‘News’ Articles
Written by Radical Daily on 25 July 2008
By Malinda Markowitz
A sobering report from the Commonwealth Fund released July 17 says a lot about the shameful state of our healthcare system and the abysmal failure of our elected leaders to enact meaningful reform.
The United States spends more than twice as much per person on healthcare as most other industrialized countries — but it has plunged to last among those nations in preventing deaths through timely and effective medical care.
How many families does this touch? A shocking 101,000 fewer Americans would die prematurely if we matched the benchmarks of 18 other industrialized nations, 25 times the number who have died in Iraq.
No long waits
Remember all those horror stories about the long waits for care in countries like Canada and Britain? Less than half of Americans with health problems were able to get a rapid appointment with a physician when sick and were the least likely, among seven nations that measured it, to get after-hours medical care without going to the emergency room.
Notably, the Commonwealth study appeared one day after an NPR/Kaiser Family Foundation/Harvard School of Public Health survey of two key election battleground states, Florida and Ohio.
That survey found that 28 percent of Floridians and one-fourth of Ohioans say they or a family member had problems paying medical bills the past year. Among that group, more than half self-ration care — delaying or foregoing needed medical treatment or dental care, not filling prescriptions, cutting pills in half or skipping doses.
There’s also a direct convergence of the healthcare and economic crisis. The same survey found 17 percent of Floridians and 14 percent of Ohioans have used up all or most of their savings in the past year to pay medical bills. One in 10 stopped paying other bills as a result.
Residents of both states ranked the economy as their No. 1 concern, and healthcare third (with the Iraq war in between).
But Sen. John McCain’s health plan won’t come close to solving the problem. Echoing the Bush administration, under whose watch the crisis has spun out of control, McCain favors tax credits of $2,500 per individual or $5,000 for families to encourage the uninsured to buy insurance. But that’s less than half the cost of average premiums now, not counting all the co-pays, deductibles, and other ATM style fees.
Florida’s ‘high-risk pools’
For those with preexisting medical conditions whom the insurance companies won’t touch, McCain proposes expanding federal support for state ”high-risk pools.” But, in a devastating recent critique, The New York Times noted that the state plans are largely a failure. Almost all impose long waiting periods, up to a year, before allowing you to enroll, and all have very high costs for getting in. Florida closed its pool in 1991, and the current membership is just 313 people, rather a small percentage of the state’s population. Moreover, McCain has no proposal to pay for a federal expansion of this train wreck.
Further, McCain wants more deregulation of the insurance industry with the dubious notion that would spur more competition to lower costs. But insurers compete by lowering their own costs, through denial of care, reducing services, or price gouging.
Sen. Barack Obama’s plan would have more impact, with more subsidies for low and middle income families and tougher oversight of the insurers. He also says everyone should get the same coverage available to members of Congress. But Obama’s plan, like McCain’s, still gives the insurers too much control over our health.
Approve HR 676
There’s a better way. All the industrial countries in the Commonwealth study — except ours — have a national or single payer healthcare system, one reason they can have better quality at half the cost. U.S. administrative costs, for example, are 30 percent to 70 percent higher — all to feed the private insurers.
The public has figured it out. More than half of those questioned in Florida and Ohio in the NPR/Kaiser/Harvard survey say the government should guarantee health insurance for all Americans. HR 676 in Congress, which would strengthen and expand Medicare to everyone would do just that. That should be at the top of the agenda for the next president.
Malinda Markowitz is co-president of the National Nurses Organizing Committee/California Nurses Association.
Copyright 2008 Miami Herald Media Co.
Tags: Health, Politics, US
Posted in News, Saswat | No Comments »
Written by Radical Daily on 01 July 2008
A critical look at modern day (or, should we say, postmodern) indifference towards feminism and the fruits of liberation realized through relentless struggles by women activists…
(- RD)
Now, the backlash
The sex industry is booming, the rape conviction rate is plummeting, women’s bodies are picked over in the media, abortion rights are under serious threat and top business leaders say they don’t want to employ women. It all adds up to one thing … an all-out assault on feminism. But why? And what’s to be done about it, asks Kira Cochrane
Anyone who has ever called themselves a feminist – even with a laugh in their voice and a toss of their hair – knows that the word is a red rag to misogynists, and that in the face of this, you have to find ways to bolster yourself. Deep-held conviction helps, as does the camaraderie of brilliant, politicised women. There’s the self-respect that comes with recognising that not having a penis is no actual impediment, and, finally, crucially, there’s the element of results: the sense that the culture is chugging forward.
