People Before Profit blog

Britain: Disabled target Atos on eve of Paralympics

Thu, 30 Aug 2012 13:03:00 +0000

BRITAIN --The Paralympic Games' slogan is "inspire a generation" but life under Atos is killing us, disability campaigners warned today in a desperate plea to end its "tick-box tests."

[The multinational corporation Atos is a major sponsor of the Olympics and Paralympic Games. Atos Healthcare, a division of Atos, has been severely criticized for its management of the Work Capability Assessment for the UK government's Department of Work and Pensions.]

Disabled People Against Cuts demonstrators carried a coffin outside the multinational's London headquarters, reading messages to Atos and memorials for people who have died after being subjected to the government's hated work capability assessments (WCA) that are carried out by the corporation.

Meanwhile in Cardiff hundreds of protesters held a mass "die-in" around welfare pioneer Aneurin Bevan*'s statue, representing disabled people's deaths from stress, exhaustion or even suicide after dealing with Atos.

In April Citizens Advice confirmed "a number of cases" where people had died shortly after Atos ruled them fit for work, while more than a thousand people in its "work-related activity group" -- involving reduced payments and work-focused interviews -- in last July's trials had died by March this year.

Ex-serviceman Jonothan Williams said he was planning to turn out in his old combat jacket and beret, medals and all.

"I'll do this to show that veterans, those people (David Cameron) calls 'heroes' in Parliament, are being 'Atossed off' as a thank you for their service and injuries," he said.

The group's Cardiff convener Dr Liza van Zyle said they were from many different backgrounds but were all victims of Atos's assessments.

"Our futures have been destroyed, and we face homelessness and destitution.

"When people are driven to destitution because their benefits are stopped, some commit suicide, some sink into further ill-health - and some decide enough is enough and fight back," she said.

The International Paralympic Committee's sponsorship is worth an estimated £100m [$159m] over the next decade, yet subsidiary Atos Origin makes that much in a single year under its WCA contract with the Department of Work and Pensions.

People who score less than 15 points on its computerized checklist are automatically deemed "fit for work" and lose their incapacity benefit.

Trials last year saw a 70 per cent drop in full benefits and a 30 per cent drop in "unfit for work" assessments, leading critics to accuse Atos of deliberately driving down payouts.

The company has rejected the claim, but earlier this month a Channel 4 TV program secretly filmed Atos trainers telling assessors that an approval rate above 13 per cent was "too high."

Since its launch, more than 300,000 people have appealed against their decisions and 38 per cent have won -- with a judicial review on human rights grounds now waiting in the wings.

An Atos spokeswoman told the Morning Star that successful appeals did not mean their assessments were wrong.

*Editor's note: Aneurin Bevan was a member of the Welsh Labor Party, the son of a coal miner, a lifelong champion of social justice and the rights of working people. He was a long-time Member of Parliament, one of the leaders of the Labor Party's left wing, and of left-wing British thought generally. His most famous accomplishment came when, as Minister of Health in the post WWII Attlee government, he spearheaded the establishment of the National Health Service, which provides medical care free at point-of-need to all Britons.

Photo: A memorial service was held outside the front doors of Paralympic sponsor Atos to coincide with the opening day of the London Paralympic Games. Disabled People Against Cuts.

Reposted from Morning Star.

Portugal’s optimistic prime minister "on another planet"

Wed, 29 Aug 2012 14:08:00 +0000

Portugal's prime minister is "living on another planet" unions said recently after Carlos Passos Coelho predicted that investment in the crisis-hit economy would bounce back next year.

The right-wing premier's upbeat assessment of the country's prospects came after fresh data showed unemployment has hit a record 15% in the second quarter, and the country's economy contracted for a seventh quarter with industrial production down 4.4% in June, twice the pace of the euro area.

The government, which has been implementing a brutal austerity programme under a 78-billion-euro EU-IMF bailout, forecasts unemployment will increase to 15.5% for all of 2012 and to 15.9% in 2013. And that's just the official figures - the true level is 22% say unions.

Passos Coelho, together with his colleague in Madrid, Mariano Rajoy, is one of the Eurozone's austerity zealots. He has been pushing through a punishing programme of cuts and deregulatory reforms hurting low and middle incomes hardest.

Yet, in his autumn statement this week, the prime minister predicted that that 2013 would be a 'year of investment."

Unions responded that this was an "over-optimistic vision of a prime minister who lives on another planet that is nothing to like ours."

"Obviously, this year we will see a significant downturn of the economy and there is nothing to suggest that next year the economy will grow. Rather, we have a stagnant economy," said Arménio Carlos, leader of the CGTP trade union confederation.

The CGTP General Secretary predicted that unless government policy changes drastically, "there won't be any more jobs created, nor mechanisms for the development of the economy and there will be no answers to the great problems of the country."

"We do not have blue skies and the sun's not shining. The sky of Portugal is still full of black clouds," he concluded.

Austerity hurts the people

Austerity measures are having a lethal effect on the Portuguese people and the economy.

Since taking power last summer, Passos Coelho's PSD/PP coalition government has cut public sector workers' jobs, wages and working conditions and reduced welfare benefits. A cut to the traditional summer and Christmas bonuses has robbed workers of an equivalent of one month's pay-on average about €1,600. In addition, certain holidays have been scrapped, limits on working hours have been removed and it's now easier for employers to hire and fire.

Pioneering health and social programmes, such as the country's drug rehabilitation strategy, a model for other countries, face collapse amid unsustainable budget cuts. And among the unemployed the risk of social exclusion is serious - 1 out of 2 jobless have no access to unemployment benefits.

Austerity hurts growth

Pulling down growth rates is a sharp fall in domestic demand. Consumer spending has been hit by wage cuts (in the first five months of this year state labour costs fell 7.2%), record unemployment and a rise in VAT. And the latest projections for the Portuguese Banco de Portugal point to a fall in gross fixed capital formation, the main component of investment, by 12.7% this year, after a 11.3% fall in 2011. Private sector investment is set to shrink 16.7% this year following a 15.8% drop in 2011. In some sectors investment has dropped as much as 30%. Exports won't take up the slack as they are expected to rise by half as strongly (3.5%) as they did last year (7.6%)

The UGT leader Joao Proenca, who has until recently been less critical of the government than the more militant CGTP, weighed in against the prime minister too.

He said that Passos Coelho was trying to convince the Portuguese that the 'reduction of the deficit is a measure that will cause miraculous economic growth." But he added: "With the crisis in Spain and Italy and Europe with virtually no economic growth, investing exclusively in export growth through low wages" was . No concrete measures have been announced for economic growth and curb unemployment, he said, adding that wage cuts would destroy economic growth and jobs.

Protests continue

Hundreds of thousands have protested against austerity and deregulatory labour reforms over the past year, organised by unions in two general strikes, and independently through social media networks.

In early June tens of thousands of protesters marched in the capital Lisbon and the second city Oporto against the labour reforms. The protests were organised by the trade unions days after parliament had approved them.

On June 18 ferry services in Lisbon were stopped by a one day strike, and on Tuesday, striking dockworkers crippled Portugal's main harbours.

Public transport was hit by strikes in Oporto on July 27, and again on Wednesday, a 24-hour strike hit rail and bus services in Lisbon and the northern city of Oporto.

Last month, on July 11 and 12, doctors and hospital staff held a two-day strike in opposition to a budgetary squeeze that has cut back access to health care for thousands.

Unions have been arguing for more progressive and humane alternatives to paying down the deficit and finding funds for investment and growth, including demanding a contribution to fixing the economy from those that can afford it.

This week the CGTP reiterated the demand for an increase in taxation on dividends and profits from stock-market listed companies. It also argues for a rise in the minimum wage to boost domestic spending, a reduction in working hours without loss of pay to increase employment and a targeted programme of investment in agriculture, fisheries and mining to improve the trade balance.

Unreal optimism

Still, who is listening? The financial markets appear to share the same dangerously unreal faith in neo-liberal economic self-flagellation as the prime minister.

Financial news service Bloomberg reported Thursday that credit-default swaps on Portugal had dropped as low as 725 basis points, from 1,515 in January and 1,237 in May. "The contracts have fallen by the most of any government this year and by more than every nation except Ireland in the past month. The implied probability of Portugal defaulting on its debt has declined to 48 percent from 73 percent as optimism that spending cuts and tax increases will get finances back on track outweighs a shrinking economy and rising unemployment," the article stated.

Pretty much every indicator in the real economy suggests there should be deep pessimism about austerity doing anything other create conditions for yet more austerity. That the banksters and the political leaders in the West like Passos Coelho should be optimistic shows just how out of touch they are.

Photo: This article originally appeared in Revolting Europe. Photo: Prime Minister Coehlo, via Wikipedia.

Colombian government, pressured, will negotiate with FARC

Wed, 29 Aug 2012 12:29:00 +0000

Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos on Aug. 27 confirmed an earlier Telesur report that representatives of his government and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) signed an agreement that day in Havana that peace talks would begin in October in Oslo, Norway. The parties had been talking in secret for two years about ending 50 years of brutal armed conflict. The smaller National Liberation Army (ELN) will be joining the peace process.

Santos identified three assumptions behind upcoming negotiations: Avoid errors of past talks; work toward ending, not prolonging, conflict and continuing military operations. Negotiators in Oslo were assigned six as yet undisclosed agenda items. Colombian ex-president César Gaviria will mediate talks that will eventually return to Havana.

Santos went to Cuba in March ostensibly to tell Cuban President Raul Castro of Cuba's exclusion from the OAS summit he was hosting in Cartagena in April. But, joined by Norwegian and Venezuelan representatives, they secretly planned the just-concluded preparatory talks.

