Oblogmov

New Taylor Follow-the-Money Report, and Nigerian Reaction

2005-05-20T00:28:00.000-07:00

The Coalition for International Justice just released a report in which I was the lead author, outlining the current financial structure of Charles Taylor's enterprises, his past weapons purchases and the threat he poses to the region. The entire report can be found here, and be sure to read the appendeces. We have a lot of original documents, weapons purchases, end user certificates, internal letters to Taylor etc., that are interesting for those who follow these issues.

In the report, we estimate Taylor took in about $105 million a year in extra-budgetary income, but was forced to spend about 80 percent of that on weapons, mercenaries, the RUF etc. Even more interesting is mapping the webs of criminal associations and terrorist ties he maintained.

At the press conference at the UN Correspondents seat in New York yesterday, a senior Nigerian diplomat made the most unequivocal statement to date that Taylor will be turned over if he is found to have violated his terms of assylum. He said it much more clearly than president Obasanjo has to this point: "The Nigerian federal government has been very very consistent. Nigeria intervened at a very critical moment within the conflict in Liberia. With the consent of AU leaders and other international leaders, Nigeria granted Mr Taylor political asylum for the purpose and only purpose of enhancing peace in Liberia. However... if the government is convinced that Taylor has violated his terms of asylum, then you can be sure-the world community can be sure-that Mr. Taylor cannot take cover in Nigeria having violated in a very proven wayhis terms of asylum."

So, there it is. However, it appears that a near-deal among Obasanjo, the Bush administration and the British has run into difficulties. The UN Security Council is scheduled to debate action on Taylor this week, most likely a resolution calling for Obasanjo to turn him over. This report lays out some of the compelling reasons it should pass and be acted on.

http://www.douglasfarah.com/ thursday, may 19th 2005

HOW CAN BRITAIN STILL USE THE MERCHANT OF DEATH?

2005-05-14T02:57:00.000-07:00

Today the UK will promise to curb arms traffickers. But the MoD is hiring planes from a dealer linked to Bin Laden.
By Andrew Gilligan. Evening Standard, Monday, 9th May 2005.

Victor Bout [sic] is the most notorious arms trafficker in the world. Linked to Osama bin Laden by the British government, linked to the Taliban by the US government, he was described by a New Labour minister as a "merchant of death" who must be shut down.
Yet an Evening Standard investigation has found that, just two months ago, a Victor Bout company was hired by that very same British government to operate military flights from a key RAF base.

Bout, a 38-year old Russian, owns or controls a constellation of airlines that have smuggled illegal weapons to conflict zones for the past 15 years. He has been named in countless official investigations and reports - the most recent only last month. The authorities in Belgium, where he used to work, have issued a warrant for his arrest. In 2004, the US froze his assets and put him on a terrorist watch list [not that they stopped him flying to and from Baghdad, TYR].

But between 6 and 9 March this year, according to official Civil Aviation Authority records, two Victor Bout charter flights took off from RAF Brize Norton in Oxfordshire. The cargo was armoured vehicles and a few British troops. The client was the Ministry of Defence.

The charters were operated by an airline called Trans Avia. It was named as one of Mr. Bout's front companies by the Government itself - in a Commons written answer on 2 May 2002. The Government cannot claim ignorance of Bout's dubious links. The Foreign Office minister Denis MacShane reassured MPs: "The UK has played a leading role in drawing international attention to Bout's activities, initially in Angola and Liberia and more recently relating to Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda".

A specialist aviation journal reported that the "al Qaeda link" was Bout's role in supplying bin Laden with a personal aeroplane - in the days before September 11, when he had a little more freedom of movement. Could Trans Avia have gone legit since then? Not according to the United States Treasury Department. Only two weeks ago, on 26 April, the Treasury "designated" Trans Avia as one of 30 companies linked to Bout, "an international arms dealer and war profiteer". Bout "controls what is reputed to be the largest private fleet of Soviet-era cargo aircraft in the world", says the Treasury press release. "The arms he has sold or brokered have helped fuel conflicts and support UN-sanctioned regimes in Afghanistan, Angola, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Liberia, Rwanda, Sierra Leone and Sudan. Notably, information available to the US government shows that Bout profited by $50 million by supplying the Taliban with military equipment when they ruled Afghanistan."

The story doesn't end there. Another two flights were made in the same three days of March by an airline called Jet Line International, also from RAF Brize Norton. A further three flights were made at the same time from another base, RAF Lyneham. The destination was Kosovo. The client, once again, was the Ministry of Defence.

Yet Jet Line, too, is a company that has been accused of close connections to Bout. According to the authoritative US newspaper, the Los Angeles Times, it appeared on a list of Bout companies circulated by the State Department to US diplomatic posts around the world.

"There is no doubt at all about the links between Jet Line and Bout," says Johan Peleman, the researcher who wrote the UN report. "It's one of his most important assets." Intelligence agencies say the same thing. Jet Line's office address in its base at Chisinau, Moldova, is the same as that of Aerocom, a company exposed by the United Nations as involved in sanctions-busting and arms-smuggling to the brutal rebels of Liberia. According to the UN, Aerocom was involved in the illegal smuggling or attempted smuggling of more than 6,000 automatic rifles and machine guns, 4,500 grenades, 350 missile launchers, 7,500 landmines, and millions of rounds of ammunition in breach of a UN arms embargo.

Tracking down the registration numbers of the sanctions-busting aircraft, it turns out that the Jet Line aircraft that flew the MoD flights in March were previously registered to Aerocom. They are in fact the same planes.

Bout's activities have helped cause quite literally thousands of deaths in many of the worst places in the world. Born in 1967, he served in the Soviet air force and then military intelligence, where he developed a gift for languages. When the USSR broke up, he "acquired" a large fleet of surplus or obsolete aircraft, which he used to deliver arms and ammunition also "acquired" from old Soviet stockpiles. That weaponry fuelled some of the most savage wars in Africa. Charles Taylor's insurgent guerrillas used Bout weapons to destroy Liberia. In Sierra Leone, the Revolutionary United Front (RUF) used Bout weapons to terrorise the country, seize the diamond mines, and chop off their opponents' hands.

None of our business? Well, the RUF's Bout-supplied weapons were almost certainly used to attack British troops engaged on the Sierra Leone peacekeeping mission in 2000.

Bout's planes would arrive at obscure African airstrips, loaded with weapons, then leave heaped with diamonds, coltan - vital for making mobile phones - and other precious minerals in return. "He was apolitical," said one UN official. "He would fly for anyone that paid." Bout's willingness to go places that no-one else would go made him the market leader in the arms-trafficking business. Little wonder, therefore, that the then Foreign Office minister Peter Hain said "The murder and mayhem of Unita in Angola, the RUF in Sierra Leone, and groups in Congo would not have been as terrible without Bout's operations." He was truly "a merchant of death", Hain said [and for a long time I respected Hain for it, too - TYR].

Bout used to operate from Ostend, in Belgium, where a shabby hotel in the city centre acted as his informal marketplace. There was a flight departures screen in the hotel bar, so he could keep track of his planes' movements. Then he was forced to retreat to Sharjah, in the United Arab Emirates - and after September 11, to Moscow, where he controls his empire through front companies such as Trans Avia. "You are not putting facts. You are putting allegations," he tells journalists on the rare occasions they manage to get through on his Russian phone number. [Actually, the quote comes from his surprise appearance on Ekho Moskhy radio in 2002 - TYR]

Britain has been embarrassed by dodgy airlines before. Last year, the Department for International Development promised a full investigation after the Standard exposed its use of Aerocom on an aid flight to Africa. The problem is that few reputable carriers want to fly to Kosovo, Iraq, Darfur or some of the places where the government needs transport. And the airline brokers used by Whitehall seem to have learned surprisingly few lessons from past embarrassments.

In a statement, the Ministry of Defence said the fact that its broker "seems to have used an aircraft in Jet Line International livery" was not the same as saying that the MoD itself had contracted Jet Line. But, whatever hairs the MoD may choose to split, the payout - for Mr. Bout - is the same.
Today and tomorrow, at the MoD's vast procurement headquarters in Bristol, defence officials are holding a special conference with human rights groups and arms trade campaigners. The purpose is to persuade them that the government is serious about cracking down on the scourge of arms trafficking.
One good way to start might, perhaps, be to stop putting British taxpayers' money into the pockets of the worst arms trafficker in the world."

http://yorkshire-ranter.blogspot.com/ 13/05/2005

A precedent for justice?

2005-04-12T06:19:00.000-07:00

Jess Bravin had a remarkable article in last Thurday's Wall Street Journal (available for free to the public) on a set of war crimes decisions issued shortly after World War II which contain striking resemblances to the cases pending today — both cases involving alleged Al Qaeda members, and cases involving U.S. servicemembers accused of abuse. According to Mr. Bravin:
For decades, records of the Kikuchi case and hundreds of other postwar tribunals lay forgotten in archives and government offices around the world. But now they could assume new significance for one of the most contentious aspects of the war on terrorism: the U.S.'s treatment of prisoners.
Hundreds of suspected terrorists and enemy fighters have been captured since the fall of 2001 and housed at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and elsewhere. The Bush administration has determined these captives aren't protected by the Geneva Conventions. But the administration has faced a wave of legal challenges to that view, and suffered several defeats so far. Today, government lawyers will ask a federal appeals court in Washington to reverse a November ruling that found the Geneva Convention protects prisoners held at Guantanamo and ordered an immediate halt to military commission proceedings against detainees because they didn't comply with the treaty.The legal battle is likely to end up at the Supreme Court, and, depending on its outcome, could compel the U.S. to devise a new road map for prisoner treatment.

