James van Luik
Publisher & Editor
& Compiler
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Monday, February 28, 2005
Volume 4, No. 4
8
Articles, 14 Pages
Editor's
Note: Social Security provides monthly benefits to some 44
million Americans who are retired, disabled or the survivor of a
deceased parent. It provides most of the income for older
Americans—some 64 percent of their support. It has lifted
generations of seniors out of poverty.
Social
security is not in crisis. That is an outright lie perpetrated in
order to create the urgency for radical changes. Under
conservative forecasts, the long-term challenges in Social
Security do not manifest themselves until 2042. Even then Social
Security has 70 percent of needed funds. That shortfall is
smaller than the amount needed in 1983, the last time we
overhauled Social Security. George Bush's Social Security
crisis-talk is an effort to create a specter of doom – just
like the weapons of mass destruction claim in Iraq.
Phasing
out Social Security and replacing it with privatized accounts
means one thing: massive cuts in monthly benefits for everybody.
Social Security privatization requires diverting taxes used to
pay current benefits into privatized accounts invested in risky
stocks. Without that money Social Security benefits will
inevitably be cut – some proposals even cut benefits of
current retirees. These benefit cuts are inevitable, since
diverting Social Security money into privatized accounts means
less money to pay current and future benefits.
Every
serious privatization proposal raises the Social Security
retirement age to 70. That might be fine if you're a Washington
special interest lobbyist but it is incredibly unfair to
blue-collar Americans with tough, physical jobs, or for African
Americans and Latinos with lower life expectancies. Also, which
companies hire and/or retain people in their sixties?
Privatization
means gambling with your retirement security. There is probably
an appropriate place for a little stock market risk in retirement
planning – but it isn't Social Security. Privatization
exposes your entire retirement portfolio to stock market risks
– and the risk that you'll outlive any of your saving at
retirement. You can't outlive your Social Security benefit.
So
who does benefit? Wall Street. Giant financial services firms
have been salivating for decades over the prospect of taking over
Social Security. Wall Street would make billions of dollars in
profit by managing the privatized accounts – money that
would come directly from your benefits.
1. The Rise of Neo-Fascism via Globalization Since the
Second World War
3. New Diseases Arise as Environments Are Destroyed
4. America Keeps Marching Toward Nuclear Apocalypse
for All of Us?
5. Private Tyrannies Called Corporations
6. American "Values" Cast a Global Shadow
7. Pandora Depleted Uranium Research Project
8. Hiroshima Remembered: Breaking the Silence
1. THE RISE OF NEO-FASCISM VIA GLOBALIZATION SINCE THE
SECOND WORLD WAR
BY
TARIK
ALI
Liberal definitions
of fascism adopt the approach of ticking off items from an
already printed menu and seeing if they match. But many
social-democratic and most Marxist definitions grew out of the
actual experience. They explained the rise of Italian, German,
Spanish and French fascism as deriving from the overall dynamics
of capitalist societies. Fascism was a weapon of last resort used
by a ruling class faced simultaneously with an economic crisis
and the threat of a revolutionary labour movement. This was
certainly the case in parts of Europe during the interwar period.
The fascist triumph
in Germany would not have been possible without the support of
big business, which benefited enormously during the first five
years of the Third Reich: profits rose from 6.6 billion marks in
1933 to 15 billion in 1938. The destructive delirium of fascist
ideology was carefully targeted. It never obstructed the payment
of permanent homage to its economic backers. Even at the height
of the war, patriotism was never permitted to deflect the search
for profits. In most cases the Nazi regime obediently
capitulated. A classic example is the detailed negotiations
between the Flick companies and the government on the price of
bazooka shells. The government offered 24 RM per shell. Flick
demanded 39.25 RM per shell. Agreement was reached at 37 RM,
which meant an extra gain of more than 1 million marks over the
period 1940-3.
To dress all new
enemies in the black shirts and leather jackets of European
fascism is grotesque. It is done because it helps the media to
project the enemy, but the credulity of Western citizens has its
limits and the Hitler fix won't work every time. State
intellectuals might be better advised to ponder their own back
yard. The American democracy they boast of is ailing. Politics
equals concentrated economics. The author of a recent
intellectual biography of Tocqueville concludes thus:
"Far from
being valued as symbolizing an aspiration towards the
democratization of power and a participatory society of political
equals – democracy as subject – democracy would come to
be regarded by late-modern power elites as an indispensable yet
valuable myth for promoting American political and economic
interests among premodern and post-totalitarian societies. At
home democracy is touted not as self-government by an involved
citizenry but as economic opportunity. Opportunity serves as the
means of implicating the populace in anti-democracy, in a
politico-economic system characterized by dominating power of
hierarchical organizations, widening class differentials, and a
society where the hereditary element is confined to successive
generations of the defenseless poor."
