Wednesday, May 03, 2006
Immigration Protests: In the tradition, via historian Nelson Lichtenstein
These May Day demonstrations and boycotts return the American protest tradition to its turn-of-the-20th-century ethnic proletarian origins—a time when, in the United States as well as in much of Europe, the quest for citizenship and equal rights was inherent in the fight for higher wages, stronger unions, and more political power for the working class.
Because today's marches are on a workday, they recall the mass strikes and marches that turned workers out of factories that convulsed America in the decades after the great railway strike of 1877, the first national work stoppage in the United States. Asserting their citizenship against the autocracy embodied by the big railroad corporations, the Irish and Germans of Baltimore and Pittsburgh burned roundhouses and fought off state militia in a revolt that frightened both the rail barons and the federal government. http://www.slate.com/id/2140846/
What’s Happening, Bolivia: Nationalizing. Notable even if your reserves [of natural gas] don’t crack the world’s top 20.
Bolivian President Evo Morales seized control of the country's natural gas industry Monday, sending soldiers to occupy fields that he contends private companies have plundered for years.
Morales said that unless foreign energy firms agreed to give Bolivia's state oil company oversight of production and a majority of their revenue generated in Bolivia, the government would evict them from the fields.
"The time has come, the awaited day, a historic day in which Bolivia retakes absolute control of our natural resources," Morales said during a televised speech from a gas field near the country's southern border. "The looting by foreign companies has ended."
Morales's announcement was expected, but his deployment of troops to gas fields was a strong statement in a region where governments are moving to block outside influence, particularly from the United States, and exert more control over the energy industry. Venezuela recently voided drilling contracts with private companies at 32 oil fields, demanding new contracts that give the state oil company a 60 percent stake. Ecuador is finalizing a law that could limit excessive profits by foreign crude producers. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/05/01/AR2006050100583_pf.html
What’s Happening, Afghanistan: Taliban Thrive Not new, as such reports are now overly familiar. Perhaps, attaining front page status is what’s most striking. The lasting image: The Taliban are "walking in the villages openly with their weapons, and sitting under the trees eating mulberries."
Building on a winter campaign of suicide bombings and assassinations and the knowledge that American troops are leaving, the Taliban appear to be moving their insurgency into a new phase, flooding the rural areas of southern Afghanistan with weapons and men.
Each spring with the arrival of warmer weather, the fighting season here starts up, but the scale of the militants' presence and their sheer brazenness have alarmed Afghans and foreign officials far more than in previous years.
"The Taliban and Al Qaeda are everywhere," a shopkeeper, Haji Saifullah, told the commander of American forces in Afghanistan, Lt. Gen. Karl Eikenberry, as the general strolled through the bazaar of this town to talk to people. "It is all right in the city, but if you go outside the city, they are everywhere, and the people have to support them. They have no choice." http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/03/world/asia/03afghan.html?_r=1&ei=5094&en=0692a5a972d58a3a&hp=&ex=1146628800&oref=slogin&partner=homepage&pagewanted=print
What’s Happening, Iraq: Sunni Soldier Graduation Upset They got posted to a Shiite area, which can be more than upsetting; it could be a death sentence.
The graduation of nearly 1,000 new Iraqi army soldiers in restive Anbar province took a disorderly turn Sunday when dozens of the men declared that they would refuse to serve outside their home areas, according to U.S. and Iraqi military authorities.
The graduation ceremony at Camp Habbaniyah, a base about 45 miles west of Baghdad, had been going well. The 978 soldiers, most of them Sunni Muslims, had just finished nearly five weeks of military training and were parading before a review stand to the sounds of martial music. They took an oath of service while U.S. and Iraqi officials delivered speeches hailing the event as an important step toward the formation of a national army.
Then some soldiers started tearing their clothes off to demonstrate their rage. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/05/01/AR2006050100854_pf.html
What’s Happening, Drug Policy- Mexico Legalization
Mexican President Vicente Fox will sign a bill that would legalize the use of nearly every drug and narcotic sold by the same Mexican cartels he's vowed to fight during his five years in office, a spokesman said Tuesday.
The list of illegal drugs approved for personal consumption by Mexico's Congress last week is enough to make one dizzy — or worse.
Cocaine. Heroin. LSD. Marijuana. PCP. Opium. Synthetic opiates. Mescaline. Peyote. Psilocybin mushrooms. Amphetamines. Methamphetamines.
And the per-person amounts approved for possession by anyone 18 or older could easily turn any college party into an all-nighter: half a gram of coke, a couple of Ecstasy pills, several doses of LSD, a few marijuana joints, a spoonful of heroin, 5 grams of opium and more than 2 pounds of peyote, the hallucinogenic cactus.
