But Will Any Justice Be Served?

UN likely to refer Goldstone findings to The Hague
By Shlomo Shamir, Barak Ravid and Avi Issacharoff / February 8, 2010

Arab states set to force debate that would bring Gaza war crimes claims before international court.

The United Nations is likely to refer the findings of the Goldstone report to the International Court of Justice in The Hague, diplomatic sources in New York said on Saturday.

A decision to bring the report on last year's Gaza war before the court would follow a debate in the UN General Assembly over Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon's response to the document last week.

Assembly president Ali Abdussalam Treki announced on Saturday that member states were drawing up a plan of action over Ban's answer to the report, in which retired South African Judge Richard Goldstone accused both Israel and Hamas of war crimes.

Treki, a senior Libyan diplomat, did not give a target date for a debate by the assembly - but the tone of his press release implied that he would push for a full discussion of the issue, diplomats said.

Ban himself is thought not to support a general session, fearing that further criticism of Israel would only delay the renewal of Israeli-Palestinian peace talks.

Most UN-watchers believe that Arab member states will demand a plenary session on the report, however.

Senior UN diplomats note, meanwhile, that one consequence of the Goldstone inquiry is that Hamas, which along with Israel issued a formal response, has become a quasi-official actor in the UN arena.

In his report, Ban wrote that Israel had responded to all the accusations against it. But he added that it was too early to say whether recommendations had yet been implemented by Israel and Hamas, as the parties were still conducting investigations.

The Foreign Ministry in Jerusalem said on Friday that Israel was satisfied with Ban's statement, which was an "accurate representation" of the Israeli submission.

Hamas on Saturday appeared to backtrack on last week's apology for harming Israeli civilians in rocket attacks. The Goldstone report accused Hamas of firing rockets indiscriminately at civilians.

The militant group, which controls the Gaza strip, had said previously that its rockets were meant to defend Gazans against Israeli military strikes: "We apologize for any harm that might have come to Israeli civilians," the Hamas government wrote in an initial response to the Goldstone report.

But on Saturday Hamas said in statement that its response to the UN had been misinterpreted and contained no apologies. Hamas officials declined to give any further comment.

"Hamas is a terror organization whose main purpose is to attack civilians, so it's not surprising that they would retract their apology," Israeli Foreign Ministry spokesman Andy David told the Associated Press on Saturday.

"For years Hamas has boasted about deliberately targeting civilians, either through suicide bombings, by gunfire or by rockets," Palmor said Saturday. "Who are they trying to fool now?"

Source / Haaretz

Fluxed Up World

[+/-] Read More...

[+/-] Summary only...

Haitian Tragedy: Still Starving After 23 Days

Haiti - Still Starving 23 Days Later
By Bill Quigley / February 6, 2010

You can walk down many of the streets of Port au Prince and see absolutely no evidence that the world community has helped Haiti. Twenty three days after the earthquake jolted Haiti and killed over 200,000 people, as many as a million people have still not received any international food assistance.

On February 4, the UN World Food Program reported they had given at least some food, mostly 55 pound bags of rice, to over a million people. The UN acknowledges that it still needs to reach another one million people. The 55 pounds of rice are expected to provide a two week food ration for a family. Beans and cooking oil are scheduled to come later.

The Associated Press reported that people in Haiti at small protests were holding up banners reading "Help us, we're starving."

Over a million people are displaced. About 10,000 families are in tents, the rest are living under sheets, blankets and tarps.

One of the people living under a sheet is a brand new mother with her one day old baby. The New York Times reports that Rosalie Antoine, 33, and her one day old baby were living in a neighbor's yard with puppies and chickens under a sheet in the Bel-Air neighborhood of Port au Prince.

Haiti and the United Nations estimate 250,000 children under the age of 7 are living in temporary housing. Most need vaccinations.

Flavia Cherry, of the Caribbean Association for Feminist Research and Action, this week witnessed a pregnant double amputee give birth on the ground in one of the tent camps without any medical assistance at all. "This poor mother had nothing, no milk, no clothing for the baby, nothing!"

Even people who can afford to purchase food are having a difficult time. A 55 pound bag of rice costs 40 percent more today than it did before the earthquake. Dr. Louise Ivers, a Partners in Health physician in Port au Prince, reports a 25 kg (55 pounds) bag of rice that sold for $30 US dollars (1,207 Haitian Gourdes) before the quake, now costs $42 US dollars (1,690 Haitian Gourdes).

The World Food Program reports prices are still rising and people outside the earthquake zone are having difficulty meeting their basic food needs.

Twenty three days after the quake.

[Bill Quigley just returned from Haiti. He is Legal Director at the Center for Constitutional Rights. His email is Quigley77@gmail.com.]

Source / Information Clearing House

Fluxed Up World

[+/-] Read More...

[+/-] Summary only...

Job Losses Slowing Under Obama

Undoing Lex Luthor
By Juan Cole / February 6, 2010

The red increase in job loss is the climax of Republican White House control. The blue decrease in job loss is Obama and the Democrats. Sort of like when Superman flies around the world counter-clockwise to undo Lex Luthor's fiendish destruction.

Source / Informed Comment

Fluxed Up World

[+/-] Read More...

[+/-] Summary only...

Cynicism Reigns Supreme (Only in Amerikkka)

The Anti-Empire Report
By William Blum / February 6th, 2010

"In America you can say anything you want — as long as it doesn't have any effect." - Paul Goodman

Progressive activists and writers continually bemoan the fact that the news they generate and the opinions they express are consistently ignored by the mainstream media, and thus kept from the masses of the American people. This disregard of progressive thought is tantamount to a definition of the mainstream media. It doesn't have to be a conspiracy; it's a matter of who owns the mainstream media and the type of journalists they hire — men and women who would like to keep their jobs; so it's more insidious than a conspiracy, it's what's built into the system, it's how the system works. The disregard of the progressive world is of course not total; at times some of that world makes too good copy to ignore, and, on rare occasions, progressive ideas, when they threaten to become very popular, have to be countered.

So it was with Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States. Here's Barry Gewen an editor at the New York Times Book Review, June 5, 2005 writing of Zinn's book and others like it:

There was a unifying vision, but it was simplistic. Since the victims and losers were good, it followed that the winners were bad. From the point of view of downtrodden blacks, America was racist; from the point of view of oppressed workers, it was exploitative; from the point of view of conquered Hispanics and Indians, it was imperialistic. There was much to condemn in American history, little or nothing to praise. ... Whereas the Europeans who arrived in the New World were genocidal predators, the Indians who were already there believed in sharing and hospitality (never mind the profound cultural differences that existed among them), and raped Africa was a continent overflowing with kindness and communalism (never mind the profound cultural differences that existed there).

One has to wonder whether Mr. Gewen thought that all the victims of the Holocaust were saintly and without profound cultural differences.

Prominent American historian Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. once said of Zinn: "I know he regards me as a dangerous reactionary. And I don't take him very seriously. He's a polemicist, not a historian."

In the obituaries that followed Zinn's death, this particular defamation was picked up around the world, from the New York Times, Washington Post, and the leading American wire services to the New Zealand Herald and Korea Times.

Regarding reactionaries and polemicists, it is worth noting that Mr. Schlesinger, as a top advisor to President John F. Kennedy, played a key role in the overthrow of Cheddi Jagan, the democratically-elected progressive prime minister of British Guiana (now Guyana). In 1990, at a conference in New York City, Schlesinger publicly apologized to Jagan, saying: "I felt badly about my role thirty years ago. I think a great injustice was done to Cheddi Jagan." 1 This is to Schlesinger's credit, although the fact that Jagan was present at the conference may have awakened his conscience after 30 years. Like virtually all the American historians of the period who were granted attention and respect by the mainstream media, Schlesinger was a cold warrior. Those like Zinn who questioned the basic suppositions of the Cold War abroad, and capitalism at home, were regarded as polemicists.