This is what the
fanatical preachers of neo-liberalism had always intended. When
they began their work in the Sixtis and Seventies of the last
century they were treated as a joke by Keynesian liberals,
scorned by social democrats and kept at a distance by the
conservatives. A majority of Marxist economists did not even
deign to take them seriously. But for a quarter of a century, Von
Hayek and his loyal followers ignored the ridicule and burrowed
away underneath the surface, suddenly to emerge and greet the
leaders of the victorious counter-Revolution: Ronald Reagan and
Margaret Thatcher. The combination of neo-liberal ideas and the
social forces represented by the two politicians transformed the
globe.
Hayek was not
just the high priest of hard doctrines at home. He favoured
military actions to defend US interests abroad. On the domestic
front he favoured the invisible magic of a manipulated market. No
state intervention against the interests of capital was to be
tolerated. But the state was vital to undertake military
interventions in the sphere of international relations. The
circle of neo-liberals were staunch defenders of the Vietnam war.
They supported the US-backed military coup in Chile. In
1979, Hayek favoured bombing Tehran. In 1982, during the Malvinas
conflict, he wanted raids on the Argentinean capital. This was
the creed of neo-liberal hegemony most favoured by its founder.
The cuts in
direct taxation, deregulation of financial markets, weak
trades-unions and privatized public services were necessary to
assert the primacy of consumption – the commodification of
all goods and services – which was fuelled by the private
sector. The modified capitalist system now accepted speculation
as a central feature of economic life in the world's financial
markets. The success of the system required that private capital
was permitted to penetrate the social fabric with the mass
marketing of mutual and pension funds.
Having united
the Western world on the necessity to push through neo-liberal
'reforms', the American Empire was to follow through on the need
to assert its power globally. In this it was supported to the
hilt by its old Trojan Horse in the European Union, otherwise the
United Kingdom. For many years now, one of the main priorities of
the WTO has been to accelerate the privatization of education,
health, welfare, social housing and transport. With the decline
of profit-margins in the once prosperous manufacturing sector,
Western capitalism is determined to force entry into a once
inviolate public sphere. Giant multinationals have been busy
preparing competitive tenders to capture the public services
share of the gross domestic product.
In its notorious
1993 development report titled "Investing in Health",
the World Bank described public services as an obstacle to
abolishing world poverty. There have been important conflicts
between US/Canada and the EU on some of the policies advocated by
the WTO which affect the health and safety of citizens, but the
multinationals are winning. A few years ago in the
hormone-treated beef dispute, the WTO ruled in favour of
USA/Canada arguing that EU safety standards were higher than
those accepted internationally. In a sharply critical review of
WTO policies Professor Allyson Pollock (of the Health Services
Research Unit at University College, London) argued in Lancet,
the leading British medical journal, on 9 December 2000:
"…the
WTO's national treatment rule was used to define a public-health
initiative as protectionist and therefore potentially illegal
… The new criteria proposed at the WTO threaten some of the
key mechanisms that allow governments to guarantee health care
for their populations by requiring governments to demonstrate
that their pursuit of social policy goals are least restrictive
and least costly to trade."
New Labour, like
their Thatcherite predecessors, ever desperate to please the US
and its financial institutions, are determined to be the first EU
state that fulfils all the WTO conditions. Accordingly, the
British public was informed that the Private Finance Initiative
(PFI) would be sued to create a new structure in the public
sector. In other words New Labour declared that it would go
further than Thatcher and Major dared and attempt to complete the
Thatcher counter-revolution. The air-traffic controllers will be
sold off to a few wealthy airlines. The railways, whose
privatization has been a total disaster financially and has led
to the breakdown of safety, will not be taken back into any form
of public ownership. New laws are being passed to make it
possible for any local authority to sell off any school to
private industry. At the moment only those schools considered to
be 'failing' – i.e. not provided with sufficient resources
by the government to teach children from poor families – are
handed over to companies. Among the firms directly engaged in
teaching children of 'failed' schools are Shell Oil (special
lessons in ecology?), British Aerospace (lectures on the arms
trade?), McDonalds (healthy eating?).
France and
Germany were moving in the same direction. Lionel Jospin and
Gerhard Schroeder had come to power repudiating the hard-nosed
policies that promoted accumulation and inequality, but their
policies have promoted both of them. The privatization carried
out by the French Socialists have exceeded that of the previous
six administrations. The German social-democrats have been more
hamstrung, but their trajectory is clear.
As they
accommodated to neo-liberal fundamentalism at home, they accepted
its militarist logic abroad. Britain, France and Germany
supported the Third Oil War (1991), the Balkan wars and the 'war
on terrorism'. So keen was Germany to become part of the new
world order that the Red-Green coalition voted through the
re-involvement of the German Republic in military adventures
abroad. The dissident Greens in the Bundestag met privately to
determine how they could register a few votes against, without
threatening the coalition.
