From thinker at uniserve.com Sun May 1 07:57:38 2005 From: thinker at uniserve.com (Ed Deak) Date: Sun May 1 07:58:54 2005 Subject: [Mai-not] Chewing raw grubs with the 'Nutcracker Man In-Reply-To: Message-ID: <5.1.0.14.2.20050501071951.02e13240@pop.uniserve.com> Interesting article with a lot of truth, but also a lot of nonsense in it. The writer is obviously some intellectual without practical experience and skills. We agree that an energy crunch is coming that will affect the lives of people in a major way. The present cities can not be maintained, for certain. There may also be major dieoffs. How or why, we don't know. But to predict that after an energy crunch people will have to go back to the caves is bloody nonsense. For one thing, there will always be a certain amount of electricity, oil etc, probably strictly rationed for useful purposes. The sooner we get rid of these needless airliners and military equipment is the better. We do need some airliners, but 90 or more percent of them should be junked tomorrow. We came on a ship to Canada 50 years ago and can't see why the system could not be reinstated. Just the other day we watched B52s crossing our sky in the middle of BC, in all directions, all day. What the hell for ? We call them the "idiot planes", but it is not only the people who fly them who are the idiots, but also those who send them out and the public that tolerates this incredible waste and stupidity. This is going on all the time. The solutions, to begin with, are : Rebuild the railways. In Canada thousands of km of railways, built mainly to freight resources, agricultural products, etc. have been torn up, because "road traffic is now more efficient". Totally insane and irresponsible. The vast majority of industrial energy goes into wasteful products and production methods, mostly to replace humans and divert the benefits to company shares. This doesn't mean that people will have to go around dressed in animal hides and scrape them with sharpened CDs. There are enough tools etc. already in existence that even if we never make any more, they'll last for indefinite periods. I have been working in and on the development of energy efficient production methods for 50 years and know what can be and should be done. Obviously, I won't be around when the energy crunch comes, but there will be millions, especially in the so called "developing countries" who will still know how to use tools, instead of pushing buttons. Europe was dug out and rebuilt after WW2 almost totally with human labour and skills, as there were no huge machines in those days. I grew up in a society where electricity was always around in my lifetime, but electric tools were not, except in major factories etc. There were all kinds of trades going and working without, or only with a few electric tools. The incredible palaces, churches etc. in Europe, even back in ancient Rome and Greece, with the most intricate floors, woodwork, tapestries, mouldings, fabrics, clothing, etc. were all built without any electricity, or any kind of power tools, with human hands only. To suggest that humanity has completely lost its imagination and skills is irresp[onsible. I firmly believe that one day, when the present economic theories and political ideologies are collapsed, or overthrown, humanity will enter the real Age of Enlightenment and this terrible waste of resources, human ingenuity and skills will not only stop, but rejuvenated and humanity will really enter its Golden Age. Cheers, Ed. At 11:50 AM 30/04/2005 -0500, you wrote: >'Chewing raw grubs with the 'Nutcracker Man'' > April 29 @ 09:04:03 EDT > >By Joe Bageant >http://www.smirkingchimp.com/article.php?sid=20903&mode=nested&order=0 > > I spent the middle weekend in April with a group of artists and thinkers > called the April Fools Group. Put together by Brad Blanton, > psychotherapist and creator of "radical honesty" politics and therapy, > the three-day meeting was set on a farm down the Shenandoah Valley amid > the battlefields and rolling countryside of Newmarket, Virginia. Brad, a > world famous redneck headshrinker, had put together old hippies, > theoreticians, musicians, young anarchists, beautiful brilliant women and > aging writers to yap, drink and plot against the Bush administration. So > when I pulled into Brad's driveway to find him and a fellow named Hank > parked in lawn chairs up on the roof with a bottle of bourbon I knew this > thing was off to a good start. > > The gathering was an organizational meeting for Brad Blanton's > independent run for the Virginia Seventh District U.S. House of > Representatives. Blanton's working slogan is "America needs a good > psychiatrist." And we got a lot accomplished in that direction, despite > my intellectual flatulence and Brad's orneriness. Any psychotherapist who > actually gets people to pay for advice such as "Fuck'em if they can't > take a joke" must be called ornery at the very least. And any politician > who thinks he can get elected on the basis of extreme honesty, well... > Anyway, I came away from the meeting deeply struck by one thing. Every > person there seemed to understand and acknowledge the coming global human > "die-off." The one that has already begun in places like Africa and will > grow into a global event sometime within our lifetimes and/or those of > our children. The one that will kill millions of white people. > > That's right, clean pink little Western World white people like you and > me. Nobody in the U.S. seems to be able to deal with or even think about > this near certainty, and the few who do are written off as nutcases by > the media and the public. Mostly though, it goes unacknowledged. All of > which drives me nuts because the now nearly visible end of civilization > strikes me as worthy of at least modest discussion. You'd think so. But > the mention of it causes my wife to go into, "Oh Joe, can't we talk about > something more pleasant?" And talk about causing weird stares and dropped > jaws at the office water cooler. > > Here's the short course: Global die-off of mankind will occur when we > run out of energy to support the complex technological grid sustaining > modern industrial human civilization. In other words, when the > electricity goes out, we are back in the Dark Age, with the Stone Age > grunting at us from just around the corner. This will likely happen in > 100 years or less, assuming the ecosystem does not collapse first. And > you are thinking, "Well ho ho ho! Any other good news Bageant? And how > the fock do you know this anyway?" > > For those willing to contemplate the subject, there is a scientifically > supported model of the timeline of our return to Stone Age tribal units. > A roadmap to the day when we will be cutting up dog meat with a sharpened > cd rom disc in some toxic future canyon. It is called the Olduvai Theory. > > The *Olduvai theory was first introduced in a scientific paper by > petroleum geologist/engineer/anthropologist Richard C. Duncan titled The > Peak Of World Oil Production And The Road To The Olduvai Gorge. Duncan > ("Dunk") chose the name Olduvai because, among other reasons, "...it is a > good metaphor for the Stone Age way of life." It also sounded cool, he > confesses. The Olduvai Gorge is a deep cleft in the Serengeti steppe of > Tanzania, where Louis and Mary Leakey found the remains of prehistoric > hominids, some up to two million years old, and along with the first > stone tools, other things such as the skulls of sheep big as draft horses > and pigs the size of hippos. Also the skull of "Nutcracker Man, > (Australopithecus boisei) so named because of a set of powerful choppers, > teeth so strong they could bust the lug nuts off a truck tire, were he > around today to work at the Goodyear Tire Center. As to Nutcracker's > "lifestyle" (and we are using the term most generously for a style that > had more than adequate pork resources but had not developed a decent > pinot grigio to serve with it, or even barbecue sauce for that matter) > Dunk says "the Olduvai way of life was and still is a sustainable one --- > local, tribal, and solar --- and, for better or worse, our ancestors > practiced it for millions of years." > > Dunk's Olduvai theory provides a modern database support structure for > the Malthusian argument. The Olduvai theory uses only a single metric, as > defined by "White's Law," and deals with electricity as the most vital > expression of other forms of energy such as crude oil or coal. The theory > is an inductive one based on world energy and population data, so > elegantly simple that any 12th grader can do it, assuming he or she can > do multiplication (a risky assumption now that no child has been left > behind by our great ownership society.) In the Olduvai schema permanent > blackouts will occur worldwide around 2030. Industrial Civilization ends > when energy availability falls to its 1930 level. Measured as energy > use---energy expended or consumed---our industrial civilization can be > described as a one-time phenomenon, a single pulse waveform of limited > duration which flashed out from the caves to outer space, then back to > the caves over approximately 100 years. > > So when was the highpoint of the flash? On the average, world per capita > energy-use crested around 1977. That was the same year John Travolta made > "Saturday Night Fever," which few of us consider much of a highpoint. To > make a long story short, there are three intervals of decline in the > Olduvai schema: slope, slide and cliff -- each steeper than the previous. > Right now we are in the slide headed for the cliff. See > http://dieoff.org/page125.htm. After more than a decade no scientist has > been able to refute it and even given the flexibility and bias inherent > in what passes for common sense in this country, it's still pretty damned > hard to argue with. > > When we do go off the cliff, the Big Die-off will play no favorites, and > will happen everywhere more or less simultaneously. But there are some > particularly lousy places to be when permanent worldwide electrical > blackouts happen. In or near a big city is the worst. You can imagine > the, uh, "discomfort" of billions when the electrical grids die and power > goes out across the densely packed high-rise buildings surrounded by a > million acres of asphalt. People with no work, no heat, no air > conditioning, no food, no water. Put on yer Adidas, it is migration time. > Wherein bankers, skinheads, little old ladies and taxi drivers swarm like > insects toward whatever passes for the countryside by then. Looks like > all those survivalists up in North Idaho and Oregon may be right. > Personally, I wouldn't want to be in New York or Bombay, or even Toledo > when the deal goes down, and in fact want to be as distant from a city as > one can get without having to be too far into the woods (of which there > will de damned few) to eat my daily requirement of tree bark. > > Americans busily expanding their lard content to fit the contours of > their air-conditioned SUVs are among the chief accelerators of the Big > Die-off. However, people worldwide assume that the average American is a > blind dickhead who wouldn't acknowledge the ecological price of his/her > lifestyle if it were branded on their forehead. That assumption is > correct. Americans for the most part don't give a twit what kind of world > their own children inherit, muchless about dolphins, Hottentots, > Frenchmen and the approaching desertification of distant places like Kansas. > > Still, it is reasonable to believe that many powerful people and > organizations with all the research capability in the world at their > fingertips must understand the future before us. In fact, I am sure some > in industry do because even 10 years ago when I used to deal with > chemical executives at Monsanto, Zeneca, Dow and other corporations, it > was discussed and acknowledged a couple of times over cocktails, and even > discussed how to profit from it through genetically engineered > non-reproducing seeds that eliminate all the native crops around them. > One might also guess that the U.S. president and his cabinet know, and > that their solution is to fight for more oil and higher profits, given > its increasing scarcity. Even the superficial whoring media is broaching > the topic of "peak oil," though mostly for shock entertainment value. > > I heard an "expert" say the other day that science will solve the peak > oil problem, probably through nuclear energy, as if that did not have its > own awful implications. Sure buddy. Just like the "Green Revolution" > solved the world's agricultural foods problem by poisoning the earth with > pesticides and burning two gallons of oil to produce a pint of milk. > There is the myth left hanging out there from the old scientific paradigm > that science and technology are somehow going to snatch us from edge of > species die-off just in time. Yes, we will be saved by the very science > and technology that evolved from, and is completely dependent upon, an > energy source that will no longer exist. I think the pundit probably > understands that, but like all media and political people, safely assumes > the public has the critical thinking capability of a jar of fruit flies. > > Shut up and watch Survivor! > > Well hell then. What does keep the American people from looking around > them and seeing the obvious? That the earth is a finite thing being used > up at exponential rates? Answer: The Spectacle. American capitalism's > "media hologram." We no longer have a country, but the artificial > spectacle of one. We have a global corporation masquerading > electronically, digitally, financially, and legally and every other way > as a nation called the "United States of America." The corporation now > animates most of us from within through management of the need hierarchy > of goods and information. We no longer have citizens. We have consumers, > "purchase decision makers" whose most influential act in life consists of > choosing a mortgage banker and an NFL team. And a car. The majority of > modernized technical humans, Digitus Cathodus Americanus, cannot perceive > the hologram because their self-identities were generated by it. It's > "reality" to them---the only one they will know until the hologram > collapses with their electrical industrial civilization. > > By design or not, the hologram's primary effect has been to induce the > illusion of a national "value system" through hypnotic repetition of > images. Thus profit seeking enterprises are legitimized as the animating > spirit of our identities as individuals and as a nation. The end result > of course is the mass replication of millions of uniform "market > segmented consumer identities." Individuality is circumscribed by brand > identification. The overall aggregate of brand identification groups is > interpreted to be an inherently superior race or nation (worth fighting > for to expand the resource base and markets.) We no longer have lives, > just lifestyles which are defined and expressed through ever expanding > (and more profitable) consumption. > > Net result: The legions of humanity toil to generate the trucks and > tofu, munitions, missiles, newspapers, petrochemicals and pizza and > millions of tons of ground up cattle sold to fire the furnace of an > economic engine that has taken on a life of its own. One that must grow > exponentially, devouring everything just to survive. Just to keep from > collapsing. And people are taught that it is called "human progress." > > This mass hallucination generated by this totalist capitalist system, > the state as engine of profit, is one thing. Life on a real planet made > of dirt and water and flesh both warm and cold blooded is quite another. > Viewed from outside the web of Western illusions, say, an Iraqi citizen > or a Filipino Moro, one finds the economic engine to be driven by unseen > death and war and the pillaging of the weak by the powerful. All this is > set against the backdrop of explosive human disease, growing starvation, > the impending failure of the environment and petroleum based > civilization, resulting in the greatest mass extinction event in the > history of this planet. The Big Die-off. And in your very lifetime too. > Admission is not only free, it is compulsory. > > One of the hologram's great illusions is that Industrial Civilization is > evolutionary---that it advances forever. Industrial civilization does not > evolve. In the overall history of man it is extremely short and > completely unsustainable. It is a one-time biological drama that rapidly > consumes the necessary physical prerequisites for its own existence, the > ecology and resources of the planetary gravity well in which it is > trapped. Any good news, for Chrissake? > > Sort of. We may not become completely extinct. It looks like the earth's > immune system is beginning to shake off its infection by the human virus > through what appears---to we virus at least---as environmental collapse. > But for the sake of discussion, let's assume that extinction through > nuclear war and ecological collapse is somehow avoided (nowadays, we're > allowed to assume anything we want, regardless of the evidence around us. > Just ask any U.S. capitalist free market economist.) If what is left > after the Big Die-off can still be called a human society, it will be > bottomed out at the subsistence level of energy-use. Now that is one ugly > booger of a notion to contemplate. What is subsistence level energy-use? > In all likelihood it has to do with shitting in the winter darkness at a > sustainable 45 indoor degrees. Meanwhile, a cockroach watches, thinking > to himself, "What a shame, because at the height of their culture these > guys made a damned good peanut butter sandwich." > > Your attention please. This is your pilot. We have crested in our > evolutionary journey and are beginning our de scent.Pleaselock your > folding trays, put you seats in an upright position and enjoy the > landing. (Captain! Why are there no lights down there at the airport?) It > was a helluva crest, that spurt of technological jism by the industrial > state toward outer space and impregnation of the moon. What with Neil > Armstrong bouncing around in the lunar dust in his high tech Pillsbury > doughboy outfit and all, it added up to about one week of attention by > the masses and a lot of dough for government contractors. But as one who > within my lifetime witnessed the entire evolution of the space program, > and its accompanying nationalistic hoopla about beating the Russians at > being to first to fart in the vacuum of space, I am somehow unconvinced > it was worth it. I dunno. Maybe my wife is right, Maybe I'm just a goddam > crab. Maybe I'm a little resentful because, thanks to the big American > suckdown of the planet, I will never have grandchildren. My kids are > among that portion of their generation who understand what their > lifetimes hold and are not remotely interested in adding to the problem. > > We weren't always like that. Right after World War II and the advent of > the atomic bomb a majority of Americans (67% of those surveyed by Gallup) > wanted a cooperative one world government with all nuclear weapons put > under the control of the United Nations. Now you cannot get an American > to turn of a light switch to save human civilization. As a friend from > Cape Verde once remarked, "Just watching Americans consume things gives > me a headache." > > As for the weak ploy I used to slip into this screed---Brad Blanton's > April Fools Group meeting---that too left me with a headache. After > nearly a fifth of Maker's Mark bourbon on the third night I was hugging > everybody in sight and had entered into an agreement with a jazz piano > player and an inventor from Wisconsin to start a free love commune > together right there in that beautiful valley. (Honest to god, I am not > joking. I wish I were.) When I woke up next morning and looked into the > mirror at eyes like two bloody pissholes in a snowbank ... and wondering > who let that dog crap in my mouth ... well ... let's just say I wasn't > experiencing the same sense of brotherly love as the night before. Rather > than go into the wretchedness of the next day's grisly recovery, or > contemplate what we might possibly find to drink while living in shipping > containers during the next Olduvai period, let me share my favorite > hangover remedy as a way out of this little box I've written myself into. OK? > > Bye! > >Uncle Joe's Big Die-off Hangover Cure: > > - Empty two cans of sardines (skinless packed in water) into a bowl. > > - Add two medium size habanera peppers. > > - One squirt of mustard. > > - One dash of Tabasco. > > - Blend coarsely in a blender. (Cover the blender with six bath towels > to keep the noise from cracking your brain and teeth.). > > - Spread on toast or crackers and eat. > > - Your lungs may or may not collapse briefly and there may be temporary > blindness. Not to worry. After your eyes quit watering enough to see, > either endorphins associated with hot peppers will kick in, or subsequent > fiery bites of the cure will be enough to distract your from the headache > until they do. > >Joe Bageant is a writer and magazine editor living in Winchester Virginia. >He may be contacted at bageantjb@netscape.net. Free downloadable pdf files >of his works are archived at www.coldtype.net. Copyright 2005 by Joe Bageant. > > Footnote: > *The Olduvai theory postulates that electricity is the essence of > Industrial Civilization. World energy production per capita increased > strongly from 1945 to its all-time peak in 1979. Then from 1979 to 1999 > -- for the first time in history -- it decreased from 1979-1999 at a rate > of 0.33 %/year (called the Olduvai 'slope'). Next from 2000 to 2011, > according to the Olduvai schema, world energy production per capita will > decrease by about 0.70 %/year (the Olduvai 'slide'). Then around year > 2012 there will be a rash of permanent electrical blackouts -- worldwide. > These blackouts, along with other factors, will cause energy production > per capita by 2030 to fall to 3.32 b/year, the same value it had in 1930. > The rate of decline from 2012 to 2030 is 5.44 %/year (the Olduvai > 'cliff'). Thus, by definition, the duration of Industrial Civilization is > less than or equal to 100 years. > -- Richard Duncan at http://dieoff.org/page125.htm. > > >-- >------------------ > >War remains the decisive human failure. > - John Kenneth Galbraith > >Jonathan > >web site at: > >http://elegant-technology.com >_______________________________________________ >Mai-not mailing list >Mai-not@globalproblematique.net >http://www.globalproblematique.net/mailman/listinfo/mai-not From creuss at bluemail.ch Sun May 1 12:23:52 2005 From: creuss at bluemail.ch (Christoph Reuss) Date: Sun May 1 12:24:45 2005 Subject: [Mai-not] Outsourcing the Occupation Message-ID: http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/pages/ShArt.jhtml?itemNo=570309&contrassID=2&subContrassID=4&sbSubContrassID=0 Outsourcing the occupation By Niv Gordon* Israel is the key to understanding United States President George W. Bush's strategy in Iraq. This is not because it had any influence on the decision-making process that led to the second Gulf War, but rather because the current administration adopted the model of "democratic occupation" - as former MK Tamar Gozansky of Hadash called it not long ago - that Israel developed in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. After the outbreak of the first intifada, Israel had to station a relatively large number of soldiers in the territories, supported by tanks and armored vehicles, in order to maintain the occupation - exactly as the United States is now doing in Iraq. This transformed the Israel occupation from a profitable enterprise, economically speaking, into a financial burden and led the heads of the country to the brilliant idea of outsourcing - transferring the responsibility for the population to an external entity while retaining control of the natural resources (land and water, in this case). After lengthy negotiations, the Palestinian Authority was established - an entity that took upon itself the running of the daily lives of the inhabitants of the territories, while Israel kept control of more than 80 percent of the land reserves. Within a few months, the civil institutions necessary for administering populations in a modern society, including education, health and welfare systems, were transferred by Israel to the hands of the young authority, which in return was granted a limited kind of sovereignty. Thus, without relinquishing its right to control the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, Israel transferred the responsibility for the inhabitants to a kind of subcontractor - the PA - and in this way sharply reduced the cost of the occupation. The democratic elections in the territories in January 1996 were essential for affording a degree of legitimacy to the PA. Of course in the end the PA did not fulfill Israel's expectations, and in many senses became a rebellious entity. But this is not directly connected to Israel's original aims. The Israeli occupation is essential for understanding Iraq for two basic reasons. First of all, like Israel, the United States has created a distinction between the population it has occupied and its resources. The intention of the Bush administration is to enable the Iraqis to run their lives for themselves, thus reducing the cost of the occupation, while retaining control of the rich oil fields. The important question at this time is which American corporations will profit most from the expected 200 percent increase in Iraqi oil production - from 2.1 million to 6 million barrels a day. Secondly, although Israel was not the first country to have initiated elections in the context of an occupation, it was the first to have brought back this practice in the post-colonial era in order to give legitimacy to a prolonged occupation. The Bush administration has found this strategy useful as it is well-suited to the new narrative of "spreading liberty" in the Middle East. Since it is impossible to nurture liberty and at the same time to impose a puppet government, Bush insisted on holding elections. The heart of the matter is that the aim of the elections is not to transfer power and authority to the Iraqi people but rather to give legitimization to continued American control in the region. Therefore, the current discussion among liberals about the degree to which the elections in Iraq stuck to the minimal procedures that ensure a fair democratic process misses the point. Even if former president Jimmy Carter himself had approved the entire election procedure, the Iraqis themselves would have had no voice, for example, in the question of the deployment of foreign forces in their country. After all, the new "democratic government" in Iraq was created in order to administer the local population so that the economic elite of the occupying power could enjoy the spoils. --- *The writer is a lecturer in the department of politics and administration at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ SpamWall: Mail to this addy is deleted unread unless it contains the keyword "igve". From papadop at peak.org Sun May 1 16:21:01 2005 From: papadop at peak.org (MichaelP) Date: Sun May 1 16:21:14 2005 Subject: [Mai-not] BBC NEWS: Italy media reveals Iraq details Message-ID: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/4504589.stm US military report into the killing of Nicola Calipari U$ tampers with evidence -=- Entire pages of the US report had been censored BBC: Sunday, 1 May, 2005, 22:22 GMT 23:22 UK Italy media reveals Iraq details By David Willey BBC News in Rome Italian media have published classified sections of an official US military inquiry into the accidental killing of an Italian agent in Baghdad. The 40-page report was censored by the Pentagon before being officially published on Saturday. Italy has refused to accept the US report's findings and is to publish its own version of events later this week. Details of the official report were published in newspapers on Sunday with censored material restored in full. Missing text A Greek medical student at Bologna University who was surfing the web early on Sunday found that with two simple clicks of his computer mouse he could restore censored portions of the report. ============================= DIFFERING ACCOUNTS US military: Car approaches checkpoint at high speed -- Troops attempt to tell driver to stop with arm signals, lights and warning shots --- Soldiers shoot into engine _________________________________________________________________ Italian government: Italy makes all necessary contacts with the US for safe passage -- The driver stops immediately when a light flashes 10m away -- At the same time, shots are fired into car for 10-15 seconds =================================== He passed the details to Italian newspapers which immediately put out the full text on their own websites. The missing text contains the names and ranks of all of the American military personnel involved in the killing of Nicola Calipari, the Italian agent who was given a state funeral and awarded Italy's highest medal of valour. It also reveals the rules of engagement in operation at the military checkpoint near Baghdad airport which have been contested by the Italian authorities. The censored sections include recommendations that the American military modify their checkpoint procedures to give better and clearer warning signs to approaching vehicles. The official Italian report on the incident expected to be published this week will accuse the American military of tampering with evidence at the scene of the shooting. The Americans invited two Italians to join in their inquiry, but the Italian representatives protested at what they claimed was lack of objectivity in presenting the evidence and returned to Rome. Relations between Rome and Washington remain tense. From jfos at net-tech.com.au Sun May 1 18:02:08 2005 From: jfos at net-tech.com.au (John) Date: Sun May 1 18:11:26 2005 Subject: [Mai-not] David and Goliath Struggles in Central Latin America Message-ID: <6.1.0.6.1.20050502110019.056c76a0@mail.net-tech.com.au> US-Cuban-Venezuelan relations James Petras Rebeli?n Introduction Cuba?s living example of 45 years of successful resistance to US military aggression and economic boycott is extremely damaging to Washington?s goal of world empire for several reasons. In the first place Cuba?s success refutes the notion put forth by the ?center-left? that ?small?, ?undeveloped? countries cannot resist imperial powers, or sustain a revolution in the face of ?globalization?. Secondly the survival of the Cuban revolution refutes the idea that Caribbean or Latin American countries located proximate to the US must conform to the dictates of Washington. Thirdly Cuba demonstrates that the US empire is not invincible ? Cuba has defeated almost all major aggressive military, political and diplomatic attacks. Diplomatically, Cuba is recognized by almost all countries in the world, and receives the support of over 150 countries (versus 3 for the US) in opposition to the US embargo in the United Nations. Economically, Cuba has trade and investment relations with all major European, Asian, African, Latin American and North American nations (except the US). Militarily the Cuban armed forces and intelligence agencies have defeated every US-sponsored terrorist attack on the islands for the past half-century in addition to raising the political cost for any potential invasion. In response to a half century of failures, the Bush Administration has escalated its aggression?: practically eliminating all US travel to Cuba, blocking almost all family remittances, and tightening trade restrictions on food and medicine. While these harsh measures have had some negative effects on Cuba, they have also provoked opposition among some conservative sectors of the US public. Many Cuban exiles who normally supported Bush have been antagonized because they cannot provide economic assistance to aging family members. Agricultural interests (from 38 states) which supported Bush are furious at the new restriction on trade. Liberal and conservative enemies of the Cuban revolution who hoped to subvert the revolution via cultural and ideological penetration are upset by the travel and cultural restrictions. In other words the harsher and more extreme the measures adopted by the Bush Administration against Cuba the greater Washington?s isolation. This is true externally as well as internally. Let us examine several case-illustrations. The US exploited the jailing of over 70 US paid propagandists labeling them ?political dissidents?, securing initially the support of the European Union. A year later, the EU has broken with Washington and renewed and expanded its cultural and economic ties with Cuba. While the US tightens its trade embargo, Cuban trade and investment ties with China and the rest of Asia, Venezuela and the rest of Latin America, Canada and Europe has expanded and deepened. The US restrictions on family remittances has been weakened by family members sending remittances via ?third countries? (Mexico, Canada, Dominican Republic etc.) Canadian, European, Latin American and Asian tourism have surpassed 2 million visitors annually and new influxes of investment have made up for most of the shortfall from the restrictions on remittances. Finally Washington?s attempts to limit Cuba?s access to energy sources after the fall of the USSR has been defeated by the far-reaching trade and investment agreements with the Venezuelan government of President Chavez. The Chavez regime provides Cuba with petrol at subsidized prices in exchange for Cuba providing a vast health and education program for the poor of Venezuela. The Cuban-Venezuelan political and economic ties have undercut US efforts to force the Caribbean and Latin American countries to break with Cuba. As a result of past and present failed policies of directly attacking Cuba, the Bush administration has turned toward destroying Cuba?s strategic alliance with the Chavez regime. The Two Stage Strategy US strategy toward destroying the Cuban revolution is increasingly following a ?two step? approach: first overthrow the Chavez government in Venezuela, cut off the energy supply and trade links and then proceed toward economic strangulation and military attack. The ?two step? strategy against Cuba, involves the elaboration of a calibrated action plan to overthrow the Chavez government. Washington?s anti-Chavez efforts up till 2005 have resulted in severe defeats. These efforts have largely been based on an ?insider approach?, utilizing the domestic ruling class, sectors of the army and the corrupt trade union bureaucracy. Not only have Washington?s domestic instruments been defeated but they have been severely weakened for future use. Washington?s support for the failed military coup resulted in the loss of several hundred counter-revolutionary officers who were forced to resign. Bush?s support for the petroleum elite?s lockout led to the expulsion of thousands of oil officials allied with Washington. The defeat of the referendum to expel Chavez, mobilized, politicized and radicalized millions of poor Venezuelans and demoralized Washington?s middle class supporters. The result of these failed policies has been to turn Washington?s attention to an ?outsider? strategy: the key to which is incremental military intervention in association with the terrorist Uribe regime in Colombia. The US strategy against Cuba involves a joint US-Colombian attack of Venezuela backed by internal terrorists and the ruling class. This indirect attack on Cuba, involves complex, external preparation in cooperation with Colombia. First of all Washington and Uribe have greatly strengthened military bases surrounding the Venezuelan border. Secondly ?trial military incursions? involving both Colombian military and paramilitary forces occur on a regular basis ? testing Venezuelan defenses. In 2004 six Venezuelan soldiers were killed, a number of Venezuelan officials were bribed to kidnap a Colombian resistance leader and numerous cross border attacks killing and kidnapping Colombian refugees took place in Venezuela. Thirdly the US has provided nearly $3 billion dollars in military aid to Colombia, tripled the size of its armed forces (to over 275,000), greatly increased its air force combat units (helicopters, fighter bombers), provided advanced military technology and several thousand official and ?contracted? military specialists. Fourthly Washington has recruited the Gutierrez regime in Ecuador, invaded Haiti, established military bases in Peru and the Dominican Republic, and has engaged in navy maneuvers just off the Venezuelan coast in preparation for a military attack. Fifthly Colombia (under US tutelage) signed a joint military-intelligence cooperation agreement on December 18, 2004 with the Venezuelan Ministry of Defense, providing the US with ?inside information? and serving as a possible source of infiltration of the Venezuelan Armed Forces to counter pro-Cuban officers. The Triangular Strategy The US is relying on a ?triangular strategy? to overthrow the Chavez regime: A military invasion from Colombia, US intervention (air and sea attacks plus special forces to assassinate key officials) and an internal uprising by infiltrated terrorists and military traitors, supported by key media, financial and petrol elites. The strategy involves seizing state power, expelling the Cuban aid missions and breaking all agreements with Cuba. Prior to this concerted military strategy, Washington has designed a propaganda campaign against the Cuban-Venezuelan alliance, Venezuela?s attempts to rectify the enormous military deficit with Colombia by purchasing defensive arms, and raising the specter of Venezuela?s ?subversion? of Latin American regimes. The key to US policy is to prevent Venezuela from joining Cuba as an alternative social welfare regime to the US neo-liberal clients in Latin America. US aggression escalates as the agrarian reform expands, Venezuela prepares self-defense and Chavez diversifies trade and investment ties. Cuba?s powerful support for Venezuela?s social welfare programs has consolidated mass support for the Chavez regime and is a main base of defense for the radicalization of the process. As Venezuela confronts Washington?s threats, it consolidates its ties with Cuba. The fate of the two projects become intertwined and bound together in a single common anti-imperialist project, despite the differences in social systems and political composition. Strengths of the Venezuelan-Cuban Alliance The US ?external? strategy toward Venezuela and its ?two step? approach toward Cuba face powerful limitations. First of all the Colombian regime faces a powerful internal opposition: 20,000 veteran guerrilla fighters and millions of Colombians sympathetic to the agrarian reform program, independent foreign policy and political freedoms of the Chavez regime. It is very dangerous for Uribe to start a ?two-front war? which might open the way to attacks on the principle cities including Bogot?. Secondly the US is heavily tied down militarily in Iraq and the Zionists put a higher priority on war against Iran/Syria than Venezuela. The US intervention would be limited to air and sea attacks and Special Forces. Thirdly the war would mobilize millions of Venezuelans in a war of national liberation, defending their own land ? homes, neighborhoods, families and friends. Moreover massive popular liberation wars radicalize the population and frequently lead to the confiscation of bourgeois counter-revolutionary property. A failed invasion could push Venezuela toward greater socialization of the economy and eliminate the domestic elite. Fourthly US economy and multi-nationals stand to lose a reliable supply of petroleum in a tight market and billions of dollars in investments ? weakening the US position in the global energy market. Fifthly an invasion is likely to lead to a joint military defense pact between Venezuela and Cuba, which would counter-US policy in the Caribbean. Sixthly an invasion is likely to provoke massive unrest and instability throughout Latin America, threaten US clients and undermining neo-liberal regimes and policies. Conclusion For all these reasons, Washington attempts to pursue the external, two step policy toward Venezuela and Cuba, while extremely dangerous to both countries, can have a boomerang effect, setting in its wake a new wave of revolutionary anti-imperialist struggles throughout the region. Up to now the escalation of US diplomatic and economic aggression against Cuba has led to the greater isolation of the US in Europe and throughout the Third World. An escalation of military aggression against Venezuela as part of a ?two-step strategy? against Cuba can have even more severe consequences ? the expansion of the powerful revolutionary struggle in Colombia and the rest of Latin America. March 15, 2005 From jfos at net-tech.com.au Sun May 1 18:11:02 2005 From: jfos at net-tech.com.au (John) Date: Sun May 1 18:12:27 2005 Subject: [Mai-not] Google Alert for: DEPLETED URANIUM Message-ID: <6.1.0.6.1.20050502110414.057141c0@mail.net-tech.com.au> Google Alert for: DEPLETED URANIUM Salmond demands answers on depleted uranium Politics.co.uk - London,UK SNP leader Alex Salmond has demanded a review of test firing practises for depleted uranium shells after it was revealed a local fisherman had discovered a ... See all stories on this topic Ending the DU nightmare Daily Campus (subscription) - Storrs,CT,USA ... She has suffered through three heart attacks and two heart surgeries as well as chronic fatigue syndrome caused by her exposure to depleted uranium (DU) and ... Salmond warns on 'nuclear madness' ePolitix - UK ... Salmond also published a letter from the Ministry of Defence confirming that four "essentially complete" depleted uranium shells have been found at the ... IRAQ: Doctors warn of increasing deformities in newborn babies Reuters AlertNet - London,England,UK ... Weaponry used during the Gulf war in 1991 contained depleted uranium, which could be a primary source for the increase, scientists in Baghdad said. ... Antiwar activists say depleted uranium has led to 11,000 American ... News Target - Taichung,Taiwan Arthur Bernklau, an advocate with the Veterans for Constitutional Law, an antiwar group, says that depleted uranium weapons used in the first Gulf War have ... Howard Dean's Sell Out And Betrayal Collective Bellaciao - Paris,France ... the VA. Who will diagnose and support our soldiers who are coming home contaminated by depleted uranium sickness? This serious consequence ... Alfredo Bremont: Lt. Col. Gordon Cucullu's?? "Insight ... VHeadline.com - Worth,IL,USA ... in Alaska, the Kyoto treaty and a huge deficit is another of the issues on which most of the world disagrees with, in addition to depleted uranium and many ... A Global Pact Against Depleted Uranium uruknet.info - Italy During September of 2004 I launched an international campaign to conclude a global pact against depleted uranium (DU) munitions by having every state in the ... The Grand Ole Opry of Murder uruknet.info - Italy ... If you "support the troops," you support killing 100,000 Iraqis, you support eventually killing innumerable Iraqis with depleted uranium, you support ... Website details war position of UK election candidates Islamic Republic News Agency - Tehran,Iran ... One who doesn't think they should organize the world using bombs, tanks, depleted uranium, nerve gas, cluster bombs, torture, corporate plunder, murder and ... A-bomb survivors call for elimination of nuclear weapons Japan Today - Tokyo,Japan ... "Hibakusha are even now being created in the world due to the use of depleted uranium in Iraq, for example," he said. (Kyodo News). VIETNAM: 30 years later, war crimes go on and on Green Left Weekly - Chippendale,NSW,Australia ... It's the same pattern that the US displayed in regard to the use of depleted uranium weapons in two wars in Iraq: deny the obvious, say there must be other ... From dgiles at central.murdoch.edu.au Sun May 1 19:09:38 2005 From: dgiles at central.murdoch.edu.au (Dion Giles) Date: Sun May 1 19:09:47 2005 Subject: [Mai-not] Duane and the future of Mai-Not In-Reply-To: <20050430054200.MGQZ550.fed1rmmtao12.cox.net@smtp.west.cox. net> References: <20050430054200.MGQZ550.fed1rmmtao12.cox.net@smtp.west.cox.net> Message-ID: <6.1.1.1.0.20050502095317.02e63a38@central.murdoch.edu.au> Busy few days -- StopMAI WA monthly meeting, unions' May Day rally and all that -- so I'm still working through messages. But Duane Behrens' message needs an urgent response. Do, please, re-subscribe, Duane. The list continues. I'll redirect to you any traffic arriving after your message and will keep on doing so until I know you're back on board. I did gather the addresses of all the people who had written to the original list run by Russell, because it was clear that Russell was not going to continue it as it was diametrically opposed to what he was seeking. Yves on the other hand, confronting a very roughly parallel problem, is not closing the list -- but there is no reason why the NCFS group should pay for it. We should accept it with thanks for Yves' generosity, and be ready to pout our money where our mouths are. I just hope that, like Truthout/William Rivers Pitt, NCFS/Yves Bajard lets people know when funds are getting low and it is time for us to renew subs. Dion Giles Western Australia At 13:42 30/04/2005, you wrote: >Fine, then. Close it down. Thanks for your efforts. > >Ed, Dion, Christopher, Janet and (especially) Jonathan, please keep me on >your list of "intellectually curious." Please do keep me posted on >articles of interest and discussion. Do so in the knowledge that what you >do here is - for me and for the various lists to which I cc your timely >posts - very, very important. > >Yves, you're right. It is late. Like you, I'm tired. Please be good >enough to "unsubscribe" me from this list in the morning, or next week - >or as soon as you can. > >And thank you all. It was a good run. I learned a lot. > >Duane Behrens > >_______________________________________________ >Mai-not mailing list >Mai-not@globalproblematique.net >http://www.globalproblematique.net/mailman/listinfo/mai-not From ax490 at ncf.carleton.ca Sun May 1 19:10:39 2005 From: ax490 at ncf.carleton.ca (Mike Dirienzo) Date: Sun May 1 19:10:54 2005 Subject: [Mai-not] Chewing raw grubs with the 'Nutcracker Man In-Reply-To: <5.1.0.14.2.20050501071951.02e13240@pop.uniserve.com> References: <5.1.0.14.2.20050501071951.02e13240@pop.uniserve.com> Message-ID: <42758C1F.8040808@ncf.carleton.ca> All so eloquently stated, Ed. I couldn't agree with you more. This is the practical, realistic, sane way to look at the problems we face. Such a contrast to all the useless wailing that the oil is running out and we are all going to die. These Chicken Little types sow despair amongst the people. The natural response is denial. So when the mainstream starts to talk about these issues, the people just tune it out and let the politicians do whatever they will. Despair serves the elite. The coming energy crunch is actually an opportunity to compel change. The battle is over what changes. If the rich have their way, people like us will be eating gruel in cold homes while the "entrepreneurs" are still comfortably jetting about the world. It is vital that the people create a political environment in which no solution is acceptable unless it distributes the burden and sacrifice fairly. As you point out, there is so much wasteful use that could be curtailed without major impact on quality of life for most people. Air travel is certainly a tremendous waste of resources. Military aircraft are a reminder that if all we do is individually reduce our usage, we are only saving fuel for the elite to squander. We need political power to really control the use of dwindling resources. The powers-that-be have proven themselves grossly irresponsible in this regard. I am glad that you mentioned trains. Rail is the most energy-efficient form of transport. It was phased out because trucking and the private automobile provided far more business opportunities. We need to get the freight off of the roads and back on the rails where it belongs. Passenger links between major centres would also save energy compared to each person driving their own vehicle. Yes, it is probably just buying time, but we need time to change how life is lived. Ed Deak wrote: > Interesting article with a lot of truth, but also a lot of nonsense in > it. The writer is obviously some intellectual without practical > experience and skills. > > We agree that an energy crunch is coming that will affect the lives of > people in a major way. The present cities can not be maintained, for > certain. There may also be major dieoffs. How or why, we don't know. > But to predict that after an energy crunch people will have to go back > to the caves is bloody nonsense. > > For one thing, there will always be a certain amount of electricity, oil > etc, probably strictly rationed for useful purposes. The sooner we get > rid of these needless airliners and military equipment is the better. > We do need some airliners, but 90 or more percent of them should be > junked tomorrow. We came on a ship to Canada 50 years ago and can't see > why the system could not be reinstated. > > Just the other day we watched B52s crossing our sky in the middle of BC, > in all directions, all day. What the hell for ? We call them the "idiot > planes", but it is not only the people who fly them who are the idiots, > but also those who send them out and the public that tolerates this > incredible waste and stupidity. This is going on all the time. > > The solutions, to begin with, are : > > Rebuild the railways. In Canada thousands of km of railways, built > mainly to freight resources, agricultural products, etc. have been torn > up, because > "road traffic is now more efficient". Totally insane and irresponsible. > > The vast majority of industrial energy goes into wasteful products and > production methods, mostly to replace humans and divert the benefits to > company shares. This doesn't mean that people will have to go around > dressed in animal hides and scrape them with sharpened CDs. There are > enough tools etc. already in existence that even if we never make any > more, they'll last for indefinite periods. I have been working in and > on the development of energy efficient production methods for 50 years > and know what can be and should be done. Obviously, I won't be around > when the energy crunch comes, but there will be millions, especially in > the so called "developing countries" who will still know how to use > tools, instead of pushing buttons. Europe was dug out and rebuilt after > WW2 almost totally with human labour and skills, as there were no huge > machines in those days. > > I grew up in a society where electricity was always around in my > lifetime, but electric tools were not, except in major factories etc. > There were all kinds of trades going and working without, or only with a > few electric tools. > > The incredible palaces, churches etc. in Europe, even back in ancient > Rome and Greece, with the most intricate floors, woodwork, tapestries, > mouldings, fabrics, clothing, etc. were all built without any > electricity, or any kind of power tools, with human hands only. > > To suggest that humanity has completely lost its imagination and skills > is irresp[onsible. I firmly believe that one day, when the present > economic theories and political ideologies are collapsed, or overthrown, > humanity will enter the real Age of Enlightenment and this terrible > waste of resources, human ingenuity and skills will not only stop, but > rejuvenated and humanity will really enter its Golden Age. > > Cheers, Ed. > From eltechno at clear.lakes.com Mon May 2 16:50:28 2005 From: eltechno at clear.lakes.com (Jonathan Larson) Date: Mon May 2 16:51:46 2005 Subject: [Mai-not] The Long Way Home Message-ID: The Long Way Home Getting Out of Iraq will Prove Tougher Than Getting Out of Vietnam By KEVIN ZEESE Washington, DC http://www.counterpunch.org/zeese05022005.html Daniel Ellsberg, of Pentagon Papers fame, gave the worst news of the day to those examining lessons from Vietnam thirty years after the end of the war we're going to be in Iraq a long time. It will be tougher to get out of Iraq, than it was to get out of Vietnam. Why? The major difference between Vietnam and Iraq is Iraq has oil, Vietnam doesn't and we need oil. It is much easier to start a war than it is to end one. Ellsberg was speaking at a forum organized by the Institute for Policy Studies held Thursday, April 28 at the Rayburn House Office Building. He pointed out that in 1968 the anti-Vietnam War protests were at full force and the U.S. did not get out until seven years later, 1975. President Nixon even ran for office promising he had a secret plan to end the war and we did not get out for years after that. If it had not been for Watergate, says Ellsberg, we might not have gotten out. According to Ellsberg, throughout our time in Vietnam US officials were saying that the US would only be in Vietnam temporarily, while in fact they were planning on staying for a long time ? permanently. This parallels claims by the U.S. government today. The government claims we're just staying in Iraq a short time until the country is stabilized. But the Department of Defense has been planning 14 permanent military bases in Iraq and in the last month both Houses of Congress approved funds for building the permanent military bases in the country. Ellsberg also pointed out that throughout the Vietnam war people argued we had to stay or there would be more chaos and death. In the end at least three million Vietnamese died in the war. Chaos was not prevented. Today, we claim to be a stabilizing force, but insurgent attacks have become more sophisticated, they've reached out to mainstream Iraqis and there are daily deaths of Iraqis and Americans. Chaos is not being prevented. As many of the other speakers pointed out the chaos is actually caused by the occupation, not prevented by it. When the United States left Vietnam it was not a smooth exit it was a rushed, chaotic exit. As soon as we left the Communists came in and renamed Saigon, Ho Chi Minh City. This is akin to the concern Rep. John Conyers, Jr. (D-MI) expressed during the forum. He is worried that if the U.S. announces a definite date of withdrawal than those who we do not want to be in power in Iraq will prepare to take over the government when we leave. Therefore, while he is calling for an exit plan and opposes the war and occupation. He wants an exit plan the results leaving Iraq in worse shape than it is now, and worse shape than it was under Saddam Hussein. Rep. Conyers is not happy about having to clean up the mess made by the Bush Administration. In addition to Rep. Conyers, two other progressive members spoke, in fact they are the co-chairs of the Progressive Caucus, Rep. Barbara Lee (D-CA) and Rep. Lynn Woolsey (D-CA). The one thing all three Members agreed on was that it is going to take an up-from-the-ground effort by the people to end the Iraq occupation. Phyllis Bennis, a Fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies, pointed out that a major difference between the Iraq War and the Vietnam War is that already only two years into the Iraq War a majority of the public opposes the war. It took many years to get that far in the Vietnam era. The anti-war movement needs to turn majority support for getting out of Iraq into the policy of the United States. Patric Resta, a National Guardsman who spent time in Iraq and now works with Iraq Veterans Against the War, highlighted the poor planning of the administration. In particular the lack of basic equipment. One example, soldiers at check points not even having flash lights in order to signal people to pull over. He pledged to work every day to end the war until the U.S. is out of Iraq. No doubt Iraq Veterans and their families may be among the most important of anti-war advocates. Jon Volk of the Friends Committee on National Legislation, put forward a practical first step. He suggests people ask their representatives whether there was an intent for the United States to leave Iraq or was the intent to stay there for the long-term? This is a critical first question. If the intent is to leave, then he urges people to get their representatives to sign-onto Rep. Woolsey's resolution, House Resolution 35. (See: http://democracyrising.us/content/view/177/165/) Congressional Black Caucus have signed on. Rep. Conyers ended on a high note the people did it during the Vietnam War, the people will do it again. Further Information: Resolution Calling for Withdrawal, HR 35 http://democracyrising.us/content/view/177/165/ Institute for Policy Studies http://ips-dc.org/ Iraq Veterans Against the War, http://www.ivaw.net/ Kevin Zeese is a director of Democracy Rising. You can comment on this column on his blog spot at DemocracyRising.US. -- ------------------ War remains the decisive human failure. - John Kenneth Galbraith Jonathan web site at: http://elegant-technology.com -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://www.globalproblematique.net/pipermail/mai-not/attachments/20050502/6b2866c9/attachment.html From duanebehrens at cox.net Mon May 2 16:54:29 2005 From: duanebehrens at cox.net (duanebehrens@cox.net) Date: Mon May 2 16:54:33 2005 Subject: [Mai-not] Re: Re: Dole Addresses Judges Issue From Senate Floor Message-ID: <20050502235426.WNDU7629.fed1rmmtao01.cox.net@smtp.west.cox.net> >From the Argus Leader online forum: A 13-Point Litmus Test -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- LAWDAWG: Perhaps [centralized control of power and the horrible repression that often goes with it] has been done on this planet, but when was it done in this country? Furthermore, your personal hysteria in this regard is really outside the boundaries of what we are talking about. PERZUKI: Hysteria? Funny, I don't remember screaming or even sweating profusely when I wrote it. I simply made an observation of what often - typically - happens when a single political party gains control of government. If this continues - if power continues to be concentrated into one party as it has been for the last decade, we can even begin to forecast some additional policies and events: 1. It's common for a strong ruling party to tighten its citizens' ability to move about, to talk, and to organize freely. This reduction in freedom and privacy is usually initiated after a real or staged "threat" from unknown assailants. 2. That reduction in freedom is achieved in a variety of ways: entire government agencies are often formed, usually with some sort of patriotic title but nevertheless devoted to spying on that nation's own citizens. 3. For instance, through government edict that new "security" agency will require that financial transactions by private citizens be reported to their government. Personal banking records and purchasing histories are also no longer private, instead accessed at will by unknown-but-authorized federal agents. 4. Fingerprinting will be required as part of normal transactions such as the execution of a notary public signature, enrollment in public schools, etc. 5. Airplane luggage will be searched often without the citizen-passenger's knowledge, consent or presence. Using a variety of "public safety" excuses, unannounced roadblocks will be set up to inspect and search private vehicles without warrant or cause. 6. Encampments will be quietly built, usually on foreign-but-adjacent soil. They will first be tested on foreign prisoners, but later used to house national political dissidents and citizens. The ongoing construction of these camps will be done largely in secret. 7. Detainees in those camps will be held without bail, without counsel, and without trial at the government's leisure, and may be tortured, starved or beaten to death. Their deaths will go unpublished. 8. Since none of this can be accomlished without a controlled press, steps will be taken to centralize ownership of national newspapers, television and radio stations until only a handful of obedient corporations control the news that is seen, heard and read by a majority of citizens. That controlled press will also be employed to repress the scandals and perversions that are often inherent in such controlled environments. Occasionally, a faux "dissident" faction will be allowed to briefly publish or air; this allowance will be used to further the claim that the national press is somehow unbiased, or even "liberal." 9. Patriotic themes and flags will be distributed throughout the country. Married to a single, simple theme (which cannot be argued but which only hides the truth), citizens will be expected to display these baubles on their autos and on their person. 10. Dissent will meet with increasing intolerance. Protests will be banned, or secured and dispatched to tiny, posted areas away from cities and political events. Protesters who attemp to gain access to political events (or their vicinity) will be arrested. 11. Popular support for a national agenda will be fostered through (a) articles published by a controlled press (see Item 8), and (b) through the televising of "press briefings" and "informal town meetings" in which paid actors ask canned questions with rehearsed answeres in a controlled production set. 12. Political dissidents who do in fact succeed in reaching a significant audience - usually popular authors from unrelated genres who finally act upon their conscience - these individuals, though rare, will usually meet with sudden death, later labeled as "suicide," or simply "disappeared." Those deaths may occur in airplanes, kitchens, or motel rooms. They will not be investigated and they will quietly and quickly recede from public view. 13. Wars will be initiated and fought against defenseless nations - and will be based on that old reliable - the iminent threat of danger. Waged at great cost, booty from those wars will go directly to the ruling class - in the form of (a) profit on reconstruction contracts, (b) profit on stolen resources, (c) profit on the takeover of public utilities, and (d) profit from the transport machinery required to achieve such massive undertakings. To fight this war, the desperate poor will be recruited under various promises of financial help, but will ultimately be used as they always have - cannon fodder. Children of the ruling class will remain safe from physical harm. Nope. No hysteria. As calmly as I can, I'm pointing to a few of the things that COULD happen in ANY country when a single party achieves dominant control of its citizens. And I believe rather strongly that control of a nation's court system is perhaps the last (and most foreboding) step in achieving that control. I only hope these things will never happen here. From dgiles at central.murdoch.edu.au Mon May 2 21:47:21 2005 From: dgiles at central.murdoch.edu.au (Dion Giles) Date: Mon May 2 21:47:28 2005 Subject: [Mai-not] Hungarian court curbs Australian cyanide vandals Message-ID: <6.1.1.1.0.20050503124000.02f66d00@central.murdoch.edu.au> An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://www.globalproblematique.net/pipermail/mai-not/attachments/20050503/a2533b93/attachment.html From dgiles at central.murdoch.edu.au Mon May 2 22:22:58 2005 From: dgiles at central.murdoch.edu.au (Dion Giles) Date: Mon May 2 22:23:08 2005 Subject: [Mai-not] Australian jobs flow to Chinese slaves Message-ID: <6.1.1.1.0.20050503130734.0308b7d8@central.murdoch.edu.au> The Australia-China Free Trade Agreement isn't even negotiated yet (well, not openly, anyway), but already Mr Greed, sensing greater profits by switching production to Chinese slave factories, is moving to transfer Australian jobs to China and slash wages for the few workers whose jobs aren't lost altogether. Dion Giles Western Australia http://www.smh.com.au/news/Business/Free-trade-agreement-jeopardises-local-workers/2005/05/02/1114886315346.html FREE TRADE AGREEMENT JEOPARDISES LOCAL WORKERS By Alexandra Smith Transport Reporter Sydney Morning Herald May 3, 2005 At least 1000 workers may be jobless within months as two Sydney car-part manufacturers plan to close, or move to Asia, as Australia moves towards a free trade agreement with China. The Australian Manufacturing Workers Union state secretary, Paul Bastian, said cheaper labour in China and an expectation that a trade agreement would be signed soon would cripple the industry. Thousands of jobs in the auto components industry would be lost within a year, he said. "The China free trade agreement, together with existing competition from China, makes it impossible for the Australian auto component industry to survive." The first companies to signal their intention to leave Australia or greatly cut operations were Tri Star Engineering, of Marrickville, and and Spicer Axle Australia, of Yennora, Mr Bastian said. The general manager of Tri Star, Vincent Kong, and the managing director of Spicer Axle, Bob Hall, could not be contacted by the Herald. Mr Bastian said Tri Star, which made steering and suspension components, had started importing parts from India and was negotiating to set up a plant in China after losing key contracts for the Asian market. Spicer Axle, which has plants making car differentials in Victoria and South Australia, employs 500 people at its Sydney plant, but had lost large contracts and was considering closing. Mr Bastian said he understood that if Spicer was unsuccessful in negotiations with Ford it would close. "Ford is demanding cost reductions amounting to a 30 per cent cost cut over the next three years," he said. "In order to enable this to take place, the company has demanded an immediate 15 per cent pay cut for all employees, with additional use of contract and casual employment and the abolition of the current redundancy agreement, with all new employees accepting a 20 per cent pay cut." Mr Bastian said the Federal Government was not considering the effect that a free trade agreement would have on workers' rights and conditions. "What employers are demanding is that workers adopt and compete on Chinese wage conditions," he said. "What the Federal Government should be doing is have an open and transparent debate in Parliament about not just the economic impacts but also the social costs and implications." Ambegahewage Jayasingha, who has worked at Tri Star for 18 years, said at least 10 people had been made redundant in the past few weeks and 270 would lose their job by next year. Mr Jayasingha said Tri Star management told employees that it would consider relocating its Marrickville plant to China and then exporting its parts back. "My personal opinion is that I would rather pay a few more dollars for something Australian made than buy something from China that will mean people have lost their jobs," Mr Jayasingha said. He said he did not know what he would do once he lost his job because there were few manufacturing jobs in Australia. From ax490 at ncf.carleton.ca Tue May 3 03:41:01 2005 From: ax490 at ncf.carleton.ca (Mike Dirienzo) Date: Tue May 3 03:41:21 2005 Subject: [Mai-not] Australian jobs flow to Chinese slaves In-Reply-To: <6.1.1.1.0.20050503130734.0308b7d8@central.murdoch.edu.au> References: <6.1.1.1.0.20050503130734.0308b7d8@central.murdoch.edu.au> Message-ID: <4277553D.9060403@ncf.carleton.ca> This is a tale that is all too familiar. But what are we to make of a working population that in Europe and the English-speaking world offers not the tiniest bit of resistance to its onrushing impoverishment. They are fully deserving of their fate. I have grown too old to wait for "the people" to rise up and create a better world. Let us be brutally honest. Even the great revolutions of the past were carried out by dedicated minorities while the masses munched and farted like so many cattle. Fully aware that the future is poverty, I am becoming meaner and cheaper every day. My full-time enslavement to the corporate workplace will last only so long as it takes to pay off my obligations to the bank for the very modest home I bottom-fished out of a depressed market nine years ago. Then I'll work only so much as I need to live, keeping my income in the lowest tax bracket. There are programs and tax breaks for low-income people. I intend to harvest them. The willing slaves, those who agree to keep working harder and forget retirement, let them pay the way. Am I bitter? Yes, like a fine beer. Dion Giles wrote: > The Australia-China Free Trade Agreement isn't even negotiated yet > (well, not openly, anyway), but already Mr Greed, sensing greater > profits by switching production to Chinese slave factories, is moving to > transfer Australian jobs to China and slash wages for the few workers > whose jobs aren't lost altogether. > > Dion Giles > Western Australia > > http://www.smh.com.au/news/Business/Free-trade-agreement-jeopardises-local-workers/2005/05/02/1114886315346.html > > > FREE TRADE AGREEMENT JEOPARDISES LOCAL WORKERS > > By Alexandra Smith > Transport Reporter > Sydney Morning Herald > May 3, 2005 > > At least 1000 workers may be jobless within months as two Sydney > car-part manufacturers plan to close, or move to Asia, as Australia > moves towards a free trade agreement with China. > > The Australian Manufacturing Workers Union state secretary, Paul > Bastian, said cheaper labour in China and an expectation that a trade > agreement would be signed soon would cripple the industry. > > Thousands of jobs in the auto components industry would be lost within a > year, he said. > > "The China free trade agreement, together with existing competition from > China, makes it impossible for the Australian auto component industry to > survive." > > The first companies to signal their intention to leave Australia or > greatly cut operations were Tri Star Engineering, of Marrickville, and > and Spicer Axle Australia, of Yennora, Mr Bastian said. > > The general manager of Tri Star, Vincent Kong, and the managing director > of Spicer Axle, Bob Hall, could not be contacted by the Herald. > > Mr Bastian said Tri Star, which made steering and suspension components, > had started importing parts from India and was negotiating to set up a > plant in China after losing key contracts for the Asian market. > > Spicer Axle, which has plants making car differentials in Victoria and > South Australia, employs 500 people at its Sydney plant, but had lost > large contracts and was considering closing. Mr Bastian said he > understood that if Spicer was unsuccessful in negotiations with Ford it > would close. > > "Ford is demanding cost reductions amounting to a 30 per cent cost cut > over the next three years," he said. > > "In order to enable this to take place, the company has demanded an > immediate 15 per cent pay cut for all employees, with additional use of > contract and casual employment and the abolition of the current > redundancy agreement, with all new employees accepting a 20 per cent pay > cut." > > Mr Bastian said the Federal Government was not considering the effect > that a free trade agreement would have on workers' rights and conditions. > > "What employers are demanding is that workers adopt and compete on > Chinese wage conditions," he said. > > "What the Federal Government should be doing is have an open and > transparent debate in Parliament about not just the economic impacts but > also the social costs and implications." > > Ambegahewage Jayasingha, who has worked at Tri Star for 18 years, said > at least 10 people had been made redundant in the past few weeks and 270 > would lose their job by next year. > > Mr Jayasingha said Tri Star management told employees that it would > consider relocating its Marrickville plant to China and then exporting > its parts back. > > "My personal opinion is that I would rather pay a few more dollars for > something Australian made than buy something from China that will mean > people have lost their jobs," Mr Jayasingha said. > > He said he did not know what he would do once he lost his job because > there were few manufacturing jobs in Australia. > > > > _______________________________________________ > Mai-not mailing list > Mai-not@globalproblematique.net > http://www.globalproblematique.net/mailman/listinfo/mai-not > From eltechno at clear.lakes.com Tue May 3 06:07:13 2005 From: eltechno at clear.lakes.com (Jonathan Larson) Date: Tue May 3 06:11:47 2005 Subject: [Mai-not] Foreign debt museum opens its doors Message-ID: http://tinyurl.com/7vf5m [Reuters] Foreign debt museum opens its doors By Mary Milliken Fri Apr 29, 5:40 AM ET Three years after staging the largest debt default in modern history, Argentina on Thursday opened what may be the first Museum of Foreign Debt to teach people the perils of borrowing abroad. The subject is heavy, but the museum's creators have tried to make the mood light and the displays accessible to everyone, especially schoolchildren. In one corner, a pink, doll-size play kitchen represents the recipes of the International Monetary Fund, which Argentines blame for encouraging the heavy borrowing in the 1990s that led to the catastrophic economic collapse in late 2001. "We chose a play kitchen because we are always so innocent and believe in magic recipes from abroad," said museum designer Eduardo Lopez. "Look, we open the freezer and the oven and there is no food." But the museum in the University of Buenos Aires economics department doesn't dwell only on this latest debt crisis: It goes back to Argentina's first default in the early 1800s and gives a detailed account of the last 30 years when the country's foreign debt woes snowballed. Visitors can delve into a spongy "black hole" -- the place where all that borrowed money ended up. "I liked best the black hole with everything the debt swallowed -- education, families, jobs," said Fabian Jader, 34, an opening night visitor. "I feel anger and pity for the people, but above all helplessness." Argentina's economy has recovered at a healthy clip in the last two years and the country is on the cusp of ending its default of some $100 billion (52.3 billion pounds) in foreign debt. But 40 percent of the population in the once-wealthy nation still lives below the poverty line, many of them in the crime-ridden industrial rust belt around Buenos Aires. "People know absolutely nothing about how we accumulated all this debt, they only know about the misery they have seen lately," said museum director Simon Pristupin, who dreamed up the idea in 2001 and struggled to convince sceptics. "I think this museum is going to become very important, but right now it's just a little bird." Pristupin said his favourite part of the museum is a golden cart sculpture made out of cardboard. "It symbolizes Argentina's reality: everything's golden, but it's made of cardboard and that reminds us of all those people who today collect cardboard for recycling." -- ------------------ War remains the decisive human failure. - John Kenneth Galbraith Jonathan web site at: http://elegant-technology.com From eltechno at clear.lakes.com Tue May 3 06:45:22 2005 From: eltechno at clear.lakes.com (Jonathan Larson) Date: Tue May 3 06:50:35 2005 Subject: [Mai-not] Postmodernism and truth Message-ID: I really do miss the enlightenment and its values!! ***************************************** Postmodernism and truth http://www.butterfliesandwheels.com/articleprint.php?num=13 By Daniel Dennett Here is a story you probably haven't heard, about how a team of American researchers inadvertently introduced a virus into a third world country they were studying.(1) They were experts in their field, and they had the best intentions; they thought they were helping the people they were studying, but in fact they had never really seriously considered whether what they were doing might have ill effects. It had not occurred to them that a side-effect of their research might be damaging to the fragile ecology of the country they were studying. The virus they introduced had some dire effects indeed: it raised infant mortality rates, led to a general decline in the health and wellbeing of women and children, and, perhaps worst of all, indirectly undermined the only effective political force for democracy in the country, strengthening the hand of the traditional despot who ruled the nation. These American researchers had something to answer for, surely, but when confronted with the devastation they had wrought, their response was frustrating, to say the least: they still thought that what they were doing was, all things considered, in the interests of the people, and declared that the standards by which this so-called devastation was being measured were simply not appropriate. Their critics, they contended, were trying to impose "Western" standards in a cultural environment that had no use for such standards. In this strange defense they were warmly supported by the country's leaders--not surprisingly--and little was heard--not surprisingly--from those who might have been said, by Western standards, to have suffered as a result of their activities. These researchers were not biologists intent on introducing new strains of rice, nor were they agri-business chemists testing new pesticides, or doctors trying out vaccines that couldn't legally be tested in the U.S.A. They were postmodernist science critics and other multiculturalists who were arguing, in the course of their professional researches on the culture and traditional "science" of this country, that Western science was just one among many equally valid narratives, not to be "privileged" in its competition with native traditions which other researchers--biologists, chemists, doctors and others--were eager to supplant. The virus they introduced was not a macromolecule but a meme (a replicating idea): the idea that science was a "colonial" imposition, not a worthy substitute for the practices and beliefs that had carried the third-world country to its current condition. And the reason you have not heard of this particular incident is that I made it up, to dramatize the issue and to try to unsettle what seems to be current orthodoxy among the literati about such matters. But it is inspired by real incidents--that is to say, true reports. Events of just this sort have occurred in India and elsewhere, reported, movingly, by a number of writers, among them: Meera Nanda, "The Epistemic Charity of the Social Constructivist Critics of Science and Why the Third World Should Refuse the Offer," in N. Koertge, ed., A House Built on Sand: Exposing Postmodernist Myths about Science, Oxford University Press, 1998, pp286-311 Reza Afshari, "An Essay on Islamic Cultural Relativism in the Discourse of Human Rights," in Human Rights Quarterly, 16, 1994, pp.235-76. Susan Okin, "Is Multiculturalism Bad for Women?" Boston Review, October/November, 1997, pp 25-28. Pervez Hoodbhoy, Islam and Science: Religious Orthodoxy and the Battle for Rationality, London and New Jersey, Zed Books Ltd. 1991. My little fable is also inspired by a wonderful remark of E. O. Wilson, in Atlantic Monthly a few months ago: "Scientists, being held responsible for what they say, have not found postmodernism useful." Actually, of course, we are all held responsible for what we say. The laws of libel and slander, for instance, exempt none of us, but most of us--including scientists in many or even most fields--do not typically make assertions that, independently of libel and slander considerations, might bring harm to others, even indirectly. A handy measure of this fact is the evident ridiculousness we discover in the idea of malpractice insurance for . . . . literary critics, philosophers, mathematicians, historians, cosmologists. What on earth could a mathematician or literary critic do, in the course of executing her profession duties, that might need the security blanket of malpractice insurance? She might inadvertently trip a student in the corridor, or drop a book on somebody's head, but aside from such outr? side-effects, our activities are paradigmatically innocuous. One would think. But in those fields where the stakes are higher--and more direct--there is a longstanding tradition of being especially cautious, and of taking particular responsibility for ensuring that no harm results (as explicitly honored in the Hippocratic Oath). Engineers, knowing that thousands of people's safety may depend on the bridge they design, engage in focussed exercises with specified constraints designed to determine that, according to all current knowledge, their designs are safe and sound. Even economists--often derided for the risks they take with other people's livelihoods--when they find themselves in positions to endorse specific economic measures considered by government bodies or by their private clients, are known to attempt to put a salutary strain on their underlying assumptions, just to be safe. They are used to asking themselves, and to being expected to ask themselves: "What if I'm wrong?" We others seldom ask ourselves this question, since we have spent our student and professional lives working on topics that are, according both to tradition and common sense, incapable of affecting any lives in ways worth worrying about. If my topic is whether or not Vlastos had the best interpretation of Plato's Parmenides or how the wool trade affected imagery in Tudor poetry, or what the best version of string theory says about time, or how to recast proofs in topology in some new formalism, if I am wrong, dead wrong, in what I say, the only damage I am likely to do is to my own scholarly reputation. But when we aspire to have a greater impact on the "real" (as opposed to "academic") world-- and many philosophers do aspire to this today--we need to adopt the attitudes and habits of these more applied disciplines. We need to hold ourselves responsible for what we say, recognizing that our words, if believed, can have profound effects for good or ill. When I was a young untenured professor of philosophy, I once received a visit from a colleague from the Comparative Literature Department, an eminent and fashionable literary theorist, who wanted some help from me. I was flattered to be asked, and did my best to oblige, but the drift of his questions about various philosophical topics was strangely perplexing to me. For quite a while we were getting nowhere, until finally he managed to make clear to me what he had come for. He wanted "an epistemology," he said. An epistemology. Every self-respecting literary theorist had to sport an epistemology that season, it seems, and without one he felt naked, so he had come to me for an epistemology to wear--it was the very next fashion, he was sure, and he wanted the dernier cri in epistemologies. It didn't matter to him that it be sound, or defensible, or (as one might as well say) true; it just had to be new and different and stylish. Accessorize, my good fellow, or be overlooked at the party. At that moment I perceived a gulf between us that I had only dimly seen before. It struck me at first as simply the gulf between being serious and being frivolous. But that initial surge of self-righteousness on my part was, in fact, a naive reaction. My sense of outrage, my sense that my time had been wasted by this man's bizarre project, was in its own way as unsophisticated as the reaction of the first-time theater-goer who leaps on the stage to protect the heroine from the villain. "Don't you understand?" we ask incredulously. "It's make believe. It's art. It isn't supposed to be taken literally!" Put in that context, perhaps this man's quest was not so disreputable after all. I would not have been offended, would I, if a colleague in the Drama Department had come by and asked if he could borrow a few yards of my books to put on the shelves of the set for his production of Tom Stoppard's play, Jumpers. What if anything would be wrong in outfitting this fellow with a snazzy set of outrageous epistemological doctrines with which he could titillate or confound his colleagues? What would be wrong would be that since this man didn't acknowledge the gulf, didn't even recognize that it existed, my acquiescence in his shopping spree would have contributed to the debasement of a precious commodity, the erosion of a valuable distinction. Many people, including both onlookers and participants, don't see this gulf, or actively deny its existence, and therein lies the problem. The sad fact is that in some intellectual circles, inhabited by some of our more advanced thinkers in the arts and humanities, this attitude passes as a sophisticated appreciation of the futility of proof and the relativity of all knowledge claims. In fact this opinion, far from being sophisticated, is the height of sheltered naivet?, made possible only by flatfooted ignorance of the proven methods of scientific truth-seeking and their power. Like many another naif, these thinkers, reflecting on the manifest inability of their methods of truth-seeking to achieve stable and valuable results, innocently generalize from their own cases and conclude that nobody else knows how to discover the truth either. Among those who contribute to this problem, I am sorry to say, is, my good friend Dick Rorty. Richard Rorty and I have been constructively disagreeing with each other for over a quarter of a century now. Each of us has taught the other a great deal, I believe, in the reciprocal process of chipping away at our residual points of disagreement. I can't name a living philosopher from whom I have learned more. Rorty has opened up the horizons of contemporary philosophy, shrewdly showing us philosophers many things about how our own projects have grown out of the philosophical projects of the distant and recent past, while boldly describing and prescribing future paths for us to take. But there is one point over which he and I do not agree at all--not yet--and that concerns his attempt over the years to show that philosophers' debates about Truth and Reality really do erase the gulf, really do license a slide into some form of relativism. In the end, Rorty tells us, it is all just "conversations," and there are only political or historical or aesthetic grounds for taking one role or another in an ongoing conversation. Rorty has often tried to enlist me in his campaign, declaring that he could find in my own work one explosive insight or another that would help him with his project of destroying the illusory edifice of objectivity. One of his favorite passages is the one with which I ended my book Consciousness Explained (1991): It's just a war of metaphors, you say--but metaphors are not "just" metaphors; metaphors are the tools of thought. No one can think about consciousness without them, so it is important to equip yourself with the best set of tools available. Look what we have built with our tools. Could you have imagined it without them? [p.455] "I wish," Rorty says, "he had taken one step further, and had added that such tools are all that inquiry can ever provide, because inquiry is never 'pure' in the sense of [Bernard] Williams' 'project of pure inquiry.' It is always a matter of getting us something we want." ("Holism, Intrinsicality, Transcendence," in Dahlbom, ed., Dennett and his Critics. 1993.) But I would never take that step, for although metaphors are indeed irreplaceable tools of thought, they are not the only such tools. Microscopes and mathematics and MRI scanners are among the others. Yes, any inquiry is a matter of getting us something we want: the truth about something that matters to us, if all goes as it should. When philosophers argue about truth, they are arguing about how not to inflate the truth about truth into the Truth about Truth, some absolutistic doctrine that makes indefensible demands on our systems of thought. It is in this regard similar to debates about, say, the reality of time, or the reality of the past. There are some deep, sophisticated, worthy philosophical investigations into whether, properly speaking, the past is real. Opinion is divided, but you entirely misunderstand the point of these disagreements if you suppose that they undercut claims such as the following: Life first emerged on this planet more than three thousand million years ago. The Holocaust happened during World War II. Jack Ruby shot and killed Lee Harvey Oswald at 11:21 am, Dallas time, November 24, 1963. These are truths about events that really happened. Their denials are falsehoods. No sane philosopher has ever thought otherwise, though in the heat of battle, they have sometimes made claims that could be so interpreted. Richard Rorty deserves his large and enthralled readership in the arts and humanities, and in the "humanistic" social sciences, but when his readers enthusiastically interpret him as encouraging their postmodernist skepticism about truth, they trundle down paths he himself has refrained from traveling. When I press him on these points, he concedes that there is indeed a useful concept of truth that survives intact after all the corrosive philosophical objections have been duly entered. This serviceable, modest concept of truth, Rorty acknowledges, has its uses: when we want to compare two maps of the countryside for reliability, for instance, or when the issue is whether the accused did or did not commit the crime as charged. Even Richard Rorty, then, acknowledges the gap, and the importance of the gap, between appearance and reality, between those theatrical exercises that may entertain us without pretence of truth-telling, and those that aim for, and often hit, the truth. He calls it a "vegetarian" concept of truth. Very well, then, let's all be vegetarians about the truth. Scientists never wanted to go the whole hog anyway. So now, let's ask about the sources or foundations of this mild, uncontroversial, vegetarian concept of truth. Right now, as I speak, billions of organisms on this planet are engaged in a game of hide and seek. It is not just a game for them. It is a matter of life and death. Getting it right, not making mistakes, has been of paramount importance to every living thing on this planet for more than three billion years, and so these organisms have evolved thousands of different ways of finding out about the world they live in, discriminating friends from foes, meals from mates, and ignoring the rest for the most part. It matters to them that they not be misinformed about these matters--indeed nothing matters more--but they don't, as a rule, appreciate this. They are the beneficiaries of equipment exquisitely designed to get what matters right but when their equipment malfunctions and gets matters wrong, they have no resources, as a rule, for noticing this, let alone deploring it. They soldier on, unwittingly. The difference between how things seem and how things really are is just as fatal a gap for them as it can be for us, but they are largely oblivious to it. The recognition of the difference between appearance and reality is a human discovery. A few other species--some primates, some cetaceans, maybe even some birds--shows signs of appreciating the phenomenon of "false belief"--getting it wrong. They exhibit sensitivity to the errors of others, and perhaps even some sensitivity to their own errors as errors, but they lack the capacity for the reflection required to dwell on this possibility, and so they cannot use this sensitivity in the deliberate design of repairs or improvements of their own seeking gear or hiding gear. That sort of bridging of the gap between appearance and reality is a wrinkle that we human beings alone have mastered. We are the species that discovered doubt. Is there enough food laid by for winter? Have I miscalculated? Is my mate cheating on me? Should we have moved south? Is it safe to enter this cave? Other creatures are often visibly agitated by their own uncertainties about just such questions, but because they cannot actually ask themselves these questions, they cannot articulate their predicaments for themselves or take steps to improve their grip on the truth. They are stuck in a world of appearances, making the best they can of how things seem and seldom if ever worrying about whether how things seem is how they truly are. We alone can be wracked with doubt, and we alone have been provoked by that epistemic itch to seek a remedy: better truth-seeking methods. Wanting to keep better track of our food supplies, our territories, our families, our enemies, we discovered the benefits of talking it over with others, asking questions, passing on lore. We invented culture. Then we invented measuring, and arithmetic, and maps, and writing. These communicative and recording innovations come with a built-in ideal: truth. The point of asking questions is to find true answers; the point of measuring is to measure accurately; the point of making maps is to find your way to your destination. There may be an Island of the Colour-blind (allowing Oliver Sacks his usual large dose of poetic license), but no Island of the People Who Do Not Recognize Their Own Children. The Land of the Liars could exist only in philosophers' puzzles; there are no traditions of False Calendar Systems for mis-recording the passage of time. In short, the goal of truth goes without saying, in every human culture. We human beings use our communicative skills not just for truth-telling, but also for promise-making, threatening, bargaining, story-telling, entertaining, mystifying, inducing hypnotic trances, and just plain kidding around, but prince of these activities is truth-telling, and for this activity we have invented ever better tools. Alongside our tools for agriculture, building, warfare, and transportation, we have created a technology of truth: science. Try to draw a straight line, or a circle, "freehand." Unless you have considerable artistic talent, the result will not be impressive. With a straight edge and a compass, on the other hand, you can practically eliminate the sources of human variability and get a nice clean, objective result, the same every time. Is the line really straight? How straight is it? In response to these questions, we develop ever finer tests, and then tests of the accuracy of those tests, and so forth, bootstrapping our way to ever greater accuracy and objectivity. Scientists are just as vulnerable to wishful thinking, just as likely to be tempted by base motives, just as venal and gullible and forgetful as the rest of humankind. Scientists don't consider themselves to be saints; they don't even pretend to be priests (who according to tradition are supposed to do a better job than the rest of us at fighting off human temptation and frailty). Scientists take themselves to be just as weak and fallible as anybody else, but recognizing those very sources of error in themselves and in the groups to which they belong, they have devised elaborate systems to tie their own hands, forcibly preventing their frailties and prejudices from infecting their results. It is not just the implements, the physical tools of the trade, that are designed to be resistant to human error. The organization of methods is also under severe selection pressure for improved reliability and objectivity. The classic example is the double blind experiment, in which, for instance, neither the human subjects nor the experimenters themselves are permitted to know which subjects get the test drug and which the placebo, so that nobody's subliminal hankerings and hunches can influence the perception of the results. The statistical design of both individual experiments and suites of experiments, is then embedded in the larger practice of routine attempts at replication by independent investigators, which is further embedded in a tradition--flawed, but recognized--of publication of both positive and negative results. What inspires faith in arithmetic is the fact that hundreds of scribblers, working independently on the same problem, will all arrive at the same answer (except for those negligible few whose errors can be found and identified to the mutual satisfaction of all). This unrivalled objectivity is also found in geometry and the other branches of mathematics, which since antiquity have been the very model of certain knowledge set against the world of flux and controversy. In Plato's early dialogue, the Meno, Socrates and the slave boy work out together a special case of the Pythagorean theorem. Plato's example expresses the frank recognition of a standard of truth to be aspired to by all truth-seekers, a standard that has not only never been seriously challenged, but that has been tacitly accepted--indeed heavily relied upon, even in matters of life and death--by the most vigorous opponents of science. (Or do you know a church that keeps track of its flock, and their donations, without benefit of arithmetic?) Yes, but science almost never looks as uncontroversial, as cut-and-dried, as arithmetic. Indeed rival scientific factions often engage in propaganda battles as ferocious as anything to be found in politics, or even in religious conflict. The fury with which the defenders of scientific orthodoxy often defend their doctrines against the heretics is probably unmatched in other arenas of human rhetorical combat. These competitions for allegiance--and, of course, funding--are designed to capture attention, and being well-designed, they typically succeed. This has the side effect that the warfare on the cutting edge of any science draws attention away from the huge uncontested background, the dull metal heft of the axe that gives the cutting edge its power. What goes without saying, during these heated disagreements, is an organized, encyclopedic collection of agreed-upon, humdrum scientific fact. Robert Proctor usefully draws our attention to a distinction between neutrality and objectivity.(2) Geologists, he notes, know a lot more about oil-bearing shales than about other rocks--for the obvious economic and political reasons--but they do know objectively about oil bearing shales. And much of what they learn about oil-bearing shales can be generalized to other, less favored rocks. We want science to be objective; we should not want science to be neutral. Biologists know a lot more about the fruit-fly, Drosophila, than they do about other insects--not because you can get rich off fruit flies, but because you can get knowledge out of fruit flies easier than you can get it out of most other species. Biologists also know a lot more about mosquitoes than about other insects, and here it is because mosquitoes are more harmful to people than other species that might be much easier to study. Many are the reasons for concentrating attention in science, and they all conspire to making the paths of investigation far from neutral; they do not, in general, make those paths any less objective. Sometimes, to be sure, one bias or another leads to a violation of the canons of scientific method. Studying the pattern of a disease in men, for instance, while neglecting to gather the data on the same disease in women, is not just not neutral; it is bad science, as indefensible in scientific terms as it is in political terms. It is true that past scientific orthodoxies have themselves inspired policies that hindsight reveals to be seriously flawed. One can sympathize, for instance, with Ashis Nandy, editor of the passionately anti-scientific anthology, Science, Hegemony and Violence: A Requiem for Modernity, Delhi: Oxford Univ. Press, 1988. Having lived through Atoms for Peace, and the Green Revolution, to name two of the most ballyhooed scientific juggernauts that have seriously disrupted third world societies, he sees how "the adaptation in India of decades-old western technologies are advertised and purchased as great leaps forward in science, even when such adaptations turn entire disciplines or areas of knowledge into mere intellectual machines for the adaptation, replication and testing of shop-worn western models which have often been given up in the west itself as too dangerous or as ecologically non-viable." (p8) But we should recognize this as a political misuse of science, not as a fundamental flaw in science itself. The methods of science aren't foolproof, but they are indefinitely perfectible. Just as important: there is a tradition of criticism that enforces improvement whenever and wherever flaws are discovered. The methods of science, like everything else under the sun, are themselves objects of scientific scrutiny, as method becomes methodology, the analysis of methods. Methodology in turn falls under the gaze of epistemology, the investigation of investigation itself--nothing is off limits to scientific questioning. The irony is that these fruits of scientific reflection, showing us the ineliminable smudges of imperfection, are sometimes used by those who are suspicious of science as their grounds for denying it a privileged status in the truth-seeking department--as if the institutions and practices they see competing with it were no worse off in these regards. But where are the examples of religious orthodoxy being simply abandoned in the face of irresistible evidence? Again and again in science, yesterday's heresies have become today's new orthodoxies. No religion exhibits that pattern in its history. 1. Portions of this paper are derived from "Faith in the Truth," my Amnesty Lecture, Oxford, February 17, 1997. 2. Value-Free Science?, Harvard Univ. Press, 1991. This is the final draft of a paper given at the 1998 World Congress of Philosophy. Daniel Dennett's most recent book, Freedom Evolves, has just been published by Viking Press. -- ------------------ War remains the decisive human failure. - John Kenneth Galbraith Jonathan web site at: http://elegant-technology.com -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://www.globalproblematique.net/pipermail/mai-not/attachments/20050503/4c7a7781/attachment-0001.html From eltechno at clear.lakes.com Tue May 3 06:57:18 2005 From: eltechno at clear.lakes.com (Jonathan Larson) Date: Tue May 3 06:58:37 2005 Subject: [Mai-not] Democracy Triple Play: Ecuador to Mexico to the OAS Message-ID: Democracy Triple Play: Ecuador to Mexico to the OAS The Smackdown of Condoleezza's Agenda Came on the Week of Her Latin American Tour By Al Giordano Special to The Narco News Bulletin http://www.narconews.com/Issue37/article1277.html May 1, 2005 MEXICO; MAY 1, 2005: For U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, her photo-op tour of Latin American nations last week was supposed to mark a comeback for flailing U.S. policy in the region. Instead - as she jet-hopped from Brazil to Colombia to Chile to El Salvador - the week brought a chain reaction of defeats for her government's impositions on other lands and victories for the democracy that surges from below. A quick review of the week's hemisphere shaking events: * On Friday, April 22, Ecuador's US-backed president, Lucio Guti?rrez, dissolved the Supreme Court to save two corrupt former presidents from prosecution. The people took to the streets (as Luis G?mez reported here), Congress rebuked him (G?mez redux), Lucio backed down. But for the Ecuadoran president it was already too late?. * By Saturday, April 23, Lucio had to resign in disgrace and seek asylum in the Brazilian Embassy. Later last week, he slipped into Brazil, as the new president of Ecuador, Alfredo Palacio, came to power amid speculation that, having learned from the mistakes of his predecessor, he will bring Ecuador, now, into the "axis of good" led by Venezuela, Argentina and Brazil, in the growing coalition of South American nations - a veritable South American Union - no longer willing to take orders from above. "Ecuador could become the next member of the new left movement that is sweeping across South America if the local indigenous communities are allowed to help fill the country's new political vacuum," notes an April 21 analysis by the Council on Hemispheric Affairs. * Meanwhile, Mexico has spent recent days inching closer South to the pro-democracy axis as well. On Friday the 22nd, a judge threw out the federal government's nuisance case against Mexico City Governor Andr?s Manuel L?pez Obrador, aimed to block the popular man they call El Peje from running for president in 2006. The Court told Attorney General Rafael Macedo de la Concha to go back to the drawing board and prepare a better case, and rejected the maneuver by which the prosecutor called in political opponents of L?pez Obrador to pay the governor's bail against his will, so that Macedo and his boss, President Vicente Fox, could avoid the heat that would indubitably have come by putting the political superstar El Peje in jail. * On Sunday, April 24, the streets of Mexico City filled as never before (or, at least not since the 2001 Zapatista Caravan) as an officially estimated 1.2 million Mexicans marched silently (read Quetzal Belmont's eyewitness report in Narco News) against the "desafuero" plot of President Vicente Fox against L?pez Obrador. The Mexico City governor flipped the proverbial bird, big time, to the illegitimate authority of those that were persecuting him. He announced that, come Monday, he'd be coming back to work running the city, and the federal authorities were displayed as impotent before the nation and much of the world. * On Tuesday, April 26, Cuban President Fidel Castro threw his own oratorical gasoline on the fire when, during a four-hour public speech, he suggested aloud that Mexican President Vicente Fox will have to resign now that his coup plot has been exposed for what it was. Always a headline generator, Castro's call was highlighted on front pages and on TV news in virtually all the Latin American countries. Like him or not, Castro still has the star power to introduce a media virus (that is to say, the idea that something like Fox resigning is possible) into the volatile hemispheric political climate. * By Wednesday night, April 27, Fox, surrounded by the bloodhounds of ridicule abroad and of surging democracy at home, forced his Attorney General to resign in disgrace, washed his hands of the desafuero plot, and in an eight-minute nationally televised speech announced that he would no longer stand in the way of any citizen (meaning L?pez Obrador, whose public popularity has skyrocketed with each attempt to victimize him) to run for president next year. * Condoleezza Rice, by then in Colombia in a futile effort to tame uppity Latin America, must have felt the needle sticking in her. After all, it was Rice who, immediately upon taking office last January, had shifted gears from her predecessor Colin Powell's grudging acceptance of Latin America's democratic left turn, and had filed a bombastic State Department Traveler's Warning in an attempt to tighten the screws on Mexico and instruct Fox to pursue the pre-electoral coup d'etat against L?pez Obrador. When Fox began to lose his resolve to take the desafuero case to the ultimate consequences (the protests surged, in three short weeks, from a whisper to a roar, with one poll by the daily El Universal showing that 61 percent of Mexican citizens indicated their personal willingness to participate in a "civil resistance" campaign against the Fox government), Condi's State Department tossed yet another silly travel advisory upon Mexico (Bill Conroy brought you the details as it was happening, via The Narcosphere). Compared to a population of 100 million that is about to explode, not even the United States seems so powerful anymore. * Fox, under siege in Mexico, was surely looking south and paying nervous attention as the head of his counterpart Lucio Guti?rrez rolled and bounced on the sharp rocks of disgrace from Ecuador into Brazil. Vicente Fox, having an Ebenezer Scrooge moment, could not help but see his own mustache painted on that face (see Dan Feder's sharp analysis comparing Mexico's Fox to Ecuador's Guti?rrez, describing how both had promised, but failed to deliver, change to calcified political systems). * Condoleezza's puddle-jumping from Bogot? to Brasilia to Santiago to San Salvador had taken on a new urgency two weeks prior, on April 11, when the 34 member countries of the Organization of American States (OAS) deadlocked in a 17-17 tie between Washington-backed candidate for OAS chief, Luis Derbez from Mexico, and the Brazil-and-Venezuela backed candidate from Chile, Jos? Miguel Insulza. And here is where the story of last week takes an even bolder new turn? Standing with Washington in the OAS internal battle were Canada, Mexico, Colombia, Peru (ask not for whom the bell tolls, Alejandro Toledo, the bell tolls for thee?), Bolivia, Paraguay, the seven Central American nations, and a handful of tiny Caribbean island and seafront countries that were backing Mexico's obedient Derbez. But the counterforce had achieved parity in recent years: Standing together, for the first time, against the US-picked OAS candidate, the lion that now roars, Brazil (which had Condoleezza inside its lair as Marco Aurelio Garcia, Brazil's Latin American point man, was gathering up the votes abroad to place her in checkmate), with Venezuela, Argentina, Uruguay, and the grand majority of Caribbean islands (now enjoying discount oil prices from Hugo Ch?vez's Venezuela). The members of CARICOM, the Caribbean Community of Nations, after all, remain steadfast in refusing to recognize Haiti's regime as legitimate, and Haiti remains expelled from CARICOM, one of the undercurrents that brought a Caribbean tide decisively into the OAS battle on the opposing side of the northern government that backed the Haiti coup. Two more strange bedfellows joined the opposition coalition (no longer mere "opposition" because it has resulted victorious) in the conflict over who will lead the OAS: newly liberated Ecuador (what is the sound of a domino falling in the woods?), and Chile. Chile has generally gone along with Washington on its Latin American agenda. So what happened with Chile? It's very simple. The masterful foreign policy of Brazil's government of President Lula da Silva wagered on a strategy of co-opting Chile's OAS vote, by tapping a Chilean candidate to lead the Organization of American States. But it was not Chilean President Ricardo Lagos' secretary of state who was drafted for the job. It was, rather, a former political exile (schooled in Mexico City and married to a Mexican), socialist, and interior minister from Lagos' coalition government, Jos? Miguel Insulza, who, truth be told, is more Lula's candidate than Lagos'. But with a Chilean in the fray, Chile's vote had to be cast for its favorite son. Most interestingly, Venezuela's Ch?vez showed great enthusiasm for the Chilean Insulza, despite his bitter and public differences with Lagos. Brazil thus spliced a brilliant coalition, bringing Chile and Venezuela together for the first time in recent memory (a harbinger, perhaps, of more cooperation to come: it is a presidential election season in Chile, after all, and the U.S.-backed coup of 1973 has not totally faded from memory). By backing a Chilean candidate, the opposition coalition virtually forfeited the vote of Bolivia, in a 126-years-cold-war, still, against all that is Chilean, because Chile, after all, took away Bolivia's seaports. But the vote of Bolivia's Mesa, when it comes to U.S. pressures, was not one that could be relied upon anyway when the going got tough. The Lula-Ch?vez gamble on Chile, instead, proved to be the charm. The Organization of American States, founded in 1948, has long been a rubber-stamp for U.S. impositions in the region, dominated by autocratic governments and dictatorships: the very same countries - Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Venezuela, Uruguay? - that today are practicing more vibrant forms of democracy than are practiced in the United States with its cash-dominated electoral system and its Diebold Overlords. Truth be told, Washington began to loose control of the OAS steering wheel in April 2002, when the OAS balked on recognizing the three-day coup regime in Venezuela. The control slipped a bit more in December 2002 when the OAS, for the first time in 54 years, directly confronted Washington by voting to defend Hugo Ch?vez's government in Venezuela as an elected democratic republic from a US-authored resolution to damn it (a story I filed here in 2002 about that watershed moment in OAS history now provides context for what happened last week). Condoleezza, entering Latin America last week, with the budget to bribe and the might to blackmail, went searching for just one more vote to impose Mexico's Derbez as the new OAS chief. The victory was supposed to be consummated while she was down here, to emboss her image as an effective foreign minister. Had Lucio still been in power in Ecuador, he would have offered the easiest pickins. But by the time Condi's jet touched down in Bogot?, Lucio's head was bouncing somewhere alongside the Amazon, and Ecuador had slipped through her fingers. With Mexico's own government trembling from the consequences of executing Condoleezza's desafuero plot against the Mexico City governor, the jig was soon up. With the OAS vote tied in four consecutive votes at 17 to 17, Mexico's Fox, as he was backing down from the desafuero plot in Mexico City, sent Derbez to inform Rice that he was withdrawing from the OAS contest. And Mexico inched closer back to the Bolivarian Am?rica where its heart, its soul and its history rightfully places it. Now the forces of reaction in Mexico from Fox's own National Action Party, or PAN in its Spanish initials, and from the old PRI party, too, are calling for Fox's head. The rug has been pulled out from all of them. As Mexican columnist (and harsh L?pez Obrador critic) Carlos Ram?rez lamented last week: "The only thing left for Fox to do is to hand the keys to (the presidential palace) over to L?pez Obrador." In other words: the right wing is out-shouting even Fidel in Havana in demands for Fox's resignation. The press spin after Condoleezza's messy defeat in the Organization of American States last week was Orwellian: A Voice of America story went so far as to say that it was Rice who engineered the withdrawal of Derbez and the victory of Insulza, with vague, unsupported claims that she got concessions from Insulza regarding OAS's stance toward Venezuela. This, after months of first throwing up a candidate from El Salvador against Insulza and, when that failed, backing Mexico's Derbez. An AP story headlined that Rice was "pleased" with the result. Why make such a claim unless it is necessary to paint a pasty, smiley face over a resounding wound? The intentional simulation of the Commercial Media about events in Latin America continues to astound in its level of transparent stupidity. And so, after this stormy week that was in April in Am?rica of 2005, the hemisphere welcomes Jos? Miguel Insulza as the man who may turn out to be the OAS's first truly independent secretary general. Time will tell. Time will also reveal whether Ecuador's new president, Alfredo Palacio, will comply with the public demands for new, more independent, course in that majority indigenous country, or whether his head will roll the same as the one before him. (About Ecuador, the Miami Herald, a.k.a. Oligarch's Daily, editorialized last Monday: "Street violence as a way of changing governments is an intolerable reversion to the discredited policies of the past in Latin America. It's hard to feel sorry for President Lucio Gutierrez of Ecuador, the latest victim of the ominous slide of democracy that is roiling the Andes? Still, Mr. Gutierrez? was chosen in a free and fair election, and the only acceptable way to remove such a figure is by constitutional means." This is utter bullshit on three counts: First, Guti?rrez was removed by constitutional means. He resigned. The Constitution provides for the process of resignation for any head of state. Second, he was not toppled by "street violence" - indeed, the marches and protests throughout Ecuador were largely nonviolent - but, rather, by his own anti-democratic dissolution by fiat of the Supreme Court, his own illegal ordering of martial law, and his own Congress' rejection of the measures. And third, although this is obviously rhetorical and wishful thinking: Where was the Miami Herald to prattle about the sanctity of being "chosen in a free and fair election" during the coup attempts against Venezuela's Ch?vez, or the successful coup against Haiti's Jean Bertrand Aristide? The two-faced double-standard of the Herald is a mirror of Washington's own decayed discourse about "democracy." There you have it: the arrogance of power displays, once again, the impeccable reasons why it is being opposed so successfully and popularly from below in our Am?rica.) Time will indeed tell about Ecuador and the OAS. But one thing that time has already told ("The tower bells chime," sang Patti Smith. "Ding dong, they chime!") is that Mexico has decisively turned the corner after almost two decades of obsequious fealty to the northern boot upon its neck, and the Mexican democratic renaissance has only just begun. That Vicente Fox tried to obey and attempted a dirty maneuver, with the help of his former rivals in the predecessor PRI (Institutional Revolutionary Party, which governed Mexico for seven decades prior to Fox), to remove Andr?s Manuel L?pez Obrador from his July 2006 electoral date with destiny, was a sign of Washington (and Condoleezza's) ongoing muscle (and unmitigated gall) in the region. But that just three weeks into the entire spectacle the unrest in Mexico (and the solidarity from Civil Society around the world) became so palpable as to force Fox - always a master opportunist, with his finger to the wind - to back down so rapidly indicates the most gigantic paradigm shift in our Am?rica since the 2002 defeat of the Venezuela coup: A Mexico reborn. For the past five years, as each of these interweaving stories has germinated and grown, the international team of reporters at Narco News have investigated beyond the veneer and reported to you what was happening as it happened - and what was about to happen? before it happened. That job - of Authentic Journalism reporting from Latin America - continues. But we are called to take on additional new responsibilities, and assume additional new costs and burdens, at this hour when human events provide us all with new opportunities. Two days from now I will thus report to you, kind reader, the roadmap of where we must go together, farther, and faster, as the new Am?rica we foretold five years ago has finally emerged on our beat. -- ------------------ War remains the decisive human failure. - John Kenneth Galbraith Jonathan web site at: http://elegant-technology.com -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://www.globalproblematique.net/pipermail/mai-not/attachments/20050503/110e5d4b/attachment.html From thinker at uniserve.com Tue May 3 08:18:33 2005 From: thinker at uniserve.com (Ed Deak) Date: Tue May 3 08:19:47 2005 Subject: [Mai-not] Talking Economics Bulletin Message-ID: <5.1.0.14.2.20050503081705.02caca58@pop.uniserve.com> 0.4 HTML_TITLE_EMPTY BODY: HTML title contains no text Talking Economics Bulletin - May 2005 The consensus that the responsibility for the conduct of economic life lies not with the individual human being but with the state is such that the percieved health of the economy, by which is normally meant the national economy, is the defining issue of modern electoral politics. But what if it is the individual alone who can write the economy large? The Colours of Money Seminar seeks to address and clarify many of the key issues with which humanity is confonted by placing them in the context of an up-to-date understanding of money and thus setting the stage for every human being to play a part in restoring balance to an economy gone abstract. 1) Exploring a Path from Competition to Association, The Colours of Money Seminar - 17-19 June 2005, Stroud UK 2) Forthcoming Evening Events in London. 3) Themes from Talking Economics Monthly - The Value of Land 4) Community Land Trusts 1) The Colours of Money Seminar - 17-19 June 2005, Stroud UK (see attached flier for details) Accompanied by unfair trade, widespread poverty, and burgeoning debt, our competitive way of life is marked by a ceaseless and unhealthy chase after money, which acts more as our master than our servant. Whether locally or globally, can we understand and use money in ways that enable competition to give way to more cooperative ways of doing business? Colours of Money looks at new ways of understanding the history and purpose of money and how it can be the main instrument for bringing about real and lasting change in our economic circumstances. Ranging from the problems of small businesses to larger questions of global finance and the power of corporations, it offers a radical yet concrete approach to money in our times. This seminar provides an opportunity to explore these problems in-depth. Based in part on Rudolf Steiner?s observations about modern economic life, it will be presented using coloured chalk imagery on black paper ? a technique intended to make economics less dismal! The seminar includes Getting to Grips with Globalisation, two public evening lectures entitled: The Future of Money - Localising a Global Problem and The Corporation - Friend or Foe of Humanity? 