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CCNY'S INDEPENDENT STUDENT NEWSPAPER   OCTOBER 2000 VOLUME 3, NUMBER 1

NATIONAL NEWSBRIEFS

It’s Not Easy Being Green…

Long-time consumer crusader, people’s rights advocate, and now Green Party presidential candidate, Ralph Nader is fighting an uphill battle against the Democan and Republicrat onslaught. He’s waging a serious campaign, though, and makes some good points, as evidenced by this e-mail that came our way: “Students and young people are tired of the corporate domination of our political system. Together, we can build a truly progressive third party: the Green Party.” Want to be a N2K Campus Coordinator? Then get thyself to the computer lab and e-mail Carolyn Danckaert at: [email protected]. Remember what Uncle Ralph says: “There can be no daily democracy without daily citizenship.”

American in Peru To Get New Trial

BBC news reports that Peru’s top military court has overturned New York native Lori Berenson’s life sentence on a terrorism charge. She now faces a civilian trial despite the court’s admission that it had no evidence that Ms. Berenson is guilty.

The 30-year-old reporter was found guilty of terrorism and treason (even though she is not a Peruvian citizen) by a secret military court in 1996 for allegedly helping the Tupac Amaru Revolutionary Movement (MRTA) plan an attack on Peru’s Congress that Peruvian authorities say they foiled. Ms. Berenson and human rights organizations such as Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch claim that she did not have a fair chance to defend herself.

Peruvian authorities describe Berenson as a radical who came to foment a revolution. Supporters say she is a political activist and journalist who was framed. Berenson arrived in Peru in 1994 as a reporter for Third World Report and Modern Times and became outspoken critic of the poverty she witnessed.

Baruch College Professor Mark Berenson, Lori’s father, told BBC that: “Peru has now admitted that Lori Berenson was not a leader of the MRTA. It knows she was not even a member.”

Berenson has spent the past four years in high security jails, including Yanamayo Prison, which is 12,700 ft. up in the Andes mountains. Yanamayo holds around 300 inmates from the Shining Path and MRTA revolutionary groups. Human rights groups and rebel spokesmen label Peru’s jail system inhumane. They say inmates receive poor diets and spend about 23 hours a day in small, cold, dimly lit cells that typically have a hole in the concrete floor serving as a toilet.

Berenson was moved to lower altitude Socabaya prison when the Organization of American States began investigating her case last year, but still suffers health problems from the altitude and frigid conditions she endured at Yanamayo.

Although President Alberto Fujimori has stated several times that Berenson would serve her full term, there may be a window of opportunity now that Fujimori is resigning amid evidence of electoral fraud and increasing pressure to stop Peru’s human rights violations.

Justice Texas style

Human rights organization Amnesty International has condemned the two executions carried out in Texas on August 10, calling the continued use of the death penalty in the United States “one of the world’s human rights scandals,” and placed the state of Texas at the center.

Texas accounts for 28 of the 58 executions carried out in the USA this year, and 227 of the 656 since the USA resumed judicial killing in 1977.

Brian Roberson and Oliver Cruz were killed by lethal injection within an hour of each other despite serious concerns relating to racial discrimination and mental impairment, two issues that mark many capital cases in the USA.

Roberson, Black, was executed for the 1986 killing of an elderly white couple in Dallas County. The prosecutor at his trial systematically removed African Americans from the jury pool, indicating that they were not educated enough to sit on a jury.

At the trial of Oliver Cruz, a Latino accused of the rape and murder of Kelly Donovan, white, the prosecutor argued for execution on the grounds that Cruz’s learning disability made him more of a threat to society. International standards oppose the death penalty for the mentally impaired. Cruz’s white co-defendant, charged with the same murder, received a prison term in exchange for testimony against Cruz.

Amnesty International also refutes Governor George W. Bush’s contention that Texas does not execute the mentally retarded, citing the examples of Terry Washington and Charles Boyd—put to death in 1997 and 1999. The juries that sentenced them to death were never told of their mental impairment.

Bush did not support 1999 bills to ban the execution of the mentally retarded and improve legal representation for poor defendants. Apparently even compassionate conservatism still means stacking the deck against the poor and vulnerable…

New York-Based Activist Murdered in Indonesia

Human Rights Watch reports that the body of missing human rights activist Jafar Siddiq Hamzah, who vanished on August 8 from the Indonesian city of Medan, has been located. Indonesian military or paramilitary groups are suspected to be responsible for his disappearance and murder, although the military maintains its innocence.

Jafar lived in Queens and was a student at the New School. In June he returned to the province of Aceh, where a pro-independence movement has been clashing with the Indonesian army for the last twenty-three years.

“Jafar came to New York because he knew he had more freedom to work on Aceh here than he had in Indonesia. He could draw on the city’s resources to raise alarms about ongoing human rights violations in Aceh, and he chose New York because Queens has the largest community of Acehnese in the United States,” said Sidney Jones, Asia director of Human Rights Watch.Jafar had planned to spend the summer documenting human rights violations and working for a resolution to the political conflict. He decided to work out of Medan, which was believed to be less dangerous than Aceh, but he reportedly was immediately aware that he was being followed and took precautions to assure his safety.

The current rebellion is due to resentment of Acehnese poverty despite the resources—including oil, natural gas, and gold—extracted from their land and the fact that most of the human rights violations against civilians committed in the name of counterinsurgency have gone unpunished.