It would be
illusory to imagine that it is only the Big Three of the EU who
lined up as obedient retrievers on US hunting missions. The
Scandinavian states, once respected throughout the world for
their independence, have not wanted to be left behind. Like
obedient poodles they follow the leaders of the Empire: Norway
was proud of its role in creating Palestinian Bantustans, Finland
(Ed. not truly a Scandinavian state) brokered the bombing
of Yugoslavia, the Swedish government has been a party to the
starvation of Iraq, while Denmark supplied a Viceroy in Kosovo.
Meanwhile in the
rest of the world, a billion people are undernourished and 7
million children die as a result of the debt owed by the
countries in which they live. It is this that accounts for the
desperation and hatred that surfaces in large parts of the world
against the US and its allies. Senegal was instructed by the IMF
mullahs to withdraw territorial sovereignty from its territorial
waters or else its debt would not be rescheduled. It did so. The
result? The factory-trawlers of Europe have taken the fish for
the super markets of the EU. The waters from which the fishermen
of Senegal drew sustenance for many thousands years have been
taken over by the rich West. The people of this country are
suffering because there is now a shortage of fish. Bolivia was
ordered to privatize its water. The poor were forbidden to
collect the rainwater that had accumulated on their roofs. Water
rates became prohibitive. There was a semi-uprising in the town
of Cochabamba as a result and some concessions were won. The
situation in Ghana is virtually the same. Here the poor
have been forced to drink untreated water which has led to
disease and death. The Ivory Coast was compelled to withdraw
subsidies to its cocoa farmers. This led to massive redundancies.
Skilled workers were replaced by indentured children. Two fifths
of the chocolate drunk and eaten by the West is produced by
super-exploited child labour.
This is the world in which we live – out of tune with the lucid humanity and the social compassion demanded by ant-globalization protesters – and beyond which, write the intellectual apologists of this system, no substantial improvement can be imagined. 'Obliterate all political passions', cry the politicians of the globalized world. It reminds me of the title of a poem written seventy years ago by Bertolt Brecht: '700 intellectuals bow before an oil tanker.'
BY
WILLIAM
PFAFF
The President has
an enormous political gulf to bridge. The trouble is, he doesn't
even know it's there.
President George W.
Bush arrives in Europe this week in the belief that the European
NATO allies can be persuaded to 'turn away from the disagreements
of the past' and open 'a new chapter' in transatlantic relations,
as Condoleezza Rice, on her European trip, advised them to do. He
is likely to go home without the concessions he wants.
He wants more help
from the Europeans in Iraq, Afghanistan, and probably in other
places yet to be announced; European backing for American policy
on Iran (and Syria and Israel/Palestine); and no European arms
sales to China. Those are Washington's priorities. There is a
further list of secondary issues, commercial as well as
political.
His trip will fail
because he and his administration do not understand what really
divides most continental European governments from the US today.
At the same time, Europeans are mostly unwilling to confront
these issues, because of the trouble with Washington they imply.
But, unacknowledged or not, they count.
First is the
definition of the crisis. Few Europeans believe either in the
global 'war on terror' or the 'war against tyranny', as
Washington describes them.
American claims
about the threat of terrorism seem grossly exaggerated, and the
American reaction disproportionate and even hysterical. Three
thousand were killed in the Twin Towers, but most advanced
societies have already had, or still have, their own wars with
'terrorism' sustaining losses proportionately as severe: the
British with the IRA, Italians and Germans with their Red
Brigades, The Spanish with the Basques separatist Eta, and so on.
It has been a condition of modern political existence.
The American-led
invasion of Iraq is widely regarded in Europe as irrelevant to
the reality of terrorism, overwrought in scale and destruction,
and perverse in effect, vastly deepening hostility between the
Western powers and Muslim society. To most Democrats as well as
Republicans, 11 September was the defining event of the age,
after which 'nothing could be the same'. Their imperviousness to
any notion that this might not be so astonishes many abroad. Many
Europeans believe it is not the world that has changed, but
the US.
The second cause of
transatlantic disagreement is the American claim to global
domination, and its hostility to Europe acquiring political or
military power commensurate with European economic power.
This claim rests on
the argument that an international system in which there is more
than one major power is no longer acceptable. Two years ago,
Condoleezza Rice told the International Institute for Strategic
Studies in London that 'multi-polarity' in the past had been 'a
necessary evil that sustained the absence of war but did not
promote the triumph of peace'. As a theory of political society,
she said, it stands for rivalry and competition. 'We have tried
this before. It led to the Great War …'
This obviously is
untrue. The simultaneous existence of major as well as minor
powers was the political reality throughout modern history,
despite efforts to overturn it, most recently by Hitler and
Stalin.
A traditional
diplomacy of 'balance of power', meant to keep peace failed in
1914, and in 1938 the existing balance of power was deliberated
destroyed by a hegemony-seeking Germany – in part made
possible by an isolationist US refusal to intervene in Europe's
affairs.
