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Various News
Various Sunday News Items:
Frank Rich endorses Gore. Parts of his Times Select column are liberated here
Mrs. Clinton does look like a weak candidate – not so much because of her marriage, her gender or her liberalism, but because of her eagerness to fudge her stands on anything and everything to appeal to any and all potential voters.
[…]
While a Gore candidacy could not single-handedly save the Democrats from themselves any more than his movie can vanquish "X-Men" at the multiplex, it might at least force the party powers that be to start facing some inconvenient but necessary truths.
I agree with that. Go Al.
NYT on Ahmadinejad: Iran Chief Eclipses Clerics as He Consolidates Power. Money quote:
He has evicted the former president, Mohammad Khatami, from his offices, …
This is like saying "Bush has evicted Clinton from his office." Hey, the had an e_l_e_c_t_i_o_n! Deeper into the article there are some insights. Ahmadinejad is a socialist:
"Parliament and government should fight against wealthy officials," Mr. Ahmadinejad said in a speech before Parliament on Saturday that again appeared aimed at upending pillars of the status quo. "Wealthy people should not have influence over senior officials because of their wealth. They should not impose their demands on the needs of the poor people."
and he is fighting for women rights:
Perhaps most surprising, the man who was rumored to want to segregate men and women on elevators and even sidewalks has emerged as a proponent of women’s rights, challenging some of the nation’s most powerful religious leaders.
Interesting fight within the coal industry – dirty versus very dirty coal power plants: 2 Industry Leaders Bet on Coal but Split on Cleaner Approach
WaPo: A gruesome Nir Rosen piece: Iraq Is the Republic of Fear
[T]he civil war started long before Samarra and long before the first uprisings. It started when U.S. troops arrived in Baghdad. It began when Sunnis discovered what they had lost, and Shiites learned what they had gained. And the worst is yet to come.
Robert Kagen has a revealing argument why in 2008 the Democrats should win. If Power Shifts In 2008. You see, if they don´t win, there is a chance that they would eventually become an anti-imperialistic party. Now we can`t have that, can we?
Independent: The children of Guantanamo Bay
Lawyers in London estimate that more than 60 detainees held at the terrorists’ prison camp were boys under 18 when they were captured.
They include at least 10 detainees still held at the US base in Cuba who were 14 or 15 when they were seized – including child soldiers who were held in solitary confinement, repeatedly interrogated and allegedly tortured.
Telegraph: Blair as Bush spokesman: Blair beefed up his Iran speech to please Bush
The Prime Minister changed key passages on possible action against Iran, climate change, and a proposed shake-up of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank.
Objections by President George W Bush’s inner circle played a key role in the alterations, which were made just before Mr Blair delivered his landmark address at Georgetown University in Washington, on Friday, British sources have revealed.
Funny: The 25 Worst Tech Products of All Time by PC World. Only IT products, so the headline is misleading. But having lived through all those hype products in the industry it’s fun to remember.
Trophies in a Barrel: US Politicians Taking Pot-Shots at ‘Illegal Immigration’
By Carrie Underwood
South Carolina Daily Specter
Published: May 31, 2006
“Illegal Immigration” — the sport of publicly slamming the indigent working immigrants in our midst, those who work migrant labor with little chance to escape from poverty — seems to generate controversy wherever it is practiced, whether by politicians running for re-election in Texas or in private corporate boardrooms in New York.
A homeless Guatamalan man was rescued today from a New York Lower East Side sweatshop by the humanitarian DeWalt Foundation, a charitable offshoot of the famous construction tool-making company. He had been coaxed into a retraining program, and then sold to the sweatshop. Homeless indigents and immigrants can be re-trained in abandoned US military barracks, and then used for cheap labor and for domestic service by private businessmen and multi-national corporations.
The US federal government is considering banning such immigrant retraining programs, which charge the costs of transport and retraining against the immigrant’s future income, so that in many cases, they must work years or even decades before they accrue any savings of their own, and are constantly in fear of being revealed and then deported, without being able to collect their life savings, held by their employer.
In South Carolina, the ‘migra’ controversy came to a climax last fall when a panel of experts commissioned by the country’s election officials recommended a total ban on the practice by humanitarian groups, which also had included training homeless indigents to drive and to vote.
In the next two months, the South Carolina Department of Labor Affairs and Expatriatism is expected to act on that recommendation by releasing for public comment the first draft of regulations on indigent retraining standards.
The cost could be steep. South Carolina has a thriving black-market migra labor industry that generates about $280 million a year from domestic service, general labor and military volunteerism.
Hiring immigrants is prohibited in the state’s 22 counties, but, as the panel noted in its report, both personal and corporate revenues earned by avoiding income tax and benefit co-payments and other non-taxable conveniences far outstrip the loss of state and local sales taxes, due to the sub-minimum pay levels, and in some cases, to work-for-board, which takes place mostly in private homes of the very well-to-do.
