Redemption Song

movies

2008-10-01T19:48:00.000-07:00

war dance

Taxi to the Dark Side

McCain: Worse than you think!

2008-09-11T18:32:00.001-07:00

McCain: Worse than you think

http://www.brasschecktv.com/page/325.html

Begin forwarded message:

My fellow American -- if you haven't made up you mind yet, or even if you have, take a peek at the attached...it would be funny if it were not so serious....

http://www.brasschecktv.com/page/325.html

PEACE!

make art not war

2008-06-21T18:46:00.000-07:00

the art is by Shepard Fairey

see these pages:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shepard_Fairey

http://obeygiant.com/

http://jonathanlevinegallery.com/?method=Artist.ArtistDetail&ArtistID=F65EBB86-3048-28EB-92D55AA4FC996E31&GalleryID=82C33C59-3048-28EB-92DB386C8C733405

missing images

2008-04-25T20:03:00.000-07:00

sorry guys. some images are now gone.

new email

2008-04-05T00:24:00.000-07:00

strider080403 .comcast.net<

haunted by hillstomp

2007-09-21T11:20:00.000-07:00

i just can't stop listening to these guys! BUY THIS MUSIC - you won't regret it.

cdbaby.com/cd/hillstomp:
"Raucous hill country blues stomp with a punkish energy from this Portland, OR duo who utilize dual vocals, a makeshift drumkit of buckets, cans and BBQ lids and some crazy good slide guitar."

hot new music for me!

2007-09-07T11:22:00.000-07:00

wow! does the soul good. check these guys out - The Devil Makes Three, and Hillstomp. thanks, Kids!

The Devil Makes Three

"After hearing the booze-stained lyrics and American roots-influenced sound of the Devil Makes Three, you may think that good ol' Mr. Johnson wasn't the only one who sold his soul to the Prince of Darkness down at the crossroads. This Santa Cruz trio blend classic country, ragtime, bluegrass, and folk with their own fiery attitude and a sincere approach that create the sound and feel of a dusty old 78, but with an immediacy that's unforgettable. Acoustic guitar, upright bass, and banjo weave with tightly knit vocal harmonies in songs that'll have you tapping your foot and humming uncontrollably - particularly "The Bullet," "Graveyard," and "Old No. 7," which Jack Daniel's should use as its jingle." -Sean McCourt, San Francisco Bay Guardian -- April 26, 2004

Hillstomp

Portland Oregon junkbox blues duo HILLSTOMP is infamous for digging through the dumps and forgotten backwoods of American music, recycling traditional elements into a refreshing and distinctive brand of do-it-yourself hill country blues stomp. North Mississippi trance blues, a bit of Appalachia, and a dash of punkabilly come clanging and tumbling from assorted buckets, cans and BBQ lids, all drenched in rambunctious slide guitar. Somehow it works.

Despite their homemade instruments and novel approach, Hillstomp is no novelty act. In addition to two widely-acclaimed (whats a better way to say widely-acclaimed??) studio albums, the band's memorable live performances give outlaws and traditionalists of every generation something to get excited about.

Top 25 Censored Stories 2008

2007-09-07T11:21:00.000-07:00

Project Censored has released its Top 25 Censored Stories of 2006/7!

#1 No Habeas Corpus for “Any Person”
Sources:
Consortium, October 19, 2006
Title: “Who Is ‘Any Person’ in Tribunal Law?”
Author: Robert Parry
http://consortiumnews.com/2006/101906.html
Consortium, February 3, 2007
Title: “Still No Habeas Rights for You”
Author: Robert Parry
http://consortiumnews.com/2007/020307.html
Common Dreams, February 2, 2007
Title: “Repeal the Military Commissions Act and Restore the Most
American Human Right”
Author: Thom Hartmann
http://www.commondreams.org/views07/0212-24.htm
Student Researchers: Bryce Cook and Julie Bickel
Faculty Evaluator: Andrew Roth, Ph.D.
With the approval of Congress and no outcry from corporate media, the Military Commissions Act (MCA) signed by Bush on October 17, 2006, ushered in military commission law for US citizens and non-citizens alike. While media, including a lead editorial in the New York Times October 19, have given false comfort that we, as American citizens, will not be the victims of the draconian measures legalized by this Act—such as military roundups and life-long detention with no rights or constitutional protections—Robert Parry points to text in the MCA that allows for the institution of a military alternative to the constitutional justice system for “any person” regardless of American citizenship. The MCA effectively does away with habeas corpus rights for “any person” arbitrarily deemed to be an “enemy of the state.” The judgment on who is deemed an “enemy combatant” is solely at the discretion of President Bush.
The oldest human right defined in the history of English-speaking civilization is the right to challenge governmental power of arrest and detention through the use of habeas corpus laws, considered to be the most critical parts of the Magna Carta which was signed by King John in 1215.
Alexander Hamilton wrote in The Federalist #84 in August of 1788:
The establishment of the writ of habeas corpus are perhaps greater securities to liberty and republicanism than any it [the Constitution] contains. The practice of arbitrary imprisonments have been, in all ages, the favorite and most formidable instruments of tyranny. The observations of the judicious [British eighteenth-century legal scholar] Blackstone, in reference to the latter, are well worthy of recital:
“To bereave a man of life” says he, “or by violence to confiscate his estate, without accusation or trial, would be so gross and notorious an act of despotism, as must at once convey the alarm of tyranny throughout the whole nation; but confinement of the person, by secretly hurrying him to jail, where his sufferings are unknown or forgotten, is a less public, a less striking, and therefore a more dangerous engine of arbitrary government.”
While it is true that some parts of the MCA target non-citizens, other sections clearly apply to US citizens as well, putting citizens inside the same tribunal system with non-citizen residents and foreigners.
Section 950q of the MCA states that, “Any person is punishable as a principal under this chapter [of the MCA] who commits an offense punishable by this chapter, or aids, abets, counsels, commands, or procures its commission.”1
Section 950v. “Crimes Triable by Military Commissions” (26) of the MCA seems to specifically target American citizens by stating that, “Any person subject to this chapter who, in breach of an allegiance or duty to the United States, knowingly and intentionally aids an enemy of the United States, or one of the co-belligerents of the enemy, shall be punished as a military commission under this chapter may direct.”1
“Who,” warns Parry, “has ‘an allegiance or duty to the United States’ if not an American citizen?”
Besides allowing “any person” to be swallowed up by Bush’s system, the law prohibits detainees once inside from appealing to the traditional American courts until after prosecution and sentencing, which could translate into an indefinite imprisonment since there are no timetables for Bush’s tribunal process to play out.
Section 950j of the law further states that once a person is detained, “ not withstanding any other provision of law (including section 2241 of title 28 or any other habeas corpus provision) no court, justice, or judge shall have jurisdiction to hear or consider any claim or cause of action whatsoever relating to the prosecution, trial, or judgment of a military commission under this chapter, including challenges to the lawfulness of procedures of military commissions.”1
Other constitutional protections in the Bill of Rights, such as a speedy trial, the right to reasonable bail, and the ban on “cruel and unusual punishment,” would seem to be beyond a detainee’s reach as well.
Parry warns that, “In effect, what the new law appears to do is to create a parallel ‘star chamber’ system for the prosecution, imprisonment, and possible execution of enemies of the state, whether those enemies are foreign or domestic.
“Under the cloak of setting up military tribunals to try al-Qaeda suspects and other so-called unlawful enemy combatants, Bush and the Republican-controlled Congress effectively created a parallel legal system for ‘any person’—American citizen or otherwise—who crosses some ill-defined line.”
In one of the most chilling public statements ever made by a US Attorney General, Alberto Gonzales opined at a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on Jan. 18, 2007, “The Constitution doesn’t say every individual in the United States or citizen is hereby granted or assured the right of habeas corpus. It doesn’t say that. It simply says the right shall not be suspended.”
More important than its sophomoric nature, Parry warns, is that Gonzales’s statement suggests he is still searching for arguments to make habeas corpus optional, subordinate to the President’s executive powers that Bush’s neoconservative legal advisers claim are virtually unlimited during “time of war.”
Citation
1. “Military Commissions Act of 2006” Public Law 109-366, 109th Congress. See http://frwebgate.access.gpo.gov/cgi-bin/getdoc.cgi?dbname=109_cong_public_laws&docid=f :publ366.109.
UPDATE BY ROBERT PARRY
The Consortium series on the Military Commissions Act of 2006 pointed out that the law’s broad language seems to apply to both US citizens and non-citizens, contrary to some reassuring comments in the major news media that the law only denies habeas corpus rights to non-citizens. The law’s application to “any person” who aids and abets a wide variety of crimes related to terrorism—and the law’s provisions stripping away the jurisdiction of civilian courts—could apparently thrust anyone into the legal limbo of the military commissions where their rights are tightly constrained and their cases could languish indefinitely.
Despite the widespread distribution of our articles on the Internet, the major US news media continues to ignore the troubling “any person” language tucked in toward the end of the statute. To my knowledge, for instance, no major news organization has explained why, if the law is supposed to apply only to non-citizens, one section specifically targets “any person [who] in breach of an allegiance or duty to the United States, knowingly and intentionally aids an enemy of the United States.” Indeed, the “any person” language in sections dealing with a wide array of crimes, including traditional offenses such as spying, suggests that a parallel legal system has been created outside the parameters of the US Constitution.
Since publication of the articles, the Democrats won control of both the House and Senate—and some prominent Democrats, such as Senate Judiciary Committee chairman Patrick Leahy, have voiced their intent to revise the law with the goal of restoring habeas corpus and other rights. However, other Democrats appear hesitant, fearing that any attempt to change the law would open them to charges that they are “soft on terrorism” and that Republicans would torpedo the reform legislation anyway. Outside of Congress, pro-Constitution groups have made reform of the Military Commissions Act a high priority. For instance, the American Civil Liberties Union organized a national protest rally against the law. But the public’s lack of a clear understanding of the law’s scope has undercut efforts to build a popular movement for repeal or revision of the law.
To learn more about the movement to rewrite the Military Commissions Act, readers can contact the ACLU at https://secure.aclu.org/site/SPageServer?pagename=DOA_learn
https://secure.aclu.org/site/SPageServer?pagename=DOA_learn.
Comment
On June 8, 2007 the Senate Judiciary Committee passed the Habeas Corpus Restoration Act on an 11-8 vote. If approved, the bipartisan bill, authored by Senator Patrick Leahy of Vermont and Senator Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania, will restore habeas rights that were taken away last year by the Military Commissions Act. The bill will move to the full Senate for vote late June 2007.

#2 Bush Moves Toward Martial Law
Sources:
Uruknet, October 26, 2006
Title: “Bush Moves Toward Martial Law”
Author: Frank Morales
http://www.uruknet.info/?p=27769
Student Researchers: Phillip Parfitt and Julie Bickel
Faculty Evaluator: Andy Merrifield, Ph.D.
The John Warner Defense Authorization Act of 2007, which was quietly signed by Bush on October 17, 2006, the very same day that he signed the Military Commissions Act, allows the president to station military troops anywhere in the United States and take control of state-based National Guard units without the consent of the governor or local authorities, in order to “suppress public disorder.”
By revising the two-century-old Insurrection Act, the law in effect repeals the Posse Comitatus Act, which placed strict prohibitions on military involvement in domestic law enforcement. The 1878 Act reads, “Whoever, except in cases and under circumstances expressly authorized by the Constitution or Act of Congress, willfully uses any part of the Army or Air Force as a posse comitatus or otherwise to execute the laws shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than two years, or both.” As the only US criminal statute that outlaws military operations directed against the American people, it has been our best protection against tyranny enforced by martial law—the harsh system of rules that takes effect when the military takes control of the normal administration of justice. Historically martial law has been imposed by various governments during times of war or occupation to intensify control of populations in spite of heightened unrest. In modern times it is most commonly used by authoritarian governments to enforce unpopular rule.1
Section 333 of the Defense Authorization Act of 2007, entitled “Major public emergencies; interference with State and Federal law,” states that “the President may employ the armed forces, including the National Guard in Federal service—to restore public order and enforce the laws of the United States when, as a result of a natural disaster, epidemic, or other serious public health emergency, terrorist attack or incident, or other condition in any State or possession of the United States, the President determines that domestic violence has occurred to such an extent that the constituted authorities of the State or possession are incapable of (or “refuse” or “fail” in) maintaining public order—in order to suppress, in any State, any insurrection, domestic violence, unlawful combination, or conspiracy.”
Thus an Act of Congress, superceding the Posse Comitatus Act, has paved the way toward a police state by granting the president unfettered legal authority to order federal troops onto the streets of America, directing military operations against the American people under the cover of “law enforcement.”
The massive Defense Authorization Act grants the Pentagon $532.8 billion to include implementation of the new law which furthermore facilitates militarized police round-ups of protesters, so-called illegal aliens, potential terrorists, and other undesirables for detention in facilities already contracted and under construction, (see Censored 2007, Story #14) and transferring from the Pentagon to local police units the latest technology and weaponry designed to suppress dissent.
Author Frank Morales notes that despite the unprecedented and shocking nature of this act, there has been no outcry in the American media, and little reaction from our elected officials in Congress. On September 19, a lone Senator Patrick Leahy (D-Vermont) noted that 2007’s Defense Authorization Act contained a “widely opposed provision to allow the President more control over the National Guard [adopting] changes to the Insurrection Act, which will make it easier for this or any future President to use the military to restore domestic order without the consent of the nation’s governors.”
A few weeks later, on September 29, Leahy entered into the Congressional Record that he had “grave reservations about certain provisions of the fiscal Year 2007 Defense Authorization Bill Conference Report,” the language of which, he said, “subverts solid, longstanding posse comitatus statutes that limit the military’s involvement in law enforcement, thereby making it easier for the President to declare martial law.” This had been “slipped in,” Leahy said, “as a rider with little study,” while “other congressional committees with jurisdiction over these matters had no chance to comment, let alone hold hearings on, these proposals.”
Leahy noted “the implications of changing the [Posse Comitatus] Act are enormous.” “There is good reason,” he said, “for the constructive friction in existing law when it comes to martial law declarations. Using the military for law enforcement goes against one of the founding tenets of our democracy. We fail our Constitution, neglecting the rights of the States, when we make it easier for the President to declare martial law and trample on local and state sovereignty.”
Morales further asserts that “with the president’s polls at a historic low and Democrats taking back the Congress it is particularly worrisome that President Bush has seen fit, at this juncture to, in effect, declare himself dictator.”
Citation
1. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martial_law, “Martial Law,” May 2007
UPDATE BY FRANK MORALES
On April 24, 2007, Major General Timothy Lowenberg, the Adjutant General, Washington National Guard, and Director of the Washington Military Department, testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee on “The Insurrection Act Rider and State Control of the National Guard.” He was speaking in opposition to Section 1076 of the recently passed 2007 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), which President Bush quietly signed into law this past October 17. The law clears the way for the President to execute martial law, commandeer National Guard units around the country and unilaterally authorize military operations against the American people in the event of an executive declaration of a “public emergency.”
This move toward martial law, which is intended to facilitate more effective counterinsurgency measures on the home front, took place, according to Lowenberg, “without any hearing or consultation with the governors and without any articulation or justification of need.” This, despite the fact that Section 1076 of the new law “changed more than one hundred years of well-established and carefully balanced state-federal and civil-military relationships.” In other words, with one swipe of the pen, says the General, “one hundred years of law and policy were changed without any publicly or privately acknowledged author or proponent of the change.”
Its “Federal Plans for Implementing Expanded Martial Law Authority” are to be executed via the recently created domestic military command, the Northern Command or NORTHCOM. “One key USNORTHCOM planning assumption,” says Lowenberg, “is that the President will invoke the new Martial Law powers if he concludes state and/or local authorities no longer possess either the capability or the will to maintain order.” In fact, this “highly subjective assumption,” as Lowenberg puts it, has been in the works for some time now. According to the General, the “US Northern Command has been engaged for some time in deliberative planning for implementation of Section 1076 of the 2007 National Defense Authorization. The formal NORTHCOM CONPLAN 2502-05 was approved by Secretary of Defense Gates on March 15, 2007,”
Further, according to the General, the 2007 NDAA provisions “could be used to compel National Guard forces to engage in civil disturbance operations under federal control.” In that case, NORTHCOM will effectuate its move to martial law, its “CONPLAN,” by way of its very own “civil disturbance plan,” Department of Defense Civil Disturbance Plan 55-2, code-named Garden Plot. Major Tom Herthel, of the United States Air Force Judge Advocate General School, recently laid out the Rules of Engagement & Rules for the Use of Force during the implementation of “GARDEN PLOT,” which according to Herthel, is ”the plan to provide the basis for all preparation, deployment, employment, and redeployment of all designated forces, including National Guard forces called to active federal service, for use in domestic civil disturbance operations as directed by the President.” Among other things, the “rules” allow for the use of lethal force during domestic “civil disturbance operations.”
That is why many are urging Congress to repeal Section 1076 of the 2007 NDAA through immediate enactment of Senate Bill 513. Introduced in February 2007, and sponsored by Senator Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.), the bill seeks to repeal, or as the Congress puts it, “revive previous authority on the use of the Armed Forces and the militia to address interference with State or Federal law, and for other purposes,” through the “Repeal of Amendments made by Public Law 109-364-Section 1076 of the John Warner National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2007.”
It is critical that Senate Bill 513 becomes law, and that our popular struggle succeeds in beating back the President’s attempt to further codify the immoral and criminal seizure of state control via woefully ill-advised and dictatorial moves toward martial law and military rule.

# 3 AFRICOM: US Military Control of Africa’s Resources
Source:
MoonofAlabama.org 2/21/2007
Title: “Understanding AFRICOM”
Author: Bryan Hunt
http://www.moonofalabama.org/2007/02/understanding_a_1.html
Student Researcher: Ioana Lupu
Faculty Evaluator: Marco Calavita, Ph.D
In February 2007 the White House announced the formation of the US African Command (AFRICOM), a new unified Pentagon command center in Africa, to be established by September 2008. This military penetration of Africa is being presented as a humanitarian guard in the Global War on Terror. The real objective is, however, the procurement and control of Africa’s oil and its global delivery systems.
The most significant and growing challenge to US dominance in Africa is China. An increase in Chinese trade and investment in Africa threatens to substantially reduce US political and economic leverage in that resource-rich continent. The political implication of an economically emerging Africa in close alliance with China is resulting in a new cold war in which AFRICOM will be tasked with achieving full-spectrum military dominance over Africa.
AFRICOM will replace US military command posts in Africa, which were formerly under control of US European Command (EUCOM) and US Central Command (CENTCOM), with a more centralized and intensified US military presence.
A context for the pending strategic role of AFRICOM can be gained from observing CENTCOM in the Middle East. CENTCOM grew out of the Carter Doctrine of 1980 which described the oil flow from the Persian Gulf as a “vital interest” of the US, and affirmed that the US would employ “any means necessary, including military force” to overcome an attempt by hostile interests to block that flow.
It is in Western and Sub-Saharan Africa that the US military force is most rapidly increasing, as this area is projected to become as important a source of energy as the Middle East within the next decade. In this region, challenge to US domination and exploitation is coming from the people of Africa—most specifically in Nigeria, where seventy percent of Africa’s oil is contained.
People native to the Niger Delta region have not benefited, but instead suffered, as a result of sitting on top of vast natural oil and natural gas deposits. Nigerian people’s movements are demanding self-determination and equitable sharing of oil-receipts. Environmental and human rights activists have, for years, documented atrocities on the part of oil companies and the military in this region. As the tactics of resistance groups have shifted from petition and protest to more proactive measures, attacks on pipelines and oil facilities have curtailed the flow of oil leaving the region. As a Convergent Interests report puts it, “Within the first six months of 2006, there were nineteen attacks on foreign oil operations and over $2.187 billion lost in oil revenues; the Department of Petroleum Resources claims this figure represents 32 percent of ‘the revenue the country [Nigeria] generated this year.’”
Oil companies and the Pentagon are attempting to link these resistance groups to international terror networks in order to legitimize the use of the US military to “stabilize” these areas and secure the energy flow. No evidence has been found however to link the Niger Delta resistance groups to international terror networks or jihadists. Instead the situation in the Niger Delta is that of ethnic-nationalist movements fighting, by any means necessary, toward the political objective of self-determination. The volatility surrounding oil installations in Nigeria and elsewhere in the continent is, however, used by the US security establishment to justify military “support” in African oil producing states, under the guise of helping Africans defend themselves against those who would hinder their engagement in “Free Trade.”
The December 2006 invasion of Somalia was coordinated using US bases throughout the region. The arrival of AFRICOM will effectively reinforce efforts to replace the popular Islamic Courts Union of Somalia with the oil industry–friendly Transitional Federal Government. Meanwhile, the persistent Western calls for “humanitarian intervention” into the Darfur region of Sudan sets up another possibility for military engagement to deliver regime change in another Islamic state rich in oil reserves.
Hunt warns that this sort of “support” is only bound to increase as rhetoric of stabilizing Africa makes the dailies, copied directly out of official AFRICOM press releases. Readers of the mainstream media can expect to encounter more frequent usage of terms like “genocide” and “misguided.” He notes that already corporate media decry China’s human rights record and support for Sudan and Zimbabwe while ignoring the ongoing violations of Western corporations engaged in the plunder of natural resources, the pollution other peoples’ homelands, and the “shoring up” of repressive regimes.
In FY 2005 the Trans-Sahara Counter Terrorism Initiative received $16 million; in FY 2006, nearly $31 million. A big increase is expected in 2008, with the administration pushing for $100 million each year for five years. With the passage of AFRICOM and continued promotion of the Global War on Terror, Congressional funding is likely to increase significantly.
In the end, regardless of whether it’s US or Chinese domination over Africa, the blood spilled will be African. Hunt concludes, “It does not require a crystal ball or great imagination to realize what the increased militarization of the continent through AFRICOM will bring to the peoples of Africa.”
Update by Bryan Hunt
By spring 2007, US Department of Energy data showed that the United States now imports more oil from the continent of Africa than from the country of Saudi Arabia. While this statistic may be of surprise to the majority, provided such information even crosses their radar, it’s certainly not the case for those figures who have been pushing for increased US military engagement on that continent for some time now, as my report documented. These import levels will rise.
In the first few months following the official announcement of AFRICOM, details are still few. It’s expected that the combatant command will be operational as a subunit of EUCOM by October 2007, transitioning to a full-fledged stand-alone command some twelve months later. This will most likely entail the re-locating of AFRICOM headquarters from Stuttgart, Germany, where EUCOM is headquartered, to an African host country.
In April, US officials were traversing the continent to present their sales pitch for AFRICOM and to gauge official and public reaction. Initial perceptions are, not surprisingly, negative and highly suspect, given the history of US military involvement throughout the world, and Africa’s long and bitter experience with colonizers.
Outside of a select audience, reaction in the United States has barely even registered. First of all, Africa is one of the least-covered continents in US media. And when African nations do draw media attention, coverage typically centers on catastrophe, conflict, or corruption, and generally features some form of benevolent foreign intervention, be it financial and humanitarian aid, or stern official posturing couched as paternal concerns over human rights. But US military activity on the continent largely goes unnoticed. This was recently evidenced by the sparse reporting on military support for the invasion of Somalia to rout the Islamic Courts Union and reinstall the unpopular warlords who had earlier divided up the country. The Pentagon went so far as to declare the operation a blueprint for future engagements.
The DOD states that a primary component of AFRICOM’s mission will be to professionalize indigenous militaries to ensure stability, security, and accountable governance throughout Africa’s various states and regions. Stability refers to establishing and maintaining order, and accountability, of course, refers to US interests. This year alone, 1,400 African military officers are anticipated to complete International Military Education and Training programs at US military schools.
Combine this tasking of militarization with an increased civilian component in AFRICOM emphasizing imported conceptions of “democracy promotion” and “capacity-building” and African autonomy and sovereignty are quick to suffer. Kenyans, for example, are currently finding themselves in this position.
It is hoped that, by drawing attention to the growing US footprint on Africa now, a contextual awareness of these issues can be useful to, at the very least, help mitigate some of the damages that will surely follow. At the moment, there is little public consciousness of AFRICOM and very few sources of information outside of official narratives. Widening the public dialogue on this topic is the first step toward addressing meaningful responses.

# 4 Frenzy of Increasingly Destructive Trade Agreements
Sources:
Oxfam International, March 2007
Title: “Singing Away The Future”
http://www.oxfam.org/en/policy/briefingpapers/bp101_regional_trade_agreements_0703
IPS coverage of Oxfam Report March 20, 2007
Title: “Free Trade Enslaving Poor Countries”
Author: Sanjay Suri
http://ipsnews.org/news.asp?idnews=37008
Student Researcher: Ann Marie O’Toole
Faculty Evaluator: Peter Phillips, Ph.D.
The Oxfam report, “Signing Away the Future,” reveals that the US and European Union (EU) are vigorously pursuing increasingly destructive regional and bilateral trade and investment agreements outside the auspices of the WTO. These agreements are requiring enormous irreversible concessions from developing countries, while offering almost nothing in return. Faster and deeper, the US and EU are demanding unprecedented tariff reductions, sometimes to nothing, as the US and EU dump subsidized agricultural goods on undeveloped countries (see story #21), plunging local farmers into desperate poverty. Meanwhile the US and EU provide themselves with high tariffs and stringent import quotas to protect their own producers. Unprecedented loss of livelihood, displacement, slave labor, along with spiraling degradation of human rights and environments are resulting as economic governance is forced from governments of developing countries, and taken over by unaccountable multinational firms.
During 2006, more than one hundred developing countries were involved in FTA or Bilateral Investment Treaty (BIT) negotiations. “An average of two treaties are signed every week,” the report says, “Virtually no country, however poor, has been left out.”
Much of the recent debate and controversy over trade negotiations has revolved around the increasingly devastating trade-distorting practices of rich countries versus the developing countries’ needs for food security and industrial development. The new generation of agreements, however, extends far beyond this traditional area of trade policy—imposing a damaging set of binding rules in intellectual property, services, and investment with much deeper consequences for development and impacts on the poor.
Double standards in the intellectual-property rights chapters of most trade agreements are glaring. As new agreements limit developing countries’ access to patented technology and medicines—while failing to protect traditional knowledge—the public-health consequences are staggering. The US-Colombia FTA is expected to reduce access to medicines by 40 percent and the US-Peru FTA is expected to leave 700,000 to 900,000 Peruvians without access to affordable medicines.
US and EU FTAs also require the adoption of plant-breeder rights that remove the right to share seeds among indigenous farmers. The livelihood of the world’s poorest farmers is thus made even more vulnerable, while profit margins of the world’s largest agribusinesses continue to climb. US FTAs are now pushing for patents on plants, which will not only limit the rights of farmers to exchange or sell seeds, but also forbid them to save and reuse seed they have grown themselves for generations. Under US FTAs including DR-CAFTA, US–Peru and US–Colombia FTAs, developing-country governments will no longer be able to reject a patent application because a firm fails to indicate the origin of a plant or show proof of consent for its use from a local community. As a result, communities could find themselves forced to pay for patented plant varieties based on genetic resources from their own soil.
New rules also pose a threat to essential services as FTAs allow foreign investors to take ownership of healthcare, education, water, and public utilities.
Investment chapters of new FTAs and BITs allow foreign investors to sue for lost profits, including anticipated future profits, if governments change regulations, even when such reforms are in the public interest. These rules undermine the sovereignty of developing nations, transferring power from governments to largely unaccountable multinational firms. A growing number of investment chapters and treaties further tip the scales of justice by preventing governments from screening or regulating foreign investment—banning the use of all ‘performance requirements’ in all sectors including mining, manufacturing, and services.
More than 170 countries have signed international investment agreements that provide foreign investors with the right to turn immediately to international investor-state arbitration to settle disputes, without first trying to resolve the matter in national courts. Such arbitration fails to consider public interest, basing decisions exclusively on commercial law.
Not only is the legal basis for investment arbitration loaded against public interest, so are the proceedings. Despite the fact that many arbitration panels are hosted at the World Bank and the United Nations, the investment arbitration system is shrouded in secrecy. It is virtually impossible to find out what cases are being heard, let alone the outcome or rationale for decisions. As a result, there is no body of case decisions to inform governments of developing countries when drafting investments agreements.
Oxfam notes that the only group privy to this information is an increasingly powerful select group of commercial lawyers, whose fees often place them out of reach of developing-country governments. These lawyers, according to the Oxfam report, are eager to advise foreign investors regarding opportunities to claim compensation from developing countries under international investment agreements.
Strong opposition is growing to the political asymmetry inherent in these bilateral trade and investment agreements (see stories #8, #19, and #21). As Oxfam notes, “It is in nobody’s long-term interest to have a global economy that perpetuates social, economic, and environmental injustice.”
UPDATE BY LAURA RUSU OF OXFAM INTERNATIONAL
While real progress toward achieving a development-friendly outcome in the World Trade Organization’s Doha Round is still quite elusive, the negotiation of bilateral and regional free trade agreements (FTAs) that would undermine development continues at an unabated pace.
In the United States, the new Democratic leadership in Congress recently negotiated changes in the areas of labor, environment, and intellectual property in regard to access to medicines that are to be incorporated into the completed FTAs awaiting Congressional ratification. If implemented as agreed, these changes would mean important progress in enforcing core International Labor Organization standards and multilateral environmental agreements, and in promoting public health over private profits by reducing onerous protections for pharmaceutical monopolies. Still, more must be done in these areas, and harmful provisions remain in several other areas that will adversely affect developing countries, particularly the poor.
Without further changes, the FTAs create a profoundly unfair situation in which the US provides massive domestic agricultural supports and subsidies that allow products to be exported below their cost of production, while developing country trading partners are left with no means of protection. With large portions of their populations dependent upon agriculture for their livelihoods, the FTAs provide no effective safeguard to protect poor farmers from unfair competition. In addition, investment rules in the FTAs will hinder local and national governments from directing foreign investment so that it contributes to sustainable development. The investment chapter will give foreign companies leeway to challenge investment regulations, such as laws to protect the environment and public health. These and other provisions would deny developing countries the policy space needed to further their own development.
The US Administration hopes to bring FTAs with Peru, Panama, Colombia and Korea to a vote this year, although it remains doubtful whether there would be sufficient Congressional support to move the latter two. Congressional leadership is insisting that Colombia must also address its serious problems of violence and impunity, particularly as suffered by trade unionists, and has raised market-access concerns with regard to South Korea.
In a similar vein, the European Union has proceeded with FTA negotiations with African, Caribbean, and Pacific countries by pushing forward negotiating texts that will undermine the ability of poor countries to effectively govern their economies, protect their poorest people, improve livelihoods, and create new jobs. Going beyond the provisions negotiated at a multilateral level, the EU is making requests that would impose far-reaching, hard-to-reverse rules in the areas of market access, agriculture, services and intellectual property. At the same time, the EU is proceeding to open formal negotiations with Central American countries for an FTA that would impose similar rules that undermine development. A similar agreement with Andean countries is expected to follow, and plans have been announced to open negotiations with ASEAN, India, and South Korea. In all of these negotiations, the EU, like the US, is failing to put development first.
For more information, please see http://www.oxfamamerica.org.

#5 Human Traffic Builds US Embassy in Iraq
Source:
CorpWatch, October 17, 2007
Title: “A US Fortress Rises in Baghdad: Asian Workers Trafficked to Build World’s Largest Embassy”
Author: David Phinney
http://www.corpwatch.org/article.php?id=14173
Student Researcher: Kristen Kebler and Angela Purcaro
Faculty Evaluator: Andrew Roth, Ph.D.
The enduring monument to US liberation and democracy in Iraq will be the most expensive and heavily fortified embassy in the world—and is being built by a Kuwait contractor repeatedly accused of using forced labor trafficked from South Asia under US contracts. The $592 million, 104-acre fortress equal in size to the Vatican City is scheduled to open in September 2007. With a highly secretive contract awarded by the US State Department, First Kuwaiti Trading & Contracting has joined the ranks of Halliburton/KBR in Iraq by using bait-and-switch recruiting practices. Thousands of citizens from countries that have banned travel or work in Iraq are being tricked, smuggled into brutal and inhumane labor camps, and subjected to months of forced servitude—all in the middle of the US-controlled Green Zone, “right under the nose of the US State Department.”
Though Associated Press reports that, “The 5,500 Americans and Iraqis working at the embassy are far more numerous than at any other US mission worldwide,”1 there is no mention in corporate media of the 3,000 South Asian laborers working for contractors in dangerous and abysmal living and working conditions.
One such contractor is First Kuwaiti Trading and Contracting. FKTC has procured several billion dollars in US construction contracts since the war began in March 2003. Much of its work is performed by cheap labor hired from South Asia. The company currently employs an estimated 7,500 foreign laborers in theaters of war.
American FKTC employees report having witnessed the issuance of false boarding passes to Dubai, and passport seizure from planeloads of South Asian workers, who were instead routed to war-torn Baghdad. Former US Embassy construction manager for FKTC, John Owen, disclosed to author David Phinney that the deception had all the appearance of smuggling workers into Iraq.
On April 4, 2006, the Pentagon issued a contracting directive following an investigation that officially confirmed that contractors in Iraq, many working as subcontractors to Halliburton/KBR, were illegally confiscating worker passports, using deceptive bait-and-switch hiring practices, and charging recruiting fees that indebted low-paid migrant workers for many months or even years to their employers.
Section 1. (U) of the Pentagon directive states, “An inspection of contracting activities supporting DoD in Iraq revealed evidence of illegal confiscation of worker (Third Country National) passports by contractors/subcontractors; deceptive hiring practices and excessive recruiting fees, substandard worker living conditions at some sites, circumvention of Iraqi immigration procedures by contractors/subcontractors and lack of mandatory trafficking in persons awareness training. This FRAGO [fragmentary order] establishes responsibilities within MNF-1 for combating trafficking in persons.”
An April 19, 2006 memorandum from Joint Contracting Command in Baghdad to All Contractors again states that, “Evidence indicates a widespread practice of withholding employee passports to, among other things, prevent employees ‘jumping’ to other employers. All contractors engaging in the above mentioned practice are directed to cease and desist in this practice immediately.”
The Pentagon has yet to announce, however, any penalty for those found to be in violation of US labor trafficking laws or contract requirements.
In a resignation letter dated June 2006, Owen told FKTC and US State Department officials that his managers at the US Embassy site regularly beat migrant workers, demonstrated little regard for worker safety, and routinely breached security. He also complained of poor sanitation, squalid living conditions and medical malpractice in labor camps where several thousand low-paid migrant workers, recruited from the Philippines, India, and Pakistan lived. Those workers, Owen noted, earned as little as $10 to $30 for a twelve-hour workday.
Rory Mayberry, a medic subcontracted to FKTC to attend construction crews at the Embassy, shares similar complaints about treatment of migrant laborers. In reports made available to the US State Department, the US Army, and FKTC, Mayberry called for the closure of the onsite medical clinic, listing dozens of serious safety hazards, unsanitary conditions, as well as routine negligence and malpractice. He furthermore called for an investigation into deaths that he suspected resulted from medical malpractice. Mayberry is not aware of any follow-up on his allegations.
Owen says that State Department officials supervising the US Embassy project are aware of abuse, but apparently do nothing. He recalls, “Once when seventeen workers climbed the wall of the construction site to escape, a State Department official helped round them up and put them in virtual lockdown.”
Phinney says that more FKTC employees are stepping forward to say that Owen’s and Mayberry’s testimonies “only begin to scratch the surface” of the conditions workers are forced to endure in building this monument to US liberation and democracy in Iraq.
Citation:
1. Associated Press, “New US Embassy in Iraq Cloaked in Mystery,” MSNBC, April 14, 2006.
UPDATE BY DAVID PHINNEY
When I first heard that Project Censored would recognize this story on the low-wage migrant laborers from South Asia building the US embassy in Baghdad, I admit I felt the story was a failure. Allegations of forced labor, lousy treatment of workers and beatings struck me as something that should rise to the level of torture at Abu Ghraib. Despite what appears to be a whitewash review of the embassy project by the State Department Inspector General that exonerated the contractor—even though more than a dozen sources on the site say conditions were abysmal—I am now encouraged by a recent effort at the US Justice Department to investigate allegations of labor trafficking and other matters. But the problem of labor abuse has been found to be “widespread” among contractors in the theater of war in Iraq. Unfortunately, not one contractor has been penalized—in fact, many are being rewarded with new US-funded contracts. That is a crime to humanity that may haunt the United States for years to come.