One of my favorite Howard Zinn quotes: "The chief problem in historical honesty is not outright lying. It is omission or de-emphasis of important data. The definition of 'important', of course, depends on one's values." 2 A People's History and his other writings can be seen as an attempt to make up for the omissions and under-emphases of America's dark side in American history books and media.

Haiti, Aristide, and ideology

It's a good thing the Haitian government did virtually nothing to help its people following the earthquake; otherwise it would have been condemned as "socialist" by Fox News, Sarah Palin, the teabaggers, and other right-thinking Americans. The last/only Haitian leader strongly committed to putting the welfare of the Haitian people before that of the domestic and international financial mafia was President Jean-Bertrand Aristide. Being of a socialist persuasion, Aristide was, naturally, kept from power by the United States — twice; first by Bill Clinton, then by George W. Bush, the two men appointed by President Obama to head the earthquake relief effort. Naturally.

Aristide, a reformist priest, was elected to the presidency, then ousted in a military coup eight months later in 1991 by men on the CIA payroll. Ironically, the ousted president wound up in exile in the United States. In 1994 the Clinton White House found itself in the awkward position of having to pretend — because of all their rhetoric about "democracy" — that they supported the democratically-elected Aristide's return to power. After delaying his return for more than two years, Washington finally had its military restore Aristide to office, but only after obliging the priest to guarantee that after his term ended he would not remain in office to make up the time lost because of the coup; that he would not seek to help the poor at the expense of the rich, literally; and that he would stick closely to free-market economics. This meant that Haiti would continue to be the assembly plant of the Western Hemisphere, with its workers receiving starvation wages, literally. If Aristide had thoughts about breaking the agreement forced upon him, he had only to look out his window — US troops were stationed in Haiti for the remainder of his term. 3

On February 28, 2004, during the Bush administration, American military and diplomatic personnel arrived at the home of Aristide, who had been elected to the presidency once again in 2002, to inform him that his private American security agents must either leave immediately to return to the United States or fight and die; that the remaining 25 of the American security agents hired by the Haitian government, who were to arrive the next day, had been blocked by the United States from coming; that foreign and Haitian rebels were nearby, heavily armed, determined and ready to kill thousands of people in a bloodbath. Aristide was then pressured into signing a "letter of resignation" before being kidnaped and flown to exile in Africa by the United States. 4 The leaders and politicians of the world who pontificate endlessly about "democracy" and "self-determination" had virtually nothing to say about this breathtaking act of international thuggery. Indeed, France and Canada were active allies of the United States in pressing Aristide to leave. 5

And then US Secretary of State Colin Powell, in the sincerest voice he could muster, told the world that Aristide "was not kidnaped. We did not force him onto the airplane. He went onto the airplane willingly. And that's the truth." 6 Powell sounded as sincere as he had sounded a year earlier when he gave the UN his now-famous detailed inventory of the chemical, biological and nuclear weapons that Saddam Hussein was preparing to use.

Howard Zinn is quoted above saying "The chief problem in historical honesty is not outright lying. It is omission or de-emphasis of important data." However, that doesn't mean the American mainstream media don't create or perpetuate myths. Here's the New York Times two months ago: "Mr. Aristide, who was overthrown during a 2004 rebellion ..." 7 Now what image does the word "rebellion" conjure up in your mind? The Haitian people rising up to throw off the shackles put on them by a dictatorship? Or something staged by the United States?

Aristide has stated that he was able to determine at that crucial moment that the "rebels" were white and foreign. 8 But even if they had been natives, why did Colin Powell not explain why the United States disbanded Aristide's personal security forces? Why did he not explain why the United States was not protecting Aristide from the rebels, which the US could have done with the greatest of ease, without so much as firing a single shot? Nor did he explain why Aristide would "willingly" give up his presidency.

The massive US military deployment to Haiti in the wake of the earthquake has been criticized in various quarters as more of an occupation than a relief mission, with the airport in the capital city now an American military base, and with American forces blocking various aid missions from entering the country in order, apparently, to serve Washington's own logistical agenda. But the large military presence can also serve to facilitate two items on Washington's political agenda — preventing Haitians from trying to emigrate by sea to the United States and keeping a lid on the numerous supporters of Aristide lest they threaten to take power once again.

That which can not be spoken

"The purpose of terrorism is to provoke an overreaction," writes Fareed Zakaria, a leading American foreign-policy pundit, editor of Newsweek magazine's international edition, and Washington Post columnist, referring to the "underwear bomber", Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, and his failed attempt to blow up a US airliner on Christmas day. "Its real aim is not to kill the hundreds of people directly targeted but to sow fear in the rest of the population. Terrorism is an unusual military tactic in that it depends on the response of the onlookers. If we are not terrorized, then the attack didn't work. Alas, this one worked very well." 9

Is that not odd? That an individual would try to take the lives of hundreds of people, including his own, primarily to "provoke an overreaction", or to "sow fear"? Was there not any kind of deep-seated grievance or resentment with anything or anyone American being expressed? No perceived wrong he wished to make right? Nothing he sought to obtain revenge for? Why is the United States the most common target of terrorists? Such questions were not even hinted at in Zakaria's article.

At a White House press briefing concerning the same failed terrorist attack, conducted by Assistant to the President for Counterterrorism and Homeland Security John Brennan, veteran reporter Helen Thomas raised a question:

Thomas: "What is really lacking always for us is you don't give the motivation of why they want to do us harm. ... What is the motivation? We never hear what you find out on why."

Brennan: "Al Qaeda is an organization that is dedicated to murder and wanton slaughter of innocents. ... [They] attract individuals like Mr. Abdulmutallab and use them for these types of attacks. He was motivated by a sense of religious sort of drive. Unfortunately, al Qaeda has perverted Islam, and has corrupted the concept of Islam, so that [they're] able to attract these individuals. But al Qaeda has the agenda of destruction and death."

Thomas: "And you're saying it's because of religion?"

Brennan: "I'm saying it's because of an al Qaeda organization that uses the banner of religion in a very perverse and corrupt way."

Thomas: "Why?"

Brennan: "I think ... this is a long issue, but al Qaeda is just determined to carry out attacks here against the homeland."

Thomas: "But you haven't explained why." 10

American officials rarely even make the attempt to explain why. And American journalists rarely press them to explain why; certainly not like Helen Thomas does.

And just what is it that has such difficulty crossing the lips of these officials? It is the idea that anti-American terrorists become anti-American terrorists to retaliate for what the United States has done to countries or people close to them or what Israel has done to them with unequivocal American support.

Osama bin Laden, in an audiotape, also commented about Abdulmutallab: "The message we wanted you to receive through him is that America shall not dream about security until we witness it in Palestine." 11

We have as well the recent case of Humam Khalil Abu-Mulal al-Balawi, a Jordanian doctor-turned-suicide bomber, who killed seven CIA employees at a base in Afghanistan December 30. His widow later declared: "I am proud of him. ... My husband did this against the U.S. invasion." Balawi himself had written on the Internet: "I have never wished to be in Gaza, but now I wish to be a ... car bomb that takes the lives of the biggest number of Jews to hell." 12

It should be noted that the CIA base attacked by Balawi was heavily involved in the selection of targets for the Agency's remote-controlled aircraft along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border, a program that killed more than 300 people in the previous year. 13

There are numerous examples of terrorists citing American policies as the prime motivation behind their acts 14, so many that American officials, when discussing the newest terrorist attack, have to tread carefully to avoid mentioning the role of US foreign policy; and journalists typically fail to bring this point home to their reader's consciousness.

It works the same all over the world. In the period of the 1950s to the 1980s in Latin America, in response to a long string of hateful Washington policies, there were countless acts of terrorism against US diplomatic and military targets as well as the offices of US corporations.