The rulings from the years immediately after World War II lay out the most complete picture available of the way the U.S. viewed treatment of prisoners of war back then, when modern international humanitarian law was laid down. The question is, do these cases apply today?
Critics of the Bush administration's policy on terror-related prisoners argue they do. "These are the foundational cases," the first to apply international law to questions of prisoner treatment during armed conflict, says David Cohen, a 56-year-old professor of classics and rhetoric at the University of California, Berkeley, who also teaches classes on war crimes. He has spent the last 10 years collecting the documents from archives and government offices, adding millions of pages to existing records and unearthing the case of Mr. Kikuchi.
The records make it clear that after World War II, U.S. military prosecutors and judges set out to establish a precedent barring any prisoner mistreatment, by aggressively pursuing and punishing even comparatively small offenses. What the records make clear are some unbelievable similarities between the policy positions and defenses of the Japanese during World War II, and the U.S. government today. Then, the U.S. prosecuted such abuses, aggressively using the "command responsibility" doctrine to go after senior officers who knew or should have known about their subordinates' misconduct.
Now, a year after Abu Ghraib, we have yet to see a single court-martial for a soldier over the rank of staff sergeant. Instead, today's generals remain free to hold panel discussions where they blame everyone else but themselves. According to BG Janis Karpinski at a recent talk in San Francisco:
"I find it hard to believe that I did not know," she said. "If I had known, I would've raised the issue. I would've shouted about it." Wrong! That's not the standard. A general officer is not just responsible for what she knew, but what she should have known.
The same goes for the colonels and captains under her. As a nation, we have sent enemy generals to the gallows for the actions of their subordinates. See Application of Yamashita, 327 US 1 (1946).
There is some irony in the fact that we now let our own generals off for similar misconduct. But wait — there's more irony where that came from. Mr. Bravin's article (and its online supplement -- also available for free from the Wall Street Journal) draws an even more interesting parallel between the kind of legal process afforded U.S. personnel by the Japanese during WWII, and the kind of legal process we are now giving alleged Al Qaeda members at Gitmo and elsewhere. After WWII, we prosecuted the Japanese for war crimes stemming from their deprivation of due process in violation of international law, so the point is a very important one. According ot Mr. Bravin and the records from the WWII archives:
Japan saw the bombing of its cities as the deliberate targeting of civilians--and employed summary proceedings to punish captured American flyers as war criminals. Following the war, American military authorities concluded that treating Americans as war criminals was itself a war crime, because the Japanese procedures didn't meet the due-process standards of international law. At U.S. military commissions convened at Yokohama, Japan, in the late 1940s, U.S. Army officers carefully reviewed the level of due process the enemy had afforded American prisoners, and harshly punished them for falling short of what the U.S. decided was required.
That history may now come back to haunt the Bush administration, as advocates for prisoners held at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, argue that, like Japan in World War II, the U.S. today is punishing prisoners without affording them sufficient due process.

The current military commission is unlawful, [Georgetown law professor Neal] Katyal argues, because it affords defendants fewer rights than American soldiers receive before courts-martial, in particular by denying defendants the right to confront all witnesses or see all evidence against them.
The government's primary claim is that courts have no authority to second-guess the treatment of enemy prisoners. But the administration also contends its military commission will offer a fair trial. President Bush's November 2001 order authorizing the commission called for "full and fair" trials, and officials say they have been reviewing the procedures with an eye to making them resemble courts-martial more closely. Nonetheless, the administration maintains that special courts are needed to try international terrorism suspects because of the grave threat they pose to the U.S. Under current rules, commissions can sentence convicts to any term or, on vote of a unanimous seven-member panel, death.

According to the U.S. military's World War II records, Japanese officials also devised special procedures to deal with what they considered an extraordinary threat. American flyers "who do not violate international law will be treated as prisoners of war," but those "suspected of being felonious war criminals" would face Japanese military tribunals. Offenses "subject to military punishment" included "bombing, strafing and other acts of attack aimed at threatening and inflicting casualties on civilians," "damaging and destroying private property which has no military significance" and "any atrocious brutal acts that disregard humanity." The maximum penalty was death by firing squad. Like the Bush administration's military commissions, the Japanese courts could consider evidence extracted through coercive interrogations. But laws passed by the Japanese Diet and regulations issued by the Imperial Army spelled out procedures intended to ensure that prisoners weren't punished arbitrarily.
As the war wore on, however, the Japanese deviated from their regulations, using samurai swords to behead convicted flyers because ammunition was too scarce to waste on firing squads. Dozens of Americans were executed after summary hearings with no right of appeal.
Prosecuted by the U.S. after the war, Japanese officials said their harsh acts were dictated by military necessity.Col. Hajime Onishi, charged with presiding over the execution of U.S. flyers in June, 1945, argued that "the indiscriminate bombings had killed 20,000 people and wounded 30,000 in his territory, most of whom were noncombatants, and, therefore, the thought of the disposition of 27 airmen was a small incident compared with these facts," records say. "The criminal code and international law were secondary matters when compared with military operations of the supreme command."
Defense lawyers argued that offering full-blown trials for American flyers was impossible in the war's waning months, as Japan suffered under relentless U.S. attacks. Besides, such procedures "would not have given the crew members any greater rights or protections than they received under the abridged procedure, and that it constituted a trial under international law." In any event, defense lawyers argued, the "crew members had no rights as they were not prisoners of war."
Perhaps surprisingly, U.S. Army reviewers concluded in 1949 that "a Japanese tribunal could have reasonably found there was indiscriminate bombing " and that " in the course of a legal trial might well have found the [American] crew members guilty." Moreover, they acknowledged that Japanese legal procedures, although based on inquisitorial judges rather than the adversarial system used in the U.S., cannot be considered "automatically illegal. "But the abridged procedures employed as the war wore down violated the flyers rights, the U.S. found.
" These men were not informed they were being charged with indiscriminate bombing and, except in the intelligence investigation, where they might reasonably be expected to give as little information as possible, they were not given a chance to make a statement." The flyers weren't permitted to attend the hearings where they were convicted and sentenced, the Army reviewers found. Then, as now, the argument was the same for the departure from legal process: necessity.
In a nutshell, the argument was made then by the Japanese and now by the U.S. that a full and fair trial for the defendants might somehow damage national security, and therefore it was necessary to convene some kind of summary proceeding (usually in secret) which would safeguard the state. The similarities between the Japanese military commissions and today's U.S. military commissions are striking. Indeed, the procedure to hold such commissions without the accused in the room is at the heart of Hamdan v. Rumsfeld, the current case pending before the DC Circuit challenging the lawfulness of the commissions. (Full disclosure: I drafted a friend-of-the-court brief opposing the government in that case.) Depriving today's military commission defendants of the right to be present for all important phases of their trial, such as voir dire, runs against both U.S. statute (10 U.S.C. 839, 849, 850) and international law. The president's order and other supporting statements make it clear that we are implementing these commission rules because we deem it necessary to do so — that it would be "impracticable" to try such individuals in federal court or a conventional military court.
However, in devising these commissions, the administration has developed a set of rules which are fatally inconsistent with both U.S. law and international law. Sixty years ago, the Japanese deployed similar arguments in support of their own military commissions — and soon found themselves in the defendant's chair for war crimes based on those unlawful legal proceedings. We should be wary of following the example set by the Japanese. If the administration wants to try enemy combatants by military commission, there is ample precedent for doing so. However, such commissions must be legislatively authorized, and constituted in accordance with U.S. law and international law. It may well be easier to simply try such defendants in a general court-martial, since the UCMJ grants military courts jurisdiction over enemy combatants for war crimes, and the military justice system is a far more mature and respected institution. Or, the current commission system can be legislatively authorized, and then amended to conform more closely to the UCMJ and past commissions procedures. The New York Times reported two weeks ago that the Pentagon was considering a proposal to do just that, but my sources agree that the proposal was dead-on-arrival when it got to the Office of the Secretary of Defense and the Vice President's office.
I suppose there is a final irony in all of this, which I alluded two in last week's Slate column on lawfare. As a nation, we have now committed ourselves to the spread of freedom and democracy throughout the world. Establishing the rule of law, and building democratic institutions, come part and parcel with this charter to spread freedom. We cannot embrace such things on the one hand, as we are in Iraq, while flouting the rule of law on the other, as we are in Gitmo. The world sees our inconsistency, and criticizes our policies as a naked, unprincipled grab for power. It's not enough to talk the freedom talk; you must also walk the freedom walk. And that means adhering to the rule of law in all contexts, such as treating captured enemy fighters according to established U.S. and international law. There is no evidence that giving these men a proper trial would somehow hurt national security; all the evidence suggests our political and moral standing would be enhanced if we treated these men according to the law. So why haven't we done so?
[Phillip Carter,Monday 11th April 2005

http://www.intel-dump.com/

"The Coalition of the Billing"

2005-04-04T02:14:00.000-07:00

The United States depends on private firms (PMFs) to conduct military operations in Iraq to an unprecedented degree. In this month's Foreign Affairs, Peter Singer identifies five unresolved, and largely undiscussed, dilemmas that arise from the military's new relationship with the private sector. I've paraphrased them here:
1. The incentives of a private industry hinge on profitability. Thus, they may not always be in sync with the security interests of the United States.
2. The global industry of PMFs is largely unregulated. Companies may hire individuals with poor credentials or accept a contract with unseemly clientele. After hiring, training may be insufficient.
3. PMFs pursue public goals using private means, severing the relationship between the public and its foreign policy.
4. US law sharply distinguishes between soldier and civilian; the expanding grey area of hired fighters remains uncharted.
5. PMFs may rob the military of its unique identity by taking over jobs which were once the exclusive duty of the military.
After reading this article, I searched for examples of these dilemmas. I found that one of the more notorious contractors, Custer Battles, nicely demonstrates (or have been accused of demonstrating) 4 of the 5 of them.

Dilemma 1: The company is embroiled in a financial scandal. Two whistle-blowers filed a $50 million dollars lawsuit, accusing the company of fraud and using a billing scheme to overcharge the US government. A small instance of "fraud" in this case: Custer Battles is accused of billing the US for Iraqi Airways forklifts even though they were found on site.

Dilemma 2: Rumors of abuse is surfacing as well. MSNBC recently interviewed four former hires of Custer Battles. All of them tell stories of fellow employees terrorizing civilians and shooting indiscriminately. In short, some of these guys have been playing Rambo, especially when dealing with what must be ferociously frustrating traffic jams: "[He] sighted down his AK-47 and started firing. It went through the window. As far as I could see, it hit a passenger. And they didn't even know we were there." says Colling of one of these traffic jam incidents. He quit the job immediately. Bill Craun, another employee interviewed, did the same, writing a letter to a friend at the Pentagon which states: "I didn't want any part of an organization that deliberately murders children and innocent civilians."

Dilemma 3: As serious as they sound, it is difficult to investigate all of these allegations . Private companies fall outside of the scope of the Freedom of Information Act. FOIA is perhaps the only reason we are aware of widespread abuses perpetrated by military personnel. Without this type of oversight, it is difficult to evaluate the behavior of the soldiers. But Bill Craun unequivocally assures us: "What we saw, I know the American population wouldn't stand for."

Dilemma 4: Perhaps because of the lack of transparency, as of yet "not one private military contractor has been prosecuted or punished for a crime in Iraq." says Singer in his article.

As for dilemma 5, well that one is somewhat abstract and thus hard to prove. But if it is indeed a problem, Custor Battles is part of it, as are the rest of the contracted firms.I am not writing this to indict all of the contractors working in Iraq, or to project them as an evil and malicious bunch. The seeds of thes alleged misconduct are planted in the structure the businesses' roles in Iraq and their relationship to the government. Left on their own, companies will be companies. It is up to the US government to make sure that this incentive driven behavior does not hinder national security goals or cause needless harm to the very people they are supposed to help.

http://www.usamnesia.com

Tariq Ramadan: The Case of the Grand Deception

2005-04-02T00:11:00.000-08:00

No case illustrates the murderous deception of Western society by Islamic militants more than the recent episode involving Tariq Ramadan, the Swiss professor who was denied a visa to teach at the University of Notre Dame. His supporters in the U.S. rallied vigorously around Mr. Ramadan, protesting with total moral certitude the politically outrageous move by the US government to muzzle a Muslim "moderate". The coalition to defend Ramadan included The New York Times, The Washington Post, academic boards around the country, Islamic advocacy groups and human rights groups. Their near unanimous message was that Mr. Ramadan was a genuine "moderate" and "Islamic pluralist", but that even if one disagreed with some of his statements, Mr. Ramadan surely should have been entitled to have his ideas debated in the great free marketplace of ideas of the American campus

Miraculously, the coalition of high priests of political correctness, Wahabi groups masquerading as pluralists, and the elite censors of fair and balanced journalism did not prevail. Mr. Ramadan was not given a visa and soon, in an act of righteous indignation, refused to reapply for another visa.

