Honduras Settled?

Agreement to Restore Zelaya, if Honored, Will Be a Victory for Democracy in the Hemisphere, CEPR Co-Director Says

For Immediate Release: October 30, 2009

Washington, D.C. - News of a deal that would effectively end the coup d'etat in Honduras and restore democratically elected President Manuel Zelaya to office would be a "victory for democracy in the hemisphere" resulting from the continued resistance of the Honduran people and pressure from Latin American governments, Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR) Co-Director Mark Weisbrot said today. The deal reportedly includes a plan for a "unity government," a "verification commission" to be made up of two respected international figures and two respected national figures to enforce the terms of the agreement, recognition of the planned November 29 elections, and a truth commission to investigate the coup d'etat and subsequent events. According to negotiations agreed by both sides, the Honduran congress must approve Zelaya's reinstatement.

The coup regime - and regime head Roberto Micheletti in particular - has been erratic and unpredictable in its approach to the negotiations, having edged close to an agreement before, only to reverse course at the last minute.

"If the coup government sticks to the agreement and Zelaya returns to office, then it will be a victory for democracy in the Western Hemisphere," Weisbrot said. "This shows that international pressure really matters. Despite the fact that the U.S. blocked stronger action by the Organization of American States, it ultimately had to go along with the rest of the hemisphere."

Last week, Marco Aurelio Garcia, the top foreign affairs advisor to Brazilian president Lula da Silva said, "I believe the United States could put more pressure on the putschists."

"This shows that Latin America is not going back to the days when U.S.-trained and funded military forces could overturn the will of the electorate," Weisbrot said.

Weisbrot also noted the importance of the Honduran resistance movement in achieving an apparent resolution to the crisis that favored democracy over dictatorship: "The Honduran people never gave up, defying repression every day to demonstrate in favor of democracy. The National Resistance Front was disciplined and organized." This also helped make it clear that any elections held under the dictatorship would never be seen as legitimate.

Weisbrot noted that there were important political divisions within the Honduran elite: "[Conservative, National Party candidate] Porfirio Lobo wants the elections to be considered legitimate, since he's projected to win."

The Obama administration did not initially condemn the coup, and in the nearly four months since the coup occurred never made a legal determination as to whether a military coup had actually transpired. Such a determination would require, under the U.S. Foreign Appropriations Act, a cut off of all forms of non-humanitarian aid.

The administration wavered back and forth in its support for Zelaya's return. While it did enact some pressure on the coup regime through the freezing of visas and limited cuts in aid; on September 28, the U.S. blocked the OAS from passing a resolution that would have committed the OAS member countries from recognizing the November 29 elections without the prior restoration of Zelaya to office. U.S. State Department officials also condemned Zelaya's efforts to return to Honduras. When Zelaya first attempted to return in July, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton commented that his actions were "reckless". On August 4, the State Department sent a letter to Senator Richard Lugar that seemed to blame Zelaya for the coup. Just a few weeks ago, U.S. Ambassador to the Organization of American States, Lewis W. Anselem said "The return of Zelaya absent an agreement is irresponsible and foolish."

But Zelaya's return to Honduras was clearly a catalyst to this negotiated settlement.

Update: Single-Payer Sit-ins a Success!

Dear Matt,
Yesterday, the next wave of the Mobilization for Health Care for All began with great success. See below for a list of media coverage of the actions.

In 11 cities across the country, hundreds of everyday Americans who want Medicare for All confronted the insurance companies and demanded that they redirect the money they're spending to control our democracy to pay for the care they deny to their members. Almost every company refused to even talk to us, and 37 people were arrested including doctor Matt Hendrickson at a Cigna office in Glendale, California. Dozens more - like the 30 people who blockaded the Blue Cross office in San Francisco for hours - sat in but weren't arrested. In Rhode Island, however, the protestors who joined cancer patient Robert Darling in occupying the UnitedHealthcare office won the first concessions of our campaign - a company representative agreed to give an answer to Robert about paying for his previous bone marrow transplant within 24 hours and to arrange a meeting for the group with the UnitedHealthcare CEO within a week! After 115 arrests in 18 cities, these companies are starting to feel the heat of our movement. And with more than 900 people now signed up to sit-in, this battle is just beginning.

Today, the Mobilization continued in Louisville, Kentucky and Baltimore, Maryland. The brave folks in Louisville are in the 9th hour of their sit-in inside the Humana headquarters as we send out this email. Humana is trying to wait them out, but may are prepared to stay overnight if they have to.

In Baltimore, four people were arrested at a CareFirst (Blue Cross) office including two doctors. One of those doctors, Margaret Flowers of the "Baucus 8," has withheld her name and is planning to stay in jail until the CEO of CareFirst, Chet Burrell, agrees to a public meeting with her.

Please call Mr. Burrell immediately and regularly at 410-528-2222 to demand that he agree to meet publicly with Margaret.
You can also email CareFirst by going to http://www.carefirst.com/email/html/ContactMediaRelations.html. Send the following message in your email:

I am writing to urge CEO Chet Burrell to agree to a public meeting with Dr. Margaret Flowers who was arrested at the CareFirst office in Baltimore while demanding to meet with Mr. Burrell about CareFirst business practices. She is going to stay in jail until Mr. Burrell agrees to a public meeting with her. CareFirst must publicly account for the serious concerns that citizens have about your company's practices.

Also, please donate generously today so we can be prepared to pay any bail that is set for Margaret's release. She decided to risk arrest and stay in jail despite a possible 6 month jail sentence for violating probation from her previous arrest in the fight for real health care reform - let's show her that we've got her back. Please donate today to support Margaret and post messages of support for her at our Facebook page (we'll read all messages to her over the phone when she calls from jail).

The Mobilization continues in Philadelphia tomorrow, and in more cities across the country next week. Click here for updated lists of all the upcoming actions and info about how you can plug in and participate. The insurance companies, the politicians in their pockets, and even some of the corporate media apparently want our movement to go away. But it's just getting started and spreading across America. Let's show them we're not going anywhere and we won't stop until health care is a right for everyone in America.

Thanks for everything you do.

- Katie, Kevin, Kai, Julia, Lacy, and the Mobilization team


Press Coverage from 10/28:
San Francisco Chronicle:
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/blogs/chronrx/detail?&entry_id=50532

South Florida Sun-Sentinel
http://www.sun-sentinel.com/news/broward/sunrise/sfl-insurance-sit-in-bn102809,1,4196723.story

NJ.com (Star-Ledger / Trenton Times / Jersey Journal blog)
http://blog.nj.com/njv_bob_braun/2009/10/7_prosters_arrested_after_bloc.html

projo.com
(Providence Journal blog):
http://newsblog.projo.com/2009/10/protesters-occupy-lobby-at-uni.html

Glendale News-Press:
http://www.glendalenewspress.com/articles/2009/10/28/news/gnp-sitin102909.art.txt

National Public Radio, Topics
http://topics.npr.org/photo/0fbsfkh3Qq8CV

Democracy Now:
http://www.democracynow.org/2009/10/28/headlines

Free Speech Radio News:
http://www.fsrn.org/audio/activists-push-keep-public-option-health-care-reform/5664

Huffington Post:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/10/28/nine-arrested-at-wellpoin_n_337326.html

Institute for Public Accuracy:
http://www.accuracy.org/newsrelease.php?articleId=2105

Atlas Press Photo:
http://www.atlaspressphoto.com/_ATLASPRESS_/ga_multi_list.asp?ga_id=confirm&adSearch=&ga_category=0&ga_category2=0&cType=1&ga_country=&within=0&fDate=1900-01-01&tDate=2009-10-29&orient=0&color=0&photographer=&imageNo=&ds=off&orderDir=desc&ssSearchType=2&searchtype=2&searchText=Health+Care+protests+lead+to+arrests+in+downtown+NYC

La Jornada (Mexico)
http://www.jornada.unam.mx/2009/10/28/index.php?section=economia&article=044n1eco

OpEdNews (featured story about doctors, by Kevin Gosztola):
http://www.opednews.com/articles/Doctors-Risking-Arrest-for-by-Kevin-Gosztola-091028-46.html

OpEdNews (about Philadelphia rally):
http://www.opednews.com/populum/diarypage.php?did=14748

Bay Area Indymedia (quality article, good for reference):
http://www.indybay.org/newsitems/2009/10/28/18627006.php
Press Coverage from 10/29:
Southern Maryland Online
http://somd.com/news/headlines/2009/10714.shtml
Wave3.com
http://www.wave3.com/Global/story.asp?S=11410405
WFPL News
http://www.wfpl.org/2009/10/29/demonstrators-sit-in-at-humana/

Adore the Baltimore Four!

