Italy - USA CIA DIA OPERATION GLADIO

An Airbase in Vicenza

How Italy Became a Launching Pad for the US Military

By VALERIO VOLPI

The presence of friendly governments in Eastern Europe and in central
Asian former Soviet Republics, allured by the prospect of U.S. investments
and protection against their Russian neighbor, is helping U.S. militarism
in its imperialist expansion eastwards, as pointed out by Elise Hugus's
article "U.S. Military Expansion in Eastern Europe", Z Magazine, September
2007.

However, as U.S. tentacles are expanding eastwards, they are, at the same
time, tightening their grip on southern Europe: infamous yet probably
unknown to the majority of people worldwide, are the latest events
concerning Vicenza, 110,000 residents, a small, pleasant town located in
the Padanian lowlands, close to world-renowned Venice and the Adriatic
sea, in the northeastern part of Italy.
Vicenza's Dal Molin airport has been chosen by the U.S. as the site for a
new base, in an area already heavily militarized (including the Ederle
base with 6,000 U.S. troops; site Pluto in Longare, where nuclear warheads
were stored for twenty years; the Tormeno base; the Torri di Q.lo depots;
the housing area in East Vicenza), but nonetheless the perfect location
for new missions in the Middle East, thanks to its geographical position
and 150 m long runway.

The network consisting of Dal Molin, which will be reinforced by an
additional 2000 new soldiers, currently stationed in Bamberg and
Schweinfurt in Germany, who will be part of the new Brigade Combat Team,
the largest assault force in Europe with six battalions in Vicenza (four
at Dal Molin and two at Ederle) and an overall 4,600 troops; Aviano air
base, near Pordenone, not far from the Slovenian border, massively used
for the bombing of Serbia in 1999, Afghanistan in 2001, as well as Iraq in
1991 and 2003; and the Ederle base, also in Vicenza, which was used to
transport the 173rd U.S. brigade into Iraq, will turn northeastern Italy
into a formidable bridgehead for assaults to the Middle East, with
hundreds of planes and thousands of men ready to take off and be deployed
in a few hours' time. How could anyone believe, then, what U.S.
authorities state, that is, that the runway at Del Molin will not be used?

Italy, unlike other countries closer to the Middle East, but not
necessarily subservient to U.S. orders, such as Turkey, is the perfect
place for U.S. imperialism: no matter who is in charge, center-left or
center-right, Prodi or Berlusconi, orders from the U.S. master must be
obeyed; besides, thanks to bilateral agreements, U.S. bases are sovereign
territories. This is why building a new base in Italy is an extremely
advantageous deal.

It is worth remembering that the only exception to this rule has been
Prime Minister Bettino Craxi, who, in spite of his many flaws as a human
being, nevertheless dared to oppose the U.S. government.

On 12 October 1985 some members of the Palestinian Liberation Front
hijacked an Italian cruise ship, the Achille Lauro, near the Egyptian
coast, in order to obtain the liberation of some imprisoned Palestinians.
During the hijacking, an American citizen was killed. The commando
eventually surrendered, and was put on an Egyptian plane, supposedly to be
flown into Tunisia. During the flight, however, four American fighter jets
forced the Egyptian plane to change route and land in the U.S. base of
Sigonella, Sicily, in order to arrest the commando. Prime Minister Craxi,
however, after stating that the killing of the American tourist had taken
place on Italian soil (the Achille Lauro ship), and that the Palestinian
commando should therefore stand trial before an Italian court, had a
number of Italian carabinieri surround U.S. troops ready to storm the
Egyptian plane. The Palestinian hijackers were eventually arrested by the
Italian police and detained in Italy.

This is, to my knowledge, the only case when an Italian government has
taken a strong stand before U.S. authorities.

This is why, though the Vicenza case has been and still is a major source
of contention both among Italian citizens and within Romano Prodi's
coalition government, the Bush Administration has never been too worried
about the outcome of the diatribe: the moderate wing of the coalition,
that is, the newly-born Democratic Party, is keen on proving its pro-U.S.,
pro-western world stance; the left wing (Greens, Communists, left-wing
Democrats of the Left) is paralyzed by the fact that the alternative to
this government would be Bush-lover Berlusconi's return.

The international agreement regulating the status of NATO and U.S. bases
in Italy is the (secret) 20 October 1954 Bilateral Infrastructure
Agreement, signed by Interior Minister Scelba and U.S. Ambassador Luce,
but never ratified by the Italian Parliament, despite the fact that
article 80 of the Italian Constitution specifically states that: "The
houses authorize through laws the ratification of international treaties
which are of a political nature, or which call for arbitration or legal
settlements, or which entail changes to national territory or financial
burdens or changes in the laws". It is very difficult to conceive how a
treaty allowing the opening of foreign bases in the country would not fall
within one of the cases mentioned above (actually, all cases mentioned
above are inherent in such a treaty).

The agreement's content was disclosed only on 10 March 1999, when
then-Prime Minister D'Alema removed this secrecy after the acquittal of
the U.S. pilot responsible for the death of 20 people (eight Germans, five
Belgians, three Italians, two Poles, one Austrian and one Dutch) on the
Cermis cableway, on the Italian Alps. That was done to allow the Italian
Bench and the provincial Government of Trento (where the cableway was
located) to access the provisions of the treaty.

What happened then was simply blood-curdling. A U.S. plane was flying by
Mount Cermis, in the Italian Alps, at a height of 360 ft (110 m), when
military regulations imposed a minimum height of 2,000 ft (600 m), and
that very plane was not allowed to fly at less than 3,600 ft (1100 m). Its
speed was also considerably faster than permitted, as recorded by a U.S.
"Awacs" radar plane, according to which the plane was traveling at 500
mp/h (100 mp/h was the maximum speed allowed).

The pilot, Captain Richard J. Ashby, had made a bet with other fellow
soldiers: had his plane managed to fly between the two cableway cables,
between 30 and 40 meters apart, his crew would win. The stake: beer for
the night. A videotape proving the bet had been recorded. However, the
plane accidentally hit and cut the cable supporting the car, which plunged
for 80 meters. All of the occupants died. The videotape was destroyed
immediately after.

Of the four Marines on the plane, only Ashby and his navigator, Captain
Joseph Schweitzer, stood trial. The trial took place in North Carolina,
after an Italian court had stated that NATO treaties gave jurisdiction to
U.S. military courts. Charged with twenty counts of involuntary
manslaughter and negligent homicide, and risking a 206-year imprisonment
sentence, they were nevertheless acquitted. The court stated that
authorized height for the flight was 500 ft (though the plane was flying
much lower, otherwise it never would have cut the cables); that board maps
did not show the cableway (event denied by the Marine Command, as the
cableway was well visible on charts); and that the radar was not working
properly (which has never been proven).

Such acquittals caused an uproar among European public opinion. After the
verdict, Ashby declared his prayers would be for the victims. The next
day, he went to Las Vegas to celebrate. Navigator Schweitzer, evidently
tortured by remorse, confessed everything. Schweitzer and Ashby stood
trial again in May 1999, charged with obstruction of justice for
destroying the videotape. Ashby was sentenced to six-month detention, and
then released after 4.5 months for good behavior. Not bad for somebody
responsible for the death of twenty innocent people.

As mentioned above, the provisions of the 1954 Agreement are now public.
However, the publicity concerns only the political framework of the
treaty. Technical attachments (that is, what is done within bases, how
bases will be used and what kind of weapons are kept inside) remain top
secret. And, though the 1995 Memorandum between the Italian and U.S.
governments states that facilities are officially under Italian control,
and that the U.S. Commander must preemptively inform Italian authorities
about any moving of supplies, weapons, personnel, and any problem or
inconvenience occurred or likely to occur, full control on staff,
equipment and operations falls within U.S. jurisdiction, and no sanctions
are provided for in case of breach of these regulations. That is, Italian
authorities officially keep an eye on bases; what happens in there,
however, is decided by U.S. authorities.

Therefore, the status of U.S. bases in Italy has not changed: they remain
sovereign enclaves within the Italian territory, no different than States
such as the Vatican or San Marino Republic (which, however, do not appear
to own nuclear weapons, planes, ships or tanks). This means that no
Italian, whether MP, judge, journalist or member of police forces can
freely access the bases, and U.S. authorities are free to do whatever they
like within their sovereign territory.

Take Camp Darby, near Pisa, for example. This base, wherein an immense
amount of weapons is amassed (60% of the weapons used in Iraq in 1991 and
2003 came from there), is directly connected to Livorno harbor by means of
ship-canals.

On the evening of 10 April 1991, because of some mysterious U.S. naval
manoeuvres in front of Livorno harbor, ferry boat Moby Prince crashed into
an oil tanker: 140 people died. The U.S. has always refused to cooperate
in the investigations.

In summer 2000, the ceilings of eight ammunition depots collapsed: in the
next twelve days, due to the dangerousness of the situation,
radio-controlled robots were used to remove more than 100,000 ammunitions,
weighing more than 24 tons. Of course, neither the public nor Italian
civil authorities were informed. No evacuation was therefore arranged.

Conventional weapons are just a small part of the issue. U.S. bases'
extra-territoriality has allowed them to be home to a massive amount of
nuclear weapons as well. One notorious example is La Maddalena naval base,
located on the island of Santo Stefano, in the northern part of the island
of Sardinia, one of the most beautiful natural areas in the world. This
base is home, thanks to a 1972 (secret) agreement between the U.S. and
Italy, to nuclear submarines.

Though Prime Minister Spadolini stated in 1984 that no Cruise nuclear
missiles were in that base, an analysis carried out by U.S. analysts
William Arkin and Joshua Handler four years later (Briefing Paper on La
Maddalena: a key site for sixth fleet Tomahawk Cruise missiles, Greenpeace
News, 22 June 1988), based on official declassified papers, stated the
opposite. According to this report, though no nuclear warheads could be
found on dry land, nuclear weapons were stored inside ship Orion, moored
at the base. Besides, nuclear submarines would frequently voyage to and
from the base. La Maddalena was, according to the report, a fundamental
location for the Cold War's arm race.

The strategic importance of this base grew after the end of the Cold War,
with threats no longer coming from the USSR, but, rather, from Islamic
fundamentalist groups, possibly hiding in North Africa. Nuclear
propulsion, necessary for long voyages, nuclear weapons, or enormous and
extremely expensive nuclear submarines would therefore no longer be
necessary for terrorist-hunting missions.

Nonetheless, despite Edward Luttwak's advice to shut down bases no longer
important strategically, the Pentagon lobby (backed by Rumsfeld) managed
to get huge amounts of funds to make the base safer against terrorist
attacks, and to even triple its extension.

However, the base is due to be shut down in February 2008. What happened?

