Tomgram: Brown, The Virginia Tech Massacre in Global Context

This post can be found at http://www.tomdispatch.com/index.mhtml?pid=189301

Last January 16th, a car bomb blew up near an entrance to Mustansiriya University in Baghdad -- and then, as rescuers approached, a suicide bomber blew himself up in the crowd. In all, at least 60 Iraqis, mostly female students leaving campus for home, were killed and more than 100 wounded. Founded in 1232 by the Abbasid Caliph al-Mustansir, it was, Juan Cole informs us, "one of the world's early universities." And this wasn't the first time it had seen trouble. "It was disrupted by the Mongol invasion of 1258."

Just six weeks later, on February 25, again according to Cole, "A suicide bomber with a bomb belt got into the lobby of the School of Administration and Economy of Mustansiriya University in Baghdad and managed to set it off despite being spotted at the last minute by university security guards. The blast killed 41 and wounded a similar number according to late reports, with body parts everywhere and big pools of blood in the foyer as students were shredded by the high explosives." The bomber in this case was a woman.

In terms of body count, those two mass slaughters added up to more than three Virginia Techs; and, on each of those days, countless other Iraqis died including, on the January date, at least thirteen in a blast involving a motorcycle-bomb and then a suicide car-bomber at a used motorcycle market in the Iraqi capital. Needless to say, these stories passed in a flash on our TV news and, in our newspapers, were generally simply incorporated into run-of-bad-news-and-destruction summary pieces from Iraq the following day. No rites, no ceremonies, no special presidential statements, no Mustansiriya T-shirts. No attempt to psychoanalyze the probably young Sunni jihadis who carried out these mad acts, mainly against young Shiite students. No healing ceremonies, no offers to fly in psychological counselors for the traumatized students of Mustansiriya University or the daily traumatized inhabitants of Baghdad -- those who haven't died or fled.

We are only now emerging from more than a week in the nearly 24/7 bubble world the American media creates for all-American versions of such moments of horror, elevating them to heights of visibility that no one on Earth can avoid contemplating. Really, we have no sense of how strange these media moments of collective, penny-ante therapy are, moments when, as Todd Gitlin wrote recently, killers turn "into broadcasters." Like Cho Seung-Hui, they go into "the communication business," making the media effectively (and usually willingly enough) "accessories after the fact" in what are little short of pornographic displays of American victimization.

Finally, articles are beginning to appear that place the horrific, strangely meaningless, bizarrely mesmerizing slaughter/suicide at Blacksburg -- the killing field of a terrorist without even a terror program -- in some larger context. Washington Post on-line columnist Dan Froomkin caught something of our moment in his mordant observation that, at the White House Correspondents Association Dinner the other evening, with the massed media and the President (as well as Karl Rove) well gathered, "the tragic Virginia Tech massacre required solemn observation and expressions of great respect, while the seemingly endless war that often claims as many victims in a day deserved virtually no mention at all." Los Angeles Times columnist Rosa Brooks took a hard-eyed look at the urge of all Americans to become "victims" and of a President who won't attend the funeral of a soldier killed in Iraq to make hay off the moment. ("It's a good strategy. People busy holding candlelight vigils for the deaths in Blacksburg don't have much time left over to protest the war in Iraq."); and Boston Globe columnist James Carroll offered his normal incisive comments, this time on "expressive" and "instrumental" violence in Iraq and the U.S. in his latest column. He concluded: "Iraqi violence of various stripes still aims for power, control, or, at minimum, revenge. Iraqi violence is purposeful. Last week puts its hard question to Americans: What is the purpose of ours?"

Sometimes, in moments like this, it's actually useful to take a step or two out of the American biosphere and try to imagine these all-day-across-every-channel obsessional events of ours as others might see them; to consider how we, who are so used to being the eyes of the world, might actually look to others. In this case, John Brown, a former U.S. diplomat, one of three State Department employees to resign in protest against the onrushing war in Iraq in 2003, considers some of the eerie parallels between Cho's world and George's. Tom

The Cho in the White House

An Ex-Diplomat Considers the World and Virginia Tech
By John Brown

Americans rushed to unite in horror and mourning in response to the mass killings in Blacksburg in a way we haven't seen since, perhaps, the attacks of 9/11. Where I live, in Washington, D.C., residents are already sporting their Virginia Tech ribbons and sweatshirts, the way so many Americans once donned those "I [heart] New York" caps and T-shirts. While media coverage has been 24/7 and fast-paced, if not downright hysterical -- as is now the norm on all such American-gothic occasions from OJ's car chase on -- the framing and contextualizing of the massacre/suicide at Virginia Tech has been narrow indeed.

As a former diplomat, educated to see the world through others' eyes, I couldn't help thinking about how the rest of our small planet might be taking in the Blacksburg tragedy. Despite the negligible coverage of overseas opinion about this event in the mainstream media, there did appear one comprehensive overview of how foreigners reacted to the killings -- a Molly Moore piece in the Washington Post.

"Nowhere, perhaps," Moore wrote, "were foreign reactions to the Virginia shooting more impassioned than in Iraq, where many residents blame the United States for the daily killings in their schools, streets and markets. 'It is a little incident if we compare it with the disasters that have happened in Iraq,' said Ranya Riyad, 19, a college student in Baghdad. ‘We are dying every day.'"

Given my own twenty-plus years in the Foreign Service, on occasions like this I find myself looking at my own country from a non-American perspective. I must confess that, when I first saw psychopathic mass murderer Cho Seung-Hui's photographs of himself savagely pointing a gun at the camera, I was reminded not only of the violent images in our popular culture, but also of George W. Bush and his wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, not to speak of the thrust of his whole foreign policy.

Indeed, for others on our globe, mass murder in Iraq, scenes of degradation from Abu Ghraib, CIA extraordinary rendition expeditions, and our prison at Guantanamo have already become synonymous with the U.S. government and the President; so, it would not be surprising if Cho's actions and Bush's foreign policy were linked in the minds of people outside the United States. I see several reasons why, for non-Americans, a mad student and our commander- in-chief could appear to be two sides of the same all-American coin.

First, as his own writings and evidence from his Virginia Tech classmates attest, Cho felt unloved. A thread running through his psychological profile is that he believed the world was after him. Many abroad will remember how, in the wake of the Twin Towers tragedy, the Bush administration immediately began obsessing about "why they hate us" (whoever "they" might specifically be). Despite the sympathy the President, as the representative of the American people, received from every corner of the Earth -- similar in some ways to the fruitless support efforts teachers and doctors gave Cho for his mental problems -- Bush, responding only to the hate he saw under every nook and cranny, chose to react with what many overseas considered disproportionate violence.

To begin with, there was the invasion of Afghanistan. Foreigners (and perhaps some Americans) might think of it as comparable, though on a far larger scale, to Cho's first foray into killing, his early morning murder of two people, a girl he apparently felt had slighted him and a young man who evidently happened on the scene. In each case, there was then a pause while elaborate propaganda was mustered, organized, and sent off to the public to justify the acts to come. In Cho's case, what followed was his final rampage when the deranged English major killed 30 people in cold blood; in the President's, what followed, of course, was the invasion of Iraq where the casualty figures, high as they are, are not yet fully in.

The Bush propaganda campaign of 2002-2003 to convince the American people that the Butcher of Baghdad was a WMD demon reached its apotheosis in a made-for FOX News "shock and awe" spectacular over Baghdad (which was, to say the least, not well received abroad). This brutal sound-and-light show -- meant to give Americans the sense of getting back at those who "hated" the U.S. by hitting them hard and mercilessly -- seems, when I put on my overseas eyeglasses, eerily reminiscent of Cho's videos of himself as a mean twenty-first century gunslinger, ready to shoot all those whom he dreamt did him wrong.

As someone who lived and served outside my own beloved country for so many years, a second link between Cho's actions and George W. Bush's policies appeared quite evident to me. The Blacksburg murders caused enormous grief and sadness throughout a community Cho felt had never accepted him. Distraught students have been offered counseling by the university, so shaken are some by what they experienced. The results of Bush's preemptive military strikes have been no less disruptive and unnerving, but of course on a regional, if not global stage. Tens or hundreds of thousands of innocent people have lost their lives due to his rash wars -- and his administration has shown little pity for refugees from this destruction seeking shelter as best they could elsewhere. (Iraqi refugees have essentially been all but barred from the United States.)

As Cho disrupted a small, defenseless college town in Virginia that welcomed him, Bush has dislocated a whole society that was not threatening the United States. Seen from an overseas perspective, there is, as with Cho and his "enemy," something megalomaniacal as well as delusional about the President's identification of a vast Soviet-style Islamofascist foe that the U.S. Armed Forces are supposed to face down in the Global War on Terror.

Consider as well a third disturbing analogy that may not come immediately to most American minds. Like Virginia Tech, Iraq could be considered a repository of culture and knowledge. Indeed, Saddam Hussein may have been a cruel despot, but Mesopotamia, as every American high school student should know, is widely considered by historians "the cradle of civilization," the first "university" of humankind, if you will.

