James van Luik

Polar bears, the biggest land carnivores on earth, face extinction this century if the Arctic continues to melt at its present rate, a study into global warming has found. The sea ice around the North Pole on which the bears depend for hunting is shrinking so swiftly it could disappear during the summer months by the end of the century, the Arctic Climate Impact Assessment (ICIA) says.

Scientists in the study believe the survival of the estimated 22,000 polar bears in the region is hanging by a slender thread as they suffer the double whammy of chemical pollution and dwindling feeding territories. Polar bears traditionally hunt on floating sea ice for seals and other quarry. But the ice has retreated significantly during summer, so the carnivores are having to swim further from one floe to another in search of quarry.

As a result of this extra effort, many bears are failing to build up the necessary fat reserves during the important hunting period of spring and early summer to take them though the bitterly cold winter months when females nurse their young. The sea ice in the Hudson Bay area of Canada, for instance, breaks up about two and a half weeks earlier than it did 30 years ago, Ian Stirling of the Canadian Wildlife Service said.

The rapid and unprecedented shrinkage of the ice, and the extra burden it places on the animals, has resulted in the polar bears here weighing, on average, 55 lb less than they did in the 1970s. And the bears have long become more than a nuisance in Churchill, Manitoba, on the shore of Hudson Bay. They are frequently tranquilized and flown back north.

Scientists at the World Wildlife Fund said that, if that continues, many of the polar bears in the Hudson Bay area will be so thin within the next 10 years that they could become infertile. Lara Hansen, chief scientist at the WWF, said: "If the population stops reproducing, that's the end of it."

Separate studies have already shown that toxic pollutants are building up in the fat of polar bears in a way that could affect their ability to reproduce. WWF scientists say these toxins are affecting the bears' immunity to infections.

The ACIA is the product of four years' work by more than 250 scientists from Britain, the US and many other industrialized countries. Its 139-page report, presented to a scientific conference this week (110804) in Reykjavik, found climate change is affecting the Arctic more than many other regions. For instance, scientists estimate that the polar region is warming at up to 10 times the rate of the world as a whole.

In Alaska, western Canada and eastern Russia, average winter temperatures have risen as much as 3C or 4C in the past 50 years, and they are projected to increase by a further 7C, or 13C, over the next 100 years.

Robert Corell, of the American Meteorological Society, who chaired the assessment , said global warming is already affecting the native Arctic people as well as the unique wildlife of the region. "The Arctic is experiencing some of the most rapid and severe climate change on Earth," he said. "The impacts of climate change on the region and globe are projected to increase substantially. The Arctic is really warming now. These areas provide a bellwether of what's coming to planet Earth."

Several computer models of how the sea ice is shrinking were examined and the scientists concluded that at the very minimum half the summer sea ice will disappear by 2100, with some models showing an almost total melt. The assessment adds: "This is very likely to have devastating consequences for some Arctic animal species such as ice-living seals, walruses and Arctic char, and for local people for whom these animals are a primary food source. Should the Arctic Ocean become ice-free in summer, it is likely that polar bears and some seal species would be driven toward extinction."

But it is not only polar bears and ringed seals that are threatened. Native people are also having to cope with a dramatic change to their lifestyle, Chief Gary Harrison of the Arctic Athabaskan Council, said. "Our homes are threatened by storms and melting permafrost, our livelihoods are threatened by changes to the plants and animals we harvest. Even our lives are threatened, as traditional travel routes become more dangerous."

Countries bordering the Arctic, notably Russia, Greenland and Canada, are already planning for the time when the north-west and north-east shipping routes are open all year round. Russia especially is expected to benefit hugely from the control of a year-round shipping route between Japan and Europe which will cut thousands of miles off present-day trade routes. Another possible change will result from the melting of the winter ice covering the Barents Sea which is probably the coolest, purest and richest stretch of salt water in the world. The corresponding increase in sunlight and phytoplankton in the Barents Sea will trigger the growth of even richer fishing grounds for cod and other commercially important species, bringing further industrial incursion into this pristine world.