#6 Operation FALCON Raids
Sources:
SourceWatch, November 18, 2006
Title: “Operation Falcon”
Author: Artificial Intelligence
http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Operation_FALCON
Ukernet, February 26, 2007
Title: “Operation Falcon and the Looming Police State”
Author: Mike Whitney
http://uruknet.info/?p=m30971&s1=h1
Student Researcher: Erica Haikara and Celeste Winders
Faculty Evaluator: Ron Lopez, Ph.D.
Under the code name Operation FALCON (Federal and Local Cops Organized Nationally) three federally coordinated mass arrests occurred between April 2005 and October 2006. In an unprecedented move, more than 30,000 “fugitives” were arrested in the largest dragnets in the nation’s history. The operations directly involved over 960 agencies (state, local, and federal) and were the brainchild of Attorney General Alberto Gonzales and US Marshal’s Director Ben Reyna. The DoJ supplied television networks government-shot action videotape of Marshals and local cops raiding homes and breaking down doors, “targeting the worst of the worst criminals on the run,” emphasizing suspected sex offenders. Yet less than ten percent of the total 30,150 were suspected sex offenders and less than two percent owned firearms. The press has not asked, “Who were the others?” And to date, the US Marshal’s office has issued no public statement as to whether the people arrested in Operation Falcon have been processed or released. Author Mike Whitney cautions that Attorney General Gonzales has little interest in the petty offenders who were netted in this extraordinary crackdown. This action is instead, he warns, a practice roundup in the move toward martial law.
Altogether, there were three FALCON Operations, each netting roughly 10,000 criminal suspects. Between April 4–10, 2005, FALCON I swept up 10,340 fugitives in the largest nationwide mass arrest (to that date) in American history. Alberto Gonzalez proudly announced on April 15 through corporate media, “Operation FALCON is an excellent example of President Bush’s direction and the Justice Department’s dedication to deal both with the terrorist threat and traditional violent crime. This joint effort shows the commitment of our federal, state, and local partners to make our neighborhoods safer, and it has led to the highest number of arrests ever recorded for a single initiative of its kind. We will use all of our Nation’s law enforcement resources to serve the people, to pursue justice, and to make our streets and Nation safer.”
Operation FALCON II, carried out the week of April 17–23, 2006, arrested another 9,037 individuals from twenty-seven states mostly west of the Mississippi River. Operation FALCON III, conducted during the week of October 22–28, 2006, netted another 10,733 fugitives in twenty-four states east of the Mississippi River.
The US Marshals Service has not yet disclosed the names of the people arrested in these massive sweeps nor of what crimes they were accused. We have no way of knowing whether they were provided with due process of law, where they are now, or whether they have been abused while in custody.
SourceWatch contributors further ask for clarification, “Although Attorney General Gonzales stated on April 15, 2005 that Operation FALCON was ‘an excellent example of President Bush‘s direction and the Justice Department’s dedication to deal both with the terrorist threat and traditional violent crime,’ where is the connection between the Operation FALCON roundups and catching terrorists? Why did police wait for federally orchestrated raids to arrest known sex offenders and suspected murders? Why were state and federal agencies integrated with local law enforcement to simply carry out routine police work?”
The media played an essential role in concealing the important details of the Operation. In fact, the non-critical “cookie cutter” articles which appeared in newspapers across the country suggest that the media may have collaborated directly with the Justice Department. (see Chapter 9, Fake News) Whitney notes that nearly identical “news” segments and articles put the best possible spin on a story that most Americans might find deeply disturbing, and perhaps frightening.
While mass militarized police roundups make little sense as a method of apprehending fugitives, the FALCON program does make sense as a means of effectively setting up a chain-of-command structure that radiates from the Justice Department and relocates the levers of control to Washington where they can be manned by members of the administration. Whitney warns that the plan behind the FALCON program appears to have been devised to enhance the powers of the “unitary” executive by putting state and local law enforcement under federal supervision, ready for the institution of martial law (see story #2.)
Update by Mike Whitney
Operation FALCON presents the first time in US history that all of the domestic police agencies have been put under the direct control of the federal government. The implications for American democracy are quite profound.
Operation FALCON serves no purpose except to centralize power and establish the basic contours of an American police state. It is not an effective way of apprehending criminals.
For the most part, the media completely ignored FALCON. In fact, these extraordinary police-state sweeps did not elicit even one editorial or one column-inch of commentary from any journalist in the country. Following the government’s version of events, the story was simply brushed aside as trivial. For those who care to explore the media’s true role in undermining the fundamental rights of Americans; FALCON is probably a good place to begin. It illustrates how the media deliberately obscures facts that do not serve the overall interests of the state.
The last FALCON operation was carried out on October 28, 2006. Since then, the project has been put on “hold,” presumably until some time in the future when it will be reactivated by presidential decree. The precedents have now been established for law enforcement agencies across the nation to be taken over by the chief executive at a moment’s notice. If there is another terrorist attack within the United States, or the outbreak of an epidemic, or a natural disaster on the scale of Hurricane Katrina; we can expect that President Bush will consolidate his power by asserting direct control over all of the various federal, state, and local police agencies. Eventually, we will see that FALCON was organized with that very purpose in mind.
Recent changes to the Insurrection Act of 1807 as well as to the Posse Comitatus Act of 1878 allow President Bush to declare martial law at his own discretion and to take control of the National Guard from the state governors. That means that Bush now has a complete monopoly on all the means of organized violence in the country.
With the aid of the corporate media and an alliance of far-right organizations, Bush has successfully removed all the traditional obstacles to absolute power. The groundwork has been laid for an American dictatorship. FALCON is just one small part of that much larger plan.
UPDATE BY ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
A more recent and less publicized sweep was made March 7, 2007, in Baltimore, with the arrest of about two hundred fugitives. The rationale for this sweep is more puzzling, perhaps, as it was the only city involved. This sweep received only local media attention.
Numerous questions, as stated in the Operation FALCON article, remain unanswered. The mainstream press does not appear to be interested in exploring beyond the initial sweep events.
Both House and Senate committees on the judiciary and government oversight are digging into DoJ operations due to the US attorney firings and politicization of the Department, with all roads leading to the White House. It is not unreasonable to expect that these sweeps may eventually come under investigation as well.
The mainstream press, to my knowledge, has not responded at all to my SourceWatch coverage of this story. The press coverage that Operation FALCON received appears to be limited to DoJ and USMS news releases with the addition of an occasional local interest story. Information on the fate of the 30,000 plus who were arrested is conspicuous by its absence.
Additional information on this story should be available from both the DoJ and USMS. In reality, it most likely will not be, as neither has provided any updates. The SourceWatch article will continue to be updated when or if additional information becomes available.

#7 Behind Blackwater Inc.
Source: Democracy Now! January 26, 2007
Title: “Our Mercenaries in Iraq: Blackwater Inc and Bush’s Undeclared Surge”
Author: Jeremy Scahill
http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=07/01/26/1559232
Student Researcher: Sverre Tysl
Faculty Evaluator: Noel Byrne, Ph.D.
The company that most embodies the privatization of the military industrial complex—a primary part of the Project for a New American Century and the neoconservative revolution is the private security firm Blackwater. Blackwater is the most powerful mercenary firm in the world, with 20,000 soldiers, the world’s largest private military base, a fleet of twenty aircraft, including helicopter gunships, and a private intelligence division. The firm is also manufacturing its own surveillance blimps and target systems.
Blackwater is headed by a very right-wing Christian-supremist and ex-Navy Seal named Erik Prince, whose family has had deep neo-conservative connections. Bush’s latest call for voluntary civilian military corps to accommodate the “surge” will add to over half a billion dollars in federal contracts with Blackwater, allowing Prince to create a private army to defend Christendom around the world against Muslims and others.
One of the last things Dick Cheney did before leaving office as Defense Secretary under George H. W. Bush was to commission a Halliburton study on how to privatize the military bureaucracy. That study effectively created the groundwork for a continuing war profiteer bonanza.
During the Clinton years, Erik Prince envisioned a project that would take advantage of anticipated military outsourcing. Blackwater began in 1996 as a private military training facility, with an executive board of former Navy Seals and Elite Special Forces, in the Great Dismal Swamp of North Carolina. A decade later it is the most powerful mercenary firm in the world, embodying what the Bush administration views as “the necessary revolution in military affairs”—the outsourcing of armed forces.
In his 2007 State of the Union address Bush asked Congress to authorize an increase in the size of our active Army and Marine Corps by 92,000 in the next five years. He continued, “A second task we can take on together is to design and establish a volunteer civilian reserve corps. Such a corps would function much like our military reserve. It would ease the burden on the Armed Forces by allowing us to hire civilians with critical skills to serve on missions abroad when America needs them.”
This is, however, precisely what the administration has already done—largely, Jeremy Scahill points out, behind the backs of the American people. Private contractors currently constitute the second-largest “force” in Iraq. At last count, there were about 100,000 contractors in Iraq, 48,000 of which work as private soldiers, according to a Government Accountability Office report. These soldiers have operated with almost no oversight or effective legal constraints and are politically expedient, as contractor deaths go uncounted in the official toll. With Prince calling for the creation of a “contractor brigade” before military audiences, the Bush administration has found a back door for engaging in an undeclared expansion of occupation.
Blackwater currently has about 2,300 personnel actively deployed in nine countries and is aggressively expanding its presence inside US borders. They provide the security for US diplomats in Iraq, guarding everyone from Paul Bremer and John Negroponte to the current US ambassador, Zalmay Khalilzad. They’re training troops in Afghanistan and have been active in the Caspian Sea, where they set up a Special Forces base miles from the Iranian border. According to reports they are currently negotiating directly with the Southern Sudanese regional government to start training the Christian forces of Sudan.
Blackwater’s connections are impressive. Joseph Schmitz, the former Pentagon Inspector General, whose job was to police the war contractor bonanza, has moved on to become the vice chairman of the Prince Group, Blackwater’s parent company, and the general counsel for Blackwater.
Bush recently hired Fred Fielding, Blackwater’s former lawyer, to replace Harriet Miers as his top lawyer; and Ken Starr, the former Whitewater prosecutor who led the impeachment charge against President Clinton, is now Blackwater’s counsel of record and has filed briefs with Supreme Court to fight wrongful death lawsuits brought against Blackwater.
Cofer Black, thirty-year CIA veteran and former head of CIA’s counterterrorism center, credited with spearheading the extraordinary rendition program after 9/11, is now senior executive at Blackwater and perhaps its most powerful operative.
Prince and other Blackwater executives have been major bankrollers of the President, of former House Majority Leader, Tom DeLay, and of former Senator, Rick Santorum. Senator John Warner, the former head of the Senate Armed Services Committee, called Blackwater, “our silent partner in the global war on terror.”

#8 KIA: The US Neoliberal Invasion of India
Sources:
Democracy Now! December 13, 2006
Title: “Vandana Shiva on Farmer Suicides, the US-India Nuclear Deal, Wal-Mart in India”
Author: Vandana Shiva with Amy Goodman
http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=06/12/13/1451229
Global Research, October 9, 2006
Title: “Genetically Modified Seeds: Women in India Take on Monsanto”
Author: Arun Shrivastava
http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=viewArticle&code=ARU20061009&articleId=3427
SciDev.Net
Title: “Sowing Trouble: India’s ‘Second Green Revolution’”
Author: Suman Sahai
http://www.scidev.net/content/opinions/eng/sowing-trouble-indias-second-green-revolution.cfm
Student Researchers: Jonathan Stoumen and Michael Januleski
Faculty Evaluator: Phil Beard, Ph.D.
Farmers’ cooperatives in India are defending the nation’s food security and the future of Indian farmers against the neoliberal invasion of genetically modified (GM) seed. As many as 28,000 Indian farmers have committed suicide over the last decade as a result of debt incurred from failed GM crops and competition with subsidized US crops, yet when India’s Prime Minister Singh met with President Bush in March 2006 to finalize nuclear agreements, they also signed the Indo-US Knowledge Initiative on Agriculture (KIA), backed by Monsanto, Archer Daniels Midland (ADM), and Wal-Mart. The KIA allows for the grab of India’s seed sector by Monsanto, of its trade sector by giant agribusiness ADM and Cargill, and its retail sector by Wal-Mart.
Though the contours of KIA have been kept so secret that neither senior Indian politicians nor the scientific community know its details, it is clear that Prime Minister Singh has agreed to sacrifice India’s agriculture sector to pay for US concessions in the nuclear field.
In one of very few public statements by a US government official regarding KIA, Nicholas Burns, Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs, states, “While the civilian nuclear initiative has garnered the most attention, our first priority is to continue giving governmental support to the huge growth in business between the Indian and American private sectors. Singh has also challenged the United States to help launch a second green revolution in India’s vast agricultural heartland by enlisting the help of America’s great land-grant institutions.”
Vandana Shiva translates, “These are twin programs about a market grab and a security alignment.” Burns announced that while the nuclear deal is the cutting edge, what the US is really seeking is agricultural markets and real estate markets, “to take over the land of people, not through a market mechanism, but using the state and an old colonial law of land acquisition to grab the land by force.”
Through KIA, Monsanto and the US have asked for unhindered access to India’s gene banks, along with a change in India’s intellectual property laws to allow patents on seeds and genes, and to dilute provisions that protect farmers’ rights. A combination of physical access to India’s gene banks and a possible new intellectual property law that allows seed patents will in essence deliver India’s genetic wealth into US hands. This would be a severe blow to India’s food security and self-sufficiency.
At the same time KIA has paved the way for Wal-Mart’s plans to open five hundred stores in India, starting in August 2007, which will compound the outsourcing of India’s food supply and threaten 14 million small family venders with loss of livelihood.
“This is not about ‘free trade,’” Shiva explains, “Today’s trade system, especially in agriculture, is dishonest, and dishonesty has become a war against farmers. It’s become a genocide.”
Farmers are, however, organizing to protect themselves against this economic invasion by maintaining traditional seed banks and setting up exemplary systems of community agrarian support. In response to the flood of debilitating debt tied to GM/hybrid seeds and the toxic petroleum based fertilizers and pesticides these crops depend on, one woman in the small village of Palarum says, “We do not buy seeds from the market because we suspect they may be contaminated with genetically engineered or terminator seeds.” Instead village women save and trade hardy traditional seeds that have evolved over centuries to produce low-maintenance, nutritious “crops of truth.”
Each village in this rural area of India has formed its own community-based organization called a sangham. Seventy-two sanghams are part of a regional federation. These sanghams form an informal social security network that, through the maintenance of seed banks, will come to the rescue of individuals or entire villages in times of crop failure. Every member of the community has access to food and is assured of some work even if landless. The federation furthermore trains students in skills such as carpentry, computing, pottery, bookbinding, veterinary science, herbal medicine, sewing, farming, waste management, and agro-forestry.
Author Arun Shrivastava comments that, “These seventy-two villages were once horizontally and vertically stratified along caste, class, and religious lines. Food scarcity was endemic, people were malnourished, the majority worked as unskilled day wagers. Today they are cohesive, interdependent. I did not see one malnourished person. Rarely do people go to urban centers to seek work.” Shrivastava continues, “The community is the most important entity that can help us ensure food and nutrition security. The right of access to natural resources—land, rivers, forests, air, and everything that Nature has given us, including seeds, is the fundamental right of the communities, not of the corporations or the state or the individual. No corporation has the right to expropriate what Nature gave us.”
Professor of genetics Suman Sahai concludes, “India must be cautious that it does not become the dumping ground for a technology and its controversial products that have been rejected in many parts of the world and whose safety and usefulness remain questionable. Food security is an integral part of national security. All India’s efforts in the nuclear arena to shore up its national security goals will be undermined if it allows itself to become insecure in the matter of food.”
Citation:
1. Nicholas Burns, “‘Heady Times’ For India And the US,” Washington Post, April 29, 2007.
UPDATE BY Arun Shrivastava
Nature has given us seeds and ‘crops of truth’ that do not require any tending but give us nutrition at no or low-cost. This knowledge needs to be rapidly disseminated; soon our lives may depend on it.
With current farming and food distribution systems it takes ten calories of fossil fuel energy to transport one calorie of food from farm to fork. That is unsustainable now; the era of cheap oil is effectively finished. Since we are already past peak oil, we all must learn to ensure food and nutrition security for our family and community. We will have to learn basic skills like conserving seeds, growing nutritious food, and medicinal crops without chemicals and machines. We will need more cohesive and interdependent local communities, like the women of Zaheerabad have shown.
The women of Zaheerabad save seeds in community-held seed banks and grow nutrition-dense food through a system that ensures health and livelihood for all. They have established how self-sufficient, sustainable communities might live in a post-carbon world.
A handful of multi-national corporations are patenting seeds. These genetically modified (GM) seeds neither increase yield nor reduce costs nor enhance nutritive content of foods, nor reduce dependence on oil. The seeds of deception have destroyed farmers in India, the US, and elsewhere.
Patenting ensures monopoly control while subverting farmers’ right to save seeds; it is antithetical to natural rights of local communities. The Indo-US Knowledge Initiative in Agriculture covertly seeks to gain access and control over community-held seeds.
Since publication of the article, Deccan Development Society (DDS) has extended the model to twenty-six more villages but the community FM radio station remains silent.
At People’s SAARC (South Asia Association for Regional Cooperation) summit in Kathmandu (March 2007) participants voted for a “GM-free South Asia,” community control over seeds and protection of South-Asian biodiversity. Over six million farmers requested the Supreme Court of India (April 2007) to ban open field trials of GM seeds because of the dangers of irreversible contamination of community-held seeds and adverse impact on health.
The mainstream media is silent. They don’t have space for disseminating information that will save us from disease and starvation. These are unglamorous issues.
For more information on growing crops of truth and the need for a new social order, the following are ideal sources:
1. The Web site of Deccan Development Society (DDS), initiator and facilitator of the sanghams, is http://www.ddsindia.com/www/default.asp. Contact PV Satheesh, Director of Zaheerabad Project.
2. Beej Bachao Andolan (BBA, Save the Seeds Movement) is a well-known movement of farmers who save traditional seeds of the Himalayan region. Contact Biju Negi, negi.biju@gmail.com.
3. For information on growing food for health and personal freedom, go to www.soilandhealth.org.
4. For information on threats posed by multinational seeds firms, go to www.gmwatch.org and www.mindfully.org.
5. The Seeds of Deception by Jeffrey Smith discusses how GM foods, introduced in the US in 1993 without proper biosafety assessment, endanger our health. It is available at www.seedsofdeception.com. See also the research of Dr. Irina Ermakova at http://irina-ermakova.by.ru/eng/articles.html/, and of Dr. Arpad Pusztai: http://www.freenetpages.co.uk/hp/a.pusztai/.
6. “Heartless in the Heartland” is the ghastly story of how Monsanto blackmailed US farmers not to save their seeds. See www.mindfully.org.
7. For an excellent summary, watch The Future of Food, a documentary by Deborah Koons Garcia, downloadable from www.mindfully.org.
8. For discussions on peak oil and food security, see Richard Heinberg’s Fifty Million Farmers, published on November 17, 2006, available athttp://www.energybulletin.net/22584.html. Also visit the Association for the Study of Peak Oil, managed by Dr. Colin Campbell, one of world’s leading oil experts, at http://www.peakoil.net.
9. My two recent papers also shed light on the subject: “The attack on our seeds,” a related article published by Farmer’s Forum in India (contact the editor at bksnd@airtelbroadband.in), and “The Silent War on the People of India,” which can be found at http://www.thepeoplesvoice.org/cgi-bin/blogs/voices.php/2007/03/22/the_silent _war_on_the_people_of_india.
UPDATE BY Vandana Shiva
The Indo-US Knowledge Initiative on Agriculture impacts 650 million farmers of India and 40 million small retailers and it is redefining the relationships between people in the two biggest democracies in the world.
A new movement on retail democracy has begun in India that is bringing together small shopkeepers, street hawkers, trade unions and farmers unions. On August 9, 2007, which is Quit India Day, the movement will be organizing actions across the country telling Wal-Mart to leave India.
For more information, visit our website at www.navdanya.org.
#9 Privatization of America’s Infrastructure
Sources:
Mother Jones, February 2007
Title; “The Highwaymen”
Author: Daniel Schulman with James Ridgeway
http://www.motherjones.com/news/feature/2007/01/highwaymen.html
Human Events, June 12,2006
Title: “Bush Administration Quietly Plans NAFTA Super Highway”
Author: Jerome R. Corsi
http://www.humanevents.com/article.php?id=15497
Student Researcher: Rachel Icaza and Ioana Lupu
Faculty Evaluator: Marco Calavita, Ph.D.
We will soon be paying Wall Street investors, Australian bankers, and Spanish contractors for the privilege of driving on American roads, as more than twenty states have enacted legislation allowing public-private partnerships to build and run highways. Investment firms including Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, and the Carlyle Group are approaching state politicians with advice to sell off public highway and transportation infrastructure. When advising state officials on the future of this vital public asset, these investment firms fail to mention that their sole purpose is to pick up infrastructure at the lowest price possible in order to maximize returns for their investors. Investors, most often foreign companies, are charging tolls and insisting on “noncompete” clauses that limit governments from expanding or improving nearby roads.
In 1956, President Eisenhower signed the Federal-Aid Highway Act, which called for the federal and state governments to build 41,000 miles of high-quality roads across the nation, over rivers and gorges, swamps and deserts, over and through vast mountain ranges, in what would later be called the “greatest public works project in human history.” Eisenhower considered the interstate highway system so vital to the public interest that he authorized the federal government to assume 90 percent of the massive cost.
Fifty years later, states are selling off our nation’s enormous, and aging, infrastructure to private investors. Proponents are celebrating these transactions as a no-pain, all-gain way to off-load maintenance expenses and increase highway-building funds without raising taxes. Opponents are lambasting these plans as a major turn toward handing the nation’s valuable common asset over to private firms whose fidelity is to stockholders—not to the public transportation system or the people who use it.
On June 29, 2006, Indiana’s governor Mitch Daniels announced that Indiana had received $3.8 billion from a foreign consortium made up of the Spanish construction firm Cintra and the Macquarie Infrastructure Group (MIG) of Australia. In exchange the state handed over operation of a 157-mile Indiana toll road for the next seventy-five years. With the consortium collecting the tolls, which will eventually rise far higher, the privatized road should generate $11 billion for MIG-Cintra over the course of the contract.
In September 2005, Daniels solicited bids for the project, with Goldman Sachs serving as the state’s financial adviser—a role that would net the bank a $20 million advisory fee. When Goldman Sachs, one of the nation’s most active and most profitable investment banks, with deep connections to Washington, began advising Indiana on selling its toll road, it failed to mention the fact that, even as it was advising Indiana on how to get the best return, its Australian subsidiary’s mutual funds were ratcheting up their positions in MIG—becoming de facto investors in the deal.
Many are suspicious that governors like Daniels across the nation are taking questionable advice from corporate investment banks—and from Washington.
Despite public concerns, privatization of US transportation infrastructure has the full backing of the Bush administration. Tyler Duvall, the US Department of Transportation’s assistant secretary for transportation policy, says the DoT has raised the idea with “almost every state” government and is working on sample legislation that states can use for such projects. Across the nation, there is now talk of privatizing the New York Thruway to the Ohio, Pennsylvania, and New Jersey turnpikes, as well as of inviting the private sector to build and operate highways and bridges from Alabama to Alaska.
In Texas, Governor Rick Perry still refuses to release details of a $1.3 billion contract his administration signed with Cintra for a forty-mile toll road from Austin to Seguin, or of an enormous $184 billion proposal to build a 4,000-mile network of toll roads through Texas.
It is known, however, that the Bush administration is quietly advancing the plan to build a huge ten-lane NAFTA Super Highway through the heart of the US along Interstate 35, from the Mexican border at Laredo, Texas to the Canadian border north of Duluth, Minnesota, financed largely through public-private partnerships. The Texas Department of Transportation will oversee the Trans-Texas Corridor as the first leg of the NAFTA Super Highway, which will be leased to the Cintra consortium as a privately operated toll road. Construction is slated to begin in 2007.
Authors Daniel Schulman and James Ridgeway warn that, just as the creation of a National Highway system promised to “change the face of America,” in Eisenhower’s words, so too could its demise.

# 10 Vulture Funds Threaten Poor Nations’ Debt Relief
Source:
BBC Newsnight, February 14, 2007
Title: “Vulture Fund Threat to Third World”
Author: Greg Palast with Meirion Jones
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article17070.htm
Student Researcher: Jenifer German
Faculty Evaluator: Robert Girling, Ph.D.
Vulture funds, otherwise known as “distressed-debt investors,” are undermining UN and other global efforts to relieve impoverished Third World nations of the debt that has burdened them for many decades.
Vulture funds are financial organizations that buy up debts that are near default or bankruptcy. The vulture fund will pay the original investor pennies on the dollar for the debt and then approach the debtor to arrange a better repayment on the loan, or will go after the debtor in court.
In the private financial world, these funds, like the birds they are named for, provide a useful function for investors who are unable to follow up on defaulted debts and are themselves facing financial ruin if the debtor reneges entirely.
Under normal circumstances, distressed-debt investing—like day trading—is risky business. It is a gamble and the company knows that going in. The vulture fund may get nothing for its investment if the debtor continues to default and has no assets to attach. However, if there is still meat on the bones (the debtor has considerable assets to liquidate) the vulture fund can make millions.
A problem has arisen in recent years, however, as vulture funds have begun inserting themselves into an increasingly globalized “free market”—where no distinction is made between an irresponsible and defaulted company and a destitute and impoverished nation.
In the case of nations, the actions of vulture funds are corrupting the process begun in 1996 to provide debt relief for Third World nations struggling to emerge from the heavy debt laid upon them by previous corrupt rulers and colonial masters.
In one recent case, the poverty-stricken nation of Zambia was negotiating with Romania to reduce a $40 million debt still owed from a 1979 loan to buy Romanian tractors. In 1999, Romania had agreed to liquidate the entire loan for $3 million. Zambia planned to use the debt cancellation to invest in much-needed nurses, teachers, and basic infrastructure. Just before the deal was finalized however, investors at the England-based vulture fund Donegal International convinced the Romanian government to sell them the loan for just under $4 million—not much more than Zambia had offered. Donegal then turned around and sued Zambia (where the average wage is barely a dollar a day) for the full $40 million.
Throughout the lawsuit, global NGOs have pleaded with the English High Court to void the new contract and allow Zambia to honor the original agreement of $3 million. But on February 15, 2007, an English court ruled that Donegal was entitled to much of what it was seeking—at least $15 million, perhaps more.1
In a last desperate plea, global NGOs working to relieve Third World debt (such as Oxfam and the Jubilee Debt Campaign) turned to Donegal directly, asking them to forgive the debt. Donegal knows that, as a national entity, even a cash-poor country like Zambia has access to considerable resources; in this case copper, cobalt, gem stones, coal, uranium, marble, and much more. Public works and other civic improvement projects can also be liquidated.
Also, Donegal has no history of mercy toward impoverished nations. In 1996 it paid $11 million for a discounted Peruvian debt and threatened to bankrupt the country unless they paid $58 million. Donegal got its money. Now they’re suing Congo Brazzaville for $400 million for a debt they bought for $10 million. Donegal and other vulture funds have teams of lawyers combing the world for assets that can be seized.
Even worse, many of these vulture funds have influential ties to powerful world leaders like the Bush administration. The risk normally faced by distressed-debt investors is virtually eliminated when they have political influence that is greater than the poor nation they are suing. They raise most of their money through legal actions in US courts, where lobbying and political contributions hold influence. And many vulture fund CEOs have close links to top officials both in the US and England.
President Bush has the power to block collection of debts by vulture funds, either individual ones or all of them, if he considers it to be at odds with US foreign policy—in this case debt relief for poor countries.2 According to Congressman John Conyers, “It’s our position that the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act and the comity doctrine brought from our constitution allows the president to require the courts defer in individual suits against foreign nations. And so, we’re conducting a couple of things. First of all, we want to know where these practices are going on at the present time, and, two, how we can get this information to President Bush so that he can, as he indicated to us, stop it immediately.”3
Chancellor Gordon Brown, now the prime minister of England, calls the vulture funds perverse and immoral. Oxfam and Jubilee have urged the chancellor to use his influence as chair of the International Monetary Fund’s key decision-making committee to make sure that new regulations are devised that prevent private companies from bypassing international debt rules and pursuing debts from very poor countries.
Citations
1. Ashley Seager, “Court Lets Vulture Fund Claw Back Zambian Millions,” The Guardian, February 16, 2007.
2. Ashley Seager, “Bush Could Block Debt Collection by ‘Vulture’ Funds,” Guardian Unlimited, February 22, 2007.
3. “Conyers Confronts Bush On Vulture Bonds,” an interview with Democracy Now!, February 16, 2007.

