soc.culture.usa
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Today's topics:
* The Videotape Recorder Turns 50 - 1 messages, 1 author
http://groups.google.com/group/soc.culture.usa/browse_thread/thread/66386290480d314c
* World War III NEWS, Thursday, April 6th, 2006 AD....Iran Test-Fires 'Top
Secret' Missile - 4 messages, 2 authors
http://groups.google.com/group/soc.culture.usa/browse_thread/thread/266a576f7ab70c68
* More Kiddie Perverts at Homeland Security - 1 messages, 1 author
http://groups.google.com/group/soc.culture.usa/browse_thread/thread/5d4147e26d817782
* Venez: No More Oil Co Financial Reports to US - 1 messages, 1 author
http://groups.google.com/group/soc.culture.usa/browse_thread/thread/4fc6f5e6ad8ae4ef
* The Case Against Coke - 1 messages, 1 author
http://groups.google.com/group/soc.culture.usa/browse_thread/thread/4493f83e2e523b71
* Sweet Comeback for Cuban Sugar - 2 messages, 2 authors
http://groups.google.com/group/soc.culture.usa/browse_thread/thread/888317ec93698417
* LatAm Alliance Takes "Free Trade" by Horns - 1 messages, 1 author
http://groups.google.com/group/soc.culture.usa/browse_thread/thread/33315687f44321b4
* Mexico Unable to Rein In Organized Crime - 1 messages, 1 author
http://groups.google.com/group/soc.culture.usa/browse_thread/thread/31dc62d11a4e8d3a
* Latin America's New Consensus - 1 messages, 1 author
http://groups.google.com/group/soc.culture.usa/browse_thread/thread/5e1a8dd6bca5e28f
* Theocons and Theocrats - 1 messages, 1 author
http://groups.google.com/group/soc.culture.usa/browse_thread/thread/2bd4e8c2e74829cd
* Iran Predicts US anti-Islam Crusade Will Fail - 1 messages, 1 author
http://groups.google.com/group/soc.culture.usa/browse_thread/thread/5e67562d919db612
* Brits Deny Anti-Iran Military Drills 2 Yrs Ago - 1 messages, 1 author
http://groups.google.com/group/soc.culture.usa/browse_thread/thread/51adbe9a3534a2b9
* US Bumbling, Friendly Fire in Afghanistan - 1 messages, 1 author
http://groups.google.com/group/soc.culture.usa/browse_thread/thread/a0a32769c449b649
* Secondary factors why Eyeran wants nukes - 1 messages, 1 author
http://groups.google.com/group/soc.culture.usa/browse_thread/thread/a6b2f655b2a3f198
* Is the Gay Life Really Gay? - 1 messages, 1 author
http://groups.google.com/group/soc.culture.usa/browse_thread/thread/6b88140d63876848
* Call/Visit Me-Susan Cohen;Discuss NAMBLA - 1 messages, 1 author
http://groups.google.com/group/soc.culture.usa/browse_thread/thread/cf55ab7e5eb8a1db
* KIKE ABRAMOFF, THE SHITWAD! - 1 messages, 1 author
http://groups.google.com/group/soc.culture.usa/browse_thread/thread/30ff46aed373bca7
* H O L O H O A X - 1 messages, 1 author
http://groups.google.com/group/soc.culture.usa/browse_thread/thread/4c8533fbeb4404a7
* Kurd party slams Turk govt, army, EU over clashes - 2 messages, 2 authors
http://groups.google.com/group/soc.culture.usa/browse_thread/thread/b6804a5deabce72c
* Some say Iran's weapons come from Russia - 1 messages, 1 author
http://groups.google.com/group/soc.culture.usa/browse_thread/thread/938d3d0d2a6b5e90
==============================================================================
TOPIC: The Videotape Recorder Turns 50
http://groups.google.com/group/soc.culture.usa/browse_thread/thread/66386290480d314c
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== 1 of 1 ==
Date: Sat, Apr 15 2006 4:58 pm
From: Nimrod ``
On Sat, 15 Apr 2006 20:52:34 GMT, "Steven L."
<sdlitvin@earthlinkNOSPAM.net> wrote:
>Joe Gillis wrote:
>> http://tvtechnology.com/features/news/2006.04.12-n_the_video_tape_02.shtml
>>
>> The Videotape Recorder Turns 50
>>
>> Routine NAB preview event showcased revolutionary technology
>>
>> by James E. O'Neal
>>
>> The Ampex video recorder is unveiled at the NARTB show in Chicago,
>> April 14, 1956.
>
>Obviously the Ampex design was so big and expensive that only
>corporations could afford it. And like audio tape recorders, you had to
>struggle with clumsily threading big reels of tape.
>
>For consumers, the big breakthrough was made by Sony, who developed the
>first consumer-oriented Video *Cassette* Recorder, VCR. An early
>prototype of the Sony VCR was demonstrated at the 1964-65 New York
>World's Fair.
Then they shot themselves in the foot by refusing to allow open use of
their Beta cassette design....insisting on being paid for its use by
video distributors, forcing the distributors to throw their weight
behind the inferior VHS cassette and dooming the Sony Betamax. We
would have had smaller cassettes with better picture and sound
reproduction until DVD came along if Sony hadn't been so hard-nosed
and greedy.
N``
==============================================================================
TOPIC: World War III NEWS, Thursday, April 6th, 2006 AD....Iran Test-Fires '
Top Secret' Missile
http://groups.google.com/group/soc.culture.usa/browse_thread/thread/266a576f7ab70c68
==============================================================================
== 1 of 4 ==
Date: Sat, Apr 15 2006 10:00 pm
From: "Krib"
<drmabusa@gmail.com> wrote in message news:1145123422.372216.161090@e56g2000cwe.googlegroups.com...
For the little worm Lemesurier.....
100% wrong, as usual danny ;0)
--
krib
== 2 of 4 ==
Date: Sat, Apr 15 2006 3:07 pm
From: "drmabusa@gmail.com"
you are unaware of the HORRIBLE FATE that awaits those who oppose the
GODS.....But you will find out soon enough.....
== 3 of 4 ==
Date: Sat, Apr 15 2006 10:25 pm
From: "Krib"
<drmabusa@gmail.com> wrote in message news:1145138876.005645.153630@t31g2000cwb.googlegroups.com...
> you are unaware of the HORRIBLE FATE that awaits those who oppose the
> GODS.....
er sure...ok... nutjob but 2 points here...
1) "GODS" plural? ah yeah I forgot... you pretend YOU are divine don't you freak.
2) Pointing out that you are a liar a fraud and a failure has nothing to do with God.
You're just some fucked up mental case with a messiah complex who screams out your
fairytales on usenet 'cos you know you get put away when you try that crap in real life,
remember all that time you spent inside for your own safety nuttet? well that's why ;0)
> But you will find out soon enough.....
Won't happen, not one of your hundreds of threats or other fairytales has happened
so here's ROFLMAO at you again you pathetic, insane retard ;0)
--
krib
== 4 of 4 ==
Date: Sat, Apr 15 2006 3:32 pm
From: "drmabusa@gmail.com"
ah, poor Krib......Hurts that are you just a puny worm who made the
FATAL ERROR of questioning Nostradamus?
==============================================================================
TOPIC: More Kiddie Perverts at Homeland Security
http://groups.google.com/group/soc.culture.usa/browse_thread/thread/5d4147e26d817782
==============================================================================
== 1 of 1 ==
Date: Sat, Apr 15 2006 5:07 pm
From: NY.Transfer.News@blythe.org
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More Kiddie Perverts at Homeland Security
Via NY Transfer News Collective * All the News that Doesn't Fit
AP via MagicValley.com (Idaho) - Apr 12, 2006
http://www.magicvalley.com/news_other/news_idaho/?storyid=/dynamic/stories/I/ID_OFFICER_ARRESTED_IDOL-
Airport security officer arrested
KETCHUM, Idaho (AP) -- An airport security officer accused of luring a
10-year-old boy into his pickup truck has been charged with second-degree
kidnapping, KTVB-TV reported.
Robert Joe Harrison Jr. appeared Wednesday before 5th District Magistrate
Judge Ted Israel, who set bail at $500,000. Harrison was held at the Blaine
County Jail.
Ketchum police said they were called to the Ernest Hemingway Elementary
School at about 4 p.m. Tuesday. They said a boy told them a man in a red
truck stopped while the boy was walking home, waved him over to the vehicle
and asked if he wanted a ride home.
The boy said he first refused the ride, but after several requests, got into
the truck and gave the driver directions to his home.
The driver passed the boy's street and told him they were going to his
apartment first, the boy told police. He said he declined an invitation from
the man to come inside and watch a movie.
The child was later released and walked home, said Kim M. Rogers, a Ketchum
police spokeswoman.
The boy was not injured, she said.
Detectives said the child led them back to the apartment complex, where they
found a red truck, but when they questioned Harrison, Harrison denied having
any contact with the boy.
Harrison was arrested and his vehicle was seized. Police said they found
several dates of birth and Social Security numbers connected to Harrison,
and could not determine which information was correct.
Harrison has worked for the Transportation Security Administration, part of
the Homeland Security Department, at the Friedman Memorial Airport in Hailey
since November 2005. He has been suspended without pay. The TSA has also
revoked his government ID and credentials, Rogers said.
He was due in court April 18 for a preliminary hearing.
© 2006 The Associated Press.
*
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TOPIC: Venez: No More Oil Co Financial Reports to US
http://groups.google.com/group/soc.culture.usa/browse_thread/thread/4fc6f5e6ad8ae4ef
==============================================================================
== 1 of 1 ==
Date: Sat, Apr 15 2006 5:07 pm
From: NY.Transfer.News@blythe.org
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Venez: No More Oil Co Financial Reports to US
Via NY Transfer News Collective * All the News that Doesn't Fit
Prensa Latina, Havana
http://www.plenglish.com
Venez: No More Oil Co Financial Reports to US
Caracas, Apr 15 (Prensa Latina) With the recent repurchase of PDVSA
Oil Company´s debt to the US, Venezuela will no longer have to explain
the company´s annual performance to the US Stocks Commission.
The initiative adds to a new hydrocarbon law included in a national
strategy for the recovery of full oil sovereignty.
President Hugo Chavez and Energy and Oil Minister Rafael Ramirez have
strongly criticized the fact that a Venezuelan state company had to
give another country a detailed report on its functioning.
The repurchase is part of a move aimed at reducing the firm´s
foreigndebt, which has decreased by 62 percent since 2001, from 8.42
billion US dollars to 3.16 billion.
Observers agree the white House´s hostility towards Venezuela is
directly targeted at the policy for full oil self-rule and Chavez´
socialist course.
hr/dig/ml/mf
*
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NY Transfer News Collective * A Service of Blythe Systems
Since 1985 - Information for the Rest of Us
339 Lafayette St., New York, NY 10012 http://www.blythe.org
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TOPIC: The Case Against Coke
http://groups.google.com/group/soc.culture.usa/browse_thread/thread/4493f83e2e523b71
==============================================================================
== 1 of 1 ==
Date: Sat, Apr 15 2006 5:07 pm
From: NY.Transfer.News@blythe.org
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
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The Case Against Coke
Via NY Transfer News Collective * All the News that Doesn't Fit
The Nation - May 1, 2006 issue
http://www.thenation.com/docprint.mhtml?i=20060501&s=blanding
The Case Against Coke
by MICHAEL BLANDING
The ballroom at the Hotel du Pont in Wilmington, Delaware, is the picture of
opulence. Paintings of Greek gods and goddesses peer down from the walls,
lit by two crystal chandeliers the size of Mini Coopers. It's here in April
that the Coca-Cola Company will hold its stockholders' meeting, an annual
exercise designed to boost the confidence of investors. If the meeting is
anything like last year's, however, it may do the opposite.