The diversity of its immigrant populations makes South Carolina one of the most popular worker retraining destinations. Bengalis, Guamese, Romanians and Ghanians are among the most desirable workers. South Carolina illegal-hire search Web sites advertise “big five” packages, which refers to one-stop hiring for a cook, maid, gardener, chauffeur and nanny.
But not all illegal-hire searches are the same. Lucrative profits have led some private illegal- retraining operators to conduct immigrant outreach “safaris” overseas, which virtually guarantee the new immigrant will speak very little English, be compliant to domestic re-training, and work for room-and-board plus a small stipend, without complaint. Growing concern over the ethics of this practice led Martin Schalk, the minister of labor affairs and expatriatism, to convene a panel of management experts to report on the dark underside of America’s illegals hiring boom.
I spoke with a Nepalese maid outside a toney Charlestown mansion this afternoon, who explained in broken English that she was enticed onto a private plane by a wealthy “benefactor”, who said he was going to bring humanitarian aid to her country after she was trained in the US as an interpretor, only to have one of her kidneys surgically removed, and then be sold into domestic service, oweing her client the finder’s fee and cost of her plane fare to the US.
The unsavory aspects of illegal smuggling in South Carolina were first revealed in “The Cook Report,” a 1997 French documentary, which showed drugged domestics being unloaded by American dealers from the backs of their vehicles outside large estates. The public, both in and outside South Carolina, responded with outrage, but in the nine years since then, no national policy on illegals hiring has been put into effect to stop the practice of illegals outreach retraining.
Instead, politicians and business pundits are taking pot-shots at illegal aliens who have come to the United States for work, after being driven out of their country by relentless and ruthless corporate global, so-called “free trade”.
“Send Them Back!” a billboard in El Paso shouts.
Along the Arizona border, Minutemen, private vigilantes, are erecting barrier fences, and the US government has moved National Guard to the state, in what is seen largely as a political move to garner votes, rather than deal with the dark issues of re-emergent slavery in the US.
“One must bear in mind that certain individuals do contravene the law,” smiled Sheriff Leslie Durham, chief of police for Vendetta County. National legislation would be an effort to curb what he calls “rogues”, but the sheriff said he doesn’t believe the federal government will be any more effective in accomplishing real labor reform, than they were in handling Katrina.
“We had slavery for four hundred years before the Yankees, and I’m sure we will have slavery for another four hundred years, you can betcha,” he yawned and spat a gob of chew into a dixie cup.
“This here is our’n promised land.”
Posted by: Carrie Underwood | May 29 2006 7:22 utc | 18
chris floyd: Siberian Khatru: On Being Banned by Daily Kos
Last week, I was banned from contributing to Daily Kos, apparently for criticizing the Democratic cave-in on Peeper Hayden’s CIA nomination a bit too forcefully. At least I think that was the reason; maybe they just didn’t like the cut of my jib, I don’t know. This banishment to Kossack Siberia is a matter of no great importance, of course, neither to the wider world nor to me, but as the shunning was accompanied by several ugly and false personal accusations against me (and our webmaster here, Richard Kastelein, who was also banned), I thought I would take this opportunity to respond. I wouldn’t want to let swift-boatian slanders enter the public record unchallenged.
…
After the banning, I asked DK if I could respond to the lies and insults of some of the site’s commenters. This request wasn’t granted, but below is the reply I would have posted.
counterpunch: The DLC and Israel: Zionist Democrats
To coincide with Olmert’s visit, the Democratic Leadership Council published a statement celebrating “Zionism” and condemning Islam. If their publication had not come from a man who purports to be a leader of the political opposition to the deeply unpopular right-wing Republican regime one might be inclined to surmise that it had been issued by the so-called Israel Lobby.
In what was meant to be a moving personal account of his fifth trip to Israel, Al From, the founding father and CEO of the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC), defined Zionism as, “a good idea filled with hope.” On his journey, Mr. From visited the summit of Mount Hadar where he experienced a moving vision of Israeli ‘hope’ locked in conflict with Palestinian ‘anger.’
…
Inspired by Mr. From’s Zionist reverie and Prime Minister Olmert’s visit to the Bush White House, the DLC is in the midst of heralding and hyping the publication of a book titled, With All Our Might, which is little more than a collection of essays advocating a radically Zionist agenda. In their vision of America and its role in the world, it is ironic that Mr. From and his DLC differ very little if at all from the neoconservatives propping up the sinking framework the Bush White House.
