Coup in Honduras : Talks Reach Stalemate as Demonstrations Continue

Posted on July 13, 2009 by Thorne Dreyer

Ousted Honduran President Manuel Zelaya. Photo by AFP/Getty.

Costa Rican President Óscar Arias mediates controversial talks between Zelaya and Micheletti stand-ins while demonstrations against coup in Honduras continue.

By David Holmes Morris / The Rag Blog / July 13, 2009

After two days of closed meetings in Costa Rica, representatives of deposed Honduran president Manuel Zelaya and de facto president Roberto Micheletti appear not to have reached any substantive agreement.

Acting as mediator, Costa Rican President Óscar Arias met with the two groups at his residence in San José last Thursday and Friday, July 9 and 10, after meeting separately with each of the two claimants to the presidency. Zelaya has asked that the next meeting be in Honduras, but Arias disagrees and so far no further meetings have been scheduled.

Since Zelaya’s term expires next January, a long delay in his reinstatement could make questions of the legality of the de facto government moot.

Arias had accepted the position of mediator at the urging of U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. Zelaya and Micheletti, neither of whom has expressed any willingness to compromise, agreed to send representatives but declined to attend the sessions themselves. After meeting with Arias, Micheletti returned to Honduras and Zelaya left for the Dominican Republic and later flew toWashington.

The meetings in San José and Arias’ part in them have been criticized by leaders of anti-coup forces in Honduras and by Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez, who see them as legitimizing Micheletti’s de facto presidency. Carlos Reyes, director of the Frente Nacional de Resistencia contra el Golpe de Estado, a coalition of Honduran groups opposing the coup, has reportedly called the arranged meetings a delaying tactic meant to give more room to the imperialists who have been supporting the pro-coup forces in Honduras.

“How horrible it was to see a legitimate president receiving one who had usurped his position, giving him equal treatment,” Chávez told reporters. “This de facto president should have been arrested in Costa Rica.”

Honduran activists have claimed prominent Venezuelan and Cuban rightists, including Robert Carmona-Borjas, in exile in the United States since the failed 2002 coup in Venezuela, and members of the Miami-based Cuban exile group Alfa 66, were in Honduras at the time of the coup and may have been involved in carrying it out.

Large demonstrations against the coup government continue in Honduras, recently blocking several important highways. And reports have surfaced that as many as 800 demonstrators have been jailed since the coup, most of them immediately after the massive demonstration last Sunday at the Toncontín Airport, when authorities declared in late afternoon that the curfew would begin at 6:30 instead of the usual 10:00, giving the activists little time to find safety.

The Salvadoran website El Faro quotes Honduran Cardinal Óscar Rodríguez Maradiaga as saying, “Lately I have verified something that didn’t exist in Honduras before, and that is class hatred. And it is something that appears in a systematic form. Mel Zelaya had advisors from Venezuela, and class hatred was the strategy.”

In the meantime, anti-coup activists point out that Roberto Micheletti was one of a group of representatives who introduced a bill in 1985 to transform the legislature into a constituent assembly for the purpose of modifying the 1982 constitution to permit the re-election of President Roberto Suazo Córdoba, a member of Micheletti’s own Partido Liberal. The bill eventually failed. The coup government claims Zelaya’s effort to poll the citizens on writing a new constitution was intended to permit his reelection and cite it as the illegal act that justified his removal from office.

[San Antonio native David Holmes Morris is an army veteran, a language major, a retired printer, a sometime journalist, and a gay liberationist.]

For previous Rag Blog coverage of Honduras, go here.

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Bhopal: Twenty-Five Years Later, Hundreds of New Victims Born Each Year

Posted on July 13, 2009 by RagBlog

Nida, 17 months old Bhopali girl with a congenital birth defect. Photograph: Money Sharma/EPA.

Poisoned legacy
By Billy Briggs / July 12, 2009

The Hiroshima of the chemical industry is still claiming victims – babies born 25 years later with serious birth defects.

Bhopal — UNABLE TO steer safely in the mud, the driver of our rickshaw pulls into the side of the road to allow us to take shelter from torrential rain. There, under a shop’s awning, a small crowd of people are standing together waiting for the weather to break. They include Sapna Sharma and her brother-in-law, Sanjay. Sanjay is holding his 18-month-old nephew, Anshul, who has kohl-rimmed eyes and silver bracelets on his ankles. As we stand talking, some of the people start pointing to the child’s hands and feet while speaking animatedly to us in Hindi. Through our translator, Sapna then explains that her son was born with 12 toes and 12 fingers.

Shortly afterwards, about half a mile away in the Shankar Nagar area of Bhopal, we meet another Indian child with congenital defects, three-year-old, Raj, who is blind, cannot walk and whose head is oversized.

“The doctors said bad water could have been a cause of my son’s condition. Older people here are gas victims and now the younger people are victims of the water,” says his mother, Poona.
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Here, in the capital city of Madhya Pradesh in India, hundreds of children are being born with deformities and mental health problems. As we walk back to our rickshaw after the interview we come across more afflicted youngsters who have followed us along the road out of curiosity. They include Rajesh, 12, who is barefoot and bald. The other children make fun of him – his mother, Yashdabai, explains that they do so because they believe that her son is “mad”.

Rajesh’s older sister, Sonia, a pretty girl with her black hair pulled back off her face, scolds the other children and tells us that she always has to protect her brother from bullies. Sonia is barefoot, too, and as she speaks a colleague notices that the young girl has huge feet.

This is the horrendous legacy the city of Bhopal is facing 25 years on from one of the world’s worst industrial accident. The Bhopal gas disaster, as it became known, occurred shortly after midnight on December 3, 1984, when a cloud of poisonous gas escaped from a Union Carbide pesticide plant in the city. It has been dubbed the “Hiroshima of the chemical industry”. The accidental release of 42 tonnes of methyl isocyanate (MIC) from the factory exposed more than 500,000 people to toxic gases and up to 10,000 inhabitants are thought to have died within the first 72 hours after the leak.

At least 25,000 people exposed to the gas have since died, and today in Bhopal tens of thousands more Indians suffer from a variety of debilitating gas-related illnesses such as respiratory and psychiatric problems, joint pains, menstrual irregularities, tuberculosis and cancers. More disturbingly, the escalating number of birth defects in children include cleft palates, webbed feet and hands, twisted limbs, brain damage and heart problems.

Shankar Nagar is a slum area of the city just north of the derelict Union Carbide factory site. For years local campaigners have been demanding that Union Carbide – now owned by US multinational Dow Chemicals – clean up the abandoned pesticide plant, but so far their pleas have been ignored.

In 1999, a Greenpeace investigation found severe chemical contamination of the environment surrounding the former Union Carbide factory, including pollution with heavy metals and chemical compounds.

The Greenpeace report also said: “Analysis of water samples drawn from wells serving the local community has also confirmed the contamination of groundwater reserves with chemicals arising either from previous or ongoing activities and/or incidents.

“As a result of the ubiquitous presence of contaminants, the exposure of the communities surrounding the plants to complex mixtures of hazardous chemicals continues on a daily basis. Though less acute than the exposure which took place as a result of the 1984 MIC release, long-term chronic exposure to mixtures of toxic synthetic chemicals and heavy metals is also likely to have serious consequences for the health and survival of the local population.”

Amnesty International’s 2004 Clouds Of Injustice report said: “Toxic wastes continue to pollute the environment and water supply and it is appalling that no-one has been held account for the leak and its appalling consequences.”

The abandoned factory site is now a vast wasteland of weeds and trees that is home to packs of wild dogs. The buildings and structure have been left to rot while tank 610, from where the poison gas escaped, sits like an old rusting locomotive in the sun. Piles of dangerous chemicals are lying in the open air and inside one of the abandoned labs we saw dozens of dusty brown bottles containing chemicals. Campaigners say drums of Sevin – the pesticide Union Carbide was producing at the time using MIC – have never been removed from the site and remain locked in one of the sheds under police guard.

“There are sacks of poisons, mercury drops, toxic carbaryl rocks from which toxic tars ooze into the earth, and subsoil water and tarry liquids that overflow when the monsoon comes,” explained our translator and guide, Sanjay Sharma, 24, a student who lost his three sisters, two brothers and parents in the 1984 disaster. He has one sister left after his only other brother, Sunil, committed suicide on July 26, 2006. Sunil had been 12 at the time of the disaster and was a vociferous campaigner on behalf of victims until be became severely depressed.