# 11 The Scam of “Reconstruction” in Afghanistan
Sources:
Tomdispatch.com, August 27, 2006
Title: “Why It’s Not Working in Afghanistan”
Author: Ann Jones
http://www.tomdispatch.com/index.mhtml?pid=116512
CorpWatch, October 6, 2006
Title: “Afghanistan Inc: a CorpWatch Investigative Report”
Author: Fariba Nawa
http://www.corpwatch.org/article.php?id=13518
Student Researchers: Madeline Hall and Julie Bickel
Faculty Evaluator: James Dean, Ph.D.
A report issued in June 2005 by the non-profit organization Action Aid reveals that much of the US tax money earmarked to rebuild Afghanistan actually ends up going no further than the pockets of wealthy US corporations. “Phantom aid” that never shows up in the recipient country is a scam in which paychecks for overpriced, and often incompetent, American “experts” under contract to USAID go directly from the Agency to American bank accounts. Additionally, 70 percent of the aid that does make it to a recipient country is carefully “tied” to the donor nation, requiring that the recipient use the donated money to buy products and services from the donor country, often at drastically inflated prices. The US far outstrips other nations in these schemes, as Action Aid calculates that 86 cents of every dollar of American aid is phantom.
Authors Ann Jones and Fariba Nawa suggest that in order to understand the failure and fraud in the reconstruction of Afghanistan, it is important to look at the peculiar system of American aid for international development. International and national agencies—including the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund and USAID, that traditionally distribute aid money to developing countries—have designed a system that is efficient in funneling money back to the wealthy donor countries, while undermining sustainable development in poor states.
A former head of USAID cited foreign aid as “a key foreign policy instrument” designed to help countries “become better markets for US exports.” To guarantee that mission, the State Department recently took over the aid agency. USAID and the Army Corps of Engineers now cut in US business and government interests from the start, making sure that money is allocated according to US economic, political, strategic, and military priorities, rather than according to what the recipient nation might consider important.
Though Afghans have petitioned to allocate aid money as they find appropriate, donor countries object, claiming that the Afghan government is too corrupt to be trusted. Increasingly frustrated and angry Afghan communities meanwhile claim that the no-bid, open-ended contracts being awarded to contractors such as Kellogg, Brown, and Root/Halliburton, DynCorp, Blackwater, and the Louis Berger Group are equivalent to licensed bribery, corruption, theft, and money laundering.
The Karzai government, confined to a self-serving American agenda, has delivered little to the average Afghan, most of whom still live in abject poverty. Western notions of progress evident in US-contracted hotels, restaurants, and shopping malls full of new electronic gadgets and appliances are beyond the imaginations or practicalities of 3.5 million war torn Afghan citizens who are without food, shelter, sewage systems, clean water or electricity.
Infrastructure hastily built with shoddy materials and no knowledge or respect for geologic or climatic conditions is culminating in one expensive failure after another. USAID’s website, for example, boasts of its only infrastructure accomplishment in Afghanistan—the Kabul-Kandahar Highway—a narrow and already crumbling highway costing Afghanis $1 million a mile. The highway was featured in the Kabul Weekly newspaper in March 2005 under the headline, “Millions Wasted on Second-Rate Roads.” The article notes that while other bids from more competent construction firms came in at one-third the cost, the contract went to the Louis Berger Group, a firm with tight connections to the Bush administration—as well as a notorious track record of other failed and abandoned construction projects in Afghanistan.
Former Minister of Planning, Ramazan Bashardost, complained that when it came to building roads, the Taliban had done a better job. “And,” he also asked, “Where did the money go?” Now, in a move certain to lower President Karzai’s approval ratings and further diminish US popularity in the area, the Bush administration has pressured Karzai to turn this “gift from the people of the United States” into a toll road, charging each driver $20 for a road-use permit valid for one month. In this way, according to American “experts” providing highly paid technical assistance, Afghanistan can collect $30 million annually from its impoverished citizens and thereby decrease the foreign aid “burden” on the United States.
Jones asks, “Is it any wonder that foreign aid seems to ordinary Afghans to be something only foreigners enjoy?”
UPDATE BY Fariba Nawa
Afghanistan, Inc. is a thirty-page report that digs deep into the corruption involved in the reconstruction of Afghanistan. The report focuses on US government-funded companies contracted to rebuild Afghanistan. The importance of this report is that it’s the first serious look at corruption of aid money spending from a grassroots level. It includes an emphasis on various projects in villages and the cities and it covers all sides of the issue. It shows how big money is spent on bad work.
The report was first published in English through CorpWatch, a watchdog of corporations, on May 2, 2006. It was translated into the Persian languages of Dari and Pashto in September 2006. The companies investigated in the report continue to receive millions of dollars in contracts from the US government despite their incompetence and wasteful spending. Louis Berger, Bearing Point, Chemonics, and DynCorp are still taking American taxpayers’ money and showing minimum results in Afghanistan.
Some of the mainstream press gave the report coverage, including NPR’s Morning Edition, KRON Channel 4 news in San Francisco when it was first published, and later on, BBC radio and many other European outlets continue to call and ask the author about the report. However, that’s a limited response to the fact that this was a groundbreaking report with important information for policy change. The report has been a source for many others researching the subject. If you’d like more information on corruption on reconstruction in Afghanistan, please refer to CorpWatch’s website www.corpwatch.org. Integrity Watch Afghanistan is another organization that monitors corruption in the country and produces various reports.
UPDATE BY ANN JONES
Nine months later the conundrum I described—no peace, no security, no development—still pertains, and Afghan hopes sour.
The US still looks for a military solution. In the first five months of 2007, seventy-five coalition troops were killed (compared to fifty-three in the same period last year), including thirty-eight Americans. Civilian casualties were variously reported—some sources said “almost 1,800”—including 135 killed by US or NATO forces.
The US position on military “progress” against the Taliban, expressed by Defense Secretary Robert Gates on June 4, 2007, as he prepared to visit Afghanistan, remained “guarded optimism.” Gates told reporters a goal of his trip was to insure close coordination of combat operations and development and reconstruction efforts. That’s a switch, suggesting some clue that reconstruction may be a better way to “kill” the Taliban, but leaving unanswered the question of how to coordinate war and peaceful activity.
The real importance of “Why It’s Not Working in Afghanistan” lies behind the front page military coverage—in what it reveals of the systemic scams and should-be scandals of American aid. The story makes news now and then when billions “disappear” from reconstruction projects in Iraq, but to my knowledge it has yet to be investigated by media or congress. What’s discussed is the occasional budgetary black hole that suggests some random malfeasance, in much the same way that torture at Abu Ghraib was discussed as the work of a few “bad apples.”
Maybe reporters don’t want to take up the story because it’s complicated. It’s about numbers. Like Enron. Dreary, ho-hum, life-shattering stuff. I don’t know. But one curious thing: when my book Kabul in Winter appeared in 2006, a very long section on this topic was the one part no reviewer touched.
Now bigger voices than mine speak out. Abdullah Abdullah, the distinguished former Foreign Minister of Afghanistan, recently complained that of every $100,000 promised to Afghan development, less than a third reaches the country. Matt Waldman, head of Afghanistan policy for Oxfam, one of the most respected humanitarian NGOs in the world, wrote in The Guardian (May 26, 2007) that “America is bankrolling Afghanistan” but “as in Iraq, a vast proportion of aid is wasted.” And more to the point, “Close to half of US development assistance goes to the five biggest US contractors in the country.” Waldman argues that too much aid money is lost to high salaries and living costs of international experts, purchase of non-Afghan resources, and corporate profits. He figures the cost of the average expat (read “American”) expert at half a million dollars a year.
So why is it left to representatives of foreign governments, foreign humanitarian organizations, and foreign press to expose this fraud?
To keep up with news about Afghanistan see news@afghanistannewscenter.com, a daily roundup of stories from the world’s English language press. For policy issues see the Web site of New York University’s Center on International Cooperation (www.cic.nyu.edu) or that of the Center’s senior fellow and Afghanistan expert Barnett Rubin (brr5@nyu.edu). To keep an eye on the corridors of power see the website of the Center for Public Integrity (www.publicintegrity.org), and specifically for information on corporate scams see www.corpwatch.org.
Journalists should also be advised that several professional organizations are protesting the increasing difficulty of covering Afghanistan because of interference by US, Afghan, and ISAF forces. They include IFJ (International Federation of Journalists), AIJA (Afghan Independent Journalists Association), and CPAJ (Committee to Protect Afghan Journalists). Currently Afghan journalists are also boycotting the Afghan Wolesi Jirga (lower house of Parliament) to protest its enactment of repressive media laws and the consequent imprisonment of journalists.

# 12 Another Massacre in Haiti by UN Troops
Sources:
HaitiAction.net, January 21, 2007
Title: “UN in Haiti: Accused of Second Massacre”
Authors: Haiti Information Project
http://www.haitiaction.net/News/HIP/1_21_7/1_21_7.html
Inter Press Service
Title: “Haiti: Poor Residents of Capital Describe a State of Siege”
Authors: Wadner Pierre and Jeb Sprague
http://ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=36772
Student Researcher: William Leeming
Faculty Evaluator: Dianne Parness
Eyewitness testimony confirms indiscriminate killings by UN forces in Haiti’s Cité Soleil community on December 22, 2006, reportedly as collective punishment against the community for a massive demonstration of Lavalas supporters in which about ten thousand people rallied for the return of President Aristide in clear condemnation of the foreign military occupation of their country. According to residents, UN forces attacked their neighborhood in the early morning, killing more than thirty people, including women and children. Footage taken by Haiti Information Project (HIP) videographers shows unarmed civilians dying as they tell of extensive gunfire from UN peacekeeping forces (MINUSTAH).
A hardened UN strategy became apparent days after the demonstration, when UN officials stated they were entering Cité Soleil to capture or kill gangsters and kidnappers. While officials of MINUSTAH have admitted to “collateral damage,” in the raids of December 2006, they say they are there to fight gangsters at the request of the René Préval government.
But many residents and local human rights activists say that scores of people having no involvement with gangs were killed, wounded, and arrested in the raids.
Although MINUSTAH denied firing from helicopter gunships, HIP captured more than three hours of video footage and a large selection of digital photos, illustrating the UN’s behavior in Haiti.
An unidentified twenty-eight-year-old man, filmed by HIP, can be seen dying as he testifies that he was shot from a circling UN helicopter that rained gunfire on those below. HIP film also shows a sixteen-year-old, dying just after being shot by UN forces. Before dying he describes details of the UN opening fire on unarmed civilians in his neighborhood. The wounded and dying, filmed by HIP, all express horror and confusion.
IPS observed that buildings throughout Cité Soleil were pockmarked by bullets; many showing huge holes made by heavy caliber UN weapons, as residents attest. Often pipes that brought in water to the slum community now lay shattered.
A recently declassified document from the US embassy in Port-au-Prince reveals that during a similar operation carried out in July 2005, MINUSTAH expended 22,000 bullets over several hours. In the report, an official from MINUSTAH acknowledged, “given the flimsy construction of homes in Cité Soleil and the large quantity of ammunition expended, it is likely that rounds penetrated many buildings, striking unintended targets.”
Frantz Michel Guerrier, spokesman for the Committee of Notables for the Development of Cité Soleil based in the Bois Neuf zone, said, “It is very difficult for me to explain to you what the people of Bois Neuf went through on Dec. 22, 2006—almost unexplainable. It was a true massacre. We counted more than sixty wounded and more than twenty-five dead, among [them] infants, children, and young people.”
“We saw helicopters shoot at us, our houses broken by the tanks,” Guerrier told IPS. “We heard detonations of the heavy weapons. Many of the dead and wounded were found inside their houses. I must tell you that nobody had been saved, not even the babies. The Red Cross was not allowed to help people. The soldiers had refused to let the Red Cross in categorically, in violation of the Geneva Convention.” Several residents told IPS that MINUSTAH, after conducting its operations, evacuated without checking for wounded.
Following the removal of Haiti’s elected Jean-Bertrand Aristide government (see Censored 2005, story #12), up to one thousand Lavalas political activists were imprisoned under the US-backed interim government, according to a Miami University Human Rights study.
A study released by the Lancet Journal of Medicine in August 2006 estimates that 8,000 were killed and 35,000 sexually assaulted in the greater Port-au-Prince area during the time of the interim government (2004-2006). The study attributed human rights abuses to purported “criminals,” police, anti-Lavalas gangs, and UN peacekeepers.
HIP Founding Editor Kevin Pina commented, “It is clear that this represents an act of terror against the community. This video evidence shows clearly that the UN stands accused, once again, of targeting unarmed civilians in Cité Soleil. There can be no justification for using this level of force in the close quarters of those neighborhoods. It is clear that the UN views the killing of these innocents as somehow acceptable to their goal of pacifying this community. Every demonstration, no matter how peaceful, is seen as a threat to their control if it includes demands for the return of Aristide to Haiti. In that context it is difficult to continue to view the UN mission as an independent and neutral force in Haiti. They apparently decided sometime ago it was acceptable to use military force to alter Haiti’s political landscape to match their strategic goals for the Haitian people.”
Update by Kevin Pina
Since President Jean-Bertrand Aristide and his Lavalas political party were ousted from power on February 29, 2004, accusations of gross human rights violations have persisted in Haiti. While the Haitian National Police (HNP) received training and assistance from the UN following Aristide’s ouster, they were also accused of summary executions, arbitrary arrests, and the killing of unarmed demonstrators. The actions of the Haitian police became so egregious that even UN police trainers (CIVPOL) began to question the motives of their commanders and the mission’s objectives. The Haiti Information Project (HIP) received the following correspondence in response to a May 8, 2005 article “UN accommodates Human Rights Abuses by police in Haiti.”1 This is the first publication of that correspondence:
Just want to reinforce your observations as all being accurate.
I am one of the 25 US CIVPOL here on the ground in Haiti, having arrived last November. As a group we are frustrated by the UN’s and CIVPOL’s unwillingness to interpret their mandate aggressively. I have been pushing them to conduct investigations into all the shootings and other significant Human Rights violations with no success. The Police Commissioner and command staff shows little interest and claim the mandate does not allow them to do this. Unfortunately I have countless examples.
The corruption in the HNP is massive with little interest in addressing the problem. Just keep up the pressure, I don’t know what else to do.
Stephen MacKinnon
Chief, Strategic Planning Unit
CIVPOL-MINUSTAH
Chief MacKinnon provided HIP with information and documents that painted a disturbing picture of a UN operation more obsessed with political embarrassment caused by mounting demonstrations for Aristide’s return than interest in reigning in human rights abuses committed by the HNP.2
The United Nations Stabilization Mission in Haiti (MINUSTAH) now stands accused of having itself committed several massacres in the seaside shantytown of Cité Soleil. This area of the capital served as a launching site for massive demonstrations demanding the return of President Aristide and for an end to what they called the foreign occupation of their country.
The Brazilian military has responsibility for leadership of the UN military forces in Haiti and is authorized to use deadly force. They are at the top of the command structure and their influence on the overall mission should not be understated. More importantly, there is a direct parallel between Brazilian military tactics utilized by UN forces in Haiti and similar military-style assaults used by the police in their own country.
The Brazilian military police have been accused of firing indiscriminately in the poor slums of Sao Paulo and Rio de Janeiro called favelas. This was highlighted in an Amnesty International report “Brazil: ‘They come in Shooting’: Policing socially excluded communities,” released on December 2, 2005.3
This is similar to the tactics authorized by the Brazilian generals in Haiti. It has resulted in several high-profile massacres committed in the poor slum of Cité Soleil where protestors challenged the UN’s authority by continuing to launch massive demonstrations demanding Aristide’s return and condemning the UN’s presence in Haiti. In each instance, the UN and the elite-run Haitian press demonized the entire community as being criminals and gangsters and/or collaborators of criminals and gangsters. While it is true that armed “gangs” operated in the neighborhood and a few claimed they were aligned with Aristide’s Lavalas movement, these military raids had a clear correlation to the ongoing demonstrations and opposition to the UN presence in Haiti.
Cité Soleil was terrorized on July 6, 2005 when Brazilian commanders authorized a raid by UN forces with the stated aim of routing gangs in the area.4 For Aristide supporters, the raid was a preemptive strike by the UN to dampen the impact of protests on Aristide’s birthday, planned to take place only nine days later on July 15. It also represented the first time UN forces purposely sought to assassinate the leadership of armed groups claiming allegiance to Aristide’s Lavalas movement.5 By the time UN guns stopped firing, countless unarmed civilians lay dead with many having been killed by a single high-powered rifle shot to the head. Since then, documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act show the US Embassy and various intelligence agencies, were aware of the excessive use of force by UN forces in Haiti on July 6, 2005.6 Despite being heavily censored by US officials, what emerges is clear evidence of the disproportionate use of force by UN troops in Cité Soleil.
December 16, 2006 saw another large demonstration for Aristide that began in Cite Soleil and only six days later on December 22, Brazilian commanders would authorize a second deadly raid that residents and human rights groups say resulted in the wholesale slaughter of innocent victims. The unspoken parallel of Brazil’s role in leading the UN’s military strategy in Haiti is the fact that terror tactics such as these have been their modus operandi in their own country.
In the early morning hours of Feb. 2, UN forces entered Cité Soleil firing indiscriminately and their victims were two young girls killed as they slept in their own home.7 Massive demonstrations were scheduled to take place five days later demanding the return of Aristide throughout Haiti on Feb. 7. While these demonstrations went largely unreported by the international corporate media, this stood in contrast, to the avalanche of news stories filed two days later on Feb. 9, when UN forces launched yet another deadly military operation in Cité Soleil.8 Although these raids were ostensibly to rid the neighborhood of gangs, they followed the same pattern and relationship to demonstrations for Aristide’s return and military tactics used by Brazilian commanders in previous UN operations.
The only rights organizations documenting the loss of life and destruction of property resulting from the UN raid on December 22, 2006, as well as previous and subsequent UN military operations, were the Institute for Justice and Democracy in Haiti (IJDH) and the Bureau des Avocats Internationaux (BAI).9 HIP, the organization originally authoring the article being recognized by Project Censored, is a news agency that has extensive video evidence and interviews from Cité Soleil taken the same day these attacks by UN forces were executed. HIP offers any human rights organization the opportunity to view the documentary footage and evidence supporting the claims of Cité Soleil residents that massacres by UN forces have been committed against them. Unfortunately, Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights of the Organization of American States have remained conspicuously disinterested and silent about this evidence.
For further information and updates about Haiti, please visit www.haitiaction.net, www.ijdh.org, www.HaitiInformationProject.net, www.haitianalysis.com, www.canadahaitiaction.ca, and www.ahphaiti.org.
Notes
1. Haiti Information Project,”UN accommodates Human Rights Abuses by police in Haiti,” May 8, 2005. See http://haitiaction.net/News/HIP/5_8_5/5_8_5.html.
2. Internet correspondence received from Steve McKinnon to HIP May 12, 2005.
3. Amnesty International Report, “Brazil: ‘They come in Shooting’: Policing socially excluded communities” December 2, 2005. See http://www.amnestyusa.org/document.php?lang=e &id=ENGAMR190252005
4. Haiti Information Project, “Evidence mounts of a UN massacre in Haiti,” July 12, 2005. See http://www.haitiaction.net/News/HIP/7_12_5.html.
5. Haiti Information Project,”The UN’s disconnect with the poor in Haiti,” December 25, 2005. See http://haitiaction.net/News/HIP/12_25_5/12_25a_5.html.
6. Haiti Information Project, “US Embassy in Haiti acknowledges excessive force by UN,” January 24, 2007. Article based on FOIA documents obtained by College of DuPage Geography Professor Keith Yearman. See http://haitiaction.net/News/HIP/1_23_7/1_23_7.html.
7. Haiti Information Project—February 2, 2007. UN terror kills Haiti’s children at night http://haitiaction.net/News/HIP/2_2_7a/2_2_7a.html.
8. Haiti Information Project, “Massive demonstrations in Haiti catch UN by surprise,” February 9, 2007. See http://haitiaction.net/News/HIP/2_9_7/2_9_7.html.
9. Haiti Information Project,”The UNspoken truth about gangs in Haiti,” February 15, 2007. See http://haitiaction.net/News/HIP/2_15_7/2_15_7.html.
10. Video images documenting UN military operations on July 6, 2005 and December 22, 2006 were taken by HIP videographer Jean-Baptiste Ristil.
UPDATE ON HAITI by Jeb Sprague and Wadner Pierre: Poor Residents of Capital Describe a State of Siege
Initially neither one of us thought of ourselves as journalists, but we were so shocked by events on the ground in Haiti (which were rarely being covered) that we felt compelled to write about them. In the dominant rhetoric of donor groups and corporate media coverage we found that the voices of grassroots civil society were absent. Of any country in the western hemisphere, Haiti’s culture is filled with a vitality for democracy, personal interaction, and dialogue. Radio is the most popular form of communication partially because of economic accessibility and partially because it encourages discussion and debate. From researching our stories we’ve come to see that two civil societies exist, one tightly connected with foreign donors, the foreign embassies present in Port-au-Prince and the large media outlets; and another civil society, a pulsating grassroots that is usually ignored by foreign journalists and donors.
The testimonials and opinions of the donor and foreign government backed elite or middle class based civil society groups are propelled in the media spotlight as unbiased and independent, the Haitian civil society. These are the groups that have bilingual language skills, often higher education, and the technological tools to communicate their programs to a transnational audience. Aid groups fly them abroad to make presentations or provide them with training seminars in the Dominican Republic or Washington, DC.
In the slum- and rural-based communities another civil society exists outside of the international limelight. The members of this civil society are often broke and rarely make a profit from their positions. They are relatively unknown and unheard of by the outside world. These groups, popular and well organized on the ground, have broad participation. They carry out large mobilizations, they fill the streets with friends and family, they organize strikes, they are on the radio, and they organize co-ops, literacy centers, and community programs.
So in our articles we have tried to provide as many direct quotes and testimonials as possible from this grassroots civil society. At the same time we try to place this along side the official rhetoric, holding the official organs responsible, confronting them and asking them the hard questions (which they are often shocked to hear). But most important are the voices of the victims of violence, the wife and husband who lost their children, the unemployed man wounded on the side of the street; these are the people that are rarely heard in the mainstream media. Part of this is because corporate journalists choose to spend their time with elites, especially in developing countries, and part is because editors are dependent on their advertisers and don’t see these stories as viable.
MINUSTAH’s operations in Cité Soleil, since writing our article, have continued. But in recent months the killings have lessened (although a man just last week was shot and killed by UN troops/ early June 2007). Over the months that followed our article, MINUSTAH was able to arrest one of the most well-known gang leaders, Evens Jeune, along with many of those within his group. MINUSTAH has claimed to have set up hospital clinics in the buildings used by the gangs, but on-site visits have revealed empty houses with no hospital clinics and no UN staffers. Haitian government promises of job programs have been slow to materialize in Cité Soleil. UN officials have purposely downplayed or ignored the protests of the poor demanding reparations. However, a number of community schools and health organizations, such as the Lamp Foundation, continue to do good work in Cité Soleil. Some human rights groups, such as the GDP, BAI, CONODH, and AUHMOD, continue to be active in the neighborhoods, but other locally formed groups such as the HNVNPC have gone back to their jobs, mostly in churches and schools.
The population of Cité Soleil has suffered horribly, either caught in the crossfire or purposely targeted. The socio-economic situation and dire poverty in Cité Soleil is a direct result of the prolonged polices of wealthy countries and donor institutions; forcing and destabilizing out of power those elected Haitian governments that have advocated key policies of sovereignty and social investment, while opposing privatization and neoliberal adjustments whenever they can. Rarely told is how Haiti’s police throughout the 1990’s and early 2000’s were systematically manipulated by the US embassy, CIA, and Haitian elites—this had a direct result on the security situation in Haiti. Economic instability heightened by coups and prolonged political crises—promoted by elites unhappy with the popular electoral choice—have cost Haiti jobs and development. All of this has pushed Haiti further into the abyss.
When international institutions and governments are busy coordinating these kinds of egregious activities, we felt it the responsibility of journalists, activists, and academics (especially those lucky enough to have the resources) to investigate; all while speaking with the poor and finding out their concerns. From this experience we founded a website, haitianalysis.com, to connect foreign young journalists with young Haitian journalists in poor communities—with the specific purpose of covering poor communities and grassroots organizing. Soon after our IPS article appeared, members of the Haitian diaspora in New York were able to raise thousands of dollars to help in the funeral expenses of the two young Lubin daughters, Stephanie, seven, and Alexandra, four, killed by UN ammo according to their parents. Wadner’s photos of the young girls have appeared in numerous Haitian newspapers and websites of various languages. The Lubin parents, distraught, wanted everyone to know about what had occurred on that night of February 1st 2007. To our knowledge, the United Nations has never launched an investigation into the killing of the two Lubin daughters. We will continue asking that they do.
For more information, we suggest that readers view websites such as ijdh.org, hurah.revolt.org, haitianalysis.com, pih.org, haiti.quixote.org, jubileeusa.org, and haitilabor.org.

# 13 Immigrant Roundups to Gain Cheap Labor for US Corporate Giants
Sources:
Truthout, January 27, 2007
Title: “Which Side Are You On?”
Author: David Bacon
http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/012907L.shtml
The Nation, February 6, 2007
Title: “Workers, Not Guests”
Author: David Bacon
http://www.truthout.org/issues_06/020607LB.shtml
Foreign Policy in Focus, February 26, 2007
Title: “Migrants: Globalization’s Junk Mail?”
Author: Laura Carlsen
http://www.fpif.org/fpiftxt/4022
Student Researcher: Fernanda Borras
Faculty Evaluator: Diana Grant, Ph.D.
The North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) flooded Mexico with cheap subsidized US agricultural products that displaced millions of Mexican farmers. Between 2000 and 2005, Mexico lost 900,000 rural jobs and 700,000 industrial jobs, resulting in deep unemployment throughout the country. Desperate poverty has forced millions of Mexican workers north in order to feed their families.
The National Campesino Front estimates that two million farmers have been displaced by NAFTA, in many cases related to the increase in US imports. In 1994, the first year of the agreement, the United States exported $4.59 billion of agricultural products to Mexico, according to the Department of Agriculture. By 2006 the figure had risen to $9.85 billion—an increase of 114 percent. US exports of corn, Mexico’s staple crop and largest source of rural employment, alone doubled to over $2.5 billion in 2006.
This combination of unemployment in Mexico, the huge gap between salaries in the United States and Mexico, and US demand for cheap labor to compete on global markets has created the current situation. The demand for undocumented labor in the US economy is structural. It is not just a few companies seeking to cut corners. These are not just jobs that “US workers won’t take.” Migrants work in nearly all low-paying occupations and have become essential to the US economy in the age of global competition.
The meatpacking industry provides a good example. The US meat industry as it went global shows a fast slide in working conditions over the past decades as a result of de-unionization, erosion of wages and benefits, and increasing safety and health hazards. Part and parcel of that slide has been the replacement of unionized US workers with migrants.
Aside from traditional employment in agriculture, another major use of migrant labor has been through the advent of subcontracting. This practice, well in place since the early 1980s, has contributed to the de-unionization of the workforce. It conveniently releases employees from direct responsibility for the legal status and treatment of workers in their employment.
In the wake of 9/11, Immigration Customs Enforcement (ICE) has conducted workplace and home invasions across the country in an attempt to round up “illegal” immigrants. ICE justifies these raids under the rubric of keeping our homeland safe and preventing terrorism. However the real goal of these actions is to disrupt the immigrant work force in the US and replace it with a tightly regulated non-union guest-worker program. This policy is endorsed by companies seeking permanent low-wage workers through a lobby group called Essential Worker Immigrations Coalition (EWIC). EWIC’s fifty-two members include the US Chamber of Commerce, Wal-Mart, Marriott, Tyson Foods, American Meat Institute, California Landscape Contractors Association, and the Association of Builders and Contractors.
ICE now has Operation Return to Sender, a program, supposedly designed to target fugitive aliens. The program has resulted in the indiscriminate roundup of over 13,000 undocumented immigrants in cities throughout the United States.
Immigrant rights organizations have noted that the crackdown has led to serious human rights violations. Families are separated. Hearings are slow, and often families do not know for long periods of time where their loved ones are being held. A January 16 report from the Homeland Security Department’s Inspector General of conditions at five detention centers identified frequent violation of federal standards, overcrowding, and health and safety violations.
The firings and raids highlight the vulnerability of immigrant workers under current US law. In 1986 Congress passed the Immigration Reform and Control Act, making it a federal crime for an employer to hire a worker without valid immigration documents. While few employers have ever faced penalties, in reality the law made it a crime for undocumented workers to hold a job. No current law requires employers to fire workers whose Social Security numbers don’t jibe. But President Bush proposed a new administrative rule, which would tell employers to fire anyone with a no-match. The regulation has never been officially issued, but many companies claim they’re already complying with it.
Both the enforcement and the agenda behind this crackdown are alarming many unions. In 1999 the AFL-CIO called for the repeal of employer sanctions, as well as for a generous legalization program, greater chances for family reunification, and enforcement of workplace rights. The federation was already on record opposing new guest worker programs. The Service Employees, and the two garment unions were among the first to push for this position. “We still call for the repeal of employer sanctions, as we have from the time it was passed,” says Bruce Raynor, UNITE HERE president. “There are 12 million undocumented people living here, who are important to the economy,” he fumes. “They have a right to seek employment, and employers have a right to hire them. The only way to deal with this is to give workers rights and a path to citizenship.”
UPDATE BY DAVID BACON
“Which Side are you On?” and “Workers, not Guests” expose the way US immigration law is being transformed into a mechanism for supplying labor to some of the country’s largest corporations. Immigration law is creating a two-tier society, in which millions of people are denied fundamental rights and social benefits, because they are recruited to come to the US by those corporations on visas that condemn them to a second-class status. Those guest workers face increased poverty and exploitation, and their status is being used to put pressure on wages, benefits and workplace rights for all workers.
“Workers, not Guests” describes the way that the Bush administration uses immigration raids to attack union organizing campaigns and efforts by immigrant workers to enforce basic workplace rights and protections. Further, the administration uses the raids to pressure Congress into adopting new, vastly expanded guest worker programs.
Both articles describe the way some groups have abandoned their historic opposition to contract labor programs. Instead, the National Council of La Raza, the National Immigration Forum, and other labor and religious organizations have developed a political alliance with some of the country’s largest corporations, with the objective of passing new guest worker legislation. This legislation also includes provisions that will make future immigration raids much harsher and more widespread.
Since publication, the Bush administration and both Democratic and Republican senators have announced new proposals that go even further. They would end the ability of immigrant families to reunite in the US, and instead institute a corporate-driven point system intended to supply skilled labor to big companies. Raids and enforcement would become even harsher, with huge detention centers built on the border. The proposals would allow corporations to recruit as many as 600,000 contract guest workers a year.
The use of immigration policy to funnel labor to corporate employers is growing at the same time that Congress is debating new corporate trade legislation, including the renewal of fast track negotiating authority for the administration, and four new trade agreements—with South Korea, Peru, Panama, and Colombia. These bills would all increase the displacement of workers and farmers in other countries, sending many of them into the migrant stream to the US. This displacement is being coordinated with Congress’s immigration proposals, which would then channel displaced workers into industries where their labor can be used profitably, and ensure that they can only remain in the US in a status vulnerable to exploitation.
The mainstream press has carried many articles about the proposals and raids. There has been very little coverage of the corporate backing for the immigration bills in Congress, however. Many reporters refer to the guest worker bills as “pro-immigrant” and “left.” This has not only been inaccurate reporting, but has actually covered up the corporate domination of the immigration agenda in Congress. There has been virtually no coverage of the connection between US trade policy and immigration policy.
For more accurate information, readers can contact the National Network for Immigrant and Refugee Rights, www.nnirr.org. Global Exchange organized a national speaking tour on trade and immigration policy by David Bacon and Juan Manuel Sandoval, a leading Mexican critic of NAFTA and US immigration policy. The presentations made during that tour are available on the Global Exchange website, www.globalexchange.org.

