People Before Profit blog

Fear of Cuba

Fri, 21 Dec 2007 09:48:00 +0000

During the Vietnam War era, President Richard Nixon worried about his country becoming a “pitiful, helpless giant.” Now, with the world’s only superpower over-reacting to fears, that possibility seems to have resurfaced. Two recent U.S. measures relating to Cuba hint at weak knees.

Washington officials recently refused permission for U.S. filmmaker Brian De Palma to attend the 29th International Festival of New Latin American Cinema in Havana. His film “Redacted,” a story of misfortunes surrounding the U.S. invasion of Iraq, was shown Dec. 5 at the inaugural event of the famous film festival. At the 2007 Venice Film Festival, De Palma won the best director’s award for the film.

And this month the U.S. government denied permission for five members of the European Parliament, representatives from Spain, Cyprus, Greece, Italy and Germany, to visit five Cuban men held in U.S. prisons for actions taken to defend the Cuban people against terrorism.

The parliamentarians issued a statement protesting the refusal as “an outright provocation to worldwide democratic public opinion,” and condemned the U.S. government for “violating the basic human rights of the five prisoners [and] basic principles of international and humanitarian law.”

Presumably Washington was acting to maintain its long embargo on news from Cuba and to discourage public knowledge about the Cuban Five. Free flow of information concerning Cuba seems to make U.S. leaders uneasy.

By contrast, a lot of bad news in other areas does circulate without the news bearers being openly attacked. Bush administration news managers seem to have coped, for example, with the wide diffusion of news about torture at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo.

The administration routinely dealt with press reports on the CIA use of European airports to transport duct-taped passengers to torturers. It didn’t seem to faze the White House. Probably foreigners reporting on the issue could gain easy entry into the United States, if they wanted to come.

Stories about civilian deaths at U.S. hands are everywhere — reporters killed in Baghdad, an Iraqi wedding party massacred on the Syrian border, for example — but military spokespersons stick to their routine: apologize and pay off the families.

Accusations are commonplace that millions of dollars are funneled by U.S. agencies into Venezuela, Bolivia and other countries to adjust elections. But apologists can and do easily ignore them.

These are weighty matters, as is the recently divulged CIA destruction of evidence from “hard” interrogations. By contrast, a film showing in Havana and five European visitors are small potatoes. Even so, Washington put its foot down. Why the difference?

Cuba gets its own script. The U.S. government has long applied special rules to the island nation, including liberal policies for would-be refugees from Cuba, full-bore economic sanctions and protection of anti-Cuban terrorists.

Why does Cuba warrant such treatment? The reason is that Cuba can be scary. One may have to stretch the imagination to realize that giants are underdogs when it comes to Cuba. According to mythologist James Frazier (“The Golden Bough”), giants’ souls often lie outside their bodies, “hidden away in some secret place.” If a giant’s enemies can find and destroy the soul, the giant dies, or at least — we might suggest — loses power and goes helpless.

Greed and rampant individualism characterize the soul of a capitalist empire. To construct a society marked by justice, the Cubans long ago must have determined that the offending soul must be watched over, maybe boxed up, the easier to be thrown away.

That’s the hold a tiny nation has over a bullying neighbor. In socialist Cuba, the giant’s soul is exposed as ready for the trash heap. It is used as a teaching aid. That’s why fences are in order separating people from ideas. Otherwise, all would be revealed and the giant’s soul endangered — a frightening prospect.

W.T. Whitney Jr. is a retired pediatrician active in the Cuba solidarity movement in Maine.

Wheres the humanity in immigration enforcement?

Fri, 21 Dec 2007 09:47:00 +0000

When human beings are called “illegal” and “alien” by elected officials and law enforcement agencies and in the media, what kind of message are we spreading?

“Illegal” means “not according to or authorized by law” or “not sanctioned by official rules.”

When people are termed “illegal,” they are defined according to rules that say, even if they are trying to survive and make a living for themselves and their families, in a time when good paying jobs, with benefits and protections, are rare, especially for poor working families, it’s “illegal” to do so, right?

Generally when we hear the word “alien” the first thing that comes to mind is Star Trek, E.T. or Star Wars characters, something strange, distant, out of this world and non-human.

When we hear “human,” people with families, men and women workers, and children, with ordinary emotions we share like happiness, sadness, anger, love, hunger and even struggle, come to mind, right?

How can we not take offense when any human being is belittled and replaced with “illegal alien”?

In search of a better future

Immigrant workers come to the United States because so many have limited job opportunities in their home countries, especially when it comes to providing food, shelter, let alone an education for their families. But upon arrival they are referred to as “illegal aliens” and dubbed criminals.

Undocumented workers have few options entering the U.S. “legally” to make a living here. Families who travel to the U.S. from Central and South America do so because it is their only hope to survive and find relief from a life surrounded by poverty, underdevelopment and scant resources including jobs.

Every day immigrant workers risk their lives to come here and once they do they live in fear and in the shadows, under scrutiny and criminalization. It is their children who are the single most important reason why they work tirelessly, with hopes for a better future. And it is the children who suffer the most.

When children have to witness how their parents are dehumanized, criminalized and punished for trying to provide for them, it sends a cruel and irresponsible message contrary to the family values taught in American society.

Because of workplace or neighborhood raids, immigrant families are constantly being torn apart, instilling widespread community fear in a country that says it is fighting terrorism.

Such terror, enforced by immigration officials, haunts workers who want what any American citizen wants, to work and provide for their family in peace.