Arctic sea-ice naturally thickens in the winter and melts in the summer but the balance has shifted significantly towards melting in recent years. Scientists estimate the period of melting has increased by about five days every decade over the past 50 years, with the result that the ice has gotten thinner and is beginning to retreat rapidly. The phenomenon was first recognized by the American military who closely monitored sea-ice thickness when its nuclear-powered submarines sailed under the North Pole during the 1950s.

A comparison of sea-ice measurements made during 1958-76 with 1993-1997 found it had thinned by 42 per cent. An analysis of similar data gathered by British submarines between 1976 and 1996 found a 43 per cent thinning of Arctic sea-ice.

Further measurements suggest sea ice has reduced from an average thickness of four meters to just under three meters in the past 30 years. Satellite measurements suggest that the area covered by sea-ice has diminished by about 4 per cent per decade, an apparently smaller rate of decline because sea-ice has to get thinner before it begins to retreat in surface area. Peter Wadhams, a specialist in Arctic sea-ice at the Dunstaffnage marine laboratory in Oban, made many of the measurements of sea-ice thickness while he was a civilian scientist onboard the Royal Navy submarines during their secret voyages under the North Pole. Some things have changed forever since, he said. One change, for instance, is the disappearance of the Odden ice tongue, a huge split of ice that formed off eastern Greenland each winter.

The Odden ice tongue, like all sea-ice, was considered an important driving force in the circulation of the ocean currents. As ice forms from salt water, salt is rejected, which causes a rise in salinity. This cold, dense, salty water sinks to the bottom of the sea, helping to drive the movement of deep ocean currents.

The Odden ice tongue was last seen in 1997, and its disappearance suggest that this important engine of ocean circulation could be slowing, Professor Wadhams said.

"The ice-covered seas represent the cold end of the enormous heat engine that enables the earth to have temperatures suitable for human life over most of its surface," he said. Melting sea ice threatens to disrupt these ocean "conveyor belts" of water. The worst scenario for Britain could be the collapse or movement further south of the warm Gulf Stream, which could cause us to experience a climate similar to that of Newfoundland, which regularly freezes in winter.

Mark Serreze, of the University of Colorado at Boulder, said satellite monitoring of the entire Arctic region reveals that there are few doubts the phenomenon is real, and warming is proceeding at a rate eight times faster than at any time in the past 100 years. Melting sea-ice does not contribute to increases in sea levels because it floats, but the melting of the Greenland ice sheet can cause sea levels to rise by as much as seven meters. There are signs that this process has begun, although total melting is likely to take up to 1,000 years.

As the ice cover retreats, one fear is that it will reduce the amount of sunlight naturally reflected from the earth back into space. In other words, a world with little or no Arctic sea ice will become even warmer as more sunlight is absorbed by the ground to heat the atmosphere. Another possible "positive feedback" resulting from a warmer climate in the Arctic could result from the release of huge amounts of methane gas locked in the permafrost of the northern hemisphere.

Molecule for molecule, methane is far more effective at trapping heat, due to the greenhouse effect, than carbon dioxide. Again, scientists are worrying that a warmer Arctic could lead to runaway global warming as more and more greenhouse gasses are released into the atmosphere.

The ACIA said a warmer polar region will not only result in the possible extinction of the polar bear and other species. It will present serious challenges to the health and survival of some native peoples and their cultures.

"During the next 100 years, climate change is expected to accelerate, contributing to major physical, ecological, social, and economic changes, and the assessment has documented that many of these changes have already begun," it warns.

2. THE MISSING VOICES OF OUR WORLD

HOWARD ZINN

Readers of my book A People's History of the United States almost always point to the wealth of quoted material in it – the words of fugitive slaves, Native Americans, farmers and factory workers, dissenters and dissidents of all kinds. These readers are struck, I must reluctantly admit, more by the words of the people I quote than by my own running commentary on the history of the nation.

I can't say I blame them. Any historian would have difficulty matching the eloquence of the Native American leader Powhatan, pleading with the white settler in the year 1607: "Why will you take by force what you may have quietly by love?"

Or the black scientist Benjamin Banneker, writing to Thomas Jefferson: "I apprehend you will readily embrace every opportunity, to eradicate that train of absurd and false ideas and opinions which so generally prevails with respect to us, and that your Sentiments are concurrent with mine, which are that one universal Father hath given being to us all, and the he hath not only made us all of one flesh, but that he hath also without partiality afforded us all the Same Sensations and [endowed] us all with the same faculties."

