after the purge

French Students Hit Streets To Protest New Labor Law

2006-03-17T06:43:00.000-08:00

Via Washington Post, an estimated 250,000 students took to the streets of Paris and major cities across France on Thursday, escalating a political rebellion by the country's younger generation against a government that is floundering in its attempts to restructure a moribund economy.

Pigdog believes protests and demonstrations reveals the dependecy on the government. Although pigdog is on the side of the students, I also think they should find a way to break away from the government. Keepingin line with the everlasting optimism of the Frankfurt school, in ourcurrent state very few, if any of us are capable of meaningfulprotest at all. Below are the details of the protests.

Some protesters wore black garbage bags to symbolize their charge that the government treats young people as disposable workers. The demonstrations were largely peaceful, but at the end, about 250 people clashed with riot police in a popular Parisian tourist and shopping area.

The protests have expanded rapidly in the past week, from a few campus demonstrations to turnouts in 80 cities and towns Thursday. They could undermine the political party of President Jacques Chirac ahead of next year's presidential and parliamentary election campaigns, political analysts here say.

Strikes and street protests are as common as spring showers in France. But the student rallies have been particularly troubling to the government because of their rapid spread, the threat of participation by labor unions and the historical power of students in France. A student protest that began at Paris's famous Sorbonne university in 1968 and spread to schools and factories across the country led to the resignation of President Charles de Gaulle.

This week, students were protesting a newly passed law that has the support of Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin, a leading presidential candidate from Chirac's party. The measure, due to go into effect in April, will make it easier to hire and fire young people at a time when the youth unemployment rate averages 23 percent.

The protesters' anger focuses on provisions that will allow companies to fire employees under 26 at any time during their first two years of work, without cause.

"They're offering us nothing but slavery," said Maud Pottier, 17, a student at Jules Verne High School in Sartrouville, north of Paris, who was wrapped in layers of scarves as protection against the chilly, gray day. "You'll get a job knowing that you've got to do every single thing they ask you to do because otherwise you may get sacked. I'd rather spend more time looking for a job and get a real one."

Business leaders complain that existing French labor laws make it virtually impossible to dismiss incompetent employees without giving them prohibitively costly severance packages. As a result, the leaders say, many companies are either relying increasingly on temporary workers or not hiring at all.

Many economists blame the strict laws for the country's lifeless economy.
The catalyst for the new law was the wave of rioting that swept cities across France last fall. Young men and boys from low-income, suburban, immigrant housing projects where the unemployment rate tops 40 percent burned cars, public buildings and businesses in a three-week spree of anger directed at what the youths considered an unresponsive government.

The violence severely damaged the reputation of Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy -- another likely presidential candidate and Villepin's main rival within the ruling Union for a Popular Movement party.

The new law has drawn a mixed reaction among unemployed youths who lack college educations and live in France's poorest communities. But it is strongly opposed by college students, who say it discriminates against young workers by not giving them the same protections as older ones. "This is an alternative to unemployment that isn't acceptable," said Boris Canepa, 22, who studies health safety and the environment at the University of Paris XIII in the northern suburban area of Saint-Denis, where last fall's riots began.

About 200 students from the city of Rouen in northwestern France descended from train cars in Paris on Thursday chanting and singing, some wearing T-shirts emblazoned with the words "knockdown prices," a reference to their belief that the government is selling out young workers at bargain prices.

More than 100 students on bicycles blocked streets surrounding the Louvre Museum, piggybacking on the main student demonstrations to protest cuts in school sports coaching staffs.

Near the end of the demonstration, about 250 youths threw rocks at police and set fire to a newspaper kiosk in the square between the Bon March?department store and the city's renowned Hotel Lutetia. Police fired tear gas to break up the group.

In the southern city of Toulouse, students supporting the marches and strikes fought with youths who were arguing to keep the local university open. Police dispersed protesters in Rennes, in the west, who attacked cars and set garbage bins ablaze. Other demonstrators temporarily disrupted rail traffic in the southwestern city of Bordeaux and at a Paris station. The French Interior Ministry put the total national turnout at nearly 250,000. The national students' union said about 330,000 people took part.

Most of the nation's colleges and universities have been shut down or partially closed in recent weeks because of protests. Last Saturday, Paris police stormed the campus of the Sorbonne to forcibly remove demonstrators.

Villepin has drawn criticism from within his own party over the new law and has dropped in popularity polls to a record low of 36 percent. After a meeting at the Labor Ministry on Thursday, Villepin said he was "open to dialogue" about the law but did not indicate that he would back away from it.

During the demonstration in Paris on Thursday, Antoine du Couessin, a third-year history student, stopped among the banners and chanting protesters to snap a photo of a man peering down at the street from his balcony. "Back to work!" the man shouted angrily at the demonstrators.

The man was Couessin's father. "He's 100 percent behind" the proposed law, Couessin said. "It's really difficult at home right now. I just go straight for my bedroom."

The Residential School System in Canada: Some facts

2006-03-09T18:42:00.000-08:00

pigdog's old friend Jesse of the North just posted a well writen piece about the reality of Residential School in Canada.

"I want to get rid of the Indian problem. Our objective is to continue until there is not a single Indian in Canada that has not been absorbed."

Quoted from Duncan C. Scott, head of Indian Affairs, 1920.

I'd like to take some time to talk about the Residential school system in Canada that was in use between 1892 and 1996. They were operated by the Government of Canada in cooperation with the Roman Catholic, Anglican, Methodist, United and Presbyterian churches. The common objective of these schools was to assimilate aboriginal children into Euro-Canadian society.

I'd like to point out that I'm not personally religious. I respect other people's right to religious beliefs as long as they don't try to impose those beliefs on me. I can acknowledge that religion has several positive aspects to it and I can understand how it can give people comfort. I am just unable to trust religious establishments by and large. These are my own personal beliefs and I expect them to be respected. Anyways, on with the post.

I think it's important to note that not all Residential schools in Canada were horrific and there were some people involved in the school system that had good intentions for the aboriginal children. But the fact remains that these people who had good intentions were the minority. Physical, emotional and sexual abuse was widespread in these schools and there has been little done to reconcile these gross injustices.

There are a lot of misconceptions concerning the truth of these schools and the goals of these institutions. By and large most people get their information on the history of the residential schools and the present legal actions from incomplete sources, a headline here and there about churches going bankrupt and the rampant substance abuse and suicides among the survivors, but very few actually know the full truth behind this issue and the full extent of the damage caused by these schools. Here are some facts about the Residential school system in Canada:

Canada's Indian residential school system began officially in 1892 but many features of this system had been in use since the 1600's in the early days of the Christian missionary infiltrations into North America.

From the beginning, the schools showed systematic problems. Often, the education offered by these institutions was inadequate to the needs of the children. Physical, emotional and intellectual deprivation with occurrences of disease, hunger and overcrowding were noted as early as 1897.

Physical and sexual abuse was extremely common in these schools, as were mortality rates. In some cases 50% of students would die in these schools.

The federal government never had a formal policy in place to refuse family allowance payments, however former Inuit students have said that their parents were threatened with the loss of these payments if they refused to send their children to these schools. Around Canada, the missionaries regularly used legal force to remove aboriginal children from their families. Parents were threatened by guns, jail sentences and withholding of rations if they refused to release their children to the authorities.

The children were only allowed to see their families for a total of 2 months in the year. Speaking any native languages was severely punished, sometimes by having their tongues stuck to frozen fences, getting strapped, locked in a closet and/or ridiculed. They were given uniforms, individualism was discouraged, they were forced to adopt a new religion and were referred to by number instead of by name.

In 1920, Duncan C Scott made it mandatory for Indian Children to attend residential schools.

The goals of this school system were primarily to eliminate aboriginal language, culture and belief systems in Canada and to oppress aboriginal students physically, emotionally and spiritually. The practice used was based on complete separation from the family and culture for up to ten years or more, ensuring that these children as young as 4 years old would not know their own people, culture, languages and law.

By 1945, almost 10,000 students were enrolled in residential schools in Canada. Only slightly over 100 were enrolled in grade 8 and there was no record of students enrolled beyond grade 9.

Over 40% of the teaching staff in 1950 had little or no professional training.

The schools typically only spent 2 hours a day on academic subjects. The focus was on learning English or French as well as Euro-Canadian values and culture. Aboriginal boys were limited to learning practical training of agricultural skills, where girls were taught how to do crafts and household duties in an agricultural context. The curriculum prepared Aboriginal students for their "expected future existence on the lower fringes of Euro-Canadian society" (Barman, Herbert & McCaskill, 1986, p.6)

Students were being neglected, supplied with alcohol, pornographic material, female students were becoming pregnant, and the spread of STI's among the students were reported. (source: "A Brief Report of the Federal Government of Canada's Residential School System for Inuit 2005, David King. p.6")

$800 million and over 100 years was dedicated to assimilation in residential schools, but only $350 million and 10 years has been dedicated to healing.

Currently in Canada there are over 87,000 residential school survivors who live with the legacy of this cultural genocide. But when you take into consideration that these survivors grew up in complete isolation from the family structure and surrounded by all this aforementioned ugliness for their entire childhoods, the children of these survivors must live with this ugly legacy as well. Until reconciliation is achieved and Canadians acknowledge the truth of our country’s treatment of native peoples, and the perpetrators of these vile acts are brought to justice, the cycle of pain, hate and isolation will only continue to fester in aboriginal society.

This is an ugly reality, but until this issue is resolved, it’s unreasonable to expect aboriginal communities to become healthy self sustaining communities. This issue will not just go away by itself. Until meaningful reconciliation by the federal government and the church is made, there will continue to be an unsightly stain on the Canadian flag. We are human beings; we have the fundamental right to justice. The truth must be known.

I’d like to leave you with a speech given by Chief Joseph of the Nez Perce at Lincoln Hall, Washington, DC in 1879, where he argued for the same liberties granted to American Citizens.

“Good words do not last long unless they amount to something. Words do not pay for my dead people. They do not pay for my country. They do not protect my father’s grave. Good words do not give back my children. Good words will not give my people good health and stop them from dying. I am tired of talk that comes to nothing. It makes my heart sick when I remember all the good words and all the broken promises.”

***
(Source: The Legacy of Hope Foundation)

What's "new socialist countryside" like?

2006-03-07T21:10:00.000-08:00

The Central Committee of the Communist Party of China (CPC) recently released an important policy document on building "a new socialist countryside," and established it as one of the primary objectives of the 11th Five-Year (2006-10) Guidelines for National Economic and Social Development currently under discussion by legislators during the ongoing session of the National People's Congress.

According to China Daily, "a new socialist countryside means advanced production, improved livelihood, a civilized social atmosphere, clean and tidy villages and efficient management."

CPC putting forward this concept could be a watershed in socialism building in China. The model of China's development is given priority to cities. For the last five decades, China has been focusing on the urban development. The interest of rural areas have been compromised to support the development of urban areas. This proposal suggests a shift of the development towards the countryside. It is time for "industries (to) support agriculture and cities (to) support the countryside". It is also a response to farmers resurgences happening in China these years.

The "new socialist countryside" covers 8 parts: water conservancy facilities, road construction, the use of marsh gas and solar energy in rural areas, construction of the rural power network, rural education, rural public health care system, culture, and, rural social security system.

I doubt whether it would be another round of privatization and commercialization in China, this time in rural area, and whether it would become a burden for rural residents.

(the Chinese character in the picture means "peasant")

Reporters without Borders: Let's Punish the People

2006-02-15T08:00:00.000-08:00

Yahoo Inc., Google Inc. , Microsoft Corp., and, Cisco will go on Capitol Hill today to defend corporate policies for dealing with China that they say balance business interests with human-rights concerns. That pressure will escalate today when the House Subcommittee on Africa, Global Human Rights and International Operations questions officials of the four technology companies, along with other witnesses critical of their activities.

Via NYT, the subcommittee's chairman, Representative Christopher H. Smith, Republican of New Jersey, plans to introduce legislation by week's end that would restrict an Internet company's ability to censor or filter basic political or religious terms — even if that puts the company at odds with local laws in the countries where it now operates. Among the act's provisions is the establishment of an Office of Global Internet Freedom, which would establish standards for Internet companies operating abroad. In addition to prohibiting companies from filtering out certain political or religious terms, it would require them to disclose to users any sort of filtering they undertake.

Lucie Morillon, the Washington representative of Reporters Without Borders, said the companies should both self-regulate and be overseen by the U.S. government to prevent future crackdowns against dissident journalists.

The group will ask Internet companies not to host network infrastructure in politically repressive countries, and it also will ask the U.S. Commerce Department to approve a company's entry into those markets, Morillon said (from washington post).

Because of the unjustified censorship from Chinese government, the people should be excluded and deprived of internet. Brilliant proposal, Reporters without Borders.

(pic from NYT: From left to right, Mark Chandler, Cisco's general counsel, Elliot Schrage, a vice president for corporate communications at Google, Jack Krumholtz, managing director of federal government affairs and associate general counsel for Microsoft, and Michael Callahan, Yahoo's general counsel before a joint hearing on the Internet in China. )

White Guys are Taking Our Girls

2006-02-11T11:09:00.000-08:00

Via wangfuproduction: Presenting the newest "short" film (actually 15 min long) from Wong Fu Productions. A comedy poking fun at, well, you'll find out. It's all just for fun, nothing serious or meant to offend anyone. Just give it a chance, you might even learn something from it.
Check out the video here.

Tyrants Can Be Elected.... Right Mr. Bush?

2006-02-05T19:01:00.000-08:00

Rumsfeld likens Venezuela's Chavez to Hitler

Washington - Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld likened Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez to Adolf Hitler, reflecting continuing tension inrelations between the United States and the Latin American government.