Governor Pataki, are you reading this?

The San Jose Mercury News reports that California Gov. Gray Davis and legislative leaders have approved an initiative to give a transfusion to the state’s chronically under-funded college aid program by virtually guaranteeing a scholarship to every new high school graduate who demonstrates financial need and earns at least a C grade average.

The grants do not have to be repaid and are designated for California residents who attend public or private colleges in the state. Last year three out of five students were passed over when the money ran out. Under the expanded program all new high school graduates meeting eligibility standards will be funded. The bill is intended to extend financial assistance to thousands of poor and middle class students who in past years would have been turned away. Did we mention that CUNY was free in the good old days that some people like to crow about?

The rich get richer…

Chief executive officers at US companies are now entitled to pay packages 475 times those of their workers and 62 times that of the US President, according to a new study by the Institute for Policy Studies (IPS), a Washington research group, and United for a Fair Economy, a non-partisan organization seeking to reduce US economic injustices.

CEO pay jumped 535 percent from 1990 to 2000, a decade in which the pay of average workers, unadjusted for inflation, rose a paltry 32 percent, according to the study. If the average annual pay for production workers had expanded at the same rate during the widely touted 1990s economic boom, the average worker would now earn $25 per hour, the study—entitled Executive Excess 2000—found.

“The growing gap between CEOs and workers underscores the legacy of wage stagnation since the 1970s,” according to the study. Despite repeated assertions by the Clinton administration that times have rarely been better for US workers, the median hourly wage in 1999, 11.88 dollars, was lower—adjusted for inflation—than it was in 1973, 12.05 dollars.

“While CEOs have seen their pay packages zoom into the stratosphere, the typical American worker has seen no improvement in real wages in over a generation,” the report concluded.

Much of the surge in CEO pay, according to the study, can be attributed to “The virtually instant riches” acquired by chief executives at Internet companies. While government officials have hailed Internet companies as creators of high-paying jobs, the number of workers employed directly by such firms is “miniscule” relative to the total workforce, according to the study.

USA: human rights rogue state

A new report released by Human Rights Watch claims that workers’ basic rights are routinely violated in the United States because U.S. labor law is so feebly enforced and filled with loopholes.

In the report, titled: “Unfair Advantage: Workers’ Freedom of Association in the United States under International Human Rights Standards,” HRW charges that the United States itself violates freedom of association standards by failing to protect workers’ rights to organize, even though the U.S. government has called for “core labor standards,” including workers’ freedom of association, to be included in the rules of the World Trade Organization and the Free Trade Agreement of the Americas.

The report is based on field research in several states, including New York. HRW examined workers’ rights to organize, bargain collectively, and strike under international norms, and found widespread labor rights violations across regions, industries and employment status.

“The cards are stacked against workers in the United States. The U.S. government cannot effectively press another country to improve labor standards while violating them itself. It should lead by example,” says Kenneth Roth, HRW’s Executive Director.

“The cards are stacked against workers in the United States,” said Kenneth Roth, executive director of Human Rights Watch. “The U.S. government cannot effectively press another country to improve labor standards while violating them itself. It should lead by example.”

Each year thousands of workers in the United States are fired from their jobs or suffer other reprisals for trying to organize unions. Millions of workers—including farmworkers, domestic household workers, low-level supervisors, and “independent” contractors (who are really dependent on a single employer)—are deliberately excluded from labor law coverage for organizing and bargaining rights. They can be fired with impunity for trying to Employers resist union organizing by dragging out legal proceedings for years, the report said. Labor law is so weak that companies often treat the minor penalties as a routine cost of doing business, not a deterrent against violations. According to National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) statistics, the problem is getting worse. In the 1950’s, workers who suffered reprisals for exercising the right to organize numbered in the hundreds each year. By 1998, the last year for which official figures are available, nearly 24,000 workers were victims of discrimination serious enough for the NLRB to issue a “back-pay” or other remedial order. The NLRB’s budget and staff have not kept pace with this growth.

HRW called on the U.S. Congress to ensure rapid reinstatement and full back pay for workers fired for organizing and ensure that protection of the right to organize be extended to farmworkers, household domestic workers, and others not currently covered by federal labor laws. HRW also urges Congress to ratify International Labor Organization conventions on worker organizing and collective bargaining, and to strengthen U.S. laws protecting these rights.

Clinton’s Colombia Waiver: ‘Grave Mistake’

President Clinton’s decision to waive human rights conditions on the $1.3 billion military aid package to Colombia will encourage violent abuses, according to Human Rights Watch. On August 23, Clinton signed a waiver allowing the United States to ignore human rights conditions included in the military aid package. In granting the waiver, Clinton not only makes America complicit in ongoing abuses, but also risks

“This is the wrong policy and the wrong time,” said José Miguel Vivanco, Executive Director of the Americas Division of HRW. “The message is that the bad apples with the armed forces shouldn’t be worried. Ultimately, the waiver defeats the purpose of any policy meant to improve human rights.”

HRW was among several leading human rights groups who took part in a two-day consultation with the State Department required by law before any certification. During those meetings, all of the human rights groups present, including HRW, unanimously opposed Colombia’s certification to receive military aid and called on President Clinton not to issue a waiver. The U.S.-backed Colombian military and paramilitary groups supported by them have been implicated in the murder and terrorizing of citizens accused of sympathizing with Colombian rebel groups.

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