Fodder happens
The Army reported on Friday that it had fallen short of its recruitment goals for a fourth consecutive month. The Marines managed to meet their recruitment target for May, but that was their first successful month this year.
Scrambling to fill its ranks, the Army is signing up more high school dropouts and lower-scoring applicants.
......There's something frankly embarrassing about a government offering trinkets to children to persuade them to go off and fight - and perhaps die - in a war that their nation should never have started in the first place. It's highly questionable whether most high school kids are equipped to make an informed decision about joining the military, which is exactly why they're targeted. The additional knowledge and maturity gained in the first few years after high school make it easier for a young man or woman to make a wiser, more meaningful choice, pro or con.
Tampa is the last civilian stop for many of those high school kids who are too ill equipped to do anything else. Tampa's Military Entrance Processing Station is located on Waters Avenue and processes recruits for all branches of the military from 19 Florida counties. The MEPS maintains a suite of rooms at a Tampa hotel where recruits are put up for the night prior to their final departure.
Matt joined after high school in Winter Haven. He played wide receiver for the football team and was prom king, he said. The Army seemed like a better way to grow up than playing drums for his band, Heavy Soul.
Morgan Parr, the skinny kid from Port Charlotte who's sitting in the sand, couldn't pass the vision test for the Air Force job he wanted. So he's off to the Army as well, hoping to make special operations. He's a tough-looking 18, and he spits patriotism nearly every time he opens his mouth.
Alphonso graduated last year, then lingered around Casselberry with his cousins. He was searching for productivity when he ran into the Air Force.
Sean, who still has a hint of the Virgin Islands in his voice, is trying to get to college.
......The kids here joined for a variety of reasons. Morgan grew up with Air Force parents and is the only one here to sign up because he thinks America is doing right in Iraq.
``Saddam Hussein is a bad dude, man,'' he says. ``It doesn't matter if he had weapons of mass destruction when we went in. Odds are, he had them sometime.''
Alphonso disagrees. ``We're like mercenaries for the U.S. empire,'' he says.
``To tell you the truth,'' Morgan says, ``I wouldn't be opposed to invading some of the weaker countries.''
Matt laughs.
``Y'all are too into the politics,'' Matt says. ``The only reason I joined is because I saw that guy get his head cut off on the Internet and I saw the World Trade Centers fall.''
``There were no Iraqis in the plane that hit the Twin Towers,'' Alphonso says, shyly determined. ``But there were 16 Saudis. Why aren't we invading them?''
``All I know,'' Morgan says, ``is if you let a bully onto your lawn, the next day he's gonna be on your porch.''
``There were no Iraqis on our lawn, man,'' Alphonso says. ``They were 100 blocks away.''
``Sorry,'' Morgan says, ``but my views are a lot different than most.''
``We've killed 100,000 Iraqis. More than that,'' Alphonso says.
Morgan looks at the girls.
``I hate to say it, but I really don't have a conscience,'' he says. ``I don't. If a man is not willing to die for a cause, he doesn't have a cause to live for.''
``What about God, man,'' Sean says. ``Don't God have something to do with it?''
``I don't believe in God,'' Morgan says.
Another plane rumbles overhead.
``The world would be overpopulated if we didn't have the military,'' Alphonso says.
``This war don't even matter,'' Sean says. ``The biggest war in America is mental slavery. That's the biggest war going on right now. America can control you by what they put into your brain. The government, man, they can do anything. For instance: Welfare.''
``What are you talking about?'' Matt says.
``In America, poor people get on welfare and they come to think that they never have to work again.''
Eyes roll.
``The thing that ticks me off - we go in and then all of a sudden there's this backlash,'' Morgan says. ``People don't want us there? Whatever, man. You don't like this country, get the hell out.''
These kids are clueless. Except for Alfonso, and he's avoiding combat by joining the Air Force.
Sean is either too poor or too stupid to get into college, but he thinks all his troubles are due to those wicked welfare mothers.
Matt has been brainwashed by Rush Limbaugh and Fox News – he thinks that avenging the gruesome death of a mercenary who went to Iraq solely for profit is somehow noble, and he feels that the Iraqi people should pay dearly for an act for which they bear absolutely no responsibility. Unlike the chickenhawks on Fox, though, at least Matt is willing to go and fight the war that he believes in.
Morgan just wants to kill people while working toward the eventual homogenization of American thought.
They are all in the final hours of the Delayed Entry Program (DEP) in which recruiters sign up kids as young as 17 for a future commitment, up to a year in advance of the actual reporting date.
