From wires at the-alarm.com Thu Nov 14 22:21:02 2002 From: wires at the-alarm.com (The Alarm!Newswire) Date: Sun Feb 8 02:51:57 2004 Subject: [Dryerase] =?ISO-8859-1?Q?=A1La_Alarma!--Ojo_en_el_INS--Cinco_mytos_=28part?= =?ISO-8859-1?Q?e_4_de_5=29?= Message-ID: Ojo en el INS La globalizaci?n ideol?gica en contra de la inmigraci?n Cinco mitos sobre la inmigraci?n (parte 4 de 5) Por Carlos Armenta Colaborador del Semanario ?La Alarma! El eurodiputado franc?s Sami Nair expone y analiza, en un art?culo publicado en el diario espa?ol El Pa?s, lo que el llama ?los cinco mitos sobre la inmigraci?n en Espa?a.? El presente art?culo (cuarto de una serie de cinco) analizar? el tercer mito dentro del contexto de la inmigraci?n en los Estados Unidos. Cuarto mito sobre la inmigraci?n: La riqueza de los Estados Unidos provoca un ?efecto de llamada? en los pa?ses pobres. Aunque se puede pensar que los globalizados medios de comunicaci?n?los cuales difunden una imagen de la vida en los EE UU que se caracteriza por la despreocupaci?n por los problemas econ?micos y la abundancia?ejercen un ?efecto de llamada? en los pa?ses pobres, los cuales se ven inundados por las im?genes de pel?culas y series de televisi?n norteamericanas, el principal efecto de atracci?n para los inmigrantes lo ejerce en realidad la existencia de una econom?a informal en el mercado de trabajo de los EE UU. La mayor parte de los inmigrantes que ingresan a los EE UU prefieren hacerlo ilegalmente debido al inminente rechazo por parte de las autoridades migratorias (INS) si intentaran internarse por la v?a legal. Dichos inmigrantes prefieren pagar los servicios de un ?coyote,? cuyo costo actualmente ronda los US $2000, que enfrentarse a dicho rechazo y a los complicados tr?mites burocr?ticos que se requieren para ingresar legalmente. Asimismo, dicha ilegalidad les asegura el encontrar un trabajo debido a la existencia de un muy bien establecido sistema de contrataci?n de trabajadores indocumentados. Es de sobra sabida la facilidad con que se pueden conseguir tarjetas de residencia, del seguro social e identificaciones oficiales falsas (como licencias de conducir). Los patrones emplean a trabajadores a sabiendas de que los documentos que estos les presentan son falsos y evitan las sanciones impuestas por las leyes migratorias para quienes contratan mano de obra indocumentada, arguyendo que no es su responsabilidad constatar la autenticidad de dichos documentos. Sin embargo, y gracias a que los patrones saben que dichos documentos son falsos, estos se aprovechan de la ilegalidad de los trabajadores que contratan y los obligan a trabajar en condiciones espantosas. Por ejemplo, los obligan a trabajar hasta ochenta horas a la semana sin pagarles ni siquiera el salario m?nimo establecido por la ley, y mucho menos el que se establece para el tiempo extra, el cual deber?a de ser del doble del normal para el tiempo que exceda las cuarenta horas a la semana. Al mismo tiempo, dichos patrones reportan en sus registros contables que dichos trabajadores solo trabajan 40 horas a la semana y se les paga el salario m?nimo. Es decir, que si el salario m?nimo es de, para usar n?meros redondos, US $5 la hora, se les paga US $200 por semana. Pero como en realidad trabajan ochenta horas a la semana, de las cuales cuarenta son de tiempo extra, entonces deber?an recibir US $600. Gracias a la ilegalidad de este sector informal del mercado de trabajo, los trabajadores indocumentados solo reciben un 33% de lo que recibir?an de acuerdo a la ley si poseyeran documentos migratorios legales para trabajar en los EE UU. Como se puede observar, la existencia de este sector informal del mercado de trabajo beneficia en gran medida a las empresas que emplean a trabajadores indocumentados. De igual manera, y aunque las condiciones de trabajo para dichos trabajadores indocumentados sean tan desfavorables, estos las aceptan con la esperanza de cuando menos poder mandar algo de dinero a sus familiares en sus pa?ses de origen, o la esperanza de integrarse a largo plazo, junto con sus familias, a la sociedad norteamericana bajo mejores condiciones, es decir, la esperanza de lograr obtener la residencia legal o la ciudadan?a. Otros que se aprovechan del efecto de llamada de dicho sector informal son las compa??as que hacen negocio con el env?o de remesas de trabajadores indocumentados a sus pa?ses de origen. Se sabe que el env?o de remesas desde los EE UU es, en el caso de M?xico, la segunda fuente de ingreso de divisas para la econom?a mexicana, solo superado por los ingresos provenientes de la exportaci?n de petr?leo, y superando a rubros de la econom?a tan importantes como el turismo y la exportaci?n de productos agr?colas. As? las cosas, compa??as como Western Union y Orlandi Valuta, solo por citar algunos ejemplos, cobran aproximadamente 10% del valor de los env?os, sumando ingresos realmente impresionantes. Aunque se pueda suponer que los inmigrantes piensen que al venir a los EE UU podr?an disfrutar de una vida como la de los personajes de ?Friends? o de cualquier otra serie de televisi?n a pel?cula norteamericana, son en realidad los testimonios de sus compatriotas que trabajan ilegalmente en los EE UU los que los motivan a venir. Dichos inmigrantes est?n, como ya se ha dicho, dispuestos a aceptar condiciones de trabajo y de vida paup?rrimas, el riesgo de perder la vida al tratar de cruzar la frontera y de utilizar los ahorros de toda una familia despu?s de a?os de trabajo para mandar a un solo miembro a los EE UU a cambio de la esperanza de poder mandar unos d?lares (menos el 10% con el que se queda Western Union, por supuesto) a sus familiares que viven en condiciones de pobreza extrema en sus pa?ses de origen. La mayor parte de los inmigrantes indocumentados saben lo que les espera en los EE UU: una vida que no se parece en nada a la de ?Seinfeld? y sus amigos, pero la aceptan porque saben que hay un sector informal del mercado de trabajo que les ofrece la oportunidad de enviar algunos d?lares a sus familias. No es, pues, la ?riqueza? de los EE UU la que ejerce el ?efecto de llamada?, sino la existencia de un amplio sector informal de contrataci?n de trabajadores indocumentados en los EE UU. All content Copyleft ? 2002 by The Alarm! Newspaper. Except where noted otherwise, this material may be copied and distributed freely in whole or in part by anyone except where used for commercial purposes or by government agencies. From wires at the-alarm.com Thu Nov 14 22:21:02 2002 From: wires at the-alarm.com (The Alarm!Newswire) Date: Sun Feb 8 02:51:57 2004 Subject: [Dryerase] The Alarm!--Labor Bits 11-1-02 Message-ID: Labor Bits 11-1-02 Canadian newspaper publishers face striking workers Twelve hundred workers at the Winnipeg Free Press went on strike October 9 after contract negotiations with the new owners of Canada?s largest independent daily newspaper broke down. The contract expired on September 30 and 96% of the workers eventually voted to strike against the company?s proposed take-backs. Workers went back to the job on October 18 with few major gains, but without concessions, either. FP Canadian Newspapers Ltd. Partnership, the new owners, had wanted to institute a two-tiered wage system which would pay new employees less and rescind certain rights of part-time workers. The 1,100 workers with Communications Energy and Paperworkers (CEP) and 60 pressmen with Graphic Communications International Union (GCIU) won wage and benefits increases and some improvements in working conditions. During the strike, CEP issued a request to its membership: ?We?ve already asked you not to vandalize the Free Press sign. Now, we?d like to take it to the next level by returning any letters you may have stolen.? Meanwhile 275 workers at the Victoria Times Colonist have been on strike since September 3 over efforts by the employer to reduce benefits to part-timers, outsource work and reduce the number of unionized workers. The three unions representing the workers earlier rejected a contract offer that included wage increases. Negotiations were broken off on October 12 due to the impasse. Union officials have indicated that the strike may stretch into the spring. In the meantime, the Times Colonist is publishing a scaled-down weekly version of the paper. For their part, the striking workers have published the Picket Post several times per week. The unions have photographed and tracked scab replacement workers in attempts to identify them. In addition, 45 workers represented by the Communication Workers of America (CWA) have gone on strike as of October 11 against the Cobourg Daily Star and Port Hope Evening Guide, both owned by Osprey Media Group Inc. At issue are wages, benefits, compensation for mileage and an employer proposal to reduce sick days. The strike was authorized in September by a 93% vote. Indian power workers campaign against privatisation Around 50,000 power employees staged a satyagraha (nonvilent protest, in the tradition of Mahatma Gandhi) on October 18 in cities across the Indian State of Uttar Pradesh as part of a week-long campaign. The workers, including junior and senior engineers, are protesting a government plan to break the State Electricity Board into four separate power distribution companies, a move which the workers say is an attempt to spearhead full privatization of the power utilities sector. After the satyagraha, the Uttar Pradesh Power Technical Employees Joint Action Committee called for a work boycott from October 22 to October 24. The government declared the action an illegal strike. The continuing stalemate has prompted the group to extend the strike indefinitely. Rancor between the two sides escalated after the UP Power Regulatory Commission announced a significant rate hike on October 23. Rates will increase by only two percent for industrial users, but 141% for the power employees themselves. Rates for the domestic sector will increase around 15%. Consumers across the board have criticized the hike, while power employees have emphasized the failure of privatization efforts in other Indian states, drawing attention to rampant power shortages and outages. The extent of those crises dwarfs last year?s energy problems in California. Source: Times of India Millions of workers engage in general strike against Italy?s Berlusconi regime Hundreds of thousands of workers marched in cities across Italy in 120 locations as CGIL (Confederazione Generale Italiana del Lavoro), the nation?s largest union, representing six million workers, called for a general strike against economic policies proposed and instituted by the regime of Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi. One of the largest of the rallies was held in the northern Italian city of Turin, where the automaker Fiat holds its headquarters. The company recently announced layoffs of 20,000 of its workers while the Berlusconi adminstration aims to reform a 1970 law to make it easier for firms to lay off workers. The previous day, 1,000 workers traveled from a Fiat factory in Sicily to protest in Rome, where they were thwarted by police from marching on the government?s headquarters. The general strike is the second this year. The first, which took place in April, was called by CGIL along with the two next largest Italian union federations, CISL (Confederazione Italiana Sindacati Lavoratori) and UIL (Unione Italiana del Lavoro). Thirteen million workers went out on strike to protest government policies in what was the nation?s largest strike in 20 years. CISL and UIL have since cut deals with the government and each urged their members not to support the latest strike. Sources: Reuters, World Socialist Website French education workers strike and protest funding and job cuts Only three weeks after utility workers struck nationally in protest of plans to partially privatize France?s utilities (see article in the last issue of The Alarm!), the nation?s education workers went on strike and rallied at around 100 locations around the country, crippling the education sector for the day. Tens of thousands of workers took part in the action on Thursday, October 17. The strike was announced after Prime Minister Jean-Pierre Raffarin proposed the 2003 national budget, which called for the slashing of 5,600 jobs for classroom aides. The government also indicated that it would not renew contracts with 20,000 young people who work in France?s school system. Source: Associated Press All content Copyleft ? 2002 by The Alarm! Newspaper. Except where noted otherwise, this material may be copied and distributed freely in whole or in part by anyone except where used for commercial purposes or by government agencies. From wires at the-alarm.com Thu Nov 14 22:21:04 2002 From: wires at the-alarm.com (The Alarm!Newswire) Date: Sun Feb 8 02:51:57 2004 Subject: [Dryerase] Alarm!--Eye on the INS--Of Paperwork, resignations & flaming hoops Message-ID: Eye on the INS Of paperwork, resignations and flaming hoops By Michelle Stewart The Alarm! Newspaper Collective Where is James Ziglar nowadays? What is going on with the Department of Homeland Security? Curiously these two questions might be linked, in the sense that they are both contemporary indicators of INS health?which is most certainly failing. After 9/11, many believed the only way to breath life into the INS was to file it under the Department of Homeland Security (DHLS) and reimagine the agency as more devoted to security than to paperwork. However, as the anniversary of 9/11 came and passed, so too has interest in the DHLS?seems that the INS may not find life support via the DLHS since the DHLS itself is dying a slow death on the Senate floor. Perhaps, jumbling together some 170,000 plus employees that are involved in over 20 federal agencies and 17 unions is a bit tricky?especially when the federal government is trying to strip union rights out of the DHLS bill. Tricky, and this debate on Capitol Hill will likely result in the absolute failure of the DHLS. Without the DHLS, the INS is left to answer for its own mistakes and shortcomings?many of which are perfect illustrations of bureaucratic inefficiency. A joke you say... Indeed, the INS has seen many tragi-comic moments over the past year. Arguably the most notable came when the agency issued visas for the 9/11 hijackers to attend flight school, many months after the Twin Towers had crumbled. Chewed out thoroughly in the media and on Capitol Hill, James Ziglar?the new commissioner of the INS at the time?fumbled around criticism and used the visa fiasco as illustration that the agency needed to be reconfigured. Ziglar relied on a staple response, saying his hands were tied until the agency was divided into divisions that focused on administration and border security. To the rescue was the proposed DHLS. Proponents agreed with weary Ziglar and said that the INS and the FBI could be reconceived under the umbrella of a larger agency. For the INS, the failure of the DHLS may serve to further illustrate the ridiculous condition of the INS. The INS has gone full-force in drafting and implementing large-scale policy changes, but it lacks the infrastructure to enforce its many new laws and provisions. Indeed, the INS is no longer seen as simply inept; rather, it is inept and becoming slightly senile. Don?t make me stop this car... Much like the parent who constantly threatens punishment for every offense commited on a roadtrip, but never really stops the car, the INS has been running willy-nilly, ordering immigrants and visitors to comply with various programs?but of these new provisions, the INS lacks the capacity to enforce its demands. The bark-worse-than-bite situation can seem rather funny from an outside perspective. However, consider the random ramblings of this agency, the fear with which immigrants are forced to live with as they attempt to comply with all these new demands, when the final realization is that the agency has neither the ability nor the manpower to enforce its demands. Comical, perhaps, for those who don?t have to run frantic with each demand from this agency. Comical, perhaps, if your future isn?t dictated by an agency so oblivious to its own ineptitude. To best understand the current condition let?s take a look at an example: During the summer, Ziglar (when he was still seen in public) announced that the INS would be renewing an archaic law that required all immigrants report a change of address within ten days of moving. The law was over 50-years-old, and had not been enforced in nearly 45 years. The announced penalty for failure to comply was either a fine or deportation (INS loves to embrace the extremeties). Immigrants heard the call, and 500,00?700,000 people submitted the change of address card. A month later, the INS announced it didn?t have the time to process the cards. Of course this didn?t stop the agency from trying to deport a Middle Eastern man for failing to comply. However, an immigration judge stepped in and halted the deporation, pointing out that if the agency had not enforced the law since 1958, how was the man supposed to understand he was subject to it? The INS has responded by turning on their computers and revising a reported 30 forms to help publicize the enforcement of the law. Why are they publicizing this law, when the change of address cards apparently end up in the circular file? Take this job and shove it... Is apparently the motto for many INS workers, making it increasingly clear why none of the paperwork is being handled when it is filed: there?s no one around to do it. According to a recent article in The Oregonian, ?[O]fficers are quitting, sometimes whole shifts at a time. One out of four agents in Arizona left during the past year. In the San Diego area, 30 to 40 agents turn in their badges each week. The national turnover rate for Border Patrol agents has almost doubled this year, to nearly 19%.? Of course, the further implication is that if the DHLS does succeed on Capitol Hill, more agents will leave out of frustration over the lack of union protection in the new agency. Although the INS has been asked to build its numbers?part of the extra one billion dollars added to the agency?s budget was earmarked for hiring more agents?it is obviously failing. More people seem to be leaving than entering the field. For these and other reasons, it is interesting to then see what the INS has accomplished with its inflated budget and heightened sense of authority. We know that many people went into detention after 9/11; however, that was largely the job of the Department of Justice rather than INS. We know that a lot of people died in the desert over the past year; however, that was largely the result of Operation Gatekeeper, which has been in effect for numerous years. We know that a lot of people applied for citizenship?an increase of 63% was reported over the past year?however, this was due to people fearful of being deported after 9/11, not because of some bang-up welcoming project by the INS. We also know that waiting periods for some residency and visa paperwork was reduced from 30 months to eleven; however, this was the result of previous years of work to expedite the permanent residency process. So what has the INS successfully done in the past year with its inflated budget? Well, they report to have successfully targeted and identified some 2,200 illegal airport workers?whew, I feel much safer, and only at a cost of approximately $454,545.50 each! The point is that the INS is not becoming streamlined with its bolstered budget, and the DHLS is not going to be a knight in shining armor. Instead, we are left with an agency that is in the process of losing its commissioner?Ziglar annouced his resignation in August?and is lacking the common sense to pull back on its exteme measures. The INS is trying to crawl out from under the rock of ridicule, and in doing so, it is inflicting itself on the immigrant population. So, Ziglar remains in seclusion, striking days off the calendar until he can ?return to the private sector,? and the agency fumbles along randomly barking orders into the dark. At the core of this crisis is the immigrant who must keep abreast of the list of demands, and pay the various fees, never knowing if the previous hoop she jumped through will really be the last, or if the next one will be on fire. It seems that the immigrant is the plaything of the INS, as the agency lolls about awaiting the outcome of the DHLS. All content Copyleft ? 2002 by The Alarm! Newspaper. Except where noted otherwise, this material may be copied and distributed freely in whole or in part by anyone except where used for commercial purposes or by government agencies. From wires at the-alarm.com Thu Nov 14 22:21:03 2002 From: wires at the-alarm.com (The Alarm!Newswire) Date: Sun Feb 8 02:51:57 2004 Subject: [Dryerase] =?ISO-8859-1?Q?=A1La_Alarma!--Inmigrantes_Nicaragu=EBnse?= Message-ID: Inmigrantes nicarag?enses buscan, cada vez m?s, internarse a Costa Rica en busca de trabajo Por Carlos Armenta Colaborador del Semanario ?La Alarma! Las dificultades econ?micas por las que atraviesa la mayor?a de la poblaci?n nicarag?ense hoy en d?a motiva, cada vez m?s, a muchos ciudadanos de este pa?s a emigrar m?s all? de sus fronteras en busca de sustento para sus familias. Sin embargo, y contra lo que puede suponerse, el destino preferido por dicho migrantes indocumentados no son los EE UU. En los ?ltimos a?os, los nicarag?enses que optan por emigrar fuera de su pa?s se trasladan principalmente a Costa Rica. Este flujo migratorio se ha establecido debido a la disparidad que existe entre Costa Rica y Nicaragua en lo que respecta tanto a oferta de trabajo como a salarios. Los nicarag?enses prefieren, cada vez m?s, trasladarse a Costa Rica debido a que solo tienen que atravesar una frontera para internarse a territorio tico, lo cual es, obviamente, mucho m?s f?cil que emprender la larga jornada que se requiere para llegar a territorio estadounidense. Adem?s de la diferencia en cuanto a distancia, para llegar a los EE UU hay que cruzar cuando menos cuatro fronteras nacionales y aguantar los abusos y vejaciones de cuatro diferentes autoridades migratorias y polic?as nacionales, pagar m?s ?mordidas? (t?rmino con el que se conoce aqu? al soborno) y gastos de transportaci?n. Otra ventaja es el idioma com?n que se habla en estos dos pa?ses (espa?ol). Sin embargo, la jornada y la estancia indocumentada en Costa Rica no est? exenta de peligros y abusos. Las autoridades y los patrones costarricenses aprovechan la condici?n de ilegalidad de estas personas para, tal y como sucede en los EE UU, explotar a los trabajadores indocumentados nicarag?enses. Por un lado, muchos de los elementos de la polic?a costarricense exigen a los inmigrantes indocumentados nicarag?enses considerables sumas de dinero?conocidas popularmente como ?mordidas??para evitar su deportaci?n. Sorayda Pulido, originaria de Le?n, Nicaragua, explica como la polic?a costarricense ?nos extorsiona y nos quita los reales cuando se entera de que somos nicarag?enses ilegales en Costa Rica?. Aunque la se?ora Pulido no especific? la cantidad exacta que los agentes policiales costarricenses le exig?an durante su estancia ilegal en Costa Rica, ni cuantas veces tuvo que dar mordida, ella explic? que la dejaron ?limpia?. La se?ora Pulido tambi?n nos explic? que no tuvo m?s remedio que trabajar lo suficiente para ahorrar para el pasaje de autob?s de regreso a Le?n. La Sra. Pulido coment? que, como la mayor?a de las mujeres nicarag?enses que emigran ilegalmente a Costa Rica, se dedicaba al trabajo dom?stico, por el cual recib?a aproximadamente US $100.00 al mes?un salario considerablemente superior al de US $60.00 al mes que le pagar?an en Nicaragua. Adem?s, explic?, ?no hay suficiente oferta de trabajo para las trabajadoras dom?sticas en Nicaragua. A lo m?s que una puede aspirar es a lavar ropa y cobrar un c?rdoba por pieza (un c?rdoba equivale a aproximadamente siete centavos de d?lar)?. Otro rubro importante de la econom?a costarricense que emplea a un n?mero importante de trabajadores indocumentados nicarag?enses es el agr?cola. Tanto Sorayda Pulido como Joaqu?n, residente de Achuapa, Nicaragua (quien se neg? a proporcionar su apellido por temor a represalias por parte de sus ex patrones, a?n cuando se le explic? que La Alarma! Es un peri?dico de circulaci?n local en Santa Cruz, California), coincidieron en se?alar que ?hoy en d?a hay m?s nicarag?enses que ticos en Costa Rica?. Aunque tal comentario parezca exagerado, en realidad s? hay m?s nicarag?enses que costarricenses trabajando en labores dom?sticas y agr?colas en Costa Rica. La mayor?a de los habitantes de Nicaragua sufren actualmente por el deplorable estado de la econom?a de su naci?n, producto de los devastadores efectos de una guerra civil que extendi? desde mediados de los setentas hasta finales de los ochentas, as? como de desastres naturales como erupciones volc?nicas, terremotos y, m?s recientemente, el hurac?n Match. Asimismo, existe el problema de una corrupci?n generalizada dentro del gobierno nicarag?ense en todos sus niveles. Dicha corrupci?n no ha sido combatida efectivamente ni durante los a?os de gobierno Sandinista, ni durante los m?s recientes a?os de gobiernos de derecha. Solo por citar un ejemplo, el ex presidente Arnoldo Alem?n, quien gobern? al pa?s hasta el a?o pasado, se encuentra actualmente acusado de malversaci?n de fondos estatales y lavado de dinero. Sin embargo, no ha sido arrestado porque disfruta de inmunidad parlamentaria. Alem?n es ahora diputado de la Asamblea Nacional de Nicaragua (equivalente al Congreso en otros pa?ses). La poblaci?n de Nicaragua ha dejado tambi?n de recibir fondos por parte de los organismos de asistencia financiera internacionales (Banco Mundial, Fondo Monetario Internacional y Banco Interamericano de Desarrollo), a?n cuando el Estado nicarag?ense ha seguido muchas de las medidas impuestas por el FMI, el BM y el BID para otorgar ayuda. La educaci?n, por ejemplo, no es completamente subvencionada por el gobierno, por lo que muchos ni?os en edad escolar no asisten a clases. El gobierno de Nicaragua se encuentra tambi?n envuelto en el proceso de privatizaci?n del agua potable, lo cu?l, seguramente, encarecer? el costo de este servicio para la poblaci?n en general. Todo esto para lograr convencer al FMI, BM y BID de que se le otorgue ayuda financiera al pa?s. Faltar? ver quien es el beneficiario real de dicha asistencia financiera. Todo esto provoca que una gran parte de la poblaci?n nicarag?ense decida emigrar hacia Costa Rica a pesar del trato abusivo que reciben en ese pa?s. Joaqu?n (de Achuapa) se?ala que ?aunque la ?ltima vez que estuve all? trabaj? durante dos meses y mi patr?n solo me dio, al final de los dos meses, dinero que apenas me alcanz? para regresar a Achuapa, ni un solo real m?s, no me va a quedar m?s remedio que volver, porque con mi trabajo de guardia de seguridad aqu? en Nicaragua no alcanza ni para frijoles y arroz?. El caso de Joaqu?n no es una excepci?n, sino que se est? convirtiendo en la regla para un n?mero cada vez mayor de nicarag?enses: emigrar, a pesar de los abusos y explotaci?n, o morir de hambre. All content Copyleft ? 2002 by The Alarm! Newspaper. Except where noted otherwise, this material may be copied and distributed freely in whole or in part by anyone except where used for commercial purposes or by government agencies. From wires at the-alarm.com Thu Nov 14 22:31:01 2002 From: wires at the-alarm.com (The Alarm!Newswire) Date: Sun Feb 8 02:51:57 2004 Subject: [Dryerase] The Alarm!--SC City Council passes resolution vs. USA PATRIOT Act Message-ID: <0B8B3C6A-F853-11D6-9A26-0003938C6F60@the-alarm.com> USA Patriot Act under fire from SC City Council By Halie Johnson The Alarm! Newspaper Santa Cruz City Council voted unanimously to pass a resolution opposing parts of the USA PATRIOT Act. Councilmember Mark Primack expressed his support for the resolution saying that parts of the USA PATRIOT Act were sure to cause distrust and weaken any community ?from the ground up.? In adopting this resolution, Santa Cruz is joining 13 other cities across the country that voiced their opposition to the Federal Government?s sweeping ?anti-terrorist? legislation. It was said that twenty-two other cities are currently considering similar resolutions. In short, the resolution affirms City Council?s opposition to those parts of the USA PATRIOT Act and certain Justice Department directives and executive orders that weaken or destroy civil rights and liberties. The resolution calls for the protection of those rights contained in the Constitution. The resolution also requests that Congress ?monitor the implementation of the USA PATRIOT Act, directives from Attorney John Ashcroft, and executive orders cited herein and actively work for the repeal of those parts of the USA PATRIOT Act and the withdrawal of those Justice Department directives and executive orders that violate fundamental rights and liberties.? Members of the public spoke mostly in favor of the resolution; many applauded City Council for what they saw as a bold statement. Others complained that Council should not be investing energy in adopting a ?foreign policy,? but should be making local issues top priority. The Mayor will send a copy of the resolution to President Bush, local Congressional representatives and the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights in Geneva, Switzerland. To view the USA PATRIOT Act in it?s entirety go to http://www.epic.org/privacy/terrorism/hr3162.html or http://www.ins.usdoj.gov/graphics/lawsregs/patriot.pdf. To contact Santa Cruz City Council email, citycouncil@ci.santa-cruz.ca.us or call (831) 420-5020. All content Copyleft ? 2002 by The Alarm! Newspaper. Except where noted otherwise, this material may be copied and distributed freely in whole or in part by anyone except where used for commercial purposes or by government agencies. From wires at the-alarm.com Thu Nov 14 22:31:03 2002 From: wires at the-alarm.com (The Alarm!Newswire) Date: Sun Feb 8 02:51:57 2004 Subject: [Dryerase] The Alarm!--The Troubles are back Message-ID: <0CA69BCE-F853-11D6-9A26-0003938C6F60@the-alarm.com> The Troubles are back By Conn Hallinan The Alarm! Newspaper Contributor The ?Troubles? in Northern Ireland are back, courtesy of an unholy Trinity of British Prime Minister Tony Blair, Protestant loyalists who refuse to share power with Ulster?s Catholics, and the Bush Administration. The current crisis, which has seen the British suspend the 1998 Good Friday Agreement and reassert direct control over the province, was sparked by a recent raid on Sinn Fein headquarters. Sinn Fein represents Catholics, and is associated with the Irish Republican Army (IRA). The police foray allegedly uncovered information that the republican organization was spying on the British military and the Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC). In the raid?s aftermath, Blair accused the IRA of threatening ?violence,? and a ?senior Bush Administration official? (according to The New York Times) joined Northern Ireland Secretary John Reid in blaming Sinn Fein for not reining in the IRA. What is this all about? What did the police find that was so terrible it required derailing the peace process? Police say they discovered that Sinn Fein had names and addresses of police and military officials in Northern Ireland. So what? Has Sinn Fein or the IRA targeted such people or engaged in any terrorism for the past eight years? No. Has the Independent Commission verified that the IRA put stores of guns, rocket launchers and explosives ?beyond use?? Yes. Have Protestant paramilitaries done the same? No. Indeed, the Ulster Defense Association (UDA), the Loyalist Volunteer Force (LVF) and the Ulster Freedom Fighters (UFF) ended their cease-fire last October. Do Protestant organizations keep the same files? Yes. Do they engage in terrorism and target the people on those lists? They sure do. When Loyalist leader John Pilling was arrested in September with information on Sinn Fein National Chair Michael McLaughlin, along with the names, addresses and car registrations of seven other Republican leaders, there were no threats from London. Pilling is a member of the Ulster Political Research group, an arm of the UDA, and its hit squad, the Red Hand Defenders. When Northern Ireland police warned Sinn Fein Member of Parliament Michelle Gildernew that the Loyalists had taken out a contract on her life, did Blair accuse Protestants of fomenting ?violence?? When the Red Hand Defenders gunned down journalist Marty O?Hagan last year, did the Bush Administration denounce the Loyalists for not controlling their paramilitaries? No to both. Where were the threats to toss the loyalists out of the government when the UFF and LVF were throwing pipe bombs at four-year-old girls on their way to attend Holy Cross School, while crowds chanted, ?No school today, ya wee whores?? Maybe Sinn Fein has reason to mistrust the intentions of the Protestant police and the British authorities. It was these same authorities who could never seem to find out who gunned down republican solicitor Pat Finucane in 1989 in front of his wife and three children. Maybe they couldn?t find the murderers because the police arranged it. At least that is what UFF gunman, Ken Barrett (now living in England under police protection) told the BBC in June. Barret claims the RUC told him Finucane was an IRA member (he wasn?t) and had to be eliminated. Then he said a British Army undercover agent gave him a photo of Finucane and his address. Barret says he wouldn?t have killed Finucane without pressure from the police. ?Solicitors were kind of taboo, you know what I mean?? he told the BBC. ?We used a lot of Roman Catholic solicitors ourselves.? The one person finally charged with Finucane?s murder, William Stobie, was acquitted, only to be assassinated by the Defenders last December. Needless to say, no one has been arrested. The fiction here is that while Sinn Fein is held responsible for the IRA, Protestant parties like Ian Paisley?s Democratic Unionist Party and David Trimble?s Ulster Unionist Party get a pass on the violence of the loyalist paramilitaries. The whole raid business is damned suspicious. As Roy Greenslade of the British Guardian points out, how did Protestant politicians know the content of the seized documents just minutes after the raid? The answer is that the police gave them the information, just like they have been doing for years. Suspending the Northern Ireland government also gives convenient cover for the Protestants to withdraw from the peace process. The only parties celebrating this recent move are the madmen on both sides who would plunge Northern Ireland back into civil war. And this time around they have an ally in the White House. All content Copyleft ? 2002 by The Alarm! Newspaper. Except where noted otherwise, this material may be copied and distributed freely in whole or in part by anyone except where used for commercial purposes or by government agencies. From wires at the-alarm.com Thu Nov 14 22:31:01 2002 From: wires at the-alarm.com (The Alarm!Newswire) Date: Sun Feb 8 02:51:57 2004 Subject: [Dryerase] The Alarm!--We can't afford an anti-war movement Message-ID: <0BEB16F4-F853-11D6-9A26-0003938C6F60@the-alarm.com> We can't afford an anti-war movement By Chris Kortright The Alarm! Newspaper Contributor The momentum of the war machine is increasing with the UN Security Council?s vote in favor of the US?s resolution on Iraq. The war machine is not the only thing that has gained momentum; the anti-war movement has been increasing its voice and appearances on the national and local scenes. I want to pose a few questions to the readers regarding the anti-war movement. Do we need an anti-war movement? What does that movement accomplish? We must oppose the war, but can it be framed within the context of a ?peace? or ?anti-war? movement? Approaching the war under these labels and moral discussions detracts us from the larger issue: that this war is a product of capitalism. The immediate focus on the war, although necessary, should not distract our attention from the issue of capitalist exploitation and expansion both locally and globally. We need to analyze and oppose the war from an anti-capitalist perspective because the war is motivated by capital interests. I know many readers are thinking that this statement is obvious, but if you go to the Ocean/Water Street weekly protests, you see American Flags, signs that say ?negotiations not bombs? and little analysis of either capitalism or nation-state projects. So, lets look at the war in economic terms. Our present militaristic and aggressive foreign policy is an attempt to minimize competition between capitalist cores and encourage monopolization of markets through imperialist tactics. A large part of the present scenario is the control of oil sources, but not necessarily the oil in the Middle East. US policy makers have their eyes on oil in Central Asia. The US also wants to control sources of oil on which Europe and Japan (our competition within the cores) are dependent. Iraq in many ways is a gateway to both Iran and Central Asia; the US has strategically had its eye on Iraq since the first Gulf War. Most of the discussions regarding the ?War on Terrorism,? or even a ?War against Islam,? miss the motivations of US global militarism. The militaristic actions are for economic domination, profit and improved competitiveness through the control of Central Asian oil; it is not motivated by desires for the removal of Saddam Hussein or the elimination of bin Laden. The economic motivations mean we can?t resist US policies in the name of ?anti-war.? This will be an anti-war resistance that would fail because the short term view of our situation is extremely bleak. We will bomb Iraq, and then other countries will move into the scope of US policies unless we take down capitalism and remove the motivations for US militaristic interventions. If we hope to show solidarity to those suffering on the global capitalist peripheries, we need to do more then stop bombs from being dropped on them. We must attack the economic apparatus that has initiated these militaristic attacks. An ?anti-war? movement can not achieve this. An analysis of militaristic violence that ignores economic violence will not end or reduce suffering in either the peripheries or the cores. I?m not calling to integrate war resistance into the ?anti-globalization? movement because the issue cannot be seen as ?anti-global.? There is a need for globalism right now. But globalism should not be confused with capitalist globalization. The way to stop wars and suffering is to incorporate our resistance to US militaristic interventions into the larger global anti-capitalist resistance. All content Copyleft ? 2002 by The Alarm! Newspaper. Except where noted otherwise, this material may be copied and distributed freely in whole or in part by anyone except where used for commercial purposes or by government agencies. From wires at the-alarm.com Thu Nov 14 22:31:02 2002 From: wires at the-alarm.com (The Alarm!Newswire) Date: Sun Feb 8 02:51:57 2004 Subject: [Dryerase] The Alarm!