“My brother hanged himself. When they found him he was wearing a T-shirt that said, No More Bhopalis’.”

Survivors campaigning for clean water petitioned the Supreme Court of India, which in May 2004 ordered that clean, safe water be piped into the communities, but to date the state government has ignored this order.

In January this year, a major study was embarked upon to try to ascertain the extent of the current health problems facing the population. The year-long investigation is being carried out by the Sambhavna Clinic in Bhopal, an innovative medical facility built in the centre of the city most badly affected by the gas leak. Researcher Santosh Kshatria said 22 different communities near the factory site were believed to be drinking from a contaminated water supply.

“There are 10 researchers. I’m covering 20,000 people in 17 neighbourhoods. So far I have surveyed 5000 people and found more than 200 cases of children with congenital defects. Many have twisted limbs and many have mental health issues. Anecdotally, this is a very high rate of incidence,” she says.

In many cases these are the same families from the poorest slum areas who were decimated by the gas in 1984. They have no option but to drink the water and complain of aches and pains, rashes, fevers, eruptions of boils, headaches, nausea, lack of appetite, dizziness and constant exhaustion.

Lead, mercury and organochlorines have been found in the milk of nursing mothers living near the factory with the result that women are terrified to breastfeed their babies in case they are giving them poison.

Another legacy for Bhopali females is that men have reservations about marrying so-called “gas victims” so many young local women face living in dire poverty having been stigmatised and left single.

Investigations into the 1984 disaster revealed that something had gone fundamentally wrong with a tank that stored methyl isocyanate. During the early hours of December 3, 1984, large amounts of water entered tank 610, containing the highly toxic chemical. The resulting reaction increased the temperature inside the tank to more than 200C, raising the pressure to a level it was not designed to withstand and eventually releasing a large volume of toxic gases.

Union Carbide has always claimed that its Indian subsidiary – Union Carbide India Limited, which was 49%-owned by the state – was solely responsible for the management of the plant and that the accident was the result of sabotage.

Union Carbide was taken over by Dow Chemicals, one of the producers of Agent Orange, in 2001, and the latter insists that all liabilities were settled in 1989 when Union Carbide paid around £300 million to the Indian government to be allocated to survivors. Furthermore, Union Carbide says it did all it could to alleviate the human suffering following the disaster and that it paid for a hospital in Bhopal to offer free medical care to victims.

The company also denies allegations that it abandoned the plant and says UCIL removed tens of thousands of pounds of MIC from the plant and spent around £1.5m undertaking additional clean-up work. The firm also says that a 1998 study of water sources near the plant site by the Madhya Pradesh Pollution Control Board did not find any traces of chemicals linked to any substance used at the UCIL plant.

In 1991, however, Bhopal’s authorities charged Union Carbide’s chief executive, Warren Andersen, with manslaughter. To date the retired American has avoided an international arrest warrant and a US court summons. Andersen was declared a fugitive from justice by the Chief Judicial Magistrate of Bhopal in 1992 for failing to appear at court. Although orders were passed to the Indian government to press for his extradition from America, Bhopal campaigners say ministers have not pushed the case, fearing a backlash from foreign investors.

A quarter of a century on the campaign for justice in Bhopal continues unabated. In June, 27 members of the US Congress appealed to Dow Chemicals to pay to clean up the derelict site and to meet survivors’ demands for medical and economic rehabilitation. The politicians also asked the company to send a representative to take part in court proceedings in India.

“Bhopal is widely regarded as the worst industrial disaster in human history, a catastrophe with widespread implications for the chemical industry, globalisation and human rights,” they said in a letter initiated by Frank Pallone, a Democrat from New Jersey.

They say the polluter, rather than taxpayers, should bear responsibility for environmental damage. Meanwhile, Bhopal’s environmental crisis continues.

Source / Scotland Sunday Herald

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The Spirit of Humanity: An Interview with Cynthia McKinney

Posted on July 12, 2009 by RagBlog


Cynthia McKinney is a former US Representative who served from 1993-2003 and from 2005-2008 . She was the 2008 Green Party presidential nominee and has been an active member of the Free Gaza Movement. In 2004, The Backbone Campaign awarded her the fifth annual Backbone Award “because she was willing to challenge the Bush administration and called for an investigation into 9/11 when few others dared to air their criticism and questions.” Here, Ishmahil Blagrove, Jr. talks to McKinney about her experience with the situation in Gaza and her views on today’s political landscape.

Last year in the midst of the Israeli onslaught against the people of Gaza, you attempted to break the Israeli siege by entering by boat. What happened?

We were rammed by the Israelis. There I got a chance to see the complicity of the media. We had CNN on board and the CNN reporter was literally arguing in the midst of a tragedy; he was arguing with headquarters because they didn’t believe what he was telling them. They would have rather run the story as the Israelis told them. I have seen how the media self-censor, twist, contort themselves to report misleading stories and then they report outright lies.

What is the situation in Gaza and explain to me why you feel so passionate about getting into Gaza and assisting?

I think we all know at least what we all saw on Al Jazeera Arabic and Press TV: the images of white phosporous and the F16’s and the helicopters. We saw all of that and those two stations in particular ran almost 24-hour coverage. People in the United States couldn’t see those images on CNN because CNN was missing in action, but through the power of and access to the internet, people in the United States were able to see the images. Never have we been able to discuss what US policy is in Israel, but we were able to see the F16’s given to Israel by the United States, the depleted Uranium munitions given to Israel by the United States, the white phosperous given to Israel by the United States. And so the United States is as complicit and even more complicit; the Israelis used it but the Americans gave them the wherewithal to use it.

Why do believe there has not been more international attention given to the plight of the Palestinians?

The media as we know it – and I can only speak mainly about US media and the media that is owned by the US media in other parts of the world – they are what I call special interest media and the special interest media have demonstrated amply that they serve the political aims and values of certain special interests inside the United States, whose goal is to affect the formulation of policy. And so we don’t get a discussion of Gaza and the Palestinian plight inside the United States as we should because it doesn’t serve the special interests in Washington, DC who lobby for a particular point of view that does not favor the Palestinians. There was an advert for Gaza that the BBC were supposed to run and they refused to run it and it was unprecedented that they would refuse to run an advert requesting help, relief for besieged people; but that shows the power of special interests operating in Britain. The Zionist lobby is powerful in the United States; it is the most powerful lobby that operates in Washington, DC and we saw it flex its muscle in Britain during Operation Cast Lead with the BBC.

What are President Obama’s policies in the region?

On the day that we were turned away from embarking upon our peace mission in Cyprus, President Obama signed over a 100 billion dollar supplemental appropriation for more war and occupation in Iraq and Afghanistan. The drones continue to kill people in Pakistan, the increase level of troops in Afghanistan, the perception of Russia and China as enemies throw back to the days of the cold war, the continued search for a home for AFRICOM: these are not things that we should be proud of coming from a President with the name Barrack Hussein Obama. But, in fact, this is what is happening under his administration. We also have seen the greatest transfer of wealth out of the hands of African Americans that we have ever seen probably since slavery, not only out of the hands of African Americans, but out of the hands of Latinos and increasingly out of the hands of middle-class white Americans as well

Many people suggest that because there is an African American president, that change has come. Are you hopeful?

What American people and the global community were subjected to was very well financed Madison Avenue propaganda. A slick media campaign to promote someone whom the United States people didn’t even know. He and I were sworn in together in 2005 in the Congress; this was when he walked into a Senate seat virtually unopposed. Now, when was the last time an African American ever was given a Senate seat? I don’t think it’s ever happened, even during the times of reconstruction when we had black Senators, black Governors; those positions of power were earned, through the blood and the toil of black people who went to the polls and voted in what, at that time, were fair elections.

Then why do you believe that President Obama was elected?

I think the American people were looking for dignity. I think the dignity of our country had been stripped from us as a result of the publication of the photos around Abu Ghraib, the information came out about the lies of Iraq and we had been through 9/11 and the Administration knowingly lied and tied 9/11 to Iraq and so there were a lot of things that the American people wanted desperately to take a blue pill for. And I’m referring to the blue pill of the Matrix, where one takes the blue pill and slips into a world of make believe and so that’s where many people are.

