The Rag Blog

Democracy for Pakistan was never the deal — and as Musharraf’s latest power grab throws his nation into turmoil, Bush will gladly go along.

Nov. 6, 2007 | In the fall of 1999, as he campaigned for the presidency, George W. Bush was asked by a reporter to name the leader of Pakistan. Bush could not. He famously replied: “The new Pakistani general, he’s just been elected — not elected, this guy took over office. It appears this guy is going to bring stability to the country, and I think that’s good news for the subcontinent.” Although Bush didn’t know Gen. Pervez Musharraf’s name and was confused as to how he got into office, the soon-to-be American president was sanguine about the anti-democratic developments in Pakistan.

More than seven years later, Bush’s illusions about Musharraf — and any illusion of democracy in Pakistan — have been shattered by the dictator’s declaration of a state of emergency. Tantamount to a coup, Musharraf’s actions on Saturday have not only thrown Pakistan into turmoil but have also revealed the hypocrisy of Bush’s foreign policy, including the proclaimed goal of fostering freedom and the rule of law in the Muslim world.

At a press conference on Monday, Bush said of the weekend coup, “We expect there to be elections as soon as possible.” But while Bush admitted that Musharraf’s actions would “undermine democracy,” he insisted that the general is “a strong fighter” in the war on terror. That dual message was accompanied by the American president tepidly declining to say what he would do if Musharraf did not move toward elections. Also revealing was the fact that Bush had sent the weakest member of his team, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, out to warn Musharraf against the coup, indicating how little he was in reality worried about it. If he had been deeply anxious, he would have called the general himself. Many observers are viewing Musharraf’s coup as a major setback for Bush’s policy, but in fact it changes almost nothing.

Although the United States has given some $11 billion to Pakistan (mostly in military aid) since 2001, Bush needs Musharraf more than Musharraf needs the United States. The war in Afghanistan is a key reason: A major proportion of the war materiel for the 20,000 U.S. troops, and additional 20,000 NATO troops, in Afghanistan (a landlocked country) goes through Pakistan. U.S., British and Canadian troops on the front lines fighting a Taliban resurgence could be endangered if Pakistan were to cut off the flow of those supplies. On Monday, Rice appeared to back off from earlier warnings to Pakistan that a coup would jeopardize U.S. aid, saying that she doubted cooperation on the war on terror would be affected by Musharraf’s actions.

Musharraf, who was brought up in part in Turkey and is representative of the secular stratum of Pakistan’s middle class, is the Bush administration’s ideal ally. They point to his successes: Musharraf has moved a lot of fundamentalist officers out of positions of power, removing them from any authority over the country’s stockpile of nuclear bombs. Under his rule, Pakistani military intelligence has captured nearly 700 al-Qaida operatives in that country, including high-value figures such as Khalid Sheikh Muhammad, the mastermind of the Sept. 11 attacks. And Pakistani cooperation was key in breaking up a plot in summer 2006 by Britons of Pakistani heritage to blow up airplanes flying from London to New York.

But the 1999 interview revealed Bush’s true stripes regarding the Pakistani dictator, and his knee-jerk support for authoritarianism over democracy. Bush was criticized then for applauding the overthrow of the democratically elected Nawaz Sharif government in the Oct. 12, 1999, military coup. His spokesperson at the time, Karen Hughes, said that Bush was encouraged by Musharraf’s promise that he would hold early elections, restore “stability” to Pakistan, and ease tensions between India and Pakistan. (In fact, Musharraf had been a notorious hawk on India and may in part have carried out the coup because he saw his civilian predecessor as too dovish toward New Delhi.) What the world did not then know was that President Bill Clinton had negotiated a deal not long before with Prime Minister Sharif whereby Pakistan would deploy special operations troops to capture Osama bin Laden. When Musharraf took power in fall of 1999, he refused to honor the deal, since the operation was unpopular with the military’s fundamentalist officers. Indeed, Bush was supporting a man who derailed the best chance the Clinton administration may have had to prevent Sept. 11.

Countless academics have sought to measure the tangible benefits of being a union member. The difference between union and non-union wages, often referred to as the “union premium”, can be calculated in many different ways. It’s a profoundly complex field… here’s a classic example of the poop one has to wade through in search of enlightenment:

If heteroscedasticity is present and affects the coefficient estimates, the quantile regression estimation suggests that the rate of change of the unobservables is different at different quantiles for males but it is not the case for females.

Rightyho, then.

Strangely, international data on the union premium has never, to our knowledge, been assembled in an easily-accessible form. The most that we found was a list of 19 countries. No doubt there are good reasons for this, probably involving heteroscedasticity. Anyway, let’s start with a sample of five countries and then consider some of the issues.

The history of relations between the Black liberation movement and law enforcement has always been adversarial, at its best. At its worst, it is a history of murder, beatings, lies and frame-ups. There are few groups in this history that experienced the latter more than the Black Panther Party. The history of FBI and police harassment and intimidation of Panther members during the Party’s heyday is well documented. It includes the murders of several members, the constant harassment and petty arrests of members by local police forces and the framing of many of its leaders. Most of these frame-ups resulted in long prison terms for the members accused and convicted falsely.

What may be surprising to many who know this history is that these frame-ups continue today. It was under the FBI-Justice Department program known as COINTELPRO that the first frame-ups took place and it is under that program’s successors that other frame-ups have occurred. Two false convictions that received much of the publicity in the 1990s were those of Geronimo Pratt and Dhoruba bin Wahad. Both of these men spent over fifteen years in prison for crimes they did not commit, thanks to frame-ups carried out under the auspices of the COINTELPRO program.

Two ongoing cases that appear to be frame-ups from this vantage point are those of Mumia abu Jamal and the San Francisco 8. The former is a case involving the murder of a Philadelphia police officer in 1981 and the latter involves the murder of a San Francisco policeman in 1971. In both situations, the prosecution’s case is based on evidence that is flimsy at best and just plain false at its worst. Neither prosecution has proven its case beyond a reasonable doubt despite several chances. In addition, the politics of the defendants has been used by the prosecution in an attempt to prejudice the jury.