The government team included Santos' national security advisor, his environmental minister, and his brother Enrique Santos Calderón. On hand for the FARC were military chiefs Jaime Alberto Parra and Andrés París and international relations specialists Rodrigo Granda and Marcos Calarcá. From 2002-2010, Cuba hosted talks between the ELN and Colombian government that were unsuccessful.

Rumors had been circulating. An interviewer recently asked Communist leader Carlos Lozano about Santos' outreach to the FARC. On August 19 ex-President Álvaro Uribe pronounced that "negotiating with the FARC terrorist group in Cuba [is] incomprehensible."

Yet the stage had been set. On taking office two years ago Santos announced he would dialogue with the FARC. In June the Congress approved constitutional reform opening the way to negotiation. Guerrilla leaders giving up armed struggle would suffer no penalties. Mechanisms were set for prioritizing cases of human rights violations.

In August 2011, FARC leader Alfonso Cano reiterated FARC inclination toward negotiation. The FARC early in 2012 indicated it would no longer kidnap civilians in order to raise money and later released its last captive soldiers and police. Current FARC leader Timoleón Jiménez on August 14 reasserted FARC desire for peace. But there would be no surrender; he envisioned instead "a scenario in which the Colombian people can once more speak out and at last obtain justice for all the barbarism they've suffered."

A recent public opinion poll confined to cities showed 74 percent of responders opting for dialogue. And "if the insurgency negotiates today it's because they can negotiate," opines analyst José Antonio Gutiérrez. The FARC "has the capacity to operate in all the national territory, with a renewed capacity to take on the state's armed forces, [and] the insurgency is an unavoidable political reality, a true double force."

Santos, he writes, is responding to powerful forces disenchanted with predecessor President Alvaro Uribe's approach. That government served narcotrafficers, ranchers, and old-style landowning bosses, those "sectors of the bourgeoisie that depend, structurally, on violent dispossession to accumulate capital." Uribe's image has suffered with the jailing and extradition of former military and political associates and from family and personal connections to drug trafficking.

Santos is turning to powerbrokers intent upon building foreign investment in land and natural resources. They view with alarm intensification of violent conflict and popular mobilization resulting from repression, killings, and displacement from land An El Tiempo editorial was speaking for them perhaps: "Negotiation is an inescapable scenario on the road to peace; it's necessary to support measures having the purpose of silencing guns." Billionaire banker Luis Carlos Sarmiento, Colombia's richest individual, controls El Tiempo, formerly owned by the Santos family.

Lessons from history are discouraging. The M-19 guerrillas relinquished arms in 1990, but the agreement left out what they fought for. In 1985 FARC guerrillas, having settled with the government, joined civilian leftists to form the Patriotic Union electoral coalition. Then followed state-tolerated massacre of UP activists. Peace negotiations beginning in 1998 were undone, says then President Andrés Pastrana, because the FARC knew that under U.S. Plan Colombia, taking effect in 2000, the Colombian military would remain "armed to the teeth."

Nevertheless, declared the Colombian Communist Party, the start of negotiations "is a transcendent step in the search for peace." It shows that "objective factors have come together requiring a political rather than a military solution to the conflict. The process must be backed up by popular mobilization putting pressure on negotiators to agree on "truth, justice, reparations, and guarantees." Labor, indigenous, and small farmer rights have to be recognized. And watch out for the U.S. Southern Command, the party statement warns.

Photo: President Santos delivering speech. Fernando Vergara/AP

Trans-Pacific trade pact would kill more jobs

Fri, 24 Aug 2012 12:44:00 +0000

You don't have to blame mainstream media or be outright paranoid to think there must be a news blackout about the newest scheme by corporations trying to grease another way to move jobs overseas and move money around the world.

The lack of coverage of the Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP), or "the NAFTA of the Pacific," as activists call it, is more because of the secrecy in which it's being written. Of course, that's not an excuse, but an explanation.

The possible results of another "free trade agreement"- as opposed to a "fair" trade deal accommodating labor rights, environmental protections and national sovereignty¨ -- could range from more closed factories like Maytag in Galesburg, Ill., to more despoiled lands and lives. That's just like NAFTA, the controversial U.S.-Canada-Mexico "free trade deal" which took effect in 1994.

Since GOP President George W. Bush signed it and Democratic President Bill Clinton jammed it through Congress over labor's strong opposition, NAFTA produced these effects in Mexico alone, along with the "giant sucking sound" of lost U.S. jobs:

Significantly lower birth weights. The impact on reproductive health is significant because there are over 350,000 women working in the maquiladoras, factories along the U.S.-Mexico border, who are of reproductive age.

Weakened food safety inspections. Mexican-grown strawberries, head lettuce, and carrots sold in Illinois groceries have violation rates of 18.4, 15.6, and 12.3 percent, respectively, for illegal pesticide residues.

Ozone depletion has increased steadily since NAFTA opened U.S. borders to Mexican trucks that don't meet U.S. safety standards. Fewer than one percent of the 3.3 million trucks entering the U.S. each year are inspected and 50 percent of those inspected are rejected for major safety violations. The Teamsters waged a long campaign to keep those dangerous Mexican trucks off U.S. roads.

The emergence of rural slums in an "American Calcutta" that stretches for miles along the U.S.-Mexico border, housing families whose members toil in maquiladoras.

Text of some of the TPP proposal recently leaked, released by the Citizens Trade Campaign. It shows the free trade proposal would ensure strong rights for investors but weak protections for labor, the environment, and national sovereignty.

The TPP is being drafted to include the U.S. and Australia, Brunei, Chile, Malaysia, New Zealand, Peru, Singapore, and Vietnam. In July, the 13th round of TPP talks were at the Hilton San Diego Bayfront Hotel, where suggestions of also including Canada, Japan, and Mexico were made, sparking demonstrations there.

The next TPP negotiating round is scheduled for Leesburg, Va., Sept. 6-15. Of the 28 chapters of the leaked TPP draft, 26 have nothing to do with trade.

As drafted, TPP would limit regulation of foreign corporations operating within U.S. boundaries, giving them more rights than U.S. firms.

It also would extend incentives for U.S. firms to move investments and jobs to lower-wage countries, and set up an alternative legal system giving foreign corporations new rights to circumvent U.S. courts and laws, including letting them sue the U.S. government before foreign tribunals and demand compensation for lost revenue due to U.S. laws they claim undermine their TPP privileges or even investment "expectations."

"While the public has no access to the full text, 600 representatives from lobby groups like the American Petroleum Institute and corporations like Johnson & Johnson do, and negotiators seek those representatives' advice," writes Labor Notes reporter Cynthia Phinney, an Electrical Worker (IBEW) and the labor representative on Maine's Citizen Trade Policy Commission from 2003-2010.

There have been few protests in the U.S., probably due to the secrecy around planning of the TPP. One was in July outside the Cargill headquarters in the Twin Cities suburbs, organized by Minnesota's chapter of the Citizens Trade Campaign. Cargill, the big agribusiness giant, was one of the corporations whose reps were inside the negotiations room in San Diego, while labor and citizens were kept out.

Because NAFTA-like trade pacts make it easier to offshore jobs to low-wage countries, they have profoundly hurt American workers. Elsewhere, "provisions promoting competition in agriculture have driven many subsistence farmers off their land and into cities to seek work, creating a downward wage spiral for workers in other countries as well," Phinney wrote.

Both consequences contribute to the "giant sucking sound," as 1992 independent presidential candidate Ross Perot put it, in describing one negative effect of NAFTA, which he opposed. Coined during that year's campaign, Perot's phrase referred to the sound of U.S. jobs heading overseas if NAFTA took effect, as it did in 1994.

Estimates of U.S. jobs lost to NAFTA range from 700,000 to nine million. TPP, like other trade pacts in intervening years, is modeled on NAFTA.

Such trade deals also have troubling language that limits democratically elected governments' power to act in the public interest, if that interest can be interpreted as impeding competition and profits.

Most importantly, in Article 12 - TPP's chapter on Investments - the texts show negotiators are considering a dispute resolution process that would grant transnational corporations special authority to challenge countries' own laws, regulations, and court decisions in international tribunals that circumvent domestic judicial systems.

TPP's 52-page investment chapter can be found online here.

"We are just beginning to analyze the new texts now, but they clearly contain proposals designed to give transnational corporations special rights that go far beyond those possessed by domestic businesses and American citizens," said Arthur Stamoulis, executive director of Citizens Trade Campaign.

"A proposal that could have such broad effects on environmental, consumer safety and other public interest regulations deserves public scrutiny and thorough public debate. It shouldn't be crafted behind closed doors."

If corporate investors or financial interests feel that laws or other regulations interfere with profitability, they may sue the government responsible for the regulation, but the case is decided by a trade tribunal instead of a court accountable to citizens.

President Obama unfortunately is acting more like the corporate-cozy Clinton than a progressive. In 2008, candidate Obama often criticized NAFTA and similar deals, but his administration has made trade deals with Colombia and South Korea, over strong objections by many unions and allied groups.

"Our hope is the U.S. Trade Representative (Ron Kirk) will answer the growing calls for transparency in the TPP," said Stamoulis. "If not, the time has come for members of Congress to intervene." Some 132 lawmakers have already written to Kirk demanding full release of the TPP drafts and explanation of his negotiating priorities. "Americans deserve the right to know what U.S. negotiators are proposing in our names," Stamoulis says.

Adds Dr. Brian Moench, a physician and member of the Union of Concerned Scientists: "This sellout to foreign corporations is not just a rogue brain cramp of President Obama. Mitt Romney demanded this agreement be signed months ago, and called Obama's 'the most hostile administration to business in recent history.' If the TPP trade agreement is 'hostile' to business, God help us if we have an administration, presumably Romney's, 'friendly' to business."

