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ACLU warning Facebook users about invasion of privacy
San Jose Mercury News
(8/27/09)

Facebook knows too much, ACLU says in warning of quizzes

Privacy advocates have long warned that users of Facebook and other social networks who seek amusement from quizzes like "What Simpsons Character Are You?" might be mortified by the way creators of such applications can access and potentially "scrape" personal information - not just about the quiz-takers, but their friends as well.
Now, engaging in some online jujitsu, the ACLU of Northern California is employing a cautionary Facebook quiz of its own to illustrate how quizzes that may seem "perfectly harmless" can release an array of data to the wider world - including users' "religion, sexual orientation, political affiliation, photos, events, notes, wall posts, and groups."
The app, titled "What Do Facebook Quizzes Know About You?" delivers its answer by opening a window that scrolls biographical data, attributed comments and photos.
More than 8,000 participants have taken the ACLU's quiz since it was quietly released a few days ago, the ACLU said Wednesday. The group hopes to prompt Facebook to upgrade its privacy default settings for its users, now numbering more than 250 million.
One helpful upgrade, the civil liberties group said, would be for Facebook to "change default privacy settings so that quizzes and other third-party applications run by a user's friends do not have access to the information on a user's profile without the user's opt-in consent."

Blue Dog Democrats "just looking to raise money from insurance companies and promote a right-wing agenda"
The Associated Press
(8/27/09)

Key Democrat suggests party moderates 'brain dead'

A key House liberal suggested Thursday that party moderates who've pushed for changes in health care legislation are "brain dead" and out for insurance company campaign donations.
Moderate Blue Dog Democrats "just want to cause trouble," said Rep. Pete Stark, D-Calif., who heads the health subcommittee on the tax-writing Ways and Means Committee.
"They're for the most part, I hate to say brain dead, but they're just looking to raise money from insurance companies and promote a right-wing agenda that is not really very useful in this whole process," Stark told reporters on a conference call ...
Any bill the House eventually passes would have to be meshed with legislation from the Senate. In the Senate the public plan faces tougher odds partly because minority Republicans who oppose it hold greater sway. A compromise being floated there would create nonprofit, member-owned health co-ops instead, along the lines of agricultural or electrical co-ops.
The Obama administration has indicated some openness to this idea, but Stark dismissed it, saying there was no indication it would work and it was "a sop" to a few senators from largely rural states.
"You might as well talk about unicorns," Stark said.

Obama putting plan in place to privatize all America's public schools
Counterpunch
(8/24/09)

Obama and Duncan's Education Policy: Like Bush's, Only Worse

It seems Obama has latched on to the ideological rhetoric that charter schools are somehow engines of innovation that promise to raise all public schools’ performance, even though, the real impetus behind charter schools is not about innovation and improving public schools but about privatizing public schools, replacing them with elaborate associations of state subsidized charter school networks, contract schools and public vouchers run by for-profit and non-profit providers. There simply is no state or national “educational innovation bank” that collects information on charter school curriculum and teaching practices and then disseminates it to traditional public schools.
Never mind that, it looks more and more like the Obama educational agenda is already beginning to shape itself into reality. On July 30, 2009 the U.S. Senate Appropriations Committee voted a $40 million increase in funding for federal Charter School Programs (CSPs), bringing total funding to a whopping $256 million for fiscal year 2010. Also included in the bill were significant educational reform investments strongly aligned with the Obama Administration’s priorities, such as a focus on increasing the number of high quality charter schools, rewarding effective teachers, and turning around the nation’s lowest performing public schools ...
What the Obama administration is doing, in tandem with the Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, is part and parcel of typical neo-liberal policy making: wielding federal stimulus funds as a financial weapon to force all states to increase the amount of charter schools they host as well as force those states that do not have them to pass legislation authorizing them. Through financial arm-twisting at a time of disastrous economic crisis, the Obama administration plans to use the power of the federal government to create a much larger national market for charter school providers, be they for profit or nonprofit, virtual charters, EMOs or single operators.
This is deeply troubling, for many states which do not want charter schools or have found the experiment to be less than adequate and in fact damaging to kids and funding, for traditional public schools will now be forced to choose stimulus money over policy, a form of economic extortion and increased federal and corporate control over decision making, especially at a time when many of these states are literally financial insolvent. This is another example of how disaster politics operates, only this time the disaster is not a natural disaster but an economic disaster that threatens public policies.

• This is part one in a three-part series. You can find all three at Counterpunch. We chose the first part because it's the most hellish.

Private insurers cover abortion, but anti-reform groups oppose any 'public option' that does the same
Wall Street Journal
(8/27/09)

Is New Front in Health Battle

Anti-abortion groups are gearing up for a battle in the fall over health-care legislation, another headache for Democrats who already face concerns about the measure's cost and reach.
Most versions of the Democratic health plan would create subsidies for lower-income people to buy private health insurance. If that insurance includes coverage for abortion, as many existing private plans do, it effectively means federal taxpayers are subsidizing abortion, critics of the legislation argue.

Desperate Republicans now embrace fringe nuts they recently shunned
The New Republic
(9/9/09)

Crazy Train

What we are witnessing is the convergence of the mainstream Republican culture with the right-wing political subculture. Last year, the two remained clearly distinct. During the presidential election last fall, angry people began showing up at John McCain's rallies, screaming out various lunatic conspiracy theories. McCain reacted to these supporters with discomfort or puzzlement. Here he was accusing Obama of massive tax hikes or palling around with Bill Ayers, and attendees at his rallies were shouting about Obama being an Arab or plotting to destroy the country. McCain would squint his face as if to wonder, "What are these people talking about?"
Now, mainstream Republican leaders are reading from the same hymnal. You don't need to rely on poorly written, all-capital-letter e-mails for your lunatic conspiracy theories. You can get them straight from the GOP and its message organs.
What distinguishes the right-wing subculture is not that it relies on lies. The mainstream political culture does, too. But mainstream lies--John McCain wants to give special tax breaks to oil companies; Obama voted for kindergarten sex education--operate within the context of plausible assumptions about how government works. The lies of the right-wing subculture, on the other hand, incorporate fantastical beliefs ...
Those Republicans embarrassed about the Birthers like to cite, in tit-for- tat fashion, the "Truthers," who thought George W. Bush was complicit in the September 11 attacks. They have excitedly circulated old polls showing that one-third of Democrats thought Bush "knew" about the attacks. But the parallel is misleading. First, the responses to the poll are not as crazy as they seem: Many or most of those responding affirmatively were probably thinking of the well-publicized revelation that Bush was warned of an Al Qaeda attack. And second, no mainstream Democrat has endorsed or sought to investigate Truther claims, which couldn't even get published on forums like Daily Kos.

Honduran police rape women opposed to coup
Latin American Herald Tribune
(8/26/09)

Group Says Honduran Cops on Rape Spree Since Coup

The group Feministas de Honduras en Resistencia said Thursday that is has documented 19 instances of rape by police officers since the June 28 coup that ousted President Mel Zelaya.
There have been many other cases of rape, but the women have not reported them out of fear of reprisals, Gilda Rivera, the executive coordinator of the Honduran Center for Women’s Rights and head of Feministas, told Efe.
The activists say that women taking part in the resistance to the coup are being targeted.
“We’ve obtained testimonials from women who’ve been sexually abused, beaten with cudgels on different parts of their bodies, especially the breasts and buttocks,” adds the report presented Thursday at a press conference in Tegucigalpa.

Controversial ad featuring Israel's separation wall confronted with reality
Radio Netherlands Worldwide
(7/22/09)

Wall football ad infuriates Palestinians

It lasts less than one minute, but a local telephone company's television commercial is causing a furore in Israel. The controversial advert shows a fun game of football next to the security wall round the West Bank. It has led to a furious response from Palestinians.
Palestinian politicians are calling it disgusting and insulting. They are demanding it be withdrawn but Cellcom, the company behind the commercial, are not worried in the slightest.
The TV commercial kicks off with an Israeli army vehicle being struck by a ball from the other side of the barrier. The soldiers decide to kick the ball back over. When the ball is immediately returned, they call for reinforcements. The scene develops into a friendly match between a whole army team and their unseen opponents on the other side of the barrier.
The footie game ends with the pay-off: "When all's said and done, what do we all want out of life? A bit of fun!"
The advert has unleashed a storm of criticism. Critics are slamming Cellcom for making use of the suffering of the Palestinians to sell mobile phones ...
After the commercial, the Bilin Palestinians decided to carry out a test. Rather than stones, a couple of footballs were kicked in the direction of the Israeli forces. Tear gas and water canon were used in response.

US pressuring UN to cook evidence on Iran's alleged nukes, just like Bush did with Iraq and WMD claims
Counterpunch
(8/23/09)

The Leaking Game

Past This is Hell! guest Gareth Porter writes ...

Western officials are leaking stories to the Associated Press and Reuters aimed at pressuring the outgoing chief of the International Atomic Energy Agency, Mohamed ElBaradei, to include a summary of intelligence alleging that Iran has been actively pursuing work on nuclear weapons in the IAEA report due out this week.
The aim of the pressure for publication of the document appears to be to discredit the November 2007 US National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) on the Iranian nuclear programme, which concluded that Iran had ended work on nuclear weapons in 2003.
The story by Reuters United Nations correspondent Louis Charbonneau reported that "several" officials from those states had said the IAEA has "credible information" suggesting that the US intelligence estimate was "incorrect".
The issue of credibility of the NIE is particularly sensitive right now because the United States, Britain, France and Germany are anticipating tough negotiations with Russia and China on Iran's nuclear program in early September.
The two parallel stories by Charbonneau and Associated Press correspondent George Jahn in Vienna, both published Aug. 20, show how news stories based on leaks from officials with a decided agenda, without any serious effort to provide an objective historical text or investigation of their accuracy, can seriously distort an issue ...
The AP's Jahn cited as further evidence of Iran's intention to manufacture nuclear weapons its alleged refusal to cooperate on IAEA demands for more cameras at the Natanz enrichment facility. "Iran's stonewalling of the agency on increased monitoring," he wrote, "has raised agency concerns that its experts might not be able to make sure that some of the enriched material produced at Natanz is not diverted for potential weapons use."
Unfortunately for that argument, however, IAEA officials revealed Aug. 20 that Iran had already agreed the previous week to allow increased IAEA monitoring of the Natanz enrichment facility through additional cameras.

British parliamentarian insults Baltimore by saying it really is like 'The Wire'
The Independent
(8/28/09)

Mayor of Baltimore accuses Grayling of 'dishonouring' city

When the shadow Home Secretary, Chris Grayling, compared modern life in parts of Britain to the critically acclaimed American crime show The Wire, he was ridiculed on this side of the Atlantic.
Now his comments have reached America, and the Mayor of Baltimore, the city in which the violent drama is set, has waded into the controversy.
"This week I was alerted to a speech made by a Member of the British Parliament, a Mr Chris Grayling, who suggested his country should fear becoming like our city of Baltimore as portrayed in the HBO series, The Wire," said Mayor Sheila Dixon, in a statement on her website.
"We all watched The Wire and while it was sometimes a heartbreaking reflection of reality, it was in the main, merely entertaining fiction."

the reality surrounding the construction of the wall. That's what we got in return: tear gas."

• We know, we know. It's a bit dated but we just became aware of the ad, the counter-ad, and the controversy.

'It’s doubtful whether the $75 billion Home Affordable Modification Program will ever match expectations and slow foreclosure rates'
Mother Jones
(8/26/09)