What do you think it will take to get that dramatic shift in American public opinion?

The American people need information. If you look at what happened in Vietnam, the policy was taken out of the hands of the joint Chiefs and put into the hands of the people. When the television images came into every living room in the United States, people understood that they needed to change policy themselves. I hope the American people only need information because once their conscience is pricked with that information then they will be compelled to do something different.

You are back in Cyprus for a second time; what is the purpose of your mission now?

The purpose of the mission is to assert our belief in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. That it is our right to travel anywhere in the world that we so choose and it is the right of people in other parts of the world to receive us, if they choose to do so.

Why have you taken up the cause of the Palestinian people?

I have been asked that a lot because I am not Arab, I’m not Muslim. So, why do I care? Well, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. said it best: “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.” And this is clearly a gross injustice; this is genocide, crimes against humanity. How can anyone remain silent in the face of this? During the civil rights movement, we were outraged at our treatment and we just couldn’t vote; here, Palestinians can’t live.

July 2009

This video is the last footage taken onboard the Spirit Of Humanity before its voyage to bring humanitarian aid to Gaza was prematurely halted by Isreali special forces. It shows the atmosphere inside the cabin as the crew try to negotiate with the Israeli ship via radio.

Source / Rice ‘N’ Peas

Thanks to Jeffrey Segal / The Rag Blog

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Singin’ on Sunday – Dick Gaughan

Posted on July 12, 2009 by RagBlog

Dick Gaughan – Handful of Earth

From a 1983 BBC Spectrum Documentary. Dedicated to all the workers out there.

Thanks to Erich Seifert / The Rag Blog

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Film / ‘The Hurt Locker’ : Kathryn Bigelow’s Explosive Iraq War Movie

Posted on July 11, 2009 by Thorne Dreyer

The Hurt Locker will deepen your understanding of what our soldiers have been enduring in Iraq for twelve to fifteen months at a stretch.

By Tod Ensign / The Rag Blog / July 11, 2009

See ‘The Hurt Locker, Ticking Time Bomb of a Movie,’ by Scott Foundas, and Movie Trailer, Below.

Yesterday, I saw a powerful new Iraq War film, The Hurt Locker, directed by Kathryn Bigelow. While it’s a theatrical film, shot mostly in Jordan, it packs all the wallop of a down and dirty documentary. It focuses on the war experiences of three soldiers who are assigned to a IED detection and detonation unit… I found some of the scenes to be so intense that they were almost unwatchable. (Warning: some Iraq and Afghan combat vets may find this film emotionally overwhelming.)

I strongly urge everyone to make a special effort to see The Hurt Locker First, because . Second, because we need to talk up and support this kind of film so that it won’t just vanish from theatres in the next few days.

At present, I believe that it’s only playing in a few large cities. (It’s currently in six NYC theatres.) As often happens, it probably won’t be available in many communities (e.g., the Salmon Mall adjacent to Fort Drum in New York) that would most benefit from seeing it. I just fantasized that somehow we could make it available to every potential recruit before he or she signed their enlistment contract!

[Tod Ensign is a veteran’s rights lawyer and director of Citizen Soldier, a non-profit GI and veteran rights advocacy group.]

The Hurt Locker, Ticking Time Bomb of a Movie

By Scott Foundas / June 24, 2009

Kathryn Bigelow’s Iraq War drama The Hurt Locker is a full-throttle body shock of a movie. It gets inside you like a virus, puts your nerves in a blender, and twists your guts into a Gordian knot.

Set during the last month in the year-long rotation of a three-man U.S. Army bomb squad stationed in Baghdad, it may be the only film made about Iraq — documentary or fiction — that gives us a true sense of what it feels like to be on the front lines of a war fought not in jungles but in cities, where bombs rise up from the ground instead of raining down from the sky, every narrow alley portends an ambush, and every onlooker is a potential insurgent.

It’s an experiential war movie — one that calls to mind the title of the 1950s docudrama series You Are There -— but also a psychologically astute one, matching its intricate sensory architecture with an equally detailed map of the modern soldier’s psyche, a diagram of what motivates the volunteers in a volunteer army.

The movie begins with a typically bracing set piece in which the soldiers of Bravo Company’s Explosive Ordnance Disposal team come upon an IED planted in the center of a busy Baghdad marketplace. When their remote-controlled bomb-detonating robot hits a snag, the team’s affable leader (Guy Pearce) dons a thick Kevlar suit and attempts to set the charge manually. He does not return. His replacement, Staff Sergeant William James (Jeremy Renner), is a career soldier of an entirely different breed, one who prefers to handle bombs up close and personally instead of by remote control, and whose Kevlar suit is part of his daily wardrobe—not just for special occasions.

At first glance, Sgt. James seems like the closest thing to a stock character — the gonzo alpha male living out his childhood cowboy fantasies — in a picture markedly devoid of small-town rubes, poetry-quoting intellectuals, or any other easily reducible war-movie “types.” But like most things in The Hurt Locker, there is considerably more to him than meets the eye. Beneath his blustery macho surface, he may be the movie’s most intricately wired explosive device.

Written by former Village Voice columnist Mark Boal, The Hurt Locker belongs to that subset of Bigelow’s work — including her biker-gang debut The Loveless and the bank-robbing-surfers caper Point Break — devoted to the ethos of hyper-masculine communities, the men who choose to live in them, and those who emerge as their leaders.

Sgt. James is one such character, and Bigelow, Boal, and especially Renner excel at showing us how his reckless displays of bravado are both a coping mechanism and an addiction, a battlefield genius and a form of madness. A secular god with sports hero stats (873 disarmed bombs and counting!), he inspires envy in some, contempt in others, and both in the men under his command—two comparatively by-the-book sergeants (very well played by Anthony Mackie and Brian Geraghty) who also want to prove their mettle as men of war, as long as they go home in one piece.

But for James, who has an ex-wife and child waiting for him somewhere, the adrenaline-rush alterna-reality of Iraq is vastly preferable to the home front, with its prison of domestic responsibility. Like the jacked-in wire trippers of Bigelow’s futuristic Strange Days, he yearns for something more visceral, more cinematic than everyday life.

With her strength of revealing character through action, Bigelow comes closer to the tradition of Anthony Mann, Sam Fuller, and other bygone practitioners of the classic Hollywood war movie than to today’s dominant breed of studio A-listers, who create (mostly incoherent) action at the expense of character. Not that The Hurt Locker, which I take to be the best American film since Paul Thomas Anderson’s There Will Be Blood, much resembles any war movie we’ve ever seen before. Here, combat is more often a solitary rather than a group endeavor — a lone man tracing a rat’s nest of wires back to its source, or exchanging long-distance fire with a single sniper across a vast desert expanse.

There is little, if any, talk about patriotism or homeland security, and there are fewer American flags on display than in any American war movie in memory. When The Hurt Locker premiered last fall at the Venice and Toronto film festivals, this prompted some observers to tag it as an “apolitical” war picture, which is really a way of saying that Bigelow’s film is mercifully free of ham-fisted polemics. Instead of setting out to prove a point, it seeks to immerse us in an environment — something Bigelow does with a conceptual rigor usually associated with those directors whose work is confined to film societies and art houses.

Time is Bigelow’s organizing principle here — the time left in Iraq for the men of Bravo company (displayed on the screen as chapter headings throughout), the time that ticks away between the discovery of a bomb and its eventual disarming or detonation, and the time that, in those unbearably tense moments, seems to stretch out indefinitely toward the horizon. War may be hell, but in The Hurt Locker, it’s also an incredibly pellucid waking dream.

Source / Village Voice

The Hurt Locker — Trailer

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Woodstock: The Memories Live On for These Two

Posted on July 11, 2009 by RagBlog

Love It: Everyone quoted in the story sounds like they’re still trippin’!

Mariann Wizard / The Rag Blog


Iconic Woodstock Couple Keeps Festival Spirit Alive

By Adam Horne / July 11, 2009

Forty years after the legendary festival in Bethel, N.Y., a photo of two lovebirds taken at Woodstock has become an iconic symbol of love. Having only met three months prior, the picture captures a young couple — Nick and Bobbi Ercoline, both now 60 — embracing underneath a dirty blanket, surrounded by exhausted concertgoers. To the Ercolines’ surprise, the image became the cover of the ‘Woodstock’ album in 1970 and was featured on posters for the subsequent documentary film.

