Students who don't speak Spanish start early with intensive
language instruction. Glover and Medina get home about once a year. They
report that living conditions are spare and English textbooks hard to come
by, but they are well taken care of and the education is rigorous.
The Bush administration's restrictions on travel to Cuba have been a
thorn in the side of the program from the beginning. Since the Cuban
government pays the students' room, board, tuition, and a stipend, the ban
was not initially applied to them. But the administration's further
attempts this summer to curtail Cuban travel threatened the students and
sent their families scrambling for political help. Representatives Barbara
Lee (D-Calif.) and Charles Rangel (D-N.Y.) led a campaign of protest, and
27 members of Congress signed a letter to Secretary of State Colin Powell
asking that the ELAM students be exempted from the ban. In August, the
administration relented and granted the students permission to remain in
Cuba.
The Cuban health care system in which these students are working is
exceptional for a poor country and represents an important political
accomplishment of the Castro government. Since 1959, Cuba has invested
heavily in health care and now has twice as many physicians per capita as
the United States and health indicators on a par with those in the most
developed nations - despite the U.S. embargo that severely reduces the
availability of medications and medical technology.3,4 This success clearly
plays well at home and has enabled Cuba to send physicians abroad to Cold
War hot spots such as Nicaragua and Angola. Yet Cuba has also sent
thousands of physicians to work in some of the world's poorest countries.
Since 1998, 7150 Cuban doctors have worked in 27 countries - on a
proportional basis this is the equivalent of the United States sending
175,000 physicians abroad.5 In the same spirit, ELAM trains young people
from these countries and sends them home to practice medicine. Although
these programs make political points for Cuba, they also represent an
extraordinary humanitarian contribution to the world's poor populations.
The U.S. students face a hurdle that their classmates in Cuba do not. To
obtain residency positions in the United States and uphold their side of
the deal with Castro, U.S. students will have to pass two steps of the
United States Medical Licensing Exam (USMLE) and the new Clinical Skills
Assessment test. The first large group of ELAM students will take Step 1
later this year, and the results will be critical to the future of the
program.
The ELAM invitation is not limited to minority students, although the
emphasis on coming from and returning to poor communities has naturally
selected students of color. Physicians from minority groups accounted for
only 3 percent of U.S. doctors during the middle years of the 20th century.
After the civil-rights movement, the number of minority medical students
increased steadily, rising to 11.6 percent of medical school graduates in
1998. Schools used scholarship money, academic enrichment programs, and
special admissions criteria to increase minority enrollment. In recent
years, such initiatives have flagged - victims of court decisions opposing
affirmative action, continued escalation of medical-school tuition, and a
supply of minority students that, in the judgment of some medical
educators, is tapped out. Today, roughly 11 percent of graduating medical
students are members of minority groups.1
Glover, Medina, and their schoolmates have gotten into and mastered
strong academic programs despite their disadvantaged backgrounds. However,
half of all applicants to U.S. medical schools are rejected. By the
unforgiving standards of the application process, a C in a science class or
a so-so MCAT score dooms an applicant. Castro has removed the financial
barriers and bet on motivation to overcome any educational liabilities that
students bring with them to ELAM.
Which brings us back to Castro's gambit. Why is he reaching out to U.S.
students? What an irony that poor Cuba is training doctors for rich
America, engaging in affirmative action on our behalf, and - while
blockaded by U.S. ships and sanctions - spending its meager treasure to
improve the health of U.S. citizens. Whether one considers this a cunning
move by one of history's great chess players or an extraordinary gesture of
civic generosity - or a bit of both - it should encourage us to reexamine
our stalled efforts to achieve greater racial and ethnic parity in American
medicine. If Castro can find diamonds in our rough, we can too.
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Marxism@lists.econ.utah.edu
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---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
14) 4/28/05 Mass Protest Of Injured
and Disabled Workers Called In
California
http://www.workersmemorialday.com/sflcresolution.html
Resolution of the San Francisco Labor Council for a State Wide Protest
of Injured and Disabled Workers On Workers Memorial Day April 28, 2005.
Whereas, injured and disabled workers are under growing attack in their
efforts to receive healthcare for their injuries and their disabilities
and,
Whereas, some workers injured on the job have committed suicide as a
result of not receiving medication for their injuries and,
Whereas, the right to a healthy and safe environment and the enforcement
of CAL-OSHA regulations is also threatened by the proposed
"restructuring" proposals of the State Administration and,
Whereas, the right to have healthcare for injured workers and disabled
workers in California is a basic human right of all working people and,
Whereas, the state administration is seeking to undermine the protection
of injured and disabled workers by the complete deregulation of workers'
compensation and total subservience to the insurance industry and,
Whereas, the corporate media has ignored and censored the stories of
injured and disabled workers who face the loss of their healthcare and
the destruction of their lives and the lives of their families and,
Whereas, the need to unite all injured and disabled workers in
California is critical in order to meet the challenge that they face and,
Whereas, the issue of healthcare is a right for all working people union
and non-union in California and,
Whereas, the collapse of the privately run healthcare system and the
escalating costs of healthcare insurance premiums threatens the rights
of healthcare to all working people,
Therefore be it resolved this body support the call by the California
Injured Workers Coalition, UAPD/AFSCME, The Chelsie Group and other
injured workers organizations and health and safety groups as well as
the San Francisco Labor Council to support the statewide protest on
Workers Memorial Day April 28, 2005 at the capital in Sacramento for the
defense of all injured and disabled workers and,
This body will support the demand healthcare for all working people by
the implementation of Single Payer and,
Finally, this union or council will circulate this resolution to all
California Labor Councils and Building and Trades Councils and all other
affiliated bodies for concurrence and will seek to reach and support all
injured and disabled workers so they can join this historic action to
protect their rights.
