…There is within the mythology America finds so indispensable something so sick and downright evil, but so pervasive that even after all the revelations of torture and rape and murder sanctioned at the highest levels of government, even now the numbness persists, and writers still insist on thinking that America is somehow a shining example of decency to a world which needs its sanctimonious preaching. Who in their right mind would want to emulate America in this century? Who on earth would want to be an American in this darkest of times? America is like a born-again Christian fundamentalist—mean, ignorant, full of hate and rage and superstition, but utterly convinced of his own righteousness. In short, insane. Dangerously insane.
informationclearinghouse.info

During the last two weeks of January 1975 Buckminster Fuller gave an extraordinary series of lectures concerning his entire life’s work. These thinking out loud lectures span 42 hours and examine in depth all of Fuller’s major inventions and discoveries from the 1927 Dymaxion house, car and bathroom, through the Wichita House, geodesic domes, and tensegrity structures, as well as the contents of Synergetics. Autobiographical in parts, Fuller recounts his own personal history in the context of the history of science and industrialization. The stories behind his Dymaxion car, geodesic domes, World Game and integration of science and humanism are lucidly communicated with continuous reference to his synergetic geometry. Permeating the entire series is his unique comprehensive design approach to solving the problems of the world. Some of the topics Fuller covered in this wide ranging discourse include: architecture, design, philosophy, education, mathematics, geometry, cartography, economics, history, structure, industry, housing and engineering.
metmeticdrift.net/bucky

Six weeks after the massive earthquake that devastated parts of Pakistan, the United Nations and relief agencies are racing against time to avert a horrendous, avoidable humanitarian tragedy.

As winter closes in, aid agencies fear the world’s failure to react quickly enough to their pleas for help has made a second disaster a terrifying prospect. About 80,000 died in the immediate aftermath of the quake, and the agencies believe another 80,000 could now perish. As the first heavy snowfalls hit the high valleys most affected by the earthquake, senior UN officials warn that up to 380,000 people in these areas still need emergency housing over the next two or three weeks, almost double earlier estimates.

At the same time, despite many promises of long-term help from the international community, immediate relief aid is still only trickling through at a fraction of the speed it is needed. According to official figures, only $216m (£125m) has so far been committed or pledged to the UN’s relief appeal for $550m, less than 40 per cent. By comparison, at the same stage, the appeal for the Indian Ocean tsunami, was almost 90 per cent complete.
independent.co.uk

11/24/05 “Los Angeles Times” — — NEW ORLEANS — Even in the desperate days after Hurricane Katrina, the news flash seemed particularly sensational: Police had caught eight snipers on a bridge shooting at relief contractors. In the gun battle that followed, officers shot to death five or six of the marauders.

Exhausted and emotionally drained police cheered the news that their comrades had stopped the snipers and suffered no losses, said an account in the New Orleans Times-Picayune. One officer said the incident showed the department’s resolve to take back the streets.

But nearly three months later — and after repeated revisions of the official account of the incident and a lowering of the death toll to two — authorities said they were still trying to reconstruct what happened Sept. 4 on the Danziger Bridge. And on the city’s east side, where the shootings occurred, two families that suffered casualties are preparing to come forward with stories radically different from those told by police.

A teenager critically wounded that day, speaking about the incident for the first time, said in an interview that police shot him for no reason, delivering a final bullet at point-blank range with what he thought was an assault rifle. Members of another family said one of those killed was mentally disabled, a childlike innocent who made a rare foray from home in a desperate effort to find relief from the flood.
informationclearinghouse.info

History is repeating itself in Haiti, as democracy is being destroyed for the second time in the past fifteen years. Amazingly, the main difference seems to be that this time it is being done openly and in broad daylight, with the support of the “international community” and the United Nations. The first coup against Haiti’s democratically elected government, in September 1991, was condemned even by the George H.W. Bush Administration. This although the CIA had funded the leaders of the coup and – according to a founder of the death squads that murdered thousands of people during the 1991-94 military dictatorship – also sponsored the repression. All this was covert, and the official position of the United States and most other countries was that the dictatorship was not legitimate.