What resonates most about the photo is that it speaks to what many Woodstock veterans consider to be the true meaning of the festival — not just music but a movement of peace, love and unity. In a recent interview with Spinner, Woodstock performer Richie Havens cited a Martin Luther King Jr. speech, saying “It’s not him or him or him, it’s all of us or nothing. That was our thing, that’s what we went against the war with.”

The couple themselves acknowledge the social significance of the now legendary picture. “It’s an honest representation of a generation. When we look at that photo … I see our generation,” Nick told the NY Daily News.

Original Santana percussionist Michael Carabello witnessed firsthand how his generation came together for three days in 1969. “It was about the music and it was about everything else, but it was more about us getting along.” Noting the hectic and exhausting nature of the festival (as evidenced by the background of the photo), Carabello told Spinner, “You know, you get so absorbed in it you just don’t want to hear it anymore, you forget about it, so the only thing you can do is become a family. You just help one another out.”

Certainly Woodstock has been romanticized over the years, but for many, the image of Nick and Bobbi wrapped in a blanket represents exactly what Carabello is talking about.

What’s more, the couple has been together ever since.

Source / Spinner

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Evidence of War Crimes in Afghanistan Coming to Light

Posted on July 11, 2009 by RagBlog

Juan Cole says it as well as it can be said: “I can tell by various web metrics that you guys are not interested in the Afghanistan story. You should be and I am going to parse it today anyway. It is one of the advantages of being non-profit that I write what I want and you can read it or not as you like. But really, you should be following this war.“

I agree with Professor Cole. We should not only be following what is happening in Afghanistan, we should also be doing our utmost to end the carnage there. War has outlived its usefulness as ‘a solution.’ I say this especially to those who make remarks on this blog that “there will always be war.” Yes, there will – just as long as there are too many people who say there will always be war. When there are too many people who say “there is a better way,” wars will end.

Richard Jehn / The Rag Blog

The forces of Gen. Abdul Rashid Dostum, shown on horseback at a campaign rally, were said to have killed Taliban prisoners. Photo: David Guttenfelder/Associated Press.

U.S. Inaction Seen After Taliban P.O.W.’s Died
By James Risen / July 10, 2009

WASHINGTON — After a mass killing of hundreds, perhaps thousands, of Taliban prisoners of war by the forces of an American-backed warlord during the 2001 invasion of Afghanistan, Bush administration officials repeatedly discouraged efforts to investigate the episode, according to government officials and human rights organizations.

American officials had been reluctant to pursue an investigation — sought by officials from the F.B.I., the State Department, the Red Cross and human rights groups — because the warlord, Gen. Abdul Rashid Dostum, was on the payroll of the C.I.A. and his militia worked closely with United States Special Forces in 2001, several officials said. They said the United States also worried about undermining the American-supported government of President Hamid Karzai, in which General Dostum had served as a defense official.

“At the White House, nobody said no to an investigation, but nobody ever said yes, either,” said Pierre Prosper, the former American ambassador for war crimes issues. “The first reaction of everybody there was, ‘Oh, this is a sensitive issue; this is a touchy issue politically.’ ”

It is not clear how — or if — the Obama administration will address the issue. But in recent weeks, State Department officials have quietly tried to thwart General Dostum’s reappointment as military chief of staff to the president, according to several senior officials, and suggested that the administration might not be hostile to an inquiry.

The question of culpability for the prisoner deaths — which may have been the most significant mass killing in Afghanistan after the 2001 American-led invasion — has taken on new urgency since the general, an important ally of Mr. Karzai, was reinstated to his government post last month. He had been suspended last year and living in exile in Turkey after he was accused of threatening a political rival at gunpoint.

“If you bring Dostum back, it will impact the progress of democracy and the trust people have in the government,” Mr. Prosper said. Arguing that the Obama administration should investigate the 2001 killings, he added, “There is always a time and place for justice.”

While President Obama has deepened the United States’ commitment to Afghanistan, sending 21,000 more American troops there to combat the growing Taliban insurgency, his administration has also tried to distance itself from Mr. Karzai, whose government is deeply unpopular and widely viewed as corrupt.

A senior State Department official said that Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and Richard C. Holbrooke, the special representative on Afghanistan and Pakistan, had told Mr. Karzai of their objections to reinstating General Dostum. The American officials have also pressed his sponsors in Turkey to delay his return to Afghanistan while talks continue with Mr. Karzai over the general’s role, said an official briefed on the matter. Asked about looking into the prisoner deaths, the official said, “We believe that anyone suspected of war crimes should be thoroughly investigated.”

The Back Story

While the deaths have been previously reported, the back story of the frustrated efforts to investigate them has not been fully told. The killings occurred in late November 2001, just days after the American-led invasion forced the ouster of the Taliban government in Kabul. Thousands of Taliban fighters surrendered to General Dostum’s forces, which were part of the American-backed Northern Alliance, in the city of Kunduz. They were then transported to a prison run by the general’s forces near the town of Shibarghan.

Some members of the Taliban were held at a prison in Shibarghan in February 2001. A mass grave of Taliban prisoners of war is thought to be in a desert stretch just outside Shibarghan. Photo: Claro Cortes IV/Reuters.

Survivors and witnesses told The New York Times and Newsweek in 2002 that over a three-day period, Taliban prisoners were stuffed into closed metal shipping containers and given no food or water; many suffocated while being trucked to the prison. Other prisoners were killed when guards shot into the containers. The bodies were said to have been buried in a mass grave in Dasht-i-Leili, a stretch of desert just outside Shibarghan.

A recently declassified 2002 State Department intelligence report states that one source, whose identity is redacted, concluded that about 1,500 Taliban prisoners died. Estimates from other witnesses or human rights groups range from several hundred to several thousand. The report also says that several Afghan witnesses were later tortured or killed.

In Afghanistan, rival warlords have had a history of eliminating enemy troops by suffocating them in sealed containers. General Dostum, however, has said previously that any such deaths of the Taliban prisoners were unintentional. He has said that only 200 prisoners died and blamed combat wounds and disease for most of the fatalities. The general could not be reached for comment, and a spokesman declined to comment for this article.

While a dozen or so bodies were examined and several were autopsied, a full exhumation was never performed, and human rights groups are concerned that evidence has been destroyed. In 2008, a medical forensics team working with the United Nations discovered excavations that suggested the mass grave had been moved. Satellite photos obtained by The Times show that the site was disturbed even earlier, in 2006.

In a 2001 mass killing, bodies were said to have been buried at a mass grave in Dasht-i-Leili. Photo: Physicians for Human Rights.

“Our repeated efforts to protect witnesses, secure evidence and get a full investigation have been met by the U.S. and its allies with buck-passing, delays and obstruction,” said Nathaniel Raymond, a researcher for Physicians for Human Rights, a group based in Boston that discovered the mass grave site in 2002.

Seeking an Investigation

The first calls for an investigation came from his group and the International Committee of the Red Cross. A military commander in the United States-led coalition rejected a request by a Red Cross official for an inquiry in late 2001, according to the official, who, in keeping with his organization’s policy, would speak only on condition of anonymity and declined to identify the commander.

A few months later, Dell Spry, the F.B.I.’s senior representative at the detainee prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, heard accounts of the deaths from agents he supervised there. Separately, 10 or so prisoners brought from Afghanistan reported that they had been “stacked like cordwood” in shipping containers and had to lick the perspiration off one another to survive, Mr. Spry recalled. They told similar accounts of suffocations and shootings, he said. A declassified F.B.I. report, dated January 2003, confirms that the detainees provided such accounts.

Mr. Spry, who is now an F.B.I. consultant, said he did not believe the stories because he knew that Al Qaeda trained members to fabricate tales about mistreatment. Still, the veteran agent said he thought the agency should investigate the reports “so they could be debunked.”

But a senior official at F.B.I. headquarters, whom Mr. Spry declined to identify, told him to drop the matter, saying it was not part of his mission and it would be up to the American military to investigate.

“I was disappointed because I believed that, true or untrue, we had to be in front of this story, because someday it may turn out to be a problem,” Mr. Spry said.

The Pentagon, however, showed little interest in the matter. In 2002, Physicians for Human Rights asked Defense Department officials to open an investigation and provide security for its forensics team to conduct a more thorough examination of the gravesite. “We met with blanket denials from the Pentagon,” recalls Jennifer Leaning, a board member with the group. “They said nothing happened.”