Even though construction works had begun, on 23 November 2005,
then-Minister of Defense Antonio Martino received the order to report to
Washington. Rumsfeld informed him that the base would be closed
permanently. Apparently, the Iraqi war costs no longer allowed for frills.
Investments had to be diverted to something more suitable to U.S. current
and future imperial plans, say Vicenza, for example.

Therefore, it is not thanks to people's mobilization, or to the sincere
commitment of Sardinia Governor Renato Soru that the base will be closed.
The Americans are leaving because it is more convenient for them.
Otherwise, they would stay.

Now, U.S. troops will be leaving Sardinia soon, leaving behind, however, a
mountain of health problems and environmental pollution.

Accidents have been numerous, though few have escaped military secrecy and
become known, for a reason or another, to the public: on 22 September
1972, damaged nuclear submarine Ray entered the base for repair, though
security protocols provided for offshore repairing; on 19 June 1982, ship
Orion left her moorings to repair a damaged nuclear submarine; on 13
November 2002, damaged nuclear submarine Oklahoma City was taken to La
Maddalena; on 25 October 2003 submarine Hartford ran aground. A trivial
accident, in the words of Rear Admiral Stanley. However, he removed the
base top officials, which was a very strange act for something so
unimportant.

Independent researchers who have analyzed the water near the U.S. base
have found consistent amounts of radioactive thorium 234, cobalt and
plutonium. An analysis carried out by consortium Epidemiologia Impresa
Sviluppo on behalf of the Sardinia government has found that in La
Maddalena area the rate of deadly diseases is far higher than in the rest
of the country. For example, Non-Hodgin lymphoma is 177.8% higher for men;
335% more people have been hospitalized for melanomas; lung cancer is
43.6% higher. Just a coincidence?

Another infamous effect of the 1954 Agreement has been the secret
stationing and training, in the past, of illegal paramilitary commandos,
often with the participation of Italian secret service agents, working to
influence Italian political life, and take action (read coup d'état) in
case of unwelcome outcome at the polls (that is, leftist victory) or
threat of Soviet invasion (certainly more imaginary than real).

Among these gangs, GLADIO, recently declared by an Italian court as
"conspiracy subversive of the constitutional order", was very active in
promoting the so-called "tension strategy", consisting in the organization
and the execution of terrorist acts, such as the detonation of bombs in
crowded places, with the help and connivance of Italian neo-fascists
groups, to then cast the blame on the Communist party or leftist
organizations in order to damage the Left at the polls.

Infamous examples are the bombings of: the Agriculture National Bank in
Piazza Fontana in Milan, on 12 December 1969 (16 people dead and 88
injured); train Italicus near Bologna on 4 August 1974 (12 dead and 105
injured); Bologna train station on 2 August 1989 (85 dead, 200 wounded);
and Rapid train 904 on 24 December 1984 (15 dead, 2 more died afterwards,
267 wounded). Probably, only the fact that Italy was located in the middle
of Europe, its size and its economic weight saved it from suffering the
same fate of countries such as Nicaragua or Guatemala.

All this in a country where U.S. military facilities (ranging from simple
radar posts to extended bases with barracks and weapons) exceed one
hundred. According to the Pentagon "Base Structure Report 2005", U.S.
armed forces own 1,614 buildings, covering 892,000 sq/m; and rent 1,190
buildings, covering 886,000 sq/m. 14,000 troops and 5,140 civilians work
for the U.S. army in Italy. A real disaster, political, urban,
environmental, social, which the new Dal Molin base will make even worse.

Now, it is first of all important to see how the decision was made, as
this is another example of full and utter contempt for popular sovereignty.

The decision was made secretly a couple of years ago by Vicenza's mayor
Hullweck and then-Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi. News began to leak
only in May 2006, when citizens organized into six different protest
committees.

On 26 October 2006, the conservative majority in Vicenza town council,
after repeatedly rejecting a citizens' advisory referendum on the issue,
voted in favor of the base (21 to 17). However, a few days later, on 15
November, in Caldogno, a little town located next to Dal Molin, the town
council voted unanimously against.

After these votes, it was up to the Prodi government to make a final
decision. In this case, despite the proclaimed commitment to local
communities' will and decisions, enshrined in the center-left coalition's
electoral manifesto; and despite the fact that the entire left side of the
coalition was strongly opposed, Prodi argued that Berlusconi's promise to
Bush was an unmodifiable obligation for his government. Vice-Prime
Minister Francesco Rutelli, who visited Vicenza last 14 September amidst
thousands of protesting people, adamantly confirmed this position.

This stance is just absurd. After all, Italian troops had been sent to
Iraq by the Berlusconi government, who had promised eternal support. But
troops were withdrawn. And a basic tenet of democracy is that governments
change, so that policies may change. And Prodi's coalition's electoral
manifesto promised to resolutely cut the extension of militarized zones.
But, evidently, obeying Washington is more important than respecting the
manifesto and the will of local communities, whose majority is opposed to
the base.

A survey carried out by Demos & Pi (headed by Ilvo Diamanti, one of
Italy's most famous political scientists) in October 2006 found that: 71.8
% of Vicenza residents and 67.5% of Caldogno's knew about the project;
84.8% of Vicenza residents and 85.5% of Caldogno's wanted a referendum;
61% of Vicenza residents and 64.8% of Caldogno's were against the new
base; 86.6% of these people in Vicenza and 82.6% in Caldogno would still
be opposed to the base, even if a different area, having a lower impact on
the environment, traffic, and territory, were chosen.

Opposition to the base is widespread in Italy: 17 February 2007 saw a
massive demonstration in Vicenza, with the participation of between
150,000 and 200,000 people coming from all over Italy (including U.S.
citizens, organized in the U.S. Citizens for Peace and Justice), which,
however, has not changed the government's mind on this insane project,
which will be disastrous.

First of all, according to 19 renowned Italian town planners, led by Eddy
Salzano, 600,000 new c/m of concrete would find their way into the center
of Vicenza, stifling any chance of future civil economic development. The
findings of the 23 September 2006 meeting on the future of Vicenza expect
707,000 c/m over a surface of 37,000 sq/m. In addition to this, a new
residential village will be built, for a total 400 new houses, necessary
to host the soldiers now stationed in Germany, and their families.

Data presented to the Vicenza town council meeting of 10 August 2006 show
that repairing the 50-year-old Ederle base would cost the U.S. 800,000
dollars; the new Dal Molin base, together with the new residential
village, new hospital and schools, only 412,000 dollars. However, new
buildings will cover an additional 30% of territory (167,000 sq/m on an
overall surface of 550,000) of the Dal Molin area, which, added to 910,000
of the old Ederle and the housing area, will result in a stunning
1,460,000 sq/m, more than the industrial area of Vicenza, but in the very
heart of the city, a few hundred meters from major historical landmarks.

Furthermore, the plan envisages that the majority of buildings at Dal
Molin will be used for the storage of nuclear, chemical and biological
weapons, as reminded by Guglielmo Verneau, an engineer. 16% of buildings
will be used as dorms; 21 depots will store weapons. Four buildings on the
southeastern side of the base, each 112.83 m long, 43.8 m wide, and 11.4 m
tall, will include five depots for biochemical materials.

This plan will also be disastrous for the local and Italian economy: a
higher number of U.S. troops will be in the city (but no apartments or
hotel rooms will be rented), resulting in more pollution, a depreciation
in real estate value in the area (usually houses around bases lose 30% of
their value), a shrinkage in tourism, much fewer acres of land for the
development of new civil activities, a higher likelihood of terrorist
attacks.

Furthermore, because of bilateral agreements between Italy and the U.S.,
the Italian government (that is, Italian tax-payers) must share the costs
(so-called burden-sharing) of bases with the U.S., in the amount of 37% of
total expenses. Therefore, if Italy paid the US 326 million euros in 2002
for 16,000 soldiers stationed in Italy, 2,000 of whom were in Vicenza, we
might assume that in that year the amount spent for the Ederle base was
40,75 million euros. The presence of an additional 2,000 soldiers would
entail a yearly cost of at least 81 million euros.

What's more, the 1954 London Agreement provides that all utilities within
U.S. bases are excise and VAT-free. All items and products bought by U.S.
troops or bases are VAT-free. Therefore U.S. troops pay 25% less than
Italians do for electricity, 40% less for natural gas, and 65% less for
fuel. That, of course, is a very powerful stimulus to the unprincipled
squandering of natural resources.

At the moment, according to data from AIM, the municipal enterprise
supplying water to Vicenza and other 25 towns in the province, reported by
Eugenio Vivian, an engineer, water consumption is 20.7 million c/m per
year, that is 280 liters per person per day (including industrial use). In
a situation where water is becoming more and more scarce, due to an
increase in industrial use, building development in piedmont areas, and a
10-15% decrease in rainfalls in the last 30 years, U.S. officials have
requested a capacity of between 60 and 260 liters per second. AIM stated
that at present only 7 liters per second can be supplied, which might
become 30 by connecting the system to a water plant. Should the Americans
manage somehow to get an average consumption of 100 liters per second,
considered that 260 liters is impossible, as it would require the digging
of new wells which would dry up the nearby cities of Padua and Rovigo,
Vicenza would consume an additional 3.15 million cubic meters of water
(that is, what 30,000 new residents would consume).

As far as natural gas is concerned, newspaper Corriere del Veneto of 5
October 2006 estimates an average consumption of 900 c/m p/h excluding
summer and winter peaks.

Vivian reckons that with a conservative estimate of 10 hours a day for 180
days, plus hot water for 185 days, overall consumption would be 1.620
million + 494,000 c/m = 2.114 million c/m which, divided by the 119,000
heated sq/m of the new base, would result in a yearly consumption of 17.76
c/m per sq/m in the base alone, when the most modern housing environmental
standards require an amount equal to or lower than 3 c/m per sq/m. An
additional 1.2 million c/m should be calculated for the new housing area,
that is, 400 houses for an average consumption of 300 c/m, for an overall
3.314 million c/m (that is, what an additional 5,500 residents would
consume).

As for electricity, not one single sq/m of the approximately 80,000 of new
roofs has been destined to solar panels. Instead, U.S. authorities have
asked for the installation of an additional 9 MW. Vivian has estimated, by
analyzing the consumption level of tertiary industries, which are the most
similar to U.S. standards, an additional consumption of about 30-31
million KWh per year, which would become 32 million with the new housing
area (that is, the amount that 26,000 new residents would consume).

We need to put an end to this madness. As Sardinia governor Renato Soru
has stated, Americans are our friends, but we want them here as tourists,
not as soldiers. To this, I would add that it is time to claim back our
sovereignty and put an end to our semi-colonial status, and take back our
land, including those immense areas occupied by Italian military bases.
Prodi should not turn a deaf ear to his voters' will.