Video: “Baltimore Four” Arrested--Health Care for All

On Oct. 29, 2009, four activists, who support a Medicare for All solution to our healthcare crisis, were arrested in Baltimore, MD, for trespassing. They were engaged in a “patients before profits sit-in” at a 17-story tower, which houses an office of the insurance giant, CareFirst BlueCross BlueShield. It’s located in the Canton area of the city. The demonstration was part of an ongoing national campaign by the “Mobilization for Health Care for All” group. The protest included the staging of a 15 ft. vampire, “Count Bleed Ya Dry,” that represented the Insurance Industry. For more more details on the Single Payer issue, the arrests and the exact charges placed against each defendant, check out: http://mobilizeforhealthcare.org/ One of the protesters arrested was Dr. Margaret Flowers. She is a member of the “Baucus Eight,” and an unrepentant advocate of a Single Payer System. Another physician, Dr. Eric Naumburg, was also arrested, along with an 81 year-old retiree, Mr. Charles Laubert, and a school teacher, Ms. Patty Courtney.

Don't Feel Sorry, Feel Solidarity

I have been struggling with an issue as of late: feeling sorry for my family and friends who are struggling through life's hardships.

This is alarming to me because I have counseled people who have been through the most unimaginable hell and have managed not to feel sorry for them. I never want to feel sorry for anyone. I think it is condescending at best. Besides, I think it's fair to say that no one wants someone to feel sorry for him or her. A person wants (and needs) love, understanding, and support. But not pity.

Maybe my recent feelings are a mask for my own fragile situation. I hope I, too, am not on the verge of breakdown, a delicate position so many of my brothers and sisters find themselves in. It would be easy for me to project my weaknesses on others.

The last month and a half has not been easy. I have lost my grandmother, which connects me tightly to others' losses - including the recent death of one of my other's former students of swine flu - and my life is rapidly restructuring around a full-time job and a return to solitude after my girlfriend's month-long visit. Have I had the adequate time and space to mourn and to accept?

I know that if I am to turn the corner sharply, it will be thanks to the warm feeling of solidarity that links me to the pain and struggles of others. I must acknowledge my own pain first, and then connect it to that of others. My understanding must be deep; I must be willing to share both smiles and tears. Only the foolish suffer alone.

I already feel better now that I am aware of this option.

Update on Honduras

Smashing the Silence: Indy reporting from Joseph Shansky

Oct. 16

Since the few days of renewed excitement around the “secret” return to Honduras of democratically-elected President Manuel “Mel” Zelaya, there has been a disturbing omission of the Honduran political crisis in the international news. It would be reasonable to think that with each passing day an exiled president was camped in a foreign embassy (as Zelaya has been in the Brazilian embassy since September 21st), tensions would rise and all eyes of the world would be on that lone building. Instead the opposite has occurred and it appears as though the international press had lost interest without action to follow. The subsequent collapse and renewal (and collapse again, etc.) of ongoing “negotiations” with Roberto Micheletti’s coup government did little to breathe life into this story.

Here in Tegucigalpa, life continues under subtle siege for ordinary citizens. The city gets dark faster at night now and the people seem more frightened in general. The curfew remains. Small groups huddle together and glance around anxiously, couples hug closer, young girls grasp hands tighter and walk faster. Militia is everywhere of course, made up of young, mostly uneducated kids who twirl their guns with abandon, dig their batons into the dirt and wait for a notice for action. It can come at a whistle’s call here, and sometimes it feels as though the entire country is poised, frozen in battle.

The most recent momentous note in this political standoff occurred when Micheletti declared an impromptu State of Emergency following the massive street rallies on the day Zelaya returned. He then imposed a “decree” which stripped Hondurans of almost all basic civil liberties, including the right to assemble freely and access to media outlets which did not strictly toe the coup government line. He also imposed a continuous and rather vague curfew, allowing open interpretation for street police to constantly monitor and harass citizens. After a brief but immediate international outcry, Micheletti apologized and promised to withdraw the decree, but has done no such thing. Instead, he’s used this legal loophole to clean house by first attacking the primary ingredient of a democracy: the free press.

The studios of Radio Globo and Channel 36 were assaulted in the middle of the night and their transmitters were sabotaged and taken, thus leaving the majority of the country without access to the few independent news sources they had depended on for so long. He then forcibly evicted 55 local farm workers who had occupied the headquarters of the National Agrarian Institute for months since the June coup. According to Honduras Resists, a leading online source for Resistance support, the Institute “houses the land titles that had been attained by small rural farmers and communities through years of struggle, many of which were finally granted under the Zelaya administration, angering the powerful landholders who are responsible for the coup and now want to halt and reverse the process of land reform in Honduras.”[1]

One major effect of this curfew and the violations that it brings is that Micheletti has unwittingly drawn people to the resistance movement against the coup government who may not have otherwise been involved. The demonstrations have continued daily for four months now, sometimes taking on different forms.

An example of the varied support for Zelaya’s restoration (and against the coup in general) has been factions of the religious community. A few days ago, a group of Evangelical Christians gathered together in front of the abandoned Channel 36 television station. They planted themselves there to sing and pray for the station, for the resistance, and for Honduras. Several speeches were also made by organizers and religious figures, including priests.

When they had completed the blessing of this censored independent media outlet, they continued making the rounds, next going to Radio Globo to perform the same songs, the same prayers. It was a striking image, the Bible lying on the table next to the microphones in the studio. It conjured up big notions of God and Information and Truth and good people who believe that these ideas are not mutually exclusive.

Under the decree, the military domination has also expanded into lesser populated areas. The police have stormed neighborhoods ranging from inside the city center all the way to Greater Tegucigalpa and its outskirts. The same has happened around the country. In turn, these remote and generally much poorer neighborhoods have begun organizing independently, as they now feel the effects of constant police raids on houses and communities. These barrios, usually ignored and left to their own devices, have begun to take action.

I recently traveled one night with several other foreign journalists to a neighborhood on the outskirts of the city. Arriving amid mountains of trash, I immediately heard a cacophony of homemade percussive sounds, people drumming on whatever was freely available. We came upon hundreds of people of all ages marching in the dark together – families shouting, singing, chanting, blowing whistles, banging on nearby doors to rouse their neighbors. Along the sidelines, others watched from windows and front steps, staring fearfully and somewhat enviously at their neighbors’ courage in defying the curfew. This was just one of many similar nightly neighborhood rallies since the decree banning such gatherings.

The crowd surged up a hill and turned into an alley where a car was parked with a film projector sitting atop. After a few minutes, the organizers were able to project the image onto the side of a nearby house. The video was a compilation of homemade footage documenting many of the recent abuses their peers had suffered at the hands of the police. In one scene, the camera followed a single police officer from behind as he ran with his gun drawn directly at group of demonstrators nearby, shooting wildly and recklessly. Others showed the police randomly isolating and dragging non-violent protesters out of the street and into unmarked cars.

The images were designed to enrage the crowd, and it worked. Cries of “¡Asesinos!” (Murderers!) rang out in the night, the excitement and anger grew to a palpable climax, and for a moment I was sure that we’d soon be experiencing our own live replay of the scenes in front of us as soon as the local police took notice. These people were loud.

But aside from provocation, the video was also used as a tool to educate people who live in outlying areas to the realities of what much of the city was going through on a daily basis. It was a form of the news which had been missing from the public since Radio Globo and Channel 36 were taken off air.

This kind of sudden unity is not a novelty limited to one area of the city. The day after the decree, twenty four separate neighborhoods were listed as openly defying the curfew to protest the coup d’état. The resistance which has held steadfast for almost four months now has grown in true grassroots style. Like a domino effect, as the coup’s fear tactics increase, the opposition grows tremendously.

Regardless of what happens from the top-down politically, it would be wise to take note of the remarkable manner in which these communities have come together at ground level. On a very fundamental level, this is innovative democracy in action. Using any means possible, these citizens are courageously breaking through the information blockade that has paralyzed so much of the country and isolated much of the world from the events taking place in Honduras.

And the REAL Peace Prize Goes to...

(Taken from CubaDebate)

IF Obama was awarded the Prize for winning the elections in a racist society despite being African-American, then Evo deserves it for winning in his country despite being an indigenous man, and moreover for keeping his promises.

It was the first time in the two countries that someone from each of their respective ethnic groups became president.