Pentagon spokesmen have said that the United States Central Command conducted an “informal inquiry,” asking Special Forces personnel members who worked with General Dostum if they knew of a mass killing by his forces. When they said they did not, the inquiry went no further.

“I did get the sense that there was little appetite for this matter within parts of D.O.D.,” said Marshall Billingslea, former acting assistant defense secretary for special operations, referring to the Department of Defense.

High-Level Conversation

Another former defense official, who would speak only on condition of anonymity, recalled that the prisoner deaths came up in a conversation with Paul D. Wolfowitz, the deputy secretary of defense at the time, in early 2003.

“Somebody mentioned Dostum and the story about the containers and the possibility that this was a war crime,” the official said. “And Wolfowitz said we are not going to be going after him for that.”

In an interview, Mr. Wolfowitz said he did not recall the conversation. However, Pentagon documents obtained by Physicians for Human Rights through a Freedom of Information Act request confirm that the issue was debated by Mr. Wolfowitz and other officials.

As evidence mounted about the deaths, Secretary of State Colin L. Powell assigned Mr. Prosper, the United States ambassador at large for war crimes, to look into them in 2002. He met with General Dostum, who denied the allegations, Mr. Prosper recalled. Meanwhile, Karzai government officials told him that they opposed any investigation.

“They made it clear that this was going to cause a problem,” said Mr. Prosper, who left the Bush administration in 2005 and is now a lawyer in Los Angeles. “They would say, ‘We have had decades of war crimes. Where do you start?’ ”

In Washington, Mr. Prosper encountered similar attitudes. In 2002, Zalmay M. Khalilzad, then the White House coordinator for Afghanistan, made it clear that he was concerned about efforts to investigate General Dostum, Mr. Prosper said. “Khalilzad never opposed an investigation,” Mr. Prosper recalled. “But he definitely raised the political implications of it.”

Mr. Khalilzad, who later served as the American ambassador to Afghanistan, did not respond to a request for comment.

Mr. Prosper said that because of the resistance from American and Afghan officials, his office dropped its inquiry. The State Department mentioned the episode in its annual human rights report for 2002, but took no further action.

Source / New York Times

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Loving: The Four Horsemen of Agriculture

Posted on July 11, 2009 by RagBlog

Cartoon by Charlie Loving / The Rag Blog

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Democrats in Texas : Lone Star State Turning Blue?

Posted on July 10, 2009 by Thorne Dreyer

The Democrats: Houston mayor Bill White, left, is expected to make a run for the Senate and Gene Locke is a leading candidate to succeed him as mayor of Houston. Another top mayoral candidate is openly gay City Controller Annise Parker. Photo by Kevin Fujii / Houston Chronicle.

The red and the blue in the Lone Star State:
High hopes for Texas Dems

By The Economist / July 10, 2009

The elected sheriff of Dallas County is a lesbian Latina. The leading candidates to become mayor of Houston in November include a black man and a gay white woman. The speaker of the House of Representatives is the first Jew to hold the job in 164 years of statehood and only the second speaker to be elected from an urban district in modern times.

In this year’s legislative session, bills to compel women to undergo an ultrasound examination before having an abortion (to bring home to them what they are about to do) and to allow the carrying of guns on campus both fell by the wayside; a bill to increase compensation for people wrongly convicted sailed through. Lakewood, in Houston, the biggest church not just in Texas but in America, claims to welcome gays. As Dorothy in “The Wizard of Oz” might have said, we’re not in Texas any more.

Or at least, not in Texas as we have recently come to know it. A Democratic-voting Texas would be nothing new, but political memories are short, and the blunders of the Bush presidency have coloured global perceptions of what Texas is like. It mostly voted Democratic in presidential elections until 1968, when, alone among the former Confederate states, it went for Hubert Humphrey, and 1976, when it voted for Jimmy Carter. Many of those voters were highly conservative “Dixiecrats” and later flipped to the Republicans. But there has always been a strong radical streak too. William Jennings Bryan was hugely popular in Texas. Jim Hightower, a former Texas agriculture commissioner and the perennial voice of Texas populism, says that “Texas has always been a purple state”—up for grabs by either the red Republicans or the blue Democrats.

It had a Democratic governor, in the feisty and liberal shape of Ann Richards, until as recently as 1995; but since that year, which saw George Bush’s ascent to the governor’s mansion, the Republicans have been firmly in control, and no Democrat has won statewide office. Since 2003 the Republicans have controlled the House as well as the Senate, monopolising every lever of power in the state. Now the pendulum is swinging back.

With no prospect of a local son to vote for in future elections (a Bush has been on the ballot paper for six of the past eight presidential votes), the Republicans have lost one big advantage. In the 2008 election the Democrats did much better all over the state. They won the presidential vote in all the big cities except Fort Worth (see map). They made big inroads into the Republicans’ dominance of the suburbs, where American elections are lost and won these days. Overall they took 44% of the vote, up from 38% in 2004, even though Barack Obama barely campaigned in Texas.

They secured a blocking minority, 12 seats out of 31, in the heavily gerrymandered state Senate, and almost took control of the Texas House of Representatives: the Republicans now hold it by just 76 seats to 74. The conservative speaker was promptly ousted and replaced by Joe Straus, who depended for his election on a sizeable block of Democratic votes.

The mild-mannered and charming Mr Straus has turned out to be a bipartisan and moderate figure, though he insists that he made no promises to the Democrats who backed him. But this year’s legislative session showed the Democrats flexing their muscles in the House, blocking a bill on voter identification that they said discriminated against their supporters.

The rise of the Democrats poses a dilemma for Republicans in Texas, just as it does nationally. And just as the national party seems to be lapsing into fratricide, so a vicious internal war has broken out over the governorship. Rick Perry is running for a third full term in the job, but the main challenge he faces is not from the Democrats who, oddly, have come up with a remarkably unconvincing candidate: Tom Schieffer, who used to be Mr Bush’s business partner and who is famous mainly because his brother is a TV presenter. The real rival is within, in the shape of Kay Bailey Hutchison, probably the most popular politician in the state. Mrs Hutchison has served as one of Texas’s two senators in Washington, DC, since 1993, and was last re-elected in 2006 with 62% of the vote.


Internecine warfare

Mr Perry has a strong economic record to run on, but because his toughest fight is against a fellow Republican, this has already turned into a battle for the souls of the 600,000 conservative sorts who vote in the Republican primary, due to be held next March. Mr Perry has lurched to the right to woo this atypical electorate.

Thus, he has backed allowing “Choose Life” to be an official Texas car licence-plate motto. This hurts Mrs Hutchison, who is in trouble with social conservatives for having once voted against overturning Roe v Wade, the Supreme Court decision that protects the right to abortion. He has also refused to take up a big chunk of the stimulus funds offered to Texas to help pay unemployment benefit, on the ground that this would create a long-lasting obligation.

No one doubts that Mrs Hutchison would beat Mr Perry or anyone else in Texas in a general election, but recent polls have her lagging behind Mr Perry in the primary. If she does formally enter the race, as expected, she will have to face being branded as a baby-killer and a creature of spendthrift Washington, DC.

Mrs Hutchison insists that “it’s very important that we don’t build a party around an issue [abortion] that is so personal, on which even families disagree.” She is surely right, but primary voters may not see it that way. This race matters hugely to Texas: it is a moment when the state’s Republicans will have to decide which wing of the party they are on.

The Democrats, meanwhile, are pinning their hopes for the 2010 election on securing a majority in the state House of Representatives and on winning a US Senate seat (which may come up sooner if Mrs Hutchison resigns to concentrate on her race for governor). Their chances in the House are good: as the recession starts to bite in Texas, later than elsewhere in the country, support for the Democrats is likely to rise. On the other hand Barack Obama will not be at the head of the ticket in 2010, as he was in 2008—though in Texas he was never quite the draw he was on the coasts.

The steady rise in the Hispanic population, coupled with a slow but continuous increase in Latinos’ tendency to vote, bodes well for the Democrats. George Bush did an impressive job courting the Hispanic vote, but the Republican Party threw that advantage away by rejecting his plans for immigration reform in 2006-07. In the 2008 presidential election Texas Latinos voted Democrat by 63% to 37%. Mr Obama’s nomination of the first Hispanic Supreme Court justice is unlikely to hurt, and nor will his commitment to immigration reform. As Hispanics increasingly spread out across the state they will start to tip the balance in many suburban counties, which is where the big political battles in America are being fought.