--Labor Bits 11-15-02 Message-ID: <0C4EA336-F853-11D6-9A26-0003938C6F60@the-alarm.com> Labor Bits 11-15-02 By Fhar Miess The Alarm! Newspaper Collective Boston janitors win contract After four weeks of walkouts, nightly parades, civil disobedience and mass demonstrations, Service Employees? International Union (SEIU) local 615 (formerly local 254) has settled on a new contract with cleaning maintenance companies. The new contract, announced October 23, increases the number of janitors with health benefits by 1,000 (bringing the total to 2,900 out of 10,700 covered under the contract), provides sick days for all janitors and increases wages by 30% over the five-year life of the contract. Some janitors and supporters are expressing opposition to the contract, noting that it leaves almost 8,000 janitors without health coverage. The two sick days negotiated were fewer than the five expected and the 30% wage increase still leaves wages at $13.10 per hour compared to $17 for New York City janitors. The contract was ratified November 9 by a vote of 622 to 103, indicating an exceptionally low voter turnout below 7%. Many janitors, supporters and union officials consider the contract a qualified victory that makes a step toward improved quality of life while fostering the collective action and solidarity of workers previously alienated from unionism by an undemocratic union leadership. The SEIU local has been reorganized since this corruption. UMass organizing Part of the windfall of the Boston janitors? campaign was an increased solidarity between students and workers. That solidarity is carrying over as workers and students at the 28 campuses across the University of Massachusetts system organize for funding of their contracts. Separate contracts are negotiated for each union and the governor generally signs off the funding of these contracts. Acting Massachusetts Governor Jane Swift this time vetoed pay increases, prompting 200 rank-and-file workers at UMass Amherst on November 6 to urge the Trustees of the university system to get their contracts funded. They threatened a walkout if the contracts are not funded. All of the union workers are working under the coalition Higher Education Unions United, representing an unprecedented system-wide coordination. Students also protested, demanding the restoration of affirmative action at the university. Dissension mounts in the ranks of the PMA At 4 a.m. on November 1, International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU) negotiators reached a tentative agreement on the technology issue with the Pacific Maritime Association (PMA), which represents shipping and stevedoring companies at West Coast ports. The union called the agreement a major victory and claimed that ?we had bottom-line concerns about jurisdiction and the employers met those concerns.? The details of the technology package, however, are not being released until the entire contract package is negotiated. A ?press blackout??suggested by the federal mediator?was agreed to by the PMA and ILWU. Some, such as Andrea Cappannari and Rafael Azul, writing for the World Socialist Website, consider the deal a major concession to employers. Apparently, one or several companies under the umbrella of the PMA also consider the deal a concession on their own side. The Journal of Commerce reported that ?A faction of employers who strongly opposed the concession were outvoted by another group within the PMA,? citing sources within the PMA. The ILWU has suggested that contract negotiations are presently at a standstill and are being sabotaged because of internal dissent in the PMA. In particular, they blame Stevedoring Services of America, the largest stevedoring company in the US. In a statement to its members on November 7, the ILWU claimed, ?though the article does not mention SSA by name, it is clear that the ?faction? is led by, if not solely comprised of that company.? ILWU official and rank-and-file have consistently accused the SSA of holding a hard line against the union. Meanwhile the union has also filed a Freedom of Information Act request with the Bush administration for documents detailing meetings between management of shippers and members of the West Coast Waterfront Coalition, an organization representing shippers, global traders and retailers. The ILWU has accused the government of collusion with industry leaders in an effort to break the union. Grain workers struggle against elevator operators Around 80 workers who have been picketing a grain elevator in Prince Rupert, British Columbia were ordered back to work on November 9 after a hearing of the Grain Workers Union (GWU) with the Canadian Labor Relations Board (CLRB). The workers initially went on strike in August when some of the 700 fellow unionists locked out by the BC Terminal Elevator Operators Association in Vancouver set up an informational picket at the Prince Rupert facility. The secondary strike was initially declared illegal and the workers were ordered back to work, but the workers returned to the picket line after that decision was reversed by courts in early November with a determination that the unionists work for the same employer. Despite the court victory, just days later, GWU leadership ordered workers back to the job in exchange for an expedited hearing with employers in front of the CLRB. The GWU is seeking a hearing before the end of the peak grain harvesting season, but many rank-and-file workers expressed through on-line forums that they hold little faith in the CLRB and prefer to make their demands directly to the employer through strike action. They have been fighting for seniority rights and against mandatory overtime and the threatened loss of over 200 jobs if the company goes ahead with a plan to introduce nonunion hiring practices. Some unionists have suggested that the workers decertify the GWU and join the more militant ILWU, which represents other workers at the elevator terminals. Unions make concessions to United Airlines The Air Line Pilots Association (ALPA) offered $2.2 billion in concessions, including an 18% pay cut, to UAL Corporation, which owns United Airlines, on behalf of its 8,800 pilots. United Airlines, the second largest US airline, calls itself an employee-owned company because most of its employees own stock through its Employee Stock Ownership Plans (ESOPs). The company is seeking a total of $5.8 billion in concessions from its three unions?ALPA, Association of Flight Attendants (AFA) and International Association of Machinists (IAM)?in order to gain approval from the Bush Administration?s Airline Transportation Stabilization Board (ATSB) for $2 billion in federally-backed loans. The company needs the money to avoid bankruptcy. ALPA?s union members will need to ratify the deal this week for it to go through. The AFA also offered a tentative settlement of $412 million in concessions, the details of which have not been released. A settlement from the IAM is the wild card. The union withdrew from joint negotiations with the other two unions, deciding to settle on its own. IAM members own 20% of UAL stock and ALPA members own 25%. AFA never accepted the employee buy-out plan of 1994. Ten percent of the company?s stock is owned by non-union salaried workers in the firm. If UAL declares bankruptcy, the unions would lose their equity in the company, as well as their two seats on the UAL board of directors. In the face of possible bankruptcy, the workers are already losing some of their equity. State Street Bank & Trust Company, which was hired by the unions to manage their ESOPs, has begun selling off as many as eleven million of the 58 million shares held by workers. The investment management company claimed to be protecting the workers? pension plans, to the protest of ALPA and IAM officials and rank-and-file. All content Copyleft ? 2002 by The Alarm! Newspaper. Except where noted otherwise, this material may be copied and distributed freely in whole or in part by anyone except where used for commercial purposes or by government agencies. From wires at the-alarm.com Thu Nov 14 22:21:04 2002 From: wires at the-alarm.com (The Alarm!Newswire) Date: Sun Feb 8 02:51:57 2004 Subject: [Dryerase] Alarm!--SF Anti-War Protest Message-ID: Anti-War Protesters Rally in San Francisco by Richard Lange and Graham Parsons The Alarm! Newspaper Contributors An estimated 80,000 people gathered Saturday, October 26 at San Fransisco?s Justin Herman Plaza to express their opposition to President Bush?s proposed plan to invade Iraq. The rally, which is being called the largest the city has witnessed since the Vietnam War, took place in solidarity with a gathering of as many as 200,000 people in Washington, D.C. Similar demonstrations also took place in Berlin, Copenhagen, Stockholm, Rome, London, Mexico City and Tokyo. The event in San Francisco began at 11:00 a.m. with a series of speeches by a variety of activists from an assortment of political groups. Helen Caldicott, president of the Nuclear Policy Institute and author of The New Nuclear Danger: George Bush?s Military Industrial Complex, called the 1991 Gulf War a war crime. She listed the health costs of that war, costs measured in cancer rates and birth defects that have dramatically increased as a result of the large quantities of depleted uranium left by exploded American warheads. She also discussed the danger of a nuclear attack on Iraq during any future conflict. According to Caldicott, Bush has expressed a willingness to use nuclear weapons against Iraq. She said such an attack has the potential to trigger Russia?s early warning system, which could accidentally launch a retaliatory strike toward the US. Other speakers included Trent Willis of the International Longshore and Warehouse Union who called for an end to the Bush administration?s attacks on organized labor. The crowd was also treated to a performance by the group Spoken Word and a rendition of ?Dump the Bosses off Your Back? by folksinger and longtime peace activist Utah Phillips, who also reminded people to curb their consumption of oil, either by riding bicycles or using public transportation. Phillips believes that oil plays a crucial role in the current push to topple Saddam Hussein. The crowd, including a group sporting smiling Bush masks and waving dollar bills, responded with raucous applause and chants of ?No Blood for Oil.? At 12:00 p.m. the gathering began its march down Market Street toward the Civic Center Plaza. The sea of protesters filled the wide street from curb to curb as spectators climbed newspaper machines, lampposts and trees in vain attempts to measure the immensity of the crowd. Many marchers had come from southern California to participate, and a few had come from as far as Arizona, Oregon and Washington. A group of marchers representing Santa Cruz County numbered in the hundreds. Topping the crowd was a forest of signs and banners that showed that people from all walks of life oppose the war. The messages ?Drop Bush Not Bombs? and ?Regime Change Begins at Home? were particularly popular. The atmosphere in the thick of the march was festive, as people danced to several percussion groups and sang their way down the route. At various times, the crowd expressed itself in waves of yells and ululations, but the mood remained peaceful. When a fire truck, sirens blaring, approached the march perpendicularly from the south, the participants respectfully opened a lane and the truck passed through quickly. Peter Camejo, the Green Party?s candidate for California Governor, participated in the march, standing in the bed of a pickup truck, handing out Green Party pennants and posters and greeting supporters. Many marchers carried Palestinian flags, expressing their support for the Palestinian people in their decades-old struggle with Israel, an American ally. The group International ANSWER, one of the rally?s main organizers, stationed members at various spots along the route to collect donations and call on marchers to continue the fight for peace. Upon reaching the Civic Center, the crowd packed the plaza and spilled onto the adjoining streets as a second wave of speakers addressed the crowd from a stage constructed in front of City Hall. Among them were Peter Camejo, US Representative Barbara Lee and actor Amy Brenneman. They called on President Bush to drop his proposed invasion and allow the United Nations to try to settle through diplomatic means the questions surrounding Hussein?s alleged weapons of mass destruction. All content Copyleft ? 2002 by The Alarm! Newspaper. Except where noted otherwise, this material may be copied and distributed freely in whole or in part by anyone except where used for commercial purposes or by government agencies. From wires at the-alarm.com Thu Nov 14 22:21:05 2002 From: wires at the-alarm.com (The Alarm!Newswire) Date: Sun Feb 8 02:51:57 2004 Subject: [Dryerase] Alarm!--War Notes 11-1-02 Message-ID: War Notes 11-1-02 By sasha k The Alarm! Newspaper Columnist North Korea North Korea?s confession that they have an active nuclear weapons program, in breach of a 1994 agreement with the US, has many people asking ?why are the Koreans admitting this now?? North Korea is already under diplomatic pressure and has been named as one of the three members of the infamous ?axis of evil,? so why bring more pressure upon themselves? North Korea is certainly not in good shape, economically or in terms of international relations--they have few friends left in the world. But for all Bush?s talk of the axis of evil, North Korea hasn?t gotten much attention lately. Now they have. And, perhaps, that is the point. By playing the nuclear weapons card, North Korea might be trying to bring about a more engaged relationship with the US. North Korea seems to be betting that this confession will bring about negotiations with the US that could lead to normalization of relations. Of course, with the Bush administration such a bet might be a long shot. Strangely enough, the Bush administration took half a month to disclose North Korea?s confession. Why did the US hold the information secret for so long? It looks like the Korea issue has started another internal battle in the Bush administration: with Powell?s State Department looking to negotiate and the Rumsfeld wing pushing a much harder line. Powell has already started talking on the diplomatic front, meeting with the South Korean Foreign Minister Choi Sung-hong and Russian Foreign Minister Igor Ivanov late last week. ?This is a time to approach this matter with care, to consult closely with our friends. We are all in this,? Powell told reporters. Others within the State Department indicate that the US will take a flexible approach to North Korea. And President Bush stated that, unlike with Iraq, the US would use diplomatic pressure, not military threats, to persuade North Korea to give up its nuclear weapons program. Department of hypocrisy The different treatment that North Korea and Iraq are getting isn?t lost on the Iraqis. Iraqi Deputy Prime Minister Tariq Aziz, one of Saddam Hussein?s most trusted advisors, bluntly stated, ?North Korea has admitted to having a secret nuclear program. The United States is not asking that North Korea be inspected in the way they are asking for Iraq to be inspected. Why? Because there are two things absent in North Korea: oil and Israel. The reason for this warmongering policy towards Iraq is oil and Israel.? Aziz?s statement is part of the diplomatic wrangling surrounding the expected UN resolution on Iraq. Bush speak on the diplomatic front: To the confusion of many, Bush has redefined one of his favorite terms, ?regime change.? ?[I]f he [Saddam Hussein] were to meet all the conditions of the United Nations, the conditions I?ve described very clearly in terms that everybody can understand, that in itself will signal the regime has changed,? Bush said. So now a regime change does not mean a new regime is put in the place of the old, but that Hussein (since Bush defines the regime as Saddam Hussein) changes his ways. This sudden change in terminology comes, of course, as Bush is trying to convince the big five permanent Security Council members to pass the US version of a resolution on Iraq. Negotiations for such a resolution have been going on for over six weeks. Both France and Russia, however, have been circulating proposals in the UN that take out language that could be interpreted as authorizing an attack on Iraq, forcing the US to slowly remove such language. But on October 23, the US finally formally presented the Security Council with its draft resolution, which included a threat of military action. The Russian ambassador to the UN, Sergey Lavrov, stated that Russia opposed any resolution that included automatic authorization for the use of military force, and that the demands on Iraq for inspections were ?unimplementable, unrealistic.? Yet it is unlikely that France, Russia or China will veto the resolution if the US can garner the seven votes?plus Britain and the US?necessary out of the fifteen Security Council member states. Mexico and Ireland are key pivot votes. The US, fearing that the resolution won?t be strong enough for its tastes, is now arguing to have inspections carried out quickly and forcefully in order to push Iraq into noncompliance. After many weeks of debate on the UN resolution, the US wants to make sure it can still fight its war in the winter months (beginning between December and February), before the sand storms and heat of the spring and summer make war efforts more difficult. Both Powell and Condoleezza Rice, the national security advisor, argued that the inspections should be a quick test of Saddam Hussein. War preparations The build-up in the Gulf is speeding up. More and more troops are arriving at bases in the Gulf. Two aircraft carriers are soon to leave for the Gulf bringing the total there to four. The Defense Department is also beginning to train at least 5,000 troops recruited from the Iraqi opposition to act as spotters and translators in the coming war. More dangerous for regional stability, there are reports that the Bush administration is planning a joint strike with Israel into Iraq?s western territory to disarm any missiles that threaten Israel. All content Copyleft ? 2002 by The Alarm! Newspaper. Except where noted otherwise, this material may be copied and distributed freely in whole or in part by anyone except where used for commercial purposes or by government agencies. From wires at the-alarm.com Thu Nov 14 22:31:08 2002 From: wires at the-alarm.com (The Alarm!Newswire) Date: Sun Feb 8 02:51:58 2004 Subject: [Dryerase] The Alarm!--How fair is Fair Trade? Message-ID: <100AB85C-F853-11D6-9A26-0003938C6F60@the-alarm.com> How Fair Is Fair Trade? By Carlos Armenta Translated By Armando Alcaraz The Alarm! Newspaper contributor The green mountains in the north of Nicaragua offer a friendly welcome to visitors. The greenery and lushness of the region, where one finds the town of Matagalpa, gives the visitor an impression of exceptional richness and fertility. However, contrary to what one might think, this region is one of the poorest in all Nicaragua, a country that has the distinction of being one of the poorest in the western hemisphere. The reason behind the deep contrast between the potential wealth in such a fertile land and the extreme poverty which most of its inhabitants suffer, is the sharp fall of the price of the main product of the area: the grano de oro or ?the grain of gold,? the name given to the coffee bean when it is ready to be roasted. The golden coffee beans are sent to the roasters in the countries that consume the best quality coffee. During the fifth annual assembly of CECOCAFEN (Center of Cooperative Coffee Growers of the North), an organization that commercializes the coffee produced by the cooperatives that belong to it, many coffee growers of Matagalpa offered their impressions on the difficult situation of the Nicaraguan coffee growers and on the real benefits received by those who, like them, can market their coffee as Fair Trade. The generalized opinion of the CECOCAFEN members was that Fair Trade is not that fair. According to Jos? Cornejo and Victorino Peralta, members of the La Providencia Cooperative of Wiwili, the maximum price that they receive for a ?quintal? (1 quintal=100 lbs.) of unroasted coffee is $141. ?The buyers pay us $1.40 per pound?in the best of cases?and the final consumer pays $1.50 per _cup_ of coffee,? said Peralta, pointing out that a pound of coffee can make from twenty to forty cups of coffee. Also, the individual grower only receives $96 per quintal after the CECOCAFEN subtracts market expenses and five additional dollars that go to a social fund, used for public social works in the coffee growers? communities. In addition, according to Peralta, if one factors in the production expenses, which with organic coffee are approximately $0.45 per pound, the grower ends up making only about half a dollar per pound of coffee. Even comparing the price per pound of Nicaraguan Organic Fair Trade Coffee in Santa Cruz, which sells for $8.95 per pound at the Santa Cruz Coffee Roasting Company, with the $1.40 that the buyers (in many cases the roasters buy the coffee directly from the grower) pay to well-organized cooperatives such as CECOCAFEN, it is possible to understand why the growers often say ?Fair Trade is not that fair.? ?And that is only if we do it inside the Fair Trade, which requires our coffee to be 100% organic and of better quality,? said Peralta. Cornejo, in a sarcastic tone of voice, refers to the coffee growers who sell through Fair Trade as the privileged. ?There are people, even inside our cooperatives, who have an even worse situation,? said Cornejo, as he introduced us to Fabiana L?pez Arauz, a member of the cooperative in La Pozolera, a municipality of Waslala. L?pez Arauz, a widow and a mother of seven, explains that her husband died during the civil war, when the ?contras,? supported by the US government, tried to take the power from the Sandinistas by means of force. L?pez Arauz told us that she is the owner of a small piece of land of about two acres, on which she sometimes grows 65 quintales of coffee per season, but sometimes she can barely grow three quintales. Even thought L?pez Arauz has never used chemical products to produce her coffee?she has always used cheaper organic fertilizers and insecticides?they still don?t certify her coffee as organic. ?They pay me $0.60 per pound (without production costs) and that is barely enough to survive. I have the hope of being certified organic next year so that I can sell my coffee at a better price?but they are also saying that the price could go even lower.? The international price of coffee in the stock market of New York is at a historical low, and it is not expected to climb in the short term. If not part of an organization, a small coffee grower in Nicaragua only gets, on average, $0.45 per pound for non-organic coffee, when the production costs for this type of coffee are about $0.60 per pound. As Cornejo says, ?the fact that we are organized, that CECOCAFEN has the necessary infrastructure to offer select coffee, clean, organic, and of the best quality, and that we have sampling laboratories (where they determine the quality and flavor of the coffee), gives us the possibility of making the minimum income that allows us to survive. However, there are many small growers who don?t have the same possibilities because they are not organized.? Peralta is saddened by the reality of the market. ?The price we get paid keeps going down and the price that consumers pay in rich countries keeps going up. Even being a member of CECOCAFEN, I can only sell a small part of my coffee as Free Trade. Even though it is not that fair, at least I can, if badly, make ends meet,? said Peralta. The consensus amongst the producers is that Free Trade should continue, but that both the coffee marketers and the consumers in developed countries should become aware that Fair Trade should be fairer to be able to justify its name and its price. As Cornejo explains, ?Fair Trade will be fair only when the growers gets to keep at least 40% of the earnings from their own coffee, which is very far from happening when one looks at the numbers.? All content Copyleft ? 2002 by The Alarm! Newspaper. Except where noted otherwise, this material may be copied and distributed freely in whole or in part by anyone except where used for commercial purposes or by government agencies. From wires at the-alarm.com Thu Nov 14 22:31:07 2002 From: wires at the-alarm.com (The Alarm!Newswire) Date: Sun Feb 8 02:51:58 2004 Subject: [Dryerase] The Alarm!--Consuming the revolution Message-ID: <0F3A9866-F853-11D6-9A26-0003938C6F60@the-alarm.com> Consuming the revolution By aaronius The Alarm! Newspaper Contributor Ch? Guevara T-shirts. Gandhi posing for Apple, The Gap spray-painting its own storefronts. The revolution will not be televised?but it will be commercialized. And at this rate it won?t be long until we have Michael Moore?s head on a Pez dispenser. It is frustrating that the creative models used to guide and inspire our cultural movements so often lend themselves to commodification. It?s bad enough that our messages generally face total media blackouts (think of recent anti-war activity). But the situation concerns far more than just exposure, and though I?m not trying to deconstruct the culture industry in all its complexity, I can point to a few elements that may not seem obvious at first glance: What strikes me as a characteristic attribute of being politically radical these days is that we have to resist the temptation to vicariously live out our political tendencies through the purchase of cheap, mass-marketed consumables designed to appeal to those soft-spots in our hearts reserved for snapshot memories of a time more subversive. We need to end the commodification of subversion. Creating dissonance in mass culture is absolutely necessary?do it now or lead a long and boring life. If we lose the critical ability to separate our real lives from the lives we watch on TV or the characters we play in video games, we might as well go full throttle and replace our brains with silicon. But wait, we are those people on TV and in the video games. Those characters are reflections of us, right? What the f**k is going on here? I?ll tell you: It?s like being under surveillance and knowing it. We know that no matter what happens, we will continue to see images of ourselves on television screens and in magazines. So we pretend not to notice or not to care or both, but in the end accept it as how the machine works and go about our daily lives. Simply put, that needs to change, and there are two main ways I see that happening. One is to start reducing the number of hours we spend directly experiencing mass media (which is obviously demanding a hell of a lot); we?re totally addicted to computers and television, so it will be hard to break away. The flipside of the addiction, though, and my second point is that we do tend to have a very keen sense of how to use technology, and thus can create our own media independently. This is happening in Santa Cruz all over the place. The Alarm!, Santa Cruz Indymedia, Free Radio Santa Cruz (96.3), and even Santa Cruz Community Television all operate independently of the corporate status quo, and similar examples can be found in cities across the country. So the dissolution of corporate media is already occurring before our eyes?we just need to pause and recognize it for what it is. Actually, we need to go a step beyond recognizing that alternatives to conformity exist?we need to make the practice of creating alternative media a habit of our daily lives. The more of us that do it, the more difficult it will be for our revolutions to be sold back to us as a mass commodity. We?ll be paying less attention to the television and more attention to what?s really going on in the world so that we can report it to our communities. And taking back media doesn?t end with news, either. News is just the beginning of the coup. It continues with the takeover of every other sector of the culture industry?merchandizing, marketing, distributing, you name it. The challenge is to remain independent every step of the way and to never sell out. There was once a time when selling out was the only option and to think otherwise was naive. Now the inverse is true. Culture no longer exists within a vacuum of power. Once you can produce your own media, the power is all yours. Aaronius is founder of the Santa Cruz Independent Media Center(http://santacruz.indymedia.org/) and is an independent videographer. Email him at aaron@cats.ucsc.edu. All content Copyleft ? 2002 by The Alarm! Newspaper. Except where noted otherwise, this material may be copied and distributed freely in whole or in part by anyone except where used for commercial purposes or by government agencies. From wires at the-alarm.com Thu Nov 14 22:31:08 2002 From: wires at the-alarm.com (The Alarm!Newswire) Date: Sun Feb 8 02:51:58 2004 Subject: [Dryerase] The Alarm!--Green Consumerism Message-ID: <0F9F0B3C-F853-11D6-9A26-0003938C6F60@the-alarm.com> Shopping our way to a better world? Can ?green consumerism? save the planet while ensuring social justice? By Fhar Miess The Alarm! Newspaper Collective As Kevin Danaher and Medea Benjamin, founders of Global Exchange, are quick to point out, it?s not often that you?ll find multinational automobile manufacturer Toyota Motor Corporation sharing an exhibition hall with the radical environmental group Earth First!, but this is precisely the scenario produced by the organizers of the Green Festival in San Francisco this last weekend (November 9?10). The festival was meant to highlight the movement for sustainable economies, ecological balance and social justice and was jointly organized by Global Exchange, Co-op America and Bioneers, mainstays of that movement establishment in the US. Organizers brought together an eclectic mix of purveyors of fair trade coffee, fair trade and ?eco-friendly? textiles and crafts, solar panels, ?sustainable? lumber and building materials, ?clean? transportation solutions and health foods, along with environmental foundations, ?sustainable? investment advocates, consumer and worker cooperatives, social justice groups, body workers and spiritual healers. While the majority of the exhibition hall was devoted to the buying and selling of merchandise?with the typical trade fair noisy ambiance of industry folk talking shop, PA system interruptions and offers of free samples?the festival also featured a line-up of speakers, including such vehement anti-corporate voices as Amy Goodman of ?Democracy Now,? and Alexander Cockburn, co-editor of CounterPunch. Several of the featured ?partners? of the event were large multinational corporations, Toyota of San Francisco being the most obvious with two hybrid cars on the exhibition hall floor. Across the aisle from Toyota?s exhibit was that of Stonyfield Farms, the nation?s fourth largest yogurt company, which uses organic milk. Stonyfield?s CEO, Gary Hirschberg, recently followed the lead of Ben Cohen (who also attended the festival) and Jerry Greenfield of Ben & Jerry?s Ice Cream in selling a chunk of his company to a large corporation. Unlike Cohen & Greenfield, who sold their entire operation to Unilever, the largest packaged foods company in the world (which incidentally acquired Slimfast diet products on the same day), Hirschberg agreed only to sell a minority 40% stake in his company to Group Danone, the largest dairy company in the world, so he could remain in control. Still, Hirschberg is unapologetic about joining forces with the corporate bigwigs. In a recent article he writes, ?I must admit that becoming part of the mainstream, while aesthetically unappealing, has nevertheless been THE goal.? Hirshberg?s goal, like that of many of his business colleagues represented at the Green Festival, is first and foremost to capture market share. If it can be done with a ?sustainable? food source, then so much the better. Chris Pomfret, Brands Director of Birds Eye Walls, Unilever?s Frozen Food products company in the UK, went further to state that sustainability is not important simply because eco-friendly and healthy products can be marketed at a premium, but because the very survival of the company depends upon sustainability. In a March 2002 speech, he declared, ?if our business is to continue, then we need to sustain our sources of supply and the only way to do that is to make them sustainable.? But that self-preservation is not just an abstract corporate response, it is also the personal response of individual business people. Jeffery Hollender, CEO of Seventh Generation, spoke at the Green Festival on the subject of ?capitalism at a crossroads.? Near the beginning of his presentation, he posed the question, ?is capitalism itself the problem? Should we be looking for some other structure? My answer is no,? he said. ?I mean, I?m a business person, and I benefit from the system that in some ways I don?t like, but I?m not ready to throw it away.? To be fair, Hollender, like most well-off green business people, does exhibit a sincere concern for some ecological and social justice values; otherwise, they never would have made it through the screening process that potential Green Festival vendors had to pass through. But the personal and institutional investment of Hollender and his colleagues in a capitalist economy puts him at odds with many of the anti-corporate and anti-globalization activists at the festival. So, why were these eco-friendly, pro-business firms willing to share the event with people who consider their consumer capitalist practices antithetical to lasting social justice and ecological diversity? According to Medea Benjamin of Global Exchange, organizers of the event ?never hid the politics of the event and?many of the businesses that participated felt that that was OK. Many of them are in total agreement and those who aren?t I still think felt it was an important demographic group for them to reach.? And this marketing potential cuts both ways. Patrick Reinsborough, an ecology activist, explored the flip side: ?it?s an interesting model to create events that really appeal to a mainstream niche, to have a trade show and even the crass ?come do your Christmas shopping and buy environmentally-friendly products? and bring in a wide group of people with that and then hit them with a much deeper message.? As he points out, however, ?it?s possible to achieve an ecologically sane world that?s not necessarily democratic or just.?I?m trying not to be dismissive of the kind of organizing that happens around green consumerism but to figure out how we can bridge this entry point for a lot of middle-class American people and make sure that we?re actually exposing them to a deeper analysis.? He suggests that examples such as the movements of landless peasants, small farmers and indigenous people might lead to such an analysis: one that points to the need for alternative economic arrangements that honor human and ecological value over that of capital. While the environmental movement takes a great deal of flak for levying plenty of criticisms without suggesting any solutions, Reinsborough notes that ?corporations are largely appropriating the sort of solution-oriented end of the environmental movement,? for instance, the solutions of smaller ecological design vendors present at the festival. This appropriation puts activists even more on the defensive. The jumbled mix of politics and commerce made this festival no exception. Reinsborough told of how he had forgotten his wallet on his way to the festival, so he had no option of buying anything. ?It made me acutely aware,? he says, ?of how little interaction there actually was aside from buying and selling.? Chris Carlsson, who was one of the people to first popularize the Critical Mass bicycle ride in San Francisco ten years ago, was also at the festival, and he shared some of his own thoughts on the event: ?There?s no critique that there might be something wrong with the buying and selling of the products of human labor or of human time itself. There?s no critique of wage labor or anything else.?On the other hand,? he says, for people who are new to green consumerism, ?I would argue that this [event] probably has a radicalizing impact, where people can see how many alternatives there really are, already present, technologically and socially, that represent themselves here through the strange veil of capitalist greenage.? However, he counters, ?I?m quite sure we won?t shop our way to a better world.? ?The reproduction of ?fair? business practices, as opposed to NON-business practices seems to me to speak more to the problem than the solution,? says Carlsson. ?I like things where people are able to engage in direct connections and make alternatives in a way that escapes the logic of buying and selling. It?s not always easy to do because you?re always stuck paying the bills, as I am, too. But when people can break out of that logic, they get a taste of something different and it leads in a more radical direction, psychologically, much more quickly.? All content Copyleft ? 2002 by The Alarm! Newspaper. Except where noted otherwise, this material may be copied and distributed freely in whole or in part by anyone except where used for commercial purposes or by government agencies. From wires at the-alarm.com Thu Nov 14 22:31:07 2002 From: wires at the-alarm.com (The Alarm!Newswire) Date: Sun Feb 8 02:51:58 2004 Subject: [Dryerase] The Alarm!--Alternatives to shopping Message-ID: <0EEBF648-F853-11D6-9A26-0003938C6F60@the-alarm.com> Join others, don?t shop, feel better Here are some things you can do that?ll keep you out of stores on November 29, Buy Nothing Day: ? Write letters to everyone you?ve been neglecting. ??Sew sock monkeys out of those sad loner socks whose partners have been lost in the black hole of laundry. All you need are two socks, some buttons, a needle and thread. ? Go for a walk and gather neat looking seed pods, dried leaves, pine cones, acorns, spark plugs, street sweeper blades, buttons, messed up coins and anything rusty. Clean out a nice looking quart jar. Arrange the items in the jar leaving room for the recipient to add their own findings. Hide a note inside (if you want to be super-sneaky). Put a lid on it. INSTA-PRESENT! ? Find one of those tin boxes from those pesky AOL CDs (you can also use old Altoids canisters, etc). Decoupage the outside with cool images from all those magazines you?ve got laying around. Coat with clear nail polish for a glossy finish. On the inside, paste photos. Voila! A picture frame. ? November 16 is free appliance pick-up day all around the city. Go scavenging for an old TV. In preparation find a fish tank/bowl (try thrift stores), a light socket, a pump, rocks, a plastic castle and some fish (living). Then on Buy Nothing Day, gut the TV, put the fish tank inside and light it from behind. (P.S. maybe some of the insides of the TV would look good in a glass quart jar.) ? Go to the beach (make sure it?s not a state beach). Look for polished stones, sea glass and shells. Dig some bottles out of your recycling bin. Remove the labels and clean them. Put your treasures inside. ? Organize a marching band or theater troupe. Dress up. Get creative. Make flyers about Buy Nothing Day and bring them to shopping areas to pass out. Play music. Have fun. ? Visit old people in nursing homes. Bring gifts you?ve made (like sock monkeys and decorative jars). ??Volunteer at a soup kitchen. Just because it?s the day after Thanksgiving doesn?t mean people aren?t hungry. ??Make a care package for someone you miss. ? Go through your closets and figure out all the stuff you can donate to a local shelter, the Drop-In Center or the Walnut Avenue Women?s Center. ? Go to the public library before Thanksgiving (they are closed on Thanksgiving and the day after) and check out videos or DVDs for free. Host a movie day.?H.J. and B.W. Check out adbusters.org for stickers etc. All content Copyleft ? 2002 by The Alarm! Newspaper. Except where noted otherwise, this material may be copied and distributed freely in whole or in part by anyone except where used for commercial purposes or by government agencies. From wires at the-alarm.com Thu Nov 14 22:31:05 2002 From: wires at the-alarm.com (The Alarm!Newswire) Date: Sun Feb 8 02:51:58 2004 Subject: [Dryerase] The Alarm!--You've got junkmail Message-ID: <0E1FBA16-F853-11D6-9A26-0003938C6F60@the-alarm.com> You?ve Got Junkmail! By Michelle Stewart The Alarm! Newspaper Collective It takes just two guys in Northern California to raise a stink. Sick and tired of getting America Online disc everywhere they went, two friends decided to launch a recall campaign. Their goal: gather 1,000,000 AOL discs,return them to the rightful owner, and demand an end to all of the unsolicited junkmail. To date they have approximately 81,000 and they need your help to reach their goal. Aside from the fact that AOL assumes a right to bombard everyone?s lives with these pesky discs, the founders of the recall campaign point out the adverse environmental effects. Citing that there is at least a two-to-one packaging to disc ratio for each piece of junkmail sent out, the organizers say enough is enough. Unbelievably, this two-to-one ratio only relates to some of AOL?s more subtle advertising techniques. More recently, AOL has transitioned away from the cardboard mailers to the tin holders that offer a colossal eight-to-one packaging-to-disc ratio. On the website devoted to this AOL recall, there are visuals and discussions ranging from AOL disc art and experiments to ongoing debates surrounding the ratio of waste-to-disc mailers sent out by the company. Whether you are annoyed about the wasteful disc industry, the overpackaging of the mailers or you are just plain tired of finding your mailbox loaded with AOL propoganda, you are in luck. You have a place to find solace and companionship, an arena of shared frustration?and somewhere to send those !