Valerio Volpi is a PhD. student in Comparative Political Institutions at
the University of Bari. He lives in Rome and can be reached at:
vvolpi77@yahoo.it
--
Using Opera's revolutionary e-mail client: http://www.opera.com/mail/

Zinn - Chomsky in Art - Marx in Soho

READING HOWARD ZINN

by David Weiner (David Wiener)?

When friends' children graduate from High School, my gift is a copy of Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States. Every time I read it a different facet of U.S. political nuance strikes me with special significance. This time it was in chapter 20, where Zinn focuses on Nixon's fall from grace and power following the Watergate scandal. How officialdom carefully managed the fallout through a program of designed disclosure. Media revealed Nixon's failings as sins of the individual, carefully disguising how systemic they were.

No respectable American newspaper said what was said by Claude Julien, editor of Le Monde Diplomatique in 1974. 'The elimination of Mr. Richard Nixon leaves intact all the mechanisms and all the false values which permitted the Watergate scandal.' ... "... In the charges brought by the House Committee on Impeachment against Nixon, it seemed clear that the committee did not want to emphasize those elements in his behavior which were found in other Presidents and which might be repeated in the future.... It concentrated on things peculiar to Nixon, not on fundamental policies continuous among American Presidents, at home and abroad. The word was out: get rid of Nixon, but keep the system... "The investigation of the FBI disclosed many years of illegal actions to disrupt and destroy radical groups and left-wing groups of all kinds ... ...Valuable information came out of the investigations, but it was just enough , and in just the right way ... to give the impression of an honest society correcting itself...

The first thought that struck me is how right Noam Chomsky was in Manufacturing Consent. In the United Statew it is essential to Power that media retain public credibility. When journalists are too sycophantic, it spoils the game. Journalists must operate honestly most of the time, so that when lies are told the lies will be believed. But this subterfuge becomes harder and harder to pull off.
Zinn is peerless at revealing the historical dialectic between ruling class manipulations of citizens and their drive to achieve autonomy. As people get better at organizing, the ruling class becomes more adept at lying and co-opting to achieve its ends. Designed disclosure of Governmental sins and infidelities, presented in the media as full disclosure, is a clever and effective innovation.

If Zinn (and Noam Chomsky in Manufacturing Consent) are right, a strong assumption I've been acting on is probably wrong. Like most of my friends I've felt confident that disclosure after disclosure of this Administration's anti-democratic and apparently irrational behavior, both at home and abroad, must be fast devouring its credibility. Disclosures of officially sanctioned torture, of assaults on the Bill of Rights, of intransigence on environmental issues to the extent of a President's literally thumbing his nose at public opinion, of disdain for citizens' struggle to make a living or obtain basic health care (even for children), of Alleged governmental collusion in the outright theft of public funds, of an intransigent radical foreign policy in the face of massive local and worldwide opposition, and on and on – must finally take their toll. Collapse must be imminent.

Reading Zinn, this conclusion doesn't really compute. It would mean that decades old systems of dis-information management had suddenly collapsed. What seems more likely is that what appear to be failures are not failures at all. How can this be? Again, Zinn's historical exegesis offers insight. Prior to Nixon's retirement, officialdom strove to placate a public grown both more critical of power and more capable of translating its discontent into effective action. Following Nixon, the emphasis of policy shapers shifted from placation to control.

"In the year 1976, with a presidential election approaching, there was worry in the Establishment about the public's faith in the system. ... ... ... "As the United States prepared in 1976 to celebrate the bicentennial of the Declaration of Independence, a group of intellectuals and political leaders from Japan, the United States and Western Europe, organized into 'The Trilateral Commission,' issued a report. It was entitled 'The Government of Democracies.' Samuel Huntington, a political science professor at Harvard University and long-time consultant to the White House on the war in Vietnam, wrote the part of the report that dealt with the United States. He called it 'The Democratic Distemper' ,,, Huntington pointed to the signs of decreasing government authority...[and] was troubled by what he saw. ... Critical in all this was the decline in the authority of the President."

The change in attitude signaled by Huntington, according to Zinn and an array of other notable U.S. Historians, was not unexpected. From the beginning, America's wealthiest citizens expressed deep concern that Democracy should not get out of hand. It was intended for the propertied classes, not for the peasantry.

Reading Zinn, it becomes clear how the elite's craving for social control always competed with its greed for profits. Media, never truly independent, always fashioned the proper climate for the pursuit of both. The abuses attendant upon business growth and expansion were always under-reported. So were the growing number of triumphs of organized opposition to these abuses. Government successes at managing and containing dissent, however, were always over-reported. Until recently, these reports were also distorted to portray the government-in-service-of-business as stern, like a good parent, but never ruthless.

But something has changed. Today, official ruthlessness receives full revelation through a system of steady "leaks." The President and Commander-in-Chief delights to be perceived not as the leader of a great and principled nation committed to global health and justice, but of an aggressive vigilante force committed to ethnocentric ass-kicking. Protecting U.S. "turf" in a jungle-world of nation-gangs is his self-proclaimed duty and heaven ordained function. His ultimate goal? To become King of the Hill. Upon his coronation the U.S. shall gain forgiveness of its massive foreign debts. Worthy (white, god-fearing, passive) residents on his "turf" will prosper (others may be jailed and tortured.) The nation, in fact the entire Western world... indeed the entire planet ... should be grateful for his leadership. He shall have saved the world from chaos.

As the public watches its President and his cohort engage nakedly in outrageous, anti-constitutional behaviors with no real opposition, the Government's credibility as a well entrenched, blatantly anti-democratic imperium soars. What if this appearance is precisely the goal of U.S. ruling class architects today? What if the President's signifying is merely pose (his personal history indicates that he excels at acting and obeying, not imagining and leading)? What if those Zinn reveals always to have pulled strings from behind the scenes, those powerful figures whom William Greider tells us in Secrets of the Temple do nothing except own money and control the affairs of all major corporations, are still in full control? In this case, then what I have perceived to be the failure of designed disclosure may be precisely the opposite. It may be the most cleverly designed in our history.

Zinn closes A People's History (1995 edition) with an expression of faith in people's ability to see through official subterfuge and assert their healthy presence. I hope he's right.

The American system is the most ingenious system of control in world history... "...How skillful to tax the middle class to pay for the relief of the poor, building resentment on top of humiliation!... How wise to turn the fear and anger of the majority toward a class of criminals bred – by economic inequity – faster than they can be put away, deflecting attention from the huge thefts of national resources carried out within the law by men in executive offices. But with all the controls of power and punishment, enticements and concessions, diversions and decoys, operating throughout the history of the country, the Establishment has been unable to keep itself secure from revolt.... To recall this is to remind people of what the Establishment would like them to forget – the enormous capacity of apparently helpless people to resist, of apparently contented people to demand change....

David Weiner teaches sociology courses at a Community College in Austin, Texas and works with groups in the community concerned with improving the quality of education for inner-city students.

David Weiner has been a sociology professor, high school teacher, community organizer, and anti-racism activist for more than half a century. Nowadays he teaches sociology and social psychology at a community college.

http://www.opednews.com/articles/opedne_david_we_071001_reading_howard_zinn.htm

Chomsky in Art:

Cornelia Parker's retrospective proves

Never Endings IKON Gallery, Birmingham; until 18 November
filmed interview with Noam Chomsky about American barbarism; the dress worn by Mia Farrow in Roman Polanski's Rosemary's Baby; a tape recording of an inconclusive seance with the Brontes at Haworth; rocks and stones taken from beneath the Leaning Tower of Pisa?


Her 'embryo firearms' are a framed pair of Colt 45s in foetal state. Alongside them, lead bullets are stretched out into fine wire and made into Spirograph drawings. Parker performs the same trick with gold from a tooth, a silver dollar which is made the height of the Statue of Liberty, a war medal...

black jokes in this context: Shared Fate (Oliver) is a little, jacketed mannequin that has been chopped in half by the guillotine that beheaded Marie-Antoinette. In a much more demure way than, say, her fellow ageing YBA Gavin Turk, she likes the idea of imposing herself on infamies, jackdawing bits of history and making them her own.

Stolen Thunder is thus a series of framed hankies on which the tarnish from resonant silver has been deposited: Guy Fawkes's lantern, Charles Dickens's knife and so on. The desire to touch what they have touched becomes a version of celebrity fixation. It also establishes the overriding sense of a reliquary that informs much of Parker's work; she is a deeply Catholic artist or, at least, the tarnish of a Catholic childhood is still rubbing off. Once again though, the objects themselves don't bear much looking; it's not the Turin shroud. The hankies are part of an ongoing series, but one you hardly hold your breath for.

Much more spectacular, even in repetition, are the pair of suspended animation sculptures that fill two rooms here. The first, made from hundreds of fragments of yellow stone from under the Leaning Tower of Pisa, rubble that apparently was removed to help the monument stay standing, a negative of underpinning, begins to suggest all sorts of interesting things about gravity, which is, in many ways, Parker's most enduring medium. You marvel again at how such a thing has been strung up; that marvelling is not diminished in the other, her blackened sculpture upstairs, an exploded cube of branches, spars and pine cones from a Florida wildfire of 2004, a 3D charcoal sketch.

These bigger pieces remain the best statement of Parker's compulsion with the afterlives of things. She is happy at times to borrow this atmosphere of spookiness from other, more conventional places, which diminishes the surprise. The Bronte room here, with its hyper-magnified photographs of the nib of Charlotte's pen and the surface of Branwell's wallet, is a case in point. Haworth represents readymade ghostliness and Parker's intervention doesn't make it any more spectral.

This opportunism is taken to a different extreme in the two most recent pieces, two films that are oddly out of kilter with the rest of the show. The first, a screen split into four quarters, shows American tourists waiting for an event to occur. You are asked to think of this event, in the context of what is elsewhere, as a coming apocalypse, I suppose, but the effect is hardly chilling.

Similarly, the fragments of interview with Noam Chomsky seem an attempt to borrow an explicit political manifesto for the rest of the work, which it generally does better by resisting. Chomsky's devastating monotone on the war on terror and global warming is essential listening in most contexts

crap statements deleted.
Original is here; http://arts.guardian.co.uk/art/visualart/story/0,,2180135,00.html


after killing countless germans as a bombadier in ww2 Howard Zinn gave the world a work of art.

A THEATRE PLAY

Marx in Soho

a play on history



KARL MARX

Marx is back! The premise of this witty and insightful "play on history" is that Karl Marx has agitated with the authorities of the afterlife for a chance to clear his name. Through a bureaucratic error, though, Marx is sent to Soho in New York, rather than his old stomping ground in London, to make his case.

Howard Zinn, best known for his book, 'A Peoples History of the United States', introduces us to Marx's wife, Jenny, his children, the anarchist Mikhail Bakunin, and a host of other characters.

Brian Jones, an African American actor and activist, has been performing this engaging one-man show across the country since 1999.

