RED EYE 3/16/11

Thousands protest Panama mining

GW, 2/25 — Demonstrations are spreading across Panama demanding an end to plans to reform mining laws in order to attract foreign investors. Thousands of indigenous people this month blocked the Pan-American highway at San Félix, 400km west of Panama City.

Some had walked for several days from villages in the indigenous Ngőbe-Buglé region, which has large copper reserves....

Opponents, a broad coalition of indigenous peoples, environmental organizations and trade unions...see it as a government plan to “flog our mineral riches to the multinationals”while jeopardizing the environment and the rights of indigenous peoples.

U.S. grabbed Haiti in 1915, still in

GW, 2/18 — In 1915, U.S. Marines invaded Haiti, occupying it until 1934. U.S. officials rewrote the constitution, and when the Haitian national assembly refused to ratify it, they dissolved the assembly. They held a referendum in which about 5% of the electorate voted and approved the new constitution, which conveniently allowed foreigners to own land. The situation today is remarkably similar  — everyone knows that Washington calls the shots.

Pills: a rising threat to U.S. troops

NYT, 2/13 — After a decade of treating thousands of wounded troops, the military’s medical system is awash in prescription drugs — and the results have sometimes been deadly.

By some estimates, well over 300,000 troops have returned from Iraq or Afghanistan with P.T.S.D., depression, traumatic brain injury, or some combination of those. The Pentagon has looked to pharmacology to treat those complex problems, following the lead of civilian medicine. As a result, psychiatric drugs have been used more widely across the military than in any previous war.

But those medications, along with narcotic painkillers, are being increasingly linked to a rising tide of other problems, among them drug dependency, suicide and fatal accidents — sometimes from the interactions of the drugs themselves.

Wallace Shawn saw the Red light

Harvard Magazine, March — During three years in the 1980s that included travel to Central America, [Actor-writer Wallace] Shawn came to espouse left-wing politics: specifically, an analysis of power, economics, and institutions....

“There was a point when I crossed over,...becoming less in the Arthur Schlesinger Jr. category and more in the Noam Chomsky category,” Shawn says. “It had to do with understanding that I and the people I knew were actually involved in the story. There are certain writers who specialize in saying, ‘Oh, my God, the terrible things they do to each other in South America! It’s absolutely shocking!’ At a certain point I was able to face the fact that — Wow, it was the U.S. Army who did that, and: a) it was my taxes that paid for them to do it; and b) they did it to preserve the status quo in which I am leading a very pleasant life. These things are happening every day because of me and my friends, and we’re not doing anything about it. You have murder and torture going on — so, what does that make us?

“I happen to believe that the American elite has been a marauding monstrosity on the world scene in my lifetime,” Shawn continues. It has been unimaginably brutal in trying to preserve the status quo and unimaginably greedy in trying to bring the world’s resources onto our continent....

Harvard’s role is mostly to service and to perpetuate and to create that elite.

20-yr. stalling as tribes sue Chevron

NYT, 2/15 — A judge in a tiny courtroom in the Ecuadorean Amazon ruled Monday that the oil giant Chevron was responsible for polluting remote tracts of the Ecuadorean jungle and ordered the company to pay more than $9 billion in damages, one of the largest environmental awards ever.

The decision by Judge Nicolás Zambrano in Lago Agrio, a town founded as an oil camp in the 1960s, immediately opened a contentious new stage of appeals in a legal battle that has dragged on in courts in Ecuador and the United States for 17 years, pitting forest tribes and villagers against one of the largest American corporations....

Both sides said they would appeal the ruling, setting the stage for months and potentially years more of legal wrangling.

Shout of “Get Out!” now “No Jobs!”

NYT, 2/14 — A month after Tunisians toppled their authoritarian president, sending shock waves across the Arab world, many are discovering that may have been the easy part....

A fragile caretaker government...faces a crush of immediate demands for jobs, economic improvement and security....

The same groups of young people who last month swarmed the streets shouting, “Get Out!” gathered Saturday evening with a new chant: “Unemployed!”

“The unemployed gained nothing from the revolution...We’re still waiting. We are waiting for work”....

The...unemployment rate is...as high as 30 percent in the impoverished and restive hinterland, where the upheaval began....

Last week the government called up military reservists to help maintain order.

Capitalism fails: need a new system

GW, 2/18 — What underpinned the great postwar boom was the industrialization of inventions. The goods that poured out of the west’s factories provided employment and rising wages for the mass of the U.S.’s and Europe’s citizens.

But the “low-hanging fruit” that delivered the benefits is disappearing...Productivity advances are not being made in new industries; they are being made by laying people off or moving production to low-cost countries. Nor is the internet a great job generator....