But when in February 2004 Haiti’s democratically elected president, Jean-Bertrand Aristide, was overthrown for the second time by remnants of that prior dictatorship – including convicted mass murderers and former death squad leaders – this was considered a legitimate “regime change.” The Caricom countries, showing great courage, objected strenuously, as did some members of the US Congress. But these voices were not powerful enough to influence the course of events.

The fix was in: The US Agency for International Development and the International Republican Institute (the international arm of the Republican Party) had spent tens of millions of dollars to create and organize an opposition – however small in numbers – and to make Haiti under Aristide ungovernable. The whole scenario was strikingly similar to the series of events that led to the coup against Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez in April 2002. The same US organizations were involved, and the opposition – as in Venezuela – controlled and used the major media as a tool for destabilization. And in both cases the coup leaders, joined by Washington, announced to the world that the elected president had “voluntarily resigned” – which later turned out to be false.

Washington had an added weapon against the Haitian government. Taking advantage of Haiti’s desperate poverty and dependence on foreign aid, it stopped international aid to the government, from the summer of 2000 until the 2004 coup. As economist Jeffrey Sachs has pointed out, the World Bank also contributed to the destabilization effort by cutting off funding.

Now the coup government, headed by unelected Prime Minister Gérard Latortue, is trying to organize an election. But it is an election that would not be seen as legitimate in any country, not even Iraq. Everything is being arranged so that the country’s largest political party, Fanmi Lavalas – which at any moment before the coup would have overwhelmingly swept national elections – cannot win. Many of the party’s leaders are in jail, generally on trumped-up or nonexistent charges, including the constitutional prime minister, Yvon Neptune, and Father Gérard Jean-Juste, a Catholic priest and likely presidential candidate if he were not jailed. Jean-Juste has been declared a prisoner of conscience by Amnesty International. Other leaders are in hiding or in exile, since the murder of political opponents is common. In one massacre in August, witnesses described Haitian police arriving at a soccer match and pointing out people in the crowd, who were then hacked to death by civilian accomplices with machetes. UN troops have also been implicated in some of the violence, and the UN has promised an investigation.
truthout.org

While he may be dead in the corporal sense, the spirit of Simon Bolivar continues to wage the struggle for freedom from oppression. Hugo Chavez is perhaps the most familiar incarnation of Bolivar’s élan vital as he defies the neocolonial policies of the United States, a nation which has supplanted the European colonial empires as looters of Latin American bounty. Bolivar’s spiritual essence also burns brightly in Evo Morales, another leader of the poor and oppressed in Latin America. Barring a CIA-orchestrated assassination or sabotage of the election process, in December Morales will be the next democratically-elected president of Bolivia. And deservedly so.

The only thing they have to fear is fear itself….or is there something more?

As they have with Chavez, the United States government and its lapdogs in the mainstream media have vilified Morales. Morales and Chavez are both portrayed as “threats” to the United States and have been characterized as “enemies”. It is mind-boggling that the leaders of the wealthiest and most powerful nation in the history of humanity can view these men or their tiny nations (neither of which have the military might to overpower the state of Rhode Island) as legitimate threats. Is the US power elite suffering from delusional paranoia? Actually, their fears are well-founded, but one needs to analyze the situation a bit more closely to discern the root cause of their trepidations.

Hugo Chavez has publicly castigated the United States (and Bush II in particular) on several occasions. Drawing calls for his assassination from “respected US Christian leader” Pat Robertson, Chavez has clearly stated his intention to use his vast petroleum resources as a geopolitical weapon against the United States. He drew thunderous applause at the UN for his speech in which he maligned the United States government and its policies. As the democratically-elected president of Venezuela, a member of the indigenous population, a survivor of a US-sponsored coup in 2002, and the winner of a recall referendum in 2004, Chavez has utilized his nation’s rich oil reserves to wage a war on poverty. He has used oil revenues to provide schools, medical care, and basic necessities at subsidized prices to the 80% of Venezuelans who live below the poverty line. He has also instituted land reforms to provide impoverished farmers an opportunity at ownership.