As stockholders filed into the room in April 2005, news hadn't been good for
Coke, which has steadily lost market share to rivals. Investors were eager
for reassurance from CEO Neville Isdell, a patrician Irishman who had
recently assumed the top job. Few in the room, however, were prepared for
what happened next. As Isdell stood at the podium, two long lines formed at
the microphones. When he opened the floor, the first to speak was Ray
Rogers, a veteran union organizer and head of the Campaign to Stop Killer
Coke. "I want to know what [Coke is] going to do to regain the trust and
credibility in order to stop the growing movement worldwide...banning Coke
products," boomed the 62-year-old.
That was just the beginning of a ninety-minute slugfest that the Financial
Times later said "felt more like a student protest rally" than a
stockholders' meeting. One after another, students, labor activists and
environmentalists blasted Coke's international human rights record. Many
focused on Colombia, where Coke has been accused of conspiring with
paramilitary death squads to torture and kill union activists. Others
highlighted India, where Coke has allegedly polluted and depleted water
supplies. Still others called the company to task for causing obesity
through aggressive marketing to children.
In the past two years the Coke campaign has grown into the largest
anticorporate movement since the campaign against Nike for sweatshop abuses.
Around the world, dozens of unions and more than twenty universities have
banned Coke from their facilities, while activists have dogged the company
from World Cup events in London to the Winter Olympics in Torino. More than
just the re-emergence of the corporate boycott, however, the fight against
Coke is a leap forward in international cooperation. Coke, with its
red-and-white swoosh recognizable everywhere from Beijing to Baghdad, is
perhaps the quintessential symbol of the US-dominated global economy. The
fight to hold it accountable has, in turn, broadly connected issues across
continents to become a truly globalized grassroots movement.
Coke shrugs off the protests as coming from a "small segment of the student
population," says Ed Potter, the company's director of global labor
relations. "What I see are largely well-meaning attempts to put a spotlight
on some reprehensible things--but which are unrelated to our workplaces."
Nevertheless, Coke has fought back with ads on TV and in student newspapers,
part of a mammoth advertising budget that has increased 30 percent in the
past two years, to a staggering $2.4 billion. However, as evidence against
the company mounts ahead of this year's annual stockholders' meeting, so
does the pressure for Coke to address its growing international image of
exploitation and brutality.
On the morning of December 5, 1996, union leader Isidro Segundo Gil was
standing at the gate of the Coca-Cola bottling plant in Carepa, Colombia,
when two paramilitaries drove up on a motorcycle and shot him dead. A week
later, unionists say, paramilitaries lined up all the workers inside the
plant and forced them to sign a letter resigning from the beverage union
SINALTRAINAL, spelling the end of the union at the plant.
Violence against union members is a fact of life in Colombia, where nearly
4,000 have been killed by paramilitaries in the past two decades. But Gil's
murder was different, say his union brothers; two months earlier, they
observed the plant manager meeting with a paramilitary commander in the
company cafeteria. And just a week before he was killed Gil had been
negotiating with the company over a new contract. Workers see these events
as an example of the collusion of bottling executives with the
paramilitaries. "From the beginning, Coca-Cola took a stand to not only
eliminate the union but to destroy its workers," said SINALTRAINAL president
Javier Correa in a recent speaking appearance in the United States.
Nor was Gil's murder a unique occurrence, says Correa. In all, eight union
members and a friendly plant manager were killed between 1989 and 2002. Even
today, union leaders routinely receive death threats and attempts on their
lives. In 2003 paramilitaries kidnapped and tortured the 15-year-old son of
one union leader and killed the brother-in-law of SINALTRAINAL's vice
president. This past January, says Correa, managers at the Coca-Cola plant
in Bogotá attempted to get workers to sign a statement saying Coke did not
violate human rights; a week later the leader of the union received a death
threat against himself and his family.
"Coke has a long history of being a virulently antiunion company," says
Lesley Gill, an anthropology professor at American University who has twice
been to Colombia to document the violence. "It has been calculated and
targeted, and it usually takes place during periods of contract
negotiations." A 2004 investigation directed by New York City Councilman
Hiram Monserrate documented 179 "major human rights violations" against Coke
workers, along with numerous allegations that "paramilitary violence against
workers was done with the knowledge of and likely under the direction of
company managers." The violence has taken a toll on the union. In the past
decade, SINALTRAINAL's Coke membership has fallen from about 1,400 to less
than 400.
Coca-Cola representatives deny involvement of the company or its bottling
partners, contending that the murders are a byproduct of the country's civil
war. In response, the company touts the security measures it offers union
leaders, including loans for home security systems and reassignment for
those in danger. Furthermore, Coke points out that it has been exonerated in
several cases in Colombian courts. However, charging those courts as
ineffective--only five paramilitaries have been found guilty of murder,
despite 4,000 killings--SINALTRAINAL reached out in 2001 to the
International Labor Rights Fund, a Washington-based solidarity organization.
Using a US law called the Alien Tort Claims Act, the ILRF and the United
Steelworkers filed suit against Coke and its bottlers in Miami later that
year. In 2003 a judge ruled that Coca-Cola couldn't be held responsible for
the actions of its bottlers and dropped it from the case, even while
allowing the case against the bottlers to go forward. ILRF lawyer Terry
Collingsworth finds that decision preposterous, noting that Coke has
ownership shares in its Colombian bottlers and highly detailed bottling
agreements. "I'm 100 percent sure that if Coca-Cola in Atlanta ordered them
to change their uniform color from red to blue, they would do it," says
Collingsworth. "They could stop these activities in a minute."
While the ILRF has appealed the decision, procedural rules require it to
wait until the case against the bottlers is over before the case against
Coke can be taken up again--a process that could take years. "We needed to
figure out a way that Coke sees delay as bad," says Collingsworth. In 2003
SINALTRAINAL put out a call for an international boycott of Coke products.
At the same time, the ILRF contacted Ray Rogers, head of Corporate Campaign,
Inc., an organization that consults with unions to win contracts through
unorthodox methods. Over the past three decades, Rogers has forced
concessions from a dozen companies--including American Airlines, Campbell's
Soup and New York's Metropolitan Transportation Authority--not through
strikes or negotiations but through an aggressive strategy of publicly
embarrassing anyone associated with his targets.
Rogers immediately saw Coke's weakness: its brand. "They are right at the
top of the worst companies in the world, and yet they've created an image
like they are American pie," he says. "When people think of Coca-Cola, they
should think about great hardship and despair for people and communities
around the world." From the beginning, Rogers appropriated Coke's trademark
red script to make the Killer Coke logo, and tweaked its advertising
campaign with slogans like "The Drink That Represses" and "Murder--It's the
Real Thing." He made a dramatic first appearance at a Coke annual meeting
two years ago, when police wrestled Rogers away from the mike and forcibly
dragged him out of the hall.
Early on, Rogers rejected SINALTRAINAL's call for a consumer boycott of Coke
products, fearing it would be ineffective and might alienate unions working
with Coke. He focused on "cutting out markets" by going after larger
institutional ties. He convinced several unions, including the American
Postal Workers, several large locals of the Service Employees International,
and UNISON, the largest union in Britain, to ban Coke from their facilities
and functions, and he induced pension-fund managers, including the City of
New York, to pass resolutions threatening to withdraw hundreds of millions
in Coke stock investments unless Coke investigated the Colombia abuses. He
persuaded not only the SEIU but the largest US union of Coke's own
employees, the Teamsters, to pass a resolution in support of the Campaign to
Stop Killer Coke and to speak out at last year's annual meeting (the
Teamsters stopped short of banning Coke from their own facilities). "It's
horrendous what we're hearing," says David Laughton, secretary-treasurer of
the union's beverage division. "The company's lack of action is having a
ripple effect all over the country in school and college, and that means
reductions in jobs for us. It's time for them to wake up and admit their
errors."
The campaign's greatest success has come at colleges and universities.
Rogers set up a website with a step-by-step guide for students looking to
convince their institutions to cut multimillion-dollar Coke contracts, and
he's traveled to schools to hold rallies and advise students. One by one,
more than a dozen schools in the United States, as well as a handful more in
Ireland, Italy and Canada, have decided to cut lucrative beverage contracts
or otherwise ban Coke from campuses. The effort accelerated after it was
joined by United Students Against Sweatshops--one of the main groups behind
the Nike boycott of the 1990s--which helped organize its own chapters.
Anti-Coke campaigns are now active at some 130 campuses worldwide. "This
campaign against Coke has politicized a new generation of students," says
Camilo Romero, a national organizer with USAS. "It's something that students
feel personally connected to, because it's something they can hold in their
hand," says Aviva Chomsky, a professor at Salem State College in
Massachusetts, which severed ties two years ago. "It's too easy to say,
'There are so many bad things in the world, I'm just going to concentrate on
my own life.' It's the concreteness of this that's appealing."
While student campaigns have mostly focused on the abuses in Colombia, some
have included demands from other countries as well. Few companies have the
kind of global reach of Coca-Cola, which has set up a network of bottling
partners around the world that allows it to maximize profits by keeping
distribution costs down and exploiting lax environmental and labor laws
abroad. The first rumblings came from India, where villagers near several
Coke bottling plants reported that their wells were dropping, sometimes more
than fifty feet; meanwhile, the water they were able to get was tainted by
foul-smelling chemicals. Starting in 2002 villagers near Plachimada, in the
southern state of Kerala, began a permanent vigil outside the local plant.
They finally won an indefinite closure in March 2004, although the case
remains an issue in the Kerala High Court.
Villagers started another vigil, at Mehdiganj in central India, this past
March. Escalating protests there and at a third plant, in the desert state
of Rajasthan, have ended in police attacks on villagers employing Gandhian
tactics of nonviolence, which Amit Srivastava of the India Resource Center
(IRC) lays at Coke's feet. "We know the company has the power to stop the
police from resorting to violence," he says, "but it has let this go on
without saying a word."
The IRC has been joined in its mission by Corporate Accountability
International (CAI), which has attacked Coke on its aggressive push to sell
bottled water. "If water becomes a branded product, it's clearly going to
undermine the demand and support for publicly managed water systems," says
CAI executive director Kathryn Mulvey. "The people who lose out are those
who don't have the means to pay top dollar for their water." As a veteran
anticorporate campaigner, Mulvey sees the Coke campaign as a new model.
"People are taking these abuses that are happening all over the world and
bringing them to Coke's headquarters," she says. "Transnational corporations
are really surpassing the nation-state as the dominant economic and
political institutions. Social change movements need to find ways to come
together across borders and strategize."
The broad attack against the company has been a strength for the campaign,
allowing diverse groups to share information and recruit greater numbers at
protests, as well as making a more difficult target for counterattacks. "The
company can't control it," says Rogers. "They realize they can't get rid of
one person or group and hope the thing will die." At the same time, the
sheer number of charges against Coke raises the question of how and when the
campaign can declare victory. On that score, the different groups are clear
about their specific goals. The Campaign to Stop Killer Coke, for example,
has adopted seven demands by SINALTRAINAL, which include a human rights
policy for bottling companies and compensation for families of slain
workers. The campaign in India calls for closure of certain plants, cleanup
of others and compensation for affected villagers.
Many student campaigns have made their top demand an independent
investigation into the Colombia abuses. At last year's annual meeting, Coke
tried to mollify critics by releasing the results of a company-funded study,
which was rejected by students as woefully biased. Still facing the prospect
of boycotts at several universities--among them Rutgers, NYU and
Michigan--Coke put together a commission of students, school administrators
and labor leaders to come up with a protocol for an independent inquiry. "I
was honestly hopeful, perhaps naïvely," says USAS's Romero. "It seemed like
they were putting this new investment into making things work." From the
beginning, however, the company insisted it had a right to be on the
commission; even after Coke was booted by the students, it kept putting
strictures on the investigation, such as a moratorium on investigating past
abuses. The final straw was Coke's insistence that anything uncovered be
inadmissible in the court case in Miami, which Collingsworth says is against
legal ethics. "We cannot prejudice our clients by agreeing to bury evidence
that would support their claims," he wrote in an angry letter to Coke's Ed
Potter.