In the Senate race the Democrats’ probable candidate will be Bill White, the current mayor of Houston. He has done an excellent job balancing the needs of business with those of his core voters, and he will have a lot of money behind him.

Texas had become used to being at the centre of events, having supplied the president, the vice-president or at least the treasury secretary for all but a handful of the past 50 years. Now it does not even have a senator in the majority party, meaning that Texas has no voice in any of the big deliberations in Washington, DC. That will help the Democrats too.

But it does seem fair to ask what Texas Democrats actually stand for. They say they want more money spent on health and education, but pretty much every politician in Texas says the same, and the party’s leadership shows no appetite for delivering this by taxing Texans more heavily. Hardly anyone seeks to abolish the death penalty, even though, in most years, Texas executes as many people as the rest of America put together. Gun control and recognition of gay marriage are off the table. Everyone has jumped on the renewable-energy bandwagon.

It would, in short, be possible to imagine Texas slipping back to the Democrats without much happening in consequence, except for two considerations. The first is that, should Texas go Democratic at the presidential level, the Republicans nationally would be in deep trouble: with its 34 electoral-college votes, Texas is the only big state they have regularly won in recent presidential elections. The second consideration is the Hispanics. As they become ever more powerful in an ever stronger Democratic Party, there is every chance that they will turn against a model that has left far too many of them behind.

Source / The Economist

Thanks to Vik Verma / The Rag Blog

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James Retherford : Who Watches the Watchman? The Espionage Octopus

Posted on July 10, 2009 by Thorne Dreyer


Part III
Who Watches the Watchman?

COINTELPRO and the Federal Government’s
Clandestine Attack on the U.S. Constitution

Using FBI and CIA intelligence reports, the federal government compiled a Rabble Rouser Index of activists. By 1973 the National Security Council compiled a ‘watch list’ of 300,000 domestic dissidents with alleged subversive foreign connections.

By James Retherford / The Rag Blog / July 10, 2009

[A version of this series was originally researched and written six years ago. It describes in chilling detail how the U.S. government surreptitiously conspired to maintain lockdown social control of American citizens in the period up to and including post-Watergate. Go here for the introduction to and first two parts of “Who Watches the Watchman.”]

The Federal Bureau of Investigation did not work alone in creating its modern-day conspiratorial shadow government.

The Central Intelligence Agency in 1967 launched Operation CHAOS, a far-reaching and illegal program targeting American dissidents. The National Security Agency, a virtually “invisible” intelligence-gathering agency with a huge budget and workforce, in 1969 expanded what became Operation MINARET, a program for electronically eavesdropping on overseas communications.

In addition, various military intelligence agencies participated in spying not only on dissident military personnel but also on American civilians. Army Intelligence developed its own 100,000-name “enemies” list. Finally, the FBI and other federal agencies developed close working and information sharing relationships with the Internal Revenue Service and the U.S. Postal Service; the bureau’s postal connection facilitated mail spying while IRS connection was used effectively to investigate the finances of targeted groups and individuals. In time the IRS compiled an 11,000-name investigation list at the bureau’s behest.

Over the years these large intelligence-gathering agencies had developed internecine rivalries prompted at least in part by the profession’s apparently pathological aversion to sharing the fruits of their labor with anyone else, including, in some cases, the Justice Department and the president. Following Eisenhower’s 1956 example, succeeding administrations called upon the National Security Council to bring together the nation’s spy agencies into a joint covert domestic operation. Using FBI and CIA intelligence reports, the federal government compiled a Rabble Rouser Index of activists. By 1973 the National Security Council compiled a “watch list” of 300,000 domestic dissidents with alleged subversive foreign connections. More than 26,000 activists were targeted under Nixon’s presidential order for detention in the event of some unspecified “national emergency.”

According to David Kaplan, director of the Center for Investigative Reporting

Until 1974, the CIA conducted a widespread, illegal spying operation within the United States. According to Congressional reports, the names of 300,000 U.S. citizens were cross-indexed within agency files, and thousands of Americans were placed on “watch lists” to have their mail opened and telegrams read. The Pentagon’s intelligence operations spilled into a highly questionable area during the 1960s and early 1970s. The U.S. Army Intelligence Command, among others, ran a far-reaching domestic spying program that, at its height, fielded over 1,500 plainclothes agents from 350 offices to spy on anti-war and civil rights groups. The Army’s program was, in the words of a Congressional subcommittee, “both massive and unrestrained,” and compiled an estimated 100,00 dossiers on U.S. citizens. The Secretary of the Army subsequently ordered those files destroyed, although, like the CIA, there are now indications that such activities may have continued.

The FBI, CIA, NSA, and other governmental agencies, despite many obvious instances in which agents operated with obvious disregard for state and federal laws, nonetheless felt inhibited from engaging in certain types of direct action which, if detected, could bring serious political damage to the agencies themselves and quite possibly to the White House. The simple solution was to create so-called extra-jurisdictional agencies that could operate independent of federal control to carry out the agenda of domestic “counterintelligence.” In 1956 the Law Enforcement Intelligence Unit (LEIU) was the first such semiofficial agency to set up shop with the CIA providing funding, training, surveillance equipment, and a national computer database.


The FBI and various military intelligence commands worked in much the same way with local police departments to create funding conduits via the Law Enforcement Assistance Agency (LEAA) which supplied money, arms, and equipment to paramilitary vigilante groups. For example the 113th Military Intelligence Group provided money and arms to the Chicago Police Department’s “Red Squad.” These resources were, in turn, channeled to the Legion of Justice paramilitary group noted for violent attacks on the underground press and on New Left activists as well as for the break-in and theft of Chicago Seven conspiracy trial defense files.

In San Diego, where the Republicans initially planned to convene their 1972 national convention, one covert action campaign culminated in the January 6, 1972, assassination attempt on anti-convention organizer Peter Bohmer by the so-called “Secret Army Organization” of rightwing militia, a group formed, subsidized, armed, and protected by the FBI.

[James Retherford knows firsthand what it was like to be targeted by COINTELPRO. A founder and editor of The Spectator in Bloomington, Indiana, in 1966, Retherford is a director of the New Journalism Project, the nonprofit organization that publishes The Rag Blog.]

Please see

Also see James Retherford : Brandon Darby, The Texas 2, and the FBI’s Runaway Informants by James Retherford / The Rag Blog / May 26, 2009

And for more background on the history of informants in Texas, read The Spies of Texas by Thorne Dreyer / The Texas Observer / Nov. 17, 2006.

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ASCAP : Ring-a-Ding-Ding! Ka-Ching.

Posted on July 10, 2009 by Thorne Dreyer

Graphic by Larry Ray / The Rag Blog.

ASCAP wants to be paid when your phone rings

…these are the same folks who crisscrossed America threatening and intimidating small business owners for having a radio playing in their small shop, diner or bar, demanding they pay an annual fee.

By Larry Ray / The Rag Blog / July 9, 2009

When I first read about being forced to pay every time your cell phone’s ringtone plays I thought it was a prank or hoax email. It wasn’t. If you don’t know what ASCAP is then turn off your cell phone and read this.

The American Society of Composers, Authors, and Publishers was born in 1913 following passage of the Copyright Law of 1909. The law was enacted, the old tale goes, after songwriter Stephen Foster died penniless while sheet music publishers became wealthy selling his music. ASCAP set up a royalty rate structure and under New York law became an unincorporated membership association. Licensing contracts with composer and publisher members give ASCAP the power to “collect and distribute money and police infringements.”

By the 1990’s ASCAP had membership of some 30,000 writers and around 14,000 music publishers who retained their individual copyrights. ASCAP’s contracted powers grew exponentially as hand cranked Victrolas gave way to movies with sound, radio, TV and an explosion of elevator music, video, jukeboxes, tape decks right up to today’s iPods, the internet and and downloadable music.

BMI is also part of the alphabet soup. Broadcast Music Incorporated collects fees from radio and TV stations for the music they play and was formed in the 1940’s when broadcasters began to feel ASCAP was more and more engaging in monopolistic practices, price fixing, and other unsavory practices.

