From debsian at pacbell.net Mon Jul 1 10:46:30 2002 From: debsian at pacbell.net (Michael Pugliese) Date: Mon, 01 Jul 2002 09:46:30 -0700 Subject: [R-G] Re: U. of Ottawa Professor Says Evidence Shows U.S. Helped Plan Attacks Message-ID: Ruppert The ex?LAPD cop who became a 9/11 conspiracy king http://www.laweekly.com/ink/02/30/cover-corn.php `````````````````````````````````````````````````````````````````````` ... WhatDIDN'Treallyhappen.com. Devoted to smashing conspiracy theories and humiliating their purveyors! Monday, June 24, 2002 :: A flimsy attempt at a snappy rejoinder. A nameless blogger (another one of those valiant dissidents who's afraid of the Treasury agents underneath his bed) has tried his hand at refuting my Ruppert timeline post below. He has his own conspiracy yarns, including a Vince Foster redux, exposing the Cliff Baxter "suicide sham." In any event, his prodding of my timeline focuses on items 3 and 4, in which Ruppert first claims the Unocal pipeline deal failed because the Taliban's price was too high (in 1997), and that Unocal VP John Maresca testified a year later that the deal would not be feasible unless and until a stable Afghan regime was in place. Predictably, this mystery blogger does not see the incongruity here. but presumably that doesn't necessarily follow. The 1997 negotiations could have failed over money, and the Unocal Vice President could also have testified before the House that the pipeline would not be built before there was a stable government in Afghanistan. I suppose you could make this argument if Afghanistan had slid into chaos between 1997 and 1998, but the truth of the matter is that the Taliban continued to consolidate its rule after 1996, and the country was certainly more stable (inasmuch as a country living under the most brutal, Luddite tyranny the world has seen since the Khmer Rouge can be called stable) in 1998 than 1997, when Unocal was supposedly haggling over a price. Prudent entrepreneurs ensure the investment is a secure one before they negotiate a price, not after. The argument then progresses to Unocal's recent press release stating that it no longer had any interest in building the pipeline, which we are to believe is "a case, I dare say, of protesting too much." Uh-huh. If Unocal had released it out of the blue, but what he doesn't tell you is that it was in response to a report that it was the "lead company" in the pipeline's construction. "Protesting too much" is something corporations sort of have to do from time to time, as they depend of what are called investors who give special slips of paper called money for their stock, based on the decisions the corporation makes. Moron. But here's the best part of the missive: Ruppert's strength isn't in any particlar part of the timeline, but in the sheer quantity of suspicious details. So you see, it doesn't matter if none of Ruppert's weak assumptions, distortions, logic fallacies, and outright factual errors, hold any water. The fact that he is able to come up with such a wealth of idiotic arguments proves him right! It should also be noted that this despicable pig also notes (again, in what is apparently his own yarn) the fact that only one flag officer - Lt. Gen. Timothy Maude - died in the attack as proof that there was foreknowledge, snidely remarking, "I guess he didn't get the memo." Thanks for reminding me why I devote so much time to humiliating you people, Mr. Xymphora. Fucktard. :: Bill Herbert 9:27 PM [+] :: ... :: Sunday, June 23, 2002 :: Mike Ruppert?s bullshit-riddled timeline (Part 1). NOTE: This is the first in what will be at least a 5-part series refuting Mike Ruppert?s conspiratorial "timeline" point by point. It may grow longer, as Ruppert continues to add more allegations, in lieu of actually providing evidence to support his older ones. David Corn may not have the space to devote to Ruppert?s entire timeline ? which contains most of his purported "evidence" of government foreknowledge of, and complicity in, the 9/11 attacks. But I do. From the top? http://mckinneysucks.blogspot.com/2002_06__mckinneysucks_archive.html From LAMZ at sympatico.ca Mon Jul 1 12:26:51 2002 From: LAMZ at sympatico.ca (Lysander Zimmerman) Date: Mon, 1 Jul 2002 14:26:51 -0400 Subject: [R-G] G8 Protestors agree Bush complicit in 9-11. HELP McKinney is introuble!! Message-ID: <00b701c2212c$e04c0030$33378d18@Indy1> ----- Original Message ----- From: "Find Truth" To: Sent: Saturday, June 29, 2002 11:55 PM Subject: G8 Protestors agree Bush complicit in 9-11. HELP McKinney is introuble!! > > URGENT ACTION - Cynthia's in trouble!! [G8 Story below] > > Post this EVERYWHERE, and share it with EVERYONE, before we lose the only > Congressperson who will stand up against the U.S. "endless wars" machine, > and for peace, justice, and truth in govt. > > Congresswoman McKinney is the ONLY Congressperson with the will and > integrity to demand a full inquiry of what Bush knew and when he knew it > about 9-11 attacks (and to find out where the $2.3 TRILLION the DOD "LOST" > went to), AND NOW WE MAY LOSE HER. For her courage the Democrats are trying > to get rid of her. Rather than using their resources to defeat Republicans, > they are taking aim at a 5 term Georgia Congresswoman. SHE NEEDS US, and WE > NEED HER IN WASHINGTON [I know many of you have already sent donations, etc. > BUT LET'S SEND MORE]: > > To find out how you can help Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney, contact > kharabia at khayumbia.com , or just send a donation to McKinney's campaign at: > > U.S. Representative Cynthia McKinney, > PO Box 371125, > DeCatur, GA 30037 , > USA > > "First they ignore you. > Then they laugh at you. > Then they fight you. > Then you win." > > - Gandhi > > > > U.S. COMPLICITY IN 9-11 ATTACKS WIDELY ACCEPTED AT G6B SUMMIT IN CANADA > > June 27, 2002, 16:00 PDT (FTW) -- An estimated crowd of 1,200 turned out on > June 25 at the University of Calgary's MacEwan Hall to hear FTW Publisher > Mike Ruppert and University of Ottawa Professor Michel Chossudovsky present > evidence of and a rationale for U.S. government complicity in last > September's terrorist attacks. (See photos at www.fromthewilderness.com). > Their two-and-a- half-hour presentation, including documentary evidence, was > greeted with a standing ovation. > > In a question and answer session after the lecture, not one audience member > questioned that the Bush Administration needed the attacks in order to > mobilize public support for a war to control Central Asian oil reserves and > the cash from the Afghani opium trade. Traditionally, Afghanistan has been > the world's largest producer of opium. > > The G6B -- standing for a global population of six billion people whose > interests need to be balanced against the corporate interests of the > industrialized world -- was a three-day event sponsored by, among others, > the government of Canada, Amnesty International and the University of > Calgary. It brought delegates and activists together from 60 countries. The > counter summit was timed and located in Calgary, Alberta so as to juxtapose > it with the G8 meeting in nearby Kananaskis of the world's eight largest > industrialized nations starting on June 26. > > The first-ever joint presentation involving Ruppert and Chossudovsky, an > economics professor, presented the strongest evidence to date that not only > did the Bush Administration have complete foreknowledge of the attacks and > allow them to happen, but also that the CIA had a direct hand in financing > the attacks. Chossudovsky presented documentary evidence from ABC news, > citing FBI sources, confirming a report that Gen. Mahmud Ahmad, then-chief f > the Pakistani intelligence service (ISI), ordered for $100,000 to be > wired to lead hijacker Mohammed Atta just weeks before the attacks. The new > corroboration from U.S. media, using FBI sources, gave considerable weight > to earlier press stories originating in India linking the ISI to 9/11. > [These new revelations will be the subject of an upcoming story in FTW]. > > "General Ahmad arrived in Washington on Sept. 4 and met with, among others, > his good friend [CIA Director] George Tenet, [Deputy Secretary of State] > Richard Armitage, [Sen.] Joe Biden, [D-Del.,] and the heads of the two > intelligence committees," Chossudovsky said. > > "To me the issue of foreknowledge is a red herring. Osama bin Laden is and > remains to this day a CIA asset. Even now his Al Qaeda operatives are > working with the Kosovo Liberation Army who are U.S. allies and with > U.S.-backed forces in Macedonia. Members of Al Q'aeda have been protected as > they moved into Kashmir where they are now fomenting conflict between India > and Pakistan. > > "The evidence is becoming clearer every day that the U.S. government helped > to plan and fund the Sept. 11 attacks," said Chossudovsky. > > In addition, Chossudovsky has uncovered what may be complicity on the part > of the major media in hiding the smoking gun. Using transcripts from the > Federal Records Service (FRS), Chossudovsky obtained the transcript of a > question posed to National Security Adviser Condoleeza Rica at a May 16 > press conference, in which she was asked if she had met with the "ISI chief" > while he was in Washington. The CNN transcript of the event indicated that > the words "ISI chief" were "inaudible" when, in fact, they were quite > audible to the FRS. Rice's response was a troubled, "I have not seen that > report, and he was certainly not meeting with me." > > Chossudovsky painted a broad picture of globalization pushing events toward > a possible nuclear exchange between India and Pakistan by noting that one > U.S. company with strong intelligence and military connections, MPRI of > Vienna, Va., was acting as adviser to both governments. He also noted the > strong links between CIA Director George Tenet and Deputy Secretary of State > Armitage to the leaders of both countries. Chossudovsky also pointed out > that George W. Bush receives daily "personal" intelligence briefings from > the CIA Director -- a custom that has never previously been followed by any > sitting president. Previously most CIA briefings have been delivered in > written format. > > Ruppert, using new evidence of U.S. government foreknowledge disclosed by > major media sources and through recent press conferences, established that > by using only open source material, the U.S. government had warnings that > multiple airliners, most likely from United and American Air Lines would be > hijacked during the week of Sept. 9 and crashed into the twin towers. Using > revelations of intelligence intercepts and a Pentagon drill responding to an > attack from a hijacked airliner staged prior to Sept. 11, Ruppert > established that the Bush Administration's position, which held it had no > hint that aircraft would be used as weapons, was false. Pointing to last > year's G8 summit in Genoa, Italy, Ruppert noted that extensive precautions > had been taken there (including anti-aircraft guns) to prevent just such an > attack. A Los Angeles Times story disclosed that President Bush was the > target of the suspected attacks in Genoa. > > "Bush ought to be having some interesting conversations with the leaders of > Italy, Germany, France and Russia since it was their intelligence services > who forwarded detailed advance warnings to the CIA throughout the summer of > 2001," said Ruppert. "And they referred specifically to suicide attacks with > airliners." > > Ruppert also debunked the notions that the 9-11 attacks were caused by a > lack of cooperation between agencies, and that great numbers of people would > have had to be involved in the U.S. end of the operation. Citing a BBC TV > report by Gregg Palast which showed an FBI report stating that the Bush > administration had ordered the FBI to curtail investigations into bin Laden > relatives, Ruppert demonstrated that orders were coming from levels above > FBI and CIA leadership. Additionally, referring to the recent memorandum > from FBI Special Agent Colleen Rowley and a press conference given by FBI > Special Agent Robert Wright, Ruppert popped the government's position that > somehow the so-called intelligence "failures" of 9-11 were the result of > negligence. > > "If you look at the text of Rowley's message and listen to what Wright said > at his press conference you hear and see words like, 'obstruct,' ' > deliberately thwart,' 'intimidate,' 'block,' 'harass,' 'dishonest,' > 'rewrite,' 'omit,' 'undermine,' 'suppress,' 'punish,' 'retaliate' and > 'prevent.' These are not words describing negligence. These are words > describing deliberate and willful actions. > > "And if you note from both the Rowley memo, and apparently from the Wright > press conference, it was only one supervisory special agent at FBI > headquarters who did all of the deliberate work to stop investigations that > could have prevented the attacks. And what did Rowley tell us? Right after > Sept. 11 the agent who had blocked the investigations was promoted!" > > The $64,000 question remains unanswered: Was the agent in Rowley's case also > involved in blocking Wright's Chicago-based investigations into > money-laundering for terrorist groups, including Al Qaeda? In any event, the > Rowley memorandum proves that just a few officials in key positions could > have carried out the 9-11 conspiracy successfully. > > LEAVING ANYWAY BUT KICKED OUT JUST THE SAME -- A CLOSE ENCOUNTER WITH AIR > FORCE ONE > > On entering Canada Ruppert was questioned first by Canadian Customs > officials and then by immigration officers. Upon learning that Ruppert was a > journalist and publisher of FTW the immigration officer typed Ruppert's name > into a computer and asked specifically if he was going near the G8 > conference. Ruppert stated that he was only planning on attending the G6B > conference and had plans to return to Los Angeles on June 25. Nonetheless, > the immigration officer stamped Ruppert's passport with a visa dated to > expire on June 26, requiring that he not be in the country when the > conference began. This highly unusual practice was offensive to many > Canadians who pointed out that there are no visa requirements between the > two countries. > > After the lecture, as he was hurrying to the airport, Ruppert was questioned > by the local press who photographed his passport as evidence of the Canadian > government's desire to censor coverage and public access to the conference. > > Ruppert's departure coincided with the arrival of President George Bush and > two identical 747 aircraft painted with Air Force One markings. He was able > to photograph the arrival of the president and a heavy deployment of support > and security aircraft. Ruppert's flight home was delayed by more than an > hour. He returned safely to Los Angeles while his suitcase was forced to > spend the night in San Francisco. The Calgary lecture was Ruppert's eighth > stop in a month in his "Truth and Lies of 9-11" lecture series. He plans to > spend the next six weeks working on new stories. > > > _________________________________________________________________ > Chat with friends online, try MSN Messenger: http://messenger.msn.com > > From mstainsby at tao.ca Mon Jul 1 11:31:08 2002 From: mstainsby at tao.ca (Macdonald Stainsby) Date: Mon, 01 Jul 2002 10:31:08 -0700 Subject: [R-G] Re: U. of Ottawa Professor Says Evidence Shows U.S. Helped Plan Attacks References: Message-ID: <001101c22125$16b0fe80$291f5318@vc.shawcable.net> Well, take all of this to Ruppert then. You can make some easy money, he states publically that if you discount even one of his sources you'll get a grand out of it. Macdonald ----- Original Message ----- From: "Michael Pugliese" Ruppert The ex?LAPD cop who became a 9/11 conspiracy king http://www.laweekly.com/ink/02/30/cover-corn.php From debsian at pacbell.net Mon Jul 1 14:58:14 2002 From: debsian at pacbell.net (Michael Pugliese) Date: Mon, 01 Jul 2002 13:58:14 -0700 Subject: [R-G] The Indiscreet Charm of the Bush-Nazi Web Conspiranoids Message-ID: http://www.thethresher.com/indiscreet.html "American politics has often been an arena for angry minds," historian Richard Hofstadter wrote nearly four decades ago. As the first great analyst/connoisseur of American political paranoia, or what he called "the paranoid style," Hofstadter, who died in 1970, would have been amazed by the web. As we all know, myriad versions of the perennial conspiracy theories Hofstadter knew well, the ones involving plots by Freemasons, Jesuits, Jews, and/or Communists to take over the world, are alive and thriving in the new medium. In addition, the web, as a radically accelerated technology for moving facts, rumors, myths and memes, has vastly widened the theater of the political imagination. It has become, for better and worse, the spiritual home of "conspiranoia." A quick search of the word "conspiracy" on Google turns up (as of mid-2001) just under 2 million hits. All of the modern classics are well represented. These include; JFK Assassination plots (75,000 hits) (whether by CIA, Mafia, Gusanos or the newly popular Federal Reserve theory), extraterrestrial visitations (over 75,000 sites), and shadow world governments (well over a million) (as administered by, the Trilateral Commission, Council on Foreign Relations, The UN, The Bank of England and any one of several dozen other organizations). Then there are the more recent conspiracy theories involving; the deliberate or accidental unleashing of the AIDS virus (roughly 65,000 hits), U.S. government involvement in the Oklahoma City bombing, (nearly 100,000), and collusions between DuPont Chemical and the oil Industry to squelch hemp production (10,000). Many, indeed most of these conspiracy "exposes" are illogical, if not totally incoherent, rants. Others are obsessively detailed, but ultimately implausible concoctions of fact and fantasy. And a few are well researched and documented. Not a few are a bit of all of the above. All are populist attempts to locate cracks in the official versions of history. Nowhere is this seen as clearly as in the sites devoted to the current rising stars of web conspiranoia, the Bush family. Conspiratorialists, whether their bete noire is Anglophile internationalist bankers, socialist one-world government advocates, neo-fascist state planners, or eugenic proponents of white supremacy, can and do find in the Bushes everything and more than they've ever wanted to imagine about American history and its rulers. Lurking in the shadows of nearly every major episode of recent U.S. history, from World War Two to the rise of the CIA to third world drug running to the Bay of Pigs, the Kennedy and King assassinations, Watergate and beyond, the Bushes have emerged as the Zeligs of the global power elite. At the crux of this saga are the Bushes' real and imagined relationships with Nazi Germany. Rumors about Bush-Nazi connections began circulating in earnest in the pre-web days of the late 80s. The Philadelphia Enquirer discovered a number of German Nazi military officers working as low-level operatives for the Republican National Committee in the Bush presidential campaign of 1988. Rumors of a Bush- Nazi association were kept alive on alt.news conspiracy bulletin boards through the 90s. They gained critical mass during the 2000 election campaign, generating a bewildering variety of exposes, mythic narratives and shadow histories. Below is just a sampling of some of the hottest current web forums dedicated to exploring Bush-Nazi ties: Eugenies in a Bottle Robert Lederman, a New York City artist, believes the Bush family, along with the Harrimans, Rockefellers, Nazis, neo-Nazis and leaders of the oil and pharmaceutical industries, has been instrumental in a plot to commit genetic genocide against "inferior races". This racial supremacist plot allegedly began in the 1920s with the founding of the Averill Harriman- Prescott Bush funded Eugenics Research Office. Accused accomplices include Planned Parenthood, the Nazi German government, and in post-war America, neo-Nazi led research under the auspices of the CIA, National Science Foundation, and Center for Disease Control. It has also involved such environmentalist fronts as Zero Population Growth and conservative think-tanks such as the Manhattan Institute. It is currently backed by large corporations, prominently including Alcoa (the theory flouride, tested by the Nazis, is being used in the water supply to create a submissive population), and big pharmaceutical companies (especially those, like I.G. Farben, with Nazi pasts). These companies are believed to be involved in introducing toxic, potentially genocidal vaccines and sprays. One example is malathion, used recently in New York City and vicinity to (presumably) control the West Nile virus. For Lederman, the project of genocide through eugenics reaches its apogee in the Human Genome Project, designed to enable realization of the Nazi goal of eliminating inferior genetic castes through genetic profiling. Acoording to Lederman, "Following the Holocaust it was necessary to disguise Eugenics as something more politically acceptable. This was something, of course, accomplished through birth control, vaccinations, insect control sprays, and other thinly disguised modes of genocide. There is mounting evidence AIDS was one of these programs." While for Lederman, the Bushes meet Nazism at the intersection of genetics and big pharmaceutical companies, the website Conspiracy Planet sees the Bushes, through three generations, as active, if subterranean, Nazi ideologues. In this reality, the Bush family has been financing the Nazi cause through clandestine sources, including drug dealing.. The website, which calls itself "the Alternative News and history Network", hosts a regular "Bush Crime Family" channel, exploring supposed relationships between the Bushes, Nazi groups and organized crime. One of its conspiracy researchers, writing under the moniker King Felix, declares, "George W's grandfather Prescott Bush was among the chief American fundraisers for the Nazi Party in the 1930s and '40s. In return he was handsomely rewarded with plenty of financial opportunities from the Nazis helping to create the fortune and legacy that his son George inherited." On the other hand, for Richard Draheim, columnist for the Dallas Libertarian, the Bushes' represent a traditional Republican collusion of big business and big government. Specifically, Draheim sees in the Bush Dynasty a marriage between Wall Street and the oil industry and (despite the low-tax rhetoric), a conspiracy to impose high taxes to subsidize Bush family-connected businesses. "The Bush family fortune is old, and it comes from a century old alliance with the most powerful interests on Wall Street and in industry. Worse, a big part of Dubya's money comes from Grandfather Prescott Bush's alliance with the Nazis." Less diplomatically, Marie Vance and John Cappetini claim in syninfo.com: "The silver spoon in George W. Bush's mouth was bought and paid for by Nazi butchers, who yanked the fillings from dead Jew's mouths. The Bush mob/Bush international crime family was and is a bunch of Satan worshipping Nazis." Though space doesn?t permit, it wouldn't be tough at all to find several hundred more examples. Internet rants? Technologically amplified paranoia? Indeed. It's easy enough to tear apart the notion of a still active, century- long, racist-Nazi (with a capital N) conspiracy based on the science of genetics. Many racist ideologues do use rhetoric couched in the scientific (or more often pseudo-scientific) jargon of genetic determinism. Some racist ideologues do continue to advance schemes for sterilizing "undesirable" populations, all too similar to those of Nazi Germany. Most scientists, (including most molecular biologists), most birth-control and reproductive rights advocates, as well as most environmentalists and population control proponents, have nothing to do with them, following totally divergent and conflicting social and political agendas. Wild stretches? Yes. But wrong about any Bush-Nazi connection? Not really. Or, at least, not entirely. Beating Around the Bushes The following is a thumbnail sketch of the Bush family biography from the early 1900s to the 1950s, as culled from several recent mainstream Bush (George the Father and Junior) biographies, a canon including Lone Star Yankee by Herbert S. Parmet, First Son by Bill Minutaglio and W: The Revenge of the Bush Dynasty by Elizabeth Mitchell, as well as official family memoirs. Samuel Bush (George H.W.'s paternal grandfather) was a successful Midwestern entrepreneur who ran both a small Ohio railroad and the Buckeye Steel Castings Company. A man of vaguely populist leanings, despite his affluence, Bush helped frame Ohio's first worker's compensation laws and has been said to have been a Democrat, and "friendly with organized labor." His son Prescott Bush, after attending Yale in the 1910s, worked briefly in a small, family owned rubber company in Ohio. In the early '20s, he accepted an invitation from his new father-in-law George Herbert to join the Harriman brothers' investment, a high-flying international banking house. George Herbert Walker, father of Prescott?s wife Dorothy, was the founder of GH Walker and Co. investment bank in St. Louis. While Samuel Bush might be characterized as "petit-bourgeois," GH Walker was a man of great wealth. In addition to being a major power broker in the Midwest, Walker had close connections to the Eastern banking elite as well. By the early '20s, he maintained an estate in Kennebunkport, Maine, a mansion on Long Island, and a ten thousand-acre hunting preserve called Duncannon in South Carolina. At the urging of his friend, railroad magnate E.H. Harriman, father of Averill and Roland (Bunny) Harriman (classmates of Prescott Bush at Yale), Walker had come to New York to help the younger Harrimans run the Harriman investment bank. By the late 1920s, Walker had groomed his son-in-law to handle large parts of the bank?s investments, including its interests in the fledgling Columbia Broadcasting Network, and several European projects. By the early 1930s, Walker left daily operations of the Harriman bank. Bush stayed on throughout the 30s and 40s as a partner in the firm. By 1931, Harriman Investment had merged with the British-American bank Brown Brothers, becoming Brown Brothers Harriman. During the 1940s Bush, who had shed his father?s Democratic politics for his father-in-law?s Republicanism, became active in Connecticut electoral politics. He ran unsuccessfully for the U.S. Senate in 1950, before winning a seat in 1952. Bush served 12 years in the Senate, earning a record as a moderately liberal "Rockefeller Republican" and a supporter of civil rights legislation, and a reputation for being President Eisenhower?s golfing buddy. Trading With Enemies One could read through the bulk of mainstream Bush family biographies and find no mention of a significant 1942 event: That year the U.S. federal government, under the auspices of the office of the U.S Alien Property Custodian. seized the assets of the Union Banking Corporation, a subsidiary of Brown Brothers Harriman, under authority of the "Trading with the Enemy Act." Prescott Bush served on the board. An eclectic body of revisionist work, most originally available in book form (and most now "out of print"), has been dedicated to investigating the background of this historically excised event. Though largely ignored by established book reviewing media, mainstream print, and broadcast punditry, three books in particular have attempted to explore and document the historical background of the "Bush-Nazi" connection. These attempts to fill in the gaps left by mainstream historians have found new life on the web. The most frequently cited and circulated source of Bush-Nazi investigations/conspiranoia, George Bush-The Unauthorized Biography (a biography of George Herbert Walker Bush) by Webster Griffin Tarpley and Anton Chaitkin, published in 1992, while well-documented, is also the most suspect. The problem is that Tarpley and Chaitkin are colleagues of the political cult leader Lyndon LaRouche. Not surprisingly, they insist on overlaying otherwise solidly researched data with wildly speculative interpretations. The book, originally published by LaRouche's Executive Intelligence Review, though "out of print," is ubiquitous on the web, and freely used and quoted by Bush conspiranoia buffs of all persuasions. Tarpley and Chaitkin fill in important details of the period of Prescott Bush's involvement in international investment banking. They document W.A. Harriman Bank's European operations, and the roles of Herbert Walker, who joined as president and chief executive in November, 1919, and Prescott Bush. According to Tarpley and Chaitkin, the first major German connections made by the newly minted Harriman bank took place in 1920, when Averill Harriman announced plans to re-launch the dormant Hamburg- Amerikan shipping line. The German shipping line, said to be the world?s largest private line, had been confiscated by the U.S. government at the end of World War I. Harriman purchased it from the government at a fraction of its market value. According to the terms of the deal, the original German management would buy back the line from Harriman at its market value, with the Harriman Bank gaining rights to 50% of all business originating in Hamburg and complete control of all activities of the line in the U.S. Soon after, In 1922, Harriman and Walker set up a European headquarters in Berlin, forming a relationship with the Hamburg- based Warburg Bank. Through Warburg, Harriman began a series of investments during the mid-to-late 1920s in German industry and raw materials. During this period, Harriman also set up a New York bank called the Union Banking Corporation. This was designed, primarily, to handle funds supplied by the Bank von Handel en Scheepvaart, a Dutch bank owned by German industrialist Fritz Thyssen. By personal agreement between Averill Harriman and Thyssen, Union Ba nk would transfer funds back and forth between New York and the Thyssen interests. During the 1920s and ?30s, Thyssen accounted for much of Germany?s pig iron, universal plate, heavy plate, pipes and tubes, wire and explosives. In 1926, along with another Wall Street bank, Dillon-Read, Harriman helped establish the new German Steel Trust, also largely owned by Thyssen. By the mid-1930s, GST had become Germany?s largest industrial corporation. From 1923 on, along with his industrial and financial activities, Thyssen was an instrumental early financial backer of a fledgling political group called the Nazi Party, extending a large credit line to the party through the Harriman banking subsidiary. (He admits this in a post-WW2 memoir entitled I Paid Hitler.) In January, 1931, the Harriman Bank merged with the British- American Brown Brothers' investment house to become Brown Brothers Harriman. By then, Herbert Walker had left full-time work at Harriman to devote himself to GH Walker &Co., but Prescott Bush stayed on with the Harrimans to become senior partner in the new firm. The consolidated Silesian Holding company (which included Prescott Bush as director) was another major German industrial trust that Brown Brothers Harriman partnered with in the 1930s. This was a complex of steel-making, coal-making and zinc-making operations in Germany and Poland. According to a U.S. government brief presented in 1946 at the Nuremburg war crimes tribunal, industrialist Friedrich Flick, owner of two-thirds of Silesian, was "a leading financial contributor to the Nazi Party from 1932 on and a member of the Circle of Friends of Himmler who contributed large sums to the Nazi SS." Silesian and United Steel Trust were the two primary suppliers of war material to the Nazi government throughout its arms build-up in the 1930s, and into the 1940s. US government documents also show that two other Harriman Bank affiliates, Wilhelm Cuno and Baron Rudolph von Schroder, directors of the Hamburg-Amerika line, were major contributors to the Nazi Party in its 1932 election campaign. Additionally, according to the Nye commission (a 1934 US Congressional investigation), The Hamburg- Amerika line was a primary conduit for the shipment of American guns to the Nazis. They also provided free passage to individuals going abroad for Nazi propaganda purposes, as well as subsidies for pro-Nazi newspapers and other Nazi propaganda materials throughout the 1930s, according to the Nye Report.. These activities continued until September, 1942, when the U.S. government ordered all property of the Hamburg-Amerika line seized under the Trading with the Enemy Act. Two months later, also under the authority of the Trading with the Enemy Act, the government issued Vesting Order No.248 seizing assets of the Union Banking Co. (approximately $4 million.) While the evidence amassed by Tarpley and Chaitkin in no way directly implicates Prescott Bush or Brown Brothers Harriman as Nazi supporters, a strong case is made for their complicity in aiding and abetting the Nazi cause for profit long after the nature of the Nazi regime became clear to any informed observer, and even after the US declaration of war against Germany. Unfortunately, not content with solid muckracking, Tarpley and Chaitkin insist on super-imposing their pet (entertaining but unsubstantiated, not to mention off-the-wall) conspiracy theory of US history, inspired by Lyndon LaRouche, leader of a radical left/right, right/left cult with so many political incarnations and reincarnations, it's spawned its own mini-industry of critic/conspiranoiaists. As a highbrow conspiracy theorist?s theorist, LaRouche puts poor John Birch and Bo Gritz not to mention Tom Clancy -- to shame. Indeed there are those who think posterity may yet judge him the grandest historical fictioneer of this era, surpassing Pynchon, Vidal, and DeLillo. His theory, as advanced by Tarpley and Chaitkin, involves linking the Bushes, Harrimans, and much, if not all, of the American elite to a several century old plot for world subjugation by a secret British-American cabal steeped in arcane lore, drug smuggling and pagan ritual. They attempt to trace the roots of this conspiracy to the collusion of British financiers and pro-Brit American Tories during the Revolutionary War and follow its machinations through two centuries of intrigue. As Tarpley and Chaitkin explain it: "Diehard pro-British families, known as Boston Brahmins, who had prospered in the ship transportation of rum and black slaves, regained power in Boston shortly after their British allies lost the Revolutionary war. In 1805 these cynical neo- pagan Tories succeeded in placing their representatives in the Hollis chair, parading publicly as liberal religionists called Unitarians." Thus commenced a secret war (which continues, two centuries later) between Tories and ?true American nationalists? like the Reverend Jedidiah Morse, the head of the Andover Academy, an institution set up to counter the British spies, atheists and criminals who had taken over Harvard. By 1840, when Jedidiah Morse's generation died out, the Andover nationalist movement was, say Chaikin and Tarpley, "crushed by New England's elite families, who were by then Britain's partners in the booming opium traffic." According to the authors, by the second half of the 19th century, Andover, though still ostensibly a Christian schoo,l had become (as had Yale University, the college of choice for Andover graduates) a front for occult-inspired Anglophile secret societies. These elite societies were dedicated to undermining American nationalism and replacing it with a secret government, run furtively by Anglo- American financiers. Though these cults did not fully prevail in the 19th century, as "national power was still precariously balanced between the imperial Anglo-American financiers and the heroic old-line nationalists who built America's railroads, steel and electric utilities," the "New Age Aristocrats" prevailed in the 20th century. Pivotal to that rise was Skull and Bones, the most formidable of these secret cults, which by the early 20th century had become the primary breeding ground of a new kind of American establishment, with imperial economic and political ambitions. "The 20th century," write Tarpley and Chaitkin, "owes much of its record of horrors to certain Anglophile American families which have employed Skull and Bones as a political recruiting agency, particularly the Harrimans, Whitneys, Vanderbilts, Rockefellers," and their lawyers, the Lords, Tafts, Bundys and Dulleses. Above all, they write, "Skull and Bones was dominated from 1913 onward by the circles of Averill Harriman, who succeeded in vanquishing traditional nationalists like Douglas McArthur." In addition to financial control, Tarpley anc Chaitkin claim Skull and Bones has exerted power in many other ways through politics (especially the CIA and Bush family), "environmentalist" organizations like the conservation, birth control and Zero Population Growth Movements (fronts for genocidal eugenics research). They even claim that would-be revolutionaries. such as the new left "Up Against the Wall Motherfuckers" (inspiration for the Yippies, but angrier), were furtively supported back in 1968 by McGeorge Bundy's Ford Foundation front ESSO (The East Side Service Organization) through the intermediary of none other than "former OSS operative, neo-Marxist philosopher Herbert Marcuse." Business As Usual Less flaky, The Secret War Against the Jews, by Mark Aarons and John Loftus, puts the Harriman Bank - Nazi connections in a wider, less conspiratorial (though far from innocent) context. The book, originally published in 1994 by St.Martin?s Press, is primarily focused on the relationship between Western intelligence agencies and the state of Israel, but it contains a very detailed chapter on U.S. corporate investment in Nazi Germany. Aaron and Loftus draw extensively on records of the Nye and Truman Senate committees, declassified intelligence and State Department documents, interviews with unnamed former intelligence operatives, and a rare interview conducted with former Supreme Court justice Arthur Goldberg shortly before his death. As a government attorney in the 1940s, Goldberg had extensively investigated and documented corporate ties to the German military-industrial complex, only to have his findings ignored and "buried" in State Department archives, a cover-up he blamed to his dying day on the Dulles Brothers, Allen and John Foster. Though the book has largely languished in semi-obscurity since its publication, public statements by Loftus (now president of the Florida Holocaust Museum) about the Bush family financial ties to Nazi Germany were widely circulated on the web during the 2000 election campaigns. Hopefully this will spur more conspiranoia-ists to actually study the book. According to The Secret War, Allen and John Foster Dulles, as young international finance specialists for the Sullivan and Cromwell legal firm in the 1920s, were pivotal advisors and agents for a "who's who" of major US. Corporations eager to get in on the bull market for German re-industrialization. The motivations behind these investors, which included Dupont, Alcoa, Standard Oil, General Motors, Chase Manhattan, GE, Ford and IBM, had less to do with ideology than money. In The Splendid Blonde Beast: Money, Law, and Genocide by Christopher Simpson, published in 1993, the most thoroughly investigated account yet of the period, these financial relationships are laid out in fairly exhaustive detail. According to Simpson, U.S.- German investment mania gripped the Roaring 20s financial elite. This mania was rooted in the 1919 Versailles agreements on reparations, which imposed payments of approximately $30 billion (about $600 billion in 2000 dollars) by the German government to other European countries over 30 years. By 1922, attempts to raise the money to pay reparations had driven the German economy into a deep crisis. For U.S. companies, this was a golden opportunity. John Foster Dulles masterminded a scheme wherein a consortium of banks and brokerage houses (among them the Harriman Bank, Chase Manhattan and Dillon Read) offered to loan U.S. dollars, through leading German banks and industrial firms, for the construction of factories, electrification and industrial plant. In turn, the German companies would issue millions of dollars worth of bonds and sell them to Dulles' clients for a discounted price. The U.S. banks would then turn around and sell the bonds "retail" to individual or small institutional investors at a hefty mark-up. The bonds helped jump-start German industry and, in fairly short order, provided the underpinning for German re-armament. For much of the 1930s, the German economy, sparked by the Nazi military build-up, stood out as one of the few bright investment opportunities in an internationally depressed economy. Some corporate executives (particularly Henry Ford, and top echelon DuPont executives) were sympathetic to Nazi and Fascist movements, publicly and financially supporting Hitler. Most, however, who engaged with Germany in the Nazi-era were probably motivated by profit, not ideology. They regarded the Nazis, Simpson believes, as a temporarily useful, if not entirely agreeable, "disciplinary" force, capable of maintaining economic stability and a safe investment climate. As a bonus, they were seen as a counter-weight to militant "Soviet inspired" labor and socialist movements. The probable zeitgeist of these financial high-flyers is perhaps best evoked by (current CNN News Executive Editor) Walter Isaacson and Evan Thomas in their 1988 study The Wise Men, a largely hagiographic profile of the post-World War Two foreign policy establishment that includes portraits of Averill Harriman and Robert Lovett, another Harriman bank director. As described by Isaacson and Thomas, the directors of Harriman Bank (Prescott Bush included) were less crypto- Nazi ideologues than characters out of The Great Gatsby, '20s wild kids thumbing their noses at such fuddy- duddy traditions as national borders and political moralism. As they write: "With the end of the war to end all wars, America quenched its yearning for a return to normalcy by retreating into isolation Wall Street, on the other hand, did nothing of the sort. Europe was industrially devastated and mired in debt. America was throbbing with revitalized factories. The situation was ripe for financiers interested in foreign investment and trade, internationalists who understood America?s ties to Europe. "While the rest of the country slept, a close-knit clique of Wall Street bankers and lawyers, most of whom had traveled through Europe as children met in the clubs of London, Paris and Berlin as friendly competitors putting together suitable investments for their firms. In a private and profit seeking capacity they were rebuilding a war- ravaged Europe in a manner as grandiose as any of these men would employ a world war later with the Marshall Plan." In Harriman, Isaacson and Thomas, see the prototype of the man without borders, the true pioneer elite globalist, the Elvis of the New World Order. "Harriman," they write, "would always harbor a belief that foes could be bargained with as easily as friends. Thus he had no qualms about entering into a shipping agreement with Germany before an armistice had been signed or a mining concession in the Soviet Union, even though the U.S. had spurned diplomatic relations with that country." What Isaacson and Thomas suggest here, and Aaron-Loftus and Simpson substantiate with more detail and in a far wider historical context, is that the relationships between Harriman Bank and other corporations and Nazi-era Germany need to be understood as part of a larger pattern. There is little evidence that the free-form meta- diplomatic modes of international financial deal making developed by Harriman, Bush and company in the 1920s and '30s signaled pro- Nazi or pro- fascist political ideology. However, it did help form a template for U.S. international finance and politics in which support for dictatorships, (financially in the '30s, financially and politically- militarily during the cold war) would become business as usual in U.S. foreign policy. One of the most interesting aspects of both the Simpson and the Aaron and Loftus books is their examination of how the private sector style of international affairs pioneered by Dulles, Harriman, Lovett and Bush in the '30s gradually metaphorphosed, during and after World War 2, into the official realpolitick of the U.S. government, often under the guidance of these same men. The ruling precepts of anti-communism and free trade that guided the international banking elite in the '30s in their dealings with Hitler would become the official policy through which the U.S. would support a wide variety of corporate-friendly dictators throughout the world, from the '50s to the present. A persuasive case can be made that investments by Brown Brothers Harriman and numerous other major U.S. corporations in Germany made the rise of Nazism possible. It's clear Harriman, Bush, Dulles and legions of the financial elite share a degree of (largely unacknowledged) responsibility for providing Hitler and the Nazis the wherewithal to launch World War Two and the Holocaust. However, it's an untenable leap to conclude that this banking elite exerted some sort of secret nefarious control over events of the 1930s, or that the rise of Nazism was not an unintended consequence of their own far shorter-sighted intentions. Those intentions involved using both German companies and unwary individual investors in their lucrative German bond investment scheme. Micro-conspiracies clearly planned to make money by pumping up German industry, including German armaments. For those micro-conspiracies, support for a compliant, pliable, big business friendly government capable of strong-arming labor and other anti-capitalist troublemakers was a matter of short-term expedience. "Blowback" (the title of another Simpson book) is the term Simpson uses to describe the unintended consequences. The Validity of Cranks Filling Cracks in the Historical Narrative There are sharp distinctions between the "Bush is a Nazi" vulgarizations of the conspiranoia-ists, and the documented corporate- Nazi connections delineated by Simpson or Aaron. Where one sees ideology, the other sees opportunism. Where one sees intention, the other sees unintended consequences. The theorists who see this historical episode not as evidence of Nazism but of business-as-usual are clearly the more sophisticated of the bunch, but this is small comfort. The results were (and are) the same. The vast majority of the Bush-Nazi conspiracy discourse is eccentric and clearly over-the-top. However, it is these web-based amateurs, and not our allegedly working professional journalists, who have kept alive a significant, largely ignored, body of evidence. This evidence is only partly about the Bushes. More significantly, it traces the origins of the cavalier, amoral relationship between American and global financial elites and genocidal dictatorships that has characterized U.S. policy for decades. At this stage, the radical media democracy thriving on the web, at least as evidenced by the Bush conspiranoia sites, is short on logic, investigative discipline and common sense, but long on guts and moxie. Unfortunately, Art Bell seems to be closer to the role model of DIY web muckrackers than I.F. Stone or Howard Zinn. Even so, at least partly because of the tireless circulation of facts, rumors, and speculations about "Bush Family Ties," dirty little secrets about the complicity of major American institutions in the rise of Nazism, buried for decades, have finally started emerging into mass consciousness. Despite generally supine treatment of the Bush family by mainstream media, there are signs that Prescott Bush's investment banking adventures of the '30s are coming under new scrutiny. A major two-part series on "The Rise of the Bush Family Dynasty" published in April 2001 by Michael Kranish in the Boston Globe, explores the Harriman Bank- German connection in some detail. The movement for reparations for Holocaust survivors has widened its focus. Previously focused on European banks laundering money stolen by the Nazis from German Jews, investigators have started looking also at US institutions. This process has exposed dealings by several major banks, including Chase Manhattan and JP Morgan. Chase Manhattan, in fact, publicly acknowledged culpability of its Paris branch in active collaboration with the Nazis in liquidating accounts of German Jews. In early 2001 Edwin Black published a widely publicized study of "IBM and the Holocaust" detailing how IBM's German division was instrumental in developing the Hollerith tabulators Nazis used to process concentration camp prisoners. This new wave of muckracking undoubtedly has sources besides the wild and wooly web. Still, it's quite likely that, without a touch of conspiranoia, mainstream media-maintained amnesia on these matters would have remained undisturbed. AN AFTER 9/11 ADDENDUM This piece was written before the events of 9/11/2001. Needless to say, the atrocities of that day, in addition to dramatically changing the political and cultural landscape, and provoking an open-ended "War Against Terrorism," have ushered in a new era in conspiranoia. At this very early stage, at least five major theories wholly or partially rejecting the official version of the attacks as the responsibility of Ossama BinLaden and Al Queda, have emerged, and gained currency on the web. The most plausable theory doesn?t claim direct Western/US involvement in the act. It simply claims that elements of the Bush Administration/CIA knew about the plan, but decided it would be politically advantageous not to stop it. Other versions involve Iraqi secret agents (a favorite of neo- conservatives), the Israeli Defense force, or domestic dissidents in the U.S. (mostly far right militias, but some claiming it was radical left anti-globalists). Finally, there are theories involving undefined rogue elements of U.S. intelligence or the military exploiting Middle Eastern fundamentalist assets. This is called "The Ossama Harvey Oswald theory." Mad as this last may seem, there is documented evidence that something nearly as grotesque has been planned at least once before in recent U.S. history. In his book, Body of Secrets: Anatomy of the Ultra- Secret National Security Agency, former ABC World News investigative reporter James Bamford details a plan by the US Joint Chiefs of Staff to launch terrorist activities against US people and property. The plot was put together in the early '60s, under the auspices of General Lyman Lemnitzer. The right wing extremist Lemnitzer was the powerful Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, inherited from the Eisenhower Administration by a displeased JFK. His brilliant notion was that these incidents (which might include bombings, hijackings of planes, even shooting down John Glenn?s Friendship 7 space capsule) could be blamed on Castro's Cuba. This would be used to galvanize U.S. public support for invading that island. Luckily, their plans were shot down by the administration. But the history of Operation Northwoods, as the plan was called, stands as a cautionary tale against considering anything "unthinkable." Whatever the merits (or lack thereof) of these conspiracy counter- narratives, it seems certain that the secrecy and sketchiness of government and mass media explanations about how the evil-doers were able to get into a position to terrorize the American population, will (and should) breed far more conspiranoia. Even for those of us who don't buy into any of the conspiracy arguments above, and believe that AlQueda was fully responsible and should be forcefully retaliated against, questions proliferate. For starters how involved has the U.S. been in training and supporting the growth of Islamic fundamentalist terrorism, not just (as is already well known) during the Soviet-Afghani conflict of the 80s, but long after in places like Bosnia via U.S. ?allies? like the Albanian Kosovo Liberation Army? To what extent has that semi-secret support undermined US domestic security? Any adequate history of the entanglements between U. S. foreign policy makers and the new breed of Islamo-Fascism the U.S. has helped spawn will likely find the same sort of reckless opportunism -- partly inspired by business and partly by geo-political considerations that have already been examined in the article. Only now, the "blowback" has reaches our shores and threatened the safety of U.S. civilians. As earlier, I see this as less a question of conscious design or plan than as the consequence of a chaotic set of short-term tactics motivated primarily by profit. But if it develops that the US is undergoing something akin to a real live fascist takeover under George W., I don't think that invalidates this analyses, except possibly for its failure to emphasize the fact that fascism can be the last refuge for capitalist opportunism, when it?s in crisis. It's still more about profit than ideology. Back to Current Issue From LAMZ at sympatico.ca Mon Jul 1 15:25:15 2002 From: LAMZ at sympatico.ca (Lysander Zimmerman) Date: Mon, 1 Jul 2002 17:25:15 -0400 Subject: [R-G] The Indiscreet Charm of the Bush-Nazi Web Conspiranoids References: Message-ID: <000901c22145$cae34ff0$33378d18@Indy1> Hey Michael, sorry to burst your fence-sitting bubble, but conspiracies are the norm for the elite in ANY class society. Adam Smith, the capitalist economist is quoted as writing that whenever the elite get together, they "CONSPIRE" against the working classes. I guess his understanding of capitalist economics is just "conspiranoia"!! Here's a CONSPIRACY REALITY for Mike: in 1975, Senator Frank Church headed the Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations With Respect to Intelligence Activities and their findings document 5 volumes of CONSPIRACIES (including assassinations, assissination plots, biological and chemical weapons programs that included SECRET testing on large parts of the population, mind-control experiments, COINTELPRO tactics, you name it....). Nope, no conspiracies here!! I guess Operation Northwoods (http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/news/20010430/doc1.pdf) and Operation Mongoose were simply plots for Hollywood movies that didn't make it on account that they were too "out there"!!! Here's another conspiracy reality for you: http://hamilton.indymedia.org:8081/front.php3?article_id=1793 Open your eyes. ____________________________________________________________ 'Naturally the common people don't want war: Neither in Russia, nor in England, nor for that matter in Germany. That is understood. But, after all, IT IS THE LEADERS of the country who determine the policy and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy, or a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship. Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is TELL THEM THEY ARE BEING ATTACKED, and denounce the peacemakers for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. IT WORKS THE SAME IN ANY COUNTRY.' ?Goering at the Nuremberg Trials ----- Original Message ----- From: "Michael Pugliese" To: Cc: Sent: Monday, July 01, 2002 4:58 PM Subject: [R-G] The Indiscreet Charm of the Bush-Nazi Web Conspiranoids http://www.thethresher.com/indiscreet.html "American politics has often been an arena for angry minds," historian Richard Hofstadter wrote nearly four decades ago. As the first great analyst/connoisseur of American political paranoia, or what he called "the paranoid style," Hofstadter, who died in 1970, would have been amazed by the web. As we all know, myriad versions of the perennial conspiracy theories Hofstadter knew well, the ones involving plots by Freemasons, Jesuits, Jews, and/or Communists to take over the world, are alive and thriving in the new medium. In addition, the web, as a radically accelerated technology for moving facts, rumors, myths and memes, has vastly widened the theater of the political imagination. It has become, for better and worse, the spiritual home of "conspiranoia." A quick search of the word "conspiracy" on Google turns up (as of mid-2001) just under 2 million hits. All of the modern classics are well represented. These include; JFK Assassination plots (75,000 hits) (whether by CIA, Mafia, Gusanos or the newly popular Federal Reserve theory), extraterrestrial visitations (over 75,000 sites), and shadow world governments (well over a million) (as administered by, the Trilateral Commission, Council on Foreign Relations, The UN, The Bank of England and any one of several dozen other organizations). Then there are the more recent conspiracy theories involving; the deliberate or accidental unleashing of the AIDS virus (roughly 65,000 hits), U.S. government involvement in the Oklahoma City bombing, (nearly 100,000), and collusions between DuPont Chemical and the oil Industry to squelch hemp production (10,000). Many, indeed most of these conspiracy "exposes" are illogical, if not totally incoherent, rants. Others are obsessively detailed, but ultimately implausible concoctions of fact and fantasy. And a few are well researched and documented. Not a few are a bit of all of the above. All are populist attempts to locate cracks in the official versions of history. Nowhere is this seen as clearly as in the sites devoted to the current rising stars of web conspiranoia, the Bush family. Conspiratorialists, whether their bete noire is Anglophile internationalist bankers, socialist one-world government advocates, neo-fascist state planners, or eugenic proponents of white supremacy, can and do find in the Bushes everything and more than they've ever wanted to imagine about American history and its rulers. Lurking in the shadows of nearly every major episode of recent U.S. history, from World War Two to the rise of the CIA to third world drug running to the Bay of Pigs, the Kennedy and King assassinations, Watergate and beyond, the Bushes have emerged as the Zeligs of the global power elite. At the crux of this saga are the Bushes' real and imagined relationships with Nazi Germany. Rumors about Bush-Nazi connections began circulating in earnest in the pre-web days of the late 80s. The Philadelphia Enquirer discovered a number of German Nazi military officers working as low-level operatives for the Republican National Committee in the Bush presidential campaign of 1988. Rumors of a Bush- Nazi association were kept alive on alt.news conspiracy bulletin boards through the 90s. They gained critical mass during the 2000 election campaign, generating a bewildering variety of exposes, mythic narratives and shadow histories. Below is just a sampling of some of the hottest current web forums dedicated to exploring Bush-Nazi ties: Eugenies in a Bottle Robert Lederman, a New York City artist, believes the Bush family, along with the Harrimans, Rockefellers, Nazis, neo-Nazis and leaders of the oil and pharmaceutical industries, has been instrumental in a plot to commit genetic genocide against "inferior races". This racial supremacist plot allegedly began in the 1920s with the founding of the Averill Harriman- Prescott Bush funded Eugenics Research Office. Accused accomplices include Planned Parenthood, the Nazi German government, and in post-war America, neo-Nazi led research under the auspices of the CIA, National Science Foundation, and Center for Disease Control. It has also involved such environmentalist fronts as Zero Population Growth and conservative think-tanks such as the Manhattan Institute. It is currently backed by large corporations, prominently including Alcoa (the theory flouride, tested by the Nazis, is being used in the water supply to create a submissive population), and big pharmaceutical companies (especially those, like I.G. Farben, with Nazi pasts). These companies are believed to be involved in introducing toxic, potentially genocidal vaccines and sprays. One example is malathion, used recently in New York City and vicinity to (presumably) control the West Nile virus. For Lederman, the project of genocide through eugenics reaches its apogee in the Human Genome Project, designed to enable realization of the Nazi goal of eliminating inferior genetic castes through genetic profiling. Acoording to Lederman, "Following the Holocaust it was necessary to disguise Eugenics as something more politically acceptable. This was something, of course, accomplished through birth control, vaccinations, insect control sprays, and other thinly disguised modes of genocide. There is mounting evidence AIDS was one of these programs." While for Lederman, the Bushes meet Nazism at the intersection of genetics and big pharmaceutical companies, the website Conspiracy Planet sees the Bushes, through three generations, as active, if subterranean, Nazi ideologues. In this reality, the Bush family has been financing the Nazi cause through clandestine sources, including drug dealing.. The website, which calls itself "the Alternative News and history Network", hosts a regular "Bush Crime Family" channel, exploring supposed relationships between the Bushes, Nazi groups and organized crime. One of its conspiracy researchers, writing under the moniker King Felix, declares, "George W's grandfather Prescott Bush was among the chief American fundraisers for the Nazi Party in the 1930s and '40s. In return he was handsomely rewarded with plenty of financial opportunities from the Nazis helping to create the fortune and legacy that his son George inherited." On the other hand, for Richard Draheim, columnist for the Dallas Libertarian, the Bushes' represent a traditional Republican collusion of big business and big government. Specifically, Draheim sees in the Bush Dynasty a marriage between Wall Street and the oil industry and (despite the low-tax rhetoric), a conspiracy to impose high taxes to subsidize Bush family-connected businesses. "The Bush family fortune is old, and it comes from a century old alliance with the most powerful interests on Wall Street and in industry. Worse, a big part of Dubya's money comes from Grandfather Prescott Bush's alliance with the Nazis." Less diplomatically, Marie Vance and John Cappetini claim in syninfo.com: "The silver spoon in George W. Bush's mouth was bought and paid for by Nazi butchers, who yanked the fillings from dead Jew's mouths. The Bush mob/Bush international crime family was and is a bunch of Satan worshipping Nazis." Though space doesn?t permit, it wouldn't be tough at all to find several hundred more examples. Internet rants? Technologically amplified paranoia? Indeed. It's easy enough to tear apart the notion of a still active, century- long, racist-Nazi (with a capital N) conspiracy based on the science of genetics. Many racist ideologues do use rhetoric couched in the scientific (or more often pseudo-scientific) jargon of genetic determinism. Some racist ideologues do continue to advance schemes for sterilizing "undesirable" populations, all too similar to those of Nazi Germany. Most scientists, (including most molecular biologists), most birth-control and reproductive rights advocates, as well as most environmentalists and population control proponents, have nothing to do with them, following totally divergent and conflicting social and political agendas. Wild stretches? Yes. But wrong about any Bush-Nazi connection? Not really. Or, at least, not entirely. Beating Around the Bushes The following is a thumbnail sketch of the Bush family biography from the early 1900s to the 1950s, as culled from several recent mainstream Bush (George the Father and Junior) biographies, a canon including Lone Star Yankee by Herbert S. Parmet, First Son by Bill Minutaglio and W: The Revenge of the Bush Dynasty by Elizabeth Mitchell, as well as official family memoirs. Samuel Bush (George H.W.'s paternal grandfather) was a successful Midwestern entrepreneur who ran both a small Ohio railroad and the Buckeye Steel Castings Company. A man of vaguely populist leanings, despite his affluence, Bush helped frame Ohio's first worker's compensation laws and has been said to have been a Democrat, and "friendly with organized labor." His son Prescott Bush, after attending Yale in the 1910s, worked briefly in a small, family owned rubber company in Ohio. In the early '20s, he accepted an invitation from his new father-in-law George Herbert to join the Harriman brothers' investment, a high-flying international banking house. George Herbert Walker, father of Prescott?s wife Dorothy, was the founder of GH Walker and Co. investment bank in St. Louis. While Samuel Bush might be characterized as "petit-bourgeois," GH Walker was a man of great wealth. In addition to being a major power broker in the Midwest, Walker had close connections to the Eastern banking elite as well. By the early '20s, he maintained an estate in Kennebunkport, Maine, a mansion on Long Island, and a ten thousand-acre hunting preserve called Duncannon in South Carolina. At the urging of his friend, railroad magnate E.H. Harriman, father of Averill and Roland (Bunny) Harriman (classmates of Prescott Bush at Yale), Walker had come to New York to help the younger Harrimans run the Harriman investment bank. By the late 1920s, Walker had groomed his son-in-law to handle large parts of the bank?s investments, including its interests in the fledgling Columbia Broadcasting Network, and several European projects. By the early 1930s, Walker left daily operations of the Harriman bank. Bush stayed on throughout the 30s and 40s as a partner in the firm. By 1931, Harriman Investment had merged with the British-American bank Brown Brothers, becoming Brown Brothers Harriman. During the 1940s Bush, who had shed his father?s Democratic politics for his father-in-law?s Republicanism, became active in Connecticut electoral politics. He ran unsuccessfully for the U.S. Senate in 1950, before winning a seat in 1952. Bush served 12 years in the Senate, earning a record as a moderately liberal "Rockefeller Republican" and a supporter of civil rights legislation, and a reputation for being President Eisenhower?s golfing buddy. Trading With Enemies One could read through the bulk of mainstream Bush family biographies and find no mention of a significant 1942 event: That year the U.S. federal government, under the auspices of the office of the U.S Alien Property Custodian. seized the assets of the Union Banking Corporation, a subsidiary of Brown Brothers Harriman, under authority of the "Trading with the Enemy Act." Prescott Bush served on the board. An eclectic body of revisionist work, most originally available in book form (and most now "out of print"), has been dedicated to investigating the background of this historically excised event. Though largely ignored by established book reviewing media, mainstream print, and broadcast punditry, three books in particular have attempted to explore and document the historical background of the "Bush-Nazi" connection. These attempts to fill in the gaps left by mainstream historians have found new life on the web. The most frequently cited and circulated source of Bush-Nazi investigations/conspiranoia, George Bush-The Unauthorized Biography (a biography of George Herbert Walker Bush) by Webster Griffin Tarpley and Anton Chaitkin, published in 1992, while well-documented, is also the most suspect. The problem is that Tarpley and Chaitkin are colleagues of the political cult leader Lyndon LaRouche. Not surprisingly, they insist on overlaying otherwise solidly researched data with wildly speculative interpretations. The book, originally published by LaRouche's Executive Intelligence Review, though "out of print," is ubiquitous on the web, and freely used and quoted by Bush conspiranoia buffs of all persuasions. Tarpley and Chaitkin fill in important details of the period of Prescott Bush's involvement in international investment banking. They document W.A. Harriman Bank's European operations, and the roles of Herbert Walker, who joined as president and chief executive in November, 1919, and Prescott Bush. According to Tarpley and Chaitkin, the first major German connections made by the newly minted Harriman bank took place in 1920, when Averill Harriman announced plans to re-launch the dormant Hamburg- Amerikan shipping line. The German shipping line, said to be the world?s largest private line, had been confiscated by the U.S. government at the end of World War I. Harriman purchased it from the government at a fraction of its market value. According to the terms of the deal, the original German management would buy back the line from Harriman at its market value, with the Harriman Bank gaining rights to 50% of all business originating in Hamburg and complete control of all activities of the line in the U.S. Soon after, In 1922, Harriman and Walker set up a European headquarters in Berlin, forming a relationship with the Hamburg- based Warburg Bank. Through Warburg, Harriman began a series of investments during the mid-to-late 1920s in German industry and raw materials. During this period, Harriman also set up a New York bank called the Union Banking Corporation. This was designed, primarily, to handle funds supplied by the Bank von Handel en Scheepvaart, a Dutch bank owned by German industrialist Fritz Thyssen. By personal agreement between Averill Harriman and Thyssen, Union Ba nk would transfer funds back and forth between New York and the Thyssen interests. During the 1920s and ?30s, Thyssen accounted for much of Germany?s pig iron, universal plate, heavy plate, pipes and tubes, wire and explosives. In 1926, along with another Wall Street bank, Dillon-Read, Harriman helped establish the new German Steel Trust, also largely owned by Thyssen. By the mid-1930s, GST had become Germany?s largest industrial corporation. >From 1923 on, along with his industrial and financial activities, Thyssen was an instrumental early financial backer of a fledgling political group called the Nazi Party, extending a large credit line to the party through the Harriman banking subsidiary. (He admits this in a post-WW2 memoir entitled I Paid Hitler.) In January, 1931, the Harriman Bank merged with the British- American Brown Brothers' investment house to become Brown Brothers Harriman. By then, Herbert Walker had left full-time work at Harriman to devote himself to GH Walker &Co., but Prescott Bush stayed on with the Harrimans to become senior partner in the new firm. The consolidated Silesian Holding company (which included Prescott Bush as director) was another major German industrial trust that Brown Brothers Harriman partnered with in the 1930s. This was a complex of steel-making, coal-making and zinc-making operations in Germany and Poland. According to a U.S. government brief presented in 1946 at the Nuremburg war crimes tribunal, industrialist Friedrich Flick, owner of two-thirds of Silesian, was "a leading financial contributor to the Nazi Party from 1932 on and a member of the Circle of Friends of Himmler who contributed large sums to the Nazi SS." Silesian and United Steel Trust were the two primary suppliers of war material to the Nazi government throughout its arms build-up in the 1930s, and into the 1940s. US government documents also show that two other Harriman Bank affiliates, Wilhelm Cuno and Baron Rudolph von Schroder, directors of the Hamburg-Amerika line, were major contributors to the Nazi Party in its 1932 election campaign. Additionally, according to the Nye commission (a 1934 US Congressional investigation), The Hamburg- Amerika line was a primary conduit for the shipment of American guns to the Nazis. They also provided free passage to individuals going abroad for Nazi propaganda purposes, as well as subsidies for pro-Nazi newspapers and other Nazi propaganda materials throughout the 1930s, according to the Nye Report.. These activities continued until September, 1942, when the U.S. government ordered all property of the Hamburg-Amerika line seized under the Trading with the Enemy Act. Two months later, also under the authority of the Trading with the Enemy Act, the government issued Vesting Order No.248 seizing assets of the Union Banking Co. (approximately $4 million.) While the evidence amassed by Tarpley and Chaitkin in no way directly implicates Prescott Bush or Brown Brothers Harriman as Nazi supporters, a strong case is made for their complicity in aiding and abetting the Nazi cause for profit long after the nature of the Nazi regime became clear to any informed observer, and even after the US declaration of war against Germany. Unfortunately, not content with solid muckracking, Tarpley and Chaitkin insist on super-imposing their pet (entertaining but unsubstantiated, not to mention off-the-wall) conspiracy theory of US history, inspired by Lyndon LaRouche, leader of a radical left/right, right/left cult with so many political incarnations and reincarnations, it's spawned its own mini-industry of critic/conspiranoiaists. As a highbrow conspiracy theorist?s theorist, LaRouche puts poor John Birch and Bo Gritz not to mention Tom Clancy -- to shame. Indeed there are those who think posterity may yet judge him the grandest historical fictioneer of this era, surpassing Pynchon, Vidal, and DeLillo. His theory, as advanced by Tarpley and Chaitkin, involves linking the Bushes, Harrimans, and much, if not all, of the American elite to a several century old plot for world subjugation by a secret British-American cabal steeped in arcane lore, drug smuggling and pagan ritual. They attempt to trace the roots of this conspiracy to the collusion of British financiers and pro-Brit American Tories during the Revolutionary War and follow its machinations through two centuries of intrigue. As Tarpley and Chaitkin explain it: "Diehard pro-British families, known as Boston Brahmins, who had prospered in the ship transportation of rum and black slaves, regained power in Boston shortly after their British allies lost the Revolutionary war. In 1805 these cynical neo- pagan Tories succeeded in placing their representatives in the Hollis chair, parading publicly as liberal religionists called Unitarians." Thus commenced a secret war (which continues, two centuries later) between Tories and ?true American nationalists? like the Reverend Jedidiah Morse, the head of the Andover Academy, an institution set up to counter the British spies, atheists and criminals who had taken over Harvard. By 1840, when Jedidiah Morse's generation died out, the Andover nationalist movement was, say Chaikin and Tarpley, "crushed by New England's elite families, who were by then Britain's partners in the booming opium traffic." According to the authors, by the second half of the 19th century, Andover, though still ostensibly a Christian schoo,l had become (as had Yale University, the college of choice for Andover graduates) a front for occult-inspired Anglophile secret societies. These elite societies were dedicated to undermining American nationalism and replacing it with a secret government, run furtively by Anglo- American financiers. Though these cults did not fully prevail in the 19th century, as "national power was still precariously balanced between the imperial Anglo-American financiers and the heroic old-line nationalists who built America's railroads, steel and electric utilities," the "New Age Aristocrats" prevailed in the 20th century. Pivotal to that rise was Skull and Bones, the most formidable of these secret cults, which by the early 20th century had become the primary breeding ground of a new kind of American establishment, with imperial economic and political ambitions. "The 20th century," write Tarpley and Chaitkin, "owes much of its record of horrors to certain Anglophile American families which have employed Skull and Bones as a political recruiting agency, particularly the Harrimans, Whitneys, Vanderbilts, Rockefellers," and their lawyers, the Lords, Tafts, Bundys and Dulleses. Above all, they write, "Skull and Bones was dominated from 1913 onward by the circles of Averill Harriman, who succeeded in vanquishing traditional nationalists like Douglas McArthur." In addition to financial control, Tarpley anc Chaitkin claim Skull and Bones has exerted power in many other ways through politics (especially the CIA and Bush family), "environmentalist" organizations like the conservation, birth control and Zero Population Growth Movements (fronts for genocidal eugenics research). They even claim that would-be revolutionaries. such as the new left "Up Against the Wall Motherfuckers" (inspiration for the Yippies, but angrier), were furtively supported back in 1968 by McGeorge Bundy's Ford Foundation front ESSO (The East Side Service Organization) through the intermediary of none other than "former OSS operative, neo-Marxist philosopher Herbert Marcuse." Business As Usual Less flaky, The Secret War Against the Jews, by Mark Aarons and John Loftus, puts the Harriman Bank - Nazi connections in a wider, less conspiratorial (though far from innocent) context. The book, originally published in 1994 by St.Martin?s Press, is primarily focused on the relationship between Western intelligence agencies and the state of Israel, but it contains a very detailed chapter on U.S. corporate investment in Nazi Germany. Aaron and Loftus draw extensively on records of the Nye and Truman Senate committees, declassified intelligence and State Department documents, interviews with unnamed former intelligence operatives, and a rare interview conducted with former Supreme Court justice Arthur Goldberg shortly before his death. As a government attorney in the 1940s, Goldberg had extensively investigated and documented corporate ties to the German military-industrial complex, only to have his findings ignored and "buried" in State Department archives, a cover-up he blamed to his dying day on the Dulles Brothers, Allen and John Foster. Though the book has largely languished in semi-obscurity since its publication, public statements by Loftus (now president of the Florida Holocaust Museum) about the Bush family financial ties to Nazi Germany were widely circulated on the web during the 2000 election campaigns. Hopefully this will spur more conspiranoia-ists to actually study the book. According to The Secret War, Allen and John Foster Dulles, as young international finance specialists for the Sullivan and Cromwell legal firm in the 1920s, were pivotal advisors and agents for a "who's who" of major US. Corporations eager to get in on the bull market for German re-industrialization. The motivations behind these investors, which included Dupont, Alcoa, Standard Oil, General Motors, Chase Manhattan, GE, Ford and IBM, had less to do with ideology than money. In The Splendid Blonde Beast: Money, Law, and Genocide by Christopher Simpson, published in 1993, the most thoroughly investigated account yet of the period, these financial relationships are laid out in fairly exhaustive detail. According to Simpson, U.S.- German investment mania gripped the Roaring 20s financial elite. This mania was rooted in the 1919 Versailles agreements on reparations, which imposed payments of approximately $30 billion (about $600 billion in 2000 dollars) by the German government to other European countries over 30 years. By 1922, attempts to raise the money to pay reparations had driven the German economy into a deep crisis. For U.S. companies, this was a golden opportunity. John Foster Dulles masterminded a scheme wherein a consortium of banks and brokerage houses (among them the Harriman Bank, Chase Manhattan and Dillon Read) offered to loan U.S. dollars, through leading German banks and industrial firms, for the construction of factories, electrification and industrial plant. In turn, the German companies would issue millions of dollars worth of bonds and sell them to Dulles' clients for a discounted price. The U.S. banks would then turn around and sell the bonds "retail" to individual or small institutional investors at a hefty mark-up. The bonds helped jump-start German industry and, in fairly short order, provided the underpinning for German re-armament. For much of the 1930s, the German economy, sparked by the Nazi military build-up, stood out as one of the few bright investment opportunities in an internationally depressed economy. Some corporate executives (particularly Henry Ford, and top echelon DuPont executives) were sympathetic to Nazi and Fascist movements, publicly and financially supporting Hitler. Most, however, who engaged with Germany in the Nazi-era were probably motivated by profit, not ideology. They regarded the Nazis, Simpson believes, as a temporarily useful, if not entirely agreeable, "disciplinary" force, capable of maintaining economic stability and a safe investment climate. As a bonus, they were seen as a counter-weight to militant "Soviet inspired" labor and socialist movements. The probable zeitgeist of these financial high-flyers is perhaps best evoked by (current CNN News Executive Editor) Walter Isaacson and Evan Thomas in their 1988 study The Wise Men, a largely hagiographic profile of the post-World War Two foreign policy establishment that includes portraits of Averill Harriman and Robert Lovett, another Harriman bank director. As described by Isaacson and Thomas, the directors of Harriman Bank (Prescott Bush included) were less crypto- Nazi ideologues than characters out of The Great Gatsby, '20s wild kids thumbing their noses at such fuddy- duddy traditions as national borders and political moralism. As they write: "With the end of the war to end all wars, America quenched its yearning for a return to normalcy by retreating into isolation Wall Street, on the other hand, did nothing of the sort. Europe was industrially devastated and mired in debt. America was throbbing with revitalized factories. The situation was ripe for financiers interested in foreign investment and trade, internationalists who understood America?s ties to Europe. "While the rest of the country slept, a close-knit clique of Wall Street bankers and lawyers, most of whom had traveled through Europe as children met in the clubs of London, Paris and Berlin as friendly competitors putting together suitable investments for their firms. In a private and profit seeking capacity they were rebuilding a war- ravaged Europe in a manner as grandiose as any of these men would employ a world war later with the Marshall Plan." In Harriman, Isaacson and Thomas, see the prototype of the man without borders, the true pioneer elite globalist, the Elvis of the New World Order. "Harriman," they write, "would always harbor a belief that foes could be bargained with as easily as friends. Thus he had no qualms about entering into a shipping agreement with Germany before an armistice had been signed or a mining concession in the Soviet Union, even though the U.S. had spurned diplomatic relations with that country." What Isaacson and Thomas suggest here, and Aaron-Loftus and Simpson substantiate with more detail and in a far wider historical context, is that the relationships between Harriman Bank and other corporations and Nazi-era Germany need to be understood as part of a larger pattern. There is little evidence that the free-form meta- diplomatic modes of international financial deal making developed by Harriman, Bush and company in the 1920s and '30s signaled pro- Nazi or pro- fascist political ideology. However, it did help form a template for U.S. international finance and politics in which support for dictatorships, (financially in the '30s, financially and politically- militarily during the cold war) would become business as usual in U.S. foreign policy. One of the most interesting aspects of both the Simpson and the Aaron and Loftus books is their examination of how the private sector style of international affairs pioneered by Dulles, Harriman, Lovett and Bush in the '30s gradually metaphorphosed, during and after World War 2, into the official realpolitick of the U.S. government, often under the guidance of these same men. The ruling precepts of anti-communism and free trade that guided the international banking elite in the '30s in their dealings with Hitler would become the official policy through which the U.S. would support a wide variety of corporate-friendly dictators throughout the world, from the '50s to the present. A persuasive case can be made that investments by Brown Brothers Harriman and numerous other major U.S. corporations in Germany made the rise of Nazism possible. It's clear Harriman, Bush, Dulles and legions of the financial elite share a degree of (largely unacknowledged) responsibility for providing Hitler and the Nazis the wherewithal to launch World War Two and the Holocaust. However, it's an untenable leap to conclude that this banking elite exerted some sort of secret nefarious control over events of the 1930s, or that the rise of Nazism was not an unintended consequence of their own far shorter-sighted intentions. Those intentions involved using both German companies and unwary individual investors in their lucrative German bond investment scheme. Micro-conspiracies clearly planned to make money by pumping up German industry, including German armaments. For those micro-conspiracies, support for a compliant, pliable, big business friendly government capable of strong-arming labor and other anti-capitalist troublemakers was a matter of short-term expedience. "Blowback" (the title of another Simpson book) is the term Simpson uses to describe the unintended consequences. The Validity of Cranks Filling Cracks in the Historical Narrative There are sharp distinctions between the "Bush is a Nazi" vulgarizations of the conspiranoia-ists, and the documented corporate- Nazi connections delineated by Simpson or Aaron. Where one sees ideology, the other sees opportunism. Where one sees intention, the other sees unintended consequences. The theorists who see this historical episode not as evidence of Nazism but of business-as-usual are clearly the more sophisticated of the bunch, but this is small comfort. The results were (and are) the same. The vast majority of the Bush-Nazi conspiracy discourse is eccentric and clearly over-the-top. However, it is these web-based amateurs, and not our allegedly working professional journalists, who have kept alive a significant, largely ignored, body of evidence. This evidence is only partly about the Bushes. More significantly, it traces the origins of the cavalier, amoral relationship between American and global financial elites and genocidal dictatorships that has characterized U.S. policy for decades. At this stage, the radical media democracy thriving on the web, at least as evidenced by the Bush conspiranoia sites, is short on logic, investigative discipline and common sense, but long on guts and moxie. Unfortunately, Art Bell seems to be closer to the role model of DIY web muckrackers than I.F. Stone or Howard Zinn. Even so, at least partly because of the tireless circulation of facts, rumors, and speculations about "Bush Family Ties," dirty little secrets about the complicity of major American institutions in the rise of Nazism, buried for decades, have finally started emerging into mass consciousness. Despite generally supine treatment of the Bush family by mainstream media, there are signs that Prescott Bush's investment banking adventures of the '30s are coming under new scrutiny. A major two-part series on "The Rise of the Bush Family Dynasty" published in April 2001 by Michael Kranish in the Boston Globe, explores the Harriman Bank- German connection in some detail. The movement for reparations for Holocaust survivors has widened its focus. Previously focused on European banks laundering money stolen by the Nazis from German Jews, investigators have started looking also at US institutions. This process has exposed dealings by several major banks, including Chase Manhattan and JP Morgan. Chase Manhattan, in fact, publicly acknowledged culpability of its Paris branch in active collaboration with the Nazis in liquidating accounts of German Jews. In early 2001 Edwin Black published a widely publicized study of "IBM and the Holocaust" detailing how IBM's German division was instrumental in developing the Hollerith tabulators Nazis used to process concentration camp prisoners. This new wave of muckracking undoubtedly has sources besides the wild and wooly web. Still, it's quite likely that, without a touch of conspiranoia, mainstream media-maintained amnesia on these matters would have remained undisturbed. AN AFTER 9/11 ADDENDUM This piece was written before the events of 9/11/2001. Needless to say, the atrocities of that day, in addition to dramatically changing the political and cultural landscape, and provoking an open-ended "War Against Terrorism," have ushered in a new era in conspiranoia. At this very early stage, at least five major theories wholly or partially rejecting the official version of the attacks as the responsibility of Ossama BinLaden and Al Queda, have emerged, and gained currency on the web. The most plausable theory doesn?t claim direct Western/US involvement in the act. It simply claims that elements of the Bush Administration/CIA knew about the plan, but decided it would be politically advantageous not to stop it. Other versions involve Iraqi secret agents (a favorite of neo- conservatives), the Israeli Defense force, or domestic dissidents in the U.S. (mostly far right militias, but some claiming it was radical left anti-globalists). Finally, there are theories involving undefined rogue elements of U.S. intelligence or the military exploiting Middle Eastern fundamentalist assets. This is called "The Ossama Harvey Oswald theory." Mad as this last may seem, there is documented evidence that something nearly as grotesque has been planned at least once before in recent U.S. history. In his book, Body of Secrets: Anatomy of the Ultra- Secret National Security Agency, former ABC World News investigative reporter James Bamford details a plan by the US Joint Chiefs of Staff to launch terrorist activities against US people and property. The plot was put together in the early '60s, under the auspices of General Lyman Lemnitzer. The right wing extremist Lemnitzer was the powerful Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, inherited from the Eisenhower Administration by a displeased JFK. His brilliant notion was that these incidents (which might include bombings, hijackings of planes, even shooting down John Glenn?s Friendship 7 space capsule) could be blamed on Castro's Cuba. This would be used to galvanize U.S. public support for invading that island. Luckily, their plans were shot down by the administration. But the history of Operation Northwoods, as the plan was called, stands as a cautionary tale against considering anything "unthinkable." Whatever the merits (or lack thereof) of these conspiracy counter- narratives, it seems certain that the secrecy and sketchiness of government and mass media explanations about how the evil-doers were able to get into a position to terrorize the American population, will (and should) breed far more conspiranoia. Even for those of us who don't buy into any of the conspiracy arguments above, and believe that AlQueda was fully responsible and should be forcefully retaliated against, questions proliferate. For starters how involved has the U.S. been in training and supporting the growth of Islamic fundamentalist terrorism, not just (as is already well known) during the Soviet-Afghani conflict of the 80s, but long after in places like Bosnia via U.S. ?allies? like the Albanian Kosovo Liberation Army? To what extent has that semi-secret support undermined US domestic security? Any adequate history of the entanglements between U. S. foreign policy makers and the new breed of Islamo-Fascism the U.S. has helped spawn will likely find the same sort of reckless opportunism -- partly inspired by business and partly by geo-political considerations that have already been examined in the article. Only now, the "blowback" has reaches our shores and threatened the safety of U.S. civilians. As earlier, I see this as less a question of conscious design or plan than as the consequence of a chaotic set of short-term tactics motivated primarily by profit. But if it develops that the US is undergoing something akin to a real live fascist takeover under George W., I don't think that invalidates this analyses, except possibly for its failure to emphasize the fact that fascism can be the last refuge for capitalist opportunism, when it?s in crisis. It's still more about profit than ideology. Back to Current Issue _______________________________________________ Rad-Green mailing list Rad-Green at lists.econ.utah.edu To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/rad-green From debsian at pacbell.net Mon Jul 1 15:38:51 2002 From: debsian at pacbell.net (Michael Pugliese) Date: Mon, 01 Jul 2002 14:38:51 -0700 Subject: [R-G] The Indiscreet Charm of the Bush-Nazi Web Conspiranoids Message-ID: Heh, Lysander a few yrs. ago I found a copy of the Church Committee reports at a used book store. Been there done that... My motive, just like Chip Berlet's who knows this stuff better than anyone, is to get folks like you to use better sources (not the far right crap from the Liberrty Lobby's AFP) and methodology. Read lefties like Bill Domhoff and marxists like Nicos Poulantzas and Ralph Miliband. Find back issues of Jim O' Connor's neo- marxist journal, "Kapitalistate, " at an academic library. Michael Pugliese From debsian at pacbell.net Mon Jul 1 15:43:48 2002 From: debsian at pacbell.net (Michael Pugliese) Date: Mon, 01 Jul 2002 14:43:48 -0700 Subject: [R-G] THE ENEMY OF MY ENEMY IS NOT MY FRIEND: Message-ID: <1VSQFAXGCZTVP61GE2YID2WYTSNGVR.3d20cd14@oemcomputer> http://www.fiu.edu/~mizrachs/left-n-fascism.html The Left and the Far Right: Curious Bedfellows? The Left has been very serious in its critique of American foreign policy and its cynicism. The basis of that policy has been, "if you are an enemy of communism, you are my friend," which has led America into cooperation with a whole range of tyrannical, military- backed dictatorships. But we should be very careful about the wisdom of that statement, because those on the Left should take heed too. Not everyone who speaks out against "the government" and "the State" is on our side. Indeed, they may have an entirely different agenda, of a decidedly fascist bent. Despite the fact that they may make statements against "capital" or "the finance class" or whatever else, their real enemy is liberal democracy, which they hate with a greater passion than even the most determined Stalinist on the left. Now imagine this scenario. It's 1991, and you're at an anti-Persian Gulf "war" speakout. Someone gets up and starts blasting CIA involvement in the region and drug trafficking from the area, and everyone applauds. Then he starts saying things like "this is really the Zionists' war, fought for the Elders of Zion." Another man gets up and starts talking about the murderous policies of the IMF and World Bank in Middle East development, and the genocidal character of the war against Iraq. Some more applause. Then he follows up by saying how he sees "the hand of the Anglo- American cartel in all this." A third individual starts talking about the role of "capital" and how the war is a distraction from the S & L looters. A third round of applause. Then he starts talking about "international bankers" and the "Trilateralists" and their role in the war. At this point, you are severely confused. This war is probably about oil, the 'VietNam syndrome', maybe even Israel. But "the Elders of Zion?" What's going on? None of these three people can, in any charitable sense, be called 'anti-war' or 'anti-intervention.' They are not interested in institutional analyses of the 'military-industrial' complex or the complexities of State Department policy and the extension of American power. The first belongs to the Liberty Lobby, publishers of the Spotlight paper, known to be anti-Semitic and anti-communist. The second is a LaRouchite (follower of jailbird Lyndon LaRouche), who speaks within a conspiratorial framework of incredible paranoid depth. And the third belongs to the 'Populist' party, which claims to represent workers & farmers, but is really xenophobic, nativist, and racist. As Chip Berlet, a researcher of Right wing movements, has noted, all three of these groups have grown in strength recently. What is really scary, though, is that people on the Left have begun listening to their diatribes. They often talk about some of the same things - government complicity in drug trafficking, the role of the CIA and 'Shadow Government', even the JFK assassination - but with a decidedly different "take" on what's going on. Perhaps due to its marginalization within American politics, the democratic Left has tended to become interested in conspiracy theories, especially during the 1980s. We've all heard of them - October Surprise, Iran-Contra, JFK's assassination, the Samson Option, etc. - but we may not know that many of them have come from Rightwing sources, such as the Liberty Lobby's newspaper, in particular. Much of the Christic Institute's information in their "La Penca" case Avirgan v. Hull , which was filed by Daniel Sheehan to close down the 'secret team', came from a 'right-wing' military specialist, according to the affidavit. That source probably was Lt. Col. James "Bo" Gritz, a Vietnam vet whose adventures to rescue POWs and MIAs in southeast Asia probably provided the basis for the Rambo movies, or Air Force Col. Fletcher Prouty, who wrote in 1973 The Secret Team: The CIA and its allies in control of the U.S. and the world. Oliver Stone admits that Prouty, a former Pentagon 'insider,' was the basis for "X", his secretive informant, in the movie JFK. Unfortunately, Prouty and other CIA critics like Mark Lane, who recently defended the Spotlight against a libel suit, have begun to drift within the Liberty Lobby's orbit, with its theories about 'dual loyalty' and 'Jewish' control of American foreign policy. The Liberty Lobby recently got an award from Project Censored for its early reporting on the S & L crisis, and it was LaRouche's Executive Intelligence Review that released a lot of documents pertaining to October Surprise and Iran- Contra. Tony Avirgan and Martha Honey, the named plaintiffs in the Christic Institute's case, kept trying to get legal counsel Sheehan 'down to earth' by getting rid of right-wing conspiracy theories in his legal brief from sources such as Prevailing Winds' Guns and Drugs reader. Prevailing Winds is an anti-CIA group whose membership includes anti-Semite Eustace Mullins and Bo Gritz, and it claims that the CIA is really controlled by the Mossad and/or the KGB. In each of these cases, these right-wing groups were the first to break ground on stories that may be of extreme interest to the Left. But, in each case, the Left has to be very careful about some of the more fantastic conspiratorial assumptions offered by these groups, and stick to the facts. Liberty Lobby's founder Willis Carto is also connected to the Institute for Historical Review (IHR), a 'revisionist' group which tries to prove the Holocaust never happened. LaRouche's outfit regularly lambasts not just George Bush and the IMF, but the Anti- Defamation League, Cult Awareness Network, the British Monarchy, and the "Greenie Nazis," meaning environmentalists. The Populist Party uses bank failures in the Midwest and elsewhere to whip people up into an irrational frenzy, and it has connections to neo-Nazi groups like Posse Comitatus and the Identity movement, as well as the John Birch society. All three of these groups are active in promoting conspiratorial theories, some of which are of interest to the Left; but we must be wary of their true agendas. Right-wing radio personality Craig Hulet has quite an audience on left-leaning Pacifica radio when he criticizes the "corrupt government" of George Bush. Sadly, Hulet also talks frequently (off radio) to right-wing audiences about 'Z.O.G.,' the "Zionist Occupation Government," and how they control "most of the Left-wing groups in this country." Hulet is connected to Gritz and Carto, and other fascists who have tried to make coalitions with the Left in cynical ways. The Left's conspiratorial imagination took off once more after the release of Oliver Stone's movie JFK. We were interested in renewing our critique of covert intelligence and the shadowy spook games of the CIA. Sadly, some of Stone's information comes from an article by Medford Evans in the New American in 1967, in which Evans argued Lyndon Johnson and the 'American Establishment' engineered the assassination in the interests of Big Oil, Big Business, the CIA, the media cartel, and Big Finance. Evans has recently written that he enjoyed Stone's film, but has criticized Stone for saying it was a right-wing plot, and especially for implicating anti-Castro Cubans, the Mafia, and hawkish Vietnam anti- communists: in Evans' view, you can clearly see "international communism" at work in the assassination, a view echoed by some Birchers who think Oswald was getting orders from the KGB and Castro. Jim Garrison is the other major source of Stone's info, and while Garrison leaned toward right- wing forces being involved in the plot, he makes a curious effort to point out that his cast of villains - David Ferrie, Clay Shaw, etc. - are homosexuals and part of "some perverted subculture." Garrison is as interested in their moral depravity as he is in (curiously) covering up the role of the New Orleans mob... Mark Lane, who recently wrote Plausible Denial implicating the CIA and Watergate veteran E. Howard Hunt in the assassination, and was consulted for the film, recently acted as legal counsel for the Liberty Lobby, and admits getting some assistance from them for his theories. Lane and Sheehan are not the only lawyers on the Left to have defended some shady characters. Recently, former U.S. Attorney General Ramsey Clark has acted as legal defender for LaRouche's organization. Ramsey Clark, who was a vocal critic of the Gulf War and has spoken out on other issues (such as the L.A. riots), especially U.S. action in the Third World, may have drifted into the LaRouchians' ideological orbit, although he denies agreeing with their more extreme ideas. Other items of interest to the Left have suspicious connections. Seymour Hersh, who wrote in the Samson Option about the mysterious millionaire Robert Maxwell (who died in a suspicious 'boating accident' recently) and his role in obtaining nuclear weapons for Israel, may have gotten some leads from Liberty Lobby people as well. James Earl Ray, MLK Jr.'s assassin, has recently tried (after 20 years!) to revive the theory that he, like Oswald, was a patsy, and people should really be looking at the FBI and their involvement in a conspiracy to kill King. But Ray's new book which tries to find the "real murderers" has a laundary list of right- wing sources in its bibliography, including books by Willis Carto's Noontide Press. Returning to our little anti-Gulf War speakout, the moral of the story is : look behind the rhetoric. When a speaker blasts the "government," does he want a more democratic, just, and equal system? Is he against power and privilege, or does he just want his group in charge? Does he oppose unfair or unjust government policies, or is he more concerned with government promotion of 'race mixing'? When he starts complaining about "Zionism," does he want to see Israelis and Palestinians living together in peace and cooperation, or is he really talking about 'the Elders of Zion' and 'ZOG'? When he complains about "the war lobby," is he an anti-militarist who supports Third World autonomy in political and economic development (and opposes U.S. interference for that reason) or an anti-war pacifist, or is he really an isolationist and nationalist - like Charles Lindbergh, whose "America First" movement wanted us to stay out of opposing the Nazis during WW II, for political, not pacifistic, reasons. If the speaker talks highly of Malcolm X, is it because he wants black empowerment in the economic system, or is he someone who admires black separatism, and likes blacks who want to live apart ('race pride')? After he's done blasting the 'shadow government' and 'international finance,' ask him his attitudes about homosexuality, feminism, integration, freedom of expression, multiculturalism, the VietNam war, affirmative action, and social justice. You may be surprised (or frightened.) Does he feel we "betrayed our boys" in VietNam? Does he think the New World Order is to be "a one-world super-socialist State"? Does he think that one of America's greatest problems is immigration by non-European peoples, like David Duke or Pat Buchanan? Does he believe this is "a Christian nation, first and foremost"? Are his pet bugaboos the Trilateral Commission, the Bilderbergers, the Rockefellers & Rothschilds, the Council on Foreign Relations, etc.? If so, you may be dealing with a fascist nut. Many of these right- wingers have decided to play at being "wolves in sheep's clothing," and have infiltrated various Left coalitions, playing up (in a cynical way) supposed common agendas ("us against the center," in a way.) They also try and recruit among labor and the poor for their 'skinhead' legions. Fortunately, at least for the moment, the Far Right is even more marginal than the Left in this country. But the Left should not help them get one iota closer to power, because their racist, anti- Semitic, irrationally paranoid agenda could not be further from ours. If they start talking about crazy schemes to eliminate usury or purge 'dual loyalists,' run the other way! These days, as one political commentator has noted, everybody running for president is a populist and an outsider, from Pat Buchanan to Jerry Brown. The question is, what do they see as the Establishment against which they are tilting their lance? Is that "establishment" the dominance of government by corporate money and the wealthy classes, or do they mean the "establishment" of the welfare state, affirmative action, and 'liberal special interests' (read: ethnic groups) in Congress? In many cases, it is the latter. "Populist" movements in America have had a record of xenophobia, nativism, racism, and paranoia, crusading against Catholics, Jews, Freemasons, and southern European immigrants, as well as "big business" and "big banking." Anyone who understands ideology, and remembers the crowds at the rallies at Nuremberg and the size of the fascist mass movement in the 1930s, knows that not every 'popular' movement is the 'will of the people.' Even today, European racists like Le Pen play at being populists, by exploiting French patriotism and enthnocentrism. David Duke ran as the Populist Party candidate in 1988. The Left should remain wary of the right- wing brand of populism, because much of it still smacks of the way Hitler used to talk about his volkisch fatherland and the horrors of the "Peoples'" State in Cambodia. They should stick to their principles: the enemy of their enemies, in this case, is most assuredly not their friend. Steve Mizrach, aka Seeker1 Return to Politix From: Michael Pugliese To: NewPacifica at yahoogroups.com Date: Mon, 01 Jul 2002 13:09:03 - 0700 Subject: Re: THE ENEMY OF MY ENEMY IS NOT MY FRIEND >...Does Mr. Pugliese answer questions?... Heh, I do! A little background. On the Christic Institute, back around the summer of 89 or so, via some folks I worked with in the Jesse Jackson campaign, I spent a few weeks organizing a meeting with Father Bill Davis of the Christic Institute. Larry Bensky covered it. I still have the humongous Daniel Sheehan document submitted to the Courts on the Secret Team and the LaPenca bombing. Way too garbage in there from the likes of Liberty Lobby loon, L. Fletcher Prouty. (Sheehan, btw, more recently was a speaker a press conference on UFO's held at the National Press Club in D.C.) Along with reading magazines like Monthly Review and Socialist Review(then entitled, "Socialist Revolution, " some of the same folks like James Weinstein of In These Times were founders of SR) in my teenage days, I was radicalized by listening to KPFK esp. the Dorothy Healy Sunday show on KPFK. Under her mentoring and Blase Bonpane until I went to college at UCSC, where I was acive in the socialist-feminist group NAM that merged with DSOC later to produce DSA. (Which, I betcha makes me a tool of the Social Imperialist Bourgeoisie to some here? ;-) On Pacifica and the Left generally in AmeriKKKa, I grow more and more disheatened at the lack of knowledge and perspective by way too many more activist inclined types. Don't have the background to know the difference between COINTELPRO from Comintern. http://www.yale.edu/annals/ On covert action, the CIA and such, long ago I read such classics as the CIA Diary of Phil Agee, William Blum's vols., Cockburn & St.Clair's, "Whiteout, " , "Deep Politics and the Death of JFK, " read all the Gary Webb stuff too. What is true, in all that has been way overextended by the nuts on the far right and hard left. Just on the CIA-Drug Smuggling angle there is loads of shit on that found on far right lists like American Patriot Friends Network. Way more Amerikkkans listen to and read that swill than all the Pacifica listeners. Michael Pugliese From LAMZ at sympatico.ca Mon Jul 1 15:46:19 2002 From: LAMZ at sympatico.ca (Lysander Zimmerman) Date: Mon, 1 Jul 2002 17:46:19 -0400 Subject: [R-G] The Indiscreet Charm of the Bush-Nazi Web Conspiranoids References: Message-ID: <003401c22148$bc516cd0$33378d18@Indy1> Okay.....so you do agree that the elite frequently turn to secret black ops and conspiracies to maintain the class structures? If so, I'm sorry for jumping on you. I'm just sick and tired of hearing the erroneous and baseless attack "you're just a paranoid conspiratorialist" whenever I discuss true government/corporate/military conspiracies. I agree that we need more left-wing sources on this stuff but contemporaries like Chomsky are fast asleep right now -- just when we need them most. ----- Original Message ----- From: "Michael Pugliese" To: Sent: Monday, July 01, 2002 5:38 PM Subject: Re:[R-G] The Indiscreet Charm of the Bush-Nazi Web Conspiranoids > Heh, Lysander a few yrs. ago I found a copy of the Church Committee > reports at a used book store. Been there done that... > My motive, just like Chip Berlet's who knows this stuff better than > anyone, is to get folks like you to use better sources (not the far > right crap from the Liberrty Lobby's AFP) > and methodology. Read lefties like Bill Domhoff and marxists like Nicos > Poulantzas and Ralph Miliband. Find back issues of Jim O' Connor's neo- > marxist journal, "Kapitalistate, " at an academic library. > Michael Pugliese > > > > > _______________________________________________ > Rad-Green mailing list > Rad-Green at lists.econ.utah.edu > To change your options or unsubscribe go to: > http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/rad-green > From debsian at pacbell.net Mon Jul 1 15:58:53 2002 From: debsian at pacbell.net (Michael Pugliese) Date: Mon, 01 Jul 2002 14:58:53 -0700 Subject: [R-G] Re; Chemtrails Message-ID: AKA Contrails. Jeesh, Lysander you believe Dr.Len Horowitz at tetrahedron about anything? The Man has no credibility on HIV, Anthrax, nada. http://www.centrexnews.com/ is full of Far Right Crap from LaRouche, Anthony Sutton (author of, "Wall St. and the Bolshevik Revolution."), John Birchers AND Chossudovsky and Jared Israel. Michael Pugliese Stop this nonsense! Tired of seeing IMC go off the deep end 11:05am Tue Jun 25 '02 comment#1823 I see this crap up here, and I despair about the future of Indymedia. IMC-Hamilton and IMC-Portland have been transformed into forums for disciples of Art Bell, Mike Ruppert, and other conspiracy hucksters. Whatever happened to doing solid, grassroots reports from our communities? Why in the HELL is IMC-Hamilton doing the "chemtrails" thing? Why aren't people in Hamilton putting a halt to this nonsense? There are enough terrible problems on this tattered planet of ours without having to invent new paranoid conspiracies about secret government chemical-spraying operations. Enough! From debsian at pacbell.net Mon Jul 1 16:08:50 2002 From: debsian at pacbell.net (Michael Pugliese) Date: Mon, 01 Jul 2002 15:08:50 -0700 Subject: [R-G] Crank Dot Net | September 11 Message-ID: http://www.crank.net/911.html From mstainsby at tao.ca Mon Jul 1 16:26:22 2002 From: mstainsby at tao.ca (Macdonald Stainsby) Date: Mon, 01 Jul 2002 15:26:22 -0700 Subject: [R-G] Re; Chemtrails References: Message-ID: <011f01c2214e$547c6780$291f5318@vc.shawcable.net> ----- Original Message ----- From: "Michael Pugliese" >Why in the HELL is IMC-Hamilton doing the "chemtrails" > thing? Why aren't people in Hamilton putting a halt to this nonsense? It's always more than curious how those who do not like the nasty aspects of digging in behind the "acceptable" issues always call on others to censor those who won't excersize such "self-restraint". Indymedia operates on a no-censorship policy, and you would be wise not make calls for such. Remember, Rad Green doesn't operate on the same policy. Lysander is very welcome here, and is an active member of the radical community on the Eastern side of the country I get to see far too rarely. A great disappointment to me on my last trip out East was being unable to find him and hoist a pint. He didn't lose any of his nerve to speakout after 9-11, something very few of us can say. Macdonald From LAMZ at sympatico.ca Mon Jul 1 22:59:11 2002 From: LAMZ at sympatico.ca (Lysander Zimmerman) Date: Tue, 2 Jul 2002 00:59:11 -0400 Subject: [R-G] Re; Chemtrails References: Message-ID: <000f01c22185$346fbbe0$33378d18@Indy1> I can't believe that you lump all of these people together. You dismiss people WAY TOO EASILY!!! LaRouche is an idiot, Chossudovsky and Israel are NOT. Their work is thousands of times more intelligent and documented then the crap that you have been posting in the last few days. As for Horowitz, I don't necesarily "believe" him, I just mentioned his theory because many people do belive what he says about chemtrails. There are plenty of historical precedents to make his story sound believable. Great comment you chose to post!! (NOT!) That comment was the LEAST intelligent one that went up to either the Hamilton or Portland posts. People are too quick at launching baseless attacks against well-documented articles. Skepticism, an open mind, a knowledge of history, and truthful questioning are required to get to the bottom of the chemtrail mystery....not baseless attacks. One thing is for sure in my mind, chemtrails ARE real and the article gives plenty of evidence for a joint geoengineering/HAARP project being carried out. Read ALL of the links before you come to any "conclusions". READ THE DAMN EVIDENCE FOR GOD'S SAKE!! IT'S ALL THERE: http://hamilton.indymedia.org:8081/front.php3?article_id=1793 http://portland.indymedia.org:8081/front.php3?article_id=13240 I'm posting more video soon (lowbandwith versions of the existing clips are going up tonight). "First they ignore you. Then they laugh at you. Then they fight you. Then you win." - Gandhi ----- Original Message ----- From: "Michael Pugliese" To: Sent: Monday, July 01, 2002 5:58 PM Subject: [R-G] Re; Chemtrails > AKA Contrails. > Jeesh, Lysander you believe Dr.Len Horowitz at tetrahedron > about anything? The Man has no credibility on HIV, Anthrax, nada. > http://www.centrexnews.com/ is full of Far Right Crap from LaRouche, > Anthony Sutton (author of, "Wall St. and the Bolshevik Revolution."), > John Birchers AND Chossudovsky and Jared Israel. > Michael Pugliese > > Stop this nonsense! > Tired of seeing IMC go off the deep end 11:05am Tue Jun 25 '02 > comment#1823 > > I see this crap up here, and I despair about the future of Indymedia. > IMC-Hamilton and IMC-Portland have been transformed into forums for > disciples of Art Bell, Mike Ruppert, and other conspiracy hucksters. > Whatever happened to doing solid, grassroots reports from our > communities? Why in the HELL is IMC-Hamilton doing the "chemtrails" > thing? Why aren't people in Hamilton putting a halt to this nonsense? > > There are enough terrible problems on this tattered planet of ours > without having to invent new paranoid conspiracies about secret > government chemical-spraying operations. > > Enough! > > > > > > _______________________________________________ > Rad-Green mailing list > Rad-Green at lists.econ.utah.edu > To change your options or unsubscribe go to: > http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/rad-green > From bobenoch at shaw.ca Mon Jul 1 23:20:36 2002 From: bobenoch at shaw.ca (Bob Enoch) Date: Mon, 01 Jul 2002 23:20:36 -0600 Subject: [R-G] The Indiscreet Charm of the Bush-Nazi Web Conspiranoids References: <003401c22148$bc516cd0$33378d18@Indy1> Message-ID: <002501bfe3e5$3bbcad20$61474d18@vf.shawcable.net> Michael Pugliesi is very wise to stick to the drill for dealing with 9/11 "conspiracists" First, wag your head in an avuncular fashion, smile sadly, and radiate pity for the mis-guided..... Then associate the offending idea with as wide a range of neo-nazis as possible... toss in a homorous reference to Mulder, and with a bit of luck, you can bail without it being noticed that you haven't addressed any of the evidence at all, merely savaged those reporting it. And if you are really slick, you can make it seem like Marx and Lenin would agree with you as a matter of course.Neat trick, that. At all costs, refuse to be drawn into a discussion of the performance of USAF and FAA and NORAD on the day. Or how the officer responsible for this "defeat" was made Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff the week following. I live in fading hope that just one of those who speak so surely to us from such a great height, chiding us for our credulity, will actually honor us with an explanation of those matters.....If it is so simple an explanation, it will only take a moment of your time to set us all straight. I, for one, would be pleased to be convinced as Michael seems to be , that our enemy lacks the imagination, or the will, or the means to carry out such a global coup. Perhaps he knows, or fears, that too much reflection