The US bombing, invasion, occupation and torture in Iraq and Afghanistan, the bombing of Pakistan, Somalia and Yemen, and the continuing Israeli-US genocide against the Palestinians have created an army of new anti-American terrorists. We'll be hearing from them for a terribly long time. And we'll be hearing American officials twist themselves into intellectual and moral knots as they try to avoid confronting these facts.

In his "State of the Union" address on January 27, President Obama said: "But if anyone from either party has a better approach that will bring down premiums, bring down the deficit, cover the uninsured, strengthen Medicare for seniors, and stop insurance company abuses, let me know." Well, ending America's many wars would free up enough money to do anything a rational, humane society would want to do. Eliminating the military budget would pay for free medical care for everyone. Free university education for everyone. Creating a government public works project that could provide millions of decently-paid jobs, like repairing the decrepit infrastructure and healing the environment to the best of our ability. You can add your own favorite projects. All covered, just by ending the damn wars. Imagine that.

Notes

1. The Nation, June 4, 1990, pp.763-4
2. "Failure to Quit: Reflections of an Optimistic Historian" (1993), p.30
3. http://killinghope.org/bblum6/haiti2.htm
4. Statement of Jean-Bertrand Aristide, March 5, 2004, from exile in the Central African Republic, Pacific News Service (San Francisco); David Swanson, "What Bush Did to Haiti", January 18, 2010; William Blum, "Rogue State", pp.219-20)
5. Miami Herald, March 1, 2004
6. CNN, March 1, 2004
7. New York Times, November 27, 2009
8. Aristide statement, op. cit.
9. Newsweek, January 18, 2010, online January 9
10. White House press briefing, January 7, 2010
11. ABC News, January 25, 2010
12. Associated Press, January 7, 2010
13. Washington Post, January 1, 2010
14. Rogue State, chapter 1, "Why do terrorists keep picking on the United States?"; this chapter ends in 2005; some later examples can be provided by the author.

Source / Anti-Empire Report on KillingHope.org

Fluxed Up World

[+/-] Read More...

[+/-] Summary only...

Violence Against Women: Unforgivable

Photo source.
Violence against women is a global struggle
By Humaira Shahid and Ritu Sharma / February 6, 2010

EIGHT YEARS ago, Nasreen (not her real name) walked into the office of the Daily Khabrain newspaper in Lahore, Pakistan, and demanded justice. She stripped off her clothes, revealing a black and blue body covered with wounds and cigarette burns. She’d been gang raped. With tears in her eyes, she said, “My husband hired three men and got me raped in front of him because I was tired of his abuse and demanded the divorce that Islam gave me a right to. He didn’t even respect me as the mother of his children. . .. I just want justice in the name of God.’’

Nasreen was just one of millions of women who suffer acid attacks, rape, forced marriages and other unimaginable forms of violence around the world. One out of every three women worldwide is physically, sexually or otherwise abused during her lifetime. The good news is that there are thousands of organizations in communities around the world for abused women. These organizations run shelters and offer help, support, training, and education so that women can be self-sufficient. They also fight to change cultural attitudes and push for legal reform.

In Pakistan, for example, legal reforms in the past decade have slowly started to give women the tools of basic justice. The story of Nasreen and countless other women became a catalyst for two groundbreaking resolutions in the provincial parliament in Punjab in 2003. One prohibited acid attacks on women. The other abolished violent customary practices or vani, which include honor killings, forced marriages and women bartered into marriage to make up for crimes committed by their male family members. These reforms were unprecedented and moved forward in a parliament that is notoriously corrupt, traditionalist and patriarchal, with leaders who are not only collaborators but often directly involved in violence themselves.



The resolutions had a snowball effect. They created pressure on the federal government of Pakistan, then led by Pervez Musharraf, to amend the nation’s criminal laws to protect women against domestic abuse. The following year, despite opposition from many religious leaders, a Women’s Protection Act was passed that repealed the Hudood Ordinance, under which a woman subjected to rape, even gang rape, was accused of fornication.

Last year, Pakistan enacted a Protection against Harassment of Women at the Workplace bill. None of this would have happened without the concerted effort of local women leaders, community-based organizations, NGOs, and the media, which together created enough public awareness and pressure to move the needle.

Now the needle may move again. The International Violence Against Women Act, a historic, bipartisan effort by the United States to address violence against women globally, was introduced this week.

The bill addresses, for the first time, violence against women and girls through all relevant US foreign policy efforts, including its international assistance programs. It would support local efforts in up to 20 countries, assisting in public awareness and health campaigns; shelters; education, training, and economic empowerment programs for women, as well as legal reforms. It would also make the issue a diplomatic priority for the first time, asking the United States to respond within three months to horrific acts of violence against women and girls committed during conflict and war.

Support from the American public is strong. A 2009 poll found that 61 percent of voters across demographic and political lines thought global violence against women should be one of the top international priorities for the US government, and 82 percent supported the International Violence Against Women Act.

Despite the odds women face, we, as advocates to end this global scourge, are always awed by their strength. There are countless examples of women supporting each other to overcome the bleakest of circumstances. Helping them become economically empowered and providing protection and access to justice will enable these women to create societies that are more tolerant, less violent, less extremist, and more human and socially just. Passing the International Violence Against Women Act could truly be a life-changing force for millions of women and girls like Nasreen around the world.

[Humaira Shahid is a former editor and legislator in Pakistan, is currently a Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University. Ritu Sharma is Co-Founder and President of Women Thrive Worldwide in Washington.]

© Copyright 2010 Globe Newspaper Company.

Source / Boston Globe

Fluxed Up World

[+/-] Read More...

[+/-] Summary only...

Only Rarely Are People of Integrity in Politics

Grifters’ Tale
By Timothy Egan / February 3, 2010

Judson Phillips is a Tennessee lawyer, specializing in personal injury lawsuits, drunk-driving cases and men who get into trouble beating their wives. It was his idea to incorporate Tea Party Nation as a money-making venture and charge $349 to hear Sarah Palin talk about what’s wrong with America over steak and lobster this weekend in Nashville.

Andrew Young is a North Carolina lawyer, specializing in John Edwards. The deceptions. The baby born to the mistress. It was his job to make sure the Diet Sprite never ran low. And when Edwards suggested that Young co-habitate with the senator’s mistress, to further an outrageous lie, Young set up the guest room and explained to his family that they now had new members.

If there’s money to be made hitching your wagon to a politician trading in populism, well, who can fault these fine men for seizing the opportunity. They must know, the check is more reliable than the politician.

Palin and Edwards are two of an American archetype, opportunists playing to outrage while taking care of themselves. They are both attractive, with that lucky combination of genes that rarely lands on more than one member of an extended family. They can both hold an audience without saying anything of substance, or even making sense.

They repeat certain phrases: “good people,” “real Americans” and “God’s will” for Palin; “hard-working folks,” “two Americas” and “millworker’s son” for Edwards. Code words, time-worn and simple, that say: I’m one of you.

Members of the Tea Party movement, from people who can’t stand having an African-American in the White House to those genuinely concerned about the sea of debt, share at least one thing: they fear the country has gone to ruination.

They see “elites” in banking, on Wall Street, in Washington, getting theirs at a time when average income did not go up a dime over the last, lost decade. They should be mad. America is passing them by.

Edwards at one point claimed to be their leader, to share their pain, even before this movement had a name. His acolyte of 10 years, the attorney Andrew Young, believed every word.

But Edwards was scamming him. The senator drove a clunker to rallies — someone else’s car — but tooled around in his Lexus or BMW in private. He wore Armani suits, careful to tear the label off. While he nested in a $6 million mansion of nearly 30,000 square feet, he complained about the “fat rednecks” he had to listen to, those people living in trailers, with no health insurance, the other Americans.