Marx in Soho is a brilliant introduction to Marx's life, his analysis of society, and his passion for radical change. Zinn also shows how relevant Marx's ideas are for today's world.

Marx in Soho is easy to produce in almost any space, large or small.

The play calls for a set consisting of a table and two chairs. Beyond that, there are only a few technical needs.

“Don’t you ever wonder: why is it necessary
to declare me dead again and again?”

The premise of this witty and insightful “play on history” is that Karl Marx has agitated with the authorities of the afterlife for a chance to clear his name. Through a bureaucratic error, though, Marx is sent to Soho in New York, rather than his old stomping ground in London, to make his case.

Zinn introduces us to Marx’s wife, Jenny, his children, the anarchist Mikhail Bakunin, and a host of other characters.

Marx in Soho is a brilliant introduction to Marx’s life, his analysis of society, and his passion for radical change. Zinn also shows how relevant Marx’s ideas are for today's world.

Winner of the 2000 Independent Publisher Award for best visionary fiction

Red Herring

Karl Marx, we hardly knew ye

By Steven Mikulan

Wednesday, July 11, 2001 - 12:00 am

Days after Karl Marx died, in 1883, San Francisco’s Daily Alta California remarked, “His life was not a success, and at the time of his death he had witnessed the failure of every extensive project on which his hopes had been set and for which he labored with such ability.” If this tart, Left Coast eulogy failed to raise the dearly departed at the time, then the more recent obituaries for history, revolution and, of course, Marxism have apparently done the trick — at least according to Howard Zinn’s one-person play, Marx in Soho. In it, Marx, tired of spinning in his Highgate grave from such punditry, returns from a kind of celebrity heaven — to set the record straight.

Zinn, the author of the popular A People’s History of the United States, is a veteran left-wing critic of capitalism, and edits his material accordingly. He has a much tougher sell than other writers of historical solo shows, of course, because Karl Marx is not Will Rogers, let alone Mark Twain or Emily Dickinson. Marx, let’s face it, is a long-dead foreigner whose name is followed by a freight train of historical baggage.

At the Complex, actor Brian Jones appears onstage not as the familiar prophet of sepia-toned photographs — that Old Testament frown framed by a penumbra of white hair and Jovian beard — but a much younger Marx, a sleeker, cheekier, pre-Manifesto Marx from the days of, say, The German Ideology or the philosophical notebooks. He’s also traded his frock coat for a three-piece, chalk-stripe suit and arrives lugging a book bag and a beer. “So good of you to come!” he says, with a mild yiddishe inflection, then proceeds to attempt “to clear my name.”

This jaunty opening nevertheless sets a subtly defensive tone of self-vindication that never really evaporates. Still, Jones gamely goes on the attack, caustically observing how much the world has improved since Victorian times, quite obviously implying that it really hasn’t. What Zinn does, very craftily, is weave a lot of Marx’s personal life into Zinn’s view that, overall, Marx’s analysis about predatory capital and the destiny of the working class to change history is still sound.

Marx’s home life in Soho was one of Dickensian poverty relieved by the rewards of fatherhood and marriage to his university sweetheart, Jenny von Westphalen. Here, it’s also a beery, smoky, bohemian existence filled with drunken visits from erratic radicals, sycophants and would-be suitors of Marx’s three daughters.

Marx in Soho is a refreshing reminder that the author of Das Kapital was a human being with foibles and boils, who emerged out of the stew of Byronic romanticism and café revolutionaries to produce his century’s most sober and insightful critique of Western political economy. Here was a jaundiced critic of the family and religious piety who worried about not having a Christmas tree ready for his children (four of whom died before he did). Here also was a learned scholar of classic antiquity and Shakespeare who could sometimes write in a style that seemed to combine Aeschylus, yellow journalism and, in his more popular works, the Brothers Grimm, only to have Jenny beg him to put more narrative excitement into the arthritically dense Das Kapital.

The viewer should also be equally interested in what Zinn leaves out, however. While, for example, “the Moor” (as the dark-skinned Marx was nicknamed) admits that Jenny became jealous over housekeeper Helena Demuth’s presence, the subject is pretty much dropped in midair, leaving the impression that Marx’s wife was unreasonably suspicious of her husband’s relationship with “Lenchen.” In fact, today it is widely believed that Marx impregnated Demuth with a son whom he would neither acknowledge nor support. Likewise, while Zinn’s Marx seems very caught up on what happened in world affairs after his death, he makes no mention that his two surviving daughters committed suicide.

Curiously, his benefactor and ideological comrade, Friedrich Engels, also gets short shrift: Marx calls Engels a “saint” but never comes clean about his own prudish misgivings about Engels’ free-love lifestyle up in Manchester or some of the rows he had with The Communist Manifesto’s co-author, much less Marx’s pleas for more money so that he could move his family to more bourgeois surroundings.

Perhaps Zinn plays loosest when his character fleetingly touches on Marx’s anti-Semitism — splitting hairs, as do many believers, by distinguishing his antipathy toward capitalists who happen to be Jews from hating Jews because they are Jews. The former case has been made by many on Marx’s behalf, along with the indisputable fact that we are all men and women of our time, imprisoned to some degree by its attitudes and language. But Marx’s comments about both his fellow Jews and race in general went far beyond a few tipsy after-dinner gibes —
“Jewish nigger” was a term he applied liberally to people he disliked, and it was just as pejorative then as it is today.

Perhaps it’s beyond the scope of a brief, one-man performance to come to terms with such a vexing figure’s complex and contradictory behavior; it certainly is not Zinn’s responsibility to explain 40 years of a man’s theoretical writings to us. But Zinn’s notable omissions might not be necessary — or at least necessary to explain — if Jones’ performance were more robustly engaging. As it is, the actor never settles on a recurrent tone (challenging? confidential? vituperative?) with which to converse and so never establishes a bond with his audience.

Jones’ Marx comes most alive when discussing the Paris Commune of 1871, the closest thing the Europe of his day would ever see of a socialist revolution, an upheaval that would inspire him to write what many consider his finest work of propagandist journalism and historical mythmaking, The Civil War in France. For a few moments, Jones channels all the reckless hope and poisonous rage Marx felt about the commune and its bloody death, but then the show sort of trails off until Marx is recalled to heaven.

In a phrase, this Marx needs to be more of what he already is. If Jones were more garrulous, more thunderous, Marx would also be more sympathetic when he blames the future distortions of his theories and the murderous excesses committed in his name by what he calls “dogmatists.” It might even make more compelling the idea that Marx may yet be proved right. As it is, Marxists today always sound like characters from a Frankenstein movie — our creature would have been so beautiful if only he hadn’t been given a criminal’s brain! And so the need to blame Marxism’s failures on Lenin, or Stalin, or Mao, or Pol Pot.

The conceit of Marx’s appearance, by the way, is that through some celestial travel snafu, he’s ended up not in his old London neighborhood of Soho, but in New York’s SoHo. This allows Zinn’s Marx to compare the abject poverty of Victorian London to the homelessness and drug use he says he sees in New York’s SoHo. He apparently hasn’t had time, during his brief stay, to price loft space around West Broadway, or to stand in line at the Spring Street Starbucks. In that case, he would no doubt feel a bit embarrassed for contrasting New York’s gallery-combed SoHo to the neighborhood where he lost a son to a cholera epidemic that claimed 6,000 lives. The road to utopia may be paved with good intentions, but it shouldn’t be potholed with such disingenuous analogies.

The conditions of economic despair necessary to spawn Marx’s revolution might never exist in our world of cars, TV and video games, but there will always be rebels to challenge and harass capitalism and its complacent pornographers. To paraphrase Marx’s famous letter to Arnold Ruge, Marxism will always exist, although not necessarily in Marxist form.

MARX IN SOHO | Written by HOWARD ZINN Performed by BRIAN JONES | At THE COMPLEX, 6476 Santa Monica Blvd., Hollywood | Through July 22

Yulia Tymoshenko - election? Hah! Corrupt capitalist nightmare

BBC: The pro-Western parties of Orange Revolution leaders Viktor Yushchenko and Yulia Tymoshenko appear to have won a slim majority in Ukraine's election.
Exit polls suggest their combined vote gives them a slender advantage over Russian-leaning PM Viktor Yanukovych. He took 35.5% of the vote, with Ms Tymoshenko's bloc second on 31.5%, exit polls suggested. Mr Yushchenko, the president, won just 13.5%, but is now expected to enter coalition talks with Ms Tymoshenko.

Bulgarian News agency: According to unofficial results of the preliminary elections in Ukraine becomes clear that leading is the Party of Regions with about 36% followed by Yulia Tymoshenko Bloc with about 27,5% and the Bloc of Our Ukraine party with about 12,5%. Ukraine’s early preliminary elections are acknowledged although the Ukraine’s National Security Service confirmed buying votes cases. About 57,53% of the electorate took part in the parliamentary elections. In case of victory of Our Ukraine Bloc and Yulia Tymoshenko Bloc they must sign an agreement for democratic coalition again.

Pro-West party leads in Ukraine poll

CIA sponsored Orange coalition ahead in Ukraine... Election results expected soon (1.oct 2007)



THE EVIL GAS AND OIL WITCH

In 1995 Yulia Tymoshenko became the president of "United Energy Systems of Ukraine" (UESU).

Remember Ahmed Chalabi finance-fraud criminal was supposed to become the saviour of Iraq? Yulia is a fraudster! Chalabi's bank-fraud seems small in comparision!

Her patron the former ukrainian PM Pavlo Lazarenko was convicted in the USA to have stolen and laundered 613 million IMF dollars. The Financial Times reports that Lazarenko received at least 72 mio in bribes from UESU for which he helped UESU become the biggest ENRON style private-tyranny.
At the time the boss of the ukrainian central bank was Yushchenko. The IMF later stated that he had systematically defrauded the International Monetary Fund.
He, like Yulia were never convicted of the crimes, they managed to present themselves as political prisoners.
After colouring her hair to a mythical blond and arranging it like a halo around head
the oligarch must be close to beatification.

In his book "Casino Moscow" (2001) Matthew Brzezinski tells us of his visit with the "11 billion dollar woman":

"...she was guarded by an entire platoon of ex-Soviet special forces bodyguards. She once sent a plane to collect Brzezinski from Moscow, fly him to Dnipropetrovsk to meet her for lunch, and drop him off back at Moscow in the evening. When Brzezinski said he didn't want to tie up the company plane, Tymoshenko said: "Don't worry. I have four of them." According to Brzezinski, as a result of Lazarenko's patronage, "Tymoshenko gained control over nearly 20% of Ukraine's gross national product, an enviable position that probably no other private company in the world could boast."


The first thing to examine when they are speaking of democracy is to see which democracy they (the US administration) are wanting to install.

In their mouths democracy is sounding as a real people’s democracy (no real intention from my part to write ‘popular’ democracy which is, as everybody knows, another body).