Speaking in Paris
last week, the Secretary of State asked, 'why should we seek to
divide our capacities for good, when they can be more effective
untied? Only the enemies of freedom would cheer this division.'
The alternative she proposes is an American –led
international system that replaces NATO's principle of equality
and collegiality with hierarchy.
NATO today has an
internal multipolarity. The treaty requires consensus on actions,
which means that differences of opinion can block US initiatives.
The Bush administration prefers 'coalitions of the willing' to
avoid this problem, although the fragility of the Iraq coalition
does not encourage its use elsewhere.
The third basic
disagreement is that the US has repudiated the system of absolute
state sovereignty that has governed international society since
1648, and is the basis of modern international law.
This was an early
casualty of the Bush administration's National Security Strategy,
announced in 2002, which declared that preemptive attack had
become an American policy option in the war against terror. The
US then renounced, 'de-ratified', or simply abandoned a series of
treaty commitments. These included Geneva standards on the
treatment of prisoners and the prohibition of torture. The US has
deliberately chosen to place itself outside the regime of
international law, to which all the European Union nations are
committed.
The American claim
to a dominating or hegemonic position in international affairs is
bipartisan. The Clinton administration made it; the Bush
administration makes it; John Kerry made it during last year's
presidential campaign. It says that America's power itself
imposes a right or responsibility to suppress terrorism, nuclear
proliferation, and 'rogue states', and to enforce international
order.
Any challenge to
American primacy by another state, or by the European Union, is
perceived a cause of international instability and therefore a
potential source of disorder or war.
The American role
is avowedly benevolent, and in the eyes of many Americans,
certainly including President Bush, it is of divine origin
(Woodrow Wilson also believed this). Within the present
administration, there are those who believe cosmic forces are in
play and responsible for America's emergence as the sole
superpower. The American belief in a divine commission goes back
to its religious origins in the 17th century, and is
not open to logical refutation. Even secular interpretations of
American destiny assert a moral claim, expressed thus in the 19th
century; 'The US has achieved the highest possible form of
political system and that this great system can be extend to the
rest of humanity … Because America is exceptionally good, it
both deserves to be exceptionally powerful and by nature cannot
use its power for evil ends.'
Current
transatlantic conflicts are thus not mere political
disagreements. They derive from the nature of the evolving
relationship between the US and a European Union that considers
itself the sovereign legatee of the European powers of the past,
and has a conservative commitment to the preservation of
international order.
The claim America
now makes is that destruction is a creative principle in politics
as well as economics. 'Creative destruction' produces new order.
This is a form of Utopianism.
The American
challenge is to the fundamental claim of other nations to
sovereign autonomy. In the immediate future this is likely to be
managed rather than solved. Many European governments are
undoubted willing to accept Washington on Washington's terms, as
has Tony Blair's Britain.
Some, as already
happens, will resist those terms and attempt to develop a
European mid-term or long-term counter-power, which will not
necessarily be military.
But throughout
history nations and other political forces have been disposed to
challenge claims to universal power. This is the source of
current tensions. It is the closest thing to a natural law that
history can offer. 'Stuff happens', whether intended or not, to
use Donald Rumsfeld's language. Uneasy lies the crown, even for
republics.
3. NEW DISEASES ARISE AS ENVIRONMENTS ARE DESTROYED
BY
MICHAEL
McCARTHY
Changes to the
environment that are sweeping the planet are bringing about a
rise in infectious diseases, the UN Environment Program (UNEP)
has warned.
Loss of forests;
the building of roads and dams; urban growth; the clearing of
natural habitats for agriculture; mining; and pollution of
coastal waters are promoting conditions under which new and old
pathogens can thrive, according to research published in UNEP's
Global Environment Outlook Year book for 2004/2005.
Ailments previously
unknown in human beings are appearing, such as the Nipah virus,
which until recently was found normally in Asian fruit bats,
according to the report.
Nipah's emergence
in the late 1990s as an often fatal disease in humans has been
linked to a combination of forest fires in Sumatra and the
clearance of natural forests in Malaysia for palm plantations. In
searching for fruit, bats were forced into closer contact with
domestic pigs, giving the virus its chance to spread to humans.
Climate change in
particular may aggravate the threats of infectious diseases in
three ways the report suggests. First, by increasing the
temperatures under which many diseases and their carriers
flourish.
Second, by further
stressing and altering habitats. For example, the geographic
range and seasonality of two of the world's most serious
mosquito-borne infections, malaria and dengue fever, are very
sensitive to changes in climate. Also, Neisseria mengingitidis, a
common cause of meningitis, can be spread many miles in the dusty
conditions that occur following prolonged drought in the Sahel.
Third, climate
change may increase the number of environmental refugees who are
forced to migrate to other communities or even countries. This in
turn will also favor the spread of diseases from one location to
another. Overall, it seems that intact habitats and landscapes
tend to keep infectious agents in check.