on the actual events of 9/11 might lead to the opposite conclusion. So, by all means talk about Lynden Larouche, and UFOs. You are on safe, reassuring ground there. Bob From LAMZ at sympatico.ca Mon Jul 1 23:20:44 2002 From: LAMZ at sympatico.ca (Lysander Zimmerman) Date: Tue, 2 Jul 2002 01:20:44 -0400 Subject: [R-G] By the way.... [Re: Chemtrails] References: <000f01c22185$346fbbe0$33378d18@Indy1> Message-ID: <004901c22188$3751ece0$33378d18@Indy1> .....I witnessed 7 high-flying jets leave cloud-forming "contrails" within 40 minutes this afternoon. I videotaped 4 of them in 20 minutes (my battery went dead). These aren't civilian aircraft and they're not up there doing aerial mapping. Read the Livermore research by Cadeira and Teller....then read the patents....then read this: http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2001/01/15/archive/main264362.shtml Some insane project is being carried out in secret and it wouldn't be the first time. Here's one of the better comments posted to the IMC Hamilton chemtrail article: << Nuclear weapons by Rockman comment#1852 I assume you all think that nuclear weapons were developed with full disclosure and complete knowledge of the risks, no conspiracies there... Read "The Plutonium Files" by Eileen Welsome, a chronicle of the development of nuclear weapons and the testing (in secret) of plutonium on thousands of Americans in an attempt to discover the effects on the human body. It was decades before these tests were publicly acknowledged by the government and longer still till the people involved found out the truth about their mysterious illnesses. The book won many awards. Whether you want to believe it or not, there ARE conspiracies. And eventually, through the hard work of dedicated investigative reporters and the open-mindedness of their supporters, these stories DO get broken. Discounting stories off hand because they sound outlandish is NOT logical or reasonable. Look at the facts for anything, or else we you will be ruled by your preconceptions. I'm not saying chemtrails are real or not, but it deserves a decent look, even if it sounds "nutty". >> ----- Original Message ----- From: "Lysander Zimmerman" To: Sent: Tuesday, July 02, 2002 12:59 AM Subject: Re: [R-G] Re; Chemtrails > > I can't believe that you lump all of these people together. You dismiss > people WAY TOO EASILY!!! LaRouche is an idiot, Chossudovsky and Israel are > NOT. Their work is thousands of times more intelligent and documented then > the crap that you have been posting in the last few days. > > As for Horowitz, I don't necesarily "believe" him, I just mentioned his > theory because many people do belive what he says about chemtrails. There > are plenty of historical precedents to make his story sound believable. > > Great comment you chose to post!! (NOT!) That comment was the LEAST > intelligent one that went up to either the Hamilton or Portland posts. > People are too quick at launching baseless attacks against well-documented > articles. Skepticism, an open mind, a knowledge of history, and truthful > questioning are required to get to the bottom of the chemtrail > mystery....not baseless attacks. > > One thing is for sure in my mind, chemtrails ARE real and the article gives > plenty of evidence for a joint geoengineering/HAARP project being carried > out. Read ALL of the links before you come to any "conclusions". > > READ THE DAMN EVIDENCE FOR GOD'S SAKE!! IT'S ALL THERE: > http://hamilton.indymedia.org:8081/front.php3?article_id=1793 > http://portland.indymedia.org:8081/front.php3?article_id=13240 > > I'm posting more video soon (lowbandwith versions of the existing clips are > going up tonight). > > > > > > > "First they ignore you. > Then they laugh at you. > Then they fight you. > Then you win." > > - Gandhi > > > > ----- Original Message ----- > From: "Michael Pugliese" > To: > Sent: Monday, July 01, 2002 5:58 PM > Subject: [R-G] Re; Chemtrails > > > > AKA Contrails. > > Jeesh, Lysander you believe Dr.Len Horowitz at tetrahedron > > about anything? The Man has no credibility on HIV, Anthrax, nada. > > http://www.centrexnews.com/ is full of Far Right Crap from LaRouche, > > Anthony Sutton (author of, "Wall St. and the Bolshevik Revolution."), > > John Birchers AND Chossudovsky and Jared Israel. > > Michael Pugliese > > > > Stop this nonsense! > > Tired of seeing IMC go off the deep end 11:05am Tue Jun 25 '02 > > comment#1823 > > > > I see this crap up here, and I despair about the future of Indymedia. > > IMC-Hamilton and IMC-Portland have been transformed into forums for > > disciples of Art Bell, Mike Ruppert, and other conspiracy hucksters. > > Whatever happened to doing solid, grassroots reports from our > > communities? Why in the HELL is IMC-Hamilton doing the "chemtrails" > > thing? Why aren't people in Hamilton putting a halt to this nonsense? > > > > There are enough terrible problems on this tattered planet of ours > > without having to invent new paranoid conspiracies about secret > > government chemical-spraying operations. > > > > Enough! > > > > > > > > > > > > _______________________________________________ > > Rad-Green mailing list > > Rad-Green at lists.econ.utah.edu > > To change your options or unsubscribe go to: > > http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/rad-green > > > > > > _______________________________________________ > Rad-Green mailing list > Rad-Green at lists.econ.utah.edu > To change your options or unsubscribe go to: > http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/rad-green From mstainsby at tao.ca Tue Jul 2 00:09:27 2002 From: mstainsby at tao.ca (Macdonald Stainsby) Date: Mon, 01 Jul 2002 23:09:27 -0700 Subject: [R-G] The Indiscreet Charm of the Bush-Nazi Web Conspiranoids References: <003401c22148$bc516cd0$33378d18@Indy1> <002501bfe3e5$3bbcad20$61474d18@vf.shawcable.net> Message-ID: <001f01c2218f$06401c60$291f5318@vc.shawcable.net> ----- Original Message ----- From: "Bob Enoch" Excellent stuff, Bob. You forgot to mention how we are to chide one another to make sure we stay "credible". Lee Harvey Oswald shot Kennedy, remember? Macdonald From mstainsby at tao.ca Tue Jul 2 02:05:17 2002 From: mstainsby at tao.ca (Macdonald Stainsby) Date: Tue, 02 Jul 2002 01:05:17 -0700 Subject: [R-G] Afghans Say U.S. Aircraft Attacked Wedding, Killing 40 Message-ID: <012a01c2219f$34306a20$291f5318@vc.shawcable.net> AP. 1 July 2002. Afghans Say U.S. Aircraft Attacked Wedding, Killing 40. BAGRAM -- U.S. aircraft attacked a village Monday while a wedding was under way, killing and injuring scores, witnesses and officials said. Bismullah, communications chief of Uruzgan province where the attack occurred, said Afghans were firing weapons in the area during the wedding as is common in rural Afghanistan. He said U.S. planes attacked, killing about 40 people and injuring 70. In the southern city of Kandahar, where many of the victims were taken, Afghans said the incident occurred in the village of Kakarak in Uruzgan province, where special forces and other coalition troops are searching for al-Qaida and Taliban fugitives. Kakarak is about 175 miles southwest of Kabul. They said the attack began about 2 a.m. and lasted for about two hours. A nurse at the Kandahar hospital, Sher Mohammed, said he heard that about 120 people were killed. In Washington, a Pentagon spokesman said a coalition air reconnaissance patrol that was flying over Uruzgan province reported coming under anti-aircraft artillery fire. Other coalition aircraft opened fire on the target and at least one bomb went astray. The official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said it was not immediately clear where the errant bomb hit. The official had no other details, including the kind of U.S. aircraft that launched the errant bomb. In Kandahar, one survivor, Abdul Qayyum, told reporters at the Mir Wais Hospital that the Americans came to the area demanding to know "who fired on the helicopters." "I said 'I don't know' and one of the soldiers wanted to tie my hands but someone said he is an old man and out of the respect they didn't," he said. Afghans often fire weapons during weddings in celebration. Hospital officials said a number of wounded were being brought to Kandahar. Most of the dead and injured were women and children, they said. In Kandahar, a 6-year-old girl was brought to the hospital still wearing her party dress. She was injured, and villagers said all members of her family were killed. Another injured child, 7-year-old Malika, lost her mother, father, one brother and one sister, according to neighbors who brought her to the hospital. The injured also included Haji Mohammed Anwar, a friend of President Hamid Karzai and one of the first prominent local figures who rose up against the Taliban. "We have many children who are injured and who have no family," nurse Mohammed Nadir said. "Their families are gone. The villagers brought these children and they have no parents. Everyone says that their parents are dead." ------------------------------------------- Macdonald Stainsby http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/rad-green http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/leninist-international -- In the contradiction lies the hope. --Bertholt Brecht From nestorgoro at fibertel.com.ar Tue Jul 2 06:51:00 2002 From: nestorgoro at fibertel.com.ar (Nestor Gorojovsky) Date: Tue, 2 Jul 2002 09:51:00 -0300 Subject: [R-G] Help, please! Message-ID: <3D217784.30060.6CF724@localhost> Dear Cdes., I have been on the "nomail" condition for some months. Today, I begun to get a lot of unexpected mail from the list. Could the moderator help me by returning to the "nomail" condition? Thanks, N?stor Miguel Gorojovsky nestorgoro at fibertel.com.ar ********************************************************************** * Compa?eros del exercito de los Andes. ...La guerra se la tenemos de hacer del modo que podamos: sino tenemos dinero, carne y un pedazo de tabaco no nos tiene de faltar: cuando se acaben los vestuarios, nos vestiremos con la bayetilla que nos trabajen nuestras mugeres, y sino andaremos en pelota como nuestros paisanos los indios: seamos libres, y lo dem?s no importa nada... Jose de San Mart?n, 27 de julio de 1819. ********************************************************************** * ****** From hunterbadbear at earthlink.net Tue Jul 2 11:21:53 2002 From: hunterbadbear at earthlink.net (Hunter Gray) Date: Tue, 2 Jul 2002 11:21:53 -0600 Subject: [R-G] Anglo bigotry flares openly in Arizona fire tragedy Message-ID: <001b01c221ec$f74ef2e0$ca70fa43@intel> Note by Hunterbear: The predominately Anglo border-towns in Southwestern Indian country -- like most of their Western counterparts and many others elsewhere in the United States -- are anti-Indian as hell [and anti-Chicano, anti-Black, anti-Asian etc.] Not all the whites are bigots by any means -- but many certainly are for sure. If the prejudice/discrimination in these hostile settings isn't out and running already, it usually doesn't take much to stimulate its poisonous flow. Meanwhile, in this colossal tragedy [where more fire damage has now occurred on Apacheland than off-reservation], An Apache accused of starting one fire is in jail at Flagstaff; an Anglo woman strongly suspected of starting the other fire is still free. Conservatives across the West are now blaming environmentalists for enabling serious fire conditions -- which is demagogic and blatantly self-serving as well as being a pure damn lie. There are some very real reasons why the fires exploded and made their devastating get-away. Among other things, see -- if you haven't -- my recent [June 23] post on the matter: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Redbadbear/message/4692 And, before too long, it may well be time for Native economic boycotts of some of these border-towns. Hunter [Hunterbear] Arizona Fire Scars Apache-White Relations By MICHAEL JANOFSKY with NICK MADIGAN July 2, 2002 http://www.nytimes.com/2002/07/02/national/02FIRE.html?tntemail0 CIBECUE, Ariz., July 1 - On the first of every month, Bernice Caddo cashes her Social Security check and heads 35 miles north to Show Low to shop for food, clothing and other family needs. Today, Ms. Caddo decided not to go. She was frightened, she said, and many other members of the White Mountain Apache living here were, too. "Maybe I'll go in a few weeks, after things calm down," she said. "But not now." Ms. Caddo, 61, and the others said they feared hatred and retribution from white communities for the act of one Apache, Leonard Gregg, 29, a contract firefighter who was arrested on Sunday and charged with starting a fire that converged with a smaller one and grew into the largest wildfire in Arizona history. Known as the Rodeo-Chediski fire, it has consumed more than 467,000 acres and is only 45 percent contained. Hot, dry conditions almost guarantee that the fire will burn at least a week more. The blaze has caused economic devastation across an area famous for hunting, fishing and scenic beauty, and it has not discriminated. Show Low and other communities north of here, mostly populated by whites, have lost more than 420 homes. The Apache have lost pine forests that supported a timber industry employing tribe members. But as Mr. Gregg awaits a court appearance on Wednesday in Flagstaff to enter a plea, psychological devastation is evident as well. Here in Cibecue, home to 2,000 Apaches, it has taken the form of fear, anxiety and even anger. Since Mr. Gregg was arrested for starting the Rodeo fire, Apaches say their northern neighbors have shown little sympathy for their losses, and rumors are spreading across Cibecue that Apaches are unwelcome in white communities and that restaurants will not serve them. "This has been there a long time," Belinda Colelay, 23, a teacher's assistant, said of years of friction between the whites to the north and the Apaches. "Now it's only going to get worse. Now they have a reason to hate us; they don't have to look for excuses. Leonard gave them one." Whether or not the rumors are true, Ms. Colelay and others say they feel growing enmity from residents of Show Low and other towns. Ms. Colelay said she and friends recently waited 45 minutes at an empty Show Low fast-food restaurant before someone took their order. But just the perception of discord has convinced many Apaches that they have to change their lives. They no longer feel comfortable, they said, driving to Show Low to shop or see a movie. Now, they said, they will drive 60 mountainous miles south to Globe. "Show Low is going to direct their anger at us," said Richard Collateta, 39, who said he had Apache friends who recently got into parking-lot fights with whites in Show Low. "Look, I understand it. If they say something to me, I say something to them. It turns into a fight. I don't know how long it's going to take to cool things down, but we're not going to Show Low anymore." To some whites in Show Low, the largest of the white communities north of the Apaches, the change is understandable. David Marley, 46, a plumber who has lived in Show Low for eight years, acknowledged mutual resentment, but suggested it was stronger on the part of the Apaches. "The Native American tribes have a large amount of resentment toward those who are not of the tribe," Mr. Marley said. "They go to a bar and they keep to themselves." Mr. Marley said he had stopped going to his favorite bar and dance hall, the Lion's Den, in Pinetop a few miles southeast of Show Low, "because a lot of the Native Americans go there and it's hard for the white people to have fun." Kelvin Beach, 59, a plumbing contractor whose house in Linden was saved, although barely, said: "A lot of people are upset that it was started by one of the Indians. They're the first ones crying about how their timber industry is destroyed." For many Apaches, the feelings of fear and anger are heightened by a sense of judicial betrayal. The authorities investigating the cause of both fires said they had interest in Valinda Jo Elliott, 31, a white woman who became lost while hiking and is believed to have set the smaller blaze, the Chediski, by lighting underbrush to gain the attention of a passing helicopter. So far, no one has been charged in the Chediski fire, which burned west of the Rodeo one in an area of thick pines. Even though the circumstances were different - prosecutors said Mr. Gregg started the fire to earn money as a contract firefighter, and he all but admitted his guilt in court on Sunday - it did not make sense to many Apaches that he was in a Flagstaff jail and Ms. Elliott remained free. "That's not equal justice," said Enoch Lupe, 50. "That lady burned all our timber. She also burned sacred Indian sites. We say, `Who did this?' We hear, `It was a white lady.' So here there is blame for everybody. But only one person is in jail." Ms. Caddo said: "One Apache. One white. The way I look at it is, they're equal. So no one should say anything against each other." Mr. Marley, the Show Low plumber, said the Apache were using the two incidents as an excuse to charge racism. Not that any Apache was willing to exonerate Mr. Gregg, who was being held in a Coconino County jail. He was routinely derided by residents here as stupid and selfish for trying to solve his financial problems through fire. Many said he had deprived the tribe of its most valuable asset: timber from forests the Indians regard as sacred. As a result, the town's lumber mill has closed, costing hundreds of Apaches their jobs and adding to a tribal unemployment rate already over 60 percent. "Sure, we're angry at him," said Mr. Collateta, once a logger and avid hunter who now hunts only for work as an auto mechanic. "If a lightning bolt had struck, then it would have been different. But for him to start the fire, just to make some money, that's ridiculous." Hunter Gray [Hunterbear] www.hunterbear.org (strawberry socialism) Protected by Na?shdo?i?ba?i? From farmelantj at juno.com Tue Jul 2 07:00:47 2002 From: farmelantj at juno.com (Jim Farmelant) Date: Tue, 2 Jul 2002 09:00:47 -0400 Subject: [R-G] Re: [L-I] Help, please! Message-ID: <20020702.090048.-68137885.0.farmelantj@juno.com> Hans Ehrbar has moved all of these lists to a new computer, but unfortunately, he was unable to transfer all of the subscription options for each list member to the new computer, so those apparently all have to be reset. Jim F. On Tue, 2 Jul 2002 09:51:00 -0300 "Nestor Gorojovsky" writes: > Dear Cdes., > > I have been on the "nomail" condition for some months. Today, I > begun > to get a lot of unexpected mail from the list. Could the moderator > help me by returning to the "nomail" condition? > > Thanks, > N?stor Miguel Gorojovsky > nestorgoro at fibertel.com.ar > > ********************************************************************** > * > > Compa?eros del exercito de los Andes. > > ...La guerra se la tenemos de hacer del modo que podamos: > sino tenemos dinero, carne y un pedazo de tabaco no nos > tiene de faltar: cuando se acaben los vestuarios, nos > vestiremos con la bayetilla que nos trabajen nuestras mugeres, > y sino andaremos en pelota como nuestros paisanos los indios: > seamos libres, y lo dem?s no importa nada... > > Jose de San Mart?n, 27 de julio de 1819. > > ********************************************************************** > * > ****** > > > _______________________________________________ > Leninist-International mailing list > Leninist-International at lists.econ.utah.edu > To change your options or unsubscribe go to: > http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/leninist-international ________________________________________________________________ GET INTERNET ACCESS FROM JUNO! Juno offers FREE or PREMIUM Internet access for less! Join Juno today! For your FREE software, visit: http://dl.www.juno.com/get/web/. From mstainsby at shaw.ca Tue Jul 2 11:44:36 2002 From: mstainsby at shaw.ca (Mac Stainsby) Date: Tue, 02 Jul 2002 10:44:36 -0700 Subject: [R-G] Re: [L-I] Help, please! References: <20020702.090048.-68137885.0.farmelantj@juno.com> Message-ID: <001c01c221f0$225bbba0$291f5318@vc.shawcable.net> Jim is right.... anyone who is experiencing this problem, please contact me offlist and we'll fix it. Macdonald ----- Original Message ----- From: "Jim Farmelant" To: Cc: ; ; Sent: Tuesday, July 02, 2002 6:00 AM Subject: [R-G] Re: [L-I] Help, please! > Hans Ehrbar has moved all of these lists to a new computer, > but unfortunately, he was unable to transfer all of the > subscription options for each list member to the new > computer, so those apparently all have to be reset. > > Jim F. > > On Tue, 2 Jul 2002 09:51:00 -0300 "Nestor Gorojovsky" > writes: > > Dear Cdes., > > > > I have been on the "nomail" condition for some months. Today, I > > begun > > to get a lot of unexpected mail from the list. Could the moderator > > help me by returning to the "nomail" condition? > > > > Thanks, > > N?stor Miguel Gorojovsky > > nestorgoro at fibertel.com.ar > > > > ********************************************************************** > > * > > > > Compa?eros del exercito de los Andes. > > > > ...La guerra se la tenemos de hacer del modo que podamos: > > sino tenemos dinero, carne y un pedazo de tabaco no nos > > tiene de faltar: cuando se acaben los vestuarios, nos > > vestiremos con la bayetilla que nos trabajen nuestras mugeres, > > y sino andaremos en pelota como nuestros paisanos los indios: > > seamos libres, y lo dem?s no importa nada... > > > > Jose de San Mart?n, 27 de julio de 1819. > > > > ********************************************************************** > > * > > ****** > > > > > > _______________________________________________ > > Leninist-International mailing list > > Leninist-International at lists.econ.utah.edu > > To change your options or unsubscribe go to: > > http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/leninist-international > > > ________________________________________________________________ > GET INTERNET ACCESS FROM JUNO! > Juno offers FREE or PREMIUM Internet access for less! > Join Juno today! For your FREE software, visit: > http://dl.www.juno.com/get/web/. > > _______________________________________________ > Rad-Green mailing list > Rad-Green at lists.econ.utah.edu > To change your options or unsubscribe go to: > http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/rad-green From debsian at pacbell.net Tue Jul 2 15:14:22 2002 From: debsian at pacbell.net (Michael Pugliese) Date: Tue, 02 Jul 2002 14:14:22 -0700 Subject: [R-G] 9/11 Conspiracism and the Left Message-ID: <764WOKIHUQOJWB951NJ3MGHG75E9ZU.3d2217ae@oemcomputer> http://www.publiceye.org/b_conspi.html#post911 From bobenoch at shaw.ca Tue Jul 2 18:00:13 2002 From: bobenoch at shaw.ca (Bob Enoch) Date: Tue, 02 Jul 2002 18:00:13 -0600 Subject: [R-G] 9/11 Conspiracism and the Left References: <764WOKIHUQOJWB951NJ3MGHG75E9ZU.3d2217ae@oemcomputer> Message-ID: <006a01bfe481$24f037a0$61474d18@vf.shawcable.net> ----- Original Message ----- From: "Michael Pugliese" < http://www.publiceye.org/b_conspi.html#post911 Same old, Michael, same old. This site mentions the basic issue, namely the "day off" taken by the Air Force, but does not address the subject at all (very wise). Wise, because there is no "explanation" for the greatest air power in the world allowing an attack on the HQ of the Empire, near the end of the second hour of of a highjacking crisis. What does an air force do during an air attack? Can you find me a doctrine which urges commanders to leave ALL of their assets on the ground during such a time ? Or a Commander-in-Chief so accepting of this dismal failure of all systems that he spikes no heads, finds no-one at fault, praises the very agencies and officers who have failed the country......? Not to mention pressuring Congress NOT to investigate the actual events. Ten minutes with an open mind looking at the detail of this op, and you know the "official" version is at best dubious and should be investigated. That should be enough to lead to a serious discussion of what really happened that day....a brilliant suprise attack by Islamicists? or the decisive move in a global coup. This is what is important about this debate; the danger of boxing oneself into the assertion that "they wouldn't do this"....in the face of all the indications that they did. They are certainly acting like it was their operation. I suggest that the post 9/11 events should lead those comrades who have dismissed this possibility to re-examine the facts. We can't afford to assume that there is anything at all that these "neo-liberals-in-a-hurry" wouldn't do. Bob From mstainsby at tao.ca Tue Jul 2 21:51:12 2002 From: mstainsby at tao.ca (Macdonald Stainsby) Date: Tue, 02 Jul 2002 20:51:12 -0700 Subject: [R-G] Going Down To Kananaskis: Fork in The Road for Our Movement (Part one) Message-ID: <017901c22244$f12eeca0$291f5318@vc.shawcable.net> _'It's a long road down to Kananaskis It's a short road back the other way If the cops pull you over to the side of the road You won't have nothing to say No, you won't have nothing to say There's a man waiting down the Highway 40 And he's waiting with a rifle in his hand And he's looking down the road for an out-of-province car And he thinks he's fighting for his land... ...Yes, he thinks he's fighting for his land'_ (Reworked from Phil Ochs: Going Down to Mississippi) Going Down To Kananaskis: Fork In the Road For Our Movement The "Endless War on Terror" was launched by the Bush Administration in near unanimity with the "International Community" (a sleight-of-hand term for imperial partners such as Britain, Germany and Canada) last October. The World Trade Centre Attacks are obviously the starting point for an understanding of most political events in our current situation. One of the very first "predictions" (perhaps an attempt at self-fulfilling prophecy) was that the Anti-corporate Globalisation movement would shrivel and die; That the few remaining activists of the First World would quickly be lumped in with Al Qaeda- and even the Palestinians and Colombian rebels-- as "terrorists". Indeed, here in Vancouver, Canada it was made only days after the attacks in September by columnist Michael Campbell in the Vancouver Sun, when he made the grotesque link between a crudely vague "terrorism" and the members of our ranks who wear black masks and get involved in direct actions against the symbols of the corporate states. Many of us who had been heart and mind involved in this movement for several years were deeply concerned about where our movement could go from here, if it could retain itself at all. Were we not a shallow movement, without a viable centre, without any connections to the communities in which we worked, a movement of transient troublemakers that might have the right idea only in the vaguest sense? Would we not completely drop off of the radar screen? Well, all apologies to Mark Twain, but the reports of our death have been greatly exaggerated. By March 16, 2002 we had regrouped enough to have five hundred thousand people amass in the streets in Barcelona, Spain against the EU- the largest convergence yet up until that point in our movement. Our organising also began to be able to make calculated choices based on what new situations reality placed before us here in North America- in February in New York, groups that were primarily anarchist-led put together a protest against the World Economic Forum. In the streets of New York there was almost no one who was willing to organise in the overwhelmingly hostile setting as it was laid before them. The "anarchist" groups usually associated with "violence" and "immaturity" put together an important demo of 25 thousand people in the very city that saw the beginning of the new era of reaction. This represented a tactical retreat into non-physical confrontation to simply maintain the existence of such protests, while we regrouped to rethink what to do next. In other words, we were developing a sense of thinking strategically. Perhaps the greatest aspects of our resurgence into prominence have been two recent events. First was the April 20, 2002 demonstration in Washington DC. What was originally to be a demonstration against the IMF and World Bank became a 100 000 strong demo in support of the heroic struggle of the Palestinian people against the increasingly genocidal Israeli Occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Again on this theme, a group that is called the International Solidarity Movement that sees itself as part of the resistance movement against corporate globalisation policies has been operating in Palestine, putting their bodies in between the civilians of Palestine and the advancing Israeli Defence Forces. Such a massive growth in both dedication and analysis is without precedent for us and speaks volumes as to the rising maturity of our movement. We are making the connections as a movement between an amorphous "globalisation"- policies that emanate from late imperialism and capitalism-with the horrid front lines of imperialist assaults on people, in places from Palestine to Venezuela. Nothing could be a more important growth, as what we truly need is to develop an analysis to arm ourselves. At the demonstrations in Calgary that I will discuss, we heard a slogan: "Viva viva Palestina, Venezuela, Argentina!" Accompanying that was one that came out of New York back in February: "They are Enron, we are Argentina". Such a noise was not made in the streets of Seattle in 1999. I had attended an anti-war conference in Montreal last May, and the conference itself had been organised by the same sorts of people that had built the more militant and anti-capitalist demonstrations at the Summit of the Americas in Quebec City. The conference focused on almost every spot on the globe, educating people in our movement from across the continent and involving people from around the world. That such a principled and non-dogmatic conference can come out of our movement is another sign of our advancing thinking. Aside from being denounced by the "International Bolshevik Tendency" for insufficiently fighting imperialism, the anti-imperialist, anti-war and anti-racist conference was able to produce a lot of constructive dialogue and opportunity for cross country, continental and planetary networking. Onward we march. From there, I began to hitchhike back home to stop in as many large Canadian cities as I could to help make further contacts with fellow activists. After about a week and a half, I stopped in Calgary where the main convergences against the G8 were slated to take place at the end of June. The first night I met a law student whom was a national from Africa. He attended the university, and after we debated the New Partnership for Africa's Development (NEPAD, an initiative developed for the G8 Summit. While called African, it would be best seen as made in response to the critiques made very public by our movement, so as to gloss over their persisting neo-colonial relationship with Africa- and lauded by people like U2's Bono) I spent the night on his couch in the residence. The next morning, we had a much needed coffee and I headed into town to make what I thought would be a quick opportunity to get in touch with the local organisers as they prepared their multitude of creative demonstrations and a counter summit. The counter summit was called the "People's Summit", the G6B (they are eight, we are six billion). What I discovered was a repressive atmosphere that I had never experienced before, except perhaps as a ten-year old tourist in Mexico in 1985 where soldiers wandered the streets with machine guns. The difference, of course, was that in Mexico those guns were ostensibly to "protect" people like myself, a simple North American tourist. However, here in Alberta, the measures-- grotesque media slanders, by-laws against our rights to peaceful assembly, "anti-terrorist" legislation and the refusal to grant any space in Calgary or near Kananaskis for protesters to meet-were directed at folks like myself. People were acting as if under siege, and the meetings were still more than a month away. With suspicion was how I was greeted, chaos seemed to reign in the organising (there were not many posters around, the city was working overtime to bungle any attempts at inter-activist communication), fear was the guiding factor and a feeling of impending doom prevailed. I had to walk around and ask people who looked like they might be considered 'usual suspects' in order to come into contact with radicals working in Calgary. I learned that some of the coalitions for organising had already broken down, with people on all sides of the different debates becoming married to certain "positions". I heard that the entire city had co-ordinated to deny the organisers proper spaces to hold meetings and that the use of ad-hoc spaces like college cafeterias was resulting in the activists being chased out. No halls were rented to activists to hold meetings during the summit, and that the few spaces that could be accrued were separated by vast amounts of space. The trade union bureaucrats had also broken off contacts, and all spaces applied for to be used for camping out-of-town activists had been denied by the city. The unions were planning a march called a "family march" for the afternoon of the 23rd of June. Even this seemingly harmless march, three days before the start of the G8 Summit and guaranteed to be peaceful, had not received a permit. A glimmer of hope was that the unions had vowed to carry out their march regardless of the city's ban from Mayor David Bronconnier (who had stated that public parks could not be used for political purposes, despite the fact that he had used just such a venue for a barbecue to kick off his last electoral campaign). The final and most significant measure used by the Federal Government to quash the resistance of the people to their plunderous economic rule was the systematic blocking of any attempt to set up the "Solidarity Village", a project to allow a camp near the Summit site itself (near Kananaskis, often called K-Country). The Federal Government had paid the Stony Nation $300 000 dollars to prevent them from renting any space for the Solidarity Village, which was being organised by the Canadian Labour Congress in conjunction with the Council of Canadians. All other locations were on Crown Land, and were quickly and without discussion, denied access to any single protester. After the cancellation of the Solidarity Village, a real black cloud began to hover above the organisers- and the city of Calgary continued to deny any place for use by the multitude of people coming in from all over the continent (and even the world, to a small extent). The plea made by activists in response to all of this was simply that people are coming, and they can't be stopped. Even a full month plus before the Summit was scheduled to begin in K-country people were being denied entry into Canada for declared spurious reasons and never admittedly the obvious. They were, in reality, denied entry for being opposed to corporate globalisation and coming to Calgary to voice their deep anger at the institutions of the G8 and their governing leaders- as is their right anywhere, whether governments recognise it or not. After tasting first hand what kind of brutal measures were being meted out to all who dare speak the truth to power, I decided that if we are to have any rights at all, they must be used in Calgary, and maybe even in Kananaskis itself. When our movement is confronted with draconian measures and manipulations such as these, both the legal and the machiavellian, we must respond with a show of unity and defiance. I decided to head home and try to organise people to come to Calgary to meet this dropping of the gauntlet by imperial hypocrisy. We didn't make the decision to have this summit simplified into an act of defending our rights to assemble, but we can answer this call, and indeed we must every time. One of the greatest leaps in the analysis of many of our movements' people has been the dwindling interest in "Summit Hopping". When you have a movement that speaks of ending the economic suffering of the Third World, the AIDS epidemic in Africa, the rapidly growing sector of the First World living in absolute poverty, created by the advance of the G8, WTO and the post-Cold War economic order of neo-liberalism, it is contradictory to base an over arching strategy based on trying to mobilise people to travel thousands of miles to attend mass convergences. This is one of the main reasons our movement, however much it might resonate with all the victimised sectors of society, has been overwhelmingly white, middle class, and economically privileged- secure enough in employment or sources of revenue to take large amounts of time out from home. Those who are not from these categories are people who have made a lifestyle choice to be so immersed in organising that they continually live off of scraps and dumpster-diving, travelling via train hopping and hitchhiking- again, not something that can galvanise people from all walks of society. Another point to this is that we are no longer going to win the kind of victories we had in the first couple of years. We caught them napping in Seattle, which gave us the ability to shut that fucker down. That, and to see it retrospectively, the actions of the Black Bloc anger-laced actions later in the same day, put real politics back on the agenda and buried the notion of "the end of history" once and for all, and good riddance to it. After that, in several valiant showings of initiative we were unable to actually disrupt the meetings, but we were able to continue the advancement of our movement through picking clearly legitimate targets and successfully garnering our aims. We took down that ugly blight on the landscape of The Wall in Quebec. We demanded our right to assemble in Genoa, attacking that wall too- and the capitalist state showed its true colours by killing our fallen comrade, Carlo Giuliani. Despite his tragic loss of life, that demonstration was as clearly a victory as any of the others. There were 300 000 people at the march, and even more the following day protesting his assassination. We were not divided, even though some began to call for such actions to take place, even within our own movement. However, now that we have won the final victory of the convergence battles by chasing them into the hills and fortress of K-Country in Alberta, we have continued to seek the same strategic orientation as though we could do this forever. We cannot catch them here. As heartening as it was to hear Fidel Castro ask if soon these leaders would be forced to run away with their meetings to the moon, it still appears to be the end game of attacking summit sites as a strategy for galvanisation, winning victories of the will, and disrupting the real terrorists ' agenda for "business as usual". Summit Hopping in North America will lead us to oblivion unless we can demonstrate what we have at every other turn: our ability to grow, to be flexible in our strategy as much as we are in our tactics on the streets. As well, and just as problematic, is the very nature of how Summit hopping works. People who are not working on the grassroots issues of the city holding the summit and the convergences against it are unable to contribute to a lasting legacy in these locales that can produce further activism and new activists. Community work cannot be done by people who are not part of that very community itself. To leave the city where you live to go elsewhere is often to make clearly counter-productive choices, though clearly not in every case. To speak of what I know, I live in Vancouver, BC, Canada. This is where the most reactionary provincial government Canada has ever seen is in power (and that is to say a heck of a lot). Gordon Campbell and his 'Liberal' Party are in almost absolute power, holding 77 of 79 seats in the provincial legislature. They have already ratcheted up massive racism, holding a referendum on the rights of First Nations that are guaranteed by the UN. They have gone after welfare, casting thousands onto the streets, they have attacked the labour code, assaulted post-secondary educational funding, shut down women's shelters, eliminated pay-equity legislation and even dropped the minimum wage to six bucks (Cdn) for first time workers. This government has torn up existing agreements with labour unions, which even raised the ire of our vastly right wing press, who called it dishonest. They have scrapped and regressed almost all the existing environmental regulations, weak though they were. They even cancelled and are dismantling the provincial Human Rights Commission. They have created an atmosphere of panic and anger among the populace after they were swept to power in the wake of a reactionary and scandal-ridden (but relatively middle ground) New Democratic Party. In many of the cases, as a result of the mismanagement of the prior administration, the Liberals were pushing at an open door to make this full scale, corporate globalisation assault on the people of this province. In this atmosphere and with things here so urgent, what is the value in going to Summits if one is a revolutionary? As has been said in a different context by revolutionaries of days before, the number one enemy is at home. Yet, what is this provincial regime here, if not the smug, smiling face of corporate globalisation come to the homefront? What is our strength as a response to this government, if we lose the real-life connection to what created it in the first place? The governments of Calgary, Alberta and Ottawa had tried extremely hard to prevent allowing what the APEC inquiry determined was our civil right: to see and be seen by government leaders when we protest. They had gone beyond that, and tried to kill our movement (or at least, to wound it severely) by preventing people from even peacefully protesting in the city of Calgary itself. They have gone so far as to intimidate churches into not hosting homeless travellers to try and prevent people from speaking to this gathering of terrorists being held over a hundred kilometres away. They want to destroy the cohesion of our movement right while we are hitting a turning point. They know exactly what they are doing; we must as well know what is being done and know how to respond. The fact that these leaders feel the need to retreat to the woods is a victory in and of itself, and that they fear our loud message enough to go to these lengths to prevent it from being above a whisper. This kind of direct attack on the aspects of our modern resistance to the attacks of capital that are global must be met directly- proving and demonstrating our unity in their face, despite their threats, intimidation and blackmail. We must always be prepared to stand up for our brothers and sisters who live and breathe in the same movement; we stand for a world that will be one, and we must reflect this thinking in our movement as well. As I believe Mao once penned, _A good comrade is one who is eager to go where the difficulties are greater._ While I have been assured that the story was primarily a plant by the very hostile _Calgary Herald_ (the amount of black propaganda in Calgary certainly outdid the work of the press in leading up to the summit of the Americas in 2001, Quebec City), there was a report some two weeks before the Summit quoting certain revolutionaries from Kansas, USA. Supposedly, they had denounced the work of Calgarians and Edmontonians as too scattered, too unorganised and responded that they were going to the better organised demonstrations in Ottawa, the "Take the Capital" and "the "No One Is Illegal" initiatives. I want to say, very clearly, to any who were thinking along similar lines: Are you serious about revolution or not? We have no business going out for "fun" or "tourism" in these situations where the vices of the capitalist states are clamping down on our collective heads. If you are truly concerned with building a revolution, you should be honoured to make the difficult tasks succeed. That means going into the situations where whatever skills you have are most urgently needed. Whatever my skills may actually be, that was the final reason I felt the necessity to go into Cowtown. Our responsibility to not only attend, but to try and get involved in the dirty, on-the-ground work of the demonstrations, the conferences, the running of the Convergence Centre (banished to the edge of the city, in the prostitute and industrial wasteland district, in a building marked for demolition in the near future) is a reflection of the international character of our movement. It was not "their" demos, which "we" attended, it is _our_ movement. If Calgary were to suffer a great defeat at the hands of the Albertan fear mechanisms, or as a result of disunity among our ranks, then all of our anti-capitalist organising becomes weakened. We are as strong as the ties that bind us across the spectrum of states and regions. Our movement does have multiple front lines, and these include our homefronts, but this particular clash was a defining point of advance, stagnancy or retreat for us all. That directly affects our ability to work against the corporate globalisation agendas of our local situations. Once a major amount of work had been put into calling people out to the location of the summit and the nearby city centres, our future on the larger, global level hung in the balance. (continued in part 2) From mstainsby at tao.ca Tue Jul 2 21:58:34 2002 From: mstainsby at tao.ca (Macdonald Stainsby) Date: Tue, 02 Jul 2002 20:58:34 -0700 Subject: [R-G] Going Down To Kananaskis: Fork in The Road for Our Movement (part 2) Message-ID: <017a01c22245$e8187540$291f5318@vc.shawcable.net> (continued from part one) I arrived back in Calgary, again hitchhiking to the city. I had been told by a friend that the CBC announced that the Alberta police were gearing up to rape our constitutional rights to free movement: they were planning on stopping people at the border between the provinces of BC and Alberta. As luck would have it, when I finally got my ride that would take me across the provincial border, I was in the car of a staff sergeant from the New Westminster Police Department. I was Safely ensconced in his car with a story about heading to Regina in one of the Prairie provinces to visit a friend (who I had warned about my cover story, and memorised his phone number) and sit around writing poetry. Thus, I now knew that should such a blockade be set up, I would get through. As it was almost two weeks before the actual Summit was to begin, nothing of any note was there, other than the giant "Welcome to Alberta, Wild Rose Country" sign. One more quick ride later, and I was back in the same coffee shop where I had tracked down summit activists two weeks before. Only, now people seemed to be even more afraid and there were not any posters up on the lampposts. Calgary media were asking people to report to the police any anti-G8 graffiti. They even set up a "volunteer squadron" of anti-graffiti citizens' patrols. Even as the air was relatively clear, the sun out and the wind blowing, the atmosphere felt utterly suffocating. I made my way out to the university to try and link up with any activities that might be going on out there. The organisers, it should be noted, did a horrible job of keeping their websites up-to-date as far as organising was concerned. It was easy for people who wanted to attend workshops to decipher what was going on by visiting the internet, but it as extremely difficult to find the actual planning. My hope was simply that this was a reflection of how busy finalising things the local planners were- and from my later experiences, this appeared to be the case. By the next afternoon I had stumbled across a couple of the good people in the city I had met by this point. They alerted me to the logistics meeting going on, in a cafeteria where the noise and echo was more disruptive than even the "zamboni" clearing off the floors all around us. The meeting went well, being facilitated by a man named Charles from the Pagan Cluster (of Starhawk fame) already in Calgary. I asked what was actually to happen on the day of the summit itself, now being referred to as J26. I was told that there was a plan for three snake marches to leave from different meeting points across the outskirts of downtown, and that these snake marches were to disrupt traffic during rush hour, calling this a form of economic disruption. My reading of the term economic disruption tells me that this is not a form of it, but that wasn't my primary concern. It wasn't clear as to what our strategy actually was. I had previously read a call to action that had come out over the internet to the same effect. I couldn't- try as I might- see the actual target. Simply causing chaos in the downtown core was not going to make a very clear point, even if our communiqu?s detailed the different corporate "targets" that were to be passed by on the march. Further, the march was organised under the banner of Quebec City and similar, much larger marches: "diversity of tactics". People can argue all they want about how that means different things to different people, and it means respecting all forms of resistance. In our movement, in most cases at least, it is code for "on this march, people are not being asked to refrain from engaging in acts that can be construed as 'violent' by the police." Such a choice, made when there were 6000 police from across the country (Ontario Provincial Police[OPP], Calgary and Albertan police, Royal Canadian Mounted Police) and we had no idea how many people were going to show up seemed to me to be begging for a massive defeat. It seemed that possibly a sad satire of victories in places like Seattle, but this time ending in chaotic mass arrests were going to befall all of our organising. I decided to try and work to help avert the disaster. The lack of a clearly defined strategy was even more disturbing than the lack of clarity as to tactics. If we had a target that was so obviously correct- such as that blasted Wall in Quebec City-that no matter what spin it was given our message would get through regardless, then our physical safety would be the only concern. As I said to some people there, I am personally fatalistic about my physical safety, but the health and advancement of our movement has the entire planet and all the inhabitants therein in the balance. We cannot afford to allow ego to cloud our judgements. People who had been working on this project for nearly a year had every reason to be tied to their original plans: They had put heart and soul into this work, and it was conceived by them. However, for the sake of any who might have emotional rather than rational reasons for wanting to try something reckless without proper consideration as to the effect on the morale of our movement, we needed to evaluate what was going on here. This is in _no way_ a morality judgement, I personally am no pacifist; it is a practical consideration. Smashing a Starbucks window is not even on the same radar screen as compared to what is going to befall our city centres when the movement of the working class to reclaim what is rightfully theirs begins in earnest. The question is one of practicality and what works to our collective advancement in "tearing the fortress down", making sure we do whatever necessary to make that fateful eventuality come sooner, for we have no time to waste. Not a single day. I had spoken directly with many different people involved in the plans, and there were as many different interpretations as there were people to talk to. As stated, there was no clearly defined target in Calgary, nothing other than the timing coinciding with the meeting some 100 plus km away. Worse still, we had no idea how many people would actually come out to these snake marches. There was and remains no place in our movement for ego about trying to be every bit as militant as the demonstrators in other flanks of our movement. It appeared that the organisation of this particular demonstration was being done in a vacuum, without paying attention to the reality of what was happening on-the-ground. We had very good reason to suspect that our numbers were going to be in the hundreds, not the thousands, for the snake marches. Labour had pulled out of the planning approximately a month before, citing safety concerns. Now, I am hardly the one to think we should ever bow before TUB's- their number of betrayals of the anti-capitalist leadership of our movement prior to this was so high I lost count long ago. However, this was not the same as in the other cases, not even close. In Calgary, the Trade Unions deserve the fullest marks at the end of all the organising. In Quebec City, the smaller anti-capitalist marches were in the tens of thousands. The organisers took great pains to accommodate everyone, through the creation of "Red, Green and Yellow" zones. They were so clearly marked and set far apart from one another as to have been able to accommodate people who could not risk arrest or didn't want to eat tear gas, but who still wanted to march under an anti-capitalist (and even anti-imperialist) banner. When the TUB's deliberately diverted their march and took their rank and file to a parking lot in the middle of nowhere, it was a grotesque paternalism being enforced on the rank and file. The leadership, being dragged by the force of history that was being created by the radicals in the forefront, could not risk having their own members wander amongst those who might have a more clearly defined critique of corporate globalisation, capitalism and imperialism than simply "working people and their families need a raise" and other such blather spoken by TUB's all too often. Worse still, these leaderships had a clear hostility to being associated in the press with the anti-capitalist leadership that has emerged in our movement. They would not demand that people have the right to take to the streets, that capital and militarism are the main problems of the day, that the FTAA was only a microcosm of the greater forces at work impoverishing us in the Global North and murdering us in the Global South. This amounts to more than a betrayal- it amounts to doing the work of the capitalists themselves in glossing over the glaring contradictions in this wretched system. When these TUB's follow our anti-capitalist leadership to a demonstration, it is because they have no other choice, and even within that situation they will resist to the bitter end the radicals who have and will maintain a real critique of the dynamics of economic, gender and racial power. We don't want more of the pie, we want to control the pie-cutter; we do not want special treatment for minorites, women and all sexual orientations, we want real freedom and diversity in equality. Calgary was not a situation where accommodation of different risk levels could realistically be done, at least not very easily. The scenario planning committee had a meeting, right after an open letter was written by one Rick Collier (of the Communist Party of Canada) citing several concerns. Some concerns I could not agree with at all- such as how he complained that blocking traffic would disrupt the lives of ordinary workers-- but on the whole the majority of what was in that widely circulated letter covered the bulk of the issues that were causing many of us to lose sleep. There were only 6 days to go until J26. Being someone who has worked on projects for months at a time before having some jackass wander in at the last minute to tell people what needed to be changed, I was very cautious, as were most people, about making my concerns loudly known. No one "knew better", but only had less attached vantagepoints, being only partially inside and partially out. All of the people like myself who heard of the scenario-planning meeting and had major concerns about where all of this was heading went directly into this meeting. Rick read out his letter, which called for one march, the march not to start at 6am but 9 and for people to give real new consideration to the numbers of people likely to attend, and to base their conduct (or at least, plans for it) on these considerations. Approximately 85% of the room stated similar points, my main one being the grave concern about how we did not appear to the outside to have a strategy. We seemed to the outside to have no other plan than to "fuck shit up". That isn't revolution- that's a stunt, to be blunt. We needed a target. Several other people pointed out that almost no activism in Calgary ever takes place, and that to have a political disaster would irreparably harm an already almost dormant city, so militance should not take place at all. Although I don't think that would be true if a more militant action could have been more direct, obvious and successful, it certainly would be if there had been a small but ultimately crushed action that served no purpose but to allow a few people to vent righteous anger. The planning committee took these concerns very seriously, and held an emergency meeting the following morning. The commitment to inclusivity was very clear, as all meetings, both semi-closed scenario planning meetings and larger, public (except to the media) spokescouncils were run via consensus. Many people complained about the amount of the work being done behind closed doors, but I think these people should give it a rest in many cases. The action that finally took shape came from a proposal at the next night's spokescouncil meeting, which was the first time I actually felt extremely elated after a 200 or so person assembly run via consensus. The enormity of the situation and the importance and gravity of keeping ourselves tight made for one of the most positive meetings I' ve ever participated in. The original time of 6am was kept according to plan, but the march had one starting place and only was to be one march. Further still, to allay concerns about personal safety of some who couldn't physically fight cops, the organisers strongly urged people to operate where only after 10am- the designated "official" end of the march-could so-called "red" high risk actions be carried out. This was a personal great relief to me, as my mother- a retired school teacher in her early sixities who has radicalised herself in the last three-odd years-had already announced to me her intention to take part in the snake march. I did not want to be in the very odd, uncomfortable position of asking her to stay away from the march. As I pointed out to a few of the people on the scenario planning committee, a 61 year old woman with a bad back taking part in an illegal snake march is already far more radical than anything any of us young'uns could do. More on that later. Sunday June 23rd was the scheduled Labour-led march, the "Family March". The event got a permit a little less than two weeks before the actual event took place. There isn't much to report on about the actual event, other than it was spirited, and saw between 3500-4000 people in attendance. Personally, since the unions had announced their willingness to march without a permit, I was upset that they received one- it would have been very good to see them take the lead in defying the attempts to crush our movement through bylaws and attacks on our civil liberties. The atmosphere and the respect given from all the different strands of demonstrators to one another probably helped give labour the confidence to do what they did in response to the re-planning and re-working of the J26 snake march. On the 23rd, the Canadian Labour Congress, the Calgary District and Labour Council, the Alberta Federation of Labour, the Communications, Energy and Paperworkers Union, the Canadian Auto Workers Union and around 40 steelworkers who flew out from Toronto (rather than go to Ottawa, because "Calgary needed the numbers") endorsed the snake march and announced their intentions to bring out their members. Many other unionists announced their intentions to bring out fellow workers, including leadership of the Alberta Nurses. The gravity of what it would mean to all aspects of the social movements, should J26 go badly, seemed to mean to these unions they could "risk" participation in the snake march. The CEP also donated $3000 to the legal team to help pay for the bail of four of our activist friends who had been arrested. Now, this was probably indicative of how small the event was in comparison to actions like Quebec City and how having a successful small march allowed people more room to wiggle in the province of Alberta, but the CEP, CAW and CLC contingents were acting in a principled solidarity fashion. There was almost no likelihood at this point of a physically confrontational march, and therein lies the main reasons they came out- but to see co-operation between anti-capitalist organisers and the trade union movement was very positive and these TUB's deserve full marks on this day of solidarity. It also goes to show that if the anti-capitalists continue to take the lead in organising and persevering to create a movement with that front and centre, eventually the TUB's will have to follow. This remains our strategy in building an anti-capitalist movement that can include the organised working class: Radical anti-capitalists of all stripes must continue to create the space that ultimately the workers movement will have to move into, as the struggle becomes more acute. If leadership and planning of the movement is surrendered to TUB's, NGO's and social democrats, it will whither and die. If a grassroots movement organises and shows the way forward, TUB's belatedly will have to come on board. I don't think there is anyway that Bono will join us, however. But Bono: We'll do it- "With or Without You." People from all over the continent, albeit in small numbers, continued to arrive in Calgary for the two days time between the Labour "Family Walk" and the J26 action. In the intervening days, on June 25th, there was another demonstration that, whether deliberately or not, was to set the tone for the main J26 action. It was the "Showdown at the Hoe-down", a mass gathering outside of the site that was (ostensibly) where several of the delegates for the G8 were meeting the press and being "welcomed Calgary style", in a sickly western themed posh gala. People were to meet at Memorial Park and march a short distance to the outside of the Roundup Centre, where a street party was to be held. This gathering ended up with some 2000 people in attendance. At first, what evolved was precisely that: we held the street that was adjacent to the Roundup Centre and DJ's set up a stage, allowing me to dance to several house and even Drum and Bass sets. A trampoline was set up, police presence was minimal and I joked to the medic team that they would probably be needed at the trampoline before long. This persisted in being the basics of the gathering for well over an hour. Then a large contingent of the demonstrators decided they wanted to get closer to a line of police behind another one of those all-too-familiar fences that are being built up by capitalists to keep out the people. This involved walking down the street and into a parking lot- where people were hemmed inside by barriers. At first, people seemed quite content to be right at the fence, and Emma Goldman 's old refrain: "If I can't dance in your revolution, I don't wanna come!" (personally, while the sentiment is okay, I'm really tired of hearing that quote everywhere) was chanted over and over while people danced in front of the fence. Then something I'm personally convinced was an operation by provocateurs began. Two drunken idiots started yanking at the fence, yelling with all their passionate idiocy, the need to tear it down. Almost immediately, I spotted a group of around 20 or so Black Bloc-type anarchists make a snake-like link up of themselves and leave the area immediately, arm in arm. When these sorts-- no strangers to physical conflict nor do they shirk from it-- decide to leave a situation, that tells me there is something really fishy going on. The tone and mood of the crowd shifted very fast and it became ominous as to what was actually going on. My personal concerns over what was happening took a few different thought patterns: A group calling themselves "the anti-globalism action network": a front for a neo-Nazi, White Nationalist organisation with connections to Tom Metzger and William Pierce had been making attempts to work inside the anti-globalisation movement. They had issued a communiqu? in several places and cities and even passed themselves off as a "legitimate" group enough to get into the _Calgary Sun_. They had already been spotted at the G6B People's Summit, trying to set up a table and hand out their trash. They had issued veiled threats to make violent conflicts and I was wondering if this was their "big move". A lot of the people congregated there believed these were police. The task became, since it was going to directly effect what we were able to do in the snake march the following day, to calm down this idiotic outburst and let people see what was happening: we were being set up. After much yelling, a few people putting themselves in between the boneheads and the fence (and the media jumped all over this, but of course), a friend got on the bullhorn and managed to get people back out onto the street where the street party was happening. End of mini-crisis and disaster averted. The party began to break up in a trickle from there and I went back to the house where I was staying to get up early (5am, to be exact) and do "runner" work in the snake march. ------------------------------------------- Macdonald Stainsby http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/rad-green http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/leninist-international -- In the contradiction lies the hope. --Bertholt Brecht From mstainsby at tao.ca Tue Jul 2 22:07:39 2002 From: mstainsby at tao.ca (Macdonald Stainsby) Date: Tue, 02 Jul 2002 21:07:39 -0700 Subject: [R-G] Going Down To Kananaskis: Fork in The Road for Our Movement (part three) Message-ID: <018b01c22247$2ca92460$291f5318@vc.shawcable.net> The final decisions as to how the J26 march was going to be organised and how communications were to be handled were made in primarily closed meetings. This, to a certain extent, made sense. However, from there what became clearer and clearer was that we are- at least in the pressure cooker of such a brutally repressive and surveillanced atmosphere- _*starting to cave into an internal culture of fear and paranoia*_. With the breaking up of the Black Panthers being only the most glaring and obvious example, we need to be far more concerned about this than I suspect we are. This is a disease that comes out of very real repression coming from above. With the new "anti-terror" bills in place in Canada, the United States and elsewhere, we must take this very seriously and have a look at how it played out in Calgary and quickly learn these lessons. If we do not, we might very well end up suffocating under the new pressures we are being faced with. This is urgent. What we need to know first, is something most of us already say we do. All of our organising is monitored especially when it comes to challenging these large summits. Any decision we make is most likely known by the police in a matter of a few minutes after that choice is made. When we say we already know that, we need to operate openly. A situation erupted in one of the spokescouncil meetings where the plans for the J26 march were being detailed to the crowd. It went like this. Many people, including me, were concerned that the overwhelming police presence in the city was going to mean that no one was allowed out of our starting place. I personally thought for some time that we wouldn't even get out of the park where we were set to begin, but that we would be initially surrounded and we would not be allowed to move. The police had been issuing threats, the march looked small and at this point, there was not a labour contingent ready to call out their members to the march (yet). "What was the contingency plan?" a woman asked. "We, for reasons of security are unable to tell you that", came the answer. The woman pressed that she didn't feel safe being told that "something" was in place, but that we couldn't know what it was. The answer came back, that well, there is a contingency plan if the police surround us, but for reasons of security we can't tell you. "we have a plan in place, we have worked to make this a safe march, but if you don't trust us, maybe you shouldn't come." The room went into a booing and hissing situation. Remember what was said at the beginning of this, that anything we plan the police know. Exact, absolute details were not called for here, but to absolutely deny people this information means: A) the activists on the march will be confused and less likely to participate, and in any case ill-equipped to do so, B) The only people who will know what is going on are the police and the small coterie of organisers, C) We will achieve the job of dividing and confusing the march (or any similar event), without any help from the police. Who needs a plant when we break down our own communications ourselves, before we even take to the streets? This is only one example of the sorts of actions taken, ostensibly for security, that end up being a comical farce, if it were not so deadly serious. The police will always be able to listen in on radio communications, yet during the march people who spoke to our communications team were rebuffed, including an incident where one organiser was explaining something to a woman while another was chastising them for sharing information about what was going on. Another example was that several of the organisers took to "street names" during the different events. I've got news for people: When we organise things, particularly of this level of scrutiny, then they already know who you are. This kind of behaviour again contributes to confusion during demonstrations and similar actions. We need to be open, honest and communicative and simply assume what we are doing is well known. When we took to the streets in Calgary at everything except the "Family March" we were already breaking illegitimate laws. None of the other actions were sanctioned. Yet we advertised our intentions to go to the streets. That, obviously, was the correct thing to do. We must stay open and honest and disclose as much as we possibly can- if we don't, it's at our own peril, and not the other way around. They are the only ones who have anything to hide. If we say we know that, but we act like we don't, then we need to give this serious attention. I had arranged to be picked up by a comrade so as to not walk alone to the snake march. Walking alone to an unsanctioned event is simply not a smart move, people who are seen as organisers get picked off and "detained" when they are alone. Avoiding paranoia is not an invitation to recklessness. My ride showed up a short time after 6am and we were at the march thereafter. The snake march gathered in Fort Calgary and upon my arrival I noticed huge amounts of union banners, particularly the CEP and the CAW. Once I saw this, I knew the march would get out of the park. The police may attack and beat on "uncouth" protesters, but they are loathe to get seen beating or gassing trade unionists. My anxiety dropped rapidly, and shortly after we "huddled up" to get our communications straight, the snake march got off of the ground. Aside from a few hitches, being held up at several intersections and the like-- there was never a time when the snake march was anything other than a loud, wandering band of activists, unionists, people marching simply because of the fact they had been told not to. There was another thing that had brought out a few people to this march in particular, a letter sent home by the Calgary School Board to all students in the public schools. It read: "If you see a demonstration, get out of the area immediately. Do not stand and watch. Do not engage any demonstrators in discussion or debate. If you feel at any time that you are in trouble, approach an adult you can trust." This letter infuriated many numbers of people, and it was quite the opposite to encouraging youth to think critically, as the school system likes to pretend it is about. A few parents had come out because of this letter (an unexpected bonus). The language and conduct guidelines were (my guess is, deliberately) of the same chatter that is used for warning children about pedophiles and abductors. It sent a chill through me to see this, reprinted in the _Calgary Sun_. The march had, as previously stated, been organised under the banner of "diversity of tactics". As well, there were large numbers of anarchists who had made the trek out to the summit and had things other than a walk through downtown on their collective minds. A large bloc, perhaps 50-75 of them, were marching under a banner (in black, of course) that read "against capital, against the state" with a circle @ under it. The fact that they respected the call for a relatively "peaceful" march through downtown until 10am, even with their preferred cover of the large crowd and their own numbers being significant, was a sign to me of their growth. They put the interests of the march ahead of their own desires, and they also knew how to make a tactical choice not to engage police, who had not appeared in riot gear (something that also lightened people's fears right from the start). When the march itself ended (shortly after Starhawk and the Pagan cluster had asked us to stop by City Hall so they could do a "spiral dance") by the Harry Hayes building, a huge federal office building, the crowd was told where different safety levels had been laid out. At this point, cutting their losses, the Black Bloc-types marched around the city and several anarchists tried to engage the police in a game of "anarchist soccer" (the anarchists won by forfeit) in the streets. Two arrests occurred later when the group tried to rush and occupy a McDonald's restaurant, which was a very mild (although foolhardy) result of the end of the J26 snake march and associated actions. There was a "Di-in" action that started at noon. The idea was to get people to the Olympic Plaza downtown to "die", lying down and remaining perfectly still for a half an hour to demonstrate and highlight the number of people dying of AIDS for lack of care and funds throughout Africa. It was also to highlight the total hypocrisy of the NEPAD initiative, that speaks in favour of "helping" Africa but didn't even make the AIDS crisis an agenda item at their talks, much less have any real way to address the issues. A few years ago, Nelson Mandela tried to implement generic drugs that would reduce the cost of treatments from astronomical to almost affordable, a mild reform. His government was threatened with sanctions and his ANC successor Thabo Mbeki has since become the architect of the neo-colonial NEPAD program. This "initiative" didn't even achieve stage one of their pathetic goals. As African speakers at the end of the labour march pointed out, Africa owes no one, Africa is owed- owed for colonialism, owed for slavery, owed for the AIDS epidemic and the IMF "restructuring" programs that have exacerbated absolute poverty and furthered landlessness and starvation. This is the real African debt, owed by imperialism, yet at the end of the summit African (mis)leaders were given even less that than the pittance of crumbs being discussed in the lead up to the summit itself inside the K-Country fortress. The "Di-in" was to raise these issues, and participation meant lying in the sun on a day where record heat prevailed (36 degrees celcius). Aside from sunburnt legs, this wasn't a problem at all. After this, my friend and I were exhausted. But the day was not really even half over. The previous day, an "action" called the "People's Picnic" had been sanctioned, though a few days before the mayor "Bronco" was actually threatening a labour sponsored event with mass arrests for eating outdoors in a park. The rhetoric coming out of officialdom really took the cake so many times. but I digress. Arriving at the picnic hot, exhausted (being a runner at a march meant that I had personally covered the ground of approximately 18 snake marches), hungry and badly sunburnt (one of these years, I'll actually buy sunblock) my friend and I got in the line up for food. It was clearly a labour event, as there was far more meat-based fare than if it had been done by the activists, who are more and more seeing a need for a vegetarian lifestyle. A veggie-burger later, I was trying to find my mother to discuss the days events. I arrived in Calgary about a week before my mother, and by the time she arrived in town I had already inserted myself as much as possible into the organising being done by the different anti-capitalist collectives and organisations. So, when my mom arrived, I asked her to come to the convergence centre where people were arriving, planning and congregating for most of the day. It was an extreme pleasure for me to "show her off" to the comrades there who had already become friends. As I introduced her to as many people as I could, I began to realise the importance even more strongly of our movement making cross-generational links. People I introduced her to mentioned to me I was lucky to have that; that my mother being willing to make an eight hour drive was "really fucking cool" (she overheard that comment, and retorted "That's alright, I _am_ really fucking cool!"). Our movement runs a real danger of falling into a trap similar to what took place throughout the sixties: being looked at as a "youth" phenomenon. We don't have the "baby boom" dynamic of numbers, but we still need to make sure this does not befall us. People who may be physically weaker are often far stronger in spirit; I heard my mother say to me at the end of all of the weeks events about how she now felt in heart and not just her mind, a part of something bigger than herself absolutely. She also stated that she was now thinking in terms of "we", not "I" was one of the highlights for me on a personal level I wish I could share with every one of my counterparts. At the end, she bought me a beer and toasted the revolution (which I'll admit, made me squirm- this is still my mother, no matter how old I get). Having her take part in these demonstrations and doing so not at all because I asked her to (she informed me that she was going quite matter of factly, almost as if to say "try and stop me") was a microcosm of the kind of outreach our movement must undertake- and do so immediately. This will also add a great strength to what we accomplish. Apparently, after the day I introduced her around, for the rest of the week many 20 and 30-somethings kept calling her "mom". The matriarch of the revolution? Perhaps. I never found my mother at the People's Picnic, but I had to leave fairly quickly: a final event, organised as a symbolic one by two comrades from the Toronto chapter of the International Socialists, was about to get underway. The idea had been put forward and organised earlier in the week to go on a caravan out to Kananaskis, and drive in as far as possible before being turned around by the military. The military of Canada had been positioned in K-Country, with the right to shoot to kill and nearly three times as many troops as in the entire Afghan operation of the "War on Terror". They had anti-aircraft guns across the mountainside. There were 22 checkpoints along the highway and many more RCMP officers. Each checkpoint had another breathtakingly large fence-like wall. The operation to put radio collars on bears to avoid seeing them get shot (mistaken for "protesters", no doubt) ended up killing two grizzlies. One would hope that the outrage expressed by some over this would have been as high if they had shot G8 dissenters. At any rate, the security operation was a massive violation, unprecedented, in fact, of our civil rights. People didn't want to leave this unchallenged. The caravan was planned and 30 vehicles, containing under 100 people, had signed up to make the hour long drive from Calgary in a convoy, going at 80km an hour, driving the entire way with the hazard lights of each vehicle on, so as to be able to identify one another. No one, it was agreed at the planning meetings, was to be planning to even get themselves symbolically arrested trying to breach a part of the perimeter. This was to be a no-risk event. Things have a funny way of changing. When the caravan got under way, I saw something that is always a beautiful sight. Mass spontaneity. The caravan touched a nerve in many people's hearts, and when the announcement at the People 's Picnic was made that it was about to leave, the buzz spread quickly and soon there were over 100 cars making their ways down the highway. The police sent an escort due to the amount of congestion (and, no doubt, to watch for "terrorists"). These cars contained over 400 people, perhaps as many as 500. We arrived there in over an hour and a half, though the drive shouldn't take so long. Our police escort took us down to only 60 clicks. People are not willing to be shut out of these meetings, people are not willing to lie down for the state when they tell us to go home, and people are not interested in being told they don't have rights. The reason for so much interest in this action was clear: Anger. How dare they try to keep us out of our public spaces? How dare they protect terrorists with fences from hippies with dances? That kind of anger made the small stunt shift to a mass gathering, a people's movement. The organisers, who should be commended beyond the heights of the mountains surrounding the Kananaskis Valley for pulling together the action itself, never understood the shift in character. Or, if they did, they did not like it and were trying to reign in the aspirations of the people- something intolerable when the majority make a feeling clear. The feeling in this crowd was simple: we are now "negotiating" with the police to get into the first checkpoint. From there, we want to try our luck at getting to the second one. Well, after an hour and a half in the baking record heat, we went to the first checkpoint. As soon as the convoy stopped, people poured out of their cars and amassed in front of the fence. It was about 30 feet high, and it stretched into the edge of the mountain face. There was a line of police in front of this barricade, all on bicycles, even with some guarding the ditches around the edge. There were 22 checkpoints, and one assumes they all looked like this. With the people in the streets to discuss what to do next, several police cars pulled up behind the several hundred people gathered around, listening to Starhawk and Gordon Christie (among others) tell us our options and to try to facilitate a deeply divided crowd. The organisers reminded us of the original plan for zero-conflict, but to Hell with that, many of us thought: we are trying to meet and see the leaders making decisions that effect billions of people. We want to press on, and the cop cars are now a negotiating tactic- they get through if we do. Personally, thinking of the fact that there were over 20 more checkpoints like this one to get through, I wasn't too hopeful at the tactics being discussed here. Nonetheless, the crowds' determination was far more important than the aspirations of the few who wanted the whole project abandoned. Then, when Starhawk was asking the crowd if we should let the cop cars through, the call came out *"They are not cops, they are delegates!"* and a buzz went through me I hadn't felt in many months. That buzz was power. We had, so it seemed, functionaries from Japan and the United States (of all places) blocked and unable to get through. Maybe, just maybe, we can stop these murderers from carrying out their meetings without a hitch. What a drug that feeling is, the simple power of having control over them. There is not much like it I have ever tasted. It was the first time I had felt that rush since the FTAA summit, there had been nothing like that in Calgary. As quickly as the feeling came on, it was gone. Before we could decide whether to try to hold them in, they backed up and went out to the Highway One, where they would have undoubtedly gone down one of the back roads into K-Country. Just like that, the action had gone from stunt to movement, to militant action, back down all the way to stunt. At this point, the debates on the ground seemed lifeless and our caravan vehicle decided to round our people up and head back to Cowtown. What almost happened there reminded me in my gut of what had not happened in Calgary- we were never a threat of any sort. Not politically, not physically, not with our voices. This was our greatest loss. In many ways, simply getting through all the actions in Calgary without a massive defeat on the ground was a victory, but only a small one, and one primarily for the local activists. If I lived in Calgary, this would now look like a new dawn. But it isn't that clear for the rest of us. (completed part 4) From mstainsby at tao.ca Tue Jul 2 22:16:35 2002 From: mstainsby at tao.ca (Macdonald Stainsby) Date: Tue, 02 Jul 2002 21:16:35 -0700 Subject: [R-G] Going Down To Kananaskis: (Part four- Conclusion) and proposal for the movement Message-ID: <019e01c22248$6bd36140$291f5318@vc.shawcable.net> What I hope has happened is that we are saying good-bye to something we can never forget, and only give the greatest of thanks to: Summit hopping as an overarching strategy. We cannot continue in this fashion or we will perish and disappear from the horizon, something we simply cannot afford to do at all. In Europe, the peoples awakening continues unabated, with hundreds of thousands of people taking to the streets on a regular basis. There are many reasons for this, but we cannot afford to get left behind. We need to leave this strategy in the dustbin of history, as surely as we intend to with their whole imperialist system. We face this fork in our road to the New World can hopefully provide a new life to our entire movement, provided the death of summit hopping (as our main strategy, not to ignore it completely) gives us the spark to rethink where we are going. What was the purpose of Summit Hopping? Does shutting down meetings or ripping down fences help slow down the advance of corporate globalisation? No more than smashing a Starbucks window actually helps create better working conditions in Guatemalan coffee plantations. What has been the point is that it allowed people to see they are not alone, that there are people willing to risk their very lives to oppose the current system- and that these same people have no recourse left to them but to take to the streets and challenge power wherever there is a possibility that we can be seen and heard. The point has been to be heard by other people, to get them thinking outside of the box, the sandbox of the playground we are all banished to in these "democracies". When people shut down the WTO in Seattle, we alerted the world that there would be no more business as usual for the leaders who put maximum profits ahead of the lives of children in every city, country and continent of the globe. Summits have also been places where nearly the entire spectrum of issues that victimise all the inhabitants of the planet and the very planet itself are discussed. It provided the absolutely perfect place and forum for the coming together of activists from the multitude of issues to network and make the larger links in their own thinking. It also was a place where the symbols we were challenging represented the supra-state level of our current late capitalist era: the fact that decisions no longer are made at the level of a particular national state. Corporate power has gone far beyond the sovereignty of any particular state, even to a limited extent, the US. So has the response to these manoeuvres in the form of our "anti-globalisation" movement. Summits have now been driven by our increasing strength, both militant and with ideas, into nowhere: not just in K-Country, but some have indeed cancelled face-to-face meetings all together, going online for their discussions instead. As this happens, we will become disoriented if we do not foment an idea that can move us to the next level. We cannot surrender the initiative. In fact, in order to get back ahead of the elites who run the world, we need to stop being, for lack of a more accurate word, reactionary. We cannot simply sit on our hands and wait until they call another summit in a location where we might possibly be able to have a convergence. Yes, it is great news that so many people decided to stay home and work on their own local struggles this time around- but the simple fact is that there are many other reasons why we had such a low turn out in the actions in Calgary and Ottawa. One of those is simple: repression works. This is a movement that has not come to terms entirely with our new situation on the ground, and people were scared off by the repressive measures, particularly in Alberta. This should not be condemned, everyone has their own safety levels and must have them respected. However, when people lose the sense that something in front of them is self-evidently the correct choice, then we are not going to win their allegiance in getting them to the "red zones", or even the cities that are under an unofficial form of martial law. We also have yet to clearly put forward what it is we are for. My suggestion to many people is that they come out and see the planning and organising that goes into these convergences: so many of our people have made clearly defined choices to live now as they want to see the world organised, that we ourselves are trying to help create. Part of this can never truly be rectified, as the struggle itself will sweep away sloganeering and certain forms of collectivity will be made self-evident by the facts on the ground. To "blueprint" too many of our ideas for that better world would be to make false promises- ones we cannot necessarily keep. The starting point is that no real democracy can exist without economic equality. Anything else is inevitably hollow, and that is why we are the only real speakers for democracy. With every new law passed against dissent, the truth of this becomes self-evident almost to the point of parody. We are in a period of our movement in North America where we see the people's awakening going from success to success, and growing in leaps and bounds throughout Europe. Yet we ourselves are in a period of seeming stagnation. There are many reasons for this new turn, and a lot of them stem from a few planes in the air back in September 2001. The best thing to come out of the Summit in Alberta was the action in Ottawa, the capital of Canada. Their numbers were around 5000 for a militant action under the banner of "diversity of tactics" and the program of anti-capitalism and anti-imperialism. This was such a massive growth, because it represented the movement from one giant demonstration that everyone is supposed to attend to a movement that thinks in terms of itself regionally. In North America, unlike in Europe, it is simply too difficult to converge on one city for all the fighters for a just world. As well, as we move into taking our global analysis into our grassroots organising, we need to find ways to maintain our international charac ter. In many ways, that there were large demonstrations to coincide with the K-Country summit speaks to the way forward. *A Call for New Ideas: Proposal* The first thing we must maintain, at all costs- is our regional contacts. We are making larger than our own backyard leaps in inter-networking. This is nothing but to strengthen us, and it makes our own work that much easier when we see it as part of the larger world. As we work on our local fronts, the way forward seems to do several adjustments to recapture the initiative of fighting corporate globalisation. I propose, loosely, the following: We begin to set our own dates. We cannot wait for them to set things for us. If we do so, we'll become lost chasing people into the forests and getting nothing but a smaller and smaller turnout and dwindling sense of our own power, as people begin to realise that there is nothing we can do to stop these meetings. We have become horribly predictable, and we need to end that right now. We organise our convergences under a banner of "building a culture of convergence" and make it clear that this is not only to demonstrate, but to get together with other activists that are not living in our backyards. Making contacts, sharing information face-to-face can never be replicated by the internet. We are part of an international movement, and we must know each other as family. Each convergence date must also continue to build a conference around it: with focuses on three basic areas: 1) The War on Terror (and all issues that are most directly related- immigration, imperialism, environmental degradation from the fallout of war) 2) Corporate globalisation issues (such as the AIDS crisis in Africa, the decline of unionisation the world over, the privatisation of water, declining environmental standards), 3) Local issues in the province/city or state that the convergence is to take place in. (Gordon Campbell and his attacks on everyone) These will, clearly, have to be taken up as part of the same fight, making the links and avoiding seeing them as separate but similar. We cannot stand on one foot at a time, but see it as all in the same body of economic and political repression. These conferences can be best brought together by bringing unions, student unions and NGO's into their organisation- and have the whole gamut of activities spearheaded by the anti-capitalists among our ranks. The organisation of these things should allow at least 6 months and should make very clearly defined choices as to where the convergence should take place. There could be bi-monthly meetings of groups of activists from several different centres, perhaps Vancouver, Seattle, Portland, Victoria, Calgary and Edmonton could work on a North-Western convergence out here on the Pacific Coast. Each city can be independently responsible for organising a particular aspect of the conference, and we meet to share information and make group decisions as to how to bring people from our different areas to the convergence. Demonstrations should be built primarily by the organisers in the host city itself. Propaganda should be as unified and presented as a common front as possible, to help create the larger networks as a culture, and to share our own ideas and begin to synthesise an analytical framework that we can all agree upon. These ideas are to hopefully get us out of our rut, and to help us bring the local to the global, and bring the global to the local. It must be seen as part of the same basic movement we have all been working in and around, or it will not clearly make itself known as the strategic jump it must become. Finally, it gets us from where we are right now to something new. Where we are right now, was heading down a one way road. but the fork in it can be seized, and we can sustain ourselves so long as we recapture the right to determine when, where and what we will do. We all know we can't allow the ruling class to determine what our rights are. we can even less afford letting them tell us how our movement is oriented. The anti-globalisation movement must meet the contradictory glare of the local and the global head on. We will find a synthesis in this contradiction or else we will be nothing but another blip on history. However, remember the words of Bertholt Brecht: "In the contradiction lies the hope". The only thing I regret was that one of the best voices of our movement, David Rovics, was stopped at the border and unable to perform at the concert on the night of J26. So, to honour his being put on the dangerous list, I close with a line from his "Shut Them Down" about our anti-corporate globalisation selves. _'And we will build a new world Without the corporate elite And we will see the day Of their international defeat We'll have self-determination And equality for all For what choice do we really have But to rise up and see them fall'_ We have absolutely no choice at all. And yet it is a beautiful one, just the same. June 29, 30 July 1, 2 2002. ------------------------------------------- Macdonald Stainsby http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/rad-green http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/leninist-international -- In the contradiction lies the hope. --Bertholt Brecht From mstainsby at tao.ca Tue Jul 2 23:27:23 2002 From: mstainsby at tao.ca (Macdonald Stainsby) Date: Tue, 02 Jul 2002 22:27:23 -0700 Subject: [R-G] Globalizing And Unifying The Movement June 29, 2002 Message-ID: <030c01c22252$4feba0a0$291f5318@vc.shawcable.net> Net Commentary Globalizing And Unifying The Movement June 29, 2002 By Judy Rebick This week may very well mark a critical turning point in the movement against corporate globalization in Canada. Since last year in Quebec City there has been a growing division on the issue of diversity of tactics between anti-capitalist direct action activists on the one side and the labour movement and more moderate groups like the Council of Canadians on the other. These divisions grew deeper after September 11, when even minor violence became much riskier and less acceptable to moderate groups. In opposition to the G8 meeting in remote Kananaskis, the two wings of the movement organized in two separate cities. The more radical direct action wing, lead by Montreal's CLAC (Anti-Capitalist Convergence) and Toronto's OCAP (Ontario Coalition against Anti-Poverty) organized two days of marches in Ottawa. The labour movement and anti-globalization NGO's organized almost of week of actions, including a People's Summit in Calgary, the nearest city to Kananskis. Taken together the demonstrations were a successful protest against the G8, especially given the lengths to which the Canadian government had gone to prevent protest altogether. Not only was the meeting itself in a remote location where five checkpoints prevented anyone getting anywhere near the leaders but also the City of Calgary refused permits for city parks and the federal government paid off a farmer who had rented land to the protesters near the Summit site. Most of the media has focussed on the welcome absence of violence. For whatever reason, the RCMP, made a decision to leave the riot cops in the closet until they were needed. No visible cops, no violence. In Calgary, police on bicycles even distributed water to protesters. In Ottawa, community police mingled with demonstrators on the edges of the march. There has also been a profound discussion in the movement about "diversity of tactics." Anarchist groups insist that imposing an agreement on non-violent tactics on a demonstration is authoritarian and divisive and that only the principle of diversity of tactics will ensure that everyone can participate. But in practice, their refusal to exclude violent tactics has deepened divisions with the labour movement. On the other hand, more conservative elements in the labour movement were only too happy to sit on their hands or organize their own actions without having to deal with the unruly anarchists. Adopting the practices of either group cannot solve the clash in politics and political culture. There has to be compromise and in Ottawa there was. Unwilling to compromise for unity with the more moderate wing of the anti-corporate globalization movement, direct action activists and leaders were willing to compromise to ensure the involvement of immigrant and refugee communities. The result was that for the first time, the demonstrators started to reflect the colours of the community. The theme of the Ottawa march, "No-one is Illegal," spoke to the interests of immigrant communities particularly in light of the repressive new immigration law. The anarchist organizers of the CLAC agreed to no direct action in Thursday's march in response to the request of Palestinians and other vulnerable groups. Despite the rhetoric of diversity of tactics, there was an actual agreement that the Thursday march would be without confrontation. Since the threat of violence at demonstrations has been at the root of divisions in the movement, the peaceful nature of both Calgary and Ottawa actions should provide a basis for a reconvergence of the movement. "The largest anti-war demonstration in Ottawa since September 11," famed activist Jaggi Singh said triumphantly, "and the radical hooligans organized it." There were about 2,000 marching on Thursday in Ottawa and about 3,000 on the day before. Even taken together, the Calgary/Ottawa marches were much smaller than the massive march in Quebec City last year of almost 70,000. The Ottawa march was organized as an explicitly anti-capitalist action; although many who marched were far from drawing those conclusions. What was missing was the labour movement. Conspicuous by their absence too were many local Ottawa activists who had organized for the G20, where their differences with the CLAC resulted in two different actions. The labour movement focussed on a march last weekend in Calgary, a typically conservative town. While Calgary had never seen 2500 people in the streets before, the march was modest by movement standards. The rest of the week in Calgary saw daily actions, including a naked protest against the GAP--I'd rather wear nothing that wear GAP clothes. The People's Summit, called the G6 billion, also had an important impact in the media and on participants. The anti-capitalist organizers of the Ottawa march can claim a victory for their ability to successfully mobilize and broaden the movement to immigrant communities and people of colour. In Calgary labour and community groups were equally successful in a creative, well organized series of actions that managed to overcome serious state imposed barriers to freedom of assembly. Imagine what could be accomplished if both wings of the movement came back together again respecting their differences but working in concert to build the kind of mass movement against corporate globalization and war that is sweeping Europe and Latin America. ------------------------------------------- Macdonald Stainsby http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/rad-green http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/leninist-international -- In the contradiction lies the hope. --Bertholt Brecht From mstainsby at tao.ca Tue Jul 2 23:31:19 2002 From: mstainsby at tao.ca (Macdonald Stainsby) Date: Tue, 02 Jul 2002 22:31:19 -0700 Subject: [R-G] Palestinian Dahlan accuses Bush of "coup d'etat." Message-ID: <035101c22252$dc2b8ee0$291f5318@vc.shawcable.net> Reuters. 2 July 2002. Palestinian Dahlan accuses Bush of "coup d'etat." LONDON -- A former Palestinian security chief often mentioned as a possible successor to Yasser Arafat said on Tuesday U.S. calls for Palestinians to seek a new leader were effectively demands for a "coup d'etat." Mohammed Dahlan wrote in Britain's Guardian newspaper that it would be wrong to criticise or replace Arafat at a time when he is "under siege" in the West Bank, where Israeli forces have reoccupied seven cities after suicide bombings in Israel. "There is no question of changing the leadership in these circumstances," wrote Dahlan, a former peace negotiator. "As long as the Israelis are against Arafat, I'm with him -- whatever reservations I have about some of the decisions that have been made." "Bush is now effectively demanding a coup d'etat against Arafat, because the American administration says even if he is re-elected in new elections, it will not deal with him," Dahlan said. In an interview with Britain's newspaper The Times, Dahlan said he would not rule out running against Arafat in future when Palestinians were left alone to decide their own fate. "I have huge criticisms of (Arafat) but when Bush and (Israeli Prime Minister) Ariel Sharon say they want to change Arafat, I become the head of his re-election committee," he said. ------------------------------------------- Macdonald Stainsby http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/rad-green http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/leninist-international -- In the contradiction lies the hope. --Bertholt Brecht From mstainsby at tao.ca Tue Jul 2 23:38:39 2002 From: mstainsby at tao.ca (Macdonald Stainsby) Date: Tue, 02 Jul 2002 22:38:39 -0700 Subject: [R-G] Palestinian Dahlan accuses Bush of "coup d'etat." References: <035101c22252$dc2b8ee0$291f5318@vc.shawcable.net> Message-ID: <039d01c22253$e2ff3040$291f5318@vc.shawcable.net> ----- Original Message ----- > "I have huge criticisms of (Arafat) but when Bush and (Israeli Prime > Minister) Ariel Sharon say they want to change Arafat, I become the head > of his re-election committee," he said. That's the way it *must* be. Macdonald From mstainsby at tao.ca Tue Jul 2 23:50:17 2002 From: mstainsby at tao.ca (Macdonald Stainsby) Date: Tue, 02 Jul 2002 22:50:17 -0700 Subject: [R-G] Something undiscussed at the G8 summit trying to "help" Africa Message-ID: <043401c22255$82b41640$291f5318@vc.shawcable.net> (if the West wants to help Africa, go the fuck home and stay there... Macdonald. Sorry for using the word "home"...) Reuters. 2 July 2002. UN: AIDS Epidemic Surges, 70 Million May Die. UNITED NATIONS -- AIDS will kill 70 million people over the next 20 years unless rich nations step up their efforts to curb the disease, the United Nations warned on Tuesday in a report showing the epidemic is still in its early stages. More than 40 million people worldwide have AIDS or are infected with HIV, the virus that causes the disease, up from 34 million two years ago, and infection rates are climbing, said the latest report from UNAIDS, the agency that coordinates U.N. AIDS programs. "We haven't reached the peak of the AIDS epidemic yet," Dr. Peter Piot, the UNAIDS executive director, told Reuters in an interview, scotching experts' hopes it would level off. "It's an unprecedented epidemic in human history." AIDS threatens to wipe out a generation in Africa and destabilize the whole continent, warns the report, released ahead of the 14th International Conference on AIDS which opens next week in Barcelona. "From a pure medical problem, AIDS has become an issue for economic and social development and even for security," Piot warned, saying the disease was eating away Africa's work force, holding back economic development and aggravating famines. "The world can't afford a whole continent to be destabilized because of AIDS. It's going to have implications for all continents," Piot said. The report called for more money from rich countries to combat the epidemic. The world must spend $7 billion to $10 billion a year by 2005 to tackle AIDS, under targets set last year at the U.N. General Assembly Special Session on HIV/AIDS in New York. "It's not asking for the moon," said Piot. "By any standards that are used for breaches in security, that's peanuts." "The international community has not given what it should have," Piot said. "They have considered it a marginal problem." Rich countries must do more to get drugs to AIDS victims in Africa, Piot said. "It's still an enormous scandal," Piot said, pointing out that just 4 percent of infected people in developing countries have access to the latest antiretroviral drugs, as opposed to about half in North America. ------------------------------------------- Macdonald Stainsby http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/rad-green http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/leninist-international -- In the contradiction lies the hope. --Bertholt Brecht From mstainsby at tao.ca Wed Jul 3 10:24:05 2002 From: mstainsby at tao.ca (Macdonald Stainsby) Date: Wed, 03 Jul 2002 09:24:05 -0700 Subject: [R-G] The Analogy to Apartheid Message-ID: <003f01c222ae$0d286440$291f5318@vc.shawcable.net> The Analogy to Apartheid Ian Urbina http://www.merip.org/mer/mer223/223_urbina.html (Ian Urbina is associate editor at the Middle East Research and Information Project. His writing has appeared in the Nation, the International Herald Tribune and elsewhere.) Students for Justice in Palestine protest with mouths taped shut after UC-Berkeley Chancellor Robert Berdahl briefly banned the group in April 2002. (Rob Katzer/The Daily Californian) It was not a novel comparison, but it caused quite a stir. In June 2001, Ronnie Kasrils and Max Ozinsky, two Jewish heroes of South Africa's struggle for liberation from state-driven racism, published a letter in the Pretoria newspaper comparing Israel's occupation of Palestinian lands to South African apartheid. The letter, signed by several hundred other prominent Jewish leaders and titled "Not in My Name," called for an immediate end to the occupation and sparked a frenzy in the South African press in the months that followed. Most recently, Nobel laureate Bishop Desmond Tutu drew the apartheid parallels in his editorial calling for Israel's full withdrawal.[1] The Kasrils-Ozinsky petition continues to inspire both support and opposition in South Africa. The Israeli left has been discussing this comparison since at least the late 1980s, when Israeli anthropologist Uri Davis published his famous work, Israel: An Apartheid State. At the September 2001 UN conference on racism in Durban, South Africa, calls to compare occupation with apartheid were drowned out by the more incendiary claim that "Zionism is racism," and therefore received little substantive or even-handed coverage in the press. But suddenly, the analogy is getting wider circulation, as efforts to persuade universities and other institutions to divest from Israel gather steam internationally and in the US. Emerging Apartheid Apartheid South Africa was based on an "us here, them there" formula of territorial segregation in which the white-ruled areas consisted of 87 percent of the country, including the big cities and most of the arable land. Nominally independent bantustans, forming a horseshoe-shaped archipelago along the nation's outskirts, made up the remaining 13 percent of the land. There is striking similarity to Israel-Palestine, where the state of Israel covers 78 percent of the original British mandate territory, while Palestine, a nation-in-waiting, makes up the remaining 22 percent. In early September 2000, Israeli activists organized a conference in Neve Shalom to announce a Campaign Against an Emerging Apartheid, which some on the radical left feel is an apt description of Israel's "matrix of control" -- composed of settlements, bypass roads, security zones and checkpoints -- in Palestine. Especially after Operation Defensive Shield, when Palestinians are required to get permits from the Israelis to travel from one tank-encircled West Bank enclave to another, life for an average citizen in the Occupied Territories resembles that of the apartheid-era townships in more ways than one. Most notably, after 1967 Palestinian workers became as dependent on work inside Israel as township residents were on jobs in the white-dominated cities and equally vulnerable -- through closures and internal sieges -- to collective punishment. Meanwhile, the growing Israeli refusenik movement evokes the small anti-conscription drive that took shape in South Africa in the late 1980s. Decorated officers refusing to perform military service in the Occupied Territories are a political embarrassment to the Israel Defense Forces. Those not in prison have taken their message on the road, arguing at US synagogues and campuses that the occupation is both wrong and a formula for perpetual insecurity. Just as in contemporary Israel, mandatory military service in apartheid South Africa was integral to the national fabric, and a refusal to serve was rare and highly stigmatized. The government attempted to coopt the young officers by offering alternative forms of service, but failed. The actions helped convince Pretoria that its apartheid policies were simply untenable. The South African analogy also conjures up the international activist movement which emerged in the late 1970s and 1980s to dismantle apartheid. This grassroots effort consisted of university and government divestment efforts, consumer boycotts, arms embargoes and eventual economic sanctions of the apartheid regime. Students confronted their university administrators, union members pressured their stockholders, faith-based groups informed their parishioners and ultimately a populist force culminated in radical change. Princeton University??Ts investments in companies that have significant operations in Israel. - Name of Company Amount of Princeton's Investment Company's Relationship with Israel American International Group $6.9 million Joint venture with Aurec to form insurance company in Israel Boston Scientific $6 million Purchased 25% of Medinol Dow Chemical $3 million Invested $750,000 in Asheklon Technological Industries, a technology incubator General Electric $8.5 million Joint venture to provide electronic trade services with an investment of $2.5 million Hewlett Packard $9.5 million Owns Computation & Measurement, Ltd., a $19 million Israeli company IBM $8.5 million Owns Ubique, Softel, and IBM Israel, Ltd. Intel $9 million $1.6 billion facility in Kiryat Gat International Paper Inc. $2.5 million Owns 11% of Scitex, Ltd. Johnson & Johnson $9.8 million Took over Biosense for $400 million Lehmann Brothers $6 million Owns 4% of Bank Leumi, 8% of Nice Systems, 4.5% of Leader Investments Lucent Technologies $5.5 million Purchased Lannet for $117 million MacDermid, Inc. $2.3 million Owns 100% of MacDermid Israel, Ltd. McDonalds Corp. $5.4 million McDonalds Israel Merck $8.4 million Opened subsidiary in Israel 6/97 Motorola $5 million Owns Motorola Israel, Ltd., Motorola-Tadiran Cellular Texas Instruments $8 million Owns $50 million Butterfly and $260 million Libit TOTAL $104.3 million ------------------------------------------- Macdonald Stainsby http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/rad-green http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/leninist-international -- In the contradiction lies the hope. --Bertholt Brecht From mstainsby at tao.ca Wed Jul 3 10:51:18 2002 From: mstainsby at tao.ca (Macdonald Stainsby) Date: Wed, 03 Jul 2002 09:51:18 -0700 Subject: [R-G] Palestinians rally for Arafat in Gaza, slam Bush Message-ID: <009901c222b1$dae39960$291f5318@vc.shawcable.net> Reuters. 3 July 2002. Palestinians rally for Arafat in Gaza, slam Bush. GAZA -- Thousands of Palestinians chanting "more attacks and explosives belts" took to the streets of Gaza on Wednesday in a rally organised by Yasser Arafat's Fatah faction to protest against a U.S. call to replace him. An activist from the al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, an unofficial Fatah armed group, pledged over a loudspeaker that any Palestinian openly challenging Arafat's leadership would be a dead man. "Any collaborator who would represent himself an alternative to (Arafat) will be executed in the public square," said the message, which echoed through the streets as armed men fired in the air. "I advise Bush to go to hell or to keep silent," an armed Fatah activist told Reuters during the rally. The protesters stopped in front of the United Nations headquarters in Gaza City before gathering for the rally at the wreckage of Arafat's headquarters on the beach, destroyed in an Israeli helicopter missile attack in April. "We urge Kofi Annan, the U.N. secretary general, to condemn Bush's remarks and to respect and protect the right of Palestinians to decide on their leadership," read a letter handed to U.N. officials. "This is Palestine and not Afghanistan," said protester Salim Ali, holding a poster of Arafat and a Palestinian flag. "Bush will not find a Palestinian Karzai," he added, referring to the U.S.-backed President Hamid Karzai, who has led post-Taliban rule in Afghanistan. ------------------------------------------- Macdonald Stainsby http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/rad-green http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/leninist-international -- In the contradiction lies the hope. --Bertholt Brecht From mstainsby at tao.ca Wed Jul 3 10:59:29 2002 From: mstainsby at tao.ca (Macdonald Stainsby) Date: Wed, 03 Jul 2002 09:59:29 -0700 Subject: [R-G] Interview with Richardo Alarcon Message-ID: <00d401c222b2$ffec6240$291f5318@vc.shawcable.net> President of Cuban National Assembly, Ricardo Alarcon, interviewed: http://www.rprogreso.com/action_alert!.htm ------------------------------------------- Macdonald Stainsby http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/rad-green http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/leninist-international -- In the contradiction lies the hope. --Bertholt Brecht From mstainsby at tao.ca Wed Jul 3 11:02:29 2002 From: mstainsby at tao.ca (Macdonald Stainsby) Date: Wed, 03 Jul 2002 10:02:29 -0700 Subject: [R-G] Interview with Richardo Alarcon Message-ID: <00f901c222b3$6a4b3800$291f5318@vc.shawcable.net> President of Cuban National Assembly, Ricardo Alarcon, interviewed: http://www.rprogreso.com/action_alert!.htm ------------------------------------------- Macdonald Stainsby http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/rad-green http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/leninist-international -- In the contradiction lies the hope. --Bertholt Brecht From mstainsby at tao.ca Wed Jul 3 11:04:44 2002 From: mstainsby at tao.ca (Macdonald Stainsby) Date: Wed, 03 Jul 2002 10:04:44 -0700 Subject: [R-G] Re: Interview with Richardo Alarcon References: <00d401c222b2$ffec6240$291f5318@vc.shawcable.net> Message-ID: <00ff01c222b3$bb9cc8e0$291f5318@vc.shawcable.net> Here is the proper link to the real audio file: http://www.rprogreso.com/Archives/bg070202.ram ----- Original Message ----- From: "Macdonald Stainsby" > President of Cuban National Assembly, Ricardo Alarcon, interviewed: > ------------------------------------------- Macdonald Stainsby http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/rad-green http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/leninist-international -- In the contradiction lies the hope. --Bertholt Brecht From mstainsby at dojo.tao.ca Wed Jul 3 12:27:37 2002 From: mstainsby at dojo.tao.ca (Macdonald Stainsby) Date: Wed, 3 Jul 2002 18:27:37 -0000 Subject: [R-G] The Pakistani Rich are Worse than Animals Message-ID: <20020703182738.F2A2717DC86@dojo.tao.ca> The Pakistani Rich are Worse than Animals ========================================= Taimur Rahman Communist Mazdoor Kissan Party Even animals have their limits, but the Pakistani ruling-class, arguibly the most reactionary ruling-class anywhere in the world (if not in the history of the world) are worse than animals. In Muzaffargarh the worst crime imaginable has occurred. A boy of low class peasant origin was found sitting in a field next to a girl of the feudal family. The boy was twelve years old and the girl was about 16. Obviously, these were two kids just playing in the fields. The feudal lords of the area, who live with a culture of strictly segregating their women and themselves from the manual workers were infuriated by the fact that the two were socialising. Feudal lords in Pakistan think of women as property that might become unclean if low class people come in contact with their Izzat (honour). So they kidnapped the boy and raped him. At first they thought that the 12 year boy would not leak the story. As it became clear that the boy might leak the story possibly even to the police, the feudal lords made another attack on the peasants. To cover up their earlier deed, they called a meeting of the Jirga (feudal tribal council) and alleged that the two had been found in a "compromising position" and that justice could only be served by the rule "an eye for an eye". 