Aligning himself closely with Fidel Castro, a man who has been a thorn in the collective sides of the United States ruling elite for years, Chavez has drawn further ire from US leaders. Since 1959, Castro has bedeviled the US government as the Cuban leader who deposed Fulgencio Batista, a ruthless dictator whom the US government supported. While ruling Cuba, Batista widened the wealth gap to a chasm (sound familiar?) and dispatched his death squads, which captured, tortured, and murdered thousands of “Leftists”. Castro is certainly no saint, but Cuba was not exactly a paradise under America’s proxy either.

Trading oil for the use of many of Cuba’s superbly-trained physicians, Chavez has parlayed his relationship with Castro to an advantage for the poor of his nation. Ironically, the infinitely benevolent and wise leaders of the United States rejected offers of help from both Chavez and Castro during Hurricane Katrina. While the Bush regime spurned overtures of help from our “enemies”, over a thousand Americans died in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina as a result of criminal neglect and incompetence on the part of a US government now geared almost solely to represent and sustain the interests of the wealthy, corporations and the military industrial complex.

Meanwhile, in Bolivia, a man named Evo Morales represents another incarnation of the spirit of Simon Bolivar as he fights to squelch US imperial interests in his nation. Standing on the brink of winning the presidency in the elections scheduled for December of 2005, Morales represents the next link in the chain of fierce Latin American resistance to US exploitation of their people and resources.

Juan Evo Morales Ayma was born in 1959 in Orinco to a family of indigenous Quechuans, but moved to Chapare province in the 1980’s to cultivate coca leaf. Growing coca leaf is a practice dating back to the Incan Empire. While the Indigenous people of Bolivia, who comprise over 50% of the population, chew coca leaves to ease hunger and make folk medicines, coca leaf is also the primary ingredient in cocaine. As part of its “War on Drugs”, the United States began a program in the 1990’s to eradicate coca production. In 1998, Plan Dignity, a barbaric and violent US-sponsored effort, resulted in the elimination of nearly 80% of coca production and left the campesinos in Bolivia with no economically viable alternative crops to cultivate. Supplied and supported by the United States, the Expeditionary Task Force, a paramilitary unit which the locals called “America’s Mercenaries”, reportedly engaged in violence and murder. Just imagine if Canada financed paramilitary forces in the United States which wiped out 80% of the production of Sudafed and Iodine because they are used in the manufacture of crystal meth. How long would Americans stand for that?
counterbias.com

n June 2005, two weeks of massive street protests and widespread blockades in Bolivia culminated in the resignation of President Carlos Mesa and a subsequent power vacuum in the country. U.S. officials suggested that Bolivian coca leader and Movement Toward Socialism (MAS) party head, Evo Morales, manipulated popular protests within the country. Washington has also asserted that the governments of Cuba and Venezuela provoked and funded the social unrest.
Accusations put forth by Bush administration officials represent both a misreading of the complex Bolivian political crisis and the latest incarnation of an unsuccessful long-term strategy to prevent a Morales presidency, which U.S. officials claim would be a destabilizing force in the region. As public statements once again failed to impede popular support for Morales, the U.S. has likely resorted to behind the scenes attempts to affect Bolivian politics, or to influence the viability of a Morales presidency if elected. In the context of a potentially volatile political climate, U.S. attempts to thwart a Morales presidency threaten to produce exactly the prolonged political instability they purportedly are seeking to avoid.

The US War of Words Falls Flat

Morales, an indigenous representative in the Bolivian congress, has long been vocal about his distaste for U.S. intervention in Bolivian affairs, be it through the U.S. War on Drugs or the dictates of international financial institutions such as the World Bank and International Monetary Fund. U.S. officials, in turn, have repeatedly tried to publicly discredit Morales as a drug trafficker and radical element. In the 2002 elections, U.S. Ambassador Manuel Rocha went so far as to warn Bolivians not to vote for Morales, “…if you elect those who want Bolivia to become a major cocaine exporter again, this will endanger the future of U.S. assistance to Bolivia”. The move backfired, and increased support for Morales, who came in a close second.