More than once, I noted that Obama was an intelligent, educated man in a social and political system in which he believes. He aspires to extend health services to almost 50 million U.S. people, to pull the economy out of the profound crisis it is experiencing, and to improve the image of the United States, deteriorated due to its genocidal wars and torture. He does not conceive of or desire, nor can he change, his country’s political and economic system.

The Nobel Peace Prize has been awarded to three U.S. presidents, a former president and a presidential candidate.

The first was Theodore Roosevelt, elected in 1901, the man of the Rough Riders that landed their riders – without their horses -- in Cuba for the U.S. intervention in 1898 to prevent our country’s independence.

The second was Thomas Woodrow Wilson, who took the United States into the first war to divvy up the world. In the Treaty of Versailles, he imposed such harsh conditions on defeated Germany, that it laid the foundations for the emergence of fascism and the breakout of World War II.

The third is Barack Obama.

Carter was the former president who, several years after ending his mandate, was awarded the Nobel Prize. Without a doubt, one of the few presidents of that country incapable of ordering the assassination of an adversary, as others did; he returned the Canal to Panama, created the U.S. Interests Section in Havana, and avoided falling into large budget deficits or squandering money for the benefit of the military-industrial complex like Reagan did [some have pointed out the post-WWII US military budget really began its current rampant expansion under Carter - MS].

The candidate was Al Gore when he was already vice president, the U.S. politician who knew the most about the terrible consequences of climate change [sic]. He was the victim of electoral fraud when he was a presidential candidate and had victory snatched away from him by W. Bush.

Opinions about the awarding of this prize have been very much divided. Many are based on ethical concepts or reflect evident contradictions in the surprising decision.

They would have preferred that prize to be the fruit of a task fulfilled. The Nobel Peace Prize is not always awarded to people who deserve that distinction. Sometimes individuals have received it who are resentful, arrogant or even worse. Lech Walesa, upon hearing the news, said disdainfully, "Who, Obama? It’s too fast. He hasn’t had time to do anything."

In our press and on CubaDebate, honest and revolutionary comrades have been critical. One of them said, "In the same week that Obama was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, the U.S. Senate passed the largest military budget in history: $626 billion". During the television newscast, another journalist commented, "What has Obama done to achieve such a distinction?" Others asked, "And what about the war in Afghanistan and the increase in bombings?" Those are viewpoints based on reality.

In Rome, the filmmaker Michael Moore made a lapidary statement: "Congratulations, President Obama, on the Nobel Peace Prize; now, please, earn it."

I am sure that Obama would agree with Moore’s statement. He possesses sufficient intelligence to understand the circumstances surrounding the case. He knows that he has not yet earned that prize. That morning, he stated, "I do not feel that I deserve to be in the company of so many of the transformative figures who have been honored by this prize."

It is said that there are five members on the famous committee that awards the Nobel Peace Prize, all of them members of the Swedish Parliament. A spokesperson said that it was unanimous. One question fits here: did they or did they not consult the winner? Can a decision of this type be made without first notifying the winning individual? This cannot be judged morally in the same way if the person knew or did not know beforehand about the awarding of the prize. It is also fitting to affirm that about those who decided to award it to him.

Perhaps it is necessary to create a Nobel Prize for Transparency.

Bolivia has major gas and oil deposits and holds the largest known reserves of lithium, a mineral greatly needed in our era for storing and using energy.

Evo Morales, a very poor indigenous farmer, traveled throughout the Andes, together with his father, before he was six years old, shepherding the llamas of an indigenous group. They led them for 15 days to reach the market where they sold them to buy food for the community. Responding to a question of mine about that unique experience, Evo told me that at the time, "they stayed in the 1,000-star hotel," a beautiful way of referring to the clear skies of the mountains where telescopes are sometimes placed.

During those hard years of his childhood, the alternative for the farmers in the community where he was born was to cut sugar cane in the Argentine province of Jujuy, where part of the Aymara community sometimes took refuge during the sugar cane harvest.

Not very far from La Higuera, where Che, wounded and disarmed, was murdered on October 9, 1967, was Evo, who was born on the 26th of that same month in 1959, not yet 8 years old. He learned to read and write in Spanish, walking to a little public school five kilometers from the hut where, in a rustic room, he lived with his brothers and sisters and parents.

During his eventful childhood, wherever there was a teacher, Evo was there. From his race, he acquired three ethical principles: not to lie, not to steal, and not to be weak.

When he was 13, his father permitted him to move to San Pedro de Oruro to go to high school. One of his biographers tells how he was better in geography, history and philosophy than in physics and mathematics. The most important thing is that Evo, to pay for his studies, would wake up at 2 a.m. to work as a baker, construction worker, or in other physical labor. He attended classes in the afternoon. His classmates admired him and helped him. From the very start, he learned to play wind instruments and was a trumpet player in a prestigious band in Oruro.

When he was still an adolescent, he organized his community’s soccer team, and was its captain.

Access to the university was not within his reach, being an Aymara Indian and poor.

After his last year of high school, he served his mandatory military term and returned to his community, located high up in the mountains. Poverty and natural disasters forced his family to migrate to the subtropical region of El Chapare, where they were able to obtain a small land parcel. His father died in 1983 when he was 23 years old. He worked hard on the land, but he was a born fighter; he organized all of the workers, created labor unions and with them filled the vacuums to which that the state was not paying attention.

The conditions for a social revolution in Bolivia had been created over the last 50 years. On April 9, 1952, before the start of our armed struggle, the revolution broke out in that country with the Nationalist Revolutionary Movement of Víctor Paz Estenssoro. The revolutionary miners defeated the forces of repression and the MNR took power.

Revolutionary objectives in Bolivia were far from being met. In 1956, according to well-informed people, the process began to fall apart. On January 1, 1959, the Revolution was victorious in Cuba. Three years later, in January 1962, our country was expelled from the OAS. Bolivia abstained. Later, all of the governments except for Mexico broke off relations with Cuba.

Divisions in the international revolutionary movement made themselves felt in Bolivia. Still to come were 40 years more of blockading Cuba, neoliberalism and its disastrous consequences, The Bolivarian Revolution in Venezuela and the ALBA; still to come, above all, were Evo and the MAS in Bolivia.

It would take to long to sum up that rich history on a few pages.

All I will say is that Evo was able to overcome the terrible and slanderous campaigns of imperialism, its coups d’état and interference in internal affairs, and to defend Bolivia’s sovereignty and the right of its millenary people to have respect for their customs. "Coca is not cocaine," he exclaimed to the largest marijuana producer and largest consumer of drugs in the world, whose market has maintained the organized crime that costs thousands of lives every year in Mexico. Two of the countries where the yanki troops and their military bases are located are the largest producers of drugs on the planet.

Bolivia, Venezuela and Ecuador are not falling into the deadly trap of drug trafficking; they are revolutionary countries that, like Cuba, are members of the ALBA. They know what they can and should do to bring health, education and well-being to their peoples. They do not need foreign troops to combat drug trafficking.

Bolivia is going forward with a program of its dreams under the leadership of an Aymara president who has his people’s support.

In less than three years, he eradicated illiteracy: 824,101 Bolivians learned to read and write; 24,699 did so in the Aymara language and 13,599 in Quechua; it is the third country to be free of illiteracy after Cuba and Venezuela.

Free medical attention is provided to millions of people who had never received it. It is one of seven countries in the world that in the last five years has most reduced its infant mortality rate, with the possibility of reaching the Millennium Goals before 2015, and it is the same case with maternal deaths, in a similar proportion. Restorative eye surgery has been performed on 454,161 people, 75,974 of them Brazilians, Argentines, Peruvians and Paraguayans.

An ambitious social program has been established in Bolivia: all of the children in public schools from first to eighth grade receive an annual donation to help pay for their school materials, benefiting almost two million students.

More than 700,000 people over the age of 60 receive a voucher for the equivalent of some $342 annually.

All pregnant women and children under the age of 2 receive assistance of approximately $257.

Bolivia, one of the poorest countries in the hemisphere, has placed under state control the country’s principal energy and mineral resources, respecting and compensating each one of the interests affected. It marches along carefully, because it does not wish to retreat a single step. Its hard currency reserves have been growing. Evo has no less than three times what the country had at the beginning of his administration. It is one of the countries that makes the best use of foreign cooperation and firmly defends the environment.

In a very short time, he has been able to establish the Biometric Electoral Register, and approximately 4.7 million voters have been registered, almost one million more than on the last electoral register, which in January 2009 had 3.8 million.