And the scam extended to loyal donors, most notably Bunny Mellon, the 99-year-old heir to a dynastic family, whose money was solicited to cover up the mistress story, in Young’s account.
Now Young has found the light, he says in “The Politician,” his tell-all book. “Virtually every word that came of his mouth was a lie,” he says of Edwards, “but it was convincing.”

Palin is trying to get in front of the same parade that Edwards wanted to lead. When she quit on her state, barely halfway through a single term as governor, her explanation was a classic of incoherence.

She never mentioned the obvious reason for resigning: to get rich, quick. Nothing wrong with that; it’s as American as late-night ads for the Snuggie — the blanket with sleeves! But why not come out and say it, instead of cloaking it in some larger cause?

If Palin truly believed in the Tea Partiers and their discontent, she would not be charging $100,000 to stoke their fears. She can do that for free, on Fox. And what policy solutions does she offer the troubled middle class? Tax cuts, like the ones that caused this massive deficit to begin with? Preventing new regulation of the banks that got us into this horrid economic collapse, under the guise of “less government”?

She has nothing to offer but honeyed words, the syrup for suckers.

Say what you will about Tea Partiers, but many of them can see through this scheme in Nashville. “Smells scammy,” wrote Red State Blogger Erick Erickson, no friend of the media elite. Others are boycotting it, citing the $549 price for the convention, or the single night tab of $349 to hear Palin.

You could even see a bit of suspicion creep into Glenn Beck, Palin’s enabler on Fox, during the strangest of interviews a few weeks ago.

Beck to Palin: “Who’s your favorite founder?”

Palin: “You know, well, all of them.”

Beck was skeptical.

So Palin, who can’t name a founder any more than she could think of a Supreme Court decision, wants to lead a movement inspired by the founders. If the original tea party had charged a week’s wages to register political outrage, we might still be wearing fussy stockings and bowing to some Lordship arriving in Boston Harbour.

Palin says she’ll plow her take back into “the cause.” Her favorite cause, of course, is Sarah Palin. It came to light this week that her political action committee spent $63,000 to buy copies of “Going Rogue.” It’s a sweet deal: get average people to donate to Palin. She then spends their money on her book, increasing her royalties and exposure.

Political grifters, the smart ones, usually get out while the getting’s good. It’s always about timing: the trick is finding the mark, before the mark finds you.

Source / New York Times Opinionator Blog

Fluxed Up World

[+/-] Read More...

[+/-] Summary only...

US Hegemony in Latin America

The US Game in Latin America
By Mark Weisbrot / January 29, 2010

US interference in the politics of Haiti and Honduras is only the latest example of its long-term manipulations in Latin America

When I write about US foreign policy in places such as Haiti or Honduras, I often get responses from people who find it difficult to believe that the US government would care enough about these countries to try and control or topple their governments. These are small, poor countries with little in the way of resources or markets. Why should Washington policymakers care who runs them?

Unfortunately they do care. A lot. They care enough about Haiti to have overthrown the elected president Jean-Bertrand Aristide not once, but twice. The first time, in 1991, it was done covertly. We only found out after the fact that the people who led the coup were paid by the US Central Intelligence Agency. And then Emmanuel Constant, the leader of the most notorious death squad there – which killed thousands of Aristide's supporters after the coup – told CBS News that he, too, was funded by the CIA.

In 2004, the US involvement in the coup was much more open. Washington led a cut-off of almost all international aid for four years, making the government's collapse inevitable. As the New York Times reported, while the US state department was telling Aristide that he had to reach an agreement with the political opposition (funded with millions of US taxpayers' dollars), the International Republican Institute was telling the opposition not to settle.

In Honduras last summer and autumn, the US government did everything it could to prevent the rest of the hemisphere from mounting an effective political opposition to the coup government in Honduras. For example, they blocked the Organisation of American States from taking the position that it would not recognise elections that took place under the dictatorship. At the same time, the Obama administration publicly pretended that it was against the coup.

This was only partly successful, from a public relations point of view. Most of the US public thinks that the Obama administration was against the Honduran coup, although by November of last year there were numerous press reports and even editorial criticisms that Obama had caved to Republican pressure and not done enough. But this was a misreading of what actually happened: the Republican pressure in support of the Honduran coup changed the administration's public relations strategy, but not its political strategy. Those who followed events closely from the beginning could see that the political strategy was to blunt and delay any efforts to restore the elected president, while pretending that a return to democracy was actually the goal.

Among those who understood this were the governments of Latin America, including such heavyweights as Brazil. This is important because it shows that the State Department was willing to pay a significant political cost in order to help the right in Honduras. It convinced the vast majority of Latin American governments that it was no different from the Bush administration in its goals for the hemisphere, which is not a pleasant outcome from a diplomatic point of view.

Why do they care so much about who runs these poor countries? As any good chess player knows, pawns matter. The loss of a couple of pawns at the beginning of the game can often make a difference between a win or a loss. They are looking at these countries mostly in straight power terms. Governments that are in agreement with maximising US power in the world, they like. Those who have other goals – not necessarily antagonistic to the United States – they don't like.

Not surprisingly, the Obama administration's closest allies in the hemisphere are rightwing governments such as those of Colombia or Panama, even though Obama himself is not a rightwing politician. This highlights the continuity of the politics of control. The victory of the right in Chile, the first time that it has won an election in half a century, was a significant victory for the US government. If Lula de Silva's Workers' party were to lose the presidential election in Brazil this autumn, that would be another win for the state department. While US officials under both Bush and Obama have maintained a friendly posture toward Brazil, it is obvious that they deeply resent the changes in Brazilian foreign policy that have allied it with other social democratic governments in the hemisphere, and its independent foreign policy stances with regard to the Middle East, Iran, and elsewhere.

The US actually intervened in Brazilian politics as recently as 2005, organising a conference to promote a legal change that would make it more difficult for legislators to switch parties. This would have strengthened the opposition to Lula's Workers' party (PT) government, since the PT has party discipline but many opposition politicians do not. This intervention by the US government was only discovered last year through a Freedom of Information Act request filed in Washington. There are many other interventions taking place throughout the hemisphere that we do not know about. The United States has been heavily involved in Chilean politics since the 1960s, long before they organised the overthrow of Chilean democracy in 1973.

In October 1970, President Richard Nixon was cursing in the Oval Office about the Social Democratic president of Chile, Salvador Allende. "That son of a bitch!" said Richard Nixon on 15 October. "That son of a bitch Allende – we're going to smash him." A few weeks later he explained why:

The main concern in Chile is that [Allende] can consolidate himself, and the picture projected to the world will be his success ... If we let the potential leaders in South America think they can move like Chile and have it both ways, we will be in trouble.

That is another reason that pawns matter, and Nixon's nightmare did in fact come true a quarter-century later, as one country after another elected independent left governments that Washington did not want. The United States ended up "losing" most of the region. But they are trying to get it back, one country at a time. The smaller, poorer countries that are closer to the United States are the most at risk. Honduras and Haiti will have democratic elections some day, but only when Washington's influence over their politics is further reduced.

Source / The Guardian

Fluxed Up World

[+/-] Read More...

[+/-] Summary only...

Signs of a Sick Society: Fighting for God

My only question is, "Fighting as a metaphor for what?"

Richard Jehn / Fluxed Up World

Diego Sanchez before a bout in Memphis. Photo: Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times.
Flock Is Now a Fight Team in Some Ministries
By R. M. Scheneiderman / February 1, 2010

MEMPHIS — In the back room of a theater on Beale Street, John Renken, 42, a pastor, recently led a group of young men in prayer.

“Father, we thank you for tonight,” he said. “We pray that we will be a representation of you.”

An hour later, a member of his flock who had bowed his head was now unleashing a torrent of blows on an opponent, and Mr. Renken was offering guidance that was not exactly prayerful.

“Hard punches!” he shouted from the sidelines of a martial arts event called Cage Assault. “Finish the fight! To the head! To the head!”