The issue of
environmental degradation and a rise of many new and old
infectious diseases is a complex, sometimes subtle one that is
causing increasing concern among scientists and disease
specialists.
Many scientists are
now convinced that ecological disruption, dramatic environmental
change, and poor handling of human and animal wastes are playing
an important part in the spread of diseases such as malaria,
bilharzia, Japanese encephalitis, and dengue haemorrhagic fever.
The report is based
on research by some of the leading specialists. They include Tony
McMichael of the Australian National University, Bernard
Goldstein of the University of Pittsburgh and Jonathan Patz of
the University of Wisconsin.
4. AMERICA KEEPS MARCHING TOWARDS NUCLEAR HOLOCAUST FOR
ALL OF US?
BY
SCOTT
RITTER
North Korea's
dramatic public revelation that it possesses nuclear weapons
represents a stark challenge for the Bush administration.
The North Korean
claim, if true, underscores the failure of President Bush's
non-proliferation policies that since the beginning of his first
term had been subordinated to a grander vision of regime change.
That policy was intended to transform strategically vital regions
of he world into Western style democracies supportive of the US
and the Bush administration's vision of American global
dominance.
The intermingling
of nonproliferation and regime change policies was doomed to
fail. One requires skillful multilateral diplomacy based on the
principles of uniform application of international law, the other
bold application of a unilateral doctrine of aggressive
liberation rhetoric backed by the real threat of military power.
When blended, as the Bush administration did, unilateralism
trumps multilateralism every time. North Korea's announced
accession to the nuclear club represents the inevitable result.
The end of
America's meaningful role as a promoter of global
nonproliferation can be traced to decisions made in the 1990s
regarding regime change in Saddam Hussein's Iraq. The UN had
embarked on a bold effort to roll back the proliferation of
weapons of mass destruction through disarmament and, despite some
initial difficulties, scored a dramatic success.
It is now clear
that Iraq, under pressure form UN weapons inspectors, was
disarmed of its WMD by 1991 and had dismantled and destroyed the
last vestiges of its weapons programs by 1996. But the US had,
since 1991, committed to a policy of regime change in Iraq, which
required economic sanctions-based containment linked to a
continued finding of Iraqi noncompliance with it disarmament
obligation.
Rather than
embracing weapons inspections, three successive US
administrations denigrated and subverted the work of the
inspectors in order to keep the primary policy objective of
regime change in Iraq on track. The nail in the coffin of US
nonproliferation efforts came when the Bush administration
willfully misstated the extent of the Iraqi WMD programs in order
to justify its invasion of Iraq.
North Korea
and Iran concluded from events leading to the US invasion of Iraq
that the Bush administration did not regard nonproliferation as
an endgame but a tool designed to weaken a target state to the
point that it could succumb to the grander US policy objective of
regime change.
Mr. Bush had stated
that the world would be a better place with the regimes in
Pyongyang and Tehran removed. Therefore, all diplomatic efforts
– whether the six-party frame work with North Korea or the
European Union-brokered negotiations with Iran – were
regarded as disingenuous fronts intended not to facilitate
nonproliferation and stability but rather instability and regime
change.
With Iraq a model
of the reality of America's unilateral militaristic approach
toward bringing about regime change, North Korea and Iran have
embarked on the only path available to either of them –
acquisition of an independent nuclear deterrent intended to
forestall what they perceive as irresponsible US aggression.
The Bush
administration has come face to face with the reality of the
failure of its policies. Rather than curtailing the proliferation
of nuclear weapons, the administration's crusade against global
tyranny has served as an accelerant in placing the most dangerous
weapons known to man in the hands of xenophobic regimes that have
been backed into a corner.
But the situation
in North Korea and Iran could still be resolved in a way that
promotes global nonproliferation objectives.
Real and meaningful
economic incentives, backed by US and allied willingness to
permit North Korea and Iran to possess civilian nuclear programs
operated under stringent international monitoring, could succeed
in rolling back North Korea's possession of nuclear weapons and
provide incentive for Iran to cease and desist in its own
program.
But the key to any
such salvation lies with the willingness of the Bush
administration to unlink nonproliferation efforts from regime
change. This is highly unlikely, given the reality of the
ideological composition of those at the senior decision–making
levels of the Bush national security team and the huge political
investment Mr. Bush has made in support of his global crusade
against tyranny.
"Freedom is on
the march," Mr. Bush has said. Unfortunately for the US,
North Korea and Iran don't see it that way. And if America keeps
marching, it could very well be in the direction of a nuclear
apocalypse.
5. PRIVATE TYRANNIES CALLED CORPORATIONS
BY
RALPH
NADER
Michael Sommer, a
technology consultant, found out the hard way about one way fine
print contracts as he checked in recently for a flight to Buenos
Aires. A United Airlines supervisor at the gate handed him a
letter that decreed the confiscation of his 2 million frequent
flier miles, dozens of flight coupons and his elite status.