In fact a quick examination of the guys they are following and helping is showing these guys are attracted by the European model or wanting to evade an external influence. This is really evident in the Ukrainian case, where Yutschenko (married to an American woman) is politically binded to Yulia Timochenko, an Ukrainian billionaire, whose past was in business in Russian petroleum and gas. We have the oil and we have the democracy now. But is it really a democracy where the people in the street are having a word to say? Apparently yes, since the orange revolution, but we may not forget the river of money that flowed out of the pockets of Soros ‘s foundations as well as from American foundations (Freedom’s house directed by former CIA director Woosley, New Endowment for democracy known as a CIA relais since its implication in the Venezuelian coup d’état.

Up to now, the structure of Ukrainian power and democracy is based on some ploutocrat looking like a MAFIA mob. The difference with the former is that they are now a Western looking mob.

A BIT OF HISTORY:

Yulia Tymoshenko founded and headed a Komsomol video rental chain (which grew to be quite successful), and later privatized it.

During privatization in Ukraine, which mirrored that in Russia in terms of corruption and mismanagement, she became one of the wealthiest oligarchs in Ukraine, exporting metals. From 1995 to 1997, Tymoshenko was the president of the United Energy Systems of Ukraine, a privately owned middleman company which became the main importer of Russian natural gas to Ukraine in 1996. During that time she was nicknamed "gas princess" in the light of accusations that she has been reselling enormous quantities of stolen gas and avoiding taxation of those deals.

In the business period of her life, Tymoshenko involved business relations (either co-operative or hostile) with many important figures of Ukraine, first of all, in Dnipropetrovsk. The list includes Pavlo Lazarenko, Viktor Pinchuk, Ihor Kolomoyskyi, Rinat Akhmetov, and, of course, Leonid Kuchma - the then-President originating from Dnipropetrovsk. As part of her gas-dealing business, Tymoshenko has also been closely linked to the management of the Russian Gazprom.

In 2005, Yulia Tymoshenko was openly called Jewish by Yevhen Chervonenko (one of the leaders of Jewish community)

Present private life

Yulia Tymoshenko is still married to Oleksandr Tymoshenko, although their marriage is sometimes perceived as a formal one. During the early years of her political career the two were parted for years when Mr. Tymoshenko was escaping arrest. The couple appear together very rarely. They have a daughter Yevhenia (born in 1980). Yevhenia graduated from a British university and now lives in Ukraine with her husband, rock-musician Sean Carr, who was born in Yorkshire, England, though he spent most of his childhood in Spain



From 1999 to 2001, Tymoshenko was the Deputy Prime Minister for fuel and energy sector in the cabinet of Viktor Yushchenko. She was fired by President Leonid Kuchma in January 2001 after developing a conflict with the oligarchs in the industry.

In February 2001, Tymoshenko was arrested on charges of forging customs documents and smuggling of gas between 1995 and 1997 (while president of United Energy Systems of Ukraine) but was released several weeks later. Her political supporters organized several protest rallies near the Lukyanivska Prison where she was held in custody. According to Tymoshenko, the charges were fabricated by Kuchma's regime, under the influence of oligarchs threatened by her efforts to root out corruption and institute market-based reforms. In spite of being cleared of the charges, Moscow maintained an arrest warrant for Tymoshenko should she enter Russia until her dismissal as Prime Minister over 4 years later.

Viktor Yushchenko and Yulia Tymoshenko on stage during a political rally, November, 2004.

In addition, Tymoshenko's husband, Oleksandr, spent two years in hiding in order to avoid incarceration on charges the couple said were unfounded and politically motivated by the former Kuchma administration.

Once the charges were dropped, she became one of the leaders of street-level campaigns against President Kuchma for his alleged role in the murder of the journalist Georgi Gongadze. In this campaign, Tymoshenko first became known as a passionate revolutionary-like leader, an example of this being a TV broadcast of her smashing prison windows during one of the rallies.

The following year Tymoshenko was involved in a mysterious car accident that she survived with minor injuries—an episode some believe may have been a government assassination attempt.[5] During this time, she founded Yulia Tymoshenko Bloc (Блок Юлії Тимошенко), a political bloc that received 7.2 percent of the vote in the 2002 parliamentary election. She is the head of the Batkivshchina (Fatherland) political party.

Tymoshenko's critics have suggested that, as an oligarch, she gained her fortune improperly. Some have speculated that her familiarity with the illegal conduct of business common in Ukraine uniquely qualifies her to combat corruption—if she is willing to do so. Her former business partner, former Ukrainian Prime Minister Pavlo Lazarenko, has been convicted in the United States on charges of billions-worth money laundering, corruption and fraud.

On 28 January 2005, following the Orange Revolution, Ukrainian prosecutors agreed, and closed the cases against then Prime Minister Tymoshenko and her family members due to lack of evidence. These cases included Tymoshenko's husband and her father-in-law, Henadiy Tymoshenko. Oleksandr Tymoshenko returned to Ukraine soon after that.

Despite this questionable past, her transition from oligarch to reformer was believed by many to be both genuine and effective. As energy Deputy Prime Minister, she virtually ended many corrupt arrangements in the energy sector. Under her stewardship, Ukraine's revenue collections from the electricity industry grew by several thousand per cent. She scrapped the practice of barter in the electricity market, requiring industrial customers to pay for their electricity in cash. She also terminated exemptions for many organizations which excluded them from having their power disconnected. Her reforms meant that the government had sufficient funds to pay civil servants and increase salaries.

After the Orange Revolution

On 24 January 2005 she was appointed as acting Prime Minister of Ukraine under Yushchenko's presidency. On 4 February 2005, at 2:54 p.m. (Kiev), Yulia Tymoshenko was ratified by the Verkhovna Rada (parliament) by an overwhelming majority of 373 votes (226 were required for approval).

On 28 July 2005, Forbes magazine named her third most powerful woman in the world, behind only Condoleezza Rice and Wu Yi. However, in the magazine's new list published on 1 September 2006, Tymoshenko did not even make the top 100.

Several months into her government, numerous inner conflicts inside the post- Revolution coalition began to damage Ms. Tymoshenko's administration. On 8 September 2005, after the resignation of several senior officials including the Head of the Security and Defence Council Petro Poroshenko and Deputy Prime Minister Mykola Tomenko, Yulia Tymoshenko's government was dismissed by President Victor Yuschenko during a live TV address to the nation. She was succeeded by Yuriy Yehanurov. Later, the President criticized her work as head of the Cabinet, suggesting it had led to an economic slowdown and political conflicts within the ruling coalition.

2006 parliamentary election

After her dismissal Tymoshenko started to tour the country in a bid to win the 2006 Ukrainian parliamentary election as the leader of her Bloc. She soon announced that she wanted to return to the post of Prime Minister.

With the Bloc coming second in the election, and winning 129 seats, many speculated that she might form a coalition with Yushchenko's Our Ukraine party and the Socialist Party of Ukraine (SPU) to prevent the Party of Regions from gaining power. Tymoshenko again reiterated her stance in regard to becoming Prime Minister. However, negotiations with Our Ukraine and SPU faced many difficulties as the various blocs scrapped over posts and engaged in counter-negotiations with other groupings.

On Wednesday June 21, 2006, the Ukrainian media reported that the parties had finally reached a coalition agreement, which appeared to have ended nearly three months of political uncertainty.

Tymoshenko's nomination and confirmation as new Prime Minister was expected to be straightforward. However, the nomination was preconditioned on an election of her long-term rival Petro Poroshenko from Our Ukraine as the speaker of the parliament. Within a few days after the coalition agreement had been signed, it became clear that the coalition members mistrusted each other, since they considered it to be a deviation from parliamentary procedures in order to hold a simultaneous vote on Poroshenko as the speaker and Tymoshenko as Prime Minister.

To aggravate matters, opposition members from the Party of Regions blocked the parliament from Thursday, June 29 through Thursday, July 6. The Party of Regions announced an ultimatum to the coalition, demanding that the parliamentary procedures be observed, asking membership in parliamentary committees to be allocated in proportion to seats held by each fraction, chairmanship in certain Parliamentary committees as well as Governorships in the administrative subdivisions won by the Party of Regions. The coalition agreement deprived the Party of Regions and the communists of any representation in the executive and leadership in parliamentary committees [4] while in the local regional counsils won by the Party of Regions, the coalition parties were locked out of all committees as well.

Following a surprise nomination of Oleksandr Moroz from SPU as the Rada speaker and his subsequent election late on July 6 with the support of the Party of Regions, the "Orange coalition" collapsed. After the creation of a large coalition of majority, led by the former prime minister Viktor Yanukovych and composed of the Party of Regions, Socialists and Communists, Viktor Yanukovych became Prime Minister, and the other two parties were left in the wilderness. Whilst Tymoshenko immediately announced that her political force would form a shadow cabinet to the current government, Our Ukraine stalled until October 4 2006, when it too joined the opposition.[9]

2007 Foreign Affairs article

Tymoshenko wrote an article called "Containing Russia" in the May-June 2007 edition of the journal Foreign Affairs. In the article she sharply criticized alleged authoritarian developments under Vladimir Putin and opposed the alleged new Russian expansionism. Consequently, the article irked Russia and more than a week before the article was published, Russia responded to the article, calling it an "anti-Russian manifesto" and "an attempt to once again draw dividing lines in Europe."

Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov wrote an article called "Containing Russia: Back To The Future?" in the same journal and was apparently meant to be a response to Tymoshenko. He withdrew the article before publication, accusing the editors of changing his text and said his article was subjected to "censorship"

---

Political and economic processes in Ukraine continue to attract the attention of European and international organisations. Along with the Council of Europe's dissatisfaction with Ukraine's planned 16 April referendum, the IMF still has doubts about the proper use of its loans by the Ukrainian government. An international audit of the National Bank of Ukraine was launched earlier this year after the publication of an article in the Financial Times (28 January 2000) concerning the misuse of IMF funds in the period between December 1997 to January 1998. In the article, the Financial Times relied on the statement of Pavlo Lazarenko, former Ukrainian prime minister, who said that USD 613 million of IMF funds were transferred by the National Bank of Ukraine in December 1997 and invested in risky enterprises.

Although on 7 March, the Ukrainian central bank was ready to report that the newspaper's allegations had not been confirmed, the IMF's recent investigation in Kyiv proved to be only the first part of a complete audit. Almost at the same time that the IMF preliminary investigation was finished, the World Bank launched a second audit of the Ukrainian Finance Ministry concerning its loans to Ukraine since 1994. Explaining their action, the World Bank's representatives say that they are almost sure of the proper use of World Bank funds, however, "the World Bank wants 'to take advantage' of the ongoing audit to check its own loans, too," Radio Free Europe reported.