17th / 18th June 2005, 7.30?9.00 pm Venue: The British School Hall, The Painswick Inn Project, Gloucester Street, Stroud, Gloucestershire, GL5 1QG Tel: 01453 759400 Cost: ?100 seminar. ?5 lecture only. Registration: Arthur Edwards Tel / Fax: 0044 (0)1452 810764 / 07979 935359 Email: Arthur@talkingeconomics.com The seminar will be presented by Christopher Houghton Budd, an economic historian with a doctorate in banking and international finance. He specialises in topics ranging from sustainability to the financial markets and has a special interest in bridging between Rudolf Steiner?s work and current understandings. Based in Canterbury, England, he travels widely as an educator and consultant working with colleagues around the world 2) Forthcoming Evening Events in London. ? Thursday 12 May, 2005. Safe as Houses? The valuing of financial assets ? Thursday 16 June, 2005. Re-thinking Welfare Economics - Mutual benefits without the moral hazard Time: 7.30 - 9.00p.m. Cost: ?3.50 Venue: Rudolf Steiner House, 35 Park Road NW1 6XT (Baker St. Tube) 0207 723 4400 3) Themes from Talking Economics Monthly - The Value of Land The perception that rising house prices are indicative of a booming economy is firmly established in the modern economic consciousness. A consequence of this is that houses begin to be seen as personal piggy banks whose value can be freely exploited with no apparent labour and no apparent cost. Yet wherein lies this value? Does it represent a true economic process? What is the consequence of basing the economy on such a semi-real notion? Public interest in and sensitivity to this issue are shown by the fact that newspaper circulation can go up by ten percent when the headline article deals with the ?housing market?. At the same time, schemes such as Community Land Trusts are increasingly being used to defend affordable housing. D?Arcy MacKenzie, in his article ?Safe as houses??, uses the analogy of water to describe the behaviour of free capital in the economy. Fresh water is of a very different quality to salt water, the distinction between spending money and investment capital must likewise be made. Christopher Houghton Budd uses the Rare Albion column to question the notion that land has value, notwithstanding the presence of an economy all around us that bases itself on this ?fact?, profiting from the capitalisation of land while core activities are starved of the money they need. Two pieces explore land taxes, one by Peter Hetherington reports on a UK government- backed study into a windfall tax on planning gains, the other by Euro-MP Chris Huhne, proposes a land value tax which aims to tailor the tax to the revenue that the land can yield. Our feature article entitled ?peer-to-peer economics? introduces Zopa, a firm which uses the internet to connect potential money lenders with borrowers directly. Douglas Wylie describes his experience at an associative economics gathering in North America - Beyond Oz, and Miche Fabre Lewin brings a poetic note to this May issue with her poem ?Scare City?. 4) Community Land Trusts Access to land, whether for sustainable farming or affordable housing, is increasingly reckoned to be a live issue in a world where many feel priced off the land. One such attempt to address this question is the Community Land Trust (CLT) model, which aims to ?capture land value? for permanent affordability. Originating in the 1980?s, but with antecedents in the Victorian age, they have been seen as a way of serving the local community by incorporating the ownership of land in a social benefit organisation. While most of the up and running models are to be found in the USA, they have attracted some considerable interest from government planners in the UK, seeming to offer, as they do, a way of providing social housing free of state management but not at the mercy of the market. April this year saw the founding of the Stroud and District Community Land Trust which aims to acquire and hold land for the benefit of the community, to provide permanently affordable homes, facilities and workspaces, to ennable people to build inclusive communities through democratic ownership and stewardship of land and to build long term assets for community re-investment. Among its benefits it offers part-equity intermediate market-housing for first time buyers and various socially inclusive community orientated aims. While laudable in its goals, and without doubt generous in its application, it would appear that CLT?s do not actually challenge the notion that land does not of itself have value. In fact they assume that it does, and that this value needs to be protected from the market. The starting point is therefore one that reinforces the market paradigm, albeit by opposing it in these special instances. To question the commodification of land is a process of intellectual clarification and does not yet imply instituting a legal structure for its realisation. Establishing a proper understanding of the nature of land is in itself a solution to issue of capitalisation. With Best Wishes, Arthur Edwards -- www.talkingeconomics.com The associative approach to economics is based on the idea that economic life is the shared responsibility of every human being. Talking Economics is about making this responsibility conscious and finding ways to give it effect. -- www.talkingeconomics.com The associative approach to economics is based on the idea that economic life is the shared responsibility of every human being. Talking Economics is about making this responsibility conscious and finding ways to give it effect. From creuss at bluemail.ch Tue May 3 08:20:14 2005 From: creuss at bluemail.ch (Christoph Reuss) Date: Tue May 3 08:21:07 2005 Subject: [Mai-not] Australian jobs flow to Chinese slaves Message-ID: > This is a tale that is all too familiar. But what are we to make > of a working population that in Europe and the English-speaking > world offers not the tiniest bit of resistance to its onrushing > impoverishment. They are fully deserving of their fate. They're believing in the wolves in sheep's clothing (predators in producers' clothing) aka "I'm-alright-Jack"ers. > I have grown too old to wait for "the people" to rise up and > create a better world. Let us be brutally honest. Even the great > revolutions of the past were carried out by dedicated minorities > while the masses munched and farted like so many cattle. Yes, so why shouldn't this work again ? > Fully aware that the future is poverty, I am becoming meaner and > cheaper every day. My full-time enslavement to the corporate > workplace will last only so long as it takes to pay off my > obligations to the bank for the very modest home I bottom-fished > out of a depressed market nine years ago. Then I'll work only so > much as I need to live, keeping my income in the lowest tax > bracket. There are programs and tax breaks for low-income people. > I intend to harvest them. The willing slaves, those who agree to > keep working harder and forget retirement, let them pay the way. Sounds like a producer becoming a predator. Wrong direction. > Am I bitter? Yes, like a fine beer. That's what the predators want you to drink, yep. Chris ____________________________________________________ "The most potent weapon in the hand of the oppressor is the mind of the oppressed." -- Steven Biko ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ SpamWall: Mail to this addy is deleted unread unless it contains the keyword "igve". From thinker at uniserve.com Tue May 3 08:48:59 2005 From: thinker at uniserve.com (Ed Deak) Date: Tue May 3 08:50:16 2005 Subject: [Mai-not] Australian jobs flow to Chinese slaves In-Reply-To: <4277553D.9060403@ncf.carleton.ca> References: <6.1.1.1.0.20050503130734.0308b7d8@central.murdoch.edu.au> <6.1.1.1.0.20050503130734.0308b7d8@central.murdoch.edu.au> Message-ID: <5.1.0.14.2.20050503084503.02d6a7b0@pop.uniserve.com> Buy land and tools with every penny you can spare, Mike, so you can grow your own grub and make your own things. You'll be surprised on how little you can get by. The one thing good about this Chinese madness is that you can buy tools and equipment to make yourself self sufficient to the highest degree. Cheers, Ed. At 06:41 AM 03/05/2005 -0400, you wrote: >This is a tale that is all too familiar. But what are we to make of a >working population that in Europe and the English-speaking world offers >not the tiniest bit of resistance to its onrushing impoverishment. They >are fully deserving of their fate. > >I have grown too old to wait for "the people" to rise up and create a >better world. Let us be brutally honest. Even the great revolutions of the >past were carried out by dedicated minorities while the masses munched and >farted like so many cattle. > >Fully aware that the future is poverty, I am becoming meaner and cheaper >every day. My full-time enslavement to the corporate workplace will last >only so long as it takes to pay off my obligations to the bank for the >very modest home I bottom-fished out of a depressed market nine years ago. >Then I'll work only so much as I need to live, keeping my income in the >lowest tax bracket. There are programs and tax breaks for low-income >people. I intend to harvest them. The willing slaves, those who agree to >keep working harder and forget retirement, let them pay the way. > >Am I bitter? Yes, like a fine beer. > >Dion Giles wrote: >>The Australia-China Free Trade Agreement isn't even negotiated yet (well, >>not openly, anyway), but already Mr Greed, sensing greater profits by >>switching production to Chinese slave factories, is moving to transfer >>Australian jobs to China and slash wages for the few workers whose jobs >>aren't lost altogether. >>Dion Giles >>Western Australia >>http://www.smh.com.au/news/Business/Free-trade-agreement-jeopardises-local-workers/2005/05/02/1114886315346.html >> >>FREE TRADE AGREEMENT JEOPARDISES LOCAL WORKERS >>By Alexandra Smith >>Transport Reporter >>Sydney Morning Herald >>May 3, 2005 >>At least 1000 workers may be jobless within months as two Sydney car-part >>manufacturers plan to close, or move to Asia, as Australia moves towards >>a free trade agreement with China. >>The Australian Manufacturing Workers Union state secretary, Paul Bastian, >>said cheaper labour in China and an expectation that a trade agreement >>would be signed soon would cripple the industry. >>Thousands of jobs in the auto components industry would be lost within a >>year, he said. >>"The China free trade agreement, together with existing competition from >>China, makes it impossible for the Australian auto component industry to >>survive." >>The first companies to signal their intention to leave Australia or >>greatly cut operations were Tri Star Engineering, of Marrickville, and >>and Spicer Axle Australia, of Yennora, Mr Bastian said. >>The general manager of Tri Star, Vincent Kong, and the managing director >>of Spicer Axle, Bob Hall, could not be contacted by the Herald. >>Mr Bastian said Tri Star, which made steering and suspension components, >>had started importing parts from India and was negotiating to set up a >>plant in China after losing key contracts for the Asian market. >>Spicer Axle, which has plants making car differentials in Victoria and >>South Australia, employs 500 people at its Sydney plant, but had lost >>large contracts and was considering closing. Mr Bastian said he >>understood that if Spicer was unsuccessful in negotiations with Ford it >>would close. >>"Ford is demanding cost reductions amounting to a 30 per cent cost cut >>over the next three years," he said. >>"In order to enable this to take place, the company has demanded an >>immediate 15 per cent pay cut for all employees, with additional use of >>contract and casual employment and the abolition of the current >>redundancy agreement, with all new employees accepting a 20 per cent pay cut." >>Mr Bastian said the Federal Government was not considering the effect >>that a free trade agreement would have on workers' rights and conditions. >>"What employers are demanding is that workers adopt and compete on >>Chinese wage conditions," he said. >>"What the Federal Government should be doing is have an open and >>transparent debate in Parliament about not just the economic impacts but >>also the social costs and implications." >>Ambegahewage Jayasingha, who has worked at Tri Star for 18 years, said at >>least 10 people had been made redundant in the past few weeks and 270 >>would lose their job by next year. >>Mr Jayasingha said Tri Star management told employees that it would >>consider relocating its Marrickville plant to China and then exporting >>its parts back. >>"My personal opinion is that I would rather pay a few more dollars for >>something Australian made than buy something from China that will mean >>people have lost their jobs," Mr Jayasingha said. >>He said he did not know what he would do once he lost his job because >>there were few manufacturing jobs in Australia. >> >>_______________________________________________ >>Mai-not mailing list >>Mai-not@globalproblematique.net >>http://www.globalproblematique.net/mailman/listinfo/mai-not > >_______________________________________________ >Mai-not mailing list >Mai-not@globalproblematique.net >http://www.globalproblematique.net/mailman/listinfo/mai-not From netcfs at shaw.ca Tue May 3 10:28:16 2005 From: netcfs at shaw.ca (Yves Bajard) Date: Tue May 3 10:28:24 2005 Subject: [Mai-not] The future of Mai-Not Message-ID: <1115141297.4905.25.camel@Yves> Dear mai-notters: I see that Mai-Not continues with posts broadcast along the usual old pattern. Yet, I see no concrete reaction to m,y post of a few days ago apart from Duane Behrens intent to unsubscribe, dale Young expressing her support and asking me where to send the cheque, and some side statements of appreciation from my proposal (Dion Giles in particular).. I would like, as said in my perevious psot, someone to come out fo your ranks to take the role of list adminstrator/moderator. He or she would be given a rapid briefing about how to do it, i.e., assemble funds to pay us at the NCFS, eliminate the spam (I had two or three a day in the past few weeks), and manage subscriptions etc.. Easy to do, but I'd like to be freed from that task. Could you discuss this and come to some sort of concrete proposal? In order to facilitate the task, I copy below the full text of my letter. Best regards Yves Bajard ==================================== Copy of my letter of April 29 ============================== In the light of the recent conversation I had with a few of you on different subject headers, which I started by "Throwing a boulder in the pond" and which became lately "clarification of energy position" and "A race to the bottom just for us 35?", I see that I am on a wave length that is completely different from yours. Therefore, I am not interested in continuing actively on this discussion group, at my cost, with the exception of some $ 360 contributed last year by a few of you..(Duane Behrens as a major contributor, more than half). The cost was in the vicinity of Can$ 600 for last year, and will be much lower for each of the following years (some Can$ 200 to 250 plus the management time and energy, mostly eliminating spam that goes through the filters) For reason of facility for you, I would propose the following: We would at the Networking for a Common Future in Sustainability Society, 1. keep on hosting Mai-not as is on the NCFS server at globalproblematique.net as long as you manage to contribute Can $ 250 per year in the same manner as last year. 2, not interfere with the contents of the posts (I would remain subscribed, but would not contribute at all, except in emergencies) 3. Keep on managing the spam away and the subscription/un-subscription until one of you takes on the task of administrator/moderator, at which time we would make the necessary changes in authority over the list. I regret that our common adventure, begun in 1997, ends up in this manner, but see no alternative., Best regards Yves Bajard, President NCFS PS: For now, the list continues as previously, without further posts from me. Good wind. From oscarptyltd at ozemail.com.au Tue May 3 18:38:47 2005 From: oscarptyltd at ozemail.com.au (Clem Clarke) Date: Tue May 3 18:38:19 2005 Subject: [Mai-not] ELECTRONIC COPY FILED: APRIL 15, 2005 S91786 - IN THE SUPREME COURT OF BRITISH COLUMBIA - Banks Message-ID: <427827A7.7000201@ozemail.com.au> An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://www.globalproblematique.net/pipermail/mai-not/attachments/20050504/386fc574/attachment.html From dgiles at central.murdoch.edu.au Tue May 3 19:40:13 2005 From: dgiles at central.murdoch.edu.au (Dion Giles) Date: Tue May 3 19:40:21 2005 Subject: [Mai-not] Postmodernism and truth In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <6.1.1.1.0.20050504101533.02fc3008@central.murdoch.edu.au> I maintain a directory of e-mailed items which I call "00 gems". The "00" is so that it will be up where I can find it. It contains items which I think speak especially profound truths, set out either discursively, or argumentatively, or briefly, or ironically. It is a very short list. Daniel Derrett's essay, posted by Jonathan Larson, goes straight in there. It says exactly what badly needs to be read, learned and inwardly digested. Johathan wrote that he misses the values of the enlightenment. I know the feeling. There have been times, in living memory, when the values of the enlightenment were not missed because they were widely taken for granted. Today they are under concerted attack by the same dark anti-human forces that they confronted in the 1600s and 1700s, but they are not by any means dead, or even dying. Only overlaid by mountains of bullshit and obfuscation by predators and by cranks alike. They are values that thankfully we don't have to miss on this list. Dion Giles Western Australia From dgiles at central.murdoch.edu.au Tue May 3 20:02:54 2005 From: dgiles at central.murdoch.edu.au (Dion Giles) Date: Tue May 3 20:02:59 2005 Subject: [Mai-not] It's becoming "in" to cut energy waste Message-ID: <6.1.1.1.0.20050504105637.02f342f8@central.murdoch.edu.au> Two articles reproduced at http://www.truthout.org/issues_05/050305EB.shtml point to a slow revolution in public perceptions about energy. Not so much an understanding of feasibility and energy balance, but an awareness that it matters. Dion Giles Western Australia From jfos at net-tech.com.au Tue May 3 17:48:31 2005 From: jfos at net-tech.com.au (John) Date: Tue May 3 22:54:59 2005 Subject: [Mai-not] Horror Of Depleted Uranium Not Limited To Iraq (Essential reading) Message-ID: <6.1.0.6.1.20050504104603.0320b040@mail.net-tech.com.au> The illegal and immoral use of 'depleted' Uranium in modern weapons of war is rarely if ever the subject of public scrutiny. Please pass this along to others for their consideration and further research/investigation. john ================================================================ [DU-WATCH] Horror Of Depleted Uranium Not Limited To Iraq By James Denver http://www.coastalpost.com/05/04/09.htm "I'm horrified. The people out there - the Iraqis, the media and the troops - risk the most appalling ill health. And the radiation from depleted uranium can travel literally anywhere. It's going to destroy the lives of thousands of children, all over the world. We all know how far radiation can travel. Radiation from Chernobyl reached Wales and in Britain you sometimes get red dust from the Sahara on your car." The speaker is not some alarmist doom-sayer. He is Dr. Chris Busby, the British radiation expert, Fellow of the University of Liverpool in the Faculty of Medicine and UK representative on the European Committee on Radiation Risk, talking about the best-kept secret of this war: the fact that, by illegally using hundreds of tons of depleted uranium (DU) against Iraq, Britain and America have gravely endangered not only the Iraqis but the whole world. For these weapons have released deadly, carcinogenic and mutagenic, radioactive particles in such abundance that-whipped up by sandstorms and carried on trade winds - there is no corner of the globe they cannot penetrate-including Britain. For the wind has no boundaries and time is on their side: the radioactivity persists for over 4,500,000,000 years and can cause cancer, leukemia, brain damage, kidney failure, and extreme birth defects - killing millions of every age for centuries to come. A crime against humanity which may, in the eyes of historians, rank with the worst atrocities of all time. These weapons have released deadly, carcinogenic and mutagenic, radioactive particles in such abundance that there is no corner of the globe they cannot penetrate - including Britain. Yet, officially, no crime has been committed. For this story is a dirty story in which the facts have been concealed from those who needed them most. It is also a story we need to know if the people of Iraq are to get the medical care they desperately need, and if our troops, returning from Iraq, are not to suffer as terribly as the veterans of other conflicts in which depleted uranium was used. A Dirty Tyson 'Depleted' uranium is in many ways a misnomer. For 'depleted' sounds weak. The only weak thing about depleted uranium is its price. It is dirt cheap, toxic, waste from nuclear power plants and bomb production. However, uranium is one of earth's heaviest elements and DU packs a Tyson's punch, smashing through tanks, buildings and bunkers with equal ease, spontaneously catching fire as it does so, and burning people alive. 'Crispy critters' is what US servicemen call those unfortunate enough to be close. And, when John Pilger encountered children killed at a greater distance he wrote: "The children's skin had folded back, like parchment, revealing veins and burnt flesh that seeped blood, while the eyes, intact, stared straight ahead. I vomited." (Daily Mirror) The millions of radioactive uranium oxide particles released when it burns can kill just as surely, but far more terribly. They can even be so tiny they pass through a gas mask, making protection against them impossible. Yet, small is not beautiful. For these invisible killers indiscriminately attack men, women, children and even babies in the womb-and do the gravest harm of all to children and unborn babies. A Terrible Legacy Doctors in Iraq have estimated that birth defects have increased by 2-6 times, and 3-12 times as many children have developed cancer and leukaemia since 1991. Moreover, a report published in The Lancet in 1998 said that as many as 500 children a day are dying from these sequels to war and sanctions and that the death rate for Iraqi children under 5 years of age increased from 23 per 1000 in 1989 to 166 per thousand in 1993. Overall, cases of lymphoblastic leukemia more than quadrupled with other cancers also increasing 'at an alarming rate'. In men, lung, bladder, bronchus, skin, and stomach cancers showed the highest increase. In women, the highest increases were in breast and bladder cancer, and non-Hodgkin lymphoma.1 On hearing that DU had been used in the Gulf in 1991, the UK Atomic Energy Authority sent the Ministry of Defense a special report on the potential damage to health and the environment. It said that it could cause half a million additional cancer deaths in Iraq over 10 years. In that war the authorities only admitted to using 320 tons of DU-although the Dutch charity LAKA estimates the true figure is closer to 800 tons. Many times that may have been spread across Iraq by this year's war. The devastating damage all this DU will do to the health and fertility of the people of Iraq now, and for generations to come, is beyond imagining. The radioactivity persists for over 4,500,000,000 years killing millions of every age for centuries to come. This is a crime against humanity which may rank with the worst atrocities of all time. We must also count the numberless thousands of miscarried babies. Nobody knows how many Iraqis have died in the womb since DU contaminated their world. But it is suggested that troops who were only exposed to DU for the brief period of the war were still excreting uranium in their semen 8 years later and some had 100 times the so-called 'safe limit' of uranium in their urine. The lack of government interest in the plight of veterans of the 1991 war is reflected in a lack of academic research on the impact of DU but informal research has found a high incidence of birth defects in their children and that the wives of men who served in Iraq have three times more miscarriages than the wives of servicemen who did not go there. Since DU darkened the land Iraq has seen birth defects which would break a heart of stone: babies with terribly foreshortened limbs, with their intestines outside their bodies, with huge bulging tumors where their eyes should be, or with a single eye-like Cyclops, or without eyes, or without limbs, and even without heads. Significantly, some of the defects are almost unknown outside textbooks showing the babies born near A-bomb test sites in the Pacific. Doctors report that many women no longer say 'Is it a girl or a boy?' but simply, 'Is it normal, doctor?' Moreover this terrible legacy will not end. The genes of their parents may have been damaged for ever, and the damaging DU dust is ever-present. Blue on Blue What the governments of America and Britain have done to the people of Iraq they have also done to their own soldiers, in both wars. And they have done it knowingly. For the battlefields have been thick with DU and soldiers have had to enter areas heavily contaminated by bombing. Moreover, their bodies have not only been assaulted by DU but also by a vaccination regime which violated normal protocols, experimental vaccines, nerve agent pills, and organophosphate pesticides in their tents. Yet, though the hazards of DU were known, British and American troops were not warned of its dangers. Nor were they given thorough medical checks on their return-even though identifying it quickly might have made it possible to remove some of it from their body. Then, when a growing number became seriously ill, and should have been sent to top experts in radiation damage and neurotoxins, many were sent to a psychiatrist. Over 200,000 US troops who returned from the 1991 war are now invalided out with ailments officially attributed to service in Iraq-that's 1 in 3. In contrast, the British government's failure to fully assess the health of returning troops, or to monitor their health, means no one even knows how many have died or become gravely ill since their return. However, Gulf veterans' associations say that, of 40,000 or so fighting fit men and women who saw active service, at least 572 have died prematurely since coming home and 5000 may be ill. An alarming number are thought to have taken their own lives, unable to bear the torment of the innumerable ailments which have combined to take away their career, their sexuality, their ability to have normal children, and even their ability to breathe or walk normally. As one veteran puts it, they are 'on DU death row, waiting to die'. Whatever other factors there may be, some of their illnesses are strikingly similar to those of Iraqis exposed to DU dust. For example, soldiers have also fathered children without eyes. And, in a group of eight servicemen whose babies lack eyes seven are known to have been directly exposed to DU dust. They too have fathered children with stunted arms, and rare abnormalities classically associated with radiation damage. They too seem prone to cancer and leukemia. Tellingly, so are EU soldiers who served as peacekeepers in the Balkans, where DU was also used. Indeed their leukemia rate has been so high that several EU governments have protested at the use of DU. The Vital Evidence Despite all that evidence of the harm done by DU, governments on both sides of the Atlantic have repeatedly claimed that as it emits only 'low level' radiation DU is harmless. Award-winning scientist, Dr. Rosalie Bertell who has led UN medical commissions, has studied 'low-level' radiation for 30 years. 2 She has found that uranium oxide particles have more than enough power to harm cells, and describes their pulses of radiation as hitting surrounding cells 'like flashes of lightning' again and again in a single second.2 Like many scientists worldwide who have studied this type of radiation, she has found that such 'lightning strikes' can damage DNA and cause cell mutations which lead to cancer. Moreover, these particles can be taken up by body fluids and travel through the body, damaging more than one organ. To compound all that, Dr. Bertell has found that this particular type of radiation can cause the body's communication systems to break down, leading to malfunctions in many vital organs of the body and to many medical problems. A striking fact, since many veterans of the first Gulf war suffer from innumerable, seemingly unrelated, ailments. In addition, recent research by Eric Wright, Professor of Experimental Haematology at Dundee University, and others, have shown two ways in which such radiation can do far more damage than has been thought. The first is that a cell which seems unharmed by radiation can produce cells with diverse mutations several cell generations later. (And mutations are at the root of cancer and birth defects.) This 'radiation-induced genomic instability' is compounded by 'the bystander effect' by which cells mutate in unison with others which have been damaged by radiation-rather as birds swoop and turn in unison. Put together, these two mechanisms can greatly increase the damage done by a single source of radiation, such as a DU particle. Moreover, it is now clear that there are marked genetic differences in the way individuals respond to radiation-with some being far more likely to develop cancer than others. So the fact that some veterans of the first Gulf war seem relatively unharmed by their exposure to DU in no way proves that DU did not damage others. The Price of Truth That the evidence from Iraq and from our troops, and the research findings of such experts, have been ignored may be no accident. A US report, leaked in late 1995, allegedly says, 'The potential for health effects from DU exposure is real; however it must be viewed in perspective... the financial implications of long-term disability payments and healthcare costs would be excessive.'3 Clearly, with hundreds of thousands gravely ill in Iraq and at least a quarter of a million UK and US troops seriously ill, huge disability claims might be made not only against the governments of Britain and America if the harm done by DU were acknowledged. There might also be huge claims against companies making DU weapons and some of their directors are said to be extremely close to the White House. How close they are to Downing Street is a matter for speculation, but arms sales makes a considerable contribution to British trade. So the massive whitewashing of DU over the past 12 years, and the way that governments have failed to test returning troops, seemed to disbelieve them, and washed their hands of them, may be purely to save money. The possibility that financial considerations have led the governments of Britain and America to cynically avoid taking responsibility for the harm they have done not only to the people of Iraq but to their own troops may seem outlandish. Yet DU weapons weren't used by the other side and no other explanation fits the evidence. For, in the days before Britain and America first used DU in war its hazards were no secret.4 One American study in 1990 said DU was 'linked to cancer when exposures are internal, [and to] chemical toxicity-causing kidney damage'. While another openly warned that exposure to these particles under battlefield conditions could lead to cancers of the lung and bone, kidney damage, non-malignant lung disease, neuro-cognitive disorders, chromosomal damage and birth defects.5 A Culture of Denial In 1996 and 1997 UN Human Rights Tribunals condemned DU weapons for illegally breaking the Geneva Convention and classed them as 'weapons of mass destruction' 'incompatible with international humanitarian and human rights law'. Since then, following leukemia in European peacekeeping troops in the Balkans and Afghanistan (where DU was also used), the EU has twice called for DU weapons to be banned. Yet, far from banning DU, America and Britain stepped up their denials of the harm from this radioactive dust as more and more troops from the first Gulf war and from action and peacekeeping in the Balkans and Afghanistan have become seriously ill. This is no coincidence. In 1997, while citing experiments, by others, in which 84 percent of dogs exposed to inhaled uranium died of cancer of the lungs, Dr. Asaf Durakovic, then Professor of Radiology and Nuclear Medicine at Georgetown University in Washington was quoted as saying, 'The [US government's] Veterans Administration asked me to lie about the risks of incorporating depleted uranium in the human body.' He concluded, 'uranium does cause cancer, uranium does cause mutation, and uranium does kill. If we continue with the irresponsible contamination of the biosphere, and denial of the fact that human life is endangered by the deadly isotope uranium, then we are doing disservice to ourselves, disservice to the truth, disservice to God and to all generations who follow.' Not what the authorities wanted to hear and his research was suddenly blocked. During 12 years of ever-growing British whitewash the authorities have abolished military hospitals, where there could have been specialized research on the effects of DU and where expertise in treating DU victims could have built up. And, not content with the insult of suggesting the gravely disabling symptoms of Gulf veterans are imaginary they have refused full pensions to many. For, despite all the evidence to the contrary, the current House of Commons briefing paper on DU hazards says 'it is judged that any radiation effects from possible exposures are extremely unlikely to be a contributory factor to the illnesses currently being experienced by some Gulf war veterans.' Note how over a quarter of a million sick and dying US and UK vets are called 'some'. The Way Ahead Britain and America not only used DU in this year's Iraq war, they dramatically increased its use-from a minimum of 320 tons in the previous war to at minimum of 1500 tons in this one. And this time the use of DU wasn't limited to anti-tank weapons-as it had largely been in the previous Gulf war-but was extended to the guided missiles, large bunker busters and big 2000-pound bombs used in Iraq's cities. This means that Iraq's cities have been blanketed in lethal particles-any one of which can cause cancer or deform a child. In addition, the use of DU in huge bombs which throw the deadly particles higher and wider in huge plumes of smoke means that billions of deadly particles have been carried high into the air-again and again and again as the bombs rained down-ready to be swept worldwide by the winds. The Royal Society has suggested the solution is massive decontamination in Iraq. That could only scratch the surface. For decontamination is hugely expensive and, though it may reduce the risks in some of the worst areas, it cannot fully remove them. For DU is too widespread on land and water. How do you clean up every nook and cranny of a city the size of Baghdad? How can they decontaminate a whole country in which microscopic particles, which cannot be detected with a normal geiger counter, are spread from border to border? And how can they clean up all the countries downwind of Iraq-and, indeed, the world? So there are only two things we can do to mitigate this crime against humanity. The first is to provide the best possible medical care for the people of Iraq, for our returning troops and for those who served in the last Gulf war and, through that, minimize their suffering. The second is to relegate war, and the production and sale of weapons, to the scrap heap of history-along with slavery and genocide. Then, and only then, will this crime against humanity be expunged, and the tragic deaths from this war truly bring freedom to the people of Iraq, and of the world. References 1. The Lancet volume 351, issue 9103, 28 February 1998. 2. Rosalie Bertell's book Planet Earth the Latest Weapon of War was reviewed in Caduceus issue 51, page 28. 3. www.gulflink.osd.mil/du_ii/du_ii_tabl1. htm#TAB L_Research Report Summaries 4. www.wagingpeace.org/articles/02.01/020117moret.htm The secret official memorandum to Brigadier General L.R.Groves from Drs Conant, Compton and Urey of War Department Manhattan district dated October 1943 is available at the website www.mindfully.org/Nucs/2003/Leuren-Moret-Gen-Groves21feb03.htm 5. www.gulflink.osd.mil/du_iitab11.htm#tab L_research report summaries .......................................................................................... Further information The Low Level Radiation Campaign hopes to be able to arrange a limited number of private urine tests for those returning from the latest Gulf war. It can be contacted at: The Knoll, Montpelier Park, Llandrindod Wells, LD1 5LW. 01597 824771. Web: www.llrc.org ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ James Denver writes and broadcasts internationally on science and technology. ================================================= [Brought to you by HTTP://WWW.STOPNATO.ORG.UK] Yahoo! Groups Links To visit your group on the web, go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/du-watch/ From eltechno at clear.lakes.com Wed May 4 06:19:27 2005 From: eltechno at clear.lakes.com (Jonathan Larson) Date: Wed May 4 06:22:56 2005 Subject: [Mai-not] Carter Tried To Stop Bush's Energy Disasters - 28 Years Ago Message-ID: Carter Tried To Stop Bush's Energy Disasters - 28 Years Ago by Thom Hartmann http://www.commondreams.org/views05/0503-22.htm In his recent news conference, George Bush Jr. suggested that our nation's "problem" with high gasoline prices was caused by the lack of a national energy policy, and tried to blame it all on Bill Clinton. First, Junior said, "This is a problem that's been a long time in coming. We haven't had an energy policy in this country." This was followed by, "That's exactly what I've been saying to the American people -- 10 years ago if we'd had an energy strategy, we would be able to diversify away from foreign dependence. And -- but we haven't done that. And now we find ourselves in the fix we're in." As is so often the case, Bush was lying. Consider President Jimmy Carter's April 18, 1977 speech. Since it was given nearly three decades ago, when many of the reporters in Bush's White House were children, it's understandable that they don't remember it. But it's inexcusable that Bush and the mainstream media (which, after all, has the ability to do research) would completely ignore it. It was the speech that established the strategic petroleum reserve, birthed the modern solar power industry, led to the insulation of millions of American homes, and established America's first national energy policy. "With the exception of preventing war," said Jimmy Carter, a man of peace, "this is the greatest challenge our country will face during our lifetimes." He added: "It is a problem we will not solve in the next few years, and it is likely to get progressively worse through the rest of this century. "We must not be selfish or timid if we hope to have a decent world for our children and grandchildren. "We simply must balance our demand for energy with our rapidly shrinking resources. By acting now, we can control our future instead of letting the future control us." Carter bluntly pointed out that: "The most important thing about these proposals is that the alternative may be a national catastrophe. Further delay can affect our strength and our power as a nation." He called the new energy policy he was proposing, "[T]he 'moral equivalent of war' -- except that we will be uniting our efforts to build and not destroy." When Carter had become president three months earlier, the nation was still recovering from the "oil shock" of the 1973 Arab oil embargo, and scientists were realizing our nation was just then hitting the point of domestic peak oil production predicted more than a decade earlier by scientist M. King Hubbert. (The rest of the world is hitting the Hubbert Peak right now.) As Carter noted in his speech, "The oil and natural gas we rely on for 75 percent of our energy are running out. In spite of increased effort, domestic production has been dropping steadily at about six percent a year. Imports have doubled in the last five years. Our nation's independence of economic and political action is becoming increasingly constrained." Hubbert had predicted that the peak of oil production for the USA would come in the 1970s, and it did, hitting us with a shock. "The world has not prepared for the future," said Jimmy Carter. "During the 1950s, people used twice as much oil as during the 1940s. During the 1960s, we used twice as much as during the 1950s. And in each of those decades, more oil was consumed than in all of mankind's previous history." Hubbert said we must begin to conserve. Carter agreed. "Ours is the most wasteful nation on earth," he said, a point that is still true. "We waste more energy than we import. With about the same standard of living, we use twice as much energy per person as do other countries like Germany, Japan and Sweden." Carter directly challenged the fossil fuel and automobile industries. "One choice," he said, "is to continue doing what we have been doing before. We can drift along for a few more years. "Our consumption of oil would keep going up every year. Our cars would continue to be too large and inefficient. Three-quarters of them would continue to carry only one person -- the driver -- while our public transportation system continues to decline. We can delay insulating our houses, and they will continue to lose about 50 percent of their heat in waste. "We can continue using scarce oil and natural gas to generate electricity, and continue wasting two-thirds of their fuel value in the process." But that would be unpatriotic, anti-American, and essentially wrong. Who but a traitor sold out to special interests, or an idiot, would countenance such insanity? The year 1977 was a turning point for America. If we didn't make clear and rapid progress, we would face painful times ahead. The Saudis would have their fingers around our necks. We'd face war in the Middle East to secure future oil supplies. "Now we have a choice," Carter said. "But if we wait, we will live in fear of embargoes. We could endanger our freedom as a sovereign nation to act in foreign affairs." Failure to act in the 1970s and 1980s would inevitably lead to a time when the only way to maintain our lifestyle would be to rape our planet and seize control of oil-rich nations in the Middle East. If we didn't begin to develop alternatives like solar power, and dramatically reduce our consumption of fossil fuels, then, Carter said, even our cherished personal freedoms would be at risk. If we continued to simply follow past policies that enriched the oil industry and the Saudis, instead of becoming energy independent, Carter said, "We will feel mounting pressure to plunder the environment." If we failed to develop alternative sources of renewable energy and conserve what we have, the alternative could be nasty. As Carter pointed out: "We will have a crash program to build more nuclear plants, strip-mine and burn more coal, and drill more offshore wells than we will need if we begin to conserve now. Inflation will soar, production will go down, people will lose their jobs. Intense competition will build up among nations and among the different regions within our own country. "If we fail to act soon, we will face an economic, social and political crisis that will threaten our free institutions." Carter's speech drew a strong reaction from the Saudis and the oil industry. Think tanks soon emerged - many whose names are today familiar - to suggest there was really no energy problem, and they led the charge to establish a permanent right-wing media in the US. Within two years, Saudi citizen and oil baron Salem bin Laden's sole US representative, James Bath, would funnel cash into the failing business of the son of the CIA's former director, political up-and-comer George H. W. Bush. With that money from the representative of Osama Bin Laden's half-brother, George Bush Jr. was able to keep afloat his Arbusto ("shrub" in Spanish) Oil Company. And he would be in the pocket of the bin Laden and Saudi interests for the rest of his life. But Carter was incorruptible. "We can be sure that all the special interest groups in the country will attack the part of this plan that affects them directly," he said. "They will say that sacrifice is fine, as long as other people do it, but that their sacrifice is unreasonable, or unfair, or harmful to the country. If they succeed, then the burden on the ordinary citizen, who is not organized into an interest group, would be crushing." But that would be wrong. It would be un-American. It would lead to future oil shocks, and the probable death of American soldiers in Middle Eastern oil wars. Instead of caving in to the Saudis and the oil industry, Carter said: "There should be only one test for this program: whether it will help our country." Two years later, as the bin Laden family's sole US representative was bailing out George Bush Junior's failing oil business, Jimmy Carter gave another speech on energy, further refining his national energy policy. He had already started the national strategic petroleum reserve, birthed the gasohol and solar power industries, and helped insulate millions of homes and offices. But he wanted to go a step further. "I am tonight setting a clear goal for the energy policy of the United States," Carter said on July 15, 1979. "Beginning this moment, this nation will never use more foreign oil than we did in 1977 -- never. From now on, every new addition to our demand for energy will be met from our own production and our own conservation. The generation-long growth in our dependence on foreign oil will be stopped dead in its tracks right now and then reversed as we move through the 1980s..." In addition, we needed to immediately begin to develop a long-range strategy to move beyond fossil fuel. Therefore, Carter said, "I will soon submit legislation to Congress calling for the creation of this nation's first solar bank, which will help us achieve the crucial goal of 20 percent of our energy coming from solar power by the year 2000." But then came the Iran/Contra October Surprise, when the Reagan/Bush campaign allegedly promised the oil-rich mullahs of Iran that they'd sell them missiles and other weapons if only they'd keep our hostages until after the 1980 Carter/Reagan presidential election campaign was over. The result was that Carter, who had been leading in the polls over Reagan/Bush, steadily dropped in popularity as the hostage crisis dragged out, and lost the election. The hostages were released the very minute that Reagan put his hand on the Bible to take his oath of office. The hostages freed, the Reagan/Bush administration quickly began illegally delivering missiles to Iran. And Ronald Reagan's first official acts of office included removing Jimmy Carter's solar panels from the roof of the White House, and reversing most of Carter's conservation and alternative energy policies. Today, despite the best efforts of the Bushies, the bin Ladens, and the rest of the oil industry, Carter's few surviving initiatives have borne fruit. It is now more economical to build power generating stations using wind than using coal, oil, gas, or nuclear. When amortized over the life of a typical mortgage, installing solar power in a house in most parts of the US is cheaper than drawing power from the grid. (Shell and British Petroleum are among the world's largest manufacturers of solar photovoltaic panels, which can now even be used as roofing shingles.) And hybrid cars that get 50-70 miles to the gallon are increasingly commonplace on our nation's highways. Instead of taking a strong stand to make America energy independent, Bush kisses a Saudi crown prince, then holds hands with him as they walk into Bush's hobby ranch in Texas. Our young men and women are daily dying in Iraq - a country with the world's second largest store of underground oil. And we live in fear that another 15 Saudis may hijack more planes to fly into our nation's capitol or into nuclear power plants. Meanwhile, Bush brings us an energy bill that includes eight billion dollars in welfare payments to the oil business, just as the nation's oil companies report the highest profits in the entire history of the industry. Americans struggle to pay for gasoline, while the Bush administration refuses to increase fleet efficiency standards, stop the $100,000 tax break for buying Hummers, or maintain and build Amtrak. George Bush Jr. is arguably right that gas prices are spiking because we don't have an energy policy. But instead of blaming Clinton, he should be pointing to the Reagan/Bush administration, and to his own abysmal failures over the past four years. Thom Hartmann's bestselling book on peak oil is titled "The Last Hours of Ancient Sunlight, published by Random House/Three Rivers Press. His articles archive is at www.thomhartmann.com/commondreams.shtml. -- ------------------ War remains the decisive human failure. - John Kenneth Galbraith Jonathan web site at: http://elegant-technology.com -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://www.globalproblematique.net/pipermail/mai-not/attachments/20050504/a7ca9c15/attachment.html From eltechno at clear.lakes.com Wed May 4 06:29:18 2005 From: eltechno at clear.lakes.com (Jonathan Larson) Date: Wed May 4 06:30:13 2005 Subject: [Mai-not] The End of the Enlightenment Message-ID: The End of the Enlightenment by John Kelley http://www.commondreams.org/views05/0503-24.htm I haven't been able to write for a week and now I know why. I have been watching the events in the U.S. and abroad with increasing concern over the survivability of the enlightenment. You know, the philosophy that says we have the ability to make decisions for ourselves based on one's reason, objective observation and mutual decision making. The Declaration of Independence was clear about the influence that that common men should have over their own lives. "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness. That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness." These thoughts are based directly in the thinking of the Enlightenment that reason should prevail over office, privilege or brute power. Unfortunately when we review history we realize that the battle for enlightened thought is a constant battle against those who would control the lives of others. We fail to realize most of the time that we have been living in a small microcosm of history that has more downs than ups, more devastation and war then peace, more exploitation than elevation of mankind. And that our current run at moving up the evolutionary scale has stopped and we are headed down for a while, if not forever. The selection of Cardinal Ratzinger as Pope Benedict XVI disheartened me greatly. Any sign that the church was going to come down on the side of humanity rather then authority has vanished. One of the last chances for a moral voice to salvage mankind from his own hand will not be there. Indeed we may see the end of the Age of Enlightenment in my time. Am I not overreacting you say? I think not. This is a 78-year-old man who claims a purity and knowledge of God and his will, but has never held a women he loves in his arms lost in passion or ever held his child in his arms right after its birth, still speckled with its mother's blood. He also has never lost his job to an immigrant, or to "outsourcing", or found himself with an unexpected pregnancy he can't afford without hurting the other children because his new job with Wal-Mart makes him just enough money to deny him public assistance with food, healthcare and childcare but not enough to afford the company plan. He has never found himself, 15 and pregnant by his father or found himself with HIV because the church told him artificial contraception was a sin. He seems to have never found himself in the situation of a young trusting altar boy molested by his priest or what felt what it is like to be rejected as a homosexual. This is a man who is proud to have crushed the "heresy" of liberation theology, as leading to upheaval and empowerment of the masses, reflecting the familiar fear of loss of authority in Benedict's history. A man who has never had to go home and tell that woman he loves that he has to move his family into the slums of a giant city because cheap corn has flooded the market and they cannot live on the land at those prices. Who never has to send his 13 year old daughter to work in a maquiladora for $1.75 a day for long shifts where the workload is increased constantly so they won't lose the job to slave labor in China. Who has never had to leave his family to migrate across the border to try and get a job working for a contractor who steals half his wage to work in the fields all day, living in a crowded room so he can send money home. Conservatives like to point out his intellect, but the problem is that Benedict's intellect is limited to his experience, almost all in top down institutions, a policeman father, the Nazi Youth Corps, a German boot camp, the seminary, academia, Vatican service. He has not even had the experience of pastoral ministry, caring directly for the needs of a flock and the conflicts of life with dogma. So his intellect is limited by a perspective based on limited experience. This is a man who we know was raised in Hitler's Germany. Even though he denies any affiliation with it he expresses through his history of dogma driven authoritarianism an obvious affinity for his experience with Nazism. It is said that he was turned from a moderate liberal (whatever the that is) to a conservative by student demands for equality and the right to question authority while on the faculty of University of T?bingen. His reaction appears to be a fear based view that saw the disorder of change in the sixties as comparable to the conditions of economic and cultural chaos feared by the establishment with the rise of Bolshevism. Much of the justification for the barbarism of the Nazis was the threat that the Bolshevik driven tide of trade unionism posed to the established order of wealth. While denying any affiliation with Nazism, he reflects that same reactionary dictatorial style to the concept of the masses having a voice in their own fate. From 1981 - 2005, Ratzinger was appointed by John Paul VI as the head of the Doctrine of Faith. As his pro George Bush Cardinal Ratzinger Fan Club (yes there is such a thing www.ratzingerfanclub.com ) gleefully states: "As "Grand Inquisitor" for Mother Rome, Ratzinger kept himself busy in service to the Truth: correcting theological error, silencing dissenting theologians, and stomping down heresy wherever it may rear its ugly head -- and, consequently, had received somewhat of a notorious reputation among the liberal media and 'enlightened' intelligentsia (ironically sic) of pseudo-Catholic universities." The truth it seems is only available to theologians and American Presidents. His criticism of modernity, atheism, other forms of Christianity ("deficient"), let alone other world religions demonstrates a fear of things outside of his experience as inferior and to be feared as threats to authority. This prejudice is made of fear of the unknown, the uncontrollable, like the human spirit. Benedict's view is to pluck out the offending eye, to make the church smaller, more orthodox, exclusionary and to fight the heretical ideas of free thought and action. If he was an isolated anachronism in the world that would be one thing, but he represents another converging river of power concentrated on authoritarianism in the world. George "silver spoon" Bush also suffers from the same lack of perspective, only the attempt at intellectual discipline is missing. Seemingly a concrete thinker, Bush believes everything he says, and believes in a simple right or wrong, black or white view of things unruffled by the nuances of real life. He sees himself as having a predetermined destiny to change history, a man to follow unquestioningly. His appeal is that he has such simple sounding answers for everything he appeals to average people who are scared of change in the world. But like Menken said "For every problem there is always a simple solution, and it is usually wrong". But in a confusing, overwhelming world, simple seems good, and when you are scared you cling on to simple. The reality is that he doesn't have the intellectual ability or moral boundaries to prevent him from justifying to himself any action. The reality is he seems to have the vacuousness of a slightly dull fraternity brother that everyone puts up with because he's got a really nice car. The fault of his enemies is that they "misunderestimate" him. The opposition doesn't really think that he can be that stupid, that ego centric, that megalomaniacal. But they are wrong, his history would indicate that Bush is driven by the fear that he really is a failure, willing to do anything to avoid that prospect, driven to do anything to avoid that awful truth of his own incompetence. A very dangerous circumstance for the rest of us. When all is said and done he is little more then a car salesman doing the advertisement for the big car companies. "Come on down, we're practically giving these cars away". The real power brokers don't have to be elected. Cheney, Wolfowitz, Perle, Rumsfeld, Kristoff, the other Neo-Cons driven by a view of world domination, that believes the rest of us need to be fooled for our own good. They have no problem lying straight to our faces. Propaganda is just a tool to them to be used without the complications of moral compunction. After all these people visualize a corporate world government (the WTO) dominated by a nuclear space weaponry and mercenary armies as their "white man's burden". Their willing assistants are thousands of corporate names that you have never heard. They are driven by greed or the need to make the next quarterly profit goals. Functionaries in a monstrous machine called the corporation, that has no problem subverting science, waging war, stripping resources, poisoning land, air and water, exploiting slave labor, destroying communities or anything else that stands in the way of profit. With corporate control of the press informing the public is secondary to selling product and manipulating public opinion. But, you say not everyone in business is unethical. You may be right, but let one of these men falter in his mission and he will soon be replaced by someone who will push the machine's drive for short term profit. Joining these power hunters to repress free thought, is James Dobson, Randall Terry, Ralph Reed, Pat Robertson and the other theocrats who are pursuing a "Christian Nation". They want to have the FCC police public discussion to their acceptable subjects, information on birth control and abortion suppressed, to deny you a job based on not only your sexual orientation but also your religion. They have many allies in congress, as illustrated by James Frist, the Senate Majority Leader's appearance at their national judge bashing event. These people believe that they should have dominion over this country including its laws, your thoughts and your actions. If you don't think they are dangerous listen to some of their statements of belief: "State Universities are breeding grounds, quite literally, for sexually transmitted diseases (including HIV), homosexual behavior, unwanted pregnancies, abortions, alcoholism, and drug abuse." James Dobson "I want to be invisible. I do guerrilla warfare. I paint my face and travel at night. You don't know it's over until you're in a body bag. You don't know until election night." --Ralph Reed "I hope...to see the day when...in...our country we won't have any public schools. The churches will have taken them over and Christians will be running them. What a happy day that will be!" --Rev. Jerry Falwell "Let a wave of intolerance wash over you. I want you to let a wave of hatred wash over you. Yes, hate is good.... If a Christian voted for Clinton, he sinned against God. It's that simple.... Our goal is a Christian Nation... we have a biblical duty, we are called by God to conquer this country. We don't want equal time. We don't want Pluralism. We want theocracy. Theocracy means God rules. I've got a hot flash. God rules." --Randall Terry "You say you're supposed to be nice to the Episcopalians and the Presbyterians and the Methodists and this, that, and the other thing. Nonsense. I don't have to be nice to the spirit of the Antichrist. I can love the people who hold false opinions but I don't have to be nice to them (Pat Robertson, The 700 Club, January 14, 1991) The goal of all of these groups is like Ratzinger, to declare those who disagree with them as "heretical" and marginalize their participation in society, even if that means a majority of the people on the planet. Most of these people including George Bush are products of experience that told them that they could always, bully or buy their way out of their mistakes, except this time they can't and you and I are all going on the ride with them if we allow it. They all live in constant fear that the masses will rise up and take away their power and privilege so they prey on fear and hopelessness to gain more and more control. This is the real axis of evil, the one who wants us to return to what was called "the dark ages" when knowledge was suppressed, the lower classes excluded from education except that chosen by and for the hierarchy of the church, commerce was completely controlled by feudal lords and their mercenaries. They all want to limit your thinking, your discussion, your thoughts, your actions. But, don't worry it the dark ages only lasted about 1,000 years. "Fear terrorism, outsourcing is good for America, there is no global warming, government is the problem, deficits don't matter, don't watch this, don't read this, turn your head from Darfur, ignore AIDs in Africa, take Prozac, give your child Ritalin. Fill that empty hole in your soul with cheap goods from China you get at Wal-Mart and "reality" TV." The candle of enlightenment is in danger of flickering out and the dark ages again loom large on the horizon, indeed human survival itself is in the balance. Time is short. You think I exaggerate, I think not. John M. Kelley is the host of the Progressive Forum Radio Interview show at 9am cst at www.texasradio947.com , has a blog at www.mytown.ca/johnkelley/ and a web page at www.radiofreecorpus.com -- ------------------ War remains the decisive human failure. - John Kenneth Galbraith Jonathan web site at: http://elegant-technology.com -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://www.globalproblematique.net/pipermail/mai-not/attachments/20050504/35e82e78/attachment-0001.html From dgiles at central.murdoch.edu.au Wed May 4 08:28:17 2005 From: dgiles at central.murdoch.edu.au (Dion Giles) Date: Wed May 4 08:28:34 2005 Subject: [Mai-not] The future of Mai-not Message-ID: <6.1.1.1.0.20050504232534.02f37548@central.murdoch.edu.au> Yves and NCFS are kindly prepared to continue to host this list, but Yves is seeking a taker for administering it. Nobody has so far come forward. Can the administration be done from abroad? Dion Giles Western Australia From dgiles at central.murdoch.edu.au Wed May 4 08:46:26 2005 From: dgiles at central.murdoch.edu.au (Dion Giles) Date: Wed May 4 08:51:23 2005 Subject: [Mai-not] Chewing raw grubs with the 'Nutcracker Man In-Reply-To: <5.1.0.14.2.20050501071951.02e13240@pop.uniserve.com> References: <5.1.0.14.2.20050501071951.02e13240@pop.uniserve.com> Message-ID: <6.1.1.1.0.20050502122539.03132cc8@central.murdoch.edu.au> An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://www.globalproblematique.net/pipermail/mai-not/attachments/20050504/4bea5fae/attachment.html From netcfs at shaw.ca Wed May 4 10:11:06 2005 From: netcfs at shaw.ca (Yves Bajard) Date: Wed May 4 10:11:14 2005 Subject: [Mai-not] The future of Mai-not In-Reply-To: <6.1.1.1.0.20050504232534.02f37548@central.murdoch.edu.au> References: <6.1.1.1.0.20050504232534.02f37548@central.murdoch.edu.au> Message-ID: <1115226666.5218.5.camel@Yves> Yes, from anywhere in the world, but not from outer space. Regards Yves Le mercredi 04 mai 2005 ? 23:28 +0800, Dion Giles a ?crit : > Yves and NCFS are kindly prepared to continue to host this list, but Yves > is seeking a taker for administering it. > > Nobody has so far come forward. > > Can the administration be done from abroad? > > Dion Giles > Western Australia > > _______________________________________________ > Mai-not mailing list > Mai-not@globalproblematique.net > http://www.globalproblematique.net/mailman/listinfo/mai-not From jomut at yahoo.com Wed May 4 12:56:54 2005 From: jomut at yahoo.com (John Mutambirwa) Date: Wed May 4 12:56:59 2005 Subject: [Mai-not] BIG could be beautiful for the poor Message-ID: <20050504195654.41642.qmail@web31111.mail.mud.yahoo.com> Hi, I think it is beginning to dawn on some that "tickle my skeleton" might come sooner than "trickle down" for many in this world of ours.!! John ======================== SOURCE WEBSITE: http://www.irinnews.org/report.asp?ReportID=46880&SelectRegion=Southern_Africa&SelectCountry=NAMIBIA Namibia: BIG could be beautiful for the poor Food aid for orphans - Namibia has huge income disparities Namibian churches and NGOs have launched a coalition to lobby for the introduction of a universal grant to provide a safety net for the country’s poor. Borrowing the idea from neighbouring South Africa, they propose that a Basic Income Grant (BIG) be paid to every Namibian citizen from birth until the age of 60, when the national pension kicks in. BIG avoids the stigma of means testing, and puts cash directly into the hands of the poor. Although the rich would also receive the grant, its proponents argue that the tax system could be remodelled to ensure that the better off pay back the cost of the grant. The Council of Churches of Namibia, together with the National Union of Namibian Workers, the Namibian NGO Forum, the Namibia Network of AIDS Service Organisations, the Legal Assistance Centre, and the Labour Resource and Research Institute all signed a declaration on Wednesday, committing themselves to push the government to introduce BIG. "The Basic Income Grant is an unconditional grant for every Namibian," said the leader of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in the Republic of Namibia (ELCRN), Bishop Zephania Kameeta. "Whether you are working or not, you will receive this grant." Although a middle-income country, Namibia has one of the most unequal societies in the world with a Gini coefficient of 0.7, according to the UN Development Programme. The Gini coefficient measures income disparities with zero indicating perfect equality. In rich countries the figure is usually around 0.3. A survey conducted by Namibia’s National Planning Commission estimates that 76 percent of the population lives below the poverty line. Given the skewed income distribution patterns, BIG promoters argue, it would take extremely high levels of economic growth before any meaningful benefits trickled down to the poor. Namibia’s GDP growth rate has averaged about 3.4 percent over the past five years. The government has not been immune to the arguments for promoting a universal grant. Back in 2002 it quietly instructed the Namibian Tax Consortium (NAMTAX) to review the tax system, and the consortium proposed a basic grant. The ELCRN made the BIG plan public during its annual synod in November 2004, where a decision was taken to launch a coalition in 2005 to press for its introduction. The proposal calls for the government to pay a monthly cash grant of N$100 (US $16) to every Namibian, which would mean a basic income of N$600 ($100) for a family of six, for example. According to ELCRN Pastor Dirk Haarmann, who holds a PhD in social development, providing BIG to Namibia’s roughly one million people below the age of 60 would cost $200 million a year. "NAMTAX proposed to finance this mainly by increasing the value added tax (VAT)," Haarmann said. "But ELRCN and our coalition partners say a combination of higher VAT and tax reforms will enable the government to finance the BIG." Several policy alternatives to tackling poverty exist, including public works programmes, a drive to create quality jobs and strengthening the existing grant schemes. "All these are important strategies that need to be pursued, but none can really claim to be serious alternatives to BIG in terms of denting mass poverty," concluded South African analyst Ravi Naidoo in a paper for the National Labour and Economic Development Institute. In reference to South Africa, Naidoo dismissed the argument that BIG would be too expensive. "Of course, with ’affordability’ you also have to look at the cost of not acting. Delaying necessary spending to save money is false economy, because the cost gets higher once the damage is done." The introduction of BIG in Namibia, however, was not imminent, Prime Minister Nahas Angula told IRIN. "Cabinet has no objection - it was our initiative back in 2002," he noted. "But it is a matter of affordability, and it must be synchronised with other social grants, like for the disabled, orphans and workers’ compensation." John Mutambirwa (Dreaming Awake) jomut@yahoo.com chakane@hotmail.com http://www.geocities.com/jomut Discover Yahoo! Find restaurants, movies, travel and more fun for the weekend. Check it out! http://discover.yahoo.com/weekend.html From jomut at yahoo.com Wed May 4 13:27:23 2005 From: jomut at yahoo.com (John Mutambirwa) Date: Wed May 4 13:27:26 2005 Subject: [Mai-not] corruption and wretchedness Message-ID: <20050504202723.81497.qmail@web31101.mail.mud.yahoo.com> Hi, I think Yves' arguments about the wretchedness that exists in Dakar, for instance, were given too short a shrift. Corruption in the developing world is much too complex a phenomenon to be summarily dismissed as a regrettable and lucrative shortcoming of the local elites (government and business). Such a view glosses over how the initiators (i.e. bankrollers) of corruption (transnational corps and others) have devised accounting methods whereby they include the bribes they pay corrupt officialdom in the contractual costs they charge for the projects they "develop" in the third world. The spectacularly profitable practice of transfer pricing is also largely omitted here. Check out this site for what I am trying to put across: http://www.thecornerhouse.org.uk/subject/corruption/ The Blair Commission on Africa was, as a consequence of being brought down to humbling reality re this issue, compelled to adopt a much more sober statement on what constitutes good governance and who are the principals involved in corruption and how they can be combatted. http://213.225.140.43/english/report/introduction.html John. ================================= John Mutambirwa (Dreaming Awake) jomut@yahoo.com chakane@hotmail.com http://www.geocities.com/jomut Discover Yahoo! Get on-the-go sports scores, stock quotes, news and more. Check it out! http://discover.yahoo.com/mobile.html From jomut at yahoo.com Wed May 4 14:15:16 2005 From: jomut at yahoo.com (John Mutambirwa) Date: Wed May 4 14:15:24 2005 Subject: [Mai-not] resending: corruption and wretchedness Message-ID: <20050504211516.3418.qmail@web31109.mail.mud.yahoo.com> Hi, I experienced some technical difficulties so I am resending this message on corruption and misgovernance in the developing world. I still think that in light of the information that I have asked those interested to refer to, Yves' claims about the nightmare experienced by people in less fortunate social climes be justified. John ============= Hi, I think Yves' arguments about the wretchedness that exists in Dakar, for instance, were given too short a shrift. Corruption in the developing world is much too complex a phenomenon to be summarily dismissed as a regrettable and lucrative shortcoming of the local elites (government and business). Such a view glosses over how the initiators (i.e. bankrollers) of corruption (transnational corps and others) have devised accounting methods whereby they include the bribes they pay corrupt officialdom in the contractual costs they charge for the projects they "develop" in the third world. The spectacularly profitable practice of transfer pricing is also largely omitted here. Check out this site for what I am trying to put across: http://www.thecornerhouse.org.uk/subject/corruption/ The Blair Commission on Africa was, as a consequence of being brought down to humbling reality re this issue, compelled to adopt a much more sober statement on what constitutes good governance and who are the principals involved in corruption and how they can be combatted. http://213.225.140.43/english/report/introduction.html John. ================================= John Mutambirwa (Dreaming Awake) jomut@yahoo.com chakane@hotmail.com http://www.geocities.com/jomut __________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Make Yahoo! your home page http://www.yahoo.com/r/hs From muldowne at rci.rutgers.edu Wed May 4 17:08:41 2005 From: muldowne at rci.rutgers.edu (Rob Muldowney) Date: Wed May 4 17:08:42 2005 Subject: [Mai-not] The future of Mai-not In-Reply-To: <1115226666.5218.5.camel@Yves> References: <6.1.1.1.0.20050504232534.02f37548@central.murdoch.edu.au> <1115226666.5218.5.camel@Yves> Message-ID: <42796409.7090404@rci.rutgers.edu> Actually , I will offer to host it on my computers for no fee. I will install majordomo software this week and test it out. Once it is working we can transfer the email list. I really don't understand how a 35 person email list with 5-10 messages a day can cost so much to operate. Anybody with a DSL line can host such a small volume list on their desktop with free software. I run a computer network at a university, so there will be no problem with capacity. I know most of you don't know me as I rarely post anything, but I have been a member for several years. Usually Ed Deak says what I would have and I have had no interest in chiming in with, yeah me too. Robert Muldowney Highland Park, New Jersey Yves Bajard wrote: >Yes, from anywhere in the world, but not from outer space. > >Regards > >Yves > >Le mercredi 04 mai 2005 ? 23:28 +0800, Dion Giles a ?crit : > > >>Yves and NCFS are kindly prepared to continue to host this list, but Yves >>is seeking a taker for administering it. >> >>Nobody has so far come forward. >> >>Can the administration be done from abroad? >> >>Dion Giles >>Western Australia >> >>_______________________________________________ >>Mai-not mailing list >>Mai-not@globalproblematique.net >>http://www.globalproblematique.net/mailman/listinfo/mai-not >> >> > >_______________________________________________ >Mai-not mailing list >Mai-not@globalproblematique.net >http://www.globalproblematique.net/mailman/listinfo/mai-not > > > From McPogo at aol.com Wed May 4 17:57:42 2005 From: McPogo at aol.com (McPogo@aol.com) Date: Wed May 4 17:57:56 2005 Subject: [Mai-not] The future of Mai-Not Message-ID: I'm one of the quiet ones that really enjoys mai-not's diverse, intelligent views who would also be willing to make a reasonable donation as well to maintain the site. Paul McLean Ontario, Canada -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://www.globalproblematique.net/pipermail/mai-not/attachments/20050504/e0e6b462/attachment.html From papadop at peak.org Wed May 4 18:50:03 2005 From: papadop at peak.org (MichaelP) Date: Wed May 4 18:50:08 2005 Subject: [Mai-not] The future of Mai-not In-Reply-To: <42796409.7090404@rci.rutgers.edu> References: <6.1.1.1.0.20050504232534.02f37548@central.murdoch.edu.au> <1115226666.5218.5.camel@Yves> <42796409.7090404@rci.rutgers.edu> Message-ID: iqy On Wed, 4 May 2005, Rob Muldowney wrote: > Actually , I will offer to host it on my computers for no fee. I will > install majordomo software this week and test it out. Once it is > working we can transfer the email list. I really don't understand how a > 35 person email list with 5-10 messages a day can cost so much to > operate. Anybody with a DSL line can host such a small volume list on > their desktop with free software. I run a computer network at a > university, so there will be no problem with capacity. > > I know most of you don't know me as I rarely post anything, but I have > been a member for several years. Usually Ed Deak says what I would have > and I have had no interest in chiming in with, yeah me too. > > > Robert Muldowney > Highland Park, New Jersey > > Yves Bajard wrote: > > >Yes, from anywhere in the world, but not from outer space. > > > >Regards > > > >Yves > > > >Le mercredi 04 mai 2005 ? 23:28 +0800, Dion Giles a ?crit : > > > > > >>Yves and NCFS are kindly prepared to continue to host this list, but Yves > >>is seeking a taker for administering it. > >> > >>Nobody has so far come forward. > >> > >>Can the administration be done from abroad? > >> > >>Dion Giles > >>Western Australia > >> > >>_______________________________________________ > >>Mai-not mailing list > >>Mai-not@globalproblematique.net > >>http://www.globalproblematique.net/mailman/listinfo/mai-not > >> > >> > > > >_______________________________________________ > >Mai-not mailing list > >Mai-not@globalproblematique.net > >http://www.globalproblematique.net/mailman/listinfo/mai-not > > > > > > > > _______________________________________________ > Mai-not mailing list > Mai-not@globalproblematique.net > http://www.globalproblematique.net/mailman/listinfo/mai-not > From dgiles at central.murdoch.edu.au Wed May 4 18:58:36 2005 From: dgiles at central.murdoch.edu.au (Dion Giles) Date: Wed May 4 18:58:41 2005 Subject: [Mai-not] The future of Mai-not In-Reply-To: <1115226666.5218.5.camel@Yves> References: <6.1.1.1.0.20050504232534.02f37548@central.murdoch.edu.au> <1115226666.5218.5.camel@Yves> Message-ID: <6.1.1.1.0.20050505095601.02f32d20@central.murdoch.edu.au> If nobody closer to Vancouver will do it, I'm prepared to have a go. Not quite in outer space though I did inhale a few times in the early 1980s to see what it was like. Dion Giles Western Australia At 01:11 05/05/2005, you wrote: >Yes, from anywhere in the world, but not from outer space. > >Regards > >Yves > >Le mercredi 04 mai 2005 ? 23:28 +0800, Dion Giles a ?crit : > > Yves and NCFS are kindly prepared to continue to host this list, but Yves > > is seeking a taker for administering it. > > > > Nobody has so far come forward. > > > > Can the administration be done from abroad? > > > > Dion Giles > > Western Australia > > > > _______________________________________________ > > Mai-not mailing list > > Mai-not@globalproblematique.net > > http://www.globalproblematique.net/mailman/listinfo/mai-not > >_______________________________________________ >Mai-not mailing list >Mai-not@globalproblematique.net >http://www.globalproblematique.net/mailman/listinfo/mai-not From dgiles at central.murdoch.edu.au Wed May 4 19:09:00 2005 From: dgiles at central.murdoch.edu.au (Dion Giles) Date: Wed May 4 19:09:11 2005 Subject: [Mai-not] The future of Mai-not (#2) Message-ID: <6.1.1.1.0.20050505100013.02c4c840@central.murdoch.edu.au> I wrote the last message before scrolling down to the rest of this morning's mail (bad habit). Naturally I'd much prefer somebody in North America did it, and am relieved to see the offer by Rob Muldowney to look after the whole shebang. I sense that Yves would be relieved also -- it's a chore when he is busy on other things. Spam monitoring can be a real problem -- I administer a list for the Murdoch Uni branch of our union and have to field several spam messages a day to keep them away from the subscribers. Long live all anti-spam legislation (just so long as it doesn't morph into anti-dissent legislation). Dion Giles Western Australia From dgiles at central.murdoch.edu.au Wed May 4 20:52:43 2005 From: dgiles at central.murdoch.edu.au (Dion Giles) Date: Wed May 4 20:52:53 2005 Subject: [Mai-not] "Gaza pullout" revealed as Zionist con trick Message-ID: <6.1.1.1.0.20050505114759.02cced60@central.murdoch.edu.au> An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://www.globalproblematique.net/pipermail/mai-not/attachments/20050505/a987356d/attachment.html From thinker at uniserve.com Thu May 5 08:09:52 2005 From: thinker at uniserve.com (Ed Deak) Date: Thu May 5 08:11:03 2005 Subject: [Mai-not] BIG could be beautiful for the poor In-Reply-To: <20050504195654.41642.qmail@web31111.mail.mud.yahoo.com> Message-ID: <5.1.0.14.2.20050505080535.02cdeca8@pop.uniserve.com> Let's hope, Namibia will show the world the way to go. Hurray and more power to them ! Somebody has to start the ball rolling and if a small nation might succeed, perhaps the people of our colonizing countries may just wake up and demand back their human rights from the real colonizers sitting our heads. Ooooops, I missed an "h" somewhere ! Cheers, and best wishes to the, Ed. =================================================================================================== At 12:56 PM 04/05/2005 -0700, you wrote: >Hi, > >I think it is beginning to dawn on some that "tickle >my skeleton" might come sooner than "trickle down" for >many in this world of ours.!! > >John >======================== > >SOURCE WEBSITE: >http://www.irinnews.org/report.asp?ReportID=46880&SelectRegion=Southern_Africa&SelectCountry=NAMIBIA > >Namibia: BIG could be beautiful for the poor > >Food aid for orphans - Namibia has huge income >disparities > >Namibian churches and NGOs have launched a coalition >to lobby for the introduction of a universal grant to >provide a safety net for the country's poor. Borrowing >the idea from neighbouring South Africa, they propose >that a Basic Income Grant (BIG) be paid to every >Namibian citizen from birth until the age of 60, when >the national pension kicks in. > >BIG avoids the stigma of means testing, and puts cash >directly into the hands of the poor. Although the rich >would also receive the grant, its proponents argue >that the tax system could be remodelled to ensure that >the better off pay back the cost of the grant. > >The Council of Churches of Namibia, together with the >National Union of Namibian Workers, the Namibian NGO >Forum, the Namibia Network of AIDS Service >Organisations, the Legal Assistance Centre, and the >Labour Resource and Research Institute all signed a >declaration on Wednesday, committing themselves to >push the government to introduce BIG. > >"The Basic Income Grant is an unconditional grant for >every Namibian," said the leader of the Evangelical >Lutheran Church in the Republic of Namibia (ELCRN), >Bishop Zephania Kameeta. "Whether you are working or >not, you will receive this grant." > >Although a middle-income country, Namibia has one of >the most unequal societies in the world with a Gini >coefficient of 0.7, according to the UN Development >Programme. The Gini coefficient measures income >disparities with zero indicating perfect equality. In >rich countries the figure is usually around 0.3. > >A survey conducted by Namibia's National Planning >Commission estimates that 76 percent of the population >lives below the poverty line. Given the skewed income >distribution patterns, BIG promoters argue, it would >take extremely high levels of economic growth before >any meaningful benefits trickled down to the poor. > >Namibia's GDP growth rate has averaged about 3.4 >percent over the past five years. The government has >not been immune to the arguments for promoting a >universal grant. Back in 2002 it quietly instructed >the Namibian Tax Consortium (NAMTAX) to review the tax >system, and the consortium proposed a basic grant. > >The ELCRN made the BIG plan public during its annual >synod in November 2004, where a decision was taken to >launch a coalition in 2005 to press for its >introduction. The proposal calls for the government to >pay a monthly cash grant of N$100 (US $16) to every >Namibian, which would mean a basic income of N$600 >($100) for a family of six, for example. > >According to ELCRN Pastor Dirk Haarmann, who holds a >PhD in social development, providing BIG to Namibia's >roughly one million people below the age of 60 would >cost $200 million a year. "NAMTAX proposed to finance >this mainly by increasing the value added tax (VAT)," >Haarmann said. "But ELRCN and our coalition partners >say a combination of higher VAT and tax reforms will >enable the government to finance the BIG." > >Several policy alternatives to tackling poverty exist, >including public works programmes, a drive to create >quality jobs and strengthening the existing grant >schemes. "All these are important strategies that need >to be pursued, but none can really claim to be serious >alternatives to BIG in terms of denting mass poverty," >concluded South African analyst Ravi Naidoo in a paper >for the National Labour and Economic Development >Institute. > >In reference to South Africa, Naidoo dismissed the >argument that BIG would be too expensive. "Of course, >with 'affordability' you also have to look at the cost >of not acting. Delaying necessary spending to save >money is false economy, because the cost gets higher >once the damage is done." > >The introduction of BIG in Namibia, however, was not >imminent, Prime Minister Nahas Angula told IRIN. >"Cabinet has no objection - it was our initiative back >in 2002," he noted. "But it is a matter of >affordability, and it must be synchronised with other >social grants, like for the disabled, orphans and >workers' compensation." > > > >John Mutambirwa (Dreaming Awake) >jomut@yahoo.com >chakane@hotmail.com >http://www.geocities.com/jomut > > > >Discover Yahoo! >Find restaurants, movies, travel and more fun for the weekend. Check it out! >http://discover.yahoo.com/weekend.html > >_______________________________________________ >Mai-not mailing list >Mai-not@globalproblematique.net >http://www.globalproblematique.net/mailman/listinfo/mai-not From dgiles at central.murdoch.edu.au Thu May 5 10:00:24 2005 From: dgiles at central.murdoch.edu.au (Dion Giles) Date: Thu May 5 10:00:39 2005 Subject: [Mai-not] corruption and wretchedness In-Reply-To: <20050504211516.3418.qmail@web31109.mail.mud.yahoo.com> References: <20050504211516.3418.qmail@web31109.mail.mud.yahoo.com> Message-ID: <6.1.1.1.0.20050505223426.03012e48@central.murdoch.edu.au> An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://www.globalproblematique.net/pipermail/mai-not/attachments/20050506/618f5a6f/attachment.html From papadop at peak.org Thu May 5 10:31:25 2005 From: papadop at peak.org (MichaelP) Date: Thu May 5 10:31:40 2005 Subject: [Mai-not] Made in China Message-ID: The following item is not available in cyberspace, and I don't intend to scan it in. But on the general topic of the "Enlightenment" and the improvement in "human conditions" I'm bringing attention to "Made in China" written by Isabel Hilton in the latest issue (#89) of GRANTA -- 40 pages of reportage on THE FACTORY in current China. Everything social and just that the subscribers to this list have been opposing is in there, and with it a measure of the difficulty faced in slowing down the removal to China of industrial activity. MichaelP From creuss at bluemail.ch Thu May 5 12:10:43 2005 From: creuss at bluemail.ch (Christoph Reuss) Date: Thu May 5 12:11:37 2005 Subject: [Mai-not] "Gaza pullout" revealed as Zionist con trick Message-ID: Dion Giles asked: > Does anyone know if there really was a commitment by the Palestinian > authority to disarm resistance groups? Sharon and Abbas only negotiated a cease-fire for the pullout, not a disarmament. But Hamas announced from the start they don't feel bound by the agreement -- Hamas would agree to a cease-fire only if the occupation ends. So Abbas figured that disarming them is the only way to ensure the cease-fire. But this measure is not viable, and controversial even among the PA. Hence the last paragraph: > At a news conference in Gaza, Palestinian security chief Rashid Abu Shbak > said he had no intention of disarming the militants. > Instead, he is calling on them to honour their cease-fire commitment. As usual, Sharon has defined the conditions so that they can't be implemented but sound like he has good will... The usual con trick. Chris ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ SpamWall: Mail to this addy is deleted unread unless it contains the keyword "igve". From jomut at yahoo.com Thu May 5 16:11:38 2005 From: jomut at yahoo.com (John Mutambirwa) Date: Thu May 5 16:11:43 2005 Subject: [Mai-not] Re: corruption and wretchedness In-Reply-To: <6.1.1.1.0.20050505223426.03012e48@central.murdoch.edu.au> Message-ID: <20050505231138.62341.qmail@web31105.mail.mud.yahoo.com> Thanks, yours is a multithreaded argument that is difficult to reply to. I shall post something on the Enlightenment later (used to read a lot on it some years back). I should like to remind you that the practical, technological skills that Europe (in particular, England) acquired starting from the seventeenth century where not quite home grown. In fact, it is well known that, before being overrun and colonized on account of much more superior English martial technology, India boasted a superiority in technologically savvy in the areas of textile production, shipbuilding, and metallurgy (especially steel-making) that actually put all of Europe to shame. It was through a socially engineered, deindustrializing scheme, that included all the known perversities of both tariff imposition and radical social restructuring, that Indian society was reduced to a grovellingly humble and underdeveloped state: http://www.mngt.waikato.ac.nz/Research/ejrot/Vol2_1/Articles/Chomsky.asp http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Chomsky/NeoliberalismPOP_Chom.html Take this sample from a Chomsky interview: http://int.usamnesia.com/noamchomsky-2.htm "aA: I’m interested in your response to those like Niall Ferguson – who write about the values of imperialism, such as increased education levels, GDP, etc. "nC: Niall Ferguson doesn’t bother telling you that in the 18th century, India was one of the commercial and industrial centers of the world. England was a kind of a backwater – it had much greater force, but not commercial or industrial advantages. It was able to forcefully impose on India what was now called the neo-liberal program of free-market, tariffs, etc. etc. Meanwhile England itself, which was a powerful state, raised high protectionist barriers to protect itself from superior Indian goods...textiles, ships, and others. There was massive state intervention in the economy, the United States later did the same thing – stole Indian technology. Over the next 200 years, that tyranny led to an impoverished, agricultural country, while England became a rich, industrial society. The mortality rate in India after 200 years of British rule was about the same as when they took over. There were railroads, but they were run from the outside – they were there for extraction of resources. Meanwhile, tens, if not hundreds of millions of people died in famines - the famines were horrendous. So that’s the history of the British in India. After India won its independence, it began a path of development, picked up again where it was two centuries ago. It’s true that while under the imperial system, some of the better features of Western society leaked through, but India had a rich literature and culture long before England came in. Basically it was a murderous, destructive, several centuries of history, which India then got out of. Then it began to develop where there were no more famines, and the infant mortality rate began to improve enormously. There are still a lot of problems, many traceable back to the English days. That’s the history of English imperialism. ....." C. Wright Mills observed very accurately (as was his wont) that America had become a "science machine" -- in the sense that the frontiers of both theoretical and practical science had been taken over by institutional orders (the political directorate and its corporate comrade-in-arms) who formulated and directed the scientific agenda. This spelled a great problem for that social category that has been referred to as "producer". The producer, given the social arrangement(s) referred to above, is a totally different breed of animal from a producer who inhabits a social universe characterized by free, small, scientific, technological and artistic societies where the clash and bang of ideas proceed with little or no centralized direction. Let us not forget the deliberate smashing of smallscale, traditional, craft-oriented, textile production in England (18th & 19th c) and its substitution with a mechanical, centralized and PRIVATIZED (legalized tyranny) factory system. Science, with its vaunted, impersonal objectivity, can be of assistance to either social arrangement. There is so much noise from somewhere nearby, so I shall end here for the nonce. John ================= --- Dion Giles wrote: --------------------------------- But his argument wasn't that the wretchedness existed -- nobody suggestsit doesn't. It was (as far as any of Yves' arguments go beyondimplication) that somehow the living conditions of hardworking Detroitassembly workers and Canadian ranchers are taken from the wretched of theearth, and should therefore be abandoned. Or what? As I say, Yvesdoesn't say what, so much as leave it hanging. Yet those shown in the Web items John quotes as causing the wretchednessare -- in addition to the local potentates and warlords whose power isapparently unchallenged -- the greedies who bribe them and impose"structural adjustment" on them, reducing the countries to weakone-crop economies and stripping away community infrastructure. All true. But it is an enormous leap, unsubstantiated, to suggest thatthis means the Detroit assembly worker and the Canadian rancher arepredators and should abandon struggle against Mr Greed because they areno different. Just what share of the take is passed on to them and inwhat form? What have they and their first-world producer class createdby their own work, and their societies produced over the centuries bygrasping the Enlightenment principles and translating them into science,technology and long hours of work? The scenario I challenge isthat the actual production of value is carried out by the street dwellersin Dacca or the victimised people of Africa and that this value istransferred to the producing class in the first world. If it is, thenthere is a moral case for returning it, minus the contribution made bythe Western scientific/secular-democratic culture which is or should befreely available to anyone to accept or reject. There is certainly acase for returning the profits being made by exploiting slaves in Chinaand Indonesia -- and the availability of underpriced goods is part of amass exploitation. And maybe the Jesuslanders owe the Confederacyslaves' descendants a packet -- again, quantification is a hell of atask. Perhaps they also owe quite a bit to the societies whosescientific culture (which most of them show by their votes that theydespise) has contributed to their living standards, if we are to assignvalue to intellectual property. It seems that the most just approach to the impoverished peoples is toassist them at every step they take, or attempt, to reject physical andideological authoritarianism, repudiate debt, link up with one another,wipe out warlords and kleptocrats (as the Russian soldiers did in thelast stages of World War I ) and develop a scientific spirit andculture. We are seeing the opposite process before our very eyes inZimbabwe, where purely local crooks are turning a country in which therewas sufficiency into one in which there is famine. In countries whose labour is exploited to transfer wealth throughlow-priced goods to ordinary Westerners -- countries like China andIndonesia -- the best that can be done is to oppose trade with them(since this is the source of the mutual exploitation), assist liberationmovements in every way possible (e.g. host governments-in-exile), seekseverance of relations with their vile regimes as was done with fascistSouth Africa and, again, promote enlightened, democratic values andoppose deference. For a start there could be calls forexploitation-indexed tariffs, with the tariffs being returned to theworkers of the countries of origin of the goods. Then there is the question of who should "own" mineral wealthunder a people's land. A great deal of the minerals needed to powerthe industrial revolution were filched from Africa, and the plundercontinues. Similar with oil. Is a fair price being paid andto whom is it being paid? All these and many other issues require some sort of quantification toeven consider who is or isn't predating the wealth created by producers,and this is something that requires a huge amount of study to establisheven very approximately. But in the absence of some convincing quantitative evidence to thecontrary I would reject absolutely that the human ingenuity and curiosityand sense of justice unleashed by the Enlightenment, and the work ofplebs with nothing to sell but the products of their work, contributed less than the lion's share of the material standard of livingthey experience. Value is created by transforming matter from its natural state to actualgoods. The real problem is how to cope with the finite supply ofsuitable matter in its natural state and how to accord the people of poorcountries their just right to have access to the same pool of rawmaterials as they, too, develop a scientific culture and seek to convertthem into goods for an improved standard of living. There is alsofood for thought in the huge amount of petrodollars that have flowed intocountries sitting on oil and their failure to become productive andscientific powerhouses with enlightened social services and a highmaterial standard of living (and defences that could swat Israel in thespace of a week). They did move in that direction in the earlypostwar years and their efforts were sabotaged by compradores and despotsin their own countries, aided by meddling European and Americanimperialists. And also by tribalism. Activists in general expose and oppose this blatant neocolonialism. I can see no reason to switch this focus to one of telling the producingpeople of Europe and North America they should abandon their productiveactivity and, where it exists, their Enlightenment culture. Thewretched conditions of a street dweller in Dacca (or New York) are notcaused by these producers and won't be addressed by their wearing hairshirts. Demands for this are a diversion from attention to issuesof anti-colonialism, anti-neoliberalism, anti-Mr Greed. And wewon't find Mr Greed on a modest and sustainable ranch or in a carassembler's dwelling. Dion Giles At 05:15 05/05/2005, you wrote: Hi, I experienced some technical difficulties so I am resending this message on corruption and misgovernance in the developing world. I still think that in light of the information that I have asked those interested to refer to, Yves' claims about the nightmare experienced by people in less fortunate social climes be justified. John ============= Hi, I think Yves' arguments about the wretchedness that exists in Dakar, for instance, were given too short a shrift. Corruption in the developing world is much too complex a phenomenon to be summarily dismissed as a regrettable and lucrative shortcoming of the local elites (government and business). Such a view glosses over how the initiators (i.e. bankrollers) of corruption (transnational corps and others) have devised accounting methods whereby they include the bribes they pay corrupt officialdom in the contractual costs they charge for the projects they "develop" in the third world. The spectacularly profitable practice of transfer pricing is also largely omitted here. Check out this site for what I am trying to put across: http://www.thecornerhouse.org.uk/subject/corruption/ The Blair Commission on Africa was, as a consequence of being brought down to humbling reality re this issue, compelled to adopt a much more sober statement on what constitutes good governance and who are the principals involved in corruption and how they can be combatted. http://213.225.140.43/english/report/introduction.html John. ================================= John Mutambirwa (Dreaming Awake) jomut@yahoo.com chakane@hotmail.com http://www.geocities.com/jomut __________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Make Yahoo! your home page http://www.yahoo.com/r/hs _______________________________________________ Mai-not mailing list Mai-not@globalproblematique.net http://www.globalproblematique.net/mailman/listinfo/mai-not > _______________________________________________ > Mai-not mailing list > Mai-not@globalproblematique.net > http://www.globalproblematique.net/mailman/listinfo/mai-not > John Mutambirwa (Dreaming Awake) jomut@yahoo.com chakane@hotmail.com http://www.geocities.com/jomut __________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Read only the mail you want - Yahoo! Mail SpamGuard. http://promotions.yahoo.com/new_mail From thinker at uniserve.com Thu May 5 18:55:33 2005 From: thinker at uniserve.com (Ed Deak) Date: Thu May 5 18:56:46 2005 Subject: [Mai-not] Fwd: Texas: You Could Lose $3,017 a Year--or More Message-ID: <5.1.0.14.2.20050505185506.02d3fa10@pop.uniserve.com> >93853d.jpg >Dear Texas Working Families e-Activist, > >URGENT: >Contact Congress Today > >Punch Back Tell Congress: Protect Our Retirement. Don t Privatize Social >Security. > >938610.jpg >Click >Here > >Seventy percent of Texas Social Security recipients 1,956,045 Texans would >lose an average of about $251 a month if the latest Social Security >benefit cuts President George W. Bush proposes were in full effect today. >That s $3,017 less each year for basics like food, medicine and >utilities.* And that s for workers who DON T sink part of their Social >Security money into risky, privatized accounts. > >Please act now to stop this attack on retirement security and America s >working families. Contact your members of Congress and demand they sign >the Pledge to Strengthen Social Security, oppose privatization and oppose >benefit cuts to pay for privatization. Click here: > >938660.jpg >Click >here > >Last week, President Bush revealed what s up his sleeve for Social >Security: a one two punch to guaranteed benefits. > >PUNCH 1: He wants to change the way future Social Security benefits are >calculated so literally millions of workers would see much smaller >benefits than what they re promised today. > >PUNCH 2: He still wants to privatize Social Security and the added cuts in >guaranteed benefits for workers who choose privatized accounts would be huge. > >Here are a few examples: > >If you earn an average of $36,000 a year, retire in 2055 and participate >in the privatized account plan, your guaranteed Social Security benefits >would total a puny $7,510 a year, compared with $22,100 a year under today >s plan (in 2005 dollars). > >Another scenario is even gloomier if you average $59,000 a year, you could >see a whopping 87 percent drop in guaranteed benefits, from $29,300 a year >to just $3,750 (in 2005 dollars).** > >We ve got to act now to stop this attack on Social Security and America s >working families. Please click the following link to urge your U.S. >senators and representative to sign the Pledge to Strengthen Social >Security, oppose privatization and oppose benefit cuts to pay for >privatized accounts. > >www.unionvoice.org/campaign/SocialSecurity_Pledge > > >Our retirement security is on the line. Even if you previously sent your >members of Congress a message urging them to sign the Social Security >pledge, do it again today. They need to hear our voices nonstop until we >ve beaten back the attacks on Social Security and America s working families. > >Once you have sent your message, please forward this e-mail to friends, >co-workers and relatives who are concerned about retirement security and >urge them to take action, too. > >We can win for working families. > >In solidarity, > >Working Families e-Activist Network, AFL-CIO >May 5, 2005 > >Sources: >* Social Security Administration >** Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, How Would the President s New >Social Security Proposals Affect Middle-Class Workers and Social Security >Solvency, May 2, 2005 > >9386b0.jpg > > > > >Visit the Web address below to tell your friends about this. >93870a.jpg >Tell-a-friend! > >If you received this message from a friend, you can >sign up for >Working Families e-Activist Network. > >If you would like to unsubscribe from the e-Activist Network, or update >your account settings, please visit your >subscription >management page. >938764.jpg >9387b4.jpg -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... 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Name: 93870a.jpg Type: image/jpeg Size: 633 bytes Desc: not available Url : http://www.globalproblematique.net/pipermail/mai-not/attachments/20050505/d35f344a/93870a.jpg -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: 938764.jpg Type: image/jpeg Size: 633 bytes Desc: not available Url : http://www.globalproblematique.net/pipermail/mai-not/attachments/20050505/d35f344a/938764.jpg -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: 9387b4.jpg Type: image/jpeg Size: 633 bytes Desc: not available Url : http://www.globalproblematique.net/pipermail/mai-not/attachments/20050505/d35f344a/9387b4.jpg From thinker at uniserve.com Thu May 5 19:03:46 2005 From: thinker at uniserve.com (Ed Deak) Date: Thu May 5 19:05:14 2005 Subject: [Mai-not] Re: corruption and wretchedness In-Reply-To: <20050505231138.62341.qmail@web31105.mail.mud.yahoo.com> References: <6.1.1.1.0.20050505223426.03012e48@central.murdoch.edu.au> Message-ID: <5.1.0.14.2.20050505185825.02d3f2f8@pop.uniserve.com> "Wealth can not be created, only taken". This is why we have wars, colonizations, crime, free trade, capital investment and 90% of our laws. Cheers, Ed. ================================================================================================ At 04:11 PM 05/05/2005 -0700, you wrote: >Thanks, yours is a multithreaded argument that is >difficult to reply to. I shall post something on the >Enlightenment later (used to read a lot on it some >years back). I should like to remind you that the >practical, technological skills that Europe (in >particular, England) acquired starting from the >seventeenth century where not quite home grown. In >fact, it is well known that, before being overrun and >colonized on account of much more superior English >martial technology, India boasted a superiority in >technologically savvy in the areas of textile >production, shipbuilding, and metallurgy (especially >steel-making) that actually put all of Europe to >shame. It was through a socially engineered, >deindustrializing scheme, that included all the known >perversities of both tariff imposition and radical >social restructuring, that Indian society was reduced >to a grovellingly humble and underdeveloped state: > >http://www.mngt.waikato.ac.nz/Research/ejrot/Vol2_1/Articles/Chomsky.asp >http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Chomsky/NeoliberalismPOP_Chom.html > > >Take this sample from a Chomsky interview: > >http://int.usamnesia.com/noamchomsky-2.htm > >"aA: I?m interested in your response to those like >Niall Ferguson ? who write about the values of >imperialism, such as increased education levels, GDP, >etc. > >"nC: Niall Ferguson doesn?t bother telling you that >in the 18th century, India was one of the commercial >and industrial centers of the world. England was a >kind of a backwater ? it had much greater force, but >not commercial or industrial advantages. It was able >to forcefully impose on India what was now called the >neo-liberal program of free-market, tariffs, etc. etc. > Meanwhile England itself, which was a powerful state, >raised high protectionist barriers to protect itself >from superior Indian goods...textiles, ships, and >others. There was massive state intervention in the >economy, the United States later did the same thing ? >stole Indian technology. Over the next 200 years, >that tyranny led to an impoverished, agricultural >country, while England became a rich, industrial >society. The mortality rate in India after 200 years >of British rule was about the same as when they took >over. There were railroads, but they were run from >the outside ? they were there for extraction of >resources. Meanwhile, tens, if not hundreds of >millions of people died in famines - the famines were >horrendous. So that?s the history of the British in >India. After India won its independence, it began a >path of development, picked up again where it was two >centuries ago. It?s true that while under the >imperial system, some of the better features of >Western society leaked through, but India had a rich >literature and culture long before England came in. >Basically it was a murderous, destructive, several >centuries of history, which India then got out of. >Then it began to develop where there were no more >famines, and the infant mortality rate began to >improve enormously. There are still a lot of >problems, many traceable back to the English days. >That?s the history of English imperialism. ....." > >C. Wright Mills observed very accurately (as was his >wont) that America had become a "science machine" -- >in the sense that the frontiers of both theoretical >and practical science had been taken over by >institutional orders (the political directorate and >its corporate comrade-in-arms) who formulated and >directed the scientific agenda. This spelled a great >problem for that social category that has been >referred to as "producer". The producer, given the >social arrangement(s) referred to above, is a totally >different breed of animal from a producer who inhabits >a social universe characterized by free, small, >scientific, technological and artistic societies where >the clash and bang of ideas proceed with little or no >centralized direction. > >Let us not forget the deliberate smashing of >smallscale, traditional, craft-oriented, textile >production in England (18th & 19th c) and its >substitution with a mechanical, centralized and >PRIVATIZED (legalized tyranny) factory system. >Science, with its vaunted, impersonal objectivity, can >be of assistance to either social arrangement. > >There is so much noise from somewhere nearby, so I >shall end here for the nonce. > >John >================= > > >--- Dion Giles wrote: > > >--------------------------------- >But his argument wasn't that the wretchedness existed >-- nobody suggestsit doesn't. It was (as far as any >of Yves' arguments go beyondimplication) that somehow >the living conditions of hardworking Detroitassembly >workers and Canadian ranchers are taken from the >wretched of theearth, and should therefore be >abandoned. Or what? As I say, Yvesdoesn't say what, >so much as leave it hanging. > >Yet those shown in the Web items John quotes as >causing the wretchednessare -- in addition to the >local potentates and warlords whose power isapparently >unchallenged -- the greedies who bribe them and >impose"structural adjustment" on them, reducing the >countries to weakone-crop economies and stripping away >community infrastructure. > >All true. But it is an enormous leap, >unsubstantiated, to suggest thatthis means the Detroit >assembly worker and the Canadian rancher arepredators >and should abandon struggle against Mr Greed because >they areno different. Just what share of the take is >passed on to them and inwhat form? What have they and >their first-world producer class createdby their own >work, and their societies produced over the centuries >bygrasping the Enlightenment principles and >translating them into science,technology and long >hours of work? The scenario I challenge isthat the >actual production of value is carried out by the >street dwellersin Dacca or the victimised people of >Africa and that this value istransferred to the >producing class in the first world. If it is, >thenthere is a moral case for returning it, minus the >contribution made bythe Western >scientific/secular-democratic culture which is or >should befreely available to anyone to accept or >reject. There is certainly acase for returning the >profits being made by exploiting slaves in Chinaand >Indonesia -- and the availability of underpriced goods >is part of amass exploitation. And maybe the >Jesuslanders owe the Confederacyslaves' descendants a >packet -- again, quantification is a hell of atask. >Perhaps they also owe quite a bit to the societies >whosescientific culture (which most of them show by >their votes that theydespise) has contributed to their >living standards, if we are to assignvalue to >intellectual property. > >It seems that the most just approach to the >impoverished peoples is toassist them at every step >they take, or attempt, to reject physical >andideological authoritarianism, repudiate debt, link >up with one another,wipe out warlords and kleptocrats >(as the Russian soldiers did in thelast stages of >World War I ) and develop a scientific spirit >andculture. We are seeing the opposite process before >our very eyes inZimbabwe, where purely local crooks >are turning a country in which therewas sufficiency >into one in which there is famine. > >In countries whose labour is exploited to transfer >wealth throughlow-priced goods to ordinary Westerners >-- countries like China andIndonesia -- the best that >can be done is to oppose trade with them(since this is >the source of the mutual exploitation), assist >liberationmovements in every way possible (e.g. host >governments-in-exile), seekseverance of relations with >their vile regimes as was done with fascistSouth >Africa and, again, promote enlightened, democratic >values andoppose deference. For a start there could >be calls forexploitation-indexed tariffs, with the >tariffs being returned to theworkers of the countries >of origin of the goods. > >Then there is the question of who should "own" mineral >wealthunder a people's land. A great deal of the >minerals needed to powerthe industrial revolution were >filched from Africa, and the plundercontinues. >Similar with oil. Is a fair price being paid andto >whom is it being paid? > >All these and many other issues require some sort of >quantification toeven consider who is or isn't >predating the wealth created by producers,and this is >something that requires a huge amount of study to >establisheven very approximately. > >But in the absence of some convincing quantitative >evidence to thecontrary I would reject absolutely that >the human ingenuity and curiosityand sense of justice >unleashed by the Enlightenment, and the work ofplebs >with nothing to sell but the products of their work, >contributed less than the lion's share of the material >standard of livingthey experience. > >Value is created by transforming matter from its >natural state to actualgoods. The real problem is how >to cope with the finite supply ofsuitable matter in >its natural state and how to accord the people of >poorcountries their just right to have access to the >same pool of rawmaterials as they, too, develop a >scientific culture and seek to convertthem into goods >for an improved standard of living. There is alsofood >for thought in the huge amount of petrodollars that >have flowed intocountries sitting on oil and their >failure to become productive andscientific powerhouses >with enlightened social services and a highmaterial >standard of living (and defences that could swat >Israel in thespace of a week). They did move in that >direction in the earlypostwar years and their efforts >were sabotaged by compradores and despotsin their own >countries, aided by meddling European and >Americanimperialists. And also by tribalism. > >Activists in general expose and oppose this blatant >neocolonialism. I can see no reason to switch this >focus to one of telling the producingpeople of Europe >and North America they should abandon their >productiveactivity and, where it exists, their >Enlightenment culture. Thewretched conditions of a >street dweller in Dacca (or New York) are notcaused by >these producers and won't be addressed by their >wearing hairshirts. Demands for this are a diversion >from attention to issuesof anti-colonialism, >anti-neoliberalism, anti-Mr Greed. And wewon't find >Mr Greed on a modest and sustainable ranch or in a >carassembler's dwelling. > >Dion Giles > > > > >At 05:15 05/05/2005, you wrote: > >Hi, > >I experienced some technical difficulties so I am >resending this message on corruption and misgovernance >in the developing world. I still think that in light >of the information that I have asked those interested >to refer to, Yves' claims about the nightmare >experienced by people in less fortunate social climes >be justified. > >John >============= > >Hi, > >I think Yves' arguments about the wretchedness that >exists in Dakar, for instance, were given too short a >shrift. Corruption in the developing world is much too >complex a phenomenon to be summarily dismissed as a >regrettable and lucrative shortcoming of the local >elites (government and business). Such a view glosses >over how the initiators (i.e. bankrollers) of >corruption (transnational corps and others) have >devised accounting methods whereby they include the >bribes they pay corrupt officialdom in the contractual >costs they charge for the projects they "develop" in >the third world. The spectacularly profitable >practice of transfer pricing is also largely omitted >here. Check out this site for what I am trying to put >across: >http://www.thecornerhouse.org.uk/subject/corruption/ > >The Blair Commission on Africa was, as a consequence >of being brought down to humbling reality re this >issue, compelled to adopt a much more sober statement >on what constitutes good governance and who are the >principals involved in corruption and how they can be >combatted. >http://213.225.140.43/english/report/introduction.html > >John. >================================= > > > >John Mutambirwa (Dreaming Awake) >jomut@yahoo.com >chakane@hotmail.com >http://www.geocities.com/jomut > > > >__________________________________ >Do you Yahoo!? >Make Yahoo! your home page >http://www.yahoo.com/r/hs >_______________________________________________ >Mai-not mailing list >Mai-not@globalproblematique.net >http://www.globalproblematique.net/mailman/listinfo/mai-not > > _______________________________________________ > > Mai-not mailing list > > Mai-not@globalproblematique.net > > >http://www.globalproblematique.net/mailman/listinfo/mai-not > > > >John Mutambirwa (Dreaming Awake) >jomut@yahoo.com >chakane@hotmail.com >http://www.geocities.com/jomut > > > >__________________________________ >Do you Yahoo!? >Read only the mail you want - Yahoo! Mail SpamGuard. >http://promotions.yahoo.com/new_mail >_______________________________________________ >Mai-not mailing list >Mai-not@globalproblematique.net >http://www.globalproblematique.net/mailman/listinfo/mai-not From papadop at peak.org Thu May 5 19:28:59 2005 From: papadop at peak.org (MichaelP) Date: Thu May 5 19:29:08 2005 Subject: [Mai-not] Palast on Bush/Blair axis of lying: Message-ID: Greg Palast's investigations are going broke and welcome donations. See the second article below or go to . where you'll learn that Palast asks for financial support. ====================================================================== http://www.buzzflash.com/analysis/05/05/ana05013.html BuzzFlash Guest News Analysis [masthead2.gif] May 4, 2005 Impeachment Time: "Facts Were Fixed." A BUZZFLASH GUEST NEWS ANALYSIS by Greg Palast Here it is. The smoking gun. The memo that has "IMPEACH HIM" written all over it. The top-level government memo marked "SECRET AND STRICTLY PERSONAL," dated eight months before Bush sent us into Iraq, following a closed meeting with the President, reads, "Military action was now seen as inevitable. Bush wanted to remove Saddam through military action justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy." Read that again: "The intelligence and facts were being fixed...." For years, after each damning report on BBC TV, viewers inevitably ask me, "Isn't this grounds for impeachment?" -- vote rigging, a blind eye to terror and the bin Ladens before 9-11, and so on. Evil, stupidity and self-dealing are shameful but not impeachable. What's needed is a " high crime or misdemeanor." And if this ain't it, nothing is. The memo, uncovered this week by the Times, goes on to describe an elaborate plan by George Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair to hoodwink the planet into supporting an attack on Iraq knowing full well the evidence for war was a phony. A conspiracy to commit serial fraud is, under federal law, racketeering. However, the Mob's schemes never cost so many lives. Here's more. "Bush had made up his mind to take military action. But the case was thin. Saddam was not threatening his neighbors, and his WMD capability was less than that of Libya, North Korea or Iran." Really? But Mr. Bush told us, "Intelligence gathered by this and other governments leaves no doubt that the Iraq regime continues to possess and conceal some of the most lethal weapons ever devised." A month ago, the Silberman-Robb Commission issued its report on WMD intelligence before the war, dismissing claims that Bush fixed the facts with this snooty, condescending conclusion written directly to the President, "After a thorough review, the Commission found no indication that the Intelligence Community distorted the evidence regarding Iraq's weapons." We now know the report was a bogus 618 pages of thick whitewash aimed to let Bush off the hook for his murderous mendacity. Read on: The invasion build-up was then set, says the memo, "beginning 30 days before the US Congressional elections." Mission accomplished. You should parse the entire memo and see if you can make it through its three pages without losing your lunch. Now sharp readers may note they didn't see this memo, in fact, printed in the New York Times. It wasn't. Rather, it was splashed across the front pages of the Times of LONDON on Monday. It has effectively finished the last, sorry remnants of Tony Blair's political career. (While his Labor Party will most assuredly win the elections Thursday, Prime Minister Blair is expected, possibly within months, to be shoved overboard in favor of his Chancellor of the Exchequer, a political execution which requires only a vote of the Labour party's members in Parliament.) But in the US, barely a word. The New York Times covers this hard evidence of Bush's fabrication of a casus belli as some "British" elections story. Apparently, our President's fraud isn't "news fit to print." My colleagues in the UK press have skewered Blair, digging out more incriminating memos, challenging the official government factoids and fibs. But in the US press Énada, bubkes, zilch. Bush fixed the facts and somehow that's a story for "over there." The Republicans impeached Bill Clinton over his cigar and Monica's affections. And the US media could print nothing else. Now, we have the stone, cold evidence of bending intelligence to sell us on death by the thousands, and neither a Republican Congress nor what is laughably called US journalism thought it worth a second look. My friend Daniel Ellsberg once said that what's good about the American people is that you have to lie to them. What's bad about Americans is that it's so easy to do. =========================== Greg Palast, former columnist for Britain's Guardian papers, is the author of the New York Times bestseller, The Best Democracy Money Can Buy. Subscribe to his columns at www.GregPalast.com. Date: Tue, 03 May 2005 02:13:08 -0400 From: palast@gregpalast.com Subject: Palast Investigations Under Attack Palast Investigations Under Attack Iraq oil, elections story scoops generate awards and lawsuits Our work is under attack and we need your help. Bluntly: without your financial support, we're finished. GregPalast.com will be no more and the on-going investigation of the election, the war and globalization shuts down. Our story on secret US plans for Iraq's oil for BBC and Harper's Magazine has already generated two threats of lawsuits from the oil industry. Our revelations on the manipulation of the US voting operations has generated more threats. We still have bills left over from our smashing legal victory over George Bush Sr.'s partners in his blood-soiled gold mining business. Please send us your tax-deductible donation to keep our current investigations alive. If you can send at least $40 to our educational foundation, I'll send you a signed copy of "Weapon of Mass Instruction," my spoken word CD, in appreciation. Go to http://www.gregpalast.com/store.htm The team is embarking on a whole new round of investigations on the solid evidence that - gasp! - George Bush did NOT win the last election; on the secrets of Big Oil and Dick Cheney in their carve-up of Iraq; and more: I am writing this from Ecuador, covering the State of Siege in this one-time member of OPEC. Our investigative scoops you hear on BBC, Democracy Now and Air America may win worldwide journalism awards - but they earn, after our costs, not one single penny. Donate $200 I'll send you a Patron Saint of Journalism pack: a signed book, film on DVD, book and the CD. Your donation is tax deductible at http://www.gregpalast.com/store.htm Greg Palast has never and will never pay a dime to "settle" law suits against our journalism. Aggressive defense of the truth is costly. But our biggest challenge is not in a courtroom, but on the airwaves and in print: to get the word out. Your donation will pay the light and phone bills and most important, our brilliant multi-lingual research team - and our lawyers. Greg Palast takes no salary - zero. But we cannot keep running in the red. So please send us your tax-deductible $40 or $200 donation to our educational foundation. Don't want the CD (produced by Jello Biafra)? We also have other gifts at http://www.gregpalast.com/store.htm I'd be happy to sign. Get our BBC film on DVD, Bush Family Fortunes, winner of the George Orwell Courage-in-Journalism prize or a signed copy of the Election Edition of the New York Times bestseller, Best Democracy Money Can Buy. Thank you for all of your support, The GregPalast.com Team *** Greg Palast is author of the New York Times Bestseller, “The Best Democracy Money Can Buy.” To read his latest reports visit www.GregPalast.com From yves at bajard.net Thu May 5 17:19:37 2005 From: yves at bajard.net (yves@bajard.net) Date: Thu May 5 19:33:34 2005 Subject: [Mai-not] You've Been Sent an Article from GregPalast.com Message-ID: <200505060018.j460I5JE027259@karma.reboot.ca> Yves Bajard just sent you an article from Journalist Greg Palast's web-site, http://www.GregPalast.com ======================================================================== Yves Bajard included this message: What do you think? And have you seen and read the contents of Mike Ruppert's "Crossing the Rubicon"? And read Richard Heinberg's Powerdown? Regards Yves Bajard ======================================================================== IMPEACHMENT TIME: "FACTS WERE FIXED." By Greg Palast Here it is. The smoking gun. The memo that has "IMPEACH HIM" written all over it. The top-level government memo marked "SECRET AND STRICTLY PERSONAL," dated eight months before Bush sent us into Iraq, following a closed meeting with the President, reads, "Military action was now seen as inevitable. Bush wanted to remove Saddam through military action justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy." Read that again: "The intelligence and facts were being fixed...." For years, after each damning report on BBC TV, viewers inevitably ask me, "Isn't this grounds for impeachment?" -- vote rigging, a blind eye to terror and the bin Ladens before 9-11, and so on. Evil, stupidity and self-dealing are shameful but not impeachable. What's needed is a "high crime or misdemeanor." And if this ain't it, nothing is. The memo uncovered this week by the Times, goes on to describe an elaborate plan by George Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair to hoodwink the planet into supporting an attack on Iraq knowing full well the evidence for war was a phony. A conspiracy to commit serial fraud is, under federal law, racketeering. However, the Mob's schemes never cost so many lives. Here's more. "Bush had made up his mind to take military action. But the case was thin. Saddam was not threatening his neighbors, and his WMD capability was less than that of Libya, North Korea or Iran." Really? But Mr. Bush told us, "Intelligence gathered by this and other governments leaves no doubt that the Iraq regime continues to possess and conceal some of the most lethal weapons ever devised." A month ago, the Silberman-Robb Commission issued its report on WMD intelligence before the war, dismissing claims that Bush fixed the facts with this snooty, condescending conclusion written directly to the President, "After a thorough review, the Commission found no indication that the Intelligence Community distorted the evidence regarding Iraq's weapons." We now know the report was a bogus 618 pages of thick whitewash aimed to let Bush off the hook for his murderous mendacity. Read on: The invasion build-up was then set, says the memo, "beginning 30 days before the US Congressional elections." Mission accomplished. You should parse the entire memo -- reprinted below -- and see if you can make it through its three pages without losing your lunch. Now sharp readers may note they didn't see this memo, in fact, printed in the New York Times. It wasn't. Rather, it was splashed across the front pages of the Times of LONDON on Monday. It has effectively finished the last, sorry remnants of Tony Blair's political career. (While his Labor Party will most assuredly win the elections Thursday, Prime Minister Blair is expected, possibly within months, to be shoved overboard in favor of his Chancellor of the Exchequer, a political execution which requires only a vote of the Labour party's members in Parliament.) But in the US, barely a word. The New York Times covers this hard evidence of Bush's fabrication of a casus belli as some "British" elections story. Apparently, our President's fraud isn't "news fit to print." My colleagues in the UK press have skewered Blair, digging out more incriminating memos, challenging the official government factoids and fibs. But in the US press … nada, bubkes, zilch. Bush fixed the facts and somehow that's a story for "over there." The Republicans impeached Bill Clinton over his cigar and Monica's affections. And the US media could print nothing else. Now, we have the stone, cold evidence of bending intelligence to sell us on death by the thousands, and neither a Republican Congress nor what is laughably called US journalism thought it worth a second look. My friend Daniel Ellsberg once said that what's good about the American people is that you have to lie to them. What's bad about Americans is that it's so easy to do. Greg Palast, former columnist for Britain's Guardian papers, is the author of the New York Times bestseller, The Best Democracy Money Can Buy. Subscribe to his columns at www.GregPalast.com Media requests to contact(at)gregpalast.com Permission to reprint with attribution granted. [Here it is - the secret smoking gun memo - discovered by the Times of London. - GP] SECRET AND STRICTLY PERSONAL - UK EYES ONLY DAVID MANNING From: Matthew Rycroft Date: 23 July 2002 S 195 /02 cc: Defence Secretary, Foreign Secretary, Attorney-General, Sir Richard Wilson, John Scarlett, Francis Richards, CDS, C, Jonathan Powell, Sally Morgan, Alastair Campbell IRAQ: PRIME MINISTER'S MEETING, 23 JULY Copy addressees and you met the Prime Minister on 23 July to discuss Iraq. This record is extremely sensitive. No further copies should be made. It should be shown only to those with a genuine need to know its contents. John Scarlett summarised the intelligence and latest JIC assessment. Saddam's regime was tough and based on extreme fear. The only way to overthrow it was likely to be by massive military action. Saddam was worried and expected an attack, probably by air and land, but he was not convinced that it would be immediate or overwhelming. His regime expected their neighbours to line up with the US. Saddam knew that regular army morale was poor. Real support for Saddam among the public was probably narrowly based. C reported on his recent talks in Washington. There was a perceptible shift in attitude. Military action was now seen as inevitable. Bush wanted to remove Saddam, through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy. The NSC had no patience with the UN route, and no enthusiasm for publishing material on the Iraqi regime's record. There was little discussion in Washington of the aftermath after military action. CDS said that military planners would brief CENTCOM on 1-2 August, Rumsfeld on 3 August and Bush on 4 August. The two broad US options were: (a) Generated Start. A slow build-up of 250,000 US troops, a short (72 hour) air campaign, then a move up to Baghdad from the south. Lead time of 90 days (30 days preparation plus 60 days deployment to Kuwait). (b) Running Start. Use forces already in theatre (3 x 6,000), continuous air campaign, initiated by an Iraqi casus belli. Total lead time of 60 days with the air campaign beginning even earlier. A hazardous option. The US saw the UK (and Kuwait) as essential, with basing in Diego Garcia and Cyprus critical for either option. Turkey and other Gulf states were also important, but less vital. The three main options for UK involvement were: (i) Basing in Diego Garcia and Cyprus, plus three SF squadrons. (ii) As above, with maritime and air assets in addition. (iii) As above, plus a land contribution of up to 40,000, perhaps with a discrete role in Northern Iraq entering from Turkey, tying down two Iraqi divisions. The Defence Secretary said that the US had already begun "spikes of activity" to put pressure on the regime. No decisions had been taken, but he thought the most likely timing in US minds for military action to begin was January, with the timeline beginning 30 days before the US Congressional elections. The Foreign Secretary said he would discuss this with Colin Powell this week. It seemed clear that Bush had made up his mind to take military action, even if the timing was not yet decided. But the case was thin. Saddam was not threatening his neighbours, and his WMD capability was less than that of Libya, North Korea or Iran. We should work up a plan for an ultimatum to Saddam to allow back in the UN weapons inspectors. This would also help with the legal justification for the use of force. The Attorney-General said that the desire for regime change was not a legal base for military action. There were three possible legal bases: self-defence, humanitarian intervention, or UNSC authorisation. The first and second could not be the base in this case. Relying on UNSCR 1205 of three years ago would be difficult. The situation might of course change. The Prime Minister said that it would make a big difference politically and legally if Saddam refused to allow in the UN inspectors. Regime change and WMD were linked in the sense that it was the regime that was producing the WMD. There were different strategies for dealing with Libya and Iran. If the political context were right, people would support regime change. The two key issues were whether the military plan worked and whether we had the political strategy to give the military plan the space to work. On the first, CDS said that we did not know yet if the US battleplan was workable. The military were continuing to ask lots of questions. For instance, what were the consequences, if Saddam used WMD on day one, or if Baghdad did not collapse and urban warfighting began? You said that Saddam could also use his WMD on Kuwait. Or on Israel, added the Defence Secretary. The Foreign Secretary thought the US would not go ahead with a military plan unless convinced that it was a winning strategy. On this, US and UK interests converged. But on the political strategy, there could be US/UK differences. Despite US resistance, we should explore discreetly the ultimatum. Saddam would continue to play hard-ball with the UN. John Scarlett assessed that Saddam would allow the inspectors back in only when he thought the threat of military action was real. The Defence Secretary said that if the Prime Minister wanted UK military involvement, he would need to decide this early. He cautioned that many in the US did not think it worth going down the ultimatum route. It would be important for the Prime Minister to set out the political context to Bush. Conclusions: (a) We should work on the assumption that the UK would take part in any military action. But we needed a fuller picture of US planning before we could take any firm decisions. CDS should tell the US military that we were considering a range of options. (b) The Prime Minister would revert on the question of whether funds could be spent in preparation for this operation. (c) CDS would send the Prime Minister full details of the proposed military campaign and possible UK contributions by the end of the week. (d) The Foreign Secretary would send the Prime Minister the background on the UN inspectors, and discreetly work up the ultimatum to Saddam. He would also send the Prime Minister advice on the positions of countries in the region especially Turkey, and of the key EU member states. (e) John Scarlett would send the Prime Minister a full intelligence update. (f) We must not ignore the legal issues: the Attorney-General would consider legal advice with FCO/MOD legal advisers. (I have written separately to commission this follow-up work.) MATTHEW RYCROFT (Rycroft was a Downing Street foreign policy aide) You can also see this article online: http://www.gregpalast.com/detail.cfm?artid=426&frm=eml ======================================================================== Complete contents of this e-mail are (c)Greg Palast. All Rights Reserved ======================================================================== From papadop at peak.org Thu May 5 20:45:14 2005 From: papadop at peak.org (MichaelP) Date: Thu May 5 20:45:28 2005 Subject: [Mai-not] smoking gun memo and comments Message-ID: This is what Greg Palast mentions as a smoking-gun memo See www.GregPalast.com =================================== SECRET AND STRICTLY PERSONAL - UK EYES ONLY DAVID MANNING From: Matthew Rycroft Date: 23 July 2002 S 195 /02 cc: Defence Secretary, Foreign Secretary, Attorney-General, Sir Richard Wilson, John Scarlett, Francis Richards, CDS, C, Jonathan Powell, Sally Morgan, Alastair Campbell IRAQ: PRIME MINISTER'S MEETING, 23 JULY Copy addressees and you met the Prime Minister on 23 July to discuss Iraq. This record is extremely sensitive. No further copies should be made. It should be shown only to those with a genuine need to know its contents. John Scarlett summarised the intelligence and latest JIC assessment. Saddam's regime was tough and based on extreme fear. The only way to overthrow it was likely to be by massive military action. Saddam was worried and expected an attack, probably by air and land, but he was not convinced that it would be immediate or overwhelming. His regime expected their neighbours to line up with the US. Saddam knew that regular army morale was poor. Real support for Saddam among the public was probably narrowly based. C reported on his recent talks in Washington. There was a perceptible shift in attitude. Military action was now seen as inevitable. Bush wanted to remove Saddam, through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy. The NSC had no patience with the UN route, and no enthusiasm for publishing material on the Iraqi regime's record. There was little discussion in Washington of the aftermath after military action. CDS said that military planners would brief CENTCOM on 1-2 August, Rumsfeld on 3 August and Bush on 4 August. The two broad US options were: (a) Generated Start. A slow build-up of 250,000 US troops, a short (72 hour) air campaign, then a move up to Baghdad from the south. Lead time of 90 days (30 days preparation plus 60 days deployment to Kuwait). (b) Running Start. Use forces already in theatre (3 x 6,000), continuous air campaign, initiated by an Iraqi casus belli. Total lead time of 60 days with the air campaign beginning even earlier. A hazardous option. The US saw the UK (and Kuwait) as essential, with basing in Diego Garcia and Cyprus critical for either option. Turkey and other Gulf states were also important, but less vital. The three main options for UK involvement were: (i) Basing in Diego Garcia and Cyprus, plus three SF squadrons. (ii) As above, with maritime and air assets in addition. (iii) As above, plus a land contribution of up to 40,000, perhaps with a discrete role in Northern Iraq entering from Turkey, tying down two Iraqi divisions. The Defence Secretary said that the US had already begun "spikes of activity" to put pressure on the regime. No decisions had been taken, but he thought the most likely timing in US minds for military action to begin was January, with the timeline beginning 30 days before the US Congressional elections. The Foreign Secretary said he would discuss this with Colin Powell this week. It seemed clear that Bush had made up his mind to take military action, even if the timing was not yet decided. But the case was thin. Saddam was not threatening his neighbours, and his WMD capability was less than that of Libya, North Korea or Iran. We should work up a plan for an ultimatum to Saddam to allow back in the UN weapons inspectors. This would also help with the legal justification for the use of force. The Attorney-General said that the desire for regime change was not a legal base for military action. There were three possible legal bases: self-defence, humanitarian intervention, or UNSC authorisation. The first and second could not be the base in this case. Relying on UNSCR 1205 of three years ago would be difficult. The situation might of course change. The Prime Minister said that it would make a big difference politically and legally if Saddam refused to allow in the UN inspectors. Regime change and WMD were linked in the sense that it was the regime that was producing the WMD. There were different strategies for dealing with Libya and Iran. If the political context were right, people would support regime change. The two key issues were whether the military plan worked and whether we had the political strategy to give the military plan the space to work. On the first, CDS said that we did not know yet if the US battleplan was workable. The military were continuing to ask lots of questions. For instance, what were the consequences, if Saddam used WMD on day one, or if Baghdad did not collapse and urban warfighting began? You said that Saddam could also use his WMD on Kuwait. Or on Israel, added the Defence Secretary. The Foreign Secretary thought the US would not go ahead with a military plan unless convinced that it was a winning strategy. On this, US and UK interests converged. But on the political strategy, there could be US/UK differences. Despite US resistance, we should explore discreetly the ultimatum. Saddam would continue to play hard-ball with the UN. John Scarlett assessed that Saddam would allow the inspectors back in only when he thought the threat of military action was real. The Defence Secretary said that if the Prime Minister wanted UK military involvement, he would need to decide this early. He cautioned that many in the US did not think it worth going down the ultimatum route. It would be important for the Prime Minister to set out the political context to Bush. Conclusions: (a) We should work on the assumption that the UK would take part in any military action. But we needed a fuller picture of US planning before we could take any firm decisions. CDS should tell the US military that we were considering a range of options. (b) The Prime Minister would revert on the question of whether funds could be spent in preparation for this operation. (c) CDS would send the Prime Minister full details of the proposed military campaign and possible UK contributions by the end of the week. (d) The Foreign Secretary would send the Prime Minister the background on the UN inspectors, and discreetly work up the ultimatum to Saddam. He would also send the Prime Minister advice on the positions of countries in the region especially Turkey, and of the key EU member states. (e) John Scarlett would send the Prime Minister a full intelligence update. (f) We must not ignore the legal issues: the Attorney-General would consider legal advice with FCO/MOD legal advisers. (I have written separately to commission this follow-up work.) MATTHEW RYCROFT (Rycroft was a Downing Street foreign policy aide) ===================== http://www.tompaine.com/articles/proof_bush_fixed_the_facts.php Proof Bush Fixed The Facts Ray McGovern May 04, 2005 Ray McGovern served 27 years as a CIA analyst and is now on the Steering Group of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity. He works for Tell the Word, the publishing arm of the ecumenical Church of the Saviour. ================= "INTELLIGENCE AND FACTS ARE BEING FIXED AROUND THE POLICY." Never in our wildest dreams did we think we would see those words in black and white -- and beneath a SECRET stamp, no less. For three years now, we in Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS) have been saying that the CIA and its British counterpart, MI-6, were ordered by their countries' leaders to "fix facts" to "justify" an unprovoked war on Iraq. More often than not, we have been greeted with stares of incredulity. It has been a hard learning -- that folks tend to believe what they want to believe. As long as our evidence, however abundant and persuasive, remained circumstantial, it could not compel belief. It simply is much easier on the psyche to assent to the White House spin machine blaming the Iraq fiasco on bad intelligence than to entertain the notion that we were sold a bill of goods. Well, you can forget circumstantial. Thanks to an unauthorized disclosure by a courageous whistleblower, the evidence now leaps from official documents -- this time authentic, not forged. Whether prompted by the open appeal of the international Truth-Telling Coalition or not, some brave soul has made the most explosive "patriotic leak" of the war by giving London's Sunday Times the official minutes of a briefing by Richard Dearlove, then head of Britain's CIA equivalent, MI-6. Fresh back in London from consultations in Washington, Dearlove briefed Prime Minister Blair and his top national security officials on July 23, 2002, on the Bush administration's plans to make war on Iraq. Blair does not dispute the authenticity of the document, which immortalizes a discussion that is chillingly amoral. Apparently no one felt free to ask the obvious questions. Or, worse still, the obvious questions did not occur. JUGGERNAUT BEFORE THE HORSE In emotionless English, Dearlove tells Blair and the others that President Bush has decided to remove Saddam Hussein by launching a war that is to be "justified by the conjunction of terrorism and weapons of mass destruction." Period. What about the intelligence? Dearlove adds matter-of-factly, "The intelligence and facts are being fixed around the policy." At this point, Foreign Secretary Jack Straw confirms that Bush has decided on war, but notes that stitching together justification would be a challenge, since "the case was thin." Straw noted that Saddam was not threatening his neighbors and his WMD capability was less than that of Libya, North Korea or Iran. In the following months, "the case" would be buttressed by a well-honed U.S.