Or Sarah Grimké, a white southern woman and abolitionist, writing: "I ask no favors for my sex…. All I ask of our brethren, is that they will take their feet from off our necks, and permit us to stand upright on that ground which God designed us to occupy."

Or Henry David Thoreau, protesting the Mexican War, writing on civil disobedience: "A common and natural result of an undue respect for law is, that you may see a file of soldiers, colonel, captain, corporal, privates, powder-monkeys, and all, marching in admirable order over hill and dale to the wars, against their wills, ay, against their common sense and consciences, which makes it very steep marching indeed, and produces a palpitation of the heart."

Or Jermain Wesley Loguen, escaped slave, speaking in Syracuse on the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850: "I received my freedom from Heaven and with it came the command to defend my title to it…. I don't respect this law – I don't fear it – I won't obey it! It outlaws me , and I outlaw it."

Or the populist orator Mary Elizabeth Lease of Kansas: "Wall Street owns the country. It is no longer a government of the people, by the people, and for the people, but a government of Wall Street, by Wall Street, and for Wall Street."

Or Emma Goldman, speaking to the jury at her trial for opposing World War I: "Verily poor as we are in democracy, how can we give of it to the world? … [A] democracy conceived in the military servitude of the masses, in their economic enslavement, and nurtured in their tears and blood, is not democracy at all.

Or Mississippi sharecropper Fannie Lou Hamer, testifying in 1964 about the dangers to blacks who tried to register to vote: The plantation owner came, and said, 'Fannie Lou…. If you don't go down and withdraw your registration, you will have to leave… because we are not ready for that in Mississippi.' And I addressed him and told him and said, 'I didn't try to register for you. I tried to register for myself.'"

Or the young black people in McComb, Mississippi, who, learning of a classmate killed in Vietnam, distributed a leaflet: "No Mississippi Negroes should be fighting in Vietnam for the White Man's freedom, until all the Negro People are free in Mississippi."

Or the poet Adrienne Rich, writing in the 1970s: "I know of no woman – virgin, mother, lesbian, married, celibate – whether she earns her keep as a housewife, a cocktail waitress, or a scanner of brain waves – for whom the body is not a fundamental problem: its clouded meanings, its fertility, its desire, its so-called frigidity, its bloody speech, its silences, its changes and mutilations, it rapes and ripenings."

Or Alex Molnar, whose twenty-one-year-old son was a Marine in the Persian Gulf, writing an angry letter to the first President Bush: Where were you, Mr. President, when Iraq was killing its own people with poison gas? … I intend to support my son and his fellow soldiers by doing everything I can to oppose any offensive American military action in the Persian Gulf."

Or Orlando and Phyllis Rodriguez, opposing the idea of retaliation after their son was killed in the Twin Towers: "Our son Greg is among the many missing from the World Trade Center attack. Since we first heard the news, we have shared moments of grief, comfort, hope, despair, fond memories with his wife, the two families, our friends and neighbors, his loving colleagues at Cantor Fitzgerald/Espeed, and all the grieving families that daily meet at the Pierre Hotel. We see our hurt and anger reflected among everybody we meet. We cannot pay attention to the daily flow of news about this disaster. But we read enough of the news to sense that our government is heading in the direction of violent revenge, with the prospect of sons, daughters, parents, friends in distant lands dying, suffering, and nursing further grievances against us. It is not the way to go. It will not avenge our son's death. Not in our son's name."

What is common to all these voices is that they have mostly been shut out of the orthodox histories, the major media, the standard textbooks, the controlled culture. The result of having our history dominated by presidents and generals and other "important" people is to create a passive citizenry, not knowing its own powers, always waiting for some savior on high – or the next president – to bring peace and justice.

History, looked at under the surface, in the streets and on the farms, in GI barracks and trailer camps, in factories and offices, tells a different story. Whenever injustices have been remedied, wars halted, women and blacks and Native Americans given their due, it has been because "unimportant" people spoke up, organized, protested, and brought democracy alive.

