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Sunday, July 28, 2002
Scary The article this excerpt comes from is from 1999, and it discussed the possiblity of internment camps being used for Serbian-Americans in the event of war with Yugoslavia. Chillingly enough, much of what it discussed can even more easily be applied to the current "war on terrorism": "In early 1984, when the Reagan administration was contemplating full- scale military intervention in Central America to bring about the overthrow of the Nicaraguan Sandinista regime and to defeat the leftist FMLN guerrillas in El Salvador, a group of National Security Council personnel was assigned to draft contingency plans for domestic security and anti-terrorist actions in the event of such a war. Lieutenant-Colonel Oliver North was in charge of this effort, which included a secret plan to suspend the US Constitution, declare martial law, and appoint military commanders to run state and local governments. The NSC team, together with the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), carried out a training exercise, called Rex '84 Alpha, from April 5 to April 13, 1984, to rehearse the measures which would be necessary at the onset of a US war in Central America. Rex 84 simulated a mass roundup of Central American immigrants in the United States, clearly modeled on the World War II detention of Japanese-Americans. Together with these Nicaraguan-Americans, Salvadorean-Americans and Guatemalan-Americans, Oliver North proposed to arrest 'known communist terrorists.' He did not list which organizations and individuals would fall in this category, but it would undoubtedly have included members and supporters of many socialist, antiwar and peace groups. One such group, labeled a suspected "terrorist" organization and subjected to FBI spying and infiltration, was the Committee in Solidarity with the People of El Salvador (CISPES), many of whose members were priests, nuns and other liberal Catholics. Under the terms of National Security Decision Directive No. 52, issued by Reagan on April 6, 1984, as many as 400,000 people were targeted for arrest and confinement in former US Army bases--four times the number of arrests carried out by the Roosevelt administration during World War II. This for a war in which the 'enemy,' the impoverished countries of Central America, was just as unlikely to 'land on our shores' as Milosevic. (For a fuller account, see the Bulletin, July 7, 1987, the Miami Herald, July 5, 19 and 26, 1987, and the pamphlet Labor Must Act on Iran-Contra Crisis, available from Mehring Books.)" Read the full article here.
Some people just don't get it "A federal judge in Louisiana ruled yesterday that the state illegally used federal money to promote religion in its abstinence-only sex education programs, a decision that could jeopardize President Bush's ambitions for expanding the effort nationwide." Why did the judge rule this way? Because the groups involved in the initiative were, "using government money to distribute Bibles, stage prayer rallies outside clinics that provide abortions and perform skits with characters that preach Christianity." In other words, they were violating the separation of church and state, and pretty shamelessly too. Apparently the governor of Louisiana sees nothing wrong with that. Read the article here.
California leads the way again "California, the most populous and richest state in the US, will no longer do business with or invest in companies that dodge US taxes." First they raised their auto emissions standards even higher, and now California is the first state to adopt tough restrictions against investing in U.S. corporations that move their headquarters off shore (at least on paper) to avoid having to pay the taxes they owe. As the article points out, given the sheer size of California, and the amount of money they toss around, this isn't going to be something that businesses can just ignore. Read the article here.
Going it alone "The United States has failed to block a United Nations treaty on preventing torture, but the country is under no obligation to adopt the new convention at home." The general tone of the article is almost one of puzzlement about why the U.S. would try so hard to stop a treaty than isn't even binding on it unless adopted by Congress and the President. The answer seems to be that the U.S. wants to be able to act morally superior without actually having to answer to the world for anything. Read the article here.
Holding the Israelis accountable "The Palestinian envoy to the United Nations has demanded that Israel be brought before the world's new criminal court for the killing of 15 people in an air strike on Gaza City." In case you hadn't heard, last week the Israelis decided to drop a 1-ton bomb on an apartment building in a crowded urban area in order to kill a militant Hamas leader. Their policy of assassination is bad enough, but in this particular case they managed to kill plenty of innocent civilians too (including women and children). In the face of worldwide condemnation (even from the U.S.), the Israelis are now trying to pretend that they somehow didn't know that a bomb that big dropped in a crowded area would kill bystanders. Read the BBC article here and more background on the story here.
Fixing capitalism? "In a few short weeks, America's political economy has been stunningly transformed. The Bush administration, the Republican Party and three decades of conservative ideology are facing a potential rout. Yesterday's conservative clichés are today's political embarrassments. Americans are getting a vivid if painful education about the limits of the marketplace and the salutary role of government. It will be a very long time before anyone can say with a straight face that markets always work better than governments. But market fundamentalism has been so ascendant for so long -- politically, culturally, financially -- that this is only the very beginning of an ideological sea change. It remains to be seen whether liberals will manage to save capitalism from itself, for the second time in the past 70 years." This excellent essay does a good job of summing up the current problems faced by the Bush administration (and the challenges faced by the Democrats) now that the rose-colored glasses have been knocked off the faces of Americans when it comes the the wonders of the free market. It also takes a look back at the parallels to the 1930s. It's rather long, but well worth the read. Read the article here.
Quelling dissent early "More than 200,000 people in rural Peru were pressured into being sterilised by the government of former President Alberto Fujimori, an official report has revealed." The American government has a long-standing fondness for right-wing governments in Latin America, like Mr. Fulimori's, despite the fact that they are often the ones most likely to commit acts like these. I suppose the lesson is that as long as you support American drug policies and American businesses, anything goes. Read the disturbing article here.
Skip the TIPS "The Bush administration wants a new set of eyes - millions of them. But perched in his rig at a truck stop near Jessup, Md., George Freeman shook his pony-tailed head at a proposed terrorism informant network that would rely on millions of American workers to feed the government tips on suspicious activity. 'It's going to be overused and abused, especially with people so nervous as it is,' said Freeman, 45, who hauls produce cross-country. 'You're going to have people running every which way looking for terrorists and their 15 minutes of glory.' Freeman's concerns were echoed by a slew of privacy-minded groups such as the American Civil Liberties Union and legislators from both sides of the ideological divide last week, perhaps signaling that Americans want some limits on governmental intrusion despite the new threats from abroad." Fortunately, despite some people jumping forward to say how great it is, lots of people don't seem to like the idea of the proposed TIPS program. The most significant of these is probably House Majority Leader Dick Armey (R-Texas), who is the one with the power to actually try and stop it. Let's hope he succeeds. Read the article here.
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