Rumsfeld, asked during a National Press Club appearance Thursday about indications of a deteriorating general relationship between Washington and parts of Latin America, said he believes such a characterization "misses themark."

"We saw dictatorships there. And then we saw most of those countries, withthe exception of Cuba, for the most part move towards democracies," he said. "We also saw corruption in that part of the world. And corruption issomething that is corrosive of democracy."

The secretary acknowledged that "we've seen some populist leadership appealing to masses of people in those countries. And elections like Evo Morales in Bolivia take place that clearly are worrisome."

"I mean, we've got Chavez in Venezuela with a lot of oil money," Rumsfeldadded. "He's a person who was elected legally just as Adolf Hitler waselected legally and then consolidated power and now is, of course, workingclosely with Fidel Castro and Mr. Morales and others."

Rising tensions

There have been increasing signs of hostility between Washington and Caracas, and on Monday Chavez said Venezuela's intelligence agencies have "infiltrated" a group of military officials from the U.S. Embassy who wereallegedly involved in espionage.

Venezuelan authorities, including the vice president, have accused officialsat the U.S. Embassy of involvement in a spying case in which Venezuelan naval officers allegedly passed sensitive information to the Pentagon.

It was not the first such charge by Chavez.

He has accused President Bush of backing efforts to overthrow his leftist government, and specifically has charged that the United States supported ashort-lived coup in 2002, fomented a devastating strike in 2004 and expelledsome American missionaries from Venezuela for alleged links to the CIA.

Washington has repeatedly rejected the allegations.

Okay, I can't help myself

2006-01-18T17:17:00.000-08:00

"Check the War-Mongers of the World: Everyone vote for the Führer!"

There is indeed a frightening political climate accumulating in the United States. Of course, the outcome of these events will not be isolated to that country in an era of spreading American imperialism. Admitedly, we must be cautious when deploying the term 'facism' since the concept itself can lose meaning when it is recklessly applied to all circumstances and political regimes many consider "right-wing".

Herbert Marcuse, having seen first hand the horrors of a true fascism system emerging in Germany during the 1930s, recognized that the U.S. could not in any way be labelled with that tretcherous mark. However, it is vital that we acknowledge the nuanced elements of this political formation, and observe the variable tendencies and features of fascism. Essentially, fascism is more than a sum of its parts though its constituent elements -- war-mongering, advocacy for "peace", notion of a "people", the flattening of the individual, nationalism, etc. -- can in themselves ressemble characteristics of a fascist state. Platitudes and rhetoric are the primary political discourse.

Let us take this article, for example, and a frightening comparison between the Enabling Acts in Germany, which fused the executive and legislative powers to the Fueher -- all under the auspices of a parliamentary system:

Bush could seize absolute control of U.S. government

By Doug ThompsonPublisher, Capitol Hill Blue

President George W. Bush has signed executive orders giving him soleauthority to impose martial law, suspend habeas corpus and ignore the Posse Comitatus Act that prohibits deployment of U.S. troops on American streets. This would give him absolute dictatorial power over the government with nochecks and balances.

Bush discussed imposing martial law on American streets in the aftermath ofthe 9/11 terrorist attacks by activating "national security initiatives" putin place by Ronald Reagan during the 1980s.

These "national security initiatives," hatched in 1982 by controversial Marine Colonel Oliver North, later one of the key players in the Iran-Contra Scandal, charged the Federal Emergency Management Agency with administeringexecutive orders that allowed suspension of the Constitution, implementationof martial law, establishment of internment camps, and the turning the government over to the President.

John Brinkerhoff, deputy director of FEMA, developed the martial law implementation plan, following a template originally developed by former FEMA director Louis Guiffrida to battle a "national uprising of blackmilitants." Gifuffrida's implementation of martial law called for jailing atleast 21 million African Americans in "relocation camps." Brinkerhoff lateradmitted in an interview with the Miami Herald that President Reagan signed off on the initiatives and they remained in place, dormant, until George W.Bush took office.

Brinkerhoff moved on the Anser Institute for Homeland Security and, following the 9/11 terrorist attacks, provided the Bush White House and thePentagon with talking points supporting revised "national securityinitiatives" that would could allow imposition of martial law and suspensionof the Posse Comitatus Act of 1878, the law that is supposed to forbid use of troops for domestic law enforcement.

Brinkerhoff wrote that intentions of Posse Comitatus are "misunderstood and misapplied" and that the U.S. has in times of national emergency the "fulland absolute authority" to send troops into American streets to "enforceorder and maintain the peace."

Bush used parts of the plan to send troops into the streets of New Orleans following Hurricane Katrina. In addition, FEMA hired former special forcespersonnel from the mercenary firm Blackwater USA to "enforce security."

Blackwater USA, in its promotional materials, describes itself as "the mostcomprehensive professional military, law enforcement, security,peacekeeping, and stability operations company in the world," adding that "we have established a global presence and provide training and operationalsolutions for the 21st century in support of security and peace, and freedom and democracy everywhere."

Blackwater is also a major U.S. contractor in Iraq and has a contract with the Bush White House to provide additional security work "on an as-neededbasis."

The Department of Homeland Security established the "Northern Command forNational Defense," a wide-ranging program that includes FEMA, the Pentagon, the FBI and the National Security Agency. Executive orders already signedby Bush allow the Northern Command to send troops into American streets,seize control of radio and television stations and networks and imposemartial law "in times of national emergency."

The authority to declare what is or is not a national emergency restsentirely with Bush who does not have to either consult or seek the approvalof Congress for permission to assume absolute control over the government of the United States.

The White House press office would neither confirm nor deny existence ofBush's executive orders or the existence of the Northern Command forNational Defense. Neither would the Department of Homeland Security.

But my sources within the White House and DHS tell me the plans are inplace, ready for implementation when the command comes from the man whokeeps telling the American public that he is a "war time president" who will "do anything in my power" to impose his will on the people of the UnitedStates.

And he has made sure that power will be absolute when he chooses to use it.

Responsible Debate

2006-01-12T06:24:00.000-08:00

For Immediate Release
Office of the Press Secretary
January 10, 2006

President Addresses Veterans of Foreign Wars on the War on Terror

[Excerpt]

We face an added challenge in the months ahead: The campaign season willsoon be upon us and that means our nation must carry on this war in an election year. There is a vigorous debate about the war in Iraq today, and we should not fear the debate. It's one of the great strengths of our democracy that we can discuss our differences openly and honestly even in times of war. Yet we must remember there is a difference between responsible and irresponsible debate and it's even more important to conduct this debateresponsibly when American troops are risking their lives overseas.

The American people know the difference between responsible and irresponsible debate when they see it. They know the difference between honest critics who question the way the war is being prosecuted and partisan critics who claim that we acted in Iraq because of oil, or because of Israel, or because we misled the American people. And they know the difference between a loyal opposition that points out what is wrong, and defeatists who refuse to see that anything is right.

When our soldiers hear politicians in Washington question the mission they are risking their lives to accomplish, it hurts their morale. In a time ofwar, we have a responsibility to show that whatever our political differences at home, our nation is united and determined to prevail. And wehave a responsibility to our men and women in uniform who deserve to know that once our politicians vote to send them into harm's way, our supportwill be with them in good days and in bad days and we will settle fornothing less than complete victory. (Applause.)

We also have an opportunity this year to show the Iraqi people what responsible debate in a democracy looks like. In a free society, there is only one check on political speech and that's the judgment of the people. SoI ask all Americans to hold their elected leaders to account, and demand adebate that brings credit to our democracy not comfort to our adversaries.

Support for the mission in Iraq should not be a partisan matter. VFW memberscome from all over the country, and both sides of the political aisle yet your position on the war is clear. In a recent resolution, the VFW declared, it is critical that the United States succeed in Iraq, which will result instability and security in the region. I appreciate your support for themission in Iraq, and so do our troops in the fight. Your lives of service, from the first time you put on the uniform to this day, are a credit to ourcountry and an inspiration to our military. A new generation of soldiers, and sailors, airmen, Marines and Coast Guardsmen is now carrying out anurgent and noble mission and they're doing so with the same determinationand courage as you who came before them.

Some of our finest men and women have given their lives in freedom's cause. Others have returned home with wounds that the best medicine cannot heal. Wehold all who sacrificed and their families in our thoughts and in ourprayers. And I'm going to make you this pledge: We will not waver, we willnot weaken, and we will not back down in the cause they served. (Applause.)By their sacrifice, we are laying the foundation of freedom in a troubled part of the world. And by laying that foundation, we're laying the foundation of peace for generations to come.

Thank you for letting me come by today. God bless. (Applause.)

ON NATIONAL SOCIALISM AND WORLD RELATIONS

BY ADOLF HITLER

The parliamentary-democratic system is inseparable from the other symptoms of the time. A critical situation cannot be remedied by collaborating with the causes of it but by a radical extermination of these causes. Hence under such conditions the political struggle must necessarily take the form of a revolution.

What are we fighting for?

We are fighting for our most valuable possession: our freedom. We are fighting for our land and our skies. We are fighting so that our children will not be slaves of foreign rulers. That is in no way an exaggeration or empty phrase.

MINUSTAH, Gidan Activewear, the group of 184: the real crime lords.

2006-01-04T16:31:00.000-08:00

Chabert has an excellent post on Emanuel 'Dread' Wilmé, the Lavalas supporter in Cité Soleil who, along with dozens of bystanders, including children, was gunned down by MINUSTAH (UN) forces. In the words of Marguerite Laurent:

"Like all the others falling in Cite Soleil, Bel Air and throughout Haiti, like Charlemagne Peralte, Marie-Jeanne, Claire Heureuse, and Jean-Jacques Dessalines, Haiti’s true freedom fighters shall be remembered and sung about long after this latest Coup D’etat’s killers have passed into history." (via)

But there are other interests at work in Cité Soleil. Thomas Robenson 'Labanyè', whose death this past year was celebrated by Cite Soleil residents, ran the death squads in Cité Soleil and was allied with the police and the Group of 184. Labanyè is dead, but the well-funded, well-armed allies of Labanyè live on. Of course, in the corporate media, the battles between people struggling against the occupation of their country, and their murder at the hands of death squads, is presented as gang warfare:

"This racialized, overdetermined media image of the black gang itself, rather than any actually existing black people, stands as sentry and border alongside police forces."

But the story is not as simple as the corporate media would present. Labanyè was allied with, and funded by, Andrè Apaid, the sweatshop owner and long-time subcontractor for Gildan Activewear, who is one of the leaders of the group of 184:

"By the end of 2002, it was clear that, despite the efforts of the U.S. and the opposition, they remained a small electoral force in the politics of Haiti. Most of their leaders had been marginalized within Haiti by the positions they were taking politically. In addition, their association with some of the worst elements of the former coup regime, who were now demanding the return of the army, further diminished their standing in the eyes of the Haitian people.

The IRI [International Republican Institute], realizing that their former strategy was not working decided to create a new opposition. They arranged a secret meeting, which became public in the Haitian press, in the Dominican Republic with assembly industry owner Andy Apaid, other business leaders, student activists, the Democratic Convergence, and other elements of the former regime, including those who were calling for the return of the army. Andy Apaid is a millionaire Lebanese American businessman in Haiti who bitterly opposed Aristide in his desire to increase the minimum wage and who was involved in a fraud on the Haitian telephone company through the “grey market” in international telephone transmission. He was ultimately fined 2,000,000 gourdes for the fraud."

So Apaid, who vied to be president, who is spokesperson for the group of elite Haitians and Duvalierists working with, and installed into power by, the US-funded coup is a patron in his own right:"

Numerous witnesses stated the Boston gang leader, Thomas Robinson, alias “Labanyè,” receives financial, firearms, and political support from wealthy businessman and politico, Andy Apaid and businessman Reginald Boulos. Cité Soleil witnesses and police officers reported that Apaid’s support of Labanyè keeps the police from arresting him.

Apaid, the leader of the Group of 184, a business-backed organization established to oppose President Aristide, told investigators that he has directed the Haitian Police not to arrest Labanyè but to “work with him.”

It turns out that Labanyè's allies may have been responsible for the killing of MINUSTAH soldiers in order to cancel the elections:

“Des partisans d'un ancien chef de gang, Thomas Robenson dit Labanyè assassiné l'année dernière, seraient derrière les attaques meurtrières perpétrées contre des soldats de la MINUSTAH, a indiqué jeudi à l'AHP des sources étrangères à Port-au-prince.

Labanyè qui a contrôlé deux des 34 quartiers de Cité Soleil, était le rival d'un autre chef de bande, Dread Wilmé, réputé proche de lavalas, tué, lui-même, en juillet dernier, lors d'une opération de la MINUSTAH qui aurait également coûté la vie à plusieurs autres habitants.

Les dernières attaques contre les casques bleus auraient pour objectif de porter la MINUSTAH à lancer une attaque musclée contre le bidonville de Cité Soleil considéré comme le quartier de tous les risques.”

and

"De nombreux observateurs ont fait savoir ces derniers jours que si des bandits issus de quartiers populaires sont impliqués dans ces actes de violence, il y a sans doute des mains politiques très habiles qui les alimentent pour tenter de persuader que les élections ne sont pas possibles maintenant en Haïti.

C'est dans ce même contexte que des partisans d'un ancien chef de gang anti-Ariside, (feu Robenson Thomas) dit labanyè, ont été accusés d'implication dans les attaques contre des casques bleus pour cherrcher à provoquer une intervention de la MINUSTAH dans le bidonville de Cite Soleil.

