Month: November 2009

If you believe the hype, the president and Big Insurance are going at at each other’s throats over health care. But it’s a sham battle, “like TV wrestling.” The insurance companies have already won the biggest prize they could ever wish for: 50 million new customers dragooned by the federal government. All the too-late huffing and puffing from the White House is “a hollow threat, for public consumption only.”

A Black Agenda Radio commentary by Glen Ford

“The health care battle has devolved into a charade.”

The Obama White House and the insurance industry are putting on a big show for the public, with both sides pretending to be engaged in a battle royal over the shape of health care legislation. In reality, the insurance corporations have already won the war. But for political reasons, it’s necessary that the insurance companies and the White House act like professional wrestlers. And like TV wrestling, it’s all fake.

The insurance profiteers put out a paper last week, claiming the Senate Finance Committee bill shepherded by Obama’s buddy, Max Baucus, would cause premiums to go up 18 percent or more. President Obama then put on his angry face, and threatened to withdraw the insurance industry’s exemption from anti-trust laws. It sounded like a throw-down of epic proportions, but it’s just sound and fury, signifying nothing, as Shakespeare would say. The health care battle has devolved into a charade; the game has been fixed since early on in the Obama presidency.

Obama made his deals with the hospital corporations, the drug cartels and the insurance companies back in the spring. He promised the insurance racketeers they could have what every gangster craves: a captive market of consumers who would be forced to buy their shoddy products. The so-called “individual mandate” is the biggest prize any monopoly-seeking industry could ever hope for. It’s was a centerpiece of Hillary Clinton’s health care platform during the presidential campaign. Back then, candidate Obama opposed forcing everyone to buy into private insurance schemes. But President Obama was soon singing Hillary’s tune, and it was sweet music to the insurance profiteers.

“The so-called “individual mandate” is the biggest prize any monopoly-seeking industry could ever hope for.”

Obama seemed to be holding out for some kind of weak public insurance “option” that would cover the neediest Americans, while forcing all the rest into the private sector’s money-sucking machine. But the president has essentially dropped that public option fig leaf.

The Baucus plan is a naked transfer of hundreds of billions of dollars from the people’s pockets to the insurance firms, a transfer enforced by the raw power of the state. It is the diametric opposite of single payer health care, which would draw the largest number of Americans into a single pool dedicated to the health and wellness of all. Instead, privatized national health care converts every citizen into a customer of giant corporations, whose goal is maximum profits.

The Baucus plan, which was nurtured at every stage of development by the Obama White House, is the greatest victory in history for the insurance companies – greater even than Congress’s 1945 decision to exempt insurance companies from federal anti-trust laws. That’s the law Obama is making all those loud noises about changing – but it’s a hollow threat, for public consumption only. Anti-trust laws are designed to prevent monopolies. But President Obama is hell-bent on awarding private insurers an unprecedented monopoly over coverage of every American, and the privateer’s profits will be fully subsidized by the people.

Obama’s brand of insurance reform will have the same effect as his finance reform: massive transfers of wealth to corporations until the people’s ability to pay is broken beyond repair.

For Black Agenda Radio, I’m Glen Ford. On the web, go to www.BlackAgendaReport.com.

BAR executive editor Glen Ford can be contacted at Glen.Ford@BlackAgendaReport.com.

BAR

By Seth Wessler

Families of color are punished twice by immigration and criminal justice systems that don’t provide equal justice.

This story is part of “Torn Apart by Deportation,” a series investigating the impacts of deportation on families of color.

It was shortly after five on the morning of June 2, 2004, when Calvin James woke up, put on his bathrobe and headed outside to put the trash bins out on the street for the pickup. As the super of his building in Jersey City, New Jersey, James liked taking the trash out early in the morning before the humidity settled in. Besides, the 45-year-old had to be at the first of his two bike messenger jobs in New York City by 7 a.m.He left his girlfriend, Kathy McArdle, asleep in their bed. In the next room was their 6-year-old son, Josh.