Imagine immigration agents invading your workplace or your home with bulletproof vests, machine guns and military gear and taking you away. Talk about alien abduction.

This needs to stop. Raids, deportations and separation of families should be illegal, and no parents should be forced to abandon their children.

Baby torn from her mother

Saida Umanzor, 26, originally from Honduras, was arrested after federal immigration agents and county police searched her house in Ohio with a warrant for her brother-in-law.

As they searched her house, Ms. Umanzor was with two of her U.S. citizen children, one of whom was a 9-month-old baby whom she breast-fed.

The officers checked Ms. Umanzor’s background and detained her for not previously appearing in immigration court. She was forced to leave her children. Along with her sister’s children, they were taken by county social workers.

While detained, Umanzor could not see her children. Her baby did not eat for three days, refusing to take formula from a bottle. After four days the children were finally released to Ms. Umanzor’s sister, who managed to wean the baby to a bottle.

Two-thirds of children whose parents were detained in immigration raids in the past year were born in the United States. At least 13,000 American children have seen one or both parents deported in the past two years after roundups in factories and neighborhoods. About 3.1 million American children have at least one parent who is an “illegal” immigrant.

President Bush says he is leading wars in Iraq and Afghanistan against world terrorism so that families in America can feel safe. Are working mothers nursing their babies a threat to our national security and the fight against terrorist attacks?

Did immigration agents find any secret conspiracy documents or weapons of mass destruction in Ms. Umanzor’s home? No, they found diapers, baby bottles and toys. What blatant hypocrisy when American family values are preached from the White House, and here is Ms. Umanzor, found guilty for nursing her child.

Their fight is our fight

In polls this year by ABC, CBS, Los Angeles Times/ Bloomberg, Fox and Pew, a majority has consistently supported allowing undocumented workers to obtain citizenship.

Whether someone comes from Mexico, Poland, India, Japan or Texas, does that mean that the right to shelter, a job, health care, or an education is different depending on where they come from? Are these basic human rights illegal?

Are immigrants being made a scapegoat for larger issues in our society?

Are poverty, lack of good paying jobs with benefits, overwhelmed public schools, lack of affordable housing and health care all the fault of immigrants?

Most people agree that immigrants fuel local economies with their consumer power and even open small businesses, not to mention pay all sorts of taxes.

The fight for immigrant rights is a fight for human rights. Their fight is our fight.

It is in the interest of every U.S. citizen to embrace immigrant workers and their families and ensure that their equality and civil rights are guaranteed without any limitations, including the right to apply for legal residence with a path to citizenship.

It’s only human for us to do so!

Just the tip of the iceberg

Fri, 21 Dec 2007 09:37:00 +0000

With the just completed Bali conference, the presentation of the Nobel Peace Prize to Al Gore and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, special reports in many newspapers and magazines, demonstrations in 50 countries on global warming, the new Australian government signing on to the Kyoto Accord, and many other events, the focus of the world’s attention is shifting to the need to decrease carbon dioxide emissions. Alongside and driving this change is a decisive shift in world public opinion. This will propel changes in elections, government policies and media coverage for years to come.

However, the basic environmental problem humanity faces is not only global warming. Global warming is but a symptom, a profound symptom to be sure, of the imbalance in the relationship between human activity and the nature on which we depend. This is the crisis of our times, of which global warming is but one part.

Global climate change is throwing into relief other looming crises. As climate change causes shifts in weather patterns, rainfall patterns and seasons, that also highlights serious problems with the way we do agriculture. When we depend on irrigation systems for increasing agricultural production, we base our ability to grow food on the stability of those water systems. Melting glaciers, rampant development in water-stressed regions, overtapped underground aquifers and rainforest destruction are all turning the water on which our food depends into threatened resources. When we don’t have enough water in the right places to grow the food we are used to, how will we feed ourselves?

When we increase agricultural output by an over-reliance on chemical fertilizers, that puts one more burden on the nonrenewable oil that is used to produce the fertilizer. And in the process, unnecessary carbon dioxide is released. What the fertilizer does is enable us to speed up the rate at which we use up the natural ability of the soil to grow food. We turn the soil into an addict, requiring ever-larger doses of fertilizer to get the same results.

Agriculture is just one example of the problems humanity faces due to our imbalance with nature. Oil and natural gas depletion, industrial pollution, the buildup everywhere in the world of persistent organic pollutants (known as “pops” — many of which negatively affect the human reproductive system), rapid desertification, increased extreme weather events and massive amounts of waste can all be linked to and added to global climate change as examples of how humanity is helping to degrade and stress the ability of nature to support us.

It is not just humanity in general, though, that is causing the problem. It is capitalism. Capitalism, in addition to its exploitation of human labor, relies on ever-expanding markets, ever-expanding production of commodities, ever-expanding development and ever-expanding private profit, all of which are root causes of the imbalance with nature. Short-term, shortsighted profit as the sole measure of value underlies many of the crises which affect humanity as a whole. Increasing capitalist globalization in part means a huge increase in the transport of goods, which results in huge increases in the burning of fossil fuels to run the ships, trucks and airplanes that transport globalized commodities.

We most certainly have to cut carbon dioxide emissions, and fast. Global climate change is an escalating challenge. But it is not the only thing we have to work on.

We need agricultural production systems that don’t rely on excess water consumption, chemical fertilizers or transporting agricultural goods many thousands of miles. We need transportation systems that are much more efficient (trains rather than trucks, for example), and that don’t substitute for local production and distribution. We need industrial production that doesn’t waste energy, doesn’t produce massive amounts of waste, and utilizes solar energy (many forms of renewable energy come from the power of the sun in one form or another — solar, wind, wave and others).