Mumia’s case has always carried the stench of a frame-up. The conflicting testimony of witnesses, the failure of witnesses to appear and many other instances of questionable conduct by the prosecution and law enforcement have conspired to create this perception. A recent book by Michael Schiffmannn titled Race Against Death (currently available only in German) adds even more documentary fuel to this perception. The text, which does a good job placing Mumia’s case into a historical context of racism in the United States, provides a history of the case itself and the movement that has grown in support of Mumia following the 1995 signing of his death warrant by then Pennsylvania governor Tom Ridge. The new material at the end of the book includes several never-before-published photographs of the 1981 crime scene that were also never produced in court. These photos raise more questions as to Mumia’s role in the events of that night the policeman was killed. The litany of miscues and missing evidence already familiar to those who have followed Mumia’s case around the world is repeated here, with a renewed emphasis. In addition to this evidence is the newly discovered fact that a fifth bullet fired by police at the scene for comparative purposes was “lost.”

The photos in Schiffmann’s text cast more doubt on the state’s case by apparently disproving the prosecution’s statements that Mumia stood over Officer Faulkner and fired at him several times. The photos show no marks from the bullets that were supposedly fired in this fashion. In fact, the sidewalk was not damaged in any way. Schiffmann goes on to write: “it is thus no question anymore whether the scenario presented by the prosecution at Abu-Jamal’s trial is true. It is clearly not, because it is physically and ballistically impossible.” (p. 205) The remainder of the photos show a scenario that constantly contradicts the testimony of officers and witnesses (apparently coerced) and the nature of the scene they described in Mumia’s original trial.

It is the continued refusal of the court to allow a new trial for Mumia that would allow the new evidence to be introduced that has been pointed to by Mumia’s supporters as part of the proof that not only was Mumia framed because of his politics and outspokenness as a member of the media, but that the frame-up continues. Added to this refusal by the court is the somewhat understandable desire of the slain officer’s family to have a perpetrator locked up, even that someone isn’t really the killer.

Other lesser known cases involving the US government and former Black Panther members are those of Veronza Bowers, Jr. and Jamil Abdullah Al-Amin (formerly H. Rap Brown). Bowers has been in prison for more than thirty years despite the fact that he is a model prisoner and has served his complete sentence under the law, been approved for parole only to have it overturned by the Justice department and is still in prison sixteen months after his sentence has expired.

Besides this travesty, the facts of Bowers’ conviction are questionable, to say the least. He was convicted of the murder of a U.S. Park Ranger based on the word of two government informers. Both of the informers received reduced sentences for other crimes in exchange for their testimony. There were no eye-witnesses, nor was there any other evidence to link him to the crime. Bowers’ alibi testimony was not credited by the jury and the testimony of two relatives of the informants who insisted that they were lying was not allowed. The informants had all charges against them in this case dropped. In addition, according to the prosecutor’s post-sentencing report, one was given $10,000 by the government.

As for Al-Amin, he was recently removed from state custody in Georgia by federal authorities and sent to the federal control unit in Florence, Colorado. No reason was given for the transfer, despite repeated requests from family and friends. According to the website maintained by the family and friends of the prisoner Dr. Mutulu Shakur, the transfer seems to be part of a more general move by the Bureau of Prisons to prevent programs that have had an “impact on the transformation of dozens of men, from a criminal mentality to liberation consciousness.” The transfers and other intimidation by the bureau seem intended to make it difficult for these prisoners to build networks of support. Other aspects of this campaign include the suspension of cultural and educational programs within the federal prison systems and the increased harassment of politically active prisoners.

As mentioned above, another ongoing case involving former Black Panthers and the government is that of the San Francisco 8. This case against eight former Panthers and Panther supporters charged with the murder of a San Francisco policeman in 1971 was thrown out of court in 1975 because the evidence used by the prosecution was obtained by torture. It was revived in the early part of the twenty-first century by the California attorney general with help from the US Justice Department. There seems to be no new evidence in the case, although the prosecution hints that some does exist. DNA taken from all of the defendants in 2005 failed to match any previous evidence and the prosecution has hinted that it will reintroduce the same evidence thrown out back in 1975 because it was extracted by torture. Evidence obtained by torture is not considered to be verifiable beyond a reasonable doubt precisely because it was obtained by torture.

Anybody following the current debate around the U.S. rendition program for terror suspects is quite familiar with the proven argument that torture does not produce credible evidence. Of course, if the purpose of the torture is something other than the procurement of credible evidence or confessions, than it doesn’t really matter as to its effectiveness.

In the case of the San Francisco 8, it appears that the prosecution was not so much interested in finding the people responsible for the killing of the San Francisco policeman in 1971 as it was interested in helping to destroy the already splintered Black Panther Party. As any student studying the COINTELPRO program can tell you, one of its primary goals was the destruction of the Panthers. This goal was pursued by a variety of means. Among them was murder, the spreading of false rumors concerning the members’ personal lives, the placing of snitch jackets on members, and the intentional framing of its members on felony charges.

The case of the San Francisco 8 falls under the latter category but is also unique if only because the entire case was based on police speculation and torture. None of the accused was ever found guilty of the murder the first time they were tried. After the torture was exposed in 1975, the prosecution’s case was thrown out. The men who were not in prison on other charges (of a questionable nature as well) returned to their communities and lived active and law abiding lives until 2005. In 2005, the Department of Homeland security revived the same case that had been discarded in 1975. Together with the State of California they convened a grand jury and called many of the same defendants to testify. To their credit, the men refused and served time for their refusal. In 2006, DNA was extracted from the men by the prosecution in the hope that this evidence could be tied to evidence from the 1971 crime scene. After more than a year of silence, the defense was told that none of the DNA samples matched any of the evidence. Despite this, the prosecution refuses to drop the case and appears to be intent on resubmitting the evidence obtained under torture back in the early 1970s despite the earlier court’s refusal to allow that same evidence. Randy Montesano, the attorney of Harold Taylor–one of the defendants-told the media after a motion to deny admission of the torture-extracted evidence that despite the refusal of the court to approve the motion “there is no way to get a fair hearing today, especially given the delay of so many years and (because) the passage of time alone precludes any reliable adjudication ­ so we will ultimately prevail.”

One respects Mr. Montesano’s optimism, yet it can not be emphasized enough that this case may not go the way it should (and the defense hopes it will) unless the light of the world is shown upon it. It will take the concerted effort of a popular movement to insure that the men known as the San Francisco 8 are not framed for the murder of the policeman in 1971. The alternative for these men would be spending the rest of their lives in prison, much like the future faced by Mumia abu Jamal. In fact, it is the growing popular movement supporting the San Francisco 8 that helped convince the judge in the case to lower the bail of most of the men and allow them to go home to their loved ones. Likewise, in the case of Mumia abu Jamal, it is the popular movement around his case that has kept him alive.