3. PROTECTING 'INNOCENT' EARS

JAMES CARROLL

Let me get this straight. What offends about "Saving Private Ryan" is not the way the film objectified the carnage of D-Day as something beautiful or the way it resuscitated the discredited myth of war as glorious – but the way it uses a four-letter word? When various television stations declined to broadcast the film last week, were we being shown a hint of the deep trouble into which we Americans have gotten ourselves?

The offending word, of course, is a profane euphemism for sexual intercourse. Does the explicit juxtaposition of war and sexual reference, perhaps, point to the underlying problem? Commentary suggested last week that the television stations were made squeamish by recent FCC rulings against broadcast indecency, but could it be that the real source of unease is that thousands of "Private Ryans" are now undergoing the actual nightmare of warfare in Iraq? Fallujah has been "liberated," they tell us, but television has also bought us hints of what a staggering battle it has been. Does last week's censoring of a movie that unforgettably features slow-motion renditions of combat savagery reflect an unconscious urge to avoid turning such horror into an evening's entertainment while young Americans are at such risk?

But there are more difficult questions embedded here. One concerns the relationship between sex and war. The other concerns the imagined character of the young people we have sent to war in our name.

A new movie tells the story of Dr. Alfred Kinsey, another indication of the obsession which we are looking for ways to speak. The famous sex researcher demonstrated what Freud had postulated, that there is a physiologically manifest connection between physical aggression and sexual assertiveness. War and sex are linked. The irony, of course, is that physical aggression seems to follow from feelings of powerlessness , the most emblematic of which – for males – have to do with sexual frustration.

Speaking of television, is it an accident that the nation finds itself most intensely at war in the season when the Viagra theme song has become a kind of anthem? Male impotence, or fears of it, are openly referred to, but the problem has its effect far more broadly than in bedrooms. Beware a heavily armed nation that acts like a man with something to prove.

Because of the puritanical way in which "moral values" are defined in contemporary America, the connection between killing and sex is not regarded as fit for public discussion any more than the connection, say, between fears of impotence and gun ownership would be. But as suggested by an election in which Iraq was not an issue but homosexuality was, it is not sex we cannot openly contemplate but the actualities of violence. In war, human beings hand over ethical decision-making to a chain of command. Private soldiers do this, but so do the populations of war-making nations. This is the ultimate in impotence. We Americans watched the unfolding story of Fallujah as if we were not responsible for it.

"We can win," a soldier told The Boston Globe's indomitable Anne Barnard last week. "We just have to blow the hell out of Fallujah. Level the place." And apparently we did. Why would it bother television viewers to think of American GIs uttering the profane word for sexual intercourse in such a context? Does rough sexual language interfere, perhaps, with an unconscious need to think of our soldiers as innocents?

In ancient Athens, "youths and virgins" were sent in blood sacrifice to the Minotaur each years; Aztec cultures did something similar. It is a primitive human impulse to appease the gods with a sacrifice of the virtuous young. Their sexual innocence is required. Such gods are perverse, of course, but so are nations seeking to appease them.

You say it is a stretch to think of the war in Iraq in such terms. But all I am trying to do here is connect the dots between a set of f-words: films, fear of impotence, filicide, the fallacy of "victory," Fallujah. When "conscious" motivations ring hollow, attention must turn to what remains "unconscious."

What could possibly be driving our nation to this "leveling" of Iraq? We don't know, and we don't want to know. We are ordering our young people to leap into a volcano. Our warplanes spew fire on the heads of old men, women, and children. We are turning cities into ashes. Meanwhile, what offends us is the Anglo-Saxon word for what people do when they are lonely or in love.

4. DEATH, DELUSION AND DEMOCRACY

ROBERT FISK

So the death of Yasser Arafat is a great new opportunity for the Palestinians, is it? The man who personified the Palestinian struggle – "Mr. Palestine" – is dead. So things can only get better for the Palestinians. Death means democracy. Death means statehood. That the final demise of the corrupt old guerrilla leader should be a sign of optimism demonstrates just how catastrophic the conflict in the Middle East has now become. It's a bit like Fallujah. The more we destroy it, the crueler we are, the brighter the chances of Iraqi democracy. The more successful we are, the worse things are going to get. That's what George Bush said on Friday: the violence will increase as Iraqi elections grow closer – a total mind warp since the more violent Iraq becomes, the less the chances of any election ever being held.