At around the same time, new evidence of Coke's antilabor tactics emerged in
Indonesia, where, according to USAS, workers were intimidated when they
attempted to unionize; and in Turkey, where more than 100 union members were
fired and then clubbed and tear-gassed by police during a protest. This past
November the ILRF filed another lawsuit against Coca-Cola, based on the
claims of the Turkish workers. By that point, students had had enough; all
but one left the commission.
With the failure of the investigation commission, administrators at some
schools ran out of excuses to keep the Coke contracts. Both NYU and Michigan
suspended contracts in December. NYU's status as the country's largest
private university earned the campaign national and international press. "We
knew if we were to ban Coca-Cola, our statement would resound around the
world," says Crystal Yakacki, a recent NYU graduate who helped lead the
campaign while she was a student.
As this year's annual meeting nears, Coke has gone on the offensive,
announcing a plan to draft a new set of workplace standards. At the same
time, the company has asked the UN's International Labor Organization to
perform a workplace evaluation of the Colombia bottling plants. Rogers and
Collingsworth have already cried foul, pointing out that Potter has been the
US employer representative to the ILO for the past fifteen years. "Either
they know something we don't know," says Collingsworth, "or they believe the
ILO moves so slowly and bureaucratically that they can delay." In response,
Potter claims the organization is so large that no one person can influence
it. Regardless, the gambit is having some effect: In April Michigan, citing
"the reputation and track record of ILO," rescinded its ban.
At the Hotel du Pont on April 19, organizers hope to stage a repeat of last
year's grilling, with an even larger contingent of activists in attendance.
Schools debating Coke contracts this spring include Michigan State, UCLA,
the University of Illinois, DePaul and several campuses of the City
University of New York. In Britain, the campaign lost a close vote in April
to convince the National Union of Students--which represents 750
campuses--to cut a multimillion-pound contract. Many British universities,
however, are continuing individual boycotts, as are campuses in Italy,
Ireland, Germany and Canada. "This is a moment in history that is very rare,
where students have the power to change one of the largest corporations in
the world," says Romero. After recent campus victories, momentum seems to be
on the side of the campaign. "Coke has a contracting market; we have an
expanding market," says Rogers. "I want Coke to come to the realization that
there is a lot more for them to lose by continuing to do what they do. They
have to be made to do the right thing for the wrong reason."
Until they do, say activists, the violence against Coke's workers will
continue. "It's very difficult for me to convince my family that they have
to live with the worries, and that they will one day maybe have to receive
bad news," says SINALTRAINAL's Correa. "My kids say that walking with Dad is
like walking with a time bomb. But I can't leave this struggle seeing these
violations happening all around me. The reality of the situation is that
it's better being with a union than without one."
*
================================================================
NY Transfer News Collective * A Service of Blythe Systems
Since 1985 - Information for the Rest of Us
339 Lafayette St., New York, NY 10012 http://www.blythe.org
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TOPIC: Sweet Comeback for Cuban Sugar
http://groups.google.com/group/soc.culture.usa/browse_thread/thread/888317ec93698417
==============================================================================
== 1 of 2 ==
Date: Sat, Apr 15 2006 5:07 pm
From: NY.Transfer.News@blythe.org
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Sweet Comeback for Cuban Sugar
Via NY Transfer News Collective * All the News that Doesn't Fit
Prensa Latina, Havana
http://www.plenglish.com
Sweet Comeback for Cuban Sugar
Havana, Apr 14 (Prensa Latina) The efficient use of fertilizers and
herbicides, higher levels of irrigation, and expansion of crops are
among actions Cuba is taking to bring back sugar cane production.
Ten percent of areas currently have irrigation and plans are to grow
between 30 and 40 percent, Sugar Ministry (MINAZ) Sugar Cane
Production Director Eglis Greck Rodriguez said on Friday.
The official told press there are 132 pumping stations that are being
recovered and electrified to favour the use of different irrigation
systems, which were seriously affected before.
The sector has 753 sugar mills, which are making great efforts to use
fertilizers and herbicides, and trying other techniques to achieve
better agricultural output, Greck said.
hr/iom/rs/mf
*
================================================================
NY Transfer News Collective * A Service of Blythe Systems
Since 1985 - Information for the Rest of Us
339 Lafayette St., New York, NY 10012 http://www.blythe.org
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== 2 of 2 ==
Date: Sat, Apr 15 2006 10:20 pm
From: "PL"
<NY.Transfer.News@blythe.org> wrote in message news:1145138792.1257929613.4291923772@blythe.org...
> -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
> Hash: SHA1
>
> Sweet Comeback for Cuban Sugar
Without production?
Another historic mistake by Castro.
Cuba seeks direct foreign investment in sugar mill
http://cubadata.blogspot.com/2006/04/cuba-seeks-direct-foreign-investment.html
Cubans back to fields to end sugar rum crisis
http://cubadata.blogspot.com/2006/03/cubans-back-to-fields-to-end-sugar-rum.html
ETHANOL ENERGY AND CUBAN CRUNCH GIVE PRICE A BUZZ
http://cubadata.blogspot.com/2006/04/ethanol-energy-and-cuban-crunch-give.html
Lots of articles about Cuban sugar at:
http://search.blogger.com/?as_q=sugar&ie=UTF-8&ui=blg&bl_url=cubadata.blogspot.com&x=0&y=0
PL
==============================================================================
TOPIC: LatAm Alliance Takes "Free Trade" by Horns
http://groups.google.com/group/soc.culture.usa/browse_thread/thread/33315687f44321b4
==============================================================================
== 1 of 1 ==
Date: Sat, Apr 15 2006 5:07 pm
From: NY.Transfer.News@blythe.org
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LatAm Alliance Takes "Free Trade" by Horns
Via NY Transfer News Collective * All the News that Doesn't Fit
Prensa Latina, Havana
http://www.plenglish.com
LatAm Alliance Takes "Free Trade" Agreement by Horns
Havana, Apr 15 (Prensa Latina) After four fruitful days of debates
opposing the free trade agreements and its consequences, the 5th
Hemispheric Meeting against the Free Trade Agreement of the Americas
(FTAA) comes to an end Saturday.
The forum is closing with the presentation of the action plans of the
Continental Alliance for Latin America and the Caribbean and of other
bodies such the Network of Networks in Defense of Humanity.
Attendees made important proposals such the creation of a world legal
network to direct anti-FTAA fighting.
Concrete actions were presented to handle Washington´s maneuvers on
their own level and a boycott was called of US products on May 1 to
illustrate the importance of the immigrants in that nation´s economy
and support recent protests by those people.
Likewise, delegates urged to closely follow the plans of the Alliance
for Security and Prosperity of North America, a new mechanism to
extend the FTA among the US, Canada and Mexico throughout America.
hr/ymr/crc/mf
*
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==============================================================================
TOPIC: Mexico Unable to Rein In Organized Crime
http://groups.google.com/group/soc.culture.usa/browse_thread/thread/31dc62d11a4e8d3a
==============================================================================
== 1 of 1 ==
Date: Sat, Apr 15 2006 5:07 pm
From: NY.Transfer.News@blythe.org
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Hash: SHA1
Mexico Unable to Rein In Organized Crime
Via NY Transfer News Collective * All the News that Doesn't Fit
Prensa Latina, Havana
http://www.plenglish.com
Mexico Unable to Rein in Organized Crime
Mexico, Apr 14 (Prensa Latina) The Mexican Public Functions Office
(SFP) denounced the absence of mechanisms and national security laws
to detect and stop organized crime´s infiltration into the government,
which cripples the battle against crime and corruption.
The statement relates to Monday's arrest of three pilots of the
National Water Commission in Campeche, southeast Mexico, while flying
more than five tons of cocaine.
Two of the accused, Fernando Poot Perez, assistant flight coordination
manager, and Marco Aurelio Perez, flight staff coordinator, are both
ex military. The first served time in jail for crimes against health.
The third pilot was Colombian Miguel Vazquez Guerra, 47.
The Attorney General's Office reported that the 128 black suitcases
confiscated from the plane contained five tons of cocaine, worth more
than 100 million dollars on the black market.
hr/ccs/emw/mpm
*
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==============================================================================
TOPIC: Latin America's New Consensus
http://groups.google.com/group/soc.culture.usa/browse_thread/thread/5e1a8dd6bca5e28f
==============================================================================
== 1 of 1 ==
Date: Sat, Apr 15 2006 5:07 pm
From: NY.Transfer.News@blythe.org
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Hash: SHA1
Latin America's New Consensus
Via NY Transfer News Collective * All the News that Doesn't Fit
The Nation - May 1, 2006 issue
http://www.thenation.com/docprint.mhtml?i=20060501&s=grandin
Latin America's New Consensus
by GREG GRANDIN
Even as the United States wages a war in the Persian Gulf that Secretary of
State Condoleezza Rice describes as a central front in an epic "generational
struggle" in defense of Western values and freedoms, another geopolitical
threat has been massing on its southern flank. Over the course of the past
seven years, Latin America has seen the rebirth of nationalist and socialist
political movements, movements that were long thought to have been
dispatched by cold war death squads. Following Hugo Chávez's 1998 landslide
victory in Venezuela, one country after another has turned left. Today,
roughly 300 million of Latin America's 520 million citizens live under
governments that either want to reform the Washington Consensus--a euphemism
for the mix of punishing fiscal austerity, privatization and market
liberalization that has produced staggering levels of poverty and inequality
over the past three decades--or abolish it altogether and create a new, more
equitable global economy.
This year, that number is likely to grow. Latin America is in the middle of
an election cycle that has already seen Evo Morales win in Bolivia and
Michelle Bachelet, a single mother and socialist, win a third term for
Chile's center-left Concertación Coalition. On April 9 in Peru, Ollanta
Humala, a nationalist former military officer backed by Chávez and Morales,
came from behind to force a runoff. In the months ahead, Colombia, Mexico,
Brazil, Ecuador, Nicaragua and Venezuela will hold presidential elections.
And with center-leftist Manuel López Obrador ahead in Mexico, the
Sandinistas poised to make a comeback in Nicaragua and Chávez's re-election
all but certain, the Bush Administration is nervous. It has responded by
trying to drive a wedge between what Rice describes as the "false populism"
that is spreading throughout the Andes and the pragmatic reformism of Chile,
Uruguay and Brazil--in other words, between the "statesmen" and the
"madmen," as Chávez recently put it.
There are, in fact, important differences among Latin American
leftists--between, say, Brazil's Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, who has opted to
pursue reform through market-led growth, and Chávez, who is more willing to
mobilize the left's social base, allow the state a greater role in the
economy and pick fights with international capital. But they are also highly
dependent on one another, especially in their dealings with the United
States. For Chávez, besieged during the first three years of his
administration, the election of sympathetic regional allies, starting with
Lula in 2002, came just in time to help him shore up his position and push
back his domestic and foreign opponents. In return, the confrontational
Chávez provides cover to his more circumspect counterparts, drawing
Washington's anger. If it were not for its quarrel with Venezuela, the
United States would certainly be less tolerant of what Rice calls its
"differences with friends," which include Brazil's opposition to the Free
Trade Agreement of the Americas (FTAA) and Chile's refusal to support the
invasion of Iraq.