George W. Bush, reflecting an attitude not unlike Cho's toward a center of learning, showed not the slightest concern or respect for the traditions of a country whose achievements have so enriched the history of humankind. Indeed, when the Baghdad National Museum was pillaged (along with the National Library and the Library of Korans) soon after the American troops took the capital, the American "liberators" simply stood by; while the Secretary of Defense, reflecting on the catastrophe, offered the now-infamous comment, "Stuff happens."

Finally, Cho's suicidal assault on a college community might bring to mind the thought that Bush's assault on Iraq has been no less suicidal -- not for himself personally but for the United States as a whole. Bush's militarism and "bring 'em on" mentality helped create an atmosphere conducive to violence that Americans inflict not only on others, but also upon themselves, leading to what might be seen abroad as a kind of perpetual national suicidal condition, examples of which appear all too frequently, including in Blacksburg, Virginia.

Bluntly put, overseas the U.S. government (and, by association, the country as well) -- thanks in large part to Bush and his foreign policy -- is now widely considered the Cho of our world, despite the often risible efforts of Karen Hughes, the administration's Image Czarina, to improve America's international standing through what she calls the diplomacy of deeds. The fact of the matter is that the President's deeds have led other countries to see our government, in its aggressive unilateralism, as unreliable, if not deranged; obsessed beyond all reason with putative enemies and globe-spanning organizations of terrorists that despise us; ready to respond with unjustified violence to any perceived slight; unwilling to listen to, or accept, advice; and unconcerned with the consequences of what it does, even when this results in widespread death and destruction in one of the birthplaces of civilization, where Bush and his top officials now pride themselves on their latest accomplishment, a military "surge" that only seems to further encourage mass murder.

Regrettably, I fear that, after more than six years of George W. Bush, Baghdad and Blacksburg are, to many on our planet, not that far apart. Woe to the diplomat who has to explain us to the world today.

John Brown, a former Foreign Service officer, served in London, Prague, Krakow, Kiev, Belgrade and Moscow. He left the Foreign Service in March 2003 to express his opposition to President Bush's war plans for Iraq. He now compiles the "Public Diplomacy Press and Blog Review," available free by requesting it at johnhbrown30@ hotmail.com

Copyright 2007 John Brown

The "Silent" Ninth Amendment Gives Americans Rights They Don't Know They Have

By Daniel A. Farber, Basic Books
Posted on April 23, 2007, Printed on April 24, 2007
http://www.alternet.org/story/50404/

The following is an excerpt from Daniel A. Farber's forthcoming "Retained by the People: The 'Silent' Ninth Amendment and the Constitutional Rights Americans Don't Know They Have" (Perseus Books, 2007), available April 30.

The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people. --The Ninth Amendment

Everyone knows about the First Amendment right of free speech and the Fifth Amendment right to avoid self-incrimination. Even the once-forgotten Second Amendment, with its "right to bear arms," has reemerged in public debate. But few people know about the Ninth Amendment, which reaffirms in broad terms rights "retained by the people." Indeed, the Ninth flies so far under the radar that it has rarely been mentioned even by the Supreme Court.

What a pity. Even more, what a terrible oversight: the Ninth Amendment bears directly on such modern-day constitutional issues as abortion, the right to die, and gay rights.

The Ninth Amendment is key to understanding how the Founding Fathers thought about the liberties they expected Americans to enjoy under the Constitution. They did not believe that they were creating these liberties in the Bill of Rights. Instead, they were merely acknowledging some of the rights that no government could properly deny.

The history of the Constitution reveals the purpose of the Ninth and the Founders' intent: to protect what constitutional lawyers call unenumerated rights -- those rights the Founder assumed and felt no need to specify in the Bill of Rights. Unenumerated rights include, for example, the right to privacy. In the America of today, unenumerated rights account for freedoms like a woman's right to abortion. ...

The truth is that anyone interested in the political and legal issues of the day can and should look to the Ninth Amendment for guidance.

The Ninth Amendment is paired with an almost equally forgotten provision, the Privileges or Immunities Clause (P or I Clause) of the Fourteenth Amendment, which draws from the same intellectual roots. The Ninth Amendment is like the rest of the original Bill of Rights: it speaks only to limits on federal power rather than to the powers of state governments. Limitations on state governments came along later, with the post-Civil War Fourteenth Amendment. Thus, the Ninth Amendment addresses the federal government; the Fourteenth addresses the states.

The human rights vision that survived the Civil War and was confirmed by the Fourteenth Amendment consciously complements that of the Founders. Confronting what these provisions really mean has the potential to reshape the way we think about the Constitution.

In particular, a look at this history helps us address the very controversial question of Supreme Court reliance on foreign law. The Framers thought that fundamental rights were embedded in what they called "the law of nations," and we should follow their lead in seeking inspiration abroad. However, their openness to foreign law is not universally shared today. When Justice Kennedy referred to foreign law in two judicial opinions on the issues of homosexuality and the death penalty, he was subject to an onslaught of criticism from legal commentators. Many of those same commentators question whether the United States is bound by international human rights laws, such as the Geneva Convention's prohibitions on mistreatment of prisoners. ...

The Ninth Amendment and the debate over fundamental rights

Standing alone, the Ninth Amendment does not make any specific law unconstitutional. It is an explanation, not a command -- like the FAQs found on many Web sites. In this case, the Frequently Asked Question is: "The Bill of Rights provides a list of specific rights that are protected from invasion by the federal government. Does this mean that the federal government can violate other rights if they aren't on the list?" The Ninth answers, "No. The Bill of Rights is not complete. Other rights exist, and the federal government must respect them." Indeed, as a supporter of the Constitution pointed out at the Pennsylvania ratification convention, "Our rights are not yet all known," so an enumeration was impossible. While it is true that history often fails to provide clear proof of what the Framers believed, there are exceptions. The Ninth Amendment is one of them.

How is all this playing out on our most vital constitutional front, the Supreme Court, today? The Court is sharply divided over whether the Constitution provides broad protection for human rights and just what those rights are. On one side have been those Justices who believe that the Constitution does give such broad protection--not just to those freedoms explicitly listed in the Bill of Rights but to other fundamental aspects of liberty. In honoring not merely the Framers' text but the intent behind it, these Justices have supported, for example, the right to abortion, the right of gays to have sexual relationships, and the right to die. More generally, these Justices have proclaimed: "At the heart of liberty is the right to define one's own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life."

These Justices also honor the Framers' intent by looking beyond our national borders to seek the parameters of liberty. For example, in striking down a Texas law against homosexual conduct, the Court found it significant that the right to engage in homosexual relationships has "been accepted as an integral part of human freedom in many other countries." On today's bench, Justice Stevens has been a leading advocate of this view. However, its most influential voice is that of the more conservative Justice, Anthony Kennedy. Kennedy, a Reagan appointee, has become the bête noire of movement conservatives because he has so firmly defended basic rights and linked those rights to international law.

The opposing side is led by Justice Antonin Scalia, another Reagan appointee. As a former law professor at the University of Chicago and the University of Virginia, and now as a judge, Scalia has spent years working out an elaborate constitutional theory of originalism. He has consistently dissented from the entire line of human rights cases, arguing that abortion, gay rights, and end-of-life decisions should all be left entirely to the political process. This is a view that has powerful backing outside the Supreme Court. President Bush has renewed calls for strict construction of the Constitution (by which he means strict limits on individual rights, but apparently not strict construction of the powers of the Presidency!).

More extremist views, replete with threats of impeachment or other unprecedented actions to rein in judges, can be found in Congress and among the Right's cultural leadership. Nothing is more anathema to these critics than the Court's reliance on foreign judicial precedents as a source of guidance in interpreting the Constitution. Justice Scalia warned of the Court's "dangerous" references to foreign law, adding that "this Court ... should not impose foreign moods, fads, or fashions on Americans." He and his fellow critics see no connection between broader conceptions of human rights and constitutional law. They refuse to look seriously at what the Framers believed, how they saw the world.

Some conservatives also seemingly misunderstand the very idea of constitutional rights. Are basic rights like free speech or privacy created by the U.S. Constitution? For many conservatives, these rights are merely the historical product of particular language adopted a century or two in the past; they have no broader roots or implications. If so, Justice Kennedy was surely wrong in the Texas sodomy case when he examined a much broader range of sources, including how states interpret their own constitutions, the actions taken by state legislatures to decriminalize sodomy, and the rulings of international tribunals. These sources are relevant only if we ask a broader question: "Are there good grounds for considering this to be a basic human right?" If that is the question, then actions by state legislatures, state judges, and international human rights tribunals are all persuasive authorities. The Founders certainly understood the law of nations and basic liberty in this way.

Rephrasing the question in these terms also rebuts another powerful argument against providing constitutional protection for human rights. Justice Scalia and others have argued that going beyond the specifics of the Bill of Rights would give the Supreme Court unlimited discretion to decide what parts of liberty are fundamental. This was the real concern that led Judge Bork to call the Ninth Amendment an inkblot: the fear that if we paid any attention to the Ninth Amendment at all, we would be mesmerized into giving the federal judiciary a blank check. This is much less problematic if the courts are guided by a broader community of opinion, including our own state decision makers as well as international authorities.

