…On Feb. 6, just 15 days after his inauguration, Morales called for the mobilization of the country’s peasant organizations to shield his government against efforts by “some transnational corporations” to destabilize the country to stop the “nationalization” of energy resources. The plot, he said, had been detected by the armed forces.

A day after swearing in, Morales shook up the Bolivian high command by choosing a low-ranking general to head the military, effectively forcing higher-ranking generals to resign. The move was a key move, as the Bolivian armed forces have a long history of intervening in Bolivian politics.

Morales also called on peasant and other popular organizations to rally behind his call for the election of a constituent assembly in early July, to draft a new constituent for Bolivia. “The oligarchs,” he said, “should not be given time to breathe” as the country tries to reshape its basic institutions.
zmag.org

“The Venezuelan government has given a Christian missionary group from the US until Sunday to leave the country.”
– The BBC, Feb 12

The BBC news report (provided below) refers to the government’s expulsion of U.S. missionaries from the Amazon region of Venezuela where they work to convert the Yanomamö Indians to christianity.

Napoleon A. Chagnon is a Professor Emeritus of Sociobiology at U.C. Santa Barbara. He first made contact with the Yanomamö Indians in Venezuela’s Amazonia, in 1964. An editorial review of the Fifth Edition of his book, Yanomamö, The Fierce People speaks of its author, Napoleon A. Chagnon,”He gives an unforgettable portrait of an extraordinary people in this eloquent, meticulously detailed, and often passionate book.”

Based upon my first reading of the Third Edition of the book many years ago and third reading again this year, this editorial description of Chagnon’s book is modest. When the 3rd Edition was published, Chagnon had lived with the Yanamomo for about 4 years. In the last chapter of the 3rd Edition, Chagnon describes the effects of the missionaries – Catholic and Protestant – on these amazing human beings.

In addition to their “contribution” of “civilized” clothing to the Yanomamö culture, the missionaries brought with them a number of other less benign gifts: disease, guns, tourism and a systematic eradication of their way of life. Some would disagree with my use of the term – but I think of it as a form of genocide. This “systematic erasure” of their culture has never been complete. The Yanomamö are a strong and resilient people. Nonetheless, the overall effects of the missionaries’ attempt to convert these people from their way of life and view of the world to their own brand of christianity is a modern tragedy.
axisoflogic.com

Unfair tactics and confusing rules still make it tough for many minorities to cast election ballots, and the barriers are so common that the federal safeguards for voters must be renewed, a detailed new report from a civil rights group says.

“Protecting Minority Voters: The Voting Rights Act, 1982-2005” pulls together research and testimony from voters around the country to urge lawmakers to renew the parts of the 1965 Voting Rights Act that will expire in August 2007.

“The past and the present look a whole lot alike in the prevalence of racial discrimination in voting,” said Barbara Arnwine, director of the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, which spearheaded the project. “It was shocking to … not only see the continuing reality of racial discrimination in voting but to see how pervasive these problems are nationwide.”
news.yahoo.com

NEW ORLEANS — The official death toll of Hurricane Katrina is more than 1,300. The unofficial toll of the storm may take that a lot higher.

Though not quantifiable in the orthodox fashion, because so many area health agencies are still in disarray, a belief exists among many here that the natural mortality rate of New Orleanians — whether still in the city or relocated — has increased dramatically since, and perhaps because of, Katrina.

The daily newspaper has seen a rise in reported deaths. Local funeral homes are burying just as many people as they did last year, though the population has decreased. Families say that their kin who had been in good health are dying, and attribute that to the stress brought on by the hurricane, flooding and relocations.

It is too early for state officials to have statistics for last year, said Bob Johannessen of the Louisiana Department of Health and Hospitals. And epidemiologists are reluctant to draw conclusions based on anecdotal information.

Still, stress here is palpable, and it is overwhelming people of all ages, said psychiatrist James Barbee, director of an anxiety clinic at Louisiana State University. “People are struggling terribly.”

Barbee said he has seen many more patients with serious problems — hypertension, diabetes out of control, suicidal tendencies — than before the storm. “Katrina took all order away from lives,” he said, and the effect can be extremely deleterious.

The increase in deaths is seen the pages of the local newspaper, the Times-Picayune, where the number of deaths reported in January was up 25 percent from the same month in 2005, according to publisher Ashton Phelps Jr.