The geographic state of the United States is pretty clearly a rogue empire at this point. We violate the nonproliferation treaty by building new, more powerful weapons and then make up stories about others who are not violating the treaty. We torture, and our democratic controlled senate judiciary committee is about to confirm someone for attorney general who doesn’t seem to know what torture is when he sees it.

We invade other countries for their oil, which is a war crime. We continue to ignore global warming and the Kyoto treaty. We won’t even sign the land mine treaty, so that innocent children don’t lose their legs and arms. Jeezus, we won’t even take care of our own working class children when they get sick.

But you say to yourself, this is not the views of Americans, we Americans are better than that.

Well, the new Zogby International Poll will set you straight.

“A majority of likely voters – 52% – would support a U.S. military strike to prevent Iran from building a nuclear weapon, and 53% believe it is likely that the U.S. will be involved in a military strike against Iran before the next presidential election, a new Zogby America telephone poll shows.

The survey results come at a time of increasing U.S. scrutiny of Iran. According to reports from the Associated Press, earlier this month Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice accused Iran of “lying” about the aim of its nuclear program and Vice President Dick Cheney has raised the prospect of “serious consequences” if the U.S. were to discover Iran was attempting to devolop a nuclear weapon. Last week, the Bush administration also announced new sanctions against Iran. “

Yes, according to this poll, every other person on the street is willing to bomb a country that has not attacked us, has made no threats against us and has denied that they are building a nuclear bomb. It has allowed their enrichment activities to be monitored by the UN, who then reports that they are not building a bomb. The country has not even started a war of aggression since maybe the old testament. (They do have oil though, and a lot of natural gas).

Our own Intelligence Agencies have falsely interpreted the words of their leaders from Farsi to English to say that they “will wipe Israel, “the country”, off the face of the map” when a far more fair translation would say that the “regime will be removed from the pages of time.”

As bad and as disheartening as this poll is, there is a thin sliver of a silver lining.

And that is, it used to be higher.

Yes, hard to imagine, but in 2006, 57% of Americans were willing to brutally murder innocent woman and children from the air with our bombs… all based on a kind of hysteria that makes me understand why both political parties are in their own version of a fist off.

Meanwhile the Jerusalem Post reports that:

“The September 6 raid over Syria was carried out by the US Air Force, the Al-Jazeera Web site reported Friday. The Web site quoted Israeli and Arab sources as saying that two US jets armed with tactical nuclear weapons carried out an attack on a suspected nuclear site under construction.

The sources were quoted as saying that Israeli F-15 and F-16 jets provided cover for the US planes.

The sources added that each US plane carried one tactical nuclear weapon and that the site was hit by one bomb and was totally destroyed.

SAY WHAT?

We just used tactical nuclear weapons under the cover of Israeli jets to illegally bomb a country that has not threatened us and has in fact helped us torture innocent Canadians.

In the meantime, everyone knows that the mega weird nuclear weapons foul up by the Air Force requires too much rubber in your brain to get your mind around the kookie concocted story that was given by the Pentagon after the Military Times took the lid off and broke the story.

There is some serious s#it happening.

And the Rogue Empire lumbers on.

With a declining currency,

and a global policy and posture of

might over right,

and lies over light.

Someone asked me yesterday about where they should keep their investments, and I told them to not ask me today because they might not get the response they expect.

For they that sow the wind,

Over 30 anti-war protestors at Morton West High School in Berwyn face expulsion for a demonstration at the school on Thursday. Scores of Students Face Expulsion Due to Sit-in Berwyn, IL

Sign the petition.

Over 70 students participated in a sit-in against the Iraq War on All Saint’s Day, Thursday, November 1st. It began third hour when dozens of students gathered quietly in the lunchroom at Morton West High School and refused to leave. The administrators and police became involved immediately and locked down the school for a half hour after class ended. Students report that they were promised that there would be no charges besides cutting classes if they took their protest outside so as not to disturb the school day. The students complied, and were led to a corner outside the cafeteria where they sang songs and held signs while classes resumed.

Despite a police line set up between the protestors and the student body, many other students joined the demonstration. Organizers say they chose November first because it is the Christian holy day called the feast of All Saints and a national day of peace. They wrote a letter and delivered it to Superintendent, Dr. Ben Nowakowski who was present at the time, stating the reason for their protest.

Deans, counselors and even the Superintendent tried to change the minds of a few, mainly those students with higher GPA scores to abandon the protest. The school called the homes of many of the protestors. Those whose parents arrived before the end of school and took their students home, or left before the protest ended at the final bell, received 3-5 days suspension. All others, an estimated 37 received 10 days suspension and expulsion papers. Parents report that Nowakowski stated those who are seventeen will also face police charges.

Parents who are frantically trying to spare their child’s expulsion flooded the school yesterday to file appeals on the matter. So far, Superintendent Nowakowski has held firm on the punishments. They are expected to find out the results of the appeals on Tuesday. Parents and students report and the school’s videotape shown to some of the parents confirms that the students were non-violent in their action.

The protest came on the heels of a recent incident on October 15th, when a student reported hearing that another student had a gun on campus. The story of the eyewitness was deemed unreliable and the school was not locked down. Later that week (October 19), the Berwyn police, acting on a tip arrested one of the youths originally questioned for gun possession and he allegedly confessed to carrying an unloaded semi-automatic handgun that day. All these issues, plus the expected announcement of whether uniforms will be established in the school should make the next Board of Education meeting on Wednesday at 7:00pm at the Morton East campus very well-attended.

See the link below for the Superintendent’s statement on the matter:
www.jsmortonhs.com/news/contentview.asp

For letters or phone calls of support, please see information below:

Dr. Ben Nowakowski, Superintendent
District 201
2423 South Austin, Cicero, IL 60804
bnowakowski (at) jsmorton.org

(708) 222-5702

Mr. Lucas, Principal
Morton West High School
2400 S. Home Ave.
Berwyn, IL 60402
jlucas (at) west.jsmorton.org

708-222-5901

Mr. Jeffry Pesek, President
Board of Education, District 201
3145 South 55th Avenue
Cicero, IL 60804

708-802-1863

For the rest of the Board Members see:
www.jsmortonhs.com/board/default.asp

For parent contact:
Pam Winstead 708-749-3163 , pwinstead (at) clearchannel.com

Alma Moran 708-717-4202 , qtalmita (at) yahoo.com

Adam Szwarek 847-587-8849 , tsq9743 (at) aol.com

Students Threatened With Expulsion after Morton West Sit-in
04 Nov 07

Nineteen Morton West High School Students were threatened with expulsion after staging a sit-in to protest the Iraq War. You can read more about the event here: http://chicago.indymedia.org/newswire/display/80059/index.php
We are urging all student and community organizations to protest the excessive actions taken by the school administrators and to give us permission to attach your organization’s name to the petition below. In order to have your organization placed on the petition, please contact me at cbrenz@gmail.com.

