Steven
-----Original Message----- From: Peter Phillips [mailto:peter.phillips at SONOMA.EDU] Sent: Wednesday, October 02, 2002 5:34 PM To: Project-censored-L at SONOMA.EDU; Subject: Censored Alerts from Project Censored (Fall 2002)
FBI Violates Civil Liberties
Under Attorney General John Ashcrofts' guidelines, FBI agents will be able to monitor what you say in Web chatroom, or in religious and political meetings without a court order, without any evidence of a potential crime, even without approval from FBI headquarters.
For the first time, under the Patriot Act, the FBI will also be able to use commercial databases to monitor the books you buy, the publications you subscribe to, where you travel, your credit profile and a wide swath of other data.
What all this means is that we are now entering a period that Sam Smith, editor of The Progressive Review, rightly describes as a 'Post-Constitutional America'. And in the present jingoistic climate, once our Bill of Rights protections against government abuse of power are given away, one by one; we won't get them back. That's arguably the terrorists' greatest victory to date.
Synopsis: Alice Reese Source: In These Times, 7/8/02, "New FBI Same Old Problem," by Doug Ireland http://www.inthesetimes.com/issue/26/16/feature1.shtml
Ill Treatment on Our Shores
The United States has been accused of inhuman treatment of Muslim, or Middle Eastern detainees in federal prisons. The Bush administration has refused to give lawyers or human rights activists access to inmates in order to ascertain the conditions of their treatment.
The FBI is also denying requests for more information about the circumstances surrounding the death of Pakistani citizen Muhammed Butt. On October 24, Muhammed Butt died of a heart attack at the Hudson County Correctional center in Kearney, New Jersey, after a prolonged illness. He was detained on September 19th by the FBI as a suspect in the September 11th attacks. Human Rights Watch personal, Allyson Collins and Cesar Munoz, say Butt's cellmate told them his collapse was anything but sudden. The INS denies the claims. "We have absolutely no information to substantiate any of the allegations being propagated by Human Rights Watch," says Kerry Gill, an INS public affairs officer in Newark.
Allegations of mistreatment have come from many others who were rounded up on orders of Attorney General John Ashcroft after September 11. Detainees claim to have been beaten, locked in solitary confinement, injected with substances against their will, or denied blankets, food, and toilet paper. Traci Billingsley, spokesperson for the United States Bureau of Prisons, denies that any prisoner in a federal institution has been mistreated. Synopsis: David G. Cole Source: The Progressive, March 2002, "Ill Treatment on Our Shores," by Anne-Marie Cusac
U. S. Government Funds Anti- abortion Clinics.
Due to a provision in the 1996 Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act, the federal Government will spend $135 million in 2003 on sexual abstinence education. The Crisis Pregnancy Centers or CPCs have been granted an additional $20 million a year to lecture in public schools.
CPCs are anti-choice "clinics" that promise free pregnancy tests and counseling, but often give inaccurate information about the physical and emotional risks of abortion. CPCs pretend to be staffed with trained personnel, but seldom are. CPCs like to show videos to clients that only reflect the severe cases of emotionally traumatized women as a scare tactic.
Elizabeth Cavendish, legal director of the National Abortion and Reproductive Rights Action League says, "If a woman comes into a clinic and says she's afraid she'll die or bleed to death from an abortion, or that she's scared she'll be unable to have children in the future, we ask if she's been to a crisis pregnancy center. In the last thirty years counseling programs have been put together to support these women frightened by CPC propaganda. Synopsis: Leanna Del Zompo Source: In These Times, 8/19/02, "Clinic Crisis," by Eleanor Bader
Israel Supported Hamas from Its Inception Until the Early 90's.
Hamas (Islamic Resistance Movement) is an outgrowth of the Muslim Brotherhood, a fundamentalist Islamic movement that dates back to 19th century Egypt. During the 1970's a group called the Islamic Congress began to gain influence in the Israeli-occupied Gaza Strip, and soon sought official Israeli recognition for its social and religious activities.
Although fully aware of its doctrine calling for the destruction of the State of Israel, the Israeli authorities chose to register the organization as a way to weaken the power of the secular-nationalist Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) which was the dominant force in Palestinian politics at the time. The Congress' leader, Sheikh Ahmed Yassin built up the organization with money from Saudi Arabia and other sources, while Israel looked the other way and actually confiscated funds designated for the secular PLO. Israeli authorities have come to learn that they had created, or at least abetted, a well-organized, militant group of religious zealots that was now completely out of their control.
As late as 1990, in a move known both to Israel and the US, Saudi Arabia, which had been funding Hamas and the PLO, cut off all funds to the secular nationalist groups, while continuing its funding of Hamas. This strengthened the organization's control in the Gaza Strip, which soon became the springboard for desperate and deadly incursions into Israel. Synopsis: Michael Kaufmann Source: Covert Action Quarterly, Winter 2001, "Israel and Hamas - Dancing the Zionist Waltz," by Rezeq Faraj
Drug Lords
In April 2002, the White House, acting under pressure from the pharmaceutical industry, dropped the expected nomination of Dr. Alastair Wood of Vanderbilt University to be head of the FDA.
The doctor had intimated he would more aggressively monitor drugs already on the market, a suggestion that under his leadership, the FDA might actually do its job as a public watchdog; that was clearly unacceptable to the industry.