400 peasants were watching the meeting of the Jirga. The Jirga ordered the father of the girl to bring his 18 year old daughter (the sister of the boy) to the Jirga. He complied. She was taken to a nearby barn and gang raped by four adult men. She was sent back to her father and parents NAKED. All the low classes of the village stood-by powerless. These are the Jirgas and Panchayats that politicians such as Imran Khan and Karzai (in Afghanistan) so boldy hold up as the model of democracy. Who order the gang rape of teenagers. Some of the names of those who committed this crime are: Fayyaz, Manzoor, Allah Ditta, Maulvi Abdul Razzaq and Mazoor Jatoi. The name of the sixth member could not be ascertained. The Punjab police has allegedly arrested some people involved with this incident. But the fact is that the Punjab police is full of more rapists than the feudals of Pakistan. In my opinion they have arrested the perpetrators of this crime to save them from a possible attack by other people. There are powerful lessons to be learnt from this incident. First, this teenage girl (just like your daughter or sister) was not gang raped by some frustrated group of youngsters acting on their own (not that this would have made this henious act any less barbaric), but by the TRIBAL COUNCIL. To further humiliate the poor peasants, she was sent back home naked. This was therefore, a decision taken by the ruling-class against the poor peasants. Its intention was to "teach them all a lesson". The lesson is that the poor are the slaves of the rich ruling-class of Pakistan. If they mistakenly feel that there is any form of equality, even socialisation between the rich and the poor, the worst possible and most humiliating punishment will be metted out against them. Even the Israeli army has to maintain some semblance of democracy and concern for human rights in the international media, but the feudal lords of Pakistan are criminals beyond compare. They are worse than the zionists. Therefore, it is abundantly clear that these slave drivers are unwilling for any form of equality or democracy. Is there any solution open to the workers and peasants of Pakistan other than a revolution? No! The slave holders of Pakistan, who have denied the people the opportunity for freedom and justice have themselves sealed the fate of the future course of development of Pakistani society. They are the ones that should be held responsible for violent revolution. They have denied the people any other course of action. The peace-loving people have tried every means to achieve some semblance of equality and democracy but it has always been crushed by the military, the feudals, and the capitalists. The time has come for the people of Pakistan to take their destiny into their own hands. To not wait for the establishment, the police, the army, the courts, the judiciary, the parliament (which does not exist), and all these other institutions that are only built to protect the rich to "deliver" justice. The time has come for the people to create a peoples justice. Just like the women of the Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist) are arming their women, the women of Pakistan should be fully armed to defend themselves. Not only those who raped the girl, but all those who participated in anyway in the decision of to rape this girl should be given the death sentence. People talk of non-violence, they say we need reform not revolution. These are the silly dreams of utopians who are totally disconnected and unaware of the reality of the oppression on the ground. They are unaware of the barbaric character of the ruling-class of Pakistan. The first conclusion is that Pakistan needs a peoples-democratic revolution. Second, we must ask ourselves, when Pakistan was created it was said that this was in order to safeguard the Muslims. Have the Muslims been safeguarded? On the Khabarnama (news) at 9 pm our government talks of the rape of Kashmiri women by the Indian soldiers. Are the working-women of Pakistan safe from the feudals, police, and army of Pakistan? It is said that the rights of self-determination of the Kashmiri people are not safeguarded. Are the rights of self-determination of the people of Pakistan guaranteed? The answer to all these questions, and many others, is NO! Today the people of Pakistan are enslaved to the feudals, capitalists, and the civil military oligarchy. Therefore, the greatest enemy of the people of Pakistan is not the Indian aggressor. The Indian aggressor is the greatest enemy of the people of India. The greatest enemy of the people of Pakistan is the enemy at home. The ruling-class and rich of Pakistan who thrive on looting, plundering, and rape. It is against our own ruling-class that we need to make a peoples-democratic revolution. Therefore, I appeal to you: People of Pakistan, do not be fooled by the nationalist and religious sloganeering of our ruling-class. The real enemy of the poor people of Pakistan, the workers and peasants of Pakistan, the men and women of Pakistan, the Baluchi, Sindhi, Pathan, Kashmiri, Punjabi is the ruling-class, the class of rich people of Pakistan. In what sense can we talk of Independence when our daughters and sisters raped by jirgas and panchayats. Enough is enough. Unite the many to fight the few! Unite the poor to fight the rich! Unite the people to overthrow the ruling-class! Inqalab Zindabad Taimur Rahman Communist Mazdoor Kissan Party -- Macdonald Stainsby, External Relations Co-ordinator, Douglas College Students Union. ** In the contradiction lies the hope. --Bertholt Brecht. *** "`Order rules in Berlin.' You stupid lackeys! Your `order' is built on sand. Tomorrow the revolution will rear ahead once more and announce to your horror amid the brass of trumpets: `I was, I am, I always will be!'" -Rosa Luxemburg, 1918. From adurrani at yorku.ca Wed Jul 3 14:19:29 2002 From: adurrani at yorku.ca (adurrani at yorku.ca) Date: Wed, 3 Jul 2002 16:19:29 -0400 Subject: [R-G] Girl Ordered Gang-Raped in Pakistan Message-ID: <1025727569.3d235c511f854@mymail.yorku.ca> ===================== Tue Jul 2, 7:18 AM ET Girl Ordered Gang-Raped in Pakistan By KHALID TANVEER, Associated Press http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/ap/20020702/ap_on_re_as/pakis tan_gang_rape_3 MULTAN, Pakistan (AP) - A Pakistani tribal council ordered an 18-year-old girl to be gang-raped in order to punish her family after her brother was seen walking with a girl from a higher class tribe, police said Tuesday. The private Human Rights Commission of Pakistan demanded that all those involved in the rape, which took place June 22 in the village of Meerwala in southern Punjab province, be punished. Police said the victim's father had filed criminal charges against the four men involved in the case. Police said they picked up eight relatives of the suspects to pressure the perpetrators into surrendering. "We will spare no efforts to do justice" for the victim, police official Malik Saeed said. According to the victim, the Mastoi tribe demanded punishment after her 11-year-old brother was seen walking unchaperoned with a Mastoi girl in a deserted part of the village. The boy and his sister are from the lower class Gujar tribe. The Mastoi tribe called a meeting of the tribal council, which ordered the girl to be raped to avenge their tribal honor. The teen-ager said she was taken to a hut and assaulted as hundreds of Mastois stood outside laughing and cheering. Pakistan has a tradition of tribal justice in which crimes or affronts to dignity are punished outside the framework of Pakistani law. The Human Rights Commission of Pakistan has demanded an end to punishments by tribal councils. Kamla Hayyat, of the commission, said the group will send a fact-finding mission to the victim's village to determine what happened and provide help to her. "The increasing incidents of terrible atrocities against women are a terrible reflection on the state of society and the status of women within it," commission chairman Afrasiab Khattak said in a statement. Last month, an Islamic court overturned the conviction of a woman who was to be stoned to death for adultery. Zufran Bibi, 28, said she was raped and appealed her early May conviction in the conservative North West Frontier Province. Her case prompted demonstrations and protests by hundreds of civil and women's-rights groups nationwide. From mstainsby at dojo.tao.ca Wed Jul 3 16:39:57 2002 From: mstainsby at dojo.tao.ca (Macdonald Stainsby) Date: Wed, 3 Jul 2002 22:39:57 -0000 Subject: [R-G] Very suggestive reaction to Emperors Clothes article... Message-ID: <20020703223958.F075017DC30@dojo.tao.ca> URL for this article: http://emperors-clothes.com/indict/update72.htm Join our email list at http://emperors-clothes.com/f.htm. Receive articles from Emperor's Clothes Website, www.tenc.net Click here to email the link to this article to a friend. We encourage readers to reprint and re-post any Emperor's Clothes article. Please quote articles exactly and include the original URL and name of author(s). ======================================= DC AIR NATIONAL GUARD WEBSITE ARCHIVE PAGE BLOCKED! SPREAD THE WORD! [Posted 2 July 2002] ======================================= It looks like we've struck a nerve. Last night we posted an article entitled, "POWERFUL EVIDENCE THAT AIR FORCE WAS MADE TO STAND DOWN ON 9-11. We emailed it to 20,000 Emperor's Clothes list members. In that article we gave step-by step instructions for accessing the DC AIR NATIONAL GUARD Website as it appeared April 19, 2001, including the then Mission Statement: "To Provide Combat Units in the Highest Possible State of Readiness." It worked fine last night. But this morning, when I and others tried to access the DC ANG archive pages at archive.org we got sent to a porno Website. We also tried going direct to DC ANG's April 19th archive page using its direct URL which is (or was!) http://web.archive.org/web/20010203183700/http://dcandr.ang.af.mil/ The URL stayed in its little window, but below was the porno page. We tried everal times and then Windows crashed. Perhaps their choice of a porno site is symbolic. Also our donations page is under assault. If you try to make a donation and have trouble, please call our direct line at 617 916-1705 (US). Apparently you-all and we are making somebody angry. Let's keep it up! The best response is to spread the word. Emperor's Clothes backed up the April 19th DC ANG archive a few months ago. I just tried the link and it seems to (still) work. We urge everyone to back it up and post it on every Website. The backup link is http://emperors-clothes.com/9-11backups/dcandr2.htm If the pictures don't show up at first, hit the 'refresh' button. -- Jared Israel ========================= -- Macdonald Stainsby, External Relations Co-ordinator, Douglas College Students Union. ** In the contradiction lies the hope. --Bertholt Brecht. *** "`Order rules in Berlin.' You stupid lackeys! Your `order' is built on sand. Tomorrow the revolution will rear ahead once more and announce to your horror amid the brass of trumpets: `I was, I am, I always will be!'" -Rosa Luxemburg, 1918. From mstainsby at dojo.tao.ca Wed Jul 3 19:05:21 2002 From: mstainsby at dojo.tao.ca (Macdonald Stainsby) Date: Thu, 4 Jul 2002 01:05:21 -0000 Subject: [R-G] Winter Clouds Message-ID: <20020704010521.9A54017DC77@dojo.tao.ca> Winter clouds snow-laden, cotton fluff flying, None or few the unfallen flowers. Chill waves sweep through steep skies, Yet earth's gentle breath grows warm. Only heroes can quell tigers and leopards And wild bears never daunt the brave. Plum blossoms welcome the whirling snow; Small wonder flies freeze and perish. --- Mao Tse-tung -- Macdonald Stainsby, External Relations Co-ordinator, Douglas College Students Union. ** In the contradiction lies the hope. --Bertholt Brecht. *** "`Order rules in Berlin.' You stupid lackeys! Your `order' is built on sand. Tomorrow the revolution will rear ahead once more and announce to your horror amid the brass of trumpets: `I was, I am, I always will be!'" -Rosa Luxemburg, 1918. From mstainsby at tao.ca Thu Jul 4 11:29:51 2002 From: mstainsby at tao.ca (Macdonald Stainsby) Date: Thu, 04 Jul 2002 10:29:51 -0700 Subject: [R-G] Afghans Angry After U.S. Air Attack Message-ID: <002601c22380$72ce3d60$291f5318@vc.shawcable.net> Afghans Angry After U.S. Air Attack By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS Filed at 7:45 a.m. ET KABUL, Afghanistan (AP) -- Having once seen Americans as liberators, a growing number of Afghans are beginning to question the U.S. military role here and wondering if the war against al-Qaida and the Taliban is taking too high a toll on civilians. Sentiment has shifted on Kabul streets after civilian deaths, most recently Monday's U.S. airstrike that Afghan authorities say killed 40 people and injured 100 others in Uruzgan province. The dead included members of a wedding party. ``We consider the Americans our liberators, but after this, they may soon become occupiers,'' a grocer named Jabbar said in his small store on the busy Qalai-e-Fatulluh Khan street. ``They should be here for peace, not death.'' In the first anti-American protest here since the collapse of the Taliban last year, about 200 Afghans marched through the streets of Kabul on Thursday to express outrage over the attacks. The demonstrators, about half of them women covered by traditional burqas, blocked midmorning traffic in the dusty capital. ``We support coalition measures against the Taliban regime and al-Qaida, but we cannot tolerate more innocent victims in our country and American bombardment of civilian targets,'' said Theyba, one of the protest organizers, reading to the crowd from a petition outside the United Nations headquarters in Kabul The U.S. military said an AC-130 gunship that retaliated after U.S. aircraft came under ground fire may have been responsible for the deaths Monday of civilians in a cluster of Uruzgan villages. ``Americans made so many mistakes here, and we cannot accept that hitting a wedding party was just another one,'' said Raz Mohammed, 40, a customer in Jabbar's store. ``They should set their aiming devices right, or just pack up and go,'' Mohammed said. ``We fought the Russians in 1980s, we'll fight Americans if need be.'' Such sentiment was rare here after the Taliban fled the capital in November. Many Afghans wanted a larger U.S. presence in their homeland, fearing that without foreign troops, their own leaders would resort to widespread killing. But no more. Anger is rising. Afghans see a series of mistaken airstrikes as evidence that the United States is not concerned about Afghan lives. ``In case of further such incidents, Afghans may start becoming really hostile toward Americans,'' said a law student who identified himself only as Hakim. ``And that does not bode well for peace in this country.'' Conscious of such sentiment, Afghan President Hamid Karzai demanded Tuesday that the United States take ``all necessary measures'' to avoid further civilian casualties. Some Afghans believe Karzai owes so much of his power to his U.S. patrons that he is afraid of angering the U.S. administration. ``What is this 'all necessary measures?''' asked Safiqulluh, a jewelry merchant. ``He should have told the Americans: 'If this happens again, out of our country.' The Americans didn't even say 'We are sorry' for what happened. Probably they'll soon say it was Afghans who killed women and children at that wedding party.'' Clearly, however, the U.S. military is sensitive to the risks of alienating the Afghans. U.S. spokesmen were quick to express regret over the loss of civilian lives, and Lt. Gen. Dan K. McNeill, commander of the U.S. forces here, said it was ``not part of the parameters of this coalition to attack innocents.'' The U.S. command took heart in a gesture by a local warlord and tribal elders who delivered two Afghan carpets to U.S. forces at Bagram air base Wednesday in a show of support for the U.S.-led coalition. Baba Jan, who says he has 2,000 local fighters around Bagram, also delivered a petition he said was signed by the tribal elders in support of the coalition forces. The carpets and petition were prearranged, but their delivery in the wake of the air strike was significant. ``They still came through,'' Col. Roger King told The Associated Press. ``They could have canceled.'' However, Baba Jan, a former northern alliance commander who does business with the Americans at Bagram, may not reflect widespread public sentiment. After 23 years of war, there is a sense of resignation among some Afghans. ``There are so many people, hundreds of thousands, who have died in this poor country over the past two decades in wars and misery,'' said Hakim, the student. ``Another 100 and so dead is just a drop in the ocean.'' ------------------------------------------- Macdonald Stainsby http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/rad-green http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/leninist-international -- In the contradiction lies the hope. --Bertholt Brecht From mstainsby at tao.ca Thu Jul 4 20:54:00 2002 From: mstainsby at tao.ca (Macdonald Stainsby) Date: Thu, 04 Jul 2002 19:54:00 -0700 Subject: [R-G] Israel deports American and British women Message-ID: <00b701c223cf$374eaaa0$291f5318@vc.shawcable.net> AP. 4 July 2002. Court upholds decision to deport American, British women arrested in Palestinian refugee camp. JERUSALEM -- A district judge on Thursday upheld a decision to deport two women, an American and Briton, who were arrested last month in a closed military area inside a Palestinian refugee camp. The women -- Darlene Wallach, 51, from San Jose, Calif., and Josie Sandercock, 32, of Birmingham, England -- were arrested June 1 in Balata refugee camp near Nablus in the West Bank. The women were among 17 foreigners who had entered Israel to show solidarity with Palestinians. Eight were arrested for being inside the closed camp and five of them were immediately deported. Sandercock, Wallach and a Japanese citizen, Makoto Hibbino, remained behind to contest the decision. Hibbino returned to Japan before the district court's decision. The women have a week to leave the country but said they would appeal. Sandercock said she was acting as a "human shield" providing protection for Palestinians against Israeli forces. The foreigners also were escorting ambulances through Israeli checkpoints. "Our presence provided protection for Palestinians," Wallach said. Israel has expelled 120 foreigners and more than 200 have been refused entry since March. ------------------------------------------- Macdonald Stainsby http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/rad-green http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/leninist-international -- In the contradiction lies the hope. --Bertholt Brecht From debsian at pacbell.net Thu Jul 4 21:46:35 2002 From: debsian at pacbell.net (Michael Pugliese) Date: Thu, 04 Jul 2002 20:46:35 -0700 Subject: [R-G] Re: GUILTY FOR 9-11: BUSH, RUMSFELD, MYERS by Jared Israel and Illarion Bykov Message-ID: Message: 12 Date: Thu, 04 Jul 2002 22:04:42 -0000 From: "chipberlet" Subject: Re: Trilaterals Over Washington by Anthony Sutton --- In NewPacifica at y..., heidichesney at a... wrote: > Chip, > > please clarify the questions i posed to you regarding how it is you KNOW (for > a fact) which military air bases were "combat ready" and which were not... > > I asked twice for clarification and i have not received a response yet. > > Thanks, > > ~Heidi Hi, You are completely missing the point. "Combat Ready" is a term used by the U.S. military to describe a unit with a sufficient number of properly trained troops; and a full inventory of equipment and ordanance that is functional and with the proper maintenance, so as to be able to be deployed into combat. It DOES NOT mean the people in the unit are sitting around on their butts on benches ready to leap into tanks and jets in ten minutes. Many "combat ready" units are Reserve units or National Guard units and most of the people in those units hold full-time jobs outside of their military commitment. Some "combat ready" units are part of the full-time military and live on or near their bases, but even in these units some people are on leave or off duty. NONE OF THESE PEOPLE ARE AUTOMATICALLY ON DUTY FOR ANYTHING UNLESS THEY ARE ASSIGNED TO A SPECIFIC TASK. We can agree that it would have been a good idea to have several jet pilots and several jet planes assigned to alert duty and on call for a scramble (5-10 minutes to be airborne) at Andrews field. There were not. It is certainly appropriate to ask why not. Nontheless, the duty assigments on 9/11 for scramble alert jet aircraft on the east coast were Langley in coastal Virginia to cover Washington, D.C. and Otis on the coast on the Cape in Massachusetts to cover New York City (and Boston). How do I know this? Because the pilots have given interviews describing their duty assignment and how the were scrambled on 9/ 11. Were their other bases with scramble-ready jets? Quite probably there were. My argument is that the article claiming that there were actually jets ready to scramble and take off at Andrews (because some web page described some of the jet units stationed there as "combat ready") is flat out wrong and based on total ignorance of the meaning of the term "combat ready." There are plenty of DOD documents explaining the term "combat ready." And "combat ready 24/7" is just a slogan to keep units on their toes as a goal, because in actual practice, when a "combat ready" unit is called up from the Reserves or National Guard, the DOD goal is 24-72 hours before embarcation. Even an active duty full time military unit can take many hours to get assembled for transport. There is NO EVIDENCE that has been produced so far that demonstrates that there were jets ready to scramble at Andrews. -Chip Berlet p.s. This means that the following article is wrong: = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = GUILTY FOR 9-11: BUSH, RUMSFELD, MYERS Introduction & Section 1 by Illarion Bykov and Jared Israel [Posted 14 November 2001] [Updated 17 November 2001] Dedicated to the firemen of New York. ======================================= INTRODUCTION TO SUMMARY OF EVIDENCE Andrews Air Force Base is a huge military installation just 10 miles from the Pentagon. From debsian at pacbell.net Thu Jul 4 22:11:41 2002 From: debsian at pacbell.net (Michael Pugliese) Date: Thu, 04 Jul 2002 21:11:41 -0700 Subject: [R-G] Fw:URL's About Otis & Langley Airbases Message-ID: Message: 24 Date: Fri, 05 Jul 2002 02:05:02 -0000 From: "chipberlet" Subject: URL's About Otis & Langley Airbases Hi, See below: --- In NewPacifica at y..., RoadsEnd at a... wrote: > > In a message dated 7/4/02 3:05:35 PM, cberlet at i... writes: > > >-Chip Berlet > > > >p.s. This means that the following article is wrong: > > > > So, because Mr. Berlet says that he has s different definition of "combat > ready" nothing in the article by Jared Israel is true? Why should we use that > logic? Is Mr. Israel a conspracist, also? Is Mr. Israel a right- winger or > just a "duped" left-winger or duped "middle-winger" or what? > > Would Mr. Berlet be as kind as to actually post something factual or where > they can be heard these interviews and such that gives some factual basis to > your unsubstantiated claims? > Sorry for the split URL's. Paste them into a notepad program, fix them, then use them in your browser. See: http://www.capecodonline.com/ cctimes/archives/2001/sep/12/ wasotis12.htm http://www.capecodonline.com/ cctimes/archives/2001/ sep/15/reportotis15.htm http://www.capecodonline.com/ cctimes/archives/2001/ sep/16/didhijackers16.htm http://september11.natca.org/ NewsArticles/Wald1016.htm http://www.sptimes.com/News/ 101701/Worldandnation/ On_cockpit_radio__ter.shtml http://www.s-t.com/daily/09-01/ 09-16-01/a03wn013.htm http://www.csmonitor.com/2002/ 0416/p01s04-usmi.htm -Chip Berlet From bobenoch at shaw.ca Thu Jul 4 23:24:21 2002 From: bobenoch at shaw.ca (Bob Enoch) Date: Thu, 04 Jul 2002 23:24:21 -0600 Subject: [R-G] Re: GUILTY FOR 9-11: BUSH, RUMSFELD, MYERS by Jared Israel and Illarion Bykov References: Message-ID: <001901bfe641$41a10e80$61474d18@vf.shawcable.net> ----- Original Message ----- From: "Michael Pugliese" > Message: 12 > Date: Thu, 04 Jul 2002 22:04:42 -0000 > From: "chipberlet" > Subject: Re: Trilaterals Over Washington by Anthony Sutton > > "Combat Ready" is a term used by the U.S. military to describe a > unit > with a sufficient number of properly trained troops; and a full > inventory of equipment and ordanance that is functional and with the > proper maintenance, so as to be able to be deployed into combat. It > DOES NOT mean the people in the unit are sitting around on their > > butts on benches ready to leap into tanks and jets in ten minutes. > > Many "combat ready" units are Reserve units or National Guard units > and most of the people in those units hold full-time jobs outside of > their military commitment. Some "combat ready" units are part of the > full-time military and live on or near their bases, but even in > these > units some people are on leave or off duty. > > NONE OF THESE PEOPLE ARE AUTOMATICALLY ON DUTY FOR ANYTHING UNLESS > THEY ARE ASSIGNED TO A SPECIFIC TASK. > > We can agree that it would have been a good idea to have several jet > pilots and several jet planes assigned to alert duty and on call for > a scramble (5-10 minutes to be airborne) at Andrews field. There > were > not. It is certainly appropriate to ask why not. > > Nontheless, the duty assigments on 9/11 for scramble alert jet > aircraft on the east coast were Langley in coastal Virginia to cover > Washington, D.C. and Otis on the coast on the Cape in Massachusetts > to cover New York City (and Boston). > > How do I know this? Because the pilots have given interviews > describing their duty assignment and how the were scrambled on 9/ 11. > Were their other bases with scramble-ready jets? Quite probably > there were. > > My argument is that the article claiming that there were actually > jets ready to scramble and take off at Andrews (because some web > page > described some of the jet units stationed there as "combat ready") is > flat out wrong and based on total ignorance of the meaning of the > term "combat ready." There are plenty of DOD documents explaining > the > term "combat ready." And "combat ready 24/7" is just a slogan to > keep units on their toes as a goal, because in actual practice, when > a "combat ready" unit is called up from the Reserves or National > > Guard, the DOD goal is 24-72 hours before embarcation. Even an > active duty full time military unit can take many hours to get > assembled for transport. > > There is NO EVIDENCE that has been produced so far that demonstrates > that there were jets ready to scramble at Andrews. > > -Chip Berlet An attempt, at least.....thank you. The DCANG, based at Andrews, describes its mission as "the defense of the District of Columbia" Now, it could be that they meant to say "defense against attacks that take 24-72 hours to develop" That's possible. Maybe the "Home of Air Force One" sends ALL their pilots home at the same time, I guess that's possible too.(all ang units retain a nucleus of trained personnel at all times) So if it seems to you reasonable to believe that the main base for the defense of the capital was incapacitated because all their personnel were too busy, or all off duty at the same time, then I guess Americans should be very afraid. Not much of a return on all those trillions...... None of this, however, explains why none of those bases "chip" describes as being "up" that day (Langley and Otis) managed to scramble a single fighter until it was too late. Militaries have procedures for things for good reason. They mean that the Command can set procedures in advance, so that the danger of enemy surprise is reduced . Surprise attacks are designed to exploit existing procedures, so far as they are known. This one succeeded because sop was NOT followed.There is no doubt that sop for a highjacking, or even an un-explained course deviation, is (of course) to get up in the air and go have a look How could any terrorist organization assume that the USAF, having procedures in place which would have foiled the attempt, would somehow fail to carry out the most obvious of these measures, such as scrambling a plane or two? Is Osama(remember him?) a mind reader, or possessed of psychic powers? Almost two hours passed with highjacked planes filling the skies, and nary an F-16 in sight. This violates not only common sense but the regs. of the FAA, NATO, and the USAF. It is therefore difficult to avoid the inference that someone senior ordered the jets to stay put. Bob . From mstainsby at tao.ca Thu Jul 4 23:36:49 2002 From: mstainsby at tao.ca (Macdonald Stainsby) Date: Thu, 04 Jul 2002 22:36:49 -0700 Subject: [R-G] US bombs Iraqi defense system. Message-ID: <021401c223e5$f63ef800$291f5318@vc.shawcable.net> AP. 4 July 2002. US bombs Iraqi defense system. ANKARA -- American warplanes bombed an Iraqi air defense system Thursday after coming under attack from Iraqi anti-aircraft artillery, the U.S. military said. The aircraft were making routine patrols when Iraqi forces fired artillery at them near the northern city of Mosul, the U.S. European Command said in a statement. "Coalition aircraft responded to the continued Iraqi attacks by dropping precision ordnance on elements of the Iraqi integrated air defense system," the Germany-based command said. "All coalition aircraft departed the area safely." In Iraq, the official news agency said U.S. and British warplanes damaged a house and killed several cows and sheep in the airstrikes, but the report did not cite any human casualties. An unidentified military official told the Iraqi News Agency that the allied warplanes "bombed our civil and service installations in Mosul." ------------------------------------------- Macdonald Stainsby http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/rad-green http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/leninist-international -- In the contradiction lies the hope. --Bertholt Brecht From info at cinox.demon.co.uk Fri Jul 5 08:47:02 2002 From: info at cinox.demon.co.uk (Tim Murphy) Date: Fri, 5 Jul 2002 15:47:02 +0100 Subject: [R-G] Fw: Pilger: Rise of a new imperialism Message-ID: The link is http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2002/07/02/1023864733062.html Rise of a new imperialism July 3 2002 In his latest book, The New Rulers of the World, John Pilger argues that the "war on terrorism" is a charade, masking an all-powerful oppressor that dares not speak its name. It is nearly 10 months since September 11, and still the great charade plays on. Having appropriated our shocked and humane response to that momentous day, the rulers of the world have since ground our language into a paean of cliches and lies about the "war on terrorism" - when the most enduring menace, and source of terror, is them. The fanatics who attacked America came mostly from Saudi Arabia, the spiritual home of al-Qaeda and the tutors of the Taliban, but no bombs fell on that oil-rich American protectorate. According to an American study, 5000 civilians were bombed to death in stricken, impoverished Afghanistan, where not a single al-Qaeda leader of importance has been caught, or to anyone's knowledge, killed. Osama bin Laden got clean away, as did the Taliban ruler Mullah Omah. After this "victory", hundreds of prisoners, including the Australian David Hicks, were shipped to an American concentration camp in Cuba, where they have been held against all conventions of war and international law. No evidence of their alleged crimes has been produced. In the United States, more than 1000 people of Muslim background have "disappeared"; none has been charged. Legislation undermining the Bill of Rights has been rushed through Congress. For example, the FBI now has the power to go into libraries and find out who is reading what. Meanwhile, the British and Australian governments made fools of their soldiers by insisting they followed America's orders and pursued Afghan tribesmen opposed to this or that favoured warlord. This is what British squaddies in puttees and pith helmets did over a century ago when Lord Curzon, Viceroy of India, described Afghanistan as one of the "pieces on a chessboard upon which is being played out a great game for the domination of the world". There is no war on terrorism. It is the great game speeded up, and now more dangerous than ever. Having delivered the Palestinians into the arms of Ariel Sharon, the Christian Right fundamentalists running the plutocracy in Washington turn their priorities to manufacturing more bombs and missiles to hurl at the 22 million suffering people of Iraq. Should anyone need reminding, this is a nation held hostage to an American-led embargo every bit as barbaric as their dictator. Iraq is the world's second greatest source of oil - the reason for the attack is that America wants another, less uppity thug to run it. The Pentagon told former president Bill Clinton that an all-out attack on Iraq might kill "at least" 10,000 civilians. In a sustained propaganda campaign, journalists on both sides of the Atlantic have been used as "conduits" for rumours and lies. These ranged from allegations about an Iraqi connection with anthrax attacks in the US to a link between the leader of the September 11 hijacks and Iraqi intelligence. Both have been discredited. The great charade is imperialism's return journey to respectability. As the historian Frank Furedi reminds us in The New Ideology of Imperialism, it is not long ago "that the moral claims of imperialism were seldom questioned in the West. Imperialism and the global expansion of the Western powers were represented in unambiguously positive terms as a major contributor to human civilisation". The quest went wrong when it was clear that fascism, with all its ideas of racial and cultural superiority, was imperialism too, and the word vanished from academic discourse. In the best Stalinist tradition, imperialism no longer existed. When the Soviet Union collapsed, a new opportunity arose. The economic and political crisis in the developing world, largely the result of post-colonialism, such as the blood-letting in the Middle East and the destruction of commodity markets in Africa, served as retrospective justification for imperialism. Although the word remains unspeakable, the Western intelligentsia, conservatives and liberals alike, boldly echo the preferred euphemism, "civilisation". >From Italy's Prime Minister, Silvio Berlusconi, an ally of crypto-fascists, to impeccably liberal commentators, the new imperialists share a concept whose true meaning relies on a comparison with those who are uncivilised, inferior and might challenge the "values" of the West. The great divisions opening up between the rich and poor are reduced to platitudes of how best "we" deal with "them" - an attitude expressed in the return of xenophobia and racism towards refugees, led aggressively by the Howard Government. There are many blueprints for the new imperialism, but none as cogent as that of Zbigniew Brzezinski, adviser to several American presidents and one of the most influential gurus in Washington, whose 1997 book is said to have biblical authority among the George W. Bush gang and its "endless war" intelligentsia. In The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and its Geostrategic Imperatives, Brzezinski writes: "Ever since the continents started interacting politically, some 500 years ago, Eurasia has been the centre of world power." The key to controlling this vast area of the world is Central Asia. Dominance of Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan ensures not only new sources of energy and mineral wealth but a "guard post" over American control of the oil of the Persian Gulf. "What is most important to the history of the world?" asked Brzezinski. "The Taliban or the collapse of the Soviet Empire? Some stirred-up Muslims or the liberation of central Europe ...?" The "stirred-up Muslims" replied on September 11 last year. Nation states, says Brzezinski, will be incorporated in the "new order". "To put it in a terminology that harkens back to the more brutal age of ancient empires," he says, "the three grand imperatives of imperial geostrategy are to prevent collusion and maintain security dependence among the vassals, to keep tributaries pliant and protected, and to keep the barbarians from coming together." Brzezinski is not from the lunar right. He is as mainstream as Bush. He was President Jimmy Carter's national security adviser, who persuaded Carter to sign a secret executive order in 1979, funding a new Islamic terrorist movement, the Mujihadeen, which the CIA trained in Pakistan and Virginia and from which emerged Osama bin Laden, al-Qaeda and the Taliban. Brzezinski's followers include John Negroponte, the mastermind of American terror in Central America under Ronald Reagan in the 1980s, now Bush's ambassador to the United Nations. It was Negroponte who first warned the world, after September 11, that the US planned to attack any country it wished. For those in thrall to, and neutered by, the supercult of America, the most salient truths remain taboos. Perhaps the most important taboo is the longevity of the US as both a terrorist state and a haven for terrorists. That the US in the only state on record to have been condemned by the World Court for international terrorism (in Nicaragua) and has vetoed a UN Security Council resolution calling on governments to observe international law, is unmentionable. "In the war against terrorism," said Bush, "we're going to hunt down these evil-doers wherever they are, no matter how long it takes." Strictly speaking, it should not take long, as more terrorists are given training and sanctuary in the US than anywhere in the world. They include mass murderers, torturers, former and future tyrants and assorted international criminals. There is no terrorist sanctuary to compare with Florida, currently governed by the President's brother, Jeb. In his book Rogue State, former senior State Department official Bill Blum describes a typical Florida trial of three anti-Castro terrorists who had hijacked a plane to Miami at knifepoint. "Even though the kidnapped pilot was brought back from Cuba to testify against the men," he wrote, "the defence simply told the jurors the man was lying, and the jury deliberated for less than an hour before acquitting the defendants." General Jose Guillermo Garcia has lived in Florida since the 1990s. He was head of El Salvador's military during the 1980s when death squads closely linked to the army murdered thousands of people. General Prosper Avril, the Haitian dictator, liked to display the bloodied victims of his torture on television. When he was overthrown, he was flown to Florida by the US Government. Thiounn Prasith, Pol Pot's henchman and apologist at the UN, lives in Mount Vernon, New York. General Mansour Moharari, who ran the Shah of Iran's notorious prisons, is wanted in Iran, but is untroubled in the US. Al-Qaeda's training camps in Afghanistan were kindergartens compared with the world's leading university of terrorism at Fort Benning in Georgia. Known until recently as the School of the Americas, it trained 60,000 Latin American soldiers, policemen, paramilitaries and intelligence agents in terrorism. In 1993, the UN Truth Commission on El Salvador named the army officers who had committed the worst atrocities of the civil war; two-thirds of them had been trained at Fort Benning. In Chile, the school's graduates ran Pinochet's secret police and three principal concentration camps. In 1966, the US government was forced to release copies of the school's training manuals. For aspiring terrorists, these recommended blackmail, torture, execution and the arrest of witnesses' relatives. The irony is that the US is also the home of some of history's greatest human rights movements, such as the 1960s epic campaign for civil rights. Having just returned from the US, it seems the stirring has begun again. In an open letter to their compatriots and the world, published in the Herald on June 17, almost 100 of the US's most distinguished names in art, literature, journalism and education wrote: "Let it not be said that people in the US did nothing when their government declared war without limit and instituted stark new measures of repression. We believe that nations have the right to determine their own destiny, free from military coercion by great powers. We believe that all persons detained and prosecuted by the US Government should have the same right of due process. We believe that questioning, criticism and dissent must be valued and protected. Such rights are always contested and must be fought for. We, too, watched with shock the horrific events of September 11. But the mourning had barely begun when our leaders launched a spirit of revenge. The Government now openly prepares to wage war on Iraq - a country that has no connection with September 11. We say this to the world: too many times in history people have waited until it was too late to resist. We draw on the inspiration of those who fought slavery and all those other great causes of freedom that began with dissent. We call on all like-minded people around the world to join us." It is time we joined them. This is an edited extract from The New Rulers of the World, by John Pilger, published this month by Pan Macmillan Australia. ===================== From mstainsby at tao.ca Fri Jul 5 12:37:41 2002 From: mstainsby at tao.ca (Macdonald Stainsby) Date: Fri, 05 Jul 2002 11:37:41 -0700 Subject: [R-G] RED FLAG RED FLAG!! U.S. Plan for Iraq LEAD STORY in NYtimes. Message-ID: <000901c22453$0c925f80$291f5318@vc.shawcable.net> U.S. Plan for Iraq Is Said to Include Attack on 3 Sides By ERIC SCHMITT ASHINGTON, July 4 - An American military planning document calls for air, land and sea-based forces to attack Iraq from three directions - the north, south and west - in a campaign to topple President Saddam Hussein, according to a person familiar with the document. The document envisions tens of thousands of marines and soldiers probably invading from Kuwait. Hundreds of warplanes based in as many as eight countries, possibly including Turkey and Qatar, would unleash a huge air assault against thousands of targets, including airfields, roadways and fiber-optics communications sites. Special operations forces or covert C.I.A. operatives would strike at depots or laboratories storing or manufacturing Iraq's suspected weapons of mass destruction and the missiles to launch them. Rest: http://www.nytimes.com/2002/07/05/international/middleeast/05IRAQ.html ------------------------------------------- Macdonald Stainsby http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/rad-green http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/leninist-international -- In the contradiction lies the hope. --Bertholt Brecht From ewokateur at yahoo.ca Fri Jul 5 14:13:11 2002 From: ewokateur at yahoo.ca (High Hopes) Date: Fri, 5 Jul 2002 16:13:11 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [R-G] Thoughts on the aftermath, if any, of the G-8 protest In-Reply-To: <20020705194750.51499.qmail@web21209.mail.yahoo.com> Message-ID: <20020705201311.44356.qmail@web14911.mail.yahoo.com> I kept away from media accounts of unofficial G-8 events, but I tell you, dear G-8ers, in the public mind of this town that I had asked you to help ventilate in transit, mud's the word. Mud is all that history will have to remember your risky efforts by, so maybe it's time to decide whether summit-hopping will become a permanent and increasingly inconsequential art form of the Left, especially as these meetings need not have any content at all (and was just that, perchance, the Message of the Mud?). I managed to debunk an alleged media allegation, triumphantly trumpeted by a neighbour, to the effect that a thousand randomly interviewed protesters could not explain their presence, but the mud kept my mental wheels spinning. Yes, I initially thought of the mudding as a brilliant strategy to keep the resplendently attired police scuffle-shy, then as another case of compulsive catch-up with America: a Canadian Woodstock, only 33 years later! Was it a highly sublimated statement? The Buddha once acted similarly with a flower and a smile in answer to a complex question. Finally I decided that everyone was aloft on something nifty from the rave pharmacopoeia that unexpectedly gave the mud both erotic and philosophical importance beyond all resisting. Look, outside of Castlegar just about everybody understands the neo-lib pox by now, so maybe it's also time to review the relationship between form and function, lest G-8 mud appear in the stores to mock you one of these summers. [ The following text is taken from pages 269-270 of "Men and Powers," the 1989 English edition of a 1987 book by Helmut Schmidt, West German chancellor, 1974-82. Francois Mitterand is the president referred to as in opposition to Reagan. The eighth economic summit evidently had some serious political sap flowing in it; what has changed since then and what not? ] "Consequently the economic summit held in Versailles in June 1982 witnessed a head-on confrontation between the two presidents. The so-called pipeline embargo (a misleading term, since it was merely a matter of supplying a few pumps) that Reagan imposed a few days after the summit aggravated the situation, until malevolent polemics were issued by all sides. Reagan's "crusade against trade with the East," as several European newspapers called it, surely made a good impression on the American television audience, since it was a concept easily understood by laymen. For the Soviet Union it meant no more than a policy of pinpricks, but the European allies saw this plan as an attempt to undermine their sovereignty and turn the United States into the economic commander of the Western world. The French media coined a term for the United States that became popular: 'economie dominante -- the United States as dominating national economy. Similarly, an American political scientist spoke of an "imperious economy." This concept was met with vehement protest not only in France; not a single government in the rest of the Western world, from Canberra and Tokyo through Ottawa to Europe, was prepared to accept the economic sovereignty of the United States. Though all of us found Reagan's vigorous presidency more reliable than the preceding Carter era, it was specifically in the economic arena that Reagan could gain neither credibility nor legitimacy." Mark Lewis Castlegar, BC "People were in prison so that prices could be free" -- Eduardo Galeano ______________________________________________________________________ Post your ad for free now! http://personals.yahoo.ca From debsian at pacbell.net Fri Jul 5 17:19:05 2002 From: debsian at pacbell.net (Michael Pugliese) Date: Fri, 05 Jul 2002 16:19:05 -0700 Subject: [R-G] Anti-Globalization and the Far Right Message-ID: <8493HG3XB6B6LHC7D9VUMI72WRZWVB6.3d262969@oemcomputer> So, I see that Mac agrees now with Chip Berlet and me about the far right and it's menace to the anti-globalization movement. This so called social democrat, is one who has never let far right loons table or march at any event I've been involved in. Now, if Mac had more of an understanding like Hitchens about the irreconciliable conflict between theocratic, anti-modernist, counter- enlightenment ideologies and movements like al-Quaeda...Not as if others his age, like Owen Jones, aren't so equpped to understand the counter-revolutionary nature of a Milosevic. Or the silliness of believing anything the KCNA says. http://www.columbia.edu/~lnp3/msg17963.html http://www.columbia.edu/~lnp3/msg17964.html http://www.columbia.edu/~lnp3/msg17965.html http://www.columbia.edu/~lnp3/msg17966.html http://www.columbia.edu/~lnp3/msg17967.html Michael Pugliese, kick me off if you wish Mac...I need less e-mail anyway ;-) And I need to re-read my Nicos Poulantzas and E.P. Thompson. From mstainsby at tao.ca Fri Jul 5 19:02:59 2002 From: mstainsby at tao.ca (Macdonald Stainsby) Date: Fri, 05 Jul 2002 18:02:59 -0700 Subject: [R-G] Venezuela's Chavez chides top world powers. Message-ID: <006d01c22488$df452cc0$291f5318@vc.shawcable.net> Reuters. 5 July 2002. Venezuela's Chavez chides top world powers. CARACAS -- Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, praising the "beautiful medicine of revolution," accused industrialized powers on Friday of trying to impose their models of free trade and democracy on the developing world. "They all try to impose economic and political models on us. No. We can construct our own models," said Chavez. In a ceremony marking the 191st anniversary of his country's independence from Spain, he said Venezuela was working to create an alternative to "neo-liberalism" -- the term he uses to describe globalized free-market capitalism. Slamming this form of unbridled capitalism as "the road to hell," Chavez said his populist government was applying "the beautiful medicine of revolution" to close the gap between rich and poor in the world's fifth-largest oil exporter. The Venezuelan leader, who says he is neither a Marxist nor a capitalist, has sought to introduce nationalist, anti-poverty policies, reaffirming state control over the strategic oil industry and distributing rural plots to landless families. The Venezuelan leader chided the world's richest nations for trying to dictate to developing countries. "They demand free trade from us, which isn't free or anything of the kind," he said, adding that the world's trading powers did not practice what they preached. "This is the height of immorality," he said. "What we ask for is equality, justice, for us to be better understood and respected." The Venezuelan leader was due to attend an independence day military parade later on Friday. ------------------------------------------- Macdonald Stainsby http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/rad-green http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/leninist-international -- In the contradiction lies the hope. --Bertholt Brecht From mstainsby at tao.ca Fri Jul 5 19:25:17 2002 From: mstainsby at tao.ca (Macdonald Stainsby) Date: Fri, 05 Jul 2002 18:25:17 -0700 Subject: [R-G] A critique from a friend: Re: Calgary Message-ID: <007d01c2248b$fcd70800$291f5318@vc.shawcable.net> THE ANTI-G8 PROTESTS IN CALGARY: SOME CONTRIBUTIONS TO A CRITIQUE OF THE ANTI-GLOBALIZATION MOVEMENT By Tom Keefer, July 2nd, 2002. (tom at tao.ca) [Synopsis: An analysis from an anarcho-communist perspective of the anti-globalization movement in the context of the G8 protest in Calgary with a special focus upon the impact of Sept 11th, and contradictions between the movement's reformist and revolutionary tendencies. Contains a discussion on the weaknesses of the concepts of "anti-capitalism" and "diversity of tactics" as expressed by the movement's radical wing. Tom Keefer is a member of the North Eastern Federation of Anarcho-Communists (NEFAC) http://flag.blackened.net/nefac/.] THE LONG SHADOW OF THE TWIN TOWERS It is clear that after a string of successes (beginning with Seattle and carried on in Washington and Quebec City), that the anti-globalization movement has lost ground in its ability to mobilize large numbers in North America in the wake of September 11th and the attendant "war on terrorism" launched by US imperialism. The forces of reaction have been strengthened by the attacks of Sept 11th, and many of those we would seek to rally to our cause have lined up behind the flags of patriotism or have been intimidated into silence by a dramatic increase in state surveillance and repression in conjunction with the mass detention and deportation of "suspect" Muslims, Arabs and undocumented immigrants. >From the perspective of the global capitalist ruling class, the development of the anti-globalization movement has been one of the most threatening forces to its hegemony in past decade. With the collapse of the Soviet Union and the seeming end to any alternatives to the consolidation of world imperialism, the mass protests against capitalist globalization have broken the illusion of a national and global consensus in favour of privatisation, de-regulation and corporate rule, as well as holding within them the seeds of real alternatives to capitalism. Within this movement, the rise of anarchist principles and ideology, the organizing of grass roots, democratically controlled affinity groups and federative structures willing to step outside the bounds of legality, the eschewing of tactics of lobbying and reformism and the turning towards direct confrontation with the defenders of the status quo, have alarmed the capitalist class and its social democratic appendages to no end. The capitalist class clings to power above all else, and threatened by a rising anti-globalization movement, it has sought to portray "violent" anti-globalization activists as part of the same attack on "western civilization" as the suicide bombers of the Al-Qaeda network. In the wake of the September 11th attacks, the capitalist state has taken the offensive in linking up the "war against terrorism" to the criminalization of the radical wing of the anti-globalization movement. In the lead up to the June G8 summit, under the guise of defending state interests from the twin evils of Osama Bin Laden and violent protestors, the Prime Minister of Canada, various military officials, and local politicians all announced steps that made even simple protest illegal at the G8 events in Kananaskis and Calgary. In the context of the largest military operation to take place on Canadian soil this century, protestors were warned that they would be shot on sight should they breach the conference's security perimeter, and in Calgary, all public protests of the G8- with the exception of a labour/community march and a picnic- were declared illegal assemblies by the Mayor who promised hundreds of jail cells as homes for any activists bold enough to disobey him. SOCIAL DEMOCRATS, TRADE UNION BUREACRATS AND NGO MANDARINS Hand in hand with attempts to smash the anti-globalization movement through state repression have come numerous attempts to co-opt and integrate the liberal "main stream" elements of this movement into a "loyal opposition" limited to critiques of the worst excesses of the system and proposing only mild reforms. Just as one wing of the movement has moved into criticizing the capitalist system as a whole and has advanced the question of its abolition; the mirror image of this tendency- generalled by social democrats, trade union bureaucrats, and NGO mandarins, has also sought ascendancy within the movement by seeking to corall protest within the bounds of legality and to mitigate the system's outrages through the charade of electoralism and surface reforms. The ruling class is aware of this split, which historically speaking has been present in every social movement, and has sought to buy off the reformists and to increase their strength by providing hundreds of thousands of dollars in direct funding to large numbers of "non governmental organizations", their conferences and "people's summits" as well as by seeking to create and solidify a "dialogue" between state, capital and "responsible" NGO's capable of reining in and isolating the young malcontents and their allies. Perhaps one of the most visible manifestations of this tendency of betrayal can be seen at repeated anti-globalization protests where the labour bureaucracy has repeatedly and consciously lead tens of thousands of their members into isolated areas far away from the scenes of action and protest, to misinform and demobilize them through lengthy speeches and boring music, and to physically separate "their" members from radical protest elements through the muscle of their marshals. ORGANIZATION OF THE PROTESTS IN CALGARY As has often been the case, the activist "leadership" that organized the latest protests against capitalist globalization in Calgary was, split between a would be more "radical" youth wing espousing the values of "anti-capitalism" and of a "diversity of tactics" and a more conservative layer made up of labour, community and NGO activists which sought to organize "non-confrontational" and educational events. As both groups accepted that protest directed at the summit location itself in far off Kananaskis was unfeasible due to the difficulties of blockading a remote backcountry location under the threat of severe state repression, organizers settled on a focus in Calgary itself. Broadly speaking, the youth focused on street protests (J-26) aimed to disrupt the interests of the corporate interests behind the G8 while the established social democratic leadership held an "alternative" summit and sought to bring out their members to a large, non-controversial protest and a picnic in the park. Throughout the course of the week of protests and educational activities, approximately 3000 and 4000 people participated in the range of activities against the G8 in Calgary. There was a small degree of support from the local population of Calgary, but no major groundswell of popular support, and no widespread "buzz" in the air in the weeks before the protests as there was in Quebec City. A significant reason for this low turnout was no doubt the difficulties that many local activists faced in trying to organize events on the scale and with the same expectations of previous anti-globalization protests, away from the continent's major population centres and in communities with a much weaker tradition of radical organizing. Nonetheless, even though organizers had been working on the G-8 protests for almost a year, there was very little communication with out of town activists as to what was going on, about what to expect, and in what specific ways those coming from out of town could be of assistance. Mainstream media organizations played up the risks of "violence" and gleefully trumpeted the military and police preparations being undertaken to repress dissent. Participation by coherently structured affinity groups active in the lead-up to the protests with a clear idea of what they wanted to accomplish was also almost non-existent. There were approximately 20-25 affinity groups present at the last spokescouncil before the G8 summit opened, and they seemed to be for the most part very loosely organized as well as not incorporating the majority of participants in the actions of J-26. The focus of the J-26 direct actions was against the corporate sponsors of the G8, and was aimed at creating maximum economic disruption to the down town core. It would seem that the media inspired hype in the weeks before the protests was more effective in doing this that the J-26 protest itself. Businesses were boarded up, special security measures were taken, and workers were told not to come into work in "business clothes" due to the threat of "violence" from protestors. The plans for J-26 were based upon having a so called "snake march", an idea apparently derived from OCAP's campaign of economic disruption in November of 2001 in the province of Ontario. Unfortunately, the "snake march" proved to be little different from a typical disorganized protest march with organizers bereft of sound equipment and lacking a clear sense of what to do. The radical youth leadership that organized the direct action "disruptive" actions against the G8 was largely made up activists from anarchist based "anti-capitalist" youth groups based in Calgary and Edmonton who it would seem leaned heavily on the activities and ideological perspectives of such anti globalization based groups as the Montreal based Convergence of Anti-Capitalist Struggles (CLAC). The political orientation of Calgary based organizers group could be largely summed up by two political concepts which for them underlined the best way to confront the G8: a commitment to "anti-capitalism" and to a "diversity of tactics". However, there was never any clear political elaboration or discussion of what these terms actually meant, rather, these terms came to be treated as fetishized commandments which had fallen from the skies of Quebec City. THE POVERTY OF "PROTEST PORN" An "anti-capitalist caucus" was held to incorporate "anti-capitalists" involved with the J-26 actions. Unfortunately, other than a vague consensus that they were opposed to "capitalism" there was no understanding or agreement by this caucus as to what exactly capitalism is, how it operates, or how and by whom it can best be opposed. There was next to no meaningful discussion of how class, race, patriarchy and struggles for native sovereignty impacted upon capitalism or movements for its abolition, nor was there any discussion and analysis of what capitalism could be replaced with and what role could be played by various social movements and the working class (who, in withdrawing their labour, can bring about an immediate cession to capitalist production.) Instead "anti-capitalism" became a strategy of producing "shocking" and symbolic spectacles- "protest porn" -which had the effect of neither shutting down the corporate center of Calgary, nor of reaching out to un-politicized workers and linking up to their struggles or concerns. Some of these actions included a "die-in" in a park, getting naked in front of the Gap, having a group of people take off their clothes and cover themselves in mud and grunt as they cavorted through the streets, and the playing of two 5 minute games of "anarchist" soccer on a downtown intersection following the snake march protest. It thus seems that an "anti-capitalist" strategy was believed by most attendees of the anti-capitalist caucus to consist of either an irrelevant fashion statement or an apolitical and unplanned clash with the forces of authority, and given the balance of forces confronting activists in Calgary, most chose to opt for the former. From the caucus one would never have guessed of the existence of something called the working class and that it might have any relationship to capitalism worthy of the name, or that the broad masses of that class need to consciously mobilize themselves for the creation of a fundamentally different kind of social system, should any anti-capitalist struggle seek to be ultimately successful. Nor did it strike members of the caucus that perhaps some of the many people we were supposedly trying to reach with our message might be interested in hearing about what kinds of alternatives we might propose to the capitalist order that we criticize so voraciously. The actions proposed in both the spokescouncil and the anti-capitalist caucus, would have been appropriate (or would have been at least a benignly irrelevant) had Calgary in fact been shut down by protestors due to a broad based and effective conjuncture of social upheaval and confrontation with the forces of state and capital. But in the context of a social movement in the process of becoming isolated from its would be supporters by a state orchestrated campaign of repression, and given the crying need for the movement to deepen and extend its influence at this critical junction, these actions were a useless diversion at best, and a stupid farce at worst. "Actions" like this serve only to draw a line between the radical "anti-capitalists" and ordinary working people who while exploited by capitalism, can see pretty clearly that a movement made up of naked, grunting, mud covered middle class "earth people" has little to concretely offer them in overcoming the oppressive conditions of their lives. Similarly, how a handful of people playing soccer, watched by a passive mass of 500 others for a short period of time in the context of a crassly commercial and profoundly nationalistic ongoing World Cup event constitutes a relevant representation of "anarchism" or for that matter, "anti-capitalism", was never explained by anyone inside the caucus. The police realized their position of strength sooner than the protestors realized their weaknesses, and having already succeeded in keeping the activists on the defensive through draconian security measures, they saw no need whatsoever to intervene against the marches and protests being planned as long as no effective forms of protest occurred (i.e. civil disobedience or direct action). They were tolerant of a badly organized "snake march" wandering around town for some 4 hours on the 26th, and tolerant of the anarchist football players for an hour or two after that, tolerant of anti-McDonalds protestors, and indeed as long as the whole affair remained a minor inconvenience, they were unwilling to tip their hand. Instead, roving squadrons of bicycle cops cordoned off potential targets of vandalism, while riot police were kept carefully hidden, and no arrests were made. From reports after the fact in the mainstream media it was clear that the police were aware that they would lose the propaganda war should they start breaking heads without any provocation whatsoever. The reason for the relative police inaction, is that there is still widespread if passive support for the anti-globalization movement, and the forces of order could not risk that the brutally oppressive nature of the capitalist state would be further thrown into relief by attacking deliberately peaceful protestors. Resistance to police repression in Seattle and Quebec City and the representation of this resistance in popular culture severely undermined the legitimacy of the state, and in Calgary as long as things "didn't get out of hand" the police were content to regain legitimacy through such media stunts as providing free bottled water to dehydrated activists, and to portray themselves as consensus building "partners" with the "responsible" section of protestors in keeping the event "safe" and "respectful" of the interests of all parties. In both the "anti-capitalist caucus" and in the larger spokescouncil there was very little willingness to organize direct actions or civil disobedience activities similar to those that have happened in other anti-globalization protests. In the case of the Calgary protests, a clear and open discussion of the actual state of struggle, the level of state repression, and what our goals and tactics were to be given that the summit couldn't be shut down, was necessary - but totally discouraged. The fact was that the defining moments in Calgary consisted of spectacles devoid of meaningful political content. This was a direct reflection of the success of state repression on one hand, and our poverty of political analysis and inability to respond by modifying tactics and strategy on the other. In the immediate run up to the summit, it became clear that the forces of law and order were well organized and prepared to unleash a campaign of mass violence and arrest upon any effective form of protest. This was compounded by the fact that anti-globalization activists were in a state of strategic retreat and tactical incoherence. The protest organizers were idealistically hoping for a simple replay of the protests of Quebec City, and were either unable or unwilling to take into account global, regional and local changes that had occurred and which had altered the balance of forces in the interval. At first, the organizers refused to entertain any suggestion that the concept of "diversity of tactics" could be flawed when considered from a revolutionary perspective. Yet several days later, under the pressure of events, the organizers abandoned this principle, deciding that they would permit no "civil disobedience" or direct action during the course of the J26 snake march and "economic disruption". While this may have been in fact a correct decision in order to incorporate last minute participation from labour to save the march from an embarrassing lack of numbers, it should have been clear weeks if not months earlier on that this was the case, and direct action alternatives to the snake march should have been prioritised instead. As it was, direct action was ephemerally relegated to the realm of various imaginary affinity groups who would be free to organize there actions free from the support of those who came out for the snake march. A DIVERSITY OF RADICAL LIBERALS The concept of a "diversity of tactics" (an understanding that a full range of tactical options from civil disobedience to physical confrontation with the police) which was an unshakable basis of unity of the direct action grouping that organized J-26, first came to the attention of the movement when the sell out wing of the anti-globalization movement sought to eliminate more militant direct action groups (such as CLAC-CASA) from participation in the movement in the lead up to the Quebec City protests. It should be clear to all revolutionaries that a wide variety of tactics, up to and including physical confrontation with the agents of the ruling class will be necessary if we are to defeat this system. It should be equally clear that a process of self discipline and democratic determination of how and when to use "violent" tactics is of paramount importance in order that it be effective. Otherwise, a blanket statement of being in support of "diversity of tactics" draws no lines between the black block clashing with police lines; the indiscriminate violence engaged in and encouraged by undercover cops acting as 'agents provocateurs' (this was a significant feature of the Genoa demonstrations); the armed violence and bombing campaigns carried out by groups like ETA or the Red Brigades (or, in Italy again, by the secret police, as in their bombing of the Bologna railway station); and finally, the kind of operations that might be mounted by Al-Queda agents should they happen to target a pro-globalization summit. This refusal to actually define what kinds of "violence" we see as necessary and useful and in what conditions, will not only leave us open to attack from the state but will give right wing propagandists a golden opportunity to lump us in with Al-Queda and co. and to justify our wholesale repression. The concept of "diversity of tactics" is problematic for its extreme liberalism and its tendency to avoid self discipline, mutual accountability and the important debate as to which tactics at a given moment are actually necessary to achieve victory or to avoid defeat. A movement where anyone and any group carries out "violent" attacks on the state and capital whenever they please and regardless of whether or not its actions are harmful to the overall movement is no movement at all. Supporters of "diversity of tactics" may argue that any attempt to limit anyone else's tactics is "authoritarian", but if we are not able to democratically come up with a strategy that works given our particular conditions, it is clear that our movement, in lacking any kind of self discipline will never succeed. It is clear that reformists, social democrats and trade union bureaucrats will try with all their might to keep protests "respectable" and "legal" and will seek to strangle all forms of protest which break from passive symbolism or lobbying. Nonetheless, we must be clear that to defeat the tyranny of capitalism with its riot police, SWAT teams, army, secret services, our use of "violence" will be undeniably necessary for own self defence, not to mention our eventual victory. This does not mean that success can be achieved from going head to head with the forces of repression- that is a recipe for disaster. What we need is an ability within the radical movement of being able to democratically decide what level of confrontation is tactically necessary given current conditions and to be able to carry it out on our own terms and within the limits that we set. As summits are held in more and more inaccessible locations and strategies of attempting to "shut them down" become less feasible, our movement needs to discover how to use tactics of civil disobedience and direct action in ways that accomplish objectives other than shutting down summits, such as through opening squats, occupying government or corporate offices, joining striking workers on picket lines and otherwise concretely connecting with ongoing local struggles which can be tied into the larger struggle against capitalist globalization. To take just one example of thinking differently, if protestors in Calgary had sought to fight the criminalization of dissent by for example setting up half a dozen "free speech zones" with sound trucks in a variety of busy intersections in the down town area and then used these platforms as a means to simultaneously engage with passer by's and to disrupt business as usual, matters might have gone quite differently on J-26. These free speech zones, surrounded by phalanxes of disciplined protestors willing to defend them with civil disobedience and direct action would in effect become our own "mini-summits" engaging, dialoguing with and entertaining many of those not reached by our message of solidarity and struggle. The mass media would have had difficulty in disguising the fact that it was police trying to crash through our lines, and not our attacks on them, that was the source of "violence" due simply to the fact that protestors were attempting to engage in free speech. There are many other kinds of actions acceptable to a wide variety of people willing to take different kinds of risks than either passively marching around or seeking to break through summit perimeters. What is key in any of these actions is a) engaging in open discussion facilitated by decent intelligence gathering methods to come to a correct understanding of the balance of forces facing us, b) having well organized, disciplined and coherent affinity groups able to take on and carry out specific tasks and projects within the event, and c) a process of mass mobilization and education that is able to bring out enough protestors to be able to avoid wholesale repression from police. SUMMIT HOPPING AND BUILDING A MOVEMENT In recent months, many critiques have been made about "summit hopping", and it is indeed true that those who do little radical work in their own communities and who, lemming like, just hop on a bus and arrive at the scene of the protest without an affinity group or plan of action are perhaps deserving of this critique. However, what critics of "summit hopping" tend to forget is that these summit protests and the movement they have given rise to have been the single most significant development in the past decade of resistance to the capitalist status quo. The key thing about these summit actions is that they allow us to multiply our strength and to reach a critical mass that we are not yet able to even come close to in the many isolated local struggles in which we engage. In Seattle and Quebec City, we were able to directly confront the powers that be and in doing so, were able to capture the imaginations of millions of people across the world in a way that has not been seen since the struggles of the 1960's. A break was created in capitalist hegemony and legitimacy, and through it the groundwork has been laid for a potential mass radicalisation of staggering proportions. This is the real reason as to why the capitalist state has responded so seriously to our movement and why it seeks to suppress us. They see perhaps more clearly than we do, that these various summit protests over the past several years have provided us with a sort of "short cut" method that has enabled us to bring together a wide tendency of activist currents and openly confront the state and capital in a manner not seen in a generation. BY MEANS OF A CONCLUSION The location of events in Calgary, the spectre of state repression, and the fallout of Sept 11th mingled with the poverty of political analysis and organizational abilities of the activists concerned all contributed to this defeat. It should be noted that many of these factors are not as pronounced in Europe, where protests against capitalist globalization are involving ever increasing numbers as well as significant amounts of industrial action from striking workers. It is possible that the sagging fortunes of the North American anti-globalization movement will have to be revived through inspiration from "a new Seattle" coming from Latin America or Europe, but regardless, the only way for our movement to consolidate its gains to date and to further advance the struggle is to take stock of our weaknesses and to combat them. In doing so anti-globalization activists must come to realize the importance of developing a coherent political analysis capable of understanding what "capitalism" is and how it can be overcome. We must realize that nothing can ever be truly destroyed until is replaced, and thus come up with visions of what kind of a system it is that we wish to replace capitalism with, as well as to construct revolutionary organizations which can aid us in that task. If we hope to succeed, another area in which the "anti-capitalist" wing of the anti-globalization movement needs to develop is in being able to contest areas of work that has until now overwhelmingly been the preserve of the reformists. The building of international networks, the organizing of alternative summits, mass circulation periodicals, and coherent media strategies with deep going anti-capitalist analyses desperately need to be provided so that we can win the battle of ideas against reformist ideologues who seek to use our movement for the purposes of gaining narrow reforms through the dead end of social democracy and electoralism. Coming up with and popularizing truly anti-capitalist perspectives will be impossible without the creation of genuine revolutionary organizations with a mass base within the ranks of the oppressed and exploited . In constructing these organizations and in being able to gain tactical and strategic victories at various summits and protests, the creation of ongoing affinity groups and revolutionary federations that continue to exist, and indeed thrive on carrying out local actions in between major mobilizations will be essential. The balance sheet from the G8 protests in Calgary adds up to a clear defeat for those in the anti-globalization camp. Even considering the objective difficulties encountered in organizing the protests, measured from the standpoint of our numbers, the self organization of affinity groups, internal democracy and political analysis, our tactical successes in causing economic disruption to downtown Calgary, and most importantly in our ability to intelligently reach out the general public and express what we are fighting for, the protests in Calgary were a failure. The defeat could have certainly been worse, but the anti-G8 protests in Calgary should come as a wake up call to our movement that a profound re-thinking of how we combat capitalist globalization is in order. The chief cause of this failure lies in our ideological weaknesses and in a crisis of self-organization and radical institution building at the grassroots of our movement. By entering into a period of meaningful reflection and self organization, we can learn from our mistakes and come out of this process strengthened and re-invigorated to continue the battle against global capitalism at a new and higher level. The alternative that faces us is further retreat and co-option, widespread demoralization and the eventual demise of one of the most important movements to challenge global capitalism in the past decade. ------------------------------------------- Macdonald Stainsby http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/rad-green http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/leninist-international -- In the contradiction lies the hope. --Bertholt Brecht From furuhashi.1 at osu.edu Sat Jul 6 09:15:56 2002 From: furuhashi.1 at osu.edu (Yoshie Furuhashi) Date: Sat, 06 Jul 2002 11:15:56 -0400 Subject: [R-G] Anti-US protest in Kabu Message-ID: "Anti-US protest in Kabul: A Sign of Wider Anger in Afghanistan," . -- Yoshie * Calendar of Events in Columbus: * Anti-War Activist Resources: * Student International Forum: * Committee for Justice in Palestine: From mstainsby at tao.ca Sat Jul 6 19:35:35 2002 From: mstainsby at tao.ca (Macdonald Stainsby) Date: Sat, 06 Jul 2002 18:35:35 -0700 Subject: [R-G] Denmark prepares for anti-EU riots: repression again. Message-ID: <004301c22556$975461a0$291f5318@vc.shawcable.net> Independent. 7 July 2002. Denmark prepares for anti-EU riots. COPENHAGEN -- Denmark is building cells in underground car parks and drawing up contingency plans to evacuate pensioners from Copenhagen city centre in readiness for possible riots during its six-month European Union presidency. The unprecedented security measures arise from last year's anti-globalisation protests at an EU summit in neighbouring Sweden, when many of those arrested turned out to be Danes. The Danish government has announced that, as key meetings approach, it will suspend an EU free travel agreement and, if necessary, draft in hundreds of extra police. Specially armoured vehicles have been brought in from the Netherlands to transport police in safety, and the police plan to use a website to present their side of the story if they are accused of violent tactics during protests. Most controversial, however, is a plan to build temporary holding centres in two underground car parks of Copenhagen police stations. Facing criticism that detainees could be held in temperatures as low as minus 15C at the December summit of EU leaders in the capital, Danish police showed the cells to the local media last week. They say the units will allow about 300 people to be held at one time but that no one will be in a unit for more than 24 hours. Suspects will have access to food, water and toilet facilities, and the cells will be 6ft high, 6ft wide and 12ft deep. By day they will hold six people, and at night no more than four, police say. The first potential flashpoint of the presidency will be a meeting of EU and Asian finance ministers in September. In December the heads of government will gather in the Danish capital, but police hope that cold weather will inhibit protests. For key EU meetings, levels of policing are to be more than doubled if necessary, with hundreds drafted in from the provinces to boost the normal 1,800 officers to a maximum of 4,000. Concerned that they stand to lose a propaganda battle, the authorities have announced that two officers from the police information department will be writing news stories from the perspective of the security forces. Jorgen Poulsen, professor of journalism at Roskilde University, told the paper: "You could imagine situations where the press don't have access and where then the police's own journalists will be the only ones reporting." ------------------------------------------- Macdonald Stainsby http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/rad-green http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/leninist-international -- In the contradiction lies the hope. --Bertholt Brecht From mstainsby at tao.ca Sun Jul 7 02:06:04 2002 From: mstainsby at tao.ca (Macdonald Stainsby) Date: Sun, 07 Jul 2002 01:06:04 -0700 Subject: [R-G] The world's ticking timebomb Message-ID: <012901c2258d$2424c080$291f5318@vc.shawcable.net> http://www.observer.co.uk/international/story/0,6903,750783,00.html The world's ticking timebomb Earth 'will expire by 2050' Our planet is running out of room and resources. Modern man has plundered so much, a damning report claims this week, that outer space will have to be colonised Mark Townsend and Jason Burke Sunday July 7, 2002 The Observer Earth's population will be forced to colonise two planets within 50 years if natural resources continue to be exploited at the current rate, according to a report out this week. A study by the World Wildlife Fund (WWF), to be released on Tuesday, warns that the human race is plundering the planet at a pace that outstrips its capacity to support life. In a damning condemnation of Western society's high consumption levels, it adds that the extra planets (the equivalent size of Earth) will be required by the year 2050 as existing resources are exhausted. The report, based on scientific data from across the world, reveals that more than a third of the natural world has been destroyed by humans over the past three decades. Using the image of the need for mankind to colonise space as a stark illustration of the problems facing Earth, the report warns that either consumption rates are dramatically and rapidly lowered or the planet will no longer be able to sustain its growing population. Experts say that seas will become emptied of fish while forests - which absorb carbon dioxide emissions - are completely destroyed and freshwater supplies become scarce and polluted. The report offers a vivid warning that either people curb their extravagant lifestyles or risk leaving the onus on scientists to locate another planet that can sustain human life. Since this is unlikely to happen, the only option is to cut consumption now. Systematic overexploitation of the planet's oceans has meant the North Atlantic's cod stocks have collapsed from an estimated spawning stock of 264,000 tonnes in 1970 to under 60,000 in 1995. The study will also reveal a sharp fall in the planet's ecosystems between 1970 and 2002 with the Earth's forest cover shrinking by about 12 per cent, the ocean's biodiversity by a third and freshwater ecosystems in the region of 55 per cent. The Living Planet report uses an index to illustrate the shocking level of deterioration in the world's forests as well as marine and freshwater ecosystems. Using 1970 as a baseline year and giving it a value of 100, the index has dropped to a new low of around 65 in the space of a single generation. It is not just humans who are at risk. Scientists, who examined data for 350 kinds of mammals, birds, reptiles and fish, also found the numbers of many species have more than halved. Martin Jenkins, senior adviser for the World Conservation Monitoring Centre in Cambridge, which helped compile the report, said: 'It seems things are getting worse faster than possibly ever before. Never has one single species had such an overwhelming influence. We are entering uncharted territory.' Figures from the centre reveal that black rhino numbers have fallen from 65,000 in 1970 to around 3,100 now. Numbers of African elephants have fallen from around 1.2 million in 1980 to just over half a million while the population of tigers has fallen by 95 per cent during the past century. The UK's birdsong population has also seen a drastic fall with the corn bunting population declining by 92 per cent between 1970 and 2000, the tree sparrow by 90 per cent and the spotted flycatcher by 70 per cent. Experts, however, say it is difficult to ascertain how many species have vanished for ever because a species has to disappear for 50 years before it can be declared extinct. Attention is now focused on next month's Earth Summit in Johannesburg, the most important environmental negotiations for a decade. However, the talks remain bedevilled with claims that no agreements will be reached and that US President George W. Bush will fail to attend. Matthew Spencer, a spokesman for Greenpeace, said: 'There will have to be concessions from the richer nations to the poorer ones or there will be fireworks.' The preparatory conference for the summit, held in Bali last month, was marred by disputes between developed nations and poorer states and non-governmental organisations (NGOs), despite efforts by British politicians to broker compromises on key issues. America, which sent 300 delegates to the conference, is accused of blocking many of the key initiatives on energy use, biodiversity and corporate responsibility. The WWF report shames the US for placing the greatest pressure on the environment. It found the average US resident consumes almost double the resources as that of a UK citizen and more than 24 times that of some Africans. Based on factors such as a nation's consumption of grain, fish, wood and fresh water along with its emissions of carbon dioxide from industry and cars, the report provides an ecological 'footprint' for each country by showing how much land is required to support each resident. America's consumption 'footprint' is 12.2 hectares per head of population compared to the UK's 6.29ha while Western Europe as a whole stands at 6.28ha. In Ethiopia the figure is 2ha, falling to just half a hectare for Burundi, the country that consumes least resources. The report, which will be unveiled in Geneva, warns that the wasteful lifestyles of the rich nations are mainly responsible for the exploitation and depletion of natural wealth. Human consumption has doubled over the last 30 years and continues to accelerate by 1.5 per cent a year. Now WWF wants world leaders to use its findings to agree on specific actions to curb the population's impact on the planet. A spokesman for WWF UK, said: 'If all the people consumed natural resources at the same rate as the average US and UK citizen we would require at least two extra planets like Earth.' The world's ticking timebomb Marine crisis: North Atlantic cod stocks have collapsed from an estimated 264,000 tonnes in 1970 to under 60,000 in 1995. Pollution: The United States places the greatest pressure on the environment, with its carbon dioxide emissions and over-consumption. It takes 12.2 hectares of land to support each American citizen and 6.29 for each Briton, while the figure for Burundi is just half a hectare. Shrinking Forests: Between 1970 and 2002 forest cover has dwindled by 12 per cent. Endangered wildlife: African elephant numbers have fallen from 1.2 million in 1980 to half a million now. In the UK the songbird population has fallen dramatically, with the corn bunting declining by 92 per cent in the past 30 years. ******************************* Alternative Press Review - www.altpr.org Your Guide Beyond the Mainstream PO Box 4710 - Arlington, VA 22204 Infoshop.org - www.infoshop.org News Kiosk - www.infoshop.org/inews ------------------------------------------- Macdonald Stainsby http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/rad-green http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/leninist-international -- In the contradiction lies the hope. --Bertholt Brecht From debsian at pacbell.net Sun Jul 7 11:38:10 2002 From: debsian at pacbell.net (Michael Pugliese) Date: Sun, 07 Jul 2002 10:38:10 -0700 Subject: [R-G] "Never listen to a man named Michel." Chossudovsky Message-ID: Heh, the URL is sure to raise hackles too! http://mckinneysucks.blogspot.com/ Devoted to smashing conspiracy theories and humiliating their purveyors! Michael Pugliese From mstainsby at tao.ca Sun Jul 7 16:01:59 2002 From: mstainsby at tao.ca (Macdonald Stainsby) Date: Sun, 07 Jul 2002 15:01:59 -0700 Subject: [R-G] KCNA on U.S. diatribe against DPRK Message-ID: <01b101c22601$eb0cc2a0$291f5318@vc.shawcable.net> KCNA on U.S. diatribe against DPRK Pyongyang, July 5 (KCNA) -- As already reported, an unexpected exchange of fire between naval vessels of the north and the south occurred in the West Sea of Korea on June 29 owing to the reckless armed provocation on the part of South Korean warships, causing a loss of human lives of both sides and a warship of the south side. In this connection, U.S. secretary of defense Rumsfeld and a spokesman for the U.S. state department Boucher at a press conference on July 2 let loose sheer sophism, describing the incident as a "provocation of the north" and a "breach of the armistice agreement". This is oft-repeated remarks made by the united states whenever a incident occurred. But we cannot but clarify once again the truth behind the incident as the U.S. is resorting to such a dastardly campaign intended to spread misinformation. The incident occurred in the West Sea of Korea as the South Korean warships made preemptive strikes at the patrol boats of the navy of the Korean People's Army under the patronage of the United States. The United States and the South Korean military authorities are claiming that the KPA naval patrol boats crossed the "northern boundary line", talking about the "breach of the armistice agreement". The "northern boundary line" advocated by them is not mentioned in the aa. It is a bogus line unilaterally drawn by the U.S. as it pleased in the territorial waters of the DPRK without any agreement with it after the signing of the aa. In view of the situation on September 2, 1999 the general staff of the KPA drew the sea demarcation line in the West Sea of Korea and proclaimed it to the world and as a follow-up measure the naval command of the KPA was authorized to fix and proclaim the "order of sailing through five islets" under the jurisdiction of the U.S. Forces' side that are located in the territorial waters of the DPRK side. However, the U.S. Forces and the South Korean military have ceaselessly infiltrated warships and fishing boats deep into the territorial waters of the DPRK side under the pretext of this bogus line and such provocations reached an extremely dangerous phase from early June. Prompted by the desire to defuse the military tensions on the Korean Peninsula and considerate of the world soccer championships that was under way in South Korea, the DPRK navy has exercised maximum restraint. The United States that has the prerogative of supreme command over the South Korean army took this as a golden opportunity to achieve its aim. On June 29 the U.S. instigated the South Korean military to infiltrate warships deep into the territorial waters of the DPRK side and mount a surprise attack on the patrol boats of the KPA navy on routine coastal guard duty, thus causing such tragedy in the long run. Such being the case, the U.S. let senior officials pull up the DPRK over "its alleged provocation" before probing the truth of the incident. This proves that the U.S. was deeply involved in the incident. In recent years the desire for the independent and peaceful reunification of Korea is mounting higher than ever before on the Korean peninsula and the anti-U.S. Forces are rapidly growing in South Korea. Upset by this, the U.S. has waited for an opportunity to orchestrate a shocking incident intended to chill the atmosphere of inter-Korean reconciliation. It is a well-known fact. The U.S. orchestrated this at a time when the world soccer championships was at its height, focusing the attention of the world community on the Korean Peninsula. The United States is well advised to admit the illegality of the bogus line so-called "northern boundary line" and make an apology for its backstage manipulation of the incident, instead of letting Rumsfeld and other officials be busy with anti-DPRK diatribe. ------------------------------------------- Macdonald Stainsby http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/rad-green http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/leninist-international -- In the contradiction lies the hope. --Bertholt Brecht From mstainsby at tao.ca Mon Jul 8 01:52:05 2002 From: mstainsby at tao.ca (Macdonald Stainsby) Date: Mon, 08 Jul 2002 00:52:05 -0700 Subject: [R-G] G-8 EPILOGUE: Movement at the Crossroads Message-ID: <013a01c22654$5abded20$291f5318@vc.shawcable.net> Another Vancouver comrade and friend from the trip to Calgary here. (Tony, that was the third time Tom's bit got to the Marxmail list) G-8 EPILOGUE: Movement at the Crossroads Garth Mullins VANCOUVER: Given the blanket prohibition on public assembly, and the largest peacetime deployment of the repressive apparatus of the Canadian state, it is a victory that our movement defied authorities and held a series of anti-G8 events in Calgary and Kananaskis. However, this is a qualified victory - we cannot paint a sunny face on a movement that is at a crucial moment in its development. We face some serious political questions and are at a strategic crossroads. The limited numbers and support we were able to mobilize against the G8 reflects our slow recovery from the conservative backlash and political disorientation of 9/11, as well as internal contradictions and weaknesses that were only exacerbated by the September attacks. G8 summit deliberations were eclipsed not by insurrections like those of Quebec or Seattle, but rather by a growing crisis of corporate corruption at World Com and Xerox. Plummeting investor confidence sent global markets into a tailspin, losing almost 10% by the close of the summit. George W. Bush felt compelled to speak out against the state of business ethics from the foothills of Alberta. Official discussions on terrorism were likewise overshadowed. Instead, Bush unilaterally called for a market-driven, democratic Palestinian state, where he chooses the non-Arafat-leadership. Chretien, after agreeing with Bush, then not knowing, finally decided he might leave the choice of a leader up to the Palestinians themselves. In terms of reforms, the presence of an African delegation at the G8 table and of NEPAD on the agenda (with its many well-documented shortcomings) reflects the growing influence of civil society and of the anti-corporate globalization movement. Critics at the "Peoples Summit - G6B" were right to point out that the New Partnership for African Development is largely an attempt to give the G8 a kinder, gentler face. The Movement The ruling class is on the offensive, retaking legitimacy and political ground lost to us over the last several years. Last week's G8 resistance represents a crisis in the development of our movement and its ability to mobilize significant numbers and support. The plateau we have now stalled-out at is an expression of a convolution of objective political forces and subjective dynamics. Kananaskis was no Genoa - it was not a political victory for us. Neither was it a shocking defeat. Rather, it was a concrete indicator of the health of the movement. Our numbers were dramatically fewer, our politics insufficiently confrontational, our strategy in a state of retreat, our tactics unclear, and our organization mal-functioning and inadequately transparent. The Canadian state made its boldest moves in the weeks before the summit; deploying the army on citizens with the use of lethal force, denying protesters any physical presence at the summit site, etc. Our actions were a defensive response to these initial moves. Officials read the public mood and realized that they could get away with a much more aggressive orientation towards dissent than they were previously able. Organizers were likewise aware. Our movement did not rise to the violence mongering of politicians and the media. But neither did the army shoot nor police attack. They realized how insignificant a treat we represented. We must arrest the decline of our movement, or face political irrelevance. Our immediate task is to come together in our local communities and figure out where we are now and what we can do about it. In Vancouver, such a meeting will take place on July13. Everybody should be included in a frank discussion on the direction of the movement, and how we organize in this brave new era of reaction. Authorities use the carrot and the stick approach to dispensing with their political opposition - repression and co-optation. Radical tactics and militant analysis are the best defense against the latter. The radical grassroots must not leave national and global networking to the NGOs. While maintaining our local roots and organic connections to local struggles, we must rid ourselves of our parochial blinders. The radical grassroots must play a more active role in the direction of the global movement and its national constituency. Over the past year or so, a consensus has been building among activists to move beyond "summit hopping" While abandoning summit hopping is wise in terms of mass strategy, we cannot leave world leaders to meet in peace, and we cannot leave the NGO's to form the infrastructure and leadership of the movement. Further, the corresponding links to organic, local and regional struggles are still in their beginning stages. In stopping hopping to K- Country, we fail to recognize everything that made this summit qualitatively more fascist other international summits. Kananaskis was the first test sight of the government's new approach to civil rights, as seen in recent security / anti- terrorist legislation. The voices of anti-corporate globalization protesters across the country were peripheral to G8 discourse. Unlike other summits where we radically undermined the leaders' hegemony, we were unable to significantly call into doubt the legitimacy of the G8, its agenda or the system it perpetuates. But neither were the issues framed entirely by G8 leaders. However, the Chretien government was able to achieve a broader victory - the further limiting of the right to protest, and forcing our movement into retreat. Kananaskis was the feds' first highly visible test of its post-9/11 approach to democracy and civil liberties. At last April's Summit of the Americas, outrage at the fence in Quebec City resonated with folks across the Country. There was no similar outrage about the qualitatively larger G8 security operation echoing off the mountains of K-Country. The lack of mass- opposition to the massive G8 security operation gives the government carte blanche to implement its new package of security legislation (bills C-35, C- 36, C-55, etc.) to designate dissent free zones as it deems politically necessary. Chretien has longed for such power since trying to make protest invisible at APEC five years ago. In the wake of the 9/11 attacks there has been a qualitative re-polarization of the political landscape and a reactionary ideological backlash to rival that of the '80s. Our movement has shifted from a 'war of position' to a more defensive posture. In the war of ideas, our movement must seek to deconstruct hegemonic discourses relating to terrorism and security, and to reframe these themes in terms of state terror, state repression, racism and imperialism. In the days following the 9/11 attacks, dissent became a dirty word, people rallied around their leaders and flags and our movement became disoriented. Some labour leaders and environmental organization representatives called for the cancellation of everything we were doing. Others at the grassroots proposed that we continue as if nothing has changed. A third current within the movement argued for a shift to anti-war work. Things have changed, and our political perspective and strategy must reflect this. We are still recovering momentum lost during this period of confusion. Without a sufficiently developed analysis of how the political landscape had moved, the movement engaged the Canadian state from a weakened position - we were unaware of how different the world had become. The summit drew closer and the government was armed with scary new legislation. Terrorist bogeymen were around every corner. We retreated in the face of this state repression, before the mayor was placing cowboy hats on delegates' heads. Before 9/11, the government would have found it much more difficult to deploy the army against its own citizens, and give soldiers permission to use lethal force. Our movement arises from diverse political backgrounds, different communities, and we are bound to disagree about assessments of conditions and appropriate strategies and tactics. However, the phrase "diversity of tactics" is now being used to avoid a desperately needed discussion about tactics and political perspective. In such a climate, I watched our G8 Spokescouncils devolve into logistical Q&A sessions rather than the models of radical democracy and alternative vision they can be. As much as possible, participants in an action must have agency. This cannot be downloaded to the affinity groups. Mass actions are not just cattle-drives; they are fundamentally acts of self-emancipation. Some organizations use marches to let their leaders flex their muscle at the negotiating table or as they lobby governments or corporations. Participants are turned on and off like a tap. This is obvious to those to whom it is done, and merely continues their alienation. That is not what our movement is about and we cannot afford to let parts of it slip back into that mode of operating. We then lose that spark that has grabbed the imagination and commitment of so many. This movement is founded on the principle of direct confrontation with the enemy - in the streets, at the point of production or consumption, or in the ideological arena. As opposed to lobbying elected officials to enact incremental change on our behalf. Most of the time we are political spectators, on the sidelines, watching as our leaders make a history we do not condone. We are encouraged to express ourselves through the products we consume. But in resistance, we have the opportunity to defiantly step out of our prescribed role of consumer or spectator, and to become an active agent in the political process, to step up to history, and play an active part. Over the past year or so, a consensus has been building among activists to move beyond "summit hopping" However, the corresponding links to organic, local and regional struggles are still in their beginning stages. Further, this strategy fails to recognize everything that makes the Kananaskis summit qualitatively different from other summits, as well as the impact of recent security / anti- terrorist legislation.. Conclusion At Calgary and Kananaskis, the movement defied attempts by authorities to completely stifle dissenting voices and prevent public assembly. Given our disorientation in the wake of the 9/11 backlash, strategic retreats in the face of elevated state repression, and the resultant decrease in numbers, we posed little threat to the legitimacy of the G8 agenda. Nationally, we were unable to mobilize a meaningful challenge to the hegemony of corporate globalization as embodied in the G8 summit. This campaign reflects a movement still trying to find its feet in a massively repolarized political landscape. In missives to these lists, some people have described G8 resistance as a nail in our movement's coffin. Others are singing in the rain. The G8 will only be a defeat for our movement if we fail to learn from it, grow, deepen our analysis, build our links and move forward. There will only be cause for pessimism if we do not take this opportunity and learn from these lessons. An ideological security perimeter is being erected around a renewed hegemony of world leaders and forces of corporate globalization. Where they haul out their terrorist bogeymen at the slightest criticism. We must not respond to this Brave New 9/11 World Hegemony with accommodation and retreat. Rather, we must regroup, debate, deepen our analysis of current political situation and decide to answer the gathering forces of reaction with bold ideological initiative, and an escalation of tactics. Garth Mullins, July 5, 2002 G8 Resistance Columns from the Vancouver Sin The following are four pieces I wrote from Calgary on G8 resistance. They were published in the Vancouver Sun during the summit, on June 25, 26, 27 and 28, 2002, on the "Commentary" and "Insight - G8 in Kananaskis" pages. I did not write the headlines. The Vancouver Sun is a Can West paper, subject to the decrees and censorship of the Aspers. Incredibly, there was no political editing on my pieces. The paper is not the tabloid / page three girl rag that is found elsewhere in Canada. It is more like the Toronto Star, or Ottawa Citizen, but a bourgeois corporate broadsheet none the less. June 25, 2002 -- The Vancouver Sun, Insight, A11 Why protesters bother to go at all Garth Mullins (1087 words) CALGARY Anti-corporate globalization activists from around the country have been converging on Calgary over the last several days. Despite reports of the police turning people away at the BC / Alberta boarder, Vancouver activists have organized a bus to bring themselves to Calgary. Many of us have come a long way, at great expense and inconvenience, and are concerned about the huge multi-agency, multi-national security operation that is being deployed. Since protesters have been denied the use of any public lands to set up a camp, there is a great deal of uncertainty about where to stay. We know that Kananaskis itself is sealed off behind a perimeter of police and we may not even get within one hundred kilometres of the G8. We'll be risking arrest and injury and everybody remembers last year's G8 summit in Genoa, Italy, where a young activist was shot and killed by police. Given all this, why go at all? The most powerful leaders on the planet will meet as far from the critical eyes of their electors as Jean Chretien could arrange. For many different reasons, and in many different ways, a growing number of people want to express their deeply felt concerns about the type of world that organizations like the G8 are perpetuating and creating. The G8 attracts protest for a wide range of reasons. They are the architects of corporate globalization and have perpetrated the so-called "War Against Terrorism" in Afghanistan. Collectively the G8 owns most of the world's wealth, the majority of "Third World" debt and creates the most pollution per capita. They are home to the Fortune 500 corporations. Individually, member countries are criticized for foreign and domestic policy decisions, such as the US's ongoing support of the occupation of Palestine by Israel and Canada's treatment of its indigenous peoples. Protesters are concerned about what is on the agenda of this G8 summit - terrorism, Africa and the global economy, as well as what's missing - human rights, social justice and the environment. Some want to include a broader social agenda and more voices at the table. Others reject the system over which the G8 presides, and want to scrap the institution. The "nix it or fix it" debate rages across the movement. But more than the specifics, the G8 is a symbol of a set of values, processes and priorities that those converging on Calgary find repugnant. The G8 envisions an increasingly homogenous world that looks like Disney, smells like McDonalds and tastes like Coke. The defining principles are greed and profit maximization. Without global governance or democracy, corporate rule has triumphed. Transnational corporations and supra-national organizations like the G8 and WTO are the dominant institutions of the corporate global order. The only laws are drawn up by the institutions themselves in documents like NAFTA, the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA) or General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS). But the people converging on Calgary are not pessimists. We believe that it is possible to change the world. Why bother to show up? Because most of the time we are political spectators, on the sidelines, watching as leaders and celebrities make a history we do not condone. We are encouraged to show our creativity and identity through the products we consume. But through social activism we have the opportunity to defiantly step out of our prescribed role of consumer or spectator, and to become an active agent in the political process, to step up to history, and play an active part. Over the last five years, a social movement has coalesced across the planet that is concerned about the processes of economic globalization. Since the "Battle of Seattle" issues of corporate rule, trade, social justice and the environment have emerged from the margins to become part of the mainstream political discourse. The movement is diverse and messy. It contains many ideologies, communities, issues and strategies. There is often little agreement. The road to Kananaskis has seen a great deal of debate and discussion, about logistics, tactics, messages, strategies, issues, everything. This summit's agenda will also consider Africa, and NEPAD (the New Partnership for Africa's Development.) Critics say that historically, G8 member states have been responsible for the underdevelopment of Africa. Among the industrialized west, Canada has also maintained the highest level of tariffs against trade with Africa. African civil society was not consulted in the development of NEPAD. Most in the movement see the current "War on Terrorism" as the most recent chapter in a centuries old story of colonial and imperial military conquest to serve the political and economic interests of an elite group of states and corporations. Afghanistan is at the top of a long list of countries invaded by the US and other western countries. Among G8 countries themselves, anti-terrorist legislation has lead to an erosion of civil liberties. Racial profiling, arbitrary arrests, detention without charge and the denial of access to legal council have become more common. In Canada, preventing terrorism meant Bill C42, which allowed for the designation of a "military exclusion area," where extra security measures could be taken and charter rights were optional. This was later amended so that such an area could only be declared for the protection of military equipment or personnel. The choice of such a remote site as Kananaskis is in keeping with the WTO's last meeting in Quitar, a remote Persian Gulf state that was impossible to get to and where protest was all but illegal. Except for stage-managed press events, these summits are held behind closed doors and largely in secret. Members of civil society are not invited. With 5 000 Canadian forces personnel in Kananaskis (more than in Afghanistan) activists have speculated about a "military exclusion zone" being declared around the G8. We realize that since the law has never been enacted, we don't know what (if any) rights we will have. Along with the army being granted permission to use "lethal force," activists face the next few days with a great deal of uncertainty and trepidation. Tonight, the city of Calgary is hosting a "western themed" party to showcase the City to the G8 delegates and the international media. The corporate backed "Hoedown" has been targeted by the grassroots activist groups, who are holding a "Showdown at the Hoedown;" anti-G8 march and street party. The police have denied activists permission for the event, but organizers plan to go ahead anyway. How police respond to tonight's protest activities will set the tone for the next few days. Stay tuned.. - 30 - Garth Mullins is a Vancouver based anti-globalization activist. He will be filing daily on the G8 summit. June 26, 2002 - The Vancouver Sun Insight: G8 in Kananaskis, A21 Protesters lack base, feel hemmed in, face phone jamming Garth Mullins (1090 words) CALGARY It has become clear to activists that there is no room for critical voices at the G8 summit - both politically and physically. Kananaskis and the summit are now sealed up behind a tight security perimeter. Protest organizers have been forced to move most all activities to Calgary. Activists are frustrated, and trying to creatively make the best of a bad situation. We are loath to let Chretien keep G8 delegates out of sight and earshot of dissent. The Prime Minister has been trying to create a "protest-free zone" since APEC in 1997. Chretien barked to the media that nobody will upstage him and his party. The intense and often violence-prone security measures that keep the public away are endemic to the anti-democratic principles that are part of the agendas of corporate globalization. G8 delegates are protected by a security perimeter that extends in a 6.5- kilometre radius around Kananaskis Village. To enter, the media, workers and 500 residents must be accredited - protesters need not apply. Security personnel from G8 countries, the army, RCMP, CSIS and over 20 other law enforcement agencies are part of the security operation. Overhead, a "no fly zone" is patrolled by jet fighters. Highway 40, the only road in, has many police patrols and checkpoints. Brigadier-General Ivan Fenton told the Calgary Herald on May 31 that Canadian soldiers have been granted permission to use "lethal force." And there's nowhere to sleep. Originally, plans were made for "Solidarity Village," a protest camp close to Kananaskis. Alberta unions and the Council of Canadians negotiated with the Stony First Nation to rent part of their reserve land. At the last minute, the deal fell through, and the camp was called off. It has since been revealed that the federal government are paying the First Nation $300 000 for "security costs." Those at the negotiations find this highly suspect. David Robbins, trade campaigner for the Council of Canadians said "We suspected there was interference when