RED EYE 01/18/12

No prez will stop U.S. imperialism

GW, 12/9 — To the editor:

Your...article on Honduras....is a timely reminder that presidents may come and go, but the malign influence of the state department and the CIA in Latin America goes on forever. What is happening in Honduras now recalls the support the US gave to rightwing death squads in El Salvador and in Guatemala in the latter half of the 20th century. Conservative estimates put the death toll in El Salvador at 70,000 people; the Guatemalan figure is sometimes put at 50,000....

American interference in Latin America has always had the aim of creating client regimes that would be supportive of US...commercial interests.... It is delusionary in the extreme to expect Barack Obama to buck this....

All U.S. soldiers soon home — NOT

NYT, 12/21 — Kabul, Afghanistan — The senior American commander in Afghanistan suggested...that American forces could remain in the country beyond 2014 despite President Obama’s pledge to withdraw them by then. The commander’s remarks ammounted to the most emphatic signal to date that the United States military intended to secure a presence here, possibly for years....

He said negotiations with the government of President Hamid Karzai on a strategic partnership agreement would ‘‘almost certainly’’ include a ‘‘discussion with Afghanistan of what a post-2014 Afghanistan will look like.’’

Vets: Back Home, but homeless

NYT, 12/19 — Veteran Affairs Secretary Eric Shinseld has vowed to eliminate homelessness among veterans by 2015. If he is going to reach that goal, the pace will have to pick up....

Veterans are about 50 percent more likely than the general population to fall into homelessness, according to the VA’s research....

 To improve health, make life liveable!

 To the editor:

 ....It is the circumstances in which people live and work that determine the health status of any population, in any nation....

 Health care, while crucial to individual survival, makes at best a modest contribution to population health.... Even a perfect American health care system (let alone what we have now) cannot by itself fix our abysmal maldistribution of health....My colleagues and I worked at the nation’s first community health center in the Mississippi Delta in the 1960s.... We repaired collapsing plantation shacks. We built sanitary privies....We organized cooperative farms.... [Such] interventions did far more to save lives, ease suffering and improve our target population’s health than any medical care did....

Cairo women jolt military rulers

NYT, 12/21 — CAIRO — Several thousand women demanding the end of military rule marched through downtown Cairo...in an extraordinary expression of anger over images of soldiers beating, stripping and kicking female demonstrators in Tahrid Square.

‘‘Drag me, strip me, my brother’s blood will cover me !’’ [many] chanted....

Historians called the event the biggest women’s demonstration in modern Egyptian history, the most significant since a 1919 march against British colonialism....It also added a new and unexpected wave of protestors opposing the ruling military council’s efforts to retain power and its tactics for suppressing public discontent.

U.S.-Israel axis moving to hit Iran

NYT, 12/8  — WASHINGTON — The stealth CIA drone that crashed deep inside Iranian territory last week was part of a stepped-up surveillance program that has frequently sent the United States’ most hard-to-detect drone into the country to map suspected nuclear sites....

The overflights...are part of an increasingly aggressive intelligence collection program aimed at Iran....The urgency of the effort has been underscored by a recent public debate in Israel about whether time is running out for a military strike to slow Iran’s progress toward a nuclear weapon.

A rich story about tax laws

Otherwords.org — Why should I pay no taxes while someone who gets up and goes to work every day does? The reason usually offered for taxing [‘‘paper’’] income at a lower rate than wages, salaries and small business income is that such preferential treatment encourages investment and job creation. And that may be true of entrepeneurs who start businesses....

But I don’t do...those things, and there are millions of rich people like me who don’t either. Like a lot of them, I inherited stock in big companies....I suport myself primarily by depositing dividend checks. Occasionally I sell some shares at a profit. And conservative tax reformers believe I should be rewarded for this great exertion by exempting me entirely from taxation.

Green loot, new tool of exploiters

 GW, 12/9 — The Peruvian Amazon is the new global centre of “carbon piracy”, as banks, conservationists and entrepreneurs rush to snap up the legal rights to trade carbon….A UN scheme called Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Degradation (Redd) allows countries that can reduce emissions from deforestation to be paid for doing so…., potentially opening up a vast new global carbon market for forest-rich countries…Indigenous leaders say companies, NGOs and individuals are abusing illiterate communities….

