Drinking on New Years Eve

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There was some talk when I was in my twenties that every time a person got

 drunk they killed a few brain cells.  

clink here for a link to a dictionary on drunkenness

please don't drive if you are drinking

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Questions for the future: buy, save, borrow, or just stay home

We don't save anymore, but we are told to go out and buy things.  We can't borrow like we used to and since we don't have savings, how can we buy anything anyway?

We are drowning our world with our clutter (it is worth a trip to the garbage dump just to see the reality of this), but we are told that if we stop accumulating (i.e. being consumers) many people will be destitute.

What a dilemma.  

Maybe the answer is finding a different way for the economy to survive.  Its crazy to depend so much on people buying things.  With all our intelligence, and ability to invent i-phones and other technologically advanced gadgets, you would think we could find a better way.

--

New York Times Letter to the Editor - on the economy
To the Editor:

We consumers are getting contradictory messages about spending. On the one hand, we are told that our overconsumption is polluting and cluttering up the earth with garbage, using up resources and showing insensitivity to all the needy people in the world. On the other hand, we are told that until we start buying more goods and services, the economy will be in the dumps and we will leave many of our fellow citizens jobless, homeless and hungry.

Something is wrong with that picture. I personally don’t feel like buying much of anything, and my life is a lot less cluttered.

Ina Aronow
New Rochelle, N.Y., Dec.
24, 2008

Immigration to Italy Doubles

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Overloaded boats, many carrying over 300 people - are landing in southern Italy. There have been 25,000 requests for asylum in 2008 alone. There has to be a reason for all this. Italy is pained at the consequences, but people are running from something they perceive as terrible.

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Hundreds of immigrants land on Italian island

By Peter Popham in Milan
Sunday, 28 December 2008

London Guardian

Italy's reception centre on Lampedusa, between Malta and Tunisia, was built to house only 840 illegal migrants but now has twice that number

More than 900 immigrants have arrived on the southern Italian island of Lampedusa this weekend, bringing the numbers which have landed in Italy this year to more than 30,000 - more than double the number that arrived in 2007 and much the highest figure since the traffic started.

The conditions of the journey, which takes at least four or five days, are more hellish than ever. “They travel literally one on top of another,” said Francesco Galipo, at the Maritime Rescue Centre in Palermo. “We have intercepted boats 14 metres long with 324 people on board.”

After a lull during which rough seas prevented crossings, the latest landings brought the arrivals over the Christmas period to more than 1,700. Laura Boldrini, spokesperson for the United Nations High Commission for Refugees, commented, “We can no longer consider summer the only season when people arrive. Now they are coming all the year round.” - more

A Report on the Cause of Immigration to the U.S. - from Global Exchange

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The List

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Surely I have written about this before. It's about flying while named Jose and Maria. Those are my parent's first names. They are in their mid eighties. Every time they fly they are searched. Why? Because their names are Jose and Maria. As Juan Fernando Gomez writes in his article in today's WaPo, too bad for any kid named Juan (or Jose and Maria). Think twice before you name your newborn.

Somebody out there, who the TSA is afraid of, has the same name as my parents. Every time their wheelchairs are pushed through security, someone says "stop!."

Of course, this isn't as bad as what Gomez experiences. The first time this happened to them, four years ago, the porter who was helping with their baggage had a quiet talk with the airline clerk at the check in counter. I called Continental and they assured me it wouldn't happen again. They were wrong.

Luckily, when we flew my Dad to New York for the opening of the 2007 Yankees season, the guy who searched him was sympathetic. With an apologetic smile, he gently searched my 84 year old father.

Let's hope Obama gets some sense back into our Department of Homeland Security. He needs to have a talk with the head of the TSA.

My Dad fought in the Pacific Theater in WWII. He was part of the invasion of Luzon. He even took his kids to see the Alamo. That's pretty American for a guy born in Mexico. He doesn't deserve to be on anybody's list of questionable travelers. Neither does Juan Fernando Gomez.

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MISSED CONNECTIONS
Why Can't I Get Off This List?
Washington Post
By Juan Fernando Gómez
Sunday, December 28, 2008; Page B03

I call it the little room. In most cases it's actually not that small, but my claustrophobia seems to kick in as soon as the immigration officer separates me from the other passengers on my flight and escorts me through a door into my own private travel hell.

As you sit in crowded airports waiting for your long-delayed flights, cursing yourself for traveling over the holidays, remember: It could be worse. You could be me. My ordeal begins before the plane touches down in the United States, some time between the moment when the flight attendant begins handing out blank immigration and customs forms and when I hear the wheels disengaging in the belly of the plane. Will I sail through immigration and customs, I wonder, or will this be the time that they get me? Might I even be whisked off to Guantanamo?

The crazy thing is that I have done nothing wrong. I am a U.S. citizen and have no criminal record. I pay my taxes (well, except for those few years when, right out of grad school, I was convinced that taxes did not apply to me). I don't litter. The problem is that I happen to share a name with at least one shady character on the Terrorist Screening Center's watch list. At least, that's the list that I believe I am on, although no official will tell me for sure.



My name is common in Latin America, the Spanish equivalent of John Smith. It also seems to be particularly popular among law-breakers. I once sneaked a peek at an immigration officer's computer and saw an entire screen full of my doppelgangers. Who knows how many of them were bad guys and how many were law-abiding saps like me?

It doesn't help that my travel habits are similar to those of people who actually belong on a watch list. I grew up in Medellín, Colombia, during the height of the Pablo Escobar drug wars and have worked for the better part of the past decade in some of the most dangerous places in the world. In countries such as Afghanistan and Colombia, I help farmers find legal, profitable and sustainable alternatives to growing coca and poppies, the raw material for cocaine and heroin. So I guess it's understandable that my passport -- packed with added pages and stamps marking my entry into and exit from countries such as Cambodia, Bolivia and Haiti -- raises eyebrows.

It seems to me, though, that airport security should know enough to tell me from the terrorists. I'm not easily offended, but being treated like a dangerous criminal every time I enter the country is getting a little old...more


Juan Fernando Gómez is a director in the Afghanistan and Pakistan region for Chemonics, a Washington-based international development consulting firm.

A Nice Move After the Advent of Prop 8

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FA to tackle homophobia with video featuring football stars
Jenny Percival
The Guardian, Saturday 27 December 2008

A video showing football stars speaking out against homophobia will be released next year as part of an unprecedented drive by the sport's governing bodies to tackle a sharp rise in abuse and discrimination.

The video will be shown in cinemas, on TV and in stadiums in an attempt to rid terraces and pitches of homophobic chants and slurs, the Guardian can reveal.

The Football Association (FA), the Professional Footballers' Association, the players' union, Kick It Out, the sport's diversity and inclusion campaign, and Peter Tatchell, of gay rights group Outrage!, began work on plans for the video at the end of last month. It is hoped that up to a dozen players, including David Beckham, Rio Ferdinand, Sol Campbell, David James, Wayne Rooney, Ashley Cole and Cristiano Ronaldo, will be persuaded to take part. The video is due to be released in March and could be shown in schools if the FA wins the backing of the Department for Children, Schools and Families.

"We're delighted that the FA has decided to produce and fund the video, it will have a hugely positive impact on young people and help to challenge bigoted attitudes among fans," said Tatchell.

The FA has put aside a budget of £20,000 and is hoping that a major advertising agency will take on the project at minimal cost.

Gay rights groups have been pressing the FA to tackle homophobia and believe the ad campaign is a breakthrough, prompted by a number of recent high-profile allegations of homophobia. Hampshire police are still investigating the homophobic and racist chanting directed at Portsmouth's Sol Campbell during a match against Tottenham Hotspur in September.

Danny Lynch, of Kick It Out, said that football - often seen as the one of the last bastions of homophobia - was out of synch with public opinion. "When we were set up 15 years ago, monkey chanting and banana throwing was commonplace, but football has changed and you just don't see that kind of behaviour any more. But in the absence of traditional racist abuse, we have seen this sharp rise in homophobic abuse and dealing with it is now a key part of our remit, " said Lynch.

Justin Fashanu was the first openly gay professional player when he came out in 1990. Eight years later, after he committed suicide, a coroner said prejudices, and the sexual assault charge he was facing, probably overwhelmed him.

Jason Bartholomew Hall, of the Justin Fashanu Campaign, said: "Footballers are revered by youngsters. It would be fantastic if they saw their heroes saying that homophobia is unacceptable."

Guardian article on response to the Pope's comments against gay rights: "Pope's Speech: 'Gay Rights Groups React Angrily'

And People Began to Disappear

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What kind of contract with the devil would a small town make to help its financial situation?  Building a detention facility, then filling the place with its own people is about the worst they could do.  This didn't stop them.

Below is an excellent NYT article on Central Falls, Rhode Island. It is long, has a video and numerous photographs.  If you are interested in the impact of recent arbitrary immigration policies, you best read this article by Nina Bernstein.

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Leaning on Jail, City of Immigrants Fills Cells With Its Own
By NINA BERNSTEIN

New York Times
Published: December 26, 2008
CENTRAL FALLS, R.I. — Few in this threadbare little mill town gave much thought to the Donald W. Wyatt Detention Facility, the maximum-security jail beside the public ball fields at the edge of town. Even when it expanded and added barbed wire, Wyatt was just the backdrop for Little League games, its name stitched on the caps of the team it sponsored.

Then people began to disappear: the leader of a prayer group at St. Matthew’s Roman Catholic Church; the father of a second grader at the public charter school; a woman who mopped floors in a Providence courthouse.

After days of searching, their families found them locked up inside Wyatt — only blocks from home, but in a separate world.

In this mostly Latino city, hardly anyone had realized that in addition to detaining the accused drug dealers and mobsters everyone heard about, the jail held hundreds of people charged with no crime — people caught in the nation’s crackdown on illegal immigration. Fewer still knew that Wyatt was a portal into an expanding network of other jails, bigger and more remote, all propelling detainees toward deportation with little chance to protest...more

A few comments on virgins and religion

This post is not about sexual mores or behavior. It is about virgins.  The religious kind.

After posting something on immigration policy in the Obama administration, I decided to include a vintage image of the Virgin of Guadalupe.  For those who don't know, she is supposed to be the Virgin Mary (mother of Christ) who appeared to an indigenous man in Mexico in 1531.

Many believe her apparition really occurred.  Some think it is folklore.  I generally stay out of those disputes.  You can't prove anything either way.  What is clear, tangible, and important is that she is considered the most important religious figure to millions of people in the Americas.  Not just to people who are Catholic.

New Age people might say she is an incredibly popular and powerful female diety, along the line of Isis and Quan Yin.

Guadalupe is everywhere these days.  On calenders, t-shirts, posters, table cloths, medals, and painted clocks.  She has gone beyond being the Mexican Mother of Christ to a commodity.  Yet I don't think it has diminished her power and the respect people have in her.

As for myself, I am not actively practicing any religion.  My parents and grandparents are (and were) deeply religious Catholics.  My maternal grandfather died walking home from the 3 pm mass on Good Friday.  (he was in his 60s and had a heart attack)

When I was a child, my parents, who sent me to Catholic school, were very open minded about what I was exposed to.  I would go to church with my Baptist friends, and my Pentecostal friends.  I'm sure I would have gone to a synagogue if I would have had any Jewish friends.

While the nuns at school told us that anyone not Catholic was not going to heaven (this was during the 60s, I hope they no longer do this), I was never convinced they were right.

It was a confusing position for me to be in.  Once, while in college I asked my Dad's best friend (who is a Basilian priest) why wasn't it enough to just be a good person.  He said that believing in God was also necessary.  At least he didn't specify a religion.

With all that in mind.  I can still say that I think the Virgin of Guadalupe is awesome - for women, for Catholics, for Americans, for Mexicans -- for people - whether they go to church or not.

The Virgin of Guadalupe Says there Will Be a DREAM Act in 2009

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The Economist is saying that comprehensive immigration reform may not happen, but the DREAM Act will.  The NYT is saying that Obama's recent picks for the cabinet are making it look like even more could happen.

Is somebody praying out there?

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Editorial
Getting Immigration Right
New York Times
Published: December 25, 2008

It’s way too early to tell whether the United States under President-elect Barack Obama will restore realism, sanity and lawfulness to its immigration system. But it’s never too early to hope, and the stars seem to be lining up, at least among his cabinet nominees.

If Mr. Obama’s team is confirmed, the country will have a homeland security secretary, Janet Napolitano of Arizona, and a commerce secretary, Bill Richardson of New Mexico, who understand the border region and share a well-informed disdain for foolish, inadequate enforcement schemes like the Bush administration’s border fence. And it will have a labor secretary, Hilda Solis of California, who, as a state senator and congresswoman, has built a reputation as a staunch defender of immigrants and workers.

The confluence of immigrants and labor is exactly what this country — particularly, and disastrously, the Bush administration — has not been able to figure out.

In simplest terms, what Ms. Solis and Mr. Obama seem to know in their gut is this: If you uphold workers’ rights, even for those here illegally, you uphold them for all working Americans. If you ignore and undercut the rights of illegal immigrants, you encourage the exploitation that erodes working conditions and job security everywhere. In a time of economic darkness, the stability and dignity of the work force are especially vital.

This is why it is so important to reverse the Bush administration’s immigration tactics, which for years have attacked the problem upside down and backward. To appease Republican nativists, it lavished scarce resources solely on hunting down and punishing illegal immigrants. Its campaign of raids, detentions and border fencing was a moral failure. Among other things, it terrorized and broke apart families and led to some gruesome deaths in shoddy prisons. It mocked the American tradition of welcoming and assimilating immigrant workers.

But it also was a strategic failure because it did little or nothing to stem the illegal tide while creating the very conditions under which the off-the-books economy can thrive. Illegal immigrant workers are deterred from forming unions. And without a path to legalization and under the threat of a relentless enforcement-only regime, they cannot assert their rights.

It’s a system that the grubbiest and shabbiest industries and business owners — think of the hellish slaughterhouse in Postville, Iowa, running with immigrant child labor — could not have designed better. Through it all, the Bush administration’s response to criticism has been ever more enforcement.

Ms. Solis, whose father immigrated from Mexico and was a Teamsters shop steward and whose mother, from Nicaragua, worked on an assembly line, promises a clean break from that past. She lives in El Monte, a Los Angeles suburb where two compelling stories of immigrants and labor have emerged in recent years.

The first was tragic: a notorious 1995 raid at a sweatshop where Thai workers were kept in slave conditions behind barbed wire. The second is less well-known but far more encouraging: a present-day hiring site for day laborers at the edge of a Home Depot parking lot. The Latino men who gather in that safe, well-run space uphold an informal minimum wage and protect one another from abusive contractors and wage thieves. It’s good for the store, its customers and the workers.

Ms. Solis is a defender of such sites and has opposed efforts in other cities to enact ordinances to disperse day laborers and force them underground. She understands that if day laborers end up in our suburbs, it is better to give them safe places to gather rather than allow an uncontrolled job bazaar to drive wages and working conditions down.

That’s a bit of local wisdom that deserves to take root in the federal government.

For Those Who Can't Go Home For Christmas

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Today is Christmas.  This is Houston, so the weather is weird.  Its too warm for sweats, too cool for shorts (at least for me).  I was outside, talking to my neighbors.  Turns out their Dad is not home this Christmas.  He went to see his parents.  He had been here for more than a decade without documents.  He and his wife persisted for years to regularize his status.  There were all sorts of complications.  He needed all his IRS reports (w2 forms) for those years to prove he had paid taxes.  Some of the reports were missing.  He couldn't find his former employer who would have had copies.  Meanwhile, the lawyer just charged more and more.  But my neighbor is a really hard worker.  He has a regular job, but also cuts lawns for businesses on the weekends.  Sometimes his wife goes to help, even though she also has another job during the week.

The day after Hurricane Ike, none of us had electricity.  So most of us were sitting on our porches (we live in an old neighborhood, and most of the houses have a front porch).  I went over to visit them.  He smiled and told me, I'm going to Mexico.  I asked what happened and he told me that had finally been regularized.  He had such a big smile on his face.  He hadn't seen his parents in over 10 years.  

So today when his daughter in law told me that he was gone for two weeks, I could just imagine how he felt being in his first home again.  Sure, Houston is his home now.  He has a wife and family.  But his parents are still back there.  

