The New York City Housing Authority, landlord to more than 400,000 poor New Yorkers, is facing a budget shortfall of $168 million and has proposed narrowing the gap by charging residents new fees and increasing old ones for everything from owning a dishwasher to getting a toilet unclogged.

The authority says its operating deficit stems from enormous increases in energy and pension costs while its federal financing for public housing has been cut. Since 2001, the agency says, it has spent $357 million from its reserves to close repeated budget gaps; this year, for the first time, it no longer has enough reserves to cover the shortfall.

So it has proposed charging tenants $5.75 a month to run a washing machine, $5 a month to operate a dishwasher, $10 a month for a separate freezer. Parking fees will rise to $75 from $5 a year on April 1.

The authority plans to raise existing fees for dozens of services, like fixing damage to apartments beyond normal wear and tear, and to charge, for the first time, for things like rescuing lost keys from elevator pits after hours. The authority would like to put the fee changes other than for parking into effect around May 1.
nytimes.com

By Juárez Polanco; Translated into English by the author and revised by Nancy Almendras.

Ever since George W. Bush was given his first imperial leadership of the northern country (by people placed in the Supreme Court by his own father), I don’t know if I should laugh, scream or cry whenever I discover what he’s been doing and saying to the planet over which he reigns.

Yes, that is right: We laugh so hard that it hurts when we’re talking about the creator of bushisms, those brilliant thoughts worthy of anthology that are destined to live forever. The examples speak for themselves: “The future will be better tomorrow”; “It’s time for mankind to enter the solar system”; or among the most erudite, “More and more of our imports are coming from abroad”; and “A low number of voters is an indication that less and less people are voting”. The land trembles, sky eclipses and winds sing a triumphal march: he’s the Great Architect of a shadowy and illogical century, full of contradictions, deaths, and mostly, stupidities.

Bush’s latest came this week. Now it seems he told Bill Sammon, a The Washington Times correspondent, that Bin Laden helped him to win the November 2004 elections against John Kerry. This is in reference to the video broadcast aired four days before those elections, in which the leader of Al-Qaeda criticized Bush and reminded the US people about the 9/11 attacks, still fresh in North Americans’ collective memory. According to The Examiner, Mr. George said, “I thought it was going to help. I thought it would help remind people that if Bin Laden doesn’t want Bush to be the president, something must be right with Bush.”

His logic and wisdom surpasses me by far. I’m thinking about the Latin-American dictators of bloody hands: using bushistic logic, the opposition of our people was an irrefutable indication that something had to be right with those dictators. I’m thinking about the Nicaraguan case (the country from which I come): the fact that Sandino didn’t want anything to do with the invading yankees, meant that something had to be right with those invaders. What a great judgment!

What’s right with Bush? His imperial conquests in Afghanistan, Iraq and now probably Iran? His colonizing trail disguised under a Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA) that will create in Central America and Dominican Republic more of what’s happening in Mexico, something called by his own ally, Mr. Fox, “inevitable poverty zones”? His telescopic sight of destruction aiming to Cuba, Venezuela, Bolivia and any other country that won’t say Sir, yes, sir?

Neither do I understand the logic of North American voters, because it’s clear that they’re alone too, under the aquiline tunic of their President. He has kept silence about multimillionaire bankrupts like Enron. New Orleans was erased from the map only because Bush didn’t want to do anything before, during and after Katrina. Thousands of jobs were cut as was, Medicare, Medicaid and education, simply to fatten even more the military spending for an invasion of a country. The costs have reached exorbitant and offensive numbers (US$ 244,577,928,372.00 is the cost of this war as of the moment I’m writing this article, according to nationalpriorities.org), causing the worst national US debt in recent years.

However, I do have an idea of why North Americans voted for Bush; they were motivated primarily by fear.

Whenever one is guided by fear, the irrational and rational blend easily. Fear alone could have given Bush an election that was already in Kerry’s hands, and there is no doubt that there was fear pervading US soil the day of elections. Both Bin Laden’s video and the continuous reiterations by the mass media of attacks and destructive images, along with those anthrax attacks that came and vanished, so effective and at the same time so ephemeral, helped build an atmosphere adequate not only for Bush’s win, but also allowing him to pass the National Security laws; the most far reaching and illegal laws of US history. Today, these laws squash human and civil rights, to include home privacy, freedom of speech, of religion, and academic freedom.. As an example,, in his recent State of the Union, Mr. Bush made public a plan that allows telephone and mail interventions without prior judicial warrant, as declared by US laws. Nevertheless, Bush is only formalizing what was previously being done. It’s no surprise that Chavez ironically calls him “Mr. Danger”.

