By Anita Rice
BBC News and Current Affairs
bbc news

The LA murder rate is going up and the police chief has requested more officers. But California is broke and cannot afford to recruit.
Civil rights lawyer Connie Rice warns that with too few officers to “police humanely”, parts of the city may as well be in Falluja.

Los Angeles is notorious for gang violence, but even by LA standards 2002 was gruesome. With 658 murders in just that one year, it became America’s murder capital.

Of those murders, almost half were directly related to gang turf wars involving drugs and guns. And of those gangs, most are based in south-central or south-east LA.

With a spiralling murder rate and poor police-community relations following the Rodney King riots and the Rampart corruption scandal, the city appointed a new chief to clean up its act.

Amid much fanfare and hype William Bratton – the man credited with cleaning up New York’s once-soaring crime rate under the political stewardship of former mayor Rudy Giuliani – was brought in to get LA under control.

Chief Bratton immediately appointed a second deputy charged with concentrating some officers in gang areas and targeting gangs. He also prioritised improving relations with minority communities.

‘Shovelling quicksand’
full article

June 1, 2004
Coming Soon
By JACOB LEVICH

Barring a sudden reversal in the direction of US foreign policy, a strong bipartisan push to reinstate the draft can be expected soon after the November elections. Whether or not Bush wins is irrelevant. The logic of empire requires more boots on the ground, and conscription looks like the only way to get them.

In fact the campaign for the draft is already under way, though election-year politics have dictated a nuanced approach. Long-dormant draft boards have been quietly reactivated and restaffed — even as the Bush administration continues to claim, in the face of mounting evidence to the contrary, that current troop levels are sufficient.

Meanwhile, a consensus behind conscription is building on Capitol Hill. Senators Chuck Hagel (R-Neb) and Joseph Biden (D-Del), chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, are among many prominent politicians suddenly calling for a “national debate” on the draft. Open supporters of the draft include Sen. Ernest Hollings (D-SC) and Reps. Nydia Velazsquez (D-NY), Pete Stark (D-Cal), and Charles Rangel (D-NY). HR 163 and S 89, Democrat-sponsored bills to restore conscription, are quietly working their way through committee. According to The Hill, Republicans are ready to sign on as soon as they get the nod from the Bush administration.

Because the draft is potentially a catalyst for student protest, many leftists are happy to believe that the Establishment would never dare to reintroduce it. But that view fails to take into account the tremendous post-Seattle expansion of the state’s repressive apparatus. Now that protest pens, mass arrests, chemical crowd control, and embedded journalists have become the norm at major demonstrations, the powerful may well believe that they have little to fear from free speech.
people against the draft
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John Negroponte’s record in Honduras does not inspire confidence about his appointment as US ambassador to Iraq

Duncan Campbell the guardian
Wednesday June 2, 2004

Suspicious deaths in custody. Allegations of torture. Claims of a military out of control. These are some of the key issues that will face John Negroponte, US ambassador to the United Nations, when he takes over this month as US ambassador to Iraq.
Suspicious deaths in custody. Allegations of torture. Claims of a military out of control. Those were some of the key issues that faced John Negroponte 20 years ago when he was US ambassador to Honduras. So it is worth examining how he reacted then when faced with evidence of extra-judicial killings, torture and human rights abuses.

Central America in the early 80s was, for a few years, the centre of the world in much the way that the Middle East now is. There had been a revolution in Nicaragua in which a dictator had been removed by the Sandinistas, who had then embarked on a political path that was anathema to the US.

The country became a magnet for the international left, who saw hopeful signs in the revolution. El Salvador and Guatemala were in turmoil as leftwing guerrillas battled with the military in their efforts to overturn years of military oppression and corruption. In those days the enemy, as far as the US was concerned, was international communism rather than al-Qaida, but the rhetoric of “good” versus “evil” took a similar pattern to today’s.

Into this world in 1981 came diplomat John Negroponte as ambassador to Honduras. At the time, the US was covertly backing the contras, the counter-revolutionaries who opposed the Sandinistas. Honduras was a vital base for them. An air base was built at El Aguacate, where they could be trained and which was used, according to Honduran human rights activists, as a detention centre where torture took place. It was also used as a burial ground for 185 dissidents, whose remains were only discovered in 2001.
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Dooh Nibor Economics
By PAUL KRUGMAN
new york times
Last week The Washington Post got hold of an Office of Management and Budget memo that directed federal agencies to prepare for post-election cuts in programs that George Bush has been touting on the campaign trail. These include nutrition for women, infants and children; Head Start; and homeland security. The numbers match those on a computer printout leaked earlier this year — one that administration officials claimed did not reflect policy.