Note how Bush could not even bring himself to mention Arafat's name. It's the same old agenda. The Palestinians have to have a democracy. They have to prove themselves; they – not the Israelis – have to show that they are a worthy "negotiating partner". And any new leader – the colorless Ahmad Qureia or the equally colorless and undemocratic Abu Mazen – must "control his own people". That was what Arafat failed to do even though he thought his job was to represent his own people, which is what democracy is supposed to be all about.

It's worth noting how this narrative has been written. The Israelis, with their continued occupation, their continued illegal construction of colonies for Jews and Jews only on Arab land, their air strikes and helicopter executions and live-fire shooting at stone-throwing children, are not part of this equation. They are just innocently waiting to find a new "negotiating partner" now that Arafat is in his grave. Ariel Sharon, held "personally responsible" for the 1982 Sabra and Shatila massacre by the Kahan commission report, remains, in George Bush's words, "a man of peace". No one asks whether he can control his own army. Or whether he can control his own settlers. He wants to close down the colonies in Gaza – even though his spokesman has told us that this will put Palestinian statehood into "formaldehyde".

So let's just take a look back at those tragic years of the Oslo accord. In 1993, we are supposed to believe, the Palestinians were offered statehood and a capital in Jerusalem if they accepted the right of Israel to exist. Oslo said nothing of this kind. It did set down a complex system of Israeli withdrawals from occupied Palestinian land and a timetable that the Israelis were supposed to meet. We all knew that any failure to do so would humiliate Arafat – and make him less able to "control" his won people.

And what happened? It's important, at this supposedly "optimistic" moment, to reflect on the facts of the previous "peace process" in which Europe as well as the US spent so much time, energy and – in the EU's case – money. Under the Oslo agreement, the occupied West Bank would be divided into three zones. Zone A would come under exclusive Palestinian control, Zone B under Israeli military occupation in participation with the Palestinian Authority, and Zone C under total Israel occupation. In the West Bank, Zone A comprised only 1.1 per cent of the land whereas in Gaza – overpopulated, rebellious, insurrectionary – almost all the territory was to come under Arafat's control. He, after all, was to be the policeman of Gaza. Zone C in the West Bank comprised 60 per cent of the land, which allowed Israel to continue the rapid expansion of settlements on Arab land.

But a detailed investigation shows that not a single one of these withdrawal agreements was honored by the Israelis. And in the meantime, the number of settlers illegally living on Palestinians' land rose after Oslo from 80,000 to 150,000 – even though the Israelis, as well as the Palestinians, were forbidden from taking "unilateral steps" under the terms of the agreement. The Palestinians saw this, not without reason, as proof of bad faith.

Since facts are sometimes elusive in the middle East, let's remind ourselves of what happened after Oslo. The Oslo II (Taba) agreement, concluded by Yitzhak Rabin in September 1995 – the month before he was assassinated – promised three Israeli withdrawals: from Zone A (under Palestinian control), Zone B (under Israeli military occupation in co-operation with the Palestinians) and Zone C (exclusive Israeli occupation). These were to be complete by October 1997. Final status agreement covering Jerusalem, refugees, water and settlements were to have been completed by October 1999, by which time the occupation was supposed to have ended. In January 1997, however, a handful of Jewish settlers were granted 20 per cent of Hebron despite Israel's obligation under Oslo to leave all west Bank Towns. By October 1998, a year late, Israel had not carried out the Taba accords.

The Israeli prime minister, Binyamin Netanyahu, negotiated a new agreement at Wye River, dividing the second deployment promised at Taba into two phases – but he only honored the first of them. Netanyahu had promised to reduce the percentage of West Bank land under exclusively Israeli occupation from 72 per cent to 59 per cent, transferring 41 per cent of the West Bank to Zones A and B. But at Sharm el-Sheikh in 1999, the Israeli prime minister, Ehud Barak, reneged on the agreement Netanyahu had made at Wye River, fragmenting the latter's two phases into three, the first of which would transfer 7 per cent from Zone C to Zone B. All implementation of the agreements stopped there.