our discussions about a venue for Solidarity Village broke down for no apparent reason. Now we know that the federal government paid to prevent G8 dissenters from being able to organize a peaceful response to the Summit." With our protest camp gone, and other Kananaskis based actions looking unlikely, discussions began several days ago among local Calgary activists, and across the country by internet, about expanding the role and significance of regional protests, including events in Calgary. As the summit itself arrives, people are worried, and nobody knows what to expect. Having to reconsider all our plans has caused disagreements, tension and splits among activist ranks. On the 23rd a 2500 strong, union organized march against the G8 raised everybody's spirits for a time. The march was loud and energetic, without police violence or arrests. Late Sunday, after a trip across Rogers Pass in my late grandmother's land yacht Oldsmobile, I arrived in Calgary. Although others were stopped and searched by the RCMP, our ride must have been good camouflage. We went to the "Convergence Space," where meetings are held, events planned and housing, medics and legal assistance organized. Spokescouncils, caucuses and affinity groups had been meeting in the crowded space for several days, analysing conditions and revisiting strategy. Organizers worry that in the confusion of shifting the focus to Calgary at the last minute, we may lose people. On the various anti-G8 websites calls to action have been posted, changed and withdrawn. Our movement's ability to spontaneously organize itself will be crucial. About 300 other activists and concerned citizens are meeting at the Peoples Summit: G6B (Group of Six Billion) at the University of Calgary. Speakers, academics and activists from all over the world are proposing reforms or alternative models to corporate globalization and other policies of the G8. A sub-committee of the main activist council is revisiting the idea of making a small caravan of cars out to Kananaskis, or as close as the police will let us get. The idea is to peacefully illustrate that the summit has been sanitized of critical ideas, and removed from the sight of those who elect the leaders who meet within. Even with most activities limited to Calgary, authorities are dead set against us. Police have been reticent to grant permission to anti-G8 public events. The City of Calgary and mayor Dave Bronconnier have opposed our use of city parks and municipal property because 'public spaces are not appropriate venues for "political" events.' Mayor Bronco said that activists hold marches "at they're own risk" and that he had plenty of cells for us. Bronco used a city park to launch his election campaign with an 800-person barbeque- certainly not a political event. The Civil Liberties Association and the Alberta Federation of Labour are now in court to challenge the city's "blanket prohibition against assembly in public" and denial of any protest permits. Activists are getting around the permit issue by calling for a picnic in the park. There will be veggie burgers and soda, but also speakers, music and much criticism of the G8 agenda. Police have also announced that they intend to make use of cell phone and radio jamming equipment. We need cell phones and walkie-talkies to communicate among ourselves, to let our volunteer medics know if anybody is hurt or needs help, steer marches through city streets, communicate with activists in other cities, talk to the media and even the police. When police reduce our ability or organize ourselves, it makes it much more difficult to get our message out, and to have a coherent and safe event. As I file this column, meetings and discussions in living rooms and pubs continue as to the character of actions for the first day of G8 meetings. With all these obstacles and concerns, activists will surely talk late into the night, and most will have little or no sleep. As the sun rises tomorrow, protesters will roll out of their tents, get up off the floors of church basements, and raise themselves from the couches of friends, determined that regardless of the location, we will make the June 26 anti-G8 actions loud, effective, militant and safe. At 6am, people will began to converge at Fort Calgary for the "J26 Global Day of Action." The main goal of the Calgary march is to cause "economic disruption" throughout the downtown core, and to call attention to the transnational corporations that are the main beneficiaries of the G8 agenda. As I write, nobody knows if the police will even let us out of our 6 a.m. rallying place. - 30 - Garth Mullins is a Vancouver based anti-globalization activist. He will be filing daily on the G8 summit. June 27, 2002 - The Vancouver Sun, Insight: G8 in Kananaskis, A10 'People's Summit' sticks up for Africa Garth Mullins (1374 words) CALGARY On the night before the summit begins, as the last of the leaders arrive in town, the city of Calgary hosted a "Hoedown" to showcase "western culture" to G8 delegates and the international media. Anti-G8 protesters organized a "Showdown at the Hoedown," with a street party, complete with music, dancing and a trampoline. Three thousand people took the streets for this un-permitted rally, chanting "this is what democracy looks like," and "They are the G8 we are the G6B" (Group of Six Billion) According to email from the organizers, Calgary Anti-Capitalist Collective and Anti-Capitalist Edmonton, the idea is to "disrupt the facade of the 'Alberta advantage' [a promotional business slogan] and the racist imagery of cavalier/cowboy capitalism." We had trained medics and legal observers on hand, but they had nothing to do, as there were no injuries or arrests. For activists, the event was a massive success. We were able to defy the police and gather peacefully, but without a permit. The street party got bery close to the Round Up Centre, where the "Hoedown" took place. There were some tense moments as protesters faced off with police at the security fence, but conflict never erupted. For activists, the event represented an end to strategic retreating - from police intimidation, from Kananaskis, and from media stereotypes. Protesters have been feeling under fire from an often hostile and sensational press. In the wake of the 9/11 the media have taken a decidedly more negative approach to dissent. A national editorial last week on the op/ed page of Can West papers described protesters as "unable to win political or public support, a furtive cabal of self-appointed world savers, out to lead the masses in breaking glass, spray-painting buildings, throwing bricks at police and often, creative uses of urine and faeces." We may be pissed off, but that's as close as anybody comes to the creative use of urine. Earlier in the day, about 200 gathered to draw attention the poor labour practices of Gap sweat shops. Protesters marched down city streets, through Calgary's shopping district to its flagship Gap shop, where some got naked, pronouncing that they'd "rather wear nothing than wear Gap." Again, there were no arrests and no police violence. Across town, in the crowded Convergence Space, spokescouncil meetings continued right up until the Hoedown action began. The space is where all the organizing and logistical planning takes place. It is like an old school gymnasium, sweltering and overflowing with 200 plus activists, chairs, tables full of literature and the smell of burnt Fair Trade coffee. The walls alre plastered with various announcements and information. There are a few slow Internet access computers. Final discussions were had about the early morning J26 march for the first day of the summit. The group, which is a delegated structure and runs on a consensus process, debated the various contingencies and responses to possible police repression, violence or mass arrests. Activists argued on the need for total democracy and disclosure of strategy on the one hand, versus the need for security to outfox police informants on the other. People are clearly tired, tense and feeling the effects of the heavy police presence. The Space is constantly observed by a variety of bicycle, cruiser and patty wagon driving police, who drive around and around the block. The meeting erupted into applause when a member of the Alberta Federation of Labour announced their success this morning in court, where along with the Civil Liberties Association, challenging the city on its blanket refusal to allow any type of public gathering in opposition to the G8. We (and the Charter of Rights and Freedoms) won and a permitted "picnic" will take place in the afternoon. One of the points of major interest to protesters is Africa. This summit's agenda includes Africa, and NEPAD (the New Partnership for Africa's Development.) It is arguable that Africa is even being considered by the G8 as a result of pressure from civil society and the changes in the political landscape caused by the anti-globalisation movement. . Critics say that historically, G8 member states have been responsible for the underdevelopment of Africa. Among the industrialized west, Canada has also maintained one of the highest level of tariffs against trade with Africa. The west is happy to strip Africa of its raw resources, but erects large barriers to the import of any value added products. The G8 approach will demand of African nations that they make massive cuts into their social programs and health care and privatize public resources, further hurting those already at the bottom of the world's economic ladder. The People's Summit - G6B is a G8 counter conference that runs in Calgary during this week is in full swing. Many sessions and speakers will focus on Africa, and the negative role that Canada and the G8 have played (and continue to play) on the continent. Discussions and statements made so far indicate that members of African labour movement, farmers' groups, women's organizations and other community organizations participating in the People's Summit see the approach of the G8 largely as a continuation of the policies that have ravaged the continent, rather than a departure from them. Moreover, African unions and civil society were not consulted in the negotiation of NEPAD. At six in the morning of June 26, the J26 march began at Fort Calgary. Thousands gathered, ready to defy the city and police's ban on public assembly with a peaceful march through Calgary. In my capacity as one of the communications people, I helped to facilitate the movement of the "Snake March" through the mystifying grid of Calgary's downtown core. We kept track of any medical issues, the location and attitude of police and our own ranks over walkie -talkie. The event was entirely peaceful, and without police violence. There was even a spontaneous game of anti-capitalist street soccer. The police were invited to play the anarchists, but declined, and thus forfeited. Protesters 1: Police 0. Calgary is home to the corporate headquarters to many transnational corporations that have played a role in the exploitation of Africa, the global south, the planet's environment and the systematic prioritization of profit over people. They are also beneficiaries of the global economic order that the G8 maintains and expands. The early morning march disrupted traffic and drew attention to the role of these organizations by stopping at their headquarters or local buildings: Sun Life Financial, Shell, McDonalds, the Gap, Ralph Klein's conservative government, the federal government and the posh hotels where G8 delegates are staying were all political targets on the march route. Helicopters buzzed overhead as about 2500 marched through downtown. The police presence was heavy, with riot troops waiting in the wings, and cruisers, vans and bike cops dogging us all the way. Two activists were arrested as they tried to occupy a McDonalds restaurant on Stephan Avenue Mall. The legal team was quickly put in touch with police. One person was treated for dehydration by our volunteer medics. The march ended with a "die- in" where activists played dead to represent the 8000 people that die each day of HIV/AIDS in Africa. The morning's events were followed by an anti-G8 picnic in Riley Park. Under a scorching sun, activists enjoyed veggie burgers and other free food and drink, listened to speakers talk on various aspects of G8 policy, and danced to live music. The permission for this event was won in court only yesterday, but still over 1000 people attended. People are feeling very positive about events so far. After the picnic, a caravan of about 100 activists will get as close to the G8 summit and delegates in Kananaskis as police will let us. About 20 cars will leave together from Riley Park, Calgary and drive out to Kananaskis, and make our presence known in a peaceful fashion. The government and police have taken extreme measures to sanitize the summit sight of any dissenting viewpoints. These ideas are being kept out with a massive security operation and the threat of lethal force. Later today we will challenge the legitimacy of this body to meet in secret, behind so much firepower and out of the sight of the people to whom the politicians owe their livings. - 30 - Garth Mullins is a Vancouver based anti-globalization activist. He will be filing daily on the G8 summit. June 28, 2002 - The Vancouver Sun, Insight: G8 in Kananaskis, A6 Draconian policy marks a declining state of democracy Garth Mullins (1443 words) CALGARY As the G8 Summit concludes, protesters and activists, sleep-deprived and sun-stroked, assess what has been accomplished, what has been learned, and what should be forgotten. Meanwhile the police, media and authorities scratch their heads, wondering why the violence they promised the rest of Canada didn't materialize. Jean Chretien and the federal government, citing bill C36 re the protection of international dignitaries, made Kananaskis and the G8 a dissent-free zone. Meetings took place beyond the sight of media, taxpayers, electors and protesters. What you know of summit deliberations is only what the G8 leaders want you to know. This week, Canadian "democracy" has seen a radical erosion of the right to protest and expression - the right to be seen and heard by leaders, as determined in the APEC inquiry and by other legal opinion. Kananaskis was a Charter-free zone. In the protest camp, we learned that to retreat and not defy such draconian policy is to essentially forfeit our rights. And on June 26 we did stand up. About 102 cars full of five hundred activists (five times what organizers had anticipated) drove out to where highway 40 turns off to Kananaskis from the Trans-Canada. We were well aware of the comments of a commanding officer, who a member of the media overheard say that if anybody without security accreditation tries to go to Kananaskis, "we'll take 'em out." We were met by hordes of RCMP and fatigue wearing soldiers. Our convoy went as far as the second security checkpoint, of which there are over a dozen between the Trans Canada and Kananaskis Village. Apparently, once you get closer to the site, tanks, rocket launchers, radar dishes and command posts become visible. These checkpoints are huge steel fences that bridge the road, guarded by rows of bicycle cops, riot troops waiting in the wings, and a team of RCMP videographers filming our every move from atop a police van. We stood face to face with police at the G8 security checkpoint and drew the attention of the world to the declining state of Canadian democracy. This extreme security operation made it impossible for protesters and activists to set up a peaceful presence at the G8. In making this statement, there were many sun burns, but no violence and no arrests. A delegation from Japan was delayed for 20 minutes because of our presence. We were still 25km from the G8 leaders. Meanwhile across the country, anti-G8 activities drew thousands. This is an intentional strategy of the movement to broaden out its ranks and audience. There is an emerging consensus that "summit hopping" is not the most effective way to get messages out or build our movement. Given the obligations of family, work and school, along with the expense of travel, most people cannot pick up and spend a week in another city attending a counter-conference or protesting a summit. On June 26, the movement held regional events in Victoria, Vancouver, Calgary, Edmonton, Winnipeg, Ottawa and Halifax to demonstrate concerns about the G8, and to connect the sometimes-abstract processes of economic globalization with local struggles at home. The media and Calgary Mayor Dave Bronconnier have learned that no protester would rise to their violence mongering. But after the first day of the summit, disappointed at the lack of spectacle on hand, media asserted that activist numbers are shrinking. Certainly across the country about 10,000 took part, and this is a smaller number than other events like it. The explanation is in our leaders and the media's hostility towards dissent in the wake of 911, and the qualitative step up in security restrictions on protesters. Through the weeks leading up to the G8, activists had to redraft our plans several times, leading to confusion and smaller numbers. "If anyone is to blame for the fewer that felt they could raise their voices," commented Sharmeen Khan, a Victoria based activist who made the trek out "it is the scare tactics of the Prime Minister and police authorities." But numbers don't tell the whole story. Myself and a dozen friends and activists occupied the Calgary small house of an old acquaintance from back in the day when we both played in little punk bands. Colin put up with a near home invasion as gracefully as Martha Stewart with a gas mask. The floor was wall-to-wall-protesters, trying to fit in three of four hours sleep. Julia got up early with me and drove me to my various engagements, and to our never-ending meetings. I am fortunate to have a thoughtful group to consider strategy and tactics with over six am coffees. Many of the ideas advanced in these essays have been developed through discussions among my posse. Certainly, along with frayed nerves and tactical disagreements, a feeling of sharing and community was firmly entrenched by the time the leaders were packing their cowboy hats and assorted Canadianna souvenirs. Early on the morning of the second day of the summit, I did an interview with CTV's "Canada AM." However, CTV was broadcasting from the Mariott, where G8 delegates stay, inside the secure zone in downtown Calgary. My cab pulled up front about 4:30am and a gaggle of police immediately confronted me. I told them I was on the security list, that the producer had done this days ago. One of the cops said "Mullins, I don't care what your story is, you ain't coming in here." After much argument, the producer escorted me through three checkpoints, a search and metal detector. A little crew of six stood frowning at me, just out of camera frame. Heather, an intern at CTV told me that she overheard journalists pitching their stories yesterday, and paraphrased "since there was no violence what will we write about? We may have to cover their issues!" A central issue now facing activists and organizers in the wake of the G8 is how our movement responds to the repressive apparatus of the state when it is unleashed upon us in protection of a fundamentally undemocratic agenda. One of the major strengths of the anti-globalization movement in its first few years was its use of civil disobedience and direct action to challenge the processes and mechanisms of corporate globalization. This does not mean just lobbying political leaders and waiting for them to enact incremental change on our behalf. Rather, it is to directly confront supra-national organizations and transnational corporations with thousands and thousands of activist bodies. It is to put ourselves in the way. It does not mean random acts of violence and property damage by frustrated individuals - that is not a tactic but an emotional outburst. Civil disobedience and direct action captured the imagination of a populace that had grown cynical with parliamentary machinations and suspicious of professional politicians. It is a direct confrontation between the engines of capitalism and the people who oppose and are victimized by them - fundamentally an act of self-liberation, where everyone has agency. With the level of security so cracked up, and the city of Calgary and its mayor making a total ban on any public gathering during the G8, the mere act of public assembly (once described as a right) becomes a radical, law- breaking act of civil disobedience. This can threaten more conservative movement constituents and divide us. Fortunately, at the eleventh hour, labour decided to give the G8 actions its full support, and such divisions were avoided. Another strength of the anti-corporate globalization movement is its radical democracy. Decisions are made democratically and by consensus across a wide geography and diverse constituency. The "Spokescouncil" model helped to share a vision and organize ten thousand to shut down the WTO in Seattle. In Calgary it was used to constantly reassess conditions and try to find a workable action given tough circumstances. This model allows every participant the potential to become an organizer and have a say. Activists now must determine how to face these elevated levels of repression that have come about with the passage of "anti-terrorism" laws and the Public Security Act since 911. I hope we have learned that the answer is not to retreat, but rather to raise our voices and escalate our tactics. However, analysis, debate and discussion will continue among activists long after summit delegates have split Cow Town. As I file this piece, activists are meeting to discuss actions for the last half of the second day of the G8 summit. The question of retreat or advance seems to have been on many minds, as suggestions for a variety of civil disobedience actions are being put forward at a mid-morning Spokescouncil. After being pushed and pushed, the movement seems to be regaining its confidence and initiative. - 30 - Garth Mullins is a Vancouver based anti-globalization activist. _______________________________________________ antiwar-van mailing list antiwar-van at resist.ca http://resist.ca/mailman/listinfo/antiwar-van ------------------------------------------- Macdonald Stainsby http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/rad-green http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/leninist-international -- In the contradiction lies the hope. --Bertholt Brecht From hunterbadbear at earthlink.net Mon Jul 8 04:07:11 2002 From: hunterbadbear at earthlink.net (Hunter Gray) Date: Mon, 8 Jul 2002 04:07:11 -0600 Subject: [R-G] NATIVES, ISSUES, AND RADICALS [Hunter Gray] Message-ID: <00c301c22667$3be203b0$f170fa43@intel> Note by Hunterbear: I'm pleased to note that my article, NATIVE PEOPLES AND THE LEFT, has recently appeared in the Spring 2002 issue of DIALOGUE AND INITIATIVE -- the official [and excellent] journal of Committees of Correspondence for Socialism and Democracy [CCDS]. NATIVE PEOPLES AND THE LEFT [Hunter Gray] My father was an essentially full-blooded Native American [Micmac, St. Francis Abenaki, and St. Regis Mohawk] and my mother an Anglo from old Western American stock. I grew up in a rough and racist quasi-frontier setting in Northern Arizona. Our identity lies on the Indian side of our family -- which has been closely involved with many Native nations -- and I've been privileged to work congenially, as a grassroots social justice organizer and college/university teacher, with people from a wide range of ethnic backgrounds in many parts of this country. I was in my teens when I began to read radical literature -- ranging from the I.W.W. Preamble to the Communist Manifesto and Granville Hicks' John Reed: The Making of a Revolutionary. Aware from the outset that this all meshed congenially with that ethos of communalism and mutual responsibility inherent in every Native tribal culture, I became a life-long socialist. I vigorously believe that Native Americans are certainly part of that great world which needs bona fide socialist democracy -- something that offers Humanity much, much more of the good things of life than capitalism ever could or would. But only a relatively few Native Americans in the United States are avowed people of the Left. Why? Let me give some thoughts -- and let me make some suggestions. I'm the first to concede that Indian people are often too reluctant to listen to worthwhile ideas if they come from non-Indians and are frequently too wary of entering into association with them. Many Native people fear that alien ideas and associations could somehow threaten one's aboriginal identity. But there are grounds for optimism: slowly growing numbers of Native people are becoming aware that that essential of tribalism -- "an injury to one is an injury to all" -- has to be extended to the dispossessed of all humanity and that loss of socio-cultural identity will not occur in the framework of healthy political association and coalition [e.g., the anti-nuclear struggle or the fight for Leonard Peltier's life and liberty.] And non-Native radicals ought to be aware by now that it takes much more than mechanical arrangements and presumably altruistic politicians to build and maintain genuine humanistic socio-economic democracy -- especially in a predominately urban/industrial context. They can learn much from the First People about faithful commitment to economic communalism, to equalitarian democracy and classless societies, and to a practical recognition of the spiritual foundations and interdependence of every component of the Creation. The U.S. census of 2000 indicates that 2.4 million people identified themselves as Native Americans: up 25% since 1990. This is a clear and unequivocal statement of basic Indian identity -- although almost all of these would be of some mixed [ Native and non-Native] ancestry, a very common situation throughout Indian country in this day and age. [In addition, slightly over four million other people indicated some Indian ancestry -- but this category is not accepted by many Native people as indicative of basic Native identity.] There are almost 600 tribal societies in the United States, each perceived by its people [though not by Federal and state governments] as a sovereign entity; more than two-thirds of Native people are from "Federally-recognized" tribes, covered by treaties or other Federal ties, and hold about 55 million acres of reservation land. [An additional 40 million acres have been set aside for Alaskan Natives.] If physically resident on their Indian lands, Federal Indians are eligible for Indian trust services [such as they are]: health, education, socio-economic development. Non-Federal Indians, mostly in the East, receive no Federal Indian services and often have little or no reservation land base. In a few instances, they may receive minimal Indian services from the state in which they reside. Urban Indians, and Native people in off-reservation rural settings -- and these are now much more than one-half the total Native population in the United States -- receive no Federal Indian services, even if they are from Federally-recognized tribes. The Native American population in the United States may be changing -- indeed, is growing with rapidity -- but some other things are certainly not changing. Indian people are at the bottom when it comes to education and income and housing and life-expectancy -- and they're at the top in unemployment, sub-employment, and suicide. The development of casinos -- over three hundred of them -- in Indian country is often seen by outsiders as much more of a positive and beneficent economic phenomenon than they are; the cold reality is that, while the casinos have helped the economic picture of the tribes involved to some extent -- but not all that much -- they have also engendered no small amount of corruption, skim-offs from outsiders, and much venomous intra-tribal factionalism. In addition, since tribes are not covered by Federal labor laws, it's been very difficult for almost all tribal casino employees to unionize -- and pay and conditions are often extremely poor. And, further, however slowly, the states themselves are beginning their own legalization of non-Indian casino gambling. Something else that has certainly not changed is the fact that, despite transitory periods of faint sunlight, the enduring common denominator of United States [and Canadian] Native policy is -- however veiled -- to get rid of Native people via socio-cultural assimilation; end all treaty obligations; and secure remaining Native land, water, and other natural resources. And again, there is another unchanging dimension: that mountain of Native commitment -- of all Native people, whoever and wherever -- to a cohesive family and clan, to one's tribal nation [essentially one big family] and to its inherent sovereignty and self-determination; and to the critical values so deeply rooted in the tribal cultures: strongly religious, a pervasive identification with the whole Creation, no coincidence or happen-chance in the Universe, an essentially communalistic view of land use, democracy, egalitarianism, classlessness. And all of this is in the context of the fundamental principle of tribal [mutual] responsibility: i.e., the society has an obligation to the individual and the individual has an obligation to the society; if these conflict, the position of the society prevails -- but there are certain clearly defined areas of individual and family autonomy into which the society -- the tribe -- cannot intrude. And from Native American perspectives, these basic issues stand very much to the fore -- issue/goals which warrant the full support of every person of good will and certainly every person of the Left: Federal adherence to treaty and related obligations. Treaties between the United States and the Indian nations are, however occasionally mangled by the Federal government, part of "the Supreme Law of the Land" -- completely in the context of Article 6, Section 2 of the U.S. Constitution. Although Congress ended treaty making with the tribal nations in 1871, the hundreds of treaties then in existence continue with full legal validity. Federal protection of Native land, water, and other natural resources -- and substantial Federal funding to build back the badly shrunken reservation land base. Federal recognition of the non-Federal tribes. This was supposed to have been effected by the 1921 Snyder Act which guaranteed Federal Indian services to all Native Americans in the U.S. -- but the Act's coverage and Indian services were restricted immediately to only those Federally-recognized Indian people resident on reservations. Removal of the Bureau of Indian Affairs from the Department of Interior [perennially dominated by the corporations] and its elevation to cabinet status. The B.I.A. is presently under very heavy fire from the tribes and their advocates for massive mismanagement of Native trust funds and the mishandling of other trust responsibilities. Substantial Federal funds for Indian-controlled and Indian-directed programs -- in the areas of health, welfare and education, among others -- on reservations, in non-reservation rural settings, and in urban areas. The 1975 Indian Self-Determination Act involving Federal reservations is a promising first step. Substantial Federal funding for tribally-owned and tribally-controlled development of natural resources and other economic programs. Correction and reinterpretation of the 1988 Indian Gaming Act in such a fashion as to allow tribes to operate their casinos without non-tribal -- e.g., state -- interference. As it stands, the Act and a subsequent 1996 Supreme Court decision [Seminole], force tribes to reach agreements with states, thus undercutting Worcester v. Georgia [1832], the key [Cherokee Nation] case blocking state jurisdiction over Indian tribes. Establishment of full tribal civil and criminal jurisdiction on Indian lands. Most of this is now held by the Federal government. Cessation of Federal and state attacks on Native activists and immediate freedom for persons such as Leonard Peltier. Elimination of racism and cultural ethnocentrism wherever they may exist. These are critical issues for Native people in any setting but are frequently -- and often brutally -- to the fore in police, employment, housing, and education situations involving urban Indians. Where do radicals -- the Left -- come into all of this? First, a revealing little story: Some years ago, in a very tough and very big-city urban context, a situation developed where racist Anglo youth gangs were attacking Native American kids -- and the predominately white police in that particular district were doing virtually nothing about it. We called a public mass meeting and demanded, successfully, that police representatives be present. A large number of people -- Native and non-Native -- came to the basement of a Catholic Church. I chaired the meeting. However turbulently, it moved along through grievances and demands -- and then, suddenly! Two non-Indian radicals arose to harangue -- not the deserving cops -- but each other: over conflicting mini-visions and perceptions of peripheral socialist ideology. With some difficulty and banging of my fist, I ended the escalating oratory and returned the discussion to the matter at hand. And, in due course, we arrived at a functional resolution of the situation -- which the police, however reluctantly, effectively honored. As we were leaving the meeting, a young Native activist asked me, "What were those guys yelling at each other about? Some religious thing?" And I could only answer, "Pretty much." And, indeed, the behavior of some non-Indian radicals -- certainly not all by any means -- can easily lend toward a religiously fundamentalist interpretation! Past relationships between Native Americans and American radical organizations and movements, although not antagonistic, have generally not been close. In the pre-World War I and post-war period, the Industrial Workers of the World, with minimal ideological rigidity and very substantial democracy; and its close relative, the Socialist Party [especially in heavily Native American Oklahoma], did have very meaningful Indian membership and support. [Always remember Frank H. Little, Cherokee Indian, metal miner, Wobbly organizer and chairman of the I.W.W. General Executive Board, mutilated and lynched at Butte on August 1, 1917, by thugs employed by Anaconda Copper.] And, especially in the Rocky Mountains after World War II, the International Union of Mine, Mill and Smelter Workers [another relative of the old I.W.W.], radical and militant, the epitome of democracy, and thoroughly committed to full racial equality, reached out and attracted many Native metal miners -- who always functioned very comfortably and loyally within Mine-Mill. But, at the present , there are, sadly, too few Indian people in American radical organizations. The Peltier case has brought some Native activists and non-Indian radicals into quite congenial and determined association. Although hard specific data are almost impossible to come by, local reports from around the United States -- including many coming to me personally, often from former Indian students of mine -- certainly indicate that the Nader/LaDuke campaign stimulated an unusual amount of Native voting activism. I should add that the "two old parties" each have token Indian figures of sometime conspicuous presence -- the Democrats more than the Republicans -- but neither has attracted a consistently loyal Native American following. Most Indians who actually vote in mainline elections -- not a pervasive pattern at all, but a slowly growing one -- are Democratic. But that party's position on Native issues is only tepidly better than the Republicans. [The Canadian situation is in many respects different than the one in the 'States. In the central provinces, many decades ago indeed, activists of the well-organized and radical Metis [ off-reserve mixed-blood category] and on-reserve tribal people were much involved in the initial formation of the Cooperative Commonwealth Federation which eventually, in 1961, became the New Democratic Party --of somewhat socialist perspective but presently faltering.] Even when interested in active participation in U.S. Left organizations, Native people often encounter a kind of indifference. In a recent and probably not atypical situation, younger Anglo radicals became interested in placing a Native activist -- and member -- on that particular socialist organization's national political commission. But other commission members, with profuse apologies, were reluctant to agree to even consider approving compensation for a small part of the Native person's [not an individual of means] transportation from the "remote" hinterland to New York City -- site of almost all of that group's occasional political commission gatherings. Partial travel compensation for other persons, geographically closer, has always been the general rule. The Native person was never named to the political body. But I reiterate: We all need each other. And big things usually start with small steps on a strange trail. I think non-Indian radicals need to reach out, in personally affirmative ways, to make contact with Native American people. Without limiting the initial arena exclusively to the urban settings, the cities -- often with Indian people of many tribes represented, and generally characterized by a somewhat greater degree of acculturation -- offer some of the most promising possibilities for mutually productive involvements: urban Indian centers, protest meetings around racial and ethnocentric prejudice and discrimination issues, Native public pow-wows, Native speakers. Opportunities to assist Indian people in good causes will always present themselves -- and, furthermore, well written articles on Native issues are always helpful. Here now is some very friendly -- comradely -- advice to non-Indian radicals: Don't see Native Americans as one monolithic group. Although there certainly is a basic Native racial togetherness, remember that there are literally hundreds of distinct tribal nations -- each with its own unique culture and ethos. Recognize, too, that there are many degrees of acculturation [but not assimilation.] Be aware, also, that there are many different factions in any tribe. And: "Not all Indians these days look like Indians." The generally mixed-blood situation has produced many Native people who don't fit the grand old face in the old American nickel. But it certainly doesn't mean they are any less committed to tribe, culture, and race -- and, frequently, militant activism. Genuinely accept and respect the socio-cultural validity of the tribal societies and cultures. Each has its own origin, vision, history and destiny. Avoid ethnocentric terms like "primitive" and "civilized," recognizing that almost all Native people do not think in traditional "western" linear terms [are much more "circlic/cyclic."] But, although change comes slowly in the Indian cultures, it does come in its own way and, in the last analysis, on the terms of the people. [A pickup truck, used by the Navajo for purely Navajo purposes, is called a "Navajo Cadillac."] Religion pervades -- usually in a non-pretentious and almost always non-sanctimonious fashion -- every Native American culture. Regardless of one's view of "religion," it -- or the lack of it -- should be up to the individual. As a life-long working organizer and teacher, I can't think of anything more counter-productive in any setting -- Native or otherwise -- than cutting at someone's religious beliefs. Go rather easy on the intricacies of radical ideology -- especially at the outset of a relationship. Native Americans are going to be much more impressed with a person's individual commitment to people and demonstrated service than they are in one's ability to quote the great socialists. I've talked socialism to all of my students, Native and non-Native, over many, many years indeed -- and likewise to my organizing constituents -- but I always take it in at a deliberate and steady pace. And this approach builds an understanding in a step-by-step fashion. With Native people, the basic communalism -- the mutual responsibility -- of the tribal cultures is the obvious context in which to discuss socialist vision and practice. And, in due course, there'll certainly be many Native people who'll join Left organizations and participate vigorously and effectively within them. Recognize that Native Americans, like all people, are very much committed to making the decisions that affect them. Self-determination is something Indians hold as critically important. Don't stereotype. Most sensitive non-Indians are certainly not going to demean Native people. But, on the other hand, don't exalt us, either. People are very much people indeed. Be a good listener. [The art of listening, to which we all pay lip service, is of course 'way too rare -- but it's within the reach of everyone!] Recognizing that there is a lot of downright hokey stuff floating about, learn all you can about Native Americans: histories and visions, centuries of Euro-American genocide and attempted genocide, massive Anglo theft of land and resources, frequently totalitarian Federally-imposed "educational" systems visited upon Indian youth, the vicious governmental and corporate efforts to "terminate" treaties and tribes and people, the great and enduring Native persistence and commitment through all of these blood-dimmed centuries. Here are a few helpful books: Ward Churchill, ed., Marxism and Native Americans [Boston: South End Press, 1989.] Barbara Graymont, ed., Fighting Tuscarora: The Autobiography of Chief Clinton Rickard [Syracuse, New York: Syracuse University Press, 1984.] Hazel W. Hertzberg, The Search for an American Indian Identity: Modern Pan-Indian Movements [Syracuse, New York: Syracuse University Press, 1971.] Laurence M. Hauptman, The Iroquois Struggle for Survival: World War II to Red Power [Syracuse, New York: Syracuse University Press, 1986.] James S. Olson, ed., The Encyclopedia of American Indian Civil Rights [Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1997.] Susan Power, The Grass Dancer [New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1994.] [Fiction] Paul Chaat Smith and Robert Allen Warrior, Like a Hurricane: The Indian Movement from Alcatraz to Wounded Knee [New York: The New Press, 1996.] Steve Talbot, Roots of Oppression [New York: International Publishers, 1981 and 1985.] We all need each other. And we can all learn from each other. We all need socialist democracy and a world in which -- to state that essential ideal of Native tribalism -- we develop people who serve their communities rather than simply serve themselves. All of this is as inextricably bound together in our human destiny as fused copper wires. Hunter Gray 2000 Sandy Lane Pocatello Idaho 83204 hunterbadbear at earthlink.net Hunter Gray [Hunterbear] www.hunterbear.org (strawberry socialism) Protected by Na?shdo?i?ba?i? From Johannes.Schneider at gmx.net Mon Jul 8 10:23:26 2002 From: Johannes.Schneider at gmx.net (Johannes Schneider) Date: Mon, 8 Jul 2002 18:23:26 +0200 Subject: [R-G] 'Jews-only' law sparks firestorm Message-ID: <018701c2269b$ca2c9160$4a1e050a@fgl.atitech.com> From the Israeli paper Haaretz: Background / 'Jews-only' law sparks firestorm By Bradley Burston, Ha'aretz Correspondent A proposed law that would allow Jews to bar Arabs from buying homes in their communities could expose Israel to a fresh wave of condemnation recalling the now-rescinded UN resolution equating Zionism and racism, critics of the bill said Wednesday. In a decision that set off a storm of debate, Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's cabinet Sunday voted to endorse a bill that would allow areas within Israel which have been designated as state land to be devoted to residential use by Jews alone. The bill still faces considerable legislative hurdles before it can be passed into law. Although worded in the gray phraseology of legislative practice, the measure goes to the heart of a crucial dichotomy of modern Israel: how to maintain a pluralistic state that is at once formally Jewish in character and genuinely democratic in practice. "If we are not already totally an apartheid state, we are getting much, much closer to it," said former cabinet minister and leftist Meretz party founder Shulamit Aloni. Full text at: http://makeashorterlink.com/?Z3F026731 From mstainsby at tao.ca Mon Jul 8 19:26:36 2002 From: mstainsby at tao.ca (Macdonald Stainsby) Date: Mon, 08 Jul 2002 18:26:36 -0700 Subject: [R-G] Peru peasants march to Lima Message-ID: <009b01c226e7$ab632ea0$291f5318@vc.shawcable.net> Reuters. 8 July 2002. Peru peasants march to Lima, protest mining damage. LIMA -- After a week of marching from villages across Peru, some 1,000 peasants arrived in Lima on Monday to demand government action against what they say is the contamination or seizure of land by big mining companies. "We're not against mining development but we want local communities to be ... consulted," said Miguel Palacin, head of a pressure group for 1,135 communities affected by mining. "The government is not interested in solving our problems caused by mining companies that contaminate land, rivers and undermine our health," he told Reuters. Mining is big business for Peru, the world's No. 5 producer of copper and No. 8 of gold, and the industry earns half of this poor Andean nation's annual export income. But a culture clash between mining companies seeking to exploit the rich mineral wealth and farmers who say their livelihood is at risk is fast becoming a headache for unpopular President Alejandro Toledo as he seeks to lure foreign investment. In the fruit-growing northern valley of Tambogrande, for example, residents in June overwhelmingly rejected a planned $315 million gold and copper mine that the proposed investor, Manhattan Minerals Corp., says will create jobs. Palacin said his group's members wanted technological development to help make more of their traditional farming and livestock jobs and the repeal of the so-called "law of mining servitude," whereby mining companies negotiate payment for agricultural land and the government relocates farmers. "Southern Peru Copper Corp. contaminates our water, our pasture land, and our animals die. There are 150 families who are being thrown off their land without being given alternatives," said Lucas Serrano, from the village of Quishque in Peru's southern Andes. "Our animals are dying. There are no fish or frogs in the rivers any more. There's no life. Our children are sick because all of the mining waste is filtering into the water we drink," said Melchora Surco, from near the southern city of Cusco. "We want to be moved and we want justice. We want to be heard -- because we never have been," she added. Filomeno Aylas, from La Oroya in central Peru, a desperately polluted Peruvian refinery town where people have shown blood lead content close to biological tolerance levels, said children as young as three were showing lead in their blood. "It's a calamity," he said. ------------------------------------------- Macdonald Stainsby http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/rad-green http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/leninist-international -- In the contradiction lies the hope. --Bertholt Brecht From Tom_Childs at Douglas.BC.CA Mon Jul 8 19:41:14 2002 From: Tom_Childs at Douglas.BC.CA (Tom_Childs at Douglas.BC.CA) Date: Mon, 8 Jul 2002 18:41:14 -0700 Subject: [R-G] Columbian U'wa Indians Brace for New Battle Message-ID: <200207090141.SAA19286@Douglas.BC.CA> http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/nm/20020708/lf_nm/colombia_in dians_dc_1 Colombian U'wa Indians Brace for New Battle Mon Jul 8,12:37 PM ET By Ibon Villelabeitia CUBARA, Colombia (Reuters) - Roberto Perez chews a cluster of dry coca leaves as he stands near a precipice overlooking a valley of rain forest and swift rivers. Legend has it that Perez's U'wa Indian ancestors jumped to their deaths from a similar ridge 500 years ago to avoid enslavement by Spanish conquistadors. Perez, a shy and mild-mannered U'wa leader, says his people will not commit mass suicide this time, but warns they will do whatever it takes to defend their land from the latest "intrusion" -- a planned U.S. aid package to train an army battalion. The $98 million in aid is aimed at preparing Colombian forces to protect an oil pipeline that runs near U'wa territory from attacks by Marxist rebels, but tribal leaders fear it will spread Colombia's 38-year-old war across their land. The U'wa, an impoverished semi-nomadic indigenous group in northeastern Colombia, gained international attention two years ago when they fought a protracted battle against Los Angeles-based Occidental Petroleum that sought to drill next to their reservation. Occidental withdrew from the project this year after failing to find commercially viable oil deposits. The controversy had been a public relations nightmare for the U.S. company as vociferous international environmental organizations cast the dispute as a David versus Goliath struggle between indigenous groups and corporate power. Now U'wa leaders fear Washington's plan, which is being discussed in the U.S. Congress, could drag them into a military conflict that kills thousands of people every year. "We have our own law. The army and the rebels should respect us. We don't want them on our land," said Roberto Cobaria, an U'wa leader with a wispy mustache. International green groups are bracing for a new battle. "Our campaign is not over. We campaign for the indigenous groups' right to self-determination, be that against oil or U.S. military aid," said Kevin Koenig, a spokesman for Amazon Watch, a group based in Oakland, California, that has taken up the U'wa cause. 'THINKING PEOPLE' SUFFER DISCRIMINATION The U'wa, which means "the thinking people" in their language, are one of Colombia's 80 indigenous ethnic groups. For centuries they have suffered oppression and discrimination at the hands of Spanish colonizers and Colombian government. Their numbers have dwindled dramatically -- to 5,000 from 20,000 in 1940. They live in remote mist-shrouded mountains, having lost large parts of their ancestral land to government expropriations and incursions by displaced peasants fleeing the violence of the country's largely rural war. Near Cubara, the main town on the tribe's reservation, children with stomachs swollen from malnutrition sat in the dirt in one settlement of mud huts inside the reservation. There is no electricity or running water. One girl, barely 15, breast-fed two babies as scrawny chickens pecked around pools of rain water. Inside a smoky hut, elders gathered around a wood fire and drank "chicha," a traditional beer made of fermented maize. Most didn't speak Spanish and seemed suspicious of foreigners. The lifestyle of most U'wa has changed little in 500 years although tribe leaders have set up a campaign office in Cubara equipped with telephones and fax machines. The leaders live in the town, and dress in the same shirts and trousers as other country Colombians. WRATH OF GOD The U'wa, a firmly religious people, believe that exploiting their sacred rivers and forests would unleash the wrath of "Sira" (God). They regard oil as the "blood of Mother Earth" and say drilling is like "stabbing a knife into your stomach." They carry coca leaves -- the raw material for cocaine -- in gourds around their necks and chew them to "gain strength and wisdom." The land dispute with Occidental entered the U.S. presidential election in 2000 as environmental groups criticized Democratic candidate Al Gore ( news - web sites) for owning company shares. When Occidental won a court order to sink a test well after a seven-year legal wrangle, Colombian soldiers were deployed near the reservation and military helicopters hovered in the skies to prevent protesters from blocking the drilling. Word that the U'wa were considering walking off the 1,400-foot (400-meter) "Cliff of Death" to fight the "invaders" as they did against the Spanish caused a media frenzy even though the U'wa later ruled out such drastic action. "The collective suicide was something our ancestors did 500 years ago to avoid becoming slaves. We are going to fight until the end to defend our land but we are not thinking of jumping off the cliff," said Perez, 60, who has 10 children. OIL IS TROUBLE History of Colombia shows that oil means trouble. Discoveries of oil -- the country's main export -- have brought violence from all sides fighting in Colombia's war and done little in the way of lifting the people from poverty. After the Cano Limon pipeline opened in the 1980s the two Marxist rebel groups that operate in the area grew fat by extorting private companies servicing the pipeline. Right-wing paramilitary outlaws have also moved into the area. In 1999, the rebels of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia -- known as "FARC" -- kidnapped and killed three U.S. Indian activists who were visiting U'wa territory. When the oil controversy faded away, the television cameras went home and the U'wa were left to their poverty and mud huts. Tall grass is overtaking the old drilling site and the sound of the rushing waters fills the air. The U'wa said they want the government to invest in hospitals and schools, not oil or war. After the White House announced the new aid package earlier this year, U.S.-based environmental groups began mobilizing a new campaign and U'wa leaders were back in the spotlight. U'wa leaders say they appreciate the solidarity received from international groups. Occidental and government officials say the Indians have been manipulated by outsiders. U'wa leaders have flown to Los Angeles, Washington and many European capitals -- paid by foreign support groups -- to promote the U'wa plight at anti-globalization forums. "These are groups that depend on fund-raising to survive and are always looking for causes in developing countries to raise their profile," an Occidental spokesman said. "They don't seem to have a problem when they fly the U'wa leaders around the world burning the 'blood of Mother Earth."' U'wa support groups say such claims are ridiculous and accuse big oil companies of trying to silence the voice of the indigenous community. Amazon Watch spokesman Koenig, who has never been to Colombia, said his group's job is "to shed the media spotlight so that the voices of the U'wa can be heard." -- Tom Childs - Audio/Visual Resources Douglas College Library New Westminster, B.C. Canada T: 604 527-5187 - library T: 604 524-9316 - home E: childst at douglas.bc.ca W: http://www.globaljustice.ca -- From Tom_Childs at Douglas.BC.CA Mon Jul 8 19:52:18 2002 From: Tom_Childs at Douglas.BC.CA (Tom_Childs at Douglas.BC.CA) Date: Mon, 8 Jul 2002 18:52:18 -0700 Subject: [R-G] [Infoshop News] Defy Columbus Day 2002 - CACC Call to Action Message-ID: <200207090152.SAA19372@Douglas.BC.CA> ------ Forwarded message: ------ Delivered-To: infoshop-news at flag.blackened.net From: Chuck Munson To: "acc at lists.mutualaid.org" , "infoshop-news at infoshop.org" Subject: [Infoshop News] Defy Columbus Day 2002 - CACC Call to Action Date: Mon, 08 Jul 2002 21:43:49 -0400 -------- Original Message -------- Subject: Defy Columbus Day 2002 - CACC Call to Action Date: Mon, 8 Jul 2002 18:28:46 -0700 (PDT) From: Mile High Resistance Reply-To: mhr at coloradicals.org To: info at abolishthebank.org There is a tradition in the United States. A tradition that dates back longer than any of us can remember. A tradition that celebrates events that lead to the annihilation of entire groups of people, slavery of thousands, violent conquest of land and the beginning of the end of vibrant cultures throughout the Americas. Indeed the beginning of what we now know as Westernization began with the landing of Christopher Columbus. The American values of cultural, economical and ecological domination were set on that day in 1492. Now, 510 years later, the American government and its hordes of capitalist fat cats continue in the fashion of their hero, Christopher Columbus. When US corporations worm their way into local marketplaces of Third World nations across the globe, the US military is not far behind to secure the place for their own way of life. Just as it was long ago, indigenous peoples and cultures are threatened in the name of progress. From the oil fields to the banana fields, people are forced to play ball with Western capitalists or starve as their lands are stripped out from under their feet by organizations like FTAA NAFTA), IMF, and if it comes to it, the CIA. It is for these reasons that the Anarchists, Socialists, and other activists of the Colorado Anti-Capitalist Convergence reject the celebration of Columbus Day. We cannot, as part of the Anti-Capitalist and Anti-Globalization movement, allow the celebration of domination, genocide and colonization continue. The fact that the annual parades began in Colorado make us feel a certain responsibility to end them in Colorado. Festivals in the name of Columbus destroy all that we anti-capitalists and anti-authoritarians hold in our hearts and in our minds. This is why we are calling out to anti-capitalists and anti-authoritarians of all stripes to converge on Denver, Colorado, for a weeklong festival of total liberation from the ghost of Christopher Columbus. The colonization of out people, land, hearts and minds end in October 2002 as we unite in opposition to the celebration of Columbus Day and to the system of domination itself; as we take the streets back from the Columbus Day parade and from the neo-colonists, the Capitalist State. This call to action goes out in solidarity with the struggle against the IMF and the World Bank in Washington DC. We see each as an equal part of the same struggle, which is why we are calling for a West coast mobilization to Denver. As the Phoenix Anarchist Coalition has stated, we are not trying to trump or out-organize the mobilization in D.C. In fact, some of the anti-Columbus Day organizers will be attending the action against the IMF/WB. Unfortunately big actions far away only leave room for a couple activists in a collective to attend. We intend to create a space for those in the West to converge for a weekend, make some solid connections and hopefully communicate more effectively in the future. Join us to liberate out culture from this sick festival! Join us to create an NEW tradition! Join us to turn October into a month that celebrates life, diversity, equality and liberation! For a new world, Colorado Anti-Capitalist Convergence http://acc.coloradicals.org ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ _______________________________________________ infoshop-news mailing list infoshop-news at infoshop.org http://www.infoshop.org/mailman/listinfo/infoshop-news -- Tom Childs - Audio/Visual Resources Douglas College Library New Westminster, B.C. Canada T: 604 527-5187 - library T: 604 524-9316 - home E: childst at douglas.bc.ca W: http://www.globaljustice.ca -- From LAMZ at sympatico.ca Mon Jul 8 22:15:58 2002 From: LAMZ at sympatico.ca (Lysander Zimmerman) Date: Tue, 9 Jul 2002 00:15:58 -0400 Subject: [R-G] BBC video implicates Israelis - tanks shown killing fleeing children in Jenin Message-ID: <000501c226ff$56713190$33378d18@Indy1> BBC video implicates Israelis - tanks shown killing fleeing children in Jenin BBC article and a video of the Jenin incident contradicts story by Israelis. People are clearly running away from the position. A tank then fires. Article and video here: http://portland.indymedia.org/front.php3?article_id=13942&group=webcast From LAMZ at sympatico.ca Mon Jul 8 22:52:20 2002 From: LAMZ at sympatico.ca (Lysander Zimmerman) Date: Tue, 9 Jul 2002 00:52:20 -0400 Subject: [R-G] "Experts" Urge Mass Vaccination for Smallpox Attack Message-ID: <000e01c22704$6a5d0a30$33378d18@Indy1> PLEASE FORWARD AS WIDELY AS POSSIBLE In the wake of a global coup d'etat, here's what we are seeing! Next there will be a suspicious "outbreak" and EVERYONE will be forced vaccinated. Time for everyone to start waking up their friends, neighbours and communities. Enough lies and state-terror! [please note: this is now also part of Canadian law under Bill C42] ____________________________________________ "Experts" Urge Mass Vaccination for Smallpox Attack The government has announced plans to vaccinate 500,000 healthcare workers. They have also said that "anyone who may have had contact with the infected patients would be tracked down and vaccinated." Full article here: http://portland.indymedia.org:8081/front.php3?article_id=14049&group=webcast ____________________________________________ Important further reading: http://portland.indymedia.org/archive/features/2002/06/2002-06.html#3901 http://portland.indymedia.org/front.php3?article_id=13240&group=webcast From Johannes.Schneider at gmx.net Tue Jul 9 03:39:10 2002 From: Johannes.Schneider at gmx.net (Johannes Schneider) Date: Tue, 9 Jul 2002 11:39:10 +0200 Subject: [R-G] Re: 'Jews-only' law sparks firestorm Message-ID: <005101c2272c$7c5e6300$4a1e050a@fgl.atitech.com> More on the background of land distribution in the state of Israel from Haaretz: State lands bill sticks to reality on ground By Zafrir Rinat When the cabinet approved a bill on Sunday that would permit state lands to be allocated to exclusively Jewish townships, it was giving legal backing to a situation that has existed in practice since the establishment of the state. Full: http://makeashorterlink.com/?N2F800831 From shniad at sfu.ca Tue Jul 9 09:46:01 2002 From: shniad at sfu.ca (shniad at sfu.ca) Date: Tue, 09 Jul 2002 8:46:01 PDT Subject: [R-G] Doonesbury on Afghanistan Message-ID: <200207091546.g69Fk1mC020953@rm-rstar.sfu.ca> An embedded and charset-unspecified text was scrubbed... Name: not available URL: From shniad at sfu.ca Tue Jul 9 10:03:30 2002 From: shniad at sfu.ca (shniad at sfu.ca) Date: Tue, 09 Jul 2002 9:03:30 PDT Subject: [R-G] We Need a Global Declaration of Interdependence - Wade Davis Message-ID: <200207091603.g69G3VmC003234@rm-rstar.sfu.ca> An embedded and charset-unspecified text was scrubbed... Name: not available URL: From debsian at pacbell.net Tue Jul 9 12:50:08 2002 From: debsian at pacbell.net (michael pugliese) Date: Tue, 9 Jul 2002 11:50:08 -0700 Subject: [R-G] FW: AUT: Re: THE ANTI-G8 PROTESTS IN CALGARY Message-ID: <090702190.42595@webbox.com> >--- Original Message --- >From: cwright >To: aut-op-sy at lists.village.virginia.edu >Date: 7/8/02 8:08:08 PM > >In a different vein Chris Hurl has picked up on some of this (diversity of >tactics, relationship between different anarchists, etc.) I don't know >diddly about cognitive mapping, so I'll just read what you all write, thank >you. > >But the question of the way in which some of this is raised has problems, >useful problems. > >I just want to take up the idea of diversity of tactics. For people I know, >diversity of tactics was originally a slogan aimed at opening up >demonstrations, of breaking the stage-managing by Leninists and Liberals. >Diversity of tactics was actually a concrete demand made to the burgeoning >movement against 'neo-liberalism' (for lack of an immediately better term.) >Diversity of tactics was a way to generate support for 'direct action' >(which, as Harald rightly points out, is more 'symbolic action' when not >carried out as simultaneously mass action or the self-activity of specific >oppressed and exploited people.) Diversity of tactics was originally not >used by everyone as a strategy, but as an attempt to push the recognition >that direct action had as much, if not more, validity than passive actions. >Now, my clear differentiation was not made by most people calling for >diversity of tactics, nor was it made by me here in Chicago, but it seems >that that was its core effort in the beginning. > >Diversity of tactics started as a way to break the hold of state-centric >politics. But in that sense, diversity of tactics was a tactical call, a >call to open up what was 'legitimate' protest, or rather, to legitimize what >the liberals and Leninists wanted to call illegitimate. Tom Keefer's >article does not seem to grasp this and its vital importance. > >Second, diversity of tactics was always consciously intended to allow people >to participate in ways that reflected their level of readiness to act, >without attempting to allow too much or too little. After all, who were we >to 'allow'? At the same time, Tom and others are right to raise the need to >open up a discussion of tactics around a given event. For example, his >specific criticism of the Calgary events may be pretty good. Diversity of >tactics does not mean a refusal to discuss tactics and, except for more >opportunistic elements who saw every demonstration that they did not call or >run as 'restrictive' or as one person I know said, as 'an opportunity to >fuck shit up', it has always meant a discussion of tactics and an attempt to >accomodate that diversity in creative ways (zones, public organizing, >alternative events, etc.) So Tom's idea about 'free speech zones', while >nothing new, was certainly creative and might have been excellent, given >what was possible. And that's the key. What was possible? > >At the same time, Tom Keefer tends to indulge in separating capital and its >functioning from labor and its resistance. Does this come up in his >discussion practically? I think it does in the way that he criticizes >diversity of tactics across the board. He focuses on 'self-discipline and >democracy' versus 'protest porn'. Being no great fan of a lot of what he >criticizes, I am sympathetic to the intent. But the execution is a problem. >As Harald pointed out in a post on 'cognitive mapping', the majority of >people will not be able to participate in deciding the character and actions >of a mass demonstration. In fact, a successful demonstration will draw in >people who did not hear about it or who did not originally intend to >participate. The problem is not technical (democracy and self-discipline), >but political. The technical problem will never be solved because the >political problem is omni-present. The question of 'what relation between >organizers/activists/revolutionaries and the rest of our class or that >fragment participating in any given action' is an unending question, but one >which is about what politics. At that moment, the questions of >self-determination vs. party, diversity vs. stage-management, etc. all >become very important, and only our politics decide what approach wins or >loses. > >That's why diversity of tactics requires an explicit discussion, on as broad >a basis as possible, of what type of action we want in each case. The >organizers certainly can take responsibility for a certain tenor and even >for the bulk of the marchers in one sense, but I have seen too many >demonstrations where the same type of direct action has had opposite >effects, either infusing a demonstration with passion and vitality and power >or turning it into a chaotic mess. Or taking a lively crowd and deadening >them into a submissive funeral march, but in another case taking a tense and >dangerous situation and giving it a quiet dignity which draws onlookers in >as the police obviously act out their premeditated violence. The right and >wrong choices are almost always political choices (although in smaller >demonstrations the actions of a few individuals has a greater impact). >Negatively, I always think of demonstrations to free Mumia Abu-Jamal where >the loval Maoists decide to run rampant regardless of the balance of forces, >at one demonstration leaving one hundred protesters (including small >children) facing one hundred angry cops, while at another breaking open a >realy dull march and making it exciting. But in neither case did they >really think about tactics. They just went for 'direct confrontation with >the police' in a 'liberal' demonstration, actions they would never do in a >march organized through politicos in the African American community (this I >have also witnessed over years.) > >What diversity of tactics should remind us is not simply a diversity between >tendencies, allowing anarcho-whatevers to do their thing, alongside Black >Blockers, alongside Autnonomist-whatevers, alongside liberal pacifist nuns >and priests, alongside Leninist paper-hawkers. Diversity of tactics (DOT) >should remind us, the libertarian revolutionaries of all stripes, of our >ability to fight for a diversity of tactics in our own approach to each and >every action. This, alongside of the the DOT slogan as a wedge against the >movement police who want to repress direct action and any confrontation with >the state or the smashing of corporate property, etc., needs to be foremost >in our own heads. > >I know that in my experience in the Chicago Direct Action Network, the >willingness to discuss politics always takes second place (actually has no >place) to 'the next big action' or 'real organizing'. As a result, a >handful of politicos dominate meetings and the e-mail listserve, while a >group of 'militants' (and I mean that in the worst, most Situationist way) >run around 'doing work'. [If anyone ever wondered where my hatred of the >idea of work or labor comes from, its mostly from the Leninist notion of >'political work', which is just another sweatshop, except that the money >goes to the organization and to the 'paid organizers' who run the >organization.] the abscence of the politicization of tactics is far more >important and in that discussion, multiple meanings of DOT, good and bad, >limited and more profound. > >Cheers, >Chris >"In a world which really is topsy-turvy, the true is a moment of the >false." - Debord > > > > > --- from list aut-op-sy at lists.village.virginia.edu --- > From Tom_Childs at Douglas.BC.CA Tue Jul 9 13:58:02 2002 From: Tom_Childs at Douglas.BC.CA (Tom_Childs at Douglas.BC.CA) Date: Tue, 9 Jul 2002 12:58:02 -0700 Subject: [R-G] Ecologist online debate on Oxfam's trade campaign (fwd) Message-ID: <200207091958.MAA28579@Douglas.BC.CA> ----- Forwarded message: -----From: Chris Keene Date: Tue, 09 Jul 2002 17:53:57 +0100 Subject: Ecologist online debate on Oxfam's trade campaign Is Oxfam right to insist that increased access to Northern markets is a solution to the Third World's problems? Go to http://www.theecologist.org/ to join in the debate -- Chris Keene 90 The Parkway, Canvey Island, Essex SS8 0AE, England Tel 01268 682820 Fax 01268 514164 Mobile 07801 250982 -- From mstainsby at tao.ca Tue Jul 9 18:41:23 2002 From: mstainsby at tao.ca (Macdonald Stainsby) Date: Tue, 09 Jul 2002 17:41:23 -0700 Subject: [R-G] Israeli government adopts proposal to keep some rural communities Jewish only Message-ID: <010501c227aa$84bb82c0$291f5318@vc.shawcable.net> AP. 9 July 2002. Israeli government adopts proposal to keep some rural communities Jewish only. JERUSALEM -- The Israeli government has approved a proposal that would prevent Arab citizens of Israel from purchasing land in some rural communities, effectively restricting them to Jewish residents. The plan must still clear several hurdles in parliament, though it is considered likely to win approval. Meanwhile, liberal and moderate Israelis vowed Monday to fight the proposal, saying it amounts to discrimination. Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's coalition government adopted the plan at a Cabinet meeting Sunday, where it was backed by right-wing and religious parties. Dan Meridor, a minister who formerly belonged to Sharon's right-wing Likud party but has since moved to the political center, said if the law is passed it would be seen by Israel's enemies as proof that Zionism is racism, a charge made by some in the Arab and Muslim world. "Israel is the state of the Jewish people, but because it is a Jewish state it must not practice against its non-Jewish citizens the kind of discrimination to which Jews were subjected in the diaspora," Meridor told Israel Radio. Attorney General Elyakim Rubinstein strongly advised the Cabinet not to adopt the proposal on the grounds that it would deepen the rift between Jewish and Arab citizens of Israel, his spokesman Yaakov Galanty said. Arabs make up more than 1 million of Israel's 6.5 million citizens. Most Arabs and Jews live in separate communities although the cities of Jerusalem, Haifa and Acre are mixed. Many Arabs from Nazareth have rented or bought apartments in the neighboring Upper Nazareth unhindered, even though the government intended it to be a Jewish town. However, anyone wishing to move into a rural area that the government has designated as a "community settlement," has to be accepted by a reception committee. The Cabinet decision goes against a Supreme Court ruling in March 2000 that held that Adel Qaadan, an Israeli Arab, must be allowed to build his home in the Jewish community settlement of Katzir. He has been repeatedly rejected. That court decision overturned a 52-year-old state policy of restricting land sales to Arabs while building towns and villages for Jews all over the country. Despite the court ruling two years ago, Qaadan and his family have continued to be turned down when making applications to lease land in Katzir. Qaadan accused the local authority in Katzir of contempt of court. "Now they (the Cabinet ministers) have fanned the flames with this wretched decision - it is discrimination pure and simple," Qaadan told Israel Radio. However, Education Minister Limor Livnat, who submitted the proposal to the Cabinet, said all Israeli governments had supported the idea of achieving a Jewish majority in Galilee, where Katzir is located. Livnat, who belongs to the Likud party, said Katzir was founded for reasons of national security, with the express purpose of having a Jewish community in a predominantly Arab area, close to the border with the West Bank. The chairman of the local authority in Katzir, Dubi Sandrov, said that following the Supreme Court ruling two years ago, the Israeli Islamic movement has been encouraging Arabs to apply to move to Katzir. He said the Israel Lands Administration offers to lease plots for homes in Arab towns for as little as $1,000. Some Arabs are prepared to pay $80,000 for a plot in Katzir. Other Arabs offer to buy homes from Jewish residents in Katzir for double the going rate or more, he said. "There are (Arab) political elements that are trying to push the Jewish population out," he said. However some Israeli Arabs are attracted to Jewish areas because the schools, infrastructure and services are much better than in the underfunded Arab towns. Qaadan said he is willing to send his children to Jewish schools where the language of instruction is Hebrew, not Arabic. "My dream is to live as an equal among equals," he said. If the Cabinet proposal is submitted to parliament it will probably pass because the right wing and religious parties have a solid majority. However, the process of legislation could be long, and the legality of the Cabinet decision may also be challenged in the Supreme Court. ------------------------------------------- Macdonald Stainsby http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/rad-green http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/leninist-international -- In the contradiction lies the hope. --Bertholt Brecht From LAMZ at sympatico.ca Tue Jul 9 22:56:24 2002 From: LAMZ at sympatico.ca (Lysander Zimmerman) Date: Wed, 10 Jul 2002 00:56:24 -0400 Subject: [R-G] Officials Work on Quarantine Plans Message-ID: <027701c227ce$24ebbad0$33378d18@Indy1> ----- Original Message ----- From: "msswv123" To: Sent: Tuesday, July 09, 2002 7:16 AM Subject: [Chem Trail Tracking USA] Re: OT "Experts" Urge Mass Vaccination for Smallpox Attack Hope everybody is praying....and got those immune systems in high gear..blessings T JULY 08, 18:40 ET Feds Prepare for Smallpox Quarantine By LAURA MECKLER Associated Press Writer http://www.newsday.com/news/health/ny-dsbelow2777934jul09.story ATLANTA (AP) - Federal health officials are quietly making plans for quarantining Americans who might be exposed to a highly contagious smallpox patient, addressing sensitive questions of how to hold people, ****possibly against their will****, in case of a bioterror attack. The planning, still in draft form, addresses complex logistical and policy questions, including where people would be kept while waiting for officials to confirm a smallpox case and, if necessary, administer vaccinations. ``It's not pretty to think through these type of doomsday scenarios, but it's important to start to put yourself there and imagine things unfolding if you want to anticipate how to react,'' said Dr. Marty Cetron, a quarantine expert at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. << http://www.newsday.com/news/health/ny-dsbelow2777934jul09.story? coll=ny%2Dhealth%2Dheadlines > > Full article here: > http://portland.indymedia.org:8081/front.php3? > article_id=14049&group=webcast > > ____________________________________________ > > Important further reading: > > http://portland.indymedia.org/archive/features/2002/06/2002- > 06.html#3901 > > http://portland.indymedia.org/front.php3? > article_id=13240&group=webcast ------------------------ Yahoo! Groups Sponsor ---------------------~--> Free $5 Love Reading Risk Free! http://us.click.yahoo.com/TPvn8A/PfREAA/Ey.GAA/g6eqlB/TM ---------------------------------------------------------------------~-> Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/ From nick at faunusherbs.com Wed Jul 10 09:52:16 2002 From: nick at faunusherbs.com (Nicholas Morcinek) Date: Wed, 10 Jul 2002 11:52:16 -0400 Subject: [R-G] Officials Work on Quarantine Plans In-Reply-To: <027701c227ce$24ebbad0$33378d18@Indy1> Message-ID: <000501c22829$c4ede390$8c2ce2d1@faunusp41800> Reminds me of a very old proverb... "The thought is father to the deed" Take care all! Nicholas -----Original Message----- From: rad-green-admin at lists.econ.utah.edu [mailto:rad-green-admin at lists.econ.utah.edu] On Behalf Of Lysander Zimmerman Sent: Wednesday, July 10, 2002 12:56 AM To: 9/11 Inquiry Subject: [R-G] Officials Work on Quarantine Plans ----- Original Message ----- From: "msswv123" To: Sent: Tuesday, July 09, 2002 7:16 AM Subject: [Chem Trail Tracking USA] Re: OT "Experts" Urge Mass Vaccination for Smallpox Attack Hope everybody is praying....and got those immune systems in high gear..blessings T JULY 08, 18:40 ET Feds Prepare for Smallpox Quarantine By LAURA MECKLER Associated Press Writer http://www.newsday.com/news/health/ny-dsbelow2777934jul09.story ATLANTA (AP) - Federal health officials are quietly making plans for quarantining Americans who might be exposed to a highly contagious smallpox patient, addressing sensitive questions of how to hold people, ****possibly against their will****, in case of a bioterror attack. The planning, still in draft form, addresses complex logistical and policy questions, including where people would be kept while waiting for officials to confirm a smallpox case and, if necessary, administer vaccinations. ``It's not pretty to think through these type of doomsday scenarios, but it's important to start to put yourself there and imagine things unfolding if you want to anticipate how to react,'' said Dr. Marty Cetron, a quarantine expert at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. << http://www.newsday.com/news/health/ny-dsbelow2777934jul09.story? coll=ny%2Dhealth%2Dheadlines > > Full article here: > http://portland.indymedia.org:8081/front.php3? > article_id=14049&group=webcast > > ____________________________________________ > > Important further reading: > > http://portland.indymedia.org/archive/features/2002/06/2002- > 06.html#3901 > > http://portland.indymedia.org/front.php3? > article_id=13240&group=webcast ------------------------ Yahoo! Groups Sponsor ---------------------~--> Free $5 Love Reading Risk Free! http://us.click.yahoo.com/TPvn8A/PfREAA/Ey.GAA/g6eqlB/TM ---------------------------------------------------------------------~-> Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/ _______________________________________________ Rad-Green mailing list Rad-Green at lists.econ.utah.edu To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/rad-green From debsian at pacbell.net Wed Jul 10 15:34:51 2002 From: debsian at pacbell.net (michael pugliese) Date: Wed, 10 Jul 2002 14:34:51 -0700 Subject: [R-G] West Nile Virus Message-ID: <100702191.52489@webbox.com> Heh, Lysander, the Conspiracy Theory Research List, with the great graphic of The Star Spangled Octopus (calling Danny Casolaro!) this morning had story that said Saddaam Hussein set loose the West Nile Virus in the upper Northeast USA. Myself, I don't think so. Michael Pugliese From mstainsby at dojo.tao.ca Wed Jul 10 15:44:05 2002 From: mstainsby at dojo.tao.ca (Macdonald Stainsby) Date: Wed, 10 Jul 2002 21:44:05 -0000 Subject: [R-G] West Nile Virus In-Reply-To: <100702191.52489@webbox.com> Message-ID: <20020710214405.BFF6517DC3A@dojo.tao.ca> michael pugliese said: > > Heh, Lysander, the Conspiracy Theory Research List, with the > great graphic of The Star Spangled Octopus (calling Danny Casolaro!) > this morning had story that said Saddaam Hussein set loose the > West Nile Virus in the upper Northeast USA. Myself, I don't think > so. > Michael Pugliese Michael, you are just being a pain. Take each issue one at a time and deal with it exactly as such, don't flame people, and provide evidence not a bunch of inference designed merely to inflame. I won't kick you off for being a loser, I'll kick you off for blocking constructive debates. Do you have an explanation for the following: No planes went into the air in the hour between the crashes into the WTC and the Pentagon. The man who was responsible for defense got promoted (after Pearl Harbour, the same position-filler was fired). the government of the US has blocked any and all inquiry into what happened, citing "national security". They knew all the names of the hijackers and beamed them into out homes before lunch was cold on September 11th. The media tried, and failed, to get the Iraqi government indicted along with Al Qaeda and the Taliban. The Pakistani government was told (this was reported on the BBC) to watch for an attack on Afghanistan in October back in July, 2001- not after the planes hit. Hosni Mubarak has publically announced more than once that his government was raising red flags on the 9th. Since 9-11, the former conspiracists of the Iran Contra days have been not only rehabilitated, but given high ranking posts in the national security state (Otto Reich, among others). I'll stop there for now, but please no stupid innuendo. This is a serious list that wants to work to figure out these things in a respectful manner. You are obliged to do the same, or exit stage right. Macdonald moderator, Rad Green. From LAMZ at sympatico.ca Wed Jul 10 22:40:52 2002 From: LAMZ at sympatico.ca (Lysander Zimmerman) Date: Thu, 11 Jul 2002 00:40:52 -0400 Subject: [R-G] Ruppert/Chossudovsky Draw Crowd of 1,200 Message-ID: <000e01c22895$237d7d60$33378d18@Indy1> Ruppert/Chossudovsky Draw Crowd of 1,200This one is especially for you Michael Pugliese! ----- Original Message ----- From: Paul Grignon To: LifeboatNews Sent: Wednesday, July 10, 2002 11:09 AM Subject: Ruppert/Chossudovsky Draw Crowd of 1,200 An update from http://www.lifeboatnews.com If you do not wish to continue receiving these updates please reply to this e-mail and request to be removed from this list. Paul Grignon http://www.lifeboatnews.com http://www.paulgrignonart.com ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- ----------- http://www.fromthewilderness.com/free/ww3/g6b_calgary.html Ruppert/Chossudovsky Draw Crowd of 1,200 U. of Ottawa Professor Says Evidence Shows U.S. Helped Plan Attacks Ruppert Kicked Out of Canada -- But He Was Leaving Anyway U.S. COMPLICITY IN 9-11 ATTACKS WIDELY ACCEPTED AT G6B SUMMIT IN CANADA June 27, 2002, 16:00 PDT (FTW) -- An estimated crowd of 1,200 turned out on June 25 at the University of Calgary's MacEwan Hall to hear FTW Publisher Mike Ruppert and University of Ottawa Professor Michel Chossudovsky present evidence of and a rationale for U.S. government complicity in last September's terrorist attacks. (See photos at www.fromthewilderness.com). Their two-and-a- half-hour presentation, including documentary evidence, was greeted with a standing ovation. In a question and answer session after the lecture, not one audience member questioned that the Bush Administration needed the attacks in order to mobilize public support for a war to control Central Asian oil reserves and the cash from the Afghani opium trade. Traditionally, Afghanistan has been the world's largest producer of opium. The G6B -- standing for a global population of six billion people whose interests need to be balanced against the corporate interests of the industrialized world -- was a three-day event sponsored by, among others, the government of Canada, Amnesty International and the University of Calgary. It brought delegates and activists together from 60 countries. The counter summit was timed and located in Calgary, Alberta so as to juxtapose it with the G8 meeting in nearby Kananaskis of the world's eight largest industrialized nations starting on June 26. The first-ever joint presentation involving Ruppert and Chossudovsky, an economics professor, presented the strongest evidence to date that not only did the Bush Administration have complete foreknowledge of the attacks and allow them to happen, but also that the CIA had a direct hand in financing the attacks. Chossudovsky presented documentary evidence from ABC news, citing FBI sources, confirming a report that Gen. Mahmud Ahmad, then-chief of the Pakistani intelligence service (ISI), ordered for $100,000 to be wired to lead hijacker Mohammed Atta just weeks before the attacks. The new corroboration from U.S. media, using FBI sources, gave considerable weight to earlier press stories originating in India linking the ISI to 9/11. [These new revelations will be the subject of an upcoming story in FTW]. "General Ahmad arrived in Washington on Sept. 4 and met with, among others, his good friend [CIA Director] George Tenet, [Deputy Secretary of State] Richard Armitage, [Sen.] Joe Biden, [D-Del.,] and the heads of the two intelligence committees," Chossudovsky said. "To me the issue of foreknowledge is a red herring. Osama bin Laden is and remains to this day a CIA asset. Even now his Al Qaeda operatives are working with the Kosovo Liberation Army who are U.S. allies and with U.S.-backed forces in Macedonia. Members of Al Q'aeda have been protected as they moved into Kashmir where they are now fomenting conflict between India and Pakistan. "The evidence is becoming clearer every day that the U.S. government helped to plan and fund the Sept. 11 attacks," said Chossudovsky. In addition, Chossudovsky has uncovered what may be complicity on the part of the major media in hiding the smoking gun. Using transcripts from the Federal Records Service (FRS), Chossudovsky obtained the transcript of a question posed to National Security Adviser Condoleeza Rica at a May 16 press conference, in which she was asked if she had met with the "ISI chief" while he was in Washington. The CNN transcript of the event indicated that the words "ISI chief" were "inaudible" when, in fact, they were quite audible to the FRS. Rice's response was a troubled, "I have not seen that report, and he was certainly not meeting with me." Chossudovsky painted a broad picture of globalization pushing events toward a possible nuclear exchange between India and Pakistan by noting that one U.S. company with strong intelligence and military connections, MPRI of Vienna, Va., was acting as adviser to both governments. He also noted the strong links between CIA Director George Tenet and Deputy Secretary of State Armitage to the leaders of both countries. Chossudovsky also pointed out that George W. Bush receives daily "personal" intelligence briefings from the CIA Director -- a custom that has never previously been followed by any sitting president. Previously most CIA briefings have been delivered in written format. Ruppert, using new evidence of U.S. government foreknowledge disclosed by major media sources and through recent press conferences, established that by using only open source material, the U.S. government had warnings that multiple airliners, most likely from United and American Air Lines would be hijacked during the week of Sept. 9 and crashed into the twin towers. Using revelations of intelligence intercepts and a Pentagon drill responding to an attack from a hijacked airliner staged prior to Sept. 11, Ruppert established that the Bush Administration's position, which held it had no hint that aircraft would be used as weapons, was false. Pointing to last year's G8 summit in Genoa, Italy, Ruppert noted that extensive precautions had been taken there (including anti-aircraft guns) to prevent just such an attack. A Los Angeles Times story disclosed that President Bush was the target of the suspected attacks in Genoa. "Bush ought to be having some interesting conversations with the leaders of Italy, Germany, France and Russia since it was their intelligence services who forwarded detailed advance warnings to the CIA throughout the summer of 2001," said Ruppert. "And they referred specifically to suicide attacks with airliners." Ruppert also debunked the notions that the 9-11 attacks were caused by a lack of cooperation between agencies, and that great numbers of people would have had to be involved in the U.S. end of the operation. Citing a BBC TV report by Gregg Palast which showed an FBI report stating that the Bush administration had ordered the FBI to curtail investigations into bin Laden relatives, Ruppert demonstrated that orders were coming from levels above FBI and CIA leadership. Additionally, referring to the recent memorandum from FBI Special Agent Colleen Rowley and a press conference given by FBI Special Agent Robert Wright, Ruppert popped the government's position that somehow the so-called intelligence "failures" of 9-11 were the result of negligence. "If you look at the text of Rowley's message and listen to what Wright said at his press conference you hear and see words like, Oobstruct,' O deliberately thwart,' Ointimidate,' Oblock,' Oharass,' Odishonest,' Orewrite,' Oomit,' Oundermine,' Osuppress,' Opunish,' Oretaliate' and Oprevent.' These are not words describing negligence. These are words describing deliberate and willful actions. "And if you note from both the Rowley memo, and apparently from the Wright press conference, it was only one supervisory special agent at FBI headquarters who did all of the deliberate work to stop investigations that could have prevented the attacks. And what did Rowley tell us? Right after Sept. 11 the agent who had blocked the investigations was promoted!" The $64,000 question remains unanswered: Was the agent in Rowley's case also involved in blocking Wright's Chicago-based investigations into money-laundering for terrorist groups, including Al Qaeda? In any event, the Rowley memorandum proves that just a few officials in key positions could have carried out the 9-11 conspiracy successfully. LEAVING ANYWAY BUT KICKED OUT JUST THE SAME -- A CLOSE ENCOUNTER WITH AIR FORCE ONE On entering Canada Ruppert was questioned first by Canadian Customs officials and then by immigration officers. Upon learning that Ruppert was a journalist and publisher of FTW the immigration officer typed Ruppert's name into a computer and asked specifically if he was going near the G8 conference. Ruppert stated that he was only planning on attending the G6B conference and had plans to return to Los Angeles on June 25. Nonetheless, the immigration officer stamped Ruppert's passport with a visa dated to expire on June 26, requiring that he not be in the country when the conference began. This highly unusual practice was offensive to many Canadians who pointed out that there are no visa requirements between the two countries. After the lecture, as he was hurrying to the airport, Ruppert was questioned by the local press who photographed his passport as evidence of the Canadian government's desire to censor coverage and public access to the conference. Ruppert's departure coincided with the arrival of President George Bush and two identical 747 aircraft painted with Air Force One markings. He was able to photograph the arrival of the president and a heavy deployment of support and security aircraft. Ruppert's flight home was delayed by more than an hour. He returned safely to Los Angeles while his suitcase was forced to spend the night in San Francisco. The Calgary lecture was Ruppert's eighth stop in a month in his "Truth and Lies of 9-11" lecture series. He plans to spend the next six weeks working on new stories. Michael Chossudovsky's website is at www.globalresearch.ca From debsian at pacbell.net Thu Jul 11 00:58:55 2002 From: debsian at pacbell.net (Michael Pugliese) Date: Wed, 10 Jul 2002 23:58:55 -0700 Subject: [R-G] Re: west nile virus In-Reply-To: <18b.a779883.2a5e0626@aol.com> Message-ID: <5VR8D725ZFWQSPD0HENK0YT64SN.3d2d2caf@oemcomputer> Heh, this isn't a computer virus! http://directory.google.com/Top/Health/Conditions_and_Diseases/Infecti ous_Diseases/Viral/West_Nile_Virus/ M.P. 7/10/02 2:50:30 PM, Malky53 at aol.com wrote: > > > Date: Wed, 10 Jul 2002 17:50:30 -0400 (EDT) > > From: Malky53 at aol.com > Subject:west nile virus > To: debsian at pacbell.net > > > > symantec does not even list a west nile virus From debsian at pacbell.net Thu Jul 11 01:16:28 2002 From: debsian at pacbell.net (Michael Pugliese) Date: Thu, 11 Jul 2002 00:16:28 -0700 Subject: [R-G] Re: Re: West Nile Virus Message-ID: Click the archive on the tentacle of the AmeriKKKan Octopus! http://www.ctrl.org/graphicHome/CTRLhome.html Some pieces of interest on the Conspiracy Theory Research List! [CTRL] Fwd: [NewPacifica] The Indiscreet Charm of the Bush- Nazi Web ... , potentially genocidal vaccines and sprays. One example is malathion, used recently in New York City and vicinity to (presumably) control the West Nile virus. For Lederman, the project of genocide through eugenics reaches its apogee in the Human Genome Project, designed to enable realization of the ... http://www.mail-archive.com/ctrl at listserv.aol.com/msg93495.html 07/02/02, 45962 bytes [CTRL] Fwd: [CIA-DRUGS] Re: FTW Economic Alert - Global Economic Collapse Imminent, Pension Fund [CTRL] Fwd: RE: [CIA-DRUGS] Re: RUPPERT'S VIEW, RoadsEnd [CTRL] EMPEROR'S CLOTHES INTERVIEWS UNOCAL OIL, Steve Wingate [CTRL] ritual crimes, Gore Vidal on the US, Smart News [CTRL] A Golden Era for Iraqi Kurds, William Shannon [CTRL] CHENEY SUED PERSONALLY FOR ALLEGED STOCK FRAUD, William Shannon [CTRL] Fisk: Threat To Liberty From New Fundamentalism, William Shannon Re: [CTRL] Fisk: Threat To Liberty From New Fundamentalism, thew Re: [CTRL] Fisk: Threat To Liberty From New Fundamentalism, InfoWarz Re: [CTRL] Fisk: Threat To Liberty From New Fundamentalism, thew Re: [CTRL] Fisk: Threat To Liberty From New Fundamentalism, InfoWarz Re: [CTRL] Fisk: Threat To Liberty From New Fundamentalism, thew Re: [CTRL] Fisk: Threat To Liberty From New Fundamentalism, InfoWarz Re: [CTRL] Fisk: Threat To Liberty From New Fundamentalism, Joshua Tinnin Re: [CTRL] Fisk: Threat To Liberty From New Fundamentalism, thew Re: [CTRL] Fisk: Threat To Liberty From New Fundamentalism, InfoWarz Re: [CTRL] Fisk: Threat To Liberty From New Fundamentalism, thew Re: [CTRL] Fisk: Threat To Liberty From New Fundamentalism, InfoWarz Re: [CTRL] Fisk: Threat To Liberty From New Fundamentalism, William Shannon [CTRL] Gore Vidal: America, Land of the Wannabe Slaves, William Shannon From hunterbadbear at earthlink.net Thu Jul 11 09:56:16 2002 From: hunterbadbear at earthlink.net (Hunter Gray) Date: Thu, 11 Jul 2002 09:56:16 -0600 Subject: [R-G] Blood Over The Copper Skies [We Never Forget] Message-ID: <002e01c228f3$80e0df20$0b70fa43@intel> Note by Hunterbear: A portion of this is taken from our large radical website, Lair of Hunterbear: www.hunterbear.org This is July, going on August. And all through these days -- hot and dry, as we fight in the Great Contemporary Struggle, there are things that we -- Indians, metal miners, radicals, Arizonians, Westerners -- always remember. Some of those things are truly hideous. And some are the epitome of great courage and honor -- and martyrdom. Let's start this off with the Wobblies. The Industrial Workers of the World. The IWW was founded in 1905, primarily through the efforts of the radical, frontier hard-rock (metal) miners' union -- the Western Federation of Miners and its vigorous, visionary leadership: William D. "Big Bill" Haywood, Vincent St. John, Father Thomas Hagerty and many, many others. Its philosophy, almost from the outset, came to be a uniquely frontier American variety of syndicalism -- the primacy of democratic revolutionary unions in effecting systemic change and administering the new cooperative society. In a very real sense, the IWW was the first homegrown American revolutionary movement since 1775: fearless, hard-driving, visionary -- and the epitome of grassroots democracy reaching out to all workers, unskilled as well as skilled, regardless of race or ethnicity or gender. And one of its major spokespersons and organizers was Frank H. Little, born of a "Quaker father" and a Cherokee Indian mother, in Indian Territory [later Oklahoma] in 1879, a metal miner who became chairman of the General Executive Board of the IWW and was lynched at Butte on August 1 1917 by thugs employed by Anaconda Copper. Tough and hard-fighting, Frank Little was a sworn foe of capitalism and an outspoken opponent of the World War. The lynching of Frank Little was in the context of very widespread, prolonged, and extraordinarily bloody and brutal repression levied against the IWW by company gunmen, state and local "lawmen," vigilantes, and then increasingly by the Federal Government. This was strike-breaking and union-busting wrapped up in the hypocritical cloth of a phony World War I "patriotism." Frank Little's murder was preceded, for example, by the "Loyalty League" deportation of almost 100 Wobbly copper strike activists at the rugged mountain town of Jerome, Arizona (southwest of Flagstaff) on July 10 1917. They were dumped in the California desert without food or water and were next forced back into Arizona at gun-point by a California sheriff's posse -- and then imprisoned at Prescott, Arizona. This operation was directed by the United Verde Copper Company. On July 12, at Bisbee, Arizona (on the Mexican border), a very large, so-called "Loyalty League" rounded up 1200 IWW-led copper strikers (not counting three that they killed), loaded them onto cattle cars, and dumped them into the desert near Columbus, New Mexico, without food or water. All of this was carried out under the direction of the Phelps-Dodge Copper Corporation. And all of these events and others are still very much a part of the living, blood-dimmed legacy of labor relations in the Western hard-rock metal mining industry -- an industry characterized consistently by the utter recalcitrance of the mine owners and managers. One of Frank Little's closest friends was Ralph H. Chaplin, IWW editor and poet and author of the primary American labor anthem, "Solidarity Forever." In his colorful and fast-moving memoir, Wobbly: The Rough and Tumble Story of an American Radical (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1948), Chaplin recounts his last visit with Frank Little during an IWW General Executive Board meeting at Chicago that fateful summer of 1917: "Frank Little was the first to arrive. This time he was on crutches. One leg was in a plaster cast. There had been an automobile accident in Jerome, Arizona, where he had been directing I.W.W. organization in the copper mines of the Southwest. But Frank wore his Stetson at the same jaunty angle, and his twisted grin was as aggressive as ever. . .Frank was leaving that day for Butte, Montana, to direct the organizational drive on Anaconda Hill. I marveled at his courage at taking on a difficult and dangerous assignment like that in his present condition. "It's a fine specimen the I.W.W. is sending into that tough town," I chided him. "One leg, one eye, two crutches -- and no brains!" Frank laughed. He lifted a crutch as though to crown me with it. "Don't worry, fellow-worker, all we're going to need from now on is guts." That was the last time I saw Frank Little alive." My youngest son, Peter, a born newspaperman, was running the Anaconda MT office of the Butte-based Montana Standard a few years ago. Thanks to him I have a copy of Frank Little's death certificate issued by Silver Bow County. Among other things, it notes his age [38], his birthplace [Oklahoma], occupation [Labor Organizer], and cause of death: "Strangulation from Hanging. Homicidal". The document indicates that the personal information was provided by the Miners Union, Butte. Thanks also to Pete, I have a copy of the August 2 edition of The Butte Miner. Its front page, framed in glass, hangs now on our dining room wall. And here are some of the things it told its world on the very grim morn of August 2, 1917: ARMED VIGILANTES LYNCH I.W.W. LEADER [Big, banner headline] Frank Little, First Lieutenant Of W.D. Haywood, Surprised And Overpowered In His Room And Hanged From Trestle On Outskirts Of The City File photo of Frank Little [wearing his Stetson] LITTLE'S DEATH CAUSES GRIEF TO I.W.W. OFFICER [W.D. Haywood says victim of vigilantes was an earnest and active worker in the interests of the laborer.] FIVE OF SEVEN MEN WHO FORMED LYNCHING PARTY ARE KNOWN, SAYS LAWYER MAYOR AFTER THE LYNCHERS ACT BRANDED AS DEVILISH Miners Tobacco Fund LAST WIRE FLASHES Leadville Strike Over I.W.W.s to Work in Montana and North and South Dakota [harvest stiffs] Miners Will Be Protected [Lt. Colonel George P. White on protecting scabs in the Globe/Miami (Arizona) Copper District] Frank Little's funeral at Butte was the largest ever held in Montana. I have a photo of the funeral procession which is eerily similar to ours in Jackson in June, '63 when 6,000 of us marched in 102 degree heat through the city -- in Mississippi's first "legal" civil rights march in history -- immediately following the massive funeral of murdered Medgar Evers on Lynch Street. No one was ever arrested for Frank Little's murder -- nor was anyone punished for their role in kidnapping and killing and deporting striking miners at Jerome and Bisbee. All of the perpetrators were well known. Jerome, as I've indicated, is close to my home town of Flagstaff, and down in the Verde Valley country, on the slope of Mingus Mountain. A tough old copper miner-turned-barber over there, Markovitch, used to cut my hair in the latter '50s. Always so pleased to see me, a very hot-eyed Red in my early 20s, he consistently gave me, as he clip-clipped along, the same running talk on Revolution. Brother Markovitch had been a Jerome deportee. And he never forgot. In early September, 1917, the liberal Woodrow Wilson administration finally acted -- not on behalf, of course, of the massively victimized American working class. Its Justice Department agents, using the spurious Federal "Espionage Act" -- which had nothing to do with "espionage" and everything to do with labor militancy and anti-War positions -- rounded up 150 major IWW leaders. [And then, of course, Gene Debs was arrested as well.] The Wobblies and Debs et al. were speedily convicted in an atmosphere of extreme fear and hysteria. In due course, they were pardoned by the conservative Warren Harding. By that time, most Western states and a few others had passed the infamous "criminal syndicalism" acts making membership in the IWW or even possession of its "Little Red Songbook: Songs to Fan the Flames of Discontent" a felony offense. Hundreds of IWWs were imprisoned across the West. [Idaho's all-encompassing "criminal syndicalism" statute remains on the books to this day. Mississippi passed one back in our civil rights days -- but, apparently, never enforced it. [I, myself, arrested there on many charges and targeted by injunctions [which we defied], was indicted by a county grand jury on "inciting to riot" charges -- first cousin, anyway, of "criminal syndicalism."] Woodrow Wilson, who supervised one of the country's most infamous witch-hunts, died early-on, in 1924. He left office in 1921 but, before he did, he toured Seattle. There he was greeted by cheering throngs -- until, suddenly, dead silence for block after block after block. His motorcade had entered the working-class district where hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of IWWs lined the streets, arms folded and eyes stony-cold. They say an ashen Wilson slumped deep into his seat, eyes staring directly downward -- block after block after block. The IWW survived, kept fighting. In 1949, the IWW -- its philosophy unchanged -- was designated "subversive" by the United States Attorney General and placed on his infamous Red Scare "subversive list." And the IWW continues to fight. And so do many, many others valiantly fight on -- individuals and outfits -- in our present era so increasingly similar to Other Great And Infamous Witch-Hunts: World War I/Red Scare and the very prolonged Red Scare of the Cold War. In a long and stirring memorial poem always contained in the editions of the old-time Wobblies' Red Song Books, Phillips Russell concluded: "We'll remember you, Frank Little! The papers said: "So far as known, He made no outcry." No, not you! Half Indian, half white man, All I.W.W. You'd have died a thousand deaths Before you'd have cried aloud Or whimpered once to let them enjoy your pain. We'll remember you, Frank Little! Long after the workers have made the world Safe for Labor, We'll repeat your name And remember that you died for us. The red flag that you dropped A million hands will carry on; The cause that you loved A million tongues will voice. Good bye, Frank Little! Indian, white man, Wobbly true, Valiant soldier of the great Red Army, We'll remember you!" ["IWW Songs To Fan The Flames Of Discontent" 1930 edition] Since 1955, a photo of Frank Little has always been on the wall of wherever I live. It's always joined by an excellent sketch of Joseph Brant [Thayendanegea], Mohawk leader, watching his warriors burning out the settlers in the Cherry Valley section of New York -- a sketch my father gave me when I was still jailed in my crib. A photo of John Reed, at his typewriter, has joined them. We fight on. Always have, always will. It's the same fight for all of us on the Side of the Sun. And, as the old Western Wobblies always put it so well, "It's better to be called Red than be called Yellow." Fraternally And In Solidarity - Hunter Gray [Hunterbear] www.hunterbear.org (strawberry socialism) Protected by Na?shdo?i?ba?i? From mstainsby at tao.ca Thu Jul 11 12:52:27 2002 From: mstainsby at tao.ca (Macdonald Stainsby) Date: Thu, 11 Jul 2002 11:52:27 -0700 Subject: [R-G] Barghouti to be tried Message-ID: <012001c2290c$1a3c48e0$291f5318@vc.shawcable.net> Reuters; AP. 11 July 2002. Barghouti to be tried in connection with attacks on Israelis. JERUSALEM -- Israel plans to put a prominent Palestinian, Marwan Barghouti, on trial soon in connection with deadly attacks on Israelis, a Justice Ministry spokesman said Thursday. The trial would be the first in years of a senior Palestinian in Israel. Barghouti, one of the most visible Palestinian leaders in the 21-month uprising against Israel, was arrested in April in the West Bank city of Ramallah during an Israeli incursion. He had not been charged. Justice spokesman Yaakov Galanti said Israel intended to try Barghouti together with four other Palestinians in civilian court because of their connection "to several attacks in Israel" -- as opposed to attacks carried out in the West Bank. Some of the four could be charged in the coming days, but charges against Barghouti are only likely in a few weeks, he said. In placing Barghouti, a key leader of Arafat's Fatah movement in the West Bank, on trial, Israel is apparently hoping to prove the complicity at the highest levels of the Palestinian leadership in terror attacks against its civilians. But the tactic could also backfire, turning Barghouti into a symbol of Israeli oppression and further increasing his popularity among Palestinians. Barghouti was often present at Palestinian street protests in the early days of the Palestinian uprising, which began in September 2000, where he delivered impassioned speeches on confronting the Israeli forces. Barghouti was gradually drawn into involvement in attacks, first defending them, then funneling funds to militants, and finally orchestrating them with the approval of Arafat, said a senior Israeli security official, who spoke on condition of anonymity. His lawyer, Jawad Boulos, has denied the claim. On Thursday, Boulos said Barghouti did not care what kind of trial Israel carried out. "Israel has no right to try him in front of a civil or military court, and we are not going to cooperate with the court," he said. "Israel will build charges around whatever it wants. We don't recognize them and we won't recognize this trial," he said. The 42-year-old Bargouthi, whose lawyer said he began a hunger strike on Thursday to protest against jail conditions, has denied the allegations, maintaining that he is a political leader resisting Israeli occupation. "We have said we do not recognize his detention and so we will not deal with any court, civilian or military," Boulos told Reuters. "I see no significance in turning him over to a civilian court. Israel is saying the move will allow an open and public trial with better legal conditions. This could be done in military courts, too," he said. "It's a weak pretext, and an admission by Israel that its military (detention) system is not fair." Barghouthi had begun refusing food after his request for another cell in a Jerusalem-area prison was refused. "He is locked in a small cell with five other inmates. It is very hot and full of insects," Boulos said. He told Reuters Barghouthi had been repeatedly threatened and deprived of sleep. In a recent public opinion survey he emerged as second in popularity only to Arafat himself. ------------------------------------------- Macdonald Stainsby http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/rad-green http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/leninist-international -- In the contradiction lies the hope. --Bertholt Brecht From mstainsby at dojo.tao.ca Thu Jul 11 13:52:58 2002 From: mstainsby at dojo.tao.ca (Macdonald Stainsby) Date: Thu, 11 Jul 2002 19:52:58 -0000 Subject: [R-G] Former Yugoslav President Is Taken by Force to Testify Message-ID: <20020711195258.3673B17DC99@dojo.tao.ca> AP. 11 July 2002. Former Yugoslav President Is Taken by Force to Testify Before U.N. Tribunal. BELGRADE -- Former Yugoslav President Zoran Lilic was detained Thursday and flown to the Netherlands to testify in the U.N. war crimes trial of his successor, Slobodan Milosevic, Lilic's lawyer and wife said. Lilic - the country's figurehead president from 1993 to 1997 - had refused a subpoena from the U.N. tribunal, based in The Hague, so police forced him onto the plane, according to his lawyer, Dragan Saponjic. "Mr. Lilic refused to testify before the court," Saponjic told The Associated Press. Lilic's wife Ljubica, sobbing when reached by telephone by reporters, said her husband was picked up in his office in Belgrade. "Zoran refused to sign anything," when presented with the official request to testify before the U.N. war crimes court. "Then they took him away," she said. The time of his arrival in the Netherlands was not immediately known. War crimes prosecutors have said they would call former members of Milosevic's inner circle to testify in his trial on charges of genocide and crimes against humanity in three Balkan wars during the 1990s. Saponjic said Lilic had previously considered testifying voluntarily before the U.N. court on condition that Yugoslav officials first release him from the duty to keep state secrets in court or elsewhere. "But no steps were taken to prepare legal conditions for my client's appearance in court," Saponjic said. Officials of the Yugoslav and Serbian governments declined comment. -- Macdonald Stainsby, External Relations Co-ordinator, Douglas College Students Union. ** In the contradiction lies the hope. --Bertholt Brecht. *** "`Order rules in Berlin.' You stupid lackeys! Your `order' is built on sand. Tomorrow the revolution will rear ahead once more and announce to your horror amid the brass of trumpets: `I was, I am, I always will be!'" -Rosa Luxemburg, 1918. From mstainsby at dojo.tao.ca Thu Jul 11 14:14:05 2002 From: mstainsby at dojo.tao.ca (Macdonald Stainsby) Date: Thu, 11 Jul 2002 20:14:05 -0000 Subject: [R-G] Venezuelan [Quisling]s Demand Chavez's Ouster Message-ID: <20020711201405.ECC3817DC9B@dojo.tao.ca> This story was very briefly linked to by the NYtimes all the way back in their AP wire extra links....but it has been removed already. For that reason, as well as others, I post it in full. Macdonald http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Venezuela-Protest.html Venezuelans Demand Chavez's Ouster By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS Filed at 3:22 p.m. ET CARACAS, Venezuela (AP) -- Dissonance from whistles, drums, horns and fireworks accompanied more than a half million Venezuelans who clogged downtown Caracas Thursday demanding President Hugo Chavez's ouster. Laborers and business executives, leftists and conservatives chanted ``Out! Out!'' in an 8-mile-long march underscoring the political divisions gripping this South American nation, a top supplier of oil to the United States. Caracas police chief Emigdio Delgado estimated the crowd at 600,000. Chavez, who was ousted April 12 but restored to power two days later, earlier appealed for calm. Thursday's march was the fifth, and perhaps the largest, since the April coup and followed a peacemaking mission this week by former President Carter. ``The turnout surpassed all our expectations -- maybe even bigger than April 11,'' Miranda state Gov. Enrique Mendoza said. Carter's efforts were rebuffed by Chavez's opposition, though Carter did persuade Chavez to accept international mediation in Venezuela's political crisis. Thursday's march was called by opposition groups commemorating the shooting deaths of 18 people by guardsmen and civilians during an April 11 protest. Hundreds more were wounded. The violence and Chavez's order to deploy the army prompted dissident generals to oust him the next day. But the leftist Chavez was restored to power in two days on a popular rebellion against an interim government that abolished the constitution. Dozens died during that weekend of rioting and looting. Investigations into who committed the April slayings have stalled. After the coup, Chavez removed unpopular ministers from his Cabinet and offered to change laws opposed by the private sector. International observers, including Carter Center delegates, monitored Thursday's demonstration. National guard troops and riot police manned barricades to keep demonstrators away from Chavez supporters and the presidential palace, hoping to avoid bloodshed. Opponents insist Chavez, a former paratrooper who staged a failed 1992 coup and was elected in 1998, cannot govern the country, which is mired in recession because of low oil prices and political instability. Venezuela's main opposition parties demand Chavez leave power well before the 2007 end of his term. They have brought court cases alleging corruption, are organizing a referendum on his rule and are demanding justice for the April 11 victims. ``We are on a war footing,'' said Carlos Ortega, head of Venezuela's largest labor group, the 1 million-member Venezuelan Workers Confederation. Ortega was surrounded by protest signs reading ``No More Deaths'' and ``Chavez, Assassin.'' Ortega, Greater Caracas Mayor Alfredo Pena and other organizers were incensed that the government prevented marchers from going to the palace, which is heavily defended by Chavez supporters. ``We decided to change the route because we have evidence that violent groups were posted near the palace,'' rights activist Elias Santana said. Jose Saldana, an unemployed 35-year-old Chavez supporter, said, ``Let them come, because they will find a people ready to give their lives for their revolution.'' Chavez appealed Wednesday for ``calm, prudence and patience. ... My government respects human rights, and I'm sure that there won't be anything to regret (Thursday) and democracy will be strengthened.'' Army commander Gen. Julio Garcia Montoya said troops were on standby in their barracks. Chavez said Wednesday he would accept an offer by the Organization of American States to help defuse Venezuela's crisis. -- Macdonald Stainsby, External Relations Co-ordinator, Douglas College Students Union. ** In the contradiction lies the hope. --Bertholt Brecht. *** "`Order rules in Berlin.' You stupid lackeys! Your `order' is built on sand. Tomorrow the revolution will rear ahead once more and announce to your horror amid the brass of trumpets: `I was, I am, I always will be!'" -Rosa Luxemburg, 1918. From debsian at pacbell.net Thu Jul 11 16:04:53 2002 From: debsian at pacbell.net (michael pugliese) Date: Thu, 11 Jul 2002 15:04:53 -0700 Subject: [R-G] Chossudovsky Message-ID: <110702192.54284@webbox.com> Among other criticisms, Harald Beyer-Arneson, an anarcho-communist makes of Michel C. is his citation of far right canadian loon, John Whitely, of the, "New World Order Intelligence, " Website. On the UFO'ology radio talk show hosted by Jeff Rense, last time i listened to him w/Whitely, he raved about The Illuminati. http://www.csf.colorado.edu/mail/pen-l/apr99/msg02924.html Michael Pugliese From debsian at pacbell.net Thu Jul 11 16:09:05 2002 From: debsian at pacbell.net (michael pugliese) Date: Thu, 11 Jul 2002 15:09:05 -0700 Subject: [R-G] RE: Chossudovsky Message-ID: <110702192.54545@webbox.com> Just tried that URL. Some server glitch. Go to http://www.google.com type in, "pen-l csf, " the critique of Chossudovsky will come right up in the first set of, "hits, " on google. M.P.