For its part, the Council of Europe has kept an eye to Ukraine's final decision concerning the legitimacy of the 16 April referendum [See this week's accompanying article for more on the referendum issue]. This week, the monitoring committee of the Council, following a meeting in Paris, adopted preliminary recommendations on this issue and asked Kyiv to cancel the referendum. The decision was made following the speech of Hanne Severinsen, Council of Europe's commissioner, who recently came back from Kyiv. The Council of Europe does not agree with Ukraine's intent to make changes in its Constitution by means of referendum nor with the nature of the referendum. Although the organisation is still awaiting the result of its Venetian commission, its disapproval seems clear enough.

http://www.ce-review.org/00/10/ukrainenews10.html

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The Yushchenko Mythos

Don't believe the U.S. government's fairy tale about what's happening in Ukraine
by Justin Raimondo

According to the U.S. government, and commentators on the left as well as the (neoconservative) right, the crisis in the Ukraine is a clear-cut case of "democracy" versus authoritarianism, "the people" versus "the oligarchs," and the forces of enlightened Europhilia up against the sinister specter of a resurgent Russia and a revivified KGB.

The only problem with this narrative is that it is unmitigated bunk.

Let's start with the central figures in this drama: the two Viktors – Yushchenko and Yanukovich. To begin with, you'll note that the former has a website in English, while the latter's site is only in the native Ukrainian and Russian. Yushchenko's audience is primarily the West, while Yanukovich is speaking to his own people. Right off the bat, the line of demarcation is drawn.

According to the conventional wisdom, Yanukovich is a dark demonic figure, a Soviet-type bureaucrat whose ties to Russia and the eastern power base of the ruling elite, automatically make him the bad guy. Besides that, we are told, Yanukovich is a man with a "criminal record," who served two jail terms. What they don't tell you is that Yanukovich was jailed by the Soviet regime on charges of robbery and assault. As the Los Angeles Times noted:

"A biography distributed on behalf of Yanukovich says that 'having suffered through a very tragic and tough childhood . . . the prime minister acknowledges regrettable youthful indiscretions, resulting in criminal charges that were eventually overturned by a Ukrainian court.'"

On the other hand, Yushchenko's indiscretions – which are not being reported in the Western media at all – were neither youthful nor the occasion for his public repentance. And if a youthful Yanukovich held up a Ukrainian gas station or knocked someone upside the head and took his wallet, Yushchenko was a key figure in a conspiracy to defraud the West of over $600 million.

The idea that Yushchenko is some kind of outsider, whose victory will cause the fresh winds of free-market reform to blow through the sealed chamber of corruption that is the Ukrainian economy is another Western fairy tale that has no basis in reality. Yushie is a key figure in the oligarchic system of "crony capitalism" that has enriched the few at the expense of the many since the fall of the USSR. He rose to power – as head of the Ukrainian central bank through a good deal of the 1990s, and then as prime minister in the thuggish Leonid Kuchma's government in 1999 – on account of the power of the oligarchs. These "entrepreneurs" who made their fortunes on the strength of their connections to the Communist apparatus control the commanding heights of the Ukrainian economy, and what is happening today in the Ukraine is a civil war involving the various oligarchic clans. As a Carnegie study of the Ukrainian political landscape by Anders Aslund puts it:

"In Russia, the financial-industrial groups provide financing to various parties and to the government. In Ukraine, the economic-political groups rather tend to own political parties. Lazarenko and Timoshenko created the parliamentary party Hromada, as a company party of the Unified Energy Systems. Vadim Rabinovich has reportedly 'bought' the Green Party. Surkis and Medevedchuk reportedly own the United Social Democratic Party. However, Bakai, Pinchuk and the Franchuks support Kuchma directly and possibly his party the National-Democratic Party. Characteristically, all these oligarchic parties are considered centrist, that is, always prepared to make a deal without any real ideology."

Yushchenko is a creature of this system, and his tenure at the National Bank of the Ukraine was marked by the corruption so characteristic of the political culture: a scandal involving falsification of the country's credit ledger – essentially lying to the International Monetary Fund about the quantity of Ukrainian cash reserves. As the Financial Times reports:

"Under his control, the bank was involved in a damaging row with the International Monetary Fund over the use of IMF loans to falsify the country's credit position - allowing some politicians, but not Mr Yushchenko, to benefit personally. He survived the ensuing scandal."

A PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) audit confirmed the suspicions of IMF officials that Western lenders have been systematically deceived by Yushchenko's NBU:

"By giving a misleading impression of the size of Ukraine's reserves, the NBU's reserve management practices may have allowed Ukraine to receive as many as three disbursements under the stand-by arrangement in effect at that time that it might not otherwise have been able to obtain. … The three disbursements in question that would have been affected by the transactions examined in the PwC report were based on October, November, and December 1997 figures. They total SDR 145 million (about US$200 million)."

What happened to all that money? Pavlo Lazarenko knows, and he hasn't been shy about telling us what he knows. But is anybody listening?

According to Lazarenko – formerly prime minister, and a key figure in the oligarchy – $613 million of the IMF's money was embezzled and then laundered in December 1997. Like many other Soviet era bureaucrats, Lazarenko took advantage of the extensive network of overseas secret accounts established by the nomenklatura once the old Soviet Union started to unravel. With state funds secreted abroad, the oligarchs bought up the remnants of the old state industries, and divided the economic assets among themselves. Lazarenko was the chief patron of one of Yushchenko's biggest supporters, Yuliya Timoshenko of the United Energy Systems of the Ukraine (UESU), who made fantastic profits at a time of economic recession. However, Ms. Timoshenko, and her fellow oligarchs, as Alexander's Gas & Oil Connections explains,

"Could realize these profits only with the help of state support. … The amount of money involved has been highlighted by the Lazarenko affair. According to a report by the Financial Times, Pavlo Lazarenko, who was Ukraine's prime minister in 1996-97, received at least $ 72 mm in bribe money from gas importer UESU. In return, Lazarenko helped UESU to become one of Ukraine's leading companies with an annual turnover of $ 10 billion."

"When Lazarenko was sacked as prime minister, his successor Valery Pustovoitenko started a comprehensive investigation into the business of UESU, which led to the first accusations. In December of 1998, Lazarenko was arrested in Switzerland on charges of money laundering. He fled to the United States, where he was again arrested and charged with the laundering of $ 114 mm received as bribe money during his time in office.

"This June, while still being held in the United States, Lazarenko was sentenced for money laundering in Switzerland. Yuliya Timoshenko, who was president of UESU when Lazarenko was prime minister, has so far avoided criminal prosecution. In 1997, she left the company and went into politics."

Ms. Timoshenko went on to become a deputy prime minister, in 1999, with special authority over energy matters. Her husband, still a member of the board of UESU, was arrested on charges of embezzlement of state property. Ms. Timoshenko, too, was arrested, and – after much posing and posturing as a "political prisoner" – was freed.

It is entirely appropriate that the "gas princess," as Ms. Timoshenko is known, should become the La Passionaria of Ukraine's phony "velvet revolution." As she leaps atop the stage at the massive rallies taking place in the middle of Kiev, she speaks with Amazonian forcefulness and the authority of someone used to being obeyed, as The Australian reports:

"'Form a column and come with us to the presidency,' she shouted to a crowd on Wednesday. 'Once we arrive at the presidency, we won't leave until Yushchenko enters it as the new Ukrainian president and occupies his post.'"

The Lazarenko-Timoshenko wing of the oligarchy is naturally grateful to Yushie – after all, he fronted for them in bilking the IMF. Now they are paying him back with their fulsome support. This isn't the struggle of valiant pro-Western "democrats" versus sinister pro-Russian neo-communists: Timoshenko's histrionics represent a falling out among thieves.

In any case, from the Gas Princess to the Boadicea of the "democracy" movement in Ukraine is a fanciful transformation, at best, but Western propagandists are counting on the American public's ignorance of the Ukrainian scene to pull off one of the biggest frauds since the selling of convicted embezzler Ahmed Chalabi as the Iraqi George Washington.

Few remember now that one of the alleged economic benefits of the "cakewalk" war was supposed to have been a huge drop in the price of oil: Iraq would be pumping as much and as fast as required by Washington, and the profits were going to finance the reconstruction. Well, that didn't exactly work out, now did it? So our grand strategists in Washington have turned to the legendary Caspian "Silk Road" to oil riches, reviving the dream of a Trans-Caucasian oil pipeline that will fill the gas tanks of Europe, bring down prices rapidly – and hand over control of much of the world's hydrocarbons to U.S. corporate interests and their allies.

Forget all this melodramatic folderol about Ukraine's "orange revolution" – and follow the money. The mythologizing of the Ukrainian "democratic" opposition serves certain Western economic interests, as John Laughland has pointed out:

"Efforts are being redoubled to crank into action the various pipelines which are supposed to transport Caspian oil to Western markets. One of these is the Brody pipeline which runs between the Ukrainian town of that name and the Black Sea port of Odessa (a Russian city but also in Ukraine). The Brody pipeline was initially supposed to take US-controlled Caspian oil to Western markets, but it has instead been pumping Russia oil, something the Americans do not like.

"So the New World Order strategists are determined to put their man in control of Ukraine, at the presidential election on 31st October. Huge influence, and presumably money, is being pumped in to ensure a victory for Victor Yushchenko. Paul Wolfowitz said in Warsaw on 5th October that Ukraine should join NATO. Mark Brzezinski and Richard Holbrooke have rattled their sabers over Ukraine, and Anders Aslund, the architect of Yelstin's mass larceny, has eloquently outlined the West's strategic interest in that country.

"These national strategic interests are, as ever, supported by the private interests of the powerful people lobbying for this new anti-Putin policy. They include people like David Owen and Jacob Rothschild: the former is Yukos' representative in Britain, the latter put up much of Khodorkovsky's original money, and sits (together with Henry Kissinger) on the board of the Open Russia Foundation, a Yukos front. They also include Anders Aslund, one of the signatories of the AEI's Open Letter, who works for the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, which is funded by Yukos, Conoco Phillips – the strategic ally of Chevron, on whose board Condoleezza Rice sat for many years – has recently announced a "strategic alliance" with Lukoil, the second largest private oil company in the world, and Conoco Phillips is said to want a controlling stake in the Russian company. Before Khodorkovsky's arrest, indeed, it was said that he wanted to sell Yukos to an American company."

The bottom line is that our oligarchs have allied with a faction of Ukrainian oligarchs, who have agreed to add Ukraine to the European Union, sabotage the free trade zone recently established between the pro-Russian nations of the former Soviet Union, and, most important of all, join NATO. The Yushchenko-Timoshenko forces want to align with Georgia, Uzbekistan, Azerbaijan, and Moldova (the other nations in the GUUAM configuration of junior league NATO aspirants) in erecting a ring of iron around Putin and the former Soviet Union. U.S. troops are already in Georgia, Uzbekistan, and Kyrgyzstan. How long before they are in Kiev, training "President" Yushchenko's NATO-ized military in the use of American equipment – and advising a spiffed-up Ukrainian military within striking distance of the Kremlin?