Even after the murderous actions by Islamic militants on 9-11 in the US, and in fact in carrying out or planning terrorist operations in more than 90 countries between 1990 and 2003, the American intelligentsia in a devilish collusion with radical Islamic groups hiding under false veneer, have managed to perpetrate the grand deception of militant Islam: pretending to be moderate, democrats with a small d, pluralists and victims of hate, radical Islamic groups have continued to invert reality, turning facts on their head, in a stunning ability to anoint themselves as the victims of hate as opposed to the murderous reality that they are the progenitors of hate. Where else could radical Islamic leaders like Yousef Al Qardawi, a leader of the Muslim Brotherhood who calls for killing Jews (not just Israelis but Jews) and Americans (not just occupiers) be described as "moderate" or a pro-western "reformer" or variations of this theme (Washington Post, New York Times, Christian Science Monitor, La Times)? Where else could one hear that Jihad was a "beautiful" concept, as was broadcast on NPR recently, devoid of any violent or militant meaning? NPR's commentator was the daughter of an Islamic American leader who justified the killing of Robert Kennedy-a fact NPR withheld from its listeners but paled in comparison to its brazen willingness to air a de facto commercial for al Qaeda with the commentator ending her Islamist (tax-payer subsidized) infomercial with the following line: "Someday, I hope 'jihad' will find its way back into our lexicon, when it can be used properly, in sentences like 'She's on a jihad to achieve the American Dream.'"

In the decade and a half before 9-11, Hamas, Islamic Jihad, al Qaeda and virtually every other radical Islamic group and leader successfully perpetrated the most brilliant strategic enemy deception in US history by planting themselves in the heart of enemy territory under false cover as non-profit (and or course tax deductible) humanitarian groups, civil rights groups, and apolitical religious institutions. Until 9-11, the deceit had continued with staggering success as radical Islamic groups and leaders were routinely invited to the White House, provided with federal funding, praised by politicians, and lionized by the media.

But before this charade was exposed, nearly 3000 Americans were forced to pay with their lives as the price for the belated realization that we had been had. Suddenly, charities that had been secretly operating as conduits for terrorists and established American Muslim leaders leading double lives as terrorist masterminds were finally being recognized for who they were: Terrorists. And instead of being toasted at the State Department, they were now more appropriately being prosecuted, shut down and deported.

And yet, more than 3 years after 9-11, it would seem that this same homicidal self-delusion is alive and well in the United States. This is where Mr. Ramadan comes to play such a pivotal role in highlighting the danger of this continued self-deception.

First, Mr. Ramadan is not any more a moderate than David Duke would be considered a moderate on race relations. The only difference is that David Duke is not smart enough to speak in two languages, cloak his racism under the mantle of pluralism or enjoy the witting collaboration of the media.

In several interviews given to various European publications over the last few years, Mr. Ramadan has repeatedly provided a justification for terrorist acts against US allies such as Israel and Russia and, more recently, against the US itself. Asked by the Italian magazine Panorama if the killing of civilians is right, Mr. Ramadan unambiguously responded that "In Palestine, Iraq, Chechnya, there is a situation of oppression, repression and dictatorship. It is legitimate for Muslims to resist fascism that kills the innocent." When asked if car bombing against US forces in Iraq were legitimate, Professor Ramadan responded that "Iraq was colonized by the Americans. The resistance against the army is just."

Mastering the art of taqiyya (double speaking to fool the unbelievers), Tariq Ramadan has enchanted many with his apparent moderation. But a careful examination of his words reveals that Professor Ramadan is not what he seems and claims to be. Yes, he says that he "agrees with integration" of Muslims in the West, but he is careful to say that "we [Muslims] are the ones who are going to decide the content." He makes us happy by saying that he accepts Western secular law, but, here's the catch, "only if this law doesn't force me to do things against my religion." And when he is cornered with questions on the brutality of some punishments of Islamic law, such as stoning, he tells us that he is against them, but (there is always a "but".) they are in Quranic texts and so he cannot fully condemn them and we have to settle for "an absolute moratorium on all physical punishments."

The telegenic, soft-spoken and charming professor is just the modern, westernized face of the same enemy that wears a different mask on other battlefields. As the distinguished expert of Middle East affairs Fouad Ajami recently wrote, Tariq Ramadan is, "in the world of the new Islamism, pure nobility." His moderate façade hides his radical heart and just a careful read of his words would reveal it. France, the country that knows him best, has made up its mind on him. A court in Lyon recently said that preachers like Tariq Ramadan "can exert an influence on young Islamists and therefore constitute an incitement that can lead them to join violent groups."

In France at least, some leftist intellectuals have recognized Mr. Ramadan for what he is. The self-censorious NY Times was even forced to report that Bernard-Henri Levy, who wrote the best-seller "Who Killed Daniel Pearl" accused Ramadan of being the "intellectual champion of all kinds of double-talk" with a "racist vision of the world" and having promoted anti-Semitism. The Times further reported that Bernard Kouchner, the foreign aid advocate and former health minister of France, called Mr. Ramadan "absolutely a kook with no historical memory" and "a dangerous man." He added, "The way he denounced some Jewish intellectuals is close to anti-Semitism."

Still, the Ramadan fan club in the US continued to portray the exclusion of Mr. Ramadan as part of an anti-Muslim campaign; the charge of anti-Muslim racism, part of the larger orchestration by radical Muslims to portray themselves as the victims of hate, has been mastered perfectly, requiring only the collaboration of the American media. At the height of the controversy last year, The New York Times opined that "American Muslim groups questioned the government's ability or willingness to distinguish between what they see as Muslim moderates like Mr. Ramadan and extremists." But who were these American Muslim groups, portrayed by the Times as intellectually honest arbiters of who really is a moderate? None other than off-shoots and branches of the Muslim Brotherhood, the Islamic radical movement that gave birth to al Qaeda and Hamas, and whose founder was none other than Hassan Al-Banna, the grandfather of Mr. Ramadan.

And there are those who fall back on the free market response: Is the most powerful nation in the world afraid of allowing Mr. Ramadan access to the intellectual pluralism of the US, where free speech is honored as the most sacred privilege that we have?

Well, Mr. Ramadan does not need to be in the United States to convey his message and thoughts. Through the internet, media and instant telecommunications, the American public is not being denied one iota of Mr. Ramadan's propaganda.

After the first World Trade Center bombing in 1993, the same defenders of Mr. Ramadan-the New York Times and other elite media-were the first to ask probing and indignant questions about how the blind Sheik, with his radical views, was able to get visas to the United States in the early 1990's. But that was before he was indicted or convicted of any US crime. So apparently, the high priests at the time decided that the premium of free speech for non-US guests was not sacred; that in fact, the right to visit the US was not a constitutional right afforded to any citizen of the world, a view unfortunately increasingly espoused by editorial boards.

Title 8 United States Code Section 1182 requires the exclusion from the US of any alien who has "used his position of prominence within any country to endorse or espouse terrorist activity, or to persuade others to support terrorist activity or a terrorist organization." The provision seems written to fit Ramadan's case. The entry into the United States of any foreign national is, by law, a privilege and not a right. It is preposterous to ask the US government to disregard its own laws and to grant this privilege to a person who openly condones attacks against U.S. forces and interests.

Aside from the legal justification for barring Mr. Ramadan, the moral reason for keeping Mr. Ramadan out is the same reason why the US has for years denied visas to neo-Nazi proponents from Western Europe. It is not only the access to the United States that both neo-Nazis and Mr. Ramadan have sought. Rather it is the official imprimatur of the US government, an effective declaration of political legitimacy attending to the granting of the visa. And that is precisely same legitimacy that allowed militant Islamic groups to operate for so long in the United States. Do we really want to repeat history?

http://counterterror.typepad.com/the_counterterrorism_blog/2005/04/tariq_ramadan_t.html#more

Guus Kouwenhoven's Arrest and Taylor's Unraveling Empire

2005-03-31T05:46:00.000-08:00

Well, the good news is that Dutch authorities last week arrested Guus Kouwenhoven, one of former President Charles Taylor's main money men. They got him in Rotterdam, although he was supposed to be banned from travel. He was the head of the Oriental Timber Corporation, the Chinese/Malaysian firm responsible for clear-cutting some of the last of West Africa's forests for the benefit of Taylor and themselve, as well as trafficking weapons for Taylor. After fleeing Liberia and his Africa Hotel, he settled, with some of OTC's equipment, in Congo-Brazzaville, where his forestry activities continued. He conveniently found a house next to the president's there.
Now he is charged charged with violating the U.N. weapons embargo and war crimes. Police searched an apartment in Rotterdam and one in Paris in relation to his arrest. So he may be in for a long haul. His arrest should lead to an unraveling of at least part of Taylor's financial empire, which seemingly continues to thrive. Kouwenhoven, like Emmanuel Shaw and other of Taylor's bagmen, started out on the other side, working for the Doe government. Of course, so did Taylor, before "liberating" Liberia.
Guus knows a lot. The question is what will he say to protect his paymaster? And, unfortunately, that paymaster may still be making money.There are disturbing reports of ongoing, illicit diamond mining activities in Liberia, which could have links to Taylor. The most recent U.N. Panel of Experts report (dated March 17 but not yet available on the net) found that there are several questionable diamond operations now underway, showing how little Liberia has changed. Among the companies whose activities were questioned were the American Mining Associates, run by Gene Byrge, and U.S. citizen. AMA has improved roads, brought in trucks and fully-mechanized washing plant and alot more, but says it is only carrying out "exploration" activities. The Panel believes the "scale of operation was excessive to exploration activity."
Perhaps more worrisome is the widespread buying of diamonds by foreign dealers, who operate out of hotels and guest houses. Coupled with that is the activity of the West Africa Mining Corporation (WAMCO), a company "financed by the privately-owned London International Bank Limited," the situation seems bad and getting worse. The fantastically-favorable terms WAMCO negotiated in a secret deal with the interim government of Liberia "would create a de facto monopoly over much of Liberia's diamond-producing regions," the report found. "The conditions under which this agreement was negotiated remain extremely opaque. There was no formal bidding process and...it transpired that the company had had no previous experience in the mining sector whatsoever." Best of all, WAMCO was granted permission to set up its own private security force. Sound like Taylor's type of operation? As the panel concluded, "The people of Liberia are not likely to benefit from such an arrangement in the long term." Nor the short term, for that matter.