This “Mr. Danger” who led his citizens into a war by claiming Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction, later acknowledging that he knew that they did not exist. This “Mr. Danger” who created lunar craters in Afghanistan in search of a “never found” Bin Laden. This “Mr. Danger” who has sent young soldiers to kill and be killed in an absurd war. This “Mr. Danger” who has suspicious oil businesses, and also has friends with suspicious oil businesses. There is so much to talk about him, that in my huge ignorance I can’t find what’s that right with him that he claims to have.

What Bush doesn’t know, or maybe knows too well to say it, is that polls show that the North American majority don’t believe in him anymore (in regards to financial and economical leadership, the handling of the situation in Iraq, and the war as the right road to fight terrorism). Bush knows he is a chosen (p)resident of the White House thanks to his dad’s friends and the influence of his brother Jeb Bush (Governor of Florida, state that technically gave him the victory in 2000). He also knows he was then elected as a product of fear, confusion and hate, and he’s so pissed off that he has no idea about what to say or do to hide it.

Like Umberto Eco said, we should not pretend that governments are led by philosophers and erudite people, but may rightly expect people with good sense and lucid ideas. Bush demonstrates that is easier and easier for leaders to gain the citizenry’s support by means of fear, distrust and hate, and more and more difficult to attain it through sincerity.

Among the minority who still believe that something is right with Bush, the most avid activist is he. We who are a minority according to him but a majority according to simple mathematics, those who live south of the imperial border (maybe in their own belly, as we have been swallowed so long ago), have and breathe another reality, a reality not waiting any magical bushism to camouflage the misery to which we have been directed.

We, Latin-Americans, confirm that something must be right with Mr. George Walker Bush, for in the end, and without him wanting it, he has united more and more people around the globe in solidarity and given them (given us) the clarity to know that Earth should not and will not be annexed to his Majesty Bush’s Empire, and that its inhabitants, I mean, us (and the US people excluded and forgotten), deserve and demand respect.

Yes, something must be right with Bush, something wonderful and prodigiously beautiful. The increasing union of people around an achievable hope is the best testimony.
axisoflogic.com

The second anniversary of the coup of elected Haitian leader Jean-Bertrand Aristide occurred in the midst of la carnival, a popular yearly cultural festival. Tens of thousands of Haitians from neighbourhoods all over the capital came out for the celebration, which included a performance by Haitian hip-hop artist Wyclef Jean. Last year, the planned festival was all but cancelled in Port-au-Prince amid political demonstrations and violence by the Haitian National Police, who shot and killed three participants in a peaceful demonstration protesting Aristide’s removal. This year, in the aftermath of the Rene Preval’s landslide win in the February 7th Haitian elections, the climate is noticeably calmer, even within some of the poorest neighbourhoods.

On Thursday, March 2nd, hip-hop star Wyclef Jean lead a delegation of individuals from Yele Haiti, the public works NGO founded by the hip-hop icon, into Bel Air and Cite Soleil, two of the poorest urban slums in the capital of Port-au-Prince. The next morning, Le Matin, a paper owned by Haitian industrialist Reginal Boulos, featured a cover photo of Jean standing arm in arm with Evans and Amaral, two “gang leaders” according to the caption, in Cite Soleil. Many of the artists and musicians accompanying Wyclef into Cite Soleil called for a new spirit of “reunification” of Haiti, presumably within the “troubled” poor neighborhoods surrounding Haiti’s capital.

Such optimism may seem somewhat premature, given the fact that on the same day as Wyclef’s well-publicized visit, the Haitian Provisional Electoral Council (CEP) announced without explanation that the planned March 19th parliamentary elections would be postponed indefinitely. This announcement echoes the announcements of past delays of the Presidential election, which was delayed at least three times before it was held in a state of massive disorganization on February 7th. The tallying of the votes for this election took more than a full week, and culminated in an explosion of street protests by poor Haitians and supporters of Preval after burned and charred ballots bearing an “x” under Preval’s name turned up in a dumpsite on the outskirts of Port-au-Prince. The Provisional Electoral Council’s tally of votes had reduced Preval’s lead from its earlier tally of 61% to 48.7%, below the 50% required to avoid a run-off vote. Preval was declared President soon after by the CEP, under pressure from within and without as the international community began to recognize the fact that none of Preval’s rivals, most of whom taken from Haiti’s wealthy elite, had garnered anywhere near the electoral support that he had.
zmag.org