Photo: John Bachtell/PW

Fukushima nuclear disaster cleanup needs global cooperation

Fri, 24 Aug 2012 09:04:00 +0000

CHICAGO - The Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear plant disaster - the worst in history - poses a growing threat to the Japanese people, global community, and environment for years to come. The magnitude of the disaster requires global cooperation to resolve.

This is the opinion of Yusuteru Yamada, 73, a retired steel industry engineer who stopped by the People's World office recently to give an exclusive interview. Yamada, founder of Skilled Veterans Corp for Fukushima (SVCF) toured the U.S. recently to gain support for international scientific and technical cooperation and allowing retired skilled workers to participate in the clean up.

Three reactors at the Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear plant built along the northeast coast of Japan suffered meltdowns on March 11, 2011 after being struck by the most powerful earthquake (9.0) ever-recorded in Japan and the resulting 133-foot high tsunami. Nearly 20,000 people were killed.

The disaster released more radiation into the air than either the Three Mile Island or Chernobyl disasters or all nuclear explosions including Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Liquid radiation is poisoning the Pacific Ocean and although no one knows for sure, it is suspected the reactor is melting the rock beneath the plant.

Over 150,000 people have been evacuated within a 20-kilometer radius of the plant. Thirty-six percent of children living in the Fukushima prefect with a total population of two million have abnormal thyroid growths, including cysts and other precancerous growths.

Fish caught only 12 miles off the coast have recorded radiation contamination levels 258 times the safe limit. And contamination is being found in bluefish tuna originating in Japanese waters, caught off the California coast. Radiation in the ocean is expected to reach the US Pacific coast in five years.

Genetic mutations are now appearing in three generations of butterflies near the plant.

Yamada and the SVCF say the clean up needs to be taken out of the hands of the Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO), owner of the nuclear plant.

"The Fukushima site should be a national project independent from TEPCO," said Yamada. "Such a job can't be handled by a profit oriented company."

Many believe the disaster could have been avoided but the entire history of the plant is shrouded in corruption, cost cutting, ignoring design flaws, site location concerns, and collusion with the national nuclear regulatory agency.

Japanese construction projects are traditionally organized through layers of contractors and subcontractors. Yamada estimates there are 7-8 such layers employing over 3,000 workers in the clean up. Such a setup hides what's actually going from the public and is fertile ground for corruption.

Yamada said this disaster requires mobilizing international expertise along with an international inspection team.

"The nuclear industry in Japan is like a 'nuclear village' and is a very closed group. We need to open up that village, especially during the clean up," he said.

This is one reason why Yamada and his colleagues are demanding retiree workers be involved in the clean up. They also believe current clean up workers are being over exposed to radiation and need to be protected.

"I am 72 and on average I probably have 13 to 15 years left to live," he says. "Even if I were exposed to radiation, cancer could take 20 or 30 years or longer to develop. Therefore us older ones have less chance of getting cancer."

Yamada says over 200 highly experienced retirees have offered their skills, including welders, crane operators, pipefitters, engineers, and even cooks.

Yamada traveled the U.S. to encourage Americans and the Obama administration to pressure the Japanese government on the SVCF demands.

Yamada says the worst may be yet to come. A nuclear fuel pool has been left hanging 100 feet in the air in Unit 4. Another earthquake shock could bring it crashing down.

Yamada also noted that radiation levels at Three Mile Island near Harrisburg, PA began rising sharply five years after the accident as workers began removing the nuclear fuel. At Fukushima, the spent nuclear fuel rods must be removed first, and badly damaged container capsules repaired before any fuel can be removed. The process to remove fuel won't even start for 10 years.

"I want to do my part so that a negative legacy will not remain for future generations," he said.

Photo: Bill Liao // CC 2.0

Secret-spiller Assange appears in public

Thu, 23 Aug 2012 14:18:00 +0000

LONDON - WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange says his organization will take action Aug. 25 with the support of twelve Latin American countries.

Various groups in London have announced that on that day they will hold a vigil here for Bradley Manning, a U.S. Army private held in jail for over 800 days. A Virginia grand jury is examining alleged "evidence" that could link Assange to Manning, who has been charged with "aiding the enemy" by passing secret files to WikiLeaks.

After the vigil they plan to march from the U.S. Embassy to the Ecuadorian embassy where they will join an ongoing vigil for Assange.

South America's foreign ministers have met in Guayaquil, Ecuador, at the invitation of Ecuador, to discuss the case. On Friday, foreign Ministers of the Organization of American states are to convene in Washington to discuss the situation.

Assange, whose organization released hundreds of government secrets to the world media, appeared in public last Sunday for the first time since he took refuge two months ago in the Ecuadorian embassy in London.

He sought asylum at the embassy because he feared being captured and taken to the United States to stand trial for leaking thousands of secret documents involving the CIA, the FBI, prisoners being held at Guantanamo and other military operations.

The 41 year-old Australian has also fought for two years against efforts to send him to Sweden for questioning over alleged sexual misconduct against two women. His supporters say the Swedish case is nothing more than a Washington-designed plot to eventually get him to stand trial in the U.S. Britain insists that if he steps outside the Ecuadorian embassy he will be detained and sent to Sweden.

"I ask President Obama to do the right thing, the United States must renounce its witch hunt against WikiLeaks," Assange said, speaking from the first floor balcony of the Embassy. He also urged the release of Manning.

The White House has declined comment on the specifics of the case but said Sunday the issue is for Sweden, Britain and Ecuador to resolve. Assange said that he and others in his organization want to bring important news to the public. "Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression and to receive important information," he said, while praising Ecuador as "a courageous Latin American nation that took a stand for justice."

Assange says that behind the extradition attempts are U.S. plans to punish him for the publication by Wikileaks of what amounted to mountains of American diplomatic and military secrets - including 250,000 U.S. Embassy cables that highlight all kinds of backroom wheeling and dealing.

Photo: Sang Tan/AP

Germany's plans to go green

Tue, 21 Aug 2012 16:10:00 +0000

Germany is moving ever forward in its transition to a clean energy-based, nuclear-free country. If the shift is successful, Germany could stand as a paradigm for industrialized countries looking to do the same. However, swapping fossil fuels for renewable energy will be a difficult process, according to a GlobalData.com press release.

The Fukushima disaster in Japan caused many people to rethink the potential risks involved with atomic energy dependence. But Germany did more than reconsider its relationship with nuclear power; in 2011, former Federal Minister for Environment, Nature Conservation, and Nuclear Safety Norbert Röttgen announced that the country plans to entirely abandon nuclear energy by 2022.

That initiative is part of a larger-scale plan, popularly referred to as Energiewende ("energy turn" or "energy revolution"). Essentially, it's the most ambitious push for clean energy ever attempted by an industrialized country, sources say.

The goals of the plan include cutting greenhouse gas emissions by 40 percent from levels during the '90s by the year 2020 - and 80 percent by midcentury. It also involves a huge, forthcoming push for wind, solar, biowaste, and hydroelectric power - materials that produced a combined 20 percent of the country's electricity in 2011 (a six-percent increase from ten years prior).

Going forward, however, that plan will mean investing billions, operating more natural gas power plants, and completely overhauling the country's electrical grid. The lattermost requirement could be achieved by using more advanced, smart grid technologies.

The flow of renewable energy generation can be altered by anything from meteorological to environmental circumstance. And during hours of high usage, congestion in power transmission lines will make voltage fluctuations more common, threatening the electricity supply with instability. Smart grid technologies would prevent that by using systems that detect voltage disturbances and provide immediate, reactive power compensation.

There are other hurdles to overcome as well: construction of a planned 25,000-megawatt underwater wind farm has been halted due to concerns that the turbines' sound was injuring and disabling porpoise populations in the North and Baltic seas. Thus, millions of dollars must now be put into developing special noise-reduction technology before construction can resume.

Beyond that, even a wind farm conscious of animal safety is still a huge gamble, both in terms of reliability and price, experts believe. "Nobody really knows what the Energiewende will cost," said Karen Pittel, an energy economist at the University of Munich. "But especially those wind farms - they are more or less pilot projects."

Miranda Schreurs, director of the Environmental Policy Research Center at the Berlin Free University, suggested that, despite the hefty cost (and animal welfare concerns), Germany's move toward renewable energies will be a beneficial experiment, because those energies combined have created an export industry that's worth $12 billion, and is "poised for more growth."

Those energies have already come a long way toward capturing the favor of people, despite Chancellor Angela Merkel's longtime support for nuclear power. Now, Germany's seven oldest reactors have been taken offline, but that looked much less likely back in 2010 when Merkel pushed through measures to extend the lifespan of all 17 of the country's reactors - with the last one not scheduled to go offline until 2036.

Then Fukushima happened, and Merkel reversed her position following the protests of tens of thousands of people, who believed that nuclear energy was not what was best for Germany's future.

In one of the largest of those protests - where 3,000 demonstrators formed a human chain around a nuclear power station in northern Germany, organizers released a statement, saying, "The half-hearted and much too slow nuclear exit in Germany must clearly be accelerated."

If that acceleration goes as planned, Germany may prove that going green in the near future is, after all, both feasible and possible.

Photo: An offshore German windmill in the North Sea. Though it and its peers still require the implementation of noise reduction technology before their construction can re-commence, offshore wind farms are just one way in which Germany plans to wean itself off fossil fuels before 2022. Frank Augstein/AP

Marikana mine massacre reflects South Africa's persistent inequality and social turmoil

Tue, 21 Aug 2012 14:04:00 +0000

JOHANNESBURG-The shooting of 34 mineworkers by police at the Lonmin platinum mine, in Marikana, North-West Province, marks a bloody setback to South Africa's fragile social reconstruction 18 years after the fall of white minority rule.