Recruiters use DEP to grab kids when they're vulnerable, and although the legal process to extract oneself from a DEP commitment is simply writing a letter of explanation, many kids who change their minds before reporting are bullied, intimidated, and lied to in an effort to pull them further into the system, where it becomes ever more difficult to turn back.
When Gerard told his recruiter he'd changed his mind, Smith "made charts with two plans: my life in 5 years, the Marine Corps in 5 years. Then he took a gun and shot my life full of holes." When Gerard persisted, "he read a paragraph from the Michigan penal code: I could face a year in jail or a $500 fine."
The next day, Gerard received a note in class to see the school guidance counselor and Smith was there. "He said it's OK, I'll change your job if you want," (a reference to the fact that Gerard had scored high enough to be assigned to intelligence) and then Smith invited him to a Delayed Entry Program barbecue.
By then, Gerard knew: "I didn't want to leave my family, and I wanted to go to college. Them telling me I HAD to be there made me hate it worse."
Fortunately, his accounting teacher, a veteran, taught him to press his case up the chain of command. When Gerard heard, "No one's going to be able to help you," he responded with, "Sure, can I have the number of your superior?" When he got to the captain and the latter said, "You can't back out, and the only one above me is the Commandant of the Marine Corps," Gerard said, "Well, can I get his name and number?"
In the meantime Gerard had taken the advice of CCCO's Alex Doty and Eric LeCompte. He wrote a letter requesting separation in April, with plenty of time until his scheduled June 21 ship date.
"I was getting ready to go to my graduation when the call came," says Gerard. "Smith was out of town. This was another sergeant, telling me my ship date had been moved up to June 15." The recruiters even came to his door but Gerard told them to go read his letter.
A week went by, and Smith returned to Michigan: "You know, you're still on for the twenty-first."
When Gerard denied this, Smith took Gerard to the very station commander, a major, to whom Gerard had written his letter. The major told Gerard, "If you do this, you'll never be able to get government loans. You'll never be certified as a CPA, you'll face the consequences. Make no mistake - you will be at boot camp."
Smith added to the scare tactics by hinting that Gerard would face a dishonorable discharge and then he leaned over and said, "I'll tell you something I never tell anyone. Listen, get on that plane, go to boot camp. When you get there, tell the drill instructor. I guarantee you'll be back in 20 days."
Convinced he had no choice, Gerard went with Smith. "We go down to the Ramada right outside the MEPS center, spent the night therethen he woke me up at 4 a.m. to go down to the station in Troy."
When Gerard weighed a quarter of a pound over the military's weight requirement, Smith said, "Then we have to spend another night in the Hotel. Just make sure you don't eat."
Gerard overheard another recruiter being told to give his 11-pound-over-the-weight-limit-recruit ex-lax. When Gerard told Smith this was all garbage and he wanted to go home, Smith started swearing: "F**k this, you decided to go. You don't have a choice, we'll call the sheriff and we'll fly you there."
......Finally, the moment of truth arrived. "I'm half an hour from having to go swear in when they hand me a paper that says I request to be put on active duty."
Gerard asked, "What happens if I don't sign this?""We'll hit you with the Michigan penal code."
"Look! won't sign."
Smith called Gerard's mother. "Tell her you're going to jail."
Amazingly, even with his mother crying, "Just sign the paper," Gerard managed to sit tight.
Finally Smith called in a gunnery sergeant, who told Gerard: "You got two choices, boot camp or jail."
"I'm not refusing to go," Gerard said. "I'm just not requesting this."
"OK, Call your mom and tell her you're going to jail."
Gerard was essentially saved from his ordeal by a lawyer called in by the Central Committee for Conscientious Objectors, but his experience is hardly unique. Recently, a teen who was doing his best to resist the advances of overzealous recruiters was actually kidnapped.
The next step of Axel's misadventure came when he heard about a cool "chin-ups" contest in Bellingham, where the prize was a free Xbox. The now 18-year-old Skagit Valley Community College student dragged his tail feathers home uncharacteristically late that night. And, in the morning, Marcia learned the Marines had hosted the event and "then had him out all night, drilling him to join."
A single mom with a meager income, Marcia raised her kids on the farm where, until recently, she grew salad greens for restaurants.
Axel's father, a Marine Corps vet who served in Vietnam, died when Axel was 4.
Clearly the recruiters knew all that and more.
"You don't want to be a burden to your mom," they told him. "Be a man." "Make your father proud." Never mind that, because of his own experience in the service, Marcia says enlistment for his son is the last thing Axel's dad would have wanted.