The Foreclosure Rescue Mirage

In theory, (the $75 billion Home Affordable Modification Program) HAMP works like this: Eligible borrowers, including homeowners behind on their payments or with a serious chance of default, apply for a program modification through their mortgage servicers—the companies that handle day-to-day responsibilities like taking payments, providing customer service, and foreclosing on those in default, but often don’t own the mortgage itself. If accepted, the homeowner’s monthly payments are lowered under HAMP terms, which say the new payments should not be more than 31 percent of the homeowner’s income. Servicers can lower payments by decreasing the interest rate, extending the term of the mortgage, or even forgiving part of the principal—the total amount owed. HAMP calls for a 90-day trial period for the new modification, and if the homeowner pays those three trial payments on time, the modification is finalized and extended over several years. For each successful HAMP modification, servicers receive a $1,000 incentive payment, and can earn $1,000 more each year (for up to three years) that borrowers stay in the program.
The problem is that the Obama administration gave mortgage servicers little more than a heads-up before rolling out its program, leaving companies to play catch-up once HAMP was announced. A vice president at Wells Fargo Home Mortgage, Mary Coffin, told the Senate banking committee in July that the percentage of loan workout inquiries from borrowers who are current increased from, on average, 5 to 10 percent a month to 40 percent since HAMP was implemented. Further complicating matters, the Treasury has continued to tweak the new program’s details while giving servicers little advance notice. “The current method of publicly announcing new guidelines or changes concurrently with their effective dates creates immediate demand with insufficient lead time for operational readiness,” Allen Jones, an executive for default management policy at Bank of America, testified to Congress in mid-July. “This can lead to negative customer experience and, ultimately, backlash against the programs.”
"Negative customer experience" is putting it mildly. One Connecticut woman described her ongoing struggle to modify her mortgage as her "worst nightmare." Simply getting someone on the phone who can help or who has any authority, homeowners say, can be a maddening endeavor. "I would call all the time, all the time," says Tangi Smith, a single mom living in Lake Worth, Florida, who's been trying to get a HAMP modification with CitiMortgage. "You just get this big circle jerk" ...
HAMP’s failings can largely be attributed to flaws in its design, particularly when it comes to the government's guidelines determining which homeowners are eligible, what kind of modification they should receive, and even how the modification process is supposed to work. (The Treasury Department did not respond to multiple requests for comment.)
For instance, one HAMP guideline specifies that a mortgage payment can't be more than 31 percent of an individual or couple’s gross income. But gross income can be an imperfect measurement—it leaves out expenses that lenders should account for, like alimony, child support, and back taxes. A more effective program, says Joseph Smith, would use net income, the actual amount of money someone has at the end of the month. This measure, he explains, shows "the borrower has the ability to sustain the mortgage, pay living expenses, and has a reasonable likelihood of success. Anything short of that is an absolute disaster."
Then there's HAMP’s paperwork process. Lacking a standardized set of forms for all servicers, the program's servicers require their own sets of documents, complicating the process for third-party debt counselors, who assist homeowners trying to navigate pages of perplexing mortgage documents. "It’s a terrible hassle, and borrowers have problems understanding these forms and filling them out correctly," says the University of Pennsylvania's Guttentag. "The whole process would be enormously simplified if there was one master form."
The program also gives homeowners no fair warning about the damage HAMP can inflict on their credit. Guidelines published by the Consumer Data Industry Association that apply to HAMP say homeowners who enter the program’s trial period current on their mortgages should continue to be reported to credit bureaus as current but should also be reported as paying "under a partial payment agreement." An official with FICO, a private company that calculates credit scores, told Bloomberg that the firm views mortgage renegotiation as an indicator of greater risk even if the homeowner pays on time. Victor Stern of Charlotte, North Carolina, told the news service that his credit score dropped by 121 points, from 740 to 619, when he began HAMP’s trial period. "This program is helping with payments on one side," he said, "but then hurting your credit on the other, so you wind up behind the eight ball."
On the servicer side, another crucial calculation—how much a homeowner should pay—is just as flawed. HAMP guidelines permit servicers to take financial information over the phone for admission into the program’s three-month trial period without verifying it. While this surely speeds up the application process, it can also lead to homeowners, intentionally or not, giving incomplete or false information to get in. Once the trial period is up, however, homeowners must submit official documentation—and if that doesn’t match their trial period information, they could end up in an unaffordable modification or dumped out of the program altogether, landing them back in jeopardy of foreclosure. Experts and servicers alike believe the technology exists to both improve the application process and speed it up (like an online application portal for the entire program), but the Treasury has yet to implement such a measure, even though it could prevent taxpayer dollars from being squandered on failed modifications ...
Between the Treasury, Fannie Mae, which administers HAMP, and Freddie Mac, which oversees compliance, program transparency and oversight are very much a work in progress. Six months in, HAMP officials have limited ability to monitor servicers and even less leverage to enforce program compliance if servicers aren’t following the rules, lending experts say ...
The companies participating in HAMP include those with questionable track records, some the targets of numerous lawsuits. For instance, Ocwen Financial Corporation, which the Central Florida Better Business Bureau gives an "F" rating, is the subject of a class-action lawsuit alleging unlawful and deceptive business practices, like increasing monthly payments without notice, misapplying homeowners' payments, and failing to give homeowners payment-related information in a timely fashion. (An executive for Ocwen questioned the veracity of the lawsuit and the BBB’s grade, saying the Bureau’s rating system unfairly targeted large companies.) ...
Despite its flaws, HAMP is a good-faith effort by the government to address the foreclosure crisis, and there are signs of improvement. In June, HAMP officials began conducting much more rigorous reviews of servicers, and have started a "second look" program, in which servicers’ decisions to approve or deny HAMP modifications are scrutinized. Compliance officials are also analyzing samples of HAMP-modified loans to track error rates with servicers. And government officials have on several occasions tried to light a fire under HAMP servicers to speed up the modification process. On July 9, Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner and Department of Housing and Urban Development Secretary Shaun Donovan sent a letter to servicers exhorting them to move faster with modifications. Several weeks later, servicers’ representatives met with Obama administration officials in Washington to talk about boosting modifications ...
But even with improvements, it’s doubtful whether HAMP will ever match expectations and slow foreclosure rates, experts say. The Treasury has set a target of modifying 4 million mortgages by 2012, but Moody's estimates HAMP will in fact modify only 1.5 to 2 million. (For perspective, Goldman Sachs projects there will be 13 million foreclosures from 2009 through 2014.) And a Moody's analyst recently wrote that the program "will have to step up substantially in the remainder of this year in order" to meet even that total. Consumer advocates and attorneys throughout the country say some of the servicers with whom they’ve interacted often seem outright reluctant to modify loans. And mortgage experts largely agree that cramdown measures must be used to put a dent in the deepening crisis. "It is clear...that this new voluntary, incentives-based program will not and cannot achieve the necessary degree of foreclosure prevention and mortgage debt reduction that are essential prerequisites to an economic recovery," Alan White, a bankruptcy law expert and law professor at Valparaiso University who's studied the mortgage industry, told Congress in July.
Homeowners, in the meantime, are left to wait to see.

"Widespread" mercury contamination at unsafe levels found in America's fish
Environmental News Service
(8/24/09)

Fish Nationwide Contaminated With Mercury

Scientists found mercury contamination in every fish sampled in 291 streams across the country, reports a new study by the U.S. Geological Survey.
About a quarter of the fish tested were found to contain mercury at levels exceeding the criterion for the protection of people who consume average amounts of fish, established by the US Environmental Protection Agency.
More than two-thirds of the fish exceeded the US EPA level of concern for fish-eating mammals, according to the study, released on Friday.
"This study shows just how widespread mercury pollution has become in our air, watersheds, and many of our fish in freshwater streams," said Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar. "This science sends a clear message that our country must continue to confront pollution, restore our nation's waterways, and protect the public from potential health dangers."

In studies, why are placebos just as good as Prozac?
WIRED
(8/24/09)

Placebos Are Getting More Effective. Drugmakers Are Desperate to Know Why.

The fact that an increasing number of medications are unable to beat sugar pills has thrown the industry into crisis. The stakes could hardly be higher. In today's economy, the fate of a long-established company can hang on the outcome of a handful of tests.
Why are inert pills suddenly overwhelming promising new drugs and established medicines alike? The reasons are only just beginning to be understood. A network of independent researchers is doggedly uncovering the inner workings - and potential therapeutic applications - of the placebo effect. At the same time, drugmakers are realizing they need to fully understand the mechanisms behind it so they can design trials that differentiate more clearly between the beneficial effects of their products and the body's innate ability to heal itself. A special task force of the Foundation for the National Institutes of Health is seeking to stem the crisis by quietly undertaking one of the most ambitious data-sharing efforts in the history of the drug industry. After decades in the jungles of fringe science, the placebo effect has become the elephant in the boardroom ...
T he blockbuster success of mood drugs in the '80s and '90s emboldened Big Pharma to promote remedies for a growing panoply of disorders that are intimately related to higher brain function. By attempting to dominate the central nervous system, Big Pharma gambled its future on treating ailments that have turned out to be particularly susceptible to the placebo effect ...
But why would the placebo effect seem to be getting stronger worldwide? Part of the answer may be found in the drug industry's own success in marketing its products ...
The success of those ads in selling blockbuster drugs like antidepressants and statins
also pushed trials offshore as therapeutic virgins - potential volunteers who were not already medicated with one or another drug - became harder to find. The contractors that manage trials for Big Pharma have moved aggressively into Africa, India, China, and the former Soviet Union. In these places, however, cultural dynamics can boost the placebo response in other ways. Doctors in these countries are paid to fill up trial rosters quickly, which may motivate them to recruit patients with milder forms of illness that yield more readily to placebo treatment. Furthermore, a patient's hope of getting better and expectation of expert care - the primary placebo triggers in the brain - are particularly acute in societies where volunteers are clamoring to gain access to the most basic forms of medicine. "The quality of care that placebo patients get in trials is far superior to the best insurance you get in America," says psychiatrist Arif Khan, principal investigator in hundreds of trials for companies like Pfizer and Bristol-Myers Squibb. "It's basically luxury care."
Big Pharma faces additional problems in beating placebo when it comes to psychiatric drugs. One is to accurately define the nature of mental illness. The litmus test of drug efficacy in antidepressant trials is a questionnaire called the Hamilton Depression Rating Scale. The HAM-D was created nearly 50 years ago based on a study of major depressive disorder in patients confined to asylums. Few trial volunteers now suffer from that level of illness. In fact, many experts are starting to wonder if what drug companies now call depression is even the same disease that the HAM-D was designed to diagnose.
Existing tests also may not be appropriate for diagnosing disorders like social anxiety and premenstrual dysphoria - the very types of chronic, fuzzily defined conditions that the drug industry started targeting in the '90s, when the placebo problem began escalating. The neurological foundation of these illnesses is still being debated, making it even harder for drug companies to come up with effective treatments.
What all of these disorders have in common, however, is that they engage the higher cortical centers that generate beliefs and expectations, interpret social cues, and anticipate rewards. So do chronic pain, sexual dysfunction, Parkinson's, and many other ailments that respond robustly to placebo treatment. To avoid investing in failure, researchers say, pharmaceutical companies will need to adopt new ways of vetting drugs that route around the brain's own centralized network for healing ...
Ironically, Big Pharma's attempt to dominate the central nervous system has ended up revealing how powerful the brain really is. The placebo response doesn't care if the catalyst for healing is a triumph of pharmacology, a compassionate therapist, or a syringe of salt water. All it requires is a reasonable expectation of getting better. That's potent medicine.

European healthcare better than US at discovering new drugs
Health Affairs
(8/25/09)

Global Drug Discovery: Europe Is Ahead

It is widely believed that the United States has eclipsed Europe in pharmaceutical research productivity. Some leading analysts claim that although fewer drugs have been discovered worldwide over the past decade, most are therapeutically important. Yet a comprehensive data set of all new chemical entities approved between 1982 and 2003 shows that the United States never overtook Europe in research productivity, and that Europe in fact is pulling ahead of U.S. productivity. Other large studies show that most new drugs add few if any clinical benefits over previously discovered drugs.

Israel evicting citizens from historic land in continued plan of 'Judaisation'
The National
(8/23/09)

Bedouin in Israeli desert struggle to retain land

Past This is Hell! guest Jonathan Cook writes ...

The inhabitants of the Bedouin village of Amra have good reason to fear that the harsh tactics used by the Israeli army against Palestinians in the occupied West Bank have been imported to their small corner of Israel’s Negev desert.
Over the summer, the Tarabin tribe, all of them Israeli citizens, have had the sole access road to their homes sealed off, while the dirt track they must use instead is regularly blocked by temporary checkpoints at which their papers and vehicles are inspected at length.
Coils of razor wire encircle much of the village, and children as young as eight have been arrested in a series of night-time raids.
“Four-fifths of our youngsters now have files with the police and our drivers are being repeatedly fined for supposed traffic violations,” said Tulab Tarabin, one of Amra’s 400 Bedouin inhabitants. “Every time we are stopped, the police ask us: ‘Why don’t you leave?’”
Lawyers and human rights activists say a campaign of pressure is being organized against the Tarabin at the behest of a nearby Jewish community, Omer, which is determined to build a neighbourhood for Israeli army officers on the tribe’s land.
“The policy in Israel is that when Jews need land, the Bedouin must move -- no matter how long they have been living in their homes or whether their communities predate Israel’s creation,” said Morad al-Sana, a lawyer with the Adalah legal centre for Israel’s Arab minority. “The Tarabin’s crime is that they refuse to budge.”
The 180,000 Bedouin in the Negev have never been welcome, says Oren Yiftachel, a geographer at Ben Gurion University of the Negev in Beersheva. They are descendants of a few thousand who managed to avoid expulsion from the southern semi-desert region during the 1948 war that founded Israel.
Many of the surviving Bedouin, including the Tarabin, were forcibly relocated from their extensive ancestral lands in the 1950s to an area close to the Negev’s main city, Beersheva, Professor Yiftachel said. Israel declared the Bedouin lands as “state land” and established a series of overcrowded “townships” to house the tribes instead.
“The stated goal is one of ‘Judaisation’,” Prof Yiftachel added, referring to a long-standing policy of concentrating the rural Bedouin into urban reservations to free up land for Jewish settlement. About half of the Negev’s Bedouin, some 90,000, have refused to move.

Former Pakistan dictator's legacy of 'Islamisation' tearing country apart
The Guardian
(8/24/09)

Intolerance is sweeping across Pakistan

Ever since the forced "Islamisation" of Pakistan under former dictator Zia ul-Haq, fanatical Sunni religious groups have loudly and aggressively pushed an intolerant brand of Islam. Although they have consistently fared poorly in elections contested by major political parties or not massively rigged in their favour, they are a powerful lobby greatly feared by governments, the public and even the judiciary.
It would be unfair, however, to only blame religious groups for the spreading intolerance. "Sectarian conflict in Pakistan is the direct consequence of state policies of Islamisation and marginalisation of secular democratic forces," concludes an International Crisis Group report.
Under Zia, school textbooks were purged of any positive reference to minorities or Muslim traditions considered too pagan. Students were taught that Pakistan was a global vanguard of Sunni Islam forever threatened by Hindus, Jews and western imperialists. Pakistan's penal code was amended to make blasphemy against Islam, including desecration of the Qur'an, a crime under strict penalties including life imprisonment to death. The Hudood Ordinance left millions of victims of rape exposed to the new crime of adultery while the testimony of non-Muslims was judged to be half the value of a Muslim ...
Only an active roll-back of Zia's Islamisation of the state will prevent Pakistan from continued communal disintegration.

Election results could throw Afghanistan into civil war
The Independent
(8/25/09)

Abdullah's supporters threaten to take up arms over 'rigged' election

With the results of Afghanistan's presidential election expected later today, supporters of the opposition leader, Abdullah Abdullah, delivered a grim message last night, threatening violence if their candidate loses.
Standing by the black marble grave of their fallen leader Ahmed Shah Masoud, two former mujahedin fighters said they still had their guns and warned that they had not forgotten how to use them.
Like most of Afghanistan's Tajik community, they had voted for Mr Abdullah, a former foreign minister of Tajik and Pashtun ancestry, who fought alongside their beloved Commander Masoud against the Soviet invaders and then the Taliban.
If the election is "stolen" by Hamid Karzai, the reaction would be violent, the former guerillas declared. Mohammed Amin, 51, said: "We have heard Karzai is saying he has already won. We have also heard there has been a lot of fraud in the south. The election cannot be decided like this. The international community should correct this and have these votes taken again. If they do not, people will resist. This is Afghanistan, and we have all got arms. If people are angry, we will use these arms."
The last time they waged war, under the charismatic command of Masoud, was to keep the Pashtun Taliban at bay when they had already conquered the rest of the country.