Le premier tour des présidentielles et législatives fixé par arrêté présidentiel au 8 janvier 2006, a été reporté sine die par le regime interimaire après 4 précédent reports."

and

"Labanyè qui a contrôlé deux des 34 quartiers de Cité Soleil, était le rival d'un autre chef de bande, Dread Wilmé, réputé proche de lavalas, tué, lui-même, en juillet dernier, lors d'une opération de la MINUSTAH qui aurait également coûté la vie à plusieurs autres habitants.

Les dernières attaques contre les casques bleus auraient pour objectif de porter la MINUSTAH à lancer une attaque musclée contre le bidonville de Cité Soleil considéré comme le quartier de tous les risques.

Un policier canadien et un soldat jordanien ont été tués dans cette région au cours de ces deux dernières semaines."

So the US funds and trains paramilitaries in Dominican Republic, works with the sweatshop owners to bring greater instability back to Haiti, then pro-occupation death squads kill some of the foreign occupation forces, including Canadian Mark Bourque?

Let's be clear. The present evidence, according to Agence Haïtienne de Presse, is that the killing of Mark Bourque (along with countless and in the Canadian press unnamed Haitians--please see here for more on these murders) was done at the hands of a death squad funded by a sweatshop owner who was the spokesperson for the group that Canadian soldiers put in power illegally, who subcontracts for a Canadian corporation, and in whose interests Canada has been acting.

Chickens coming home to roost indeed:

"As of March 2nd, 2004 Canada’s Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade (DFAIT) states, “some Canadian companies are looking to shift garment production to Haiti.” DFAIT provides research and Haitian contacts through a variety of sub-agencies to Canadian companies that want to exploit low Haitian wages.

Montreal based Gildan Activewear is already subcontracting work to Haitian owned sweatshops, and they have opened a new factory in Port au Prince which employs 400 to 500 people. Gildan, one of the largest T shirt makers in the world, claimed recently to CBC radio to pay its workers a premium on the minimum Haitian wage. However unionized workers at Gildan’s Montreal factory earn more than 10 times the Haitian wage, and unorganized Haitian workers employed by Gildan recently told the CBC that their wages are not enough to live on. With recent increases in the cost of fuel in Haiti – the IMF demanded it be deregulated and the price has soared – Haitian workers have once again been demanding their minimum wage of 36 Gourdes per day be increased to keep up with inflation.

But what’s bad for Haitian workers - low wages and appalling conditions - are good business for the T shirt trade. At the time of writing, a blank Gildan T sells on Ebay for about $1.25. It’s a volume business, our appetite for T shirts. Gildan’s sales have nearly doubled, from $344 million in 1999 to $630 million in 2003. In the same period Gildan stock soared on the Toronto Stock Exchange from $5 to $44 per share. According to UNITE, Gildan has received over $3 million dollars of federal subsidies while it contemplated moving production offshore.

In 2002 Gildan donated $2000.00 to Paul Martin, campaigning then for the leadership of the Federal Liberal Party.

In February 2003, Gildan won an award for “social responsibility” given by the Association of Canadian Manufacturers and Exporters, (CME) and the government’s Canadian International Development Agency, (CIDA) which subsidizes Canadian companies to invest overseas. CIDA has been heavily criticized for lending to Liberal Party allies to subsidize projects of dubious social development value."

Elections or no, everything has gone according to plan for the real crime lords:

"Following the landslide victory of Aristide and his Famni Lavalas party in the 2000 elections, Canada (along with the U.S. and the E.U. at the behest of France) declared the elections flawed on the basis of a technicality and cut off $500 millions dollars in aid to the government while redirecting funding to anti-Aristide NGOs.

At the same time, gangs of former soldiers and death squad members (who were found to be financed and organized by the CIA during the 1991-1994 military regime) were launching frequent attacks and even coup attempts from their base in the Dominican Republic.

Then, in January 2003, Canada hosted the "Ottawa Initiative", a gathering of all the "major players" in Haiti, which did not include representatives from the democratically elected government, and reached a consensus that "Aristide must go".

As political tensions between the foreign-funded opposition and Lavalas supporters flared in early 2004, former police chief Guy Philippe led an invasion by the paramilitary forces (likely armed by the US) from the Dominican Republic, misleadingly called a "rebellion" or even a "popular uprising" in the Canadian media. The paramilitaries quickly overran key cities and surrounded Port-au-Prince before the Marines and JTF2 completed the coup d'état/kidnapping."

and

"On July 14th, “North America’s largest t-shirt maker” Gildan Activewear announced that they will be closing their El Progresso assembly plant in Honduras, when the lease expires on September 30th. 1800 workers will be laid off, in addition to the approximately 100 workers who were fired for attempting to unionize in 2002-03 (1). Several organizations are shocked by Gildan’s decision to shutdown and relocate - like a “godsend” - to Haiti and Nicaragua, especially since reports are about to be released by the Fair Labor Association (FLA) and the Workers Rights Consortium (WRC) that detail the findings of their extensive audits into factory conditions, wage and worker- related issues.

The WRC’s Scott Nova said “the evidence is overwhelming” regarding “serious violations”, part of a broader “systematic problem” in the realm of women’s and workers rights. Nova described how Gildan even conducted their own internal investigation concerning the violation of women’s rights reaching the “exact same” conclusion as the WRC. The WRC’s case, similar to the forthcoming FLA report, is “cut and dried”. Being an unaccountable corporation has its advantages, however, as Gildan has consistently denied any wrongdoing and appear to be operating with ‘corporate impunity’.

Although Gildan spokesperson Stephane Lemay has attempted to preemptively discredit the WRC audit, pointing out that Gildan refused the WRC access to the El Progresso plant, Nova counters that physical access to the plant “was not important” anyway, given that they conducted extensive interviews with “just under one hundred” expelled workers, as well as with Honduras government officials, off premises. In other words, the WRC didn’t need access to the plant to prove that Gildan was committing these crimes. The allegations that 1. Gildan illegally fired substantial numbers of workers for exercising their right to organize over a period of roughly two years, which “succeeded in preventing workers from forming a union” and 2. That Gildan violated Honduran law requiring workers to be paid for overtime, yielded conclusions that determined “substantial workers rights violations.”

According to Nova, there is “no debate over the facts”, and very similar conclusions were reached by the FLA, who, should Gildan refuse to honor the findings of their report or refuse to reverse the decision to cut and run from the El Progresso plant, will likely revoke Gildan’s membership. Lemay has stated that Gildan will adhere to the “corrective actions” recommended by the FLA, whom they are “bound contractually” to. The Maquila Solidarity Network’s Bob Jeffcot, and the WRC’s Nova, think it will be hard to enforce these corrective actions if Gildan cut and runs from its El Progresso plant. Says Jeffcot, “to close it down now is incredibly suspicious”, especially in light of the fact that approximately 100 workers are owed back pay “who deserve something irrespective of the decision to move.”

It is doubtful that Gildan will care whether or not they remain members of the FLA; they probably only joined to appease some shareholders, notably the Quebec Solidarity Fund. One week after Gildan joined the FLA, the Solidarity Fund announced that they will be pulling out their 11.1% share of Gildan, based on their own findings concerning the “cut and dried” facts of workers and women’s rights violations at El Progresso. (2) No longer having to concern themselves with ‘ethical considerations’ Gildan is proceeding into Haiti and the Dominican Republic (whose textile sector employs thousands of Haitian refugees, see below), where conduct is neither seriously monitored nor enforced, especially now that the legitimately elected government is gone.

Haitian labor unions have reported (3) that the 70 gourde minimum wage (paltry, but fought for and attained by the Lavalas government in 2003) is being rolled back (to its pre-2003 36 gourde level) now that a puppet/military regime is in place and are looking the other way while sweatshop owners exploit workers and expand operations in this more “favorable” environment. People like Andy Apaid, who is one of Gildan’s “local” subcontractors (4), according to former workers, never honored the minimum wage and would fire workers who dissented. In addition, feudal lords like Apaid would force workers to attend anti-Aristide “opposition” rallies under threat of termination or reprimand."

See also Lenin's post, Populism and Haiti.

Another way of fighting terrorism

2005-12-29T21:35:00.000-08:00

Check out the video "Interview with Terrorists" (Windows Media Player required)

$5.35 an hour? Outsourcing Mercenaries in Iraq

2005-12-28T08:09:00.000-08:00

Well, there seems to be a company out there that does it all. If your firm is in need of outsourced operators, call-centre staff, data entry operators, receptionists, and secretaries, then perhaps 3D Global Solutions is the answer for you. But don't stop there.

Things could get a bit harry for your operation if it is located, say, in Baghdad or Kabul. Fortunately this Umbrella Corp. can offer you dog handlers, weapons engineers, force protection, and stadium security protection in the event that the washed out lower classes are giving you a hard time. Sorry, no Nemesis Project or bio-engineered personnel quite yet.

In the fashion of James Bond-type super villany, 3D Global Solutions will find your inexpensive security force offshore. It seems that this up-standing corporate citizen has been recruiting from South American militaries, and paying these private secruity workers roughly $5.35 / hour -- less than a tenth what is paid to American mercinaries -- to put themselves in "the line of fire" for American and British troops in Iraq and Afghanistant. Exporting the "dirty warriors" to America's new imperialist hot-spot couldn't possibly go wrong, could it?

The price of course for these recruits could indeed be their life. Some of the men have returned with strange ailments and have even died from lukemium, probably a result of exposure to high levels of uranium.

This must be such a shock to the capitalist libertarians who point to governments as the culprits of war, genocide, and related atrocities. The market and its corporations could not possibly be responsible for such horrors. On the contrary, adventure capitalism always makes a profit off arms sales, production, and warfare. The military industrial complex must be getting rather bored with the current conflict in the Mid-East, as HUMVEES and body armour are not exactly big tickets items. Making a tidy buck off soldiering might just fill the gap.

WTO Kills Farmers

2005-12-20T15:57:00.000-08:00

Via Anti (Chinese) and Shanghai Daily (English), Hong Kong police charged 14 men with unlawful assembly yesterday for their part in anti-free trade demonstrations during a World Trade Organization meeting over the weekend and released another 944 people who had been detained. Most of the more than 1,000 people rounded up during the protests, in which activists attacked riot police and sought to disrupt the WTO ministers meeting, were militant South Korean farmers or unionists.

Shanghaiist witnessed the riot on Saturday night:

One notable and very media-friendly method of protest involved the Korean peasants, who formed the bulk of the protesters, walking three steps and then prostrating themselves on the ground, as if in prayer. They did this for the three hours it took to walk from Victoria Park to the Wanchai protest zone near the Convention Center, where the conference was being held. Things changed on Saturday night, (the conference concluded Sunday). Shanghaiist was present at the "Siege of Wan Chai" on Saturday night, where the scuffles got fairly violent, with protesters using their flag poles as spears and using metal roadblocks as makeshift weapons as they faced off with a battalion of riot police. The area was sealed off, and the subways and public transportation bypassed Wan Chai. The protesters were beating drums and the tension was running high when the police fired pepper spray canisters, which quickly enveloped the protest crowd and sent everyone running. Shanghaiist tried taking some pictures of this moment, but while we were fumbling with the camera, we noticed that our lungs, nasal passages, and eyes were burning, though even that word doesn’t quite do justice to it. It was more like a combination of asphyxiation, nausea, Sichuanese food, and panic.
After running out of the miasma of pepper spray smoke, we saw a lot of people who were in worse shape than we were. People shared what water they had to wash out their eyes and spit out the pepper from their systems. The Koreans decided that they would just occupy the street as long as they possibly could. We left at around 9 pm — according to news reports we heard, over a thousands people were rounded up and taken away on paddy wagons that night and the streets were completely cleared by around 2 am.

The farmers say opening their domestic rice market to foreign competition under a WTO treaty would bankrupt them.

The final key agreements of this WTO meeting includes:

All forms of agricultural export subsidies to be eliminated by 2013 - achieved in parallel and progressive manner. A substantial part to be realized by the end of the first half of the implementation period.
All forms of export subsidies for cotton to be eliminated by developed countries by 2006.
Developed countries will give duty and quota free market access for cotton exports by developing countries once the policy is implemented.
The 32 least developed countries will enjoy duty and quota free access for their products in 97% of all product categories, excluding rice and textiles, which the USA and Japan are protective about.
For service industry, countries will adhere to the Doha Ministerial Declaration and continue to aid the developing countries, as stated in the Modalities for the Special Treatment for Least-Developed Country Members in 2003.

Links:

Your one-stop shop for information about the WTO, from the protests to the conference to the larger issues, is at Simon World.
To learn more about the final accord reached at the end of the conference, this will prove a useful summary.
You can check out some pictures Shanghaiist took from Hong Kong here.

Silly teenager...driver's licences are for students

2005-12-16T11:21:00.000-08:00

The Ontario government is proposing new legislation which would ban highschool dropouts from being able to get a driver's licence.

"The law also provides for fines of up to $1,000 for students who are regularly absent from school and would fine parents the same amount, up from $200 under current legislation. Employers who have students working during school hours could also be fined $1,000."

Education Minister Gerard Kennedy notes:
"This by itself can't make the difference," Kennedy said of the driver's licence restrictions, which will apply with some exceptions for "family situations."

"We're saying to people that you shouldn't be going into a job, no matter how attractive it looks, that doesn't have a learning component, if you're 16 or 17," he added. "You're short-changing yourself. The success of this will really much more depend on the (educational) program that we're putting forward," he said. "What we're doing, mainly, is opening up better choices for students."