The next weekend, when Marcia went to Seattle for the Folklife Festival and Axel was home alone, two recruiters showed up at the door.
Axel repeated the family mantra, but he was feeling frazzled and worn down by then. The sergeant was friendly but, at the same time, aggressively insistent. This time, when Axel said, "Not interested," the sarge turned surly, snapping, "You're making a big (bleeping) mistake!"
Next thing Axel knew, the same sergeant and another recruiter showed up at the LaConner Brewing Co., the restaurant where Axel works. And before Axel, an older cousin and other co-workers knew or understood what was happening, Axel was whisked away in a car.
"They said we were going somewhere but I didn't know we were going all the way to Seattle," Axel said.
Just a few tests. And so many free opportunities, the recruiters told him.
He could pursue his love of chemistry. He could serve anywhere he chose and leave any time he wanted on an "apathy discharge" if he didn't like it. And he wouldn't have to go to Iraq if he didn't want to.
At about 3:30 in the morning, Alex was awakened in the motel and fed a little something. Twelve hours later, without further sleep or food, he had taken a battery of tests and signed a lot of papers he hadn't gotten a chance to read. "Just formalities," he was told. "Sign here. And here. Nothing to worry about."
By then Marcia had "freaked out."
She went to the Burlington recruiting center where the door was open but no one was home. So she grabbed all the cards and numbers she could find, including the address of the Seattle-area testing center.
Then, with her grown daughter in tow, she high-tailed it south, frantically phoning Axel whose cell phone had been confiscated "so he wouldn't be distracted during tests."
Axel's grandfather was in the hospital dying, she told the people at the desk. He needed to come home right away. She would have said just about anything.
But, even after being told her son would be brought right out, her daughter spied him being taken down a separate hall and into another room. So she dashed down the hall and grabbed him by the arm.
"They were telling me I needed to 'be a man' and stand up to my family," Axel said.
What he needed, it turned out, was a lawyer.
Five minutes and $250 after an attorney called the recruiters, Axel's signed papers and his cell phone were in the mail.
Around Tampa, where recruiters have also been known to stretch the truth, the Hillsborough County School System has been selling student contact information to the military for years. More recently, since 2002, Federal law has mandated that student information from all public high schools be freely shared with recruiters. They tend to concentrate on schools with large numbers of poor and minority students.
Two private high schools also are on Hawkins’ map: Jesuit and The Cambridge School. His access to them is limited, though.
John Crumbley, an assistant principal at Jesuit, says his students plan for college. The campus welcomes representatives from the service academies, including West Point, but not recruiters looking for enlistees.
“They want to come in all day with a truckload of pamphlets, and that’s not happening here,'’ Crumbley said.
......This underscores what some say is most wrong with the recruiting system. Recruiters look for candidates at public schools, particularly in poorer neighborhoods, where seniors are less likely to go to college and more uncertain about their futures, says Kevin Ramirez of the Central Committee for Conscientious Objectors in Philadelphia.
“Recruiting is a numbers game,'’ said Ramirez, coordinator of the organization’s Military Out Of Our Schools program. “They have information going back five, 10 years on the percentage of students from a school that enlists. They know where to look for recruits.'’
It’s clear that the frequency of recruiter visits can vary by school.
At Plant High School in south Tampa, for example, 97 percent of graduating seniors go on to college, says Principal Eric Bergholm. Military recruiters are welcome at Plant, he says, but they visit the campus only a few times a month.
At Blake High School in central Tampa, 60 percent of graduates are college-bound. Military recruiters are on campus as often as three times a week, says Principal Jacqueline Haynes.
Federal law allows parents to opt out of having their kids names given to recruiters. Parents can also excuse their children from taking the Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery (ASVAB) which is given by over 14,000 schools nationwide and used to evaluate potential fodder
A few days before her holiday break, South River High School junior Emily Hawse took a three-hour standardized test offered by military officials that suggests possible careers for students while helping to identify promising recruits.
Hawse, 16, of Davidsonville said she did not realize until the day of the exam that it had a military link. She said students were told not to go to the Edgewater school that morning if they didn't want to take the test, called the Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery.
"We couldn't go to class if we wanted to," said Hawse, who is undecided about her future but said it doesn't include the military.
Emily Hawse, a junior at South River High School, said she didn't know until the day she took the aptitude test that it was part of a Defense Department program.
......Area school and military officials defend the test as a valuable career-planning tool.