After President Mesa’s resignation in June and with early elections scheduled for December 2005, top U.S. officials attempted to explain the crisis in Bolivia by accusing Fidel Castro in Cuba and Hugo Chavez of Venezuela — who officials claim are trying to install allied “popular Marxist-socialist” governments in the region (Los Tiempos 7/28/05) — of providing funding and instructions to MAS and Morales. In August, U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld told reporters that, “There is certainly evidence both Cuba and Venezuela have been involved in the situation in Bolivia in unhelpful ways” (AP 8/17/05). When pressed, Rumsfeld refused to be more specific in his claim. One of Rumsfeld’s deputies, however, stated that Bolivian elements, including Morales, have received organizational support from Cuba and financial resources from Venezuela (AP 8/17/05). The grouping of Bolivia with Venezuela and Cuba, two countries which Bush’s top Latin America aide has popularly characterized as a Latin American “Axis of Evil” (National Review 3/28/05), could be used to justify increased involvement in Bolivian internal affairs.

Though Morales makes no attempt to hide a personal friendship and political affinity with both Castro and Chavez, he denies receiving any financing from either. Members of the Bolivian traditional political elite have promoted the Chavez intervention thesis to U.S. government officials in an attempt to stimulate further U.S. efforts to block Morales’s election and to garner support for their own candidacies.

Miscalculating the Roots of Social Unrest

It remains unclear whether Morales or MAS receive economic support from Cuba or Venezuela. The greater danger, however, is that by broadly characterizing the people protesting in the streets of Bolivia as products of Cuban or Venezuelan provocateurs (AFP 8/16/05), U.S. officials misinterpret a diverse and complex political landscape, and vastly underestimate the systemic causes of popular dissent within the country. Members of the traditional Bolivian political elite characterize the forces clamoring for change in Bolivia as factions of radical extremists seeking to destroy the nation’s democracy, an analysis that dovetails neatly with Bush Administration officials’ objectives. In reality, the voices of dissent in Bolivia include diverse union, civic, professional, and indigenous groups as well as regional elites with varied interests. Past protests have sought the meaningful inclusion of these groups within the existing structure in order to affect change, rather than the destruction of the political system. In fact, many of the leaders of protesting social groups announced their candidacies in the upcoming presidential and congressional elections.

Bolivian elite and U.S. claims that social groups needed external Venezuelan and Cuban funding to take to the streets reflect both a desire to misrepresent popular unrest and a failure to comprehend that subsistence farmers and other poor social sectors can enact significant change without money. The ground rules in Bolivia are changing, and a monopoly on economic wealth is no longer synonymous with a monopoly on political power. Mass political and social movements, many of whose members live on less than a dollar a day, have learned to run successful political campaigns and carry out extended protests on people power and a shoestring budget — a phenomena terrifying to both the nation’s discredited political elite and U.S. economic interests.

Since the tumultuous “gas war” of October of 2003 that brought the ouster of former president Gonzalo Sanchez de Lozada, recurring popular unrest has been unified around two key demands: a popular Constituent Assembly to redraft the constitution, and the nationalization of Bolivia’s natural gas resources. Support for the Constituent Assembly has been polled at 75 percent (Los Tiempos 6/25/05) and a national referendum in 2004 found that over 90 percent of Bolivians support of recovering control of gas resources, though the particular demands of diverse sectors vary.

Less concise, but even more pronounced is the overarching demand that Bolivian elected officials govern legitimately for the benefit of the Bolivian people, rather than serving the interests of the U.S., foreign capital or their own pockets. Though there is not unity in the exact road that Bolivia should take, the demand for fundamental change is widespread.