@#*$)- discs! As many opponents point out, if the discs were at least re-writable it would be just a little less annoying to find the discs everywhere you go! So, the next time you find an AOL disc you will never use, remember this: www.NoMoreAOLcds.com. Visit the site, and see if you want to join this campaign to return a million discs. If not, grin and bear it when you hear the clank of another disc hitting the bottom of your mailbox. All content Copyleft ? 2002 by The Alarm! Newspaper. Except where noted otherwise, this material may be copied and distributed freely in whole or in part by anyone except where used for commercial purposes or by government agencies. From wires at the-alarm.com Thu Nov 14 22:31:05 2002 From: wires at the-alarm.com (The Alarm!Newswire) Date: Sun Feb 8 02:51:58 2004 Subject: [Dryerase] The Alarm!--Gimme a Break, USA Message-ID: <0DBFD121-F853-11D6-9A26-0003938C6F60@the-alarm.com> Gimme a Break, USA By Michelle Stewart The Alarm! Newspaper Collective Biggs, CA , November 4, 2002?Don?t ask if they got milk in Biggs. You may get eight ounces of the white stuff spilled over your head. It was a controversial few weeks in the small town just north of Sacramento, filled with overexposure in the media and tension between citizens. So the City Council held a meeting at the local high school to bring the matter up for discussion and decision. In end?and to the relief of many locals?Biggs turned down the proposal from the California Milk Processors Board. A firm statement was made that Biggs, CA would not become Got Milk?, CA. Earlier this year, Jeff Manning, executive director of the California Milk Processors Board sent out letters to 20 small towns in California asking them to officially change their name to ?Got Milk?? The Milk Board is preparing for a media and advertising frenzy surrounding the tenth anniversary of the ad campaign. As part of the festivities, Manning was hoping to get a town to rename itself. According to Manning, the Board isn?t making any explicit financial offers as part of the proposal. Instead, he believes the town that accepts the offer will experience increased tourism, and the Milk Board might assist in building a museum. Apparently that offer isn?t sweet enough to sell. To date, Biggs is the only town to publicly respond to the letter. Other towns that received the letter include San Juan Bautista and Maricopa. Indications are that most of the towns are not considering the proposal. But Manning holds out hope. The Milk Board cites statistics that indicate a 21% drop in milk consumption over the past 30 years. Will a town name change help a struggling industry? The vote is out on that matter also. It is not the first time that businesses and industry have turned to town naming as a gimmick. In the 1950s, a small New Mexico town renamed itself Truth or Consequences after an offer came in from the popular radio game show. And most recently, Halfway, Oregon picked up a check for over $70,000 in exchange for changing its name to Half.com, Oregon. In Halfway, they only had to do a half-effort, since the name change was only for a year?and the startup company was absorbed by eBay before that year was up. It is not a new idea. But it is an idea that is indicative of the times; on eBay you can pay to name someone else?s child, and when you take a roadtrip you may soon find yourself in town named after a cow campaign. Imagine if Budweiser had picked up this idea and named a town ?Wassuppp?? If you remember that ad campaign, you know what I am talking about. I guess its just too bad its not the 80s, then we could look forward to visiting Where?s the Beef?, Florida. All content Copyleft ? 2002 by The Alarm! Newspaper. Except where noted otherwise, this material may be copied and distributed freely in whole or in part by anyone except where used for commercial purposes or by government agencies. From wires at the-alarm.com Thu Nov 14 22:31:03 2002 From: wires at the-alarm.com (The Alarm!Newswire) Date: Sun Feb 8 02:51:58 2004 Subject: [Dryerase] The Alarm!--Film Review: Three Kings Message-ID: <0D0B8BD0-F853-11D6-9A26-0003938C6F60@the-alarm.com> Three Kings: Reflections of the Gulf War before the Sequel By Michelle Stewart The Alarm! Newspaper Collective ?For many critics of the war, however, the problem of representation of Desert Storm went well beyond questions of censorship or adequate reporting. The dynamic of saturation live coverage led to a discussion, especially in academic circles, of the Gulf War as the first postmodern war. This was the first time, it was sometimes said, in which representation of the event was the event.??Melani McAllister, Epic Encounters. On Friday, November 8, a 15?0 vote at the UN resolved that weapons inspectors would go back to Iraq on a mission to ensure that Hussein doesn?t have weapons of mass destruction (or any of the fixings thereof). Here we go again?back to Iraq. With the scars of the last invasion not yet healed we enter once again. Whether it is under the aegis of weapons inspections or outright military aggression, one thing is certain: it is Desert Storm, the Sequel. I say sequel, because in a sequel, you are often introduced to many of the same characters and themes. Whereas we entered with Bush, Sr., we are recommitting under Bush, Jr. Colin Powell was then the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff; today he speaks of policy and tactics as the Secretary of State. In the first war, Ariel Sharon was a prominent military official in the Israeli government and advocated for a non-passive response to Iraq?s aggressions. Today, Prime Minister Sharon says he will not allow Tel Aviv to be attacked without response. Twelve years ago, Bush, Sr. and other prominent individuals in the US government tried to create a rallying call, stating, ?the Iraqi people need to rise up against Saddam Hussein,? words that are being muttered once again, on the cusp of the new war. But twelve years ago when the ?Iraqi people? rose up against Hussein, the US responded by abandoning them as it pulled out of Operation Desert Storm. The Gulf War was only the first example of media saturation. Could we have imagined the way 9/11 was handled had we not experienced the media event that was the Gulf War? ?War is only possible when we allow a fictionalized other or enemy to be constructed for us out of all of the lies that make certain we realize how different other lives are from ours, and how threatening that difference is. If we think of our lives as constituted in opposition to what we are not, then we find ourselves threatened by all difference? (Jill Stauffer, War and Peace Small Time). Taking this into account, and adding to it the historical relationship between the Middle East and the US, the ripple effects of Orientalism and the post-9/11 mindset, we begin to see that the sequel may indeed be more vicious than Desert Storm. But what does this have to do with a movie released three years ago? Director David O. Russell came across the script for Three Kings in 1996, and decided to do an 18-month rewrite of John Ridley?s work. Through his research, Russell was able to integrate into the script his reactions to the media coverage, the fall-out of US withdrawal during the ?democratic? uprising, US military policies on racist language and the personal narratives of Arab participants living through the war. In his attempt to ?unpack? the Gulf War, Russell generated a different approach to the action/war film both through his writing and experimental film techniques. In doing so, he allowed his film to be in dialogue with much of the Gulf War discourse. In his research, Russell spent considerable time reviewing media coverage and decided to appropriate some techniques that would be easily identifiable to his viewing audience. Russell mixed contemporary studio techniques and angles associated with CNN?s coverage of the Gulf War to create an intentionally, fragmented viewing experience. He further pushed this feeling of fragmentation by experimenting with the filming style to create a grainy, surreal look. From the opening of the film, the viewer is challenged with these various production experiments. The dialogue and subject matter of the film?s central investigations are also challenging, and concern the democratic uprising that was not supported by the US. Russell makes it his chief priority to question US policy that allowed for the withdrawal during this critical moment: ?Most people themselves didn?t follow what happened, so the characters themselves are confused?it?s Iraqi Insurrection 101?we didn?t know about this here in American so it gets played to us via Mark Walberg, Spike, Cube and George? (Three Kings, ?Commentary?). Using his characters in subtle ways he instigates dialogues and conflicts to illustrate critical aspects of the war that were left largely?or wholly?undiscussed. Assisting in this dialogue is the supporting cast. In scouting to cast the film Russell went to Deerbourne, Michigan and San Diego, California (areas with high Iraqi immigrant concentrations) and cast from the community those who bore witness to the event he was retelling. The supporting cast became informal advisors alongside the military advisors and the Arab Anti-Defamation League. A discussion of Three Kings cannot be complete without a brief moment spent on the issue of violence and gunshots. The director of the film spent some of his research time looking at medical writings that explore the effects of violence on the body. When doing this research, he happened upon a picture and explanation of the trauma a body goes through in the wake of a gunshot wound (Three Kings, ?Commentary?). This part of his research became another key aspect in the film. Throughout the course of the film, Russell approaches each scene involving violence with a variety of techniques. In some scenes, Russell slows the entire film down to show each shot fired and where the bullet hits; in other scenes, he makes specific use of graphic close-ups shots to illustrate the effects of the bullet inside the body. And often if violence is a probability in the scene, the camera begins to use close-up shots of all of the guns that would be involved if violence erupts. In the editing room, Russell maintained his attention to the gun, by demanding that the sound mixers not amplify or alter the sound of the gunshots. It is common in Hollywood studios to use a generic, loud gunshot sound. Russell insisted that the sounds of the guns be left as ?natural? as possible. He believed that the lack of amplification lends to the eeriness of the sound?to which I would agree. So, the next time you are at the video store and happen to be in the Action section, take a moment and locate this film. It is a departure from the genre and a film that serves to open up discussions about a war fought twelve years ago that is being rehashed today. Many of the themes of Desert Storm are beginning to reemerge. And so, in the case of this film, it is interesting to view Desert Storm through Hollywood?s eyes. I have heard it argued that Three Kings is an anti-war testimony. Three Kings must be identified for what it is: it is a compelling Hollywood film that addresses a contemporary event. With that in mind, the film can be seen as a participant in the discourse surrounding the Gulf War. After viewing the movie, you decide if this is an anti-war film, or simply a film that raises compelling questions about Desert Storm. Three Kings was an interesting Hollywood moment in which the action/war genre was manipulated to allow for a compelling script to thrive on the big screen. This was a fleeting moment that should not be over-idealized but rather consciously recognized. Three Kings stars George Clooney, Mark Walberg, Ice Cube and Spike Jonze. David O. Russell is both the director and screenplay writer. The film is available at your local video store. All content Copyleft ? 2002 by The Alarm! Newspaper. Except where noted otherwise, this material may be copied and distributed freely in whole or in part by anyone except where used for commercial purposes or by government agencies. From wires at the-alarm.com Thu Nov 14 22:31:12 2002 From: wires at the-alarm.com (The Alarm!Newswire) Date: Sun Feb 8 02:51:58 2004 Subject: [Dryerase] The Alarm!--War Notes 11-15-02 Message-ID: <121322A0-F853-11D6-9A26-0003938C6F60@the-alarm.com> War Notes 11-15-02 By sasha k The Alarm! Newspaper Columnist The Resolution On Friday November 8, after weeks of haggling, the United Nations Security Council passed a resolution calling for a tough weapons inspection regime in Iraq with a fifteen to zero vote. In the end, the United States, France and Russia compromised. The resolution does not give automatic approval to war with Iraq if they do not comply with the resolution, but it also does not specifically state that military action needs Security Council approval. It is the vagueness of the resolution that allowed its passage. According to resolution 1441, if Iraq does not fully cooperate with implementation, Iraq shall be considered in ?material breach? and Hans Blix, the head of Unmovic, the UN weapons inspection team, and Mohamed ElBaradei, head of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) team, are to report Iraq to the Council for ?assessment.? No specific consequences for noncompliance are named, although it is ?recalled? in the resolution that Iraq has already been warned ?that it will face serious consequences as a result of its continued violations of its obligations.? The resolution gives Blix and ElBaradei wide latitude to judge Iraqi compliance. ?We will be guided by the definition of material breach, which is really a major violation of the very purpose of the process,? ElBaradei told the New York Times. Many of the arguments during the drafting of the resolution have been over the meaning of the phrase ?material breach.? The Bush administration has been arguing that even the slightest misstep on the part of the Iraqi government would be cause for war. In addition, the US administration has indicated that it will make its own judgement on whether Iraq is in compliance or not, holding it to tougher standards than Unmovic and the IAEA team. It is the ambiguity of the resolution?in not stating that any response to Iraqi noncompliance must be approved by the Security Council?that keeps us firmly on the path to war. The US policy towards Saddam Hussein is still essentially ?to commit suicide or be liquidated,? as Ayman El-Amir of Al-Ahram has said. The Arab League was quick to offer its own interpretation of 1441. After approving the resolution, they stated that only the Security Council should evaluate the reports of weapons inspectors and that the inspection team must include more Arabs than in the past. Farouk al-Sharaa, foreign minister of Syria, which voted for the resolution as a member of the Security Council, said, ?this resolution stopped an immediate strike against Iraq, but only an immediate strike. Now America cannot strike Iraq under UN auspices, although of course the United States can strike Iraq unilaterally outside international law. If this happens, the world will not be with the Americans. It will have to deal with all those demonstrators from Los Angeles to the Far East and the Arab countries.? Iraqi response: On Wednesday, two days before the Friday deadline, the Iraqi government stated that it would comply with the resolution. Earlier in the week, seemingly as a way to express Iraqi distaste for 1441, the Iraqi parliament recommended that the government reject the resolution, leaving the final decision up to Saddam Hussein. With France, Russia and the Arab world backing the resolution, Iraq had no option to reject compliance. The first opportunity for the Bush administration to again push for war will be thirty days after the adoption of the resolution. By that date the Iraqi government must clearly outline to Unmovic and the IAEA all chemical, biological and nuclear weapons and weapons development projects that it has. If it fails to do so, it would be considered in material breach of the resolution and would be reported to the Security Council. On Wednesday, the Iraqi ambassador to the UN announced that Iraq had no such programs. Britain and the US maintain that it does. Thus the stage for conflict is set. Newest war plans The Pentagon has again leaked a new war plan?ostensibly in an attempt to frighten the Iraqi military and government. This ?rolling war? would not aim to immediately occupy Baghdad, but would instead take three regions of Iraq?the northern Kurdish region from Turkey, the south from Kuwait and the west possibly from Israel or Jordan?and hold them as bases for further attacks on the Iraqi government and military. These bases would allow for attacks aimed at the ?pillars of the regime??its missiles, air defenses, presidential sites and military targets. The hope would be that the Iraqi government would crumble and the military would end its support for Hussein without needing a possibly costly ground assault on Baghdad itself. By taking the southern city of Basra as a major base, US forces would not need to use Saudi territory. Four British minesweeper ships are already on their way to the region to clear the Shatt al-Arab waterway that runs up to Basra. According to the BBC, the plan includes a psychological campaign?including encouraging uprisings and a coup?which would begin before the actual conflict. This campaign is probably already underway. The war, of course, has been underway for some time. US and British fighters have been bombing Iraqi targets since the first Gulf War, despite the fact that no US or British plane has been shot down since then. But since the summer, they have expanded the type of installations targeted. Instead of only hitting anti-aircraft and missile batteries in ?self-defense,? planes are now taking out command bunkers, communication stations and radar systems, weakening Iraqi defenses before the start of full-scale war. Meanwhile, the British organization Medical Action for Global Security estimates that around half a million people would die in a war with Iraq, 200,000 of whom would die from starvation and disease. Yemen On November 3, the CIA used a Predator drone?a remote controlled plane with no pilot?to kill what it claimed were al-Qaida operatives in Yemen. This the first time such planes have been used outside of Afghanistan to target people. They have been used in southern Iraq for the last month and have attacked radar dishes. The CIA and senior intelligence officials seem to have been given the right to decide for themselves when to use the tactic; President Bush did not make the decision himself. Perhaps even more worrying, the Yemen killings closely resemble the Israeli tactic of ?targeted killings? (assassinations) of its opponents. The US has maintained that it opposes the Israeli tactic, but the Yemen assassinations confirm that the US and Israel are increasingly converging on military tactics. The Israelification of US military tactics and strategy?preemption and assassination?coincides with a shift in US strategy that now more than ever promotes Israel as the regional hegemonic power and looks to redraw the Mideast map. All content Copyleft ? 2002 by The Alarm! Newspaper. Except where noted otherwise, this material may be copied and distributed freely in whole or in part by anyone except where used for commercial purposes or by government agencies. From wires at the-alarm.com Thu Nov 14 22:31:10 2002 From: wires at the-alarm.com (The Alarm!Newswire) Date: Sun Feb 8 02:51:58 2004 Subject: [Dryerase] =?ISO-8859-1?Q?=A1La_Alarma!--Ojo_en_el_INS--Cinco_mytos_=28part?= =?ISO-8859-1?Q?e_5_de_5=29?= Message-ID: <10C4B934-F853-11D6-9A26-0003938C6F60@the-alarm.com> Ojo en El INS La globalizaci?n ideol?gica en contra de la inmigraci?n Cinco mitos sobre la inmigraci?n (parte 5 de 5) Por Carlos Armenta Colaborador del Semanario ?La Alarma! El eurodiputado franc?s Sami Nair expone y analiza, en un art?culo publicado en el diario espa?ol El Pa?s, lo que el llama ?los cinco mitos sobre la inmigraci?n en Espa?a.? El presente art?culo (?ltimo de una serie de cinco) analizar? el quinto mito dentro del contexto de la inmigraci?n en los Estados Unidos. Quinto mito sobre la inmigraci?n: ?La inmigraci?n ?amenaza? con alterar la identidad de los Estados Unidos? Primero que nada, nunca ha existido, ni existir?, una identidad nacional totalmente cerrada. La identidad nacional de los EEUU se ha visto transformada, desde el principio de la formaci?n de la naci?n estadounidense, por la aportaci?n cultural de millones de inmigrantes de diversos or?genes nacionales. La sociedad estadounidense siempre se ha jactado de ser un ?melting pot,? es decir, un crisol en el que se funden diversos elementos culturales que le dan a la naci?n un car?cter multicultural. Aunque dicha teor?a del ?melting pot? haya sido despojada de legitimidad por innumerables y cuidadosos an?lisis acad?micos, muchos de los cuales han optada por el modelo del ?frying pan? (sart?n para fre?r), en el cual los que se encuentran al fondo del orden social (o sea, la sart?n) se queman, mientras los que se encuentran arriba se cocinan perfectamente, es indudable que la identidad estadounidense le debe su formaci?n a la aportaci?n de los inmigrantes. Adem?s de los beneficios econ?micos que aportan los inmigrantes a la naci?n estadounidense, los cuales ya han sido analizados en los cuatro anteriores cap?tulos de esta serie, dichos inmigrantes han dotado a los EEUU, y lo siguen haciendo, de un interminable n?mero de aportaciones culturales. Basta citar el ejemplo de California, estado que, desde su incorporaci?n a la uni?n americana, ha gozado de una riqueza y diversidad cultural gracias a la influencia de sus residentes de diversos or?genes nacionales, ?tnicos y culturales. ?Qui?n puede argumentar, por ejemplo, que la inmigraci?n proveniente de M?xico o Am?rica Central ?amenaza? con alterar la identidad californiana, cuando al recorrer dicho estado de sur a norte uno se encuentra con poblaciones que llevan los nombres de San Diego, Los Angeles, Sacramento, Monterey, Santa Cruz, San Francisco, Los Ba?os, etc.? ?C?mo se puede entender tal argumento si en cada pueblo o ciudad existan establecimientos que ofrecen, por ejemplo, platillos deliciosos de origen mexicano como los tacos, burritos, enchiladas, tostadas, tamales; o salvadore?os, como las pupusas? ?Cu?l ser?a la suerte de la agricultura californiana y de su sector de servicios, solo por citar algunos ejemplos, si el campo y las cocinas de California se vieran privadas del trabajo y los conocimientos culturales de los inmigrantes (legales e indocumentados por igual) que laboran en ellos? Cada cocina, sin importar que tipo de comida se prepara en ellas, cada campo agr?cola o cada hotel en donde se contrate a personal de limpieza es un lugar en donde ya se habla el espa?ol, el chino, el tagalo, as? como una infinidad de lenguas ind?genas de Centro y Sudam?rica. Inclusive los hijos de muchos de las familias m?s privilegiadas, no solo de California, sino de toda la naci?n, se encuentran bajo el cuidado de nanas y personal de servicio dom?stico indocumentados que provienen de lugares de habla hispana o de lenguas ind?genas. California es un estado en el que la mayor?a de sus habitantes son originarios o descendientes directos de personas de otros pa?ses, los cuales le han dado y le siguen dando a California una riqueza cultural y una identidad por dem?s original. La historia nos ha demostrado, una y otra vez, que las sociedades m?s saludables son aquellas que disfrutan de flexibilidad, diversidad y movilidad. No hay que olvidar las horrendas consecuencias que han acarreado, como en el caso de la Alemania Nazi o Sud?frica bajo el Apartheid, el querer conservar la ?pureza? de una raza o de una sociedad. Ll?mesele como se le quiera llamar: alteraci?n, transformaci?n o evoluci?n, la existencia de dicho proceso en el que una identidad cambia y se transforma no representa una amenaza, sino un signo de salud social. Para finalizar esta serie, se deben tomar en cuenta las observaciones hachas por el eurodiputado Nair, el cual subraya que los cinco mitos sobre la inmigraci?n analizados en esta serie ?alimentan un c?rculo perverso, ya que se justifica la marginalizaci?n de la v?ctima propiciatoria mediante la creaci?n continua del chivo expiatorio. Es grave, porque rebajar demag?gicamente el debate sobre el control de flujos migratorios conduce siempre a un debilitamiento de la democracia.? All content Copyleft ? 2002 by The Alarm! Newspaper. Except where noted otherwise, this material may be copied and distributed freely in whole or in part by anyone except where used for commercial purposes or by government agencies. From wires at the-alarm.com Thu Nov 14 22:31:09 2002 From: wires at the-alarm.com (The Alarm!Newswire) Date: Sun Feb 8 02:51:58 2004 Subject: [Dryerase] =?ISO-8859-1?Q?=A1La_Alarma!--Comercio_Justo?= Message-ID: <105FC054-F853-11D6-9A26-0003938C6F60@the-alarm.com> ?Qu? tan justo es el llamado ?Comercio Justo/Fair Trade?? Lo que el consumidor debe saber acerca de los beneficios del ?Fair Trade? para los productores cafetaleros de Nicaragua. Por Carlos Armenta Colaborador del Peri?dico ?La Alarma! Las frescas y verdes monta?as del norte nicarag?ense ofrecen una amigable bienvenida a todo el que las visita. El verdor y la frescura de dicha regi?n, en donde se encuentra enclavado el poblado de Matagalpa, le dan al visitante la impresi?n de encontrarse en un lugar dotado de una fertilidad y riqueza excepcionales. Sin embargo, y muy contrariamente a lo que pudiera pensarse, esta regi?n se caracteriza por ser una de las que sufre la m?s generalizada pobreza de todo Nicaragua, el cual, dicho sea de paso, es uno de los pa?ses m?s pobres del hemisferio occidental. La raz?n del marcado contraste entre la riqueza potencial de una tierra tan f?rtil y la extrema pobreza en que viven la mayor?a de sus habitantes es la estrepitosa ca?da de los precios de sus principal producto: el ?grano de oro,? nombre que recibe el grano de caf? cuando se encuentra listo para ser tostado, y que es el estado en que dicho grano abandona los pa?ses en donde se produce con destino a las tostadoras instaladas en los pa?ses en donde se consume el caf? de mejor calidad. En el marco de la quinta asamblea anual de CECOCAFEN (Central de Cooperativas Cafetaleras del Norte), organismo que comercializa el caf? que producen las cooperativas que lo conforman, varios productores cafetaleros de la zona de Matagalpa, Nicaragua nos ofrecieron sus impresiones sobre la dif?cil situaci?n de los productores cafetaleros nicarag?enses en general y sobre los verdaderos beneficios que reciben los que, como ellos, se ven en la posibilidad de comercializar su caf??gracias a que se encuentran bien organizados?dentro del marco del ?Fair Trade.? La opini?n generalizada de los productores miembros de CECOCAFEN fue la de que el ?Comercio Justo? (nombre con el que ellos conocen al ?Fair Trade?) no es tan justo. Segun Jos? Cornejo y Victorino Peralta, ambos miembros de la cooperativa ?La Providencia? de Wiwil?, Nicaragua, el precio m?ximo que se paga por un quintal (100 libras) de caf? grano de oro es de $141. ?Los importadores nos pagan a nosotros US $1.40 por libra?en el mejor de los casos?y el consumidor final paga US $1.50 por _taza_ de caf?,? subrayo Peralta, resaltando que una libra de caf? alcanza para veinte o cuarenta tazas. Mas aun, el productor solo recibe solo $96 por quintal despu?s de que CECOCAFEN deduce gastos de comercializaci?n y cinco d?lares que van a un fondo de aportaci?n social, el cual se utiliza para obras sociales en las comunidades cafetaleras. Adem?s, seg?n Peralta, si se calculan los gastos de producci?n, que en el caso del caf? organico son de aproximadamente $0.45 por libra, el productor acaba ganando solamente alrededor de medio d?lar por libra. A?n cuando se compara el precio de venta al p?blico por libra del caf? nicarag?ense org?nico de ?Fair Trade? en Santa Cruz, el cual se vende a US $8.95 por libra en Santa Cruz Coffee Roasting Company, con los US $1.40 que los importadores (en muchos casos las tostadoras lo compran al productor directamente) pagan a cooperativas bien organizadas como las de CECOCAFEN, nos damos cuenta de porqu? los productores hacen el comentario de que ?el comercio justo no es tan justo.? ?Y eso si comerciamos dentro del ?Comercio Justo,? el cual exige que nuestro caf? sea ciento por ciento org?nico y de mejor calidad,? dice Peralta. Cornejo, en tono sarc?stico se refiere a los productores que comercian dentro del Comercio Justo como los m?s privilegiados. ?Hay gente, inclusive dentro de nuestras cooperativas, que sufren de una situaci?n todav?a peor,? dice Cornejo, present?ndonos con Fabiana L?pez Arauz, miembro de una cooperativa en La Pozolera, municipio de Waslala. L?pez Arauz, madre viuda de siete hijos, nos explica que su esposo muri? durante la guerra civil, cuando los ?contras,? apoyados por el gobierno de los EEUU, trataban de tomar el poder de los Sandinistas por la v?a de la lucha armada. La se?ora L?pez Arauz nos cuenta que ella es due?a de un lote de una ?manzana y media? (poco menos de una hect?rea), de la cual saca a veces 65 quintales de caf? por temporada, pero a veces apenas saca 3 quintales. Aunque la se?ora L?pez Arauz nunca ha utilizado productos qu?micos para producir su caf??siempre ha utilizado fertilizantes y anti-plagas org?nicos porque ser m?s baratos?todav?a no certifican su caf? como org? nico y lo tiene que vender como convencional. ?A mi me pagan $0.60 por libra (sin contar los costos de producci?n) y eso me alcanza para medio sobrevivir. Tengo la esperanza de que el a?o pr?ximo me certifiquen como org?nico para poder vender mi caf? a mejor precio?pero tambi?n me dicen que el precio puede bajar a?n m?s.? En efecto, el precio internacional del caf? que se cotiza en la Bolsa de Valores de Nueva York se encuentra ahora en un m?nimo hist?rico, y las expectativas no auguran ninguna mejor?a en el corto plazo. Los peque?os productores cafetaleros no organizados de Nicaragua solo reciben, en promedio, US $0.45 por libra de caf? convencional, cuando los costos de producci?n de este tipo de caf? andan por los US $0.60 por libra. Tal y como lo apunta el se?or Cornejo, ?el hecho de que nosotros estamos organizados, de que CECOCAFEN cuenta con la infraestructura necesaria para ofrecer un caf? seleccionado y limpio, org?nico, de la mejor calidad, y de que contamos adem?s con laboratorios de cataci?n [donde se determina la calidad y el sabor del caf?], nos da la posibilidad de poder obtener una m?nima ganancia que nos permite sobrevivir. Sin embargo, hay todav?a muchos peque?os productores que no tienen las mismas posibilidades porque no est?n organizados.? Para Peralta, la realidad del mercado es triste. ?El precio que nos pagan a nosotros sigue bajando mientras que el precio que pagan los consumidores en los pa?ses ricos sigue subiendo. Yo solo tengo la posibilidad de vender, a?n siendo miembro de CECOCAFEN, una peque?a parte de mi caf? dentro del ?Comercio Justo,? que aunque no sea tan justo, cuando menos me ayuda a mal pasarla,? dice Peralta. El consenso entre los productores es de que el ?Comercio Justo? debe continuar, pero tanto los que comercian su caf? como los consumidores en los pa?ses desarrollados deben de tomar conciencia de que el ?Fair Trade? debe ser todav?a m?s justo para poder justificar tanto su nombre como su sobreprecio. Es decir, y tal y como lo explica el se?or Cornejo, ?la justicia del ?Fair Trade? solo se dar? cuando al productor le quede cuando menos un 40% de la ganancia de la comercializaci?n de su caf?, lo cual, al analizar cifras, se da uno cuenta de que est? muy lejos de ser una realidad.? All content Copyleft ? 2002 by The Alarm! Newspaper. Except where noted otherwise, this material may be copied and distributed freely in whole or in part by anyone except where used for commercial purposes or by government agencies. From wires at the-alarm.com Thu Nov 14 22:31:11 2002 From: wires at the-alarm.com (The Alarm!Newswire) Date: Sun Feb 8 02:51:58 2004 Subject: [Dryerase] The Alarm!--Eye on the INS--Snapshots from the war on terror Message-ID: <11A634FD-F853-11D6-9A26-0003938C6F60@the-alarm.com> Eye on the INS 11-15-02 Snapshots from the War on Terror By Michelle Stewart The Alarm! Newspaper Collective ?Anonymous mailer sends us photos taken inside a military C-130 transporting POWs,? reads the headline on the website of radio host Art Bell. For those unfamiliar with Mr. Bell, on this website you will also find many stories and/or photos that are ?evidence? of alien life on earth. However, in the case of these photos, there has been an authorized voice that verified their authenticity, as well as a firestorm of response?both from the Federal government. ?We have very very tight restrictions on any images of the detainees for security purposes and because we have no interest in potentially holding detainees up for any kind of public ridicule,? said Victoria Clark at a Pentagon press conference the morning after the photos first appeared. Clark announced that the Pentagon was mounting an investigation to determine who in the plane took the photos, because the release was unauthorized and perhaps the photos themselves were unauthorized. Does the Pentagon want to keep these photos from the public to insure the detainees are not subjected to ?public ridicule,? or rather to insure that the Pentagon itself is not subject to public scrutiny? The answer seems obvious. In looking back over the past few months, perhaps the chain of events has forced the Pentagon to try and avoid this type of scrutiny. Early in the summer, a certain photo of John Walker Lindh surfaced. In the photo, Lindh was heavily restrained, blindfolded and appeared to be strapped to a carrying board, naked. The Pentagon was challenged about the way Lindh was being handled. The Pentagon responded to the criticisms by stating that Lindh?s restraints and lack of clothing were part of their security measures. It later surfaced?according to Lindh?s defense attorneys?that he?d been ridiculed by officers, and that his body had both pro-America and homophobic language scrawled on it in marker. Despite initial concerns, the public soon forgot these issues, along with concerns about the initial photo and the way Lindh was treated. Lindh eventually took a plea bargain and was sentenced to 20 years in prison. Earlier in the year, the US government released photos to the press of some of the first detainees arriving at Guantanamo Bay. The government, expecting a reaction of adulation from a fearful public, was surprised when the photos were greeted with horror and questions were raised about the treatment of US-held prisoners in the ?War on Terrorism.? The chief concern surrounded the ways in which the prisoners were uniformly transported with eye goggles and ear muffs as well as shackles and often surgical masks. The government responded that these were security measures taken to insure the safety of all involved in the transport (even the safety of the prisoner). Over time, this outcry, too, was silenced. People seemed to ?accept? that the US had the right to snatch up whomever it wished (no trial, no public proof offered) and schlep them off to an island (Guantanamo Bay) in another country (Cuba), bound, gagged and goggled for an indeterminate amount of time (the joys of being labeled a material witness, not a Prisoner of War)?in the name of security, of course. With the photos on Bell?s website, here we are again. The only difference this time is that the US didn?t officially release the photos?probably sick and tired of defending itself, it is keeping the photo album closed to the public. So, aside from the occasionally leaked photo, what will the public do now? We have proven ourselves to be rather accepting of these disturbing pictures. Over time we seem to silence our complaints and outcry. Without the photos as reminders, are we simply going to become absolutely compliant with the way in which events play out in this endless and ambiguous ?War on Terrorism?? I fear we are. Lost in this latest round of discussions about the photographs of detainees is the fact that they are being treated as human cargo. And consider for a moment the timing. What have we been hearing about Guantanamo Bay lately? Well, in October, the government prided itself on releasing prisoners; it was expelling those prisoners who were not deemed adequate material witnesses. For all intents and purposes, the government has not talked about bringing in more detainees; rather it has only spoken of releases. Of course this was coming up on the elections where, perhaps, it did not want to be seen as ?collecting? detainees and thereby spending American tax dollars on a program that is not precisely collecting terrorists. Material witnesses are not very exciting, and cost a lot of money to house and feed. But whether we have photos?officially released or not?I am left with the sneaking suspicion that people are largely undisturbed by these pictures or the general landscape of this ?War on Terrorism.? That the mantra of homeland security has finally taken hold, and the treatment of anyone who is suspected of terrorism is inconsequential. Do we care that the CIA is sending out unmanned drone missiles to kill people ?believed to be? members of al-Qaeda, that the attack in Yemen did kill an American, that we are killing suspects? And those we don?t kill we strap into cargo planes, bound and gagged? Is this what we are agreeing to? Whether it is the nearly 600 detainees at Guantanamo Bay, or the hundreds still held in INS detention, the War on Terrorism is very tangible, and yet we don?t seem to respond. The War on Terrorism is not just about bin Laden (or nowadays Hussein), it is about treating people as cargo, about assuming the guilt of all suspects, about treating Arabs or Muslims as guilty and about the pretense that in the name of ?security? we must accept these violations of decency. So, do we respond or do we just shake our heads at these photos? Do we dismiss the photos?when they surface?and ignore the INS?s detainees; just sit back, and turn our collective attention to the upcoming ?holiday season?? Your comments are encouraged and welcomed at michelle@the-alarm.com All content Copyleft ? 