So, with that bit of background, let’s look at just one of the inevitable excesses ASCAP has indulged in based upon it’s interpretation of licensing practices that are, “the only practical way to give effect to the right of public performance which the Copyright Law intends creators to have.”

It is a tough call as to whether it was music industry greed or just plain stupidity that led ASCAP to actually go after Girl Scouts singing songs around a campfire. In 1996, ASCAP, ever seeking more licensing and musical moolah, cast a wide net covering hotels, restaurants, funeral homes, even resorts demanding payment for the right to “perform” licensed or recorded music.

Under copyright law, “where a substantial number of persons outside a normal circle of a family and its social acquaintances are gathered,” that qualifies as a public performance. Summer camp is sort of like a resort, they reasoned, so the suits around the table opened negotiations with the American Camping Association asking $1,200 annually each from the 288 camps in the association. They finally settled for a nag of $257 per camp. But when the public learned that the Girl Scouts were among the camps being dunned and would have to pony up their Girl Scout Cookie money to sing around a campfire, ASCAP took a PR beating and called off the whole camping caper.

Now, just a couple of weeks ago, ASCAP decided every time that snip of music you bought for a ringtone blares forth on your cell phone that constitutes a performance, violating copyright law meaning you must pay up! ASCAP is in a big legal skunk peeing contest with major mobile cell phone carriers like AT&T and Verizon.

Customers who have legally bought ringtones have already boosted the music industry’s bottom line by millions of dollars. But now ASCAP’s lawyers are dialing for more dollars. Existing law from the much earlier Sony Betamax ruling says companies are not liable for how their technology is used. It would seem like ASCAP doesn’t have a case at all.

But these are the same folks who crisscrossed America threatening and intimidating small business owners for having a radio playing in their small shop, diner or bar, demanding they pay an annual fee. Those found playing a radio or recorded music were hounded month after month not unlike mafia shakedown goons seeking protection money. ASCAP agents didn’t burn down the businesses who refused to pay for playing a radio but hounded them mercilessly.

I doubt many of us are keeping up with briefs filed in court by ASCAP, but THIS ONE in their battle with AT&T pretty well shows where this may all be headed, and the outcome of their insatiable greed may just be coming to a cell phone near you.

Imagine! You, an ASCAP performer!

[Retired journalist Larry Ray is a Texas native and former Austin television news anchor. He also posts at The iHandbill.]

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Organic Alternative and the Whole Foods Fraud

Posted on July 9, 2009 by Thorne Dreyer


The organic monopoly and the myth of ‘natural’ foods:

How industry giants are undermining the organic movement

On non-meat products, the term natural is typically pure propaganda. Companies (like Whole Foods Market or UNFI) are simply telling us what we want to hear, so that we pay an organic or premium price for a conventional product.

By Ronnie Cummins / July 9, 2009

The organic alternative: A matter of survival

After four decades of hard work, the organic community has built up a $25 billion “certified organic” food, farming, and green products sector. This consumer-driven movement, under steady attack by the biotech and Big Food lobby, with little or no help from government, has managed to create a healthy and sustainable alternative to America’s disastrous, chemical and energy-intensive system of industrial agriculture.

Conscious of the health hazards of Big Food Inc., and the mortal threat of climate change and Peak Oil, a critical mass of organic consumers are now demanding food and other products that are certified organic, as well as locally or regionally produced, minimally processed, and packaged.

The Organic Alternative, in turn, is bolstered by an additional $50 billion in annual spending by consumers on products marketed as “natural,” or “sustainable.” This rapidly expanding organic/green products sector — organic (4% of total retail sales) and natural (8%) — now constitutes more than 12% of total retail grocery sales, with an annual growth rate of 10-15%. Even taking into account what appears to be a permanent economic recession and a lower rate of growth than that seen over the past 20 years, the organic and natural market will likely constitute 31-56% of grocery sales in 2020.

If the Organic Alternative continues to grow, and if consumers demand that all so-called “natural” products move in a genuine, third party-certified “transition to organic” direction, the U.S. will be well on its way to solving three of the nation’s most pressing problems: climate change, deteriorating public health, and Peak Oil.

Sales statistics and polls underline the positive fact that a vast army of organic consumers, more than 75 million Americans, despite an economic recession, are willing to pay a premium price for organic and green products. These consumers are willing to pay a premium because they firmly believe that organic and natural products are healthier, climate stabilizing, environmentally sustainable, humane for animals, and well as more equitable for family farmers, farmworkers, and workers throughout the supply chain.

Many of the most committed organic consumers are conscious of the fact that organic food and other products are actually “cheaper” in real terms than conventional food and other items-since industrial agriculture’s so-called “cheap” products carry hidden costs, including billions of dollars in annual tax subsidies, and hundreds of billions of dollars in damage to our health, the environment, and climate.

Strengthening the argument for organic food and farming, scientists now tell us that it will take a massive conversion to organic agriculture (as well as renewable energy, sustainable housing and transportation) to drastically reduce climate-destabilizing greenhouse gases in the atmosphere to 350 parts per million and to cope with the advent of “Peak Oil,” the impending decline in petroleum and natural gas supplies.

Organic food and a healthy diet and lifestyle are obviously key factors in preventing chronic disease, restoring public health, and reducing out-of-control health care costs. While in 1970, U.S. health care spending appeared somewhat sustainable, totaling $75 billion, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services project that by 2016, health care spending will soar to over $4.1 trillion, or $12,782 per resident.

Millions of health-minded Americans, especially parents of young children, now understand that cheap, non-organic, industrial food is hazardous. Not only does chemical and energy-intensive factory farming destroy the environment, impoverish rural communities, exploit farm workers, inflict unnecessary cruelty on farm animals, and contaminate the water supply; but the end product itself is inevitably contaminated.

Plane spreads pesticides, adding to the contamination of non-organic food.

Routinely contained in nearly every bite or swallow of non-organic industrial food are pesticides, antibiotics and other animal drug residues, pathogens, feces, hormone disrupting chemicals, toxic sludge, slaughterhouse waste, genetically modified organisms, chemical additives and preservatives, irradiation-derived radiolytic chemical by-products, and a host of other hazardous allergens and toxins.

Eighty million cases of food poisoning every year in the US, an impending swine/bird flu pandemic (directly attributable to factory farms), and an epidemic of food-related cancers, heart attacks, and obesity make for a compelling case for the Organic Alternative.

Likewise millions of green-minded consumers understand that industrial agriculture poses a terminal threat to the environment and climate stability. A highly conscious and passionate segment of the population are beginning to understand that converting to non-chemical, energy-efficient, carbon-sequestering organic farming practices, and drastically reducing food miles by relocalizing the food chain, are essential preconditions for stabilizing our out-of-control climate and preparing our families and communities for Peak Oil and future energy shortages.

Decades of research confirm that organic agriculture produces crop yields that are comparable (under normal weather conditions) or even 50-70% superior (during droughts or excessive rain) to chemical farming. Nutritional studies show that organic crops are qualitatively higher in vitamin content and trace minerals, and that fresh unprocessed organic foods boost the immune system and reduce cancer risks.

And, of course climate scientists emphasize that organic agriculture substantially reduces greenhouse pollution. Organic farms use, on the average, 50% or less petroleum inputs than chemical farms, while generating drastically less greenhouse gases such as methane and nitrous oxide. Moreover diverse, multi-crop organic farms sequester enormous amounts of CO2 in the soil. Agronomists point out that a return to traditional organic farming practices across the globe could reduce greenhouse gas pollution by 40%.

In other words, America and the world desperately need an Organic Revolution in food and farming, not only to salvage public health and improve nutrition, but also in order to literally survive in the onrushing era of Peak Oil and climate change.


Scientists, as well as common sense, warn us that a public health Doomsday Clock is ticking. Within a decade, diet and environment-related diseases, including obesity, diabetes, heart disease, and cancer-heavily subsidized under our Big Pharma/chemical/genetically engineered/factory farm system-will likely bankrupt Medicare and the entire U.S. health care system.

Likewise, climate chaos and oil shortages, unless we act quickly, will soon severely disrupt industrial agriculture and long-distance food transportation, leading to massive crop failures, food shortages, famine, war, and pestilence. Even more alarming, accelerating levels of greenhouse gases (especially from cars, coal, cattle, and related rainforest and wetlands destruction) will soon push global warming to a tipping point that will melt the polar icecaps and unleash a cataclysmic discharge of climate-destabilizing methane, fragilely sequestered in the frozen arctic tundra.