--- Original Message --- >From: "michael pugliese" >To: rad-green at lists.econ.utah.edu >Date: 7/11/02 3:04:44 PM > Among other criticisms, Harald Beyer-Arneson, an anarcho-communist makes of Michel C. is his citation of far right canadian loon, John Whitely, of the, "New World Order Intelligence, " Website. On the UFO'ology radio talk show hosted by Jeff Rense, last time i listened to him w/Whitely, he raved about The Illuminati.http://www.csf.colorado.edu/mail/pen-l/apr99/msg02924.htmlMichael Pugliese > From LAMZ at sympatico.ca Thu Jul 11 20:32:12 2002 From: LAMZ at sympatico.ca (Lysander Zimmerman) Date: Thu, 11 Jul 2002 22:32:12 -0400 Subject: [R-G] Justice Department to Attempt Shut Down of 9/11 Evidence Message-ID: <004501c2294c$55c851c0$33378d18@Indy1> On June 20, Bush Administration officials quietly informed a New York judge of their intention to commence legal actions...to control access to all evidence and documents related to all private litigation...regarding the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 -- citing grave national security concerns as their motivation. Full Story: http://indymedia.org:8081/front.php3?article_id=191632&group=webcast From LAMZ at sympatico.ca Thu Jul 11 20:50:37 2002 From: LAMZ at sympatico.ca (Lysander Zimmerman) Date: Thu, 11 Jul 2002 22:50:37 -0400 Subject: [R-G] Chossudovsky References: <110702192.54284@webbox.com> Message-ID: <009301c2294e$e6e30220$33378d18@Indy1> So what's the big deal???? Rense.com deals with EVERYTHING that the mainstream press won't cover. SO WHAT if it also deals with UFO'logy!?!? Man you are small-minded. Just because there are articles about UFO's (let us be reminded that UFO's literally stand for "UNIDENTIFIED flying objects" and very well could be experimental aircraft -- the first sightings of the F-117A were described as "spacecraft") does not mean that the site is void of useful information. In fact, it is full of it. If you are willing to step out of your established-left bubble for five minutes to explore it, you would come o the same conclusions. By the way, if you haven't noticed, Chomsky frequently quotes right-wing sources to back up his arguments. I guess he is a right-wing conspiratorialist as well!! Also, anyone can label themselves "anarcho-communist" without truly understanding that the struggle against capitalism in NOT one-dimensional and sectarian. I might not totally agree with Chossudovsky's politics, nor do I totally agree with Chomsky's political vision (especially his post-9/11 analysis), but they are both still valuable resources in our fight for human liberation from the technofascist monopoly-capitalist system. ----- Original Message ----- From: "michael pugliese" To: Sent: Thursday, July 11, 2002 6:04 PM Subject: [R-G] Chossudovsky > > > Among other criticisms, Harald Beyer-Arneson, an anarcho-communist > makes of Michel C. is his citation of far right canadian loon, > John Whitely, of the, "New World Order Intelligence, " Website. > On the UFO'ology radio talk show hosted by Jeff Rense, last time > i listened to him w/Whitely, he raved about The Illuminati. > http://www.csf.colorado.edu/mail/pen-l/apr99/msg02924.html > Michael Pugliese > > > > _______________________________________________ > Rad-Green mailing list > Rad-Green at lists.econ.utah.edu > To change your options or unsubscribe go to: > http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/rad-green > From mstainsby at tao.ca Thu Jul 11 20:11:02 2002 From: mstainsby at tao.ca (Macdonald Stainsby) Date: Thu, 11 Jul 2002 19:11:02 -0700 Subject: [R-G] FARC cooperates with ELN Message-ID: <010401c22949$5f713000$291f5318@vc.shawcable.net> Reuters. 11 July 2002. Colombian mountain clashes claim at least 35 lives. BOGOTA -- Mountain clashes in northeast and southwest Colombia have claimed 35 lives, the army said on Thursday, with Marxist rebels, Colombian troops and civilians added to the growing body count of the country's 38-year guerrilla war. The heaviest combat took place near the town of La Plata, in southwestern Huila Province, with 17 leftist guerrillas killed in clashes with government soldiers. In a battle in the northeast, 14 soldiers were killed in ongoing fighting that began on Tuesday. Colombian jets bombed rebel positions more than 9,850 feet (3,000 meters) above sea level, some 185 miles (300 km) northeast of Colombia's capital, Bogota, the commander of the army's first brigade, Gen. Fabio Bedoya, told reporters. Bedoya said his soldiers were fighting a combined contingent from the country's two largest leftist rebel armies, the Marxist-inspired Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, known by its Spanish initials FARC, and the Cuban-inspired National Liberation Arm, or ELN. The 17,000-member FARC and the 5,000-member ELN have increasingly joined forces to stave off incursions by the army and far-right paramilitary outlaws, who are funded by the drug trade and wealthy cattle-ranchers to kill leftist rebels. In the mountains of Huila province, south of Bogota, guerrilla fighters attacked a police station in the small town of Maito with gas-cylinder bombs, grenades and gunfire, laying waste to several buildings and killing two police officers and two civilians, the army said. It was possible that more dead and injured were buried in the rubble. ------------------------------------------- Macdonald Stainsby http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/rad-green http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/leninist-international -- In the contradiction lies the hope. --Bertholt Brecht From jmarshal at ol.com.au Fri Jul 12 06:28:48 2002 From: jmarshal at ol.com.au (Jon Marshall) Date: Fri, 12 Jul 2002 22:28:48 +1000 Subject: [R-G] Chossudovsky References: <110702192.54284@webbox.com> Message-ID: <3D2ECB80.1C747435@ol.com.au> I may be missing the point, but how does someone having some crazy views mean they can't ever be correct. And how does the existence of crazy conspiracy theories lead us to conclude that all conspiracy theories are crazy? Did not Lenin and Co. conspire to establish communism in Russia? Didn't they succeed in having an effect? How come its inherently impossible for the powerful to also conspire against everyone else? Now as it happens I don't hink Bush had to go to anything like the lengths of planning the attack on Sept 11 himself, to get a state of continual war, and to get his policies legitimated, but that does not mean that it is impossible, that someone in the US state thought otherwise. There is an important question about how we act, and it might be the case that as we (say) don't understand chemtrails we should not bother about them and get on with the real action. but, if Lysander will forgive me putting words in his mouth, the people in his area may not be about to strike against capitalism, but they might distrust the government, and they might worry about chemtrails, and it might be useful as leading on to other things.. the right manages to work together with all kinds of conflicting beliefs as long as they support established power, but the left always seems to splinter. The question perhaps should be what do we do? what are we aiming at? jon michael pugliese wrote: > > Among other criticisms, Harald Beyer-Arneson, an anarcho-communist > makes of Michel C. is his citation of far right canadian loon, > John Whitely, of the, "New World Order Intelligence, " Website. > On the UFO'ology radio talk show hosted by Jeff Rense, last time > i listened to him w/Whitely, he raved about The Illuminati. > http://www.csf.colorado.edu/mail/pen-l/apr99/msg02924.html > Michael Pugliese > > _______________________________________________ > Rad-Green mailing list > Rad-Green at lists.econ.utah.edu > To change your options or unsubscribe go to: > http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/rad-green From LAMZ at sympatico.ca Fri Jul 12 15:58:51 2002 From: LAMZ at sympatico.ca (Lysander Zimmerman) Date: Fri, 12 Jul 2002 17:58:51 -0400 Subject: [R-G] WHO IS DICK CHENEY? Message-ID: <000d01c229ef$5010dc40$33378d18@Indy1> WHO IS DICK CHENEY? ----- Original Message ----- From: Paul Grignon To: LifeboatNews Sent: Friday, July 12, 2002 4:37 PM Subject: WHO IS DICK CHENEY? An update from http://www.lifeboatnews.com If you do not wish to continue receiving these updates please reply to this e-mail and request to be removed from this list. Paul Grignon http://www.lifeboatnews.com http://www.paulgrignonart.com ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- ----------- http://www.moveon.org WHO IS DICK CHENEY? MoveOn Bulletin Thursday, July 11, 2002 Edited by Eli Pariser (eli.pariser at moveon.org) Subscribe online at: http://www.moveon.org/moveonbulletin INTRODUCTION: MAN OF MYSTERY "Cheney and Bush want privacy for their conversations, but not for anyone else's." --Tony Mauro in USA Today, Feb. 27, 2002 Since September 11, Vice President Dick Cheney has kept a low profile. For months, he rarely appeared at all, emerging only to sell his political ideas on CNN or to dismiss allegations of corporate wrongdoing. Even now, Cheney mostly stays in a "secure location," ready to spring into action if President Bush is attacked. Unlike most politicians, Cheney actually enjoys working in the background. By his own account, he doesn't relish campaigning, and he's hardly a natural spokesman, but Cheney excels at assembling and managing teams of people to "get stuff done." Since he and Bush arrived at the White House, Cheney has managed to accomplish quite a bit. He's met with the heads of oil, gas, and nuclear power companies, assembled their "wish lists," and turned them into a new national Energy Plan. Cheney's close relations with folks like Ken Lay of Enron have made this one of the most corporation-friendly administrations in history. In this issue of the MoveOn Bulletin, we take an in-depth look at Dick Cheney. It's not surprising that Cheney is avoiding the limelight: an SEC investigation is under way on accounting practices at Halliburton, the company he ran, and Congress's investigative body is still trying to determine how much of the Energy Plan he organized was shaped by oil, coal, and nuclear energy executives. Given his key role in determining the policy and practice of the Bush administration, an understanding of Cheney's history is important. When Cheney was Chief of Staff for President Gerald Ford, his code name was "Backseat." Perhaps these days President Bush's nickname suits him better: for Cheney, it's "Big Time." ONE LINK "[S]triking another blow for freedom from government interference, Mr. Cheney led Halliburton into the top ranks of corporate welfare hogs, benefiting from almost $2 billion in taxpayer-insured loans from the U.S. Export-Import Bank and the Overseas Private Investment Corp. In the five years before Mr. Cheney joined the company, it got a measly $100 million in government loans." Molly Ivins' article, "Cheney's Mess Worth a Close Look" is online at: http://www.commondreams.org/views02/0610-03.htm CHENEY IN NUMBERS Cheney's 2000 income from Halliburton: $36,086,635 Increase in government contracts while Cheney led Halliburton: 91% Minimum size of "accounting irregularity" that occurred while Cheney was CEO: $100,000,000 (One hundred MILLION dollars) Number of the seven official US "State Sponsors of Terror" that Halliburton contracted with: 2 out of 7 Pages of Energy Plan documents Cheney refused to give congressional investigators: 13,500 Amount energy companies gave the Bush/Cheney presidential campaign: $1,800,000 HALLIBURTON DAYS "[W]hen I was Secretary of Defense, my biggest problem was with the Congress of the United States. Now that I'm chairman and CEO of a Fortune 500 company, my biggest problem is the Congress of the United States." --Dick Cheney, during an address to the Export-Import Bank Conference, May 8, 1997. Cheney was asked to assume the helm of Halliburton in 1995. As one of the largest global providers of equipment and services to the oil industry, Halliburton needed a chief executive who could ensure that the company had the government's full support. Cheney's close connections to top government and industry decision makers made him perfect for this role. In a debate with Vice Presidential candidate Joe Lieberman in 2000, Lieberman noted that Cheney had done well for himself as CEO of Halliburton. Cheney responded flatly, "I can tell you, Joe, the government had absolutely nothing to do with it." But even a glance at Cheney's tenure at Halliburton suggests otherwise. During his five years as CEO, Cheney nearly doubled the size of Halliburton's government contracts, totaling a whopping $2.3 billion. He convinced the Export-Import Bank of the U.S. to lend Halliburton and oil companies another $1.5 billion, backed by U.S. taxpayers. As exposed in the article below, some of these loans went to a Russian company with ties to drug dealing and organized crime. http://www.public-i.org/story_01_080200.htm Cheney's rule at Halliburton was characterized by a ruthless geopolitical strategy that put aside political beliefs whenever they were inconvenient. In a number of cases, Halliburton and its subsidiaries supported or even ordered human rights violations and broke international laws. Consider the following examples: * Libyan dictator and suspected anti-U.S. terrorist Moammar Gadhafi engaged a foreign subsidiary of Halliburton company Brown & Root to perform millions of dollars worth of work. According to the Baltimore Sun, Brown & Root was fined $3.8 million for violating Libyan sanctions. (Although Cheney wasn't leading Halliburton when these sales started, subsidiaries' sales to Libya continued throughout his tenure.) * Cheney claimed that he supported the U.S. sanctions on Iraq, but the Financial Times of London reported that through foreign subsidiaries and affiliates, Halliburton became the biggest oil contractor for Iraq, selling more than $73 million in goods and services to Saddam Hussein's regime. (See http://gwbush.com/spots/postpage.html for a Washington Post article on the matter.) * In Burma, Halliburton joined oil companies in working on two notorious gas pipelines, the Yadana and Yetagun. According to an Earth Rights report, "From 1992 until the present, thousands of villagers in Burma were forced to work in support of these pipelines and related infrastructure, lost their homes due to forced relocation, and were raped, tortured and killed by soldiers hired by the companies as security guards for the pipelines. One of Halliburton?s projects was undertaken during Dick Cheney?s tenure as CEO." (The full report is linked to below.) Halliburton is now being investigated by the Securities and Exchange Commission for Enron-style accounting practices that took place while Cheney was CEO. http://www.nytimes.com/2002/05/30/business/30HALL.html More on Cheney and Halliburton: For an extensive briefing on Halliburton and Cheney's foreign policy impact, check out this well-written and thorough report: http://www.earthrights.org/halliburton/report.pdf Cheney made $36 million at Halliburton in 2000 alone. Thesmokinggun.com has his tax returns to prove it: http://www.thesmokinggun.com/archive/dicktax1.shtml A LOT OF ENERGY "Conservation may be a sign of personal virtue, but it is not a sufficient basis for a sound, comprehensive energy policy." --Cheney, in a speech in Toronto, Canada, May 1, 2001. The ongoing fracas over Cheney's Energy Plan ties together many of the themes of his working life: his corporate alliances, especially with energy companies; his view of oil as integral to U.S. foreign policy; and his insistence on secrecy for the activities of the Executive branch. On May 16, 2001, Cheney revealed the results of months of meetings of his Energy Task Force: a national energy plan. President Bush had established the Task Force in January 2001, under Vice President Cheney's leadership. (See http://www.whitehouse.gov/energy for the final plan.) The plan essentially made Cheney's statement about 'personal virtue' national policy. It put a premium on exploring for and extracting more oil, and proposed that the Arctic National Wildlife Reserve be used for this purpose. While it paid lip service to alternative energy sources, its recommendations focused almost exclusively on the need for more "energy supply" -- more oil, more nuclear plants, more coal. According to the Natural Resources Defense Council, "the Bush plan would provide no short-term relief for Americans struggling to pay their gasoline and electric bills this summer. And, over the long-term, it would increase pollution, despoil the environment, threaten public health and accelerate global warming. Moreover, it would have no impact on energy prices, and no practical effect on U.S. dependence on foreign sources of oil. Who would benefit? The oil, coal and nuclear industries that shoveled millions of dollars into Bush campaign coffers." Shortly before the Plan was revealed, controversy arose. On April 19, 2001, Representatives Henry Waxman (D-CA) and John Dingell (D-MI) wrote to the General Accounting Office (GAO), asking it to investigate the Task Force. According to the GAO, "The congressional investigation of the task force was prompted by news reports that the task force had met privately with major campaign contributors, such as Kenneth Lay, the CEO of Enron, to discuss energy policy. According to these reports, major Republican contributors attended private sessions with Vice President Cheney and the task force met secretly with other contributors in formulating the President's National Energy Policy." In response, Cheney's counsel returned a letter, refusing to disclose whom Cheney and the Task Force had met with and even who was on the Task Force's staff. The GAO made a formal demand for information; Cheney rebuffed it, citing Executive Privilege. It's worth noting that the GAO wasn't even requesting the minutes of the Task Force meetings; it merely wanted to know who the Task Force met with, and when. In late August 2001, a Los Angeles Times article exposed the connections between Cheney's Task Force and Bush's campaign contributors. The article described how the final report adopted verbatim a global warming policy suggested by the U.S. Energy Association (an energy industry group), how language was altered to favor Halliburton, and how a company called Peabody Coal and its affiliates gave more than $900,000 to the Bush campaign and "gained extraordinary access" to the Task Force. (See http://www.commondreams.org/headlines01/0826-02.htm for a copy of the article.) As Enron collapsed, Cheney continued to refuse access to the documents of the Task Force. In February 22, 2002, the GAO filed suit to obtain the documents, some of which have since been turned over. But large questions about the circumstances under which the Bush Administration's energy policy was formed remain. The evidence indicates that the final product was a gift for the energy industry from Cheney, their former colleague. More on Cheney and the Energy Plan: The GAO's comprehensive timeline of the Cheney failure to turn over the Task Force documents is viewable at: http://www.9-11%70%65%61%63%65.org/r2.php3?r=60 You can search the documents that Cheney was ordered to make public at: http://www.nrdc.org/air/energy/taskforce/tfinx.asp You can read NRDC's "Slower, Costlier, and Dirtier: A Critique of the Bush Energy Plan" at: http://www.nrdc.org/air/energy/scd/execsum.asp "With so many new international crises erupting every day, it is hard to detect any clear forward direction to American U.S. foreign policy. At times, it appears that providing a response to the latest upheaval is about all that Washington can accomplish. But beneath the surface of day-to-day crisis management, one can see signs of an overarching plan for U.S. policy: a strategy of global oil acquisition." --Michael Klare, Pacific News Service: http://www.9-11%70%65%61%63%65.org/r2.php3?r=61 Satire: Cheney's 10 energy tips http://www.9-11%70%65%61%63%65.org/r2.php3?r=62 MORE ABOUT CHENEY The White House's official page on the Vice President: http://www.whitehouse.gov/vicepresident A short, and perhaps too sweet, biography that captures the highlights of Cheney's career: http://www.infoplease.com/spot/cheney1.html The Christian Science Monitor offers a little more background on Cheney, prior to the 2000 election. "Cheney's connections and influence are seen everywhere these days - giving rise to talk that he's CEO to Bush's Chairman of the Board. Most people around Cheney probably suffer from something like Rolodex-envy." http://www.csmonitor.com/durable/2000/12/20/fp1s2-csm.shtml A PBS Newshour report on Cheney's management style and personality. http://www.9-11%70%65%61%63%65.org/r2.php3?r=63 ABOUT THE MOVEON BULLETIN AND MOVEON The MoveOn Bulletin is a free, biweekly email bulletin providing information, resources, news, and action ideas on the political issues that shape our lives. The full text of the MoveOn Bulletin is online at http://www.moveon.org/moveonbulletin/; users can subscribe at that address. The MoveOn Bulletin is a project of MoveOn.org. ____________________________________________________________ 'Naturally the common people don't want war: Neither in Russia, nor in England, nor for that matter in Germany. That is understood. But, after all, IT IS THE LEADERS of the country who determine the policy and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy, or a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship. Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is TELL THEM THEY ARE BEING ATTACKED, and denounce the peacemakers for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. IT WORKS THE SAME IN ANY COUNTRY.' -Goering at the Nuremberg Trials From LAMZ at sympatico.ca Fri Jul 12 16:07:04 2002 From: LAMZ at sympatico.ca (Lysander Zimmerman) Date: Fri, 12 Jul 2002 18:07:04 -0400 Subject: [R-G] Chossudovsky References: <110702192.54284@webbox.com> <3D2ECB80.1C747435@ol.com.au> Message-ID: <001d01c229f0$74f79e30$33378d18@Indy1> Thanks Jon. I would just like to add that, in my mind (and in the mind of EVERYONE who witnessed the chemtrails over Hamilton today), they are real, and yes, they are part of a huge conspiracy. Today, I left work for twenty minutes only to bear witness to 5 high-flying jets leaving behind chemtrails SIMULTANEOUSLY! The sky was already saturated with them and the spraying continued all day. I rushed inside to get others and they were completely shocked at what they were witnessing. People said that it made them sick to their stomachs and had to go back inside. One of the secretaries exclaimed "something is definitely up because those are not passenger planes". I called friends to take pictures and they will go up to the Hamilton Indymedia site along with video of heavy spraying that I took yesterday. Stayed tuned for Hamilton Indymedia for the on-going feature. Peace, Lysander ----- Original Message ----- From: "Jon Marshall" To: Sent: Friday, July 12, 2002 8:28 AM Subject: Re: [R-G] Chossudovsky > > I may be missing the point, but how does someone having some crazy views > mean they can't ever be correct. > > And how does the existence of crazy conspiracy theories lead us to > conclude that all conspiracy theories are crazy? > > Did not Lenin and Co. conspire to establish communism in Russia? > Didn't they succeed in having an effect? > > How come its inherently impossible for the powerful to also conspire > against everyone else? > > Now as it happens I don't hink Bush had to go to anything like the > lengths of planning the attack on Sept 11 himself, to get a state of > continual war, and to get his policies legitimated, but that does not > mean that it is impossible, that someone in the US state thought > otherwise. > > There is an important question about how we act, and it might be the > case that as we (say) don't understand chemtrails we should not bother > about them and get on with the real action. > > but, if Lysander will forgive me putting words in his mouth, the people > in his area may not be about to strike against capitalism, but they > might distrust the government, and they might worry about chemtrails, > and it might be useful as leading on to other things.. > > the right manages to work together with all kinds of conflicting beliefs > as long as they support established power, but the left always seems to > splinter. > > The question perhaps should be what do we do? what are we aiming at? > > jon > > michael pugliese wrote: > > > > Among other criticisms, Harald Beyer-Arneson, an anarcho-communist > > makes of Michel C. is his citation of far right canadian loon, > > John Whitely, of the, "New World Order Intelligence, " Website. > > On the UFO'ology radio talk show hosted by Jeff Rense, last time > > i listened to him w/Whitely, he raved about The Illuminati. > > http://www.csf.colorado.edu/mail/pen-l/apr99/msg02924.html > > Michael Pugliese > > > > _______________________________________________ > > Rad-Green mailing list > > Rad-Green at lists.econ.utah.edu > > To change your options or unsubscribe go to: > > http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/rad-green > > _______________________________________________ > Rad-Green mailing list > Rad-Green at lists.econ.utah.edu > To change your options or unsubscribe go to: > http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/rad-green > From aaron at istop.com Fri Jul 12 16:17:30 2002 From: aaron at istop.com (aaron at istop.com) Date: Fri, 12 Jul 2002 18:17:30 -0400 (EST) Subject: [R-G] Re: Going Down To Kananaskis: Fork in The Road for Our Movement (Part one) In-Reply-To: <017901c22244$f12eeca0$291f5318@vc.shawcable.net> Message-ID: <20020712221730.DDB4E17013@ns.istop.com> hi all! I have not got a chance to read all 4 parts of this but I will run it off and read it when I have time. On the first day we went out to "k" Country, there was aproximatly 110 or so vehicles in our convoy. we were ill prepared to stay in the heat on highgway40 and some people had heat exhoustion. if we were more prepared,I am certain that we would have had a tent city on the side of the road. we will know better next time. The proplem with the action or lack there of as some may sayat the first fence perimiter on highway 40 in my opinion was those that organisesd the caravan had come up with a agenda of getting as far as we could and then giving a message to the police to somehow get it to the delagates. wE did have a chance to convey a message if we has of elected one person to go and giv it to the delegates, but it was agree that all of us go or none. When we got there, in my opinion, starhawk chucked the original dicision out the window and rightly so, because it did not take into account last minute sign ups to the caravan.There should have been one last meeting of all those going, just before we left the park to get in our cars to go. there was a meeting on the hwy 40,but in my opinion that was too late, we were already there and not prepared to do any long term vigil or blockade.the meeting in my opinion was split untill the end when I believe the speakers list was stacked with people we opposed the idea of staying and instead of using factual information to gain support amongst the growd for there ideas of just having a spiral dance and then leaving, the used passion. Facts were: yes, we had no water no tents, no food ,no stove, but if we were really concerned about confronting the ilegality of the security perimiter, we would have gotten supplies brought out from calgary. and whoever thinks that by some people leaving the meeting early(most labour left first),that that is going to somehow split the movement,needs to check there head. If I am at my sons hocky game with my wife, and I have to leave early, That will not split up the familly. After almost everybody left, there were still about 10 or so of us who wern't satisfied with a pacifist action when a more assertive action was needed. starhawk was nice enough to stay behind for a while and help facilitate a discusion which ended up in us agreeing to hold an action again on hwy 40 the next day.too be continued Aaron Doncaster P.s This is in no way intended to point a finger at anyone or group and say they were in the wrong. as we continue to grow as a movement, it is inevitable that we will make some mistakes and we must be extremley criticle in analysing mistakes we make so that we can learn from them From pieinsky at igc.org Fri Jul 12 17:02:32 2002 From: pieinsky at igc.org (Jay Moore) Date: Fri, 12 Jul 2002 19:02:32 -0400 Subject: [R-G] Deep Background on Middle East Conflicts/Alliances Message-ID: <007301c229f8$66fed480$c9321e40@bypass.com> FYI, this is an interesting four-part article by Pepe Escobar. Especially parts 2 and 3 on Osama and on the Saudi Prince Abdullah. I just started reading "Asia Times" on the Net. It has a lot of other good info to offer. http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/DG13Ak02.html From Tom_Childs at Douglas.BC.CA Fri Jul 12 18:00:41 2002 From: Tom_Childs at Douglas.BC.CA (Tom_Childs at Douglas.BC.CA) Date: Fri, 12 Jul 2002 17:00:41 -0700 Subject: [R-G] The Importance of Surprises Message-ID: <200207130000.RAA05567@Douglas.BC.CA> Subscribers, You may find Rachel's News a useful resource. The electronic edition comes out with a feature once a month, sometimes once every two months, so it's not a email box-clogger. There's a complete archive available over email or on-line. Fwd # 747 f.y.i. Regards, -Tom ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ ----- Forwarded message: ----- Date: Fri, 12 Jul 2002 19:11:33 -0400 From: Rachel News Subject: Rachel #747: The Importance of Surprises To: RACHEL-NEWS at LISTS.RACHEL.ORG If you find the Rachel newsletter useful or interesting, please forward it to a friend suggesting that they start their own free E-mail subscription. =======================Electronic Edition======================== . . . RACHEL'S ENVIRONMENT & HEALTH NEWS #747 . . ---July 11, 2002--- . . HEADLINES: . . THE IMPORTANCE OF SURPRISES . . ========== . . Environmental Research Foundation . . P.O. Box 5036, Annapolis, MD 21403 . . Fax (410) 263-8944; E-mail: erf at rachel.org . . ========== . . All back issues are available by E-mail: send E-mail to . . info at rachel.org with the single word HELP in the message. . . Back issues are also available from http://www.rachel.org. . . To start your own free subscription, send E-mail to . . listserv at lists.rachel.org with the words . . SUBSCRIBE RACHEL-NEWS YOUR FULL NAME in the message. . . The Rachel newsletter is now also available in Spanish; . . to learn how to subscribe in Spanish, send the word . . AYUDA in an E-mail message to info at rachel.org. . ================================================================= Controlling Technologies--Part 1 THE IMPORTANCE OF SURPRISES The scientists who first split the atom, in 1942, were no doubt some of the smartest people in the world: Enrico Fermi, J. Robert Oppenheimer, Hans Bethe, Neils Bohr, Glenn Seaborg, and dozens of others. For the next 50 years, nuclear technology served as a magnet for brainy people, attracting graduate students who were excited to work at the cutting edge of technology where research funds were nearly limitless. In the field of nuclear weapons, nuclear power or nuclear medicine, if you had a bright idea, you could probably find the funds to explore it, so smart people flocked into nuclear technology. Despite all this brain power, in 60 short years nuclear technology has created an array of problems that now rank among the most difficult, dangerous and long-lived that the world has ever faced, and which grow larger each passing year. What went wrong? This is an important question because -- despite all the problems it has already created -- the nuclear industry is redoubling its efforts to expand. [NY TIMES May 7, 2001, pg. A17] Furthermore, nuclear is not the most complex technology humans have set out to master: biotechnology and the now-emerging nanotechnology[1] are intrinsically much more complex. (Nanotechnology is the attempt to create molecule-sized machines, some of which can themselves create more molecule-sized machines.) If we are having trouble controlling nuclear technology, shouldn't we think twice before deploying new technologies that are far more complicated, much less understandable and therefore far less predictable? What went wrong with nuclear? The people who gave us nuclear technology evidently didn't notice that our ability to control complex systems is limited by surprises that arise from three sources: (1) technical misunderstanding of the underlying chemistry, physics, or biology; (2) an astonishing range of management lapses (including simple errors, unwillingness to confront the troublesome parts of a problem, a tendency to doze off on the job after a few uneventful years, and the human desire to hide and deny embarrassing mistakes); and (3) the shifting sands of politics and economic dislocations, including commercial competition. The history of nuclear power tells us that these three kinds of surprises (technical, managerial, and political) set pretty narrow limits on the human capacity to control complex technologies. Nuclear technology has clearly exceeded our human capacity for control, while biotech and nanotech make nuclear seem simple and easy by comparison. Where is the evidence that nuclear is uncontrollably complex? It's in the newspapers almost every week. Let's take a look. ** Because it operates 51 nuclear power plants to generate electricity, Japan justifiably ranks high among the high-tech nations. However, on Sept. 30, 1999, an atomic fuel plant in the town of Tokaimura, 87 miles northwest of Tokyo, spewed radioactivity into the air. At least 35 workers were exposed and 300,000 nearby residents were told to shut their windows and stay indoors. [NY TIMES October 1, 1999, pgs. A1, A10.] When the accident occurred, the Tokaimura plant was in its 17th year of commercial operation. The accident began when workers poured 35 pounds of uranium -- instead of the usual 5 pounds -- into a tank containing nitric acid. (Management surprise.) The tank happened to be surrounded by a shell filled with water, which reflected neutrons back toward the uranium, thus promoting a chain reaction. (Technical surprise.) There was an ominous blue flash of light as the 35 pounds of uranium "went critical," meaning a nuclear chain reaction had begun spewing deadly gamma rays and neutrons into the surrounding area. Japanese nuclear safety officials had previously scrutinized the plant and concluded that an accidental chain reaction was impossible, so the plant had no emergency plan. (Management surprise.) [NY TIMES Oct. 23, 1999, pg. A4.] It took Japanese authorities 17 hours to bring the atomic reaction under control. The Tokyo Electric Power Company rushed 880 pounds of sodium borate to the plant to absorb radiation and quench the nuclear reaction, but they discovered they had no way of getting close enough to the chain reaction to dump the powder onto it. (Management surprise). Japanese authorities requested help from the U.S. military stationed in Japan but were told those troops were not equipped to deal with nuclear accidents. (Management surprise.) [NY TIMES October 1, 1999, pgs. A1, A10.] Workers finally brought the chain reaction under control by smashing a pipe connected to the water shell, letting the water drain out. [NY TIMES Oct. 23, 1999, pg. A4.] The Japanese Government Nuclear Safety Commission immediately blamed the workers involved. One member of the Commission said, "If they had done their job as they were supposed to, there is no way something like this could have happened." [NY TIMES Oct. 1, 1999, pg. A10.] However, a few days later it became apparent that the Government Nuclear Safety Commission had misunderstood the situation. (Management surprise.) The NEW YORK TIMES reported that, for years, the plant's managers had been pressuring workers to skip important safety steps, to increase productivity and improve competitiveness. One of the injured workers said he had routinely used procedural shortcuts following directions given in an illegally-drafted plant manual that allowed workers to speed up production. [NY TIMES Oct. 4, 1999, pg. A8.] For their part, plant managers continued to blame the workers' "lack of sufficient expertise," as if employee training were not a management responsibility. (Management surprise.) Plant managers refused to acknowledge that they had urged workers to speed up production, "But company officials have acknowledged that the plant had recently faced intense foreign competition," the NEW YORK TIMES reported. (Management surprise, political surprise.) The most highly-irradiated worker in the September accident, Hisashi Ouchi, 35, died of his injuries December 22. The Japanese government had made heroic efforts to keep him alive, transfusing 10 pints of fresh blood into his body each day for several months before his death. Just as the government feared, his death catalyzed a citizen movement to oppose the expansion of nuclear power in Japan, and especially to stop the use of MOX, or "mixed oxide fuel." (Political surprise.) [NY TIMES Jan. 13, 2000, pg. A1.] MOX fuel combines plutonium with uranium into fuel for nuclear power plants, as a way of (1) avoiding the need for new uranium fuel; and (2) in some cases, reducing the world's supply of pure plutonium, 18 pounds of which can be used to make a crude but effective A-bomb. [NY TIMES November 12, 2001, pg. B1.] Japan had been planning to purchase mixed oxide fuels (MOX) from a British plant known as Sellafield, an industrial complex on the edge of the Irish Sea employing 10,000 workers. Sellafield had begun operating a nuclear power plant in 1956, but the plant caught fire Oct. 10, 1957, exposing workers and nearby residents to excessive radioactivity. (Technical surprise.) In 1957, the British government denied anyone had been harmed but in 1983 the British National Radiological Protection Board estimated that the doses received by the public during the 1957 fire could cause hundreds of thyroid cancers.[2] (Technical surprise, management surprise.) The British government released its health report in 1988, 31 years after the fire, and some of the health data remain secret to this day. (Management surprise.) Sellafield survived the disaster of 1957 and went on to expand its operation to include nuclear fuel reprocessing and nuclear waste management. In anticipation of a growing market for MOX fuels, Sellafield invested $480 million in a new fuel fabrication facility in 1999. Japan agreed to buy 1/3 of the plant's output. Unfortunately, shortly after Sellafield shipped its first batch of MOX fuel to Japan, British authorities discovered that Sellafield workers had falsified inspection documents related to the fuel rods sent to Japan. (Management surprise.) A union representative blamed commercial competition: "Clearly there was commercial pressure to meet customers' demands," he said. (Political surprise.) [NY TIMES Apr. 20, 2000, pg. C4.] In Japan, news of the falsified inspection documents created such an uproar that the fuel was rejected and shipped back to Sellafield. [NY TIMES Jan. 13, 2000, pg. A1.] Switzerland and Sweden then suspended shipments of spent fuel to Sellafield. (Political surprise.) Germany, too, said it had received MOX fuels from Sellafield accompanied by falsified documents. Subsequently Germany raised concerns about "irregularities" in MOX fuel manufactured at La Hague in France, engulfing the entire MOX fuel industry in scandal and controversy. (Management surprise, political surprise.) [NY TIMES April 20, 2000, pg. C1.] Two months later, Germany announced that it would phase out and shut down all 19 of its nuclear power plants. (Political surprise.) [NY TIMES June 16, 2000, pg. A6.] But Sellafield's troubles did not stop there. Two months after the revelation of falsified documents, British government inspectors reported "systematic management failures" at the Sellafield complex and found fault with Sellafield's entire "safety culture." (Management surprise.) [NY TIMES April 20, 2000, pg. C4.] Shortly after this embarrassing revelation, British authorities announced that "a saboteur had severed cables controlling robotic operations in a radioactive area of the installation." (Management surprise.) [NY TIMES March 27, 2000, pg. A8.] Ireland and Denmark then began an international campaign to have the Sellafield plant closed for good. (Political surprise.) With its MOX fuel investment in serious trouble and its reputation in tatters, Sellafield announced that recent events had forced it to increase the price for cleaning up the Hanford Nuclear Reservation in Washington state, USA, one of the most contaminated places on Earth, where DuPont, Westinghouse and other private firms made plutonium for weapons between 1943 and 1987. In October 1998, Sellafield has offered to solidify -- for a fee of $6.6 billion\- -- 54 million gallons of DuPont's and Westinghouse's discarded radioactive liquids, sludges and salts held in 177 tanks at Hanford. But 18 months later, in late April 2000, Sellafield management said the Hanford cleanup would now cost U.S. taxpayers $15.2 billion. The U.S. Department of Energy balked, canceled the contract with Sellafield and declared its attempt to "privatize" the Hanford cleanup a failure. Evidently, the private sector can affordably create one of the world's largest radioactive stews but cannot affordably clean it up. (Management surprise, political surprise.) [NY TIMES April 27, 2000, pg. C4; NY TIMES May 9, 2000, pg. C4.] The Hanford cleanup is itself a technical frontier. Of the 177 waste tanks at Hanford, 149 are made of a single shell of steel. So far, 68 tanks have leaked and "all the single-shell tanks are expected to leak eventually," the NY TIMES reported March 23, 1998, pg. A10. (Technical surprise.) For 50 years, private-sector and governmental managers at the Hanford Reservation steadfastly maintained that leaks of radioactive liquids were inconsequential because the soil would bind the radioactive particles tightly, preventing them from moving into the Columbia River. However, in 1997 officials announced that they had been wrong and that leaked wastes had already entered the river. (Technical surprise.) [NY TIMES Oct. 11, 1997, pg. A7.] Of the 54 million gallons of wastes abandoned by DuPont and Westinghouse at Hanford, so far at least 900,000 gallons have escaped into the soil on their way to the river. No one has any idea how to retrieve them. (Technical surprise.) [NY TIMES Mar. 23, 1998, pg. A10.] To be continued. =========== [1] http://www.foresight.org/NanoRev/FIFAQ1.html#FAQ1 and http://www.nanozine.com/WHATNANO.HTM#whatsa [2] Jean McSorley, LIVING IN THE SHADOW (London: Pan Books, 1990; ISBN 0330313312). ################################################################ NOTICE In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107 this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving it for research and educational purposes. Environmental Research Foundation provides this electronic version of RACHEL'S ENVIRONMENT & HEALTH NEWS free of charge even though it costs the organization considerable time and money to produce it. We would like to continue to provide this service free. You could help by making a tax-deductible contribution (anything you can afford, whether $5.00 or $500.00). Please send your tax-deductible contribution to: Environmental Research Foundation, P.O. Box 5036, Annapolis, MD 21403-7036. Please do not send credit card information via E-mail. For further information about making tax-deductible contributions to E.R.F. by credit card please phone us toll free at 1-888-2RACHEL, or at (410) 263-1584, or fax us at (410) 263-8944. --Peter Montague, Editor ################################################################ -- From walk at igc.org Fri Jul 12 18:20:52 2002 From: walk at igc.org (Mark D. Stansbery) Date: Fri, 12 Jul 2002 20:20:52 -0400 Subject: [R-G] [Infoshop News] Defy Columbus Day 2002 - CACC Call to Action In-Reply-To: <200207090152.SAA19372@Douglas.BC.CA> References: <200207090152.SAA19372@Douglas.BC.CA> Message-ID: Good call to action, We in Columbus, Ohio will be doing the same during the Indigenous Peoples' Observances of October 1-12, 2002 with a major action on Oct. 12 which begins with a walk of mourning at 10 a.m. in the bicentennial Park. Ends with an action in front of a Santa Maria Slave ship replica in the Battelle Memorial River front park. Peace, Mark D. Stansbery PS check out our web site: www.osu.edu/students/sif From LAMZ at sympatico.ca Fri Jul 12 20:24:01 2002 From: LAMZ at sympatico.ca (Lysander Zimmerman) Date: Fri, 12 Jul 2002 22:24:01 -0400 Subject: [R-G] Guardian: Earth 'will expire by 2050' Message-ID: <000d01c22a14$5a2b39d0$33378d18@Indy1> My sincerest apologies if you receive more than one copy of this, for I am sending it to my entire address book. ______________________________________________ PASS THIS AROUND. IT'S TIME FOR PEOPLE TO START WAKING UP! ______________________________________________ Earth 'will expire by 2050' Our planet is running out of room and resources. Modern man has plundered so much, a damning report claims this week, that outer space will have to be colonised. Using the image of the need for mankind to colonise space as a stark illustration of the problems facing Earth, the report warns that either consumption rates are dramatically and rapidly lowered or the planet will no longer be able to sustain its growing population Full article here: http://www.observer.co.uk/international/story/0,6903,750783,00.html From nick at faunusherbs.com Fri Jul 12 20:37:26 2002 From: nick at faunusherbs.com (Nicholas Morcinek) Date: Fri, 12 Jul 2002 22:37:26 -0400 Subject: [R-G] Guardian: Earth 'will expire by 2050' In-Reply-To: <000d01c22a14$5a2b39d0$33378d18@Indy1> Message-ID: <000001c22a16$3b1a9480$8c2ce2d1@faunusp41800> Yeah..insane! And only an epsilon semi-moron would consider trying to move to "outer space" a realistic objective. Oh... sorry, those are the folks currently making the major decisions on this planet! Bring on the global revolution... time is running out! Nicholas -----Original Message----- From: rad-green-admin at lists.econ.utah.edu [mailto:rad-green-admin at lists.econ.utah.edu] On Behalf Of Lysander Zimmerman Sent: Friday, July 12, 2002 10:24 PM To: defeat_bill_36 at hotmail.com Subject: [R-G] Guardian: Earth 'will expire by 2050' Importance: High My sincerest apologies if you receive more than one copy of this, for I am sending it to my entire address book. ______________________________________________ PASS THIS AROUND. IT'S TIME FOR PEOPLE TO START WAKING UP! ______________________________________________ Earth 'will expire by 2050' Our planet is running out of room and resources. Modern man has plundered so much, a damning report claims this week, that outer space will have to be colonised. Using the image of the need for mankind to colonise space as a stark illustration of the problems facing Earth, the report warns that either consumption rates are dramatically and rapidly lowered or the planet will no longer be able to sustain its growing population Full article here: http://www.observer.co.uk/international/story/0,6903,750783,00.html _______________________________________________ Rad-Green mailing list Rad-Green at lists.econ.utah.edu To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/rad-green From pieinsky at igc.org Sat Jul 13 16:51:48 2002 From: pieinsky at igc.org (Jay Moore) Date: Sat, 13 Jul 2002 18:51:48 -0400 Subject: [R-G] The "New Chiapas" Message-ID: <00e901c22abf$e5b723a0$c9321e40@bypass.com> Mexico town becomes center of battle July 13, 2002 Posted: 5:00 PM EDT (2100 GMT) Riot police wait for orders two miles outside of San Salvador Atenco, near Mexico City, Friday. SAN SALVADOR ATENCO (AP) -- With the Zapatista guerrilla movement gone quiet, this farming town on the outskirts of Mexico City has become the central battleground for the leftist and anti-globalization movements that were attracted to southern Chiapas state eight years ago. Mexican anarchists, national farm groups, even a delegation of U.S. university students have been drawn to San Salvador Atenco in recent months to merrily brandish machetes and denounce the expropriation of farms to build a new Mexico City airport. On Thursday the anger reached a critical mass, and Atenco exploded in riots. Protesters have barricaded themselves in the town and are threatening to kill 12 hostages, including city officials and police officers. Since the airport project was announced in October, peasants in Atenco, and around the surrounding region known as Texcoco, have grown increasingly radical in their opposition to the plan. Outraged by the government's original offer to buy their land for as little as 60 cents per square meter, their almost-weekly protests have become a fixture on Mexico City's streets. The protesters' refusal to compromise, even as the government has offered more money to buy their land, has made their cause increasingly attractive to leftist activists across Mexico. Buildings in the town are now covered with murals of revolutionary heroes. Farmers listen to a speech by one of their leaders during a standoff with the police in San Salvador Atenco, Friday. "This is now the center of the fight against globalization and the multinationals," said Juan Blanchen Nieto, an activist from the southern state of Morleos who came to Atenco to assist the protesters. "Chiapas was the center, but by sheer activity, the movement is here now." The Coca-Cola company -- a frequent target of anti-globalization activists -- has taken a particularly hard beating from the farmers. This week, several Coca-Cola trucks were hijacked and turned into barricades. Coke bottles in the trucks were turned into Molotov cocktails. Thursday's violence was the kind of revolt not seen since 1994, when Zapatista rebels staged a bloody 12-day rebellion in Chiapas in the name of socialism and Indian rights. But the Zapatistas have lapsed into silence since a successful bus caravan to Mexico City to address legislators in March 2001. In April, students from Evergreen State College in Washington State wanted to visit Chiapas during a two-month exchange program. Their professor steered some of them to Atenco instead. Seventeen of the U.S. students, brandishing machetes and chanting revolutionary slogans in broken Spanish, joined Atenco farmers in a May 1 protest march, and were promptly expelled from Mexico for violating a ban on foreigners becoming involved in domestic politics. On Friday, demonstrators turned out for another March in Mexico City opposing the airport. Many said they see the Atenco protest as the extension of the Chiapas conflict. Rodrigo Oliveras, a 19-year-old marcher with a mohawk and a black leather jacket with an anarchy symbol spray-painted on the back, said the anti-globalization movement "hadn't yet noticed what was happening in San Salvador Atenco" but that they would after this week's events. "San Salvador Atenco has now won support all of the world," Oliveras said. Some of the farmers say they are gratified -- but a little surprised -- by the interest shown by activists of other stripes. Jorge, a 34-year-old Atenco farmer who, like most here, covered his face with a bandanna and would give only his first name, said he didn't consider himself anti-globalization until this week's standoff began. "I'm just a working stiff, and this didn't start out as anti-globalization," he said. "But if the movement means survival, then I'm anti-globalization." From epcraig at efn.org Sat Jul 13 20:31:44 2002 From: epcraig at efn.org (Edward Craig) Date: Sat, 13 Jul 2002 19:31:44 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [R-G] Guardian: Earth 'will expire by 2050' In-Reply-To: <000001c22a16$3b1a9480$8c2ce2d1@faunusp41800> Message-ID: So we're living in a country where the government is being run by nutcases who believe that the world's overdue to end, and it'll be all better when God returns and makes the world right. What's new about this news? -- Ed Craig epcraig at efn.org Taxi (I need an income) GNU/Linux (I can afford a Free OS) Think this through with me, let me know your mind... Hunter/Garcia From info at cinox.demon.co.uk Sat Jul 13 20:33:34 2002 From: info at cinox.demon.co.uk (Tim Murphy) Date: Sun, 14 Jul 2002 03:33:34 +0100 Subject: [R-G] Fw: Asian Times (UK): Former UN Undersecretary speaks out on West Message-ID: wrote in message news:... Asian Times (UK) 25 June 2002 Former UN Undersecretary speaks out on West Papua role By John Saltford [abridged] Last year, the respected Indian ex-UN Under-Secretary General, Chakravarthy Narasimhan gave an interview to a journalist, Slobodan Lekic. As a result a number of embarrassing articles appeared in the international press about his old employers. The subject in question was a seemingly long-forgotten UN operation, far away in West Papua, the Western half of the island of New Guinea. Second only to the Secretary-General himself, Narasimhans position in the UN at the time was key, especially when it came to freeing the organisation of this unwelcome problem. In brief, West Papua had been a Dutch colony due for independence by 1970. However, President Sukarno in neighbouring Indonesia insisted that the territory was his and, emboldened by Indias success in Goa, threatened to invade. In 1962, under pressure from the US, who feared growing Soviet influence and wanted Sukarno appeased, the Dutch gave in. They agreed to sign an agreement with Jakarta handing West Papua over to a temporary UN administration, but only on condition that genuine self-determination would take place by 1969. In the event, the UN operation, overseen by Narasimhan, pulled out seven months later and the Indonesians assumed control. As one senior UN official commented privately, the Papuans would rebel so from the point of view of expediency it behoves the UN to depart as soon as the Indonesians are in fact thick enough on the ground. In 1968, Narasimhan and U Thant, the Burmese Secretary-General, sent a small UN team back led by Ortiz Sanz. Their job was to assist Indonesia with preparations for the promised act of self-determination. But, aware of their deep unpopularity, Jakarta declared that a referendum was impractical because the people were too primitive. Instead, they hand-picked 1023 Papuans to act as representatives for the whole population. Rather than protest, the UN cooperated. As one confidential US report noted, Ortiz Sanz admitted that the only conceivable result as far as UN and Indonesian interests were concerned was a vote against independence. It was no surprise therefore that the vote in 1969 did indeed unanimously reject independence. Even Hitler was satisfied with less than one hundred percent in plebiscites noted one journalist. Elsewhere a British diplomat privately wrote; the [UN] Secretariat, whose influence could be important, appear only too anxious to get shot of the problem as quickly and smoothly as possible. With no one prepared to speak out, the UN voted in November 1969 to take note of the Papuan result and with that the organisation washed their hands of it. And then 31 years later, Narasimhan decides to speak out, reportedly saying, the whole procedure was a whitewash.How could anyone have seriously believed that all voters unanimously decided to join [Indonesia] . (Dr) John Saltford. His forthcoming book The United Nations and the Indonesian Takeover of West Papua is due out in September, published by Routledge-Curzon From Borba100 at aol.com Sat Jul 13 22:44:30 2002 From: Borba100 at aol.com (Borba100 at aol.com) Date: Sun, 14 Jul 2002 00:44:30 EDT Subject: [R-G] IN THE HIHGEST POSSIBLE STATE OF COMBAT READINESS Message-ID: <7e.2a6d3643.2a625bae@aol.com> URL for this article: http://emperors-clothes.com/indict/update630.htm Join our email list at http://emperors-clothes.com/f.htm. Receive articles from Emperor's Clothes Website, www.tenc.net we encourage readers to reprint and re-post any Emperor's Clothes article. Please quote articles exactly and include the original URL and name of author(s). ======================================= POWERFUL EVIDENCE THAT AIR FORCE WAS MADE TO STAND DOWN ON 9-11 [Posted 1 July 2002] To go right to instructions for accessing the DCANG Website, as it was April 19, 2001, click here ======================================= In response to the letter below, we have provided a clearer explanation of the proof that the Air Force was ordered to stand down on 9-11. Dear Emperor's Clothes, I want to start with congratulating you on a great website, all kudos to you. I'm pointing out a key error you're making because I'm trying to help. In several places on your 911 pages you refer to "combat ready" jets, seemingly implying that these jets are ready to take off on a few minutes notice. But the terminology is wrong. All that the term "combat ready" means is that they are capable of Combat. It doesn't necessarily mean "scramble ready". A much clearer phrase is "combat units in the highest possible state of readiness," which you quoted from the Washington, DC Air National Guard [DCANG] website but it looks like that's been erased from the archives since the middle of June. Any suggestions? Best regards, Kalun D. Seattle, Washington USA *** Dear Kalun, Thanks for the kind words and helpful criticism. Fortunately, the DC Air National Guard (DCANG) Website archives have not been erased, at least not yet. We'll show how to locate them below. These archives provide a key part of the evidence that the Air Force was not permitted to respond on 9-11. You're right about 'combat-ready.' It is too broad a term. And as you say, the phrase "combat units in the highest possible state of readiness" is much clearer. We'll go through our 9-11 texts and make some changes, using this clearer wording. The Website of the D.C. Air National Guard (DCANG) is at http://www.dcandr.ang.af.mil But please don't go there yet. As of April 19, 2001, that Website included the following statement: "DCANG MISSION To provide combat units in the highest possible state of readiness." This is powerful stuff. Consider. The military never makes public all its air defense procedures. If it did, a potential enemy could entirely circumvent defenses. So key air procedures are kept secret. Therefore one can be sure that air defense information posted on the DCANG Website on April 19, 2001 and available to the general public excluded some key defense procedures. They would *understate*, not overstate. When DCANG stated that its Mission was "To provide combat units in the highest possible state of readiness," they were indicating a general approach but leaving out the nitty gritty details. They were saying: 'Don't worry; we're ready. But we're not going to tell you our emergency plans.' Given this understandable reticence, the phrase, "To provide combat units in the highest possible state of readiness," means that the DC Air National Guard at Andrews Air Force Base had fighter jets ready for an emergency. And when you think about it, this would have to be the case. Not only is Andrews Air Force Base a few miles from the White House, the Pentagon, the Capital building and the CIA, but it is also the official airport of the US government. The President flies out of Andrews. Other top US officials fly out of Andrews. Foreign diplomats and national leaders may arrive and depart from Andrews at any time. For instance: "[There is] Tony Blair, Prime Minister of Britain. He has just landed here at Andrews Air Force Base." (CNN November 7, 2001) Let us say that as it took off from Andrews Air Force Base, Tony Blair's plane was attacked by a hostile jet. Would his pilot have to radio the attackers and ask them to kindly postpone their attack until US fighter jets arrived from Langley Air Force Base, 129 miles away? Andrew's unique role as the Federal government's official airport is another reason DCANG would withhold key details of its emergency response procedures. So again, when DC ANG stated on its Website that its Mission at Andrews included providing combat units "in the highest possible state of readiness," one can be sure this meant Andrews was equipped to scramble aircraft in an emergency. We'll show you how to find the April 19th backup of the DCANG Mission Statement in just a moment. Let us consider the significance of that statement, as it relates to 911. The FAA (Federal Aviation Administration) reported that it 'suspected' Flight 11 out of Boston had been hijacked by 8:20 Eastern Time. (1) So when Flight 11 hit the World Trade Center, of course the FAA knew this was a terrorist act. Vice President Cheney said on MEET THE PRESS September 16th that the FAA had open lines to the Secret Service as soon as Flight 11 hit the World Trade Center. So the Secret Service was in the know no later than 8:45 Eastern time. (2) Flight 77 reached Ohio and turned around, heading back to Washington, DC around 8:55, we are told. At 9:06 the FAA reports that it ordered the air corridor from Cleveland, Ohio, to Washington, D.C. closed to all air traffic. (3) We are told that Flight 77 hit the Pentagon around 9:45 Eastern time. So here's the burning question: why weren't those combat jets which DCANG provided, "in the highest possible state of readiness" - why weren't those planes scrambled from Andrews Air Force Base *before* the Pentagon was hit? Some respond that it was due to human error. The people at DCANG were asleep at the wheel. Well, military organizations don't accept explanations like that. A catastrophic failure leads to court martial. If the people at DCANG merely are guilty of criminal negligence in failing to respond, why haven't they been pilloried and put on trial? Some respond that the whole military was lax before 9-11. Nobody was worried about security. Really? In a dispatch discussing security after 9-11, Associated Press noted that US military bases were already on security alert *before* 9-11: "Earlier this summer, all three Army bases in Hampton Roads, including Fort Eustis and Fort Story, already had begun restricting public access to their grounds for security reasons. The bases did so under an order affecting major Army installations around the country. "The Army required its bases to perform mandatory vehicle registrations. Military members and civilian employees were to receive vehicle decals serving as proof they have permission to be on base." ("Military Tightens Security in Wake of Apparent Terrorist Attacks," AP, 12 September 2001) We'll put out an FAQ with more evidence concerning the myth of a security lapse prior to 9-11. Now, here's how you can access the DCANG Mission Statement. HOW TO ACCESS THE APRIL 19th DCANG MISSION STATEMENT The Mission Statement is no longer posted on the DCANG Website, but you can (as of June 30th) access it by using the free archive service at www.archive.org. They backed up the DCANG Website as it was on April 19th (with the Mission Statement) and on September 13th (without the Statement.) Important point: we cannot say *exactly* when the Mission Statement was removed. We can only say with certainty that it was between April 19 and September 13, 2001. Here's a step-by-step guide to access the Mission Statement: 1) Go to http://www.archive.org 2) You will see their logo, 'WAYBACK MACHINE.' Just below the logo is a search box. After "http://" paste-in the following url: www.dcandr.ang.af.mil/ 3) Hit "enter." You will be taken to the index of backups for DCANG. 4) Click the hyperlink for "April 19, 2001." 5) This will take you to the DCANG website as it looked April 19th. On the upper left click on the hyperlink, "Headquarters." This will take you to a page with the Mission Statement: "DCANG MISSION To provide combat units in the highest possible state of readiness." HOW TO ACCESS THE SEPT. 13TH DCANG ARCHIVE 1) If you are at the April 19th DCANG WebPage, hit the back-arrow twice. If you are not, follow steps 1, 2 and 3 above. Either way you'll be at the DC ANG backups index page. 2) Click on the hyperlink for September 13, 2002. 3) On the upper right, click the hyperlink, "About the DCANG." 4) Click "MISSION AND VISION" on the upper left. This will take you to the new Mission Statement: "Headquarters Mission Be the premier State Head Quarters in the Air National Guard, Critically linked to our units and influencing the future of the DCANG." In case the April; 19th archive is pulled from www.archive.org, we have made a backup. It is at http://emperors-clothes.com/9-11backups/dcandr2.htm If possible, please make backups yourself as well. - John Flaherty and Jared Israel ========================= FURTHER READING : FOR A COMPLETE LIST of our articles refuting false information about 9-11, go to http://emperors-clothes.com/indict/911page.htm 1) NEWSDAY reported that the FAA 'suspected' Flight 11 had been hijacked. For our backup of NEWSDAY text, which should take you to the exact quote, go to http://emperors-clothes.com/9-11backups/nd923.htm#b For Newsday text scroll 2/3 of the way down at http://www.newsday.com/ny-uspent232380681sep23.story 2) Regarding Cheney's statement on MEET THE PRESS that the FAA had open lines to the Secret Service after the first plane hit the World Trade Center, for link to exact quote, in our backup, go to 'NBC, Meet the Press' (10:00 AM ET) Sunday 16 September 2001. http://emperors-clothes.com/9-11backups/nbcmp.htm#openlines Original transcript of MEET THE PRESS can be read at: http://stacks.msnbc.com/news/629714.asp?cp1=1 ) 3) On FAA closing the air corridor, see, for exact NEWSDAY quote, our backup at http://emperors-clothes.com/9-11backups/nd923.htm#a Or for original NEWSDAY text, scroll 2/3 of way down at http://www.newsday.com/ny-uspent232380681sep23.story ========================= Join our email list at http://emperors-clothes.com/f.htm. Receive about one article/day. Click here to email a link to this article to a friend. ======================================= Emperor's Clothes Urgently Needs Your Help! ======================================= In order for Emperor's Clothes to continue publishing we urgently need your help. Many of you have written thanking us for our exclusive interviews, original articles exposing official crimes and lies, and our analysis, published on Emperor's Clothes. We are very glad you find them useful. Since September 11 our readership has greatly increased. We now transfer over 1 gigabyte of data a day. But our income has not kept up. We are way behind on rent, Internet expenses, electricity and phones, which we use for interviews. We do not charge for articles, and we do not accept advertising. But we have to pay bills and in order to continue publishing, we urgently need the help of all our friends. Please send whatever contributions you can! $20, $50, $100, $500, $1000 or more. Every penny will be used to get articles to more people. You can make a donation using at https://www.paypal.com/xclick/business=emperors1000 at aol.com&no_shipping=1 You can make a credit card donation by going to our secure server at http://emperors-clothes.com/howyour.html#donate Or Mail a check to Emperor's Clothes, P.O. Box 610-321, Newton, MA 02461-0321. (USA) Or make a donation by phone at the donation line, (U.S.) 617 916-1705. Note: If you mail a donation or make one by secure server, please let us know by email at emperors1000 at aol.com to make sure we receive it. Thanks! Thank you for reading Emperor's Clothes. www.tenc.net * [Emperor's Clothes] This Website is mirrored at http://emperor.vwh.net/ and at http://globalresistance.com From Borba100 at aol.com Sat Jul 13 22:59:16 2002 From: Borba100 at aol.com (Borba100 at aol.com) Date: Sun, 14 Jul 2002 00:59:16 EDT Subject: [R-G] Chossudovsky Message-ID: <141.11669ec5.2a625f24@aol.com> In a message dated 7/12/02 3:54:28 AM Eastern Daylight Time, jmarshal at ol.com.au writes: << I may be missing the point, but how does someone having some crazy views mean they can't ever be correct. And how does the existence of crazy conspiracy theories lead us to conclude that all conspiracy theories are crazy? Did not Lenin and Co. conspire to establish communism in Russia? Didn't they succeed in having an effect? How come its inherently impossible for the powerful to also conspire against everyone else? >> Ahh, somebody who defies the norm by having brains in his head. In fact, conspiracy is the human condition - if by it we mean planning in private, which is done a zillion times a day. But of course, when one rules the world one would NEVER NEVER do such a naughty thing! Actually, this particular Empire is more into deception than most previous - witness the vast lying that comes out of our media every day (but all by coincidence, of course.) E.g.: My cohorts and I gave EVERY news agency in the world a copy of Milosevic's speech at Kosovo Field at the opening of the Hague "trial" in February. Not one of them reported (wait - the LA times did! - but way buried in the article...) that the prosecutor lied about the speech. Not one published the SCOOP that the rest were all lying... Chossudovsky may be wrong about many things - I think he is - but he is NOT wrong that they conspire. OF course they conspire. Jared From mstainsby at tao.ca Sun Jul 14 14:08:19 2002 From: mstainsby at tao.ca (Macdonald Stainsby) Date: Sun, 14 Jul 2002 13:08:19 -0700 Subject: [R-G] Where did all the protesters go? Message-ID: <009e01c22b72$330ab100$291f5318@vc.shawcable.net> Where did all the protesters go? After 11 September, the anti-globalisation movement was swept from the headlines. In a wide-ranging investigation, Mike Bygrave met key players from across the world and found that while their tactics have changed, their aims are intact - and the issues they confront haven't gone away Mike Bygrave Saturday July 13 2002 The Guardian A year ago at the Siege of Genoa, a quarter of a million protesters surrounded the annual meeting of G8 political leaders and many fought running battles with the Italian police. It was the peak of the anti-globalisation movement. Anti-globalisation seemed unstoppable, as the defining agenda of the new century and 'the most sweeping rebellion since the Sixties'. Where is it now? What changed after 11 September? Now the movement has all but vanished from the bulletins and the headlines, has it been dumped in the dustbin of history along with other failed slogans such as Solidarity with the Striking Miners or All Power to the Soviets? Was its brief stretch in the spotlight - two years from surfacing in Seattle to its apotheosis at Genoa - simply a passing fad, and its youthful, mainly middle-class army of protesters yesterday's children? Or is it all the fault of the media? Have we turned our backs on a still-vibrant radical movement and a key issue in the modern world - distracted by the World Trade Centre attacks and wars on terror? Globalisation is still with us, after all. From the state of Africa to world food supplies, trade disputes to asylum-seekers, privatisation to the environment, globalisation roars ahead. But what's happened to the anti-globalisers? In his tiny Oxford terraced house, writer-activist George Monbiot, a vigorous, eager man, speaks with the fluency of the university lecturer he used to be. He was surprisingly cheerful about the state of the movement: 'To the extent we had an effective dynamic before 11 September, we've had one since. That hasn't changed. What's changed is that we're less visible in the media and we've been caused to think about both our tactics and strategy. The big set-piece protests were very effective at drawing attention to the issues but they're not a good way to precipitate change.' 'Look,' Monbiot went on. 'It's like the Peasants' Revolt. The peasants revolt, they meet the king, the king promises them the earth and they all go home. Whereupon their leaders are hanged and nothing happens. If we follow that model, we're doomed, so you could say that 11 September, by putting a roadblock in the way of that model, did us a favour.' There was a moment in our conversation when both of us fumbled for words and fell into a brief, awkward silence. The same moment recurred with everyone I interviewed and it was over what name to use in talking about anti-globalisers. 'Anti-Globalisation Movement' turns out to be a name invented by journalists that has stuck. All the activists reject it, not least because it offers ammunition to opponents ('How can you be against globalisation? Are you against air travel? The internet? Cheap international phone calls?'). But no one can agree on a replacement. Suggestions include the 'Civil Society Movement', the 'Global Justice Movement', the 'Anti-Capitalist Movement', the 'Citizens Movement for World Democracy' or simply 'the Alternative Movement'. Mirroring the confusion over the name is the confusion many feel about the nature of the protest itself. What is the central core linking its assortment of fashionable causes? Amsterdam-based activist Susan George calls the Global Justice Movement (I'm going to take the plunge and choose a better name than anti-globalisation) 'a movement of popular education directed towards action'. Education about what? Well, globalisation for a start. Globalisation in its classic sense means the historical process by which the world moves ever closer together. That process began in the sixteenth century with the voyages of discovery and has gone on accelerating ever since. Some scholars argue that in its most recent phase, say since the early Seventies, globalisation has moved so fast and on such a scale that its quantitative leap has produced a qualitatively different world, one world at last, be it a global village or a global empire. Whether or not you agree with their analysis, it is meaningless to oppose globalisation in this sense, as it would be meaningless to oppose such great historical trends as the development of the nation state or the rise of science. The activists do not reject the underlying process: they attack the current form that process takes. As the American Centre for Economic and Policy Research puts it, these forms 'are not an inevitable outcome of technological change in communications, transportation and other industries'; but due to 'deliberate decisions by policymakers', which have 'shaped the process of globalisation in a certain way'. The way is economic globalisation led by multinational corporations chanting their mantra of free trade, freedom of investment and free movement of capital. All those 'frees' should make you suspicious, say the protesters. Someone has to pay. While the corporations present themselves as heralds of a gleaming global future for all, with a Nike sweatshirt on every back, a Starbucks moccha frappuccino in every hand and a Nissan Sentra in every garage, to the movement they are a modern Mongol horde, Genghis Khans in Armani suits, ravaging the world in general, and the Third World in particular, in pursuit of power and profit. 'I think the great majority of people who have joined this movement started off with a vague sense that something was wrong and not necessarily being able to put their finger on what it was,' Monbiot said. 'Having a sense that power was being removed from their hands, then gradually becoming more informed, often in very specific areas because what you find in our community of activism is some people who are very concerned about farming, those who are very interested in the environment, or labour standards, or privatisation of public services, or Third World debt. These interests tie together and the place they all meet is this issue of corporate power.' To Susan George, the aim of contemporary capitalism is 'all power to big business', a 'pure nineteenth-century agenda, an attempt to turn the clock back a hundred years'. 'When I'm asked why people join our group,' she told a recent forum at the London School of Economics, 'I say it's because of a feeling that, "the bastards have gone too far".' The statistics involved in globalisation are staggering. World trade rose 50 per cent over the past six years and is now worth over $17 billion a day. The volume of air freight flown out of the UK doubled over the past 10 years and is forecast to double again by 2010. One third of world trade is goods moved between different parts of the same corporations. Of the 100 largest economic entities in the world 51 are corporations. In 1979, 90 per cent of international transactions were trade and 10 per cent were in capital flow: today the position is the opposite, with $1.5 trillion traded every day in the foreign exchange markets. Meanwhile, non-oil primary commodity prices (the basic foods and raw materials produced by the Third World) fell 50 per cent in real terms over the past 20 years. The total external debt of developing countries rose from $90bn in 1970 to almost $2,000bn in 1998; 2.8bn of the world's 6bn people live on less than $2 a day; 1.2 bn on less than $1 a day. Between 30-35,000 children under five die every day of preventable diseases. The gap between the richest 20 per cent and the poorest 20 per cent of the world's population has doubled over the past 40 years, with the assets of the world's top three billionaires exceeding the GNP of all the 48 least developed countries (population: 600 million). The interaction of corporate globalisation with the majority of the world's people (those in the Third World) is mediated by three international institutions: the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, and the World Trade Organisation. The IMF and the World Bank are dominated by the US; the WTO by the US and the rest of the G8 countries, mainly Europe plus Japan. In the Eighties, these organisations began to pursue the three 'freedoms' - of trade, investment and capital flow, though not the fourth freedom that goes with them, namely the free movement of labour, or migration. This programme is known as the 'Washington consensus' or neo-liberalism in its international form. As a result, say the critics, when the disadvantages of globalisation started to become visible in the Nineties, the first place they appeared was in the poor countries in the Third World, forced to follow the policies of the IMF, the Bank and the WTO. In 1994, the WTO massively expanded its influence with the Uruguay round of trade negotiations, transforming the organisation, in Naomi Klein's phrase, 'from an international chamber of commerce into a quasi-world government'. In 1999, Trade Ministers met in Seattle intending to launch a new negotiating round. Instead, they were met by the mass protest that launched the Global Justice Movement on the world stage. The coalition includes a strong element from the Third World or 'the South' as it is now known (since the Second World consisting of middle-income countries, mainly the old Socialist bloc, has all but disappeared, slid back down the poverty ladder). The plight of the South is the movement's moral heart and the focus of much of its campaigning energy. Tony Juniper is director-designate of Friends of the Earth UK. Before the Global Justice Movement came into being, the environmentalists were the best-known and most broadly popular among its elements. Juniper explains the evolution in their thinking. 'For the past 10 years we've been locating ourselves more in the bigger economic debate and less in the "save the whales" type debate. Talking about rainforests led us into talking about Third World debt. Talking about climate change led us to talk about transnational corporations. The more you talk about these things, the more you realise the subject isn't the environment any more, it's the economy and the pressures on countries to do things that undercut any efforts they make to deal with environmental issues. By the time we got to Seattle, we were all campaigning on the same basic trend that was undermining everybody's efforts to achieve any progressive goals. That trend is the free market and privileges for big corporations and rich people at the expense of everything else.' The presence of the big environmental groups and other mainstream NGOs (non-governmental organisations), such as Oxfam or Christian Aid, in the ranks of the activists is what makes it impossible for Western governments and business leaders to dismiss the movement as a bunch of disaffected youth and window-smashing anarchists. Witness Tony Blair's put-down of the anti-globalisers as a 'travelling circus' of anarchists and a recent EU attempt to equate the protesters with terrorists. To the Western elite, globalisation is good for you. To the anti-globalisers, it's the villain of the piece, a sort of collective Dr No. Is there any way to judge between these two positions? One way is to look at a slightly different question - is global inequality increasing? Or has globalisation's advance over the past 20 years decreased global inequality as its supporters suggest? Small armies of economists study these questions. In pursuit of the answers, I attended a lecture by Professor Robert Wade at the London School of Economics. He began with the usual depressing figures: 80 per cent of world income goes to the top 20 per cent of people while 60 per cent of the world's population have to make do with 6 per cent of the income. Then he moved on to 'the thunder and lightning of current debate': whether the situation has been getting better or worse over the past 20 years. His answer was twofold: we don't know for sure; but the balance of the evidence is, it's getting worse and inequality is increasing. It turns out the statistics relied on by the pro-globalisers, led by the World Bank, are suspect. There are different methods for determining global poverty and inequality and the answers you get depend on the techniques you use. The World Bank, Wade implied, may have chosen the one that supports its own neo-liberal agenda. 'The Bank is a very political institution,' he said. Wade dealt equally briskly with the other part of the problem, moving on from poverty and inequality to whether economic globalisation is the best way to address them. The issue here is when, and on what terms, poor countries should open their markets. The World Bank's current poster boys are India and China, supposed to prove that globalising countries, ie those with liberal trade regimes, have grown richer while the non-globalisers have fallen behind. But 'the causal sequence in India and China was the opposite [of the one the Bank claims],' Wade said. 'These countries started growing fast before they liberalised. And they still have highly protective trade regimes, just as Taiwan and South Korea did before them. Trade liberalisation is not the motor of growth.' Most activists would go further than Wade. They claim 'free trade' and Third World debt are scams. Advertised as being the outcome of natural and benign economic laws that will eventually lift everyone out of poverty, they're actually tools of a system devised by the North to keep the southern countries in their place, as honeypots from which the rich countries buy raw materials and assembly-line labour on the cheap and to which they can sell manufactured goods, subsidised agricultural products and high-interest loans and privatising packages for huge profits. Trade agreements force the South to open its markets, dismantling tariffs and eliminating domestic subsidies. But the rich countries massively subsidise their own agriculture and maintain tariff barriers to things such as textiles. Any country threatening to resist gets a tug on its leash. The leash is Third World debt and the refusal by the North to 'forgive' it. Debt is the device to keep the poor in line. One developing country after another has toppled under the impact of rampant speculation and/or the IMF's 'structural adjustment policies' (slash public spending, cut and privatise services, service your debt): Mexico in 1994-95; South-East Asia in 1997-98; Russia in 1998-99. Argentina, the recipient of no less than nine IMF 'stabilisations', is the latest, and Brazil teeters on the brink. As the gap between rich and poor widens, so the space between crises shortens. Far from being a permanent model of economic efficiency, guided by Adam Smith's invisible hand, the world economic order is seen by activists as a form of political blackmail. Listening to Wade, I was listening to a moderate, mainstream voice, far from the wilder shores of anti-globalisation. The IMF itself has confessed that 'in recent decades nearly one-fifth of the world population has regressed - arguably one of the greatest economic failures of the twentieth century'. World Bank economist Branco Milanovic recently pondered 'how long such inequalities [of income] may persist in the face of ever closer contacts... ultimately the rich may have to live in gated enclaves while the poor roam the world outside those few enclaves'. This theme was part of the liberal response to 11 September - the connection between poverty and terrorism and the need to address the two together. But there was also a conservative response, led by the US, whose Trade Representative Robert Zoellick spoke of 'wiping out the stain of Seattle' and of free trade as 'promoting the values that lie at the heart of this protracted struggle', meaning the war on terror. The conservative agenda was: more neo-liberalism, more corporate globalisation, more 'structural adjustment'. This was the approach that prevailed with the Financial Times commenting 'no one has done more recently to favour the cause of trade liberalisation than Osama bin Laden'. The Global Justice Movement came under attack from both sides, condemned as (in the words of James Harding, a sympathetic FT reporter) 'the last gasp of the Old Left, a bunch of protectionists, a Wizard of Oz type movement with no substance, nothing behind the curtain'. In fact, the Global Justice Movement has too many policies, often worked out by the various pressure groups and NGOs. What everyone I spoke to in the movement did agree on was that the era of big street protests was over. Until an estimated 250,000-plus protesters turned up in Barcelona in March for the EU summit. As many as rallied at Genoa last year, only this time the (peaceful) protest was almost totally ignored by the media. Within the movement, last year's debate about demos - what should be done about the violence associated with them? - has moved on to a debate about what 'positive alternatives' to the status quo should be put forward. Many realise that a lot of individual policies don't make up for the lack of one overriding idea. Naomi Klein, author of the bestseller No Logo , is a movement star (it's been said the movement does not have leaders; it has celebrities instead, most of them women). In a recent article on her website, she writes of how for more than a year before 11 September, 'the largely symbolic activism outside summits and against individual corporations [had already been] challenged within movement circles... a new mood of impatience was already taking hold, an insistence on putting forward social and economic alternatives that address the roots of injustice as well as its symptoms ... our task, never more pressing, is to point out that there are more than two worlds available, to expose all the invisible worlds between the economic fundamentalism of "McWorld" and the religious fundamentalism of "Jihad".' If the dark side of globalisation first showed itself in the condition of the South, by the late Nineties there were splinters of discontent in the rich North. GM crops; private jails; political favours for campaign contributors; planning laws eviscerated by big developers; privatisations of public services; economic migrants qua asylum-seekers; multinational corporations opening and closing factories, creating and destroying thousands of jobs. The global protesters had chanted 'The World Is Not For Sale'. Now it was the turn of people in Europe and America to feel as if their home towns, and everyone in them, was For Sale. While no one argues that economic globalisation is the direct cause of all these phenomena, globalisation provides a way to understand them, a structure that links them one to another and to the plight of the Third World, and traces their roots in overweening corporate power. Seen in this context, the sudden eruption of the Global Justice Movement in 1999, becomes explicable. After all, the same thing has happened before, in the Sixties (and also in the early Nineties). But the Global Justice Movement differs from the Sixties in two crucial respects. One is that it is a genuinely global affair, involving the South as well as the North. The other is that it is 're-inventing the Sixties' the other way around. The Sixties began with the hippies, a social movement seeking an alternative lifestyle, then fell apart when it turned political after 1968 into Womens Lib, Gay Lib, and a thousand mutually hostile factions. The Global Justice Movement started as a political movement, with people from a great diversity of political backgrounds. 'Some are anarchists, some are Greens, some Christian, some old-fashioned liberals and some, like myself, don't know what we are and are still trying to find out,' says Monbiot. The challenge they face is to stay united while elaborating their own alternative. If the movement resembles the Sixties, is the war on terrorism their Vietnam? Some would say so. One result of 11 September has been for groups among the activists to form an anti-war movement. The leaders in this endeavour are the radicals. So far I have described the Global Justice Movement from its more moderate end, but it has a radical end too, as anyone who followed Seattle and Genoa well knows (though it is worth noting, as the Green Party's Chris Keen told me, 'the irony is that the only way we can get any media coverage is by being violent, which is sickening but true'). The movement takes its place in the broader history of the Left. Ever since the rise of conservative governments in the Seventies and Eighties, followed by the collapse of communism, the Left has been in disarray. Endless discussions went on about how, and on what basis, it could be revived. Suddenly, along came anti-globalisation, performing the impossible trick of uniting everybody. So is 'Global Justice' the socialism that dare not speak its name? Globalise Resistance, the British-based, formidably efficient organisers of conferences and demonstrations, was created by members of the Socialist Workers Party. In Europe, Susan George's ATTAC, which campaigns for the Tobin Tax, a small levy on international financial transactions, can sound like the Old Left or pragmatic policy wonks, depending on the day. Veteran rebels such as Tony Benn and Noam Chomsky have given their blessings to the protesters. The central tension in the movement reproduces the traditional tension in left politics between reformists and revolutionaries - are we looking to reform and regulate capitalism or to overthrow and replace it? Nevertheless, supporters are right to claim the movement is something new. The absence of leaders or hierarchical organisation; the emphasis on networks, modelled on the internet; the interest in participatory democracy rather than state socialism; even the willingness to experiment may not be new ideas per se but together, they make a genuinely new package. Guy Taylor is a member of Globalise Resistance and therefore on the more radical wing of the movement. 'Many in the movement aren't consciously anti-capitalist,' he admits, 'but I take the view this movement is making demands on the system that the system can't deliver. Therefore they'll de facto become anti-capitalist in the end.' Taylor sees what he prefers to call the 'Anti-Capitalist Movement's future as allied with the trade unions, since 'if you plug our movement and the labour movement together, you've got political dynamite.' My own informant among the real radicals requested anonymity, so we communicated by exchanging emails, in which he declined to answer questions but forwarded me selected texts that represented his position. The texts dismiss all attempts 'to give a "human face" to capitalism by regulating it at the global level... although [such attempts] present themselves as "pragmatic" or "result-oriented" they have not made any difference at all in the destructive nature of policies that are designed to satisfy the needs of global capital'. Instead, the texts recommend building autonomous and decentralised anti-capitalist networks' to create 'spaces' that are not capitalist. Stripped of jargon, this is a recipe for turning the movement itself, with its rolling mobilisations and communal values, into the basis of a new society. Tony Blair's 'travelling circus' will come to town, put down roots and put up the Big Top on the bypass next to Tesco's and B&Q. If that seems an unlikely scenario, it's no more unlikely than what is actually happening on the other side - among the globalists, the capitalists, or more simply, the Americans. Following the Clinton formula of 'trade, not aid' abroad (it was the Clinton regime that first slashed US foreign aid budgets to the bone) and the Republican programme of tax cuts and welfare reduction at home, America seems to have developed a system in which governments exist principally to promote and reward business. People show their moral worth by working hard and getting rich and countries show it via their economic growth. Those who fail, do so because they are lazy or immoral. Rather than being a problem, economic inequality is the essential motor of the whole system. Welfare/aid, let alone redistribution of wealth, are wrong because they interfere with this ethical and quasi-natural order, rewarding defective individuals or, on the international scale, defective societies, as in sub-Saharan Africa. Meanwhile, the success stories form the global elite among individuals and the global superpower among countries (ie the US), having proved their right to rule. This New American Order erects economic neo-liberalism and into a moral and political philosophy via a kind of revived Social Darwinism. It's the market as God-image, which claims to bring about the end of history and of politics, thus establishing itself as the final framework for human affairs. Between the 'no politics' espoused by people such as Frances Fukuyama ( The End of History ) and Thomas L. Friedman, the New York Times columnist and globalisation cheerleader, who argues that economic growth will abolish the need for political disputes, and my informant's 'total politics', lie two fundamentally opposed visions of the future. As one activist said, 'we're constantly winning the argument and losing the battle'. Over the past 12 months, the movement has lost most of its public profile. Barry Coates of the World Development Movement says: 'Obviously, it's much harder to attack the US and they deserve to be attacked on a lot of their positions. And it's harder to get people out on the streets when there's a perceived solidarity with government on a larger aim.' Harding of the Financial Times questions whether the movement can continue as a global force without the American radicals, now silenced by 11 September. Meanwhile, Western political and business leaders move their meetings to ever-more remote and heavily fortified places, out of reach of protesters. The latest WTO talks took place in Qatar, an impregnable oil statelet, with a US warship sitting in the harbour and the Qatar government restricting visas. While last year's G8 meeting was in Genoa, last month's was in Kananaskis, a dot in the Canadian wilderness. According to Monbiot, none of this matters because the struggle over corporate-led globalisation has come home. People can see it in their own towns. They can feel its effects for themselves. The state of public services such as the Tube, the NHS, the railways; privatisation; companies ending 'final salary' pension schemes while pensions for directors and chief executives soar; the crisis in farming, with small farmers being forced off the land; manufacturers such as Raleigh, Dyson and Royal Doulton (which makes those quintessentially British china figurines), shutting factories in the UK and moving production to the Third World. All these developments are related to economic globalisation - or, to call the same thing by a different name, to triumphant laissez-faire capitalism on the march. Then there's the General Agreement on Trade in Services, now being negotiated in Geneva, which will open up public services to the multinationals to run; any attempt to keep them out could count as 'unnecessary barriers' to trade and be illegal. As David Hartridge, ex-director of the Services Division at the WTO, has said, 'Gats will speed up the process of [economic] liberalisation and make it irreversible'. To the Global Justice Movement, Gats shows how calls for free trade and investment, economic growth and universal consumption hide a different agenda: to advance corporate power while rolling back the state and democracy. President Bush, playing fast and loose with his 'free trade' policy, slapping import duties on steel and hugely increasing subsidies to US agribusiness, while offering the Third World the sop of limited, conditional increases in the derisory US aid budget, only reveals the bankruptcy of 'globalisation as usual'. Instead of pushing ahead with Gats and its sibling acronyms, say the activists, capitalism needs to reform itself, as it has done before, for example with the US New Deal and the creation of European welfare states. Many of those reforms were as pragmatic as the movement's ideas are today. Big business fought them as bitterly then as now. Others in the movement argue capitalism is beyond reform. The radicals have a strong voice and a good argument. Historically, change has happened only in the aftermath of a major crisis. Is economic globalisation destined to end in global crisis? Argentina has gone. Japan is looking very rocky, as are Brazil and the rest of Latin America. Sub-Saharan Africa as a whole has been written off. The stock markets are sinking. Islamic fundamentalism won't vanish any time soon. There are fears of a wider war. Hold on to your hats, it's going to be a bumpy ride. ------------------------------------------- Macdonald Stainsby http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/rad-green http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/leninist-international -- In the contradiction lies the hope. --Bertholt Brecht From pieinsky at igc.org Sun Jul 14 18:58:52 2002 From: pieinsky at igc.org (Jay Moore) Date: Sun, 14 Jul 2002 20:58:52 -0400 Subject: [R-G] Pilger's Latest Message-ID: <004001c22b9a$d1866900$f0321e40@bypass.com> The great charade As the West prepares for an assault on Iraq, John Pilger argues that 'war on terror' is a smokescreen created by the ultimate terrorist ... America itself John Pilger Sunday July 14, 2002 The Observer (UK) It is 10 months since 11 September, and still the great charade plays on. Having appropriated our shocked response to that momentous day, the rulers of the world have since ground our language into a paean of cliches and lies about the 'war on terrorism' - when the most enduring menace, and source of terror, is them. The fanatics who attacked America came from Saudi Arabia and Egypt. No bombs fell on these American protectorates. Instead, more than 5,000 civilians have been bombed to death in stricken Afghanistan, the latest a wedding party of 40 people, mostly women and children. Not a single al-Qaeda leader of importance has been caught. Following this 'stunning victory', hundreds of prisoners were shipped to an American concentration camp in Cuba, where they have been held against all the conventions of war and international law. No evidence of their alleged crimes has been produced, and the FBI confirms only one is a genuine suspect. In the United States, more than 1,000 people of Muslim background have 'disappeared'; none has been charged. Under the draconian Patriot Act, the FBI's new powers include the authority to go into libraries and ask who is reading what. Meanwhile, the Blair government has made fools of the British Army by insisting they pursue warring tribesmen: exactly what squaddies in putties and pith helmets did over a century ago when Lord Curzon, Viceroy of India, described Afghanistan as one of the 'pieces on a chessboard upon which is being played out a great game for the domination of the world'. There is no war on terrorism; it is the great game speeded up. The difference is the rampant nature of the superpower, ensuring infinite dangers for us all. Having swept the Palestinians into the arms of the supreme terrorist Ariel Sharon, the Christian Right fundamentalists running the plutocracy in Washington, now replenish their arsenal in preparation for an attack on the 22 million suffering people of Iraq. Should anyone need reminding, Iraq is a nation held hostage to an American-led embargo every bit as barbaric as the dictatorship over which Iraqis have no control. Contrary to propaganda orchestrated from Washington and London, the coming attack has nothing to do with Saddam Hussein's 'weapons of mass destruction', if these exist at all. The reason is that America wants a more compliant thug to run the world's second greatest source of oil. The drum-beaters rarely mention this truth, and the people of Iraq. Everyone is Saddam Hussein, the demon of demons. Four years ago, the Pentagon warned President Clinton that an all-out attack on Iraq might kill 'at least' 10,000 civilians: that, too, is unmentionable. In a sustained propaganda campaign to justify this outrage, journalists on both sides of the Atlantic have been used as channels, 'conduits', for a stream of rumours and lies. These have ranged from false claims about an Iraqi connection with the anthrax attacks in America to a discredited link between the leader of the 11 September hijacks and Iraqi intelligence. When the attack comes, these consorting journalists will share responsibility for the crime. It was Tony Blair who served notice that imperialism's return journey to respectability was under way. Hark, the Christian gentleman-bomber's vision of a better world for 'the starving, the wretched, the dispossessed, the ignorant, those living in want and squalor from the deserts of northern Africa to the slums of Gaza to the mountain ranges of Afghanistan.' Hark, his 'abiding' concern for the 'human rights of the suffering women of Afghanistan' as he colluded with Bush who, as the New York Times reported, 'demanded the elimination of truck convoys that provide much of the food and other supplies to Afghanistan's civilian population'. Hark his compassion for the 'dispossessed' in the 'slums of Gaza', where Israeli gunships, manufactured with vital British parts, fire their missiles into crowded civilian areas. As Frank Furedi reminds us in The New Ideology of Imperialism , it is not long ago 'that the moral claims of imperialism were seldom questioned in the West. Imperialism and the global expansion of the western powers were represented in unambiguously positive terms as a major contributor to human civilisation.' The quest went wrong when it was clear that fascism was imperialism, too, and the word vanished from academic discourse. In the best Stalinist tradition, imperialism no longer existed. Today, the preferred euphemism is 'civilisation'; or if an adjective is required, 'cultural'. >From Italy's Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, an ally of crypto-fascists, to impeccably liberal commentators, the new imperialists share a concept whose true meaning relies on a xenophobic or racist comparison with those who are deemed uncivilised, culturally inferior and might challenge the 'values' of the West. Watch the 'debates' on Newsnight. The question is how best 'we' can deal with the problem of 'them'. For much of the western media, especially those commentators in thrall to and neutered by the supercult of America, the most salient truths remain taboos. Professor Richard Falk, of Cornell university, put it succinctly some years ago. Western foreign policy, he wrote, is propagated in the media 'through a self righteous, one-way moral/legal screen [with] positive images of western values and innocence portrayed as threatened, validating a campaign of unrestricted violence'. Perhaps the most important taboo is the longevity of the United States as both a terrorist state and a haven for terrorists. That the US is the only state on record to have been condemned by the World Court for international terrorism (in Nicaragua) and has vetoed a UN Security Council resolution calling on governments to observe international law, is unmentionable. 'In the war against terrorism,' said Bush from his bunker following 11 September, 'we're going to hunt down these evil-doers wherever they are, no matter how long it takes.' Strictly speaking, it should not take long, as more terrorists are given training and sanctuary in the United States than anywhere on earth. They include mass murderers, torturers, former and future tyrants and assorted international criminals. This is virtually unknown to the American public, thanks to the freest media on earth. There is no terrorist sanctuary to compare with Florida, currently governed by the President's brother, Jeb Bush. In his book Rogue State , former senior State Department official Bill Blum describes a typical Florida trial of three anti-Castro terrorists, who hijacked a plane to Miami at knifepoint. 'Even though the kidnapped pilot was brought back from Cuba to testify against the men,' he wrote, 'the defence simply told the jurors the man was lying, and the jury deliberated for less than an hour before acquitting the defendants.' General Jose Guillermo Garcia has lived comfortably in Florida since the 1990s. He was head of El Salvador's military during the 1980s when death squads with ties to the army murdered thousands of people. General Prosper Avril, the Haitian dictator, liked to display the bloodied victims of his torture on television. When he was overthrown, he was flown to Florida by the US Government. Thiounn Prasith, Pol Pot's henchman and apologist at the United Nations, lives in New York. General Mansour Moharari, who ran the Shah of Iran's notorious prisons, is wanted in Iran, but untroubled in the United States. Al-Qaeda's training camps in Afghanistan were kindergartens compared with the world's leading university of terrorism at Fort Benning in Georgia. Known until recently as the School of the Americas, it trained tyrants and some 60,000 Latin American special forces, paramilitaries and intelligence agents in the black arts of terrorism. In 1993, the UN Truth Commission on El Salvador named the army officers who had committed the worst atrocities of the civil war; two-thirds of them had been trained at Fort Benning. In Chile, the school's graduates ran Pinochet's secret police and three principal concentration camps. In 1996, the US government was forced to release copies of the school's training manuals, which recommended blackmail, torture, execution and the arrest of witnesses' relatives. In recent months, the Bush regime has torn up the Kyoto treaty, which would ease global warming, to which the United States is the greatest contributor. It has threatened the use of nuclear weapons in 'pre-emptive' strikes (a threat echoed by Defence Minister Geoffrey Hoon). It has tried to abort the birth of an international criminal court. It has further undermined the United Nations by blocking a UN investigation of the Israeli assault on a Palestinian refugee camp; and it has ordered the Palestinians to replace their elected leader with an American stooge. At summit conferences in Canada and Indonesia, Bush's people have blocked hundreds of millions of dollars going to the most deprived people on earth, those without clean water and electricity. These facts will no doubt beckon the inane slur of 'anti-Americanism'. This is the imperial prerogative: the last refuge of those whose contortion of intellect and morality demands a loyalty oath. As Noam Chomsky has pointed out, the Nazis silenced argument and criticism with 'anti German' slurs. Of course, the United States is not Germany; it is the home of some of history's greatest civil rights movements, such as the epic movement in the 1960s and 1970s. I was in the US last week and glimpsed that other America, the one rarely seen among the media and Hollywood stereotypes, and what was clear was that it was stirring again. The other day, in an open letter to their compatriots and the world, almost 100 of America's most distinguished names in art, literature and education wrote this: 'Let it not be said that people in the United States did nothing when their government declared a war without limit and instituted stark new measures of repression. We believe that questioning, criticism and dissent must be valued and protected. Such rights are always contested and must be fought for. We, too, watched with shock the horrific events of September 11. But the mourning had barely begun when our leaders launched a spirit of revenge. The government now openly prepares to wage war on Iraq - a country that has no connection with September 11. 'We say this to the world. Too many times in history people have waited until it was too late to resist. We draw on the inspiration of those who fought slavery and all those other great causes of freedom that began with dissent. We call on all like-minded people around the world to join us.' It is time we joined them. ? This is a revised extract from The New Rulers of the World , by John Pilger, published by Verso. To order a copy, for ?8 plus p&p (rrp ?10), call the Observer Books Service on 0870 066 7989. From info at cinox.demon.co.uk Mon Jul 15 08:29:12 2002 From: info at cinox.demon.co.uk (Tim Murphy) Date: Mon, 15 Jul 2002 15:29:12 +0100 Subject: [R-G] Michel Chossudovsky on H.A.A.R.P. Message-ID: H.A.A.R.P. It's not only greenhouse gas emissions: Washington's new world order weapons have the ability to trigger climate change. By Michel Chossudovsky - Professor of Economics, University of Ottawa and TFF associate, author of The Globalization of Poverty, second edition, Common Courage Press The important debate on global warming under UN auspices provides but a partial picture of climate change; in addition to the devastating impacts of greenhouse gas emissions on the ozone layer, the World's climate can now be modified as part of a new generation of sophisticated "non-lethal weapons." Both the Americans and the Russians have developed capabilities to manipulate the World's climate. In the US, the technology is being perfected under the High-frequency Active Aural Research Program (HAARP) as part of the ("Star Wars") Strategic Defence Initiative (SDI). Recent scientific evidence suggests that HAARP is fully operational and has the ability of potentially triggering floods, droughts, hurricanes and earthquakes. HAARP IS A MASS DESTRUCTIVE WEAPON - NOT PART OF ANY NEGOTIATIONS >From a military standpoint, HAARP is a weapon of mass destruction. Potentially, it constitutes an instrument of conquest capable of selectively destabilising agricultural and ecological systems of entire regions. While there is no evidence that this deadly technology has been used, surely the United Nations should be addressing the issue of "environmental warfare" alongside the debate on the climatic impacts of greenhouse gases. Despite a vast body of scientific knowledge, the issue of deliberate climatic manipulations for military use has never been explicitly part of the UN agenda on climate change. Neither the official delegations nor the environmental action groups participating in the Hague Conference on Climate Change (CO6) (November 2000) have raised the broad issue of "weather warfare" or "environmental modification techniques (ENMOD)" as relevant to an understanding of climate change. The clash between official negotiators, environmentalists and American business lobbies has centered on Washington's outright refusal to abide by commitments on carbon dioxide reduction targets under the 1997 Kyoto protocol.(1) The impacts of military technologies on the World's climate are not an object of discussion or concern. Narrowly confined to greenhouse gases, the ongoing debate on climate change serves Washington's strategic and defense objectives. "WEATHER WARFARE" World renowned scientist Dr. Rosalie Bertell confirms that "US military scientists are working on weather systems as a potential weapon. The methods include the enhancing of storms and the diverting of vapor rivers in the Earth's atmosphere to produce targeted droughts or floods."(2) Already in the 1970s, former National Security advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski had foreseen in his book "Between Two Ages" that: "Technology will make available, to the leaders of major nations, techniques for conducting secret warfare, of which only a bare minimum of the security forces need be appraised... Techniques of weather modification could be employed to produce prolonged periods of drought or storm. " Marc Filterman, a former French military officer, outlines several types of "unconventional weapons" using radio frequencies. He refers to "weather war," indicating that the U.S. and the Soviet Union had already "mastered the know-how needed to unleash sudden climate changes (hurricanes, drought) in the early 1980s." (3) These technologies make it "possible to trigger atmospheric disturbances by using Extremely Low Frequency (ELF) radar [waves]." (4) A simulation study of future defense "scenarios" commissioned for the US Air Force calls for: "US aerospace forces to 'own the weather' by capitalizing on emerging technologies and focusing development of those technologies to war-fighting applications." From enhancing friendly operations or disrupting those of the enemy via small-scale tailoring of natural weather patterns to complete dominance of global communications and counterspace control, weather-modification offers the war fighter a wide-range of possible options to defeat or coerce an adversary. In the United States, weather-modification will likely become a part of national security policy with both domestic and international applications. Our government will pursue such a policy, depending on its interests, at various levels. (5) THE HIGH-FREQUENCY ACTIVE AURAL RESEARCH PROGRAM - HAARP The High-Frequency Active Aural Research Program (HAARP) based in Gokoma Alaska-jointly managed by the US Air Force and the US Navy-is part of a new generation of sophisticated weaponry under the US Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI). Operated by the Air Force Research Laboratory's Space Vehicles Directorate, HAARP constitutes a system of powerful antennas capable of creating "controlled local modifications of the ionosphere". Scientist Dr. Nicholas Begich-actively involved in the public campaign against HAARP-describes HAARP as: "A super-powerful radiowave-beaming technology that lifts areas of the ionosphere (upper layer of the atmosphere) by focusing a beam and heating those areas. Electromagnetic waves then bounce back onto earth and penetrate everything-living and dead." (6) Dr. Rosalie Bertell depicts HAARP as "a gigantic heater that can cause major disruption in the ionosphere, creating not just holes, but long incisions in the protective layer that keeps deadly radiation from bombarding the planet." (7) MISLEADING PUBLIC OPINION HAARP has been presented to public opinion as a program of scientific and academic research. US military documents seem to suggest, however, that HAARP's main objective is to "exploit the ionosphere for Department of Defense purposes." (8) Without explicitly referring to the HAARP program, a US Air Force study points to the use of "induced ionospheric modifications" as a means of altering weather patterns as well as disrupting enemy communications and radar.(9) According to Dr. Rosalie Bertell, HAARP is part of a integrated weapons' system, which has potentially devastating environmental consequences: "It is related to fifty years of intensive and increasingly destructive programs to understand and control the upper atmosphere. It would be rash not to associate HAARP with the space laboratory construction which is separately being planned by the United States. HAARP is an integral part of a long history of space research and development of a deliberate military nature. The military implications of combining these projects is alarming. The ability of the HAARP / Spacelab/ rocket combination to deliver very large amount of energy, comparable to a nuclear bomb, anywhere on earth via laser and particle beams, are frightening. The project is likely to be "sold" to the public as a space shield against incoming weapons, or, for the more gullible, a device for repairing the ozone layer. (10) In addition to weather manipulation, HAARP has a number of related uses: "HAARP could contribute to climate change by intensively bombarding the atmosphere with high-frequency rays. Returning low-frequency waves at high intensity could also affect people's brains, and effects on tectonic movements cannot be ruled out. (11). More generally, HAARP has the ability of modifying the World's electro-magnetic field. It is part of an arsenal of "electronic weapons" which US military researchers consider a "gentler and kinder warfare". (12) WEAPONS OF THE NEW WORLD ORDER HAARP is part of the weapons arsenal of the New World Order under the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI). From military command points in the US, entire national economies could potentially be destabilized through climatic manipulations. More importantly, the latter can be implemented without the knowledge of the enemy, at minimal cost and without engaging military personnel and equipment as in a conventional war. The use of HAARP-if it were to be applied-could have potentially devastating impacts on the World's climate. Responding to US economic and strategic interests, it could be used to selectively modify climate in different parts of the World resulting in the destabilization of agricultural and ecological systems. It is also worth noting that the US Department of Defense has allocated substantial resources to the development of intelligence and monitoring systems on weather changes. NASA and the Department of Defense's National Imagery and Mapping Agency (NIMA) are working on "imagery for studies of flooding, erosion, land-slide hazards, earthquakes, ecological zones, weather forecasts, and climate change" with data relayed from satellites. (13) POLICY INERTIA OF THE UNITED NATIONS According to the Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) signed at the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro: "States have, in accordance with the Charter of the United Nations and the principles of international law, the responsibility to ensure that activities within their jurisdiction or control do not cause damage to the environment of other States or of areas beyond the limits of national jurisdiction." (14). It is also worth recalling that an international Convention ratified by the UN General Assembly in 1997 bans "military or other hostile use of environmental modification techniques having widespread, long-lasting or severe effects." (15) Both the US and the Soviet Union were signatories to the Convention. The Convention defines "environmental modification techniques" as referring to any technique for changing-through the deliberate manipulation of natural processes-the dynamics, composition or structure of the earth, including its biota, lithosphere, hydrosphere and atmosphere or of outer space." (16) Why then did the UN-disregarding the 1977 ENMOD Convention as well as its own charter-decide to exclude from its agenda climatic changes resulting from military programs? EUROPEAN PARLIAMENT ACKNOWLEDGES IMPACT OF HAARP In February 1998, responding to a report of Mrs. Maj. Britt Theorin-Swedish MEP and longtime peace advocate--, the European Parliament's Committee on Foreign Affairs, Security and Defense Policy held public hearings in Brussels on the HAARP program.