But more than just giving one another room to maneuver, Latin America's new
leftists have produced over the last couple of years their own consensus, a
common project to use the centrifugal forces of globalization to loosen
Washington's unipolar grip. Brazil's Lula has been central to this project,
especially insofar as he has helped to awaken international financial
institutions to the downsides of free-market orthodoxy. When he was elected,
he was hailed as Latin America's great hope, not just by the poor but, once
he promised to maintain a high budget surplus, by the officials of
institutions like the World Bank and the Inter-American Development Bank.
His campaign took place in the shadow of Argentina's financial meltdown, the
latest in a series of international financial crises that led
globalization's managers to emphasize the importance not only of freeing
markets but of strengthening institutions that could stabilize those
markets. If a man of the left such as Lula could achieve "growth with
equity"--which by Brazil's 2002 vote had become the World Bank's new
mantra--in Latin America's largest economy, it would go a long way toward
defining the post-Washington Consensus consensus. Lula, said former World
Bank president James Wolfensohn in an interview last year, is leading the
"most important experiment in Latin America today."
As Lula approaches the end of his first, and possibly only, term, the
results of this experiment have been disappointing. Extreme poverty has
decreased somewhat, but this has less to do with his showpiece "zero hunger"
program than with steady economic growth driven by high commodity prices.
Still, after emerging as a spokesperson for developing countries on trade
issues and leading the opposition to the FTAA over subsidies and concerns
about intellectual property rights, he did begin to represent an
alternative, if not to free trade then to Washington's stranglehold over the
way free trade was proceeding in the Americas.
Under Lula, Brazil has played a key role in fostering the economic links
that have begun to wean the region from its dependence on the United States.
Buoyed by Argentina's and Uruguay's turn left, and anchored by Brazil's
enormous market and advanced agricultural, pharmaceutical, heavy equipment,
steel and aeronautical sectors, the countries of South America have taken a
number of steps to diversify the hemisphere's economy. They courted non-US
trade and investment, particularly from Asia. Fueled by a consuming thirst
for Latin America's raw materials--its oil, ore and soybeans--the Chinese
government has negotiated more than 400 investment and trade deals with
Latin America over the past few years, investing more than $50 billion in
the region. China is both Brazil's and Argentina's fourth-largest trading
partner, providing $7 billion for port and railroad modernization and
signing $20 billion worth of commercial agreements. South American leaders
have also sought to deepen regional economic integration, primarily by
expanding the Mercosur--South America's most important commercial
alliance--and embarking on an ambitious road-building project. These efforts
appear to be working. In December Lula claimed that Brazil's trade with the
rest of Latin America grew by nearly 90 percent since the previous year,
compared with a 20 percent increase with the United States.
One sign that economic diversification is gaining force was the success last
year of Argentine President Néstor Kirchner's take-it-or-leave-it offer of
30 cents on every dollar owed on its $100 billion external debt, to be paid
in long-term, low-interest bonds. In the past, financial markets would have
severely punished such insolence, but with Asian investment pouring in and
the economy rebounding at a steady clip, a majority of lenders had no choice
but to make the deal. For its part, the IMF, fearing either a complete
default or a successful agreement made without its imprimatur, was forced
grudgingly to sanction the bid. It was, according to Knight Ridder Business
News, the "biggest sovereign debt restructuring in history, with
international creditors accepting unprecedented losses." "For the first time
in history," a triumphal Kirchner said in a speech to Congress reporting on
the transaction, "a restructuring process has culminated in a drastic
reduction of the indebtedness of the country."
Asian investment, road building and common markets are not what Fidel Castro
had in mind when in the 1960s he rallied third-world youth to take up arms
against Yankee imperialism. Yet the rise and maintenance of the United
States as a world power has long been predicated on claiming Latin America
as its own. On the eve of the cold war, for instance, even as Harry Truman
was promoting the United Nations and pushing for open markets elsewhere, his
envoys in Latin America were negotiating an alliance that gave preferential
treatment to US corporations and allowed Washington to mobilize the region
as a bloc in its struggle against the Soviet Union.
In the past few years, however, the region's most consequential nations have
refused to be conscripted into Bush's "war on terror." And unlike the way
they lined up to quarantine Cuba during the cold war, they have rebuffed
Washington's calls to pursue an "inoculation strategy" against Chávez, as
Secretary of State Rice put it to Congress in February. Last year, Bush even
saw his nominee to head the Organization of American States bested by a
candidate backed by Venezuela. If Latin America's new left achieves nothing
else, it has at least broken the political bonds of this proprietary
relationship.
The FTAA is the US government's gambit to turn things around. It is meant to
do for Latin America what the North American Free Trade Agreement did for
Mexico: ratify its status as a US province within an increasingly globalized
economy. Under NAFTA the United States has come to dominate Mexican trade,
muscling out other Latin American countries. The same is expected to occur
when the Chilean and Central American free-trade pacts are fully
implemented. Call it "market polygamy," whereby the United States can have
multiple partners but each of those partners must remain faithful to it
alone.
Hopes that Brazil could counter the gravitational pull of the United States
have been diminished by the corruption scandals that in the past ten months
have rocked Lula's Partido dos Trabalhadores (PT) and shattered its
Congressional coalition. While Lula has not yet announced whether he will
stand for re-election in October, recent polls indicate that if he does, he
will most likely face a tough fight. There is still time for him to pull
through. He has recently raised the minimum wage, increased social spending
and cut interest rates, all in the hopes of boosting the economy in the
run-up to the election. But even if he does win a second term, he will
govern from a greatly weakened position.
As Lula recedes, Chávez proceeds. Until his victory in the August 2004
recall, it was easy to dismiss the Venezuelan president as the latest in a
long line of Latin American Bonapartists, a strongman who emerged to restore
order after Venezuela's two-party system collapsed under the weight of its
own venal incompetence. During Chávez's first six years in office, his fiery
rhetoric did little to diminish economic inequality or challenge the
generous contracts his predecessors gave to petroleum multinationals. But
whereas Lula started with high expectations only to disappoint, Chávez has
moved in the opposite direction. He has rebounded from the recall fight to
quicken the pace of reform. With the economy booming, unemployment falling,
the opposition in disarray and his Fifth Republic Movement in control of
Congress and regional posts, he has accelerated the distribution of
expropriated land, nationalizing industries and diverting Central Bank
reserves to diversify the economy.
For Washington, the most immediate threat posed by Venezuela is not the
spread of "false populism" in Latin America but Chávez's emergence as the
motor behind the left's attempt to advance economic and political
multilateralism. He has turned out to be a skilled rope-a-dope artist,
making at times preposterous political pronouncements--in March Chávez
requested that the legislature have the white horse on Venezuela's flag face
left instead of right, so that it would no longer be an "imperialist
horse"--while playing a nimble Great Game of geopolitics. He has capitalized
on the rise of China and India as alternative sources of investment and
trade--Venezuelan exports to India tripled over the past year, while oil
sales to China are expected to double this year and increase fivefold by
2010--and parlayed the 2004 election of Spanish Prime Minister José Luis
Rodríguez Zapatero into a strategic victory. Under Zapatero's predecessor,
José Aznar, Madrid not only backed Bush's "war on terror" but helped enforce
neoliberalism in Latin America through Spain's powerful banking sector. That
has changed as Zapatero and Chávez have joined their respective countries
into a corridor linking South America and the European Union. Although
Washington may yet scuttle the deal, Spain recently agreed to sell Venezuela
$2 billion worth of transport planes and patrol boats, while Caracas has
offered a long-term agreement to supply Spain with gas and oil.
Chávez has cultivated alliances across the ideological spectrum, buying arms
from Russia and negotiating a deal with Colombia's conservative President
Alvaro Uribe to build a natural gas pipeline connecting the two
countries--the first step in what observers believe will give Venezuela
access to the Pacific and lower export costs to China. Venezuela has also
managed to secure the tacit endorsement of Chile's just inaugurated Bachelet
for its bid to become a nonpermanent member of the UN Security Council,
which surely will contribute to John Bolton's anger issues.
Last December Venezuela scored another diplomatic coup, joining Argentina,
Brazil, Uruguay and Paraguay as a full member in Mercosur. When Mercosur was
founded in 1991, it was to be little more than a tool to groom individual
countries for eventual absorption into the US market. But reformers in
recent years have worked to transform it into a real alternative to
Washington's FTAA. The entrance of Venezuela, South America's third-largest
economy, comes just at the moment when Lula's troubles are threatening to
derail this project. Serious obstacles to trade and tariff standardization
remain, yet at the same meeting where it approved Venezuela's petition for
admission, Mercosur established a Parliament modeled on the European Union,
agreeing to cooperate on a range of issues, including multilateral trade
agreements with countries like China. Caracas has promised billions of
dollars to develop northern South America's transportation and commercial
infrastructure and has even floated the idea of a "Bank of the South," along
with a common Latin American currency, which would provide an alternative to
US-controlled financial institutions like the IMF and dollar-denominated
financial and commodity transactions. Venezuela has already become an
important regional creditor, purchasing more than $1 billion of Argentine
debt last year, which allowed Buenos Aires to pay off its IMF tab in full.
Venezuela is making cheap oil available to a majority of its neighbors,
including a quid pro quo with Paraguay for support of its bid to join
Mercosur. But oil does more than grease Chávez's diplomatic wheels: Energy
integration, he insists, will lay the foundation of Latin American unity.
Kirchner, Chávez and Lula have announced plans to build a 5,000-mile
pipeline that will transport Venezuelan natural gas through Brazil to
Argentina; Buenos Aires and Brasilia just signed a deal whereby Argentina
will ship 1.5 million cubic meters of gas to Brazil in the summer and Brazil
will provide Argentina with 700 megawatts of electricity in the winter. In
March the government-owned Petróleos de Venezuela (PDVSA) announced that it
would spend $3 billion to buy thirty-six oil tankers from a Brazilian
shipbuilder. The deal, which is the largest foreign order of Brazilian
vessels to date, is expected not only to create 10,000 new jobs but, as a
prime example of Chávez's realpolitik, to help Lula's re-election prospects.
In addition, over the last year Venezuela and Brazil have signed a number of
energy deals and have begun the construction of a joint oil refinery in the
Brazilian state of Pernambuco. And while US pundits have dismissed Chávez's
provision of cheap oil to poor urban neighborhoods in New England and
Chicago as a public relations stunt, this innovative form of diplomacy lets
him bypass unsympathetic national governments and build alliances directly
with local political movements. In March he reached an agreement with a
group of FMLN mayors in El Salvador, including the mayor of San Salvador, to
supply them with petroleum under preferential terms, allowing Chávez to
strike into a region firmly under US control and giving the leftist mayors
access to an important resource independent of the national government,
which is headed by the FMLN's main rival, the ultraconservative ARENA Party.
Much of this activity is taking place under the umbrella of three
Chávez-brokered oil alliances--PetroAndina, PetroCaribe and
PetroSur--through which Venezuela is not only offering a reliable stream of
petroleum at a set price but cheap credit, processing capabilities and
financing to expand gas and oil production in the respective regions.
Caracas has allowed fifteen Caribbean countries to pay part of their oil
bills up front, spreading the balance out over twenty-five years at low
interest rates, and has even let some nations pay their debt in kind, with
bananas, sugar or, in the case of Cuba, doctors. This past September, twelve
Latin American energy ministers met in Venezuela and voted to pursue the
unification of the three oil alliances into one PetroAmerica, which if it
comes into being would allow petroleum exporting countries to negotiate
collectively with the United States, generate price competition through the
creation of new regional markets, and help buffer economies from energy
price spikes.
Chávez's oil diplomacy extends beyond Latin America. Perhaps his most
consequential initiative upon taking office in early 1999 was to end
Venezuela's role as a rate-busting OPEC member and to work with Iran and
other petroleum-exporting countries to enforce production quotas, which,
well before Bush's invasion of Iraq and the current troubles in the Middle
East, began a steady rise in world oil prices. Last year, taking advantage
of increased global demand, Chávez forced seventeen foreign companies to
increase royalty payments and convert their operating contracts into joint
ventures with PDVSA, which not only means that the state now owns at least
51 percent of all oil production but that the multinationals will be picking
up the bill for modernizing the country's drilling and refining capacities.