————-

In Defense of the Morton West Students

We are writing in defense of the nineteen students who now face excessive disciplinary actions at the hands of various Morton West school administrators. Our sympathies lie with the courageous and moral struggle that the students have taken up, and with their parents who still support them. The struggle for a peaceful and just society absent of war should not be met with punishment, but should be supported by the community as a whole, especially from within the educational setting. Furthermore, It is our firm belief that an injury to freedom for students anywhere is an injury to freedom for students everywhere. This is why we urge all Morton West administrators to drop all disciplinary action against the said students, and to remove any indications of said events from their permanent records.

Columbia College Chicago Students for a Democratic Society

Agricultural policy is not sexy. You probably don’t know the intricacies of “loan deficiency payments” or “base acreage,” and you probably don’t care. This was once an agrarian nation, but now there’s a less than 1% chance that you’re a farmer, and if you are, you’re probably part time; the average farm family gets 82% of its income from nonfarm sources. We’re not a people of the soil anymore, and for most of us, our eyes glaze over when we see farm statistics like the ones in that last sentence.

But farms still cover most of our land, consume most of our water and produce most of our food. If you eat, drink or pay taxes–or care about the economy, the environment or our global reputation–U.S. agricultural policy is a big deal.

It’s also a horrible deal. It redistributes our taxes to millionaire farmers as well as to millionaire “farmers” like David Letterman, David Rockefeller and the owners of the Utah Jazz. It contributes to our obesity and illegal-immigration epidemics and to our water and energy shortages. It helps degrade rivers, deplete aquifers, eliminate grasslands, concentrate food-processing conglomerates and inundate our fast-food nation with high-fructose corn syrup. Our farm policy is supposed to save small farmers and small towns. Instead it fuels the expansion of industrial megafarms and the depopulation of rural America. It hurts Third World farmers, violates international trade deals and paralyzes our efforts to open foreign markets to the nonagricultural goods and services that make up the remaining 99% of our economy.

Ever since the 1980s, when a wave of foreclosures inspired those iconic Farm Aid concerts, the media’s sporadic reports from farm country have tended to focus on floods, droughts and other disasters. But the farm crisis is as over as Barbara Mandrell. Farm incomes are at an all-time high. The median farmer enjoys five times the net worth of the median nonfarmer household. Crop prices have soared–thanks largely to the Federal Government’s promotion of corn ethanol over more efficient renewable energies–and yet subsidies have as well.

Nevertheless, Congress is finalizing a $286 billion farm bill that will continue our basic farm policies, which means it will keep funneling money to farmers and pseudo farmers through a bewildering array of loans, price supports, subsidized insurance, disaster aid and money-for-nothing handouts that arrive when times are tough–or not tough. “What a joke,” grumbles Congressman Ron Kind, a Wisconsin Democrat who led a failed bipartisan reform effort in the House. “You’re eligible as long as you’re breathing.” Actually, that’s not quite true. Since the vast majority of the cash goes to five row crops–corn, soybeans, wheat, cotton and rice–more than 60% of our farmers receive no subsidies. And a recent Government Accountability Office report identified $1.1 billion of subsidies whose recipients were no longer breathing.

Franklin Roosevelt’s Administration started farm aid in response to the Dust Bowl and the Depression, calling it “a temporary solution to deal with an emergency.” But in Washington, the emergency has never ended. The government still gives farmers your money–more than ever over the past decade–along with research projects to expand their yields, restoration projects to clean up their messes, flood-control and irrigation projects to protect and enhance their land, visa programs to supply them with cheap labor, ethanol mandates and tariffs to boost their prices, and tax breaks by the bushel.

The bipartisan farm bills that Congress passes every five to seven years reflect the power and savvy of the farm lobby, which parlays cue-the-violins stereotypes of struggling yeomen into giveaways to the planter class of the South and Great Plains. In reality, the top 10% of subsidized farmers collect nearly three-quarters of the subsidies, for an average of almost $35,000 per year. The bottom 80% average just $700. That’s worth repeating: most farmers, especially the small farmers whose steadfast family values and precarious family finances are invoked to justify the programs, get little or nothing.

This summer an unprecedented coalition, running the gamut of the advocacy world from rural development to health to business to the environment, emerged to help Kind and Republican Jeff Flake of Arizona try to shake up the system. Editorials thundered for reform, and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi of San Francisco–the city of organic kale and “meat is murder”–vowed to deliver it. The moment seemed ripe for Democrats to challenge the status quo. Agribusiness was steering two-thirds of its campaign donations to Republicans, and just 19 of the 435 congressional districts were vacuuming up half of all subsidies. Still, House Agriculture Committee chairman Collin Peterson of Minnesota had a warning for Kind. “I told him, ‘Ron, you’re a good guy, but you’re way out of your league here,'” Peterson told TIME. “I knew we were going to kick his butt.”

He was right. Pelosi sided with the American Farm Bureau, the National Farmers Union and the Big Five commodity lobbies, spearheading a bill she called “a first step toward reform,” an oblique way of saying it isn’t reform at all. The Big Five would still hog the subsidies, while the influential sugar industry would retain its lucrative price supports. The one major “reform” was that farm families earning at least $2 million a year would supposedly be ineligible for subsidies, assuming none of them knew decent accountants.

The story of this butt-kicking is a quin-tessential Washington tale, illustrating how a single special interest with a single-minded devotion to a cause can trump a broad coalition and the national interest. The Senate is considering a similar bill, and a reform effort led by Republican Richard Lugar of Indiana seems likely to meet a similar fate. The Bush Administration has made noises about a veto; Kind says the President, famously reluctant to admit mistakes, confided in a private chat that he regrets signing the lavish 2002 bill. But it’s never wise to bet against the farm lobby, which spent $135 million on lobbying and donations last year and brilliantly portrays opponents as enemies of the heartland of America. “The game is always the same,” says Oxfam America’s Jim Lyons, a former U.S. Agriculture Under Secretary. “The big commodity groups have a stranglehold on policy. And there’s not a lot of stomach for new ideas.”