The young man was a member of a fight team at Xtreme Ministries, a small church near Nashville that doubles as a mixed martial arts academy. Mr. Renken, who founded the church and academy, doubles as the team’s coach. The school’s motto is “Where Feet, Fist and Faith Collide.”

Mr. Renken’s ministry is one of a small but growing number of evangelical churches that have embraced mixed martial arts — a sport with a reputation for violence and blood that combines kickboxing, wrestling and other fighting styles — to reach and convert young men, whose church attendance has been persistently low. Mixed martial arts events have drawn millions of television viewers, and one was the top pay-per-view event in 2009.

Recruitment efforts at the churches, which are predominantly white, involve fight night television viewing parties and lecture series that use ultimate fighting to explain how Christ fought for what he believed in. Other ministers go further, hosting or participating in live events.

The goal, these pastors say, is to inject some machismo into their ministries — and into the image of Jesus — in the hope of making Christianity more appealing. “Compassion and love — we agree with all that stuff, too,” said Brandon Beals, 37, the lead pastor at Canyon Creek Church outside of Seattle. “But what led me to find Christ was that Jesus was a fighter.”

The outreach is part of a larger and more longstanding effort on the part of some ministers who fear that their churches have become too feminized, promoting kindness and compassion at the expense of strength and responsibility.

“The man should be the overall leader of the household,” said Ryan Dobson, 39, a pastor and fan of mixed martial arts who is the son of James C. Dobson, the founder of Focus on the Family, a prominent evangelical group. “We’ve raised a generation of little boys.”

These pastors say the marriage of faith and fighting is intended to promote Christian values, quoting verses like “fight the good fight of faith” from Timothy 6:12. Several put the number of churches taking up mixed martial arts at roughly 700 of an estimated 115,000 white evangelical churches in America. The sport is seen as a legitimate outreach tool by the youth ministry affiliate of the National Association of Evangelicals, which represents more than 45,000 churches.

“You have a lot of troubled young men who grew up without fathers, and they’re wandering and they’re hopeless and they’re lousy dads themselves and they’re just lost,” said Paul Robie, 54, a pastor at South Mountain Community Church in Draper, Utah.

Fighting as a metaphor has resonated with some young men.

“I’m fighting to provide a better quality of life for my family and provide them with things that I didn’t have growing up,” said Mike Thompson, 32, a former gang member and student of Mr. Renken’s who until recently had struggled with unemployment and who fights under the nickname the Fury. “Once I accepted Christ in my life,” Mr. Thompson said, “I realized that a person can fight for good.”

Nondenominational evangelical churches have a long history of using popular culture — rock music, skateboarding and even yoga — to reach new followers. Yet even among more experimental sects, mixed martial arts has critics.

“What you attract people to Christ with is also what you need to get people to stay,” said Eugene Cho, 39, a pastor at Quest Church, an evangelical congregation in Seattle. “I don’t live for the Jesus who eats red meat, drinks beer and beats on other men.”

Robert Brady, 49, the executive vice president of a conservative evangelical group, the Alliance of Confessing Evangelicals, agreed, saying that the mixed martial arts motif of evangelism “so easily takes away from the real focus of the church, which is the Gospel.” Many black churches have chosen not to participate.

Almost a decade ago, mixed martial arts was seen as a blood sport without rules or regulation. It was banned in nearly every state and denounced by politicians like Senator John McCain, Republican of Arizona.

Over the past five years, however, because of shrewd marketing by the Ultimate Fighting Championship, the sport’s premier brand, mixed martial arts has become mainstream. Today the sport is legal and regulated in 42 states.

Its proponents point to a study by researchers at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine showing that mixed martial arts participants suffer a lower rate of knockouts than boxers.

Over the past year and a half, a subculture has evolved, with Christian mixed martial arts clothing brands like Jesus Didn’t Tap (in the sport, “tap” means to give up) and Christian social networking Web sites like Anointedfighter.com.

Roughly 100 young men, many sporting shaved heads and tattoos, attend fight parties at Canyon Creek near Seattle, watching bouts on the church’s four big-screen televisions. Vendors hustle hot dogs and “Predestined to Fight” T-shirts. About half are not church members but heard about the parties through friends, said Mr. Beals, who is known as the Fight Pastor.

Men ages 18 to 34 are absent from churches, some pastors said, because churches have become more amenable to women and children. “We grew up in a church that had pastel pews,” said Tom Skiles, 37, the pastor of Spirit of St. Louis Church in Arnold, Mo. “The men fell asleep.”

In focusing on the toughness of Christ, evangelical leaders are harking back to a similar movement in the early 1900s, historians say, when women began entering the work force. Proponents of this so-called muscular Christianity advocated weight lifting as a way for Christians to express their masculinity.

“This whole generation is raised on the idea that they’re in a culture war for the heart and soul of America,” said Stephen Prothero, a professor of religion at Boston University.

Paul Burress, 35, a chaplain and fight coach at Victory Baptist Church in Rochester, said mixed martial arts had given his students a chance to work on body, soul and spirit. “Win or lose, we represent Jesus,” he said. “And we win most of the time.”

But on that cold night in Memphis, Mr. Renken, the pastor from Xtreme Ministries, watched as two of his three fighters were beaten, one emerging with a broken ankle.

Another, Jesse Johnson, 20, a potential convert, was subdued in a chokehold and decided not to return home with the other church members after his bout. He stayed in Memphis, drinking and carousing with friends along Beale Street, this city’s raucous, neon-lighted strip of bars.

Source / New York Times

Fluxed Up World

[+/-] Read More...

[+/-] Summary only...

GWOT: What a Shining Success Story

Here is a report concerning the success of the GWOT. Only politicians of the deepest cynicism could argue that this is success, that this is gaining anyone anything at all.

Richard Jehn / Fluxed Up World

US drones killed 123 civilians, three al-Qaeda men in January
By Amir Mir / February 01, 2010

LAHORE: Afghanistan-based US predators carried out a record number of 12 deadly missile strikes in the tribal areas of Pakistan in January 2010, of which 10 went wrong and failed to hit their targets, killing 123 innocent Pakistanis. The remaining two successful drone strikes killed three al-Qaeda leaders, wanted by the Americans.

The rapid increase in the US drone attacks in the Pakistani tribal areas bordering Afghanistan can be gauged from the fact that only two such strikes were carried out in January 2009, which killed 36 people. The highest number of drone attacks carried out in a single month in 2009 was six, which were conducted in December last year. But the dawn of the New Year has already seen a dozen such attacks.

The unprecedented rise in the predator strikes with the beginning of the year 2010 is being attributed to December 30, 2009 suicide bombing in the Khost area of Afghanistan bordering North Waziristan, which killed seven CIA agents. US officials later identified the bomber as Humam Khalil Abu Mulal al-Balawi, a Jordanian national linked to both al-Qaeda and the Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP).

In a subsequent posthumous video tape released by Al-Jazeera, Balawi claimed while sitting next to TTP Chief Commander Hakimullah Mehsud that he would blow himself up in the CIA base to avenge the killing of former TTP chief Baitullah Mehsud in a US drone attack. The consequent increase in US strikes, first in North Waziristan and then South Waziristan, specifically targeting the fugitive TTP chief Hakimullah Mehsud clearly shows that revenge is the major motive for these attacks. The US intelligence sleuths stationed in Afghanistan are convinced the Khost suicide attack was planned in Waziristan with the help of the TTP. Therefore, it is believed Afghanistan-based American drones will continue to hunt the most wanted al-Qaeda and Taliban leaders, especially Hakimullah, with a view to avenge the loss of the seven CIA agents and to raise morale of its forces in Afghanistan.