After all, as Jonathan Steele points out in the Guardian, American "advisors" have been directing and funding the entire Yushchenko operation, just as they did in the former Yugoslavia, with money pouring in not only from the U.S. Treasury but also from billionaire George Soros, who has his own interests in Ukraine and the former Soviet Union. According to the Ukrainian Center for Political and Economic Research (UCPER), a poll of the mostly pro-Yushchenko Ukrainian NGOs reveals that foreign sponsors pick up 60 percent of the tab, including:

"'Vidrodzhenya' (Revival) sponsored by George Soros - 36.3%, 'Freedom House' (the U.S.) - 22.7%, 'Poland-America-Ukraine Cooperation Initiative' - 22.7%, USAID - 22.7%, National Endowment for Democracy (the U.S.) - 18.2%, the World Bank - 13.6% (the total percentage exceeding 100%, since the respondents often named several sponsors)."

Ms. Timoshenko, who boasts of having a fleet of six jets at her disposal, no doubt picks up the rest.

We are being sold a bill of goods, and, upon close inspection, they turn out to be pretty darn shoddy. Yushchenko is no more the "democratic" savior of Ukraine than the Gas Princess is a paragon of idealism and Western-style "free-market" reform. Like Yushie, the Robber Baroness of crony capitalism is a symbol, not of "democracy," but of the gullibility of Western public opinion when faced with a slick public-relations campaign – and a compliant media that goes for attractive narratives which mesh neatly with their ideological presumptions.

The complex web of lies that make up the Yushchenko mythos requires extensive debunking, and one could write a good-sized book on the subject, but a matter that needs to be cleared up at once is the story about Yushchenko's alleged "poisoning" – presumably at the hands of the KGB. The internet is filled with before-and-after pictures of the once-handsome Yushie: the sight of his puffy and ravaged face, pitted with unappetizing pustules, is not a pretty sight to see. But what is the evidence that he's been poisoned by the pro-Yanukovich forces? There is none. As the New York Times reported on September 29 :

"An Austrian hospital that recently treated Viktor A. Yushchenko, the Ukrainian presidential candidate and opposition leader, said Tuesday that accusations that he had been poisoned were baseless."

The hospital's announcement was the occasion for death threats directed at the team of doctors involved, and the staff wisely retreated to a position of official agnosticism on the question of what caused Yushchenko's transformation from a prince into a toad. After all, a member of the Ukrainian parliament who served on a commission investigating the incident, and who had publicly dismissed the idea of Yushchenko's "poisoning," had a land mine placed outside his home.

The "poisoning" of Yushchenko is a cock-and-bull story. As a news story in the Globe and Mail pointed out:

"The problem for conspiracy theorists is that a variety of standard laboratory tests should have turned up signs of such drugs in blood, hair or tissue samples in relatively short order."

Not that they are letting a few facts get in the way. Propaganda doesn't require facts – only a gullible public and constant repetition. If these techniques are all-too-familiar, then they ought to be: isn't this how we got bamboozled into the Iraqi quagmire, buying into a narrative of "heroic" "pro-democracy" dissidents pushing back the frontiers of liberty, with the U.S. by their side?

As the worst president ever once put it:

"There's an old saying in Tennessee – I know it's in Texas, probably in Tennessee – that says, fool me once, shame on – shame on you. Fool me – you can't get fooled again."

The neocons are letting the Arab quagmire simmer, hoping that the Iraqi insurgency can be tamped down with the assistance of a Shi'ite majority government supported by the mainstream clerics and propped up by a growing indigenous military force acting in tandem with less-visible U.S. forces, a plan of dubious prospects. In any event, the Ukrainian events have given them the opportunity to move on another front while movement in the Iraqi theater is seemingly stalled.

The campaign against Vladimir Putin as the latest incarnation of Stalin has been going on for quite some time, its most recent crescendo having been reached with a neocon publicity campaign on behalf of "poor little Chechnya," as well as complaints about the uniformity of opinion in the Russian media – this, coming from the same crowd who regularly denounce the supposedly "antiwar" media as a "fifth column"! But fronting for the Chechens is another kind of hypocrisy altogether. That they are willing to bloc with Islamist terrorists allied with Osama bin Laden against Putin, and Russia, underscores their determination in pursuit of their latest victim. Russia is the latest front in what the more perfervid neocons call "World War IV," and Ukraine is the first battlefield, but not likely to be the last. John Laughland put it well:

"Chechnya borders Georgia, and Georgia, like Azerbaijan, is on the fast track to join NATO. There are already hundreds of US troops in Georgia, training the local forces. They are there for two reasons: first, to protect the US-built Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline; secondly – and this follows from the first – to assist Georgia in recuperating her two secessionist territories, South Ossetia and Abkhazia. It will not do to have Russia anywhere close to the pipeline, and she has troops in both these areas. Pushing Russia comprehensively out of the Caucasus, and humiliating her, requires victory for the Chechens. An independent Chechnya may also be the prelude to the longer-term break-up of Russia herself: the CIA predicted that oil-rich Siberia might escape Moscow's control in its report, Global Trends 2015, published in April."

Russia, the Middle East, the Trans-Caucasus, and even China – there is no limit to the ambition of the neocons, which surpasses the dreams of Alexander – and the hubris of Icarus.

I might add that the true politics of the "liberal" opposition are revealed in their response to the prospect that the eastern pro-Yanukovich portion of the country (which is far richer, and more industrialized, than the western region) might secede. Already the Easterners – culturally and temperamentally close to our "red" states – are holding assemblies in major cities calling for autonomy. The reaction from Yushchenko:

"Those who are calling for separatism are committing crimes and will definitely receive severe punishment."

Thugs always revert to form. The prince becomes a toad – and, no, I seriously doubt that Yushie's physical deterioration has anything to do with a nefarious plot by Putin's KGB against his good looks. Instead, let me suggest an alternative theory, one not contradicted by expert medical testimony – and the account of a parliamentary inquiry – and it is this: perhaps the Faustian deal that Yushchenko made with the U.S. government has taken its toll, and, as in the dramatic climax of Oscar Wilde's famous tale, "The Picture of Dorian Grey," his sins are being visited on his once-handsome visage, ravaging it – and revealing his inner soul.

http://antiwar.com/justin/?articleid=4072

Palestine - Burma - USA -- Liberty? Class War!

Worse Than Apartheid

Water mixes with blood in a street of the northern Gaza Strip town of Beit Hanoun in this Nov. 8 file photo. Israeli tank shells landed in a residential neighborhood, killing at least 18 people in their sleep, including eight children, according to witnesses and hospital officials.


In the latter half of 2006 Israel has been unleashing missiles, attack helicopters and jet fighters over the densely packed concrete hovels in the Gaza Strip. The Israeli army has made numerous deadly incursions, and some 500 people, nearly all civilians, have been killed and 1,600 more wounded. Israel has rounded up hundreds of Palestinians, destroyed Gaza’s infrastructure, including its electrical power system and key roads and bridges, carried out huge land confiscations, demolished homes and plunged families into a crisis that has caused widespread poverty and malnutrition.

Civil society itself—and this appears to be part of the Israeli plan—is unraveling. Hamas and Fatah factions battle in the streets, despite a tenuous cease-fire, threatening civil war. And the governing Palestinian movement, Hamas, has said it will boycott early elections called by Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, done with the blessing of the West in a bid to toss Hamas out of power. (Remember that Hamas, despite its repugnant politics, was democratically elected.) In recent days armed groups loyal to Abbas have seized Hamas-run ministries in what looks like a coup.

The stark reality of Gaza, however, has failed to penetrate the consciousness of most Americans, who, when they notice the Israeli and Palestinian conflict, prefer to debate the merits of the word “apartheid” in former President Jimmy Carter’s new book, “Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid.” It is a sad commentary on the gutlessness of the U.S. press and the timidity of the Democratic opposition that most Americans are not aware of the catastrophic humanitarian crisis they bear so much responsibility in creating. Palestinians are not only dying, their olive trees uprooted, their farmland and homes destroyed and their aquifers taken away from them, but on many days they can’t move because of Israeli “closures” that make basic tasks, like buying food and going to the hospital, nearly impossible. These Palestinians, after decades of repression, cannot return to land from which they were expelled. The 140-plus U.N. votes to censure Israel and two Security Council resolutions—both vetoed by the United States—are blithly ignored. Is it any wonder that the Palestinians, gasping for air, rebel as the walls close in around them, as their children go hungry and as the Israelis turn up the violence?

Palestinians in Gaza live encased in a squalid, overcrowded ghetto, surrounded by the Israeli military and a massive electric fence, unable to leave or enter the strip and under daily assault. The word “apartheid,” given the wanton violence employed against the Palestinians, is tepid. This is more than apartheid. The concerted Israeli attempts to orchestrate a breakdown in law and order, to foster chaos and rampant deprivation, are on public display in the streets of Gaza City, where Palestinians walk past the rubble of the Palestinian Ministry of Interior, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Ministry of National Economy, the office of the Palestinian prime minister and a number of educational institutions that have been bombed by Israeli jets. The electricity generation plant, providing 45 percent of the electricity of the Gaza Strip, has been wiped out, and even the primitive electricity networks and transmitters that remain have been repeatedly bombed. Six bridges linking Gaza City with the central Gaza Strip have been blown up and main arteries cratered into obliteration. And the West Bank is rapidly descending into a crisis of Gaza proportions. The juxtaposition of what is happening in Gaza and what is being debated on the U.S. airwaves about a book that is little more than a basic primer on the conflict reinforces the impression most outside our gates have of Americans living in a distorted, bizarre reality of our own creation.

What do Israel and Washington believe they will gain by turning Gaza and the West Bank into a miniature version of Iraq? How do they think people who are desperate, deprived of hope, dignity and a way to make a living, under attack from one of the most technologically advanced armies on the planet, will respond? Do they believe that creating a Hobbesian nightmare for the Palestinians will blunt terrorism, curb suicide attacks and foster peace? Do they not see that the rest of the Middle East watches the slaughter in horror and rage—its angry, disenfranchised young men and women determined to overcome feelings of impotence and humiliation, even at the cost of their own lives?

And perhaps they do see and understand all this. Israel and Washington probably do get the recruiting value of this repression for Islamic militants. But these Israeli attacks, despite the rage and violence they breed against Israelis and against us, also create conditions so intolerable that Palestinians can no longer reside on their land. More than 160,000 civil servants have not received full salaries for almost nine months. These government employees support families that number more than a million Palestinians. And a United Nations report states that more than two-thirds of Palestinians are now living below the poverty line. The unemployment rate is more than 50 percent. The Palestinian Foreign Ministry says 10,000 Palestinians have emigrated in the last four months and almost 50,000 others have applied to leave.