(17) The Committee's "Motion for Resolution" submitted to the European Parliament: "Considers HAARP by virtue of its far-reaching impact on the environment to be a global concern and calls for its legal, ecological and ethical implications to be examined by an international independent body; [the Committee] regrets the repeated refusal of the United States Administration to give evidence to the public hearing into the environmental and public risks [of&] the HAARP program." (18.) The Committee's request to draw up a "Green Paper" on "the environmental impacts of military activities", however, was casually dismissed on the grounds that the European Commission lacks the required jurisdiction to delve into "the links between environment and defense". (19) Brussels was anxious to avoid a showdown with Washington. FULLY OPERATIONAL While there is no concrete evidence of HAARP having been used, scientific findings suggest that it is at present fully operational. What this means is that HAARP could potentially be applied by the US military to selectively modify the climate of an "unfriendly nation" or "rogue state" with a view to destabilizing its national economy. Agricultural systems in both developed and developing countries are already in crisis as a result of New World Order policies including market deregulation, commodity dumping, etc. Amply documented, IMF and World Bank "economic medicine" imposed on the Third World and the countries of the former Soviet block has largely contributed to the destabilization of domestic agriculture. In turn, the provisions of the World Trade Organization (WTO) have supported the interests of a handful of Western agri-biotech conglomerates in their quest to impose genetically modified (GMO) seeds on farmers throughout the World. It is important to understand the linkage between the economic, strategic and military processes of the New World Order. In the above context, climatic manipulations under the HAARP program (whether accidental or deliberate) would inevitably exacerbate these changes by weakening national economies, destroying infrastructure and potentially triggering the bankruptcy of farmers over vast areas. Surely national governments and the United Nations should address the possible consequences of HAARP and other "non-lethal weapons" on climate change. NOTES 1. The latter calls for nations to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by an average of 5.2 percent to become effective between 2008 and 2012. See Background of Kyoto Protocol at http://www.globalwarming.net/gw11.html. 2. The Times, London, 23 November 2000. 3. Intelligence Newsletter, December 16, 1999. 4. Ibid. 5. Air University of the US Air Force, AF 2025 Final Report, http://www.au.af.mil/au/2025/ (emphasis added). 6. Nicholas Begich and Jeane Manning, The Military's Pandora's Box, Earthpulse Press, http://www.xyz.net/~nohaarp/earthlight.html. See also the HAARP home page at http://www.haarp.alaska.edu/). 7. See Briarpatch, January, 2000. (emphasis added). 8. Quoted in Begich and Manning, op cit. 9. Air University, op cit. 10. Rosalie Bertell, Background of the HAARP Program, 5 November, 1996, http://www.globalpolicy.org/socecon/envronmt/weapons.htm 11. Begich and Manning, op cit. 12. Don Herskovitz, Killing Them Softly, Journal of Electronic Defense, August 1993. (emphasis added). According to Herskovitz, "electronic warfare" is defined by the US Department of Defense as "military action involving the use of electromagnetic energy?" The Journal of Electronic Defense at http://www.jedefense.com/ has published a range of articles on the application of electronic and electromagnetic military technologies. 13. Military Space, 6 December, 1999. 14. UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, New York, 1992. See complete text at http://www.unfccc.de/resource/conv/conv_002.html, (emphasis added). 15. See Associated Press, 18 May 1977. 16. Environmental Modification Ban Faithfully Observed, States Parties Declare, UN Chronicle, July, 1984, Vol. 21, p. 27. 17. European Report, 7 February 1998. 18. European Parliament, Committee on Foreign Affairs, Security and Defense Policy, Brussels, doc. no. A4-0005/99, 14 January 1999. 19. EU Lacks Jurisdiction to Trace Links Between Environment and Defense, European Report, 3 February 1999. Copyright by Michel Chossudovsky, Ottawa, November, 2000. All rights reserved. Permission is granted to post this text on non-commercial community internet sites, provided the essay remains intact and the copyright note is displayed. To publish this text in printed and/or other forms contact the author at chossudovsky at videotron.ca, fax: 1-514-4256224. Michel Chossudovsky Department of Economics, University of Ottawa, Ottawa, K1N6N5 Voice box: 1-613-562-5800, ext. 1415 Fax: 1-514-425-6224 E-Mail: chossudovsky at videotron.ca; (altern. E-mail: chossudovsky at sprint.ca) > On the Globalisation of Poverty and the Financial Crisis: > "Seattle and Beyond: Disarming the New World Order" > http://www.transnational.org/forum/meet/seattle.html > Global Poverty in the Late 20th Century > http://www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/intrel/chossu.htm > http://www.transnational.org/features/chossu_worldbank.html > http://www.transnational.org/features/g7solution.html > http://www.heise.de/tp/english/special/eco/ > http://heise.xlink.de/tp/english/special/eco/6099/1.html#anchor1 Recent articles on Yugoslavia at: http://emperors-clothes.com/artbyauth.html#C NATO?s Reign of Terror in Kosovo http://members.xoom.com/_XOOM/yugo_archive/ 19990816mcpaper.htm Overview of the War: http://www.transnational.org/features/Yuoverview.html On the role of the KLA: http://www.heise.de/tp/english/inhalt/co/2743/1.html Breakup of Yugoslavia: http://www.hartford-hwp.com/archives/62/022.html --------------------- From LAMZ at sympatico.ca Mon Jul 15 13:18:45 2002 From: LAMZ at sympatico.ca (Lysander Zimmerman) Date: Mon, 15 Jul 2002 15:18:45 -0400 Subject: [R-G] Michel Chossudovsky on H.A.A.R.P. References: Message-ID: <005901c22c34$70bbc2b0$33378d18@Indy1> This is a great article. I put it in the links section of our article on chemtrails: http://hamilton.indymedia.org:8081/front.php3?article_id=1793 Peace, LZ ----- Original Message ----- From: "Tim Murphy" To: Sent: Monday, July 15, 2002 10:29 AM Subject: [R-G] Michel Chossudovsky on H.A.A.R.P. > H.A.A.R.P. > > It's not only greenhouse gas emissions: Washington's new world order weapons > have the ability to trigger climate change. > > By Michel Chossudovsky - Professor of Economics, University of Ottawa and > TFF associate, author of The Globalization of Poverty, second edition, > Common Courage Press > From mstainsby at dojo.tao.ca Mon Jul 15 13:54:06 2002 From: mstainsby at dojo.tao.ca (Macdonald Stainsby) Date: Mon, 15 Jul 2002 19:54:06 -0000 Subject: [R-G] The Women of FARC-EP Message-ID: <20020715195406.AAE5F17DC45@dojo.tao.ca> Guardian. 14 July 2002. Girls go to war as Colombia's frontline killers. BOGOTA -- The fighting, said General Mora of the Colombian Army, had been intense and bloody. But when his soldiers collected the bodies of rebels killed last week near the town of La Plata, they were surprised to find that most were young women. The women had been fighting for the country's largest guerrilla group, the Armed Revolutionary Forces of Colombia, the Farc. It is training girls as young as 13 to be killers, and has used women to hijack airliners. The battles near La Plata was yet another round in Colombia's 38-year civil war that kills around 3,500 people every year. At least 52 people, soldiers and rebels, were killed near the southern town last week, as five equally vicious fights raged elsewhere. The presence of so many female combatants at La Plata shows Farc is increasingly forced to rely on its women warriors as the intensifying war puts the rebels under greater pressure. At least one third of Farc's 18,000 soldiers are now women. Hundreds more are being recruited as it gears up for a greater challenge from an expanding army expecting to receive more military aid and training from the United States as part of Washington's wars against drugs and terrorism. The US State department calls the Farc 'the most dangerous terrorist group in our hemisphere.'. One army chief, General Gilberto Rocha, said the rebel offensive is 'the escalation that they have traditionally done when a government administration is about to end'. A new president is to be inaugurated on 7 August. The president-in-waiting, Alvaro Uribe, who has been accused of having links with right-wing paramilitary groups, won the election by promising a bigger army and to wipe out the Farc. The guerrillas' response has been a massive recruitment drive of its own in which hundreds of men and women are being signed up. The Farc is as close to an 'equal opportunities' organisation as exists in macho Colombia. On each front line, Farc women, or guerrilleras, fight alongside men and are expected to kill or be killed. Many are teenagers, but there are no concessions to age or gender. The women wear regulation uniforms, carry AK-47 machine guns and machetes, and must march long distances like the men, carrying their own equipment. The guerrillas' seven-strong leadership is all male, but women are rising through the ranks, some winning 'commandante' titles. One, Olga Lucia Marin, was a Farc ambassador to long peace talks which ended last February. Typically, females join up during their teens. Some sign up to escape the boredom of villages without opportunity, or the drudgery of marriage in which some women are little more than chattels. Others are seduced by Farc's revolutionary ideals. Life in the camps is highly disciplined. Fighters must ask permission to go to the toilet, contraception is mandatory, pregnancy forbidden. Women may have relationships, but only with fellow Farc fighters and only with permission from their commanding officer. Men who sexually assault women are executed. One former Farc fighter told The Observer the guerrilla commanders believe that women are braver fighters than men and kill more cleanly. On the Farc website, one female fighter Rubiela talks of being scared of battle. 'You always feel fear, but you are not alone. You are with your compneros, and they encourage you a lot.' Another, Sonia, says: 'If we lower our guard, they'll kill us. If they aren't careful, we kill them, though we know we are fighting against our own people. That's why we prefer them to surrender.' -- Macdonald Stainsby, External Relations Co-ordinator, Douglas College Students Union. ** In the contradiction lies the hope. --Bertholt Brecht. *** "`Order rules in Berlin.' You stupid lackeys! Your `order' is built on sand. Tomorrow the revolution will rear ahead once more and announce to your horror amid the brass of trumpets: `I was, I am, I always will be!'" -Rosa Luxemburg, 1918. From LAMZ at sympatico.ca Mon Jul 15 14:20:04 2002 From: LAMZ at sympatico.ca (Lysander Zimmerman) Date: Mon, 15 Jul 2002 16:20:04 -0400 Subject: [R-G] US planning to recruit one in 24 Americans as citizen spies Message-ID: <002e01c22c3d$036a23b0$33378d18@Indy1> Welcome to the manufactured crisis! Welcome to the police-state! Welcome to the New World Order! __________________________________________________________ US planning to recruit one in 24 Americans as citizen spies By Ritt Goldstein July 15 2002 The Bush Administration aims to recruit millions of United States citizens as domestic informants in a program likely to alarm civil liberties groups. The Terrorism Information and Prevention System, or TIPS, means the US will have a higher percentage of citizen informants than the former East Germany through the infamous Stasi secret police. The program would use a minimum of 4 per cent of Americans to report "suspicious activity". Full article here: http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2002/07/14/1026185141232.html From hunterbadbear at earthlink.net Tue Jul 16 10:56:22 2002 From: hunterbadbear at earthlink.net (Hunter Gray) Date: Tue, 16 Jul 2002 10:56:22 -0600 Subject: [R-G] Kennewick: Great White Hope? Negative. Message-ID: <000c01c22ce9$ba3f7c00$8070fa43@intel> THOUGHTS ON THE KENNEWICK MAN CONTROVERSY [HUNTER GRAY JULY 16 2002] Note by Hunterbear: The fervor that has enveloped the archaic Kennewick "find" -- Native people who wish the remains interred in solemn and traditional fashion [my view], the Anthros who want Him for scientific and endless examination, Anglo racists who see an opportunity to try [however hopelessly] to undermine Native "aboriginal title" in the context of the Western Hemisphere -- does say a great deal about the enduring turbulence and cultural diversity within what's now called the United States. Kennewick Man's remains were found in the Kennewick Park region of the Columbia River Basin in July, 1996. Soon thereafter, following Federal law, the US Army Corps of Engineers ruled that the remains should be returned to the local Native nations for traditional burial. This was immediately challenged by some Anthros who, contending that Kennewick is Caucasian [or at least non-Mongoloid or racially ambiguous], should be studied. Things have been in court, off and on, for a long time -- and a Federal magistrate at Portland has promised a definitive ruling by Labor Day, 2002. The Native nations, in firm coalition around this issue, are the Nez Perce, Yakima, Colville, Wanapum and Umatilla. I would expect them to be the victors in this -- with the ultimate victor being traditional propriety. I take the creation explanations of the respective Native tribal nations [including my own] in symbolic fashion. And it's really quite obvious that the Western Hemisphere was originally populated by Mongoloid hunters and their families who crossed over the then-existent Bering "land bridge" from Siberia and environs. It's also obvious that these migrations occurred over eons -- extending much further back into time than most scientists, until quite recently, were willing to concede. Again, it's obvious that the Western Hemisphere was also "visited" regularly by a few others over this vast span of time -- and that these travelers were either absorbed into the generally hospitable Native population [probably the most common situation], killed [probably happened occasionally, too] or returned [as per the Vikings] with some interesting tales. [The Old Norse Edda -- Great Saga with substantial pre-Christian theological components -- and certain dimensions of Wabanaki mythology in the far Northeast -- have some fascinating common ingredients.] More to the point, the essentially Mongoloid population of the Siberian region and environs has always contained many variations in its own right -- and some of those, in the more westerly regions, have always mixed with Caucasian elements. Anyway, by far and away, the people who came to traditionally populate the Hemisphere were Mongoloid -- and that's the Native situation today. [Decades ago, Soviet scientists established that some Native Americans crossed into Siberia and eventually wound up in the region just east of the Ural Mountains.] One further note. I would certainly not dispute the existence of intelligent and friendly ET life across our Great Universe. But the idea floated by some -- e.g., Erik Von Daniken -- that the great pyramids of Teotihuac?n and Tula and Tenotchitlan of Mexico and the Mayan works of Central America and the impressive creations of the Inca of the Andes were all laid out by ETs is total nonsense: charlatanism, mixed liberally with commercialism and crackpotism. And, as some do, to attribute those to shipwrecked Egyptian or Phoenician sailors [who were also apparently and coincidentally, gifted architects ] is likewise ridiculous. For better [most of the time] but sometimes for worse, everything in Old America was created by Native people. Let's get Kennewick Man properly and traditionally buried -- and get on with the urgent contemporary challenges of great import to Natives and friends. Hunter Gray [Hunterbear] Great White Hope? Kennewick Man, the Facts, the Fantasies and the Stakes By Bruce E. Johansen ? 1999 Native Americas http://nativeamericas.aip.cornell.edu/spr99features/johansenspr99.html Was he European? Norse, perhaps? Was he Asiatic, perhaps Ainu, the indigenous people of Japan? Was he Native American, from the earth of Turtle Island (North America)? Is Kennewick Man, perhaps, a combination of the worldly elements of his own time, a reminder that human origins in the Americas are much more complex, much more multicultural, than has been commonly supposed? If "Kennewick Man," a 9,300-year old, nearly complete skeleton of roughly 350 pieces found in eastern Washington during 1996, could come to life, he might be surprised to find that he has become the object of an exercise in racial heritage fantasies and related political tensions in our time. The debate over the origins of Kennewick Man says as much about the racial politics of the very late twentieth century as it does about the skeleton's actual origins. Kennewick Man is one anecdote in a long story, one reminder of the increasing complexity of our knowledge about human origins in the Americas. A number of archaeological discoveries and speculations during the past generation have effectively jettisoned the neat and tidy myth of the 1950s: one group of Asiatic people traversed the Bering Strait more or less at one time and populated the continents of the Western Hemisphere in one fell swoop. The racial politics evoked by the discovery of Kennewick Man and other, similarly ancient remains, has presented us with a number of very diverse opinions. But one thing that nearly all serious observers of human antiquity in the Americas now share is this: human origins in the Americas are much more diverse, and cover a much greater time span than the simplistic Bering Strait theory allows. Following the find of 10,000-year old human remains as far south as Monte Verde, Chile, many scholars maintain that the accepted date of human arrival in the Americas needs to be pushed back by several thousand years. Some have even put the date as far back as 200,000 years, although no remains have been found which are nearly that old. On this time line, Kennewick Man was not one of the first human beings to trod Turtle Island. An overview of the evidence suggests the Americas were populated by many people, from many places, both by land and sea, over a longer period of time than many archaeological professionals suspected. In some cases, migration may have reached Asia from the Americas, reiterating a position taken two hundred years ago by Thomas Jefferson. Jefferson, a student of human languages, suspected that Native cultures in America were of great antiquity based on the number and complexity of their languages. Jefferson supposed that the Old World might have been partially populated from the Americas. Some present-day linguistic analysis supports Jefferson's supposition. Johanna Nichols, a professor of Slavic languages at the University of California (Berkeley) said that from Alaska to the southern tip of South America, Native Americans speak or have spoken 143 language stocks that are mutually unintelligible. Nichols said that it takes roughly 6,000 years for a language to split into two mutually unintelligible tongues. Based on this calculation, she estimated that human languages were being spoken in the Americas at least 60,000 years ago. It is amazing how quickly the discovery of one skeleton can be plugged into contemporary racial agendas such as those who seem to need attachment, no matter how tenuous, to the land they have come to call their America. This has persisted despite acknowledgement by those who first called Kennewick Man a European-type that he was, on closer examination, also much like the ancient Ainu, Native peoples of Japan. If they came from Europe at all, peoples such as Kennewick Man may have gone through a lot of changes before arriving in America, making him a racial mosaic that stumps so-called racial classifications. ========================================= Hunter Gray [Hunterbear] www.hunterbear.org (strawberry socialism) Protected by Na?shdo?i?ba?i? Hunter Gray [Hunterbear] www.hunterbear.org (strawberry socialism) Protected by Na?shdo?i?ba?i? From Tom_Childs at Douglas.BC.CA Tue Jul 16 13:42:20 2002 From: Tom_Childs at Douglas.BC.CA (Tom_Childs at Douglas.BC.CA) Date: Tue, 16 Jul 2002 12:42:20 -0700 Subject: [R-G] ZNet Commentary - U.S. Preps for War on Iraq Message-ID: <200207161942.MAA15226@Douglas.BC.CA> Date: Tue, 16 Jul 2002 09:12:12 -0400 www.zmag.org ---- Target Iraq: U.S. Plans for Major War By Larry Everest "Tens of thousands of marines and soldiers [will invade Iraq] from Kuwait. Hundreds of warplanes based in as many as eight countries, possibly including Turkey and Qatar, would unleash a huge air assault against thousands of targets, including airfields, roadways and fiber-optics communications sites. Special operations forces or covert CIA operatives would strike at depots or laboratories storing or manufacturing Iraq's suspected weapons of mass destruction and the missiles to launch them." New York Times , July 5, 2002 This isn't a fictional scenario from a Tom Clancy novel. It's a real scenario from "CentCom Courses of Action"--the latest U.S. plan for war on Iraq. Leaked to the New York Times, the plan calls for attacks on Iraq by U.S. air, land, and sea- based forces from the north, south, and west, in coordination with covert operations inside Iraq by the CIA and various Iraqi groups. As many as 250,000 U.S. troops could be involved. The goal: to overthrow the Iraqi government and install a pro-U.S. regime. In the 1991 Gulf War, the U.S.-led coalition killed between 100,000 and 200,000 Iraqis. A new U.S. war carried to Baghdad could make that bloodbath pale in comparison. The Central Command plan reveals the rulers' determination to wage war on Iraq, and how advanced their planning is. Yet the establishment treated their disclosure as routine -- as if the U.S. has an undisputed right to openly plot wars on whomever, whenever. No big outcry came from Congress -- leading Democrats vocally support "regime change" in Iraq. One Republican backed congressional hearings "as a way of building public support for potential military action." Mainstream editorials focused on tactics and timing - not justice. Military Preparations Underway Since September 11 there has been intense discussion within the ruling class over how to seize upon the attacks to advance U.S. global interests. Much of this discussion has focused on Iraq - most of it behind closed doors. The options reportedly being considered include a CIA-organized coup against the Hussein regime; a campaign--modeled after the U.S. war in Afghanistan--involving a combination of air strikes, a limited number of U.S. Special Forces, and anti-Hussein forces in Iraq; a full-scale U.S. invasion; and various combinations of all three. The New York Times notes that "Courses of Action" may indicate that war planners favor a large-scale invasion: "Most military and administration officials believe that a coup in Iraq would be unlikely to succeed, and that a proxy battle using local forces would not be enough to drive the Iraqi leader from power." Meanwhile, the U.S. has been actively preparing for battle. The Washington Post (6/16) reports that earlier this year, Bush "signed an intelligence order directing the CIA to undertake a comprehensive, covert program to topple Saddam Hussein, including authority to use lethal force to capture the Iraqi president." One official told the Post that these plans were not a substitute for war but "should be viewed largely as `preparatory' to a military strike." In the wake of the 1991 Gulf War, the U.S. built up an extensive network of military bases throughout the region. Today there are some 20,000 U.S. troops in Qatar, Oman, Bahrain, and Kuwait and another 5,000 in Saudi Arabia. These bases are being beefed up, expanded, and readied. The New York Times reports, "Thousands of marines from the First Marine Expeditionary Force at Camp Pendleton, Calif., the marine unit designated for the Gulf, have stepped up their mock assault drills," and the "Air Force is stockpiling weapons, ammunition and spare parts, like airplane engines, at depots in the United States and in the Middle East." Troops are reportedly arriving in Turkey, and military aid to Jordan is being increased. U.S. officials have been touring the pro-U.S. regimes in the area to line up support--Defense Secretary Rumsfeld visited Kuwait, Bahrain and Qatar in June. In April the CIA brought officials from Kurdish groups based in northern Iraq to the U.S. for secret meetings. Some 70 former Iraqi military officers met in London during the week of July 8 to discuss their role in a U.S. war. And U.S. support for Israel's brutal invasions of the West Bank and Gaza--as well as hypocritical and empty words about a Palestinian "state"--are aimed at extinguishing the fires of the Palestinian uprising in preparation for war against Iraq. According to the New York Times (7/10), "Once a consensus is reached on the concept, the steps toward assembling a final war plan and the element of timing for ground deployments and launching an air war represent the final decisions for President Bush to make." The Times also reports (7/5) that "senior administration officials continue to say that any offensive would probably be delayed until early next year, allowing time to create the right military, economic and diplomatic conditions." Of course, such timetables are speculative and subject to change by global events. Preparing Pretexts War preparations are also well underway on the propaganda front. At his July 8 press conference, Bush declared, "The world would be safer, more peaceful if there is a regime change" in Iraq. The U.S. accuses Iraq of possessing or developing "weapons of mass destruction." Yet a number of former UN arms inspectors say that Iraq has largely been disarmed, and even Pentagon officials admit that Iraq's current military is only one-third its 1990 size. Meanwhile, the U.S. is boosting its already staggering military budget by another $50 billion, and now embraces preemptive wars and first use of nuclear weapons. The U.S. has troops stationed in every corner of the globe and is at this moment bombing Afghanistan, organizing counterinsurgency campaigns in the Philippines and elsewhere, and backing Israel's murderous assaults on Palestinians. The Bush administration demands that Iraq accept intrusive, U.S.-controlled arms inspections - in other words spies must be allowed to roam throughout Iraq as the U.S. prepares its war. After talks between Iraq and the UN on return of arms inspectors recently broke off, the State Department called Iraq "a threat to regional security, to the nations in the region." Iraq argues that any agreement on arms inspection must be part of an overall agreement on exactly what constitutes compliance with all UN resolutions. Such terms have never been clearly spelled out -- allowing the U.S. to claim Iraq is "non-compliant" no matter what steps it takes. This is the prime U.S. excuse for maintaining sanctions, which were extended again in May. In 1999, UNICEF found that one Iraqi child in seven dies before the age of 5. This means that 5,000 more children in Iraq die each month today than before the U.S. war and sanctions. UNICEF also reported that 22 percent of Iraq's young children are chronically malnourished. An Imperialist Agenda After September 11, the U.S. rulers aggressively pushed forward their pre-existing agenda of recasting global relations to extend and solidify U.S. global dominance. And waging war on Iraq has been central to this whole vision. The Wall Street Journal (6/14) revealed that within days of the September attacks, top Bush advisers "argued over whether to launch a strike on Iraq"-- even though there was "no real evidence that Saddam Hussein's regime had anything to do with the terror attacks." In the view of those running the empire, Iraq's defiance undermines U.S. hegemony in the oil-rich Middle East and tarnishes its standing as the world's dominant superpower. By toppling the current Iraqi government and installing a pro-U.S. regime, the U.S. hopes to tighten its grip on Persian Gulf oil--and all who depend on it. These global predators view war on Iraq as key to redrawing the region's political map and intimidating anti-U.S. resistance. According to the New York Times, top officials argue that "an Iraq under new governance could become a new Western ally, helping to reduce American dependency on bases in Saudi Arabia, to secure Israel's eastern flank and act as a wedge between Iran and Syria." Waging war on Iraq is also seen as a crucial test of the so-called "Bush doctrine" of pre-emptive wars against any the U.S. considers a threat. Those running the empire are determined to show the world that the U.S. is willing and able to crush any challenger, or sweep away any impediment to its power. U.S. plans for war against Iraq--and the whole "Bush doctrine"--have nothing to do with "protecting the world" or "saving the lives of American people." They're about naked imperialist power politics--gangsterism on a global scale. In 1991, on the eve of "Operation Desert Storm," George Bush Sr. declared, "We have no argument with the people of Iraq; indeed, we have only friendship for the people there." Eleven years later, over one million Iraqis are dead thanks to U.S. bombs and sanctions. Any new U.S. war on Iraq will no doubt be undertaken in the name of helping Iraq's people. But such a war will once again inflict enormous destruction, suffering, and death on ordinary Iraqis. People around the world -- especially those of us who live in the U.S. itself -- must oppose such an unjust and cruel war with all our hearts. *** Larry Everest is a correspondent for the Revolutionary Worker newspaper and the author of Behind the Poison Cloud: Union Carbide's Bhopal Massacre. He traveled to Iraq in 1991 and shot the video Iraq: War Against the People. His articles can be found at www.rwor.org and he can be reached at larryeverest at hotmail.com. ==================================== This message has been brought to you by ZNet (http://www.zmag.org). Visit our site for subscription options. From lani at dojo.tao.ca Tue Jul 16 17:30:24 2002 From: lani at dojo.tao.ca (lani at dojo.tao.ca) Date: Tue, 16 Jul 2002 23:30:24 -0000 Subject: [R-G] Guardian: Earth 'will expire by 2050' In-Reply-To: <000d01c22a14$5a2b39d0$33378d18@Indy1> Message-ID: <20020716233024.669BA17DCA2@dojo.tao.ca> instead of colonizing outer space, why don't we just starve the poor, stop them from breeding like rabbits, and maybe even speed up the process by fuelling war and mass slaughter in the third world? at the very least, don't let these countries develop as that would surely anger mother earth. Lysander Zimmerman said: > My sincerest apologies if you receive more than one copy of this, for I am > sending it to my entire address book. > ______________________________________________ > > PASS THIS AROUND. > > IT'S TIME FOR PEOPLE TO START WAKING UP! > ______________________________________________ > > Earth 'will expire by 2050' > > Our planet is running out of room and resources. Modern man has plundered so > much, a damning report claims this week, that outer space will have to be > colonised. > > Using the image of the need for mankind to colonise space as a stark > illustration of the problems facing Earth, the report warns that either > consumption rates are dramatically and rapidly lowered or the planet will no > longer be able to sustain its growing population > > Full article here: > > http://www.observer.co.uk/international/story/0,6903,750783,00.html > > > > > _______________________________________________ > Rad-Green mailing list > Rad-Green at lists.econ.utah.edu > To change your options or unsubscribe go to: > http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/rad-green > -- From mstainsby at tao.ca Tue Jul 16 23:32:11 2002 From: mstainsby at tao.ca (Macdonald Stainsby) Date: Tue, 16 Jul 2002 22:32:11 -0700 Subject: [R-G] U.S. recruiting vast pool of snitches. Message-ID: <009501c22d53$4dcfe180$291f5318@vc.shawcable.net> Globe and Mail. 16 July 2002. U.S. recruiting vast pool of snitches. WASHINGTON -- The Bush administration is hoping to recruit one million potential informants by next month for the first stage of a counterterrorism measure that has civil-liberties advocates appalled. In time, as many as 4 per cent of Americans could be spying on their neighbours, a proportion that would exceed even the network set up by the former East Germany's notorious Stasi spy-service. The Terrorism Information and Prevention System (Operation TIPS) will use letter-carriers, utility workers and others who normally have access to private homes to keep watch on suspicious characters in 10 U.S. cities, which have not been disclosed. Operation TIPS will give these volunteer watchers a channel through which to pass their concerns to the Justice Department, who will consolidate any information gathered in a widely available database. The information will be accessible within the department as well as by state and local agencies and state police forces. The American Civil Liberties Union has "questioned the prudence" of the idea in an alarmed statement, saying that law-enforcement officials might use these informants to conduct what amount to warrantless searches of suspects' homes. "The administration apparently wants to implement a program that will turn local cable or gas or electrical technicians into government-sanctioned peeping toms," said Rachel King, an ACLU lawyer. Critics argue that, far from defending America's freedoms, such programs subvert them -- and they warn that the dangers could go beyond constitutional violations. "Snitching creates a culture in which every encounter between two citizens is mediated by authority: Big Brother is always in the room with you," warned YellowTimes columnist Gabriel Ash. "And even if it isn't, you have to behave as if it is." "Snitching creates a culture of paranoia. It isolates people, breaks down social solidarity, and prevents exchange of information between members of society. Everyone becomes obsessed with watching their own back. Nobody is a friend. Nobody can be trusted." ------------------------------------------- Macdonald Stainsby http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/rad-green http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/leninist-international -- In the contradiction lies the hope. --Bertholt Brecht From mstainsby at tao.ca Wed Jul 17 10:36:54 2002 From: mstainsby at tao.ca (Macdonald Stainsby) Date: Wed, 17 Jul 2002 09:36:54 -0700 Subject: [R-G] Two anarcho poets Message-ID: <006601c22db0$2966eb60$291f5318@vc.shawcable.net> Perhaps surprisingly, the United States has been the home of a number of poets who have expressed anarchist ideas in their works. But then again, there are strong traditions of immigrant anarchism among Jews, Italians, Spaniards and Russians. There is the radical workers organisation, the Industrial Workers of the World. There is the libertarian tradition among intellectuals, dating back to Thoreau. And there is a ?bohemian? tradition, often interconnected with these other movements which above all had its home in San Francisco and Greenwich Village in New York . Kenneth Rexroth Labor power on the market, Firepower on the battlefield, It is all one merely two Aspects of the same monster. The Dragon and the Unicorn Kenneth Rexroth was born in 1905 in Indiana, into a family that had a long line of freethinkers, feminists, abolitionists, socialists and anarchists. His father used to drink whisky with Eugene Debs, the socialist leader. He had an enlightened upbringing but then had the misfortune of being orphaned at the age of 12. Most of his adolescence was spent in Chicago, where he worked as a newspaper reporter and was involved in running a jazz tea shop. Here he came in contact with the bohemian world of musicians, poets, writers, artists, hobos, revolutionaries and outsiders. He was almost completely self-educated, with only five years of formal schooling. He read avidly, began to write poetry, paint abstract paintings, worked in avant-garde theatre and taught himself several languages. Like the European writer Malaquais, he took to the road in his late teens, He ranged, he roamed, he rambled. He worked at all sorts of jobs, sometimes as a cowboy cook, sometimes as a wrangler, and in farm and forestry jobs. He worked as a toothbrush maker and as a peddler of pamphlets on diet. He even managed to make it to Paris and back as a stowaway. There he met many important radical artists, including many surrealists. The anarchist Alexander Berkman told him whilst he was in France not to become another expatriate and he returned. Becoming an anarchist at an early range, he saw through the Bolshevik myth as soon as 1921 when the Kronstadt sailors uprising was crushed by Lenin and co. In 1927 he joined the Industrial Workers of the World working for a while on its newspaper. In Chicago he set up a Dadaist group. He carried on independent activity in the thirties. Settling in San Francisco he was involved in the newssheet the Waterfront Worker which exhorted dockers to organise. (In later life he entertained his friends with renditions of IWW and Spanish anarchist songs and sometimes used the IWW address ?Dear Fellow Worker?in letters). With the collapse of the revolutionary wave he began to dig in, maintaining and seeking out contact with those who had preserved their radicalism, looking for reassessment and reappraisal. Where possible he spoke out against the established order. We have to remember that in this most grievous period, it was an extraordinary achievement to maintain revolutionary optimism. The perversions of Bolshevism had meant that as Kenneth said ? There was no one left who was not completely centred on the Kremlin, either as a mindless Stalinist hatchet man or a psychopathic anti-Bolshevik?. He was also able to make the acute observation that: the socialist and trade union movements in the West have functioned in reality- not just as governors to insure that steam is let off when the pressure gets too high, not just as what are now called ? fail safe? devices, though they certainly are that- but as essential parts of the motive organisation of capitalism, more, in other words, like carburettors that insure there will be just the right mixture of fuel and air for each new demand on the engine. In World War II he refused to take part in the clash of opposing capitalist states and was a conscientious objector. He did alternative service working in a psychiatric ward. During the war he formed the antimilitarist Randolph Bourne Council (named after the libertarian writer who had coined the phrase ?War is the Health of the State?). He helped Japanese-Americans who were being interned by the thousands in concentration camps, devising ways by which many were able to avoid internment. Down in Berkeley from 1944 to 1948 the magazine Circle which united local ?Berkeley Renaissance? writers and exiled European Surrealist poets expressed anarchist and anti-authoritarian views (Rexroth contributed to it). In their last issue an ad for a New Writers Group stated that ? We believe in the possibility of a culture which fights for its freedom, which protects the economic interests of its workers in all fields including the arts, and which can create for itself new forms and new voices, against reaction and the threat of war?. After the war Rexroth was involved in the setting up of the San Francisco Anarchist Circle. (later the Libertarian Circle). Anarchists like David Koven, surviving old Italian and Spanish anarchists, and conscientious objectors returning from the Waldorf detention camp took part. Lively weekly meetings discussed all sorts of subjects from the Spanish revolution, Kronstadt and Makhno, to the ideas of anarchists like Goldman, Berkman , Voltairine de Cleyre , Kropotkin, the Anarchist Womens Movement, Sex and Anarchy. The sessions at Rexroth?s house were enriched by his food (he was a superb cook) and his huge and encyclopaedic knowledge. Rexroth?s actions were designed to trigger what he felt was needed for a successful transition to an anarchist society- the development of a new consciousness. The little magazine Ark that was set up (printed on a small hand press from 1947) was more militant than its forebear to the south, Circle. It proclaimed:? Today, at this catastrophic point in time, the validity if not the future of the anarchist position is more than ever established. It has become a polished mirror in which the falsehoods of political modes stand naked?. When all the other social commentators were bluntly asserting that all revolt and dissidence had ended he was able to say ?The youngest generation is in a state of revolt so absolute that its elders cannot even recognise it??. Members of the Libertarian Circle were to be key players in the radical upsurge that became known as the San Francisco Renaissance, as poets and artists, in free radio, in experimental theatre and in the little magazine movement. Rexroth was to be the midwife of the Beat movement that emerged that succeeded in uniting the dissident poets and writers of both the East and West Coasts. Kenneth hated being called the Father of the Beats- a movement of which he had many criticisms- but he was able to see that he and they were united in their mutual antagonism to the ruling ? convergence of interest- the business community, military imperialism, political reaction, the hysterical, tear and mud drenched guilt of the ex-Stalinist, ex-Trotskyist American intellectuals?. Rexroth was to preside at the birth pains of the San Francisco Renaissance, which led directly on to the emergence of the Beat movement, at the Six Gallery event in San Francisco where Allen Ginsburg?s powerful anti-authoritarian poem Howl was read out to a eager and excited audience of several hundreds in an electric, drunken atmosphere, where Jack Kerouac was cheerleader and rhythm-maker. William Everson says what I feel about Rexroth better than I could so let?s hear him speak: ?He is a powerful spokesman for any cause he espouses. A born journalist, he has a flair for vigorous public speech and the guts to speak out in unequivocal terms. He has fantastic intellectual and moral courage, taking on the establishment and throwing it on the defensive through the sheer force of his invective. His rhetoric is savage, sometimes shockingly so, but it is never ineffectual?His faults are the excesses of his virtues and he quarrels with his friends as readily as he clobbers his enemies?He tends to drop the movement he has fostered as soon as it shows signs of fragmenting. But his constitutional restlessness could not jeopardise the work he actually accomplished. He touched the nerve of the future and more than any other voice in the movement called it into being. Though others picked up his mantle and received the plaudits, it remains true that today we enjoy the freedom of expression and lifestyle we actually possess largely because he convinced us that it was not only desirable but possible, and inspired us to make it be?. Rexroth placed too much stress on the development of a radical lifestyle as a fortress against capitalism to the detriment of struggle. His increasingly religious turn in the last years of his life are jarring for many atheists and agnostics. Nevertheless, both his prose and his poems are deeply anarchist and deeply combative. In the long poem The Phoenix and the Tortoise he wrote: The State is the organization Of the evil instincts of mankind. In For Eli Jacobson, one of his most moving poems, Rexroth remembers a dead friend: ?.We were comrades Together, we believed we Would see with our own eyes the new World where man was no longer Wolf to man, but men and women Were all brothers and lovers Together. We will not see it. We will not see it, none of us. It is farther off than we thought ???? We will be remembered, all Of us, always, by all men, In the good days now so far away. If the good days never come, We will not know. We will not care. Our lives were the best. We were the Happiest men alive in our day. In one of his angriest poems Thou Shalt Not Kill Rexroth talks of the toll that the collapse of the revolutionary wave had on so many writers, artists and intellectuals. How many stopped writing at thirty? How many died of prefrontal Lobotomies in the Communist Party? How many are lost in the back wards Of provincial madhouses? How many on the advice of Their psychoanalysts, decided A business career was best after all? How many are hopeless alcoholics? One critic snidely called Rexroth (and Gary Snyder and Philip Whalen) ?members of the bear-shit-on-the-trail school of poetry.?. Rexroth did indeed spend a lot of time in mountain and wilderness, thought that this time was a splendid antidote to the scourges of urban capitalist life, and wrote beautifully about these experiences. But often, in the middle of such a poem, we are pulled back to ideas of struggle, just as I myself, walking in the mountains, have turned to thoughts of revolution. Here Rexroth thinks about the Italian-American anarchist Bartomeleo Vanzetti and his comrade Nicola Sacco, murdered by the State ( He had visited them both in prison). I saw you both marching in an army You with the red and black flag, Sacco with the rattlesnake banner. I kicked steps up the last snow bank and came To the indescribably blue and fragrant Polemonium and the dead sky and the sterile Crystalline granite and final monolith of the summit. These are the things that will last a long time, Vanzetti, I am glad that once on your day I have stood among them. Some day mountains will be named after you and Sacco. They will be here and your name with them, ?When these days are but a dim remembering of the time When man was wolf to man?. I think men will be remembering you a long time Standing on the mountains Many men, a long time, comrade. >From Climbing Milestone Mountain August 22,1937. Philip Levine Philip Levine was born in the industrial city of Detroit to parents of Russian Jewish origin in 1928. Detroit was the home of Father Coughlin, a notorious anti-Semitic Catholic priest who broadcast on the radio every Sunday. He spent most of his childhood and adolescence fighting people who wanted to beat him up because he was Jewish. Identifying with anti-fascism, he progressed to a discovery of anarchism, and in particular Spanish anarchism. Spanish anarchism and anarchists are a recurring theme in Levine?s poems. He was educated in the state schools and at an early age had to take jobs in the factories of Detroit. Many of these were badly paid, unhealthy and unsafe. The conditions of working life and the way people survive them, and are effected by them is another recurring theme in his poetry. Levine has been called the poet of the proletariat by one critic, and indeed there are few others who deal with factory life and can replicate the experience of it as Levine does. He began to write poetry while he was going to night school at Wayne State University and working days in the car plants. Levine has written 16 books of poetry. In the first two On the Edge (1963) and Not This Pig (1968) Levine deals with those caught up in situations not of their own making. In Animals Are Passing From Our Lives the pig about to be sent to the abattoir intends to keep its dignity, no matter what, as if that was some sort of victory. Wage labour turns everything human into a commodity, the poems illustrate, and they are often harrowing in their depiction of working misery. This is further expanded upon in Levine?s third book They Feed, They Lion (not a spelling mistake). Levine picked this phrase up from a black workmate in Detroit and in the title poem- his most fiery-he deals with the seething anger and foul conditions and racism that led to the Detroit riots of 1967. A subsequent book of poems The Names of the Lost is dedicated to the Spanish anarchist Durruti ?and the world he said is growing here in my heart this moment?. One of the poems Gift for a Believer is for the Anarchist artist Flavio Costantini and deals with the lives of many fallen anarchists which have been used by Costantini as subject material for his paintings. Another, For the Fallen talks about a visit to the Montjuich cemetery in Barcelona where Durruti, his comrade Ascaso and the libertarian educationalist Ferrer are buried. Levine returns to this theme in his 7 Years from Somewhere. The book?s cover is illustrated with a photo of the graves of Durruti and Ferrer but the greatest poem in it Francisco, I?ll Bring You Red Carnations deals with Francisco Ascaso For two there are floral Displays, but Ascaso faces Eternity with only a stone. Maybe as it should be. He was A stone, a stone and a blade, The first grinding and sharpening The other. And below in the city Levine describes Industrial filth and the burning mists of gasoline Levine ends with the hope We have it here Growing in our hearts, as Your comrade said, and when We give it up with our last Breaths someone will gasp it home to their lives. Read The Relevance of Rexroth, a pamphlet written by the Situationist Ken Knabb for a passionate appreciation of what Rexroth was about. Published by the Bureau of Public Secrets PO Box 1044, Berkeley, California 94701 And In Search of a New World: The Anarchist Dream in the Poetry of Philip Levine, by Robert Hedin in American Poetry (1986). ****************************************************** >From the pages of Organise!, thrice yearly bulletin of the Anarchist Federation (Britain and Ireland). ------------------------------------------- Macdonald Stainsby http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/rad-green http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/leninist-international -- In the contradiction lies the hope. --Bertholt Brecht From hunterbadbear at earthlink.net Thu Jul 18 10:23:52 2002 From: hunterbadbear at earthlink.net (Hunter Gray) Date: Thu, 18 Jul 2002 10:23:52 -0600 Subject: [R-G] Fussing & Fuming About Religion [ Things Seen, Unseen] -- and Radicals, Too Message-ID: <002701c22e77$d4e4b720$da70fa43@intel> First, let me do a Confession. It's about something I am -- a thing I haven't yet admitted on any of these Discussion Lists -- and it involves a formal Membership Card. Oh, oh! some might think. He's finally getting ready to admit -- finally -- something really [Politically Exotic.] We always knew it! The Secret Agenda. No, not That at all, I'm a Minister, an Ordained Clergyman. Have a card credential to prove it. Now, to some, that's far heavier -- negatively -- than politics could ever be. But quickly, I say, Whoa! Steady. Not quite! Wait until the end of this little piece before you draw any final conclusions on that one. There's a lot of fracas these days on the Left discussion groups about Religion. And this certainly speaks loudly and vitriolically to its great endurance and proliferation. I, of course, hold no brief whatsoever for anything that's anti-people in any sense and that certainly includes the Christian Right. But there's a lot more to Religion than its poisonous bigots of many flags and names. One of the Stars that generally drops from one's eyes early in life is that which presumes that human beings are mostly rational most of the time. That one -- possibly in part because of my modicum of objective insight into myself -- went very early for me. [I have resolutely retained the conviction, however, that most people are basically good most of the time.] So I'm never too surprised at the roiling and boiling of Humanity's tangents on anything. Not anymore. When I go to most of the on-line discussion groups on which I'm presently residing, Holy Wars are often burning fast and furiously -- like forest fires in the summer pines of the Mountain West. Given the fact that most of the folks on these lists -- not all, not me -- seem to consider themselves atheists or at least agnostics, this flaming fervor is intriguing. Sometimes, admittedly, it stems from Real Issues -- the tragically sanguinary dichotomies of the Middle East and the increasingly global resurrection of the Crusades. But much of the List shooting is far from the centrality of those struggles which swim in the rivers of economic determinism, directed by the skeletal hands of their Boatmen of History. High Noon list fighting around Religion [like some of the other list passions] frequently strikes me as being a kind of combative therapy in arenas where the high winds of multi-faceted Passion take frustrations stemming from every other conceivable facet of the life of individual and collective Humanity -- and alchemically carry them into the Realm of Religion where the Wars can be pursued with comfortable piety and sanctimoniousness. To cite a hardly uncommon example of pragmatic transference: this from the edges of my own extended family: A young couple's marriage plunged into heavy trouble -- and any objective eye could see mountainous financial difficulties as a great big piece of the situational headwaters. But that was rarely mentioned by the protagonists who, when they earnestly explained their particular positions to their respective family members, put it all very piously into the religious context: he, a Catholic and she a Mormon, just couldn't -- they said -- make it work -- for those reasons. The marriage collapsed in a red-hot crucible of religious crown fires -- near, as a matter of fact, the quite recently forest fire-threatened Showlow, Arizona. My life-long view on all of this Religion thing is pretty much live and let live. Even as a sometime fist-fighting kid, I never threw a punch for Theology. And I am, in my own way, a Believer. Our Catholicism [which has never embraced the Anglo concept of Hell and is very, very casual about Confession] comes from my father's side -- where the legacy of Ignatius of Loyola and the Jesuits mixed with the Native religions. Mother's thing was High-Church Episcopalianism [Anglicanism] which, increasingly, seemed to function on a Big Broad Tent basis. [We never took the differential nuances all that seriously and sometimes the main canyon between the respective Church officialdoms seemed to me as a kid that our Catholic clergy drank whiskey and the Episcopal priests did sherry.] And, most fundamentally, I grew up very much in a very strongly and always enduring and vitally influencing Navajo setting -- and also with close ties to Laguna Pueblo and, too, with Hopi relationships. A good Anglo buddy of mine was Mormon and, at 15, I served as pall-bearer at his mother's funeral -- much impressed with the moving and tremendously supportive simplicity of the people and the ceremony. My Finnish/Saami/Norwegian wife, Eldri, has a Lutheran background. Almost all of the inherently radical metal miners, millmen, smeltermen and ore refinery workers of my native Mountain West were [and are] essentially religious: a great many are Catholic, others often Mormon -- and all of this frequently in the context of an essentially Wobbly view of Solidarity, the Struggle, the Bosses, and the Future. And privileged by History to be deeply involved for six years in the Southern Movement [1961-67], I certainly saw there the very positive role that religion played in sparking and fueling that Great Wave -- as we traveled through the very pits of Hell. Picture this: the hordes of "lawmen" -- with their guns and clubs and dogs -- are outside the church in which your mass march is taking shape, and you know what awaits you at their hands [both in the street and in jail as well.] The words from We Shall Overcome -- "God is on our side" and "We are not afraid" -- carry some very real meaning as you get ready to have your head and hide cut open. And I saw, too, in the Deep South especially, the twisted uses to which Religion could be put -- say, in the service of a hideously exploitative economic power structure wearing the blood-spattered clothing of States' Rights and Racial Integrity. And, again, that for sure is the kind of anti-people thing where my circle of religious tolerance stops far, far short. Speaking now as a practical life-long Organizer, I definitely do indeed think that religion -- or the lack of it -- is up to the individual. And I certainly say emphatically that any really working organizer seeking to get grassroots people together, develop on-going and democratic local leadership, deal effectively with grievances and individual/family concerns, achieve basic organizational goals and develop new ones -- and build a sense of the New World To Be Over The Mountains Yonder and how all of this relates to shorter-term steps -- can hardly afford, whatever the organizer's particular stand on religion may be, to become involved in his constituents' views on religion. If you aren't really tolerant, I strongly suggest acting so. Read William James on Pragmatism. And, remember, of course, that Jesus Christ [Jerusalem Slim] was, however divinely or otherwise one sees Him, a truly great Peoples' Agitator whose physical fate concluded , as the indefatigable Woody Guthrie described it, when "they laid poor Jesus in his grave." And when Father Thomas J. Hagerty, the revolver-packing priest of the Western Federation of Miners [he could hit two silver dollars, tossed high, with his .45 Colt], wrote out the preamble of the embryonic Industrial Workers of the World in 1905, his great creation -- however inspired -- started off, of course, with "The working class and the employing class have nothing in common." For my part, I read that preamble decades later when I was a teenager and, shortly thereafter, lots of material indeed on radical labor and socialism. To me, at least, it all goes together, along with the foundational dimensions -- the sensible "tribal responsibility" balance between group and individual -- of my Native tribalism. And hopefully, this will all add up to a socialism where all people are genuinely free in all respects and where their choices are many indeed. Lots of fine figures of all sorts of religious persuasions throughout the history of Humanity. So, how about me? How did I become an ordained clergyman? Let me tell you: Some years ago, when, in a remote corner of vast Navajoland, I went to our little post office with the syncretic and multi-cultural address of Tsaile [Saylee], Navajo Nation, Arizona 86556, a stunning little surprise awaited. There, in our box -- 711 -- I found a package slip which I took to our postmaster, Lorenzo -- a traditional Navajo who was also a Catholic and who occasionally saw me at Mass at Chinle [Chinlee], 35 miles south. As he handed me a large, brown packet, he looked uncharacteristically puzzled. I saw the address: my then name with something else. And it was all "The Reverend John R. Salter, Jr." Lorenzo and I stared at each other for a very long moment. "I don't know what this is, Lorenzo," said I. As I looked at him, it would have been purely cruel to have walked away with the mysterious thing still packaged. "I think maybe I'll open it right now, right here" I went on. He nodded -- much, much more visibly than usual. "Let's" he said. And when I got it opened, I found a card that formally proclaimed me a certified and life-long "Ordained Minister" -- duly authorized to perform "weddings and funerals." It was in the Mother Earth Church. A letter explained my rights and responsibilities in some impressive detail. Most of the package, however, was a catalogue which sold various Churchly items. And there was also a list of Titles -- and Prices. Ordained Minister cost five bucks, Bishop fifteen, Archbishop was twenty. "This is a joke, Lorenzo," I said. "And it has to be B______." B was a young free-spirit Anglo faculty member in our Social Sciences Division at Navajo Community College [now Dine' College], of which I was the very easy-going Chair. "Only B would do this." Lorenzo grinned. "It has to be B," said he. "No one else around here." And it was. I was really touched that B spent five bucks getting me Certified for Life. I still have the card. And, sometimes, when friends and family members are getting ready to wed, I do offer to do it for them -- quickly, easily, in a living-room, no fee whatsoever. No fuss, no muss. And no takers either. In the Red Faith - Hunter Gray [Hunterbear] Hunter Gray [Hunterbear] www.hunterbear.org (strawberry socialism) Protected by Na?shdo?i?ba?i? From info at cinox.demon.co.uk Thu Jul 18 15:06:39 2002 From: info at cinox.demon.co.uk (Tim Murphy) Date: Thu, 18 Jul 2002 22:06:39 +0100 Subject: [R-G] World Racism Message-ID: http://www.worldracism.com/ From mstainsby at dojo.tao.ca Thu Jul 18 16:39:17 2002 From: mstainsby at dojo.tao.ca (Macdonald Stainsby) Date: Thu, 18 Jul 2002 22:39:17 -0000 Subject: [R-G] Terrorism.com: al-Qaida online Message-ID: <20020718223917.74BCA17DC38@dojo.tao.ca> Guardian. 17 July 2002. Terrorism.com. How does al-Qaida stay organised when its members are in hiding and scattered across the world? Easy - it runs a website. For a secret organisation hunted by the intelligence services of the most powerful nations on earth, al-Qaida has a remarkably public face. It is a website run by the Centre for Islamic Studies and Research. Since the start of the war on terrorism, the site has been producing hundreds of pages of material to rally support among radical Muslims, scare the west and enable al-Qaida cells to operate independently of Osama bin Laden and other leaders now in hiding. The site is entirely in Arabic, which means that tens of millions of people who hate American policies on the Middle East can read it, but almost nobody in either the governments or the media of the west can understand a word. The website is central to al-Qaida's strategy to ensure that its war with the US will continue even if many of its cells across the world are broken up and its current leaders are killed or captured. The site's function is to deepen and broaden worldwide Muslim support, allowing al-Qaida or successor organisations to fish for recruits, money and political backing. The whole thrust of the site, from videos glorifying September 11 to Islamic legal arguments justifying the killing of civilians, and even poetry, is to convince radical Muslims that, for decades, the US has been waging a war to destroy Islam, and that they must fight back. "America is the cause of every injustice, every wrong, every tyranny that afflicts Muslims... It is steeped in the blood of Muslims," wrote Sulaiman Bu Ghaith, an al-Qaida spokesman, in a series of articles published on the site last month entitled Under the Shadow of Spears. "America does not understand dialogue. Nor peaceful coexistence. Nor appeals, nor condemnation, nor criticism. America will only be stopped by blood." In a letter to "brother mojahedin everywhere" in late May, Bu Ghaith warned: "My dear brothers: the path of principles and prayers is surrounded by calamities and obstacles, full of dangers and misfortunes, prison, death, banishment and exile. One day the believers are victorious over the infidels, the next day the infidels are victorious over the believers. Victory will never be the ally of either side, although definitely in the end the believers will triumph." He repeated the message in an audio recording on the site late last month. He also warned of new attacks on the US and promised a television appearance soon by Bin Laden. The story topped world headlines when the satellite TV channel al-Jazeera broadcast the recording, although it did not mention the website as the original source. Al-Qaida has also been using the site to launch diatribes against Muslims who question its strategy of total war with America. One statement on the subject of "the legality of the operations in Washington and New York" laid out seven grounds in Islamic law on which it is permissible to kill "sacrosanct infidels" - essentially civilians - and six grounds on which it is permissible to kill Muslims. These polemics explain why the site is so important to al-Qaida and why the real action in radical Muslim politics is now in a jungle of websites, bulletin boards, email lists and chatrooms on the internet. Al-Qaida knows it has to engage people there if it is to dominate debate. The Centre for Islamic Studies and Research website is a substantial undertaking. It has 11 sections, including the centre's own reports of fighting in Afghanistan, a regular digest of world media coverage of the conflict, books of jihad theology to download, videos such as the hijacker's testament, information about prisoners held in Pakistan and Guantanamo Bay, and poetry about jihad. The site has been hosted by legitimate internet service providers in Malaysia and, more recently, the US, at addresses such as www.alneda.com and www.drasat.com. The site has been shut down three times, each time because CNN was researching a story about the site and emailed the ISP for comment. As soon as the ISPs realised what they were hosting, they closed it. The site is now offline, but it is of such importance to al-Qaida that it is likely to try to find a new way to publish it. There has been media speculation that the site is being used to direct al-Qaida operational cells, and it has certainly carried low-level operational information. In February it published the names and home phone numbers of 84 al-Qaida fighters captured by Pakistan after their escape from fighting in Afghanistan, presumably with the aim that sympathisers would contact their families and let them know they were alive. More broadly, the site supports al-Qaida's effort since the war in Afghanistan to disperse its forces and enable them to operate independently. It provides all the strategic guidance, theological argument and moral inspiration - in a word, leadership - that a cell of trained al-Qaida operatives would need to plan an attack on western targets. A statement signed by Qaidat al-Jihad ("the Base of Jihad," al-Qaida's official name), published on the site in April, said: "God has enabled al-Qaida by his grace to reorganise its ranks, distribute its forces and arrange cooperation with the Afghan mojahedin. Serious work has begun inside Afghanistan. As for work abroad against the Americans and the Jews, matters have been arranged so that if one link is removed, however large its organisational importance, the organisation will not be struck by fatal blows, for new units have been formed..." Whether Bin Laden, al-Qaida's Egyptian theorist Ayman al-Zawahiri and their colleagues are on a mountain in the Hindu Kush or living with their beards shaved off in a suburb of Karachi no longer matters to the organisation. They can inspire and guide a worldwide movement without physically meeting their followers - without even knowing who they are. -- Macdonald Stainsby, External Relations Co-ordinator, Douglas College Students Union. ** In the contradiction lies the hope. --Bertholt Brecht. *** "`Order rules in Berlin.' You stupid lackeys! Your `order' is built on sand. Tomorrow the revolution will rear ahead once more and announce to your horror amid the brass of trumpets: `I was, I am, I always will be!'" -Rosa Luxemburg, 1918. From dmurray at globalserve.net Thu Jul 18 17:50:27 2002 From: dmurray at globalserve.net (Dan Murray) Date: Thu, 18 Jul 2002 18:50:27 -0500 Subject: [R-G] World Racism References: Message-ID: <005e01c22eb5$e4729cf0$4200a8c0@dmurray> Hey Tim, Sounds interesting, but the URL doesn't work :( Dan ----- Original Message ----- From: "Tim Murphy" To: "RAD GREEN" Sent: Thursday, July 18, 2002 4:06 PM Subject: [R-G] World Racism > > > http://www.worldracism.com/ > > > > > _______________________________________________ > Rad-Green mailing list > Rad-Green at lists.econ.utah.edu > To change your options or unsubscribe go to: > http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/rad-green > From mstainsby at tao.ca Thu Jul 18 18:52:53 2002 From: mstainsby at tao.ca (Macdonald Stainsby) Date: Thu, 18 Jul 2002 17:52:53 -0700 Subject: [R-G] Viruses and my address (and yours) Message-ID: <002801c22ebe$b2e34d20$291f5318@vc.shawcable.net> Apologies to people, I'm sending this to my entire address book (on BCC) to clear up something. I noticed earlier today that one of the lists I administer was holding back a post from "me" : mstainsby at Tao.ca. I never sent such a mail and my address has not been hacked: The new worms that exist can often, without even being on your computer, send themselves out to other people via a third party or a program of some sort. I have no idea how all this works, my techie knowledge is practically non-existent, but thought I'd warn people this is happening, and could happen to all of us. Personally, if I have tosend an attachment, I send a waring email ahead of it. I also received just such a ghost email recently as well- from a friend who I don't think has any idea about it. You will all see more and more of these. Caution is the buzzword! Macdonald ------------------------------------------- Macdonald Stainsby http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/rad-green http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/leninist-international -- In the contradiction lies the hope. --Bertholt Brecht From info at cinox.demon.co.uk Fri Jul 19 07:04:57 2002 From: info at cinox.demon.co.uk (Tim Murphy) Date: Fri, 19 Jul 2002 14:04:57 +0100 Subject: [R-G] Fw: GM GENES FOUND IN HUMAN GUT BACTERIA Message-ID: GM genes found in human gut John Vidal Guardian Wednesday July 17, 2002 British scientific researchers have demonstrated for the first time that genetically modified DNA material from crops is finding its way into human gut bacteria, raising potentially serious health questions. Although the genetically modified material in most GM foods poses no health problems, many of the controversial crops have antibiotic-resistant marker genes inserted into them at an early stage in development. If genetic material from these marker genes can also find its way into the human stomach, as experiments at Newcastle university suggest is likely, then people's resistance to widely used antibiotics could be compromised. The research, commissioned by the food standards agency, is the world's first known trial of GM foods on human volunteers. It was last night described as "insignificant" by the agency but as "dynamite" by Friends of the Earth. The scientists took seven human volunteers who had their lower intestine removed in the past and now use colostomy bags. After being fed a meal of a burger containing GM soya and a milkshake, the researchers compared their stools with 12 people with normal stomachs. They found "to their surprise" that "a relatively large proportion of genetically modified DNA survived the passage through the small bowel". None was found in people who had complete stomachs. But to see if GM DNA might be transferred via bacteria to the intestine, they also took bacteria from stools in the colostomy bags and cultivated them. In three of the seven samples they found bacteria had taken up the herbicide-resistant gene from the GM food at a very low level. The report added "that transgenes, although surviving passage through the small intestine, appear to be completely degraded in the human colon". Michael Antonio, a senior lecturer in molecular genetics at King's College Medical School, London, last night said that the work was significant. "To my knowledge they have demonstrated clearly that you can get GM plant DNA in the gut bacteria. Everyone used to deny that this was possible." He said there were "lots of inadequacies" in the research but that did not take away the importance of the main findings. "It suggests that you can get antibiotic marker genes spreading around the stomach which would compromise antibiotic resistance. They have shown that this can happen even at very low levels after just one meal." Marker genes are inserted into GM plants to allow identification of GM cells or tissue during development. The House of Lords has called for them to be phased out as swiftly as possible. Last night Friends of the Earth called for an immediate halt to the use of marker genes in GM crops. "Industry, science and government advisers have always played down the risk of this happening and here, at the very first attempt by scientists to look for it, they find it," said Adrian Bebb, GM foods campaigner. The FSA said the research "showed in real-life conditions with human volunteers, no GM material survived the passage through the entire human digestive tract... the research concluded that the likelihood of functioning DNA being taken up by bacteria in the human or animal gut is extremely low". ---------------- From mstainsby at tao.ca Fri Jul 19 11:37:39 2002 From: mstainsby at tao.ca (Macdonald Stainsby) Date: Fri, 19 Jul 2002 10:37:39 -0700 Subject: [R-G] After 65 years, Franco's mass graves start to yield their dark secrets Message-ID: <051d01c22f4a$fa9a5960$291f5318@vc.shawcable.net> Forwarded from A-List After 65 years, Franco's mass graves start to yield their dark secrets By Elizabeth Nash The Independent on Sunday, 14 July 2002 Spain is reclaiming its own "desaparecidos", excavating mass graves of Franco's victims after more than 60 years, breaking one of the last taboos of his dictatorship. Thousands of young Republican soldiers shot dead by nationalists in the civil war were flung into roadside ditches, and their relatives terrorised into silence. That silence persisted through 40 years of Franco's rule and more than 25 years of democracy. But last week in the village in Piedrafita de Babia, near the Castillian town of Leon, children and grandchildren of those killed, along with elderly survivors, watched as bones, skulls, even black straw espadrilles, were turned up in unmarked graves that they had secretly revered for decades. Isabel Gonzalez, 84, was 19 when her brother Eduardo, 22, and brother-in-law Francisco were persuaded to turn themselves in to nationalist forces who had taken over northern Spain. "They were told they had nothing to fear if they gave themselves up. But they were tricked. Within eight hours they lay dead in that ditch with 35 other comrades," she said. The slaughter took place on 5 November 1937. Isabel has been visiting the spot since 1943, obsessed by the dream that one day her loved ones would be buried properly. "I just want to see them lying by my parents in the cemetery, instead of abandoned in this miserable ditch by the roadside," she said. A group called the Association for the Recovery of Historical Memory has been working for two years to identify and excavate mass graves which they say are dotted all over Spain. Seven sites near Piedrafita are being excavated in search of a total of 50 people. Many remain unclaimed. But the group is convinced that, as the graves are opened, relatives will come forward. "They are still afraid," said Santiago Macias, spokesman for the association. "They've been unable to speak for 60 years and it's an effort for them to break the silence. But they will." Piedrafita's mass grave was discovered the morning after the killings by Ricardo Suarez, now 80, who went to work in the fields as usual and was drawn by the barking of his dog to huge pools of blood by the roadside. The terrified 14-year-old alerted his family, but fear silenced them. "If you spoke once, you never mentioned it again. That was terror. On TV they go on about Yugoslavia, Chile, Argentina ... they should ask us, we've suffered much more, and longer," the old man said. Asuncion Alvarez, 87, whose brothers Joaquin and Porfirio surrendered and were shot that night, became so worried over the years that their fate would be forgotten that she drew a map of the spot where they lay and gave it to her children. Last week's excavations confirmed the map's accuracy. Guided by testimonies from those who remember, Mr Macias's organisation hopes to investigate mass graves throughout Spain, and possibly even find the remains of Spain's symbol of resistance to Franco: the poet and playwright Federico Garcia Lorca, who was shot and dumped in a trench in August 1936. ------------------------------------------- Macdonald Stainsby http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/rad-green http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/leninist-international -- In the contradiction lies the hope. --Bertholt Brecht From Tom_Childs at Douglas.BC.CA Fri Jul 19 13:10:14 2002 From: Tom_Childs at Douglas.BC.CA (Tom_Childs at Douglas.BC.CA) Date: Fri, 19 Jul 2002 12:10:14 -0700 Subject: [R-G] [Infoshop News] WSJ visits the Brecht Forum (fwd) Message-ID: <200207191910.MAA27050@Douglas.BC.CA> ----- Forwarded message: ----- Delivered-To: infoshop-news at flag.blackened.net From: Chuck Munson To: "acc at lists.mutualaid.org" , "mgj-discuss at lists.mutualaid.org" , "infoshop-news at infoshop.org" Subject: [Infoshop News] WSJ visits the Brecht Forum Date: Fri, 19 Jul 2002 14:49:31 -0400 -------- Original Message -------- Subject: WSJ visits the Brecht Forum, discovers THE Woman Date: Fri, 19 Jul 2002 12:24:50 -0400 From: Doug Henwood Reply-To: lbo-talk at lists.panix.com To: lbo-talk Wall Street Journal online - July 19, 2002 My Summer School By BRIAN MCGUIRE In summer 1931, the journal Class Struggle noted an educational triumph: "The classes of our workers school have been unusually successful. More than 30 workers attended the class in volume one of Marx's Capital, the most popular of them all." The tradition continues. This past week, the Brecht Forum, on 27th Street in Manhattan, offered its 24th annual "intensive study" in Marxism -- for workers and anyone else who was interested. An ad headed "Another World Is Possible!" noted that Marxism can help us find "a political response that can confront the interdependence of capital with racism, sexism, homophobia and xenophobia." An ambitious goal, but then revolution was too. On the first day, as 20-odd people filed into the forum's lobby, someone muttered about Enron. That got the event's organizer, Lincoln Van Sluytman, going about how "the movement" benefits from capitalist pratfalls. Taped to the wall above the coffee and bagel spread was a sign reading "Evidence of Struggle." Beneath it were newspaper clippings of recent uprisings around the world. A table was stacked with pamphlets and articles on "Bush's Nuclear Threat," "Collateral Damage of War," "U.S. Funds Israeli Occupation" and Danny Glover's views on human rights. Anti-Capitalist Tool The sessions over the four days -- led by New York-area professors and activists -- took place in a large, windowless room with four round tables. The walls were covered with photographs of oppressed peoples around the world. As people took their seats the first day, conversation turned again to Enron. Mr. Van Sluytman declared that the members of the Brecht Forum "believe very strongly that the thinking of Karl Marx provides an essential tool that helps us look at these conditions of horror." Corporate scandal -- along with the war on terrorism -- was a touchstone at many sessions. It seemed to suggest that capitalism was finally collapsing in on itself -- through internal crises and futile attempts at global dominance. "Sept. 11 was a godsend for Bush," said Bill Tabb, a professor at Queens College. "It was the occasion to totally militarize the U.S. government. The corruption of this administration will historically be the most corrupt we've had in our history." But the discussion often covered more traditional, and predictable, ground. Indeed, it was amazing how often the commentary drifted toward clich=E9. Steve Brier, an associate provost at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, noted that through the Social History Project he and his colleagues have been retelling history from "the bottom up." "Since the '60s," he observed, "history has changed from being about great white men." To which a woman remarked: "History is his story. Now we have her story as well." Before showing a video on American intervention in the Philippines in the 1890s, Mr. Brier stated that "America was born out of a colonial process." When he mentioned that the Spanish brought smallpox to South America, one woman asked whether they had done this deliberately. "I don't think we have to look at it that way," he responded, to her evident disappointment. The participants composed a motley cadre. The ages ranged widely. Some eagerly identified themselves as Marxists. Others, like Dot Griss, a retired director of community relations for United Cerebral Palsy of Queens, were more like New Deal Democrats. "I came because frankly I am really so upset with the state of the world that sometimes I want to go out and scream," she said. "I consider myself a concerned citizen. I would like universal health care." Most participants simply called themselves leftists. Factions weren't really in evidence, but disputes did break out. During a heated discussion of racist elements within Marxism itself, Brenda Stokely, chairman of the New York Labor Party, broke through a crescendo of exasperated voices with the cry: "There should be free everything for everybody!" When the discussion moved toward the view that "a nicer capitalism" is preferable to revolution, the more committed members of the group -- a kind of priestly class -- would steer it back to Marx. Ms. Griss complained about "not even being able to find Medicaid in the phone book," but Neil Smith, a professor of sociology at the City University of New York, shot back that the group must learn to distinguish between "deep human sympathy and socialist strategy." The important thing, he urged, wiping sweat from his brow with a red bandana, was not to sympathize but to organize. In an effort to inspire all present to greater radicalism, Mr. Smith offered a scenario. "OK. It's St. Petersburg in 1918. We've gotten rid of all the nasty capitalists. What's our plan?" By way of response, a woman wearing large plastic glasses announced that people today are "too comfortable" to revolt. "I think not enough people are hurting," she said, a bagel and coffee in front of her. "That's what the media tells you," answered a voice from across the room. At this point, Mr. Smith warned that participants should not content themselves with imagining alternatives to capitalism. Such alternatives "are inevitable," he said. "I've never seen the U.S. ruling class so out on a limb." But "there's nothing that says egalitarian socialism or a feminist society, and not global military control, is the next step." 'Global Bourgeoisie' Other lecturers were less gloomy. An articulate, if chirpy, young woman named Lisa Featherstone gave an update on the anti-globalists who disrupt meetings of the World Trade Organization or "wherever else global bourgeoisie get together." She said that the slogan "another world is possible" had become "ubiquitous" on campuses. Young people had even taken to "anti-capitalist lifestyles." She cited the Anti-Authoritarian Baby-Sitters Club, where "the fiercest looking men" give up a day of protesting to stay at home and watch the kids. At the mention of this novelty, an argument erupted in the back of the room. Josh, a graduate student, said that the lives of the protesters were shot through with what Marx referred to as the fetishism of commodities. Their love of organic food, he implied, was greater than their love of the oppressed who grow it. Ms. Featherstone conceded the point. She mentioned that organic farming might actually be "more exploitative" than large, mechanized farms, "because it requires more stooping." Several people nodded their heads approvingly, happy to learn something new. Finally, "Capital" had something fresh to teach! Another world is possible indeed. Mr. McGuire is a free-lance writer in New York. Updated July 19, 2002 _______________________________________________ infoshop-news mailing list infoshop-news at infoshop.org http://www.infoshop.org/mailman/listinfo/infoshop-news From info at cinox.demon.co.uk Fri Jul 19 13:55:17 2002 From: info at cinox.demon.co.uk (Tim Murphy) Date: Fri, 19 Jul 2002 20:55:17 +0100 Subject: [R-G] Re: World Racism (Dan Murray) In-Reply-To: <20020719140330.2218.10021.Mailman@lists.econ.utah.edu> Message-ID: Hi Dan, Yes it stopped working for a while but it seems to work now... http://www.worldracism.com Tim -----Original Message----- From: "Dan Murray" To: Subject: Re: [R-G] World Racism Date: Thu, 18 Jul 2002 18:50:27 -0500 Reply-To: rad-green at lists.econ.utah.edu Hey Tim, Sounds interesting, but the URL doesn't work :( Dan ----- Original Message ----- From: "Tim Murphy" To: "RAD GREEN" Sent: Thursday, July 18, 2002 4:06 PM Subject: [R-G] World Racism > > > http://www.worldracism.com/ > > > --__--__-- From mstainsby at tao.ca Fri Jul 19 18:11:31 2002 From: mstainsby at tao.ca (Macdonald Stainsby) Date: Fri, 19 Jul 2002 17:11:31 -0700 Subject: [R-G] Iraq says five killed, 17 hurt in U.S., British attack. Message-ID: <007d01c22f82$00aeb9e0$291f5318@vc.shawcable.net> Reuters. 19 July 2002. Iraq says five killed, 17 hurt in U.S., British attack. BAGHDAD -- Iraq said on Friday five people had been killed and 17 others wounded when U.S. and British planes attacked civilian targets in the south of the country on Thursday. "At 11:15 p.m. local time (0715 GMT) yesterday evil American and British warplanes violated our airspace coming from Saudi Arabia and carried out 34 sorties," an Iraqi military spokesman said in a statement carried by the official Iraqi News Agency. 'The enemy attacked civilian installations in the province of Qadissiya (Diwaniya), killing five citizens and wounding 17 others," the spokesman said. He said a house was destroyed and another was damaged during the attack in the centre of Diwaniya city, some 180 km (110 miles) south of Baghdad. There was no immediate confirmation from the United States or Britain. ------------------------------------------- Macdonald Stainsby http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/rad-green http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/leninist-international -- In the contradiction lies the hope. --Bertholt Brecht From Tom_Childs at Douglas.BC.CA Fri Jul 19 22:09:52 2002 From: Tom_Childs at Douglas.BC.CA (Tom_Childs at Douglas.BC.CA) Date: Fri, 19 Jul 2002 21:09:52 -0700 Subject: [R-G] [Infoshop News] Genoa 1 year on (fwd) Message-ID: <200207200409.VAA01698@Douglas.BC.CA> subscribers, ...an interesting follow-up to an earlier post i made today. The question Munson raises here: "Have we failed to put on any kind of big successor to Genoa?"...rings all to clear i fear...at least in north america. time to get at some big time strategies for the real immediate future i think. any ideas out there? regards, -t ----- Forwarded message: ----- Delivered-To: infoshop-news at flag.blackened.net From: Chuck Munson To: "infoshop-news at infoshop.org" Cc: "mgj-discuss at lists.mutualaid.org" , "acc at lists.mutualaid.org" Subject: [Infoshop News] Genoa 1 year on Date: Fri, 19 Jul 2002 23:52:24 -0400 Two weeks ago I would have been so pissed about reading an article like this that I would have been prompted to write an angry letter to the author. Funny thing is, I think that the journalists who are writing the obituary for our movement are probably correct, at least when it comes to the movement in Europe and North America. We have failed to put on any kind of big successor to Genoa. We bicker amongst ourselves and can't unify on any kind of big action. What's worse are the activists who write fashionable essays about how we should abandon summit protests, utterly forgetting what those big summit protests did for activism and reistance, especially on the local level. I hear from people in small town America all the time. They have heard about our movement and our big protests. They want to plug in and get involved, but I don't know what to say to them anymore. We have become timid and conservative. We fail to inspire at precisely the moment when so many Americans are angry at corporations. We fancied ourselves the leaders of a movement against capitalism, but the parade of working people have moved past the knot of bickering and navel-gazing anti-globalization "leaders." I told everybody that it was a mistake to get cautious after 9-11 and the events since have proven my assessment correct. "The poll also found that the national political mood on domestic issues is returning to what it was before Sept. 11 -- a change that could help the Democratic Party in this fall's midterm elections." http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A28387-2002Jul18?language=printer We have lost a lot of ground due to our timidity and bickering. The stock market crashed big time today and an anti-corporate mood fills the air. Do we have what it takes to work together, keep our eye on the bigger picture, and give capitalism a big shove? Chuck0 Date: Fri, 19 Jul 2002 20:35:42 -0700 (PDT) From: seamus2001 at attbi.com The fuse that fizzled One year on from Genoa, Italy\'s anti-globalisation movement is still no match for Berlusconi Rory Carroll Saturday July 20, 2002 The Guardian Through the mist of tear gas and burning cars the story of Genoa seemed as shocking as it was momentous. Police officers tasked with guarding a G8 summit lashed out at protestors in a weekend-long frenzy of screams, cracked heads and snapped bones. More than savage, it was stupid. Many of the victims were foreigners, Germans, Britons, Americans, Spaniards, with good jobs and connections back home. And the world's media was there, cameras rolling, to record for posterity, not to mention the courts, what the Italian police did to the anti-globalisation movement. Blocked by iron gates and water cannon from the Ducal palace where George Bush and Tony Blair were meeting fellow heads of government, there were more than 200,000 protestors who in years to come could boast they were at a historic clash. After Paris '68, Genoa '01. Some have returned and will be in the port city today to mark the anniversary of the summit with another demonstration which will demand, among other things, the arrest of Italy's deputy prime minister, Gianfranco Fini, for allegedly stoking police brutality. Demonstrators - along with the host of books and documentary films chronicling the events of last July - are determined that Genoa is not forgotten. Beyond the anti-globalisation community, memories of events in Genoa were blotted out by what happened in New York 53 days later. Brutal as it was, the shooting dead of one rioter and beatings meted to more than 300 protestors lost shock value in the shadow of Ground Zero and the war in Afghanistan. Genoa should remain shocking - and in the news - because the story is not over. It continues to evolve in a direction which says a lot about Silvio Berlusconi's Italy and the state of the country's anti-globalisation movement. Let us rewind to one of that weekend's most egregious incidents, the early morning raid on the Diaz school used as a headquarters by the protestors. For the previous two days the Black Bloc anarchists had smashed up the city and attacked the police, who responded by lashing out, sometimes in panic, at peaceful demonstrators. The raid was different. Involving several units, hundreds of men and senior officers, it was approved by the interior minister. It was an operation to arrest Black Bloc members and seize weapons, police spokesmen said afterwards. The blood-splattered walls told their own story of the ferocity which left 62 of the 93 people arrested needing hospital treatment. Most had been asleep when the police broke down the doors. From his hospital bed Mark Covell told me, with difficulty given his punctured lung, five broken ribs and absence of teeth, of being used as a football. "I thought, my God, this is it, I'm going to die. The last thing I heard was a lot of screaming. Then I lost consciousness." At a press conference the police said an officer had been stabbed during the raid and paraded their seizures: an assortment of hammers, knives, pick-axes, balaclavas and two Molotov cocktails - enough, said magistrates, to charge all 93 people with conspiracy to bomb. Instead they were all released as it became clear they were not Black Bloc. Some European governments complained of police brutality and the Italian government said wrongdoers would be punished. Then the Twin Towers fell, and Genoa vanished from headlines. Since then, there have been three developments: new evidence has emerged showing the brutality was worse than initially thought; prosecutors have said they think the police planted the Molotov cocktails and faked the stabbing; and the government has protected the police. A raft of investigations by Italian magistrates and human rights groups such as Amnesty International, aided by police officers breaking the omerta , or code of silence, have built up a picture of systematic abuse in two holding centres. Police officers, prison guards, nurses and doctors have been accused of beating and humiliating detainees. Stories have emerged of body piercings being removed with pliers, people being stripped and insulted, threatened with rape, denied food and water, or forced to sing fascist songs. A disabled man was bludgeoned for being unable to keep his legs spread. Prosecutors allege police tried to frame the Diaz occupants by planting Molotov cocktails found by a mobile patrol seven hours earlier in the city centre. Pasquale Guaglione, a deputy police chief, identified the wine bottles shown at the post-raid press conference as the ones he found. An officer who said he was stabbed during the raid is under investigation for lying about the gash in his body armour. Dozens of police are expected to face trial. Quite an indictment of what Silvio Berlusconi hoped would be his glittering debut on the world stage, especially given that the G8 meeting achieved nothing of substance, though Italy\'s prime minister strived to make it pretty: extra lemons added to trees, a plea to locals not to hang underwear out to dry, drapes of renaissance facades to hide ugly buildings. An empty show? Not at all. History was made, said Mr Berlusconi, because it was at Genoa that he persuaded George Bush and Vladimir Putin to bring Russia into Nato. Mr Berlusconi's majority in parliament agreed the summit was a total success, and absolved the security forces. Overall no "illegality had emerged...just occasional individual excesses", said a parliamentary commission. The police "gave their best, paying a high price in terms of risking injury". Three senior Italian police commanders were transferred to other posts but so far nobody has been fired or convicted. If there are guilty officers they will face justice, said the government, but Gianfranco Fini, the deputy prime minister and ex-fascist whose presence at a police station during the riots allegedly signalled political cover for excesses, has not wavered in defending the security forces. Genoa is a rallying cry for the anti-globalisation movement, each revelation feeding its indignation, and publishers and art house cinemas sense a market for its tales, but in terms of igniting something bigger the fuse has fizzled. The thousands expected at Piazza Alimonda today to remember the dead protestor, Carlo Giuliani, will be looking back, not forward. To talk to its intellectuals is to realise the movement in Italy, once Europe's most vibrant, is alive but wrongfooted in an era with evils greater than McDonald's. Its leaders, feted as a rising national political force, have floundered. Luca Casarini, head of the Tute Bianche (White Overalls) protest group, got a derisory vote in local elections two months ago. So did Carlo Giuliani's father, Giuliano, when he stood in Genoa. Vittorio Agnoletto, head of the Genoa Social Forum, has vanished from public view. At a poorly attended gathering in Rome last month I was about to interview Jose Bove when he realised his wallet had been pinched. He frantically grabbed his mobile phone to cancel credit cards. For a movement of symbols, here was an epitome of loss. Nostalgia has suffused the build-up to today's anniversary. Genoa provides a fixed point for a movement groping for a way ahead. Who would have thought that that weekend of mayhem and tragedy would become - in Italy at least - a comfort memory, a time when the swelling influence of Italy's activists seemed a giddy, glorious inevitability? Rory Carroll is the Guardian's Rome correspondent rorycarroll at guardian.co.uk _______________________________________________ infoshop-news mailing list infoshop-news at infoshop.org http://www.infoshop.org/mailman/listinfo/infoshop-news From mstainsby at tao.ca Fri Jul 19 23:47:29 2002 From: mstainsby at tao.ca (Macdonald Stainsby) Date: Fri, 19 Jul 2002 22:47:29 -0700 Subject: [R-G] [Infoshop News] Genoa 1 year on (fwd) References: <200207200409.VAA01698@Douglas.BC.CA> Message-ID: <003001c22fb0$efe7f160$291f5318@vc.shawcable.net> ----- Original Message ----- From: > From: Chuck Munson > Subject: [Infoshop News] Genoa 1 year on > > Date: Fri, 19 Jul 2002 23:52:24 -0400 > > Two weeks ago I would have been so pissed about reading an article like > this that I would have been prompted to write an angry letter to the > author. Funny thing is, I think that the journalists who are writing the > obituary for our movement are probably correct, at least when it comes to > the movement in Europe and North America. We have failed to put on any > kind of big successor to Genoa. We bicker amongst ourselves and can't > unify on any kind of big action. What's worse are the activists who write > fashionable essays about how we should abandon summit protests, utterly > forgetting what those big summit protests did for activism and reistance, > especially on the local level. > > I hear from people in small town America all the time. They have heard > about our movement and our big protests. They want to plug in and get > involved, but I don't know what to say to them anymore. We have become > timid and conservative. We fail to inspire at precisely the moment when so > many Americans are angry at corporations. We fancied ourselves the leaders > of a movement against capitalism, but the parade of working people have > moved past the knot of bickering and navel-gazing anti-globalization > "leaders." > > I told everybody that it was a mistake to get cautious after 9-11 and the > events since have proven my assessment correct. > > "The poll also found that the national political mood on domestic issues > is returning to what it was before Sept. 11 -- a change that could help > the Democratic Party in this fall's midterm elections." > http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A28387-2002Jul18?language=printer > > We have lost a lot of ground due to our timidity and bickering. The stock > market crashed big time today and an anti-corporate mood fills the air. Do > we have what it takes to work together, keep our eye on the bigger > picture, and give capitalism a big shove? > > Chuck0 Munson isn't doing any new thinking other than describe that we should be looking at things as we did before 9-11. I think that is as faulty as those who said not to do anything at all. It is wrong for us to backdown- it is essential for us to advance. It is also, however, essential that we grow and change and be flexible with the contortions of our movement. One way we can do that is by being a bit more excited about the 100 000 in DC last April 20th, to oppose both the attacks on Palestine and the IMF/World Bank. We are in a serious re-thinking position, and Munson is right about our need to continue to challenge them with convergences- but I think wrong so far as to say we shouldn't leave Summit Hopping. It is not the same thing to re-direct the movement to a new strategy, one influenced and sparked by the old, one that takes the same issues up but allows us instead to determine the time and the place, and to do so regionally and start to wallop on a rotating basis, towns with networks going out in a reasonable distance around the area. Summit Hopping gave us much of our strength, but so far as continuing to advance, the ruling class has defeated the concept of summit hopping. Yet, it was this way because of our own victories- so now we must step up, escalate what we bring down on the ruling state- while making the connections between the global and the local more than a slogan but a new guide to our analytical framework. We also need to be prepared to make a clear principled stand when the launch of the next war on Iraq- it is coming soon- we need to find a way in which that can also be seen as a united attack on us as well and begin to see it in that light. For that is how it really exists anyhow. Macdonald From info at cinox.demon.co.uk Sat Jul 20 00:17:43 2002 From: info at cinox.demon.co.uk (Tim Murphy) Date: Sat, 20 Jul 2002 07:17:43 +0100 Subject: [R-G] Fw: smoke and mirrors Message-ID: Ha'aretz quotes French government sources who say that the U.S. will attack Iraq soon: Condoleeza flies a kite ====================== Friday, July 19, 2002 Av 10, 5762 Israel Time: 09:05 (GMT+3) http://www.haaretzdaily.com/hasen/pages/ShArt.jhtml?itemNo=188407&contrassID =2&subContrassID=1&sbSubContrassID=0 French sources: U.S. to attack Iraq `soon' By Amir Oren The U.S. operation to topple Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein will take place in the coming months, even before November's Congressional elections, according to high-level sources in the French government following talks with American decision-makers and professionals in Washington. The French assessment is based, in part, on what National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice told new French Foreign Minister Dominique de Villepin this month. Rice emphasized U.S. President George W. Bush's determination to topple Saddam "soon," according to the French sources. Frequent media reports about difficulties in deploying American troops and completing preparations for the operation are meant, according to French government experts, as disinformation to achieve tactical surprise with regard to the timing, place and method of the assault. This will partly make up for the lack of strategic surprise given Bush's declared policy and Saddam's preparations to absorb an attack. Reports and analysis based on official sources in Washington reiterate the assumption that the operation will take place this winter, so that any failure will not reflect badly for the Republicans at the polls. But the French regard that as a strategy to lower Saddam's guard in the coming three months, while Congress is in recess and the election campaign heats up. Paris won't be surprised if the blow comes in the middle of August, while Bush is seen vacationing at his Texas ranch, in the form of a special forces raid backed by the CIA and precision air attacks. The French officials believe the the chances are good for an American operation to succeed, since it will take far less effort than the 1991 Gulf War when Iraq was expelled from Kuwait. But the officials do have their doubts about the U.S.'s ability to form a government to their liking in Baghdad. That skepticism is derived from both the weak opposition to Saddam inside Iraq and the failure to protect the new Afghan government. The officials said they won't be surprised if Afghani President Hamid Karzai, like his vice president, is assassinated. "And we don't know what will happen then to the gamble the Americans took on Karzai." In the Foreign and Defense ministries in Paris, officials are more worried about Iranian nuclear ambitions. French experts say that Iran won't forgo its nuclear ambitions, and they expect, at the current rate of development, Tehran will have a bomb by 2008 or 2010, three-to-five years after Israel believes the Iranian nuclear program will reach fruition. But Iran can accelerate its project, with foreign help, especially from North Korea. "The Iranians tell us they're only doing what we did 50 years ago," said one French official, adding, "and what you Israelis did, with a bit of help from us. That may be true, but global politics is not based on absolute justice and equality, and even if Sharon has a bomb, that's nonetheless less worrisome than if [Iranian President Mohammed] Khatami has one." France's traditional reservations about a military operation against Iraq have been blatantly weakened in the weeks since French President Jacques Chirac was re-elected without the need for power sharing with the Left. Bush's military doctrine, which calls for a preemptive strike against countries and entities that might use terror or weapons of mass destruction, is accepted by Paris despite its reticence. "If we know that Libya is going to launch a missile at Marseilles, we won't wait until [Libyan leader Moammar] Gadhafi pushes the button, but why say so ahead of time?" said one strategic planner in the French Foreign Ministry this week. One of his colleagues added that his government now tilts toward welcoming an American decision to topple Saddam, both because of the general intra-Arab politics and within the context of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. For the Arab world, the collapse of dictatorial or dynastic regimes and intensification of the democratic process will eventually sweep through countries like Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia. France is worried that without an added degree of democracy, the political protests could be channeled into Islamic fundamentalism and result in civil wars, which would send hundreds of thousands of refugees onto the country's southern beaches seeking asylum. Regarding the Israeli-Palestinian context, the establishment of a pro-Western government in Baghdad would loosen the stranglehold on Jordan, "which is, in effect, only a buffer-state between Iraq and Israel and is run with the inspiration of the IDF and Mossad," said one French source. Without an Iraq hostile to Israel breathing down Jordan's neck, the Palestinians would have to sober up from their far-reaching illusions and chances would grow for an arrangement that suits the needs of all three sides - Jordan, the Palestinians and Israel. And an end to PA Chairman Yasser Arafat's regime is also now acceptable to France's planners, in the spirit of the "change the regime" rule Bush set in place in Kabul and his plans for Baghdad. If it's good for them, why not for Ramallah, say the French officials. A French source as informed as any about Chirac's closed-door views, told Israel's Ambassador to France, Eli Bar-Navi, that Chirac is disappointed in Arafat, referring to him as "the rug salesman," a euphemism for someone who cannot be trusted. ====================== *** NOTICE: In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. Feel free to distribute widely but PLEASE acknowledge the original source. *** From Tom_Childs at Douglas.BC.CA Sat Jul 20 00:54:01 2002 From: Tom_Childs at Douglas.BC.CA (Tom_Childs at Douglas.BC.CA) Date: Fri, 19 Jul 2002 23:54:01 -0700 Subject: [R-G] [Infoshop News] Genoa 1 year on (fwd) In-Reply-To: <003001c22fb0$efe7f160$291f5318@vc.shawcable.net>; from "Macdonald Stainsby" at Jul 19, 102 10:42 pm Message-ID: <200207200654.XAA02662@Douglas.BC.CA> Mac, The WTO next meets at Cancun, 2003...We'd best be gettin' our machetes honed to join up with the Mexican resistance against corporate global rule, and seriously get our heads around Zapatismo! See you at the rally at the VAG mana~a. !Viva Zapata! soup/t >>>>mstainsby at tao.ca wrote:<<<< > > ----- Original Message ----- > From: > > > From: Chuck Munson > > Subject: [Infoshop News] Genoa 1 year on > > > > Date: Fri, 19 Jul 2002 23:52:24 -0400 > > > > Two weeks ago I would have been so pissed about reading an article like > > this that I would have been prompted to write an angry letter to the > > author. Funny thing is, I think that the journalists who are writing the > > obituary for our movement are probably correct, at least when it comes to > > the movement in Europe and North America. We have failed to put on any > > kind of big successor to Genoa. We bicker amongst ourselves and can't > > unify on any kind of big action. What's worse are the activists who write > > fashionable essays about how we should abandon summit protests, utterly > > forgetting what those big summit protests did for activism and reistance, > > especially on the local level. > > > > I hear from people in small town America all the time. They have heard > > about our movement and our big protests. They want to plug in and get > > involved, but I don't know what to say to them anymore. We have become > > timid and conservative. We fail to inspire at precisely the moment when so > > many Americans are angry at corporations. We fancied ourselves the leaders > > of a movement against capitalism, but the parade of working people have > > moved past the knot of bickering and navel-gazing anti-globalization > > "leaders." > > > > I told everybody that it was a mistake to get cautious after 9-11 and the > > events since have proven my assessment correct. > > > > "The poll also found that the national political mood on domestic issues > > is returning to what it was before Sept. 11 -- a change that could help > > the Democratic Party in this fall's midterm elections." > > http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A28387-2002Jul18?language=printer > > > > We have lost a lot of ground due to our timidity and bickering. The stock > > market crashed big time today and an anti-corporate mood fills the air. Do > > we have what it takes to work together, keep our eye on the bigger > > picture, and give capitalism a big shove? > > > > Chuck0 > > Munson isn't doing any new thinking other than describe that we should be > looking at things as we did before 9-11. I think that is as faulty as those who > said not to do anything at all. > > It is wrong for us to backdown- it is essential for us to advance. It is also, > however, essential that we grow and change and be flexible with the contortions > of our movement. One way we can do that is by being a bit more excited about the > 100 000 in DC last April 20th, to oppose both the attacks on Palestine and the > IMF/World Bank. > > We are in a serious re-thinking position, and Munson is right about our need to > continue to challenge them with convergences- but I think wrong so far as to say > we shouldn't leave Summit Hopping. It is not the same thing to re-direct the > movement to a new strategy, one influenced and sparked by the old, one that > takes the same issues up but allows us instead to determine the time and the > place, and to do so regionally and start to wallop on a rotating basis, towns > with networks going out in a reasonable distance around the area. > > Summit Hopping gave us much of our strength, but so far as continuing to > advance, the ruling class has defeated the concept of summit hopping. Yet, it > was this way because of our own victories- so now we must step up, escalate what > we bring down on the ruling state- while making the connections between the > global and the local more than a slogan but a new guide to our analytical > framework. > > We also need to be prepared to make a clear principled stand when the launch of > the next war on Iraq- it is coming soon- we need to find a way in which that can > also be seen as a united attack on us as well and begin to see it in that > light. For that is how it really exists anyhow. > > Macdonald > > > > _______________________________________________ > Rad-Green mailing list > Rad-Green at lists.econ.utah.edu > To change your options or unsubscribe go to: > http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/rad-green > -- From Tom_Childs at Douglas.BC.CA Sat Jul 20 00:57:18 2002 From: Tom_Childs at Douglas.BC.CA (Tom_Childs at Douglas.BC.CA) Date: Fri, 19 Jul 2002 23:57:18 -0700 Subject: [R-G] En;NYT,Cornfields or Runways? Zapata's Ghost Watches,Jul 18 (fwd) Message-ID: <200207200657.XAA02688@Douglas.BC.CA> ----- Forwarded message: ----- Date: Thu, 18 Jul 2002 21:28:39 -0500 (CDT) To: chiapas95-english at eco.utexas.edu From: owner-chiapas95-english at eco.utexas.edu (Chiapas95-english) Subject: En;NYT,Cornfields or Runways? Zapata's Ghost Watches,Jul 18 -- This message is forwarded to you by the editors of the Chiapas95 newslists. To contact the editors or to submit material for posting send to: . From: dana.aldea at t-online.de (Dana) To: Subject: NYT,Cornfields or Runways? Zapata's Ghost Watches,Jul 18 Date: Thu, 18 Jul 2002 17:03:05 +0200 Cornfields or Runways? Zapata's Ghost Watches By GINGER THOMPSON New York Times July 18, 2002 SAN SALVADOR ATENCO, Mexico, July 15 - Peasant farmers fighting the construction of a multibillion-dollar airport might seem a wildly lopsided struggle. But here the little guys have the power of history on their side. Some seven decades ago, this land was taken at gunpoint from the rich and distributed to the poor by the revolutionary hero Emiliano Zapata. During his fight, joined by millions of servants and sharecroppers, General Zapata told his ragtag following, "It is better to die on your feet than live on your knees." Since the end of the Mexican Revolution, after millions of acres were divided among millions of people, Zapata's fighters became farmers. But the legacy of armed struggle infused their sons and grandsons. Those rebellious sensibilities raged anew when President Vicente Fox announced that the government would take control of thousands of cornfields around this rundown community just northeast of Mexico City. The land would be used for his most important physical contribution to modernizing Mexico: an 11,000-acre international airport with six runways. To the farmers, many of whom are Indians, the plan sounded like a modern-day Conquest. And it seems that President Fox had no idea of the slumbering giant he had awakened. "Our grandfathers gave their blood to win this land," said Jorge Espinoza, whose great-grandfather lost his leg fighting alongside Zapata. "And we will defend our land in the same way. "Without our land we would be like caged birds. And what would happen to our dignity?" In a conflict last week that pushed this community to civil unrest, hundreds of farmers armed with machetes and gasoline bombs seized control of local government offices here to protest Mr. Fox's expropriation orders. At least 30 people on both sides were injured in the clashes. The farmers hijacked trucks to block all roads into town. And for four days they held at least a dozen local officials and police officers hostage. Tensions have eased here since Sunday night, when government officials released the peasant leaders arrested at the start of the disturbances. Farmers, in turn, released their hostages from the local auditorium and dismantled roadblocks. Negotiations with the Fox administration are expected to begin this week. Still, the fiery spirit of rebellion remains high. One 76-year-old grandmother, Mari'a Sa'nchez, boasted about standing at the front lines of the clashes last week, showing scabs left on both arms by rubber bullets. "If it is blood the government wants," she said, waving her machete, "then they will have blood." The threat of continued violence and a burgeoning public support for the farmers seem to have shifted the odds in their favor. Newspaper reports said the government was prepared to increase its offer for the land from 70 cents per square meter ($2,835 an acre) to $5 per square meter ($20,250 an acre). Government officials announced plans for jobs and social benefits for farmers whose land was expropriated, and President Fox indicated in televised statements that he would even consider a new site for his airport. "We are not going to trample the rights of anyone," Mr. Fox said in an interview on CNN. "There are alternatives for the airport." It is not uncommon for angry peasants across Mexico to resort to violence as a means of protest, or to take justice into their own hands. Criminals have been lynched for crimes as small as robbery and as serious as rape. In 1994 peasants in the southern state of Chiapas, who call themselves Zapatistas, mounted a rebellion against the government that continues to spark violence. To the disappointment of many, those practices continue two years after Mr. Fox rose to power. His election ended seven decades of authoritarian rule by the Institutional Revolutionary Party and raised expectations for an end to the lawlessness. "President Fox promised to make the poor a priority," said Sergio Va'squez, a peasant here who voted for Mr. Fox. "But he ignored our demands, just like the PRI, until we raised our machetes against him." "In Mexico," said a peasant leader, Ignacio del Valle, "if you have right and reason on your side, then you have to shout for it. You have to fight, no matter what happens." Dozens of farmers from San Salvador Atenco echoed his words. Most owned tiny patches of land, a little more than an acre each. But altogether the patches form a sea of corn in what was once the heart of the Aztec empire and later the setting for Zapata's vision for modern Mexico. On a tour of the cornfields, Mr. Va'squez, 45, pointed out willow trees that were 300 years old. Family legend has it that a pair of twin hills overlooking the cornfields was once a favorite refuge for the Aztec ruler Cuauhte'moc. Ruins remain from the old plantations that dotted the landscape at the turn of the last century. But while the land is rich with history, Mr. Va'squez acknowledges that the people who work it remain mired in poverty. He has a grade school education and barely ekes out a living growing corn and alfalfa. Like most fathers, he dreams of better lives for his three sons. But Mr. Fox's idea of progress is not what the farmer has in mind. "We want progress that allows us to be owners of our destiny," he said. "The government wants to make us peons in an airport." -- To unsubscribe from this list send a message containing the words unsubscribe chiapas95 (or chiapas95-lite, or chiapas95-english, or chiapas95-espanol) to majordomo at eco.utexas.edu. Previous messages are available from http://www.eco.utexas.edu/faculty/Cleaver/chiapas95.html or gopher to Texas, University of Texas at Austin, Department of Economics, Mailing Lists. From Tom_Childs at Douglas.BC.CA Sat Jul 20 01:30:05 2002 From: Tom_Childs at Douglas.BC.CA (Tom_Childs at Douglas.BC.CA) Date: Sat, 20 Jul 2002 00:30:05 -0700 Subject: [R-G] [Infoshop News] Fear and Loathing in the USA (fwd) Message-ID: <200207200730.AAA02902@Douglas.BC.CA> ...this is sort of like the white-knukle ride mac once described on a hitch-hicking ride down a Rocky Mountain or Pursell range mountainside... betweem here(B.C.)and Kananaskis...fwd here f.y.i. -t ----- Forwarded message: ----- Delivered-To: infoshop-news at flag.blackened.net From: "Viviane Lerner" To: "Infoshop" Cc: "Prog. Review" , "Rad Times" , "KBOO" , "Emmasnews" , "Common Dreams" Subject: [Infoshop News] Fear and Loathing in the USA Date: Fri, 19 Jul 2002 20:04:47 -0700 http://www.spectrezine.org/global/Heather.htm Fear and Loathing in the USA 19th July, 2002 Heather Wokusch We were somewhere near day 600 of the Bush administration on the edge of sanity when reality began to take hold ... And suddenly there was a terrible roar all around us and the future was full of bombs and Enrons and Cheneys, all swooping and screeching and diving around the SUV, which was going about a hundred miles an hour straight into a brick wall. And a voice was screaming: "Holy Jesus! How did we get here?" Feels that way sometimes. Like we're on the white-knuckle, e-ticket ride of our lives, passengers of some smacked out maniacs at the wheel, careening down freeways of their own private Idaho. So let's get this straight ... Our foreign policy was written by a weapons manufacturer executive and our energy policy was dictated by oil-companies. The White House finally acknowledges catastrophic global warming but says we should ignore it. Why conserve when we can drill for more! Bush didn't get his way turning the Arctic Refuge into an oil field, so he now (unbelievably) pushes for an even bigger prize:despoiling a 23-million-acre tract of pristine Alaskan wilderness, to dig for oil that will profit energy contractors, but not make a dent in the country's overwhelming consumption ... which contributes to global warming. Hubris. Like it doesn't matter if you smash up the car because daddy's so rich he'll just buy another one. Similar to how Cheney finagled the golden handshake from energy services company Halliburton, right before its stock collapsed due to Cheney's bad management. Or the way Bush crashed and burned company after company, only to have Poppy Bush supply him with other corporate toys to wreck. But what they're playing with now is the future. Our future. $100 billion has already been burned up testing the lunatic missile defense system, and billions more corporate "Star Wars" pork is on the way. This while social and environmental programs are being axed due to lack of funding, and millions of Americans continue to lose their jobs, joining the millions more already languishing in poverty, hunger and homelessness. The administration's response? A tax cut benefiting the richest 1%, and an attempted repeal of the estate tax, further enriching the very rich. Let them eat cow pies, apparently. Meanwhile, philanthropist Bush scores U2-Bono points proposing billions in aid to African countries, then turns around and signs into law a farm bill not only disproportionately burdening America's poor, but also creating trade barriers so high as to wipe out any of the African aid benefit. If this were simply madness it would be scary enough - but the coldly calculated method behind the madness confirms this administration is on a suicide run, taking us pedal to the metal down their dangerous dead end street. We've got inebriates at the wheel, drunk on power grabbing, lies and short-term profit. We've got Bush & Cheney et al blocking investigations into Enron, corruption and "who knew what when," Ashcroft massacring civil rights, and disempowered citizens accused of being unpatriotic if they dare to question administration policies. But what's at stake this time isn't some car or even some company - it's our country. Our future. Heather Wokusch is a free-lance writer who will be contributing regularly to Spectre. She can be contacted via her web site at http://www.heatherwokusch.com ========= *** NOTICE: In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.