I think that "choice" is a very pertinent word in this instance. The word choice implies that people are able to freely choose to attend school or not attend school. But is this always the case? As Kennedy notes, "family situations" can often get in the way for many students. But, what counts as a "family situation?" For instance, it seems obvious that the Liberal government does not include having to work to support your family or yourself, as a "family situation" since you "shouldn't be getting a job, no matter how attractive it looks." However, this elides the fact that there are certain students who are more likely to be absent than others, such as poorer students, rural students, etc. Students, in other words, who are already disadvantaged. What the proposed legislation assumes is that students are freely choosing to work instead of go to school, which may not often be the case. Furthermore, fining students and their families up to $1000 dollars for missing school seems to completely miss the point. Attending school is not always a choice for some students, and this legislation does absolutely nothing to address underlying issues such as poverty and discrimination. In fact, it seems to do the exact opposite. Instead of creating more "choices" for students, it seems to be decreasing the already limited choices certain students have.

As the following highschool student notes:

Molle Dorst, a 17-year-old Grade 12 student at Seed Alternative School, said the legislation won't encourage students to stay in school."By not letting a student get their licence, it is saying, `If you drop out, we're going to cut your choices you have in life,'" she said."There's lots of experiences they can have based on their life experience, which are just as valid as having a university education."

Speciesism.

2005-12-14T20:04:00.000-08:00

Chabert points to the shameless opening address by Director General Pascal Lamy at the latest WTO meeting:

"You are the heirs of almost 60 years of tradition in trade negotiations, of a remarkable set of rules and decisions, and an impressive body of legal interpretations. You have also inherited a well-oiled machine that oversees and ensures the implementation of a balanced system of rights and obligations. You have every reason to be proud of the past achievements of your collective enterprise. So much for the past.

The current state of affairs is somewhat more heterogeneous. On the one hand, the day-to-day and dispute settlement activities are doing relatively well. Although the number of disputes has risen considerably, most of the decisions are respected and implemented, without recourse to retaliation — which speaks for the credibility of the dispute settlement mechanism. Only a handful of the more than 300 disputes submitted to the WTO since its creation in 1995 have not yet been resolved.

The negotiations part of your activities, on the other hand, could certainly be improved. There is also a lot of room for improvement in public acceptance of the WTO, as there is in its marketing activities. The WTO — the crowds in and certainly outside this building will remind you with sound and sometimes fury — is not the most popular international organization around, to say the least.

Even if it is famous throughout the world, the WTO is a very small business: its budget for 2006 is only 140 million US dollars — five times less than the budget of another international organization — FIFA — the Fédération Internationale de Football Association, for example (US$700 million), and almost ten times less than the budget of a famous NGO! I will certainly have to use your magic to see if we can get a more powerful engine for the WTO car, which is getting bigger and bigger, and now includes two newcomers, Saudi Arabia and Tonga.

As for the future of the WTO, it started in Doha in 2001 and it is up to you to decide, in this assembly, how you wish to fashion the years to come. If the WTO is to maintain and increase its current activities, then you must take a further step and commit yourselves to a new investment in the improvement of its rules, through the success of the current negotiations.

How do you decide on this collective investment? The WTO decision-making process, as you all know is, let us say, difficult. The difficulty stems from the fact that all stakeholders — all of you — have decided that you have exactly the same right, no matter how big or small, no matter how powerful or weak, no matter how rich or poor you are: you all have the right to speak, the right to agree, the right to disagree. In sum, in spite of all criticism, the WTO decision-making process is democratic. If it were different, taking decisions on the negotiations would probably be easier. But it would not be as legitimate. Reaching agreement in the WTO is difficult because it is done bottom-up — and it is good this is so. It takes more time, it is more burdensome and cumbersome, but I am convinced it remains the best way to take decisions that impact directly the lives of billions of people.

In short, you should indeed be proud of this healthy and democratic common institution. But like any stakeholder, you should also look beyond your immediate needs, you should think prospectively, you should care about the future.

Let me tell you a little secret I learnt since I took office as Director-General: there is an apocryphal and funny Secretariat guide to the language of trade negotiators in the old GATT. This guide tells you that, in those years, when negotiators said “Mr Chairman, we seek a balanced agreement”, what they really meant was “this agreement had better contain everything we demand”; when the negotiators said “we have demonstrated flexibility”, they really meant “we have successfully concealed our intransigence”; and when the negotiators announced “we are prepared to make our contribution to an ambitious outcome”, they really meant “we will only support agreements where others make all the concessions — and we make none”! This attitude, as we all know, is part of our past.

This is the past because today, what we really need are negotiators that are bold, open-minded and prepared to take some risks, as successful stakeholders. Ministers often face the difficult task of explaining to national constituencies that they have gained something in negotiations, even if the negotiating process is not over. The many people who benefit from open trade are usually politically silent, whereas those fewer who are affected by it can be politically very loud. We all understand the need of each and every delegation to take home some gain from trade negotiations.

The reality is that the true magic of these negotiations is to achieve results where all participants are winners, all will be able to declare victory. But for that, some risks must be taken. A popular Chinese proverb says “If you don't go into the cave of the tiger, how will you get its cub?” — in other words: nothing ventured, nothing gained."
-Pascal Lamy

He speaks to the WTO stakeholders about people. But they aren't mentioned, except for outbursts of fury, or as tigers or cubs to be hunted. These aren't people he talks about. They aren't even sub-human. The language used is as if people at the receiving end of these policies were a different biological entity. It's as if Wells' Martians were speaking of the invasion of Earth: "that as men busied themselves about their various concerns they were scrutinised and studied, perhaps almost as narrowly as a man with a microscope might scrutinise the transient creatures that swarm and multiply in a drop of water."

But this talk of stakeholders seemed familiar. Where had I heard this before?

Oh yes, in almost every communique from the university administration:

"Queen’s [administration] has established a working group to review key higher education issues and begin the process of preparing the university’s formal submission to Ontario’s Rae panel on Postsecondary Review...
...As the process moves forward, the working group will be talking to other key stakeholders on campus and in the broader community."
-The Queen’s Committee on the Rae Review on [privatizing] Higher Education [further]

Elites used to use terms like 'citizen', or 'the public', as a fantasmal referrent that was said to have been consulted on the way to the exploitation of people. Now, such a a pretense at a universality (within a state) is dropped. It is only the mighty stakeholders, the overseers, that matter.

On Wikipedia 'stakeholder' is defined as:

"originally a person who holds money or other property while its owner is being determined......In the last decades of the 20th century, the word "stakeholder" has evolved to mean a person or organisation that has a legitimate interest in a project or entity."

This legitimate vocal participant in bureacratic memos and communiques, the stakeholder, is the new bureaucratic overman, it is the new public, the new citizen, the new species.

Turning a blind eye to Canadian war crimes in Haiti.

2005-12-13T18:40:00.000-08:00

Canada's unflinching complicity (via CHAN)

Canada is complicit in each and every one of these acts of violence. The Haitian National Police are currently being trained by a 1600-member UN Civil Police Force, which has largely been under Canadian command since last summer. The UN Mission in Haiti, as well as the Canadian government, have thus far failed to acknowledge the well-documented killings and detentions of human rights activists, journalists, grassroots activists, and ordinary Haitians which have been carried out by the HNP.

In a report issued by the Miami-based Centre for the Study of Human Rights last January, members of the UN Civil Police Operations, as well as UN peacekeepers stated that their mission consisted of offering "back up" to HNP raids within poor neighbourhoods. A commander of the Civil Police from Quebec City was interviewed and stated that all he had done in Haiti was to "engage in daily guerrilla warfare." The Brazilian head of the UN forces was quoted in a Reuters article in November as stating "we are under extreme pressure from the international community to use violence." He cited France, the United States, and Canada among the countries pressing for the use of force.

Haitian government officials are currently on the payroll of the Canadian government as well. Philippe Vixamar, a minister within the Justice Department, has stated publicly that he was assigned to his position by the Canadian International Development Agency, and is currently on the CIDA payroll. CIDA is also employing Fernand Yvon, a senior advisor to President Gerard Latortue. Vixamar also denied that there were any political prisoners in Haiti in early November. Paul Martin, on a state visit to Haiti several days later, would make the same claim. In reality, the Catholic Justice and Peace Commission has estimated that there are over 700 political prisoners throughout Haiti, including former Haitian Prime Minister Yvon Neptune and other ex-cabinet ministers within Aristide's government.

Haitian coup: Made in Canada?

However, in noting the Canadian role in legitimizing the current government, one cannot leave out the role Canadian politicians have played in de-legitimizing the government of Aristide in the lead-up to last year's coup.

In January of 2003, according to an article which appeared in L'Actualite magazine in March of the same year, Canadian MP Denis Paradis hosted a "high-level roundtable meeting on Haiti," at the Meech Lake Resort. The round-table's invitees included Canadian officials, high-level US officials, diplomats with the Organization of American States (OAS), and officials from throughout Latin America. No Haitian representatives were present.

L'Actualite reporter Michel Vastel noted that Paradis had told him the themes of the meeting would include Aristide's possible removal, the possibility of placing Haiti under international "trusteeship," and the potential return of the Haitian military, which was disbanded in 1995 by Aristide as a result of its history of human rights abuses and corruption. This revelation raises troubling questions of the role of Canadian officials in the planning of the coup of Aristide.

In addition, CIDA funding to Haiti during the period from 2000-2004 -- like that of the US Agency for International Development (USAID) -- was funnelled solely to "grassroots" NGO's and business organizations who were aligned with the opposition Democratic Convergence party. The Democratic Convergence never managed to gain more than eight per cent voter support in Haitian elections. Supported by neo-Duvalierist ex-military members as well as members of the Haitian business elite, it was the Democratic Convergence which first claimed that the May 2000 parliamentary elections in Haiti were fraudulent, contrary to the conclusions reached by election observers from CARICOM and the Organization of American States. Only eight out of 7000 total positions decided in this election were contested. Yet the Canadian media, as well as Canadian officials, parroted the accusations of fraudulence made by the Democratic Convergence even after Aristide ordered the eight government officials to resign.

The Canadian Corporate/State Nexus In Haiti by Anthony Fenton

http://canadahaitiaction.ca/

New Orleans: Kick'em When They're Down

2005-12-13T14:40:00.000-08:00

By Jordan Barab, Reprinted From Confined Space
It never ceases to amaze me how, whenever a crisis hits, Republicans instinctively go after the very workers that society depends on to pull them out: public employees. It happened after 9/11 and now it's happening again in New Orleans.
Gulf Coast Watch blog reports that SEIU Local 21 led a successful charge against Louisiana Senate Bill 5which would have
allowed parishes and municipalities to slash wages for teachers, water and sanitation workers, social workers, and other public employees for up to six months AFTER a declared state of emergency was terminatedRepublican Senator Tom Schelder withdrew the bill after the legislature was hit by flood of emails and phone calls by a very nice coalition that came together to oppose the bill:
Opposition to this bill was supported by the Black Chamber of Commerce, the Northern and Central Louisiana Interfaith Network, and members of newly formed NOAH (New Opportunities for Action and Hope), founded by community and labor organizations in Louisiana in order to ensure that as LA rebuilds
via labor blog

absolut corruption

2005-12-10T10:06:00.000-08:00

Union Busting NYU style

2005-12-09T10:28:00.000-08:00

In 2000 there was a landmark ruling at the National Labour Relations Board, which granted the right to graduate students to form unions at private universities. In 2004 the NLRB reversed its ruling, now making it illegal to form unions at private universities, stating that:

"Graduate-student assistants, including those at Brown, are primarily students and have a primarily educational, not economic, relationship with their university," the majority wrote. They further found that since the money received by teaching assistants is the same as that received by students on fellowships, it is not "consideration for work" but financial aid.

Because of this ruling, in 2005 when it came time for NYU students to negotiate a new contract, the administration refused to recognize their union, GSOC. This is why graduate students at NYU have been on strike since November 9th.

"The strike is the culmination of tensions that began this summer when NYU announced it would no longer recognize the Graduate Student Organizing Committee, the local affiliate of the United Auto Workers that represents NYU graduate assistants."

Around November 28th, NYU President John Sexton sent out a letter to all striking teaching assistants threatening them with financial repurcussions and blacklisting, should they not return to work by December 5th, which was then extended to December 7th.

Gordon Lafer notes that the threatening sanctions and scare tactics against the teaching assistants and faculty at the university have not been seen since the McCarthy era:

"According to Sexton, teachers who continue striking will be banned from teaching in the spring and will be denied their full salary for that term. Such punitive threats are patently illegal under federal law; while it is permissible to dock the pay of people while they are on strike, it is illegal to ban them from future work as punishment for past strikes.

Sexton further demanded that anyone who takes a teaching job in the spring pledge - as a condition of employment - not to participate in job actions. This type of "yellow dog" contract has been illegal since 1932, when it was banned in legislation authored by New York's own Fiorello LaGuardia, when he was a member of Congress.

Finally, Sexton suggests that those who participate in strike actions but, God forbid, graduate before they can be punished, may have negative assessments attached to their university record when they apply for jobs at other schools. This type of blacklisting has not been seen since the dark days of McCarthyism."

If you believe that graduate students should have the right to form unions, and they possess a dual role in the university as both students and workers, please send a letter to NYU President John Sexton (john.sexton@nyu.edu) or sign the online petition, which now has over 6000 signatures on it:
http://new.petitiononline.com/tosexton/petition.html

To keep up to date on the strike:

http://www.2110uaw.org/

-posted by Dr. Snake Roberts.

Remembrance.