# 14 Impunity for US War Criminals
Source:
Congressional Quarterly, November 22, 2006
Title: “A Senate Mystery Keeps Torture Alive—and Its Practitioners Free”
Author: Jeff Stein
http://public.cq.com/public/20061122_homeland.html
Student Researcher: Marley Miller
Faculty Evaluator: James Dean, Ph.D.
A provision mysteriously tucked into the Military Commission Act (MCA) just before it passed through Congress and was signed by President Bush on October 17, 2006 (see story #1), redefines torture, removing the harshest, most controversial techniques from the definition of war crimes, and exempts the perpetrators—both interrogators and their bosses—from prosecution for such offences dating back to November 1997.
Author Jeff Stein asks, “Who slipped language into the MCA that would further exempt torturers from prosecution?”
The White House denies any involvement or knowledge regarding the insertion of such language, leaving the origin of adjustments to this significant part of the MCA a mystery.
Motivation for this provision, however, leads clearly to leadership in the Bush administration, as the passage effectively rewrote the US enforcement mechanism for the Geneva War Crimes Act, which would have, upon sworn testimonies of Lieutenant General Randall M. Schmidt, Major General Mike Dunlavey, and US Brigadier General Commander, Janis Karpinski, held former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, Vice President Dick Cheney, and President George Bush guilty of active roles in directing acts of torture upon detainees held at Guantánamo and Abu Ghraib (see Censored 2007, Story #7) .
A spokesperson for the Center for Constitutional Rights comments, “The MCA’s restricted definitions arguably would exempt certain US officials who have implemented or had command responsibility for coercive interrogation techniques from war crimes prosecutions. This amendment is designed to protect US government perpetrators of abuses during the ‘war on terror’ from prosecution.”
Joanne Mariner of Human Rights Watch adds that the effect of this provision of the MCA is “that perpetrators of several categories of what were war crimes at the time they were committed, can no longer be punished under US law.”
As a whole, the MCA evolved out of the need to override the June 2006 Supreme Court declaration that the administration’s hastily assembled military commissions were unconstitutional. That momentous Supreme Court decision confirmed that all prisoners in US custody had to be held in accordance with the Geneva Convention’s Article 3, which prohibits “outrages upon personal dignity, in particular, humiliating and degrading treatment.” Through passage of the MCA, Congress and the President negated the corrective role of the courts in checking and balancing executive power.
A Senate aide involved in the drafting of the Senate version of the bill that was agreed upon by John McCain, Lindsey Graham, and John Warner, said, “We have no idea who [the extended impunity provision] came from or how it came to be.” White House spokesperson Dana Perrino said the stealth changes didn’t come from the counsel’s office, “It could have come from elsewhere in the White House or Justice Department,” she said, “but it didn’t come from us.”
Whatever the source, the amended provision was passed and is now a part of US law.
# 15 Toxic Exposure Can Be Transmitted to Future Generations on a “Second Genetic Code”
Source:
Rachel’s Democracy & Health News, October 12, 2006
Title: “Some Chemicals are More Harmful Than Anyone Ever Suspected”
Author: Peter Montague
http://www.precaution.org/lib/06/ht061012.htm
Student Researchers: Kristen Kebler and Michael Januleski
Faculty Evaluator: Gary Evans, M.D.
Research suggests that, contrary to previous belief, our behavior and our environmental conditions may program sections of our children’s DNA. New evidence about how genes interact with the environment suggests that many industrial chemicals may be more ominously dangerous than previously thought. It is increasingly clear that the effects of toxic exposure may be passed on through generations, in ways that are still not fully understood. “This introduces the concept of responsibility into genetics and inheritance,” said Dr. Moshe Szyf, a researcher at McGill University in Montreal, “This may revolutionize medicine. You aren’t eating and exercising just for yourself, but for your lineage.”1
The new field of genetic research, called epigenetics, involves what scientists are referring to as a “second genetic code” which influences how genes act in the body. If DNA is the hardware of inheritance, the epigenetic system is the software. The epigenetic system determines which genes get turned “off” or “on” and how much of a certain protein they produce.
It is this switching system that allows the genetic material in each cell to influence the creation of proteins—which ones are manufactured, in what sequence, and how many. Proteins are the building blocks of our bodies. The chemicals and hormones in our bodies are proteins. They determine, in large part, how we look, how we feel, even how we act.1
Now, it seems that this chemical switching system may also act in reverse. In most cases, epigenetic changes (changes to DNA from current environmental conditions) are not passed from parents to their offspring. Scientists are still not sure how—but genes seem to be “wiped clean” after a sperm fertilizes an egg. Based on the recent data, however, researchers are intrigued by the notion that some of the genetic changes influenced by our diet, our behaviors, or our environment, may be passed on from generation to generation.
On average, 1,800 new chemicals are registered with the federal government each year and about 750 of these find their way into products, all with hardly any testing for health or environmental effects. The bad news about chemical contamination is steadily mounting, while the number of new chemicals is steadily increasing. Many critics of the chemical and pharmaceutical industries are renewing their admonitions that government agencies practice the “precautionary principle”—the rule of “do no harm first” in the approval of new drugs and chemicals.
In 2005, the European Union responded to this situation by trying to enact a new law called Registration, Evaluation and Authorization of Chemicals (REACH), which requires that chemicals be tested before they are sold—not after. As they say in Europe, “No data, no market.” At the same time, US and European chemical industries—and the White House—began working overtime to subvert the European effort to enact REACH. Their efforts failed, however, and the REACH act was adopted by the European Union in December, 2006.2 Chemical companies throughout the US and Europe are still struggling with how they will respond to the new requirements.
Citations
1. Anne McIlroy, “Chemicals and Stress Cause Gene Changes That Can Be Inherited,” Globe & Mail, March 11, 2006. See http://www.precaution.org/lib/06/prn_code_2.060311.htm.
2. “European Parliament OKs World’s Toughest Law on Toxic Chemicals,” San Francisco Chronicle, December 14, 2006.
UPDATE BY PETER MONTAGUE
Basically this story tells us that environmental influences (like our mother’s diet and her exposure to toxic chemicals) are far more important to us than anyone suspected just a decade ago.
It turns out that environmental influences shape us from the moment of conception onward, and the earliest months and years of life are the most important ones. It is called “fetal programming” and it means our first environment (the womb) can determine what sorts of diseases will afflict us later in life. Furthermore, some of these early influences can be inherited by our offspring and even by their offspring. So your personal pattern of disease may have been set by your grandmother’s diet, or by her exposure to toxicants.
These findings imply that keeping toxic industrial chemicals out of the environment is far more urgent than anyone has previously thought. With more than 1,000 chemicals presently entering commercial channels each year with almost no health or safety testing, this is not welcome news.
In May 2007, a group of two hundred scientists from five continents issued strongly worded consensus statement (the “Faroes Statement”) saying that early exposure to common chemicals leaves babies more likely to develop serious diseases later in life, including diabetes,
attention deficits, certain cancers, thyroid disorders, and obesity, among others.
Notably, the scientists urged governments not to wait for more scientific certainty but to take precautionary action now to protect fetuses and children from toxic exposures.
Most of the mainstream press continued to tiptoe around this story, with a few important exceptions, until May 2007 when the Faroes statement blew the story open. Now that it is out in the open, we’ll have to see if the mainstream press has what it takes to explain the far-reaching ramifications of these findings.
The best source of information on this topic (and many others) is http://www.environmentalhealthnews.org. Search for “epigenetics,” “fetal programming,” or “gene expression.”
e concerns, warns Parry, over how the Pentagon judges “threats” and who falls under the category of “those who would harm us.” A Pentagon official said the Counterintelligence Field Activity’s TALON program has amassed files on antiwar protesters.
In the view of some civil libertarians, a form of martial law already exists in the U.S. and has been in place since shortly after the September 11 attacks when Bush issued Military Order Number One, which empowered him to detain any noncitizen as an international terrorist or enemy combatant. Today that order extends to U.S. citizens as well.
Farrell ends her article with the conclusion that while much speculation has been generated by KBR’s contract to build huge detention centers within the U.S., “The truth is, we won’t know the real purpose of these centers unless ‘contingency plans are needed.’ And by then, it will be too late.”
UPDATE BY PETER DALE SCOTT
The contract of the Halliburton subsidiary KBR to build immigrant detention facilities is part of a longer-term Homeland Security plan titled ENDGAME, which sets as its goal the removal of “all removable aliens” and “potential terrorists.” In the 1980s Richard Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld discussed similar emergency detention powers as part of a super-secret program of planning for what was euphemistically called “Continuity of Government” (COG) in the event of a nuclear disaster. At the time, Cheney was a Wyoming congressman, while Rumsfeld, who had been defense secretary under President Ford, was a businessman and CEO of the drug company G.D. Searle.
These men planned for suspension of the Constitution, not just after nuclear attack, but for any “national security emergency,” which they defined in Executive Order 12656 of 1988 as: “Any occurrence, including natural disaster, military attack, technological or other emergency, that seriously degrades or seriously threatens the national security of the United States.” Clearly September 11 would meet this definition, and did, for COG was instituted on that day. As the Washington Post later explained, the order “dispatched a shadow government of about 100 senior civilian managers to live and work secretly outside Washington, activating for the first time long-standing plans.”
What these managers in this shadow government worked on has never been reported. But it is significant that the group that prepared ENDGAME was, as the Homeland Security document puts it, “chartered in September 2001.” For ENDGAME’s goal of a capacious detention capability is remarkably similar to Oliver North’s controversial Rex-84 “readiness exercise” for COG in 1984. This called for the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) to round up and detain 400,000 imaginary “refugees,” in the context of “uncontrolled population movements” over the Mexican border into the United States.
UPDATE BY MAUREEN FARRELL
When the story about Kellogg, Brown and Root’s contract for emergency detention centers broke, immigration was not the hot button issue it is today. Given this, the language in Halliburton’s press release, stating that the centers would be built in the event of an “emergency influx of immigrants into the U.S.,” raised eyebrows, especially among those familiar with Rex-84 and other Reagan-era initiatives. FEMA’s former plans ‘for the detention of at least 21 million American Negroes in assembly centers or relocation camps’ added to the distrust, and the second stated reason for the KBR contract, “to support the rapid development of new programs,” sent imaginations reeling.
While few in the mainstream media made the connection between KBR’s contract and previous programs, Fox News eventually addressed this issue, pooh-poohing concerns as the province of “conspiracy theories” and “unfounded” fears. My article attempted to sift through the speculation, focusing on verifiable information found in declassified and leaked documents which proved that, in addition to drawing up contingency plans for martial law, the government has conducted military readiness exercises designed to round up and detain both illegal aliens and U.S. citizens.
How concerned should Americans be? Recent reports are conflicting and confusing:
• In May, 2006, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) began “Operation Return to Sender,” which involved catching illegal immigrants and deporting them. In June, however, President Bush vowed that there would soon be “new infrastructures” including detention centers designed to put an end to such “catch and release” practices.
• Though Bush said he was “working with Congress to increase the number of detention facilities along our borders,” Rep. Bennie Thompson, ranking member of the House Homeland Security Committee, said he first learned about the KBR contract through newspaper reports.
• Fox News recently quoted Pepperdine University professor Doug Kmiec, who deemed detention camp concerns “more paranoia than reality” and added that KBR’s contract is most likely “something related to (Hurricane) Katrina” or “a bird flu outbreak that could spur a mass quarantine of Americans.” The president’s stated desire for the U.S. military to take a more active role during natural disasters and to enforce quarantines in the event of a bird flu outbreak, however, have been roundly denounced.
Concern over an all-powerful federal government is not paranoia, but active citizenship. As Thomas Jefferson explained, “even under the best forms of government, those entrusted with power have, in time, and by slow operations, perverted it into tyranny.” From John Adams’s Alien and Sedition Acts to FDR’s internment of Japanese Americans, the land of the free has held many contradictions and ironies. Interestingly enough, Halliburton was at the center of another historical controversy, when Lyndon Johnson’s ties to a little-known company named Kellogg, Brown and Root caused a congressional commotion—particularly after the Halliburton subsidiary won enough wartime contracts to become one of the first protested symbols of the military-industrial complex. Back then they were known as the “Vietnam builders.” The question, of course, is what they’ll be known as next.
Additional links:
“ Reagan Aides and the Secret Government,” Miami Herald, July 5, 1987, http://fpiarticle.blogspot.com/2005/12/front-page-miami-herald-july-5-1987.html
“Foundations are in place for martial law in the US,” July 27, 2002, Sydney Morning Herald, smh.com.au/articles/2002/07/27/ 1027497418339.html
“Halliburton Deals Recall Vietnam-Era Controversy: Cheney’s Ties to Company Reminiscent of LBJ’s Relationships,” NPR, Dec. 24, 2003, http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=1569483
“Critics Fear Emergency Centers Could Be Used for Immigration Round-Ups,” Fox News, June 7, 2006, http://www.foxnews.com/ story/0,2933,198456,00.html
“U.S. officials nab 2,100 illegal immigrants in 3 weeks,” USA Today, June 14, 2006, http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2006-06-14-immigration-arrests_x.htm
#16 No Hard Evidence Connecting Bin Laden to 9/11
Source:
The Muckraker Report, June 6, 2006, and Ithaca Journal, June 29, 2006
Title: “FBI says, ‘No Hard Evidence Connecting Bin Laden to 9/11’”
Author: Ed Haas
http://www.teamliberty.net/id267.html
Student Researcher: Bianca May and Morgan Ulery
Faculty Evaluator: Ben Frymer, Ph.D.
Osama bin Laden’s role in the events of September 11, 2001 is not mentioned on the FBI’s “Ten Most Wanted” poster.
On June 5, 2006, author Ed Haas contacted the Federal Bureau of Investigation headquarters to ask why, while claiming that bin Laden is wanted in connection with the August 1998 bombings of US Embassies in Tanzania and Kenya, the poster does not indicate that he is wanted in connection with the events of 9/11.
Rex Tomb, Chief of Investigative Publicity for the FBI responded, “The reason why 9/11 is not mentioned on Osama bin Laden’s Most Wanted page is because the FBI has no hard evidence connecting bin Laden to 9/11.” Tomb continued, “Bin Laden has not been formally charged in connection to 9/11.” Asked to explain the process, Tomb responded, “The FBI gathers evidence. Once evidence is gathered, it is turned over to the Department of Justice. The Department of Justice then decides whether it has enough evidence to present to a federal grand jury. In the case of the 1998 United States Embassies being bombed, bin Laden has been formally indicted and charged by a grand jury. He has not been formally indicted and charged in connection with 9/11 because the FBI has no hard evidence connecting bin Laden to 9/11.”
Haas pauses to ask the question, “If the US government does not have enough hard evidence connecting bin Laden to 9/11, how is it possible that it had enough evidence to invade Afghanistan to ‘smoke him out of his cave?’” Through corporate media, the Bush administration told the American people that bin Laden was “Public Enemy Number One,” responsible for the deaths of nearly 3,000 people on September 11, 2001. The federal government claims to have invaded Afghanistan to “root out” bin Laden and the Taliban, yet nearly six years later, the FBI said that it had no hard evidence connecting bin Laden to 9/11.
Though the world was to have been convinced by the December 2001 release of a bin Laden “confession video,” the Department of Defense issued a press release to accompany this video in which Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld said, “There was no doubt of bin Laden’s responsibility for the 9/11 attacks even before the tape was discovered.”
In a CNN article regarding the bin Laden tape, then New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani said that “the tape removes any doubt that the US military campaign targeting bin Laden and his associates is more than justified.” Senator Richard Shelby, R-Alabama, the vice chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee said, “The tape’s release is central to informing people in the outside world who don’t believe bin Laden was involved in the September 11 attacks.” Shelby went on to say “I don’t know how they can be in denial after they see this tape.”
Haas attempted to secure a reference to US government authentication of the bin Laden “confession video,” to no avail. However, it is conclusive that the Bush Administration and US Congress, along with corporate media, presented the video as authentic. So why doesn’t the FBI view the “confession video” as hard evidence? After all, notes Haas, if the FBI is investigating a crime such as drug trafficking, and it discovers a video of members of a drug cartel openly talking about a successful distribution operation in the United States, that video would be presented to a federal grand jury. The participants identified in the video would be indicted. The video alone would serve as sufficient evidence to net a conviction in a federal court. So why, asks Haas, is the bin Laden “confession video” not carrying the same weight with the FBI?
Haas strongly suggests that we begin asking questions, “The fact that the FBI has no hard evidence connecting Osama bin Laden to 9/11 should be headline news around the world. The challenge to the reader is to find out why it is not. Why has the US media blindly read the government-provided 9/11 scripts, rather than investigate without passion, prejudice, or bias, the events of September 11, 2001? Why has the US media blacklisted any guest that might speak of a government-sponsored 9/11 cover-up, rather than seeking out those people who have something to say about 9/11 that is contrary to the government’s account?” Haas continues. “Who is controlling the media message, and how is it that the FBI has no ‘hard evidence’ connecting Osama bin Laden to the events of September 11, 2001, while the US media has played the bin Laden-9/11 connection story for [six] years now as if it has conclusive evidence that bin Laden is responsible for the collapse of the twin towers, the Pentagon attack, and the demise of United Flight 93?”
UPDATE BY ED HAAS
On June 6, 2006 the Muckraker Report ran a piece by Ed Haas titled “FBI says, ‘No hard evidence connecting bin Laden to 9/11.’” Haas is the editor and a writer for the Muckraker Report. At the center of this article remains the authenticity and truthfulness of the videotape released by the federal government on December 13, 2001 in which it is reported that Osama bin Laden “confesses” to the September 11, 2001 attacks. The corporate media—television, radio, and newspapers—across the United States and the world repeated, virtually non-stop for a week after the videotape’s release, the government account of OBL “confessing.”
However, not one document has been released that demonstrates the authenticity of the videotape or that it even went through an authentication process. The Muckraker Report has submitted Freedom of Information Act requests to the FBI, CIA, Department of Defense, and CENTCOM requesting documentation that would demonstrate the authenticity of the videotape and the dates/circumstances in which the videotape was discovered. CENTCOM has yet to reply to the FOIA request. After losing an appeal, the FBI responded that no documents could be found responsive to the request. The Department of Defense referred the Muckraker Report to CENTCOM while also indicating that it had no documents responsive to the FOIA request either.
The CIA however claims that it can neither confirm nor deny the existence or nonexistence of records responsive to the request. According to the CIA the fact of the existence or nonexistence of requested records is properly classified and is intelligence sources and methods information that is protected from disclosure by section 6 of the CIA Act of 1949, as amended. Therefore, the Agency has denied your request pursuant to FOIA exemptions (b)(1) and (b)(3).
Many people believe that if the videotape is authentic, it should be sufficient hard evidence for the FBI to connect bin Laden to 9/11. The Muckraker Report agrees. However, for the Department of Justice to indict bin Laden for the 9/11 attacks, something the government has yet to do, the videotape would have to be entered into evidence and subjected to additional scrutiny. This appears to be something the government wishes to avoid.
Some believe that the video is a fake. They refer to it as the “fat bin Laden”video. The Muckraker Report believes that while the videotape is indeed authentic, it was the result of an elaborate CIA sting operation. The Muckraker Report also believes that the reason why there is no documentation that demonstrates that the videotape went through an authenticity process is because the CIA knew it was authentic, they arranged the taping.
It is highly probable that the videotape was taped on September 26, 2001—before the US invaded Afghanistan.

# 17 Drinking Water Contaminated by Military and Corporations
Sources:
Environment News Service, March 24, 2006
Title: “Factories, Cities Across USA Exceed Water Pollution Limits”
Author: Sunny Lewis
http://www.ens-newswire.com/ens/mar2006/2006-03-24-05.asp
AlterNet, August 4, 2006
Title: “Military Waste in Our Drinking Water”
Authors: Sunaura Taylor and Astor Taylor
http://www.alternet.org/envirohealth/39723/

Student Researchers: Jonathan Stoumen, Adrienne Magee, and Julie Bickel
Faculty Evaluator: Sasha Von Meier, Ph.D. and Steve Norwick, Ph.D.
Water is essential to life, contributing to blood circulation, digestion, metabolism, brain activity, and muscle movements. Yet reliably pure water is growing scarce, even in the United States. Despite the federal government’s avowed commitment “to restore and maintain the chemical, physical, and biological integrity of the Nation’s waters,”1 corporations, municipalities, and the US military pollute our waters—often with little or no accountability.
“Polluters are using America’s waters as their dumping ground,” said US PIRG’s Clean Water Advocate Christy Leavitt. (US PIRG is the national lobby office for the state Public Interest Research Groups, nonprofit public interest advocacy organizations.) “Troubled Waters: An Analysis of Clean Water Act Compliance,” released by US PIRG in March 2006 shows that, between July 2003 and December 2004, over 62 percent of industrial and municipal facilities across the country discharged pollution into US waterways at rates above limits established by the Clear Water Act (CWA).
Using the Freedom of Information Act, US PIRG investigated major facilities’ compliance—or lack of it—with established federal limits on pollution discharges. The average facility discharged pollutants in excess of its permitted limit by over 275 percent, nearly four times the legal limit. Nationally, 436 major facilities exceeded their limits at least half of the time during the study’s timeframe. Thirty-five facilities exceeded their permits during every reporting period. Seven states allowed more than one hundred violations of at least 500 percent (Ohio, Indiana, Pennsylvania, New York, Tennessee, Texas, and Massachusetts). The study could not analyze facilities in California, Oregon, or Washington due to unreliable data.
Corn farming—think ethanol—is the crop most likely to leach chemical contaminants into waterways.2 Atrazine, which several European nations have banned, is an herbicide widely used in agribusiness, especially on major crops such as corn. The EPA identifies atrazine as the second-most common herbicide in drinking wells. Maximum safe levels of atrazine in drinking water are three parts per billion, but scientists have found up to 224 parts per billion in Midwestern streams, and 2,300 parts per billion in Corn Belt irrigation reservoirs.
Today more than 40 percent of US waterways are unsafe for swimming and fishing, and, as shown by the PIRG study, industrial pollution of the nation’s waters persists—despite the goals of the 1972 Clean Water Act to make all US waters safe for fishing, swimming, and other uses by 1983, and to eliminate the discharge of pollutants into waterways by 1985.
One reason for these ongoing failures is the Bush administration’s consistent efforts to shortchange the Environmental Protection Agency’s budget and to gut the Clean Water Act. In 2003, the Bush administration significantly weakened protections for small streams, wetlands, and other waters, despite Bush having declared 2002-2003 the Year of Clean Water.
However, opposition to environmental protection for clean waterways stems from not only the Bush administration but also the US military, whose pollution poisons the very citizens it is supposed to protect in the name of national security. Weapons production, by the US military and its private contractors, generates more hazardous waste annually than the five largest international chemical companies combined, accounting for one-third of the nation’s toxic waste. Furthermore, the US military is among the most frequent violators of environmental laws.
The Department of Defense (DoD) has sought and received exemptions from a number of crucial public health and environmental laws. Dramatic increases in the amounts of trichloroethylene (TCE) in public aquifers have been one fatal consequence of these exemptions. TCE, a known carcinogen, is used commercially as a solvent. It is the most widespread industrial contaminant in US drinking water. Since the Korean War, military contractors, such as Hughes Missiles Systems (purchased by Raytheon in 1997), have used TCE to degrease airplane parts, and to clean fuel lines at missile sites.
Consequently, TCE contamination is especially common around military facilities. The Pentagon is responsible for the TCE contamination of over 1,400 properties. In 2001, the EPA sought to force the government to require more thorough cleanups at military sites, by lowering the acceptable limits on TCE from five parts per billion to one part per billion. In response, the DoD joined the Department of Energy and NASA in blocking the EPA’s proposed action. The Bush administration charged the EPA with inflating TCE’s risks, and called on the National Academy of Sciences to evaluate the EPA’s claims. The Academy’s 2003 report confirmed the EPA’s assessment, linking TCE to kidney cancer, impaired neurological function, reproductive and developmental damage, autoimmune disease, and other human ailments. The Bush administration and the DoD have ignored these inconvenient findings. As a result, citizens, who pay for the military budget with their tax dollars, are also paying with their health and sometimes their lives.
Citations
1. Federal Water Pollution Control Act (33 USC. 1251 et seq), Section 101(a).
2. Sasha Lilley, “Green Fuel’s Dirty Secret,” CorpWatch, June 1, 2006.
UPDATE BY SUNNY LEWIS
Compliance with the Clean Water Act on the part of industrial and municipal water facilities and land developers is of utmost importance to the quality of America’s waters—from wetlands, ponds, and small streams to mighty rivers and the Great Lakes.
The US Public Interest Research Group, US PIRG, which discovered the failure of 62 percent of facilities to comply with the law based on documents obtained through the Freedom of Information Act, intends to do more work on this subject later this year.
Christy Leavitt of US PIRG, quoted by ENS in the original article, says the group will issue another report based on updated figures obtained in May from the US Environmental Protection Agency.
As ENS reported, US PIRG recommended that all US waters be protected by withdrawal of what the group called “the Bush administration’s 2003 No Protection” policy which excludes many small streams and wetlands from protection under the Clean Water Act.
Since the ENS report was published, the US Supreme Court handed down a ruling on the scope of the Clean Water Act that many water and environmental experts as well as Members of Congress believe has muddied the legal waters and made new legislation necessary.
In June 2006, the high court ruled in the case Rapanos et ux., et at. v. United States that there are limits to the federal government’s authority to regulate wetlands under the Clean Water Act, but failed to agree on the confines of that power.
The consolidated case involved conflicts between developers who wanted to build condos and stores on wetlands and federal regulators, who refused to allow the developments under the authority of the Clean Water Act. The waters at issue were wetlands adjacent to ditches and drains that connected to “navigable waters” of the United States.
For a full discussion of the ruling, please see the ENS report, “US Supreme Court Decision Fails to Clarify Clean Water Act,” at http://www.ens-newswire.com/ens/jun2006/2006-06-19-10.asp.
In 2001, the Supreme Court ruled in another case, Solid Waste Agency of Northern Cook County v. Corps of Engineers, SWANCC, that non-navigable, isolated, intrastate waters do not fall under the jurisdiction of the Clean Water Act.
On May 25, 2007, a bi-partisan bill was introduced in the House of Representatives that attempts to clarify the original intent of Congress in the 1972 Clean Water Act in the wake of these two decisions.
To achieve clarification, the new measure, the Clean Water Restoration Act, replaces the term “navigable waters of the United States” with the term “waters of the United States.”
The Clean Water Restoration Act has 158 original cosponsors, and the endorsement of more than three hundred organizations representing the conservation community, family farmers, fishers, surfers, boaters, faith communities, environmental justice advocates, labor unions, and civic associations.
It replaces a bill mentioned in the original ENS report, the Clean Water Authority Restoration Act, that was not approved during the 109th Congress.
As ENS reported in March 2006, US PIRG recommended that the Clean Water State Revolving Fund be fully funded to help communities upgrade their sewer systems.
The Clean Water State Revolving Loan Fund guarantees loans for cities and towns so they can borrow for sewer projects at a lower interest rate, saving local taxpayers billions of dollars nationwide.
On March 8, 2007, ENS reported that the Bush administration’s budget proposal to cut some $400 million from the Clean Water State Revolving Fund budget came under fire by members of both parties in the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee.
On March 9, 2007, ENS reported that the US House of Representatives passed the Water Quality Financing Act of 2007. For the first time in twenty years, the measure H.R. 720, would reauthorize the Clean Water State Revolving Funds. At press time, this measure had not come before the US Senate.
For its part, the US EPA Office of Enforcement and Compliance Assurance, OECA, says its actions to enforce Clean Water Act requirements in FY 2006 resulted in more than 283 million pounds of pollutants reduced.
Most of these reductions are the result of the EPA’s “national priority efforts” to control overflows from combined sewer overflows and sanitary sewer overflows and contamination caused by surface runoff from stormwater and concentrated animal feeding operations, the agency said.
Working in partnership with states, OECA says it concluded major legal settlements with dozens of cities to bring critical sewer systems back into compliance.
The settlements require comprehensive plans to improve the maintenance and operation of systems to reduce overflows, and long-term capital construction projects to expand treatment capacity to ensure that sewage is properly treated before being discharged, the OECA said in the “EPA Fiscal Year 2006 Accomplishments Report.”
The settlements concluded in FY 2006 will reduce overflows of untreated or inadequately treated sewage by 26 million pounds, with an estimated investment of $930 million in sewer system upgrades and improvements.
To find out more about the scope of the Clean Water Act and compliance with this law, visit:
US Public Interest Research Group: http://www.uspirg.org/
US EPA Office of Enforcement and Compliance Assurance: http://www.epa.gov/compliance/
US EPA Clean Water Act Compliance Assistance:
http://www.epa.gov/compliance/assistance/bystatute/cwa/index.html
Clean Water Act State Revolving Fund:
http://www.epa.gov/owm/cwfinance/cwsrf/index.htm
Stormwater Authority: http://www.stormwaterauthority.org

# 18 Mexico’s Stolen Election
Sources:
AlterNet, August 2, 2006
Title: “Evidence of Election Fraud Grows in México”
Author: Chuck Collins and Joshua Holland
http://www.alternet.org/story/39763
Revolution, September 10, 2006
Title: “Mexico: The Political Volcano Rumbles”
Authors: Revolution Newspaper Collective
http://revcom.us/a/060/mexico-volcano-en.html
Researchers: Bill Gibbons and Erica Haikara
Faculty Evaluator: Ron Lopez, Ph.D.
Overwhelming evidence reveals massive fraud in the 2006 Mexican presidential election between “president-elect” Felipe Calderón of the conservative PAN party and Andrés Manuel López Obrador of the more liberal PRD. In an election riddled with “arithmetic mistakes,” a partial recount uncovered evidence of abundant stuffing and stealing of ballots that favored the PAN victory.
Meanwhile, US interests were significantly invested in the outcome of Mexico’s election. Though neither candidate had any choice but to cooperate with the US agenda, important differences existed around energy policy, specifically with regard to foreign privatization of Mexican oil and gas reserves.
Though the energy sector of Mexico is already deeply penetrated by US capital, as it stands, the Mexican government owns and controls the oil industry, with very tight restrictions on any foreign investment. Petróleos Mexicanos (Pemex), the fifth largest oil company in the world, exports 80 percent of its oil to the US. Sixty percent of its revenue ($30 billion per year) currently goes to the Mexican government, accounting for more than 40 percent of the Mexican government’s annual revenues.
Calderón promises a more thorough and streamlined exploitation of Mexico’s oil, demanding that Mexico remove barriers to private/foreign investment (which are currently written into the Mexican Constitution). Obrador, on the other hand, insisted on maintaining national ownership and control of the energy sector in order to build economic and social stability in Mexico.
In June 2005, Mexico signed an accord called Alliance for the Security and Prosperity of North America (ASPAN) with Canada and the US. The point was made that this accord would be binding on whoever became president of Mexico in the upcoming elections. Included in ASPAN is a guarantee to fill the energy needs of the US market, as well as agreements to forge “a common theory of security,” allowing US Homeland Security measures to be implemented in Mexico.
Five months later, in November 2005, an “audition” was held with Mexican presidential candidates before members of the US Chamber of Commerce in Mexico City. All candidates were asked whether they would open the energy sector in Mexico, especially the nationalized oil company, Pemex, to US exploitation.
Felipe Calderón received resounding applause when he answered that he is in favor of private investment in Pemex, and of weakening the labor unions. He also received applause when he stated that he supported George Bush’s guest worker program and that he agreed the border needed to be secured or militarized. Obrador said that he would not allow risk capital investment in Pemex—but hastened to add that other sectors would be opened to investment.
Calderón won the audition, Obrador was granted the role of understudy. Former US Ambassador to Mexico Jeffrey Davidow told Obrador, “If you win the election, we will support you.” But when Obrador appeared to be the front-runner in the election, PAN allied with forces in the US to launch a feverish campaign against him.
Though US laws prevent US influence in other countries’ elections, anti-Obrador ads airing on Mexican TV were designed by US firms and illegally financed by business councils that included such transnationals as Wal-Mart and Halliburton. US election advisers Rob Allyn and Dick Morris were contracted to develop a media campaign that would foment fear that Obrador, with ties to Chavez and Castro, posed a dangerous Socialist threat to Mexico.
Outgoing president Vicente Fox violated campaign law by making dozens of anti-Obrador speeches during the campaign, as the PAN party illegally saturated airwaves with swift-boat style attack ads against Obrador. Under Mexican law, ruling party interference is a serious crime and grounds for annulling an election.
While Obrador’s campaign and hundreds of independent election observers documented several hundred cases of election fraud in making their case for a recount, most Mexican TV stations failed to report the irregularities that surfaced. Days after the election The New York Times irresponsibly declared Calderón the winner, and Bush called to personally congratulate Calderón on his “win,” even though no victor had been declared under Mexican law. Illegal media campaigns combined with grand-scale fraud had had their effect.
Dominant forces in the US thus had a strong presence behind the scenes of the 2006 Mexican election. As a consequence, Washington looks forward to working with Calderón, who promises tighter (repressive) control and cooperation on all matters of interest to the US, in an accelerated plan to put Mexico more directly under US domination.
Mexico has thus been denied the democratic election of a president who might have joined Latin America in standing up to aggressive US neoliberal policies.

# 19 People’s Movement Challenges Neoliberal Agenda
Sources:
Trade Matters, American Friends Service Committee, May 3, 2006
Title: “Is the US Free Trade Model Losing Steam?”
Author: Jessica Walker Beaumont
http://www.afsc.org/trade-matters/trade-agreements/LosingSteam.htm
International Herald Tribune, December 28, 2006
Title: “Economic Policy Changes With New Latin American Leaders”
Author: Mark Weisbrot
http://www.cepr.net/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=773&Itemid=45
International Affairs Forum, March 31, 2007
Title: “Is Hugo Chavez a Threat to Stability? No.”
Author: Mark Weisbrot
http://www.cepr.net/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=1102&Itemid=45
Student Evaluator: Toni Catelani
Faculty Evaluator: Phil Beard, Ph.D.
The US Free Trade model is meeting increasingly successful resistance as people’s movements around the world build powerful alternatives to neoliberal exploitation.
This is particularly evident in Latin America, where massive opposition to US economic domination has demanded that populist leaders and parties take control of national governments in Venezuela, Bolivia, Ecuador, Argentina, Brazil, Nicaragua, and Uruguay.
Latin American presidents are delivering on promises to fix the mistake of twenty-five years of neoliberal reforms that resulted in the region’s worst economic collapse in more than one hundred years. In the two decades preceding World Bank and International Monetary Fund (IMF) policies, 1960-1980, the region’s income per person grew by 82 percent. By comparison it grew just 9 percent 1980–2000, and only 4 percent 2000–2005.
Strong ties between Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez, Cuba’s Fidel Castro, and Bolivia’s Evo Morales, Ecuador’s Rafael Correa, and Nicaragua’s Daniel Ortega, along with cooperative relationships with major economies including Argentina and Brazil, are creating the real potential for autonomous alternatives to US-dictated economic policy in the Western Hemisphere.
In the past year alone several leaders have announced plans to cut ties with the World Bank and IMF. After a sweeping reelection in December 2006, Chavez announced April 30, 2007 that, having paid off debts to the World Bank and the IMF, Venezuela would cut ties with both institutions.1 Chavez has been able to put his nation on a path of solid growth by fulfilling his 1998 campaign promise to renationalize Venezuela’s oil industry (PDVSA). Though fierce US opposition to his move to end foreign privatization led to a failed US-backed military coup in 2002, nationalized oil is now the source of nearly half the Venezuela government’s revenues and 80 percent of the country’s export earnings. Venezuela’s economy has grown 38 percent in the last three years.
Chavez plans to set up a new lending institution run by Latin American nations and has pledged to support it with Venezuela’s booming oil revenues.1 Venezuela’s $50 billion in foreign exchange reserves is providing financial support to countries in the region without the exploitive policy conditions attached to WTO and World Bank lending. Leaders are thus able to deliver on promises to their people, contributing not only to stability but to the strengthening of Democracy in the region.
In April 2006, Evo Morales announced his rejection of the IMF and any future FTA with the US. He instead launched the Bolivian Peoples Trade Agreement (PTA), a socialist alternative to the neoliberal free trade model. The PTA emphasizes support of indigenous culture, reciprocity, solidarity, and national sovereignty. Above all the PTA emphasizes improved living conditions for the whole population as a result of international trade and investment. Bolivia’s 2005 passage of a Hydrocarbons Law raised the royalties paid by foreign gas companies to the government of Bolivia. While infuriating US corporations, the resulting tens of millions of dollars in revenue have enabled Bolivia to pay off its IMF debt and begin to build social programs and national reserves.
In December 2006, Rafael Correa, who recently won the presidential election in Ecuador on an anti-privatization, anti-US military base platform, announced plans to restructure Ecuador’s foreign debt in order to increase spending on crucial social programs. Ecuador has since paid its debt to the IMF and announced plans to sever ties to the institution. Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega has also announced negotiations toward an IMF exit.
Argentina was one of the IMF’s most publicized “successes” turned-crushing-failure at the end of the last century. From 1991 to 1998 the country adopted a host of IMF-recommended reforms including large-scale privatizations. The economy grew substantially during this period but went into a terrible downward slide beginning in mid-1998. At the end of 2001 the whole experiment fell apart, with the country defaulting on more than $100 billion of debt. The currency collapsed soon thereafter, and the majority of people fell below the poverty line in a country that had previously been one of the richest in Latin America.2
When Argentina’s President Nestor Kirchner finally refused the IMF’s debilitating repayment mandates, Argentina’s economy began to rebound—and it hasn’t stopped growing. In a remarkable expansion, which was never supposed to have happened according to IMF predictions, Argentina’s economy has grown by 47 percent in the past few years, making it the fastest growing economy in the Western Hemisphere, and pulling more than nine million people (in a country of 36 million) out of poverty.2 Argentina decided to make its break with the IMF in January 2006 by paying off its remaining $9.9 billion debt.
As of December 2005, Brazil is also free to make its own decisions, free from IMF interference, after paying off its debt two years ahead of schedule. “We repaid the money to show the world that this country has a government and it is the owner of its own nose,” Lula said at the time, adding, “Brazil has been able to decide that it does not want another IMF deal.”3
While it is an expanding reality that many strong and growing people’s movements have not been so fortunate as to have representative governments—the people of India (see story #8), Mexico (see story #18), and Niger (see story #3) are but a few examples—more and more elected leaders in Latin America are providing models of true democratic leadership that is of, for, and by the people.
Citations
1. Jorge Rueda, “Venezuela Pulling Out of IMF, World Bank,” Associated Press, May 1 2007.
2. Mark Weisbrot, “IMF’s Fall From Power,” Washington Post.com, April 13, 2007.
3. Xinhua, “Early Debt Payment Enables Brazil to Make Own Budget Decisions,” Peoples Daily Online, December 16, 2005.
UPDATE BY Jessica Walker Beaumont
Written a year ago, the American Friends Service Committee article “Is the US Free Trade Model Losing Steam?” accurately predicted a growing resistance among Latin American and African leaders to the current “one-size-fits-all” US trade policy model.
Proponents of the current US free trade model seem willing to do whatever it takes to keep the free trade train moving down the track. However their time is literally running out, in part due to the looming July 1 expiration of “fast track” authority that gives the Bush administration the power to negotiate free trade agreements on behalf of Congress.
Although Bolivia, Ecuador and Southern Africa stand firm against US Free Trade Agreements (FTA), there remains a “coalition of the willing” lining up to get their trade agreements. Pending trade pacts for Congressional consideration include those with Colombia, Peru, Panama and Korea. Greasing the wheels to pass these FTAs is a new “breakthrough trade deal” with the Bush administration announced by Democratic leadership on May 10, 2007.
It is said that the deal would improve new free trade agreements by requiring that they include labor and environmental standards, and by insuring better access to essential medicines. Sounds good right? Well, the deal was negotiated in secret with only a handful of Congressional members, the legal text is still not released, and high-powered big business groups are supporters. The official outline of the deal reveals all that is excluded, ignoring a cry for substantial rethinking of US trade policy.
Meanwhile Bolivia continues to advance its People’s Trade Agreement. In April, 2007 Bolivia (along with Venezuela and Nicaragua) decided to withdraw from the International Center for Settlement of Investment Disputes (ICSID) housed at the World Bank. This came out of the social movement started in 2001 against the US multinational Bechtel that sued Bolivia under the ICSID for $25 million after it was thrown out during the Cochabamba Water War. Dropping out of the ICSID sends a clear message that protecting private investment at the expense of the rights of the people will not be tolerated.
Ecuadorian President Rafael Correa, elected into power on an anti-FTA and anti-US military base agenda, is considering doing the same. In April Correa expelled the World Bank’s representative in Quito, accusing him of withdrawing funds in protest over the government’s oil sector reforms.
Costa Rica offers a new beacon of hope as they have yet to ratify the Central American Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA). Huge resistance to CAFTA grew as people learned it would require the dismantling of Costa Rica’s public telecommunications sector that is funding education. On April 12, 2007 the Supreme Electoral Court approved a measure calling for a binding referendum on CAFTA, likely to take place in August or September. The CAFTA referendum will be Costa Rica’s first public referendum since it gained independence from Spain in 1821 (Inside US Trade, May 4, 2007).