2002 by The Alarm! Newspaper. Except where noted otherwise, this material may be copied and distributed freely in whole or in part by anyone except where used for commercial purposes or by government agencies. From boyer2128 at msn.com Thu Nov 14 23:24:13 2002 From: boyer2128 at msn.com (SARAH BOYER) Date: Sun Feb 8 02:51:58 2004 Subject: [Dryerase] Taking Back Iraq's Oil, November Public i Message-ID: Taking Back Iraq's Oil by Jeff Sowers Oil may not be the only reason the U.S. government is rushing into war with Iraq, but it is certainly one of the main reasons. Domestic politics, arms industry sales, and other factors all play a role. But for the money-hungry oil corporations, like Exxon-Mobile, Shell, and BP, it is oil that glitters like a mountain of diamonds in the Iraqi desert. Crude oil is the world's most actively traded commodity, and when it comes to oil, Iraq has lots of it. With proven reserves of 112-bil bbl (barrels of oil) and probable reserves of 214-bil bbl, Iraq is second only to Saudi Arabia in crude oil reserves. Industry experts believe that Iraq's true resource potential may be far higher, however, as years of war and sanctions have severely restricted exploration and development. At current prices of about $27 a barrel, this comes out to be a prize worth between $3 trillion and $8.1 trillion. No wonder a post WWII, U.S. State Department assessment called the gulf oil resources “a stupendous source of strategic power, and one of the greatest material prizes in world history ... probably the richest economic prize in the world in the field of foreign investment.” Buying Security Council Votes with Oil The central role that oil is playing in this crisis was evident in recent U.S. efforts to get the support of Russia and France, who have been resisting U.S. pressure to authorize the use of force against Iraq before inspectors are allowed to return. Their backing has been crucial because they are among the five Security Council members with the power to veto a U.N. Security Council resolution authorizing force. Why would Russia and France be so resistant to using force against Saddam Hussein? It is because both have a large stake in Iraqi oil and have already invested heavily in it. On September 1st, the headline of a Washington Post article read “Russian-Iraqi Oil Ties Worry U.S.: Moscow's Support for an Attack on Hussein May Depend on Economic Assurances.” The article talked about the “depth” of economic ties between Russia and Iraq, which have been long-time allies, ever since the emergence of the Ba’th party and Saddam Hussein in the late 60’s. Major Russian oil corporations such as LUKoil and Zarubezhneft have made major investments in Iraq and have been seeking to position themselves as leading exporters of Iraqi oil when economic sanctions are lifted. LUKoil currently owns 68% in a consortium that has invested a reported $6 billion in developing the 20-bill bbl West Kurna oil field; Iraq also owes Russia at least $7 billion in debt from previous decades. In a September 9th New York Times article a senior Bush official said the arguments presented to the Russians to get their vote for war against Iraq had been “economic,” and that the U.S. “did not rule out the possibility of negotiating explicit guarantees for Russian interests, mostly oil-related.” The official also stated that “they're a lot more likely to get their debts paid off” by supporting the U.S. policy. France also has major investments in Iraqi oil. It, more than any other western nation, has cultivated a relationship with Iraq. France was the largest supplier of arms to Iraq during the Iran-Iraq war. In the 1970’s they helped Iraq build a nuclear power plant that was subsequently bombed by Israel in 1981. The French oil corporation TotalElfFina, the fifth largest oil corporation in the world, has a major presence in Iraq. Among other deals, TotalElfFina has negotiated with Iraq on development rights for the fabulously rich Majnoon oil field, the largest in Iraq. A top French official candidly laid it out in a September 15th article in the New York Times. He said, “In a sense we're trapped. Ultimately, we will want to re-engage in Iraq. We built a strategic relationship there. We have a market. We want the oil and we want to be in the game of rebuilding the country. If there were a new regime and we have not been with the Americans, where will we be?” Actually, what is probably worrying the Russians and the French more than what might happen if they don’t go along is what might happen if they do. Will they get their “fair share” of Iraq’s oil even if they give their support, or will they be left to scramble after the crumbs left behind after U.S. and British oil corporations are allowed to sweep in and gobble up the juiciest and most lucrative fields? Recent statements made by the U.S.-backed opposition group the Iraqi National Congress (INC) would certainly give Russia and France reason to pause. INC officials have made it clear that “they will not be bound by any of the deals” Iraq has made with Russia, France or other nations. Ahmed Chalabi, the INC leader, went even further, saying he supports the formation of a U.S.-led consortium to develop Iraq's oil fields. "American companies will have a big shot at Iraqi oil," he said. Exxon and Mobil Had it First But how did it come to be that Russia and France got the dominant position in Iraqi oil, a position they are now anxious about losing to the British and Americans? Not so long ago, before the era of Saddam and the Ba’th party, it wasn’t LUKoil and TotalElfFina that had the dominant position in Iraqi oil, but Exxon-Mobil, BP and Shell. From their perspective, îregime change” in Iraq would give them the opportunity to reclaim what was “theirs” to begin with. Following the collapse of the Ottoman Empire after WWI, western governments and oil corporations descended on the Persian Gulf like a pack of hungry hyenas, growling and nipping at each other as they fought for the greatest share. Britain was the main military power in the region, and pieced together Iraq from remnants of the Ottoman Empire. They placed King Faisal, a British puppet, on the throne, and proceeded to block Exxon and Mobil's exploration efforts in Iraq while giving full support to those of British Petroleum and Royal Dutch Shell. This led to intense diplomatic pressure by the Americans. A British foreign office official complained that "Washington officials began to think, talk and write like Exxon officials.” Finally, in 1928, as part of an overall deal to divide the region’s oil between the world’s great powers, known as the “Red Line Agreement,” Exxon and Mobil were granted a 25% share in the Iraq Petroleum Company. Production began in 1934. While the oil corporations were satisfied with the arrangement, many Iraqi’s were not. To insure their control, Britain maintained bases in the area and routinely bombed and strafed rebellious Kurdish and Shia tribesmen. When the Iraqi leadership rebelled in 1940, the British were forced to send in reinforcements leading to armed conflict with Iraqi forces in 1941. The conflict was short lived, the rebellious Iraqi leadership fled the country, and Britain reestablished its authority. Iraq Slips Through Britain’s Fingers In 1958, the British again lost control when an Iraqi revolution led by an army faction known as the Free Officers, under the leadership of Abd al-Karim Qasim, overthrew and executed the British puppet King Faisal II. This time, however, reestablishing British control would not be so easy. The Cold War was in full swing. Qasim soon established diplomatic relations between Iraq and Moscow, signed an extensive Iraqi-Soviet economic agreement, and the Soviets began supplying arms to Iraq. At the same time, Qasim was cautious in dealing with the western oil corporations, and only sought increased revenues rather than complete nationalization. Qasim also sought to keep his distance from the Soviets, first embracing and then later repressing the Iraqi Communist Party (ICP). Internal division within the army soon led to Qasim’s overthrow and a series of internal coups. In 1968, the Iraqi Ba’th party, under the leadership of Ahmad Hasan al Bakr and Saddam Hussein, emerged as the dominant faction. Some claim that the CIA played a role in the successful 1968 coup that brought the Ba’th party to power. This may well have been, but as events turned out, it would have been a gamble that didn’t pay off. The Ba’th turned away from the U.S. and sought improved relations with the ICP. In April of 1972, Iraq signed a 15-year treaty of Friendship and Cooperation with the Soviet Union and agreed to cooperate in political, economic, and military affairs. The Soviets agreed to supply Iraq with arms. Bakir also nationalized Iraq’s entire oil industry, including Exxon and Mobil’s 25% share in the Iraq Petroleum Company (a share worth today upwards of a trillion dollars). The Soviet Union, and later France, among others, provided Iraq critical technical skill and capitol needed to exploit the oil fields. And thus it happened that U.S., British, and Dutch oil corporations lost their hold on Iraq. This is not to say that Iraq became part of the Soviet sphere. While the Ba’th turned to the Soviets for protection from British and U.S. imperialists, they maintained their independence, and did not allow the soviets to penetrate their security apparatus to the point of allowing them to ‘reach’ the inner leadership. In the mid-seventies, as had happened in the mid-sixties under Quasim, when it was felt the communists were getting too powerful, the Ba’th cracked down on the ICP and moved to distance themselves from the Soviets. During the Cold War period the Iraqi government, like other revolutionary governments at the time, was able to find a space to exist independently within the balance of power between the U.S. and the Soviet empires. Strange Bedfellows Neither should the temporary strategic alliance between the U.S. and Iraq during the Iran-Iraq war be overstated, as some progressives have mistakenly done. Iraq under Saddam was never a “client state” of the U.S., though the U.S. did provide crucial military and political support for Iraq during the latter stages of the war (a time when Iraq was repeatedly using chemical weapons against Iran, with U.S. knowledge and support). Both Iraq and the U.S. found themselves in conflict with Iran after the 1979 Islamic revolution that brought Ayatollah Khomeini to power, but for completely different reasons. The Ayatollah Khomeini promoted the spread of Islamic revolution across the Middle East, including revolution in Iraq to overthrow Saddam and the Ba’th party, who were secular nationalists that tended toward authoritarian socialism. The U.S., on the other hand, had just lost another oil rich nation to a revolution, and was intent on not letting the revolutionary fever spread. The Prize and the Price The collapse of the Soviet Union in 1990 and end of the Cold War radically changed the global power arrangement. No longer can nations like Iraq play the superpowers off one another to maintain independence. So after more than 30 years, with no one to stop them, the U.S. and Britain, with Exxon-Mobil, BP, Shell, UNOCAL, and Chevron waiting in the wings, are moving in to reclaim their lost Iraqi prize. Impotent militarily, all France and Russia will likely do is sell their Security Council vote for the highest price they can get, which probably won’t be much. The highest price of all, of course, is being paid by Iraqi children, innocent civilians, and young American troops. It is they, and not the oil company stockholders, executives, and political elites who die and suffer as the result of continued sanctions and the bloody horror that is war. Jeff Sowers and his family recently moved to Urbana from Olympia, Washington for his wife’s graduate work in African Studies. He is currently working as a substitute public school teacher. He graduated from the University of Washington with a degree in Physics in 1988 and then spent six months living in India, an experience that he says made the rest of the world much more real and human. He then came across the work of Noam Chomsky, which completely transformed his understanding of the world and the U.S. government. When the first Gulf war took place in 1991, he became very involved with the anti-war movement in Seattle. Since then he has been involved in a variety of issues and projects, including Pastors for Peace, the Green Party, sweatshop issues, and the promotion of Direct Democracy. He has also traveled to Haiti, Cuba, Mexico, and Tanzania. He is currently a working member at the Common Ground Food co-op and an active member of AWARE. For use by dryerase-members. Please send an email to imc-print@urbana.indymedia.org when reprinted. _________________________________________________________________ Add photos to your e-mail with MSN 8. Get 2 months FREE*. http://join.msn.com/?page=features/featuredemail From boyer2128 at msn.com Thu Nov 14 23:26:15 2002 From: boyer2128 at msn.com (SARAH BOYER) Date: Sun Feb 8 02:51:58 2004 Subject: [Dryerase] Incidents Mar Otherwise Successful Anti-War Protests, Nov. Public i Message-ID: Incidents Mar Otherwise Successful Anti-War Protests By Sandra Ahten As evidenced by the recent demonstrations in Washington, DC that drew nearly 200,000 protestors, the anti-war movement is being "reinvigorated," as reported in the October 30th New York Times. Locally, the trend of increasing skepticism and opposition to the Bush administration's plans to use military force in Iraq has been reflected in the growing number of people attending the weekly protests along Prospect Avenue organized by A.W.A.R.E., the Anti-War, Anti-Racism Effort. A.W.A.R.E. has organized various protests around Champaign and Urbana during the past year. The protests began in the spring of 2001 with a regular demonstration near the Urbana Free Library by "Ladies Against War," in opposition to the bombing of Afghanistan. These protests later moved to Saturdays at the interstate exit at Prospect Avenue. Until recently, local police have no objected to the protesters' presense nor been asked to intervene on behalf of their safety. On Saturday, October 19, 2002, however, two anti-war protestors were issued citations by the Champaign Police Department. Those cited were Ellen Fireman and Michael Weissman, both professors at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. They were issued $75 citations for jay-walking. Other demonstrations took place before the Chicago Bears' football games, initially at Lincoln near Green in Urbana. At that demonstration, literature was handed out for the first time. The next two protests took place on Kirby Avenue, and literature was again handed out. Police gave no warnings, formal or informal, that this was illegal or inappropriate. ENRAGED DRIVER INDICATES HE WILL "RUN OVER" PROTESTERS October 12, 2002 saw the first of what AWARE members hoped would be a weekly presence on Prospect Avenue. While the protesters were met with a lot of positive enthusiasm---including having people who were driving by stop to join their effort---they were also met with negative responses. In the most serious, a vehicle left the roadway, and drove on to and then off the sidewalk numerous times---threatening the protesters. A woman who had her back turned narrowly missed injury; she was pulled out of the way by her partner. The driver was all the while shouting expletives at the peace protesters. The police were called by the protesters and provided with the license plate number of the offender. The police assured Kimberlie Kranich, protest organizer, that they would "go talk to" the offender. The Champaign Police department reports that the status of that investigation was "still open" and that no arrests have been made. In fact in follow up phone calls we have learned that there has been no investigator assigned. The officer who took the report (Officer Standifer) has not returned phone calls of inquiry. The investigation number is #70212351. The Champaign police acted with significantly more dispatch when the crime was jay-walking rather than endangerment. On October 19th the protest started at 2pm, and the citations were issued almost immediately. Ms. Fireman, who had not attended protests or AWARE meetings previously, was not aware of the laws prohibiting her being on the street and was actually between two lanes of traffic as the police came over the over-pass, heading north. Mr. Weissman was simply stepping off the curb, offering a flier to cars stopped at the red light. Two police stopped their vehicle and ordered all of the protesters to gather in a nearby parking lot. When one of the officers indicated that they would be issuing a citation to the two on the street, a member of the group asked if they could issue a warning instead. “I could, but I'm not going to,” was the answer given by the officer. Several members of the protest group reported that the police insisted that the jaywalkers were responsible for the traffic jam at the intersection. In fact there was a traffic jam all afternoon in spite of the fact that the protesters stayed on the sidewalk and after they had disbursed. There was high traffic volume, resulting in backup in all four directions at the intersection, as is usual on Saturday afternoon on Prospect Avenue. The police did nothing to direct traffic and try to clear the congestion. Fireman and Weissman were ordered to leave the scene, and the group was told that they would be arrested if they were on the grass beside the sidewalk or on the street. They were only allowed to be on the sidewalk. The group sustained a presence on Prospect Avenue through the afternoon. The group continues to protest each Saturday at 2pm at the corner of Prospect and Marketview. AWARE meetings are held at the Indy Media Center, 218 W. Main, Urbana IL, every Sunday from 5-7pm. All are welcome. For use by dryerase-members. Please send an email to imc-print@urbana.indymedia.org when reprinted. _________________________________________________________________ Add photos to your messages with MSN 8. Get 2 months FREE*. http://join.msn.com/?page=features/featuredemail From boyer2128 at msn.com Thu Nov 14 23:33:06 2002 From: boyer2128 at msn.com (SARAH BOYER) Date: Sun Feb 8 02:51:59 2004 Subject: [Dryerase] A Review of Civil Liberties, Nov. Public i Message-ID: A Review of Civil Liberties One Year After 9/11 by Stephen Hartnett As the failed hunt for Osama Bin Laden gives way to preparations for the invasion of Iraq, and as the passing of a year of mourning gives way to commercial exploitation and political opportunism, many Americans are beginning to realize that one of our most pressing duties is to protect the Constitution from the Patriot Act. Ponderously titled “An Act to Deter and Punish Terrorist Acts in the United States and Around the World, to Enhance Law Enforcement Investigatory Tools, and for Other Purposes,” the Act amounts to the most drastic revision of US civil liberties since the shameful Espionage Acts of 1917 and 1918. The Act’s final phrase, “and for Other Purposes,” sounds ominously like a blank check for government intervention. As various essays in the Public-i have noted throughout the past year, federal authorities have not hesitated to use that blank check to imprison immigrants and harass peace activists and dissident journalists. Nonetheless, the courageous work of supporters of liberty and justice has triggered a national debate regarding the Patriot Act. Focusing on recent developments, what follows is a review of this ongoing debate and its impact on the First, Fourth, Fifth, and Sixth Amendments. The First Amendment: Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press, or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances. Given the vitriol of John Ashcroft, including his infamous claim before the Senate Judiciary Committee that anyone criticizing the government “only aids terrorists, for they erode our national unity and diminish our national resolve,” many observers assumed in the months following 9/11 that the First Amendment was in dire jeopardy (see Ashcroft’s testimony in NY Times, 7 Dec 01). The shrill unison of the mass media and the restrictive use of “press pools” in war region coverage has also led many observers to argue that even without official forms of censorship public debate about the War on Terrorism is so circumscribed that it mocks the robust exchange of ideas envisioned in the First Amendment. But in a wonderful turn of events that again shows the strength of democracy in America, a diverse chorus of voices has risen to champion the First Amendment and to question the heavy-handed powers granted in the Patriot Act. The case of Rabih Haddad is instructive. Haddad is a Lebanese Muslim clergyman active in Ann Arbor with the Global Relief Foundation, a group charged by the Justice Department with (but as yet not proven guilty of) supporting terrorist activity. Combining this assumed link to terrorists with the fact that Haddad’s tourist visa had expired, federal agents arrested Haddad on December 14, 2001, and initiated secret deportation hearings. Although still technically innocent, Haddad has nonetheless been in custody for over nine months. The Detroit News and Metro Times (a solid weekly arts and politics paper roughly the equivalent of a combination of our CU City View and Public-i) appealed for the right to cover the hearings, charging that secret proceedings clashed with the First Amendment’s prohibition on abridging the freedom of the press. When the newspaper’s request was denied they joined forces with Congressman John Conyers, Jr. (MI, Dem) and the American Civil Liberties Union’s Immigration Rights Project and sued. The Federal District Court in Detroit overturned the District Court’s decision, which in turn prompted Ashcroft to appeal to the United States Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals, based in Cincinnati. In its remarkable decision rejecting Ashcroft’s appeal the Court wrote that “The First Amendment, through a free press, protects the peoples’ right to know that their government acts fairly, lawfully and accurately in deportation proceedings. When government begins closing doors, it selectively controls information rightfully belonging to the people. Selective information is misinformation” (NY Times, 27 August 02). In yet another blow to Ashcroft’s dream of establishing a post-Constitutional police state, Judge Nancy Edmunds of the Federal District Court in Detroit ruled recently that either Ashcroft would have to raise formal charges against Haddad in an open court of law or release him within ten days (NY Times, 18 September 02). These decisions recognize that free speech is useless without meaningful information and that secret hearings contradict the spirit of public scrutiny enshrined in the Constitution. Similar sentiments have been echoed in cases in New Jersey and Washington, thus demonstrating not only that free speech is alive and well but that the Patriot Act’s ham-fisted assault on civil liberties may provoke Constitution-defending courts to expand our understanding of the First Amendment (see Edward Klaris in The Nation, 10 June 02). The lesson here, then, is that activists should continue using alternative media outlets such as WEFT, the Public-i, and the Champaign-Urbana Independent Media Center to fight for peace and justice in full confidence that their First Amendment rights will be defended in the courts as the truest form of patriotism. The Fourth Amendment: The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized. The Patriot Act administers a beating to the Fourth Amendment. For example, in Section 213, “Authority for Delaying Notice of the Execution of a Warrant,” the Act amends the traditional understanding of the Fourth Amendment to grant the court serving a warrant the right to delay notice “if the court finds reasonable cause to believe that providing immediate notification of the execution of the warrant may have an adverse result.” Translated, that means that your Fourth Amendment right to be secure in your persons, houses, papers, and effects against unreasonable searches is dead. Indeed, the bulk of Title II of the Act, entitled “Enhanced Surveillance Procedures,” grants the federal government almost limitless powers “to intercept wire, oral, and electronic communications relating to terrorism” (that’s the heading of Section 201). The key to triggering these powers is the government’s ability to argue the “probable” threat of terrorist activity. Leaving aside the slippery nature of the term “probable,” measuring the Act’s impact on the Fourth Amendment essentially hinges on its definition of terrorism. In subsection F.IV of Section 411, “Definitions Relating to Terrorism,” the Act defines “terrorist activity” as covering anyone or any group that attempts “to commit or to incite to commit, under circumstances indicating an intention to cause death or serious bodily injury, a terrorist activity; to prepare or plan a terrorist activity; to gather information on potential targets for terrorist activity; or to solicit funds or other things of value for a terrorist activity.” This definition seems clear and sensible, but a more ominous definition is given in Section 802, where domestic terrorism is defined as any activity that is intended “to influence the policy of a government by intimidation or coercion.” Are strikes a form of coercion? Are non-violent acts of social disobedience acts of intimidation or coercion? We may answer that question in part by turning to President Bush’s executive order authorizing military tribunals, where he defined a terrorist as any non-US citizen who “has engaged in, aided or abetted, or conspired to commit, acts of international terrorism, or acts in preparation therefore . . . to cause injury to or adverse effects on the US, its citizens, national security, foreign policy, or economy” (NY Times, 14 Nov. 01). Although specifically targeting non-US citizens, it is clear that applying this broad definition of terrorism to the Patriot Act’s assault on search and seizure policy means that anyone working against US foreign policy may find their phones tapped, or that anyone protesting the WTO may find their email monitored, or that anyone protesting at nuclear missile sites may be held without warrant as a terrorist threatening national security. In short, the language defining terrorism is so broad---who defines “adverse effects”?---that it grants federal authorities a frighteningly wide range of options for turning protesters into terrorists and thus people for whom, according to the Patriot Act, traditional Fourth Amendment protections no longer apply. The only oversight for these powers is the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court of Review (FISA-CR), a three-member panel empowered to hear appeals regarding the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISA), an 11-member group established in 1978 to oversee government requests for wiretaps and other means of intelligence gathering above and beyond normal legal procedures. Although FISA has approved more than 10,000 such requests over the past twenty years without rejecting even one---a remarkable record of rubber-stamping government intervention!---it nonetheless argued in a memorandum dated 17 May 2002 that the FBI had committed “errors in some 75 FISA applications related to major terrorist attacks.” Furthermore, FISA observed in this memorandum that “In virtually every instance, the government’s misstatements and omissions in FISA applications and violations of the Court’s orders involved information sharing and unauthorized disseminations to criminal investigators and prosecutors.” Translated, this means that even FISA, a super-secretive Court with a history of approving wire-taps and other forms of government intervention, finds that Ashcroft has sought to use Patriot Act powers to bridge the gap between foreign intelligence operations and domestic criminal investigations, and to do so by lying repeatedly (FISA’s memorandum is available on-line at http://news.findlaw.com/cnn/docs/terrorism/fisa51702opn.pdf). By denying Ashcroft’s grab for more snooping authority FISA has led Ashcroft to appeal to the higher FISA-CR (see NY Times, 23 August 02 and 27 August 02). If FISA-CR upholds FISA’s refusal of Ashcroft’s request then Ashcroft’s last resort would be an appeal to the Supreme Court, hence bringing these issues regarding surveillance and the Fourth Amendment to the attention of the highest court in the land. Given the recent election debacle, however, it is hard to place any faith in the Supreme Court, meaning that activists concerned with protecting the Fourth Amendment should make use of the free speech rights discussed above to make these hearings part of our larger push to derail Ashcroft’s hijacking of the Constitution. For brevity’s sake I will discuss the Fifth and Sixth Amendments together: The Fifth Amendment: No person shall be held to answer for a capital, or otherwise infamous crime, unless on a presentment or indictment of a Grand Jury, except in cases arising in the land or naval forces, or in the Militia, when in actual service in time of War or public danger; nor shall any person be subject for the same offence to be twice put in jeopardy of life or limb, nor shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself, nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of the law; nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation. The Sixth Amendment: In all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right to a speedy and public trial, by an impartial jury of the State and district wherein the crime shall have been committed; which district shall have been previously ascertained by law, and to be informed of the nature and cause of the accusation; to be confronted with the witness against him; to have compulsory process for obtaining Witnesses in his favor, and to have the Assistance of Counsel for his defense. The most obvious blow to the Fifth and Sixth Amendments has been the FBI’s relentless dragnet for terrorists. The Justice Department reported recently that 1,200 suspects were arrested in the weeks following 9/11, that 750 of them were held on immigration violations, and that all but 74 of these 750 have since been expelled from the country (NY Times, 11 July 02). Thus the federal government uses INS technicalities to justify what amounts to sweeps through immigrant communities where the Fifth and Sixth Amendments appear to be dead. David Cole reports that the number of detainees may be as high as 2,000 (see The Nation, 23 September 02 and Amnesty Now, Spring 02), while Amy Goodman has repeatedly argued on “Democracy Now” (the Pacifica news show, available on WEFT, 90.1 FM, every weekday at 4:00) that there have been as many as 3,000 arrests in the New York City area alone. Consider the case of the Board of Immigration Appeals (BIA), the lone source of appeal for anyone caught in such INS-swathed War on Terror deportation proceedings. Currently a 19-member board, Ashcroft has just announced that he is slashing the BIA back to 11 members. Typically handling as many as 30,000 cases per year, Ashcroft has ordered the BIA to clear its backlogged cases by March of 2003, leaving the now reduced BIA roughly five months to handle an overwhelming number of cases. Do the math: if the BIA has to hear even 20,000 cases by next March, with 11 members serving, then that means that each judge will need to decide on 363 cases per month, 91 per week, 18 per day, 2 per hour (assuming a nine hour work day). This means that the Patriot Act grants the government the authority to make arrests where the only recourse, if lucky, is 30 minutes before an over-worked BIA judge. Additionally, Deidre Davidson reports that last year 36% of those who appeared before the BIA had no legal counsel, thus directly violating the Sixth Amendment (see “Immigration Rights Community Outraged,” available at www.talkleft.com). As ordered by Ashcroft, then, the BIA cannot possibly function as a court that honors due process or that provides defendants the aid of legal counsel. In short, thousands of immigrants are being deported at the whim of federal agents, thus practicing precisely the kind of unilateral and extra-judicial state powers that the Fifth and Sixth Amendments were meant to protect against. Nonetheless, as Champaign activists learned this summer when AWARE organized mutual aid for Ahmed Bensouda, grassroots pressure can shed light on such injustices and make it clear to federal authorities that we will not stand idly by while they arrest our neighbors. Checks and Balances in the Balance The news on civil liberties one year after 9/11 is therefore complicated and contested. Ashcroft’s attack on the BIA is clearly intended to destroy the possibility of checks and balances regarding immigrant deportation hearings, yet as the Haddad case demonstrates, US courts may not roll over as easily as Ashcroft and Bush may have hoped. A similar power struggle is evident in recent Washington gamesmanship. Suspecting as we all do that Ashcroft is attempting to circumvent the rule of law, the House Judiciary Committee (HJC) has recently requested information from the Justice Department regarding its handling of Patriot Act powers. The Justice Department has responded by sending written answers not to the HJC but to the House Intelligence Committee (HIC) (see NY Times, 15 August 02, A14). This misdirection is politically important, for the generally critical HJC plans to hold hearings into the response to 9/11, whereas the in-bed-with-the-administration HIC does not. In effect, then, the Justice Department has sent its answers to a dead letter office, to a bureaucratic black hole where no one will study their response. The HJC could therefore use support from activists in making an even more forceful and public push to make the Justice Department submit to the lawful process of checks and balances. As always, then, it is up to grassroots activists to use their First Amendment rights to hold the government accountable. Indeed, more than ever the old motto “use ‘em or lose ‘em” appears to be true: for democracy in America to survive, now is the time to make some noise. For more printed information on these topics see the most recent press releases from the American Civil Liberties Union at www.aclu.org, the materials collected under “Justice and Human Rights” by Amnesty International at www.amnestyusa.org/usacrisis, and the documents under “Homefront Confidential” by The Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press at www.rcfp.org; for audio updates listen to “Democracy Now” on WEFT, 90.1 FM, Monday through Friday from 4:00-5:00 and “Free Speech Radio,” also on WEFT, every Monday through Friday from 5:00-5:30; to get involved locally log on to www.anti-war.net. Stephen Hartnett is Assistant Professor of Speech Communication at The University of Illinois. He is the author of Democratic Dissent & The Cultural Fictions of Antebellum America, which recently won the Winans and Wichelns Memorial Award for Distinguished Scholarship in Rhetoric and Public Address. He is co-author with Robert James Branham of Sweet Freedom’s Song: “My Country Tis of Thee” and Democracy in America. His first book of poems, Democracy is Difficult: Investigative Prison Poems, will be published this spring. He has taught college in prisons for nine years and has spent the past four years working on The Waiting Room, an interactive art installation organized around community conversations about the death penalty. For use by dryerase-members. Please send an email to imc-print@urbana.indymedia.org when reprinted. _________________________________________________________________ The new MSN 8: smart spam protection and 2 months FREE* http://join.msn.com/?page=features/junkmail From boyer2128 at msn.com Thu Nov 14 23:35:43 2002 From: boyer2128 at msn.com (SARAH BOYER) Date: Sun Feb 8 02:51:59 2004 Subject: [Dryerase] Santa Claus Conquers the Longshoremen, Nov. Public i Message-ID: Santa Claus Conquers the Longshoremen By Ricky Baldwin The mainstream media have buried the biggest labor story in decades, far bigger than the Reagan Administration’s decision to fire the air traffic controllers. The Bush Administration has used the 1947 Taft-Hartley Act, not to break a strike, but to slap down a union already locked out by employers. Never before has the government used this power in a lockout. After months of hostile negotiations, mainly over outsourcing, the International Longshore and Warehouse Union resisted striking despite all media predictions. The business press had been whipping importers into a frenzy all summer, and shipping through West Coast docks had increased dramatically in anticipation. This created “more jobs than people to fill them,” (SF Chronicle), and the ILWU said the “speedup” was unsafe. Five workers had been killed on the docks in the last five years, the union noted, and called on workers to “work to rule.” Break the Rules, or Else “Work to rule” means that workers follow all safety and other rules strictly, depriving the employer of the unpaid or unsafe work - during breaks, lunch, or when safety procedures demand extra time - that workers normally provide. The Longshoremen also began refusing overtime and rotating shipping clerks so that no one clerk had to handle the busiest ports all the time. The most careful reader would have found virtually none of this information in the mainstream media. Instead, press reports were full of employer condemnations and accusations that workers were engaging in a “slowdown,” a legally unprotected activity that involves workers intentionally dragging their feet, now apparently also known as a “strike with pay,” (NYT). “I have said it before and I will say it again,” says Pacific Maritime Association president Joseph Miniace, “I will not pay workers to strike,” (SF Chronicle). The summer news of the speedup, sparse as it was before, was completely forgotten by the second day of the PMA’s lockout. And the workers’ perspective appeared as a kind of footnote, if at all: “The union denied that it had orchestrated slowdowns, saying it merely urged members to refuse overtime and to strictly follow safety rules.” But such radical suggestions were quickly balanced by the PMA’s plaintive explanations: “We just talked to the union’s international officers and asked them not to do these things---If they do not give us labor, then that's a strike. And if there's a strike, the gates would be locked,” (LA Times). The workers refused to call a strike, so the bosses did it for them. Blaming the Workers Owners closed the ports Sept. 27 and again Sept. 30, at a cost to the national economy estimated at $1 billion a day. Still the media blamed the workers. In an article titled, “Labor’s muscle on Pacific docks,” the Christian Science Monitor opined, “Few unions can cause this kind of ruckus any more.” The article recounted past strikes by coalminers, “threatening America’s ability to heat their homes,” and steelworkers, “roiling President Kennedy and national inflation,” before telling us that the waterfront dispute “would seem to hold the holiday season hostage, with millions of Christmas toys and televisions from Asia trapped on a conga line of ships left bobbing in untended harbors.” For added authority, we had chief economist for Merrill Lynch, Bruce Steinberg: “I don't think the government will let the economy be held hostage by some longshoremen.” Then the article compared the lockout to a “violent” 1934 strike, when police had killed several dockworkers. Backed by media cheerleading, the Bush Administration set the Taft-Hartley wheels in motion Oct. 7, ordering a one-day investigation. The President appeared to have his mind made up, reported the Associated Press, as of course he likely had well before the contract expired July 1. Business lobbyists had reported a “sympathetic ear” in the Oval Office all summer, citing “post-September 11 national security concerns,” (AP). Labor Secretary Elaine Chao warned the ILWU early in negotiations that the White House would intervene, possibly with federal troops. No national media explained the history of the Taft-Hartley Act’s passage after World War II, with FDR dead, amid a national backlash against organized labor, much less the history of the act’s usage. Taft-Hartley has always weakened the union and often failed to settle the conflict, concluded one study in 2000 (Arizona Law Review). But in the media, federal intervention was neutral and imminently necessary. All the News That Fits (Our Story) After all, Christmas was coming, and probably a war on Iraq. Gifts and military supplies had to flow freely. A long shutdown would completely cut off Hawaii and Alaska. This was such an exciting story that most media seemingly could not bear to include the facts. When the lockout came, the Longshoremen volunteered to handle shipments for Alaska, Hawaii, the US military and all cruise ships - without pay. With the help of a federal mediator, ILWU convinced the owners to allow this work, but the national media never reported this, or the dock owners’ weeklong opposition. Here and there in the national media, the careful reader might find a more revealing tidbit, such as the dock owners bragging that they would “keep the ports closed until the longshoremen agree to extend the expired contract,” (AP). But this was rare. Even when the