MAS on a Tightrope

MAS’s attempt to respond to these demands, repeatedly ignored and postponed by previous administrations and legislators, has made the party a major political force. Widespread disenchantment with corrupt traditional party politics has led sectors of intellectuals, middle class and even military to join MAS’s original largely indigenous and campesino ranks, although it remains unclear how long these groups would support a Morales administration. In the 2002 elections, Morales came in second, garnering 20.94 percent of the popular vote, less than two points behind winner Sánchez de Lozada. Though Bolivian polling data is notoriously inaccurate and subject to fluctuation, the majority of recent polls show MAS in the lead by one or two percentage points. Bolivian polling samples grossly underrepresent rural areas, suggesting that Morales’s lead may be even greater.

However, MAS does not “control” Bolivia’s social movements or the protests they carry out. The decentralization of social movements is perhaps the only “given” of the nation’s political environment. The patchwork of Bolivian social actors employs a diversity of organizational and decision-making structures. Most of them do not take direction from Morales, and many are openly at odds with MAS’s politics.

Morales currently walks a fine line between being far enough to the left to extend concrete benefits to the long-disenfranchised Bolivian people, and not far enough to spark immediate capital flight or further U.S. impositions and pressure. MAS has taken pains to appease international interests and allay fears of a radical socialist regime, but faces significant popular pressure to enact sweeping reforms. Bolivia has gone through three presidents in the last three years, amid mass discontent and recurring cycles of conflict. The greatest source of instability has been the inability of Bolivian presidents to respond to profound economic and social demands, due to internal weakness and externally imposed conditions. The inherent frailty of the Bolivian political system, with its highly ineffectual and partisan congress that has consistently blocked efforts at legislative reform, has exacerbated the crisis.

Should the U.S. Fear Morales?

Within the Bolivian political context, Morales’ anti-neoliberal positions are not extremely radical. With 64 percent of the population living in poverty, many Bolivians realize that they have not fared well under U.S. mandates and neoliberal policies. They’ve struggled against an ineffective and damaging War on Drugs, disastrous water privatization schemes, IMF-mandated privatization of national gas resources, and mounting foreign debt. In this context, many within Bolivia’s social movements view Morales’ and MAS’s positions as not going far enough to reverse neoliberal policies. For instance, during the protest that led to Mesa’s resignation, MAS did not originally support the nationalization of oil and gas. Pure electoral reality forced the party to change course, though even now, their “nationalization without confiscation” platform is more of a business-friendly increase in regulation rather than anything approaching expropriation. Even pro-free trade second place candidate, Jorge Quiroga, has realized the tide of popular sentiment and has adopted his own rhetoric of “nationalization” as well as cancellation of Bolivia’s external debt (El Mundo 10/12/05), though his formal policy proposals don’t reflect this discourse.

On the issue of coca production and control, a priority for the United States, MAS proposes what it calls a “zero tolerance” policy with regard to drug trafficking. The party’s policy of coca industrialization and decriminalization, however, clearly ruffles U.S. feathers. MAS calls for continued controlled coca production along with cooperative reduction of excess plants. The platform opposes military forced coca eradication, which has been imposed and funded by the U.S. in the Chapare for almost a decade, with disastrous consequences for the region. The MAS platform also includes a politically modest campaign targeting the U.N. for removal of coca from its list of controlled substances, an issue promoted by several previous administrations.
upsidedownworld.org

And here is the NY Times’ take:

Advocate for Coca Legalization Leads in Bolivian Race

They have the awkwardness of amateur home videos: background noise, long silences, people looking away from the camera. But inside a booth at the New-York Historical Society, visitors to the exhibition “Slavery in New York” are recording their reactions, creating snapshot reflections on race and history in the nation’s largest city.

“It allows our young people to understand, really, how this city was born and who carried the brunt of the prosperity that we see in New York, not only then but now,” a black man from “Harlem, New York,” said of the show, the largest in the museum’s 201-year history. The man, who appeared to be in his 30’s, said he wanted to know what businesses in the city today derived profits in the past from selling human beings.

A white lawyer went into the booth twice to sort out his feelings. “This has just been devastating,” he said. As he looked at the exhibition’s array of documents, he said, he realized that the some of the laws used to isolate and dehumanize enslaved black New Yorkers became custom after the laws vanished and “contributed to the way whites look at blacks,” even today.