2005-12-09T06:44:00.000-08:00

"Everyone knows what happened in the Soviet Union and throughout Eastern Europe during the post-war period: the systematic brutality, the widespread atrocities, the ruthless suppression of independent thought. All this has been fully documented and verified.
But my contention here is that the US crimes in the same period have only been superficially recorded, let alone documented, let alone acknowledged, let alone recognised as crimes at all. I believe this must be addressed and that the truth has considerable bearing on where the world stands now. Although constrained, to a certain extent, by the existence of the Soviet Union, the United States' actions throughout the world made it clear that it had concluded it had carte blanche to do what it liked.
Direct invasion of a sovereign state has never in fact been America's favoured method. In the main, it has preferred what it has described as 'low intensity conflict'. Low intensity conflict means that thousands of people die but slower than if you dropped a bomb on them in one fell swoop. It means that you infect the heart of the country, that you establish a malignant growth and watch the gangrene bloom. When the populace has been subdued - or beaten to death - the same thing - and your own friends, the military and the great corporations, sit comfortably in power, you go before the camera and say that democracy has prevailed. This was a commonplace in US foreign policy in the years to which I refer...

...The United States supported and in many cases engendered every right wing military dictatorship in the world after the end of the Second World War. I refer to Indonesia, Greece, Uruguay, Brazil, Paraguay, Haiti, Turkey, the Philippines, Guatemala, El Salvador, and, of course, Chile. The horror the United States inflicted upon Chile in 1973 can never be purged and can never be forgiven.
Hundreds of thousands of deaths took place throughout these countries. Did they take place? And are they in all cases attributable to US foreign policy? The answer is yes they did take place and they are attributable to American foreign policy. But you wouldn't know it.
It never happened. Nothing ever happened. Even while it was happening it wasn't happening. It didn't matter. It was of no interest. The crimes of the United States have been systematic, constant, vicious, remorseless, but very few people have actually talked about them. You have to hand it to America. It has exercised a quite clinical manipulation of power worldwide while masquerading as a force for universal good. It's a brilliant, even witty, highly successful act of hypnosis."
-from Harold Pinter's Nobel acceptance speech.
video of the speech here.

stalinismus ist tot

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

Monument.

2005-12-08T00:14:00.000-08:00

The problem of violence and the radical opposition.

2005-12-07T19:29:00.000-08:00

"Let me speak for just a few minutes about the prospects of the opposition. I never said that the student opposition today is by itself a revolutionary force, nor have I ever seen in the hippies the "heir of the proletariat"! Only the national liberation fronts of the developing countries are today in a revolutionary struggle. But even they do not by themselves constitute an effective revolutionary threat to the system of advanced capitalism. All forces of opposition today are working at preparation and only at preparation--but toward necessary preparation for a possible crisis of the system. And precisely the national liberation fronts and the ghetto rebellion contribute to this crisis, not only as military but also as political and moral opponents--the living, human negation of the system. For the preparation and eventuality of such a crisis perhaps the working class, too, can be politically radicalized. But we must not conceal from ourselves that in this situation the question whether such radicalization will be to the left or the right is an open one. The acute danger of fascism or neo-fascism has not at all been overcome.

I have spoken of a possible crisis, of the eventuality of a crisis of the system. The forces that contribute to such a crisis would have to be discussed in great detail. I believe that we must see this crisis as the confluence of very disparate subjective and objective tendencies of an economic, political, and moral nature, in the East as well as the West. These forces are not yet organized on a basis of solidarity. They have no mass basis in the developed countries of advanced capitalism. Even the ghettos in the United States are in the initial stage of attempted politicization. And under these conditions it seems to me that the task of the opposition is first the liberation of consciousness outside of our own social group. For in fact the life of everyone is at stake, and today everyone is part of what Veblen called the "underlying population," namely the dominated. They must become conscious of the horrible policy of a system whose power and pressure grow with the threat of total annihilation. They must learn that the available productive forces are used for the reproduction of exploitation and oppression and that the so-called free world equips itself with military and police dictatorships in order to protect its surplus."
-from Herbert Marcuse "The problem of violence and the radical opposition" (1967)

Canada's Prince of Darkness, Michael Ignatieff

2005-12-05T21:05:00.000-08:00

Or Thomas Friedman in Striped Trousers, Silk Stockings and Garters

By John Chuckman

Asian Tibune 2005-12-03

If Michael Ignatieff is anything, it's connected, and I do not mean just tothe relatively small establishment of Canada, I mean connected to theshadowy godfathers of World Empire. Ignatieff has a rich career in Americawhere truly loyal service, whether by natural or adopted sons, is alwayshandsomely rewarded.

Another Canadian, David Frum, made it all the way to the White House withhis custom-tailored scribbling. So too such a genuinely dangerous Americanas Pat Buchanan. How does a man like Thomas Friedman pick up prizes writingadvertising copy for the Pentagon? As I said, loyalty is handsomely rewarded.

David Frum and Pat Buchanan both fell from grace, but there is little dangerof Ignatieff's doing so. He almost perceptibly pants and gasps when heapplies words to the imperial splendor of which he stands in awe....

BUT THE GREATEST GEM OF THEM ALL

"His paternal grandfather, Count Paul Ignatieff, was minister of educationfor Czar Nicholas II of Russia. Following the Russian Revolution, the familymoved to Canada, where Ignatieff's father, George, became a leading diplomatduring Cold War era. Ignatieff's maternal great-grandfather, George MunroGrant, was a well-known Canadian advocate of British imperialism in the late19th century, and an uncle, George Parkin Grant, was a conservative political philosopher."

corporate crime quiz

2005-12-04T12:58:00.000-08:00

CORPORATE CRIME REPORTER

Corporate Crime Quiz
19 Corporate Crime Reporter 48(1), December 2, 2005

Okay kids, ready for your end of the year corporate crime quiz?

Consider it real life jeopardy.

Passing grade 18 out of 25.

Ready? (Answers below – no cheating!)

1. Starts with an A, ends with two fs. The king of lobbyists. Hand caught in cookie jar doesn’t do it justice.

2. Means postpone. Accused of shuffling corporate money in and out of Texas.

3. Lord of Crossharbour. Accused king of corporate kleptocracy.

4. Two former Justice Department officials who wrote memos on how to prosecute corporations.

5. Senator from HCA.

6. Teaches a class at Columbia Law School titled “The Black Letter Law of White Collar Crime.”

7. Former Supreme Court Chief Justice and lead Nuremberg prosecutor who said – war of aggression is the supreme international crime.

8. Corporation forced into deferred prosecution, required to fund a chair of business ethics at Seton Hall Law School – the school where the prosecuting attorney graduated from.

9. Special prosecutor investigating bribery and fraud in Iraq.

10. Company that was required to create 1,600 jobs in Oklahoma as a condition of deferred prosecution

agreement.

11. After pleading guilty to taking bribes said this: “In my life, I have known great joy and great sorrow. And now I know great shame.”

12. Pled guilty this year. Worked for Tom DeLay. Expressed his philosophy on how to deal with opposition this way: "This whole thing about not kicking someone when they're down – you kick him until he passes out, then beat him over the head with a baseball bat, then roll him up in an old rug and throw him off a cliff and pound the surf below.”

13. U.S. Attorney who prosecuted the HealthSouth cases, and accused chief judge of her district of being “intellectually dishonest” for sentencing one of the lead executives to seven days in jail.

14. Alabama company convicted of massive pollution crimes.

15. Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals throws out his 24 year prison sentence of this Dynegy trader.

16. Scooter Libby’s lawyer. He said this about prosecuting corporations: “Ten years ago, it was – save the individuals and plead the corporation. Now, things have radically changed and it’s totally reversed.”

17. Most famous quote: “If your sources are wrong, you are going to be wrong.”

18. Number of 30 major corporations that make up Dow Jones Industrial Index that have been convicted of crimes.
19. When asked whether she tried to redecorate her prison cell, she told NPR’s Terry Gross.: “There are no materials to work with in a place like Alderson.”

20. High profile corporate crime prosecutor whose nickname in college was “Ironbutt” for his ability to sit motionless in a study carrel for hours.

21. Under this federal law, you can sue on behalf of the federal government against a corporation that has ripped off the government. If the government recovers the money – you get a percentage – up to 30 percent of the recovery.

22. Then U.S. Attorney in Manhattan David Kelley wanted to prosecute this firm for a massive criminal tax fraud, but was reportedly overruled by James Comey at Main Justice. Firm got a sweetheart deferred prosecution agreement.

23. Company and seven of its current or former executives indicted earlier this year on federal charges that they knowingly put their workers and the public in danger through exposure to vermiculite ore contaminated with asbestos from the company's mine in Libby, Montana.

24. Unit of this Swiss based pharma giant pled guilty in February to obstructing a federal audit.

25. He said this on November 29, 2005: “Any member of Congress, Republican or Democrat, must take their office seriously and the ethics seriously. The idea of a congressman taking money is outrageous. And Congressman Cunningham is going to realize that he has broken the law and is going to pay a serious price, which he should.”

Answers:

1. Jack Abramoff

2. Tom DeLay

3. Conrad Black

4. Eric Holder, Larry Thompson

5. Bill Frist

6. John Coffee

7. Robert Jackson

8. Bristol Myers Squibb

9. Stuart Bowen

10. MCI/WorldCom

11. Congressman Randall “Duke” Cunningham

12. Michael Scanlon

13. Alice Martin

14. McWane

15. Jamie Olis

16. Ted Wells

17. Judith Miller

18. Nine – 3M, Alcoa, Boeing, Exxon, General Electric, General Motors, Merck, Pfizer, and United Technologies

19. Martha Stewart

20. Eliot Spitzer

21. False Claims Act

22. KPMG

23. W.R. Grace

24. Novartis

25. President George Bush

Haiti is 'fixed'

2005-12-03T12:46:00.000-08:00

Haiti is 'fixed'

by Kevin Skerrett

http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=55&ItemID=9238

Recent Canadian policy in Haiti has been remarkably successful, having achieved most of its objectives. This is the case in much the same way that US policies in places such as El Salvador and Nicaragua in the 1980s were smashing successes – quite literally.

At first glance, such an assertion would appear terribly wrong. Any serious reading of the existing situation in Haiti (available almost exclusively outside the mainstream media, within explicitly left-wing vehicles such as New Socialist) indicates that when Canada, the US and France initiated the February 29 2004 coup d’état that ousted the elected government of Haiti and installed an unelected puppet regime, they unleashed a terrifying wave of repression against the desperately poor majority of the country (see NS issues #46,49, & 52 and extensive coverage of the coup on Znet). Along with uncounted thousands killed, independent human rights groups report that over 700 political prisoners have been jailed without charge, mainly leaders and supporters of (deposed) President Jean-Bertrand Aristide’s Lavalas party. The Canadian-trained Haitian National Police have been repeatedly seen shooting unarmed demonstrators, and – most recently – collaborating with machete-wielding gangs engaged in a terror campaign targeting all those calling for a return of the constitutional government that most Haitians elected.

However, to conclude that such outcomes signify a policy failure assumes that Canada’s agenda was actually the establishment of a peaceful, human rights respecting democracy in Haiti. In fact, the recent episode in Haiti offers us rich evidence for the view that Canada’s actual foreign policy agenda is to work in tandem with the US and a few other key military allies in entrenching and stabilizing a world economic system where safe investment outlets, cheap labour production zones and unfettered access to natural resources and export markets are not only established but locked-in by trade agreements which trump national constitutions.

In what follows, I advance this argument by examining three central objectives of Canada’s Haiti policy. In concluding that these objectives were met, I then offer a brief reflection on what lessons this “success” might hold for those of us aiming to challenge and subvert this unconscionable agenda.

Objective 1: Further debase the established concept of national sovereignty

Having joined the coup brigade in Haiti, Canada needed a rationale to explain why such a patently undemocratic assault on a poor country was in fact quite legitimate. This rationale would need to be able to overcome the established attachment to the concept of national sovereignty and make it revocable, under certain circumstances (to be defined by the powerful). As eventually articulated in the May 2005 International Policy Statement, and in various speeches to the UN, Canada has used its Haiti intervention (along with the bombing and occupation of Afghanistan) as positive illustrations of the doctrine now known as “Responsibility to Protect” (R2P). For some, this concept is merely an update of the racist “white man’s burden” – the notion that wealthy, militarily powerful countries have an obligation to “protect” the populations of poorer countries unable to protect (or govern) themselves.

Canada’s Haiti policy also shows us how deeply-set racist perceptions of other (non-white) countries can be effectively mobilized to advance this concept. The established view of Haiti’s (formerly enslaved, extremely poor, African) population – as “incapable of self-government” – was renewed and refreshed. When Ottawa Citizen columnist David Warren lamented on the eve of the coup that Haiti had failed to create “a people who are susceptible to self-government,” it elicited no particular notice. His racism was echoed more recently by Liberal MP Beth Phinney, who asked during a June 14 Foreign Affairs committee hearing: “How can you change the will of the people [of Haiti] to want to be able to govern themselves?” Such repugnant views require total ignorance of Haitian history, during which the population liberated itself from slavery, occupation and dictatorship, and then managed to democratically elect a president (three times!) that the US government overtly opposed. If the people of Haiti have proven one thing in their tragic history, it is their burning desire – and their capacity – to “govern themselves.”

But of course, this is the threat that the coup in Haiti ended, and that the R2P doctrine is designed to counter. And, with the concept now “field-tested,” it is ready to serve usefully in the future should the need to violate another country’s sovereignty (or support the violations carried out by an “ally”) arise again.

Objective 2: Disguise Imperial Domination as “Development”

Unfortunately, fond recollections of some of the original redistributive ideals attached to international development programs have blinded some progressives to the true function of “development” and development agencies within the current international system. As a result, we have the social democratic NDP and many well-intentioned progressives following the lead of Bono, Bob Geldof, and the recent “Live 8” showbiz against world poverty concerts calling more or less blindly for “more aid.” Progressive critics of the Liberals point to their failure to reach the hallowed development aid target of 0.7% of GDP – and often just stop there.