For example, With All Our Might, advocates a plan of action that seriously proposes that the Democratic Party should support a swift and decisive increase in the militarization of American society. Another policy objective advocated by the authors of With All Our Might is the long-term, ongoing and open-ended continuance of the counterproductive US occupation of Iraq. Even though the latest polls indicate that the American people and most especially the Democratic grassroots would prefer a timely exit from Iraq, the authors of With All Our Might advocate that the Democratic Party, “should rally the American people for an extended and robust security and reconstruction presence (in Iraq).”
via mark crispin miller’s blog: Theocratic genocide in Africa
Crushing news out of Uganda last week. The Bush administration’s $1 billion experiment in using abstinence messages as the basis of HIV prevention has born its first fruit: In a public speech on May 18, Uganda’s AIDS Commissioner Kihumuro Apuuli announced that HIV infections have almost doubled in Uganda over the past two years, from 70,000 in 2003 to 130,000 in 2005. And despite this chilling wake-up call, Bush has empowered Christian right activists to continue to push their abstinence-only agenda at a UN Special Session on HIV/AIDS, to begin next week. According to a State Department email I obtained, the official U.S. delegation is stacked with some of the very people who contributed to the debacle in Uganda.
Uganda was once an HIV prevention success story, where an ambitious government-sponsored prevention campaign, including massive condom distribution and messages about delaying sex and reducing numbers of partners, pushed HIV rates down from 15 percent in the early 1990s to 5 percent in 2001. But conservative evangelicals rewrote this history–with the full-throated cooperation of Uganda’s evangelical first family, the Musevenis.
wwIV report: Guatemalan war criminal dies a free man
When Slobodan Milosevic died, he was in a prison cell at The Hague facing war crimes charges, and it made world headlines. The May 27 passing of Guatemala’s equally genocidal dictator of the late ’70s and early ’80s, Romeo Lucas Garcia, was largely confined to the obituary pages and wire copy, and he died a free man, passing his final years in luxurious Venezuelan exile. Nothing could indicate more clearly how much cheaper life is for indigenous peoples such as his Maya Indian victims, and for those whose oppressors happen to be on the good side of US imperialism. Obits have generally noted his bloody 1980 attack on the Spanish embassy after it was occupied by Maya protesters. This is because Spanish judicial authorities would later seek his extradition over the affair. Forgotten is what the embassy occupiers were protesting–the reign of terror in the Guatemalan countryside that (carried on by Lucas Garcia’s successor Rios Montt) would ultimately leave some 50,000 dead, a million displaced and hundreds of villages destroyed. The obits have generally not used the “G word,” but the 1999 finidngs of the UN-backed Guatemala Historical Clarification Commission estimated 200,000 dead in the civil war that lasted from 1962 to 1996, squarely accusing the Guatemalan state of “genocide.” The Lucas Garcia-Rios Montt period was the bloodiest of the war, and that in which the violence was most explicitly aimed at the Maya ethnicity.
pepe escobar’s book review of mike davis’ the planet of slums: The accumulation of the wretched
Davis saves the best for last – the chapter titled “Down Vietnam Street”. Reflecting reality in the streets of the world’s hypercities, where the permanently redundant masses will never stand a chance of being included in socio-economic terms, he writes that “the late capitalist triage of humanity, then, has already taken place”. The enterprising Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) has also reached the same conclusion, he notes, as a 2002 report stressed that already by the late 1990s “a staggering 1 billion workers representing one-third of the world’s labor force, most of them in the South, were either unemployed or underemployed”.
Davis remembers how the administration of US president John Kennedy “officially diagnosed Third World revolutions as ‘diseases of modernization’ and prescribed – in addition to Green Berets and B-52s – ambitious land reforms and housing programs”. Everyone living in Latin America in the 1960s remembers the dreaded Alliance for Progress – advertised US-style as a sort of Marshall Plan that would “lift pan-American living standards to southern European, if not gringo, levels”. The results were disastrous, just as the heavily advertised UN Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) will not be met. Davis quotes the UN’s Human Development Report 2004, which warns that measuring by recent “progress”, sub-Saharan Africa will not reach most of these goals “until well into the 22nd century”.
So we’re left with repression – the definitive neo-liberal paradigm, a literal “Great Wall” of high-tech border repression trying to suppress migration to rich countries – as in the conservative US vis-a-vis Mexico and Central America and the European Union vis-a-vis the Maghreb. Meanwhile, slum populations, according to UN-HABITAT, will keep growing at least by 25 million people a year.
swans: Open Letter To Democracy Now!: Milosevic’s Trial and Death
I sent the following letter to Democracy Now! (DN!) two months ago following their piece on Milosevic’s trial and death on March 13, 2006. I never received an answer from DN! and more importantly they have not, as far as I know, offered any corrections to the misinformation aired in the piece. It should be noted that DN! covered the trial and the demolition of the prosecution’s case about as little or less than the mainstream, corporate media.
here’s an afghan blog – http://www.afgha.com/
and a good collection of left-wing political mvmt news in latin america – Latin America News Review
Posted by: b real | May 30 2006 18:42 utc | 44
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