This resolution is endorsed and supported by the following groups and
organizations:
California Injured Workers Coalition, Inc.
UAPD/AFSCME
San Francisco Labor Council
The Chelsie Group
Labor Action Coalition
Million Worker March
Labor Video Project
FACE Intel.
Dr. June Fisher
Dr. Larry Rose
The next meeting of the N. California organizing
committee is Saturday
January 8, 2005 at 9:30 AM at the Blue Muse
Restaurant at 409 Gough near
Hayes St. in San Francisco.
For further information call:
California Injured Workers Coalition (415)928-9343
samg@injuredworkerscoalition.com
Labor Video Project (415)282-1908 lvpsf@labornet.org
Northbay Area Contact (415)332-9675 fight4yourlife@aol.com
Sacramento Area Contact friends@faceintel.com
ActionLA
Action for World Liberation Everyday!
Tel: (213)403-0131
URL: http://www.ActionLA.org
e-mail: Info@ActionLA.org
Please Donate to ActionLA!
Send check pay to:
ActionLA/SEE
1013 Mission St. #6
South Pasadena CA 91030
(All donations are tax deductible)
Please join our ActionLA Listserv
go to: http://lists.riseup.net/www/subscribe/actionla
or send e-mail to: actionla-subscribe@lists.riseup.net
[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
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15) A scientific inquiry into the existence of Santa Claus.
(This was sent to me by my thirteen-year-old grandson,
Dominic...BW)
No known species of reindeer can fly. But there are 300,000 species
of living organisms yet to be classified, and while most of these are
insects and germs, this does not completely rule out flying reindeer
which only Santa has ever seen.
There are 2 billion children (persons under 18) in the world.
But since Santa doesn't (appear to) handle the Muslim, Hindu, Jewish
and Buddhist children, that reduces the workload to 15% of the total -
378 million according to Population Reference Bureau.
At an average (census) rate of 3.5 children per household, that's 91.8
million homes. One presumes there's at least one good child in each.
Santa has 31 hours of Christmas to work with, thanks to the different
time zones and the rotation of the earth, assuming he travels east
to west (which seems logical).
This works out to 822.6 visits per second.
This is to say that for each Christian household with good children,
Santa has 1/1000th of a second to:
park,
hop out of the sleigh,
jump down the chimney,
fill the stockings,
distribute the remaining presents under the tree,
eat whatever snacks have been left,
get back up the chimney,
get back into the sleigh and move on to the next house.
Assuming that each of these 91.8 million stops are evenly
distributed around the earth (which, of course, we know to be
false but for the purposes of our calculations we will accept), we
are now talking about .78 miles per household, a total trip of
75-1/2 million miles, not counting stops to do what most of us
must do at least once every 31 hours, plus feeding and etc.
This means that Santa's sleigh is moving at 650 miles per second,
3,000 times the speed of sound. For purposes of comparison, the
fastest man- made vehicle on earth, the Ulysses space probe, moves
at a poky 27.4 miles per second. A conventional reindeer can run,
tops, 15 miles per hour.
The payload on the sleigh adds another interesting element.
Assuming that each child gets nothing more than a medium-sized
lego set (2 pounds), the sleigh is carrying 321,300 tons, not
counting Santa, who is invariably described as overweight.
On land, conventional reindeer can pull no more than 300 pounds.
Even granting that "flying reindeer" could pull ten times the normal
amount, we cannot do the job with eight, or even nine.
We need 214,200 reindeer. This increases the payload - not even
counting the weight of the sleigh - to 353,430 tons. Again, for
comparison - this is four times the weight of the Queen Elizabeth.
353,000 tons traveling at 650 miles per second creates enormous
air resistance - this will heat the reindeer up in the same fashion
as a spacecraft reentering the earth's atmosphere.
The lead pair of reindeer will absorb 14.3 quintillion joules of
energy. Per second. Each. In short, they will burst into flame
almost instantaneously, exposing the reindeer behind them,
and create deafening sonic booms in their wake.
The entire reindeer team will be vaporized within 4.26 thousandths
of a second.
Santa, meanwhile, will be subjected to centrifugal forces 17,500.09
times greater than gravity.
A 250-pound Santa (which seems ludicrously slim) would be
pinned to the back of his sleigh by 4,315,015 pounds of force.
In conclusion - If Santa ever did deliver presents on Christmas
Eve, he's dead now.