http://www.douglasfarah.com/

You bet your life

2005-03-31T05:41:00.000-08:00

The epidemic of bird flu among poultry in North Korea is taking on a decidedly desperate cast. UN Food and Agriculture experts are flying there from Bangkok, China and Australia (Reuters).The context is grim. A great deal of money, effort and hope was invested in poultry production by the North Korean government. Struggling to feed its undernourished population of 23 million, a special state agency was established for breeding chickens and ducks in December of 2001 (UPI via World Peace Herald). While poultry was one of the few growing sectors of the economy, the country produced only about 25 million birds in 2004, just over one per person/year, far short of Kim Jong Il's promised one kilogram of chicken meat and 60 eggs a month for every household in Pyongyang. The number of chickens estimated in North Korea is about 19 million. Now mass culling is reducing this already inadequate source of protein.Pyongyang's public admission of the previously denied bird flu outbreak is seen by many as a sure sign the problem has spiraled out of control and foreign help is needed. The epidemic has probably already hit the poor rural area and is spreading. North Korea has mobilized its military to cull and disinfect poultry farms around Pyongyang, according to the South Korean Unification Ministry:
"Thousands of soldiers from the Pyongyang Defense Command and 3d Army Corps are involved in the slaughter and burial of diseased fowl," a Unification Ministry official told the Joong Ang Ilbo.[ . . . ]According to the Unification Ministry, the North's mobilization of the military is evidence of the seriousness of the situation. North Korean troops, after finishing winter drills this month, were scheduled to assist farmers during spring planting, the ministry said. The North shifted the assignment of the soldiers to cope with the spread of bird flu, officials said.So while the Bush Administration and our European allies were dithering over North Korea's nuclear shenanigans, another kind of bomb was ticking in the Korean peninsula, where the current Asian bird flu outbreak began in 2003 in the South and spread to Cambodia, Thailand, Vietnam, China and Indonesia.Reuters reports that the FAO experts are hoping to contain the virus before it mutates to a form easily transmissible between humans. This view is incomprehensible. The virus is already solidly entrenched in poultry in Asia, animals in close proximity to human beings. By common consent the virus cannot be eradicated at this point. If there is no intrinsic biological barrier to its making the feared genetic change, it will happen and containing the poultry epidemic (a worthwhile enterprise on its own) will not prevent it.It is time to stop talking this way and plan seriously for a pandemic in the near future. With good luck it won't happen, although no one at the moment can give a convincing argument why it shouldn't and there are plenty of plausible arguments why it should. If I were a betting person, I wouldn't bet my money against a pandemic. Why should I bet my life on it?

http://effectmeasure.blogspot.com

YAWNING HEIGHTS

2005-03-16T06:48:00.000-08:00

Sexy yawns
Donald MacLeod reports on the research that suggests sex is the reason for yawning
Wednesday March 16, 2005

Don't drop off at the back there - yawning is really interesting. Proving this has become the mission in life of Dutch academic Wolter Seuntjens, whose thesis - The Hidden Sexuality of the Human Yawn - has earned him a well-deserved place on this week's Improbable Research tour.
"The yawn has not received its due attention," argues Seuntjens, of Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, who set out to provide an encyclopaedic overview of all available knowledge about yawning, drawing on linguistics (semantics, etymology), sociology, psychology, the medical sciences (anatomy, physiology, pathology, and pharmacology), and the arts (literature, film, visual arts).
He then explores whether yawning has an erotic side.
Not all readers will agree he has really proved his point about the erotic yawn , despite citing a passage from The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie as an example, but it is a good try.
Seuntjens believes there is no good explanation for yawning. He says the common explanation of hypoxia - that yawning is a way for the body to take in more oxygen - is untested.
Psychologically, too, it remains a riddle, Seuntjens has found after trawling through all sorts of literature. "In fact, we have really no idea what causes yawning and what purpose yawning serves or what mechanisms are responsible for yawning and even what the essential anatomical constituents of yawning are. In the age in which the human genome has been deciphered and space travel has become almost trite this verdict may sound like an affront," he writes.
But the yawn and the associated stretch of the 'stretch-yawn syndrome' have been linked to desire and even of being in love, figuring in the courtship process both in the West and in passages in ancient Indian literature. Seuntjens has even found one pair of authors who described the feeling that accompanies the acme of yawning as a "mini-orgasm".
He adds: "In discussing pathology I discovered that yawning and spontaneous ejaculation were mentioned concomitantly in terminal rabies.
"In discussing pharmacology I found a link between yawning and spontaneous orgasm in withdrawal from heroin addiction. Likewise, yawning and sexual response were associated as clinical side effects of several antidepressant drugs. In one publication an undeniable causal relation was reported: both spontaneous and intentional yawning provoked instantaneous ejaculation orgasm."
But there times, concedes Dr Yawn, when a yawn is simple a yawn - "even if a 'simple' yawn is not simple at all" - and we have to interpret every individual yawn as the occasion arises.

http://education.guardian.co.uk/higher/research/improbable/story/0,11109,1438356,00.html

Good old socialized medicine

2005-03-11T02:24:00.000-08:00

Congratulations to the team at King’s College London, who have managed to achieve the first claimed “cure” of Type 1 Diabetes via transplanted islet cells. Just to drive the point home, the technique that they used was originally developed in Canada, so it’s a double win for socialized medical research.

The temptation is almost overpowering to speculate that the reason this particular procedure was developed outside the USA might have something to do with the fact that curing a disease with a single operation doesn’t produce a lifelong dependence on patented pharmaceuticals. But this temptation probably ought to be resisted; it’s only a single case. But well done King’s College, and perhaps this will shame our government into funding London’s hospitals properly.

from: www.crookedtimber.org

YES to the European Constitution (but only in the UK. No to the Constitution of the Bosses in continental Europe!)

2005-03-10T01:54:00.000-08:00

I'm not a big fan of George Monbiot. It's not really anything to do with his politics, which are broadly admirable, if a little wet. It's just that I tend to find his writing style exceptionally bland. I also don't think he holds himself up well in debates, conceding here, politely acquiescing there, as he does. And he's as posh as a mother-of-pearl caviar spoon. But in the end he's not so bad. I guess it's a bit like Rush. I recognise that they're very good musicians, and should probably be allowed into the canon of Good Bands, but I just can't get past Geddy Lee's voice. You know?
However, yesterday in the Guardian he wrote a very good article indeed (George Monbiot, not Geddy Lee), covering a subject which, for shame, almost the entirety of the British left is handling as well as I can handle three martinis.
Since moving to Brussels last February, I've spent quite more than a quart d'heure on anti-Bolkestein demonstrations, one of which was quite large (for Brussels, admittedly), and the draft directive and reactions to it certainly have given rise to any number of continental newspaper column inches, often even creeping onto the front pages. But if you're reading this from Britain, I'd wager no small amount that even if you consider yourself to be the most Right On and 'conscious' person in your circle of friends, with your collective guerrilla turnip garden and a civil disobedience rap sheet as long as a roll of toilet paper, you won't have the faintest clue what this Bolkestein business is. (I can't speak to the discussion in Ireland, I'm afraid. I hope the level of debate is healthier than in the UK)
If the Bolkestein directive becomes European law, and this really is no exaggeration, many of the social gains, and in particular the advances the workers' movement has made in Europe since the birth of trade unionism, will be destroyed legally, as Lord Monbiot points out:
'[The directive] impose[s] on member states a compulsory commercialisation of public services, while destroying their ability to defend us from corporate exploitation. It is - or was - due for approval by the end of this year.
'The gremlin inhabits a clause called "the country of origin principle". Companies, it says, "are subject only to the national provisions of their member state of origin". What this means is that if a construction firm based in Lithuania is working in the UK, it need abide only by Lithuanian laws. Every enterprising corporation will want to relocate its HQ to the state with the weakest regulations.
Even worse,
'The state responsible for enforcing the rules will be the one in which the company is based, not the one in which it is working. If, for example, the Lithuanian company forced workers in the UK to risk their lives on dodgy scaffolding, our Health and Safety Executive wouldn't be able to do a damn thing. Instead, the Lithuanian equivalent would have to send its inspectors over here, and, hampered by any number of translation problems, seek to defend the lives of British workers.'
This is no small bit of fuss about courgettes that are too bendy or how much cocoa butter needs to go into a Mars bar for it to qualify as chocolate (and as far as I'm concerned, the answer there is: a hell of a lot more). It is no wonder that activists across Europe have plowed almost as much energy into defeating the directive as they have into opposing the war.
But because of the British left's provincialism and soft nationalism, there has been little in the way of even information campaigns, let alone protest. The veritably Arctic lack of interest is so thoroughgoing that even the English pages for the Stop Bolkestein campaign website had to be written by someone for whom English is a second language.
I don't think I'm going to make any friends here, but I have to say that I am seriously leaning towards voting in favour of the European Constitution simply because of the failure of the UK far left to mount a serious campaign against it. Instead, they have been half-silent cowards not wanting really to touch the issue, leaving the anti-constitution campaigning to the xenophobes and nationalists.
The progressive arguments against the Constitution are sound. Where historically, conceptions of freedom ran as themes through bourgeois constitutions, being born for the most part in times of anti-feudal revolutions, the organising theme of the European Constitution is the free market.
From Alternative Libertaire's English pages (yes, I had to go to the English pages of a French anarchist magazine to find a coherent English analysis of the document - that's how pathetic this all is) about the Constitution, we find:
'For example article 1-2 declares that "the Union is based on indivisible and universal values of human dignity, equality and solidarity, it rests on the principles of democracy and the rights of the State." But this wonderful declaration is contradicted in the following articles 111-69, 70, 77, 144 and 180 all identically repeating that the. Union will act "in conformity with the respect for the principles of an open economic market where competition is free".'
…
'In their pursuit of anti-social policies, different EU governments have shown no hesitation in hiding behind the constraints of the UE treaties. Consequently, a fundamental treaty like the constitutional project stipulates as obligatory a whole range of [neo-]liberal dispositions (including certain clauses that specifically correspond to demands made by certain big bosses lobbies), to demand unanimity voting for any measures that might go against capitalist interests, is to block all political attempts in that direction. This is the certainly case for measures against tax fraud, or taxation of companies, the very measures that should require a unanimous vote and above all "they are necessary for the functioning of the internal market and to avoid distortion of competition." (111-63). The same applies to controls of the free circulation of capital, under article III-46-3: "Only a European law or framework law of the Council of ministers may enact measures which constitute a step back in Union law as regards the liberalisation of the movement of capital to or from third countries. The Council of Ministers shall unanimously after consultation with the European parliament."
…
'…on the question of the break up of public services, it is allowed that a member state can be in favour of maintaining a public service. But public services have: "the effect of distorting the conditions of competition in the internal market, [and] the Commission shall, together with the state concerned, examine how these steps can be adjusted to the rules laid dawn in the Constitution. By derogation of common law procedure, the Commission or any member state can apply directly to the Court of Justice which will sit in secret..." (III-17)'
'As for the rest of the constitutional project, nearly everything that the bosses' union wants, the Union of the confederation of industry and employers in Europe (UNICE, MEDEF of France is a member) is set out in Part III. On the other hand, there is no mention of the rights of wage earners concerning questions of remuneration, rights of associations, strike action, etc.'
While there are social and environmental provisions, the language gives away the intent: member states 'may' do things, where when it comes to the market, they 'shall' do them.
Then there is the militarisation of Europe that finds its place in the document (again from Alternative Libertaire):
'"member states shall undertake progressively to improve their military capacities." (1-40-3). Article 1-40-2 stipulates that European defence policy shall be compatible with members' NATO obligations, a direct recognition of the superior judicial status of that military organisation. Furthermore, the article continues with even greater precision that "participating member states shall work in close collaboration with NATO". Even in situations of "internal serious disturbances affecting public order, in cases of war or of [...] the threat of war", member states are obliged to work together in order to avoid "affecting" the functioning of the "internal market"! (III-16)
And finally, the existing undemocratic - nay - anti-democratic structures of the European Union - in which the institution that is elected, the parliament, has no power and those institutions that are appointed, the Commission, the Council and the presidency - will be enshrined forever.
The European Union is not in any way responsibly democratic (in the sense that it is responsible to electors), and the European Constitution is a naked attempt to advance deregulation, privatisation and militarisation and to undermine social services and workers' rights. So how can I possibly vote in favour of this?
Because the British people, overwhelmingly so, are not opposed to the Constitution for the above reasons, but simply because it's European and it's foreign. The causes of racism, xenophobia, nationalism and even fascism will be profoundly strengthened by a No vote in the UK.
If the British far left, like the continental far left, had mounted a coherent campaign opposing the constitution for these reasons, distinguishing themselves from the far and nationalist right, then I would vote No. But, if anyone from the far left in the UK at any point does actually begin campaigning against it, are they really going to correct someone they come across while handing out leaflets outside a tube station who says she's going to vote No to protect the pound, or because he believes Britain's sovereignty is being eroded?
Realistically, even the limpest of campaigns is unlikely to even be mounted. Why waste valuable activist energy on something that is certainly going to go down to the most legendary of defeats?
To be honest, I am bending the stick a bit in the opposite direction in order to straighten it out (to steal a phrase): I cannot actually bring myself to vote in favour of this wretched, wretched document, despite the fact that my vote will not be seen as it should be - as a rejection of a corporatised and militarised Europe - but as a rejection of Europe in toto.
In the end, I will have to vote No.
Nonetheless, the UK far left is being unquestionably criminal and cowardly in the way it is dealing with Europe.