As he walked outside, James spotted a black SUV across the road. He thought nothing of it and continued his work. But as he pulled the last trash bin to the curb, four people jumped out of the vehicle, dressed in black clothing marked with the letters “ICE.” They bolted toward James, demanded he confirm his name, handcuffed him and pulled him into the back of the SUV in which several other officers were sitting in silence.

Inside, McArdle was startled awake to the sound of banging, followed by yelling. Officers with Immigration and Customs Enforcement were pounding on her front door and screaming, “Federal agents, federal agents! We have Calvin James! We want pants, shirts, socks and shoes, right now!”

McArdle pulled on some clothes and rushed out of her room to the front of the apartment. As she opened the door, four officers charged into the hallway. Immediately, her eyes fell to the guns on their holsters.

The officers took the clothes and shoes and left as quickly as they had arrived. After four months in immigration detention, first in New Jersey and then in Louisiana, James was put on a plane and deported to Jamaica, a place he had not set foot in since he was 12 years old.

Calvin James’s crime? Being vulnerable to a dramatic change in U.S. immigration law.

The shift has altered the balance among some of our country’s most tightly embraced values and principles: we believe that nations have a sovereign right to determine who can enter and stay within their borders; our Constitution demands that due process be given to all; and people across the political spectrum claim to value families as central to our way of life. In the past decade, the scale has tipped in favor of an iron-clad attachment to that sovereign right, and hundreds of thousands of immigrants of color have been deported as a result.

•••

For years in the United States, prisons have been filling up. When inmates are released back to their communities, they face a range of challenges from racial profiling by police to discrimination against people with criminal records. Despite the U.S. Constitution’s prohibition on double jeopardy—being tried and convicted twice for the same crime—incarceration is just the beginning of a barrage of punishments that follow.

For immigrants who enter the criminal justice system, double punishment is a formal part of their legal landscape. While it has been true to some extent since the early part of the 20th century that immigrants convicted of some crimes could face the possibility of deportation after completing their sentences, the passage of the Illegal Immigration Reform and Individual Responsibility Act in 1996 changed this possibility into an airtight conclusion.

CL

By ‘Femi Meyungbe-Olufunmilade

Meyungbe-Olufunmilade teaches Political Science at the Igbinedion University, Okada. Edo State.

I FEEL duty bound to pen this piece as a rejoinder to Olufemi Oyedele’s letter titled ‘Who is afraid of China?’ (The Guardian, October 8, 2009). Oyedele lives in London and coincidentally, I was on a research tour of England at the time he wrote, gathering materials on an aspect of my research on China’s diplomacy bordering on Western responses to China’s ascendancy in global affairs. Oyedele’s views, I must say, were typically Western. He cautioned Nigeria not to grant China’s prayer for a $50 billion oil deal on grounds of the former’s poor industrial record, penchant for underpayment, corruption, human rights abuses etc – a jumble of things that have little or no bearing on business transactions. Or, how does China’s human rights record affect the pricing of oil blocks?

I don’t know who Oyedele works for, but I got curious when he remarked thus concerning China National Offshore Oil Corporation’s (CNOOC) bid for Nigerian oil blocks: ‘They are proponents of ‘cheap labour’ and may not match the pay of other employers like Chevron, Texaco and Agip in the same sector’. He forgot to add Shell and Total to the list of super-paying Western oil companies!

While I will never say China cannot improve on its international economic relations, I will unhesitatingly declare that it presents a golden opportunity for developing nations of Africa to secure a fairer deal in global political economy, which never served their interests while Western hegemony held sway. There is so much propaganda being churned out in the Western world to scare Third world countries from doing business with China simply because they realise they are losing influence and grips on global affairs to China. The media and academia of the West are awash with news reports and books that are nothing short of propaganda materials. As a matter of fact, the frenzy with which Western universities are setting up centres and special programmes on China is phenomenal. Far-sighted people that they are, they want to understand how to cope with the great challenge China presents to their system and well-being. Some Nigerian academics make money by consulting for Western inquirers on diverse aspects of Chinese penetration of Africa.