The law would be among the most permissive in the world, putting Mexico in the company of the Netherlands. Critics, including U.S. drug policy officials, already are worrying that it will spur a domestic addiction problem and make Mexico a narco-tourism destination. http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-legalize3may03,0,5421561,print.story
What’s Happening, Environment: Final(?) Confirmation of Global Warming- Bush retrogrades lose their last grounds for doubt.
A scientific panel convened by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has concluded that the Earth's surface and its upper atmosphere have been warming as a result of climate change at least partly caused by human activity.
Thomas Karl, director of the NOAA's climate-data center, said the findings resolve a "nagging issue" between climate-change experts and their skeptics. Because of poor data analysis and errors in some satellite data, he said, earlier measurements had shown the Earth was warming but the atmosphere wasn't. http://online.wsj.com/article/SB114662116494242246.html?mod=politics_primary_hs
What’s Happening, Health Care You don’t expect good news, no? Two reports on our failed system:
In mid-2004, more than 1,500 Kaiser Permanente patients awaiting kidney transplants in Northern California got form letters that forced them to change the course of their treatment.
Kaiser would no longer pay for transplants at outside hospitals, even established programs with thousands of successes. Instead, adult patients would be transferred to a new transplant center run by Kaiser itself — the first ever opened by the nation's largest HMO.
....Kaiser's massive rollout in Northern California endangered patients, forcing them into a fledgling program unprepared to handle the caseload, according to a Los Angeles Times investigation based on dozens of interviews, statistical analyses and confidential documents. http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-kaiser3may03,0,7436765,full.story?coll=la-home-headlines
"At every point in the social hierarchy there is more illness in the United States than in England and the differences are really dramatic," said study co-author Dr. Michael Marmot, an epidemiologist at University College London in England.
The upper crust in both countries was healthier than middle-class and low-income people in the same country. But richer Americans' health status resembled the health of the low-income British.
Marmot offered yet another explanation for the gap: Americans' financial insecurity. Improvements in household income have eluded all but the top fifth of Americans since the mid-1970s. Meanwhile, English citizens saw their incomes improve, he said.
Robert Blendon, a professor of health policy at the Harvard School of Public Health who was not involved in the study, said the stress of striving for the American dream may account for Americans' lousy health.
"The opportunity to go both up and down the socioeconomic scale in America may create stress," Blendon said. Americans don't have a reliable government safety net like the English enjoy, Blendon said. http://www.cnn.com/2006/HEALTH/05/02/sick.america.ap/index.html
Colbert: Follow-up to the Terrific Weekend performance
Comedy Central star Stephen Colbert's biting routine at the White House Correspondents Association dinner won a rare silent protest from Bush aides and supporters Saturday when several independently left before he finished.
"Colbert crossed the line," said one top Bush aide, who rushed out of the hotel as soon as Colbert finished. Another said that the president was visibly angered by the sharp lines that kept coming.
"I've been there before, and I can see that he is [angry]," said a former top aide. "He's got that look that he's ready to blow."
Colbert's routine was similar to what he does on his show, the Colbert Report, but much longer on the topic of Bush, suggesting that the president is out of touch with reality. http://www.usnews.com/usnews/news/articles/060501/1whwatch.htm
This morning, Katie Couric and Matt Lauer giggled and got all warm about the cutesy performance of Bush and the Twin look-alike imitator. Really funsy. Colbert was not mentioned.
I'm old enough to remember when Eartha Kitt told off Lady Byrd Johnson for her husband's policies in Vietnam at some innocent luncheon... the news media reported that, they didn't only report on the chicken salad sandwiches.
Yesterday the New York Times had no coverage of the event, except buried in its Washington section was a small, uninteresting blurb picked up from Reuters.
This morning, lo and behold, they have more... a fawning piece by someone named Elizabeth Bumiller called "At Award Correspondents' Dinner, A Set of Bush Twins Steal the Show."
Like Katie and Matt's briefer piece, this article too finds the President absolutely adorable. And makes the judgment call that the President's darling sense of humor is the true story of the event.
And the Colbert appearance -- which chilled the room, attacking journalists as well as Bush -- is literally not worth reporting. Back before blogs and C-Span, we wouldn't even know about it. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/chris-durang/ignoring-colbert-part-tw_b_20130.html
Finally, the Wednesday NY Times acknowledges, in the entertainment section: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/03/arts/03colb.html?ei=5094&en=bbdf71b100b0926d&hp=&ex=1146628800&partner=homepage&pagewanted=print
Video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lcIRXur61II&search=colbert
-R
These May Day demonstrations and boycotts return the American protest tradition to its turn-of-the-20th-century ethnic proletarian origins—a time when, in the United States as well as in much of Europe, the quest for citizenship and equal rights was inherent in the fight for higher wages, stronger unions, and more political power for the working class.