from: http://apostatewindbag.blogspot.com/

Defend the BBC; Death to the privateers!

2005-03-04T01:29:00.000-08:00

As some of you already know, for my day job, I am a journalist who covers European technology and telecoms news - a business journo, in truth (quite far from the professional revolutionary I used to imagine I'd be). As such, I really have to bite my tongue while reporting on privatisation issues. I try to insert as much of a progressive perspective as I can - which often can only take the form of reports of lay-offs due to various liberalisation measures, or covering the recent meeting of Balkan telecoms unions, for example. But I am certainly not able to offer any overtly anti-privatisation perspective, and this can be extraordinarily frustrating when I am writing about neo-liberal shenanigans almost daily.
There is almost nobody within the sector who is anything other than a libertarian fundamentalist. Most other tech journos, the major parliamentary parties in every country in the union and, obviously, the companies themselves are so thoroughly committed to the supposed good that comes from competition, in this sector in particular, that deregulation and privatisation have become not merely policies which they support, but political axioms. One might more easily suggest that the moon is made of green cheese than question the idea of privatisation and deregulation in telecoms. At the same time, because most progressives have little interest in the subject area - especially as there are far more sexy issues such as the war to get stuck into - the privateers in member state governments and in the Commission are given free rein to cut the heart out of what remains of public broadcasting and regulated telecommunications, safe in the knowledge that not only will no organised opposition be mounted, but most of the population will not even be aware that any of this is going on.
In one thoroughly typical example, last July, hidden in an otherwise bland and not especially noteworthy Commission communication on the roll-out of mobile broadband (3G telephony and the like) throughout the union, was a handful of paragraphs (Section 3.7, COM(2004) 447 [30 June, 2004]) that said essentially, in typically fustian bureaucrat-speak, that member states must eliminate local barriers to the roll-out and expansion of mobile base stations and masts. Specifically, member states must somehow get rid of restrictive local anti-mobile-mast by-laws and re-educate their populations of nimbies as they don't know what’s good for them. Now, personally, I think the jury's still out on the potential health side-effects of mobile phones, masts and base stations, but I certainly believe that local communities have the right to invoke the precautionary principle in this regard and ban the placement of mobile masts near schools and hospitals. But this is not merely an environmental issue: It is perfectly illustrative of the anti-democratic imperative at the heart of the European Union. Sadly, this particular issue has barely been touched by campaigners, not even by the local nimby groups themselves.
I hope the same indifference will not greet this week's news of the dagger pointed at the heart of public broadcasting in Europe, and indeed the world. Two weeks ago a brief story appeared in the Guardian about the launch of a European Commission investigation into the use of television and radio licence fees by the German public broadcasters, ARD and ZDF, to fund internet content provision and other new services.The competition commissioner, Neelie Kroes, has said that while the licence fee does not amount to an illegal subsidy under EU rules, the use of such funds to develop internet content and services is indeed unlawful. Undoubtedly because of today's release of the UK government's green paper on the future of the BBC, the Guardian published the story again, but this time on the front page and beefed up a little.
Public broadcasting - heck, public anything - sticks in the craw of the capitalists. With poor rates of return on investment dating back a generation in almost every industry and little expectation of growth anywhere, these vultures slaver over the trillions spent globally in the public sector and are absolutely ideologically committed to its wholesale sell-off.
In the age of hundred-channel digital television, Tivo, broadband TV and video on demand, public broadcasting is seen as particularly vulnerable, and neo-liberals see public broadcasters' internet activities to be the soft underbelly.
Last July, the UK government released its review of BBC Online, which criticised the BBC's expansive and award-winning website as harmful to competition. Essentially the argument goes: 'The BBC Online is simply too good. There is no way that most private internet publishers can compete with it.'
At the time, the vampirically named Hugo Drayton, chair of the anti-BBC British Internet Publishers’ Alliance and managing director of the Telegraph Group, was approving of the report: 'On balance, I'm very glad that something positive has come out. It's taken a long time. BIPA has been banging this drum for six years and there's been no response…The British consumer and taxpayer are being cheated by the BBC...The bottom line is there's no regulation, no remit and no recognition of the damage their activities have done to the commercial market.'
In response, the chastised BBC shuttered five of its sub-websites and pulled back from its mobile internet plans.
The decision of the Commission to investigate the German public broadcasters will not in the short term end the licence fee in the UK or Germany, and today's green paper argues that the BBC licence fee is safe for another ten years. But there is no doubt that the investigation will find that ARD and ZDF are illegally using public funds to deliver internet content. After two and half years of covering this sector, I am absolutely certain this will be the conclusion. This will in turn result in public broadcasters throughout Europe being shorn of their internet enterprises, to the delight of the Hugo Drayton and the rest of the vultures.
But it won't stop there. The neo-liberals have their eyes set on the entirety of public broadcasting in Europe. Within ten years, probably sooner, television and the internet will have converged completely. There will not just be hundreds of television channels, but millions. In such a context, the privateers will feel even more confident of the superfluity of public broadcasting.
However, the contrary will be true. Public broadcasting/internet content provision will be more necessary than ever. Already in the current environment most newspapers are finding it incredibly difficult to compete with the free provision of news. While online advertising has taken off in the last year, it is spread across hundreds of thousands or even millions of sites, rather than just thousands of newspapers and magazines, as it was for the last century and a half. There is not enough advertising money to keep afloat an internet version of a broadsheet, with its dozens of bureaus around the world, forcing many, such as the Financial Times, the Wall Street Journal and the Economist to charge for access, charging sums that are out of bounds for all but upper management. The New York Times and Washington Post are currently playing chicken to see who go first in charging for access, worried that whoever goes first will lose customers to the other, but they will both likely make the shift this year.
As a result, most internet users will simply go to other, free sites for their news, sites of poor quality, with no sub-editors, editors or fact-checkers (sites like this, actually). Furthermore, without editors compiling a collection of news and other content that updates the reader on the latest developments in 'the national/international conversation', an individual's awareness will become increasingly compartmentalised, visiting just those sites that interest him or her, not necessarily ones that inform. Indeed, this latter process is already underway. This makes for poorly informed citizens and ultimately undermines democracy, dependent as it is on a populace that is aware.
This effect will be amplified after TV-internet convergence is complete: as expensive as it is to publish a newspaper, it is vastly more expensive to produce television programming. Even with a significant reduction in costs resulting from technological advances (which in any case will not be as much as the tech-geek pollyannas predict), the labour is, as ever, the most expensive part. It has never cost a penny to write a poem or a play, but not everyone is a poet or a playwright. For fifty years or thereabouts, it has cost relatively little to take a photograph but not everyone is a photographer. Building a website is essentially free, and there is an ocean of shit out there. However cheap broadcasting becomes eventually, we will not all be broadcasters.
Already in North America, cable has delivered a televisual experience of hundreds of stations. However, the amount of funding available from advertisers has not commensurately expanded. Thus the pie is now shared amongst some three hundred niche channels (more or less, depending on the particular market), resulting in few that can afford to produce their own content. Most channels prefer to show repeats of older shows or, if they do actually develop original content, it will be reality programming showing the viewer, say, what not to wear or how to spend eleven bucks down at the hardware store on some twigs, glitter and a glue gun in order to transform their unfinished basement into a home cinema. Moreover, there has been an explosion of 'paid programming', selling George Foreman Grills, Girls Gone Wild videos and - now here I must say this is impressive, although thankfully I have no use for it - instant back-hair removal cream (Doesn't sound that impressive? You haven't seen the infomercial. They get this, like, gorilla man to squirt the stuff on and then, voila, he's hairless. It's truly remarkable).
In this environment, far from public broadcasting becoming irrelevant, it acquires an even greater relevance. As the market becomes increasingly segmented, one of the few remaining providers of edifying, democracy-expanding, quality content will be the public sector.
Furthermore, it is vital that there be provision of media content that is free from the distortions of the market, free from commercial imperatives. The liberalisation and subsequent corporate consolidation of the media in the United States has, amongst other things, killed off rock and roll and hip hop. The real shit simply does not exist anywhere on mainstream radio in the way that it still does at least to some extent in the UK and elsewhere. In the States, community and campus radio are the last islands of independent music, and even they are under unremitting attack. And let's not even talk about talk radio.
Additionally, the market, by its very nature, cannot overcome the so-called digital divide without help from the public sector: there is no financial incentive. Telecoms and private satellite broadcasters are loath to roll out new technologies to poor and rural regions, as such enterprises are as loss-making as rural public transportation provision is. The public broadcaster fills this gap because its remit is public service, not private profit, hence we see in Britain the BBC’s stonkingly successful roll-out of digital television following the private sector’s abysmal failure in this regard. Digital TV penetration in the UK has increased from 1.2m homes to 4m in the last two years, making it the country’s fastest-growing consumer electronics product in history, and the BBC has achieved this from annual revenues of €4.2bn - just two thirds of the €6.75bn BSkyB earns.
In the face of assaults from the likes of the Commission, we must go on the offensive, saying: Far from the public sector being redundant - the private sector is undermining democracy. We can get rid of the licence fee, which is a regressive tax, but it must be replaced by public funding derived directly from taxation. Public broadcasting and public internet content provision must not merely be defended, but expanded. Not only that, but there must be publicly funded newspapers and magazines and journals and books as well, and a gigglingly silly and profligate expansion of arts funding! Museums and galleries must be as cathedrals! Opera houses should have to wonder what ever will they do will all the money they receive! Theatre should be free! The private media near-monopolies such as News Corp and Clear Channel must be broken up and the resulting companies must be heavily regulated to deliver content in the public interest. Bring back the guillotine just for Rupert Murdoch and strap Michael Eisner into an electric chair with mouse ears!
I mean really. It is a scandal that the European Comission is investigating ARD and ZDF for putting up some websites while Silvio Berlusconi, who has his orange, over-tanned, proto-fascist little sausage fingers in every major media outlet in Italy, is left alone. As bad as the BBC is, Fox is so, so, so much worse.[While we're at it, how about the public funding of a few bloggers? Dude, that would be sweet. But only if it were me and some other kids in the anti-war neighbourhood. Then I could stop working for the Man and writing about digital rights management in Lithuania or whatever it was I did today