New Orleans Parish Coroner Frank Minyard said he doesn’t keep records on natural deaths, but that he believes “stress causes an increase in the rise of natural-death rates.”

Louis Charbonnet, 67, president of Charbonnet-Labat Funeral Home on St. Philip Street in the Tremé neighborhood, said, “It’s an absolute fact.” New Orleanians are “dying away,” he said. “They are distressed by being displaced.”
washingtonpost.com

Six Months After Katrina: Who Was Left Behind – Then and Now
The Katrina evacuation was totally self-help. If you had the resources, a car, money and a place to go, you left. Over one million people evacuated – 80 to 90% of the population. No provisions were made for those who could not evacuate themselves. To this day no one has a reliable estimate of how many people were left behind in Katrina – that in itself says quite a bit about what happened.

Who was left behind in the self-help evacuation?

In the hospital, we could not see who was left behind because we did not have electricity or TV. We certainly knew the 2000 of us were left behind, and from the hospital we could see others. Some were floating in the street – face down. Some were paddling down the street – helping older folks get to high ground. Some were swimming down the streets. We could hear people left behind screaming for help from rooftops. We routinely heard gunshots as people trapped on rooftops tried to get the attention of helicopters crisscrossing the skies above. We could see the people trapped in the Salvation Army home a block away. We could hear breaking glass as people scrambled to get away from flooded one story homes and into the higher ground of several story office buildings. We saw people swimming to the local drugstore and swimming out with provisions. But we had no idea how many were actually left behind. The poor, especially those without cars, were left behind. Twenty-seven percent of the people of New Orleans did not have access to a car. Government authorities knew in advance that “.100,000 citizens of New Orleans did not have means of personal transportation.” Greyhound and Amtrak stopped service on the Saturday before the hurricane. These are people who did not have cars because they were poor – over 125,000 people, 27% of the people of New Orleans, lived below the very low federal poverty level before Katrina.

Capitalism is Racism: An Update on the New Orleans Tragedy
…The September article opened with the statement, “The late Malcolm X said that: ‘You cannot have capitalism without racism’….” This claim can be understood when considered in the historical context of the fact that the early (white) capitalists in America were, among other things, slave holders while the early African Americans were brought here by force and violence in order to be slaves for the purpose of maximizing profits for the rich land owners by reducing labor costs. As a result of this vicious practice, the African American people were brought to America in such a circumstance that they were actually considered to be material resources, or property, rather than being economic earners, or humans. Later, after the slaves gained their freedom, these good people continued to be held at the very bottom of the economic ladder without any real means of climbing above whatever rung of that ladder its builder, the white “master class” of capitalist ownership, made available to them. Since it is a basic tenet of capitalist economics that those at the top will always rise at a more rapid and greater rate than those at the bottom, those at the bottom will inevitably always remain there.

President Bush yesterday strongly defended an Arab company’s attempt to take over the operation of seaports in Baltimore and five other cities, threatening a veto if Congress tries to kill a deal his administration has blessed.

Facing a sharp bipartisan backlash, Bush took the unusual step of summoning reporters to the front of Air Force One to condemn efforts to block a firm from the United Arab Emirates from purchasing the rights to manage ports that include those in New York and New Orleans.
washingtopost.com

Hey, these are his boys, and a deal’s a deal.

Its regional influence fortuitously boosted by the US invasion of Iraq and the advent of a Shia-dominated government in Baghdad, Iran’s leadership is contemplating another unintended gift from Washington: the chance to become a power in Palestine.
guardian.co.uk

I don’t believe in luck

Iran was not referred to the Security Council for Noncompliance
02/21/06 “ICH” — — How powerful is the corporate information-system we call the mainstream media?

Is it powerful enough, for example, to mislead the public into believing that Iran has been “referred” to the United Nations Security Council for violations to the NPT, thus paving the way for another war on the back of false information?

The IAEA DID NOT report on Iran’s “noncompliance” to the Security Council, because there is no evidence that Iran has done anything wrong. In fact, as nuclear physicist Gordon Prather points out in his recent article, “March Madness”, “THE BOARD DIDN’T REPORT ANYTHING.”

Then why does the media keep insisting that Iran is being called before the Security Council for noncompliance?

Could it be that the media is simply executing an agenda that is deliberately designed to deceive?