# 20 Terror Act Against Animal Activists
Sources:
Vermont Journal of Environmental Law, March 9, 2007
Title: “The AETA is Invidiously Detrimental to the Animal Rights Movement (and Unconstitutional as Well)”
Authors: David Hoch and Odette Wilkens
http://www.vjel.org/editorials/2007S/Hoch.Wilkens.Editorial.htm
Green is the New Red, November 14, 2006
Title: “US House Passes Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act With Little Discussion or Dissent”
Author: Will Potter
http://www.greenisthenewred.com/blog/2006/11/13/aeta-passes-house-recap/
Earth First! Journal, November, 2006
Title: “22 Years for Free-Speech Advocates”
Author: Budgerigar
Student Researcher: Sverre Tysl
Faculty Evaluator: Scott Suneson, MA
The term “terrorism” has been dangerously expanded to include acts that interfere, or promote interference, with the operations of animal enterprises. The Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act (AETA), signed into law on November 27, 2006, broadens punishment present under the Animal Enterprises Protection Act (AEPA) of 1992. One hundred and sixty groups, including the National Lawyers’ Guild, the Natural Resources Defense Council, the League of Humane Voters, Physicians’ Committee for Responsible Medicine, and the New York City Bar Association, oppose this Act on grounds that its terminology is dangerously vague and poses a major conflict to the US Constitution.
The broad definition of an “animal enterprise,” for example, may encompass most US businesses: “any enterprise that uses or sells animals or animal products.” The phrase “loss of any real or personal property,” is elastic enough to include loss of projected profit. Concerns deepen as protections against “interference” extend to any “person or entity having a connection to, relationship with, or transactions with an animal enterprise.”
A letter from the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) to Congress dated March 6, 2006, “on behalf of hundreds of thousands of activists and members and fifty-three affiliates nationwide,” explains their opposition to AETA based on the concern that First Amendment activities such as demonstrations, leafleting, undercover investigations, and boycotts may be punishable as acts of terror under the overly vague and open-ended law.
The ACLU letter maintains, “Lawful and peaceful protests that, for example, urge a consumer boycott of a company that does not use humane procedures, could be the target of this provision because they ‘disrupt’ the company’s business. This overbroad provision might also apply to a whistleblower whose intentions are to stop harmful or illegal activities by the animal enterprise. The bill will effectively chill and deter Americans from exercising their First Amendment rights to advocate for reforms in the treatment of animals.”
Author Will Potter argues that the harsher amendments that AETA brings to its predecessor, AEPA, are hardly necessary, as AEPA was successfully used to disproportionately prosecute the SHAC 7—six animal rights activists organized to expose the illegal and inhumane operations of Huntingdon Life Sciences—for “animal enterprise terrorism.” Budgerigar of Earth First! recounts that three of the defendants were charged under AEPA in September of 2006 with interstate stalking and conspiracy to commit interstate stalking for organizing demonstrations and running a website that published names and addresses of those involved in the vivisection industry. The group was collectively sentenced to twenty-two years in prison. “The supreme irony of this case,” notes Budgerigar, “rests in the fact that these activists were convicted of conspiracy to damage the profits of an animal enterprise, but not of actually damaging it. Even so, the ever-so-honorable judge ordered the defendants to pay a total of $1,000,001 in restitution fees.”
Yet Congress deemed that AEPA was not a serious enough tool for going after animal rights “extremists.” David Hoch and Odette Wilkens of Equal Justice Alliance ask, “How did this bill [AETA] pass the House?”
Hoch and Wilkens explain that in spite of the fact that one hundred and sixty groups opposed its passage, the House Judiciary Committee placed AETA on the suspension calendar, under which process bills that are non-controversial can be passed by voice vote. The vote on the bill was then held hours earlier than scheduled, with what appears to have been only six (out of 435) Congresspersons present. Five voted for the bill, and Dennis Kucinich, who said that “[t]his bill will have a real and chilling effect on people’s constitutionally protected rights,” voted against it. Kucinich went on to say, “My concern about this bill is that it does nothing to address the real issue of animal protection but, instead targets those advocating animal rights.”
Budgerigar concludes, “The message could not be more clear: run an effective activist campaign, and you will be vilified, criminalized, and imprisoned.”
UPDATE BY DAVID HOCH AND ODETTE WILKENS
The Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act (AETA), whose recent passage received virtually no media coverage, will chill the first amendment rights of animal advocates and serve as a template for future limitations on the free speech of all activists. The Act subjects anyone who (1) uses interstate commerce, (2) with the intent to damage or interfere with an “animal enterprise” or with any person or entity associated with an animal enterprise, and (3) causes any economic damage or corporate profit loss or bodily injury or fear of bodily injury, or (4) conspires or attempts to do any of the foregoing, to prosecution for “animal enterprise terrorism.”
AETA expands the Animal Enterprise Protection Act (AEPA), under which six animal activists were convicted and imprisoned for publicly advocating animal protection activities. The new law requires less serious conduct than the “physical disruption to...an animal enterprise” called for in AEPA, provides stiffer penalties for economic damage and subjects violators who cause no economic damage, bodily harm or fear of serious bodily harm, to as much as one year in prison, while also serving as a predicate for wiretapping.
AETA serves animal enterprises wishing to brand animal activists as criminals and treating dissent as terrorism, and indicates a trend toward treating dissent as terrorism, as evidenced by the Justice Department’s current attempt to increase sentences up to twenty years through the application of a concept called “terrorism enhancement.”
AETA violates the First and Fourteenth Amendments by proscribing formerly protected modes of expression and invidiously discriminating against animal activists through the imposition of harsher sanctions than those applied to similar or even more serious crimes under the 2005 federal sentencing guidelines. The Act is also unconstitutionally vague, due to the indecipherable ambiguity of statutory terms such as “interfere with” or “profit loss.” That vagueness extends to declared exemptions for lawful boycotts and peaceful protests, which could involve the same conduct that would subject one to prosecution under AETA. A lawful boycott is, by definition, the intent to interfere with and cause economic damage to some enterprise.
Furthermore, an animal enterprise need not be acting lawfully to be protected under the Act. Illegal animal enterprise is not an affirmative defense for activities such as whistle-blowing or undercover investigations into animal cruelty, labor conditions, or environmental violations.
To pass AETA, the House invoked a technicality that allows non-controversial bills to be approved by a voice vote, and then voted when only six members were present, although the bill was highly controversial, with approximately one hundred sixty organizations opposing its passage. The Act is unjust, oppressive, and unconstitutional and the honorable thing would be for Congress to repeal it, but without public knowledge and pressure that is unlikely. Therefore, a more prudent strategy would be to increase public awareness until a critical mass convinces Congress to rescind the Act.
To learn more about AETA or become involved in the effort to repeal it, visit the Equal Justice Alliance website at http://noaeta.org/index.htm.
UPDATE BY WILL POTTER
Shortly after passage of the Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act, the Fur Commission USA distributed an announcement to supporters proclaiming “Mission Accomplished!” Corporations have been eager to appropriate much of the “War on Terrorism” rhetoric against activists, but this was an interesting PR choice. Bush stood on the USS Abraham Lincoln in front of a banner proclaiming “Mission Accomplished” in 2003, only to be dogged by that hubris months, and now years, later.
It looks like corporations may be haunted by similar ghosts in this domestic front of the “War on Terrorism.” Not only has the legislation not deterred illegal activity by underground activists, it may have actually added fuel to their fire. On January 5, 2007, the Animal Liberation Front—considered by the FBI to be the “number one domestic terrorist threat”—distributed an anonymous communiqué related to vandalism at the home of a University of Utah animal researcher. It concluded: “PS. To all the vivisectors we have yet to visit: don’t bask in your recent legislative victory for too long. This new animal enterprise law means NOTHING. —ALF”
It wasn’t an isolated incident. Just two days after the president signed the law, another communiqué claimed credit for vandalizing the windows of a pharmaceutical company, and underground activists signed it: “Dedicated to the SHAC 7!” (The SHAC 7 are a group of activists convicted under the original legislation. They were never accused of anything like breaking windows: they “conspired” to violate the law by running a website and vocally supporting both legal and illegal tactics against companies doing business with a controversial lab).
If the purpose of AETA is to go after underground activists, that mission is far from accomplished. And if the purpose of AETA is to go after “the above ground,” activists are organizing to challenge that mission as well. Just a few weeks after the legislation passed, student activists protested outside the offices of US Rep. James P. McGovern in Massachusetts, naming and shaming him for not being present for a vote. McGovern’s staff quickly stated publicly that he does not support the law, he would have voted against it if he had known about a vote, and he would advocate for repeal.
And then there were dozens of community events around the world to raise awareness about labeling activists as “ecoterrorists,” from South Africa to Greece to Minneapolis, MN.
“Mission Accomplished”? Ahem.
To be clear, in some ways the mission of the Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act has been accomplished: it has instilled a level of fear in mainstream, above-ground, legal activists that they may one day be hit with the T-word in this ever-expanding “War on Terrorism.”
But through my reporting I’ve found that an interesting thing happens when people learn about this “Green Scare” and the corporate and political interests behind it: that fear easily turns to rage. More than 140 comments have been posted on the article I wrote about the legislation passing the House. Some of them express fear and a bit of hopelessness. Many share the tenor of “Jersey” who wrote: “do they really think everyone is going to crawl into the woodwork and stand for this?”
Since the law passed, I have been speaking regularly in public forums like the New York City Bar Association, Yale Law School, activist conferences, and with both mainstream and alternative press, and I’ve been able to see that phenomenon over and over again: questioning and investigating the legislation, and the money behind it, demystifies the law. It declaws it.
That knowledge is what ultimately worked against Senator Joseph McCarthy, succeeding where the “loyalty oaths” and the “naming names” failed. It can work now, too. If reporters do their jobs, and expose these issues to the general public, people can stop being afraid and start being pissed.
For more information, please visit www.GreenIsTheNewRed.com.

# 21 US Seeks WTO Immunity for Illegal Farm Payments
Sources:
Oxfam International, June 29, 2006
Title: “US Seeks ‘Get-Out Clause’ for Illegal Farm Payments”
http://www.oxfam.org/en/news/pressreleases2006/pr060629_wto_geneva
Financial Times UK, January 9 2007
Title: “Canada Launches WTO Case on US Subsidies”
Author: Eoin Callan
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/5debac74-9f9b-11db-9e2e-0000779e2340.html
Student Researcher: Cedric Therene
International Business Evaluator: Tim Ogburn
On July 24, 2006, after nearly five years of global trade negotiations, talks at the meetings of the World Trade Organization collapsed—perhaps permanently, say some economic analysts. In January of 2007, trade ministers from the United States, the European Union, Brazil, India, Japan, and Australia said they remained hopelessly stalemated, mostly on the contentious issue of farm trade. US negotiators blamed the breakdown on E.U., India, and Japan for balking at the unrestricted opening of markets to agricultural products.1
What went uncovered in mainstream news sources was any analysis of the content of the negotiations—what exactly the countries involved were offering, and what they expected in return.
Of utmost importance to the Bush Administration was that the US receive immunity from lawsuits by poor countries before Bush’s special “fast track” trade negotiating powers expired at the end of June, 2007.
In a last-minute proposal, one not included on the original agenda, the US suddenly insisted that all trade agreements include a special clause called a “Peace Clause” that would make its use of illegal farm subsidies immune from prosecution by the countries affected. Between 1994 and 2003, such a Peace Clause had denied developing nations any legal recourse in the face of the “dumping” of cheap foreign products that had devastated their agricultural communities.
According to international NGOs such as Oxfam International, the Peace Clause gives rich countries like the US and the European Union free rein to provide huge subsidies to their farmers. Such practices benefit the economies of already-wealthy nations, while damaging the agricultural communities of poorer nations. According to a 2003 Oxfam report, thirty-eight developing countries have suffered from unfair competition as a result of illegal subsidies in the US and EU.
Events following expiration of these legal protections make it clear why the US was so eager to reintroduce a new version of the Peace Clause (and why it was done so slyly). Following its expiration in 2003, Brazil took the US to the WTO court charging that US cotton subsidies had depressed world prices, hurting cotton producers in Brazil and around the world—and Brazil won! In 2005, the WTO agreed with Brazil’s charge, ordering that the US immediately discontinue its distribution of illegal agricultural subsidies. Fearing that other developing nations would follow suit, US negotiators were driven to reintroduce the proposal for protections they had enjoyed under the Peace Clause.
More recently, following the July 2006 collapse of the Doha trade talks, Canada has asked the WTO to review charges that the US is continuing to use illegal and “trade-distorting” agricultural subsidies. The charges focus on payments made to American corn farmers, but also challenge the total level of US agricultural subsidies. This is the most significant challenge to the structure of US agricultural subsidies since the landmark WTO ruling in favor of Brazil in 2005.
In June of 2007, The Canadian government asked the WTO to establish a dispute settlement panel to investigate the allegation.2 Under WTO rules, the United States can provide up to $19.1 billion annually in subsidies that are considered trade-distorting. Canada says the United States broke the rules every year from 1999 to 2005 except for 2003.
Gretchen Hamel, a spokeswoman for the US trade representatives, parroted the position taken previously by US officials addressing the Brazil dispute. She said, “Negotiation, not litigation, is the path to removing trade distortions in agriculture and improving opportunities for farmers and producers all around the world.”2 The US says that it needs the Peace Clause renewed in order to protect itself from litigation while it “is in the process of reducing its trade-distorting subsidies.” But Oxfam notes that, proposals included in the new Peace Clause would actually allow the US to increase its farm support from under $20 billion to almost $23 billion. The EU proposal would allow an increase in farm subsidies from $23 billion to $33 billion. Poor countries, with no surplus to supplement their farmers’ income shortfalls, would have nothing to respond with—no global support, no economic power, and no legal appeals.
Citations
1. Paul Blustein, “Trade Talks Fail After Stalemate Over Farm Issues; Collapse Comes With Finger-Pointing,” Washington Post, July 25, 2006.
2. Phillip Brasher, “Canada attacks US subsidies at WTO,” Des Moines Register, June 8, 2007.

# 22 North Invades Mexico
Source:
TomDispatch.com, September 19, 2006
Author: Mike Davis
Title: “Border Invaders: The Perfect Swarm Heads South”
http://www.tomdispatch.com/index.mhtml?pid=122537
Student Researcher: Rachel Icaza and Erica Haikara
Faculty Evaluator: Francisco Vazquez, Ph.D.
The visitor crossing the Mexican border from Tijuana to San Diego these days is immediately confronted by a huge sign, “Stop the Border Invasion!” Sponsored by allies of the anti-immigrant vigilante group, the Minutemen, the same signs insult Mexican citizens at other border crossings in Arizona and Texas. The ultimate irony is that a crisis invasion is indeed occurring, but the signs, it seems, may be pointed the wrong direction.
Author Mike Davis points out that, in a “reality stood on its head,” few people—at least outside Mexico—have bothered to notice that while all the nannies, cooks, maids, and gardeners have been heading north to tend the luxury lifestyles of irate republicans, the Gringo masses have been rushing south to enjoy glorious budget retirements and affordable second homes in Mexico.
The number of North Americans living in Mexico has soared from 200,000 to 1 million (one-quarter of all US expatriates) in the past decade. With more than 70 million American baby-boomers expected to retire in the next two decades, experts predict “a tidal wave” of migration to warmer—and cheaper—climates. Baby-boomers are not simply feathering nests for eventual retirement, but also increasingly speculating in Mexican resort property and gated communities, complete with Hooters, Burger King, and Starbucks. The land rush is sending up property values to the detriment of locals whose children are consequently driven into slums or forced to emigrate north, only to face increasing “invasion” charges.
The Gringo footprint is largest (and brings the most significant geopolitical consequences) in Baja California, an epochal process that, if unchecked, will produce intolerable social marginalization and ecological devastation.
Indeed, the first two stages of informal annexation have already occurred. Under the banner of NAFTA, Southern California has exported hundreds of its sweatshops and toxic industries to the maquiladora zones of Tijuana and Mexicali. The Pacific Maritime Association, representing the West Coast’s major shipping companies, has joined forces with Korean and Japanese corporations to explore the construction of a vast new container port at Punta Colonel, 150 miles south of Tijuana, which would undercut the power of Longshore unionism in San Pedro and San Francisco.
Secondly, tens of thousands of US retirees and winter-residents are now clustered at both ends of the peninsula. Along the northwest coast from Tijuana to Ensenada, a recent advertisement for a real estate conference at UCLA boasts that “there are presently over fifty-seven real estate developments with over 11,000 homes/condos with an inventory value of over $3 billion all of them geared for the US market.”
Meanwhile, at the tropical end of Baja, a US expatriot enclave has emerged in the twenty-mile strip between Cabo San Lucas and San Jose de Cabo. Los Cabos has become an archipelago of real-estate hot spots where continuous double-digit increases in property values pull in speculative capital. Judging from the registration of private planes at the local airport, Cabos has essentially become a resort suburb of Orange County—the home of the most vehement Minutemen chapters.
Davis points out that many wealthy Southern Californians evidently see no contradiction between fuming over the “alien invasion” with one’s conservative friends at the Newport Marina one day, and flying down to enjoy their Cabos investment properties the next.
One of several multi-billion dollar real estate projects being developed for the US market is the Villages of Loreto: another 6,000 homes for expatriates in colonial-Mexico motif on the Sea of Cortez. The $3 billion Loreto project boasts that it will be the last word in green design, exploiting solar power and restricting automobile usage. It will, coincidently, balloon Loreto’s population from its current 15,000 to more than 100,000 in a decade, with the social and environmental consequences of a sort that can already be seen in the slum peripheries of Cancun and other mega-resorts.
One of the irresistible attractions of Baja is that it has preserved a primordial wildness that has disappeared elsewhere in the West. Local residents, including a very eloquent indigenous environmental movement, cherish this incomparable landscape, as they do the survival of an egalitarian ethos in the peninsula’s small towns and fishing villages.
However, thanks to the silent invasion of the baby-boomers from the north, much of the natural history and frontier culture of Baja could be swept away in the next generation. The problem is, as Tom Engelhardt of Tomdispatch points out, “Fences don’t work if you’ve got your own plane.”

# 23 Feinstein’s Conflict of Interest in Iraq
Source:
North Bay Bohemian, January 24, 2007
Title: “Senator Feinstein’s Iraq Conflict”
Author: Peter Byrne
http://www.bohemian.com/metro/01.24.07/dianne-feinstein-0704.html
Student Researcher: David Abbott, Amanda Spigut, and Ann Marie O’Toole
Faculty Evaluator: David McCuan, Ph.D.
Dianne Feinstein—the ninth wealthiest member of congress—has been beset by monumental ethical conflicts of interest. As a member of the Military Construction Appropriations Subcommittee (MILCON) from 2001 to the end of 2005, Senator Feinstein voted for appropriations worth billions of dollars to her husband’s firms.
From 1997 through the end of 2005, Feinstein’s husband Richard C. Blum was a majority shareholder in both URS Corp. and Perini Corp. She lobbied Pentagon officials in public hearings to support defense projects that she favored, some of which already were, or subsequently became, URS or Perini contracts. From 2001 to 2005, URS earned $792 million from military construction and environmental cleanup projects approved by MILCON; Perini earned $759 million from such projects.
In 2000, Perini earned a mere $7 million from federal contracts. After 9/11, Perini was transformed into a major defense contractor. In 2004, the company earned $444 million for military construction work in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as for improving airfields for the US Air Force in Europe and building base infrastructures for the US Navy around the globe. In a remarkable financial recovery, Perini shot from near penury in 1997 to logging gross revenues of $1.7 billion in 2005.
It is estimated that Perini now holds at least $2.5 billion worth of contracts tied to the worldwide expansion of the US military. Its largest Department of Defense contracts are “indefinite delivery-indefinite quantity” or “bundled” contracts carrying guaranteed profit margins. As of May 2006, Perini held a series of bundled contracts awarded by the Army Corps of Engineers for work in the Middle East worth $1.725 billion. Perini has also been awarded an open-ended contract by the US Air Force for military construction and cleaning the environment at closed military bases.
In 2003 hearings, MILCON approved various construction projects at sites where Perini and/or URS are contracted to perform engineering and military construction work. URS’s military construction work in 2000 earned it a mere $24 million. The next year, when Feinstein took over as MILCON chair, military construction earned URS $185 million. On top of that, the company’s architectural and engineering revenue from military construction projects grew from $108,726 in 2000 to $142 million in 2001, more than a thousand-fold increase in a single year.
Beginning in 1997, Michael R. Klein, a top legal adviser to Feinstein and a long-time business partner of Blum’s, routinely informed Feinstein about specific federal projects coming before her in which Perini had a stake. The insider information, Klein said, “was intended to help the senator avoid conflicts of interest.” Although Klein’s admission was intended to defuse the issue, it had the effect of exacerbating it, because in theory, Feinstein would not know the identity of any of the companies that stood to contractually benefit from her approval of specific items in the military construction budget—until Klein told her.
Feinstein’s husband has profited in other ways by his powerful political connections. In March 2002, then-Governor Gray Davis appointed Blum to a twelve-year term as a regent of the University of California, where he used his position as Regent to award millions of dollars in construction contracts to URS and Perini. At the time, he was the principal owner of URS and had substantial interests in Perini. In 2005, Blum divested himself of Perini stock for a considerable profit. He then resigned from the URS board of directors and divested his investment firm of about $220 million in URS stock.1
Citation
1. Peter Byrne, “Blum’s Plums” North Bay Bohemian, February 21, 2007.
UPDATE BY PETER BYRNE
Shortly before my expose of Senator Dianne Feinstein’s conflict of interest was published in January 2007, Feinstein, who had declined to substantively comment upon serious allegations of ethical misconduct as reported in the story, resigned from the Military Construction Subcommittee. I then wrote three follow-ups, including a news column on her resignation, an expose of her husband Richard Blum’s conflict of interest as a regent of the University of California, and an expose of Blum’s business partner, Michael R. Klein. With Blum’s financial backing, Klein, a war contractor, operates a non-profit called The Sunlight Foundation that awards millions of dollars to reporters and government watchdog groups to research government ethics.
In March, right-wing bloggers by the thousands started linking to and commenting upon these stories—agitating for a Congressional investigation of Feinstein. In just two days, the stories got 50,000 online hits. Michael Savage and Rush Limbaugh did radio segments on my findings. I declined to appear on their shows, because I do not associate with racist, misogynist, homophobic demagogues. Fox News’ Bill O’Reilly invited me to be on his national TV show, but quickly uninvited me after I promised that the first sentence out of my mouth would frame Feinstein as a neoconservative warmonger just like O’Reilly.
As the storm of conservative outrage intensified, Joe Conason, from The Nation Institute, which had commissioned the Feinstein investigation, asked to have the tag thanking the Nation Institute for funding removed from my stories because, he said, Katrina vanden Heuval, The Nation’s editor and publisher, did not want the magazine or its non-profit institute to be positively associated with Limbaugh. I told Conason that not only was I required to credit The Nation Institute under the terms of our contract, but that The Nation’s editors should be proud of the investigation and gratified by the public reaction.
The back story to that encounter is that, in October, vanden Heuvel had abruptly killed the Feinstein story, which had been scheduled to run as a cover feature before the November 2006 election in which Feinstein was up for reelection. The Nation’s investigative editor, Bob Moser, who worked closely with me on the project from start to finish, wrote that I had done a “solid job,” but that the magazine liked to have a political “impact,” and since Feinstein was “not facing a strong challenge for reelection,” they were not going to print the story. Moser added that there was no “smoking gun,” which amazed me, since Klein’s admission that he was funneling defense contracting wish lists developed by Feinstein’s husband’s company directly to the senator, who was in a position to make those wishes come true, was a hot and smoking fact pointing toward corrupt practices. Subsequently, vanden Heuval wrote an editorial praising women leaders of the newly-empowered Democratic Party, including Feinstein: go figure.
I then sold the story to Salon.com, who abruptly killed it right before publication, too. This time the editor’s explanation was that “someone talked to the Sunlight Foundation” and that Salon no longer saw the matter as a serious conflict of interest. So, I pitched the story to Slate, The NewRepublic, Harper’s, the Los Angeles Times and, by way of experiment, to the neoconservative American Spectator and Weekly Standard. Most of the editors praised the reporting, but turned down the story. I cannot help but believe that, considering the precarious balance of power in the post-election Senate, some of these editors were not eager to critique the ethics of a Democrat. As for rejection by the neoconservatives, I theorize that they secretly adore Feinstein, who has consistently supported Bush’s war and homeland security agenda and the illiberal Patriot Act.
So I sold the tale to the North Bay Bohemian, which, along with its sister papers in San Jose and Santa Cruz ran it on the cover—complete with follow-ups. After it appeared, the editors and I received a series of invective-filled emails from war contractor Klein (who is also an attorney) but, since he could show no errors of fact in the story, he did not get the retraction that he apparently wanted. In March, the story crested a Google tidal wave generated by left- and right-wing bloggers wondering why the mainstream media was ignoring the Feinstein scandal. After two dozen newspapers ran a McClatchy wire service article in April observing that no one had found any factual faults in my reporting, the lefty group Media Matters attacked me on its Web site as a right-wing pawn, without even calling me for comment, nor finding any errors in my reporting. I parried their fact-free insults with facts and they were compelled to correct the inaccurate rant.
On April 30, The Hill newspaper in Washington D.C. ran a highly-visible op-ed by a conservative pundit quoting from my story and comparing Feinstein (unfairly) to convicted felon and former Congressman, Duke Cunningham. As the Feinstein investigation gained national traction, mostly outside the realm of the mainstream media, one of Klein’s employees at the Sunlight Foundation posted a “critique” of my story, which was loaded with personal insults, but contained no factual substance. Not coincidentally, Feinstein’s press office distributes, upon request, a similarly-worded “rebuttal,” which insults my personal integrity, finds no factual errors, and does not address the damning fact, reported in the story, that four non-partisan ethics experts based in Washington D.C. found the senator had a conflict of interest after reviewing the results of my investigation.
Also, in April, CodePink and The Raging Grannies held a demonstration in front of the Feinstein-Blum mansion in San Francisco demanding that she return her war profits to the Iraqi people. That was my proudest moment.
Five months after the story was printed, opinion-floggers across the political spectrum continue to loudly ask why the mainstream media has not reported on Feinstein’s ethical problem. Some say that the hurricane of opinion raised by the investigation has killed Feinstein’s chance for a spot on the Democratic Party’s presidential ticket in 2008. Klein has continued to send me e-mails full of verbal abuse, misspellings, and implied threat of lawsuit.
Blissfully, I delete them.

# 24 Media Misquotes Threat From Iran’s President
Sources:
Global Research, January 20, 2007
Title: “Wiped Off The Map—The Rumor of the Century”
Author: Arash Norouzi
http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=viewArticle&code=NOR20070120&articleId=4527
Information Clearing House, May 9, 2006
Title: “Full Text: The President of Iran’s Letter To President Bush”
Translated by Le Monde
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article12984.htm
Student Researchers: Becky Bazell
Faculty Evaluator: Peter Phillips, Ph.D.
Across the world a media story has spread that Iran’s President Ahmadinejad has threatened to destroy Israel, by saying that, “Israel must be wiped off the map.” Contrary to general belief, this statement was actually a misinterpretation. However, it was the Islamic Republic News Service in Iran that first mistranslated the quote. Iran’s Foreign Minister attempted to clarify the statement, but the quote ended up having a life of its own in the corporate media.
Amid heated wrangling over Iran’s nuclear program and the threat of preemptive strikes by the US, the quote has been continually used to reinforce the idea that Iran is being run by extremists seeking the total destruction of Israel.
So what did Ahmadinejad actually say? To quote his exact words in Farsi:
“Imam ghoft een rezhim-e ishghalgar-e qods bayad az safheh-ye ruzgar mahv shavad.”
Rezhim-e is the word “regime,” pronounced just like the English word with an extra “eh” sound at the end. Ahmadinejad did not refer to Israel the country or Israel the landmass, but the Israeli regime. This is a vastly significant distinction, as one cannot wipe a regime off the map. Ahmadinejad did not even refer to Israel by name, he instead used the specific phrase “rezhim-e ishghalgar-e qods” (regime occupying Jerusalem).
A similar statement by Ahmadinejad in December 2006, “As the Soviet Union disappeared, the Zionist regime will also vanish and humanity will be liberated,” has also been misinterpreted.
In May of 2006 President Ahmadinejad published an open letter to President Bush clearly asking for peace and the mutual respect of human rights. He warns that Western media, through contrived and deceptive information, has intensified the climate of fear that leads to attacks on innocent peoples. The letter was not reported in the US news media. Ahmadinejad began the letter writing, “Mr. George Bush, For some time now I have been thinking, how one can justify the undeniable contradictions that exist in the international arena. Can one be a follower of Jesus Christ (PBUH), the great Messenger of God, Feel obliged to respect human rights, Present liberalism as a civilization model, Announce one’s opposition to the proliferation of nuclear weapons and WMDs, Make “War on Terror” his slogan, And finally, Work towards the establishment of a unified international community—a community which Christ and the virtuous of the Earth will one day govern, But at the same time, have countries attacked; The lives, reputations and possessions of people destroyed and on the slight chance of the … of a … criminals in a village city, or convoy for example the entire village, city or convey set ablaze.”
Evaluator Comment
Ahmadinejad declared that Zionism is the West’s apparatus of political oppression against Muslims. He says the “Zionist regime” was imposed on the Islamic world as a strategic bridgehead to ensure domination of the region and its assets. This position is viewed as threatening to many in the West. While threats and counter-threats escalates tensions in the Persian Gulf, I believe it is important for the media to publish both sides of issues and be as accurate as possible by seeking to build understanding rather than fear and anger.
—Peter Phillips
UPDATE BY Arash Norouzi
In May 2007, the US House of Representatives unanimously passed a resolution calling on the U.N. Security Council to charge Ahmadinejad with the crime of inciting genocide “because of his calls for the destruction of the State of Israel”—a violation of the U.N.’s 1948 Genocide Convention—specifically citing the false “wiped off the map” quote from October 2005. It also called for the U.N. to prevent Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons, with the “potential means to the end of carrying out President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s threats against Israel.”
This misquote has become a key component of the push for war with Iran, a war that would make Iraq look like the cakewalk it was predicted to be. Attacking Iran would result in massive death and destruction, affect world oil supplies, provoke terrorism, could initiate the next World War, and might even include the use of nuclear weapons for the first time since WWII. In this heated atmosphere, an accurate narrative is essential in averting the next cataclysmic Mideast intervention. When President Bush emphasizes the importance of taking the words of America’s enemies seriously, that process begins with first determining just what exactly those words are.
Yet my article is about more than just clarifying a mistranslated statement. It’s about the media, propaganda, plagiarism, language, false assumptions ...Functioning much like a puzzle, it engages readers by allowing them to deconstruct the quote and its meaning themselves. This self-verification process adds a compelling aspect in which credibility becomes largely obsolete. The article’s ’punchline’ demonstrates undeniably that members of the mainstream media knowingly spread this rumor, and readers are challenged to check for themselves by comparing linked sources proving this claim.
The idea is not merely to contest a single misquote, but to also promote skepticism about all pre-war intelligence. If this quote is false, then it’s logical to assume that other accusations against Iran could be wrong too—just as they were with Iraq.
The overwhelming ubiquity of this misquote has deterred others from correcting what they probably view as a lost cause. Yet my article alone has been viewed by millions, translated into at least half a dozen languages, garnered radio interviews, inspired videos on YouTube, and become the subject of an entire article in The Bangkok Post. It got the attention of people at the BBC, Washington Post, IAEA, State Department, United Nations, and the Islamic Republic itself. It’s been quoted by numerous journalists, authors and academics, in published letters to the editor, and on call-in TV shows such as on C-SPAN. The Associated Press has now begun citing the “vanish from the page of time” phrase, adding that “independent analysts” have refuted the “map” quote; and Dennis Kucinich was prepared to correct the rumor when asked about the subject on TV recently.
These are hopeful signals that underscore the importance of alternative voices in the media, and their potential effectiveness in influencing the discourse. If the first casualty of war is the truth, then it’s up to the truth tellers—whomever they may be—to enlighten us.

