WASHINGTON — When Sandi Stokes waits for lunch at the sandwich shop near her office in downtown Washington, she notices the counter worker often assumes the white person next to her was there first.

Brenda Person frequently finds that when she goes shopping near her home in Silver Spring, Md., clerks seem to ignore her and instead help a white customer.

Peggy Geigher, a District of Columbia resident, says restaurant hostesses often seem to seat her near the bathroom, even when better tables are available.

Many African Americans tell stories like these — seemingly minor examples of subtle discrimination they experience routinely.

“It happens all the time,” said Person, 56, a mother of two daughters. “It’s part of day-to-day experiences, unfortunately. But you are never prepared for it — it makes you feel like you’re out of rhythm with the rest of the world, and like there’s no justice.”

Some medical researchers have begun to suspect that such incidents take a physical toll and may play a role in why black people tend to have poorer health than white people. Chronic, low-level stress from such incidents may increase the risk for a host of ills, including heart disease and cancer, according to the theory.

The hypothesis remains far from proven and is highly controversial. Skeptics say it is difficult to rule out other factors, such as diet, lifestyle, personal perceptions and cultural differences. But support for the theory has been accumulating slowly, including a new study released yesterday linking such experiences to the early stages of heart disease. Some researchers say it is among the strongest pieces of evidence so far.
Full: seattletimes.nwsource

This is sort of a no-brainer. What about the epidemic of chronic asthma in inner-city children? There are very real environmental factors as well, but the metaphor of not being able to breathe here…

t seemed, at first, like nothing more than a novelty item in the news briefs, the kind of odd, meaningless side-fact thrown off by most major stories: “New Pope, President’s Brother Had Link in Swiss Group.” But a look beneath the surface of this innocuous connection reveals a vast web of sinister alliances — and moral corruption on a world-shaking scale.

The network links a bewildering line-up of players — the Bushes, the Vatican, bin Laden, Saddam Hussein and China’s Communist overlords, among others — in a staggering array of crime and turpitude: prostitution, pedophilia, mass death and war profiteering. Yet this is not some grand “conspiracy theory,” a serpent’s egg hatched in Bilderberg or Bohemian Grove. It’s simply the way the Bush boys do business, trawling the globe for sweetheart deals and gushers of blood money from the war and terror they foment.

At the center of this particular nexus is the unlikely figure of Neil Bush, the feckless, fraudulent brother of the current president. Neilsy, as he’s known in the family, is most famous for costing American taxpayers $1 billion to bail out a savings-and-loan he had ruined with secret insider loans to his own business partners. For this massive fraud, he was fined — by his father’s administration — the princely sum of $50,000, which was actually paid by one of his dad’s political bagmen, of course.

You see, the Bushes are robber barons, not capitalists: They never risk any of their own money in the competition of the marketplace. Nor do they ever pay the price when their deals go belly-up. Just ask George W., whose first business was jump-started with secret cash from the bin Ladens, laundered through their U.S. frontman, James Bath — who was also hired by W.’s dad, then-CIA director George Bush Sr., to set up offshore companies for shifting CIA money and aircraft between Texas and Saudi Arabia, the Texas Observer reported.
Full:axisoflogic.com

The Palestine/Israel Conflict as a Means of Control

The NYT is not only biased in a “Jews are good and their lives are important, Palestinians are bad and their lives are unimportant” kind of way.

It is also biased because of its very wrong subtext, which is: “The Palestine/Israel conflict is an ethnic war, not a war fomented by elites to control ordinary people, both Jews and Arabs.” The way elites foment ethnic war is by portraying one ethnic group as the innocent victim of the other ethnic group’s evil. The NYT and the pro-Zionist forces are engaged in fomenting ethnic war between “Jews and we Americans who should of course identify with them” against “Palestinians and Arabs in general who are, well, Arabs.”