union did agree to a 30-day extension, as demanded by Labor Secretary Chao - and the owners refused - the President invoked Taft-Hartley anyway, moving up his announcement 15 minutes to coincide with the ILWU’s announcement that the union had agreed (AP). Not to be upstaged by agreement when employing force, is of course vintage Bush. By then, it really should not have been surprising that the big media failed to report the historical significance of Bush’s decision. To do so would require focusing on the fact that the waterfront “walkoff” (CNN) did not exist, but a lockout did, and on why that difference is everything. Undisciplined minds might have wondered why the White House was so clearly and disingenuously siding with the bosses who “created a phony crisis,” as AFL-CIO Secretary-Treasurer Richard Trumka put it. “President Bush saves Christmas,” was the preferred theme. Jubilant reports almost always reminded audiences of the enormous cost of the port shutdown and, of course, how well paid those nasty Longshoremen are anyway - the ten percent whose jobs haven’t already been eliminated, that is. Nowhere does the press mention how much the bosses make. Negotiations during the Taft-Hartley “cooling off period” are likely to be ugly. Negotiators for the companies have already turned up at the bargaining table with armed guards, an outrageous “breach of protocol” and attempt at intimidation, as noted by the head of the Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service (FMCS press release). Nowhere in the national press is this story to be found, much less the suggestion that it might have been the bosses “holding the holidays hostage”---with the help of the White House. For use by dryerase-members. Please send an email to imc-print@urbana.indymedia.org when reprinted. _________________________________________________________________ Add photos to your e-mail with MSN 8. Get 2 months FREE*. http://join.msn.com/?page=features/featuredemail From boyer2128 at msn.com Thu Nov 14 23:38:30 2002 From: boyer2128 at msn.com (SARAH BOYER) Date: Sun Feb 8 02:51:59 2004 Subject: [Dryerase] The World Summit in Johannesburg, Nov. Public i Message-ID: The World Summit in Johannesburg: Notes from the Field by Michael Goldman On the drive from the Johannesburg airport to the wealthy white suburb of Sandton---host to the 2002 World Summit on Sustainable Development, the largest international conference ever---colorful billboards cajole Summit delegates to taste and enjoy the city’s tap water, boasting that it is as pure and clean as bottled water. Suspended above the airport freeway, Black township boys splash joyfully in an endless bath of fresh blue tap water. Unlike bottled water, the messages imply that Jo’burg’s water is free, clean, and for all to enjoy. Yet, after a few days of swimming through murky Summit politics, one learns that these omnipresent billboards were not purchased to assuage the fears of European delegates that African tap water is unsafe. Rather, the ANC-led, post-Apartheid South Africa has been busy packaging all of its public goods---water, electricity, sanitation, health services, transport systems---for sale to any willing buyer. From billboards to policy statements to business transactions, the message of the World Summit was loud and clear: Welcome to South Africa, where Everything is for Sale. Of the 60,000 Summit attendees, many were in town to buy (i.e., bargain-hunting large firms), sell (i.e., cash-strapped Southern governments), or mediate (i.e., entrepreneurial NGOs) these deals. Only ten kilometers down the road, in classic Apartheid-like geography, the rigidly segregated and decrepit township of Alexandra (“Alexî) houses Sandton’s underemployed labor force. Without good public transportation, health clinics, schools, or basic public services, Alex stands as a grim reminder of all that has not changed since liberation. Three hundred thousand people in Alex are packed into just over two square miles of land without access to affordable clean water, electricity, safe housing, or basic sanitation services. The key word is “affordable,” as many of these services have been provided but have now been shut off because people cannot afford to pay for them. In a dramatic political U-turn, the new politics of the post-liberation African National Congress (ANC) is one that conforms to the Washington consensus’ view of the market as “willing buyer, willing seller,” which has been imposed on poor (Black) South Africans in the most draconian fashion. Today, South Africa is still reeling from a deadly cholera outbreak that erupted from the worst wave of government-enforced water and electricity cut-offs. At the outset of the epidemic, which has infected more than 140,000 people, the government cut off one thousand people’s (previously free) water supply in the rural Zululands for lack of a $7 reconnection fee. In addition, 43,000 children die yearly from diarrhea, a function of limited or no water and sanitation services. The Wits University Municipal Services Project (http://www.queensu.ca/msp) conducted a national study last year that identified more than ten million out of South Africa’s forty-four million residents who had experienced water and electricity cutoffs. Epidemiologists say that these cutoffs were the catalysts to the national cholera crisis. Township activists have struck back by forming by day the Soweto Electricity Crisis Committee (SECC) of the Anti-Privatization Forum (APF), the Western Cape Anti-Eviction Campaign, and the Concerned Citizens’ Forum in Durban and working by night with stealth teams re-connecting homes before dawn (“Operation Khanyisa”, as it is called in Soweto, which the ANC has called the new “criminal culture” of the townships). When a stealth team disconnected the Jo’burg’s mayor’s home from electricity in April, they were met with live ammunition and arrest, spending eleven days in the notorious Apartheid Diepkloof prison without a bail hearing. What’s all this have to do with the World Summit on Sustainable Development? The changes occurring in the workers’ townships were mirrored in the agenda of this international forum. As a follow-up to the momentous Rio Earth Summit in 1992, the Jo’burg Summit’s mission was to assess the accomplishments and failures of the past ten years, and to agree upon a program of what should be accomplished over the next decade. The agenda emphasized five basic issues (or goods): Water, Energy, Health, Agriculture, and Biodiversity. After a series of preparatory committee meetings were held on each continent, with government officials, staff from major intergovernmental agencies, international environmental organizations, and respondents to “open” invitations to all members of so-called civil society, the agenda and its main policy document read like both a World Bank policy paper and a wish list for the world’s largest service sector firms (e.g., Vivendi, Suez, Saur, Bechtel, RWE/Thames Water). These firms, meanwhile, have spent these last few years signing large contracts with Southern governments to manage the basic public goods that can often make the difference between life and death for the poor majority. The most prevalent actors at the Summit were the World Bank and the IMF, and their “environmental agenda” has become unambigously neoliberal. Their water policy, for example, has become a new condition for future financing and debt relief. The threat is that the capital spigots will be shut off for those governments refusing to consider privatizing their water services. As overwhelming debt has toppled governments and created dire social conditions such as poverty and the present famine in southern Africa, and as populist movements demand that their governments stop servicing these odious and unjust debts, the Bank and IMF are using the lever of debt relief to force water policy reform on borrowing-country governments. Hence, privatization has become much more than a policy that economically benefits a few transnational firms; it also increases the political roles of international finance institutions and transnational firms in the global South. Thanks to the Bank’s arm-twisting, indebted governments are allowing Northern firms to become institutionally embedded in the everyday lifeworlds of the people of the South: Northern firms now provide the people’s water, power, health care, and garbage pick-up, and firms now even send them a consolidated bill to collect their money. It is to these firms that one must go if one needs basic goods for household survival. Reading the Summit Script The rise of this World Bank-style green neoliberal politics can be clearly read in the script of the 2002 Jo’burg World Summit. On one level, the storyline typical of these international forums remains the same: unenforceable targets, goals, heartless steamrolling by the U.S., and last-minute heroics by a few fearless Southerners. The defensive World Bank generates press releases that decry Europe and the U.S. for their huge subsidies for agribusiness; a Bank vice president even apologizes for the Bank’s role in the famine in southern Africa, by forcing highly indebted countries to eliminate subsidies to their farmers who could not afford the inputs to produce this season. Perhaps millions will starve as a consequence. The Bank’s presence can also be felt in the final agreements of the Summit. The official negotiations concluded like this: Under the category of water, government leaders agreed to halve by 2015 the number of people---now an estimated 2.4 billion---who live without basic water and sanitation (a guideline doggedly opposed by the U.S.). Under the category of energy, the U.S. and OPEC would not allow targets to pass for renewable energy, especially the Brazilian proposal endorsed by most countries to quadruple the world’s use of clean energy by 2010. The EU pushed a more modest plan for a 1 per cent increase over the next decade. Under the category of agriculture and fishing, the World Bank’s Global Environmental Facility (GEF) was given the authority to fight against desertification and to rebuild fish stocks “where possible” by 2015, all in very vague language that critics argue may undermine existing and more concrete agreements. U.S. and European delegates refused to phase out their own agricultural subsidies, support organics, or restrict genetically modified crops. Under the category of biodiversity, the Summit took a big step backwards in watering down existing wording to “stop and reverse the current alarming biodiversity loss” to language that could satisfy the U.S. The big news was under the unexpected category of corporate accountability: Due to a well-constructed campaign by North-South pressure groups, governments accepted that binding rules could be developed to govern the behavior of multinational companies, language which the U.S vigorously fought, even after the agreement had been signed. No timetable, however, was set for such negotiations. Finally, there remain the two most significant elements to the official World Summit. One was the “consensus” or the widespread acceptance by NGOs, foundations, governments, intergovernmental organizations, and of course corporations, of the mechanism of Public-Private Partnerships (PPPs) or the leasing of traditionally public services to private firms and the circumventing of international agreements and agencies that have often mediated between strong firms and weak states. In other words, as a complement to UN Secretary General Kofi Anan’s Global Compact with firms, no longer are the transnational corporations the silent partner and discrete beneficiary of the “world of development”; now, they become the legitimized main driver. The second, equally as pernicious, is the agreement to give the World Trade Organization (WTO), which seeks to eliminate all obstacles to “free trade,” the power to override international environment agreements. This marks the re-ascendancy of the WTO when some thought, post-Seattle, that the hubristic WTO was withering away. Cracks in Summit coalitions, however, showed during some decidedly anti-Summit events in town. Jo’burg was jammed with large public forums on land reform; on privatization of water and electricity; on fisheries and the rapidly decreasing access to fish resources by fishing communities; on evictions and poor housing conditions; on World Bank boycott campaigns; and on environmental issues such as GMO foods and nuclear power. Across the board, southern African-based groups were busy organizing across national borders throughout southern Africa, but also more widely as they brought together movement leaders from Brazil, India, Zimbabwe, Kenya, Mexico, and more. On the day the heads of state arrived to sign the World Summit’s final agreement, 20,000-30,000 marchers took to the streets under the banners of “Africa is Not For Sale” and “Phansi W$$D, Phansi!” (the Zulu command for “away with!” plus the initials of the World Summit). It was the first show of independent-left opposition since the ANC took power, and it reflected not just a politics of anti-ANC but a politics of anti-neoliberalism from around the world. From Bolivia to Ghana to Hungary, people’s movements are responding. In Jo’burg last month, perhaps we saw a glimpse of what’s to come, with tens of thousands of people organizing to resist what is officially called “sustainable development,” but is unambiguously a greened-over neoliberalism that has captured indebted Southern governments with few options but to comply. Michael Goldman, Assistant Professor of Sociology at the U of I, came here four years ago from Berkeley, CA and is currently teaching Transnational and Environmental Sociology. He is involved with an international network of scholars and activists educating people on the role of the World Bank and IMF in the global economy and in people's lives. His books include Privatizing Nature: Political Struggles for the Global Commons and the soon to be completed Imperial Nature: The New Politics and Science of the World Bank. For use by dryerase-members. Please send an email to imc-print@urbana.indymedia.org when reprinted. _________________________________________________________________ MSN 8 helps eliminate e-mail viruses. Get 2 months FREE*. http://join.msn.com/?page=features/virus From boyer2128 at msn.com Thu Nov 14 23:43:27 2002 From: boyer2128 at msn.com (SARAH BOYER) Date: Sun Feb 8 02:51:59 2004 Subject: [Dryerase] A Development Disaster: The Pak Mun Dam in Thailand, Nov. Public i Message-ID: A Development Disaster: The Pak Mun Dam in Thailand By Joe Rupp For the past half-decade Thailand's Pak Mun Dam has been recognized by environmental and human rights groups as a posterchild of insensitive, inequitable, top-down development strategy. Despite civil society's criticism, however, thousands of local villagers still squat in a makeshift, shantytown protest village only yards from the dam. They eat, sleep and commune in protest of the dam that has stolen their own livelihoods, their families' food source and their children's playground. Still today their demands to permanently decommission the dam, restore the river ecology and revitalize community health remain unmet. I recently had the opportunity to study about, work for, and live with this group of dispossessed villagers. HISTORY Pak Mun Dam is situated 5.5 kilometers upstream from the confluence of the Mun and the Mekong Rivers. Above the dam, the Mun’s waters are fed by a basin three times the size of the Netherlands. Because of such an expansive ecological base, environmental groups and biologists were concerned how the dam would affect migratory fish from the Mekong, one of the planet's most diverse waterways. Doctors raised the issue of schistosomiasis, a deadly worm that resides in stagnant water. Human rights organizations questioned how resettlement and compensation plans could prove effective if no topographical map of water level was released. Civil society fumed at the lack of participatory process, as countless villagers were told of their soon-to-be neighbor. After all, villagers had never requested the electricity or irrigation the dam was to provide. In 1990 the resolution to build the Pak Mun Dam passed the Thai parliament. The only environmental and social impact assessment performed for this project was completed seven years before. The study assessed a dam of different proportions than what was actually built and assumed it to be several kilometers downstream from its eventual site. Despite several dramatic displays of protest, including villagers strapping themselves to rocks slated for explosive removal, the project barreled forward. A thirteen percent budgetary boost from the World Bank buoyed the monster, and in 1994, voila, a dam was born. IN HINDSIGHT Eight years later, it's apparent the only factor keeping the dam in place is a fear of losing political face. It can safely be said, the project has been a failure on all fronts; project costs nearly doubled, ballooning from an expected 3.88 billion Baht to and eventual 6.6 billion. Power generation, estimated at 136 MW in the project proposal, barely scratches 21 MW, enough to power one Wal-Mart. Irrigation is non-existent. And tourism, the Thailand fallback? Well, remember that shantytown protest village? That's positioned on the “scenic overlook.” Even more unfortunate have been the effects unforeseen, at least by the government and the Electricity Generating Authority of Thailand (EGAT). According to the 1998 World Bank Operation and Evaluation Report, fish catch and income decreased by 50% from 1994. A study by the Thai NGO, Project for Ecological Recovery, found upwards of 75% reductions in incomes only a year later.. Vegetation has been destroyed. The dry-season riverbank, usually a fertile area for local agriculture, is inundated year-round. Mitigation efforts have proved obsolete. A fish ladder, unwisely modeled after the designs of the Columbia River and customized for the sleek-swimming Pacific Northwest Salmon has, not surprisingly, flopped. Said Dr. Pladprasop Suraswasdi, former director of the Royal Fisheries Department, "We know nothing about the pattern and behavior of fish migration." Prawns were introduced to the reservoir in hopes of reviving local fishing incomes but are unable to reproduce. Local, small-scale, subsistence fisherman, accustomed to the shallow rapids, have no equipment for the style of fishing the reservoir necessitates. Communities and families have suffered the brunt of the load, as children and women have been forced to seek low-pay work in Bangkok. The final judgment broke when the World Commission on Dams (WCD), a panel of NGOs, businessmen, politicians and engineers assembled by the World Bank, deemed Pak Mun a tragedy. Their case study of Pak Mun, released in 2000, states, "If all the benefits and costs were adequately assessed, it is unlikely that the project would have been built." DAMN DAMS Pak Mun is a textbook example of development projects that lack necessity and, for most persons, desirability. Large dam projects are especially prone to this tendency. Together with the WCD report, Patrick McCully's "Silenced Rivers" throws light on the inequities and drawbacks of dams which usually go unreported. Most often a dam is built, then justified, not vice versa. Those that lose out are those most dependent on and responsible for a healthy local environment: poorly represented, traditional communities. Those that win are transnational corporations, which are brought in for construction, financing and consulting. These companies benefit most from surplus electricity and suffer least from heightened water costs. After large chunks of profit and benefits flow over the border, what's left is a dam that typically fails to meet expected benefits and exceeds expected costs. The global anti-dam movement reflects a growing sentiment among many human rights and earth rights organizations who have watched this pattern repeat itself again and again in the South. Supported by NGOs such as the International Rivers Network and by committed political activists such as Arundhati Roy in India, local communities in the South are able to further strengthen their fight. HOW MANY MILES MUST WE MARCH? Twelve years after a handful of villagers strapped themselves to the rivers’ rocks, the protestor’s resolve has remained undeterred. Pak Mun villagers have joined forces with other dispossessed of Thailand to create the Assembly of the Poor, a large people’s organization that has limited but undeniable influence in national politics. They have organized a 2,000-mile protest march and raised more than ten protest villages throughout the nation including one in front of Bangkok’s Government House. In 2001 they were successful in lobbying the government to open the eight sluice gates of the dam in order to perform studies on the natural river ecology and the communities it supports. Released last month, this study notes the social and ecological damage far outweighs the benefits from electricity. Moreover, it illustrates the communities’ and ecosystem’s regenerative ability. Regardless, the Thai government is threatening to once again ignore the plight of villagers and reasoning of academics. Surely, as long as Thailand's powerful continue to take their cues from Western political, economic and corporate paradigms, the villagers’ fight to stay afloat will still remain. Joe Rupp is a student at the U of I majoring in Agriculture and Consumer Economics with a focus on International Trade, Policy and Development. This past year he spent over seven months in Thailand, first as a student and then as an informal correspondent between the study abroad program, the villagers of Pak Mun and several local and international NGOs. Joe says the experience really lit a fire inside him: “Thailand not only exposed me to a different way of life, culturally, economically and politically, it also clearly showed me the connection between them and us, the United States and the rest of the world. You can't understand that and not want to do anything.” For use by dryerase-members. Please send an email to imc-print@urbana.indymedia.org when reprinted. _________________________________________________________________ Add photos to your messages with MSN 8. Get 2 months FREE*. http://join.msn.com/?page=features/featuredemail From nyvoices at indypress.org Mon Nov 18 18:56:15 2002 From: nyvoices at indypress.org (Dania Rajendra) Date: Sun Feb 8 02:51:59 2004 Subject: [Dryerase] Voices That Must Be Heard Message-ID: <000001c28f66$76c7b1b0$6501a8c0@herman> Dear Dry Erase people, Thanks for welcoming me to your content exchange. Assuming it's alright with the group, I'll post Voices That Must Be Heard, a weekly digest of New York's immigrant, ethnic and community press stories, every week. Just a note about permissions, though. We're pleased to present the work of these journalists and encourage other publications to pick it up. We do not own the rights-they rest with the source publication. So to reprint a story, you can contact the paper directly or you can contact me and I'll help you get permissions. Often papers don't charge for reprints, but it's necessary to check in with them. We ask for a courtesy line, and a link. We do own the rights to the collection as a whole, so if someone wants to pick an entire issue, or a special section, give me a shout. I'll post an abbreviated version of all of this when I post Voices, but I just wanted to give that All the best, and looking forward to seeing your stuff. Dania. Dania Rajendra Editor, Voices That Must Be Heard Independent Press Association - New York www.indypressny.org * 212/279-1442 * 143 West 29th St., 901, New York, NY 10001 Voices That Must Be Heard: Election Special Section Find the full text at www.indypressny.org . A special election week extra! 8 November 2002. Advisory Editor: Abu Taher, Executive Editor of Bangla Patrika, an IPA-member publication. Elections Special Section: Nice guy finished second by Adam Dickter, Jewish Week, 8 November 2002. English language. In retrospect, the McCall campaign was ?too cautious? and lacking focus, according to some politcal observers. They criticized McCall?s campaign for downplaying the historic nature of his candidacy as the state?s first black major-party candidate for governor. Some fear backlash over weak Jewish support. MORE. Black voter apathy eroding black political and economic power by Walter Smith, New York Beacon, 6 November 2002. English language. We?ve come too far, marched too long, prayed too hard, wept too bitterly, bled too profusely, and died too young to not take advantage of the battles we?ve won. As the Black media, we need to do a better job of educating our community on the importance of voting. MORE. Chinese Americans pleased by Pataki?s landslide by Xiaoqing Rong, Sing Tao Daily, 6 November 2002. Translated from Chinese by Yik Kong. ?In New York, the Republican Party is the minority party. However, its policies match the visions of many Chinese Americans,? said Republican Hsieh Mei-Lin. Others disagree, saying that although Pataki has a good record of achievement, the governor?s failure to address workers? problems after September 11th exposes his weakness. MORE. David Chong lost his third bid for Palisades Park City Council by an unexpectedly large margin by Joo-Chan Kim, Korea Times New York, 6 November 2002. Translated from Korean by Jeongwoo Han. Republican David Chong received a total of just 865 votes for the Palisades Park, N.J. City Council. Chong's campaign staff called the result shocking, since this year's total was much less than last year's. MORE. Whom should American Muslims vote for? Republicans, Democrats or the Green Party by Wakil Ansari, Urdu Times, 18 October 2002. Translated from Urdu by Rehan Ansari. In the 2000 presidential elections, many Muslims, including me, championed the cause of the Republican Party. Disillusioned by Bush?s support for Israel, the War on Terror, the USA Patriot Act, racial profiling, roundups and detentions in our community, I now support the Green Party. If you look at the platform of the Green Party, you will realize that Muslim Americans have a lot to gain from supporting it. MORE. Korean-Americans have the highest voter turnout ever by Jun-Whan Lee, Jong-Whun Kim, Korea Daily News, 6 November 2002. Translated from Korean by Jeongwoo Han. Too busy to vote: Filipino-American voters tend to become apolitical due to present by Emelyn Tapaoan, Filipino Express, 8 November 2002. English language. Impact in the Hispanic community by Mariana Reyes Angler?, Hoy, 7 November 2002. Translated from Spanish by Hillary Hawkins. Filipino supporters blame Gonzalez defeat on lack of support from Fil-Am community by Anthony D. Advincula, Filipino Express, 8 November 2002. English language. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://lists.cu.groogroo.com/mailman/archive/dryerase/attachments/20021118/a45bb7e0/attachment.htm From editors at agrnews.org Mon Nov 18 16:07:50 2002 From: editors at agrnews.org (AGR) Date: Sun Feb 8 02:51:59 2004 Subject: [Dryerase] AGR INS conduct Message-ID: <5.1.0.14.0.20021118170330.00ac5b80@buncombe.main.nc.us> Asheville Global Report www.agrnews.org Reprinting permitted to non-profit orginizations and the member publications of the dryerase news wire. New Jersey Groups outraged over INS conduct By Shawn Gaynor Asheville, North Carolina, Nov. 11(AGR)? Over a year after the 9/11 attacks on the United States hundreds of immigrants continue to be held by the INS (Immigration and Naturalization Services). But citizens in New Jersey are beginning to speak out against the detentions, demanding a release of INS detainees who they claim are being held due to their race and religious beliefs, and not because of evidence that they are part of a terrorist organization. On Nov. 9, roughly 50 concerned citizens gathered on Main Street in Montclair, NJ, to raise awareness about the detentions. Local high school students and residents from the immigrant community joined members of Anti-Racist Action (ARA), New Jersey Free the Detainees! (NJFtD), Montclair College Arab Student Association, and others, in calling for an end to the detentions, and a Justice Department investigation in what the groups are characterizing as reprisal beatings of detainees for an Oct. 12 demonstration at the Passaic County Jail. ?We will not stand by as the current state of racist policies continues to allow for the unjust, arbitrary detentions of hundreds upon hundreds of individuals. We will speak out against the actions of our government and provide a voice for those who are silenced behind prison walls,? said a statement from New Jersey ARA. At the Oct. 12 demonstration police were out in numbers, moving protesters from a permitted demonstration area in the front of the jail to an area in the back and surrounding them. Following the demonstration a number of complaints surfaced of reprisal beatings in the jail. According to the New Jersey Action Network, on Oct. 16 a dozen guards and a dog attacked and beat a Jamaican detainee, Sebastian Allen, and another Jamaican detainee, who declined to give his name. On the following day, guards beat a third detainee, Tony Bonne, from the Ivory Coast. ?This is the second case of retaliation after protests at the New Jersey county jails demanding the release of the detainees,? said Jeannette Gabriel of Workers Democracy Network. Police presence at the high profile Main Street demonstration was limited, with only about a half dozen officers on foot patrolling the event. Aside from the alleged reprisals, many of the detainees have been held months without legal council. According to New Jersey ARA the situations for some of the detainees has been even more severe. ?Two dozen detainees were brought to Union County Jail in Elizabeth, New Jersey after acting out their frustrations about jail conditions in a previous jail. For three days, detainees from Albania, India, Ghana, and elsewhere were beaten, held naked, made to crawl on their hands and knees through a gauntlet of jail officers, and forced to chant ?America is Number One.? One Indian detainee claimed that between beatings, correctional officers used pliers to pinch the skin on his genitals and squeeze his tongue.? Following the Sept. 11 attacks thousands of immigrants were rounded up by federal authorities. Most of the detainees now being held are from a second phase of roundups that started in February of this year, said Eric Learner of NJFtD!. ?Officially they have been picked up on minor immigration violations. However there are 800,000 people in the United States with these violations, and this is a very select group. They have targeted Muslim males age 15-45.? ?Certain communities of people have been scapegoated as terrorists, and it is our job to demand our basic civil liberties and civil rights back ? to demand that all of the INS detainees are freed!? said Diane Krauthamer from NJFtD. The groups involved called the protest a success and say they plan to continue their campaign for the immediate release of the detainees. ?We will not allow the United States government to get away with the prosecution and persecution of immigrants in the name of ?national security? or ?terrorist defense?,? stated New Jersey ARA. From editors at agrnews.org Mon Nov 18 16:11:49 2002 From: editors at agrnews.org (AGR) Date: Sun Feb 8 02:51:59 2004 Subject: [Dryerase] AGR Culture a village is born Message-ID: <5.1.0.14.0.20021118170754.00ad1458@buncombe.main.nc.us> Asheville Global Report www.AGRNews.org Reprinting permitted for non-profit use, and by the members of the DryErase news wire. From the earth, a village is born By Brendan Conley Mun Yuen Village, Thailand, (AGR) Nov. 7? In the mountains of northeastern Thailand, a quiet revolution is taking place. A diverse group of people who came together to construct a sustainable village has found that they are building much more. The group includes Buddhist monks, Thai students and professionals, villagers displaced by development projects, and farang -? Westerners -? several hundred people in all. They?re spending a month in rural Chaiyaphum province, building Mun Yuen, a sustainable, self-sufficient community, and the nation?s first earthen village. ?We are building a community, not just houses,? said Thanai Uthaipattrakoon. He quit his job as a conventional architect to teach (and learn) natural building. ?I want people to know that they can design and build their own home,? he said. As he spoke, a group of saffron-robed monks passed by with wheelbarrows full of earth. They deposited their load in a shallow pit where young, sunburned Americans and Europeans joined Thai students mixing clay mortar with their bare feet. Above them, a local villager balanced atop a wall of adobe as he wiggled the last earthen brick into place. ?This is the way to learn about natural building,? said Uthaipattrakoon, looking around. ?You learn by doing, by really experiencing it. At first I thought my role would be to help design the buildings, but now I am really getting my hands dirty, working the hardest I have ever worked.? Uthaipattrakoon smiled as he looked up at the first half-finished building, a community kitchen and meeting hall. ?This building is beautiful,? he said. ?But in a way, the structure is not as important as the knowledge and spirit that we are building together.? Bahn din As Thailand moves further down the path of Western development, the need for alternatives is becoming hard to ignore. Bangkok, one of the world?s most polluted cities, is a sprawling, haphazard metropolis with massive daily traffic jams and few open spaces. Corruption pervades the country?s military-dominated government, and International Monetary Fund (IMF)-sponsored mega-development projects are extracting Siam?s natural resources, leaving polluted air and water behind. As the country becomes deforested, its famed biodiversity is rapidly eroding. For Janell Kapoor, one alternative is obvious: build with mud. ?I think we all have an awareness that the world we?re living in doesn?t make sense,? said Kapoor, an Asheville, North Carolina-based natural building instructor. ?Whether it?s being stuck in traffic, having no time to play with your kids, or seeing violence on television,? we all realize that something is not right.? For Kapoor, these small imbalances are symptoms of the accelerating spread of capitalism and consumerism -? the process of corporate globalization. ?The work we?re doing here is part of what you might call a localization movement,? said Kapoor. ?Look at a conventional house in the US or Europe, and try to track every part of that house -? where the materials came from, how they were created, how all the machines and tools were made. By the time you?re done, you?ll have traveled the world, strip-mined mountains, clear-cut forests, exploited workers, and polluted the earth, all to build a house. ?On the other hand, look at how we?re building these houses,? said Kapoor. ?We?re using clay from right next to the site, bamboo and rice husks harvested nearby, rainwater, and hand tools. Everything is local.? At least three construction techniques are being used here to create bahn din -? mud houses. Adobe bricks are made by mixing earth, rice husks, and water. Wooden forms are used to shape the mud into bricks, which are left to dry in the hot, arid climate. A thinner mix is used for mortar. Cob construction is different: a thick mud-straw mixture is sculpted by hand in layers to form walls. The wattle and daub method is used to fill in walls between wooden posts or columns of bricks: a weave of split bamboo or branches is coated with mud plaster. Here in Mun Yuen, thatch roofs provide shelter from sun and rain. The villagers here were displaced from their former homes and faced with building anew. They wanted to avoid contributing to deforestation, and they wanted to build simply and cheaply, to avoid adding to their debt. After Kapoor led an earthen building workshop at Wongsanit Ashram near Bangkok last year, the villagers decided that bahn din structures were the answer. The struggle For Noi Singna, one of the villagers here, the road to Mun Yuen has been long and hard. It began for her 13 years ago, with the construction of Lam Khan Choo dam. The huge government development project would destroy her home. ?Our life before the dam was good,? said Singna. ?We supported ourselves by fishing and collecting bamboo shoots and vegetables from the forest.? Plua Chamnan, 70, also lived in the vicinity of the dam. ?The government told us that when they built the dam they would also build an irrigation canal. They said we would be able to grow more rice than ever before,? she said. ?But this was not true. They never built the canal, and the whole area was flooded, so nothing could grow.? Faced with the destruction of their livelihood, the homeless villagers traveled to Bangkok, where they intended to press the Prime Minister for compensation. When he refused to meet with them, they organized a peaceful invasion, scaling the walls of the Parliament building. Riot police repressed this demonstration, knocking protesters from the walls to the ground, and beating and tear-gassing the villagers, including children and elderly people. In the aftermath, 225 protesters spent three days in jail. Still homeless, the displaced people set up camp in front of Parliament, fasting and demonstrating for eight months. They were joined by people displaced by two other dam projects, and supporters organized by the group Assembly of the Poor. Finally, following a change in government, the protesters were offered a loan to purchase land. ?The government gave us a 7 million baht [approximately $160,000] loan to purchase this 570-rai [220 acre] area of land,? said Singna. ?We decided to set up a cooperative to accept the loan,? she added. ?This gave us more legitimacy in the eyes of the government, and it made our group stronger. As individuals we had no power, but we learned through our protest that collectively we had power.? The struggle did not end with the purchase of the land. A forest fire burned the area recently, one that the villagers believe was intentionally set. Illegal logging takes place on national forest land nearby, and the loggers perceive the villagers as witnesses to their crime. When an observation tower was built at Mun Yuen for stargazing, loggers burned it down, believing that it was being used to spy on them. With the arrival of dozens of volunteer builders and the construction of the first clay walls, the village has reached a turning point. ?It?s such a warm feeling having all these people here, working and exchanging knowledge,? said Singna. The community is unique in Thailand -? in a way, the European-American concept of an intentional community has been imported here. The village will serve as a demonstration and learning center in the future, open to students of ecology and natural building. The residents have begun a reforestation project, planting thousands of fruit and hardwood trees. Mun Yuen seems certain to live up to its name -? the words mean ?long lasting.? The spirit Phra Sutape Chinawaro, a monk who is teaching Buddhist meditation to the builders here, knows something about struggle. As a member of the Communist Party in the 1970s, he joined a guerrilla army to fight for a Marxist revolution in Thailand. After the revolutionaries reconciled with the government, Chinawaro worked as a secular activist and then became ordained as a monk, to work for change in a much different way. ?I discovered that if people use violent means, they will never be done with fighting,? said Chinawaro. Peaceful change, he said, begins with looking inward. ?If you want freedom from capitalism, you need freedom of mind,? he said. ?If you want a peaceful community, you must have a peaceful heart.? The idea that inner change is necessary for social change is at the heart of engaged Buddhism, a philosophy that pervades the project here. Indeed, one of its foremost proponents, Sulak Sivaraksa, a Thai social critic, founded Wongsanit Ashram, which supports the building project. Sivaraksa, author of Seeds of Peace, has been imprisoned and exiled for his criticism of the Thai government. He promotes a philosophy of social change that is radically opposed to corporate globalization and ?the religion of consumerism,? and deeply rooted in the Buddhist ethic of self-awareness and mindfulness. Buddhism is central to Thai culture, but the spirit seems to have affected the farang here too. Far from the Western missionary attitude, the foreigners are here to learn. ?I?m still detaching from a very materialist, consumerist way of life,? said Eliana Uretsky of Berkeley, California. ?Here, I feel like I?m learning how to be a human being.? ?I?m gaining a much greater presence of mind about my role in my own community,? said Julie Covington of Asheville, North Carolina. ?In the past, that was a passive role. Now I feel a need to be active, to pass on this sense of community.? For Katherine Foo, a Wellesley, Massachusetts resident now volunteering at Wongsanit Ashram, ?Buddhism provides a philosophical framework for activist work? -? a spiritual motivation that is missing from secular organizing. Phra Chinawaro believes that some great motivation is necessary to stop the current large-scale exploitation of people and the earth. ?The American capitalist empire is infecting the whole world,? he said. The struggle of displaced people against government corruption and the building of sustainable communities are signs of hope, he said, but the journey toward peace and justice begins in each individual. Indeed, the infectious consumerism that drives corporate globalization is rooted in individual desire, multiplied by cultural and economic forces. Buddhism, with its ethic of selflessness and non-attachment, offers a way out. Seated on the ground, Chinawaro glanced up at the adobe wall towering above him and reflected for a moment. ?There are people who know the difference between the bad society and the good, and they have the ability to choose, to act,? the monk said. ?They have a great responsibility, and I place my hope in them.? Natural building projects in Thailand and the US are ongoing. For more information, see www.kleiwerks.com (email janell@kleiwerks.com) or www.sulak-sivaraksa.org. From editors at agrnews.org Mon Nov 18 16:20:33 2002 From: editors at agrnews.org (AGR) Date: Sun Feb 8 02:52:00 2004 Subject: [Dryerase] AGR Asheville Police Dept Message-ID: <5.1.0.14.0.20021118171714.00ad4608@buncombe.main.nc.us> Asheville Global Report www.AGRNews.org Reprinting permitted for non-profit use, and by the members of the DryErase news wire. Photo Available at http://www.agrnews.org/issues/199/index.html AGR editor injured by Asheville Police By Nicholas Holt Asheville, North Carolina, Nov. 6 (AGR)? Early on the morning of Nov. 1, following police disruption of a Halloween-inspired midnight marching band parade in downtown Asheville, city resident and Asheville Global Report editor Eamon Martin was arrested by one or more members of the Asheville Police Department (APD). Martin, who was injured during the arrest, feels both the arrest and the degree of force employed by the police were unjustified. Martin recalls immediately before his arrest that he stood with his hands in the air and verbally expressed his compliance with the officers. During his arrest, Martin?s face was thrown against a street curb. As a result, his right eye was so badly swollen that he was unable to open it for three days and was forced to miss a day of work. Martin recalls the arrival of police as the only down-side to what had been an enjoyable Halloween celebration. ?