‘Look What’s Happened.’

OUR CULT OF THE SMALL FAMILY FARMER dates back to Thomas Jefferson, who hailed humble “cultivators of the earth” as America’s “most valuable” and “most virtuous” citizens. Politicians still paint American Gothic portraits of the country folk who toil in the soil to grow our food and fiber. But at the Husker Harvest Days farm show in September in Grand Island, Neb., it was clear how far American agriculture had come from the days when Cornhuskers husked corn by hand.

The farm show looked like a state fair but felt like an industry expo, with barkers urging visitors to increase productivity or cut costs rather than ride a pony or eat corn dogs. John Deere salesmen showed off their largest machinery ever, including a 530-horsepower tractor and a combine that costs $410,000 fully equipped. At the Firestone tent, a rep said the company is preparing a 91-in. (230 cm) farm tire, taller than Yao Ming. TopCon Precision Agriculture exhibited GPS gadgets that adjust your spraying and watering according to the topography of your fields and can even steer your tractor. ADM Financial advisers showed how to hedge risk in futures markets, while a lecturer at Monsanto’s Biofuture tent touted drought-tolerant corn: “We’re in a brand-new world here, folks! You’ve got to get more production out of every acre just to keep up!”

Jefferson’s “cultivators of the earth” didn’t have genetically engineered seeds or 530-horsepower tractors. They had 1-horsepower horses. And they didn’t have subsidies either. In fact, most antebellum farmers opposed all federal aid to private enterprise, assuming it would just enrich manufacturing élites. The lesson of Husker Harvest Days is that modern farmers–at least the ones with most of the land and subsidies–are a new manufacturing élite. They just happen to be manufacturing food and fiber. Production agriculture is a high-tech, globalized business with economies of scale. You don’t buy a $410,000 combine to farm the back 40.

But it’s hard to start big, which is why agriculture has the kind of demographics that cancels sitcoms: only 6% of farmers are younger than 35, while 26% are over 65. “It’s damn near impossible to get started today,” Craig Ebberson says during a tour of the endless rows of corn and soybeans he farms with his sons near Randolph, Neb. “Farms are getting bigger and more efficient, and that’s not going to stop.” The Environmental Working Group’s farm-subsidy database shows that Ebbersons in the area collected $3 million in crop aid over the past decade. Craig used that money to snap up more land, expand his feedlot, invest in a nearby ethanol plant and buy gizmos that track his fertilizer and pesticide use and the food and drug intake of every cow. It’s no accident that agriculture’s productivity growth consistently outpaces the rest of the economy–or that farms with million-dollar revenues are the fastest-growing agricultural sector. “We started with a corn knife and a scoop shovel, and look what’s happened,” he chuckles.

What’s happened is, some farm families got big, but more got out. Subsidies have helped finance the expansion plans of the big guys while inflating the rents of the little guys. Ebberson’s neighbor Mike Korth has a 1,000-acre (400 hectare) corn and soybean spread that would have been considered enormous a century ago but is now about average for the area. His township has only 39 families on 36 sq. mi. (94 sq km), a frontier-level population density. No wonder a Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City study found the rural counties most dependent on subsidies had the worst population losses and the weakest job growth.

“We’re killing what made America great,” says Korth, an intense 50-year-old who looks like a miniature Mike Ditka. Randolph’s school district has dwindled from nearly 1,000 students to fewer than 400. It’s adopted a four-day week to save money and might switch to eight-man football. The town has lost its Ford, Chevy and Chrysler lots, all its implement dealers and lumber yards, its creamery, jewelry store and movie theater. “The big farmers took over, and it’s killed small business,” says Paul Loberg, who runs a welding shop off Main Street. “All they need downtown is coffee and beer. They can’t buy that by the truckload yet.”

Subsidies aren’t the only cause of expansion, but they do “wed farming regions to an ongoing pattern of economic consolidation,” concluded the Kansas City study. Nebraska’s Center for Rural Affairs found the 2002 farm bill–the Farm Security and Rural Investment Act–spent six times as much on subsidies for the state’s top 20 farmers as on rural development programs for the 20 counties losing the most population. And the South’s cotton and rice farmers get even fatter checks than Middle America’s grain farmers, which is why Korth managed to persuade the Nebraska Farm Bureau to endorse limits on payments to rich farmers, even though the national Farm Bureau aggressively opposes them. “Wealth has a natural tendency to concentrate,” says Chuck Hassebrook, the center’s director. “But why reinforce that? Shouldn’t government try to offset that?”

Modern agroindustrialists are perhaps even more admirable than the modest ploughmen of yore. They’re still family farmers who like to play in the dirt–only 2% of our farms are corporate-owned–but they also have to be land managers, soil scientists, hydrologists, veterinarians, mechanics, commodity traders, exterminators, meteorologists and highly sophisticated businessmen. The question is, Why do they need our help when they’re doing so well? Agriculture Secretary Mike Johanns, a former Nebraska farm boy who is running for Senate, put it this way in an interview hours before he announced his resignation: “Congratulations! We celebrate your success. You don’t need subsidies anymore!”

An Imperfect System

IN JEFFERSON’S DAY, 9 OUT OF 10 Americans cultivated the earth. When Abraham Lincoln created the U.S. Department of Agriculture, half the country still farmed. He once said farmers were “neither better nor worse than any other people,” just “more numerous.” (They also received inordinate political flattery, “the reason of which I cannot perceive, unless it be that they can cast more votes.”) Under F.D.R., 1 in 5 Americans was still a farmer.

11/04/07 “Informed Comment” — — George W. Bush may indeed be the worst president ever, and Dick Cheney the worst vice-president imaginable but that does not exonerate the American people because Americans have the constitutional right and responsibility to remove miscreants from office.

The Bush-Cheney administration has not just given freedom a hollow ring, they have not just made a mockery of American democracy and human rights in the present, and they have not just put future generations at risk with reckless deficit spending, environmental degradation and the burden of war without end, but they have effectively caused the past to be rewritten as well. America is beginning to understand what it’s like to be on the wrong side of history.