Much of the mass media in the country and internationally have painted the crisis that led to the massacre as a "turf war" between rival trade unions scrabbling for control over a pliant workforce.

More astute analysis by some news media, research institutes and from within the Tripartite Alliance (comprising the African National Congress, the Congress of South African Trade Unions, and the South African Communist Party) highlights the appalling situation of South Africa's mining communities as being fertile ground for the crisis that has developed at Marikana.

A new study of communities in the platinum minefields by the Bench Marks Foundation, a Johannesburg-based organization that monitors corporate social responsibility - released coincidentally during the week of the massacre at Marikana - details much of the context of the tragedy.

It paints a picture of how all the major platinum mining corporations have made billions of dollars out the world's richest platinum deposits in the Bonjanala District of North-West Province, while leaving a trail of misery death, poverty, illness and environmental pollution in the surrounding communities.

The report finds that Lonmin's operations at Marikana "include high levels of fatalities" and that residential conditions under which Lonmin employees live are "appalling."

The report also attributes the high levels of deaths of miners at work to the use of cheaper sub-contracted labor that is "usually poorly paid, poorly trained and educated, and poorly accommodated."

The use of such labor, brought in from outside Marikana, was also an attempt, the report explains, to "break the power of the NUM (National Union of Mine Workers)" and to undercut the collective bargaining rights that the NUM had built up over decades of struggle.

Furthermore, the report notes that the expanded use of sub-contracted laborers from other localities, including from the Eastern Cape, has created community tensions.

The volatile atmosphere has played into the hands of the Association of Mining and Construction Union (AMCU), set up with the blessing of mining company owners, and led by Joseph Mathunjwa, who was expelled by the NUM in 1998 for divisive and anarchic agitation.

He helped establish the AMCU two years ago to undermine the NUM. As the SACP has pointed out, the new union receives support from the multinational minerals corporation BHP Billiton.

AMCU has tried to attract support by promising that it can deliver far higher pay agreements than the NUM can manage, and has been responsible for a spate of violent confrontations against NUM members.

Last year the violence associated with AMCU spread to the Rustenburg platinum mines, of which Lonmin is one. This was when the management of Impala Platinum deliberately undercut collective bargaining agreements reached with NUM by opportunistically seeking to attract, with higher wages, mineworkers from other companies.

The situation that nurtured a grievance among the less-skilled rock-drillers, which was exploited by AMCU, and ultimately led to the dismissal of thousands of workers.

For a number of months at Marikana, the AMCU leadership has been once again exploiting the credulity and desperation of the most marginalized sectors of the Lonmin work force, the contracted-workers. The union has promised them a pay hike from R4 000 to R12 5000.

The resulting strike and stand off between workers and police became increasingly violent, culminating in the mass shooting of strikers on 16 August. The strikers had been persuaded by AMCU members that if they used a traditional medicinal plant, intelezi, used to ward off evil spirits, they would evade police bullets.

The police claimed that the workers advanced on them with traditional weapons (pangas, knobkerries and spears) and that some had pistols and had been the first to open fire. The police responded catastrophically with automatic weapons, leaving 34 dead and over 70 injured.

President Zuma cut short his visit to Mozambique to return home visit Marikana, where he met with injured workers in hospital and with their families. He has commissioned an inquiry into the massacre and the crisis that led to it.

While there has been much media criticism of the police heavy-handed tactics against the strikers, the government has yet to offer an explanation of police behavior at the mine.

In a central committee statement, the SACP said that it is impossible to understand the tragedy "without an appreciation of how the major platinum mining corporations have created desperate community poverty, divisive tensions and a fatalistic attitude by workers towards danger and death."

The party said that the strategy of trying to break the National Union of Mineworkers has now backfired on the profits of the platinum companies.

"It is also not possible to understand the tragedy without understanding how profit-maximizing corporate greed has deliberately sought to undercut an established trade union and collective bargaining by conniving with demagogic forces."

The crisis and the nature of how it exploded also reflect the deep problems of South African society, where the fatal mix of massive inequality and entrenched brutality are a constant blight on people's lives.

The Marikana killings come at a time of increasingly precipitous dissatisfaction in working class communities that the root causes of poverty and inequality in the country remain intact so long after the end of apartheid. Though South Africa has a small emerging black middle class, burgeoning inequality mainly continues along apartheid era divisions and fault-lines.

"As a society we need to ask ourselves real questions about what this level of brutality says about our society that is still so unequal, so angry and so willing to respond violently," said the veteran trade union leader and founder of COSATU Jay Naidoo in a press interview.

Right wing populist former ANC Youth League member, Julius Malema, who was expelled by the ANC earlier this year for sowing division in the movement and bringing it into disrepute, turned up at Marikana a few days after the massacre to address the strikers.

Euphorically, Malema urged them to be ready to die for their cause. He blamed President Zuma for the massacre, saying that he "presided over the killings". Malema also accused Zuma of only meeting with "whites" when he visited Marikana. "He went to speak to white people, not to you," he told the strikers.

Photo: In mineral rich South Africa, miners have brought enormous wealth to the surface for huge, multi-national corporations, often without just compensation and under extremely hazardous conditions. Themba Hadebe/AP

Kurt Maetzig, master of German cinema

Tue, 21 Aug 2012 10:59:00 +0000

BERLIN -- An extraordinary filmmaker who made extraordinary films and lived to the extraordinary age of 101, Kurt Maetzig died August 8. He was virtually unknown in the United States, indeed, in the western world generally. The reason: he lived and worked in the German Democratic Republic (East Germany).

While some of his films were mediocre, many were quite good, even true masterworks, but they were almost totally ignored, indeed boycotted, in the 45 years when they were created.

The Nazis, WWII, Liberation

Maetzig was born January 25, 1911, into a well-to-do Berlin family. He studied in Munich and then the Sorbonne in Paris, got a doctor's degree and delved into the technical side of filming. When he was 22 the Nazis seized power. Barred from film work, Maetzig defied the Nazis by joining the underground Communist Party in 1944. Maetzig's father divorced his mother who was Jewish. She eluded the train to Auschwitz only by taking her own life.

Within weeks of liberation, the end of World War II in Europe, he joined a cooperative to copy films for the Soviet Union. But when U.S. troops arrived, the shop was given to an owner who told Maetzig: "I can't work with you. You're a Communist!" The reply: "And I can't work with you. You're a capitalist!"

Very soon the Soviet Union helped create the first post-war German film company, to be named DEFA (Deutsche Film Aktiengesellschaft). Maetzig was one of a handful of anti-Nazis who got it going. Though a technical expert by training, he was soon directing the first post-1945 German newsreels.

DEFA's first film, "The Murderers Are Amongst Us," launched actress Hildegard Kneef's career. It was a stark condemnation of Nazi war crimes.

Then Maetzig was sent an unprinted story so close to his own story that he quickly began work on "Marriage in the Shadows," DEFA's second film. Maetzig's film dealt with the Nazi pogrom against the Jews.

The story, based on a true case, tells of a talented actor and actress couple. Since she is Jewish the Nazis try to get the husband to divorce her. Unlike Maetzig's father, he refuses. Her career is ended, his can continue if she remains out of sight. But for his big premiere they weaken, she attends and is recognized, which means her certain deportation. The two, with their small son, commit suicide.

The extremely moving film, finely acted and beautifully directed, premiered in all four sectors of Berlin* in October 1947. It was seen by over eleven million viewers, which means that almost all adults, most of them bitter, confused and cynical after the lost war and in a wrecked country, saw a soul-searing judgment of Nazi bestiality. Its effect cannot be overestimated.

His next film, also sensitive, also successful, chronicled the story of a housemaid who survives two world wars and economic depression, who quietly rejects a job making weapons and tries vainly to persuade her son to do likewise and, in her own small way, also vainly, to help a family of Jewish neighbors.

Then came a hard-hitting exposé of the giant chemical concern I. G. Farben, showing its responsibility for poison gas in World War I, its genocidal murders in World War II and its return after 1945 as Bayer and BASF. With music by the great Hanns Eisler, it did not distort true events, but lacked the sensitivity of the first two films.

Maetzig's talent at finding deeply human values in the midst of social upheaval was seen again in a saga about conflicts in the countryside when Junkers (landed nobility) were forced to leave their huge, feudal estates, and in a surprisingly light comedy about a girl with constant troubles in finding a place in society, with the tragic background revealed in a brief note from her mother who was murdered at Ravensbrück, the notorious women's concentration camp.

"Der schweigende Stern" (The Silent Star), a co-production with Poland was a big hit; it was the GDR's first try at science fiction (based on the book "The Astronauts" by Stanislaw Lem, the great Polish science fiction writer), about a space ship with an international team which finds a planet, once a threat to the Earth, but now totally dead after an atomic catastrophe. A Japanese scientist in the team had herself been scarred as a child by Hiroshima. The connections were clear, the effects simple but very effective. Its irony increased when a western version of the film substituted an American hero for the Russian, a Frenchman for the Pole, and eliminated all references to Hiroshima!

Political changes in the GDR

In 1954-1955 Maetzig blundered. Ten years after the murder by the Nazis of Ernst Thälmann, head of Germany's Communist Party, its GDR follower, the ruling Socialist Unity Party, wanted a film about his life and deeds and Maetzig accepted the job. But due to the constant meddling by the party, up to and including its head, GDR President Walter Ulbricht, what resulted was not a fine-feeling portrait of a controversial yet certainly heroic figure but rather two full-length films with huge numbers of extras, a bigger-than-life hero, politically correct in every word and deed but with little subtlety and few if any nuances. Maetzig was always ashamed of those two films.