Beyond the routine mendacity, the case of the leaked memo points us to a larger truth: whatever they may say in public, administration officials know that sustaining Mr. Bush’s tax cuts will require large cuts in popular government programs. And for the vast majority of Americans, the losses from these cuts will outweigh any gains from lower taxes.

It has long been clear that the Bush administration’s claim that it can simultaneously pursue war, large tax cuts and a “compassionate” agenda doesn’t add up. Now we have direct confirmation that the White House is engaged in bait and switch, that it intends to pursue a not at all compassionate agenda after this year’s election.

That agenda is to impose Dooh Nibor economics — Robin Hood in reverse. The end result of current policies will be a large-scale transfer of income from the middle class to the very affluent, in which about 80 percent of the population will lose and the bulk of the gains will go to people with incomes of more than $200,000 per year.
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In just 14 days the problems of the poorest countries in the world — starvation, lack of education, scarcity of potable water, etc. — could be solved if each nation donated its military spending budget for just that period of time — 14 days.

Rich-poor gulf widens
‘Inequality Matters’ conference puts nations on alert
By Thomas Kostigen, CBS.MarketWatch.com cbs market watch
Thursday is when the Inequality Matters conference begins in New York City to discuss the biggest wealth and income gap — and its consequences on society — since the Hoover Administration. The Congressional Budget Office says the income gap in the United States is now the widest in 75 years.

While the richest one percent of the U.S. population saw its financial wealth grow 109 percent from 1983 to 2001, the bottom two-fifths watched as its wealth fell 46 percent.

Alarming? You bet. And here’s why: The number of Americans without health insurance climbed 33 percent during the 1990’s, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. The biggest indicator of a healthy society — average life expectancy — has dropped. People in the U.S. now don’t live even as long as people in Costa Rica. Meanwhile the U.S. infant mortality rate has risen, so much so Cuba has a better success rate of bringing healthy children into the world.

Citing those facts and figures, James Lardner, who heads Inequality.org, says “there is no way you can deny the power of money.” He, along with Bill Moyers, Barbara Ehrenreich and numerous other leaders, activists and institutions hope to bring some of these startling facts “to the front burner of politics.”
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by Mark Weisbrot
common dreams.org

Last week the New York Times published an 1100-word note “From the Editors” criticizing its own reporting on the build-up to the Iraq war and the early stages of the occupation. On Sunday the newspaper’s Public Editor went further, citing “flawed journalism” and stories that “pushed Pentagon assertions so aggressively you could almost sense epaulets sprouting on the shoulders of editors.”

This kind of self-criticism is important, because the media played an important role in convincing the American public — and probably the Congress as well — that the war was justified. Unfortunately, these kinds of mistakes are not limited to the New York Times — or to reporting on Iraq.

Venezuela is a case in point. The Bush administration has been pushing for “regime change” in Venezuela for years now, painting a false and exaggerated picture of the reality there. As in the case of Iraq’s alleged weapons of mass destruction and links to Al-Qaeda, the Administration has gotten a lot of help from the media.

Reporting on Venezuela relies overwhelmingly on opposition sources, many of them about as reliable as Ahmed Chalabi. Although there are any number of scholars and academics — both Venezuelan and international — who could offer coherent arguments on the other side, their arguments almost never appear. For balance, we usually get at most a poor person on the street describing why he likes Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, or a sound bite from Chavez himself denouncing “imperialist intervention.”

Opposition allegations are repeated constantly, often without rebuttal, and sometimes reported as facts. At the same time, some of the most vital information is hardly reported or not reported at all. For example, the opposition’s efforts to recall President Chavez hit a snag in March when more than 800,000 signatures for the recall were invalidated. These signatures were not thrown out but were sent to a “repair process,” currently being tallied, in which signers would get a second chance to claim invalidated signatures.
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I guess now that the New York Times has made its big apology it feels under some obligation to let slip some real information. Only two and a half years late, after thousands of others reported it, and were called paranoid nut cases for doing so.

By CRAIG UNGER
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