“It’s striking for any of us who are New Yorkers to realize that the ground we touch, every institution, is affected by slavery,” he said.

Two young African-American brothers crammed into the booth together. “Slavery in New York was bad, and it’s how New York became the richest city in the world,” one of them declared.
nytimes.com

GRAND FORKS, N.D. – Embedded in the granite floor inside the main entrance to Ralph Engelstad Arena, an enormous American Indian-head logo spreads like a welcome mat in front of the larger-than-life statue of Engelstad himself.

A statue of the Sioux warrior Sitting Bull throws a long shadow across the plaza outside the Ralph Engelstad Arena in Grand Forks, N.D.
Every night that the University of North Dakota Fighting Sioux men’s hockey team plays in its $104 million arena, thousands of fans walk across the likeness of the handsome Sioux face in profile, with its four eagle feathers attached to the crown of the head.

It is humiliating to many of the school’s Indian students and faculty members who consider eagle feathers sacred.

“We see the eagle as a messenger,” said Margaret Scott, a sophomore nursing student from the Winnebago tribe in Nebraska. “It flies so close to the heavens, he carries the messages and prayers of the people to God. In our culture, eagle feathers can’t touch the ground.

“It’s like if you put a cross on a shot glass. What they’re doing is sacrilegious.”

As the N.C.A.A. begins enforcing a ban on Indian imagery that it considers “hostile or abusive,” the North Dakota arena and its logo pointedly illustrate the passions surrounding the issue, and the complexities, both political and financial, in resolving it.

The floor, walls and furniture of the hockey arena are plastered with as many as 3,000 of the Sioux Indian logos. It is on each row of seats, on frosted glass doors and pillars, stitched into every two steps of the carpeting that rings the luxury box floor. None of it can be cheaply or easily erased.

And the larger issue of the Fighting Sioux nickname, which has long been controversial here, has again polarized the campus, the town and the state. One online student message board that favored the nickname was titled, “Everyone Who Opposes the Sioux Logo Deserves to Die of AIDS.”

About 400 of the university’s nearly 13,000 students are Indian, making them the largest minority group on campus. “Unless you’re here, you don’t know what it’s like and how nasty it can get,” said a psychology professor, Doug McDonald, who is Sioux. “I’ve had students in my office in tears because of the harassment we get.”
nytimes.com

THE Thanksgiving holiday is over and the frenzied Christmas shopping season has begun. This is bonanza time for the tribe of rummaging Americans known as “freegans”.
The anti-capitalist freegans — the name combines “free” and “vegan” — are so appalled by the waste of the consumer society that they try to live on the leftovers, scavenging for food in supermarket dustbins.

“It’s fun. It’s a thrill. It’s more fun and more satisfying than just going to the store and saying, ‘I wanted some bread and I got it’. It’s the surprise — and the prize,” said Janet Kalish, a New York high school teacher who describes herself as “60 per cent freegan”.

A 1997 study by the US Department of Agriculture estimated that the US wastes about 43 billion kilograms of food a year. That is about 27 per cent of US production, but the true figure is as much as 50 per cent, according to ten years of research by Timothy Jones at the University of Arizona.

“The No 1 problem is that Americans have lost touch with what food is for,” Professor Jones said. “We have lost touch with the processes that bring it to the table and we don’t notice the inefficiency.”

The freegan philosophy of “ethical eating” argues that capitalism and mass production exploit workers, animals and the environment.

Adam Weissman, a freegan activist and sometime security guard in New Jersey, says freeganism grew out of the radical 1960s “yippie” movement but also has affinities with the hobos of the Great Depression who travelled around the country by stealing rides on the railways.

“I have pity for people who have not figured out this lifestyle,” he said. “I am able to take long vacations from work, I have all kinds of consumer goods, and I eat a really healthy diet of really wonderful food: white asparagus and cactus fruit, three different kinds of mushrooms and four different kinds of pre-cut salad. And I’m just thinking of what is in my refrigerator right now.”
timesonline.co.uk