Ten years later he had problems in just the opposite direction. In the early 1960's when the Berlin wall, nasty as it was, protected the GDR economically and permitted rapid growth and relative openness, there was a large number of frank, honestly critical, often very good books and films. One of the most interesting was Maetzig's "I Am the Rabbit" (Das Kaninchen bin ich"), a condemnation of careerists, in this case a judge, willing to sacrifice anyone and anything to move upwards, and the courageous fight of a young woman against him, her one-time lover.

But in 1964, Soviet Premier Brezhnev, who had different ideas and a lot of influence in the GDR, exerted pressure in all directions: political, economic and in the arts. The dogmatists had their day and banned a dozen critical films. Maetzig was pressured into criticizing his own film and became deeply discouraged. He directed a few films after that, one interesting and controversial about human genetics, but no more masterpieces.

He turned to work with cinema clubs, becoming vice-president of the international cine-club organization, then its honorary president for life. By the time the pendulum turned, as it so often did in the GDR, and honestly critical films were produced, some of them quite wonderful, it was too late for Maetzig to try again.

The media, in eulogizing Maetzig, concentrates almost completely on the bad Thälmann films and even more, the banned "rabbit" film. In my view his most important film was his first one.

In his own words

Ten years before his death he said: "In all the past decades I was for humanitarianism, for enlightenment, for democratic socialism. That is what led me to join the Communist Party. I kept to those beliefs and I still believe in them."

*Editor's Note: After the 1945 Potsdam Conference (including the new British prime minister Clement Attlee, U.S. president Harry Truman, and the USSR head of state Joseph Stalin), what was formerly greater Berlin was divided into four sectors, administered jointly by the Allied powers (the United States, Great Britain, France, and the Soviet Union).

The whole of Germany was similarly divided into four zones. But in 1949, in violation of the Potsdam agreement, the U.S., Great Britain and France united their zones to create the Federal Republic of Germany (West Germany), with Bonn as its capital. Then, also in violation of the Potsdam agreement, they established a new currency for West Germany and illegally made their zones of Berlin a part of West Germany, thus effectively dividing the country.

The remaining zone administered by the Soviet Union later became the GDR. The wall that was eventually constructed surrounded West Berlin, part of the capital city in the middle of a socialist country.

Photo: Poster for "Marriage in the Shadows."

Italy's heritage for sale

Mon, 20 Aug 2012 14:39:00 +0000

Italy's government has unveiled a fire sale of some real gems of the country's heritage.

Some 350 historic buildings in the capital and historic towns across the country are to be sold off, including Castello Orsini di Soriano in Cimiano, Palazzo Bolis Gualdo in Milan, and Palazzo Diedo in Venice.

Euros 42 billion worth of property is being put onto the market, a sizeable chunk of the country's 600 billion-euro public property portfolio.

Prime Minister Mario Monti, a former European Commissioner, says the move is necessary to reduce the country's debt and to reassure the speculators in the financial markets that have sent Italy's borrowing costs to record highs.

National treasures gift wrapped for banks

In practice the policy is just one more gift to banks - which have plenty to spend what with the billions in government support and from the European Central Bank - and the rich - who in Italy are master tax dodgers and who yet again have escaped a wealth tax demanded by left-wingers and tax justice campaigners.

Meanwhile, the vast majority of Italians, who are being steadily impoverished by unemployment, reforms increasing job insecurity, and austerity measures cutting living standards, won't get a look in. They face a plain and simple plunder of their heritage.

Among those horrified by the privatization of the country's cultural jewels is Nicola Caracciolo from Italia Nostra, an organization that campaigns for the protection of the country's artistic and natural heritage.

With the property market in the doldrums, public buildings that are currently for all in the nation will be sold off at bargain prices to a privileged few private individuals and deep pocketed organizations for their profit.

"It makes more sense and in the long run there will be a greater return if we invest in our heritage rather than sell it off," Caracciolo told il Manifesto newspaper.

Lessons from the New Deal

Caracciolo argues that Italy, the eurozone's third largest economy, should reject its destructive obsession with austerity, and instead learn from the New Deal that used public investment to lift the USA out of the Great Depression in the 1930s: among the most successful government programs of President Roosevelt was the Civil Conservation Corps, which provided a living, shelter, and training for 2.5 million young Americans in an ambitious conservation project for the American countryside.

In parallel to this, the Democrat President promoted a massive cultural program known as the Works Progress Administration. This boosted art, music, theatre, writing, and local history collections, with an emphasis on engaging Black and other minority ethnic communities. And it created tens of thousands of skilled jobs in the process.

Despite an unrivaled cultural patrimony and architecture, not to mention zillions of priceless artworks, Rome has a long history of neglect. Yet viewing the country's Roman ruins, Renaissance churches and thousands of other historic treasures as assets rather than liabilities, would undoubtedly boost tourism, and crucially, cut the 2.8 million-strong dole queues, especially among the young, who are bearing the brunt of the economic crisis.

Sadly in Italy, it is Mario Monti, a blinkered, neo-liberal Eurocrat - not a visionary like Roosevelt - at the helm.

Tom Gill is a London-based journalist who writes regularly for the U.K.'s Morning Star, the daily socialist newspaper, and Tribune magazine, the labor weekly. Follow him on twitter @tomgilltweets.

Photo: Palazzo Diedo will be just one of many historic Italian buildings to be sold off. ValeryToth/Flickr

What would Romney-Ryan Latin America policy look like?

Mon, 20 Aug 2012 12:01:00 +0000

A Romney administration Latin America policy would most likely return us to the same policies, and to some extent the same cast of characters, which brought about tens of thousands of deaths in Central America during the Reagan, Bush I, and Bush II administrations.

In a previous article, I wrote about information that had surfaced which strongly suggests that millions of dollars of start-up money for Mitt Romney's company Bain Capital came from Salvadoran oligarchs with ties to death squads. Now, Romney's candidate for Vice President, Wisconsin Rep. Paul Ryan, is being "mentored" by Reagan and George W. Bush administration official Elliot Abrams on foreign policy. That is hair-raising.

Bearing the Orwellian title of "Assistant Secretary of State for Human Rights and Humanitarian Affairs," Abrams distinguished himself during the Reagan administration by trying to cover up grotesque human rights violations in El Salvador, including one of the most horrific atrocities of that country's Civil War, the El Mozote massacre.

This massacre was perpetrated by the U.S.-trained and supported Atlacatl Battalion of the Salvadoran Army which, in December of 1981, invaded the small village of El Mozote, tortured and raped men, women, and children and then massacred the entire population of the village and surrounding hamlets, killing more than 700. Abrams and his colleagues in the Reagan administration tried to cover for their right-wing Salvadoran allies by denying the incident had happened and smearing and red-baiting the journalists and activists who brought it to light.

Abrams has been an apologist for the worst genocide of all - the holocaust unleashed against indigenous people in Guatemala during the regime of dictator Efrain Rios Montt in the 1980s, and for other crimes of the most brutal Latin American dictators.

Abrams was also linked to the Iran-Contra scandal, in which the U.S. government secretly and illegally sold arms to the extremist regime in Iran as a means of laundering money to support the Contras, U.S.-supported fighters against the left-wing government of Nicaragua.

The original pretext for selling arms to Iran was to achieve the release of seven U.S. hostages being held by Iranian-allied Hezbollah. But the National Security Council's Lieutenant Colonel Oliver North devised a means whereby funds gained by this devious arrangement, which used Israel as an intermediary, would be channeled into the hands of the "Contras," right-wing counter-revolutionaries allied with the U.S.

The Contras utilized terrorist methods, including the murder of health care workers, teachers, union and peasant leaders, and others who were trying to bring social improvements to the people. The late Gary Webb, in his 1998 book The Dark Alliance: The CIA, the Contras, and the Crack Cocaine Explosion (Seven Stories Press), based on his reporting for the San Jose Mercury News, also accused the CIA of abetting the Contras in drug dealing which eventually contributed to the crack cocaine epidemic in Los Angeles and other U.S. cities.

For covering up Iran-Contra, Abrams accepted a plea bargain, which would have gotten him a slap-on-the-wrist punishment, but was pardoned, along with most of the Iran-Contra culprits, by President George H.W. Bush in 1992. He returned to the National Security Council as a Special Assistant for Democracy and Human Rights in the George W. Bush administration, just in time for the attempted coup against Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez in 2002, in which some suspect he had a hand. He is a very active Senior Fellow of the Council on Foreign Relations.

The current administration has not followed the advice of the left-wing Mexican political figure Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador to go back to the "good neighbor" policies of Franklin D. Roosevelt. Rather than accommodate itself to the general leftward movement of the countries of the hemisphere, the State Department under Hillary Clinton has butted heads with those governments.

Disappointments have included the post-facto abetting of the perpetrators of the 2009 coup in Honduras, the signing of the Free Trade Agreement between the U.S. and Colombia over the strong objections of U.S. and Colombian organized labor, and the continued supplying of military support to the Colombian and Mexican governments, all of which have taken a toll in human lives. There have been some improvements in Cuba policy, mostly relating to opportunities for travel and cultural exchanges, but the blockade of the Cuban economy continues unabated, and the issue of the Cuban 5 seems no nearer to finding a resolution.

However, there are vast differences in scale between what is going on now and what was going on when people like Abrams and North were allowed to run wild.

To permit Romney, Ryan, and the Republican Party to win the November elections by default would greatly worsen the situation, and very likely turn tense relations with progressive Latin American governments and political movements into armed confrontations. A Romney-Ryan administration might well go back to using fascist surrogates or perhaps directly involving U.S. armed personnel to overthrow left-wing governments and return the whole hemisphere to U.S. domination, no matter what the cost in blood.

We cannot let that happen.