On December 6, there will be elections. It is a sure thing that the people’s support for their president will grow. Nothing has been able to stop his growing prestige and popularity.

Why isn’t he awarded the Nobel Peace Prize?

I understand his big disadvantage: he is not a U.S. president.

Fidel Castro Ruz
October 15, 2009
4:25 p.m.

Translated by Granma International

If we want Policy instead of Speeches

If we want Policy instead of Speeches
Vers La Verité Speech in Paris

by Cynthia McKinney

.
Global Research, October 11, 2009


President Obama’s Nobel Peace Prize was not the only news yesterday. And in my opinion, it’s not even the biggest news. It’s not even the saddest news. But it does provide us with some critical information as we move forward. The three-part question for us, tonight however, is “What are we moving forward TO; is that the place we want to go; and if not, what do we do about it?

In other words, “What is our vision for the future and how do we define success?”

I have been and am still in deep pain over the institutional homicide of my aunt and in my grief, I’ve considered giving up.

But then, I wiped the tears from my eyes long enough to remember communities of people that I’ve been blessed enough to get to know, from Toronto, Canada to Cape Town, South Africa; from Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia to Valdosta, Georgia, there are people struggling through their own pain, their own deep personal disappointments to reach a better place—not just for themselves, but for the global community of man. And I know deep in my own heart, as broken as it is, that I cannot give up. My brain tells me that the struggle for truth, justice, peace, and dignity is too important to lose because of heartbreak.

The one thing that probably best defines everyone in this room are our search for and activities on behalf of principles that are bigger than ourselves. We want our governments to tell us the truth; we want them to deliver justice; we want our global community to live in peace; and we want respect for the dignity of all humankind.

So if these are the ingredients of our vision, what tools do we need to produce the desired result?

Well, first of all, the desired result has to have definition.

I mentioned in one of my messages to a dear friend in response to the Nobel award to President Barack Obama that we needed to keep our eyes on the prize and then I erased it because I don’t think we’ve sufficiently defined what the prize is.

So there must be a small, cohesive, international group of rock-solid people feverishly working to redefine for all who want to be active, and a part of our vision, just what the prize is. And this “prize,” our vision, must be repeated and explained often so people can differentiate our vision, from their reality.

Here is where language becomes important. If we want policy instead of speeches, then this must be repeated early and often because what I’m alarmed by is that in the absence of us providing real definition, and there are reasons for that, people are beginning to think that a speech IS policy.

But, as I said earlier, there was a lot of news yesterday. Some of it even more important than the Nobel Peace Prize Award, but the award certainly overshadowed all other stories.

And I’m always searching for context. Because, as the U.S. military puts it, “perception management” is important. And we must understand the context of what happens and when it happens, in order to understand why.

I always say that we must see the invisible, hear the unspoken, and read the unwritten. That’s what some of the organizers of Vers La Verité were professionally trained to do, before they became whistleblowers, and now our leaders.

Now, what were some of those other interesting news items?

Well, at a Native American Lodge located next to Senator John McCain’s ranch, two people died and several others were hospitalized following a hazardous materials situation at the Sweat Lodge, which is like a spiritual retreat led by Native Americans. I’ve even been invited to participate in one upon my return to the U.S.

Now, I find this interesting and a story that should be followed up on and I will be doing that because I want to make sure there’s no bigger story hidden in an important cultural ritual of the Native Americans who are victims of a genocide in North America that continues to this day.

On the day that the Nobel Prize was announced, we also learned that the U.S. bunker buster bomb will be ready in a few more months.

This is the bomb that holds over 5,000 pounds of explosives and is designed to penetrate hardened facilities, including those underground. Some brilliant people in the U.S. even want to put nuclear tips on bunker buster bombs. However, in announcing the near deployment of the project that pays McDonnell Douglas to adapt the B-2 bomber so it can deliver the Boeing-made bomb to its intended target, the Pentagon press secretary said, "The reality is that the world we live in is one in which there are people who seek to build weapons of mass destruction and they seek to do so in a clandestine fashion." The article noted that the Obama Administration had not ruled out military action against Iran.

Another story noted that hours after winning the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize, President Obama met with his military advisors about troop levels in Afghanistan. The troop increase requested by the U.S. Commander ranged, it is reported, from 10,000 to 60,000—although the top number isn’t listed in that news report. One has to go to another news item to see the true top number. At any rate, it seems that the choices confronting U.S. and European leaders is whether to increase the current 68,000 U.S. boots on the ground in Afghanistan or to merely increase the number of drone attacks. Decreasing death and destruction and bringing our young men and women home is not on the Nobel Peace Prize winner’s agenda for discussion.

The last article of note is about a restaurant in west Georgia that is using the “N-word” on its marquee to describe President Obama. It reminds me of the Atlanta area restaurant that put on its marquee that I was Buckwheat with Boobs. Now, those of you who are from the U.S. will know what that means and the depth of insult that was intended. The article notes that I’ve made this restaurant’s marquee, too. Both restaurant owners claim to not be racists and to be protected by free speech.

My point in including this particular news item is that we still have so far to go just in terms of our human relations. It is imperative that we do what we can to spread our message and our vision and reach those who can be reached.

Which brings me to who can be reached.

Those with enough discernment to know that what is being pronounced from on high is not their reality. And rather than accept or discount the contradictions, we want them to join us and struggle for a better reality for everybody.

I am saddened beyond belief that on the day of the Peace Prize award, a struggling democracy in Honduras was besieged with U.S. supplied weapons and U.S.-trained paramilitaries and snipers in support of coup leaders over the democratically-elected people’s leaders. In fact, the latest dispatch from Honduras is that many of the snipers and paramilitaries—now descending on Honduras from all over Latin America—were trained in my home state of Georgia.

More and more people are experiencing cognitive dissonance and rightly so. Our leaders and respected organizations are lying to us! One friend and former Congressional Staffer of mine puts it this way: we need a democratic military instead of a militarized democracy.

The United States, with the help of its European and Asian allies maintains over 700 bases around the world. The number is increasing under President Obama.

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. said that we must combat racism, poverty, and militarism. Our movement cannot struggle against militarism and fail to address racism. We must be comprehensive and to racism, militarism, and poverty, we must now add gaining control of a media that will allow us to communicate to a broader community and not just within our small spheres, and regaining control of education so that people are not so dumbed down that they actually believe that war is peace, slavery is freedom, ignorance is strength, and lies are truth.

And if we are right, then others will join us. They will share with us their dreams and their passions and we will help to empower them.

Global resistance combined with local action, organization, vision, commitment, and resources will allow us to have significant victories in the future.

Vers La Verité understands that the foundation of all of this action, attainment of the prize, can only happen with truth as our foundation.

It’s already a brave new world, let’s get busy and make it ours!!!

Report from D.C. Homeless Blogger/Activist

DC MAYOR TRIES TO RID CITY OF HOMELESS

In a recent STREET SENSE article I pointed out that the homeless often have "no place to go". This article can be seen as an addendum to that.

I came out of the subway system at Judiciary Square just before noon on Wednesday, September 9th, having used the 4th Street exit. As I walked from the escalator toward 4th street, I saw several homeless people speaking to a HAWK ONE security guard who was doing a glorified disclaimer by telling people that he only carries out the orders that are handed down to him. As I listened, I was able to ascertain that the homeless people had been told that they had to leave the large restaurant on the first floor of the One Judiciary Square government office building. As the conversation continued, several PROTECTIVE SERVICES cops walked up -- just one at first and then 3 more several minutes later.

The several homeless people that were involved in the discussion often eat at Thrive DC which is right across the road. From what I was able to gather, they entered the restaurant -- some of them having baggage with them -- and sat down. Some bought food and/or drink and others didn't. They were told that if they weren't buying that they'd have to go. They were made to go out into the bad weather, with it drizzling off and on that day until about 2 PM. One of the homeless was a pregnant woman. There are claims that the cops were overly aggressive as they told people to leave. An officer had supposedly threatened to body slam the pregnant woman as he made them leave the porch earlier that morning as the restaurant prepared to open. During this latter incident, only those who looked homeless were being made to leave. Though the security officer claimed that only those who hadn't purchased anything were being made to leave, the homeless claimed that even those who had made purchases were being put out and that one man had been prevented from purchasing and was made to leave. The homeless who were offended during this incident, claim that there were others -- some homeless -- who didn't look the part and weren't made to leave, though they hadn't purchased anything.