Are goods and food distributed justly? Are all humans provided with health care? Is there sufficient safe water for everyone? It is not good enough that there is sufficient food on average: there has to be sufficient food for everyone.

Justice, peace, environmental sustainability and world health all require socialist planning, cooperation and democratic decision-making. We need an economic system that measures all value by human need rather than individual profit.

Marc Brodine (marcbrodine @inlandnet.com) is chair of the Washington State Communist Party and co-authored the second edition of the CPUSA environmental program, “People and Nature Before Profits.”

Chiquita in the dock for murder

Fri, 21 Dec 2007 08:30:00 +0000

For lawyer Terry Collingwood, capital punishment has its place, especially if it means “the death of a truly evil corporation.” The reference was to Ohio-based Chiquita Corp., which last March pleaded guilty to making 100 payments over seven years totaling $1.7 million to the right-wing, paramilitary Colombian Self Defense Units — AUC in Spanish. The payoffs began in 1997. Observers say the aim was to suppress labor activism, bar left-wing insurgents and control territory.

Rights groups blame the AUC for killing 10,000 Colombians over a period of 10 years and for seizing massive amounts of its victims’ land, displacing and impoverishing tens of thousands of the victims’ family members in the process.

According to Colombian police statistics, the AUC accounted for most of the 2,700 murders in the Uraba banana-growing region between 1997 and 2004. That area provided Chiquita subsidiary Banadex with $49.4 million in profits during 2001-2004, according to interactivist.net.

Collingwood and legal associate Paul Wolf filed a civil lawsuit in June on behalf of the families of 137 victims. Wolf reported Dec. 12 that Chiquita lawyers have submitted a “motion to dismiss.” He predicts that if Judge Paul Friedman turns them down, “there’s little doubt we’ll win.” Wolf has gone to Uraba to identify victims and recruit potential plaintiffs, who now number over 800.

Chiquita is facing at least five new lawsuits since it agreed in March to pay a $25 million fine related to the AUC payoffs in exchange for getting assurances of immunity from prosecution for its executives. Chiquita’s own lawyers informed company officials in February 2003 that under anti-terrorist legislation, Chiquita’s AUC payments were illegal, especially after 2002 when the AUC received its terrorist designation. Payments continued until Feb. 4, 2004.

Chiquita contends the payments were aimed at protecting employees from “extortion.” Victims’ lawyers say the AUC not only killed students, unionists and peasants allegedly associated with left-wing insurgents, but also seized land for the Chiquita empire and arranged for thousands of automatic weapons plus ammunition to pass across Chiquita docks at the northwestern port city of Turbo. The AUC had gained control of the area after expelling the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) during the 1990s.

On June 14, attorneys for relatives of 22 people killed by paramilitaries filed a civil suit in Florida. A month later, EarthRights International filed a class-action lawsuit against Chiquita in New Jersey. According to legal director Marco Simons, “Chiquita’s involvement violates not only Colombian law and U.S. law, but also international law prohibiting crimes against humanity, extrajudicial killing, torture, war crimes.” Chiquita was “an accomplice to a criminal conspiracy,” he told Amy Goodman of “Democracy Now.”

In November, Jonathan Reiter filed suit against Chiquita in New York on behalf of families of 393 murdered victims. Each group of relatives is demanding $20 million in compensatory and punitive damages for “terrorism, war crimes and wrongful death.” Reiter told Goodman that “when you put money into the hands of terrorists, when you put guns into the hands of terrorists, then you are legally responsible for the atrocities, the murders and the tortures which those terrorists commit.”

In its capacity as a Chiquita stockholder, the Service Employees International Union sued the corporation’s board of directors on Dec. 14 for having “instituted a corporate culture that encouraged unlawful and irresponsible activity.” Analysts say that stockholders have good reason to fear that burgeoning legal assaults threaten the company’s solvency.

The Chiquita case exemplifies U.S. government sensitivity to corporate priorities. Homeland Security chief Michael Chertoff, then head of the Justice Department’s criminal investigation division, headed a team that met with Chiquita board members on April 24, 2003, to discuss the AUC payments. Regarding the matter as “complicated,” he promised further study, according to the Washington Post. Payoffs continued.

Board member Roderick Hills, once Securities and Exchange Commission head and Chertoff’s former law partner, was present.

In Colombia, after the deal was announced in March, Attorney General Mario Iguaran demanded the extradition of eight Chiquita officials. But under the U.S.-Chiquita deal, names remain secret. Observers suggest that extradition is unlikely, given the AUC’s tight connections with Colombia’s political establishment and President Alvaro Uribe’s dependence on the Bush administration.

For Terry Collingsworth, “This is a landmark case, maybe the biggest terrorism case in history. In terms of casualties, it’s the size of three World Trade Center attacks.” Paul Wolf adds, “Chiquita’s victims are living in dire poverty.”

atwhit @megalink.net

On the Bali conference and building a new society

Thu, 20 Dec 2007 05:33:00 +0000

Havana, Dec. 17, 2007

The news about the Bali conference confirms the importance of the international agreements and the necessity of taking them very seriously.

On that small island of Indonesia, there was a meeting of many heads of government of countries of the so-called Third World. They are fighting for their development and they demand fair treatment, financial resources and transfer of technology from the industrialized nations that were also represented there.

The UN Secretary General, faced with the tenacious obstruction by the United States in the midst of the 190 representatives meeting there, and after 12 days of negotiations, stated that the human species could disappear as a result of climate change.