There has always been resistance to feminism – the backlash that Susan Faludi chronicled in her 1991 book of the same name. But there is also the satisfaction of arguments won, rights enshrined, respect ensured, the sense that the central feminist project – the fight for women to be treated as human beings, no more, no less – is inching along. In fact, reading a recent piece by US feminist writer, Katha Pollitt, headlined Backlash Spectacular and charting the ways in which North American culture is regressing on women’s rights, I felt smug. Thank God that’s not happening here, I thought, sinking into my seat and reaching for another chocolate.
Of course, if you’re feeling smug, you’ve got it wrong. In the weeks after Pollitt’s article, I found myself tripping over signs, left and right, that not only does the feminist movement still have far to go, but that arguments we thought were long-won have been re-opened, rights we thought were settled are suddenly under threat. These signs came in a whole variety of forms, some ridiculous, some devastating.
On the ridiculous side, for instance, came a survey by Marketing magazine of the nation’s most-loved and least-loved celebrities. The respondents’ top five most loved were men: Paul McCartney, Lewis Hamilton, Gary Lineker, Simon Cowell and David Beckham. Of the five most hated, the top four were women: Heather Mills, Amy Winehouse, Victoria Beckham and Kerry Katona, with Simon Cowell coming in at number five. On some level, reacting to this at all seemed stupid, and yet …
Another small sign came in the response to a post on the British feminist website the F Word. The average number of comments on any post on the site is around 10, but after one of the site’s bloggers asked whether readers had experienced street harassment, hundreds of responses poured in. “Of course,” wrote one woman, “I can’t go out without being honked at, and people have asked me to ’suck their cock’ when I was just walking down the street.” “Yup,” wrote another, “got threatened with rape on my way home just under a fortnight ago – when I responded angrily the creeps followed me down the road.”
Then there are all the signs about attitudes to women and work. Flicking through the newspapers one day, I came across an interview with Theo Paphitis, who appears on the TV show, Dragon’s Den, as well as on the country’s Rich List each year; he is easily one of the UK’s most prominent business people. “All this feminist stuff,” he said, “are we seriously saying that 50% of all jobs should go to women?” Paphitis went on to note that women “get themselves bloody pregnant and … they always argue that they’ll be working until the day before, have the baby, go down to the river, wash it off, give it to the nanny and be back at work the following day, but sure enough, their brains turn to mush, and then after the birth the maternal instincts kick in, they take three months off, get it out of their system and are back to normal”. On the subject of paternity leave he suggested that he thinks “it’s a bit soppy”.
And, sadly, Paphitis isn’t alone in his unreconstructed views. In interviews earlier this year, Alan Sugar, Amstrad founder, Apprentice star and government business adviser, repeatedly challenged a law instituted more than three decades ago. This law was one of the big wins of the 1970s feminist movement, making it illegal for women to be asked at interview whether they plan to have children, on the grounds that it is clearly discriminatory: a chance for employers to weed out any woman who wants to combine a family with work. “You’re not allowed to ask, so it’s easy,” said Sugar, “just don’t employ them.”
A survey showed that 68% of employers agree with Sugar, and it was at this point, admits Katherine Rake, director of equality campaign, the Fawcett Society, that she seriously began to worry that a major backlash was underway – suddenly she found herself having to speak up for rights that are so long-established they had seemed entirely beyond debate. More cause for concern arrived in a particularly unlikely and depressing figure: former feminist icon, Rosie Boycott, one of the founders of the ground-breaking 70s magazine, Spare Rib. Writing in the Sunday Times, Boycott, who now runs a smallholding, said that “my pigs certainly aren’t going to thrive on flexi-feeding schemes. And neither is my business. Little wonder, then, that plenty of angry voices were last week demanding that women should get back to the kitchen”.
If women aren’t wanted in the workplace – and the fact that we’re still paid 17% less than men for full-time work, 36% less for part-time work, is a sign in itself – then at least our right to be safe from violence is recognised and protected, right? Far from it. Just as the attitudes of business leaders seem to be regressing at speed, the number of women being killed by a current or former partner has remained constant at two a week, and the rape conviction rate has been diminishing to the point of near-invisibility.
I was reminded of this last fact when the Washington Post, a newspaper that rarely picks up on British feminist issues (the US frankly having enough issues of its own) ran a long article about this disgrace in our justice system. The piece pointed out that the rape conviction rate in Britain has plummeted from 33% in the 70s to just 5.7% today, and that the 14,000 rapes reported each year are thought to be the tip of the iceberg – Solicitor General, Vera Baird, suggested that only 10%-20% of all cases are brought to the attention of the authorities. The article quoted a barrister called Kerim Fuad, who has represented many men accused of rape, and who admitted that he had been surprised by some “not guilty” verdicts – including those in which the plaintiff had sustained internal injuries. It alluded to an Amnesty International poll, conducted in 2005, which found that 26% of respondents thought that a woman was totally or partially responsible for being raped if she was wearing revealing clothing, and 30% thought she was totally or partially responsible if she was drunk.