-U.K. intelligence-turned-propaganda-machine. The argument would be made "solid" enough to win endorsement from Congress and Parliament by conjuring up: * Aluminum artillery tubes misdiagnosed as nuclear related; * Forgeries alleging Iraqi attempts to obtain uranium in Africa; * Tall tales from a drunken defector about mobile biological weapons laboratories; * Bogus warnings that Iraqi forces could fire WMD-tipped missiles within 45 minutes of an order to do so; * Dodgy dossiers fabricated in London; and * A U.S. National Intelligence Estimate thrown in for good measure. All this, as Dearlove notes dryly, despite the fact that "there was little discussion in Washington of the aftermath after military action." Another nugget from Dearlove's briefing is his bloodless comment that one of the U.S. military options under discussion involved "a continuous air campaign, initiated by an Iraqi casus belli" -- the clear implication being that planners of the air campaign would also see to it that an appropriate casus belli was orchestrated. The discussion at 10 Downing St. on July 23, 2002 calls to mind the first meeting of George W. Bush's National Security Council (NSC) on Jan. 30, 2001, at which the president made it clear that toppling Saddam Hussein sat atop his to-do list, according to then-Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neil, who was there. O'Neil was taken aback that there was no discussion of why it was necessary to "take out" Saddam. Rather, after CIA Director George Tenet showed a grainy photo of a building in Iraq that he said might be involved in producing chemical or biological agents, the discussion proceeded immediately to which Iraqi targets might be best to bomb. Again, neither O'Neil nor the other participants asked the obvious questions. Another NSC meeting two days later included planning for dividing up Iraq's oil wealth. OBEDIENCE SCHOOL As for the briefing of Blair, the minutes provide further grist for those who describe the U.K. prime minister as Bush's "poodle." The tone of the conversation bespeaks a foregone conclusion that Blair will wag his tail cheerfully and obey the learned commands. At one point he ventures the thought that, "If the political context were right, people would support regime change." This, after Attorney General Peter Goldsmith has already warned that the desire for regime change "was not a legal base for military action," -- a point Goldsmith made again just 12 days before the attack on Iraq until he was persuaded by a phalanx of Bush administration lawyers to change his mind 10 days later. The meeting concludes with a directive to "work on the assumption that the UK would take part in any military action." I cannot quite fathom why I find the account of this meeting so jarring. Surely it is what one might expect, given all else we know. Yet seeing it in bloodless black and white somehow gives it more impact. And the implications are no less jarring. One of Dearlove's primary interlocutors in Washington was his American counterpart, CIA director George Tenet. (And there is no closer relationship between two intelligence services than the privileged one between the CIA and MI-6.) Tenet, of course, knew at least as much as Dearlove, but nonetheless played the role of accomplice in serving up to Bush the kind of "slam-dunk intelligence" that he knew would be welcome. If there is one unpardonable sin in intelligence work, it is that kind of politicization. But Tenet decided to be a "team player" and set the tone. POLITICIZATION: BIG TIME Actually, politicization is far too mild a word for what happened. The intelligence was not simply mistaken; it was manufactured, with the president of the United States awarding foreman George Tenet the Medal of Freedom for his role in helping supervise the deceit. The British documents make clear that this was not a mere case of "leaning forward" in analyzing the intelligence, but rather mass deception -- an order of magnitude more serious. No other conclusion is now possible. Small wonder, then, to learn from CIA insiders like former case officer Lindsay Moran that Tenet's malleable managers told their minions, "Let's face it. The president wants us to go to war, and our job is to give him a reason to do it." Small wonder that, when the only U.S. analyst who met with the alcoholic Iraqi defector appropriately codenamed "Curveball" raised strong doubt about Curveball's reliability before then-Secretary of State Colin Powell used the fabrication about "mobile biological weapons trailers" before the United Nations, the analyst got this e-mail reply from his CIA supervisor: "Let's keep in mind the fact that this war's going to happen regardless of what Curveball said or didn't say, and the powers that be probably aren't terribly interested in whether Curveball knows what he's talking about." When Tenet's successor, Porter Goss, took over as director late last year, he immediately wrote a memo to all employees explaining the "rules of the road" -- first and foremost, "We support the administration and its policies." So much for objective intelligence insulated from policy pressure. Tenet and Goss, creatures of the intensely politicized environment of Congress, brought with them a radically new ethos -- one much more akin to that of Blair's courtiers than to that of earlier CIA directors who had the courage to speak truth to power. Seldom does one have documentary evidence that intelligence chiefs chose to cooperate in both fabricating and "sexing up" (as the British press puts it) intelligence to justify a prior decision for war. There is no word to describe the reaction of honest intelligence professionals to the corruption of our profession on a matter of such consequence. "Outrage" does not come close. HOPE IN UNAUTHORIZED DISCLOSURES Those of us who care about unprovoked wars owe the patriot who gave this latest British government document to The Sunday Times a debt of gratitude. Unauthorized disclosures are gathering steam. They need to increase quickly on this side of the Atlantic as well -- the more so, inasmuch as Congress-controlled by the president's party-cannot be counted on to discharge its constitutional prerogative for oversight. In its formal appeal of Sept. 9, 2004 to current U.S. government officials, the Truth-Telling Coalition said this: We know how misplaced loyalty to bosses, agencies, and careers can obscure the higher allegiance all government officials owe the Constitution, the sovereign public, and the young men and women put in harm's way. We urge you to act on those higher loyalties...Truth-telling is a patriotic and effective way to serve the nation. The time for speaking out is now. If persons with access to wrongly concealed facts and analyses bring them to light, the chances become less that a president could launch another unprovoked war -- against, say, Iran. From dgiles at central.murdoch.edu.au Thu May 5 20:45:20 2005 From: dgiles at central.murdoch.edu.au (Dion Giles) Date: Thu May 5 20:45:29 2005 Subject: [Mai-not] You've Been Sent an Article from GregPalast.com In-Reply-To: <200505060018.j460I5JE027259@karma.reboot.ca> References: <200505060018.j460I5JE027259@karma.reboot.ca> Message-ID: <6.1.1.1.0.20050506113151.02f78650@central.murdoch.edu.au> An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://www.globalproblematique.net/pipermail/mai-not/attachments/20050506/2686e782/attachment.html From jfos at net-tech.com.au Thu May 5 18:02:09 2005 From: jfos at net-tech.com.au (John) Date: Thu May 5 20:56:58 2005 Subject: [Mai-not] daily information concerning occupied Iraq Message-ID: <6.1.0.6.1.20050506104601.041ff920@mail.net-tech.com.au> uruknet.info :: information from occupied iraq :: informazione dall'iraq occupato Interview with Iraq Veterans Against the War: Patrick Resta: 'sent into combat unequipped and unprepared' Kevin Zeese* ...?When you break something in a store you don't sit there with crazy glue trying to piece it back together. And you most certainly don't run around with a bat breaking more things. What you do is apologize, write them a check, and get out before you do anymore damage?...?The hypocrisy of the occupation was evident when I was told we were going to help rebuild Iraq and then watched as the only things being rebuilt were Saddam's military bases to prepare for a permanent US military presence?... Read the full article / Leggi l'articolo completo: www.uruknet.info/?p=11539 ---------- THE COUNTER-CULTURAL REVOLUTION Malcom Lagauche ...But, the toys are even more despicable. Look at the picture of Uday Hussein with this article. That is offered by a company called "Herobuilders"; at www.herobuilders.com. The title is "Uday Dead on Arrival." American kids actually play with these items today. And, there are many: toys with Iraqi houses blown up; U.S. commandos tracking down and killing Arabs; and many other "action figures" that depict a! nd glorify the violence of war (...) A 12-year-old kid may slip at the dinner table and say the word "shit" and he will be immediately reprimanded and sent up to his room as a form of punishment. A few hours later, his father will check him out and see him playing with his "Uday Dead on Arrival" toy and commend him on his learning a lesson... Read the full article / Leggi l'articolo completo: www.uruknet.info/?p=11517 ---------- Antiwar soldiers speak out: ?The situation in Iraq is getting worse every day? Socialist Worker FOR U.S. troops in Iraq who oppose the war for oil and empire they were sent to fight, speaking out can be dangerous. But three soldiers--whose pen names are hEkLe, Heretic and Joe Public--found that their consciences made it more difficult not to speak out. Each spent about a year in Iraq. Throughout their tours, they earned a reputation for reporting the truth--on their Web log at ftssoldier.blogspot.com ! < http://wwww.ftssoldier.blogspot.com/ > --about what was taking place in occupied Iraq (...)In mid-April, hEkLe, Heretic and Joe Public spoke to Socialist Worker?s ERIC RUDER about their experiences, observations and opinions of the U.S. occupation. Here, we print excerpts of the conversation. Read the full article / Leggi l'articolo completo: www.uruknet.info/?p=11523 ---------- A few more details on Blair's strategy of lies Xymphora ...From Paul O'Neill and Richard Clark, we know that Bush was planning a regime change in Iraq immediately after his inauguration (O'Neill said it was 'topic A' 10 days after the inauguration). The neocons needed to get a few preliminaries out of the way, including their Perle harbor of September 11 and the training-wheels war in Afghanistan, before they could set up for a war on Iraq, but it was always inevitable. Apparently it was also always inevitable that Britain would participate (we don't know, and may never know, whether this is due to some secret treaty, or just globalist Blair following orders from the Powers That Be)... Read the full article / Leggi l'articolo completo: www.uruknet.info/?p=11531 ---------- Pentagon analyst charged with passing defence secrets to pro-Israel lobby Associated Press The FBI arrested a Pentagon analyst Wednesday on a charge of illegally passing classified information about potential attacks against U.S. forces in Iraq to employees of a pro-Israel group. Larry Franklin, 58, of Kearneysville, W. Va., turned himself in Wednesday morning, FBI spokeswoman Debra Weierman said (...) FBI agents twice searched AIPAC offices as part of the investigation about whether Israel improperly obtained classified U.S. information on Iran. They also have interviewed two AIPAC employees about whether Franklin gave them classified information that wound up in Israel's hands... Read the full article / Leggi l'articolo completo: www.uruknet.info/?p=11538 ---------- Lying on Air America to Support the War Al Franken is a Big Fat Phony JOHN WALSH, CounterPunch ...Coverage of Iraq is largely confined to the corruption of Halliburton and the general idea that whatever has gone wrong there is the fault of George W. Bush and the Republicans. That the war was a "mistake" is laid at the feet of Bush, with no mention of the Democrats' role in voting for it, including J. Kerry and H. Clinton. "Incompetence" over the waging of the war is a frequent complaint ? as though it would be better for an "unjust and unnecessary war," in the words of Jimmy Carter, to be waged more competently. (Would that Hitler had been a little more competent!)... Read the full article / Leggi l'articolo completo: www.uruknet.info/?p=11537 ---------- TONY BLAIR CAN'T WIN Greg Palast Mark my words: Tony Blair won't be re-elected Thursday. However, he will remain in office. That's because Brits don't vote for their Prime Minister. They've got a "parliamentary" system there in the Mother Country. And the difference between democracy and parliamentary rule makes all the difference. It is the only reason why Blair will keep his job -- at least for a few months. Let me explain... Read the full article / Leggi l'articolo completo: www.uruknet.info/?p=11536 ---------- Proof Bush Fixed The Facts Ray McGovern, Tompaine.com Never in our wildest dreams did we think we would see those words in black and white?and beneath a SECRET stamp, no less. For three years now, we in Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS) have been saying that the CIA and its British counterpart, MI-6, were ordered by their countries' leaders to "fix facts" to "justify" an unprovoked war on Iraq. More often than not, we have been greeted with stares of incredulity. It has been a hard learning?that folks tend to believe what they want to believe. As long as our evidence, however abundant and persuasive, remained circumstantial, it could not compel belief. It simply is much easier on the psyche to assent to the White House spin machine blaming the Iraq fiasco on bad intelligence than to entertain the notion that we were sold a bill of goods... Read the full article / Leggi l'articolo completo: www.uruknet.info/?p=11534 ---------- FOX News Still Says Saddam Hussein Was Involved With 9/11 News Hounds There's an article on FOXNews.com about an upcoming ABC miniseries on the history of terrorism that supposedly includes the period from the 1993 World Trade Center bombing until 9/11. The last paragraph begins: And there will be more to come, as the miniseries casts for just about everyone involved in national security and the plotting of the Sept. 11 tragedies. Who will play bin Laden? Or Saddam Hussein?... Read the full article / Leggi l'articolo completo: www.uruknet.info/?p=11533 ---------- Muslim soldier gets the death penalty while... Politicians forgive murder in Iraq Eric Ruder, Socialist Worker THE U.S. military values some lives more than others. That?s the only conclusion you could draw from the trials of two U.S. soldiers--one accused of killing two American officers, the other of executing two Iraqi civilians. Last week, Sgt. Hasan Akbar was sentenced to death for using grenades and his rifle at a base camp in Kuwait to kill two officers and injure 14 other soldiers shortly after the March 2003 invasion of Iraq (...) The climate surrounding the trial of Marine Second Lt. Ilario Pantano--who killed two unarmed Iraqis with a hail of bullets during a search of their car--couldn?t be more different... Read the full article / Leggi l'articolo completo: www.uruknet.info/?p=11532 ---------- Iraq?s Al-Madain Symbol of ?Glory? Samir Haddad, IOL Correspondent The Iraqi city of Al-Madain, one of the ancient cities of Mesopotamia and the onetime capital of collapsed empires under the name Ctesiphon, has always been a haven for both Sunnis and Shiites. But the recent turmoil in the city created by the hostage hoax has given a cause for concern and raised ?imperial? fears. ?Those behind the borders are considering the city and the ancient Taq-i Kasra (the vault of Caeser) as the seat of their collapsed empire,? Adnan Al-Delimi, head of the Sunni Waqfs in Iraq, told IslamOnline.net Tuesday, May 3. ?They want to revive the past glories of the Persian Empire under the cloak of ethnicity, not Islam,? he said, in a veiled reference to Iran... Read the full article / Leggi l'articolo completo: www.uruknet.info/?p=11529 ---------- Fighting mad The Guardian Dave Corrigan was proud to be a British soldier serving in Iraq. Then he was wounded and his nightmare began. He tells Ed Vulliamy why, as the only war casualty in Tony Blair's constituency, he'll be voting against the PM - and why his old comrades should all be brought home... Read the full article / Leggi l'articolo completo: www.uruknet.info/?p=11527 ---------- U.S. policy fosters abuse Paul Vitello ...It is ironic that a person such as she, with little education, no authority, and zero training as a prison guard, becomes the poster child for our depravity, while the authors of the American policy toward Iraqi detainees remain virtually untouched by the scandal. The authors are Gonzales, who drafted the policy; President Bush, who approved it; and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, who put it into effect... Read the full article / Leggi l'articolo completo: www.uruknet.info/?p=11525 ---------- Roadside bombs kill two U.S. soldiers in Iraqi capital Associated Press Two American soldiers died in roadside bomb attacks by insurgents in Baghdad, the U.S. military said Wednesday. The two separate attacks on U.S. convoys in the capital occurred Tuesday, and further information was being withheld pending notification of the victims' relatives... Read the full article / Leggi l'articolo completo: www.uruknet.info/?p=11521 ---------- Iraqi Resistance Report for events of Tuesday, 3 May 2005 Translated and/or compiled by Muhammad Abu Nasr, member, editorial board, the Free Arab Voice. http://www.freearabvoice.org ...The puppet so-called ?minister of human rights? in the US-installed ?Iraqi regime? on Tuesday lifted the veil on a report that states that a number of US occupation troops raped Iraqi youths ranging in age from 15 to 17 years in the city of at-Tarimiyah, north of Baghdad in February. The report was released in a press conference in! Baghdad attended by a correspondent for Mafkarat al-Islam... Read the full article / Leggi l'articolo completo: www.uruknet.info/?p=11520 ---------- Suicide bomber kills 60 in Iraqi city Reuters A suicide bomber struck the offices of a Kurdish party in northern Iraq on Wednesday, killing at least 60 people in the bloodiest attack since a new government promising stability was formed a week ago. Witnesses said a crowd had gathered outside the Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP) office, which also served as a police recruiting centre, when the bomber hit. A health ministry official in Arbil said 150 people were wounded. Hospitals said they were overwhelmed with caalties... Read the full article / Leggi l'articolo completo: www.uruknet.info/?p=11519 ---------- Insurgents find new ways to bedevil U.S. in Iraq Associated Press About as quickly as the U.S. military finds a way to thwart insurgents' roadside bombs and other methods of attack, the insurgents counter with a new move of their own. On foot or in vehicles, U.S. troops are killed and maimed almost daily by the insurgents' weapon of choice, the roadside bomb, known in the U.S. military as an improvised explosive device, or IED. The insurgents also use car bombs, rocket-propelled grenades, mortars and small arms..! . Read the full article / Leggi l'articolo completo: www.uruknet.info/?p=11518 ---------- Iraq: When Was The Die Cast? John Prados, Tompaine.com ...Emerging in the final days before the UK's parliamentary election, a memo leaked to the London Sunday Times reveals that Bush decided to go to war by April of 2002, and that by July of that same year it was clear that the United States would fabricate the intelligence necessary to justify the war. The Bush administration's pious rhetoric about strengthening the United Nations was strictly for public consumption. Its talk about alleged Iraqi weapons of mass destruction?as Lord Goldsmith's legal opinion demonstrates?was crucial because the only avenue offering a fig leaf of legal justification for war was to claim to be enforcing U.N. disarmament resolutions. And President Bush's repeated assertions that no decision had been made about attacking Iraq were plainly false... Read the full article / Leggi l'articolo completo: www.uruknet.info/?p=11516 ---------- Creating Reasons to Go to War Congressman John Conyers, Daily Kos Unfortunately, the mainstream media in the United States was too busy with wall-to-wall coverage of a "runaway bride" to cover a bombshell report out of the British newspapers. The London Times reports that the British government and the United States government had secretly agreed to attack Iraq in 2002, before authorization was sought for such an attack in Congress, and had discussed creating pretextual justifications for doing so... Read the full article / Leggi l'articolo completo: www.uruknet.info/?p=11528 ---------- www.uruknet.info: a site gathering daily information concerning occupied Iraq: news, analysis, documents and texts of iraqi resistance available in Italian and English. From papadop at peak.org Thu May 5 21:24:47 2005 From: papadop at peak.org (MichaelP) Date: Thu May 5 21:24:56 2005 Subject: [Mai-not] Military data leak using Acrobat Message-ID: http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/Page/document/common/chewy/nav-all_sections_frame Tuesday, May 3, 2005 Associated Press NEW YORK Just a few clicks were enough to reveal names, training procedures and other secrets the U.S. military thought it had blacked out from an electronic report. The data leak resulted from a type of mistake that is becoming increasingly common as government agencies and corporations scrap paper in favour of cheaper, faster distribution on-line. "Software is basically a lot more complicated than mechanical typewriters, whiteout and black ink," said Richard M. Smith, a privacy and security consultant in Cambridge, Mass. The U.S. military command in Baghdad produced the report in Adobe Systems Inc.'s popular Portable Document Format, or PDF, and posted it on the command's website Saturday. Its investigation cleared American soldiers of wrongdoing in the shooting of an Italian agent in Baghdad. The blacked-out portions included names of soldiers at Iraqi checkpoints and their units. The material also discussed training for checkpoint duty, checkpoint procedures and general security in the Baghdad area, including the number of attacks since November. John Landwehr, Adobe's director of security solutions and strategies, examined the document Monday and suggested its censors "simply put black rectangles over the text and did not delete any of the text itself from the documents. They were trying to do redaction with something not designed to do redaction." By simply opening the document in Adobe's free Acrobat Reader, hitting the "select text" button, copying and then pasting all the text into any word processor, readers can see what's buried beneath. The military admits it goofed. "We need to improve our procedures. We regret this happened. We obviously didn't take sufficient precautions," said U.S. Air Force Col. Donald Alston, a spokesman for U.S.-led forces. He added that some of the leaked information appeared classified. The full report, with the black marks removed, first appeared on some Italian websites, including that of the newspaper La Repubblica. Landwehr said companies and governments needing to delete secrets should turn to third-party redaction tools like Appligent Inc.'s Redax. Smith suggested going further: Print the document, use markers to black out text and scan the document back in. Relying on a purely electronic copy, he said, spells trouble. "Generally, it's a bad idea to send out electronic documents in sensitive situations," Smith said. "There can be all sorts of little things that can pop out." Besides offering the ability to uncover blacked-out text, many documents carry "metadata" -- embedded information like the document's author and company. Users of Microsoft Corp.'s Word also routinely send files embedded with previous drafts, all revealed with a few clicks. Smith used details hidden in one document years ago to help the FBI track down the author of the damaging "Melissa" computer virus. Many lawyers have turned to PDF to prevent the Word leakage, said Albert Barsocchini, an attorney and director of professional services at Guidance Software Inc., which makes tools for recovering data. The military breach is "another wake up that they have to go another step further," Barsocchini said. The U.S. government has made similar mistakes before. Large portions of a sensitive, 186-page Justice Department report -- about hiring and promoting minorities as federal prosecutors -- was digitally blacked out in late 2003, but savvy computer users could read the entire report. The Department of Homeland Security warned businesses about hackers breaking into PBX telephone networks in June 2003, but every word of its electronic warning even passages thought deleted could be viewed. And the Army in March 2001 inadvertently disclosed a rash of drownings during training exercises at one post by crews aboard Bradley armoured vehicles. "I'm surprised there hasn't been a more formal review that says when you release documents electronically, they have to be scrubbed with certain tools or procedures," said Ron Gula, who runs Tenable Network Security Inc. and used to test the security of government computers for the National Security Agency. Placing blame for such breaches is difficult, though. "I would hesitate to call it stupidity," said Steven Aftergood, senior research analyst with the Federation of American Scientists' Project on Government Secrecy. "It's something no one would know unless they learn it, and it's an easy mistake to make. Unfortunately, sometimes the only way to learn is to do it the wrong way." From papadop at peak.org Thu May 5 21:28:28 2005 From: papadop at peak.org (MichaelP) Date: Thu May 5 21:28:46 2005 Subject: [Mai-not] Greg Palast fund Message-ID: Here's how to by-pass paypal Michael ================================= If you would like to donate by check, pay to the order of "IHC / Palast Investigative Fund" and send to: Int'l Humanities Center PO Box 923 Malibu, CA 90265 Here's a link to send GP a note: http://www.gregpalast.com/contact.cfm Kat MichaelP said: > Kat > > This guy is in Australia - do you have any info or advice to give - I can > have him send ME a check but that will take weeks and there's no need to > use horse n'buggy techniques. > > Michael > ---------- Forwarded message ---------- > Date: Fri, 06 May 2005 11:45:20 +0800 > From: Dion Giles > > > I tried to donate $US40 to Palast as requested but he uses that horrible > Paypal system. Paypal has an intricate path for everyone, but a > specillay intricate path for people like me who were foolish enough at > one time to join it. I have long since discarded much of the info they > want -- logins, passwords etc. One can gain access to this information, > I understand, by first quoting log-in and password ! > > So I tried as a person not a Paypal member but after going through their > grossly overdone intricacies received the following stopper: > > Our records indicate that this email address and credit card are already > registered to an existing PayPal account. To complete this transaction, > please enter a different credit card and email address. > > To log in to your existing PayPal account, please click the Login button > below. > > Stymied. > > Sorry Greg, no $40. > > Warning: Never, ever, use Paypal to set up a payment system. Most > British and Australian sites, and many American ones like Amazon.com, > allow you simply to enter your credit card number and your name and > address and pay the account. No surplus information, no further > three-digit number for which you have to dredge up the actual card, no > log-in and password, no bureaucracy masquerading as "security". > > As an afterthought, does anyone have an email address to reach Gregory > Palast's organisation? > > Dion Giles > Western Australia > > > > At 08:19 06/05/2005, Yves wrote: > > > Yves Bajard just sent you an article from > Journalist Greg Palast's web-site, http://www.GregPalast.com > > > ======================================================================= > Yves Bajard included this message: > > What do you think? And have you seen and read the contents of > Mike Ruppert's "Crossing the Rubicon"? And read Richard > Heinberg's Powerdown? > > Regards > > Yves Bajard > > ===================================================================== > IMPEACHMENT TIME: "FACTS WERE FIXED." > > By Greg Palast > > Here it is. The smoking gun. The memo that has "IMPEACH > HIM" written all over it. > > The top-level government memo marked "SECRET AND STRICTLY > PERSONAL," dated eight months before Bush sent us into Iraq, > following a closed meeting with the President, reads, > "Military action was now seen as inevitable. Bush wanted to > remove Saddam through military action justified by the > conjunction of terrorism and WMD. But the intelligence and > facts were being fixed around the policy." > > Read that again: "The intelligence and facts were being > fixed...." > > For years, after each damning report on BBC TV, viewers > inevitably ask me, "Isn't this grounds for impeachment?" -- > vote rigging, a blind eye to terror and the bin Ladens before > 9-11, and so on. Evil, stupidity and self-dealing are > shameful but not impeachable. What's needed is a "high crime > or misdemeanor." > > And if this ain't it, nothing is. > > The memo uncovered this week by the Times, goes on to > describe an elaborate plan by George Bush and British Prime > Minister Tony Blair to hoodwink the planet into supporting an > attack on Iraq knowing full well the evidence for war was a > phony. > > A conspiracy to commit serial fraud is, under federal law, > racketeering. However, the Mob's schemes never cost so many > lives. > > Here's more. "Bush had made up his mind to take military > action. But the case was thin. Saddam was not threatening > his neighbors, and his WMD capability was less than that of > Libya, North Korea or Iran." > > Really? But Mr. Bush told us, "Intelligence gathered by this > and other governments leaves no doubt that the Iraq regime > continues to possess and conceal some of the most lethal > weapons ever devised." > > A month ago, the Silberman-Robb Commission issued its report > on WMD intelligence before the war, dismissing claims that > Bush fixed the facts with this snooty, condescending > conclusion written directly to the President, "After a > thorough review, the Commission found no indication that the > Intelligence Community distorted the evidence regarding > Iraq's weapons." > > We now know the report was a bogus 618 pages of thick > whitewash aimed to let Bush off the hook for his murderous > mendacity. > > Read on: The invasion build-up was then set, says the memo, > "beginning 30 days before the US Congressional elections." > Mission accomplished. > > You should parse the entire memo -- reprinted below -- and > see if you can make it through its three pages without losing > your lunch. > > Now sharp readers may note they didn't see this memo, in > fact, printed in the New York Times. It wasn't. Rather, it > was splashed across the front pages of the Times of LONDON on > Monday. > > It has effectively finished the last, sorry remnants of Tony > Blair's political career. (While his Labor Party will most > assuredly win the elections Thursday, Prime Minister Blair is > expected, possibly within months, to be shoved overboard in > favor of his Chancellor of the Exchequer, a political > execution which requires only a vote of the Labour party's > members in Parliament.) > > But in the US, barely a word. The New York Times covers this > hard evidence of Bush's fabrication of a casus belli as some > "British" elections story. Apparently, our President's fraud > isn't "news fit to print." > > My colleagues in the UK press have skewered Blair, digging > out more incriminating memos, challenging the official > government factoids and fibs. But in the US press … nada, > bubkes, zilch. Bush fixed the facts and somehow that's a > story for "over there." > > The Republicans impeached Bill Clinton over his cigar and > Monica's affections. And the US media could print nothing > else. > > Now, we have the stone, cold evidence of bending intelligence > to sell us on death by the thousands, and neither a > Republican Congress nor what is laughably called US > journalism thought it worth a second look. > > My friend Daniel Ellsberg once said that what's good about > the American people is that you have to lie to them. What's > bad about Americans is that it's so easy to do. > > > Greg Palast, former columnist for Britain's Guardian papers, > is the author of the New York Times bestseller, The Best > Democracy Money Can Buy. > Subscribe to his columns at href=http://www.gregpalast.com>www.GregPalast.com Media > requests to contact(at)gregpalast.com Permission to reprint > with attribution granted. > > > [Here it is - the secret smoking gun memo - discovered by > the Times of London. - GP] > > SECRET AND STRICTLY PERSONAL - UK EYES ONLY > DAVID MANNING > From: Matthew Rycroft > Date: 23 July 2002 > S 195 /02 > > cc: Defence Secretary, Foreign Secretary, Attorney-General, > Sir Richard Wilson, John Scarlett, Francis Richards, CDS, C, > Jonathan Powell, Sally Morgan, Alastair Campbell > > IRAQ: PRIME MINISTER'S MEETING, 23 JULY > > Copy addressees and you met the Prime Minister on 23 July to > discuss Iraq. > > This record is extremely sensitive. No further copies should > be made. It should be shown only to those with a genuine need > to know its contents. > > John Scarlett summarised the intelligence and latest JIC > assessment. Saddam's regime was tough and based on extreme > fear. The only way to overthrow it was likely to be by > massive military action. Saddam was worried and expected an > attack, probably by air and land, but he was not convinced > that it would be immediate or overwhelming. His regime > expected their neighbours to line up with the US. Saddam knew > that regular army morale was poor. Real support for Saddam > among the public was probably narrowly based. > > C reported on his recent talks in Washington. There was a > perceptible shift in attitude. Military action was now seen > as inevitable. Bush wanted to remove Saddam, through military > action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD. > But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the > policy. The NSC had no patience with the UN route, and no > enthusiasm for publishing material on the Iraqi regime's > record. There was little discussion in Washington of the > aftermath after military action. > > CDS said that military planners would brief CENTCOM on 1-2 > August, Rumsfeld on 3 August and Bush on 4 August. > > The two broad US options were: > > (a) Generated Start. A slow build-up of 250,000 US troops, a > short (72 hour) air campaign, then a move up to Baghdad from > the south. Lead time of 90 days (30 days preparation plus 60 > days deployment to Kuwait). > > (b) Running Start. Use forces already in theatre (3 x 6,000), > continuous air campaign, initiated by an Iraqi casus belli. > Total lead time of 60 days with the air campaign beginning > even earlier. A hazardous option. > > The US saw the UK (and Kuwait) as essential, with basing in > Diego Garcia and Cyprus critical for either option. Turkey > and other Gulf states were also important, but less vital. > The three main options for UK involvement were: > > (i) Basing in Diego Garcia and Cyprus, plus three SF > squadrons. > > (ii) As above, with maritime and air assets in addition. > > (iii) As above, plus a land contribution of up to 40,000, > perhaps with a discrete role in Northern Iraq entering from > Turkey, tying down two Iraqi divisions. > > The Defence Secretary said that the US had already begun > "spikes of activity" to put pressure on the regime. No > decisions had been taken, but he thought the most likely > timing in US minds for military action to begin was January, > with the timeline beginning 30 days before the US > Congressional elections. > > The Foreign Secretary said he would discuss this with Colin > Powell this week. It seemed clear that Bush had made up his > mind to take military action, even if the timing was not yet > decided. But the case was thin. Saddam was not threatening > his neighbours, and his WMD capability was less than that of > Libya, North Korea or Iran. We should work up a plan for an > ultimatum to Saddam to allow back in the UN weapons > inspectors. This would also help with the legal justification > for the use of force. > > The Attorney-General said that the desire for regime change > was not a legal base for military action. There were three > possible legal bases: self-defence, humanitarian > intervention, or UNSC authorisation. The first and second > could not be the base in this case. Relying on UNSCR 1205 of > three years ago would be difficult. The situation might of > course change. > > The Prime Minister said that it would make a big difference > politically and legally if Saddam refused to allow in the UN > inspectors. Regime change and WMD were linked in the sense > that it was the regime that was producing the WMD. There were > different strategies for dealing with Libya and Iran. If the > political context were right, people would support regime > change. The two key issues were whether the military plan > worked and whether we had the political strategy to give the > military plan the space to work. > > On the first, CDS said that we did not know yet if the US > battleplan was workable. The military were continuing to ask > lots of questions. > > For instance, what were the consequences, if Saddam used WMD > on day one, or if Baghdad did not collapse and urban > warfighting began? You said that Saddam could also use his > WMD on Kuwait. Or on Israel, added the Defence Secretary. > > The Foreign Secretary thought the US would not go ahead with > a military plan unless convinced that it was a winning > strategy. On this, US and UK interests converged. But on the > political strategy, there could be US/UK differences. Despite > US resistance, we should explore discreetly the ultimatum. > Saddam would continue to play hard-ball with the UN. > > John Scarlett assessed that Saddam would allow the inspectors > back in only when he thought the threat of military action > was real. > > The Defence Secretary said that if the Prime Minister wanted > UK military involvement, he would need to decide this early. > He cautioned that many in the US did not think it worth going > down the ultimatum route. It would be important for the Prime > Minister to set out the political context to Bush. > > Conclusions: > > (a) We should work on the assumption that the UK would take > part in any military action. But we needed a fuller picture > of US planning before we could take any firm decisions. CDS > should tell the US military that we were considering a range > of options. > > (b) The Prime Minister would revert on the question of > whether funds could be spent in preparation for this > operation. > > (c) CDS would send the Prime Minister full details of the > proposed military campaign and possible UK contributions by > the end of the week. > > (d) The Foreign Secretary would send the Prime Minister the > background on the UN inspectors, and discreetly work up the > ultimatum to Saddam. > > He would also send the Prime Minister advice on the positions > of countries in the region especially Turkey, and of the key > EU member states. > > (e) John Scarlett would send the Prime Minister a full > intelligence update. > > (f) We must not ignore the legal issues: the Attorney-General > would consider legal advice with FCO/MOD legal advisers. > > (I have written separately to commission this follow-up > work.) > > MATTHEW RYCROFT > > (Rycroft was a Downing Street foreign policy aide) > > > You can also see this article online: > > http://www.gregpalast.com/detail.cfm?artid=426&frm=eml > > ======================================================================= > Complete contents of this e-mail are (c)Greg Palast. All > Rights Reserved > ===================================================================== > _______________________________________________ > Mai-not mailing list > Mai-not@globalproblematique.net > http://www.globalproblematique.net/mailman/listinfo/mai-not > > > > From dgiles at central.murdoch.edu.au Thu May 5 22:08:30 2005 From: dgiles at central.murdoch.edu.au (Dion Giles) Date: Thu May 5 22:08:36 2005 Subject: [Mai-not] Military data leak using Acrobat In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <6.1.1.1.0.20050506130646.02dcc3e8@central.murdoch.edu.au> Why were they keeping the murderers' names secret anyway? Good that the Italians know -- it was one of theirs who was targeted. Dion Giles Western Australia From dgiles at central.murdoch.edu.au Thu May 5 22:30:50 2005 From: dgiles at central.murdoch.edu.au (Dion Giles) Date: Thu May 5 22:30:56 2005 Subject: [Mai-not] Texas: You Could Lose $3,017 a Year--or More In-Reply-To: <5.1.0.14.2.20050505185506.02d3fa10@pop.uniserve.com> References: <5.1.0.14.2.20050505185506.02d3fa10@pop.uniserve.com> Message-ID: <6.1.1.1.0.20050506114815.02f783c0@central.murdoch.edu.au> Most Texans voted for it. Their deadly ill-will towards people being bombed and terrorised on the orders of their hero makes their own losses at the hands of the same hero a grim sort of poetic justice to those who expressed their hatred in the pubs and at the ballot box and in the once-great flag they so conspicuously wave as an "up yours" top the victims -- and a terrible injustice to the decent minority who retained their humanity and the best traditions of their country. Dion Giles Western Australia From netcfs at shaw.ca Fri May 6 06:13:56 2005 From: netcfs at shaw.ca (Yves Bajard) Date: Fri May 6 06:14:09 2005 Subject: [Mai-not] The future of Mai-Not Message-ID: <1115385236.5142.9.camel@Yves> I have been having second thoughts. My apologies to you all for my anger of some two weeks ago. I'll keep on hosting and managing Mai-Not, even if you don't send enough cash to cover the costs. I feel in solidarity with you all, even though we don't agree on some fundamental aspects of the world problematique and of where we as persons, stand in it., I want to thank those of you who addressed the issue, and especially Robert Muldoney for his kind proposal. From netcfs at shaw.ca Fri May 6 06:28:24 2005 From: netcfs at shaw.ca (Yves Bajard) Date: Fri May 6 06:29:28 2005 Subject: [Mai-not] The future of Mai-Not Message-ID: <1115386104.5142.24.camel@Yves> Mai-Notters of all stripes and shades: (:-) I have been having second thoughts. My apologies to you all for my anger of some two weeks ago. I'll keep on hosting and managing Mai-Not, even if you don't send enough cash to cover the costs. I feel in solidarity with you all, even though we don't agree on some fundamental aspects of the world problematique and of where we as persons, stand in it., I want to thank those of you who addressed the issue, and especially Robert Muldoney for his kind proposal. I Think, given the political situation in the USA, that it is preferable and safer to keep on hosting the list from outside of the US. Another hesitation about transferring the whole shebang to Robert Muldoney, is his surprise at "how a 35 person email list with 5-10 messages a day can cost so much to operate." and his (IMO) rapid judgement that "Anybody with a DSL line can host such a small volume list on their desktop with free software." Majordomo and Mailman are free, at least in Linux (The list works with Mailman, not majordomo, as mailman is much, much better than majordomo for list management). Installing Mailman on a commercial server in BC is not free and has a small annual cost onward. Also, running the ADSL or cable connection and Webpage space is not free either. There is a difference between independently running a network and paying the costs and taking advantage of a university to provide a service taht is actually not part of normal university functions.. Returning to majordomo would also create a serious problem of archive transfer.. Therefore, those of you who want and can can contribute their share by sending what they want to contribute in the from of a bank cheque or money order (*in US or Can $ preferably, but not necessarily) to Dee Shoolingin, Treasurer of the NCFS , at the following address: Dee Shoolingin 942 Cloverdale Avenue Victoria, BC, Canada. V8X 2T6 Bets regards Yves Bajard From netcfs at shaw.ca Fri May 6 06:29:52 2005 From: netcfs at shaw.ca (Yves Bajard) Date: Fri May 6 06:29:57 2005 Subject: [Mai-not] The future of Mai-Not Message-ID: <1115386192.5142.27.camel@Yves> Mai-Notters of all stripes and shades: (:-) The first message of this morning was sent unfinished by error, Please discard. Best regards Yves Bajard From thinker at uniserve.com Fri May 6 07:07:30 2005 From: thinker at uniserve.com (Ed Deak) Date: Fri May 6 07:08:41 2005 Subject: [Mai-not] The future of Mai-Not In-Reply-To: <1115385236.5142.9.camel@Yves> Message-ID: <5.1.0.14.2.20050506070508.02cb8610@pop.uniserve.com> Thanks for your efforts, Yves !!!!!!!!!!!! Now please post it on the list where we can send and address the cheque. Mine will be in the mail by return post. Cheers, Ed. At 06:13 AM 06/05/2005 -0700, you wrote: >I have been having second thoughts. > >My apologies to you all for my anger of some two weeks ago. > >I'll keep on hosting and managing Mai-Not, even if you don't send enough >cash to cover the costs. I feel in solidarity with you all, even though >we don't agree on some fundamental aspects of the world problematique >and of where we as persons, stand in it., > >I want to thank those of you who addressed the issue, and especially >Robert Muldoney for his kind proposal. > > > > >_______________________________________________ >Mai-not mailing list >Mai-not@globalproblematique.net >http://www.globalproblematique.net/mailman/listinfo/mai-not From d_a_d at telusplanet.net Fri May 6 07:59:17 2005 From: d_a_d at telusplanet.net (David A Davidson) Date: Fri May 6 07:59:24 2005 Subject: [Mai-not] (no subject) Message-ID: <20050506145918.FMCA24811.priv-edtnes57.telusplanet.net@david> Re address to Greg Palast ttr this one: palast@gregpalast.com David -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://www.globalproblematique.net/pipermail/mai-not/attachments/20050506/d2b3c627/attachment.html From jmeaton at ns.sympatico.ca Fri May 6 08:41:05 2005 From: jmeaton at ns.sympatico.ca (Janet M Eaton) Date: Fri May 6 08:41:12 2005 Subject: [Mai-not] The future of Mai-Not In-Reply-To: <5.1.0.14.2.20050506070508.02cb8610@pop.uniserve.com> References: <1115385236.5142.9.camel@Yves> Message-ID: <427B65E1.3929.62ACB34@localhost> THANKS Yves - I agree with you about keeping the list host in Canada and as you say thanks to all who addressed the issue and Robert for his kind proposal. . I will forward a donation as well. I forget what amount we were talking about based on assumed numbers if you could let me know. all the best, janet ===================== On 6 May 2005 at 7:07, Ed Deak wrote: Date sent: Fri, 06 May 2005 07:07:30 -0700 To: A renewed Mai-Not From: Ed Deak Subject: Re: [Mai-not] The future of Mai-Not Send reply to: A renewed Mai-Not [ Double-click this line for list subscription options ] Thanks for your efforts, Yves !!!!!!!!!!!! Now please post it on the list where we can send and address the cheque. Mine will be in the mail by return post. Cheers, Ed. At 06:13 AM 06/05/2005 -0700, you wrote: >I have been having second thoughts. > >My apologies to you all for my anger of some two weeks ago. > >I'll keep on hosting and managing Mai-Not, even if you don't send >enough cash to cover the costs. I feel in solidarity with you all, >even though we don't agree on some fundamental aspects of the world >problematique and of where we as persons, stand in it., > >I want to thank those of you who addressed the issue, and especially >Robert Muldoney for his kind proposal. > > > > >_______________________________________________ >Mai-not mailing list >Mai-not@globalproblematique.net >http://www.globalproblematique.net/mailman/listinfo/mai-not _______________________________________________ Mai-not mailing list Mai-not@globalproblematique.net http://www.globalproblematique.net/mailman/listinfo/mai-not From d_a_d at telusplanet.net Fri May 6 09:24:23 2005 From: d_a_d at telusplanet.net (David A Davidson) Date: Fri May 6 09:24:26 2005 Subject: [Mai-not] renewed Mai-Not Message-ID: <20050506162423.KYNV18331.priv-edtnes46.telusplanet.net@david> I too am sending my personal check to help defray the costs of keeping this list going. I find it very interesting and informative, and would miss it immensely should it be discontinued. David -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://www.globalproblematique.net/pipermail/mai-not/attachments/20050506/c7ef5ccb/attachment.html From jomut at yahoo.com Fri May 6 12:30:27 2005 From: jomut at yahoo.com (John Mutambirwa) Date: Fri May 6 12:30:33 2005 Subject: [Mai-not] revisiting the salon Message-ID: <20050506193027.22771.qmail@web31106.mail.mud.yahoo.com> Hi, The following two essays are rather long, apologies for that, but I have decided to post them because they emphasize two of the many Enlightenment themes on social development and the role that scientific and technological progress would play in that overall development. One of the essays is from Condorcet's "Tenth Epoch" and the other is a commentary on Carlyle's Sarto Resartus (roughly meaning "the taylor redressed"). One of the problems that the Enlightenment (particularly the French version of it) tried to address was the vast cultural distance between the so called "enlightened" few and the largely nescient majority of the human brood. How was this gap to be narrowed given the inevitability of human progress that was being ushered in by the irresistible advance of both letters and science? Condorcet believed that a resilient, largely autonomous and self-correcting cultural environment would take care of this (Marx would later condemn this as utopian daydreaming). Progress in Science and technology would occur pari passu with incremental advance in pedagogy, administrative savvy and general institutional amelioration. Unreadable and off-putting mathematical somersaults and dissertations of pioneers would in future, through well-developed instant response systems, be readily popularized for mass comprehension. The other view (though I have not included it in the two essays) was advanced by the Duc de St. Simon and his followers, the St. Simonians. In their view, the education of the human race would be mediated by a fabulously well meaning crew of avant garde scientists, engineers and men of letters. They would be the pace-setting trail blazers in all areas of human concern who set the pattern that the intellectually sluggish majority would then follow -- a la Toynbee's "cultural mimesis". It is rather interesting to speculate on which of these two views has carried the day in our time. The point I am trying to make, however, is that they can both be traced back to the Enlightenment. John. ====================== http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/mod/condorcet-progress.html Modern History Sourcebook: Condorcet: The Future Progress of the Human Mind -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Marie Jean Antoine Nicolas Caritat, marquis de Condorcet (1743­ 1794), was an aristocrat, a mathematician, an official of the Academy of Sciences, and was a friend of Voltaire (1694­1778). In sum, a perfect example of an Enlightenment figure. Condorcet supported the revolution of 1789, but became a victim of the revolution during the Radical period. For a time he was able to hide, but soon after the completion of this Sketch for a Historical Picture of the Progress of the Human Mind, he was arrrested. He killed himself rather than wait for execution. No one has ever believed that the human mind could exhaust all the facts of nature, all the refinements of measuring and analyzing these facts, the inter relationship of objects, and all the possible combinations of ideas.... But because, as the number of facts known increases, man learns to classify them, to reduce them to more general terms; because the instruments and the methods of observation and exact measurement are at the same time reaching a new precision; . . . the truths whose discovery has cost the most effort, which at first could be grasped only by men capable of profound thought, are soon carried further and proved by methods that are no longer beyond the reach of ordinary intelligence. If the methods that lead to new combinations are exhausted, if their application to problems not yet solved requires labors that exceed the time or the capacity of scholars, soon more general methods, simpler means, come to open a new avenue for genius.... . . . Applying these general reflections to the different sciences, we shall give, for each, examples of their successive improvement that will leave no doubt as to the certainty of the future improvements we can expect. We shall indicate particularly the most likely and most imminent progress in those sciences that are now commonly believed to be almost exhausted. We shall point out how more universal education in each country, by giving more people the elementary knowledge that can inspire them with a taste for more advanced study and give them the capacity for making progress in it, can add to such hopes; how [these hopes] increase even more, if a more general prosperity permits a greater number of individuals to pursue studies, since at present, in the most enlightened countries, hardly a fiftieth part of those men to whom nature has given talent receive the education necessary to make use of their talents; and that, therefore, the number of men destined to push back the frontiers of the sciences by their discoveries will grow in the same proportion [as universal education increases]. We shall show how this equality of education, and the equality that will arise between nations, will speed up the advances of those sciences whose progress depends on observations repeated in greater number over a larger area; all that mineralogy, botany, zoology, meteorology can be expected to gain thereby; and finally what an enormous disproportion exists, in these sciences, between the weakness of the means that nevertheless have led us to so many useful and important truths, and the great scope of the means men will in the future be able to deploy. . . . If we now turn to the mechanical arts, we shall see that their progress can have no other limit than the reach of the scientific theories on which they depend; that the methods of these arts are capable of the same improvement, the same simplifications as methods in the sciences. Instruments, machines, looms will increasingly supplement the strength and skill of men; will augment at the same time the perfection and the precision of manufactures by lessening both the time and the labor needed to produce them. Then the obstacles that still impede this progress will disappear, and along with them accidents that will become preventable and unhealthy conditions in general, whether owing to work, or habits, or climate. Then a smaller and smaller area of land will be able to produce commodities of greater use or higher value; wider enjoyment will be obtained with less outlay; the same manufacturing output will call for less expenditure of raw materials or will be more durable. For each kind of soil people will know how to choose, from among crops that satisfy the same kind of need, those crops that are most versatile, those that satisfy [the needs on a greater mass of users, requiring less labor and less real consumption. Thus, without any sacrifice, the methods of conservation and of economy in consumption will follow the progress of the art of producing the various commodities, preparing them and turning them into manufactures. ` Thus not only will the same amount of land be able to feed more people; but each of them, with less labor, will be employed more productively and will be able to satisfy his needs better. . . . But in this progress of industry and prosperity . . . each generation . . . is destined to fuller enjoyment; and hence, as a consequence of the physical constitution of the human species, to an increase of the population. Will there not come a time when . . . the increase in population surpassing its means of subsistence, the result would necessarily be-if not a continuous decline in wellbeing and number of people, a truly retrograde movement-at least a kind of oscillation between good and bad? Would not such oscillations in societies that have reached this point be an ever­present cause of more or less periodic suffering? Would this not mark the limit beyond which all improvement would become impossible. . . ? No one will fail to see how far removed from us this time is; but will we reach it one day? It is impossible to speak for or against an event that will occur only at a time when the human species will necessarily have acquired knowledge that we cannot even imagine. And who, in fact, would dare to predict what the art of converting the elements to our use may one day become? But supposing a limit were reached, nothing terrible would happen, regarding either the happiness or the indefinite perfectibility of mankind. We must also suppose that before that time, the progress of reason will have gone hand in hand with progress in the arts and sciences; that the ridiculous prejudices of superstition will no longer cover morality with an austerity that corrupts and degrades it instead of purifying and elevating it. Men will know then that if they have obligations to beings who do not yet exist, these obligations do not consist in giving life, but in giving happiness. Their object is the general welfare of the human species, of the society in which people live, of the family to which they belong and not the puerile idea of filling the earth with useless and unhappy beings. The possible quantity of the means of subsistence could therefore have a limit, and consequently so could the attainable level of population, without resulting in the destruction . . . of part of the living. Among the progress of the human mind that is most important for human happiness, we must count the entire destruction of the prejudices that have established inequality between the sexes, fatal even to the sex it favors. One would look in vain for reasons to justify it, by differences in physical constitution, intelligence, moral sensibility. This inequality has no other source but the abuse of power, and men have tried in vain to excuse it by sophisms. We shall show how much the destruction of customs authorized by this prejudice, of the laws it has dictated, can contribute to the greater happiness of families, and to the spread of the domestic virtues, the first foundation of all other virtues. It will promote the progress of education, because [education] will be extended to both sexes more equally, and because education cannot become general, even among men, without the cooperation of mothers. . . . All these causes of the improvement of the human species, all these means that assure it, will by their nature act continuously and acquire a constantly growing momentum. We have explained the proofs of this . . .; we could therefore already conclude that the perfectibility of man is unlimited, even though, up to now, we have only supposed him endowed with the same natural faculties and organization. What then would be the certainty and extent of our hopes if we could believe that these natural faculties themselves and this organization are also susceptible of improvement? This is the last question remaining for us to examine. The organic perfectibility or degeneration of races in plants and animals may be regarded as one of the general laws of nature. This law extends to the human species; and certainly no one will doubt that progress in medical conservation [of life], in the use of healthier food and housing, a way of living that would develop strength through exercise without impairing it by excess, and finally the destruction of the two most active causes of degradation-misery and too great wealth-will prolong the extent of life and assure people more constant health as well as a more robust constitution. We feel that the progress of preventive medicine as a preservative, made more effective by the progress of reason and social order, will eventually banish communicable or contagious illnesses and those diseases in general that originate in climate, food, and the nature of work. It would not be difficult to prove that this hope should extend to almost all other diseases, whose more remote causes will eventually be recognized. Would it be absurd now to suppose that the improvement of the human race should be regarded as capable of unlimited progress? That a time will come when death would result only from extraordinary accidents or the more and more gradual wearing out of vitality, and that, finally, the duration of the average interval between birth and wearing out has itself no specific limit whatsoever? No doubt man will not become immortal, but cannot the span constantly increase between the moment he begins to live and the time when naturally, without illness or accident, he finds life a burden? >From Marie Jean Antoine Nicolas Caritat, marquis de Condorcet, Esquisse d'un tableau historique des progrès de l'esprit humain (Paris: Masson et Fils, 1822), pp. 279­85, 293­94, 303­5. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- This text is part of the Internet Modern History Sourcebook. The Sourcebook is a collection of public domain and copy-permitted texts for introductory level classes in modern European and World history. Unless otherwise indicated the specific electronic form of the document is copyright. Permission is granted for electronic copying, distribution in print form for educational purposes and personal use. If you do reduplicate the document, indicate the source. No permission is granted for commercial use of the Sourcebook. (c)Paul Halsall Aug 1997 halsall@murray.fordham.edu =========================== Chapter 3, Part 1, of the author's Carlyle and the Search for Authority, which the Ohio State University Press published in 1991. It appears in the Victorian Web with the kind permission of the author, who of course retains copyright. Numbers in brackets indicate page breaks in the print edition and thus allow users of VW to cite or locate the original page numbers. Where possible, bibliographical information appears in the form of in-text citations, which refer to items in the list of abbreviations or to those in the bibliography at the end of each document. Non-bibliographic notes appears as text links. indicates a link to material not in the original print version. [GPL]. Alwin Wee, an undergraduate in the University Scholars Program, National University of Singapore, created the electronic text using OmniPage Pro OCR software, and George P. Landow created the HTML version, converting footnotes, and adding links. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- http://www.victorianweb.org/authors/carlyle/vandenbossche/3a.html HEN CARLYLE BEGAN authoring his own works in the 1830s, he made the search for authority in an era of revolution his major theme. His first attempt to resolve the problem, Sartor Resartus, led to the crisis of authority displayed in "The Reminiscence of James Carlyle." In reaction, he reformulated his poetics and produced a work that directly addressed the problem of authority in an era of revolution, The French Revolution. But this masterpiece in turn opened up a new realm of revolutionary discourse, leading him to the conclusion that writing alone would never recover the domestic idyll. "Sartor Resartus" and the Revolution of 1830 Carlyle watched with interest when, on July 27, 1830, a second French revolution overturned the Bourbon monarchy. Although Carlyle was living in relative isolation in southwestern Scotland, he followed these events closely in the newspapers (see CL, 5:130, 161, 216). In late August, he would have seen Mill's letters on the revolution, which appeared anonymously in the Examiner (Mill, Earlier Letters, 12:59-67). In England, parliamentary elections earlier the same month had begun to raise the issues that led to the passage of the Reform Bill in 1832. Throughout the month of August, almost certainly inspired by his reflections on the sansculottes -- "men without trousers" -- Carlyle began to develop in his letters and notebooks the clothing metaphor of Sartor Resartus. On August 6, less than two weeks after the revolution began, he was advising his brother that "Men are but poor spindle-shanked wiffling wonners [wonders] when you clutch them thro' the mass of drapery they wear" (CL , 5:130; see 133). By September, he had begun writing the first draft of Sartor Resartus, "Thoughts on Clothes" (see TNB , 176, 177). Carlyle informed his brother on September 18 that he was planning to "write something of [his] own," and, on October 10, he spoke of actually being at work on it (CL, 5: 164, 170 Carlyle completed the long essay that was eventually to become Sartor Resartus on October 28, just two weeks before Wellington resigned [40/41] as prime minister, making way for a Whig ministry and parliamentary reform. The July elections had returned the Tories, but Wellington could not suppress the demand for reform in Parliament. The events in France convinced many that reform was the only alternative to revolution. When Grey succeeded Wellington that autumn, Carlyle shared the general expectation that radical change was imminent: "The Whigs in office, and Baron Brougham Lord Chancellor! Hay-stacks and corn-stacks burning over all the South and Middle of England! Where will it end? Revolution on the back of Revolution for a century yet?" (TNB , 178-79). If Carlyle had reservations about Whig reform, it was because it did not go far enough, not because, as the Tories argued, it was too revolutionary (Briggs, 237). Carlyle, who considered that the Whigs, like the Tories, were already "done" for, agreed with the radicals that England required a more fundamental, a more truly revolutionary, alteration of its social structure: "All Europe is in a state of disturbance, of Revolution.... Their Part. Reforms, and all that, are of small moment; a beginning ... nothing more. The whole frame of Society is rotten and must go for fuel-wood" (TNB , 186, 183-84). Although he distrusted the utilitarian principles of the philosophic radicals, he shared their desire for radical reform, following the course of events in the Examiner, which he considered the "cleverest of all Radicals" (CL , 5:201; see 249, 270). In January, Carlyle read the first of a series of articles in the Examiner, entitled "Spirit of the Age," that seemed to support the ideas he had set forth in the first draft of "Thoughts on Clothes." Like Carlyle, its author was concerned with the problem of finding "authority which commands confidence" during an "era of transition" (Newspaper Writings, 244). He also shared Carlyle's sense that they were living in an era of revolution, that "the times are pregnant with change; and that the nineteenth century will be known to posterity as the era of one of the greatest revolutions of which history has preserved the remembrance" (230). He even employed the clothing metaphor to make the point that revolution is the process by which society throws off outmoded institutions and "renovate[s]" itself: "Mankind have outgrown old institutions and old doctrines, and have not yet acquired new ones. When we say outgrown, we intend to prejudge nothing. A man may not be either better or happier at six-and-twenty, than he was at six years of age: but the same jacket which fitted him then, will not fit [41/42] him now" (230). On January 21 (the article appeared on January 9), Carlyle wrote his brother praising "Spirit of the Age"-he discovered in reply that its author was John Stuart Mill-and outlining for the first time his plans for extensively revising his essay on clothes (CL , 5:215-16, 235). Mill's essay seems to have encouraged him to expand "Thoughts on Clothes" and to seek a more serious outlet for it than Fraser's satirical literary magazine, to which he had originally submitted it. In March, while Parliament began considering the reform bill, he began to rework "Thoughts on Clothes," and in late July, while Parliament still sat in a state of indecision, he took the revised manuscript to London. Like "The Spirit of the Age," Sartor Resartus addresses itself to and analyzes Carlyle's "revolutionary times," its opening chapter alluding directly to the Revolt of Paris and the British agitation for Reform (6). Sartor Resartus inscribes its origins in the Paris Revolt in its fictional frame where the "British Editor," who transcribes and narrates the life and opinions of Diogenes Teufelsdröckh, completes his work just at the moment when the "Parisian Three Days" begins (296). Furthermore, its central figure, the German clothes philosopher, is a "Radical" "Sansculottist" (63, 59) Other details indicate Teufelsdröckh's sympathy with the revolution. The Editor suggests he may be headed for London, where the reform agitation was under way; Teufelsdröckh responds to news of the July revolution with a German version of the revolutionary song, "c'a ira," and we are also told that he has been communicating with the revolutionary St. Simonians. On the relationship between what Carlyle himself said of the St. Simonians and this passage, see CL, 5:136, and TNB, 158-59. Sartor Resartus represents a world in which ideas can "overturn . . . the whole old system of Society," in which a sansculottic philosopher can tailor or author a new suit of social clothing (118). Carlyle could hardly have chosen a more appropriate figure than clothing to represent an era of revolution. Not only did the metaphor have a long religious and literary history and an association with political revolution through the term sansculotte, but clothing was also the chief product of the industrial revolution. The textile industry was the first to be extensively mechanized and brought under the factory system, and the social disruptions wrought by these changes played a major role in producing the social unrest that led to the movement for reform. Hard hit by the decline in the value of their labor-between 1814 and 1829, the price of a piece of handmade calico dropped from 6s. 6d. to 1s. 1d.-- hand-loom weavers were among the most active participants in the intermittent riots and mob activities of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries (Ashton, 81; Logue, 194). Carlyle sympathized with the "poor wretches" who threatened to strike and riot in Glasgow in late 1819 and early 1820 (CL, 1: 242; see also 212, 2 18, 224-25, 252-53, 254; Rem., 212-13, 222). He may even have had firsthand experience of these riots, since one occurred in Edinburgh in August 1812, a summer that he spent mostly there (Logue, 33, 41; Kaplan, 32). Carlyle perceived the fine irony that the glut of cloth produced by the industrial revolution would not serve to clothe the nation but to strip it naked, that weavers of cloth were being pushed toward sansculottism. [42/43] Carlyle, via his clothes philosopher Teufelsdröckh, uses the weaving of cloth, or the sewing of a suit of clothes, to represent the process of authoring beliefs and institutions. His emphasis on clothing as woven textile plays on the root of the word text -- texere, to weave. It also elaborates the familiar notion of the "fabric" of society (see 62). On the general notion of the tissue of society and social interconnectedness, see the chapter "Organic Filaments" and 52, 53, 60, 70, 71, 89, 95, 132, 245. Transcendental authority authors, weaves, or sews together the institutions and beliefs that constitute human society. Clothes are the medium through which the transcendental becomes visible in the finite world of human history: "Church-Clothes are, in our vocabulary, the Forms, the Vestures, under which men have at various periods embodied and represented for themselves the Religious Principle" (214). At the moment of their creation, clothes adequately represent or reveal the transcendental. Insofar as beliefs and institutions possess transcendental authority, they unite the authority to compel belief and to compel obedience, but because clothes, beliefs, and institutions are historical, they gradually lose their ability to manifest or represent transcendental authority. Carlyle represents this aspect of clothing by emphasizing that cloth is an organic material subject to wear and decay. The rags of old customs must be discarded in the "laystall," where they will decompose and become fertilizer for the "organic filaments" from which new cloth can be woven. The clothing metaphor thus represents the fundamental historicity of cultural institutions and the inevitability of periodic revolution (see Dale, Victorian Critic, 299; Vanden Bossche, "Revolution and Authority," 277). Since nothing can prevent the processes of decay that destroy old clothing, Sartor's pervasive organic imagery suggests that revolution and historical change are natural, noncataclysmic processes. arlyle was aware, however, that many of his contemporaries thought it possible to patch up the old suits of clothing, to revive old beliefs and institutions instead of creating new ones. This patching up, however, would only repress the forces of change that would eventually break out in violent, rather than peaceful, revolution. Carlyle also uses the clothing metaphor to suggest the dangers that arise when clothing becomes customary or habitual. "Custom," Teufelsdröckh writes, persuades us that "the Miraculous, by simple repetition, ceases to be Miraculous . . . thus let but a Rising of the Sun, let but a Creation of the World happen twice, and it ceases to be marvellous, to be noteworthy, or noticeable" (259, 57). Puns on habit and costume appear throughout Sartor (35, 59, 72-73, 171, 223, 260-61, 266; see also the chapter on symbols, esp. 218). While clothing is theoretically transparent to the authority it reveals, it also covers and conceals it. Sartor Resartus suggests that the organic process that wears out clothes increases their opacity. When clothes become impediments to the recognition of authority rather than revelations of it, one is justified in stripping away and destroying them so that they can be replaced with new clothing. Teufelsdröckh does not flinch at the thought of destroying worn-out [43/44] clothing. In fact, he positively delights in the sansculottic vision in which "the Clothes fly off the whole dramatic corps; and Dukes, Grandees, Bishops, Generals, Anointed Presence itself, every mother's son of them, stand straddling there, not a shirt on them" (61). Yet vision in Sartor Resartus seeks to make the transcendental manifest through new clothes, not just to pierce through and destroy clothing. One might expect that stripping away the clothing that conceals transcendental authority would be the surest way of recovering that authority. This is the position of "Adamites," antinomian sects that seek to recover paradise by living, like Adam, without clothes and without laws. But, for the Carlyle of Sartor Resartus, the fall into history makes the divine inaccessible except through clothing. Consequently, while Teufelsdröckh is a "Sansculottist," he is no "Adamite" (60). The antinomian Adamites of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries had argued that human law cannot displace divine law and therefore wanted to discard human law, to go naked; but Teufelsdröckh insists that only through clothing can we produce social order, that "Society is founded upon Cloth," that "without clothes" there would be no "Politeness, Polity, or even Police" (51, 64; see 41, 60). In fact, the sansculottes, modern-day Adamites, have left society naked, stripped of the beliefs and institutions that constitute the social order. Organic clothing, alive with transcendental presence, produces just social relationships in a world otherwise subject to the amoral and purely mechanical laws of raw nature, a universe that is "one huge, dead, immeasurable Steam-engine, rolling on, in its dead indifference, to grind [one] limb from limb. O the vast, gloomy, solitary Golgotha, and Mill of Death" (164; emphasis added). The metaphor of the mill-punning on the name of the leading utilitarian philosopher, James Mill, a "Motive-Millwright"-connects the natural order to the laissez-faire economics espoused by the utilitarians (159, 220-21; see 68, 117, 232). Human beings, without the social order provided by custom, would tear one another to pieces. In The French Revolution, Carlyle will represent this as the sansculottic tendency toward cannibalism, and already in Sartor Resartus he is concerned with the Malthusian anxiety that we will end up "universally eating one another" (SR, 227). He also frequently complains that the utilitarian "Profit-andLoss Philosophy" replaces the soul with the stomach (e.g., 232). When human law no longer manifests transcendental authority, it cannot simply be destroyed: it must be replaced. Voltaire rightly destroys the "Mythus of the Christian Religion" because it is no longer a vital system of belief, but he falls into the Adamite heresy when he fails to "embody the divine Spirit of " Christianity "in a new Mythus, in a new vehicle and vesture" (163, 194). When it comes to discovering who has authority to make new clothing, however, Sartor Resartus becomes ambiguous, divided between a [44/45] Goethe who would author a new mythus and a Napoleon who preaches his doctrine "through the cannon's throat" (178). The figure of the king, whose "authority from God" enables him to rule by "divine right," combines the authority to compel belief and to compel obedience because he excels in "Ken-ning (Cunning), or which is the same thing, Can-ning" (249). Because Sartor Resartus privileges "kenning," that is, knowledge and belief, from which "canning," social action and law, derives, the king is more likely to be a man of letters like Goethe than a politician like Napoleon. Indeed, in his notebook, Carlyle had claimed that the "only Sovereigns in this world in these days are the Literary men," and when he introduces the idea of "Hero-worship" in Sartor Resartus, he gives as an example of the hero, not a political figure, but Voltaire (TNB , 184; SR , 251) Yet the figure of Voltaire raises the problem of how the man of letters can act ("can") as well as know ("ken"). Throughout Sartor Resartus, Carlyle expresses the anxiety that Teufelsdröckh's vocation will lead him to emulate, not Goethe, but Voltaire and Byron (192, 194). Employing the metaphor of building to describe the creation of a new social structure, Sartor Resartus articulates an opposition between those writers who create and those who destroy. While England needs a "Rebuilder" or an "Architect," not a "hodman," English utilitarianism is "calculated for destroying ... not for rebuilding" (248, 105, 234). From "The State of German Literature" (1827) forward, Carlyle depicts as mere hodmen authors who do not treat literature as religion (CME, 1: 59; 184; see CL, 4:271, 5:152-53, 6:329; TNB, 144). He also contrasts those who build (e.g., Goethe) with those who burn or destroy (e.g., Voltaire; see WM, 1: 28). The masonry metaphor can be found throughout Sartor Resartus (see especially 54, 250, 263). Similarly, Voltaire fails because he possesses "Only a torch for burning, no hammer for building" (163). This suggests that already in Sartor Resartus, Carlyle was beginning to doubt whether the man of letters could build, could replace the man of religion. To become a man of letters was to participate in the industrial revolution-journalism as the industry of literature-that was undermining rather than establishing authority. About 1830, his insistence that literature will be the new liturgy receives an ironic twist when he begins saying that "journalism," which he always despised, rather than "literature," is the new religion. Teufelsdröckh writes, for example, that "Journalists are now the true Kings and Clergy," for the liturgy of journalism is an ironic one that destroys "ancient idols" rather than producing a new belief (45, 252; see CME, 2:77; TNB, 263; HGL, 5). Because the man of letters "kens" but cannot "can," Carlyle is attracted to the political hero, the Napoleon, who "can" but does not "ken." Although a sansculotte, Teufelsdröckh is also concerned with social control, with the ability to enforce belief in order to guarantee a just social order. This tendency of hero-worship to slide toward authoritarianism, or at least hierarchy, remains muted in Sartor Resartus because Sartor frames its analysis of the era of revolution in terms of the problem of religious belief, not, as the later works would, in terms of the institution of democracy. Although Teufelsdröckh is a sansculotte interested in social reform, he articulates his concern for [45/46] reform through a religious medium, the problem of the loss and recovery of faith. Although Carlyle became increasingly concerned with discovering heroic leadership rather than establishing religious belief, he would never fully abandon the idea that there could be "no permanent beneficent arrangement of affairs" until "Religion, the cement of Society," was reestablished (TNB , 179). Furthermore, he would always be haunted by the question that arose even as he introduced the idea of hero-worship in Sartor Resartus: "Kings do reign by divine right, or not at all. The King that were God-appointed, would be an emblem of God, and could demand all obedience from us. But where is that King? (TNB , 185; emphasis added in last sentence). -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Last John Mutambirwa (Dreaming Awake) jomut@yahoo.com chakane@hotmail.com http://www.geocities.com/jomut __________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Small Business - Try our new resources site! http://smallbusiness.yahoo.com/resources/ From dale_young at telus.net Fri May 6 12:45:49 2005 From: dale_young at telus.net (Dale Young) Date: Fri May 6 12:45:53 2005 Subject: [Mai-not] The future of Mai-Not In-Reply-To: <427B65E1.3929.62ACB34@localhost> References: <1115385236.5142.9.camel@Yves> <427B65E1.3929.62ACB34@localhost> Message-ID: <427BC96D.2020306@telus.net> Janet, I agree also that it would be a concern if the list moved entirely to the US. So Yves' movet to keep the list going here is very welcome. Yves suggested that it would take about $250-300 to maintain the list for the next year. I then suggested that with 35 members on the list, if we each contributed anywhere from $10-25, that should meet the need. My donation will be in the mail too. Dale Janet M Eaton wrote: > THANKS Yves - I agree with you about keeping the list host in Canada > and as you say thanks to all who addressed the issue and Robert for > his kind proposal. . > > I will forward a donation as well. > I forget what amount we were talking about based > on assumed numbers if you could let me know. > > all the best, > janet > > > ===================== > > On 6 May 2005 at 7:07, Ed Deak wrote: > > Date sent: Fri, 06 May 2005 07:07:30 -0700 > To: A renewed Mai-Not > From: Ed Deak > Subject: Re: [Mai-not] The future of Mai-Not > Send reply to: A renewed Mai-Not > > > > [ Double-click this line for list subscription options ] > > Thanks for your efforts, Yves !!!!!!!!!!!! Now please post it on the > list where we can send and address the cheque. Mine will be in the > mail by return post. > > Cheers, Ed. > > > > At 06:13 AM 06/05/2005 -0700, you wrote: > >>I have been having second thoughts. >> >>My apologies to you all for my anger of some two weeks ago. >> >>I'll keep on hosting and managing Mai-Not, even if you don't send >>enough cash to cover the costs. I feel in solidarity with you all, >>even though we don't agree on some fundamental aspects of the world >>problematique and of where we as persons, stand in it., >> >>I want to thank those of you who addressed the issue, and especially >>Robert Muldoney for his kind proposal. >> >> >> >> >>_______________________________________________ >>Mai-not mailing list >>Mai-not@globalproblematique.net >>http://www.globalproblematique.net/mailman/listinfo/mai-not > > > _______________________________________________ > Mai-not mailing list > Mai-not@globalproblematique.net > http://www.globalproblematique.net/mailman/listinfo/mai-not > > _______________________________________________ > Mai-not mailing list > Mai-not@globalproblematique.net > http://www.globalproblematique.net/mailman/listinfo/mai-not > > From netcfs at shaw.ca Fri May 6 12:55:26 2005 From: netcfs at shaw.ca (Yves Bajard) Date: Fri May 6 12:55:29 2005 Subject: [Mai-not] The future of Mai-Not In-Reply-To: <427BC96D.2020306@telus.net> References: <1115385236.5142.9.camel@Yves> <427B65E1.3929.62ACB34@localhost> <427BC96D.2020306@telus.net> Message-ID: <1115409327.5178.2.camel@Yves> Thanks for the responses to my recent proposal;. The address to which to send your contributions is in the real message where I did specify the details. The firset mesage ahd be3 send byt error, hardly started.. Cordially Yves Bajard Le vendredi 06 mai 2005 ? 12:45 -0700, Dale Young a ?crit : > Janet, I agree also that it would be a concern if the list moved > entirely to the US. So Yves' movet to keep the list going here is very > welcome. > > Yves suggested that it would take about $250-300 to maintain the list > for the next year. I then suggested that with 35 members on the list, if > we each contributed anywhere from $10-25, that should meet the need. ============+++SNIP=============== From eltechno at clear.lakes.com Fri May 6 17:38:53 2005 From: eltechno at clear.lakes.com (Jonathan Larson) Date: Fri May 6 17:42:30 2005 Subject: [Mai-not] The secret Downing Street memo Message-ID: http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2087-1593607,00.html The secret Downing Street memo SECRET AND STRICTLY PERSONAL - UK EYES ONLY DAVID MANNING From: Matthew Rycroft Date: 23 July 2002 S 195 /02 cc: Defence Secretary, Foreign Secretary, Attorney-General, Sir Richard Wilson, John Scarlett, Francis Richards, CDS, C, Jonathan Powell, Sally Morgan, Alastair Campbell IRAQ: PRIME MINISTER'S MEETING, 23 JULY Copy addressees and you met the Prime Minister on 23 July to discuss Iraq. This record is extremely sensitive. No further copies should be made. It should be shown only to those with a genuine need to know its contents. John Scarlett summarised the intelligence and latest JIC assessment. Saddam's regime was tough and based on extreme fear. The only way to overthrow it was likely to be by massive military action. Saddam was worried and expected an attack, probably by air and land, but he was not convinced that it would be immediate or overwhelming. His regime expected their neighbours to line up with the US. Saddam knew that regular army morale was poor. Real support for Saddam among the public was probably narrowly based. C reported on his recent talks in Washington. There was a perceptible shift in attitude. Military action was now seen as inevitable. Bush wanted to remove Saddam, through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy. The NSC had no patience with the UN route, and no enthusiasm for publishing material on the Iraqi regime's record. There was little discussion in Washington of the aftermath after military action. CDS said that military planners would brief CENTCOM on 1-2 August, Rumsfeld on 3 August and Bush on 4 August. The two broad US options were: (a) Generated Start. A slow build-up of 250,000 US troops, a short (72 hour) air campaign, then a move up to Baghdad from the south. Lead time of 90 days (30 days preparation plus 60 days deployment to Kuwait). (b) Running Start. Use forces already in theatre (3 x 6,000), continuous air campaign, initiated by an Iraqi casus belli. Total lead time of 60 days with the air campaign beginning even earlier. A hazardous option. The US saw the UK (and Kuwait) as essential, with basing in Diego Garcia and Cyprus critical for either option. Turkey and other Gulf states were also important, but less vital. The three main options for UK involvement were: (i) Basing in Diego Garcia and Cyprus, plus three SF squadrons. (ii) As above, with maritime and air assets in addition. (iii) As above, plus a land contribution of up to 40,000, perhaps with a discrete role in Northern Iraq entering from Turkey, tying down two Iraqi divisions. The Defence Secretary said that the US had already begun "spikes of activity" to put pressure on the regime. No decisions had been taken, but he thought the most likely timing in US minds for military action to begin was January, with the timeline beginning 30 days before the US Congressional elections. The Foreign Secretary said he would discuss this with Colin Powell this week. It seemed clear that Bush had made up his mind to take military action, even if the timing was not yet decided. But the case was thin. Saddam was not threatening his neighbours, and his WMD capability was less than that of Libya, North Korea or Iran. We should work up a plan for an ultimatum to Saddam to allow back in the UN weapons inspectors. This would also help with the legal justification for the use of force. The Attorney-General said that the desire for regime change was not a legal base for military action. There were three possible legal bases: self-defence, humanitarian intervention, or UNSC authorisation. The first and second could not be the base in this case. Relying on UNSCR 1205 of three years ago would be difficult. The situation might of course change. The Prime Minister said that it would make a big difference politically and legally if Saddam refused to allow in the UN inspectors. Regime change and WMD were linked in the sense that it was the regime that was producing the WMD. There were different strategies for dealing with Libya and Iran. If the political context were right, people would support regime change. The two key issues were whether the military plan worked and whether we had the political strategy to give the military plan the space to work. On the first, CDS said that we did not know yet if the US battleplan was workable. The military were continuing to ask lots of questions. For instance, what were the consequences, if Saddam used WMD on day one, or if Baghdad did not collapse and urban warfighting began? You said that Saddam could also use his WMD on Kuwait. Or on Israel, added the Defence Secretary. The Foreign Secretary thought the US would not go ahead with a military plan unless convinced that it was a winning strategy. On this, US and UK interests converged. But on the political strategy, there could be US/UK differences. Despite US resistance, we should explore discreetly the ultimatum. Saddam would continue to play hard-ball with the UN. John Scarlett assessed that Saddam would allow the inspectors back in only when he thought the threat of military action was real. The Defence Secretary said that if the Prime Minister wanted UK military involvement, he would need to decide this early. He cautioned that many in the US did not think it worth going down the ultimatum route. It would be important for the Prime Minister to set out the political context to Bush. Conclusions: (a) We should work on the assumption that the UK would take part in any military action. But we needed a fuller picture of US planning before we could take any firm decisions. CDS should tell the US military that we were considering a range of options. (b) The Prime Minister would revert on the question of whether funds could be spent in preparation for this operation. (c) CDS would send the Prime Minister full details of the proposed military campaign and possible UK contributions by the end of the week. (d) The Foreign Secretary would send the Prime Minister the background on the UN inspectors, and discreetly work up the ultimatum to Saddam. He would also send the Prime Minister advice on the positions of countries in the region especially Turkey, and of the key EU member states. (e) John Scarlett would send the Prime Minister a full intelligence update. (f) We must not ignore the legal issues: the Attorney-General would consider legal advice with FCO/MOD legal advisers. (I have written separately to commission this follow-up work.) MATTHEW RYCROFT (Rycroft was a Downing Street foreign policy aide) -- ------------------ War remains the decisive human failure. - John Kenneth Galbraith Jonathan web site at: http://elegant-technology.com -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://www.globalproblematique.net/pipermail/mai-not/attachments/20050506/0c8639eb/attachment.html From netcfs at shaw.ca Fri May 6 20:29:12 2005 From: netcfs at shaw.ca (Yves Bajard) Date: Fri May 6 20:29:18 2005 Subject: [Mai-not] The secret Downing Street memo In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <1115436552.5178.36.camel@Yves> If I remember well, MichaelP had already sent that memo to the list. It is available anyway on Greg Palast's website at www.GregPalast.com The Seattle Times and the Kansas City Star took it on their today's issue (see and for the Kansas City Star,a reproduction of the article in the Information Clearing House at http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article8757.htm. The article is by Warren P. Strobel and John Walcott and both papers are part of the Knight Ridder Newspapers.). We cannot expect that the BIG mainstream media will seize on the opportunity with all the necessary energy. An idea might be for all of you, Mainotters of US citizenship, to send to all members of the US Congress a personal letter,short and snappy, (and not a form letter) asking for immediate action toward impeaching the President with links to or appended copy of the article in the Times of London, i.e., of the memo itself (http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2087-1593607,00.html of the Gregg Palast article at http://www.gregpalast.com/, and of the Knight Ridder articles referred to above. Copy of these calls should be also sent to the Washington Post, the New York Times, the Boston Globe, The Miami Herald, the San Francisco Tribune and other prominent newspapers in the US. You might also find it udeful to alert other lists and networks you are linked to or part of, so that he movement snowballs toa critical size. Such an initiative might have some effect in the USA and it would show to us from the outside of the USA, that there still are people with some sense of civic responsibility and courage int eh USA. Cordially Yves Bajard PS: This is the frist time in my life where I regret not to be American.. (:-) Le vendredi 06 mai 2005 ? 