It's just a reminder for those of us that grit our teeth at Christmas when we go see our parents.  Not everyone is so lucky to have the option "to go back."  I'm glad my neighbor Tomas finally went home again.  Even though, I must say, we all miss him when he is not around.  

DREAM Act Has a Chance

The Economist is saying that if larger Comprehensive Immigration Reform doesn't happen, "smaller steps" may be taken - this could include the DREAM Act - lets hope.

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The Economist

December 20, 2008
U.S. Edition

The border closes;
Immigration


Tougher enforcement and the recession have cut the flow of immigrants; but the state of the economy has made it harder to overhaul a broken system

UNTIL recently, most of the people who came to Emilio Amaya's office in San Bernardino were working illegally. Now the flow of immigrants has slowed, and those who used to toil on building sites and in restaurant kitchens are taking long breaks to visit their relatives. Fortunately, a new line of business has emerged. Mr Amaya is helping people fill in forms that will enable them to move their possessions back to Mexico.

It is an abrupt reversal of a once seemingly inexorable trend. Ever since 2002, when America began to recover from a mild economic downturn, migrants both legal and illegal have streamed over the border. By 2006 Americans rated immigration as the nation's second-most-important problem after the Iraq war, according to Gallup. A bold attempt to reform immigration laws the following year was scuppered by an extraordinary outburst of popular anger. Yet, almost at that moment, the problem began to go away.

The least desirable kind of immigrant has declined the most steeply. In the year to September 2008 724,000 fewer people were caught trying to cross into America from Mexico, the lowest annual tally since the 1970s (see chart). Border cops have naturally claimed credit for the drop. But the heavy hand of the law is probably much less of a deterrent than the invisible hand of the market.

Illegal immigrants often work as builders and landscapers, two trades that have collapsed along with the housing market. As the most casual workers in any industry, they are often laid off first. Although it is impossible to say how many are out of work, one clue comes from their closest competitors in the labour market. In the past year the unemployment rate among Hispanic Americans has risen from 5.7% to 8.6%. That is a steeper increase than for whites or blacks.

In some places, such as Arizona, tough penalties for companies that hire illegals have made the situation worse. Edmundo Hidalgo, who runs a Hispanic organisation in Phoenix, says employers who are prepared to wink at illegality in a tight labour market become more scrupulous when there are lots of workers to choose from. Not surprisingly, the Arizona border is particularly quiet these days. "Why risk your life to come and be unemployed?" asks Wes Gullett, who steered John McCain's presidential campaign in Arizona.

Jeffrey Passel, a demographer at the Pew Hispanic Centre, estimates that the number of illegal immigrants in America fell by 500,000 between 2007 and 2008. Some left the country; others worked their way to legitimacy. Few were replaced. For the past three years, Mr Passel reckons, there has been more legal than illegal immigration—a reversal of the previous pattern. And even legal immigration may now be falling.

Gabriel Jack, a Silicon Valley immigration lawyer, says companies are requesting fewer visas for foreign workers, although demand for the most popular permits still outstrips supply. Tourism and business travel seem to have declined, too. Fewer people are flying into and out of America than at this point last year, according to the International Air Transport Association. All of this changes the politics of immigration.

During the presidential campaign Mr Obama promised to tackle immigration reform in his first year in office. He has a sound reason for keeping that promise: Latinos are solidly Democratic. Exit polls for CNN suggest that Mr Obama carried Hispanic voters by 28 points in Texas, 51 points in California and 54 points in Nevada. By 2012 the Hispanic electorate will be bigger and the heavily Latino Western states will command a few more electoral-college votes, thanks to the 2010 census, which will give extra congressional seats to the West.

The abrupt slowdown in human movement might seem to improve the odds that America's broken immigration system will be overhauled soon. What do nativists have to fear, if fewer people are trampling the border and some undocumented workers are going home? In fact, though, immigration reform is becoming harder.

The immigration bill that died in 2007 would have legalised undocumented workers, stepped up enforcement of existing laws and increased the supply of immigrant workers. It was a compromise that offered something to liberals, Hispanics, conservatives and businessmen.

The recession has swept away the third part of the grand bargain. Even 18 months ago some Midwestern Democrats (including Mr Obama) were wary of a guest-worker programme. It will be extremely hard to sell an increase in foreign workers during a recession. Doris Meissner of the Migration Policy Institute in Washington notes that the last two major relaxations of immigration laws, in 1965 and 1990, both occurred at times of low unemployment.

If there is to be no grand bargain, lesser steps may be taken. Farmers, who have political clout and a perpetual hunger for cheap labour, may be allowed to hire more seasonal workers. "Americans still aren't rushing to pick lettuces in 115{degree} heat," notes Glenn Hamer, president of Arizona's chamber of commerce. The DREAM Act, which would enable some illegal aliens who were brought to America as children to become residents, may be revived.

But if no provision is made to increase the supply of foreign labour permanently, the immigration issue will come back once business picks up again. As Tamar Jacoby of ImmigrationWorks USA, a pressure group, puts it, efforts to secure the border and to police unscrupulous employers will have to compete against the dynamism of the world economy. Don't count on the cops to win.

Cheney: Out of Touch with Reality

Who is Cheney kidding? It is common knowledge that Cheney has been the most feared and mistrusted Vice-President in history - has any other Vice-President shouted profanities in Congress?

The newspapers recently asked what would happen if we had another Water Gate. I say nothing... there have been numerous situations worse than Water Gate and all the potential Deep Throats have all gone into hiding.   They are all afraid of Cheney.

Biden: Cheney was probably the "most dangerous" vice president in U.S. history.

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Cheney, Biden Spar In TV Appearances

Discord Centers on Scope of Executive Power

By Dan Eggen
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, December 22, 2008; Page A02

Vice President Cheney and his successor, Joseph R. Biden Jr., exchanged insults yesterday in a pair of unusually critical television interviews, laying bare apparent animosity between the two as Cheney prepares to hand over power next month.

Cheney, offering no regrets or apologies for his aggressive role in guiding national security policies over the past eight years, openly mocked Biden for citing the wrong part of the Constitution during a campaign debate and for pledging to pursue a less expansive agenda than Cheney has.

"If he wants to diminish the office of the vice president, that's obviously his call," Cheney said in an interview on "Fox News Sunday." He added: "President-elect Obama will decide what he wants in a vice president and, apparently, from the way they're talking about it, he does not expect him to have as consequential a role as I have had during my time."

Biden said in an interview on ABC's "This Week" that Cheney was "dead wrong" in his views about unfettered presidential powers during wartime and that the approach "has been not healthy for our foreign policy, not healthy for our national security, and it has not been consistent with our Constitution." He said he intended to "restore the balance" in power between the presidency and the vice presidency.

The sparring revealed lingering tensions between Cheney and Biden, who said during the election campaign that Cheney was probably the "most dangerous" vice president in U.S. history...more

Spain Tightens Immigration Rules

Spain regularized 600,000 undocumented immigrants in 2005 - it needed labor at the time. Now things have changed, the global financial crisis has affected their labor market and they have decided to crack down on immigrants without papers.

Spain proposes tougher laws for immigrants


By DANIEL WOOLLS
The Associated Press/Washington Post
Friday, December 19, 2008; 10:52 AM

MADRID, Spain -- Grappling with rising unemployment and a moribund economy, the Spanish government proposed new immigration rules Friday to limit the influx of immigrants.

The measures, which need Parliamentary approval, would let police hold undocumented aliens longer pending expulsion and make it harder for foreign-born residents to bring relatives over. They are yet another reflection of the dramatic turnabout in Spain's economy.

Just a few years ago, Spain was Europe's top job-creator. In 2005, it even granted amnesty to 600,000 illegal aliens, many of whom worked under-the-table as laborers in a booming real estate sector.

But with the property bubble collapse in the last year, the Spanish economy is now on the verge of recession and unemployment has soared to an EU-high of 11.3 percent. Among immigrants, the jobless rate surpasses 17 percent.

Labor Minister Celestino Corbacho said Friday the government must limit immigrants so as not to swell the ranks of the unemployed...more

Hilda Solis will be Labor Secretary - a plus for laborers

Obama picked a person sensitive to laborers - Hilda Solis of California - known as a "warrior for workers"

A Warrior for Workers
The Nation
posted by JOHN NICHOLS on 12/19/2008 @ 08:42am

When the Los Angeles County Federation of Labor decided in 2000 that it would stop giving "rubber stamp" backing to disappointing Democrats, the federation's dynamic leader at the time, Miguel Contreras, declared: "We've lifted the bar for endorsements."

"It's not enough to say you're for a minimum-wage increase and expect our backing," Contreras explained. "We want candidates who make a commitment to be with us on every vote, and to be with us on the picket lines."

The first candidate to leap the bar and secure the backing of the labor group was a California legislator named Hilda Solis, who was challenging incumbent Democratic Congressman Matthew Martinez.

Martinez's labor record was reasonably good. But he had disappointed the unions by supporting free-trade deals favored by the Clinton administration -- and by failing to show up on those picket lines.

Solis, who had worked closely with the United Farm Workers, the Service Employees and other unions, won the 2000 Democratic primary in an east L.A. district. And Contreras declared that "a warrior for working families" had been sent to Washington.

Contreras was proven right.

Solis has been a steady pro-labor and progressive member of the House, taking a leadership role in fights to write union-friendly labor laws that will make it easier for workers to organize and bargain collectively, to reframe the trade debate and to defend the rights of women workers in the U.S. and abroad.

Solis has voted with the AFL-CIO 97 percent of the time since coming to Congress.

Solis serves on the board of directors of the pro-labor group American Rights at Work -- along with board chair David Bonior, the former Michigan congressman who has been her mentor and ally over the years.

Solis still shows up for picket lines.

And, now, she is President-elect Barack Obama's designee to join his Cabinet as the next Secretary of Labor.
Miguel Contreras, who died too young a few years back, is smiling today.

After too many years of attacks by Republicans and compromises by Democrats, this country's toiling millions are looking at the prospect of having a Labor Secretary who serves as a "warrior for workers.

I - When People Are Afraid They Invent Enemies

dreamacttexas could write all sorts of philosophical stuff about immigration and xenophobia... but what we write won't have the impact (or distribution) of an article from Salon.com.

Just because most of the national news is on the economy does not mean the immigration polemic has gone away.  

There are still people who hate immigrants and think we are being run over.  Some say that the economic downturn will increase xenophobia, lets hope not.

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DECEMBER 19, 2008 11:30AM
Xenophobia From the Comfort of Your Own Computer Chair
Salon.com
December 19, 2008
by D.B.S.

A few days ago, Fox News ran a news segment focused on a new website, BlueServo, a joint partner ship between the Texas Border Sheriff's Coalition and BlueServo that seeks to utilize "innovative real-time surveillance program designed to empower the public to proactively participate in fighting border crime."

Simply by providing your email and answering a few questions, one becomes an honorary "Virtual Texas Deputy" and gains access to a number of real-time, live streams from surveillance cameras located on the US-Mexico border. Under each live feed is a button labeled "Report Suspicious Activity." Ostensibly, if while monitoring the camera feed, a "Virtual Texas Deputy" sees something that they feel is suspicious, they can click the link and report it to the authorities so that it might be adressed. From the comfort of one's own computer chair , then, anyone can do their part to "protect their own homes, neighborhoods, and families from criminal acts."

Let's cut to the chase here: this website - and values, sentiments, and discourse that have created it - says something deeply disturbing about our nation. This website is portrayed as a tool to fight drug smuggling and criminal activity, but its actual motives are quite transparent, as it clearly intends to contribute to the notion that we must vigilantly guard our border against the so-called "illegal aliens" that seek to cross our borders.

Through the approach that federal, state, and local governments have taken in the wake of 9/11 to address the issue of immigration, immigration has become inextricably linked with two "wars": the war on drugs and the war on terror. In the days immediately following the terrorist attacks of September 11, then Attorney General Ashcroft announced that immigration control and enforcement would play a primary role in combating future terror attacks on US soil. Concomitantly, regulations on immigrants have become exceedingly severe, the border between the US and Mexico has been militarized and fortified (despite the fact that none of the 9/11 attackers arrived in the US by crossing the border, but through legal visas), and deportations and indefinite detention in immigration prisons have become widespread...continued

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II - When People Are Afraid They Invent Enemies

Continued


Xenophobia From the Comfort of Your Own Computer Chair
Salon.com
by D.B.S.


Conflating the issues of national security, crime, and immigration is not only a drastic oversimplification of a complex, global phenomena that stems from globalization and transnational flows of labor and capital, but also demonstrates the lack of national conscience. If our interests are perceived to be threatened, then we will demonize whom we will, regardless of the enormous contributions made by immigrants to our social and economic infrastructure or the massive toll that their demonization takes on the advancement of human rights. Research has repeatedly demonstrated that immigrants - even those with the lowest levels of education - commit far fewer crimes than do the native born; by continuing to label immigrants as drug smugglers and terrorists, we run the risk of creating irrevocable inequalities and human rights abuses.

Which brings me back to BlueServo: validating vigilantism and xenophobia in this manner only strengthens the resolve of those who seek to harden the heart of the nation against those who come to make a better life for themselves and their families. Our nation's incapability to craft a sensible immigration policy has continually plagued our history, and one need look no further than the estimated 10 million undocumented individuals living and working in the US forced to hide in the margins of our society to see that our immigration system is broken.

As the economy worsens and the search for culprits intensifies, the United States has a choice. Continue to dehumanize immigrants as illegal, drug smugglers, terrorists, job-stealers, and a strain on the public infrastructure, or accept the realities of globalization and transnational labor and capital flows and lead by example, creating a fair, thoughtful immigration policy that is not rooted in ideology or nativism but in a recognition of the social world as it truly is.

My closing thought will be a verse from the Old Testament that the prominent sociologist Roger Waldinger included in the dedication of one of his books on immigration. The sentiment, I think, applies quite nicely here.

The stranger who lives with you shall be to you as one of your citizens; you shall love him as yourself, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt. Leviticus 19:34

Giving Something to Veterans

One of the worst travesties these days is what is happening to U.S. military veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan.  The death toll is only a fraction of the terrible things that are occuring.  The injuries are horrific.  Modern medicine has kept many alive, but their lives are ruined.  The suicide rate is astronomical and is said to be the same number of those who actually died while on a tour.  

Veterans for America has released a guide to help with problems that arise.  While this is a very small thing considering all that our veterans need, it is still helpful.  A link to the 500+ page book is posted below the NYT editorial.

----

EDITORIAL
Survival Guide for Veterans

New York Times
Published: December 18, 2008
Far too often, military veterans find themselves desperately short of the information they need as they make the torturous quest for benefits within one of this country’s most daunting bureaucracies, the Department of Veterans Affairs.

Officials say help is on the way, but administrators are forever promising to streamline procedures for an era of conquered paperwork that never seems to come. That is why it is heartening to see that one promising form of help has indeed arrived: a 599-page guide to veterans’ issues, from educational help to vocational rehabilitation, from housing to citizenship.

It’s called “The American Veterans’ and Servicemembers’ Survival Guide,” and it comes, unsurprisingly, from outside the system. It is a publication of the nonprofit advocacy group Veterans for America, available as a free download at veteransforamerica.org...more


click here for link to the Veteran's Survival Guide

link to photo

North-South: Rival Economies

Most of us thought that Congress was angry at the automakers for making dumb decisions and killing the electric car. This seemed to be the reason behind the lack of enthusiasm for a bail out of the American automakers. But we were wrong. It's an old north-south rivalry, focusing on regional economies. The South doesn't have a national perspective - better to save the southern auto economy (fueled by foreign car makers) than to save the whole country. What else is new?

The Economic Civil War

The South's attempt to kill the North's auto industry is the latest battle in an ongoing conflict. It's time for a Third Reconstruction to put an end to it.

Salon.com
by Michael Lind
Dec. 18, 2008 | It is just as well that Barack Obama is emulating Abraham Lincoln by traveling to his inauguration in Washington by train. As the regional politics of the automobile bailout controversy demonstrate, the Civil War continues. If the major U.S. automobile companies go under, it will be partly because timely federal aid for them was blocked by members of Congress like Tennessee Senator Bob Corker, whose states have created their own counter-Detroit in the form of Japanese, Korean, and German transplant factories. The South will have risen by bringing down the North. Jefferson Davis will have had his revenge.