To see what is at stake, consider a 1927 Supreme Court case that upheld compulsory sterilization. The Virginia statute involved in the case established a procedure for sterilizing people with mental retardation who lived in state institutions, based on the idea that mental disability was inherited. The statute was challenged by a woman who was about to be sterilized. As later historical research revealed, she actually did not have a mental disability at all; she simply had been sent to an institution by her foster parents because she had become pregnant. In any event, the Supreme Court could not see any problem with the Virginia statute: "It is better for all the world, if instead of waiting to execute degenerate offspring for crime, or to let them starve for their imbecility, society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind. ... Three generations of imbeciles are enough." By 1935, over twenty thousand forced sterilizations had been performed in the United States as a result of this decision.

If mainstream conservatives like Bork and Scalia are right, there is no constitutional barrier to these laws, because the Framers failed to predict this abuse and explicitly ban it. This is exactly the kind of reasoning that the Ninth Amendment was designed to guard against. A better understanding of the Ninth Amendment can do a great deal to clarify the current debate over fundamental rights, laying a firm foundation for the views of Justice Kennedy and other leading judges. Correspondingly, a true understanding of the Ninth Amendment is deadly to Justice Scalia's position.

Libertarians, who dislike government regulation of all kinds, agree with part of my argument, and I have found much of their historical research useful. They, too, would find the Amendment to be a source of real legal guidance. But they swing too far in the opposite direction from conservatives like Scalia. While Scalia wants the Ninth Amendment to protect nothing, the libertarians want it to protect virtually everything. They see in it the basis of a revolutionary return to the small government ideas of the early nineteenth century. But this is a gross overreading of the Amendment. It was meant to protect fundamental human rights, not just the right to do whatever you want whenever you want.

...[H]ere are some of the things I believe are among the unenumerated rights protected by the Constitution under the Ninth Amendment, backed up by the Fourteenth:

• The right to engage in private sexual acts between consenting adults. The Supreme Court was completely correct to strike down state sodomy laws.

• The right of reproductive autonomy, including the use of contraceptives and access to abortion as well as freedom from forced sterilization. Abortion is not an absolute right. The state can regulate to protect potential life, particularly later in pregnancy, so long as the burden placed on the pregnant woman is not too severe.

• The right to an adequate basic education. The Supreme Court has explicitly rejected this as a fundamental constitutional right, but many state courts have interpreted their state constitutions to protect this right. The Supreme Court would do well to follow their lead.

• The right to travel within the United States and to enter and leave the country freely (subject to clearly demonstrated national security needs).

• The right to government protection from private violence: when the government knows of the violence and has the resources to deal with the problem, it cannot simply sit on its hands. The Supreme Court has ruled that the state has every right to sit by while a Libertarians, who dislike government regulation of all kinds, small boy is beaten into a permanent coma by his father, even though the state knows all about what is going on. I would overturn that decision.

• The right to refuse unwanted medical treatment, including the right of terminally ill patients to reject life support.

But not everything is protected as a fundamental right. Here are some things that are not:

• The right of a terminally ill patient to prescribed medication with which to commit suicide.

• The right of businesses to be free from government regulation of their contracts with employees and customers.

• The right of individuals to use their property however they want, without regard to the public interest.

Daniel A. Farber is Sho Sato Professor of Law and Director of the Environmental Law Program at California University at Berkeley and author of many books, including most recently, Retained by the People: The 'Silent' Ninth Amendment and the Constitutional Rights Americans Don't Know They Have" (Perseus Books, 2007).

© 2007 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/50404/

Demoralized generals refuse 'war czar' job

By John Catalinotto

Published Apr 22, 2007

According to popular myth and Pentagon propaganda, generals are the staunchest patriots, aching to serve their country and ambitious to take the leadership. They also don’t mind making top government connections where they can influence big arms contracts.

All the more is it a telling sign that at least three retired generals have turned down such an opportunity. To be precise, they refused to be considered for the job the April 12 Washington Post called “war czar” for the Bush administration. The responsibility of the “war czar” is to coordinate civilian and military direction of the occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan.

The “war czar” would report directly to National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley. It has been said that Hadley would take the job himself but he is “too busy.”

Had this job been offered four years ago, when the Iraqi government had just been smashed and Bush was preparing his victory speech, dozens of retired officers and an equal number of civilians would have lined up for the job.

It’s not that these generals now feel guilty that the U.S. is an aggressor and the Pentagon’s officers are war criminals. They just don’t want to lose. Apparently the Iraq war is going to hell in a hand basket—from U.S. imperialism’s viewpoint—and everyone connected to the Pentagon knows exactly how quickly.

Two of the generals held their tongues. But one, Marine Gen. John J. “Jack’’ Sheehan, was quite outspoken. Gen. Sheehan, a former NATO commander, now has a cushy job with Bechtel Corp., a company highly invested in the Middle East and in oil extraction. It is only under extraordinary circumstances that someone like Sheehan would turn down such a job, let alone criticize the administration.

“The very fundamental issue is, they don’t know where the hell they’re going,” said Sheehan. “So rather than go over there, develop an ulcer and eventually leave, I said, ‘No thanks.’” According to the Washington Post, “Sheehan said he believes Vice President Dick Cheney and his hawkish allies remain more powerful within the administration than pragmatists looking for a way out of Iraq.”

One refusal could be due to an individual quirk; two, perhaps a coincidence. That three or maybe five top military leaders of U.S. imperialism turned down the job is a sign that the military brass sees the war in Iraq, and perhaps in Afghanistan too, as already lost. They don’t want responsibility for a disaster that they know they can’t turn around. And they don’t even expect an opportunity to organize an orderly retreat.

If this is the attitude of the top officers, one can only imagine how this plays out among the rank and file who have just learned that their tours in Iraq are now 15 months instead of 12. Or of the National Guard from those smaller cities and rural areas in the U.S. who are being mobilized for the second time to go to the Iraq quagmire. When will their indoctrinated patriotism turn to class awareness and resistance?

It is fitting that much of the media chose to call the new post the “war czar.” A czar is an autocratic ruler, an emperor, with the root of the word from the Roman “caesar,” which then became the Germanic “kaiser” and Russian “czar.” Caesar was assassinated by his senators two millennia ago. The Russian czar and the German kaiser were overthrown when war-weary Russians and Germans, after 3-4 years of the World War I bloodbath, rose up against them.

It looks like Gen. Sheehan and his colleagues want to avoid that fate.

E-mail: jcat@workers.org

---

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The NewStandard is closing up shop

Text of email I received today regarding the online news publication The NewStandard:

Dear Peter,

We regret to announce that, after nearly 3 and a half years online, we will discontinue publication of The NewStandard this Friday.

As those familiar with us or our work can imagine, this was a tremendously difficult decision for us to reach. But the five staffers who form the PeoplesNetWorks Collective – the nonhierarchical nonprofit that publishes TNS – have accepted that the news publication we envisioned cannot be achieved without a greater level of support. We do not believe we will be able to obtain that support in the foreseeable future, and as individuals, we have reached a point at which we are unable to sustain the long hours and stress that publishing TNS entails.

We will write at greater length next week to reflect upon our efforts to build TNS, discussing in detail what led to this saddest of conclusions. For now, we wanted to announce our decision and explain what it will mean for you in the immediate term.

On April 27, we will publish the last edition of The NewStandard. We will then begin the process of shutting down our operations. We intend to continue accepting regular monthly donations from our Premium Members until the end of April, in order to keep publishing for the rest of the month. By May 1, we will cease all credit card charges.

We are currently working on plans to establish an online archive of all TNS content, and we will do all we can to ensure that readers can continue to access past articles for years to come.

Individually, the people who have brought you TNS since 2004 will no doubt move on to other media and social change projects. Nonetheless, the closure of this groundbreaking publication – unique both for its product and for its radical structure and democratic values -- will be deeply felt by us all.

We are so proud of what you have helped us accomplish. For more than three years, we showed that a group of young journalists could uphold the highest standards in news reporting, institute a remarkably equitable workplace and organizational structure, and all the while, never even contemplate selling out to advertisers or other special interests.

For various reasons, we never gained the level of support we needed to provide sustainable jobs and to develop the readership we had aimed for. But we will leave in our wake nearly 3,000 examples of excellent public-interest journalism -- each one a small but indelible mark of achievement in a field wracked with mediocrity, pettiness and criminality.

We want to thank everyone who recognized the special value of an operation like TNS and helped us make it happen by donating, passing our stories along to other readers and agitating for a better news media. Your support for our work has meant everything to us.

Many of you will no doubt wish to respond. We intend to reply individually to everyone who contacts us. However, please understand that for the remainder of this week and the coming weekend, we will be in production and shut-down mode, continuing to produce content and then wrap up our operations. We will provide a more detailed explanation of our decision next week. Until then, we appreciate your patience in waiting for further information or replies from us.