*** _______________________________________________ infoshop-news mailing list infoshop-news at infoshop.org http://www.infoshop.org/mailman/listinfo/infoshop-news From mstainsby at tao.ca Sat Jul 20 13:02:25 2002 From: mstainsby at tao.ca (Macdonald Stainsby) Date: Sat, 20 Jul 2002 12:02:25 -0700 Subject: [R-G] Italy March Remembers Carlo Guiliani Message-ID: <003901c2301f$fd0e7de0$291f5318@vc.shawcable.net> Reuters. 20 July 2002. Italy March Remembers Anti - Globalization Martyr. GENOA -- Thousands took to the streets of Genoa on Saturday to remember the "martyr" of the anti-globalization movement, a protester shot dead by police during last year's meeting of the Group of Eight leaders. Carlo Giuliani, 23, was killed during violent clashes between police and demonstrators that left another 300 injured and prompted widespread accusations of police brutality. On the first anniversary of the Genoa G8 summit, activists and well-wishers converged on the northern Italian city to honor the memory of Giuliani and to inject fresh energy into the anti-globalization movement. At 5:27 p.m., the time that Giuliani was shot by a young policeman as he tried to throw a fire extinguisher into a paramilitary police jeep, the crowds broke into a prolonged applause and released dozens of colored balloons into the sky. "This is not a funeral. We wanted to have a celebration of life, of the right to live and of so many rights that are denied in the world and in Italy," Giuliani's father said at the piazza where his son was shot. All day, demonstrators streamed through the piazza, leaving flowers and messages at a makeshift altar to their martyr, and in the early evening they marched through the city in a sea of red flags. Organizers said 50,000 people had turned out. For many, Genoa, which drew some 250,000 protesters, marked a high point in the grassroots movement that started at the World Trade Organization meeting in Seattle in 1999. According to witness statements gathered by Amnesty International, police reacted with extreme violence, beating and kicking protesters and depriving those arrested of prompt medical treatment. Human rights groups have slammed the government for failing to sentence anyone for the police brutality. A year after Genoa, activists hope to show that the anti-globalization movement is very much alive and well. On Saturday, the mood was cheerful as balloons and jugglers filled the piazzas in Genoa. Organizers were determined to keep the peace during the demonstration but more than 3,000 police were on hand to ensure the march did not turn violent. At the head of the march, activists carried a large banner reading: "With Carlo in our hearts our future isn't for sale." ------------------------------------------- Macdonald Stainsby http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/rad-green http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/leninist-international -- In the contradiction lies the hope. --Bertholt Brecht From hunterbadbear at earthlink.net Sun Jul 21 12:27:16 2002 From: hunterbadbear at earthlink.net (Hunter Gray) Date: Sun, 21 Jul 2002 12:27:16 -0600 Subject: [R-G] U.S. Should Consider Giving Military Arrest Powers, Ridge Says Message-ID: <000c01c230e4$3f662250$4970fa43@intel> Note by Hunterbear: "Fascist" isn't a term I use lightly, but it's obviously becoming an increasingly appropriate label for the prevailing mind-set of the black-suited, grim-faced, and increasingly paranoid characters in Bush's "security" retinue. Theirs are faces that could be lifted flat from the photos of Joe McCarthy's committee, House Un-American Activities Committee, and Senate Internal Security Subcommittee -- and the days and offices of J. Edgar Hoover. Hell, as far as FBI is concerned, it's never -- however covertly it's occasionally had to function at various points -- stopped its primary mission focus: anti-Left political witch-hunting. At almost every juncture, most Democrats have caved in and supported these increasingly authoritarian proposals. Who should be surprised at this? Much of the recent precedent-setting groundwork for the Patriot Act and its virulently poisonous appendages came in Bill Clinton's 1996 so-called Anti-Terrorism Act. That, BTW, launched full-scale United State Post Office surveillance of citizens' mail -- as part of the continuing-right-along plethora of Federal/state/local "lawmen" task forces. This jungle of venomously anti-civil libertarian poison ivy and belladonna and loco weed came directly from joint Democratic and Republican initiatives -- long before Election 2000. H. U.S. Should Consider Giving Military Arrest Powers, Ridge Says Bloomberg.com | 7/21/02 | Alex Canizares Washington, July 21 (Bloomberg) -- The government should consider reversing a more than a century of tradition and law to give the military authority to make arrests and fire their weapons on U.S. soil in the event of a terrorist attack, Homeland Security Director Tom Ridge said. Fears that terrorists might attempt a nuclear, biological or chemical attack on U.S. territory are prompting some lawmakers to support revisions to the Posse Comitatus Act of 1878, which restricts the use of the military in civilian law enforcement. ``I think it is time to revisit it,'' Senator Joe Biden, a Delaware Democrat, said on the ``Fox News Sunday'' program. That would ``allow for military that has expertise with weapons of mass destruction to be called in'' if such a plot was discovered. Since terrorists linked to Osama bin Laden's al-Qaeda organization destroyed the World Trade Center and damaged the Pentagon on Sept. 11, Congress has given law enforcement agencies more latitude to conduct wiretapping and other intelligence gathering to uncover terrorist plotting. President George W. Bush has proposed the biggest government reorganization in 50 years to put more than 100 offices and agencies into one department devoted to homeland security. The Bush administration already has taken step to investigate giving the military a larger domestic security role, the New York Times reported today. Air Force General Ralph Eberhart, who is in charge of U.S. defenses against attack, had urged the review, the newspaper said. Legal Review Lawyers in the Departments of Justice and Defense are looking into the legal questions that might be raised by greater involvement of military personnel, the Times reported. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said in May that the Pentagon would not seek expanded law enforcement powers and some defense officials are wary of making any changes, the Times said. Congress revised the Posse Comitatus Act in 1981 to allow the military to help the Coast Guard in drug interdiction efforts. Another change would require congressional approval. Ridge said officials haven't yet discussed giving the military powers to arrest U.S. citizens, though such authority might be discussed once Bush's homeland security department is created. ``Generally that goes against our instincts as a country to empower the military with the ability to arrest,'' Ridge said on ``Late Edition'' on the Cable News Network. ``But it may come up as a part of a discussion. It does not mean that it will ever be used or that the discussion will conclude that it even should be used.'' Unrealistic Limits Biden said he may revive a proposal he sponsored with former Georgia Senator Sam Nunn to revise the Reconstruction-era limits the Army, Navy, and later the Air Force's law enforcement authorities. That plan was prompted by the bombing of an Oklahoma City federal building by a domestic terrorist. It is ``not very realistic'' to deny the military the ability, for example, to shoot at suspected terrorists trying to deploy chemical, biological or nuclear weapons on a passenger train, Biden said. ``Right now, when you call in the military, the military would not be allowed to shoot-to-kill, if in fact they were approaching the weapon,'' Biden said. Still, he said ``we shouldn't go overboard'' by giving the military too many domestic powers. Ridge said on Fox that the discussion should take place between the Secretary of Defense and the Secretary of Bush's proposed Homeland Security Department, which has not yet been enacted by Congress. ``We need to be talking about military assets, in anticipation of a crisis event,'' Ridge said. ``And clearly, if you're talking about using the military, then you should have a discussion about Posse Comitatus.'' On another security issue, Ridge said the administration would accept legislation approved by a special congressional committee last week to extend by one year the Dec. 31, 2002 deadline requiring all bags to be screened at airports. ``There is a question, depending on the particular airport, as to the ability to install some of these massive machines between now and the end of the year, and I think this probably gives the new agency a little more flexibility.'' Ridge said. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- ---- Hunter Gray [Hunterbear] www.hunterbear.org (strawberry socialism) Protected by Na?shdo?i?ba?i? From mstainsby at tao.ca Sun Jul 21 14:23:30 2002 From: mstainsby at tao.ca (Macdonald Stainsby) Date: Sun, 21 Jul 2002 13:23:30 -0700 Subject: [R-G] Reject conditional aid from West, says President Mugabe Message-ID: <00f901c230f4$7b394720$291f5318@vc.shawcable.net> Reject conditional aid from West, says President From Itayi Musengeyi in HAVANA, Cuba Zimbabwe Herald Reporter AFRICA must reject Western aid under Nepad if it comes with conditions, President Mugabe said here yesterday. Speaking for the first time on the South African and Nigerian- sponsored economic recovery programme, President Mugabe told African ambassadors based in Cuba that the continent should co-operate with developed countries in transforming its economy but must guard against being dictated to. The need to revamp the continent?s economy had led some African countries to come up with Nepad, under which Africa should develop partnership with the West, he told the diplomats. Differences over Nepad emerged at the AU summit in Durban and it was not clear how it would be implemented, Cde Mugabe said. "It?s up to us to remain vigilant in any process of co- operation with them (the West) and reject any tendencies to subject us to their whims. The main principle is that we as United Africa can forge unity with developed countries and get them to fund a process of transformation," he said. "But others have their own reservations, they fear that the developed countries might subject us to their whims. They might impose conditionalities like those of the International Monetary Fund and World Bank." President Mugabe said the West was least qualified to lecture Africa on human rights, democracy and good governance because it denied Africans their rights under colonialism. "Now they are coming to us as teachers of democracy when during colonialism and imperialism they would not allow us to exercise our rights. "Soon after South Africa got independence and all African countries were free, the developed world started new methods of controlling us. But it?s up to us to remain vigilant," he said. Nigerian ambassador to Cuba Mr Ngam Nwochukwu said he had doubts about Nepad and saw no reason why Africa should trust the West. He said there was no way the West would fund Nepad and let Africa to run its affairs. "My President Olusegun Obassanjo is one of the founding fathers of Nepad but still he has doubts and reservations. One thing which is of great concern is why our leaders still tend to trust the West," Mr Nwachukwo said. He added: "If we go back to history, these particular people have done everything to demonise us, colonise and make us slaves and they still are doing everything to keep us down." The Nigerian diplomat wondered why African leaders still believed the West would change. "Why do we believe that Nepad will work. Sir, I still have my doubts because in the past they have used that guise of helping us so as to keep us down. "So if we engage Nepad shall we try as much as possible to keep them out because he who pays the piper dictates the tune. This was an idea to help Africa that has been hijacked." =================================================== ? Copyright of Zimbabwe Newspapers (1980) Limited 2001. Terms and Conditions of reading. Commercial Information . Privacy Policy . Information About http://www.herald.co.zw/ ------------------------------------------- Macdonald Stainsby http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/rad-green http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/leninist-international -- In the contradiction lies the hope. --Bertholt Brecht From pieinsky at igc.org Sun Jul 21 17:10:47 2002 From: pieinsky at igc.org (Jay Moore) Date: Sun, 21 Jul 2002 19:10:47 -0400 Subject: [R-G] More Signs of Imminent War Message-ID: <006501c2310c$49757c00$89211e40@bypass.com> Bush rallies US for strike on Iraq Iraq: Observer special Peter Beaumont and Paul Beaver Sunday July 21, 2002 The Observer (UK) President George Bush has told US troops to be ready for 'pre-emptive military action' against Iraq, as security sources warned that a massive assault against President Saddam Hussein could be likely at 'short notice'. Whitehall sources confirmed that Tony Blair had decided Britain must back any US assault and had ordered defence planners to begin the preparations for a new war in the Gulf. 'President Bush has already made up his mind. This is going to happen. It is a given,' said one Whitehall source. 'What we are waiting for is to be told the details of how and when and where.' Although Britain has not decided on its level of commitment, defence sources say planners have been told to expect to send 20,000-30,000 British troops. The sources added that British Challenger II main battle tanks and other key armoured fighting vehicles were being pushed through a crash servicing and refit programme. The Ministry of Defence has explained the crash repairs programme by saying it is for a military exercise planned for Scotland. However, expectation of a large British involvement in a US-led war to topple Saddam Hussein has been raised by reports that Britain will issue an emergency call-up of reservists in September and by reports of other preparations, including a big increase in RAF training flights. 'The combat indicators are all there,' said one source. 'This is going to happen. And perhaps sooner than we think.' Whitehall sources claim, however, that the Prime Minister is hesitating in declaring his full endorsement of Bush's plans until Washington puts in a formal request for British troops. Unlike Bush, Blair is understood to be concerned that Britain can make a legal case for intervening in Iraq to remove Saddam, because of concern that his support for the war could split the Cabinet and lose the support of the Parliamentary Labour Party. Blair ordered the preparation of a document that would lay out the justification for attacking Iraq three months ago. Sources say the document - expected to set out a 'legal framework' for a war - has been completed. The latest disclosures came as Bush used a visit to the troops that fought al-Qaeda forces in Afghanistan to renew his vow that the United States would strike pre-emptively against countries developing weapons of mass destruction, telling troops that 'America must act against these terrible threats before they're fully formed'. Surrounded by troops of the 10th Mountain Division, among the first sent to Uzbekistan and Afghanistan, one of the soldiers yelled: 'Let's get Saddam!' Bush's address came amid reports of efforts by Iraqi diplomats to court Arab neighbours in countries that might be used for a US assault. Iraq began to end a decade of diplomatic isolation in March at the Arab summit. Since then - according to the Washington Post - it has signed up to economic agreements with Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Turkey, and discussed prisoner exchanges with Iran, putting pressure on Washington to act swiftly. From Tom_Childs at Douglas.BC.CA Sun Jul 21 18:20:31 2002 From: Tom_Childs at Douglas.BC.CA (Tom_Childs at Douglas.BC.CA) Date: Sun, 21 Jul 2002 17:20:31 -0700 Subject: [R-G] WARNING: The P3's are coming! (fwd) Message-ID: <200207220020.RAA15180@Douglas.BC.CA> ----- Forwarded message: ----- Date: Sun, 21 Jul 2002 08:46:38 -0700 From: Murray Dobbin Subject: WARNING: The P3's are coming! http://www.winnipegfreepress.com/westview/story/468135p-586290c.html Winnipeg Free Press Sun, Jul 21, 2002 Warning: The P3s are coming! By Murray Dobbin I am a definite outsider when it comes to corporations, so I don't often get to enter the corporate culture and observe its special little rituals. But in May, I got the opportunity at a conference of the Canadian Council on Public-Private Partnerships (C2P3), the front-group for some of the world's largest corporations who try to make people feel good about privatizing every precious public service we have. The folks at C2P3 swept into Vancouver in a mood that can only be described as giddy anticipation. They could just taste the profits soon to be made with the new Gordon Campbell anti-government, eager to turn over public services to the private sector. The Premier's Deputy Minister Ken Dobell had already declared that "the choice is now between either not getting the project done at all or delivering it through a P3." The conference was a two-day cheerleading session for P3s, and no one was allowed to say a negative word about these corporate giveaways. Journalists at the event were not allowed to ask questions during the sessions - we were reduced to trying to find presenters in the halls amongst the paid-up delegates munching their canapes at the breaks. There were times when I felt I was at a meeting of the Shriners or some other secret society. The P3 priesthood even makes up its own language, wtih several promoters talking about the need for the "incentivization" of businesses to get involved, and how to "incent" business and government into embracing P3s. I, however, remained unincented. I would have liked to ask some questions of the privateers about their actual record. Or, as they liked to say at the conference, their "outputs". I would have especially liked to ask them about companies repeatedly defrauding governments, like dozens of American health-services corporations. (Many U.S. health-industry players now have their eye on Canadian medicare -- there was a whole session on health care.) In the mid-1990s, health-care fraud by U.S. corporate giants has been estimated as high as $100 billion annually. Washington actually started catching up with some of these crooks by 1994 -- the year that National Medical Enterprises paid a then-record $379 million in fines and restitution for fraud in psychiatric services. In 1997, the mega-giant Tenet Healthcare Corp. agreed to pay $100 million to settle claims that patients were kept in psychiatric hospitals simply to maximize insurance payments. In 1999 alone, the U.S. Justice Department recovered $840 million stolen from the taxpayers through health-care fraud. Columbia/HCA Health Corp., America's largest hospital company, agreed to pay $745 million to settle civil fraud charges. In 2001, Tap Pharmaceuticals agreed to pay $875 million, including a $290-million criminal fine. Schering-Plough Corp. will pay the U.S. Food and Drug Administration $500 million. Lest you think that all that is involved here is a few hundred billion in tax dollars, think again. People die as a result of these corporate practices. American nursing-home advocate Ila Swan, testifying before the Senate Committee on Aging, stated: "I am still aghast at collecting 26,000 death certificates of nursing-home residents, showing the causes of death from starvation, dehydration, fecal impactions, bedsores and urinary tract infections." Are all for-profit contractors providing public services engaged in fraud? Of course not. But you don't need to commit outright fraud to rip off the public. If the private-sector trashing of medicare in the U.S. doesn't convince you to keep these vultures away from your public services then we can turn to our own backyard and look at what P3s have to offer public education. In 1994, Nova Scotia committed itself to the most extensive experiment in P3 schools anywhere in Canada. Called "leaseback" arrangements, they are common in the U.S. The government leases the schools from a contractor and then agrees to buy the school (or hospital, or prison) outright at the end of 20 to 35 years. In Nova Scotia, the government contracted the construction of 30 P3 schools to a local consortium. Within six years, there were so many scandals and improprieties the whole grand experiment was causing a public uproar. The government cancelled all future P3 construction. But by then, the 30 schools -- with contracts as long as 35 years -- were slated to cost the public $32 million more than if they had been built in the traditional manner. It isn't just the money. It turned out that corporations, not local preferences, determined where new schools would be built, usually on land already owned by a member of the consortium. And the consortium preferred to locate in upper-income subdivisions with lower land costs, rather than in urban cores where the schools were actually needed. You might think that if you were leasing the school you wouldn't have to worry about repairs. Think again. The taxpayer is responsible for the operating costs, capital improvements and repairs, and technology upgrading. The private owners were assured of receiving 89 per cent of their costs through leasing charges, and will still own the building and the land when the lease is up. Then the government has to buy the school whether or not it is still needed. Not sweet enough for you? Still need a little incentivization? Why not? The contract exempts the owners and the builders from any legal or financial liability for shoddy school construction, or even faulty wiring and plumbing. This was an enormous incentive for using cheap labour and low-quality materials. And, of course, since the corporation owns the schools, it has the right to use them and all their technology for profitable activities after hours, on weekends and during the summer. The C2P3 conference hosts didn't mention the Nova Scotia fiasco, which is a little strange given that it presented the first Halifax P3 school with its first prize in the "infrastructure" category in 1998. Students and staff in that school were still drinking bottled water in 2001, 12 months after arsenic was found in the school's well water. A water-filtration system had been installed, but it wasn't being used because the school board and the school's corporate owner couldn't agree on who was responsible for providing students with clean water. I suppose we should give C2P3 a break. It's hard to find a corporation today that isn't fiddling the books and/or stiffing the public. Case in point -- Accenture (formerly Andersen Consulting of Enron infamy) is right there at the top of the list of "sponsor members" in C2P3's welcoming letter to conference delegates. Among other things, Accenture is known in Ontario for its outrageous cost overruns (from $70 million to $180 million) in its welfare privatization scheme. They paid some project managers $575 an hour. If Canadians actually buy the argument about P3s providing better and cheaper public services it will only be after a prolonged period of intensive stupidification. But governments are already there. It doesn't seem to matter how many P3 disasters -- trains in Britain, water in Latin America, prisons and schools in the U.S. -- rain down on an unsuspecting public. It's a matter of faith, not reason. Accenture has just been handed several divisions of B.C. Hydro to run. Pray for the B.C. taxpayer. From mstainsby at tao.ca Mon Jul 22 18:52:21 2002 From: mstainsby at tao.ca (Macdonald Stainsby) Date: Mon, 22 Jul 2002 17:52:21 -0700 Subject: [R-G] Israeli Air Force Strike Kills at Least 12 Message-ID: <002c01c231e3$3434adc0$291f5318@vc.shawcable.net> AP (with additional material by Reuters). 22 July 2002. Israeli Air Force Strike Kills at Least 12 in Gaza, Palestinian Officials Say. GAZA CITY -- An Israeli air force F-16 blew up a house belonging to a Hamas leader in Gaza City early Tuesday, killing at least 12 people including his wife and three of their children, Palestinian officials said. Doctors at Gaza's Shifa Hospital said the missile strike also injured more than 100 people. The house belonged to Sheik Salah Shehada, founder of the military wing of Hamas, known as Izzadine el-Qassam, in Gaza and the West Bank, security officials said. Shehadeh's wife and three of their children were killed, said Hamas spokesman Ismail Haniyeh. He did not say whether Shehadeh himself was among the casualties. But announcements on loudspeakers in Gaza said Shehadeh was wounded. In a statement, the Israeli military confirmed that Shehadeh was the target and said he was hit. Palestinian witnesses said the Israeli warplane brought down five houses, reducing them to rubble. Hamas threatened to hit back. "Not only will Hamas take revenge for the martyrs, all the Palestinian people will unify to revenge for the blood of the martyrs," Haniyeh told reporters at Gaza's Shifa hospital, where the dead and wounded were taken. ------------------------------------------- Macdonald Stainsby http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/rad-green http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/leninist-international -- In the contradiction lies the hope. --Bertholt Brecht From mstainsby at tao.ca Mon Jul 22 22:48:58 2002 From: mstainsby at tao.ca (Macdonald Stainsby) Date: Mon, 22 Jul 2002 21:48:58 -0700 Subject: [R-G] internment camps for Arab-Americans ?? Message-ID: <009601c23204$42225740$291f5318@vc.shawcable.net> AP. 22 July 2002. Civil Rights Groups Ask Bush to Remove Appointee After Comments on Arab-Americans. WASHINGTON -- Two civil rights groups asked President Bush Monday to remove Peter Kirsanow from the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights after he said people might demand internment camps for Arab-Americans if Arab terrorists strike the United States again. Officials with the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights and the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee wrote Bush to complain about the Cleveland attorney's comments during a commission meeting Friday in Detroit. Kirsanow made the comments after hearing testimony from Arab-American leaders who said the government violated civil rights following Sept. 11. Kirsanow, who was appointed by Bush and finally took his seat in May after a heated legal fight with the commission chairwoman, said if there was another attack by Arabs on U.S. soil, "not too many people will be crying in their beer if there are more detentions, more stops and more profiling." "There will be a groundswell of public opinion to banish civil rights," Kirsanow added. The civil rights' groups said in their letter to Bush, "You have reminded people on a number of occasions that we are engaged in a war against terrorism, not a war against Arabs or Islam, and certainly not against Arab Americans." The letter asked the president "to repudiate and disavow these remarks" and remove Kirsanow from the Civil Rights Commission. "Unlike you, Mr. President, Mr. Kirsanow appears to be condoning collective guilt and seems open to the idea of the mass internment of an entire community," the letter said. White House spokeswoman Anne Womack said: "Peter Kirsanow has assured the White House that he was discussing the important role that security plays in guaranteeing civil rights of all Americans." Kirsanow aides said his comments came after some made comparisons between current practices in the war on terror and the practice during World War II of confining Japanese-Americans to internment camps. ------------------------------------------- Macdonald Stainsby http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/rad-green http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/leninist-international -- In the contradiction lies the hope. --Bertholt Brecht From debsian at pacbell.net Tue Jul 23 05:48:49 2002 From: debsian at pacbell.net (Michael Pugliese) Date: Tue, 23 Jul 2002 04:48:49 -0700 Subject: [R-G] CHEMTRAILS CAMPAIGN Message-ID: Attn, Lysander that one sees zillions more of this stuff on chemtrails on far right websites and lists like this one, below, RumourMills, doesn't give you pause? William Thomas is the author of a new book alleging that the PRC is gonna take over the world! http://www3.bc.sympatico.ca/Willthomas/homepage.html Michael Pugliese ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Message: 2 Date: Tue, 23 Jul 2002 04:01:38 +0100 From: "World- Action" Subject: II - CHEMTRAILS CAMPAIGN - Action Pack TWO - DOWNLOAD FILES & PRINT OUT PLEASE SEND THIS ON - IMPORTANT. CAMPAIGN ON CHEMTRAILS - Action Pack TWO - DOWNLOAD FILES & PRINT OUT http://www.world-action.co.uk/evidence.html CAMPAIGN ON CHEMTRAILS - Action Pack TWO DOWNLOAD M/S WORD FILES (UK/A4 OR USA/LETTER) AND PRINT THEM OUT AND GIVE THEM TO PEOPLE IN LOCAL GOVERNMENT, LOCAL MEDIA, FRIENDS, AND CONTACTS.... WHILE WE STILL HAVE A CHANCE. CHANGE IS HAPPENING - HELP IT HAPPEN - NOW. http://www.world-action.co.uk/evidence.html <><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><> http://www.rense.com/general2/clar.htm http://www.world-action.co.uk/thomas2.html Clarifying Chemtrail Confusion By William Thomas wilco at islandnet.com 7-26-2000 Over the past two years - and possibly longer - one of the biggest covert operations ever undertaken by a military in peacetime has caused illness and consternation across America as positively identified U.S. Air Force aerial tankers continue to spread broad white plumes in patterns that defy civil air regulations, public health and air pollution laws - and the physics of normal contrail formation. As hundreds of thousands of North Americans jam hospital emergency rooms in a nearly year-round epidemic of sometimes fatal "flu- like" illness, it has been difficult not to believe that some kind of population cull is underway. Indeed, more than 80 years of calls by pioneering American eugenicists, some of the most powerful families in the U.S., and their Nazi allies to eliminate unproductive "useless eaters" and the "human weeds" of non-white races, the infirm and elderly - are thoroughly documented. With the pressures of an aging population increasingly squeezing government and corporate bottom lines, such influential statesmen as Henry Kissinger, Robert McNamara, Jaques Cousteau and Ted Turner have called for immediate and drastic population reductions. The dictionary definition of decimation of a population is a one-in- 10 death toll. Despite a CDC-confirmed few-percentage increase in annual deaths among the elderly from pneumonia, Influenza-Like Illness and related cardiac arrest - there is no statistical proof that such a chemtrail cull is currently taking place. If genocide is truly intended, such an aerial spray program need not be repeated relentlessly over cities and remote rural communities for at least 28 months. Current U.S. biowarfare capabilities could see one or two aerial applications of a rapidly replicating contagion infecting, sickening and killing target populations virtually overnight. But who would fly the genocide planes? Since there are not nearly enough foreign pilots qualified to fly the 700 KC-135 and KC-10 tankers in the U.S. inventory, how could American air crews be persuaded to carry out such missions against their own families? The "inoculation" explanation would not play well among tanker crews already leaving the armed forces in droves rather than line up for anthrax vaccinations known to contain illegal adjuvants and the mycoplasma responsible for Gulf War Illness. Military personnel conversant with germ warfare also know that besides posing grave risks, no inoculation can possibly protect against terrorist "cocktails" of multiple disease agents whose genetic composition can be altered literally overnight. If the choice is air-sprayed genocide, what would be the point of any government inflicting massive and indiscriminate casualties on its own people? With so many sick and dying workers, managers and consumers, entire economies would face catastrophic curtailment. Not to mention armed revolt by the survivors. A far more effective and selective pathway for pathogens is through vaccination. In 1969, House Appropriations bill 15090 approved an additional $10 million for U.S. biowarfare researchers to produce a synthetic biological agent "that does not naturally exist and for which no natural immunity could have been acquired." Three years later, the misnamed World Health Organization suggested that their new human immuno- deficiency virus could best be tested in a vaccination program aimed at infecting siblings. In 1977, after warning of a non- existent epidemic, the WHO began injecting HIV-laced smallpox vaccine into over 100 million Africans in the remote jungles of Sierre Leone. The following year an experimental hepatitis B vaccine administered to gay men in seven U.S. cities was followed by an outbreak of AIDS in those seven - and only those seven - locations. Five years after receiving the WHO,s contaminated vaccinations, 60% of recipients became infected with HIV. Today, half of New York City,s gay population has died from AIDS, and 30 million African people are infected with this lab-concocted disease. Within 15 years, the population of Africa could be cut in half, and the spread of AIDS in Asia will account for more infections than in sub- Saharan Africa. Merck pharmaceutical, Litton Bionetics and other profiteering vaccines-makers have a long history of biowarfare research - as well as close connections with Henry Kissinger and other influential Americans who have called for a cull. In October, 1999, a special congressional investigation examined contractual links between vaccine makers and the biological weapons industry after the National Cancer Institute tied millions of cases of cancer and auto-immune illness to contaminated vaccines and possible bioweapons experiments. Experimental vaccines known to cause systemic illness continue to target minority groups in the USA, where the inoculation of infants is now mandatory. A campaign as vast, blatant and expensive as chemtrails is not needed to facilitate a cull continued under the guise of "mercy killing" in hospitals across North America. The New England Journal of Medicine reports that at least 1 in 5 critical care nurses admit to having hastened the death of the elderly in their care - even killing patients who are not terminally ill. Pope John Paul II has railed against this "Culture of Death", which he warned in a recent encyclical "is advancing above all in prosperous societies, marked by an attitude of excessive preoccupation with efficiency and which sees the growing number of elderly and disabled as intolerable and too burdensome." People sickened by chemtrails are easier to control. But mass media brainwashing, orchestrated fears of unemployment, a cornucopia of legal and illicit drugs - and the further mind-muddle caused by incessant din, experimental electromagnetic weaponry and rapidly rising microwave smog - have already created a befuddled and docile public too frightened, apathetic or mesmerized even to look up at the outrageous aerial patterns being woven right over their heads. But not everyone is asleep. In the face of deepening distrust in shadowy federal agencies unresponsive to their electorate employers, chemtrail confusion and paranoia is spreading with every repetition of unverified rumor and garbled reports. Let's look at the facts as they are known today: 1. Steadily intensifying high- level "chemtrail" spraying at altitudes between approximately 20,000 and 35,000 feet are being reported over at least 14 allied nations. 2. Widespread illness and unusual, non-forecast weather events often follow heavy spraying - which usually takes place on "blue sky days", clear nights just before dawn, and/or along the edge of advancing storm fronts. 3. To date, no disease-causing organisms have been found in chemtrail plumes. 4. To date, no chemtrail plumes have been successfully sampled. 5. There are at least two aerial spray programs underway. Though much less extensive than high-altitude chemtrail spraying, over the past two years C-130 propeller aircraft have dropped gel-like material at rooftop- level over at least 40 neighborhood and wilderness locations in the USA. The biggest cluster of suburban spatterings has taken place in Utah near Dugway Proving Grounds. (This military test center for bioweapons became notorious for killing sheep around its boundaries after the spray valve on a jet fighter failed to close.) Intentional treetop-level drops of a sick-making red powder also took place over Espanola, Ontario last summer. Just as in high-level chemtrail spraying, in all documented cases of extremely low-level drops over populated areas, serious upper respiratory and/or gastrointestinal illness followed within 24 - 48 hours among people and pets exposed on the ground. 6. Our only laboratory tests of air-dropped gel and red powder come from rooftop-level releases. The disease-causing bacteria, molds and fungi found so far have not come from chemtrails. 7. While decades of "open air" biowarfare tests on population centers in Canada, England and the U.S. provide plenty of precedent for experimenting on uninformed and non-consenting "human test subjects" - the current chemtrail program is far too pervasive and persistent to coincide with previous biowarfare tests conducted at specific locations over a few days. Nor are supposedly harmless biowar "simulants" being used today. "Bio-hazard" materials found in low-level gel and red powder drops by startled laboratory technicians include corroborative "cocktails" of disease-causing bacteria, molds and fungi. (The televised 1994 gel drops over Oakville, Washington were also found by the state health department to contain human blood cells.) 8. Cobweb-type material has also fallen across the United States, Canada, the Caribbean, Australia and South Africa. Eye-witnesses report fine filaments - sometimes referred to as "angel hair" - being dropped over Salisaw, Oklahoma and Karoo, South Africa from high-flying jet aircraft. So far, microscopic examinations revealing the possible presence of inert blood cells have not been corroborated by actual lab tests. \ 9. A call by Edward Teller for an aerial "sunscreen" to be sprayed above the Earth, a practical patent for the reduction of greenhouse warming by spraying reflective aluminum particles from jets, and a study by the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory confirming that this billion-dollar-a-year aerial spray program would prevent further warming despite a projected doubling in CO2 emissions came in 1998 as the world,s insurers pressed governments to turn down the heat on rapidly rising temperatures. Reeling from catastrophic storm losses up 1,500% over the past decade, the insurance lobby is a voice - and money market investor - bigger than Big Oil and the international trade in arms. 10. The only actual laboratory test carried out on rainwater falling through heavy chemtrails over Espanola, Ontario found aluminum particles at seven-times maximum permissible "safe" levels. 11. Aluminum is a potent neurotoxin capable of producing all symptoms of Chemtrail-Related Illness (CRI). Unlike viral-derived illness, the absence of contagion between exposed and non-exposed family members - along with asthma attacks and other severe allergic reactions - points to a non-viral cause of chemtrail sickness. 12. Jet fuel ingredients found to cause severe allergic reactions include benzene byproducts and Ethylene Dibromide (EDB). Tests on commercial jet fuel (not chemtrails) carried out by Aqua-Tech labs in 1997 found in lab sample #MEL 97-1140, 51 toxic substances - including benzenes, various methanes, carbon tetrachloride, styrene, toluene, and 1,2 dibromethane (EDB). The EDB measured by Aqua Tech was found at such minute levels as to be almost undetectable. But the Registered Microbiologist who submitted this California JP-8 jet fuel sample disputes the official lab report, insisting that the actual levels of this potent carcinogen (banned by emergency EPA order in 1984) were much higher. Recently reported NASA lab tests of JP-8 do not substantiate his claim. 13. Despite laboratory evidence of potent chemtrail allergens, the weeks-long dry hacking cough and other extreme and persistent symptoms often experienced in the wake of chemtrail spraying - coupled with reoccurring illness in the absence of re- exposure - argue strongly for a pathogenic component. With the CDC now reporting that an unknown disease- causing parasite is responsible for epidemics that most often test negative for influenza, this reporter believes that parasitic fungal infection is the primary agent of systemic sickness in the North American population today. Since no actual chemtrail plumes have been tested, it is not yet possible to say whether fungal spores growing inside jet fuel tanks or deliberately introduced into the spray "mix" are part of the chemtrail program. But immune-weakening reactions to aluminum dust fine as talcum powder could leave susceptible persons vulnerable to extremely toxic fungal mycotoxins already proliferating in the environment. The escape of germ warfare- modified mycoplasma fungi into the general population following the Gulf War, and the sudden appearance of other "stealth" pathogens such as viral-bacterial-fungal hybrids called viteria are further cause to suspect inadvertent and intentional releases of experimental bio-agents from secretive biowarfare labs. Adding chemtrail contamination to this unholy brew is extremely hazardous. 14. Though aluminum carries a relatively low electrical conductivity, the possible presence of other chemicals and/or metals in chemtrail sprays could interact unpredictably with electromagnetic energy already saturating urban environments. The possibility of deliberately introduced pulsed microwaves or low frequency waves to cause confusion and illness cannot be ruled out. On several occasions, aircraft displaying unusual antenna have been sighted during chemtrail activity and simultaneous television interference on the ground. At least two observers report electromagnetic alarms sounding during chemtrail flyovers. 15. So far, those persons with strong immune systems appear to be either unaffected by chemtrails, or recover relatively quickly from heavy exposure. Reported effective treatments and preventative "cellular shielding" include homemade colloidal silver, liquid oxygen supplementation, and high- quality vitamin and herbal supplements. Laboratory-confirmed mycoplasma infection can almost always be cured by repeated courses of specific antibiotics such as doxycycline administered under a physician,s direct supervision. 16. While the best available print and photographic documentation confirms what USAF "Weather Force Specialists" refer to as chemical spraying for the purposes of "aerial obscuration" - the bottom line of the chemtrails conundrum remains: We still cannot say for certain what is being sprayed on us, and why. 17. Any government that continues to spray toxic substances on its own people for any reason - knowing that an epidemic of fatalities is taking place at the same time - is committing murder. 18. Under the Uniform Code of Military Justice, it is illegal to carry out an illegal order. Even if undertaken as an "operational necessity" for reasons of unannounced and unsubstantiated national security, any member of the military who deliberately sickens and kills her or his own people is committing treason against the populace they are pledged to protect. Our investigation continues. ----- William Thomas - Investigative Journalist Author: Scorched Earth, Bringing The War Home, Probing The Chemtrails Conundrum Documentary videos: "Eco War", "Chemtrails: Mystery Lines In The Sky" wilco at islandnet.com ---------------- http://www.rense.com/general2/ clar.htm http://www.world-action.co.uk/ thomas2.html <><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><> http://www.rense.com/general2/ turkey.htm http://www.world-action.co.uk/ media.html Chemtrail Media Coverage - One Good Job & One Turkey From David Allen 7-17-2000 A couple of years ago I was living on the northern California coast, twenty miles south of the Oregon border. I had a friend who was very much into the conspiracy theories, and was always ranting and raving about what "they" were doing to us, what "they" were hiding, and so forth. One day during a visit, he brought up CHEMTRAILS. I listened to his rantings with the usual grain of salt, and promised him I would look at the websites he offered would "open my eyes". A few days later, while on the net, I decided to look up the alleged CHEMTRAILS. I was at first amazed. The sites I looked at contained photos, maps and eye witness accounts- Then I began to be concerned. Just what were "they" spraying? I began to inform other friends and neighbors, and it wasn't long before I saw the spraying with my own eyes, above my own house. Now it was "real." Last year, I made a trip to Nashville, TN to visit my mother and she admitted to following the growing data being compiled on the net, too. We stood outside her house a couple of mornings and evenings watching a myriad of gridlines being laid over the area , and tossed about a few theories as to the meaning of them all. Now I live in Cocoa, FL and see heavy spraying overhead almost everyday. I watched the internet coverage explode almost over night with reports from Portland to Perth. A few solid theories seem to have taken hold, but I have yet to make up my own mind ( I favor the inoculation theory). I am writing today because I have witnessed a new chapter unfold. Last night (Sunday, July 16), Channel 35 News, which is the local FOX station out of Orlando, actually did a hefty segment (on Chemtrails) on the 10pm news. I was stunned, and pleased. Finally. They presented many photographs and had a few experts on both sides of the issue. It was typical media fare, but it was THERE. Probably the best thing of all was that the anchor refrained from making any follow-up comments, leaving the issue suspended, and the viewers to make up their own minds. As I went out this morning to have my coffee on the back porch, I noticed the spraying is quite intense today, about 10 lines so far- and I couldn't help but wonder how many "new" eyes were now gazing along with me, and asking the same question....why? --------------------------------- ----------------------- From Tod 7-16-2000 Hi Jeff, Thanks for all the great shows and info you provide. I just wanted you to know that today, July 16, we here in Portland, OR were treated to beautiful chemtrail "rainbows" for lack of a better word. Actually more of an oily smudge in the sky similar to oil on pavement in wet weather. It, along with about 35 other chemtrails polluted my whole beautiful blue sky. We topped out at 92 degrees today, but without all the clouds from the craptrails we would have hit alot higher. Our CBS affiliate weatherman, Randy Querin, reported this as some sort of 'ice crystal' in the atmosphere phenomenon and actually gave it a rather pretty-sounding name which, not being a meteoroligist, escapes me. However, his describing this as a 'high altitude ice crystal rainbow' makes no sense as I witnessed it in my local geographic location not once but about 5 times in different parts of the sky at different times of the day, and agles of the sun? So, why something so rare would occur so frequently during a single day makes no sense. Not to mention I have personally witnessed the exact same " formations" about 3 times since last year. Not to mention the fierce-looking black line that you have pictures of on your site. I have noticed that the black line varies as to duration from mere minutes to more like 10 minutes. I have seen this scarey momma 3 times and pointed it out twice to others. It is time for an answer. Let us all work together on this. http://www.world-action.co.uk/ media.html http://www.rense.com/general2/ turkey.htm <><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><> http://www.rense.com/general2/ by.htm http://www.world-action.co.uk/ byronbay1.html BYRON BAY CHEMTRAILS - AUSTRALIA By Eve Sinton Environmental Editor - The Echo, Mullumbimby. Date: 7-25-2000 Last Wednesday's unusual sky patterns over Byron Bay attracted the attention of a number of people interested in the phenomenon of 'chemtrails', which are the subject of a large volume of internet and fringe media content. What they saw was a lingering set of vapour trails, similar to those commonl y seen when high-altitude jet aircraft pass overhead and known as 'contrails'. But unlike contrails, which dissipate over a few minutes, chemtrails linger in the sky for hours, sometimes eventually forming an overhead haze. Chemtrails are typically found at lower altitudes than contrails, typically between 10,000 and 15,000 feet. Often, chemtrails form cross- cross or scattered matchstick patterns. They are associated with anonymous white aircraft, and appear to be emitted directly from the plane, unlike contrails which form distinctly behind, and separate from, high-flying jet aircraft. Within hours of the sightings, the high-volume Jeff Rense web- site http://www.rense.com featured a report of 'Chemtrails over Byron Bay and Gold Coast of Australia'. Local resident Gary Opit contacted The Echo about the sightings, saying 'During the last couple of years in the USA various newspapers have been reporting epidemics of respiratory infections and auto- immune reactions immediately after residents have sighted aircraft creating chemtrail grid patterns followed by occluded skies. Severe headaches, shortness of breath, joint pain and dry, hacking coughs are the usual symptoms. 'It is interesting to note that Dr Lyman Condie, chair of the Virtual Proving Ground at the US Army's Dugway biowarfare testing centre, states in their website that "the computer- derived Atmospheric Dispersion Models, used to simulate the spread of bioweapons in the open air, must be validated by field testing on live human subjects provising a far more realistic and believable simulation".' When attempting to confirm this quote, I contacted the Dugway site but was rebuffed with an 'access forbidden' message. Mr Opit continued, 'In December 1998 and January 1999 the BBC reported lingering contrails and cobweb- like fallout followed by epidemics of respiratory infection in the London, Birmingham, Manchester, Mersey, Norfolk and Norwich areas of England and in August 1998 at Quirindi, NSW, dozens of residents reported a similar occurrence.' Another local chemtrail-watcher, Shlomo Arnon, provided The Echo with many references on the subject, including a woman from Pingelly, WA, a small town south-east of Perth. She claims her family has suffered dramatic ill-health since numerous chemtrail appearances over the town in April and May last year, and that many other the townspeople suffered similarly. Mr Arnon says he also saw chemtrails over Brunswick Heads in early June. The skies over Byron last Wednesday also caught the attention of wholistic health practitioner Mark Abriel. He photographed the chemtrail- like formation while on a surf-stop at Lennox Head. Mr Abriel has been intrigued by a number of people coming to him recently with ailments similar to those described by chemtrail-affected people. Although he is the first to point out it's impossible to link these illnesses with chemtrails, just as it's extremely difficult to unequivocally link ailments with almost any form of chemical exposure, he finds the similarities striking. 'These people had lingering infections, such as month-long flu symptoms, or ulceration of the mucus lining inside the nose,' he said. 'They had lethargy, digestive problems, confusion and flu-like sore throats.' Analyses of chemtrail fallout overseas have shown up a biochemical- warfare soup of toxins, pathogens, fungi, moulds, and genetically-engineered organisms such as Mycoplasma Fermentens Incognitus and Psuedomonas Flourescens. Some of these organisms have been linked to the 'Gulf War Syndrome'. Most are extremely antibiotic-resistant. Mark Abriel said, 'The whole brew is said to be activated by oxidated stress, so anything that oxidises the body and the production of free radicals will accelerate the destructive effects.' He is a practitioner of Ayurvedic medicine which has at its disposal some potent anti-oxidants, such as Amla berry, and finds that people with mystery lingering illnesses often respond well to these treatments. 'It's an ancient form of defence against our newest modern threats,' says Mr Abriel.' He finds that the diagnostic techniques of Kinesiology and other alternative health traditions make treatment and neutralisation of difficult illnesses very effective. 'But these diagnostic techniques are not accepted as evidence by Western science,' he says. Chemtrail-watchers find the appearance of the phenomenon over Byron extremely disturbing, and a trawl through the internet explains why. There are hundreds of sites documenting chemtrails. Chemtrail theory includes the possibility of biowarfare tests, clandestine mass-vaccination, attempts to ameliorate global warming, and de- population strategies. Some of the exerts, like award-winning journalist Will Thomas, make convincing reading. And there are plenty of sceptics who say this is nothing but another lunatic-fringe conspiracy theory. Space constraints prevent us from evaluating these theories here. While it's not possible to be sure exactly what was drifting over Byron last week, a trawl of the internet certainly has one paying more attention than usual to the sky. Some initial links to the subject: http:// www.strangehaze.freeservers.com http://www.geocities.com/ Pentagon/1250 http://home.earthlink.net/ ~wolfmind/CT01.html http://www.carnicom.com/ contrails.htm http:// www.contrailconnection.com/ index.html http://members.xoom.com/ centrexnews/chemtrails http://www.lacarte.org/health/ chemtrails -------------- Above article at: http://www.rense.com/general2/ by.htm http://www.world-action.co.uk/ byronbay1.html <><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><> http://www.world-action.co.uk/ evidence.html CAMPAIGN ON CHEMTRAILS - Action Pack TWO DOWNLOAD M/S WORD FILES (UK/A4 OR USA/LETTER) AND PRINT THEM OUT AND GIVE THEM TO PEOPLE IN LOCAL GOVERNMENT, LOCAL MEDIA, FRIENDS, AND CONTACTS.... WHILE WE STILL HAVE A CHANCE. CHANGE IS HAPPENING - HELP IT HAPPEN - NOW. http://www.world-action.co.uk/evidence.html PLEASE SEND THIS ON - IMPORTANT. --------------------------- From pieinsky at igc.org Tue Jul 23 08:40:07 2002 From: pieinsky at igc.org (Jay Moore) Date: Tue, 23 Jul 2002 10:40:07 -0400 Subject: [R-G] Fw: Two statements dated 23 July 2002 Message-ID: <009001c23256$d9f6c680$b5211e40@bypass.com> ----- Original Message ----- From: "Muhammad Abu Nasr" To: Sent: Tuesday, July 23, 2002 10:15 AM Subject: Two statements dated 23 July 2002 > Dear Jay, > > Here are translations of the two Popular Front > statements dated 23 July 2002 on the Zionist massacres > in Ghazza. > > Best! > > Muhammad > > --------------------- > > Press Release issued by the Political Bureau of the > Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. > > Crowning its massacres in Jenin refugee camp, the Old > City of Nablus, and the invasion of the territories of > the Palestinian Bank, the Zionist criminal murderer > gangs led by the butcher Sharon are continuing their > terrorism against the unarmed Palestinian people. > Last night they undertook to commit a new crime in the > heroic Gaza Strip when their F-16s rocketed a > residential neighborhood and destroyed numerous houses > over the heads of their residents. > > This new and fearsome massacre that has caused the > death of 15 martyrs and 150 wounded women, children, > and elderly people, demonstrates the extent and depth > of the preoccupation of the Zionist terrorist > leadership with committing war crimes. It also > demonstrates the extent of the hypocrisy of the > American administration, which covers up for and > participates in these crimes, when it labels the > struggle of the Palestinian people and their > legitimate self-defense as "terrorism." > > Anyone who accuses the Palestinian resistance of > terrorism is the real criminal, covering up the acts > of genocide inflicted upon a people subjected to > occupation. > > The Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine > demands that the Arab states put a halt to the policy > of maintaining frightful silence as they observe the > massacres committed by the Zionist occupation forces. > The Arab states must understand that the people of > Palestine are not defending only themselves and their > land, they are defending the honor and interests of > the whole Arab Nation. The Arab states must shoulder > their responsibility, because keeping quiet and > betting on American solutions that benefit Israel are > no longer acceptable in any way whatsoever. > > The international community and the United Nations > Organization too must shoulder their responsibilities > with respect to these crimes against humanity that are > committed before the eyes and ears of the whole world. > > The Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine > affirms to the masses of the people and the Arab > Nation that these crimes will not go unpunished. We > will pursue the enemy, their soldiers, their settlers, > and their leaders and, with an iron hand, we will > strike at them until the last Israeli soldier is > thrown out of our land and our country. > > There is no way except resistance, struggle, > continuing and escalating the intifada until all > Palestinian national rights have been seized back. > Down with illusions of reaching solutions, > settlements, and negotiations with an enemy that does > not understand the meaning of peace and only believes > in the policy of murder, terror, and crime! > > The Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine > Damascus > 23 July 2002. > > ------------ > > Statement issued by the Popular Front for the > Liberation of Palestine > > Continuing its policy of Zionist violence and > aggression, the Israeli occupation forces have > committed a new massacre against the children of the > Palestinian people. They have destroyed a residential > neighborhood in the Gaza Strip causing the martyrdom > of the militant national leader Salah Shahhadeh, the > commander of the Izz al-Din al-Qassam Brigades, and > more than twelve Palestinian martyrs besides, in > addition to wounding about 150 citizens, including > women, children, and the elderly, many of whose > injuries are extremely serious. > > This new Zionist crime of violence confirms the > barbarism of our Zionist enemy and makes it clear that > they are not seeking any kind of peace with the > Palestinian people. What they want is that this > people and the Arab Nation completely surrender to the > Zionist will supported by America. Their aim is to > finish off the people and the Palestinian national > cause. > > We in the Popular Front for the Liberation of > Palestine, as we express our condolences to the > families of the martyrs, the brothers in the Hamas > Movement, and to all the sons and daughters of our > heroic people, and as we wish for a speedy recovery > for all the wounded, affirm the following: > > 1. This operation, and all the Zionist crimes, will > not deter us from continuing the struggle and the > resistance. In fact it calls on us all to intensify > our painful strikes against our Zionist enemy. On > this occasion we call on all the people and their > active forces immediately and quickly to respond to > this violent, ugly crime. > > 2. What occurred yesterday should prove to the > Palestinian dreamers and to official Arab circles that > it is impossible to coexist with this Zionist enemy. > Therefore . . . we call on everyone to make a serious > reexamination that would yield a rejection of all > surrender solutions. We call on the Palestine > Authority to halt all forms of political and security > contacts with this enemy. > > 3. We call on the Arab peoples to revive all forms of > support and backing for the Palestinian people. We > appeal for broad mass action by these peoples and > their militant political forces to compel the Arab > regimes to put serious pressure on the United States, > to boycott it, and to seriously threaten its interests > in our countries, rather than pursuing the policy of > begging. > > 4. We call on the international community, the > Secretary General of the United Nations, all human > rights organizations in the world, and all the > political and social forces that support justice and > peace to condemn the war crimes and the organized > terrorism of the Zionist state and to check Zionist > violence and aggression backed by America. > > Sons and daughters of our militant people! As we say > farewell today to a new constellation of martyrs, we > in the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine > affirm to all our people that we are holding fast to > our firm national principles, that we are continuing > our resistance until the occupation is swept away and > our just national goals are attained. > > Loyalty and Faithfulness to the Martyrs! > Speedy recovery to the Wounded! > Glory to the Resistance and Victory to our People! > > The Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine > 23 July 2002. > > __________________________________________________ > Do You Yahoo!? > Yahoo! Health - Feel better, live better > http://health.yahoo.com From Tom_Childs at Douglas.BC.CA Tue Jul 23 09:50:56 2002 From: Tom_Childs at Douglas.BC.CA (Tom_Childs at Douglas.BC.CA) Date: Tue, 23 Jul 2002 08:50:56 -0700 Subject: [R-G] A chill in the library (fwd) Message-ID: <200207231550.IAA03858@Douglas.BC.CA> ----- Forwarded message: ----- Delivered-To: librarians-outgoing at lists.tao.ca Date: Tue, 23 Jul 2002 11:15:18 -0400 From: Chuck Munson Subject: A chill in the library -------- Original Message -------- Subject: [SRRTAC-L:8490] A chill in the library Date: Tue, 23 Jul 2002 06:33:41 -0400 From: kmccook at tampabay.rr.com Reply-To: srrtac-l at ala.org To: SRRT Action Council -------------------- A chill in the library St. Petersburg Times, published July 23, 2002 Under the USA-Patriot Act, passed by Congress in the wake of the Sept. 11 attacks, librarians have been made unwitting partners in the FBI's search for potential terrorists. Any records a library might retain on a patron's reading choices or Internet use are now retrievable by federal law enforcement with an easily obtainable court order. Librarians, traditionally defenders of intellectual freedom, are being pressed to become extensions of law enforcement, and many are balking at the new job description. Under the USA-Patriot Act, passed by Congress in the wake of the Sept. 11 attacks, librarians have been made unwitting partners in the FBI's search for potential terrorists. Any records a library might retain on a patron's reading choices or Internet use are now retrievable by federal law enforcement with an easily obtainable court order. Librarians, traditionally defenders of intellectual freedom, are being pressed to become extensions of law enforcement, and many are balking at the new job description. Judith Krug, the American Library Association's director for intellectual freedom, has been advising librarians who think this new use of library records is antithetical to their mission. She proposes establishing a system of regular record deletions to put information on patron's tastes and interests out of reach well before the FBI comes to call. Krug notes that the Patriot Act eliminates the need to show probable cause before invading a patron's privacy. The new law allows the FBI to go to a secret foreign intelligence court, claim the information desired is part of a terrorism investigation and walk away with a court order allowing it to take a look at all the Internet traffic emanating from a library on a particular day. Moreover, librarians are prohibited from disclosing anything about law enforcement's visit. Some library professionals may relish their new role. At the Lely campus of Edison Community College in Collier County, library staff recently contacted campus security about three Middle Eastern-looking men who were whispering while using library computers to look up Islamic newspapers. That call in turn prompted a call to the Collier County Sheriff's Office, which dispatched deputies to seize the library's computer hard drives for further investigation. Mary Faulkner, library director, said her staff acted correctly in contacting security and refused to comment further. But the situation raises disturbing questions. What exactly was suspicious about the behavior of these men: Whispering in a library? Reading newspapers in their native language? Being Middle Eastern? The Patriot Act is trying to remake librarians into citizen spies, and while some librarians have slipped happily into that role, many others are raising concerns. Do you suddenly feel a chill in our public libraries? http://www.sptimes.com/2002/07/23/Opinion/A_chill_in_the_librar.shtml -- Tom Childs - Audio/Visual Resources Douglas College Library New Westminster, B.C. Canada T: 604 527-5187 E: childst at douglas.bc.ca W: http://www.globaljustice.ca -- From shniad at sfu.ca Tue Jul 23 17:13:38 2002 From: shniad at sfu.ca (shniad at sfu.ca) Date: Tue, 23 Jul 2002 16:13:38 PDT Subject: [R-G] Zionist dreams come at Palestinians' expense, labour reps tell McDermott Message-ID: <200207232313.g6NNDdmC026087@rm-rstar.sfu.ca> An embedded and charset-unspecified text was scrubbed... Name: not available URL: From shniad at sfu.ca Tue Jul 23 17:12:56 2002 From: shniad at sfu.ca (shniad at sfu.ca) Date: Tue, 23 Jul 2002 16:12:56 PDT Subject: [R-G] Band of Roving Chief Executives Spotted Miles from Mexican Border Message-ID: <200207232312.g6NNCumC025431@rm-rstar.sfu.ca> An embedded and charset-unspecified text was scrubbed... Name: not available URL: From shniad at sfu.ca Tue Jul 23 17:13:52 2002 From: shniad at sfu.ca (shniad at sfu.ca) Date: Tue, 23 Jul 2002 16:13:52 PDT Subject: [R-G] Israel responds to Hamas peace offer by bombing Hamas leader's apartment building Message-ID: <200207232313.g6NNDrmC026279@rm-rstar.sfu.ca> An embedded and charset-unspecified text was scrubbed... Name: not available URL: From shniad at sfu.ca Tue Jul 23 17:14:08 2002 From: shniad at sfu.ca (shniad at sfu.ca) Date: Tue, 23 Jul 2002 16:14:08 PDT Subject: [R-G] The dangers of fanaticism - Robert Fisk Message-ID: <200207232314.g6NNE8mC026583@rm-rstar.sfu.ca> An embedded and charset-unspecified text was scrubbed... Name: not available URL: From shniad at sfu.ca Tue Jul 23 17:14:25 2002 From: shniad at sfu.ca (shniad at sfu.ca) Date: Tue, 23 Jul 2002 16:14:25 PDT Subject: [R-G] US Agency reports looming humanitarian crisis in Palestine Message-ID: <200207232314.g6NNEQmC027010@rm-rstar.sfu.ca> An embedded and charset-unspecified text was scrubbed... Name: not available URL: From mstainsby at tao.ca Tue Jul 23 17:50:37 2002 From: mstainsby at tao.ca (Macdonald Stainsby) Date: Tue, 23 Jul 2002 16:50:37 -0700 Subject: [R-G] Zionist dreams come at Palestinians' expense, labour reps tell McDermott References: <200207232313.g6NNDdmC026087@rm-rstar.sfu.ca> Message-ID: <003b01c232a3$bef3c520$291f5318@vc.shawcable.net> > The Vancouver Sun Tuesday, July 23, 2002 > > Zionist dreams come at Palestinians' expense, labour reps tell McDermott > > By Sid Shniad and Paul Tetrault > > An open letter to Dennis McDermott, former president of the Canadian Labour > Congress, who has publicly accused his former colleagues of bashing Israel: This is great stuff, Sid. Today American labour got mad at George W for "allowing" the stock market to fall. Then I read this piece and have some hope again, at least for the rank and file. in solidarity, Macdonald From nick at faunusherbs.com Tue Jul 23 19:11:10 2002 From: nick at faunusherbs.com (Nicholas Morcinek) Date: Tue, 23 Jul 2002 21:11:10 -0400 Subject: [R-G] Zionist dreams come at Palestinians' expense, labour reps tell McDermott In-Reply-To: <003b01c232a3$bef3c520$291f5318@vc.shawcable.net> Message-ID: <000001c232af$009b0460$8c2ce2d1@faunusp41800> Gentlemen! One of the most rational honest and realistic pieces from the labour movement that I have seen for a long time. As someone who grew up with the movement and its struggles... thanks! My father was a coal miner in the 50's and 60's in the UK, and I grew up on a miner's estate (slum district). My non-miner's culture friends were often afraid to come visit us. Some of them used the word "hell" to describe the location of our home! When we were out on strike my brother's and sister and I would collect bits of coal from the slag heaps to cook and keep warm. I have dodged many a bobby - and so did my dad! I know that my experience growing up taught me compassion, honesty and the true meaning of hard work. Those were real life honest times... no pretension, no bull (and not much else either!). Take care guys.... Nicholas P.S. My life hasn't changed that much in some ways... my farming lifestyle of the last 18 years has been just as much of a struggle. Oh... and I'm still a union member! -----Original Message----- From: rad-green-admin at lists.econ.utah.edu [mailto:rad-green-admin at lists.econ.utah.edu] On Behalf Of Macdonald Stainsby Sent: Tuesday, July 23, 2002 7:51 PM To: rad-green at lists.econ.utah.edu Subject: Re: [R-G] Zionist dreams come at Palestinians' expense, labour reps tell McDermott > The Vancouver Sun Tuesday, July 23, 2002 > > Zionist dreams come at Palestinians' expense, labour reps tell McDermott > > By Sid Shniad and Paul Tetrault > > An open letter to Dennis McDermott, former president of the Canadian Labour > Congress, who has publicly accused his former colleagues of bashing Israel: This is great stuff, Sid. Today American labour got mad at George W for "allowing" the stock market to fall. Then I read this piece and have some hope again, at least for the rank and file. in solidarity, Macdonald _______________________________________________ Rad-Green mailing list Rad-Green at lists.econ.utah.edu To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/rad-green From mstainsby at tao.ca Tue Jul 23 19:39:36 2002 From: mstainsby at tao.ca (Macdonald Stainsby) Date: Tue, 23 Jul 2002 18:39:36 -0700 Subject: [R-G] Rabin's Daughter Resigns from Israeli Government Message-ID: <004001c232b2$f9ac95c0$291f5318@vc.shawcable.net> Reuters. 23 July 2002. Rabin's Daughter Resigns from Israeli Government. JERUSALEM -- Dalia Rabin-Pelosoff, daughter of the assassinated Israeli leader who began a peace process with Palestinians, resigned her cabinet post Tuesday in protest at the army's reoccupation of Palestinian towns in the West Bank. Rabin-Pelosoff, whose father Yitzhak Rabin struck interim peace deals with Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat in 1993, was named deputy defense minister in the broad coalition of right-wing Prime Minister Ariel Sharon last year. A senior Israeli political source told Reuters that Rabin-Pelosoff, a Labor Party member, was "unhappy with Sharon and said that if he wants to reoccupy the West Bank and to destroy the Palestinian Authority, he should do so without us." Israeli troops reoccupied seven of the eight largest West Bank towns on June 18-19. Israeli left-wingers believe that Sharon wants to dismember the Palestinian Authority. He opposed self-rule for Palestinians agreed by a Labor-led government he was not part of. Dalia-Pelosoff's political future was uncertain but she has said in the past that she would continue to support Defense Minister Binyamin Ben-Eliezer as Labor party leader. Political sources said her decision to resign was taken more than two weeks ago and had nothing to do with an Israeli air strike that killed the military chief of the Islamic group Hamas and 14 Palestinian civilians in the Gaza Strip Tuesday. ------------------------------------------- Macdonald Stainsby http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/rad-green http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/leninist-international -- In the contradiction lies the hope. --Bertholt Brecht From Tom_Childs at Douglas.BC.CA Tue Jul 23 19:39:33 2002 From: Tom_Childs at Douglas.BC.CA (Tom_Childs at Douglas.BC.CA) Date: Tue, 23 Jul 2002 18:39:33 -0700 Subject: [R-G] [Infoshop News] Book review - Managing Activism: PR Advice for "Neutralizing" Democracy (fwd) Message-ID: <200207240139.SAA11122@Douglas.BC.CA> ----- Forwarded message: ----- Delivered-To: infoshop-news at flag.blackened.net From: Chuck Munson To: "infoshop-news at infoshop.org" Cc: "mgj-discuss at lists.mutualaid.org" , "acc at lists.mutualaid.org" Subject: [Infoshop News] Book review - Managing Activism: PR Advice for "Neutralizing" Democracy Date: Tue, 23 Jul 2002 21:22:14 -0400 Managing Activism: PR Advice for "Neutralizing" Democracy Book Review by John Stauber When I first picked up Denise Deegan's book, Managing Activism: A Guide to Dealing with Activists and Pressure Groups, I imagined a roomful of uniformed pest applicators at the Orkin company, sitting on benches like military aviators before a bombing mission, being briefed on the best tools available for eradicating cockroaches. I was a spy for the roaches--the pesty "activists" that Deegan works to "manage." Roaches don't generally read the "how to" manuals written by their would-be exterminators, but activists certainly should. As someone who has spent the last decade investigating the seamy side of the "perceptions management" industry, I wish I could tell you that this book is a gold mine of revelation, but for me it is not. Still, I recommend that my fellow citizens read this book. It is written in classroom text-like fashion, and the author is careful to put the best face on her profession and not include advice that might offend the atypical reader. Nevertheless, it can help people working for democratic social change to understand the often successful ways in which we are targeted for defeat, especially the "good cop/bad cop" tactic for dividing and conquering activists through "partnering" and co-optation by industry. For activists, Deegan's book provides a primer on how to recognize these traps and hopefully avoid them. Managing Activism is written for PR practitioners whose clients engage in risky businesses (fossil fuels, pesticides, genetically engineered foods, nuclear waste, toxic dumps, animal testing) and who therefore become the targets of "activist groups" including "environmentalists, workers' rights activists, animal rights groups and human rights campaigners." Don't expect much sympathy for the activists. Deegan is a battle-hardened PR veteran and a committed soldier in the war against activists who "in an increasingly pluralistic society" present what she calls "a growing threat to organizations of all shapes and sizes. And because activists employ a wide range of aggressive tactics such as generating bad publicity, seeking government and legislative intervention, encouraging boycotts, etc., they can cause severe disruption, including damage to reputation, sales, profitability, employee satisfaction and, of course, share price." The picture that Deegan paints is undoubtedly a chilling scenario if you are an executive or major share holder in companies like Monsanto or DuPont that have long histories of worldwide trade in everything from nuclear weapon components to pesticides and genetically modified crops. What's a besieged CEO to do? "Fortunately, if dealt with in the right manner, activists have been shown to change their approach from aggressively confrontational to cooperative," Deegan promises. "Learning to manage activists involves learning about activists. Who are they? What do they want? What will they do to achieve their objectives? And most importantly, what is the best way to deal with them?" Deegan's recommendations are similar to the advice which comes from Peter Sandman, E. Bruce Harrison, James Lukaszewski, Paul Gilding and other "crisis management" experts whom Sheldon Rampton and I cover in our work for PR Watch.Unfortunately, this entire area of PR--how to defeat activism--is insufficiently scrutinized by the citizens who need most to be aware of it, the activists themselves. Until we "cockroaches" understand the strategies of the "exterminators," the PR roach hotels built by corporate crisis management practitioners will continue to entrap movements for democracy, ecological sustainability, fair trade, human rights, social justice, and all those other extreme threats to the corporate bottom-line. Social activists like to believe that we are too committed to our causes, too worldly and aware to be sweet-talked into unwitting submission by sitting down and partnering with the enemy. As Deegan reiterates, however, industry continues to regard this sort of "dialogue" as its most effective method for managing activists. Deegan's book tries to put the best face on the practice of "managing activism," which may explain why she avoids mentioning the Washington-based PR firm of Mongoven, Biscoe and Duchin (MBD), one of the worldwide leaders in this particular PR subspecialty. As we have documented previously, MBD grew out of the successful effort by one of its founders, Jack Mongoven, to defeat the large religious-lead boycott campaign aimed at the Nestl=C8 corporation for its deadly promotion of infant formula in the third world. In activist lore this boycott is touted as a major victory, but in the corporate world it is understood that industry really won the day by pulling the rug out from the campaign. By making selective concessions to the activists, Nestl=C8 succeeded in negotiating an end to the boycott. Later, activists were dismayed to discover that its infant formula marketing practices are continuing with only token changes. Third world children continue to die, but today their plight receives little attention, and activists have found that a boycott, once terminated, is not easily turned back on. MBD is a sort of spy operation. Its dozens of employees relentlessly compile dossiers on activists of all sizes and shapes the world over, advising industry how to defeat them. Their favorite method is a "divide and conquer" strategy heavily dependent on co-optation: First identify the "radicals" who are unwilling to compromise and who are demanding fundamental changes to redress the problem at hand. Then, identify the "realists"--typically, organizations with significant budgets and staffs working in the same relative area of public concern as the radicals. Then, approach these realists, often through a friendly third party, start a dialogue and eventually cut a deal, a "win win" solution that marginalizes and excludes the radicals and their demands. Next, go with the realists to the "idealists" who have learned about the problem through the work of the radicals. Convince the idealists that a "win-win" solution endorsed by the realists is best for the community as a whole. Once this has been accomplished, the "radicals" can be shut out as extremists, the PR fix is in, and the deal can be touted in the media to make the corporation and its "moderate" nonprofit partners look heroic for solving the problem. Result: industry may have to make some small or temporary concessions, but the fundamental concerns raised by the "radicals" are swept aside. This, in a nutshell, is the strategy that Deegan recommends in what she calls "one of the first books to offer a 'how to . . .' format to help people cope with the threat of activism." I especially recommend her chapters on "relationship building, negotiation and conflict resolution" and "media relations." Reading these chapters should help drive home the realization that activist efforts are being deliberately targeted for defeat by corporate funding, partnership and co-optation. These may seem like unusual weapons, but PR crisis managers have taken to heart the advice of military strategist Carl Von Clausewitz: "We see then that there are many ways to one's object in War; that the complete subjugation of the enemy is not essential in every case." Activist readers should remember that Deegan's book only offers part of the story, the sanitized version. It does not go into all the real-world ways in which nasty, smear attacks against activists are waged and funded by the same corporations and industries offering the outstretched hand of partnership. For the "rest of the story," also read Secrets and Lies: The Anatomy of an Anti-Environmental PR Campaign, by Nicky Hager and Bob Burton. Secrets and Lies is included in Deegan's "recommended reading" list. Based on a mother lode of leaked documents, its revelations of anti-environmental dirty tricks in New Zealand proved so shocking to citizens there that its publication contributed to the political downfall of the head of state. _______________________________________________ infoshop-news mailing list infoshop-news at infoshop.org http://www.infoshop.org/mailman/listinfo/infoshop-news -- Tom Childs - Audio/Visual Resources Douglas College Library New Westminster, B.C. Canada T: 604 527-5187 E: childst at douglas.bc.ca W: http://www.globaljustice.ca -- From hunterbadbear at earthlink.net Tue Jul 23 20:05:16 2002 From: hunterbadbear at earthlink.net (Hunter Gray) Date: Tue, 23 Jul 2002 20:05:16 -0600 Subject: [R-G] White supremacist William Pierce, author of `The Turner Diaries,' dies at age 68 Message-ID: <000701c232b6$8fcf0120$1b70fa43@intel> Note by Hunterbear: This was a major figure in raw American Hate. His organization, National Alliance, is now the leading hate mongering outfit in the United States -- with a very wide range of targets: especially all racial and ethnic minorities of color, Jews, and very much gays and lesbians. And "foreigners." And "Reds." National Alliance has been trying hard and consistently to build itself into a national force. And here in Idaho, as I've noted on other occasions, it's vigorously attempting to fill the void being left by the older faction-ridden and lawsuit-targeted outfits: e.g., Aryan Nations and Identity. It's been active right here in the general Pocatello region -- and we are among a goodly number of people who are actively combating it. Racism and the whole sweep of Anti-People Bigotry have deep and twisted roots and headwaters. The death of a leader such as Pierce, while certainly a setback to the sinister operations of hate organizations [ and possibly something that will open the door to power struggles], obviously isn't going to drive the wooden stake into these deeply rooted and pervasive virulent sicknesses. The old Southern Klans developed and functioned [and a few survivors still do] in the context of the traditionally closed South and its open, widespread poverty -- with the poverty-stricken poor Whites being cunningly and consistently manipulated in anti-union and racist schemes by the economic Big Mules, the "Captains." The primary basis for the old Klans was/is economic. These far more complex and increasingly sophisticated contemporary hate organizations [again, National Alliance, the Nationalist Movement, Aryan Nations, The Order, Identity Church, modern Klan, skinheads, etc. et al. ] reflect in virulent fashion -- via their own incredibly sick and twisted perspective -- the great maelstrom of forces in which modern Humanity is enmeshed. But, when you cut down -- through it all -- right to their ultra-poisonous bone, you find, again, the same very basic components: racism, anti-Semitism, and the other anti-people isms. And you find violence. And you also find, as the ultimate foundational component, very substantial economic fears and insecurities. While all of these pose substantial threats and dangers, the one category now most open to racist/violent recruitment -- and this has been true for at least this past generation -- has been economically precarious, disaffected and alienated White youth: Racist skinhead material. And, again, this very much goes back to economic fear and great insecurity and, certainly in this present era, deepening economic recession and rapidly mounting unemployment. Approaches? Widespread exposure and multi-faceted education -- certainly. Arrest and prosecution for hate crimes -- for sure. But, far more basically, ethnically integrated grassroots socio/economic justice and advocacy organizations, militant and pervasive unionization, widespread public works programs and other shorter-term approaches -- and, most fundamentally of all, a socialist society organized to ensure a full measure of bread and butter and a full measure of respect and liberty for every human, everywhere. Hunter Gray [Hunterbear] www.hunterbear.org (strawberry socialism) Protected by Na?shdo?i?ba?i? White supremacist William Pierce, author of `The Turner Diaries,' dies at age 68 Associated Press / SFGate ALLISON BARKER, Associated Press Writer Tuesday, July 23, 2002 ?2002 Associated Press URL: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/news/archive/2002/07/23/obituar y1845EDT0839.DTL (07-23) 16:49 PDT CHARLESTON, W.Va. (AP) -- White supremacist leader William Pierce, whose book "The Turner Diaries" is believed to have inspired Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh, died Tuesday. He was 68. Pierce died at his compound near Hillsboro, about 140 miles northeast of Charleston, said his business manager, Bob DeMarias. He became ill about three weeks ago from cancer, though he was never diagnosed, DeMarias said. The medical examiner is expected to release a report on the cause of death Wednesday, State Police Maj. B. D. Gore said. Pierce's novel, published in 1978, depicts a violent overthrow of the government by a small band of white supremacists who finance themselves through counterfeiting and bank robbery. One chapter, titled the "Day of the Rope," describes white corpses hung from every street corner with placards reading, "I defiled my race." FBI investigators have said McVeigh was a fan of Pierce's book and used it as a blueprint for bombing the Oklahoma City federal building in 1995. The book includes a truck-bombing of FBI headquarters. The Oklahoma City bombing wasn't the first violence that federal prosecutors linked to "The Turner Diaries." In 1985, 10 members of a supremacist group called The Order were convicted of racketeering and other charges in Seattle. Among the crimes they were accused of were armored-car robberies and the 1984 machine-gun slaying of Jewish radio talk show host Alan Berg. One witness testified that a defendant told him, "You should read it, partner, it's all there. Everything that's going to happen is in 'The Turner Diaries."' Pierce led his group, National Alliance, from a two-story steel building on 400 acres deep in the Appalachians, about four hours southwest of Washington. "William Pierce was by far the most dangerous and effective American extremist and racist in recent memory," said Rabbi Abraham Cooper, associate dean of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, an international Jewish human rights organization based in Los Angeles. The Southern Poverty Law Center, which tracks hate groups, estimated the group makes more than $1 million a year, mainly through sales of white power music and supremacist or neo-Nazi literature. "This is the major hate group in the United States. It's the most organized, the best run and the wealthiest," said Mark Potok, editor of the center's intelligence report on hate groups. The law center in 1995 won an $85,000 civil judgment against Pierce in a case involving property he received from the neo-Nazi Church of the Creator. Pierce has said the center raised $10 million with a funding appeal that presented the case as a chance to bankrupt the 1,500-member National Alliance. Recently, Pierce began using the Internet to promote his recording label, Resistance Records -- "The soundtrack for white revolution." In an interview last July, Pierce, a former physics professor, said his "long-term goal is to be the biggest distributor and producer of resistance music in the world. We may be there now." The Anti-Defamation League estimated last year that Resistance Records received about 50 orders a day, with each order averaging $70. The league won't say how it comes by its information, but Pierce had said the figures were "not too far off." That would make gross revenues about $1.27 million a year. Potok said the National Alliance has experts in computers, Web site design, video game technology, short-wave broadcasting and video production. DeMarias said the group would continue to operate "as it did before." He said Pierce left instructions to his associates about how to continue the group's operations. Pierce's death is a significant development because the group has no clear heir, Potok said. "It seems quite likely that the group will be led essentially by committee in the coming months," Potok said. "The problem for this group is that it is a group that is built around a single man, William Pierce." The group said Pierce was not married and did not have children, but he was survived by unspecified family members. ?2002 Associated Press ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- ---- Hunter Gray [Hunterbear] www.hunterbear.org (strawberry socialism) Protected by Na?shdo?i?ba?i? From info at cinox.demon.co.uk Wed Jul 24 08:08:33 2002 From: info at cinox.demon.co.uk (Tim Murphy) Date: Wed, 24 Jul 2002 15:08:33 +0100 Subject: [R-G] The Times (UK) - Palestinian ceasefire plan lies buried in the rubble of Gaza Message-ID: The Times (UK) July 24, 2002 Palestinian ceasefire plan lies buried in the rubble of Gaza >From Stephen Farrell in Jerusalem WESTERN diplomats believe they were within hours of clinching an unprecedented Palestinian commitment to end suicide bombings when Israel launched its missile strike on Gaza on Monday night. The Times has learnt that a Palestinian declaration containing an unconditional commitment to end suicide attacks on civilians was finalised hours before the attack. It was to have been made public yesterday but has now been postponed indefinitely. Yesterday diplomats said they suspected the attack ? which killed 14 Palestinians as well as the Hamas commander Sheikh Salah Shehada ? was timed to wreck what might have been a breakthrough. Backed by senior leaders of Yassir Arafat?s Fatah movement and the Tanzim, the Fatah wing most closely linked with the al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, the declaration contained a commitment to do everything in the militias? power to stop attacks on Israeli civilians, including settlers in the West Bank and Gaza. International mediators involved in drafting the document, a copy of which has been seen by The Times, confirmed that two hours before the strike a very senior Fatah leader met Hamas leaders in Gaza to secure their support. ?Those directly involved in drafting the statement believe that this (attack) was a purposeful initiative on the part of the Israeli leadership to undermine what the Palestinians believed was the chance to stop the suicide bombs,? one of the international officials involved in drafting the 1?-page declaration said. ?This was a very ham-fisted operation on the part of the Israelis. They were apparently desperate to short-circuit whatever they wanted to short circuit and obviously in the short term the chance of any such declaration is now gone. People on the street are angry.? Gideon Meir, a senior Israeli Foreign Ministry spokesman, insisted the strike was dictated by intelligence reports on Shehada?s whereabouts at a precise time. F16s had tried to kill him three days earlier. ?The timing is nothing to do with politics. The decision to target this man was taken six months ago.? He also dismissed talk of Hamas signing a deal. ? Hamas is dedicated to the elimination of the state of Israel. There is no ceasefire, there was no ceasefire.? The declaration is said to have arisen from a growing realisation among the militias that the suicide bombing campaign had caused huge damage to the Palestinian cause internationally, and was in danger of tearing Palestinian society apart by creating a cult of violence among the younger generation in the West Bank and Gaza. A street-level initiative stitched together over the past two months with the help of a high-level European diplomat and an American who has worked with the Palestinian leadership for two decades, it is said to have the support of Mr Arafat, but was not initiated by him. However, it promised only a partial end to violence, leaving open the prospect of attacks on Israeli soldiers in the occupied territories. There would have been no signatures on the document. It is also unclear whether attempts to bring Hamas on board would have been successful, although Hamas?s spiritual leader, Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, said on Monday that the Islamist group would consider halting suicide attacks if Israel pulled out. Taisir Nasrallah, a senior Fatah official, said: ?The militant factions were within a few days of releasing a statement calling for a partial ceasefire. This is unprecedented. Never before have all the factions and the militant wing agreed to sign a written statement.? Javier Solana, the European Union?s foreign policy chief, also hinted at the imminence of a deal. Diplomats said he was aware of the secret plan. ?I?m afraid that this is going to be more difficult after the events of last night,? he said. Mr Arafat denounced ?a massacre that aborted an agreement to reach a ceasefire with Hamas?. ____________________ From Tom_Childs at Douglas.BC.CA Wed Jul 24 11:54:32 2002 From: Tom_Childs at Douglas.BC.CA (Tom_Childs at Douglas.BC.CA) Date: Wed, 24 Jul 2002 10:54:32 -0700 Subject: [R-G] En;Jornada,On war,autonomy and the price of resistance.Jul 24 (fwd) Message-ID: <200207241754.KAA20562@Douglas.BC.CA> For those who've followed the plight of the Zapatista insurgency in Chiapas state, southern Mexico, this update on their struggle may be of interest. Regards, TC "!La lucha continua!" ----- Forwarded message: ----- Date: Wed, 24 Jul 2002 06:12:36 -0500 (CDT) To: chiapas95-english at eco.utexas.edu From: owner-chiapas95-english at eco.utexas.edu (Chiapas95-english) Subject: En;Jornada,On war,autonomy and the price of resistance.Jul 24 This message is forwarded to you by the editors of the Chiapas95 newslists. To contact the editors or to submit material for posting send to: . ---------- Original message ---------- Date: Wed, 24 Jul 2002 00:08:26 -0500 (CDT) From: irlandesa To: chiapas at eco.utexas.edu Subject: En;On war,autonomy and the price of resistance Originally published in Spanish by La Jornada *********************************** Translated by irlandesa La Jornada Tuesday, July 23, 2002. Autonomy: A Kind of Patience In Response To Failure To Comply With San Andre's Accords Hermann Bellinghausen, correspondent. Africa, Chiapas. July 22. Through one of those happenstances of bureaucratic evolution, Africa appears on the good commercial state maps, but not Asia, the neighboring ranch, even though it has five or six times more residents. And that is not all. A green metal sign with white fluorescent letters - one of the ones which successive Departments of Communication have set up at the entrances of so many villages at the side of the road - announces the appearance of the few wooden houses which make up Africa, in the "roof" of the Selva Lacandona. Asia, on the other hand, perhaps because it does not appear on maps, does not merit an official green sign. The people, in their eagerness to exist, have nailed a board to the thickest tree which can be seen from the road and put: "Asia, ranch." Ten, maybe 15, people live in Africa. There are more than 60 in Asia. Both of them are located on one of the approaches to the biosphere reserve, also called the Lacando'n Community. They are legal settlements in the "critical" area, which, according to the "needs" of each moment, government officials are claiming as the property of the nation (and even of "humanity"), or, rather, the property of the decimated Lacando'n people: the Montes Azules. Now that it is summer, the vegetation has grown so much that it conceals the houses of Asia and Africa. The landscape completely engulfs both ranches, and what you can see of them is their names. The rest is selva. The Costs of Wearing Down Resistance The communities which are nearby the barracks - and especially those within the army base - demonstrate a little documented side of militarization. A disturbing demonstration of how the military strategy of "hearts and minds" - which seeks to conquer the "minds and hearts" of the enemy, or at least of the enemy's neighbors - works in the mid-range. For all these years there has been in existence, formally, a law for peace and reconciliation in Chiapas, a presidential peace commission and an ex profeso commission of federal deputies and senators of the Republic. Nonetheless, those "dissenting Mexicans" - as former President Ernesto Zedillo described the zapatistas at the time - have never been treated as anything but "enemies." Operating here is the "removing the water from the fish" strategy, taken from Yankee counterinsurgency manuals, which was well tested in the hot lands of Guatemala and South Vietnam. "Military Uniforms Altered," reads a poster on the door of a house in Cintalapa. A nice door. A nice house, large and painted. One can see the Singer sewing machine which would have come in one of the many government "batches." Also a television, a CD player and a pair of speakers. Although not as large as San Quinti'n or Maravilla Tenejapa, Cintalapa is one of the important communities inside the selva with historical ties to the PRI and which, compared to most of the towns in the region, turned out relatively prosperous. It has infrastructure and commerce. Social investment is good business. Cases of daughters of Tzeltal families who have had children with soldiers from the barracks, 200 meters from the town, are common. Some girls have gotten married and left when there was a change in troops. Some of them have become prostitutes. So many girls have become women with the base next door. Given that they cannot always manage the price of the prostitutes, the experience of San Quinti'n has proven that the young soldiers show a preference for the local wildflowers, and they have the money. In direct reflection of this phenomenon of propinquity, throughout Cintalapa and neighboring Pe~a Limonar, large painted ads on the walls warn about AIDS, promote condom use, family planning and, emphatically, attention to women and children. These towns have developed a certain mercantile economy. There is a permanent population of service providers and another population, also permanent, for consumption. The phenomenon is extended to other large, pro-government communities such as Santo Domingo and Nueva Palestina which, although they do not have military bases, attend constantly to the needs of the soldiers. This economy, parallel with the war, explains the disenchantment of some PRI communities, addicted to their military neighbors, when, in early 2000 the government withdrew some federal Army bases (seven in total). The towns of Cuxulja' and El Carmen suffered economically with the departure of the troops (located next to Moise's Gandhi and Guadalupe Tepeyac respectively). Others, also PRI but more traditional, such as Jolnachoj (in San Andre's), expressed relief. Regardless, the troop rearrangements ordered by President Vicente Fox did not involve any reduction in the number of forces stationed inside the so-called conflict zone. Recent evidence suggests, on the contrary, an increase (unquantified) in soldiers, which can be concealed from the public, but which cannot be hidden from day to day life in the community. The Fox government denies it (or chooses not to make it explicit), but it is, in fact, maintaining a war in Chiapas. The deployment of forces has nothing to do with containment, or with safeguarding our borders. They are advance troops, under cover of a truce riddled with holes. The Costs of Autonomous Resistance In these lands of Mayan Indians, autonomy is a kind of patience. Towns where there are no hotels, restaurants, cantinas, cobblers, pharmacies, grocery stores, wine shops, sawmills, garages, federal and state bureaucracies, satellite telephones, water storage tanks and solar cells in the houses, pay television antennas on the rooftops. They do not accept government financing or programs. Many towns still do not have electricity. It is easy to identify the communities in resistance. By the signs which proclaim that they belong to a certain Autonomous Municipality. Or by the striking murals on which Emiliano Zapata appears, or Zapatista Army of National Liberation insurgents, passages from their history, scenes of war or idyllic dreams, patriotic heroes or Che Guevara, that universal icon. There is usually no alcohol, or any drunks. But these towns are also recognizable because of their higher levels of deprivation. Although their determination and collective organization makes it less obvious, the rebel Indians of Chiapas are the poorest of the poor. In communities where zapatista support bases and campesinos from official organizations coexist (as exemplified by the Roberto Barrios and Morelia ejidos), the economic differences can be heartbreaking. And they always represent a declaration of principles in themselves. There are a scarcity of pots in zapatista kitchens. In many places there are no spoons, or buckets. Food is very limited. One can see that all of their buildings are made by themselves. Even though they sometimes get cement for schools and autonomous clinics (even though it is for the floors), they usually only have wood. The little money that they have goes towards laminate. Even so, they erect bilingual primary schools, libraries, meeting places, small clinics which rarely have doctors. They have been in these circumstances for a decade or more (the zapatista uprising was, in fact, precisely against neglect), and between four and six years of functioning as Autonomous Municipalities, which has cost them deaths, exile, jail, fields that have been destroyed or stolen from them, polluted rivers. The resistance of hundreds of communities confirms three things: that their residents are accustomed to the idea; that they are peacefully resisting a constant war (military, paramilitary, political and economic) that dares not speak its name, and, as the public communique's by the different autonomous councils are wont to state, that they do not accept "crumbs" from the government. One of the rebels' demands, however, reaches a broader population. Most of the non-zapatista organizations and communities in the Indian territories of Chiapas demand (or want) the fulfillment of the San Andre's Accords. During the PRI era, there were government gestures which purportedly "fulfilled" the Accords. Despite their insistence on a constitutional reform which did not satisfy chiapaneco indigenous in general, the Fox government has refrained from Albores-style fakery. Pablo Salazar Mendiguchi'a's government has even rejected the reform (known as the Bartlett-Cevallos Law) - which is currently under review by the Supreme Court of Justice of the nation because of the hundreds of indigenous constitutional challenges which have been raised in the country. Consistent with their resistance, the Autonomous Municipalities release continuous denuncias. Almost every day something is deliberately done to them by the public forces, or by people and organizations which belong to political parties or which collaborate with the federal Army and other agencies of the government which committed itself to meeting their demands. The years go by. The war advances. The communities in resistance keep waiting. "The government does not hear us," they keep repeating. -- To unsubscribe from this list send a message containing the words unsubscribe chiapas95 (or chiapas95-lite, or chiapas95-english, or chiapas95-espanol) to majordomo at eco.utexas.edu. Previous messages are available from http://www.eco.utexas.edu/faculty/Cleaver/chiapas95.html or gopher to Texas, University of Texas at Austin, Department of Economics, Mailing Lists. -- Tom Childs - Audio/Visual Resources Douglas College Library New Westminster, B.C. Canada T: 604 527-5187 E: childst at douglas.bc.ca W: http://www.globaljustice.ca -- From Tom_Childs at Douglas.BC.CA Wed Jul 24 12:18:09 2002 From: Tom_Childs at Douglas.BC.CA (Tom_Childs at Douglas.BC.CA) Date: Wed, 24 Jul 2002 11:18:09 -0700 Subject: [R-G] Listen to latest interview at www.MiddleEast.org (fwd) Message-ID: <200207241818.LAA20897@Douglas.BC.CA> ----- Forwarded message: ----- To: "MER" From: "MID-EAST REALITIES" Subject: Listen to latest interview at www.MiddleEast.org Date: Wed, 24 Jul 2002 08:41:27 -0400 _______ ____ ______ / |/ / /___/ / /_ // M I D - E A S T R E A L I T I E S / /|_/ / /_/_ / /\\ Making Sense of the Middle East /_/ /_/ /___/ /_/ \\ www.MiddleEast.Org News, Information, & Analysis That Governments, Interest Groups, and the Corporate Media Don't Want You To Know! "Had it not been for Israel's long occupation of the Palestinians and U.S. policies supporting Israel I don't think 9/11 would have happened." "Israel, with a U.S. green light and help, is getting ready to totally decimate Palestinian society and try to destroy all resistance to the occupation when the U.S. invades Iraq, with untold historical consequences yet to come." Listen to Mark Bruzonsky interviewed a few hours ago on the most listened to syndicated radio program in Australia. The most recent interview now plays automatically when you go to the MER Homepage at www.MiddleEast.Org If you don't have Real Player installed in your Windows computers use the link on the MER Homepage to download the free version. To reach Mark Bruzonsky - Mark at MiddleEast.Org and 202 362-5266 -- Tom Childs - Audio/Visual Resources Douglas College Library New Westminster, B.C. Canada T: 604 527-5187 E: childst at douglas.bc.ca W: http://www.globaljustice.ca -- From Tom_Childs at Douglas.BC.CA Wed Jul 24 14:06:07 2002 From: Tom_Childs at Douglas.BC.CA (Tom_Childs at Douglas.BC.CA) Date: Wed, 24 Jul 2002 13:06:07 -0700 Subject: [R-G] Mencken "On Government" (fwd) Message-ID: <200207242006.NAA22526@Douglas.BC.CA> ...if only the great masses could take these sentiments to heart...maybe we could turn around this absurdity we're faced with. -tc ----- Forwarded message: ----- Delivered-To: librarians at tao.ca Date: Wed, 24 Jul 2002 13:32:37 -0500 From: Earl Lee To: Don Wood Cc: Annie Laurie Gaylor , Institute for First Amendment Studies , "librarians at tao.ca anarchist librarians" Subject: Mencken "On Government" H.L. Mencken's essay is even more relevant today, in the wake of 9/11, than it was when it was first written. Everyone can benefit from these sentiments: The great pox of civilization, alas, I believe to be incurable, and so I propose no new quackery for its treatment. I am against dosing it, and I am against killing it. All I presume to argue is that something would be accomplished by viewing it more realistically--by ceasing to let its necessary and perhaps useful functions blind us to its ever-increasing crimes against the ordinary rights of the free citizen and the common decencies of the world. The fact that it is generally respected--that it possesses effective machinery for propagating and safeguarding that respect--is the main shield of the rogues and vagabonds who use it to exploit the great masses of diligent and credulous men. Whenever you hear anyone bawling for more respect for the laws, whether it be a Coolidge on his imperial throne or an humble county judge in his hedge court, you have before you one who is trying to use them to his private advantage; whenever you hear of new legislation for putting down dissent and rebellion you may be sure that it is promoted by scoundrels. The extortions and oppressions will go on so long as such bare fraudulence deceives and disarms the victims--so long as they are ready to swallow the immemorial official theory that protesting against the stealings of the archbishop's secretary's nephew's mistress' illegitimate son is a sin against the Holy Ghost. They will come to an end when the victims begin to differentiate clearly between government as a necessary device for maintaining order in the world and government as a device for maintaining the authority and prosperity of predatory rascals and swindlers. -- Tom Childs - Audio/Visual Resources Douglas College Library New Westminster, B.C. Canada T: 504527-5187 E: childst at douglas.bc.ca W: http://www.globaljustice.ca -- From shniad at sfu.ca Wed Jul 24 16:04:01 2002 From: shniad at sfu.ca (shniad at sfu.ca) Date: Wed, 24 Jul 2002 15:04:01 PDT Subject: [R-G] Everyone Is Outraged - NYT Message-ID: <200207242204.g6OM41mC020935@rm-rstar.sfu.ca> An embedded and charset-unspecified text was scrubbed... Name: not available URL: From shniad at sfu.ca Wed Jul 24 17:28:13 2002 From: shniad at sfu.ca (shniad at sfu.ca) Date: Wed, 24 Jul 2002 16:28:13 PDT Subject: [R-G] U.S. Aims to Block U.N. Torture Vote Message-ID: <200207242328.g6ONSDmC025682@rm-rstar.sfu.ca> An embedded and charset-unspecified text was scrubbed... Name: not available URL: From shniad at sfu.ca Wed Jul 24 17:28:25 2002 From: shniad at sfu.ca (shniad at sfu.ca) Date: Wed, 24 Jul 2002 16:28:25 PDT Subject: [R-G] Palestinian ceasefire plan lies buried in the rubble of Gaza - The Times Message-ID: <200207242328.g6ONSPmC025794@rm-rstar.sfu.ca> An embedded and charset-unspecified text was scrubbed... Name: not available URL: From shniad at sfu.ca Wed Jul 24 17:28:36 2002 From: shniad at sfu.ca (shniad at sfu.ca) Date: Wed, 24 Jul 2002 16:28:36 PDT Subject: [R-G] Israel stopping vital supplies into Palestinian areas: aid groups Message-ID: <200207242328.g6ONSamC025949@rm-rstar.sfu.ca> An embedded and charset-unspecified text was scrubbed... Name: not available URL: From shniad at sfu.ca Wed Jul 24 17:28:46 2002 From: shniad at sfu.ca (shniad at sfu.ca) Date: Wed, 24 Jul 2002 16:28:46 PDT Subject: [R-G] Rise of a new imperialism - John Pilger Message-ID: <200207242328.g6ONSkmC026115@rm-rstar.sfu.ca> An embedded and charset-unspecified text was scrubbed... Name: not available URL: From shniad at sfu.ca Wed Jul 24 17:28:58 2002 From: shniad at sfu.ca (shniad at sfu.ca) Date: Wed, 24 Jul 2002 16:28:58 PDT Subject: [R-G] Zionist Ideology, the Non-Jews and the State of Israel Message-ID: <200207242328.g6ONSxmC026350@rm-rstar.sfu.ca> An embedded and charset-unspecified text was scrubbed... Name: not available URL: From nick at faunusherbs.com Wed Jul 24 21:44:38 2002 From: nick at faunusherbs.com (Nicholas Morcinek) Date: Wed, 24 Jul 2002 23:44:38 -0400 Subject: [R-G] UNDERNEWS JUL 24 Message-ID: <000401c2338d$9b735f30$8c2ce2d1@faunusp41800> UNDERNEWS July 24, 2002 From the Progressive Review: Inside the Beltway, Out of the Loop, Ahead of the Curve Edited by Sam Smith Since 1964, Washington's most unofficial source 1312 18th St. NW #502, Washington DC 20036 202-835-0770 Fax: 835-0779 WORD We want President Roosevelt to hear the wail of the children who never have a chance to go to school but work eleven and twelve hours a day in the textile mills of Pennsylvania; who weave the carpets that he and you walk upon and the lace curtains in your windows, and the clothes of the people. Fifty years ago there was a cry against slavery and men gave up their lives to stop the selling of black children on the block. Today the white child is sold for two dollars a week to the manufacturers. Fifty years ago the black babies were sold C. 0.D. Today the white baby is sold on the installment plan. In Georgia where children work day and night in the cotton mills they have just passed a bill to protect song birds. What about little children from whom all song is gone? . . . The trouble is that no one in Washington cares. I saw our legislators in one hour pass three bills for the relief of the railways but when labor cries for aid