Show trials no longer having the same effect on Iranians as they used to
The New Yorker
(8/31/09)

The Iran Show

Forced confessions have been part of Iran’s penal system since the mid-nineteen-seventies. But it was the Islamic Republic that turned the auditorium of Evin Prison, in Tehran, into a macabre theatre. In 1982, after a fierce fight between the extremist theocrats in the government and the radical Muslim guerrillas outside it, the revolutionary regime began broadcasting confessions from Evin. The prisoners—mainly secular leftists and Muslim guerrillas—recanted their views and apologized for betraying Islam. Ervand Abrahamian, the author of “Tortured Confessions: Prisons and Public Recantations in Modern Iran,” quotes a witness who said of the night a major leftist recanted, “Something snapped inside all of us. We never expected someone of his reputation to get down on his knees. Some commented it was as revolting as watching a human being cannibalize himself.”
Revulsion was, in many ways, the point. Those who confessed not only implicated themselves; they implicated others. They persuaded the public either of the existence of malevolent plots against the state or—more likely—of the state’s ruthlessness in crushing opponents. A few Iranians who confessed even became agents of the state, betraying former colleagues. These repenters became hated figures, and the word for them, tavab, a term of abuse. In an era of warring ideologies, the only meaningful contest was for domination, and the repenters were clearly the losers. In 1988, Iran’s inquisition came to a climax with the systematic execution of thousands of political prisoners ...
And so a spectacle that was meant to produce compliance and terror has instead stoked fury and derision. The regime has lost control of the political discussion within Iran, which is focussing on the abuse of prisoners rather than on the perfidy of foreigners or the futility of resistance. On July 31st, Mehdi Karroubi, a reformist cleric and former Presidential candidate, shattered a taboo by airing allegations of rape and sexual abuse inside Iran’s prisons. The authorities responded by shutting down a newspaper that Karroubi published. But the burden of shame had shifted squarely from the prisoners to their wardens. A senior ayatollah praised Karroubi, quoting Muhammad: “A realm will survive without believing in God, but will not survive with oppression.”
Meanwhile, Iranians are turning the show trials into a kind of black comedy, by mocking the predictability of their ugliness. Last month, Mohsen Armin, a prominent reformist, issued a preëmptive statement declaring that, no matter what he might say should he be taken to prison, he is not the agent of foreign powers. Perhaps no one has done more to undermine the effect of forced confessions than Ebrahim Nabavi, an exiled Iranian satirist who has released a parody confession video. Dressed in striped pajamas and wearing bandages, he confesses to meeting with a C.I.A. agent, importing green velvet, and having affairs with Carla Bruni and Angelina Jolie (“She had a very ugly and terrible husband”). He apologizes to the Supreme Leader and to the paramilitaries who “kindly” beat him.
In today’s Iran, the interrogator, not the repenter, has become the object of rage and ridicule. Recanting under pressure, Abrahamian told me, is now seen as a sign not of weakness or treachery but, rather, of “being human.” The display of systemic cruelty is not chilling but galvanizing.

• Here's the before-and-after pictures of Abtahi. Get this line: A close aide to President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad suggested that Mohammad Ali Abtahi, a reformist critic of the president, appeared so gaunt during his televised confession this month because he himself had decided to take off some weight.
  "It's natural that when someone has become fat, in prison he understands that his fatness harmed his body and spirit," said Ali Akbar Javanfekr (left)."So maybe Mr. Abtahi took advantage of this opportunity to lose weight."

Komodo dragon latest potential victim of gold mining
mongabay.com
(8/24/09)

Gold mining threatens world's most infamous reptile, the Komodo dragon

A row has taken off in Indonesia over whether or not to allow gold mining near Komodo National Park, home to the infamous, venomous, and largest of all lizards, the Komodo dragon. Eight mines have currently been proposed, several have already begun exploratory work. Critics of the gold mines contend that the mining threatens the ecology of the park and the Komodo dragon, listed as Vulnerable by the IUCN.
"Komodo dragons live here (and only here) and the national park together with the dragons, coral and fish are integral for what little tourism they get here. The entire community in the state relies on income generated either directly or indirectly from this area," a local source said. "The locals here don’t want the mine but are powerless to stop it. They have attempted a blockade but to no avail."
The regional environmental minister, Sudirman, concurred, stating that the mine had damaged the area’s topography and tourism. He added the company did not have the documents required pertaining to environmental management and monitoring. "Batugosok Island was intended for tourism and not mining," he told the press ...
Eighty percent of gold mined in the world is used to make jewelry and much of the mining is done in ecological sensitive areas, such as rainforests.

Piracy booming globally ... and not even all the world's navies can stop it
Foreign Policy
(8/21/09)

You Ain't Seen Pirates Yet

This week, the Russian Navy found the Arctic Sea, a timber freighter that mysteriously disappeared at the end of July after passing through the English Channel. The Maltese-registered, Russian-crewed ship ended up 300 miles off the coast of Cape Verde -- a spectacular act of piracy and one of the first in European waters since the 1700s ...
Naval commanders and ship owners alike are bracing themselves for an imminent surge in attacks -- and the world's navies are in no position to stop it ...
The Maritime Security Center, run by the EU Naval Force, warns mariners to expect "a continuing spreading and a rapid increase of piracy in the Indian Ocean directly after the monsoon" and "a moderate increase" in the Gulf of Aden once the rains and strong winds that have deterred the marauders dissipate in late August.
This September surge will come on top of an unprecedented rise of piracy in just the past few years. According to a recent study by the International Maritime Bureau, the number of attacks between January and June more than doubled -- to 240 -- year on year. Although the rise is largely due to well-publicized efforts of Somali pirates, the phenomenon is global -- as the Arctic Sea incident demonstrates. In Nigeria alone, there were at least three dozen attacks in the second quarter; attacks have doubled in Southeast Asia and the Far East. Worldwide, in just the first six months of 2009, 78 vessels were boarded, 31 successfully hijacked, and 75 fired upon. In the same period, 561 crew members were taken hostage, 19 injured, 7 kidnapped, and 6 killed. Eight remain missing.
It is increasingly clear that naval power is not going to stop the spread of piracy anytime soon. Take the case of the waters off Somalia. No fewer than three dozen ships from three powerful multinational forces patrol the coast: the EU's Operation Atalanta, the U.S.-coordinated Combined Task Force (CTF) 151, and NATO's Operation Allied Protector, plus independent flotillas from China, France, India, Malaysia, and Russia, among others. Despite this unprecedented mobilization, the number of attacks by Somali pirates this year already exceeds the total number recorded last year ...
First, modern piracy is a sophisticated enterprise; pirates have proven themselves to be highly adaptable. Turkish Rear Adm. Caner Bener, commander of CTF 151, acknowledged last month, "While our ability to deter and disrupt attacks has improved over time, we are constantly adapting the way we do our business as the pirates adapt and modify their tactics." As the massive hunt for the Arctic Sea highlighted with respect to the Russian fleet, it is easier to look for one missing boat than to prevent its seizure.
Second, no less a figure than the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Adm. Michael Mullen, has pointed out that to cover all the expanses of sea at risk of piracy would require 1,000 ships -- three times the size of the entire U.S. Navy. And naval forces aren't what they used to be. The United States has an aging, shrinking fleet and has slashed its shipbuilding budget. With the exception of China, where the People's Liberation Army Navy is in the midst of a major expansion, other navies are dwindling even faster thanks to recession-necessitated cuts.
Third, even if there were enough naval vessels to cover the entire world's piracy "hot spots" -- to say nothing of the problem of coordinating their commands -- the effort would hardly be cost-effective. Piracy strikes less than 1 percent of shipping vessels, and the price tag, financial and otherwise, of keeping naval forces on semipermanent patrol far from home ports would be extraordinary.

Are advertisers growing weary of all political gabfests, on the right and left?
Advertising Age
(8/24/09)

Political Talk Shows Talk Themselves Out of Ads

Could Glenn Beck be killing off an entire cable genre?
After the recent controversy over the cable talker, marketers seem to be considering pulling ads from the politically oriented cable news shows that have helped NBC Universal's MSNBC and News Corp.'s Fox News Channel thrive in the ratings -- no matter what their political leanings ...
A decision to end support of a political program is particularly thorny. It's one thing to yank money from a really noxious reality program or a drama that features brief nudity. With every political gabfest tilted toward a particular set of beliefs and values, however, an advertiser looking to reach the broadest possible audience could find it difficult to suspend support of a right-leaning pulpit without also cutting ad dollars to a left-leaning one, or vice versa.
"I'll bet [networks] are going to have to dial it down for all of them. [MSNBC's 'Countdown With Keith] Olbermann' will have to drum it down, and Fox is going to have to drum it down," said Ira Berger, director-network broadcasting at independent agency Richards Group. The question the cable-news networks will face should more marketers pull out, he said, is whether they are "about the cause or about the money. We'll find out. Stay tuned."
But those expecting a quieter, more-civil discourse on cable shouldn't get their hopes up. It's not clear that any one marketer's decision to cut ad support would force the extremely radical move of making a host change his or her tone, or of taking that person off the air ...
A deciding factor in any advertiser's stance toward the hot-potato political genre could be how long the issue of advertising on any of these programs remains part of the broader public debate. Typically, decisions to suspend advertising are made to protect advertisers "in the short term," said Steve Kalb, senior VP-director of broadcast media at Interpublic Group of Cos.' Mullen. P&G, for one, declined to comment regarding advertising plans for other political talk shows on Fox News or elsewhere. TV networks will "have to ride it out," Mr. Kalb said. "Whether they reconfigure the lineup or make the programs more accountable, that remains to be seen."

Convicted Lockerbie bomber released after agreeing to drop appeal 'which many felt had a good chance of success'
Asia Times
(8/26/09)

Lockerbie deal leaves no clean hands

Past This is Hell! guest Ian Williams writes ...

United States President Barack Obama owes Libya and Scotland a lot. The release of Abdelbeset Ali Mohmed al-Megrahi was like throwing red meat to the wolves who have been on the president's case. For a week, hysteria about Obama-care, euthanasia, abortion and the rest has been subsumed under a wave of bipartisan indignation about Megrahi.
The America that gave the world the Salem witch trials and the lynch mob ran unabashed and there was the unedifying spectacle of the Obama team running alongside, baying in harmony. (Although perhaps one of the most ill-augured boycott calls ever made is the one to eschew Scotch whisky.)
In contrast, over much of the world, Scotland's decision to release Lockerbie bomber [1] Megrahi on compassionate grounds because he is dying of terminal cancer seems reasonable, as Scottish Justice Minister Kenneth MacAskill so eloquently expounded when giving his decision ...
United States Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) director Robert Mueller called the Libyan's release "a mockery of the rule of law" and complained to MacAskill that his decision was "as inexplicable as it is detrimental to the cause of justice".
MacAskill does not need lessons in justice from the US, certainly not from the FBI, with its notorious use of paid informants and provocateurs. When the USS Vincennes indisputably shot down an Iranian Airbus in 1988, killing 290, the crew involved received medals. When the case of dubiously convicted murderer Troy Davis came up before the Supreme Court this month, two justices, fortunately a minority, declared that there was nothing unconstitutional about executing an innocent man as long as he had had a trial.
The US has an incarceration rate more then four times Britain's, almost 10 times that of the European Union as a whole and even higher than Russia's. Clearly, dying in prison has no fears in the US - for those who inflict it. Prisons have had to be adapted for wheelchairs for inmates too old to walk, let alone commit new crimes.
Few people come out with clean hands from the episode. British Prime Minister Gordon Brown certainly knew of the impending release, and did not strive too officiously to avert it, while his protests at Libyan celebrations provide cover against the equally expedient and contrived protests from the White House. British and American oil companies will still be knocking on doors in Tripoli - and finding them opened.
In an oil-short world, Libya has been able to behave with almost Chinese impunity ...
Voluntary fall guys are the noblest fools in politics. Megrahi "volunteered" to go to The Hague and take the rap for Libya to rejoin the world economy. If one overlooks the possibility that dire things might have happened to his family if he hadn't, greater love hath no one ...
His sacrifice is all the more so in view of the strong possibility of his innocence. Totally lost, as so often in the US, is any doubt that someone convicted could possibly be innocent. In fact, it would be a stretch to say that a secret policeman for Gaddafi was "innocent". The regime has proven blood aplenty on its hands, but there is plausible evidence that investigators were so determined to "convict" Libya that they ignored all other leads ...
Many observers suspect a jury would have thrown both cases out. His release on compassionate grounds was predicated on him dropping his appeal against the conviction, which many felt had a good chance of success. Indeed, he seems to have needed Gaddafi's say-so before dropping the appeal. If Megrahi were guilty, it was because he was acting as an agent for the Gaddafi now being greeted by politicians all over the West. If he were not, then the intelligence agencies of the West framed an innocent man to score political points at Libya.
MacAskill's halo is the only one on the horizon in this murky world.

Iranian insurgent claims US behind terrorism
Xinhua
(8/26/09)

Iranian Sunni rebel confesses US role in terror plots inside Iran

An Iranian Sunni rebel said on Tuesday the United States had supporting role in launching terror plots inside Iran.
"After meeting with the US officials in the US embassy in Pakistan four years ago, they (the US officials) promised to help us with everything we needed," Abdolhamid Rigi, the brother of insurgent Jundallah leader Abdolmalek Rigi, told reporters ...
"We were deceived by them (the US officials)...We received monetary and armed supports from the United States...We received orders from them" to carry out the terrors inside Iran, Abdolhamid Rigi said ...
Jundallah, or Peoples Resistant Movement of Iran, is an insurgent Sunni Islamic organization based in Balochistan of Pakistan which claims to fight for the rights of Sunni Muslims in Iran ...
The group has been identified as a terrorist organization by Iran and Pakistan and has been behind numerous acts of terror, kidnapping and smuggling narcotics. Many believe it is linked to al-Qaida.