The most shocking thing about the alliance between the Southern states and America's friendly but earnest economic rivals to destroy America's most important industry is the fact that so few people find it shocking. Contrast the U.S. with the European Union. The nation-states of the European Union collaborate with each other in order to compete against foreign economic rivals, including the U.S., Japan, and China. By contrast, many states, particularly in the South, collaborate with foreign economic rivals of the U.S. in order to compete against other American states. Any British or French or German leader who proposed collaborating with Japan or the U.S. in order to wipe out industry and destroy jobs in neighboring EU member states would be jeered out of office. But it is perfectly acceptable for American states to connive with Asian and European countries in the destruction of industry elsewhere in the U.S...more

link to Harper's image

1,900 immigrants not naturalized in time - couldn't vote in election

"the Ombudsman received credible information that one court denied USCIS the opportunity to administer the oath in a timely fashion to more than 1,900 approved naturalization applicants. The court's delay adversely impacted the ability of these individuals to vote in the recent general elections.

"USCIS leadership and staff worked hard to naturalize these new citizens, and they had the assistance of many district courts that proved flexible in scheduling additional naturalization oath ceremonies," said CIS Ombudsman Michael Dougherty. "courts that choose to assert exclusive authority to naturalize new citizens should also embrace a customer service ethic that recognizes the singular importance of oath ceremonies."

see report:

Cisomb Naturalization Recommendation 2008-12-16

Publish at Scribd or explore others:

--

Some Judges Delay Swearing-In Of New Citizens, Report Says
Immigration Ombudsman Says Money Is Motivation


By Spencer S. Hsu
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, December 18, 2008; Page A23

Federal judges in some parts of the United States have delayed the swearing-in of new citizens, keeping millions of dollars in fees that would otherwise go to immigration officials if they were allowed to administer the oaths instead, according to a new government report and immigration officials.

In one of the nation's busiest courts, a judge's delay caused nearly 2,000 people to not receive the oath in time to register for November's general election, USCIS ombudsman Michael Dougherty said in a 13-page report released yesterday...more

Solidarity Dinner for Eberto Romero Tonite: Restaurante 'EL Coquito'

Eberto Romero is a friend and a beloved community organizer in Houston who has undergone a series of brain surgeries since August of this year.

Eberto has done extensive work with Border Networks for Human Rights and Hondureños Unidos. Eberto has been greatly involved in the work of immigrant rights in Houston for several years and has been a critical part of our organizing efforts and advancements.

Since August, Eberto has had nine brain surgeries in hopes of ridding a brain tumor; his last intervention was twenty days days ago. Currently, he recovers in Ben Taub Hospital and remains in stable condition.

A group of family and friends have organized a fundraiser dinner taking place tonight in Houston, TX in order to help alleviate some of the hospital expenses.

Where: Restaurante El Coquito, 6121 Hillcroft AVE; Sharpstown Area. 713.776 0220
What: Solidarity dinner for Eberto
When: Tonite, Thursday, December 18th. Starting 7:30 PM

For more information, please contact: bordernet2001@yahoo.com

I urge you to please support Eberto in any possible way. I have had the pleasure of working with him; he is just a stellar individual who has given his heart to the struggle of immigrants.

En la lucha,

-Juli

1986 Immigration Law gives hope to some

There are ways for some to obtain their green cards, but the problem is always the cost. Who has thousands of dollars to pay for an attorney, not knowing if he/she will be able to help you.

Check out your local law school. Some times they have "immigration clinics" that offer low or no cost legal help.

Settlement opens up amnesty for tens of thousands of immigrants
LA Times


Many who entered the United States on valid visas but fell out of legal status between 1982 and 1988 are eligible for the amnesty offered under the 1986 immigration reform law.

By Teresa Watanabe
December 15, 2008
For two decades, Anaheim businessman Erkan Aydin has taken on a task unimaginable for most immigrants like himself: trying to convince the U.S. government that he was here illegally.

Aydin, 50, arrived in the United States from his native Turkey with a valid student visa in 1981, but fell out of legal status when he failed to enroll in school, he said.



* Skilled immigrants a 'brain waste' in California's workforce
Skilled immigrants a 'brain waste' in...
* U.S. to renew push for crackdown on illegal workers
U.S. to renew push for crackdown on...

*
Colorado judge stops tax crackdown on illegal workers

The customer service representative has a powerful reason why he wants to be considered an illegal immigrant. It would make him eligible for the amnesty offered to 2.7 million illegal immigrants under the 1986 immigration reform law.

Thanks to a recent legal settlement, the chance to apply for amnesty is finally open to Aydin and tens of thousands of others who entered the country on a valid visa but fell out of legal status between 1982 and 1988. The settlement, approved this fall by a U.S. district court in Washington state, stems from a class-action lawsuit filed by attorney Peter Schey originally on behalf of an immigrant assistance program of the Los Angeles County Federation of Labor, AFL-CIO.

"I have been born again, like a new baby," Aydin said last week in his Anaheim car dealership office. "I will start a beautiful life in this beautiful country."

The landmark reform law offered a one-time amnesty to immigrants who were in the United States unlawfully from before 1982 to about 1988.

But Congress was concerned that those who entered the country with a valid visa would argue that they fell out of legal status during that time simply to qualify for amnesty. As a result, Schey said, Congress created a rule requiring immigrants to show that their shift from legal to illegal status was "known to the government."

That rule, however, created a new problem: How to prove that the government knew about their violations?

Nigeria native Olaniyi Sofuluke, for instance, came to the United States in 1981 on a student visa to study banking and finance at Troy State University (now Troy University) in Alabama. But, lacking funds, he soon dropped out to work as a dishwasher in two Atlanta restaurants until he could earn enough for his tuition and living expenses.

That violated his visa conditions and threw him into illegal status. The university was required to send a notice to the U.S. government that Sofuluke had dropped out but was not able to provide him with a copy when he requested one five years later. So immigration officials rejected his amnesty application, saying his violations were not known to the government.

Schey, however, successfully argued that because schools were legally required to send the notices, it should be presumed that the government received them and therefore knew about the violations.

He also successfully argued that the government knew many immigrants had violated their status another way: by failing to furnish an address report every three months. The government's failure to produce the address reports showed that the immigrants had not filed them, violating the terms of their visa, he argued.

U.S. immigration officials accepted both arguments in the settlement. They have announced that immigrants whose cases involve violations known to the government may apply for amnesty between Feb. 1, 2009, and Jan. 31, 2010.

Although the settlement was announced in September, many immigrants are just learning about it. Sofuluke, now a Maryland administrator, just found out about it last week.

"I couldn't even eat dinner, I was so full of joy," he said. "I've been in the twilight zone all of this time."

As a banker in Nigeria, he said his colleagues would return from studying in the United States and regale him with stories about the land of opportunity.

He devoured news about the United States in Time and Newsweek, he said, and finally got his chance to study here in 1981.

He eventually earned an undergraduate degree in accounting and an MBA, started a dry cleaning business that employed 16 people, bought his own home and began doing volunteer work with the disabled. (He was given a work permit while his amnesty application was pending.)

"You can find the greatest opportunities here," he said in a phone interview. "That's why we call America 'the golden egg.' "

The settlement marks Schey's third and final class-action lawsuit over the 1986 amnesty law. The previous lawsuits, both settled in 2003, resulted in more than 150,000 immigrants being allowed to apply for amnesty.

In the first lawsuit, Schey successfully challenged U.S. policy that effectively barred from amnesty applicants who traveled outside the United States roughly between 1986 and 1988. Although Congress specifically allowed a "brief, innocent and casual absence" during that period for, say, holiday visits, immigration authorities at the time essentially declared that anyone who left and reentered illegally was not "innocent" and therefore became ineligible for amnesty.

In the second lawsuit, Schey argued against the rejection of amnesty applicants who had returned home and reentered with a valid visa. Immigration officials at the time held that the reentry was legal, breaking the continued illegal residency required for amnesty. Schey argued, however, that the reentry was illegal because the immigrants would have to have lied about themselves when they applied for the visa to return.

Schey said that amnesty will allow countless immigrants to report crime without fear of deportation, to visit ailing parents back home and to leave exploitative jobs.

"It will make an immeasurable difference in the lives of thousands of people," Schey said. "For many of them, it will be the first time since they entered the country 30 years ago that they will be able to move forward and end their underground existence."

For Aydin, the settlement will give him the chance to fulfill a long-held dream of serving his adopted country in law enforcement or the military.

Once he has his green card, he said, he plans to pursue a master's degree in criminal justice administration with an eye toward joining the Navy, Secret Service, FBI or CIA.

"For many years, I wanted to serve this country, but I haven't had the opportunity," Aydin said. "Now I'm happy I'll finally have the chance."

Watanabe is a Times staff writer.

teresa.watanabe@latimes.com

Iraqi Journalist Beaten over Shoe Incident

al Zaidi, who threw the shoes has not been allowed legal representation. He is being held without charges. His brother reports multiple injuries. al Zaidi probably knew he would be facing a beating if he proceeded with his plan to throw the shoes at Bush.

It would be no surprise if the Americans were involved in the beating, especially since the U.S. government has been so supportive of torture in general since 9-11. It is also no surprise that the Arab world is celebrating al Zaidi. It is important to remember that over 1,000,000 Iraqi´s have died in the war.

---

link to video on Gaza rally for al Zaidi: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/video/2008/dec/16/1

article: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/dec/16/shoe-protest-bush-iraq

Bush shoe protester 'beaten by Iraqi military'• Brother claims al-Zaidi was
beaten in custody

• Hundreds protest for second day in support of journalist
Mark Tran and agencies guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 16 December 2008 16.55 GMT
London Guardian
December 16, 2008

The Iraqi journalist who threw his shoes at George Bush has been beaten in custody, his brother said today.

Muntadhar al-Zaidi suffered a broken hand, broken ribs, internal bleeding and an eye injury, his older brother, Dargham, told the BBC. He has since been handed over to the Iraqi judiciary, a step that normally heralds a criminal case.

Iraqi security took al-Zaidi into custody and interrogated him about whether anybody had paid him to throw his shoes at Bush on Sunday, according to officials. He could face charges of insulting a foreign leader and the Iraqi prime minister, Nouri al-Maliki, who was standing next to Bush. The offence carries a maximum penalty of two years in jail.

His act has generated a wave of support across the Arab world, and hundreds took to the streets of Baghdad, Mosul and other towns yesterday, demanding his release.

"Muntadhar al-Zaidi has expressed the feelings and ambitions of the Iraqi people toward the symbol of tyranny," Nassar Afrawi, a protester in Nassiriya, said.

In Baghdad, the head of the Iraqi union of journalists described al-Zaidi's action as "strange and unprofessional", but urged clemency.

"Even if he has committed a mistake, the government and the judiciary are broadminded and we hope they consider his release, because he has a family
and he is still young," Mouyyad al-Lami said. "We hope this case ends before
going to court."

Ten of thousands of people throughout Iraq have demonstrated in support of al-Zaidi. Throwing shoes is a deep insult in the Arab world, and Iraqis showed their contempt for Saddam Hussein when they removed their shoes to beat his statue with, when Baghdad fell to US forces in 2003.

Dargham al-Zaidi said he believed his brother had been taken to a US military hospital in Baghdad. Despite many offers, his brother had not been given access to any lawyers since being arrested by forces under the command of Mowaffaq al-Rubaie, Iraq's national security adviser.

Iraq's Flying Shoes

This CBS video provides a cultural explanation for the meaning of throwing shoes at someone in the Arab world. There is another video that I cannot post (because of profanity) that actually explains it all very well - (warning, very likely to be offensive) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jgZr3Ku4T9Q - try to skip the screaming at the beginning.

Flying Shoes Create a Hero In Arab World

By Sudarsan Raghavan
Washington Post Foreign Service
Tuesday, December 16, 2008; Page A01

BAGHDAD, Dec. 15 -- In hurling footwear and insults at President Bush, Muntadar al-Zaidi expressed what relatives said were his own frustrations with American policy in Iraq and made himself into an overnight celebrity in the Arab world...

On Monday, people across the Middle East applauded Zaidi for expressing their anger at the Bush administration. In cafes and online chat rooms, people joked about the incident with glee, releasing years of frustration with U.S. policies. Thousands of Iraqis demonstrated in the streets demanding his release from Iraqi custody.

Iraqi authorities have not charged Zaidi, but they have arrested him for "his aggressive actions against an official and a visitor of the Iraqi government," Yaseen Majeed, a top media adviser to Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, said in a statement. Majeed called Zaidi "a disgrace to journalism" and said he would be handed over to the Iraqi justice system for punishment.

Munqeth al-Faroon, an Iraqi court official, said Zaidi could be sentenced to up to seven years in prison for insulting the nation's leader. On Sunday, at a news conference held by Maliki and Bush, Zaidi threw his shoes, one after the other, at the U.S. president, shouting, "This is a farewell kiss!" As Iraqi security guards converged on Zaidi, he yelled: "Dog! Dog!" ..more

Torture is not as important as Blagojevich

Why is Blagojevich more important than the Iraqis who are tortured by the U.S.? A report on how the Bush administration is responsible for the use of torture was made public five days ago and all has been quiet.

What is it about all the atrocities performed by Bush administration officials that the media is so reticent about making notice? Why are they letting Rumsfeld off the hook? There is clear evidence in the report, there are no "assumptions" - these are facts.

No wonder the Iraqi journalist threw a shoe at Bush. While technically this is an inappropriate action (you shouldn`t be throwing shoes at presidents), after over a million Iraqi deaths, people have a right to be angry...

link to Senate Armed Services Committee Report on Torture

---

Monday Dec. 15, 2008 09:30 EST
Senate report links Bush to detainee homicides; media yawns
by Glenn Greenwald
Salon.com

...This Report was issued on Thursday.
Not a single mention was made of it on any of the Sunday news talk shows, with
the sole exception being when John McCain told George Stephanopoulos that it was "not his job" to opine on whether criminal prosecutions were warranted for the Bush officials whose policies led to these crimes. What really matters, explained McCain, was not that we get caught up in the past, but instead, that we ensure this never happens again -- yet, like everyone else who makes this argument, he offered no explanation as to how we could possibly ensure that "it never happens again" if we simultaneously announce that our political leaders will be immunized, not prosecuted, when they commit war crimes. Doesn't that mindset, rather obviously, substantially increase the likelihood -- if not render inevitable -- that such behavior will occur again? Other than that brief exchange, this Senate Report was a non-entity on the Sunday shows.

Instead, TV pundits were consumed with righteous anger over the petty, titillating, sleazy Rod Blagojevich scandal, competing with one another over who could spew the most derision and scorn for this pitiful, lowly, broken individual and his brazen though relatively inconsequential crimes. Every exciting detail was vouyeristically and meticulously dissected by political pundits -- many, if not most, of whom have never bothered to acquaint themselves with any of the basic facts surrounding the monumental Bush lawbreaking and war crimes scandals. TV "journalists" who have never even heard of the Taguba report -- the incredible indictment issued by a former U.S. General, who subsequently observed: "there is no longer any doubt as to whether the current administration has committed war crimes. The only question that remains to be answered is whether those who ordered the use of torture will be held to account" -- spent the weekend opining on the intricacies of Blogojevich's hair and terribly upsetting propensity to use curse words... more

Sneak is the word for the Bush administration

Democracy Now aired a program on how the Bush administration was pushing last minute regulations on November 13, 2008. It was titled "Bush Admin Pushes Through Last-Minute Deregulation that May Be Hard to Undo."


This is all no surprise. What has been the pattern all along is not going to change now.

---

Bush sneaks through host of laws to undermine Obama

by Paul Harris
The Observer, Sunday 14 December 2008

The lame-duck Republican team is rushing through radical measures, from coal waste dumping to power stations in national parks, that will take months to overturn, reports Paul Harris in New York

After spending eight years at the helm of one of the most ideologically driven administrations in American history, George W. Bush is ending his presidency in characteristically aggressive fashion, with a swath of controversial measures designed to reward supporters and enrage opponents.

By the time he vacates the White House, he will have issued a record number of so-called 'midnight regulations' - so called because of the stealthy way they appear on the rule books - to undermine the administration of Barack Obama, many of which could take years to undo.

Dozens of new rules have already been introduced which critics say will diminish worker safety, pollute the environment, promote gun use and curtail abortion rights. Many rules promote the interests of large industries, such as coal mining or energy, which have energetically supported Bush during his two terms as president. More are expected this week.