# 25 Who Will Profit from Native Energy?
Source:
LiP Magazine, June 5, 2006
Title: “Native Energy Futures”
Author: Brian Awehali
http://www.lipmagazine.org/articles/featawehali_nativefutures.htm
Student Researchers: Ioana Lupu and Mayra Madrigal
Faculty Evaluator: Dolly Freidel, Ph.D.
Energy on Native American land is becoming big business. According to the Indigenous Environmental Network, 35 percent of the fossil fuel resources in the US are within Indian country. The Department of the Interior estimates that Indian lands hold undiscovered reserves of almost 54 billion tons of coal, 38 trillion cubic feet of natural gas, and 5.4 billion barrels of oil. Tribal lands also contain enormous amounts of alternative energy. “Wind blowing through Indian reservations in just four northern Great Plains states could support almost 200,000 megawatts of wind power,” Winona LaDuke told Indian Country Today in March 2005, “Tribal landholdings in the southwestern US…could generate enough power to eradicate all fossil fuel burning power plants in the US.”
The questions to be answered now are: what sort of energy will Indian lands produce, who will make that decision, and who will end up benefiting from the production?
According to Theresa Rosier, Counselor to the Assistant Secretary for Indian Affairs, “increased energy development in Indian and Alaska Native communities could help the Nation have more reliable homegrown energy supplies.” This, she says, is “consistent with the President’s National Energy Policy to secure America’s energy future.”
Rosier’s statement conveys quite a lot about how the government and the energy sector intend to market the growing shift away from dependence on foreign energy. The idea that “America’s energy future” should be linked to having “more reliable homegrown energy supplies” can be found in native energy-specific legislation that has already passed into law. What this line of thinking fails to take into account is that Native America is not the same as US America. The domestic “supplies” in question belong to sovereign nations, not to the United States or its energy sector.
So far, government plans to deregulate and step up the development of domestic (native) energy resources is being spun as a way to produce clean, efficient energy while helping Native Americans gain greater economic and tribal sovereignty. Critics charge, however, that large energy companies are simply looking to establish lucrative partnerships with tribal corporations, which are largely free of regulation and federal oversight.
For example, in 2003, the Rosebud Sioux of South Dakota, in partnership with NativeEnergy, LLC, completed the first large-scale native-owned wind turbine in history. The project was billed as a way to bring renewable energy–related jobs and training opportunities to the citizens of this sovereign nation, who are among the poorest in all of North America.
NativeEnergy’s President and CEO Tom Boucher, an energy industry vet, financed the Rosebud Sioux project by selling “flexible emissions standards” created by the Kyoto Protocol. These are the tax-deductible pollution credits from ecologically responsible companies (or in this case, Native American tribes), which can then be sold to polluters wishing to “offset” their carbon dioxide generation without actually reducing their emissions.
Since the Rosebud test case proved successful, NativeEnergy moved forward with plans to develop a larger “distributed wind project,” located on eight different reservations. NativeEnergy also became a majority Indian-owned company in August 2005, when the pro-development Intertribal Council on Utility Policy (COUP) purchased a majority stake in the company on behalf of its member tribes.
The COUP-NativeEnergy purchase just happened to coincide with the passage of the 2005 Energy Policy Act. The act contains a number of native energy–specific provisions in its Title V, many of which set alarming precedents.
Most outrageously, it gave the US government the power to grant rights of way through Indian lands without permission from the tribes—if deemed to be in the strategic interests of an energy-related project. Under the guise of “promoting tribal sovereignty,” the act also released the federal government from liability with regard to resource development, shifting responsibility for environmental review and regulation from the federal to tribal governments. Also, according to the Indigenous Environmental Network, the act “rolls back the protections of…critical pieces of legislation that grassroots indigenous peoples utilize to protect our sacred sites.” Some critics have derided the 2005 act as a fire sale on Indian energy, characterizing various incentives as a broad collection of subsidies (federal handouts) for US energy companies.
America’s native peoples may attain a modicum of energy independence and tribal sovereignty through the development of wind, solar, and other renewable energy infrastructure on their lands. But, according to Brian Awehali, it won’t come from getting into bed with, and becoming indebted to, the very industry currently driving the planet to its doom.
UPDATE BY Brian Awehali
I believe the topic of this article was important and urgent because sometimes all that glitters really is gold, even if the marketing copy says it’s green. The long and utterly predictable history where indigenous peoples and US government and corporate interests are both concerned shouldn’t be forgotten as we enter the brave new green era. Marketing for-profit energy schemes on Indian lands as a means of promoting tribal sovereignty is both ludicrous and offensive, as are “green” development plans intrinsically tied to the extraction of fossil fuels in the deregulated Wild West of Indian Country. Energy companies are only interested in native sovereignty because it means operations on Indian lands are not subject to federal regulation or oversight. This is why I included a discussion in my article about the instructive example of the Alaska tribal corporations and the ways they’ve mutated into multi-billion dollar loophole exploiters. (My brief examination of Alaska tribal corporations drew heavily from an excellent Mother Jones article, “Little Big Companies,” by Michael Scherer). It’s also my belief that the probably well-intentioned idea of “green tags,” carbon offset credits, and market-enabled “carbon neutrality” should be examined very closely: Why are we introducing systems for transferring (or trading) the carbon emissions of “First World” polluters to those who contributed least to global warming? I would argue that this is merely a nice-sounding way for the overdeveloped world to purchase the right to continue its pathologically unsustainable mode of existence, while doing little to address the very grave ecological realities we now face.
It’s very hard to know what the impact of this story was, or to gauge mainstream response to it. In my experience, the so-called mainstream has a difficult time absorbing and understanding Native American issues, not least because this mainstream tends to think of indigenous peoples in North America in historical, rather than contemporary, terms. I am, however, encouraged by the number of journalists and writers who are beginning to ask critical questions about greenwashing, and I see my story as adding to that collective body of work.
For more information about energy policy and its impact on indigenous communities of North America, I recommend visiting the Indigenous Environmental Network (www.ienearth.org), and checking out their Native Energy Campaign.

Amnesty International Report 2007

2007-06-01T08:09:00.000-07:00

This report documents human rights issues of concern to Amnesty International during 2006.
>> thereport.amnesty.org

ALERT: re "at fornits" stuff

2007-04-07T23:04:00.000-07:00

ALERT: re "at fornits" stuff - most of that "at fornits" stuff is now history my friends. sorry

This now includes my email addresses - loads of lost emails, sorry!

the article server is extinct - none of those links will work! (server swaps & glitches... someone drops off, sorry! its gone.)

>> the end of an era!

who knows? i may put up an archive of the nearly 9,000 articles that /RENEGADE/ used to serve up, but i am not sure how that could work... maybe try to restore some of the links and other resources at some point (?) who knows?

a new era! maybe no time for all that now. there have been those things; now: mabye something else, some different things...

watch my blogs for updates -

Strider's RENEGADE [activism]
and
Strider's REDEMPTION SONG [movies, music &
thoughts]

!!! a special message to bar: are you enjoying the music?

and, as always:

PEACE!

If I had a hammer

2007-04-07T22:51:00.000-07:00

If I had a hammer
I'd hammer in the morning
I'd hammer in the evening ... all over this land,
I'd hammer out danger
I'd hammer out a warning
I'd hammer out love between all of my brothers and my sisters
All over this land.

If I had a bell
I'd ring it in the morning
I'd ring it in the evening ... all over this land,
I'd ring out danger
I'd ring out a warning
I'd ring out love between all of my brothers and my sisters
All over this land.

If I had a song
I'd sing it in the morning
I'd sing it in the evening ... all over this world,
I'd sing out danger
I'd sing out a warning
I'd sing out love between all of my brothers and my sisters
All over this land.

If I've got a hammer
And I've got a bell
And I've got a song to sing ... all over this land,
It's a hammer of justice
It's a bell of freedom
It's a song about love between all of my brothers and my sisters
All over this land.

War With Iran?

2007-02-23T22:39:00.000-08:00

"War With Iran? Now we'll have to shop even harder!"
freewayblogger.blogspot.com

The Women's Museum in Denmark Grants Asylum to Pregnant Teenager

2007-02-14T17:16:00.000-08:00

From: Jens Galschiøt
Date: Wed, 14 Feb 2007 19:59:48 +0100
Subject: The Women's Museum in Denmark Grants Asylum to Pregnant Teenager

Press release, 14 February 2007

This Press release as Word file:
http://www.aidoh.dk/new-struct/Happenings-and-Projects/2007/Aarhus/GB-Aarhus.doc

**The Women's Museum in Denmark Grants Asylum to Pregnant Teenager**

The Women's Museum in Denmark harbours Danish sculptor Jens Galschiot‚s artwork ŒIn the Name of God‚. The 7 metre high sculpture depicts a crucified pregnant teenager. The crucifix was put up on Wednesday 14 February at the Women‚s Museum, neighbouring the Cathedral of Aarhus.

At the inauguration there were speeches by Mr Bjarne Oerum, chairman of the parish council, curator of the museum Ms Merete Ipsen and the sculptor Jens Galschiot. Mr Oerum stressed the role of art for the renewal of the churches. Ms Ipsen emphasized the role of Mathilde Fibiger, born 1830, who had given name to the square of the exhibition. She was a pioneer for the Danish women‚s emancipation. Ms Ipsen stressed the affinity between the pioneers and the cause of the sculpture.

*From cathedral to cathedral*

The controversial sculpture has been exhibited for a couple of months in front of the Cathedral of Copenhagen, where it was put up in co-operation with the Dean and Parish Council. The exhibition in Aarhus has also a connection to the Cathedral, although the sculpture is displayed under the auspices of the Women‚s Museum.

Jens Galschiot‚s new art manifestation In the Name of God is launched to highlight Christian fundamentalists‚ attempt to the world‚s policy on contraception, alleging that the use of condoms is a kind of abortion and therefore contrary to God‚s will. About this policy the artist declares: The consequences for the proliferation of AIDS are disastrous and the advances of the women‚s movement are being set back to the Victorian era.‰

*From woman to woman

The artist has recently been to Nairobi where he displayed his crucifixion sculpture. The reactions of the 66,000 participants of the World Social Forum were generally benevolent. Especially the women in the demonstrations in the streets of Nairobi and at the venue of the WSF adopted the sculpture and saw it as a symbol of the oppression women that usually follows in the wake of the fundamentalists‚ campaign, Jens Galschiot declares and continues: So I‚m delighted that exactly the Women‚s Museum is the driving force for launching the sculpture here in Aarhus.

**For more info and photos of the event, see
www.aidoh.dk/Aarhus

**The artist: Jens Galschiot
Banevaenget 22 - DK-5270 Odense N
Tel.: +45 6618 4058 ˆ Fax: +45 6618 4158
E-mail: aidoh@aidoh.dk - Internet: www.aidoh.dk

**The Women's Museum in Denmark
Curator Ms Merete Ipsen
Domkirkepladsen 5 DK-8000 Aarhus C - Tel.: +45 86 1864 84
E-mail: mi@womensmuseum.dk
Internet: www.womensmuseum.dk

**Chairman of the parish council ˆ Mr Bjarne Oerum
Skt. Olufs Gade 1, 1. ˆ DK-8000 Aarhus C - Tel.: +45 8612 5497

***************************************

Short presentation: The artist was born in Denmark, 1954. He stakes his art to defend the ethical values of our society, regardless of political, religious or economical interests. His sculptures suddenly appear in public areas and start the performance. Best known are My Inner Beast (European cities in 1993) and the Pillar of Shame (Hong Kong, Mexico and Brazil).

The projects are financed through the sale of Galschiot's bronze sculptures to art collectors all over the world. He has a huge industrial area in Odense, Denmark with a bronze foundry, gallery and workshop. Photos of all Jens Galschiot's sculptures: http://sculptures.aidoh.dk

Hegemony [repost portion of last]

2007-02-05T21:48:00.000-08:00

why would i be interested in a latin american revolutionary?

we are not alone/ what do they think? we live in a rascist, imperialistic and hegemonic republic...

<<< expanded at /RENEGADE/

Hegemony From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Hegemony (pronounced he'gem.?.ni or h?'d??.m?.ni) (Greek: hgemon?a he¯gemonía) is the dominance of one group over other groups, with or without the threat of force, to the extent that, for instance, the dominant party can dictate the terms of trade to its advantage; more broadly, cultural perspectives become skewed to favor the dominant group. The cultural control that hegemony asserts affects commonplace patterns of thought: hegemony controls the way new ideas are rejected or become naturalized in a process that subtly alters notions of common sense in a given society.

Hegemony results in the empowerment of certain cultural beliefs, values, and practices to the submersion and partial exclusion of others. Hegemony influences the perspective of mainstream history, as history is written by the victors for a congruent readership.

throwing lambs

2007-02-03T23:22:00.000-08:00

070202

throwing lambs... sometimes its okay to call the police.

--

some kinda buzz! the horrors of war weigh upon us...

so thank you for the call, i just bought a new battery; plus good news: i got a ride!

people do some weird shit. when was the last time you "whooped?"

please state your name, who you are calling for, and hope

---

070203

common ground cultural exchange and support - a multilingual newsletter serving the community?

--

why would i be interested in a latin american revolutionary?

we are not alone/ what do they think? we live in a racsist, imperialistic and hegemonic republic...

Hegemony From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Hegemony (pronounced he'gem.?.ni or h?'d??.m?.ni) (Greek: hgemon?a he¯gemonía) is the dominance of one group over other groups, with or without the threat of force, to the extent that, for instance, the dominant party can dictate the terms of trade to its advantage; more broadly, cultural perspectives become skewed to favor the dominant group. The cultural control that hegemony asserts affects commonplace patterns of thought: hegemony controls the way new ideas are rejected or become naturalized in a process that subtly alters notions of common sense in a given society.

Hegemony results in the empowerment of certain cultural beliefs, values, and practices to the submersion and partial exclusion of others. Hegemony influences the perspective of mainstream history, as history is written by the victors for a congruent readership.

in the meantime: i hope we don't all get blown up. this world is a mess!

2007-01-28T04:45:00.000-08:00

>Date: Sun, 28 Jan 2007
>Subject: RE: talking
>
>in the meantime: i hope we don't all get blown up. this world is a mess!
>

Happy Birthday Molly Rose!

2006-12-23T21:19:00.000-08:00

we miss you Sweeheart!

i see-feel you out there and inside me,
and know you are always with us

i will always think of Molly as a great revolutionary

- i had that vision of her, and now as i reflect upon her death and her short life i see a bright ray of light, and it says: "this is life and death, my kin. please think of all those that are suffering and dying needlessly these days under the direction of warmongers"

previous:
30 May 2006: Molly - a great revolutionary
i will always think of Molly as a great revolutionary - i had that vision of her, and now as i reflect upon her death and her short life i see a bright ray of light, and it says: "this is life and death, my kin. please think of all ...
-
30 Dec 2005: molly dreaming (be sure to save a tree)

LOVE, Grandpa

How Rent Makes Poverty

2006-12-05T18:11:00.000-08:00

How Rent Makes Poverty

"...Real, practical changes will not begin until poverty is reframed back from a dollar quantity to a moral problem for the nation.

"Rent should be made an open topic -- and a point of accountability."

>>> Complete Article >>>

HAPPY BIRTHDAY, JIMI!

2006-11-27T22:22:00.000-08:00

HAPPY BIRTHDAY, JIMI!

Jimi Hendrix
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia -
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jimi_Hendrix

image hosted by wikipedia.org

Born November 27, 1942 Seattle, Washington, USA
Died September 18, 1970 London, England

James Marshall "Jimi" Hendrix (November 27, 1942 – September 18, 1970) was an American singer, songwriter, and guitarist. Widely hailed by music fans and critics alike, Hendrix is considered to be the most influential electric guitarists in rock music history. He achieved worldwide fame in 1967 playing at the Monterey Pop Festival, then headlined the iconic 1969 Woodstock Festival before his tragic death in 1970, at the age of 27.

more >>>

current "essentials" playlist:

Born Under A Bad Sign Jimi Hendrix Blues 2 of 11
If 6 Was 9 Jimi Hendrix Axis: Bold As Love 7 of 13
Machine Gun Jimi Hendrix Band of Gypsys 2 of 6
All Along the Watchtower Jimi Hendrix Hendrix - The Best of Jimi 5 of 20
Hear My Train A Comin' (Electric) Jimi Hendrix Blues 11 of 11
Manic Depression Jimi Hendrix Hendrix - The Best of Jimi 8 of 20
Foxey Lady Jimi Hendrix Hendrix - The Best of Jimi 11 of 20
Hey Joe Jimi Hendrix Hendrix - The Best of Jimi 4 of 20

the right stuff

2006-11-26T20:57:00.000-08:00

watching The Right Stuff for the first time tonight.

i was totally caught OFF GUARD when my old aussie aboriginie friends [from The Last Wave] and their magic show up in the second half! way too cool.

see the firefly scene [of The Right Stuff], and The Last Wave [all time favorite].

links goe to neflix, just for convenience

An Inconvenient Truth

2006-11-24T15:20:00.000-08:00

the climate crisis is the most serious thing we face, other than the possibility of a nuclear holocaust. drastic climate chage, perhaps much sooner than expected, is coming. it is not just a "possibilty" - climate change is happening now, and will be getting worse. we may still have time to turn it around...

so - what did you do today to reduce your contribution to carbon pollution?

- have you seen the movie "An Inconvenient Truth?" - if so: please be sure to pass the word. it is very good - especially for those who are "confused by the controversy" (which isn't really a controversy, all that doubt was created intentionally).

if you haven't seen it: get it now!

if you rented it, buy a copy and pass it around.

An Inconvenient Truth (2006)
- (@netflix) -
Director-producer Davis Guggenheim (HBO's "Deadwood") captures former Vice President Al Gore in the midst of waging a passionate campaign -- not for the White House, but for the environment. Laying out the facts of global warming without getting political, Gore makes a sobering impression on the audiences who hear his message, urging them to act "boldly, quickly and wisely" … before it's too late to act at all.

See: climatecrisis.net

and PLANT TREES!

/RENEGADE/: Howling Like a Wild Wolf: Overcoming Fear and Undermining the Invader

2006-11-24T15:19:00.000-08:00

/RENEGADE/: Howling Like a Wild Wolf: Overcoming Fear and Undermining the Invader

The Truth Shall Free Us - The Pentagon Papers

2006-11-13T21:31:00.000-08:00

movies to see / history to study / things to think about

The Pentagon Papers

The Pentagon Papers (2003) -
This compelling political drama is based on the true story of high-ranking Pentagon official Daniel Ellsberg, who, during the Nixon era, strove to preserve American democracy by leaking top-secret Defense Department documents to the The New York Times and The Washington Post. The documents in question would eventually become famous as The Pentagon Papers. Stars Alan Arkin, Claire Forlani, James Spader and Paul Giamatti.

(quotes & links ~ netflix / no endorsement, just convenience ~ unless otherwise stated)

see: > > The Pentagon Papers @ Wikipedia > >

I look forward to the release of the IRAQ PAPERS!

other recent viewing, also reccommended:

Thirteen Days (2000) -
When a nuclear missile presence rapidly escalates in Cuba, President Kennedy (Bruce Greenwood) attempts to curb the threat with help from his aides (including Kevin Costner) and generals. After assessing the situation, they quickly realize the Soviets could launch offensive warheads at any moment. Based on historical events, Thirteen Days is a gripping reenactment of a time when the world's fate hung by a thread.

JFK (1991) -
Oliver Stone's fascinating movie is part deconstruction, part re-creation and part history lesson all wrapped up in one. One of America's most enigmatic and mythical presidents, John F. Kennedy, is assassinated in Dallas, and a lone gunman, Lee Harvey Oswald, takes the fall. But was he acting alone when he shot JFK from the Texas Book Depository? This version includes an extra 17 minutes added...

The Postman (1997) -
In the year 2013, amidst the desolation of a decimated, post-apocalypse United States, rogue groups of armed men prey on individuals. The largest of these -- the Holnists, led by General Bethlehem (Will Patton) -- seeks to rule the country. They capture a drifter (Kevin Costner), who escapes at first chance and stumbles on an abandoned mail Jeep. He begins delivering its letters, eventually restoring hope and inspiring revolution.

Last of the Dogmen, 1995 <<< long unknown surviving remnants of Native America discovered

Water, 2005 <<< [child] widows in India

The Last of His Tribe, 1992 <<< the story of Ishi, last of his tribe... ever really consider the true history of California? ...pretty recent...

Good Night, and Good Luck, 2005 <<< ah. the media...

George Clooney's Oscar-nominated docudrama pits TV newsman Edward R. Murrow (David Strathairn) against Sen. Joseph McCarthy and his single-minded crusade to quell the red threat at home. Despite corporate pressure to back off, Murrow and his CBS staff are determined to examine the lies and fear tactics perpetrated by McCarthy during his Communist witch-hunts. The impressive cast includes Robert Downey Jr., Patricia Clarkson and Jeff Daniels.

Munich, 2005 <<< regarding assassination...

see: > > The Pentagon Papers @ Wikipedia > >

And please check out wikipedia if you haven't yet!

/RENEGADE/: 37th National Day of Mourning

2006-11-06T23:33:00.000-08:00

/RENEGADE/: 37th National Day of Mourning

Since 1970, Native Americans have gathered at noon on Cole's Hill in Plymouth to commemorate a National Day of Mourning on the U.S. thanksgiving holiday. Many Native Americans do not celebrate the arrival of the Pilgrims and other European settlers. Thanksgiving day is a reminder of the genocide of millions of Native people, the theft of Native lands, and the relentless assault on Native culture. Participants in National Day of Mourning honor Native ancestors and the struggles of Native peoples to survive today. It is a day of remembrance and spiritual connection as well as a protest of the racism and oppression which Native Americans continue to experience.

good night, and good luck

2006-10-31T20:22:00.000-08:00

bravo! movie highly reccommended. thanks, Geo.

Good Night, and Good Luck (2005)
@ netflix:
George Clooney's Oscar-nominated docudrama pits TV newsman Edward R. Murrow (David Strathairn) against Sen. Joseph McCarthy and his single-minded crusade to quell the red threat at home. Despite corporate pressure to back off, Murrow and his CBS staff are determined to examine the lies and fear tactics perpetrated by McCarthy during his Communist witch-hunts. The impressive cast includes Robert Downey Jr., Patricia Clarkson and Jeff Daniels.

Any of you kids know what McCarthyism is ???
@Wikipedia:
McCarthyism is the term describing a period of intense anti-Communist suspicion in the United States that lasted roughly from the late 1940s to the late 1950s. The term derives from U.S. Senator Joseph McCarthy, a Republican of Wisconsin. The period of McCarthyism is also referred to as the Second Red Scare, and coincided with increased fears of Communist influence on American institutions, espionage by Soviet agents, heightened tension from the Soviet domination of Eastern Europe, the success of the Chinese Communist revolution (1949) and the Korean War (1950-1953).

What do you think the role of "the media" should be?

How about "Cointelpro"? did you ever hear of that?
@Wikipedia:
COINTELPRO (Counter Intelligence Program) is a program of the United States Federal Bureau of Investigation aimed at investigating and disrupting dissident political organizations within the United States. Although covert operations have been employed throughout FBI history, the formal COINTELPRO operations of 1956-1971 were broadly targeted against organizations that were (at the time) considered to have politically radical elements, ranging from those whose stated goal was the violent overthrow of the U.S. government (such as the Weathermen) to non-violent civil rights groups such as Martin Luther King Jr.'s Southern Christian Leadership Conference to violent racist and segregationist groups like the Ku Klux Klan and the American Nazi Party. The founding document of COINTELPRO directed FBI agents to "expose, disrupt, misdirect, discredit, or otherwise neutralize" the activities of these movements and their leaders.

How about Fascism? do you know what it is?
@Wikipedia:
Fascism is a radical political ideology that combines elements of corporatism, authoritarianism, nationalism, militarism, anti-anarchism, anti-communism and anti-liberalism.

so: Since when is it unpatriotic to dissent?

and: Why and how would calling for peace make you a traitor?

kinda makes you think about whats going on in the good ol' USofA these days, don't it?

/RENEGADE/: save whales

2006-10-22T23:43:00.000-07:00

/RENEGADE/: save whales

artwork-clip_01

2006-10-22T22:57:00.000-07:00

re/see_also: center-of-earth

deadelephant.ORG

2006-10-16T16:51:00.000-07:00

Date: Mon, 16 Oct 2006 05:43:28 -0700
From: Bill Mandel
Subject: underground "anti-marketing" campaign against the GOP

This crossed my desk today and will be of interest to you.

DeadElephant.ORG, an "anti-marketing" campaign, distributed friend-to-friend over the web, launched last week against the GOP. The underground campaign features more than 50 bumper-stickers in a single theme which share a distinctive logo - you guessed it: a dead GOP elephant! These are available instantly and FREE directly from the website - just click and print!

The messages capture the earnest self-satisfaction of the neoCons perfectly, and are very funny. Of course no bumper-strip message, however clever, can move public opinion on its own. But picture Dead Elephant logos popping up everywhere... Now THAT will effectively express MASS disaffection with the current leadership, and will help defeat the GOP on November 7th.

Have look for yourself. Print some out. And most important:

TELL EVERYONE YOU KNOW !

Happy culture jamming!

--Bill
--
William (Bill) Mandel

My autobiography, SAYING NO TO POWER (Introduction by Howard Zinn), is a history of how the American people fought to defend and expand its rights since the 1920s (I'm 88) employing the form of the life of a 30s AND 60s activist, one who was involved in most serious movements: student, labor, 45 years of efforts to prevent war with the USSR, civil rights South and North, women's liberation [my late wife appears on 50 pages], 37 years on Pacifica Radio [where I invented talk radio], civil liberties. You may hear/see my testimony before different McCarthy-Cold-War-Era witch-hunting committees [used in six films and a play]) on my website, http://www.billmandel.net I am the author of five books in my academic field. For an autographed copy of SAYING NO TO POWER, send me $24 at 4466 View Pl.,#106, Oakland, CA. 94611

/RENEGADE/: re: Letter to Cousin [re: impeach]

2006-09-30T23:16:00.000-07:00

/RENEGADE/: re: Letter to Cousin [re: impeach]

Keywords = Dereliction of Duty, Treason, Torture, War Crimes, Violation of The Constitution, Conspiracy, IMPEACH BUSH... i can't get past that - and wouldn't even try to, no reason to.

SO: sorry! when i hear "don't send him emails, they have a son who could die, its too upsetting for them" i JUST WANT TO PUKE! - because that kind of thinking is what only drives the madness further on. i have some bit of honor and integrity, i think... and torture and illegal wars just are not okay! i will stand against them in whatever way i can. if Cousin wants to just stay blind its his choice and unfortunate, but don't give me any shit for speaking up.

/RENEGADE/: another letter to my cousin

2006-09-25T04:30:00.000-07:00

...there are other ways to deal with this stuff! too bad that they don't realize that approaching these problems with their limited militaristic mentalities is not the only option, and is in fact probably the worst option at this point - so i have not much else to say... except that there are alternatives, and if we want to survive we had best check them out! we Americans are rapidly becoming the "outcasts" - and it will take generations for it to resolve.

mark my word Cousin! ...are you ready for life in a gulag?

read the complete letter at /RENEGADE/ blog >>>

/RENEGADE/ article server has gone extinct - broken links

2006-09-24T14:25:00.000-07:00

sorry for the broken links, guys! the /RENEGADE/ article server has gone extinct, so any link that goes to "fornits.com/renegade/peaars.cgi?" will not work. i don't think i will be able to fix them all, so please accept my apologies. i may get back to restoring the archive somehow, but no idea how or when that might happen.

PEACE!

Global Call to Action with the Youth of the World

2006-09-24T13:55:00.000-07:00

Global Call to Action with the Youth of the World

Link goes to a post on my /RENEGADE/ blog [not the extinct website] - [is it] Text of a document produced by 10 Nobel Peace Prize laureates directing PeaceJam

update 060905

2006-09-03T14:12:00.000-07:00

UPDATE: FYI - my email is now working [more or less], the /RENEGAE/ article server has gone extict [none of those links will work], and i now have updated the /RENEGAE/ homepage to reflect that. headers and footers of my blogs are not yet updated, no time to get to that yet, but will post further updates and fix those as soon as i can get to it.

update

2006-08-26T21:32:00.000-07:00

UPDATE: FYI - my email is now working [more or less], the /RENEGADE/ article server has gone extict [none of those links will work], and i now have the ability to update the /RENEGADE/ homepage - i just haven't had time to get to that yet. headers and footers etc not yet updated, no time to get to that yet, but will post further updates and fix those.

Counting Bodies Like Sheep To The Rhythm Of The War Drums

2006-08-04T22:54:00.000-07:00

current soutndtrack: Counting Bodies Like Sheep To The Rhythm Of The War Drums

still no email or website access / blogs only

server swap = glitches. sorry.

2006-08-03T19:53:00.000-07:00

server swap = glitches. sorry.

images not showing up | ren article server not serving | lost emails

i can't update my website either; so no notices there

SORRY !!!

UPDATE 6 August:
still no email - still no FTP - i can't update /RENEGADE/ at all, and the article server is probably history. i will try and see if i can get a database dump, and restore it somehow for historical purposes... what do you think? are the nearly 9,000 articles there worth worrying about?

sorry

VOTE: Do you believe President Bush's actions justify impeachment?

2006-07-30T23:25:00.000-07:00

>GO VOTE! / The results, which you get right after you vote, are utterly astounding at this time. 87% are currently in agreement, and almost 300,000 having already voted.

>>msnbc.msn.com/id/10562904/

PEACE!

-- don't you know?

IMPEACH! [articles @ /RENEGADE/ are now extinct] | GO VOTE!

Live Vote
Do you believe President Bush's actions justify impeachment?
Yes, between the secret spying, the deceptions leading to war and
more, there is plenty to justify putting him on trial.
No, like any president, he has made a few missteps, but nothing
approaching "high crimes and misdemeanors."
No, the man has done absolutely nothing wrong. Impeachment would just
be a political lynching.
I don't know.
Vote to see results
Live Vote
Do you believe President Bush's actions justify impeachment? *
291786 responses
Yes, between the secret spying, the deceptions leading to war and
more, there is plenty to justify putting him on trial.
87%
No, like any president, he has made a few missteps, but nothing
approaching "high crimes and misdemeanors."
4.3%
No, the man has done absolutely nothing wrong. Impeachment would just
be a political lynching.
7.2%
I don't know.
1.8%

IMPEACH! [articles @ /RENEGADE/ are now extinct] | GO VOTE!

Born Into Brothels

2006-07-26T22:28:00.000-07:00

image hosted by kids-with-cameras.org

Born Into Brothels (2004) @ Netflix

This Oscar-winning documentary is a portrait of several unforgettable children who live in Calcutta's red-light district, where their mothers work as prostitutes. Spurred by the kids' fascination with her camera, Zana Briski, a photographer documenting life in the brothels, decides to teach them photography. As they begin to look at and record their world through new eyes, the kids awaken to their own talents and sense of worth.

website: kids-with-cameras.org

numerology

2006-07-26T18:20:00.000-07:00

from a friend, based on my info... interesting how accurate! - -

Deep, serious, introspective, and analytical, you accept nothing at face value, and you are always probing into the hidden side or deeper meaning of situations and people. You are fascinated by the mysterious and unknown. You enjoy periods of solitude in peaceful surroundings, and need time to study, reflect, or meditate. You may be given to much daydreaming and flights of the imagination as well. The ocean has a powerful attraction for you. The study of philosophy, psychology, scientific research, metaphysics, or religion appeals to you. You are scientific in your approach to Truth.

Private, reserved, and rather secretive, there are probably very few who truly know and understand your inner thoughts, feelings, hopes, and aspirations. Unless you learn to share your deeper self more freely, and to be less of an idealistic perfectionist, you may be rather lonely.

we want YOU !!! [repost]

2006-07-18T23:11:00.000-07:00

we want YOU !!!

letter to cousin

2006-07-11T01:46:00.000-07:00

ever think about how many thousands of people have been saved by one person here and there, by some sort of effort on their part? or maybe you would rather think about how many killed?

do you ever picture the wastelands of war? ...the plants and animals are all gone; the soil is eroding away...

well, we are talking about saving millions of lives, if not literally the whole planet and our very own race - Earth's entire ecosystem, in fact. nukes are simply unacceptable - no questions asked, and not to mention a bunch of other things.

one has to have at least a few principles, right?

<<< that is a period there, on "no nukes;" and it doesn't matter who has or wants them! diplomacy and negotiation are the only answer here. hopefully the lunatics will find some reason, and our scientific community will be able to save the planet from deadly contaminations over the next several hundreds of thousands of years.

my point, my Cousin, is that it is all of our making,- our Forefathers and now Us who might continue it - and its coming up to "all or nothing." so we are "at the gate" - Lord of the Rings, huh? its up to us to fix it and not continue the old ways of violence and corruption.

so it is this: "Christ! either shit or get off the fucking train, right?"

i said i wouldn't be getting into a pissing contest with you, and sorry about the quotes - i should have stuck with that first one...

you and i just may not agree on the approach. uh, yeah - i guess thats it: you have it all wrong! i am not a liberal = i am a fucking radical! my dear cousin !!! because that is what its going to take - a bit of outside the box thinking, and an ability to challenge the status quo at the very least! these are radical times - just wait and see how crazy it gets = i'll take bets! none of those shelters or safe suits would matter... our entire thinking has to change.

- the first quote that i should have just stuck with -
He who joyfully marches in rank and file has already earned my contempt.
He has been given a large brain by mistake, since for him the spinal cord
would suffice.
- Albert Einstein

--previous--

people have made all this shit up - its our own doing, and its time it was undone else we won't survive

"touch not that most unclean thing"

this is not Star Wars, or Lord of the Rings...

"they" [as in "big brother is going to take care of >>them??"] -
- they/them- are not Wargs - they are people who we are going to have to
live with on this planet. why train them to hate us?

our society is so screwed up!
just think if all those billions went into
creating a truly sane and just society
instead of all the technology needed
to send smart bombs
upon the most politically
and financially lucrative
targets...

its all about power and control, Cousin

we can do much better than that

we want YOU !!!

2006-07-09T23:58:00.000-07:00

we want YOU !!!

Deva

2006-07-06T23:16:00.000-07:00

Deva-ji! please email me!

Center of the Earth

2006-07-03T21:43:00.000-07:00

hey there

here is an artwork of mine that i thought to share with you. i just sent a couple of pictures to a very close circle, then thought: oh yeah! - so here you go - just this one [other links below]. this artwork relates to my own personal journey "down the rabbit hole."

i am not overly thrilled with the photography (flash reflections! - need to reshoot under natural light - there is not that much white in it - its totally washed out in certain reflective areas); and i didn't spend much time with the file [sorry], but you get the idea.

very few people have ever seen this... i guess thats over, since you are looking

check these out if you want -

centeroftheearth

flying (larger image of the above)

phoenix

happy independence day

--previous--
a movie to see ---

"The neurological processes and "quantum uncertainty" of life are explored in this film..."

a movie to see

2006-07-02T02:08:00.000-07:00

we can change the world

i am thinking
of you
so often
in the back
of my mind

! ~ peptides ~!

What the #$*! Do We Know!? (2004)

What the Bleep Do We Know!?

"The neurological processes and "quantum uncertainty" of life are explored in this film..."

"...exploring the links between quantum mechanics, neurobiology, human consciousness and day-to-day reality...

"WHAT THE BLEEP DO WE KNOW?! is a new type of film. It is part documentary, part story, and part elaborate and inspiring visual effects and animations. The protagonist, Amanda, played by Marlee Matlin, finds herself in a fantastic Alice in Wonderland experience when her daily, uninspired life literally begins to unravel, revealing the uncertain world of the quantum field hidden behind what we consider to be our normal, waking reality."