Russia's updated list of illegal extremist images includes Winnie the Pooh as a Nazi
The Moscow Times
(8/21/09)

Winnie the Pooh Debuts on Extremism List

Prime Minister Vladimir Putin and Winnie the Pooh share a dubious honor: Anyone who depicts either of them with a swastika can be punished under the law.
The Justice Ministry published the latest — and biggest — update to its list of extremist materials on its web site this week, and many of the 414 new entries are so vague or controversial that analysts say they threaten to discredit the list all together.
The list is important because police officers and other law enforcement officials use it in street checks, apartment searches and criminal cases.
Among the new entries, extremist material is identified as “a picture of Winnie the Pooh wearing a swastika,” “a self-made template for a future newspaper, comic or other print materials,” and “a flag with a cross.”
The flag entry theoretically makes it an offense to produce or distribute Georgian or Swiss flags and Russian Orthodox banners, all of which have crosses on them.
Even the possession of these materials in mass quantities — and it is up to a court is to decide how many items comprise a “mass” in each individual case — carries the threat of punishment ...
The list included the flags with crosses, Winnie the Pooh and “two sheets of A4 white paper with the picture of a swastika and the words ‘White Fist National-Socialist Newspaper’” ...
“The thing is, most provincial courts have no idea that their rulings made in individual extremist cases will have an impact on the whole country,” said Galina Kozhevnikova, an analyst with Sova, a watchdog that tracks extremism in Russia.
The law on extremism, which stipulated the creation of the list of extremist materials as a tool to fight extremist propaganda, was adopted in 2002, but the first entries onto the list appeared only in 2007.
Kozhevnikova said she had witnessed policemen with the list in hand as they approached activists distributing leaflets, newspapers and books during nationalist gatherings in Moscow. The officers compared the activists’ materials against the list’s entries. “It was clear and rational at the very beginning,” Kozhevnikova said of the list. “Then came an avalanche of decisions from the regional courts, and the whole idea of the list as of a tool for law enforcement officials turned into a mess.”
She called the latest addition the “apotheosis of absurd” and said it would make it impossible to use the list in practice and only encourage abuses by law enforcement officials interested in beefing up their extremism crime solving statistics by cracking down on the innocent. “The worst thing is that no one is moving to create mechanisms to repair the system,” she said. ...
A closer look at the list brings other surprises. For example, item No. 402 is the LiveJournal blog Reinform.livejournal.com.
The blog has not been suspended by LiveJournal’s abuse team and is being updated almost daily. Its owner wrote on its front page that he had opened the blog after seeing prosecutors mistakenly name the then-nonexistent blog as extremist.
A puzzling entry on the list reads “Text document ‘Putin’ in folder ‘Decrees’ in folder ‘Declaration CDR disk No. 2,’” which was named extremist by the Akhtubinsk City Court in the Astrakhan region.
There are also dozens of documents related to Islamic studies on the list. Russian Muslim religious leaders have repeatedly called for some of them to be removed, but to no avail.
The appearance of Winnie the Pooh on the list this week is not surprising given his popularity, Kryukova said. Jokes about the honey-obsessed bear are plentiful and have entered modern Russian folklore after Winnie the Pooh made his Russian debut in a well-known Soviet cartoon.
A picture depicting Putin in a Nazi uniform with a swastika armband was published in 2007 by the Saratovsky Reporter newspaper, and resulted in a criminal case against its editor for insulting a state official and another case in which the government sought to close the newspaper for extremism. Courts threw out both cases.

Malawi's orphaned children the latest victims of tobacco industry
The Ottawa Citizen
(8/24/09)

Malawi's child tobacco pickers suffer illness, exploitation

For one boy, the coughing fits started with "sores" in his nose because of the "smell" of tobacco, and continued long after his extended workday had ended.
"We even carry on coughing at home. It starts as a little cough, but it goes on for a long time. Sometimes it feels like you don't have enough breath, you don't have enough oxygen," the teenage Malawian tobacco harvester recalled in a report released Monday. "Yes, you reach a point where you cannot breathe in because of the pain in your chest. Then the blood comes and you vomit, you vomit blood. At the end, most of this dies and then you remain with a headache."
Children in the African country of Malawi already have it rough, facing the highest level of child labour anywhere. Now, this new study shows that those who already suffer the indignity of little or no pay for their toil in tobacco fields are being exposed to the equivalent of almost a pack and a half of cigarettes a day.
According to aid agency Plan International, many of them are getting sick with Green Tobacco Sickness — from nicotine leaching out of the plants they pick on humid days.
"On humid days, the average field worker may be exposed to as much as 54 milligrams of dissolved nicotine — the equivalent of more than 32 average cigarettes," says the report from the British development agency.
This serious health hazard adds one more layer of misery for children who toil in tobacco fields, often just for some food. Many also have to contend with physical and sexual abuse at the hands of their employers.
Tobacco companies have shifted as much as three-quarters of their production to Third World countries to cut labour and other costs, the report said. The report's authors did not know whether any of the Malawian tobacco was used by Canadian cigarette companies ...
As many as 78,000 young children work on Malawian tobacco farms in a country where almost nine of every 10 children between the ages of five and 14 are employed in the agricultural sector. Tobacco is Malawi's biggest export crop.
Researchers conducted detailed interviews with 44 young workers, age 12 to 18, and found a disturbing, but familiar, pattern of poverty and loss — more than three-quarters of those interviewed were orphans — that was driving young people to eke out a living in tobacco fields ...
Among other things, the report underlines the need to give child labourers better access the health care and for the government to ensure safer working conditions, (Sarah) Stevenson (a child rights adviser with Plan Canada, the group's Canadian affiliate) said.
The Malawian government has been supportive of the report and they want to meet with the authors and the local tobacco suppliers to discuss the problem, she added.

Borneo's indigenous protest destruction of forest for biofuels
Agence France Presse
(8/23/09)

Malaysia's Penan tribe ups anti-logging campaign

Hundreds of Penan tribespeople armed with spears and blowpipes have set up new blockades deep in the Borneo jungles, escalating their campaign against logging and palm oil plantations.
Three new barricades, guarded by Penan men and women who challenged approaching timber trucks, have been established in recent days. There are now seven in the interior of Malaysia's Sarawak state.
"They are staging this protest now because most of their land is already gone, destroyed by logging and grabbed by the plantation companies," said Jok Jau Evong from Friends of the Earth in Sarawak.
"This is the last chance for them to protect their territory. If they don't succeed, there will be no life for them, no chance for them to survive."
Penan chiefs said that after enduring decades of logging which has decimated the jungles they rely on for food and shelter, they now face the new threat of clear-felling to make way for crops of palm oil and planted timber.
"Since these companies came in, life has been very hard for us. Before it was easy to find animals in the forest and hunt them with blowpipes," said Alah Beling, headman of Long Belok where one of the barricades has been built.
"The forest was once our supermarket, but now it's hard to find food, the wild boar have gone," he said in his settlement, a scenic cluster of wooden dwellings home to 298 people and reachable only by a long suspension bridge.
Alah Beling said he fears that plans to establish plantations for palm oil -- which is used in food and for biofuel -- on their ancestral territory, will threaten their lifestyle and further pollute the village river with pesticide run-off.
"Once our river was so clear you could see fish swimming six feet deep," he said as he gestured at the waterway, which like most others in the region has been turned reddish-brown by the soil that cascades from eroded hillsides.
Indigenous rights group Survival International said the blockades are the most extensive since the late 1980s and early 1990s when the Penan's campaign to protect their forests shot to world attention.
"It's amazing they're still struggling on after all these years, more than 20 years after they began to try to fight off these powerful companies," said (past This is Hell! guest) Miriam Ross from the London-based group.

Big Food's acquisition of organic brands undermines sustainability, localism
Chicago Tribune
(8/19/09)

Organic foods: Big companies swoop in to capitalize on lucrative market

Philip Howard has studied the organic industry's consolidation, and he is dismayed. A professor at Michigan State University, Howard designed a chart that has become an oft-used reference tool on the issue. He said that consumers are frequently unaware of the corporate name behind an organic product -- what he has come to call "stealth ownership."
Though some companies have increased their commitment to organic principles, Howard worries that some firms are working to cut costs by merging operations and using fewer organic ingredients; those tend to be more expensive than their non-organic counterparts.
"If all you're interested in is eating foods grown without pesticides or synthetics, then going mainstream has been great," he said. "But if you're interested in the values of sustainability and things like that, it's been a mixed blessing" ...
Consider: Cascadian Farm, the maker of organic frozen fruits and breakfast cereals, was snapped up by General Mills when it bought a company called Small Planet Foods. But shoppers will not find General Mills' name or logo on a box of Cascadian Farm cereal. They'll find Small Planet Foods.
Nor will you find the Kellogg's name on a package of Bear Naked's granola, even though Kellogg's acquired Bear Naked when its Kashi division purchased the company. Indeed, Bear Naked's Web site provides reams of detail about the company's history, worldview and its commitment to the environment. Its timeline, though, omits the November 2007 buyout.
"The large companies go to great lengths to hide that they're the owners," Potter said from his company's headquarters in Clinton, Mich. "There's a great deal of effort that goes into shielding that from the public. There's smoke and mirrors in the marketing of organic foods."
What's more, some companies import their ingredients, undercutting the organic ideal that the food is grown close to home and making it more difficult to ensure that organic practices are followed -- a crucial issue for those consumers who see buying organic as a social movement. Cascadian Farm, for instance, uses vegetables from Mexico in some products. Woodstock Farms, owned by the large distributor United Natural Foods Inc., uses some vegetables from China.
"When consumers are buying a half-gallon of milk, they're not just buying the milk. They're buying the story behind the milk," said Mark Kastel of The Cornucopia Institute, an organic advocacy group. "The problem is that, when you look behind the facade, the story doesn't fit the organic ethic."

'There is a mean and merciless streak in mainstream US attitudes, which tolerates ... inequality, deprivation and suffering'
The Independent
(8/25/09)

A mean streak in the US mainstream

When we Europeans - the British included - contemplate the battles President Obama must fight to reform the US health system, our first response tends to be disbelief. How can it be that so obvious a social good as universal health insurance, so humane a solution to common vulnerability, is not sewn deep into the fabric of the United States?
How can one of the biggest, richest and most advanced countries in the world tolerate a situation where, at any one time, one in six of the population has to pay for their treatment item by item, or resort to hospital casualty wards?
The second response, as automatic as the first, is to blame heartless and ignorant Republicans. To Europeans, a universal health system is so basic to a civilised society that only the loony right could possibly oppose it: the people who cling to their guns, picket abortion clinics (when they are not trying to shoot the abortionists) and block funding for birth control in the third world. All right, we are saying to ourselves, there are Americans who think like this, but they are out on an ideological limb.
If only this were true. The reason why Obama is finding health reform such a struggle - even though it was central to his election platform - is not because an extreme wing of the Republican Party, mobilised by media shock-jocks, is foaming at the mouth, or because Republicans have more money than Democrats to buy lobbying and advertising power. Nor is it only because so many influential groups, from insurance companies through doctors, have lucrative interests to defend - although this is a big part of it ...
But there is something else at work here, too, beyond defective advocacy, and it lays bare a profound misunderstanding. Europe hailed Obama's landslide election victory as evidence that America had reclaimed its better self, turned to the left and bade farewell to ingrained racial divisions as well. That was a benevolent, but ultimately idealistic, gloss.
Obama's victory can indeed be seen as a reaction to eight years of conservative Republicanism under George Bush and a turn by US voters to the left. But that left is still quite a bit further right than in most of Europe. Nor was it just a leftward turn that cost John McCain the White House; it was also a rejection of the weaker candidate. Obama's great asset was that he came across as more competent on the economy, at a time of global financial meltdown. From this side of the Atlantic, we convinced ourselves that Americans had voted with their hearts, but there was a considerable element of the wallet as well ...
The point is that, when on "normal", the needle of the US barometer is not only quite a way to the political right of where it would be in Europe, but showing a very different atmospheric level, too. For there is a mean and merciless streak in mainstream US attitudes, which tolerates much more in the way of inequality, deprivation and suffering than is acceptable here, while incorporating a large and often sanctimonious quotient of blame.
This transatlantic difference goes far beyond the healthcare debate. Consider the give-no-quarter statements out of the US on the release of the Lockerbie bomber - or the continued application of the death penalty, or the fact that excessive violence is far more common a cause for censorship of US films in Europe than sex. Or even, in documents emerging from the CIA, a different tolerance threshold where torture and terrorism are concerned.
Some put the divergence down to the ideological rigidity that led Puritans and others to flee to America in the first place; others to the ruthless struggle for survival that marked the early settlement years and the conquest of the West. Still others see it as the price the US pays for its material success. What it means, though, is that if and when Obama gets some form of health reform through, it will reflect America's fears quite as much as its promise. And it is unlikely to be a national service that looks anything like ours.

Diversity is not the same as equality
London Review of Books
(8/27/09)

What Matters?