That declaration transformed the conference into a shouting match. On the 12th day of pointless persuasive efforts, the American representative, Paula Dobriansky, after sighing deeply, said: “We join

the consensus.” It is obvious that the United States made moves to get around its isolated position, even though it didn’t change the empire’s dismal intentions one iota.

The grand show began: Canada and Japan attached themselves immediately to the American coat-tails, confronting the rest of the countries, which were demanding serious compromises on the emissions of gases that are causing climate change.

Everything had been planned ahead of time between the NATO allies and the powerful empire, which, in one fell swoop of deceit, agreed to negotiate during 2008 in Hawaii, U.S. territory, for a new treaty project that would be presented and approved at the Copenhagen Conference in Denmark in 2009 — this would take the place of the Kyoto Protocol, which is due to expire in 2012.

Europe played the role of savior of the world. Gordon Brown spoke, as did Angela Merkel and other leaders of the European countries, requesting international gratitude. What an excellent present for Christmas and the New Year! Just as if we were living in the best of all worlds, none of the eulogists mentioned the tens of millions of poor people who continue to die of diseases and hunger each year.

The Group of 77, which includes 132 countries that are struggling to develop themselves, had achieved consensus to demand from the industrialized countries a reduction of the gases that cause climate change — 20-40 percent below 1990 levels by the year 2020, and from 60-70 lower by the year 2050, something which is technically possible. Furthermore, they were demanding that sufficient funds be allocated to transfer the necessary technology to the Third World.

We cannot forget that those greenhouse gases lead to heat waves, desertification, the melting of the glaciers and the rising levels of the seas, which could cover entire countries or a large part of them.

The other industrialized nations share the U.S. idea of converting foods into fuels for luxury cars, and other wasteful practices of these consumer societies.

On that very same Saturday, Dec. 15, it was announced that the President of the United States had asked the Senate for $696 billion for the military budget for the 2008 fiscal year; in this amount, $189 billion was earmarked for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

I harbor no illusions.

My most profound conviction is that the answers to the current problems of Cuban society — which possesses an average educational level close to Grade 12, almost a million university graduates and the real possibility for its citizens to become educated with no discrimination whatsoever — require more varieties of answers for each concrete problem than those contained on a chess board. We cannot ignore one single detail, and we are not dealing with an easy path, if the intelligence of a human being in a revolutionary society truly is to prevail over instinct.

My fundamental duty is not to cling to positions, much less to stand in the way of younger persons, but it is to bring experience and ideas whose modest value comes from the exceptional era that I had the privilege of living in.

Reprinted, slightly abridged, from Granma. Translated by W.T. Whitney Jr.

ANC meet: South Africa at crossroads

Wed, 19 Dec 2007 06:16:00 +0000

POLOKWANE, South Africa — Progress was a central theme of South African President Thabo Mbeki’s address to the 52nd National Conference of the African National Congress, which opened here Dec. 16, in the capital of South Africa’s northern province of Limpopo. Over 4,000 delegates were attending.

Mbeki’s wide-ranging address, which has been given scarce attention in the Western press, however was preceded by hot debate that rocked the football-field-sized white tent housing the historic gathering. On the surface at least, the issue was whether an electronic or paper ballot would be used in convention elections. However underlying it are deep-set divisions causing many a delegate to exclaim, “This is not the ANC we know.”

At the center of this debate, in the opinion of some, is the trajectory of South Africa’s democratic revolution: in what direction the country should go and how to chart the course. Communist Party leader Blade Nzimande, in an op ed published the day of the congress, said as much, claiming the very nature of the country’s orientation was hanging in the balance.

Curiously, however, the main policy planks of the ANC seem to hold a wide consensus among all parties, particularly after a conference several months ago adopted a stronger public works orientation and favored greater state intervention. The issue, then, seems to be dissatisfaction with the rate of change, the method of its implementation, style of leadership, democracy and the age-old problems of raw opportunism, thirst for power and ego. These have combined to produce a pronounced factional situation, one that if not checked could pose a grave danger to the country’s future.

An example of this is that in the opening session, forces siding with ANC presidential candidate Jacob Zuma had proposed using a paper ballot only, opposing a recommendation by the outgoing executive committee of a combined used of both paper and electronic methods to reconfirm results. After much raucous back and forth, with delegates seizing microphones and the chair of the session virtually losing control of the proceedings, delegates later in a closed session agreed to use paper.

Mbeki touched on some of these issues in a two-and-one-half hour presentation that was long on substance and short on style, which charted the achievements of the ANC since its last national meeting. Much attention was paid to South Africa’s steady economic growth rate over the last several years, with the country achieving records in all fields of the economy save agriculture. In Mbeki’s opinion, the essentials for continued progress are in place. On the other hand, all would acknowledge that these growth rates have failed to dent unemployment or adequately redress the housing and health crisis. These issues clearly were among the chief concerns of delegates.

Mbeki insisted that a campaign of lies had been undertaken by some, a campaign that misled and confused many. He acknowledged that problems in the alliance with the Congress of South African Trade Unions and the South African Communist Party had not been handled well, including the much-debated issue of socialism and the national democratic revolution.

The second day, Dec. 17, began with a continuation of the previous day’s acrimony and two mid-day rallies by the respective camps. A credentials report given later in the day seemed to calm nerves, and nominations for top officers concluded the day. Voting was to begin Dec. 18. In another development, delegates agreed to expand the National Executive of the ANC by 20 and to mandate a 50/50 gender balance in it.