Canada’s relationship with Haiti is a stark indicator of the simplicity of these calls. When the Canadian government hosted a secret meeting in early 2003 in order to (it was later revealed in L’Actualité magazine) plot the overthrow of Haiti’s elected government, they invited representatives of the US and France, and brought along senior staff from Canada’s international development agency – CIDA. A careful examination of CIDA’s recent programming in Haiti reveals that in politically sensitive areas (human rights, women’s rights, media, etc.), the Haitian NGOs and agencies that CIDA was funding were without exception active players within the elite minority political opposition to Haiti’s government.

While CIDA continued to boast publicly that it was providing substantial assistance to Haiti, the reality was that in the several years leading up to the coup, it was quietly supporting the US-led embargo on aid to the highly dependent Haitian government, in an effort to destabilize it through financial strangulation. A look at recent international aid flows to Haiti – coming primarily from Canada, the US and France – clarifies the severity of this murderous embargo.

External aid to Haiti
in $US millions 1994-2002
1994-95: 611
1995-96: 427
1996-97: 378
1997-98: 371
1998-99: 330
1999-2000: 266
2000-01: 170
2001-02: 136

Source: World Bank, International Cooperation Framework (ICF), July 2004

With the election of George W. Bush in the US in 2000, US aid to Haiti’s government actually stopped altogether, leaving the nearly bankrupt Haitian government defenceless and incapacitated. It is telling that the thousands of Haitians who surely died or suffered badly as a result of these “aid sanctions” have never even been counted – “unworthy victims” of an aid policy turned policy sledgehammer.

What must be realized is that this result was intentional. It was the design and intended consequence of a program in which CIDA and its American equivalent USAID participated directly. The question of why this destabilization was carried out continues to be debated, but many have argued persuasively that while President Aristide accepted some of the dictates of Canadian and American neoliberal conditionality, he also resisted some, such as the demand for wholesale privatization of state enterprises. (On this, it is worth recalling that in a recent interview with journalist Naomi Klein, Aristide summarized the reason for his overthrow in three words: “Privatization, privatization, privatization.”)

Of course, none of this has ever been reported in any detail in the Canadian media, and in fact, Prime Minister Martin was able to point to Haiti as his main foreign policy “success story” during the June 2004 federal leadership debates (to no response from NDP leader Jack Layton or anyone else for that matter). In this sense, the con – disguising an utterly cynical and self-interested imperial game as a humanitarian intervention led by CIDA – has worked quite well. It has shown that “international aid” can do more than just feed and dig wells: it can provoke (and legitimize) regime change.

Objective 3: Establish Canada’s reputation as trusted election monitor

Following the coup, it was recognized that the installed puppet government would not enjoy the full legitimacy that would be required to truly move Haiti onto the “correct” neoliberal path. What was therefore required was what Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman have referred to as a “demonstration” election – a tightly constrained and controlled voting exercise that projects the imagery of liberal-democratic institutions, but whose actual function is to legitimize the “elected” government. A key function within such elections is the “observation/monitoring” process, which Chomsky and Herman describe in Manufacturing Consent as follows:

“Official observers are dispatched to the election scene to assure its public-relations success. Nominally, their role is to see that the election is ‘fair.’ Their real function, however, is to provide the appearance of fairness by focusing on the government’s agenda and by channeling press attention to a reliable source. They testify to fairness on the basis of long lines, smiling faces, no beatings in their presence, and the assurances and enthusiasm of U.S. and client-state officials.”

Such elections were recently organized in both occupied Afghanistan (October, 2004) and occupied Iraq (January, 2005). What is interesting to recall is that in Iraq, Canada’s Chief Electoral Officer, Jean-Pierre Kingsley (head of Elections Canada) played a leading role in precisely this process. Barely six weeks prior to the January 30, 2005 vote, Kingsley was called upon to form an expert “assessment mission” to evaluate the quality of the planned election. To no one’s surprise, this mission dutifully issued the needed blessing on the day of the election itself (surely drafted in advance, and released prior to any possible detailed reporting as to the vote’s fairness). Remarkably, the definitive conclusion brought forward was widely cited in the pro-war corporate media, despite having been reached by an “assessment” team physically located in Jordan!

When a similar blessing was needed for a post-coup occupation election in Haiti in late 2005, the relevant powers turned once again (in June 2005) to Jean-Pierre Kingsley to head up an almost identical group of “election experts,” this time not even offering to “assess” (as in Iraq) but merely to “monitor.” Kingsley was an especially good choice for advancing the Canadian and American agendas in Haiti. He is a Board member of a “pro-democracy” NGO called the International Foundation of Election Systems (IFES), which has been very active in Haiti in recent years. In fact, as a detailed report from the University of Miami Law School has shown, IFES was centrally involved in the organization of Haiti’s small, elite-led political opposition, and was an active supporter of the forces that brought about the coup. (It is hardly surprising to find that IFES receives funding from such renowned democracy-lovers as Exxon-Mobil, Citibank and Motorola).

In order to reach the foregone conclusion that a “free and fair” election was held in Haiti that “meets recognized standards,” it will be necessary that the assessment team minimize or ignore the significance of certain key aspects of Haiti’s political climate, such as: hundreds of political prisoners including prominent leaders of one party in particular (Lavalas); state terror exercised through police squads who target victims on a political, as well as class/race basis; the arrest or even police execution (Abdias Jean) of journalists willing to report on police atrocities; politically selective exclusions of vast sectors of the electorate through insufficient registration and polling station access; the judicial exoneration and release of convicted paramilitary killers such as Louis-Jodel Chamblain; reasonable and legitimate boycotts of both registration and voting by parties who are targets of state terror, etc.

We should anticipate that yet another sham occupation election will be carried out, buttressed by the foregone conclusions of the Kingsley/Elections Canada led monitoring mission, and Haiti will be placed neatly in the Afghanistan/Iraq category – embarking on a “bold new era of democratic life.” Paul Martin and the Government of Canada will take much credit for having “democratized” the unruly masses of Haiti – and a new pro-US, pro-Canadian government will be installed, ready to embrace the economic policy agenda designed for it in Washington and Ottawa. The profits available to Canadian companies engaged in Haiti’s “reconstruction,” or taking advantage of its re-disciplined labour market, are already flowing, with more to come.

Lessons for the Left in Canada

One of the obvious lessons from the foregoing is simple: “Don’t believe the hype.” But the fact is that far too many “progressives,” including some involved in the anti-war movement and within otherwise quite progressive NGOs, have swallowed the government and the corporate media messaging about Haiti. In part, this is because certain trusted groups – such as CIDA-funded NGOs like Development and Peace, Rights and Democracy and Alternatives – supported the coup. Trust in such groups needs to be reassessed.

Further, much more work is needed to undermine and expose the carefully constructed and maintained mythology of Canada as peacekeeper and democracy-builder. If anything, our Haiti policy illustrates that neoliberal and neo-colonial rot has infected and transformed even some of the government programs and NGOs about which we may have thought better. In some cases, they now serve as key cogs in the machinery of Canadian imperialism, no less vital than Foreign Affairs and its corporate partners.

UN troops continue to murder Haitians

2005-12-02T11:07:00.000-08:00

Urgent Action Alert: The Haiti Action Committee has received eyewitness reports over the past four days from Cite Soleil that UN troops have launched a new round of attacks on the residents there, killing at least three civilians and gravely wounding others. According to the preliminary reports:

On Wednesday, November 23rd, UN troops killed one man who was a maker of kitchen utensils when they fired into his shop near his home; 5 reported wounded.

Over the weekend, UN troops\x98led by Jordanian soldiers\x98killed two more Cite Soleil residents, husband and wife, and wounded 8 people. More people could have been killed and wounded\x98further investigation is required.

Residents in Cite Soleil are once again trapped and under siege. This could be a massacre that is in the making as we send out this alert. Unfortunately, the UN troops have already demonstrated on July 6th, 2005, and again on other occasions that they will shoot and kill men, women and children in their homes, in their beds, and as they go about their daily chores. Now is the time to act -- to let them know the world is watching and demands an end to the killings!

Contact the following officials and demand that they intervene to stop the siege on the residents of Cite Soleil:

* Craig G. Mokhiber

Deputy Director, NY Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights

Ph: 917-367-5208 mokhiber@un.org

* Juan Gabriel Valdes

Special Representative of the UN Secretary-General to Haiti

Phone: 011-509-244-9650 or 9660 Fax 011-509 244 3512

* Thierry Fagart

Human Rights Chief, UN Mission in Haiti

Ph: 011-509-510-3183 or 3185 - ext. 6360 fagart@un.org

* US Embassy in Haiti Telephones: 011-509-223-4711...222-0200 or 0354...Fax: 011-509-223-1641 or 9038 Email to Dana Banks, Human Rights Officer: BanksD@state.gov

OVER THE WEEKEND OR AT NIGHT -- Call 011-509-222-0200 and press "0" for emergency.

***Be sure to contact your local media, and ask that they cover these atrocities.

Please check www.haitiaction.net for updates on what is happening

(via Le Colonel Chabert)

The free press and imperialism.

2005-12-01T12:38:00.000-08:00

"U.S. Army officers have been secretly paying Iraqi journalists to produce upbeat newspaper, radio and television reports about American military operations and the conduct of the war in Iraq."

"The military's effort to disseminate propaganda in the Iraqi media is taking place even as U.S. officials are pledging to promote democratic principles, political transparency and freedom of speech in a country emerging from decades of dictatorship and corruption. It comes as the State Department is training Iraqi reporters in basic journalism skills and Western media ethics, including one workshop titled "The Role of Press in a Democratic Society." Standards vary widely at Iraqi newspapers, many of which are shoestring operations"

The banal but horrifying truth, that this imperialist adventure would engage in deceit and lies, that it would seek to pacify an occupied country through the media (as useful an unconventional weapon as white phosphorus) of course must be framed in the ‘free’ press as some sort of contradiction: the press in Iraq is being ‘perverted’ by the military. Cue outrage.

Of course, there is every reason to be outraged by this, to be angered by this vicous bamboozle, to print it on pages, on screens, to talk about of how fucking despicable our institutions of occupation are. But what does this narrative about these press articles, this story about a story, tell us as consumers of the ‘free’ press, consumers safely inside the borderlands of empire? That we are outiside of the information being shaped by imperialist interest? What agendas are met by reporting this as some sort of perversion, of pretending this present order is just a momentary corruption of a just system as it overextends itself?

“Freedom of the press” is another of the principal slogans of “pure democracy”. And here, too, the workers know — and Socialists everywhere have explained millions of times —that this freedom is a deception because the best printing presses and the biggest stocks of paper are appropriated by the capitalists, and while capitalist rule over the press remains—a rule that is manifested throughout the whole world all the more strikingly, sharply and cynically—the more democracy and the republican system are developed, as in America for example. The first thing to do to win really equality and genuine democracy for the working people, for the workers and peasants, is to deprive capital of the possibility of hiring writers, buying publishing houses and bribing newspapers. And to do that the capitalists and exploiters have to be overthrown and their resistance oppressed. The capitalists have always use the term “freedom” to mean freedom for the rich to get richer and for the workers to starve to death. And capitalist usage, freedom of the press means freedom of the rich to bribe the press, freedom to use their wealth to shape and fabricate so-called public opinion. In this respect, too, the defenders of “pure democracy” prove to be defenders of an utterly foul and venal system that gives the rich control over the mass media. They prove to be deceivers of the people, who, with the aid of plausible, fine-sounding, but thoroughly false phrases, divert them from the concrete historical task of liberating the press from capitalist enslavement."

Meanwhile:

Canadian journalists 'train' Haitians in the midst of massacres they don't report.

Fifteen years after the Oka Crisis, Canadian colonialism continues in Kanesetake.

Defenders of a free press and war criminals:

(cross-posted at LazyLafargue)

Tempest in a Test Tube

2005-11-29T19:00:00.000-08:00

By W.Ż.
23 November 2005
The Warsaw Voice News: http://www.warsawvoice.pl/view/9911

The first week of the new government's work brought the first ideological debate concerning in vitro fertilization.

In an interview for the ultra-Catholic Radio Maryja, Prime Minister Kazimierz Marcinkiewicz said Nov. 16 he would guard the current law on the protection of life. He also made it understood that his government would disallow "experiments connected with in vitro fertilization."

Marcinkiewicz announced that a special advisor for the protection of life would be appointed in his office. He assured listeners he did not fear directives and resolutions from Brussels demanding a milder anti-abortion policy. "I am not afraid of confrontation," Marcinkiewicz said. "I am sure, at least for now, that the European Union will not introduce any directives forcing us to change our stance (...). I am also convinced we can play a certain role in the EU, consolidating those communities in different countries which stand up for life. So far, Poland has been almost mute in this department." Marcinkiewicz also told Radio Maryja that he hoped the newly appointed advisor would be able to take part in Poland's dialogue with EU partners.

"We will not, even to the slightest extent, promote contraceptives, because this is not what the state is for," Marcinkiewicz emphasized, saying that the government was taking other pro-family actions, including a bonus of zl.800 to 1,000 for the birth of a child, extension of maternity leaves by two to four weeks and a housing program. Two days earlier, Roman Giertych, chair of the League of Polish Families (LPR) caucus, addressed Marcinkiewicz requesting the government's official position on the admissibility of methods of artificial insemination. The request was a result of a statement by Joanna Kluzik-Rostkowska, a candidate for deputy minister of labor and social policy responsible for family affairs, expressing her support for the use of artificial insemination methods. Kluzik-Rostkowska later explained she did not speak on behalf of the government, since at the time she did not expect to become a member. She worked as Warsaw Mayor Lech Kaczyński's (today president-elect of Poland) commissioner for family and women.