Israel, with no restraints from Washington, despite the Iraq Study Group report recommendations that the peace process be resurrected from the dead, has been given the moral license by the Bush administration to carry out what is euphemistically in Israel called “transfer” and what in other parts of the world is called ethnic cleansing. Faced with a demographic time bomb, knowing that by 2020 Jews will make up only 40 to 46 percent of the overall population of Israel, the architects of transfer, who once held the equivalent status in Israeli society of the Ku Klux Klan, have wormed their way into positions of power in the Israeli government.

Washington and Israel, I suspect, know the cost of this repression. But it is beginning to appear as though they accept it—as the price for ridding themselves of the Palestinians.
Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert has installed in his Cabinet a politician who openly calls for the expulsion of the some 1.3 million Israeli Arabs who live inside Israel. Avigdor Lieberman’s “Israel Is Our Home” Party, part of Olmert’s governing coalition, proposes involuntary transfer in a region populated mostly by Arab citizens of Israel, shifting those people to a future Palestinian state that would include Gaza, parts of the West Bank and a small slice of northern Israel. All Israeli Arabs who continued to reside in the territory of transfer would automatically lose their Israeli citizenship unless they took a loyalty oath to the state and its Jewish symbols. The inclusion of Lieberman, the David Duke of Israel, into the Cabinet is an indication to most Palestinians that the worst is yet to come.

The debate over Jimmy Carter’s book, one that dishes up a fair number of Israeli myths about itself and states a reality that is acknowledged even by most Israelis, misses the point. The question is not whether Israel practices apartheid. Apartheid is a fond dream for most Palestinians. The awful question is rather will Israel be able to unleash a policy so draconian and cruel that it will obliterate a community that has lived on this land for centuries. There are other, far more loaded words for what is happening to the Palestinians. One shudders to repeat them. But unchecked, unstopped, the current wave of violence and abuse meted out to the Palestinians will echo down the corridors of history as one of the greatest moral and tactical blunders of the early part of this century, one that will boomerang on Israel and on us, bringing to our own doorsteps the evil we have allowed to be delivered to the narrow alleys and refugee camps in Gaza. When it was only apartheid, we had some hope.

http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/20061218_worse_than_apartheid/

Beyond Rangoon: Stories Beneath the Surface of Myanmar Reporting

As all eyes turn to Myanmar with brutal crackdowns by the military junta (including reports of a Japanese reporter murdered and school children being fired upon), international condemnations, speculation of a "saffron revolution," and China caught between a policy of noninterference and brutal crackdown on its borders that could turn into a public relations disaster, there are stories at the micro-political level that deserve to be highlighted for the inspiration they might offer.

First, the role that technology has played in both mobilizing and broadcasting this information to the rest of the world through cell phones and the internet. News reports abound on the process of gathering reports in Myanmar as much as the actual reports of the brutal crackdowns by the military junta. The Democratic Voice of Burma has been praised for its role at the helm of collecting, hosting, and distributing information from the myriad of reports electronically smuggled out of the country. Despite the internet crackdown which The New York Times The Lede is reporting on, information is still apears to be making its way through to blogs like Global Voices and the Cbox aggregator of on-the-ground reports.

Just like the protests against a chemical plant organized by text messages in China a few months ago, this is not the story of technological triumphalism, but rather, of little victories that are applying pressures and compelling governments and international actors to move in certain, sometimes constructive ways.

The second story that needs be told (and I hope gets reported on more) is the bonds of solidarity formed between the monks and local residents. The lead editorial of the Asahi Shimbun reads:

Sharp increases in the prices of gasoline and other items on Aug. 15 sparked the demonstrations. The price hikes caused bus fares and other fees to soar, hitting the pocketbooks of ordinary citizens. Monks who rely on alms stood up in protest on behalf of the citizens. (...)

In Myanmar, it is customary for men to enter the priesthood at least once during their lifetime. As writer Michio Takeyama (1903-1984) described in his novel "Biruma no Tategoto" (The Harp of Burma), Buddhism is the spiritual mainstay of the people. The fact that monks, who distance themselves from mundane affairs, stood up in protest shows just how precarious everyday civilian life has become.

In return, DVB is reporting that local residents of all religions have been defending Bhuddist monks and thwarting attacks on monasteries, which have been targeted by the military:

In Rangoon, troops encountered resistance from local residents as they approached Sasana Alin Yaung, Sanana Wuntha and Min Nanda monasteries in Daw Pon and Tharkayta townships.

At Min Nanda monastery, which backs on to Pazuntaung creek, troops tried to approach from both land and water but retreated when they saw the strength of local resistance.

"There were not only Buddhist people but also Muslims, Christians and Hindus defending the monasteries," said a resident of Tharkayta township.

A similar story has been played out in other townships in Burma, as residents take action to resist government raids on monasteries.

Despite the much ballyhooed cedar, rose, and orange revolutions that turned out to be far more complex power struggles rather than purely democratic revolutions, there appears to be something qualitatively different about what is happening in Myanmar right now -- a much more organic galvanization of the population -- though I think we lack sufficient information to substantiate it. Nevertheless, the accounts above should provide sufficient cause to hope that a new social contract will arise out the battle unfolding in the country.

--Sameer Lalwani

http://www.thewashingtonnote.com/

US prison population at all time high

By Naomi Spencer
29 September 2007

The “war on terror” is endlessly peddled by the American political establishment as a crusade for freedom and liberty around the world. Yet, as the latest prison figures again demonstrate, far from representing freedom, justice and democracy, the United States is notorious for its propensity to jail its own population.

The US incarcerates a far higher percentage of its population than any other country, with its prison population accounting for fully a quarter of the world’s prisoners. In 2006, newly released Census Bureau data indicate, the US incarcerated population stood at 2.1 million. According to separate figures put out by the Justice Department, by June 30, 2006, the prison population stood at well over 2.2 million.

No other country in the world comes close to these numbers. The far more populous China ranks second, with a prison population of approximately 1.5 million. The number of incarcerated persons in the US now exceeds the population of all but three cities in the country, and is equivalent to the combined populations of Seattle, Boston, Atlanta and Washington, D.C.

The number of inmates held in US state and federal prisons in 2006 was more than double the 1990 prison population, according to the Census Bureau’s American Community Survey. The research and advocacy group The Sentencing Project estimates that in 2006, one in every 133 Americans was in prison or jail. Excluding the child population from the total brings this ratio close to one in every 100 adults behind bars.

Minorities continue to make up an enormously disproportionate percentage of the incarcerated. Approximately 41 percent of the adult correctional population were black in 2006, and 19 percent were Hispanic. One in every nine black men between the ages of 25 and 29 were incarcerated in 2006, as were one in 26 Hispanic and one in 59 white men of the same age group. According to the Justice Department’s Bureau of Justice Statistics, black men have a one in three chance of serving time in prison at some point in their lives; Hispanic men have a 17 percent chance; white men have a 6 percent chance.

The Census survey also found an increase of the female incarcerated population. As a percentage of the total prison population, women increased from 8 percent in 1990 to 10 percent in 2006.

Since the late 1970s, the prison population has increased sixfold, and the number of people on probation or parole has also skyrocketed. The overall correctional population (either in prison or on parole) has grown during this time from 1.8 million to well over 7 million people. Another 4.3 million ex-convicts live in the US. The total population of the United States is approximately 300 million.

The figures from the Justice Department and Census measure the number of prisoners at any given time. However, during the course of one year, a far larger number of people spend at least some time behind bars. According to the 2007 Public Safety Performance review by the Pew Charitable Trusts, more than 600,000 people are admitted to state and federal prisons, and more than 10 million spend time in local jails, over the course of any given year.

Driving this increase in prisoners has been a shift from rehabilitative to punitive “tough on crime” policies. The incarceration rate increased dramatically beginning in the early 1990s, in tandem with a drastic growth in inequality and the dismantling of social programs. While the rich amass ever-higher concentrations of wealth, social infrastructure and economic opportunities have deteriorated.

The crumbling of industry, education, healthcare and drug rehabilitation programs in America finds its consequences in all the social ills plaguing society’s poorest layers—unemployment, debt, despair, addiction, homelessness—and gives rise to domestic disturbances, theft, and property and drug crimes. The response of the ruling elite to these problems is more prisons.

Another unsurprising consequence of this economic polarization has been an increasingly aggressive policing of minor crimes. State legislatures have enacted laws that have removed much of the judicial system’s ability to make independent decisions outside of severe sentencing laws. Drug possession, child support non-payment, shoplifting, and other various minor offenses catch more of the poor in “three-strikes laws,” which mandate long sentences for repeat offenders.

At the same time, funding has been redirected away from public defense and rehabilitation programs and toward prosecution and punishment. Even as violent crime has dropped over the past decade, longer and more rigid mandatory sentences for non-violent offenses have resulted in the huge growth in incarceration.

As Allen Beck, deputy director of the Bureau of Justice Statistics, told the Washington Post, “The growth wasn’t really about increasing crime but how we chose to respond to crime. When you increase the likelihood of a person going to prison for a conviction, and then you increase how long you keep them there, it has a profound effect.”

According to a new report from The Sentencing Project, drug arrests have more than tripled in the last 25 years, to a record 1.8 million arrests in 2005. The so-called war on drugs has pushed the number of incarcerated drug offenders up by 1,100 percent since 1980. During this same period, rates of drug use declined by half.

The overwhelming majority of drug arrests are for possession of marijuana, and most persons in prison for a drug offense have no history of violence or high-level drug selling activity.

The racial disparity is enormous in drug sentencing as well. The Sentencing Project reports that while blacks constitute 14 percent of regular drug users in the US, they make up 37 percent of those arrested for drug offenses and 56 percent of those held in state prison for drugs.

The number of prisoners held without being sentenced is also on the rise, according to the Justice Department figures. In 2006, 62 percent of jail inmates were awaiting trial, up from 51 percent in 1990 and 56 percent in 2000. Most were arrested on drug offenses.

The number of prisoners held in private, for-profit facilities rose by more than 10 percent in one year. This represents a dramatic leap in the growth of the for-profit prison industry that dovetails with the growth of police state measures at large. The prison industry—the network of private companies that operate the prison system—now has annual revenues of approximately $40 billion a year.

Virtually all of these prisons are horrifically overcrowded. State prisons were operating at 99 to 113 percent of capacity, and the federal prison system was operating at 134 percent of capacity. This compounds the dangers and brutality of prison life. Inmates are exposed to physical and sexual assault, and put at risk for diseases such as HIV/AIDS or developing mental illness.

See Also:
Massive US prison population continues to grow
[7 December 2006]
US prison population continues to soar in 2005
[5 June 2006]
US: record numbers in prison and on parole
[3 August 2004]