As delegates cast their ballots both sides seem sure of victory, with many claiming that, at the end of the day, it’s each voter, their ballot, and their conscience. However, in light of the intensity of this internal struggle one wonders whether, whoever wins, South Africa loses.

joesims @politicalaffairs.net

New book eloquently describes tragedy of Cuban exile

Wed, 12 Dec 2007 12:02:00 +0000

Book Review Love, Loss and Longing: The Impact of U.S. Travel Policy on Cuban-American Families By Jeanne Parr Lemkau and David L. Strug Latin American Working Group Fund/Washington Office on Latin America, 2007 Softcover, 49 pages, $20 For people you know who are impervious to what you tell them about the triumphs of the Cuban Revolution or the evils of U.S. Cuba policy, but who have good hearts and can be moved by stories of human tragedy and triumph, here is an excellent holiday present. 'Love, Loss and Longing,” written by Jeanne Parr Lemkau and David L. Strug and copiously illustrated with photographs by Nestor Hernandez Jr. and Juan E. Gonzalez Lopez, is neither a compendium of statistics nor a dry narrative of events, but a series of short, colorful accounts of what U.S. Cuba policy does to Cuban immigrants in the USA and their relatives, both here and back on the island.

Supporters of the Cuban Revolution, like this reviewer, will not agree with some of the critical comments made about Cuba’s socialist government, especially in letters from various politicians that are reproduced in the book. But the book has a worthy didactic and tactical political purpose, which is to show Americans very vividly how the U.S.-imposed blockade and travel restrictions, and especially new restrictions on Cuban-American travel to see relatives in Cuba that Bush imposed in 2004, are hurting perfectly innocent people. And it speaks well of the majority of the people of the USA that the government can only sell them on its anti-Cuba policies by claiming to be 'helping' the very people it is harming. A concise introduction by Wayne Smith, President Jimmy Carter's former envoy to Havana (and someone who is now working to end the blockade), deftly sets out the legal and political issues surrounding the restrictions on Cuban-Americans visiting their relatives in Cuba. The book then continues as a series of illustrated vignettes about how families in Cuba and the United States are hurt by this intransigent and vicious policy.

The material was gathered through interviews with 53 Cuban immigrants and Cuban-Americans in the United States. Each of them tells a story of blocked or restricted opportunities to visit loved ones in Cuba, or to send old or sick relatives needed supplies. Some of the stories are heartbreaking. A soldier who fought at Falluja in Iraq is not allowed by the Bush administration to go to Cuba to visit his young sons, and asks what would happen if he were to now be killed in battle after this cruel denial. Marisela, age 54, is not allowed to visit her elderly, sick father in Cuba, and can not send him a supply of adult diapers because our government in Washington has decided that these are not 'medicine,' or to send money to the people who were giving him round-the-clock nursing care because they are not 'family.'

Cuba has a good system for caring for the elderly and infirm, but that is not the point. Marisela wanted to help her father as an expression of love, not because he was lying unattended in Cuba, but our government would not let her. Her father became despondent and died. Marlene, 39, of Miami, is the single mother of a 4-year-old. Her 74-year-old mother in the city of Guantanamo needs an operation but is afraid to undergo it unless her daughter can be with her. Again, I would trust the Cuban health care system in such a situation more than I would trust the U.S. system, but any elderly person undergoing surgery with full anesthesia is at risk.

So why can't the old woman have her daughter with her holding her hand? Because U.S. law now does not allow Marlene to visit her mother more than once in three years. She would go anyway, in violation of the law, but she is afraid that if she were prosecuted her child would be taken away from her. What a horrible situation to put a loving daughter and mother into! The attitudes of the interviewees toward the Cuban Revolution are varied, but that is not the point. All of them feel they are now being oppressed not by the Cuban government, but by Washington.

For us on the left, these stories are also a reminder that the 'Cuban exile' community is not monolithic. It also shows the Miami hard-liners are less and less representative of the people for whom they claim to speak, but whose real interests they so cynically betray. The book can be ordered at .

Scofflaw UnitedHealth pushes UK privatization

Fri, 07 Dec 2007 07:22:00 +0000

UnitedHealth, the discredited scofflaw U.S. health insurance company, just paid $12 million in fines to 37 state governments for its illegal administrative practices. The settlement followed years of legal problems. This hasn’t stopped UnitedHealth from seeking to expand its profiteering in the United Kingdom.

One of the company’s senior executives was an advisor to the most recent effort by big business to privatize the British National Health Service. The recent change in prime ministers has not stopped this anti-people effort. But previous efforts, while disrupting the health service system, have not been totally successful, and the struggle continues.

Privatization debate

The failure of privatization schemes in England is forcing the Gordon Brown government to take another look at this backward method of “saving money.” Brown promised some changes from the Tony Blair regime.

The information spin about these privatization measures is very contradictory, but one thing is for sure, the patients at the National Health Service are not happy with the way the NHS has been functioning. That unhappiness is not what many right-wing candidates and other politicians in the U.S. are assuming. There no desire to scrap socialized medicine in the U.K. On the contrary, the issue is how to make the public system work better.

Mixed message

A recent BBC report headlined “NHS Private Sector Deals Scrapped” said, “The government is rowing back on its use of private sector for NHS care by scrapping a series of projects.”

Brown’s health secretary, Alan Johnson, is quoted as saying a third wave of use of independent treatment centers would not take place. The report cites Wave Two as being too costly to the health service. Use of these nongovernmental centers was meant to deal with the waiting periods to get services. By all accounts it failed.