America's attention is focused on the fate of the beleaguered car industry, still seeking backing in Washington for a multi-billion-dollar bail-out. But behind the scenes, the 'midnight' rules are being rushed through with little fanfare and minimal media attention. None of them would be likely to appeal to the incoming Obama team.

The regulations cover a vast policy area, ranging from healthcare to car safety to civil liberties. Many are focused on the environment and seek to ease regulations that limit pollution or restrict harmful industrial practices, such as dumping strip-mining waste.

The Bush moves have outraged many watchdog groups. 'The regulations we have seen so far have been pretty bad,' said Matt Madia, a regulatory policy analyst at OMB Watch. 'The effects of all this are going to be severe...'...more

Will DNA Testing for Immigrant Arrestees be Ruled out in Obama's Administration

Will the DNA testing of immigrant arrestees be abolished by the Obama administration? After all, it will only be in effect for 11 days before he assumes the presidency. If he allows this he will be opening the door to an even further loss of immigrants rights.

New Rule Expands DNA Collection to All People Arrested
Civil Rights Groups Assail Change
By Spencer S. Hsu
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, December 12, 2008; Page A02

Immigration and civil liberties groups condemned a new U.S. government policy to collect DNA samples from all noncitizens detained by authorities and all people arrested for federal crimes.

The new Justice Department rule, published Wednesday and effective Jan. 9, dramatically expands a federal law enforcement database of genetic identifiers, which is now limited to storing information about convicted criminals and arrestees from 13 states...more

Can a U.S. President Save the World?

It wouldn't have seemed possible until we saw George W. Bush almost destroy the world. If one American president can cause so much chaos, then another can bring just as much resolution to the world's problems.

It is not so much that Obama is so special (although he is quite remarkable)... it is what he represents... it is what we as the American populace has become. The presidency is a mirror of the nation. If we elected Barack Obama it is because we are ready for his type of leadership.

As many have said. Thank you George W. Bush for your terrible presidency. Without the mess you created, we might not have been as open to someone like Obama.

--

Wanted: A New U.S. Grand Strategy

by Fareed Zakaria
Washington Post
December 13, 2008

Barack Obama's campaign for president began with his opposition to the war in Iraq. But before last week's terror attacks in India, the subject of foreign policy had disappeared, almost completely overshadowed by the economic crisis.

This doesn't mean that international issues will be ignored. No doubt the national security team Obama is announcing this week will be quick to tackle the many issues in their inbox, and will likely do so with intelligence and competence. There are enough problems to occupy them fully -- Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, al-Qaeda, Iran, Russia -- and they will face unexpected crises like the Mumbai assaults.

But we must hope that as president, Obama does more than select a good team, delegate well and react intelligently to the problems that he will confront. He must have his administration build a broader framework through which to view the world and America's relations with it -- a grand strategy.

At this moment, the United States has a unique opportunity to push forward a vision that aligns its interests and ideals with those of most of the world's major powers. But it is a fleeting opportunity. Grand strategy sounds like an abstract concept--something academics discuss -- and one that bears little relationship to urgent, jarring events on the ground. But in the absence of strategy, any administration will be driven by the news, reacting rather than leading. For a superpower that has global interests and is forced to respond to virtually every problem, it's all too easy for the urgent to drive out the important...


President-elect Obama has powers of his own... I will not exaggerate the importance of a single personality, but Obama has become a global symbol like none I can recall in my lifetime. Were he to go to Tehran, for example, he would probably draw a crowd of millions, far larger than any mullah could dream of. Were his administration to demonstrate in its day-to-day conduct a genuine understanding of other countries' perspectives and empathy for the aspirations of people around the world, it could change America's reputation in lasting ways.

This is a rare moment in history. A more responsive America, better attuned to the rest of the world, could help create a new set of ideas and institutions -- an architecture of peace for the 21st century that would bring stability, prosperity and dignity to the lives of billions of people. Ten years from now, the world will have moved on; the rising powers will have become unwilling to accept an agenda conceived in Washington or London or Brussels. But at this time and for this man, there is a unique opportunity to use American power to reshape the world. This is his moment. He should seize it.

Posted by Fareed Zakaria on December 1, 2008 12:14 PM

link to complete article

Bush Administration says Obamas can't move into Blair House early

It seems very strange that the Bush administration will not let the Obamas move into Blair House before January 15th. Obama asked for the accommodations so that his daughters could start school right after the holidays, thus making their transition less stressful. Blair House is logical, especially because of the heightened security it can offer. Plus, having Obama across the street from the White House would probably make the country feel a little more secure. Maybe Bush thinks Obama will be too close for comfort. No matter what the reason, has anyone ever heard of a president-elect being denied a request of this nature?

It would be interesting to see what is really on the Blair House schedule that is more important than a request from our incoming president.

----

The Blair House web site states:

Blair House has stood in front of the White House for more than 180 years, witness to events of extraordinary importance for the nation and her people. For decades the rooms of this stately home have played an even more active role, serving United States foreign policy as a gracious residence, meeting place, and sanctuary for visiting heads of state.

Obama aides: White House says Obamas can't move into Blair House early, other events scheduled

By PHLIIP ELLIOTT | Associated Press Writer
Chicago Tribune
3:29 PM CST, December 12, 2008

CHICAGO (AP) — President-elect Barack Obama asked the White House if his family could move to Washington earlier than normal, but aides say the White House couldn't give them the official guest house as early as his family wanted.

The Obamas had asked White House officials to move into Blair House about two weeks before the traditional date so their two daughters could start their new school when classes resume Jan. 5. Obama aides say the White House told them that the request cannot be met because the current administration still has plans for the historic government home across Pennsylvania Avenue from the White House.

An Obama aide said the family was told that there were previously scheduled events at the Blair House and guests could not be displaced. The aide, who was not authorized to speak about Obama family matters, spoke on the condition of anonymity...more

London Police Lie about Brazilian's Death

Why was it so easy to kill Jean Charles de Menezes in London? Why did London police so easily think he was a terrorist? Was is because he was not white? The department's lies make the death of Menezes even more horrific.


link to editorial on Menezes' death from the London Guardian

Menezes: Did the police lie?

By Mark Hughes, Crime correspondent
London Independent
Saturday, 13 December 2008

Jean Charles de Menezes was not lawfully killed as part of an anti-terrorist operation, a jury decided yesterday, rejecting the police account of how the Brazilian died as not to be trusted.

Returning an open verdict at the end of the 12-week inquest, the jurors contradicted evidence given by seven firearms and surveillance officers when they answered a series of 13 questions put to them by the coroner.

In particular, they said they refused to believe that the first officer to open fire, codenamed C12, had shouted a warning of "armed police" first. They also rejected the officer's claim that the Brazilian had walked towards him.

Mr de Menezes died on 22 July 2005 aged 27, after police mistook him for a terrorist and shot him seven times in the head. The coroner, Sir Michael Wright, had already stopped the jury from returning a verdict of unlawful killing, leaving open and lawful killing verdicts as the only possibilities...more

Why didn't the National Democratic Party Support Rick Noriega?

photo: Rick Noriega
Cornyn was vulnerable this year. With help from the DNC Noriega would have had a good chance. But $20,000 was like pennies...They must have thought that Texas was a lost cause.

There is another chance in 2010. If the DNC wants Texas back, they need to wake up and support their candidate.

Texas Hispanic Dems Blast National Party for Non-Support

Houston Chronicle

December 11, 2008

Two prominent Hispanic Democratic officials from Texas harshly criticized an arm of their national party today for skipping over the state when it provided funding muscle for U.S. Senate candidates across the country.

State Sens. Mario Gallegos of Houston and Leticia Van de Putte of San Antonio objected to the fact that the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee collected contributions from Texans — $1.1 million at an event in San Antonio, for instance — without sending any to the campaign of outgoing state legislator Rick Noriega of Houston.

Noriega lost the Senate race in November to Republican incumbent John Cornyn, who raised $10 million during the campaign to $4 million for Noriega, according to federal records.

The Democratic committee's decision to spend the money outside Texas "is shameful and disgraceful, and we will do everything we can to prevent this disrespect from happening again," the two state senators wrote.

"For the face of the U.S. Senate to represent the true face of America, we must all work together to invest in quality candidates such as Rick Noriega, not take a walk when our candidate is not a member of the millionaires' club," they added...more

Undocumented Workers at Chertoff's Home

Even Chertoff can't get away from E-Verify.

----

Cleaning Firm Used Illegal Workers at Chertoff Home

By Spencer S. Hsu
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, December 11, 2008; Page A01
Every few weeks for nearly four years, the Secret Service screened the IDs of employees for a Maryland cleaning company before they entered the house of Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff, the nation's top immigration official.

The company's owner says the workers sailed through the checks -- although some of them turned out to be illegal immigrants.

Now, owner James D. Reid finds himself in a predicament that he considers especially confounding. In October, he was fined $22,880 after U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement investigators said he failed to check identification and work documents and fill out required I-9 verification forms for employees, five of whom he said were part of crews sent to Chertoff's home and whom ICE told him to fire because they were undocumented...more

What do you do if your father was a monster?

A new PBS documentary deals with this theme on Sunday night, December 10.

Many of us like to think our parents were perfect.  It is hard to see they have faults, sometimes abominable ones.  

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"Your father was a monster"

In the PBS documentary "Inheritance," the daughter of Nazi murderer Amon Goeth struggles to accept an unbearable legacy.

By Heather Havrilesky



Dec. 10, 2008 | Monika Hertwig knew very little about her father until she went to see Steven Spielberg's film "Schindler's List." According to Hertwig, no one in Germany talked about the Second World War. Her grandmother had told her, when she was 11, that her father was hanged for killing Jews as the head of the Plaszow concentration camp in Krakow, Poland. But she didn't fully grasp her father's unconscionable acts until 1993, when Spielberg's film came out. The moment Ralph Fiennes' character was introduced, Hertwig recognized him. Then she sat in the dark for hours, feeling, in her words, "sick with the truth."

In the POV documentary "Inheritance" (premieres 9 p.m. Dec. 10 on PBS), filmmaker James Moll unveils the story of how Hertwig, now in her 60s, discovered the unthinkable horrors of her father's legacy. She never knew her father, who died when she was 1 year old, and she'd never gotten along with her mother, who once told her in anger that she was just like her father and would die like him, too. But when Hertwig saw a German documentary about the Holocaust featuring a woman named Helen Jonas who'd been a servant in Amon Goeth's house, Hertwig became intent on meeting Jonas to learn more about her father and to understand why her mother had stayed by his side, as his mistress, during those years...more

Jack & the Box and Diabetes

Food that will push you towards becoming diabetic:

1.  Jack in the Box hamburgers

2.  McDonalds

3.  Burger King

4.  carbonated softdrinks

5.  most store-bought cookies

6.  many bottled fruit juices

Diabetes is killing us.  As I write this my 48 year old brother has gone through his 4th dialysis treatment in five days.  As kids, we never thought twice about going to get food from Jack and the Box.

My students were aghast a few weeks ago when I told them a colleague of mine who is a researcher at a Cambridge diabetes research center told me that this generation will have a shorter life span than the previous.  My family is getting to it early.  My brother unfortunately has a bleak future ahead of him.  My parents are in their 80s.  They didn't grow up on junk food.

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The chain's junior bacon cheeseburger is ranked as 'the most unhealthful'

value item available among the offerings of national fast-food chains, according to the Cancer Project.
By Jerry Hirsch
December 9, 2008
Recessionary eating isn't always healthful eating, especially when it comes to the $1 value menus pushed by fast-food chains to keep sales growing through the economic slump, according to one health watchdog.

Jack in the Box's Junior Bacon Cheeseburger was ranked "the most unhealthful" value item available among the offerings of national fast-food chains, according to an analysis by dietitians with the nonprofit Cancer Project in Washington that is scheduled to be released today.

The $1 burger from San Diego-based Jack in the Box topped the ranking because of its hamburger patty and "hefty helpings of cheese and mayo-onion sauce," said Krista Haynes, Cancer Project staff dietitian.

The item contains 23 grams of fat, 860 milligrams of sodium, and bacon, a processed meat that Haynes said was associated with increased colorectal cancer risk.

Jack in the Box spokesman Brian Luscomb said the burger was a "great value for guests looking for a flavorful meal, but if you are looking for something else there are plenty of other great items on our value menu to choose from," including a chicken sandwich and a salad.

McDonald's new $1 McDouble sandwich and Irvine-based Taco Bell's 89-cent Cheesy Double Beef Burrito are among the other items singled out in the Cancer Project's report on the five least healthful fast-food value menu items...more

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Virgin of Guadalupe 6

An image of Guadalupe from a book published in Mexico City in 1665

Virgin of Guadalupe 5

From the Museum at the Basilica of Guadalupe

Mexico City

Brooklyn: Latino Immigrant on Life Support After Beating

It has happened in Pennsylvania, now twice in New York State. Another immigrant has been beaten. Jose Sucuzhanay has been declared brain dead.

Every one of these beatings should weigh on the mind of Lou Dobbs and other media people who have sensationalized the immigrant "problem."


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Family Keeps Vigil for Beaten Brooklyn Man
New York Times
December 10, 2008

An Ecuadorean immigrant who was brutally beaten in Brooklyn last weekend in what the police have described as a possible bias attack was declared brain-dead on Tuesday, a law enforcement official said. But the man was being kept on life support while his family decides whether to donate his organs, the official said.

There have been no arrests in the attack, which came four weeks after the fatal stabbing of an Ecuadorean immigrant on Long Island by a group of teenagers who had been looking for a Latino to attack. The attacks have jolted nerves in the city’s Latino communities and have drawn wide condemnation from city officials and Ecuadorean community leaders, many of whom joined relatives of the Brooklyn beating victim on Tuesday...more

Virgin of Guadalupe 4

Outside the Basilica of the Virgin of Guadalupe, Mexico City, March 2008.  

Photo by M.T. Hernandez

Virgin of Guadalupe 3

Mexico City, 2008.  Photo by M.T. Hernandez

Immigration crackdown in Spain after economic downturn

Unemployed Immigrants Struggle as Hard-Pressed Spain Rolls Up Welcome Mat

New York Times
December 10, 2008


Spain created more jobs and drew more immigrants than any other country in Europe in the past decade, largely because of a construction boom. As the economy shrinks, employers are disgorging workers at an alarming rate — unemployment soared to more than 11 percent in the third quarter — and immigrants in low-skilled jobs have been hit hardest.

The once permissive Spanish government is rolling up the welcome mat, even encouraging immigrants to return home in exchange for lump-sum welfare payments. During its economic boom, Spain epitomized Europe’s hunger for low-cost labor. But now, it could become a laboratory for the strains that emerge when those workers are unemployed, yet stay put.

Spain has not yet suffered the outbursts of xenophobia heard in places like Italy, and Spaniards say their own years as a nation of émigrés help them sympathize...

But hospitality may wear thin. Spain’s unemployment rate is now the highest in the European Union, up from 8 percent at the end of 2007. Among immigrants, unemployment is estimated at 17 percent. About five million immigrants are registered as living in Spain, a country of 46 million, with Moroccans, Romanians and Ecuadoreans topping the list.

... Many [immigrants] said life had become a grinding trail of employment centers, soup kitchens and local charities. Some are months behind on rent or mortgage payments and have racked up debts a month...

...The authorities have cracked down on businesses that employ undocumented workers, and immigrants say plainclothes police officers prowl commuter trains, arresting those without papers. Prime Minister José Rodríguez Zapatero has said he supports the European Union’s tough Return Directive, which would allow illegal migrants to be held for as long as 18 months...

for complete article click here

Virgin of Guadalupe 2

In a taxi, Merida, Yucatan, 2005.  photo by M.T. Hernandez

Virgin of Guadalupe

Her story is magical. She appeared on a mountaintop near Mexico City in 1531. She has become the patroness of the Americas. Catholics say she is the mother of Christ. Others say she is a powerful female deity. She is the soul of the Mexican people, whether they are in Mexico, the U.S., or Europe.

December 12 is her feast day. For the rest of the week, dreamacttexas will be posting images of Guadalupe.