United Airlines had audited his account, discovering violations
of passenger program rules, which he denied so doing.
Now, regardless of
the violations alleged – such as misusing denied boarding
certificates, is this unilateral wipeout the way to treat loyal
customer racking up over 2 million frequent miles? Especially
when United Airlines is in bankruptcy and presumably wanting to
make friends and influence people to use its services!
Mr. Sommer's case
led the new York Times to further inquires which resulted in
finding that some other airlines are conducting these tougher
"audits" of their most loyal customers and making
decisions from special software that looks for suspicious
patterns. These include, the Times reports, "claiming miles
for a nonrevenue ticket or using the wrong frequent-flier number
when requesting mileage credit."
The procedures are
autocratic. Paul Dingham, an economic consultant, found out about
his audit only after the US Airways slammed down the gavel on
him. "The airline didn't inform me in advance of the audit,
or did they offer me an opportunity to appeal," he
complained.
What these seasoned
travelers discover is the fine print on most of these frequent
flier programs declare that the miles to be owned by the airline
and they can be diluted, deadlined or removed by the unbridled
judgment of the carrier.
Mr. Sommer may
contest this assertion by United Airlines in court. Thus far, the
courts have not been congenial to passengers when the airlines
dilute the frequent flier program by requiring, for example, more
miles, already earned, for a round trip.
American consumers
are fast losing their contractual rights in the service area of
the economy. Fine print contracts, such as credit card
agreements, brokerage agreements and insurance policy contracts,
are very one-sided and getting worse each year. Have you ever
read the shrink wrap license agreement after you buy software?
More and more of
these standard/form take-it-or-leave-it contracts contain binding
arbitration clauses that prevent you from suing vendors to
resolved a dispute. They even contain the ultimate mockery of the
meaning of the word "contract" as a mutually binding
agreement. The large companies increasingly stipulate in
microscopic print that they reserve the unilateral right to
change their terms of their sales agreement.
Well, you may say,
you don't have to sign on the dotted line and can look for
another competitor to patronize. Sure, but the competitor has the
same fine print contract, whether General Motors or Ford, State
Farm or Allstate, Citigroup or Bank of America.
These big company
standardized contracts regulate your relationship with the
company. That fine print is enforceable in most courts. Judges
rarely invalidate these provisions anymore under the doctrine of
unconscionability. These giant corporations have become their own
private legislatures. Perhaps someday anti-trust doctrine can be
invoked if there is evidence of collusion by sellers to suppress
competition in pre-printed contractual offerings.
Meanwhile, the
dotted line moves on to fiat after fiat, as in the recent
proliferation of wholly unregulated stored value cards offered to
millions of desperate "unbanked" consumers. The control
of peoples' money by the financial industry not only gouges with
sky-high interest rates and penalties. It also ranks your credit
rating, and credit score in ways that deter your ability to
complain and assigns you a number that determines where, how,
when and whether you can or cannot buy.
Congress and the
state legislatures are way behind the curve in protecting
consumers here. It is time for citizens to start giving these
lawmakers a score card for being absent without leave of the
voters, thereby leaving them defenseless before these modern day
mammons.
6. AMAERICAN
"VALUES" CAST A GLOBAL SHADOW
BY
JAMES
CARROLL
This has been the
year of American democracy. The values of this nation have never
been more dramatically on display before the world.
"Freedom" has been the watch word, from Operation Iraqi
Freedom to the coming Freedom Tower at Ground Zero in New York.
In a period of enormous stress, America has pulled itself
together, freshly defined its beliefs, and begun to press them on
others. Washington aims at nothing less than the propagation of
US notions of civil order and social justice everywhere. And why
shouldn't citizens be proud? But this vision throws a shadow.
Contradictions of American idealism have also been manifest with
rare clarity this year – and not only in wars abroad. A
signal event took place in Massachusetts as the year approached
its end. A jury made up of citizens of one of the relatively few
states that outlaws the death penalty nevertheless imposed it in
the federal murder case against Gary Lee Sampson, the brutal
killer of Jonathan Rizzo and Philip McCloskey. As advocates of
the death penalty hoped, this decision in the heart of a
community that has long rejected capital punishment – the
last execution in Massachusetts was in 1947 – speeds
America's complete return to frontier justice.
Even in a period
when the fallibility of the death penalty has been repeatedly
exposed, roughly two out of three Americans still support it. In
Texas, George W. Bush personally supervised the executions of 152
people – and is proud of it. That the blood of this
slow-motion massacres on the president's hands is a political
asset says everything about current American values. Where once
leading Democrats opposed capital punishment, now, as the Globe's
Brian C. Mooney reports, they (i.e. the Clintons, Gore, Dean,
Kerry, Lieberman, Edwards, Gephardt, Clark) support it. As the
world's democracies go in one direction on this question, the US
goes in another.