The technologies that created private-sector jobs in abundance are a shadow of what they were. This was disguised by the credit boom over the 30 years up to the financial crash in 2008, that created jobs in the service sectors....

If we want to step up the pace of invention, there has to be a huge shift in the way we think. For 30 years or more the consensus has been that governments fail, and only markets succeed. But reality is beginning to intrude. Even the British coalition government, wedded to the old-time religion, is finding that if it wants a growth strategy it has to...build institutions that innovate...Invention and innovation, we are discovering, are much too important to be left to the tender mercies of markets.

Big biz says, kill ALL regulations

Thom Hartman blog, 1/12 – Chairman... of the House Government Oversight Committee.... Issa asked for more than one hundred businesses to outline what federal regulations he should attempt to strike down with his new powers as Chairman....

The wish-list of deregulation includes: dismantling the EPA, repealing lead-paint restrictions, ending coal tar and hydraulic fracking regulations and ending required flammability tests for children’s mattresses.

Basically, free reign to pollute the environment, contaminate our drinking, poison our families with lead and mass produce fire traps for children, that’s what the business community wants Darrell Issa to let them get away with....

Get rid of all or most, was the overwhelming response – they’re “job-killing.” Anyone their side doesn’t like is “job-killing”....

Republicans are busy renaming House Committees – like removing the word “labor” from the Labor and Education Committee – and removing the words “civil rights” from the Civil Rights and Constitution Subcommittee.

I suggest they go ahead and rename Issa’s Government Oversight Committee too. Let’s just call it the “Unless You’re Big Business, You’re Screwed” Committee.

Market system = unneeded surgery

NYT, 2/19 – A clinical professor of surgery at the University of Southern California, said...”outrageous” numbers...of breast biopsies were done by surgery.

He said...unnecessary procedures were being performed by surgeons who did not want to lose biopsy fees by sending patients to a radiologist.

“I hate to even say that,” Dr. Silverstein said. “But I don’t know how else to explain these numbers.”....

Dr. Silverstein says that when he lectures and asks how many surgeons in the audience perform open biopsies, no hands go up. “Nobody will admit it,” he said.

Ask not profiteers to help!

Tribune Media, 2/11 – Obama sounded a strong patriotic note. Echoing John F. Kennedy, he asked business people to think of what they can do for their country. Alas, business owners tend to see their most patriotic duty as...first producing a healthy, sustainable income for their businesses.

Cease romanticizing Greece!

NYT, 2/20 – We like to think of Athens as a place where robed citizens wandered thoughtfully through the Parthenon and agora...Instead...it was filled with prostitutes, male and female, with small stalls for what Athenians called “middle-of-the-day marriages.”...There were two or three slaves for every adult, so leisured citizens, Socrates included, spent most of their time at the gym honing their bodies or in discussions.

Greed seems to beat persuasion

GW, 2/25 – One of the Conservative party’s most cherished shibboleths is that legislation and regulation are Bad, and that gentle persuasion is Good. The embodiment of that quaint belief is the Behavioural Insight Team, a seven-member group set up to influence policymakers and instill in them the belief that people’s habits can be improved without regulation. It has quickly become known as the nudge unit, and there is not a scintilla of evidence that it will work.

That is not our assertion; it is the admission to a House of Lords committee by Oliver Letwin, the awesomely brainy minister in charge of policy. He said there was no guarantee that the nudge unit will work, but that on the other hand it was low-cost (half a million quid) and “almost zero risk.”

A National Audit Office report last week was a little more forthcoming. It revealed that the nudge unit failed to convince a single [government] department to make use of its ideas.

America’s ‘promise’ being exposed

NYT, 2/22 – Senator Sanders is a Vermont independent...He asked his consituents to write to him about their experiences coping with the recession and its aftermath....

One of the things I noticed reading through the letters was the pervasive sense of loss, not just of employment, but of faith in the soundness and possibilities of America. For centuries, Americans have been nothing if not optimistic. But now there is a terrible sense that so much that was taken for granted during the past six or seven decades is being dismantled or destroyed....

The great promise of the United States, its primary offering to...the world, is at grave risk.

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NYT, 2/18 – The Egyptian military...also runs day care centers and beach resorts. Its divisions make television sets, jeeps, washing machines, wooden furniture and olive oil, as well as bottled water under a brand reportedly named after a general’s daughter, Safi.

From this vast web of businesses, the military pays no taxes, employs conscipted labor, buys public land on favorable terms and discloses nothing to...the public....

Now the military also runs the government....

“Protecting its businesses from scrutiny and accountability is a red line the military will draw...And that means there can be no meaningful civilian oversight.”