According to the data compiled by the interior ministry, the first US drone strike was conducted on January 1 which struck a vehicle near Ghundikala village in North Waziristan and killed four people. The second attack came on January 3, targeting the Mosakki village in North Waziristan, killing five people. Two separate missile strikes carried out on January 6 killed 35 people in Sanzalai village of North Waziristan. The fifth predator attack was carried out on January 8 in the Tappi village of North Waziristan, killing five people. The sixth attack on January 9 in Ismail Khan village of North Waziristan killed four people, including two al-Qaeda leaders. Mahmoud Mehdi Zeidan, the bodyguard for al-Qaeda leader Sayeed al-Masri, and Jamal Saeed Abdul Rahim, who had been involved in hijacking of Pan Am Flight 73 in 1986, were reportedly killed in this missile strike.

The seventh US attack on January 14 in the Pasalkot village of North Waziristan killed 15 people, amidst rumours Hakimullah Mehsud could be among the dead.

The eighth drone attack came on January 15 in the Zannini village near Mir Ali in North Waziristan, killing 14 people, including an al-Qaeda-linked terrorist, Abdul Basit Usman, a Filipino wanted by the Americans. The ninth strike was carried out on January 17 in the Shaktoi area of South Waziristan, which killed 23 people. The tenth drone attack came on January 19 when two missiles were fired at a compound and vehicle in Booya village of Datakhel subdivision, 35km west of Miramshah, in North Waziristan, killing eight people. The eleventh strike carried out on January 29 targeting a compound belonging to the Haqqani network in the Muhammad Khel town of North Waziristan, killed six people. The twelfth and the last predator attack of the month came on January 30, killing nine people in the Lend Mohammad Khel area of North Waziristan.

Source / International The News

Fluxed Up World

[+/-] Read More...

[+/-] Summary only...

The Future Is Now

Thanks to Alan Brodrick / Fluxed Up World

[+/-] Read More...

[+/-] Summary only...

Haiti Quake Manmade ?

Chavez Says US ‘HAARP Weapon’ Caused Haiti Quake

Venezuelan leader Hugo Chavez Wednesday accused the United States of causing the destruction in Haiti by testing a ‘tectonic weapon’ to induce the catastrophic earthquake that hit the country last week.

President Chavez said the US was “playing God” by testing devices capable of creating eco-type catastrophes, the Spanish newspaper ABC quoted him as saying.

A 7.0-magnitude quake rattled the desperately poor country on January 12, killing an estimated 100,000 to 200,000 people. As Haiti looks to the world for basic sustenance, the authorities say the biggest dangers facing survivors are untreated wounds and rising disease.

Following the quake, appeals for humanitarian aid were responded to globally. However, the nation is struggling with violence and looting as aid is still not enough for the tens of thousands left homeless and injured.

Chavez said the killer earthquake followed a test of “weapon of earthquakes” just offshore from Haiti. He did not elaborate on the source of his claim.

The outspoken leader had earlier accused the US of occupying Haiti “under the guise of the natural disaster.”

Did HAARP cause the damage? Hugo says so.

At least 11,000 US troops have been dispatched to the country to provide security for aid distribution efforts.

Venezuelan media have reported that the earthquake “may be associated with the project called HAARP, a system that can generate violent and unexpected changes in climate.”

HAARP, the High Frequency Active Auroral Research Program, is a study run in Alaska directed at the occasional reconfiguration of the properties of the Earth’s ionosphere to improve satellite communications.

Former US Secretary of Defense William Cohen in 1997 expressed concerned over countries engaging “in eco-type of terrorism whereby they can alter the climate, set off earthquakes, volcanoes remotely through the use of electromagnetic waves.”



Source / Impact Lab

Fluxed Up World

[+/-] Read More...

[+/-] Summary only...

War Gives Us PTSD, Depression, and Death

War is hell on the brain: Doctors map psychological disorders in Gaza and the West Bank
By Kathlyn Stone / January 7, 2010

Médecins Sans Frontières/Doctors Without Borders reports that short-term psychotherapy could be an effective treatment in specific psychiatric disorders, especially in children.

Trauma from war and violence has led to a high incidence of psychological disorders in Palestinians living in the Gaza Strip and West Bank.

The international medical nongovernmental organization Médecins Sans Frontières/Doctors Without Borders reports that even short-term psychological support can ease the burden of violence-induced psychiatric disorders, especially in children.

Emmanuelle Espié of the Paris-based Epicentre and colleagues from Médecins Sans Frontières/Doctors Without Borders, along with researchers from four French hospitals shared data collected from Palestinian patients ages 1 year and older referred to the Médecins Sans Frontières psychological care program.

Data was gathered from 1,369 patients (773 from the Gaza strip and 596 from the Nablus area) who received psychological care between January 2005 and December 2008. All patients in the study were clinically assessed by a psychologist or psychiatrist.

The patients were evenly divided between male and female with a median age of 16 years. Among the 1,254 patients for whom full clinical information was available, 23.2 percent had post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), 17.3 percent had an anxiety disorder (other than PTSD or acute stress disorder), and 15.3 percent had depression.

PTSD was more frequently identified in children under age 15, while depression was the main symptom observed in adults. Among children under 15, factors significantly associated with PTSD included being witness to murder or physical abuse, receiving threats, and property destruction or loss.

Sixty-five percent of patients took part in individual, short-term psychotherapy, with 30.6 percent requiring psychotropic medication (generally Fluoxetine or Alprazolam) along with counseling.

Following psychotherapy, 82.8 percent of children and 75.3 percent of adults had improved symptoms. Psychological care was conducted principally at the patient's home over a course of 8 to 12 weeks. Children tended to stay in therapy longer and to take part in group therapy sessions more often than adults.

Among patients that showed no improvement or aggravated symptoms at the last session, the main persistent symptoms were sadness (14 percent) and aggressive behavior (12.7 percent).

The study authors concluded, “These observations suggest that short-term psychotherapy could be an effective treatment for specific psychiatric disorders occurring in vulnerable populations, including children, living in violent conflict zones, such as in Gaza strip and the West Bank.”

The study was published in the open access journal International Journal of Mental Health Systems.

(The 48-month epidemiological study was concluding just as Operation Cast Lead was beginning. The intensive three-week military attack by Israel began December 27, 2008. More than 1,400 Palestinians -- 237 combatants and 1,172 non-combatants, including 342 children -- were killed and 5,000 civilians were injured during the air and land assault, according to the human rights organization, Al-Haq. More than 4,000 homes and much of Gaza's infrastructure and buildings were destroyed during the assault.)

Sources:

International Journal of Mental Health Systems 2009, 3:21doi:10.1186/1752-4458-3-21

'Operation Cast Lead': A Statistical Analysis, August 2009, Al-Haq, the West Bank affiliate of the International Commission of Jurists-Geneva

Source / Flesh and Stone

Thanks to Juan Cole / Fluxed Up World

[+/-] Read More...

[+/-] Summary only...

Tribute to Howard Zinn

Thanks to Jeffrey Segal / Fluxed Up World

[+/-] Read More...

[+/-] Summary only...

Without Words

Source / El Universal

Fluxed Up World

[+/-] Read More...

[+/-] Summary only...

Haitian Tragedy: Opportunity for US Hegemony

A crowd gathers at a country club that U.S. soldiers are using as a forward operating base in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, Jan. 16, 2010. DoD photo by Fred W. Baker III.
Haiti's suffering is a result of calculated impoverishment
By Seumas Milne / January 20, 2010

Last week's earthquake was a natural disaster, but the carnage is a result of a punitive relationship with the outside world

There is no relief for the people of Haiti, it seems, even in their hour of promised salvation. More than a week after the earthquake that may have killed 200,000 people, most Haitians have seen nothing of the armada of aid they have been promised by the outside world. Instead, while the US military has commandeered Port-au-Prince's ­airport to pour thousands of soldiers into the stricken Caribbean state, wounded and hungry survivors of the catastrophe have carried on dying.