How does the wider culture respond to this? Does it do everything it can to make sure that rapists are punished, that women are granted justice, that the balance is redressed? It does not. In the years in which the rape conviction rate has stood at a point so insultingly low that it represents a backlash in and of itself, the papers have often focused, not on the victims, not on the rapists, but instead on running multiple articles about women who have apparently lied about being raped. The number of women who take false complaints to the police is thought to stand at 3% of the total, as it does with other crimes, but the media focus has casually, simply, successfully, helped ingrain in the public imagination that, when it comes to rape, women lie – a notion that, naturally, has a rather serious effect when it comes to trial by jury.
If rapists aren’t going to be punished, then there must at least be good support services in place for women who have been raped. Well, no. The women’s movement of the 70s and early 80s fought for provision for rape victims, a network of Rape Crisis centres, and, by 1984, there were 68 of these essential services across England and Wales. Today, with rapes at an unprecedented high (the tally of recorded rapes rose by 247% between 1991 and 2004), the number of Rape Crisis centres has almost halved – there are now only 38. This massive shortfall in services is less surprising when you consider that three of the most important women’s charities in the UK – Refuge, Women’s Aid and Eaves Housing for Women – all of which support female victims of violence, have a combined income considerably lower than that of The Donkey Sanctuary, a charity that supports ageing donkeys.
As the number of Rape Crisis centres plummets, the number of lapdancing clubs has proliferated, bolstered by a 2003 change in licensing laws, which bracketed them with coffee shops and karaoke bars. Since this legislative change came into effect, the number of lapdancing clubs has doubled. In the small city of Brighton and Hove, for instance, six clubs opened in quick succession and across the country they are now opening at a rate of almost one each week. The government has recently pledged to tackle this issue, by reclassifying lapdancing clubs as “sex encounter” establishments, and while that’s great, it doesn’t change what we’ve learned in the meantime – the fact that there is clearly a massive demand for these clubs, that venues which involve women’s bodies being marketed to men are patently a brilliant business proposition. This isn’t surprising when you consider that the sex industry is more casually accepted than ever: one in 10 men now admit to having visited a prostitute, stag party visits to brothels are seen as par for the course, and the consumption of internet pornography has gone far beyond the point of familiarity.
The rise of the sex industry is one indication of how women’s bodies are considered public property; in the wider culture, we’ve seen scrutiny of women reach unprecedented levels. In gossip magazines, women’s bodies are pored over – a pound gained provoking headlines that they’re fat, a pound lost leading to headlines that they’re too thin. Circles are drawn around a spot on their ankle where they’ve failed to apply fake tan, around a bitten nail or a tiny, incipient wrinkle beside their eye – which could just be a stray lash. What is implicit but unsaid is that there is no objective standard of beauty, no level of perfection that a woman could reach at which her body would be perceived as acceptable and in control. In the eyes of these magazines, a healthy body mass index could be considered seriously plump. A woman deemed too fat in one magazine could, on the basis of exactly the same picture, be deemed too thin by another magazine. The constant message is that women’s bodies are not our own. They belong to everyone but us, and are there to be picked apart. Women can try to curry favour, come up to snuff, spend hours like, say, Madonna, working out, perfecting themselves. But there’s then every chance that they will be derided for the veins on their hands. There’s something essentially depressing about women being derided for their veins.
That intense scrutiny of women’s bodies is one trend in pop culture. Another related one is the current obsession with women as mothers, a trend being played out all over our cinema screens – in films including Juno, Knocked Up, Baby Mama, Happy Endings, Waitress and Smart People. It’s also being played out in the gossip magazines. In the past few years we have seen Jennifer Lopez paid a reported $6m (£3m) for exclusive pictures of her with her twin babies; Angelina Jolie is expected to clear $10m if she agrees to pose with the twins she will give birth to later this year.
In fact, the obsession is such that one magazine editor has said that “it’s at the point now where some stars might decide to have more kids just to collect the money from their photos”. We’ve seen Christina Aguilera, Britney Spears, former child star Melissa Joan Hart and Myleene Klass all pose naked and pregnant in the past few years – as Keri Russell, an actor who has played a pregnant woman in two films in the past year has said, there is “this weird, crazy pop-culture infatuation with all these actresses being pregnant. Have you ever seen so many pictures of [pregnant] actresses?”
Indeed not. The message that these images strike home is that women’s worth is directly tied to childbearing, the constant images of mothers are a siren call for women to get back into the home, and yet we’re also seeing more and more blame put on mothers. Women whose children are murdered or abducted are increasingly blamed for not having looked after their offspring well enough, for not having been on constant watch; those who work with the victims of child sexual abuse say that this is true in those cases too – there is often more blame put on the mother of a child who has been abused, than whoever actually abused them. And on a more day-to-day basis, it seems that it’s impossible for women to live up to social standards of motherhood. Mothers who go out to work are seen as neglectful, those who stay at home are seen as dullards. Today’s mothers are regularly defined as too overbearing – when they’re not being reviled as too lax.
