LA PAZ, Bolivia, June 8 – A worsening five-year political crisis in Bolivia reached a precarious impasse on Wednesday, with left- and right-wing adversaries so polarized that the departing president, Carlos Mesa, warned his country to step back from the brink of civil war.

With Mr. Mesa’s government collapsing and surging indigenous protesters demanding early elections and more say in economic policy, Bolivia, a country of nine million people, stands at a perilous moment. Five years of instability have already forced two presidents to quit.

In Santa Cruz, the eastern lowland province where much of the country’s energy sector is located, peasants pressing for expropriation of private oil companies occupied installations belonging to Repsol YPF of Spain and British Gas, forcing the companies to shut down production.

Here in the western Andes, Indians marched by the thousands and blocked key roads, keeping La Paz short of fuel and food and prompting two international airlines, American and LanChile, to cancel flights.

Two days after Mr. Mesa offered to leave office to defuse mounting protests, demonstrators vowed to topple the new government if it is led by the next in line to the presidency, the Senate president, Hormando Vaca Díez. Congress is preparing to accept Mr. Mesa’s resignation on Thursday and anoint Mr. Vaca Díez as successor in a special session in Sucre, the judicial capital.

Leaders of Bolivia’s powerful indigenous movement vehemently oppose Mr. Vaca Díez, a wealthy land owner and long-time politician who has the support of the influential business elites in Santa Cruz, his home province. The conservative business class there wants more autonomy, giving it control over the natural gas reserves that the Indians in the highlands want to nationalize.
Full: nytimes.com

WASHINGTON, June 8 – In a sharp setback for the Bush administration’s Latin America policy, the Organization of American States rejected a United States plan on Tuesday to create a committee to monitor the exercise of democracy in the hemisphere.

Instead, the organization agreed, at a meeting in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., on a declaration that attaches equal or greater emphasis to attacking poverty because of what it calls “the interdependent relationship of democracy and social and economic development.”

The organization, which represents 34 states of the Western Hemisphere, voted to approve the resolution at midnight on Tuesday, but the language was not completed until Wednesday by staff members who lingered after the formal meeting.

The United States professed to be satisfied with the final resolution, even though it bears little resemblance to the proposal the State Department introduced last week. The resolution does not include the element that Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice insisted it must have, a committee that would investigate troubled democracies.

On Sunday, en route to the organization’s meeting of foreign ministers, Ms. Rice responded to a reporter’s question about the growing opposition to the United States plan, by asking how the organization could be effective without a “mechanism that can help at times of crisis?”
Full: nytimes.com

“a mechanism that can help at times of crisis.” I’m sure.

DAKAR, Senegal (AP) — A weekend raid into Mauritania by Algerian Islamic militants illustrates why north Africa needs the U.S.-led joint counterterror exercises launched this week, a U.S. military spokeswoman said Wednesday.

The training exercise began Monday in Chad, Mauritania, Mali, Niger and, for the first time, Algeria, from where Islamic insurgents linked to the al-Qaida network began a raid into Mauritania that left two dozen dead. Five other countries will take part by the time the program finishes in two weeks.

The Mauritania raid is an example of why nations in the region ”have to work together now,” said Maj. Holly Silkman, a spokeswoman for the Germany-based U.S. European Command, or EUCOM, which is responsible for operations in most of Africa.
Full: nytimes.com

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – A White House official, who previously worked for the American Petroleum Institute, has repeatedly edited government climate reports in a way that downplays links between greenhouse gas emissions and global warming, The New York Times reported on Wednesday.

Philip Cooney, chief of staff for the White House Council on Environmental Quality, made changes to descriptions of climate research that had already been approved by government scientists and their supervisors, the newspaper said, citing internal documents.

The White House declined comment on the report.

The report said the documents were obtained by the newspaper from the Government Accountability Project, a nonprofit group that provides legal help to government whistleblowers.

The group is representing Rick Piltz, who resigned in March from the office that coordinates government research and issued the documents that Cooney edited, the Times said.

The newspaper said Cooney made handwritten notes on drafts of several reports issued in 2002 and 2003, removing or adjusting language on climate research.

White House officials told the newspaper the changes were part of a normal interagency review of all documents related to global environmental change.

“All comments are reviewed, and some are accepted and some are rejected,” Robert Hopkins, a spokesman for the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy told the the newspaper.

In a memo sent last week to top officials dealing with climate change at a dozen agencies, Piltz charged that “politicization by the White House” was undermining the credibility and integrity of the science program.
yahoonews.com

Credibility??? Integrity???

Los Alamos whistle-blower beaten outside bar
A Los Alamos lab whistle-blower scheduled to testify before Congress was badly beaten in an attack outside a Santa Fe bar.

Tommy Hook was in a hospital recovering from a fractured jaw and other injuries, his wife, Susan Hook, said Monday.

Hook’s wife and his lawyer believe the attack was designed to keep him quiet.