There was no “referral” and there will be no “punitive action” because there are no violations. “Rather”, as Prather ads, “the IAEA Board ‘REQUESTED’ that Director-General Mohamed ElBaradei report to the Security Council”…”calling on Iran to-among other things-implement ‘transparency measures’”.

These “transparency measures” have nothing to do with Iran’s obligations under the NPT. They are additional demands made at the behest of the Bush administration (through strong-arm tactics with nations on the IAEA Board) that will force Iran to provide access to “individuals, documentation relating to procurement, dual-use equipment, certain military owned workshops, and research and development as the Agency may request in support of its ongoing investigations”.

March madness

…Since Sept. 11, private advocacy groups that promote U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East and the war on terror have targeted professional academics who disagree with right-wing agendas. Although the assault on academic professionals who disagree with U.S. foreign policy is not new, the right-wing thought police have been churning the political rhetoric against professors who express “patriotic incorrectness.”

“The neoconservatives have a knee-jerk understanding of Israel and the Middle East,” Beinin said. “They can’t win in a fair intellectual fight; their ideas are passé.”

Beinin explained that right-wing advocacy groups, such as Campus Watch and The David Project compile offensive dossiers on people that contain selective quotes from professors taken out of context.

On their web site Campus Watch states their campaign “supports the unencumbered freedom of speech of all scholars regardless of their views” but that “academic freedom does not mean freedom from criticism, to the contrary no one enjoys privileges in the free marketplace ideas.” The campaign established “The Columbia Project,” which will provide detailed studies of what they believe are “problems with Columbia University’s Middle East Studies faculty.” In the coming months they will be publishing these studies.
dissidentvoice.org

Escalating Israeli declarations around “final borders” are alarming, particularly in the face of ongoing Occupation pursuits to devour more Palestinian land, control the West Bank, and contain the Palestinian Struggle. Recent announcements, launched during the Herzliya policy conference that ended the day before the Palestinian Legislative Council elections, were not a surprise in the face of the near completion of the Apartheid Wall, confirming Israeli plans to permanently control approximately half the West Bank by imprisoning the majority of Palestinians in walled ghettos. In continuing its current policy and measures, the Occupation seeks to deepen and make official, preferably through negotiations, its de facto annexation of lands between the Wall and the Green Line as well as the Jordan Valley, thus demarcating a Palestinian “state” more accurately referred to as bantustans, ghettos, or reservations.
zmag.org

Update on Balata refugee Camp
February 21st, 2006 | Posted in Press Releases, Nablus Region
Sixteen year old Kamal Khalili was shot in his chest with live ammunition at 11:00 this morning in Balata Camp while throwing a stone at Israeli soldiers. He is now brain dead. According to Dr. Ghassan Hamdan head of the Nablus UPMRC nine other youths were injured today, at least four of them with live ammunition. Dr. Hamdan Says that this brings the total of injured people to 64.

This is third Day of the military operation in Balata Camp, The camp has been under continues curfew and people are suffering from lack of food medicine and milk formula for babies.

The military has occupied over sixty homes. Families in these homes are completely isolated. When a medical team tried to see 64 year old Im Imad Mashi who has high blood pressure and has recently undergone a heart operation they were denied acsess. “the soilders told us she can die” said Clara a volunteer from Germany .

…In August, the bureau announced that 12.7 percent of Americans lived in poverty in 2004, making it the official poverty rate. Last week, the bureau said the rate might be as high as 19.4 percent, or as low as 8.3 percent, depending on how income and basic living costs were defined.

One outside analyst said he could cut the poverty rate in half using census data and a pocket calculator. But his exercise would change only the definition of poverty. It wouldn’t make anyone richer.

“I know virtually no one who thinks the current poverty line is an accurate measure of poverty,” said Rebecca Blank, co-director of the National Poverty Center at the University of Michigan.
commondreams.org

WASHINGTON – A small branch of a South American religious sect may use hallucinogenic tea as part of a ritual intended to connect with God, a unanimous Supreme Court ruled Tuesday.

In its first religious freedom decision under Chief Justice John Roberts, the court said the government cannot hinder religious practices without proof of a “compelling” need to do so.

“This is a very important decision for minority religious freedom in this country,” said lawyer John Boyd, who represents about 130 U.S. members of O Centro Espirita Beneficiente Uniao do Vegetal who live in New Mexico, California and Colorado.
news.yahoo.com