In the meantime, you can send reactions, questions and comments to respond@newstandardnews.net. Please indicate if you would like to have your remarks made public.

Sincerely,
Jessica Azulay
Michelle Chen
Brian Dominick
Shreema Mehta
Megan Tady 

This is a sad day for me since I have supported them since their beginnings and believed them to be an objective, non-commercial, non-corporate voice in investigative journalism. The website may have seemed to be left-leaning, but any journalism worth its salt is going to subvert the dominant paradigm, which lately seems to be corporate/capitalist (read: fascist). In fact, they have always reported in favor of information for citizens - not merely for consumers. It is a coincidence that just yesterday I placed a NewStandard link in the news feed column of this blog.--Pete

A better way to vote

USA Today Endorses Instant Runoff Voting

http://blogs.usatoday.com/oped/2007/04/post_60.html

"The majority rules!" is one of the most frequently heard battle cries of American politics, but the reality is otherwise: Every year, in scores of state and local elections, no candidate wins a majority. That results in either costly runoffs or "winners" who in fact have been rejected by as many as two-thirds of the voters in a multi-candidate field.

Minnesota, for example, hasn't had a governor elected with majority support since 1994 (Jesse Ventura won with only 37% of the vote). North Carolina spent $3.5 million of the taxpayers' money in 2004 on a runoff to determine the Democratic nominee for superintendent of public instruction; just 3% of the voters participated.

There is, however, a worthwhile solution that can guarantee the majority really does rule. It's called instant-runoff voting, and over the past five years it has been adopted by communities as large as Minneapolis and San Francisco and as small as Ferndale, Mich., and Takoma Park, Md. Now, several more states and cities are experimenting with the idea or considering it. Sarasota, Fla., will vote on it in November. North Carolina has a pilot program for 20 municipalities to try instant-runoff voting in local elections and to use it for certain statewide elections.

In an instant-runoff election, instead of just placing an "X" beside the name of one candidate, voters have the option of ranking the candidates in order of preference: 1, 2, 3, etc. If no one gets 50% of the first-choice votes, the candidate with the fewest votes is eliminated from the count and the second-choice votes on those ballots are distributed among the remaining names. The process continues until one candidate with true majority support emerges.

Among the advantages of this system:

*Costly runoffs, in which voter turnout is often anemic, are avoided.

*Third-party or "spoiler" candidates finishing toward the bottom of the field are less likely to destroy a mainstream candidate's chances.

*Winners can claim a greater mandate from the voters.

*Campaigns can be more civil because candidates looking for second-choice as well as first-choice votes don't want to alienate a rival's supporters.

In most places, once the idea has been seriously advanced and explained, it has gained wide support. Some wary public officials warn of the cost — $1 million or more in big jurisdictions — of reprogramming voting machines or buying new ones to accept preferential votes. But San Francisco, for example, quickly recovered what it spent for that purpose by not having to hold a separate runoff election in 2004.

If the nation really believes in "majority rule," instant-runoff voting is one way to get closer to it.

http://blogs.usatoday.com/oped/2007/04/post_60.html

Ice traps Canadian seal hunters

How do you spell justice?--Pete

Canadian coastguards are trying to rescue the occupants of about 100 boats carrying seal hunters trapped by pack ice off the country's eastern coast.

Several of the boats are threatened with damage or sinking, and at least one crew had to abandon ship.

Fishermen have described conditions as the worst for more than 20 years.

The hunt, described by activists as cruel and unnecessary, is currently in its third and largest stage off the coast of Newfoundland province.

A spokesman of the Canadian Fisheries and Oceans Department said two-thirds of the quota for the cull had already been filled.

The total quota for the hunt is 270,000 seals.

Food and fuel shortage

Winds pressing the ice floes in towards land have made conditions difficult for the boats, some of which are hemmed in and face having their hulls cracked open.

Conditions are set to continue until the end of the week and could deteriorate further, coastguards say.

Canada's CBC network said some of the boats were running out of food and fuel.

A crew member of one of the stranded boats, the Southern Pride, told the network the ice had crushed a speedboat and left their vessel high and dry.

"I've never, ever experienced nothing like this. We've been in the wrong place each time," said Gill Cadwell.

Canada insists that the cull, which is smaller than last year's, is necessary to keep seal numbers down.

Seal pelts are sold to the fashion industry in Russia, China and Norway, and seal blubber is used for oil.

The culls regularly provoke an international outcry, with celebrities such as Sir Paul McCartney and Brigitte Bardot being involved in the campaign against them.

Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/americas/6570723.stm

Don't blame Hip Hop for Imus's racism

By Larry Hales
Published Apr 19, 2007 12:21 AM

Since MSNBC decided to cancel Don Imus’s radio program and was followed by CBS firing the “shock jock,’ ” the capitalist media and the pundits that are its face have launched an assault against Black culture in the form of Hip Hop.

This is in the aftermath of the furor that arose over the racist and sexist remarks Don Imus made on his April 4 morning radio show regarding the Rutgers women’s basketball team.

It would seem, from the articles now circling in major newspapers and news outlets nationwide, that Imus and the like are victims of Hip Hop music. That all this country’s ills are to be blamed on a culture that grew from conditions imposed on oppressed nationalities, specifically Blacks and Puerto Ricans. These conditions, which arose from a system that uses racism like a carpenter uses a hammer, are nothing more than an illustration of the racism endemic to capitalist society.

The opaqueness of the “blame Hip Hop” argument should be obvious; however, the ruling class in this country, for whom Don Imus is a mouthpiece, is extremely effective.

Surely, this incident was not an isolated incident, but more of the same from a man who built his radio career espousing racist, anti-women and homophobic sentiments.

While it is a victory that MSNBC and CBS had to bow to the will of the people and fire Imus, he is only one of many and his firing came after he had spewed his rancid speak for 15 years on radio. Many in the Black community and other oppressed communities stood up to call for Imus’s firing and so did certain ranks within the media, especially Black women.

Imus’s sidekick, Sid Rosenberg and producer Bernard McGuirk, who was hired by Imus to do “N-word jokes,” have gotten away with catering to one of the founding doctrines of U.S. society—white supremacy.

Racism is a tool of the bosses used to create a privileged layer in society, to obfuscate and pit workers against other workers instead of fighting together against the owners and protectors of the capitalist mode of production.

For example, Lou Dobbs continues his racist, fascistic-like assault on immigrant workers in order to whip up the white middle-class and white workers into a frenzy against people of color. This is nothing more than dangerous demagogy that must be challenged.

Bill O’Reilly still figures prominently on right-wing Fox News, a channel that proudly trumpets its right-wing bent. Michael Savage, Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck are only a few more of the far-right pundits. A campaign should be waged to remove them all from the public eye. When the ruling class uses the First Amendment, it is wielded as a weapon. It is the workers that pay for their vile speech.

There is ample evidence to point to the rancid mind of Imus; remarks that belie his supporters, who claimed his firing constitutes a violation of free speech or that his comment was in jest. Some can be found at mediamatters.org/issues_topics/shows/imusinthemorning. Behind the jest of a racist is the desire of the bosses.

Using Hip Hop as a diversion

The desire of the bosses in this particular instance has taken the form of a continued assault against Black culture.

Some in the Black community and other working-class communities have unfortunately bought into the claim of the capitalist media, that ultimately Imus only reiterated what is prevalent in Hip Hop music.

Mainstream Hip Hop can at times be replete with misogynistic imagery and lyrics, as well as being homophobic and self-destructive as well. However, that this has become mainstream, though not representative of the majority of Hip Hop, is the doing of the corporate takeover and co-opting of hip hop culture.

M-1, one half of the rap group, dead prez, said of these attacks, “Hip Hop is taking the blame for what they turned it into. The Hip Hop they are talking about is not the majority. The Hip Hop that is political is highly censured,” and “Media is hypocritical, and these attacks create the ground work for continued exploitation of our artists by relegating Hip Hop to being shallow.”

Lil Wayne, a musician from New Orleans, has made his career appealing to the popular tendency in Hip Hop music. Recently, however, he recorded a scathing indictment against the Bush administration in the wake of the Hurricane Katrina tragedy and the callous disregard shown by the U.S. puppets of capital.

The song, called “Georgia Bush,” starts with the rapper labeling his city, the “Lost City of New Orleans,” and includes the lyrics “Hurricane Katrina / we shoulda called it hurricane, Georgia, Bush / Then they telling yall lies on the news / the white people smiling like everythangs cool / but I know people that died in that pool / I know people that died in them schools / now what is a survivor to do / got no trailer / you gotta move ... they tell what they want / show you what they want you to see / but don’t let you know what’s really going on / make it look like a lot of stealing going on / all them cop killings in my home ...”

Culture is the product of a current reality, the work and thought of human beings and is the expression of a class or element of a particular class and is reflective of a certain period. It cannot exist above and beyond the human world, no matter how fantastic. Trotsky wrote in the “Social Roots and Social Function of Literature,” “Marxism alone can explain why and how a given tendency in art has originated in a given period of history; in other words, who it was who made a demand for such an artistic form and not for another, and why.”