Susan Hook said the assailants told her husband during the attack early Sunday that “if you know what’s good for you, you’ll keep your mouth shut.”

Tommy Hook has a pending lawsuit against the University of California alleging whistle-blower retaliation. He had been scheduled to testify before the House Energy and Commerce Committee later this month about alleged financial irregularities at the nuclear weapons lab.

Police and the FBI said they are investigating.

According to Hook’s wife, the 52-year-old lab employee got a telephone call late Saturday night — after he was already in bed — wanting to meet with him at a Santa Fe bar about 45 minutes from their home.

She said her husband told her the man never showed up, but as he was leaving the topless bar’s parking lot, a group of men pulled him from his car and beat him.

“They left him in the parking lot for dead,” Hook’s lawyer, Robert Rothstein, said Monday at a news conference where pictures of Hook’s bruised and swollen face were passed around.
Full: cnn.com

“The White Man’s Burden”
by Rudyard Kipling
First published in McClure’s Magazine (Feb. 1899).

Take up the White Man’s burden–
Send forth the best ye breed–
Go, bind your sons to exile
To serve your captive’s need;
To wait, in heavy harness,
On fluttered folk and wild–
Your new-caught sullen peoples,
Half devil and half child.

Take up the White Man’s burden–
In patience to abide,
To veil the threat of terror
And check the show of pride;
By open speech and simple,
An hundred times made plain,
To seek another’s profit
And work another’s gain.

Take up the White Man’s burden–
The savage wars of peace–
Fill full the mouth of Famine,
And bid the sickness cease;
And when your goal is nearest
(The end for others sought)
Watch sloth and heathen folly
Bring all your hopes to nought.

Take up the White Man’s burden–
No iron rule of kings,
But toil of serf and sweeper–
The tale of common things.
The ports ye shall not enter,
The roads ye shall not tread,
Go, make them with your living
And mark them with your dead.

Take up the White Man’s burden,
And reap his old reward–
The blame of those ye better
The hate of those ye guard–
The cry of those ye humor
(Ah, slowly!) toward the light:–
“Why brought ye us from bondage,
Our loved Egyptian night?”

Take up the White Man’s burden–
Ye dare not stoop to less–
Nor call too loud on Freedom
To cloak your weariness.
By all ye will or whisper,
By all ye leave or do,
The silent sullen peoples
Shall weigh your God and you.

Take up the White Man’s burden!
Have done with childish days–
The lightly-proffered laurel,
The easy ungrudged praise:
Comes now, to search your manhood
Through all the thankless years,
Cold, edged with dear-bought wisdom,
The judgment of your peers.
rootsie.com/forum

Anarchists from around the world are planning to cause chaos at next month’s G8 summit in Gleneagles as a row broke out last night between Bob Geldof and DJ Andy Kershaw over the absence of black musicians at events staged to benefit Africans.

With police fears mounting over Geldof’s call for one million people to protest at the summit, Kershaw last night condemned the almost exclusively white line-up for the pop concerts to coincide with the summit. “If we are going to change the West’s perception of Africa, events like this are the perfect opportunity to do something for Africa’s self-esteem,” he said. “But the choice of artists for the Live8 concerts will simply reinforce the global perception of Africa’s inferiority.”

Bob Geldof last week called on one million people to descend on Edinburgh on 6 July – a move branded irresponsible by city leaders and local police. Geldof’s fellow campaigner, Midge Ure, later claimed the one million figure was “symbolic” and talks between the campaign groups and police appear to have resolved any potential problems for the march.

But The Independent on Sunday can reveal that anarchist groups that have rioted at previous G8 gatherings are planning similar disruptions in Scotland and plan to hijack Geldof’s “long march to freedom” on 6 July and the Make Poverty History rally on 2 July. Anarchist groups will encourage protesters to “Make Capitalism History” instead.

Since this event is pretty much the ultimate in hypocrisy and imperial pageantry I wonder why any blacks would choose to be involved. It’s discouraging that these ‘anarchists’ don’t seem to get it at all, but not surprising. They’re part of the show. The way I see it is as a day for whites to reflect on how good and kind they are. ‘The Whiteman’s Burden’ you know old boy. Not a bit different.
(more…)

When F. Scott Fitzgerald pronounced that the very rich “are different from you and me,” Ernest Hemingway’s famously dismissive response was: “Yes, they have more money.” Today he might well add: much, much, much more money.

The people at the top of America’s money pyramid have so prospered in recent years that they have pulled far ahead of the rest of the population, an analysis of tax records and other government data by The New York Times shows. They have even left behind people making hundreds of thousands of dollars a year.

Call them the hyper-rich.

They are not just a few Croesus-like rarities. Draw a line under the top 0.1 percent of income earners – the top one-thousandth. Above that line are about 145,000 taxpayers, each with at least $1.6 million in income and often much more.