19:38 -0500, Jonathan Larson a ?crit : > http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2087-1593607,00.html > > > The secret Downing Street memo > SECRET AND STRICTLY PERSONAL - UK EYES ONLY > > DAVID MANNING > From: Matthew Rycroft > Date: 23 July 2002 > S 195 /02 > ============================+++SNIP============================== From wochubb at escape.ca Fri May 6 20:43:28 2005 From: wochubb at escape.ca (William Chubb) Date: Fri May 6 20:44:29 2005 Subject: [Mai-not] Glad that mai-not is continuing Message-ID: <5.0.2.1.2.20050506223014.00aa8ba0@pop.escape.ca> I have been a subscriber almost since the list started. both for my own edification and to glean information that I can use in my attempts to subvert my MP's way of thinking. I don't swear I have been particularly successful but he did say he read everything I sent him ??? ( R. Allcock). I thank all those who post even if I disagree with a lot of what I read here. I have contributed in the past and will again. from an unreformed 88 year old radical W. O. Chubb 825-110 Adamar Rd Winnipeg MB R3T 3M3 E-Mail: wochubb@escape.ca M. K. Gandhi said: The world holds enough to satisfy everyone's needs but not everyone's greed. From duanebehrens at cox.net Fri May 6 21:03:01 2005 From: duanebehrens at cox.net (duanebehrens@cox.net) Date: Fri May 6 21:03:12 2005 Subject: [Mai-not] Glad that mai-not is continuing Message-ID: <20050507040301.FCZK16890.fed1rmmtao08.cox.net@smtp.west.cox.net> Well, William. . . I've never met you . . . but I'm sure I like you. Thanks for checking in. Duane Behrens William Chubb writes [snipped] > from an unreformed 88 year old radical > > > W. O. Chubb > 825-110 Adamar Rd > Winnipeg MB R3T 3M3 > E-Mail: wochubb@escape.ca > > M. K. Gandhi said: The world holds enough to satisfy everyone's needs > but not everyone's greed. > > _______________________________________________ > Mai-not mailing list > Mai-not@globalproblematique.net > http://www.globalproblematique.net/mailman/listinfo/mai-not > From dgiles at central.murdoch.edu.au Fri May 6 21:35:09 2005 From: dgiles at central.murdoch.edu.au (Dion Giles) Date: Fri May 6 21:35:14 2005 Subject: [Mai-not] Usury Message-ID: <6.1.1.1.0.20050507123152.02e7c8a0@central.murdoch.edu.au> An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://www.globalproblematique.net/pipermail/mai-not/attachments/20050507/39015291/attachment.html From dgiles at central.murdoch.edu.au Fri May 6 21:43:33 2005 From: dgiles at central.murdoch.edu.au (Dion Giles) Date: Fri May 6 21:43:39 2005 Subject: [Mai-not] The secret Downing Street memo In-Reply-To: <1115436552.5178.36.camel@Yves> References: <1115436552.5178.36.camel@Yves> Message-ID: <6.1.1.1.0.20050507123533.02fc3eb0@central.murdoch.edu.au> An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://www.globalproblematique.net/pipermail/mai-not/attachments/20050507/23e4f087/attachment.html From jfos at net-tech.com.au Fri May 6 23:07:19 2005 From: jfos at net-tech.com.au (John) Date: Sat May 7 01:00:39 2005 Subject: [Mai-not] DEPLETED URANIUM BURNING: AN ETERNAL MEDICAL DISASTER Issues on the Use and Effe Message-ID: <6.1.0.6.1.20050507160636.03523a80@mail.net-tech.com.au> http://www.xs4all.nl/~stgvisie/ud_main.html KeyWords: Depleted Uranium Medical Disaster, Afghanistan, Serbia, cancer, radioactivity, health, poison, toxins, Nato, politics, Europe, food Description: Depleted Uranium Medical Consequences Kosava/ Yugoslavie/ Iraq/ Netherlands/ UK/ Vieges Author: Hans de Jonge From jfos at net-tech.com.au Sat May 7 01:00:33 2005 From: jfos at net-tech.com.au (John) Date: Sat May 7 01:03:51 2005 Subject: [Mai-not] antiWar Mothers Day Message-ID: <6.1.0.6.1.20050507175736.03570d30@mail.net-tech.com.au> A poignant but disturbing plea from a grand-mother in Central America on behalf of thousands of poor Mexican women and others from the region's beseiged Central American countries. The torture-murders she refers to are very real, but mostly ignored by the (male) 'authorities' in the U$A, Mexico , Guatemala and the like, where life has become so cheap under Corporate Capitalism's 'Free Trade Agreements'. john To my son, to all the men i know and all the people i know: Charles Southwell's article on legitgov.org about it being time for the left to get well armed is what i would expect to see coming as it is from a right wing extremist position and in the tried and true approach of the right wooing the left. Legitgov is one of many bigoted websites that have graced the 911 Deception Dollars over the past few years. I have encountered this mindset before: at 2nd ammendment meetings here is Stevens County, WA during the heyday of the militia movement that then went incognito after Timothy McViegh's blunder in Oklahoma City. I talked to several notorious militia leaders in my region during this time who were speaking publicly about Jews, Race Mixers (which i am) and Homosexuals "needing some rope" among other delightful community projects. I did my homework as i was on their hit list due to my mixed race children and my unmarried status. I went to several such meetings and picked up at least a couple of boxes worth of their propaganda, including the Spotlight which went on to become the American Free Press, one of several rags promoting the views of David Duke, holocaust denier Eustace Mullins and Christian Identity nuts like Pete Peters. American Free Press also was featured on the Deception Dollars for the first 5 printings. Why the left could not detect this troublesome development only pointed clearly to it's across the board failure to uproot it's dyed in the wool bigotry. Such ignorance keeps the interest of the death squad mentality going as self imposed blindness is another form of welcome mat to killers and their ilk. Now we see the unfolding of the civil war, or the Racial Holy War, as the KKK and the Christian Identity prefer to call the conflict emerging along the US/Mexico border. Just check out the website of deceased bigot William Cooper (Comes a Pale Horse), where i frist came across the piece by Edgar J. Steele "In Defense of Racism" that describes the Racial Holy War (long promoted by Tom Metzger of the White Aryan Resistance) pitting white patriots against Mexicans and those Blacks who live in the south. The call by the Minutemen in southern Arizona to patrol the US/Mexican border is in fact the beginnings of outright annihilation of the unwanted in this country that for so long has operated under the dark of night and the safety of ignored violent white supremacy. Now the guys who showed up to patrol in southern Arizona are threatening to establish their vigilante presence in California (where Arnold loves them!) as well as Texas. Expanding the bigoted border patrol to Canada starting with Idaho and a few other northern border states is in the works. Until now the killings of marginalized, vilified peoples has gone unnoticed by most. The thousands of unsolved murders (many involving torture) of immigrants, prostitutes, Native Americans, homeless, African Americans, homosexuals that have taken place somewhat covertly have the unspoken sanction of Bush and his cronies. Anyone who pays attention will see how few of these murders of voiceless people are solved. Now we are approaching the time when openly killing them has the potential to errupt. What is wrong with people? What makes anyone on the so called left think that more guns and more killing will solve the crisis all humanity is faced with? Only the very privileged, those who refuse to do the hard work of examining their own prejudices, those who continue to fail to see the value in authentic egalitarianism could go for such an ill fated scheme. What stands out so loudly to me as a mother is the complete lack of consideration for the women and children who are the major casualties in so called war. We overwhelmingly have no voice, whether it is on the left that still has a remnant of conscience, the left that leans to the right that has never even tried to dismantle any bigotry or sexism or the right, which in my mind includes every other bigoted fundammentalist patriarch on the planet. In Ciudad Juarez across from El Paso, over 400 young womern have been murdered, 4000 missing since the North American Free Trade Agreement dumped cheap US corn on the market ruining a million and a half Mexican farmers forcing them and their families to flee north in search of work and food. These young murder victims are the price paid for free trade. An entire generation of young Mexican Indian women is being wiped out simply for the violent perverse pleasure of drug dealing kingpins, drug smuggling mutinous Mexican army assassins trained at the SOA and other depraved men getting off on pornographizing girls in the ultimate snuff fantasies. They get to live what most sick men only dream of with their video games and twisted porn rags and movies. Not one real killer has been apprehended and people minimize this situation due to the poverty and powerlessness of the women targeted and their families. I am inspired by the women, the Indigenous and Afro Colombians who have formed nonviolent communities of resistance in Colombia. They are fed up with the nearly half century old civil war that basically is between the US funded Colombian Military and Paramilitaries and the so called revolutionary groups like FARC and others that kill everyone no matter what side of the conflict they are on. The price paid by women and children is astronomical pressuring the UN High Commission on Refugees to compare their situation to that of the women and girls in Dafur, Africa. Femicide it is called. Yet the women of Ruta Pacifica have called on American women to heed their plight and spread the word of their double trouble on both sides of the conflict. They are raped and killed by FARC and by the Colombian military. When will it stop? Then the divisions plaguing any of us who hope for a livable future further the overwhelming hopelessness that does NOT have to be. People who care about the border complain about the attention the murdered women in Juarez get, while the same goes for those concerned about the over 1300 women and girls who have been similarly torture murdered in Guatemala. We cannot afford to be jealous of a line or two of attention given to a serious situation where no killers have been jailed and deaths continue. The common reality here is that free trade is the culprit that insures complete military protection as it's greed propels final corporate rape and pillage of all remaining resources, including the people! In Mexicao, it is NAFTA. In Guatemala, it is CAFTA. In Colombia, it is AFTA. Ecocide, Femicide, Genocide. All of us face a common fate. All of us. None will escape the unfolding horror. Arming ourselves will guarantee that it will get worse much quicker. The spirit of humanity's essence must prevail. Love is ALL we have and we need to be seriously putting it to use rather than hoarding what privilege remains. From the depths of my being, from my many years living with Pauline Whitesinger at Big Mountain supporting her resistance to final genocide, from all i have learned in my almost 55 years, i know that we must stand with LOVE and COURAGE for our children, for the coming generations, for our ailing Mother Earth. PLEASE, PEOPLE, WAKE UP! WE MUST COME TOGETHER WHEREVER WE CAN TO SOLVE THE WAR AT HOME THAT SIMPLY REFLECTS THE WAR IN IRAQ AND AFGHANISTAN. THE ROOTS OF ALL THE WORLD'S WARS ARE THE GREED OF CORPORATE FASCISM. We must take care of each other and put the petty conflicts aside, for we have everything to lose rather quickly. Finally, it is time to listen to the Grandmothers, the women, those most familiar with the repercussions of violent societies and the cost of war. Men must learn to honor their Mothers, Sisters, Lovers, Wives, Daughters as never before. You cannot go on molesing, raping, killing us nor can you stand by while others do it. STOP WAR FROM THE WORDS TO THE DEEDS. Happy Mother's Day, an old anti war day. In peaceful struggle, swaneagle From dgiles at central.murdoch.edu.au Sat May 7 02:57:13 2005 From: dgiles at central.murdoch.edu.au (Dion Giles) Date: Sat May 7 02:57:22 2005 Subject: [Mai-not] Yes sir. Thank you sir. Message-ID: <6.1.1.1.0.20050507175529.02cfa1a0@central.murdoch.edu.au> and may I lick your boots sir? http://www.nytimes.com/2005/05/07/national/07catholic.html?th&emc=th Dion Giles Western Australia From eltechno at clear.lakes.com Sat May 7 04:05:50 2005 From: eltechno at clear.lakes.com (Jonathan Larson) Date: Sat May 7 04:07:33 2005 Subject: [Mai-not] Darwin's Lament Message-ID: Darwin's Lament May 7, 2005 By punpirate http://www.democraticunderground.com/articles/05/05/07_darwin.html Okay, maybe I'm just confused again, but, from what I can see, the state of Kansas, in answer to the stupidest quiz show question of all (what state is determined to utterly undermine the Enlightenment?), jumps up and says, "Me! Me! Me! Pick me!" Every day, Kansans, even those who think the Bible is the inerrant word of God, no exceptions, no qualifications, no hesitations, no thought about it whatsoever, get into an encapsulate object made of metal, vinyl and glass, insert a small metal object into a specially-designed receptable, turn that object and begin to pump hydrocarbons into a specially-designed metal object which turns those hydrocarbons into heat, which causes that encapsulated larger object to move. Ever hear a born-again Kansan rail against the science that made the automobile? Nope, me neither. Periodically, some of those Kansans get into a long metal tube with wings (some of which are made in, gasp, Wichita, Kansas!), strap themselves in and are then accelerated to nearly 600 mph and are lifted into the sky to an altitude of about 33,000 feet, without the aid of Jesus, and directed to their destination by a strange assemblage of wires and glass known as a klystron tube (or its post-millennial equivalent), an essential part of what silly scientists refer to as radar. Ever hear a born-again Kansan harp about the inherent ungodliness of airplanes? Nope, me neither. Or wail about the evil of having to pick up a plastic pen, or drag a synthetic rubber-hosed sprinkler into the back yard and turn the handle of a sophisticated metal and plastic object and have water come out, water provided by distant, complicated pumps (run by even more distant and more complicated generators making the electricity to run them) and industrial processes to kill the germs and remove the gritty bits as flocculants, and inject a bit of sodium fluoride to keep their teeth strong and free of cavities? Me neither. Hell, their preachers love polyester leisure suits. Ever hear them talk about spinning wool from polyester sheep to clothe their mentors? Me neither. Well, folks, everyone takes it for granted, but all that's the result of science. What's Kansas complaining about, then? Uh, umm, science. Not the science that makes automobiles, or airplanes, or water valves or polyester leisure suits (well, maybe we should all complain about that aspect of it), but, rather, Darwin's theory of evolution, as he described in his Origin of the Species. Why on earth would they complain about that? Umm, there's that little bit in the Bible called Genesis, which says, essentially, that whatever creative mischief done by whatever being creating this little orb we know of as Earth did it in six days. Everything. Sculpting, watering, landscaping, stocking the refrigerator with tasty animal bits, the works--and, oh, yes, creating that odd little conflicted, neurotic, highly imaginative bipedal animal known as man, some examples of whom have recently taken to believing ancient texts as perfect and unchangeable and emanating from said mischievous creator being, absolute and inviolate, a few thousand years ago. So, they have complained to the Kansas state school board that science is a "belief system," the same as their belief in the Bible as the inerrant word of said mischievous creator being. Well, folks, I can guess who's been asleep during biology class for the last hundred or so years, or has been sticking their fingers in their ears, or has been drawing pictures of Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell in the margins of their books. If they hadn't been, they'd have understood that science, if anything at all, isn't a belief system, if only because the heart and soul of it depends not on belief, but, rather, on skepticism. Want proof of that? Just go back fifteen years and read about the brouhaha over cold fusion. But, back to Darwin. Darwin said something that got the fundamentalists--the people who believe that the mischievous creator being of the Bible created everything (except Buicks and lawn sprinklers and 110 volts on demand and bad suits) in six days--very upset. Darwin said, "y'know, guys, we're so much like apes that we probably came from them, hundreds of thousands of years ago." Imagine Marlon Brando, wiping the malarial sweat from his shiny, shaven pate, clutching a Bible instead of a copy of The Golden Bough, groaning, "the horror, the horror." Yup, you've got the emotional extent of the fundamentalists' reaction to Darwin's little scientific observation. They were so upset that when a Tennessee biology teacher named John Scopes dared teach Darwin's theory of evolution in his classes in the `20s, they put him, and Darwin, on trial. They hired the most prominent populist and defender of the common man of the day, William Jennings Bryan, to defend them and their right to have science barred from high school biology, in defense of "traditional values." Tennessee had an anti-evolution statute, and that was the premise for the case, but it wasn't about just challenging that law. At its root, it was about "ordinary people" having some choice about what was taught in their local schools to their children, even if most of them were illiterate and uneducated. It was about limiting education to whatever the community believed to be true. Protestants arguing about grandpa monkeys weren't the first instance of this sort of aberrant logic. Nearly three hundred years prior, another scientist by the name of Galileo Galilei ran afoul of the dominant church of the time by suggesting that the sun and the other heavenly bodies didn't revolve around the earth. His book on the subject was banned, he was convicted of heresy in 1633, and was kept under house arrest for the rest of his life. In 1979, 346 years later, the then-current pope, John Paul II uttered the polite and politic equivalent of "oops," and said, well, maybe we were wrong, despite the sin and corruption the Inquisition had found in the soul of Galileo. It only took the officialdom of the Catholic Church another thirteen years to formally declare, "uh, well, maybe we were wrong about that heavenly bodies thingie." John Scopes and his lawyer, Clarence Darrow, sort of won in 1925. Galileo sort of won in 1992. Most of us thought that would be the end of religion shoving its bristled porcine nose against the pristine bell jar of science, but, no. Not by a long shot. There was still Kansas, and the rest of the states with vocal extreme minorities believing in the Dark Ages. With the help of corrupt and ambitious politicians, they began their attempt to make their religion the only authority of value in a secular society, even if their Constitution and ours said, "unh, uh, bub" to mixing state and religion. Thus they begat the culture wars. So, today, Darwin is once again on trial. Who cares if the human genome project has shown that humans and chimpanzees have 98.4% of their genes in common? Who cares if increasingly accurate radiological dating techniques put the age of the earth at about 4.5 billion years old? Who cares if the human limbic system resembles, in structure and function, that of a reptile brain? Who cares? The true believers. The born-again Christians who see metaphorical, best-guesses of the ancients' stories in the Bible as the literal truth, and their political friends who want to make political hay while riding the crest of this fervent minority's beliefs. More than fifty years ago, Eric Hoffer, in The True Believer, has something to say about such people and their politicians: Pascal was of the opinion that "one was well-minded to understand holy writ when one hated onself." There is apparently some connection between dissatisfaction with oneself and a proneness to credulity. The urge to escape our real self is also an urge to escape the rational and the obvious. The refusal to see ourselves as we are develops a distaste for facts and cold logic. There is no hope for the frustrated in the actual and the possible. Salvation can come to them only from the miraculous, which seeps through a crack in the iron wall of inexorable reality. They ask to be deceived. What Stresseman said of the Germans is true of the frustrated in general: "[They] pray not only for [their] daily bread, but also for [their] daily illusion." The rule seems to be that those who find no difficulty in deceiving themselves are easily deceived by others. They are easily persuaded and led. ... The inability or unwillingness to see things as they are promotes both gullibility and charlatanism. Seeing things as they are... that would be a good definition of what we might hope science will eventually help us do as a race and as the sentient stewards of our little orb. If we, as a society, cannot respect and understand the science we have created out of our own imaginations and our rational thought processes, cannot transmit that rigorous spirit of inquiry and curiosity to our progeny, then we shall have no choice but to fall back into that chaos and misery and tyranny, political and literal, of the Dark Ages. punpirate is a New Mexico writer who is looking for the light. -- ------------------ War remains the decisive human failure. - John Kenneth Galbraith Jonathan web site at: http://elegant-technology.com -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://www.globalproblematique.net/pipermail/mai-not/attachments/20050507/f18fdc75/attachment.html From papadop at peak.org Sat May 7 09:42:48 2005 From: papadop at peak.org (MichaelP) Date: Sat May 7 09:43:01 2005 Subject: [Mai-not] Paparatzinger strikes at exchange of ideas Message-ID: Do I recall correctly that the Inquisition developed into the "Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith" all under Jesuit auspices? Michael ============= http://www.nytimes.com/2005/05/07/national/07catholic.html?th&emc=th&oref=login By LAURIE GOODSTEIN NY Times ( susbscriber URL) Published: May 7, 2005 An American Jesuit who is a frequent television commentator on Roman Catholic issues resigned yesterday under orders from the Vatican as editor of the Catholic magazine America because he had published articles critical of church positions, several Catholic officials in the United States said. The order to dismiss the editor, the Rev. Thomas J. Reese, was issued by the Vatican's office of doctrinal enforcement - the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith - in mid-March when that office was still headed by Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, the officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak on the matter, said. Soon after, Pope John Paul II died and Cardinal Ratzinger was elected pope, taking the name Benedict XVI. Related America Magazine America magazine, a weekly based in New York City, is a moderate-to-liberal journal published by the Jesuits, a religious order known for producing the scholars who run many of the church's universities and schools. The Jesuits prize their independence, but like everyone in the church, even their top official, the Jesuit superior general in Rome, ultimately answers to the pope. In recent years America has featured articles representing more than one side on sensitive issues like same-sex marriage, relations with Islam and whether Catholic politicians who support abortion rights should be given communion. Church officials said it was the publication of some of these articles that prompted Vatican scrutiny. Father Reese, in a statement yesterday, confirmed his departure but gave no indication that he was resigning under duress: "I am proud of what my colleagues and I did with the magazine, and I am grateful to them, our readers and our benefactors for the support they gave me. I look forward to taking a sabbatical while my provincial and I determine the next phase of my Jesuit ministry." Catholic scholars and writers said in interviews yesterday that they feared that the dismissal of such a highly visible Catholic commentator was intended by the Vatican as a signal that debating church teaching is outside the bounds. Some Jesuits said that within the last two years they had received spoken or written warnings from then-Cardinal Ratzinger's office about articles or books they had published. Stephen Pope, a moral theologian at Boston College who wrote the article critical of the church's position on same-sex marriage, said of the dismissal: "If this is true, it's going to make Catholic theologians who want to ask critical questions not want to publish in Catholic journals. It can have a chilling effect." Father Reese, who is 60 and has been editor of America for seven years, is a widely regarded political scientist. He has written several books that examine the Roman Catholic Church as a political institution as well as a religious one, a rather secular approach that was not appreciated in Cardinal Ratzinger's office, an official there said in an interview last month. Jesuit officials said Father Reese was informed of his ouster just after he had returned from Rome, where he had been interviewed by nearly every major American news outlet covering the pope's funeral and the elevation of Cardinal Ratzinger to pope. He is being replaced by his deputy, the Rev. Drew Christiansen, a Jesuit who writes often on social ethics and international issues, and whom Father Reese recruited to the magazine in 2002. Catholic experts said yesterday that they were stunned to learn of Father Reese's dismissal. "I'd think of him as sort of a mainstream liberal," said Philip F. Lawler, the editor of Catholic World News, a news outlet on the more conservative end of the spectrum. "I think he's been reasonably politic. I watched him during the transition, and I cannot think of a single thing I heard that would have put him in jeopardy." The Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith first complained to Jesuit officials about the magazine four years ago, the church officials said, after America published a special issue with articles criticizing "Dominus Jesus," a document on interfaith relations and the supremacy of Catholicism that had been issued by the Congregation. Dominus Jesus was broadly denounced by many Catholic and non-Catholic theologians who said it would undermine decades of bridge-building with other faiths, and even with other Christian denominations. "They were just reporting what a lot of people were saying, they weren't stirring up trouble," said the Rev. Mark Massa, a Jesuit who leads the Center for American Catholic Studies at Fordham University. "I can't think of anything they've reported that was scandalous." Related America Magazine Cardinal Ratzinger's office also complained to the Jesuits about articles America had published on gay priests and on the work of the Congregation itself. The Congregation threatened either to order the dismissal of Father Reese or to impose a committee of censors to review the magazine's content, but backed down after discussions with the Jesuits, church officials said in interviews yesterday. The magazine then began to more regularly solicit articles examining a single issue from a variety of viewpoints. In 2001, it published a piece Father Reese had solicited from then-Cardinal Ratzinger as a response to an article by Cardinal Walter Kasper, a German who works in the Vatican, that had criticized the Vatican and in particular the Congregation as failing to give local churches and bishops sufficient autonomy. "For a long while," Cardinal Ratzinger wrote, "I hesitated to accept this invitation because I do not want to foster the impression that there is a longstanding theological dispute between Cardinal Kasper and myself, when in fact none exists." Then in 2004, the Congregation took issue with two more articles: one by Professor Pope of Boston College on same-sex marriage, which criticized the Congregation for issuing a document that he argued dehumanized gay men and lesbians; and one by Representative David R. Obey, a Wisconsin Democrat, who bristled at bishops who would deny communion to Catholic politicians like himself who support abortion rights. In both of these cases, Father Reese published opposing viewpoints. Mr. Obey's piece was actually a response to an earlier article in America by Archbishop Raymond L. Burke, now of St. Louis, who had called for Catholic politicians who support abortion rights to change their positions or be denied communion. The Rev. Richard John Neuhaus, editor of another Catholic journal based in New York, First Things, which is more conservative than America, said yesterday, "It would be fair to say that during the pontificate of John Paul II that America apparently saw itself or at least certainly read as a magazine of what some would describe as the loyal opposition. And, needless to say, there's dispute over the definition of 'loyal' and the definition of 'opposition.' " But Father Neuhaus added that he considered Father Reese a friend who was always "fair-minded" even when they disagreed. At the Jesuits' American headquarters in Washington, a spokesman, the Rev. Albert Diulio, said Father Reese and his provincial had jointly agreed on the job change. But he said he did not know if Father Reese had resigned under duress. The Rev. Thomas Smolich, who as the Jesuit provincial of California is Father Reese's supervisor, said he was discussing with Father Reese about what he would do next. "Tom is a very talented guy," he said. "There are many things he could do in Jesuit and Catholic ministries, in a university, in journalism of some kind." After the election of Pope Benedict XVI, America ran an editorial that said: "A church that cannot openly discuss issues is a church retreating into an intellectual ghetto." From netcfs at shaw.ca Sat May 7 11:31:24 2005 From: netcfs at shaw.ca (Yves Bajard) Date: Sat May 7 11:31:34 2005 Subject: [Mai-not] Paparatzinger strikes at exchange of ideas In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <1115490684.5178.56.camel@Yves> No, Michael, The Inquisition was part of the tasks of the Dominican Order, long before the Jesuits Order was founded and Iignacio de Loyola was born.. They were very active during and after the repression of Catharism in southern France (XIIIth and XIVthe centuries..) Cordially Yves Bajard Le samedi 07 mai 2005 ? 09:42 -0700, MichaelP a ?crit : > Do I recall correctly that the Inquisition developed into the > "Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith" all under Jesuit auspices? > > Michael > > > ============= > > http://www.nytimes.com/2005/05/07/national/07catholic.html?th&emc=th&oref=login > > By LAURIE GOODSTEIN NY Times ( susbscriber URL) Published: May 7, 2005 > > An American Jesuit who is a frequent television commentator on Roman > Catholic issues resigned yesterday under orders from the Vatican as editor > of the Catholic magazine America because he had published articles > critical of church positions, several Catholic officials in the United > States said. > > The order to dismiss the editor, the Rev. Thomas J. Reese, was issued by > the Vatican's office of doctrinal enforcement - the Congregation for the > Doctrine of the Faith - in mid-March when that office was still headed by > Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, the officials, who spoke on condition of > anonymity because they were not authorized to speak on the matter, said. > Soon after, Pope John Paul II died and Cardinal Ratzinger was elected > pope, taking the name Benedict XVI. Related America Magazine > > America magazine, a weekly based in New York City, is a > moderate-to-liberal journal published by the Jesuits, a religious order > known for producing the scholars who run many of the church's universities > and schools. The Jesuits prize their independence, but like everyone in > the church, even their top official, the Jesuit superior general in Rome, > ultimately answers to the pope. > > In recent years America has featured articles representing more than one > side on sensitive issues like same-sex marriage, relations with Islam and > whether Catholic politicians who support abortion rights should be given > communion. Church officials said it was the publication of some of these > articles that prompted Vatican scrutiny. > > Father Reese, in a statement yesterday, confirmed his departure but gave > no indication that he was resigning under duress: "I am proud of what my > colleagues and I did with the magazine, and I am grateful to them, our > readers and our benefactors for the support they gave me. I look forward > to taking a sabbatical while my provincial and I determine the next phase > of my Jesuit ministry." > > Catholic scholars and writers said in interviews yesterday that they > feared that the dismissal of such a highly visible Catholic commentator > was intended by the Vatican as a signal that debating church teaching is > outside the bounds. > > Some Jesuits said that within the last two years they had received spoken > or written warnings from then-Cardinal Ratzinger's office about articles > or books they had published. > > Stephen Pope, a moral theologian at Boston College who wrote the article > critical of the church's position on same-sex marriage, said of the > dismissal: "If this is true, it's going to make Catholic theologians who > want to ask critical questions not want to publish in Catholic journals. > It can have a chilling effect." > > Father Reese, who is 60 and has been editor of America for seven years, is > a widely regarded political scientist. He has written several books that > examine the Roman Catholic Church as a political institution as well as a > religious one, a rather secular approach that was not appreciated in > Cardinal Ratzinger's office, an official there said in an interview last > month. > > Jesuit officials said Father Reese was informed of his ouster just after > he had returned from Rome, where he had been interviewed by nearly every > major American news outlet covering the pope's funeral and the elevation > of Cardinal Ratzinger to pope. > > He is being replaced by his deputy, the Rev. Drew Christiansen, a Jesuit > who writes often on social ethics and international issues, and whom > Father Reese recruited to the magazine in 2002. > > Catholic experts said yesterday that they were stunned to learn of Father > Reese's dismissal. "I'd think of him as sort of a mainstream liberal," > said Philip F. Lawler, the editor of Catholic World News, a news outlet on > the more conservative end of the spectrum. "I think he's been reasonably > politic. I watched him during the transition, and I cannot think of a > single thing I heard that would have put him in jeopardy." > > The Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith first complained to Jesuit > officials about the magazine four years ago, the church officials said, > after America published a special issue with articles criticizing "Dominus > Jesus," a document on interfaith relations and the supremacy of > Catholicism that had been issued by the Congregation. > > Dominus Jesus was broadly denounced by many Catholic and non-Catholic > theologians who said it would undermine decades of bridge-building with > other faiths, and even with other Christian denominations. > > "They were just reporting what a lot of people were saying, they weren't > stirring up trouble," said the Rev. Mark Massa, a Jesuit who leads the > Center for American Catholic Studies at Fordham University. "I can't think > of anything they've reported that was scandalous." Related America > Magazine > > Cardinal Ratzinger's office also complained to the Jesuits about articles > America had published on gay priests and on the work of the Congregation > itself. The Congregation threatened either to order the dismissal of > Father Reese or to impose a committee of censors to review the magazine's > content, but backed down after discussions with the Jesuits, church > officials said in interviews yesterday. > > The magazine then began to more regularly solicit articles examining a > single issue from a variety of viewpoints. In 2001, it published a piece > Father Reese had solicited from then-Cardinal Ratzinger as a response to > an article by Cardinal Walter Kasper, a German who works in the Vatican, > that had criticized the Vatican and in particular the Congregation as > failing to give local churches and bishops sufficient autonomy. > > "For a long while," Cardinal Ratzinger wrote, "I hesitated to accept this > invitation because I do not want to foster the impression that there is a > longstanding theological dispute between Cardinal Kasper and myself, when > in fact none exists." > > Then in 2004, the Congregation took issue with two more articles: one by > Professor Pope of Boston College on same-sex marriage, which criticized > the Congregation for issuing a document that he argued dehumanized gay men > and lesbians; and one by Representative David R. Obey, a Wisconsin > Democrat, who bristled at bishops who would deny communion to Catholic > politicians like himself who support abortion rights. > > In both of these cases, Father Reese published opposing viewpoints. Mr. > Obey's piece was actually a response to an earlier article in America by > Archbishop Raymond L. Burke, now of St. Louis, who had called for Catholic > politicians who support abortion rights to change their positions or be > denied communion. > > The Rev. Richard John Neuhaus, editor of another Catholic journal based in > New York, First Things, which is more conservative than America, said > yesterday, "It would be fair to say that during the pontificate of John > Paul II that America apparently saw itself or at least certainly read as a > magazine of what some would describe as the loyal opposition. And, > needless to say, there's dispute over the definition of 'loyal' and the > definition of 'opposition.' " > > But Father Neuhaus added that he considered Father Reese a friend who was > always "fair-minded" even when they disagreed. > > At the Jesuits' American headquarters in Washington, a spokesman, the Rev. > Albert Diulio, said Father Reese and his provincial had jointly agreed on > the job change. But he said he did not know if Father Reese had resigned > under duress. > > The Rev. Thomas Smolich, who as the Jesuit provincial of California is > Father Reese's supervisor, said he was discussing with Father Reese about > what he would do next. "Tom is a very talented guy," he said. "There are > many things he could do in Jesuit and Catholic ministries, in a > university, in journalism of some kind." > > After the election of Pope Benedict XVI, America ran an editorial that > said: "A church that cannot openly discuss issues is a church retreating > into an intellectual ghetto." > > _______________________________________________ > Mai-not mailing list > Mai-not@globalproblematique.net > http://www.globalproblematique.net/mailman/listinfo/mai-not From eltechno at clear.lakes.com Sat May 7 13:47:28 2005 From: eltechno at clear.lakes.com (Jonathan Larson) Date: Sat May 7 13:48:40 2005 Subject: [Mai-not] Tsunami '06: Put a stake through the heart of the GOP Message-ID: 'Tsunami '06: Put a stake through the heart of the GOP' May 07 @ 08:16:34 EDT . Totalize It, And Put A Stake Through The Heart Of This Monster, Once And For All By David Michael Green, Common Dreams http://www.commondreams.org/views05/0411-21.htm Democrats couldn't win a campaign if they had Field Marshal Rommel and a division or six of panzers with which to do it. Republicans are so skilled at marketing they have been able to sell an administration that makes Enron look like a model of comparative probity and success. Or such was the case. The latter half of this equation is now growing stale. The wheels are coming off the wagon, and the main question remaining is can Democrats, mired in despondency and debilitation since Reagan rode up, find the smarts and guts to take advantage of a once-in-a-generation opportunity. The stakes could not be higher. There is the chance in 2006 to kill the abomination of contemporary American regressivism (what the right likes to call conservatism) altogether, wholly and decisively. The model would be the Labour Party's long-term rout of the Conservatives in Britain. After eighteen years of increasingly unpopular rule, with most of that under the abrasive and arrogant Margaret Thatcher, the Conservatives could have been beaten by a volleyball named Wilson in 1997. This week's election has again demonstrated just that concept, given the current distrust and unpopularity of Tony Blair. He has nevertheless still won reelection as - even a decade later - overwhelming margins of the country remain completely unwilling to trust the Tories with the keys to government. The same could happen in the US, in 2006. What is required to win is a totalizing campaign strategy. Democrats must of course have the courage of their convictions to run aggressively, but they must also totalize the campaign ideologically and geographically, turning it into a referendum on the failed policies of Bush and all those on the right. Powerful signs nowadays suggest that the smoke and mirrors of Rove and Company have grown tedious to all but those true believers for whom regressive Republicanism has become a religion - quite literally, as well as figuratively. For a president and congress newly installed just three months ago, this change in fortunes has been remarkably precipitous. Far from the mandate Bush claimed in November, the guy can't seem to do anything now. Every time he parts the smirk long enough to utter some mangled pablum about Social Security 'reform', he actually loses public and congressional support, rather than gaining it. Likewise, both he and his allies took a considerable hit on the Terri Schiavo fiasco, and are doing so again with their hysterical attacks upon the very judges their own party placed on the bench. Now Tom DeLay's deodorant has gone on strike, yet his Republican colleagues foolishly attach themselves to this drowning pol and his cement shoes of exponentially escalating scandal. Meanwhile, Bush's sinking job approval ratings are far lower than those of any president ever at 100 days into a second term. Bolton is tanking. Ethics rigging is tanking. Even the nuclear option is tanking, except in North Korea and Iran, both of which are demonstrating for the good Senator Frist how it's properly done. All this while Greenland is melting faster than gas prices are rising, and Republicans in Texas and elsewhere are suing Bush (yes, you read that right) over the No Child Left Behind albatross which he's saddled upon them. Even the Terminator has now predictably commenced his self-destruct sequence, and may ultimately count himself lucky if he can escape back to Austria before Californians string him up for those sexual predations which somehow don't seem so boyishly cute anymore. All this means that Democrats, who have in recent years elevated to an art form the snatching of defeat from the jaws of victory, now have the opportunity of a generation hanging like ripe fruit before them. It always struck me that losing the presidency in 2004 could prove a blessing in disguise - provided that the right did not then take the full fascist plunge and use its lock on national power to kill off altogether that whole pesky democracy thing (still a very scary possibility). That is, instead of the election producing the singular 'victory' of a weak, badgered and hapless Kerry presidency, relentlessly hounded by the dark cadres of regressivism and - judging by what we saw in the campaign - completely incapable of effectively responding, progressives could instead lose the presidency battle in 2004 and hope, ironically, to thereby win the wider war for America. Now that possibility looms large on the horizon, much earlier than might have been imagined. Yes, Republicans control all three branches of government and have achieved everything they have so far sought, but this victory is morphing from juggernaut to bull's-eye underneath their feet. Their destructive agenda was never popular on its own merits, and was therefore always dependent upon world-class marketing expertise to keep it afloat. Those deceits now wear thin. When it comes to American government, they have broken it, they own it, and they can no longer plausibly redirect public dissatisfaction with their failures onto Bill Clinton, Janet Jackson or sundry Teletubbies. Americans are waking up with a bad headache the morning after their lost weekend of hallucinatory imbibing, and they don't like what they see, even if it is still kinda blurry. Of course, there's always the jingoism card to play, but - two wars later - very likely even that dependable old dog won't hunt anymore. Meanwhile, the economy is anemic for working Americans while the rich grow fatter and, if the Republican government acts at all, it renders the situation worse, not better. Even the use of cultural issues such as gay-bashing can be effectively turned against the right in the form of political jujitsu, if only Democrats have the courage and the smarts. This simply requires pointing out to independent, centrist voters how issues of key importance to them are ignored by Republicans, who instead indulge their obsessions with other people's sexuality and with the ever-deeper invasion of Americans' personal privacy. Granted, history suggests that such courage and smarts are iffy propositions indeed for Democrats, but recent behavior has been encouraging, and 2006 presents the party with an opportunity to redeem itself in a huge way. The trick will be to pull out a big stick and swing it hard. In addition to the opportunities presented by the heightened vulnerabilities of the right's house of cards politics, Democrats can reap the benefits of conviction, the sheer power of which (irrespective of the ideological flavor in question), they have lost sight of for a quarter-century. This is what Harry Truman and Ronald Reagan knew, and Democrats today do not. People do not want to be desultorily presided over. They want to be led, they want the security of being led firmly, and they will follow you to all kinds of different places if you simply go. Should Democrats find the means to actually stand firm for their core values, they may learn that sometimes good policy is also good politics. There are many themes which the party should hammer hard upon to win decisively in 2006, including the Iraq lies, the economic struggles of middle America, the concentration of power (which American political culture historically loathes, regardless of party) in Republican hands, and GOP arrogance and corruption. What is most important, however, is to make the strategic decision to totalize the election, on two dimensions. The first and most significant is ideological. Now is the opportunity to put the entirety of the conservative scourge away for the foreseeable future by running against the right, as the right. That is, Democrats should be making the case against the full GOP experiment in regressive politics, which the right has now largely implemented, and which voters can now assess - but only if they are prompted to perceive the package as a package. In short, it is essential to force Republicans to own the totality of their record, and then to turn the election into a public referendum on the continuing desirability of the right-wing lunacy which now has the country in its grips. Given the current climate it would be the height of folly, the greatest failure of imagination, and the world's worst marketing cock-up since the New Coke, for Democrats to run on a series of individual issues. Instead, they should hoist Republicans with their own petards, and let Americans judge whether they like what they see. Many - including the scary millions of glassy-eyed political moonies of the right - will. But most won't. The result could well be a powerful and lasting mandate against the full panoply of caustic conservative policies too long abrading the American body politic, as opposed to an incremental and piecemeal victory on a couple of issues, or in a few congressional districts. This is important. If Democrats are bold and clever, the ruinous turn to the right which has infected America and tormented the world for a quarter-century can possibly be repudiated in toto. Doing so takes marketing savvy to frame it for what it actually is - a concerted, integrated movement - and boldness to go after it as such, labeling it a disastrously failed experiment conducted by ideological fanatics. This is about changing political consciousness in this country. It requires getting Americans to collectively associate with the GOP and conservatism everything they don't like regarding current policies and conditions, so that they can then decide to reject the GOP and conservatism. What is at stake here is the difference between success on, say, Social Security and maybe a few judgeships, versus taking down, hard, the entirety of the radical right for the foreseeable future. It is the difference between winning isolated skirmishes as against ultimate victory in a war. Democrats must turn the campaign into a totalized struggle against an ideology, and the party advancing it, which are bankrupting the country, pursuing reckless and failed foreign policies, ignoring domestic security, and destroying popular programs like Social Security and Medicare. Then, when they win big in November 2006, they must show the smarts to frame that victory (and set it up for the press) as a wholesale repudiation of the regressive right experiment, just as the right adroitly and effectively floated the "moral values" and presidential "mandate" claims following the 2004 election. Of course, an explicitly ideological campaign has always been a non-starter in America, and is especially so now that the very term liberalism has become so tainted. I am not arguing that Democrats should run on the slogan "choose liberalism, not conservatism", particularly when so many more Americans self-identify today as the latter rather than the former. But running against the concentrated power, corruption, arrogance and mismanagement of the Republican Party and its agenda - as a package - would be a winner, and one which could take down the whole apparatus at once, not just the least popular parts of it. But this alone is not enough. The second approach by which Democrats should totalize the next election, and one which also jibes perfectly with ideological warfare, calls for employing a national strategy. That means running everywhere against the national party instead of - the other profound blunder Democrats could make in 2006 - against individual candidates, on the basis of local issues, in each district and state race. The so-called 'Republican Revolution' of 1994, which flipped both houses of Congress into GOP hands for the first time in decades, employed this strategy and points the way to victory here. Every Republican running for office, regardless of their individual positions, should be bound and tied to Republicanism and its myriad failures in Washington until they appear joined at the very hip. Democrats must morph their opponents across the country into an army of faceless Tom DeLay and George Bush clones. Employing both these strategies could generate a political tsunami in 2006, sweeping new Democratic majorities into both houses of Congress, propelled by a general public dissatisfaction with the experience of conservative policy choices. Elections in the sixth year of a presidency usually produce a wide swing in favor of the opposition party, but given the current political climate 2006 has the potential to generate unusually profound changes on the American political landscape. The simple truth is that Bush has been a sinking ship of a president from the beginning, combining radical and unpopular policies with presidential (though not political) ineptitude and transparent personal insecurities. Talk about hitting the trifecta. He has been rescued only by the perfect storm of 9/11-driven rally-round-the-flag sympathies, a highly skilled and equally savage political team, a free pass from America's biased and/or intimidated press, and the gift of two breathtakingly bungling (when not cowardly) electoral opponents, with a Democratic Party to match. In short, this has long been an apparently powerful presidency and associated ideological movement which has utilized bluster, craft and luck to barely mask its actual high degree of vulnerability, all the more so now. All that was ever required to bring it down was the simple combination of strategic smarts and the courage of conviction. Indeed, the latter alone would probably have been enough, and would have gone a long ways toward substituting for the former anyhow. What is more, the likelihood of a GOP electoral unraveling will be especially high when the economy heads south (as it inevitably will, and may be already - perhaps dramatically so, given the lurking disasters of the debt, trade deficit, sinking dollar, etc.). This will leave the sitting government to face a surly public as a backdrop to likely scandal. I have long suspected that this phenomenon, in reverse, is precisely what saved Clinton during his impeachment debacle. Had the economy not been so robust, it is not at all clear to me that he would have survived. In any case, if a popular president could be impeached during munificent times for lying about a minor sexual peccadillo, imagine what could become of the unpopular and transparently duplicitous Bush should control of Congress change hands, the economy tank badly, the war continue to spiral out of control with no end in sight, and major scandals then starting to break. And imagine if one of those scandals involved the stealing of the election in either 2000, 2004, or both, further undermining an unpopular president's legitimacy and further antagonizing an increasingly angry public. The key for Democrats is to give Americans a real alternative to vote for, not some weak impersonation of the GOP in drag. This means, in the coming cycle, running a strategically smart campaign, words which in recent years have not oft been found in the same sentence as 'Democratic Party'. But it also means showing some guts, for once, by standing for something clearly and emphatically - even if it is only, for starters, a firm rejection of regressive conservatism. The prize for finally getting it right could not be greater. An already lame-duck presidency would be completely hobbled on domestic policy, to the point of being a dead duck. Even major foreign policy initiatives could be blocked through the power of the purse, if necessary. Popular progressive legislation could be passed, forcing Bush to veto laws like a minimum wage hike, which would serve to further out him as a corporate shill. Legislative disasters of the past four years, such as crippling tax cuts for the rich and No Child Left Behind, could be undone with the backing of considerable public support, and under the rubric of just that - undoing the mistakes of the past four years. Right-wing judicial and executive appointments would be DOA. Most importantly, Congress could begin again to perform one of its most essential functions - executive oversight - forcing testimony from the administration and other witnesses, and investigating the myriad scandals now bottled up by Bush's intransigence and Republican complicity on the Hill. To choose but the most obvious examples, it is breathtaking to consider that the torture fiasco sullying worldwide America's already heavily-tarnished reputation has never been properly investigated by Congress, even though documentary smoking-gun evidence now substantiates that the policies were made at the highest levels of the government. Obviously, that ain't gonna happen as long as DeLay the Thug and Frist the Puppet are running things there. Then there is also the matter of GOP election thievery in both 2000 and 2004, pre-war intelligence manipulation on Iraq, the Valerie Plame affair, and so on. Undoubtedly there's far more where these scandals came from, and the list of improprieties for which these clowns are responsible would surely prove endless. What is more, if Congress actually began doing its job in this respect, the press could hardly continue to ignore such exposed scandals, and would finally begin doing theirs as well. Forced cabinet-level resignations (start polishing your resume, Don) and even impeachments (give Poppy a call, W) would not be out of the question. A liberal hallucination? Perhaps. But, regressive conservatism generally, and the Bush administration particularly, has always been a house of cards waiting for even a slight wind to come along and knock it down. Many Americans would find themselves astonished at how fast the whole apparatus might crumble once a single card were removed. These guys will not have to be marched back to Berlin, block by bloody block. Rather, they have depended on an inherently unstable constellation of a compliant press, fears of external enemies, a remarkably incompetent 'opposition' party, and a generally tuned-out public, in order to continue convincing a sufficient number of people that the emperor is indeed wearing clothes. My read on this volatile condition is that once one of these legs gets yanked out from underneath their rickety contraption, only two paths forward would remain probable. One would be an implosion of the entire apparatus as the dominos start falling. That would mean the end of Bush, and the end of America's 21st century flirtation with returning to the 13th. But, with regressives well understanding the likelihood of that eventuality transpiring, the other possibility is far more ominous: a turn toward full-scale fascism as their only means of retaining power. Think of Dick Cheney in a very bad mood. Should such an attempt occur, we will then test as never before the challenge Benjamin Franklin proffered when he emerged from Constitution Hall and was asked what sort of government he and his fellow Founders had given us: "A republic", he said, "if you can keep it". The prospect of a rapidly destructing regressive movement in America is neither a liberal fantasy, nor predicated on a sequence of ridiculously improbable requisite developments. Indeed, the background pieces are already in place: an unpopular president heading toward deeper unpopularity on the basis of his policies alone, a weak economy undercutting increasingly frustrated working Americans, and a press which is now timid but could not ignore stories of such magnitude. All that is missing is a Democratic congress with the guts to lift the lid on the cesspool of the Bush administration. Given general public dissatisfaction with the country's direction, a Democratic rout in 2006 is hardly a fanciful prospect, and its impact might be felt for a generation. But not if the past remains prologue. Since 1980, Democrats have been trying to bunt their way onto first base, with disastrous results. Even on the rare occasions when they win (e.g., Bill Clinton), they lose (e.g., Bill Clinton's policies). Such tepid politics needn't be pursued any longer. Now is the time for Democrats to swing hard at the fat lob which is Republican vulnerability on every front. Heck, it would be worth it for the novelty alone. David Michael Green (pscdmg@hofstra.edu) is a professor of political science at Hofstra University in New York. -- ------------------ War remains the decisive human failure. - John Kenneth Galbraith Jonathan web site at: http://elegant-technology.com -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://www.globalproblematique.net/pipermail/mai-not/attachments/20050507/03bac85a/attachment.html From radred at ix.netcom.com Sat May 7 14:53:52 2005 From: radred at ix.netcom.com (Carol) Date: Sat May 7 14:39:15 2005 Subject: [Mai-not] The future of Mai-Not In-Reply-To: <1115386104.5142.24.camel@Yves> Message-ID: <4.3.2.7.2.20050507175112.021cc3b0@pop.ix.netcom.com> Many thanks, Yves. My check will sprout wings on Monday. Carol At 06:28 AM 5/6/05 -0700, you wrote: >Mai-Notters of all stripes and shades: (:-) > >I have been having second thoughts. > >My apologies to you all for my anger of some two weeks ago. > >I'll keep on hosting and managing Mai-Not, even if you don't send enough >cash to cover the costs. I feel in solidarity with you all, even though >we don't agree on some fundamental aspects of the world problematique >and of where we as persons, stand in it., -- No virus found in this outgoing message. Checked by AVG Anti-Virus. Version: 7.0.308 / Virus Database: 266.11.6 - Release Date: 5/6/05 From wesburt at juno.com Sat May 7 15:36:39 2005 From: wesburt at juno.com (wesburt@juno.com) Date: Sat May 7 15:55:29 2005 Subject: [Mai-not] Kinsley, Gelles, Priest, Ashford, Hirschfeld, Olson, Hamerstrom, Samuelson, and Burt; on Social Security Message-ID: <20050507.184319.-395071.4.wesburt@juno.com> Skipped content of type multipart/alternative-------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: not available Type: image/gif Size: 15706 bytes Desc: not available Url : http://www.globalproblematique.net/pipermail/mai-not/attachments/20050507/4ae03ae5/attachment-0001.gif From eltechno at clear.lakes.com Sat May 7 19:08:45 2005 From: eltechno at clear.lakes.com (Jonathan Larson) Date: Sat May 7 19:10:24 2005 Subject: [Mai-not] A Review of The Smartest Guys in the Room Message-ID: A Review of The Smartest Guys in the Room Hollywood Does Enron By HEATHER WILLIAMS http://www.counterpunch.org/williams05072005.html For armchair prophets who declared half a decade ago that share prices were bound to rise forever and make the whole world rich, watching Producer/director Alex Gibney's new documentary, Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room is bound to be like looking at snapshots of a party with where they got drunk with strangers, put lampshades on their heads, and ended up unconscious on the couch with their wallets gone and the house trashed. In the fog of morning-after regret there is the echo of the gibberish of the night before: The Dow Jones was going to hit 20 thousand! Stock market prices weren't inflated because this was a "market renaissance!" Globalization would float all boats! Why, in the New Economy, workers wouldn't need unions because they'd all be wealthy shareholders! Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room, adapted from Bethany McLean and Peter Elkind's book by the same name, rightly rekindles a public discussion about the price the world paid for general credulity about the notions of ever-rising markets based on the virtues of corporate self-maximization. Although it seems incredible given the magnitude of the financial scandals that have in the last two decades gutted public utilities, pension funds, credit unions, workers' personal savings, and a significant number of treasuries and national banking systems around the world, the public has still never fully come to grips with the implications of these debacles. Making a serviceable film about a corporate scandal that everyone ought to have seen coming might seems a straightforward task. The moral story Big Business Gone Bad after all is a fable of right over wrong that even the most docile members of the mass media have mastered. For those who didn't cut their teeth in the 1980s and 1990s on BCCI's arms deals, Michael Milken's insider trading, Chase Manhattan's handling of Raul Salinas' drug and bribe money, the plundering of the Savings and Loans, the untoward bailouts of investment banks caught in the East Asian Financial Crisis, the Federal Reserve's intervention in the hedge fund world of Long Term Capital Management, the new century brought us plenty more graft, lies, and hapless workers cheated out of billions at at Worldcom, Tyco, Halliburton, and finally Enron. Given that head start, Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room does more with its subject matter than anyone has done before. While righteous pundits at CNN or the Lehrer Report featured tired pieces about the decline in corporate ethics or the need for greater vigilance at the Securities and Exchange Commission--with the underlying inquiry being that of how on earth could the executives at Enron have gone so far astray--Gibney's film suggests that there was nothing about Skilling, Lay, Fastow, or any of the other principals that was, in corporate terms, particularly nefarious. The film points out that executives at Enron were ambitious, to be sure, determined to make big profits, little concerned about their employees and eager to cut out the competition, but that none had any grand plan to scuttle the corporation and run away with billions in cash. In fact, despite the self-consciously macho culture of the corporation, in which employees were charged yearly with voting up to 15 percent of the workforce Survivor-style out of the corporation, the film suggests through close-ups of the traders that most of the people who took home the millions were former high school dorks. One doesn't know whether to laugh or cry, for example, at an interview with Charles Wickman, a former trader whose rubbery broad face lends him an uncanny resemblance to Mr. Potatohead, recalling his motivations at the corporation: "If I'm going to my boss's office to talk about compensation, and if I step on some guy's throat and that doubles it, then I'll stomp on that guy's throat." The visuals are entertaining and well-assembled: workers in rumpled suits carrying their pink slips and desk effects in cardboard boxes with the steel-and-glass Enron skyscraper gleaming behind them; naked strippers and champagne; corporate jets and luxury cars emitting the coiffed figures of now-infamous executives Jeff Skilling, Andrew Fastow, and Ken Lay, shots of dad and son Bush and their industry colleague Dick Cheney sending their Enron friends their best wishes in personal video greetings. Between theses images, the film relies smartly on a mixture archival footage and solid, smart interviews with journalists who wrote book-length accounts of the scandal, ex-Enron people, and various other players in the drama, including a hapless Gray Davis in lights-out California. Beyond its elegance, the film's strongest point is its ambiguity. Like a mystery novel with the last chapter torn out, Gibney's film never offers the viewer a clear answer as to who or what was to blame for the Enron fraud. Was it Ken Lay, who built the company and was known to tolerate misconduct and graft among in the upper ranks at times? Perhaps, but Lay would have been nowhere without his right-hand man Jeff Skilling, who figured out how to make fictive profits with so-called mark-to-marketing treatment, which enabled the accountants to put down projected future profits as current assets. But then the film reminds us that Skilling could never have done what he did without a cooperative Securities and Exchange Commission to legalize his accounting scheme or an eager Arthur Andersen to conjure the fictive profits and make yearly losses into gains and please the shareholders. Skilling also needed the magic of Chief Financial Officer Andrew Fastow who, for $45 million in skimmed-off fees, set up shell corporations where Enron could hide $30 billion dollars in debts from its investors. And because Enron was doing little in the energy industry in the 1990s that was actually bringing in revenue, it was clearly the Wall Street brokers who were recommending the stock to their clients and keeping the share prices booming and the cash flowing to Enron were more than minor players. But then, the same analysts point out self-righteously that if they asked too many questions about Enron, their bosses in the brokerages and financial groups threatened their jobs because parent companies stood to lose lucrative investment banking deals with Enron, who, after all, was leading the market in derivatives. And all of this would have been impossible to maintain if Enron's savage securities traders hadn't been able to define the derivatives market in gas and oil futures in the first place by finding loopholes in new deregulation laws big enough to drive a truck through, and that of course was the fault of visionless politicians who blithely handed public trusts to the private sector in the name of efficiency. The chain of deferred culpability that so strongly links the boardroom to the halls of government gives the film great narrative strength, but it also suggests one false conclusion, which is that Enron achieved what it needed politically through the Bush family and the Republican party. This may be convenient four years after the exit of Democrats from the White House, but it obscures the reason why Enron or any of the other corporate scandals that broke after January 2001 did not become campaign issues in the last election cycle. The California deregulation bill that infused a faltering Enron with no less than 5 billion dollars in extorted rates was after all passed in 1996 by an Assembly controlled by Democrats. Likewise, the Bush Administration who was blamed for not putting an end to the California energy crisis did in fact cap prices after five months in June 2001. The Clinton Administration, by contrast, stood by for nineteen months of energy gaming between May 1999 and January 2001. The Democratic Party was just as whorish as the Republican Party when it came to Enron's money, just a little less pricey. Between 1999 and 2000, the Republican Party took in about $1.1 million from Enron in soft money contributions, but the Democratic Party was happy to take in $532,000. Enron also saw clear to grease the campaigns of 70 Senators in 1989-2001, including 27 Democrats. Given the constraints of a two-hour film, the fairest statement may be that an account of the Enron's fall ought to supplemented at some point by a prequel that shows something about how such a corporate behemoth rose in the first place. Such a cinematic sibling would feature the cast of characters in the Clinton administration who could not do enough for Enron, domestically or internationally, or a set of powerful New Democrats working with Joe Lieberman who bent over backwards to do what they could for Enron and took plenty of their money and legislative suggestions. The prequel would also feature Warren Christopher and Madeleine Albright's State Department bullying public officials in Mozambique, Brazil, and Argentina into accepting Enron's terms on pipelines, or turning a blind eye while Enron-backed thugs in Maharashtra, India beat up citizens who were protesting the $3.2 billion gas plant going up their front yards. Perhaps there might be an interview with Mack MacLarty, Clinton's advisor and turned Enron project director who helped run political interference for the company when its projects were turned down by the World Bank, who considered them unviable. Thanks to a Democratic White House, Enron instead got $2.4 billion in loans and loan guarantees from the Export-Import Bank and the Overseas Private Investment Corporation. Of these loans, U.S. taxpayers would eventually mop up $1 billion in unpaid debts left by the corporation after it went bankrupt. Finally, there may be footage somewhere of Enron executives attending meetings of the World Trade Organization, where Clinton's Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin was happy to help Enron and its accounting partner Arthur Anderson help dictate the content of the General Agreement on Trade and Services, which, not incidentally, helped export and standardize Arthur Anderson's creative accounting methods to the rest of the world. After leaving public office, the esteemed Mr. Rubin would later go to work for Citigroup and use his connections at Treasury to try and bail out Enron in mid 2001. Then there's the odious role of neoliberal environmental groups, such as NRDC, which shilled for the deregulation of electric utilities and lobbied on behalf Enron's raid to acquire local power companies such as Portland General Electric. NRDC's energy guru Ralph Cavanagh told the skeptical residents of Oregon that Enron was a company they could "trust." These very significant omissions aside, the film does what a film should do: it puts the mega-corporation back in the spotlight and suggests that the demise of Enron and the disappearance of 60 billion dollars in equity ought not to have shocked anyone and will likely happen again with a similar cast of characters. Detailing the decade-long chronology of Enron's rise, the film makes it clear that the company's collapse was actually years overdue, and all its deceptions were orchestrated with complicity of all the major players in the market and most of the agencies charged with overseeing corporate activities. In so doing, Gibney actually manages to lay out a compelling logical framework for a colossal scandal that we have yet to fully process. Heather Williams is an Associate Professor of Politics at Pomona College; hwilliams@pomona.edu -- ------------------ War remains the decisive human failure. - John Kenneth Galbraith Jonathan web site at: http://elegant-technology.com -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://www.globalproblematique.net/pipermail/mai-not/attachments/20050507/dc018902/attachment.html From dgiles at central.murdoch.edu.au Sat May 7 19:56:38 2005 From: dgiles at central.murdoch.edu.au (Dion Giles) Date: Sat May 7 19:56:40 2005 Subject: [Mai-not] Tsunami '06: Put a stake through the heart of the GOP In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <6.1.1.1.0.20050508105352.02e96008@central.murdoch.edu.au> We must never let anyone forget that for every 36 British voters who were prepared, noses held, to accept Blair as Prime Minister 64 were not. The British electoral system is so rigged and gerrymandered that it makes Zimbabwe and the USA look almost like democracies. Dion Giles Western Australia From dgiles at central.murdoch.edu.au Sat May 7 19:57:34 2005 From: dgiles at central.murdoch.edu.au (Dion Giles) Date: Sat May 7 19:57:37 2005 Subject: [Mai-not] The future of Mai-Not In-Reply-To: <4.3.2.7.2.20050507175112.021cc3b0@pop.ix.netcom.com> References: <1115386104.5142.24.camel@Yves> <4.3.2.7.2.20050507175112.021cc3b0@pop.ix.netcom.com> Message-ID: <6.1.1.1.0.20050508105704.02b50448@central.murdoch.edu.au> At 05:53 08/05/2005, Carol wrote: >Many thanks, Yves. My check will sprout wings on Monday. > >Carol And mine -- Dion Dion Giles Western Australia From papadop at peak.org Sat May 7 21:48:25 2005 From: papadop at peak.org (MichaelP) Date: Sat May 7 21:48:37 2005 Subject: [Mai-not] U$ Soldier lifts lid on Camp Delta Message-ID: http://observer.guardian.co.uk/international/story/0,6903,1479040,00.html For the first time, an army insider blows the whistle on human rights abuses at Guantanamo The Observer (London) Sunday May 8, 2005 Paul Harris in New York An American soldier has revealed shocking new details of abuse and sexual torture of prisoners at Guantanamo Bay in the first high-profile whistleblowing account to emerge from inside the top-secret base. Erik Saar, an Arabic speaker who was a translator in interrogation sessions, has produced a searing first-hand account of working at Guantanamo. It will prove a damaging blow to a White House still struggling to recover from the abuse scandal at Abu Ghraib jail in Iraq. In an exclusive interview, Saar told The Observer that prisoners were physically assaulted by 'snatch squads' and subjected to sexual interrogation techniques and that the Geneva Conventions were deliberately ignored by the US military. He also said that soldiers staged fake interrogations to impress visiting administration and military officials. Saar believes that the great majority of prisoners at Guantanamo have no terrorist links and little worthwhile intelligence information has emerged from the base despite its prominent role in America's war on terror. Saar paints a picture of a base where interrogations of often innocent prisoners have spiralled out of control, doing massive damage to America's image in the Muslim world. Saar said events at Guantanamo were a disaster for US foreign policy. 'We are trying to promote democracy worldwide. I don't see how you can do that and run a place like Guantanamo Bay. This is now a rallying cry to the Muslim world,' he said. Saar arrived at Guantanamo Bay in December 2002, and worked there until June 2003. He first worked as a translator in the prisoners' cages. He was then transferred to the interrogation teams, acting as a translator. Saar's book, Inside the Wire, provides the first fully detailed look inside Guantanamo Bay's role as a prison for detainees the White House has insisted are the 'worst of the worst' among Islamic militants. His tale describes his gradual disillusionment, from arriving as a soldier keen to do his duty to eventually leaving believing the regime to be a breach of human rights and a disaster for the war on terror. Among the most shocking abuses Saar recalls is the use of sex in interrogation sessions. Some female interrogators stripped down to their underwear and rubbed themselves against their prisoners. Pornographic magazines and videos were also used as rewards for confessing. In one session a female interrogator took off some of her clothes and smeared fake blood on a prisoner after telling him she was menstruating. 'That's a big deal. It is a major insult to one of the world's biggest religions where we are trying to win hearts and minds,' Saar said. Saar also describes the 'snatch teams', known as the Initial Reaction Force (IRF), who remove unco-operative prisoners from their cells. He describes one such snatch where a prisoner's arm was broken. In a training session for an IRF team, one US soldier posing as a prisoner was beaten so badly that he suffered brain damage. It is believed the IRF team had not been told the 'detainee' was a soldier. Staff at Guantanamo also faked interrogations for visiting senior officials. Prisoners who had already been interrogated were sat down behind one-way mirrors and asked old questions while the visiting officials watched. Saar also describes the effects prolonged confinement had on many of the prisoners. He details bloody suicide attempts and serious mental illnesses. One detainee slashed his wrists with razors and wrote in blood on a wall: 'I committed suicide because of the brutality of my oppressors.' Saar details a meeting with an army lawyer where linguists, interrogators and intelligence workers at the base were told the Geneva Conventions did not apply to their work as the detainees could not be considered normal prisoners of war. At the end of the meeting the group was told: 'We still intend to treat the detainees humanely, but our purpose is to get any actionable intelligence we can and quickly.' But Saar said that many, if not most, of the detainees were rarely interrogated at all after their initial arrival. They just sat listlessly in their cells for months on end. He believes that many of them were either simple footsoldiers caught up in the war in Afghanistan or elsewhere, or innocent men sold out to the Americans by local enemies settling a grudge or looking to collect reward money. Saar accepts that some genuine terrorists have been held at Guantanamo. 'There are individuals there who I hope will never be set free,' he said, but he contends that they are in the minority. 'Overall, it is counter-productive,' he said. Saar was an enthusiastic supporter of George Bush in the 2000 elections but he has changed his world view after being exposed to Guantanamo Bay. 'I believe in America and American troops,' he said, 'but it has drastically changed my world view and my politics.' Saar left the army and has become a hate figure for some right-wing groups which say he and his book are unpatriotic. But Saar believes exposing the abuses of Guantanamo will lessen the damage done to America's reputation in the long run. 'The camp is a mistake. It does not need to be that way. There should be a better way, more in line with American morals,' he said. From papadop at peak.org Sat May 7 22:13:21 2005 From: papadop at peak.org (MichaelP) Date: Sat May 7 22:13:25 2005 Subject: [Mai-not] MAVERICK MP PLEDGES TO OUST BLAIR -- GEORGE GALLOWAY Message-ID: These are interesting times !! M. ========== http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/vote_2005/frontpage/4526213.stm Sunday, 8 May, 2005, 00:17 GMT 01:17 UK Mr Galloway was expelled from Labour and helped set up Respect Ex-Labour MP George Galloway has told his new east London constituents he will hound Tony Blair out of office. The newly-elected member for Bethnal Green and Bow was touring the area in an open-top bus, after ousting the previous incumbent, Labour's Oona King. The Respect MP told the crowds: "It is one of my first missions to bring him [Tony Blair] in front of a court in The Hague and behind bars." Mr Galloway won the seat by 823 votes in Thursday's general election. "We are increasingly in a presidential system and that means the president is personally responsible and the buck stops there," he said. "I doubt if there are many people in the country who do not think that he is a liar." I am younger and fitter than Mr Blair and will certainly be continuing in politics Mr Galloway - who was expelled from Labour for his anti-war stance -- said his first attack would come in the Queen's Speech debate. "I will have plenty to say about Mr Blair - assuming he's still there. I don't think he is in for a third term." Mr Galloway was joined by more than 100 supporters on his victory "Sunshine Tour" to thank the people who voted him in. He said his victory had struck a decisive blow against New Labour and promised "fireworks" for the future. But the 50-year-old pledged not to stand at the next general election in Bethnal Green and Bow because the people needed an MP of their "own origin". He said he may stand in another constituency or for the European Parliament. "I am younger and fitter than Mr Blair and will certainly be continuing in politics," he said. His pledges to his constituents include campaigning for better housing, schools, public areas and action on youth unemployment. "East London is the 'Cinderella' of our capital city and it has been grossly abandoned by both the major parties while in government," he said. "There is a saying that 'it's a squeaky wheel that gets oil' and the East End did not just squeak on Thursday, it roared." From tranet at tdstelme.net Sun May 8 03:53:31 2005 From: tranet at tdstelme.net (Bill Ellis) Date: Sun May 8 07:16:48 2005 Subject: [Mai-not] Re: [simpol-USA] Kinsley, Gelles, Priest, Ashford, Hirschfeld, Olson, Hamerstrom, Samuelson, and Burt; on Social Security In-Reply-To: <20050507.184319.-395071.4.wesburt@juno.com> References: <20050507.184319.-395071.4.wesburt@juno.com> Message-ID: <425b8f3bf9151aadbe6d93c73c6f672e@tdstelme.net> On May 7, 2005, at 6:36 PM, wesburt@juno.com wrote: > Let's see how the payroll tax paid > looks when tabulated against earned income: > > EARNED TAX PAID EFFECTIVE TAX DUE > INCOME/YEAR CAPPED TAX RATE flat 12.4% > $0 0 12.40% 0 > $46,000 $5,580 12.40% $5,580 > $90,000 $11,160 12.40% $11,160 > ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ cap ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ > $180,000 $11,160 6.20% $22,320 > $360,000 $11,160 3.10% $44,640 > $720,000 $11,160 1.56% $89,280 > $1,440,000 $11,160 0.78% $178,560 > EARNED TAX PAID EFFECTIVE TAX DUE > INCOME/YEAR CAPPED TAX RATE flat 12.4% BE: Does anyone have the figures of how much the added income would be if the cap were removed? If we all paid 12.40% on all personal income how much would the SS insurance short fall be reuced? If the SS pay off to those with high incomes after retirement were indexed as Bush suggests how much could other taxes be reduced? We need some numbers. Bill Ellis From thinker at uniserve.com Sun May 8 07:53:18 2005 From: thinker at uniserve.com (Ed Deak) Date: Sun May 8 07:54:28 2005 Subject: [Mai-not] Rumsfeld meets Saddam ????????? Message-ID: <5.1.0.14.2.20050508075244.02c6c778@pop.uniserve.com> ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ Saddam Hussein refuses to sell out Iraq Albasrah Tuesday, May 3, 2005 From:lamees@basrah.fsworld.co.uk Egyptian Magazine publishes transcript of [alleged] meeting in prison between Saddam Hussein and Donald Rumsfeld. Translated by Muhammad Abu Nasr THE Egyptian magazine al-Usbu'on Monday, May 2, 2005, published what it said was the text of a conversation between Iraqi President Saddam Hussein and US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld on his latest trip to Baghdad during which he visited the imprisoned Iraqi leader. Al-Usbu' reports that informed political sources had disclosed the details of the meeting. David Irving comments: WE reproduce this item without any guarantees whatever to the veracity of its claim, and with certain reservations. This is however what the Internet is famous and prized for -- sheer irresponsibility, transcending the laws of libel and probability, and more than once actually forcing a breach in an official wall of secrecy surrounding some action or other. On the one hand: the "transcript" seems calculated and even designed to show Saddam Hussein in the posture of a hero to his own people and it contains theatrical directions (e.g., "mockingly") that such transcripts do not normally contain; on the other hand, Saddam and Rumsfeld have met before, and Ariel Sharon is known to have had an audience of the imprisoned Saddam. With the apparently unstoppable growth of the patriotic Iraqi resistance movement, Saddam may well have a lot of trumps in his hand, even while he languishes as a prisoner of the "Coaliation". But are they powerful enough to force Donald Rumseld to swallow his pride and eat crow instead (or humble-pie, as we have it in England). A sustained guerrilla war against the American occupation forces is however what Saddam Hussein shrewdly planned all along, and the Coalition must recognise that he holds the key to stopping it, as easily it started. Al-Usbu' reports that the meeting took place after an escalation of Iraqi Resistance attacks against US occupation forces and their allies and stooges in Iraq. The sources indicated that the US had lost more than 1,600 men killed and wounded in the last three months, only a fraction of which they officially admitted. The available information indicates that US President George W. Bush held a meeting with his staff in which they discussed ways to stop the Resistance violence in Iraq. In order to save us lives and stop the continued deterioration of relations between the US and its allies and other countries that sent forces to occupied Iraq. The US leadership arrived at a decision to offer to release the Iraqi President Saddam Hussein and take him to his preferred place of exile outside Iraq in return for his appearing on television to demand that the Iraqi Resistance halt its armed operations and form a political party to take part in the political process set up by the US occupation forces in Iraq. Bush entrusted his Secretary of State, Donald Rumsfeld, with the task of going to Iraq immediately to urge the quick formation of a new Iraqi puppet "government" and to meet with the Iraqi "leaders" who have emerged from the 30 January "election" results held under the threat of US weapons in occupied Iraq. At the same time, however, Rumsfeld was to meet with Iraqi President Saddam Hussein in his American prison near Saddam International Airport west of Baghdad. The Saddam Hussein-Rumsfeld meeting reportedly lasted nearly an hour and took place in the presence of the commander of US occupation forces in Iraq. Rumsfeld followed up on his meeting by sending a report to President Bush in which he enclosed minutes of his meeting with the Iraqi President and offered outlines for how the US should deal with future developments in Iraq. He is said to have stressed the need for pursuing various ways to hold political dialogue with the Resistance and with Iraqi President Saddam Hussein. In his report, al-Usbu' said, Rumsfeld emphasized that the situation in Iraq was increasingly dangerous. He said that the Arab Resistance looked like an organized army in the making and that it was training well and had been provided with important support in weapons and other material back up. Rumsfeld said that the number of Resistance fighters in Iraq had now reached 400,000 active fighters and that around them were more than five million people providing the Resistance with support. Rumsfeld said that what took place in al-Fallujah had a negative impact on the security situation and that the Resistnace had succeeded in reaping the fruits of the "war on terror" being waged by the United States to use them for its benefit. He said that Iraqi youths were now vying with one another in volunteering to fight in the ranks of the Resistance. Rumsfeld confirmed that the names of many of the Resistance organizations that declare themselves here and there are nothing but fronts for organizations of the Arab Baath Party under the leadership currently of Izzat Ibrahim ad-Duri, the Vice President of Iraq. Rumsfeld expressed the expectation that the situation would become much more difficult in the coming period since the pace of armed operations against the US forces had greatly accelerated, and now stands at more than 200 attacks every day, making dozens of casualties in the "coalition" and puppet "national guard" ranks likely. Rumsfeld said that he had reviewed numerous American and Iraqi reports that reveal a deterioration in the security situation in Iraq and a fall in the morale level of the troops as casualties and material losses increase. Rumsfeld indicated that there have also been serious material losses in US ranks, and that the Americans are now loosing an average of at least 30 military vehicles every week, something that is continually depleting American power. Rumsfeld also disclosed that the Resistance had just recently seized stockpiles of advanced American weaponry including artillery and rocket launchers as well as anti-aircraft launchers and that the US command expressed the fear that these arms would soon have their effect in escalating the movements of violence and Resistance operations. At the end of his report, al-Usbu' reports, Rumsfeld urged the continuation of the dialogue with Saddam Hussein and his supporters until they can arrive at a formula for bringing about a temporary truce to facilitate a discussion of both sides' proposals. Al-Usbu' obtained the minutes of the conversation between Saddam Hussein and Donald Rumsfeld from a reliable American source. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- The following are the minutes of the meeting: Minutes of the meeting between President Saddam Hussein and US Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. AT the beginning of the meeting President Saddam appeared extremely calm, perhaps he was surprised that his visitor was Rumsfeld, but he did not show any nervous tension. Rumsfeld began the discussion: Rumsfeld: I have come to meet you to talk with out about the situation in Iraq. We have been in communication with some of your supporters inside and outside Iraq and they advised us to listen to you. Saddam Hussein: And what is it that you want? Your forces have occupied the territory of noble Iraq; you brought down the ruling regime without any legal basis; you attacked the sovereignty of an independent, free, sovereign country; and you committed crimes that history will record astestimony against your bloodstained civilization. So what more do you want after all that? Rumsfeld (trying to conceal his anger): there no call for going into the past. I've come specially to present you a clear and specific offer and I want to hear from you a clear and specific answer. Saddam Hussein (mockingly): I suppose you've come to apologize and return authority to the Iraqis. Rumsfeld: We have nothing to apologize for. You were a danger to your neighbors. You were trying to acquire weapons of mass destruction, and you practiced dictatorship over your people. So it was natural for us to extend our hands to help the people of Iraq to rid themselves ofthe perils they faced for more than thirty years. Saddam Hussein: I know that you're ignorant of history and I know that your president is no less ignorant. But it seems that you've been telling lies for so long that you have come to believe them yourselves. If you mean by "our neighbors" the Zionist Entity, then, yes, we really were posing a danger to it and preparing to liberate our plundered land in Palestine. This is the trust of every Arab person, not just Iraqis, for that land is Arab and its people are Arab and the Zionists have done nothing but occupy the land. They came to us from every corner of the world with your help and that of the old colonial powers. But if you mean Kuwait, I would like to ask you: Haveyou withdrawn from Kuwait or not? Rumsfeld: These are security issues. Besides, between us and Kuwait and the other Gulf States there are security agreements.We came in based on their request to defend them from your threats. Saddam Hussein: Isn't it funny to entrust the wolf to guard the sheep? The Kuwaiti people are an Arab people, and Kuwait is Iraqi territory. So I would ask you to go and read up on history well, except that I am sure that you will never be able to grasp it. Rumsfeld: Enough of this chatter. I am offering you . . . Saddam Hussein (cuts him off): Before you offer me your rotten goods, I want to ask you: did you find any weapons of mass destruction or not? Rumsfeld (confused): we haven't found any so far. But we definitely will find them one day. Do you deny that you had the intention of making a nuclear bomb? Saddam Hussein: We had no weapons of mass destruction since 1991. We were truthful when we spoke to the International Inspection Team and we were truthful in our letters toKofi Annan. And you knew those facts, but you were looking for any false excuse to occupy Iraq and overthrow the legal authorities. Rumsfeld: The Iraqis greeted us happily and welcomed us and the reason was the bloody practices of your regime for all the years in which you ruled Iraq. Saddam Hussein: I ask you, Mr. Rumsfeld . . . Enough lying. You are the ones who opened up cascades of blood on the land of Iraq. You plotted against us and you came with some traitors to take over rule of the great land of Iraq. Rumsfeld: The ones you call traitors were chosen as their leaders by the Iraqi people by democratic means and clean elections, such as never took place while you ruled the country. Saddam Hussein: I knew that you came with a band of traitors with [Jalal] at-Talibani in their front ranks (laughs mockingly). Great Iraq being ruled by at-Talibani and al-Ja'fari, isn't that ridiculous? And what kind of elections are you talking about. Is it possible to hold free elections, as you call them, when our country is occupied? Mr. Rumsfeld, we have learned from history that occupiers come only with their lackeys and agents, then you want after all that to convince me that the people of Iraq are enjoying freedom and democracy? You must really be delirious. Rumsfeld (trying very hard to control his anger): You are in isolation and don't know the facts of what is going on outside. The Iraqi people have been freed from your oppression. If they saw you or any of you men in the street, they would destroy you!! Saddam Hussein: And I bet you that if you were able to announce where you are in Iraq, if the Iraqi Resistance learned where you were, you wouldn't be able to get out alive. I want to pass on some advice that you must convey to your stupid president: you must tell him to save what remains of his troops. Death is stalking them in every place and historywill not forgive him. Rumsfeld: I came to talk with you about the 'terrorist' operations that your men are inciting and carrying out. Your men recently carried out a foul attack against Abu Ghurayb prison where more than 50 Americans were killed or wounded, and they killed a number of those in custody on various charges as well. Your men are getting help from terrorists from every corner of the world and they are threatening the democratic experiment in Iraq. Saddam Hussein: What exactly is it that you want? Rumsfeld: I'm making you one offer and that is that you will be released and can chose for yourself a place of exile freely, in any country you like, on condition that you go on television and issue a condemnation of terrorism and order your men to stop these acts. Saddam Hussein: Have you obtained the agreement of your president to this offer? Rumsfeld: Yes, this offer has been agreed on in a meeting in which the President, Vice President, Secretary of State, and Chief of Intelligence took part. AndI have been authorized to inform you of this offer. Saddam Hussein: It's a trifling offer. Rumsfeld (with a sigh): We're also ready to bring elements close to you into the government. Saddam Hussein: And what else? Rumsfeld: You will be given generous financial assistance and security protection for you and your family in the country of your choice. Saddam Hussein: Do you want to hear my conditions? Rumsfeld: I would love to. Saddam Hussein (with an air of superciliousness and superiority) I want First from you that you set a time table for your withdrawal from Iraq and that your government commit itself to it before the world and that you begin the withdrawal immediately. Secondly, I ask you to release immediately all the Iraqi and Arab prisoners in the prisons you have set up or in which you have taken the freedom of tens of thousands of honorable people of Iraq. Thirdly, I ask from you to pledge to grant full compensation for the material losses that afflicted the Iraqi people as a result of your aggression against our country since the Mother of Battles in 1991 and until today. And I accept the assistance of an Arab and International Committee in estimating the extent of those losses. Fourth, I ask that you return the money that you and your men plundered from the treasuries of Iraq, and its oil, in particular that criminal[L. Paul] Bremerand his gang of traitors and renegades. Fifth, the return of the artifacts that you stole and gave to the archaeological artifact mafia. These are treasures that are beyond all the monetary value in the world, because they carry the history of Iraq and its civilization. It's true that you don't have any civilization or history and that the lifespan of your country is no more than a few hundred years, but all that must not serve to justify your theft and your hatred for the civilization of Iraq and the wealth of Iraq. And sixth, you must hand over the weapons of mass destruction if you have found any and return to us the lives of all the martyrs whose lives you took and to return the honor of the noble women of Iraq whom you dishonored. Rumsfeld: Is this some kind of joke? Saddam Hussein: No! This is the bitter reality. . . which you know, Mr. Rumsfeld. You have committed the greatest crime in history against a peaceful Arab country. We met together in the 1980s. Do you remember your offers? Rumsfeld: Enough of the past. We are reassessing our positions towards you and towards a number of powers that have been hostile to us in the past. We have decided to hold dialogue with moderate Islamicists and we have no objection to their coming to power through the ballot box. More important than that we have decided to open channels for dialogue with 'terrorist' organizations like Hamas, the Islamic Jihad, and Hizbollah, which is pro-Iranian, and also with other fundamentalist organizations in the whole world. We even have a plan for contacting the Taliban movement in Afghanistan to study the possibility of their participation in power, in exchange for their giving up arms. Saddam Hussein: So you have begun to rethink your erroneous course? Rumsfeld: It is a natural development of events. We are striving to spread democracy in all countries and movements subject to tyranny. Saddam Hussein: May you prosper if you are truthful. I know your real aim, though. If you were really truthful, then you and your allies must begin immediately by withdrawing from Iraq. And you would also have to depart from your position of support for 'Israel'. But I know that your president is stubborn and arrogant and is not telling the truth. Rumsfeld: He is a democratically elected president, not a bloody ruler like you. Saddam Hussein: Terror is your product and lying is your method. Rumsfeld: This offer is a historic opportunity for you. You will be released and we will consult with you in everything related to the running of Iraq. If you refuse this offer, the opportunity will not be fulfilled. Saddam Hussein: I am not looking for opportunities. I am not looking for a way to save my neck from the gallows that you have set up for all of Iraq. If I wanted that I would have accepted the Russian offer and saved my sons and grandson from martyrdom. I don't know what has become ofmy family and my daughters and grandchildren. But believe me I am concerned with every Iraqi citizen and the future of great Iraq more than I am concerned with myself and my family. Through your men, you previously made an offer that if I declare that weapons of mass destruction were smuggled to Syria, you said that in return you would release me. I rejected that then and I reject it again now. Rumsfeld: I don't want a rejection from you. I want you to think about it. We are continuing our reassessment of our stances at the present time. We want to stop the bloodshed on both sides. And therefore we have made this offer out of the logic of power and not the logic of weakness. We asked Jalal at-Talibani to make a statement denying any intention of executing you as a sign of good intentions on our part. We are ready to reassess our whole position on the political arrangement in Iraq as a whole and to discuss this matter with you and with your men. Saddam Hussein: Are you ready to withdraw or not? Rumsfeld: We can possibly discuss redeployment. Our forces have prepared bases for a long stay. We can possibly withdraw from streets and cities, but we will remain in the bases for some time. Saddam Hussein: then you want a new stooge to add to that line of stooges. No Mr. Rumsfeld. Don't forget that you are talking with Saddam Hussein the President of the Republic of Iraq. Rumsfeld: But you lost power. Saddam Hussein: I have nothing left but honor and honor cannot be bought and sold. Rumsfeld: But life is priceless. Saddam Hussein: There is no value to life without honor. You robbed Iraq of its honor when you trampled on its land and we will regain our honor whether Saddam Hussein remains or dies a martyr. Rumsfeld: Your supporters with whom we have been discussing told us that you were the first and last decision maker. Were they expecting this reaction from you? Saddam Hussein: Definitely, they know that Saddam Hussein cannot back away at the expense of his homeland and honor. Rumsfeld: History will hold you responsible for the blood that is being shed in Iraq. Saddam Hussein: Rather history will judge you for your crimes. I warned you before, saying that you would commit suicide on the walls of Baghdad. And here you are paying the price. I want you to go to London and read the records of the British Foreign Office and learn something about the struggle of the Iraqi people against your British friends who are now repeating their mistakes and fighting with you. The Iraqi people are a stubborn people who do not fear death. The Resistance is stronger than you imagine. So I promise you that you will have even more. Sources: http://www.albasrah.net/maqalat_mukhtara/arabic/0505/sadam_lqa_020505.htm http://www.elosboa.com/elosboa/issues/423/0401.asp From dgiles at central.murdoch.edu.au Mon May 9 03:17:40 2005 From: dgiles at central.murdoch.edu.au (Dion Giles) Date: Mon May 9 03:17:41 2005 Subject: [Mai-not] Rumsfeld meets Saddam ????????? In-Reply-To: <5.1.0.14.2.20050508075244.02c6c778@pop.uniserve.com> References: <5.1.0.14.2.20050508075244.02c6c778@pop.uniserve.com> Message-ID: <6.1.1.1.0.20050509181534.02f0b908@central.murdoch.edu.au> The report at http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/05/08/AR2005050800838.html would seem to be consistent with the story of the Saddam-Rumsfeld meeting. Dion Giles Western Australia At 22:53 08/05/2005, Ed Deak wrote: >++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ >Saddam Hussein refuses to sell out Iraq >Albasrah >Tuesday, May 3, 2005 > >From:lamees@basrah.fsworld.co.uk >Egyptian Magazine publishes transcript of [alleged] meeting in prison >between Saddam Hussein and Donald Rumsfeld. >Translated by Muhammad Abu Nasr >THE Egyptian magazine al-Usbu'on Monday, May 2, 2005, published what it >said was the text of a conversation between Iraqi President Saddam Hussein >and US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld on his latest trip to Baghdad >during which he visited the imprisoned Iraqi leader. Al-Usbu' reports that >informed political sources had disclosed the details of the meeting. > >David Irving comments: WE reproduce this item without any guarantees >whatever to the veracity of its claim, and with certain reservations. > >This is however what the Internet is famous and prized for -- sheer >irresponsibility, transcending the laws of libel and probability, and more >than once actually forcing a breach in an official wall of secrecy >surrounding some action or other. > >On the one hand: the "transcript" seems calculated and even designed to >show Saddam Hussein in the posture of a hero to his own people and it >contains theatrical directions (e.g., "mockingly") that such transcripts >do not normally contain; on the other hand, Saddam and Rumsfeld have met >before, and Ariel Sharon is known to have had an audience of the >imprisoned Saddam. > >With the apparently unstoppable growth of the patriotic Iraqi resistance >movement, Saddam may well have a lot of trumps in his hand, even while he >languishes as a prisoner of the "Coaliation". But are they powerful enough >to force Donald Rumseld to swallow his pride and eat crow instead (or >humble-pie, as we have it in England). > >A sustained guerrilla war against the American occupation forces is >however what Saddam Hussein shrewdly planned all along, and the Coalition >must recognise that he holds the key to stopping it, as easily it started. > >Al-Usbu' reports that the meeting took place after an escalation of Iraqi >Resistance attacks against US occupation forces and their allies and >stooges in Iraq. The sources indicated that the US had lost more than >1,600 men killed and wounded in the last three months, only a fraction of >which they officially admitted. The available information indicates that >US President George W. Bush held a meeting with his staff in which they >discussed ways to stop the Resistance violence in Iraq. In order to save >us lives and stop the continued deterioration of relations between the US >and its allies and other countries that sent forces to occupied Iraq. The >US leadership arrived at a decision to offer to release the Iraqi >President Saddam Hussein and take him to his preferred place of exile >outside Iraq in return for his appearing on television to demand that the >Iraqi Resistance halt its armed operations and form a political party to >take part in the political process set up by the US occupation forces in Iraq. >Bush entrusted his Secretary of State, Donald Rumsfeld, with the task of >going to Iraq immediately to urge the quick formation of a new Iraqi >puppet "government" and to meet with the Iraqi "leaders" who have emerged >from the 30 January "election" results held under the threat of US weapons >in occupied Iraq. At the same time, however, Rumsfeld was to meet with >Iraqi President Saddam Hussein in his American prison near Saddam >International Airport west of Baghdad. > >The Saddam Hussein-Rumsfeld meeting reportedly lasted nearly an hour and >took place in the presence of the commander of US occupation forces in >Iraq. Rumsfeld followed up on his meeting by sending a report to President >Bush in which he enclosed minutes of his meeting with the Iraqi President >and offered outlines for how the US should deal with future developments >in Iraq. He is said to have stressed the need for pursuing various ways to >hold political dialogue with the Resistance and with Iraqi President >Saddam Hussein. >In his report, al-Usbu' said, Rumsfeld emphasized that the situation in >Iraq was increasingly dangerous. He said that the Arab Resistance looked >like an organized army in the making and that it was training well and had >been provided with important support in weapons and other material back >up. Rumsfeld said that the number of Resistance fighters in Iraq had now >reached 400,000 active fighters and that around them were more than five >million people providing the Resistance with support. > >Rumsfeld said that what took place in al-Fallujah had a negative impact on >the security situation and that the Resistnace had succeeded in reaping >the fruits of the "war on terror" being waged by the United States to use >them for its benefit. He said that Iraqi youths were now vying with one >another in volunteering to fight in the ranks of the Resistance. >Rumsfeld confirmed that the names of many of the Resistance organizations >that declare themselves here and there are nothing but fronts for >organizations of the Arab Baath Party under the leadership currently of >Izzat Ibrahim ad-Duri, the Vice President of Iraq. > >Rumsfeld expressed the expectation that the situation would become much >more difficult in the coming period since the pace of armed operations >against the US forces had greatly accelerated, and now stands at more than >200 attacks every day, making dozens of casualties in the "coalition" and >puppet "national guard" ranks likely. >Rumsfeld said that he had reviewed numerous American and Iraqi reports >that reveal a deterioration in the security situation in Iraq and a fall >in the morale level of the troops as casualties and material losses increase. > >Rumsfeld indicated that there have also been serious material losses in US >ranks, and that the Americans are now loosing an average of at least 30 >military vehicles every week, something that is continually depleting >American power. >Rumsfeld also disclosed that the Resistance had just recently seized >stockpiles of advanced American weaponry including artillery and rocket >launchers as well as anti-aircraft launchers and that the US command >expressed the fear that these arms would soon have their effect in >escalating the movements of violence and Resistance operations. > >At the end of his report, al-Usbu' reports, Rumsfeld urged the >continuation of the dialogue with Saddam Hussein and his supporters until >they can arrive at a formula for bringing about a temporary truce to >facilitate a discussion of both sides' proposals. >Al-Usbu' obtained the minutes of the conversation between Saddam Hussein >and Donald Rumsfeld from a reliable American source. > >------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- > >The following are the minutes of the meeting: >Minutes of the meeting between President Saddam Hussein and US Secretary >of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. > >AT the beginning of the meeting President Saddam appeared extremely calm, >perhaps he was surprised that his visitor was Rumsfeld, but he did not >show any nervous tension. Rumsfeld began the discussion: >Rumsfeld: I have come to meet you to talk with out about the situation in >Iraq. We have been in communication with some of your supporters inside >and outside Iraq and they advised us to listen to you. > >Saddam Hussein: And what is it that you want? Your forces have occupied >the territory of noble Iraq; you brought down the ruling regime without >any legal basis; you attacked the sovereignty of an independent, free, >sovereign country; and you committed crimes that history will record >astestimony against your bloodstained civilization. So what more do you >want after all that? >Rumsfeld (trying to conceal his anger): there no call for going into the >past. I've come specially to present you a clear and specific offer and I >want to hear from you a clear and specific answer. > >Saddam Hussein (mockingly): I suppose you've come to apologize and return >authority to the Iraqis. >Rumsfeld: We have nothing to apologize for. You were a danger to your >neighbors. You were trying to acquire weapons of mass destruction, and you >practiced dictatorship over your people. So it was natural for us to >extend our hands to help the people of Iraq to rid themselves ofthe perils >they faced for more than thirty years. > >Saddam Hussein: I know that you're ignorant of history and I know that >your president is no less ignorant. But it seems that you've been telling >lies for so long that you have come to believe them yourselves. If you >mean by "our neighbors" the Zionist Entity, then, yes, we really were >posing a danger to it and preparing to liberate our plundered land in >Palestine. This is the trust of every Arab person, not just Iraqis, for >that land is Arab and its people are Arab and the Zionists have done >nothing but occupy the land. They came to us from every corner of the >world with your help and that of the old colonial powers. But if you mean >Kuwait, I would like to ask you: Haveyou withdrawn from Kuwait or not? >Rumsfeld: These are security issues. Besides, between us and Kuwait and >the other Gulf States there are security agreements.We came in based on >their request to defend them from your threats. > >Saddam Hussein: Isn't it funny to entrust the wolf to guard the sheep? The >Kuwaiti people are an Arab people, and Kuwait is Iraqi territory. So I >would ask you to go and read up on history well, except that I am sure >that you will never be able to grasp it. >Rumsfeld: Enough of this chatter. I am offering you . . . > >Saddam Hussein (cuts him off): Before you offer me your rotten goods, I >want to ask you: did you find any weapons of mass destruction or not? >Rumsfeld (confused): we haven't found any so far. But we definitely will >find them one day. Do you deny that you had the intention of making a >nuclear bomb? > >Saddam Hussein: We had no weapons of mass destruction since 1991. We were >truthful when we spoke to the International Inspection Team and we were >truthful in our letters toKofi Annan. And you knew those facts, but you >were looking for any false excuse to occupy Iraq and overthrow the legal >authorities. >Rumsfeld: The Iraqis greeted us happily and welcomed us and the reason was >the bloody practices of your regime for all the years in which you ruled Iraq. > >Saddam Hussein: I ask you, Mr. Rumsfeld . . . Enough lying. You are the >ones who opened up cascades of blood on the land of Iraq. You plotted >against us and you came with some traitors to take over rule of the great >land of Iraq. >Rumsfeld: The ones you call traitors were chosen as their leaders by the >Iraqi people by democratic means and clean elections, such as never took >place while you ruled the country. > >Saddam Hussein: I knew that you came with a band of traitors with [Jalal] >at-Talibani in their front ranks (laughs mockingly). Great Iraq being >ruled by at-Talibani and al-Ja'fari, isn't that ridiculous? And what kind >of elections are you talking about. Is it possible to hold free elections, >as you call them, when our country is occupied? Mr. Rumsfeld, we have >learned from history that occupiers come only with their lackeys and >agents, then you want after all that to convince me that the people of >Iraq are enjoying freedom and democracy? You must really be delirious. >Rumsfeld (trying very hard to control his anger): You are in isolation and >don't know the facts of what is going on outside. The Iraqi people have >been freed from your oppression. If they saw you or any of you men in the >street, they would destroy you!! > >Saddam Hussein: And I bet you that if you were able to announce where you >are in Iraq, if the Iraqi Resistance learned where you were, you wouldn't >be able to get out alive. I want to pass on some advice that you must >convey to your stupid president: you must tell him to save what remains of >his troops. Death is stalking them in every place and historywill not >forgive him. >Rumsfeld: I came to talk with you about the 'terrorist' operations that >your men are inciting and carrying out. Your men recently carried out a >foul attack against Abu Ghurayb prison where more than 50 Americans were >killed or wounded, and they killed a number of those in custody on various >charges as well. Your men are getting help from terrorists from every >corner of the world and they are threatening the democratic experiment in Iraq. > >Saddam Hussein: What exactly is it that you want? >Rumsfeld: I'm making you one offer and that is that you will be released >and can chose for yourself a place of exile freely, in any country you >like, on condition that you go on television and issue a condemnation of >terrorism and order your men to stop these acts. > >Saddam Hussein: Have you obtained the agreement of your president to this >offer? >Rumsfeld: Yes, this offer has been agreed on in a meeting in which the >President, Vice President, Secretary of State, and Chief of Intelligence >took part. AndI have been authorized to inform you of this offer. > >Saddam Hussein: It's a trifling offer. >Rumsfeld (with a sigh): We're also ready to bring elements close to you >into the government. > >Saddam Hussein: And what else? >Rumsfeld: You will be given generous financial assistance and security >protection for you and your family in the country of your choice. > >Saddam Hussein: Do you want to hear my conditions? >Rumsfeld: I would love to. > >Saddam Hussein (with an air of superciliousness and superiority) I want >First from you that you set a time table for your withdrawal from Iraq and >that your government commit itself to it before the world and that you >begin the withdrawal immediately. Secondly, I ask you to release >immediately all the Iraqi and Arab prisoners in the prisons you have set >up or in which you have taken the freedom of tens of thousands of >honorable people of Iraq. Thirdly, I ask from you to pledge to grant full >compensation for the material losses that afflicted the Iraqi people as a >result of your aggression against our country since the Mother of Battles >in 1991 and until today. And I accept the assistance of an Arab and >International Committee in estimating the extent of those losses. Fourth, >I ask that you return the money that you and your men plundered from the >treasuries of Iraq, and its oil, in particular that criminal[L. Paul] >Bremerand his gang of traitors and renegades. Fifth, the return of the >artifacts that you stole and gave to the archaeological artifact mafia. >These are treasures that are beyond all the monetary value in the world, >because they carry the history of Iraq and its civilization. It's true >that you don't have any civilization or history and that the lifespan of >your country is no more than a few hundred years, but all that must not >serve to justify your theft and your hatred for the civilization of Iraq >and the wealth of Iraq. And sixth, you must hand over the weapons of mass >destruction if you have found any and return to us the lives of all the >martyrs whose lives you took and to return the honor of the noble women of >Iraq whom you dishonored. > >Rumsfeld: Is this some kind of joke? >Saddam Hussein: No! This is the bitter reality. . . which you know, Mr. >Rumsfeld. You have committed the greatest crime in history against a >peaceful Arab country. We met together in the 1980s. Do you remember your >offers? > >Rumsfeld: Enough of the past. We are reassessing our positions towards you >and towards a number of powers that have been hostile to us in the past. >We have decided to hold dialogue with moderate Islamicists and we have no >objection to their coming to power through the ballot box. More important >than that we have decided to open channels for dialogue with 'terrorist' >organizations like Hamas, the Islamic Jihad, and Hizbollah, which is >pro-Iranian, and also with other fundamentalist organizations in the whole >world. We even have a plan for contacting the Taliban movement in >Afghanistan to study the possibility of their participation in power, in >exchange for their giving up arms. >Saddam Hussein: So you have begun to rethink your erroneous course? > >Rumsfeld: It is a natural development of events. We are striving to spread >democracy in all countries and movements subject to tyranny. >Saddam Hussein: May you prosper if you are truthful. I know your real aim, >though. If you were really truthful, then you and your allies must begin >immediately by withdrawing from Iraq. And you would also have to depart >from your position of support for 'Israel'. But I know that your president >is stubborn and arrogant and is not telling the truth. > >Rumsfeld: He is a democratically elected president, not a bloody ruler >like you. >Saddam Hussein: Terror is your product and lying is your method. > >Rumsfeld: This offer is a historic opportunity for you. You will be >released and we will consult with you in everything related to the running >of Iraq. If you refuse this offer, the opportunity will not be fulfilled. >Saddam Hussein: I am not looking for opportunities. I am not looking for a >way to save my neck from the gallows that you have set up for all of Iraq. >If I wanted that I would have accepted the Russian offer and saved my sons >and grandson from martyrdom. I don't know what has become ofmy family and >my daughters and grandchildren. But believe me I am concerned with every >Iraqi citizen and the future of great Iraq more than I am concerned with >myself and my family. > >Through your men, you previously made an offer that if I declare that >weapons of mass destruction were smuggled to Syria, you said that in >return you would release me. I rejected that then and I reject it again now. >Rumsfeld: I don't want a rejection from you. I want you to think about it. >We are continuing our reassessment of our stances at the present time. We >want to stop the bloodshed on both sides. And therefore we have made this >offer out of the logic of power and not the logic of weakness. > >We asked Jalal at-Talibani to make a statement denying any intention of >executing you as a sign of good intentions on our part. We are ready to >reassess our whole position on the political arrangement in Iraq as a >whole and to discuss this matter with you and with your men. >Saddam Hussein: Are you ready to withdraw or not? > >Rumsfeld: We can possibly discuss redeployment. Our forces have prepared >bases for a long stay. We can possibly withdraw from streets and cities, >but we will remain in the bases for some time. >Saddam Hussein: then you want a new stooge to add to that line of stooges. >No Mr. Rumsfeld. Don't forget that you are talking with Saddam Hussein the >President of the Republic of Iraq. > >Rumsfeld: But you lost power. >Saddam Hussein: I have nothing left but honor and honor cannot be bought >and sold. > >Rumsfeld: But life is priceless. >Saddam Hussein: There is no value to life without honor. You robbed Iraq >of its honor when you trampled on its land and we will regain our honor >whether Saddam Hussein remains or dies a martyr. > >Rumsfeld: Your supporters with whom we have been discussing told us that >you were the first and last decision maker. Were they expecting this >reaction from you? >Saddam Hussein: Definitely, they know that Saddam Hussein cannot back away >at the expense of his homeland and honor. > >Rumsfeld: History will hold you responsible for the blood that is being >shed in Iraq. >Saddam Hussein: Rather history will judge you for your crimes. I warned >you before, saying that you would commit suicide on the walls of Baghdad. >And here you are paying the price. I want you to go to London and read the >records of the British Foreign Office and learn something about the >struggle of the Iraqi people against your British friends who are now >repeating their mistakes and fighting with you. The Iraqi people are a >stubborn people who do not fear death. The Resistance is stronger than you >imagine. So I promise you that you will have even more. > >Sources: >http://www.albasrah.net/maqalat_mukhtara/arabic/0505/sadam_lqa_020505.htm >http://www.elosboa.com/elosboa/issues/423/0401.asp > > >_______________________________________________ >Mai-not mailing list >Mai-not@globalproblematique.net >http://www.globalproblematique.net/mailman/listinfo/mai-not From jfos at net-tech.com.au Mon May 9 00:12:52 2005 From: jfos at net-tech.com.au (John) Date: Mon May 9 15:01:17 2005 Subject: [Mai-not] daily information concerning occupied Iraq Message-ID: <6.1.0.6.1.20050509170954.03646660@mail.net-tech.com.au> The news from Iraq is bad and getting worse with each passing day. Iraqi insurgents are stepping up the pace of their attacks, unleashing eleven deadly bombings on April 29th alone. Many of the 150,000 Iraqi police and soldiers hastily trained by U.S. troops have deserted or joined the insurgents. The cost of the war now tops $192 billion, rising by $1 billion a week, and the corpses are piling up: Nearly 1,600 American soldiers and up to 100,000 Iraqi civilians are dead, as well as 177 allied troops and 229 private contractors. Other nations are abandoning the international coalition assembled to support the U.S., and the new Iraqi government, which announced its new cabinet to great fanfare on April 27th, remains sharply split along ethnic and religious lines. But to hear President Bush tell it, the war in Iraq is going very, very well... When asked about media coverage of US carnage in the cradle of civilization, General Kimmitt's response was "I change the channel"... "Iraq is getting more like Bosnia every day. The centre is becoming very weak. Officially they will keep the fa?ade of a unitary state, but in practice there is no effective government"... SECRET PLANS Eighty-eight members of Congress call on Bush for answers on secret Iraq plan RAW STORY Eighty-eight members of Congress have signed a letter authored by Rep. John Conyers (D-MI) calling on President Bush to answer questions about a secret U.S.