Photo: Romney has demonstrated he will be clueless as to how to engage in peaceful relations with Latin American governments. Mary Schwalm/AP

Winds of change blow strong in Cuban colleges

Mon, 20 Aug 2012 10:25:00 +0000

University education in Cuba is heading for big changes. The force behind them is the wave of major economic reforms moving through Cuban society, reforms necessary, Cuban leaders say, to preserve socialism.

Many regard Cuba's success in making education accessible and socially useful to have been a prime achievement of the Cuban Revolution. Indeed, at any given time, roughly one fifth of all Cubans are enrolled in one or another kind of school. Universities increased from three in 1959 to the present 67. And eleven percent of Latin American scientists obtained their PhD's in Cuba.

Beginning in 2000, so-called municipal university centers came into being that, offering televised courses, extended university education to small towns and rural areas. Then something happened: 122,193 fewer students entered Cuban universities in the academic year 2011-2012 than in the year before. From 744,000 entering students in 2007-2008, the number fell over four years to 351,000. There were far fewer CUM's, and their enrollment was down 50 percent. That a disproportionate number of CUM students were studying social sciences may have been significant.

Tightened requirements for university study contributed to declining enrollment. But other factors were at work. As higher education officials saw it, university curricula were becoming less and less relevant in a nation undergoing economic readjustment. Students by and large had been studying medicine, biotechnology, information sciences, tourism, pedagogy, social sciences, and humanities. Not all these curricula fit current needs, say those in charge, especially the latter two.

Education officials had already been dealing with the problem of declining numbers of teachers. Low pay was forcing many of them into part-time work or causing them to leave the profession. Concerned that the resulting over-filled classrooms were detrimental to the quality of pre-university education, authorities have been working to find replacement teachers, including efforts to recruit retired teachers.

Educational funding remains stable: 12.9 percent of the GDP in 2010, up from 11.9 percent in 2007. That's tops in the world except for East Timor, according to World Bank figures. Paying for university education - students pay nothing - represents 4.4 percent of Cuba's GDP. Reallocations have been necessary, however, among them a cutback in scholarships for foreign students studying at Cuba's flagship Latin American School of Medicine.

Changing university education was in the air in July as higher education Minister Rodolfo Alarcón reported to the Cuban Parliament. Amidst "profound transformations," his ministry wants universities to promote scientific and technical innovations, carry out research benefitting society and the economy, provide special support for basic science students, and prepare graduates to meet the needs of individual regions in the country. University enrollments must increase, he said.

The Higher Education Ministry website mentions goals of "achieving greater pertinence, efficiency, rationality, and integration in all types of courses." Cuba wants to train "professionals who are highly competent and committed to society and revolutionary principles."

Emphasis has turned to vocational training, and away from study areas without immediate application. More and more students will be preparing to become technicians and agricultural specialists. The overall purpose, reports Inter Press Service, source of much of this information, is "the necessity to revitalize the productive sector of the country...particularly on the land." Cuba's need to import great amounts of expensive food products imposes an overwhelming burden. Building up domestic agricultural capabilities is a crucial part of Cuba's current economic reform program.

In some ways re-direction of higher education is a return to Cuba's revolutionary roots. Speaking to students and faculty in 1959, Che Guevara advised universities to prepare students for practical work in the "heart of the people."

According to Victor Pérez Galdós, reporting on current university reforms for Rebel Radio, Che reminded listeners that universities "belong to the people of Cuba." In 1962, Che explained that necessities of the time meant, "for the sake of future industrial development a great lumber of engineers and thousands of technicians were necessary."

He emphasized the importance of technicians and students relating closely with manual workers.

Photo: Cuban medical schools are thought of as being among the best in the world. Javier Gerleano/AP

German wind farm delayed over possible danger to porpoises

Fri, 17 Aug 2012 15:06:00 +0000

German utility companies have delayed the construction of a 25,000-megawatt wind farm off its coast because of fears the noise it would emit could kill thousands of porpoises.

The plan for solving the problem would involve spending millions on development of noise-reduction technology (the noise is reportedly caused by driving turbines into the seabed). That initiative comes after environmental activists expressed concerns at what effect the sound would have on the porpoise population.

For porpoises, sound is arguably their bread and butter. The 230,000-plus porpoises (and dolphins) in the North and Baltic seas use sound to navigate, locate prey, and find mating partners. Interference with that could, indeed, effectively kill them.

"A porpoise is doomed to die if its hearing is shattered," said German marine expert Kim Detloff, who works at nature conservation group NABU.

The goal is to have the wind farm, which would cover an area eight times larger than New York City, in operation by 2030. The plan is regarded by activists as an admirable attempt at creating a real clean energy source. The fact that technology companies E.ON and RWE are listening to their concerns and tweaking the technology accordingly is being praised even more.

Cutting the noise would be made possible by creating a stream of bubbles around the drilling area to absorb the sound.

The technology represents a concentrated effort in Germany to utilize wind power in the wake of its abandonment of nuclear energy. While that is an excellent prospect, activists warn that safety cannot be forgotten in the transition.

"Quite a large proportion of our sea area will probably be used for offshore wind farms," said Hans-Ulrich Rosner, head of the Wadden Sea Office for the World Wildlife Federation in Germany. "This will have a serious impact on nature, which needs to be mitigated."

"While developers are generally eager to install [the wind farm] as quickly as possible, they've come under pressure from regulators and nature groups to protect the porpoise," added scientist Otto von Estorf of the Hamburg University of Technology. "No developer wants to be seen harming the environment."

Photo: Artist's impression of one type of underwater wind turbine. Tidal Stream/Wikipedia

Mutated butterflies: Fukushima aftermath continues

Fri, 17 Aug 2012 13:06:00 +0000

The ripple effect of the Fukushima nuclear disaster in Japan in March 2011 has still not been fully understood, but another part of the aftermath has fallen into the spotlight. Scientists there have connected abnormalities in butterflies to radioactive fallout, confirming that the Fukushima Daiichi power plant disaster caused "physiological and genetic damage to pale grass blue butterflies."

The tracking of common butterflies around the plant began two months after the worst nuclear disaster since Chernobyl. About 121 insects were collected - 12 percent of which had peculiarly small wings. Then those irradiated butterflies had offspring, and the percentage increased. Now that number is something in the ballpark of 56 percent.

"At the time of the accident," wrote the researchers in their study, "the populations of this species were overwintering as larvae and were externally exposed to artificial radiation. It is possible that they ate contaminated leaves during the spring, and were thus also exposed to internal radiation."

The butterfly deformities seen included dented eyes, bent wings, malformed antennae, and abnormal color patterns.

Seventeen months after the Fukushima disaster, the word is that the effects on people have been minimal. No deaths or illnesses directly related to the accident seem to have been reported. But the long-term effects - on both people and the environment - are still unknown.

Traces of radioactive cesium, however, have been found in more than a dozen bluefin tuna caught in August 2011 in San Diego, Calif. Though the cesium levels were not considered very harmful, they still exceeded "government safety levels." The incident was just one of many, and served as a reminder that the damage caused by the Fukushima incident is not yet done, and that it may continue to crop up in the smallest and most subtle of ways.

Amidst concern that people would begin exhibiting physiological effects from the fallout, Joji M. Otaki, the head scientist on the study, explained, "Humans are totally different from butterflies, and they should be far more resistant." However, he suggested it remains to be seen if aftereffects will be seen in other organisms.

On the other hand, the Fukushima disaster has changed people in another way: This past July, more than 100,000 people gathered in Tokyo to protest nuclear power. The demonstration was a response to Prime Minister Yoshihiko Noda's decision to restart two of Japan's nuclear reactors (the other 52 remain idle).

"After the Fukushima disaster," said protester Miho Igarashi, "I thought that the government and vested interests were telling us lies about nuclear power being safe. We have to raise our voices against the danger of atomic power."

Meanwhile, for those who continue to argue that nuclear energy is both feasible and safe, protesters may have a new, compelling argument: "Tell that to the butterflies."

Photo: An adult pale grass blue butterfly, collected from near the Fukushima Daiichi plant, is here shown with dented eyes and stunted wings - mutations caused by radiation. Chiyo Nohara/AP

Women made big gains at Olympics, but challenges remain

Thu, 16 Aug 2012 09:48:00 +0000

The successes of U.S. women at the 2012 London Olympics as recently profiled here are the most recent testament to the powerful impacts of Title IX since its passage. However, the London Games were also the site of positive developments for women athletes across the world.

Belinda Goldsmith of Reuters noted many of these advances: Every nation participating in the Games had at least one female athlete competing on their national team; the three largest teams - the U.S., China, and Russia - had more women than men on their Olympic squads; and female Olympians made up approximately 45 percent of the total athletes - the highest percentage in the history of the Games.

London's Olympics was the site of these laudable developments for women's access to and full participation in major athletic activities. However, the female contingents from a number of countries faced challenges as they prepared for, came to, and participated in the 2012 Games.

The most notable of these difficulties were the allegations of sexism lodged at the Japanese and Australian Olympic committees for their travel arrangements. The Australian women's basketball team and the Japanese women's soccer team were both relegated to flights in economy seating while the male teams flew in the more spacious business class seating.

This difference in treatment is even more galling when one looks at the records of these teams. The Australian women's basketball squad has earned more medals and seen much more international success than the men's team. The Japanese women's soccer team was coming off winning a World Cup at the most recent FIFA tournament in 2010.

After public outrage over the Japanese flight arrangements, the women were told that they could have upgraded flights if they earned a medal at the London Games. No such arrangement was publicly made for the men. Ultimately, the women's soccer team earned a silver medal for Japan and got moderately upgraded seating for their flight home.

There was another significant challenge that did not receive nearly as much media coverage: the limitation of opportunity, full participation, and ability to thrive successfully in international sports for women in certain countries.