[The parade] was really large and festive and was making its way through downtown and looked like a lot of fun ? and it was. We had a great time. People were just dancing and singing and carrying on to a marching band,? says Martin, who estimates the crowd size at 150 - 200. ?The next thing I know, we were penned in by cops. A cop car was coming up through the parade slowly and telling people to disperse. So, I walked away from the cop car. I was pretty annoyed at this, so I barked out ?Fuck this,? and immediately noticed that a cop, who I found out later was Officer D. Loveland, got out of her car.? Martin then ran from the police. He did this because of ?a previous altercation in which I was arrested for watching someone get ticketed and was found guilty. I didn?t want to have that happen again.? That previous arrest and subsequent conviction left Martin with a cynical view of justice in the city of Asheville. During his trial, he says he observed a disturbing level of apparent camaraderie between his public defender and the officer. ?I got the overall sense, especially from the judge that city workers are looking out for each other and aren?t going to embarrass each other, or give each other any trouble, to keep the status quo relations of power the way they are,? says Martin, explaining his desire to avoid conflict with the police that early morning last week. ?So I tried to avoid arrest. I ran, and thought I was doing what they wanted ? I was dispersing.? Seeing that he was being chased, Martin says he stopped running after about half a block. ?I put both arms in the air, and I said ?I give up, I?m compliant, I?m compliant,? and then, about two seconds later, the next thing I know, I?m on the pavement and my head was whacked into the curb. ?My face hit the curb. I?m lucky it wasn?t my teeth or my nose.? Martin said that when he asked Loveland, ?Did you just smack me down on the pavement because I said the word ?fuck??? the police officer replied that that was indeed the case. Martin notes that, although the police ?couldn?t hear me say [he was compliant], they could hear me mutter an obscenity from inside a squad car.? City of Asheville ordinance code Article 1, Sec. 11-9 does forbid ?loud or boisterous swearing in any public place in the city,? but Martin was not charged with this offence. Martin is charged with resist, delay and abstruct. His citation form, as filled out by Officer Loveland, reads that he ?Did appear intox [sic] and disruptive in a public place to wit: cursing by saying fuck this when told to dispurse [sic].? ?I had been drinking,? says Martin. ?but I don?t know that I would have called myself intoxicated.? The police report gives no record of Martin being administered a breathalizer or otherwise tested for blood alcohol content. Also arrested was AGR volunteer Shane Perlowin. ?I was walking down the street and saw Eamon being chased down by some cops and so, like I do for anybody, I walked over [because] I was concerned there wouldn?t be anybody to view what was going on,? Perlowin says. Perlowin says a police officer threatened him with a tazer gun and announced ?I?ll fucking zap your ass,? and ordered Perlowin to back up, which Perlowin says he did. Perlowin says he was then handcuffed tightly enough to leave bruises and taken to the jail where he says he was groped and sexually harassed by the officer who frisked him. North Carolina state law allows for the use of force during arrests (NCGS 15a-401(d)) but the document is clear in its prohibition of abuse of such police power: ?Nothing in this subdivision [of the general statute] constitutes justification for willful, malicious, or criminally negligent conduct by any person which injures or endangers any person or property, nor shall it be construed to excuse or justify the use of unreasonable or excessive force.? Asheville?s citywide regulations are even more explicit: ?Officers will use only the minimum amount of force necessary to achieve lawful objectives. Any use of excessive force may subject the officer to disciplinary action, civil damages, and criminal prosecution.? (Policy Number: 1030) The same document states that ?Whenever any officer uses any force that results in serious physical injury to another person, the Chief or his designee will place the officer on administrative leave or assign him to duties that do not require carrying a firearm, until completion of the investigation. [And] relieve the officer of his weapon after the incident Any officer involved..[shall] attend a preliminary counseling session with the Employee Assistance Program.? As of press time, the APD did not provide the AGR with requested information regarding Officer Loveland or other officers present at Martin?s arrest in relation to these regulations. The APD?s ?Mission,? ?Values,? and ?Guiding Principals? include the following: u ?We subscribe to the principle that services will be delivered in a manner which preserves and upholds democratic values within our neighborhoods.? u ?The mission of the Asheville Police Department is to provide community leadership, to promote individual responsibility, and a commitment to improving the City?s quality of life through crime control and public safety while serving all people with fairness and respect.? u ?We believe that quality service is achieved by maintaining the highest standards of honesty, trustworthiness, and mutual respect.? u ?The Asheville Police Department [work is] consistent with the following principles: Respect for human rights ? [Italics added]. Martin says he encountered little respect, fairness, or regard for his human rights during his experience and notes that he feels the behavior of the APD resembled that of ?bullies who could exercise brutality with impunity I found my rights to be very flexible and highly negotiable as far as they were concerned.? After being held for three or four hours, Martin was released. ?Right before they let me go, one of the corrections officers said something to the effect of ?Are you gonna sue us? Don?t sue us. I mean, you can go ahead and sue us, but you?re not gonna win, because we?re well protected and backed by the state,?? he says, noting ?I was slightly amused by this remarkable honesty.? From ckln-news at ryesac.ca Mon Nov 18 18:11:12 2002 From: ckln-news at ryesac.ca (ckln NEWS 88.1fm) Date: Sun Feb 8 02:52:00 2004 Subject: [Dryerase] "Canadians say no to war" Message-ID: <3DD981A0.D600F9B9@ryesac.ca> November 18, 2002 (script from radio feature) Canadians took to the streets in 25 cities and towns across the country this weekend, to denounce the economic sanctions and possible war against Iraq, and to call on the Canadian government to resist U.S. pressure to participate in a war. In Toronto, an estimated 6,000 people braved one of the first cold days of winter to express their opposition, in Toronto's largest anti-war demonstration in years. Among the speakers was Marie Clarke Walker, executive Vice President of the Canadian Labour Congress. Through their member unions, the Canadian Labour Congress represents two million Canadian workers. "The Canadian Labour Congress calls on Prime Minister Jean Chretien to use his statesmanship - I thought he did have some - and all the power of influence that Canada professes in world affairs, to intervene as a third party on the side of peace," she said. Ali Mallah, president of the Canadian Arab Federation, highlighted the links between the drive for war abroad, and racial profiling and discrimination at home. "It's time we stood up my friends, and said no to racism, no to discrimination, no to war and no to hate! It's time we stood up and said yes to democracy, yes to civil rights, yes to multiculturalism, yes to Arabs and yes to Muslims," he said. Zafar Bangash, editor of Crescent International, waved a Canadian flag as he spoke. "When Canadians travel around the world, they carry this flag as a sign of dignity and honour, and people around the world honour this flag because they see Canada as a peace-loving country. But you know something? When Americans travel around the world, they hide their identity, because the Americans are hated around the world because of the wars that their government imposes on other people. What we must do is prevent our government from dragging this flag in the mud." After a spirited march through the downtown core, the hip-hop crew Dope Poet Society played to the crowd, which included many youth from all of Toronto's communities. "Hey yo, let me ask you all a question here How many bombs did the U.S. drop last year? And while they claim to be setting people free How many lives are taken in the name of democracy?" No Canadian peace demonstration would be complete without an appearance by the Raging Grannies, a network of elderly women who express themselves in song. "The wealthy nations of the West Always think that they know best Selling arms with profits high Never mind how many die." Canada's weekend of rallies came just days after Saddam Hussein agreed to allow weapons inspectors back into Iraq, and also just after a visit from U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell to Ottawa. At a press conference held with Powell on November 14, Foreign Affairs Minister Bill Graham said that Canada supports the U.S. threat to use force against Iraq if Saddam thwarts weapons inspectors. However, Graham is convinced that a war can now be avoided. He said: "I think that Iraq will conform, I think its neighbours are now putting pressure on it to say look there is no other alternative and it's very much thanks to the iron role of the U.S. that we've got the pressure there to make sure that this happens." Canada's Parliament debated the issue of Canadian involvement in a war against Iraq for three days in October. According to Joe Comartin, a Member of Parliament from the industrial city of Windsor, Ontario: "The Liberals were interesting because that party is clearly divided. A lot of backbenchers, and they did speak out in the debate, absolutely oppose the unilateral action by the US or the US and the UK together. But the Cabinet is under great pressure, we know this, from the United States, to follow the American line. And the fear is that, when we look at our past practices for the better part of 12 or 15 years, if the US put on pressure, whether it was the Mulroney government or the Chretien government, they always caved in." Of the opposition parties, the Canadian Alliance is staunchly in support of U.S. policy. But the Bloc Quebecois, which holds 44 of the seats in the province in Quebec, the Conservative Party and the New Democratic Party, are all opposed to a U.S. led war. Comartin is a member of the New Democratic Party, which will oppose military action against Iraq even if the UN approves. From dr_broccoli at hotmail.com Fri Nov 22 13:42:32 2002 From: dr_broccoli at hotmail.com (Shawn G) Date: Sun Feb 8 02:52:00 2004 Subject: [Dryerase] panhandling ordinance hits Asheville Message-ID: Asheville Global Report WWW.AGRNews.org Reprinting permitted for non-profit use and to the members of the Dryerase news wire. New, stricter panhandling ordinance hits Asheville By Liz Allen Asheville, North Carolina, Nov. 19 (AGR)— Asheville Chief of Police Will Annarino presented a proposed anti-begging, sleeping outdoors ordinance at approximately 10:30pm at the Asheville City Council meeting on Tuesday, Nov. 12. The ordinance was passed unanimously by city council members despite requests from a vocal majority of citizens at the meeting asking the council to seek more community-oriented solutions to the area’s homelessness problem instead of resorting to legal measures. All types of solicitation are now illegal in the central downtown area, including those of the Salvation Army, the Girl Scouts, and street musicians with open guitar cases or hats asking for tips. Although inquired about by council members Holly Jones and Jim Ellis, permits are unlikely to be a possible alternative for such groups. According to city attorneys, it is necessary to ban all forms of solicitation to avoid an unconstitutional restriction on speech content. Bruce Elmore, representing the WNC American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) at the council meeting, called the criminalization of begging or sleeping in public an infringement on First Amendment freedom of speech and assembly rights. In the judiciary, restrictions on the content of speech must survive a “strict scrutiny” review — meaning that in order to pass constitutional muster, a compelling government interest must be present. Elmore stated he felt the court would find attractiveness to tourists and the free flow of pedestrian traffic to be important but not compelling governmental interests. Council members expressed interest in expanding the ordinance to other sections of Asheville, such as Montford and Tunnel road. However, the city attorney felt this would not be legally possible. The ordinance was specifically tailored to only apply to the central downtown area in order to fit current constitutional restrictions on “time, place, and manner.” Selective enforcement was a concern voiced by members of the public and reiterated by Councilperson Brian Peterson. “I know if the Chief [Annarino] saw a criminal offense he would give a ticket.” Asheville resident Allie Morris expressed doubt that she would receive a citation if she were caught short of money and asked a stranger for change “because I’m a cute little white girl who appears to have a job and a house and it’s socially acceptable for me to exist.” In response to predictions of selective enforcement, the city attorney pointed out that the term is “prosecutorial discretion” and it is common police practice. In supporting the bill, several council members expressed their feelings that the homeless issues should be addressed by organizations such as churches and shelters. Council woman Holly Jones, in a teary-eyed statement supporting the ordinance, stated that by choosing downtown establishments for dining out and gift-buying she supports downtown with her checkbook. Additionally, she was horrified when she heard that two homeless people died in a fire “two blocks away from my front door.” She asked that in passing the ordinance, initiative should be taken to create a social justice task force, $20,000 should be given to the AHOPE shelter to expand its hours to Saturdays, and that the city create more public restrooms. The issues of restrooms and money were postponed for further decision. Concil member Joe Dunn expressed doubt and concern over giving the shelter money, saying it could cost money that should be used for public restrooms. A variety of groups and citizens were represented at the meeting, the majority speaking against the ordinance. Martha Are, co-chair of a local homeless coalition and director of area shelter, the Hospitality House, pointed out that on any given night in Asheville there are a hundred people more than the local shelters can accommodate. “If this ordinance passes as is, I don’t know what to tell people when we close,” said Are. “The sick joke is Immodium AD and No Doz.” Are said most people on the street want to be law-abiding but don’t have a choice when it comes to basic bodily functions. A representative from Helpmate, a local shelter for battered women, compared the ordinance’s rigid control over another person’s right to sleep or relieve themselves to cases of domestic abuse. “The abuser sets up the rules of the rules such that the rules have elements of living that the abused can’t possibly live up to,” offered the spokesperson. In presenting the ordinance, Chief Annarino stated that he felt the ordinance is necessary to eliminate street nuisances that impact traffic and tourism. He made the claim that people give panhandlers money because they are afraid of what might happen if they refused. He also expressed the belief that panhandlers have prior criminal records and may use the money to buy drugs or alcohol. In a phone interview, Annarino explained that the violation of the ordinance is a Class III misdemeanor, not subject to jail time but carries a $50­500 fine decided on by a judge. He said before citations are issued, the APD’s first task is to educate people on the ordinance; talking to homeless advocates, churches, the shelters and the people staying in them. Annario said outreach to the general public is also necessary to “Let those folks know that they are literally contributing to a crime if they give people money.” Other forms of education will include giving individual warnings “which we do a lot of anyway; generally, anyone who is cited has had several warnings.” “Its time that the silent majority be spoken for,” said Dunn in support of the ordinance. Councilman Dunn criticized the ACLU as a special interest group, accusing them of being silent on constitutional issues like school prayer and rights to arms and uninterested in the rights of the majority. “Poverty is not an excuse for disobeying and disrespecting the laws of this country, ” Dunn admonished, claiming those present could vote him and his fellow council members out if unhappy with their decisions. The council meeting lasted seven hours and was adjourned at 12:15 am on Wednesday morning, the ordinance issue being discussed last, after several public hearings for development issues. A demonstration was held against the anti-loitering law on Friday, Nov. 15. A group of around 50 people sat on the Buncombe County Courthouse steps for about an hour and then began overusing the crosswalk on College Street to gain attention. _________________________________________________________________ Help STOP SPAM with the new MSN 8 and get 2 months FREE* http://join.msn.com/?page=features/junkmail From dr_broccoli at hotmail.com Fri Nov 22 13:47:50 2002 From: dr_broccoli at hotmail.com (Shawn G) Date: Sun Feb 8 02:52:00 2004 Subject: [Dryerase] AGR Asheville police brutality Message-ID: Asheville Global Report WWW.AGRNews.org Reprinting permitted for non-profit use and to the members of the Dryerase news wire. Asheville residents hold forum against police brutality By Shawn Gaynor Asheville, NC, Nov. 20(AGR)—Roughly 50 concerned citizens gathered last Saturday at the Stephen’s Lee community center to share their concerns over the national epidemic of police brutality. The forum, hosted by Abdul Hassan, father of Youth Corrections Officer Ismael Hassan, who, along with former Asheville Police Department (APD) officer Khalid Saadiq have accused the APD of police brutality during an encounter on the night of Sunday, July 21.(see www.agrnews.org/issues/186/index.html). The incident was caught on video, and is raising questions about how the APD conducts its work. “This young man is an upstanding citizen in our community. In my opinion in our community, the African American community, he is one of our finest,” said William Wynd, a lifetime citizen of Asheville, who spoke of the incident that took place involving Ismael Hassan’s case. “I was informed about the incident the day after and I could hardly believe it that Ishmael had been involved in something like this…. It stirred up memories inside of me I thought had been long forgotten.” Wynd, a devout Christian, recalled a troubled youth of petty crime, during which, in two separate incidents, he was shot, and run over by a squad car fleeing from police. He was 16 years old at the time. Community activist Mickey Mahaffey spoke about finding closed ears within the city’s processes and urged residents to call City Manager Jim Westbrook and report any police abuses directly to him. “With in the next few weeks the homeland security bill will be enacted, which means a lot of money will pour into the Asheville Police Department,” said Mahaffey. “I’ve already seen in the streets in the last few days rookie cops I have not seen before, and we know what that leads to.” Wynd, who also had concerns about rookie officers, said, “In America where is the basic training camp for young, inexperienced police officers? Is it Biltmore forest, is it Beaver Lake? I submit to you the only place they can get police experiance is to come down to a community that is not going to say anything about it, that’s not going to question if it is right or wrong, or whether they used too much force or whether or not a person was innocent or not, and who cartes. They’re black, they’re poor.” Jesse Barber, whose son was killed by police in Guilford County North Carolina earlier this year, traveled several hours to attend the forum. “My son Gilbert Barber was 22 years old and was involved in a single car accident in a white neighborhood and needed some help. He was yelling and hollering. It was four o’clock in the morning. This deputy who ended up killing my son had only been on the seen 123 seconds and my son was dead, even though he says he gave my son every chance in the world.” “When the police do things, I don’t care what they do, they can kill you, they can beat you, and they always find it justified… and most of the times they are recognized as heroes because they’re gangs.” Scott Trent, with the October 22nd coalition, who has helped the Barber family in the wake of their loss, spoke about the change in the climate surrounding police brutality nationally. “This is happening in every city… every little town you can think of, deaths at the hand of police is off the charts since Sept 11th. We’re talking about a situation after Sept 11th where everyone suppose to fall in line. Everyone’s is supposed to say the police are our heroes, our protector, they are the ones that are going to be on the front lines against the bad people who are trying to come get us. Well what about when you have to ask a question, like what the hell happened in this situation? Why did this have to go down like this, that a seriously injured young man who needed an ambulance instead got a cowboy cop come out and go quick on his gun and shoot the kid to death? When can we ask that kind of question?” There are no comprehensive national statistics kept on police brutality, and concerns are growing. According to Human Rights Watch, a group that tracks human rights abuses world wide, “The excessive use of force by police officers [in the United States], including unjustified shootings, severe beatings, fatal choking, and rough treatment, persists because overwhelming barriers to accountability make it possible for officers who commit human rights violations to escape due punishment and often to repeat their offenses. Abdul Hassan said of the problem, “We got to stand up, we can’t just keep sitting down waiting for something to happen, for that piece of pie to fall out of the sky. We have to let the police department know that we’re not taking it any more. We’re not going to sit down when you keep beating up my children, you keep beating up my brothers and sisters, I don’t care what color they are, or where they’re from, or whether they are rich or poor, we are people and we want to be treated like people.” A 1999 Amnesty International report on police abuses in the United States asserts, “racial and ethnic minorities were disproportionately the victims of police misconduct, including false arrest and harassment as well as verbal and physical abuse.” _________________________________________________________________ Tired of spam? Get advanced junk mail protection with MSN 8. http://join.msn.com/?page=features/junkmail From dr_broccoli at hotmail.com Fri Nov 22 13:49:59 2002 From: dr_broccoli at hotmail.com (Shawn G) Date: Sun Feb 8 02:52:00 2004 Subject: [Dryerase] AGR Asheville police brutality Message-ID: Asheville Global Report WWW.AGRNews.org Reprinting permitted for non-profit use and to the members of the Dryerase news wire. Pictures available at www.agrnews.org Police checkpionts fail to stop SOA protest By Willy Rosencrans Nov. 19 (AGR)— Over 10,000 people showed up at the gates of Ft. Benning in Columbus, GA on Nov. 16 and 17 to demand the closure of the US Army counterinsurgency training center once known as the School of the Americas, now popularly called the School of Assassins (SOA). Organizers said that, despite unprecedented efforts by authorities to prohibit access to the gathering, it was one of the largest yet in the annual demonstration’s thirteen-year history. The day before the demonstration, Judge Clay Land ruled that the city of Columbus could erect police checkpoints, complete with metal detectors, at the entrances to the protest site. SOA Watch, the organizing group committed to shutting the school down, responded by issuing thousands of forms declaring that the bearer did “not consent to this search.” “We have monitored protests for decades,” said Gerry Weber of the American Civil LIberties Union (ACLU), “and this is the first time we’ve ever heard of a plan to conduct mass searches of all demonstrators.” “It’s totally inappropriate for people to be searched in order to exercise their right to freedom of assembly,” added Solstice, a member of SOA Watch’s staff. “The court’s ruling was a very bad precedent; we’re appealing it.” At checkpoints erected between curbside greenery freshly mowed by prison convicts, police armed with metal detector wands confiscated an arbitrary assortment of metal objects. No weapons were found. “They took some staples and a paint can opener from me,” fumed David Christian, a puppetista from Atlanta who came to work on the event’s puppet pageant. “Apparently a paint can opener is a deadly weapon these days.” Karl Meyer of Nashville, TN refused to submit to the search; he made it through the checkpoint without stopping and was arrested. The 65-year-old activist served 6 months in prison last year for trespassing onto Ft. Benning. Local businesswoman Miriam Tidwell staged a first-time counterprotest at Express Automotive Service, near the checkpoint. A nearby marquee read “God Bless Ft. Benning Day – Oil Change $15.99;” the sign was changed to read “Godless Ft. Benning Day” at some point during the night. Participants at the SOA Watch vigil heard music ranging from folksingers to hip hop and Mayan bands, and testimony from a diverse group of speakers including torture survivor advocates, student groups, drug policy researchers and a representative of displaced Afro-Colombians. A puppet pageant including almost 400 performers reenacted Argentina’s struggle through the violent military repression of the 70s and 80s, through its recent spate of successful popular uprisings, to the growing number of bakeries, clinics, and other enterprises run by and for the people. The pageant’s second run followed the traditional funeral procession, during which thousands of mourners walked to the fence erected across the entrance to Ft. Benning after the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks in New York and Washington, DC, to decorate it with crosses bearing the names of SOA victims, along with offerings such as banners, baby-sized coffins, and paper cranes. Many wept as the names of victims, ranging in age from the unborn to the elderly, were recited from the stage. No complete record exists of deaths orchestrated by SOA graduates; they number in the uncounted thousands and include atrocities like the El Mozote massacre of 1981, in which about 900 Salvadorans were killed. The date of the vigil commemorates the assassination of six Jesuit priests, their housekeeper, and her daughter, also in El Salvador, in 1989. Graduates have been implicated in virtually every major human rights violation in Latin America. In 1996 the Pentagon admitted that the SOA had used manuals advocating torture for years. Current manuals encourage the use of counterinsurgency techniques against labor organizers, student groups, and people critical of their government. In January, 2001, the school was renamed the Western Hemispheric Institute for Security Cooperation in an attempt to deflect criticism. These days its opponents often refer to it as a “terrorist training camp.” “Our foreign policy has been hijacked by corporations,” says Solstice. “Institutions like the SOA reflect neither the values nor the interests of the American people. And we believe that these policies are making us a lot of enemies… “There are two possible paths we can take after September 11. We can teach our children to fear and avoid people who criticize what our government is doing, people who engage the democratic process through street protests and other means of nonviolent engagement. Or we can choose a direction where we say ‘Now, more than ever, we need to take responsibility for the policies of our government.’” Civil disobedience has been a major part of the vigil since its earliest days, typically consisting of trespassing onto the base to demand the SOA’s closure. This year, police arrested 92 people. Five were released without being charged, including four juveniles, one of whom was abandoned by military police (MPs) at a gas station by herself, at night, and had to find her own way back to SOA Watch’s Legal Collective office. Of the rest, the majority were charged with a Class B federal trespassing misdemeanor, which carries a maximum sentence of six months and a $5,000 fine. Four were charged with Class A misdemeanors, including “running a police checkpoint” (the woman in question had taken a wrong turn onto Ft. Benning) and property damage (the cutting of a lock on Ft. Benning’s gates); Class A carries a maximum sentence of one year and a $100,000 fine. Judge G. Mallon Faircloth set bail at $5,000, releasing one on personal recognizance because his position as a tenured professor, according to Faircloth, made him less of a bail-jumping risk. Bail was briefly revoked for some because they refused to give personal information required by incorrectly used Federal Marshal forms; the forms are meant to be used after conviction, for people being transported to federal prison. “There’s obviously no ‘innocent until proven guilty’ in Faircloth’s court,” said Becky Johnson, a member of the Legal Collective. “And exacting punitive damages before a trial has even occurred for them – it’s appalling.” Over $40,000 was required to satisfy the excessive bond. As of this writing, two remain in jail – one for refusing to post bond until the judge releases her on personal recognizance, and the other for insisting on calling himself Peace; without his real name, federal prosecutors have had to refer to his case as “The United States of America vs. Peace.” Peter Jessup, 22, a student from Omaha, NB, and one of those arrested, described his experiences Monday evening shortly after his release. He had not planned to get arrested, but was moved to climb the fence after the funeral procession. “Even if only one person had to face the horrors perpetrated by SOA grads, it would be a good enough cause,” said Jessup. “We need to do more than just say we’re opposed… The feeling of support as we were cheered on was incredible. And the people I was incarcerated with were wonderful. We were all really scared; but that we all had the same fears, and the same optimism, really lifted us up. It was very powerful. “[But] people were denied water and food; people were cold. Elderly people especially. There was no access to warm clothing… A diabetic who hadn’t eaten for 12 hours was denied appropriate food.” Earlier this year, 43 people were convicted year for trespassing at last year’s action. 