SEE ALSO: center of the earth

Molly - a great revolutionary

2006-05-30T02:50:00.000-07:00

i will always think of Molly as a great revolutionary

- i had that vision of her, and now as i reflect upon her death and her short life i see a bright ray of light, and it says: "this is life and death, my kin. please think of all those that are suffering and dying needlessly these days under the direction of warmongers"

IndiGENIUS Media

2006-05-22T17:32:00.000-07:00

Strider, I thought you might be interested in this blog. She is currently attending
the United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues. Pretty good stuff!
http://indigeniusmedia.blogspot.com/
-=kilmeister=-

IndiGENIUS Media

Be Good, Smile Pretty

2006-05-14T21:35:00.000-07:00

Documentary: Be Good, Smile Pretty (2003)

Be Good, Smile Pretty @ netflix
From Netflix: In March 2001, when Tracy Droz Tragos happened upon a first-hand account of her father's death on a U.S. Naval swift boat in Vietnam, she decided she needed to know exactly who that 25-year-old stranger was. Be Good, Smile Pretty documents Tragos's journey of discovery and the powerfully moving, personal exploration of her grief for the father she never knew, a grief shared by the estimated 20,000 Americans whose fathers were killed in Vietnam.

http://www.orphansofwar.org/

Additional:
Be Good, Smile Pretty
[United States] : Docurama : Distributed by New Video Group, [2004], c2003.
ISBN:
0767060636Description:
1 videocassette (56 min.) : sd., col. ; 1/2 in.Performance Note:
Director of photography, Dan Schmeltzer ... [et al.] ; editor, Jenna McFeely ; music, Christina Lee Agamanolis, Mariana Bernoski, Willow Forbes Williamson.
Interviews with members of the Droz family.
Notes: Originally released as a television documentary program in 2003. VHS, full screen presentation.
Additional Authors: ; Mason, Randy.; Murphy, Michael.; Tragos, Tracy Droz.; Schmeltzer, Dan.; McFeely, Jenna.; Agamanolis, Christina Lee.; Bernoski, Mariana.; Williamson, Willow Forbes.; Independent Television Service.; Orphans of War Foundation (Firm); KCPT (Television station : Kansas City, Mo.); Docurama (Firm); New Video Group.

I HOPE PEOPLE WILL WATCH THIS - JUST A GLIMPSE INTO ONE FAMILY'S LOSS SUFFERED THROUGH WAR

---- NO WAR! IMPEACH THOSE ASSHOLES AND TAKE BACK OUR COUNTRY! US OUT OF IRAQ NOW / HANDS OFF IRAN

SUPPORT OUR TROOPS - BRING THEM HOME! PEACE IS PATRIOTIC.

...why haven't they been thrown in jail yet?

Globalized inspiration

2006-05-06T16:39:00.000-07:00

From: Jens Galschiøt
Thu, 04 May 2006 21:57:21 +0200
Subject: Globalized inspiration

To the press and the mailing list,

We have the pleasure to present you a funny story about globalization, art and photo collages.

* Galschiot creates his sculptures in Denmark ˆ The Hunger March consisting of 20 starved copper sculptures and the three metre high Survival of the Fattest depicting an extremely obese woman sitting on the back of a skinny man. She represents Justitia, the goddess of justice.

* The sculptures are loaded into a container and shipped for Hong Kong where they join the manifestations during the WTO summit, December 2006 together with NGOs from the whole world.

* 4 months later Jens Galschiot comes to India to take his holiday with his family. To his stupefaction the big Indian city of Cochin is crowded with posters with his sculptures!

* The background is that the local trade union had sent some poor female tea-pickers to Hong Kong to demonstrate against the dumping of tea prices in Southern India. The women have taken some photos or found a leaflet with Galschiot‚s sculptures and brought them to the trade unionists in the village. Eventually the photos fell into the hands of NGOs that were launching a film festival against President Bush‚s visit to India. They used the sculptures as illustration on their posters. Even the title of the festival, Survival of the Fattest, was inspired of the Danish sculptures.

>>> Complete Article >>>

Neil Young's new album, Living With War

2006-05-01T18:35:00.000-07:00

Neil Young's new album, Living With War, a collection of anti-Bush anthems featuring the bluntly worded single "Let's Impeach the President," started in a hotel room. "I went down to the coffee machine and there was USA Today," Young tells Rolling Stone."The cover showed a large military craft converted into a flying hospital. The caption said something about how we are making great strides in medicine as a result of the Iraq conflict. That just caught me off guard, and I went upstairs and wrote 'Families' for one of those soldiers who didn't get to come home. Then I cried in my wife's arms. That was the turning point for me."

"The guitar was playing itself," Young says of his Crazy Horse-style solos on Living With War's ten emotionally raw songs - which are backed by a 100-voice choir. "The singers were all told there was a song called 'Let's Impeach the President' and if they weren't comfortable with that, then please don't come," says Young. "More people came than we called."

Legendary backing singer Rosemary Butler, who sang on Jackson Browne's "Running on Empty," assembled the choir on an hour's notice. "I was calling people at 3:30 in the morning for a session at 10 a.m.," Butler says. "Everyone came. As the lyrics came up on the projection screen people were yelling and crying. We were in an exalted state. Neil knows Southern gospel. Neil gets down. He was having so much fun he was blushing from head to toe."

* Listen to the full "Living with War" album at: neilyoung.com

The Worst President in History?

2006-04-28T17:10:00.000-07:00

image hosted by Rollingstone.com

Rollingstone.com: George W. Bush's presidency appears headed for colossal historical disgrace. Barring a cataclysmic event on the order of the terrorist attacks of September 11th, after which the public might rally around the White House once again, there seems to be little the administration can do to avoid being ranked on the lowest tier of U.S. presidents. And that may be the best-case scenario. Many historians are now wondering whether Bush, in fact, will be remembered as the very worst president in all of American history.

>>> Complete Article >>>

put him in jail! The WORST dictator in U.S. history. He ain't no president no how!

IMPEACH!

060426 - many holocausts

2006-04-26T18:55:00.000-07:00

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Redemption Song - movies, music & thoughts - 060426

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hmm. yesterday was Holocaust Remembrance Day. did anybody know that?

...many holocausts...Burma, Rwanda, IRAQ...down through the ages we go...

suggested viewing: Amistad (1997)

re: "another holocaust" - Steven Spielberg directed this story about the 1839 revolt aboard Spanish slave ship La Amistad and the uprising's tragic aftermath. An African-born slave (Djimon Hounsou) leads a mutiny against his brutal captors. Because the ship is in American waters, a U.S. court must decide the slaves' fate. In an eloquent courtroom speech, ex-president John Quincy Adams (Anthony Hopkins) argues for the Africans' freedom.

see netflix. for additional info

see also below: paper clips project

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PEACE! Strider

Home: fornits.com/renegade/
Blogs:
Strider's RENEGADE [activism]
striders-renegade.blogspot.com
Strider's REDEMPTION SONG [movies, music & thoughts] << this is where you are
top of this blog

climate change - expect the worst [snipped from "The Queen worries about a Bush"]

2006-04-21T23:22:00.000-07:00

Since roughly half the world's 6.5 billion people live near
coastlines, a three-foot sea-level rise would be [even more] punishing
[overseas]. Amsterdam, Venice, Cairo, Shanghai, Manila, and Calcutta
are some of the cities most threatened. In many places the people and
governments are too poor to erect adequate barriers-think of
low-lying Bangladesh, where an estimated 18 million people are at
risk-so experts fear that they will migrate to neighboring lands,
raising the prospect of armed conflict. A Pentagon-commissioned study
warned in 2003 that climate change could bring mega-droughts, mass
starvation, and even nuclear war as countries such as China, India,
and Pakistan battle over scarce food and water.

These are just some of the reasons why David King wrote in Science in
2004, "Climate change is the most severe problem that we are facing
today-more serious even than the threat of terrorism."

>>> Complete Article >>>

Paper Clips Project

2006-04-21T17:15:00.000-07:00

image hosted by paperclipsstore.com

from http://www.marionschools.org/holocaust/beginninghol.htm -

In 1998 eighth grade students at Whitwell Middle School began an after-school study of the Holocaust. The goal of this study was to teach students the importance of respecting different cultures as well as understanding the effects of intolerance. As the study progressed, the sheer number of Jews who were exterminated by the Nazis overwhelmed the students. Six million was a number that the students could not remotely grasp. The students asked Sandra Roberts and David Smith if they could collect something to help them understand the enormity of this extermination. The teachers told the students to ask permission of principal, Linda M. Hooper. She gave the students permission to begin a collection, IF, they could find something to collect that would have meaning to the project. After some research on the Internet, the students decided to collect paper clips because they discovered that paper clips were 1) invented by Norwegians and 2) that Norwegians wore them on their lapels as a silent protest against Nazi occupation in WWII.

Students began bringing in paper clips. They wrote letters to famous people asking for a paper clip. The students also asked people to share their reasons for sending a paper clip. To date approximately 30 million paperclips have been sent to Whitwell Middle School. In addition, the project has received 30 thousand + letters, documents, and artifacts. All of these have been counted and catalogued by students and are on display in the Children's Holocaust Memorial and in the school library.

The paper clip collection has become a part of the "Children's Holocaust Memorial" created by the students, staff, and community of Whitwell Middle School. The Memorial contains 11 million paper clips housed in an authentic German transport car honoring the lives of all people murdered by the Nazis. And eleven million other paper clips are contained in a monument honoring the children of Terezin. Eighteen (for chai-Hebrew for life) butterflies (the Christain symbol of renewal) enhance the grounds around the rail car. The students, staff, and community of Whitwell Middle School have transformed the car from a death car into a symbol of renewed life honoring the lives of those murdered by the Nazis. For generations of Whitwell students, a paper clip will never again be just a paper clip. Instead, the paper clip is a reminder of the importance of perseverance, empathy, tolerance, and understanding.

- the movie -

RELEASE DATE: MARCH 7, 2006

When the students of Tennessee's Whitwell Middle School began studying the Holocaust as a way to learn about intolerance and diversity, nobody could have predicted the results. In 2001, the Paper Clip Project culminated in a unique memorial that changed the lives of those who created it, as well as touching Holocaust survivors and countless communities.

Because Norwegians invented the paper clip and used it as a symbol of solidarity against the Nazis, students started collecting them to help visualize such vast numbers of victims. As word spread online and in the media, paper clips poured in from around the world, 11 million of which are enshrined in an authentic German railcar standing in the schoolyard. “Patiently told and lovingly made” ( Variety ), this inspiring, award-winning documentary shows how even small-town students and educators can teach the world powerful lessons.

Rating: Rated G Genre: Documentary Run Time: TBD- 2 discs DVD SKU#: (8) 29567 0322-2 (0) DVD SRP: $24.99

For those of you interested in ordering the updated versions of the documentary Paper Clips, it is now available through this web address - www.paperclipsstore.com. If you order through this address, a portion of the sales will go to support the goals of the Children's Holocaust Memorial at Whitwell Middle School.

>>> PAPER CLIPS PROJECT HOME >>>

060415

2006-04-16T00:54:00.000-07:00

just watched Constantine. Have you seen that? mindblower [special effects galore] with a surprise bonus: APC music video of Passive [eMOTIVe] - very cool. and then, just now on the radio: Lightening Crashes by Live; makes me think of angel songs - She Talks To Angels by black crowes, etc... maybe i will do an angels theme compilation - appropriate for Easter.

snippet

2006-04-14T21:47:00.000-07:00

Andrew Sullivan, one of the blogging pioneers, is finishing "The Conservative Soul: How We Lost It; How to Get It Back." He calls it "an attempt to grapple with the way in which American conservatism has shifted in recent years from an emphasis on small government, individual freedom and a 'leave-us-alone' coalition into a big-spending, big-government force for correcting human immorality and delivering us from foreign evil."

from Blogging Manifestos
>>> Complete Article >>>
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/01/22/AR2006012201084.html

Machine Gun

2006-04-10T21:31:00.000-07:00

current track: Machine Gun | Jimi Hendrix | Band of Gypsys

don't miss it!

/RENEGADE/ - Articles posted in the last 40 days

tonight's playlist

2006-04-06T23:44:00.000-07:00

Name Artist Album:
Track 09 Slipknot vol. 3
Lost in Hollywood System Of A Down Mezmerize
Wonder What's Next Chevelle Wonder What's Next
No Quarter Led Zeppelin Houses of the Holy
Catfish Blues Jimi Hendrix Blues
Track 13 Korn Untouchables
Let's Have A War A Perfect Circle eMOTIVe
Going Up The Country Canned Heat The Best of Canned Heat
Redemption Song Bob Marley Legend
Woodstock Improvisation Jimi Hendrix Woodstock
Aenema Tool Aenima
Track 21 Sublime 40oz of freedom
Good Times Bad Times Led Zeppelin Led Zeppelin I
Rock And Roll Music To The World Ten Years After Essential
Machine Gun Jimi Hendrix Band of Gypsys

PEACE!

GE-Free Action Alert

2006-04-05T00:19:00.000-07:00

GE-Free Action Alert - Letters needed, get involved! -
2006-04-04 From: "Daniel Solnit" dsolnit@gefreesonoma.org Subject: GE-Free Action Alert - Letters needed, get involved! Date: Mon, 3 Apr 2006 19:38:27 -0700 Dear Strider Every day brings new wins - and some losses - in the fight....
>>> Complete Article >>>

crash

2006-03-27T18:06:00.000-08:00

one word: astonishing!

crash @ netflix

/RENEGADE/: Sea levels to rise due to global warming

2006-03-24T18:10:00.000-08:00

Glaciers and ice sheets on opposite ends of the Earth are melting faster than previously thought and could cause sea levels around the world to rise as much as 13 to 20 feet by the end of the century, scientists are reporting today.

/RENEGADE/: Sea levels to rise due to global warming

060316

2006-03-17T00:15:00.000-08:00

Redemption Song - movies, music & thoughts - 060316 -
thats a sweet taste, man | JAZZ | The Blues... life changing

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THOUGHT --

maybe a new phase coming up here - jazz... its brewing...

thats a sweet taste, man! ...life changing

MOVIES & MUSIC --

- TONIGHT -

finished 10 DVD PBS Series tonight - JAZZ - VERY worthwhile; in fact, for me, is was life-changing

"... .. . Spanning more than 19 hours, Jazz is, of course, about a lot more than what many have called America's classical music--especially in episodes 1 through 7. It's here that Burns unearths precious visual images of jazz musicians and hangs historical narratives around the music with convincing authority. .. ..." - from/link goes to amazon.com [for more info only]

- SEE ASLO -

The Blues [actually, watch you should this series first, "life-changing" as well, and then JAZZ] - of course that all especially applies to you fellow musicians out there, but to everyone else as well! there are messages many there

-- "This PBS series, executive produced by Martin Scorsese, consists of seven feature-length films that capture the essence of the blues while exploring how this art form so deeply influenced music and people the world over. The films include such treasures as rare video footage, interviews and unforgettable performances by some of the greatest musicians in blues history..." - from/link goes to "The Blues" at netflix [for more info only]

Search this blog for "The Blues"

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PEACE! strider

home: fornits.com/renegade/
blogs:
- strider's RENEGADE [activism] -
striders-renegade.blogspot.com
- strider's REDEMPTION SONG [movies, music & thoughts] -
striders-redemption-song.blogspot.com << top of this blog

Final Senate Patriot Act vote tomorrow!

2006-02-27T18:49:00.000-08:00

just posted to /RENEGADE/ blog >>> Although lawmakers from both sides of the aisle agree that the president has overstepped his authority, Congress is now on the brink of voting to reauthorize and expand the Patriot Act, which would make secret searches of Americans' financial and internet records more coercive and more punitive... __click for more__

water

2006-02-18T02:15:00.000-08:00

>what we have done to this planet is most likelly irreversible...

water... its the key to life

go to where your water comes from, and enhance every inch of its flow from heaven to earth and back again - if we don't respect it, and fix it, our species will die out along with many others.

060215 - thought[s] for the day

2006-02-15T21:23:00.000-08:00

may never catch up with "movies watched" - tiz a long list since... as for music: playing my dobro - thats the best thing going on... just me and some improvisations. but i do need to chart some stuff out, and actually start playing "songs."

--

there is no need to be impolite

--

i always feel like there is something that i am supposed to be doing / hard to relax

--

cried watching Greendale last night. neil: a masterpiece

Greendale @ Netflix

--

previous/unposted[?]/random ---

-- thought 060111

thought.

oil money war = profit.

uh, yeah.

cellular sex

-- the true barbarism [051221]

pass it on - - -

humanity: it is time to give up your barbaric ways! weapons are obsolete, really.
we have technology, but lack wisdom;

anything made to kill humans - touch not this most unclean thing.

-- thought 060106

do you have the time?

do you have the time to watch how a fish acts?

-- thought 051210

re previous "be sure to turn stuff off. when you turn on a
light, think about which ones you can turn off" - - -

before you turn on anything, think about what you should
turn off

question - how many towns and villages are on this planet?
how many "spots?" ...i could be living here, or there... how
many things can be shut off?

-- thought 051122

i should ice
no...

i should play my guitar,
but...

i need to...

-- thought 051113

it seems that the human population of the world must be reduced drastically

whether this be through design, warfare, famine, pestilence - that is to be seen
- probably a combination of the later three

one thing, however, concerns me - the mess, the toxics that we will leave behind
for generations yet to be born to deal with

someone who knows the hazards and how to deal with them must survive
- perhaps they shall become the new "priests"

-- thought 051017

i've brought you into this reality [or helped, anyway]
- - a very wierd world with too many people in it...
the same thing happened to me!
only i can't imagine how it must really be for you now,
so many people now, so much more wierdness!
it seems to be exponential...

what we have done to this planet is most likelly irreversible...
there will be some "evolution" going on
- survival of the fittest, you know?

rampant corruption and illegal wars are one thing,
while we many people are having something of a life
and are just living on here right now;
but think of this:

roving hordes of starving masses,
- starving, and just trying to stay alive...
and you and ours among them

articles last ten days @ /RENEGADE/

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PEACE! strider

home: fornits.com/renegade/
blogs:
- strider's RENEGADE [activism] -
striders-renegade.blogspot.com
- strider's REDEMPTION SONG [movies, music & thoughts] -
striders-redemption-song.blogspot.com << top of this blog

Recent articles posted to the /RENEGADE/ article server

2006-01-20T17:29:00.000-08:00

i'll catch up on movies & music stuff later...

>>> Impeachment, text of Gore speech; anti-Wal-Mart song

>>> The Impeachment of George W. Bush

>>> An NSA Whistleblower Speaks Out

IMPEACH BUSH! - put him in jail! the WORST president in US history

articles last ten days @ /RENEGADE/

060107

2006-01-07T17:53:00.000-08:00

Redemption Song - movies, music & thoughts - 060107 -
Yi Yi [A One and a Two] | Finding Neverland | RAN | Akira Kurosawa | Don Juan De Marco | To Live [Huozhe] | Bless the Child | Shogun | Captain Corelli's Mandolin | Witness | Peter Weir | Johnny Cash - Hurt | "Impeach" is the word... | pbs.org | zoomrang.com | freewayblogger.blogspot.com & freewayblogger.com

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MOVIES --

- CURRENT -

Yi Yi (2000) [A One and a Two]
Among movie critics' highest-rated foreign films of 2000, Yi Yi chronicles three generations of a Taiwanese family mired in a crisis of self-doubt. A chance meeting with a former lover compels a father to question the assumptions on which his life is based. Warm and thoughtful, Yi Yi posits that truth is something we may never know.
Cast: Nien-Jen Wu, Elaine Jin, Issey Ogata, Kelly Lee, Jonathan Chang, Hsi-Sheng Chen, Su-Yun Ko
Director: Edward Yang

additional info:

Yi Yi = A one and a two /
New York, NY : Winstar TV & Video, Distributed by Fox Lorber Films, [2001], c1999.
ISBN: 0794200540
Description: 2 videocassettes (173 min.) : sd., col. ; 1/2 in.
Cinematography, Wei-han Yang ; editor, Bo-wen Chen ; music, Kai-Li Peng ; production designer, Peng. Nien-Jen Wu, Elaine Jin, Issey Ogata, Kelly Lee, Jonathan Chang.
Videocassette release of the 1999 motion picture.
In Mandarin with English subtitles.
Additional Authors: Kawai, Shinya. Tsukeda, Naoko. Yang, Dechang, 1947- Wu, Nien-Jen. Jin, Elaine. Ogata, Issey. Lee, Kelly. Zhang, Wangyang. Yang, Wei-han. Chen, Bo-wen. Peng, Kai-Li. Peng. WinStar Cinema (Firm) Pony Canyon Inc. Omega Project Co. Ltd. Atom Films (Firm) Fox Lorber Films.

- LAST NIGHT -

Finding Neverland (2004) [J.M. Barrie's Neverland]
Peter Pan and the denizens of Neverland have captured the hearts and minds of J.M. Barrie's readers. But how did the imaginative author ever envision a world so wondrous yet perilous? Johnny Depp plays Barrie, a writer inspired by genius and dedicated to seeing his vision come to life onstage at the Duke of York's Theatre in 1904 London. Kate Winslet co-stars in this magical film that nabbed seven Oscar nominations and won Best Original Score.
Cast: Johnny Depp, Kate Winslet, Julie Christie, Radha Mitchell, Dustin Hoffman, Freddie Highmore, Joe Prospero, Nick Roud, Luke Spill, Ian Hart, Kelly Macdonald, Mackenzie Crook
Director: Marc Forster

- RECENT -

RAN

image hosted by reku.freeblog.hu

image hosted by pbs.org

Ran (1985)
Legendary Japanese auteur Akira Kurosawa retells Shakespeare's classic tragedy King Lear against a samurai backdrop. Tatsuya Nakadia is a warlord who transfers his kingdom to his eldest son. A power struggle ensues, incited by his two disinherited younger sons. Kurosawa is a master storyteller (almost on par with The Bard himself), and Ran ranks among the maestro's most compelling films.
Cast: Tatsuya Nakadai, Akira Terao, Jinpachi Nezu, Daisuke Ryu, Mieko Harada, Yoshiko Miyazaki, Takashi Nomura, Hisashi Igawa, Masayuki Yui, Kazuo Kato, Norio Matsui, Toshiya Ito, Kenji Kodama
Director: Akira Kurosawa

from pbs.org -
A work of intense bitterness and melancholy, RAN shows where Kurosawa went after RED BEARD. As he did in THRONE OF BLOOD, Kurosawa transposes a Shakespearean source (here, "King Lear"; "Macbeth" in the earlier film) to 16th-century Japan and uses the bloody samurai wars and social disintegration of the medieval period as a framework for constructing a Buddhist vision of hell. Kurosawa said that all of the technological progress of the 20th century had only taught people how to kill each other more efficiently, and in this film he shows that forces of violence and destruction, once unleashed, destroy all in their path.
The film's tone is remote, cold, epic. Kurosawa depicts a world devoid of heroes or hope, and the grand majesty of his pessimism gives the film its power and bite. RAN is the culminating work of the melancholy period in his art that lasted from 1970 to 1985. While he moved beyond this pessimism in his last three films, he never again worked on the kind of grand and lavish scale that he did here. RAN contains sequences that only a master director, a giant of cinema, could conceive and design. The most impressive of these is the huge samurai battle and massacre, climaxing with a burning castle, and filmed by Kurosawa as if it were a scroll of hell. This film has the unmistakable aura of greatness.
-- Stephen Prince

"What has always troubled me about 'King Lear' is that Shakespeare gives his characters no past. ... In RAN, I have tried to give Lear a history."
From KUROSAWA.

see also: pbs.org/wnet/gperf/shows/kurosawa

<< speaking of Akira Kurosawa [Kurosawa Akira] -
search this blog for Akira Kurosawa
see also, previous: 051107 [Throne of Blood]
see also, previous: 051229 [Red Beard]

google Akira Kurosawa [Kurosawa Akira]

<<< a little inspiration there, quentin? [see especially the scene where the evil fox devil gets its head cut off]

Don Juan De Marco (1995)
Psychiatrist Marlon Brando is assigned to diagnose a mysterious young man (Johnny Depp) who's convinced that he's Don Juan De Marco, a legendary lover and swashbuckler. The journey into Don Juan's past revitalizes the doctor's own relationship with his wife (Faye Dunaway). The mix of old and new star power plus charm to spare makes this a great first date DVD. The café singer is Selena, who died just weeks before this film's release.
Cast: Faye Dunaway, Marlon Brando, Johnny Depp, Selena
Director: Jeremy Leven

To Live (1994) [Huozhe]
A bold, energetic masterpiece from Zhang Yimou, the foremost director from China's influential "fifth generation" of filmmakers. Continuing his brilliant collaboration with China's best-known actress, Gong Li, Zhang weaves a tapestry of personal and political events, following the struggles of an impoverished husband and wife (Ge You and Li) from their heyday in the 1940s to the hardships that accompanied the Cultural Revolution in the 1960s.
Cast: Ge You, Li Gong, Ben Niu, Deng Fei, Jiang Wu, Dahong Ni, Guo Tao, Liu Tianchi
Director: Yimou Zhang

Bless the Child (2000)
Kim Basinger stars as Maggie O'Connor, a woman whose well-ordered, practical universe has no room for such concepts as Good and Evil. But when her six-year-old niece Cody is forcibly abducted, Maggie learns that Evil is very real indeed.
Cast: Kim Basinger, Jimmy Smits, Holliston Coleman, Rufus Sewell, Christina Ricci, Lumi Cavazos, Dimitra Arliss, Ian Holm, Dan Warry-Smith, Gary Hudson, Yan Birch
Director: Chuck Russell

Shogun, again. see previous: Redemption Song - 050820.1a

search this blog for Toshiro Mifune
google Toshiro Mifune

search this blog for posts which mention Shogun

Captain Corelli's Mandolin (2001)
Dr. Iannis (John Hurt) and his beautiful daughter, Pelagia (Penélope Cruz), live an idyllic life on the Greek island of Cephallonia -- that is, until Italian forces occupy it during World War II. When Capt. Corelli (Nicolas Cage) is placed in the Iannis home as a boarder, he and Pelagia are quickly smitten with each other. But when the Nazis arrive, Corelli must fight to liberate the island from the real enemy.
Cast: Nicolas Cage, Penelope Cruz, John Hurt, Christian Bale, David Morrissey, Irene Papas, Patrick Malahide, Paco Reconti
Director: John Madden

some funky Indian musical

Witness (1985)
In director Peter Weir's tense thriller, cop John Book (Harrison Ford) goes undercover in an Amish community to protect a boy who witnessed a murder. Once inside, the faux-Amish Block must adjust to major culture shock while cautiously romancing the child's mother (Kelly McGillis). Suspense and romance intermingle memorably in William Kelly's airtight script, a frequent model for budding screenwriters.
Cast: Harrison Ford, Kelly McGillis, Josef Sommer, Lukas Haas, Jan Rubes, Alexander Godunov, Danny Glover, Brent Jennings, Patti LuPone, Angus MacInnes, Frederick Rolf, Viggo Mortensen
Director: Peter Weir

<< speaking of Peter Weir, search this blog for posts which mention him or google Peter Weir

above quote[s] from netflix unless otherwise noted

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MUSIC --

Of special note -

Johnny Cash - Hurt
From the Grammy nominated album American IV: The Man Comes Around

image hosted by zoomrang.com

johnnycash.com

from stagepassnews.com -
If someone would have told me that Johnny Cash listened to a 'Nine Inch Nail' song let alone cover one, I would have thought this person was one fry short of a happy meal. ------- Johnny Cash, the living legend and icon of country music for almost 50 years worked absolute magic on the Trent Reznor song 'Hurt'. I for one was completely blown away, and I'm not really all that much a country music buff. There is something about the delivery that was as unnerving as it was powerful coming from this man. Probably the most moving video I've ever seen, bar none.

google Johnny Cash

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THOUGHTS --

"Impeach" is the word...
Hello Everyone, Some of the folks from Daily Kos are teaming up with the freewaybloggers to reacquaint the American people with the word "Impeach" next week, with signhanging to begin on the 8th and 9th. Many of us will simply be posting the word "Impeach", but it is free speech after all, and people can say what they like.

>>> Complete Article with links >>>

- LINK[S] OF THE DAY -

pbs.org

zoomrang.com

freewayblogger.blogspot.com

freewayblogger.com - Free Speech - Use it or Lose it

articles last ten days @ /RENEGADE/

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PEACE! strider

home: fornits.com/renegade/
blogs:
- strider's RENEGADE [activism] -
striders-renegade.blogspot.com
- strider's REDEMPTION SONG [movies, music & thoughts] -
striders-redemption-song.blogspot.com << top of this blog

051229

2005-12-30T00:40:00.000-08:00

Redemption Song - movies, music & thoughts - 051229 -
Grizzly Man | Red Beard | The Road Home | Radio | Super Size Me | save a tree | pbs.org | supersizeme.com

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MOVIES --

- TONIGHT -

Grizzly Man image hosted by usatoday.com

Grizzly Man (2005)
Renowned nonfiction director Werner Herzog chronicles the tragic and untimely death of outdoorsman Timothy Treadwell, who devoted his life to studying grizzly bears living in the Alaskan wilderness -- only to have one of them maul him to death. Pieced together mainly from Treadwell's own video footage, this fascinating documentary goes deep into the wilderness of one man's mind to uncover how he spent his final days.
Cast: Timothy Treadwell, Amie Huguenard, Werner Herzog, Franc G. Fallico, Warren Queeney, Willy Fulton, Sam Egli, Marnie Gaede, Marc Gaede, Larry Van Daele
Director: Werner Herzog
A review by Nathan D. Champion:
This is the first great movie of 2005. Even with such an easy hook (half-sane guy living among wild bears in Alaska) it defies easy catagorization. It's a film about obsession, man's relationship with nature, and an adventurous spirit that finds its calling. It's also, most importantly, a film about filmmaking. There is no way to take Tim Treadwell's life as anything other than a scientific misnomer; he did no research, had no training, and though he claimed to be protecting his bears, the one scene in which intruders approach finds him hiding in the bushes. However, Herzog immediately realizes that his real gift was the footage he left behind. It's filled with psychotic rants, half-baked observations about the bears, silly professions of love to the bears... all encompassing an incredible self-portrait of a man who didn't feel at home in an increasingly impersonal society and journeyed into Alaska with his camera to discover an understanding of himself. Treadwell has precious little self-awareness, and Grizzly Man is all about how Herzog is able to discover a focus and insight into Treadwell's self-analytic work that Treadwell couldn't have done himself. Viewers expecting a wildlife film will surely be disappointed; this is a man and his camera, and how living in the wild gave him the identity he was looking for. Brilliant stuff.

- RECENT -

Red Beard image hosted by pbs.org

Red Beard (1965) [Akahige]
A testament to the goodness of humankind, Akira Kurosawa's Red Beard (Akahige) chronicles the tumultuous relationship between an arrogant young doctor and a compassionate clinic director. Toshiro Mifune, in his last role for Kurosawa, gives a powerhouse performance as the dignified yet passionate director who guides his embittered intern to maturity, teaching him to appreciate the lives of his destitute patients.
Cast: Toshiro Mifune, Yuzo Kayama, Kamatari Fujiwara, Tsutomu Yamazaki, Yoshio Tsuchiya, Tatsuyoshi Ehara, Reiko Dan, Akemi Negishi
Director: Akira Kurosawa

The Road Home (2001) [Wo de fu qin mu qin]
Veteran director Zhang Yimou this time trains his camera on a love story between a Chinese boy and girl that endures for 40 years. Starring Zhang Ziyi (Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon), The Road Home tells the tale of Zhao Di (Ziyi) and how she met the love of her life, Luo Changyu -- a new schoolteacher assigned to teach the children in her small village.
Cast: Ziyi Zhang, Honglei Sun, Hao Zheng, Yuelin Zhao, Bin Li, Guifa Chang, Wencheng Sung, Qi Liu, Zhongxi Zhang
Director: Yimou Zhang

Radio (2003)
A small-town high school football coach (Ed Harris) befriends an illiterate, developmentally disabled man (Cuba Gooding Jr.) nicknamed "Radio," who has always been the target of jokes and teasing. Although their friendship raises eyebrows at first, Radio's growth under the coach's guidance ultimately inspires the local townsfolk. Based on the true story of the life of James Robert Kennedy.
Cast: Ed Harris, Cuba Gooding Jr., Riley Smith, Sarah Drew, Debra Winger, Alfre Woodard, S. Epatha Merkerson, Chris Mulkey
Director: Michael Tollin

image hosted by supersizeme.com

Super Size Me (2004)
Two out of three Americans are overweight or obese, but where does personal responsibility end and corporate responsibility take over? On the heels of recent lawsuits against McDonald's, director Morgan Spurlock takes a hilarious and often terrifying look at the effects of fast food on the human body. Spurlock spends a month of eating nothing but McDonald's food, ordering everything on the menu at least once and "super-sizing" his order if asked.
Cast: Morgan Spurlock, Bridget Bennett, Dr. Lisa Ganjhu, Dr. Daryl Isaacs, Alexandra Jamieson, Dr. Stephen Siegel
Director: Morgan Spurlock

Time and Tide (2000) [Seunlau ngaklau]
Tyler (Nicholas Tse) is a restless, streetwise bartender who needs to make some cash quick -- so he takes a job at a bodyguard company. On assignment to protect a wealthy businessman, he meets a former mercenary named Juan (Wu Bai), and the two become fast friends. But when Tyler learns of an impending assassination, his friendship with Juan will be tested. Hark Tsui directs this high-flying Hong Kong action-adventure.
Cast: Nicholas Tse, Wu Bai, Candy Lo, Cathy Tsui, Anthony Wong Chau-Sang
Director: Tsui Hark

above quote[s] from netflix

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THOUGHTS --

be sure to save a tree

molly dreaming

PEACE!

- LINK[S] OF THE DAY -

pbs.org

supersizeme.com

articles last ten days @ /RENEGADE/

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PEACE! strider

home: fornits.com/renegade/
blogs:
- strider's RENEGADE [activism] -
striders-renegade.blogspot.com
- strider's REDEMPTION SONG [movies, music & thoughts] -
striders-redemption-song.blogspot.com << top of this blog

051225.2 - words | peace

2005-12-25T21:41:00.000-08:00

Redemption Song - movies, music & thoughts - 051225.2 -
words | peace

hello, good day! how are you?
konichiwa
buenos dias! como estas?
------
please
dozo
por favor
------
thank you
domo | arigato
gracias
------
peace
wabi *see below [wabi-sabi]
paz
------
understand?
wakarimas?
comprende?
------
yes | underdstood
hai | wakarimashta
si | comprende
------
no | negative
niyeh [??] | wakarimasen
no
------
how do you say?
como se dice?
------
sorry
excuse me
gomen nasai
------
bye | go with the Gods
sayonara ??
adios [via con dios]
------
* Wabi-sabi [from above "peace/paz"]
- From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
at en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wabi-sabi --

Wabi-sabi =
represents a comprehensive Japanese world view or aesthetic. It is difficult to explain wabi-sabi in Western terms, but the aesthetic is sometimes described as one of beauty that is imperfect, impermanent, or incomplete. A concept derived from the Buddhist assertion of the first noble truth - Dukkha.