DREAMers often pray that she keep them safe.



link to image

a visual explanation of immigration

enlarge and start at the top left of the image



legal pdf

Publish at Scribd or explore others:

thanks to my colleague C. Munnell for this link

Remarkable Acts of Kindness in the Republic of Congo

In the middle of the war in the Congo, people are offering shelter to those running from the violence.  It is risky, those helping out could be hurt themselves.

Our American way of life does not allow of to really do things for other people. We may think we are being "good people" by giving a turkey or helping serve food at a homeless shelter. But that is really nothing... in fact sometimes it may seem like a superficial act of drama - it only makes the "giver" look good.


How about doing things that really make a difference? There are many other things you can do. Here are a few ideas.

1. If you are a teacher, take a second look at your students, is there someone there that you may be ignoring or stereotyping?

2. If you are a law enforcement officer, think about how you may be stereotyping people of color.

3. Spend an entire afternoon or morning at a retirement center. Have conversations with people.

4. Sponsor a kid to go to summer camp.

5. Volunteer at your local public school (not just to serve turkey).

6. Teach your own children not to hate or stereotype.

7. Do something nice for someone and keep it a secret.

8. Say something positive about DREAMers, or other undocumented people.

9. Remember everybody is not ALL bad or ALL good.

Families offer shelter to victims of Congo war

Amid the brutality of Africa's most deadly and intractable conflict, refugees fleeing the fighting are being sheltered by families - in defiance of warring factions. Though desperately frightened themselves, they cannot find it in their hearts to turn people away. In the midst of horror, there is comfort in these simple acts of compassion

* Tracy McVeigh in Kalengera, Eastern Congo
* The London Observer, Sunday December 7 2008

The melted handle of a red plastic cup and a snake of blackened cloth are all that remains of someone's home. Burnt-out circles in the grass and charred branches stretch across the plain of Nyabirehe and the smell of the fires is still strong.

Two days earlier, when The Observer passed this field, there were around 200 displaced families living in Swiss roll-shaped huts of grass and banana leaf. 'Everyone is gone,' says a woman plucking at bean stalks in the grass with her son and daughter. 'They're in the communities.' The rebels had burnt them out, she said, and the people were running again. But this time, it seems, they had found a safer refuge.

In remarkable acts of kindness that are being repeated over and over in the red mud villages of this tortured eastern part of the Democratic Republic of Congo, people who themselves have almost nothing are opening their homes to the destitute and displaced in open defiance of the armies warring around them.

The people who had set up home in the open fields of Nyabirehe had fled fighting between government troops and the rebels in their village of Kiwanja, some 15 miles (24km) north, where more than 50 people had been killed.

'The rebel captain came to Nyabirehe and told everyone to leave, that it was shameful to live in camps,' said Nyanzira Vitwaiki, 14. 'He said they are places where spies and enemies hide. They opened fire because people didn't run fast enough. Five people were hurt.'

With her mother and crippled brother, she was taken in by a family of strangers in Kalengera, a sprawling village that sits midway along what is now a rebel-controlled stretch of line that leans out into a semi-circle from a point just outside Goma in the south, up to Ishasa, some 100 miles north, on the Ugandan border. Hundreds of people displaced by the violence of the past month have been taken in by people here...more

link to map

Eagle Pass, TX: Consequences of the Border Fence

Would Eagle Pass be so fortunate that the Obama administration remove the Border Fence? It would be a great "public works" project. I'm sure Obama would have lots of people who would even work for free to demolish it.

National Public Radio (NPR)

December 5, 2008 Friday

SHOW: Morning Edition 10:00 AM EST NPR

Fence Affects Border Town Culture, Relationships

RENEE MONTAGNE, host:

And in this country the government is rushing to finish building 670 miles of fence along the border with Mexico before President Bush leaves office. The Department of Homeland Security says it's on track to complete the project in the coming weeks. In the final installment of our series on the U.S.-Mexico border, NPR's Jason Beaubien visits Eagle Pass, Texas. The Department of Homeland Security sued that city, earlier this year, to clear the way to build the fence.

JASON BEAUBIEN: Eagle Pass bills itself as the place where yeehaw meets ole. Mayor Chad Foster has a sign in his office declaring: Don't build walls between Amigos. He's been one of the most vocal critics of the border fence in Texas. Driving his white Chevy suburban along the bank of the Rio Grande in Eagle Pass, 30-foot-high stalks of bamboo like cane stalks batter the top and sides of his SUV. Rather than building a fence, the mayor says Homeland Security should clear all this overgrown vegetation so border patrol agents can see people crossing the river.

Mayor CHAD FOSTER (Eagle Pass) There could be a 500-pound elephant on fire in here, and we'd never see it.

BEAUBIEN: The federal government is spending billions of dollars to install physical barriers along the southern frontier. The two-mile section that's going in here at Eagle Pass is expected to cost $10 million. A report from the Congressional Research Service suggested installing and maintaining the border wall could cost as much as $49 billion over the next 25 years.

BEAUBIEN: Construction crews are driving 15-foot-high, thick metal posts into the ground along the side of a city park. The new border fence will separate the park and the municipal golf course from the rest of the city. The border patrol plans to put in gates, so that people will still have access to the park, from 6 a.m. to 10 at night. Several guys in a pickup, who've stopped to watch the construction, joke that they'll need their passports now, just to play golf, but Mayor Foster sees it as no joking matter. He insists the park should remain open 24 hours a day, and he says the whole feel of the waterfront is being hurt by the barrier.

Mayor FOSTER: The ambiance is going to be affected. If your friends and neighbors from Mexico are coming in, across our international bridges, a fence or a wall is not an inviting structure.

BEAUBIEN: Reaction to the fence in this small city of about 22,000 people is mixed.

Ms. CARMEN HERNANDEZ (Resident, Eagle Pass): I think it's a protection for the people of Eagle Pass.

BEAUBIEN: Carmen Hernandez says for too long, illegal immigrants and smugglers have been able to freely cross over from Mexico. She acknowledges the new fence isn't going to stop everybody.

Ms. HERNANDEZ: But it will help, especially the ones that are carrying the drugs over, you know, and I feel it's a good protection for us.

Mr. REFUGIO RAMIREZ (Resident, Eagle Pass): This fence really is not going to do anything good.

BEAUBIEN: Refungio Ramirez(ph), like Hernandez, has lived here all his life. He says Mexican migrants are just going to go around or under or over the new barrier.

Mr. RAMIREZ: I'm against illegal immigration, but what they doing. This is not going to stop them. No way. The coyotes are going to keep on doing the job. Yes, sir.

BEAUBIEN: Just behind him, a section of the new barrier slices between a kids' playground and the golf course. Ramirez says all this project has done is make it harder to get to the putting greens. And he continues to prod Hernandez that the government is throwing money away on the fence.

Mr. RAMIREZ: I think to me it's a waste of money.

Ms. HERNANDEZ: There are a lot of things that is a waste of money. A lot of things. Not only the fence.

Mr. RAMIREZ: Not only the fence.

BEAUBIEN: Just across the river from Eagle Pass is the Mexican city of Piedras Negras. Piedras Negras has a population of about 150,000. It's a relatively quaint industrial city as far as border towns go. There's a cobblestone square with a Spanish colonial cathedral just after your cross the bridge. Once a week, there's a flea market in Eagle Pass, and people from Piedras cross the bridge on foot to poke through the merchandise.

Mr. GUILLERMO BIRCHELMANN (Resident, Piedras Negras): We've lived together and intermarried between the two communities.

BEAUBIEN: Guillermo Birchelmann(ph) has lived most of his life in Piedras Negras. He now works for the economic development department of the Mexican state of Coahuila. Birchelmann says people on his side of the border are a bit offended by the fence and don't think it's necessary.

Mr. BIRCHELMANN: First of all, there's a river, but we just don't think that's nice between neighbors, especially neighbors that have seen each other as family all their lives.

BEAUBIEN: Birchelmann says the relationship between Eagle Pass and Piedras Negras is also being strained by waits at the U.S. customs posts of up to an hour and a half. It may be harder for people to cross between Piedras and Eagle Pass, but the volume of goods crossing in trucks and trains continues to grow, and in the coming years, it's expected to increase even more.

(Soundbite of train blowing horn)

BEAUBIEN: Grupo Modelo is building what they claim will be the largest brewery in the world in Piedras. Once it's up and running in 2010, the plant will be able to ship 200 rail cars of Corona every day into the United States. From Eagle Pass and Piedras Negras, the border meanders south into the lush Rio Grande Valley. Much of this international boundary between the world's economic superpower, and its far poorer neighbor, is laden with tension, - tension fueled by an unequal, unavoidable and unsettled relationship. The border cuts through industrial cities, desert, farmland. Two thousand miles from the concertina wire of Tijuana, the border finally slips unmarked into the Gulf of Mexico at a quiet sandy beach. And this line that carries so much significance farther west is lost in the waves. Jason Beaubien. NPR News.

MONTAGNE: See what this big fence looks like and learn about key towns on the changing border from our interactive map at npr.org.

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I - Eating Meat Costs the World Too Much

Did you know the gas emitted by cows is one of the greatest culprits for causing global warming?

Now is also the destruction of lands used to grow the feed for the cows.

The hidden cost of our growing taste for meat

As the west's appetite for meat increases, so too does the demand for soya - used as animal feed by farmers. But the planting of huge tracts of land is causing deforestation and destroying eco-systems in developing countries. 

London Guardian

December 7, 2008

by Juliette Jowit and Oliver Balch in Minga Pora, Paraguay, report

To the European eye, accustomed to square hedgerows and neatly tilled arable land, the countryside of eastern Paraguay is unexceptional, almost pretty. The rolling hills spread out to the far distance. The sky is vast, the horizon broken only by the occasional homestead, leafy copse or bulky metal silo.

But to 47-year-old Melitón Ramírez, this is no paradise. It's a wasteland. Juddering down a farm track in a muddy Jeep, he points to a wide field by the road. It has been sown with soya and the green-leafed plants are sprouting. It looks like a huge bed of wild clover.

'Thirty years ago, almost all of this was woodland,' says Ramírez, who's been a farmer in Alto Paraná state all his life. He grew up surrounded by the Interior Atlantic Forest, listening to the sound of bare-throated bellbirds and saffron toucanets. Before the advent of commercial farming, 85 per cent of eastern Paraguay was forest. Now, with roughly 12 per cent of it still standing, silence fills the air.

'There used to be 2,000 families living here. Now there are only 30, if that,' he continues.

The story of Ramírez's home village of Minga Porá is familiar in South America. It is a story that starts on the dinner tables of the UK and other rich nations, where a hunger for meat and dairy products fuels an ever-rising demand for the industrial farming of animals using high-protein feed. At the bottom of this food chain is the soya plant. Millions of hectares of intensively cultivated soya are gnawing at tropical forests and savannah - displacing farmers and communities, leading to poverty, ill-health and even violence, ruining habitats and exacerbating global warming.

A report by campaign group Friends of the Earth is to be published on Tuesday to focus the attention of UK consumers and the government on the scale of this destruction. It will detail for the first time the cutting, burning and spraying that occurs as a consequence. The report, What's Feeding our Food?, will start a campaign urging the government to take action, ending subsidies and other policies that encourage intensive farming and making sure public money spent on food is not propping up damaging practices.

Across the main soya-producing countries of Brazil, Argentina and Paraguay, an area the size of California has been cleared for this one crop, which is exported around the world, mainly to the European Union and China. As the third biggest customer in the European Union, the UK required nearly 1.2m hectares - an area the size of Devon and Cornwall - to generate the 1.7m tonnes of soya beans and 652,000 tonnes of crushed soya meal imported in the most recent year for which figures are available, 2006-7. That was most of the soya used by UK farmers producing 850 million broiler chickens, 10 billion eggs, 10 million turkeys, 4.9 million pigs and 10 million cattle for dairy and beef. Some of this food is exported, but imports, mostly from the EU, are also reared using soya feed, says the report.

'Even though bacon, burgers, milk and cheese may be produced in the UK, most will have come from animals fed on crops grown on the other side of the world,' it says. Nor is the pace of change slackening: this year official estimates judge that soya production will increase in all three major producers. Although demand for meat is largely flat in the UK, it is growing in developing countries.

Attracted by generous offers from Brazilian-born soya growers, Ramírez's neighbours began selling their plots. Soon herbicides began to contaminate the land and water supplies. His own crops began to fail. Worried the chemicals would harm his family, six years ago Ramírez decided to leave...con't

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II - Eating Meat Costs the World Too Much

The Hidden Cost of Our Taste for Meat
London Guardian
December 7, 2008
con't

The destruction wreaked by soya has forced about 90,000 families in the neighbouring state of Caaguazú to leave their homes since the mid-Nineties, according to Javiera Rulli, a biologist for Asunción-based research group BASE, and the editor of a book on soya's expansion in South America. 'The expansion of GM soya is leading to social conflict and mass migration,' she says.

Some problems are easy to measure, particularly the damage to the Amazon and Atlantic forests and the Cerrado savannah. Only two per cent of Paraguay's tropical and subtropical Atlantic forest is left, according to the report - the same proportion of 16th-century woodland remaining in the UK.

Others problems are anecdotal, but the report cites dozens of incidents and statistics to build up a picture of the complex chain of social problems that can be traced back to the growth of the soya farms. Then there are the health impacts of spraying fertilisers and pesticides.

In Paraguay, in the tiny rural hamlet of San Isidro, resident Cipriano Vega says there has been a surge in diseases that were almost unknown in the community previously. Diarrhoea, rashes, headaches, allergies, chest infections and epilepsy are all commonplace now, he alleges.

The community has asked the local government to test the water supply, but to no avail. Without such data, Vega admits that it is difficult to prove a link to the herbicides. But he is in little doubt. 'The year before last, two kids were born without the ability to move their arms or legs, and two people recently died of brain haemorrhages,' he says.

Although it is hard to prove any one person or village has been poisoned by the farming chemicals, the World Health Organisation estimates that, excluding suicide, 355,000 people a year are poisoned by chemicals, and agrochemicals are a major contributor, particularly pesticides. 'Acute exposure can lead to death or serious illness,' particularly when people live close to where chemicals are used, adds the WHO briefing on toxic hazards.

Not everybody accepts, however, that the problems of soya production are as widespread as campaigners claim.

Robert Newbery, the National Farmers Union's chief poultry adviser, said soya products for animals were only part of a global industry that also produced soya oil for processed food, and most crops were planted on existing agricultural land. Newbery said the NFU would support action to tackle wrongdoing by soya farmers, but said they were confident 'the majority is grown ethically'.

Bunge, which with Cargill is one of the biggest soya production companies in the region, also said it had been working for many years, especially in Brazil, to make the industry more sustainable, backing a moratorium on buying soya from newly deforested parts of the Amazon, and working with the Brazilian Ministry of the Environment on promoting best practices among producers. 'A lot has been done, but there is always more to do,' said a spokesman.

Melitón Ramírez now lives in the optimistically named El Triunfo (The Triumph), a rural settlement off the trunk road heading west from Ciudad del Este. He and his fellow subsistence farmers hope to prevent soya's continual encroachment by joining the ownership of their lands together so the soya farmers can't pick them off one by one.

Back in the UK, FoE is calling for the government to axe subsidies that encourage intensive livestock production, lobby the EU to change trade policies and international aid that bolster the industry, and ensure that the £2.2bn a year spent on food by public bodies such as schools and hospitals does not buy products from intensive soya-fed animals.

'Most people don't realise that there's a hidden chain of events linking the meat and dairy they buy to factory farming and to climate change, deforestation and loss of livelihoods in developing countries,' said Clare Oxborrow, FoE's senior food campaigner. 'The government must revolutionise the way that meat and dairy is produced in this country to urgently tackle these impacts while supporting sustainable UK livestock farming.'
A versatile crop

• Cultivated for thousands of years in China, soya was considered one of five holy crops, along with rice, wheat, barley and millet.

• The beans can be eaten as sprouts, milk, tofu, tempeh, sauce or miso.

• Shoyu is the dark brown liquid produced by fermenting soya beans.

• According to a report in the journal Biology of Reproduction in 2004, soya may delay baldness and help to prevent prostate cancer.

• A two-year study by the Institute for Optimum Nutrition and Copenhagen University Hospital found that soy milk reduces bone loss in post-menopausal women.

• Candles made from soya burn for longer than ones made from pure wax.

• Compounds in soya known as phyto-oestrogens or plant oestrogens mimic the female hormone oestrogen, so a woman drinking two glasses of soya milk a day will alter the timing of her menstrual cycle.

link to complete article

What is your experience with Medical Insurance?