During the conversation, the HAWK ONE officer said that the rule is that, when you buy something, you have 15 to 20 minutes to sit down and eat it and then must leave. In response I asked him,"Do you enforce that 15 to 20 minute rule with everyone or just the homeless? Do you tell everyone that they must leave after they're through eating or just the homeless?" He responded by talking about the many bags that some people bring in. This sounds like a move directed at just the homeless. They were put out of the restaurant irrespective of whether or not they had purchased there.

I also want to point out that, as the officer whom I was told is named OFFICER GREEN arrived, he was not in a talking mood. He just walked up as others of us were having a somewhat productive and respectful conversation with the other cops and said with an assertive attitude,"Have a nice day". As I tried to explain that I had not been part of the situation in the restaurant and that I am a homeless advocate, he repeated himself so as to make it clear that he was in no mood for conversation. He was impossible to reason with.

All of this goes to show that the homeless are being dehumanized by society and relegated to the level of second-rate citizens. However, I would find out on the following day that this incident was the result of an executive order that had been handed down by the mayor.

Mayor Fenty failed to show up at a community meeting which was held by residents of the poor Trinidad neighborhood on Friday, September 4th. However, he was able to attend another community meeting at the First District police station which was attended by well-to-do members of the business community. During this latter meeting, business owners complained to the mayor about the presence of homeless people in and around their businesses. They told the mayor that he was able to decrease the presence of homeless people near the businesses in Franklin Square by closing Franklin School Shelter and asked if he could do something similar for this group of entrepreneurs. Mayor Fenty responded by giving police the order to clean the homeless out from the Gallery Place/Chinatown Metro station eastward to Union Station and southward toward Capitol Hill. The security officer had only been following orders after all.

During that meeting, Mayor Fenty also said that he wants to send any homeless person who is not from Washington, DC back to where they came from. This is reminiscent of moves made by New York mayors Rudolph Giuliani and Michael Bloomberg. This begs the question: If a thousand homeless Washingtonians are made to return to their birthplace in New York and the same number of homeless New Yorkers are made to return to their birthplace in DC, what has the city gained? At some point we must stop doing the homeless shuffle and just solve the problem.

What's noteworthy in all of this is the sheer ignorance of the police and others when it comes to the plight of the homeless. (That's not to speak of the apathy or the I'm-just-doing-my-job mentality.) I'm sure that many officers don't know that the homeless people whom they wake and tell to move on couldn't get into a shelter due to there being a shortage and might not have slept for a day or more because they couldn't find an adequate place to sleep. Ironically, sleep deprivation is seen as a form of torture when U.S. soldiers inflict it on Middle-Eastern enemy combatants but not when cops and security guards inflict it on American homeless people. The difference is that, while the soldiers are deliberately forcing their prisoners to stay awake, the homeless are often being kept awake through a combination of disassociated circumstances which include the police enforcing no-loitering ordinances and there being no place for the homeless to go in lieu of the shelter shortage.

The homeless are being pushed to the limit, whether intentionally or unintentionally. Some of the problems with which they are faced have been created by a mayor who is becoming more openly antagonistic toward them. Others are the result of a faulty system wherein so many different people have held a particular office and left their footprint that one can't logically blame a single official for the problems being experienced by the underprivileged. The latter concern makes accountability nearly impossible. It is also the reason that the rank and file gets the brunt of people's anger when, in fact, that anger should be directed at the public officials who handed down the inhumane orders.

The homeless are victims of objective circumstances as well as policies that target them and add insult to injury. In Washington, DC the average rent for a one-bedroom is $1,400/month. If your rent shouldn't exceed 30% of your gross income, you'd need to make over $4,500/month or about $28/hour. However, the minimum wage in DC is always $1 more than the federal minimum, which puts it at less than $10/hour. Some of the homeless work but still can't afford a place to stay. Add to this the fact that housing programs and shelters are being closed across the city while affordable housing returns to market rate. As if that's not enough, people are losing jobs left and right and becoming homeless, creating the need for more -- not less -- shelter. So, when the homeless are awakened for sleeping in a public place, told to move along or even forced out of town by their mayor it is easy to see why they would get frustrated and feel mistreated. When will we demand the same level of humane treatment for our nation's homeless that we demand for those of other nations?

That said, things seem to building toward a major confrontation between the homeless and city officials, though it wouldn't be completely without precedent. Given the option of not sleeping or sleeping in a jail cell, some would choose the latter. Faced with the dilemma of having no food or jail food, the choice is an obvious one. When made to choose between being made to move along throughout the course of the day or sit in a jail cell, some would rather sit. All in all, going to jail is beginning to look like a move upward and something to be aspired to. This is presumably another result of ignorance on the part of our public officials. It is also a recipe for open conflict -- much like the open conflict between the homeless operating under the leadership of Mitch Snyder and the Reagan administration. The primary difference is that this time around the antagonist has a didderent name -- Adrian Fenty.

Eric Jonathan Sheptock "The Blogger"
www.ericsheptock.com (blog)

Mobilize for Health!

Will Civil Disobedience For Health Care Make Obama and Dems Listen?

By Black Agenda Report managing editor Bruce A. Dixon

They're not listening. They're just not listening. It simply does not matter to the president and his advisors, to Democratic leaders in the House and Senate, or to those who decide what is broadcast and published in corporate media that two thirds of the American people still favor an everybody-in-nobody-out health care system, a Medicare For All solution to the nation's health care crisis. For these players Big Pharma favors and insurance company dollars speak louder than their own campaign promises, louder than the will of the American people. Maybe it's time to turn up the volume.

45,000 Americans die every year for lack of affordable, available health care. Not for lack of insurance --- for lack of care. Almost a million Americans went bankrupt last year, two thirds of them for unpayable medical bills. Most of those did have insurance when they first became sick or injured. If we really want health care for everyone --- all of us in and nobody out, maybe it's time to stop deferring to our imagined betters. Maybe it's time to get loud, to get impolite. Maybe it's time to raise their cost of business as usual to unacceptable levels. Our costs, the costs of ordinary American families have been unacceptable for some time now.

Maybe it's time to show we know the truth and to speak that truth to power. That's why they call these things “demonstrations.” Maybe it's time again for nonviolent civil disobedience, time to get arrested, not in the cause of “health insurance reform,” but in the cause of universal and accessible health care for everybody, Medicare For All. That's the thinking behind the good people at MoblizeForHealthCare.Org, a collaborative project initiated by Healthcare-NOW!, Prosperity Agenda, and the Center for the Working Poor.

“It's high time to let go of the political pessimism that says well, we don't have the votes in Congress...”

The participants threw up a web site at www.mobilizeforhealthcare.org, and kicked off a national campaign of civil disobedience with a September 28 appearance on Democracy Now, and a demonstration the following day at the New York offices of Aetna Insurance. 17 people inside the insurance company offices were arrested as hundreds more marched, chanted and sang outside. A few hours after this article is published on October 8, a similar civilly disobedient action will take place at the Chicago office of one or another greedy insurance company. On October 15, similar actions will take place in Los Angeles and several other cities, and continue until this administration and congressional leaders abandon their plans to bail out the insurance industry, until they remember and implement their campaign promises of universal, accessible, affordable health care --- not health insurance, but real health care for everybody, Medicare For All.

Black Agenda Report talked late last week to Kevin Zeese, who told us that in the first four days the site was up, nearly a thousand people signed up, with about half expressing a willingness to get arrested in a nonviolent demonstration at an insurance company or some other likely location. We thought this was a great start, and heartily endorsed the effort. In the days to come we will certainly do all we can to help out.

It's high time to let go of the political pessimism that says well, we don't have the votes in Congress, 86 (the number of current HR 676 co-sponsors, down from 99 in the pre-Obama congress) is not 218. It's time to stop caving to the un-elected billionaire-owned corporate media who tell us every day that “the political will” for Medicare For All just isn't there. These are the same media and politicos who told us tech stocks and real estate prices could only go up, that Saddam had nukes and maybe there's no such thing as man-made climate change. They are the same bipartisan crowd who emerged from the White House only yesterday to assure us that continuing the Afghan war with tens or hundreds of thousands more troops is absolutely necessary and not subject to debate, even if only 39% of Americans believe it.my son died

If you believe a democratic political process consists of elections, the world's free-est press and three branches of government that do what the people who elected them told them to do, you have to admit this process is broken. It's time to step outside that box. If you think politics is broader and deeper than what laws are passed and what our bipartisan establishment and corporate media deem “politically feasible” it's also time to crank up the pressure a notch.