Because today's marches are on a workday, they recall the mass strikes and marches that turned workers out of factories that convulsed America in the decades after the great railway strike of 1877, the first national work stoppage in the United States. Asserting their citizenship against the autocracy embodied by the big railroad corporations, the Irish and Germans of Baltimore and Pittsburgh burned roundhouses and fought off state militia in a revolt that frightened both the rail barons and the federal government. http://www.slate.com/id/2140846/
What’s Happening, Bolivia: Nationalizing. Notable even if your reserves [of natural gas] don’t crack the world’s top 20.
Bolivian President Evo Morales seized control of the country's natural gas industry Monday, sending soldiers to occupy fields that he contends private companies have plundered for years.
Morales said that unless foreign energy firms agreed to give Bolivia's state oil company oversight of production and a majority of their revenue generated in Bolivia, the government would evict them from the fields.
"The time has come, the awaited day, a historic day in which Bolivia retakes absolute control of our natural resources," Morales said during a televised speech from a gas field near the country's southern border. "The looting by foreign companies has ended."
Morales's announcement was expected, but his deployment of troops to gas fields was a strong statement in a region where governments are moving to block outside influence, particularly from the United States, and exert more control over the energy industry. Venezuela recently voided drilling contracts with private companies at 32 oil fields, demanding new contracts that give the state oil company a 60 percent stake. Ecuador is finalizing a law that could limit excessive profits by foreign crude producers. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/05/01/AR2006050100583_pf.html
What’s Happening, Afghanistan: Taliban Thrive Not new, as such reports are now overly familiar. Perhaps, attaining front page status is what’s most striking. The lasting image: The Taliban are "walking in the villages openly with their weapons, and sitting under the trees eating mulberries."
Building on a winter campaign of suicide bombings and assassinations and the knowledge that American troops are leaving, the Taliban appear to be moving their insurgency into a new phase, flooding the rural areas of southern Afghanistan with weapons and men.
Each spring with the arrival of warmer weather, the fighting season here starts up, but the scale of the militants' presence and their sheer brazenness have alarmed Afghans and foreign officials far more than in previous years.
"The Taliban and Al Qaeda are everywhere," a shopkeeper, Haji Saifullah, told the commander of American forces in Afghanistan, Lt. Gen. Karl Eikenberry, as the general strolled through the bazaar of this town to talk to people. "It is all right in the city, but if you go outside the city, they are everywhere, and the people have to support them. They have no choice." http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/03/world/asia/03afghan.html?_r=1&ei=5094&en=0692a5a972d58a3a&hp=&ex=1146628800&oref=slogin&partner=homepage&pagewanted=print
What’s Happening, Iraq: Sunni Soldier Graduation Upset They got posted to a Shiite area, which can be more than upsetting; it could be a death sentence.
The graduation of nearly 1,000 new Iraqi army soldiers in restive Anbar province took a disorderly turn Sunday when dozens of the men declared that they would refuse to serve outside their home areas, according to U.S. and Iraqi military authorities.
The graduation ceremony at Camp Habbaniyah, a base about 45 miles west of Baghdad, had been going well. The 978 soldiers, most of them Sunni Muslims, had just finished nearly five weeks of military training and were parading before a review stand to the sounds of martial music. They took an oath of service while U.S. and Iraqi officials delivered speeches hailing the event as an important step toward the formation of a national army.
Then some soldiers started tearing their clothes off to demonstrate their rage. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/05/01/AR2006050100854_pf.html
What’s Happening, Drug Policy- Mexico Legalization
Mexican President Vicente Fox will sign a bill that would legalize the use of nearly every drug and narcotic sold by the same Mexican cartels he's vowed to fight during his five years in office, a spokesman said Tuesday.
The list of illegal drugs approved for personal consumption by Mexico's Congress last week is enough to make one dizzy — or worse.
Cocaine. Heroin. LSD. Marijuana. PCP. Opium. Synthetic opiates. Mescaline. Peyote. Psilocybin mushrooms. Amphetamines. Methamphetamines.
And the per-person amounts approved for possession by anyone 18 or older could easily turn any college party into an all-nighter: half a gram of coke, a couple of Ecstasy pills, several doses of LSD, a few marijuana joints, a spoonful of heroin, 5 grams of opium and more than 2 pounds of peyote, the hallucinogenic cactus.