-UK agreement to attack Iraq, RAW STORY has learned. In a letter, Conyers and other members say they are disappointed the mainstream media has not touched the revelations... Read the full article / Leggi l'articolo completo: www.uruknet.info/?p=11570 ---------- Abu Musab al-Zarqawi?s Laptop Kurt Nimmo, Another Day in the Empire It looks like Abu Musab al-Zarqawi will be retired, the same way Osama bin Laden was. Arab boogeyman have a shelf life and it appears al-Zarqawi is approaching his expiration date, as bin Laden did after the battle of Tora Bora. Or so we are told. Actually, Osama bin Laden died in mid-December, 2001, after escaping Tora Bora (it is also possible he was not there)... Read the full article / Leggi l'articolo completo: www.uruknet.info/?p=11571 ---------- Iraqi Resistance Report for events of Friday, 6 May 2005 Translated and/or compiled by Muhammad Abu Nasr, member, editorial board, the Free Arab Voice. ( http://www.freearabvoice.org ) ...In a dispatch posted at 6:20pm Mecca time Friday evening, Mafkarat al-Islam reported that US occupation troops at the time of writing were surrounding the Shi?i holy city of an-Najaf on all sides, having deployed a large number of military vehicles and giant armored vehicles around the city. The correspondent for Mafkarat al-I! slam reported that the American occupation troops had prevented journalists coming from Baghdad from getting into an-Najaf, setting a serious precedent of further inhibiting news coverage in the country... Read the full article / Leggi l'articolo completo: www.uruknet.info/?p=11588 ---------- Something Iraq Will Never Lose Felicity Arbuthnot** , IslamOnline.net It's been two years since the illegal invasion, the destruction of humanity's history, the subsequent slaughters, and the attempt to dehumanize Iraqis, the people of Mesopotamia who brought the world all that we call civilized. A people whose deaths, in the words of the inimitable Major General Mark Kimmitt, are not productive to count. When asked about media coverage of US carnage in the cradle of civilization, General Kimmitt's response was "! change the channel"... Read the full article / Leggi l'articolo completo: www.uruknet.info/?p=11584 ---------- McNamara: Bush Nukes ?Dreadfully Dangerous? Kurt Nimmo, Another Day in the Empire On occasion, even war criminals make sense. For instance, Robert McNamara, war criminal par excellence (responsible for the murder of a million or more Vietnamese). McNamara, in an article appearing in Foreign Policy, basically writes that Bush and Crew are immoral sociopaths (the inclusion of the word denoting a serious mental condition is my choice, not McNamara?s) because they are determined to use ?nuclear weapons as a foreign-policy tool?... Read the full article / Leggi l'articolo completo: www.uruknet.info/?p=11583 ---------- The Quagmire. As the Iraq war drags on, it's beginning to look a lot like Vietnam ROBERT DREYFUSS The news from Iraq is bad and getting worse with each passing day. Iraqi insurgents are stepping up the pace of their attacks, unleashing eleven deadly bombings on April 29th alone. Many of the 150,000 Iraqi police and soldiers hastily trained by U.S. troops have deserted or joined the insurgents. The cost of the war now tops $192 billion, rising by $1 billion a week, and the corpses are piling up: Nearly 1,600 American soldiers and up to 100,000 Iraqi civilians are dead, as well as 177 allied troops and 229 private contractors. Other nations are abandoning the international coalition assembled to support the U.S., and the new Iraqi government, which announced its new cabinet to great fanfare on April 27th, remains sharply split along ethnic and religious lines. But to hear President Bush tell it, the war in Iraq is going very, very well... Read the full article / Leggi l'articolo completo: www.uruknet.info/?p=11590 ---------- Memo says Bush wanted data to justify Saddam's removal Washington Bureau A classified British memo, leaked in the midst of Britain's just-concluded election campaign, indicates President Bush decided by summer 2002 to oust Iraqi President Saddam Hussein and was determined to ensure that U.S. intelligence data supported his policy. The document, which summarizes a July 23, 2002, meeting of British Prime Minister Tony Blair with his top security advisers, reports on a visit to Washington by the head of Britain's MI! -6 intelligence service... Read the full article / Leggi l'articolo completo: www.uruknet.info/?p=11578 ---------- Veterans for Peace Call for Bush Impeachment Veterans For Peace On the second anniversary of the invasion and occupation of Iraq, this letter is being sent on behalf of Veterans For Peace (VFP), a national organization of military veterans, to appeal for Congressional action to remove George W. Bush and Richard Cheney from the offices of President and Vice-President of the United States, respectively. We do not make this call lightly and as former members of the U.S. armed forces, we take our responsibilities as! citizens very seriously... Read the full article / Leggi l'articolo completo: www.uruknet.info/?p=11589 ---------- "The relevant issue is not the number of combatants but the number of civilians supporting them". An interview with the Iraqi Resistance Delegation of CEOSI to Iraq, IraqSolidaridad (www.nodo50.org/iraq) Abu Yusef identifies himself as representative of "[...] the patriotic current of the dissolved Iraqi Armed Forces integrated in the Resistance". Abu Yusef, slowly speaking and discreet in gestures, almost white haired whose age can be no more than 55 is a former General: "Part of the actions of the Iraqi Resistance against the occupiers are being lead by members of the former Iraqi Army" that was dissolved, with the Ba'ath Party, by the Civil Administrator of the Coalition Provisional Authority, Paul Bremer, in Summer, 2003... Read the full article / Leggi l'articolo completo: www.uruknet.info/?p=11575 ---------- Bush, Blair and the Osama Tapes If the Moon could talk, what would it say? Maher Osseiran, www.globalresearch.ca While the controversy in England about the advice of the Attorney General on the legality of the Iraq war rages on and fuels requests for its publication in full, in America, George W. Bush is luckier and has survived the Valerie Plame issue, WMD?s, and the scathing report on the failure of intelligence prior to 9/11, the question is, how would both deal with the issue brought up in this article that potentially dwarfs all other issues... Read the full article / Leggi l'articolo completo: www.uruknet.info/?p=11573 ---------- Baghdad Diary A Week of Bombs and Blood PATRICK COCKBURN, CounterPunch ...The sense of hopelessness has deepened as the optimism following the election on 30 January dissipated while the triumphant Shia and Kurdish coalitions failed to form a government. It was finally sworn in this week with Ibrahim al-Jaafari as Prime Minister, but several ministerial positions have still to be filled. The sense of anarchy in Iraq is growing. Ghassan Attiyah, an Iraqi commentator, said in Baghdad yesterday: "Iraq is getting more like Bosnia every day. The centre is becoming very weak. Officially they will keep the fa?ade of a unitary state, but in practice there is no effective government"... Read the full article / Leggi l'articolo completo: www.uruknet.info/?p=11581 ---------- Galloway Wins Respect in AntiWar Election Triumph Fintan Dunne, BreakForNews.com George Galloway has scored a major victory for the antiwar movement in Britain, stealing the supposedly safe Labour seat of Bethnal Green and Bow which the ruling party has held unbroken since 1945. The former Glasgow Labour MP -who was ejected from the party over his stance on the Iraq invasion- is the founder of anti-war party Respect. His stunning win over Labour's Oona King, overturned a Labor majority of 10,000 at the last elect! ion by almost a 1,000 vote margin. Galloway denounced Blair in his victory speech, telling the Prime Minister: "All the people you have killed, all the lies you have told have come back to haunt you". Blair, knowing well that the Labour party is totaly unrepresentative of Labour supporters, in his own early morning speech to supporters used the leftist catchphrase words "solidarity" and "comrades" to try put a grassroots veneer on his party's return to government. The win is a tremenduous boost for Britain's antiwar movement. It gives them a voice in Parliament -where no party currently reflects their views (...) Galloway was interviewed overnight on BBC by establishment hatchet-man Jeremy Paxman. It was the second time a TV station had tried to ambush the antiwar candidate in three days. But Galloway was well up to the job... Read the full article / Leggi l'articolo completo: www.uruknet.info/?p=11574 www.uruknet.info: a site gathering daily information concerning occupied Iraq: news, analysis, documents and texts of iraqi resistance available in Italian and English. From eltechno at clear.lakes.com Tue May 10 01:30:25 2005 From: eltechno at clear.lakes.com (Jonathan Larson) Date: Tue May 10 01:32:07 2005 Subject: [Mai-not] An ethical blank cheque Message-ID: An ethical blank cheque British and US mythology about the second world war ignores our own crimes and legitimises Anglo-American warmaking Richard Drayton Tuesday May 10, 2005 The Guardian http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,3604,1480178,00.html In 1945, as at the end of all wars, the victor powers spun the conflict's history to serve the interests of their elites. Wartime propaganda thus achieved an extraordinary afterlife. As Vladimir Putin showed yesterday, the Great Patriotic War remains a key political resource in Russia. In Britain and the US, too, a certain idea of the second world war is enthusiastically kept alive and less flattering memories suppressed. Five years ago, Robert Lilly, a distinguished American sociologist, prepared a book based on military archives. Taken by Force is a study of the rapes committed by American soldiers in Europe between 1942 and 1945. He submitted his manuscript in 2001. But after September 11, its US publisher suppressed it, and it first appeared in 2003 in a French translation. We know from Anthony Beevor about the sexual violence unleashed by the Red Army, but we prefer not to know about mass rape committed by American and British troops. Lilly suggests a minimum of 10,000 American rapes. Contemporaries described a much wider scale of unpunished sex crime. Time Magazine reported in September 1945: "Our own army and the British army along with ours have done their share of looting and raping ... we too are considered an army of rapists." The British and American publics share a sunny view of the second world war. The evil of Auschwitz and Dachau, turned inside out, clothes the conflict in a shiny virtue. Movies, popular histories and political speeches frame the war as a symbol of Anglo-American courage, with the Red Army's central role forgotten. This was, we believe, "a war for democracy". Americans believe that they fought the war to rescue the world. For apologists of the British Empire, such as Niall Ferguson, the war was an ethical bath where the sins of centuries of conquest, slavery and exploitation were expiated. We are marked forever as "the good guys"and can all happily chant "Two world wars and one world cup." All this seems innocent fun, but patriotic myths have sharp edges. The "good war" against Hitler has underwritten 60 years of warmaking. It has become an ethical blank cheque for British and US power. We claim the right to bomb, to maim, to imprison without trial on the basis of direct and implicit appeals to the war against fascism. When we fall out with such tyrant friends as Noriega, Milosevic or Saddam we rebrand them as "Hitler". In the "good war" against them, all bad things become forgettable "collateral damage". The devastation of civilian targets in Serbia or Iraq, torture at Abu Ghraib and Guant?namo, the war crime of collective punishment in Falluja, fade to oblivion as the "price of democracy". Our democratic imperialism prefers to forget that fascism had important Anglo-American roots. Hitler's dream was inspired, in part, by the British Empire. In eastern Europe, the Nazis hoped to make their America and Australia, where ethnic cleansing and slave labour created a frontier for settlement. In western Europe, they sought their India from which revenues, labour and soldiers might be extracted. American imperialism in Latin America gave explicit precedents for Germany's and Japan's claims of supremacy in their neighbouring regions. The British and Americans were key theorists of eugenics and had made racial segregation respectable. The concentration camp was a British invention, and in Iraq and Afghanistan the British were the first to use air power to repress partisan resistance. The Luftwaffe - in its assault on Guernica, and later London and Coventry - paid homage to Bomber Harris's terror bombing of the Kurds in the 1920s. We forget, too, that British and US elites gave aid to the fascists. President Bush's grandfather, prosecuted for "trading with the enemy" in 1942, was one of many powerful Anglo-Americans who liked Mussolini and Hitler and did what they could to help. Appeasement as a state policy was only the tip of an iceberg of practical aid to these dictatorships. Capital and technology flowed freely, and fascist despots received dignified treatment in Washington and London. Henry Ford made Hitler birthday gifts of 50,000 marks. We least like to remember that our side also committed war crimes in the 1940s. The destruction of Dresden, a city filled with women, children, the elderly and the wounded, and with no military significance, is only the best known of the atrocities committed by our bombers against civilian populations. We know about the notorious Japanese abuse of prisoners of war, but do not remember the torture and murder of captured Japanese. Edgar Jones, an "embedded" Pacific war correspondent, wrote in 1946: "'We shot prisoners in cold blood, wiped out hospitals, strafed lifeboats, killed or mistreated enemy civilians, finished off the enemy wounded, tossed the dying into a hole with the dead, and in the Pacific boiled flesh off enemy skulls to make table ornaments." After 1945, we borrowed many fascist methods. Nuremberg only punished a handful of the guilty; most walked free with our help. In 1946, Project Paperclip secretly brought more than 1,000 Nazi scientists to the US. Among their ranks were Kurt Blome, who had tested nerve gas at Auschwitz, and Konrad Schaeffer, who forced salt into victims at Dachau. Other experiments at mind control via drugs and surgery were folded into the CIA's Project Bluebird. Japan's Dr Shiro Ishii, who had experimented with prisoners in Manchuria, came to Maryland to advise on bio-weapons. Within a decade of British troops liberating Belsen, they were running their own concentration camps in Kenya to crush the Mau Mau. The Gestapo's torture techniques were borrowed by the French in Algeria, and then disseminated by the Americans to Latin American dictatorships in the 60s and 70s. We see their extension today in the American camps in Cuba and Diego Garcia. War has a brutalising momentum. This is the moral of Taken By Force, which shows how American soldiers became increasingly indiscriminate in their sexual violence and military authorities increasingly lax in its prosecution. Even as we remember the evils of nazism, and the courage of those who defeated it, we should begin to remember the second world war with less self- satisfaction. We might, in particular, learn to distrust those who use it to justify contemporary warmongering. ? Richard Drayton is senior lecturer in history at Cambridge University. -- ------------------ War remains the decisive human failure. - John Kenneth Galbraith Jonathan web site at: http://elegant-technology.com -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://www.globalproblematique.net/pipermail/mai-not/attachments/20050510/0d3b3ba6/attachment.html From papadop at peak.org Tue May 10 15:41:07 2005 From: papadop at peak.org (MichaelP) Date: Tue May 10 15:41:23 2005 Subject: [Mai-not] Rumsfeld vists Saddam - leaked transcript Message-ID: This is not exactly a verified story -- it's attributed to a "reliable American source." Michael ========== http://globalresearch.ca/articles/SAD505A.html www.globalresearch.ca Centre for Research on Globalisation Centre de recherche sur la mondialisation Rumsfeld Meets Saddam: Transcript of Conversation www.AlBasrah.net 3 May 2005 www.globalresearch.ca 9 May 2005 ============ The Egyptian Magazine published the transcript of an alleged meeting in prison between Saddam Hussein and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. The Egyptian magazine al-Usbu', May 2, 2005, published the text of a conversation between Saddam Hussein and US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, which is said to have taken place on Rumsfeld's trip to Baghdad in late April. Rumsfeld, according to the al Usbu' report, visited Saddam Hussein in prison. Al-Usbu' reports that "informed political sources had disclosed the details of the meeting," of which we provide the transcript, translated from the Arabic. The Report of the Rumsfeld-Hussein meeting was also published in a number of Arabic language news media as well in French by The Algerian newspaper Liberte. ( Rumsfeld l'a rencontre lors de son recent sejour en Irak Saddam rejette l'offre Americaine par Abdelkamel K) The Pentagon in an official statement has denied the Rumsfeld-Hussein meeting: "The Al Quds news report out of London that Secretary Rumsfeld recently met with Saddam Hussein is not only false but the allegation that he negotiated with Saddam is absolutely ludicrous, " ______________________________________________________________ Translated by Muhammad Abu Nasr Al-Usbu' reports that the meeting took place after an escalation of Iraqi Resistance attacks against US occupation forces and their allies and stooges in Iraq. The sources indicated that the US had lost more than 1,600 men killed and wounded in the last three months, only a fraction of which they officially admitted. The available information indicates that US President George W. Bush held a meeting with his staff in which they discussed ways to stop the Resistance violence in Iraq. In order to save us lives and stop the continued deterioration of relations between the US and its allies and other countries that sent forces to occupied Iraq. The US leadership arrived at a decision to offer to release the Iraqi President Saddam Hussein and take him to his preferred place of exile outside Iraq in return for his appearing on television to demand that the Iraqi Resistance halt its armed operations and form a political party to take part in the political process set up by the US occupation forces in Iraq. Bush entrusted his Secretary of State, Donald Rumsfeld, with the task of going to Iraq immediately to urge the quick formation of a new Iraqi puppet "government" and to meet with the Iraqi "leaders" who have emerged from the 30 January "election" results held under the threat of US weapons in occupied Iraq. At the same time, however, Rumsfeld was to meet with Iraqi President Saddam Hussein in his American prison near Saddam International Airport west of Baghdad. The Saddam Hussein-Rumsfeld meeting reportedly lasted nearly an hour and took place in the presence of the commander of US occupation forces in Iraq. Rumsfeld followed up on his meeting by sending a report to President Bush in which he enclosed minutes of his meeting with the Iraqi President and offered outlines for how the US should deal with future developments in Iraq. He is said to have stressed the need for pursuing various ways to hold political dialogue with the Resistance and with Iraqi President Saddam Hussein. In his report,al-Usbu' said, Rumsfeld emphasized that the situation in Iraq was increasingly dangerous. He said that the Arab Resistance looked like an organized army in the making and that it was training well and had been provided with important support in weapons and other material back up. Rumsfeld said that the number of Resistance fighters in Iraq had now reached 400,000 active fighters and that around them were more than five million people providing the Resistance with support. Rumsfeld said that what took place in al-Fallujah had a negative impact on the security situation and that the Resistnace had succeeded in reaping the fruits of the "war on terror" being waged by the united states to use them for its benefit. He said that Iraqi youths were now vying with one another in volunteering to fight in the ranks of the Resistance. Rumsfeld confirmed that the names of many of the Resistance organizations that declare themselves here and there are nothing but fronts for organizations of the Arab Baath Party under the leadership currently of Izzat Ibrahim ad-Duri, the Vice President of Iraq. Rumsfeld expressed the expectation that the situation would become much more difficult in the coming period since the pace of armed operations against the US forces had greatly accelerated, and now stands at more than 200 attacks every day, making dozens of casualties in the "coalition" and puppet "national guard" ranks likely. Rumsfeld said that he had reviewed numerous American and Iraqi reports that reveal a deterioration in the security situation in Iraq and a fall in the morale level of the troops as casualties and material losses increase. Rumsfeld indicated that there have also been serious material losses in US ranks, and that the Americans are now loosing an average of at least 30 military vehicles every week, something that is continually depleting American power. Rumsfeld also disclosed that the Resistance had just recently seized stockpiles of advanced American weaponry including artillery and rocket launchers as well as anti-aircraft launchers and that the US command expressed the fear that these arms would soon have their effect in escalating the movements of violence and Resistance operations. At the end of his report, al-Usbu' reports, Rumsfeld urged the continuation of the dialogue with Saddam Hussein and his supporters until they can arrive at a formula for bringing about a temporary truce to facilitate a discussion of both sides' proposals. Al-Usbu' obtained the minutes of the conversation between Saddam Hussein and Donald Rumsfeld from a reliable American source. ______________________________________________________________ Transcript of the meeting between President Saddam Hussein and US Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld: AT the beginning of the meeting President Saddam appeared extremely calm, perhaps he was surprised that his visitor was Rumsfeld, but he did not show any nervous tension. Rumsfeld began the discussion: Rumsfeld: I have come to meet you to talk with out about the situation in Iraq. We have been in communication with some of your supporters inside and outside Iraq and they advised us to listen to you. Saddam Hussein: And what is it that you want? Your forces have occupied the territory of noble Iraq; you brought down the ruling regime without any legal basis; you attacked the sovereignty of an independent, free, sovereign country; and you committed crimes that history will record astestimony against your bloodstained civilization. So what more do you want after all that? Rumsfeld: (trying to conceal his anger): there no call for going into the past. I've come specially to present you a clear and specific offer and I want to hear from you a clear and specific answer. Saddam Hussein (mockingly): I suppose you've come to apologize and return authority to the Iraqis. Rumsfeld: We have nothing to apologize for. You were a danger to your neighbors. You were trying to acquire weapons of mass destruction, and you practiced dictatorship over your people. So it was natural for us to extend our hands to help the people of Iraq to rid themselves ofthe perils they faced for more than thirty years. Saddam Hussein: I know that you're ignorant of history and I know that your president is no less ignorant. But it seems that you've been telling lies for so long that you have come to believe them yourselves. If you mean by "our neighbors" the Zionist Entity, then, yes, we really were posing a danger to it and preparing to liberate our plundered land in Palestine. This is the trust of every Arab person, not just Iraqis, for that land is Arab and its people are Arab and the Zionists have done nothing but occupy the land. They came to us from every corner of the world with your help and that of the old colonial powers. But if you mean Kuwait, I would like to ask you: Have you withdrawn from Kuwait or not? Rumsfeld: These are security issues. Besides, between us and Kuwait and the other Gulf States there are security agreements. We came in based on their request to defend them from your threats. Saddam Hussein: Isn't it funny to entrust the wolf to guard the sheep? The Kuwaiti people are an Arab people, and Kuwait is Iraqi territory. So I would ask you to go and read up on history well, except that I am sure that you will never be able to grasp it. Rumsfeld: Enough of this chatter. I am offering you . . . Saddam Hussein (cuts him off): Before you offer me your rotten goods, I want to ask you: did you find any weapons of mass destruction or not? Rumsfeld (confused): we haven't found any so far. But we definitely will find them one day. Do you deny that you had the intention of making a nuclear bomb? Saddam Hussein: We had no weapons of mass destruction since 1991. We were truthful when we spoke to the International Inspection Team and we were truthful in our letters toKofi Annan. And you knew those facts, but you were looking for any false excuse to occupy Iraq and overthrow the legal authorities. Rumsfeld: The Iraqis greeted us happily and welcomed us and the reason was the bloody practices of your regime for all the years in which you ruled Iraq. Saddam Hussein: I ask you, Mr. Rumsfeld . . . Enough lying. You are the ones who opened up cascades of blood on the land of Iraq. You plotted against us and you came with some traitors to take over rule of the great land of Iraq. Rumsfeld: The ones you call traitors were chosen as their leaders by the Iraqi people by democratic means and clean elections, such as never took place while you ruled the country. Saddam Hussein: I knew that you came with a band of traitors with[Jalal] at-Talibaniin their front ranks (laughs mockingly). Great Iraq being ruled by at-Talibani andal-Ja'fari, isn't that ridiculous? And what kind of elections are you talking about. Is it possible to hold free elections, as you call them, when our country is occupied? Mr. Rumsfeld, we have learned from history that occupiers come only with their lackeys and agents, then you want after all that to convince me that the people of Iraq are enjoying freedom and democracy? You must really be delirious. Rumsfeld (trying very hard to control his anger): You are in isolation and don't know the facts of what is going on outside. The Iraqi people have been freed from your oppression. If they saw you or any of you men in the street, they would destroy you!! Saddam Hussein: And I bet you that if you were able to announce where you are in Iraq, if the Iraqi Resistance learned where you were, you wouldn't be able to get out alive. I want to pass on some advice that you must convey to your stupid president: you must tell him to save what remains of his troops. Death is stalking them in every place and historywill not forgive him. Rumsfeld: I came to talk with you about the 'terrorist' operations that your men are inciting and carrying out. Your men recently carried out a foul attack against Abu Ghurayb prison where more than 50 Americans were killed or wounded, and they killed a number of those in custody on various charges as well. Your men are getting help from terrorists from every corner of the world and they are threatening the democratic experiment in Iraq. Saddam Hussein: What exactly is it that you want? Rumsfeld: I'm making you one offer and that is that you will be released and can chose for yourself a place of exile freely, in any country you like, on condition that you go on television and issue a condemnation of terrorism and order your men to stop these acts. Saddam Hussein: Have you obtained the agreement of your president to this offer? Rumsfeld: Yes, this offer has been agreed on in a meeting in which the President, Vice President, Secretary of State, and Chief of Intelligence took part. AndI have been authorized to inform you of this offer. Saddam Hussein: It's a trifling offer. Rumsfeld (with a sigh): We're also ready to bring elements close to you into the government. Saddam Hussein: And what else? Rumsfeld: You will be given generous financial assistance and security protection for you and your family in the country of your choice. Saddam Hussein: Do you want to hear my conditions? Rumsfeld: I would love to. Saddam Hussein (with an air of superciliousness and superiority) I want first from you that you set a time table for your withdrawal from Iraq and that your government commit itself to it before the world and that you begin the withdrawal immediately. Secondly, I ask you to release immediately all the Iraqi and Arab prisoners in the prisons you have set up or in which you have taken the freedom of tens of thousands of honorable people of Iraq. Thirdly, I ask from you to pledge to grant full compensation for the material losses that afflicted the Iraqi people as a result of your aggression against our country since the Mother of Battles in 1991 and until today. And I accept the assistance of an Arab and International Committee in estimating the extent of those losses. Fourth, I ask that you return the money that you and your men plundered from the treasuries of Iraq, and its oil, in particular that criminal[L. Paul] Bremerand his gang of traitors and renegades. Fifth, the return of the artifacts that you stole and gave to the archaeological artifact mafia. These are treasures that are beyond all the monetary value in the world, because they carry the history of Iraq and its civilization. It's true that you don't have any civilization or history and that the lifespan of your country is no more than a few hundred years, but all that must not serve to justify your theft and your hatred for the civilization of Iraq and the wealth of Iraq. And sixth, you must hand over the weapons of mass destruction if you have found any and return to us the lives of all the martyrs whose lives you took and to return the honor of the noble women of Iraq whom you dishonored. Rumsfeld: Is this some kind of joke? Saddam Hussein: No! This is the bitter reality. . . which you know, Mr. Rumsfeld. You have committed the greatest crime in history against a peaceful Arab country. We met together in the 1980s. Do you remember your offers? Rumsfeld: Enough of the past. We are reassessing our positions towards you and towards a number of powers that have been hostile to us in the past. We have decided to hold dialogue with moderate Islamicists and we have no objection to their coming to power through the ballot box. More important than that we have decided to open channels for dialogue with 'terrorist' organizations like Hamas, the Islamic Jihad, and Hizbollah, which is pro-Iranian, and also with other fundamentalist organizations in the whole world. We even have a plan for contacting the Taliban movement in Afghanistan to study the possibility of their participation in power, in exchange for their giving up arms. Saddam Hussein: So you have begun to rethink your erroneous course? Rumsfeld: It is a natural development of events. We are striving to spread democracy in all countries and movements subject to tyranny. Saddam Hussein: May you prosper if you are truthful. I know your real aim, though. If you were really truthful, then you and your allies must begin immediately by withdrawing from Iraq. And you would also have to depart from your position of support for 'Israel'. But I know that your president is stubborn and arrogant and is not telling the truth. Rumsfeld: He is a democratically elected president, not a bloody ruler like you. Saddam Hussein: Terror is your product and lying is your method. Rumsfeld: This offer is a historic opportunity for you. You will be released and we will consult with you in everything related to the running of Iraq. If you refuse this offer, the opportunity will not be fulfilled. Saddam Hussein: I am not looking for opportunities. I am not looking for a way to save my neck from the gallows that you have set up for all of Iraq. If I wanted that I would have accepted the Russian offer and saved my sons and grandson from martyrdom. I don't know what has become ofmy family and my daughters and grandchildren. But believe me I am concerned with every Iraqi citizen and the future of great Iraq more than I am concerned with myself and my family. Through your men, you previously made an offer that if I declare that weapons of mass destruction were smuggled to Syria, you said that in return you would release me. I rejected that then and I reject it again now. Rumsfeld: I don't want a rejection from you. I want you to think about it. We are continuing our reassessment of our stances at the present time. We want to stop the bloodshed on both sides. And therefore we have made this offer out of the logic of power and not the logic of weakness. We asked Jalal at-Talibani to make a statement denying any intention of executing you as a sign of good intentions on our part. We are ready to reassess our whole position on the political arrangement in Iraq as a whole and to discuss this matter with you and with your men. Saddam Hussein: Are you ready to withdraw or not? Rumsfeld: We can possibly discuss redeployment. Our forces have prepared bases for a long stay. We can possibly withdraw from streets and cities, but we will remain in the bases for some time. Saddam Hussein: then you want a new stooge to add to that line of stooges. No Mr. Rumsfeld. Don't forget that you are talking with Saddam Hussein the President of the Republic of Iraq. Rumsfeld: But you lost power. Saddam Hussein: I have nothing left but honor and honor cannot be bought and sold. Rumsfeld: But life is priceless. Saddam Hussein: There is no value to life without honor. You robbed Iraq of its honor when you trampled on its land and we will regain our honor whether Saddam Hussein remains or dies a martyr. Rumsfeld: Your supporters with whom we have been discussing told us that you were the first and last decision maker. Were they expecting this reaction from you? Saddam Hussein: Definitely, they know that Saddam Hussein cannot back away at the expense of his homeland and honor. Rumsfeld: History will hold you responsible for the blood that is being shed in Iraq. Saddam Hussein: Rather history will judge you for your crimes. I warned you before, saying that you would commit suicide on the walls of Baghdad. And here you are paying the price. I want you to go to London and read the records of the British Foreign Office and learn something aboutthe struggle of the Iraqi people against your British friends who are now repeating their mistakes and fighting with you. The Iraqi people are a stubborn people who do not fear death. The Resistance is stronger than you imagine. So I promise you that you will have even more. Translated by Muhammad Abu Nasr Sources: http://www.albasrah.net/maqalat_mukhtara/arabic/0505/sadam_lqa_0205 05.htm http://www.elosboa.com/elosboa/issues/423/0401.asp ______________________________________________________________ Email this article to a friend To become a Member of Global Research The Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG) at www.globalresearch.ca grants permission to cross-post original Global Research articles in their entirety, or any portions thereof, on community internet sites, as long as the text & title are not modified. The source must be acknowledged and an active URL hyperlink address of the original CRG article must be indicated. The author's copyright note must be displayed. For publication of Global Research articles in print or other forms including commercial internet sites, contact: crgeditor@yahoo.com www.globalresearch.ca contains copyrighted material the use of which has not always been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. 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To express your opinion on this article, join the discussion at Global Research's News and Discussion Forum From thinker at uniserve.com Tue May 10 18:58:14 2005 From: thinker at uniserve.com (Ed Deak) Date: Tue May 10 18:59:33 2005 Subject: [Mai-not] Finance community on climate change Message-ID: <5.1.0.14.2.20050510185721.02ce19d0@pop.uniserve.com> UNEP NEWS RELEASE Global Finance Community Joins UN to Tackle Climate Change Institutional investors managing $3.22 trillion back new call for action at 2005 Investor Summit on Climate Risk NEW YORK, 10 May 2005 -- An unprecedented grouping of pension funds, foundations, European investors and US state treasurers have joined today with the United Nations to back a new call for urgent action by the global investment community to tackle the threat of climate change. Faced with growing evidence of the negative economic consequences of climate change this powerful alliance of institutional investors managing some $3.22 trillion (see below) are pressing for capital market regulators to demand more rigorous corporate disclosure of climate risks. Amongst other commitments, they are also seeking to unlock $1 billion in capital in the next year for investment in clean technology. The 2005 Call for Action was made at the 2005 Institutional Investor Summit on Climate Risk being held today at United Nations Headquarters in New York. Klaus Toepfer, Executive Director of the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), told participants at the Summit: "The local and global challenges created by climate change -- environmental, economic and social -- are manifold and will both multiply and accelerate in our lifetimes. For the world's financiers, investors and capital markets the time to act is now." Mr. Toepfer continued: "If our money markets are to manage climate risk more effectively then we must have greater corporate disclosure of how companies are dealing with the economic threats posed by global warming." The United Nations' environmental head welcomed the 2005 Summit "Call for Action" - signed by 20 major investors -- and said "Investors backing these practical and pragmatic steps send a strong signal to the markets that climate risk is real and needs to be managed aggressively". The 2005 "Call for Action" came as more than 400 financiers, government and civil society experts met at UN Headquarters for a summit to explore risks to the investment world resulting from global warming. The Summit, which follows on from the first such gathering in November 2003, has been jointly convened by the United Nations Foundation, the United Nations Fund for International Partnerships, the Boston-based US non-government organization CERES and UNEP. The four co-conveners are backing three post-summit initiatives to support the call for action by the investors. The initiatives are: * A New Climate Risk Disclosure Initiative (CRDI). This will be aimed at enhancing corporations' climate risk disclosure. The effort will focus on disclosure of corporate emissions, climate actions, scenario analysis, strategic analysis, and plans to address climate risks and opportunities. * UNEP and the UN Global Compact, working with leaders in the institutional investment community, are developing Principles for Responsible Investment (PRI). * A New Forum for International Investor Cooperation in Addressing Climate Risk. This forum will promote collaboration and information sharing among investors internationally about actions to address the financial risks and investment opportunities posed by climate change. The New York Summit comes shortly after the world's biggest reinsurance companies confirmed that 2004 saw the largest ever insured losses from natural catastrophes. According to Munich Re, economic losses totalled $145 billion in 2004. This included insured losses of $44 billion from natural catastrophes, the highest ever recorded. Swiss Reinsurance has published statistics that show 2004 was a record year in terms of claims, mainly dues to hurricanes, cyclones and typhoons. "On the one hand, the negative economic consequences of climate change are clear", said Mr. Toepfer. "Yet for the financial and business communities our efforts to adapt to and mitigate climate change and its impacts present emerging opportunities for those with the vision, entrepreneurial flair and commitment to embrace new business challenges", he said. As well as seeking to understand the economic and financial risks associated with climate change the business world is also awakening to a range of emerging opportunities associated with efforts to tackle global warming. It is estimated that greenhouse gas emissions trading markets could be worth $2 trillion by 2012 and it is further estimated that the market for clean technologies could be worth $1.9 trillion by 2020. Note to Editors There are 20 institutional investors signing and three international investors supporting the 2005 Summit Action Plan, representing a total of over $3.22 trillion. The list includes: State Treasurers: Phil Angelides, Treasurer, State of California; Randall Edwards, Treasurer, State of Oregon; Nancy Kopp, Treasurer, State of Maryland; David Lemoine, Treasurer, State of Maine; Denise Nappier, Treasurer, State of Connecticut; Jeb Spaulding, Treasurer, State of Vermont; Robert Vigil, Treasurer, State of New Mexico. State and City Controllers: Alan G. Hevesi, New York State Comptroller; William Thompson, Comptroller, New York City; Steve Westly, Controller, State of California. Public Pension Funds: Jack Ehnes, CEO, California State Teachers' Retirement System (CalSTRS); Edward Smith, Chairman, Illinois State Board of Investment. Labor Pension Funds: Steve Abrecht, Executive Director, National Industry Pension Fund, Service Employees International Union (SEIU); William J. Boarman, Chairman of the Board of Trustees, CWA/ITU Negotiated Pension Plan; R. Thomas Buffenbarger, President, International Association of Machinists; M. Benny Hernandez, Administrator, Sheetmetal Workers Pension Fund; C. Thomas Keegel, General Secretary Treasurer, International Brotherhood of Teamsters, Trustee, Teamsters Affiliates Pension Plan; Bruce Raynor, Secretary, UNITE HERE National Retirement Fund (Union of Needletrades, Textiles and Industrial Employees and Hotel Employees and Restaurant Employees International Union). Foundations: Lance E. Lindblom, President and CEO, The Nathan Cummings Foundation Religious Funds: William Somplatsky-Jarman, Presbyterian Church (USA) European Investor Supporters of the Call for Action: Sir Graeme Davies, Chairman, Universities Superannuation Scheme; Peter Scales, Chair, Institutional Investor Group on Climate Change; Neil Newton, Chair, London Pensions Fund Authority. For more information, please contact: Jim Sniffen, UNEP Information Officer in New York on Tel 1-212-963-8094/8210, sniffenj@un.org. Or, Robert Bisset, UNEP Spokesperson for Europe, in Paris, on Tel: +33-1-4437-7613, Mob: +33-6-2272-5842, E-mail: robert.bisset@unep.fr Eric Falt, Director, Division of Communications and Public Information, UNEP Nairobi, Tel: +254-2-62-3292, Mobile: +254-733-682656, E-mail: eric.falt@unep.org. Or Nick Nuttall, UNEP Spokesperson, Tel: +254-2-62-3084, Mobile: +254-733-632755; E-mail: nick.nuttall@unep.org UNEP News Release 2005/24 *********************************** Jim Sniffen Information Officer UN Environment Programme New York tel: +1-212-963-8094/8210 info@nyo.unep.org www.nyo.unep.org********************************* From thinker at uniserve.com Tue May 10 20:21:31 2005 From: thinker at uniserve.com (Ed Deak) Date: Tue May 10 20:22:38 2005 Subject: [Mai-not] Metabolic syndrome Message-ID: <5.1.0.14.2.20050510202034.02ccd860@pop.uniserve.com> Vancouver Sun 7 May 2005 Big waistline condition costly TRENTON, N.J. Americans with metabolic syndrome - a condition marked by big waistlines, diabetes, high blood pressure and cholesterol problems - account for $4 of every $10 spent on prescription drugs for adults in the United States, according to a study. The report by Medco Health Solutions, a huge prescription benefit manager, shows that adult use of medication for the syndrome jumped 36 per cent between 2002 and 2004. Annual prescription costs for people 20 and older with metabolic syndrome averaged $4,116 U.S. last year, 4.2 times the average amount spent on drugs for that age group, according to New Jersey-based Medco, which released the data exclusively to the Associated Press. Medco reached its findings by studying prescription records from a random sample of 2 million clients. Dr. Robert Epstein, Medco's chief medical officer, calls metabolic syndrome one of the country's top five health problems. The syndrome - once called Syndrome X - was first recognized about 40 years ago, but the renm "metabolic syndrome" did not come into wide use until the last decade. Metabolic syndrome is caused by the body's inability to use insulin efficiently, and the hallmark of the condition is excessive abdominal fat. Patients also have two or more related conditions, including high blood pressure, low levels of good cholesterol, high levels of blood fats called trigyclerides [I think this might be a misspelling of triglycerides], and high blood sugar. Many have diabetes or will eventually. People with metabolic syndrome are twice as likely to suffer a heart attack or stroke and more than three times as ilkely to die early from those causes. According to various U.S. estiamtes, at least one in four adults and roughly one in eight children have metabolic syndrome, with overeating and inactivity being key causes. "When change threatens to rule, the rules are changed." ? Michael Parenti From dgiles at central.murdoch.edu.au Tue May 10 21:36:23 2005 From: dgiles at central.murdoch.edu.au (Dion Giles) Date: Tue May 10 21:36:28 2005 Subject: [Mai-not] God, Israel, the Ten Commandments and Abe Lincoln Message-ID: <6.1.1.1.0.20050511123512.02f577a0@central.murdoch.edu.au> Item at http://www.positiveatheism.org/hist/lewis/lewis11.htm says something about what confronts the USA today. Dion Giles Western Australia From thinker at uniserve.com Wed May 11 07:35:13 2005 From: thinker at uniserve.com (Ed Deak) Date: Wed May 11 07:36:37 2005 Subject: [Mai-not] Metabolic syndrome Message-ID: <5.1.0.14.2.20050511073437.029f9678@pop.uniserve.com> Watch it Al, you're interfering with the principles of the "Free Enterprise, Free to Choose Market Economy". According to the prophet Friedman when people don't want to kill themselves with junkfoods any more they'll stop buying them. As they have done with cigarettes. Then they'll close down all the junkfood joints and plough up the grounds for the growing of organic vegetables. It's all WRITTEN and taught in our universities as the "science of economics" so it must be true ! Cheers, Ed. =========================================================================================== At 04:06 PM 11/05/2005 +1000, you wrote: Yes, that?s surely triglycerides misspelt, a lipid as cholesterol. A change has occurred with people smoking less and eating more. People used to stop eating to have a smoke. Now instead of dying from emphysema or lung cancer they prefer to dye from heart disease and its treatment?s drugs That?s the liberty Bush?s floggin? around. Viva la Pharma!! All the best, Al ----- Original Message ----- From: Ed Deak (by way of Dion Giles ) To: aljogallo@bigpond.com Sent: Wednesday, May 11, 2005 3:16 PM Subject: spam: [Mai-not] Metabolic syndrome Why the Yanks are the way they are. The effect of junk food on behaviour is pretty well documented. Cheers, Dion Vancouver Sun 7 May 2005 Big waistline condition costly TRENTON, N.J. Americans with metabolic syndrome - a condition marked by big waistlines, diabetes, high blood pressure and cholesterol problems - account for $4 of every $10 spent on prescription drugs for adults in the United States, according to a study. The report by Medco Health Solutions, a huge prescription benefit manager, shows that adult use of medication for the syndrome jumped 36 per cent between 2002 and 2004. Annual prescription costs for people 20 and older with metabolic syndrome averaged $4,116 U.S. last year, 4.2 times the average amount spent on drugs for that age group, according to New Jersey-based Medco, which released the data exclusively to the Associated Press. Medco reached its findings by studying prescription records from a random sample of 2 million clients. Dr. Robert Epstein, Medco's chief medical officer, calls metabolic syndrome one of the country's top five health problems. The syndrome - once called Syndrome X - was first recognized about 40 years ago, but the renm "metabolic syndrome" did not come into wide use until the last decade. Metabolic syndrome is caused by the body's inability to use insulin efficiently, and the hallmark of the condition is excessive abdominal fat. Patients also have two or more related conditions, including high blood pressure, low levels of good cholesterol, high levels of blood fats called trigyclerides [I think this might be a misspelling of triglycerides], and high blood sugar. Many have diabetes or will eventually. People with metabolic syndrome are twice as likely to suffer a heart attack or stroke and more than three times as ilkely to die early from those causes. According to various U.S. estiamtes, at least one in four adults and roughly one in eight children have metabolic syndrome, with overeating and inactivity being key causes. "When change threatens to rule, the rules are changed." ? Michael Parenti _______________________________________________ Mai-not mailing list Mai-not@globalproblematique.net http://www.globalproblematique.net/mailman/listinfo/mai-not From thinker at uniserve.com Wed May 11 07:37:29 2005 From: thinker at uniserve.com (Ed Deak) Date: Wed May 11 07:38:45 2005 Subject: [Mai-not] Fwd: Tell Congress: Good Jobs, No CAFTA Message-ID: <5.1.0.14.2.20050511073701.021936b8@pop.uniserve.com> >279a35.jpg >Dear Working Families e-Activist, >STOP CAFTA > >Help Stop CAFTA Send Congress >a Message >Now: > >279b12.jpg >Click Here > >Today, more than 1,000 industrial union members are on Capitol Hill, >urging Congress to reject the Central American Free Trade Agreement >(CAFTA). Please join them in a Virtual Lobby Day by sending a message to >Congress now. Click this link, or keep reading: > >www.unionvoice.org/campaign/StopCAFTA > > >CAFTA is the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) all over again >but with broader reach. CAFTA, President Bush s No. 1 trade priority, >would extend NAFTA s job loss, economic inequality, workers rights abuse >and environmental damage to five Central American countries and the >Dominican Republic. Many people call it NAFTA s twin brother. > >It s important to contact your members of Congress about CAFTA this week >because the pressure s really on them right now. President Bush is hosting >leaders of the six CAFTA countries on Thursday and you can bet he ll be >twisting arms on Capitol Hill in an attempt to win support for NAFTA II. > >NAFTA has cost nearly 1 million jobs in the United States and has failed >to improve life for the workers of Mexico. Rather than creating good jobs >and protecting workers, CAFTA would destroy more good U.S. jobs and >actually weaken protections for Central American workers. CAFTA would >reward governments that clearly violate international workers rights >standards by granting them trade preferences and it would shield these >governments from legal challenges about their treatment of workers. > >CAFTA isn t good for U.S. workers and it s sure not good for our >counterparts in Central America and the Dominica Republic. Tell your >members of Congress to reject this CAFTA. Click here: > >www.unionvoice.org/campaign/StopCAFTA > > > >Please join the Virtual Lobby Day by e-mailing your members of Congress >and urging friends and colleagues to e-mail Congress today, too. Click >here to invite others to join you: > >www.unionvoice.org/campaign/StopCAFTA/forward > > >Thank you for all you do for working families, here and in other countries. >In solidarity, > >Working Families e-Activist Network, AFL-CIO >May 10, 2005 > >279b6c.jpg > > > > >Visit the Web address below to tell your friends about this. >279bc6.jpg >Tell-a-friend! > >If you received this message from a friend, you can >sign up for >Working Families e-Activist Network. > >If you would like to unsubscribe from the e-Activist Network, or update >your account settings, please visit your >subscription >management page. >279c2a.jpg >279c8e.jpg -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: 279a35.jpg Type: image/jpeg Size: 633 bytes Desc: not available Url : http://www.globalproblematique.net/pipermail/mai-not/attachments/20050511/b6d68878/279a35.jpg -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... 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Name: 279c8e.jpg Type: image/jpeg Size: 633 bytes Desc: not available Url : http://www.globalproblematique.net/pipermail/mai-not/attachments/20050511/b6d68878/279c8e.jpg From eltechno at clear.lakes.com Wed May 11 12:41:24 2005 From: eltechno at clear.lakes.com (Jonathan Larson) Date: Wed May 11 12:44:49 2005 Subject: [Mai-not] From Baghdad to Brasilia Message-ID: And just LOOK at what happens while USA is tied down fighting the utterly futile War of Zionist Revenge in Mesopotamia. All that good training at the School of the Americas going to waste--I mean in the old days, we would have seen a military coup in Brazil by now. Such disrespect for the only Superpower on earth. Sheesh!! ************************************ From Baghdad to Brasilia By Pepe Escobar http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/GE12Ak02.html There could hardly be a more graphic instance of an emerging new world order than Iraqi President Jalal Talabani, Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas and the premiers of both Syria and Lebanon all flying for a get-together in Brasilia in Brazil, designed from scratch in the 1950s by modernist icon Oscar Niemeyer as the futuristic capital of the new world. They were among the heads of state and ministers from 33 South American and Arab League states gathered in the Brazilian capital for the first-ever Arab-South American summit. Brazilian Foreign Minister Celso Amorim has described the summit as an "alliance of civilizations" - a reference to 150 years of Syrian-Lebanese immigration to South America. More than 10 million people of Arab descent live in South America, most of them in Brazil, which holds the largest Arab diaspora in the world. The "Declaration of Brasilia" to be endorsed this Wednesday calls for close political and economic ties between South America and the Arab world; demands that Israel disband its settlements in the West Bank, including "those in East Jerusalem", and retreat to its borders before 1967; criticizes US "unilateral economic sanctions against Syria", which violates principles of international law; and forcefully condemns terrorism. Israel is also implicitly criticized for holding an undeclared nuclear arsenal. The declaration also calls for a global conference to define the meaning of terrorism, and defends peoples' rights to "resist foreign occupation in accordance with the principle of international legality and in compliance with international humanitarian law". It's unlikely that Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice will lose any sleep over what happened in Brasilia - despite all the inevitable hardline Israeli-American rumblings. Arab League secretary general Amr Moussa said, "It's their [Israel's] problem if they are concerned. If they don't want to be concerned anymore, they should change their policy in the occupied territories." Washington was so concerned about the summit turning into a forum against President George W Bush's Greater Middle East and against Israel that it pressured the pliable, dependent leaders of Egypt, Jordan and Morocco not to attend. As much as Brazil counts on Arab support in its pledge for a permanent United Nations Security Council seat, the Arab League counts on South America to support an Egyptian bid. South America is avidly cultivating much stronger ties with China, Russia and the Arab world - and there's little Washington can do about it. The US officially requested to be an observer at the summit. The Brazilians politely declined: "It's a public meeting, you can watch it on TV." Not surprisingly, Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez and Abbas were welcomed in Brasilia as heroes. Brazilian President Luis Ignacio "Lula" da Silva diplomatically praised the Palestinians for their "patience" during the Middle East peace process. Al-Jazeera went live with the opening remarks by the co-hosts, Lula and Algerian President Abdelaziz Bouteflika, also the current president of the Arab League. Lula insisted once again that "poor countries [must] receive the benefits of globalization". The Algerians are excitedly talking about "a coalition on cultural, political and economic terms". Al-Sharq al-Awsat, a leading Arab paper, stressed how the summit could influence the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The London Arabic-language daily al-Hayat published a half-page photo of Talabani arriving in Brasilia. South-South cooperation The key point of all this is economic. Bilateral trade between South America and the Arab world stands only at US$10 billion a year, but growth possibilities are endless. The main success of the summit is the PetroSul agreement, which creates a continental oil major composed by Brazil, Argentina and Venezuela. Arabs are delighted to find good products and competitive prices in South America and a business climate much more relaxed than in Europe, and especially post-September 11 US. For instance, Brazil will export even more sugar, beef and chicken to the Middle East. According to the Arab-Brazilian Chamber of Commerce, exports may double within five years. According to Georgetown University's Tarik Youssef, "From the Arabs' perspective, Latin America is probably the best case to benchmark the pace of progress in the Arab world," meaning in both the political and economic spheres. Arabs may learn one or two practical things in South America in terms of privatization and fiscal and political reforms. Brazil is forcefully engaged in a campaign for the elimination of rich countries' agricultural subsidies - a popular theme also in the Arab world. The summit is the first step toward a future free trade agreement between the Mercosur and the Gulf Cooperation Council. No wonder Washington hawks are uneasy. There's an emerging geopolitical axis on the map - Arab-South American. It's non-aligned. And it's swimming in oil. Between them, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Iraq, the United Arab Emirates, Algeria, Egypt, Qatar, Libya, Oman, Syria, Yemen, Venezuela, Ecuador, Argentina and Brazil pump about 27.2 million barrels of oil a day, about 32.5% of global production. One of the key reasons for Talabani's presence at the summit is that Brazil will inevitably be back to oil-field development in Iraq. Brazil had very close commercial relations - in the oil service industry and in the military sector - with Iraq during Saddam Hussein's time. Brazilian technical expertise helped in the discovery of some of the largest Iraqi oilfields. Both Venezuela and Brazil hope to win plenty of service contracts in the Arab world. Venezuela, instead of just supplying about 13% of the daily US oil consumption, is avidly diversifying - striking new deals with Spain and China. The last thing Hugo Chavez wants is to be dependent on the US market. The writing on the (global) wall is now inevitable: region-to-region economic deals, more exports, and increased distancing from the weak dollar. In this renewed South-South cooperation, trade and commerce prevail over invasion and regime change; respect to UN resolutions regarding military occupations prevail over alienated terrorism rhetoric. There's an alternative global agenda in town. -- ------------------ War remains the decisive human failure. - John Kenneth Galbraith Jonathan web site at: http://elegant-technology.com -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://www.globalproblematique.net/pipermail/mai-not/attachments/20050511/cf395f56/attachment.html From papadop at peak.org Wed May 11 13:28:02 2005 From: papadop at peak.org (MichaelP) Date: Wed May 11 13:28:13 2005 Subject: [Mai-not] CUOMO CLO$ES BOOK ON PALAST SUIT Message-ID: http://www.nypost.com/news/regionalnews/46365.htm NY Post May 11, 2005 -- Mario Cuomo has settled a $15 million lawsuit against the author and publisher of a best-selling book that he said portrayed him as corrupt. The terms of the agreement between the ex-governor and Greg Palast, author of "The Best Democracy Money Can Buy," and Penguin publishing's Plume imprint, were not disclosed. In a disputed passage, Palast wrote that after the government won a racketeering judgment against a power company, Cuomo "reached the chief federal judge in New York and poof the jury's verdict was thrown out." Palast wrote Cuomo's lawyer that there was "no intent to imply" the case was "fixed." From jomut at yahoo.com Wed May 11 13:30:29 2005 From: jomut at yahoo.com (John Mutambirwa) Date: Wed May 11 13:30:32 2005 Subject: [Mai-not] innocent terrorism! Message-ID: <20050511203029.90938.qmail@web31112.mail.mud.yahoo.com> Hi, Dubious has a legal solution for this one folks. He calls it a "stature of limutations". John ======================== May 9, 2005 Cuban Exile Could Test the U.S. Definition of Terrorist By TIM WEINER http://www.nytimes.com/2005/05/09/national/09exile.html?th&emc=th&oref=login MIAMI, May 5 - From the United States through Latin America and the Caribbean, Luis Posada Carriles has spent 45 years fighting a violent, losing battle to overthrow Fidel Castro. Now he may have nowhere to hide but here. Mr. Posada, a Cuban exile, has long been a symbol for the armed anti-Castro movement in the United States. He remains a prime suspect in the bombing of a Cuban commercial airliner that killed 73 people in 1976. He has admitted to plotting attacks that damaged tourist spots in Havana and killed an Italian visitor there in 1997. He was convicted in Panama in a 2000 bomb plot against Mr. Castro. He is no longer welcome in his old Latin America haunts. Mr. Posada, 77, sneaked back into Florida six weeks ago in an effort to seek political asylum for having served as a cold war soldier on the payroll of the Central Intelligence Agency in the 1960's, his lawyer, Eduardo Soto, said at a news conference last month. But the government of Venezuela wants to extradite and retry him for the Cuban airline bombing. Mr. Posada was involved "up to his eyeballs" in planning the attack, said Carter Cornick, a retired counterterrorism specialist for the Federal Bureau of Investigation who investigated Mr. Posada's role in that case. A newly declassified 1976 F.B.I. document places Mr. Posada, who had been a senior Venezuelan intelligence officer, at two meetings where the bombing was planned. As "the author or accomplice of homicide," Venezuela's Supreme Court said Tuesday, "he must be extradited and judged." The United States government has no plan yet in place for handling the extradition request, according to spokesmen for several agencies. Roger F. Noriega, the top State Department official for Western Hemisphere affairs, said he did not even know whether Mr. Posada was in the country. In fact, Mr. Posada has not been seen in public, and his lawyer did not return repeated telephone calls seeking to confirm his presence. Mr. Posada's case could create tension between the politics of the global war on terrorism and the ghosts of the cold war on communism. If Mr. Posada has indeed illegally entered the United States, the Bush administration has three choices: granting him asylum; jailing him for illegal entry; or granting Venezuela's request for extradition. A grant of asylum could invite charges that the Bush administration is compromising its principle that no nation should harbor suspected terrorists. But to turn Mr. Posada away could provoke political wrath in the conservative Cuban-American communities of South Florida, deep sources of support and campaign money for President Bush and his brother Jeb, the state's governor. To jail Mr. Posada would be a political bonanza for Mr. Castro, who has railed against him in recent speeches, calling him the worst terrorist in the Western Hemisphere. To allow his extradition would hand a victory to President Hugo Chávez of Venezuela, Mr. Castro's closest ally in Latin America and no friend to President Bush. "As a Cuban, as a freedom fighter myself, I believe he should be granted asylum," said Marcelino Miyares, a veteran of the 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion and president of the Christian Democratic Party of Cuba, which is based in Miami. "But it's a no-win situation for the United States government." Orlando Bosch, the most prominent face of the violent anti-Castro wing in Florida, said in an interview broadcast on Tuesday in Miami that he had spoken by telephone with Mr. Posada, who, "as everybody knows, is here." Mr. Bosch, a longtime ally of Mr. Posada's, presented a similar problem for the United States in 1989, when the Justice Department moved to deport him despite resistance from Miami's Cuban-Americans. The Justice Department called Mr. Bosch "a terrorist, unfettered by laws or human decency, threatening and inflicting violence without regard to the identity of his victims," in the words of Joe D. Whitley, then an associate United States attorney general. Mr. Whitley added: "The United States cannot tolerate the inherent inhumanity of terrorism as a way of settling disputes. Appeasement of those who would use force will only breed more terrorists. We must look on terrorism as a universal evil, even if it is directed toward those with whom we have no political sympathy." The first Bush administration overruled the deportation in 1990; Mr. Bosch remained in Florida. Mr. Whitley, now general counsel for the Department of Homeland Security, declined to comment on the Posada case. Mr. Posada is said to be sick with cancer, facing mortality. Some veterans of the Bay of Pigs say the armed struggle he represents is dying, too. "I believe that movement is already dead," Mr. Miyares said. Alfredo Durán, who was captured at the Bay of Pigs and later led a militant anti-Castro group, said that "after 9/11, it has become inexcusable to defend attacks that could kill innocent civilians." "Everybody's renouncing violence except a small group of ultra-hard-core right-wingers," said Mr. Durán, now a lawyer in Miami advocating peaceful change in Cuba. Mr. Durán said that Mr. Posada had never renounced violence and that the question for the United States was whether to denounce him despite his service during the cold war. Mr. Posada served with the C.I.A. from 1961 to 1967, according to declassified United States government records. He was scheduled to land at the Bay of Pigs, the attack on Cuba ordered by the Kennedy administration, but his mission was canceled when the invasion collapsed. He kept in close touch with the agency after leaving it and joining Venezuela's intelligence service, known by its initials as Disip, where he served as a senior officer from 1969 to 1974, according to the declassified records and retired American officials who served in Venezuela. In 1974, after a change in government, Mr. Posada set up a detective agency in the capital, Caracas, an office through which many anti-Castro Cubans passed, according to F.B.I. records. He retained his links to Disip, a militantly anti-Castro agency in those cold war days. Then, amid an international wave of violence by the anti-Castro movement, including the attempted bombing of a New York City concert hall, two attacks shook the United States and Cuba. On Sept. 21, 1976, in the heart of Washington, a car bomb killed a former foreign minister of Chile, Orlando Letelier, and an American aide, Ronni Moffitt; at the time, it was one of the worst acts of foreign terrorism on American soil. Fifteen days later, a Cubana Airlines flight with 73 people on board was blown out of the sky off the coast of Barbados in the worst terrorist attack in Cuban history. Mr. Cornick, the F.B.I. counterterrorism specialist who worked on the Letelier case, said in an interview that both bombings were planned at a June 1976 meeting in Santo Domingo attended by, among others, Mr. Posada. "The Cubana bomb went off, the people were killed, and there were tracks leading right back to Disip," said Mr. Cornick, who is now retired. "The information was so strong that they locked up Posada as a preventative measure - to prevent him from talking or being killed. They knew that he had been involved," said Mr. Cornick, referring to the Venezuelan authorities. "There was no doubt in anyone's mind, including mine, that he was up to his eyeballs" in the Cubana bombing. A November 1976 F.B.I. report, based on the word of a trusted Cuban-American informer, Ricardo Morales, places Mr. Posada at two meetings where the Cubana bombing was plotted. It quotes the informer directly: "If Posada Carriles talks," it says, "the Venezuelan government will 'go down the tube.' " The document was obtained from government files by the National Security Archive, a private research group in Washington. Mr. Posada has always denied that he had a role in the bombing. But he was detained by the Venezuelan government for almost nine years in the case - never formally convicted, never fully acquitted. Finally, in 1985, he escaped his minimum-security confines. He found work in El Salvador as a quartermaster for the contras, the rebels fighting the Nicaraguan government, whose mission was financed by the C.I.A. and Lt. Col. Oliver L. North of the National Security Council. After that covert operation was exposed in 1986, Mr. Posada landed in Guatemala, working as a government intelligence officer. In 1990, he was nearly killed in Guatemala by gunmen who he has said he suspected were sent by Mr. Castro. After a slow recovery, Mr. Posada, by his own admission, ran a string of operatives on a series of missions to blow up Cuban people and places. Mr. Posada spoke to The New York Times seven years ago, boasting of what was then his latest exploit, a string of bombings at Havana's hottest tourist spots that terrorized the city and killed an Italian visitor. Then in November 2000, he traveled to Panama, accompanied by Guillermo Novo, whose conviction in the Letelier bombing had been overturned on appeal; Gaspar Jiménez, convicted of trying to kidnap a Cuban diplomat in Mexico in 1977; and Pedro Remón, convicted of the attempted murder of Cuba's ambassador to the United Nations in 1980. The moment Mr. Castro arrived in Panama for an international conference, he accused Mr. Posada of plotting against his life. Mr. Posada was seized, along with his three colleagues and 33 pounds of the plastic explosive C-4. Despite Mr. Posada's protest that the case was a sting set up by the Cuban spy service, he received an eight-year sentence in April 2004 for endangering public safety. Eight months ago, in her last week in office, President Mireya Moscoso of Panama pardoned the men. She cited humanitarian grounds. Ms. Moscoso, who has long had a home in Key Biscayne, has strong social ties to Cuban conservatives in South Florida, said Mr. Durán, the Bay of Pigs veteran. Her successor, Martín Torrijos, criticized the pardon at his inauguration, saying, "For me, there are not two classes of terrorism, one that is condemned and another that is pardoned." Mr. Posada left Panama City and flew to San Pedro Sula, Honduras, bearing a false American passport, according to President Ricardo Maduro, who publicly denounced him. Mr. Posada left Honduras in a hurry. Mr. Castro said in a recent speech that Mr. Posada then went to the Mexican resort Isla Mujeres and arrived in Florida on a boat owned by a Cuban-American developer in Miami. The Cuban leader offered no proof. If Mr. Posada wants asylum, "there will come a time when he will have to come out of the dark," Mr. Durán said. "At that point, he could be arrested for illegal entry." But in the present political climate, "the only place he's safe is here - even if he's in jail." John Mutambirwa (Dreaming Awake) jomut@yahoo.com chakane@hotmail.com http://www.geocities.com/jomut __________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Read only the mail you want - Yahoo! Mail SpamGuard. http://promotions.yahoo.com/new_mail From creuss at bluemail.ch Wed May 11 13:30:56 2005 From: creuss at bluemail.ch (Christoph Reuss) Date: Wed May 11 13:31:52 2005 Subject: [Mai-not] An ethical blank cheque Message-ID: > In eastern Europe, the Nazis hoped to make their America I guess this sheds a new light on (former) EU-boss Romano Prodi's quote on EU enlargement: "Going west was their [U$] enlargement. They found the Rocky Mountains; we found Prague and Budapest." (also see next posting) Chris ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ SpamWall: Mail to this addy is deleted unread unless it contains the keyword "igve". From creuss at bluemail.ch Wed May 11 13:31:07 2005 From: creuss at bluemail.ch (Christoph Reuss) Date: Wed May 11 13:32:09 2005 Subject: [Mai-not] EU, Putin plan "Greater Europe" Message-ID: http://news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/afp/20050510/wl_afp/russiaeu_050510105107 Russia, EU agree to boost ties, Putin eyes 'greater Europe' AFP Tue May 10, 6:51 AM ET MOSCOW (AFP) - Russia and the European Union (EU) struck a landmark accord to boost cooperation, in what President Vladimir Putin said should forge a "greater Europe" and ease recent strains in ties with Brussels. The Russian leader was speaking at a Russia-EU summit expected to formally approve four "road map" accords to bolster cooperation in areas ranging from trade and investment to the fight against terrorism. "The strategic partnership with the EU is an important priority for Russia. I am convinced that adoption of these road maps which is expected today will allow us to build a greater Europe," he said. Shortly before the start of the talks Russia and an EU official confirmed "road map" accords had been reached on four policy areas: the economy; freedom, security and justice; external security; and research, education and culture. Negotiations had been snagged notably on demands by the 25-nation EU for a firm linkage between an accord to ease visa rules and an agreement on the re-admission of illegal immigrants. But officials said this was virtually resolved and would be adopted by the EU leaders during the three-hour summit. "It should be done, there is no need to worry," said one EU diplomat. "The work between experts and official of Russia and the EU was not easy, but it is going ahead and I hope we will continue to cooperate constructively in the future," he added. The EU was represented by foreign policy chief Javier Solana [the former NATO secretary general who helped the KLA to build a "Greater Albania" in the Balkans], Luxembourg Prime Minister Jean-Claude Juncker -- whose country currently holds the EU's rotating presidency, and EU commission chief Jose Manuel Barroso. Barroso paid tribute to Russia as a "European" country on the eve of the talks. "Russia is a bridge from Europe to Asia, and we can be happy that we share the same values," he said. The Moscow summit was aimed at repairing ties battered in recent years: an attempt to agree on the four "road map" accords foundered last year when Russia was angered by perceived EU interference in Ukraine. Threats to a harmonious summit this time have focussed on strains between Russia and the EU's three ex-Soviet Baltic newcomer states, one of which had hoped until recently to sign a border accord with Moscow at the summit. Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania were occupied by Stalin's Soviet Union following a Nazi-Soviet pact in 1939 and were forcibly assimilated into the Soviet Union at the end of World War II. EU external relations commissioner Benita Ferrero-Waldner [Austrian J?rg Haider's nominee for president, named after Benito Mussolini] conceded ahead of the talks that the Latvia-Russian border issue remains "delicate" and is not yet resolved. "We understand that there are always difficulties of the past. We all have to work to get rid of these difficult memories. But at the same time this is really about looking to the future," she said. Another cause of concern for the EU are so-called "frozen conflicts" in Russia's ex-Soviet backyard near the expanded bloc's borders. One EU official said the EU was "extremely disappointed" that Moscow had failed to implement an accord signed in 1999 to withdraw Russian forces notably in Georgia and Moldova. Ferrero-Waldner added that she hoped the summit -- a day after world leaders gathered for ceremonies to commemorate the end of World War II -- would focus on the future, not the troubled past. "It is an important moment to look to the future together with Russia," she told reporters in Moscow Monday. The EU-Russia summit came a day after over 50 heads of state and government gathered in Moscow for ceremonies to commemorate the 60th anniversary of the end of World War II. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ SpamWall: Mail to this addy is deleted unread unless it contains the keyword "igve". From papadop at peak.org Wed May 11 13:37:01 2005 From: papadop at peak.org (MichaelP) Date: Wed May 11 13:37:21 2005 Subject: [Mai-not] COLORADO LEGISLATURE APPROVES NON-DISCRIMINATION BILL Message-ID: http://www.hrc.org/Template.cfm?Section=Home&CONTENTID=26808&TEMPLATE=/ContentManagement/ContentDisplay.cfm HUMAN RIGHTS CAMPAIGN For Immediate Release: Thursday, May 5, 2005 COLORADO LEGISLATURE APPROVES NON-DISCRIMINATION BILL, STRIKES DOWN MARRIAGE BAN 'There's nothing partisan about making sure a good employee can keep their job,' said HRC's Joe Solmonese. 'We urge Governor Owens to ensure this important protection becomes law.' WASHINGTON The Human Rights Campaign lauded the Colorado Legislature for passing a measure that would ban discrimination against gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender employees. A House committee also struck down a proposed amendment to the Colorado Constitution that would deny marriage, along with other legal arrangements, to same-sex couples. "There should be nothing partisan about making sure good employees can keep their jobs," said HRC President Joe Solmonese. "We urge Governor Owens to ensure this important protection becomes law, making certain that Coloradoans' employment opportunities are based on the quality of their work and nothing more." Solmonese added, "We laud the House Judiciary Committee for defeating a measure that would put discrimination in the Colorado Constitution. This amendment was politics at its worst and put real Coloradoans and their families in danger." "Passage of S.B. 28 is a historic landmark for the cause of GLBT equality in Colorado," said Pat Steadman, a lobbyist for the GLBT state group Equal Rights Colorado. "This is precisely the bill that the authors of 'Amendment 2' tried to prevent our Legislature from passing. Today's vote demonstrates just how far we've come in Colorado toward an acknowledgement of the equal dignity of each and every citizen of our great state." Colorado S.B. 05-28 would prohibit employment discrimination against GLBT individuals. The measure was sponsored, by openly lesbian state Sen. Jennifer Veiga, D-Denver, and passed the Senate on April 25, 2005, by a partisan 18-17 vote. The measure passed the House on May 4, 2005, by a 36-29 vote. Today, the Senate concurred with House changes. Sixteen states and Washington, D.C., have laws that prohibit employment discrimination based on sexual orientation, and six also prohibit gender identity-based discrimination, including Colorado neighbor New Mexico. The Human Rights Campaign is the largest national lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender political organization with members throughout the country. It effectively lobbies Congress, provides campaign support and educates the public to ensure that LGBT Americans can be open, honest and safe at home, at work and in the community. From papadop at peak.org Wed May 11 15:04:13 2005 From: papadop at peak.org (MichaelP) Date: Wed May 11 15:04:19 2005 Subject: [Mai-not] Sacramento legislative Panels Reject Gay Marriage Ban Message-ID: http://news.findlaw.com/ap/o/632/05-11-2005/e4fd001a4d27fd5c.html Calif. Panels Reject Gay Marriage Ban By STEVE LAWRENCE Associated Press Writer (AP) - SACRAMENTO, Calif.-Two legislative committees on Tuesday rejected a constitutional amendment that would ban gay marriages and strip away a long list of rights granted to domestic partners in recent years. The Assembly and Senate Judiciary Committees both rejected an amendment offered by Republican Assemblyman Ray Haynes, who claimed the proposal would strengthen the intent of voters who approved a ballot measure five years ago that prevents the state from recognizing gay marriages performed elsewhere. Other laws bar same-sex marriages from taking place in California. Conservative groups immediately said they would try to gather the nearly 600,000 signatures required to put an initiative banning gay marriage on the ballot in 2006. "This disturbing display of arrogance against marriage and the voters means average Californians must take matters into their own hands," said Randy Thomasson, president of the Campaign for Children and Families. Democratic state Sen. Sheila Kuehl, the state's first openly gay legislator, predicted otherwise. "This is about America, the place where no civil rights movement has ever failed," she said. Haynes said the Legislature and the courts had "eviscerated" the meaning of the law banning gay marriages and made up legal arguments to determine it was unconstitutional. "When the people said only that marriage could be between a man and a woman, they knew exactly what they were talking about," he said. "The words were clear. The meaning was clear. The intention was clear." Opponents of the amendment said it was an attempt to repeal domestic partners' rights. Since 1999, the Legislature has approved a series of bills recognizing domestic partnerships and granting them most of the rights given married couples, including the right to sue for wrongful death of a partner and to adopt a partner's child. Democratic Assemblyman Lloyd Levine said the proposed amendment amounted to "legalizing discrimination." "The fact is plain and simple," he said. "There is a group of people who, for whatever reason, do not like gays and cannot tolerate the idea of two women sleeping together or two men sleeping together. To put that into the constitution ... is simply unconscionable." Meanwhile, in Raleigh, N.C., hundreds of people rallied behind the Legislative Building Tuesday to urge legislators to allow them to vote on a constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage. "You've got a very vocal, savvy minority that wants marriage to be understood differently," said protester Mark Faggion. An election on the proposed constitutional amendment appears unlikely. Two-thirds majorities in both the House and Senate are needed to authorize a statewide vote, but referendum bills filed in both chambers have sat in committees for three months without action. North Carolina already has a law banning same-sex marriages and the state doesn't recognize gay marriages performed in other states. From thinker at uniserve.com Wed May 11 20:58:30 2005 From: thinker at uniserve.com (Ed Deak) Date: Wed May 11 20:59:42 2005 Subject: [Mai-not] Sacramento legislative Panels Reject Gay Marriage Ban In-Reply-To: Message-ID: <5.1.0.14.2.20050511204852.02cc7d58@pop.uniserve.com> It is amazing on what people will waste their time and energy on, unless they do it to divert attention from the real problems. As far I'm concerned, a civil marriage is basically a form of contract between two people, or whatever, therefore there's nothing to prevent anybody of any sex to marry another. As far the anti gay discrimination is concerned, as a custom furniture maker, I have worked with gay interior decorators, many of whom were living with others already and anyway, every day for 22 years in Vancouver. Not one of them ever bothered me, or made any suggestions, or anything, while the goddamn religious fanatics were knocking on our door all the time, making a nuisance of themselves and trying to force some of their garbage literature on us. No wonder, they now are in the forefront of this hysterical propaganda campaign against fellow human beings. Cheers, Ed. At 03:04 PM 11/05/2005 -0700, you wrote: >http://news.findlaw.com/ap/o/632/05-11-2005/e4fd001a4d27fd5c.html > >Calif. Panels Reject Gay Marriage Ban > >By STEVE LAWRENCE Associated Press Writer > >(AP) - SACRAMENTO, Calif.-Two legislative committees on Tuesday rejected a >constitutional amendment that would ban gay marriages and strip away a >long list of rights granted to domestic partners in recent years. > >The Assembly and Senate Judiciary Committees both rejected an amendment >offered by Republican Assemblyman Ray Haynes, who claimed the proposal >would strengthen the intent of voters who approved a ballot measure five >years ago that prevents the state from recognizing gay marriages performed >elsewhere. > >Other laws bar same-sex marriages from taking place in California. > >Conservative groups immediately said they would try to gather the nearly >600,000 signatures required to put an initiative banning gay marriage on >the ballot in 2006. > >"This disturbing display of arrogance against marriage and the voters >means average Californians must take matters into their own hands," said >Randy Thomasson, president of the Campaign for Children and Families. > >Democratic state Sen. Sheila Kuehl, the state's first openly gay >legislator, predicted otherwise. "This is about America, the place where >no civil rights movement has ever failed," she said. > >Haynes said the Legislature and the courts had "eviscerated" the meaning >of the law banning gay marriages and made up legal arguments to determine >it was unconstitutional. > >"When the people said only that marriage could be between a man and a >woman, they knew exactly what they were talking about," he said. "The >words were clear. The meaning was clear. The intention was clear." > >Opponents of the amendment said it was an attempt to repeal domestic >partners' rights. Since 1999, the Legislature has approved a series of >bills recognizing domestic partnerships and granting them most of the >rights given married couples, including the right to sue for wrongful >death of a partner and to adopt a partner's child. > >Democratic Assemblyman Lloyd Levine said the proposed amendment amounted >to "legalizing discrimination." > >"The fact is plain and simple," he said. "There is a group of people who, >for whatever reason, do not like gays and cannot tolerate the idea of two >women sleeping together or two men sleeping together. To put that into the >constitution ... is simply unconscionable." > >Meanwhile, in Raleigh, N.C., hundreds of people rallied behind the >Legislative Building Tuesday to urge legislators to allow them to vote on >a constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage. > >"You've got a very vocal, savvy minority that wants marriage to be >understood differently," said protester Mark Faggion. > >An election on the proposed constitutional amendment appears unlikely. >Two-thirds majorities in both the House and Senate are needed to authorize >a statewide vote, but referendum bills filed in both chambers have sat in >committees for three months without action. > >North Carolina already has a law banning same-sex marriages and the state >doesn't recognize gay marriages performed in other states. >_______________________________________________ >Mai-not mailing list >Mai-not@globalproblematique.net >http://www.globalproblematique.net/mailman/listinfo/mai-not From wesburt at juno.com Wed May 11 18:23:26 2005 From: wesburt at juno.com (wesburt@juno.com) Date: Wed May 11 21:12:23 2005 Subject: [Mai-not] TOP, The Fundamental Link Between People and Markets Message-ID: <20050511.212344.-394823.0.wesburt@juno.com> Hi Folks, My May 8, 2005 post "Kinsley, Gelles, Priest, Ashford, Hirschfeld, Olson, Hamerstrom, Samuelson, and Burt; on Social Security" evoked a flood of serious e-mails on my favorite lists. But they all failed to mention the fundamental questions raised in the following two year old post. ~~~~~~~~~~ Begin two year old post ~~~~~~~~~~ From: "Wesley S. Burt" To: wesburt@juno.com Date: Fri, 9 May 2003 11:23:40 -0400 Subject: The Optimum Policy (TOP), Lost Since The 1890s? To: My few friends lurking on my copy list. Hi folks, My post of Thu, 24 Apr 2003, and the four which followed, have been completely stonewalled by my readers. None of my favorite interlocutors, W. Curtiss Priest, Charley Musselman, ichinen1, nor Todd Boyle returned a comment. Perhaps, if I had revised my 24 April reply to Curtiss as follows, a serious discussion of "The Optimum Policy" might have started. ~~~~~~~~~~ Snip redundant text ~~~~~~~~~ Because the US economy presently dominates the global economy, any systemic defect in US public policy which unbalances the flow of money or goods across US boundaries cannot be corrected or compensated for by the combined policies of other nations in the global economy. To the contrary, if the US economy is properly balanced by applying "The Optimum Policy" to the public sector, as consistently as it has been applied to the private sector during the 20th century, every other nation's WHIPs (their wealthy, healthy, intelligent, and powerful folks) will find their own advantage in applying "The Optimum Policy" to their own economy. Do Afghanistan and Iraq deserve any less? "The Optimum Policy" has been a matter of standard operating practice (SOP) for our capital intensive industries since a founder of the AEA, Henry Carter Adams devoted 15 pages of his 1887 paper, "Relation Of The State To Industrial Action," to describing three classes of industry; those with increasing returns to scale, those with constant returns to scale, and those with decreasing returns to scale. Adams concluded that only industries with decreasing returns could be properly regulated by the competitive action of a free market, or automated by computer control which simulated a free market pricing mechanism. The reason why was as well understood by Paul A. Samuelson and electrical engineers in 1953 as by H. C. Adams in 1887. Both increasing returns and constant returns provide excessive gain in a closed loop regulating system and form a hysteresis loop which shifts violently between two physical states. So free market or automatic control of production requires each productive asset to exhibit decreasing returns to scale in order to achieve stable and efficient operation of a population of such assets. Sooner or later, the many diverse critics of the status quo on my copy list will have to find common ground and speak as one voice, if they expect to prevail over the DDotSQ ( Devious Defenders of the Status Quo). My work experience and research since 1969 indicates only two places in our history and literature where that common ground has been documented. One place is in the Pentateuch, or Five Books of Moses, which anticipated all of the diverse religious teachings that presently divide and conquer humanity. But Curtiss Priest, quite rightly, fears that I'll be taken for a religious fanatic if I continue to advocate that source of common ground. So let's move on. The second place for finding this common ground is in the fact that both the public sector and the private sector of every national economy are composed of reproducible productive assets, human and capital. Both types of assets require a sustained investment during their development period to realize their full potential during their productive period. The extent to which those two development expenses are "capitalized," and thereby assure "decreasing returns to scale" for either type of asset, is the primary determinant of stability and efficiency among corporations or nations. Visual-aids to bring that concept into sharp focus are provided by attached Fig4a.gif and file Fig8c.gif. Fig4a serves to integrate the data presented on the supporting charts which have been so bravely posted to the URL in the signature below, but not yet discussed seriously, by my mentor and favorite contemporary economist, W. Curtiss Priest. As you all know, the medium of exchange in any national economy flows through three closed loops, the GDP loop presently at $10 Trillion/year in US, the business to business transactions loop at 150% of GDP, and the speculative transactions loop at an order of magnitude larger than the GDP. As shown in Fig 2-3 at the web site, the US medium of exchange (M1) expanded from $250 Billion in 1965 to $1,200 billion in 1994 and has remained at that level to date, while the other debt instruments continued their upward trends. This indicates a remarkable improvement in the speed of payments by electronic means throughout the global economy. Fig4a, however, tell us nothing about growth, stability, or efficiency in a family farm, a corporation, an industry, a national economy, or a global economy. After we digest and reject all of the red herrings that are every day promulgated to the public on money, interest, taxes, banks, and globalization there remains only ONE significant systemic requirement for social development such as Germany and Japan exhibited in the three decades after World War II. That ONE is an adequate capitalization of both capital and human assets, sufficient to bring both types of assets to market with "decreasing returns to scale." That is to say, without pricing young and startup assets out of the market. Fig8c shows the $6,500/year expense of 1-12 education, which is adequately capitalized in the US, on the left side of the horizontal (Value added or consumed) scale. The $5,000/year expense of supporting dependent children and students, which is not adequately capitalized in the US, is shown by the dependent lines on the right side of the chart where this uncapitalized expense diminishes the purchasing power of the work force by $5,000/year per dependent. This is a total expense equal to the DOD budget, which is charged per dependent, to US households. For more than a century, the US business community has kept its employees and the public ignorant of this ONE systemic requirement for a growing, stable, and efficient national economy. To cure what has ailed the US economy since the 1890s, we have three options, but are discussing only two of them: 1, Tax cuts, as proposed by Congress and President Bush, which will produce future budget deficits, but does not address the systemic defect in US public policy. 2, A Keynesian expansion of the M1 money supply, as proposed by subscribers to list Post Keynesian Thought (PKT), which also does not address the systemic defect in US public policy. 3, Adequately capitalize the remaining fixed costs that presently dominate the budget of US parenting families, which will restore the rising trend in the value of the dollar that Americans enjoyed prior to the 1890s, except during time of war. Hi Folks, As Fig4a shows us, our human assets operate in tandem with our capital assets, so a maximum flow of real goods and services cannot be realized by optimizing only our capital plant, if our human assets are under capitalized and thereby burdened with fixed and unavoidable fixed costs as shown by the dependent lines (1 to 6) in Fig8c. ~~~~~~~~~~ End two year old post ~~~~~~~~~~ What can be more fundamental than doing justice to those who must depend on others for justice. Kind regards, Wes Burt The Optimum Policy (TOP) is shown on Dr. W. Curtiss Priest's web site at: If you can't refute it, then make it public knowledge. -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: not available Type: image/gif Size: 14010 bytes Desc: not available Url : http://www.globalproblematique.net/pipermail/mai-not/attachments/20050511/fd073ee8/attachment-0002.gif -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: not available Type: image/gif Size: 10058 bytes Desc: not available Url : http://www.globalproblematique.net/pipermail/mai-not/attachments/20050511/fd073ee8/attachment-0003.gif From duanebehrens at cox.net Wed May 11 22:05:46 2005 From: duanebehrens at cox.net (duanebehrens@cox.net) Date: Wed May 11 22:05:50 2005 Subject: [Mai-not] Someone's At the Door! Message-ID: <20050512050545.UVZH26972.fed1rmmtao03.cox.net@smtp.west.cox.net> ED DEAK: > It is amazing on what people will waste their time and energy on, unless > they do it to divert attention from the real problems. DUANE: Ed, I think you may have nailed it, right there. Betcha you'd be surprised at the percentage of homophobes who are merely overcompensating for their own "sinful" leanings. . . ED:As far I'm concerned, a civil marriage is basically a form of contract between two people, or whatever, therefore there's nothing to prevent anybody of any sex to marry another. As far the anti gay discrimination is concerned, as a custom furniture maker, I have worked with gay interior decorators, many of whom were living with others already and anyway, every day for 22 years in Vancouver. Not one of them ever bothered me, or made any suggestions, or anything, while the goddamn religious fanatics were knocking on our door all the time, making a nuisance of themselves and trying to force some of their garbage literature on us. DUANE: Funny, I've never been bothered by the religious fanatics. I've ALWAYS answered the door when they've come calling, I've ALWAYS listened politely to their very brief speeches, always made just before their hasty retreat. And I've ALWAYS asked them if they couldn't stay just a little longer? I call to them, standing in the doorway . . . . . . in my underwear. From jfos at net-tech.com.au Wed May 11 20:54:28 2005 From: jfos at net-tech.com.au (John) Date: Wed May 11 22:20:28 2005 Subject: [Mai-not] Water Privatisation: International Solidarity for the Struggle for Water Justice (2 articles) Message-ID: <6.1.0.6.1.20050512135146.02b26540@mail.net-tech.com.au> "There is great risk that the experience of Enron-Anderson could be repeated if the auditors suggested by the company are chosen, for they are all big firms that have interests in privatization. Indeed, as a recent report by UNISON (the largest association of public unions in the United Kingdom) demonstrates, the big auditing firms such as Ernst and Young, KPMG, Deloitte and Touche, and Pricewaterhousecoopers, have played a key role in pushing for the privatization of public services within the British government. The large auditing firms have a direct interest in the proliferation of private water contracts worldwide, since the privatization of public service means more auditing contracts for them." Date: Wed, 11 May 2005 12:00:33 -0500 Right to Water -- posted by svarghese@iatp.org ============================================================ International Solidarity for the Struggle for Water Justice in El Alto, Bolivia by Susan Spronk May10, 2005 Tired of high connection fees and demanding expansion of service, thousands of citizens of El Alto took to the street earlier this year to pressure the government to return water to public control. The water and sanitary sewerage system was privatized in the neighboring cities of El Alto and La Paz in 1997, when the government granted a concession to private consortium, Aguas del Illimani, controlled by French water giant, Suez. The people of La Paz and El Alto never asked for their water to be privatized. In fact, since the government negotiated the contract in secret, citizens had to learn that the water system was privatized when the water bills arrived at their doors with a new name on them. Although it was heralded as a "pro poor" contract that promised new connections, the contract left between 160,000 and 200,000 people in El Alto without access to water. After eight years of broken promises to expand services the citizens of El Alto had enough and organized a three-day general strike asking for the exit of Aguas del Illimani. Their action was successful, and on January 11, the government promised to cancel the contract. The struggle to return water to public hands in El Alto is not over yet. For the past few months the government has been playing a waiting game. With the clock ticking and no concrete resolution in sight, the social movement that organized the protests has to fight to keep their forces united. To help arm the struggle, there was an international meeting last weekend in El Alto with water warriors from all over the Americas, including Uruguay, Argentina, and Canada. Their inspiring words helped to remind the residents of El Alto that they are not alone in the struggle to reclaim water from the grasp of transnational corporations. The international meeting to support El Alto was primarily the initiative of the Coordinator for the Defence of Water and Life - the social movement that led the struggles against water privatization in Cochabamba in 2000 - and the Federation of Neighborhood Committees (FEJUVE), which played a crucial role in the "Gas War" of October 2003 and led the recent protests in January that pressed for the immediate exit of Aguas del Illimani from the cities of El Alto and La Paz. The similarities between the struggles going on throughout the world were highlighted throughout the event. Maude Barlow, international water activist from the Council of Canadians and long-time friend of the water justice movements in Bolivia, told the audience that similar struggles against the Water Barons - Suez, Vivendi, and RWE Thames - are happening all over the world in cities like Atlanta, Johannesburg, Manila, and Buenos Aires. She argued that in both North and South, people are saying "no" to the corporate theft of water. They kicked Suez out of Atlanta, and peasants are organizing a boycott called "Coke Quit India", against Coca-Cola, which is sucking water from aquifers that are also used by poor rural farmers in India, leading to overexploitation of water resources. She stressed that, "it is important not to give up right before you are about to win" and that we need to continue picking at Suez "like mosquitoes" until they leave Bolivia and the Americas forever. Carlos Santos, communications director from the coalition that successfully entrenched public water as a constitutional right in Uruguay last year, spoke about how the Bolivian social movements for water justice inspired their own struggle across the border. The coalition in Uruguay named itself the "Coordinadora," after the organization in Cochabamba that played a central role in the "Water War" of 2000. He argued that the two struggles in Cochabamba and Uruguay share much in common. First, both movements were headed by coalitions with horizontal organizational structures in which there was no formal leadership. Second, both brought together various interests from different sectors, rural, urban, workers, the unemployed, etc. He attested that this kind of social movement organizing demonstrates that different interests can co-operate and that the result is nothing less than a new form of doing politics in Latin America. Carlos highlighted that all Latin American countries that have suffered through dictatorships and the neoliberal regimes that followed them have a long historical memory of struggle. Omar Fern?ndez from the Federation of Small Irrigating Farmers in the Cochabamba Valley (FEDECOR), focused on the imperialist relations between the Bolivian government and "international cooperation," in particular the German Technical Development Agency (GTZ). According to Omar, the GTZ is to blame for the privatization of water resources in Bolivia, since it has been both financier and consultant in the process to formulate the Water Law, which set off the "Water War" of 2000. He noted that the GTZ did not have to wait for the regulations for the modified water law to be approved to come forward with its own law, ratified by a Presidential Decree that authorized the German version of "public-private partnership" called "anonymous mixed societies." There are two such projects underway in Bolivia. Omar argued that by passing this law, the Germans are trying to impose their own model of water management in La Paz and El Alto. The fundamental objection is that these "public" utilities are regulated by the commercial code, which means that water can potentially be sold for a profit. The Germans have also stuck their unwelcome noses into the democratic process that was underway in El Alto to define what kind of new utility should replace the private company in the two cities. The FEJUVE-El Alto is pushing for a democratic, publicly owned company which is managed by an elected board of citizens and treats water as a "common good", not a way to make profit. At the end of February, the German Embassy emitted a statement to the press that makes their position clear: the new water company in La Paz-El Alto must involve some form of private participation in order to receive international credit. The event concluded with the presentation of a one-way plane ticket to Suez, asking the company to leave Bolivia. As discussion among the participants highlighted, there is a growing movement in the Americas to form a "Coordinadora" at the international level to pressure the water transnationals to back their bags and leave the Americas forever. Update on the El Alto "Water War": Maintaining Unity against Divide and Conquer Strategies International solidarity with the El Alto movement is much needed in this crucial conjuncture in order to support the movement for water justice in El Alto. Compared to the "Water War" in Cochabamba, the struggle in El Alto has been relatively isolated. One of the problems is that the social movement is that its social base is located in El Alto, although the water system is shared with neighboring city, La Paz. As with most Latin American cities, both cities are highly stratified by race and class, and the poor, indigenous majority is concentrated in El Alto. The composition of the social movement is quite different from the Cochabamba "Water War", which was a broader-based movement of rural farmers, the middle class and the urban poor. In La Paz-El Alto, tariff increases brought by privatization have not been dramatic enough to guarantee the participation of the small middle class of El Alto who already have water services (and failed to participate in the mobilization in March), and the residents of La Paz. Indeed, there has been little solidarity from La Paz, apart from ex-workers of SAMAPA, the public utility that was privatized, who have proposed to re-institute the former public utility. It is very difficult to know which organizations to contact to build solidarity since there are three different neighborhood organizations in La Paz, and the largest one has been co-opted by the Mayor, who is promoting the formation of a new public-private partnership with Suez. Furthermore, the El Alto conflict has not received near the same level of international media coverage. The state has not used violence to repress the El Alto struggle, and therefore there have not been as many sexy news stories. In this context, both the company and the government have been using "divide and conquer" strategies to try to fragment and disorient the movement. As time drags on, people in El Alto are growing tired. Now that a few months have passed, the residents of El Alto most likely to gain from the struggle - residents who lack household water and sewerage connections - have grown visibly frustrated with the lack of progress at the negotiating table. As one resident commented in a FEJUVE meeting during a discussion about the new public utility, "How much more time will pass until we know when we will have water?" The government has been stalling on making any firm commitments to satisfy the demand of the protestors - that "Aguas del Illimani get out now, damn it/Que se vaya Aguas del Illimani, carajo" - fearing the possibility that Suez would sue the Bolivian government in international court if they terminated the contract unilaterally. This is exactly what happened when Bechtel-Abengoa was kicked out of the country five years before, and although Becthel dropped the lawsuit, Abengoa still continues to demand $25 million for damages and lost profits. The government remains hopeful that it will be possible to reach a "mutual accord" with the company after an audit of their investments. Last week, the government finally approved two Supreme Decrees that bring the conflict a few baby steps towards resolution. One promises that the proposal to replace Aguas del Illimani will be approved by the end of July. While it is clear that the new company will not be named "Aguas del Illimani" given all the bad press, it is still not clear whether Suez will stay or go. The company has suddenly decided that it can provide services to those residents outside of the "served area" and has been knocking on doors in El Alto to offer its services. It appears that if at one time it wanted to leave, now it wants to stay. It is possible that Suez is trying to control the damage all this conflict has caused to its public image, given that the contract was one of the models for Latin America. Suez is also receiving political support from the Mayors of the two cities of El Alto and La Paz, both of whom hope to form a "public-private partnership" with Suez in which they, instead of the company, will channel the international loans and donations. Local residents suspect that El Alto?s mayor, Juan Paredes, has personal business interests in forming a new consortium. The reason behind Juan de Granado?s support for a public-private partnership is much more obvious given the pressure he faces from the Inter-American Development Bank, which has given his municipal government a $28.5 million loan for "institutional strengthening." The second Supreme Decree authorizes the government to conduct an audit of the company's investments. This topic is highly contentious, since the residents of El Alto claim that there have been little, if no new investment besides that which the neighbors have made themselves. Unfortunately, the government has only committed $175,000 to this task, when it has been estimated that an "integral audit" demanded by the FEJUVE would cost around $400,000. The FEJUVE wants more than just a book audit, and is demanding that it be consulted on the choice of auditor. There is great risk that the experience of Enron-Anderson could be repeated if the auditors suggested by the company are chosen, for they are all big firms that have interests in privatization. Indeed, as a recent report by UNISON (the largest association of public unions in the United Kingdom) demonstrates, the big auditing firms such as Ernst and Young, KPMG, Deloitte and Touche, and Pricewaterhousecoopers, have played a key role in pushing for the privatization of public services within the British government. The large auditing firms have a direct interest in the proliferation of private water contracts worldwide, since the privatization of public service means more auditing contracts for them. The Bolivian government has also been catering to the desires of the most combative zones to try to lessen the possibility of further conflict. When blockades were erected again in El Alto in early March, the government promised that they would find $15 million to build water and sanitary sewerage systems in District 8, which was central in the January "Water War." While only a fraction of this finance has since been guaranteed, the community organized an event last weekend to thank the politicians for their promises. The FEJUVE is in a difficult position given rising tensions amongst the citizens of El Alto. At the last meeting of neighborhood presidents in February, the presidents approved a resolution that no one was to pay their water bills. As the case of Tucum?n, Argentina in 1996 demonstrates, a payment strike can be an effective way to get rid a company that is only interested in making profit. However, there was widespread failure to implement this resolution and now those who complied face disconnection of water service and fines. The problem is not that the strategy failed, but that the FEJUVE leadership seems to have forgotten that such a resolution was taken. The FEJUVE leaders have taken other steps to try to deal with the problems with bills, such as opening a consumer complaint office in El Alto. While this may be necessary to assuage the fears of residents facing fines and higher water bills, it risks encouraging angry residents to take individual actions rather than collective ones. The Thirst for Justice As Eduardo Galeano wrote during the brutal dictatorship in Uruguay, "They wanted to take away our right to water. But they could never because they could not take away our thirst." The thirst for social justice and freedom from want still runs strong in the El Alto movement to reclaim public water. As with any social movement struggling for justice in against neoliberalism and imperialism, however, the road is long and difficult, and victory is uncertain. Building solidarity between international water justice movements and the local movement is just as important as maintaining solidarity within the movement. Given the powerful interests at play in the El Alto water struggle, the latter is going to be difficult to achieve. Susan Spronk is a doctoral candidate at York University currently living in La Paz. Thanks to Jeffery R. Webber for helpful editorial comments http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=52&ItemID=7827 ============================================================ View the ARCHIVES of this list at: http://lists.iatp.org/listarchive/ For help with listserv SUBSCRIPTIONS visit: http://lists.iatp.org/listarchive/subscriptions.cfm Questions, comments, concerns? Email us: support@iatp.org ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ Date: Mon, 9 May 2005 Right to Water -- posted by svarghese@iatp.org ============================================================ Dear Friends, For those of you who do not read Spanish I wanted to share with you a tremendous victory. Suez has FINALLY decided to leave the province of Santa Fe where it had contracts in 13 cities, including the second largest city in Argentina, Rosario. Popular organizations have been calling for the termination of the contract since they held a popular referendum 3 years ago. Suez has finally bowed to popular pressure after many years of not completing its contractual obligations, charging for work not done, refusing to invest, and hiking water rates. Congratulations to all the community groups who have worked so hard! Citizens groups now begin the hard task of rebuilding a public, community-run water company. For those who read Spanish, please find the details below. Representatives from Argentina still plant to travel to Paris, for the Suez Annual General Meeting on May 13th. (Suez is still active in other parts of Argentina, including Buenos Aires.) VICTORIA EN SANTA FE: RETIRADA DE SUEZ La empresa Aguas Provinciales de Santa Fe, perteneciente al grupo Suez, anunci? hoy su retirada. Tr?s largos meses en los que el di?logo entre la empresa y el gobierno provincial estuvieron llenos de acusaciones cruzadas, y ante una fuerte opini?n publica que constantemente se manifest? contra la empresa, la Suez anunci? su alejamiento de la concesi?n en la provincia de Santa Fe. Luego de innumerables postergaciones que llevaron a la paralizaci?n de las obras ( 9 de los 10 a?os que llevamos de concesi?n), de la falta de inversi?n, del constante incumplimiento contractual, del cobro indebido de un cargo para obras que nunca realiz?, la empresa rescindi? el contrato en forma unilateral. Es que en Santa Fe, debido al descontento y la organizaci?n de la gente que tuvo como resultado de un hist?rico plebiscito expres? su voluntad de dar por terminado el contrato con la empresa por sus reiterados incumplimientos, la Suez no pudo aumentar la tarifa desde el 2000. Hoy d?a el gobierno no puede dar a la empresa lo que pide: un incre?ble aumento de tarifa, rentabilidad garantizada y fondos p?blicos para la realizaci?n de obras que la empresa deb?a realizar. Es que la gente no lo permite. Ante esto el gobierno no quiso asumir el costo pol?tico de aumentar las tarifas y la Suez ha decidido retirarse de la concesi?n en 30 d?as mientras se reorganiza el sistema de agua potable y saneamiento. A tres a?os del plebiscito resultado de 7000 militantes movilizados por el derecho al agua, 976 urnas y 256.236 votos en las 15 ciudades concesionadas, la conclusi?n del trabajo de integraci?n y articulaci?n de los conflictos tanto a nivel territorial como temporal buscando mantener la unidad en la diversidad en funci?n de un objetivo com?n, optimizando las mejores capacidades de cada espacio y anim?ndonos a dise?ar nuestro futuro porque no s?lo incluimos en la propuesta el modelo de empresa que no queremos sino que tambi?n describimos el que si queremos: un nuevo modelo de gesti?n publica y social con participaci?n ciudadana que asegure acceso universal, buena calidad y menor tarifa, excluyendo el agua como mercanc?a de lucro, defendiendo el agua como bien com?n y derecho humano, como sostenedor de nuestro ecosistema natural, como elemento vital contra el derroche, la contaminaci?n y la degradaci?n de las cuencas. Hoy d?a el primer objetivo fue logrado. Fuera Suez de Santa Fe! Fuera de Suez de las Am?ricas!!! Sara Grusky Water for All Campaign Public Citizen Phone: (202) 454-5133 Website: www.wateractivist.org From jfos at net-tech.com.au Wed May 11 22:12:58 2005 From: jfos at net-tech.com.au (John) Date: Wed May 11 22:26:23 2005 Subject: [Mai-not] [DU-WATCH] U$ sale of 600 DU bunker busters to Israel Message-ID: <6.1.0.6.1.20050512150537.02b26d70@mail.net-tech.com.au> "During Putin's visit to Israel in April, the US announced the sale of 100 additional uranium-coated (read: depleted uranium) bunker busting bombs to Israel which will accompany the 500 DU-coated bunker busters the US had already sold to them. The US Senate has already authorized the use of nuclear bunker-busting bombs in conventional theatres of war, because they are deemed to pose no threat to civilians since they will explode underground." Also last month, the seemingly tireless Donald Rumsfeld visited Baku in Azerbaijan to discuss the deployment of US troops along Iran's northwest border. The purpose of that hitherto curious manoeuvre is completely transparent." The War of Gog & Magog (The Iran War) http://planetmove.blogspot.com/ Michael Carmichael According to current reports on the rapidly escalating preparations for a US war against Iran, it now appears that the prophecies of the Bible are driving President Bush, Vice President Cheney and their inner circle of neoconservatives to design a strategic platform for the prosecution of the final war for control of Planet Earth. In the Bible, this conflict is called The War of Gog & Magog, and the final battle of that war is Armageddon. This scenario has been graphically detailed in the best-selling Left Behind fantasies authored by the Rev Tim LaHaye, a true believer and a devout political supporter of George Bush. You might well ask, "Who, what and where are Gog and Magog?" According to the literature of fundamentalist Christianity as it is peculiarly practiced in America, Magog, is the prince of Gog, an area that is frequently described as including many of the following nations: Iran, Iraq, Syria, Russia, Azerbaijan, Armenia, Georgia, Chechnya, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan and Afghanistan. While accounts of the geography of Gog vary, the consensus is that it includes the mass of central Asia, and may involve European nations as well who will form an alliance to attack Israel. While all of this is an amusing Biblical theory, it is now certain that the US and its allies, Israel and Turkey, are in a highly advanced state of preparation for the launch of an aerial bombardment against the region that is now seen to be the strategic keystone of Gog: the Islamic Republic of Iran. The exchanges between Bush and Putin during yesterday's VE celebrations in Moscow spotlight the fact that the next war has a larger dimension to it. In what were the sharpest exchanges between an American president and his Russian counterpart since the Cold War, it is now clear that the Iranian campaign is designed as part of a broader plan to target Russia. The distinguished Professor Michel Chossudovsky of the University of Ottawa has published a paper detailing the prolific manifestations of the rapidly advancing military preparations by the United States, Israel, Turkey and NATO that are the unmistakable build-up to an aerial attack on Iran. The military preparations are now nearing completion for the launch of a bombing campaign, but the political and diplomatic machinations have not yet reached fruition. That said, the neoconservative diplomatic and political operations are reaching a feverish pitch in Bush's Washington. While conventional wisdom is that Bush's America and Rumsfeld's Pentagon already have more than they can deal with in the occupation of Iraq, many of their most radical and motivated neoconservative minions are working day and night to perfect the game plan and to prepare the public for the next phase of their final war for global supremacy. An important study of the diplomatic and political operations to launch the Iran War is now published in the current issue of GQ, the American men's fashion magazine. Authored by Joshua Kurlantzick, the Foreign Editor of The New Republic, his paper, The Next War Is Closer Than You Think, details the meticulous political build-up to the next phase of the neoconservative wars for global domination. The following is what we know of the current state of play. While common sense prevails within a large segment of the intelligence community that has steadfastly argued against launching a new phase of warfare, rabid hawks highly placed in the neoconservative hierarchy have over-ruled the CIA and their counterparts at State. Colin Powell and Richard Armitage argued strenuously against an Iranian campaign, and that is precisely why they were removed from their posts so unceremoniously late last year. While their hasty removals were disguised as natural attrition from an administration ending its first term, they were engineered due to their direct conflict with the unfolding neoconservative agenda which will be defined in religious terms in order to build up a progression of higher levels of political support among the many Bible-fearing elements of the American electorate. Condoleezza Rice, herself a deeply indoctrinated religious fundamentalist, wholeheartedly approves of the escalation of the Middle Eastern war. She is an expert on the Soviet Union and its survivor, Russia, which is the leading candidate for the role of Gog, an Apocalyptic prophecy with which she is intimately familiar following her childhood in Alabama and her strict fundamentalist upbringing in the Bible Belt where the End of Time scenario is taught morning, noon and night. Rice's father was a Southern minister and a strict constructionist of the fundamental literality of the Bible. To stem the tide of scathing critiques about plans to attack Iran that were pouring out of the CIA, Porter Goss was dispatched to Langley, where he was moved into position to silence the critics of the Bush White House by enforcing a strict code of political discipline and a stern rule of silence. The theoretcial incubation of the War of Gog and Magog has been assigned to neoconservative intellectuals including but not limited to the following figures: William Kristol, Michael Ledeen and John Bolton. The Project for a New American Century (PNAC) is the most powerful think-tank in Bush's Washington. Founded by Kristol, PNAC published its prescription for full spectrum imperial domination of the globe in 2000. Calling for military confrontation and political reconstruction of the Middle East, PNAC proposes erecting a huge array of US military bases to enforce imperial hegemony far into the foreseeable future. The neoconservatives have designed a breathtaking strategy that will involve the long-range American domination and geopolitical restructuring of Planet Earth. The birth of this project has been aimed directly at the Middle East, where the repository of the world's greatest oil and energy reserves and the situation of many of the world's weakest nations combine to present American neoconservativism with an attractive set of strategic circumstances. That these economic and military factors converge with the prevailing Apocalyptic ideology of the fundamentalist culture of America should not be seen as a mere coincidence. Bush takes it as read that he has been anointed by Jesus Christ, his Lord and Saviour, to fulfil biblical prophecy, a fact that resonates with many books, papers and sermons as well as his own political speeches and posturing in order to attract the fundamentalist vote. In Congress, the archconservative Republican, Senator Rick Santorum, has cooperated with the divine inspiration of his Commander-in-Chief. Santorum has introduced legislation titled the Iran Freedom & Support Act that calls for outright "regime change" in Tehran. Senator Richard Lugar's objections to the language of Santorum's Iran Act have postponed passage of this landmark legislation for the time being, but it is still undergoing incubation, and even its critics predict that it is very likely that it will pass both houses of Congress. This political reality belies what is truly a pitiful state of incompetence of the Democratic Party and its members of Congress. With the majority of the nation now believing that the Iraq War was a huge $300 billion mistake and climbing, the Democratic members of Congress are lining up to support Santorum's disastrous legislation. Following the passage of a hard line Iran Act, Congress will be in position to support much more aggressive military operations against Bush's next target. This will involve support for Iranian dissidents, but not merely political reformers. Funds will begin to funnel into the Mujahideen-e-Khalq (MEK), a paramilitary organization of "freedom fighters" or "terrorists" depending on one's geopolitical perspective. These are the same people funded by the US during the Iran-Iraq conflict to wage an internecine war against the Islamic Republic. In the 1970s, the MEK killed American civilians, and they have been on the State Department's pariah list of terrorist organizations since 1997. Yet, those facts are mere trifles for neoconservatives, and they will not stand in the way of using the MEK to: engineer terrorist atrocities in Iran; conduct surveillance for the CIA and to target the forthcoming aerial attacks inside of Iran. Kurlantzick revealed that moves will soon be made to take the MEK off the official State Department list of prohibited terrorist organizations, and it will then be primed for covert reactivation. Against this backdrop, the neoconservatives have written a script starring two of the most evocative political figures in Iran. Reza Pahlavi, the exiled son of the late Shah of Iran has been totally integrated into the neoconservative scenario. He has appeared at some of the glittering events sponsored by the American Enterprise Institute where he has inspired neoconservatives with their luminous vision of the restoration of the Iranian monarchy to the Peacock Throne, a gaudy and tortuous piece of furniture that was actually encrusted with zillions of diamonds. However, even this splendiferous fantasia pales in contrast to the second major figure now integrated into the evolving script. Hussein Khomeini, the grandson of Ayatollah Khomeini, has cleverly emerged from behind the curtain as the favourite Iranian pawn of Michael Ledeen. In an arresting speech delivered to the American Enterprise Institute, Hussein Khomeini called for the United States to invade Iran in order to effect regime change. After making his surprising oracular pronouncement, Khomeini was whisked away back behind the curtain by Ledeen who had been hovering Svengali-like by his side. A steady stream of clues continues to appear to confirm suspicions of regime change in Iran. Elizabeth Cheney, the Vice President's famous daughter, has been installed at Condoleezza Rice's State Department to direct the political dimensions of the soon to be forthcoming democratization operations in Iran. Dick Cheney speaks incessantly about the urgent crisis in Iran due to their potential to manufacture nuclear weapons sometime in the foreseeable future even though they have pledged not to build WMDs, and the indisputable fact that they have signed treaties prohibiting them from doing so. In 2003, neoconservatives in the Pentagon including Donald Rumsfeld, Richard Perle and Paul Wolfowitz, proposed a national-security directive on Iran for the president to sign. This directive mandated that the US would launch a multi-pronged campaign to destabilize Tehran in order to effect regime change. This original presidential directive was never validated, however the neoconservatives have launched a new initiative to formalize a "Get tough with Iran," presidential directive which is in draft preparation at this very moment in time. In January, Seymour Hersh reported that there were American commando units already on the ground in Iran. The following month, Scott Ritter reported that the US would be able to deploy a bombing campaign against Iran by this June - that is in two and a half weeks time. On Capitol Hill, neoconservatives are whispering confidently that the US will now launch a multifaceted campaign to undermine Tehran, destabilize the region and to sabotage specific strategic sites inside Iran. Kurlantznick reported that a confidential source who had direct contact with Bush confirmed that the president will definitely order the launch of an attack against Iran if Tehran remains recalcitrant in the face of US demands about its nascent nuclear energy programme. While it is conventional wisdom to presume that each of Bush's wars are tightly confined strategies designed to achieve limited objectives, it is now becoming clear that he is working from a grand design of biblical proportions - especially to those voters who supported him most enthusiastically - the so-called, born-again Christians. The Prophet Ezekiel warned that Magog, the prince of Gog, would attack Israel. The majority of Israel's charismatic Jews believe that Russia is the land of Gog. Last month, Vladimir Putin visited Israel where he announced that he was selling missiles to Syria and that he would continue to support the nuclear industry of Iran. Putin's comments were seen as a threat to Israel and her sponsor, the United States. To both the Bible Belt practitioners of fundamentalist Christianity and to the fundamentalist Hebrews of Israel, there is no longer any doubt whatsoever about the identity of Magog. They are equally convinced that George Bush is doing the work of "The Lord," in smiting Gog, and its leading prince, Magog, is now clearly revealed to the true believers as Vladimir Putin, the President of Russia. The pointed remarks of the two men yesterday in Moscow have brought the underlying conflict between the two nations that is taking shape in the Middle East to the broader attention of the public. During Putin's visit to Israel in April, the US announced the sale of 100 additional uranium-coated (read: depleted uranium) bunker busting bombs to Israel which will accompany the 500 DU-coated bunker busters the US had already sold to them. The US Senate has already authorized the use of nuclear bunker-busting bombs in conventional theatres of war, because they are deemed to pose no threat to civilians since they will explode underground. Also last month, the seemingly tireless Donald Rumsfeld visited Baku in Azerbaijan to discuss the deployment of US troops along Iran's northwest border. The purpose of that hitherto curious manoeuvre is completely transparent. Chossudovsky reports that Israeli Dolphin-class submarines heavily armed with US Harpoon missiles that are armed with nuclear warheads trained on targets in Iran are now in position. The Israeli submarines may be cruising into the Persian Gulf right now. Chossudovsky suggests that the US and Israel are planning to introduce nuclear weapons into the bombardment of Iran which would be somewhat ironic, since the primary rationale for warfare will be that Iran constitutes a potential nuclear threat. Surrounded by a ring of US military bases, Iran is poised to be the next phase of a belligerent process that - for fundamentalist Americans - is unfolding as the War of Gog and Magog - an unending world war that will bring the United States into direct conflict with Russia. Sources Joshua Kurlantzick, The Next War is Closer than you think, GQ, June, 2005. America's Religious Right - Saints or Subversives? ttp://www.truthout.org/docs_2005/050905A.shtml Planned US-Israeli Attack on Iran http://www.globalresearch.ca/articles/CHO505A.html Target Iran: It's a semi-secret joint US-Israel Operation http://www.globalresearch.ca/articles/THO311A.html Scott Ritter Says U.S. Plans June Attack On Iran http://www.guardian.co.uk/russia/article/0,2763,1480148,00.html Bush offers support to Putin's critics http://www.guardian.co.uk/russia/article/0,2763,1480148,00.html The thorns in Georgia's rose http://www.guardian.co.uk/russia/article/0,2763,1480185,00.html The Planetary Movement Limited http://www.planetarymovement.org/ Michael Carmichael Chairman / The Planetary Movement Limited 64 Kingston Road Oxford OX2 6RJ The United Kingdom Telephone +44 1865 553195 Email mc@cosvam.com Brought to you by HTTP://WWW.STOPNATO.ORG.UK This email was cleaned by emailStripper, available for free from http://www.papercut.biz/emailStripper.htm From thinker at uniserve.com Thu May 12 07:27:03 2005 From: thinker at uniserve.com (Ed Deak) Date: Thu May 12 07:28:24 2005 Subject: [Mai-not] Colonoscopies Message-ID: <5.1.0.14.2.20050512072625.02d84ce0@pop.uniserve.com> Subject: colonoscopies A physician claimed that the following are actual comments made by his patients (predominately male) while he was performing their colonoscopies: 1. "Take it easy Doc, you're boldly going where no man has gone before!" 2. "Find Amelia Earhart yet?" 3. :Can you hear me NOW?" 4. "Are we there yet? Are we there yet? Are we there yet?" 5. "You know in Arkansas we're now legally married." 6. "Any sign of the trapped miners Chief?" 7. "You put your left hand in, you take your left hand out..." 8. "Hey! Now I know how a Muppet feels!" 9. "If your hand doesn't fit, you must quit!" 10. "Hey Doc, let me know if you find my dignity." 