Most scandalously, US commanders have repeatedly turned away flights bringing medical equipment and ­emergency supplies from organisations such as the World Food Programme and Médecins Sans Frontières, in order to give priority to landing troops. Despite the remarkable patience and solidarity on the streets and the relatively small scale of looting, the aim is said to be to ensure security and avoid "another Somalia" – a reference to the US ­military's "Black Hawk Down" ­humiliation in 1993. It's an approach that ­certainly chimes with well-­established traditions of keeping Haiti under control.

In the last couple of days, another motivation has become clearer as the US has launched a full-scale naval blockade of Haiti to prevent a seaborne exodus by refugees seeking sanctuary in the United States from the desperate aftermath of disaster. So while Welsh firefighters and Cuban ­doctors have been getting on with the job of ­saving lives this week, the 82nd Airborne Division was busy parachuting into the ruins of Haiti's presidential palace.

There's no doubt that more Haitians have died as a result of these shockingly perverse priorities. As Patrick Elie, former defence minister in the government of Jean-Bertrand Aristide – twice overthrown with US support – put it: "We don't need soldiers, there's no war here." It's hardly surprising if Haitians such as Elie, or French and Venezuelan leaders, have talked about the threat of a new US occupation, given the scale of the takeover.

Their criticisms have been dismissed as kneejerk anti-Americanism at a time when the US military is regarded as the only force that can provide the ­logistical backup for the relief effort. In the context of Haiti's gruesome history of invasion and exploitation by the US and European colonial powers, though, that is a truly asinine response. For while last week's earthquake was a natural ­disaster, the scale of the human catastrophe it has unleashed is man-made.

It is uncontested that poverty is the main cause of the horrific death toll: the product of teeming shacks and the absence of health and public infrastructure. But Haiti's poverty is treated as some ­baffling quirk of history or culture, when in reality it is the direct ­consequence of a uniquely brutal ­relationship with the outside world — notably the US, France and Britain — stretching back centuries.

Punished for the success of its uprising against slavery and self-proclaimed first black republic of 1804 with invasion, blockade and a crushing burden of debt reparations only finally paid off in 1947, Haiti was occupied by the US between the wars and squeezed mercilessly by multiple creditors. More than a century of deliberate colonial impoverishment was followed by decades of the US-backed dictatorship of the Duvaliers, who indebted the country still further.

When the liberation theologist Aristide was elected on a platform of development and social justice, his challenge to Haiti's oligarchy and its international sponsors led to two foreign-backed coups and US invasions, a suspension of aid and loans, and eventual exile in 2004. Since then, thousands of UN troops have provided security for a discredited political system, while ­global financial institutions have imposed a relentlessly neoliberal diet, pauperising Haitians still further.

Thirty years ago, for example, Haiti was self-sufficient in its staple of rice. In the mid-90s the IMF forced it to slash tariffs, the US dumped its subsidised surplus on the country, and Haiti now imports the bulk of its rice. Tens of thousands of rice farmers were forced to move to the jerry-built slums of Port-au-Prince. Many died as a result last week.

The same goes for the lending and aid conditions imposed over the past two decades, which forced Haitian governments to privatise, hold down the minimum wage and cut back the already minimal health, education and public infrastructure. The impact can be seen in the helplessness of the Haitian state to provide the most basic relief to its own people. Even now, new IMF loans require Haiti to raise electricity prices and freeze public sector pay in a country where most people live on less than two dollars a day.

What this saga translates into in real life can be seen in the stark contrast between Haiti, which has taken its market medicine, with nearby Cuba, which hasn't, but suffers from a 50-year US economic blockade. While Haiti's infant mortality rate is around 80 per 1,000, Cuba's is 5.8; while nearly half Haitian adults are illiterate, the figure in Cuba is around 3%. And while 800 Haitians died in the hurricanes that devastated both islands last year, Cuba lost four people.

In her book The Shock Doctrine, Naomi Klein shows how natural disasters and wars, from Iraq to the 2004 Asian tsunami, have been used by corporate interests and their state ­sponsors to drive through predatory neoliberal ­policies, from ­radical deregulation to privatisation, that would have been impossible at other times. There's no doubt that some would now like to impose a form of ­disaster ­capitalism on Haiti. The influential US conservative Heritage Foundation initially argued last week that the ­earthquake ­offered ­"opportunities to ­reshape Haiti's long-dysfunctional government and ­economy as well as to improve the ­public image of the United States".

The former president Bill Clinton, who wants to build up Haiti's export-processing zones, appeared to contemplate something similar, though a good deal more sensitively, in an interview with the BBC. But more sweatshop assembly of products neither made nor sold in Haiti won't develop its economy nor provide a regular income for the majority. That requires the cancellation of Haiti's existing billion-dollar debt, a replacement of new loans with grants, and a Haitian-led democratic reconstruction of their own country, based on public investment, redevelopment of agriculture and a crash literacy programme. That really would offer a route out of Haiti's horror.

Source / The Guardian

And then there's this from someone who experienced the earthquake:

Occupation in Humanitarian Clothing
By Jesse Hagopian / January 24, 2010

Everything you need to know about the U.S. aid effort to assist Haiti in the wake of the catastrophic earthquake can be summed up by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's touchdown in Port-Au-Prince on Saturday, January 16: they shut down the airport for three hours surrounding her arrival for "security" reasons, which meant that no aid flights could come in during those critical hours.

If there was one day when the Haitian people needed aid to flow all day long, last Saturday was it because the people trapped under the rubble on Tuesday evening couldn't survive much beyond that without water.

Defenders of Clinton will say that her disimpassioned, monotone, photo-op speech was needed in Haiti to draw attention to the plight of the Haitians. But no one north of hell can defend her next move: according to airport personnel that I spoke to during my recent evacuation from Haiti, she paralyzed the airport later that same day to have a new outfit flown in from the Dominican Republic. I am having a hard time readjusting to life back home after having survived the earthquake and witnessing so much death, so even typing those words is making my heart pound uncontrollably.

I guess for America's rulers a new pantsuit is more valuable than the lives of poor, Black Haitians.

Unfortunately, Clinton's model of diverting and delaying critical aid to the Haitian people, while emphasizing security, has become standard operating procedure.

Alain Joyandet, the French minister responsible for humanitarian relief in Haiti, charged the U.S. with treating this as a military operation rather than an aid mission. Mr. Joyandet told the Daily Telegraph he had been involved in an argument with a U.S. commander in the airport's control tower over the flight plan for a French evacuation flight, saying, "This is about helping Haiti, not about occupying Haiti."

But with the U.S. occupying Iraq and Afghanistan, and funding the Israeli occupation of Palestine, it seems our government knows how to do little else when it comes to international affairs.

The day I left the Toussaint L'Ouverture International Airport I saw lots of crates of food, water and medical supplies piled on the tarmac. But I didn't see that aid being transported out of the airport to actually be used by Haitians. Undoubtedly, there has been some aid distributed, but because there was no serious effort to disperse that aid in the first four days after the quake, tens of thousands of people trapped under rubble have died needlessly because they couldn't get a sip of water.

The Geneva-based organization Doctors Without Borders has been turned away from the airport numerous times to allow U.S. troops to land. A ring of U.S. war ships surround Haiti to make sure that Haitians don't escape the disaster and try to get to the United States. The U.S. has taken control of Haiti's main airport and seaport, and is in the process of deploying 18,000 U.S. troops to bolster the 9,000 UN troops already occupying the island nation--and as an eyewitness I can tell you those troops are guarding their own compounds rather than distributing aid.

The Obama administration will try to dress up their ambition to occupy and pillage Haiti in a humanitarian evening gown. But clothing is in short supply in Haiti and we can't afford to waste it.