When ExxonMobil balked at Chávez's New Year's deadline to become PDVSA's
junior partner, Spain's Repsol-YPF stepped in and bought out its holdings
under Venezuela's terms. A similar diversification of demand may help
Morales renegotiate Bolivia's existing contracts with foreign natural gas
companies, if not to nationalize production then perhaps to set up something
similar to Venezuela's joint ventures. With Malaysian, Indian and Chinese
gas companies eager to get in, firms already operating in Bolivia, including
Repsol, will have to consider seriously whatever offer Morales puts on the
table. Just recently, Russia's Gazprom struck a preliminary deal with the
Morales government to invest in joint exploration, production and refining
operations--which would give one of the world's largest energy companies its
first significant toehold in Latin America--while Brazil's state-owned
Petrobras has signaled its willingness to renegotiate existing contracts,
backed up by an announcement that it would help jumpstart Bolivia's moribund
state energy company.
the Bush Administration may well face the following scenario by the end of
the year, starting closest to home and working downward: A likely López
Obrador win in Mexico in July, possibly supplemented by a Sandinista victory
in Nicaragua, would bring Latin America's left renaissance to the United
States's doorstep. Since signing NAFTA, Mexico has been one of Washington's
few sure regional allies, countering Chávez's oil diplomacy by spearheading
its own effort to integrate Mesoamerican and Colombian energy production and
consumption. Markets are betting that López Obrador will speak like Chávez
but govern like Lula. Yet Lula has demonstrated that being "fiscally
responsible" in the eyes of the global financial community no longer means
complete submission to Washington's will. López Obrador has not yet taken a
stand on PetroAmerica, but he has invoked Mexico's long tradition of
petro-nationalism, pledging not to privatize the state-owned industry and to
reduce foreign influence in its operations. He has also promised to
renegotiate NAFTA--particularly a provision scheduled to go into effect in
2008 that completely opens the Mexican market to US corn--and allying with
Venezuela could strengthen his hand at the bargaining table. And while few
welcome the possible return of the now corrupt Daniel Ortega, there are
still worthy grassroots social movements within the Sandinista coalition,
and a victory might begin to thaw Washington's icy grip on Central America.
Further south, with Morales in Bolivia and Chávez-style candidates on the
march in Peru and Ecuador, the United States could confront a mobilized
Andean rim, which could put access to cheap natural resources in danger and
leave Colombia, its one trusted lieutenant in the region, isolated. Chávez's
re-election, which seems assured, would give him at least another six years
to consolidate Venezuela's position as a strategic hub, connecting the
Andes, the Caribbean and southern South America to Spain and the EU, Russia,
the Middle East, India and China. And PT militants in Brazil may look to the
success of Chávez's Fifth Republic Movement to renovate their party. But
Latin American solidarity historically has been honored more in the breach
than in the observance. Entrenched political and economic rivalries will
probably slow, if not stall, Mercosur and PetroAmerica integration. If the
dollar declines and shrinks demand for imports, if global interest rates go
up and swell Latin American debt, or if China slumps, leading to a fall in
commodity prices and Asian investment, the economic growth that has
underwritten regional cooperation over the past few years could end
abruptly. Yet even if a pro-FTAA candidate wins in Brazil in October, and
Peru and Ecuador remain firmly in Washington's camp, the United States would
still confront opposition from Argentina, open defiance from Venezuela and,
most likely, skepticism from Mexico--three of Latin America's four largest
economies and critical to any successful free-trade deal.
As its political and economic influence in the region wanes, Washington has
given up trying to convince Latin America to join the "war on terror," while
its trade envoys are now reduced to signing bilateral deals with negligible
economies like Paraguay and Ecuador to dilute opposition to the FTAA. The
White House, under the sway of neocon ultras, has further backed itself into
a corner by encouraging Chávez's adversaries to go for broke. Rather than
patiently broadening a base of opposition and accumulating grievances, they
have pursued an increasingly desperate series of actions--a coup attempt, an
oil strike, the recall and, most recently, a boycott of legislative
elections--that have left their nemesis strengthened and themselves
discredited. Washington may be laying the groundwork for the same
all-or-nothing strategy against Morales, having just announced that it is
cutting off 96 percent of its military aid to Bolivia, a move that seems
calculated to provoke the armed forces to act. The Bush Administration now
promises to wage a battle for the "future of Latin America," but with few
options left--except, of course, the military one--it is unclear if it will
have any more success in what used to be the United States's backyard than
it is having now in the Middle East.
*
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TOPIC: Theocons and Theocrats
http://groups.google.com/group/soc.culture.usa/browse_thread/thread/2bd4e8c2e74829cd
==============================================================================
== 1 of 1 ==
Date: Sat, Apr 15 2006 5:08 pm
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Theocons and Theocrats
Via NY Transfer News Collective * All the News that Doesn't Fit
[It's amusing to see the neo-con darling of the Reagan era, Kevin Phillips,
appearing in the pages of The Nation. He's selling a new book, and is
one of the latest conservatives to hop out of the anti-Bush closet.-NYTr]
The Nation - May 1, 2006 issue
http://www.thenation.com/docprint.mhtml?i=20060501&s=phillips
Theocons and Theocrats
by KEVIN PHILLIPS
Is theocracy in the United States (1) a legitimate fear, as some liberals
argue; (2) a joke, given the nation's rising secular population and moral
laxity; (3) a worrisome bias of major GOP constituencies and pressure
groups; or (4) all of the above? The last, I would argue.
The characteristics are not inconsistent. No large nation--no leading world
power--could ever resemble theocracies like John Calvin's Geneva, Puritan
Massachusetts or early Mormon Utah. These were all small polities produced
by unusual migrations of true believers.
As a great power, a large heterogeneous nation like the United States goes
about as far in a theocratic direction as it can when it meets the
unfortunate criteria on display in George W. Bush's Washington: an elected
leader who believes himself in some way to be speaking for God; a ruling
party that represents religious true believers and seeks to mobilize the
nation's churches; the conviction of many rank-and-file Republicans that
government should be guided by religion and religious leaders; and White
House implementation of domestic and international political agendas that
seem to be driven by religious motivations and biblical worldviews.
As several chapters in American Theocracy make clear, this kind of religious
excess has been a problem--indeed, a repeating Achilles' heel--of leading
powers from late-stage Rome (historian Gibbon thus explained Roman decline
and fall) to the militant Catholicism of Habsburg Spain and most recently
the evangelical and moral imperialist Britain that saw 1914 as something of
an Armageddon against the German Kaiser's Antichrist and wound up in 1917-18
crusading in the Middle East to liberate Jerusalem. But although this facet
of historical decline constitutes a major caution regarding the future of
the United States, this essay will concentrate on the domestic political
aspects--the theocratic tendencies in the GOP and the notable
"religification" of American politics across a spectrum from life and death
to science and medicine to climate change and biblical creationism.
The Growth of Theocratic Sentiment
The essential US conditions for a theocratic trend fell into place in the
late 1980s and '90s with the growing mass of evangelical, fundamentalist and
Pentecostal Christianity, expressed politically by the religious right; and
the rise of the Republican Party as a powerful vehicle for religious
policy-making and eventual erosion of the accepted degree of separation
between church and state. This transformation was most vivid at the state
level, where fifteen to twenty state Republican parties came under the
control of the religious right, and party conventions in the South and West
endorsed so-called "Christian nation" platforms. As yet nationally
uncatalogued--a shortfall that cries out for a serious research
project--these platforms set out in varying degrees the radical political
theology of the Christian Reconstructionist movement, ranging from the Bible
as the basis for domestic law to an emphasis on religious schools and
women's subordination to men. The 2004 platform of the Texas Republican
Party is a case in point.
So are the political careers of Pat Robertson and John Ashcroft, two
presidential aspirants whose careers were milestones in the theocratization
of the Republican Party. Robertson's 1988 presidential bid brought huge
numbers of Pentecostals into the Republican Party. Missouri Senator
Ashcroft, who explored a presidential race in 1997-98, got much of his
funding from Robertson and other evangelicals. Picked as Attorney General by
Bush after the 2000 election, Ashcroft was the choice of the religious
right. Earlier in his career Ashcroft had decried the wall between church
and state as "a wall of religious oppression," and his memoir describes each
of his many electoral defeats as a crucifixion and every important political
victory as a resurrection, and recounts scenes in which he had friends and
family anoint him with oil in the manner "of the ancient kings of Israel."
But the national political emergence of Bush was equally relevant. "Born
again" during the mid-1980s, he came up during the same period and in the
same intense mode. As Newsweek noted in 2003, "As a subaltern in his
father's 1988 campaign, George Bush the Younger assembled his career through
contacts with ministers of the then emerging evangelical movement in
political life. Now they form the core of the Republican Party, which
controls all of the capital for the first time in a half century.
Bible-believing Christians are Bush's strongest backers."
More telling still, in the years since 1988 dozens of reports have quoted
Bush the Younger telling ministers, supporters and foreign officials that
God wanted him to run for President and that God speaks through him. In
mid-2004 one Pennsylvania newspaper reported his telling a local Amish
audience, "I trust God speaks through me. Without that, I couldn't do my
job." Reports that he told Middle Eastern leaders that God told him to
invade Iraq have been denied by the White House, but this is clearly the
sort of language he uses from time to time.
Since Robertson's run for the White House in 1988 and the victory that same
year by Bush the Elder, the Republican Party has clearly moved closer to
this constituency--and the process was speeded by Bill Clinton, whose
politics and personal conduct offended the churchgoing South, in particular,
enabling George W. Bush to pose as the standard-bearer of moral restoration
in 2000. This metamorphosis gained further momentum after September 11,
2001, when the younger Bush responded to the terrorist attacks by declaring
the start of a war between good and evil, speaking in a relentlessly
religious idiom that several biblical scholars have described as
double-coding--only mildly religious on the surface, but beneath that full
of allusions to biblical passages and Christian hymns. They, too, suggested
that Bush cast himself as a prophet of sorts--one who spoke for God.
The upshot of this escalating religiosity on the part of the Republican
national leadership has been an escalating and parallel religiosity on the
part of the Republican rank and file. Those voting Republican for President
since 1988 have become increasingly religious in motivation. After 9/11
pro-Bush preachers described Bush as God's chosen man while hinting that
Saddam Hussein, whose Iraq was the biblical "New Babylon" of fundamentalist
preacher Tim LaHaye's eerie Left Behind series, was the Antichrist or at
least the forerunner of the Evil One. In 2004 a further wave of evangelical,
fundamentalist and Pentecostal turnout helped to cement the Republican
transformation, even as moderate mainline Protestants shuddered and turned
in a small Democratic trend between 2000 and 2004.
As early as 1988, Ohio academician John Green, a specialist in religious
political behavior, had commented on how the growing correlation between
frequent church attendance and Republican presidential voting was starting
to raise a US parallel to the religious parties of Europe, most notably the
Christian Democrats in Germany and Italy. By 2000-04, this correlation was
much stronger, and political journalists began to speak of the "religious
gap" that was replacing the "gender gap." The less discussed but even more
significant aspect of this upheaval lay in a second set of polls that showed
the increasingly theocratic inclinations of the Republican electorate (see
chart).
These sentiments did not spring from nowhere. A majority of Americans take
the Bible literally in many dimensions, including subjects ranging from the
creation and Noah's Ark to the Book of Revelation. Within the ranks of
Republican voters, the ratios are lopsided. For example, in 1999 a national
poll by Newsweek revealed that 40 percent of American Christians believed in
Armageddon and virtually as many thought the Antichrist was already alive.