This point was driven home to me when I read that respected American historian Herbert Bix, author of “Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan” recently pointed out some striking similarities between Tojo’s Japan and Bush-Cheney’s America, particularly the willful disregard of international law, the pursuit of diplomacy by force and failure to account for war criminality.

Let’s consider for the moment that current US policy bears some eerie parallels to that of Tojo’s Japan. Is that a result of having judged militarist Japan unfairly, or has America gotten worse? Is that to say Japan’s criminal past was not as bad as we used to say it was, or is it still every bit as bad, only now, we, the American interlocutors, are debased in such a way that the moral distance is less distant?

Scholars have long been familiar with US lapses in civilized behavior, even in the great and just war carried out by the “greatest generation.” The enemy was understandably viewed with contempt for his actions, but improperly viewed with racist contempt. Indiscriminate killing took untold innocent life, nowhere more vividly than in the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but with equal cold-blooded consequences in the fire-bombing of Tokyo, Nagoya and Osaka.

For decades now, scholars have been effectively challenging the Truman era myth that the atomic bombing was necessary and saved millions of lives. While reasonable interpretations differ, the twin atomic bombings remain a uniquely uncomfortable and awkward topic for Americans who subscribe to the otherwise generally positive national narrative that starts with the day of infamy, the day on which the peace-loving US was sneakily attacked at Pearl Harbor, and continues with a series of heroic battles for sea, sky and land control across the Pacific, followed by a generally enlightened occupation of Japan’s home islands.

Given the incessant mutual violence that the war extracted from both sides, epitomized by the brutal battles of Iwo Jima and Okinawa, it took decades for ordinary soldiers on both sides to be viewed with sympathetic respect –basically unfree men following orders as required by the tragedy of the time. Last year Clint Eastwood did a remarkably even-handed job of conveying the equivalency of the rank and file on both sides of the Pacific with the twin films “Flags of Our Fathers” and “Letters from Iwo Jima.”

The US occupation of Japan saw many a samurai’s sword turned into treasured souvenir, if not plowshare. It was none other than US war hero Douglas MacArthur who set the tone for sanitizing and containing Japan’s war criminality at the elite level by letting the Emperor off the hook and selectively exonerating war criminals who were of utility to the US. But if it wasn’t the people, and it wasn’t the penultimate leader, then who takes the blame?

To blame everything on a few bad apples is bad history, incongruent with the complex, interactive way things usually happen, but it allows nagging, difficult-to-resolve issues to be buried or put on the back burner as happened at the Tokyo trials. The entirety of Japan’s war guilt was deftly shifted onto the shoulders of Tojo and a handful of “Class A War Criminals.

Scapegoating, even of the obviously odious, is not fair, but it is expedient because it staves off more damaging and nuanced reckonings. That’s not to say scapegoated Class A war criminals are innocent in the same way their hapless victims were; the criminality of the Class A men is clearly documented. But they were unfairly singled out and unfairly apportioned more of the blame than even their cruel shoulders could bear. They were made caricatures of evil in contrast to the aloof, doddering emperor and the witless soldier in the field.

George W. Bush publicity handlers take note; better to spin your client as a dodderer playing with something less than a full deck than have him be held accountable. In today’s America, as in wartime Japan, there is plenty of blame to be passed around, but no takers. It’s too hurtful to the American ego to even contemplate war criminality. US House Speaker Nancy Pelosi says impeachment is not an option. The State Department has granted immunity to the criminally negligible including the thugs of Blackwater. Is this apparent benevolence not just another type of denial, that Americans don’t torture, Americans don’t commit crimes of war?

Eventually, narratives that blame no one have to round up a few suspects, and that’s where the bad apples come in. But this sort of selective justice unduly burdens middling war criminals with more historical agency than they ever possessed.

Does making Tojo an example of evil incarnate exonerate Japanese war veterans, among them mean-spirited soldiers who violated the conventions of war by gratuitously killing, raping and torturing non-combatant Chinese? And what about Japanese civilians on the home front, making weapons, churning out propaganda, feeding the beast? Blame it on Tojo?

What about people like Akira Kurosawa who worked uninterrupted with ample state support during a war that wreaked murder and mayhem on Japan’s neighbors under the guise of racial superiority? To hear Kurosawa tell it in his biography, his main beef with the Tojo authorities was over artistic control, not the insane politics of the time.

The bad apple school of thought thrives in national narratives because it aids and abets denial for proud individuals and powerful constituencies.

The problem with Japanese rightists, and America’s problem understanding them, is not so much the seemingly futile attempt polish up the bad apples, the futile attempt to make the class A Criminals shine. It’s not even the rightists’ dubious campaign to re-configure war criminals as honorable Shinto spirits at Yasukuni Shrine. The problem with the rightists is they are bound to honor the penultimate leader at all costs, which short-circuits all other arguments and prevents blame from being fairly apportioned.

The result of this implacable cognitive dissonance is denial. Denial is the worst thing about the Japan’s rightists, not their contrarian desire to challenge the America-centric narrative as articulated in the admittedly clumsy and compromised Tokyo War Crimes Trials.

Americans are starting to learn more about war crimes and denial they they ever dreamed of. The divisive words and belligerent actions of George W. Bush, the contempt for diplomacy, the lack of accountability, the tortured rhetoric and the rhetoric defending torture have caused America’s global prestige to drop to an unprecedented low. America is increasingly seen as the crux of the problem rather than a flawed but otherwise normal country, let alone a beacon of hope.

The horror of an unjust and unnecessary war is forcing Americans to confront the opacity of their own self-image, and in doing so, to seek lessons and parallels than now, in a way not possible even four years ago, make it possible to see Tojo and Japan’s war criminality in slightly more sympathetic way. This is not to exonerate but rather to heave a heavy sigh of understanding, to acknowledge that even the most refined and civilized of nations can be disfigured and disabled by the politics of fear and denial.

America has been diminished to such an extent under the Bush-Cheney “unitary presidency” that a crime like torture — once comfortably seen as beyond the pale because it was only associated with the most despicable of enemies– suddenly resonates in an uncomfortably familiar way.

Just as it should be acknowledged that the people of Japan share a certain culpability in Tokyo’s terrible war, a war that ravaged Asia and eventually Japan itself, Americans have to own up to Iraq. But it can also be said in defense of the average Japanese in the days after Pearl Harbor that there was much they didn’t know and couldn’t talk about; –the media was completely censored and the Kempeitai dealt brutally with domestic opposition.