We should not imagine that the path of a widespread national campaign of civil disobedience to obtain univesal health care will be easy. The first demonstration got adequate coverage in New York, even in the corporate press. Today's action in Chicago might do the same, or maybe not. In recent years we have seen half a million marchers on the mall in DC ignored by corporate media while a crowd not one tenth or twentieth that size demonstrating against single payer, a public option or anything of the kind in mid-September was inflated to the dimensions of a near-insurrection by CNN, Fox News and C-SPAN.

We can and should utilize the internet, text messaging and social networking tools like FaceBook, Twiiter, MeetUp and others to grow support, to collaborate and coordinate this effort. But we should know that Verizon and other telecom providers have blocked antiwar, pro-woman and other text messaging before and may do it again. Only last week local police in Pennsylvania and the FBI in New York arrested and charged activists with felonies for using Twitter to let anti-G20 demonstrators in Pittsburg talk to each other over their accounts. Being arrested and having your house trashed is no picnic, and being charged with felonies, especially federal ones --- federal courts convict more than 97% of all defendants, according to the National Lawyers Guild --- is no joke. But neither are the 125 Americans who die daily from lack of accessible, affordable health care. Both are prices someone is defintely bearing, one to bolster insurance company profits, the other for peace abroad and justice at home. It shouldn't be hard to decide which price you'd rather bear.

So we ask our readers to go to www.mobilizeforhealthcare.org and sign up. The form asks six questions.

· Are you willing to be arrested in a nonviolent demonstration for health care for all?

· Will you demonstrate legally in support of those who are civilly disobedient?

· Have you ever given nonviolent training for other efforts?

· Can you contribute bail money for those arrested?

· Are you a legal professional competent to help defend the arrested?

· Have you or someone in your family been denied medical coverage by an insurer?

“Back in the 60's it used to be said that the young people were impatient with injustice. We need to lose that patience again to get something done.”

And after you sign up at www.mobilizeforhealthcare.org, we encourage you to open your phone books and email lists and bend the eyes and ears of all your friends, vial email, FaceBook, Twitter and especially in person. Let them know you gave a few dollars for bail money, that you have offered to demonstrate, legally or otherwise in your city or town to get affordable, accessible, Medicare For All. If you're in a fraternity or sorority, a motorcycle club or a church, carry it to them. There is almost no family in the nation untouched by the health care crisis. Tell them what you know, and what you are doing. And invite them to do the same. If you're anybody I know personally, you can look for my call or email. It's coming.

At some point we are either grownups or children, we either lift up our eyes and put our faith in democracy, or we bow our heads and submit to authority. Submission to authority including unjust authorities, automatic deferral to the wishes of the wealthy and entitled are a big part of American political culture.

We expect that few elected Democrats, and those who aspire to or are already dependent upon their patronage will want to touch this. That's OK. There are Elected Democrats and their baggage train differ from small-d democrats in that their careers are funded by corporations, the most profoundly anti-democratic force in modern human societies. There are way more small-d democrats than the elected ones. Those few are, like Langston Hughes used to say, not the sea, but just the foam on the sea. We are the rocks and the mighty waves themselves. It's about what we want, not what the corporate-sponsored elect consider "politically feasible."

This has to change and nobody can do it but Americans. Back in the 60's it used to be said that the young people were impatient with injustice. We need to lose that patience again to get something done. We can raise their cost of doing business to unacceptable levels. We can make them listen, if only we will.

Bruce Dixon is managing editor at Black Agenda Report and lives near Atlanta GA. He can be reached at bruce.dixon(at)blackagendareport.com.

Save Lives, Legalize Drugs!

A Radical Solution to the War on Drugs: Legalize EVERYTHING

By John H. Richardson

We've heard a lot about the terrible death toll Mexico has suffered during the drug war — over 11,000 souls so far. This helps to account for the startling lack of controversy that greeted last week's news that Mexico had suddenly decriminalized drugs — not just marijuana but also cocaine, LSD, and heroin. In place of the outrage and threats that U.S. officials expressed when Mexico tried to decriminalize in 2006 was a mild statement, from our new drug czar, that we are going to take a "wait and see" approach.

Still, we've heard nothing about the American death toll. Isn't that strange? So far as I can tell, nobody has even tried to come up with a number.

Until now. I've done some rough math, and this is what I found:

6,487.

To repeat, that's 6,487 dead Americans. Throw in overdoses and the cost of this country's paralyzing drug laws is closer to 15,000 lives.

I'm basing these numbers on an interview with a high-ranking former narcotics officer named Neill Franklin. A member of the Maryland State Police for 32 years, Franklin eventually rose to the position of commander in Maryland's Bureau of Drug Enforcement. As he puts it, he was a classic "good soldier" in the drug war.

Franklin's turning point came in October of 2000. "I lost a very, very close friend of mine, a narcotics agent for Maryland State Police," he says. "His name was Ed Toatley. He was assassinated outside of Washington, D.C., trying to make a drug deal in a park. He had a wife, he had three kids. I had just spoken to him a couple of weeks prior to him getting assigned to this particular deal — he was finally going to bring this guy down, and lo and behold the guy kills him."

That got Franklin thinking. "I started doing the research and asking the questions: What progress are we making on this thing? And it turns out that not only are we losing kids who are in the game, but we are losing communities and fellow cops. We had lost a number of police officers in Baltimore alone."

Another turning point was 2002, when Angela Dawson and her five kids were murdered in East Baltimore by drug dealers she had been tying to keep from doing business in front of her house. "They fire-bombed the house late one night and the whole family perished," Franklin remembers.

So he started brooding on the drug war's body count. "Baltimore is a city of just a hair over 600,000 people. Our annual homicide rate was fluctuating between 240 and 300 every year for decades. Think about that: 240 to 300 homicides annually, and 75 percent to 80 percent are drug related. It's either gangs that are using drugs to support operations, or territorial disputes among drug dealers, or people just getting caught in the line of fire. And Baltimore is a small city compared to others," Franklin notes. "So we're not talking a handful of homicides; we're talking about the majority of the homicides in any city in the U.S. So if you add those cities up — just lowball it, take just 50 percent — I guarantee you, you'll find the numbers are quite similar to what they have in Mexico."

I took his advice. In 2007, the last year for which hard numbers are available, 16,425 people were murdered. Since our most recent Census said that 79 percent of the country is urban, I cut out the rural Americans — although there's plenty of drug use there, too — and came up with 12,975 urban homicides. Low-balling that number at 50 percent, I arrived at a rough estimate of 6,487 drug deaths. Using 75 percent, the toll rises to 9,731.

"And now we've got the cartel gangs coming up from Mexico," Franklin reminds me. "They're in over 130 cities in the U.S. already, and it's not going to get better."

Why Regulating Legal Drugs Fixes the Dead-Body Problem

Neill Franklin's solution is radical: "You have to take the money out of it. Many people talk about legalization and decriminalize — it's still illegal, but you're just not sending as many people to jail, especially for the nonviolent offenses. However, the money is still being made in the illegal sales, so you still have the drug wars. It's prohibition that's killing our people. That's why people are dying."

"So," I ask, "you want to legalize everything?"

"Yes. But I like to put it like this: I want regulation of everything. Because right now, I think they're confusing prohibition with regulation. What I'm talking about is applying standards — quality control, just like alcohol. We should have learned our lesson during alcohol prohibitions — we repealed the Eighteenth Amendment and applied standards of sale and manufacture, so it has to be a certain quality and you can't sell it to just anybody, and you still go to jail if you sell it to the wrong people. So, among other things, you'll also reduce overdoses — the majority of the overdoses we have is people who don't know what they're getting or buying because the purity level fluctuates. In addition, people are afraid to get help because they don't want to go jail, so they let their friends die."

So let's add overdoses to our death toll. In 2005, recent Senate testimony shows, 22,400 Americans died of drug overdoses. Leaving aside prescription drugs and counting only the 39 percent of overdoses attributed to cocaine, heroin, and methamphetamines, I count another 8,736 deaths.

That brings us to 15,223 Americans dead from the drug war.

But what about the argument that drugs will spread like wildfire if we don't keep bringing down the hammer?

"First, there's no concrete study to support such a belief — it's all completely speculation," Franklin insists. "So in my left hand I have all this speculation about what may happen to addiction rates, and then I look at my other hand and I see all these dead bodies that are actually fact, not speculation. And you're going to ask me to weigh the two? Second, if the addiction rate does go up, I'm going to have a lot of live addicts that I can cure. The direction we're going in now, I've got a lot of dead bodies."