... it would be a mistake to think that because the US is a less racist, sexist and homophobic society, it is a more equal society. In fact, in certain crucial ways it is more unequal than it was 40 years ago. No group dedicated to ending economic inequality would be thinking today about declaring victory and going home. In 1969, the top quintile of American wage-earners made 43 per cent of all the money earned in the US; the bottom quintile made 4.1 per cent. In 2007, the top quintile made 49.7 per cent; the bottom quintile 3.4. And while this inequality is both raced and gendered, it’s less so than you might think. White people, for example, make up about 70 per cent of the US population, and 62 per cent of those are in the bottom quintile. Progress in fighting racism hasn’t done them any good; it hasn’t even been designed to do them any good. More generally, even if we succeeded completely in eliminating the effects of racism and sexism, we would not thereby have made any progress towards economic equality. A society in which white people were proportionately represented in the bottom quintile (and black people proportionately represented in the top quintile) would not be more equal; it would be exactly as unequal. It would not be more just; it would be proportionately unjust.
An obvious question, then, is how we are to understand the fact that we’ve made so much progress in some areas while going backwards in others. And an almost equally obvious answer is that the areas in which we’ve made progress have been those which are in fundamental accord with the deepest values of neoliberalism, and the one where we haven’t isn’t. We can put the point more directly by observing that increasing tolerance of economic inequality and increasing intolerance of racism, sexism and homophobia – of discrimination as such – are fundamental characteristics of neoliberalism. Hence the extraordinary advances in the battle against discrimination, and hence also its limits as a contribution to any left-wing politics. The increased inequalities of neoliberalism were not caused by racism and sexism and won’t be cured by – they aren’t even addressed by – anti-racism or anti-sexism.
My point is not that anti-racism and anti-sexism are not good things. It is rather that they currently have nothing to do with left-wing politics, and that, insofar as they function as a substitute for it, can be a bad thing. American universities are exemplary here: they are less racist and sexist than they were 40 years ago and at the same time more elitist. The one serves as an alibi for the other: when you ask them for more equality, what they give you is more diversity. The neoliberal heart leaps up at the sound of glass ceilings shattering and at the sight of doctors, lawyers and professors of colour taking their place in the upper middle class. Whence the many corporations which pursue diversity almost as enthusiastically as they pursue profits, and proclaim over and over again not only that the two are compatible but that they have a causal connection – that diversity is good for business. But a diversified elite is not made any the less elite by its diversity and, as a response to the demand for equality, far from being left-wing politics, it is right-wing politics.
The recent furore over the arrest for ‘disorderly conduct’ of Henry Louis Gates helps make this clear. Gates, as one of his Harvard colleagues said, is ‘a famous, wealthy and important black man’, a point Gates himself tried to make to the arresting officer – the way he put it was: ‘You don’t know who you’re messing with.’ But, despite the helpful hint, the cop failed to recognise an essential truth about neoliberal America: it’s no longer enough to kowtow to rich white people; now you have to kowtow to rich black people too. The problem, as a sympathetic writer in the Guardian put it, is that ‘Gates’s race snuffed out his class status,’ or as Gates said to the New York Times, ‘I can’t wear my Harvard gown everywhere.’ In the bad old days this situation almost never came up – cops could confidently treat all black people, indeed, all people of colour, the way they traditionally treated poor white people. But now that we’ve made some real progress towards integrating our elites, you need to step back and take the time to figure out ‘who you’re messing with’. You need to make sure that nobody’s class status is snuffed out by his race.
In the wake of Gates’s arrest, among the hundreds of people protesting the injustice of racial profiling, a white cardiologist married to a black man put the point best when she lamented that even in the ‘diverse area’ where she lives (Hyde Park, Obama’s old neighbourhood) she’ll hear people nervously say, ‘Look at those black guys coming towards us,’ to which she replies: ‘Yes, but they’re wearing lacrosse shorts and Calvin Klein jeans. They’re probably the kids of the professor down the street.’ ‘You have to be able to discern differences between people,’ she went on to say. ‘It’s very frustrating.’ The differences she means, of course, are between rich kids and poor kids, and the frustration she feels is with people who don’t understand that class is supposed to trump race. But while it’s easy to sympathise with that frustration – rich black kids are infinitely less likely to mug you than poor black kids or, for that matter, poor white kids – it’s a lot harder to see it as the expression of a progressive politics.
Nevertheless, that seems to be the way we do see it. The neoliberal ideal is a world where rich people of all races and sexes can happily enjoy their wealth, and where the injustices produced not by discrimination but by exploitation – there are fewer poor people (7 per cent) than black people (9 per cent) at Harvard, and Harvard’s not the worst – are discreetly sent around to the back door. Thus everyone’s outraged that a black professor living on prosperous Ware St (and renting a summer vacation ‘manse’ on Martha’s Vineyard that he ‘jokingly’ calls ‘Tara’) can be treated with disrespect; no one’s all that outraged by the social system that created the gap between Ware St or ‘Tara’ and the places where most Americans live. Everyone’s outraged by the fact that Gates can be treated so badly; nobody by the fact that he and the rest of the top 10 per cent of American wage-earners have been doing so well. Actually, it’s just the opposite. Liberals – especially white liberals – are thrilled by Gates’s success, since it testifies to the legitimacy of their own: racism didn’t make us all this money, we earned it!

Ben Bernanke is responsible for the real estate bubble!
The Guardian
(8/24/09)

Fire Ben Bernanke

Past This is Hell! guest Dean Baker writes ...

The world's central bankers met in Jackson Hole last weekend for their annual gathering.
Undoubtedly one of the main topics of discussion was the reappointment of Ben Bernanke as Federal Reserve board chairman. His reappointment would almost certainly win the support of the vast majority of attendees. This should raise serious concerns.
This is the same group that in 2005 devoted their meeting to an Alan Greenspan retrospective (seriously). The world's leading thinkers and practitioners of monetary policy debated whether Greenspan was the greatest central banker of all time.
I'm not sure how the polling on this question turned out, but four years later the world is facing the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression because of Greenspan's failed monetary policy. Greenspan either did not recognise an $8tn housing bubble or did not think it was a big enough deal to demand his attention. The collapse of this bubble gave us the financial panics of 2008 and more importantly led to the falloff in demand that produced the downturn.
None of this should have been a surprise to people who understand monetary policy. The housing bubble should have been easy to recognise. There was a 100-year-long trend in which nationwide house prices in the United States had just tracked the overall rate of inflation. At the peak of the bubble in 2006, house prices had risen by more than 70% after adjusting for inflation.
There were no changes in the fundamentals of the supply or demand of housing that could provide a remotely plausible explanation for this unprecedented run-up in prices.
Furthermore, rents were not outpacing inflation. If the run-up in house prices was being driven by fundamentals, then there should have been at least some upward pressure on prices in the rental market.
The bubble was very evidently driving the economy by the time of GreenspanFest 2005.
The residential construction sector had expanded to more than 6% of GDP, an increase of more than two percentage points (approximately $300bn a year) from its normal level.
The $8tn in housing bubble wealth was also propelling consumption. Assuming a wealth effect of six cents on the dollar, the bubble wealth was generating close to $500bn a year in increased consumption.
It was inevitable that both the construction and consumption demand would disappear when the bubble burst. What did Greenspan and his acolytes think would make up this lost demand? ...
Ben Bernanke has moved very effectively in the last year to prevent the collapse of the financial system. However, even in this area there have been serious issues of unnecessary secrecy and failed regulation. (Isn't Goldman Sachs supposed to be a bank holding company now?)
But more importantly, Bernanke is waist deep in responsibility for this mess. Before becoming Fed chairman in January of 2006 he had served on the board of governors since 2002, and had been head of George Bush's council of economic advisers from June of 2005. After Greenspan, there was probably no one else better positioned to combat the bubble.

Republican Senator admits, "There is a serious problem with the lack of competition among insurers ... the impact on the consumer is significant"
The Associated Press
(8/22/09)

Competition lacking among private health insurers

One of the most widely accepted arguments against a government medical plan for the middle class is that it would quash competition — just what private insurers seem to be doing themselves in many parts of the U.S.
Several studies show that in lots of places, one or two companies dominate the market. Critics say monopolistic conditions drive up premiums paid by employers and individuals.
For Democrats, the answer is a public plan that would compete with private insurers. Republicans see that as a government power grab. President Barack Obama looks to be trapped in the middle of an argument that could sink his effort to overhaul the health care system.
Even lawmakers opposed to a government plan have problems with the growing clout of the big private companies.
"There is a serious problem with the lack of competition among insurers," said Republican Sen. Olympia Snowe of Maine, one of the highest-cost states. "The impact on the consumer is significant" ...
Snowe, among the few Republican senators still trying to come up with a bipartisan compromise, wants to hold back on creating a public plan for now and give insurers one last chance to show if they can keep costs in check.
That's doesn't go far enough for liberals, who are loath to give the insurance industry tens of millions of new customers supported by taxpayer subsidies.
"It would give the industry a windfall without any countervailing force to require them to lower their costs," said Richard Kirsch, national campaign manager for the advocacy group Health Care for America Now. "The insurance companies could continue to jack up premiums while getting a whole new market."

On 'public option' healthcare, will Obama "cave under pressure" or "stand up for the best values of our country?"
Marin Independent Journal
(8/23/09)

Hope for health reform fading

Past This is Hell! guest Norman Solomon writes ...

A year ago, I sat with other delegates at the Democratic National Convention and cheered when Barack Obama said in his acceptance speech: "Now is the time to finally keep the promise of affordable, accessible health care for every single American."
Now, the promise is fading.
The White House showed a white flag last weekend, discarding its commitment to a "public option" that would compete with private health insurance. Since then, despite efforts to backtrack, the signal keeps flashing: Obama won't go to the mat for a public option after all.
Foes are elated. But it didn't have to be this way ...
At its best, "the public option" was no great shakes. Under the plan, private insurance companies would continue to dominate health care while extracting huge profits. Yet some hoped that the public option might open the door to truly universal health care across the country.
But last weekend, President Obama dubbed the public option "just one sliver" of potential health-care reform. The next day, Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius declared that the public option is "not the essential element."
The retreat jarred activists who've been working hard for meaningful health-care reform. Within hours of Sebelius' statement, the Marin chapter of Democracy For America sent out an "emergency action" alert.
For the organization, which has been very supportive of Obama, the tone of its sample letter to the president was unprecedented: "We insist that you follow through on your pledges and stand up for a strong public option! This is our moment of truth - will we have elected a president who will lead, who will not cave under pressure, who will stand up for the best values of our country?"

Obama waived rules to allow defense lobbyist at Pentagon and it's paying off ... for contractors
Mother Jones
(8/24/09)

The Defense Industry's Secret Weapon

In July, to great fanfare, the Obama administration finally killed the F-22 fighter jet—an underperforming, overpriced Cold War relic that has never flown a combat mission over Iraq or Afghanistan. But all the breathless talk of Defense Secretary Robert Gates' "sweeping reforms" obscures an unpleasant truth. While the rare defeat of congressional porkmongers offers a ray of hope, real reform will require a far more ambitious, persistent effort. And standing in the way is the Pentagon's No. 2 civilian official—handpicked by Gates and coming directly from a lobbying job for the giant defense contractor Raytheon.
William J. Lynn III is, after Gates, the most powerful person in the Defense Department, responsible for managing the entire building, including weapons acquisitions. His opposition to reform is well documented. During the Clinton administration, he rose to be the Pentagon's comptroller, in charge of a system that was completely unable to account for the hundreds of billions it spent every year. Faced with this mess, Lynn's major contribution during his tenure was to block fiscal accountability rather than promote it. In public testimony to a federal accounting board, Lynn requested that the Pentagon be exempted from a crucial part of the Chief Financial Officers' Act of 1990, a reform requiring all federal departments to comply with accepted financial integrity standards. The board granted his wish. Next, he advocated for a notorious bill-paying system referred to by critics as "pay and chase" under which the Pentagon hands a contractor a quick payout for bills and later tries to figure out what the money was for. Today's financial chaos and lack of accountability at the DOD stem in part from Lynn's handiwork.
After Lynn left the Pentagon, he accepted a plush position in 2003 as chief lobbyist for Raytheon, the DOD's fifth-largest defense contractor. Lynn spent the next five years pushing Raytheon moneymakers such as computers for the F-22 and the electronics for the Navy's preposterously overpriced Zumwalt destroyer.
When Barack Obama took office, he introduced sorely needed new ethics rules to close the revolving door between government agencies and the private sector, particularly lobbyists. But within the month, he had waived those rules—specifically to permit Lynn to become deputy secretary of defense. Now that the lobbyist emeritus is back at the Pentagon, it's clear that he hasn't lost his aversion to reform.
In May, Obama proudly signed the Weapon Systems Acquisition Reform Act of 2009—Congress' answer to the Pentagon's chronic procurement problems. It would surely be something to be proud of if Congress and the executive branch had finally discovered their political spines, after decades of sabotaging reform attempts. But that's not quite what happened. The bill was written by the bipartisan leadership of the House and Senate Armed Services Committees, and not one lawmaker voted against it—in itself a suspicious sign that the legislation wouldn't upset the cozy relationship between Congress and the defense industry.
As originally written by senators Carl Levin (D-Mich.) and John McCain (R-Ariz.), the measure was already disturbingly cosmetic. But according to numerous conversations with insiders in Congress, as well as a letter (PDF) Lynn sent to Levin outlining objections to the bill, Lynn, as the DOD's point person for negotiations with Congress, worked assiduously to further widen the legislation's many loopholes ...
In essence, through waivers and loopholes, the legislation was reduced to a pathetic request for the Defense Department to fix itself. This sorry history holds two lessons: First, the Pentagon's leadership is as hostile as ever to meaningful reform; second, instead of independently overseeing the nation's defenses as required by the Constitution, Congress remains the willing anti-reform ally of the Pentagon.
There are other troubling signs of business as usual in Obama's DOD. When Gates very correctly canceled Lockheed's F-22, he simultaneously endorsed going ahead full speed with the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, built by the same company. The F-35 is already overweight, sluggish, behind schedule, and growing in much the same manner as the F-22. But the plan approved by Gates and Lynn commits to more than 500 of them before the first definitive flight test report lands on the secretary's desk. The F-35 program exemplifies why the Pentagon cannot be trusted to reform itself. By endorsing a program so obviously laden with the same old problems, Gates is ensuring a rerun of the F-22 fiasco.
Each of the other services is nurturing similar time bombs. The Navy has the obscenely expensive Littoral Combat Ship. The Army is busy defending the Future Combat Systems program, a baroque "system of systems" edifice intended to gather so many expensive technologies under one budget roof that it would become "too big to fail." The Marine Corps is falling on its sword to protect the overambitious, technically hopeless Expeditionary Fighting Vehicle. As each of these programs approaches its inevitable implosion over the next several years, reform-minded Pentagon and congressional staffers will be pressing for restructuring or cancellation. The traditional coalition of military and industry big-spending advocates, in lockstep with the masters of pork on the Hill, will close ranks to preserve business as usual. William Lynn won't be far away.