Lara, Venezuela- Rito Martinez a former guerilla fighter with flowing white hair and a long white beard stands in the town square of Sanare, a small mountain village. Sanare is located in the state of Lara, a state which lies roughly 200 miles southwest of Caracas, Venezuela’s capital. Inspired by the revolution in Cuba Martinez along with thousands of other fighters in the 1960s took to the surrounding mountainside. In response the Venezuelan government pursued these fighters imprisoning or “disappearing” thousands of guerillas and their sympathizers. For 9 years Martínez was held captive in what he describes as “a rodent infested tunnel with prison cages.” Today the sons and daughters of Martinez’s generation carry forth their left wing legacy and earn Lara the reputation of being called the ‘most revolutionary state in the country.’

By utilizing oil money the Chavez government has implemented massive social welfare programs which have in turn caused an explosion of grass roots political activity. This process taken as a whole is referred to simultaneously as ‘the revolutionary process,’ ‘the Bolivarian process,’ or ‘the process of change.’ It is here in Lara, perhaps more so than anywhere else in the country, that ‘the process of change’ has made such dramatic strides. Lara therefore provides a glimpse as to how this process works and where it is taking Venezuela.
zmag.org

WARRI, NIGERIA – Gunmen dressed in black balaclavas and camouflage flak jackets approach in a boat. As it draws alongside, their voices can be heard singing. The chorus fades and they introduce themselves.
“We are the security men of the Niger delta,” says one of the men in the blue speedboat bristling with assault rifles and rocket-propelled grenade launchers. “Nobody is going to hurt you. We are everywhere in the Niger delta.”

The singing militiamen are part of the newly organized Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta (MEND) and are the latest expression of local resentment in a region of the country where tens of millions of dollars worth of oil are extracted each day, but most people live on only several hundred dollars each year.

The MEND organization, whose leadership remains a matter of speculation, appears to be better organized, trained, and equipped than any other group to emerge so far from this restive, swampy region.

“The way [the MEND militiamen] have been able to engage [the Nigerian military] in the last one month or so, the sophistication of firepower, it’s not child’s play,” says Kayode Komolafe, managing editor of Nigeria’s This Day newspaper. “What we have in this place is something aching. If we are not careful it could explode into greater warfare.”

Nigeria is the world’s eighth largest oil exporter and the fifth largest supplier of crude to the US. MEND’s recent sabotage of pipelines and other oil facilities has so far shut off over a fifth of the country’s oil output, steadily driving up world oil prices.
csmonitor.com

By 2050, world population is projected to reach nine billion people. That would constitute a 38 percent jump from today’s population total of 6.5 billion, and more than five times the 1.6 billion people believed to have existed in 1900. Demographers foresee declining, more aged populations in many industrialized nations, and explosively-growing, ever-younger populations in much of the developing world. VOA’s Michael Bowman reports from Washington, both trends are seen as problematic.

If projections hold true, future global population growth will be heavily concentrated in Latin America, Africa and South Asia. Carl Haub is senior demographer at the Washington-based Population Reference Bureau. “All world population growth today is in the developing world. There is no natural population growth in Europe, and even the U.S. is very heavily dependent on immigration,” he said.

By 2050, Africa’s population, both northern and sub-Saharan, is expected to surge from 900 million to almost two billion, while South Asia’s population is projected to swell from 1.6 billion to nearly 2.5 billion. At the same time, Europe’s population is expected to shrink from 730 million to 660 million.
voanews.com

SPOKANE, Wash. – A woman has accused the president of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops of sexually abusing her more than four decades ago when she was a child.

Bishop William Skylstad issued a statement Wednesday categorically denying the accusation, saying he has not violated the vow of celibacy he took 47 years ago.

The claim was filed against the Roman Catholic Diocese of Spokane on Dec. 27 by a woman who said she was under the age of 18 when Skylstad sexually abused her at St. Patrick’s Parish and at Gonzaga University from December 1961 to December 1964.

The woman’s claim was first reported Wednesday by the Spokesman-Review newspaper of Spokane.