The point is, Hip Hop music, whether it started with Kool Herc, Afika Bambatta, the Watts Poets, Last Poets, Lee Scratch Perry, Gil Scott Heron, with the style of James Brown or Langston Hughes reading his poems to musical accompaniment courtesy of Charlie Mingus’ band, or “Ali rap” from the period when Muhammad Ali was the greatest boxer, emanated from the Black experience in North America.

Hip Hop reflects reality and resistance

Perhaps it would be more correct to say that Hip Hop began when the first captives from Africa were brought across the Atlantic and sold into bondage in North America.

This cultural/musical explosion came out of a period that began during the decline of powerful social movements. There was a recession which settled heavily upon the most oppressed and an outgrowth of that recession was desperateness and coupled with that, the explosive social movements were ending, and though gains were made, the masses of the oppressed were still underfoot and suffering.

Hip Hop music reflected the conditions, though it was celebrative as well. To correctly highlight what happened to Hip Hop music, one need only look at a 7-year period, from 1987-1994.

In the late 1980s there was a lot of positive Hip Hop. Public Enemy released “It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold us Back” in 1988 and it resounded like a bomb. The album was hardcore and an indictment of racism and the system. That same year NWA made the anti-cop anthem “Fuck Tha Police.”

One year before that, many East Coast rappers decided to release a rallying cry to end Black on Black violence. The song begins with a speech by Malcolm X and KRS One leads off and his lyrics include the call, “We got together so that you can unite and fight for what’s right.”

Following Public Enemy’s release came Queen Latifah and her anthem for women, “Ladies First.” Intelligent Hoodlum made his first collection of music in 1990, as well as did Poor Righteous Teachers, X-Clan and other positive Hip Hop music.

Tupac Shakur burst into the scene in 1991 with his first release that included many tales of the realities of life for Black people and songs calling for unity and calling attention to state repression in the form of police brutality. Ice Cube released “Death Certificate” the same year.

The music was a reflection of the conditions of the oppressed under capitalism, especially after Reaganomics and in the midst of the so-called War on Drugs, which was really a war on the poor and people of color.

When Chuck-D called rap music the “CNN of the ghetto,” he was basically saying that it not only spoke of the conditions but was a barometer of the willingness of the people to openly struggle. On April 29, 1992, after the acquittal of the racist cops that beat Rodney King, the rebellion in Los Angeles started.

It wasn’t just the brutal beating of Rodney King and the subsequent acquittal, but those things were merely added weight heaped upon the history of slavery, oppression and repression of Black people—after this Hip Hop began to change.

The music was co-opted; musicians were signed to contracts, drawn in by money and were set upon with debt as they were made to pay record labels back for producers, equipment, video production and the only way out is to make more records, incur more debt and hope to sell enough music to be set free.

It must be made clear that misogyny, homophobia, racism and the like are tools of the oppressing class, the ruling class, and that these tools permeate all of society and filter from the top down, so to heap the blame on Hip Hop music is an attack to silence a culture that is rooted in social commentary and the desire for freedom.

These attacks must be fought, and progressive, revolutionary underground Hip Hop supported.

Nas said in an interview with Jet Magazine of April 9, 2007, “No one who knows rap, protects rap and loves it has the power to help. We don’t have direct control at radio or video channels. Those people who are in charge have always destroyed music. ... The whole industry needs to be destroyed. Shut down. Labels and everything. It needs to start from the ground up!”

There is no better way to protect culture than the destruction of the profit system. Then culture will be free to flourish, the human mind set free to create without the worry of trying to financially maintain in a system that seeks to exploit the majority for a small minority.
Articles copyright 1995-2007 Workers World. Verbatim copying and distribution of this entire article is permitted in any medium without royalty provided this notice is preserved.

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FDA Complicit in Pushing Prescription Drugs, Ad Critics Say

by Shreema Mehta, The NewStandard
http://newstandardnews.net/content/index.cfm/items/4716

In light of news that government regulators have neglected their duties to review pharmaceutical commercials, their proposed fix involves crawling even deeper into bed with drugmakers.

Apr. 20 – A blueprint animation of an older man enjoying his day tells viewers that the arthritis drug Celebrex carries the same cardiovascular warnings as several common pain medications. The actress Sally Field says she "feels great" after taking Boniva, a drug to treat osteoporosis. A beaver and Abraham Lincoln escape a man's dreams to chastise him for failing to take action for his sleep troubles, telling him, "We miss you."

Consumer and health groups say prescription-drug advertisements like these are often deceitful, interfere with the doctor-patient relationship, and lead to unnecessary drug use.

The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) does impose some requirements on pharmaceutical advertisements, such as mandatory risk information and supposedly prohibiting "false and misleading" messages. Though drug companies are required to submit their advertisements to the FDA, the agency does not review them before they are released to the public.

In fact, it's not clear whether the FDA reviews most advertisements at all. The agency can direct drug companies to change their advertisements if it finds they violate regulations, but a Government Accountability Office report released last November found that the FDA reviews only a "small portion" of the advertisements it receives, and does not review them using the same, consistent criteria. The report said the GAO could not calculate the percentage of submissions reviewed because the FDA does not keep track of that information.

Now, in an effort to impose greater regulations on drug marketing, the FDA plans to ask Congress to charge drug companies fees in order to fund FDA review of advertisements before they go public. The initiative is part of the renewal of the Prescription Drug User Fee Act (PDUFA), which currently charges drug companies to review the safety of new medicines.

The FDA hopes that if Congress approves the plan, it will raise more than $6 million annually through "user fees" to review advertisements.

As previously reported by The NewStandard, PDUFA has come under fire from consumer advocates who say it gives the pharmaceutical industry too much leverage over the FDA and has resulted in rushing drugs to market.

Groups like Public Citizen and Consumers Union say the FDA review of drug advertisements will likewise be tainted if funded by the very companies the FDA would be charged with scrutinizing. Critics are calling for stricter regulations over drug companies, and they say eliminating the financial ties between the FDA and the pharmaceutical industry should be the first step.

A range of public-interest groups, from ad critics Commercial Alert to senior advocates Gray Panthers, want an outright ban on all prescription-drug advertisements.

Industry representatives, on the other hand, say banning ads would violate the First Amendment. "In our system of jurisprudence we have a very high threshold that protects the right to free speech, whether it's political or commercial," Jim Davidson, attorney for the drug-company-funded Advertising Coalition, told the Associated Press on Tuesday.

In 2005, pharmaceutical companies spent about $4.2 billion in advertisements aimed at the public, known as "direct-to-consumer" ads – up from about $2.5 billion in 2000 and $1.1 billion in 1997. Advertising to the public is dwarfed by promoting drugs to physicians, with almost $7.2 billion spent in 2005.

At the same time, public spending on prescription drugs has also steadily increased, to about $140 billion in 2001, more than tripling since 1990.

Richard Frank, a professor at Harvard Medical School and co-author of a report published by the Kaiser Family Foundation on direct-to-consumer prescription-drug advertisements, said advertising was a contributing factor, but not the only driver of increased prescription-drug spending.

"It's just a general trend in this country, there are more drugs available [and] they have greater capacities so people are using them more," he said. Frank added that many people are increasingly taking drugs for conditions they previously thought they just had to accept, ranging from depression to toenail fungus.

Frank said drug advertisements can be beneficial if they help people with untreated illnesses, such as depression, get treatment. But he also called for stricter advertisement regulations, such as banning celebrity endorsements of drugs. "There are things that could be done to make the advertising less persuasion-oriented, and more factual-oriented," he said.

John Pippin, a former physician and adviser to the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine, who favors a ban on direct advertisements, said they put unfair pressure on doctors. "People see these ads in magazines or television or hear them on the radio and they write it down and they call their doctor… and that puts the doctor on the spot, because there's always more to it than the media coverage and advertising lets on," he said. "A lot of times doctors acquiesce to what their patients want."

Survey results released by IMS Health, a market-research firm, stated that physicians were "responsive" to requests for brand-name drugs. The survey of about 2,300 physicians found that about half of them granted more than 50 percent of patient requests for specific brands. Patients requested Claritin, Celebrex and Viagra the most often, drugs which were also among the most heavily advertised, according to the survey.

"[FDA officials] behave as if their job is to get as many ‘good products’ to the American public as quickly as they can," Pippin said. "The focus should be on public safety rather than on facilitation of the drug availability process."

Charges Against Vermont Peace Activist Dropped

By Daniel Borgström, Z Magazine Online
http://zmagsite.zmag.org/Apr2007/borgstrom0407.html

Rosemarie Jackowski is a 69year-old grandmother, former schoolteacher, Air Force veteran, and active member of Veterans for Peace who was arrested at a peace demonstration in March 2003. A year and a half later she was finally tried and convicted. She faced two months in jail and a $500 fine. When the conviction was eventually overturned by the Vermont Supreme Court in the fall of 2006, it looked like she’d won. However, the prosecuting attorney announced plans to try her again.