If we care about our children and the future generations, we obviously must reverse global warming, stabilize the climate, and prepare for petroleum shortages and vastly higher oil prices. The only way to do this is to reduce greenhouse gas pollution by 90% by 2050, by shifting away from petroleum and coal-based energy to radical energy conservation and making a transition to renewable solar and wind power-not only in transportation, housing, and industry, but in farming, food processing, and food distribution as well.

In the food sector, we cannot continue to hand over 88% of our consumer dollars to out-of-control, chemical-intensive, energy-intensive, greenhouse gas polluting corporations and “profit at any cost” retail chains such as Wal-Mart. The growth of the Organic Alternative is literally a matter of survival. The question then becomes how (and how quickly) can we move healthy, organic, and “natural” products from a 12% market share, to becoming the dominant force in American food and farming. This is a major undertaking, one that will require a major transformation in public consciousness and policy, but it is doable, and absolutely necessary.

But before we overthrow Monsanto, Wal-Mart, and Food Inc., we need to put our own house in order. Before we set our sights on making organic and “transition to organic” the norm, rather than the alternative, we need to take a closer, more critical look at the $50 billion annual natural food and products industry.

How natural is the so-called natural food in our local Whole Foods Market, coop, or grocery store? Is the “natural” sector moving our nation toward an organic future, or has it degenerated into a “green washed” marketing tool, disguising unhealthy and unsustainable food and farming practices as alternatives. Is “natural” just a marketing ploy to sell conventional-unhealthy, energy-intensive, and non-sustainable food and products at a premium price?

The myth of natural food, farming, and products

Walk down the aisles of any Whole Foods Market (WFM) or browse the wholesale catalogue of industry giant United Natural Foods (UNFI) and look closely. What do you see? Row after row of attractively displayed, but mostly non-organic “natural” (i.e. conventional) foods and products. By marketing sleight of hand, these conventional foods, vitamins, private label “365” items, and personal care products become “natural” or “almost organic” (and overpriced) in the Whole Foods setting.

Whole Foods: Row after row of ‘natural’ foods.

The overwhelming majority of WFM products, even their best-selling private label, “365” house brand, are not organic, but rather the products of chemical-intensive and energy-intensive farm and food production factories. Test these so-called natural products in a lab and what will you find: pesticide residues, Genetically Modified Organisms, and a long list of problematic and/or carcinogenic synthetic chemicals and additives.

Trace these products back to the farm or factory and what will you find: climate destabilizing chemical fertilizers, pesticides, fungicides, herbicides, and sewage sludge-not to mention exploited farm workers and workers in the food processing industry. Of course there are many products in WFM (and in UNFI’s catalogue} that bear the label “USDA Organic.” But the overwhelming majority of their products, even their best selling private label, “365,” are not.

What does certified organic or “USDA Organic” mean? This means these products are certified 95-100% organic. Certified organic means the farmer or producer has undergone a regular inspection of its farm, facilities, ingredients, and practices by an independent Third Party certifier, accredited by the USDA National Organic Program (NOP).

The producer has followed strict NOP regulations and maintained detailed records. Synthetic pesticides, animal drugs, sewage sludge, GMOs, irradiation, and chemical fertilizers are prohibited. Farm animals, soil, and crops have been managed organically; food can only be processed with certain methods; only allowed ingredients can be used.

On the other hand, what does “natural” really mean, in terms of farming practices, ingredients, and its impact on the environment and climate? To put it bluntly, “natural,” in the overwhelming majority of cases is meaningless, even though most consumers do not fully understand this. Natural, in other words, means conventional, with a green veneer.

Natural products are routinely produced using pesticides, chemical fertilizer, hormones, genetic engineering, and sewage sludge. Natural or conventional products-whether produce, dairy, or canned or frozen goods are typically produced on large industrial farms or in processing plants that are highly polluting, chemical-intensive and energy-intensive.

“Natural,” “all-natural,” and “sustainable,” products in most cases are neither backed up by rules and regulations, nor a Third Party certifier. Natural and sustainable are typically label claims that are neither policed nor monitored. (For an evaluation of eco-labels see the Consumers Union website). The USDA’s Food Safety and Inspection Service provides loose, non-enforced guidelines for the use of the term “natural” on meat–basically the products cannot contain artificial flavors, coloring, or preservatives and cannot be more than minimally processed.

Cruel and unusual.

On non-meat products, the term natural is typically pure propaganda. Companies (like Whole Foods Market or UNFI) are simply telling us what we want to hear, so that we pay an organic or premium price for a conventional product. Perhaps this wouldn’t matter that much if we were living in normal times, with a relatively healthy population, environment, and climate. Conventional products sold as natural or “nearly organic” would be a simple matter of chicanery or consumer fraud. But we are not living in normal times.

Pressuring natural and conventional products and producers to make the transition to organic is a matter of life or death. And standing in the way of making this great transition are not only Fortune 500 food and beverage corporations, Monsanto, and corporate agribusiness, as we would expect, but the wholesale and retail giants in the organic and natural products sector, UNFI (United Natural Foods) and Whole Foods Market (WFM).

UNFI and Whole Foods: Profits at any cost

UNFI and Whole Foods Market are the acknowledged market and wholesale distribution leaders in the $70 billion organic and natural foods and products sector. Companies or brands that want to distribute their products on more than just a local or regional basis must deal with the near-monopoly wholesaler, UNFI, and giant retailer WFM. Meanwhile retailers in markets dominated by Whole Foods have little choice but to emulate the business practices of WFM — i.e. sell as many conventional foods, green washed as “natural,” as possible.

Unfortunately neither UNFI and Whole Foods are putting out the essential message to their millions of customers that expanding organics is literally a matter of life or death for public health, climate, and the environment. Neither is leading the charge to double or triple organic food and farming sales by exposing the myth of natural foods, giving preference to organic producers and products, and pressuring natural brands and companies to make the transition to organic. Neither are the industry giants lobbying the government to stop nickel and dime-ing organics and get serious about making a societal transition to organic food and farming.

Organic Carrots. Photo © Rebekah Burgess / Dreamstime.com / Organic Feast.

The reason for this is simple: it is far easier and more profitable for UNFI and WFM to sell conventional or so-called natural foods at a premium price, than it is to pay a premium price for organics and educate consumers as to why “cheap” conventional/natural food is really more expensive than organic, given the astronomical hidden costs (health, pollution, climate destabilization) of conventional agriculture and food processing.

UNFI has cemented this “WFM/Conventional as Natural” paradigm by emulating conventional grocery store practices: giving WFM preferential prices over smaller stores and coops —many of whom are trying their best to sell as many certified organic and local organic products as possible. Compounding this undermining of organics is the increasing practice among large organic companies of dropping organic ingredients in favor of conventional ingredients, while maintaining their preferential shelf space in WFM or UNFI-supplied stores.

In other words the most ethical and organic (often smaller) grocers and producers are being discriminated against. WFM also demands, and in most cases receives, a large quantity of free products from producers in exchange for being distributed in WFM markets.

The unfortunate consequence of all this is that it’s very difficult for an independently-owned grocer or a coop trying to sell mostly organic products to compete with, or even survive in the same market as WFM, given the natural products “Sweetheart Deal” between UNFI and WFM.

As a consequence more and more independently owned “natural” grocery stores and coops are emulating the WFM model, while a number of brand name, formerly organic, companies are moving away from organic ingredients (Silk soy milk, Horizon, Hain, and Peace Cereal for example) or organic practices (the infamous intensive confinement dairy feedlots of Horizon and Aurora) altogether, while maintaining a misleading green profile in the UNFI/WFM marketplace.

Other companies, in the multi-billion dollar body care sector for example, are simply labeling their conventional/natural products as “organic” or trade-marking the word “organic” or “organics” as part of their brand name.

The bottom line is that we must put our money and our principles where our values lie. Buy Certified Organic, not so-called natural products, today and everyday. And tell your retail grocer or coop how you feel. Please join thousands of other Organic Consumers and send a message to Whole Foods and UNFI today.

[Ronnie Cummins is National Director of the Organic Consumers Association.]

Source / CommonDreams

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