To illustrate the Western media-academia anti-China propaganda, Adam Blenford opens a November 26, 2007, report, tongue-in-cheek, on the BBC website as follows: ‘In almost every corner of Africa there is something that interests China’. TimesOnline in its October 13, 2009 issue laments: ‘There is now barely a country on the continent (Africa) that does not have a sizeable Chinese presence’. If you talk of books, you will find Western titles like these: Mark Leonard’s ‘What does China think?’, James Kynge’s ‘China Shakes the World: the Rise of a Hungry Nation’, Frank Ching’s ‘China: The Truth About its Human Rights Record’, Alexandria Harney’s ‘The China Price: The True Cost of Chinese Competitive Advantage’. The list is endless and more are at the press in a frenzy.

The grouses of the West against China are basically economic. The West is suffering a complex economic siege from China. They are the preachers of free trade but by the time China opened up to the global market from its socialist cocoon, signing WTO’s agreements etc, it in no time began to beat them at their own game. The forms the siege is taking can be condensed into three. One, China is causing business closures in the West by offering high quality, cheaper consumer goods ranging from toys to garments to Western consumers. Two, unemployment is not helped by the growing recourse by Western businesses to relocate to China to take advantage of cheaper overheads. Many so-called Western products we buy in stores in London, Paris, New York, Amsterdam etc are now only Western in name, courtesy of the trend called outsourcing. Factories physically get uprooted and got shipped to China. China has earned the sobriquet: ‘Factory of the World.’ And, only in the second week of this October, America’s General Motors sold its Hummer Jeep brand to a Chinese firm, Sichuan Tengzhong Heavy Equipment Corporation.

Three, China is also taking over the overseas markets over which the West used to enjoy a structural monopoly. These include African countries. But, unlike the West, that more or less enforced draconian reforms on Africa in the throes of economic crisis without any tangible support critical to recovery, China’s in-roads in Africa come with support in the form of funds with no strings attached and investments in critical infrastructure. President Paul Kagame of Rwanda – a model African leader – spoke the truth in a recent October 12 Reuters report. To quote him, “Our resources have been exploited and served others. Western companies have soiled Africa to a large extent and still do…The Chinese bring Africa what it needs: investment and money for governments and companies. China invests in infrastructure, builds streets.” When you view the $50 billion oil deal China is offering Nigeria, which Oyedele is kicking against, ask what the status quo is with the oil blocks the so-called Western oil majors want to keep. Which is more beneficial to Nigeria? CNOOC’s offer or the oil majors’? The lawmakers in Abuja handling the new petroleum bill are living witnesses to the extent the ‘oil majors’ are going to frustrate its contents which are meant to stop their abuses and promote our interests.

NG

By Farrukh Dhondy

“She never reads for truth
But only for sensation
I placed a bet on love and lost
On Casablanca station”.
From The Love Song of J.P.X. Jaganbhai by Bachchoo

Augest.29 : I have lived a long time without asking myself what the precise difference between sex and gender is. I am now told — I can’t help but hear, because it is loudly proclaimed from the speakers of TV sets and radios — that “gender” is a purely grammatical concept whereas sex is — Well! — the real thing!

The distinction is being proclaimed because a young South African athlete, who spectacularly set a new world record for the women’s 800 metres race in the current Berlin World Athletic Games, is under suspicion of really being a man.

One would have thought that a very brief sojourn in the changing rooms would settle the matter. But no!

Poor Caster Semenya, the “woman” in question, was asked if she was a man, but no examination of the obvious sort took place. Instead the world was told what, to my untutored mind, came as something of a surprise.

The spokesman for the International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF), one Nick Davies, says that the tests necessary to determine the sex of Ms Semenya involve “an extremely complex procedure involving doctors, scientists, gynaecologists and psychologists”.

Apparently this is because there are a variety of sexual states in between what we know of and accept as the “male” and the “female”.
Most people’s sex awareness begins with a comparison of the apparatus one possesses with that of a member of the opposite sex.

One naturally takes what one possesses to be the universal state of being and then notices that a sister, a cousin or some other child, seems to be the proud possessor of alternative arrangements.