for the children they will not listen. I asked a man in prison once how he happened to be there and he said he had stolen a pair of shoes. I told him if he had stolen a railroad he would be a United States Senator. - Mother Jones, in a speech delivered this day in 1903 at Coney Island, NY. She had led 300 men, women, and children on a 17-day march to Teddy Roosevelt's home, but the president refused to see them when they arrived a few days later. FLOTSAM & JETSAM The real war THE REAL WAR today is not one against terrorism - which not even federal agencies can uniformly define - but between myth and reality. While myth has been doing extremely well over the past two decades, reality has one ace in the hole: it doesn't really care what people say about it. Thus the stock market has shown itself deeply contemptuous of its boosters, the "war on terrorism" has increased the likelihood of further attacks, and the Department of Homeland Security has created vast new insecurities for those American citizens who still want to live in a democracy. In the capital city, the city council is considering a bill permitting big brother spy cameras all over town - in part because they will reduce the "fear" of crime. As Marc Rotenberg of the Electronic Privacy Information Center asked the council: "Let us imagine that crime has gone up after [the cameras are] installed but the public, perhaps aided by an effective public relations campaign, believes that the cameras have helped deter crime. How do we evaluate the system?" In other words, does myth still trump reality? It's worth noting that on this date in 1980, Peter Sellers died at age 54. Sellers, in the person of Chance the gardener in "Being There," left us with as a profound observation as we would hear in all the years that followed: "Life is a state of mind." Certainly, no other paradigm has so consistently and increasingly guided the American spirit. Say it loudly, often, and on the right channel, and it will be. Like Chance, many now only to know the world through television. But, unlike Chance, many do not have the wisdom of their garden. Nor do many these days - especially among the elites - have much contact with the sort of reality that demands competence you can't talk your way out of - say the type found among farmers and those who earn their living on the sea. As Conrad noted, "Of all the living creatures upon land and sea, it is ships alone that cannot be taken in by barren pretenses, that will not put up with bad art from their masters." I have been blessed by acquaintance with both the land and the sea and these experiences have affected my outlook as much as any college course, book, or ideology. And even though a writer, I am deeply conscious of the limits of words compared, for example, with the ability to protect oneself, or to choose a wise course, nautically or politically. I also have at least some second hand knowledge of living close to fear, for a part of my childhood was spent in the company of an English girl evacuated during the bombing of London. It hadn't been easy for Ann to get to Washington in July of 1940. She wrote me 60 years later: "I set sail in the Duchess of Atholl in convoy. There was a slight skirmish with a submarine. I remember feeling the ship shudder as depth charges were dropped but we were unscathed and pressed on, though I remember seeing icebergs and wondering. That was the time that my mother told me we might well be sunk. If I was dragged underwater, not to struggle. I would come to the surface naturally, then not to strike out to England or America but float on my back, as I had learned at school, until I was picked up. "On August 30, 1940, the Volendam set off with a load of British children for America. It was sunk in the Irish sea. All were saved. "On September 17, the City of Benares sailed with many of the Volendam survivors. It sank in mid-Atlantic and most of the children perished." No more British children were sent to America after that. Ann, as always, was dry in wit, understated, resolute in determination, and unflappable in crisis. What struck me as I read her letter, was how much I had learned from her over the years about staying calm and realistic in bad times. More than once, after September 11, I wondered what Ann would do right now. Today, I find myself in a town utterly possessed by crisis yet stunningly unable to shine reality upon it. Almost from the moment of the attacks of September 11, the news channels draped their screens with pseudo-patriotic propaganda and now the president can hardly be seen without some cynical semiotic pattern on the wall paper behind him, misinforming the public and deluding himself. To this day, we are not allowed - in any major public forum at least - to consider the present crisis as the religious struggle that it is or to raise the possibility that it is a rapacious foreign policy and not rampant civil liberties that has so put us at risk. Similarly, the public words about the market that fall down upon us even faster than the market itself, are dripping in self-denial, empirically absurd clich?s, and hope masquerading as fact. As has been pointed out, you would have done better investing in soft-drinks and getting just your deposit back than taking the same sum and buying some of the most touted stocks. The participants in this magic show are not just the politicians. Our media increasingly covers perception rather than reality and our academics have helped convince us that common truth doesn't exist anyway. Further, a whole tribe of professors make their living arguing that their theories about the economy or geopolitics are objective, despite these paradigms being strikingly unsupported by fact and in the end having more in common with a creationist's use of the Bible than with a scientist's use of evidence. In any case, it is certainly not a liberal-conservative divide. It is the myth of each that, absent the other, everything would be fine. In fact, both camps are engaged in manipulations of emotions, ideas, and facts. And what happens when - as on September 11 or during the July crash - reality intrudes again? Even the Christian fundamentalists had enough sense to come up with an Apocalypse. The best the boomers can do is to nod their heads as the man on MSNBC says again, "buy and hold." Chance the gardener, forced outside his haven, ran into some young thugs. His reaction was to pull out a remote and change the channel. We've tried that twice in the past year and it hasn't worked any better than it did for Chance. It may be time to get real. - SAM SMITH From Johannes.Schneider at gmx.net Thu Jul 25 06:44:46 2002 From: Johannes.Schneider at gmx.net (Johannes Schneider) Date: Thu, 25 Jul 2002 14:44:46 +0200 Subject: [R-G] SACP Congress Message-ID: <008601c233d9$12600e40$4a1e050a@fgl.atitech.com> >From the British Guardian: Communists' row with ANC tests alliance Chris McGreal in Johannesburg, Thursday July 25, 2002 President Thabo Mbeki cancelled an opening speech to the South African Communist party congress yesterday as hostile delegates tried to purge the party's central committee of members who serve in his cabinet. He backed out less than 24 hours before the conference opened, delivering a snub to the African National Congress's long-standing ally after weeks of confrontation between them about his rightwing economic policies and his authoritarian style of leadership. His office offered a thinly veiled excuse, saying he was too busy with cabinet meetings. But the president was apparently worried about being met by a display of outright hostility from the party on whose central committee he served in the 1980's. Full: http://www.guardian.co.uk/international/story/0,3604,762582,00.html >From South African Mail and Guardian: Friction at SACP congress Hannes de Wet | Rustenburg , 25 July 2002 08:03 Cosatu came to the SA Communist Party's 11th Congress in a fighting mood on Wednesday, while the African National Congress sought to subdue tensions in the tripartite alliance. Reiterating plans by the Congress of SA Trade Unions to stage an anti-privatisation strike in October, general secretary Zwelinzima Vavi said: "The future does not belong to cowards who are afraid to speak out." ANC national chairman Mosiuoa Lekota chose to make little of public tension between his party and the SACP and Cosatu. "The alliance has always acknowledged that we can never eliminate contradictions," said Lekota, who is also Minister of Defence. "The art of managing contradictions is what has carried this alliance to where it is today." Full: http://www.mg.co.za/Content/l3.jsp?a=11&o=6428 >From South African Business Day: Cosatu, SACP to vet members in government Political Correspondent RUSTENBURG, The Congress of SA Trade Unions (Cosatu) wants to keep tabs on unionists and communists in government to ensure that they do not stray too far from their organisations' principles. Addressing the SA Communist Party (SACP) congress yesterday, amid soaring tension between the African National Congress (ANC) and its alliance partners, Cosatu general secretary Zwelinzima Vavi proposed a performance measurement system for Cosatu and SACP members. The proposal is seen as an attempt to tighten control over Cosatu and SACP "cadres" in government, who Vavi accused of pushing "neo-liberal policies". Full: http://www.bday.co.za/bday/content/direct/1,3523,1137418-6079-0,00.html see also: http://news.google.com/news?q=SACP&num=15&scoring=d From info at cinox.demon.co.uk Thu Jul 25 07:39:37 2002 From: info at cinox.demon.co.uk (Tim Murphy) Date: Thu, 25 Jul 2002 14:39:37 +0100 Subject: [R-G] FW: Sergio Vieira de Mello to replace Mary Robinson Message-ID: The new United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights to replace Mary Robinson is Sergio Vieira de Mello. He was the United Nations Transitional Administrator in East Timor. Full text of UN Press Release below... UNITED NATIONS Press Release 23 July 2002 The Secretary-General, following consultations with the Chairmen of the five regional groups of Member States, yesterday informed the General Assembly of his intention to appoint Sergio Vieira de Mello of Brazil as the new United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights. The General Assembly is expected to approve the appointment today, 23 July. The appointment would be for a four-year term, beginning on 12 September 2002. Mr. Vieira de Mello was, until May of this year, the United Nations Transitional Administrator in East Timor. Prior to that, he briefly held the position of Special Representative of the Secretary-General in Kosovo, following a year and a half serving at Headquarters as Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs and Emergency Relief Coordinator. He has been with the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees since 1969, culminating in his appointment as United Nations Assistant High Commissioner for Refugees in January 1996. He has extensive Headquarters and field experience in humanitarian and peacekeeping operations, including in Bangladesh, Sudan, Cyprus, Mozambique, Peru and Lebanon. Mr. Vieira de Mello has also served as Special Envoy for the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees for Cambodia, Director of Repatriation for the United Nations Transitional Authority in Cambodia (UNTAC), Head of Civil Affairs of the United Nations Protection Force (UNPROFOR), as well as United Nations Regional Humanitarian Coordinator for the Great Lakes Region of Africa. Mr. Vieira de Mello studied in Brazil and France, receiving a doctorate from the University of Paris (Panth?on-Sorbonne). Born on 15 March 1948, he is married and has two sons. [end of press release] From mstainsby at tao.ca Thu Jul 25 11:33:47 2002 From: mstainsby at tao.ca (Macdonald Stainsby) Date: Thu, 25 Jul 2002 10:33:47 -0700 Subject: [R-G] Gush Shalom on recent missile strikes Message-ID: <008f01c23401$6f5a5d80$291f5318@vc.shawcable.net> ----- Original Message ----- From: "Gush Shalom (Israeli Peace Bloc)" > 3) 'Tanzim intended to stop terrorism' - Alex Fishman in Yediot Aharonot Once again Yediot Aharonot's Alex Fishman publishes important information and commentary, apparently reflecting the views of dissident elements within the army. The following articles take up two full pages in today's issue of Yediot, Israel's largest mass-circulation paper. Tanzim intended to stop terrorism An hour and half after the heads of Tanzim agreed on publishing a declaration of a unilateral cease-fire, Israel liquidated Salim Shehade in Gaza. Thus was cut off a two-month old move aimed at achieving a cease-fire. Day before yesterday, at 22:30, the heads of Tanzim, convened at Jenin, approved the text of a communique calling unilaterally for an end to fighting by Tanzim, Hamas and Islamic Jihad. A few hours before, Muhammad Dahlan [influntial former head of Palestinian Security in the Gaza Strip] met with [Hamas Leader] Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, in which meeting Yassin accepted the principles of the cease-fire communique. In fact, already starting on the past weekend, Sheik Yassin and [senior Hamas member] Abd-El-Aziz Rantisi started making statements aimed at creating a public atmosphere among the public conducive to accepting the cease-fire communique. The Israeli military system ands the country's high political echelons were briefed officially on Monday by the European Union. In fact, that briefing was not needed, since Israel is already for weeks following the deliberations inside Tanzim on the idea of declaring a unilateral cease-fire without making any immediate demands upon Israel. The Tanzim initiative - backed by the European Community, Saudi Arabia and Egypt - is an ongoing move already deliberated for the past two months. Moreover, the organization's leader Marwan Barghouti, held in an Israeli prison, was informed of the initiative, and Palestinian sources say he was expected to give it his endorsement. One and a half hour after the Tanzim leadership approved the document at its Jenin gathering, Israel carried out the assassination of Salah Shehadeh, in the course of which dozens of civilians were killed and wounded as well. In this way, Israel apparently destroyed the chance to test the viability of a cease-fire. The initiative did not originate from the Palestinian Authority, but from the grassroots level. Arafat was aware of the initiative, but neither led nor impeded it. But for the Shehade liquidation, the Tanzim communique - calling for an end to suicide bombings, to the shooting of mortar shells and missiles and to any other activity against Israeli civilians - was due to be published already yesterday. Today, it was to be published as an article in the Washington Post and simultaneously in the Palestinian and Israeli press. The US Administration was also briefed on this initiative, though in essence it was internationally sponsored by the EU. In the course of their two months' dialogue with the Tanzim, the Europeans were initially sceptical of the Tanzim choosing for a unilateral move, and even more sceptical about the Hamas and Islamic Jihad joining it, but to their surprise it came to fruition at the beginning of this week. During their talks, the Europeans asked the Tanzim leader for their demands upon Israel. The text of the communique spoke of a unilateral cease-fire (see box). However, the Tanzim leaders told the Europeans that they were asking for an end to "targeted killings" by Israel, and to the demolition of houses, and for Israel to avoid deportations and withdraw its forces from the Palestinian cities. The Tanzim people were asked for their envisioned timeline of Israeli withdrawal from the cities. Their answer, transmitted also to the Israeli military, was that they would like to get to January 2003, when Palestinian Authority elections are due to take place, with the cities free of Israeli mitary presence. Israeli military elements who were aware of the Tanzim move being formulated took it seriously. They made, however, the reservation that the Tanzim was in fact seeking to delay by about a year the decision in the conflict with Israel. They said that the Tanzim communuqe made no reference to essential issues such as the Right of Return, and that it continues to back Arafat. In the defence establishment it was yesterday emphasized that they give no weight whatsoever to the Tanzim's projected communique, and that Hamas was not going to be a party to it. The Tanzim Communique - full text According to West European sources, the following is the text of the Tanzim communique which was due to be published today in the territories: We, representatives of the Tanzim and Fatah, in the name of our comrades and organizations in all the towns and villages of the West Bank and Gaza, declare that from this moment on we are stopping any and all attacks on innocent, non-combatant men, women and children. We call upon all Palestinian political organizations and movements to put an immediate end to such attacks, and to do so withoutt any hesitations or preconditions. For our part, we will halt all such attacks and work with other Palesatinian political organizations in order to achieve their support. We will monitor the activities of organizations in order to ensure that no such actions are being planned or carried out, and we will take part in a national dialogue aimed at convincing our people that this is the right course to take. We undertake a permanent committment to this policy, and our efforts in promoting it will be determined and tireless. Our revolution is stating out under a new principle. We will continue our struggle and defend our people. We will oppose any aggression aimed at our cities and our familes, against the confiscation of our land and the deportation of our people, against the slow, deliberate, pitiless destruction of our society and our aspirations, against the ongoing occupation of the West Bank by the Israeli army. All these we will go on opposing and rebelling against. [second article - published alongside the first one] A justified target, a strange timing By Alex Fishman Is it possible that somebody in Israel's high political and military echeleons wanted to deliberately sabotage the chances for a cease-fire? God forbid. Such a thing is unthinkable in our country. But then, how to explain that exactly an hour and half after the Tanzim heads agreed upon the text of their call for a unilateral ceasefire, Israel liquidated in such a clumsy way the head of the Hamas military wing in the Gaza Strip, thereby also liquidating a chance - faint as it may have been - to calm down the region? Is it just coincidence? Or are we locked upon the concept that any Palestinian move is always a lie or conspiracy? The target was more than justified: Shehadeh was an arch-terrorist who should have been liquidated years ago. But the timing of the liquidation is very strange, and the clumsy implemetation very untypical of Military Intelligence and the Air Force. As if somebody was in a very big hurry to carry it out right this moment, no matter what. Shehadeh was a target whose "targeted killing" was aproved many months ago. The collection of intelligence about him involved an enormous effort. Just two weeks ago it was found out that he had moved to a new house, the same where he was yesterday liquidated. Already last Friday the missile sights were turned upon him, but the attack was called off when it turmned out that a female relative of his was nearby. As far as the armed forces were concerned, there was no doubt - this was a legitimate target approved by the political echelon. But what would have happened had the political echelon decided to postpone the liqudation and wait to see what would come of the Tanzim/European initiative? Military Intelligence has no confidence in the Tanzim cease-fire initiative, still less in Tanzim's ability to get Hamas involved in that initiative. But Military Intelligence makes no more than recommendations. It was for the political echelon to consider and decide upon the importance of that declaration. After all, Tanzim declaring a unilateral cease-fire would amount to declaring the failure of the Intifada. It could have amounted to a victory of Ariel Sharon's policies. But somebody's finger seemed to itching on the trigger. It is reasonable to assume that a pinpoint liquidation of the man alone would not have aroused the would agner against us in such a way. But a plane with a bomb can go wrong. In this case, the pilot made no mistake - he landed the bomb exactly where he was instructed to land it. The mistake was in another place, in the basic considerations - and not only those of the armed forces. For almost two years, the Air Force is carrying out attacks in the Territories. Pilots involved in targeted killing speak proudly - and present action footage to prove their point - of enormous effort invested and the many safety precautions taken before the trigger is pressed, in order to avoid harming innocent civilians. So far, the Air Force and the IDF kept this ethical code in a most respectful way. And suddenly, exactly yesterday, Intelligence gave wrong information which led to wrong action. This is no small "intelligece discrepency". It is a very big hole in the intelligence-gathering process. Mistakes always happen, but the liquidation of Shehade was no tactical move of liquidating yet another local terrorist. It was a strategic move. Where was the Minister of Defence, who is supposed to be a balancing factor between the policial and miltary echelons and weigh carefully all the considerations before taking such a significant military move? So, instead of trying to measure the seriousness of the Tanzim's intentions to declare a cease-fire, we are prepaping ourselves to absorb a new wave of suicide bombings, which will require of us more painfiul and justified reactions. Did we already talk of the conquest of Gaza? ------------------------------------------- Macdonald Stainsby http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/rad-green http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/leninist-international -- In the contradiction lies the hope. --Bertholt Brecht From shniad at sfu.ca Thu Jul 25 17:57:32 2002 From: shniad at sfu.ca (shniad at sfu.ca) Date: Thu, 25 Jul 2002 16:57:32 PDT Subject: [R-G] Communists row with ANC tests alliance Message-ID: <200207252357.g6PNvWmC000540@rm-rstar.sfu.ca> An embedded and charset-unspecified text was scrubbed... Name: not available URL: From shniad at sfu.ca Thu Jul 25 17:57:21 2002 From: shniad at sfu.ca (shniad at sfu.ca) Date: Thu, 25 Jul 2002 16:57:21 PDT Subject: [R-G] Here we go -- again Message-ID: <200207252357.g6PNvLmC000420@rm-rstar.sfu.ca> An embedded and charset-unspecified text was scrubbed... Name: not available URL: From shniad at sfu.ca Thu Jul 25 17:57:41 2002 From: shniad at sfu.ca (shniad at sfu.ca) Date: Thu, 25 Jul 2002 16:57:41 PDT Subject: [R-G] In Alabama Politics, How New Kid Won the Bloc - NYT Message-ID: <200207252357.g6PNvfmC000656@rm-rstar.sfu.ca> An embedded and charset-unspecified text was scrubbed... Name: not available URL: From shniad at sfu.ca Thu Jul 25 18:01:06 2002 From: shniad at sfu.ca (shniad at sfu.ca) Date: Thu, 25 Jul 2002 17:01:06 PDT Subject: [R-G] A Canadian Jew, visiting the West Bank, speaks out for the Palestinians Message-ID: <200207260001.g6Q016mC003285@rm-rstar.sfu.ca> An embedded and charset-unspecified text was scrubbed... Name: not available URL: From mstainsby at tao.ca Thu Jul 25 18:47:09 2002 From: mstainsby at tao.ca (Macdonald Stainsby) Date: Thu, 25 Jul 2002 17:47:09 -0700 Subject: [R-G] Zimbabwe urged to take GM grain Message-ID: <00a201c2343d$f98e57e0$291f5318@vc.shawcable.net> Well, everyones favourite "corrupt despot" (or worse) has now taken the lead in refusing to import GMO's. The rhetoric from the ZANU-PF has continued to be about "the land" since the elections. Has there been any movement on this issue, or has it just been a continuance of the talk? No one should trust Mugabe after his last 20 years, but this article was certainly heartening. And what of the land reform? If it is carried out (beyond ZANU-PF members), is that not better than anything the MDC was going to do? YFTR, Macdonald Wednesday, 24 July, 2002, 12:55 GMT 13:55 UK Zimbabwe urged to take GM grain BBC Online Zimbabwe could suffer from a famine by September if the government continues to refuse food aid containing genetically-modified organisms (GMO), according to a senior United States aid official. In June, the United States gave 8,500 tonnes of maize to Zimbabwe but a further 10,000 tonnes was turned away by the government because it did not have a certificate saying that it was GM-free. In the wider region, arguments over genetically modified food are threatening to derail efforts to help the 12 million people across southern Africa who are facing a critical food shortage, according to the BBC's Martin Plaut in Zambia. But few in Zimbabwe are really aware of the arguments over GM foods. BBC reporters there say that most people just want food. They do not know what GM food is and are not worried about its quality when they are so hungry. But they could be influenced if the government issued warnings that GM food might be unsafe, says the BBC's Lewis Machipisa in Harare. A number of Zimbabwe's neighbours are also concerned about the possibility of their own crops being contaminated by the American aid. The government's stance over GM food was limiting the amount of food the United States Agency for International Development (USAid) could supply, the agency's assistant administrator Roger Winter said, according to the Reuters news agency. "We do not have other products that do not have GMO in the volumes and within the time frames that are necessary to keep the food pipeline full,", he said. He also stressed that the food was safe. "It is the same food that Americans eat every day. It is the same food that has been approved by our Environmental Protection Agency," he said. Mr Winter argues that countries across southern Africa affected by the food crisis have a stark choice. "Famine and food-related deaths are not pretty. I argue that they are certain in this case if there is not an adequate food pipeline. You are going to start in all likelihood seeing serious impacts of at least a localised nature as soon as September." Mozambique is refusing to allow its ports to be used for trans-shipment to Malawi and Zimbabwe, two of the worst-hit countries in the region. For Richard Ragan, the UN World Food Programme representative in Zimbabwe, this could mean re-thinking the whole transport strategy. "If GMO maize can't transit Mozambique, and it's likely it would have to come in from Dar es Salaam, so that means that we have to begin to consider different options with respect to both rail and trucking opportunities in the region," he said. One possibility would be to grind the maize before it arrives in southern Africa. This could not only be costly, but also logistically difficult, according to the BBC's Martin Plaut. And aid agencies worry that the United States might not accept conditions being imposed on its donations. Mr Winter says that if US-supplied food is not accepted, it would cause massive problems because, "the volumes that the US is offering to supply cannot be made up for by any other country or group". ------------------------------------------- Macdonald Stainsby http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/rad-green http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/leninist-international -- In the contradiction lies the hope. --Bertholt Brecht From Tom_Childs at Douglas.BC.CA Fri Jul 26 01:32:15 2002 From: Tom_Childs at Douglas.BC.CA (Tom_Childs at Douglas.BC.CA) Date: Fri, 26 Jul 2002 00:32:15 -0700 Subject: [R-G] [corp-focus] Push Back (fwd) Message-ID: <200207260732.AAA18247@Douglas.BC.CA> ...a good one for your files here..... regards, tc ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ ----- Forwarded message: -----From: Robert Weissman To: "corp-focus at lists.essential.org" Subject: [corp-focus] Push Back List-Id: Sharp-edged commentary on corporate power Date: Thu, 25 Jul 2002 12:26:53 -0700 Push Back By Russell Mokhiber and Robert Weissman Let the corporate criminals take over Wall Street. And investors flee the market. Hello criminals. Goodbye market. Pollute nature. And nature confronts the polluters. Push the people to the edge of their misery, and the people push back. In Escravos, Nigeria, 600 women seized control of the ChevronTexaco oil terminal. The unarmed women villagers threatened to remove their clothes -- a traditional shaming gesture aimed at humiliating ChevronTexaco. Despite its great oil wealth, the Niger Delta is among the poorest -- and most polluted -- places in West Africa. "Chevron has neglected us," says Felicia Itsero, 67, one of the protesting women. "They have neglected us for a long time. For example, any time spills occur, they don't do proper clean-up or pay compensation. Our roofs are destroyed by their chemical. No good drinking water in our rivers. Our fishes are killed on daily basis by their chemicals, even the fishes we catch in our rivers, they smell of crude oil." (see www.moles.org) In West Virginia, the coal industry, which for generations has controlled West Virginia, is trying to jam through a special session of the state legislature a new law that would allow coal trucks to carry 120,000 pounds of coal -- up from the previous limit of 80,000. There goes traffic safety. There go the roads. Last week, the Charleston Gazette, the state's leading newspaper, referring to the protests in Nigeria, wrote this: "This drain the wealth pattern (in Nigeria), the essence of colonialism, smacks of the way out-of-state coal corporations treat West Virginians. We wonder if a naked protest (in West Virginia) would accomplish anything." Last week, Julia Butterfly Hill, was arrested and deported from Ecuador. (see www.amazonwatch.org) Hill was protesting an Occidental oil pipeline being built through a nature reserve. The pipeline faces massive opposition from indigenous communities that would be affected. She was roughed up. She was taken in the morning to the airport escorted by 10 police officers and then forced to board a plane to Panama. Hill gained worldwide recognition in the late 1990s after spending two years camped atop a redwood tree in northern California to save it from being cut down. In Ecuador, she met with the Mindo community, which staged a three-month tree sit to block construction of the pipeline. And as we write, Diane Wilson, a fourth generation shrimper and mother of five, is outside of a Union Carbide chemical facility in her hometown, Sea Drift, Texas. (see www.bhopal.net) Dow Chemical purchased Union Carbide in 1999. The Dow facility is one her area's biggest polluters. Wilson is in the midst of a hunger strike to protest Union Carbide's treatment of residents of Bhopal, India. That's the city in northern India that was gassed when a Union Carbide facility blew up in 1984, killing thousands. Wilson visited Bhopal after the accident and has never forgotten. She is outraged that Dow is pushing to water down the criminal charge against Warren Andersen, the former Union Carbide CEO, to criminal negligence, a non-extraditable offense. She is outraged that the 150,000 victims received only $500 from Union Carbide, when in the United States, there have been million dollar settlements paid out by Dow to people injured here. Following the demands of victims in India, Diane Wilson wants Andersen extradited to India. Warren Andersen is a fugitive from the Indian courts. She wants the company to face pending criminal charges for culpable homicide. For 15 years now, Wilson has been fighting the chemical companies that destroyed the bay that provided for generations of her family. The corporate counterattack against Wilson has been vicious. Her dogs have been killed. Members of her family have been shot at. Her shrimp boat has been sunk twice. But she continues to fight for justice. She says she will continue the water-only hunger strike until the people of Bhopal get justice. That means money, and a criminal trial of Union Carbide/Dow, and its executives. Wilson's hunger strike follows one begun in New Delhi on June 8, when two women gas survivors from Bhopal -- Tara Bai, 35, and Rashida Bi, 46 -- together with long-time Bhopal activist Satinath (Sathyu) Sarangi, 48, sat outside the Indian Parliament and pledged to fast until the Government ensured that justice would be done in Bhopal. After 18 days without food, the two women hunger strikers collapsed during a mass rally and were taken to hospital. Sathyu broke his fast with orange juice. Wilson picked up the fast soon thereafter. She says she will continue until justice is done in Bhopal. Women in Texas, Nigeria, Ecuador, and India are teaching us a basic truth. You can talk or write a blue streak and who listens? But put your body on the line and things begin to move. Get up. Get out. Push back. Russell Mokhiber is editor of the Washington, D.C.-based Corporate Crime Reporter. Robert Weissman is editor of the Washington, D.C.-based Multinational Monitor, http://www.multinationalmonitor.org. They are co-authors of Corporate Predators: The Hunt for MegaProfits and the Attack on Democracy (Monroe, Maine: Common Courage Press, 1999; http://www.corporatepredators.org). (c) Russell Mokhiber and Robert Weissman This article is posted at: http://lists.essential.org/pipermail/corp-focus/2002/000122.html _______________________________________________ Focus on the Corporation is a weekly column written by Russell Mokhiber and Robert Weissman. Please feel free to forward the column to friends or repost the column on other lists. If you would like to post the column on a web site or publish it in print format, we ask that you first contact us (russell at essential.org or rob at essential.org). Focus on the Corporation is distributed to individuals on the listserve corp-focus at lists.essential.org. To subscribe, unsubscribe or change your address to corp-focus, go to: or send an e-mail message to corp-focus-admin at lists.essential.org with your request. Focus on the Corporation columns are posted at . Postings on corp-focus are limited to the columns. If you would like to comment on the columns, send a message to russell at nationalpress.org or rob at essential.org. -- Tom Childs - Audio/Visual Resources Douglas College Library New Westminster, B.C. Canada T: 604 527-5187 E: childst at douglas.bc.ca W: http://www.globaljustice.ca -- From Johannes.Schneider at gmx.net Fri Jul 26 02:18:58 2002 From: Johannes.Schneider at gmx.net (Johannes Schneider) Date: Fri, 26 Jul 2002 10:18:58 +0200 Subject: [R-G] Fw: Pakistan Teachers Under Attack Message-ID: <00a301c2347d$1a83d940$4a1e050a@fgl.atitech.com> This just came from the Labour Party Pakistan: > De-Nationalization of Educational Institutions in Pakistan & it's > Repercussions > > Please send your protest letters: > > An Appeal from All Pakistan Professors and Lecturers Association > > A Province-Wide unrest and agitation against the decision of the Punjab > government to denationalization and privatize the educational institutions on 8th > July is continuing. The movement is lead by the teacher's community of the > province. Why was this drastic step taken by the provincial government is > still a big question mark? The haste and timing of the policy makes it all more > suspicious and smacks of conspiracy and ill will. > > Was it the pressure of the international donor agencies or a deliberate ploy > of the policy makers to bring bad name to the present regime, remains to be > seen? All the teachers unions have formatted a joint action committee. The > JAC has successfully organized protest meetings across the province (Punjab). > In these meetings thousands of male and female teachers have participated. It > seems that government measure to denationalization the educational > institutions have unit all the teachers form primary school to post graduate colleges > on one point agenda, to oppose privatization. > > Background > > A bird's eye view of the history of education in Pakistan brings to fore the > high handedness and callous approach of the private sector. The > pre-nationalization scene is replete with the financial exploitation of teachers, fake > and bogus salary structure, appointments of unqualified staff and no job > security for the teaching and other staff in the private sector. > > The standards of education were fast deteriorating, till unrest and > discontent among the teachers and students reached a crescendo in the 1968 agitation > against Ayub Khan's military dictatorship where a popular slogan was the > demand for nationalization of education. > > This lead to the establishment of a probe committee by the Yahya Khan > government to ascertain the genuineness of this demand. Under these circumstances, > the succeeding government of Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto in 1972 was forced to carry > out the nationalization of education vide martial law regulation 118, later > ratified by the national assembly of Pakistan. > > These nationalized institutions were granted a sum of Rs.180 billion during > the 30 years period between 1972-2002. The old buildings were expanded. Some > altogether new ones were constructed. Fresh recruitments were made some of > the best results have been produced by these nationalized institutions over the > years. > > The denationalization and privatization policy was under taken a few years > back when 53 schools were returned to the former owners, managements and > missionaries. An immediate resentment and displeasure was recorded by the various > representative bodies of the teaching community, pointing out the disastrous > repercussions of such a policy. > > The sitting govt. made assurances regarding the new fee structures, job > security of the staff members and the use of school property only for the purpose > of education. All proved hollow and futile as the properties were sold for > commercial purposes, the staff was removed and the fees were raised, to around > thirty times of the former in same cases. Same happened in the case of > colleges, which were granted so called autonomy during the 1990's. > > The situation will not be different this time around as the govt. has issued > a notification for denationalization and privatization of 82 out of 379 > colleges of Punjab including 16 major colleges of Lahore, and more then 2000 > schools. This policy is a clear indication that thousands of teachers will lose > their jobs, adding to the unemployment already rampant in the country. > > Education, primary, secondary and higher, will become out of reach of the > large sections of society due to unbearable raise in the fee structures. The > poor sections of the society will be the worst hit because of this anti people > policy. Billions of rupees worth of state property will be sold, breeding > more corruption in the society. Moreover, this ill planned and ill-advised step > will create dangers for the national security and solidarity. > > We demand an immediate review of this lethal policy. The government should > use its good sense and save the teachers, the students, the parents and the > society from complete disaster. > > WE EXPECT THE SUPPORT AND ACTIVE COOPERATION OF THE MEDIA, THE HUMAN RIGHTS > GROUPS, AND THE TEACHERS UNIONS ACROSS GLOBE AND THE INTERNATIONAL > COMMUNITY TO SAVE EDUCATION IN PAKISTAN FROM TOTAL DISASTER AND CATASTROPHE. > > comradely yours, > > Raja Mehboob > Information Secretary > Punjab Professors & Lecturers Association (Pakistan) > E-Mail: ppla786 at hotmail.com > > Please send your protest letters to > > Chief Executive > Write to: > > General Pervez Musharraf > President of Pakistan > CE Secretariat, Islamabad > Email: ce at pak.gov.pk > Fax: 92-51-9201051 > > Federal Minister Education > > Zubaida Jilala > E-mail: pak at yahoo.com > Fax Number 92 51 9202851 > > Governor of Punjab > Khalid Maqbool > Governor Punjab > Governor House, Lahore > Fax: 92-42-9200077 From Johannes.Schneider at gmx.net Fri Jul 26 05:47:17 2002 From: Johannes.Schneider at gmx.net (Johannes Schneider) Date: Fri, 26 Jul 2002 13:47:17 +0200 Subject: [R-G] Prosecution witness: 'Milosevic ordered that no atrocities should be carried out.' Message-ID: <00f101c2349a$35187b40$4a1e050a@fgl.atitech.com> It looks as if one of the key prosecution witnesses in the Milosevic trial has competely reverted his testimony under cross-examination from Milosevic. Here is the key passage from the BBC report: Friday, 26 July, 2002, 11:16 GMT 12:16 UK Milosevic confronts key witness Slobodan Milosevic is cross-examining Serbia's former secret police chief, who has said the former Yugoslav president knew about alleged atrocities being carried out by his security forces in Kosovo. Rade Markovic told the international war crimes tribunal in The Hague that Mr Milosevic had been briefed daily on the activities of the army and police in Kosovo. [...] He said Mr Milosevic had been the effective boss of state security operations against the ethnic Albanian population in Kosovo. But on Friday, in reply to Mr Milosevic's questions, he said the former president had acted within the scope of the law, ordering that no atrocities should be carried out. Full text: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/2152747.stm From shniad at sfu.ca Fri Jul 26 17:11:56 2002 From: shniad at sfu.ca (shniad at sfu.ca) Date: Fri, 26 Jul 2002 16:11:56 PDT Subject: [R-G] Barbarism Runs Rampant in the Holy Land - LAT Message-ID: <200207262311.g6QNBumC018562@rm-rstar.sfu.ca> An embedded and charset-unspecified text was scrubbed... Name: not available URL: From shniad at sfu.ca Fri Jul 26 17:12:15 2002 From: shniad at sfu.ca (shniad at sfu.ca) Date: Fri, 26 Jul 2002 16:12:15 PDT Subject: [R-G] Sharon's Bomb Explodes in His Face - Guardian Message-ID: <200207262312.g6QNCFmC018799@rm-rstar.sfu.ca> An embedded and charset-unspecified text was scrubbed... Name: not available URL: From shniad at sfu.ca Fri Jul 26 17:12:24 2002 From: shniad at sfu.ca (shniad at sfu.ca) Date: Fri, 26 Jul 2002 16:12:24 PDT Subject: [R-G] Milosevic 'acted within law' - prosecution witness (BBC News) Message-ID: <200207262312.g6QNCOmC018928@rm-rstar.sfu.ca> An embedded and charset-unspecified text was scrubbed... Name: not available URL: From shniad at sfu.ca Fri Jul 26 17:12:35 2002 From: shniad at sfu.ca (shniad at sfu.ca) Date: Fri, 26 Jul 2002 16:12:35 PDT Subject: [R-G] Afghan heroin trade 'booming' - BBC Message-ID: <200207262312.g6QNCZmC019106@rm-rstar.sfu.ca> An embedded and charset-unspecified text was scrubbed... Name: not available URL: From shniad at sfu.ca Fri Jul 26 17:12:07 2002 From: shniad at sfu.ca (shniad at sfu.ca) Date: Fri, 26 Jul 2002 16:12:07 PDT Subject: [R-G] The Eagle Has Crash Landed - Wallerstein Message-ID: <200207262312.g6QNC7mC018695@rm-rstar.sfu.ca> An embedded and charset-unspecified text was scrubbed... Name: not available URL: From debsian at pacbell.net Sat Jul 27 09:25:36 2002 From: debsian at pacbell.net (Michael Pugliese) Date: Sat, 27 Jul 2002 08:25:36 -0700 Subject: [R-G] Fwd: Ruppert Speaking at David Irving event Message-ID: <98ONDFDH3XUS96CBQNIG84NHZXZTOL.3d42bb70@oemcomputer> http://www.fpp.co.uk/cinc/2002/speakers/index.html From Tom_Childs at Douglas.BC.CA Sat Jul 27 12:34:08 2002 From: Tom_Childs at Douglas.BC.CA (Tom_Childs at Douglas.BC.CA) Date: Sat, 27 Jul 2002 11:34:08 -0700 Subject: [R-G] New book from CorpWatch Message-ID: <200207271834.LAA27237@Douglas.BC.CA> ----- Forwarded message: -----From: corpwatchers (snip) WHAT'S NEW ON CORPWATCH Holding Corporations Accountable July 25, 2002 CORPORATE-FREE UN >From Rio to Johannesburg: The Globalization Decade http://www.corpwatch.org/campaigns/PCD.jsp?articleid=3190 As part of our special coverage of the Johannesburg Earth Summit, CorpWatch is running excerpts from the new book, _Earthsummit.biz: The Corporate Takeover of Sustainable Development_ written by CorpWatch staffers Kenny Bruno and Joshua Karliner and co-published by Food First Books and CorpWatch. The first excerpt, "The Globalization Decade," appears today on CorpWatch.org. It looks at the rise of corporate globalization that has dominated the decade between the 1992 Rio Earth Summit and the upcoming summit in Johannesburg. And it examines the role of the United Nations, under whose auspices both the summits are held. The book will roll off the press in early August 2002, but won't be in bookstores until late fall. However, you can order it anytime from CorpWatch. http://www.corpwatch.org/misc/PFR.jsp?freestyleid=esbiztoc -- Tom Childs - Audio/Visual Resources Douglas College Library New Westminster, B.C. Canada T: 604 527-5187 E: childst at douglas.bc.ca W: http://www.globaljustice.ca -- From Tom_Childs at Douglas.BC.CA Sun Jul 28 10:21:30 2002 From: Tom_Childs at Douglas.BC.CA (Tom_Childs at Douglas.BC.CA) Date: Sun, 28 Jul 2002 09:21:30 -0700 Subject: [R-G] Book Review: _THE WAR ON FREEDOM_ Message-ID: <200207281621.JAA06944@Douglas.BC.CA> ...an interesting book review for your perusal here. regards, -tc ----- Forwarded message: -----From: "Richard Alexander" To: Subject: Fw: [psy-op] URGENT FW: [frameup] THE WAR ON FREEDOM Date: Sun, 28 Jul 2002 11:20:46 +0100 forwarded fyi i haven't read the text so this should not be taken as a recommendation richard PLEASE SEND THIS EVERYWHERE. -----Original Message----- From: Carol Brouillet [mailto:cbrouillet at igc.org] Sent: 27 July 2002 01:04 To: frameup at yahoogroups.com Subject: [frameup] The War on Freedom The War on Freedom- How and Why America was Attacked September 11, 2001 by Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed http://waronfreedom.mediamonitors.net/index.html reviewed by Carol Brouillet http://www.communitycurrency.org/9-11.html This book, on many levels, is a miracle, not unlike the mysterious process of Birth, and revives our collective aspirations for Hope, Peace, Justice, Joy and Life to prevail against those in power who scream for War. Piercing the smoke and mirrors of propaganda, misinformation, the largest psychological "Special Operation" ever pulled on humanity, the book calmly, carefully, meticulously examines the facts, the evidence of the crime of the century, and documents the clear need for a real, open, public inquiry of 9-11. Much of the C.I.A.'s budget is devoted to controlling the public mind, for there is no greater threat, today, to the powers that be, than an informed American public. Enormous resources have been squandered to distract, mislead, deflect, frighten attention from a deep understanding of the events of September 11th, what actually happened, why it happened, who has benefited, and who is paying the price. Outside the U.S., the veil is perhaps easier to see through, Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed has the advantage of distance, living in England. He also has drawn from his work on the history and development of the conflict in Afghanistan, and the rich insights of others, freely scattered across the Internet, to pull together a clear, coherent understanding of the geopolitics of a war that had been planned for many, many years. He lays bare the hypocrisy and deception of the U.S.'s policy in Afghanistan, from luring the Russians into the "Afghan trap" to propelling the Taliban into power, to the installation of a "foothold in Central Asia" from which new geo-political alliances have emerged, as well as an "interim government," friendly to multi- national oil interests. Under the deluge of theories and facts about 9-11, Ahmed focuses on the key issues- the evolution of the Afghan crisis since before the Soviet invasion, the strategic design behind the U.S. war plans, foreknowledge of "the terrorist attacks," the collapse of Standard Operating Procedures on 9-11, the American ties with Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda, the Saudi Connection, the U.S. Pakistani Alliance, and the I.S.I. (Pakistan's Inter Services Intelligence), the "New War;"- Power and Profit, at Home and Abroad. Ahmed's evidence and analysis are very compelling: the U.S.'s role in creating Al Qaeda, how the U.S. funds, trains, supports Al Qaeda (and terrorism) where convenient, and uses them as an excuse for military intervention in other regions (when convenient), the blatant elevation of the "security interests of multi-national oil interests" above the interests of humans living in the U.S. or other countries, the financial links between the Bush family and the Bin Laden family, and the ISI Director-General Mahmoud Ahmed's role in last September's drama. Lt. General Mahmoud Ahmad was in the U.S. meeting with top U.S. officials before and during the attacks. At the urging of the U.S., he was later sent to Afghanistan to "demand that the Taliban hand over Bin Laden without conditions or face certain war." When it was revealed that Mahmoud Ahmad had ordered his aide, Ahmad Umar Sheikh, to wire $100,000. to "WTC hijacker Mohammed Atta" from Pakistan, and confirmed by the F.B.I., the U.S. sought ISI Director-General Mahmoud Ahmed's removal from his position, but did not investigate or, in any way, try to hold him responsible for his role in the attacks. Last winter, our awareness of this information, prompted many of us, peace and human rights activists, to march on our senators and congresswoman to demand a Congressional Inquiry of 9-11, and to get out in the streets, to demonstrate, raise these issues publicly, and to expose the fraudulent nature of the "War." I spoke to television reporters, journalists, Noam Chomsky, Michael Parenti, Norman Solomon who doubted "the credibility of my information and analysis." Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed, has done what I have not found time to do, patiently document the evidence, compile multiple references from many different sources, including the Congressional Records, analyze it in a dispassionate way, allowing readers to make their own judgements. From his examination of what he believes to be the key facts, he concludes that- "The virtually unhindered expansion of the American Empire is simultaneously and systemically eroding the very values that America claims to stand for. Throughout the West and beyond, civil liberties, basic freedoms and human rights are being curtailed in the name of fighting terrorism, while military interventions with nuclear implications are being planned to pursue brute strategic and economic interests, at the expense of indigenous populations --- and for the benefit of corporate elites. Under U.S. leadership, it seems that the entire world is moving towards a situation of global apartheid governed by the Western-based international institutions of what is fast becoming a global police state, administered by the powerful for their own profit." He dedicates the book to the innocent civilians murdered in the terrorist attacks on September 11th, their families, their friends, and to all the other victims of terrorism around the world, including those killed, injured and starving in Afghanistan. By understanding the role of the state in creating "terrorists" and "terrorist attacks" to further their interests and the interests of multinational corporations, we are in a better position to stop "terrorism" at its roots. In the lengthy Afterward, publisher John Leonard, takes a broader historical look at the "deceptions" perpetuated by governments to justify their wars, and at the more controversial areas of inquiry into what actually happened. Leonard makes a good case that the "War on Terrorism" should be recognized as a "War of Terrorism." The War on Terrorism needs to be redefined; the big lie needs to be countered by the simple truth. The clash of "civilizations" is a "smokescreen" for a clash of "worldviews." There are those who believe in Bush, capitalism, the integrity of corporations and their ordained right to govern the world they own, the evil of any who "oppose them," and then there are those who believe in- the goodness of humanity, human rights, freedom, peace, justice, the interdependence of humanity with the web of Life. Will the forces of "Fear and Greed" triumph over the desire for "Peace, Life, Freedom?" We are all part of the public mind; will we allow it to obscure Truth, embrace Denial, be frightened into Obedience? Or can we play our part to further the cause of Truth, Peace, Justice, Freedom by helping to raise consciousness on the most critical issues of our time. Will we hold those in power accountable for their actions, and their crimes against humanity? Process must match purpose; democracies demand transparency; dictatorships demand deception. Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed and John Leonard have given us an invaluable tool to cast light upon the darkest secrets of our time, in this powerful book- The War on Freedom, now it is up to us, to get out the message to the world, especially to the people of the United States and the legislators who are supposed to serve them. ------------ The War on Freedom- How and Why America was Attacked September 11, 2001 by Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed http://waronfreedom.mediamonitors.net/index.html reviewed by Carol Brouillet http://www.communitycurrency.org/9-11.html PLEASE SEND THIS EVERYWHERE Outgoing mail is certified Virus Free. Checked by AVG anti-virus system (http://www.grisoft.com). Version: 6.0.375 / Virus Database: 210 - Release Date: 10/07/02 -- Tom Childs - Audio/Visual Resources Douglas College Library New Westminster, B.C. Canada T: 604 527-5187 E: childst at douglas.bc.ca W: http://globaljustice.ca -- From info at cinox.demon.co.uk Sun Jul 28 15:21:26 2002 From: info at cinox.demon.co.uk (Tim Murphy) Date: Sun, 28 Jul 2002 22:21:26 +0100 Subject: [R-G] Who is David Irving? Message-ID: Who is David Irving? http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&q=David+Irving From Tom_Childs at Douglas.BC.CA Sun Jul 28 23:39:45 2002 From: Tom_Childs at Douglas.BC.CA (Tom_Childs at Douglas.BC.CA) Date: Sun, 28 Jul 2002 22:39:45 -0700 Subject: [R-G] BUSH TERRORIST NETWORK ON THE BRINK OF MASS DESTRUCTION (fwd) Message-ID: <200207290539.WAA12893@Douglas.BC.CA> ...time to organize a neighborhood 'resistance' demo in your neighborhood... take some digital images of it and post it to the internet via indymedia.org. ....go for it. regards, t. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ ----- Forwarded message: ----- To: "stoptheWTO at topica.com" From: Isidor Subject: BUSH TERRORIST NETWORK ON THE BRINK OF MASS DESTRUCTION Date: Sun, 28 Jul 2002 15:13:44 -0400 Scott Ritter and UNCOMs Decommissioning of Iraq's Weapons [US "GOVERNMENT PLOTS MASSIVE TERRORIST ATTACK AGAINST IRAQ] "Ritter was careful to note that there are no good wars - as a veteran, he described war as purely awful and something not to be trivialized - but that there is such a thing as a just war. He described America as a good place, filled with potential and worth fighting for. We go to just war, he said, when our national existence has been threatened. According to Ritter, there is no justification in fact, national security, international law or basic morality to justify this coming war with Iraq. In fact, when asked pointedly what the mid-October scheduling of this conflict has to do with the midterm Congressional elections that will follow a few weeks later, he replied, simply, "Everything." ------ "His purpose for coming to that room was straightforward: The Senate Foreign Relations Committee, chaired by Democrat Joe Biden, plans to call a hearing beginning on Monday, July 29th. The Committee will call forth witnesses to describe the threat posed to America by Iraq. Ritter fears that much crucial information will not be discussed in that hearing, precipitating a war authorization by Congress based on political expediency and ignorance. Scott Ritter came to that Boston classroom to exhort all there to demand of the Senators on the Committee that he be allowed to stand as a witness." ------ According to Ritter, there is no justification in fact, national security, international law or basic morality to justify this coming war with Iraq. In fact, when asked pointedly what the mid-October scheduling of this conflict has to do with the midterm Congressional elections that will follow a few weeks later, he replied, simply, "Everything." "This is not about the security of the United States," said this card-carrying Republican while pounding the lectern. "This is about domestic American politics. The national security of the United States of America has been hijacked by a handful of neo-conservatives who are using their position of authority to pursue their own ideologically-driven political ambitions. The day we go to war for that reason is the day we have failed collectively as a nation." ------ "If Iraq was producing weapons today, we would have definitive proof," said Ritter, "plain and simple." And yet we march to war, and soon. A chorus of voices was raised in the room asking why we are going. What motivates this, if not hard facts and true threats? According to Ritter, it comes down to opportunistic politics and a decade of hard anti-Hussein rhetoric that has boxed the Bush administration into a rhetorical corner." ------ The removal of Saddam Hussein became a plank in the GOP's race for the Presidency in 2000. After gaining office, George W. Bush was confronted with the reality that he and many within his administration had spent a great amount of political capital promising that removal. Once in power, however, he came to realize what his father and Clinton already knew - talking tough was easy, and instigating pinprick military confrontations was easy, but removing Hussein from power was not easy at all. His own rhetoric was all around him, however, pushing him into that corner which had only one exit. Still, like the two Presidents before him, he treaded water. Then came September 11th. Within days, Bush was on television claiming that the terrorists must have had state-sponsored help, and that state sponsor must be Iraq. When the anthrax attacks came, Bush blamed Iraq again. Both times, he had no basis whatsoever in fact for his claims. The habit of lambasting Iraq, and the opportunity to escape the rhetorical box twelve years of hard-talking American policy, were too juicy to ignore. The dearth of definitive proof of an Iraqi threat against America began to go international. Defense Secretary Rumsfeld appeared before NATO not long ago and demanded that they support America's looming Iraq war. Most of the NATO nations appeared ready to do so - they trusted that America's top defense official would not come before them and lie. But when they tried to ask questions of him about the basis for this war, Rumsfeld absolutely refused to answer any of them. Instead, he offered this regarding our utter lack of meaningful data to support a conflict: "The absence of evidence is not the evidence of absence." Scott Ritter appeared before NATO some days after this at their invitation to offer answers to their questions. Much of what he told them was mirrored in his comments in that Boston classroom. After he was finished, 16 of the 19 NATO nations present wrote letters of complaint to the American government about Rumsfeld's comments, and about our basis for war. American UN representatives boycotted this hearing, and denounced all who gave ear to Ritter. Some have claimed that the Bush administration may hold secret evidence pointing to a threat within Iraq, one that cannot be exposed for fear of compromising a source. Ritter dismissed this out of hand in Boston. "If the administration had such secret evidence," he said, "we'd be at war in Iraq right now. We wouldn't be talking about it. It would be a fait accompli." Our immediate military action in Afghanistan, whose ties to Al Qaeda were manifest, lends great credence to this point. Ritter dismissed oil as a motivating factor behind our coming war with Iraq. He made a good defense of this claim. Yes, Iraq has the second-largest oil reserves on earth, a juicy target for the petroleum-loving Bush administration. But the U.S. already buys some 68% of all the oil produced in Iraq. "The Navy ships in the Gulf who work to interdict the smuggling of Iraqi oil," said Ritter, "are fueled by Iraqi oil." Iraq's Oil Minister has stated on camera that if the sanctions are lifted, Iraq will do whatever it takes to see that America's oil needs are fulfilled. "You can't get a better deal than that," claimed Ritter. His thinking on this aspect of the coming war may be in error. That sort of logic exists in an all-things-being-equal world of politics and influence, a world that has ceased to exist. Oil is a coin in the bargaining, peddled as influence to oil-state congressmen and American petroleum companies by the Iraqi National Congress to procure support for this baseless conflict. Invade, says the INC, put us in power, and you will have all you want. There are many ruling in America today, both in government and business, who would shed innocent blood for this opportunity. Ritter made no bones about the fact that Saddam Hussein is an evil man. Like most Americans, however, he detests being lied to. His work in Iraq, and his detailed understanding of the incredible technological requirements for the production of weapons of mass destruction, leads him to believe beyond question that there is no basis in fact or in the needs of national security for a war in Iraq. This Marine, this Republican who seemed so essentially hawkish that no one in that Boston classroom would have been surprised to find wings under his natty blue sportcoat, called the man he cast a Presidential vote for a liar. "The clock is ticking," he said, "and it's ticking towards war. And it's going to be a real war It's going to be a war that will result in the deaths of hundreds, if not thousands, of Americans and tens of thousands of Iraqi civilians. It's a war that is going to devastate Iraq. It's a war that's going to destroy the credibility of the United States of America. I just came back from London, and I can tell you this - Tony Blair may talk a good show about war, but the British people and the bulk of the British government do not support this war. The Europeans do not support this war. NATO does not support this war. No one supports this war." It is of a certainty that few in the Muslim world support another American war with Iraq. Osamanbin Laden used the civilian suffering in Iraq under the sanctions to demonstrate to his followers the evils of America and the West. Another war would exacerbate those already-raw emotions. After 9/11, much of the Islamic world repudiated bin Laden and his actions. Another Iraq war would go a long way to proving, in the minds of many Muslims, that bin Laden was right all along. The fires of terrorism that would follow this are unimaginable. Scott Ritter wants to be present as a witness on Monday when the Foreign Relations Committee convenes its hearing, a hearing that will decide whether or not America goes to war in Iraq. He wants to share the information he delivered in that Boston classroom with Senators who have spent too many years listening to, or propounding, rhetorical and speculative fear mongering about an Iraqi threat to America that does not exist. Instead, he wants the inspectors back in Iraq, doing their jobs. He wants to try and keep American and Iraqi blood from being spilled in a military exercise promulgated by right-wing ideologues that may serve no purpose beyond affecting the outcome of the midterm Congressional elections in November 2002. "This is not theory," said Ritter in Boston as he closed his comments. "This is real. And the only way this war is going to be stopped is if Congress stops this war." On the web: The Senate Foreign Relations Committee: http://foreign.senate.gov/committee/ William Rivers Pitt is a teacher from Boston, MA. His new book, 'The Greatest Sedition is Silence,' will be published soon by Pluto Press. Scott Ritter and UNCOMs decommissioning of Iraq's weapons - nobody http://www.indymedia.org/front.php3?article_id=194702 http://www.indymedia.org/front.php3?article_id=194699 ***************************** The Bush terrorists, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Richard Armitage, Robert Zoellick, Richard Perle, Fony Blare, those "Congressmen" [sic(k)], those military chicken hawks, the Bilderberg Group, the CFR, the CIA, the Vatican, the Trilaterals, the British Monarchy and others, have got to be the most despicable pack of monsters that ever crawled the Earth. How any person can put up with these God damn bomb freaks is way beyond me!!! Given the opportunity to be locked up in a room with any one of these pompous, greedy and conceited cocksuckers, I would smash their sickening faces with my bare hands! Make no mistake about it: YOU WOULDN'T HEAR A SINGLE LIE COMING OUT OF THEM AGAIN!! YES, I utterly HATE, LOATHE AND DESPISE these pathological liars, thieves, murderers and sycophants for what they have done and for what they are about to do. THERE IS VERY LITTLE TIME LEFT!! ISN'T IT HIGH TIME TO GET UP OFF YOUR ASSES AND LOCK THESE BASTARDS UP??? !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Sincerely, Isidor P.S.: If this bunch of mass murderers destroys Iraq or any other country, I won't be wasting any more of my time writing! The sheeple of the U.S. will get what they deserve and there will be nothing left to say. *********************************** Millions on the streets would stop this War - DL War in October - William Pitt http://www.indymedia.org/front.php3?article_id=194648 "Scott Ritter should be commended for speaking up against the impending Imperialist War on Iraq. But he is wrong to believe that the sycophantic U.S. Congress will have the spine & integrity to stop this Bush League Mad War disease. There is, of course, another way to stop this War. And that is for millions of citizens to stand up, marching down the streets and demanding an immediate stop to the War. It happened once during the aggressive war on Vietnam back in the 1970s. Yes, things are different now, but activists have to remember that it took years to build a massive anti-war movement. It can happen again, but we will need to re-analyze very keenly, and we need to persevere for however long it takes to organize against the world's #1 terrorist state. The time is very short, so let's roll up our shirtsleeves and get started..."Don't Mourn, Organize!" *********************************** The only JUST WAR I see is the war against this filthy pack of criminals that calls itself the US Government and all its agencies along with those Transnational banksters like the Bilderbergs, the CFR, the CIA, etc...etc... Don't forget Plan America! - Isidor http://www.indymedia.org/front.php3?article_id=192123&group=webcast "I am one left wing guy who has had enough of this crap. Its impeachment time and not just for Bush and Cheney but for the filthy five Supreme Court Justices as well, for their role in fixing the election. The Joint Chiefs of Staff and any other officers involved must also go for their role in 9/11. I know for a fact that there are good people in the Military, the Intelligence Community and throughout the government that know what is really going on and are capable of making a move against these crooks that have stolen our government. I am calling on those folks within our government to make that move now and breath life back into our dead Constitution. How can we possibly survive this politic that has come over this land without removing from power these cynical men and women that believe they own the right to rule as the Monarchs my family fled in 1620 to come to this great and wondrous land. I beg of you, it is time to risk all to take back of our stolen liberty." - By Lloyd Hart ` The Media Knows the Truth - Lloyd Hart Impeach the Filthy Five - sweet mother of mustafa Time To Roll Out The Guillotine!! - Isidor http://www.indymedia.org/front.php3?article_id=194663&group=webcast ==^================================================================ This email was sent to: Tom_Childs at Douglas.BC.CA EASY UNSUBSCRIBE click here: http://topica.com/u/?a84tq1.a9F5la Or send an email to: stoptheWTO-unsubscribe at topica.com T O P I C A -- Register now to manage your mail! http://www.topica.com/partner/tag02/register ==^================================================================ -- Tom Childs - Audio/Visual Resources Douglas College Library New Westminster, B.C. Canada T: 604 527-5187 E: childst at douglas.bc.ca W: http://www.globaljustice.ca -- From Johannes.Schneider at gmx.net Mon Jul 29 04:06:27 2002 From: Johannes.Schneider at gmx.net (Johannes Schneider) Date: Mon, 29 Jul 2002 12:06:27 +0200 Subject: [R-G] Dog Bites Man: Qwest Finds Problem With $1.1 Billion in Transactions Message-ID: <00e801c236e7$9dddcfa0$4a1e050a@fgl.atitech.com> >From today's New York Times: Qwest Finds Problem With $1.1 Billion in Transactions By SIMON ROMERO Qwest Communications International, the dominant provider of local telephone service in 14 Western states, said last night that it had incorrectly accounted for more than $1.1 billion of transactions from 1999 to 2001 in the latest revelation of accounting irregularities at a telecommunications company. Qwest also said that its accounting problems might extend to areas beyond the sale of fiber optic capacity, where most scrutiny had been focused until recently. The company said in a statement last night that it might have improperly accounted for services acquired from other telecommunications carriers and for communications equipment that it sold. Qwest withdrew its financial forecasts for 2002 as a result of weakness in its telecommunications business. It said it still expected to report its financial results for the second quarter and revised outlook for the year on Aug. 8. Full: http://www.nytimes.com/2002/07/29/business/29QWES.html From Johannes.Schneider at gmx.net Mon Jul 29 11:31:24 2002 From: Johannes.Schneider at gmx.net (Johannes Schneider) Date: Mon, 29 Jul 2002 19:31:24 +0200 Subject: [R-G] Re: Pakistan Teachers Under Attack Message-ID: <01d501c23725$c3c0b820$4a1e050a@fgl.atitech.com> Here is an update on Pakistan teachers protests from the BBC: Monday, 29 July, 2002, 12:19 GMT 13:19 UK Pakistani teachers protest broken up Teachers' unions in Pakistan say more than 100 of their members have been detained by police after they tried to hold a protest rally in the city of Lahore. The president of the All Pakistan Professors and Lecturers Association, Nazim Hassnain said police man-handled the school and college teachers who had wanted to demonstrate against the government's proposed privatisation of educational institutions in the provinces of Punjab and Sindh. Last Thursday, thousands of teachers took part in protests throughout Punjab province. They say more than a million teachers would lose their jobs as a result of the privatisation plans, and more than six million students would be deprived of free education. Online at: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/south_asia/2159015.stm see as well: http://www.frontierpost.com.pk/main.asp?id=23&date1=7/29/2002 From Johannes.Schneider at gmx.net Mon Jul 29 11:33:46 2002 From: Johannes.Schneider at gmx.net (Johannes Schneider) Date: Mon, 29 Jul 2002 19:33:46 +0200 Subject: [R-G] Fw: Over 200 Teachers Arrested in Pakistan Message-ID: <01e001c23726$18e76ce0$4a1e050a@fgl.atitech.com> This just came from the Pakistan Labour Party: From: "Labour Pakistan" To: Sent: Monday, July 29, 2002 11:15 AM Subject: Over 200 Teachers Arrested in Pakistan > Over 200 Teachers Arrested in Pakistan > > Over two hundreds teachers were arrested by Lahore police today on 29th > July. They were arrested outside Government Islamia Girls College Cooper Road > where a protest meeting was to be held against privatization. Hundreds of > policemen were deployed since early morning to stop this rally. Women and male > professors and teachers were dragged to the police van while they tried to enter > the college premises. It is estimated that the police has picked up over 200 > teachers this morning. > > We just had been to a police station to meet the arrested teachers. They > were 45 teachers including professor Nazim Husnain, the president of All > Pakistan Professors and lecturers Association cram packed in a tiny room with only > fan. All the teachers were sweating but determined to fight back > privatization. > > Women teachers were brought to Race Course police station of Lahore also > receiving the same treatment. > > In a unique show of strength, all the teachers from the colleges and schools > are united in Joint Action Committee Teachers Punjab to launch a protest > movement against the handing over the nationalized educational institutions to > the former owners. The notification to denationalize these institutions > sparked an immediate movement of the teachers across Punjab who are organizing > protest meetings at various educational intuitions. Protest meetings have been > attended by thousands of teachers across Punjab during the last one-week. > > The military government issued the notification during the summer vocations > in a false hope that teachers without the help of the students would not be > able to resist against this. On the contrary, the movement of the teachers is > getting stronger and stronger forcing the government to curb this movement by > arresting the teachers. > > On 26th July, Labor Party Pakistan organized a one day All Parties > Conference at Lahore Press Club against this anti education move. Several political > parties, Trade unions and social organizations attended the APC and vowed to > fight the privatization of the educational institutions. > > Most of the student organizations have also condemned the privatization of > education and have declared their full support to the teachers. > > The joint Action Committee Teachers Punjab is holding a press conference > today and appealing to teachers all over Pakistan to protest as strong as > possible against the arrests. > > This an emergency appeals to all the teachers unions and other union > movement internationally to take up this issue and send strong protest against these > brutal actions of the government. > > >From Farooq Tariq > General secretary > Labour Party Pakistan > > Raja Mehboob Hussain > Information secretary > Joint Action Committee > Teachers Punjab > > Send your protests to > Please send your protest letters to > > Chief Executive > General Pervez Musharraf > President of Pakistan > CE Secretariat, Islamabad > Email: ce at pak.gov.pk > Fax: 92-51-9201051 > > Federal Minister Education > Zubaida Jilala > E-mail: pak at yahoo.com > Fax Number 92 51 9202851 > > Governor of Punjab > Khalid Maqbool > Governor Punjab > Governor House, Lahore > Fax: 92-42-9200077 > > From tomcondit at igc.org Mon Jul 29 13:29:28 2002 From: tomcondit at igc.org (Tom Condit) Date: Mon, 29 Jul 2002 12:29:28 -0700 Subject: [R-G] Who is David Irving? In-Reply-To: Message-ID: <5.0.2.1.0.20020729122827.02b8fec0@pop.igc.org> David Irving is a British "historian" who is one of the main holocaust deniers -- that is, the soft front for fascism. At 10:21 PM 7/28/02 +0100, Tim Murphy wrote: >Who is David Irving? > > >http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&q=David+Irving > > >_______________________________________________ >Rad-Green mailing list >Rad-Green at lists.econ.utah.edu >To change your options or unsubscribe go to: >http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/rad-green Tom Condit tomcondit at igc.org The Peace & Freedom Party needs to raise its registration to 86,212 to get back on the California ballot. http://www.peaceandfreedom.org From mstainsby at tao.ca Mon Jul 29 16:18:50 2002 From: mstainsby at tao.ca (Macdonald Stainsby) Date: Mon, 29 Jul 2002 15:18:50 -0700 Subject: [R-G] Milosevic 'acted within law' - prosecution witness (BBC News) References: <200207262312.g6QNCOmC018928@rm-rstar.sfu.ca> Message-ID: <011d01c2374d$eab5fd00$291f5318@vc.shawcable.net> ----- Original Message ----- From: > He also alleged that the Belgrade authorities had offered to drop charges > against him if he agreed to testify falsely against Slobodan Milosevic. My suggestion to people is to watch the archives. This is not all he said. The trial is going from farce to parody. Good thing, too. archives address: http://hague.bard.edu/video.html Macdonald From shniad at sfu.ca Mon Jul 29 17:26:23 2002 From: shniad at sfu.ca (shniad at sfu.ca) Date: Mon, 29 Jul 2002 16:26:23 PDT Subject: [R-G] RIFT OVER SADDAM (Blair vs. Bush) - The Mirror Message-ID: <200207292326.g6TNQNmC024870@rm-rstar.sfu.ca> An embedded and charset-unspecified text was scrubbed... Name: not available URL: From shniad at sfu.ca Mon Jul 29 17:26:34 2002 From: shniad at sfu.ca (shniad at sfu.ca) Date: Mon, 29 Jul 2002 16:26:34 PDT Subject: [R-G] US accused of airstrike cover-up - The Times Message-ID: <200207292326.g6TNQYmC025119@rm-rstar.sfu.ca> An embedded and charset-unspecified text was scrubbed... Name: not available URL: From shniad at sfu.ca Mon Jul 29 17:26:13 2002 From: shniad at sfu.ca (shniad at sfu.ca) Date: Mon, 29 Jul 2002 16:26:13 PDT Subject: [R-G] Some top military brass favor status quo in Iraq - WP Message-ID: <200207292326.g6TNQDmC024609@rm-rstar.sfu.ca> An embedded and charset-unspecified text was scrubbed... Name: not available URL: From shniad at sfu.ca Mon Jul 29 17:26:52 2002 From: shniad at sfu.ca (shniad at sfu.ca) Date: Mon, 29 Jul 2002 16:26:52 PDT Subject: [R-G] The Case Against Moussaoui - Internal Doubts - Newsweek Message-ID: <200207292326.g6TNQqmC025520@rm-rstar.sfu.ca> An embedded and charset-unspecified text was scrubbed... Name: not available URL: From shniad at sfu.ca Mon Jul 29 17:27:15 2002 From: shniad at sfu.ca (shniad at sfu.ca) Date: Mon, 29 Jul 2002 16:27:15 PDT Subject: [R-G] Peres has doubts about Sharon as peace partner - AFP Message-ID: <200207292327.g6TNRFmC025936@rm-rstar.sfu.ca> An embedded and charset-unspecified text was scrubbed... Name: not available URL: From mstainsby at tao.ca Tue Jul 30 02:49:24 2002 From: mstainsby at tao.ca (Macdonald Stainsby) Date: Tue, 30 Jul 2002 01:49:24 -0700 Subject: [R-G] Saudi Arabia could fall to al-Qaeda. Message-ID: <00fa01c237a6$01ba98a0$291f5318@vc.shawcable.net> Guardian. 28 July 2002. Britons left in jail amid fears that Saudi Arabia could fall to al-Qaeda. LONDON -- Saudi Arabia is teetering on the brink of collapse, fuelling Foreign Office fears of an extremist takeover of one of the West's key allies in the war on terror. Anti-government demonstrations have swept the desert kingdom in the past months in protest at the pro-American stance of the de facto ruler, Prince Abdullah. At the same time, Whitehall officials are concerned that Abdullah could face a palace coup from elements within the royal family sympathetic to al-Qaeda. Saudi sources said the Pentagon had recently sponsored a secret conference to look at options if the royal family fell. Demonstrations across the kingdom broke out in March, triggered by a fire in a girls' school in which 14 pupils died after the religious police stopped them escaping. Unrest in the east of the country rapidly escalated into nationwide protests against the royal family that were brutally suppressed by the police. The Observer has obtained secret video footage of the protests smuggled out of the country last week that shows hundreds of Saudis, including women, demonstrating in support of the Palestinians and opposition to the regime. The Foreign Office believes that the failure of Abdullah's recent Middle East peace plan could have terminally undermined his position. The Crown Prince's main rival, Prince Sultan, the Defence Minister, has been vocal in his opposition to Abdullah's pro-Western policy. His brother Prince Naif, head of the Interior Ministry, has led a crackdown on the Saudi media in the wake of the demonstrations to stop any word of them leaking out. Abdullah has even sent his own representative to Washington to counter the influence of the ambassador, Prince Bandar, a son of Prince Sultan. Anti-Abdullah elements within the Saudi government are also thought to have colluded in a wave of bomb attacks on Western targets by Islamic terrorists. The authorities have blamed the attacks on an alleged 'turf war' between Westerners involved in the bootleg alcohol trade and have jailed five Britons, a Canadian and a Belgian for the bombings. But British intelligence sources have confirmed that the attacks were carried out by Islamists linked to al-Qaeda. Earlier this year, the accused men were handed sentences ranging from execution to long prison terms. But lawyers acting for the Britons have told The Observer that they could soon be free. The tensions between the royal factions will intensify with the death of King Fahd. The condition of the king, in hospital in Switzerland, is 'unstable', doctors said. British-based Saudi dissident Dr Saad al-Fagih said: 'There is now an undeclared war between the factions in the Saudi royal family.' ------------------------------------------- Macdonald Stainsby http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/rad-green http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/leninist-international -- In the contradiction lies the hope. --Bertholt Brecht From mstainsby at tao.ca Tue Jul 30 02:51:40 2002 From: mstainsby at tao.ca (Macdonald Stainsby) Date: Tue, 30 Jul 2002 01:51:40 -0700 Subject: [R-G] 'Saudi Arabia Betrayed the Palestinian cause' Message-ID: <010c01c237a6$5276a040$291f5318@vc.shawcable.net> Jang. 28 July 2002. Doha's channel causes malaise with Riyadh. DUBAI -- Qatar's Al-Jazeera satellite channel is said to be once more behind a chill between the tiny state and one of its neighbors, this time Gulf heavyweight Saudi Arabia. "Saudi Arabia is angry," Daud al-Shrayan, Riyadh bureau chief of the Saudi-owned pan-Arab daily Al-Hayat, said Wednesday. Al-Jazeera, a "chronic headache" as Qatar's foreign minister has described it, "has crossed all red lines this time round, and Saudi Arabia will not be satisfied with protesting" against Al-Jazeera, Shrayan told AFP. "No Saudi can tolerate the charge that his country stabbed the Palestinians in the back or brook disparaging comments about the kingdom's founder Abdul Aziz bin Saud," he said. "I would not rule out the recall of the Saudi ambassador in Doha," added Shrayan, who is close to Saudi decision-makers. Riyadh might even go further -- "by, for example, obstructing a plan to supply Qatari gas to Kuwait via Saudi territory." "The dispute is now with Qatar, not with Al-Jazeera, which has become a political tool rather than a media outlet," the Saudi journalist charged. The dispute was ostensibly triggered by a June 25 live debate on Al-Jazeera in which participants criticized Saudi Crown Prince Abdullah's Middle East peace initiative, accused Saudi Arabia of having "betrayed the Palestinian cause," and made disparaging remarks about the kingdom's founder. ------------------------------------------- Macdonald Stainsby http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/rad-green http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/leninist-international -- In the contradiction lies the hope. --Bertholt Brecht From Johannes.Schneider at gmx.net Tue Jul 30 04:58:08 2002 From: Johannes.Schneider at gmx.net (Johannes Schneider) Date: Tue, 30 Jul 2002 12:58:08 +0200 Subject: [R-G] Re: Over 200 Teachers Arrested in Pakistan References: <01e001c23726$18e76ce0$4a1e050a@fgl.atitech.com> Message-ID: <012e01c237b7$feb65420$4a1e050a@fgl.atitech.com> Pakistan daily Dawn reports today: LAHORE: Policemen batoncharge protesting teachers: Women's clothes torn By Our Reporter LAHORE, July 29: City police on Monday batoncharged male and female teachers and arrested hundreds of them for holding a protest demonstration against the government policy of denationalization of educational institutions. The teachers staged a rally in front of the Government Islamia College for Women, Cooper Road. School and college teachers had started gathering at the Islamia College for Women, Cooper Road, on Monday to attend a convention against the denationalization policy. A heavy contingent of police, including plainclothesmen and lady police, was deployed outside the college. The teachers had just come to the college when the policemen swooped down upon them. They were arrested and bundled into police trucks. Full: http://www.dawn.com/2002/07/30/local14.htm From mstainsby at tao.ca Tue Jul 30 13:01:02 2002 From: mstainsby at tao.ca (Macdonald Stainsby) Date: Tue, 30 Jul 2002 12:01:02 -0700 Subject: [R-G] US exploited UN arms teams -- ex-UN chief inspector Message-ID: <007301c237fb$73327200$291f5318@vc.shawcable.net> Reuters. 30 July 2002. US exploited UN arms teams -- ex-UN chief inspector. STOCKHOLM -- The former chief U.N. arms inspector has accused the United States and other powers of exploiting United Nations inspection teams in Iraq for their own political ends, including tracking President Saddam Hussein's movements. Rolf Ekeus, the Swedish diplomat who led the first inspections for Iraq's weapons of mass destruction programs from 1991-1997, said that, at times, crises were created that could possibly form the basis for military action. The comments by Ekeus, who has in the past harshly criticised Iraqi actions towards the inspectors, are bound to enforce Iraq's view that some U.N. inspectors were sent by Washington to spy on Baghdad. His remarks were posted on a Swedish Radio website after an interview with him was broadcast on Sunday. "There is no doubt that the Americans wanted to influence the inspections to further certain fundamental U.S. interests," Ekeus said. "I don't think this was the case during the first few years as there was, at that time, a genuine concern about the weapons of mass destruction that Iraq could have." He said such efforts had been made while he was head of UNSCOM but he did not think they had been successful. "But there were always different interests, from all powers, from the United States and also from the Russians," he said. Nevertheless he said the pressure had "increased with time" and included attempts to "create crises in relations with Iraq, which to some extent was linked to the overall political situation -- internationally but also perhaps nationally." [N.B.] He said the United States had wanted information about how Iraq's security services were organised and what its conventional military capacity was. [N.B.] And he said he was "conscious" of the United States seeking information on where President Saddam Hussein was hiding, "which could be of interest if one were to target him personally." "There was an ambition to cause a crisis through pressure for, shall we say, blunt provocation, for example by inspection of the Department of Defence, which at least from an Iraqi point of view must have been provocative," Ekeus said. Although this inspection took place after he left office, Ekeus said he did not believe this building had housed materials connected to Iraq's weapons of mass destruction programs. At the same time he said there had been situations when the inspection teams might have conducted tough searches. " "And then they were put under pressure from the United States to halt them as, all of sudden, a confrontation was no longer wanted, owing to wider political interests in the game." ------------------------------------------- Macdonald Stainsby http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/rad-green http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/leninist-international -- In the contradiction lies the hope. --Bertholt Brecht From mstainsby at tao.ca Tue Jul 30 13:01:51 2002 From: mstainsby at tao.ca (Macdonald Stainsby) Date: Tue, 30 Jul 2002 12:01:51 -0700 Subject: [R-G] Fw: New ProletarianNews site Message-ID: <007701c237fb$9034e5e0$291f5318@vc.shawcable.net> ----- Original Message ----- From: "Barry Stoller" To: "Macdonald Stainsby" Sent: Monday, July 29, 2002 9:34 PM Subject: New ProletarianNews site Please forward... Yahoo! and /or Zionist hackers have killed the ProletarianNews list on Yahoo. ~~ Visit www.utopia2000.org for the NEW ProletarianNews! ~~ . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Barry Stoller http://www.utopia2000.org ------------------------------------------- Macdonald Stainsby http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/rad-green http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/leninist-international -- In the contradiction lies the hope. --Bertholt Brecht From shniad at sfu.ca Tue Jul 30 17:32:26 2002 From: shniad at sfu.ca (shniad at sfu.ca) Date: Tue, 30 Jul 2002 16:32:26 PDT Subject: [R-G] The definition of Enron Venture Capitalism Message-ID: <200207302332.g6UNWQmC009707@rm-rstar.sfu.ca> An embedded and charset-unspecified text was scrubbed... Name: not available URL: From shniad at sfu.ca Tue Jul 30 17:32:52 2002 From: shniad at sfu.ca (shniad at sfu.ca) Date: Tue, 30 Jul 2002 16:32:52 PDT Subject: [R-G] FBI: Just 200 hard-core Al-Qaeda Message-ID: <200207302332.g6UNWqmC010086@rm-rstar.sfu.ca> An embedded and charset-unspecified text was scrubbed... Name: not available URL: From shniad at sfu.ca Tue Jul 30 17:32:42 2002 From: shniad at sfu.ca (shniad at sfu.ca) Date: Tue, 30 Jul 2002 16:32:42 PDT Subject: [R-G] Italian police planted petrol bombs on G8 summit protesters - Independent Message-ID: <200207302332.g6UNWgmC009946@rm-rstar.sfu.ca> An embedded and charset-unspecified text was scrubbed... Name: not available URL: From shniad at sfu.ca Tue Jul 30 17:33:12 2002 From: shniad at sfu.ca (shniad at sfu.ca) Date: Tue, 30 Jul 2002 16:33:12 PDT Subject: [R-G] Foundations are in place for martial law in the US - SMH Message-ID: <200207302333.g6UNXCmC010508@rm-rstar.sfu.ca> An embedded and charset-unspecified text was scrubbed... Name: not available URL: From shniad at sfu.ca Tue Jul 30 17:33:01 2002 From: shniad at sfu.ca (shniad at sfu.ca) Date: Tue, 30 Jul 2002 16:33:01 PDT Subject: [R-G] Castro says scandals reflect 'crisis' in capitalism - WP Message-ID: <200207302333.g6UNX1mC010269@rm-rstar.sfu.ca> An embedded and charset-unspecified text was scrubbed... Name: not available URL: From furuhashi.1 at osu.edu Wed Jul 31 07:05:12 2002 From: furuhashi.1 at osu.edu (Yoshie Furuhashi) Date: Wed, 31 Jul 2002 09:05:12 -0400 Subject: [R-G] Ohioan arrested by Israeli military - press release Message-ID: Date: Tue, 30 Jul 2002 16:08:55 -0400 From: T P Subject: Ohioan arrested by Israeli military- press release Ohioan Arrested by Israeli Military 7-29-02 For Immediate Release [NABLUS] Travis Lee Pugh, a U.S. citizen from Columbus, Ohio, was arrested July 28 by Israeli soldiers and later released. He is in Palestine with the International Solidarity Movement, an organization committed to non-violent direct action aimed at preventing atrocities being carried out by the Israeli military. An Israeli army bulldozer accompanied by an armored personnel carrier today attempted to dig trenches in the road that leads from the Palestinian city of Nablus to the neighboring village of Salem. This morning international activists and Palestinians worked to remove roadblocks that had been placed by the military on the road to Salem, obstructing Palestinian movement and blocking the delivery of food and water. Yesterday internationals and local Palestinians successfully removed roadblocks on the road from Nablus to Iraq Bureen, opening the road to Palestinian traffic and much needed water and delivery trucks. Soldiers have blindfolded, handcuffed and thrown in an armored personnel carrier 3 American citizens, Jonathen Mello, Travis Lee Pugh, and David Yee. Other internationals are currently sitting in the road, still trying to block the bulldozer from tearing up the road. All film and cameras from the internationals have been confiscated by Israeli soldiers. Travis stated before leaving for Palestine "We must provide the Palestinians with the resources they need to stop the injustices and create a situation where the rights and lives of all people are protected. As international citizens we are an incredible resource that can build understanding of the Palestinian cause throughout the world, while at the same time, through non-violent direct action, actively prevent the Israeli armed forces from committing crimes against the Palestinians. I am going to Palestine to be that resource." To contact Travis Pugh and his supporters: Paltrip at hotmail.com For more information, please call in Nablus: Susan: +972(0)55-829-680 Merna : +972(0)67-429-686 For more information on the International Solidarity Movement: Huwaida: +972(0)52-642-709 or +972(0)67-473-308 Ghassan: +972(0)2-277-2018 ISM office: +972-(0)2-626-4844 -- Yoshie * Calendar of Events in Columbus: * Anti-War Activist Resources: * Student International Forum: * Committee for Justice in Palestine: From hunterbadbear at earthlink.net Wed Jul 31 13:33:23 2002 From: hunterbadbear at earthlink.net (Hunter Gray) Date: Wed, 31 Jul 2002 13:33:23 -0600 Subject: [R-G] Factionalism and Geronimo and Organizers and Today Message-ID: <000301c238c9$2b3f0ed0$2270fa43@intel> This is about Factionalism and Organizing and Challenges. Geronimo [Goyathlay] knew how to do it. The enduring Apache fighter, whose tactical abilities were equaled only by his tremendous commitment to his people, never gave up. Traveling, often with his cohesive band encompassing only with a few dozen warriors and their women and children, frequently crossing vast stretches of formidable desert -- sucking a small rock or chewing twigs to keep throats moist -- they fought on and on and on against thousands of U.S. Army troops. Winchesters were as easily incorporated into their culture as computers are by the Natives of today. Even when captured, many -- including Geronimo -- eventually escaped and continued the Resistance. Finally, conclusively in chains in 1886, he never capitulated. While some members of his band escaped into the Sierra Madre Occidental of Mexico -- their descendants to return briefly into Arizona [about the time I was born ] and there to destroy three towns -- Geronimo, exiled into a Florida prison and then another at Fort Sill, Oklahoma, remained an unyielding "recalcitrant" until his death in 1909. His eyes --- as with other Natives, go back into the Gobi and environs and whose kin, under the Great Chief Jenghiz [Temuchin, 1162-1227] and his successors, carried their culture and genes from the Yalu to the Danube -- stare back coldly at the Anglo photographers and then via the History pages at the other curious over the many generations that have flowed beyond. Geronimo was one of those, along with the Yaquis and the resistance fighters of other Native nations, who were so frequently referred to in Mexico as "la raza de bronce que sabe morir." Indeed, they knew how to die -- honorably -- and they fought, in one effective way or another, right to the very moment of their passage into the Spirit World. Those in the radical movement of today [organizers, leaders, rank-and-file] could learn something from all of this. Indeed, many have -- or at least many emulate the example of the Great Apache. But many do not -- and the reasons are myriad. I started out in earnest in the Save the World Business in 1955. With my characteristic lack of false modesty, I can certainly say that I've been a reasonably successful social justice organizer for almost half a century. There really weren't very many of us in the Open Left of the U.S. at that time. I saw more radical kin in those days in Mexico and even in Canada. Eventually, as the '60s progressed, there were many more of us. And then there were fewer -- over a very long stretch of desert. By the time of that Great Trek -- much of the '70s through the rest of the Century -- there were some who died and many who fell away. And now there are more of us, and more. But it isn't easy to be a radical in the United States. Lots of clubs in the gauntlet, many slick fish-hooks as well. Sometimes repression, overtly or subtly cruel; always social disapproval from the respectables -- including the so-called liberals; occasionally co-optation in some cases. And sometimes there's withdrawal into "identity groups" -- all well and good within reason but, too often, simply becoming closed and insular retreats that never end. And sometimes [sometimes indeed!] there's factionalism. Early this morning, I received a long message from a guy who, age-wise, is half a century younger than I. But that's about the only difference. We agree on much and certainly the critical importance of genuine socialism -- socialist democracy -- and the need to keep fighting. But he did write this: " Can you help me understand why there is so much fighting and bickering on the left? It's all like chicken scratching, there's nothing there. Why argue about every little point or idea? So many splits based on some old-fashioned ideology. I don't get it. That's driven me away somewhat." I -- and many of us indeed -- certainly know whereof he speaks. As an organizer, and as a teacher/organizer, I've worked with people from many Native tribal nations, a great many ethnicities, and from all of the major, so-termed racial groups save the Aborigines of Australia. [And, based on some long, long-distance phone conversations that I've had with several of those fellow tribespeople, we'd get along fine indeed.] But I have never worked with a tribe or an ethnicity or a "race" which, at some point, didn't ask me: "Are there other people who get into as much factionalism as we do?" And my answer, of course, both reassuring and sad, is an honest affirmative. Factionalism, in some degree or another, seems to be a human universal. However academically self-unfrocked I may seem at times, I still do remain, I guess, very much a sociologist -- but this is not an intricate discussion of the social dynamics of factionalism. I do have, however, a few basic thoughts on that sometimes sanguinary and always painful turf where, figuratively and literally, many bodies are buried -- and a myriad of bones as well bleach under the sun and the very frequently dark clouds. And I have a fair number of closely related thoughts on my own Calling -- Organizer. Some factionalism, of course, is inevitable. Some can be healthy and a positive reflection of democracy -- IF it remains in the Circle of Unity. And, obviously, some -- breaching unity -- is dangerous as hell: e.g., deep political differences. Schism may be inevitable -- but never as genuinely inevitable as its often sad emergent reality. An organizer -- or an organizational/movement activist -- confronted with factionalism, would do well to ask: "What are the real reasons for this?" Sometimes the internal discord might stem from outside manipulation. A case in point would be the massive Jackson [Mississippi] Movement of 1962 and 1963, in which some frightened elements in the National Office of NAACP, joined by comparable entities from the Kennedy administration, did their best to split and retard the militancy and radicalism of that great and ultimately successful grassroots struggle. [See my own book: Jackson Mississippi: An American Chronicle of Struggle and Schism, 1979 and 1987.] And then, of course, there's that eternal manifestation of secular "original sin" which boils down to a few individuals who simply don't want peace or unity -- no matter how intricately they may rationalize all of this. And sometimes -- very often, in fact -- the really basic tap roots of factionalism lie in the fact that the organization/movement has lost its way. To digress, for just a moment, into the related matter of The Organizer -- the person who ideally gets people together, and keeps them together, for action great and good. A good organizer -- and a good leader generally -- has to have a number of positive qualities: He/she should be reasonably intelligent; pure [but not sanctimoniously so]; ethical and honorable; practice an unpretentious life-style; should not "put on airs" [should simply be oneself]; should communicate well [teach -- but not really appear to do so]; and should for sure practice the oft-difficult "art of listening." If the organizer has an ideology -- and most organizers have Something -- then it certainly should be one open to sensible and flexible pragmatism. That boils down to conveying a general ideological perspective -- but one which people can take or not take in total. "The people" may very well have a "loosening up" effect on the organizer -- but the good organizer also brings to the people some very special gifts -- including verve and ?lan. And a good organizer has bona fide commitment to living people -- not simply an abstract generalization -- but a commitment based on the very real belief that any person is important by dint of the fact that he or she is an individual; that their active participation in the organization/movement is needed and welcomed; that, right from the beginning, they can make their voice and presence felt; and that, as the Endeavor advances, winning victories, their power and ability to affect those forces out in their world and beyond -- which have been affecting their lives -- will be steadily and proportionately increased. An organizer needs to have a healthy ego -- even a sense of Destiny -- but it should damn well be a controllable ego! And an organizer, of course, has to have a tough hide and thick skull. And he or she has to have courage -- courage not only against the official enemies -- but sometimes the courage to say things among his/her constituents that, however unpopular, must be said. And, very importantly, a good organizer must have a two-dimensional Vision: One eye going Over the Mountains Yonder -- and the other on the Day-to-Day needs of the people. Each is absolutely critical. Vision is the Dream -- the Shiny Ideal -- that makes people part of a great crusade, gives deep meaning to their lives, and may even be something for which one would die. The other piece -- effectively addressing the practical day-to-day realities and the immediate needs of the people -- creates a dynamic where, by seeking and accomplishing these things, people help themselves, build confidence, and contribute to the Vision Stream. Each of these fundamental dimensions -- Vision and Day-to-Day -- stimulates and contributes to the Other. And any successful organizer has to show this interconnection again and again -- and again. A healthy organization/movement, democratic in ethos with the broadest possible people participation, adding new dimensions -- often with deliberate speed and sometimes quickly by necessity -- confronting new challenges, and always with fresh and ongoing leadership development, will live on: enduringly, effectively. And when factionalism develops in this healthy context, it can be constructively addressed by a wide variety of methodologies ranging from on-the-spot dialogue to talking-it-all-out in a retreat -- or at a leisurely dinner [an old Native American unity approach], or arbitration. In a basically positive setting, a good organizer can often help protagonists save face and bury the hatchet. But when an Endeavor has lost its way -- really lost it -- then factionalism, lots of it and virulently so, becomes inevitable. At that point, things either become a small, ingrown sect [with ossified Vision], or a tired, service type shadow [a few day-to-day crumbs] -- or , simply and mercifully, dies. [And an old Mississippi proverb comes to mind: "A rabbit can't fight nothing but a rabbit."] Geronimo kept fighting -- in the context of unyielding solidarity and against great odds -- and the Apache world, and those of Natives generally, are all the better for it. And the guy who wrote me the question this morning is obviously "with it" over the long, long pull. He, BTW, is someone who, asked to write letters -- say, with regard to the [still unsolved] murders of Native men at Grand Forks, ND and with respect to death penalty cases -- will often do those in the early morning hours before he hits the sack. That's how I operate and I've kept going. And so have many of us -- right into this bitter and extraordinarily challenging and hideously crucial blood-dimmed epoch. When one horse has gone down, we've found another -- and kept right on going -- full and directly ahead. There are many of us now -- and there will be many more. We may not chew twigs and suck small stones, but, if we stick with this fight, then we are all Geronimo's kin. And together -- all of us -- we shall Win. Fraternally/In Solidarity - Hunter Gray [Hunterbear] [formerly John R Salter, Jr] Micmac/St Francis Abenaki/St Regis Mohawk www.hunterbear.org (strawberry socialism) Protected by Na?shdo?i?ba?i? From mstainsby at dojo.tao.ca Wed Jul 31 16:38:03 2002 From: mstainsby at dojo.tao.ca (Macdonald Stainsby) Date: Wed, 31 Jul 2002 22:38:03 -0000 Subject: [R-G] Questions presented by Iraq to the Security Council Message-ID: <20020731223803.B05FB17DC48@dojo.tao.ca> * Questions presented by Iraq to the Security Council Baghdad 25, July 2002 Questions presented by Iraq's Foreign Minister to the UN Secretary General in the session of talks on March 7, 2002 and demanded the Security Council answer on them. 1 - What is your vision and assessment to what we have reached after seven years and seven months of Iraq's cooperation with the Special Committee and the International Agency of Atomic Energy? How would this cooperation be used to build on? 2 - If one or two of the Security Council permanent members say that they are not assured of disarmament, we want to know what do they want to be assured of? What do they search for? What is the necessary time to complete this? We also ought to be satisfied, not only the Security Council, in order to go on cooperating with it. If they have any doubt about a certain site or activity, we ought to know about it. 3 - How do you explain a stance of a permanent member in the Security Council which officially calls to invade Iraq and impose an agent regime on its people by force in a clear violation of the Security Council resolutions themselves which clearly state to respect Iraq's sovereignty, independence and territorial integrity and the rules of the international law and the UN Charter. At the same time, it demands Iraq implementing the Security Council resolutions. 4 - Is the Security Council seriously stick on its mandate and the resolutions which it issued, in particular resolution 687 on April 3, 1991, and the fair, legal reading for this Resolution? The Security Council is subject to the US explanation of the resolutions and to what it (the US) is issuing of unilateral resolutions concerning Iraq. 5 - How could normal relation between Iraq and the Security Council be achieved under the current, declared US policy, seeking to invade Iraq and change by force the patriotic political regime in it? 6 - The United States continuously declares that the economic sanctions imposed on Iraq will remain as long as the patriotic political regime in Iraq stays, what is the Security Council stance over this policy, which violates the relevant Security Council resolutions? 7 - What are the guarantees that the United Nations could offer to prevent interference between Iraq's relation with the United Nations and the political, aggressive US goals? 8 - The concept of synchronization in implementing the reciprocal obligations stated in the Security Council resolutions related to Iraq is necessary and essential to rebuild confidence between Iraq and the Security Council. What are your speculations on the obligations related to Iraq's rights, foremost the lifting of the sanctions, respect of Iraq's sovereignty, independence and territorial integrity and make the Mid-East region free of weapons of mass destruction. Those obligations, the Security Council ought to implement, to open a new page of cooperation between Iraq and the United Nations? How could we set up a mechanism that secures synchronizing the implementation of two sides' obligations? 9 - Security Council resolutions and not to demand the same from a permanent member in the Security Council which continues violating those resolutions, especially those related to respecting Iraq's sovereignty, independence and territorial integrity, and officially vows that its policy aims to invade the Republic of Iraq and impose an agent government on its people? 10 - After disclosure of the spying activities of former UNSCOM inspectors and the International Agency of Atomic Energy according to the confessions made by some of the special committee members and statements issued by US sources and some Security Council permanent members and what was acknowledged by the General Secretariat. Is it fair that inspectors return to Iraq who could be used to spy against Iraq and its leadership and to update information about Iraq's vital economic installations to bomb them in a coming aggression? 11 - Could the United Nations secure that those coming to Iraq are not spies and will not commit spying activities? 12 - Could the UN guarantee elimination of the two no-fly zones? Could the UN guarantee the upcoming inspection would not be a prelude for an aggression on Iraq as in 1998? Could the UN guarantee that the U.S. would not attack Iraq during the inspecting operations like wise along the seven years and a half from may 1991 to December 1998. 13 - What is the secretary general view about the time required for the inspection teams that could make them sure that Iraq does not have weapons of mass destruction and inform the Security Council on this fact? What are methods of which the UN thinks of using in this aspect and how far its coincidence with related international accords? 14 - How would inspectors of whom states are declaring the bids officially to threaten Iraq's national security and invade it apply international unbiased mandate on Iraq or respect the Security Council resolutions and their duties in virtue of the charter? The presence of US and British inspectors at the special committee and international agency for atomic energy helped in collecting intelligence data and specify locations that were targeted in their aggression. All location which had been visited by the inspections teams were exposed in 1998 aggression including the presidential sites despite the inspectors have affirmed being clear from weapons of mass destruction. Besides, the American and British have bombed all the industrial sites according to inspectors' data while they were under continuous monitoring. 15 - What is the secretary general's view over structure of UNIMOVIC? And is it plausible to approve some individuals who had violated their unbiased mandate and duties in addition to reputation of their organization (the UN) when they acted espionage on Iraq? 16 - What is the mandate of UNIMOVIC? The UN statement and documents released up to now are ambiguous? How far is the authority of its head? And what is the delegates' committee authority? What is the form of the secretary general supervision on its functioning. And what are the guarantees that the committee and its chief would not abuse their authority? What are the guarantees that this committee would not violate Iraq's sovereign rights? 17 - Dropping 120,000 tones of bombs, including 800 tones of depleted uranium, on Iraq during 1991 aggression and the aggressions that followed, in addition to the all- out, 12-years blockade have led to a semi- demolition of economic, health, education and service infrastructure. Iraq needs to utilize all its resources when sanctions are lifted to rebuild its basic installations. The question of compensations with their high rate stands as a big obstacle to this. What does the secretary general see to correct this situation? Does he intend to send expert teams to Iraq to discuss the question of rebuilding and its costs and prepare the requirements to urge the Security Council to reconsider the question of compensations? 18 - The blockade and the military aggressions launched by the United States and Britain against Iraq since 1991 have caused huge material and human losses in Iraq. What is the possibilities of reconsidering, within the comprehensive solution based on justice, for compensating Iraq for human material and psychological damages and losses that its people were suffering from on the same base adopted by the security council on compensation? 19 - Iraq has a firm right of self-defense under article 15 of the charter, though the security council had to abided with its commitments and respecting Iraq's sovereignty and territories integrity which encouraging regional and none- regional parties to violate Iraq's national security. How do you look at the question of Iraq's right of self-defense and the use of what the international law and charter secures it of the right to possess the defense weapons? http://www.uruklink.net/iraqnews/enews8.htm -- Macdonald Stainsby, External Relations Co-ordinator, Douglas College Students Union. ** In the contradiction lies the hope. --Bertholt Brecht. *** "`Order rules in Berlin.' You stupid lackeys! Your `order' is built on sand. Tomorrow the revolution will rear ahead once more and announce to your horror amid the brass of trumpets: `I was, I am, I always will be!'" -Rosa Luxemburg, 1918. From shniad at sfu.ca Wed Jul 31 16:59:01 2002 From: shniad at sfu.ca (shniad at sfu.ca) Date: Wed, 31 Jul 2002 15:59:01 PDT Subject: [R-G] In Ahmeds Shoes - Uri Avnery Message-ID: <200207312259.g6VMx1mC020619@rm-rstar.sfu.ca> An embedded and charset-unspecified text was scrubbed... Name: not available URL: From shniad at sfu.ca Wed Jul 31 16:59:19 2002 From: shniad at sfu.ca (shniad at sfu.ca) Date: Wed, 31 Jul 2002 15:59:19 PDT Subject: [R-G] What, If Anything, Does Iraq Have to Hide? - Scott Ritter Message-ID: <200207312259.g6VMxJmC021109@rm-rstar.sfu.ca> An embedded and charset-unspecified text was scrubbed... Name: not available URL: From shniad at sfu.ca Wed Jul 31 16:59:30 2002 From: shniad at sfu.ca (shniad at sfu.ca) Date: Wed, 31 Jul 2002 15:59:30 PDT Subject: [R-G] Weapons inspections were manipulated - FT Message-ID: <200207312259.g6VMxUmC021308@rm-rstar.sfu.ca> An embedded and charset-unspecified text was scrubbed... Name: not available URL: From shniad at sfu.ca Wed Jul 31 16:59:50 2002 From: shniad at sfu.ca (shniad at sfu.ca) Date: Wed, 31 Jul 2002 15:59:50 PDT Subject: [R-G] Minister's aide calls Hebron riots a 'pogrom' - Haaretz Message-ID: <200207312259.g6VMxomC021672@rm-rstar.sfu.ca> An embedded and charset-unspecified text was scrubbed... Name: not available URL: From shniad at sfu.ca Wed Jul 31 16:58:22 2002 From: shniad at sfu.ca (shniad at sfu.ca) Date: Wed, 31 Jul 2002 15:58:22 PDT Subject: [R-G] UN keeps damning report on Afghan massacre secret - Independent Message-ID: <200207312258.g6VMwMmC019721@rm-rstar.sfu.ca> An embedded and charset-unspecified text was scrubbed... Name: not available URL: From shniad at sfu.ca Wed Jul 31 16:57:56 2002 From: shniad at sfu.ca (shniad at sfu.ca) Date: Wed, 31 Jul 2002 15:57:56 PDT Subject: [R-G] Latin America turns left Message-ID: <200207312257.g6VMvumC019186@rm-rstar.sfu.ca> An embedded and charset-unspecified text was scrubbed... Name: not available URL: From mstainsby at tao.ca Wed Jul 31 19:32:39 2002 From: mstainsby at tao.ca (Macdonald Stainsby) Date: Wed, 31 Jul 2002 18:32:39 -0700 Subject: [R-G] RE: Latin America Turns Left Message-ID: <015b01c238fb$53487740$291f5318@vc.shawcable.net> Forwarded from: yreflauta at aol.com (please post in plain text only!) Conspicuously not mentioned as yet turning left, in this article in the Financial Times, is the country of Mexico. Unlike other countries in Latin America, the US 'bailed out' Mexico from its financial jam of the mid '90s. Over $50 billion was the price tag paid by the Clinton Administration. And in addition, the Clinton Administration brokered the fall of the PRI dictatorship and the victory of Vicente Fox. This 'liberalization' of the political climate inside Mexico was considered a necessity by both the Mexican and US political establishments. It also was considered part of the agreement with Zedillo in the 'bailout' plan that was brokered. The loyal opposition was to be allowed to be formed, and then allowed to take the highest office. And this was successfully done, with a minimum of introspection regarding the process. The success of all this previous maneuvering by the elites has been a setback to the Mexican Left, and a solidification of rule of the Mexican elite. Now, they have a "two party system", as opposed to a festering and faltering one party dictatorship. Plus, the fate of Mexico has been tied to the fate of the United States, as opposed to seemingly being tied to the fate of the rest of Latin America. Both the PRD and the Zapatistas have had their power bases demobilized to great extent. Correspondingly, the Mexican American community inside the US continues to grow more and more conservatized by the process of simultaneously becoming more respectable to mainstream America, and having their political elites being wooed by both the Democratic and Republican Parties. Now, lying side by side, is a growingly conservatized Mexican American community expanding throughout most regions of the US, and a growing Americanization and conservatizing of Northern Mexico, expanding further and further south into Central Mexico and beyond. Bad Mexican food expands north, and Walmart heads south. Mexican elites speak impeccable English based on university education in the US, while US governors head south to take Spanish lessons (as Gov. Perry of Texas did) to improve their good ol' buddy gringo Spanish, for TV shots and for visits to and from Mexico with Mexican businessmen. So point is, even though Latin America turns left, Mexico has left Latin America to an extent. Only time will tell what the results of this will be. But for right now, it appears to be quiet in Mexico, and also within the Mexican American communities in the US. A $50 billion bailout seems to have bought quite a lot. (end forwarded item) ------------------------------------------- Macdonald Stainsby http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/rad-green http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/leninist-international -- In the contradiction lies the hope. --Bertholt Brecht