Bush policy on renditions won't change under Obama
The New York Times
(8/24/09)

Rendition of Terror Suspects Will Continue Under Obama

The Obama administration will continue the Bush administration’s practice of sending terror suspects to third countries for detention and interrogation, but will monitor their treatment to ensure they are not tortured, administration officials said on Monday.
The administration officials, who announced the changes on condition that they not be identified, said that unlike the Bush administration, they would give the State Department a larger role in assuring that transferred detainees would not be abused.
“The emphasis will be on insuring that individuals will not face torture if they are sent over overseas,” said one administration official, adding that no detainees will be sent to countries that are known to conduct abusive interrogations.
But human rights advocates condemned the decision, saying it would permit the transfer of prisoners to countries with a history of torture and that promises of humane treatment, called “diplomatic assurances,” were no protection against abuse.
“It is extremely disappointing that the Obama administration is continuing the Bush administration practice of relying on diplomatic assurances, which have been proven completely ineffective in preventing torture,” said Amrit Singh of the American Civil Liberties Union, who tracked rendition cases under President George W. Bush.

Was Honduran coup all about cocaine trafficking?
PULSE
(8/23/09)

US cocaine trade suffers with campesino empowerment

A brief investigation on our way out of the bar revealed that there was at least one bus parked in the middle of the runway and that there were soldiers sleeping under it, apparently unaware of the danger of being run over by Zelaya’s plane. Army fatigues hanging from the bus windows to dry suggested that aircraft deterrence was not the only addition to the list of possible bus functions in the context of the Honduran coup, which had already seen soldiers shoot out the tires of a school bus full of peaceful protesters en route to the capital.
Other instances of Honduran vehicular impediment had meanwhile occurred near the community of Guadalupe Carney just outside Trujillo, where resistance members had closed the highway a number of times following the coup. One campesino leader reported to (past This is Hell! guest) Al (Giordano) and me on Friday that the road closures had generally lasted between 48 and 72 hours and had complicated not only the curfews imposed by the coup government but also banana transport for the US-based Standard Fruit Company. Subsequent research revealed that Standard Fruit was now called Dole; campesino fixation with archaic Latin American terminology was also observed in their reference to Roberto Micheletti’s “presidential succession” as a military coup.
In response to the highway closures outside Guadalupe Carney, the Trujillo Chamber of Commerce had issued a pronouncement on July 18 which failed to mention either Standard Fruit Company or Dole but did not fail to mention the harmful effects roadblocks can have on the nutritional intake of old people and children. The pronouncement appealed to the national government to disarm Guadalupe Carney, citing “the presumed presence of arms in said community,” and additionally appealed to relevant authorities such as the Ministry of Defense to put an immediate end to roadblocks.
An elderly community leader named Ramón offered a different perspective on the presumed presence of arms, and—in between coveting Al’s filterless Mexican cigarettes—described an August 2008 attack on Guadalupe Carney at five a.m. by mercenaries of a local landowner and former Army colonel named Henry Osorto Canales. Osorto’s approach to community relations is thus shown to be distinct from that of the campesinos, who established Guadalupe Carney almost a decade ago by simply moving onto territory belonging to large area landowners and planting corn and beans.
The community is now populated by several thousand Hondurans, who are presumed to actually be Venezuelans, Cubans, and Nicaraguans by the same people who presume the presence of arms. The effectiveness with which said nationalities have disguised themselves is now reaching new levels, and a public schoolteacher in Guadalupe Carney described a visit to the community by North American reporter Reed Lindsay on behalf of Venezuela-backed TeleSur.
Rumors of Latin Americans in disguise have meanwhile been fueled by societal modifications undertaken by ousted President Zelaya, whose contributions to agrarian reform included legalizing the land underneath 700,000 Honduran subsistence level farmers. According to a law passed in 2006, citizens occupying land for two years or more were entitled to own it, and the government was responsible for compensating the previous titleholders. One such previous titleholder was former Army colonel Henry Osorto Canales’ father, whose failure to include Osorto in his will did not deter his son from sending 15 masked men with AK-47s into Guadalupe Carney on August 3, 2008 ...
Former army colonel Henry Osorto Canales may be amenable to retitling the land around Guadalupe Carney in more ways than one, given his presumed interest in the Guaymoreto Lagoon bordering the community which was used as a key loading point for Colombian cocaine by Oliver North and his private-sector narco-successors. The arrival to the area in 2000 of the campesinos, who tend to focus on less lucrative products like corn and beans as well as tending to notice when drugs are being funneled through their backyard, has thus interrupted the flow of business.
Community leaders in Guadalupe Carney fear the flow will be reinstated via an expulsion of campesinos from their land. The Honduran coup regime’s insistence on discrediting farmers as violent foreigners suggests that although the clientele of the Bahia Bar in nearby Trujillo has changed since the days and nights of Oliver North’s command here, covert drug interests have not.

Bribe a German prof, get a PhD
The Associated Press
(8/22/09)

Germany: 100 professors suspected of Ph.D. bribes

German prosecutors are investigating about 100 professors across the country on suspicion they took bribes to help students get their doctoral degrees, authorities said Saturday ...
(Cologne prosecutor's spokesman Guenther) Feld confirmed reports of the investigation in both Focus magazine and the Neue Westfaelische newspaper, but would not give further details ...
According to the two publications, students paid between euro4,000 to euro20,000 ($5,700 to $28,500) to the company, which promised to help them get their doctorate degrees through its extensive contacts within university faculties.
The Neue Westfaelische newspaper reported that "hundreds" of students were involved, and that the company paid professors between euro2,000 to euro5,000 when their clients had successfully received their Ph.D.'s. It was not clear whether the students knew that bribes were being paid.
The professors are being investigated on suspicion of fraud, Feld said ...
So far, evidence points to the involvement of about 100 professors across the country spanning "numerous disciplines," Feld was quoted as saying. Most are people teaching classes on a contract basis, rather than full-time professors, he said.

Israel is "an apartheid regime worse than the one that existed in South Africa"
Haaretz
(8/24/09)

UN agent: Apartheid regime in territories worse than S. Africa

South African law professor Prof. John Dugard, the special rapporteur for the United Nations on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territories, has written in a report to the UN General Assembly that there is "an apartheid regime" in the territories "worse than the one that existed in South Africa."
As an example, Dugard points to the roads only open to settlers, from which Palestinians are banned.
In his report presented early this month, Dugard is highly critical of Israel for its "continuing violations of human rights in the territories." He said Israel is blatantly violating the International Court of Justice's ruling on the separation fence, and has declared it will not obey it.
The report was disseminated among the member countries ahead of the September General Assembly session meant to discuss the fence.
Dugard, a law professor from South Africa, was a member of a Truth Commission at the end of the apartheid regime, and was appointed by the UN in 2001 as special rapporteur for human rights in the West Bank and Gaza.

The real enemy of healthcare reform isn't the insurance industry; it's Rupert Murdoch
AlterNet
(8/20/09)

Utilizing Public Airwaves, Media Mogul Murdoch Is Big Muscle Behind Fraudulent Astro Turfers

In the cable and broadcast spectrum occupied by Fox News Channel and Fox Television, Murdoch operates through a public trust, as do all cable and broadcast outlets.
As much as he hates to share, Murdoch is using the common property of the United States to turn out mobs at town hall events for the purpose of intimidating members of Congress and spreading disinformation about what's in the health care bills.
There's nothing unusual about media properties whose editorial and opinion content reflects the views of the owner.
What's new here is Murdoch's use of his media empire as an organizing tool in a campaign designed not only to affect several very particular pieces of legislation, but concocted to "break," in the words of (Republican US Senator Jim) DeMint, a U.S. president ...
The easy assumption is that the resistance all comes from the health-care industry, since it will be the most directly affected by the bill. But that's thinking too small.
This is about something much bigger -- Very Big Business writ large, and amplified and organized by one very big media mogul.
Murdoch's personal political views appear to come down to three: he's against regulation of virtually any kind, he hates taxes and he's a union-buster, famous for breaking the unions at British newspapers he owns.

Despite new consumer protections, you still can't take your credit card company to court
News Junkie Post
(8/20/09)

Credit Card Companies Continue To Be Protected From Lawsuits

Starting Thursday, credit card consumers will receive new protections against unscrupulous credit card practices. Credit card holders will have the opportunity to opt-out of interest rate rises.
Consumers will also receive 45 days notice before an interest rate increase. As these new guidelines are meant to offer protections for consumers, an important protection will still be unavailable - the right to take your credit card company to court.
Each time you sign on the dotted line, you could be signing away your rights. Nearly every bank, credit card and cell phone company is a party. Many home builders, nursing homes, and some employers are too.
Written into the fine print, contracts often notify the consumer that arbitration is the permissible recourse. That means, you have no right to sue or file a class action lawsuit.
David Arkish, Director Public Citizen's Congress Watch Division, says arbitration works in business' favor. "Lenders use arbitration as both a shield and a sword." Arkish said. "The sword component is it makes it much easier to go after consumers." Arkish said the shield is to "protect the company from liability."
Arbitration goes through a for-profit third-party. It has no structured format and the case is never heard before a jury of one's peers.

'Will Americans realize that they are not ruled by elected representatives but by an oligarchy that owns the Washington whorehouse?'
Information Clearing House
(8/19/09)

Americans: Serfs Ruled by Oligarchs

Past This is Hell! guest Paul Craig Roberts writes ...

Americans think that they have “freedom and democracy” and that politicians are held accountable by elections. The fact of the matter is that the US is ruled by powerful interest groups who control politicians with campaign contributions. Our real rulers are an oligarchy of financial and military/security interests and AIPAC, which influences US foreign policy for the benefit of Israel.
Have a look at economic policy. It is being run for the benefit of large financial concerns, such as Goldman Sachs ...
Why does any American care who rules Afghanistan? The country has nothing to do with us.
Did the armed services committees of the House and Senate calculate the risk of destabilizing nuclear armed Pakistan when they acquiesced to Obama’s new war there, a war that has already displaced two million Pakistanis?
No, of course not. The whores took their orders from the same military/security oligarchy that instructed Obama.
The great American superpower and its 300 million people are being driven straight into the ground by the narrow interest of the big banks and the munitions industry. People, and not only Americans, are losing their sons, husbands, brothers, and fathers for no other reason than the profits of US armaments corporations, and the gullible American people seem proud of it. Those ribbon decals on their cars, SUVs and monster trucks proclaim their naive loyalty to the armaments industries and to the whores in Washington who promote wars.
Will Americans, smashed and destroyed by “their” government’s policy, which always puts Americans last, ever understand who their real enemies are?
Will Americans realize that they are not ruled by elected representatives but by an oligarchy that owns the Washington whorehouse?
Will Americans ever understand that they are impotent serfs?

Did US business opposition to higher Honduran minimum wage spark coup?
Information Clearing House
(8/7/09)

Honduras: Military Coup Engineered By Two US Companies?

Past This is Hell guest John Perkins writes ...

I recently visited Central America. Everyone I talked with there was convinced that the military coup that had overthrown the democratically-elected president of Honduras, Manuel Zelaya, had been engineered by two US companies, with CIA support. And that the US and its new president were not standing up for democracy.
Earlier in the year Chiquita Brands International Inc. (formerly United Fruit) and Dole Food Co had severely criticized Zelaya for advocating an increase of 60% in Honduras’s minimum wage, claiming that the policy would cut into corporate profits. They were joined by a coalition of textile manufacturers and exporters, companies that rely on cheap labor to work in their sweatshops.
Memories are short in the US, but not in Central America. I kept hearing people who claimed that it was a matter of record that Chiquita (United Fruit) and the CIA had toppled Guatemala’s democratically-elected president Jacobo Arbenz in 1954 and that International Telephone & Telegraph (ITT), Henry Kissinger, and the CIA had  brought down Chile’s Salvador Allende in 1973. These people were certain that Haiti’s president Jean-Bertrand Aristide had been ousted by the CIA in 2004 because he proposed a minimum wage increase, like Zelaya’s.
I was told by a Panamanian bank vice president, “Every multinational knows that if Honduras raises its hourly rate, the rest of Latin America and the Caribbean will have to follow. Haiti and Honduras have always set the bottom line for minimum wages. The big companies are determined to stop what they call a ‘leftist revolt’ in this hemisphere. In throwing out Zelaya they are sending frightening messages to all the other presidents who are trying to raise the living standards of their people.”
It did not take much imagination to envision the turmoil sweeping through every Latin American capital. There had been a collective sign of relief at Barack Obama’s election in the US, a sense of hope that the empire in the North would finally exhibit compassion toward its southern neighbors, that the unfair trade agreements, privatizations, draconian IMF Structural Adjustment Programs, and threats of military intervention would slow down and perhaps even fade away. Now, that optimism was turning sour.

Evidence released showing brutality of Honduran coup
eXaminer.com
(8/19/09)

Honduras: Amnesty International releases photos of protesters injured by riot police

On Aug. 19, Amnesty International published a series of photos and testimonies on alleged ill treatment by police and military of protesters in the Honduran capital, Tegucigalpa. The organization warned that beatings and mass arrests are being used as a way of punishing people for voicing their opposition to the June ouster of President Manuel Zelaya.
The photos and testimonies were gathered by an Amnesty International delegation, which interviewed many of the 75 people who were detained at a Tegucigalpa police station after the police, supported by the military, broke up a demonstration on Jul. 30.
Most detainees had injuries as a consequence of police beatings with batons and having stones and other objects thrown at them. When they were arrested, no one was told where they were being taken, the reasons for their detention or the charges against them. All detainees were released a few hours later.
“Mass arbitrary arrests and ill treatment of protesters are a serious and growing concern in Honduras today,” said Esther Major, Central America researcher at Amnesty International.
“Detention and ill treatment of protestors are being employed as forms of punishment for those openly opposing the de facto government, and also as a deterrent for those contemplating taking to the streets to peacefully show their discontent with the political turmoil the country is experiencing.”
Amongst those held in detention on 30 July were 10 students. They had all been beaten with batons on the back, arms and backs of the legs by police. One of them said: “The police were throwing stones; they cornered us, threw us on the floor, on our stomachs and beat us. They took our cameras from us, beat us if we lifted our heads and even when we were getting into the police wagons.”
Several of those interviewed told Amnesty International that during the demonstration, police officers wore no visible identification, and others wore bandanas to hide their faces.
A 52-year-old teacher also detained on Jul. 30 told Amnesty International: “We were demonstrating peacefully. Suddenly, the police came towards us, and I started running. They grabbed me and shouted ‘why do you (all) support Zelaya’s government?’. They beat me. I have not been informed as to why I am detained.”
Amnesty International said the human rights situation outside of Tegucigalpa is believed to be equally or even more serious. The checkpoints along the primary roads in Honduras are currently manned by military and police who often delay or refuse entry to human rights organizations to areas where human rights violations are reportedly occurring.