I don’t think it ever occurred to me, surveying as an infant my female cousin’s properties, that the complementary contrasts were unexpected or shocking. Girls were girls and boys were boys and there were differences to explore and celebrate. Obviously, at that age one didn’t know how the apparatus fitted together or what it was for.

The other great lesson in sexual identity was provided by the backwardness of India. In my home town of Pune (then “Poona”) there was Dastur School, founded by Parsis for the benefit of the general community but with a Zoroastrian ethos, attended predominantly by Parsi children. I didn’t go to that school though several of my friends from the neighbourhood, including Kishan Abhichandani, a Sindhi, did.

The reputedly brilliant mathematics teacher of the school was a Parsi gentleman called Mr Diwan. He was slightly obese, had very distinct formations of breasts which showed through his shirt, circular hips and, though he was easily 40 when I became aware of his existence, no facial hair and so no necessity to shave. The male pupils of the school referred to him in Gujarati as “Diwan Hijro!” openly calling him a eunuch.

Even in my innocence I knew that shouting this epithet at him when he passed us in the street was rude and unacceptable, even though I didn’t know anything about the intermediate sexual state to which it referred.

In India hijras were (and still are!) everywhere, and one of them made me conspicuous in my crowd of friends when he/she crossed the street and caressing my cheek said, “Salim hein Salim!” and clapped with the hollows of his/her palms ringing. I had to live the name down. We always thought of hijras as “eunuchs” and I often wondered what sort of sexual apparatus they possessed.

A doctor friend enlightened me. These so called eunuchs, the hijras, were not eunuchs at all, they were “cryptorchids”.

They were born with male genitalia but as infants their testicles were trapped inside a peculiar bone formation of their crotch. A very simple medical procedure could release these testicles and allow them to drop as those of all males normally did. The paucity of medical attention and supervision in the country resulted in these growing boys having their testicles trapped and crushed instead of developing in the male way.

So while “hijras” possess a little boy’s penis, the machinery that would have made them preponderantly male with testosterone dominating their hormonal production has been crushed and they develop the secondary sexual features of males and females. Parents who observe their sons growing in this way give them away to be adopted by tribes of “their own kind”. Here, dear Indian reader, is a sadness that could be legislated away.

In the West you don’t have gangs of hijras at traffic lights begging for a living, clapping and parodying themselves, using their own being as ironic instruments to raise the price of a meal!

A simple medical procedure allowing the testicular drop, makes men of these, to me, unfortunate boys.

AA

By Devinder Sharma

Every time I meet an agricultural scientist, especially those who are engaged in Genetic Engineering, I am shocked at the blatant manner in which they lie. They are not even remotely ashamed of telling a lie, although they know they are not speaking the truth.

I thought telling a lying was a prerogative of the agricultural scientists alone. But over the past few years I am noticing that molecular geneticists, whether they work for the Royal Society in London or Jawaharlal Nehru University in Delhi or even the Indian Institute of Science in Bangalore, have picked up the art (or should I say science) of lying, and that too right through their nose.

Genetic Engineering has surely come of age. It has become synomenous with lying.

It didn’t shock me when I was told last week that the Royal Society in London had come out with a report, which warns that if Britain does not adopt GM crops, it should be ready to face hunger and starvation. Feeding another 2.3 billion people by the year 2050 and at the same time limit the environmental impact of farming would require GM crop research to be taken up vigorously, the study says.

Both the points stressed in the report — producing more food to feed an additional 2.3 billion people, and the use of GM crops to offset any environmental damage accruing from intensive farming systems — are simple lies. Neither do GM crops produce higher yields (in fact, the GM crops in market by and large produce less than the normal varieties), nor are they environmentally safe. World over the debate is about its biosafety and environmental impacts, and look at these scientists associated with the Royal Society, they don’t even bat an eyelid before speaking lies.

Oh dear ! Where is science headed to? If this is the level to which the scientists can stoop down to, you should be ready for the worst.

What a climbdown? What a disgrace for modern science? I am so glad my children did not pick up science in their graduation.