Skylstad, 70, was a student at Gonzaga University from 1962-1966 and taught mathematics to students at Mater Cleri Seminary at Colbert, north of Spokane.
news.yahoo.com

PHOENIX – Gov. Janet Napolitano on Wednesday ordered more National Guardsmen posted at the Mexican border to help stop illegal immigrants and curb related crimes.

National Guard troops have worked at the border since 1988, but Napolitano signed an order authorizing commanders to station an unspecified number of additional soldiers there to help federal agents.

Once the funding is approved, the troops will monitor crossing points, assist with cargo inspection and operate surveillance cameras, according to the order.

“They are not there to militarize the border,” the governor said. “We are not at war with Mexico.”
news.yahoo.com

A few weeks ago, Colin Powell’s former chief of staff in the State Department, Lawrence Wilkerson, revealed to a PBS NOW audience something we all knew anyway about Saddam Hussein’s weapons arsenal: ‘I participated in a hoax on the American people, the international community, and the United Nations Security Council.’

A chief planner of that hoax was Paul Wolfowitz. Is he now carrying out another–telling the world that he’s ridding the Third World of corruption?

‘I would certainly counsel Paul Wolfowitz to put himself in the hands of the professionals who run the World Bank’s external-relations department: he needs an extreme makeover,’ former IMF chief economist Kenneth Rogoff advised shortly after his appointment last April.

He got one. By September, a Los Angeles Times editorial remarked, ‘Wolfowitz’s most valuable contribution to date may simply be his role as a cheerleader. Amid an agency and a US public that is cynical about the value of foreign aid, Wolfowitz has continually pointed out that things are changing for the better in Africa and that the world’s contributions are making a difference.’

Commentator Ariana Huffington observed last November, ‘Talk about your Extreme Political Makeover. Wolfie has gone from war hawk to the second coming of Mother Teresa–all without having to make any kind of redemptive pit stop in political purgatory or having to apologize for being so wrong about Iraq.’

Added Washington Post journalist Dana Milbank in December: ‘Being Wolfie means not having to say you’re sorry. Since taking the World Bank job six months ago he has found a second act. He has toured sub-Saharan Africa, danced with the natives in a poor Indian village, badgered the United States to make firmer foreign aid commitments and cuddled up to the likes of Bono and George Clooney.’

There is no question that Wolfowitz quickly learned to talk ‘left’ about unfair trade subsidies, meagre US aid and corruption. Whether this was merely superficial rhetoric, veiling the sinister agenda of the petro-military complex, would soon be tested.

Last August in Ecuador, the centrist government employed a Keynesian finance minister, Rafael Correa, who renewed Ecuador’s long-standing $75 million tax-avoidance complaint against Occidental Petroleum. In addition, a new Ecuadoran law aimed to redirect 20% of an oil fund towards social needs and 10% for national development in science and technology, instead of debt servicing to foreign banks. (The windfall from the oil price rise from $18/barrel when the fund was set up, to $70/barrel in 2005, was being funnelled to Ecuador’s creditors.)

Correa aimed to rescind Occidental’s control of the oilfields, as the original contract allowed for under conditions of non-performance. But next door to Ecuador, in Colombia, Wolfowitz had helped Occidental defend one of the most productive oil fields in the world, Cano Limon, whose pipeline runs through jungle adjacent to guerrilla controlled territory. The Pentagon established a Colombian ‘Pipeline Brigade’ with a $150 million grant arranged by Wolfowitz when he was the second-ranking military official.

A senior financier explained in MRzine: ‘Wolfowitz’s decision provoked a crisis in the government of president Alfredo Palacio who, especially with a weak government, has indicated his reluctance to confront the United States. After discussions with the president, finance minister Correa was obliged to resign and the head of the national petroleum company has been sacked. The new head of the petroleum company, Luis Roman, held the same post in the 1990s and helped Occidental into its current position. In fact, he is a supporter of further privatizing the oil fields.’

A few months later, a seemingly opposite case arose in Africa, namely a redirection of the controversial Chad-Cameroon oil pipeline’s funds away from social programmes into the military. As leader of the country tied with Bangladesh for most corrupt in the world (according to Transparency International), Chad’s authoritarian president Edriss Déby and the country’s parliament amended a 1999 petroleum revenue management law last December in spite of warnings by Wolfowitz.

Bank cofinancing of the $3.7 billion pipeline was the target of a long-running international campaign by community, human rights and environmental groups on grounds it would simply empower the Déby regime, not the people. In 1999, the Bank had responded with revenue legislation to mitigate these concerns.