Just how guilty is released Lockerbie bomber?
Consortiumnews
(8/21/09)

Lockerbie Doubts

The truth about what happened at Lockerbie appears quite a bit more complex than the cookie-cutter version presented by the mainstream media. Several longtime observers of the al-Megrahi case have concluded that it has always been weak, at best.
According to British journalist Hugh Miles in a 2007 article for London Review of Books, many "lawyers, politicians, diplomats and relatives of Lockerbie victims now believe that the former Libyan intelligence officer is innocent."
Miles quoted Robert Black QC, an Edinburgh University professor emeritus of Scottish law, as saying, "No reasonable tribunal, on the evidence heard at the original trial, should or could have convicted him and it is an absolute disgrace and outrage what the Scottish court did."
Al-Megrahi was tried along with fellow Libyan intelligence officer Al Amin Khalifa Fhimah.
With distraught relatives of victims filling the courtroom, the Scottish judges understandably feared the reaction to two not guilty verdicts. Instead, the judges acquitted Fhimah and found al-Megrahi guilty.
A U.N. observer to the trial, Austrian philosophy Professor Hans Koschler, noted, "You cannot come out with a verdict of guilty for one and innocent for the other when they were both being tried with the same evidence."
The only important piece of evidence that differentiated al-Megrahi from Fhimah was the dubious identification of al-Megrahi by a storekeeper in Malta who fingered the Libyan as the buyer of clothing found in the bomb suitcase.
But this storekeeper had earlier identified several other people, including one who was a CIA agent. When he finally identified al-Megrahi from a photo, it was after al-Megrahi's photo had been in the world news for years.
There also were major discrepancies between the shopkeeper's original description of the clothes-buyer and al-Megrahi's actual appearance. The shopkeeper told police that the customer was "six feet or more in height" and "was about 50 years of age." Al-Megrahi was 5'8" tall and was 36 in 1988.
The Scottish judges acknowledged that the initial description "would not in a number of respects fit the first accused [al-Megrahi]" and that "it has to be accepted that there was a substantial discrepancy" ...
Enter the political truth. With Iran and Syria no longer available as sponsors, given the new political reality, Libya became the new enemy. Never mind that the evidence was nearly nonexistent.
In a BBC report from 2002, UN trial observer Koschler stated it appeared to him the US and UK authorities exerted undue influence over al-Megrahi's trial. Why would US and UK authorities try to influence the court? Beyond their roles as advocates for the victims, what did they have to gain or to hide?
Authors John Ashton and Ian Ferguson, who together wrote Cover-up of Convenience: The Hidden Scandal of Lockerbie, point out that more than just bodies were found in the wreckage of Flight 103.
Along with the 270 dead were approximately $500,000 in American bills and an envelope marked with $547,000, carrying travelers checks. But according to a few key witnesses, something else was found.
Drugs. Heroin, to be exact.
Additionally, locals were perturbed by the immediate presence of large numbers of Americans who showed up in Lockerbie within a couple of hours of the downing of the plane ...
While I don't know if the alternative theories of the Pan Am 103 bombing are true, what I do know is that there is a lot more support for some of them than there ever was for the conviction of the unfortunate and now cancer-ridden al-Megrahi, whose release on Thursday was widely condemned by US officials and media figures with almost no reference to the lingering doubts about his conviction beyond brief mentions that he continues to assert his innocence.
How did we get so far off track on this story? In part, by not having a truly independent media to investigate and report on the truth behind this case.

• Check out past This is Hell! guest William Blum's 2001 story on Lockerbie, also at Constoriumnews.

'Afghanistan is a kleptocracy rather than a functioning democracy ... people are no better off than under the Taliban'
The Guardian
(8/19/09)

Today's Afghan election is a moment of truth for zealous liberal aggressors

During the last Afghan elections, a UN official outside a polling booth grabbed a voter's blue-stained finger and raised it before the cameras. "Look," he said ecstatically. "This is what it's all about."
No, it isn't. Even in its present belligerent stance, the western world does not go about bombing and killing people just so they can vote. The Afghan war and occupation were about punishing the Taliban for harbouring Osama bin Laden and to prevent them ever doing it again. The punishment was delivered. The prevention was, and remains, ill-conceived and elusive.
No believer in self-government can decry the vote. It remains the essential ritual of democratic grace.
Tomorrow's election reflects the aspirations of millions of Afghans. It is an advance on the earlier Islamist fundamentalism and offers voters both a choice of leader and an opportunity, albeit at great personal risk, to share in the national polity.
Even the likely triumph of Hamid Karzai as president does not invalidate this cause. For a nation as poor as Afghanistan to tolerate a contested election that embraces Ashraf Ghani, the darling of the Kabul NGOs, is an achievement, even if impossible without the presence of a huge foreign army. Any distraction from the politics of death, destruction and corruption must be welcome.
Voting is one thing, elections another. Tomorrow's election will make no difference to the ramshackle structure of government in what, nearly eight years after the Nato invasion, is a wholly dysfunctional state. While western diplomats are right to protest that no one should expect a lily-white poll in such a country, the awesome scale of electoral pollution should make even nation-building's most ardent defenders pause to think.
Reports are rife of vote selling, ballot rigging and general chicanery. Karzai's running mate is the dubious warlord Mohammad Qasim Fahim, and he has allowed back the brutal Tajik leader Abdul Rashid Dostum from well-deserved exile. Low turnout in the Taliban-dominated centre and south may well tilt Kabul towards the non-Pashtun north, distorting national politics.
As Malalai Joya, a brave young member of parliament, said recently on a tour in Britain, Afghanistan is a kleptocracy rather than a functioning democracy. Her assertion, that people (especially women) are no better off than under the Taliban, is not for outsiders to contest ...
This election should be a moment of truth for liberal interventionists everywhere. To cruise the world instigating elections at the point of a gun may have conferred neocon street cred on George Bush and Tony Blair. It has met its nemesis in the partition of Yugoslavia, the reversion of Iraq to feuding religious rivalry, and the chaos of Afghanistan. Other theatres of this missionary zeal - Pakistan, Palestine, Sudan and, in a different sense, Iran and Burma - are not glowing advertisements for the policy. Who knows where it will next bless with democracy at the blast from a drone? ...
In retrospect, Donald Rumsfeld is a better guide to Afghan policy. His original intention to punish the Taliban by backing the northern tribes, and getting out before being sucked into nation-building, was in retrospect prudent and pragmatic. Don't get involved, he warned. Let Afghans arrange their future, whatever it may be.
Had such a policy been pursued after 2001, the Taliban would probably have returned to power in some new alliance, possibly under the quiet influence of their old Soviet-era allies, the American CIA - with whom they were re-establishing links prior to 9/11. Were Nato troops not present, magnetising and revitalising al-Qaida, Pakistan could have refashioned a new Afghan policy that better accorded with the west's security interests. By now, the country would surely have settled into a new isolation from the world ...
A bombastic crusade has mutated into a long, hard slog, and now into a state of despair. The daily ritual of soldiers' deaths should be acceptable to a nation at war. But there comes a point in the rhetoric of heroism when the pointlessness of it all bursts the shackles of jingoism. Surely an election, the ultimate moment of political realism, is the time to stop mouthing insincerities and call a mistake a mistake.

Will expanded sanctions against Iran lead to peace or war?
Foreign Policy in Focus
(8/20/09)

Iran Gas Ban: Step toward War with Iran?

Past This is Hell! guest Michael Klare writes ...

As the Obama administration struggles to devise a strategy for dealing with Iran's intransigence on the uranium enrichment issue, it appears to be gravitating toward the imposition of an international embargo on gasoline sales to that country. Such a ban would be enacted if Iranian officials fail to come up with an acceptable negotiating plan by the time the UN General Assembly meets in late September - the deadline given by the White House for a constructive Iranian move.
Iran, of course, is a major oil producer, pumping out some 4.3 million barrels per day in 2008. But it is also a major petroleum consumer. And its oil industry has a significant structural weakness: Its refinery capacity is too constricted to satisfy the nation's gasoline requirements. As a result, Iran must import about 40% of its refined products. Government officials are attempting to reduce this dependency through rationing and other measures, but the country remains highly vulnerable to any cutoff in gasoline imports.
Many in Washington view Iran's vulnerability as an opportunity to coerce the country into abandoning its nuclear-arms program. Although senior Iranian officials deny that they are seeking nuclear munitions, many Western analysts believe that the enrichment effort now under way at a huge centrifuge facility in Natanz is intended to produce highly enriched uranium for an eventual Iranian bomb. Despite massive pressure from the United States and the European Union, Tehran has refused to cease work at Natanz or to consider a slowdown there as part of a negotiating process. If Iran
persists on this course, proponents of a gasoline embargo argue that sanctions should be the next step ...
Having options short of war is, therefore, something to be greatly desired. But one must ask: Would a ban on gasoline sales prove a step toward peace, or a step toward war? That is, would it make armed conflict less likely by forcing the Iranians to return to the bargaining table in a more accommodating mood, or would it prove a stepping-stone to military action?
No one can be absolutely sure about this, of course. But there are good reasons to be skeptical about a gasoline ban's effectiveness in promoting peace and cooperation ...
More frightening scenarios could unfold if the United States and its closest allies seek to enforce an embargo by establishing a naval blockade in waters off Iran and stopping ships thought to be violating the ban. Given the high likelihood of cheating, such a blockade would probably be necessary for the embargo to prove effective. But such a move could be considered an act of war, and might well invite retaliation by Iran's Revolutionary Guard - which sports its own small-ship navy ...
That a ban on gasoline sales to Iran carries these potential downsides is not a reason to abandon consideration of such a move. As suggested, it is far better to be thinking of economic sanctions if Iran proves intransigent in the months ahead than to opt automatically for military action. But an oil embargo appears especially risky, both because it would strengthen the hand of conservative clerics in Tehran and it could entail a naval blockade, setting off a chain reaction of violent moves.
Administration officials should, therefore, scrutinize this option very rigorously before it becomes the preferred response to an Iranian rebuff in September.

Oceans' massive trash flotillas finally deemed toxic
The Independent
(8/20/09)

Scientists uncover new ocean threat from plastics

Scientists have identified a new source of chemical pollution released by the huge amounts of plastic rubbish found floating in the oceans of the world. A study has found that as plastics break down in the sea they release potentially toxic substances not found in nature and which could affect the growth and development of marine organisms.
Until now it was thought that plastic rubbish is relatively stable chemically and, apart from being unsightly, its principle threat to living creatures came from its ability to choke or strangle any animals that either got caught in it or ingested it thinking it was food.
But the latest research suggests that plastic is also a source of dissolved substances that can easily become widely dispersed in the marine environment. Many of these chemicals are believed to toxic to humans and animals, the scientists said.

Bush's first Homeland Security chief says President manipulated terror warning for political gain
Agence France Presse
(8/20/09)

Former Bush aide says politics colored US 'terror alert'

Former US homeland security chief Tom Ridge charges in a new book that top aides to then-president George W. Bush pressured him to raise the "terror alert" level to sway the November 2004 US election.
Then defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld and attorney general John Ashcroft pushed him to elevate the color-coded threat level, but Ridge refused, according to a summary from his publisher, Thomas Dunne Books.
"After that episode, I knew I had to follow through with my plans to leave the federal government for the private sector," Ridge is quoting as writing in "The Test of Our Times: America Under Siege ... And How We Can Be Safe Again" ...
He also says that Bush's homeland security adviser at the White House, Fran Townsend, called his department ahead of an August 1, 2004 speech to ask Ridge to include a reference to "defensive measures ... away from home" -- language that he read as being a reference to the Iraq war.
In those remarks, Ridge said he was raising the threat alert level for the financial services sector in New York City, northern New Jersey, and Washington DC, and went on to praise Bush's leadership against extremism ...
Ridge also details his frustration after the White House rejected his suggestion to establish department of homeland security offices in major cities such as New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Washington, and -- long before Hurricane Katrina -- New Orleans, according to the summary.
He also says he urged his successor, Michael Chertoff, to reconsider the appointment of Michael Brown as the head of the Federal Emergency Response Agency (FEMA), whose response to the killer storm drew widespread criticism.
Ridge also charges that he was often "blindsided" during daily morning briefings with Bush because the FBI withheld information from him, and says he was never invited to sit in on National Security Council meetings.

'The Republican Party really is spinning off into a bizarre cult who believe Barack Obama is a baby-killer plotting to build death panels for the grannies of America'
The Independent
(8/19/09)

Republicans, religion and the triumph of unreason

Past This is Hell! guest Johann Hari writes ...