It is becoming increasingly evident that the elites running the U.S. and Israel and the Middle East dictatorships intentionally foment ethnic/national war as a means of social control. Sharon and Hamas use each other. The pattern is very similar to the way elites fomented ethnic war in Yugoslavia in the 1990s to control a working class population there who were not pre-occupied with who was a Croat and who was a Serb (intermarriage rates were very high) and whose strikes and massive military draft refusals were threatening elite power. The strategy consists of elites of a particular ethnic group (and often of the “opposing” group as well, in a symmetrical fashion) carrying out vicious violent attacks on the other ethnic group in the name of one’s own, followed by attacks, verbal and sometimes violent, on members of “one’s own” ethnic group who don’t go along with the ethnic war attacks. In Yugoslavia the Serb and Croat elites worked together to pit their respective populations against each other.

The Same Strategy used in WWII

This same pattern was carried out by the rulers of the U.S., Germany and Japan to control working people in each of those nations who, in the 1930’s and early 40’s, were mounting sharp struggles that the rulers feared were about to turn into revolutions. The rulers instigated World War II to regain control over their own populations. (See my book, The People As Enemy: The Leaders’ Hidden Agenda in World War II, for a full treatment of this story.) We’ve seen the same use of deliberately fomented ethnic war used as a social control strategy in Ireland. And the current war in Iraq and the larger War on Terror are similarly about social control, practically lifted from the pages of Orwell’s 1984.

The Importance of Fighting Zionism

The significance and the importance of our effort to expose Zionism and build opposition to it, is not only the immediate but modest changes that we might win and might lose again, as so often is the case. It is also significant and important in that it enables us to discuss with our friends and neighbors and colleagues the most important facts about the world in which we live – Facts which, when fully appreciated by millions of people, make it possible to really change the world in fundamental ways:
Full: axisoflogic.com

Robert Zoellick is the archetypal US government insider, a man with a brilliant technical mind but zero experience of any coalface or war front. Sliding effortlessly between ivy league academia, the US treasury and corporate boardrooms (including an advisory post with the scandalous Enron), his latest position is the number-two slot at the state department.

Yet this ultimate “man of the suites” did something earlier this month that put the prime minister and the foreign secretary to shame. On their numerous visits to Iraq, neither has ever dared to go outside the heavily fortified green zones of Baghdad and Basra to see life as Iraqis have to live it. They come home after photo opportunities, briefings and pep talks with British troops and claim to know what is going on in the country they invaded, when in fact they have seen almost nothing.

…Daud Salman, an Iraqi journalist with the Institute for War and Peace Reporting, on a visit to Falluja two weeks ago, found that only a quarter of the city’s residents had gone back. Thousands remain in tents on the outskirts. The Iraqi Red Crescent finds it hard to go in to help the sick because of the US cordon around the city.

Burhan Fasa’a, a cameraman for the Lebanese Broadcasting Company, reported during the siege that dead family members were buried in their gardens because people could not leave their homes. Refugees told one of us that civilians carrying white flags were gunned down by American soldiers. Corpses were tied to US tanks and paraded around like trophies.

Justin Alexander, a volunteer for Christian Peacemaker Teams, recently found hundreds living in tents in the grounds of their homes, or in a single patched-up room. A strict system of identity cards blocks access to anyone whose papers give a birthplace outside Falluja, so long-term residents born elsewhere cannot go home. “Fallujans feel the remnants of their city have been turned into a giant prison,” he reports.

Many complain that soldiers of the Iraqi national guard, the fledgling new army, loot shops during the night-time curfew and detain people in order to take a bribe for their release. They are suspected of being members of the Badr Brigade, a Shia militia that wants revenge against Sunnis.

One thing is certain: the attack on Falluja has done nothing to still the insurgency against the US-British occupation nor produced the death of al-Zarqawi – any more than the invasion of Afghanistan achieved the capture or death of Osama bin Laden. Thousands of bereaved and homeless Falluja families have a new reason to hate the US and its allies.