Because such believers were most numerous in the Republican electorate, I
would calculate that roughly 55 percent of Bush 2004 voters believed in
Armageddon--and it could be higher.
Such voters are especially prone to theocratic views, and foreign policy is
by no means immune. In 2004 a survey by the Pew Center found that 55 percent
of white evangelical Protestants consider "following religious principles"
to be a top priority for foreign policy. Only a quarter of Catholics and
mainline Protestants agreed, but given the makeup of the Bush coalition, I
would guess that about half its voters would favor that position. This
explains both why so many of Bush's core supporters cheered the first-stage
US involvement in Iraq--and why Bush bungled things in the Holy Land so
badly.
The Bible, Theology and American Politics
This is a bit of a chicken-versus-egg situation. Have the issues that matter
most to Americans become more theological because religion has become more
of a political force--or has the growth of issues with a religious dimension
spurred the increasing religious divisions? Probably some of each, but the
list is frighteningly long.
First and foremost are the issues involving birth, life, death, sex, health,
medicine, marriage and the role of the family--high-octane subject matter
since the 1970s. These are areas where perceived immorality most excites
stick-to-Scripture advocates and the religious right. Closely related is the
commitment by the Bush White House and the religious right to reduce the
current separation between church and state.
Topics such as natural resources, climate, global warming, resource
depletion, environmental regulation and petroleum geology mark out a third
important arena. Organizations such as the Acton Institute for the Study of
Religion and Liberty have enlisted a fair amount of conservative religious
and corporate support for preparing what amounts to a pro-business,
pro-development explanation of Christian stewardship. The institute's
director, Roman Catholic Father Robert Sirico, contends that left-tilting
environmentalism is idolatrous in its substitution of nature for God, giving
the Christian environmental movement a "perhaps-unconscious pagan nature."
Then there is the subject matter of business, economics and wealth, in which
the tendency of the Christian right is to oppose regulation and justify
wealth and relative laissez-faire, tipping its hat to the upper-income and
corporate portions of the Republican coalition. Christian Reconstructionists
go even further, abandoning most economic regulation in order to prepare the
moral framework for God's return.
The last arena of theological influence, almost as important as sex, birth
and mortality, involves American foreign policy, bringing us to the
connections among the "war on terror," the rapture, the end times,
Armageddon and the thinly disguised US crusade against radical Islam. Since
Islam and Christianity began fighting in the seventh century, the Holy Land
has often brought disillusionment: after the Crusades (all nine of them);
after the fall of Constantinople in 1453; and five centuries later for the
British, in particular, after World War I. Unmindful Western nations may
still be playing out the Crusader hand. In the months before George W. Bush
sent US troops into Iraq, his inspirational reading each morning was a book
of sermons by a Scottish preacher accompanying troops about to march on
Jerusalem in 1917.
Controversies over life and death--often pivoting on precise definitions of
each--can only continue to burgeon. The arguable rights of women (or
parents) are being displaced by the rights of embryos or by the prerogative
of sperm and egg to join, decisions rooted largely in theology, not science.
Perhaps the preoccupation involves maximizing the potential soul count for
the hereafter, in the manner of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century
inquisitors who ordered that heretics must die even if they repented, yet
pursued repentance to save their souls first.
The theology of death is cloudier and also riskier politically. Although
Bush took a bold and ultimately unpopular stand in the Terri Schiavo case,
bending over backward to insist on continuing her life support, blocking
death is not the theological equivalent of enabling birth. The Bible abounds
with the killing of those already born, both by God and by lawful
authorities. Bush himself, as governor of Texas, sent hundreds of prisoners
to the electric chair.
The next throbbing cluster of issues involves church-state relations. The
nonradical theocon wing of the GOP demands a more conservative judiciary and
an expanded role for religion in education, social services and the
constraining of what they consider to be immoral behavior--abortion,
homosexuality, pornography and contraception--but avoids spelling out any
grand revolutionary mandate. The Christian Reconstructionist movement, by
contrast, proclaims ambitions that range from replacing public schools with
religious education to imposing biblical law and limiting the franchise to
male Christians.
The federal judiciary is the arena in which the battles most critical to
incipient theocrats will be fought out judge by judge, court by court. Signs
of their anxiety to control the federal judiciary burst into view in an
early 2005 meeting at which conservative evangelical leaders were addressed
by Tom DeLay and Senate majority leader Bill Frist. The focus of the
strategy session was how to strip funding or jurisdiction from federal
courts, or even eliminate them. James Dobson of the Colorado-based Focus on
the Family named one target: the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. "Very few
people know this, that the Congress can simply disenfranchise a court,"
Dobson commented. "All they have to do is say the 9th Circuit doesn't exist
anymore, and it's gone." A spokesman for Frist said he did not agree with
the idea of defunding courts or shutting them down, but DeLay, who had once
said, "We set up the courts. We can unset the courts," declined to comment.
Beyond the judiciary, pressure for theological correctness became overt in
federal government relationships with the varieties of science--from
climatology to geology, and even entomology--that can conflict with the Book
of Genesis. For the growing number of elected officials who uphold Genesis,
the Almighty, not carbon dioxide, brings about climate change. The
consequences here go far beyond the evolution-doubting books being sold by
the National Park Service or inconvenient information about climate change
or caribou habitats in oil lands being deleted from government websites. In
Texas, where the cotton industry is plagued by a moth in which an immunity
to pesticides has evolved, a frustrated entomologist commented, "It's
amazing that cotton growers are having to deal with these pests in the very
states whose legislatures are so hostile to the theory of evolution. Because
it is evolution they are struggling against in their fields every season."
Meanwhile, the bigger message--depressingly reminiscent of our imperial
predecessors--is that science in the United States is already in trouble.
Irving Weissman, a stem-cell researcher, told the Boston Globe, "You are
going to start picking up Nature and Science and all the great [research]
journals, and you are going to read about how South Koreans and Chinese and
Singaporeans are making advances that the rest of us can't even study."
Part of the explanation involves the religious right's larger view of
economic matters and dismantling of government. In the radical Texas
Republican platform adopted in 2004, the Lone Star GOP was not content to
call for abolishing the Environmental Protection Agency and the Energy
Department; it also demanded abolition of the Internal Revenue Service and
elimination of the income tax, the inheritance tax, the gift tax, the
capital-gains levy, the corporate income tax, the payroll tax and state and
local property taxes.
Evangelicals, Southern Baptist Convention adherents and others oppose
government social and economic programs because they interfere with a
person's individual responsibility for his or her salvation. Others were
diverted by rapture and end-times possibilities. "Overall, this kind of
teaching has certainly stifled social consciousness among evangelicals,"
said Tim Weber, professor of church history at Northern Baptist Theological
Seminary. "If Jesus may come at any minute, then long-term social reform or
renewal are beside the point. It has a bad effect there."
These are divisive issues, and they divide both parties, but survey data
suggest that they divide the Republicans somewhat more than the Democrats.
True, liberals were front and center in trying to shrink the role of
religion in the public square, and they have paid the price. However, the
more important confrontation is now within the GOP, as the essential
tensions shift from the unpopular derogation of religion so prevalent
decades ago to the theologization and theocratic excesses of the
conservative countertide.
Three prominent Republicans have staked out the boundaries. Former
Republican Senator John Danforth of Missouri complained in 2005 that "the
only explanation for legislators comparing cells in a petri dish to babies
in a womb is the extension of religious doctrine into statutory law." Rhode
Island Senator Lincoln Chafee suggested that George W. Bush's "I carry the
word of God" posture ought to be a 2004 election issue. And Representative
Christopher Shays of Connecticut regretted that "the Republican Party of
Lincoln has become a party of theocracy."
Unhappily, that's the direction in which it's been trending.
*
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TOPIC: Iran Predicts US anti-Islam Crusade Will Fail
http://groups.google.com/group/soc.culture.usa/browse_thread/thread/5e67562d919db612
==============================================================================
== 1 of 1 ==
Date: Sat, Apr 15 2006 5:08 pm
From: NY.Transfer.News@blythe.org
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Iran Predicts US anti-Islam Crusade Will Fail
Via NY Transfer News Collective * All the News that Doesn't Fit
Prensa Latina, Havana
http://www.plenglish.com
Iran: Khamenei Predicts US Crusade Against Islam Will Fail
Tehran, Apr 14 (Prensa Latina) The supreme spiritual leader of the
Islamic Republic of Iran, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, stated Friday that
the US conspiracy against Iran, Syria, Lebanon and Iraq is doomed to
end in a failure.article.
The US goal is to support Israel for control of the Middle East,
Khamenei asserted to more than 200 politicians and scientists
attending an international conference backing the cause of the
Palestine people.
He declared that if the US acted reasonably, it would cease the ruse
and avoid creating more tension in the zone.
It (US) must respect the Palestinian and Iraqi right to form their own
governments, noted the religious chief, who urged the Moslem people to
speak up for the Islamic Resistance Movement.
hr/ccs/ecq/joe
*
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==============================================================================
TOPIC: Brits Deny Anti-Iran Military Drills 2 Yrs Ago
http://groups.google.com/group/soc.culture.usa/browse_thread/thread/51adbe9a3534a2b9
==============================================================================
== 1 of 1 ==
Date: Sat, Apr 15 2006 5:08 pm
From: NY.Transfer.News@blythe.org
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Brits Deny Anti-Iran Military Drills 2 Yrs Ago
Via NY Transfer News Collective * All the News that Doesn't Fit
Prensa Latina, Havana
http://www.plenglish.com
UK Denies Anti-Iran Military Drills
London, Apr 15 (Prensa Latina) One year after the US-British
occupation of Iraq, British troops simulated an invasion of Iran at
the US military base Fort Belvoir, in Virginia, US.
Foreign Secretary Jack Straw denies that British military simulated on
Jul 2004 an attack on an imaginary Middle East country called Korona,
similar to Iran, but a Defense Ministry source confirms it did.
The Guardian recalled that the information became public when
Washington, claiming the production of WMD, called for sanctions of
Iran and threatened the use of force.
Teheran has said it will not renounce its peaceful technology, namely
used to generate electricity under supervision of the International
Atomic Energy Organization (IAEO).
IAEO President Mohamed El Baradei, following a visit to Iran, will
submit a report to the UN on the Iranian nuclear program on May 28.
hr/emw/bts/mf
*
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TOPIC: US Bumbling, Friendly Fire in Afghanistan
http://groups.google.com/group/soc.culture.usa/browse_thread/thread/a0a32769c449b649
==============================================================================
== 1 of 1 ==
Date: Sat, Apr 15 2006 5:08 pm
From: NY.Transfer.News@blythe.org
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US Bumbling, Friendly Fire in Afghanistan
Via NY Transfer News Collective * All the News that Doesn't Fit
Prensa Latina, Havana
http://www.plenglish.com
US Bumbling, Friendly Fire in Afghanistan
Kabul, Apr 15 (Prensa Latina) Afghan troops backed up by US helicopter
gunship targeted alleged Taliban rebels in the convulsed southern
province of Kandahar Saturday, with government sources elaborating
that Afghan troops were killed mistakenly by US missiles.
The fierce combat, causing casualties on both sides, followed
intelligence reports that rebel groups concentrated in Sangisar area
(Cherai district) were to attack Kandahar city, a former Taliban
spiritual stronghold.
The Afghani Defense Ministry informed 41 rebels and six policemen
died, while another nine soldiers and three civilians were wounded.