Since Obama's rise, the US right has been skipping frantically from one fantasy to another, like a person in the throes of a mental breakdown. It started when they claimed he was a secret Muslim, and - at the same time - that he was a member of a black nationalist church that hated white people. Then, once these arguments were rejected and Obama won, they began to argue that he was born in Kenya and secretly smuggled into the United States as a baby, and the Hawaiian authorities conspired to fake his US birth certificate. So he is ineligible to rule and the office of President should pass to ... the Republican runner-up, John McCain.
These aren't fringe phenomena: a Research 200 poll found that a majority of Republicans and Southerners say Obama wasn't born in the US, or aren't sure. A steady steam of Republican congressmen have been jabbering that Obama has "questions to answer". No amount of hard evidence - here's his birth certificate, here's a picture of his mother heavily pregnant in Hawaii, here's the announcement of his birth in the local Hawaiian paper - can pierce this conviction.
This trend has reached its apotheosis this summer with the Republican Party now claiming en masse that Obama wants to set up "death panels" to euthanise the old and disabled.
Yes: Sarah Palin really has claimed - with a straight face - that Barack Obama wants to kill her baby.
You have to admire the audacity of the right. Here's what's actually happening. The US is the only major industrialised country that does not provide regular healthcare to all its citizens. Instead, they are required to provide for themselves - and 50 million people can't afford the insurance. As a result, 18,000 US citizens die every year needlessly, because they can't access the care they require. That's equivalent to six 9/11s, every year, year on year. Yet the Republicans have accused the Democrats who are trying to stop all this death by extending healthcare of being "killers" - and they have successfully managed to put them on the defensive.
The Republicans want to defend the existing system, not least because they are given massive sums of money by the private medical firms who benefit from the deadly status quo. But they can't do so honestly: some 70 per cent of Americans say it is "immoral" to retain a medical system that doesn't cover all citizens. So they have to invent lies to make any life-saving extension of healthcare sound depraved ...
This tendency to simply deny inconvenient facts and invent a fantasy world isn't new; it's only becoming more heightened. It ran through the Bush years like a dash of bourbon in water. When it became clear that Saddam Hussein had no weapons of mass destruction, the US right simply claimed they had been shipped to Syria. When the scientific evidence for man-made global warming became unanswerable, they claimed - as one Republican congressman put it - that it was "the greatest hoax in human history", and that all the world's climatologists were "liars". The American media then presents itself as an umpire between "the rival sides", as if they both had evidence behind them.
It's a shame, because there are some areas in which a conservative philosophy - reminding us of the limits of grand human schemes, and advising caution - could be a useful corrective. But that's not what these so-called "conservatives" are providing: instead, they are pumping up a hysterical fantasy that serves as a thin skin covering some raw economic interests and base prejudices.
For many of the people at the top of the party, this is merely cynical manipulation. One of Bush's former advisers, David Kuo, has said the President and Karl Rove would mock evangelicals as "nuts" as soon as they left the Oval Office. But the ordinary Republican base believe this stuff. They are being tricked into opposing their own interests through false fears and invented demons. Last week, one of the Republicans sent to disrupt a healthcare town hall started a fight and was injured - and then complained he had no health insurance. I didn't laugh; I wanted to weep ...
However strange it seems, the Republican Party really is spinning off into a bizarre cult who believe Barack Obama is a baby-killer plotting to build death panels for the grannies of America. Their new slogan could be - shrill, baby, shrill.

More evidence backs suspicions that Karl Rove is a misleading manipulative prick
Huffington Post
(8/20/09)

Karl Rove Vs. ACORN

Past This is Hell! guest John Atlas writes ...

Now we know that Karl Rove spearheaded the firing of David Iglesias, the U.S. Attorney in New Mexico who refused to follow the Bush White House's orders to intimidate low-income voters by making false charges of "voter fraud." What the New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, Wall Street Journal and other major papers missed in their stories last week was that Rove was specifically targeting ACORN, the community organizing group that has waged some of the most effective voter registration drives in recent memory.
Rove viewed ACORN as a threat to the GOP because of its success in registering low-income voters and turning them out to vote on election day ...
Last week, the House Judiciary Committee released over 5,000 pages of White House and Republican National Committee e-mails, with transcripts of closed-door testimony by Karl Rove and former White House Counsel Harriet Miers. The documents reveal that Rove played a central role in sacking Iglesias, who was one of several federal prosecutors fired in a string of politically motivated dismissals in 2006.
Iglesias refused to cooperate with the White House's political agenda of prosecuting ACORN for "voter fraud." Under pressure from New Mexico Republicans and Rove, Iglesias, a Republican and former Navy lawyer appointed by President George W. Bush, did investigate whether ACORN was engaged in voter registration fraud. But once Iglesias realized ACORN was following the rules he refused to smear the group by filing a phony indictment ...
Since it was founded in the 1970s, ACORN has been in the thorn in the side of big business, banks, Democrats and Republicans. It has helped families obtain affordable housing, increased wages for working people, stopped mortgage companies from deceiving customers with predatory subprime loans, cleaned up vacant lots, and saved thousands of Hurricane Katrina survivor's home from being demolished.
Rove no longer controls the White House, but the GOP and its conservative allies in Congress and the right-wing media echo chamber at Fox News and elsewhere are still using the Rove playbook. Their attacks on ACORN have persisted, part of their propaganda campaign to tarnish Obama and Democrats as "radicals."

Foreign interests' millions to Congress "raises the question of what lobbyists for health
care, energy and other interests — who disclose far less information — are up to"
CQ Politics
(8/18/09)

New Study Details Contacts Between Foreign Interests and Lawmakers

Foreign interests spent $87 million lobbying Congress and executive branch officials last year, according to a new analysis compiled by the Sunlight Foundation and ProPublica.
The money helped finance an estimated 22,000 contacts directly with federal officials, lawmakers and their staffs, and even the media — all in the interest of influencing legislation, regulations and US policy abroad.
According to the analysis of filings made during 2008 under the Foreign Agent Registration Act, the officials who were contacted weren’t hesitant about providing whatever services they could. As a result, legislation was sometimes introduced favoring a country’s particular position, letters were also written, and sometimes more direct action was taken after meeting with foreign representatives ...
(Past This is Hell! guest) Ellen Miller, executive director of the Sunlight Foundation, said information contained on the site “shows how effective lobbyists can be.
“While it brings needed transparency to these filings, it raises the question of what lobbyists for health care, energy and other interests — who disclose far less information — are up to in Washington,” Miller added.

US prison at Bagram makes Guantanamo look like a spa
AlJazeera
(8/20/09)

Guantanamo's 'more evil twin'?

It is a US-run prison built from scratch on an US military base to hold "enemy combatants" captured in the so-called "war on terror".
Those imprisoned there have never been charged with a crime, nor do they have any meaningful way of challenging their detention.
The inmates allege abuse at the hands of their captors, ranging from sleep deprivation to brutal beatings. And no, it is not Guantanamo Bay.
The Bagram Theatre Internment Facility lies on a sprawling US military complex, 40km northeast of the Afghan capital Kabul. It holds almost three times as many prisoners as Guantanamo and, as its better-known Cuban counterpart prepares to close, the Bagram prison is about to double in size.
You could be forgiven for never having heard of the prison at Bagram. After all, Barack Obama, the US president, does not like to mention it, preferring to concentrate on his flagship policy of closing the Guantanamo Bay prison facility.
Journalists are not allowed to visit and lawyers are banned from the premises. Even the number of prisoners held there remains an official secret. Estimates suggest it currently houses more than 600 but exact details remain classified by US authorities.
While Guantanamo has been in the spotlight in recent years, Bagram has operated in the shadows. The first announcement of detentions at Bagram came in January 2002 and, as the US renditions programme swung into action, the site became a key regional hub in a global network of prisons.

Iraqi bombings are warnings to government, Kurds
The Guardian
(8/20/09)

Iraq bombs are a warning to Maliki

Past This is Hell! guest Jonathan Steele writes ...

No one has taken responsibility for the horrendous bombs that shattered the foreign and finance ministries in Baghdad and took more than a hundred lives yesterday but the finger must point to Sunni Arab radicals. The foreign ministry is run by Hoshyar Zebari, a prominent Kurdish politician, while the finance ministry is in the hands of the Shia hardliner Bayan Jabr, who represents the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq and infuriated Sunnis during his previous post as interior minister. He was moved from that post after death squads operating directly or indirectly under cover of the ministry were revealed four years ago to have held and tortured hundreds of Sunnis. That brutality helped to start the sectarian revenge killings that so disfigured Iraq in 2006 and 2007.
The bombings may therefore have been meant in part as a Sunni Arab warning to the Kurds. Tensions and armed clashes between Kurds and Arabs are the biggest danger currently facing Iraq. Until now they have centred on the disputed city of Kirkuk as well as the land surrounding Mosul in the northwest, which Kurds also claim. Bombings in Kirkuk and Mosul have been frequent in recent months. Yesterday's blast in Baghdad could be a way of showing Kurds that their positions in Baghdad are also vulnerable and that Sunni Arabs can hit them in the capital.
But they are also a warning to Shia hardliners, and by extension the whole of prime minister Nouri al-Maliki's Shia-dominated Iraqi government, that its policies are still not giving Sunnis a fair share of power. The disbandment of the Sunni Arab militias known as the Awakening movement, which successfully confronted al-Qaida in Iraq in 2007 has angered many Sunnis who felt they deserved more in gratitude and reward. It took courage for Iraqi Sunnis to challenge al-Qaida, and this should have been recognised by Shia leaders. Instead, the government has been slow to honour promises to take former Awakening members into the national army and police.

Contractors funding the Taliban more than drugs
GlobalPost
(8/13/09)

Who is funding the Afghan Taliban? You dont want to know

It is the open secret no one wants to talk about, the unwelcome truth that most prefer to hide. In Afghanistan, one of the richest sources of Taliban funding is the foreign assistance coming into the country.
Virtually every major project includes a healthy cut for the insurgents. Call it protection money, call it extortion, or, as the Taliban themselves prefer to term it, "spoils of war," the fact remains that international donors, primarily the United States, are to a large extent financing their own enemy.
"Everyone knows this is going on," said one US Embassy official, speaking privately ...
Up until quite recently, most experts thought that drug money accounted for the bulk of Taliban funding. But even here opinion was divided on actual amounts. Some reports gauged the total annual income at about $100 million, while others placed the figure as high as $300 million - still a small fraction of the $4 billion poppy industry.
Now administration officials have launched a search for Taliban sponsors. Richard Holbrooke, US special envoy for Afghanistan and Pakistan, told a press conference in Islamabad last month that drugs accounted for less of a share of Taliban coffers than was previously thought.
"In the past there was a kind of feeling that the money all came from drugs in Afghanistan," said Holbrooke, according to media reports. "That is simply not true."
The new feeling is that less than half of the Taliban's war chest comes from poppy, with a variety of sources, including private contributions from Persian Gulf states, accounting for much of the rest. Holbrooke told reporters that he would add a member of the Treasury Department to his staff to pursue the question of Taliban funding.
But perhaps US officials need look no further than their own backyard.
Anecdotal evidence is mounting that the Taliban are taking a hefty portion of assistance money coming into Afghanistan from the outside.
This goes beyond mere protection money or extortion of "taxes" at the local level - very high-level negotiations take place between the Taliban and major contractors, according to sources close to the process ...
One Afghan contractor, speaking privately, told friends of one project he was overseeing in the volatile south. The province cannot be mentioned, nor the particular project.
"I was building a bridge," he said, one evening over drinks. "The local Taliban commander called and said 'don't build a bridge there, we'll have to blow it up.' I asked him to let me finish the bridge, collect the money - then they could blow it up whenever they wanted. We agreed, and I completed my project." In the south, no contract can be implemented without the Taliban taking a cut, sometimes at various steps along the way.
One contractor in the southern province of Helmand was negotiating with a local supplier for a large shipment of pipes. The pipes had to be brought in from Pakistan, so the supplier tacked on about 30 percent extra for the Taliban, to ensure that the pipes reached Lashkar Gah safely.
Once the pipes were given over to the contractor, he had to negotiate with the Taliban again to get the pipes out to the project site. This was added to the transportation costs.
"We assume that our people are paying off the Taliban," said the foreign contractor in charge of the project.

Afghan translators 'have been abandoned or poorly treated by a complex web of US contractors, their insurance companies, and their military counterparts'
CorpWatch
(8/11/09)

Mission Essential, Translators Expendable

Past This is Hell guest Pratap Chatterjee writes ...

Basir “Steve” Ahmed was returning from a bomb-clearing mission in Khogyani district in northeastern Afghanistan when a suicide bomber blew up an explosive-filled vehicle nearby. The blast flipped the military armored truck Ahmed was riding in three or four times, and filled it with smoke. The Afghan translator had been accompanying the 927th Engineer Company near the Pakistan border on that October day in 2008 that would forever change his life.
“I saw the gunner come out and I followed him. The US Army soldiers helped pull me out, but I got burns,” says Ahmed, who had worked as a contract translator with US troops for almost four years. “The last thing I remember was the “dub-dub-dub” of a Chinook helicopter.” A medical evacuation team took the injured men to a US Army hospital at Bagram Base.
Three days later Ahmed regained consciousness, but was suffering from the shrapnel wounds in his scalp and the severe burns covering his right hand and leg.
A little more than three months after his accident, Ahmed was fired by his employer, Mission Essential Personnel (MEP) of Columbus, Ohio, the largest supplier of translators to the US military in Afghanistan. In a statement released to CorpWatch, the company said that Ahmed’s “military point of contact (POC) informed MEP that Basir was frequently late and did not show up on several occasions. A few days later, Basir's POC called MEP’s manager and told her that they were not able to use him and requested a new linguist.”
Ahmed says he missed only one day of work and arrived late twice.
Today, he lives in hiding in nearby Jalalabad for fear that his family will be targeted because he had worked with the US military. The 29-year-old has no job and had to wait nine months for disability compensation to pay for medical treatment for the burns that still prevent him from lifting his hand to his mouth to feed himself.
Ahmed is one of dozens of local Afghans who have been abandoned or poorly treated by a complex web of US contractors, their insurance companies, and their military counterparts despite years of service risking life and limb to help the US military in the ongoing war in Afghanistan. The company they work for has become one of the largest employers of translators in the country.

Chinese bootcamps beat kids to cure web addiction
BBC News
(8/19/09)

China web addict 'beaten' at camp

A teenage boy is in a serious condition after being repeatedly beaten at a boot camp to treat internet addicts in China, state media have reported.
Pu Liang, 14, is said to have been beaten several times by the camp's principal and by other students.
It comes after a 15-year-old boy was beaten to death earlier this month at another of the military-style camps.
The death drew outrage in China, where many parents and officials believe some children spend too much time online.
Pu Liang's mother told local reporters that she sent her son to the camp, in the city of Chengdu in Sichuan province, because he was spending too much time playing online games.
She said the camp claimed it could cure the "problem" for 5,000 yuan ($730; £450).
But the mother said her son was beaten up and now has chest and kidney problems.
The camp is now closed and its principal has been arrested, according to Chinese media reports.