26 remain in prison. Adrian Tate, 19, a resident of Southgate housing complex which lies just outside Ft. Benning, sympathized with those who committed civil disobedience. “I’m glad they’re doing it,” he said. “I don’t want to see all those people going over there and getting locked up. But it ain’t nothing but the truth – they ought to close that motherfucking school.” Eight-year-old Holly Rose Black of Asheville, NC was one of the last to cross the line, at sunset, long after the vigil was over. Oblivious MPs crunched their way up and down a growing garbage pile of crosses nearby as she took the last paper crane from the fence. “I was really happy that so many people were brave enough to cross the line and go to prison,” she said afterward. “I’m glad there were so many people there to help close the SOA.” _________________________________________________________________ Add photos to your messages with MSN 8. Get 2 months FREE*. http://join.msn.com/?page=features/featuredemail From dr_broccoli at hotmail.com Fri Nov 22 13:51:27 2002 From: dr_broccoli at hotmail.com (Shawn G) Date: Sun Feb 8 02:52:00 2004 Subject: [Dryerase] AGR victory over Staples Message-ID: Asheville Global Report WWW.AGRNews.org Reprinting permitted for non-profit use and to the members of the Dryerase news wire. Asheville Enviro group celebrates victory over Staples By Eamon Martin Asheville, North Carolina, Nov. 20 (AGR)— Activists across the country are celebrating a grassroots victory this week. Staples Inc., the world’s largest and fastest growing office supply retailer with more than a thousand stores nationwide, announced an unprecedented agreement with environmental groups. The agreement will result in sweeping protections for forests in the southern United States and around the world. Led by the Asheville, North Carolina-based Dogwood Alliance and California-based ForestEthics, the campaign targeting Staples has come to a successful close after two years. It featured more than 600 protests at Staples stores nationwide, ads featuring southern rock legends R.E.M., and tens of thousands of letters and calls directed to the company’s CEO. Last week Staples Office Supply announced that the company is going to phase out paper made from US National Forests from their stores. The agreement is the culmination of a tireless drive by The Paper Campaign, the largest grassroots, market-based forest protection campaign in the US. The campaign represents a coalition of dozens of citizen groups dedicated to moving the marketplace towards recycled paper. “Staples’ new policy is a big win for America’s heritage forests in the southern US, where paper production is destroying millions of acres of forests a year,” said Danna Smith, director of The Paper Campaign for Dogwood Alliance. “Staples’ announcement today creates a mandate from the marketplace for large paper producers like International Paper to rely more on recycled fiber and less on destroying southern forests.” The Paper Campaign said that they applaud Staples’ move to set the standard in the office supply industry and that they are now looking to other paper retailers such as Office Max, Office Depot and Corporate Express to follow Staples’ lead. Under Staples’ new guidelines, an industry first, the company will: • Achieve an average of 30% post-consumer recycled content across all paper products it sells • Phase out purchases of paper products from Endangered Forests, including the Canadian Boreal forests, key forests in the Southern US, and endangered National Forests • Create an environmental affairs division and report annually on its environmental results. As logging has been reduced in many high-profile regions around the world such as the Pacific Northwest, it has expanded in the southern US and the Canadian boreal forests. Five million acres of southern forests, the most biologically diverse forests in North America, are being logged each year to produce 25% of the world’s paper products and two-thirds of the paper made in the US. International Paper and Georgia Pacific, the two primary loggers of southern forests, are major suppliers to Staples. With recycled paper now comparable to virgin fiber in quality and price, moving away from cutting trees for paper is now practical for the industry and could yield immense conservation benefits. If all the paper mills in the South increased their recycled fiber use by 30%, 15 million acres of forests – an area comparable to all the forests in Tennessee – would be saved over the next ten years. “Make no mistake, today’s landmark announcement by Staples is a big win for America’s vanishing forests in the southern US where paper production is destroying some of the most diverse ecosystems on the planet,” said Smith. The Staples campaign included nearly 35 banners dropped on storefronts, 21 arrests in acts of civil disobedience, creative street theater, over 15,000 postcards, thousands of phone calls to the corporate headquarters and regional offices, hundreds of letters from concerned citizens, 75 children’s drawings, coverage in more than 10 national media outlets and over 50 local media outlets, a shareholder’s resolution, and flying the CEO over clearcuts on the Cumberland Plateau in Tennessee. “I can’t say enough for the people who participated in the hundreds of demonstrations over the past two years,” said Dogwood Alliance volunteer Coleman Smith. “Whether someone had a little or a large part in this, they should be proud. This is a great example of how direct action on a grassroots level can be so effective.” “Staples is the first large paper retailer to make such a big commitment to forests,” said Andrew George, director of the conservation group National Forest Protection Alliance. “Today’s announcement is testament to the power of thousands of people joining together against a single corporation to demand environmental change.” _________________________________________________________________ STOP MORE SPAM with the new MSN 8 and get 2 months FREE* http://join.msn.com/?page=features/junkmail From dr_broccoli at hotmail.com Fri Nov 22 13:52:54 2002 From: dr_broccoli at hotmail.com (Shawn G) Date: Sun Feb 8 02:52:00 2004 Subject: [Dryerase] AGR SOA protest Message-ID: Asheville Global Report WWW.AGRNews.org Reprinting permitted for non-profit use and to the members of the Dryerase news wire. Police checkpoints fail to stop SOA protest By Willy Rosencrans Nov. 19 (AGR)— Over 10,000 people showed up at the gates of Ft. Benning in Columbus, GA on Nov. 16 and 17 to demand the closure of the US Army counterinsurgency training center once known as the School of the Americas, now popularly called the School of Assassins (SOA). Organizers said that, despite unprecedented efforts by authorities to prohibit access to the gathering, it was one of the largest yet in the annual demonstration’s thirteen-year history. The day before the demonstration, Judge Clay Land ruled that the city of Columbus could erect police checkpoints, complete with metal detectors, at the entrances to the protest site. SOA Watch, the organizing group committed to shutting the school down, responded by issuing thousands of forms declaring that the bearer did “not consent to this search.” “We have monitored protests for decades,” said Gerry Weber of the American Civil LIberties Union (ACLU), “and this is the first time we’ve ever heard of a plan to conduct mass searches of all demonstrators.” “It’s totally inappropriate for people to be searched in order to exercise their right to freedom of assembly,” added Solstice, a member of SOA Watch’s staff. “The court’s ruling was a very bad precedent; we’re appealing it.” At checkpoints erected between curbside greenery freshly mowed by prison convicts, police armed with metal detector wands confiscated an arbitrary assortment of metal objects. No weapons were found. “They took some staples and a paint can opener from me,” fumed David Christian, a puppetista from Atlanta who came to work on the event’s puppet pageant. “Apparently a paint can opener is a deadly weapon these days.” Karl Meyer of Nashville, TN refused to submit to the search; he made it through the checkpoint without stopping and was arrested. The 65-year-old activist served 6 months in prison last year for trespassing onto Ft. Benning. Local businesswoman Miriam Tidwell staged a first-time counterprotest at Express Automotive Service, near the checkpoint. A nearby marquee read “God Bless Ft. Benning Day – Oil Change $15.99;” the sign was changed to read “Godless Ft. Benning Day” at some point during the night. Participants at the SOA Watch vigil heard music ranging from folksingers to hip hop and Mayan bands, and testimony from a diverse group of speakers including torture survivor advocates, student groups, drug policy researchers and a representative of displaced Afro-Colombians. A puppet pageant including almost 400 performers reenacted Argentina’s struggle through the violent military repression of the 70s and 80s, through its recent spate of successful popular uprisings, to the growing number of bakeries, clinics, and other enterprises run by and for the people. The pageant’s second run followed the traditional funeral procession, during which thousands of mourners walked to the fence erected across the entrance to Ft. Benning after the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks in New York and Washington, DC, to decorate it with crosses bearing the names of SOA victims, along with offerings such as banners, baby-sized coffins, and paper cranes. Many wept as the names of victims, ranging in age from the unborn to the elderly, were recited from the stage. No complete record exists of deaths orchestrated by SOA graduates; they number in the uncounted thousands and include atrocities like the El Mozote massacre of 1981, in which about 900 Salvadorans were killed. The date of the vigil commemorates the assassination of six Jesuit priests, their housekeeper, and her daughter, also in El Salvador, in 1989. Graduates have been implicated in virtually every major human rights violation in Latin America. In 1996 the Pentagon admitted that the SOA had used manuals advocating torture for years. Current manuals encourage the use of counterinsurgency techniques against labor organizers, student groups, and people critical of their government. In January, 2001, the school was renamed the Western Hemispheric Institute for Security Cooperation in an attempt to deflect criticism. These days its opponents often refer to it as a “terrorist training camp.” “Our foreign policy has been hijacked by corporations,” says Solstice. “Institutions like the SOA reflect neither the values nor the interests of the American people. And we believe that these policies are making us a lot of enemies… “There are two possible paths we can take after September 11. We can teach our children to fear and avoid people who criticize what our government is doing, people who engage the democratic process through street protests and other means of nonviolent engagement. Or we can choose a direction where we say ‘Now, more than ever, we need to take responsibility for the policies of our government.’” Civil disobedience has been a major part of the vigil since its earliest days, typically consisting of trespassing onto the base to demand the SOA’s closure. This year, police arrested 92 people. Five were released without being charged, including four juveniles, one of whom was abandoned by military police (MPs) at a gas station by herself, at night, and had to find her own way back to SOA Watch’s Legal Collective office. Of the rest, the majority were charged with a Class B federal trespassing misdemeanor, which carries a maximum sentence of six months and a $5,000 fine. Four were charged with Class A misdemeanors, including “running a police checkpoint” (the woman in question had taken a wrong turn onto Ft. Benning) and property damage (the cutting of a lock on Ft. Benning’s gates); Class A carries a maximum sentence of one year and a $100,000 fine. Judge G. Mallon Faircloth set bail at $5,000, releasing one on personal recognizance because his position as a tenured professor, according to Faircloth, made him less of a bail-jumping risk. Bail was briefly revoked for some because they refused to give personal information required by incorrectly used Federal Marshal forms; the forms are meant to be used after conviction, for people being transported to federal prison. “There’s obviously no ‘innocent until proven guilty’ in Faircloth’s court,” said Becky Johnson, a member of the Legal Collective. “And exacting punitive damages before a trial has even occurred for them – it’s appalling.” Over $40,000 was required to satisfy the excessive bond. As of this writing, two remain in jail – one for refusing to post bond until the judge releases her on personal recognizance, and the other for insisting on calling himself Peace; without his real name, federal prosecutors have had to refer to his case as “The United States of America vs. Peace.” Peter Jessup, 22, a student from Omaha, NB, and one of those arrested, described his experiences Monday evening shortly after his release. He had not planned to get arrested, but was moved to climb the fence after the funeral procession. “Even if only one person had to face the horrors perpetrated by SOA grads, it would be a good enough cause,” said Jessup. “We need to do more than just say we’re opposed… The feeling of support as we were cheered on was incredible. And the people I was incarcerated with were wonderful. We were all really scared; but that we all had the same fears, and the same optimism, really lifted us up. It was very powerful. “[But] people were denied water and food; people were cold. Elderly people especially. There was no access to warm clothing… A diabetic who hadn’t eaten for 12 hours was denied appropriate food.” Earlier this year, 43 people were convicted year for trespassing at last year’s action. 26 remain in prison. Adrian Tate, 19, a resident of Southgate housing complex which lies just outside Ft. Benning, sympathized with those who committed civil disobedience. “I’m glad they’re doing it,” he said. “I don’t want to see all those people going over there and getting locked up. But it ain’t nothing but the truth – they ought to close that motherfucking school.” Eight-year-old Holly Rose Black of Asheville, NC was one of the last to cross the line, at sunset, long after the vigil was over. Oblivious MPs crunched their way up and down a growing garbage pile of crosses nearby as she took the last paper crane from the fence. “I was really happy that so many people were brave enough to cross the line and go to prison,” she said afterward. “I’m glad there were so many people there to help close the SOA.” _________________________________________________________________ The new MSN 8: advanced junk mail protection and 2 months FREE* http://join.msn.com/?page=features/junkmail From dr_broccoli at hotmail.com Fri Nov 22 13:54:54 2002 From: dr_broccoli at hotmail.com (Shawn G) Date: Sun Feb 8 02:52:00 2004 Subject: [Dryerase] AGR Bush to privatize 850,000 federal jobs Message-ID: Asheville Global Report WWW.AGRNews.org Reprinting permitted for non-profit use and to the members of the Dryerase news wire. Bush to privatize 850,000 federal jobs for ‘market based government’ By Shawn Gaynor Asheville, NC, Nov. 20 (AGR)— In a bold post-midterm-election move, President Bush announced plans to cut nearly half of all federal jobs, and allow private companies to bid for the work. According to the AFL-CIO, prior to the election, Bush had been calling for the privatization of 15 percent of federal jobs. The privatization move mirrors some of the “structural adjustment” programs that have been forced on weaker nations by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank. These programs have lead to a decrease in wages, a destabilization of economies, and an accelerated concentration of wealth in the hands of the rich. “This administration is selling the federal government at bargain basement prices to their corporate friends, who then make campaign contributions back,” said Bobby L. Harnage, President the American Federation of Government Employees(AFGE). “This is not about saving money, it’s about moving money to the private sector.” The Union represents 600,000 federal workers. The jobs have become open to privatization because of the rewriting of the OMB Circular A-76, which governs the public-private competition process. The administration believes this process doesn’t allow contractors to take federal employee jobs often enough or fast enough. Federal employee trade unions vowed on Friday to keep fighting plans by the Bush administration to open nearly half of government jobs to competition from the private sector, but the new concentration of federal power in the traditionally anti-union Republican party leaves unions with little recourse. According to the Associated Press, “After a 30-day public review period, [President] Bush can impose the new rules without congressional approval.” The plans is said to involve only workers in “commercial activities,” which the corporate mainstream media has reduced to “lawn mowing.” In reality the privatization will likely include such government services as the running of federal prisons and national parks. The Government Accounting Office has determined that public-private competition will save taxpayers 30 percent on each contract. But Paul Light of the Brookings Institute said “They may low-bid to get the contract, and once the Federal Government denudes itself of its capacity, they start ratcheting up their costs.” The move comes as the house and senate voted to create the new Office of Homeland Security, the largest shift in government programs since the New Deal. The legislation mandates the elimination of union rights and whistleblower protections for over 170,000 federal workers that will be moved from 22 federal agencies into the newly created department. Many of these workers currently belong to unions. “Undermining the collective bargaining rights and civil service protections of federal employees on the front lines of the war on terrorism does not improve the security of our homeland,” stated Harnage “Now we see the real White House agenda -- it’s not homeland security, it’s union busting,” said Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.), chairman of the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee. “This proposal means that the safety of our communities could be entrusted to the administration’s favorite companies and their lobbyists instead of to dedicated, trained federal workers. It’s wrong to entrust our homeland security to the lowest bidder,” he said. Also buried in the 484 pages of the new Homeland Security legislation are provisions relaxing rules on giving federal contracts to overseas companies, opening the door for federal jobs to be out-sourced to countries notorious for sweatshop labor practices. “How serious are [Republicans] about coming up with a good bill if they’re going to protect companies who declare that they don’t want to do business in the United States of America, to avoid paying taxes?” asked Tom Daschle, the Democratic Senate leader. _________________________________________________________________ MSN 8 with e-mail virus protection service: 2 months FREE* http://join.msn.com/?page=features/virus From millietent at yahoo.com Wed Nov 27 15:05:38 2002 From: millietent at yahoo.com (annie v) Date: Sun Feb 8 02:52:00 2004 Subject: [Dryerase] december indypendent is out Message-ID: <20021127210538.84954.qmail@web13208.mail.yahoo.com> What’s Noisy But Says Nothing? From TV’s hysterical talking heads to the maverick grassroots journalists who fight media megaconglomerates, to the iron-fisted corporate control of communication, this month’s Indypendent explores the dissemination and control of information through mass media. We take a look at the role of PR firms in selling everything from purple ketchup to war; radio behemoth Clear Channel Communications and its underhanded manipulation of musical artists; as well as how video games like America’s Army reflect and manipulate political power dynamics. We also explore the marginalization of women within the ‘old boy’ media networks. And as always, enjoy hard-hitting local coverage of Bushwick students' resistence to millitary recruiting; the Village Voice conglomerate's thwarting of labor and alternative publications; and the struggle of the Oneidas against a wealthy casino kingpin. Check out our national and international coverage, including a first-person report from Gaza. Featured stories will be forwarded to the dry erase list, but a feature with links is available now at http://nyc.indymedia.org. Peace! __________________________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Mail Plus - Powerful. Affordable. Sign up now. http://mailplus.yahoo.com From millietent at yahoo.com Wed Nov 27 15:06:14 2002 From: millietent at yahoo.com (annie v) Date: Sun Feb 8 02:52:00 2004 Subject: [Dryerase] Shark Attacks, Snipers and Thugs, Oh My! Message-ID: <20021127210614.90112.qmail@web13204.mail.yahoo.com> __________________________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Mail Plus - Powerful. Affordable. Sign up now. http://mailplus.yahoo.com From millietent at yahoo.com Wed Nov 27 15:07:22 2002 From: millietent at yahoo.com (annie v) Date: Sun Feb 8 02:52:00 2004 Subject: [Dryerase] Shark Attacks, Snipers and Thugs, Oh My! Message-ID: <20021127210722.85418.qmail@web13208.mail.yahoo.com> Shark Attacks, Snipers and Thugs, Oh My! By Emily Reinhardt Mothers use their bodies as human shields, trying to protect their children as they take them to school. Drivers glance around anxiously as they gas up their cars. The streets are deserted as fearful residents stay indoors, peering into their television sets for the latest news. This is not Kabul or some other war-torn city, but suburban Washington, D.C. in the midst of last month’s sniper attacks. The sniper attacks launched a media blitz and an accompanying public panic. It’s cause and effect: the media leaps onto a story or theme and the public fearfully watches and feels informed and entertained. Prior to snipers, there were child kidnappings; before that, there were missing interns, shark attacks, flesh-eating bacteria, school shootings, mailmen going “postal,” and countless others. News (especially local television news) often influences a person’s perceptions of the world around them. Unfortunately, the news often makes individuals feel unnecessarily afraid of their streets, their cities, their country and their world. “The majority of Americans who get information on which to base decisions — whether it’s voting decisions or what policies to support or what to be afraid of in the world — get that information from the news,” writes Lori Dorfman of the Berkeley Media Studies Institute in the Los Angeles Times. “When the news limits the information that people get, that leads to distortion.” According to a Roper survey of television viewing, a plurality of Americans get their news from local TV broadcasts. In Los Angeles and New York, two of the biggest markets, local television news is watched three times as much as the national news broadcast. Local television news is also the most saturated of news sources with stories about violent crime; 66 percent of stories covered in 56 major markets of local news are crime stories. Stories concerning violent crime runs every three minutes during the local news broadcasts in Los Angeles. The sheer density of crime stories gives viewers a misguided sense of the real statistics on crime: the numbers have gone down steadily in the last 20 years. In 2001, violent crime was at its lowest numbers since 1973. Youth crimes dropped over two-thirds from 1993 to 1998. Homicide dropped 33 percent in the Nineties, while national news increased its coverage of violent crime 600 percent. Prior to September 11, most Americans felt that “violent crime” was one of the worst problems facing the nation. 62 percent of Americans felt “desperate” about crime during the Nineties. Yet 76 percent of these “desperate” people had never themselves been victims of violent crime, according to a Harvard survey, but were concerned about crime “from the TV.” In poll after poll, “crime” topped the list of Americans’ concerns. Policy-makers and poll watchers took note. “When mainstream media over-reports on violent crime, people end up with a distorted sense of their world culture,” said Rachel Coen of the media watchdog group Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR). “[That the stories are] more frivolous is annoying, but there are real political consequences to the media concentration on these stories.” Larger than crime statistics and surveys is the climate of fear that these stories create. They contribute to specific attitudes about race and youth and justify biased attitudes and legislative actions. Though four times as many people are hit by lightning each year than were shot by the sniper, the D.C. community’s reaction was to shut down school activities and refuse to go out of doors. “I now only gas up at my local gas station… surrounded by buildings and people. I will not go to one that is out in the open near a busy street,” said one Tacoma Park, Maryland resident in an online session with the Washington Post. Another Maryland resident had an even more extreme reaction: “I use my body as a shield when I drop off my son at school.” Local crime stories are only the icing on the cake. The media writ large has produced many “theme” stories over the years that were over-dramatized or later proven untrue. The difference now is that the amount of television, print and internet media far surpasses anything known previously. Stories stay longer in the public consciousness and the fear is more intense. “Part of the problem is the 24-hour news climate. There were no cable 24-hour news channels 25 years ago and these channels have the need to fill space,” said Coen. “It’s news as a product, trying to make a profit.” __________________________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Mail Plus - Powerful. Affordable. Sign up now. http://mailplus.yahoo.com From millietent at yahoo.com Wed Nov 27 15:09:17 2002 From: millietent at yahoo.com (annie v) Date: Sun Feb 8 02:52:00 2004 Subject: [Dryerase] Brooklyn Students Buck Military Recruiting Message-ID: <20021127210917.12345.qmail@web13206.mail.yahoo.com> Bushwick students buck military By John Tarleton Luis Reyes is a senior at Bushwick Outreach Center in Brooklyn who wants to study journalism in college. He recently discovered that military recruiters had the inside scoop on him. "They know my interests and everything," says Reyes, 19. "I’m already getting all kinds of letters and phone calls and whatnot." The military’s individually targeted appeal to Reyes hasn’t worked to date. He still hopes to start college next fall at Hofstra University. However, the high pressure recruiting experienced by Reyes and many of his friends suggests what lies ahead for students as the military aggressively makes use of a little-known provision in the 670-page No Child Left Behind Act of 2002. The provision in the much-touted education bill requires high schools to military recruiters access to facilities as well as contact information for every student — or lose their federal aid. "The military would choose to be in every school in every classroom in every community if they could, because overkill is their way of doing things," says Rick Jahnkow, Director of Project YANO (Youth And Non-military Opportunities), a San Diego-based group founded in 1984. The military currently enlists 350,000 people a year. Its recruitment efforts have become increasingly sophisticated, and relentless, since it switched from the draft to an all-volunteer force in 1973 at the end of the Vietnam War. It spends hundreds of millions of dollars to advertise on television, radio, web sites, outdoor ads, and in youth publications. It also operates Junior Reserve Officer Training Corps (JROTC) programs in 3,500 schools, holds summer camp programs on military bases for disadvantaged youth, and provides guidance counseling, after-school tutoring and dropout recovery programs in some troubled inner city schools. Mobile recruiting stations also appear in shopping malls, at sporting events and inside theaters at showings of popular pro-military movies. In Bushwick, getting the message out also means calling prospective recruits as early as 6 a.m. and showing up at their workplaces and outside of their churches, according to Reyes and Jesus Gonzalez, 17, a junior at Bushwick Outreach. Under the No Child Left Behind Act, students or their parents can sign an opt-out form to prevent information from being released. In late September, the city’s Department of Education mailed the forms to parents of over a quarter million high school students, giving them an Oct. 15 reply deadline. Reyes says most Bushwick Outreach students were unaware of the forms and were barraged by recruiter appeals soon after the deadline passed. The students’ frustration at their loss of privacy boiled over on Oct. 23 when about 60 of them held a protest in front of nearby Bushwick High School. They demanded a reversal of the opt-out form, which would allow their information to be released only with their permission. "It’s for us to decide if we want to give them information," says Gonzalez, who along with Reyes is also an organizer for the Youth Power project of Make the Road by Walking, a Bushwick-based community organization. "If we want to sign up, we can walk down to the recruiting station on Myrtle Avenue." Commander Edward Gehrke, head of Navy recruiting in New York, poured more fuel on the fire by responding to the protest in a letter to the New York Daily News, stating that most Bushwick students were plagued by police and drug problems and wouldn’t be eligible to enlist if they tried. "It’s clear what the high people in the Navy and the military think about people of color in poor neighborhoods," Gonzalez says. Captain John Caldwell, public affairs officer for the Marine Corps 1st Recruiting District, which encompasses New York City, says the military is simply trying to offer students another opportunity. "They get tons of information from colleges when they are looking at going to school," he says. "We’re also providing information that could help them get an education and a job." Yet these promises of education and training are misleading, critics say. The present-day GI Bill is fraught with loopholes and stringent conditions that cause many soldiers to lose their educational benefits. Most soldiers train on equipment that is obsolete or has no civilian counterpart, or they perform specific functions on one or two machines, leaving them with few real world skills. "Somebody who was a cook at McDonald’s who learns how to pick up a tray of prepared food, put in a heater, heat it up and wrap it, couldn’t walk in the door of a regular restaurant and say I want to be a chef," says John Judge, a longtime anti-recruitment activist based out of Washington, D.C. The Bushwick action has since inspired other youth activists in the city. Youth Bloc, a citywide network of high school-age activists, has decided to launch a campaign against No Child Left Behind as well as JROTC, which is currently active in about 100 high schools across the city. The Youth Bloc activists plan to visit a high school a week in each borough except Staten Island, giving presentations or leafleting outside. "It’s our generation that’s going to be the cannon fodder," says Mike Gould-Wartoffky, a Youth Bloc member and senior at Hunter College High School. "We want our generation to be in the front lines of the anti-war movement, not the war." The Bushwick students look to hold more anti-recruitment actions, but say their first priority is having more options in life than Army, Navy Air Force or Marines. "Bring college recruiters, not military recruiters," Reyes says. "F— the military. These kids want to go to college." __________________________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Mail Plus - Powerful. Affordable. Sign up now. http://mailplus.yahoo.com From millietent at yahoo.com Wed Nov 27 15:24:11 2002 From: millietent at yahoo.com (annie v) Date: Sun Feb 8 02:52:00 2004 Subject: [Dryerase] It Takes a Village (Voice) To Raze the Media Message-ID: <20021127212411.89820.qmail@web13208.mail.yahoo.com> It Takes a Village (Voice) To Raze the Media by Mark Pickens When do jaundiced business ethics tarnish a newspaper’s hard-won reputation for feisty, progressive reporting? Between Sept. 27 and Oct. 2, Village Voice Media (VVM) snuffed out a Cleveland newspaper on 24- hours notice, slit the throat of a union drive at the chain’s second-largest paper and sealed a deal with its biggest rival to divide up markets in two cities. The actions have attracted the attention of the Justice Department’s anti-trust division, according to sources close to the deals. The events have left staffers at the six VVM-owned papers wondering what’s happened to America’s alternative press. "It just shows that alternative media is now a part of big media business," said David Eden, former editor-in-chief of the now-defunct Cleveland Free Times. VVM head David Schneiderman pulls the levers for a consortium of Wall Street investment bankers and venture capitalists that bought the Voice papers for a reported $150 million in January 2001. This was a step up for Schneiderman, who was previously the publisher of the Village Voice. "We definitely think of David Schneiderman as the Wicked Witch of the West," says Erin Aubrey, staff writer and union president at VVM’s LA Weekly. The 2001 deal brought the 57-year-old Voice under the combined ownership of the Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce, a group of Dutch investors and Goldman Sachs, America’s third largest brokerage house. The new management now owns some of the most respected alternative newspapers in America, including the Pulitzer Prize-winning Village Voice, the LA Weekly, the City Pages in Minneapolis, the Seattle Weekly, the OC Register in California’s Orange County and the Nashville Scene. With a combined circulation of 900,000 copies and annual revenue of $90 million, VVM is the largest alternative chain in the country. It took just months for VVM to institute its new bare-knuckles management style. In May, a dispute over unionizing the LA Weekly’s advertising department began to divide journalists and managers at the paper. Pressed by escalating sales quotas, post- Sept. 11 layoffs and other job security issues, the paper’s ad staff petitioned to join the already unionized writers. Given the Weekly’s unwavering editorial stance as an ally of labor unions, employees were stunned when the new Schneiderman-appointed publisher, Beth Sestanovich, deployed every means at her disposal to defeat the organizing campaign. "It was like Union Busting 101," says Aubrey. After questionable tactics, including intimidation, withholding of raises, and hiring a well-known "labor relations" law firm to help squash the union drive, pro-union staff were defeated by just two votes in an election held on Sept. 27. "We’re regarded as the gold standard of labor reporting in L.A," says Aubrey. "Suddenly [management is] at war with their own paper. It struck us as extremely hypocritical." Sestanovich’s union busting echoes events this past summer at the Village Voice itself. Staff in New York came within 24 hours of a strike after Schneiderman’s management moved to slash health and retirement benefits, as reported in the July Indypendent. Just five days after the coup de grace for the Weekly union, though, another VVM-devised hammer fell on the alternative news world, this time hitting both L.A. and Cleveland. Schneiderman and VVM colluded with ostensible arch-rival, Phoenix-based New Times, a chain of 12 alternative papers, in announcing a surprise deal on Oct. 2. VVM closed its Cleveland Free Times and paid $8 million to New Times for it to shutter the LA New Times. As the only two cities where the chains had competing weeklies, the swap effectively ended competition between the two publishing giants. Nationally, some 250 alternative weeklies generate $500 million in annual revenue, according to the Association of Alternative Newsweeklies. VVM and New Times together rake in nearly one-third of the revenue. The L.A.-Cleveland deal raised immediate cries of foul play from many corners of the alternative newsweekly world. "We give the finger to all those who think this is a good deal for L.A.," said Alex Ben Block of the LA Press Club, alluding to the popular column, The Finger, which ran in the now-defunct LA New Times. The move also came as a total surprise to David Eden, then-Cleveland Free Times editor in chief. "I heard about it the same day it happened," said Eden. "They had a few people come in from New York and give out final paychecks." The controversies spanning from L.A. to Cleveland and New York point to a widening gap between VVM’s business behavior and the editorial support its newspapers often give to progressive issues. The Village Voice, for example, was going to print with a hard-hitting story on the woes of a construction workers’ union (Local 32 B-J) in New York just at the same time its parent company was squashing its own employees’ union drive in LA. Howard Blume, staffwriter and vice president of the writers’ union at the LA Weekly, thinks these changes bode ill not just for the employees, but the public at large. "There’s both a consolidation of media ownership and a shrinking of media jobs and that’s bad in every way possible," says Blume. "There seems to be more news and more media than ever, but it’s a mile wide and only an inch deep." __________________________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Mail Plus - Powerful. Affordable. Sign up now. http://mailplus.yahoo.com From millietent at yahoo.com Wed Nov 27 15:25:31 2002 From: millietent at yahoo.com (annie v) Date: Sun Feb 8 02:52:00 2004 Subject: [Dryerase] Casino Kingpin Terrorizes Oneida Families Message-ID: <20021127212531.16260.qmail@web13206.mail.yahoo.com> Casino Kingpin Terrorizes Oneida Families by A. Venesky Danielle Shenandoah Patterson’s home has been demolished. She has been illegally held in a Pennsylvania prison and denied needed medicine. Now homeless, she may lose her three young children. Meanwhile, the rest of her family and other community members are threatened with the same fate: the destruction of their homes, their community and the ability to practice their Native Oneida heritage. "This," says the resilient 31-year-old with a stern anger in her voice, "is cultural genocide." The conflict, occurring on a 32-acre territory in upstate New York, between Syracuse and Utica, pits Patterson and other Oneida traditionalists against an illegal tribal leadership led by Ray Halbritter, Harvard-trained businessman. On this small territory, Patterson’s community practices the traditional culture designated for it by two Oneida clan mothers in 1961. It is the only undisputed piece of Oneida land that remains of the original 6 million acres occupied by the nation before the influx of European settlers displaced many Oneida. The entire nation, which consists of 11,000 in Wisconsin, 2,000 living in Canada and 1,100 New York residents, claims 250,000 disputed acres in upstate New York. Since 1993, the 52-year-old Halbritter has forced more than half of the territory’s approximately 160 residents off of their land. His 40-man non-native paramilitary force has also forcibly "inspected," condemned and destroyed the homes of 12 traditional families, including Patterson’s. "We are a community of women, elders and children, and a few older men… We are under 24-hour surveillance, and they the police] are heavily armed… even though they have no deputation in New York State," Patterson noted in September. It’s ridiculous." Halbritter usurped the traditional matrilineal government and has ignored the Iroquois Grand Council of Chiefs, the confederacy to which the Oneida have belonged since the 14th century. He instituted an undemocratic and secretive Men’s Council to govern the nation’s affairs. Halbritter then locked the traditional longhouse and closed down the community food bank that served 280 families. Having incorporated the nation as the Oneida Nation of New York, Inc., he established himself as CEO and built the Turning Stone Casino — the largest in the state, raking in $167 million a year — as the cornerstone of an expansive business enterprise. Danielle’s sister, Diane Shenandoah, has spoken out against Halbritter’s engagement in gambling. "Our spiritual tradition does not condone gaming," she said. As a result, Oneida Nation, Inc. has been kicked out of the Iroquois Confederacy, which is opposed to gambling. The Grand Council of Chiefs removed Halbritter in 1993 as the Oneida representative and then notified the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA). The BIA accepted, and then quickly reversed, the decision, reportedly under pressure from Congressman Sherwood Boehlert (R-NY). Boehlert allegedly cut a deal with the Clinton administration, voting for the North American Free Trade Agreement in exchange for BIA recognition of Halbritter as the Oneida representative for life. Many suspect that official state support of Halbritter — including Gov. George Pataki’s — is driven by a scheme in which Native American land claims are traded for casino contracts. According to a March report in the Rochester, NY Democrat and Chronicle, "Halbritter wants to run two of the three casinos in the Catskills" in a deal that would give "a 25 percent cut off the top to the state." Patterson says the BIA’s refusal to acknowledge the Iroquois’ rejection of Halbritter violates the Two Row Wampum Treaty, which has existed since the 17th century and "clearly states that both parties, the U.S. and the Iroquois Confederacy will not interfere in each others’ affairs." The Oneida Wolf Clan, headed by Patterson’s mother, Maisie Shenandoah, disavowed Halbritter’s leadership in 1995. While Halbritter reaps his millions, the other Oneida remain dependent upon nation benefits — dispensed by Halbritter. This is why other non-traditionalist Oneidas haven’t come out in support of the traditional community. "He uses benefits from the nation to make people silent," says Patterson’s sister, Vicki Shenandoah. "Halbritter has said he will make examples of us. More people would stand up, if not for fear." Patterson says Halbritter’s intimidation tactics include assaults by his police force, including one on herself in November 2001. The incident was caught on videotape, prompting Halbritter to ban all media from the territory. In response, Patterson and others launched a request for legal observers and set up a Peace Camp. Patterson says as many as 200 activists came from as far as Canada to participate. The presence of 100 observers this past Sept. 15 helped prevent a threatened demolition at the time. But on Oct. 18, tribal police arrested Patterson, without notifying her lawyer. She was flown in one of Halbritter’s private jets to Cambria County Prison in Pennsylvania, 300 miles away. Patterson was held for three days, during which she was denied needed medication for her thyroid condition. "This was kidnapping. This was not legal," she attested. "I was a political prisoner." Patterson was also denied her right to consult with her attorney, Joe Heath, in confidence. "After a seven-hour drive, we were only allowed one 10-minute insecure conversation," says Heath. "My ability to prepare her case was hindered." Patterson regained her freedom only by accepting a plea bargain in which she promised not to interfere with the demolition of her home. Her ex-husband, one of Halbritter’s associates, has now challenged Patterson for custody of her two daughters and son on the grounds that she is homeless. Halbritter representative Jerry Reid refused to comment on Patterson’s case, saying only, "That situation is over." Patterson adds that the many criminal reports that the Oneidas have filed against the tribal police — including a 1996 assault on Patterson’s 70-year-old mother — to the local Madison County District Attorney’s office have "all been ignored." "This is a severe violation of … international law. All indigenous people have right to be free of cruel and inhumane treatment," she said. Since Patterson is now homeless and has been denied compensation for her destroyed home and belongings, she and her family are looking for a seasonal home. For more info on how to help, go oneidasfordemocracy.org. __________________________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Mail Plus - Powerful. Affordable. Sign up now. http://mailplus.yahoo.com From millietent at yahoo.com Wed Nov 27 15:26:34 2002 From: millietent at yahoo.com (annie v) Date: Sun Feb 8 02:52:00 2004 Subject: [Dryerase] "We Only Have the Choice to Die": Gaza Residents Brace for More Terror Message-ID: <20021127212634.94740.qmail@web13204.mail.yahoo.com> "We Only Have the Choice to Die": Gaza Residents Brace for More Terror by Kristin Ess GAZA STRIP, NOV. 14 — Today in Rafah an elderly woman sits in a chair in a narrow dirt alleyway, the same spot she sat in yesterday when she still had a house, uninhabitable though it was from the stench of flooding sewage. In one day, her eyes have gone from bright to dull. She is now both stateless and homeless. Israeli tanks ripped through her house yesterday, along with those of over 100 Palestinians. The woman next door holds my hands, kissing my cheeks. She is imploring