The other day I was in a TV discussion on Bt brinjal. There were two scientists on the panel — one from the Indian Agricultural Research Institute and the other from Jawaharlal Nehru University. If you had watched that programme, I am sure you would have been appalled at the number of times they lied. I was particularly very disturbed when I found one of them having the courage to tell a blatant lie, and that too starkly. There is no difference in the development of high-yielding crop varieties and the transgenics like Bt brinjal, the scientist said.

DSB

Of Columbus, Coups, and War Criminals

by Dominion Staff

Sixty-five thousand Indigenous people demonstrated against Columbus Day in southwest Colombia. The mobilization, part of the Minga process that shook Colombia last year, marked “517 years of struggle against genocide, laws of displacement, the imposition of foreign economic policies, the handing over of resources to multinational corporations and human rights violations,” according to Colombian organizers.

In Guatemala, one man was killed by gunfire on Columbus Day, when tens of thousands of people blocked roadways to protest open-pit mining and hydro electric projects. “We don’t commemorate [Columbus Day], but instead the Indigenous Peoples Day of Dignity and Resistance, and we’re demonstrating to demand the end of operations of mega-projects,” Indigenous leader Juana Mulul told AFP.

In Venezuela, activists toppled a statue of Columbus in Caracas.

In Denver, Colorado, dozens of people protested the official Columbus Day parade. “We let them [the parade organizers] know that every time they have this parade, it won’t go unanswered until they celebrate indigenous cultures instead of their colonization,” Terry Burnsed, a professor at Metropolitan State College of Denver told The Denver Post.

In Honduras, President Manuel Zelaya remained trapped in the Brazilian embassy. The coup regime, led by Roberto Micheletti, “suspended civil liberties and shut down independent sources of news, including the TV station Cholusat Sur and Radio Globo,” according to historian Greg Grandin. A new tally showed at least 14 people have been killed since the coup took place. Landowners in Honduras hired Colombian paramilitaries belonging to the United Autodefense of Colombia (AUC) group to protect their properties.

Migrant workers and their allies gathered in Edmonton to protest the conditions of people subject to the Temporary Foreign Worker program. The protests in Edmonton came as the federal government introduced new regulations limiting the amount of years that temporary foreign workers can stay in Canada.

DP

By Nancy Scheper-Hughes

Department of Anthropology, University of California,
BerkeleyCentre, nsh@berkeley.edu

Elsewhere1 I have described the criminal aspects of the traffic in humans for their disposable organs and tissues. I have publicized the scars left not only on the ruined bodies of disillusioned sellers but on the geo-political landscapes where the illicit transplant trade has taken root. In an effort to get the attention of medical professionals, human rights organizations, regulatory agencies and government officials I have used forceful language. I have described organs buying and brokering as ‘neo-cannibalism’, as biolust, body theft, and, even as bio-terrorism. I have called surgeons involved in brokered living donor transplants as ‘outlaws’, ‘vultures’, part of an international “organs mafia” and their local recruiters as ‘kidney-hunters’. I described the buyers – the transplant tourists and travelers as the ethically impaired, giving no more thought to helping themselves to kidneys purchased from depressed, displaced, disgraced and debt-ridden slum and shantytown dwellers than if they were actually dead bodies rather than proxy-cadavers.

At the heart of my decade long, multi-sited project on the global traffic in organs, tissues, and body parts is an anthropological analysis of post-modern forms of human sacrifice. Neo-liberal global capitalism, alongside the spread of advanced medical and biotechnologies have incited new tastes and desires for the skin, bone, blood, organs, tissue and reproductive and genetic material of the other. The darker side of organs harvesting and transplant, focusing on the ‘fetishized kidney’ the new ‘blood diamonds’ in the global trade in organs. This new commodity is an organ of opportunity and an organ of last resort for both the buyers and the sellers.