"This is actually a community service that the Department of Defense provides to help every generation of youth find where they fit in the world about them," said Chris Arendt, deputy director of accession policy at the Pentagon.
......Baltimore administers the test to seniors on a voluntary basis, generally at career and technology schools, and at schools with ROTC programs. Baltimore County makes it available to students who request it.
......The test, which has been given to recruits since 1968, measures verbal and math skills, and knowledge in areas such as automotive maintenance and repair, electronics and mechanics. It was expanded to schools at the urging of the federal Labor and Education departments, Defense Department officials say.
......Nationwide, 722,450 students took the test during the past school year, according to the Defense Department. That includes more than 8,700 Maryland students from 175 schools.
......Megan Lloyd, 16, a junior from Edgewater, said she learned about the test when a military recruiter spoke to her class. She was interested in anything that could help her decide what path to pursue and was not concerned about the military connection.
"The man who came into our social studies class made me feel comfortable about it," she said after classes one day.
"It's not like they're going to hound you about it," said fellow Edgewater resident Charlie Fischer, 16, who is considering the armed forces and college.
"Or at least, we hope not," Lloyd said.
The Objector: Home of the Central Committee for Conscientious Objectors
Not in Our Name: Stop the Military Recruiters
VFP Lawrence High School exhibit
How To Help Delayed Entry Program Members Out
update: edited for clarity
Propaganda catapult over matched by reality?
W, last week, in a rare and mistaken bit of honesty.
"See, in my line of work you got to keep repeating things over and over and over again for the truth to sink in, to kind of catapult the propaganda."
Cheney, catapulting the propaganda.
Cheney said. "The level of activity that we see today from a military standpoint, I think, will clearly decline. I think they're in the last throes, if you will, of the insurgency."
The frequency of suicide bombings here is unprecedented, exceeding that of Palestinian attacks against Israel and of other militant insurgencies, such as the Chechen rebellion in Russia. Baghdad saw five suicide bombings in a six-hour span Sunday.
Early today, three suicide bombers killed at least 16 Iraqis in blasts north of Baghdad.
The first, around 8 a.m., ripped through a restaurant in Tuz Khurmatu where the Kurdish deputy prime minister, Rosh Shawais, was having breakfast. He was unharmed but a bodyguard was among the nine killed.
In Baqubah, another blast killed the deputy head of the Diyala province governing council, Hussein Alwan Timimi, and four others.
In Kirkuk, a bomber plowed his car into a U.S. consulate convoy. Two Iraqis died and 12 were hurt, a witness said.
With U.S.-led forces now better protected with concrete blast walls and rings of concertina wire and sandbags, militants have taken to targeting Iraqi police and civilians in their bid to convince Iraqis that their new leaders can't protect them. And increasingly, Iraqis are believed to be carrying out some of the suicide attacks.
U.S. officials and Iraqi analysts say the insurgents' resources are increasing on several fronts: money to buy vehicles and explosives, expertise in wiring car and human bombs and intelligence leaks that help them target U.S. and Iraqi forces.
......"They are trying to penetrate defensive measures by conducting more complex attacks, double suicide attacks or suicide attacks combined with other weapons such as small-arms fire or mortar attacks," said Gaghan, the Navy officer.
Memorial Day
Veterans Sue Over Care At D.C. Home
A group of veterans living at the U.S. Armed Forces Retirement Home filed a class-action suit yesterday on behalf of all its residents, claiming that drastic budget cuts by the Defense Department have resulted in substandard medical care.
The suit alleges that the more than 1,000 veterans living at the Northwest Washington facility can no longer get prescriptions and regular doctor checkups at the home because of service cuts in the two years since the Defense Department installed new management.
"These cuts are affecting our health," said Homer Rutherford, one of the veterans bringing suit.
The plaintiffs said the austerity measures have put their health in danger and left them with no choice but to sue Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and the home's chief operating officer, Timothy Cox.
They said the cuts violate a federal law requiring the home to provide a minimum standard of health care on the campus off North Capitol Street that has been a veterans' sanctuary since 1851. It was formerly known as the U.S. Soldiers' and Airmen's Home.
Why does Jim Davis hate Florida families?
Actually, maybe I'm being a little too hard on Jim – maybe it's his love of big corporations, rather than his hatred of the Florida family, that spurred him to vote for the bankruptcy bill and publicly support DR-CAFTA.
The bill would make it much harder for families in distress to write off their debts and make a fresh start. Instead, many debtors would find themselves on an endless treadmill of payments.