But Johnson makes it clear that the Brown government still intends to use the private sector to offer government-paid-for services. For example, while the government has stopped use of some private centers, it gave the green light to 10 centers, joining 40 others.

The BBC report quoted Dr. Jonathan Fielden, chair of a British Medical Association committee: “It’s a crying shame that so much money has been wasted on this political initiative when the NHS could have achieved better value for the money.”

On the other hand, a group called the NHS Partners Network, set up by Tony Blair, expressed disappointed that some of the private clinics would be cut. They clearly are a lobbying group representing the for-profit forces seeking to dismantle the NHS.

Which way will Brown go?

A highly controversial report by Brown’s health minister, Lord Darzi, “A Framework for Action,” is being challenged by the London Health Emergency organization, which is very skeptical of the privatization that the Labor Party has been pursuing. They fear that this report is a Trojan horse for more privatization. For example, the Kingston Hospitals, part of the NHS, is going ahead with its plan to hand over its entire elective surgical operation to the private sector, using the Darzi report as its rationale.

UnitedHealth connection

It turns out that UnitedHealth is a direct adviser to Darzi. Simon Stevens, a senior officer of UnitedHealth, was also a senior adviser to Tony Blair. While paying millions in fines for its scofflaw activities, UnitedHealth registered a $3.4 billion profit this year, up from last year’s $2.98 billion.

The Darzi strategy looks to privatize major sections of primary care throughout England. Groups like London Health Emergency have other ideas. Stay tuned.

Australia signs Kyoto pact on gas emissions

Fri, 07 Dec 2007 06:55:00 +0000

As one of his very first official actions Dec. 3, Kevin Rudd, Australia’s newly sworn-in prime minister, signed the instrument of ratification for the Kyoto Protocol limiting greenhouse gas emissions. The ratification will come into force in 90 days.

Rudd was elected prime minister Nov. 24 as the candidate of Australia’s Labor Party. His election was a stunning defeat for Prime Minister John Howard, a right-wing ally of President Bush.

Australia’s ratification of the Kyoto accords is significant because the United States and Australia have the highest per capita emissions of any country. Until Rudd’s election upset, the refusal of both countries to ratify the Kyoto accords has limited their impact and effectiveness.

Rudd’s action puts additional pressure on the U.S. government to acknowledge the scientific consensus on global climate change and to participate in international negotiations for future climate change agreements. It also sets the stage for the negotiations in Bali, Indonesia, sponsored by the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change.

The Bali conference, which opened on the same day as Rudd’s action and runs through Dec. 14, is discussing the accumulating evidence of rapid climate change and the need for new negotiations on an international accord to become effective after the Kyoto Protocol expires in 2012.

The conference is set to hear remarks by Ban Ki-moon, the UN secretary-general, calling for a breakthrough leading to “a comprehensive agreement that tackles climate change on all fronts — including adaptation, mitigation, deforestation, clean technologies and resource mobilization.”

Many heads of state will be gathered in Bali, along with other government officials responsible for environmental policy and scientists. Though the conference is not expected to reach any definitive agreements, it will lay the groundwork for future negotiations.

Rajendra Pachauri, chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), said, “We, the human race, have substantially altered the earth’s atmosphere. In 2005, the concentration of carbon dioxide exceeded the natural range that has existed over 650,000 years. Eleven of the warmest years since instrumental records have been kept occurred during the last twelve years. Therefore climate change is accelerating.”

The IPCC, a UN-sponsored scientific panel, along with Al Gore, recently won the Nobel Peace Prize for its work on global climate change.

Difficult issues face the negotiators — how to implement mandatory limits on carbon dioxide emissions, how severe those limits should be, how much to rely on so-called market solutions, how to reconcile the wide divergence of per capita emissions between developed and developing countries, and how rapidly action should be undertaken, among others.

But scientific evidence shows that climate change is real, is caused in large part by human activity and is accelerating rapidly. Climate change interacts with water shortages, desertification, escalating oil and natural gas prices, and poverty to cause escalating environmental problems all over the world.

marcbrodine @inlandnet.com

Medical students rally for World AIDS Day

Fri, 07 Dec 2007 06:24:00 +0000

CHICAGO — Wearing white lab coats and red armbands, dozens of American Medical Student Association members from schools across the Midwest rallied here Nov. 30, urging presidential candidates to back expanded, comprehensive programs to fight AIDS and reject President Bush’s abstinence-only focus. The students also marched to the Illinois Republican Party offices. Nationwide rallies took place in San Francisco and Washington, D.C., on Dec. 1.

The medical students called for reform of the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR), now up for reauthorization. Kirsten Austad, 23, an AMSA intern, said, “As medical students we have an invested responsibility to advocate for AIDS relief, especially as future doctors.”

The student medical association is urging Congress to approve at least $50 billion over the next five years to fight global AIDS and $8 billion to train and retain health care workers. AMSA says Bush’s allocation of one-third of prevention funding to abstinence-until-marriage programs needs to be replaced with comprehensive, integrated and evidence-based HIV prevention programs.

A spokesperson for presidential candidate Barack Obama addressed the rally, commending the medical students for promoting public health and pledging Obama’s support for prevention education.

Jing Luo, a second-year medical student at the University of Illinois at Chicago, said, “This virus knows no boundaries and recognizes no borders. You might think that it’s cold here in Chicago next to Lake Michigan, but I’m willing to bet that it’s much colder for those afflicted with AIDS in the sub-Saharan African country of Malawi.