Undaunted, Jackowski took up that next challenge. “I’m very willing and ready to go to trial again,” Jackowski told the Bennington Banner. “It will be much more easy for me this time. I will have experience at being a defendant in a criminal trial,” she said. “I don’t believe that I am guilty of anything.” Her supposed “crime” was taking part in a peaceful demonstration that blocked traffic for 15 minutes in downtown Bennington. Her act of resistance consisted of standing in silence while bowing her head and holding a protest sign on the first day of the “shock and awe” bombing in Iraq.

During her four-year trial, Jackowski continued her efforts as a peace activist and advocate journalist. She spoke to groups and wrote for websites. She also ran for attorney general on a thirdparty ticket and received 10,299 votes.

One result of all this was an ongoing series of articles in Vermont newspapers as well as letters to the editors. Her story was also told by supporters and posted on independent media sites. The publicity generated more interest. “Meet the anti-war movement’s newest folk hero,” read an Associated Press article published in over 80 newspapers across the country and around the world last December.

William D. Wright, the Bennington County State’s Attorney, had clearly gotten himself into a no-win situation, but he insisted on going ahead with the retrial. Perhaps he couldn’t see his mistake, but others did. A letter in the Rutland Herald read, “If it hadn’t been for these trials, most of us would never have heard of Rosemarie Jackowski. So maybe in a perverse sort of way the state’s attorney is doing a good service.”

When Wright retired at the end of January, the new prosecutor, seeing the perils involved in promoting more publicity for Jackowski, immediately dropped the charges. In an editorial titled “Good Move,” the conservative Bennington Banner called the new prosecutor’s decision “both expected and welcome.” The newspaper was no supporter of Jackowski, but it was extremely relieved to see the end of “what was threatening to become a long-running soap opera that essentially would waste the court’s time.”

Rosemarie Jackowski hung in there for nearly four years and won. She has graciously thanked her many supporters, some from as far away as China. She should also thank former prosecutor William Wright who so unwittingly added the final chapter to her victory.

Daniel Borgström is an ex-Marine against the war. He’s part of a small group that holds a weekly peace walk around Lake Merritt in Oakland, California. He also writes about progressive events.

Ecuador’s President Takes Tough Stand

Rogere Burbach, Z Magazine Online
http://zmagsite.zmag.org/Apr2007/burbach0407.html

Ecuador’s leftist government —led by Rafael Correa who won the presidency in a November runoff election—has moved assertively in its relations with the United States during its first month in office. Minister of Foreign Relations, Maria Fernanda Espinosa, in a meeting with the Foreign Press Association in Quito, declared that Ecuador intends to close the U.S. military base located at Manta. “Ecuador is a sovereign nation, we do not need any foreign troops in our country,” she said. The treaty for the base expires in 2009 and will not be renewed.

The largest U.S. base on South America’s Pacific coast was ostensibly set up to help monitor narcotrafficking, but has become a major operations center for U.S. intelligence gathering and for coordinating counterinsurgency efforts against the leftist guerrillas in neighboring Colombia. The base’s air runway, built at a cost of $80 million, is capable of accommodating the largest and most sophisticated U.S. spy and intelligence gathering aircraft. Manta was also being used as a port for U.S. naval operations in the Pacific. Upwards of 475 U.S. military personnel are continually rotated between Manta and the U.S. Southern Command headquarters in Florida.

Popular sentiment in Ecuador overwhelmingly supports the closure of the base at Manta. Since its establishment in 1999 the civil war in Colombia has spread to Ecuador, bringing refugees, violence, and social conflict, particularly in the Amazon region. Aerial spraying of herbicides by planes originating in Colombia eradicates food crops and has deleterious health effects on Ecuadorans. The Colombian and U.S. governments claim that the defoliants are only sprayed on the Colombian side of the border and that there are no flights over Ecuador. But President Correa disagrees: “We will not permit the continual violation of Ecuadorian air space by planes that are not even Colombian, but from the United States. They enter our country and then fly back to Colombia.” Correa has ordered the Ecuadorian air force “to intercept any planes that violate our air space.”

The Correa government is preparing a case for the World Court against the Colombian government for the conflict and damages in northern Ecuador. Foreign Minister Espinosa is emphatic in saying that this is a “violation of human rights. It is not only a question of the health effects, but also of the psychological traumas caused by the constant over flights and the terrorization of the local population, particularly among the children who hear planes flying overhead and are subjected to war-like conditions.” Special teams comprised of international health and human rights representatives are being formed to investigate the conditions on the border. “We want to replace the conflictive conditions with a Plan for Peace and Development in the region,” Espinosa said.

In February Ecuadoran vice president, Lenin Moreno, on a trip to Caracas, Venezuela, stated that the Colombian government “should act more as a friendly neighbor and not respond only to the orders of the empire.” Commenting on President Bush’s March trip to Latin America that excluded Ecuador, Moreno added, “Every time Bush comes to visit our region we worry because we don’t know what proposals he comes to impart and what sorts of statements he will make.” Moreno’s comments caused an uproar and, in an effort to calm the diplomatic waters, Espinosa said that Moreno’s remarks were not officially sanctioned. “We want cordial, normal relations with the U.S. embassy and government in order to resolve any issues between us,” she said.

The Correa government is also moving to break with the neo-liberal trade and commercial policies that have been imposed on Ecuador by Washington and international lending agencies. In line with his campaign platform, Correa has made it clear that he will never sign the free trade agreement with the United States that was being discussed with previous governments. At the same time, Ecuador is negotiating special bilateral trade and economic agreements with Presidents Chavez of Venezuela and Morales in Bolivia. Venezuela has agreed to refine Ecuadorian oil and provide financial assistance for social programs in Ecuador while the Bolivian government has concluded an agreement to import food commodities from small and medium producers in Ecuador.

For the moment Correa has not opted to join the People’s Trade Treaty signed last year between Cuba, Bolivia, and Venezuela. As Rene Baez, an economic analyst at the Catholic University of Ecuador, says, “The treaty is really a series of special accords and financial agreements and in that sense Ecuador is already an informal member of this alternative bloc.”

The financial news that captured recent headlines was the announcement by Economics Minister Ricardo Patino that Ecuador would make a scheduled debt payment of $135 million to foreign bond holders. Known for his long-held belief that paying off the foreign debt undercuts critical social spending programs and keeps Ecuador in a state of perpetual poverty, Patino’s decision came two days after he had announced that Ecuador would not make the $135 million payment.

Informed sources close to the government say that after high level discussions, Correa opted to pay the bond holders, preferring to concentrate on upcoming negotiations with international creditors over a reduction in the schedule of debt payments and on the annulment of part of the debt that resulted from corrupt practices by prior Ecuadorian governments and foreign creditors. As Rene Baez said, “The Correa government decided to be selective in the battles it is taking on for the moment. A default now would have caused an international reaction and possibly provoked a domestic financial crisis, just as the government is trying to get its legs under it.”

Roger Burbach is director of the Center for the Study of the Americas in California. He has written extensively on Latin America, including The Pinochet Affair: State Terrorism and Global Justice and (with Jim Tarbell) Imperial Overstretch: George W. Bush and the Hubris of Empire.

Kurt Vonnegut, Counterculture’s Novelist, Dies

By DINITIA SMITH
NYT Article Here...

Kurt Vonnegut, whose dark comic talent and urgent moral vision in novels like “Slaughterhouse-Five,” “Cat’s Cradle” and “God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater” caught the temper of his times and the imagination of a generation, died last night in Manhattan. He was 84 and had homes in Manhattan and in Sagaponack on Long Island.

His death was reported by his wife, the author and photographer Jill Krementz, who said he had been hospitalized after suffering irreversible brain injuries as a result of a fall several weeks ago.

Mr. Vonnegut wrote plays, essays and short fiction. But it was his novels that became classics of the American counterculture, making him a literary idol, particularly to students in the 1960s and ’70s. Dog-eared paperback copies of his books could be found in the back pockets of blue jeans and in dorm rooms on campuses throughout the United States.

Like Mark Twain, Mr. Vonnegut used humor to tackle the basic questions of human existence: Why are we in this world? Is there a presiding figure to make sense of all this, a god who in the end, despite making people suffer, wishes them well?

He also shared with Twain a profound pessimism. “Mark Twain,” Mr. Vonnegut wrote in his 1991 book, “Fates Worse Than Death: An Autobiographical Collage,” “finally stopped laughing at his own agony and that of those around him. He denounced life on this planet as a crock. He died.”

Not all Mr. Vonnegut’s themes were metaphysical. With a blend of science fiction, philosophy and jokes, he also wrote about the banalities of consumer culture, for example, or the destruction of the environment.

His novels — 14 in all — were alternate universes, filled with topsy-turvy images and populated by races of his own creation, like the Tralfamadorians and the Mercurian Harmoniums. He invented phenomena like chrono-synclastic infundibula (places in the universe where all truths fit neatly together) as well as religions, like the Church of God the Utterly Indifferent and Bokononism (based on the books of a black British Episcopalian from Tobago “filled with bittersweet lies,” a narrator says).