As a man from Leogane, Haiti, told Democracy Now,

"Myself, if you look at me, I don't have shoes, and I don't have food. Even my shoes, if you look at them, you see. I need clothes. We need everything. Even medicines, we need."

[Jesse Hagopian, a teacher from Seattle, was in Haiti with his wife (who works on HIV education in the country) and one-year-old son when the earthquake hit. Jesse can be contacted at: jdhagopian@gmail.com.]

Source / Common Dreams

Thanks to Juan Cole / Fluxed Up World

[+/-] Read More...

[+/-] Summary only...

Singin' on Saturday - Bossa Dorado

Great show at the Elephant Room in Austin Texas, September 10, 2009. Wonderful gypsy jazz from these amazing musicians: Tony Airoldi, Steve Carter, David Carroll, Phillip Fajardo, and Ruby Jane.

Fluxed Up World

[+/-] Read More...

[+/-] Summary only...

Marx's Criticisms of Capitalism Are Understated

How Wall St Destroyed Private Medicine
By Paul Craig Roberts / January 22, 2010

At my annual check-up, my doctor handed me a sheet explaining the reasons for office fee increases for Medicare Patients. It is worth reporting at length.

Medicare fixes the prices for Medicare patients’ health care. All office charges for Medicare, including office visit charges, have been set by the Federal government since 1984. In real terms (adjusted for inflation), these fixed prices are less today than they were three decades ago.

During the last four years, there have been large decreases in Medicare reimbursements for laboratory services provided in-house by private physicians. Payments for in-office blood work, for example, have been cut 35 to 47 percent. Yet, a physician’s overhead continues to increase as a result of uncontrollable costs, such as property taxes, building insurance, electricity, maintenance, malpractice and workers compensation insurance.

As one result, my doctor had to close both the x-ray unit and the state and federally licensed medical laboratory on his premises. Now patients are inconvenienced by having to go to other locations for services that formerly were provided by the doctor at lower cost. A one day medical check-up is now a multiple day event and more expensive.

While Medicare payments to doctors have been cut, regulations have been increasing: “Almost every outside diagnostic procedure (CT, MRI scan, sonogram) ordered by this office now has to be pre-approved by some outside agency. Many medications are now requiring pre-approval or step therapy. Each requires filling out 1-2 pages of forms and/or two or more phone calls. This requires personnel time and therefore more cost. Consultant referrals are requiring more paperwork and time to schedule.”

My doctor has more people employed doing paperwork than he does delivering health care.

While Medicare payments for in-office services to private doctors, including those for blood work and x-ray units, were drastically cut, payments to outside corporate facilities for the same services were increased. It is obvious what is afoot. Corporate lobbies are using their whores in Congress to shift income from physician offices to corporate labs, corporate medical service providers, and hospitals that are owned by national corporations.

Legislation that cuts payments to private physicians and increases the payments to large corporate entities is intended to destroy private practice and to create in its place corporate bureaucracies in which doctors are wage slaves. The physician’s income is diverted to shareholders, CEO bonuses, and Wall Street. Health care is being replaced with health business.

As a result of the way American medicine is being reconstructed, patients will cease to have a doctor whom they know and who knows them. Important information is lost in a system of bureaucratized “health care” in which a patient sees whatever face happens to be on duty at the corporate provider. Impersonal health care thus brings a cost of its own, and its quality can be low compared to private practice. Indeed, the U.S. is creating a “health care” system that is more costly and less efficient than single-payer national health systems. But it will enrich corporations and provide play for Wall Street.

It turns one’s stomach to watch libertarians and “free market economists” defend bureaucratized impersonal health care as “free market medicine.” There is no free market present. Corporate lobbies and campaign contributions use government power to create bureaucratized monopolies that destroy medicine for the practitioner and the patient. Wall Street pushes for greater shareholder earnings, which are achieved by denying care.

Just as independent businesses have been destroyed by corporate chains from Wal-Mart to auto parts to fast food, medicine is being destroyed by monopoly capital. The risks of starting a private business today are many times higher than they were a half century ago. Chains have turned Americans who once were independent business men and women into employees.

The fate of the health care bill demonstrates the power of private lobbies. What was to be health care for Americans was instantly transformed into 30 million new patients for the private health insurance industry. The “solution” to tens of millions of Americans being unable to afford health care is a law that requires them to purchase a private health care policy or be annually fined. As most of these uninsured Americans cannot afford to purchase a private policy, the plan is for the federal government to use taxpayers’ money to subsidize their purchase of a policy from private companies.

In other words, tax money is being diverted to the pockets of private businesses. This is par for the course in “capitalist” America.

In today’s America, Karl Marx’s criticisms of capitalism are understated. Wherever one looks, the scene is one of the government using taxpayers’ money to enrich private interests. Taxes are collected from people who can barely make it, and the revenues are transferred to multi-millionaires and billionaires. The federal government piles debt on the backs of heavily-burdened and dispossessed Americans in order that investment banksters can pay annual bonuses that exceed the lifetime earnings of most Americans.

Every aspect of the US military has been mined for private profit. Supply and other functions for the military, such as those provided by Halliburton and Blackwater, services once provided by the military itself at low cost, have been privatized. These services now cost many multiples of the cost to taxpayers of in-house military provision.

The “war on terror” enriches the armaments/security industry and enables Israeli territorial expansion. The Israel Lobby and the munitions industry are major sources of funding for U.S. political campaigns.

Prisons have been privatized in order to create profits for private corporations. The prisons require high incarceration rates in order to be profitable. Consequently, “freedom and democracy” America not only has the highest incarceration rate and the highest absolute number of prisoners in the world, but also a prison population comparable in size to the prison population of Stalin’s Gulag Archipelago.

Congress allows private companies run by hardline Republicans to count electronically without paper trails the votes in elections. It has been proved over and over that the electronic voting machines, with proprietary undisclosed codes, can rig any election, especially if there are no exit polls or the captured media can find a way to discredit the exit polls.

And now we have private health care destroyed by the greed for profit. There are many reports of health care corporations, but not private doctors, rationing and even denying health care to policy holders in order to maximize profits. There are reports of people with treatable forms of cancer who were not told by their corporate health care providers in order to avoid the cost of their treatment. These reports are in compliance with capitalist America’s emphasis on profits uber alles, to hell with people, the environment, honor and integrity.

Wall Street is romanticized by libertarians and “free market economists.” They believe, entirely on the basis of their ideology, that Wall Street finances venture capitalists who bring economic progress and higher living standards. Wall Street does no such thing, especially since financial deregulation turned Wall Street into a speculative hedge fund.

Wall Street is concerned with annual bonuses. It will do anything to get them.

Today the interests of American capitalists are as far removed from the interests of the population as the bureaucrats of state owned firms under socialism. Neither can fail, no matter how incompetent or inefficient, as they have the public purse as their backup.

The Wall Street investment banks, which created with the compliance of the regulatory authorities and the credit rating agencies, “toxic” instruments that were sold world wide, thus destroying the prospects of people in many countries, are devoid of integrity and honor. Their only god is greed. And they control the US government, which is too dependent on campaign contributions to restore regulation.

The lobbies of greed rule America. The White House, Congress, even the federal judiciary are impotent in the face of capitalist greed. The recent Supreme Court decision permitting corporations to use shareholders’ money in corporate treasuries to influence elections increases the control that corporations have over the outcome of elections and the decisions of the government of the United States. www.counterpunch.org/feingold01222010.html

There is no government of the people, for the people, by the people, only the rule of private interests.

[Dr. Roberts was assistant secretary of the U.S. Treasury in the Reagan administration, associate editor of the Wall Street Journal, Senior Research Fellow in the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, and held the William E. Simon Chair in Political Economy, Center for Strategic and International Studies, Georgetown University.]

Source / Information Clearing House

Thanks to Diane Stirling-Stevens / Fluxed Up World

[+/-] Read More...

[+/-] Summary only...