According to Leonard Koren, wabi-sabi is the most conspicuous and characteristic feature of what we think of as traditional Japanese beauty and it "occupies roughly the same position in the Japanese pantheon of aesthetic values as do the Greek ideals of beauty and perfection in the West." Andrew Juniper claims, "if an object or expression can bring about, within us, a sense of serene melancholy and a spiritual longing, then that object could be said to be wabi sabi." Richard R. Powell summarizes by saying "It (wabi-sabi) nurtures all that is authentic by acknowledging three simple realities: nothing lasts, nothing is finished, and nothing is perfect."

Examining the meanings of the component words wabi and sabi, we find sentiments of solitude and desolation. In a Zen view of the universe, these may be viewed as positive characteristics, representing liberation from a material world and transcendence to a simpler life. Zen philosophy itself, however, warns that genuine understanding cannot be achieved through words or language, so accepting wabi-sabi on nonverbal terms may be the most appropriate approach.

<<< i learned of this [the word "wabi"] from/through uncle george anderson and his thesis on wabi-cho-no-yu, [and his] the tea cereomony. thanks g. how are you? hasn't it been a long time since i have heard your sakuhachi?

------

peace on earth | wabi-sabi | paz = todos los dios... love you!

------

articles last ten days @ /RENEGADE/

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PEACE! strider

home: fornits.com/renegade/
blogs:
- strider's RENEGADE [activism] -
striders-renegade.blogspot.com
- strider's REDEMPTION SONG [movies, music & thoughts] -
striders-redemption-song.blogspot.com << top of this blog

051225

2005-12-25T00:58:00.000-08:00

Redemption Song - movies, music & thoughts - 051225 -
World Charter for Nature

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MOVIES --MUSIC -- will catch up later

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THOUGHTS -- for now it is this -

World Charter for Nature (1982)

see also - seashepherd.org

articles last ten days @ /RENEGADE/

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PEACE! strider

home: fornits.com/renegade/
blogs:
- strider's RENEGADE [activism] -
striders-renegade.blogspot.com
- strider's REDEMPTION SONG [movies, music & thoughts] -
striders-redemption-song.blogspot.com << top of this blog

051219

2005-12-19T17:18:00.000-08:00

Redemption Song - movies, music & thoughts - 051219 -
Ponette | Dead Poets Society | The Nasty Girl | The Old Man and the Sea | My First Mister | Led Zeppelin pix | save a tree | a selection of articles from yesterday's t r u t h o u t

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MOVIES --

- TONIGHT -

Ponette (1996)
When her mother dies in a car accident, 4-year-old Ponette (Victoire Thivisol) is left physically and emotionally scarred and in the care of her grief-stricken father. Sent to live with family for a while, Ponette sullenly navigates a world made up mostly of children's faces and slowly comes to terms with her loss. Thivisol's powerful, haunting performance earned her a Best Actress award at the Venice Film Festival in 1996.
Cast: Xavier Beauvois, Matiaz Bureau Caton, Claire Nebout, Victoire Thivisol
Director: Jaques Doillon
Language: French
Subtitles: English

Dead Poets Society (1989)
John Keating (Robin Williams) is an unconventional English teacher who lives by a simple motto: Seize the day! Neil Perry (Robert Sean Leonard) is a prep school student who dreams of being an actor but lives in fear of his imperious father, who wants to see him matriculated into Harvard's medical school. Can Keating -- and his infectious love of poetry -- inspire Neil to reach for his dreams? The screenplay won an Oscar.
Cast: Robin Williams, Robert Sean Leonard, Ethan Hawke, Josh Charles, Allelon Ruggiero, Gale Hansen, James Waterston, Norman Lloyd, Kurtwood Smith
Director: Peter Weir

- LAST NIGHT -

The Nasty Girl (1990) [Das Schreckliche Mädchen]
German high schooler Sonya (Lena Stolze) decides to write an essay about her town's history during the Third Reich and its heroic resistance to Nazi tyranny. To her (and the town's) dismay, she instead uncovers evidence of collaboration with the regime. As she digs deeper, she must struggle against the vocal and violent opposition to her search for the truth. This provocative satire won a BAFTA Award for Best Film Not in the English Language.
Cast: Lena Stolze, Hans-Reinhard Muller, Monika Baumgartner, Elisabeth Bertram, Michael Gahr, Robert Giggenbach, Fred Stillkrauth, Barbara Gallauner
Director: Michael Verhoeven
Language: German
Subtitles: English
--- other notes: The Nasty girl = Das schreckliche Madchen / New York : HBO Video, c1990. ISBN: 1559837551 :Description: 1 videocassette (94 min.) : sd., col., stereo. 1/2 in.Performance Note: Screenplay and direction, Michael Verhoeven. Videocassette release of a 1989 German film. Rated PG-13. "Letterbox format with yellow subtitles." "90621." Sentana Filmproduktion. HBO Video (Firm) Miramax Films. ---

The Old Man and the Sea (1958)
....Screen legend Spencer Tracy stars as an itinerant Cuban angler who's gone months without a big haul. Still, he shoves off in his moldering ketch hoping for good fortune. After awhile, he hooks a giant marlin, engaging the beast in a grueling three-day duel and in the process is forced to face his frailties. Though he's pressed to the limit, cunning and skill help the old man snag his quarry. But soon sharks besiege the boat, eyeing his catch. …
Cast: Spencer Tracy, Felipe Pazos, Don Diamond, Don Blackman, Joey Ray, Harry Bellaver
Director: John Sturges

- RECENT -
-- 051217 additional -

My First Mister (2001)
An underappreciated comedy directed by Christine Lahti. Against all odds, a 49-year-old store owner (Albert Brooks) and his teenage clerk (Leelee Sobieski) become close friends. He's neurotic, and she's from a dysfunctional family -- but together, they heal emotional wounds and form an unbreakable bond.
Cast: Albert Brooks, Leelee Sobieski, Desmond Harrington, Carol Kane
Director: Christine Lahti

above quote[s] from netflix

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MUSIC --

Led Zeppelin - need to dig out my pictures!

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THOUGHTS --

be sure to think about your "consumables" - paper towels for example. don't use, or be very conservative! never ever buy the "double-strenth double-sized" versions because they [purposefully] encourage waste

save a tree!

- LINK[S] OF THE DAY -

an page listing selections from yesterday's t r u t h o u t -
>>> fetch=8635
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. on America's Anti-Torture Tradition; Bush's Fumbles spur new talk in congress; Matthew Rothschild on how Rumsfield spies on Quakers and Grannies; and more

Browse their continually updating front page at truthout.org

articles last ten days @ /RENEGADE/

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PEACE! strider

home: fornits.com/renegade/
blogs:
- strider's RENEGADE [activism] -
striders-renegade.blogspot.com
- strider's REDEMPTION SONG [movies, music & thoughts] -
striders-redemption-song.blogspot.com << top of this blog

051217

2005-12-17T16:30:00.000-08:00

Redemption Song - movies, music & thoughts - 051217 -
The Outsiders | Star Wars: Episode III: Revenge of the Sith | The Indonesia experience | Led Zeppelin Discography | what is "clean" | how do you say "i only know a few phrases" politley in Japanese? | A President above the Law [more] | GOP May Harness Arctic Drilling to Pentagon Budget | Trade Summit Violence Escalates

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MOVIES --

- TONIGHT -

The Outsiders (1983)
Francis Ford Coppola's drama about teen turmoil in rural Oklahoma features nearly every big name of 1980s cinema -- including Tom Cruise, Matt Dillon, Emilio Estevez, C. Thomas Howell, Diane Lane, Ralph Macchio and Patrick Swayze. In this faithful adaptation of S.E. Hinton's popular novel, the hardscrabble "Greasers" face off against the affluent "Socs," and the resulting conflict proves sad and deadly for these ultimately lovable delinquents.
Cast: C. Thomas Howell, Matt Dillon, Ralph Macchio, Patrick Swayze, Rob Lowe, Emilio Estevez, Tom Cruise, Diane Lane, Leif Garrett
Director: Francis Ford Coppola

- LAST NIGHT -

Star Wars: Episode III: Revenge of the Sith (2005)
In the third and final installment of the Star Wars prequel trilogy, Anakin Skywalker (Hayden Christensen) and Padmé Amidala (Natalie Portman) are married, and General Grievous leads the Confederacy in a battle against the Republic. Darth Sidious (Ian McDiarmid) lures war-weary Anakin to the dark side, forcing Obi-Wan (Ewan McGregor) to fight against his former pupil. Samuel L. Jackson and Jimmy Smits also star.
Cast: Ewan McGregor, Hayden Christensen, Natalie Portman, Ian McDiarmid, Samuel L. Jackson, Christopher Lee, Anthony Daniels, Kenny Baker, Peter Mayhew, Keisha Castle-Hughes
Director: George Lucas

above quote[s] from netflix

<< a quote from Star Wars: Episode III - "Only then, there can be peace" << a justification for using the Dark Side, and wiping out all opposition
>>> see also below in thoughts - "A President above the Law" and more

- RECENT -

The Indonesia experience.
London : International Video Network, c1995.
ISBN:
1563452715 :Series:
Lonely Planet--the experience.Description:
1 videocassette (VHS) (47 min.) : sd., col. ; 1/2 in.Additional Authors:
International Video Network.

<< very superficial and tourist oriented

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MUSIC --

Led Zeppelin Discography

Led Zeppelin DVD - 2003
How The West Was Won - 2003
Latter Days - 2000
Early Days- 1999
BBC Sessions - 1997
The Complete Studio Recordings - 1993
Boxed Set 2 CD - 1993
Remasters - 1992
Led Zeppelin (Boxed Set) - 1990
Coda - 1982
In Through The Out Door - 1979
The Song Remains The Same (Soundtrack) - 1976
Presence - 1976
Physical Graffiti - 1975
Houses Of The Holy - 1973
Led Zeppelin IV - 1971
Led Zeppelin III - 1970
Led Zeppelin II - 1969
Led Zeppelin - 1969

ledzeppelin.com

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THOUGHTS --

be sure to think about what is "clean" and use fewer [or no] harsh chemicals. the sheer tonnage of crap that we are putting into the environment, polluting it and ourselves and our gene pool and every other living creature's, is astronomical!

Search /RENEGADE/ for articles that mention environment
[only articles for the last one year will be indexed]

- Japanese word[s] for the day -

hmmm... Dozo: how do you say "i only know a few phrases" politley in Japanese? Arigato!

- LINK[S] OF THE DAY - IN THE NEWS -

A President above the Law | GOP May Harness Arctic Drilling to Pentagon Budget | Trade Summit Violence Escalates

A President above the Law
Civil libertarians say the latest revelations of Bush's vow to continue secretly spying on Americans adds to their frustration with the Bush administration. "If we are a nation of laws, then the president must be bound by the rule of law," said Lisa Graves, senior counsel at the ACLU in Washington. "This is clearly in violation of FISA and a violation of the Constitution. The president, no matter who he is, does not have the power to decide which laws he will follow."

Senate Blocks Extension of Patriot Act
The Senate on Friday rejected attempts to reauthorize several provisions of the USA Patriot Act as infringing too much on Americans' privacy and liberty, dealing a huge defeat to the Bush administration and Republican leaders.

Bush Vows to Continue Spying on Americans
Reacting to Bush's vow to continue spying on Americans, Sen. Russell Feingold, D-Wis., said the president's remarks were "breathtaking in how extreme they were." Feingold said it was "absurd" that Bush said he relied on his inherent power as president to authorize the wiretaps. "If that's true, he doesn't need the Patriot Act because he can just make it up as he goes along. I tell you, he's President George Bush, not King George Bush."

'78 Law Sought to Close Spy Loophole
Civil libertarians say the latest revelations add to their frustration with the Bush administration. "If we are a nation of laws, then the president must be bound by the rule of law," said Lisa Graves, senior counsel at the ACLU in Washington. "This is clearly in violation of FISA and a violation of the Constitution. The president, no matter who he is, does not have the power to decide which laws he will follow."

Behind Power, One Principle as Bush Pushes Prerogatives
A single, fiercely debated legal principle lies behind nearly every major initiative in the Bush administration's war on terror, scholars say: the sweeping assertion of the powers of the presidency.

Bush and McCain Reach Deal on Treatment of Torture Suspects
The White House, after weeks of resistance, agreed today to Senator John McCain's call for a law specifically banning cruel or inhuman treatment of terror suspects anywhere in the world.

Pentagon Is Said to Mishandle a Counterterrorism Database
Pentagon analysts appear not to have followed guidelines that require deleting information on American citizens and groups from a counterterrorism database within three months if they pose no security threats, Pentagon officials said on Thursday.

Bush Refuses to Discuss NSA-Spying
President Bush said today that he would not discuss ongoing intelligence operations in the United States, after a report in The New York Times said he secretly authorized the National Security Agency to eavesdrop on Americans and others inside the United States. Several Republicans and Democrats have criticized Bush's action

GOP May Harness Arctic Drilling to Pentagon Budget
With a budget-cutting measure stymied by stiff resistance to opening the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to oil drilling, Congressional Republicans began exploring Wednesday a new tactic to win approval of both $45 billion in cuts and the drilling plan.

Trade Summit Violence Escalates
Riot police have fought running battles with anti-globalization protesters near world trade talks in Hong Kong, in the worst violence there for 16 years. Protesters with bamboo sticks broke through police lines, until they were forced back with tear gas and batons.

articles last ten days @ /RENEGADE/

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PEACE! strider

home: fornits.com/renegade/
blogs:
- strider's RENEGADE [activism] -
striders-renegade.blogspot.com
- strider's REDEMPTION SONG [movies, music & thoughts] -
striders-redemption-song.blogspot.com << top of this blog

051215

2005-12-15T18:03:00.000-08:00

Redemption Song - movies, music & thoughts - 051215 -
The Ice Storm | The Astronaut's Wife | Rob Roy | Led Zeppelin! | one shoulder higher that the other? | check the list | freewayblogger.com | wow. way too much | salamander update | frogs.org | Brazilian Genocide | Bush: "It's a ** Piece of Paper"/Constitution

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MOVIES --

- TONIGHT -

The Ice Storm (1997)
Prep-schooler Tobey Maguire returns home one winter weekend and finds his family on the verge of imploding. His father (Kevin Kline) tries to douse his unhappiness with booze and infidelity while his mother (Joan Allen) searches for answers in self-help books. The experimentation and permissiveness that defined the times lead to ruin as the family's surroundings literally turn to ice during a freakish storm.
Cast: Kevin Kline, Joan Allen, Henry Czerny, Adam Hann-Byrd, David Krumholtz, Tobey Maguire, Christina Ricci, Jamey Sheridan, Elijah Wood, Sigourney Weaver, Katie Holmes, Michael Cumpsty
Director: Ang Lee

- RECENT -

- last night -

The Astronaut's Wife (1999)
Johnny Depp is NASA astronaut Spencer Armacost, and Charlize Theron is his beautiful, schoolteacher wife Jillian -- a seemingly perfect couple. When Depp heroically returns from a space mission, all is well – well, almost. Depp's sudden personality quirks threaten their sanity, their future and their lives in this psychological thriller. (See the DVD filmographies for Depp and Theron for hidden bonus features.)
Cast: Johnny Depp, Charlize Theron, Joe Morton, Gary Grubbs, Tom Noonan, Dawn Landon, Clea DuVall, Donna Murphy, Nick Cassavetes, Samantha Eggar, Lucy Lin, Blair Brown
Director: Rand Ravich

- night before last -

Rob Roy (1995)
Set in the majestically beautiful Scottish highlands in the 1700s, this drama follows legendary swashbuckler Rob Roy (Liam Neeson), a cattle drover who takes out a loan from local nobility to help his townsmen survive. But when bad guy Archibald (Tim Roth) makes off with the money, murders Roy's best friend (Eric Stoltz) and rapes his wife (Jessica Lange), Roy goes on the run, and his flight culminates in a heart-racing sword-fight showdown.
Cast: Liam Neeson, Jessica Lange, Eric Stoltz, John Hurt, Andrew Keir, Tim Roth
Director: Michael Caton-Jones

above quote[s] from netflix

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MUSIC --

Led Zeppelin!

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THOUGHTS --

right-handed? right shoulder higher that the other? visa versa?

look out! mousing is dangerous. highly recommended = track ball.'

watch your posture! think of a string at the very top of your head/mind holding you up from excatly "right above"

--

be sure to................ check the list

--

Date: Thu, 8 Dec 2005 19:22:52 -0800 (PST)
From: Freewayblogger
Subject: hello from the freewayblogger

hello strider, and thanks for linking to my main site, freewayblogger.com. To refresh your memory, I'm the guy who's been putting signs up on the freeways against the war and trying to get others to do the same - slowly, but surely, the revolution is growing.

Trying to use humor, outrage and gentle encouragement here, in a daily weblog, to get more folks involved...

http://freewayblogger.blogspot.com

Enjoy, and give some thought to trying it yourself sometime. Cardboard, paint and something to say - that's all it takes...

peace, scarlet p.

--

wow. way too much. my eldest child about to give birth; i have a leaking fish tank; my biggest project of the year is due in two weeks with xmas in the middle... i still don't know how this thing with my neck is going to work out... even/ever more...

- LINK[S] OF THE DAY -

salamander update

frogs.org/

Brazilian Genocide - A former state governor and a former top policeman are among the accused in Brazil's first ever investigation into the genocide of an uncontacted Indian tribe

Bush: "It's a ** Piece of Paper"/Constitution

articles last ten days @ /RENEGADE/

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PEACE! strider

home: fornits.com/renegade/
blogs:
- strider's RENEGADE [activism] -
striders-renegade.blogspot.com
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striders-redemption-song.blogspot.com << top of this blog

Konformist: KN4M 12-13-05

2005-12-13T17:58:00.000-08:00

Review: The Beast of Adam Gorightly | World Terrorism & Security | 50 Years Ago Today... From Michael Moore | Sabbath, Sex Pistols on Rock's Rolls | L.A. hospitals send patients to skid row | Ultimate Sacrifice: John and Robert Kennedy, the Plan for a Coup in Cuba, and the Murder of JFK | New Deal Keeps N.Y. Punk Venue CBGB Open

>>> Complete Article >>>

-------------------------------------------
The Konformist - konformist.com

Kirby The Konspiracy Boy says, "Don't read this magazine!!! It's all a diabolical brainwashing plot!!!"

Mailing list @ yahoo groups (groups.yahoo.com/group/konformist)
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articles last ten days @ /RENEGADE/

051211

2005-12-11T17:58:00.000-08:00

Redemption Song - movies, music & thoughts - 051211 -
The Diary of Anne Frank | think about where your water comes from - and goes | Japanese word for the day | New Mammal Discovered in Indonesian Borneo Already At Risk | Environment News Service (ENS)

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MOVIES --

- TONIGHT -

The Diary of Anne Frank (1959)
As the "Green Police" search for Jews on the streets of Amsterdam, a young girl named Anne (Millie Perkins), her parents Otto and Edith (Joseph Schildkraut and Anna Huber) and another family retreat for two years to the small attic of shop owners Kraler and Miep (Douglas Spencer and Dody Heath). Despite being confined to a small area and having no contact with the outside world, the families go on with their lives to the best of their ability.
Cast: Millie Perkins, Joseph Schildkraut, Shelley Winters, Richard Beymer, Gusti Huber, Lou Jacobi, Diane Baker, Douglas Spencer, Dodie Heath, Ed Wynn
Director: George Stevens

above quote[s] from netflix

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THOUGHTS --

be sure to think about where your water comes from - and goes!

put sea shells and stream stones around your sinks to help you remember

think of what is in the water you use, where it comes from and what effect that has; and what is in the water after you use it, and where it is headed

--

Japanese word[s] for the day - wakari - understanding, comprehension

wakarimashta - i understand
wakarimasen - i don't understand

wakarikiru - to understand completely
wakarikitta - obvious, undeniable
wakarinikui - hard to understand
wakariyasui - easy to understand
wakariyoi - easy to understand

- LINK[S] OF THE DAY -

New Mammal Discovered in Indonesian Borneo Already At Risk

JAKARTA, Indonesia, December 8, 2005 (ENS) - A World Wildlife Fund
camera trap in an Indonesian national park on the island of Borneo
photographed an animal of unknown species this fall but before
scientists have identified it, the dark red furry creature is already
threatened by a proposed palm oil plantation that would be the world's
largest.

Environment News Service (ENS)

articles last ten days @ /RENEGADE/

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PEACE! strider

home: fornits.com/renegade/
blogs:
- strider's RENEGADE [activism] -
striders-renegade.blogspot.com
- strider's REDEMPTION SONG [movies, music & thoughts] -
striders-redemption-song.blogspot.com << top of this blog

051210

2005-12-10T17:29:00.000-08:00

Redemption Song - movies, music & thoughts - 051210 -
Farewell My Concubine (Ba Wang Bie Ji) | La Strada | be sure to turn stuff off | Japanese word for the day | U.S., Under Fire, Eases Its Stance in Climate Talks | Climate Change - Global Warming - Kyoto Protocol | The Decisive Role of the Individual in History

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MOVIES --

- TONIGHT -

image hosted by amazon.com

Farewell My Concubine (1993) (Ba Wang Bie Ji)
A seemingly unshakable friendship gets put to the test by war, a communist takeover, the Cultural Revolution and especially by the intrusion of a woman into the lives of two Chinese opera stars. Inseparable since childhood, Duan Xiaolou (Zhang Fengyi) and Cheng Dieyi (Leslie Cheung) find themselves increasingly at odds after Xiaolou weds a lovely courtesan (Gong Li). The film captures 50 years of Chinese history as it spins around the characters.
Cast: Leslie Cheung, Zhang Fengyi, Li Gong
Director: Kaige Chen
<<<<<<<< oops! bad disc... will have to come back to this one

La Strada (1954)
Italian auteur Federico Fellini helmed this powerful rumination on love and hate, the Academy Award winner for Best Foreign Film in 1956. This restored version (introduced by Martin Scorsese) tells the story of gentle Gelsomina (Giulietta Masina), sold by her mother to the bullying circus performer, Zampanò, with whom she falls in love. When a clown, Il Matto (Richard Basehart), wins her heart, a doomed love triangle inevitably develops.
Cast: Anthony Quinn, Giulietta Masina, Richard Basehart, Aldo Silvani, Marcella Rovere, Livia Venturini
Director: Federico Fellini

above quote[s] from netflix

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THOUGHTS --

be sure to turn stuff off. when you turn on a light, think about which ones you can turn off.

-

Japanese word[s] for the day -

Itamae - sushi chef

Omakase - "Chef's choice" meaning whatever the chef would like to serve you

phrase - Konichiwa, Ita-san! Omakase ?!?! <<< Dozo [please] tell me if i'm wrong!

see also: kirisute gomen

-

- LINK[S] OF THE DAY -

NYT: U.S., Under Fire, Eases Its Stance in Climate Talks
The United States dropped its opposition early Saturday morning to nonbinding talks on addressing global warming.

see also - previous -

051209 - How America Plotted to Stop Kyoto Deal | US Attacked on Its Climate Stance

051204 - What Planet Are You On, Mr. Bush? (And Do You Care, Mr. Blair?)
More than 100,000 people took to the streets in more than 30 countries yesterday, in the first worldwide demonstration to press for action to combat global warming.

FYI: climatecrisisaction list info -
Subscribe: climatecrisisaction-subscribe@yahoogroups.com
Web: groups.yahoo.com/group/climatecrisisaction

Search /RENEGADE/ for articles on climate action -
peaars.cgi?CLIMATE

--

The Decisive Role of the Individual in History
By Rob Sewell
Alan Woods in his book on the Venezuelan Revolution recalls a conversation he had with Hugo Chavez, the leader of the Bolivarian Revolution. “I read a book by Plekhanov a long time ago”, commented President Chavez, “and it made a big impression on me. It was called The Role of the Individual in History.” The President pondered the title and said: “Well, I know none of us is really indispensable.” Alan interjected, however, and corrected the Venezuelan President on this point: “There are times in history when an individual can make a fundamental difference.” A case in point is Hugo Chavez himself...

articles last ten days @ /RENEGADE/

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PEACE! strider

home: fornits.com/renegade/
blogs:
- strider's RENEGADE [activism] -
striders-renegade.blogspot.com
- strider's REDEMPTION SONG [movies, music & thoughts] -
striders-redemption-song.blogspot.com << top of this blog

051209

2005-12-10T00:22:00.000-08:00

Redemption Song - movies, music & thoughts - 051209 -
The Emperor and the Assassin | Ghosts of Mississippi | Roots | Apollo 13 | t r u t h o u t

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MOVIES --

- TONIGHT -

The Emperor and the Assassin (1999)
Yin Zheng (Li Xuejian), King of Qin, embarks on a brutal campaign to unite all seven Chinese kingdoms in the third century B.C. Wanting to appear invincible, Yin sends his lover, Lady Zhao (Gong Li), to her homeland to hire a killer who will intentionally botch an assassination attempt on him. Once there, Lady Zhao tries to enlist Jing Ke (Zhang Fengyi), but complications arise in this lavishly produced historical epic from China.
Cast: Li Gong, Fengyi Zhang, Li Xuejian, Wang Zhiwen
Director: Kaige Chen

also watched the bonus features on the Apollo 13 discs - see previous: 051207 - Apollo 13

- LAST NIGHT -

Ghosts of Mississippi (1996)
In 1963, civil-rights activist Medgar Evers was shot to death by white supremacist Byron De La Beckwith (James Woods). He was captured, but after two trials ended in hung juries, De La Beckwith went free. Thirty years later, Assistant District Attorney Bobby DeLaughter (Alec Baldwin) reopened the case. Ghosts of Mississippi tells the true story of his struggle to bring De La Beckwith to justice.
Starring: Cast: Alec Baldwin, Whoopi Goldberg, James Woods, Craig T. Nelson, Susanna Thompson, Lucas Black, Virginia Madsen
Director: Rob Reiner

also finished up the Roots series - see previous: 051207 - Roots

above quote[s] from netflix

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MUSIC --

nothing of note lately

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THOUGHTS --

- LINK[S] OF THE DAY -

from yesterday's t r u t h o u t Issues -

US Terror Watchlist 80,000 Names Long
A watchlist of possible terror suspects distributed by the US government to airlines for pre-flight checks is now 80,000 names long, a Swedish newspaper reported, citing European air industry sources. The classified list, which carried just 16 names before the September 11, 2001, attacks in New York and Washington, had grown to 1,000 by the end of 2001, to 40,000 a year later, and now stands at 80,000, Svenska Dagbladet reported.

How America Plotted to Stop Kyoto Deal
A detailed and disturbing document has revealed an extraordinary American plan to destroy Europe's support for the Kyoto treaty on climate change.

US Attacked on Its Climate Stance
Canadian Prime Minister Paul Martin took aim at the United States on Wednesday for its refusal to negotiate a new global warming treaty, telling a United Nations conference that the world's most powerful economy needed to resume participating in international talks to reduce greenhouse gases.

Developers Sentenced in Wetlands Case
A federal judge sentenced three Mississippi real estate developers to prison yesterday for filling in wetlands and selling the property to low- and fixed-income families, marking the end of the nation's largest wetlands criminal prosecution.

truthout.org

articles last ten days @ /RENEGADE/

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PEACE! strider

home: fornits.com/renegade/
blogs:
- strider's RENEGADE [activism] -
striders-renegade.blogspot.com
- strider's REDEMPTION SONG [movies, music & thoughts] -
striders-redemption-song.blogspot.com << top of this blog

051207

2005-12-07T18:26:00.000-08:00

Redemption Song - movies, music & thoughts - 051207 -
A Beautiful Mind | Roots | Apollo 13 | Monster | Sideways | Life of Oharu (Saikaku ichidai onna) | pearl jam - live in seattle | No Exceptions to the Ban on Torture | Jens Galschiot | salamander update | truthout.org

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MOVIES --

- TONIGHT -

A Beautiful Mind (2001)
John Forbes Nash Jr. (Russell Crowe) was a brilliant economist [mathemetician! / note added by s] -- when his mind was clear. But life changed forever with the revelation that he was a schizophrenic. Nash's brilliance persisted amidst the anguish his mental illness caused for him and his wife (Jennifer Connolly), and 40 years after his diagnosis, he won the Nobel Prize for economics. Connolly's acting and Ron Howard's direction won Oscars, and the film was named Best Picture.
Cast: Russell Crowe, Jennifer Connelly, Ed Harris, Paul Bettany, Adam Goldberg, Judd Hirsch, Clint Howard, Josh Lucas, Christopher Plummer, Anthony Rapp
Director: Ron Howard

above quote from netflix

- CURRENT -

image thanks to stark raving viking - see his blog at starkravingviking.blogspot.com/

ROOTS

Roots was a 1977 American television miniseries based on Alex Haley's work Roots: The Saga of an American Family, his critically acclaimed genealogical novel.

Roots was a ground-breaking event in U.S. television history. It received unprecedented Nielsen Ratings (with the finale still standing as the 3rd highest rated U.S. program ever [1]) and captivated American television audiences, successfully crossing racial lines and piquing the interest of families in all ethnic groups. Some viewers reportedly took the telephone off of the hook for the eight consecutive nights of the broadcast.

above text from Roots page at wikipedia.org

google "Roots TV miniseries"

- RECENT -

- - Last Night - -

Apollo 13 (1995)
Unlucky Apollo flight 13 was bound for the moon when technical troubles scuttled the mission and nearly doomed the crew. Director Ron Howard expertly chronicles the smallest details of this true-life story, turning a failed scientific journey into a thrilling saga of true heroism. As lead astronaut Jim Lovell, Tom Hanks utters the now-famous line, "Houston, we've got a problem."
Cast: Tom Hanks, Gary Sinise, Kevin Bacon, Kathleen Quinlan, Bill Paxton, Ed Harris, Mary Kate Schellhardt, Tracy Reiner, Chris Ellis, David Andrews, Xander Berkeley, Marc McClure, Clint Howard, Loren Dean
Director: Ron Howard

Monster (2003)
Aileen Wuornos (Charlize Theron, in an Oscar-winning performance) faced difficult odds early in life, abusing drugs and becoming a prostitute (and pregnant) by the age of 13. Wuornos moved from Michigan to Florida where she continued to ply her "trade," specializing in a clientele consisting mainly of truck drivers. It was during that time that she began murdering any "John" who tried to rape her. Christina Ricci co-stars in this true story.
Cast: Charlize Theron, Christina Ricci, Bruce Dern, Scott Wilson, Lee Tergesen, Pruitt Taylor Vince, Annie Corley, Marco St. John, Bubba Baker, Marc Macaulay
Director: Patty Jenkins

- - Other - -

Sideways (2004)
Two men go on an excursion and end up inducing midlife crises in this comedy-drama that won six Independent Spirit Awards, including Best Feature and Best Director. Pinot Noir lover Miles (Paul Giamatti) convinces friend Jack (Thomas Haden Church) to enjoy his last days of bachelorhood with a wine country road trip. The pair get involved with two women (Sandra Oh and Virginia Madsen) and inevitably come face to face with their past and present.
Cast: Paul Giamatti, Thomas Haden Church, Virginia Madsen, Sandra Oh, Marylouise Burke, Jessica Hecht, Missy Doty, M.C. Gainey, Alysia Reiner, Shake Toukhmanian, Duke Moosekian, Robert Covarrubias, Patrick Gallagher, Stephanie Faracy
Director: Alexander Payne

above quotes from netflix unless otherwise noted

Life of Oharu = Saikaku ichidai onna
[New York] : Janus ; [Chicago] : Public Media/Home Vision, [1992?]
ISBN:
0780019016Series:
The Japanese classic collectionDescription:
1 videocassette (137 min.) : sd., b&w ; 1/2 in.Performance Note:
Associate producer, Hideo Koi ; cinematography, Yoshimi Hirano ; music, Ichiro Saito.
Kinuyo Tanaka, Toshiro Mifune, Masao Shimizu, Ichiro Sugai, Daisuke Kato, Jyukichi Uno, Tsukie Matsura, Eitaro Shindo.Notes:
Originally produced as a motion picture in 1952. Based on the novel Ko¯shoku ichidai onna by Saikaku Ihara.
VHS.
In Japanese with English subtitles. Additional Authors:
Ihara, Saikaku, 1642-1693. Ko¯shoku ichidai onna.
Mizoguchi, Kenji, 1898-1956.
Yoda, Yoshikata, 1909-
Tanaka, Kinuyo, 1909-1977.
Mifune, Toshiro¯, 1920-
To¯ho¯ Kabushiki Kaisha
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MUSIC

pearl jam - live in seattle / sorry for the repetition

pearl jam notes, this blog

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THOUGHTS --

more synchronicity... same director [a couple of Ron Howard films]

i am hoping that people really start thinking. we don't want to be associated with torture do we? the US is earning itself a very bad name...

- LINK[S] OF THE DAY -

No Exceptions to the Ban on Torture
Louise Arbour writes that the absolute ban on torture, a cornerstone of the international human rights edifice, is under attack. The principle we once believed to be unassailable ˆ the inherent right to physical integrity and dignity of the person ˆ is becoming a casualty of the so-called war on terror.

photo: a successful happening in Belgium where we erected an eight meters high Golden Calf in front of the banks

Next stop Hong Kong
Danish artist Jens Galschiot is going to Hong Kong to erect 3 larger sculpture groups, all illustrating the global inequality. The sculptures will be put up in the public space in Victoria Park in Hong Kong and carried along with the demonstrations. - Thursday morning at eight o'clock we are going to Hong Kong, to make a tremendous happening during the WTO Summit. We just finished a leaflet, and we have decided to make a diary including photos, so it will be possible to follow our activities during the stay at www.aidoh.dk/WTO...We just returned from a successful happening in Belgium where we erected an eight meters high Golden Calf in front of the banks in Gent, to draw attention to their unethical investments in weapons and the military regime Burma. www.aidoh.dk/?categoryID=136

salamander update

truthout.org

articles last ten days @ /RENEGADE/

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PEACE! strider

home: fornits.com/renegade/
blogs:
- strider's RENEGADE [activism] -
striders-renegade.blogspot.com
- strider's REDEMPTION SONG [movies, music & thoughts] -
striders-redemption-song.blogspot.com << top of this blog

treasongate update

2005-12-04T16:56:00.000-08:00

see Konformist: Treasongate Articles On Konformist Newswire 2005