The credit card companies say this is needed because people have been abusing the bankruptcy law, borrowing irresponsibly and walking away from debts. The facts say otherwise.
A vast majority of personal bankruptcies in the United States are the result of severe misfortune. One recent study found that more than half of bankruptcies are the result of medical emergencies. The rest are overwhelmingly the result either of job loss or of divorce.
To the extent that there is significant abuse of the system, it’s concentrated among the wealthy - including corporate executives found guilty of misleading investors - who can exploit loopholes in the law to protect their wealth, no matter how ill-gotten.
It makes it harder for average people to file for bankruptcy protection; it makes it easier for landlords to evict a bankrupt tenant; it endangers child support payments by giving a wider array of creditors a shot at post-bankruptcy income; it allows millionaires to shield an unlimited amount of value in homes and asset protection trusts; it makes it more difficult for small businesses to reorganize, while opening new loopholes for the Enrons of the world; it allows creditors to provide misleading information; and it does nothing to rein in lending abuses that frequently turn manageable debt into unmanageable crises. Even in failure, ordinary Americans do not get a level playing field.
As for DR-CAFTA ,
-CAFTA does NOT include adequate enforcement for violations of internationally recognized labor and environmental standards. It only requires enforcement of national law, which is often inadequate, and the penalty for violations is a set of modest fines, which the government pays back to itself.
-CAFTA’s worker rights protections are substantially weaker than those under current U.S. law, with higher standards (international standards) and tougher penalties (loss of trade privileges).
- CAFTA threatens the livelihoods of millions of small farmers in Central America and the Dominican Republic, while increasing domination by agricultural monopolies and hurting U.S. family farmers.
- CAFTA would prevent access to affordable life saving medicines in a region where half the population live in poverty.
- CAFTA will prohibit governments in the region from ensuring that foreign investment serves national development goals, and has a provision like NAFTA that would allow foreign corporations to sue governments that pass strong labor, public health or environmental laws.
CAFTA includes rules that promote privatization and deregulation of services including education, health care, postal service, construction, transportation and water supply. Such policies have proved particularly devastating for families living in poverty.
So, Jim, as he prepares his run for governor, seems much more concerned with the wants of powerful corporations than with the actual needs of his constituents. Call Mr. Davis and ask him why he hates Florida families.
WASHINGTON:
409 Cannon House Office Building
Washington, D.C. 20515
(202) 225-3376
FAX: (202) 225-5652DISTRICT:
3315 Henderson Boulevard
Suite 100
Tampa, Florida 33609
(813) 354-9217
Florida Toll Free: 1 (888) 266-0205
Fax: (813) 354-9514Satellite Office:
1186 62nd Avenue South
St. Petersburg, FL 33705
(727) 867-5301
FAX: (727) 867-5302
The vote may be very close, so call now.
The trade agreement that would erase tariffs between the United States and the Dominican Republic as well as Central America, opening the prospect of a vast exchange of crops and goods, once seemed to be the inevitable next step after NAFTA.
But now, a mix of influences has President Bush contemplating a losing fight for congressional approval. The problem is that the agreement's heavy tilt toward agriculture has cost DR-CAFTA, as it is known, some key GOP votes, including those of several Floridians. In addition, this latest free-trade proposal seems to be more harmed than helped by the record of the North American Free Trade Agreement, which opened economic borders between the United States, Mexico and Canada in 1994.
......Though DR-CAFTA was signed by country leaders in May last year, the Bush administration has delayed sending a bill to ratify it in Congress. Under special fast-track authority, the White House can speedily push through trade agreements, bypassing often lengthy committee proceedings that would try to amend the agreement.
"They haven't pulled the trigger because they don't want the embarrassment of losing," said Lori Wallach, a former trade lawyer and DR-CAFTA opponent who is director of Public Citizen Global Trade Watch. "There's never been a situation where an agreement has sat around this long."
Analysts say the blame lies with the poor track record of DR-CAFTA's big brother. NAFTA, which took effect more than a decade ago.
"It's very hard to make a case that NAFTA has had any benefits," said Mark Weisbrot, an economist at the Center for Economic Policy and Research in Washington, which is critical of U.S. trade deals.
Indeed, it's hard to pin down conclusive data on NAFTA's effect. Business interests highlight increased cross-border trade and a boom in the garment assembly industry in Mexico. But grass-roots activists stress job losses in the United States. Tomato and pepper farmers in Hillsborough County were among those hardest hit.
Whatever the truth, most agree there is a widespread perception that NAFTA has failed to live up to expectations. As a result, new agreements are met with less enthusiasm.