The grisly embrace
of death is only part of the year's story of crime and
punishment, American style. In August, the rapist of children,
John J. Geoghan, was murdered by a fellow inmate at a prison in
Massachusetts. As Geoghans' crimes had led to the exposure of the
abusive secrets of the Catholic Church, his punishment led to
revelations of what America's "criminal justice system"
actually involves. Sadistic treatment by guards and a lawless
culture in which prisoners are allowed to prey on each other
– are these exceptions or the rule? In America there can be
no question an outright acceptance of torture, and US sponsorship
of democracy abroad insists on that (or did before the war on
terrorism). Yet the US prison system, with many abusive guards
and unchecked sadist-inmates, effectively assumes torture as part
of punishment. If Geoghan were not notorious, his fate would have
gone unnoted.
But the year just
ending marked other milestones toward a reckoning with the real
meaning of American democracy. In late October, in a speech in
Fall River, Robert A. Mulligan, chief administrative judge of
Massachusetts, noted current characteristics of US criminal
justice. The American prison population recently went over 2
million for the first time, putting the US ahead of Russia as the
world capital of incarceration. Add to that the number those on
parole or probation and the total under "correctional"
control grows to 7 million. Thirty years ago, one in 1,000
Americans was locked up; today, almost five are. In famously
liberal Massachusetts, the prison population has grown, since
1980, from under 6,000 to almost 23,000. In 2003, for the first
time, the amount of money Massachusetts spent on prisons was more
than that it spent on higher education.
These statistics
accumulate a punishing weight falling more on African-American
males than anyone else, and from that springs the year's fundamental
epiphany. Justice? Democracy? In the US, according to Judge
Mulligan, one in three African-American males between the ages of
20 and 30 is "under correctional control." In places
like Baltimore and Washington more than half are. The number of
African-American men in college is less than the number of those
under supervision of the courts. And why? Such facts reveal far
more about the about the way justice is administered in America
than about the moral character of any group.
Mulligan, for one,
points to the "war on drugs" as key, a war that has
seen the rate of imprisonment of drug offenders jump by 700
percent since 1980: a war that depends on narrowly targeted law
enforcement and on mandatory prison sentences. In 2002, 80
percent of those receiving such sentences were minorities. The
war on drugs has been disproportionately a war on young black
men.
2003. The death
penalty set loose. Prison populations setting records. Effective
torture as part of punishment. A system of racial injustice
that rivals slavery. American values across the world. Please.
7. PANDORA DEPLETED URANIUM RESEARCH PROJECT
BY
PANDORA
PROJECT AUTHORS
How depleted, is
depleted uranium?
Depleted uranium is
the byproduct of the uranium enrichment process. Natural uranium
consists of the isotopes, U-234, U-235 and U-238, approximately
0.0056%, 0.71% and 99.28% respectively. U-235 is fissile and can
sustain the chain reaction necessary in nuclear power stations
and nuclear weaponry. Enriched uranium contains a higher
percentage of U-235. For every kg of enriched uranium, between 5
– 10 kg of depleted uranium are formed. Enrichment is
achieved through gaseous diffusion or centrifugation. The
remaining uranium is generally stored as depleted uranium
hexaflouride (DUF6). DuF6 can be converted to uranium oxide and
uranium metal. The metal is very dense and pyrophoric. It is used
by the military in tank armor, armor piercing ammunition and
other hard target weaponry. In the civilian sector, it has
various uses including counterweights, radiation shielding,
ceramic glazes and piling equipment. Research in the US is
looking into is potential use in polyethylene compounds,
pyrolitic compounds, ducrete, and fluorine compounds.
In a letter to the New
York Times, June 1997, Leonard Dietz wrote:
"The term
depleted, is in a sense a misnomer… Both natural uranium and
depleted uranium emit alpha particles and weak gamma rays. One
gram of uranium undergoes 25,205 alpha disintegrations a second;
one gram of depleted uranium undergoes 14,273 such
disintegrations. The difference is largely due to the difference
in the uranium 234 component of the two uraniums. Furthermore
uranium 238 decays into thorium 234,which decays into
protactinium 234, which decays into uranium 234 and so on. The
thorium and protactinium emit energetic beta particles and gamma
rays. The half life of uranium 238 is 4.47 billion years. Thus,
for all practical purposes, uranium 238 can be said never to
cease giving off alpha particles and decaying into beta and gamma
emitters."
What is the
environmental impact?
A UK Environment
Agency R&D report states: "In normal use there is
virtually no environmental impact – dispersion through fire,
explosion, smelting, chemical treatment or corrosion would be
necessary to generate environment contamination." The
normal use of military munitions is, of course, fire and
explosion and corrosion is the after effect. Fire and corrosion
are also a constant danger in the civilian sector as is machining
(manufacturers) and smelting (scrap metal workers). Depleted
uranium is highly pyrophoric and burns at high temperatures,
around 2000C. The fire releases tiny aerosolized particles, many
of them ceramic. They can remain airborne for weeks and travel
many miles. They are easily inhaled or ingested and are both
chemically and radiologically toxic. They are taken up by the
soil, water and vegetation and quickly enter the food chain.