When Arafat finally went to Camp David to meet Barak, he was allegedly offered 95 per cent of the West Bank and Gaza but turned it down and went to war with the second intifada .A study of the maps, however, shows that – with the exclusion of Jerusalem and its extended boundaries, with the exclusion of existing major Jewish colonies and with the inclusion of an Israeli cordon sanitaire, Arafat was offered nearer to 64 per cent of the 22 per cent of mandate Palestine that was left to him. Then a new explosion of Palestinian suicide bombings, usually aimed at Israeli civilians, destroyed Israel's patience with Arafat. Sharon, who had provoked the second intifada by strolling on to the Temple Mount with a thousand policemen, decided that Arafat was a Bin Laden-style "terrorist" and all further contact ended.

This is not to excuse the PLO or Arafat himself. His arrogance and corruption, and his little dictatorship – initially encouraged by the Israelis and Americans who lent Arafat their CIA boys to "train" the Palestinian security services – ensured that no democracy could thrive in "Palestine". And I suspect that while he personally disapproved of suicide bombings, Arafat cynically realized that they had their uses; they proved that Sharon could not provide Israel with the security he promised at his election, at least until he built the new wall – which is stealing further Palestinian land. But that was only one side of the story – and last week Bush and Blair went back to the old game of seeing only the other side. The Palestinians – the victims of 39 years of occupation – must prove themselves worthy of peace with their occupiers. The death of their leader is therefore billed as a glorious occasion that provides hope. All this is part of the self-delusion of Bush and Blair. The reality is that the outlook in the Middle East is bleaker than ever.

Oh yes, and – since we'd be asking this question today if Sharon had gone to meet his maker in an equally mysterious way – just what did Arafat die of?

5. THE PEOPLE'S BUSINESS

RALPH NADER

The massive corporate wave of crime, fraud and abuse rolls on, is undeterred by regular exposes in the business media itself. My favorite corporate crime journal (aka the Wall Street Journal) is a daily newspaper that never runs out of material.

Daily Journal headlines recently alerted readers to: (1) "Lucent Faces Bribery Allegations," (2) "Companies Sue Union Retirees to Cut Promised Health Benefits," (3) "How Drug's Rebirth as Treatment for Cancer Fueled Price Rises," reporting one capsule for $29 compared to a price of seven cents in Brazil, (4) "A Retired Maid's Questions About her ATM Card Led Lawyer to Georgia Scandal," (5) "At Cigna, Some Patients Found Conflict of Interest in System," (6) "As Corporate Fines Grow, SEC Debates How Much Good They Do." (7) From the Associated Press – "Calif. Insurance Chief Sues Four Insurance Giants in Kickback Probe." Also in the headlines are the pharmaceutical companies led by Merck's deadly fiasco with Vioxx.

In the midst of the daily revelations – most of which produce no corrective behavior – the Congress and state legislatures are paid to sleep though it all. Aside from a modest new law called Sarbanes/Oxley designed to deter some of the big accounting firm scandals, there is no corporate reform drive on Capital Hill, and no demands for larger prosecution budgets for the Justice Department. During the recent political campaigns by the two major parties, there was not focus on a continuing pattern of corporate outlaws damaging the health and safety of the people and draining trillions of dollars from investors, worker pensions and 401Ks.

There is, however, activity among business lobbies, like the US Chamber of Commerce, to water down law enforcement, weaken the Sarbanes law, block the Securities and Exchange Commission's efforts to protect investors, and make it harder for the defrauded to have their full day in court. The political and legal systems are not just crumbling before these business lobbies; they are even failing to articulate a comprehensive 'law and order' philosophy toward large multinational corporations playing one national jurisdiction off of another one across the globe. To demonstrate the untapped potential for prosecution, note that New York state Attorney General Eliot Spitzer is accomplishing his moves against Wall Street with fewer than 85 attorneys in his corporate crime division. There are corporate law firms defending these culprits that each have over 1000 attorneys in their offices.

Inside the government's law enforcement agencies are officials and commissioners who can barely serve out their few years before accepting lucrative offers to join the other side. Even in office they concoct excuses for voting against significant corporate fines on the grounds that such penalties would punish shareholders and diminish the value of corporate shares. (SEC Commissioners Paul Atkins and Cynthia Glassman tried this absurdity recently).