"I will not motion for extracorporeal in vitro fertilization to be refunded," Prof. Zbigniew Religa, a famous heart surgeon and the new minister of health in Marcinkiewicz's government, said Nov. 17. He emphasized that if he were to choose between paying for the resuscitation of a young person and an in vitro procedure, he would opt for saving someone's life. "The system has too little money," Religa said. "There is not enough for everything and so there will be limitations." He presented the guidelines of his program of recovery for the healthcare system and remarked that contraceptives would not be refunded by the state budget either, because, he said, "sex is not a disease" and adults should make responsible decisions on birth control.

Some leftist groupings and women's organizations have for a long time attempted to get contraceptives on the list of refunded medicines. That never happened, however, not even during the past four years of the left-wing government.

Eagle Eyes Program

2005-11-28T18:17:00.000-08:00

The Eagle Eyes program is an anti-terrorism initiative that enlists the eyes and ears of Air Force members and citizens in the war on terror.

It starts with teaching people about the typical activities terrorists engage in to plan their attacks. Armed with this information, anyone can recognize elements of potential terror planning when they see it.

Next, the program provides a network of local, 24-hour phone numbers to call whenever a suspicious activity is observed.

You and your family are encouraged to learn the categories of suspicious behavior and stay attuned to your surroundings. If you observe something suspicious, send your input using the "Crimebusters" link on this site, or alert local authorities.

"... National Socialism has done away with the essential features which characterize the modern state. It tends to abolish any separation between state and society by transferring the political functions to the social groups actually in power. In other words, National Socialism tends toward direct and immediate selfgovernment by the prevailing social groups over the rest of the population. And it manipulates the masses by unleashing the most brutal and selfish instincts of the individual." -- Herbert Marcuse, "State and Individual Under National Socialism"

Antonio Gramsci on Sesame Street

2005-11-28T09:53:00.000-08:00

Antonio Gramsci on Sesame Street

by Paul Street

The hegemonic ideology of the ruling class, Antonio Gramsci once observed, becomes all too much like the "air we breathe." It comes to define the "common sense"of ordinary daily consciouness and experience, with tragic consequences all around.
Here is a small and childish example.

Flipping through the television clicker one morning, I recently I happened upon "Sesame Street" (SS), the venerable educational PBS series for pre- and early grade-school children.
The morning's lesson was on the just and inviolable nature of socioeconomic inequity and the sanctity of private property and possessive individualism.

At the point I clicked on the program, two very concerned and mature adults --- a black man and a black woman, both in their 40s it appeared --- were listening with raised eyebrows to a blue puppet animal ("Cookie Monster" perhaps) who had just designated himself "Cookie-Hood." "Cookie-Hood" was a play on Robin Hood.

"Cookie Hood" had just come to the alarming (for him) realization that "some people have lots more cookies than they need" while "other people have no cookies at all."

That's a prescient observation in the industrialized world's most unequal and wealth-top-heavy society, where the top 1 percent owns at least 40 percent of total wealth and more than 1 million black children are growing up at less than half the federal government's notoriously low and inadequate poverty level.

The solution, "Cookie-Hood" announced, is to take the surplus cookies away from the wealthy few and give them away to the poor, cookie-less many. Imagine!
"Hooray!" the other puppet animals shouted.

The two adults were not pleased. "That," the father figure sternly intoned, "is stealing." And "stealing is wrong," he elaborated, "because it means taking something that doesn't belong to you."

No room, of course, in the SS script for why the cookie-less exist in the first place: because of societal dispossession, repression, and, well, theft. No room for moral outrage at the fact that masses of cookie-less are born into a world they never made where billions go hungry and ill-housed while a wealthy minority lives surrounded by extravegant opulence. No sense of justice in the demand of equal cookies for all.

"Cookie-Hood" felt sad and ashamed. He thought he'd been doing something good and just, but really he'd been doing something wrong.

He'd been stealing cookies that didn't belong to him! Bad cookie puppet!!
The other puppet animals were confused.

What to do now? And what about the cookie-less?

Not to worry! Semase Street's wise and benevolent adults had a solution.
The solution is....currency. Puppets and people don't have to steal cookies from the rich because, the father figure explained, "we can all go to the store and buy cookies." Yes, all of can us get as many cookies as we want with a magical medium called.....drumroll...ta-da....MONEY.
Because everybody's got money, right?

Money is equality.

Who needs Robin Hoods when we've all got that great universal leveller and destoyer of hiearchy and inequality called money.

Three cheers for money! Hooray for the means of exchange!
"Cookie-Hood" (Cookie-Monster?) was happy because he remembered that he just gotten his allowance. He held up a little bag of coins and shouted, "Hooray, let's go the store and buy cookies."

He wasn't worried anymore about whether other people have enough cookies. Now he just cared about getting his own. He knew that other people get money (allowances) too.
Before going to the store, however, Cookie-Hood had to take back the surplus cookies he'd stolen from the privileged few.

I was left to wonder how long it will take Cookie-Hood to figure out that some few people's allowances are 500 and more times bigger than other peoples' allowances.
Here's my idea for a future SS episode: "Cookie Hood changes his name to 'Money Hood' and Robs a Bank." The adults can send "Money Hood" back to the bank with his ill-gotten green, explaining to him that people don't have to steal money....they just have to get jobs.
Everyone knows that jobs pay a lot of money to everyone who wants to work, right?
Hooray for jobs. Get a job!

The next show after that can deal with the blue puppet animal's childish struggle against the authoritarian structure of the capitalist labor process.

Paul Street is a writer, speaker, activist, and historian. His books include Empire and Inequality: America and the World Since 9/11 (Paradigm Publishers, 2004); Segregated Schools: Educational Apartheid in the Post-Civil Rights Era (Routledge, 2005); and Still Separate, Unequal: Race, Place, and Policy in and Around Chicago (Chicago Urban League, 2005).

PIERRE SEEL, Last Living "Pink Triangle" in France, Dies

2005-11-27T23:32:00.000-08:00

Pierre Seel, the last known surviving French homosexual victim of the Nazi concentration camps, has died at the age of 82, it was announced in Paris yesterday. Anyone who has seen the remarkable documentary "Paragraph 175," by Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman -- about the Pink Triangles, the homosexual victims of Nazi repression -- will remember the unforgettable sequence in the film in which Pierre Seel ... recounted his arrest and torture for being gay -- this included his multiple rapes, and being sodomized with a wooden stake, which left his ass bleeding all his life long -- and how the Nazis fed his lover to be eaten by dogs before his eyes. [More...]

Blame it on black gangs... revisited

2005-11-27T09:37:00.000-08:00

Le Colonel Chabert writes about the media manufacture of "black gangs" and how it shortcircuits any critique of imperialism in Haiti:

Even for the latest explosion of violence in Kosovo, accomplishing the ethnic cleansing of the remaining dregs of non Albanian inhabitants, for which the western media wished to apologize gently, an account of the adversaries was required, identification of their motives and affiliations, a narrative, if mendacious and tendentious, recap of the history and events leading to this crisis....But for Haiti, of course, it would be impossible without flagrant and easily debunkable lies to tell the story without revealing the monstrous criminality of the US, France, Canada and its puppet dictatorship(s). But racism solves this problem; by the evocation of its whole elaborate framework, its myths, it literary clichés, and faux social science, the glaring lack of explanation, of indeed actual reporting in the traditional genre, is entirely concealed. A hot, banana-growing place inhabited by black people left to their own devices (having violently, arrogantly thrown off their custodians and tutors before they could be taught to control and govern themselves like Christians) is simply like this, poor, dirty, precarious, menaced by violent 'gangs' with no particular motive for their violence other than the unfettered expression of their nature - for this is what 'young black men' do when they don't make the NBA. This is how they behave on the shitpile their delusional Kings leave after embezzling all the money to dress up in feathers and dine with real royalty.

Lenin's Tomb notes the same logic at work in New Orleans:

Now, who would have believed that desperate residents of New Orleans were busily shooting at those who were trying to help them - unless their faces were black? As it happens, violent crime fell during the post-Katrina catastrophe. And that's quite predictable: it is what you would expect. In 2001, not including the mass murder on 9/11, New York's murder rate was the lowest since Kennedy was killed. In fact, just about every kind of crime was down (except for the crimes to self-respect inflicted by the retailers of kitsch and tat). I'm not saying all of it was down to post-9/11 solidarity, but one thing that does stand out is that the disaster did not result in Hobbesian war of all against all , or in the city being "raped". Yet, the stories that enabled the government to block aid from getting into the city, and prevent people from getting out as they prepared for their "little Somalia" were somehow widely enough believed that there was not mass protest about what was being done. I was widely remarked at the time that New Orleans seemed to have joined the Third World. Well, then, think of Haiti

Afterthepurge's very own Dr. Snake Roberts tackles the image of black gangs and rap music in Toronto and Paris:

Rap music does not “cause” violence, any more than it “causes” misogyny, and this scapegoating of rap music results in little being done to change the violence many women, white and black, face in their day to day lives. What does this focus in the media on “stranger violence”, specifically, the threat of a black man with a gun, hide?Half of Canadian women (51%) have been victims of at least one act of physical or sexual violence since the age of 16.Women are much more likely to be victimized by someone they know than by a stranger.

It's not an accident that these images of a violent, anonymous black underclass of people continue to be the favorite of ruling elites hiding the traces of their crimes from their citizens. This trope was produced in the age of imperialism, which it helps maintain. Anne McClintock notes, "the fetish image of the crowd as degenerate was a measure of very real ruling-class anxieties about popular resistance, as well as a crucial element in legitimizing the policing of militant working class communities." But does any other simultaneously racialized, classist and gendered image serve so well as border-guard from the critical curiosity of a state's citizenry? This racialized, overdetermined media image of the black gang itself, rather than any actually existing black people, stands as sentry and border alongside police forces.

cross-posted at Lazylafargue

Haiti support hits the streets

2005-11-26T11:51:00.000-08:00

Endorsed by an impressive list of groups, the demands of the HaitiSolidarity Demonstration week's actions were delivered on a large plaque tothe Prime Minister's office in Ottawa.

by Yves Engler

"Haiti for the Haitians - Canada, U.S. out!" and "Canada Sortez d'Haiti" were two of the chants 350 protesters took to the streets of the nation'scapital recently. The Haiti Solidarity Demonstration - Ottawa's largest inrecent memory - kicked off a Canada Haiti Action Network (CHAN) week of action.

The same day the streets were alive in Ottawa, 50 people rallied for a "die-in" outside RCMP Headquarters in Winnipeg. Blood-stained participantsfell to the ground with signs reading: "Victim of RCMP-trained deathsquads." Throughout the week, movie showings, talks and public leafletingsessions were organized in cities across the country. Fifty people held amini- march through downtown Toronto and CHAN's actions concluded with 40people taking to the streets of Halifax.

Full story...

One in four children in B.C. lives in poverty

2005-11-26T00:01:00.000-08:00

Globe and Mail Friday, November 25, 2005 Page A11

By Jonathan Woodward

Vancouver -- One in four British Columbia children are living in poverty --the highest of any province -- according to a report by an advocacy groupthat calls for governments across Canada to change the conditions of thecountry's poorest children.

The report, by anti-poverty group Campaign 2000, paints B.C. as the worstoffender in a country where the gap between rich and poor families isgrowing and where children of aboriginals and recent immigrants are hardesthit.

Moral panic(s) and rap music

2005-11-25T15:14:00.000-08:00

What's with the panic about rap music in Toronto and Paris?

In Toronto: Gun crime biggest fear

Poll: 87% say city is more violent compared to five years ago

Nicholas Kohler, National Post
Tuesday, October 25, 2005

TORONTO - Toronto residents are feeling "under siege" by gangs that draw their income from drug sales and their inspiration from urban rap music, says an Ipsos-Reid poll released yesterday.

Canadian MP calls for 50 Cent ban, Thursday, 24 November, 2005

Junior foreign minister Dan McTeague has called on officials to stop the performer (5o cent) from entering the country.

"This is not a question of censorship," he said. "This is a question of trying to protect impressionable young men."

Meanwhile, in France:

Rappers face rap for riots
23/11/2005 23:14 - (SA)

http://www.news24.com/News24/World/News/0,,2-10-1462_1839472,00.html

Paris - Seven French rap outfits could face legal action after a complaint lodged by about 200 parliamentarians on Wednesday, accusing them of helping to provoke the country's recent riots through their lyrics.

"Sexism, racism and anti-Semitism are no more acceptable in lyrics than in written or spoken words," said the deputy behind the initiative, Francois Grosdidier of the ruling centre-right UMP.

"This is one of the factors that led to the violence in the suburbs," he said, arguing that rap music "conditions" listeners into a violent frame of mind that could spur them on to action.

In a petition co-signed by 152 deputies and 49 senators, the deputy drew the attention of justice minister Pascal Clement to seven rap singers and bands whom he accused of inciting racism and hatred.

Stop giving hip hop a bad rap

Nov. 24, 2005. 07:39 AM

As Ben Rayner states:

“It seems rather self-evident, but gun violence was thriving in Toronto long before Get Rich or Die Tryin' opened in theatres and 50 Cent threatened to visit.

This is the way crusades like the one launched this week by Liberal MP Dan McTeague to prevent the platinum-plated gangsta rapper from entering Canada next month usually work, though. They don't bother putting in the time to seek out real-world solutions to the complex social and fiscal predicaments that lead to gun violence; they settle for Band-Aid grandstanding that gives the impression of "doing something" for communities largely thrust into these situations by generations of government neglect in the first place, and that wins headlines for a junior foreign minister with an eye on re-election.”