The law would be among the most permissive in the world, putting Mexico in the company of the Netherlands. Critics, including U.S. drug policy officials, already are worrying that it will spur a domestic addiction problem and make Mexico a narco-tourism destination. http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-legalize3may03,0,5421561,print.story
What’s Happening, Environment: Final(?) Confirmation of Global Warming- Bush retrogrades lose their last grounds for doubt.
A scientific panel convened by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has concluded that the Earth's surface and its upper atmosphere have been warming as a result of climate change at least partly caused by human activity.
Thomas Karl, director of the NOAA's climate-data center, said the findings resolve a "nagging issue" between climate-change experts and their skeptics. Because of poor data analysis and errors in some satellite data, he said, earlier measurements had shown the Earth was warming but the atmosphere wasn't. http://online.wsj.com/article/SB114662116494242246.html?mod=politics_primary_hs
What’s Happening, Health Care You don’t expect good news, no? Two reports on our failed system:
In mid-2004, more than 1,500 Kaiser Permanente patients awaiting kidney transplants in Northern California got form letters that forced them to change the course of their treatment.
Kaiser would no longer pay for transplants at outside hospitals, even established programs with thousands of successes. Instead, adult patients would be transferred to a new transplant center run by Kaiser itself — the first ever opened by the nation's largest HMO.
....Kaiser's massive rollout in Northern California endangered patients, forcing them into a fledgling program unprepared to handle the caseload, according to a Los Angeles Times investigation based on dozens of interviews, statistical analyses and confidential documents. http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-kaiser3may03,0,7436765,full.story?coll=la-home-headlines
"At every point in the social hierarchy there is more illness in the United States than in England and the differences are really dramatic," said study co-author Dr. Michael Marmot, an epidemiologist at University College London in England.
The upper crust in both countries was healthier than middle-class and low-income people in the same country. But richer Americans' health status resembled the health of the low-income British.
Marmot offered yet another explanation for the gap: Americans' financial insecurity. Improvements in household income have eluded all but the top fifth of Americans since the mid-1970s. Meanwhile, English citizens saw their incomes improve, he said.
Robert Blendon, a professor of health policy at the Harvard School of Public Health who was not involved in the study, said the stress of striving for the American dream may account for Americans' lousy health.
"The opportunity to go both up and down the socioeconomic scale in America may create stress," Blendon said. Americans don't have a reliable government safety net like the English enjoy, Blendon said. http://www.cnn.com/2006/HEALTH/05/02/sick.america.ap/index.html
Colbert: Follow-up to the Terrific Weekend performance
Comedy Central star Stephen Colbert's biting routine at the White House Correspondents Association dinner won a rare silent protest from Bush aides and supporters Saturday when several independently left before he finished.
"Colbert crossed the line," said one top Bush aide, who rushed out of the hotel as soon as Colbert finished. Another said that the president was visibly angered by the sharp lines that kept coming.
"I've been there before, and I can see that he is [angry]," said a former top aide. "He's got that look that he's ready to blow."
Colbert's routine was similar to what he does on his show, the Colbert Report, but much longer on the topic of Bush, suggesting that the president is out of touch with reality. http://www.usnews.com/usnews/news/articles/060501/1whwatch.htm
This morning, Katie Couric and Matt Lauer giggled and got all warm about the cutesy performance of Bush and the Twin look-alike imitator. Really funsy. Colbert was not mentioned.
I'm old enough to remember when Eartha Kitt told off Lady Byrd Johnson for her husband's policies in Vietnam at some innocent luncheon... the news media reported that, they didn't only report on the chicken salad sandwiches.
Yesterday the New York Times had no coverage of the event, except buried in its Washington section was a small, uninteresting blurb picked up from Reuters.
This morning, lo and behold, they have more... a fawning piece by someone named Elizabeth Bumiller called "At Award Correspondents' Dinner, A Set of Bush Twins Steal the Show."
Like Katie and Matt's briefer piece, this article too finds the President absolutely adorable. And makes the judgment call that the President's darling sense of humor is the true story of the event.
And the Colbert appearance -- which chilled the room, attacking journalists as well as Bush -- is literally not worth reporting. Back before blogs and C-Span, we wouldn't even know about it. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/chris-durang/ignoring-colbert-part-tw_b_20130.html
Finally, the Wednesday NY Times acknowledges, in the entertainment section: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/03/arts/03colb.html?ei=5094&en=bbdf71b100b0926d&hp=&ex=1146628800&partner=homepage&pagewanted=print
Video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lcIRXur61II&search=colbert
-R