Several key Hispanic groups who backed NAFTA in the '90s are opposed to DR-CAFTA or have declined to support it.
"These agreements are a very hard sell," Weisbrot said. "They are incredibly unpopular."
Even so, the Bush administration says it intends to proceed as early as late May. "Over the next few months, one of our trade priorities will be the free trade agreement with Central America and the Dominican Republic," Commerce Secretary Carlos Gutierrez said at a March 30 board meeting of the National Association of Manufacturers in Miami-Dade County.
But it remains doubtful that the deal has the votes in Congress. A number of Republican members have broken ranks with the White House, including Rep. Ginny Brown-Waite of Crystal River and Rep. Mark Foley of West Palm Beach.
"There's no question that members remain concerned over the impact of NAFTA," Foley said after a committee hearing attended by Central American trade and labor ministers Thursday. "It's one of those steep inclines for the administration to climb."
Even so, the battle in Congress is just getting started, and there is time for compromise.
"There's maybe some tweaking that could be done" to make it more palatable for Floridians, said Foley, who represents a heavy sugar-growing constituency. "We'd like to be helpful. If they took sugar off the table, it would certainly help."
On the other hand, Democrat Rep. Jim Davis of Tampa says he is inclined to support free trade with Latin America. DR-CAFTA presents "important business opportunities" for Tampa Bay. "It's important to have ties with these countries," he said.
It is vehemently opposed by a statewide coalition of farm worker, labor, environmental and church groups. Labor activists say the deal fails to offer protection to workers in countries where workers rights are not enforced. Cheap U.S. exports could wipe out Central American farmers, raising unemployment and migration.
"Our opposition is based on the human factor and the practical effects of NAFTA," said Eric Rubin, state coordinator for the St. Petersburg-based Florida Fair Trade Coalition. The coalition has campaigned statewide via hundreds of thousands of mailings and weekly speaking engagements.
Rubin says DR-CAFTA enjoys little public support. "It's only a small and powerful segment of the business community that back it."
CAFTA must be stopped
CAFTA, now known as DR-CAFTA, is an anti-worker, pro-US corporation “free” trade agreement much beloved by those who pushed NAFTA and other treaties that seek to grease the skids of exploitation of South American labor while enriching a very elite and wealthy ownership class.
The Tampa Tribune and various Chambers of Commerce are, unsurprisingly, all for it.
What's good for Nicaragua is good for Florida - and, in particular, the Tampa Bay area.
That's the message Nicaragua President Enrique Bolanos Geyer presented Tuesday when he spoke with business leaders in Tampa to shore up support for the proposed Dominican Republic-Central American Free Trade Agreement.
He said the proposed trade treaty, better known simply as CAFTA, would create sorely needed jobs in Nicaragua and other countries, would expand markets to American businesses, and beef up the already healthy trade ties between CAFTA members and Florida, he said.
Some would tend to disagree with those statements.
CAFTA is modeled after the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). NAFTA has been a disaster for small farmers and working people in Canada, the United States, and Mexico. Hundreds of thousands of jobs lost, family farms foreclosed, and public interest laws overturned or challenged in secret NAFTA courts. Despite this dismal record, the Bush administration is seeking to expand NAFTA to Central America and the rest of the Western Hemisphere.
From the beginning of CAFTA negotiations, the Bush administration has been clear that completion of CAFTA is crucial to move the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA) negotiations forward faster, by adding extra pressure to countries like Brazil, Venezuela and Argentina to either accede to U.S. demands, or be left out.
CAFTA is NAFTA Extended to Central America
All the same issues human and labor rights organizations have with NAFTA (and FTAA) are present in CAFTA, including:
Secrecy Instead of Transparency: No formal public input or oversight in the negotiations.
Corporate Domination Over Democracy: At the expense of democracy and people's right to self-rule, CAFTA would likely give corporations powers to object to barriers to free trade, including laws people enact for their own protection. For example, NAFTA established the right for companies to sue governments over public-interest laws that may limit their profits. This right has been employed 27 times by companies since 1994.
Increased Inequality: A minority of rich companies and wealthy stockholders will benefit from reduced costs. The poor will get poorer and more people will move into poverty: workers will get lower pay and lose their jobs while shouldering higher costs of living as more services are privatized.
Disappearing Public Services: Resources such as education, health care, energy, and water utilities owned by everyone in a community will more likely become owned by corporations. This could put essential public services out of the hands of many people. For example, When Bolivia privatized its water utility, water rates increased 200 percent, leading to riots that resulted in six deaths.