“It’s much colder for married women in India or Tajikistan who can do nothing to protect themselves from HIV-positive husbands,” he said. “And it’s definitely a much colder world for those children born of HIV-positive mothers who find themselves alive in a village so far away from a paved road that no health care worker could possibly bring the life-saving medications that they desperately need.”

It is estimated that some 33 million people are living with AIDS worldwide and between 33 and 46 million have HIV. The Joint United Nations Program on HIV/AIDS and the World Health Organization estimate that AIDS has killed more than 25 million people since it was first recognized in 1981, making it one of the most destructive epidemics in recorded history. The epidemic claimed an estimated 2.8 million lives in 2005 of which more than half a million were children. Despite recent improved access to treatment and care, access to medication is underfunded and extremely limited in many developing countries.

Joseph Tasosa, a University of Chicago medical student from Zimbabwe, said he has aunts, uncles and cousins back home who are living with the disease. “There isn’t anyone that doesn’t know anyone who hasn’t died from AIDS,” said Tasosa. “I’m lucky because none of my immediate family is infected.”

Cathy Christeller, executive director of the Chicago Women’s AIDS Project, said real prevention for girls, including access to education and anti-violence protection, is needed, not abstinence-only programs advocated by the Bush administration.

She said many women and girls around the world are harmed by the restrictions of the current PEPFAR and called Bush’s funding proposals inadequate.

Matt Sharp, a 20-year HIV survivor and director of education with Test Positive Aware Network in Chicago, said, “I am lucky to be alive, but as an AIDS activist I have fought hard for universal access to treatment. We know it’s successful where there is funding to support it, and well-funded treatment can turn the tide of death and despair.”

“The pandemic is not over on this World AIDS Day, and with PEPFAR, putting money where it’s needed really works,” Sharp said. “Congress needs to be committed, not just on paper. No more ignorance and blatant disregard. Now is not the time to sit back. We must demand an increase for everyone impacted by HIV/AIDS globally and here at home.”

plozano @pww.org

After elections, Venezuelans vow to press ahead

Fri, 07 Dec 2007 05:56:00 +0000

The campaign to reshape Venezuela’s 1999 constitution toward a socialist future ended Dec. 2 in a narrow defeat for the government of President Hugo Chavez.

Hours after polls closed on the vote for two referendums that collectively represented 69 changes to the constitution, the country’s National Electoral Council announced that in each case about 51 percent of the electorate had voted no, and 49 percent yes. A low turnout rate of 56 percent contributed significantly to the defeat, analysts said.

On national television, Chavez praised Venezuela’s democratic institutions, accepted the “photo finish” and asked that “roads toward violence and destabilization be forgotten.”

Noting that a long battle still lay ahead, he said, “This is not any defeat — this is another ‘for now,’” a reference to his use of those words on national television en route to jail in 1992 after a failed military coup. He was elected president in 1998 and re-elected twice after that.

While Chavez acknowledged that more needs to be done to convince Venezuelans, particularly those who abstained from the vote, that his “21st-century socialism” is in their interests, he assured television viewers that “the rhythm and the government’s program will continue on course.”

Some of Chavez’s supporters were buoyed by the fact that half of the participating electorate, or about 4 million people, had for the first time explicitly affirmed their support for a socialist path.

Oscar Figuera, general secretary of the Communist Party of Venezuela, said the country’s wealthy oligarchy waged an “infernal” media campaign depicting Chavez’s proposals as “a supposed threat to property, to the family and to religion,” preying upon “ancestral fears and historical prejudices.” These fears, combined with some voter uncertainties about the details of the constitutional reform measures, neutralized some of Chavez’s otherwise enthusiastic supporters, he said.

Election observers from 39 countries, including several from the NAACP and the National Lawyers Guild in the U.S., testified to the calm and transparency of the vote.

The referendum campaign had been advancing since December 2006 when Chavez won re-election with a 63 percent majority. On Aug. 15, he submitted 33 constitutional changes to the National Assembly, which subsequently added 36 revisions of its own. Opposition parties were absent from the Assembly’s deliberations, having withdrawn from the 2005 parliamentary elections.

During the campaign, the Venezuelan, U.S. and European corporate-dominated media spearheaded attacks on the proposals, particularly those removing presidential term limits. They did so although democratic heads of state worldwide take for granted open-ended possibilities for re-election and few face the contingency, as Chavez does, of a recall vote.

The corporate media and right-wing forces also hammered on provisions to let the government take emergency measures toward the media in a time of crisis. Chavez’s supporters, however, pointed to media complicity in the 2002 U.S.-backed coup against his democratically elected government.

Largely left unmentioned in such media attacks were measures that would have benefited most Venezuelans, including cutting the standard workweek from 44 to 36 hours, providing social security to workers in the “informal economy,” granting homeowners bankruptcy protection, guaranteeing free education, and extending new rights to Afro-Venezuelans, gays and lesbians.

“Popular power,” Venezuela’s grassroots democracy, also stood to gain under Chavez’s proposals, with 5 percent of the national budget going to community councils and women’s, student and workers’ councils. Agrarian reform would have been streamlined, the central bank would have become a state function, and worker-controlled factories would have received additional support.

The corporate media’s focus on Chavez’s supposed use of constitutional changes to cement personal power was incessant, however, and it underscored Venezuela’s sharp class divide. His policies were denounced at raucous, occasionally violent demonstrations staged by middle- and upper-income sectors of the population and students from mostly private universities.