Tom Daschle, the new head of U.S. Health and Human Services is working on fixing our health care problem.  He is asking people to send in their stories about dealing with medical insurance.

send your information to www.change.gov

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Daschle asks Americans for health care stories

By KEVIN FREKING Associated Press Writer
Salon.com

Dec 6th, 2008 | WASHINGTON -- President-elect Barack Obama and his aides are determined not to repeat the mistakes the Clinton administration made 15 years ago in trying to revamp the nation's health care system. Some of the lessons learned: Move fast, seize the momentum and don't let it go.

Tom Daschle, Obama's point man on health reform, discussed the early strategy for revamping the nation's $2 trillion health care system. Details of Obama's proposals won't be finalized for a while, but the political and public relations strategy is coming into place.

The strategy begins with giving people the chance to highlight their concerns and experiences. Daschle invited people around the nation to hold what amounts to house parties from Dec. 15-31. Obama's transition team will gather the information that's provided from those meetings and post the material on its Web site, http://change.gov...

more

Mobilize for the DREAM

This is the moment.  Major societal changes occur during time of leadership transition.  Here is an excerpt from the December 5, 2008 broadcast of Democracy Now.

link to mp3 of interview

This is Media Benjamin, of CODE PINK:

MEDEA BENJAMIN: We feel like this is the moment for us as organizers. Yesterday, there were 2,000 organizers that were brought into Washington, D.C., many of them coming from the community organization where Barack Obama was trained in Chicago, talking about how we have to be there to push this administration forward. Groups are planning, January, February, bringing thousands of people to Washington, and also to be a part of this ten million email list that has been created.

In fact, today they sent out a message from Barack Obama’s people saying we want you to organize house parties December 13th and 14th to give us your ideas, and it’s called “Change Is Coming.” We tell progressives go to those meetings, whether you voted for Ralph Nader, Cynthia McKinney or Barack Obama. Go to those meetings and be part of this community that’s going to have the ear of this new administration. You can go to my.barackobama.com/changeiscoming, find out where the events are, create ones in your own community, and, you know, essentially, have progressives infiltrate this vast network of organizers.

AMY GOODMAN: Do you have any sense you’ll have the ear of the administration?

MEDEA BENJAMIN: We have people we know that have been appointed or are advisers. I mean, we’re excited that some people with some progressive views are going to be in this administration. We have friends who are moving to Washington to take lower-level positions. And we feel like we cannot give up and say, just because we don’t like the cabinet positions, we don’t like a lot of the people he’s appointed, that we’re going to say, OK, you know, he’s already betrayed us. No, no. We’ve got to get in there and be in there from day one.

We’re even part of organizing an inaugural peace ball on the day of the inauguration that sold out in one week, a thousand people—Amy Goodman is going to be there; I hope Juan will be there—to say peace is on the agenda. We’re going to be at the airports. We’re going to be at Union Station in Washington, D.C. when people arrive to the inauguration with quotes of Barack Obama and other people saying, you know, this is what he stood for. He stood for getting the troops out of Iraq. He stood for talks without preconditions. We’re going to remind people as they come in that this is what we’re hoping will happen.

Napolitano, Immigration, and DREAMers: The DREAM is NOW

No longer just HOPE.  The DREAM is now. While Governor of Arizona, Napolitano, who has been named head of the Department of Homeland Security VETOED a bill that would have ended in-state tuition for DREAMers. Obama said he would pass the DREAM Act in the first hundred days. This is the time to mobilize.

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Democrats Should Face the Challenge
Immigration Can't be Neglected

Washington Post
December 3, 2008

...As U.S. attorney for Arizona in the 1990s, she [Janet Napolitano] prosecuted illegal immigrants. As governor of a state that has become the main entry point for illegal aliens, she has backed tough measures to tighten control of the border, including deploying the National Guard.

Faced with an inundation of unauthorized workers and the federal government's inability to act, she also signed a bill cracking down on employers who knowingly hire undocumented workers.

At the same time, she vetoed a bill that would have cut off in-state tuition aid for undocumented college students, even if they were brought to the country as children by their parents. She quashed another bill that would have forced local police to act as stand-in federal immigration agents, arresting illegal residents and, she noted, saddling the state with tens of millions of dollars in expenses.

To Republicans in the party's nativist wing, her attempts to steer a middle course smacked of coddling illegal border-crossers. But voters in conservative-leaning Arizona reelected her by a huge margin in 2006, and she remains enormously popular.

Ms. Napolitano has argued that the federal government must establish a viable system for absorbing migrant workers even as it gets serious about enforcement at the border and in the workplace. She has rolled her eyes at provisions that seem less pragmatic than punitive, such as requiring migrant workers to return home for a year after every two years of work or forcing undocumented heads of household to "touch back" in their country of origin to apply for permanent resident status in the United States.

Resistance to comprehensive reform will be intense, particularly in a lifeless economy with high unemployment. There are 40 million foreign-born people in the country today, the highest proportion in almost a century. That has caused political discomfort not just in cities but in suburban, exurban and rural areas -- the new melting pots where many immigrants, including illegal ones, have settled.

As Ms. Napolitano herself has suggested, the status quo is untenable. Local governments bear the brunt of providing for illegal immigrants and rightly resent it.

Meanwhile, millions of illegal immigrants continue to languish in the shadows of a nation that, even in a stricken economy, offers them better employment prospects than they would have at home.

Working in factories and fields, kitchens and construction sites, they form a huge pool of workers easily exploited by unscrupulous employers, who occasionally rob them of wages. They face apparently random federal raids, which have exposed chilling accounts of workplace abuses. A Republican president tried and failed to right the system. It now poses a critical test for the Democrats...

for complete editorial

Fear is Contagious Too

How long will we stay afraid? The last eight years have put us in a mode of fear. We drive to the airport and there is a big sign that says "terror alert" - usually it has been yellow, but now we are being told it could go up. The Mumbai incident makes people more afraid. Just remember that fear is contagious


America, cowering to an imaginary enemy, is not the country I once knew

Like McCarthy, Bush relied on a synthesised climate of fear. Obama inherits a nation that sees al-Qaida fiends at all turns

by Simon Jenkins in New York
London Guardian
December 5, 2008

America seems much in need of Roosevelt's maxim to stop fearing fear itself. Virtually all comment on the Mumbai massacre has mentioned 9/11 and al-Qaida, and thus invited citizens to continue feeling afraid. No matter that Mumbai appears to have been primarily about Kashmir and the status of India's Muslims. No matter that Osama bin Laden has no dog in that fight. Any stick will do to elevate al-Qaida as America's enemy number one.

Last week, the CIA warned of a terrorist threat that "might be unleashed" during the presidential transition, a threat that George Bush described as "dangerously real". On Wednesday Barack Obama was formally told by a congressional inquiry that "it is more likely than not that a weapon of mass destruction, either nuclear or biological, will be used in a terrorist attack" in his first year of office. The inquiry demanded that an official must be appointed "to oversee efforts to prevent such an attack", as if millions of Americans in and out of uniform were not doing that already...more

link to cartoon

A positive view on what is contagious

No kidding, a study found that if you hang around with someone who is happy, you can catch some of it.  This is an important study for DREAMers, who are under so much stress...  look for friends that are really positive, have a healthy outlook on life... it will help you survive in these hard times...

--

Happiness Can Spread Among People Like a Contagion, Study Indicates

By Rob Stein
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, December 5, 2008; A08

Happiness is contagious, spreading among friends, neighbors, siblings and spouses like the flu, according to a large study that for the first time shows how emotion can ripple through clusters of people who may not even know each other.

The study of more than 4,700 people who were followed over 20 years found that people who are happy or become happy boost the chances that someone they know will be happy. The power of happiness, moreover, can span another degree of separation, elevating the mood of that person's husband, wife, brother, sister, friend or next-door neighbor.

"You would think that your emotional state would depend on your own choices and actions and experience," said Nicholas A. Christakis, a medical sociologist at Harvard University who helped conduct the study published online today by BMJ, a British medical journal. "But it also depends on the choices and actions and experiences of other people, including people to whom you are not directly connected. Happiness is contagious."

One person's happiness can affect another's for as much as a year, the researchers found, and while unhappiness can also spread from person to person, the "infectiousness" of that emotion appears to be far weaker.

Previous studies have documented the common experience that one person's emotions can influence another's -- laughter can trigger guffaws in others; seeing someone smile can momentarily lift one's spirits. But the new study is the first to find that happiness can spread across groups for an extended period.

When one person in the network became happy, the chances that a friend, sibling, spouse or next-door neighbor would become happy increased between 8 percent and 34 percent, the researchers found. The effect continued through three degrees of separation, although it dropped progressively from about 15 percent to 10 percent to about 6 percent before disappearing.

The research follows previous work by Christakis and co-author James H. Fowler that found that obesity also appears to spread from person to person, as does the likelihood of quitting smoking. The researchers have been using detailed records originally collected by the Framingham Heart Study, a long-running project that has explored a host of health issues, to construct and analyze detailed maps of social networks.

The findings, Christakis and others said, provide striking new evidence of the power of social networks, which could have implications for public policy. Happy people tend to be better off in myriad ways, being more creative, productive and healthier.

"For a long time, we measured the health of a country by looking at its gross domestic product," said Fowler, a political scientist at the University of California at San Diego who co-authored the study. "But our work shows that whether a friend's friend is happy has more influence than a $5,000 raise. So at a time when we're facing such economic difficulties, the message could be, 'Hang in there. You still have your friends and family, and these are the people to rely on to be happy.' "

Other experts praised the study as a landmark in the growing body of evidence documenting the influence of personal connections and the importance of positive emotions.

"It's a pathfinding article," said Martin E.P. Seligman, a University of Pennsylvania psychologist. "It's totally original, and the findings are striking."

Stanley Wasserman, who studies social networks at Indiana University, said: "We've known that one's network ties are important, but we've never looked at anything on this scale. The implications are you can't look at individuals as little entities devoid of their social context."

Others, however, questioned the findings, noting that it is difficult to account for every variable that might affect the outcomes of such studies.

"Researchers should be cautious in attributing correlations in health outcomes of close friends in social network effects," wrote Ethan Cohen-Cole of the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston and Jason M. Fletcher of Yale University in an accompanying study. Their research used data from a large federal survey to show that acne, headaches and even height could appear to spread through social networks if not analyzed properly. "The methods of detecting 'social network effects' of health outcomes commonly found in the recent medical literature might produce effects where none exists."

But Christakis said his analysis took other possible explanations into consideration.

Ed Diener, a psychologist at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, said the findings could explain why people in some countries tend to be happier than others. "This is an extremely exciting study -- interesting, provocative and important," Diener said.

While obesity appeared to spread even among people who lived far apart, happiness appears to be transmitted only among people who live within a mile of one another. The influence was also greatest among people who considered themselves mutual friends.

Because the researchers did not find the effect for people living on the same block beyond a next-door neighbor, they were confident that the positive mood was not the result of living in the same good neighborhood. Because people tended to get happier if someone they knew became happy, the researchers could rule out the alternative explanation that happy people tend to be drawn to each other.

"We know it's not a 'birds of a feather flock together' effect," Christakis said.

Surprisingly, happiness had no such effect at work. The researchers speculated that work relationships may have different dynamics. One worker might become happy because he or she got a raise or a promotion at the expense of another, for example.

Unhappiness also appeared to be catching, but not as strongly: An unhappy connection increased the chances of being unhappy by about 7 percent on average, while a happy connection increased the chances of being happy by about 9 percent. While having more friends is important for a person's happiness, the benefit of having more friends appears to be canceled out if they are unhappy, the researchers found.

The researchers and others speculated that the emotion may be important on an evolutionary level by helping people cooperate. Seligman likened happiness to an orchestra tuning up.

"Laughter and singing and smiling tune the group emotionally," Seligman said. "They get them on the same wavelength so they can work together more effectively as group."

Money for Bankers but not for Autoworkers

In this morning's New York Times, there is a full page ad on page A7 that states

We are not bankers

We don't work on Wall Street or for big insurance companies...If we go out of business, so will thousands of other businesses.  If we lose our jobs, so will millions of others...

...if Wall street can get help, so should Main Street"

It is true that the auto makers showed up asking for money after flying to D.C. in their private jets. But didn't the bankers do the same? 

Today's paper shows a photo of the auto guys driving to D.C. It's almost comical.  Why aren't their photos of AIG driving around in cars for middle class people?

Yes, the automakers killed the electric car, ignored the impending environmental pressure to make fuel efficient cars. None of this can be denied. Yet, the bankers made their own share of mistakes, and those mistakes have been felt all over the world.

The bankers and AIG showed up without a plan. Well, I should take that back. AIG showed up with a plan (they didn't talk openly about) to have a fancy party a few days later.

The automakers had not game plan and were laughed at. 

For a few days I've been thinking about the difference between a Wall Street Banker and an Auto Worker. Detroit and Manhattan are two distinct worlds.  Yet, if you think about it, even with a bailout, lots of bankers still lost their jobs.  Seems like the only people that really win in these rescues are the guys at the top.

Even so, it seems like the Congress intends to make a point of the difference between the banks and the car makers.

p.s. We are back to the consumer supporting the provider.  The automakers make big SUV's because WE bought them.  Even Obama owns one.

link to photo

I - Obama's Heritage of Political Activism

Interesting how leadership and activism often don't just erupt in a person.  Obama is a third generation political mover...  Think of the difference between the first generation and the third.

On another note.  The London Times has a knack for bad titles...

--

From The [London] Times
December 3, 2008
Beatings and abuse made Barack Obama’s grandfather loathe the British

by Ben Macintyre and Paul Orengoh 

The President-elect’s relatives have told how the family was a victim of the Mau Mau revolt

Barack Obama’s grandfather was imprisoned and brutally tortured by the British during the violent struggle for Kenyan independence, according to the Kenyan family of the US President-elect.

Hussein Onyango Obama, Mr Obama’s paternal grandfather, became involved in the Kenyan independence movement while working as a cook for a British army officer after the war. He was arrested in 1949 and jailed for two years in a high-security prison where, according to his family, he was subjected to horrific violence to extract information about the growing insurgency.

“The African warders were instructed by the white soldiers to whip him every morning and evening till he confessed,” said Sarah Onyango, Hussein Onyango’s third wife, the woman Mr Obama refers to as “Granny Sarah”.

Mrs Onyango, 87, described how “white soldiers” visited the prison every two or three days to carry out “disciplinary action” on the inmates suspected of subversive activities.

“He said they would sometimes squeeze his testicles with parallel metallic rods. They also pierced his nails and buttocks with a sharp pin, with his hands and legs tied together with his head facing down,” she said The alleged torture was said to have left Mr Onyango permanently scarred, and bitterly antiBritish. “That was the time we realised that the British were actually not friends but, instead, enemies,” Mrs Onyango said. “My husband had worked so diligently for them, only to be arrested and detained.”

Mr Obama refers briefly to his grandfather’s imprisonment in his best-selling memoir, Dreams from My Father, but states that his grandfather was “found innocent” and held only for “more than six months”.

Mr Onyango served with the British Army in Burma during the Second World War and, like many army veterans, he returned to Africa hoping to win greater freedoms from colonial rule. Although a member of the Luo tribe from western Kenya, he sympathised with the Kikuyu Central Association, the organisation leading an independence movement that would evolve into the bloody uprising known as the Mau Mau rebellion.

“He did not like the way British soldiers and colonialists were treating Africans, especially members of the Kikuyu Central Association, who at the time were believed to be secretly taking oaths which included promises to kill the white settlers and colonialists,” Mrs Onyango said.

In his book, Mr Obama implies that his grandfather was not directly involved in the anticolonial agitation, but his grandmother said that her husband had supplied information to the insurgents. “His job as cook to a British army officer made him a useful informer for the secret oathing movement which would later form the Mau Mau rebellion,” she said. The Mau Mau used oaths as part of their initiation ceremony.

Mr Onyango was probably tried in a magistrates’ court on charges of political sedition or membership of a banned organisation, but the records do not survive because all such documentation was routinely destroyed in British colonies after six years.

“To arrest a Luo ex-soldier, who must have been a senior figure in the community, is pretty serious. They must have had some damn good evidence,” said Professor David Anderson, director of the African Studies Centre at the University of Oxford and an authority on the Mau Mau rebellion.