When the day of reckoning comes for ordinary Americans to assess their culpability in the debacle of Iraq, a hideous and heinous war fought in view of a free media and in the context of relatively unfettered freedom to protest, what will the excuse be?

If Bush is unjust, if he is, as they say, the worst ever, then the free people who support, tolerate and enable him cannot be said to be good.

The US is smearing IAEA chief Mohamed ElBaradei for not finding evidence of Iranian nuclear weapons. Sound familiar?

11/04/07 “The Guardian” — — – When it comes to Iran’s nuclear capabilities, whose word would you rather take: that of a Nobel prize-winning head of an international agency specializing in nuclear issues who was proved triumphantly right about Iraq, or that of a bunch of belligerent neocons who make no secret of their desire to whack Iran at the earliest opportunity and who made such a pigs ear of Iraq?

That is the stark choice facing the sane people of the world, given the smearing of IAEA chief Mohamed ElBaradei for not joining the hysterical lynch mob building up against Iran. Criticised by Condoleezza Rice and others in the Bush administration, it is uncannily reminiscent of the slurs against him and UN weapons inspector Hans Blix in the run up to the invasion of Iraq – and we should remember that the US vindictively tried to unseat him afterwards for not joining in the lying game.

ElBaradei is hardly acting as cheerleader for the Iranians. He says that his inspectors have not seen “any concrete evidence that there is a parallel military program,” though he could not yet swear to its absence. But he does believe that our issues with Iran can be resolved through negotiations – in which it would help if the US were not implicitly threatening war. But it looks as though we have reached a similar stage to when Saddam let in the inspectors. When they found no WMDs Washington cried foul, ordered the UN inspectors out and sent the troops in. The US and its allies will not accept anything short of regime change in Teheran – no matter what ordinary Iranians might want and what the IAEA says.

The only difference from last time is that France has defected, and France’s opposition to the war in Iraq was as much because of Saddam’s oil contracts with Total and Elf-Aquitaine as any deep attachment to international law. Teheran should sign a contract immediately!

There are, of course, several separate issues here. One is whether Iran has the right to enrich uranium. The second is whether it is abusing the putative right to build nuclear weapons. A third is whether the nuclear issue is not just some sort of White House feint, since we all know that if the shooting starts, it will really be about fighting terrorism, liberating gays and women, restoring democracy and taking down a major rival in the region to both Saudi Arabia and Israel – or any permutation of the above.

On the first question, stupid though it is, the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty does not ban countries from reprocessing and purifying uranium. It should have done, and it should have allowed more intrusive inspections, but it doesn’t, and one reason for that is that the US, under the influence of the people who now want to cite non-proliferation against Iran, fought against attempts to strengthen the treaty. These are the same people, in fact, who have successfully fought against the senate ratifying the comprehensive test ban treaty.

President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s maladroit diplomacy led to Iran being outmanoeuvred. His comments on Israel and the Holocaust, no matter whether interpreted correctly or not, have made it difficult for many countries to support him. The US got a resolution against Iran through the IAEA council calling on Iran to stop its uranium reprocessing, largely by promising council member India a free pass for developing nuclear weapons outside the Non-Proliferation Treaty, and with the enthusiastic support of Israel, the only definite nuclear state in the Middle East.

The US then took that IAEA council resolution to the UN security council, whose word, whether Iran likes it or not, is law under the UN charter, even though it is manifestly a political rather than a judicial body. (The law is not always just, and that goes for international law as well). It does not help Iran as much as it should that Washington, a major scofflaw in the international field, is once again talking piously about the need to enforce UN resolutions, with its own interpretation and its own timetable – just as was the case with Iraq.

Iran is playing a dangerous game. Most countries have deep reservations about what the US, France and, to a lesser extent, the UK are up to, but few of them are prepared to go to the wall, diplomatically, let alone militarily, for the ayatollahs.

Iran should accept the additional and more intrusive inspections that it did before, and throw open its program to the IAEA inspectors, but the war talk in Washington and Jerusalem gives it a plausible excuse not to, since it would be tantamount to offering them a list of targets.

When a married politician resigns after allegations that he had sex with a young man in an out-of-town hotel room — particularly when he tips off the cops himself — the obvious question is: “What was he thinking?”

In the case of state Rep. Richard Curtis, a 48-year-old Republican from La Center, Clark County, no one knows — yet. Curtis, who resigned Wednesday, has declined to elaborate, on the advice of his lawyer.

But because cases like his are becoming so familiar, experts in politics, risk-taking behavior and psychology have plenty to say. They recall the indiscretions of former President Bill “I did not have sex with that woman” Clinton; former New Jersey Gov. Jim McGreevey, who announced on live television in 2004 that he was a “gay American”; and the late Spokane Mayor Jim West, who last year was ousted from office after a scandal involving alleged gay sex.

On Monday, Curtis insisted to The Columbian in Vancouver, Wash., that he was not gay and that sex was not involved in what he said was an extortion attempt.

But in police reports released Tuesday, Curtis said he was being extorted by a man he’d had sex with in a Spokane hotel room. The other man contends Curtis reneged on a promise to pay $1,000 for sex.

What’s going on when politicians risk everything for a quickie? Do they have some innate need to take risks — a sort of Evel Knievel-like urge to juggle chainsaws at the top of a ladder? Or are they just clueless, like the guy who lights up while pouring gas into his lawn mower?

Is the power of a closeted sex drive so strong that it just can’t be resisted for long? And why would someone repressing sexual urges become a Republican politician instead of finding a job with a private company where no one would care?

“There really is a pattern here,” says John Gastil, a University of Washington professor who studies communications in politics.

Curtis’ encounter allegedly also included his appearance at a porn shop in women’s lacy lingerie. Even so, it only qualifies as a “medium-grade sex scandal,” says Brian Gladue, a behavioral biologist at the University of North Texas Health Science Center who has studied sexual behavior.

“What’s his excuse?” asks Gladue. “That will tell you an enormous amount about how they’re going to do their own risk management.”

Oddly or admirably, Curtis, who told police he had spent his career in risk management, apparently was candid when they interviewed him. Although he told police he gave the young man money “for gas,” he admitted to the sex, according to the police report.

He didn’t say he was sleepwalking, Gladue notes. He didn’t say the whole thing was a setup by Democrats out to get him. He didn’t say the lacy lingerie was just a Halloween costume he was “test-driving.” He didn’t say he had a compulsion he couldn’t control and offer to enter rehab.