The average income for the top 0.1 percent was $3 million in 2002, the latest year for which averages are available. That number is two and a half times the $1.2 million, adjusted for inflation, that group reported in 1980. No other income group rose nearly as fast.

The share of the nation’s income earned by those in this uppermost category has more than doubled since 1980, to 7.4 percent in 2002. The share of income earned by the rest of the top 10 percent rose far less, and the share earned by the bottom 90 percent fell.

Next, examine the net worth of American households. The group with homes, investments and other assets worth more than $10 million comprised 338,400 households in 2001, the last year for which data are available. The number has grown more than 400 percent since 1980, after adjusting for inflation, while the total number of households has grown only 27 percent.

The Bush administration tax cuts stand to widen the gap between the hyper-rich and the rest of America. The merely rich, making hundreds of thousands of dollars a year, will shoulder a disproportionate share of the tax burden.

President Bush said during the third election debate last October that most of the tax cuts went to low- and middle-income Americans. In fact, most – 53 percent – will go to people with incomes in the top 10 percent over the first 15 years of the cuts, which began in 2001 and would have to be reauthorized in 2010. And more than 15 percent will go just to the top 0.1 percent, those 145,000 taxpayers.

The Times set out to create a financial portrait of the very richest Americans, how their incomes have changed over the decades and how the tax cuts will affect them. It is no secret that the gap between the rich and the poor has grown, but the extent to which the richest are leaving everyone else behind is not widely known.

The Treasury Department uses a computer model to examine the effects of tax cuts on various income groups but does not look in detail fine enough to differentiate among those within the top 1 percent. To determine those differences, The Times relied on a computer model based on the Treasury’s. Experts at organizations representing a range of views, including the Heritage Foundation, the Cato Institute and Citizens for Tax Justice, reviewed the projections and said they were reasonable, and the Treasury Department said through a spokesman that the model was reliable.

The analysis also found the following:

¶Under the Bush tax cuts, the 400 taxpayers with the highest incomes – a minimum of $87 million in 2000, the last year for which the government will release such data – now pay income, Medicare and Social Security taxes amounting to virtually the same percentage of their incomes as people making $50,000 to $75,000.

¶Those earning more than $10 million a year now pay a lesser share of their income in these taxes than those making $100,000 to $200,000.

¶The alternative minimum tax, created 36 years ago to make sure the very richest paid taxes, takes back a growing share of the tax cuts over time from the majority of families earning $75,000 to $1 million – thousands and even tens of thousands of dollars annually. Far fewer of the very wealthiest will be affected by this tax.
nytimes.com

And of course, it is for these one’s sakes and for this ‘remarkable transformation of the American economy’ that predominantly poor American kids are getting chopped up in Iraq, and the media pounds the reptilian brain with the message that they are dying for ‘freedom.’ And what is so quaintly referred to as ‘opening up the global economy’ is actually the imperial adventure of all time, with the world’s resources bleeding out into the pockets and bank accounts of these ‘hyper rich.’ This is the context of ‘debt forgiveness’ and ‘aid’. They call it democracy.
(more…)

A French appeal court has found the editor-in-chief of Le Monde and the authors of an opinion piece in the paper guilty of “racial defamation” against Israel and the Jewish people.

In a ruling greeted with applause by Jewish groups and some alarm by media lawyers, the court ordered Jean-Marie Colombani and the three writers to pay a symbolic one euro in damages to the France-Israel Association and to Lawyers Without Borders.

The two groups had alleged that the June 2002 article, headed Israel-Palestine: the Cancer, contained comments that “targeted a whole nation, or a religious group in its quasi-globality”, and constituted racial defamation.

The offence was exacerbated, the groups said, by a “semantic slip” from the phrase “the Jews of Israel” to “Jews in general”; in other words, it referred to “the Jews” when it meant “certain Israelis”.
Full: guardian.co.uk

Jerusalem’s city council has ordered one of the largest mass demolitions in the city’s recent history, with plans to raze the homes of about 1,000 Palestinians in a neighbourhood claimed by Jewish settlers.

The council says about 90 buildings served with demolition orders were built illegally over the last three decades on a site of religious and archaeological value just outside the Old City walls, and that they are being destroyed to restore the area as a national park.

But Israeli human rights campaigners say the real intent is to forcibly remove Palestinians from an area, Silwan, that is an important link in the government’s plan to encircle Arab East Jerusalem with Jewish settlements.
Full: guardian.co.uk

WASHINGTON (AP) – The Nuclear Regulatory Commission has put on hold a proposal to allow some very low-level radioactive waste to be routinely put into public landfills or recycled instead of shipped to special disposal sites.

By a 5-0 vote, the commission decided against issuing a final regulation on the matter, although it did not rule out considering the issue again in the future. The agency’s staff had recommended that the rule change be approved, saying the waste under consideration has such a low level of radioactivity that it does not pose a public health risk.
Full: guardian.co.uk