All this, along with the corporate domination of our government, argues for a more comprehensive approach to "controlling corporations and restoring democracy." These words comprise the subtitle of a new book called The People's Business – the report of the Citizen Works Corporate Reform Commission.

Having founded Citizen Works, I am pleased to trumpet this endeavor written by Lee Drutman and Charlie Cray as a long overdue, timely and fundamental challenge to the judicial usurpation of our Constitution which have given these companies – that are artificial entities and not human beings or voters – almost all the rights possessed by real people. There can be no equal justice under the law between you and Pfizer or General Motors under such equivalence.

The steady and accelerating erosion of democracy by the corporate supremacists was not envisioned by the framers of our constitution. There is no mention of the "Corporation" in that founding document ratified well before the emergence of the modern corporation in the 19^th century. The framers were far more worried about too much governmental power and could not foresee the many uses of that very power by corporations against the interests of "we the people."

Even the owners of the large corporation – the shareholders – do not control their company. It is a highly autocratic structure controlled by the officers and their rubber stamp boards of directors. Making corporations into the servants of people, not their masters, is the challenge of The People's Business (Berrett-Koehler Publishers (1-800-929-2929).

The many-splendored ways that this work meets this challenge can open up a major public debate. An exciting public inquiry is needed by the workers, consumers, small taxpayers, voters and various communities of citizens who are now being driven backwards despite the overall conventional economic growth that has enriched the few against the well being of these people.

6. THIRTY FIFTH NATIONAL DAY OF MOURNING TO BE OBSERVED IN PLYMOUTH, MA AT 12 NOON ON THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 25^TH, 2004

MAHTOWIN MUNRO & MOONANUM JAMES

United American Indians of New England (UAINE) has called for the 35^th National Day of Mourning. Participants will gather by the statue of Massasoit on Cole's Hill above the Plymouth waterfront.

Since 1970, hundreds of Native people and their supporters have gathered in Plymouth on US Thanksgiving day. There, Native people speak the truth about the conditions faced by Indigenous peoples throughout the Americas.

According to UAINE co-leader Moonanum James (Wampanoag), "Native people have no reason to celebrate the arrival of the Pilgrims. We want people to know the truth about Thanksgiving. Plymouth Rock is nothing more than a monument to racism and genocide."

UAINE co-leader Mahtowin Munro (Lakota) continued, "We want people to know that the stories we all learned in school about the first Thanksgiving are nothing but lies. Native people have certainly not lived happily ever after since the arrival of the Pilgrims. We want to put a stop to the racist mythology that is perpetuated in Plymouth. For us, Thanksgiving is a Day of Mourning, because we remember the millions of our ancestors who were murdered by European colonists such as the Pilgrims."

This year marks the 35^th National Day of Mourning. In 1997, participants in National Day of Mourning were pepper-sprayed and arrested while peacefully marching in Plymouth. Thousands of people worldwide voiced their outrage. In 1998, UAINE and the Town of Plymouth signed an agreement under the terms of which all charges were dropped, Plymouth made a donation to a Native education project, two historical markers about Native history were erected in Plymouth, and UAINE will forever be able to observe National Day of Mourning without obtaining a permit from the Town of Plymouth.

A major element of National Day of Mourning has long been the demand for freedom for Native political prisoner Leonard Peltier, unjustly imprisoned by the US government since 1976.

7. UN VOTES OVERWHELMINGLY AGAINST US EMBARGO ON CUBA

EVELYN LEOPOLD

Friends and adversaries of the US voted overwhelmingly in the UN General Assembly on Thursday against the four-decade-old American economic, financial and commercial embargo against Cuba.

The vote, conducted for the 13^th consecutive year, was a lopsided 179 to 4 with one abstention on the resolution opposing the embargo. The US, Israel, Palau and the Marshall Islands voted "no" and Micronesia abstained.

Cuba has been under a US trade and travel embargo since Fidel Castro defeated a CIA-backed assault at the Bay of Pigs in 1961. In subsequent years, some foreign firms have been threatened with penalties for dealing with Cuba.