From: http://apostatewindbag.blogspot.com/

Bosnia Remains a Terrorist Shadow Land

2005-03-01T05:13:00.000-08:00

Like so many places that once riveted the world, Bosnia is now off the policy map and its brutal war largely forgotten. But as Evan Kohlmann has described so well, it was also the great al Qaeda experiment in Europe in the years immediately after the Afghan war.After spending a week in the region exchanging information with people who track these issues, it is clear that Bosnia, while not on the policy radar screen, retains great attraction for the terrorist network and remains a crossroads for the Jihadi worldwide movement. Some, it appears, are seeking to penetrate Europe (and possibly the United States), others may be using Bosnia and surrounding states as way stations on the way to Iraq. There are also radicals with strong ties to Iran, who govern their own banks and control security forces, often the elite troops of now-disappeared state armies. Because of its geographic location and European ties, Bosnia offers many things to a terrorist network. Much of the government and those of the surrounding states that once comprised Yugoslovia are greatly influenced by different organized criminal networks that have a hand in fuel deliveries, electricity, banking, and other economic activities. Yet the region enjoys much better communications facilities than, say, a failed state such as Liberia. It also has remnants of the Muslim population sympathetic to jihad and its supporters from the early 1990s. Couple this with a thriving trade in false passports and other identification cards that allow one to travel to a host of countries without a visa, and it becomes clear why Bosnia and surrounding states poses a continuing challenge on the radical Muslim front.It is not that this radical Islamic network was unknown. My former collegue John Pomfret wrote of it in great detail in 1996, in a series of articles that can be found here. But the remnants of this group, directly funded by bin Laden and leaders of the National Islamic Front in Sudan, were largely ignored after the Bosnian war ended, and has remain largely unexplored territory in the post-9/11 world. Ironically, one of the key players in the radical Islamic network then continues to retain a very high profile, serving in the Bosnian parliament, buying jets and attempting to build a private airstrip near his stronghold. I will soon be doing a much more in-depth report on Hasan Cengic, who was instrumental in building the arms network necessary for the Muslims to defend themselves during the war. He did much of his work from Iran, where he retains strong ties. The ability to deal with Sunni and Shi'ite factions of the radical Islamic movement point to the role of members of the Muslim Brotherhood, who are traditionally the ones to bridge the theological gap. Cengic has been designated as a terrorist by the U.S. Treasury Department and is currently under investigation by Bosnian prosecutor's office. A look at that investigation can be found here. When I finish getting some documents together, I will look more at Cengic and his ties to my favorite arms trafficker dating from the mid-1990s.The real danger is that, as pressure grows in other parts of the world, the existing Bosnian network of radical Islamists will be accessed again by terrorists, including al Qaeda operatives. We know al Qaeda works only with people it knows and trusts, and hence returns often to places where its network has operated. The international presence in Bosnia is shrinking, the state is incapable and unwilling to take on the criminal enterprises that are stronger than it is, and radical Islamists with a great deal of experience have control wealth and networks capable of moving commodities, people and weapons. A dangerous mix, indeed.

from http://www.douglasfarah.com/

The Supply of Oil

2005-02-21T13:42:00.000-08:00

via http://angrybear.blogspot.com/

Eric Chaney and Richard Berner of Morgan Stanley pose this question: Why haven't oil prices fallen more in recent months? Most forecasts made late in 2004 for oil prices had them falling in 2005 -- Morgan Stanley's forecast was for an average price of around $37/bbl -- and yet they have remained stubbornly high, with Brent crude mostly stuck in the high $40s per bbl. As a result, forecasts for 2005 average oil prices by Morgan Stanley and other market watchers are being revised upward by $4 or $5 per bbl.

Unsurprisingly (at least to an economist), Chaney and Berner argue that there are two very familiar reasons that oil prices are higher than observers thought they would be just a few months ago: demand is higher, and supply is lower than expected.

The key reason for these forecast changes is that oil markets are today much tighter than we thought. New data from the February International Energy Agency (IEA) report show that global crude demand was 0.2 mb/d stronger than previously estimated in the last quarter of 2004 and that crude supply was slightly lower than prior data indicated. Nor is significant relief likely soon: the limited global economic slowdown we anticipate (with world GDP growth slowing from 4.6% in 2004 to a trend-like 3.6% in 2005) will not be sufficient to ease oil-market tensions significantly in 2005.

On the supply side... non-OPEC producers are operating at full capacity and output is stagnant. That has been a chronic issue for the past five years, and it has given OPEC market power as the swing producer. But the problem has lately intensified. For example, former Soviet Union (FSU) production was down 1% in January from a year ago, and we expect that Russian production growth will likely dwindle by half through 2007... [Also,] in hindsight, it appears that OPEC was literally operating at full capacity in the fourth quarter of last year, for the first time ever.

Naturally such talk makes one wonder if the world's oil extraction is actually at or near its peak (often referred to as the Hubbert Peak), or if instead we're currently just seeing a temporary pause in the expansion of the world's production capacity, which will continue to grow once the oil development projects that have been launched in the past few years come to fruition. Given that demand will probably (barring a major economic setback to the world economy) keep growing at a steady rate in coming years, regardless of what happens to supply, the difference between these two scenarios could be quite dramatic.

Kash

spinach

2005-02-14T09:55:00.000-08:00

Dana Larsen published the following article in Alternet

What's In Popeye's Pipe?

By Dana Larsen, Cannabis Culture
Posted on February 8, 2005, Printed on February 14, 2005
http://www.alternet.org/story/21206/

Popeye is one of the world's most well-known and beloved animated characters. Since his creation, the pipe-puffing Popeye has become a global phenomenon, with millions of kids heartily munching on spinach in the hopes that it will make them as strong as the legendary sailor-man.

Yet is the spinach which gives Popeye his super-strength really a metaphor for another magical herb? Have children around the world been adoring a hero who is really a heavy consumer of the forbidden weed – marijuana?

The evidence is circumstantial, but it is there, and when added together it presents a compelling picture that, for many readers at least, Popeye's strength-giving spinach is meant as a clear metaphor for the miraculous powers of marijuana.

Comic Creation

Popeye has gone through many different writers and artists since he was first created in 1929 by cartoonist Elzie Segar. Popeye was originally introduced as a minor character in Segar's ongoing comic strip, Thimble Theatre. For 10 years Segar had been chronicling the adventures of Olive Oyl, her brother Castor, and her fiance Ham Gravy. At the start of one new adventure, Castor and Ham were to embark on an overseas voyage, and so they went to the docks and hired a sailor named Popeye.

Soon Popeye had become a major part of the Thimble Theatre cast, and within a year Ham Gravy was written out of the strip as Popeye replaced him as Olive's sweetheart. Wimpy was added to the cast three years later, and baby Swee'pea four years after that.

At first there was no explanation for Popeye's amazing strength. But within a few years Popeye's reliance on spinach was entrenched in the strip, and the basis of some ongoing jokes. By the time of the animated cartoons, decades after Segar's death, the spinach had become an essential part of every plot, with Popeye's consumption of the magic herb signaling a swift end to his foes.

The original comic by Segar was much more complex and nuanced than the later animated shorts. Segar introduced many strange and wonderful characters into Popeye's world, including the malicious Sea Hag, whose enchanted flute enables her to fly and do magic; the wealthy Mr. Vanripple, whose beautiful daughter June rivals Olive for Popeye' affections; the disturbing Alice the Goon who speaks only in squiggles; and the mighty Toar, whose monstrous strength challenges even Popeye's.

Segar's storylines were full of adult humor, including Toar having a crush on Popeye, calling him "hot stuff" and kissing him on the head. Popeye's ongoing adventures included founding his own island nation called Spinachovia, and becoming "dictipator" over a country made up only of men.

Spinach = Marijuana

So from these seemingly innocent beginnings, what evidence is there that Popeye is actually a stoner?

During the 1920s and '30s, the era when Popeye was created, "spinach" was a very common code word for marijuana. One classic example is "The Spinach Song," recorded in 1938 by the popular jazz band Julia Lee and Her Boyfriends. Performed for years in clubs thick with cannabis smoke, along with other Julia Lee hits like "Sweet Marijuana," the popular song used spinach as an obvious metaphor for pot.

In addition, anti-marijuana propaganda of the time claimed that marijuana use induced super-strength. Overblown media reports proclaimed that pot smokers became extraordinarily strong, and even immune to bullets. So tying in Popeye's mighty strength with his sucking back some spinach would have seemed like an obvious cannabis connection at the time.

Further, as a "sailor-man," Popeye would be expected to be familiar with exotic herbs from distant locales. Indeed, sailors were among the first to introduce marijuana to American culture, bringing the herb back with them from their voyages overseas.

Segar did make other, more explicit drug references in his comic strip. One ongoing 1934 plotline had Vanripple's gold mine facing corrupt, thieving workers. Popeye discovers that the mine manager is feeding his men berries from a bush whose roots are soaked in a nasty drug. Consuming the drugged berries removes human conscience, making people more violent and willing to commit crime.