Not all violence is created equal…

Rap music does not “cause” violence, any more than it “causes” misogyny, and this scapegoating of rap music results in little being done to change the violence many women, white and black, face in their day to day lives. What does this focus in the media on “stranger violence”, specifically, the threat of a black man with a gun, hide?

Half of Canadian women (51%) have been victims of at least one act of physical or sexual violence since the age of 16.
Of all victims of crimes against the person in 2000, females made up the vast majority of victims of sexual assaults (86%), criminal harassment (78%) and kidnapping/hostage-taking or abduction (67%).
Of all female victims of violent crimes in 2000, 47% were victims of common assault, 9% of sexual assault, 9% of assault with a weapon causing bodily arm, 7% of robbery and 6% of criminal harassment.
Women are much more likely to be victimized by someone they know than by a stranger. In 2000, 77% of all female victims were victimized by someone they know (37% by a close friend or an acquaintance, 29% by a current or past partner, 11% by other family members - including parents) while 19% were victimized by a stranger. (link)

Intimate Femicide: An Analysis Of Men Who Kill Their Partners

By: Gregory P. Kerry M.A., Correctional Service of Canada & Carleton University

While there is a vast body of knowledge on violence against women, intimate femicide, the most severe form of violence, has received little attention. This is alarming since statistics show that when a woman is killed, the perpetrator is often a man who has been intimately involved with her (Campbell, l992; Crawford & Gartner, l992; Stout, l99l; Statistics Canada, l99l; l989; U.S. Department of Justice, l992).

To better understand intimate femicides, a binary model is proposed. Within this model, intimate femicide is understood as having two different origins: one involves the murder of an oppressed woman who attempted to emancipate herself and the other is an actual or attempted murder/suicide in which a socially inept and dependent man kills his liberated and independent partner. This model thus divides intimate murders into those who attempted or committed suicide immediately after killing their partner and those who did not.

Fighting Femicide

DENVER - Nearly 400 women have been murdered, and seventy more have disappeared, in a Mexican city that lies only miles from the

U.S.

border. In October 2003, the Bullhorn traveled to Ciudad Juarez to report on the femicides ravaging

Mexico

’s fourth-largest city ['Crosses of Despair,' October 16, 2003]. At the time, the motives behind the killings were a mystery, and Mexican authorities had not arrested any promising culprits.

More info:

http://slingshot.tao.ca/displaybi.php?0079002

http://www.socialism.com/fsarticles/vol26no2/radicalwomen.html

-posted by Dr. Snake Roberts.

Dark Armies, Secret Bases & Rummy, oh my!

2005-11-24T11:56:00.000-08:00

By Conn Hallinan

It would be easy to make fun of President Bush's recent fiasco at the 4thSummit of the Americas in Mar del Plata, Argentina. His grand plan for afree trade zone reaching from the Artic Circle to Terra del Fuego wassoundly rejected by nations fed up with the economic and social chaoswrought by neo-liberalism. At a press conference, South American journalistsasked him rude questions about Karl Rove. And the President ended the wholedebacle by uttering what may be the most trenchant observation the man hasever made on Latin America: 'Wow! Brazil is big!'

Click here to read more...

Imperialism in Haiti: It’s a gang problem.

2005-11-23T20:56:00.000-08:00

Hollywood Freedom:
“in most of the conventional media, Haiti is viewed through a sociological prism in which the country’s problems are boiled down to a neat cycle of poverty, gang violence, crime and more poverty. Through this prism, the undeniably political murders of Lavalas supporters and other poor Haitians are recast easily by slick public information officers for the HNP, the international cabal, and the UN into legitimate responses to a growing “crime/gang problem.”
This hoax allows the US, French, and Canadian footprints to fade from the canvas, and the UN troops seem less like occupiers and more like, well, peacekeepers. How can the situation in Haiti, in which the US, France and Canada spent millions of dollars to destabilize Aristide’s government and where the UN has marshaled as many as 300-400 troops at a time to commit deadly raids, be characterized simply as a police action to counter “criminal elements” in poor neighborhoods? The answer is that it can’t, because this scenario is a propaganda fabrication.”
From “Haiti, Imperialism, and the Treachery of Liberals” by Shirley Pate http://www.haitiprogres.com/2005/sm051019/eng10-19.html

Previously seen on sanitized UN War Crimes:
“In the early morning hours of July 6, more than 350 UN troops stormed the seaside shanty town of Cite Soleil in a military operation with the stated purpose of halting violence in Haiti. The successful goal of the mission was to assassinate a 31 year-old man and his lieutenants that Haiti’s right wing media and reactionary business community had labeled bandits and armed supporters of ousted president Jean-Bertrand Aristide.
According to residents, Emmanuel “Dread” Wilmer and four others were felled in a hail of gunfire that came from all directions including a circling helicopter. According to the Associated Press, a military spokesman for the UN peacekeeping [sic] mission in Haiti, Colonel Eloufi Boulbars stated, “Armed bandits who had tried to resist were either killed or wounded.”
On July 6 in Cite Soleil, a weeping Fredi Romelus, recounted how UN troops lobbed a red smoke grenade into his house and then opened fire killing his wife and two children. “They surrounded our house this morning and I ran thinking my wife and the children were behind me. They couldn’t get out and the blan [UN] fired into the house.”
http://www.world-crisis.com/news/1152_0_1_0_C/
(warning: graphic pictures)

If you missed the first airing, there will be repeats playing continuously:
“17 November - In the slum of Cité Soleil, UN troops regained control of a neighborhood Thursday after a night of clashes with armed gang members who authorities say are supporters of Aristide. "Both sides exchanged thousands of bullets," said Lt. Col. Andre Novaes, the UN commanding officer in the zone. "We fought from sunset till dawn."”
http://haitisupport.gn.apc.org/fea_news_index.html

The original gangsters: Paul Martin, Jacques Chirac and George W. Bush.

For more information:
http://www.outofhaiti.ca/
http://canadahaitiaction.ca/

UK Wartime Torture Camp

2005-11-23T16:07:00.000-08:00

The Guardian 11-14-5

Revealed - UK Wartime Torture Camp

By Ian Cobain

The British government operated a secret torture centre during the secondworld war to extract information and confessions from German prisoners,according to official papers which have been unearthed by the Guardian.

More than 3,000 prisoners passed through the centre, where many weresystematically beaten, deprived of sleep, forced to stand still for morethan 24 hours at a time and threatened with execution or unnecessarysurgery.

Some are also alleged to have been starved and subjected to extremes oftemperature in specially built showers, while others later complained thatthey had been threatened with electric shock torture or menaced byinterrogators brandishing red-hot pokers.

The centre, which was housed in a row of mansions in one of London's mostaffluent neighbourhoods, was carefully concealed from the Red Cross, thepapers show. It continued to operate for three years after the war, duringwhich time a number of German civilians were also tortured. A subsequentassessment by MI5, the Security Service, concluded that the commandingofficer had been guilty of "clear breaches" of the Geneva convention andthat some interrogation methods "completely contradicted" international law.

On at least one occasion, an MI5 officer noted in a newly declassifiedreport, a German prisoner was convicted of war crimes and hanged on thebasis of a confession which he had signed after he was, at the very least,"worked on psychologically". A number of people who appeared as prosecutionwitnesses at war crimes trials are also alleged to have been tortured.

The official papers, discovered in the National Archives, depict the centreas a dark, brutal place which caused great unease among senior Britishofficers. They appear to have turned a blind eye partly because of theusefulness of the information extracted, and partly because the detaineeswere thought to deserve ill treatment.

Not all the torture centre's secrets have yet emerged, however: the Ministryof Defence is continuing to withhold some of the papers almost 60 yearsafter it was closed down.

New revelations of US military use of white phosphorus in Iraq

2005-11-21T12:23:00.000-08:00

By Tom Carter
November 21, 2005

A week after RAI, the Italian state television network, aired footage of the American military deploying white phosphorus munitions against the population of Fallujah and their grisly effects on innocent residents, more evidence has come to light confirming that the US is using chemical weapons against the Iraqi people. The report on Italian television sparked angry protests outside the US embassy in Rome.

Despite denials by top Pentagon and state department officials that white phosphorus, a napalm-like substance, is being used as a chemical weapon in Iraq, facts are continuing to emerge that confirm the opposite.

The first new piece of evidence comes from an embedded reporter, Darrin Mortenson of the North County Times in California, who gave this account of a mortar crew in action during the assault on Fallujah last November:

“The boom kicked the dust around the pit as they ran through the drill again and again, sending a mixture of burning white phosphorus and high explosives they call ‘shake ’n bake’ into a cluster of buildings where insurgents have been spotted all week.”

Complete story @ http://www.wsws.org/articles/2005/nov2005/phos-n21.shtml

Fallujah: the hidden massacre, produced by Sigfrido Ranucci and Maurizio Torrealta, is available in English translation, and can be downloaded at: http://www.rainews24.rai.it/ran24/inchiesta/video.asp

The face behind the mask (2): Queen's deregulation

2005-11-21T11:51:00.000-08:00

Principal Hitchcock’s vision for Queen’s:
“The resources needed to ensure our evolution as a truly engaged global research university will be substantial, but achievable, as we leverage our assets across all sectors of society – as we engage our partners in a shared dream for Queen’s. We must communicate our belief that Queen’s is making a difference on a global scale. Governments (provincial and federal), industry, alumni and friends will look to Queen’s as an agent of change – an institution aware of and responsive to societal needs; and, they will invest their resources to advance our mission... ...The issues we in higher education face are truly global in scope and therefore require that we view them in an international context. Such a global perspective defines today’s economy and labor markets and must also define our student and faculty recruitment, and our engagement with the multiple constituencies that support and sustain us.”
-from "Engaging the world: a discussion paper" by Karen R. Hitchcock, September, 2005.

Principal Hitchcock’s legacy at SUNY Albany:
“As SUNY shifts from full to part-time labor, it is also undergoing changes in the education it provides. Federal and state tax dollars, not to mention student tuition, are flowing into technology centers such as the Center for Environmental Sciences and Technology Management. The aim, says SUNY Albany President Karen Hitchcock, is "to move the best ideas of university researchers into the marketplace." SUNY has increased matching funds for sponsored research at its colleges. Meanwhile, other disciplines are being scaled back.
SUNY's research universities are also being restructured. Last year, SUNY Albany's administration closed down the German department, fired its four tenured professors, and merged the French department into a newly created Modern European Languages department. It simultaneously hired 19 new professors in other disciplines as part of what it called a "strategy of investment in strength." Invariably, strong disciplines are those that engage in corporate-sponsored research.
In an open letter in the November 7, 1997, Albany Student Press, French professor Helen Regueiro Elam wrote that the SUNY-Albany administration "has transformed the university into a country club... with utter disregard for intellectual values, pedagogical priorities, or the larger role of a university in a democratic culture." Students at SUNY Albany, she said, are becoming processors of information rather than critical thinkers, as corporations increasingly dictate SUNY's curriculum."
- from "From public to private: the dismantling of SUNY" by A.S. Zaidi.

The face behind the mask.

2005-11-19T04:22:00.001-08:00

-In suport of freedom and democracy everywhere (via)

-Illustration from a 2004 Guantanamo tribunal (via)

Guantanamo is just one of an unknown number of torture camps run by the US:
"The CIA has been hiding and interrogating some of its most important al Qaeda captives at a Soviet-era compound in Eastern Europe, according to U.S. and foreign officials familiar with the arrangement.
The secret facility is part of a covert prison system set up by the CIA nearly four years ago that at various times has included sites in eight countries, including Thailand, Afghanistan and several democracies in Eastern Europe, as well as a small center at the Guantanamo Bay prison in Cuba, according to current and former intelligence officials and diplomats from three continents.
The hidden global internment network is a central element in the CIA's unconventional war on terrorism..."
"...Virtually nothing is known about who is kept in the facilities, what interrogation methods are employed with them, or how decisions are made about whether they should be detained or for how long.
While the Defense Department has produced volumes of public reports and testimony about its detention practices and rules after the abuse scandals at Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison and at Guantanamo Bay, the CIA has not even acknowledged the existence of its black sites."
-Washington Post, November 2, 2005.

The phantasm of legal exception behind 'a mass of incomprehensible data':
"...these gruesome crimes took place in a phantom world, which, however, has materialized, as it were, into a world which is complete with all sensual data of reality but lacks that structure of consequence and responsibility without which reality remains for us a mass of incomprehensible data. The result is that a place has been established where men can be tortured and slaughtered, and yet neither the tormentors nor the tormented, and least of all the outsider, can be aware that what is happening is anything more than a cruel game or an absurd dream."
-Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism.

2005-11-17T21:47:00.000-08:00

Private military industry is eager for nations to contract out peacekeeping

Huge profit potential drives industry's quest for market; critics worryabout losing military control

By David Pugliese Ottawa --

The private military industry says it is ready to take over thepeacekeeping jobs that Canada and other Western nations have turned theirbacks on.

With the situation in Iraq expected eventually to stabilize, some in theprivate military industry believe the next big growth area is peacekeeping.The companies say they can provide trained soldiers to help guard andprotect refugee camps, fly helicopter troop transports or surveillanceplanes as well as take care of logistics, medical and other supportfunctions.

One British-based company, Global Peace and Security Partnership, plans tocreate a database of up to 10,000 private soldiers who could be on call forpeacekeeping operations.

"What's happened is the West has abrogated its responsibility to dopeacekeeping and instead has left that up to the militaries of the poorestcountries in the world," said Doug Brooks, president of the InternationalPeace Operations Association. That U.S.-based organization represents firmsproviding various security and support services to governments, military andcorporations.

For the complete post see http://www.canada.com/vancouver/vancouversun/news/story.html?id=06e8ac61-3ae

testing...

2005-11-17T08:17:00.000-08:00

...1,2,3

link test