He has insisted that he was a victim, however. “I am not the criminal here,” he told an editor at the Columbian.

At 48, Curtis — like McGreevey — now faces the sudden destruction of the life he’s built.

Why would any politician take such risks?

For the answer to that, start with the notion that people who go into politics are more likely than others to be risk-takers, say experts in the field. To a large extent, they’re people who are comfortable inviting scrutiny because that’s what politicians do to get elected.

“Politics tends to attract risk-takers,” says Frank Farley, a Temple University psychologist who has studied risk-taking, politics and human motivation. “It’s an uncertain job, you live at the whim of the electorate, there’s no tenure. It’s often short-term — you’re in for two or four years, and you’re out. Then you have to start all over again in some field.”

Often, successful politicians got there largely because of that personal chutzpah, a risk-taking predilection honed and encouraged by success. For those who come from modest circumstances or small towns, risk-taking is often the only ticket out, as it was for Bill Clinton, who fueled his brainpower with nerve to overcome a childhood broken home and financial hardship.

“Often one of the ways to get ahead is to take risks, be bold; if you don’t, the world is going to pass you by, because you don’t have anything besides your psychology — no wealth, you’re not a Bush, not born into money,” Farley says.

Such risk-takers are likely more prone to do things others consider unsafe, says Gladue. “It’s not that they’re brain-damaged and they can’t evaluate the dangers; they just have a higher threshold for risk than most people. … [To them] it’s not risky.”

Everyone finds a level of risk they’re comfortable with, Gladue says. They’ll hike but not climb. Or they’ll climb Mount Rainier, but only in the summer. Or they’ll climb Mount Rainier in all seasons, but not Mount Everest.

Some people just keep “pushing the limits,” Gladue says. “Everybody knows somebody like that. You just don’t want to be in a car with them, because they’re not managing risk as well as you’d like them to be.”

There’s plenty of research indicating that such sensation-seeking personalities are more likely to engage in risky sexual behavior as well, Gladue says. “This is part of who they are. Their temperament gets a little watered down as they get older, but it doesn’t go away.”

Some evolutionary biologists have argued that politicians, as the modern-day equivalent of the “alpha male” gorilla, are even more tempted than others by the lure of sexual conquests, almost as a right of office. After all, they say, in nature it’s the alpha male who gets the sexual access.

Of course, these days such “evolutionary” urges are generally tempered by pragmatism, they add.

For some people, hiding an inner life that’s in direct conflict with an outer life becomes intolerable, says Farley. “You want to bring some alignment, some freedom, from that continual, conflictual stress.”

At some point, the pain of the conflict itself may become a powerful motivator to resolve the differences, Farley says.

McGreevey, in his tell-all book, “The Confession,” wrote that “the closet starves a man and when he gets a chance, he gorges ’til it sickens him.”

Curtis, like many who have found themselves in this situation, has a wife and children. He ran for office as a conservative Republican.

Farley says that, too, is understandable.

“You’re creating a cover for your behavior so you’re beyond reproach. You figure you will get away with what you’re doing; you’ve covered it with those strong positions, so nobody thinks of you as gay.”

Farley, who has studied heroes, says such “untidy” lives don’t necessarily undo a leader’s popularity. Look at Clinton, or at the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., who was said to have “wrestled in his own soul” over infidelity, Farley says.

But these days, covering up is so old-school, he says.

“It’s simply becoming so much more acceptable to state your sexual orientation,” says Farley. In the 21st-century, “people are more upset about covering up something, living a lie, than being gay,” he says. “Saying one thing and doing another — that’s one of the things Americans don’t like.”

In the long run, says David Domke, who studies political communications at the UW, the Curtis scandal hurts not only Republicans, but politicians of every stripe.

“I think the public is going to eventually say, ‘We don’t trust politicians — we’re going to stop listening to you,’ ” he says. “Most people are saying, ‘Either deal with this in your private life or get out of office, because we’ve got more important issues to deal with.’ “

This morning, over a million people poured into Caracas for the Gran Marcha En Apoyo de la Reforma Constucional! (The Great March in support of Constitutional Reform). The march began at 10 am and its numbers are only exceeded by the powerful, high spirited support of “El Pueblo” for the reforms. As far as the eye can see, they are garbed in red, many waving the majestic Venezuelan flag, dancing, marching and singing, punctuated with high wire actors, juggling and other street performers.

Large contingents carry signs with the numbers and texts of their favorite reforms to the constitution which they have held dear since they adopted it by referendum in 1999. Throughout the crowd large banners and signs with the word “ SI !! ” can be seen, signifying the people’s support for the reforms. This is the greatest mass-outpouring of support for Chavez and the policies of his administration since the December 3, 2006 elections when he won the presidential election once again in an landslide.

As President Chavez joins the march on Avenida Bolivar, standing atop a truck traveling through the crowds the people are going wild, jumping up and down, cheering and screaming support of a head of state who is respected worldwide for his union with the people of Venezuela, Latin America and the world.

This massive support stands in contrast with the students organized by the minority opposition and funded by Washington over the last few weeks. Those protests were carried out by a.few students in comparison with the flood of people we see here today. Those protests were also marred by student violence and destruction of property in the face of an incredibly patience, well-trained police and National Guard who exercised tremendous restraint. Last Friday, in front of the National Assembly these students literally attacked police who stood on the back of a military vehicle. They hit a number of police with steel barricades, knocking them off the back of a flatbed truck and still, the police did not respond with arrests or any physical violence. I could not help but think what would happen if the police were attacked by anti-war protestors in the United States.

Today’s demonstration of support for the government by the people has been a totally peaceful march through the city with no signs of violence. However, signs of opposition media manipulations are ever present and can be expected in the future. On live coverage by VTV, TVES and ANTV of President Chavez’ speech today the amazing breadth and length of the audience can be clearly seen. On the other hand, when one switches the channel to Globovision, nearly empty streets are shown while broadcasting the voice of Chavez. These petty antics may please the minority opposition and set up their December 2 arguments that the vote for reforms has been rigged, just as they did in the 2006 presidential elections. But the vast majority are fully aware based upon their learning and past experiences with the lies of the opposition.

Overwhelming support from the National Federation of Venezuelan Students brings a powerful answer to the few students who protested violently last week and received wide coverage by Globovision and other private media here and in the West. Hundreds of thousands of students are in the street today to show the country and the world that the majority of University students in Venezuela stand with the government and for the Constitutional Reforms.