Popeye falls under the influence of the laced berries and becomes surly and mean, striking out at his friends and allies. Yet he still manages to get five gallons of "myrtholene," a joy-inducing drug which he pours over the plant's roots. The new berries produce delirious happiness, and as Popeye says, "When a man's happy he jus' couldn't do nothin' wrong."

Pot References

Segar died in 1938, and the strip was taken over by others in the following decades. As the Popeye character was re-interpreted by others in print, animation and film, other indicators of a marijuana subtext have continued to pop up.

For example, in many of the animated Popeye cartoons from the 1960s, Popeye is explicitly shown sucking the power-giving spinach through his pipe.

Further, in the comics and cartoons made during the '60s, Popeye had a dog named Birdseed. Surely the writers who named Popeye's dog during this "flower power" era were aware that cannabis was in fact America's number one source of birdseed until it was banned?

Another slightly different drug reference occurs in the 1954 cartoon, Greek Mirthology. In the cartoon, Popeye tells his nephews the story of his ancestor, Hercules. Hercules, who looks just like Popeye, is shown sniffing white garlic to gain his super strength. By the end of the cartoon Hercules has discovered spinach and switches over to it. Is this a metaphor for the benefits of cannabis over cocaine or snuff?

Another animated film shows Popeye carefully tending a crop of spinach plants reminiscent of a cannabis patch. He carefully takes cuttings, dips them into rooting gel and plants them in his outdoor garden. He even gives each plant a special feeding mix from a baby bottle. Pot growers worldwide would recognize the unique way that Popeye cares for his sacred crop.

I Yam What I Yam

Some have commented on the parallel between Popeye's famous phrase, "I yam what I yam," and the statement, "I am that I am," made by God to Moses in the Old Testament. In the story, God speaks to Moses through a magical burning bush, which was not consumed by the fire. Many different people and faiths, including Rastafarians and various early Christian sects, have believed that the biblical burning bush is a reference to the cannabis plant.

So in this context, the use of phrase, "I yam what I yam," can be seen as a reference to Popeye's use of the burning cannabis bush, which creates his higher awareness of the self-reflective nature of the Godhead.

Pure Bolivian Spinach

The only Popeye strip to ever explicitly refer to the pot/spinach connection was published in the 1980s by illustrator Bobby London. The comic showed Popeye and Wimpy picking up a load of "pure Bolivian spinach."

London did the syndicated Popeye daily strip for King Features from 1986 to 1992, and was known for putting adult, controversial themes into his work. He had previously worked on the short-lived comic book Air Pirates, which showed Mickey and Minnie Mouse having sex, getting high and smuggling drugs.

London was eventually fired from Popeye for writing an allegorical satire about the abortion issue. No new Popeye strips are now being written; those running in daily newspapers are all repeats.

Popeye Mythology

Whether Popeye 's many pot references are intentional or not, some see amazing depths and layers of meaning within the Popeye saga. An author and online artist named Michaelm provides the following analysis:

"Popeye characterizes the natural cycle going back through the ages to the ancient mariners ... books, [B]ibles, logs, maps, pennants, sails, ropes, paints, varnishes, lamp oil and sealants were all derived from hemp. Bluto represents the greedy toxic corporations, dependent industries and landowners.

"Both characters try to swoon the premier oil source, Olive Oyl. Bluto begins to understand Popeye is too competitive so he decides to eliminate him. He chains Popeye down, captures Olive Oyl, and approaches the point of rape. But in the end Popeye manages to suck the 'spinach' through his pipe, grows strong with hemp, breaks free and defeats the evil corporations, saving her from industrial pollution and oppression.

"Relieved and happy, she gives herself back to the natural cycle, then Popeye smiles, winks and toots his pipe."

While this is likely reading far more into the strip than any of its creators ever intended, it is an excellent example of the iconic status that Popeye has achieved among some quarters of the cannabis community.

Surviving the embrace of Bush

2005-02-08T01:58:00.000-08:00

David at Central America (http://davidholiday.com/weblog/blogger.html) links to the following:

Morgan over at Old Town Review Chronicles pulls out the last two grafs from Hendrik Hertzberg's comment in the New Yorker, and they're good enough to be repeated here:
Critics of the Bush Administration can take comfort in the fact that the apparent success of the Iraqi election can be celebrated without having to celebrate the supposed wisdom of the Administration. Like the Homeland Security Department and the 9/11 Commission, the Iraqi election was something Bush & Co. resisted and were finally maneuvered into accepting. It wasn’t their idea; it was an Iraqi idea—specifically, the idea of Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, Shiism’s most prominent cleric. In a way, it was a by-product of the same American ignorance and bungling that produced the unchallenged post-Saddam looting and the myriad mistakes of the Coalition Provisional Authority. But this time—for the first time—the bungling seems to have yielded something positive.
Iraq is still a very, very long way from democracy. And even if it gets there, the costs of the journey—the more than ten thousand (so far) American wounded and dead, the tens of thousands of Iraqi men, women, and children killed, the hundreds of billions of dollars diverted from other purposes, the lies, the distraction from and gratuitous extension of the “war on terror,” the moral and political catastrophe of systematic torture, the draining of good will toward and sympathy for America—will not necessarily justify themselves. But, for the moment at least, one can marvel at the power of the democratic idea. It survived American slavery; it survived Stalinist coöptation (the “German Democratic Republic,” and so on); it survived Cold War horrors like America’s support of Spanish Falangism and Central American death squads. Perhaps it can even survive the fervent embrace of George W. Bush.But why stop there, let's go back a couple of paragraphs to Hertzberg's smart dismissal of that old press report about Vietnam's elections in 1967 that everyone cited last week, frequently without comment (and as if no comment were necessary.) Well, here's a comment (with no comment necessary):
There are plenty of Vietnam echoes in America’s Iraq adventure, especially in the corrosive effects on domestic comity, the use of false or distorted intelligence to create a sense of immediate threat, and the arrogance, combined with ignorance of local realities, of many senior strategists. But the differences are large, beginning with the nature of the enemy. The Vietnamese Communists possessed a legitimacy derived from thirty years of anticolonial struggle—against France, then Japan, then France again, and, finally, willy-nilly, the United States. Iraq’s insurgency has support in the Sunni minority, but it is no national liberation movement. And for all the cruelty of the Iraq war’s “collateral damage,” it has produced no equivalents of Vietnam’s carpet bombings, free-fire zones, or strategic hamlets. (Nor, it must be said, did Vietnam produce an equivalent of Abu Ghraib; but then Vietnam was a war in which both sides held prisoners.)
Iraq is not Vietnam, and Iraq’s election was not like Vietnam’s in 1967. The latter was a winner-take-all presidential and vice-presidential “contest,” staged on American orders. The predetermined winners were the military strongmen already in power, Generals Nguyen Van Thieu and Nguyen Cao Ky. The exercise was as meaningless as one of those plebiscites by which the cowed citizens of banana republics ratify whichever colonel or corporal has lately mounted a coup. The Iraq election was the real thing. Voters had a choice of a hundred and eleven party lists, ranging from Communists to theocrats to secularists. (The murderous “security situation” made personal campaigning next to impossible, but this was less important than one might think; there were some seventy-seven hundred candidates on the national lists, far too many for voters to keep track of, so the election was about political, religious, and ethnic identity, not about personalities.) Moreover, the voting was the first stage of a process that, if it goes as planned, will provide fairly strong incentives for consensus and disincentives for civil war. Once the votes are counted—a laborious process—the result will be an extremely diverse two-hundred-and-seventy-five-member assembly, which will choose a transitional government and write a constitution. Since the draft constitution can be vetoed by two-thirds of the voters in any three of Iraq’s eighteen provinces—a provision which, though originally designed to protect the Kurds, could prove equally efficacious in protecting the Sunnis—the assembly will have every reason to design a mechanism that accommodates the interests of minorities.

2005-02-03T02:21:00.000-08:00

Under One Roof, Aging Together Yet Alone
By JANE GROSS

TRATFORD, Conn., Jan. 28 - Everyone complains about the food. Nobody wants to sit with the misfits. There are leaders and followers, social butterflies and loners, goody-goodies and troublemakers. Friendships are intense and so are rivalries. Everybody knows everybody else's business.
Except for the traffic jam of wheelchairs and walkers, the dining room at the Atria assisted living community here might as well be a high school cafeteria.
Mary Mercandante, 88, has an explanation for the restive, gossipy environment when old people are forced to live under one roof, even in a top-notch place like this. "Nobody wants to be here," said Mrs. Mercandante, who has lived in the residence for all of its five years and has a gold key to prove it.
Phil Granger, a chipper 84-year-old newcomer, agrees that no one welcomes assisted living's stark reminder of mortality. "There's everything anybody could want here," said Mr. Granger, who spreads good cheer by dispensing hard candy, except to diabetics and those with dementia, who might choke. "The only thing wrong with this place is that we're all old. We remember what we used to do and can't do anymore."
When introduced in the mid-1980's in the United States, assisted living was hailed as a dignified alternative to nursing homes. Its chief attraction was a well-appointed private apartment rather than a fluorescent-lighted double room along a linoleum corridor. The monthly costs, which average $2,524 nationwide and thousands of dollars more here in Connecticut's wealthiest county, include a common dining room, transportation, housekeeping, activities meant to relieve isolation, and à la carte services for changing personal care and medical needs.
In the last decade the number of elderly Americans in assisted living has tripled, to nearly one million, and industry experts say the residents, overwhelmingly widowed women with an average age of 85, have steadily grown older and frailer. A study by the National Center for Assisted Living, an industry group, shows that half the residents have some degree of cognitive impairment, three-quarters need help bathing, 8 in 10 cannot administer their own medication and more than 90 percent can no longer cook or do housework.
Residents who leave assisted living usually do so not because they die but because they run out of money, and go to nursing homes. There the impoverished, including middle-class men and women who have outlived their savings, are covered by Medicaid as they are not (except for a small percentage) in assisted living.
The federal government has already made recommendations to improve quality control and correct misleading advertising in assisted living facilities. But only a few sociologists and public health researchers have studied the social organization and daily preoccupations of these communities. Dr. Catherine Hawes, a professor of health policy at Texas A&M University, is one. She describes them as "high school all over again, without the expectations."
Keren Brown Wilson, who ran some of the nation's first assisted living homes, in Oregon, said that "naïve notions about the socialization of older adults" leave many residents wondering why they are not having as much fun as the happy people pictured in retirement brochures. The Atria brochure, by example, features photographs of people who look to be 60 to 70.
"We pretend everything is wonderful," Dr. Brown Wilson said, "which is an unrealistic expectation at this stage in life."
This stage in life, experts agree, is bleaker than most Americans admit. Humbled by the loss of control and fearful of the future, many older people complain incessantly, most often about the food. Also, in a cruel sorting process, they ostracize others more impaired than themselves. The hierarchy by disability "is really fear," said David Vail, executive director of Atria Stratford and president of the Connecticut Assisted Living Association, an industry group. "They don't want to look at what they might become." Both the crankiness and the cliques are on view in the dining room of the Atria Stratford, home to 120 residents, many of whom good-humoredly call themselves "inmates." But also on view are acts of exceptional kindness, budding friendships and sparks of romance between flirtatious women who dress for dinner and chivalrous men who hold their chairs.