11. "You used to be an executive at Enron didn't you?" 12. "God, Now I know why I am not gay." And the best one of them all... 13. "Could you write a note for my wife saying that my head is in fact not up there. From eltechno at clear.lakes.com Thu May 12 12:06:24 2005 From: eltechno at clear.lakes.com (Jonathan Larson) Date: Thu May 12 12:10:49 2005 Subject: [Mai-not] Let's face it - the state has lost its mind Message-ID: Let's face it - the state has lost its mind The media coverage of this past election was a pastiche. Our right to know what our rulers are doing to people the world over is being lost in the new propaganda consensus. By John Pilger http://www.newstatesman.com/nscoverstory.htm In 1987, the sociologist Alex Carey, a second Orwell in his prophesies, wrote "Managing Public Opinion: the corporate offensive". He described how in the United States "great progress [had been] made towards the ideal of a propaganda-managed democracy", whose principal aim was to identify a rapacious business state "with every cherished human value". The power and meaning of true democracy, of the franchise itself, would be "transferred" to the propaganda of advertising, public relations and corporate-run news. This "model of ideological control", he predicted, would be adopted by other countries, such as Britain. To many who work conscientiously in the media, this will sound alarmist; it is not like that in Britain, they will say. Ask them about censorship by omission or the promotion of business ideology and war propaganda as news, a promotion both subtle and crude, and their defensive response will be that no one ever instructed them to follow any line: no one ever said not to question the Prime Minister about the horror he had helped to inflict on Iraq: his epic criminality. "Blair always enjoys his interviews with Paxo," says Roger Mosey, the head of BBC Television News, without a hint of irony. Blair should enjoy them; he is always spared the imperious bombast that is now a pastiche and kept mostly for official demons. "Watch George Galloway clash with Jeremy Paxman," says the BBC News homepage like a circus barker. Once under the big top of Newsnight, you get the usual set-up: a nonsensical question about whether or not Galloway was "proud of having got rid of one of the few black women in parliament", followed by mockery of the very idea that his opponent, an unabashed Blairite warmonger, should account for the deaths of tens of thousands of innocent people. Seven years ago, when Denis Halliday, one of the United Nations' most respected humanitarian aid directors, resigned from his post in Iraq in protest at the Anglo-American-led embargo, calling it "an act of genocide", he was given the Paxo treatment. "Aren't you just an apologist for Saddam Hussein?" he was mock-asked. The following year, Unicef revealed that the embargo had killed half a million Iraqi children. As for East Timor, a triumph of the British arms trade and Robin Cook's "ethical" foreign policy, the presence of British Hawk jets was "not proved", declared Paxo, parroting a Foreign Office lie. (A few months later, Cook came clean.) Today, napalm is used in Iraq, but the armed forces minister is allowed to pretend that it isn't. Israel's weapons of mass destruction are "dangerous in the extreme", says the former head of the US Strategic Command, but that is a permanent taboo. In the Guardian of 9 May, famous journalists and their executives were asked to reflect on the election campaign. Almost all agreed that it had been "boring" and "lacked passion" and "never really caught fire". Mosey complained that it had been "very hard to reach out to people who are disengaged". Again, irony was absent, as if the BBC's obsequiousness to the "consensus of propaganda", as Alex Carey called it, had nothing to do with people's disengagement or with the duty of journalists to engage the public, let alone tell them things they had a right to know. It is this right-to-know that is being lost behind a wilful illu-sion. Since the cry "freedom of the press" was first heard roughly 500 years ago, when Wynkyn de Worde set up Caxton's old printing press in the yard of St Bride's Church, off Fleet Street, there has never been more information or media in the "mainstream", yet most of it is now repetitive and profoundly ideological, captive to the insidious system that Carey described. Omission is how it works. Between 1 and 15 April, the Media Tenor Institute analysed the content of television evening news. Foreign politics, including Iraq, accounted for less than 2 per cent. Search the post-election comments of the most important people in journalism for anything about the greatest political scandal in memory - the unprovoked bloodbath in Iraq - and you will find nothing. The Goldsmith affair was an aberration, forced on to the election agenda not by a journalist but by an insider; and no connection was then made with the suffering and grief in Iraq. In the middle of the election campaign, Dr Les Roberts gave a special lecture at the School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine in London. It was all but ignored. Yet this is the extraordinary man who led an US-Iraqi research team in the first comprehensive investigation of civilian deaths in Iraq. Published in the Lancet, the most highly regarded medical journal in the world, with the tightest peer-review procedures, the study found that "at least" 100,000 civilians had died violently, the great majority of them at the hands of the "coalition": women, children, the elderly. He also described how American military doctors had found that 14 per cent of soldiers and 28 per cent of marines had killed a civilian: a huge, unreported massacre. This great crime, together with the destruction of the city of Fallujah and the 40 known victims of torture and unlawful killing at the hands of the British army, as well as the biggest demonstration by Iraqis demanding the invaders get out, was not allowed to intrude on a campaign that "never really caught fire". The airbrushing requires no conspiracy. "The thought," wrote Arthur Miller, "that the state has lost its mind and is punishing so many innocent people is intolerable. And so the evidence has to be internally denied." In its ideological crusade, the Blair regime has bombed and killed and abused human rights directly or by proxy, from Iraq to Colombia, from tsunami-stricken Aceh to the 14 most impoverished countries in Africa, where the sale of British weapons has fanned internal conflict. When I asked a television executive why none of this had been glimpsed in the election "coverage", he seemed nonplussed. "It was not relevant to the news," he said. What is relevant in the wake of the election is a propaganda consensus promoting the "potential greatness" of Gordon Brown, as the greatness of the now embarrassing Blair was once promoted. ("My God, he will be a hard act to follow. My God, Labour will miss him when he has gone," wrote Blair's most devoted promoter, Martin Kettle, in the Guardian, skipping over his crimes.) That Brown is the same ideologue as Blair is of no concern. Neither is his commitment, not to ending poverty in the world, but to the rehabilitation of imperialism. "We should be proud . . . of the empire," he said last September. "The days of Britain having to apologise for its colonial history are over," he told the Daily Mail. These views touch the nostalgic heart of the British establishment, which, under Margaret Thatcher and Tony Blair, has recovered from its long disorientation after Hitler gave all imperial plunderers a bad name. This and the appeasement of British imperialists is rarely mentioned in the endless anniversaries of the Second World War, whose triumphalism in politics and popular culture has bred imperial wars, such as Iraq. Thus, Blair's foreign policy adviser Robert Cooper caused little controversy when he wrote a pamphlet calling for "a new kind kind of imperialism, one acceptable to a world of human rights and cosmopolitan views". This is conquest redefined as liberation, evoking the same moral claims that were not questioned until Hitler. "Imperialism and the global expansion of the western powers," wrote Frank Furedi in The New Ideology of Imperialism, "were represented in unambiguously positive terms as a major contributor to human civilisation." That imperialism was and is racist, violent and the cause of suffering across the world - witness the ruthless expulsion of the people of Diego Garcia as recently as the 1970s - is "not relevant to the news". Observe instead the BBC swoon at Gordon Brown's 19th-century speeches about ending African poverty on condition that business can exploit and arm Africa's poorest. All this chimes in Washington, where Bush's drivel of "democracy and liberty on the march" is swallowed by leading journalists. On both sides of the Atlantic, a vintage imperialist campaign is under way against strategic and resource-rich Arab nations: indeed, against all Muslim peoples. It is the "clash of civilisations" of Samuel Huntington's delusions. The Arabs being Semites, it is one of the west's greatest anti-Semitic crusades. That, you might say, is well discussed. Perhaps. What is not discussed is a worldwide threat similar to that of Germany in the 1930s, certainly the greatest threat in the lifetime of most people. This is not news. Consider the unreported demise of the "war on terror". In his inaugural speech in January, Bush pointedly said not a word about that which he had made his signature. No terrorism. No Osama. No Iraq. No axis of evil. Instead, he warned that America's new targets were those living in "whole regions of the world" which "simmer in resentment and tyranny" and where "violence will gather, and multiply in destructive power, and cross the most defended borders, and raise a mortal threat". The monumental paranoia is almost beside the point. Bush was lowering the threshold. The American military can go anywhere, attack anything, use any kind of weapon in pursuit of its latest, most dangerous illusion: the "simmering resentment" and the "gathering violence". Unreported is the military coup that has taken place in America: the Pentagon and its civilian militarists now control "policy". Diplomacy is "finished . . . dead", as one of them put it. Andrew Bacevich, soldier, conservative and professor of American military strategy at Boston University, says that Bush has "committed the United States to waging an open-ended war on a global scale". Britain, with its profound understanding of imperialism, is a pioneer of this new danger. In 1998, the Blair government's Strategic Defence Review stated that the country's military priority would be "force projection" and that "in the post-cold war world we must be prepared to go to the crisis rather than have the crisis come to us". In 2002, Geoff Hoon became the first defence secretary to declare that British nuclear weapons could be used against non-nuclear nations. In December 2003, a defence white paper, Delivering Security in a Changing World, called for "expeditionary operations" in "a range of environments across the world". Military force was no longer "a separate element in crisis resolution". Almost a third of public spending on research now goes to the military - far more than is spent on the National Health Service. On 6 August, it will be the 60th anniversary of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima which, with the destruction of Nagasaki, stands as one of the greatest crimes. There is now a nuclear renaissance, led by the nuclear "haves", with America and Britain upgrading their "battlefield" nuclear weapons. The very real danger is, or should be, clear to all of us. The Guardian says Blair, having won his "historic" third term, ought to be "humble". It is truly humbling that only 20 per cent of eligible voters voted for him, the lowest figure in modern times, and that he has no true mandate. No, it is journalists who ought to be humble and do their job. -- ------------------ War remains the decisive human failure. - John Kenneth Galbraith Jonathan web site at: http://elegant-technology.com -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://www.globalproblematique.net/pipermail/mai-not/attachments/20050512/084df924/attachment.html From thinker at uniserve.com Thu May 12 22:51:35 2005 From: thinker at uniserve.com (Ed Deak) Date: Thu May 12 22:52:42 2005 Subject: [Mai-not] Bolton out ? Message-ID: <5.1.0.14.2.20050512225110.02c7a590@pop.uniserve.com> The following is a news item posted on CBC NEWS ONLINE at http://www.cbc.ca/news ____________________________________________________ BUSH SUFFERS BLOW ON CHOICE OF UN ENVOY WebPosted Thu May 12 19:56:11 2005 Washington---U.S. President George W. Bush was dealt a blow Thursday when a Senate committee refused to endorse his choice for the next ambassador to the United Nations, John Bolton. All 10 Republicans on the Senate foreign relations committee voted to send the controversial nomination to the full Senate, while all eight Democrats voted no. However, they took the rare step of sending it without endorsement after a key Republican senator opposed the nomination, describing Bolton as arrogant and bullying. "This is not behaviour that should be endorsed as the face of the United States to the world community at the United Nations," said Senator George Voinovich of Ohio. "It is my opinion that John Bolton is the poster child of what someone in the diplomatic corps should not be." Bolton, who is now the top arms control official in the U.S. State Department, has been a long-time critic of the United Nations. He has also been accused of bullying subordinates and tweaking and exaggerating intelligence information on weapons of mass destruction to please the administration. "It is my opinion that John Bolton is the poster child of what someone in the diplomatic corps should not be." The committee's refusal to endorse Bolton is seen as an embarrassment to Bush just six months into his second term. As soon as the president nominated the outspoken conservative in March, Democrats attacked the choice. The Senate committee vote was delayed for three weeks after four Republican members also opposed the nomination – but only Voinovich remained steadfast. FROM APR.11, 2005: Bolton nomination for UN ambassador gets rough ride from Senate committee "This United States can do better than John Bolton," Voinovich told the committee on Thursday. His opposition would have caused a 9-9 defeat, since a majority is needed to win. But the committee acted on a suggestion by Voinovich that they send the nomination to the Senate without the traditional endorsement. Voinovich said Bolton would be fired if he were in the private sector. He told reporters he would vote against Bolton in the full Senate. Copyright (C) 2005 CBC. All rights reserved. From eltechno at clear.lakes.com Fri May 13 08:09:09 2005 From: eltechno at clear.lakes.com (Jonathan Larson) Date: Fri May 13 08:10:47 2005 Subject: [Mai-not] Tom Friedman, the Imperial Chronicle Message-ID: The Nobility of Slaughter Tom Friedman, the Imperial Chronicler By MIKE WHITNEY http://www.counterpunch.org/whitney05132005.html Tom Friedman is the most popular columnist in the United States. He's also the voice of the American establishment. From his perch at the CFR (Council of Foreign Relations) he delivers his affable-sounding polemics; spreading a gospel of free markets and endless war. His many accolades, including a stockpile of Pulitzer prizes, attest to his ability to convert the self-serving doctrine of personal accumulation into the highest form of personal virtue. Friedman is forever the casual acquaintance, the man on the street, whispering a friendly word of advice to his readers. The world according to Tom is getting "flatter" all the time. This is his snappy, non-threatening expression for globalization. Friedman is the foremost pitch-man for the new economic paradigm; ignoring the tens of thousands of high-paying American jobs that have fled the country and the withering blow that outsourcing has delivered to the middle-class. He carefully avoids the details of how the neoliberal agenda has crushed third world nations with its austerity measures; privatizing resources, deregulating business and compromising national sovereignty. Instead, he champions the dismal results as a sign of emergent democracy. "For globalism to work," Friedman avers, "America cannot be afraid to act like the almighty superpower that it is...The hidden hand of the market will never work without the hidden fist--McDonald's cannot flourish without McDonald-Douglas, the designer of the F-15. And the hidden fist that keeps the world safe for Silicon Valley technologies is called the United States Army, Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps." (NYTs March 28, 1999) It's doubtful that anyone has ever written a more succinct defense of American militarism. Friedman's analysis casually mixes Machiavelli with Adam Smith; producing a poignant description of how the real world operates. Behind the illusion of "free markets" and globalization the same coercive, "hidden fist" is guiding events. For all his "folksiness", Friedman's world view is no different than that of George Bush. Friedman has always been a reliable salesman for Imperial aggression. He supported the war in Iraq from the get-go; concealing his bloodlust behind the flawed justifications of democracy and liberation. His only proviso was that the war be "done right". That's right; his one stipulation was that the killing, occupation and theft of resources be carried out with maximum efficiency, or, in his words, "done right". One can only wonder whether or not the 100,000 dead Iraqis fit within Friedman's rigid moral criteria. Friedman's unbridled support for the war can be best summarized in his own words: "The war in Iraq is the most important liberal, revolutionary US democracy- building project since the Marshall Plan. It is one of the noblest things this country has ever attempted abroad." (New York Times) "Noblest"? There's no indication that Friedman's support has wavered in the slightest since he delivered this injunction nearly 2 years ago. And, why should it? It is a point of view that is held almost universally among his peers at the CFR and the other bastions of American plutocracy. Friedman simply articulates the commonplace view among American elites that the world should be grateful for the hellfire unleashed by the US military. The vast devastation we see in Iraq today is not the result of evil men conspiring to destroy the world's oldest civilization, but of the incalculable arrogance expressed in Friedman's quote. Simply put, this is the flawed rationale that underwrites Falluja, Abu Ghraib and the myriad other atrocities perpetrated on the Iraqi people. In his most recent column Friedman explores another of his favorite themes, "Why have the winds of democracy blown everywhere else" except in the Arab world? He responds by citing a UN report that focuses on "the acute deficit of freedom and good governance in the Arab world," and "the state's firm and absolute grip on power." Friedman avers that "the report is scathing about what Arabs have done to themselves and how they must change...That's why part of every Arab hates the US invasion of Iraq--and why another part is praying that it succeeds." The quote is vintage Friedman and shows why he gets the plaudits from his friends in high-places. In just a few terse comments, he manages to turn the tables and convince his reader that the victims of American aggression can only blame themselves. It's a familiar refrain for Friedman who likes to characterize the disastrous effects of American war-mongering as a struggle with modernity within the Arab world. He fails to acknowledge the daily bombings, arrests, and raids that are the up shot of the American occupation. He, similarly, forgoes any mention of the lack of power and services, the skyrocketing unemployment, the steadily increasing malnutrition, the poisoning of groundwater, the outbreaks of cholera and diarrhea, the continuing reports of torture and abuse, and the exponential growth of birth deformities and cancer rates among children. These, somehow, don't fit into the tale of backward Arabs being ushered into the 21st century by their friends in Washington. Friedman's paternalistic views would fit nicely next to the other apologies for western colonialism like "white man's burden" or "manifest destiny"; flimsy ideologies papering-over the empire's excesses. The primary task of the imperial chronicler is to create an acceptable narrative for the savagery of the state. Friedman has shown that his talent at spinning that yarn far exceeds his competitors. Don't expect to see an account of torture-chambers and death-squads in Tom's scribbling; it's nowhere to be found. Instead, Friedman postulates a fairytale world where American foreign policy is always governed by principle and genuine humanitarian concern. His role as establishment-scribe is to perpetuate the illusion that the American Goliath may stumble, but the policy is always driven by good intentions. Mike Whitney lives in Washington state. He can be reached at: fergiewhitney@msn.com -- ------------------ War remains the decisive human failure. - John Kenneth Galbraith Jonathan web site at: http://elegant-technology.com -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://www.globalproblematique.net/pipermail/mai-not/attachments/20050513/ab296670/attachment.html From thinker at uniserve.com Fri May 13 08:52:21 2005 From: thinker at uniserve.com (Ed Deak) Date: Fri May 13 08:53:37 2005 Subject: [Mai-not] Metabolic syndrome Message-ID: <5.1.0.14.2.20050513085143.02c79df8@pop.uniserve.com> Look at it this way Al, your government is spending all that money to make the world safer by investing in more arms and on the occupation of liberated Iraq so they can become a democratic market economy, like us, here in the civilized world. We had daily overflights of "fail safe" B 52s over our house in central BC, for 30 years, since we're here and long before that, and are happy to report that the flights have recently increased. In past years they were only flying North and South, once or twice a day, now also East and West. Sometimes we can see two at the same time, or the condensation strips of one being crossed by another. Must have had a half dozen yesterday alone, but we love it, because we know that they are guarding our safety from dastardly attackers, especially from terrorist groups attempting to interfere with our free enterprise market economy. You ask any good economics professor and they'll tell you that people should work in 2-3, minimum wage part time jobs, so the corporations can prosper and create wealth, then invest their savings wisely, so they can be free to chose to send their children to private schools and be able to pay the fees and prices of free enterprise, private medical practitioners and drug companies to keep the economy healthy and moving ahead, instead of relying on those socialistic programs that interfere and distort the competitive equilibrium of the marketplace. Cheers, Ed. =============== =================================================================================== At 04:29 PM 12/05/2005 +1000, you wrote: Nice to meet you Ed, Thanks for that insight into the world of economics. We've got good exponents of that kind of rot here in Australia. I've just had a look at what is called 'health' federal budget released last Tuesday. I was pleased to find that someone, at some time, introduced de following items: Consumer and community involvement in influencing health decisions ------------- Preventative health - extension of the Investment in Preventative Health ----------------- Preventative health - Bowel Cancer Screening Programme ------------------ Inborn errors of metabolism - grant for high cost special foods ----------------- Preventative health - falls prevention in older people -------------- Preventative health - National Alcohol Harm Reduction Strategy ------------------- I won't tell you how many Aussie dollars were allocated to those categories because there weren't any. I guess these items are mentioned just to let a few silly buggers know that at least the Government thought about them! In reality Ed, 'health' in this context is a misnomer. It's more appropriate to call it 'The Drug and Disease Federal Budget'. I hope in your side of the world things are running on a bit more of common sense fuel. Warm regards, Al Gallo ----- Original Message ----- From: "Ed Deak" To: "Al and Jo Gallo" Sent: Thursday, May 12, 2005 12:17 AM Subject: Re: [Mai-not] Metabolic syndrome Watch it Al, you're interfering with the principles of the "Free Enterprise, Free to Choose Market Economy". According to the prophet Friedman when people don't want to kill themselves with junkfoods any more they'll stop buying them. As they have done with cigarettes. Then they'll close down all the junkfood joints and plough up the grounds for the growing of organic vegetables. It's all WRITTEN and taught in our universities as the "science of economics" so it must be true ! Cheers, Ed. =========================================================================================== At 04:06 PM 11/05/2005 +1000, you wrote: Yes, that's surely triglycerides misspelt, a lipid as cholesterol. A change has occurred with people smoking less and eating more. People used to stop eating to have a smoke. Now instead of dying from emphysema or lung cancer they prefer to dye from heart disease and its treatment's drugs.That's the liberty Bush's floggin' around. Viva la Pharma!! All the best, Al ----- Original Message ----- From: )>Ed Deak (by way of Dion Giles ) To: aljogallo@bigpond.com Sent: Wednesday, May 11, 2005 3:16 PM Subject: spam: [Mai-not] Metabolic syndrome Why the Yanks are the way they are. The effect of junk food on behaviour is pretty well documented. Cheers, Dion Vancouver Sun 7 May 2005 Big waistline condition costly TRENTON, N.J. Americans with metabolic syndrome - a condition marked by big waistlines, diabetes, high blood pressure and cholesterol problems - account for $4 of every $10 spent on prescription drugs for adults in the United States, according to a study. The report by Medco Health Solutions, a huge prescription benefit manager, shows that adult use of medication for the syndrome jumped 36 per cent between 2002 and 2004. Annual prescription costs for people 20 and older with metabolic syndrome averaged $4,116 U.S. last year, 4.2 times the average amount spent on drugs for that age group, according to New Jersey-based Medco, which released the data exclusively to the Associated Press. Medco reached its findings by studying prescription records from a random sample of 2 million clients. Dr. Robert Epstein, Medco's chief medical officer, calls metabolic syndrome one of the country's top five health problems. The syndrome - once called Syndrome X - was first recognized about 40 years ago, but the renm "metabolic syndrome" did not come into wide use until the last decade. Metabolic syndrome is caused by the body's inability to use insulin efficiently, and the hallmark of the condition is excessive abdominal fat. Patients also have two or more related conditions, including high blood pressure, low levels of good cholesterol, high levels of blood fats called trigyclerides [I think this might be a misspelling of triglycerides], and high blood sugar. Many have diabetes or will eventually. People with metabolic syndrome are twice as likely to suffer a heart attack or stroke and more than three times as ilkely to die early from those causes. According to various U.S. estiamtes, at least one in four adults and roughly one in eight children have metabolic syndrome, with overeating and inactivity being key causes. "When change threatens to rule, the rules are changed." ? Michael Parenti _______________________________________________ Mai-not mailing list Mai-not@globalproblematique.net http://www.globalproblematique.net/mailman/listinfo/mai-not From creuss at bluemail.ch Fri May 13 10:51:17 2005 From: creuss at bluemail.ch (Christoph Reuss) Date: Fri May 13 10:52:21 2005 Subject: [Mai-not] Metabolic syndrome Message-ID: Ed Deak wrote: > Look at it this way Al, your government is spending all that money to make > the world safer by investing in more arms and on the occupation of > liberated Iraq so they can become a democratic market economy, like us That's preventative healthcare for shareholders' portfolios. The metabolic syndrome includes "dog eat dog". Cheers, Chris ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ SpamWall: Mail to this addy is deleted unread unless it contains the keyword "igve". From creuss at bluemail.ch Fri May 13 11:08:37 2005 From: creuss at bluemail.ch (Christoph Reuss) Date: Fri May 13 11:09:37 2005 Subject: [Mai-not] EU demockracy mask blown in Berlin Message-ID: [Contrary to public opinion, the German parliament voted Yes to the new EU constitution. Schr?der's orwellian commentary: The EU would be "more democratic and closer to the people" as a result of the new EU constitution. (Of course they can't vote on such matters afterwards either.) Now Germans have to appeal to French citizens to vote Non.] http://news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/afp/20050512/wl_afp/euconstitutiongermany_050512190720 German parliament overwhelmingly approves EU constitution Thu May 12, 3:07 PM ET BERLIN (AFP) - Germany's lower house of parliament backed the EU constitution with an overwhelming majority in a move it hoped would persuade French voters to approve the treaty. The constitution received 569 votes in favour in the Bundestag, with 23 votes against and two abstentions. The main German political parties indicated the ratification would be rubber-stamped by the Bundesrat upper house when it votes on May 27, two days before France holds its referendum on the constitution. Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder said he hoped the clear support from his country's parliament would encourage voters in France, where opinion polls showed that the "yes" and "no" camps were neck and neck. French President Jacques Chirac hailed the German vote. "With this vote, the German deputies have once again shown their attachment to European integration. It's an important decision with a view to the coming into force of the treaty," said Chirac's spokesman. The constitution aims to set out a new framework for an enlarged European Union, which last year opened its doors to 10 members, eight of them former Communist countries. But it needs to be ratified by all 25 member states to take effect. Schroeder urged deputies to back the treaty, saying it would give the process of European integration "a new push and a new dynamism". "We should be cautious and reasonable when using the term 'historic' but the EU constitution deserves this grand title," he said in a speech. The EU would be "more able to take decisions, more democratic and closer to the people" as a result of the constitution, he added. Schroeder's Social Democratic Party (SPD), their coalition partner the Greens and the main opposition Christian Democrats all supported the treaty. Angela Merkel, the leader of the Christian Democratic Union (CDU), acknowledged there was some concern within her party that the constitution would erode the power of national governments. "I will say yes with all of my heart, even if I am not happy about everything," she told the Bundestag. The EU constitution will not be put to a referendum in Germany, as in France. But a survey carried out for ARD television station and published last weekend found that 59 percent of Germans would vote in favour if a referendum were held, while only 15 percent were opposed. One of the newer EU members, Slovakia, became the sixth country to complete the ratification process on Wednesday. The treaty also was approved Wednesday by the Austrian lower house of parliament, and the Austrian upper house was expected to follow suit. Greece, Hungary, Italy, Lithuania and Slovenia were the other five countries to have fully ratified the constitution. The people of Spain voted "yes" in a referendum, but the treaty has yet to be approved by the Senate. Voters in the Netherlands were to have their say in a consultative referendum on June 1, although the result was not binding for the Dutch government. The parliaments of Germany, Belgium, Estonia and Latvia were expected to ratify the constitution in May. But all eyes are on France. EU leaders have warned that if one of the founding members of the European project rejected the treaty it could have disastrous consequences for the future of the Union. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ SpamWall: Mail to this addy is deleted unread unless it contains the keyword "igve". From eltechno at clear.lakes.com Sat May 14 08:37:22 2005 From: eltechno at clear.lakes.com (Jonathan Larson) Date: Sat May 14 08:39:45 2005 Subject: [Mai-not] Thumbing their nose at Uncle Sam Message-ID: 'Thumbing their nose at Uncle Sam' May 14 America may be flexing its military muscle in the Middle East, but in South America it is losing the diplomatic battle. By Irene Caselli, The London Line http://www.thelondonline.co.uk/theline/article.php?articleID=221 The United States is nursing a bruised ego. After decades of funding malleable regimes, fomenting right-wing coups and building economic hegemony in the Americas, Washington just found itself locked out of its own backyard. This week saw leaders of the Latin American and Arab worlds meet in a historic summit in Brazil - and the US was denied even the courtesy of observer status. Washington is outraged, fearing that this was more than just a diplomatic slight: it sees it as the latest gesture of defiance from the two regions that bear the deepest grudge over recent US foreign policy. The Summit of South American-Arab Countries, which concluded on Wednesday and was attended by Iraqi president Jalal Talabani, furthered Latin America's drive to strengthen relationships away from the United States. Brazilian President Luiz Ignacio Lula da Silva led moves by South American states to cement alliances outside the US, which has traditionally held the South on a short leash economically. On the surface, the summit's "Brasilia declaration" was predictable. Arab states ensured there was a condemnation of Israel's occupation of the Palestinian territories. But Capitol Hill is said to be more concerned about its rumblings of dissent on its doorstep. "It is time to change the commercial geography of the world," Lula said at the summit. "If we are alone, then none of us can compete with rich nations." Commentators in the US have taken the move very seriously. "This is mind-boggling in its significance," Larry Birns, head of the Council of Hemispheric Affairs, one of Washington's most prominent independent think tanks, told The London Line. "There is a growing tendency in Latin American states to break out of the ghetto of US diplomacy," he said. He compared the attitude of President George W. Bush's administration to its poor cousins in the South to Russian President Vladimir Putin's clamping down on the efforts of many Eastern European states to distance themselves from Moscow. "The symbolic message of the snub couldn't be huger," Birns said. Across Latin America, a new left has swept to power. In Bolivia, Venezuela, Brazil, Argentina, the Dominican Republic, Chile and, most recently, Uruguay, charismatic leaders vociferously opposed to the US' free-trade agenda have won elections over the past six years. Ill feeling towards their northern neighbours is running high: in a recent poll, 85% of Latin Americans said they opposed Bush's re-election. The State Department dismissed suggestions that the US' continental dominance is under threat. "We hope our friends in the hemisphere do not fall back on the failed policies of the past," said a State Department official, who declined to be named. "We will work with any country, provided its leader is democratically elected," he said. " We urge them to crack down on corruption and promote free trade." That exhortation seems to fall on deaf ears. Washington's grand plans for a Free Trade Area of the Americas have stalled after Latin American leaders objected to proposals restricting access to US markets and continued subsidies for US industry. The rhetoric of the Brazilian summit will do nothing to quell fears that the FTAA is dead in the water. Washington's most throbbing Latin American headache takes the form of Venezuela's Hugo Chavez. Birns believes Chavez, a man who has publicly called President Bush a "dickhead", was "instrumental in orchestrating the summit". Venezuela, which controls 40% of the US' oil imports, has moved closer to Cuba, the b?te noire of US-Latin American relations, since Chavez was elected president in 1998. He survived a US-backed coup in 2002 and, with the example of his radically socialist "Bolivarian revolution", is giving the rest of the continent a lesson in bucking the north's neo-liberal agenda. The snub completes a bad month for the US in Latin America. Both their preferred candidates for the presidency of the Organisation of American States were defeated two weeks ago in a bruising race eventually won by Chilean socialist Jose Miguel Insulza. It remains to be seen how far Latin America's bid for greater independence can go. The continent still receives US$1.6 billion financial assistance from the US, and owes vast sums to the IMF and the World Bank. With antagonistic appointments in Washington - such as that of Roger Noriega, a man implicated in the Iran Contra scandal - tensions between Washington and Latin America show no sign of improving in the near future. ? The London Line 2005 -- ------------------ War remains the decisive human failure. - John Kenneth Galbraith Jonathan web site at: http://elegant-technology.com -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://www.globalproblematique.net/pipermail/mai-not/attachments/20050514/b588f47e/attachment.html From eltechno at clear.lakes.com Sat May 14 08:51:37 2005 From: eltechno at clear.lakes.com (Jonathan Larson) Date: Sat May 14 08:55:07 2005 Subject: [Mai-not] Join the 14 Per Cent Club! We Won! Message-ID: Join the 14 Per Cent Club! We Won! By ALEXANDER COCKBURN http://www.counterpunch.org/cockburn05142005.html Sign here to become a member of the 14 Per Cent Club. Twenty bucks plus shipping and handling gets you the t-shirt. Credentials for membership derive from a recent study from the Pew Research Center disclosing, in the words of Katharine Seelye of the New York Times on May 9, that a recent study from the Pew Research Center found that 45 percent of Americans believe little or nothing of what they read in their daily newspapers. When specific newspapers were mentioned, The Times fared about average, with 21 percent of readers believing all or most of what they read in The Times and 14 percent believing almost nothing. Chalk up another victory for the left. We're been at it for thirty years at least, saying that most things in the Times are distortions of reality or outright lies and here is a robust slice of the American people agreeing with us. Of course the faint hearts who believe that the left can never win anything will say that the credit should go to moles at the New York Times, boring from within, hollowing out the mighty edifice with year upon year of willful falsehoods until at last the whole ponderous structure is crumbling into dust crushing all within. True to a point. Heroic moles, entombed in the rubble of your own making, Judith Miller and all the others, back through to the suzerain of sappers, A.M. Rosenthal, we salute you all! As with any empire on the brink of collapse, frantic commands are issuing from the command bunker. Seelye divulges the program of proposed "reform" devised by the editors. "Encourage reporters to confirm the accuracy of articles with sources before publication and to solicit feedback from sources after publication. Set up an error-tracking system to detect patterns and trends. Encourage the development of software to detect plagiarism when accusations arise. Increase coverage of middle America, rural areas and religion. Establish a system for evaluating public attacks on The Times's work and determining whether and how to respond." Can there be any better evidence of the panic that has settled in? If this trend continues, they'll be forcing Tom Friedman to install preventive software based on the works of Noam Chomsky that freezes his hard drive every time he types an untrue sentence. The Times's "reform" package veers between apologetic sniveling about improved coverage of the heartland (fatter slabs of patronizing nonsense about god-fearing kulaks in Iowa) and quavering barks of defiance at "the relentless public criticism of the paper...Mr. Keller [the NYT's editor] asked the committee to consider whether it was 'any longer possible to stand silent and stoic under fire.'" "'We need to be more assertive about explaining ourselves - our decisions, our methods, our values, how we operate,' the committee said, acknowledging that 'there are those who love to hate The Times' and suggesting a focus instead on people who do not have 'fixed' opinions about the paper." This is like reading a strategy memo from the dying embers of the Dukakis Campaign. I'm glad to say I have no constructive recommendations to offer to the editors of the New York Times, except maybe one suggested by my Nation intern, Mark Hatch-Miller whom I canvassed for his opinions: "Stop bringing up Jayson Blair every time you screw up. Every time the Times talks about why people don't trust them, they have to mention Blair, but we all would have forgotten him by now if they'd shut up about him for a second. His story is only used to distract us from the real problems. at the Times." Aye to that. So far as I know, the Times has never named its reporter, Judith Miller, as a prime agent in fomenting what has become the most thoroughly discredited propaganda campaign in the entire history of war scares. On the matter of constructive versus destructive criticism, I'll always opt for the latter. Keep things clean and simple, like "US out of Iraq now". My only quibble with Chomsky down the years has been the implication in all his trenchant criticisms of the Times that somehow the NYT should be getting things right, and that it would be better if it did so. This has always seemed to me to be a contradiction in terms. The role devised for itself by the New York Times was to be the credible organ of capitalism ("newspaper of record"), with its reports and editorials premised on the belief that American capitalism can produce a just society in which all can enjoy the fruits of their labor in peaceful harmony with their environment and the rest of the planet. The evidence is in. The case is proved a million different ways. American capitalism can't do that. It's produced an unjust society run by a tiny slice of obscenely rich people (including the real estate developers owning the New York Times) with a vested and irreversible interest in permanent war and planetary destruction. Given those premises, how can the Times ever get it right? Why would we want the Times to get it right? It's like a parody I wrote here a decade ago, when the Times said that henceforth it would issue corrections "for the sake of balance": A New York Times Business Day report published two days ago quoted sources confident of America's continued economic expansion, but the report failed to provide adequate balance to these optimistic views. The report markedly failed to represent the views of the Marxist school. According to the Marxist school, the capitalist economy of the United States will suffer increasing crises of accumulation and a falling rate of profit. These phenomena will aggravate social and economic contradictions to a degree that will be ultimately fatal to capitalism. Failure to note the theories of the German economic and social critic Karl Marx violated Times standards of fairness." Get the idea? We won! On the left we've always said that the corporate press tells lies and now, for a variety of reasons, at most people believe us. The corporate media are discredited, the same way the corporate political parties are. They have zero credibility. Newspapers are dying. The main tv networks have lost a third of their audience over the past twenty years. There's no need for whining that the problem consists of narrowing ownership. The corporate press was just as bad when there were five hundred different newspaper owners instead of five. And, for now at least, we have the web. We're infinitely better off than we were thirty years ago. The only trouble is, the Left hasn't got too many ideas. We should stop bitching about the corporate press and get with a new program. If it's credible, then the people who don't trust the New York Times might start trusting us. -- ------------------ War remains the decisive human failure. - John Kenneth Galbraith Jonathan web site at: http://elegant-technology.com -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://www.globalproblematique.net/pipermail/mai-not/attachments/20050514/da6319c9/attachment.html From eltechno at clear.lakes.com Sat May 14 11:04:54 2005 From: eltechno at clear.lakes.com (Jonathan Larson) Date: Sat May 14 11:07:18 2005 Subject: [Mai-not] The Democrats have No Clothes Message-ID: Friday 13th May 2005 (20h33) : The Democrats have No Clothes: 'Leaders' Silent on The British Memo http://bellaciao.org/en/article.php3?id_article=6037 Just like the $9 billion 'lost' and the 52 warnings prior to 9/11, the Democratic 'Leadership' is silent on the most important news of the day. The current earth-shattering news is The Memo revealing that Bush and Blair agreed to go to war in April 2002, that they 'fixed the facts' to scare us into war. This news should turn American politics upside down. It should cause all Americans, even Republicans, to be outraged, really F#@%ing pissed off that WE'VE BEEN LIED TO !!! We were deliberately lied to as Bush planned this war from the beginning, repeatedly telling us he was hoping for peace, war was the last resort. A bald-faced lie! Think about all of those maimed and dead troops - and now it turns out that Bush and Blair made up the WMD threat to justify this war of aggression and theft of Iraqi oil. 100,000 dead innocents in Iraq, we should be ashamed of our nation. Why should those that lied to us be allowed to remain in power? Why don't the Dem 'Leaders' have anything to say about The Memo? So far, a week after The Memo shocked the world, our Democratic Leadership like Bill and Hillary, Al Gore, John Kerry, Harry Reid, Nancy Pelosi, Howard Dean, John Edwards... these 'Leaders' have all been silent regarding The Memo. Why? As Martin Luther King Jr. said, "There comes a time when silence is betrayal." And if you think that's bad... The Senate just voted 100-0 to approve the $82 billion for more war, even after The Memo revealed that the Iraq war was concocted by Bush and Blair in 2002. Literally, Bush and Blair were just exposed to the world as having deliberately lied to start this unjust war- and the US Senate response is to unanimously approve more war funding while completely ignoring this screaming, "hair on fire," impeachable offense. And if you think that's bad... Halliburton has already been caught overcharging US taxpayers $200 million (tip of the iceberg), and what does our government do- why of course we give Halliburton a $75 million bonus! We just 'liberated' Iraq because Bush and Blair decided to use 9/11 to scare us into war. Now that it's all been proven a big lie, the Iraqis have voted and demonstrated - clearly - they want us to leave. But nooooo... we must stay to and continue to 'help' (spread more depleted uranium across) Iraq. And in our generosity we've allocated $50 million to expand Iraq's prison system. That's freedom, American style - and that's why the world loves us - kind and benevolent America- ha ha ha. Wake Up America! Both parties in Congress are pretending the revelations from The Memo are not that significant, when in fact this information is THE SMOKING GUN! Planning this war in 2002 then lying to us about it is worthy of immediate impeachment. Every single US Senator just voted for $82 billion more for the war profiteers, while ignoring The Memo - they should all be thrown out of office- immediately. Not one more person, American or Iraqi, should die for Bush's Lies. Congress doesn't get it. They need to get it - now - or go to prison for their complicity. Innocent Iraqis and Our Own Troops are suffering from Bush's Lies, and this Senate is has failed to do anything to about it. They've done nothing to bring the troops home, and nothing to hold Bush accountable. Congress failed to investigate the missing $9 billion, the 52 warnings, and now The Memo. The United States Congress is a dysfunctional failure (good deal of corruption too). Bush and Blair planned the war and "fixed the facts", even though the "case was thin" against Saddam. They had no choice, Iraq was "swimming on a sea of oil." (wolfowitz) They planned the war in 2002 and then told us they really wanted peace, but Saddam was just too dangerous to leave alone, so we had to send our kids to die. But it was all a lie. The lies have been exposed for the world to see, As Stan Goff said, "They did it On Purpose!" (mp3) ... and Congress is trying to let them off the hook. Those in Congress that refuse to impeach are just as guilty as Bush. -- ------------------ War remains the decisive human failure. - John Kenneth Galbraith Jonathan web site at: http://elegant-technology.com -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://www.globalproblematique.net/pipermail/mai-not/attachments/20050514/c8057f8d/attachment.html From dgiles at central.murdoch.edu.au Sat May 14 19:40:59 2005 From: dgiles at central.murdoch.edu.au (Dion Giles) Date: Sat May 14 19:41:13 2005 Subject: [Mai-not] Electors snub Peking colonialists Message-ID: <6.1.1.1.0.20050515103118.02e8e008@central.murdoch.edu.au> An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://www.globalproblematique.net/pipermail/mai-not/attachments/20050515/df3f54b5/attachment.html From eltechno at clear.lakes.com Sat May 14 22:22:27 2005 From: eltechno at clear.lakes.com (Jonathan Larson) Date: Sat May 14 22:23:25 2005 Subject: [Mai-not] Elite Protectionists Message-ID: Elite Protectionists William Greider http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20050411&s=greider A man-bites-dog story of momentous implications is unfolding in Washington: The US multinational establishment, having successfully championed free-trade orthodoxy for decades, may now be flirting with protectionist heresy--a stiff tariff against China to stanch America's hemorrhaging trade deficits. Fred Bergsten, the multinationals' leading economic authority, warns that the United States is in "big trouble," taking on foreign debt beyond anything any industrial nation has experienced and comparable to Mexico and Thailand just before they crashed in the 1990s. Bergsten, director of the Institute for International Economics, is lobbying elite circles to demand decisive action by the Bush Administration--an "import surcharge" as high as 50 percent on all Chinese imports--to avert financial meltdown. Meantime, a bipartisan group of senators--nine Democrats, five Republicans--has introduced Senate Bill 295, which targets China with a 27.5 percent tariff. Charles Schumer, the lead sponsor, calls it "a tough-love effort." The co-sponsors include Democratic minority leader Harry Reid and, more surprising, Hillary Clinton, a longtime free trader close to financial leaders like former Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin, now an executive at Citigroup. The bill lets politicians express solidarity with constituents who lost their jobs, without offending big hitters. Conceivably, we could be witnessing the start of a break from the era of US-led globalization in which Washington preached unfettered trade to the rest of the world. Now it is America that needs protection, its trade deficits swollen to more than $600 billion a year, its capital borrowing from abroad approaching 7 percent of GDP. Bergsten predicts that, unless there is dramatic action, the deficits will keep rising until something truly awful happens to the US economy and, therefore, the global economy too. Bergsten, Assistant Treasury Secretary in the Carter Administration, is a high-church free trader offended by the protectionist label. His institute's board of directors includes heavyweights from Citigroup, Morgan, United Technologies, ChevronTexaco and the Carlyle Group, plus former Federal Reserve chairman Paul Volcker, David Rockefeller and Jean-Claude Trichet. Alan Greenspan is listed as an "honorary director." Improbable as it sounds, Bergsten insists he is freelancing this explosive proposition. "The big companies and financial firms are not goosing China," he told me. "They all like the status quo and are very much in disagreement." He does acknowledge, however, heightened anxiety among financiers about America's swollen debt position. The declining dollar has not reversed the US trade deficits, as experts like Bergsten had predicted, and it must fall much further to do so. "Wall Street," Bergsten explains, "faces a risk of precipitous decline--an overshooting free fall that would shatter confidence, drive US interest rates toward double digits and crash equities ? la Black Monday in 1987." The multinational club does not intend to abandon free-trade dogma. Bergsten's strategy--threatening tariffs--is meant to bluff China and other Asian nations into letting their currencies appreciate and allowing the dollar to fall much further so the US trade deficits will shrink, at least enough to avert a financial crisis. The strategy is also designed to light a fire under George W. Bush. "It is virtually inconceivable," Bergsten wrote in the Financial Times, "that the Bush Administration could skate through four more years without addressing these issues decisively." In a sense, Bush is being handed a weapon to use to intimidate the trading partners: Work out a deal with us or protectionist politics may engulf us all. Schumer's bill provides for a six-month negotiating period-- time enough for Beijing to relent--before the ax would fall (other Asian nations can't move on currencies unless China does because they'd lose their own export sales to Chinese goods). Bergsten has worked out a clever but strained rationale for how his import surcharge defends free trade: China and the others, he says, are manipulating their currencies to gain trading advantage. But all important nations manage their currencies for economic advantage; furthermore, during the 1990s, American experts encouraged developing nations to peg their currency to the dollar, exactly what China's doing now. Bergsten argues that the United States should take his accusation to the IMF and WTO, but the threat seems hollow since such a case would take years. The bleeding is now. Waving the tariff "stick" to pressure others can be risky, however. When Bergsten presented his case before the Council on Foreign Relations in February, financier and former Commerce Secretary Pete Peterson sounded in agreement but cited the risks. "I don't suggest using sticks lightly," he said. "They're a very dangerous thing to get started because they can result in retaliation and so forth." But they can also work, Bergsten responded. "Absolutely," Peterson said. These events also pose a large domestic political risk for the multinationals: When "responsible" players break the taboo and talk up tariffs, it could ignite a more honest public debate on globalization. The major news media seem not to have noticed that Democratic leaders and some conservative Republicans are waving the big stick. The establishment probably prefers that this remain an inside-the-Beltway story. Why confuse the public with front-page stories explaining that tariffs are actually useful and legal? Organized labor and others should make sure this story becomes big news. People might begin to ask deeper questions. If free-trade agreements are the road to greater US prosperity, how did the United States wind up in this deep hole? If the government is willing to invoke the tariff weapon to protect US financial interests, why can't it use it to protect US workers and jobs? Why does US trade policy serve the multinational interests but not the nation as a whole? The trade crisis is a new opening in politics, but its origins are bipartisan, spawned by Republican and Democratic Presidents adhering to the orthodoxy. Imagine if John Kerry had had the nerve last year to talk about an emergency tariff to protect America. He might have carried Ohio. -- ------------------ War remains the decisive human failure. - John Kenneth Galbraith Jonathan web site at: http://elegant-technology.com -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://www.globalproblematique.net/pipermail/mai-not/attachments/20050515/39e13d3a/attachment.html From dgiles at central.murdoch.edu.au Sun May 15 05:29:21 2005 From: dgiles at central.murdoch.edu.au (Dion Giles) Date: Sun May 15 05:29:38 2005 Subject: [Mai-not] The remarkable prescience of George Orwell Message-ID: <6.1.1.1.0.20050515202249.02c54158@central.murdoch.edu.au> An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://www.globalproblematique.net/pipermail/mai-not/attachments/20050515/ad4e69e8/attachment.html From creuss at bluemail.ch Sun May 15 13:15:59 2005 From: creuss at bluemail.ch (Christoph Reuss) Date: Sun May 15 13:16:51 2005 Subject: [Mai-not] Ibrahim, the Shin Bet wants you to join Al-Qaida Message-ID: http://www.haaretzdaily.com/hasen/pages/ShArt.jhtml?itemNo=241042&contrassID=2&subContrassID=5&sbSubContrassID=0&listSrc=Y&itemNo=241042 Ibrahim, the Shin Bet wants you to join Qaida By Danny Rubinstein PA unveils Israeli intelligence scheme, denies Gaza links to bin Laden Early last week, Rashi Abu Sba, head of the preventive security apparatus in Gaza, the equivalent of the Shin Bet, accused the Israeli security service of tricking young Palestinians into conducting missions in the name of Al-Qaida. Last Tuesday, a young man named Ibrahim was presented to reporters in Gaza. Ibrahim hid his face behind a mask, and told what happened to him. He said that a year ago he sent in a personal, with his photo and phone number, to East Jerusalem's Posta, a cultural-entertainment weekly with a personals section. Three months later, the Gazan received a phone call from an older man, who introduced himself as a merchant named Ahmed, who told Ibrahim that his photo reminded him of his son. They spoke on the phone a number of times, with Ahmed asking Ibrahim about the situation - and if he was a devout Muslim. During one of the conversations, Ahmed told Ibrahim that he wanted to help Gazans in economic distress and began sending money - cash in dollars and Jordanian dinars - through the Nablus branch of the Cairo-Amman bank. Ibrahim told Ahmed that he had never been arrested nor involved in any political organization. Then, in one of the conversations, Ahmed said he was working for Osama bin Laden's Al-Qaida organization, and Ibrahim was meant to be one of its organizers in northern Gaza since the group already had an infrastructure in the south. Ahmed gave Ibrahim a list of people, mostly Hamas activists, and was told to collect information about them and follow them so they could also be drafted for the Al-Qaida cause. The two never met, but at a certain point during their telephone contact, Ibrahim became suspicious. He contacted a preventive security officer in Gaza and told him the whole story. The officer looked into the matter and told Ibrahim that Ahmed was an Israeli Shin Bet agent, and Ibrahim should immediately cut off any contacts with him. Palestinian sources said last week that the case was not unusual, and they reported it, as well as similar cases, during a security meeting with top-level U.S. security officials. Ahmed from the Shin Bet The incident was revealed against the background of the terror attacks on Israelis three weeks ago in Mombasa, Kenya - the first Al-Qaida operation aimed specifically against an Israeli target after the group had attacked a Jewish target, the synagogue on Jerba Island, off the Tunisian coast. In the wake of the Mombasa attack, Israeli intelligence circles began revealing information about Al-Qaida operatives in Lebanon trying to recruit Gazan Palestinians. Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and Chief of Staff Moshe Ya'alon spoke about it, and hinted that bin Laden is tightening his grip in Lebanon and among Palestinians. Those hints startled PA Chairman Yasser Arafat and his people. From his office in Ramallah, Arafat told reporters, "Israel's accusations tying Palestinians to Al-Qaida are meant to justify the intensification of attacks against our people." An official Palestinian Authority statement added: "We vehemently deny the Israeli falsehoods about Al-Qaida being in Gaza." This was followed by Abu Sba's revelations about the Ibrahim episode, which, irrespective of the specific case, is common practice among intelligence services worldwide. [...] ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ SpamWall: Mail to this addy is deleted unread unless it contains the keyword "igve". From dgiles at central.murdoch.edu.au Sun May 15 20:56:27 2005 From: dgiles at central.murdoch.edu.au (Dion Giles) Date: Sun May 15 20:56:32 2005 Subject: [Mai-not] Lucky Canada, writes Alexander Moens Message-ID: <6.1.1.1.0.20050516115030.02c94870@central.murdoch.edu.au> The rubbish at http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/05/13/AR2005051301391.html by Alexander Moens may influence people outside the usual Washington cheer squad -- it is characterised by a string of careful omissions. But can anyone come up with a rebuttal? The guy is (presumably) a Canadian with access to Canadian ears. Meanwhile Canadian eyes see the north-south con-trails joined by east-west con-trails over their own country! Dion Giles Western Australia From papadop at peak.org Sun May 15 22:05:45 2005 From: papadop at peak.org (MichaelP) Date: Sun May 15 22:06:03 2005 Subject: [Mai-not] NYReview prints about the Brits; Smoking-Gun memo Message-ID: http://www.tomdispatch.com/ Tomgram: a project of the Nation Institute TomDispatch.com compiled and edited by Tom Engelhardt Tomdispatch.com is researched, written and edited by Tom Engelhardt (bio), a fellow at the Nation Institute, for anyone in despair over post-September 11th US mainstream media coverage of our world and ourselves. The service is intended to introduce you to voices from elsewhere (even when the elsewhere is here) who might offer a clearer sense of how this imperial globe of ours actually works. An editor in publishing for the last 25 years, Tom is the author of The End of Victory Culture, a history of American triumphalism in the Cold War era. He is at present consulting editor for Metropolitan Books, a fellow of the Nation Institute, and a teaching fellow at the journalism school of the University of California, Berkeley. ======== Tomgram intros Mark Danner on the British Smoking-Gun Memo In its June 9 issue (on sale this week), the New York Review of Books will be the first American print publication to publish the full British "smoking gun" document, the secret memorandum of the minutes of a meeting of Tony Blair's top advisors in July 2002, eight months before the Iraq War commenced. Leaked to the London Sunday Times, which first published it on May 1, the memo offers irrefutable proof of the way in which the Bush administration made its decision to invade Iraq -- without significant consultation, reasonable intelligence on Iraq, or any desire to explore ways to avoid war -- and well before seeking a Congressional or United Nations mandate of any sort. By July, as the British officials reported, the decision to invade was already in the bag. The only real questions -- other than those involving war planning -- were how to organize the intelligence in such a way as to promote the war to come and how to finesse Congress (and the UN). While people often speak of the "road to war," in the case of the invasion of Iraq, as this document makes clear, a more accurate phrase might be "the bum's rush to war." The Review is also publishing an accompanying piece on the secret memo and what to make of it by their regular Iraq correspondent, Mark Danner, and its editors have been kind enough to allow Tomdispatch to distribute the piece early on-line. That the Review is the first publication here to print the document is not only an honorable (and important) act, but a measure of the failure of major American papers to offer attention where it is clearly due. After all, whole government investigations have, in the past, gone in search of "smoking guns." In fact, the Bush administration spent much time searching fruitlessly for its own "smoking gun" of WMD in Iraq -- and this process was considered of front-page importance in our major papers and on the TV news. That a "smoking gun" document about the nature of the war in the making has appeared in this fashion, not in Kyrgyzstan but in England; that no one in the British or American governments has even bothered to dispute its provenance or accuracy; and that, with a few honorable exceptions like columnist Molly Ivins, that gun was allowed to lie on the ground smoking for days, hardly commented upon (except on the political internet, of course), tells us much about our present moment. Should you want to consider the miserable coverage in this country, check out FAIR's commentary on the matter. Congressman John Conyers has just sent a letter, signed by eighty-nine Democratic congressional representatives, to the President demanding some answers to the document's revelations. And articles by good reporters in major papers finally did start to appear late this week -- but those of John Daniszewski at the Los Angeles Times and Walter Pincus at the Washington Post were typically tucked away on inside pages (meant for political news jockeys), and they had a distinctly just-the-facts-maam, nothing-out-of-the-ordinary feel to them. But shouldn't it be a front-page story that, as Danner points out below, all the subsequent arguments we've had to endure about the state of, and accuracy of American intelligence on Iraq, were actually beside the point? After all, as the smoking-gun memo makes perfectly clear, the decision to go to war was made before the intelligence -- good, bad, or indifferent -- was even seriously put into play. As the secret memo also makes clear, administration officials, and the President himself, had already rolled the dice and placed their bet -- on the existence of WMD in Iraq as an excuse for the war they so desperately wanted. (Their Iraqi exile sources had, of course, assured them that it was so and, as the Brits reported in July 2002, they were already wondering, "For instance, what were the consequences, if Saddam used WMD on day one [of an invasion].") After all, it seemed so logical. Saddam had used such weapons in the 1980s in the Iran-Iraq War and against Kurds in Iraq. American troops and UN inspectors had found such weaponry in profusion after our first Gulf War. So why not now as well? Recently, Ted Rall, considering press response to a more modest smoking-gun incident -- the covered up friendly-fire death of former NFL star Pat Tillman in Afghanistan whose revelation was reported rather reluctantly on the inside pages of papers -- wrote tellingly: "For journalists supposedly dedicated to uncovering the truth and informing the public, this is exactly the opposite of how things ought to be. Corrections and exposŽs should always run bigger, longer and more often than initial, discredited stories." Dream on, as we smoking-gunsters like to say. The least commented upon aspect of the smoking-gun memo has been its military side. It is, in significant part, a military document, reflecting how much serious thinking and planning at the highest levels in the U.S. and Britain had already gone into the question of how to have a war by July 2002. The question of how technically to launch the "military action" -- whether by a "generated start" or a "running start" -- was, for instance, front and center. Also addressed was the mundane but crucial issue (for the Pentagon) of where, around Iraq, to base forces. "The US," reads the memo, "saw the UK (and Kuwait) as essential, with basing in Diego Garcia and Cyprus critical for either [the generated or running start] option." Diego Garcia is the British-controlled Indian Ocean Island that was already a stationary American "aircraft carrier" and from which, 8 months later, B-2s would fly on Baghdad. Since Danner -- whose book Torture and Truth: America, Abu Ghraib, and the War on Terror does much to explain the nature of the fix the Bush administration now finds itself in -- covers the British document in great and fascinating detail below, let me just add a final note: To me, perhaps the most telling line in the memo, given what's happened since, is the observation of Sir Richard Dearlove, the head of M16 (the British CIA equivalent), just back from a U.S. visit, that "[t]here was little discussion in Washington of the aftermath after military action." This line not only represented the greatest gamble the Bush administration's top officials would make, but the hubris with which they approached the taking of Iraq. As true believers in force nothing impressed them more than the advanced technology of destruction they possessed and its possible applications -- they were already awed by themselves and deeply believed in the shock to come once they hit Iraq hard. As the British smoking-gun memo indicates in that single classic line, they placed their deepest faith in their conviction that, once the invasion was completed successful and Saddam had fallen, everything else in Iraq would simply fall into place as well. Planning for a post-war occupation? What me worry? Tom ====================== The below article will appear in the June 9th issue of The New York Review of Books SECRET WAY TO WAR By Mark Danner 1. It was October 16, 2002, and the United States Congress had just voted to authorize the President to go to war against Iraq. When George W. Bush came before members of his Cabinet and Congress gathered in the East Room of the White House and addressed the American people, he was in a somber mood befitting a leader speaking frankly to free citizens about the gravest decision their country could make. The 107th Congress, the President said, had just become "one of the few called by history to authorize military action to defend our country and the cause of peace." But, he hastened to add, no one should assume that war was inevitable. Though "Congress has now authorized the use of force," the President said emphatically, "I have not ordered the use of force. I hope the use of force will not become necessary." The President went on: "Our goal is to fully and finally remove a real threat to world peace and to America. Hopefully this can be done peacefully. Hopefully we can do this without any military action. Yet, if Iraq is to avoid military action by the international community, it has the obligation to prove compliance with all the world's demands. It's the obligation of Iraq." Iraq, the President said, still had the power to prevent war by "declaring and destroying all its weapons of mass destruction" -- but if Iraq did not declare and destroy those weapons, the President warned, the United States would "go into battle, as a last resort." It is safe to say that, at the time, it surprised almost no one when the Iraqis answered the President's demand by repeating their claim that in fact there were no weapons of mass destruction. As we now know, the Iraqis had in fact destroyed these weapons, probably years before George W. Bush's ultimatum: "the Iraqis" -- in the words of chief U.S. weapons inspector David Kaye -- "were telling the truth." As Americans watch their young men and women fighting in the third year of a bloody counterinsurgency war in Iraq -- a war that has now killed more than 1,600 Americans and tens of thousands of Iraqis -- they are left to ponder "the unanswered question" of what would have happened if the United Nations weapons inspectors had been allowed -- as all the major powers except the United Kingdom had urged they should be -- to complete their work. What would have happened if the UN weapons inspectors had been allowed to prove, before the U.S. went "into battle," what David Kaye and his colleagues finally proved afterward? Thanks to a formerly secret memorandum published by the London Sunday Times on May 1, during the run-up to the British elections, we now have a partial answer to that question. The memo, which records the minutes of a meeting of Prime Minister Tony Blair's senior foreign policy and security officials, shows that even as President Bush told Americans in October 2002 that he "hope[d] the use of force will not become necessary" -- that such a decision depended on whether or not the Iraqis complied with his demands to rid themselves of their weapons of mass destruction -- the President had in fact already definitively decided, at least three months before, to choose this "last resort" of going "into battle" with Iraq. Whatever the Iraqis chose to do or not do, the President's decision to go to war had long since been made. On July 23, 2002, eight months before American and British forces invaded, senior British officials met with Prime Minister Tony Blair to discuss Iraq. The gathering, similar to an American "principals meeting," brought together Geoffrey Hoon, the defense secretary; Jack Straw, the foreign secretary; Lord Goldsmith, the attorney general; John Scarlett, the head of the Joint Intelligence Committee, which advises the prime minister; Sir Richard Dearlove, also known as "C," the head of MI6 (the equivalent of the CIA); David Manning, the equivalent of the national security adviser; Admiral Sir Michael Boyce, the chief of the Defense Staff (or CDS, equivalent to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs); Jonathan Powell, Blair's chief of staff; Alastair Campbell, director of strategy (Blair's communications and political adviser); and Sally Morgan, director of government relations. After John Scarlett began the meeting with a summary of intelligence on Iraq -- notably, that "the regime was tough and based on extreme fear" and that thus the "only way to overthrow it was likely to be by massive military action," "C" offered a report on his visit to Washington, where he had conducted talks with George Tenet, his counterpart at the CIA, and other high officials. This passage is worth quoting in full: "C reported on his recent talks in Washington. There was a perceptible shift in attitude. Military action was now seen as inevitable. Bush wanted to remove Saddam, through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy. The NSC had no patience with the UN route, and no enthusiasm for publishing material on the Iraqi regime's record. There was little discussion in Washington of the aftermath after military action." Seen from today's perspective this short paragraph is a strikingly clear template for the future, establishing these points: 1. By mid-July 2002, eight months before the war began, President Bush had decided to invade and occupy Iraq. 2. Bush had decided to "justify" the war "by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD." 3. Already "the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy." 4. Many at the top of the administration did not want to seek approval from the United Nations (going "the UN route"). 5. Few in Washington seemed much interested in the aftermath of the war. We have long known, thanks to Bob Woodward and others, that military planning for the Iraq war began as early as November 21, 2001, after the President ordered Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld to look at "what it would take to protect America by removing Saddam Hussein if we have to," and that Secretary Rumsfeld and General Tommy Franks, who headed Central Command, were briefing American senior officials on the progress of military planning during the late spring and summer of 2002; indeed, a few days after the meeting in London leaks about specific plans for a possible Iraq war appeared on the front pages of the New York Times and the Washington Post. What the Downing Street memo confirms for the first time is that President Bush had decided, no later than July 2002, to "remove Saddam, through military action," that war with Iraq was "inevitable" -- and that what remained was simply to establish and develop the modalities of justification; that is, to come up with a means of "justifying" the war and "fixing" the "intelligence and facts...around the policy." The great value of the discussion recounted in the memo, then, is to show, for the governments of both countries, a clear hierarchy of decision-making. By July 2002 at the latest, war had been decided on; the question at issue now was how to justify it -- how to "fix," as it were, what Blair will later call "the political context." Specifically, though by this point in July the President had decided to go to war, he had not yet decided to go to the United Nations and demand inspectors; indeed, as "C" points out, those on the National Security Council -- the senior security officials of the U.S. government -- "had no patience with the UN route, and no enthusiasm for publishing material on the Iraqi regime's record." This would later change, largely as a result of the political concerns of these very people gathered together at 10 Downing Street. After Admiral Boyce offered a brief discussion of the war plans then on the table and the defense secretary said a word or two about timing -- "the most likely timing in US minds for military action to begin was January, with the timeline beginning 30 days before the US Congressional elections" -- Foreign Secretary Jack Straw got to the heart of the matter: not whether or not to invade Iraq but how to justify such an invasion: "The Foreign Secretary said he would discuss [the timing of the war] with Colin Powell this week. It seemed clear that Bush had made up his mind to take military action, even if the timing was not yet decided. But the case was thin. Saddam was not threatening his neighbors, and his WMD capability was less than that of Libya, North Korea or Iran." Given that Saddam was not threatening to attack his neighbors and that his weapons of mass destruction program was less extensive than those of a number of other countries, how does one justify attacking? Foreign Secretary Straw had an idea: "We should work up a plan for an ultimatum to Saddam to allow back in the UN weapons inspectors. This would also help with the legal justification for the use of force." The British realized they needed "help with the legal justification for the use of force" because, as the attorney general pointed out, rather dryly, "the desire for regime change was not a legal base for military action." Which is to say, the simple desire to overthrow the leadership of a given sovereign country does not make it legal to invade that country; on the contrary. And, said the attorney general, of the "three possible legal bases: self-defence, humanitarian intervention, or [United Nations Security Council] authorization," the first two "could not be the base in this case." In other words, Iraq was not attacking the United States or the United Kingdom, so the leaders could not claim to be acting in self-defense; nor was Iraq's leadership in the process of committing genocide, so the United States and the United Kingdom could not claim to be invading for humanitarian reasons.[1] This left Security Council authorization as the only conceivable legal justification for war. But how to get it? At this point in the meeting Prime Minister Tony Blair weighed in. He had heard his foreign minister's suggestion about drafting an ultimatum demanding that Saddam let back in the United Nations inspectors. Such an ultimatum could be politically critical, said Blair -- but only if the Iraqi leader turned it down: "The Prime Minister said that it would make a big difference politically and legally if Saddam refused to allow in the UN inspectors. Regime change and WMD were linked in the sense that it was the regime that was producing the WMD.... If the political context were right, people would support regime change. The two key issues were whether the military plan worked and whether we had the political strategy to give the military plan the space to work." Here the inspectors were introduced, but as a means to create the missing casus belli. If the UN could be made to agree on an ultimatum that Saddam accept inspectors, and if Saddam then refused to accept them, the Americans and the British would be well on their way to having a legal justification to go to war (the attorney general's third alternative of UN Security Council authorization). Thus, the idea of UN inspectors was introduced not as a means to avoid war, as President Bush repeatedly assured Americans, but as a means to make war possible. War had been decided on; the problem under discussion here was how to make, in the prime minister's words, "the political context ...right." The "political strategy" -- at the center of which, as with the Americans, was weapons of mass destruction, for "it was the regime that was producing the WMD" -- must be strong enough to give "the military plan the space to work." Which is to say, once the allies were victorious the war would justify itself. The demand that Iraq accept UN inspectors, especially if refused, could form the political bridge by which the allies could reach their goal: "regime change" through "military action." But there was a problem: as the foreign secretary pointed out, "on the political strategy, there could be US/UK differences." While the British considered legal justification for going to war critical -- they, unlike the Americans, were members of the International Criminal Court -- the Americans did not. Mr. Straw suggested that given "US resistance, we should explore discreetly the ultimatum." The defense secretary, Geoffrey Hoon, was more blunt, arguing "that if the Prime Minister wanted UK military involvement, he would need to decide this early. He cautioned that many in the U.S. did not think it worth going down the ultimatum route. It would be important for the Prime Minister to set out the political context to Bush." The key negotiation in view at this point, in other words, was not with Saddam over letting in the United Nations inspectors -- both parties hoped he would refuse to admit them, and thus provide the justification for invading. The key negotiation would be between the Americans, who had shown "resistance" to the idea of involving the United Nations at all, and the British, who were more concerned than their American cousins about having some kind of legal fig leaf for attacking Iraq. Three weeks later, Foreign Secretary Straw arrived in the Hamptons to "discreetly explore the ultimatum" with Secretary of State Powell, perhaps the only senior American official who shared some of the British concerns; as Straw told the secretary, in Bob Woodward's account, "If you are really thinking about war and you want us Brits to be a player, we cannot be unless you go to the United Nations." [2] 2. Britain's strong support for the "UN route" that most American officials so distrusted was critical in helping Powell in the bureaucratic battle over going to the United Nations. As late as August 26, Vice President Dick Cheney had appeared before a convention of the Veterans of Foreign Wars and publicly denounced "the UN route." Asserting that "simply stated, there is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction [and] there is no doubt that he is amassing them to use against our friends, against our allies, and against us," Cheney advanced the view that going to the United Nations would itself be dangerous: "A return of inspectors would provide no assurance whatsoever of his compliance with UN resolutions. On the contrary, there is great danger that it would provide false comfort that Saddam was somehow 'back in the box.'" Cheney, like other administration "hard-liners," feared "the UN route" not because it might fail but because it might succeed and thereby prevent a war that they were convinced had to be fought. As Woodward recounts, it would finally take a personal visit by Blair on September 7 to persuade President Bush to go to the United Nations: "For Blair the immediate question was, Would the United Nations be used? He was keenly aware that in Britain the question was, Does Blair believe in the UN? It was critical domestically for the prime minister to show his own Labour Party, a pacifist party at heart, opposed to war in principle, that he had gone the UN route. Public opinion in the UK favored trying to make international institutions work before resorting to force. Going through the UN would be a large and much-needed plus."[3] The President now told Blair that he had decided "to go to the UN" and the prime minister, according to Woodward, "was relieved." After the session with Blair, Bush later recounts to Woodward, he walked into a conference room and told the British officials gathered there that "your man has got cojones." ("And of course these Brits don't know what cojones are," Bush tells Woodward.) Henceforth this particular conference with Blair would be known, Bush declares, as "the cojones meeting." That September the attempt to sell the war began in earnest, for, as White House Chief of Staff Andrew Card had told the New York Times in an unusually candid moment, "You don't roll out a new product in August." At the heart of the sales campaign was the United Nations. Thanks in substantial part to Blair's prodding, George W. Bush would come before the UN General Assembly on September 12 and, after denouncing the Iraqi regime, announce that "we will work with the UN Security Council for the necessary resolutions." The main phase of public diplomacy -- giving the war a "political context," in Blair's phrase -- had begun. Though "the UN route" would be styled as an attempt to avoid war, its essence, as the Downing Street memo makes clear, was a strategy to make the war possible, partly by making it politically palatable. As it turned out, however -- and as Cheney and others had feared -- the "UN route" to war was by no means smooth, or direct. Though Powell managed the considerable feat of securing unanimous approval for Security Council Resolution 1441, winning even Syria's support, the allies differed on the key question of whether or not the resolution gave United Nations approval for the use of force against Saddam, as the Americans contended, or whether a second resolution would be required, as the majority of the council, and even the British, conceded it would. Sir Jeremy Greenstock, the British ambassador to the UN, put this position bluntly on November 8, the day Resolution 1441 was passed: "We heard loud and clear during the negotiations about 'automaticity' and 'hidden triggers' -- the concerns that on a decision so crucial we should not rush into military action.... Let me be equally clear.... There is no 'automaticity' in this Resolution. If there is a further Iraqi breach of its disarmament obligations, the matter will return to the Council for discussion as required.... We would expect the Security Council then to meet its responsibilities." Vice President Cheney could have expected no worse. Having decided to travel down "the UN route," the Americans and British would now need a second resolution to gain the necessary approval to attack Iraq. Worse, Saddam frustrated British and American hopes, as articulated by Blair in the July 23 meeting, that he would simply refuse to admit the inspectors and thereby offer the allies an immediate casus belli. Instead, hundreds of inspectors entered Iraq, began to search, and found...nothing. January, which Defence Secretary Hoon had suggested was the "most likely timing in US minds for military action to begin," came and went, and the inspectors went on searching. On the Security Council, a majority -- led by France, Germany, and Russia -- would push for the inspections to run their course. President Jacques Chirac of France later put this argument succinctly in an interview with CBS and CNN just as the war was about to begin: "France is not pacifist. We are not anti-American either. We are not just going to use our veto to nag and annoy the US. But we just feel that there is another option, another way, another more normal way, a less dramatic way than war, and that we have to go through that path. And we should pursue it until we've come [to] a dead end, but that isn't the case."[4] Where would this "dead end" be found, however, and who would determine that it had been found? Would it be the French, or the Americans? The logical flaw that threatened the administration's policy now began to become clear. Had the inspectors found weapons, or had they been presented with them by Saddam Hussein, many who had supported the resolution would argue that the inspections regime it established had indeed begun to work -- that by multilateral action the world was succeeding, peacefully, in "disarming Iraq." As long as the inspectors found no weapons, however, many would argue that the inspectors "must be given time to do their work" -- until, in Chirac's words, they "came to a dead end." However that point might be determined, it is likely that, long before it was reached, the failure to find weapons would have undermined the administration's central argument for going to war -- "the conjunction,"as C' had put it that morning in July, "of terrorism and WMD." And as we now know, the inspectors would never have found weapons of mass destruction. Vice President Cheney had anticipated this problem, as he had explained frankly to Hans Blix, the chief UN weapons inspector, during an October 30 meeting in the White House. Cheney, according to Blix, "stated the position that inspections, if they do not give results, cannot go on forever, and said the U.S. was 'ready to discredit inspections in favor of disarmament.' A pretty straight way, I thought, of saying that if we did not soon find the weapons of mass destruction that the US was convinced Iraq possessed (though they did not know where), the US would be ready to say that the inspectors were useless and embark on disarmament by other means."[5] Indeed, the inspectors' failure to find any evidence of weapons came in the wake of a very large effort launched by the administration to put before the world evidence of Saddam's arsenal, an effort spearheaded by George W. Bush's speech in Cincinnati on October 7, and followed by a series of increasingly lurid disclosures to the press that reached a crescendo with Colin Powell's multimedia presentation to the UN Security Council on February 5, 2003. Throughout the fall and winter, the administration had "rolled out the product," in Card's phrase, with great skill, making use of television, radio, and all the print press to get its message out about the imminent threat of Saddam's arsenal. ("Think of the press," advised Josef Goebbels, "as a great keyboard on which the government can play.") As the gap between administration rhetoric about enormous arsenals -- "we know where they are," asserted Donald Rumsfeld -- and the inspectors' empty hands grew wider, that gap, as Cheney had predicted, had the effect in many quarters of undermining the credibility of the United Nations process itself. The inspectors' failure to find weapons in Iraq was taken to discredit the worth of the inspections, rather than to cast doubt on the administration's contention that Saddam possessed large stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction. Oddly enough, Saddam's only effective strategy to prevent war at this point might have been to reveal and yield up some weapons, thus demonstrating to the world that the inspections were working. As we now know, however, he had no weapons to yield up. As Blix remarks, "It occurred to me [on March 7] that the Iraqis would be in greater difficulty if...there truly were no weapons of which they could yield possession.'" The fact that, in Blix's words, "the UN and the world had succeeded in disarming Iraq without knowing it" -- that the UN process had been successful --meant, in effect, that the inspectors would be discredited and the United States would go to war. President Bush would do so, of course, having failed to get the "second resolution" so desired by his friend and ally, Tony Blair. Blair had predicted, that July morning on Downing Street, that the "two key issues were whether the military plan worked and whether we had the political strategy to give the military plan the space to work." He seems to have been proved right in this. In the end his political strategy only half worked: the Security Council's refusal to vote a second resolution approving the use of force left "the UN route" discussed that day incomplete, and Blair found himself forced to follow the United States without the protection of international approval. Had the military plan "worked" -- had the war been short and decisive rather than long, bloody, and inconclusive -- Blair would perhaps have escaped the political damage the war has caused him. A week after the Downing Street memo was published in the Sunday Times, Tony Blair was reelected, but his majority in Parliament was reduced, from 161 to 67. The Iraq war, and the damage it had done to his reputation for probity, was widely believed to have been a principal cause. In the United States, on the other hand, the Downing Street memorandum has attracted little attention. As I write, no American newspaper has published it and few writers have bothered to comment on it. The war continues, and Americans have grown weary of it; few seem much interested now in discussing how it began, and why their country came to fight a war in the cause of destroying weapons that turned out not to exist. For those who want answers, the Bush administration has followed a simple and heretofore largely successful policy: blame the intelligence agencies. Since "the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy" as early as July 2002 (as "C," the head of British intelligence, reported upon his return from Washington), it seems a matter of remarkable hubris, even for this administration, that its officials now explain their misjudgments in going to war by blaming them on "intelligence failures" -- that is, on the intelligence that they themselves politicized. Still, for the most part, Congress has cooperated. Though the Senate Intelligence Committee investigated the failures of the CIA and other agencies before the war, a promised second report that was to take up the administration's political use of intelligence -- which is, after all, the critical issue -- was postponed until after the 2004 elections, then quietly abandoned. In the end, the Downing Street memo, and Americans' lack of interest in what it shows, has to do with a certain attitude about facts, or rather about where the line should be drawn between facts and political opinion. It calls to mind an interesting observation that an unnamed "senior advisor" to President Bush made to a New York Times Magazine reporter last fall: "The aide said that guys like me [i.e., reporters and commentators] were 'in what we call the reality-based community,' which he defined as people who 'believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.' I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. 'That's not the way the world really works anymore,' he continued. 'We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality -- judiciously, as you will -- we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors... and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.'" Though this seems on its face to be a disquisition on religion and faith, it is of course an argument about power, and its influence on truth. Power, the argument runs, can shape truth: power, in the end, can determine reality, or at least the reality that most people accept -- a critical point, for the administration has been singularly effective in its recognition that what is most politically important is not what readers of the New York Times believe but what most Americans are willing to believe. The last century's most innovative authority on power and truth, Joseph Goebbels, made the same point but rather more directly: "There was no point in seeking to convert the intellectuals. For intellectuals would never be converted and would anyway always yield to the stronger, and this will always be 'the man in the street.' Arguments must therefore be crude, clear and forcible, and appeal to emotions and instincts, not the intellect. Truth was unimportant and entirely subordinate to tactics and psychology." I thought of this quotation when I first read the Downing Street memorandum; but I had first looked it up several months earlier, on December 14, 2004, after I had seen the images of the newly reelected President George W. Bush awarding the Medal of Freedom, the highest civilian honor the United States can bestow, to George Tenet, the former director of central intelligence; L. Paul Bremer, the former head of the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq; and General (ret.) Tommy Franks, the commander who had led American forces during the first phase of the Iraq war. Tenet, of course, would be known to history as the intelligence director who had failed to detect and prevent the attacks of September 11 and the man who had assured President Bush that the case for Saddam's possession of weapons of mass destruction was "a slam dunk." Franks had allowed the looting of Baghdad and had generally done little to prepare for what would come after the taking of Baghdad. ("There was little discussion in Washington," as "C" told the Prime Minister on July 23, "of the aftermath after military action.") Bremer had dissolved the Iraqi army and the Iraqi police and thereby created 400,000 or so available recruits for the insurgency. One might debate their ultimate responsibility for these grave errors, but it is difficult to argue that these officials merited the highest recognition the country could offer. Of course truth, as the master propagandist said, is "unimportant and entirely subordinate to tactics and psychology." He of course would have instantly grasped the psychological tactic embodied in that White House ceremony, which was one more effort to reassure Americans that the war the administration launched against Iraq has been a success and was worth fighting. That barely four Americans in ten are still willing to believe this suggests that as time goes on and the gap grows between what Americans see and what they are told, membership in the "reality-based community" may grow along with it. We will see. Still, for those interested in the question of how our leaders persuaded the country to become embroiled in a counterinsurgency war in Iraq, the Downing Street memorandum offers one more confirmation of the truth. For those, that is, who want to hear --May 12, 2005 Notes 1. The latter charge might have been given as a reason for intervention in 1988, for example, when the Iraqi regime was carrying out its Anfal campaign against the Kurds; at that time, though, the Reagan administration -- comprising many of the same officials who would later lead the invasion of Iraq -- was supporting Saddam in his war against Iran and kept largely silent. The second major killing campaign of the Saddam regime came in 1991, when Iraqi troops attacked Shiites in the south who had rebelled against the regime in the wake of Saddam's defeat in the Gulf War; the first Bush administration, despite President George H.W. Bush's urging Iraqis to "rise up against the dictator, Saddam Hussein," and despite the presence of hundreds of thousands of American troops within miles of the killing, stood by and did nothing. See Ken Roth, "War in Iraq: Not a Humanitarian Intervention" (Human Rights Watch, January 2004). 2. See Bob Woodward, Plan of Attack (Simon and Schuster, 2004), p. 162. 3. See Woodward, Plan of Attack, pp. 177178. 4. See "Chirac Makes His Case on Iraq," an interview with Christiane Amanpour, CBS News, March 16, 2003. 5. See Hans Blix, Disarming Iraq (Pantheon, 2004), p. 86. Mark Danner, a longtime New Yorker Staff writer, is Professor of Journalism at the University of California at Berkeley and Henry R. Luce Professor at Bard College. His most recent book is Torture and Truth: America, Abu Ghraib, and the War on Terror, which collects his pieces on torture and Iraq that first appeared in the New York Review of Books. His work can be found at markdanner.com Click here to write to Tom Engelhardt. older posts May 2005 April 2005 March 2005 February 2005 January 2005 December 2004 November 2004 October 2004 links The Nation Institute AlterNet Mother Jones Cursor Asia Times openDemocracy Juan Cole Progressive Trail Common Dreams The Nation Magazine The Guardian Foreign Policy in Focus The War in Context Antiwar.com Znet Democrats.com History News Network Shameless Plug Department [tomsbook.jpg] ÒA satisfyingly virulent, comical, absurd, deeply grieving true portrait of how things work today in the sleek factories of conglomerate book producers... a skillful novel of manners -- of very bad mannersÓ ÑHerb Gold, LA Times Click to read author interview, reviews and blurbs, first pages of novel, or to buy. Mark Danner on the British Smoking-Gun Memo In its June 9 issue (on sale this week), the New York Review of Books will be the first American print publication to publish the full British "smoking gun" document, the secret memorandum of the minutes of a meeting of Tony Blair's top advisors in July 2002, eight months before the Iraq War commenced. Leaked to the London Sunday Times, which first published it on May 1, the memo offers irrefutable proof of the way in which the Bush administration made its decision to invade Iraq -- without significant consultation, reasonable intelligence on Iraq, or any desire to explore ways to avoid war -- and well before seeking a Congressional or United Nations mandate of any sort. By July, as the British officials reported, the decision to invade was already in the bag. The only real questions -- other than those involving war planning -- were how to organize the intelligence in such a way as to promote the war to come and how to finesse Congress (and the UN). While people often speak of the "road to war," in the case of the invasion of Iraq, as this document makes clear, a more accurate phrase might be "the bum's rush to war." The Review is also publishing an accompanying piece on the secret memo and what to make of it by their regular Iraq correspondent, Mark Danner, and its editors have been kind enough to allow Tomdispatch to distribute the piece early on-line. That the Review is the first publication here to print the document is not only an honorable (and important) act, but a measure of the failure of major American papers to offer attention where it is clearly due. After all, whole government investigations have, in the past, gone in search of "smoking guns." In fact, the Bush administration spent much time searching fruitlessly for its own "smoking gun" of WMD in Iraq -- and this process was considered of front-page importance in our major papers and on the TV news. That a "smoking gun" document about the nature of the war in the making has appeared in this fashion, not in Kyrgyzstan but in England; that no one in the British or American governments has even bothered to dispute its provenance or accuracy; and that, with a few honorable exceptions like columnist Molly Ivins, that gun was allowed to lie on the ground smoking for days, hardly commented upon (except on the political internet, of course), tells us much about our present moment. Should you want to consider the miserable coverage in this country, check out FAIR's commentary on the matter. Congressman John Conyers has just sent a letter, signed by eighty-nine Democratic congressional representatives, to the President demanding some answers to the document's revelations. And articles by good reporters in major papers finally did start to appear late this week -- but those of John Daniszewski at the Los Angeles Times and Walter Pincus at the Washington Post were typically tucked away on inside pages (meant for political news jockeys), and they had a distinctly just-the-facts-maam, nothing-out-of-the-ordinary feel to them. But shouldn't it be a front-page story that, as Danner points out below, all the subsequent arguments we've had to endure about the state of, and accuracy of American intelligence on Iraq, were actually beside the point? After all, as the smoking-gun memo makes perfectly clear, the decision to go to war was made before the intelligence -- good, bad, or indifferent -- was even seriously put into play. As the secret memo also makes clear, administration officials, and the President himself, had already rolled the dice and placed their bet -- on the existence of WMD in Iraq as an excuse for the war they so desperately wanted. (Their Iraqi exile sources had, of course, assured them that it was so and, as the Brits reported in July 2002, they were already wondering, "For instance, what were the consequences, if Saddam used WMD on day one [of an invasion].") After all, it seemed so logical. Saddam had used such weapons in the 1980s in the Iran-Iraq War and against Kurds in Iraq. American troops and UN inspectors had found such weaponry in profusion after our first Gulf War. So why not now as well? Recently, Ted Rall, considering press response to a more modest smoking-gun incident -- the covered up friendly-fire death of former NFL star Pat Tillman in Afghanistan whose revelation was reported rather reluctantly on the inside pages of papers -- wrote tellingly: "For journalists supposedly dedicated to uncovering the truth and informing the public, this is exactly the opposite of how things ought to be. Corrections and exposŽs should always run bigger, longer and more often than initial, discredited stories." Dream on, as we smoking-gunsters like to say. The least commented upon aspect of the smoking-gun memo has been its military side. It is, in significant part, a military document, reflecting how much serious thinking and planning at the highest levels in the U.S. and Britain had already gone into the question of how to have a war by July 2002. The question of how technically to launch the "military action" -- whether by a "generated start" or a "running start" -- was, for instance, front and center. Also addressed was the mundane but crucial issue (for the Pentagon) of where, around Iraq, to base forces. "The US," reads the memo, "saw the UK (and Kuwait) as essential, with basing in Diego Garcia and Cyprus critical for either [the generated or running start] option." Diego Garcia is the British-controlled Indian Ocean Island that was already a stationary American "aircraft carrier" and from which, [A8 months later, B-2s would fly on Baghdad. Read More Tomgram: Mark Danner on the British Smoking-Gun Memo In its June 9 issue (on sale this week), the New York Review of Books will be the first American print publication to publish the full British "smoking gun" document, the secret memorandum of the minutes of a meeting of Tony Blair's top advisors in July 2002, eight months before the Iraq War commenced. Leaked to the London Sunday Times, which first published it on May 1, the memo offers irrefutable proof of the way in which the Bush administration made its decision to invade Iraq -- without significant consultation, reasonable intelligence on Iraq, or any desire to explore ways to avoid war -- and well before seeking a Congressional or United Nations mandate of any sort. By July, as the British officials reported, the decision to invade was already in the bag. The only real questions -- other than those involving war planning -- were how to organize the intelligence in such a way as to promote the war to come and how to finesse Congress (and the UN). While people often speak of the "road to war," in the case of the invasion of Iraq, as this document makes clear, a more accurate phrase might be "the bum's rush to war." The Review is also publishing an accompanying piece on the secret memo and what to make of it by their regular Iraq correspondent, Mark Danner, and its editors have been kind enough to allow Tomdispatch to distribute the piece early on-line. That the Review is the first publication here to print the document is not only an honorable (and important) act, but a measure of the failure of major American papers to offer attention where it is clearly due. After all, whole government investigations have, in the past, gone in search of "smoking guns." In fact, the Bush administration spent much time searching fruitlessly for its own "smoking gun" of WMD in Iraq -- and this process was considered of front-page importance in our major papers and on the TV news. That a "smoking gun" document about the nature of the war in the making has appeared in this fashion, not in Kyrgyzstan but in England; that no one in the British or American governments has even bothered to dispute its provenance or accuracy; and that, with a few honorable exceptions like columnist Molly Ivins, that gun was allowed to lie on the ground smoking for days, hardly commented upon (except on the political internet, of course), tells us much about our present moment. Should you want to consider the miserable coverage in this country, check out FAIR's commentary on the matter. qq+++Congressman John Conyers has just sent a letter, signed by eighty-nine Democratic congressional representatives, to the President demanding some answers to the document's revelations. And articles by good reporters in major papers finally did start to appear late this week -- but those of John Daniszewski at the Los Angeles Times and Walter Pincus at the Washington Post were typically tucked away on inside pages (meant for political news jockeys), and they had a distinctly just-the-facts-maam, nothing-out-of-the-ordinary feel to them. But shouldn't it be a front-page story that, as Danner points out below, all the subsequent arguments we've had to endure about the state of, and accuracy of American intelligence on Iraq, were actually beside the point? After all, as the smoking-gun memo makes perfectly clear, the decision to go to war was made before the intelligence -- good, bad, or indifferent -- was even seriously put into play. As the secret memo also makes clear, administration officials, and the President himself, had already rolled the dice and placed their bet -- on the existence of WMD in Iraq as an excuse for the war they so desperately wanted. (Their Iraqi exile sources had, of course, assured them that it was so and, as the Brits reported in July 2002, they were already wondering, "For instance, what were the consequences, if Saddam used WMD on day one [of an invasion].") After all, it seemed so logical. Saddam had used such weapons in the 1980s in the Iran-Iraq War and against Kurds in Iraq. American troops and UN inspectors had found such weaponry in profusion after our first Gulf War. So why not now as well? Recently, Ted Rall, considering press response to a more modest smoking-gun incident -- the covered up friendly-fire death of former NFL star Pat Tillman in Afghanistan whose revelation was reported rather reluctantly on the inside pages of papers -- wrote tellingly: "For journalists supposedly dedicated to uncovering the truth and informing the public, this is exactly the opposite of how things ought to be. Corrections and exposŽs should always run bigger, longer and more often than initial, discredited stories." Dream on, as we smoking-gunsters like to say. The least commented upon aspect of the smoking-gun memo has been its military side. It is, in significant part, a military document, reflecting how much serious thinking and planning at the highest levels in the U.S. and Britain had already gone into the question of how to have a war by July 2002. The question of how technically to launch the "military action" -- whether by a "generated start" or a "running start" -- was, for instance, front and center. Also addressed was the mundane but crucial issue (for the Pentagon) of where, around Iraq, to base forces. "The US," reads the memo, "saw the UK (and Kuwait) as essential, with basing in Diego Garcia and Cyprus critical for either [the generated or running start] option." Diego Garcia is the British-controlled Indian Ocean Island that was already a stationary American "aircraft carrier" and from which, 8 months later, B-2s would fly on Baghdad. Since Danner -- whose book Torture and Truth: America, Abu Ghraib, and the War on Terror does much to explain the nature of the fix the Bush administration now finds itself in -- covers the British document in great and fascinating detail below, let me just add a final note: To me, perhaps the most telling line in the memo, given what's happenedSince Danner -- whose book Torture and Truth: America, Abu Ghraib, and the War on Terror does much to explain the nature of the fix the Bush administration now finds itself in -- covers the British document in great and fascinating detail below, let me just add a final note: To me, perhaps the most telling line in the memo, given what's happened since, is the observation of Sir Richard Dearlove, the head of M16 (the British CIA equivalent), just back from a U.S. visit, that "[t]here was little discussion in Washington of the aftermath after military action." This line not only represented the greatest gamble the Bush administration's top officials would make, but the hubris with which they approached the taking of Iraq. As true believers in force nothing impressed them more than the advanced technology of destruction they possessed and its possible applications -- they were already awed by themselves and deeply believed in the shock to come once they hit Iraq hard. As the British smoking-gun memo indicates in that single classic line, they placed their deepest faith in their conviction that, once the invasion was completed successful and Saddam had fallen, everything else in Iraq would simply fall into place as well. Planning for a post-war occupation? What me worry? Tom since, is the observation of Sir Richard Dearlove, the head of M16 (the British CIA equivalent), just back from a U.S. visit, that "[t]here was little discussion in Washington of the aftermath after military action." This line not only represented the greatest gamble the Bush administration's top officials would make, but the hubris with which they approached the taking of Iraq. As true believers in force nothing impressed them more than the advanced technology of destruction they possessed and its possible applications -- they were already awed by themselves and deeply believed in the shock to come once they hit Iraq hard. As the British smoking-gun memo indicates in that single classic line, they placed their deepest faith in their conviction that, once the invasion was completed successful and Saddam had fallen, everything else in Iraq would simply fall into place as well. Planning for a post-war occupation? What me worry? Tom New York Review of Books SECRET WAY TO WAR By Mark Danner - To be published in June 9 issue 1. It was October 16, 2002, and the United States Congress had just voted to authorize the President to go to war against Iraq. When George W. Bush came before members of his Cabinet and Congress gathered in the East Room of the White House and addressed the American people, he was in a somber mood befitting a leader speaking frankly to free citizens about the gravest decision their country could make. The 107th Congress, the President said, had just become "one of the few called by history to authorize military action to defend our country and the cause of peace." But, he hastened to add, no one should assume that war was inevitable. Though "Congress has now authorized the use of force," the President said emphatically, "I have not ordered the use of force. I hope the use of force will not become necessary." The President went on: "Our goal is to fully and finally remove a real threat to world peace and to America. Hopefully this can be done peacefully. Hopefully we can do this without any military action. Yet, if Iraq is to avoid military action by the international community, it has the obligation to prove compliance with all the world's demands. It's the obligation of Iraq." Iraq, the President said, still had the power to prevent war by "declaring and destroying all its weapons of mass destruction" -- but if Iraq did not declare and destroy those weapons, the President warned, the United States would "go into battle, as a last resort." It is safe to say that, at the time, it surprised almost no one when the Iraqis answered the President's demand by repeating their claim that in fact there were no weapons of mass destruction. As we now know, the Iraqis had in fact destroyed these weapons, probably years before George W. Bush's ultimatum: "the Iraqis" -- in the words of chief U.S. weapons inspector David Kaye -- "were telling the truth." As Americans watch their young men and women fighting in the third year of a bloody counterinsurgency war in Iraq -- a war that has now killed more than 1,600 Americans and tens of thousands of Iraqis -- they are left to ponder "the unanswered question" of what would have happened if the United Nations weapons inspectors had been allowed -- as all the major powers except the United Kingdom had urged they should be -- to complete their work. What would have happened if the UN weapons inspectors had been allowed to prove, before the U.S. went "into battle," what David Kaye and his colleagues finally proved afterward? Thanks to a formerly secret memorandum published by the London Sunday Times on May 1, during the run-up to the British elections, we now have a partial answer to that question. The memo, which records the minutes of a meeting of Prime Minister Tony Blair's senior foreign policy and security officials, shows that even as President Bush told Americans in October 2002 that he "hope[d] the use of force will not become necessary" -- that such a decision depended on whether or not the Iraqis complied with his demands to rid themselves of their weapons of mass destruction -- the President had in fact already definitively decided, at least three months before, to choose this "last resort" of going "into battle" with Iraq. Whatever the Iraqis chose to do or not do, the President's decision to go to war had long since been made. On July 23, 2002, eight months before American and British forces invaded, senior British officials met with Prime Minister Tony Blair to discuss Iraq. The gathering, similar to an American "principals meeting," brought together Geoffrey Hoon, the defense secretary; Jack Straw, the foreign secretary; Lord Goldsmith, the attorney general; John Scarlett, the head of the Joint Intelligence Committee, which advises the prime minister; Sir Richard Dearlove, also known as "C," the head of MI6 (the equivalent of the CIA); David Manning, the equivalent of the national security adviser; Admiral Sir Michael Boyce, the chief of the Defense Staff (or CDS, equivalent to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs); Jonathan Powell, Blair's chief of staff; Alastair Campbell, director of strategy (Blair's communications and political adviser); and Sally Morgan, director of government relations. After John Scarlett began the meeting with a summary of intelligence on Iraq -- notably, that "the regime was tough and based on extreme fear" and that thus the "only way to overthrow it was likely to be by massive military action," "C" offered a report on his visit to Washington, where he had conducted talks with George Tenet, his counterpart at the CIA, and other high officials. This passage is worth quoting in full: "C reported on his recent talks in Washington. There was a perceptible shift in attitude. Military action was now seen as inevitable. Bush wanted to remove Saddam, through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy. The NSC had no patience with the UN route, and no enthusiasm for publishing material on the Iraqi regime's record. There was little discussion in Washington of the aftermath after military action." Seen from today's perspective this short paragraph is a strikingly clear template for the future, establishing these points: 1. By mid-July 2002, eight months before the war began, President Bush had decided to invade and occupy Iraq. 2. Bush had decided to "justify" the war "by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD." 3. Already "the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy." 4. Many at the top of the administration did not want to seek approval from the United Nations (going "the UN route"). 5. Few in Washington seemed much interested in the aftermath of the war. We have long known, thanks to Bob Woodward and others, that military planning for the Iraq war began as early as November 21, 2001, after the President ordered Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld to look at "what it would take to protect America by removing Saddam Hussein if we have to," and that Secretary Rumsfeld and General Tommy Franks, who headed Central Command, were briefing American senior officials on the progress of military planning during the late spring and summer of 2002; indeed, a few days after the meeting in London leaks about specific plans for a possible Iraq war appeared on the front pages of the New York Times and the Washington Post. What the Downing Street memo confirms for the first time is that President Bush had decided, no later than July 2002, to "remove Saddam, through military action," that war with Iraq was "inevitable" -- and that what remained was simply to establish and develop the modalities of justification; that is, to come up with a means of "justifying" the war and "fixing" the "intelligence and facts...around the policy." The great value of the discussion recounted in the memo, then, is to show, for the governments of both countries, a clear hierarchy of decision-making. By July 2002 at the latest, war had been decided on; the question at issue now was how to justify it -- how to "fix," as it were, what Blair will later call "the political context." Specifically, though by this point in July the President had decided to go to war, he had not yet decided to go to the United Nations and demand inspectors; indeed, as "C" points out, those on the National Security Council -- the senior security officials of the U.S. government -- "had no patience with the UN route, and no enthusiasm for publishing material on the Iraqi regime's record." This would later change, largely as a result of the political concerns of these very people gathered together at 10 Downing Street. After Admiral Boyce offered a brief discussion of the war plans then on the table and the defense secretary said a word or two about timing -- "the most likely timing in US minds for military action to begin was January, with the timeline beginning 30 days before the US Congressional elections" -- Foreign Secretary Jack Straw got to the heart of the matter: not whether or not to invade Iraq but how to justify such an invasion: "The Foreign Secretary said he would discuss [the timing of the war] with Colin Powell this week. It seemed clear that Bush had made up his mind to take military action, even if the timing was not yet decided. But the case was thin. Saddam was not threatening his neighbors, and his WMD capability was less than that of Libya, North Korea or Iran." Given that Saddam was not threatening to attack his neighbors and that his weapons of mass destruction program was less extensive than those of a number of other countries, how does one justify attacking? Foreign Secretary Straw had an idea: "We should work up a plan for an ultimatum to Saddam to allow back in the UN weapons inspectors. This would also help with the legal justification for the use of force." The British realized they needed "help with the legal justification for the use of force" because, as the attorney general pointed out, rather dryly, "the desire for regime change was not a legal base for military action." Which is to say, the simple desire to overthrow the leadership of a given sovereign country does not make it legal to invade that country; on the contrary. And, said the attorney general, of the "three possible legal bases: self-defence, humanitarian intervention, or [United Nations Security Council] authorization," the first two "could not be the base in this case." In other words, Iraq was not attacking the United States or the United Kingdom, so the leaders could not claim to be acting in self-defense; nor was Iraq's leadership in the process of committing genocide, so the United States and the United Kingdom could not claim to be invading for humanitarian reasons.[1] This left Security Council authorization as the only conceivable legal justification for war. But how to get it? At this point in the meeting Prime Minister Tony Blair weighed in. He had heard his foreign minister's suggestion about drafting an ultimatum demanding that Saddam let back in the United Nations inspectors. Such an ultimatum could be politically critical, said Blair -- but only if the Iraqi leader turned it down: "The Prime Minister said that it would make a big difference politically and legally if Saddam refused to allow in the UN inspectors. Regime change and WMD were linked in the sense that it was the regime that was producing the WMD.... If the political context were right, people would support regime change. The two key issues were whether the military plan worked and whether we had the political strategy to give the military plan the space to work." Here the inspectors were introduced, but as a means to create the missing casus belli. If the UN could be made to agree on an ultimatum that Saddam accept inspectors, and if Saddam then refused to accept them, the Americans and the British would be well on their way to having a legal justification to go to war (the attorney general's third alternative of UN Security Council authorization). Thus, the idea of UN inspectors was introduced not as a means to avoid war, as President Bush repeatedly assured Americans, but as a means to make war possible. War had been decided on; the problem under discussion here was how to make, in the prime minister's words, "the political context ...right." The "political strategy" -- at the center of which, as with the Americans, was weapons of mass destruction, for "it was the regime that was producing the WMD" -- must be strong enough to give "the military plan the space to work." Which is to say, once the allies were victorious the war would justify itself. The demand that Iraq accept UN inspectors, especially if refused, could form the political bridge by which the allies could reach their goal: "regime change" through "military action." But there was a problem: as the foreign secretary pointed out, "on the political strategy, there could be US/UK differences." While the British considered legal justification for going to war critical -- they, unlike the Americans, were members of the International Criminal Court -- the Americans did not. Mr. Straw suggested that given "US resistance, we should explore discreetly the ultimatum." The defense secretary, Geoffrey Hoon, was more blunt, arguing "that if the Prime Minister wanted UK military involvement, he would need to decide this early. He cautioned that many in the U.S. did not think it worth going down the ultimatum route. It would be important for the Prime Minister to set out the political context to Bush." The key negotiation in view at this point, in other words, was not with Saddam over letting in the United Nations inspectors -- both parties hoped he would refuse to admit them, and thus provide the justification for invading. The key negotiation would be between the Americans, who had shown "resistance" to the idea of involving the United Nations at all, and the British, who were more concerned than their American cousins about having some kind of legal fig leaf for attacking Iraq. Three weeks later, Foreign Secretary Straw arrived in the Hamptons to "discreetly explore the ultimatum" with Secretary of State Powell, perhaps the only senior American official who shared some of the British concerns; as Straw told the secretary, in Bob Woodward's account, "If you are really thinking about war and you want us Brits to be a player, we cannot be unless you go to the United Nations." [2] 2. Britain's strong support for the "UN route" that most American officials so distrusted was critical in helping Powell in the bureaucratic battle over going to the United Nations. As late as August 26, Vice President Dick Cheney had appeared before a convention of the Veterans of Foreign Wars and publicly denounced "the UN route." Asserting that "simply stated, there is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction [and] there is no doubt that he is amassing them to use against our friends, against our allies, and against us," Cheney advanced the view that going to the United Nations would itself be dangerous: "A return of inspectors would provide no assurance whatsoever of his compliance with UN resolutions. On the contrary, there is great danger that it would provide false comfort that Saddam was somehow 'back in the box.'" Cheney, like other administration "hard-liners," feared "the UN route" not because it might fail but because it might succeed and thereby prevent a war that they were convinced had to be fought. As Woodward recounts, it would finally take a personal visit by Blair on September 7 to persuade President Bush to go to the United Nations: "For Blair the immediate question was, Would the United Nations be used? He was keenly aware that in Britain the question was, Does Blair believe in the UN? It was critical domestically for the prime minister to show his own Labour Party, a pacifist party at heart, opposed to war in principle, that he had gone the UN route. Public opinion in the UK favored trying to make international institutions work before resorting to force. Going through the UN would be a large and much-needed plus."