Sahaf Rahimi is a 17-year-old female Afghan boxer. A combination of cultural limitations within her society and the lack of spaces to train appropriately have significantly inhibited her ability to reach her true athletic potential. During the reign of the Taliban, all women were denied access to sports and have only had a little over a decade of burgeoning access and involvement. Her father has spoken about receiving threats from conservative members of Afghan society over Rahimi's sporting activity. Then, of course, there are the devastating effects of an over ten-year imperial occupation by U.S. military forces.

A combination of these factors has created a situation where Rahimi and her fellow boxers are fearful about their personal safety, have no ring in which they can spar, and have very limited access to training facilities - especially when compared to their Olympic counterparts from other nations. Due to all of these factors, she ultimately lost her Olympic berth over fears that she would be gravely injured in competition.

Similar limitations can be seen in the case of female athletes in Saudi Arabia. Women in the kingdom are not allowed to participate in school physical education courses, have no access to sporting club facilities/sport federations, and have not been able to access international sporting competition.

After much public pressure, the threat of banning Saudi Arabia from the 2012 Games, criticism from human rights groups, and the technical ineligibility of possible female Saudi athletes, two women - Sarah Attar and Wojdan Shaherkani - were given the opportunity to represent Saudi Arabia in the 2012 London Games.

Much like Rahimi and her fellow female athletes in Afghanistan, there was a concerted intimidation campaign waged against Shaherkani and her family including threats to the family and a Twitter campaign calling her a "prostitute" for her involvement in athletics.

Despite a possible ban from participation over the safety of wearing a sport hijab in judo competition, Shaherkani ultimately did compete at the Games in judo. Attar competed in a track event. Shaherkani was defeated in 82 seconds and Attar finished last in her heat. Yet both women were heralded for their groundbreaking status as the first female Olympians to represent Saudi Arabia.

While there were incredibly affirming events for women athletes at the London Games, we must continue to be vigilant about the underlying issues to ensure that there is fairness in treatment and that women athletes around the world are able to have equality in access, training, and participation in sports.

Photo: Women's marathon at the 2012 Olympics. aurelien/Flickr

Indigenous mobilization challenges Colombian government

Mon, 13 Aug 2012 10:06:00 +0000

Indigenous resistance in Colombia has become a social movement. Colombia’s right wing, U.S. supported government has to deal with that now, plus guerrilla insurgencies and agitation for negotiated peace. The indigenous, guerrillas and leftist opposition parties are all fighting against the take-over of land and subsoil resources by the wealthy few and the Colombian government which supports them.

Indigenous people from throughout Colombia and beyond gathered on August 9 in Popayán, capital of Cauca department in Colombia's southwest. Some 15,000 indigenous people demonstrated in the streets the next day. Later, they later marched to an indigenous reserve 12 miles away. Students, small farmers, and Afro-Colombians were also on hand on August 12 -13 for the National Indigenous Encounter in Defense of Mother Earth, organized by the Regional Indigenous Council of Cauca.

Dora Muñoz of the Association of Indigenous Councils of North Cauca set the stage: "The indigenous of Cauca won't leave our territory, nor are we going to allow indiscriminate exploitation of Mother Earth. [We want] to consolidate our autonomous territories and our own government...For us, Mother Earth is sacred, for the government and multinationals, it's wealth."

Cauca is rich in natural resources, coca plantations, and drug trafficking corridors. Pacifist Nasa indigenous people make up 95 percent of its population. The Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia have been there for 50 years. Many Nasa people have relatives who've fought with the FARC.

Also at issue for Nasa people, says CRIC, are unfulfilled promises regarding health and education; guarantees on human rights; prior consultation for government actions affecting the indigenous; lack of dialogue on peace; and, crucially, removal of armed combatants from their homelands.

CRIC invited President Santos to the Encounter's last day, on August 14. His participation Nasa leaders see as a continuation of the government - indigenous Permanent Coordination Table set up in mid-July. The aim then was to defuse Nasa confrontations with the Colombian Army, mounting over two months.

The Army has been implementing new strategy. Priority was shifted from targeting guerrilla leaders to attacking selected guerrilla units directly and occupying base areas. Military occupations spread nationwide, arrests mounted, and in Cauca indigenous people faced real or threatened displacement. Resistance flared.

On July 23, the Constitutional Court condemned the Defense Ministry for Army occupations of indigenous land. On August 9, United Nations indigenous rights specialist James Anaya cited "the right of indigenous peoples to have autonomy over their land."

In Toribío in North Cauca, 100 troops were encamped around a communications tower at the summit of nearby Mt Berlin. ACIN organizers on July 8 demanded the Army and FARC leave North Cauca. They soon issued an ultimatum and declaration of humanitarian disaster. President Juan Manuel Santos arrived there on July 12 to announce a development grant and reject demilitarization. He was jeered, overhead helicopters fired at ground targets, and FARC roadblocks materialized nearby.

On July 17, 500 members of the so-called indigenous guard plus 2000 other Toribío people peacefully removed the soldiers from Mt. Berlin. Alleging FARC complicity, the media showed photographs of a soldier crying as he was carried off as portraying a "humiliated" army. The next day elite troops returned soldiers to the mountain top. In the melee, they wounded 32 Nasa people and killed an 18 year-old man. Later on in an increasingly violent atmosphere, two more Nasa people were killed and two others wounded.

The indigenous guard also captured four FARC guerrillas. They were of Nasa heritage, and the community decided to apply the traditional punishment of whippings applied to lower legs. Earlier, a FARC shell landing inside a Toribío clinic had wounded six. One lost a leg. ACIN told FARC leader Timoleón Jiménez that, "We don't accept your guerrilla forces in our territories. We don't want them and don't need them...Stop the war. We are all losing."

According to ACIN spokesperson Isadora Cruz, "We don't want the army; we don't want the guerrillas; we don't want anyone, because none of them protect us. We are filled with rage, we are tired of war."

Crisis in Cauca entered onto the national political stage with the government's condemnation of formal Liberal Party Senator Piedad Cordoba for two speeches she delivered in North Cauca. Head of Colombians for Peace and long targeted as an alleged FARC collaborator, Cordoba called for protecting civilian from war dangers. She called for a petition campaign to remove the Santos government. She would replace it with one "whose primary object is no longer plunder and expansion of the military."

The Prosecutor General's Office announced investigation of Cordoba "for the crimes of instigation, rioting and conspiracy." Defence Minister Juan Carlos Pinzon concurred: "The government expects the prosecution to initiate an official investigation."

Guitar company used illegal rainforest wood

Fri, 10 Aug 2012 16:46:00 +0000

Gibson, one of the most celebrated guitar brands, has admitted to using illegal, threatened rainforest wood to make its instruments. The crime came to light after federal agents raided one of the company's supply outlets in Nashville, Tenn.

Subsequently, the company admitted importing illegally harvested wood known as Madagascar ebony for its guitar fretboards. Madagascar is a country that has been severely impacted by deforestation. Gibson must now pay $350,000 in penalties to settle federal charges. Of that sum, $50,000 will be donated to the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation.

The company was found to be in violation of the Lacey Act, which makes it a crime to import wood that was harvested and exported unlawfully under another country's laws.

The Nashville raid occurred August 24, 2011. At that time, the government seized $260,000 worth of ebony and rosewood. That marked the second time Gibson was raided on suspicion of illegal activities; the first was in Memphis during 2009. In both instances, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service argued that the confiscated wood had either been illegally logged in Madagascar, or in violation of Indian export law.

Republicans have used the issue as a window to advocate decriminalization of endangered wood importation and vilify federal intervention in environmental matters. They and the Tea Party called the Nashville raid an "arrogant act of federal power."

The right wing has criticized the Lacey Act - legislation that originally focused on prohibiting the importation, capture, or transportation of wildlife across state lines, but was amended in 2008. At that time, the Food, Conservation, and Energy Act of 2008 expanded its protection to a broader range of plant life, transforming the Lacey Act into one of the world's toughest laws against the often-illegal wood trade.

Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) seized the opportunity in May to paint the act as the latest bogeyman responsible for government interference, and proposed the FOCUS (Freedom from Over-Criminalization and Unjust Seizures) Act in response. That act would combat parts of Lacey by removing all references to foreign laws, and by replacing criminal penalties with small fines.

Actor Chuck Norris - also a Republican - also took part in the recent attack on the Lacey Act, suggesting that taxpayers' dollars were being wasted "as federal agents sought to bust another pillar of American business by rounding up alleged tree contraband based upon a century-old law."

But environmental activists argue that the portions of the Lacey Act that Republicans seek to obliterate are vital to the preservation of both the environment and the American timber industry.

Gibson CEO Henry Juszkiewicz made a number of troubling statements on the matter, remarking that he believes his company is very "forward-thinking," and that "true legislative reform is necessary to avoid systemic criminalization of capitalism."

As numerous environmental activists, scientists, and ecologists understand, capitalism is viewed as anathema to both environmental and social progress.

Gibson later recognized, in a statement, that valuable wood species in Madagascar faced considerable risk, and that the country dealt with the very serious problem of de-forestation.

Madagascar is reportedly experiencing a loss of biodiversity due to that deforestation, which experts blame on human interference and economic activities.

Photo: Gibson Guitar CEO Henry Juskiewicz mimicked Republicans' claims that a raid on a Nashville Gibson supply outlet was another sign of what they call "government overreach." Samuel M. Simpkins/AP & The Tennessean

Romney's Bain Capital connected to Salvador death squads?

Fri, 10 Aug 2012 11:33:00 +0000

A new dimension of the story of Mitt Romney's connections to Bain Capital has now emerged, namely the possible connection of Bain, and Romney, to violent ultra-right-wing political circles in Latin America.