Dirty DU:
Depleted uranium in
munitions is known to have been contaminated with particles from
nuclear spent fuel. These include plutonium, americanium,
neptunium, telechnecium and uranium 236.
Cause and effect:
Wherever depleted
uranium has been used, there has been a legacy of increased
cancers, leukaemias, birth defects, rare kidney and bowel
disorders, chronic fatigue, aching joints and neurological
problems. These symptoms have affected civilians in military
zones, those living in proximity to testing sites, workers in
civilian industry and military personnel including medics and
engineers.
Cover up:
Victims,
scientists, journalists, activists etc. involved in the DU issue
have been subjected to harassment and intimidation. Some have
been fired from their jobs, medical records have been lost, and
the sick have been denied pensions and proper health care.
Countries such as Iraq and Kosovo are being denied the means to
conduct proper investigation.
8. HIROSHIMA REMEMBERED: BREAKING THE SILENCE
BY
HOWARD
ZINN
The bomb dropped on
Hiroshima on August 6, 1945 turned into powder and ash, in a few
moments, the flesh and bones of 140,000 men, women and children.
Three days later a second atomic bomb dropped on Nagasaki killed
perhaps 70,000 instantly. In the next five years, another 130,000
inhabitants of those two cities died of radiation poisoning.
No one will ever
know the exact figures, but these come from the most exhaustive
report available. Hiroshima and Nagasaki: the Physical,
Medical, and Social Effects of the Atomic Bombings, put
together by a team of 34 Japanese scientists and
physicians, then translated and published in this country in
1981. Those statistics do not include countless other people who
were left alive, but maimed, poisoned, disfigured, blinded.
We live in a time
where our minds have been so battered by the statistics of death
and suffering that figures in the millions leave us numb, and
nothing but the personal testimony of individuals, even if it can
only faintly represent the reality, is capable of shaking us out
of that numbness.
A Japanese school
girl, 16 at the time, recalled years later that it was a
beautiful morning. She saw a B-29 fly by, then a flash. She put
her hands up and "my hands went right through my face."
She saw "a man without feet walking on his ankles." She
passed out. "By the time I wake (sic) up, black rain was
falling…. I thought I was blind, but I got my eyes open, and
I saw a beautiful blue sky and the dead city . Nobody is standing
up. Nobody is walking around….I wanted to go home to my
mother."
This was Kimuko
Kaskey, speaking in broken English at a Washington, D.C. Senate
hearing. We need to recall her testimony and that of another.
"A woman with her jaw missing and her tongue hanging out of
her mouth as wandering around … in the heavy black rain
… crying for help."
In The Making of
the Atomic Bomb, probably the most thorough and most vivid
narrative of that long, costly, and secret enterprise on the New
Mexico desert known as "The Manhattan Project," Richard
Rhodes, scrupulously controlled up to this point, describes the
results with unmistakable feeling:
"People
exposed within half a mile of the Little Boy fireball were seared
to bundles of smoking black char in a fraction of a second as
their internal organs boiled away…. The small black bundles
now stuck to the streets and bridges and sidewalks of Hiroshima
numbered in the thousands. At the same instant birds ignited in
midair. Mosquitoes and flies, squirrels, family pets crackled and
were gone."
Robert Jay Lifton,
a psychiatrist who refused to work within the orthodox limits of
his profession, was one of the first, in his book, Death in
Life, to interview survivors. A junior college girl in
Hiroshima remembered, "The faces of my friends who just
before were working energetically are now burned and blistered,
their clothes torn to rags…. Our teacher is holding her
students close to her like a mother hen protecting her chicks,
and like baby chicks paralyzed with terror, the students were
thrusting their heads under her arms.
A woman, then a
girl in the fifth grade, remembered, "Everybody in the
shelter was crying out loud…. I do not know how many times I
called begging that they would cut off my burned arms and
legs."
One of the first
American journalists on the scene after the bombing was John
Hersey. His articles in The New Yorker were reproduced in
the book, Hiroshima, and delivered the first shock to an
American public still celebrating the end of the war. Hersey
interviewed six survivors: a clerk, a tailor's widow, a priest, a
doctor, a surgical assistant, a pastor. He found that of 150
doctors in the city, 65 wee dead or so badly wounded that they
could not work.
Hersey reported on
his interview of the pastor, "Mr. Tanimoto … reached
down and took a woman by the hands, but her skin slipped off in
huge, glove-like pieces. He was so shocked by this that he
had to sit down for a moment…. He had to keep consciously
repeating to himself, 'These are human beings.'"
Only with those
scenes in our minds can we judge the distressingly cold arguments
that go on now, 50 years later, about whether is was right
to send those planes out those two mornings in August of 1945.
That this is arguable is a devastating commentary on our
moral culture.