…The rush in the Amazon has been like a “new fever”, comparable to earlier attempts by international companies to find oil…in the Amazon.

“NGOs, carbon consultants and investors are roaming the jungle in search of communities with carbon offsetting potential…This even involved an effort to convince communities to sign away their rights….

Others “involve long-term commercial contracts with communities whose terms are extremely favorable to external commercial interest sand NGOs”…..

“In the communities almost nobody knows what Redd is and…the NGOs and the companies will arrive in the communities to cheat and enslave us. Many communities do no know their right or the laws and are tricked. This is what happened with loggers,” one community leader said.

Islam getting fruits of Arab spring

GW, 12/9 — Among the potent symbols of the Arab spring is one that has been less photographed and remarked on,…the Muslim Brotherhood….

Welcome to the age of “political islam”, which may prove to be one of the most lasting legacies of the Arab spring. It is not only in Egypt that an unprecedented Islamist political movement is playing out…In Tunisia….Yemen and Libya, too, it seems likely that political Islam will define the shape of the new landscape….All of which, as journalist Issandr El Amrani, wrote in the wake of the election results in Egypt on his Arabist blog, “has profoundly depressed most educated, middle-class Egyptians who had hoped that the overthrow of Hosni Mubarak would be followed by a relatively liberal democracy that would be inclusive of moderate Islamists”.

U.S. dumps poison on workers in Mexico

NYT, 12/9 — The spent batteries [U.S.] turns in for recycling are increasingly being sent to Mexico, where their lead is often extracted by crude methods that are illegal in the United States, exposing plant workers and local residents to dangerous levels of toxic metal….U.S. environmental protection agency standards o lead pollution make domestic recycling more difficult and expensive, but do not prohibit companies from exporting the work and the danger to countries where standards are low….

Batteries are imported…to satisfy a growing demand for lead, once cheap and readily available but not in short global supply. Lead batteries are crucial to cell phone networks, solar power array and the exploding Chinese car market….About 20 millions such batteries will cross the border this year…and that does not take into account batteries smuggled in as mislabeled metal scrap.

Women’s work fuelled big profits

GW, 12/2 — The U.S. economy is now almost thrice as big as in the nearly 1970s — and yet the typical working man enjoys not a dime of this transformative growth….America’s rich…often triumphed by stealth: outsourcing labour, and with it responsibility for terms and conditions; capturing the committees that set bosses’ pay; and darting into every space vacated by the trade unions. The cumulative effects were breathtaking….The top 1% quadrupled their disposable income….Working wives and occasional targeted tax breaks combined to allow families to eke out…feminizing the workforce is a trick that can’t be pulled twice….

$500,000 will get a green card

NYT, 12/19 — Affluent foreigners are rushing to take advantage of a federal immigration program that offers them the chance to obtain a green card in return for investing in construction projects in the United States…Each…must invest at least $500,000 in a project….Critics of the program have described it as an improper use of the immigration system… — a cash-for-visas scheme.

Jobless, U.S. will get very angry

NYT, 11/28 — …The current jobless recovery, and the concurrent failure to create enough new jobs, is breeding a new and growing surplus pool. And some in this pool are in danger of becoming superfluous, likely to never to work again.

….What could be done to prevent such a future?....In the long run,…today’s polarized and increasingly corporate-run democracy will have to be turned into a truly representative one…A society that has permanently expelled a significant proportion of tits members fro the work force would soon deteriorate into an unbelievably angry country…

‘Justice’ is titled against immigrants

NYT, 12/19 — They are often poorly prepared or make incoherent arguments in court. Some fail to present key evidence or witnesses. Others simply don’t show up….Immigrants received “inadequate” legal assistance in 33 percent of the cases between mid-2010 and mid-2011…..

“They are easy prey for ambulance-chasing-style lawyers who do not adhere to the highest standards of responsibility,”….Many immigrants do not have representation at all. (Unlike in criminal courts, respondents in immigration courts are not entitled to court-appointed lawyers.)