The British responded to the Mau Mau uprising with draconian violence: at least 12,000 rebels were killed, most of them Kikuyu, but some historians believe that the overall death toll may have been more than 50,000. In total, just 32 European settlers were killed.

According to his widow, Mr Onyango was denounced to the authorities by his white employer, who sacked him on suspicion of consorting with “troublemakers”. He may also have been the victim of a feud with an African neighbour who worked in the district commissioner’s office. Mr Onyango, notoriously outspoken, appears to have accused this official of corruption.

According to Mrs Onyango, her husband was arrested by two soldiers, and taken to Kamiti prison, the national maximum-security prison outside Nairobi.

“This was like a death camp because some detainees died while being tortured,” Mrs Onyango said. “We were not allowed to see him, not even taking him food.” She said her husband was told that he would be killed or maimed if he refused to reveal what he knew of the insurgency, and was beaten repeatedly until he promised “never to rejoin any groupings opposed to the white man’s rule”. Even after he had confessed, and renounced the insurgency, the physical abuse allegedly continued.

Some of Mr Onyango’s fellow inmates were beaten to death with clubs, according to Mrs Onyango. “In fact, my late husband was lucky to have left the prison alive without any serious bodily harm, save for the permanent scars from beatings and torture, which remained on his body till he died.”

Like all family histories, retold many years after the events, some elements of Mrs Onyango’s account are hazy. For example, the white men she described as “soldiers” are far more likely to have been Special Branch officers, who wore a uniform that was indistinguishable from military uniform to most Africans.

Mrs Onyango also described an incident of her husband’s “torture”, which was nothing of the sort. “The white soldiers would spray his body with an itching chemical. This, he said, could make him scratch his body till it bled.” Almost certainly, Mr Onyango was being treated for body lice but apparently he was so used to brutality that he assumed the routine chemical delousing treatment was another form of abuse.

During Mr Obama’s first visit to Kenya in 1988, his grandmother recalled the growing resentment against white colonial rule in Kenya, with rallies and mounting violence that would explode into full-scale rebellion in 1952. “Most of this activity centred on Kikuyuland,” she told him. “But the Luo, too, were oppressed, a main source of forced labour. Men in our area began to join the Kikuyu in demonstrations . . . many men were detained, some never to be seen again.”

The British colonial authorities began a sustained campaign to quell the Mau Mau uprising, establishing numerous detention camps that some historians describe as “Kenya’s Gulag”, where inmates were frequently abused. “There was torture in Kenya during the Mau Mau emergency, institutional and systematic, and also casual and haphazard,” Professor Anderson writes in Histories of the Hanged: Britain’s Dirty War in Kenya and the End of Empire (2005). “Violence . . . was intrinsic to the system, and the use of force to compel obedience was sanctioned at the highest level.”

At the height of the rebellion, an estimated 71,000 Kenyans were held in prison camps. The vast majority were never convicted. Letters smuggled out of the camps complained of systematic brutality by warders and guards. According to the Harvard historian Caroline Elkins, who won a Pulitzer Prize for her exposé of British atrocities during the Mau Mau uprising, there were reports of sexual violence and mutilation using “castration pliers”. “This was an instrument devised to crush the men’s testicles,” she writes in Britain’s Gulag: The Brutal End of Empire in Kenya (2005). “Other detainees also described castration pliers, along with other methods of beating and mutilating men’s testicles.”

Several hundred letters from camp inmates survive in the Kenyan National Archives, “chronicling camp conditions, forced labour, torture, starvation and murder”, according to Ms Elkins. One white policeman, Duncan McPherson, told Barbara Castle, the former MP, that conditions in some detention camps were “worse, far worse, than anything I experienced in my 4½ years as a prisoner of the Japanese”.

Mr Onyango was 56 when he was arrested, and he emerged from imprisonment prematurely aged and deeply embittered. In his memoir, Mr Obama described his grandfather’s shocking physical state: “When he returned to Alego he was very thin and dirty. He had difficulty walking, and his head was full of lice.” For some time, he was too traumatised to speak about his experiences. Mrs Onyango told her grandson: “From that day on, I saw that he was now an old man.”

Understandably, Mr Onyango held a lifelong grudge against the British for the way he had been treated, yet he was doubtful that the independence movement would succeed. “How can the African defeat the white man,” he told his son, “when he cannot even make his own bicycle?”

Barack Obama Sr, Mr Onyango’s son and the President-elect’s father, seems to have inherited his father’s attitudes towards the colonial power. He was also arrested, for attending a meeting in Nairobi of the Kenya African National Union (Kanu), the organisation spearheading the independence movement. Mrs Onyango told Mr Obama that his father, unlike her husband, had been held only for a short time in the white man’s prison: “Because he was not a leader in Kanu, Barack was released after a few days.”

Mr Onyango was a victim of the fight for Kenyan independence, but his son became a direct beneficiary of that movement. In 1960, Barack Obama Sr travelled on a scholarship to the University of Hawaii, as part of a programme (sponsored by John F. Kennedy) to train young Kenyans to rule their own country.

Mrs Onyango said that the combative spirit shown by her husband during Kenya’s bloody independence struggle has passed down through the generations to the future president. “This family lineage has all along been made up of fighters,” she said. “Senator Barack Obama is fighting using his brain, like his father, while his grandfather fought physically with the white man.”

Bloody birth of a nation

— In 1895, the British Government establishes the East Africa Protectorate and opens up the fertile highlands of Kenya to whites

— Kenya becomes a British colony in 1920. A year later, members of the Kikuyu tribe, angered by exclusion from political representation, form Kenya’s first African political protest movement

— In 1952, the Mau Mau rebellion against colonial rule erupts and for the next seven years Kenya is under a state of emergency

— Uprising is put down by military action and the detention of thousands of Mau Mau suspects in prison camps. Only 32 European civilians are killed in the violence, but more than 50,000 Africans are believed to have died

— Kenya becomes independent on December 12, 1963, with Jomo Kenyatta elected its first President

II Obama's Heritage of Political Activism

Here are comments from the London Times articles on Obama's grandfather's association with the Kenya African Union

link to comments

Emma, Southampton UK You are quite right in arguing that history is never that clear cut as to label good and bad guys. The problem is that a certain influential world leader forcibly defined several nations as all "evil "and others including his own country as all "good".

M.Murakami, Tokyo, Japan

Unfortunate incident however, we shouldn’t lose sight of the brutality of the Mau that brought on that sort of response. And the truth is that Kenya has gained far more from colonialism than it lost, today's Kenya's ministers still regard foreigners as a convenient cash cow.

Andrew , Adelaide, Australia

The British will definitely have committed sins in the colonial era, some government instructed and some through soldiers own behaviour.

I am not sure of the point of dragging this up again. This was quite some time ago. Britain is not the same now and did many good things in its past.

Talese Amer, Londontown,

Mr Woodward in Manchester omits that slavery in the US was, pre-independence - British. It is unfair to call it America's original sin...It was simply another in a long litany of European imperial sins. One of which was Kenya.
Stockton Mick and Dublin Mick: same person? Bit like Ireland and UK...

GB, Berlin, Germany

If you are interviewing Sarah Onyango, why don't you ask her where exactly Obama was born? I thought she was not allowed to speak to reporters.

Mary, Oklahoma, USA

The British never left Kenya. They own huge acres of land in Rift Valley Province; control tourism, tourist resorts hotels everywhere in Kenya. Tribalism and tribal strifes in Kenya are merely divide and conquer British tools unleashed by British trained Africans homeguards posing as leaders!

AKECH, New Brunswick,

It's payback time!

You Brits better watch out ;-)

rachael78, New York, USA

Made "civilised"? Big cities, capitalism and tea parties are not the only definition of civilisation.

Before the Roman Empire tribes of "barbarians" roamed Europe and killed each other and the Romans made them civilised by, erm, killing them. Yes, very logical.

AnneMarie, Cork,

The abundance of cameras makes this very hard to do today. I mean, look at the very benign torture that was exposed at Abu Griab. Even the communist country of China can't hide their atrocities.

I hope Obama isn't hiding a grudge that will destroy many.

Timuchin, Jacksonville, FL, USA

Yes, that sort of thing happens all over, but how much of it is told to tell the TRUTH; for instance, here in America, Palm Beach, Florida where blacks lived on the Island in little shanty shacks that Flagler himself had burned down and proclaimed he was the first to inhibite the Island. Not true.

Ms. Machalle Brown, West Palm Beach, USA

This is not surprising. Britain and Europe in general are notoriously, violently racist societies, far more than the US ever was. The sad part is that you still are, and yet you don't even realize it, that's how much racism is ingrained in your "enlightened" society.

Cherry, Brooklyn, NY, USA

I´ve no doubt that the British tortured in every colony Why are people so defensive about ´´their ´´ancestors..Look at the recent events in Kenya, torture and indiscriminate killings commonplace.Why should Obama hate the Brits,anymore than white Americans for the they treat black Americans in USA.

edward donagher, ajijic, mexico

""Hopefully Obama is sensible and educated enough not judge a nation of 6m people on the actions of a few.""

Isn't this what the rest of the world did to innocent citizens of the U.S. when you assaulted and abused us for one man's policies? So how tight does that shoe feel on the other foot now?

Cherry, Brooklyn, NY, USA

Every country can be held responsible for things like this:
US- slaughter of Native Americans
Spain- slaughter of South Americans
Turkey- Armenian Genocide
Germany- Holocaust
France-slave trade
Rwanda- Genocide
Its everywhere! The Brits upheld law and order for a long period of time and helped many.

George Woodward, Manchester, UK

The problem with this story is the Mau Mau emergency was not declared until 3 years after Obama's father's supposed work.His relatives also claimed Barack Obama was born in Kenya. Elkin's book was a work of "advocacy"- as she admitted..

Peter Gee, Nairobi,

While the treatment of Obama's father does Britain no credit, perhaps his grandson would do well to reflect that had he been born in Afghanistan and acted in a similar fashion, he might now be languishing in Guantanamo Bay.
Hopefully this will enable him to take positive steps to prevent terrorism.

Mike, Eastbourne, UK

By 1953, almost half of all Kikuyus had no land claims at all. The results were worsening poverty, starvation, unemployment and overpopulation. The economic bifurcation of the Kikuyu set the stage for what was essentially a civil war within the Kikuyu during the Mau Mau Revolt.

Winston Montgomery, Cors, Wales

By 1948, 1.25 million Kikuyu were restricted to 2000 square miles (5,200 km²), while 30,000 settlers occupied 12,000 square miles (31,000 km²). The most desirable agricultural land was almost entirely in the hands of European settlers.

Winston Montgomery, Cors, Wales

Christine, USA.

Smallpox infected blankets.....

I presume your ancestors were plains Indians. I'd suggest looking a little closer to home for the big player killer of Plains Indians than here.....

Personally I'll never forgive the Italians for the sacking of Iceni.

Dave St Peters, London,

The wider point was that this happened 60 years ago and Britain's standards have supposedly changed since then. Guantanamo suggests that America's have not. We cannot change history, only the future. The best way we can honour Obama's grandfather and others like him is ensuring it never recurs.

Jonathan, London,

Hopefully Obama is sensible and educated enough not judge a nation of 6m people on the actions of a few. Every nation on this earth - Obama's included - has shameful events in their histories. Hindsight makes it easy to label good and bad guys - in reality history is never that clear cut.

Emma, Southampton, UK

It is so sad to read the comments that the British 'civilized' other societies. You certainly weren't very civilized when you supplied pox infected blankets to my ancestors! Civilized? You take but those you took from were not happy shining your boots or making your tea? Clean your mirror!

Cristine, NC, USA

does mick from dublin want a lollipop? or just a little footnote about ireland and some sympathy? Sounds to me like Obama's great grandfather was nothing more than a traitor and was treated accordingly. This article takes a dangerously sympathetic and casual outlook on the actions of the Mau Mau..

Rob, London,

For matt who thinks Caroline Elkin's work was sensational, you can thank your propaganda machinery. please come to kenya one day and let me introduce me to some survivors of the British Gulag then you can speak with authority. better still you can visit your colonial office and ask to see the record

Wachira, Nakuru, Kenya

I think calling the British Empire "evil" is a display of profound ignorance. Sadly, it's the product of national masochism - rather than see the good and the bad, we choose to only see the bad. Law, order, intolerance, servitude, education, justice, injustice - these were all parts of the Empire.

James David, Newcastle upon Tyne, UK

mike, stockton, uk: In my travels when I indicate that I'm Irish not English, people generally launch into an unwanted tirade of abuse about the Brits. I guess they mean people like you. At a time when peace is finally achieved in the North, I find your comments provocative and far from civilised.

Claire, Brussels, Belgium

Of course the Mau Mau never tortured anyone and always respected human rights and treated British soldiers and Kenyan police officers according to the Geneva Convention. They also never organised themselves into gangs butchering loyalist Africans with machetes. Rose tinted history is great isn't it?

John, Manchester, UK

I think if Mick Stockton reads his history books again he will find that it was the Irish missionaries in the Dark ages who civilised not only England but Europe as well.

mick, preston, england

You may want to mention that Caroline Elkins work has been overwhelmingly criticised, with many stating it's purely sensationalist, one stating "'I shudder for those of her students who expect academic rigour: Elkins doesn't let facts stand in the way of a good rant.'" .

matt, nottingham,

There seem to be many notions this article inspires. My take away was that the life of a father effects, but is never the same as the life of the son. That and how amazing opportunities can change in a generation.

Mary, Chicago, USA

Seems fairly likely; we certainly behaved quite badly in Kenya.

David, Maldon, UK

You don't gain and maintain an Empire by being nice to people. Look at all the Empires throughout history. We have to remember the world is a very different place to even 50 years ago. It is very easy to get on our human rights high horse and condemn every Empire throughout history.

Chris, London, UK

What a suprise - the Empire tortured people. It's not an unusal story, it's a well known fact that the British Empire was as brutal and represive as allmost any other - the actions of the Colonial autoritys are directly comparable to those of figures such as Mao, Pinochet or Stalin. It was evil.

James, London, UK

Ah ha, some compensation seems to be called for, I'm sure we can pay for one of our human rights lawyers to represent the family, which will soon number in the thousands.

John, lincoln,

Today the Americans and the British just use African dictators to do that to Africans. Witness all the papa leaders they patron like Museveni. The American's fund and arm Meles of Ethiopia to brutally occupy Somalia. Nothing has changed.

Sam Hudson, London, UK

wish we had done a better job!

Maybe Irish Mick should realise Ireland wouldnt be civilised if it was not for the British!

mike, stockton, uk

Barack Obama must therefore know in his heart that no matter who does it or when it occurs in the historical sense torture is wrong, tends to create destructive attitudes in both the torturer and the victim and has no place in a modern civilised nation. We must hope he puts that lesson into practice

Chris Coles, Medstead, Alton, United Kingdom

Small World. What a turnaround!

rosalie a abbey, Phoenix,

Since William Ayers wrote most of Obama's first book, we should ask Ayers how Obama described this to him. That would tell us how Obama regards the British and the white man in general. That would be an interesting conversation.

Lee Ruth, Athens, USA

They did the same to the Irish...for about 300 years.

Mick, Dublin, Ireland

Given the difference in the stories told, I would say one is probably true and the other a total fiction told for attention.

Nona, New York City, USA

So the Obama's Granfather betrayed those who trusted and provided a living for him, put his British friends lives at risk, became a non-uniformed combatant spy for the rebels, and when caught (in an age when spies would be automatically shot) THEN he realised that the British were the enemy!

Tom Genin, Seymour, CT

What a sad tale of oppression. Present day African leaders treat their own kind just as cruelly as the Brits treated the Africans if not worse. Idi Amin comes to mind, Rwanda's genocide, Sudan, Darfur et al. Humans are the cruellest of all creatures and yet they can also be the noblest. Strange!

Naomi, Lodi, USA

The ways of empire and occupation don't change. Direct link from Kenya to Palestine to Iraq and Afghanistan. Dear professor claims it was white man's burden eh..

rh, la, us

III Obama's Heritage of Political Activism

They Fought For Britian, then turned to rebellion
December 3, 2008
London Times

by David Anderson

The story of Hussein Onyango Obama’s political activism will make Kenyans proud, and might also give some Americans a new insight into their President-elect. Having answered the call to join the British Army during the Second World War, Barack Obama’s grandfather was among 75,000 Kenyans who served in Burma. Demobilised after the war, they came home with bulging pockets and high expectations. But having fought for freedom against the Japanese, they returned to a colony that had little to offer.