At least Zoellick went to see. He gave no hint of the impression that the trip left him with, but is too smart not to have understood something of the reality. The lesson ought not to be lost on Blair and Straw. Every time the prime minister claims it is time to “move on” from the issue of the war’s legality and rejoice at Iraq’s transformation since Saddam Hussein was toppled, the answer must be: “Remember Falluja.” When the foreign secretary next visits Iraq, he should put on a flak jacket and tour the city that Britain had a share in destroying.

…In the 1930s the Spanish city of Guernica became a symbol of wanton murder and destruction. In the 1990s Grozny was cruelly flattened by the Russians; it still lies in ruins. This decade’s unforgettable monument to brutality and overkill is Falluja, a text-book case of how not to handle an insurgency, and a reminder that unpopular occupations will always degenerate into desperation and atrocity.
Full: guardian.co.uk

HAVANA – Declaring that U.S. citizens are oppressed by their own government, Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez promised Friday that he would not visit the United States again until Americans “liberate” their nation.

Chavez, in Havana for trade talks, told an international gathering of activists here that before an earlier trip to Cuba, a U.S. State Department undersecretary he did not identify warned him not to go because he would no longer be received in Washington.

He said he went ahead with that trip anyway, and later traveled to the United States to visit U.S. President George W. Bush, who he said greeted him with a Coca-Cola in his hand.

“I have not returned, nor do I think about returning again, until the people of the United States liberate that nation,” said Chavez, saying that Americans are “oppressed” by their government and U.S. media.
Full: commondreams.org

UNITED NATIONS – A United Nations human rights monitor who accused American military forces and civilian contractors last week of abusing and torturing prisoners in Afghanistan has been told his job is over.

M. Cherif Bassiouni, a professor of law at DePaul University in Chicago who was the human rights commission’s independent expert for Afghanistan, said Friday that he had received an e-mail message from a commission official in Geneva a week ago telling him his mandate had expired.

The day before, he had released a 21-page report saying that Americans running prisons in Afghanistan had acted above the law “by engaging in arbitrary arrests and detentions and committing abusive practices, including torture.”

In an interview from his Chicago office, he said that he had been expecting a routine two-year renewal but that the United States had lobbied against him because of his persistent efforts to examine American-supervised prisons and his disclosure that prisoners were being detained in remote “fire bases” constructed for combat operations.
Full: commondreams.org

For the college-bound, today is generally the last day to decide which college. No more second thoughts, no more waffling. It’s time for a decision already!

Then reality hits. No longer do colleges pull out all the stops to woo accepted students – “Please, please, come here. We’re the best school ever. We promise you ideal roommates, the ultimate fitness center, the career of your dreams!” Now the mailings from the chosen college carry more mundane messages, like, say, when exactly you should take every cent you have and mail it in.

Pondering those staggering costs, one can’t help wondering who, exactly, can afford this most necessary of luxuries. The answer, increasingly, is the rich. Roughly half of American families make less than $50,000 a year, but according to The Chronicle of Higher Education, just 30 percent of current college freshmen come from that group.

A decade ago, just 14 percent of freshmen had parents who made more than $100,000; that has shot up to 32 percent. And only part of that can be attributed to inflation.
Full: nytimes.com

WOMEN now outnumber men in managerial and professional positions, and most companies have installed policies that aim to help their leaders balance the demands of job and family.

Yet three decades after a woman first became chief executive of a Fortune 500 company, fewer than 2 percent of the biggest corporations are run by women. Executive recruiters and corporate boards could be forgiven for asking themselves why.

The answer, experts are beginning to conclude, has less to do with discrimination in the corporate suite or pressures at home than with frustration and boredom on the job. “Men will grit their teeth and bear everything, while women will say: ‘Is this all there is? I need more than this!’ ” said Mabel M. Miguel, a professor of management at the Kenan-Flagler Business School at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Full: nytimes.com