me to do something to save her damaged home, to stop the Israeli soldiers from shooting at her, to stop the sewage from seeping through the creases in her cement block house. As we wade through the floor, she is crying as she leads me through the broken glass. She points to the tanks and bulldozers just outside her window, and holds her hands up to the sky. The streets are full of flies. The 8-meter-high security wall Israel is building out of dirty reddened steel is getting longer everyday. Israeli soldiers targeted a 2- year-old boy yesterday. Even they could not come up with an excuse for shooting him in the head. At his funeral today, Fatah Youth flags flew in the breeze, the baby’s body covered in purple- pink flowers. He was carried on a stretcher along side another small boy, nine years old, who died from 2-day-old injuries. In Gaza City, Israeli Apache helicopters are shooting missiles at the same building they already destroyed two nights before. This is a reminder to everyone here that they are never safe. In violation of international law, Israel continues to practice collective punishment. The Gaza Strip, already like a prison because people cannot move in or out, is being used as a dumping ground for the family members of "wanted" Palestinians. Many are saying that as soon as Israel banishes all Palestinians to Gaza, it will simply bomb the Strip out of existence. In Rafah this morning, a family was eating its Ramadan breakfast in the one room remaining in its destroyed house. The house had already been partially bulldozed days before, but there was nowhere else for the family to go. An Israeli tank passed by, firing inside. The mother and father grabbed their children and began to run. The father, carrying two of the children, escaped. The mother holding her 3-year-old son, but was injured as she tried to run away from the Israeli tank fire. She was taken to the hospital. The father found their 3-year-old son with a 50mm shell in his chest. A friend who has two young children and another on the way phones me and says, "This is a small body, a 3-year-old’s body. This bullet is big; it’s for walls, or to fight tank to tank, not for children." I ask him, "What can anyone do to defend themselves, to resist?" He tells me, "We have the choice to die. This is the reality. We can’t escape this." Later, I’m watching satellite news. A hundred tanks are plowing through Nablus, a West Bank city still under curfew. On Al Jazeera, I see a boy in a t-shirt and jeans running behind one of the tanks, trying to insert a Palestinian flag. __________________________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Mail Plus - Powerful. Affordable. Sign up now. http://mailplus.yahoo.com From millietent at yahoo.com Wed Nov 27 15:28:15 2002 From: millietent at yahoo.com (annie v) Date: Sun Feb 8 02:52:01 2004 Subject: [Dryerase] Building a Home in the Media: Simba Rousseau interview with Ana Noguiera Message-ID: <20021127212815.42844.qmail@web13207.mail.yahoo.com> Building a Home in the Media: Simba Rousseau interview with Ana Noguiera Simba Rousseau was homeless for seven and a half years. Now she has an apartment in Bushwick that she pays for with her storytelling. Starting at age 13, when she designed a house for ten dollars that would have cost the owner $500,000 at “professional” rates, Simba was never afraid to teach herself new skills and do what she needed to get by. An immigrant in her own country because she left her abusive home without any documentation, Simba has made a name for herself in the independent media world. She taught herself photo, audio and video skills and has been published in The Indypendent and Rolling Stone Magazine. She is a regular corre-spondent for Free Speech Radio News and a cameraperson for Democracy Now! and PBS. What started as a flyer making business when she was on the streets, Simba’s own project, Universal Rhythms, now produces documentaries on the prison industrial complex, detainees, and immigrant struggles. As a black, lesbian woman hustling the streets for spare change, Simba has battled some of the worst prejudices and injustices of our society. But through it all, her spirit has emerged as a determined force and it shines in her work as an independent journalist. Simba, now 27, was born in Florida and spent half of her homeless years there. We start our journey with her in NYC, which she got to by beating a master at his chess game…. Chess to me was the ultimate idea of what the game of life is. You either know how to play your pawns right or you just get fucked. That’s how street life is. So, when I won the game, [the master] paid for my ticket to New York City. I had always wanted to go to NYC. As a kid I read about the Harlem Renaissance, at a time when I hated myself for being black, for being a girl. I felt that, if anywhere, Harlem would be the place where I would find out who I was. At first, I worked as a messenger because it was the only job I could get without papers. So just like an immigrant I was making $20 a day, working 60 hours a week. But soon, I was starting my own businesses: cleaning houses, babysitting, and making flyers. That’s when I developed Universal Rhythms, my trademark. My first apartment in Harlem was a Section 8 building for people on welfare. I was paying $550 per month. But the place was a slum, with a slumlord and slum management. No hot water or heat in the winter; no working stove. After about a year, I realized this was screwed up. So I started talking to other people in my building to ask if they wanted to start a lawsuit. Everyone was scared. They just wanted to live and hope that things would get better. But I couldn’t take it. So I put my case together. I learned housing law. I learned my rights. And I read a book about photography. I borrowed my friend’s camera, this little shitty point-and-shoot. And I documented everything that happened in my house. I took my landlord to court with that. I represented myself in court and I won my case. From there, I thought, imagine how many people have no clue about their rights as tenants. That’s what got me into journalism. I taught myself how to develop prints. I happened to also bump into an old friend from Miami who was a photo assistant. And he taught me carpentry and together we built his photo studio from scratch. I became his assistant and we started getting big jobs. We traveled a lot, all over the freakin’ country. That’s how I learned photography. He knew that I was into photo-journalism so he told me about the Inauguration protests in D.C. Someone there gave me a card for the Independent Media Center. So I started looking into it. As soon as I walked in, Eddie Becker threw me on the radio. And that’s when I met Madhava, who told me there was an IMC in New York City.... I got into journalism primarily because there are so few people of color journalists in the U.S. There are none to have as role models. And mainstream media doesn’t cover issues of color. I soon discovered that the left media doesn’t really cover issues of color either. So it became my mission, as a person who was struggling internally to appreciate her own identity. Each issue was an opportunity to battle those issues with myself. Plus, as a journalist, you learn to speak out and ask certain questions, and that was me learning to think for myself and speak for myself and find my voice. My voice was lost. But through each person I interviewed, I felt like I was speaking, that I was allowing my voice to speak. How did you learn audio? I taught myself. I teach myself everything by finding people who are the best at what they do and I learn from them. Video was easier because I already knew photo. But I saw so much stuff as a homeless person, that’s really where my eye started. To me, life is a movie and you can either be the character in a movie or you can be the director. And I guess I wanted to be a director because I love to sit in trees. When you sit in trees you can see the whole movie from the tree. I learn by watching. Then I started listening to “Democracy Now!” I loved Amy Goodman’s style of journalism because she asked tough questions. So I knew I needed to get in there to learn how to be a good journalist. I figured if we had a person of color journalist who could be that tough and ask those kinds of questions and do that kind of work, well, then you’ve got some-thing going. So I came to DN! And started doing camerawork. How and why did you make it over to East Timor? Miranda [Kennedy, former producer for DN!] told me about Amy’s reporting in E. Timor. So I listened to all those archives, and they blew me away. When I found out about their independence day I knew I had to go. And then I found out that Amy was going. I knew if I really wanted to learn how she did it, I had to be in the field doing it. So I worked my butt off, enough to buy a laptop and all the equipment I needed. In E. Timor, I met Deepa [Fernandez, anchor of FSRN], and I learned a lot from her. I stayed with Amy and Deepa and the whole crew, so I watched and learned from them. But then I realized what what they were doing was different from what I wanted to do. Amy was interested in the high politicians, but I wasn’t. I just wanted to be with the people. I met this kid. He was 20 years old. His name was Abrau. I was shooting with my little Rolleicord camera. This kid came up to me and had never seen such an incredible camera, even though it was actually a shitty camera. He only had a point-and-shoot. But he said, ‘I’m ready to work.’ I didn’t have any money, just enough to survive. So instead of paying him, I gave him my audio equipment. In exchange he was my translator. He spoke English, Portuguese, Indonesian and Tetoun. So, we went around to people’s houses and they showed us what happened to their houses and they told us their experiences during the occupation. When you were there did you ever reflect on your days sitting on a beach in Miami? It’s still hard to realize that I’ve come so far, mostly because I’ve blocked out about seven and a half years of my life. I still feel like I haven’t accomplished much. Even in E. Timor I felt that. But occasionally, I would look around and say, wow, I’m here. I’ve really just been very fortunate my whole life. Just the fact that I’m here. I could have been killed so many times. I’ve seen it flash in front of my eyes so many times. I’ve learned to climb obstacles.I spent a lot of time in the mountains. To me mountains are like obstacles in your everyday life. When I was on an Indian reservation I’d hike a different mountain everyday. I felt like if I could conquer them there then I could take care of those mountains in the “real world.” I’m in this world by myself, obviously. My family is not here. I learned to be my own family, and cheer myself on in hard times. I tried every drug possible on the street. But the fact that I was interested in spirituality at a very young age is what kept me through it all. Otherwise I probably would have given up a long time ago. I felt like giving up many times, but once you’ve gone through so much, you know you’ve come this far. And after you’ve hit rock bottom, you know at least that it can’t get any worse, unless you just stay there. I didn’t want to stay there, because I also wanted to help other homeless people. I wanted to move because I couldn’t help them from where I was. I had nothing to help them with. __________________________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Mail Plus - Powerful. Affordable. Sign up now. http://mailplus.yahoo.com From millietent at yahoo.com Wed Nov 27 15:29:21 2002 From: millietent at yahoo.com (annie v) Date: Sun Feb 8 02:52:01 2004 Subject: [Dryerase] Radio, Radio: Clear Channel Makes Monopoly Nightmare Reality Message-ID: <20021127212921.17157.qmail@web13206.mail.yahoo.com> Radio, Radio: Clear Channel Makes Monopoly Nightmare Reality by Jeff Perlstein SAN FRANCISCO — Think of a Texas-based multinational company that is facing a Department of Justice investigation, lawsuits for inappropriate business practices, a flurry of criticism in the main-stream press, and a bill in congress to curb its impact on the industry. Did you think Enron? Try again. This 800-lb. Texas gorilla has spent $30 billion since 1996 to buy its way into becoming the world’s largest radio broadcaster, concert promoter, and outdoor advertising firm. Clear Channel Communications of San Antonio, TX may not be a household name yet, but in less than six years it has rocketed to a place alongside NBC and Gannett as one of the largest media companies in the United States and gained a reputation in the radio and concert promotion industries for its ugly hardball tactics. It has played a leading role in destroying media diversity in the United States. And yes, it is the same media company that allegedly “blacklisted” certain songs following September 11, including Cat Stevens’ “Peace Train” and John Lennon’s “Imagine.” Before passage of the 1996 Telecommunications Act, a company could not own more than 40 radio stations in the entire country. With the Act’s sweeping relaxation of ownership limits, Clear Channel now owns approximately 1,225 radio stations in 300 cities and dominates the audience share in 100 of 112 major areas. Its closest com-petitors — CBS and ABC, media giants in their own right — own only one-fifth as many stations. “It’s not just how big and powerfulthey are but how they do business, the arm twisting,” Mike Jacobs, former independent label owner and manager of Blink 182, told Eric Boehlert who has been covering Clear Channel’s shady business practices for Salon.com. Accusations abound that Clear Channel has illegally used its dominance in radio to help secure control of the nation’s live entertainment business. Several cities, including Denver and Cincinnati, have accused radio station managers of threatening to withdraw certain music from rotation if the artists do not perform at a Clear Channel venue. This tactic, “negative synergy,” has allegedly been used to pressure record companies into buying radio advertising spots in cities where they want to book concert venues. With this anti-competitive tactic of leveraging airplay against concert performances, Clear Channel has firmly solidified its hold in both areas. As a result, Clear Channel now owns, operates or exclusively books the vast majority of amphitheaters, arenas and clubs in the country. It also controls the most powerful promoters, who last year sold 27 million concert tickets. That is 23 million more than the closest competitor. Clear Channel’s mode of operation is also accelerating the homogenization of programming on the airwaves. The company shuts out independent artists who can’t afford to go through high-priced middlemen, and is responsible for taking the practice of voice tracking to new heights (or depths, depending on your perspective). Voice tracking is the practice of creating brief, computer-assisted voice segments that attempt to fool the listener into thinking that a program is locally produced, when in fact the same content is being broadcast to upwards of 75 stations nationwide from a central site. So you have one overworked “radio personality” recording the phrases, “Hello Topeka!” “Hi Springfield!” “How you feeling Oakland?” all day long. Voice tracking is also part of another Clear Channel homoge-nizing strategy. In cities across America they have set up stations with call letters which sound like KISS-FM so that everywhere you hear the same songs, the same DJs and the same presentation when you tune in to KISS-FM. Such branding and consolidation is clearly counter to the Federal Communications Commission’s mandate to encourage media diversity. Fortunately, long-standing concerns of media activists are now being echoed by the mainstream press, courts and regulatory agencies, and members of Congress. Clear Channel is currently facing antitrust lawsuits from a wide range of plaintiffs around the country, including an Illinois concert-goer concerned with soaring ticket prices and the nation’s largest Latino-owned radio company. Last summer a small Denver-area concert promoter, called Nobody in Particular Presents, sued the media behemoth for antitrust violations, claiming that it “has used its size and clout to coerce artists ... to use Clear Channel to promote their concerts or else risk losing airplay.” The judge agreed to hear the case, and ruled that the evidence is “sufficient to make a case of monopolization and attempted monopolization under Section 2 of the Sherman Act.” As a result, the halo of silence surrounding the company’s anti-competitive practices may finally be shattered. Plaintiffs’ lawyers will be able to compel music industry insiders to testify regarding the often-repeated, off-the-record allegations that Clear Channel’s radio stations have illegally rewarded or punished artists based on their dealings with the company’s concert division. Community coalitions that hold Clear Channel accountable for the negative effects of over consolidation have also emerged in Detroit and San Francisco. Letter writing campaigns have urged elected officials to reign in the company and make policy changes to protect the public interest. Several websites and hundreds of listserves have been providing information about Clear Channel’s excesses and communities’ resistance. At a Reclaim the Media Conference in Seattle in mid-September, a national coalition launched a campaign strategically to coordinate efforts, amplify their impact, and link up with broader media-policy initiatives. Nationally-recognized organizations such as Fairness and Accuracy In Reporting, the Democratic Media Legal Project, Media Alliance, and Prometheus Radio Project began mapping out steps to mobilize public pressure against Clear Channel. “The political terrain is really shifting,” says Robert W. McChesney, author and professor of communications at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, in an interview by Randy Dotinga in Wirednews.com. “There’s an opportunity for discussion about radio that would have been unthinkable six months or a year ago.” Jeff Perlstein is the executive director of Media Alliance. To get involved with the national cam-paign to curtail Clear Channel, see www.media-alliance.org or www.clearchannelsucks.org. __________________________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Mail Plus - Powerful. Affordable. Sign up now. http://mailplus.yahoo.com From millietent at yahoo.com Wed Nov 27 15:30:57 2002 From: millietent at yahoo.com (annie v) Date: Sun Feb 8 02:52:01 2004 Subject: [Dryerase] Old Boys Network: Women Confined to Pink Media Ghetto Message-ID: <20021127213057.13010.qmail@web13201.mail.yahoo.com> Old Boys Network: Women Confined to Pink Media Ghetto by Jennifer L. Pozner Ask a feminist to identify the most important issue facing women today, and, chances are, she wouldn’t immediately point to the media. But she should. Corporate media is key to why our fast-moving culture is so slow to change, stereo-types are so stubborn and the power structure so entrenched. By determining who can and cannot speak, which issues are discussed and how they are framed, media have the power to maintain the status quo or challenge the dominant order. Without accurate, non-biased news coverage and challenging, creative cultural expression it is virtually impossible to significantly move public opinion of social justice issues and create lasting change. And how have media used this power where women’s rights are concerned? With a vengeance. From millietent at yahoo.com Wed Nov 27 15:32:03 2002 From: millietent at yahoo.com (annie v) Date: Sun Feb 8 02:52:01 2004 Subject: [Dryerase] 9/11 Probe: Bush Gets His Way Again Message-ID: <20021127213203.10853.qmail@web13205.mail.yahoo.com> 9/11 Probe: Bush Gets His Way Again by Mike Wu The question “How did this happen?” still lingers. Many relatives of the victims of the Sept. 11 attacks and politicians have been asking this. They have been pressing the government for a broad inquiry, but thanks to an obstinate White House, the investigation will not be as far-reaching or as unbiased as they would have liked. Various groups of relatives and congressmen had been at loggerheads with the White House for months over the details. Bush and company won two major concessions: the ability to appoint a chairman, and raising the number of votes required for a subpoena to be issued from five to six out of the 11 commission members. The proposal passed the House and Senate as an attachment to the Intelligence Authorization Bill. “They kept saying ‘We just have this little thing to fix.’ So we fixed that, and they would come up with three other things,” says Stephen Push, whose wife, Lisa J. Raines, died in the plane that crashed into the Pentagon. “We’re not crazy about the president appointing the chairman, but our greatest concern was the subpoena power.” The time frame of the investigation and the various topics it will be investigating were two issues the relatives of victims fought for and won. The time span is limited to two years, with the committee having the ability to turn in its findings earlier. Also key to the agreement was the role that Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) would play. One of the Republican appointees must meet his approval. The proposal would not have been approved otherwise. “As long as Sen. McCain has one of the picks, and the others are people of integrity, then we’re guardedly optimistic about this investigation,” Push said. The battle was intense. The White House wanted a chairperson of its choice, and it wanted the Republicans to be able to block subpoenas. Acceptance of those proposals would have prevented the commission from being bipartisan and from investigating whatever and whomever it wished. The Bush administration also wanted the commission to wrap up its findings within a year. Senators from both parties believed they would need at least 18 months to two years to complete the probe. That length of time would have meant the report (and any embarrassing findings) would come out in the middle of President George W. Bush’s re-election campaign. Bush and company also called for sharp limits on the scope of the investigation. Rather than focusing on intelligence, the White House wanted the independent commission to investigate other areas, including aviation security, border control, immigration policy, and the response of the North American Aerospace Defense Command. The demand for limits on the scope of the investigation was especially stinging for those who lost loved ones. “More than half an hour after the second Trade Tower attack, the Pentagon was attacked. Why weren’t jets scrambled to intercept that airliner?” Push asked. The actions of the White House caused many to question the administration’s real intentions. Sen. Joseph I. Lieberman (D-Conn) asked the White House, “Do you really want to allow this commission to be created? And if you don’t, why not?” A coalition of four groups of families issued a statement saying they could not understand why the administration declared it supported an investigation “while apparently doing everything in its power to prevent the commission from being established.” Leaders of family groups promised a high-pressure campaign against the Bush administration if the commission proposal was rejected. Not long after that, an agreement was reached. Commission members may be appointed as soon as Dec. 15. __________________________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Mail Plus - Powerful. Affordable. Sign up now. http://mailplus.yahoo.com From millietent at yahoo.com Wed Nov 27 15:32:56 2002 From: millietent at yahoo.com (annie v) Date: Sun Feb 8 02:52:01 2004 Subject: [Dryerase] A Party Without A People: Dems Stay Loyal to Fat-Cat Backers Message-ID: <20021127213256.52784.qmail@web13202.mail.yahoo.com> A Party Without A People: Dems Stay Loyal to Fat-Cat Backers by A. K. Gupta Pundits, politicians and spin doctors have diagnosed “lack of message” as the disease the Democrats suffered in November’s election. The criticism is misplaced. If the Democrats failed to stand for anything in the mid-term elections, it is because their corporate patrons are their only true constituents. Absent an active social base pushing them to adopt progressive legislation, they have shown themselves incapable of opposing corporate cronyism and tax cuts for the rich. How could the Democrats assail the Republican party for Enron when they were also on the take? It’s like a $25 hooker calling a $100 prostitute sleazy. Opponents of the Republicans’ extreme agenda should instead ponder the shift through the years from debating the contours of the welfare state to arguing about the parameters of the police state. The G.O.P. stranglehold on power has been decades in the making. Starting in the 1960s with Richard Nixon’s “silent majority” and cries of “law and order,” it solidified with the “moral majority” and the 1980 victory of Ronald Reagan. While the Republicans have some inherent advantages, namely as the party of capital and the military-security apparatus, they have also mobilized social movements, white-flight suburbanites, right-to-lifers and evangelicals, in favor of their authoritarian agenda. In contrast, the movements that used to hold the Democrats’ feet to the fire — labor, environmentalists, feminists, blacks, Latinos — are in disarray. Unions are in perpetual decline, unable to get legislation passed that would make organizing more hospitable. The big environmental groups are fundraising machines more comfortable lounging in the halls of power than stirring up the grassroots. The feminist agenda, at least nationally, is limited to abortion rights. And while blacks and Latinos have made dramatic gains in political power since the civil rights era, there are no prominent groups or leaders pushing a visionary agenda. The Republicans have a vision, albeit a creepy one: that of a divinely ordained, free-market, iron-fisted paternalism; a triumvirate of market, the military and God. It is the vision that pits America as the force of righteousness in the global crusade against terrorism and the evil hordes of Islam. Closer to home, it is the vision that capitalizes on suburban fears of poor, darker-skinned “others” by continuing a savage and senseless drug war. Progressive social movements have forgotten the importance of vision. That is why Marxism-Leninism, perhaps terminally sclerotic now, was such a powerful force for so long. It had a transcendental view, historical materialism, with a historical agent of change, the revolutionary proletariat. What is needed are movements that once again speak the language of a grand historical narrative, instead of being cri-pled by postmodern subjectivity. There are glimmers of hope, in the global justice movement, the Greens and the anti-war movement. The latter displayed its new-found muscle in October, spurring 133 congressional Representatives to oppose the Iraq war resolution, more than anyone predicted. In fact, powerful social movements can even effect positive change under a Republican president, as happened under Nixon with the passage of landmark clean air and clean water legislation, and the establishment of the Occupational Safety and Health Administration and the Environmental Protection Agency. The wresting of power from the right won’t happen in an election or two; that was the mistake of the Clinton era, when progressives, in a desperate bid for power, willfully ignored his corporate agenda. Change has to come from below in a vibrant visionary form with wide appeal, not by pleading with the Democrats to market themselves better. __________________________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Mail Plus - Powerful. Affordable. Sign up now. http://mailplus.yahoo.com From millietent at yahoo.com Wed Nov 27 15:33:58 2002 From: millietent at yahoo.com (annie v) Date: Sun Feb 8 02:52:01 2004 Subject: [Dryerase] GI Joe Goes Digital Message-ID: <20021127213358.44137.qmail@web13207.mail.yahoo.com> GI Joe Goes Digital by Sarah Stuteville You experience the nervous breath of a soldier as he jostles the sight on his sniper rifle. He tenses as an anonymous figure darts across the road — a button pushed, a trigger pulled, and the shadow crumples in the dusk. You are playing America’s Army, a video game designed and created by the United States military to help with recruitment. With 24 million plays since its June debut, America’s Army is introducing a new generation of children to the adventure of a camouflage lifestyle where honor is earned guilt-free by racking up virtual "kills" and slaying America’s enemies. The game’s high-tech graphics and realistic soundtrack — including the whir of chopper propellers and radioed instructions — have made America’s Army one of this year’s most popular computer games. In this "T for Teen"-rated video game, players experience virtual boot camp, venture out on reconnaissance missions in Afghanistan’s Tora Bora caves and hone their skills in sniper training. Just coincidentally, young players can also access the Army’s official recruitment website through a button on the screen, which urges them to " … earn the right to call yourself a soldier…." The U.S. Army isn’t the only one to cash in on making entertainment out of the new world order. Electronic Arts’ Delta Force is another case of turning yesterday’s news into today’s entertainment. It offers an array of simulated missions ranging from "Task Force Dagger: Afghanistan" to "Urban Warfare: Fight Terrorism at Home" and "Black Hawk Down: Mission Somalia." Like America’s Army, the weapons are realistic and the targets are usually Arab, with familiar rhetoric such as, "Join the Fight for World Justice," "Defeat the Global Threat," and "Terrorists behind every door." Interestingly, the American perspective is not the only one offered in political video games. A Syrian publishing house, Dar al-Fikr, has designed a video game on the Palestinian uprising called UnderAsh. Set in current-day Israel the protagonist of UnderAsh is not a heavily armed soldier with full artillery available, but a 19-year-old named Ahmad. The website includes Ahmad’s story, that of a hero "born during the Israeli invasion of South Lebanon… he belongs to Jerusalem." He is devoted to the Palestinian resistance. In the scenes available Ahmad is depicted throwing stones and firing machine guns at Israeli tanks, as well as praying at the Dome of the Rock mosque in Jerusalem and being imprisoned in an Israeli jail. UnderAsh has received a flurry of attention and elicited controversy. Some have hailed it to be what it claims on the game’s web site — "A call to justice," and "a new form of history book … letting others understand what’s happening in Palestine." Others, such as Middle East Realities, have denounced it as "disgusting propaganda." Whether political elements are co-opting popular culture media to disseminate their views and market their interest, or popular culture is using its own tools to express and examine the growing unrest in the world, video games are transforming the violence of current international conflicts into another form of entertainment. __________________________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Mail Plus - Powerful. Affordable. Sign up now. http://mailplus.yahoo.com From editors at agrnews.org Thu Nov 28 11:24:13 2002 From: editors at agrnews.org (Asheville Global Report) Date: Sun Feb 8 02:52:01 2004 Subject: [Dryerase] Protesters defy new ordinance; cite =?iso-8859-1?Q?=91selective?= =?iso-8859-1?Q?_enforcement=92?= Message-ID: <5.1.0.14.0.20021128121829.00a79e00@buncombe.main.nc.us> Asheville Global Report www.agrnews.org Reprinting permitted for non-profit organizations, and members of the dry-erase news wire. Protesters defy new ordinance; cite ?selective enforcement? By Liz Allen Asheville, North Carolina, Nov. 24 (AGR)? Protesters gathered in Pritchard Park last Saturday with sleeping bags, pajamas, and overturned hats asking for money, demonstrating their opposition to the new city ordinance banning solicitation, loitering, loafing, relieving oneself and sleeping in public in central downtown areas. The ordinance is being criticized as promoting the interests of wealthy investors, merchants, and tourists while assaulting the poor?s basic rights of survival. At the demonstration, Bud Howell, who also spoke against the ordinance at the city council meeting where the law was passed, explained, ?Right now the flow of money has more rights on the streets than human beings.? The demonstration coincided with the end of the Asheville Christmas parade. By 5:30pm, approximately 80 demonstrators, including a number of young children, were present. Many lay in the center of the park, in sleeping bags, holding signs and asking for change. Signs had slogans like ?All who wander are not criminals? and ?Social cleansing is good for business.? The crowd of spectators had mixed reactions. Many voiced support or donated change to demonstrators. Others believed the event was ineffective or irrelevant. Robbie Wheeler, Asheville resident and parade/protest spectator, stated poverty does not bother him and people who disagree with the ordinance should ?Get a job, go to work, and buy their own food.? Area homeless residents at the park were supportive of the event but doubtful over the possible outcome; some (including demonstrators) expected a police riot. ?Homeless people don?t stand a chance in this town,? said one woman who regularly sleeps in the park and wished to remain anonymous. ?If you don?t do what you?re told then they beat the heck out of you and you go to jail for 30 days.? She also stated that homeless residents are afraid to speak out about the issue, out of concern for their own safety. The Asheville Police Department (APD) refused to cite any of the protesters for ordinance violations. Former Asheville mayoral candidate Mickey Mahaffey said he panhandled Lt. John Kirkpatrick, downtown commander for the APD, holding a sign reading ?I?m begging for contributions for the poor! Please help!? According to Mahaffey, Kirkpatrick told him: ?I hope you make a lot of money because we?re not doing anything tonight.? ?I wonder if the other panhandlers today got off as easily,? added Mahaffey. In attempt to violate as many aspects of the ordinance as possible, protesters began stretching their sleeping gear out in front of the Wachovia Bank ATM across the street from the park. Although no one was prevented from using the cash machine, protesters believed they were violating the rules banning the impediment of the free flow of pedestrian traffic and solicitation occurring within fifteen feet of an ATM. In a dialog with the demonstrators, Kirkpatrick surmised they should have four feet of sidewalk on either side of them, in accordance with Americans with Disabilities Act regulations. Although not blocking access to the ATM, there was not four feet of walkway on either side of demonstrators. At one point Kirkpatrick, after watching from across the street, reprimanded the demonstrators, calling them rude, but cited no one. Pajama-clad demonstrator Allie Morris reported that 5 people were not cited after urinating in Prichard Park in plain view of the police (eight were present on the scene). ?It?s amazing how determined they are to maintain their selective enforcement .How is 10 people stretched across the sidewalk not impeding the flow of traffic? I don?t even think they brought their ticket books,? she exclaimed. The protest also included cheers from radical cheerleaders, a story time for the camping protesters, street musicians and performers. At one point a demonstrator lowered the American flag in front of the Wacovia building to half-mast. The demonstration dispersed around 9pm that evening, with no citations issued or arrests reported. From editors at agrnews.org Thu Nov 28 11:32:43 2002 From: editors at agrnews.org (Asheville Global Report) Date: Sun Feb 8 02:52:01 2004 Subject: [Dryerase] TIME magazine advocates assassination Message-ID: <5.1.0.14.0.20021128122737.00a7c6b0@buncombe.main.nc.us> Asheville Global Report www.agrnews.org Reprinting permitted for non-profit organizations, and members of the dry-erase news wire. TIME magazine advocates assassination By Eamon Martin Asheville, North Carolina, Nov. 26 (AGR)? Back in 1999, in an extremely self-referential article paying tribute to Mohandas Gandhi, TIME magazine Chief Foreign Correspondent Johanna McGeary characterized herself as a disciple of the anti-colonialist Indian leader. A self-described ?sixties kid,? McGeary bragged about her principled kinship with ?Martin Luther King Jr.,? ?Nelson Mandela,? and ?the environmental marchers [against the World Trade Organization] in Seattle.? Further demonstrating narcissistic, journalistic co-optation at it?s worst, McGeary went on to mythologize misty-eyed about her and her fellow activists? ?passionate commitment,? and ?nonviolent activism,? a Gandhian tradition, she implied, that they helped keep alive in the civil rights and anti-war movements of the 1960s. Whatever ?passionate commitment? to nonviolence that McGeary clearly went out of her way to espouse at the time was demonstrably abandoned or exposed as being the superficial fakery it actually was in the Nov. 25, 2002 issue of TIME. In its feature article, ?Why Can?t We Find bin Laden? An inside look at what the US is doing to nail him ? and why the campaign has fizzled so far,? McGeary and congressional correspondent Douglas Waller teamed up to not only answer that question, but to provide their own narrow and very violent options for dealing with the al-Qaida leader. Waller, it should be noted first, is no adversary of the military. In recent years the writer has made a side career as the US military?s first choice for book market boosterism, authoring such propagandistic titles as The Commandos and Air Warriors. For the latter, his website boasts: ?he put you in the cockpit with the Navy?s daring carrier pilots.? Now, for his latest release, BIG RED: Three Months On Board A Trident Nuclear Submarine, ?the veteran TIME Magazine correspondent penetrates for the first time one of the most secretive worlds in the US military ? a Trident nuclear submarine with its 24 strategic missiles and more than 120 nuclear warheads.? These Washington insiders must have felt so confidently inside the consensus of military opinion that they didn?t feel the need to cite even one US official when they framed a short list of tactical possibilities in tackling the al-Qaida ?master terrorist.? McGeary and Waller suggest that nothing short of brutal murder is in order for Osama bin Laden: Theoretically, there are four ways to take him out: 1) Spot him with a Predator drone and drop a precision-guided weapon on him. Fast, cheap, simple. It worked in Yemen on Nov. 3, when a drone?s missile obliterated a car carrying five other al-Qaida operatives [actually six men, one of whom was believed to be an al-Qaida operative, another of whom was a US citizen - ed.] . But an air strike inside Pakistan would require more cooperation from President Pervez Musharraf than the US has. Pakistan only reluctantly agreed to allow the US to use its airspace and bases to stage the Afghan invasion; it would balk at Predator drones flying all over the country. 2) Detect him electronically, triangulate his position quickly, listen long enough to make sure he?s the right man, then drop a bomb fast. 3) Track him down the old-fashioned way, paying off locals until he?s just around the corner, then surround him, strap on the night-vision gear, take out the guards and do him in. 4) Persuade someone else to get him. Read in its entirety, the article might easily be interpreted as suggesting that heightened American anxiety in reaction to CIA and FBI warnings of ?spectacular? terrorist threats alone is reason enough to drop a bomb on a single man. But, significantly, McGeary and Waller deduce, ?bin Laden?s demise? is an ?important symbol of success? for George W. Bush?s terror war. The article concludes with perhaps another self-referential clue to the authors? modus operandi: ?In symbolic terms, the value of getting [bin Laden] ? dead or alive ? remains incalculable.?