The defining moment of Mr. Vonnegut’s life was the firebombing of Dresden, Germany, by Allied forces in 1945, an event he witnessed firsthand as a young prisoner of war. Thousands of civilians were killed in the raids, many of them burned to death or asphyxiated. “The firebombing of Dresden,” Mr. Vonnegut wrote, “was a work of art.” It was, he added, “a tower of smoke and flame to commemorate the rage and heartbreak of so many who had had their lives warped or ruined by the indescribable greed and vanity and cruelty of Germany.”

His experience in Dresden was the basis of “Slaughterhouse-Five, or The Children’s Crusade,” which was published in 1969 against the backdrop of war in Vietnam, racial unrest and cultural and social upheaval. The novel, wrote the critic Jerome Klinkowitz, “so perfectly caught America’s transformative mood that its story and structure became best-selling metaphors for the new age.”

To Mr. Vonnegut, the only possible redemption for the madness and apparent meaninglessness of existence was human kindness. The title character in his 1965 novel, “God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater, or Pearls Before Swine,” summed up his philosophy:

“Hello, babies. Welcome to Earth. It’s hot in the summer and cold in the winter. It’s round and wet and crowded. At the outside, babies, you’ve got about a hundred years here. There’s only one rule that I know of, babies — ‘God damn it, you’ve got to be kind.’ ”

Mr. Vonnegut eschewed traditional structure and punctuation. His books were a mixture of fiction and autobiography in a vernacular voice, prone to one-sentence paragraphs, exclamation points and italics. Graham Greene called him “one of the most able of living American writers.” Some critics said he had invented a new literary type, infusing the science-fiction form with humor and moral relevance and elevating it to serious literature.

He was also accused of repeating himself, of recycling themes and characters. Some readers found his work incoherent. His harshest critics called him no more than a comic book philosopher, a purveyor of empty aphorisms.

With his curly hair askew, deep pouches under his eyes and rumpled clothes, he often looked like an out-of-work philosophy professor, typically chain smoking, his conversation punctuated with coughs and wheezes. But he also maintained a certain celebrity, as a regular on panels and at literary parties in Manhattan and on the East End of Long Island, where he lived near his friend and fellow war veteran Joseph Heller, another darkly comic literary hero of the age.

Mr. Vonnegut was born in Indianapolis in 1922, the youngest of three children. His father, Kurt Sr., was an architect. His mother, Edith, came from a wealthy brewery family. Mr. Vonnegut’s brother, Bernard, who died in 1997, was a physicist and an expert on thunderstorms.

During the Depression, the elder Vonnegut went for long stretches without work, and Mrs. Vonnegut suffered from episodes of mental illness. “When my mother went off her rocker late at night, the hatred and contempt she sprayed on my father, as gentle and innocent a man as ever lived, was without limit and pure, untainted by ideas or information,” Mr. Vonnegut wrote. She committed suicide, an act that haunted her son for the rest of his life.

He had, he said, a lifelong difficulty with women. He remembered an aunt once telling him, “All Vonnegut men are scared to death of women.”

“My theory is that all women have hydrofluoric acid bottled up inside,” he wrote.

Mr. Vonnegut went east to attend Cornell University, but he enlisted in the Army before he could get a degree. The Army initially sent him to the Carnegie Institute of Technology (now Carnegie Mellon University) in Pittsburgh and the University of Tennessee to study mechanical engineering.

In 1944 he was shipped to Europe with the 106th Infantry Division and shortly saw combat in the Battle of the Bulge. With his unit nearly destroyed, he wandered behind enemy lines for several days until he was captured and sent to a prisoner of war camp near Dresden, the architectural jewel of Germany.

Assigned by his captors to make vitamin supplements, he was working with other prisoners in an underground meat locker when British and American warplanes started carpet bombing the city, creating a firestorm above him. The work detail saved his life.

Afterward, he and his fellow prisoners were assigned to remove the dead.

“The corpses, most of them in ordinary cellars, were so numerous and represented such a health hazard that they were cremated on huge funeral pyres, or by flamethrowers whose nozzles were thrust into the cellars, without being counted or identified,” he wrote in “Fates Worse Than Death.” When the war ended, Mr. Vonnegut returned to the United States and married his high school sweetheart, Jane Marie Cox. They settled in Chicago in 1945. The couple had three children, Mark, Edith and Nanette. In 1958, Mr. Vonnegut’s sister, Alice, and her husband died within a day of each other, she of cancer and he in a train crash. The Vonneguts took custody of their children, Tiger, Jim and Steven.

In Chicago, Mr. Vonnegut worked as a police reporter for the City News Bureau. He also studied for a master’s degree in anthropology at the University of Chicago, writing a thesis on “The Fluctuations Between Good and Evil in Simple Tales.” It was rejected unanimously by the faculty. (The university finally awarded him a degree almost a quarter of a century later, allowing him to use his novel “Cat’s Cradle” as his thesis.)

In 1947, he moved to Schenectady, N.Y., and took a job in public relations for the General Electric Company. Three years later he sold his first short story, “Report on the Barnhouse Effect,” to Collier’s magazine and decided to move his family to Cape Cod, Mass., where he wrote fiction for magazines like Argosy and The Saturday Evening Post. To bolster his income, he taught emotionally disturbed children, worked at an advertising agency and at one point started a Saab auto dealership.

His first novel was “Player Piano,” published in 1952. A satire on corporate life — the meetings, the pep talks, the cultivation of bosses — it also carries echoes of Aldous Huxley’s “Brave New World.” It concerns an engineer, Paul Proteus, who is employed by the Ilium Works, a company similar to General Electric. Proteus becomes the leader of a band of revolutionaries who destroy machines that they think are taking over the world.

“Player Piano” was followed in 1959 by “The Sirens of Titan,” a science-fiction novel featuring the Church of God of the Utterly Indifferent. In 1961 he published “Mother Night,” involving an American writer awaiting trial in Israel on charges of war crimes in Nazi Germany. Like Mr. Vonnegut’s other early novels, they were published as paperback originals. And like “Slaughterhouse-Five,” in 1972, and a number of other Vonnegut novels, “Mother Night” was adapted for film, in 1996, starring Nick Nolte.

In 1963, Mr. Vonnegut published “Cat’s Cradle.” Though it initially sold only about 500 copies, it is widely read today in high school English classes. The novel, which takes its title from an Eskimo game in which children try to snare the sun with string, is an autobiographical work about a family named Hoenikker. The narrator, an adherent of the religion Bokononism, is writing a book about the bombing of Hiroshima and comes to witness the destruction of the world by something called Ice-Nine, which, on contact, causes all water to freeze at room temperature.

Mr. Vonnegut shed the label of science-fiction writer with “Slaughterhouse-Five.” It tells the story of Billy Pilgrim, an infantry scout (as Mr. Vonnegut was), who discovers the horror of war. “You know — we’ve had to imagine the war here, and we have imagined that it was being fought by aging men like ourselves,” an English colonel says in the book. “We had forgotten that wars were fought by babies. When I saw those freshly shaved faces, it was a shock. My God, my God — I said to myself, ‘It’s the Children’s Crusade.’ ”

As Mr. Vonnegut was, Billy is captured and assigned to manufacture vitamin supplements in an underground meat locker, where the prisoners take refuge from Allied bombing.

“Slaughterhouse-Five” provided another stage for his fictional alter ego, Kilgore Trout, a recurring character introduced in “God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater.” The novel also featured a signature Vonnegut phrase.

“Robert Kennedy, whose summer home is eight miles from the home I live in all year round,” Mr. Vonnegut wrote at the end of the book, “was shot two nights ago. He died last night. So it goes.

“Martin Luther King was shot a month ago. He died, too. So it goes. And every day my Government gives me a count of corpses created by military science in Vietnam. So it goes.”

One of many Zenlike words and phrases that run through Mr. Vonnegut’s books, “so it goes” became a catchphrase for opponents of the Vietnam war.

“Slaughterhouse-Five” reached No. 1 on best-seller lists, making Mr. Vonnegut a cult hero. Some schools and libraries have banned it because of its sexual content, rough language and scenes of violence.

After the book was published, Mr. Vonnegut went into a severe depression and vowed never to write another novel. Suicide was always a temptation, he wrote. In 1984, he tried to take his life with sleeping pills and alcohol.

“The child of a suicide will naturally think of death, the big one, as a logical solution to any problem,” he wrote. His son Mark also suffered a breakdown, in the 1970s, from which he recovered, writing about it in a book, “The Eden Express: A Memoir of Insanity.”

Forsaking novels, Mr. Vonnegut decided to become a playwright. His first effort, “Happy Birthday, Wanda June,” opened Off Broadway in 1970 to mixed reviews. Around this time he separated from his wife and moved to New York. (She remarried and died in 1986.)

In 1970, Mr. Vonnegut moved in with Ms. Krementz, whom he married in 1979. They had a daughter, Lily. They survive him, as do all his other children.