Finally, I have over the past decade mapped on the ground the traffic in humans for ‘fresh’ organs, and identified the key players in the medical under-world of transplant tourism. This traffic is fueled by a neo-liberal economy that values humans as commodities and the ‘self’ as a market mechanism – suppliers, brokers, buyers, sellers, and processors – of re-usable body parts, pushing human agency and hyper-individualism to their extreme limits. I will discuss organ sharing for transplant in terms of the unruly desires, demands and obligations it has released with respect to procuring ‘fresh’ organs and tissues from living people. The situation puts one in mind of the absurd Monty Python skit from The Meaning of Life2 (“We’re here for your liver.”“But I’m still using it!”) that captures a truth that is concealed within the rhetoric on the ‘gift of life’ – a demand for self-sacrifice. Whereas altruistic (gifted) and commercial (sold) organs for transplant are normally treated as very different phenomena, I will emphasize their common features. Both operate from within the same economic and moral imperatives.

Pp. 5-16 econ_soc_11-1.pdf

Prominent women in politics in the Arab world are very few and far between, but one has risen to one of the great offices of state; the foreign ministry of Mauritania in west Africa, even if some snipe that Alnaha Bint Djaddi Oueld Meknes only has the job because her father was foreign minister for 17 years.

Riad Muasses, euronews: “You are a member of President Mohammed Ouild Abd el Aziz’s first government, and as head of the foreign ministry you are the first Arab woman to hold such high office. What will be the general direction of the new president’s foreign policy?”

Alnaha Bint Djaddi Oueld Meknes: “In his acceptance speech just after the presidential elections President Mohamed Ouild Aabd el Aziz underlined that Mauritania’s foreign policy would serve the interests of Mauritania and the Mauritanian people. We are going to work to ensure our foreign policy is productive and focussed on development. Our foreign policy will be defined by the needs and interests of our people.”

EN: “President Abdel Aziz has visited Venezuela and has good relations with Hugo Chavez, along with Mouammar Gaddafi in Libya, and Iran. Will foreign policy now take a new course?”

ABDOM: “From today relations with brother nations and friendly states will be based above all on mutual respect. They will be based on respect for the soveregnity of the Mauritanian state and the interests of the Mauritanian people. Any brother or friend ready to work with us respecting these principles will be welcome, and we will be open to any sort of collaboration with countries prepared to respect our soverenity.”

EN: “We know that President Abdel Aziz has a working visit to France on the 26th of this month. What are the most important issues on the agenda in talks with President Sarkozy?”

ABDOM: “There are several scheduled for this meeting. There are priority issues for our president, who is commited to reforms in the education, health, infrastructure and security, for Mauritanians and above all for foreigners living in Mauritania.”

EN: “Are you saying that France might send aid to Mauritania like training for the army, or direct military aid that might help to re-enforce security around the country. ?

ABDOM: “There is a role for anyone who wants to help the Mauritanian state improve its citizen’s living standards.”

EN: “Has France already said it is ready to provide this sort of aid?”

ABDOM: “We are ready to work with any country that expresses its desire to work with Mauritania.”

EN: “We know that Mauritania has suffered from terrorist attacks recently. Is there a plan, or any sort of co-operation with France in this specific area?”

ABDOM: “First of all I’d like to say categorically that there are no terrorist training camps on Mauritanian soil. There aren’t any terrorist bases, either. Of course there are infiltrations across our borders with neighbours and we are trying to bring this dangerous trend to an end. We are ready to co-operate with any nation that wants to help Mauritania and the other concerned nations guarantee the security of their citizens.”

EN: “After the war in Gaza the Mauritanian president closed the Israeli embassy in Nouakchott. Do you intend to reopen it?”

ABDOM: “The government and president’s priority is to improve living standards for the Mauritanian people. All other issues will be dealt with at the right moment.”

EN: “Mauritania is a transit hub for illegal immigration towards Europe , and Europe is very concerned by this question, especially France and Spain. We know that Italy has signed a convention with Libya concerning this. Has Mauritania signed conventions with Europe, or is it taking steps to restrict this illegal immigration?”

ABDOM: “Even if there are signed conventions with other states to limit illegal immigration I think the solution to the problem is to fight against poverty and improve education. If there is a drive to reduce poverty then we are sure that illegal immigration will fall one day.”

EN

By Sinan Antoon

I took a brush
Immersed in death
And drew a window
On war’s wall
I opened it
Searching
For something
But
I saw another war
And a mother
Weaving a shroud
For the dead man
Still in her womb
Baghdad, 1990

FPIF