"The US government has unleashed a world wide genocidal economic war against Cuba," said Havana's foreign minister, Felipe Perez Roque, the only speaker warmly applauded.

But the US delegate said Cuba has shown no interest implementing economic reforms that would lead to democratic change or a free market.

"The Cuban government is not a victim as it contends. Rather it is a tyrant, aggressively punishing anyone who dares to have a differing opinion," said Oliver Garza, a State Department adviser.

The EU strongly condemns the current human rights situation on Cuba, which since 2003 has not shown any significant improvement," said Netherlands deputy ambassador, Arjan Hamburger, speaking for the EU.

Typical of the more than dozen speakers was Mexico's delegate, who criticized the US for not heeding the UN's resolutions year after year, saying this weakened the UN's multilateral role.

"Mexico is concerned that this type of resolutions that are presented year after year do not have any effect on the reality they seek to change," said Mexican UN Ambassador Enrique Berruga.

Garza denied the US was denying Cuba food and medicine, saying it had licensed over $1.1 billion in sales and donation since 1992 and agricultural goods worth more than $5 billion since 2001. In addition remittances amounted to about $1 billion a year, he said.

But Cuba's Perez said that if Washington was so sure Cuba was using the blockade as a pretext "why does it not lift the blockade and leave us without a pretext?"

8. US IRAQ WAR IS A BLOOD BATH FOR THE IRAQI PEOPLE

A.N.S.W.E.R. ACTIVISTS

A medical study on Iraqi war causalities was published in The Lancet, October 29, 2004. Scientists have concluded that the US invasion and occupation of Iraq has resulted in the death of at least 100,000 Iraqis. It further revealed that most of the 100,000 Iraqis were killed in violent deaths, primarily carried out by US forces air strikes. "Most killed by coalition forces were women and children,"

The population of Iraq is approximately 25 million people. Were this slaughter carried out on an equivalent scale in the US, it would be comparable to a death toll of one million people. Even the youngest and most vulnerable have not been spared: as a consequence of the US war against the people of Iraq, infant mortality rose form 29 deaths per 1000 live birth before the war to 57 deaths per 1,000 afterward.

The Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, 78 UN T.S. 277, executed in 1948, and ratified by the US, and which carries the binding force of the law of nations, prohibits genocide or complicity in genocide. See, also, 18S C. 1091.

"In the present Convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:

a. Killing members of the group;

b. Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;

c. Deliberately inflicting upon the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part…"

This is a criminal war just as the Vietnam war was a criminal war. It isn't enough to advocate that replacing Bush with Kerry should be the goal of anti-war advocates. The Pentagon is preparing to rain down their favored "shock and awe" violence on the devastated people of Fallujah who have already been subject to terrorizing bombing raids and the killings of entire families night after night for months. By demanding the unconditional withdrawal from Iraq we are sending a message to the Iraq people that we respect their right to determine their own destiny and we send a message to the US soldiers that their lives and dignity are too important to be used in the commission of war crimes or to serve as cannon fodder in a war that only benefits corporate and banking elite.

Bush and Kerry have pledged to continue this violent occupation in order to "win" in Iraq. The people of Iraq are desperately trying to regain their sovereignty and right to determine their own futures without outside intervention. While some feel that the "final stretch" is in these next few days culminating at the polls, for the People of Iraq and all those around the would who stand in solidarity with them, the "final stretch" is from now until the US troops and all occupation forces are removed form that sovereign land.

We must deepen the fight in the US to bring this war to an end unconditionally. It is completely bogus to insist the intervention must continue based on some humanitarian argument that since US intervention wrought so much devastation, the US must now stay the course in order to prevent "civil war," "chaos," or "a blood bath." These were the same arguments that were used to justify the prolongation of the US war in Vietnam. The only thing that happened when the US finally left Vietnam was that the real blood bath ended. That's why thousands of people are planning to take action starting on November 3^rd and culminating in a mass action all along the route of the Inaugural parade on January 20^th in Washington, DC.

Only the anti-war movement will end the criminal war in Iraq. Anti-war activists out in the streets, both before the election fighting against racist disenfranchisement and after the election, are communicating the most important anti-war messages: Bring the Troops Home Now! and End All Occupations! Back to Top