When Romney was, in the early 1980s, spinning off Bain Capital from its parent company Bain and Company, he was told that he had to find new people to put up the initial capital. So he made a connection with some members of the elite "14 families" that have historically run El Salvador, many of whom were living in Miami at that time because of the civil war raging in their homeland. Early contributors of a total of $9 million to Bain's startup were members of the de Sola, Poma, Dueñas and Salaverria families. The facilitator for this hookup seems to have been Panamanian-born banker Frank Kardonski, who died earlier this year.

Romney later claimed that he was nervous about dealing with some of these people for fear that the money they would put into Bain Capital might be tainted by drug trafficking or human rights violations. So he had them vetted as individuals (he says) but did not check out there relatives. But for of Latin American oligarchs, everything is "family business."

These Salvadoran families were involved in coffee and cotton production and other enterprises, and had kept control of the country through dictatorial governments. In 1979 the dictator of the moment, Carlos Humberto Romero, was overthrown and replaced by a progressive military-civilian "Junta", which tried to initiate land reform and the nationalization of the banking and coffee industries. This greatly threatened the interests of the oligarchy, which responded violently.

During this period and subsequently, also, the Salvadoran oligarchs were interested in diversifying their investments, so the Bain opportunity was in line with their priorities.

They have continued to invest in Bain.

The money was channeled through shell companies and banks in Panama. This was in the early 1980s, when Panama was run by strongman Manuel Noriega, and when the Panamanian banking system was notorious for its secrecy and therefore its use for money laundering by drug traffickers and other criminals, including the CIA.

Another Bain investor was Robert Maxwell, a corrupt British press lord who had deep ties to both the CIA and the Israeli Mossad, and after whose very suspicious drowning death was discovered to have been looting his employees' pension fund. Another British financier who put up initial money for Bain Capital was Sir Jack Lyons, who later was convicted of unrelated corrupt practices.

Many of the Salvadoran families who pitched in for the start-up of Bain Capital were also contributors to the ferociously right wing political party ARENA (National Republican Alliance). ARENA's leading light was a former military officer, Roberto D'Aubuisson, who is considered to have been the godfather of the death squads in El Salvador. D'Aubuisson, who died of cancer in 1992, is known to have ordered the March, 1980 assassination of the Archbishop of San Salvador, Oscar Romero, because the prelate had been denouncing military violence against the Salvadoran people. Seventy-five thousand people were killed in the Salvadoran Civil War, the vast majority by the death squads and the military. The Reagan administration gave full support to all this violence, which, in the "Contra Wars", eventually enveloped Nicaragua and Honduras also.

The networks of reactionary forces that were brought together by the activities of the Salvadoran elites, often working with the CIA and criminal elements, continue to be a destabilizing element all over the Western Hemisphere. The Salvadoran ultra-right was involved in efforts to start a terrorism campaign in Cuba in the late 1990s. Several bombs set off in Havana, one of them killing an Italian tourist, Fabio de Celmo.

The networks which link Central and South American reactionaries with right wing politicians in the United States have their fingerprints on the coups in Honduras and Paraguay, and are deeply involved in efforts to destabilize the progressive governments of Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Ecuador, El Salvador, Nicaragua and Venezuela. Their activities are integrated with those of the right wing Cuban exile elite in South Florida and elsewhere.

Many progressives here and abroad are disappointed by the Obama administration's Latin America policy. The Cuba blockade is still on, and our money continues to be poured into the "drug wars" in Colombia and Mexico. The Clinton State Department connived at legitimizing the results of the 2009 coup in Honduras.

However, a victory for Romney and his Republicans in November would greatly worsen the situation. It would mean that the kind of right wing extremists who helped Romney establish Bain Capital in the 1980s and whom he still calls his friends would be partners in setting U.S. policy toward the entire region. U.S. harassment of Cuba, Venezuela and other countries with progressive governments would sharply increase. Reactionary Republican Latin America policy figures Ollie North, Otto Reich, Roger Noriega and John Negroponte, all of them major figures in the "Contra Wars" but still politically active, as well as Cuban exile politicians like Congresswoman Ileana Ros-Lehtinen would be the people Mitt Romney would probably turn to in developing Latin America policy for the United States.

We can't let that happen by default.

Photo: Statue of Archbishop Óscar Romero, who was murdered by a right-wing death squad. Amber // CC 2.0

New rights pact signed as Colombia hunger strike continues

Thu, 09 Aug 2012 11:50:00 +0000

BOGOTA, Colombia - The Obama administration's Labor Department, the Colombian government and the International Labour Organization signed yet another agreement, on Aug. 6, pledging the Colombians to protect workers' rights - even as a hunger strike by illegally fired ex-GM Colombian workers continued in front of the U.S. Embassy here.

Full details of the pact were not released, but ILO Chair Cleopatra Doumbia-Henry said it included a new "National Unity of Protection," a Colombian institution that is dedicated to workers' rights and to improving security for union activists.

Some 29 unionists have been murdered so far in Colombia in the last year, bringing the 26-year toll to close to 3,000. Another activist escaped an assassination attempt the weekend before the pact was signed.

Doumbia-Henry said labor rights in Colombia have "significantly" improved, compared to prior years, but it's still not good. The ILO, which gets nations to sign non-binding international labor rights standards pacts, lacks enforcement power.

The labor rights situation is also not good for the 17 ex-GM workers, now on the hunger strike, who were illegally fired. Three of the 17 joined the strike on Aug. 8.

The hunger strike started Aug. 1, though the tent at the U.S. embassy occupied by the workers was set up already a year ago. General Motors "is firing us without just cause, harming us and our families," one hunger striker told Radio Caracol. He said they began the hunger strike "because our health has worsened day by day, we have lost our homes, we're basically on the street and we have been forgotten by the government."

"The association of workers and former workers of General Motors Colomotores takes the decision to begin a hunger strike, sewing our lips, until our rightful requests are heard by the company, the ambassador of the United States and the government," a second hunger striker said.

U.S. Ambassador Michael McKinley represented the administration at the signing ceremony, along with Doumbia-Henry and Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos. McKinley has yet to meet with the hunger strikers, and the embassy has largely stayed out of the debate over the FTA's labor rights and implementation. Santos called the new pact a "ratification" of his government's "commitment" to protect unionists and human rights "increasingly effectively" during implementation of the FTA.

Photo: Public Citizen // CC 2.0

London 2012 - the Title IX Olympics

Wed, 08 Aug 2012 14:29:00 +0000

Title IX, the landmark women's equality law, celebrated its 40th anniversary in June. While the legislation was originally meant to target sex discrimination in hiring and employment, it has become associated with its impacts on women in sport.

Since its inception, women have seen immense gains in sporting opportunities. According to the Women's Sports Foundation, women's involvement has increased 545 percent in college sports and 979 percent for high school sports. Other studies have correlated the legislation to additional benefits for women and girls involved in sport, such as being more likely to get better grades and graduate, while being less likely to get pregnant as a teen or use drugs.

The legacy of these successes has contributed to multiple U.S. media outlets naming the 2012 London Olympics "The Title IX Olympics." For the first time, women outnumber the male presence on the U.S. Olympic team. They've also been quite successful in their various sports at the Olympics, including the U.S. women's soccer team playing in the gold medal game (the game may be over when this goes to press), the U.S. women's gymnastic team gold medal victory, the groundbreaking gymnastics success of Gabby Douglas, Kayla Harrison winning gold in judo, and more.

Yet, for all of these significant successes, there are still struggles to be won.

As women's boxing was entering the Olympics during the London 2012 Games, there was massive public pushback by the athletes over the prospect that all women would have to wear skirts while competing in the ring. The resistance ultimately forced the Amateur International Boxing Association to back down. But similar sexualizing of U.S. Olympians can be seen in other sports.

The women's beach volleyball event is populated by some of the most talented American women. In fact, the finals of the event has two American teams competing against each other for the gold medal. Yet, a disturbingly significant amount of media coverage has focused on what these athletes are wearing.

When the female tandems chose to wear long-sleeve shirts while playing in the cooler English temperatures, there were angry comments from men on social media who felt entitled to see women in skimpy outfits as well a prominent UK paper that asked: "Is THIS the biggest scandal to hit the Olympics? U.S. women's beach volleyball stars trade in bikini tops for long-sleeve shirts."

These limitations in the scope of media coverage for women at the Olympics can also be seen in recent research.

A University of Delaware study found that women received significantly less prime time media coverage than men during the 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver.

Similarly, another study by the University of North Carolina saw limitations in which events got covered for women in previous Summer Olympics. The researchers stated: "[N]early three-quarters of the women's coverage was devoted to gymnastics, swimming, diving and beach volleyball. Track and field, where the clothing is almost as minimal, made up another 13 percent of the women's prime-time coverage."

"The remaining sports represented - rowing, cycling, and fencing - are not, by traditional standards, 'socially acceptable' sports for women, and make up approximately 2 percent of coverage ... Women who take part in sports that involve either power or hard-body contact are particularly unlikely to receive media coverage. When women engage in stereotypical feminine events, or look pretty or graceful, they will receive coverage, but they risk being shunned if they venture from that space."

Yet, for all of these very real limitations and the scourge of institutionalized sexism, it is a testament to the growing demand for women's sport, and the movements for equality like those that have championed Title IX, that we've been able to not only have such significant and powerful successes of American female Olympians on the fields of play but also have their feats publicized in multiple media venues.

Calling the 2012 Games the Title IX Olympics is appropriate. These Olympic Games, much like the landmark legislation of Title IX, have shown the very significant gains for women in athletics. Yet they also have shown the need for continued struggle to meet the real spirit of the Games and the law.

Photo: Women's boxing at the London Olympics. Ira Glover // CC 2.0