I told Franklin I was surprised to hear a cop express so much sympathy for drug addicts. Even pro-drug types don't do that much. "I do have sympathy," he says. "What they're dealing with is a health issue, not a criminal issue. And as long as you treat it as a criminal issue, we're treating the symptom and not the cause."

Why Cleaning Up the Justice System Solves the Wasted-Money Problem

Last year, Franklin went public with his conclusions by joining a group called Law Enforcement Against Prohibition. Since then he's made it his business to talk to other cops about the subject, and he's been surprised by another discovery: "I find that 95 percent of my law-enforcement friends agree that we have to take a different direction, but they're not sure what direction that is — and probably 60 percent to 65 percent agree that we should legalize."

And why, exactly, don't we hear about a possibly overwhelming majority of police wanting to legalize — not just decriminalize, but legalize — major narcotics?

"Selfish reasons," he says. "There is a lot of money to be made in law enforcement. If we were to legalize, you could get rid of one third of every law-enforcement agency in this country."

Really? One third?

"And give back all the federal funds too. That's why very seldom will you see a police chief step forward and say, 'Yeah, we need to do this.'"

I made a stab at crunching those numbers, too. In 2003, America's local police budgets (PDF) were $43 billion dollars. A third of that: $12.9 billion. Add another $9 billion in domestic and international law enforcement (PDF) and the number rises to $21.9 billion.

Then consider America's prisons, the problems with which we've discussed here time and again. "The prison population is off the hook in this country," Franklin says. "In 1993, at the height of apartheid in South Africa, the incarceration of black males was 870 per 100,000. In 2004 in the U.S., for every 100,000 people we are sending 4,919 black males to prison. And the majority of those are for nonviolent drug offenses. But we'd rather send people to prison than give them information and treatment."

So... our federal prison budget in 2007 was $6.3 billion, and 55 percent of the prisoners were there for drug offenses. The total state-prison budget for the U.S. in 2007 was $49 billion, according to this study from the Pew Foundation, which found that "at least" 44 states had gone into the red to incarcerate their citizens. Using the same 55 percent number — which is probably low — we arrive at a rough total of the prison expenses associated with the drug war: $30.4 billion.

"I know jails are a big business and keep lot of people employed," Franklin says, "but it doesn't make it right."

To review, using what seem to be very conservative numbers, our first unofficial tally of the drug war in the United States is staggering:

15,223 dead and $52.3 billion spent each year — which is, incidentally, almost enough to pay for universal health care.

"We've got serious constitutional issues involved, too," Franklin adds. "Improper search and seizure is occurring every day..."

But I'll save that for another column.

Correction appended: An earlier version of this column estimated an incorrect fraction of America's local police budgets.

Sound off on the drug war! Click here to e-mail John H. Richardson about his weekly political column at Esquire.com.

Read more: http://www.esquire.com/the-side/richardson-report/drug-war-facts-090109#ixzz0Ty8H5uV7

Give Back the Prize, Obama

Top Ten Reasons President Obama Should Give Back the Nobel Peace Prize

by Black Agenda Report managing editor Bruce A. Dixon

In the real world Barack Obama is a politician. The Nobel Peace Prize is highly political too, handed out with equanimity to bloodthirsty warmongers and genuine peacemakers alike, according to the politics of the moment. Henry Kissinger got one less than a year after breaking off peace talks to end the Vietnam war to bomb Hanoi over the 1972 Christmas holidays. Dr. King's receipt of the prize on the other hand, contributed mightily to his eventual public opposition to the imperial war in Vietnam.

Black Agenda Report salutes the European journalist who posed the key question at the Nobel press conference. Corporate American media being the great force for openness and accountability that it is, the query would have been a career-killer for any American reporter who dared utter it. In that same spirit of reality-based reporting and commentary we offer these top ten reasons the president ought to reconsider accepting the Nobel Peace Prize.

Reason Number Ten: The president is escalating, not ending the war in Afghanistan and Pakistan

Like his Republican opponent John McCain, Barack Obama ran not as the peace candidate on Afghanistan, but the war candidate, promising to up the ante with drone attacks and cross-border forays into Afghanistan. The main difference between Obama and McCain on that issue was that McCain said we should escalate the war in that part of the world because we were winning, while Obama contended we must escalate it because we were winning. This is one promise Obama has kept. His first military strike inside the Afghanistan-Pakistan theater was ordered within 36 hours of his inauguration. The president is reportedly now considering the deployment of 40,000 or more additional US forces to Afghanistan.

Reason Number Nine: Obama's puppet Afghan president is the brother of the country's and possibly the planet's biggest opium dealer.

That's no small thing, since Afghanistan supplies 90% of the world's opium, most of which is refined into heroin for addicts at home and around the world. To be fair, Obama did inherit the puppet regime from his predecessor, who also begat the tradition of the United States funding its puppet regimes and mercenary armies abroad with drug profits. We did it in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia, where many of our local generals were the opium lords who ran the refineries and exported the crop. The Reagan regime also paid for its bloody contra war in Nicaragua with a mixture of illicit arms sales and profits from the cocaine trade too. So despite being hailed as a '”transformative leader” President Obama continues a proud and corrupt tradition of dubious and drug-soaked allies to carry on the wars at the fringes of America's global empire.

Reason Number Eight: President Obama is still peddling lies about Iran building nuclear weapons.

When Iran announced that it planned to exercise its treaty right to diversify its energy sources and build a plant for enriching uranium within the guidelines of applicable international agreements, President Obama sank nearly to the level of his predecessors in trying to sell to the world the spectre of an imaginary nuclear threat. The fact that the president's own intelligence agencies and the relevant international bodies affirm that there is no Iranian nuclear threat didn't stop the president warlike rhetoric of sanctions and drastic measures directed against Iran. The last president who sold us imaginary tales of Middle Eastern nukes used those tales to justify a genocidal war that has killed more than 1.5 million Iraqis along with a few thousand Americans, at a cost estimated in the trillions of dollars.

Reason Number Seven: Barack Obama's first budget called for expanding, not shrinking the army and marine corps.

The military has two jobs, breaking things and killing people. It's no secret that with no real military rivals anywhere on earth for the last twenty years, the United States, with five percent of the world's population has outspent the rest of the planet combined on military hardware, personnel, bases, research and operations. President Obama ran for office pledging to expand the US army and marines by 90 to 120 thousand pairs of boots, the better to fight multiple wars in far-flung corners of a world where the US maintains more than 800 military bases in over 100 countries.

Reason Number Six: President Obama retained Robert Gates, a bloodthirsty Reaganite war criminal as Secretary of Defense.

In a 1948 rebranding, the US renamed its Department of War the Department of Defense. Nothing else changed but the name. Barack Obama is the first president in more than two centuries of US history to keep the Secretary of War installed by a predecessor of the opposite party. The current Secretary of War, Robert Gates has a history of bloodstained treachery stretching back to his betrayal of Jimmy Carter when he served on Carter's National Security Administration team. Gates allegedly assured Iran they'd get a better deal from Reagan if they kept the hostages till the new president took office. Gates was rewarded with the post of deputy director at the Reagan era CIA, where he doctored intelligence and ran murderous secret operations around the world till the end of the first Bush administration. When 1993 Democrats decided to “look forward” and not prosecute the crimes of Reagan-Bush misrule, Gates slunk off to private life until his recall a decade later by the second Bush. The Pentagon under Robert Gates has 2.1 million uniformed employees and millions more contractors, civilian employees, armies of spooks, lobbyists and propagandists and dozens of secret budgets.

Reason Number Five: In the Americas, the US Still Blockades Cuba, Threatens Venezuela, & Funds The Longest and Bloodiest War in South America since the Genocide of Native Americans in Colombia

All of these are legacy policies President Obama inherited. He has renounced none of them and continued each and every one. Obama still punishes Cuba for the crime of self-rule by keeping intact travel bans and a fifty year blockade of the island only 90 miles from Florida, separating families, choking trade and disrupting cultural ties. Colombia continues to be one of the world's top recipients, after Israel and Egypt, of US military aid, which it utilizes to prosecute a decades-long civil war in which Afro-Colombians and been particularly victimized. More than a million Colombians are displaced by the war and hundreds of thousands have died. And under President Obama, the US is now building two military bases in Colombia near the Venezuelan border.

Reason Number Four: The US government, in and out of uniform still practices torture and maintains a global gulag of law-free secret prisons.