Reduced Labor Rights: Labor laws such as those that protest worker's safety can also be challenged and the "race to the bottom" for pay will likely hurt workers in all countries involved in CAFTA.
Negative Agricultural Impact: Increased corporate domination of farms and possible devastation of family farms and farmers in the US and Central America.
Environmental Destruction: Environmental laws are just one types of barriers to trade that can be gutted. This decreases costs to companies but increases costs to local communities which suffer more health problems as a result of pollution.
W lies, America yawns
In July 2002, lots of people saw the writing on the wall and assumed that W. had already decided to illegally invade and occupy Iraq using any justifications that could be bent to fit his goal, but W maintained that he had not yet made up his mind, and absent any proof to the contrary, he was given the benefit of the doubt by most Americans.
A secret British memo emerged last week and it seems to prove that W knowingly deceived the American public and the world, since by the summer of 2002 the invasion was essentially a done deal.
Juan Cole has the memo and some commentary.
“C [Dearlove] reported on his recent talks in Washington. There was a perceptible shift in attitude. Military action was now seen as inevitable. Bush wanted to remove Saddam, through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy.”
It is not surprising on the face of it that Bush had decided on the Iraq war by summer of 2002. It it is notable that Dearlove noticed a change in views on the subject from earlier visits. By summer of 2002, the Afghanistan war had wound down and al-Qaeda was on the run, so Bush no longer felt vulnerable and was ready to go forward with his long-cherished project of an Iraq War. What is notable is that all this was not what Bush was telling us.
Bush was lying to the American people at the time and saying that no final decision had been made on the war.
Godfrey Sperling of the Christian Science Monitor could write on August 27, 2002, "Indeed, Bush has said he welcomes a 'debate' on Iraq from those in Congress and from the public. But he has made it clear that he will make his decision based on what his intelligence people are telling him."
But Dearlove's report makes it clear that Bush had already decided absolutely on a war already the previous month, and that he had managed to give British intelligence the firm impression that he intended to shape the intelligence to support such a war. So poor Sperling was lied to twice. Any "debate" was meaningless if the president had already decided. And he wasn't waiting to make his decision in the light of the intelligence. He was going to tell the intelligence professionals to what conclusion they had to come. "But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy."
So, this is rather incontrovertible proof that W lied his way into a quagmire that has killed hundreds of thousands of Americans and Iraqis, but, outside of the blogosphere, the story has been mostly ignored in this country.
Professor Cole has much more , including the full text of the memo.
Democracy rising
Bomber Posing as Job Applicant Kills at Least 45 in Iraq
A suicide bomber pretending to be a job applicant blew himself up at a police recruitment center in the Kurdish provincial capital of Erbil today, killing at least 45 prospective recruits and wounding more than 200 other people, Iraqi officials said, as insurgents pressed an all-out effort to destabilize Iraq's infant democratic government.
"All I can remember is a huge explosion from behind which lifted me off my feet," Abdul-Razaq Sarmab, 17, told the Reuters news agency from his hospital bed. Mr. Sarmab, who received shrapnel wounds in the attack, had been waiting in line to register to join the police force.
Iraq: 5 Americans dead
Shouldn't this be on every newspaper's front page?
5 US Soldiers Killed in 24 Hours, 1 Wounded
Lets see... if I click on the NYT article with the headline about a freed reporter, and I read all the way to the end of the article, and then I keep reading, there seems to be something tacked onto the very end there...
Five American Marines Killed
In Anbar Province, the heart of the Sunni insurgency, five American marines with the First Marine Expeditionary Force were killed in separate incidents, the United States military command in Baghdad said Sunday.
They even printed another coupla paragraphs, for a grand total of 135 words, including header, hidden at the end of a much longer article about Najaf.
WaPo has nothing at all about Iraq on its front web page.
I know that this isnt exactly a scientific survey, and that headlines and articles may change later today, but this illustrates just how well Ws insistence on symbolically handing sovereignty to his Iraqi puppets earlier this summer has worked exactly as planned: American news coverage is down significantly, and with election and Olympics news further sapping attention, odds are that most citizens will remain blissfully unaware that American troops are still being killed at alarming rates.
How alarming? The fatality rate since the symbolic turnover has actually increased to over 2 killed per day.