Taliban spokesman Qari Yousif Ahmadi clarified in a telephone
conversation with media that they only had two rebels killed and three
wounded.
hr/dig/mne/mf
*
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TOPIC: Secondary factors why Eyeran wants nukes
http://groups.google.com/group/soc.culture.usa/browse_thread/thread/a6b2f655b2a3f198
==============================================================================
== 1 of 1 ==
Date: Sat, Apr 15 2006 10:11 pm
From: Fred J. McCall
Vince <firelaw@firelaw.us> wrote:
:Fred J. McCall wrote:
:> Vince <firelaw@firelaw.us> wrote:
:>
:> :Fred J. McCall wrote:
:> :> Vince <firelaw@firelaw.us> wrote:
:> :>
:> :> :Fred J. McCall wrote: :> Vince <firelaw@firelaw.us> wrote: :> :>
:> :> :Fred J. McCall wrote: :> ianparker2@gmail.com wrote: :> :> :Yes but
:> :> :> if you have 10,000 centrfuges and a reprocessing facility :> :>
:> :> :everyone knows that one could be cobbled together fairly quickly if
:> :> :> :> :required. Perhaps that is all that is needed for the desired
:> :> :> political :> :pressure. :> :> If you have 10,000 centrifuges (and
:> :> a :> bunch of uranium) you don't need :> a reprocessing facility. :>
:> :> :> :> The centrifuges are used for enriching uranium. The
:> :> reprocessing :> :> facility is for separating plutonium from a
:> :> nuclear fuel burn. The :> :> former gives you material that can
:> :> probably "cobbled together :> fairly :> quickly" into a (gun-type)
:> :> bomb if required. The latter :> gives you :> plutonium, which is a
:> :> much harder problem to turn into a :> working :> weapon (and
:> :> "cobbling" just won't get it). :> :> Please :> learn something about
:> :> the technologies behind what you are :> talking :> about. :
:> :> :Reprocessing facilities also describes extracting uranium :> from
:> :> spent :reactor fuel elements :> :> Which has nothing to do with
:> :> making a bomb, which is what is being :> talked about. The uranium
:> :> from fuel rods would need to be further :> enriched (and there isn't
:> :> enough of it to do that, generally - you're :> better off just
:> :> starting from tons of ore). : :nonsense. spent Reactor fuel is
:> :> already enriched (3-5%), so it is the :best possible feedstock for
:> :> the Centrifuge.
:> :>
:> :> Nope. The nuclear burn process creates uranium isotopes (like U236,
:> :> I think - working from memory so that may not be right) that you
:> :> don't want in there.
:> :>
:> :> :"A PWR has fuel assemblies of 200-300 rods each, arranged vertically
:> :> in :the core, and a large reactor would have about 150-250 fuel
:> :> assemblies :with 80-100 tonnes of uranium. : :80-100 tons of uranium
:> :> enriched to 5% is a huge amount of U-235 :even partially spent fuel
:> :> rods can be about 3% u=235
:> :>
:> :> But it's hard to get out. Easier to start with ore unless you can
:> :> start with a brand new core. Even then, the metal may be locked up
:> :> in a form where it's difficult to get back out by design.
:> :>
:> :
:> :its not hard at all
:> :
:> : REX
:> :
:> : The PUREX process can be modified to make a UREX (URanium EXtraction)
:> :process which could be used to save space inside high level nuclear
:> :waste disposal sites, such as Yucca Mountain, by removing the uranium
:> :which makes up the vast majority of the mass and volume of used fuel and
:> :recycling it as reprocessed uranium.
:> :
:> : The UREX process is a PUREX process which has been modified to prevent
:> :the plutonium being extracted. This can be done by adding a plutonium
:> :reductant before the first metal extraction step. In the UREX process,
:> :~99.9% of the Uranium and >95% of Technetium are separated from each
:> :other and the other fission products and actinides. The key is the
:> :addition of acetohydroxamic acid (AHA) to the extraction and scrub
:> :sections of the process. The addition of AHA greatly diminishes the
:> :extractability of Plutonium and Neptunium, providing greater
:> :proliferation resistance than with the plutonium extraction stage of the
:> :PUREX process.
:> :
:> : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_reprocessing
:>
:> I said hard, not impossible. Fuel rod reprocessing is hard, Vinnie.
:> That's one reason that so few countries do it.
:>
:> The fact that there IS a process doesn't mean it is an EASY process.
:>
:> And after you do what is described above, you still have your U236
:> problem.
:>
:> You CAN make a weapon out of uranium extracted from spent reactor
:> fuel, but it's much harder to do than if you start from ore. DOE did
:> it once as a 'science project'. It's a much more complex design.
:>
:> But you will continue to argue about things that you know practically
:> nothing about, won't you?
:
:OFCS
:this is well understood as a problem when you are down blending
:
:Process Parameters
:
:HEU Feed Assay [wt-% U-235] · [wt-% U-234] · [wt-% U-236]
: Weight-percent of the fissile isotope uranium-235 and of the
:byproducts uranium-234 and uranium-236 in the uranium contained in the
:HEU feed (highly enriched uranium). U-235 assays are > 20% for HEU, by
:definition. The assays of HEU currently being downblended are in the 40%
:to 90% range. U-234 is a minor isotope contained in natural uranium;
:during the enrichment process, its concentration increases even more
:than that of U-235. Caution: Upon entry of a value for the U-235 assay,
:or the HEU Origin or Tails Assay (see below), the calculator
:automatically determines a value for the U-234 assay. In case the
:estimated value is inappropriate, it can be overwritten.
: U-236 is a byproduct from irradiation in a reactor and may be
:contained in the HEU, depending on its manufacturing history. HEU
:reprocessed from nuclear weapons material production reactors may
:contain U-236 concentrations as high as 25%.
:
:http://www.wise-uranium.org/nfcubh.html
:
:its a well understood problem
:You just adjust for it.
You can't just "adjust for it" if you're building bombs, Vinnie. It's
more than a minor adjustment to bomb design if the uranium contains
any significant quantity of U236.
Frankly, you've gone from merely ignorant (nothing wrong with that) to
obstinately ignorant (lots wrong with that).
--
"Ignorance is preferable to error, and he is less remote from the
truth who believes nothing than he who believes what is wrong."
-- Thomas Jefferson
==============================================================================
TOPIC: Is the Gay Life Really Gay?
http://groups.google.com/group/soc.culture.usa/browse_thread/thread/6b88140d63876848
==============================================================================
== 1 of 1 ==
Date: Sat, Apr 15 2006 10:12 pm
From: Bock
> LIFE must be faced as it is, not as one wishes it would be. Many
> homosexuals may wish that the world would accept them as they are simply
> as peoplewithout any regard as to whether they choose males or females
> as bed partners.
Most women who choose male bed partners have way more problems than any
homosexual does.
> But the fact of the matter is that the world does not,
> generally speaking, fully accept a person known to be a homosexual.
>
The wrld as a whole does not accept a lot of things like global warming
and the
quick melting of the icebergs, over population, energy shorages,
shortages and
increased prices of drinking water. For most of the problems in the
world, homosexuals
don't even make the radar screen.
> The homosexual may call this unfair or discriminatory. But most people
> are not attracted to the homosexual way of life.
I would hope not. Most guy have a enough problems find a woman that
will have him
on her terms, keeping a woman on her terms and producing offspring on
her terms.
That any heterosexual man would find another male remotely interesting
in a sexual
way is an embarrassment to other heterosexuals.
> If anyone is involved
> in it or just starting to be so involved, that is a necessary point to
> keep in mind.
Your kind concerns and regards for the remote chance that a heterosexual
might find
another heterosexual attractive in a sexual way. No wonder
heterosexuals are nervous.
The view of homosexuality held by most people will create
> real problems for such a one.
Well, the fact that most men are confused and frustrated by the women
the love so much so that
45 percent of them said they have had enough and divorce is exqually
true of heterosexual women confused and frustrated by the heterosexual
male should be a sufficient warning to stay a way from even something
more remote as homosexual love and sex.
==============================================================================
TOPIC: Call/Visit Me-Susan Cohen;Discuss NAMBLA
http://groups.google.com/group/soc.culture.usa/browse_thread/thread/cf55ab7e5eb8a1db
==============================================================================
== 1 of 1 ==
Date: Sat, Apr 15 2006 4:17 pm
From: Frank Arthur
Fromother articles, and pictures, Sueee Cohen is a really revolting object,
barely humanoid, but deserving of sympathy.
But she does love being with Riain Barton, who as an admitted fag, has certain
talents for Sueee.
This is the best picture I can find of me, LOL...
Spouting Hot Air: http://tinyurl.com/apzwp
On 15 Oct 2004 06:34:44 -0000, Hilary Ostrich wrote:
>From: john.poindexter@wowmail.com (John Poindexter)
>Newsgroups:
>soc.culture.usa,soc.motss,soc.culture.palestine,alt.homosexual,us.taxes
>Subject: Re: NAMBLA-A Conduit for Pedophiles;Visit Me
>Date: 20 Sep 2003 12:22:08 -0700
>Isn't this the same Susan Cohen who supports the convict, and child
>molester Ken McVay running the Bnai Brith funded BUSINESS where he
>cheats JEWS called NIZKOR?
>Sounds like 2 of a kind to me....
>> From: Fred Cherry (john1@world.std.com)
>> Subject: Re: NAMBLA: A conduit for Pedophiles
>> View: Complete Thread (5 articles)
>> Original Format
>> Newsgroups: soc.motss, soc.bi, can.motss, sdnet.motss, ba.motss
>> Date: 2002-10-04 11:49:43 PST
>> In Message-ID: <9f2e0168.0209261203.3456323a@posting.google.com>
>> Subject: Re: NAMBLA: A conduit for Pedophiles
>> Newsgroups: rec.arts.poems
>> Date: 26 Sep 2002 13:03:20 -0700
>> c_lysaght@bikerider.com (Chuck Lysaght) wrote:
>> > It's no surprise that no one in this newsgroup can offer any
>> > intelligent comments about the url I posted. Just nonsense, and
>> > personal attacks. Predictable, but unfortunate for others.
>> Chuck, if you think YOU have been the victim of personal attacks, you
>> should try to post something directly in opposition to something that
>> Susan Cohen posts. Then you will REALLY see personal attacks from the
>> number-one liar and the number-one supporter of NAMBLA on Usenet. Here is
>> an excerpt from a recent 221 line diatribe against me, posted in the
>> newsgroup alt.politics.homosexuality, Susan Cohen's favorite newsgroup.
>> Because of my opposition to NAMBLA, Susan Cohen's favorite organization,
>> I have had to put up with this sort of thing for about five years.
>> //////////////////////////////////////////////////
>> > I have some bad news for Your Heinous.
>> What was that His Gayness typed? He should take his hand off that little boy & put
>> it back on the keyboard where it belongs; then maybe his posts would be legible.
>> > Good news for me, but bad news for
>> > Your Heinous.
>> What was that His Gayness typed? He should take his hand off that little boy & put
>> it back on the keyboard where it belongs; then maybe his posts would be legible.
>> > I am referring to the suit by the parents of murdered
>> > Jeffrey Curley against NAMBLA. See
>> > http://www.seacoastonline.com/2001news/10_5d.htm.
>> "Page Not Found". Freddie's fantasies strike again.
>> ////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////
>> You will NOT get "Page Not Found" if you access that URL. You WILL get the
>> front page of the Portsmouth Herald for Friday, October 5, 2001. The
>> headline reads: "Curley's lawsuit against Man/Boy love goes forward."
>> The URL gives you the whole story.
>> Print it out and save it for future reference. Susan Cohen would call me a
>> liar if I merely reported what the Portsmouth Herald said. But now she and
>> the rest of the NAMBLA supporters who have flocked to the poetry
>> newsgroups will have to say that the Portsmouth Herald is lying.
>> john1@world.std.com (Fred Cherry)
>> Grand Duke of Yugoslobia
>> Duke of Vulgaria
>> Grand Muff-Diver of Jerusalem
>> & Elector of Homophobia
>hans.helmut.tavisch@wowmail.com (Hans Helmut Tavisch) wrote in message
>news:<8e4816c0.0309181610.5cec486b@posting.google.com>...