King of Crankiness
The king of crankiness, by his own account, is Bill Haug, 87, who finds fault with just about everything. The chicken is dry and the soup lukewarm. The fitted sheet does not quite cover his bed. What the menu bills as cranberry juice is actually cranberry cocktail. His hotheaded letters to management are legendary. So are his tirades at meetings of the residents' council.
Mr. Haug writes the letters on the same electric typewriter he uses for love poems, sent back to him unread by a woman he dated after his wife died. Bluster turns to tears in the privacy of his apartment, where only the typewriter and crossword puzzle books are his own. The shabby furnishings were borrowed from Atria's storeroom. Within months, Mr. Haug says, his nest egg will be gone, despite selling his house, car and possessions. Then he will have to go into a nursing home.
To Mr. Haug's right at the dinner table is Mary Thompson, 85, statuesque, dressed to the nines and reluctantly resettled here by an adult daughter. Mrs. Thompson sometimes gets confused, insisting she is in a hotel while her home is remodeled. At meals, she bangs a spoon on her glass or hollers to get the waitress's attention.
Mr. Haug pays her no mind. But it took lots of shuffled seating assignments to achieve this peculiar if peaceable arrangement. Most residents have no patience for either of them. Behind his back Mr. Haug is often called a windbag. Mrs. Thompson's behavior provokes cries of "Shut up!" from nearby tables, where fear of the future trumps empathy. Everywhere but the dining room, Mrs. Thompson is never more than inches away from Christine Schwinbold, 88, who is a full foot shorter and cheerfully forgetful. The pair, who even accompany each other to the ladies' room, are known as the Bobbsey Twins and are generally given a wide berth.

Plans to Call a Cab
Mrs. Schwinbold declares that her former home in Wisconsin is just down the block. Other residents were so tired of hearing about Beaver Lake that they showed her a map. It made no difference.
Gwendolyn Lord, director of food services, separated the two women at meals because "they feed off each other's impairment," with one or the other hatching plans to call a cab and go home. This way, Ms. Lord said, Mrs. Thompson, a great beauty in her time, holds court with Mr. Haug and two other grumpy old men. And Mrs. Schwinbold is the perfect dinner companion for others who are similarly impaired but less perky about it.
Ms. Lord's latest seating dilemma is which woman to put in the "ghost seat" occupied by Ann Cerino until her sudden death on Dec. 26. Leaving a chair empty after a funeral is a mistake, Ms. Lord said. So is an all-male table, a waste of scarce resources. "Men have a duty to flirt with the ladies because the desire to be admired doesn't go away with age," Ms. Lord said. "Plus, assuming responsibility for their female tablemates enhances their masculinity."
Mrs. Cerino's wake and funeral drew a big crowd of residents, including Mr. Granger, in a new topcoat, who drove there in his souped-up 2001 Impala, mostly used to visit his own wife's grave.
Mrs. Cerino was the queen bee here, holding court all day in the snack bar, known as the country kitchen. She also ran the all-important food committee - assisted living's equivalent to being president of the student government - which debates the merits of chunky versus smooth spaghetti sauce and whether the fish should be fried or broiled. Meanwhile her 90-year-old husband, Tony, a shy man, watched television in their apartment upstairs.
Mr. Cerino was dazed in the weeks following the death of his wife of 67 years, so Pete Piretti, 83, kept an eye on him. Mr. Piretti lives alone in a studio, while his wife, Millie, who has had Alzheimer's disease for 18 years, is upstairs in the dementia unit. Mr. Piretti had some homemade tomato sauce, Mrs. Cerino's recipe for polenta with beans and a jug of Chianti. The two men had a jolly evening in Apartment 306, neither directly mentioning the other's heartache.
"He can cook better than I can because I didn't have to," Mr. Cerino said, obliquely referring to the many years Mr. Piretti cared for his wife and assumed all the housekeeping duties.
The Pirettis, high school sweethearts, arrived at Atria Stratford on March 17, 2002, when Mr. Piretti said he was close to "the breaking point" and afraid he would strike out at his wife. He is not alone in knowing the precise month, date and year, a grim milestone that stays fixed in memory.
For Mr. Granger it was Oct. 4, 2004, shortly after his wife died and he realized he "couldn't hack it" at home alone. Arline Brady, 87 and nearly blind, came a month earlier. She had taken a bad fall in her Florida condominium and, she said, her five children "told me I couldn't live alone anymore." Similarly, Helen Simics, 78, moved here at the insistence of her brother and sister-in-law, on June 21, 2000, after she broke a hip.
Leaving an assisted living community, on average after two and a half years, is rarely voluntary. Three residents died at Atria Stratford in December. Others, when their assets are gone, will go to nursing homes, which charge 40 percent more on average but accept government reimbursement. The best known in these parts is Lord Chamberlain. The euphemism for winding up there is "being sent across the street."
Most states in the last few years have begun small, experimental programs that permit Medicaid to pay a portion of the cost of assisted living: the personal care and medical services that are tacked on to the monthly charge, but not the rent itself. Nationwide, according to a 2002 study by the National Academy for State Health Policy, 102,000 assisted living residents, or 11 percent of the total, received this benefit, double the number in 2000. But rarely is it enough to allow people to stay in an apartment for more than a few extra months.
That is because of the traditional fee structure in assisted living. At Atria Stratford, for example, a studio costs $3,400 with no special services. Medication management adds $400 a month. Help bathing, dressing or eating can cost an additional $1,400 a month, for a total of $5,200. Of that amount $1,800 would be covered by Medicaid if Atria participated in Connecticut's tiny waiver program. It does not.
Statewide, Mr. Vail said, there are 9,800 assisted living units and only 75 Medicaid waiver slots. So he advises families to calculate when their money will run out and move before that point, since nursing homes, if they have a high enough percentage of Medicaid patients, can push those with assets to the top of the waiting list.
Mr. Piretti, a former gas station owner, currently pays $3,400 a month for his apartment and an additional $5,500 a month for his wife's care and accommodations, a stunning sum to him. "When we run out," he said, "she'll go on Title 19," as Medicaid is known in Connecticut, "and I'll go live with my daughter."
It is a workable plan. Especially if Mr. Piretti remains as fit and independent as he is now, able to drive to stores that sell supplies for the log houses he builds from kits and the decoupage watering cans he decorates with magazine photos. He is among just 20 residents, mostly men, who need no assistance but meals and housekeeping, Mr. Vail said.
The discrepancy seems to be a result of men moving here earlier than women, who want to stay home as long as possible, often until their adult children intervene. Men, by contrast, seem to willingly relocate when their wives have died or deteriorated to the point they cannot run a household anymore. Here they will be taken care of by a largely female staff and have the companionship of the female residents, who outnumber them 4 to 1.
"I couldn't stay home alone," Mr. Granger said. "My wife was my life. I just didn't know that until she died."

Big Men on Campus
Now Mr. Granger is one of the big men on campus. He favors a tweed cap, has all his faculties and still drives, even after dark. But grief for his wife is fresh and his outings take him no farther than Riverside Cemetery, 4.1 miles away by his reckoning. The other candidate for romance is Pat Jordan, 94, whose wife died here last year. Mr. Jordan is a charmer. His arrival in the country kitchen or the arts and crafts room brings a blush to the faces of at least two women. One is Mrs. Brady, a well-to-do widow whom Mr. Jordan describes as "one classy gal." The other is Doris Mauri, 85, who never married and worked with computers. Mr. Jordan says Miss Mauri is "a quiet girl, a decent girl and my very best friend here."
"I'm very fond of her," he added. "But I have no love interest in anyone. I don't think my Florence would like it."
But Colleen Douglas, the activity director, has not given up hope. She is not the typical aerobics-instructor-type who is often hired to lure the old folks to the 9:30 a.m. seated exercise class. Residents love her faux leopard skin coat, red furry boots and year-round tan, as well as her sharp wit. Activity directors, more typically, are cloying or patronizing.
The daily activities schedule here nevertheless has a cookie cutter-feel. On Dec. 28, for instance, the lobby signboard, headlined "Today's Opportunities to Engage Life," lists exercise, penny poker, word games, afternoon snacks and socializing, bingo, and a Gene Hackman movie, "The Heist." But outside the formal schedule, Ms. Douglas injects a bit of pizzazz.
One recent day she baked apple pies, using a resident's recipe. She never pushes organized gaiety on loners, like Miss Simics, who prefers reading The Connecticut Post in the lounge each morning and then spending the rest of the day puttering in her apartment. Ms. Douglas gets a kick out of seeing Mr. Jordan return from the store with a six-pack of beer. And she does not tattle on a resident with no serious disabilities who has a forbidden hot plate.
Mr. Jordan is her best shot at every activity director's dream: a wedding. "Nobody wants a romance in this building more than I do," Ms. Douglas said. "So if I'm moving in a woman who still has her mind and walks, I go to Mr. Jordan. So far he's still mourning his wife. But I'll keep trying."

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/30/national/30assisted.html?ex=1264741200&en=6190801f0f5f4bd8&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland

In 1977 Jennie-Keith Ross published “Old People, New Lives”, Community Creation in a Retirement Residence. Univ. of Chicago Press, ISBN 0-226-72825-0.
“A powerful force for perpetuation of stereotypes about the stagnation, rejection, and isolation supposedly implicit in age-segregated housing is the attitudes of younger people. …..the reasons for these negative attitudes pose an intrigiung question, which derives from the fact that most decisions about private and public housing for older people are made by younger researchers, planners and administrators….. (p 195)

On Bullshit

2005-02-03T01:29:00.000-08:00

One of the most salient features of our culture is that there is so much bullshit. Everyone knows this. Each of us contributes his share. But we tend to take the situation for granted. Most people are rather confident of their ability to recognize bullshit and to avoid being taken in by it. So the phenomenon has not aroused much deliberate concern. We have no clear understanding of what bullshit is, why there is so much of it, or what functions it serves. And we lack a conscientiously developed appreciation of what it means to us. In other words, as Harry Frankfurt writes, "we have no theory."

http://www.pupress.princeton.edu/titles/7929.html

thanks
http://www.lefarkins.blogspot.com/

Mark Thatcher and the Bight of Benin Company

2005-01-24T08:54:00.000-08:00

http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/common/story_page/0,5744,12029862%255E2703,00.html

sunday

2005-01-23T02:27:00.000-08:00

As usual listened to the news (BBC World Service), no items regarding South and Middle America, Australia, Central Asia. Presumably nothing newsworthy happened there.
The present occupant of the White House promised freedom; freedom from superstition; freedom from ignorance; freedom from hunger; freedom from illness; freedom from social insecurity. Well that's all cloud cuckooland; more likely it'll be freedom of exploitation.