Piggies comin’ to Tampa
TrueMajority Pig mobile coming to Tampa
Contact Information:
Norwood Orrick
813-226-2550
norwood@blogwood.com
www.BlogWood.com (local updates)
www.TrueMajority.org (general info)
Event Information:
What: TrueMajority Pig Mobile
Where: All over the Tampa Bay area
Date: July 18 - July 31
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: July 13, 2004
TrueMajority Pig mobile coming to Tampa
Tampa, FL - The PantsOnFire Mobile-the 12-foot statue of President Bush with his pants aflame- was a big hit in Tampa, garnering media attention and turning heads on land and in the air as local volunteers led a procession of vehicles over the Gandy bridge, crossing the hump just as Air Force One flew overhead with George W. Bush aboard. This was the first time the President and the statue had crossed paths. George (the statue) is now on his way West to spread the truth about Bush's lies.
Following in his wake is the Pig Mobile, another whimsical art car by TrueMajority. The Pig Mobile consists of three different-sized piggy banks strung together to illustrate just how big a financial disaster the Iraq War has turned out to be.
The largest pig (by far) shows the financial cost ($200 billion) of America's attack on Iraq, including the projected minimum cost of reconstruction. The smaller pig illustrates how much the federal government spends on K-12 education ($34 billion). And the third pig, which is a wee little pig, shows America's dedication to lessening world hunger and poverty ($10 billion).
These piggies feature an oinking soundtrack and are made of striking pink fiberglass based on a full-sized Chevy van towing a trailer.
The goal is to keep the mess in Iraq on people's minds and to hold President Bush accountable for it-even if the media does not report the facts on the costs of America's attack on Iraq. And there's no better way to understand the giant numbers involved than to compare them to how little our government finds to spend on stuff we all care about-like schools and world hunger.
Local volunteers will be driving the Pig Mobile all around the Bay Area from July 18 - 31.
October July surprise
This spring, the administration significantly increased its pressure on Pakistan to kill or capture Osama bin Laden, his deputy, Ayman Al Zawahiri, or the Taliban's Mullah Mohammed Omar, all of whom are believed to be hiding in the lawless tribal areas of Pakistan. A succession of high-level American officials--from outgoing CIA Director George Tenet to Secretary of State Colin Powell to Assistant Secretary of State Christina Rocca to State Department counterterrorism chief Cofer Black to a top CIA South Asia official--have visited Pakistan in recent months to urge General Pervez Musharraf's government to do more in the war on terrorism. In April, Zalmay Khalilzad, the American ambassador to Afghanistan, publicly chided the Pakistanis for providing a "sanctuary" for Al Qaeda and Taliban forces crossing the Afghan border. "The problem has not been solved and needs to be solved, the sooner the better," he said.
This public pressure would be appropriate, even laudable, had it not been accompanied by an unseemly private insistence that the Pakistanis deliver these high-value targets (HVTs) before Americans go to the polls in November. The Bush administration denies it has geared the war on terrorism to the electoral calendar. "Our attitude and actions have been the same since September 11 in terms of getting high-value targets off the street, and that doesn't change because of an election," says National Security Council spokesman Sean McCormack. But The New Republic has learned that Pakistani security officials have been told they must produce HVTs by the election. According to one source in Pakistan's powerful Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), "The Pakistani government is really desperate and wants to flush out bin Laden and his associates after the latest pressures from the U.S. administration to deliver before the [upcoming] U.S. elections." Introducing target dates for Al Qaeda captures is a new twist in U.S.-Pakistani counterterrorism relations--according to a recently departed intelligence official, "no timetable[s]" were discussed in 2002 or 2003--but the November election is apparently bringing a new deadline pressure to the hunt. Another official, this one from the Pakistani Interior Ministry, which is responsible for internal security, explains, "The Musharraf government has a history of rescuing the Bush administration. They now want Musharraf to bail them out when they are facing hard times in the coming elections." (These sources insisted on remaining anonymous. Under Pakistan's Official Secrets Act, an official leaking information to the press can be imprisoned for up to ten years.)
A third source, an official who works under ISI's director, Lieutenant General Ehsan ul-Haq, informed tnr that the Pakistanis "have been told at every level that apprehension or killing of HVTs before [the] election is [an] absolute must." What's more, this source claims that Bush administration officials have told their Pakistani counterparts they have a date in mind for announcing this achievement: "The last ten days of July deadline has been given repeatedly by visitors to Islamabad and during [ul-Haq's] meetings in Washington." Says McCormack: "I'm aware of no such comment." But according to this ISI official, a White House aide told ul-Haq last spring that "it would be best if the arrest or killing of [any] HVT were announced on twenty-six, twenty-seven, or twenty-eight July"--the first three days of the Democratic National Convention in Boston.