Unable to find dignified jobs, and thwarted in their efforts to invest their savings in small businesses by colonial rules and regulations, the ex-soldiers became disillusioned and dangerous. Obama plied his trade as a cook, and took domestic service with a British Army officer in the White Highlands.

As a new nationalist politics emerged after 1945 to challenge colonial rule in Kenya, the returning soldiers were in the vanguard of protest. Some affiliated to the KCA (Kikuyu Central Association). Later many more flocked to the broader-based KAU (Kenya African Union) that replaced the KCA in 1946. Obama, a Luo from Nyanza province in the west of the country, was among many for whom the nationalist reach of the KAU held appeal.

The KAU had begun organising the collection of funds by 1947. The next year a more radical group within the KAU, led by former army comrades from the Burma front, had secretly begun other collections that would buy the weapons with which the Mau Mau embarked upon its rebellion.

Was [Hussein Onyando] Obama connected with this radical ginger group? It is impossible for us to know for sure, and it is doubtful that even his family would have been aware of the political machinations within the KAU at the time, but it does seem the most plausible reason for his arrest and trial in 1949.

Those convicted of political subversion, or of membership of unregistered or banned political organisations, were liable to prison sentences. Violence was endemic in Kenya’s penal system long before the Mau Mau rebellion. Even in the 1930s and 1940s beatings and other punishments were routine. As a prisoner convicted of a political charge, Obama would certainly have been subjected to interrogations by Special Branch, who by 1950 were keen to find out as much as they could about the embryonic Mau Mau movement.

His disillusionment with the British after his incarceration is hardly surprising. But it seems not to have dented his political will. His son, Barack Obama’s father, briefly returned to Kenya after his education in the US and became a supporter of Kenya’s ruling nationalist party under Jomo Kenyatta. But when, in 1965, Kenyatta reneged on his promises to bring social democracy to Kenyans through building a welfare state and consolidating land reform, Obama’s father took up his pen. Writing in the influential magazine the East African Journal, he chastised Kenyatta and his Government for lacking the courage of their convictions. He lamented that without the reforms that were so urgently needed, Kenya’s social problems would haunt its future.

Amid the burning farms and violent mayhem of the early months of 2008, these words were grimly prophetic.

David Anderson is Professor of African Politics and director of the African Studies Centre at the University of Oxford

DREAMers: Don't Follow Advice Blindly - investigate before you act

Daniela Aguado was told by university officials that she needed to go to Mexico so that she could take care of documentation that would make her eligible for a scholarship. THEY WERE WRONG. Daniela should not have followed their recommendations. Anytime you get advice regarding immigration issues, talk to a lawyer before you do anything.

Since she had lived in the U.S. as an undocumented person, she was not allowed back into the country.

LDS Membership to Church Leaders on Immigration: Take a Hike

BY DAVE BENNION
PUBLISHED DECEMBER 02, 2008 @ 08:26PM PST

Change.org

Daniela Aguado was a star student at her high school in Arizona and wanted to attend college. Just one problem: she was undocumented. Acting on some dodgy legal advice, she left the country to apply for a student visa to try to qualify for a scholarship to Brigham Young University.

"And that's when they told me I couldn't receive the student visa because i have lived in the states without a student visa before. And that probably I was taking advantage of the country and the government." Daniella recalls.

And now she's stuck in Mexico.

BYU was the university I first attended after high school. The school's motto is "The World Is Our Campus," an extension of the LDS church's goal to become a global institution. With over 50,000 missionaries spread out around the world, learning the language and absorbing the culture of almost every country on the planet, the church's membership is remarkably cosmopolitan. Many of those missionaries return to the States--or come here from their homelands--to attend BYU.

But that didn't stop Republican voters in Utah County--which includes Provo and BYU--from sending diehard conservative Chris Cannon packing in the primary election earlier this year. (This was a rare victory for a restrictionist politician--the trend has run the other way for the last two years.) The main reason for Cannon's defeat at the hands of former BYU football player Jason Chaffetz: he was too conciliatory to immigrants, and had some kind words to say about Utah's Latin@ population.

From the article, I see that Daniela attended church regularly with her family before they were separated indefinitely ... planning to attend BYU ... I'll go out on a limb and guess that she's a baptized member of the LDS church.

One who now can't attend the LDS school of her choice, find an LDS spouse there, excel in a career in the U.S., or even see her family in this country.

How this advances the goals of the church to keep LDS families together and build a global organization is not clear. The church itself intervened earlier this year when the Utah state legislature was on the brink of passing an Oklahoma-style enforcement-only bill. One member of the legislature characterized the church's position as "Take a step back, be calm, and above all remember that we are dealing with human beings here." The bill that passed wasn't good. But it could have been much worse.

But the individual members of the church who voted for Chaffetz weren't thinking about Daniela or her family. They weren't even listening to the church leadership. It's one reason the institutional church's worst enemy is sometimes its own membership (passage of Prop 8 is another, though that had support from the top).

BBC stays quiet on Somali Piracy Incident

It doesn't just happen in the United States...

----

World Service dropped report on piracy after Foreign Office request
• Journalists protest at threat to independence
• Network says decision was made for sake of hostages

* Leigh Holmwood
* The Guardian, Thursday December 4 2008


The BBC has been accused of putting the independence of the World Service at risk after agreeing to pull an episode of the series From Our Own Correspondent following a request from the Foreign Office.

Angry World Service staff and union officials said the decision to withdraw the programme, about the Somalia pirate hijackings, could "seriously damage" the Foreign Office-funded operation's reputation for independent journalism.

The programme, about how reporter Mary Harper was able to speak to the pirates holding the Sirius Star and its captain, had been broadcast on Radio 4 and 48 times on the World Service network before the Foreign Office intervention on Sunday.

Sources said the FCO had asked for the programme to be pulled as it claimed that after each broadcast the phonelines to the Sirius Star were blocked by callers - even though the number was not aired - and that it was hampering efforts by Saudi Arabia to end the hijack...more

Odetta, voice of civil rights movement

This morning, I looked through the news and really had no motivation to write about violence or the automaker's begging in Washington.  For a moment I thought, maybe I won't even post today.  But then I looked at the NYT front page and found this video about Odetta, who died yesterday.  

dreamacttexas highly recommends you take the time to view the entire video

link to Odetta video

link to photo

Making the DREAM ACT Happen

Pass the DREAM Act Now!

Change.org
Every year, thousands of undocumented American students graduate from college and high school, and face a roadblock to their dreams -- they can't drive, can't work legally, can't get loans or establish credit, can't further their education, and can't contribute to the economy. It is a classic case of lost potential and broken dreams.

The federal DREAM Act (Development, Relief, and Education for Alien Minors Act), is a bipartisan legislation that would permit a select group of undocumented students conditional legal status and eventual citizenship granted that they meet the following requirements:
--if they were brought to the United States before they turned 16, are below the age of 30,
--have lived here continuously for five years,
--graduated from a U.S. high school or obtained a GED
--have good moral character with no criminal record and
--attend college or enlist in the military for at least two years.

Barack Obama has stated that undocumented students brought up in the United States are "American for all intents and purposes." Senator Richard Durbin has implored Congress to "give these kids a chance." Republican Sen. Orrin Hatch has said: “In short, although these children have built their lives here, they have no possibility of achieving and living the American dream. What a tremendous loss for them, and what a tremendous loss to our society.”

Why penalize children for the actions of their parents? Why throw away the talent we have invested in from K-12 right when we can make use of it? Why deport students from the ONLY home they have ever known?

Let's bring these students out of the shadows, out from underground. Tell President-Elect Obama to pass the DREAM Act in 2009. Talented students and their families living in fear of raids and ripped apart by deportations, cannot afford to wait for change.

- DreamACTivist . (MA Graduate DREAMer - Blogger), San Francisco, CA Nov 24 @ 01:27PM PST

Thanks to S. Aran for passing this along

Work Place ICE Raids Ending?

Ashville Citizen Times

December 2, 2008 Tuesday
Shuler to tackle immigration again next year

by DOUG ABRAHMS

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., plans to take up more comprehensive immigration reform but still is working with the new Obama administration on timing, said Jon Summers, a Reid spokesman.

The Obama administration is likely to focus on a more comprehensive immigration plan and cut back on workplace raids, which the Bush administration increased over the past few years, said Ali Noorani, Executive Director of the National Immigration Forum. The group -- which represents attorneys, business groups, the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops and immigration-rights groups -- opposes Shuler's bill and favors larger reforms that include speeding up the naturalization process and increasing guest worker programs.

Illegal immigrants deported from Georgia, South Carolina and North Carolina jumped from 10,996 in 2007 to 17,882 last year, according to the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency. This doesn't include the 57 employees at Mills Manufacturing in Woodfin who were arrested in August and face deportation for reportedly entering and working in the U.S. illegally.

"The evidence points that worksite raids are not a good resource of time and money," Noorani said. "We've not addressed the root problem here -- which is having one workforce exploited at the expense of another."

Arresting illegal immigrants rips apart families, harms communities' economies and doesn't create new job openings, he said.

Few expect immigration to be a hot topic early next year because all the attention will be focused on the economy. The E-Verify program is set to expire in March unless Congress renews it, which could set off an immigration debate...more

360 migrants killed in Yemen in 2008

Smugglers Kill more than 20 Refugees in Gulf of Aden

London Guardian

December 2, 2008

At least 20 refugees have drowned after smugglers forced 115 people overboard while crossing the Gulf of Aden, the UN's refugee agency said today.

The incident takes the number of people killed making the hazardous crossing to Yemen to at least 380 this year, with another 360 feared dead, according to the office of the UN high commissioner for refugees (UNHCR).

"At least 20 people drowned off the coast of Yemen yesterday and two were reported missing after smugglers carrying them across the Gulf of Aden from the Horn of Africa forced them to jump overboard in deep water," said Ron Redmond, a spokesman for UNHCR.

The survivors, many of whom are Ethiopians, were "sick and exhausted from the trauma of the voyage", AFP reported.

Redmond said the remaining 93 passengers made it to shore in Yemen and were transferred to a reception centre.

The Gulf of Aden is a busy shipping lane, vital for transporting oil and gas and notorious for piracy. It is also used for human trafficking, as smugglers transport people from Somalia to Yemen.

Thousands of Somalis, many fleeing violence in their homeland, and others from Eritrea, Ethiopia and as far away as Sri Lanka, arrive in Yemen - which has an open door policy for refugees - every year. On average an estimated 100 people a day arrive after making the 36-hour journey between September and March.

Last month, UNCHR said up to 40 people on a boat smuggling people across the Gulf of Aden from Somalia were forced overboard in deep water off the Yemeni coast.

UNHCR and other international agencies have called for global action to address the problem and have opened an additional reception centre for survivors.

At Least W Regrets Something

BBC News
December 1, 2008
Bush regrets Iraqi WMD failure

President Bush looks back on eight years in the White House

Outgoing US President George Bush has said his biggest regret is the failure of intelligence over Iraqi weapons.

In a wide-ranging TV interview, he declined to say whether he would have decided to invade Iraq if he had known it had no weapons of mass destruction.

Asked about what he regarded as his greatest achievement, Mr Bush said that his administration had fought a war against "ideological thugs".

Mr Bush will hand over to President-elect Barack Obama on 20 January.

The outgoing president told ABC television: "The biggest regret of all the presidency has to have been the intelligence failure in Iraq."

He added: "I wish the intelligence had been different."

Asked what his greatest accomplishment was, Mr Bush replied: "I keep recognising we're in a war against ideological thugs and keeping America safe."

He also defended his actions over the recent economic crises.

"When the history of this period is written, people will realise a lot of the decisions that were made on Wall Street took place over a decade or so," he told ABC.

Mr Bush - whose approval ratings are at an historic low - said he was happy for history to be his judge.

"I will leave the presidency with my head held high," he said.

link to interview

It takes a Consumer to Support a Provider: U.S. role in the Mexican Drug Cartel War

Mexico must be losing lots of tourism dollars these days. So many people don't want to travel there anymore. But whatever is lost must not be much in comparison to what Mexico gains from its narco-traficante industrial complex.

As quoted by the Dallas Morning News, U.S. Ambassador to Mexico, Tony Garza stated: "Mexico would not be the center of cartel activity or be experiencing this level of violence, were the United States not the largest consumer of illicit drugs and the main supplier of weapons to the cartels"


In other words, it takes two to tango, and the U.S. & Mexico have been longtime dancing partners.

Outgoing U.S. ambassador to Mexico lashes out on drug war

11:16 PM CST on Thursday, November 27, 2008

By ALFREDO CORCHADO / The Dallas Morning News
acorchado@dallasnews.com

MEXICO CITY – After six sometimes tumultuous years as ambassador to Mexico, Tony Garza is speaking out forcefully about U.S. responsibility for Mexico's widening drug violence.

"As U.S. ambassador to Mexico, I've tried to be honest with both Americans and Mexicans alike, and the truth is, Mexico would not be the center of cartel activity or be experiencing this level of violence, were the United States not the largest consumer of illicit drugs and the main supplier of weapons to the cartels," Mr. Garza said during a recent speech in Texas. "The U.S. and Mexico must fight these criminal organizations together, or we will fail together."

It's that kind of candor that over the years has won Mr. Garza both kudos and criticism on both sides of the border.

As ambassador, he has helped shepherd the U.S.-Mexico relationship through numerous minefields. But as he prepares to leave his post at noon on Jan. 20 ­ "to ensure a smooth transition" – Mexico's bloody drug violence remains his greatest concern, he said in an interview...more

World Aids Day - December 1

The UK celebrates World AIDS Day by deporting HIV positive immigrants.

London-Guardian
December 1, 2008


Britain is criticised for deporting HIV patients
• MP says some people face virtual death sentence
• Government failing to support G8 drugs pledge

by Sarah Boseley

The government is today, on World Aids Day, accused of double standards for permitting the deportation of people diagnosed in the UK with HIV to countries where they may not get the drugs they need to stay alive.

The UK has strongly supported the G8 pledge to get treatment to all people who need it in poor countries, and yet it is sending back people who have discovered they have HIV and been put on drugs while in the UK, to places where they have little hope of continuing their medication.

The African HIV Policy Network, which is attempting to change UK policy, has many examples of people who are struggling to get hold of life-saving medication. Its campaign is supported by Neil Gerrard, the Labour MP who chairs the all-party parliamentary group on refugees and previously chaired the group on Aids.

"I think when you have got someone who has been put on treatment here and then they are removed back to a country where they can't get treatment, it is virtually a death sentence," he said.

Britain has heavily backed the G8 call for universal access to Aids drugs, as well as prevention and care, in the poorest countries of the world.

"We are doing some really good work and probably leading the field in terms of promoting better care and treatment internationally," said Gerrard. "To have that on the one hand and be sending somebody back knowing if they are not able to get treatment they will die, is a horrible contradiction."

Two years ago, Sitiwe, who prefers not to give her full name, lived in the UK and was on regular medication for HIV. She was able to go about her normal life without worrying that her health might suddenly deteriorate.

Last year she was deported to her native Zimbabwe. Now she goes to the only clinic that will supply her with the three-drug combination she needs and sometimes leaves empty-handed. She shares tablets with friends who are in the same predicament. If people with HIV do not take the tablets at the same time every day, there is a high risk the virus will become resistant to the medication and the drugs will no longer work.

"I tried to visit clinics but they couldn't take me on," she said from the home she shares with her son and granddaughter. "Finally I found this one.

"They said they would give me some medication but sometimes they don't give me all the combination. Sometimes I have to do without. It makes me very anxious. It is really scary. You don't know whether you are going to make it."

Allegations that people with HIV are seeking asylum in the UK solely to get medical treatment are false, says Gerrard. Figures from the Health Protection Agency last week showed people are arriving at their GP's surgery when their immune systems are compromised and they are at risk of dying.

It is not a long-term issue for the UK, said Gerrard. "If we are successful - and there has been some really solid progress in getting drugs available in sub-Saharan Africa - this is a short-term problem. We should reach a point where removing somebody for immigration reasons doesn't mean you are sending them to somewhere they will probably die."