Retired Gen. Raul Baduel, formerly a Chavez supporter and defense minister, appeared Nov. 5 at an elaborately staged press conference to denounce Chavez’s supposed power grab and express reservations about socialism. A recent article on aporrea.org by Jose Sant Roz sketches out Baduel’s ties with U.S. intelligence officials, cultivated over a two-year period.

Among other manifestations of right-wing skullduggery was a brief CNN image of Chavez flashing across television screens over the words, “Who killed him?” The government also obtained a videotape of a meeting in a Caracas Catholic church from which the call went out for “pockets of resistance” in the event of a “yes” victory.

On Nov. 28, lawyer Eva Golinger publicized a communication from U.S. Embassy official Michael Steere to CIA head Michael Hayden. The letter, supposedly waylaid by Venezuelan counterintelligence, described U.S. support in 2007 to the tune of $8 million for opposition demonstrations, literature, anti-Chavez media coverage, student organizing, and artificial food shortages. It called for the creation of dissident military enclaves situated in U.S. bases along Venezuela’s border with Colombia and in Curacao.

Relying on documents provided by the National Security Archives, the Washington Post reported Dec. 1 that from 2003 on the Bush administration has supplied Venezuelan university students with $216,000 for “conflict resolution” and “democracy promotion.”

Commenting on the referendum vote, the Mexico City daily La Jornada noted that President Chavez has another five years left under his current term and that “Chavismo comes out of the crisis strengthened and adorned with a moral authority that its adversaries have to acknowledge.”

atwhit @megalink.net

Bali and Beyond: A New Green Economics

Wed, 05 Dec 2007 05:59:00 +0000

We have read the science. Global warming is real, and we are a prime cause.

We have heard the warnings. Unless we act, now, we face serious consequences. Polar ice may melt. Sea levels will rise. A third of our plant and animal species could vanish. There will be famine around the world, particularly in Africa and Central Asia.

Largely lost in the debate is the good news. We can do something about this-more easily, and at far less cost, than most of us imagine.

These are the conclusions of the latest report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the scientific body that recently shared the Nobel peace prize. It is sobering reading, but we must not miss its optimistic bottom line: to repeat, we can do this-in ways that are both affordable and promote prosperity.

This week, world leaders gather for the summit in Bali. We need a break-through: a comprehensive climate change agreement that all nations can embrace. We must set an agenda-a roadmap to a better future, coupled with a tight time-line that produces a deal by 2009.

We do not yet know what such an accord might look like. Should it tax greenhouse gas emissions, or create an international carbon-trading system? Should it provide mechanisms for preventing de-forestation, accounting for 20 percent of CO2 emissions, or help less developed nations adapt to the inevitable effects of global warming-effects weighing disproportionately on them? Should it emphasize conservation and renewable fuels, like biomass or nuclear power, and make provisions for transferring new “green” technologies around the world?

The answer, of course, is some variation on all the above-and much, much more. If the negotiations bog down in the sheer breadth and complexity of the issues, we lose our most precious resource: time. In this, it helps to have a vision of how the future might look, if we succeed. That is not merely a cleaner, healthier, more secure world for all. Handled correctly, our fight against global warming could, in fact, set the stage for an eco-friendly transformation of the global economy-one that spurs growth and development rather than crimps it, as many national leaders fear.

We have witnessed three economic transformations in the past century. First came the industrial revolution, then the technology revolution, followed by our modern era of globalization. We stand, now, at the threshold of another great change: the age of green economics.

The evidence is all about us, often in unexpected places. Visiting South America recently, I saw how Brazil has become one of the biggest players in green economics, drawing some 44 percent of its energy needs from renewable fuels. World average: 13 percent. The figure in Europe: 6.1 percent.

Much is made of the fact that China is poised to surpass the United States as the world’s biggest emitter of greenhouse gases. Less well-known, however, are its more recent efforts to confront grave environmental problems. China will invest $10 billion in renewable energy this year, second only to Germany. It has become a world leader in solar and wind power. At a recent summit of East Asian leaders in Singapore , Premier Wen Jiabao pledged to reduce energy consumption (per unit of GDP) by 20 percent over five years-not so far removed, in spirit, from Europe’s commitment to a 20 percent reduction in greenhouse gas emissions by 2020.

This is the way of the future. According to some estimates, growth in global energy demand could be cut in half over the next 15 years simply by deploying existing technologies yielding a return on investment of 10 percent or more. The new IPCC report lays out the very practical ways, from tougher standards for air conditioners and refrigerators to improved efficiency in industry, building and transport. It estimates that overcoming serious climate may cost as little as 0.1 percent of global GDP a year over the next three decades.

Growth need not suffer and in fact may accelerate. Research by the University of California at Berkeley indicates that the United States could create 300,000 jobs if 20 percent of electricity needs were met by renewables. A leading Munich consulting firm predicts that more people will be employed in Germany’s enviro-technology industry than in the auto industry by the end of the next decade. The UN Environment Programme estimates that global investment in zero-greenhouse energy will reach $1.9 trillion by 2020-seed money for a wholesale reconfiguration of global industry.

Already, businesses in many parts of the world are demanding clear public policies on climate change, regardless of what form they might take-regulation, emissions caps, efficiency guidelines. The reason is obvious. Business needs ground rules. Helping to create them is very much the role of the United Nations.

Our job, in Bali and beyond, is to shape this nascent global transformation-to open the door to the age of green economics and green development. What’s missing is a global framework within which we, the world’s peoples, can coordinate our efforts to fight climate change.

The scientists have done their job. Now it’s up to the politicians. Bali is a test of their leadership. What are we waiting for?

The writer is Secretary-General of the United Nations