From stateside military brigs Carolinas to dungeons in Eastern Europe, torture chambers in Egypt and black holes in ships at sea or remote Diego Garcia, where the US military has allowed no journalists for twenty years, US civil servants are committing lawless and unspeakable acts of torture and degradation. They've been doing it for some time now in our name and on our dime. It didn't start with George Bush and apparently it will not end with Barack Obama. In the spirit of 1993 Democrats who declined to investigate or prosecute the decade of rampant criminality on the part of three Reagan-Bush administrations, Nobel laureate Barack Obama has adopted a don't ask don't tell don't prosecute policy on war crimes, international kidnapping and torture committed by US agents in or out of uniform. Let's look to the future, the president has told us, crimes are in the past. But aren't all crimes in the past?

Reason Number Three: The president has utterly disregarded his campaign pledge to withdraw one combat brigade per month from Iraq.

Comedian Bill Maher says people should try to remember that Barack Obama is their president, not their boyfriend. When your boyfriend lies it's a private matter whether you forgive, forget or believe him the next time. Presidents act with your money and in your name. When they lie it's a very public affair. Although close and lawyerly scrutiny of his statements reveals he probably never intended to withdraw from Iraq, Candidate Obama deliberately gave the impression he would bring home some or most of the troops because he knew that was what the electorate wanted in a Democratic candidate for president. By now President Obama should have withdrawn more than half a dozen combat brigades from Iraq, but there are few signs of that happening. An Iraqi referendum on whether the US must leave by a date certain is supposed to occur in 2010 under the current Status of Forces Agreement, but it is doubtful that this will ever occur.

Reason Number Three: The US Continues to Ignore Israeli nukes, while it acts as banker, diplomatic cover, and armorer its brutal Israel's sixty year occupation of Palestine.

Despite being in violation of more UN resolutions than any nation on earth, Israel is the top recipient of US economic and military aid. The optimism in the Arab world that greeted Obama's swearing in has given way to resignation and despair as the bloody occupation endures, the choking of Gaza and the taking of Palestinian land and resources on the West Bank continues. The Obama administration has even blocked the investigation of Israeli war crimes in its military assault against the nearly helpless civilian population of Gaza last year. Israel still conducts military exercises to underline the nuclear threat it poses to every other state in the region, a nuclear threat President Obama is not even inclined to acknowledge, let alone address in the meaningful fashion of a peacemaker. This is the same Barack Obama who used to attend Palestinian community events as a state senator in Chicago. Barack Obama has been captured by the office of president rather than the other way around.

Reason Number Two: The US is Funnelling Billions Into Expanding Its Military Presence Across the African Continent.

In recent years the US has given military aid to more than fifty of the fifty four nations on the African continent, invariably backing at least one, and often two or more sides in every case of invasion or civil war. As Glen Ford pointed out only last week, the US has just concluded a joint training exercise with personnel from dozens of African armies, all of which are being made to look to Uncle Sam as their paymaster, armorer and training resource. The US intends to grab the lion's share of African oil, water, agricultural and mineral resources in the coming century. The rape of the Congo, in which more than five million have perished in the last decade, has been perpetrated to make central Africa safe for business. Congolese resources are flowing to the US and its allies, so five million dead there is not considered a genocide. But neighboring Darfur, where the Chinese are pumping the oil, a hundredth of that death toll several years back still fuels fresh charges of genocide and calls for US intervention on the part of our bipartisan foreign policy elite. By backing the military sectors of African societies instead of civil sectors, by sending arms instead of forgiving the debt and allowing African countries to build their own hospitals and educate their people, the First Black President perpetuates a dreadful legacy of neo-colonial oppression that has cost millions of lives and will injure millions more to come.

Reason Number One: It just ain't right.

The Nobel Peace Prize is bad politics, even for Obama supporters. For the rest of his career it will invite unflattering comparisons of Barack Obama with the work of genuine peacemakers like Dr. Martin Luther King who declared that his own country, the United States was “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world.” The US presidency would be a great place to put a genuine peacemaker, a visionary woman or man who would bend the law to enforce respect for human rights, who would take the lead in nuclear disarmament by trashing the largest stockpile of nukes in the world which would be under his control. A peacemaker would open the doors to travel and trade with Cuba, and follow the Cuban example of aiding Africa with teachers, doctors and appropriate technology rather than flooding the continent with arms. A peacemaker would close the torture chambers and prosecute war criminals so that justice would roll down like water, and righteousness like a mighty stream. None of that is going on.

The European elite didn't do Barack a favor with this Nobel prize. But then you don't flatter the king to help the monarch out. You flatter the king to help yourself. The Nobel Peace Prize is their soiled and fulsome love note to the new emperor. It will hang around Obama's neck like a millstone, a token of the vast gulf between the fiction of a progressive black president and the reality of just another imperial CEO minding the same old store.

Bruce Dixon is managing editor of Black Agenda Report, and can be reached at bruce.dixon(at)blackagendarport.com.

Too Positive?

Check out: Barbara Ehrenreich: The Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America

I think there is a difference between positivity vs. complacency on one hand and delusion on the other, even though I've never liked the corporate motivational speakers-types or advocates of unlimited prosperity and "The Secret" enthusiasts. Having a positive attitude works for humanity when it's coupled with a genuine understanding of reality and the challenges of the human experience. Positivity isn't about delusion (i.e. the Wall Street/'no housing bubble' mentality, etc.). It's about understanding your own personal power and the possibility of improvement and advancement. It's definitely possible to be realistic and positive at the same time. One way to see this realized is to look at expectations. If a person has unrealistic expectations (hence an unrealistic person), she is unlikely to be positive once those expectations aren't met, but if she were to base her expectations on what is actually possible under the current circumstances, positivity is easier to maintain.

A concrete example of this concerns the last presidential election. I knew someone who had somehow, perhaps unconsciously, convinced herself that a leftist third-party candidate had the chance of winning. When this didn't happened, she was extremely upset to the point of insanity, even though most of the left, even the Green Party-types, were celebrating because not only did the country elect its first other-than-white president, Obama happened to be more progressive than McCain, albeit not nearly as progressive as Cynthia McKinney and others. Most who had supported third-party candidates did so with the understanding that they would not win the election and probably not even win the critical 5% needed to gain further attention and access, so they were not upset when Barack Obama won. They held up their heads, and some were even excited about it.

This is not to say that we shouldn't think big, but we should do so while aiming small. This will keep us from suffering from the kind of delusional positivity that Ehrenreich is criticizing.

On the other hand, I believe she is also criticizing complacency with the status quo. This is also delusional thinking. If you're positive because you think things are fine the way they are in this country and the world, you need to read. It's as simple as that.

Perfect Tribute to Columbus's Victims

Today's Democracy Now! featuring Buffy Sainte-Marie, indigenous singer and activist.

Verses in Faith Mind

There is a very famous poem written by the third patriarch of Zen, Seng-ts’an, called the Hsin-Hsin Ming, which translates as Verses in Faith Mind. In this poem Seng-ts’an writes these lines: “Do not seek the truth; only cease to cherish opinions.” This is a reversal of the way most people go about trying to realize absolute truth. Most people seek truth, but Seng-ts’an is saying not to seek truth. This sounds very strange indeed. How will you find truth if you don’t seek it? How will you find happiness if you do not seek it? How will you find God if you do not seek God? Everyone seems to be seeking something. In spirituality seeking is highly honored and respected, and here comes Seng-ts’an saying not to seek.

[…]

In order to seek, you must first have an idea, ideal, or an image, what it is you are seeking. That idea may not even be very conscious or clear but it must be there in order for you to seek. Being an idea it cannot be real. That’s why Seng-ts’an says “only cease to cherish opinions.” By opinions he means ideas, ideals, beliefs, and images, as well as personal opinions. This sounds easy but it is rarely as easy as it seems. Seng-ts’an is not saying you should never have a thought in your head, he is saying not to cherish the thoughts in your head. To cherish implies an emotional attachment and holding on to. When you cherish something, you place value on it because you think that it is real or because it defines who you think you are. This cherishing of thoughts and opinions is what the false self thrives on. It is what the false self is made of. When you realize that none of your ideas about truth are real, it is quite a shock to your system. It is an unexpected blow to the seeker and the seeking.

[…]

This is why I sometimes ask people, “Are you ready to lose your world?” Because true awakening will not fit into the world as you imagine it or the self you imagine yourself to be. Reality is not something that you integrate into your personal view of things. Reality is life without your distorting stories, ideas, and beliefs. It is perfect unity free of all reference points, with nowhere to stand and nothing to grab hold of. It has never been spoken, never been written, never been imagined. It is not hidden, but in plain view. Cease to cherish opinions and it stands before your very eyes.