Hence Déby’s 2005 amendment triggered Wolfowitz to withhold any new loans and grants and halt disbursement of $124 million in International Development Association monies. A local group, the Chadian Association for the Promotion and Defence of Human Rights, endorsed Bank sanctions because ‘new money would mainly be used for military purposes and increasing repression of the Chadian people. But we regret that the Bank did not listen to the warnings of civil society organisations earlier.’

Indeed, as the Bretton Woods Project records, ‘Local authorities and the military are known to extort money from villagers when they receive cash compensation from the oil companies. Chadian human rights organisations report that human rights activists trying to defend local peoples’ rights often receive death threats and have to flee the region. Pollution is taking a toll on the health and crops of some of the poorest people on earth, but none of the project sponsors are even studying it, let alone resolving the problems.’

Surprisingly perhaps, this case of petro-military alignment was resolved–temporarily–against the World Bank’s allies in a repressive regime and multinational oil corporations. Wolfowitz apparently required a dose of public credibility in what was Africa’s highest-profile financing dispute. Cynics might add, on the other hand, that the other crucial function of the clampdown was to impose Bank discipline on an errant country, in the process sending a tough lesson to others, that they must obey Washington’s orders.

Likewise, the same conflict of objectives arose in Ethiopia and Kenya late last year. In the former, Africa’s second most populous country and the world’s seventh-poorest, donors announced the suspension of $375 million budget support following severe state repression including a massacre of opposition political protesters and mass arrests. Although this threatened to wipe out fully a third of the country’s budget, and although president Meles Zenawi–an ex-Marxist ex-guerrilla–was a favourite of the neoliberals, the Bank complied.

…Dennis Brutus from Jubilee South Africa is in town to launch his fantastic new book, Poetry and Protest (Haymarket Books and UKZN Press). As I talk this dilemma over with him, he offers a very simple proposition: ‘It seems to me that both the IMF and Bank are inherently corrupt institutions, because they systematically transfer the wealth of poor countries to the North. While they are asking their clients–dictators and other ruling elites–to clean up their act, our job is still is to demand the abolition of this much more broadly corrupt system.’

This is not theory, Brutus reminds: ‘The World Bank Bonds Boycott is still going strong)

But what do you do if you’re in Nairobi or Brazzaville or Harare, then? Would it help to have Kibaki or Sassou-Nguesso or Robert Mugabe–who just caused a massive inflation spurt by repaying the IMF long-overdue debt–even more under Washington’s thumb?

Brutus replies: ‘Each case is different. Ask the progressive movements in those countries, and take the lead from them! Unless you have the mass of the citizens participating in the debate over resource inflows and outflows, you will just see elites being legitimised and empowered. We had this enormously instructive participatory-budgeting example from the Porto Alegre municipality. Limited and truncated as it was, it nevertheless gave a sense of the way we will want to control resources and stop corruption in the future, in Africa and everywhere else.’
counterpunch.org

Benjamin Netanyahu said he would move Israel’s security barrier deeper inside the West Bank.

The Likud Party leader was the third of the three candidates in Israel’s March 28 elections to address this year’s American Israel Public Affairs Committee policy conference.

Acting Prime Minister Ehud Olmert of the Kadima Party and Amir Peretz of Labor both said they would cut off a Hamas-led Palestinian Authority but would seek moderates with whom to deal, and Olmert said he was ready to unilaterally withdraw from some West Bank territory. Netanyahu suggested Israel should assume control of more territory, saying a Hamas-controlled West Bank posed dangers to Israel’s population centers and to Ben-Gurion Airport.
jta.org

UNICEF: “Sad day for children of Gaza”
GAZA CITY –- UNICEF said Monday was a sad day for the children of Gaza, after five were killed in conflict-related incidents.

In the first incident, two brothers, aged 14 and 15, were killed instantly when they were exposed to an unexploded device in a pond in Bereij, south of Gaza City.

Later in the day, two brothers, aged 11 and 15, and a 14-year-old boy were killed as bystanders during an air attack.

Monday’s tragic incidents bring the year’s death toll of Palestinian children to conflict-related violence to 11. The organization noted that yesterday’s one day toll was very high at a time when overall child casualties were actually going down.

UNICEF said the events of Monday starkly illustrate the how children are impacted in many ways by the conflict. In line with the Convention on the Rights of the Child all efforts should be made to protect children from violence as well as their rights to education, health and play.