Consumers will now pay the price. Prescription costs have risen by 10% in each of the last two years. The drug companies claim that the high prices they charge are necessary for research and development. However, between a Third and half of all US drug research is actually carried out with tax dollars through the National Institutes of Health (NIH), a federal agency under the department of Health and Human Services.
For example, drug maker Phizer did not invent the antibiotic Penicillin that eventually made them spectacularly wealthy, but did find a way to mass produce the drug in a usable form. That is the contribution to pharmacology made by America's private drug lords; they rarely do the pure, painstaking research that leads to discoveries, concentrating instead on processing, packaging, and marketing the discoveries of other government supported researchers.
The US is the only major country that allows the primary inventor of a drug or medicine to patent the discovery, even if it was made with the help of a public grant, and to retain exclusive rights to its production and sale, thereby avoiding competition. This is one of the reasons that the American drug prices are twice what they are in Japan, Canada, and Europe. Synopsis: Casey Stenlund Source: The Progressive Populist, 8/1/02, "Drug Lords," by Wayne O'Leary
Farm Workers Suffer for Taco Bell Profits
If you eat a Chalupa Supreme for lunch, you may be helping to exploit farmworkers. That's the message of a coalition of students and farmworkers urging a boycott of the Taco Bell restaurant chain. Farmworkers employed by Six L's Picking Company, a main supplier to Taco Bell, earn only 40 cents for every 32-pound bucket of tomatoes they pick and have not had a pay raise since 1978. In addition to this, the workers have no heath insurance, sick leave, pension, paid holidays, vacations, or overtime compensation.
Taco Bell maintains that though they are one of Six L's largest buyers, they do not employ the farmworkers and it is not their responsiblity for the wages that they receive. A spokesman for Taco Bell stated, "This is a labor dispute between the farmworkers and their employer."
SAF (Student Action with Farmworkers) insists that if Taco Bell agreed to pay one penny more per pound for their tomatoes they could double the picking piece rate paid to farmworkers. Synopsis: Sarah Anderson Source: Asheville Global Report, 6/13/02, "Coalition Urges Taco Bell Boycott," by Brendan Conley
Domestic Sweatshops
The Department of Labor states that over half of American garment production shops violate minimum wage and overtime regulations and over 75% violate health and safety laws. In the Los Angeles garment district alone the Department of Labor reports that 61% of garment shops ignore wage and hour regulations, and 96% violate health and safety codes. According to the U.S. General Accounting Office sweatshops are defined as "an employer that violates more than one federal or state labor, industrial homework, occupational safety and health, workers' compensation or industrial regulation law."
The manufacturers of the clothing are contracted out by retail companies, who are not affiliated with the production, or responsible for labor conditions in the factories. A small number of retailers control the majority of the market, and are thus able to dictate the quantity and price of the goods. The cheaper the price, the more there is to be made, and sweatshops offer quantity for virtually nothing. The employees of these shops are usually newly arrived undocumented immigrants who will work for much less and who are not in a position to go to the authorities for fear of deportation. In 1999, in an effort to curb horrendous working conditions, California Governor Gray Davis signed Bill 633 into law. Designed to crack down on employers who owe an estimated $81 million in unpaid wages, it has since collected $17,274.
Synopsis: Josh Sisco Source: Clamor, Jul./Aug. 2002, "American Made: Sweatshops in the USA," by Casey Boland
The Four Steps of World Bank Assistance
A former chief economist for the World Bank, Joseph Stiglitz, recently revealed how the World Bank conducts their Country Assistance Strategy for developing nations. Stiglitz, who also served as a member of Bill Clinton's Cabinet as Chairman of the President's council of economic advisors, was fired for criticizing World Bank policies in 1999. In an interview with Greg Palast, Stiglitz laid out the four steps of how the World Bank systematically ravages the economies and communities of poor nations.
Step one is privatization, also known as bribery. National leaders are pushed to sell off state industries while getting millions for shaving a few billion dollars off the sale price of these national assets. Step Two, capital market liberalization, allows for the free flow of capital in and out of the country. However, in the examples of Indonesia and Brazil, money simply flows out. Step Three is market-based pricing; raising prices on food, water, and cooking gas. This leads, inevitably, to Step Three-and-a-Half: what Stiglitz calls, The IMF riot.
Take, for example, when the IMF eliminated food and fuel subsidies for the poor in Indonesia. The nation exploded into riots. Other examples include: the Bolivian riots over water prices last year and this February and the riots in Ecuador over the rise in cooking gas prices imposed by the World Bank.
Palast also discovered that in World Bank documents, stamped confidential, that they expected to spark social unrest as a result of World Bank plans. Step Four is the poverty reduction strategy - Free Trade. Stiglitz likens this process to the Opium Wars of the 19th century in that today Western countries are kicking down the barriers to sales in Asia, Latin America, and Africa, while barricading our own markets against Third World agriculture. Stiglitz concludes with the advice that radical land reforms are necessary to challenge the power of the third world elites. Synopsis: Omar Malik Source: Sentient Times, Apr/May 2002, "The Four Steps of World Bank Assistance," by Greg Palast
Peter Phillips Ph.D. Sociology Department/Project Censored Sonoma State University 1801 East Cotati Ave. Rohnert Park, CA 94928 707-664-2588 http://www.projectcensored.org/