[3] The President now told Blair that he had decided "to go to the UN" and the prime minister, according to Woodward, "was relieved." After the session with Blair, Bush later recounts to Woodward, he walked into a conference room and told the British officials gathered there that "your man has got cojones." ("And of course these Brits don't know what cojones are," Bush tells Woodward.) Henceforth this particular conference with Blair would be known, Bush declares, as "the cojones meeting." That September the attempt to sell the war began in earnest, for, as White House Chief of Staff Andrew Card had told the New York Times in an unusually candid moment, "You don't roll out a new product in August." At the heart of the sales campaign was the United Nations. Thanks in substantial part to Blair's prodding, George W. Bush would come before the UN General Assembly on September 12 and, after denouncing the Iraqi regime, announce that "we will work with the UN Security Council for the necessary resolutions." The main phase of public diplomacy -- giving the war a "political context," in Blair's phrase -- had begun. Though "the UN route" would be styled as an attempt to avoid war, its essence, as the Downing Street memo makes clear, was a strategy to make the war possible, partly by making it politically palatable. As it turned out, however -- and as Cheney and others had feared -- the "UN route" to war was by no means smooth, or direct. Though Powell managed the considerable feat of securing unanimous approval for Security Council Resolution 1441, winning even Syria's support, the allies differed on the key question of whether or not the resolution gave United Nations approval for the use of force against Saddam, as the Americans contended, or whether a second resolution would be required, as the majority of the council, and even the British, conceded it would. Sir Jeremy Greenstock, the British ambassador to the UN, put this position bluntly on November 8, the day Resolution 1441 was passed: "We heard loud and clear during the negotiations about 'automaticity' and 'hidden triggers' -- the concerns that on a decision so crucial we should not rush into military action.... Let me be equally clear.... There is no 'automaticity' in this Resolution. If there is a further Iraqi breach of its disarmament obligations, the matter will return to the Council for discussion as required.... We would expect the Security Council then to meet its responsibilities." Vice President Cheney could have expected no worse. Having decided to travel down "the UN route," the Americans and British would now need a second resolution to gain the necessary approval to attack Iraq. Worse, Saddam frustrated British and American hopes, as articulated by Blair in the July 23 meeting, that he would simply refuse to admit the inspectors and thereby offer the allies an immediate casus belli. Instead, hundreds of inspectors entered Iraq, began to search, and found...nothing. January, which Defence Secretary Hoon had suggested was the "most likely timing in US minds for military action to begin," came and went, and the inspectors went on searching. On the Security Council, a majority -- led by France, Germany, and Russia -- would push for the inspections to run their course. President Jacques Chirac of France later put this argument succinctly in an interview with CBS and CNN just as the war was about to begin: "France is not pacifist. We are not anti-American either. We are not just going to use our veto to nag and annoy the US. But we just feel that there is another option, another way, another more normal way, a less dramatic way than war, and that we have to go through that path. And we should pursue it until we've come [to] a dead end, but that isn't the case."[4] Where would this "dead end" be found, however, and who would determine that it had been found? Would it be the French, or the Americans? The logical flaw that threatened the administration's policy now began to become clear. Had the inspectors found weapons, or had they been presented with them by Saddam Hussein, many who had supported the resolution would argue that the inspections regime it established had indeed begun to work -- that by multilateral action the world was succeeding, peacefully, in "disarming Iraq." As long as the inspectors found no weapons, however, many would argue that the inspectors "must be given time to do their work" -- until, in Chirac's words, they "came to a dead end." However that point might be determined, it is likely that, long before it was reached, the failure to find weapons would have undermined the administration's central argument for going to war -- "the conjunction,"as C' had put it that morning in July, "of terrorism and WMD." And as we now know, the inspectors would never have found weapons of mass destruction. Vice President Cheney had anticipated this problem, as he had explained frankly to Hans Blix, the chief UN weapons inspector, during an October 30 meeting in the White House. Cheney, according to Blix, "stated the position that inspections, if they do not give results, cannot go on forever, and said the U.S. was 'ready to discredit inspections in favor of disarmament.' A pretty straight way, I thought, of saying that if we did not soon find the weapons of mass destruction that the US was convinced Iraq possessed (though they did not know where), the US would be ready to say that the inspectors were useless and embark on disarmament by other means."[5] Indeed, the inspectors' failure to find any evidence of weapons came in the wake of a very large effort launched by the administration to put before the world evidence of Saddam's arsenal, an effort spearheaded by George W. Bush's speech in Cincinnati on October 7, and followed by a series of increasingly lurid disclosures to the press that reached a crescendo with Colin Powell's multimedia presentation to the UN Security Council on February 5, 2003. Throughout the fall and winter, the administration had "rolled out the product," in Card's phrase, with great skill, making use of television, radio, and all the print press to get its message out about the imminent threat of Saddam's arsenal. ("Think of the press," advised Josef Goebbels, "as a great keyboard on which the government can play.") As the gap between administration rhetoric about enormous arsenals -- "we know where they are," asserted Donald Rumsfeld -- and the inspectors' empty hands grew wider, that gap, as Cheney had predicted, had the effect in many quarters of undermining the credibility of the United Nations process itself. The inspectors' failure to find weapons in Iraq was taken to discredit the worth of the inspections, rather than to cast doubt on the administration's contention that Saddam possessed large stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction. Oddly enough, Saddam's only effective strategy to prevent war at this point might have been to reveal and yield up some weapons, thus demonstrating to the world that the inspections were working. As we now know, however, he had no weapons to yield up. As Blix remarks, "It occurred to me [on March 7] that the Iraqis would be in greater difficulty if...there truly were no weapons of which they could yield possession.'" The fact that, in Blix's words, "the UN and the world had succeeded in disarming Iraq without knowing it" -- that the UN process had been successful --meant, in effect, that the inspectors would be discredited and the United States would go to war. President Bush would do so, of course, having failed to get the "second resolution" so desired by his friend and ally, Tony Blair. Blair had predicted, that July morning on Downing Street, that the "two key issues were whether the military plan worked and whether we had the political strategy to give the military plan the space to work." He seems to have been proved right in this. In the end his political strategy only half worked: the Security Council's refusal to vote a second resolution approving the use of force left "the UN route" discussed that day incomplete, and Blair found himself forced to follow the United States without the protection of international approval. Had the military plan "worked" -- had the war been short and decisive rather than long, bloody, and inconclusive -- Blair would perhaps have escaped the political damage the war has caused him. A week after the Downing Street memo was published in the Sunday Times, Tony Blair was reelected, but his majority in Parliament was reduced, from 161 to 67. The Iraq war, and the damage it had done to his reputation for probity, was widely believed to have been a principal cause. In the United States, on the other hand, the Downing Street memorandum has attracted little attention. As I write, no American newspaper has published it and few writers have bothered to comment on it. The war continues, and Americans have grown weary of it; few seem much interested now in discussing how it began, and why their country came to fight a war in the cause of destroying weapons that turned out not to exist. For those who want answers, the Bush administration has followed a simple and heretofore largely successful policy: blame the intelligence agencies. Since "the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy" as early as July 2002 (as "C," the head of British intelligence, reported upon his return from Washington), it seems a matter of remarkable hubris, even for this administration, that its officials now explain their misjudgments in going to war by blaming them on "intelligence failures" -- that is, on the intelligence that they themselves politicized. Still, for the most part, Congress has cooperated. Though the Senate Intelligence Committee investigated the failures of the CIA and other agencies before the war, a promised second report that was to take up the administration's political use of intelligence -- which is, after all, the critical issue -- was postponed until after the 2004 elections, then quietly abandoned. In the end, the Downing Street memo, and Americans' lack of interest in what it shows, has to do with a certain attitude about facts, or rather about where the line should be drawn between facts and political opinion. It calls to mind an interesting observation that an unnamed "senior advisor" to President Bush made to a New York Times Magazine reporter last fall: "The aide said that guys like me [i.e., reporters and commentators] were 'in what we call the reality-based community,' which he defined as people who 'believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.' I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. 'That's not the way the world really works anymore,' he continued. 'We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality -- judiciously, as you will -- we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors... and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.'" Though this seems on its face to be a disquisition on religion and faith, it is of course an argument about power, and its influence on truth. Power, the argument runs, can shape truth: power, in the end, can determine reality, or at least the reality that most people accept -- a critical point, for the administration has been singularly effective in its recognition that what is most politically important is not what readers of the New York Times believe but what most Americans are willing to believe. The last century's most innovative authority on power and truth, Joseph Goebbels, made the same point but rather more directly: "There was no point in seeking to convert the intellectuals. For intellectuals would never be converted and would anyway always yield to the stronger, and this will always be 'the man in the street.' Arguments must therefore be crude, clear and forcible, and appeal to emotions and instincts, not the intellect. Truth was unimportant and entirely subordinate to tactics and psychology." I thought of this quotation when I first read the Downing Street memorandum; but I had first looked it up several months earlier, on December 14, 2004, after I had seen the images of the newly reelected President George W. Bush awarding the Medal of Freedom, the highest civilian honor the United States can bestow, to George Tenet, the former director of central intelligence; L. Paul Bremer, the former head of the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq; and General (ret.) Tommy Franks, the commander who had led American forces during the first phase of the Iraq war. Tenet, of course, would be known to history as the intelligence director who had failed to detect and prevent the attacks of September 11 and the man who had assured President Bush that the case for Saddam's possession of weapons of mass destruction was "a slam dunk." Franks had allowed the looting of Baghdad and had generally done little to prepare for what would come after the taking of Baghdad. ("There was little discussion in Washington," as "C" told the Prime Minister on July 23, "of the aftermath after military action.") Bremer had dissolved the Iraqi army and the Iraqi police and thereby created 400,000 or so available recruits for the insurgency. One might debate their ultimate responsibility for these grave errors, but it is difficult to argue that these officials merited the highest recognition the country could offer. Of course truth, as the master propagandist said, is "unimportant and entirely subordinate to tactics and psychology." He of course would have instantly grasped the psychological tactic embodied in that White House ceremony, which was one more effort to reassure Americans that the war the administration launched against Iraq has been a success and was worth fighting. That barely four Americans in ten are still willing to believe this suggests that as time goes on and the gap grows between what Americans see and what they are told, membership in the "reality-based community" may grow along with it. We will see. Still, for those interested in the question of how our leaders persuaded the country to become embroiled in a counterinsurgency war in Iraq, the Downing Street memorandum offers one more confirmation of the truth. For those, that is, who want to hear --May 12, 2005 Notes 1. The latter charge might have been given as a reason for intervention in 1988, for example, when the Iraqi regime was carrying out its Anfal campaign against the Kurds; at that time, though, the Reagan administration -- comprising many of the same officials who would later lead the invasion of Iraq -- was supporting Saddam in his war against Iran and kept largely silent. The second major killing campaign of the Saddam regime came in 1991, when Iraqi troops attacked Shiites in the south who had rebelled against the regime in the wake of Saddam's defeat in the Gulf War; the first Bush administration, despite President George H.W. Bush's urging Iraqis to "rise up against the dictator, Saddam Hussein," and despite the presence of hundreds of thousands of American troops within miles of the killing, stood by and did nothing. See Ken Roth, "War in Iraq: Not a Humanitarian Intervention" (Human Rights Watch, January 2004). 2. See Bob Woodward, Plan of Attack (Simon and Schuster, 2004), p. 162. 3. See Woodward, Plan of Attack, pp. 177178. 4. See "Chirac Makes His Case on Iraq," an interview with Christiane Amanpour, CBS News, March 16, 2003. 5. See Hans Blix, Disarming Iraq (Pantheon, 2004), p. 86. Mark Danner, a longtime New Yorker Staff writer, is Professor of Journalism at the University of California at Berkeley and Henry R. Luce Professor at Bard College. His most recent book is Torture and Truth: America, Abu Ghraib, and the War on Terror, which collects his pieces on torture and Iraq that first appeared in the New York Review of Books. His work can be found at markdanner.com This article appears in the June 9th issue of The New York Review of Books Copyright 2005 Mark Danner From papadop at peak.org Sun May 15 22:25:06 2005 From: papadop at peak.org (MichaelP) Date: Sun May 15 22:25:23 2005 Subject: [Mai-not] RESEND - NYReview prints about the Brits; Smoking-Gun memo Message-ID: Just a few minutes back I posted this item - but somehow it got doubled and won't fit in some mailboxes, I've cut it down to size - good reading MichaelP ======================= http://www.tomdispatch.com/ Tomgram: a project of the Nation Institute TomDispatch.com compiled and edited by Tom Engelhardt Tomdispatch.com is researched, written and edited by Tom Engelhardt (bio), a fellow at the Nation Institute, for anyone in despair over post-September 11th US mainstream media coverage of our world and ourselves. The service is intended to introduce you to voices from elsewhere (even when the elsewhere is here) who might offer a clearer sense of how this imperial globe of ours actually works. An editor in publishing for the last 25 years, Tom is the author of The End of Victory Culture, a history of American triumphalism in the Cold War era. He is at present consulting editor for Metropolitan Books, a fellow of the Nation Institute, and a teaching fellow at the journalism school of the University of California, Berkeley. ======== Tomgram intros Mark Danner on the British Smoking-Gun Memo In its June 9 issue (on sale this week), the New York Review of Books will be the first American print publication to publish the full British "smoking gun" document, the secret memorandum of the minutes of a meeting of Tony Blair's top advisors in July 2002, eight months before the Iraq War commenced. Leaked to the London Sunday Times, which first published it on May 1, the memo offers irrefutable proof of the way in which the Bush administration made its decision to invade Iraq -- without significant consultation, reasonable intelligence on Iraq, or any desire to explore ways to avoid war -- and well before seeking a Congressional or United Nations mandate of any sort. By July, as the British officials reported, the decision to invade was already in the bag. The only real questions -- other than those involving war planning -- were how to organize the intelligence in such a way as to promote the war to come and how to finesse Congress (and the UN). While people often speak of the "road to war," in the case of the invasion of Iraq, as this document makes clear, a more accurate phrase might be "the bum's rush to war." The Review is also publishing an accompanying piece on the secret memo and what to make of it by their regular Iraq correspondent, Mark Danner, and its editors have been kind enough to allow Tomdispatch to distribute the piece early on-line. That the Review is the first publication here to print the document is not only an honorable (and important) act, but a measure of the failure of major American papers to offer attention where it is clearly due. After all, whole government investigations have, in the past, gone in search of "smoking guns." In fact, the Bush administration spent much time searching fruitlessly for its own "smoking gun" of WMD in Iraq -- and this process was considered of front-page importance in our major papers and on the TV news. That a "smoking gun" document about the nature of the war in the making has appeared in this fashion, not in Kyrgyzstan but in England; that no one in the British or American governments has even bothered to dispute its provenance or accuracy; and that, with a few honorable exceptions like columnist Molly Ivins, that gun was allowed to lie on the ground smoking for days, hardly commented upon (except on the political internet, of course), tells us much about our present moment. Should you want to consider the miserable coverage in this country, check out FAIR's commentary on the matter. Congressman John Conyers has just sent a letter, signed by eighty-nine Democratic congressional representatives, to the President demanding some answers to the document's revelations. And articles by good reporters in major papers finally did start to appear late this week -- but those of John Daniszewski at the Los Angeles Times and Walter Pincus at the Washington Post were typically tucked away on inside pages (meant for political news jockeys), and they had a distinctly just-the-facts-maam, nothing-out-of-the-ordinary feel to them. But shouldn't it be a front-page story that, as Danner points out below, all the subsequent arguments we've had to endure about the state of, and accuracy of American intelligence on Iraq, were actually beside the point? After all, as the smoking-gun memo makes perfectly clear, the decision to go to war was made before the intelligence -- good, bad, or indifferent -- was even seriously put into play. As the secret memo also makes clear, administration officials, and the President himself, had already rolled the dice and placed their bet -- on the existence of WMD in Iraq as an excuse for the war they so desperately wanted. (Their Iraqi exile sources had, of course, assured them that it was so and, as the Brits reported in July 2002, they were already wondering, "For instance, what were the consequences, if Saddam used WMD on day one [of an invasion].") After all, it seemed so logical. Saddam had used such weapons in the 1980s in the Iran-Iraq War and against Kurds in Iraq. American troops and UN inspectors had found such weaponry in profusion after our first Gulf War. So why not now as well? Recently, Ted Rall, considering press response to a more modest smoking-gun incident -- the covered up friendly-fire death of former NFL star Pat Tillman in Afghanistan whose revelation was reported rather reluctantly on the inside pages of papers -- wrote tellingly: "For journalists supposedly dedicated to uncovering the truth and informing the public, this is exactly the opposite of how things ought to be. Corrections and exposŽs should always run bigger, longer and more often than initial, discredited stories." Dream on, as we smoking-gunsters like to say. The least commented upon aspect of the smoking-gun memo has been its military side. It is, in significant part, a military document, reflecting how much serious thinking and planning at the highest levels in the U.S. and Britain had already gone into the question of how to have a war by July 2002. The question of how technically to launch the "military action" -- whether by a "generated start" or a "running start" -- was, for instance, front and center. Also addressed was the mundane but crucial issue (for the Pentagon) of where, around Iraq, to base forces. "The US," reads the memo, "saw the UK (and Kuwait) as essential, with basing in Diego Garcia and Cyprus critical for either [the generated or running start] option." Diego Garcia is the British-controlled Indian Ocean Island that was already a stationary American "aircraft carrier" and from which, 8 months later, B-2s would fly on Baghdad. Since Danner -- whose book Torture and Truth: America, Abu Ghraib, and the War on Terror does much to explain the nature of the fix the Bush administration now finds itself in -- covers the British document in great and fascinating detail below, let me just add a final note: To me, perhaps the most telling line in the memo, given what's happened since, is the observation of Sir Richard Dearlove, the head of M16 (the British CIA equivalent), just back from a U.S. visit, that "[t]here was little discussion in Washington of the aftermath after military action." This line not only represented the greatest gamble the Bush administration's top officials would make, but the hubris with which they approached the taking of Iraq. As true believers in force nothing impressed them more than the advanced technology of destruction they possessed and its possible applications -- they were already awed by themselves and deeply believed in the shock to come once they hit Iraq hard. As the British smoking-gun memo indicates in that single classic line, they placed their deepest faith in their conviction that, once the invasion was completed successful and Saddam had fallen, everything else in Iraq would simply fall into place as well. Planning for a post-war occupation? What me worry? Tom ====================== The below article will appear in the June 9th issue of The New York Review of Books SECRET WAY TO WAR By Mark Danner 1. It was October 16, 2002, and the United States Congress had just voted to authorize the President to go to war against Iraq. When George W. Bush came before members of his Cabinet and Congress gathered in the East Room of the White House and addressed the American people, he was in a somber mood befitting a leader speaking frankly to free citizens about the gravest decision their country could make. The 107th Congress, the President said, had just become "one of the few called by history to authorize military action to defend our country and the cause of peace." But, he hastened to add, no one should assume that war was inevitable. Though "Congress has now authorized the use of force," the President said emphatically, "I have not ordered the use of force. I hope the use of force will not become necessary." The President went on: "Our goal is to fully and finally remove a real threat to world peace and to America. Hopefully this can be done peacefully. Hopefully we can do this without any military action. Yet, if Iraq is to avoid military action by the international community, it has the obligation to prove compliance with all the world's demands. It's the obligation of Iraq." Iraq, the President said, still had the power to prevent war by "declaring and destroying all its weapons of mass destruction" -- but if Iraq did not declare and destroy those weapons, the President warned, the United States would "go into battle, as a last resort." It is safe to say that, at the time, it surprised almost no one when the Iraqis answered the President's demand by repeating their claim that in fact there were no weapons of mass destruction. As we now know, the Iraqis had in fact destroyed these weapons, probably years before George W. Bush's ultimatum: "the Iraqis" -- in the words of chief U.S. weapons inspector David Kaye -- "were telling the truth." As Americans watch their young men and women fighting in the third year of a bloody counterinsurgency war in Iraq -- a war that has now killed more than 1,600 Americans and tens of thousands of Iraqis -- they are left to ponder "the unanswered question" of what would have happened if the United Nations weapons inspectors had been allowed -- as all the major powers except the United Kingdom had urged they should be -- to complete their work. What would have happened if the UN weapons inspectors had been allowed to prove, before the U.S. went "into battle," what David Kaye and his colleagues finally proved afterward? Thanks to a formerly secret memorandum published by the London Sunday Times on May 1, during the run-up to the British elections, we now have a partial answer to that question. The memo, which records the minutes of a meeting of Prime Minister Tony Blair's senior foreign policy and security officials, shows that even as President Bush told Americans in October 2002 that he "hope[d] the use of force will not become necessary" -- that such a decision depended on whether or not the Iraqis complied with his demands to rid themselves of their weapons of mass destruction -- the President had in fact already definitively decided, at least three months before, to choose this "last resort" of going "into battle" with Iraq. Whatever the Iraqis chose to do or not do, the President's decision to go to war had long since been made. On July 23, 2002, eight months before American and British forces invaded, senior British officials met with Prime Minister Tony Blair to discuss Iraq. The gathering, similar to an American "principals meeting," brought together Geoffrey Hoon, the defense secretary; Jack Straw, the foreign secretary; Lord Goldsmith, the attorney general; John Scarlett, the head of the Joint Intelligence Committee, which advises the prime minister; Sir Richard Dearlove, also known as "C," the head of MI6 (the equivalent of the CIA); David Manning, the equivalent of the national security adviser; Admiral Sir Michael Boyce, the chief of the Defense Staff (or CDS, equivalent to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs); Jonathan Powell, Blair's chief of staff; Alastair Campbell, director of strategy (Blair's communications and political adviser); and Sally Morgan, director of government relations. After John Scarlett began the meeting with a summary of intelligence on Iraq -- notably, that "the regime was tough and based on extreme fear" and that thus the "only way to overthrow it was likely to be by massive military action," "C" offered a report on his visit to Washington, where he had conducted talks with George Tenet, his counterpart at the CIA, and other high officials. This passage is worth quoting in full: "C reported on his recent talks in Washington. There was a perceptible shift in attitude. Military action was now seen as inevitable. Bush wanted to remove Saddam, through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy. The NSC had no patience with the UN route, and no enthusiasm for publishing material on the Iraqi regime's record. There was little discussion in Washington of the aftermath after military action." Seen from today's perspective this short paragraph is a strikingly clear template for the future, establishing these points: 1. By mid-July 2002, eight months before the war began, President Bush had decided to invade and occupy Iraq. 2. Bush had decided to "justify" the war "by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD." 3. Already "the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy." 4. Many at the top of the administration did not want to seek approval from the United Nations (going "the UN route"). 5. Few in Washington seemed much interested in the aftermath of the war. We have long known, thanks to Bob Woodward and others, that military planning for the Iraq war began as early as November 21, 2001, after the President ordered Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld to look at "what it would take to protect America by removing Saddam Hussein if we have to," and that Secretary Rumsfeld and General Tommy Franks, who headed Central Command, were briefing American senior officials on the progress of military planning during the late spring and summer of 2002; indeed, a few days after the meeting in London leaks about specific plans for a possible Iraq war appeared on the front pages of the New York Times and the Washington Post. What the Downing Street memo confirms for the first time is that President Bush had decided, no later than July 2002, to "remove Saddam, through military action," that war with Iraq was "inevitable" -- and that what remained was simply to establish and develop the modalities of justification; that is, to come up with a means of "justifying" the war and "fixing" the "intelligence and facts...around the policy." The great value of the discussion recounted in the memo, then, is to show, for the governments of both countries, a clear hierarchy of decision-making. By July 2002 at the latest, war had been decided on; the question at issue now was how to justify it -- how to "fix," as it were, what Blair will later call "the political context." Specifically, though by this point in July the President had decided to go to war, he had not yet decided to go to the United Nations and demand inspectors; indeed, as "C" points out, those on the National Security Council -- the senior security officials of the U.S. government -- "had no patience with the UN route, and no enthusiasm for publishing material on the Iraqi regime's record." This would later change, largely as a result of the political concerns of these very people gathered together at 10 Downing Street. After Admiral Boyce offered a brief discussion of the war plans then on the table and the defense secretary said a word or two about timing -- "the most likely timing in US minds for military action to begin was January, with the timeline beginning 30 days before the US Congressional elections" -- Foreign Secretary Jack Straw got to the heart of the matter: not whether or not to invade Iraq but how to justify such an invasion: "The Foreign Secretary said he would discuss [the timing of the war] with Colin Powell this week. It seemed clear that Bush had made up his mind to take military action, even if the timing was not yet decided. But the case was thin. Saddam was not threatening his neighbors, and his WMD capability was less than that of Libya, North Korea or Iran." Given that Saddam was not threatening to attack his neighbors and that his weapons of mass destruction program was less extensive than those of a number of other countries, how does one justify attacking? Foreign Secretary Straw had an idea: "We should work up a plan for an ultimatum to Saddam to allow back in the UN weapons inspectors. This would also help with the legal justification for the use of force." The British realized they needed "help with the legal justification for the use of force" because, as the attorney general pointed out, rather dryly, "the desire for regime change was not a legal base for military action." Which is to say, the simple desire to overthrow the leadership of a given sovereign country does not make it legal to invade that country; on the contrary. And, said the attorney general, of the "three possible legal bases: self-defence, humanitarian intervention, or [United Nations Security Council] authorization," the first two "could not be the base in this case." In other words, Iraq was not attacking the United States or the United Kingdom, so the leaders could not claim to be acting in self-defense; nor was Iraq's leadership in the process of committing genocide, so the United States and the United Kingdom could not claim to be invading for humanitarian reasons.[1] This left Security Council authorization as the only conceivable legal justification for war. But how to get it? At this point in the meeting Prime Minister Tony Blair weighed in. He had heard his foreign minister's suggestion about drafting an ultimatum demanding that Saddam let back in the United Nations inspectors. Such an ultimatum could be politically critical, said Blair -- but only if the Iraqi leader turned it down: "The Prime Minister said that it would make a big difference politically and legally if Saddam refused to allow in the UN inspectors. Regime change and WMD were linked in the sense that it was the regime that was producing the WMD.... If the political context were right, people would support regime change. The two key issues were whether the military plan worked and whether we had the political strategy to give the military plan the space to work." Here the inspectors were introduced, but as a means to create the missing casus belli. If the UN could be made to agree on an ultimatum that Saddam accept inspectors, and if Saddam then refused to accept them, the Americans and the British would be well on their way to having a legal justification to go to war (the attorney general's third alternative of UN Security Council authorization). Thus, the idea of UN inspectors was introduced not as a means to avoid war, as President Bush repeatedly assured Americans, but as a means to make war possible. War had been decided on; the problem under discussion here was how to make, in the prime minister's words, "the political context ...right." The "political strategy" -- at the center of which, as with the Americans, was weapons of mass destruction, for "it was the regime that was producing the WMD" -- must be strong enough to give "the military plan the space to work." Which is to say, once the allies were victorious the war would justify itself. The demand that Iraq accept UN inspectors, especially if refused, could form the political bridge by which the allies could reach their goal: "regime change" through "military action." But there was a problem: as the foreign secretary pointed out, "on the political strategy, there could be US/UK differences." While the British considered legal justification for going to war critical -- they, unlike the Americans, were members of the International Criminal Court -- the Americans did not. Mr. Straw suggested that given "US resistance, we should explore discreetly the ultimatum." The defense secretary, Geoffrey Hoon, was more blunt, arguing "that if the Prime Minister wanted UK military involvement, he would need to decide this early. He cautioned that many in the U.S. did not think it worth going down the ultimatum route. It would be important for the Prime Minister to set out the political context to Bush." The key negotiation in view at this point, in other words, was not with Saddam over letting in the United Nations inspectors -- both parties hoped he would refuse to admit them, and thus provide the justification for invading. The key negotiation would be between the Americans, who had shown "resistance" to the idea of involving the United Nations at all, and the British, who were more concerned than their American cousins about having some kind of legal fig leaf for attacking Iraq. Three weeks later, Foreign Secretary Straw arrived in the Hamptons to "discreetly explore the ultimatum" with Secretary of State Powell, perhaps the only senior American official who shared some of the British concerns; as Straw told the secretary, in Bob Woodward's account, "If you are really thinking about war and you want us Brits to be a player, we cannot be unless you go to the United Nations." [2] 2. Britain's strong support for the "UN route" that most American officials so distrusted was critical in helping Powell in the bureaucratic battle over going to the United Nations. As late as August 26, Vice President Dick Cheney had appeared before a convention of the Veterans of Foreign Wars and publicly denounced "the UN route." Asserting that "simply stated, there is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction [and] there is no doubt that he is amassing them to use against our friends, against our allies, and against us," Cheney advanced the view that going to the United Nations would itself be dangerous: "A return of inspectors would provide no assurance whatsoever of his compliance with UN resolutions. On the contrary, there is great danger that it would provide false comfort that Saddam was somehow 'back in the box.'" Cheney, like other administration "hard-liners," feared "the UN route" not because it might fail but because it might succeed and thereby prevent a war that they were convinced had to be fought. As Woodward recounts, it would finally take a personal visit by Blair on September 7 to persuade President Bush to go to the United Nations: "For Blair the immediate question was, Would the United Nations be used? He was keenly aware that in Britain the question was, Does Blair believe in the UN? It was critical domestically for the prime minister to show his own Labour Party, a pacifist party at heart, opposed to war in principle, that he had gone the UN route. Public opinion in the UK favored trying to make international institutions work before resorting to force. Going through the UN would be a large and much-needed plus."[3] The President now told Blair that he had decided "to go to the UN" and the prime minister, according to Woodward, "was relieved." After the session with Blair, Bush later recounts to Woodward, he walked into a conference room and told the British officials gathered there that "your man has got cojones." ("And of course these Brits don't know what cojones are," Bush tells Woodward.) Henceforth this particular conference with Blair would be known, Bush declares, as "the cojones meeting." That September the attempt to sell the war began in earnest, for, as White House Chief of Staff Andrew Card had told the New York Times in an unusually candid moment, "You don't roll out a new product in August." At the heart of the sales campaign was the United Nations. Thanks in substantial part to Blair's prodding, George W. Bush would come before the UN General Assembly on September 12 and, after denouncing the Iraqi regime, announce that "we will work with the UN Security Council for the necessary resolutions." The main phase of public diplomacy -- giving the war a "political context," in Blair's phrase -- had begun. Though "the UN route" would be styled as an attempt to avoid war, its essence, as the Downing Street memo makes clear, was a strategy to make the war possible, partly by making it politically palatable. As it turned out, however -- and as Cheney and others had feared -- the "UN route" to war was by no means smooth, or direct. Though Powell managed the considerable feat of securing unanimous approval for Security Council Resolution 1441, winning even Syria's support, the allies differed on the key question of whether or not the resolution gave United Nations approval for the use of force against Saddam, as the Americans contended, or whether a second resolution would be required, as the majority of the council, and even the British, conceded it would. Sir Jeremy Greenstock, the British ambassador to the UN, put this position bluntly on November 8, the day Resolution 1441 was passed: "We heard loud and clear during the negotiations about 'automaticity' and 'hidden triggers' -- the concerns that on a decision so crucial we should not rush into military action.... Let me be equally clear.... There is no 'automaticity' in this Resolution. If there is a further Iraqi breach of its disarmament obligations, the matter will return to the Council for discussion as required.... We would expect the Security Council then to meet its responsibilities." Vice President Cheney could have expected no worse. Having decided to travel down "the UN route," the Americans and British would now need a second resolution to gain the necessary approval to attack Iraq. Worse, Saddam frustrated British and American hopes, as articulated by Blair in the July 23 meeting, that he would simply refuse to admit the inspectors and thereby offer the allies an immediate casus belli. Instead, hundreds of inspectors entered Iraq, began to search, and found...nothing. January, which Defence Secretary Hoon had suggested was the "most likely timing in US minds for military action to begin," came and went, and the inspectors went on searching. On the Security Council, a majority -- led by France, Germany, and Russia -- would push for the inspections to run their course. President Jacques Chirac of France later put this argument succinctly in an interview with CBS and CNN just as the war was about to begin: "France is not pacifist. We are not anti-American either. We are not just going to use our veto to nag and annoy the US. But we just feel that there is another option, another way, another more normal way, a less dramatic way than war, and that we have to go through that path. And we should pursue it until we've come [to] a dead end, but that isn't the case."[4] Where would this "dead end" be found, however, and who would determine that it had been found? Would it be the French, or the Americans? The logical flaw that threatened the administration's policy now began to become clear. Had the inspectors found weapons, or had they been presented with them by Saddam Hussein, many who had supported the resolution would argue that the inspections regime it established had indeed begun to work -- that by multilateral action the world was succeeding, peacefully, in "disarming Iraq." As long as the inspectors found no weapons, however, many would argue that the inspectors "must be given time to do their work" -- until, in Chirac's words, they "came to a dead end." However that point might be determined, it is likely that, long before it was reached, the failure to find weapons would have undermined the administration's central argument for going to war -- "the conjunction,"as C' had put it that morning in July, "of terrorism and WMD." And as we now know, the inspectors would never have found weapons of mass destruction. Vice President Cheney had anticipated this problem, as he had explained frankly to Hans Blix, the chief UN weapons inspector, during an October 30 meeting in the White House. Cheney, according to Blix, "stated the position that inspections, if they do not give results, cannot go on forever, and said the U.S. was 'ready to discredit inspections in favor of disarmament.' A pretty straight way, I thought, of saying that if we did not soon find the weapons of mass destruction that the US was convinced Iraq possessed (though they did not know where), the US would be ready to say that the inspectors were useless and embark on disarmament by other means."[5] Indeed, the inspectors' failure to find any evidence of weapons came in the wake of a very large effort launched by the administration to put before the world evidence of Saddam's arsenal, an effort spearheaded by George W. Bush's speech in Cincinnati on October 7, and followed by a series of increasingly lurid disclosures to the press that reached a crescendo with Colin Powell's multimedia presentation to the UN Security Council on February 5, 2003. Throughout the fall and winter, the administration had "rolled out the product," in Card's phrase, with great skill, making use of television, radio, and all the print press to get its message out about the imminent threat of Saddam's arsenal. ("Think of the press," advised Josef Goebbels, "as a great keyboard on which the government can play.") As the gap between administration rhetoric about enormous arsenals -- "we know where they are," asserted Donald Rumsfeld -- and the inspectors' empty hands grew wider, that gap, as Cheney had predicted, had the effect in many quarters of undermining the credibility of the United Nations process itself. The inspectors' failure to find weapons in Iraq was taken to discredit the worth of the inspections, rather than to cast doubt on the administration's contention that Saddam possessed large stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction. Oddly enough, Saddam's only effective strategy to prevent war at this point might have been to reveal and yield up some weapons, thus demonstrating to the world that the inspections were working. As we now know, however, he had no weapons to yield up. As Blix remarks, "It occurred to me [on March 7] that the Iraqis would be in greater difficulty if...there truly were no weapons of which they could yield possession.'" The fact that, in Blix's words, "the UN and the world had succeeded in disarming Iraq without knowing it" -- that the UN process had been successful --meant, in effect, that the inspectors would be discredited and the United States would go to war. President Bush would do so, of course, having failed to get the "second resolution" so desired by his friend and ally, Tony Blair. Blair had predicted, that July morning on Downing Street, that the "two key issues were whether the military plan worked and whether we had the political strategy to give the military plan the space to work." He seems to have been proved right in this. In the end his political strategy only half worked: the Security Council's refusal to vote a second resolution approving the use of force left "the UN route" discussed that day incomplete, and Blair found himself forced to follow the United States without the protection of international approval. Had the military plan "worked" -- had the war been short and decisive rather than long, bloody, and inconclusive -- Blair would perhaps have escaped the political damage the war has caused him. A week after the Downing Street memo was published in the Sunday Times, Tony Blair was reelected, but his majority in Parliament was reduced, from 161 to 67. The Iraq war, and the damage it had done to his reputation for probity, was widely believed to have been a principal cause. In the United States, on the other hand, the Downing Street memorandum has attracted little attention. As I write, no American newspaper has published it and few writers have bothered to comment on it. The war continues, and Americans have grown weary of it; few seem much interested now in discussing how it began, and why their country came to fight a war in the cause of destroying weapons that turned out not to exist. For those who want answers, the Bush administration has followed a simple and heretofore largely successful policy: blame the intelligence agencies. Since "the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy" as early as July 2002 (as "C," the head of British intelligence, reported upon his return from Washington), it seems a matter of remarkable hubris, even for this administration, that its officials now explain their misjudgments in going to war by blaming them on "intelligence failures" -- that is, on the intelligence that they themselves politicized. Still, for the most part, Congress has cooperated. Though the Senate Intelligence Committee investigated the failures of the CIA and other agencies before the war, a promised second report that was to take up the administration's political use of intelligence -- which is, after all, the critical issue -- was postponed until after the 2004 elections, then quietly abandoned. In the end, the Downing Street memo, and Americans' lack of interest in what it shows, has to do with a certain attitude about facts, or rather about where the line should be drawn between facts and political opinion. It calls to mind an interesting observation that an unnamed "senior advisor" to President Bush made to a New York Times Magazine reporter last fall: "The aide said that guys like me [i.e., reporters and commentators] were 'in what we call the reality-based community,' which he defined as people who 'believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.' I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. 'That's not the way the world really works anymore,' he continued. 'We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality -- judiciously, as you will -- we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors... and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.'" Though this seems on its face to be a disquisition on religion and faith, it is of course an argument about power, and its influence on truth. Power, the argument runs, can shape truth: power, in the end, can determine reality, or at least the reality that most people accept -- a critical point, for the administration has been singularly effective in its recognition that what is most politically important is not what readers of the New York Times believe but what most Americans are willing to believe. The last century's most innovative authority on power and truth, Joseph Goebbels, made the same point but rather more directly: "There was no point in seeking to convert the intellectuals. For intellectuals would never be converted and would anyway always yield to the stronger, and this will always be 'the man in the street.' Arguments must therefore be crude, clear and forcible, and appeal to emotions and instincts, not the intellect. Truth was unimportant and entirely subordinate to tactics and psychology." I thought of this quotation when I first read the Downing Street memorandum; but I had first looked it up several months earlier, on December 14, 2004, after I had seen the images of the newly reelected President George W. Bush awarding the Medal of Freedom, the highest civilian honor the United States can bestow, to George Tenet, the former director of central intelligence; L. Paul Bremer, the former head of the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq; and General (ret.) Tommy Franks, the commander who had led American forces during the first phase of the Iraq war. Tenet, of course, would be known to history as the intelligence director who had failed to detect and prevent the attacks of September 11 and the man who had assured President Bush that the case for Saddam's possession of weapons of mass destruction was "a slam dunk." Franks had allowed the looting of Baghdad and had generally done little to prepare for what would come after the taking of Baghdad. ("There was little discussion in Washington," as "C" told the Prime Minister on July 23, "of the aftermath after military action.") Bremer had dissolved the Iraqi army and the Iraqi police and thereby created 400,000 or so available recruits for the insurgency. One might debate their ultimate responsibility for these grave errors, but it is difficult to argue that these officials merited the highest recognition the country could offer. Of course truth, as the master propagandist said, is "unimportant and entirely subordinate to tactics and psychology." He of course would have instantly grasped the psychological tactic embodied in that White House ceremony, which was one more effort to reassure Americans that the war the administration launched against Iraq has been a success and was worth fighting. That barely four Americans in ten are still willing to believe this suggests that as time goes on and the gap grows between what Americans see and what they are told, membership in the "reality-based community" may grow along with it. We will see. Still, for those interested in the question of how our leaders persuaded the country to become embroiled in a counterinsurgency war in Iraq, the Downing Street memorandum offers one more confirmation of the truth. For those, that is, who want to hear --May 12, 2005 Notes 1. The latter charge might have been given as a reason for intervention in 1988, for example, when the Iraqi regime was carrying out its Anfal campaign against the Kurds; at that time, though, the Reagan administration -- comprising many of the same officials who would later lead the invasion of Iraq -- was supporting Saddam in his war against Iran and kept largely silent. The second major killing campaign of the Saddam regime came in 1991, when Iraqi troops attacked Shiites in the south who had rebelled against the regime in the wake of Saddam's defeat in the Gulf War; the first Bush administration, despite President George H.W. Bush's urging Iraqis to "rise up against the dictator, Saddam Hussein," and despite the presence of hundreds of thousands of American troops within miles of the killing, stood by and did nothing. See Ken Roth, "War in Iraq: Not a Humanitarian Intervention" (Human Rights Watch, January 2004). 2. See Bob Woodward, Plan of Attack (Simon and Schuster, 2004), p. 162. 3. See Woodward, Plan of Attack, pp. 177178. 4. See "Chirac Makes His Case on Iraq," an interview with Christiane Amanpour, CBS News, March 16, 2003. 5. See Hans Blix, Disarming Iraq (Pantheon, 2004), p. 86. Mark Danner, a longtime New Yorker Staff writer, is Professor of Journalism at the University of California at Berkeley and Henry R. Luce Professor at Bard College. His most recent book is Torture and Truth: America, Abu Ghraib, and the War on Terror, which collects his pieces on torture and Iraq that first appeared in the New York Review of Books. His work can be found at markdanner.com From jfos at net-tech.com.au Sun May 15 19:06:37 2005 From: jfos at net-tech.com.au (John) Date: Sun May 15 22:44:34 2005 Subject: [Mai-not] IRAQ Intervention and the left Message-ID: <6.1.0.6.1.20050516120119.02bcf050@mail.net-tech.com.au> "Only those ignorant of history, or blinded by a faith in American exceptionalism, believe that the US?s global intentions are everywhere benign. Just as the hawks have been willing to promote democracy when it has suited US interests, they have shamelessly destroyed democracy when it has stood in the way. There is no better illustration than the US-led destruction of the Allende government in 1973, events that ushered in a vicious US-backed tyranny that traumatised Chile for decades." IRAQ Intervention and the left The Australia Institute Posted: 6-5-2005 The quest for democracy shouldn?t obscure the real lessons of Iraq, argues Clive Hamilton THE LEFT has been snookered by the US invasion of Iraq, for it is deeply opposed to the war yet supports the spread of democracy and civil freedoms. It is in the interests of the world that democracy should succeed in Iraq but that the US has its nose bloodied in the process. President Bush and his allies, including John Howard, had little interest in promoting democracy in Iraq until it became expedient to do so, when the weapons of mass destruction proved chimerical. Neoconservative support for democracy is contingent on whether its promotion is in the financial and strategic interest of the US. For anyone with an appreciation of the history of US foreign policy, Bush?s dewy-eyed homilies in praise of democracy in the Middle East are nauseating. If he were serious he would act against regimes in those countries that could most easily be converted to democracy ? those where autocrats rule only by dint of US support. He could begin with the US client regime in Saudi Arabia. The decision to go to war in Iraq was wrong, not because Saddam was not a monstrous tyrant, but because it violated the first principle of international relations ? respect for sovereignty. Without respect for sovereignty, international relations are reduced to the will of the powerful. The only exception arises when a regime?s activities directly threaten one?s own security. Thus Vietnam was within its rights to invade Cambodia to overthrow the Pol Pot regime, which had launched a series of military incursions across their common border. Although most of the world breathed a sigh of relief to see such an odious regime fall, even then some countries, such as Singapore, were alarmed that a nation?s sovereignty had been violated by a powerful neighbour. The principle of non-intervention is one that has been much harder for the left to accept than the right, because historically the democratic left in the West has been a much more staunch defender of democracy and human rights. And it has been at the forefront of legitimate means to put pressure on dictatorial regimes by supporting domestic dissidents and pro-democracy movements. Trade sanctions and sporting boycotts against the apartheid regime in South Africa were supported by the left long before the conservatives felt the need to respond to public pressure. Some on the right, such Margaret Thatcher and our own petty tyrant Joh Bjelke-Petersen, resolutely refused to support the international opposition to the white regime. Western powers could have intervened militarily to overthrow the minority government. But none of the anti-apartheid activists, within South Africa and outside, ever advocated such a move. Imagine if majority rule in South Africa had not been won by the struggle of black and coloured South Africans but had been delivered by a foreign victor. Similarly, the revolutions in Eastern Europe were so inspiring and successful because they were people?s revolutions. Governments created by US or NATO occupying forces could never enjoy the same degree of legitimacy and stability. It is regrettable therefore that some, such as Michael Costello, former adviser to Labor leaders and one who identifies with the left, should give unalloyed support to the Iraq invasion and criticise sceptics on the left by repeating the arguments of people with abysmal records of support for democracy and human rights throughout the world (Australian, 15 April 2005). It is more regrettable that some on the left should support an invasion by a belligerent Administration that trampled over the United Nations and then used appeals to democracy as a post hoc rationalisation to cover up its own lies. Unscrambling the egg While the intervention in Iraq was based on misrepresentations and hypocrisy, the fact is that withdrawal now would, in all likelihood, lead to catastrophic civil war. This is why the left is snookered: it wants peace and democratic government in Iraq, but it understands that an outcome that allowed the neocons to claim a victory would have grave consequences for the world. While appalled at the human cost, the fact that the US and its allies quickly became bogged down in a costly and uncontrollable insurgency in Iraq is not without its long-term benefits. For if the adventurism of Bush and his hawks had been vindicated it would have entrenched the US under George Bush as an aggressive and arrogant power prepared to impose its will anywhere. Only those ignorant of history, or blinded by a faith in American exceptionalism, believe that the US?s global intentions are everywhere benign. Just as the hawks have been willing to promote democracy when it has suited US interests, they have shamelessly destroyed democracy when it has stood in the way. There is no better illustration than the US-led destruction of the Allende government in 1973, events that ushered in a vicious US-backed tyranny that traumatised Chile for decades. So a rapid victory in Iraq would have been good for the Iraqis but not for the future of peace, stability and self-determination elsewhere. The bloody nose that the US has received in Iraq has severely dented the confidence of the neocons and that can only be good for the world. ? Clive Hamilton is executive director of The Australia Institute. AUSTRALIAN POLICY ONLINE Weekly Briefing, 13 May 2005 ----------------------------------------------------------- COMMENT & ANALYSIS Available at: http://www.apo.org.au ----------------------------------------------------------- This email was cleaned by emailStripper, available for free from http://www.papercut.biz/emailStripper.htm From david.p at psu.ac.th Mon May 16 00:01:43 2005 From: david.p at psu.ac.th (Dave Patterson) Date: Mon May 16 00:00:22 2005 Subject: [Mai-not] Lucky Canada, writes Alexander Moens In-Reply-To: <6.1.1.1.0.20050516115030.02c94870@central.murdoch.edu.au> References: <6.1.1.1.0.20050516115030.02c94870@central.murdoch.edu.au> Message-ID: <200505161401430550.00E3378D@mail.psu.ac.th> Most of us could probably come up with a rebuttal, but to what end? Nobody in the MSM would print it, those who read the alt media know it is propaganda.... *********** REPLY SEPARATOR *********** On 16/5/48 at 11:56 Dion Giles wrote: The rubbish at http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/05/13/AR2005051301391.html by Alexander Moens may influence people outside the usual Washington cheer squad -- it is characterised by a string of careful omissions. But can anyone come up with a rebuttal? The guy is (presumably) a Canadian with access to Canadian ears. Meanwhile Canadian eyes see the north-south con-trails joined by east-west con-trails over their own country! Dion Giles Western Australia _______________________________________________ Mai-not mailing list Mai-not@globalproblematique.net http://www.globalproblematique.net/mailman/listinfo/mai-not From dgiles at central.murdoch.edu.au Mon May 16 01:54:26 2005 From: dgiles at central.murdoch.edu.au (Dion Giles) Date: Mon May 16 01:54:46 2005 Subject: [Mai-not] NYReview prints about the Brits; Smoking-Gun memo In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <6.1.1.1.0.20050516162102.02f81898@central.murdoch.edu.au> An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://www.globalproblematique.net/pipermail/mai-not/attachments/20050516/b2201366/attachment.html From thinker at uniserve.com Mon May 16 07:20:07 2005 From: thinker at uniserve.com (Ed Deak) Date: Mon May 16 07:21:25 2005 Subject: [Mai-not] Lucky Canada, writes Alexander Moens In-Reply-To: <6.1.1.1.0.20050516115030.02c94870@central.murdoch.edu.au> Message-ID: <5.1.0.14.2.20050516071420.02cdbcb8@pop.uniserve.com> By coincidence I sent the enclosed columns to our friend, Jerry Wests's "Record" on Saturday. But then,. I'm not a professor of political science, so what the hell do I know ? Cheers, Ed. ============================================================================================== At 11:56 AM 16/05/2005 +0800, you wrote: >The rubbish at >http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/05/13/AR2005051301391.html >by Alexander Moens may influence people outside the usual Washington cheer >squad -- it is characterised by a string of careful omissions. But can >anyone come up with a rebuttal? The guy is (presumably) a Canadian with >access to Canadian ears. Meanwhile Canadian eyes see the north-south >con-trails joined by east-west con-trails over their own country! > >Dion Giles >Western Australia > >_______________________________________________ >Mai-not mailing list >Mai-not@globalproblematique.net >http://www.globalproblematique.net/mailman/listinfo/mai-not ========================================================================================================= Fiat lux # 141 May 13, 2005. As if we hadn't had enough election hysteria to last for a year or two, we may just have another federal one within a few weeks. Now the whole propaganda, brainwash barrage will start all over again, enough to drive anybody to tears. The plans and objectives of the two Parties trying to bring down the Martin government are transparent and obvious: Both the Harper Conservatives and Duceppe's Bloc are out to kill Canada. Duceppe to get his dream of an independent Quebec realized, Harper to satisfy his corporate bosses, by integrating Canada into the dying American empire to prolong its suicidal agonies by a few minutes. Now this brings up an interesting question: Why is it that we can criticize, curse and are welcome do anything to bring down Canadian governments, but the minute we start questioning the actions of any American government, we're labelled "anti American", which seems to be a crime on the level of drug pushing? We all have the best of American friends and relations and in my case the arrival of the US Army in Austria saved my neck from the nazis. Europe survived after WW2 on food supplied by the American government, but in the 50 years that I've lived in this country I can not remember a single US government action that might have been beneficial for Canada. As far their screwball Presidents are concerned........well, we'd better not get into that. Even by the writings of the most conservative observes and financial experts, America is broke. Broke, bankrupt and without any hope for recovery. The ideology of so called "free enterprise" and now the neoconservative, so called religious right, has not only bankrupted, but also stripped the American people of their birthrights and democratic freedoms. Capitalists and communists have a lot in common. Both ideologies are out to collectivize and divert the benefits to a ruling class. Wealth can not be created, but only taken from other sectors and the environment. Only God can create. We humans can only use and waste the created wealth. America's power was built on the destruction and exploitation of indigenous peoples and the so called working class. This has been going on for centuries, until Roosevelt and a short lived enlightenment put a stop to it and created probably the most affluent society that lasted about 20-30 years, into the mid '70s. Then the temporarily sidelined ruling class got control of the university economics departments and forced on the teachings of the neoclassical theory, which is now accepted around the world, killing people by the millions every year. Next they got control of all information systems and turned them into the biggest propaganda machine in history, including all levels of the media, now in the hands of a few major players, censoring news and eliminating debate. Free speech and investigative journalism are dead. This has also been happening here in Canada, albeit still not to the same extent, which is disturbing and worrying the citadels of power, because they're afraid that even the limited freedoms Canadians still enjoy may just seep across the border and people will start asking questions. They still tolerate a certain diversity at provincial levels, but if there was any chance for an NDP federal government, Canada would be invaded and occupied on the request of our own, so called conservatives, to "preserve our freedoms". The Soviets were great for such campaigns in countries under their control. Always in the name of freedom. If wealth could be created, we wouldn't have crimes, wars, colonizations and globalization schemes, built around the power of imaginary capital to conquer, exploit and skim off the benefits into the hands of the free enterprisers. Not to be mistaken with private enterprisers, which is a completely different system and ideology, built on the premise of true market principles, mutual respect, sustainability and honesty. Small businesses have to keep their noses clean, or the customers will go somewhere else. Large corporations can get away with theft and murder and there's nothing anybody can do to call them to justice, because with their monetary power they can buy the laws and ruin the lives of millions to maintain their control and steal anything they want. In a private business the customer always has to be right, with big business, always wrong. In the supermarket we frequent the organic products, like sugar, honey, peanut butter, club soda, are disappearing from the shelves and there's no point in complaining. We tried, but the next time around something else was gone and replaced with junk foods. Local managers have no powers to order anything and the head offices, located God knows where, don't give a hoot. Now let's see where the machinations of Harper, d'Aquino, Manley and their big business associates are planning to take us ? The official figure for the US federal debt is $7.4 trillion, with a daily interest payment at $600. million. Next year's deficit is estimated to bring the debt to $8.1 trillion. Congress just passed another $81. billion to go into the Iraq fiasco, while there are alleged plans to attack Iran next. The average US personal credit card now carries an approx. $8,000. debt load according to NBC news. The Concord Coalition estimates the unfunded US liabilities at $74. trillion. While Canadian manufacturing was ruined with the FTA in 1989, since Bush took office over 2.5 million well paid manufacturing jobs and thousands of companies have disappeared in the USA. The original intent of outsourcing was that people in low wage countries could do the dirty jobs Americans and Canadians don't want, but now China and India are educating and producing several times the number of engineering graduates of North America, while here the only increases are in dead end jobs, pushing junk foods and Chinese products. Campbell's much touted job increases are reported mainly in the so called "hospitality industries". Just recently I saw an ad by the fanciest restaurant in Williams Lake for a chef at $9. per hour. If I'd tried to pay that to my tradesmen 30 years ago they'd laughed and quit. From thinker at uniserve.com Mon May 16 07:40:08 2005 From: thinker at uniserve.com (Ed Deak) Date: Mon May 16 07:41:20 2005 Subject: [Mai-not] NYReview prints about the Brits; Smoking-Gun memo In-Reply-To: <6.1.1.1.0.20050516162102.02f81898@central.murdoch.edu.au> References: Message-ID: <5.1.0.14.2.20050516073329.02cde580@pop.uniserve.com> The main purpose in the life and history of all priesthoods, regardless of what and where, has always been to search for new ways to get around the Ten Commandments, or similar religious laws, and discover amendments ordained by their gods to justify theft, crime and killings, overruling the original. Because wealth can not be created, only taken, we have to have divine orders to legalize the takings and that's where the job of the clergy comes in. Cheers, Ed. ======================================================================================================== At 04:54 PM 16/05/2005 +0800, you wrote: >Excellent story -- http://www.tomdispatch.com/index.mhtml?pid=2486 is a >specific URL to cite, at least unless and until the NY Review puts it on >the Web. > >It is proof that John Howard, Alexander Downer, Simon Crean and Kevin Rudd >(the one who wants to being God into the Labor Party but presumably minus >four of the commandments [1]) are shameless liars. > >Dion Giles >Western Australia > >[1] > >Sixth: "Thou shalt not kill" (The "Children of Israel" who wrote all >this for their own purposes were busy in Canaan murdering everybody who >moved, irrespective of gender or age, and claiming God had told them this >was OK. They haven't changed much.) > >Eighth: "Thou shalt not steal" (presumably this includes theft of land >and minerals) > >Ninth: "Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbour". (Rudd >ignored this when lying about Iraqi WMDs) > >Tenth: "Thou shalt not covet . . ." (The rest is so disgusting even for >a religious text written to justify a land grab that it is best left >unprinted. But covering a country's oil wealth is in breach of the >commandment) > > > > > >_______________________________________________ >Mai-not mailing list >Mai-not@globalproblematique.net >http://www.globalproblematique.net/mailman/listinfo/mai-not From creuss at bluemail.ch Mon May 16 11:32:35 2005 From: creuss at bluemail.ch (Christoph Reuss) Date: Mon May 16 11:33:37 2005 Subject: [Mai-not] Map to disappear from Euro coins Message-ID: [Since Brussels can't see yet how far its Empire is going to expand -- to Turkey, to the Urals, or the Pacific --, it has decided to remove the map from the Euro coins. Just to keep all options open...] http://news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/ap/20050513/ap_on_bi_ge/eu_finance_ministers_3 EU to Redesign Euro Coins; Outlook Mixed By ROBERT WIELAARD, Associated Press Writer Fri May 13, 3:10 PM ET LUXEMBOURG - The European Union will redesign the euro coins to reflect the bloc's massive eastward expansion last year when it absorbed 10 nations that are not depicted on the map of Europe shown on the current coins. Euro notes show a map of the 25-nation EU, but coins only the 15 nations that formed the bloc up to May 1, 2004, when Cyprus, Malta and eight East European nations joined. The EU finance ministers agreed future coins should either show a larger Europe or another common symbol reflecting a bigger EU. EU Finance Commissioner Pedro Solbes will make design recommendations next month. Solbes was also asked to look into diverging rates of growth in the euro-zone, which comprises the 12 nations that now use the currency. In the first quarter, Germany posted a 1 percent growth rate, breaking out of the 0.1 percent contraction of the last quarter of 2004, while Italy's economy shrank by 0.5 percent in the first quarter. Luxembourg Finance Minister Jean-Claude Juncker said the divergence showed that "in spite of the economic difficulties, we should continue structural reforms" to trigger growth and safeguard pensions and other benefits for a fast-graying EU population. The EU economy has been buffeted by high oil prices and an expensive euro in the past year. Officials gave no date for the introduction of the new-look euro coins. Last year, Estonia, Slovenia and Lithuania joined the EU's Exchange Rate Mechanism, which limits their currency fluctuations and is a waiting room for euro membership. This year, Latvia, Malta and Cyprus joined the ERM. Under EU rules, countries must spend at least two years in the ERM before they can join the euro. They must also have a budget deficit not exceeding 3 percent of gross domestic product and a total debt burden of not more than 60 percent of GDP. The euro became the currency of 300 million Europeans in 12 nations - Belgium, Germany, Greece, Spain, France, Ireland, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Austria, Portugal and Finland - in 2002. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ SpamWall: Mail to this addy is deleted unread unless it contains the keyword "igve". From eltechno at clear.lakes.com Mon May 16 19:52:27 2005 From: eltechno at clear.lakes.com (Jonathan Larson) Date: Mon May 16 19:55:00 2005 Subject: [Mai-not] no comment Message-ID: a really good photoshopped version of the Nuremburg trial the world can wish -- ------------------ War remains the decisive human failure. - John Kenneth Galbraith Jonathan web site at: http://elegant-technology.com -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: war-crimes-trial.jpg Type: application/octet-stream Size: 95690 bytes Desc: not available Url : http://www.globalproblematique.net/pipermail/mai-not/attachments/20050516/f2b0929a/war-crimes-trial-0001.obj From dgiles at central.murdoch.edu.au Mon May 16 19:58:25 2005 From: dgiles at central.murdoch.edu.au (Dion Giles) Date: Mon May 16 19:58:37 2005 Subject: [Mai-not] A culture crushes women -- and kills them Message-ID: <6.1.1.1.0.20050517105449.026a6490@central.murdoch.edu.au> What was it again that Marx wrote about village life? http://www.nytimes.com/2005/05/11/international/africa/11malawi.html? Dion Giles Western Australia From creuss at bluemail.ch Tue May 17 08:29:39 2005 From: creuss at bluemail.ch (Christoph Reuss) Date: Tue May 17 08:30:40 2005 Subject: [Mai-not] no comment Message-ID: > a really good photoshopped version of the Nuremburg trial Ariel Ultra is missing! Chris ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ SpamWall: Mail to this addy is deleted unread unless it contains the keyword "igve". From eltechno at clear.lakes.com Tue May 17 10:38:25 2005 From: eltechno at clear.lakes.com (Jonathan Larson) Date: Tue May 17 11:15:48 2005 Subject: [Mai-not] no comment In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: >> a really good photoshopped version of the Nuremburg trial > >Ariel Ultra is missing! > >Chris And SHOULD be there. I don't want you to think I was responsible for that EXCELLENT photo. I am pretty good at Photoshop but not THAT good. Whoever did it had to obtain a good version of the original photo and then find good pictures of all the new war criminals with their heads at the correct angles. Then the artist would have had to carefully remove the new backgrounds so that the heads didn't have any digital junk around the edges. Then, everything would have to be composited and a new jpeg generated. Three days of tedious work is my guess at the minimum time this all required. I was especially impressed by the inclusion of Alan Greenspan with his hand to his face. Brilliant--utterly brilliant. >SpamWall: Mail to this addy is deleted unread unless it contains the keyword >"igve". -- ------------------ War remains the decisive human failure. - John Kenneth Galbraith Jonathan web site at: http://elegant-technology.com From eltechno at clear.lakes.com Tue May 17 11:15:12 2005 From: eltechno at clear.lakes.com (Jonathan Larson) Date: Tue May 17 11:18:06 2005 Subject: [Mai-not] Fears for dollar as central banks sell US assets Message-ID: Fears for dollar as central banks sell US assets By Christopher Swann in Washington and Richard Beales in New York Published: May 16 2005 18:17 | Last updated: May 16 2005 18:17 http://news.ft.com/cms/s/883cd656-c62b-11d9-b69b-00000e2511c8.html The world's central banks were net sellers of US assets in March for the first time since September 2002, according to figures that may hint that the recent rebound in the dollar will be temporary. Central banks sold a net $14.4bn in US assets during the month, the largest sale since August 1998, the US Treasury revealed. Asian central banks, however, continued to accumulate reserves, with their stockpiles rising by about $30bn over the month. "For those central banks that are not managing their currencies, there may well be a feeling that the dollar is not a great bet," said Adam Cole, currency strategist at RBC Capital Markets Economists says these sales may be a sign that central bank officials fear the dollar downtrend will at some point resume. The most conspicuous sale was by the Central Bank of Norway, which sold $17bn of US Treasuries. Private-sector inflows into the US remained robust in March at $74.5bn, only slightly down from $79.4bn in February. "It does seem that when private sector investors are willing to buy dollars, the central banks are happy for any excuse to offload part of the mountain of dollars they have accumulated," said David Bloom, currency strategist at HSBC. Demand for US Treasuries was boosted by $28bn of net purchases from the Caribbean region, the highest level in at least four years. Analysts associate banking centres in the Caribbean with hedge funds. Some analysts suggest that hedge fund buying of US government bonds in recent months may be associated with unwinding failed bets in which the funds were short on Treasuries while owning riskier, higher-yielding debt. Among the central banks, reserve accumulation has been particularly aggressive in Asia, where many of the banks have been anxious to prevent a rise in their currencies from choking off export growth. The US dollar fell by about 30 per cent against floating currencies from its peak in February 2002 until the end of last year. But since then it has bounced back just over 5 per cent. Many currency strategists believe the dollar downtrend will resume. "The cyclical picture for the US still looks very good for the dollar," said Ray Attrill, director of US research at 4Cast, an economic consultancy. "But there are no convincing signs that the current account deficit is getting better and this should eventually weigh the dollar down again." Although the US trade deficit narrowed in March from $60.6bn to $55bn, most economists believe this was due to a shortlived slowdown in US demand and the timing of the Chinese new year. Last year the current account deficit was $666bn, or 6 per cent of gross domestic product. -- ------------------ War remains the decisive human failure. - John Kenneth Galbraith Jonathan web site at: http://elegant-technology.com -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://www.globalproblematique.net/pipermail/mai-not/attachments/20050517/67da25bf/attachment.html From creuss at bluemail.ch Tue May 17 11:24:18 2005 From: creuss at bluemail.ch (Christoph Reuss) Date: Tue May 17 11:25:23 2005 Subject: [Mai-not] Happy Slapping Message-ID: [This is what advertising has made of today's youth. Awful.] http://www.guardian.co.uk/crime/article/0,2763,1470213,00.html Concern over rise of 'happy slapping' craze Fad of filming violent attacks on mobile phones spreads Mark Honigsbaum Tuesday April 26, 2005 The Guardian In one video clip, labelled Bitch Slap, a youth approaches a woman at a bus stop and punches her in the face. In another, Knockout Punch, a group of boys wearing uniforms are shown leading another boy across an unidentified school playground before flooring him with a single blow to the head. In a third, Bank Job, a teenager is seen assaulting a hole-in-the-wall customer while another youth grabs the money he has just withdrawn from the cash machine. Welcome to the disturbing world of the "happy slappers" - a youth craze in which groups of teenagers armed with camera phones slap or mug unsuspecting children or passersby while capturing the attacks on 3g technology. According to police and anti-bullying organisations, the fad, which began as a craze on the UK garage music scene before catching on in school playgrounds across the capital last autumn, is now a nationwide phenomenon. And as the craze has spread from London to the home counties to the north of England, so the attacks have become more menacing, with increasing numbers of violent assaults and adult victims. In London, British Transport police have investigated 200 happy slapping incidents in the past six months, with eight people charged with attacks at south London stations and bus stops in January alone. The Metropolitan police have no overall figures but recorded a number of attacks in London boroughs earlier this year. Following a spate of random attacks last December on pupils at Godolphin and Latymer girls' school in Hammersmith, west London, police posted extra officers in the area as a deterrent. But as police have become more vigilant, so the gangs have become more sophisticated, seeking victims in parks or public areas where their crimes are unlikely to be spotted by the authorities or captured on CCTV. Liz Carnell, the director of Bullying Online, a Yorkshire-based charity set up to combat bullying in schools, said that since the start of the year she has heard of increasing attacks both on children and on adults. But she fears many incidents are not reported. "In most cases the worst that happens is a minor scratch or a bruised ego," she said. "What the people behind these attacks have to understand is that technically they are committing an assault. And if they then upload the images on to the internet or a phone system they could be prosecuted for harassment." What makes the attacks all the more bewildering is that many victims do not realise they have been happy slapped until after the event. Earlier this month James Silver, 34, a freelance journalist, was attacked while jogging on the South Bank in London. While one youth blocked his path, another hit him with a rolled-up magazine. When he spun around another teenager - who had been hiding behind nearby scaffolding - leapt out and hit him hard in the head. When he staggered to his feet he noticed the rest of the gang were jeering and pointing their mobile phones at him. Silver admits that while the attack left his "ego smarting" he did not think it worth reporting. "At the end of the day I was unharmed but it was pretty shocking at the time," he said. "The worry is that while the bulk of the attacks are trivial, some of these youths could be carrying knives." Earlier this year, schools in Lewisham, south London, and St Albans banned camera phones because of worries that the fad was leading to an increase in playground bullying. In a comment recently posted on a London community web forum, "Happyslapper2" described the craze as a "joke", writing: "If you feel bored wen ur about an u got a video phone den bitch slap sum norman, innit." However, in a sign of a gathering backlash, other forum members disagreed. "It's hardly a joke ... it's fuckin rude and pea-brained," wrote "slappersidiots". "If this happy slapping fad continues it will only be a matter of time before someone is seriously hurt," predicted another. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ SpamWall: Mail to this addy is deleted unread unless it contains the keyword "igve". From jfos at net-tech.com.au Mon May 16 15:37:59 2005 From: jfos at net-tech.com.au (John) Date: Tue May 17 14:54:15 2005 Subject: [Mai-not] Depleted Uranium in Iraq Threatens World Populations Message-ID: <6.1.0.6.1.20050517083332.02ac88f0@mail.net-tech.com.au> American use of DU is "A crime against humanity which may, in the eyes of historians, rank with the worst atrocities of all time." US Iraq Military Vets "are on DU death row, waiting to die." "I'm horrified. The people out there - the Iraqis, the media and the troops - risk the most appalling ill health. And the radiation from depleted uranium can travel literally anywhere. It's going to destroy the lives of thousands of children, all over the world. We all know how far radiation can travel. Radiation from Chernobyl reached Wales ... Clearly, with hundreds of thousands gravely ill in Iraq and at least a quarter of a million UK and US troops seriously ill, huge disability claims might be made not only against the governments of Britain and America if the harm done by DU were acknowledged. There might also be huge claims against companies making DU weapons and some of their directors are said to be extremely close to the White House. How close they are to Downing Street is a matter for speculation, but arms sales makes a considerable contribution to British trade. So the massive whitewashing of DU over the past 12 years, and the way that governments have failed to test returning troops, seemed to disbelieve them, and washed their hands of them, may be purely to save money. Horror of USA's Depleted Uranium in Iraq Threatens World By James Denver Vive le Canada Friday 29 April 2005 The speaker is not some alarmist doomsayer. He is Dr. Chris Busby, the British radiation expert, Fellow of the University of Liverpool in the Faculty of Medicine and UK representative on the European Committee on Radiation Risk, talking about the best-kept secret of this war: the fact that by illegally using hundreds of tons of depleted uranium (DU) against Iraq, Britain and America have gravely endangered not only the Iraqis but the whole world. For these weapons have released deadly, carcinogenic and mutagenic, radioactive particles in such abundance that-whipped up by sandstorms and carried on trade winds - there is no corner of the globe they cannot penetrate-including Britain. For the wind has no boundaries and time is on their side: the radioactivity persists for over 4,500,000,000 years and can cause cancer, leukemia, brain damage, kidney failure, and extreme birth defects - killing millions of every age for centuries to come. A crime against humanity which may, in the eyes of historians, rank with the worst atrocities of all time. These weapons have released deadly, carcinogenic and mutagenic, radioactive particles in such abundance that there is no corner of the globe they cannot penetrate - including Britain. Yet, officially, no crime has been committed. For this story is a dirty story in which the facts have been concealed from those who needed them most. It is also a story we need to know if the people of Iraq are to get the medical care they desperately need, and if our troops, returning from Iraq, are not to suffer as terribly as the veterans of other conflicts in which depleted uranium was used. A Dirty Tyson 'Depleted' uranium is in many ways a misnomer. 'Depleted' sounds weak. The only weak thing about depleted uranium is its price. It is dirt cheap, toxic, waste from nuclear power plants and bomb production. However, uranium is one of earth's heaviest elements and DU packs a Tyson's punch, smashing through tanks, buildings and bunkers with equal ease, spontaneously catching fire as it does so, and burning people alive. 'Crispy critters' is what US servicemen call those unfortunate enough to be close. And, when John Pilger encountered children killed at a greater distance he wrote: "The children's skin had folded back, like parchment, revealing veins and burnt flesh that seeped blood, while the eyes, intact, stared straight ahead. I vomited." (Daily Mirror) The millions of radioactive uranium oxide particles released when it burns can kill just as surely, but far more terribly. They can even be so tiny they pass through a gas mask, making protection against them impossible. Yet, small is not beautiful. For these invisible killers indiscriminately attack men, women, children and even babies in the womb - and do the gravest harm of all to children and unborn babies. A Terrible Legacy Doctors in Iraq have estimated that birth defects have increased by 2-6 times, and 3-12 times as many children have developed cancer and leukemia since 1991. Moreover, a report published in The Lancet in 1998 said that as many as 500 children a day are dying from these sequels to war and sanctions and that the death rate for Iraqi children under 5 years of age increased from 23 per 1000 in 1989 to 166 per thousand in 1993. Overall, cases of lymphoblastic leukemia more than quadrupled with other cancers also increasing 'at an alarming rate.' In men, lung, bladder, bronchus, skin, and stomach cancers showed the highest increase. In women, the highest increases were in breast and bladder cancer, and non-Hodgkin lymphoma.[1] On hearing that DU had been used in the Gulf in 1991, the UK Atomic Energy Authority sent the Ministry of Defense a special report on the potential damage to health and the environment. It said that it could cause half a million additional cancer deaths in Iraq over 10 years. In that war the authorities only admitted to using 320 tons of DU-although the Dutch charity LAKA estimates the true figure is closer to 800 tons. Many times that may have been spread across Iraq by this year's war. The devastating damage all this DU will do to the health and fertility of the people of Iraq now, and for generations to come, is beyond imagining. The radioactivity persists for over 4,500,000,000 years killing millions of every age for centuries to come. This is a crime against humanity which may rank with the worst atrocities of all time. We must also count the numberless thousands of miscarried babies. Nobody knows how many Iraqis have died in the womb since DU contaminated their world. But it is suggested that troops who were only exposed to DU for the brief period of the war were still excreting uranium in their semen 8 years later and some had 100 times the so-called 'safe limit' of uranium in their urine. The lack of government interest in the plight of veterans of the 1991 war is reflected in a lack of academic research on the impact of DU but informal research has found a high incidence of birth defects in their children and that the wives of men who served in Iraq have three times more miscarriages than the wives of servicemen who did not go there. Since DU darkened the land Iraq has seen birth defects which would break a heart of stone: babies with terribly foreshortened limbs, with their intestines outside their bodies, with huge bulging tumors where their eyes should be, or with a single eye-like Cyclops, or without eyes, or without limbs, and even without heads. Significantly, some of the defects are almost unknown outside textbooks showing the babies born near A-bomb test sites in the Pacific. Doctors report that many women no longer say 'Is it a girl or a boy?' but simply, 'Is it normal, doctor?' Moreover this terrible legacy will not end. The genes of their parents may have been damaged for ever, and the damaging DU dust is ever-present. Blue on Blue What the governments of America and Britain have done to the people of Iraq they have also done to their own soldiers, in both wars. And they have done it knowingly. For the battlefields have been thick with DU and soldiers have had to enter areas heavily contaminated by bombing. Moreover, their bodies have not only been assaulted by DU but also by a vaccination regime which violated normal protocols, experimental vaccines, nerve agent pills, and organophosphate pesticides in their tents. And yet, though the hazards of DU were known, British and American troops were not warned of its dangers. Nor were they given thorough medical checks on their return-even though identifying it quickly might have made it possible to remove some of it from their body. Then, when a growing number became seriously ill, and should have been sent to top experts in radiation damage and neurotoxins, many were sent to a psychiatrist. Over 200,000 US troops who returned from the 1991 war are now invalided out with ailments officially attributed to service in Iraq - that's 1 in 3. In contrast, the British government's failure to fully assess the health of returning troops, or to monitor their health, means no one even knows how many have died or become gravely ill since their return. However, Gulf veterans' associations say that, of 40,000 or so fighting fit men and women who saw active service, at least 572 have died prematurely since coming home and 5000 may be ill. An alarming number are thought to have taken their own lives, unable to bear the torment of the innumerable ailments which have combined to take away their career, their sexuality, their ability to have normal children, and even their ability to breathe or walk normally. As one veteran puts it, they are 'on DU death row, waiting to die.' Whatever other factors there may be, some of their illnesses are strikingly similar to those of Iraqis exposed to DU dust. For example, soldiers have also fathered children without eyes. And, in a group of eight servicemen whose babies lack eyes seven are known to have been directly exposed to DU dust. They too have fathered children with stunted arms, and rare abnormalities classically associated with radiation damage. They too seem prone to cancer and leukemia. Tellingly, so are EU soldiers who served as peacekeepers in the Balkans, where DU was also used. Indeed their leukemia rate has been so high that several EU governments have protested at the use of DU. The Vital Evidence Despite all that evidence of the harm done by DU, governments on both sides of the Atlantic have repeatedly claimed that as it emits only 'low level' radiation DU is harmless. Award-winning scientist, Dr. Rosalie Bertell who has led UN medical commissions, has studied 'low-level' radiation for 30 years. 2 She has found that uranium oxide particles have more than enough power to harm cells, and describes their pulses of radiation as hitting surrounding cells 'like flashes of lightning' again and again in a single second.[2] Like many scientists worldwide who have studied this type of radiation, she has found that such 'lightning strikes' can damage DNA and cause cell mutations which lead to cancer. Moreover, these particles can be taken up by body fluids and travel through the body, damaging more than one organ. To compound all that, Dr. Bertell has found that this particular type of radiation can cause the body's communication systems to break down, leading to malfunctions in many vital organs of the body and to many medical problems. A striking fact, since many veterans of the first Gulf war suffer from innumerable, seemingly unrelated, ailments. In addition, recent research by Eric Wright, Professor of Experimental Haematology at Dundee University, and others, have shown two ways in which such radiation can do far more damage than has been thought. The first is that a cell which seems unharmed by radiation can produce cells with diverse mutations several cell generations later. (And mutations are at the root of cancer and birth defects.) This 'radiation-induced genomic instability' is compounded by 'the bystander effect' by which cells mutate in unison with others which have been damaged by radiation-rather as birds swoop and turn in unison. Put together, these two mechanisms can greatly increase the damage done by a single source of radiation, such as a DU particle. Moreover, it is now clear that there are marked genetic differences in the way individuals respond to radiation-with some being far more likely to develop cancer than others. So the fact that some veterans of the first Gulf war seem relatively unharmed by their exposure to DU in no way proves that DU did not damage others. The Price of Truth That the evidence from Iraq and from our troops, and the research findings of such experts, have been ignored may be no accident. A US report, leaked in late 1995, allegedly says, 'The potential for health effects from DU exposure is real; however it must be viewed in perspective... the financial implications of long-term disability payments and healthcare costs would be excessive.'[3] Clearly, with hundreds of thousands gravely ill in Iraq and at least a quarter of a million UK and US troops seriously ill, huge disability claims might be made not only against the governments of Britain and America if the harm done by DU were acknowledged. There might also be huge claims against companies making DU weapons and some of their directors are said to be extremely close to the White House. How close they are to Downing Street is a matter for speculation, but arms sales makes a considerable contribution to British trade. So the massive whitewashing of DU over the past 12 years, and the way that governments have failed to test returning troops, seemed to disbelieve them, and washed their hands of them, may be purely to save money. The possibility that financial considerations have led the governments of Britain and America to cynically avoid taking responsibility for the harm they have done not only to the people of Iraq but to their own troops may seem outlandish. Yet DU weapons weren't used by the other side and no other explanation fits the evidence. For, in the days before Britain and America first used DU in war its hazards were no secret.[4] One American study in 1990 said DU was 'linked to cancer when exposures are internal, [and to] chemical toxicity-causing kidney damage'. While another openly warned that exposure to these particles under battlefield conditions could lead to cancers of the lung and bone, kidney damage, non-malignant lung disease, neuro-cognitive disorders, chromosomal damage and birth defects.[5] A Culture of Denial In 1996 and 1997 UN Human Rights Tribunals condemned DU weapons for illegally breaking the Geneva Convention and classed them as 'weapons of mass destruction' 'incompatible with international humanitarian and human rights law.' Since then, following leukemia in European peacekeeping troops in the Balkans and Afghanistan (where DU was also used), the EU has twice called for DU weapons to be banned. Yet, far from banning DU, America and Britain stepped up their denials of the harm from this radioactive dust as more and more troops from the first Gulf war and from action and peacekeeping in the Balkans and Afghanistan have become seriously ill. This is no coincidence. In 1997, while citing experiments, by others, in which 84 percent of dogs exposed to inhaled uranium died of cancer of the lungs, Dr. Asaf Durakovic, then Professor of Radiology and Nuclear Medicine at Georgetown University in Washington was quoted as saying, 'The [US government's] Veterans Administration asked me to lie about the risks of incorporating depleted uranium in the human body.' He concluded, 'uranium does cause cancer, uranium does cause mutation, and uranium does kill. If we continue with the irresponsible contamination of the biosphere, and denial of the fact that human life is endangered by the deadly isotope uranium, then we are doing disservice to ourselves, disservice to the truth, disservice to God and to all generations who follow.' Not what the authorities wanted to hear and his research was suddenly blocked. During 12 years of ever-growing British whitewash the authorities have abolished military hospitals, where there could have been specialized research on the effects of DU and where expertise in treating DU victims could have built up. And, not content with the insult of suggesting the gravely disabling symptoms of Gulf veterans are imaginary they have refused full pensions to many. For, despite all the evidence to the contrary, the current House of Commons briefing paper on DU hazards says 'it is judged that any radiation effects from possible exposures are extremely unlikely to be a contributory factor to the illnesses currently being experienced by some Gulf war veterans.' Note how over a quarter of a million sick and dying US and UK vets are called 'some.' The Way Ahead Britain and America not only used DU in this year's Iraq war, they dramatically increased its use - from a minimum of 320 tons in the previous war to at minimum of 1500 tons in this one. And this time the use of DU wasn't limited to anti-tank weapons - as it had largely been in the previous Gulf war - but was extended to the guided missiles, large bunker busters and big 2000-pound bombs used in Iraq's cities. This means that Iraq's cities have been blanketed in lethal particles - any one of which can cause cancer or deform a child. In addition, the use of DU in huge bombs which throw the deadly particles higher and wider in huge plumes of smoke means that billions of deadly particles have been carried high into the air - again and again and again as the bombs rained down - ready to be swept worldwide by the winds. The Royal Society has suggested the solution is massive decontamination in Iraq. That could only scratch the surface. For decontamination is hugely expensive and, though it may reduce the risks in some of the worst areas, it cannot fully remove them. For DU is too widespread on land and water. How do you clean up every nook and cranny of a city the size of Baghdad? How can they decontaminate a whole country in which microscopic particles, which cannot be detected with a normal geiger counter, are spread from border to border? And how can they clean up all the countries downwind of Iraq-and, indeed, the world? So there are only two things we can do to mitigate this crime against humanity. The first is to provide the best possible medical care for the people of Iraq, for our returning troops and for those who served in the last Gulf war and, through that, minimize their suffering. The second is to relegate war, and the production and sale of weapons, to the scrap heap of history-along with slavery and genocide. Then, and only then, will this crime against humanity be expunged, and the tragic deaths from this war truly bring freedom to the people of Iraq, and of the world. References [1] The Lancet volume 351, issue 9103, 28 February 1998. [2] Rosalie Bertell's book Planet Earth the Latest Weapon of War was reviewed in Caduceus issue 51, page 28. [3] TAB L_Research Report Summaries [4] The secret official memorandum to Brigadier General L.R. Groves from Drs Conant, Compton and Urey of War Department Manhattan district dated October 1943 is available at the website. [5] TAB L_Research Report Summaries Further Information The Low Level Radiation Campaign hopes to be able to arrange a limited number of private urine tests for those returning from the latest Gulf war. It can be contacted at: The Knoll, Montpelier Park, Llandrindod Wells, LD1 5LW. 01597 824771. Web: LLRC.org. James Denver writes and broadcasts internationally on science and technology. Dennis Kyne Support the Truth www.denniskyne.com Brought to you by HTTP://WWW.STOPNATO.ORG.UK From papadop at peak.org Tue May 17 15:20:28 2005 From: papadop at peak.org (MichaelP) Date: Tue May 17 15:21:35 2005 Subject: [Mai-not] George Galloway gives the U$ Senators hell Message-ID: =================== http://www.commondreams.org/views05/0517-35.htm Published on Tuesday, May 17, 2005 by the Times Online (UK) Galloway vs. The US Senate: Transcript of Statement George Galloway, Respect MP for Bethnal Green and Bow, delivered this statement to US Senators today who have accused him of corruption "Senator, I am not now, nor have I ever been, an oil trader. and neither has anyone on my behalf. I have never seen a barrel of oil, owned one, bought one, sold one - and neither has anyone on my behalf. "Now I know that standards have slipped in the last few years in Washington, but for a lawyer you are remarkably cavalier with any idea of justice. I am here today but last week you already found me guilty. You traduced my name around the world without ever having asked me a single question, without ever having contacted me, without ever written to me or telephoned me, without any attempt to contact me whatsoever. And you call that justice. [startquote.gif] I told the world that Iraq, contrary to your claims did not have weapons of mass destruction. I told the world, contrary to your claims, that Iraq had no connection to al-Qaeda. I told the world, contrary to your claims, that Iraq had no connection to the atrocity on 9/11 2001. I told the world, contrary to your claims, that the Iraqi people would resist a British and American invasion of their country and that the fall of Baghdad would not be the beginning of the end, but merely the end of the beginning. Senator, in everything I said about Iraq, I turned out to be right and you turned out to be wrong and 100,000 people paid with their lives; 1600 of them American soldiers sent to their deaths on a pack of lies; 15,000 of them wounded, many of them disabled forever on a pack of lies. "Now I want to deal with the pages that relate to me in this dossier and I want to point out areas where there are - let's be charitable and say errors. Then I want to put this in the context where I believe it ought to be. On the very first page of your document about me you assert that I have had 'many meetings' with Saddam Hussein. This is false. "I have had two meetings with Saddam Hussein, once in 1994 and once in August of 2002. By no stretch of the English language can that be described as "many meetings" with Saddam Hussein. "As a matter of fact, I have met Saddam Hussein exactly the same number of times as Donald Rumsfeld met him. The difference is Donald Rumsfeld met him to sell him guns and to give him maps the better to target those guns. I met him to try and bring about an end to sanctions, suffering and war, and on the second of the two occasions, I met him to try and persuade him to let Dr Hans Blix and the United Nations weapons inspectors back into the country - a rather better use of two meetings with Saddam Hussein than your own Secretary of State for Defense made of his. "I was an opponent of Saddam Hussein when British and Americans governments and businessmen were selling him guns and gas. I used to demonstrate outside the Iraqi embassy when British and American officials were going in and doing commerce. "You will see from the official parliamentary record, Hansard, from the 15th March 1990 onwards, voluminous evidence that I have a rather better record of opposition to Saddam Hussein than you do and than any other member of the British or American governments do. "Now you say in this document, you quote a source, you have the gall to quote a source, without ever having asked me whether the allegation from the source is true, that I am 'the owner of a company which has made substantial profits from trading in Iraqi oil'. "Senator, I do not own any companies, beyond a small company whose entire purpose, whose sole purpose, is to receive the income from my journalistic earnings from my employer, Associated Newspapers, in London. I do not own a company that's been trading in Iraqi oil. And you have no business to carry a quotation, utterly unsubstantiated and false, implying otherwise. "Now you have nothing on me, Senator, except my name on lists of names from Iraq, many of which have been drawn up after the installation of your puppet government in Baghdad. If you had any of the letters against me that you had against Zhirinovsky, and even Pasqua, they would have been up there in your slideshow for the members of your committee today. "You have my name on lists provided to you by the Duelfer inquiry, provided to him by the convicted bank robber, and fraudster and conman Ahmed Chalabi who many people to their credit in your country now realize played a decisive role in leading your country into the disaster in Iraq. "There were 270 names on that list originally. That's somehow been filleted down to the names you chose to deal with in this committee. Some of the names on that committee included the former secretary to his Holiness Pope John Paul II, the former head of the African National Congress Presidential office and many others who had one defining characteristic in common: they all stood against the policy of sanctions and war which you vociferously prosecuted and which has led us to this disaster. "You quote Mr Dahar Yassein Ramadan. Well, you have something on me, I've never met Mr Dahar Yassein Ramadan. Your sub-committee apparently has. But I do know that he's your prisoner, I believe he's in Abu Ghraib prison. I believe he is facing war crimes charges, punishable by death. In these circumstances, knowing what the world knows about how you treat prisoners in Abu Ghraib prison, in Bagram Airbase, in Guantanamo Bay, including I may say, British citizens being held in those places. "I'm not sure how much credibility anyone would put on anything you manage to get from a prisoner in those circumstances. But you quote 13 words from Dahar Yassein Ramadan whom I have never met. If he said what he said, then he is wrong. "And if you had any evidence that I had ever engaged in any actual oil transaction, if you had any evidence that anybody ever gave me any money, it would be before the public and before this committee today because I agreed with your Mr Greenblatt [Mark Greenblatt, legal counsel on the committee]. "Your Mr Greenblatt was absolutely correct. What counts is not the names on the paper, what counts is where's the money. Senator? Who paid me hundreds of thousands of dollars of money? The answer to that is nobody. And if you had anybody who ever paid me a penny, you would have produced them today. "Now you refer at length to a company names in these documents as Aredio Petroleum. I say to you under oath here today: I have never heard of this company, I have never met anyone from this company. This company has never paid a penny to me and I'll tell you something else: I can assure you that Aredio Petroleum has never paid a single penny to the Mariam Appeal Campaign. Not a thin dime. I don't know who Aredio Petroleum are, but I daresay if you were to ask them they would confirm that they have never met me or ever paid me a penny. "Whilst I'm on that subject, who is this senior former regime official that you spoke to yesterday? Don't you think I have a right to know? Don't you think the Committee and the public have a right to know who this senior former regime official you were quoting against me interviewed yesterday actually is? "Now, one of the most serious of the mistakes you have made in this set of documents is, to be frank, such a schoolboy howler as to make a fool of the efforts that you have made. You assert on page 19, not once but twice, that the documents that you are referring to cover a different period in time from the documents covered by The Daily Telegraph which were a subject of a libel action won by me in the High Court in England late last year. "You state that The Daily Telegraph article cited documents from 1992 and 1993 whilst you are dealing with documents dating from 2001. Senator, The Daily Telegraph's documents date identically to the documents that you were dealing with in your report here. None of The Daily Telegraph's documents dealt with a period of 1992, 1993. I had never set foot in Iraq until late in 1993 - never in my life. There could possibly be no documents relating to Oil-for-Food matters in 1992, 1993, for the Oil-for-Food scheme did not exist at that time. "And yet you've allocated a full section of this document to claiming that your documents are from a different era to the Daily Telegraph documents when the opposite is true. Your documents and the Daily Telegraph documents deal with exactly the same period. "But perhaps you were confusing the Daily Telegraph action with the Christian Science Monitor. The Christian Science Monitor did indeed publish on its front pages a set of allegations against me very similar to the ones that your committee have made. They did indeed rely on documents which started in 1992, 1993. These documents were unmasked by the Christian Science Monitor themselves as forgeries. "Now, the neo-con websites and newspapers in which you're such a hero, senator, were all absolutely cock-a-hoop at the publication of the Christian Science Monitor documents, they were all absolutely convinced of their authenticity. They were all absolutely convinced that these documents showed me receiving $10 million from the Saddam regime. And they were all lies. "In the same week as the Daily Telegraph published their documents against me, the Christian Science Monitor published theirs which turned out to be forgeries and the British newspaper, Mail on Sunday, purchased a third set of documents which also upon forensic examination turned out to be forgeries. So there's nothing fanciful about this. Nothing at all fanciful about it. "The existence of forged documents implicating me in commercial activities with the Iraqi regime is a proven fact. It's a proven fact that these forged documents existed and were being circulated amongst right-wing newspapers in Baghdad and around the world in the immediate aftermath of the fall of the Iraqi regime. "Now, Senator, I gave my heart and soul to oppose the policy that you promoted. I gave my political life's blood to try to stop the mass killing of Iraqis by the sanctions on Iraq which killed one million Iraqis, most of them children, most of them died before they even knew that they were Iraqis, but they died for no other reason other than that they were Iraqis with the misfortune to born at that time. I gave my heart and soul to stop you committing the disaster that you did commit in invading Iraq. And I told the world that your case for the war was a pack of lies. I told the world that Iraq, contrary to your claims did not have weapons of mass destruction. I told the world, contrary to your claims, that Iraq had no connection to al-Qaeda. I told the world, contrary to your claims, that Iraq had no connection to the atrocity on 9/11 2001. I told the world, contrary to your claims, that the Iraqi people would resist a British and American invasion of their country and that the fall of Baghdad would not be the beginning of the end, but merely the end of the beginning. "Senator, in everything I said about Iraq, I turned out to be right and you turned out to be wrong and 100,000 people paid with their lives; 1600 of them American soldiers sent to their deaths on a pack of lies; 15,000 of them wounded, many of them disabled forever on a pack of lies. If the world had listened to Kofi Annan, whose dismissal you demanded, if the world had listened to President Chirac who you want to paint as some kind of corrupt traitor, if the world had listened to me and the anti-war movement in Britain, we would not be in the disaster that we are in today. Senator, this is the mother of all smokescreens. You are trying to divert attention from the crimes that you supported, from the theft of billions of dollars of Iraq's wealth. "Have a look at the real Oil-for-Food scandal. Have a look at the 14 months you were in charge of Baghdad, the first 14 months when $8.8 billion of Iraq's wealth went missing on your watch. Have a look at Halliburton and other American corporations that stole not only Iraq's money, but the money of the American taxpayer. "Have a look at the oil that you didn't even meter, that you were shipping out of the country and selling, the proceeds of which went who knows where? Have a look at the $800 million you gave to American military commanders to hand out around the country without even counting it or weighing it. "Have a look at the real scandal breaking in the newspapers today, revealed in the earlier testimony in this committee. That the biggest sanctions busters were not me or Russian politicians or French politicians. The real sanctions busters were your own companies with the connivance of your own Government." From papadop at peak.org Tue May 17 15:32:43 2005 From: papadop at peak.org (MichaelP) Date: Tue May 17 15:32:48 2005 Subject: [Mai-not] Galloway - manhandles the U$ Senate Message-ID: But this is a balanced Reuters story Michael http://www.reuters.co.uk/newsArticle.jhtml?type=topNews&storyID=729751§ion=news&src=rss/uk/topNews Galloway takes on Senate Tue May 17, 2005 10:52 PM BST Galloway Rejects US Charges Play By Sue Pleming WASHINGTON (Reuters) Maverick MP George Galloway angrily rejected on Tuesday as "utterly preposterous" charges by the U.S. Congress that he profited from the Iraq oil-for-food programme and used the hearing as a platform to attack the U.S.-led invasion. Far from showing the usual deference of witnesses before Congress, Galloway defiantly told a Senate committee its evidence against him was false, condemned the investigation and demanded to know why it had not questioned him first before making the allegations. The east London Member of Parliament appeared before the U.S. Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, which is examining how Saddam used oil to reward politicians, particularly from Russia, France and Britain, under the U.N.'s oil-for-food program. As the sharp exchange unfolded, the mood in the packed room was electric with occasional snickers from the audience at Galloway's jibes at the senators. Galloway bluntly confronted the Republican chairman of the committee, Sen. Norm Coleman of Minnesota, and challenged the attorney to back up claims the British MP profited handsomely from the now defunct program. Some of his harshest remarks concerned Coleman's support for the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq that ousted President Saddam Hussein. "Now I know that standards have slipped over the last few years in Washington, but for a lawyer, you are remarkably cavalier with any idea of justice," Galloway said. Galloway accused Coleman of sullying his reputation and falsely asserting that he gave money to Saddam. "You call that justice?" he asked, adding later: "This is utterly preposterous." The MP told reporters later he felt Coleman had failed in his cross-examination. "He's not much of a lyncher," he said. Coleman, in turn, said afterward he did not think Galloway was a "credible witness" and that if he lied to the committee there would be consequences. A maverick kicked out of the Labour Party for his fervent opposition to the Iraq war and for personal attacks on Prime Minister Tony Blair, Galloway used the opportunity to criticize the U.S. invasion of Iraq. "Senator, in everything I said about Iraq, I turned out to be right and you turned out to be wrong, and 100,000 people have paid with their lives -- 1,600 of them American soldiers sent to their deaths on a pack of lies," he said. DOCUMENTS Coleman, who did not respond to Galloway's criticism, stuck to questions over the MP's dealings in Iraq and quizzed him over Iraqi Oil Ministry documents the senator said showed he received oil allocations. "Senior Iraqi officials have confirmed that you, in fact, received oil allocations and that the documents that identify you as an allocation recipient are valid," said Coleman, urging Galloway to provide evidence to the contrary. The committee released documents it said showed Saddam gave Galloway the rights to export 20 million barrels of oil under the defunct humanitarian program. Former French Interior Minister Charles Pasqua, now a French senator, also was named as getting vouchers for 11 million barrels. Pasqua, who also denied the allegations, was not at the hearing. The U.N. oil-for-food program, which began in late 1996 and ended in 2003, was aimed at easing the impact of sanctions imposed after Saddam's troops invaded Kuwait in 1990. Mark Greenblatt, legal counsel on the committee, told senators Galloway had used his cancer charity "Mariam's Appeal" to conceal these allocations and provided several Oil Ministry documents referring to the charity. Galloway denied this. Greenblatt said a senior Iraqi official interviewed by the committee's investigators again in Baghdad on Monday, had confirmed allegations against Galloway and authenticated Iraqi oil ministry documents. Baghdad was allowed to sell oil to buy basic goods and could negotiate its own contracts, but the program has been dogged by allegations of massive fraud and charges Saddam used it to buy influence in the West. Coleman's panel also gave details about Iraqi oil allocations to Russia's presidential council, which advises President Vladimir Putin. Senate investigators said there was no evidence Putin knew of the payments. A report released on Monday said Saddam's government provided Putin's former chief of staff, Alexander Voloshin, and the council with oil rights worth nearly $3 million in exchange for support to lift U.N. sanctions against Iraq imposed in August 1990 after the invasion of Kuwait. The committee also said 75 million barrels of oil were allocated to Vladimir Zhirinovsky, an ultranationalist Russian parliamentarian who made frequent visits to Iraq, or his political party. From dgiles at central.murdoch.edu.au Tue May 17 17:45:07 2005 From: dgiles at central.murdoch.edu.au (Dion Giles) Date: Tue May 17 17:45:15 2005 Subject: [Mai-not] Galloway In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <6.1.1.1.0.20050518083733.02f385c0@central.murdoch.edu.au> The reason for the lie-based campaign against George Galloway is to try to block a demonstrably truth-based campaign by Mr Galloway to get Tony Bliar charged before the ICJ with war crimes. The case against Bliar is rock-solid, especially in view of the Bush-Bliar documents that came to light recently and the recently-revealed official legal opinion that Bliar had lied about in the House of Commons. They're desperate over this, and it is to be hoped that if they manage to gaol Galloway others will step forward to continue to mount the case against Bliar. Dion Giles Western Australia From jfos at net-tech.com.au Tue May 17 17:44:46 2005 From: jfos at net-tech.com.au (John) Date: Tue May 17 17:56:32 2005 Subject: [Mai-not] no comment In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <6.1.0.6.1.20050518104303.02b434f0@mail.net-tech.com.au> At 03:38 18/05/05, you wrote: >>> a really good photoshopped version of the Nuremburg trial >> >>Ariel Ultra is missing! >> >>Chris > >And SHOULD be there. > >I don't want you to think I was responsible for that EXCELLENT photo. I am >pretty good at Photoshop but not THAT good. Whoever did it had to obtain >a good version of the original photo and then find good pictures of all >the new war criminals with their heads at the correct angles. Then the >artist would have had to carefully remove the new backgrounds so that the >heads didn't have any digital junk around the edges. Then, everything >would have to be composited and a new jpeg generated. > >Three days of tedious work is my guess at the minimum time this all >required. I was especially impressed by the inclusion of Alan Greenspan >with his hand to his face. > >Brilliant--utterly brilliant. That it is. thanks once more for all the excellent articles you post to this list Jonathon john foster victoria, australia From dgiles at central.murdoch.edu.au Tue May 17 18:13:24 2005 From: dgiles at central.murdoch.edu.au (Dion Giles) Date: Tue May 17 18:13:32 2005 Subject: [Mai-not] Is Washington Post preparing to dump its protege? Message-ID: <6.1.1.1.0.20050518085726.02f66928@central.murdoch.edu.au> If you are interested in Star Wars (I'm not) or in its impact on public consciousness (I certainly am) it is well worth reading Dan Froomkin's Washington Post article at http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/blog/2005/05/16/BL2005051600615.html Froomkin describes the latest Star Wars episode as the strongest anti-Bush film since Fahrenheit 9-11, and proceeds to present a roundup of commentaries around the world (each hyperlinked to the source). It is surprising to find such an article in such a newspaper. Educationalists (academics and bureaucrats who write about the work of people who can actually teach) have a term "advance organiser" for the tactic of preparing a class to identify the important message in the lesson to follow. Any of us who know people who are likely to go to see this film could do well to provide an advance organiser following Dan Froomkin. Dion Giles Western Australia From eltechno at clear.lakes.com Wed May 18 00:01:32 2005 From: eltechno at clear.lakes.com (Jonathan Larson) Date: Wed May 18 00:03:05 2005 Subject: [Mai-not] Blair blamed for Indian farmers' deaths Message-ID: Blair blamed for Indian farmers' deaths IANS[ TUESDAY, MAY 17, 2005 04:11:59 PM ] http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/articleshow/1113107.cms LONDON: The British government had its back to the wall over its development policies on Tuesday after claims that it paid a think tank to enforce needless privatisation of state units in India's Andhra Pradesh - a move that contributed to thousands of farmer suicides. Christian Aid, the international non-governmental organisation, said in a devastating report published on Monday that in India, unfettered liberalisation policies backed by the British government had led to a crisis in agriculture, spiralling rural debt and an epidemic of suicide among poor farmers. The group says that more than 4,000 farmers have committed suicide in the southern Indian state since the so-called 'reforms' initiated by ousted Chief Minister Chandra Babu Naidu's "hard-line liberalising regime", in part bankrolled by the British government. Astonishingly, the report, titled 'The Damage Done: Aid, Death and Dogma,' revealed that the privatisation was implemented not by Britain's Department for International Development (DfID), but by the Adam Smith Institute, a right-wing think tank. While DfID, created by the centre-left Labour government under Prime Minister Tony Blair, has won praise for its development policies, the Adam Smith Institute is well-known for its close ideological proximity to the opposition Conservative Party. In a statement, DfID's deputy head in India Howard Taylor also said the department does not support unfettered free trade or forced liberalisation and that "it is for the state or national governments with which DfID works to determine what economic reforms they undertake". "This is not just bizarre - in fact, many people in Britain have been extremely worried that millions of pounds of taxpayers' money is being used to bankroll the Adam Smith Institute by this government," John McGhie, campaigns and investigations director at Christian Aid said. McGhie also strongly rebutted DfID's claim, made Monday night, that its support for economic reforms in Andhra Pradesh, including the privatisation of state-owned enterprises, has helped safeguard the livelihoods of "around two million people" in the state. McGhie acknowledged that the Labour government's broad policy thrust was not to support unfettered liberalisation and privatisation, but added that this "180 degree U-turn was very recent - after years of supporting liberalisation." One stark example of how unfettered privatisation went wrong, said McGhie, was the fate of the Andhra Pradesh State Seed Development Corporation (APSSDC), which was allowed to languish to make way for private operators to move in. The result was sub-standard seeds, higher prices, low productivity and farm debts. "I don't know where DfID gets its figures from, but the very fact that the new Andhra government has revived the APSSDC shows that its privatisation was damaging to farmers." Mincing no words, the Christian Aid report draws a strong link between the privatisation of 42 state units in Andhra Pradesh and the farm suicides. "The immediate cause of these deaths is debt. This debt was brought on by a number of factors, all of which, except for the weather, can be ascribed to liberalisation," it says. "These liberalising factors at both national and state level were the results of policies made by India's central government, the Andhra Pradesh government of Chandrababu Naidu, the IMF, the World Bank and DFID. Christian Aid is now campaigning for the British government to bring in legislation to make it illegal for any government to tie development aid to enforced liberalisation and privatisation. McGhie said the DfID's outsourcing arrangement with the Adam Smith Institute too is coming to an end, adding: "It takes a long time to turn around a tanker." -- ------------------ War remains the decisive human failure. - John Kenneth Galbraith Jonathan web site at: http://elegant-technology.com -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://www.globalproblematique.net/pipermail/mai-not/attachments/20050518/9061f3ef/attachment-0001.html From eltechno at clear.lakes.com Wed May 18 07:43:33 2005 From: eltechno at clear.lakes.com (Jonathan Larson) Date: Wed May 18 07:46:09 2005 Subject: [Mai-not] A steeper ladder for the have-nots Message-ID: 'A steeper ladder for the have-nots' May 18 @ 08:54:30 EDT By Derrick Z. Jackson, Boston Globe http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2005/05/18/a_steeper_ladderfor_the_have_nots/ IT IS STUNNING to see the Wall Street Journal and The New York Times simultaneously devote a series to the American class divide. The Journal reported last Friday, "Despite the widespread belief that the US remains a more mobile society than Europe, economists and sociologists say that in recent decades the typical child starting out in poverty in continental Europe or in Canada has had a better chance at prosperity." In an echo, the Times wrote vitually the same thing, adding that in America, a child's economic background is a better predictor of school performance than in Denmark, the Netherlands, or France. The best that could be said was that class mobility in the United States is "not as low as in developing countries like Brazil, where escape from poverty is so difficult that the lower class is all but frozen in place." Oh joy. This is what we have come to? Comparisons to developing countries? Another odd thing about the series is that the mainstays of the mainstream press are making a big deal out of the divide after years in which many economists warned that our policies were plunging us straight toward Brazil. For years, groups like the Boston-based United for a Fair Economy and the Institute for Policy Studies sent up smoke signals that should have been a smoking gun. In 1973, the ratio of CEO pay to worker pay was 43 to 1. By 1992, it was 145 to 1. By 1997, it was 326 to 1. By 2000, it hit a sky-high 531 to 1. The post 9/11 shakeouts and corporate scandals of recent years on the surface narrowed the gap back to 301 to 1 in 2003. But a much worse parallel global gap is emerging in the era of outsourcing. United for a Fair Economy published a report last summer that found CEOs of the top US outsourcing companies made 1,300 times more than their computer programmers in India and 3,300 more than Indian call-center employees. Such groups say if the minimum wage kept up with the rise in CEO pay, it would be $15.76 an hour instead of its current $5.15. Looking at it another way, the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, another often written-off liberal think tank, published a report last month that in the last three years, the share of US national income that goes toward corporate profits is at its highest levels since World War II, while the share of national income that goes to wages and salaries is at a record low. This completes a perfect storm over the last quarter century of corporate welfare for those with the most among us and vilification for those with the least. Americans have been seduced by simplistic notions of rugged individualism to vote more to punish people (welfare mothers, prison booms, and affirmative action in the 1990s, and gay marriage in 2004) than for programs and policies that might lead to healing the gaps (national healthcare and revamped public schools). It is obvious that Americans believed that none of the inequalities long endured by the poor (because it's all their fault, right?) would seep into our lives. We were wrong. With suburban schools slashing their budgets, healthcare costs rising, retirement funds in doubt, and the next generation facing a drop in their life span from obesity and diabetes, the nation is sliding into a dangerous place. A quarter century of a "mine, all mine" ethos continues to work for CEOs and the upper class. The rest of America finds the ladder taller and steepening. Much of the nation is now one catastrophic injury away from falling into poverty. It should be a national emergency that stratification in the richest nation in the world has us fading from the relative mobility of Europe and sinking toward the discouragement in developing countries. It is no wonder why politicians who protect the wealthy scream "class warfare" every time someone talks about inequity. It is a diversion to keep those who vote against their own interests from realizing they are victims of friendly fire. Derrick Z. Jackson's e-mail address is jackson@globe.com. -- ------------------ War remains the decisive human failure. - John Kenneth Galbraith Jonathan web site at: http://elegant-technology.com -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://www.globalproblematique.net/pipermail/mai-not/attachments/20050518/b247d241/attachment.html From eltechno at clear.lakes.com Wed May 18 07:46:23 2005 From: eltechno at clear.lakes.com (Jonathan Larson) Date: Wed May 18 07:46:36 2005 Subject: [Mai-not] no comment In-Reply-To: <6.1.0.6.1.20050518104303.02b434f0@mail.net-tech.com.au> References: <6.1.0.6.1.20050518104303.02b434f0@mail.net-tech.com.au> Message-ID: >>Brilliant--utterly brilliant. > >That it is. thanks once more for all the excellent articles you post >to this list Jonathon > >john foster >victoria, australia Thanks. I only pass along what I find especially interesting myself. I am happy when others appreciate this primitive selection process. -- Terrorism is the war of the poor, and war is the terrorism of the rich. - Patrick J. Buchanan Jonathan web site at: http://elegant-technology.com From creuss at bluemail.ch Wed May 18 07:57:09 2005 From: creuss at bluemail.ch (Christoph Reuss) Date: Wed May 18 07:58:09 2005 Subject: [Mai-not] Is Washington Post preparing to dump its protege? Message-ID: > Froomkin describes the latest Star Wars episode as the strongest anti-Bush > film since Fahrenheit 9-11, and proceeds to present a roundup of > commentaries around the world (each hyperlinked to the source). > > It is surprising to find such an article in such a newspaper. Not really surprising. Like F911, it's another piece of Dem party PR that's designed to deflect attention from the fact that the Dems are imperialists too. The message shouldn't be that there are nice imperialists (Dems) and ugly imperialists (Reps), but that imperialism as such is ugly. You can't expect that message in Holowood movies. On the contrary, the underlying plot of the Star Wars series is to normalize the idea of an empire fighting any opponents as "terrorists", not only worldwide but in space too. Chris ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ SpamWall: Mail to this addy is deleted unread unless it contains the keyword "igve". From eltechno at clear.lakes.com Wed May 18 09:15:35 2005 From: eltechno at clear.lakes.com (Jonathan Larson) Date: Wed May 18 09:20:59 2005 Subject: [Mai-not] Resisting the Latest Version of "European Construction" Message-ID: Resisting the Latest Version of "European Construction" Vive La France? By JEAN BRICMONT http://www.counterpunch.org/bricmont05182005.html When I went off to work as a teacher-researcher in the United States in 1978, the contrast with Europe was striking. An educational system generally of very poor quality and glaring inequality, a constant invasion of daily life by advertising and commercialisation, a strongly anti-intellectual culture, a population profoundly alienated politically (two parties monopolizing public life, pursuing the same policies and with limited ability to mobilize the electorate), an omnipresent militarism and scandalous social disparities (notably in terms of security, housing and access to health care). And all that was upheld ideologically by a perfect self-satisfaction and by the idea that the American model should be imposed, like it or not, on the rest of the world. In those days, Europe was largely social democratic and peaceful; there was a strong system of social protection, unemployment existed but was not structural, education was being democratized and modernized but continued to transmit knowledge, television was free of advertising, it was possible to walk safely in the streets, there was no far right to be seen, there was no talk of fundamentalism or separate ethnic communities, and the idea of taxing the rich was not shocking to anyone (except to the rich themselves, of course). Having been defeated in its colonial conflicts, Europe had abandoned its imperial ambitions and its citizens were tired of war. All was far from perfect, but, compared to the present-day outlook, it was a "socialist paradise" that managed to be both democratic and real. On the other hand, from the viewpoint of the European privileged classes, it was, if not hell (their privileges being far from abolished), at least purgatory. Fortunately for them, the eighties and nineties were the time of neo-liberal and neo-militarist follies. Europe came around to imitating the United States, even if, at the same time, the United States was getting worse. This at least maintained the gap between the two, obscured the extent of the upheavals underway, and allowed the European elites to complain ceaselessly that "Europe was falling behind". One of the preferred methods of catching up is called "European construction", whose latest manifestation is the treaty for establishing a European Constitution. The method is simplicity itself. It consists in isolating political processes from the influence of the citizenry, by entrusting a maximum of decisions to a non-elected bureaucracy which is not answerable to any parliament, but which is open to the influence of every possible private pressure group (including certain NGOs). European construction boils down to transferring State power to a super-privileged bureaucracy which preaches to others the purest economic liberalism. Elections can go on being held, but they are of no importance, because no serious political alternative can be proposed, no "New Deal", no "structural reform", no "common programme of the left", no "Italian way to socialism". Competition and the free market are the only prospects on the horizon now and forever. And, as in the United States, people vote more and more with their feet by avoiding the ballot box, or else vote for whoever seems to be most hated by those in power (Le Pen for instance). The results of the policies accompanying this "European construction" are catastrophic: whereas the urgent need, after the rapid growth of the fifties and sixties, was for disarmament, cooperation with the third world and ecological development, on the contrary everything was done to encourage waste, endanger people's very existence, exacerbate antagonisms between North and South and give free rein to every possible particularism and fundamentalism. Jeremy Rifkin's recent book speaks of the "European dream" and provides a long list of Europe's advantages in the fields of security, health, education and even scientific research. But all that is precisely the effect of our "falling behind" the model our "advanced Europeans" are desperately trying to catch up with. Of course, there has been economic progress. But there was also economic progress -- more of it, in fact -- during the preceding period of social democracy and sovereign States. But for the past twenty years, how many social advances have there been? What progress has been made in workers' control over their work? How many major collective decisions have been taken to improve living conditions? It is no doubt better not to ask such questions. In the discussions on the constitution, at least on the left, there are in general two types of argument: those who refer to the texts, who are for voting "no", and those who refer to Auschwitz and Le Pen, who are for voting "yes". To hear the latter, one would think that rejection of the constitution would lead us into war, if not genocide. This argument, which considers that peace depends on eliminating sovereignty, fails to note that there is more than one kind of sovereignty. Europe is seeking to create its own sovereignty, imitating that of the United States which has strong borders and troops deployed to the four corners of the earth. This creates the danger of endless war, as sooner or later people do not welcome armed missionaries. On the other hand, Switzerland is without doubt the most sovereign country in Europe, but it has never sent its troops abroad, never committed genocide nor started a war. A referendum has its disadvantages in comparison to an election: those who win an election can always end up doing the opposite of what they promised. The clarity of a referendum prevents such manipulations, and that may be why the procedure is often denounced as dangerous and "populist". On the other hand, there is no way to prevent people giving the same answer to a question for different reasons, which means that there is sure to be left-wing "no", a right-wing "no" and a far right "no". But so what? It is rather odd that those who have supported the policies creating the social conditions that giver rise to the far right now turn around and try to use its existence against those who are precisely seeking to break with those policies. European construction also enables ecological and socialist leaders to protect themselves from their own principles, or rather from those of their supporters. Every capitulation to the right can always be justified by "Europe". Indeed -- but who wants and who has constructed that Europe? It is easier to evoke Auschwitz than to explain how a social, democratic and ecological Europe can be based on a "highly competitive" deregulated economy. To cite only one simple example, how is it possible to pursue an ecological policy if public transport has to be profitable? The most dishonest argument of the "yes" camp is without doubt the one about a strong Europe standing up to the United States. For one thing, it is enough to read the American press or to listen to U.S. leaders, who wholeheartedly support the "yes" (while complaining that the most popular argument is precisely the one about standing up to the United States), to realize how shaky that argument is. For another, a Europe whose educational system is sacrified on the altar of short-term profit will be simply a second USA, not an alternative to it. The rest of the world already has enough problems with a single ignorant, aggressive and arrogant superpower. Preferring peace to war and security to competition means opposing the United States, or at least what it represents, but also opposing "European construction". There is at least one argument used by the "yes' camp that is partly correct: the debate goes beyond the narrow bounds of the treaty's text to become largely symbolic. It fundamentally pits against each other partisans and adversaries of the neo-liberal order, those who want to pursue the policy begun in the 1980s and those who want to change it. A victory of the "no" would provoke a political shock wave, principally by awakening, throughout Europe, the social and popular aspirations which have for so long been repressed and defeated. With Bush in Washington, Sharon in Tel Aviv, Wolfowitz at the World Bank and Ratzinger in the Vatican, one might conclude that reactionary forces have got their way worldwide. But with Chavez in Caracas, the "no" which is growing in Paris and the U.S. army bogged down in Iraq, hope may be changing sides and this is what gives a profound meaning to this campaign. Even if the "yes" wins (and in light of the disproportion of the means at the disposal of the two sides, it would be a miracle if if didn't), the mobilization for the "no" shows that the times are changing and that the days of TINA (There Is No Alternative to unbridled capitalism) are no doubt counted. After all, the grassroots movement for "no" was launched primarily (on the left) by ATTAC and by the CGT base, which in themselves are far from representing a majority of French people. The echo of that movement throughout French society is an immense sign of encouragement and shows that if the genuine left is at once bold and intelligent, it can rally practically a majority of French people around specific objectives. Moreover, as in the case of Venezuela's referendum, or the anti-war mobilization in 2003, a victory of the "no" would show that the media are not invincible, that they don't yet exercise total brain control and that Internet is a formidable weapon against their propaganda. In 2003, the former leader of the Algerian FLN, Ahmed Ben Bella, so many of whose companions were killed and tortured by the French army, went so far as to exclaim, "Vive la France!" He would not have been able to exclaim "vive l'Europe", given how subservient its bureaucracy is to the United States. But France, far from being a "black sheep", at that moment of its history was a sign of hope and rallying for the whole of the Arab world about to be plunged once more into the horror of colonialism and, as a result, of a war of national liberation (which is far from being over in Iraq, or for that matter in Palestine). By the same token, the Venezuela of Chavez and Cuba are not "isolated" in Latin America -- they embody the ideals and hopes of the masses of the people. The left-wing elites have for a long time shamed France by reducing her past to Vichy and (for the far left) to the Algerian war. But France is also the first democratic revolution on the European continent (and the most radical of all), the Paris Commune, the denunciation of anti-semitism at the time of the Dreyfus case, the Popular Front, the biggest of all general strikes (in May-June 1968) and the model for secularism throughout the world. With the campaign for "no" to the European constitution, after the official "no" in 2003 to American imperial policy, France once again arouses surprise and admiration in much of the world and gives a fresh impetus to a movement, stalled for decades but more necessary than ever, in favor of peace and social progress. Jean Bricmont lives in Brussels. -- ------------------ War remains the decisive human failure. - John Kenneth Galbraith Jonathan web site at: http://elegant-technology.com -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://www.globalproblematique.net/pipermail/mai-not/attachments/20050518/2d9932f0/attachment.html From jfos at net-tech.com.au Tue May 17 18:38:15 2005 From: jfos at net-tech.com.au (John) Date: Wed May 18 14:13:29 2005 Subject: [Mai-not] Fw: Military Pay in the good ol' U$ of A Message-ID: <6.1.0.6.1.20050518113708.02bad570@mail.net-tech.com.au> fyi, john WHETHER OR NOT WE SUPPORT THE WAR...OUR SERVICEMEN AND WOMEN NEED OUR SUPPORT IN EVERY WAY!!! Subject: Military Pay This is an Airman's response to Cindy Williams' editorial piece in the Washington Times about MILITARY PAY, it should be printed in all newspapers across America. On Nov. 12, Ms Cindy Williams (from Laverne and Shirley TV show) wrote a piece for the Washington Times, denouncing the pay raise(s) coming service members' way this year -- citing that the stated 13% wage was more than they deserve. A young airman from Hill AFB responds to her article below. He ought to get a bonus for this. "Ms Williams: I just had the pleasure of reading your column, "Our GIs earn enough" and I am a bit confused. Frankly, I'm wondering where this vaunted overpayment is going, because as far as I can tell, it disappears every month between DFAS (The Defense Finance and Accounting Service)and my bank account. Checking my latest earnings statement I see that I make $1,117.80 before taxes. After taxes, I take home $874.20. When I run that through the calculator, I come up with an annual salary of $13,413.60 before taxes, and $10,490.40, after. I work in the Air Force Network Control Center where I am part of the team responsible for a 5,000 host computer network. I am involved with infrastructure segments, specifically with Cisco Systems equipment. A quick check under jobs for Network Technicians in the Washington, D.C. area reveals a position in my career field, requiring three years experience with my job. Amazingly, this job does NOT pay $13,413.60 a year. No, this job is being offered at $70,000 to $80,000 per annum...I'm sure you can draw the obvious conclusions. Given the tenor of your column, I would assume that you NEVER had the pleasure of serving your country in her armed forces. Before you take it upon yourself to once more castigate congressional and DOD leadership for attempting to get the families in the military's lowest pay brackets off of WIC and food stamps, I suggest that you join a group of deploying soldiers headed for AFGHANISTAN; I leave the choice of service branch up to you. Whatever choice you make, though, opt for the SIX month rotation: it will guarantee you the longest possible time away from your family and friends, thus giving you full "deployment experien ce." As your group prepares to board the plane, make sure to note the spouses and children who are saying good-bye to their loved ones. Also take care to note that several families are still unsure of how they'll be able to make ends meet while the primary breadwinner is gone -- obviously they've been squandering the "vast" piles of cash the government has been giving them. Try to deploy over a major holiday; Christmas and Thanksgiving are perennial favorites. And when you're actually over there, sitting in a foxhole, shivering against the cold desert night; and the flight sergeant tells you that there aren't enough people on shift to relieve you for chow, remember this: trade whatever MRE (meal-ready-to-eat) you manage to get for the tuna noodle casserole or cheese tortellini, and add Tabasco to everything. This gives some flavor. Talk to your loved ones as often as you are permitted; it won't nearly be long enough or often enough, but take what you can get and be thankful for it. You may have picked up on the fact that I disagree with most of the points you present in your op-ed piece. But, tomorrow from KABUL, I will defend to the death your right to say it. You see, I am an American fighting man, a guarantor of your First Amendment rights and every other right you cherish. On a daily basis, my brother and sister soldiers worldwide ensure that you and people like you can thumb your collective nose at us, all on a salary that is nothing short of pitiful and under conditions that would make most people cringe. We hemorrhage our best and brightest into the private sector because we can't offer the stability and pay of civilian companies. And you, Ms. Williams, have the gall to say that we make more than we deserve? Rubbish! A1C Michael Bragg Hill AFB AFNCC IF YOU AGREE, PLEASE PASS THIS ALONG TO AS MANY PEOPLE AS POSSIBLE AND SHOW OUR SUPPORT OF THE AMERICAN FIGHTING MEN AND WOMEN. THANK YOU Brought to you by HTTP://WWW.STOPNATO.ORG.UK From jfos at net-tech.com.au Tue May 17 20:55:29 2005 From: jfos at net-tech.com.au (John) Date: Wed May 18 14:14:01 2005 Subject: [Mai-not] Greed (Part I) Message-ID: <6.1.0.6.1.20050518135152.02b14a10@mail.net-tech.com.au> "People are going hungry in America. A Los Angeles survey found more than a quarter of low income residents, many working, are not getting enough food to meet basic nutritional needs.(snip) Misery is a word seldom applied to the contemporary scene. Like wretchedness it seems antique, an Old World term. But many Americans live in cold, dank slums; many do not earn enough for shelter, many sleep outside. In America's inner cities and at its lowest levels, under freeway bridges and in tubercular alleys, in stained and broken rooming houses and in torn-apart schools, misery exists and persists.(snip) ...The whispered truth is that this nation bent on the pursuit of happiness is not so happy. Suicide afflicts all classes, and suicide rates are now so high as to eclipse homicide rates with three suicides for every two murders.(snip) Competition is a fundamental good in utilitarian economics. Competition is a process which results in inequalities - winners and losers. ....Inequality is a non-issue to the defenders of Smithian economics. The pursuit of excellence makes it inevitable and, they argue, the pursuit of excellence benefits all. As this society grows, it becomes more unequal. As aggregate wealth goes up, equality goes down. Our population has soared 13.2% in the last decade alone to 281 million,8 and the wealth has been concentrating in fewer hands (it has since the 1770s 9) and the difference between the richest and the poorest is now immense. While the wealthiest individuals count their assets in the tens of billions, the lowest classes are falling. Americans' earnings are more unequal today than they have been any time in the past 60 years This is a flamboyantly optimistic and self-congratulatory society, and the puzzle is why it allows this suffering. The inequalities are stunning, but a frequent attitude is a shrug - so what?" sanity, humanity and science post-autistic economics review Also available on line at http://www.btinternet.com/~pae_news/review31/issue31.htm back issues at www.paecon.net Forum on Economic Reform Greed (Part I) Julian Edney 1 An essay concerning the origins, nature, extent and morality of this destructive force in free market economies. Paradoxes and omissions in Adam Smith's original theory permit - encourage - greed without restraint so that in a very large society [USA] over two centuries it has become an undemocratic force creating precipitous inequalities; divisions in this society now approach a kind of wealth apartheid, and our values are quite unlike Smith's: this is an immensely wealthy society but it is not a humane society. Wealth and poverty are connected, in fact recent sociological theory shows our institutions routinely design inequality in, but this connection is largely avoided in texts and in the media, as is the notion that greed is a moral wrong. Problems created by greed cannot be solved by technology. We are also distracted by already-outdated environmental rhetoric, arguments that scarcities and human suffering follow from abuse of our ecology. Rather, these scarcities are the result of what people do to people. This focus opens practical solutions. -o0o- Sign the tab in certain Midtown eateries and your neighbors' eyes slide over. Is that a $48,000 Michel Perchin pen? What's on your wrist - a $300,000 Breguet watch? In Palm Springs and Bel Air, $100,000 twin-turbo Porsches and $225,000 Ferraris buzz the warm streets. In New York at an exclusive Morell & Company auction last May, a single magnum of Dom Perignon champagne was sold for $5,750. And there are the paintings of course - one evening at auction two Monets sold for $43 million.2 Hotel rooms, anyone, at $10,000 a night? Estate agents in suburbs of Dallas and Palm Beach have advertised baronial homes for sale at over $40 million.3 These are prices paid by the exceptionally wealthy, the folks who skim the pages of the Robb Report (average annual salary of subscribers: $1.2 million) in whose glossy pages are reviewed the best of everything. In a recent issue a southern plantation is advertised, "everybody's dream," at $8.5 million. Robert Reich points out that the superrich live in a parallel universe to the rest of the country: much of the time we don't see them because they live in walled estates, travel in private limousines and use different airports from the rest of us.4 There's lots of them. There are now more than 200 billionaires. Some five percent of American households have assets over $1 million. And we're back to levels of extravagant consumption not seen for 100 years.5 By historical accounts this is a nation of persistent and resilient people with an unshakable mission: the pursuit of happiness. This idea of happiness is largely connected with wealth (and this connection has long philosophic roots). It is a nation of ambitious people with notions of unfettered future growth, a nation that celebrates abundance. There seems to be no reason anyone should be deprived of luxury, if he works hard. Indeed with this country's aggregate wealth, there should be no reason anyone should ever go hungry or suffer. People are going hungry in America. A Los Angeles survey found more than a quarter of low income residents, many working, are not getting enough food to meet basic nutritional needs. And 10% are experiencing hunger.6 Estimates are that 3 out of 10 Americans will face poverty sometime in their lives.7 Misery is a word seldom applied to the contemporary scene. Like wretchedness it seems antique, an Old World term. But many Americans live in cold, dank slums; many do not earn enough for shelter, many sleep outside. In America's inner cities and at its lowest levels, under freeway bridges and in tubercular alleys, in stained and broken rooming houses and in torn-apart schools, misery exists and persists. All our largest cities contain neighborhoods where some people live day to day in apartments that could be mistaken for closets, some fearing to leave home on gang-terrorized streets, some sharing bus seats with people with drug-scarred arms. Every great metropolis has its skid row mired in fecal gutters, where whole blocks are awash in narcotics and violence, its inhabitants despised and flatly abandoned. America is once again a nation of extremes. Sealed Off As this society grows, it becomes more unequal. As aggregate wealth goes up, equality goes down. Our population has soared 13.2% in the last decade alone to 281 million,8 and the wealth has been concentrating in fewer hands (it has since the 1770s9) and the difference between the richest and the poorest is now immense. While the wealthiest individuals count their assets in the tens of billions, the lowest classes are falling. Americans' earnings are more unequal today than they have been any time in the past 60 years.10 Some corporations' CEOs have been making over 400 times the hourly rate of their lowest worker11 but this inequality is not just a feature of businesses, it spans a variety of professions, perhaps to include my favorite musicians and your favorite athletes. For example, shortstop Alex Rodriguez's $252 million 10 year baseball contract pays him $170,000 per game.12 To a person receiving the average allocation of $83 per month in food stamps, the inequality is astronomical, and the chances of closing it so small it doesn't feel like a real freedom. If the best-off are sealing themselves off, the worst-off are also doubly fenced about, this time by the distrust and aversion of those above. Around 20% of American children are living in poverty. An estimated two million are homeless some time during the year,13 including whole families and people who have full- or part-time jobs.14 This is a flamboyantly optimistic and self-congratulatory society, and the puzzle is why it allows this suffering. The inequalities are stunning, but a frequent attitude is a shrug - so what?. These days it is hard to plumb a concern. Frequently I survey acquaintances with this touchstone question, attributed to Rawls:15 Suppose there are people living on one side of a big city who throw weekly parties so lavish that afterwards they are throwing out meat, while on the other side of the same town are people so poor they cannot afford to buy meat at all. Is this a moral problem? I get a spectrum of answers: "No problem" to "Yes, of course" and in between "Technological, but not ethical problem," and "Maybe, but (horrified look) what solution are you pushing?" - as well as some yawns, as if these questions were so old fashioned. I believe the variety of these responses eventually leads to the question of what kind of society we live in. Winner Takes All My first point is that these extremes of wealth are connected. While the rich are growing richer, the poor are growing poorer,16 and this is no coincidence. But we largely deny the connection. This is a society which, as the divide between the happy and the abject grows, tries, now by education, now by medication, now by paradox, now by distraction, to avoid the inhuman consequences of its collective actions, and in the end - because none of those strategies is effective - it is one that uses specific strategies for vacating reality. Defenders, of course, argue that the rich getting richer benefits all, and that in an economy that is an unlimited, growing, open system, all can rise, that (once we get through temporary difficulties) we will find a full and abundant world. In fact these are not so much arguments as swollen cliches. There is indeed a problem, and it has a history. I will sift the philosophy of utilitarianism and Adam Smith's founding economics theory for origins. Smith's 1776 treatise, we recall, tied the growth of wealth to the work of common entrepreneurs. It refused the inherited inequalities of aristocracy and with the Enlightenment's notion of reason, a quality accessible to Everyman, it promptly democratized the economy. This philosophy was exported whole cloth to the new America, and it has since grown to dominate our economic policies, its influence is now worldwide. But despite its original claims, we will find it woven with mystical filaments and contradictions. I will show that as the theory is commonly related, it is hard to separate rationality from dogma. Competition is a fundamental good in utilitarian economics. Competition is a process which results in inequalities - winners and losers. It cannot be, in a society of free competitive units, that competition among all is good for all. Modern analysts Cook and Frank show free market competition has become so stark that we are becoming a winner-takes-all society.17 In a giant economy, aggressive acquisition, greed, where so widespread and popular as to be celebrated, has resulted in colossal differences, so that, as much as we are accustomed to reproaching the Europeans for their inequalities, we are now caught in a lie. We have become more unequal. The United States is the wealthiest nation. But its 20.3 percent child poverty rate ranks worse than all European nations.18 Historians Will and Ariel Durant19 estimated in their survey that the gap between the wealthiest and the poorest in America has become greater than at any time since Imperial plutocratic Rome. Paradoxes Inequality is a non-issue to the defenders of Smithian economics. The pursuit of excellence makes it inevitable and, they argue, the pursuit of excellence benefits all. So we are hostage to a paradox. As powerfully as we struggle for wealth and happiness we fling ourselves on the axiom that we all are equal, leaving some damage to the national psyche. The whispered truth is that this nation bent on the pursuit of happiness is not so happy. Suicide afflicts all classes, and suicide rates are now so high as to eclipse homicide rates with three suicides for every two murders. Surgeon General Satcher partially blamed the media.20 Clinical depression is at its highest rate in decades.21 There are unprecedented rates of anxiety, companionship itself is receding, trust is fading.22 Tens of millions are using prescription mood elevators. Scarcity oppresses. And the worst signs of unhappiness cluster in the lowest cuts: we have among the highest national rates of imprisonment, and the Administration concedes there are 5 million hard-core drug users in America23 and millions of alcoholics, all disproportionately among the poor. Resonating with the battle cry of the French Revolution, Liberte, Egalite, Fraternite, the American Constitution was written with promises of human liberty and equality. Freedom and equality qualify as the fundamental political virtues. They are the two legs upon which democracy walks. The second of the promises is broken. So we first have a philosophical problem: There are many reasons for inequality, but it is ensured in an unfettered materialistic society by a celebrated style of acquisition we call greed. Greed is not just the whimsical excess of the individual. Its most virulent forms are displayed by business groups and corporations - but aggregated, it is an antidemocratic force. Greed demolishes equity. Simply, you cannot have both unrestrained greed and equality. Apartheid Economy The principle of freedom always comes first, argues the Smithian capitalist. But in America, freedom has become something else, a wild individualism24 with a strange amnesia - a disconnect between parts of our culture. A kind of sociopathic haze is settling, helped by mood-altering drugs and television, and appearing in the fashionable cluelessness and chic ignorance - so ubiquitous they have aerated society to numbness. Another facet is the narcissism (to rival one of Dostoevsky's characters so narcissistic he cared more about an ounce of his own body fat than the lives of 100,000 of his own countrymen25). What the free individual chooses to do is now paramount., and the poor understand that detachment is the pivot. Detachment allows the paradox that you can both compete with others but not be involved with what results. The concept of "the common good" has almost disappeared, and nobody is his brother's keeper. Neither are these inequalities an unfortunate by-product of the healthy struggle. Competitive acquisition for the sake of exhibition is again in vogue - and it seems television repeatedly flaunts that on the way to wealth, there are no principles competitors won't compromise. Besides hunger and fear, lack of health care, decent education and housing shortages, which make living hard, the poor live with brash opulence in their faces. People in decaying buildings daily watch glittering television scenes of shining cars, ocean yachts, and overflowing parties of the rich and famous. Owned by these images, a poor person cannot but feel the differences, and year by year these images add a sedimented frustration, resentment, sense of failure and inferiority which they cannot avoid. Poverty is also punitive. The poverty-struck family is not just paying the price of its own failure: it is also paying the price of others' success. Still, many regard these problems as if they were no more than the economy's stubble, moles, and split ends. Second, we have a practical problem. The Durants show a cycle repeating through history. Great social inequality creates an unstable equilibrium. The swelling numbers of the poor and resentful come to rival the power of the rich. As grievances and restlessness grow, government worsens, becoming tyrannical. Eventually a critical point arrives. Wealth will be redistributed, either by politics, or by revolution. Denying the Shadow Could it happen in America? To some analysts, it is already beginning. A survey released by the Milton S. Eisenhower Foundation attributes our enduring levels of violence to "vast and shameful inequality in income, wealth and opportunity among urban poor" who are often "trapped in places of terror"26 - inequalities which are simply un-American, opines C. Murphy.27 Troubling studies exist, but we surround this research with technicians questioning methodology and politicians arguing the study represents no reality. There is denial: "Forget the data," asserts one newspaper columnist on poverty issues, " things have gotten better."28 Finally, this issue is no longer the environmentalist's concern about scarcity of natural resources, nor the population expert's warnings about Earth's limits to growth. These scarcities are man made, the result of what people do to people. The fact is, far from being an abundant world, it is a world of scarcity because we calibrate it so. And yet the moral connection is absent. Currently our aggregate wealth is like a high tide, covering many unpleasant things on the ocean floor. When there is full employment, we all seem happily raised. But a few years ago the Harvard Business Review carried an article daring to look down: Richard Freeman29 warns that under the surface America is becoming dangerously segregated, forming an apartheid economy, and the lowest are not free to move up. Freeman adds a shadow. He sketches in a huge new group of Americans, the economically sinking workers who are trailing their counterparts in other advanced countries. Sociologist Derber's point is that where people are homeless, starving, or jobless, civil society has failed.30 But these demographics will not reverse, because we are a society busily denying its own shadow. In this essay I will pull back the curtain on the irrational in this driving, powerful economy. Instead of an overarching machinery running on smooth technical devices, we shall see a clutter of denial, rationalization, visionary statements and internal contradictions. And the quietness around this topic has another reason. Perhaps we had better be quiet. If we look up, we see Goliath. Definitions Greed vastly predates Smithian economics, of course. It is one of the Bible's Seven Deadly Sins. Contemporary dictionaries define it as intense acquisitiveness of (usually material) goods or wealth. To dilate: Greed is the acquisition of a desirable good by one person or a group beyond need, resulting in unequal distribution to the point others are deprived. Competitive greed is the same type of acquisition deliberately to create that inequality. Punitive greed is the same type of acquisition deliberately to leave the deprived suffering, powerless or disabled. Sometimes it takes fine grained analysis of circumstance and motive to distinguish these, but all the preceding involve overt behaviors, and the measure is the resulting inequities. Simple greed does not require intention, for instance while continuing to acquire in the face of others' deprivation a person denies greed explaining he is unaware of results; it is still greed, the measure being the resulting inequity. Next, passive hoarding which perpetuates extremes of inequity previously created is also greed. Next, greed is not always impulsive. It may be planned and calibrated; sustained effort and greed are not incompatible. Next, greed can be exhibited by person, group, corporation, even government. Common observation also shows personality differences. Not everybody exhibits the extremes of greed; but I believe all people act on the impulse at some time in their lives. Separately, greed can be purely mental, a longing, or craving, akin to obsession and addiction, not acted upon, but this is the province of the psychologist. In practice, as James Childs points out, greedy individuals usually hoard both wealth and power.31 The origins of greed are not mysterious. Like the origins of the drive for power the seeds are everywhere, and if a little bit feels good, more must be better. Previous lack is not necessary to start greed any more than fire is started by lack of fire, but like fire greed expands where it can, it has no internal homeostatic mechanism and the bigger it gets, the faster it grows. Its spread is also quickened by social imitation, akin to panic spreading through a crowd. Greed is not a rational force. As a concept greed has largely lost its moral sting. Few contemporary dictionaries include that it is reprehensible. The modern fashion not to sound judgmental, situation ethics, and the habit of social scientists to use past deprivation, social pressure, low self esteem, background, entitlement and myriad extenuating circumstances to explain the behavior, make the moral question so complex, all has crumbled into uncertainty. This essay resurrects the moral dimension. If the consequences of greed are harm and pain, it is immoral. If greed is flaunted, when the pain is known, it is also sociopathic. These situations are quite common. Anyone doubting the concept of punitive greed should recall that the ancient book by Sun Tzu The Art of War is required reading in top corporate circles. Not all wealth is created by greed, and not all inequalities are caused by greed, but if you could start with a society of complete equals, unrestrained greed will be sufficient to quickly render that society unequal. It is also the purpose of this paper to suggest repairs, for which we need to know how our present problems started. Our founding economic theory is tangled. You had to be Bold The ordinary test of a philosophy is whether it makes people better and happier, whether it results in prosperity, cooperation and peace. Utilitarianism seemed a swaggering success because it dismantled the smothering pessimism of the Middle Ages, when a social caste system shackled your life chances, church dogma shrouded attitude and thought. Hobbes's dictum at the time was that life for Everyman was solitary, nasty, poor, brutish and short . Our current economic theory is based on a radically different idea. You had to be bold bringing out new ideas in the European 1700s but they were revolutionary times and philosophers risked their necks pushing some new arguments that people were created equal and each had the liberty to create his own destiny. The French Revolution opened with its violence for equality. In England these ideas took shape as utilitarianism, a put-together philosophy that is neither profound nor poetic, but which was brazenly inclusive, and it confronted a national system of unbearably elaborate dogma and ancient ritual. Jeremy Bentham, Henry Sidgwick,. J.S. Mill and Adam Smith drew the footings. Inverting the Problem Rather than religious, utilitarianism uses secular, psychological motivators to explain human behavior, the emotions of pleasure (happiness) and pain. Pleasure is a good. Its ethics: units of pleasure and pain can be summed and compared, and we should choose the act that results in the greatest good for the greatest number, calculations that any person can do. Utilitarianism is practical, astonishingly democratic, and astonishingly rule-free. The utilitarians bluntly advised governments, let the people alone. Let them be human, doing what they do naturally. So instead of having high priests and nobility dictating values, utilitarianism promotes the values of science, which are truth, practicality and factuality. Adam Smith's contribution was a step further, to give happiness a mercantile slant. In the new philosophy there is no conspicuous concern with sympathy, compassion, honesty, courage, grace, generosity, altruism, charity, beauty, purity, love, care nor honor. It accepts that humans are fundamentally selfish and egoistic and that they don't care about society-as-a-whole. So how does utilitarianism reconcile the selfishness of individuals with the common good - a problem no other social philosophy had solved? Adam Smith's breakthrough was inverting the problem. He simply declared that the selfishness of man and the good of society go together. The general welfare is best served by letting each person pursue his own interests. Each unit egoistically strives to better his own lot and maximize his own pleasures. In exerting himself so, he looks for efficiency, for better ways to make money. He'll invent a better way to cure hides or find a quicker delivery route, for entirely personal gain. But these are soundly rational moves from an economic point of view, and when everybody does this, it sums and spreads through the community, which is improved as if lifted by an invisible hand because no individual intended that end. And we note all of this is achieved without the value of justice, because justice, like the preceding list of noble values, is not a natural quality. It requires rules, and utilitarianism is fundamentally to be rule-free. Its writers were bold. Utilitarianism pitched a very big tent. As far as theories go, it is fabulously inclusive, reaching down from intrahuman emotions all the way up to prescriptions for nations. For Smith, a country is its economics. Exported raw to America, this principle spread like wildfire, melding with the American philosophy of Pragmatism. Old morality withered, except where it became an instrument of economic progress. Little of value existed outside of usefulness, and a means-to-ends consciousness became urgent. It also emerged in the national consciousness that this pursuit was unlimited - this was the spirit of freedom. At the end of the 1800s, enormous business and enormous acquisition was understood as heroic. It still is. We still believe in the invisible hand, and that the outsize wealth of the topmost benefits all. These are the footings of our contemporary capitalistic society and our progress in national wealth has been the awe of other countries. Lost in the Rout The typical high school textbook teaches a skimmed version of Adam Smith's argument that as the rich get richer, it's good for everybody. Not until he gets to college does the student find complications in Smithian capitalism, such as the persistence of inequalities, and of poverty. If the student pursues the study of economics he will eventually read texts containing "Indifference Curves" which show the economy actually does better with social inequality.32 The original ideal of equality is tainted, the pursuit of happiness is full of conditions. Utilitarianism runs into trouble with some simple counterexamples. If we should judge an act by what brings the greatest good to the greatest number (the 'hedonic calculus') then, for instance, in setting up a factory to make cheap clothes, the pain caused to employees doing tedious work for low wages is offset by the greater benefit to the greater number of customers who benefit from cheap clothes, and the factory is a good idea. This example shows how the hedonic calculus is a sum of pleasure units weighed against units of pain. It is a simple additive economics, held to be rational. But in each example, there is no provision for the minority caught offside. Why don't we have public executions? - the pain to the victim would be more than offset by the summed satisfactions of all the spectators. A second counterexample, in different circumstances: suppose, on a battlefield, a hand grenade is tossed in on five soldiers in a trench. If one of them throws himself on it, saving the lives of the others, the hedonic calculus makes this a good act. But utilitarian ethics is also satisfied if one of the soldiers is pushed or ordered onto the grenade because four lives are still saved at the cost of one. Other philosophical systems would consider that an entirely different act. The usual explanation for these counterexamples is that utilitarianism includes an understanding that we are all enlightened people with civilized motives. Selfish, yes; competitive, yes. But we would never take pleasure from the suffering of another human, and we are not cruel - we are simply not that kind of people. We are a species of competitives, and each person is inclined to do what benefits him and utilitarianism does not recognize greed nor avarice as moral wrongs. It regards self promotion as rational. It does not list equality as a social virtue. The problem is, utilitarianism is a philosophy with no ideals to offend anybody - just what works. In the 1800s, through its industrial stage, Smithian economics consumed whole cities, and in the rout, gentlemanly civilities were lost. Some people got prodigiously wealthy, others suffered. But Darwinism was also rising and the robber-baron acquired allies among the Darwinists who held that inequality is an unavoidable fact of nature, so in capitalism's results, no guilt. It held, there are only the strong and the weak. Historically, it took more than a century after Adam Smith for the western democracies to question child labor. Until that time, the invisible hand justified the misery of legions of ragged and barefoot children whose lives were ruined in dank mills and deep mines, whose profits made Britain and America so powerful.33 Squeezes In fact there are many ways to crack Adam Smith's theory and John Nash's34 famous mathematical rebuttal is only one. An elementary rule of logic is that when there is a contradiction anywhere within a theorem, the whole theorem is false. The center of Adam Smith economics is a paradox. It says, what's good for the selfish individual is also the common good. Secondly, it says, when you and I are in competition, what's good for me is also good for you. Those two by fiat. Next paradox: utilitarianism does have an indirect gesture at equality. The notion is that when many units compete under the same rules of market exchange, the ever-circulating of goods and money keeps the whole system fluid; units are free to enter and exit this system at will. There is only one system, the free market, so we are all in the same boat, so we all must be the same. In practice, of course, history shows us a boat or ship of state with sweating galley rowers down on benches in the bilge, and with people up on deck all dressed in colorful finery, their faces upturned into the glorious sun. Yes, we are all in the same boat. And what is different is supposed to be the same. The fourth self-contradiction is that free market capitalism is supposed to rectify past inequalities by allowing free competition, which is something that results in inequalities. Further, Smith's system cannot be regulated at the extremes where self-interest becomes the greed of not-so-well intentioned entrepreneurs, profiteers in cartels, and of corners, squeezes, and monopoly makers. All of these also want wealth but they are for the common bad. But here is the most obvious point. Try to fit greed into the hedonic calculus and watch the ethics. Greed is the outstanding moral wrong because it reverses the utilitarian ethic, with greatest happiness for the smallest number. The most popular way to handle paradoxes are to ignore them, of course. They take thought, and I'll argue later this is discouraged by our culture of bombastically bright entertainment. Another way is to repair them with rationalizations. Historically, the contradiction between the Constitution's talk of happiness and justice, and what was visible to the naked eye, that most workers' lives were still nasty, brutish and short, was rationalized by saying actually pain and suffering are good because they goaded the poor into greater efforts, thus the economy is energized. And this rationalization thrives today. Since the promise of upward mobility is axiomatic in Smithian economics, we should take a closer look. Present inequality is vast enough, the chances for the poor to work to close up the gap are long gone. Inequalities of this magnitude tend to become hereditary35 and by and large, the descendants of the American poor will be poor. Upward mobility is a sacrosanct notion in Smithian economics, very widely held because the freedom to move up represents hope - in some people's minds, this freedom rebuts all criticism of the system. Let's measure this myth. While there is freedom to move up adjacent classes (a stock hand may rise to supermarket manager in a lifetime), the same freedom allows many people also to fall, which is called downward mobility, and which occurs in similar numbers. But the chances of a person born poor climbing all five classes into the top ("making it"), while occurring in a few widely publicized instances, are too small to constitute a real freedom. (Remembering that the top is an extremely thin, long tip to a pyramid,36 one sociologist puts the upper class at roughly 3 percent of the population. About 7.7% of that has moved in from below - a minute, and historically persistent, figure.37 The argument that everyone is free to rise to the top is dismantled in most introductory sociology textbooks - although a student must usually wait until college to read this. But the trick of flaunting possibility to mask actual probability is not a casual device. These paradoxes are no less nonsensical because they are cross-stitched into the writings of professional economists. Economists have been building on Adam Smith's examples of pin factories and canal barges for more than two hundred years. Our libraries contain shelf upon creaking shelf of intellectual embroidery around these basics. But the end result is that today all we have is a long, groping slavery to principles which don't work; can't work; because some of Adam Smith's axioms don't even rise to the level of common sense. Mystique A historical detail: one of the popular distractions of Smith's era was spiritualism. The vernacular was everywhere. Rawls has unearthed a minor book in utilitarianism, F.Y. Edgeworth's Mathematical Psychics. In that era, leisure time for the upper classes was spent at seances. Sidgwick was president of a Society for Psychical Research and actually conducted experiments to evoke mysterious forces. Science was in its infancy. And Smith's "invisible hand" is not a scientific principle. It is a mystical concept. Marx's principles were once the major rebuttal, but now that communism has largely collapsed (of the world's 260 countries only 5 now are communist) Adam Smith's doctrine appears to emerge again, as if the winner, a victorious truth. If size is success, the showcase example is today's megacompany, the corporation "overweeningly powerful and accountable to no one",38 almost magical, because the belief also lives that once a certain high level of anything is achieved, you are invulnerable and above the law. This is a place where heroes live - the Nietzschean mystique - where big things get done, where no one is slowed down by theoretical contradictions. Money Happiness Recently, psychologists have provided a decimating argument against Smithian theory. Ryan and Deci 39 have summarized a whole literature in psychology on the antecedents of human well-being. Psychologists have always wondered what makes people feel good, and for decades they have quizzed people on the intricacies of happiness. The general answer, all the more reliable because it is based on voluminous and cross cultural research, is that money is not a reliable route to happiness. Happiness is based on other, internal factors. The relation of wealth to well-being is tenuous; only below the poverty line does money bring well-being, above it, increases in personal wealth do not bring increased happiness. A corollary finding is that the more people focus on financial and materialistic goals, the lower their feeling of well-being. Finally, certain people tenaciously believe that money does bring happiness; they are the unhappy. Together, these findings largely dismantle Smithian theory of human motivation. For the present essay it also means that the motivation behind greed, pursuit of material wealth to extremes, cannot be for the happiness it brings. There is nothing heroic about greed. It is closer to obsession. In fact, after the fall of communism, most of the original problems of industrial capitalism have reemerged too - in different guise. Instead of local factories and mills, we have transnational corporations, just as indifferently employing hordes of unprotected labor, including children, for egregiously low wages in foreign countries. All notable developments for a philosophy that was invented against privilege and tyranny. Making It If we are to build up a system with paradoxes, we must promote contradiction as we go. This begins with the contradictory myths we are teaching our children. We are currently teaching our young two incompatible morality tales. Horatio Alger's children's books from the 1800s tell the story of a boy from ragged tenement origins who struggles from poverty up to riches in an urban odyssey of unflagging effort, single-minded ambition, determination, tenacity and hard work. The boy hero meets tyrannical employers, jealous competitors, wily criminals, prejudice and derision of the poor. He defeats mountainous odds to emerge finally on top, financially successful, pulling his own mother up out of poverty, and this all with his good character intact, in a world where the good guys always win. The youngest minds get molded around the idea that this sort of ambition makes a person invincible. This myth instills a trust in long term, hard work . Yet in the same semester our schoolchildren learn the opposite value: how to turn a quick profit using cunning and slick chatter. A contemporary of Alger's, Samuel Clemens (Mark Twain), wrote luminous country tales, regularly read to children. In one, Tom Sawyer, a juvenile in a mid-nineteenth century American small town, is ordered to complete a wearying chore one beautiful Saturday morning, to whitewash a long fence. But our Tom is a gifted talker, and he figures a way out of the task. As each of his friends comes walking by, Tom plays the work up to be a magically rare opportunity, and his friends, persuaded, compete for a chance to try it, actually paying Tom their toys to let them paint the fence. More friends come by and Tom gets rich from all their prize possessions while getting them to do the work for him until the task is done. The story is imagetic and funny, but it values slyness over effort, and it makes a clear point of getting ahead by exploiting one's friends. Despite the phosphorescent prose, this tale is about skimming and suckers in a world where the good guys do not win. In it, winners are people who subtly know how to manipulate the wants of others.40 It would be nice if children generalized from Alger and colored themselves all industrious, righteous, honest, rational and forward thinking. But growing up, some of us have absorbed the point that hard work is for dupes, and that out of the sleeve of ambition comes the hand of greed. Distraction The topic of greed battles with a powerful distracter. Poverty, I have argued, is partly a product of unfettered greed. But since the 1970s we have been captured in the orbit of a certain kind of argument, that we have poverty and scarcity because our planet Earth has limits and we are running out of food and raw materials. Actually there is a new consciousness on this point. Analysts Mark Sagoff 41 and Bjorn Lomborg 42 head this argument. Since the 1970s environmentalists have been predicting energy will be dangerously short because we consume too much. These predictions are framed in phrases of standard economic theory, in material terms, with mathematical projections of dire depletion and collapse of the ecosystem if we continue at present rates. They state we will imminently see starvation among industries for materials, accompanied by starvation among people. But these predictions simply haven't turned out. Both analysts document that since the 1970s the world's most basic resources have actually become more abundant and cheaper. There are ultimate planetary limits, of course, but we are nowhere near. Malthusian arguments that starvation exists because there are 'too many people' don't compute. In far too many places where the absolute level of food supply is adequate, there is famine. The world now produces enough food for everyone to have an adequate protein-rich vegetarian diet if the food was equally distributed. But, says Sagoff, neither technology nor economics can address the major causes of starvation which are corruption, mismanagement, ethnic antagonism, war, trade barriers, and social conflict. Absolute levels of raw resources are not getting worse; what is getting worse is the difference in income between the wealthy and the poor. Technological methods will not bring solutions. Not until we try a solution that turns on the moral will we begin to see improvement. Scarcity is man made. The whole debate needs a new pivot. There is a lot of misery worldwide, and the argument that there is abundance for all who would only try is false. We need a new paradigm to explain life-threatening scarcity in the face of plenty. ? Copyright: Julian Edney 2002-2005 Part II of "Greed" will appear in the next issue. Notes 1. Julian Edney Ph.D. is based in Los Angeles. (Contact at bottom of this page.) 2. "Fine wines are hot lots at auctions in New York." 2002, New York Times, May 27, P. A 12. 3. Forbes.com Magazine, 12 April 2001. 4. Reich, Robert B, 1991. "Secession of the successful." New York Times Magazine, January 20, p. 16. 5. Galvin, J. "Wretched excess." 2000, Ziff Davis Smart Business for the New Economy, August 1, p. 122. 6. "Many miss out on food stamps." 2001, Los Angeles Times, June 23. Section B p.1. 7. "3 in 10 Americans face poverty, study says." 1998, Los Angeles Times, August 10, Section A p. 15 8. "State picks up house seat as Sunbelt grows." 2000, Los Angeles Times, December 29, Section A p.1. 9. Converting old wealth into modern terms is tricky but it appears in 1774 the top 1% owned 14.6% of the national wealth. By 1989 it owned 36.3%. In Gordon J.S. "Numbers game," 1992, Forbes, October 9 p 48. 10. Murphey, C. "Are the rich cleaning up?" 2000, Fortune, 24 September. p. 252 11. See for example: Childs, J.M. 2000. Greed. Minneapolis, Fortress Press, p.36 12. Los Angeles Times, 2000, December 12. Section A. p. 1. 13. Profile of the nation: An American portrait. 2000, Farmington Hills, MI., Gale Group. P. 180. 14. "Families total 43% of homeless, survey reports." 1993, Los Angeles Times, December 22. Section A p. 1 15. Rawls, J. A theory of justice. 1971. Cambridge, MA. Harvard University Press. 16. "Study finds widening gap between rich, poor." 2000, Los Angeles Times October 20. Section B p.3. 17. Cook, P.J. and Frank, R.H. The winner-takes-all society: Why the few at the top get so much more than the rest of us. 1995. New York. Viking Books. 18. Vleminckx, K. and Smeeding, T.M. (Eds) Child well-being, child poverty and child policy in modern nations. 2001. Bristol, U.K.: The Policy Press. (Available from the University of Toronto Press.) 19. Durant, W. and Durant, A. The lessons of history 1968, New York: MJF Books. 20. Surgeon General aims campaign at rising suicide rate. 2001, Los Angeles Times May 3. Section A p. 14. 21. Lasn, K. and Grierson, B. "America the blue." 2000, Utne Reader. September. P.74 22. Lane, R.E. The loss of happiness in market democracies. 2000. New Haven: Yale University Press. 23. America Online News, 2001, by Scott Lindlaw. 10 May. 24. Derber, C. The wilding of America. 2002. New York. Worth Publishers. 25. Dostoevsky, F.M. Notes from underground. 1864/1992. New York: Bantam Books. 26. "US crime study sees society in trouble." 1999. Los Angeles Times. 6 December. Section A p.22 27. Murphy, C. "Are the rich cleaning up?" 2000, Fortune 24 September. P. 252. 28. "Is America the land of the poor?" Investor's Business Daily 1999, 27 December P. A.1. 29. Freeman, R.B. "Toward an apartheid economy?" Harvard Business Review 1996. Sept-Oct p. 114-121 30. Derber, C. Ibid. 31. Childs, J. Greed. 2000. Minneapolis, Fortress Press. P. 24. 32. Rawls, J. Ibid ,p.33. 33. Bly, R. The sibling society. New York: Vintage Books. 1977. 34. Kuhn, H. and Nasar, S. (Eds) The essential John Nash. Princeton, N.J. Princeton University Press. 2002. 35. Lasch, C. The revolt of the elites and the betrayal of democracy. 1995. New York: Norton. 36. Rose, S.J. Social stratification in the United States. 2000, New York: The New Press. 37. McGuire, C. Social stratification and mobility patterns. American Sociological Review. 1950, v. 15, p.200. A historical study cited by Gabler found that in 1850, 2 per cent of the wealthy of that period had been born poor while 90 percent were descended from families of affluence and social position: Neal Gabler, Life: The movie. 1998. New York: Vintage Books. p. 30. 38. Attributed to Robert Monks, quoted in H. Scutt, The trouble with capitalism. New York: Zed Books 1998. P. 176 39. Ryan, R.M. and Deci, E.L. On happiness and human potentials: A review of research on hedonic and eudiamonic well-being. Annual Review of Psychology. 2001, 52, 141-166 40. Mark Twain is listed as a caricaturist and a satirist but this does not change my point because the very young do not know enough to distinguish satire (some adults can't either). 41. Sagoff, M. "Do we consume too much?" Atlantic Monthly, June 1997, p. 80. 42. Lomborg, B. The skeptical environmentalist. 2001. New York: Cambridge University Press. --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- julianedney@aol.com From: "pae news" Subscriptions are free. To subscribe, email "subscribe". To unsubscribe, email "unsubscribe". Send to: pae_news@btinternet.com From netcfs at shaw.ca Wed May 18 16:21:37 2005 From: netcfs at shaw.ca (Yves Bajard) Date: Wed May 18 16:23:48 2005 Subject: [Mai-not] TEST Message-ID: <1116458498.5087.117.camel@Yves> Test From creuss at bluemail.ch Wed May 18 16:53:25 2005 From: creuss at bluemail.ch (Christoph Reuss) Date: Wed May 18 16:54:20 2005 Subject: [Mai-not] Fw: Military Pay in the good ol' U$ of A Message-ID: A GI wrote: > I work in the Air Force Network Control Center where I am part of the team > responsible for a 5,000 host computer network. I am involved with > infrastructure segments, specifically with Cisco Systems equipment. A quick > check under jobs for Network Technicians in the Washington, D.C. area > reveals a position in my career field, requiring three years experience > with my job. Amazingly, this job does NOT pay $13,413.60 a year. No, this > job is being offered at $70,000 to $80,000 per annum... Boo-hoo!!! That pooooor guy thought he could make a buck by joining the world's worst killer army, just to find out he makes $60,000 LESS than in the civilian job ! Are we supposed to raise donations now? Maybe he could write to the Compassionate Born Again Rapture Armageddonists Charity Fund? > Brought to you by HTTP://WWW.STOPNATO.ORG.UK I wonder why this site has pity with those who make the whole madness possible in the first place, by actually doing that job. Chris ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ SpamWall: Mail to this addy is deleted unread unless it contains the keyword "igve". From jfos at net-tech.com.au Tue May 17 23:42:21 2005 From: jfos at net-tech.com.au (John) Date: Wed May 18 19:11:00 2005 Subject: [Mai-not] The Malaria Gap: Economic Methodologies For Evaluating The Burden Of Malaria Message-ID: <6.1.0.6.1.20050518163609.02b48710@mail.net-tech.com.au> "An enormous gap separates the various available estimates of the costs exacted by malaria, with certain research methodologies producing far larger estimates than do others. A careful examination of each approach suggests that the malaria gap could, in fact, convey a critical piece of information. If the studies undertaken using the different approaches successfully answer the question that they set out to explore, then the difference between these estimates most likely reflects a difference in the kinds of costs that each research approach seeks to assess. At the broadest level, this gap suggests that malaria imposes important economic externalities, i.e., costs that are borne not by each individual household, but by the community as a whole. These would include such costs as diminished tourism or foreign direct investment. One example of such a cost is the effect that fear of malaria may have on discouraging foreign trade and investment. International corporations that seek to extract natural resources may be willing to invest in intensive anti-malaria measures to protect their workers from infection because the value of the natural resources that they extract would justify the cost. In Zambia, for example, such investments by mining corporations greatly increased in-migration of labor and the output from copper mines. Indeed, it has been suggested that "effective malaria control was a principle driving force behind Northern Rhodesian economic development."16 To encourage investment in the kinds of manufacturing industries that have formed the basis of growth in many newly industrializing countries, however, it is necessary to provide an environment that can compete with other such opportunities. Malaria-endemic sites are inimical to foreign experts and their families. In such a market, investors are less likely to invest in a region requiring costly health interventions when they can choose instead to invest in malaria-free zones. In a rapidly globalizing economy, malaria can prove excessively burdensome in the long run. Although macroeconomic analyses of the cost of malaria cannot identify individual elements in the chain of causation, they do encompass all possible malaria-related causes of poverty, including any that microeconomic analyses might miss. The apparent magnitude of the gap that separates these estimates suggests that certain economic externalities may be vastly more important than are the direct effects of malaria on public health. Our present challenge requires that we verify the magnitude of the economic burden of malaria, understand the channels through which these costs are imposed, and devise anti-malaria interventions that will most effectively contribute to human betterment in malaria-endemic parts of the world." sanity, humanity and science post-autistic economics review Issue no. 31, 16 May 2005 back issues at www.paecon.net Subscribers: 8,121 in over 150 countries Forum on Economic Reform In recent decades the alliance of neoclassical economics and neoliberalism has hijacked the term "economic reform". By presenting political choices as market necessities, they have subverted public debate about what economic policy changes are possible and are or are not desirable. This venue promotes discussion of economic reform that is not limited to the one ideological point of view. The Malaria Gap Pia Malaney, Andrew Spielman, and Jeffrey Sachs (Harvard University, Harvard School of Public Health, Columbia University, USA) Copyright ? 2004 by The American Society of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene Introduction: Malaria And The World Twice Given Would an Africa free of malaria still be just as poor? If the continent were rich, would its malaria still be endemic? The scientist-philosopher Ernst Mach once remarked that "the world is given only once" in an effort to discourage undue effort spent on such counterfactuals. In the case of malaria, however, the planet can be divided into those regions that are malarious and those that are not, and from the point of view of both public health and economic development, these regions often resemble separate worlds. The frequently cited case of sickle cell anemia is but the most dramatic example of the extent to which malaria changes the lives of those it afflicts: how better to evince the power of the parasite than with a potentially lethal modification of the genetic code as a desperate Darwinian defense against the even more deadly ravages of malaria? Accordingly, it may be expected that a force strong enough to rewrite our DNA will rewrite many of the lives and economies that it touches. It is no exaggeration to say that where malaria is present, it can be expected to affect diverse features of human existence including mobility, investment choices, and even fertility decisions. We are not powerless to face this force of nature; from simple mosquito coils to investment in the development of a vaccine, there are numerous measures that may reduce or eliminate the threat posed by malaria. The economic dimension enters the picture precisely because these measures are not all equally effective, and none is without cost. It is in evaluating the appropriate level of resources that should be devoted toward anti-malaria interventions that the economist must ask "What would the sphere of economic behavior look like in the absence of malaria?" Answering this question provides the first step towards a comprehensive cost-benefit analysis. Because the effects of malaria can pervade the fabric of human endeavor, however, it is not surprising that the current state of economic analysis has yet to provide a definitive accounting. To begin with, the state of the art for costing a disease like malaria has not progressed to the point where a dominant paradigm can be said to exist. Rather, there are competing schools of thought, each of which directly addresses some piece of the puzzle while leaving other aspects of the problem to alternative methodologies. Recent attempts to assess the economic burden of malaria by means of cross-country regression analysis have found the disease to be a significant factor in long-term economic growth and development.1,2 The nature of the macroeconomic approach, however, is such that it functions independently of chains of causation and so cannot shed much light on the underlying mechanisms through which these costs are incurred. As a first approximation, one might anticipate that the cost of malaria at a national level would be an aggregation of the burden borne at the household level. Microeconomic analyses that seek to estimate the burden of malaria on households generally conclude that the effect of this disease is, in fact, quite large and particularly burdensome for the "poorest of the poor." The costs of prevention, treatment, and the loss of productivity as a result of malaria-related morbidity and mortality can represent a significant portion of the annual income of poor agricultural households. When aggregated to provide estimates of the burden of disease at a national level, however, the results are considerably smaller than those of cross-country estimates. Potentially large economic costs, therefore, appear to escape microeconomic analyses, implying that there are negative externalities that render the overall burden of malaria greater than its direct impact on individuals and on households.3 The extent of the economic burden imposed by malaria as well as the mechanisms through which these costs are imposed are relevant to health policy. The main reason for allocating resources towards malaria prevention and treatment is undoubtedly the significant cost that it represents in human terms. In trading off between equally deserving demands on health budgets, and more broadly, development budgets, however, an understanding of the extent of the economic impact of an investment in anti-malaria interventions becomes important. If intense malaria results in a considerable negative impact on economic growth, any reduction in this burden can ultimately promote a cycle of health and wealth that may improve standards of living. The very difference between the estimates of the economic burden deriving from microeconomic studies and from macroeconomic crosscountry regressions provides insight into the mechanisms through which malaria inhibits development. To the extent that malaria-related costs are external to the household unit, private expenditures allocated towards its reduction will be insufficient, and public support for anti-malaria interventions will be all the more critical. The difference between the macroeconomic, or "topdown" approach and the microeconomic, or "bottom-up" approach for assessing the economic burden of malaria serves as the focus for the following analysis. Toward this end, we shall identify factors that may explain the apparent "malaria gap" that separates these estimates. Economic Methodologies For Evaluating The Burden Of Malaria Understanding the conditions that permit long-term economic growth is a central focus of economic research. There have been a number of attempts to explain the nearly hundred-fold difference in per capita incomes between the richest and the poorest countries. The many explanations for the difference that economists have explored include such factors as demographic structures, cultural practices, education, openness to trade, and legal and economic institutions.4-7 Although economists favor diverse explanations, more recent explanations have included an increased focus on the role of health, and in particular of malaria. Indeed, poverty and malaria appear to go hand in hand, the world over. The per capita gross domestic product (GDP) (adjusted for differences in purchasing power) in highly malarious countries is on average one-fifth that of non-endemic countries.2 In fact, recent macroeconomic studies have found that the growth rate of per capita GDP in malarious countries is 0.25-1.3% points lower per year than that of non-malarious countries, even after controlling for the impact of such factors as savings rates, economic and political institutions, and education levels of the population. Over a period of 25 years this can amount to almost half of the per capita GDP of poor countries. Although macroeconomic studies suggest that malaria greatly inhibits economic growth, they cannot specify the mechanisms through which this happens. Their microeconomic counterparts attempt to provide national estimates by assessing the cost of malaria accrued by individual households and aggregating these estimates across households. This more conventional approach to assessing the burden of disease has been applied in numerous studies worldwide. An early 20th century calculation of the cost of malaria in the United States estimated the overall burden at US $100 million in 1917 dollars.8 Since then, many area-specific studies ranging from South and Southeast Asia to Latin America and Africa have attempted to assess the costs imposed by malaria both on households and populations. The conclusions differ considerably, in part due to variations in methodology, but also to diverse patterns of endemicity and differences associated with the particular species of parasite involved. Of the several kinds of malaria parasites that infect people, Plasmodium falciparum produces a disease that is far more severe than that of the others, and the resulting costs reflect these differences. Similarly, the nature of the costs associated with the disease also change based on levels of endemicity. In highly endemic regions, mortality occurs mainly among infants and young children, while survival incrementally conveys disease modifying immunity. In addition to the unacceptable suffering associated with high infant and child mortality rates, they potentially have long-term effects on demographic and economic outcomes. Direct productivity losses, however, are less severe in such an environment than where transmission is less stable, where herd immunity is less, and where malaria associated disease burdens people of all ages. The most frequent approach toward evaluating the economic burden of malaria has been the cost-of-illness (COI) method. Such analyses attempt to account for the direct as well as indirect costs associated with an illness. Direct costs are private as well as non-private medical care costs. Private costs include private expenditures on prevention, diagnosis, treatment, and on case management. These could be such expenses as those required for bed nets, doctor's fees, the cost of anti-malaria drugs, the cost of transportation to medical facilities, and necessary support for the patient. Costs borne by an accompanying adult may be included, and these would be calculated over the duration of that person's stay at the facility. Non-private medical care costs include public expenditures on prevention and on treatment of the resulting disease and would be comprised of governmental expenditures on such measures as vector control, health facilities, education, and research. Indirect cost calculations include productivity losses associated with malaria-attributed illness. Such costs are measured by estimating any income that may be foregone due to illness or death. In the case of mortality, foregone income is estimated by calculating the capitalized value of future earnings over the anticipated life-span of those who died prematurely as a result of malaria, based on projected incomes for different age groups, basic longevity estimates, and agespecific mortality rates. The indirect cost of morbidity is the value of lost workdays for each person with malaria and malaria- related illness, and this is calculated using similar methods. The standard formula for the COI method of calculating the cost of a disease is COI = Private Medical Costs + Non- Private Medical Costs + Foregone Income + Pain and Suffering. The outcomes of previous COI studies on malaria have varied, based not only on such factors as the endemicity of the infection in the study locale, which actually does affect the cost of the disease, but also the particulars of the way in which the methodology was applied. A comprehensive example of this is represented by a collection of case studies conducted within Africa, where the cost of malaria was estimated using the COI formula in Burkina Faso, Chad, the Republic of the Congo, and Rwanda. Each study used data available within the country, modifying the formula and components as necessary.9 These studies indicated that a case of malaria in Africa cost $9.84 in 1987, of which $1.83 was direct and $8.01 was accrued indirectly as a result of foregone income associated with malaria morbidity and mortality. The total estimated cost of $0.8 billion represented 0.6% of the GDP of sub-Saharan African economies. An increase in this burden to 1% of the GDP in 1995 was predicted. Although COI analyses generally find that the economic burden of malaria is less than macroeconomic results would suggest, they do demonstrate that the costs of malaria fall particularly heavily on the poor because the direct and indirect costs of a single case often represents a significant portion of a person's income. A household survey conducted in Malawi focused on the costs of malaria for low-income households.10 In a sample of households with a mean annual household income of $115, the costs of malaria prevention and treatment, added to the foregone income from adult morbidity and caretaking for children with the disease, represent about 20% of annual income. Although the COI approach theoretically includes the cost of pain and suffering, it is generally excluded from calculations because it is difficult to assess. An approach that is better designed to access these and other less tangible costs is the willingness-to-pay (WTP) approach, in which analysts attempt, by means of household surveys, to determine the value that a household would place on avoiding the disease. If it were possible to elicit such a dollar value, treatment costs and lost productivity would presumably be captured, as well as the value of lost leisure time, the cost of the pain and suffering associated with malaria, and other intangible costs that might be difficult to estimate. The WTP approach, which was developed originally to assign values to such public goods as environmental quality, has come under much criticism in the context of "existence" values, which do not derive from private consumption of a good.11,12 Such values may be subject to personal interpretation and can be biased by respondents' desire to engage in strategic behavior. It is possible, however, to avoid some of these pitfalls through the use of a carefully constructed survey with closed-ended questions that place the issue in a market context. In one such study conducted in Tigray, Ethiopia, poor, agricultural households were found to be willing to pay about 16% of their annual income for a hypothetical malaria vaccine, or about two to three times as much as would be suggested by a COI calculation for the same sample.13 The COI approach also fails to account for lost productivity in the event that patients must return to work before they have fully recovered from a malaria episode and are therefore less effective. Indeed, in intensely endemic regions, many residents sustain chronic infection even though they appear to be non-symptomatic. It seems reasonable to expect that such a condition might actually reduce productive capacity. The production function approach attempts to take reduced productive capacity into account by assessing the change in output caused by a disease. The results of such studies vary considerably. One analysis in southern India estimated that households whose members suffered with malaria could clear only 40% as much cropland as those households without malaria,14 suggesting a considerably greater burden than is indicated by COI analyses. A study conducted in Cameroon, however, which assessed the impact of parasitemia on rice production, found no significant effect.15 The Malaria Gap Macroeconomic analyses indicate that malaria inhibits long-term growth and development to a degree that previously was unimagined. There are at least three potential explanations for the magnitude of this effect and for the discrepancy between these results and those of microeconomic studies. First, although our hypothesis states that malaria causes poverty, causation runs in the other direction as well. Many countries are too poor to afford the kinds of malaria interventions that enabled such wealthier countries as the United States and Italy to eliminate transmission of this infection from within their borders. The causal effect of malaria on poverty cannot readily be isolated from the effect of poverty on malaria. A second econometric problem lies in the effect of such confounding factors as climate that may drive both poverty and malaria. A third explanation for the gap lies with a failure of traditional microeconomic methods to incorporate broad costs of the disease. The cost-of illness, WTP, and production-function methods for microeconomic analysis provide a broad range of estimates for the economic costs of malaria. Leaving aside fundamental data problems, each of these methods of analysis focus only on certain costs of the illness. The COI approach may miss costs that are not easily estimated numerically. The WTP approach incorporates household costs exclusively. The production-function approach makes no attempt to include direct costs of the disease. There are, moreover, other costs that malaria may impose that could represent a significant burden at a national level, which would not be captured by any conventional microeconomic analyses. The COI methodology evolved in the developed world to evaluate the costs of a range of illnesses such as circulatory or respiratory diseases. These diseases tend to affect only a small segment of the population at any point in time. In much of sub-Saharan Africa, however, malaria represents not merely an illness, but a pandemic. The ubiquity of malaria in some regions leads not only to excessive costs for prevention and treatment and a loss of labor, but also to modifications of social and economic behavior that profoundly affect economic growth and development. Standard measures of direct and indirect costs generally used to classify the economic burden of disease are simply not designed to capture the full range of these impacts. Some of the costs deriving from the ubiquitous nature of malaria are such that they are external to individual households. In such a situation, the very existence of malaria in a community imposes a cost on the entire community by modifying social and economic decisions taken in response to the perceived risk of infection. It has been widely observed in the descriptive literature that decision making in such diverse areas as crop choice, trade, investment, and fertility is affected by the risk of acquiring malaria, with a potentially sizeable negative effect on economic productivity and growth. Standard household-based studies naturally fail to capture these effects. One example of such a cost is the effect that fear of malaria may have on discouraging foreign trade and investment. International corporations that seek to extract natural resources may be willing to invest in intensive anti-malaria measures to protect their workers from infection because the value of the natural resources that they extract would justify the cost. In Zambia, for example, such investments by mining corporations greatly increased in-migration of labor and the output from copper mines. Indeed, it has been suggested that "effective malaria control was a principle driving force behind Northern Rhodesian economic development."16 To encourage investment in the kinds of manufacturing industries that have formed the basis of growth in many newly industrializing countries, however, it is necessary to provide an environment that can compete with other such opportunities. Malaria-endemic sites are inimical to foreign experts and their families. In such a market, investors are less likely to invest in a region requiring costly health interventions when they can choose instead to invest in malaria-free zones. In a rapidly globalizing economy, malaria can prove excessively burdensome in the long run. Malaria can also affect trade within an economy because visitors to endemic sites generally lack appropriate immunity, and this may inhibit local traders from travel within and between malarious regions. This would limit the development of markets that form the building blocks of economic growth. Tourism, which can constitute a highly profitable industry, would similarly be affected by the perception of malaria risk. One approach to understanding the magnitude of some of these factors is to examine the impact of malaria control strategies on small island economies. For example, the emerging oil economies of the West African islands of Sao Tome, Principe, and Bioko are planning widespread control programs to control intense endemic malaria that could provide an opportunity to examine such macroeconomic impacts. The risk of acquiring malaria can also affect population mobility. Adult residents of highly endemic sites generally benefit from an acquired non-sterilizing immunity to the malaria parasite that protects them from the intense illness that otherwise would result from this infection. Migrants from non-malarious regions, on the other hand, are exquisitely vulnerable to infection. Acquired partial immunity, moreover, dissipates within a few years in the absence of reinfection, as for example during a period of schooling or a job assignment away from home. The considerable risk of illness or death upon return may depress the extent of short-term migration for schooling or temporary job opportunities in other locations. By limiting the movement of labor to regions where it is most productive, malaria can interfere with skill-matching and generally depress worker productivity. More fundamentally, malaria profoundly affects the demographic structure of a society. Where this infection is endemic, its mortality burden generally falls most heavily on children less than five years of age. High rates of infant and child mortality slow the pace of a country's demographic transition, wherein fertility rates decrease in response to a decrease in mortality. A high fertility/high mortality environment can be especially detrimental to a nation's long-term economic growth. In such an environment, women devote a major part of their productive life to child-rearing activities. Not only does this exclude them from the workforce, it often discourages investment in human capital through education of women because such an investment is less likely to produce economic returns. Such a cost is particularly inefficient when relatively few of the children a family has invested in survive to adulthood. Malaria can also slow the long-term economic growth process through its impact on the accumulation of human and physical capital. High rates of saving and investments in physical and human capital have formed the engine of growth in many of today's most advanced and rapidly developing economies. The drain that malaria imposes on family resources through its direct and indirect costs limits the ability of households to save and to invest in physical and financial capital. Moreover, malaria tends to reduce the funds that might be available for education limits the human capital represented by children. Human capital accumulation is affected even more directly by malaria through its effects on school attendance and performance. High rates of school absenteeism as a result of this disease increase repetition and dropout rates. An increasing body of research also points toward ways in which malaria in childhood may permanently affect development and cognitive performance.17-21 Parasitemic children, for example, score lower on certain tests than do non-parasitemic children. The in utero experience of a fetus in a malaria-infected mother may also inhibit the long term cognitive performance of the resulting child To the extent that malaria contributes to the burden on societies of other illnesses, the entire range of direct and indirect costs that result should be included in the economic calculation. Acute or chronic malaria infection may alter the immune response to certain other infections while also changing the response to vaccines. Malaria is causally associated with hyper-reactive splenomegaly, chronic renal damage, the nephrotic syndrome, and Burkitt's lymphoma. Malaria suppresses appetite and growth in children and infants.22,23 Acute malaria infection, furthermore, can have chronic health consequences; cerebral malaria appears to cause long-term neurologic damage in many of those who survive. Perhaps most tellingly, endemic malaria has produced such a heavy disease burden through the ages that it has led to a potentially deadly genetic modification causing sickle cell disease in approximately 130,000 African infants each year. A particularly burdensome consequence of chronic malaria is the anemia that directly results from this infection, particularly in children.24-26 In adults, such anemia markedly reduces worker productivity.27,28 In children, malaria-related anemia may be severe and potentially fatal, frequently requiring blood transfusions. Transfusion screening systems remain rudimentary in many sub-Saharan African countries, resulting in the iatrogenic transmission of such blood-borne pathogens as hepatitis B virus, hepatitis C virus, cytomegalovirus, parvovirus, and others. An increasingly deadly consequence is the transmission of human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) through infected blood supplies. Ten to fifteen percent of overall HIV infections and as much as 25% of pediatric infections in sub-Saharan Africa result from blood transfusions, mainly for the treatment of severe malaria and sickle cell anemia.29,30 Recent studies have also shown that malaria infection in pregnant mothers carrying the HIV virus can increase the rate of transmission to the unborn child.31 The economic burden of HIV is extremely high, and the role that malaria plays in increasing risk of infection represents a particularly costly consequence in both human and economic terms. Conclusion Economic estimates of the burden imposed by malaria are essential for guiding the effective allocation of resources within tightly constrained health or development budgets. Different methodologic approaches, however, have produced drastically different results, with consequent implications for resource allocation. If indeed macroeconomic estimates of the impact of malaria, which suggest that the disease could account for a reduction of almost half the annual per capita GDP of some countries, are correct, then by economic considerations this disease should receive a much larger share of available resources than is currently devoted toward this end. Microeconomic estimates, on the other hand, find that the cost is closer to one percent of per capita GDP, with very different implications for resource allocation. An enormous gap separates the various available estimates of the costs exacted by malaria, with certain research methodologies producing far larger estimates than do others. A careful examination of each approach suggests that the malaria gap could, in fact, convey a critical piece of information. If the studies undertaken using the different approaches successfully answer the question that they set out to explore, then the difference between these estimates most likely reflects a difference in the kinds of costs that each research approach seeks to assess. At the broadest level, this gap suggests that malaria imposes important economic externalities, i.e., costs that are borne not by each individual household, but by the community as a whole. These would include such costs as diminished tourism or foreign direct investment. Another difference between the questions posed by these methodologies is the time horizon of the effects. Microeconomic studies focus on the short-term effect of malaria on households. The magnitude of the impact of malaria on economic growth found by macroeconomic regressions, in contrast, suggests that the accumulation of the effects of malaria on standards of living may be far more serious over the long term. If malaria affects peoples' decisions about schooling and their ability to learn or their decisions to save, this infection could potentially change long-term income streams in a far more remarkable fashion than is indicated by a case by case analysis of costs borne by households. Although macroeconomic analyses of the cost of malaria cannot identify individual elements in the chain of causation, they do encompass all possible malaria-related causes of poverty, including any that microeconomic analyses might miss. The apparent magnitude of the gap that separates these estimates suggests that certain economic externalities may be vastly more important than are the direct effects of malaria on public health. Our present challenge requires that we verify the magnitude of the economic burden of malaria, understand the channels through which these costs are imposed, and devise anti-malaria interventions that will most effectively contribute to human betterment in malaria-endemic parts of the world. References 1. McCarthy D, Wolf H, Wu Y, 2000. Malaria and Growth. Policy Research Working Paper 2303. Washington, DC: World Bank. 2. Gallup J, Sachs J, 2001. The economic burden of malaria. Am J Trop Med Hyg 64 (Suppl): 85-96. 3. Sachs J, Malaney P, 2002. The economic and social burden of malaria. Nature 415: 680-685. 4. Bloom DE, Canning D, Malaney PN, 2000. Demographic change and economic growth in Asia. Popul Dev Rev 26 (Suppl): 257-290. 5. Sachs J, Warner A, 1995. Economic reform and the process of global integration. Brookings Papers Econ Activity 1: 1-118. 6. Acemoglu D, Johnson S, Robinson J, 2001. Reversal of Fortune: Geography and Institutions in the Making of the Modern World Income Distribution. Cambridge, MA: National Bureau of Economic Research, Working Paper No. w8460. 7. Rodrik D, Subramanian A, Trebbi F, 2002. Institutions Rule: The Primacy of Institutions over Geography and Integration in Economic Development. Cambridge, MA: National Bureau of Economic Research. Working Paper No. w9305 8. Carter HR, 1919. The malaria problem in the south. Public Health Rep 34: 1927-1931. 9. Shepard DS, Ettling MB, Brinkmann U, Sauerborn R, 1991. The economic cost of malaria in Africa. Trop Med Parasitol 42: 199-203. 10. Ettling MB, Chitsulo L, McFarland D, 1993. Malawi: The Economic Impact of Malaria on Low Income Households. Arlington, VA: Vector Biology and Control Project. Report No.82239. 11. Kahneman D, Knetsch J, 1992. Valuing public goods: the purchase of moral satisfaction. J Environ Econ Management 22: 57-70. 12. Diamond P, Hausman J, 1994. Contingent valuation: is some number better than no number? J Econ Perspect 8: 45-64. 13. Cropper ML, Lampietti JA, Haile M, Poulos C, Whittington D, 1999. The Value of Preventing Malaria in Tigray, Ethiopia. Geneva: World Health Organization. 14. Bhombore SR, Worth CB, Nanjundiah KS, 1952. A survey of the economic status of villagers in a malarious irrigated tract in Mysore state, India, before and after DDT residual insecticidal spraying. Indian J Malariol 6: 355-366. 15. Audibert M, 1986. Agricultural non-wage production and health status: A case-study in a tropical environment. J Develop Econ 24: 275-291. 16. Utzinger J, Tozan Y, Domani F, Singer B, 2001. The economic payoffs of malaria control in the Zambian Copper Belt: 1930- 1950. Trop Med Int Health 7: 657-677. 17. Holding PA, Snow RW, 2001. Impact of Plasmodium falciparum malaria on performance and learning: review of the evidence. Am J Trop Med Hyg 64 (Suppl): 68-75. 18. Serouri AW, Grantham-McGregor SM, Greenwood B, Costello A, 2000. Impact of asymptomatic malaria parasitaemia on cognitive function and school achievement of schoolchildren in the Yemen Republic. Parasitology 121: 337-345. 19. Lozoff B, 1989. Nutrition and behavior. Am Psychiatry 44: 231-236. 20. McKay H, Sinisterra L, McKay A, Gomez H, Lloreda P, 1978. Improving cognitive ability in chronically deprived children. Science 200: 270-278. 21. Grantham-McGregor SM, Powell CA, Walker SP, Himes JH, 1991. Nutritional supplementation, psychosocial stimulation, and mental development of stunted children: the Jamaican study. Lancet 338: 1-5. 22. Rowland MG, Cole TJ, Whitehead RG, 1977. A quantitative study into the role of infection in determining nutritional status in Gambian village children. Br J Nutr 37: 441-450. 23. Snow RW, Molyneux CS, Njeru EK, Omumbo J, Nevill CG, Muniu E, Marsh K, 1997. The effects of malaria control on nutritional status in infancy. Acta Trop 65: 1-10. 24. Shiff C, Checkley W, Winch P, Premji Z, Minjas J, Lubega P, 1996. Changes in weight gain and anaemia attributable to malaria in Tanzanian children living under holoendemic conditions. Trans R Soc Trop Med 90: 262-265. 25. Draper CC, 1960. Malaria control and haemoglobin levels. BMJ 6: 1480-1483. 26. Hedberg K, Shaffer N, Davachi F, Hightower A, Lyamba B, Paluku KM, Nguyen-Dinh P, Breman JG, 1993. Plasmodium falciparum-associated anemia in children at a large urban hospital in Zaire. Am J Trop Med Hyg 48: 365-371. 27. Scholz BD, Gross R, Schultink W, Sastroamidjojo S, 1997. Anaemia is associated with reduced productivity of women workers even in less-physically-strenuous tasks. Br J Nutr 77: 47-57. 28. Basta SS, Soekirman KD, Karyadi D, Scrimshaw NS, 1979. Iron deficiency anemia and the productivity of adult males in Indonesia. Am J Clin Nutr 32: 916-925. 29. Fleming AF, 1997. HIV and blood transfusion in sub-Saharan Africa. Transfus Sci 18: 167-179. 30. Ryder RW, 1992. Difficulties associated with providing an HIVfree blood supply in tropical Africa. AIDS 6: 1395-1397. 31. Brahmbhatt H, Kigozi G, Wabwire-Mangen F, Serwadda D, Sewakambo N, Lutalo T, Wawer M, Abramowsky C, Sullivan D, Gray R, 2003. The effects of placental malaria on motherto-child HIV transmission in Rakai, Uganda. AIDS 17: 2539-2542. Acknowledgments: We are grateful to Eric R. Weinstein for extensive discussions and valuable insights. This article also benefited greatly from the ongoing support and uncompromising clarity of Dr. Robert W. Snow. Financial support: This work was carried out under grant #17408 from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Authors' addresses: Pia Malaney Center for International Development, John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University, 79 JFK Street, Cambridge, MA 02138, Fax: 617-496-8753, E-mail: Pia_Malaney@harvard.edu. Andrew Spielman, Department of Immunology and Infectious Diseases, Harvard School of Public Health, 665 Huntington Avenue, Boston, MA 02115, Fax: 617-432-1796, Jeffrey Sachs, Earth Institute, Columbia University, New York, NY 10027,. This paper appeared originally in the Am. J. Trop. Med. Hyg., 71(Suppl 2), 2004, pp. 141-146. From dgiles at central.murdoch.edu.au Wed May 18 19:11:39 2005 From: dgiles at central.murdoch.edu.au (Dion Giles) Date: Wed May 18 19:11:45 2005 Subject: [Mai-not] no comment -- and fascism In-Reply-To: References: <6.1.0.6.1.20050518104303.02b434f0@mail.net-tech.com.au> Message-ID: <6.1.1.1.0.20050519093416.02f17008@central.murdoch.edu.au> John Foster's post spoke for us all. The amazing commentary and information Jonathan Larson passes on to this list immeasurably enriches our understanding and out interactions with others. He deserves our heartfelt thanks, and his posts deserve maximum on-sending by us to wider audiences. The gems mined by Jonathan and others in their assiduous newsculls tell us something about fascism: in fascist Germany, Italy, Spain, Portugal, Japan there is no way that such material could have been found by people willing to take the trouble to look. Nor would there be in today's China or North Korea. I was fortunate enough to be present at a lecture in Fremantle by Tariq Ali a couple of evenings ago, and a questioner brought up the issue of fascism. Tariq replied that fascism was a form of rule in which challenge was stamped out even more rigorously than in pre-Enlightenment days. Lists like ours, and the news and commentary that Jonathan and others find and pass on, and this week's Fremantle meeting and the ability of Tariq Ali and others like him to move from country to country spreading enlightenment, would be unimaginable under fascism. Our countries are (and have been for many decades) arenas of struggle between fascist and anti-fascist forces, and to regard the countries as fascist (as Tariq Ali's questioner appeared to do) would weaken the antifascist struggle. Dion Giles Western Australia At 22:46 18/05/2005, Jonathan wrote: >>>Brilliant--utterly brilliant. >> >>That it is. thanks once more for all the excellent articles you post to >>this list Jonathon >> >>john foster >>victoria, australia > >Thanks. I only pass along what I find especially interesting myself. I am >happy when others appreciate this primitive selection process. > >-- >Terrorism is the war of the poor, and war is the terrorism of the rich. >- Patrick J. Buchanan > >Jonathan > >web site at: > >http://elegant-technology.com >_______________________________________________ >Mai-not mailing list >Mai-not@globalproblematique.net >http://www.globalproblematique.net/mailman/listinfo/mai-not From dgiles at central.murdoch.edu.au Wed May 18 18:36:15 2005 From: dgiles at central.murdoch.edu.au (Dion Giles) Date: Wed May 18 19:18:20 2005 Subject: [Mai-not] George Galloway socks it to war criminals: transcript Message-ID: <6.1.1.1.0.20050519092521.02e6cd20@central.murdoch.edu.au> For a transcript of George Galloway stripping the war criminals naked see http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,3-1616578,00.html Dion Giles Western Australia From jfos at net-tech.com.au Wed May 18 18:37:18 2005 From: jfos at net-tech.com.au (John) Date: Wed May 18 21:11:03 2005 Subject: [Mai-not] daily information concerning occupied Iraq Message-ID: <6.1.0.6.1.20050519113433.02ada8e0@mail.net-tech.com.au> uruknet.info :: information from occupied iraq :: informazione dall'iraq occupato PRESS RELEASE BUSH ON TRIAL WORLD TRIBUNAL ON IRAQ REPRESENTATIVES DELIVER Today, representatives of the World Tribunal on Iraq (WTI) delivered a law summon and invitation letter addressed to President Bush at the US Embassy in Brussels. It was part of a global action day, as similar actions took place in Japan, Sweden, Turkey and the United States. The WTI representatives invited George Bush to the final hearing of the World Tribunal on Iraq that will take place in Istanbul between 23-27 of June 2005. In Brussels a number of activists arrived at the US Embassy with a huge banner reading ?President Bush, the World holds you accountable?. The activists also presented a letter to the US officials at the Embassy. In front of the US Embassy today, Prof. Lieven De Cauter, initiator of the Brussells Tribunal, and spokesperson for the WTI in Belgium, said: ?Since the US administration does not recognize the International Criminal Court (ICC), the citizens of the world have undertaken an initiative to reclaim justice. The world is calling for Bush to be held accountable for the crimes committed in Iraq"... Read the full article / Leggi l'articolo completo: www.uruknet.info/?p=11788 ---------- ILLEGAL IRAQ WAR. Breaking Through the US Media Blackout Grace Reid Finally, the US Media is beginning to pay attention to the war documents released by the British government. Michael Getler, of the Washington Post, was the first to break through the main stream media's coverage of the story yesterday, followed by an editorial by Paul Krugman of the New York Times today. Getler's piece in particular, looks at the story with some astonishment, asking why there has been a media blackout of the story in the United States (...) As a result of ignorance, Sen. John McCain has come out today on CNN as saying he disagrees with the "memo." Well, that's like me saying I disagree that sunrise follows sunset. Senator McCain may be suffering the effects of the media blackout that has been going on for quite a while. But that does not explain why most Americans are unaware of the story, or that the "memo" cannot be disputed, having been released from Downing Street and Prime Minister Tony Blair... Read the full article / Leggi l'articolo completo: www.uruknet.info/?p=11770 ---------- Saddam warns US will target all Arabs Gulf Times ...In a recent meeting with the member of the Amman-based defence panel, Iraqi lawyer Khalil Duleimi, Saddam also rebuked the Arab League and its Secretary General Amr Moussa for failure to muster pan-Arab support for the Iraqi resistance, Duleimi told the daily Alarab Alyawm. ?The American aggression will target all Arabs and the agenda of the US interests in the Middle East is overwhelming and will not spare even friends,? Duleimi quoted the former Iraqi leader as saying. In his criticism of the Arab League, Saddam said, ?The Arabs should remember that Iraq is fighting on their behalf and the Iraqi front represents the first defence line in this great battle?, according to Duleimi... Read the full article / Leggi l'articolo completo: www.uruknet.info/?p=11777 ---------- THE SLEDGEHAMMER AND THE ANT Malcom Lagauche ...The U.S. quickly marched to Baghdad and was confused because none of the predicted battles occurred. "Where are they?" was the cry when American troops entered Baghdad. On April 8, 2003, the Iraqi Information Minister made the famous statement at which the whole world laughed. When it was pointed out that American troops were already in Baghdad, he said, "We?ve got them right where we want them." Now, it is apparent that the current resistance was planned well in advance of the U.S. invasion of 2003. On May 1, 2003, George Bush said, "Mission accomplished!" in a staged appearance on an aircraft carrier. Since then, more than 2,500 Americans (military and civilian) have died in Iraq and thousands more have lost limbs or have become brain-dead. Read about this astute military strategy in the section called "Rope-a-Bush" and you will see exactly how Ali?s scheme was similar to that of the Iraqis... Read the full article / Leggi l'articolo completo: www.uruknet.info/?p=11784 ---------- Iraqi Resistance Report for events of Monday, 16 May 2005. Translated and/or compiled by Muhammad Abu Nasr, member, editorial board, the Free Arab Voice. http://www.freearabvoice.org The General Command of the Iraqi Resistance issued a communiqu? dated 16 May 2005 concerning the defeat of the American enemy and its evident losses in the Battle of al-Qa?im. The communiqu? reads as follows (...) The perfidious American enemy wanted to get another taste of its inevitable failure at the hands of the valiant men of the difficult tasks forces. This time it was the Resistance that had the initiative, making decisions about the engagement in accordance with its military plan to draw the enemy into battle in places other than where it was forced to lick its wounds in previous fights. This time our choice fell on a piece of the pure territory of Iraq that has made enemies taste the bitterness of wounds time and time again since 9 April 2003 ? the area of al-Qa?im... Read the full article / Leggi l'articolo completo: www.uruknet.info/?p=11794 ---------- How they forged the case against Galloway Simon Assaf and Charlie Kimber, assisted by Ann Ashford, Socialist Worker The central document used against George Galloway this week by the senate committee in Washington is a forgery. Investigation by Socialist Worker shows that evidence crucial to the alleged case against the Respect MP is a fake, created after the fall of Baghdad in 2003. The entire assault is another desperate attempt to smear the opponents of the war on Iraq and to make them appear as the corrupt hirelings of tyranny... Read the full article / Leggi l'articolo completo: www.uruknet.info/?p=11797 ---------- Iraq: ICRC concerned for civilians Aljazeera.net The International Committee of the Red Cross has said a recent escalation of violence in the western Iraqi city of al-Qaim has resulted in very high numbers of civilian casualties and refugees. According to a statement published by the ICRC on Monday, fighting near the Iraqi border has forced hundreds of women, children and elderly persons to flee their homes and take refuge in surrounding areas... Read the full article / Leggi l'articolo completo: www.uruknet.info/?p=11798 ---------- Sadr urges restraint amid sectarian violence Hassan Abdulzahrah ..."If occupation forces leave Iraq, there will be no ethnic conflict here, and I'm ready to fight terrorists wherever they are if the occupiers leave," he told reporters. "Personally, I don't need the political process, I don't interfere in it. But I'm ready to do anything that contributes to the welfare of the Iraqi people" (...) Despite calling on supporters to refrain from revenge attacks, Sadr demanded other steps less likely to appeal to the Sunni Arab minority. "I am in favour of re-activating the de-Baathification committee," he said referring to a body set up following the 2003 invasion to eradicate members of Saddam Hussein's ruling party from the civil service and the security forces... Read the full article / Leggi l'articolo completo: www.uruknet.info/?p=11789 ---------- A conspiracy theory with legs. Did Bush fix facts to invade Iraq? Sean Gonsalves This week's phrase is "conspiracy theory." A conspiracy, according to Webster's, is defined as "an agreement between two or more persons to commit a crime or accomplish a legal purpose through illegal action." Of course, "sophisticated" Americans are above such paranoia because, we would like to think, U.S. government officials are inherently incapable of being party to a conspiracy. Years before the invasion of Iraq, a "conspiracy theory" involving the Bush administration decision to invade Iraq on a WMD pretext first came into circulation. The theory -- that the "straight-talking" Bush administration lied about the threat Iraq allegedly posed to the world -- now has new legs... Read the full article / Leggi l'articolo completo: www.uruknet.info/?p=11785 ---------- AMERICA HAS ENTERED THE DARK SIDE Allen Roland Watching Condi Rice tell the world, with great sincerity, that America respects other nation's religious practices while the whole world knows we have and continue to trample innocent Muslims and their religious practices ~ makes me realize that we have fully entered the dark side . We have, indeed, become the Evil Empire ( the Death Star ) and Darth Vader is not Bush ~ The Dark Lord of the Sith is none other than Dick Cheney, whose paranoia and Global empire building schemes are still very much intact... Read the full article / Leggi l'articolo completo: www.uruknet.info/?p=11796 ---------- Depleted uranium victims plead for understanding, help Mid-Hudson News Network Army National Guard Specialist Gerard Matthew is a veteran of the Iraq war. He has an 11-month-old daughter who was born with a deformed right hand. If she tries to stand, and falls, she will not put out here arms to protect herself. Matthew, himself, suffers constant headaches and blurred vision. He has tested positive for depleted uranium, a component used in tank armor, and weapons shells. Dust from unexploded shells can be inhaled. The symptoms can be devastating... Read the full article / Leggi l'articolo completo: www.uruknet.info/?p=11782 ---------- The deserters: Awol crisis hits the US forces Andrew Buncombe, Independent ..."If I am sincere in what I say and there's consequences because of my actions, I am prepared to stand up and take it," Sgt Benderman said. "If I have to go to prison because I don't want to kill anybody, so be it." The case of Sgt Benderman and those of others like him has focused attention on the thousands of US troops who have gone Awol (Absent Without Leave) since the start of President George Bush's so-called war on terror. The most recent Pentagon figures suggest there are 5,133 troops missing from duty. Of these 2,376 are sought by the Army, 1,410 by the Navy, 1,297 by the Marines and 50 by the Air Force... Read the full article / Leggi l'articolo completo: www.uruknet.info/?p=11778 ---------- Tomgram: Mark Danner on the British Smoking-Gun Memo Tom Engelhardt & Mark Danner In its June 9 issue (on sale this week), the New York Review of Books will be the first American print publication to publish the full British "smoking gun" document, the secret memorandum of the minutes of a meeting of Tony Blair's top advisors in July 2002, eight months before the Iraq War commenced. Leaked to the London Sunday Times, which first published it on May 1, the memo offers irrefutable proof of the way in which! the Bush administration made its decision to invade Iraq -- without significant consultation, reasonable intelligence on Iraq, or any desire to explore ways to avoid war -- and well before seeking a Congressional or United Nations mandate of any sort. By July, as the British officials reported, the decision to invade was already in the bag. The only real questions -- other than those involving war planning -- were how to organize the intelligence in such a way as to promote the war to come and how to finesse Congress (and the UN). While people often speak of the "road to war," in the case of the invasion of Iraq, as th