Mr. Vonnegut returned to novels with “Breakfast of Champions, or Goodbye Blue Monday” (1973), calling it a “tale of a meeting of two lonesome, skinny, fairly old white men on a planet which was dying fast.” This time his alter ego is Philboyd Studge, who is writing a book about Dwayne Hoover, a wealthy auto dealer. Hoover has a breakdown after reading a novel written by Kilgore Trout, who reappears in this book, and begins to believe that everyone around him is a robot.

In 1997, Mr. Vonnegut published “Timequake,” a tale of the millennium in which a wrinkle in space-time compels the world to relive the 1990s. The book, based on an earlier failed novel of his, was, in his own words, “a stew” of plot summaries and autobiographical writings. Once again, Kilgore Trout is a character. “If I’d wasted my time creating characters,” Mr. Vonnegut said in defense of his “recycling,” “I would never have gotten around to calling attention to things that really matter.”

Though it was a best seller, it also met with mixed reviews. “Having a novelist’s free hand to write what you will does not mean you are entitled to a free ride,” R. Z. Sheppard wrote in Time. But the novelist Valerie Sayers, in The New York Times Book Review, wrote: “The real pleasure lies in Vonnegut’s transforming his continuing interest in the highly suspicious relationship between fact and fiction into the neatest trick yet played on a publishing world consumed with the furor over novel versus memoir.”

Mr. Vonnegut said in the prologue to “Timequake” that it would be his last novel. And so it was.

His last book, in 2005, was a collection of biographical essays, “A Man Without a Country.” It, too, was a best seller.

It concludes with a poem written by Mr. Vonnegut called “Requiem,” which has these closing lines:

When the last living thing

has died on account of us,

how poetical it would be

if Earth could say,

in a voice floating up

perhaps

from the floor

of the Grand Canyon,

“It is done.”

People did not like it here.

MINNESOTA SUPREME COURT STRIKES DOWN RED LIGHT CAMS

THE NEWSPAPER - The Minnesota Supreme Court delivered the highest-level court rebuke to photo enforcement to date with a unanimous decision against the Minneapolis red light camera program. The high court upheld last September's Court of Appeals decision that found the city's program had violated state law.

The supreme court found that Minneapolis had disregarded a state law imposing uniformity of traffic laws across the state. The city's photo ticket program offered the accused fewer due process protections than available to motorists prosecuted for the same offense in the conventional way after having been pulled over by a policeman. The court argued that Minneapolis had, in effect, created a new type of crime: "owner liability for red-light violations where the owner neither
required nor knowingly permitted the violation."

"We emphasized in Duffy that a driver must be able to travel throughout the state without the risk of violating an ordinance with which he is not familiar," the court wrote. . .

The court also struck down the "rebutable presumption" doctrine that lies at the heart of every civil photo enforcement ordinance across the country.

"The problem with the presumption that the owner was the driver is that it eliminates the presumption of innocence and shifts the burden of proof from that required by the rules of criminal procedure," the court concluded. "Therefore the ordinance provides less procedural protection to a person charged with an ordinance violation than is provided to a person charged with a violation of the Act. Accordingly, the ordinance conflicts with the Act and is invalid."

RULING
http://www.thenewspaper.com/news/16/1688.asp

How to Get Out of Iraq

by JUAN COLE

[from the April 23, 2007 issue]

Both houses of Congress have now backed a timeline for withdrawal of US combat troops from Iraq in 2008, which George W. Bush has vowed to veto. He gives two major rationales for rejecting withdrawal. At times he has warned that Iraq could become an Al Qaeda stronghold, at others that "a contagion of violence could spill out across the country--and in time, the entire region could be drawn into the conflict." These are bogeymen with which Bush has attempted to frighten the public. Regarding the first, Turkey, Jordan and Iran are not going to put up with an Al Qaeda stronghold on their borders; nor would Shiite and Kurdish Iraqis. Most Sunni Iraqis are relatively secular, and there are only an estimated 1,000 foreign jihadis in Iraq, who would be forced to return home if the Americans left.

Bush's ineptitude has made a regional proxy war a real possibility, so the question is how to avoid it. One Saudi official admitted that if the United States withdrew and Iraq's Sunnis seemed in danger, Riyadh would likely intervene. Turkish Foreign Minister Abdullah Gul has threatened to invade if Iraq's Kurds declare independence. And Iran would surely try to rescue Iraqi Shiites if they seemed on the verge of being massacred.

But Bush is profoundly in error to think that continued US military occupation can forestall further warfare. Sunni Arabs perceive the Americans to have tortured them, destroyed several of their cities and to be keeping them under siege at the behest of the joint Shiite-Kurdish government of Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki. American missteps have steadily driven more and more Sunnis to violence and the support of violence. The Pentagon's own polling shows that between 2003 and 2006 the percentage of Sunni Arabs who thought attacking US troops was legitimate grew from 14 to more than 70.

The US repression of Sunnis has allowed Shiites and Kurds to avoid compromise. The Sunnis in Parliament have demanded that the excesses of de-Baathification be reversed (thousands of Sunnis have been fired from jobs just because they belonged to the Baath Party). They have been rebuffed. Sunnis rejected the formation of a Shiite super-province in the south. Shiites nevertheless pushed it through Parliament. The Kurdish leadership has also dismissed Sunni objections to their plans to annex the oil-rich province of Kirkuk, which has a significant Arab population.

The key to preventing an intensified civil war is US withdrawal from the equation so as to force the parties to an accommodation. Therefore, the United States should announce its intention to withdraw its military forces from Iraq, which will bring Sunnis to the negotiating table and put pressure on Kurds and Shiites to seek a compromise with them. But a simple US departure would not be enough; the civil war must be negotiated to a settlement, on the model of the conflicts in Northern Ireland and Lebanon.

Talks require a negotiating partner. The first step in Iraq must therefore be holding provincial elections. In the first and only such elections, held in January 2005, the Sunni Arab parties declined to participate. Provincial governments in Sunni-majority provinces are thus uniformly unrepresentative, and sometimes in the hands of fundamentalist Shiites, as in Diyala. A newly elected provincial Sunni Arab political class could stand in for the guerrilla groups in talks, just as Sinn Fein, the political wing of the Irish Republican Army, did in Northern Ireland.

The United States took a step in the right direction by attending the March Baghdad summit of Iraq's neighbors and speaking directly to Iran and Syria about Iraqi security. Now the United States and Britain should work with the United Nations or the Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC) to call a six-plus-two meeting on the model of the generally successful December 2001 Bonn conference on Afghanistan. The Iraqi government, including the president and both vice presidents, would meet directly with the foreign ministers of Iran, Turkey, Syria, Jordan, Saudi Arabia and Kuwait to discuss the ways regional actors could help end the war as the United States and Britain prepare to depart. Unlike the Baghdad summit, this conference would have to issue a formal set of plans and commitments. Recent Saudi consultations with Iranian leaders should be extended.

The Saudi government should then be invited to reprise the role it played in brokering an end to the Lebanese civil war at Taif in 1989, at which communal leaders hammered out a new national compact, which involved political power-sharing and demobilization of most militias. At Taif II, the elected provincial governors of Iraq and leaders of the major parliamentary blocs should be brought together. Along with the US and British ambassadors to Baghdad and representatives of the UN and the OIC, observers from Iraq's six neighbors should also be there.

Saudi Arabia's King Abdullah has credibility with Iraq's Sunnis, especially now that he has denounced the US occupation as illegitimate. They could trust his representations, which would include Saudi development aid in places like Anbar province. Since the Sunnis are the main drivers of violence in Iraq, it is they who must be mollified, bribed, cajoled and threatened into a settlement. The Shiites will have to demobilize the Mahdi Army and Badr Organization as well, and Iran will have to commit to working with the Maliki government to make that happen. A UN peacekeeping force, perhaps with the OIC (where Malaysia recently proffered troops), would be part of the solution.

On the basis of a settlement at Taif II, the US military should then negotiate with provincial authorities a phased withdrawal from the Sunni Arab provinces. The Sunnis will have to understand that this departure is a double-edged sword, since if they continued their guerrilla war, the United States could not protect them from Kurdish or Shiite reprisals. Any UN or OIC presence would be for peacekeeping and could not be depended on for active peace-enforcing. The rewards from neighbors promised at Taif II should be granted in a phased fashion and made dependent on good-faith follow-through by Iraqi leaders.

From all this the Sunni Arabs would get an end to the US occupation--among their main demands--as well as an end to de-Baathification and political marginalization. They would have an important place in the new order and be guaranteed their fair share of the national wealth. Shiites and Kurds would get an end to a debilitating civil war, even if they have to give up some of their maximal demands. The neighbors would avoid a reprise of the destructive Iran-Iraq War of the 1980s, which killed perhaps a million people and deeply damaged regional economies. And by ending its occupation, the United States would go a long way toward repairing its relations with the Arab and Muslim world and thus eliminate one of Al Qaeda's chief recruiting tools. A withdrawal is risky, but on the evidence so far, for the US military to remain in Iraq is a sure recipe for disaster.