>> > "Brian Blank" <BrianBlank@earthlink.net> wrote in message
>> > news:k1obmv8k1t6vgemi1ac6702a30rlik3t0c@4ax.com...
>Susan Cohen has admitted living in Silver Spring, MD.
>Susan has also talked about her husband Gary.
>Well guess what, a guy named Gary Cohen AND a woman named
>Susan Cohen just happen to live at the address specified below!!
>So, This is almost certainly Susan's address. If
>not, we'll dig further in public records (tax records, etc.)
>Susan Cohen
>2805 Blazer Ct
>Silver Spring, MD, 20906-2319
>Phone: (301) 871-8577
>She can probably use some company, male,female,animal or whatever....
>By the way, it seems that Susan Cohen also campaigned against
>a ZHID group trying to scam $850 millions for a proposed
>development in Silver Springs,Md. She did not like the
>Ghermezian JEWS from Canada and their scam.
>She isn't completely worthless, I guess.....
If you believe in the TRUTH and the RIGHT,
then visit www.freedomsite.org
Lawyers, politicians, and judges need to be recycled - as fertiliser!!
"At a time of universal deceit - telling the truth
is a revolutionary act."
(George Orwell)
David Icke - '...and the truth shall set you free'
"All truth passes through three stages.
First, it is ridiculed, second it is violently opposed,
and third, it is accepted as self-evident."
(Arthur Schopenhauer)
"The reason men are silenced is not because they speak falsely,
but because they speak the truth. This is because if men speak
falsehoods, their own words can be used against them; while if
they speak truly, there is nothing which can be used
against them -- except force." -- John Bryant
"To attempt to silence a man is to pay him homage, for it is an
acknowledgement that his arguments are both impossible to answer
and impossible to ignore."
--John Bryant
If you believe in the TRUTH and the RIGHT,
then visit www.freedomsite.org
Lawyers, politicians, and judges need to be recycled - as fertiliser!!
"At a time of universal deceit - telling the truth
is a revolutionary act."
(George Orwell)
David Icke - '...and the truth shall set you free'
"All truth passes through three stages.
First, it is ridiculed, second it is violently opposed,
and third, it is accepted as self-evident."
(Arthur Schopenhauer)
"The reason men are silenced is not because they speak falsely,
but because they speak the truth. This is because if men speak
falsehoods, their own words can be used against them; while if
they speak truly, there is nothing which can be used
against them -- except force." -- John Bryant
"To attempt to silence a man is to pay him homage, for it is an
acknowledgement that his arguments are both impossible to answer
and impossible to ignore."
--John Bryant
Posted by:
Patrick Lee Humphrey
7500 Bellerive #1807
Houston, Texas 77036-3040
1-713-266-7764
Steven Horn (KCOM)
1836 NW 11th St
Oklahoma City, OK 73106
(405) 524-0576
together with
Boris Dynin <boris@sonic.net> = NAMBLA executive &
Henry<hermcam@mindspring.com> who like
late night discussions, even from Stormfront,
Christian Identity, Pamyat, Aryan Nations, etc.
I am together with McVay, regional managers for NAMBLA.
We like young children, so that we can train them our way.
CALL late nights to discuss: (408) 773-0984
Email me: boris@movil.com , boris@sonic.net or even
VISIT me at:
55 Chumasero Drive, Daly City, San Francisco 94132
Ken McVay invites callers,and visitors,to his homosexuals escorts
office: VISIT at:
#5 - 1601 - Bowen Road, Nanaimo, B.C., Canada, or my home at:
Apt. 3108 - 995 Bowen Road, Nanaimo, B.C., Canada
or call: 1-250-616-9431
As everyone can see McVay takes it as a compliment when he is
called a "confessed child-molester" and the additional material
should give an indication as to the why.
"I am weary of seeing the issue of "child porn" blown out of
proportion (I've been on and around the Net since 1988, and have
yet to come across anything I'd consider "child porn." I've
seen photos of naked children, but then I've got some of those in
my family photo album, and fail to see the harm, or any great
moral danger to our society)." - Nizkor Director Ken McVay
http://www.spectacle.org/695/mcvay.html [Many paedophiles
also have family albums with naked children photos in them.]
Look at Ken McVay's photo and ask yourselves; "Does he not look like
a disheveled unkempt pervert or someone who would molest your child
even if he or she were not naked"?
http://www.protocol.gov.bc.ca/protocol/prgs/obc/1995/1995_KMcVay.jpg
For detailed and documented evidence of McVay's questionable
background and details of convictions, please refer to Dr.David Michael's
detailed expose on McVay. McVay is a distraught paranoid molseter, and is
known for claiming that anyone who refutes his lies must be a grosvenor!!
It is also suspected that McVay fabricates responses using aliases, just
to justify his existence to his ZHID masters.
Since I am a female, I also like to receive many calls, to discuss
NAMBLA,lesbianism, JEW atrocities and similar.
Email me, Shiksa Susan Cohen at: FlaviaR@verizon.net, especially late nights.
Also,be sure to include me on maillists:
Keith Spencer,5005 Whitemud Road,Edmonton,AB,Canada T6H5L2
I welcome phone calls, late nights:(780)437-1787 or
send lots of emails to: krs2@ualberta.ca, or phone to
work:(780)492-0473
And also: George Firestone: "George" <firestone@hemisphere.com>
Here is Fag Rianin's own web page: http://gaydar.co.uk/riain_il
Notice he is a self confessed ZionistFagJew!
For the real TRUTH about ZHIDS, visit the world top-rated website for
JEW-WATCH:
http://www.jewwatch.com
Now with more evidence coming out proving ZHID COLLABORATION WITH
NAZIS - another 51 cases besides the renowned Kastner case - no wonder
people around the world are really disliking the Christkiller ZHIDS!!
Or, other useful websites include:
ZUNDELSITE - www.zundelsite.org
IHR - www.ihr.org
OSTARA - www.ostara.org
PAMYAT - http://abbc.com/pamyat/index.html
Edgar J.Steele - www.ConspiracyPenPal.com
AL JAZEERA - http://english.aljazeera.net/HomePage
THE HOFFMAN WIRE - Dedicated to Freedom of the Press,
Investigative Reporting and Revisionist History
Subscribe: HoffmanWire-subscribe@topica.com
Or, visit the website for NATIONAL ALLIANCE : http://www.natall.com
They have lots of information, as well as books and records.
They also are involved in exposing Ken McVay for the crook he is,
and passing on information to the appropriate criminal prosecutors.
As a service to the public, this article is posted worldwide by a
victim of the molester pervert Ken McVay, with the assistance
of a group interested in detailing the depredations of the ZHIDS.
May Ken McVay and his like,rot in gehenna.
In memory of William Grosvenor who courageously posted the TRUTH
for many years around the world.
Reply-To: "George" <firestone@hemisphere.com>
_________________________________________
Usenet Zone Free Binaries Usenet Server
More than 140,000 groups
Unlimited download
http://www.usenetzone.com to open account
==============================================================================
TOPIC: KIKE ABRAMOFF, THE SHITWAD!
http://groups.google.com/group/soc.culture.usa/browse_thread/thread/30ff46aed373bca7
==============================================================================
== 1 of 1 ==
Date: Sat, Apr 15 2006 10:19 pm
From: "Salah Jafar"
I thought I have tamed you kike.
SJ
==============================================================================
TOPIC: H O L O H O A X
http://groups.google.com/group/soc.culture.usa/browse_thread/thread/4c8533fbeb4404a7
==============================================================================
== 1 of 1 ==
Date: Sat, Apr 15 2006 10:21 pm
From: "captain."
do you think that is funny?
==============================================================================
TOPIC: Kurd party slams Turk govt, army, EU over clashes
http://groups.google.com/group/soc.culture.usa/browse_thread/thread/b6804a5deabce72c
==============================================================================
== 1 of 2 ==
Date: Sat, Apr 15 2006 10:20 pm
From: "Ali Asker"
Kurd party slams Turk govt, army, EU over clashes
4/15/2006 Reuters
Fri 14 Apr 2006 9:43 AM ET
ANKARA, April 14 (Reuters) - Turkey's main Kurdish political party
accused the government of doing nothing to tackle the problems of the mainly
Kurdish southeast and also expressed disappointment with the attitude of the
EU.
Turkey's impoverished southeast has recently been rocked by street
clashes between Kurdish protesters and security forces. Violence has also
increased between rebels of the banned Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) and the
army.
"The army and the government does not want the Kurdish problem to be
solved ... If soldiers and the government wanted a solution, weapons would
immediately fall silent," said Hasip Kaplan, deputy head of the Democratic
Society Party (DTP).
"The solution of the problem lies in Ankara," he told a news
conference devoted to the recent civil disturbances.
Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan has refused to meet DTP representatives,
saying they must first renounce terrorism.
During the recent clashes, DTP leaders said they understood and
sympathised with the protesters. The government accused the PKK of
deliberately provoking the violence.
Kaplan did not spell out what the DTP wanted Ankara to do, but in the
past the party has called for more cultural and linguistic rights for the
Kurds, more state help to revive the region's economy and a lowering of the
threshold for parliament.
The DTP has no representatives in the Turkish parliament because it
has failed to win enough votes to cross the 10 percent threshold. Its
support is mainly concentrated in the southeast and is weak elsewhere across
Turkey.
Turkey's Kurds have strongly backed Turkey's bid to join the European
Union, which has already resulted in the lifting of some restrictions on
their language and culture, but Kaplan hinted that the EU could do much more
for his people.
http://www.kurdmedia.com/
"The EU ... made weak statements without inspecting the scene of the
(recent) incidents ... The EU scored badly in this test. But unrest in
Turkey, as a candidate country, should interest them," he said.
Erdogan, on a visit to the southeast on Friday, reiterated his view
that all ethnic groups in Turkey should work closely together and abandon
political separatism.
"We all have different ethnic identities, but it is the bond of common
citizenship of the Turkish Republic that unites us," he said.
"Our Kurdish citizens should not feel that the state regards them
differently."
== 2 of 2 ==
Date: Sat, Apr 15 2006 3:44 pm
From: "BabaTurk" <520001085531-0001@t-online.de>
"Ali Asker", the well known News Manipulator, posted again some dubious articles:
> Kurd party slams Turk govt, army, EU over clashes
The usual Bla bla bla.... of this guy.
Cheers!
==============================================================================
TOPIC: Some say Iran's weapons come from Russia
http://groups.google.com/group/soc.culture.usa/browse_thread/thread/938d3d0d2a6b5e90
==============================================================================
== 1 of 1 ==
Date: Sat, Apr 15 2006 3:33 pm
From: "captain."
"TBD" <yournamehere@yourdomain.com> wrote in message
news:Yo80g.117$Jw2.95@fe10.lga...
>
> "captain." <spammersmustdie@now.net> wrote in message
> news:q450g.13396$Zl.4063@edtnps89...
>>
>> "MTRPT" <Mir.Topolski@gmx.de> wrote in message
>> news:1145096239.610034.245930@u72g2000cwu.googlegroups.com...
>>> TBD wrote:
>>>> "Andrzej Adam Filip" wrote:
>>>> > Does USA threat military action against Iran?
>>>> No. The USA has repeatedly said it wants a diplomatic solution.
>>>
>>> C'mon Brookski. Even Krapo knows that US diplomacy = oxymoron.
>>>
>>
>> i believe that the usa will not invade iran.
>>
>> but imagine they do... can you say "draft"?
>>
>>
>>
>
> No need for a draft. Just cruise-missile every Iranian powerplant and no
> more centrifuges.
>
oh, but then you will need to look for all of the hidden places. you can't
do that without manpower. iran's a large country.
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