The other big gossip-magazine trend is for women to be depicted as “mad”. Over the past few years we’ve seen a massive media obsession with women who are considered to be out of control – Britney Spears, Amy Winehouse, Lindsay Lohan and, to a lesser extent, Paris Hilton – and it’s hard to avoid the sense that people want to watch these women’s story arcs reach the same conclusion as that of their predecessor, the former Playboy model Anna Nicole Smith, who died of an overdose last year. Of course, at one point there was also a massive interest in Pete Doherty’s behaviour, but it’s notable that this was when he was going out with Kate Moss, and his transgressions therefore reflected on her. Once they had broken up, that interest quickly waned.
These pop cultural trends have been around for a few years, but one longstanding issue that renewed itself very recently was the backlash against abortion rights. This crept up on me suddenly in late Spring – I knew that a Conservative MP, Nadine Dorries, was campaigning to bring the abortion time limit down from 24 weeks to 20 weeks, but until a few days before the Commons vote on this issue, I had no idea that amendments had been tabled to bring the time limit down to 12 weeks, 14 weeks, 16 weeks, 18 weeks, 22 weeks. And while the outcome of that vote was a retention of the time limit, that was only because of the Labour majority in the House of Commons. Eighteen shadow cabinet ministers voted to reduce the limit to 22 weeks; David Cameron voted to reduce it to 20 weeks. A survey of prospective Conservative MPs found that only 9% would vote in favour of the current time limit – 86% want a lower limit.
With figures like this, there seems no doubt that it could be very difficult to retain current abortion rights if the Conservatives come to power, as many now consider inevitable. And this is especially true since analysis of parliamentary candidates shows that the already appallingly low rate of women in government – they make up just under 20% of MPs – may well fall given a Tory influx at the next election, and certainly won’t rise.
“My big concern,” says Rake, “is making sure that we create a feminist debate that sustains us through however many terms of Tory government we’re going to have”. And there are plenty of other signs that we’re going to need such a debate – in fact, the backlash is intensely bound up with the current rightward shift in politics. Since taking office as Mayor of London, for instance, one of Boris Johnson’s first acts has been to axe the role of women’s adviser; an insider was quoted in the Evening Standard as saying that Johnson saw the role as a “throwback to the Eighties GLC”.
Thankfully, there are signs that the feminist debate is growing – in fact, many of those I spoke to believe that this is exactly why the backlash is so strong at the moment. Before the abortion vote took place in the Commons, for instance, a large group of women gathered outside Parliament, and formed a rowdy protest against this potential assault on our rights. Rake says that membership of Fawcett has shot up recently, because “as the progressive space closes down at a national level, it just opens up somewhere else … I do think that there’s a general unease about the culture – we’ve been campaigning on the lapdancing issue, and we’ve had a lot of people saying, ‘Thank God someone’s finally saying something about the fact that I have to walk past a lapdancing club just to get home every night’. I think that there’s that general concern about backslip on cultural issues, and then just a concern that, while on other issues we’re moving vaguely in the right direction, the progress is incredibly slow. That’s led to a kind of militancy that’s re-arising now, in all sorts of quarters.”
She points to the revival of the Reclaim the Night marches, and the recent Million Women Rise march. “I do think that there’s a sense that people are beginning to get active, because they’re also all waking up to the fact that a lot of the rights that we’ve taken for granted, can’t be. I think that that activism and recognition is a cause for optimism.”
Professor Liz Kelly, chair of the End Violence Against Women campaign agrees that we’re in a time of resistance, but also sees a positive side to the situation: “I think that you always get the greatest resistance when you’re actually doing something,” she says. “I think it signals that there’s a slightly stronger sense of feminist organisation and voice than there was 10 years ago. The irony, of course, is that you only get resistance if there’s something to be resisted.”
A friend of mine, a long-time feminist activist, notes that “there’s always been a backlash, ever since day one of women’s existence – long before it’s ever been documented. So the concept of backlash is always alive, it’s just that there are times when you think that we are really sinking into a cesspit. What I would say, though, is that, for all the resistance, I don’t think we ever take two steps back. I think we only ever take steps forward, but those steps can be smaller and harder, like wading through treacle, or sometimes you can have a little sprint, a spurt, and think, ‘That’s fantastic, we’ve won that little battle.’
“What a backlash does is that it curtails us, but we never take those two steps back, and that’s what I think can send the conservatives – and I mean that with a small ‘c’ – and the rightwingers, and the upholders of the traditional family, absolutely wild, because whatever they throw at us, so what? What do they think we’re going to do? Go back to how we were before? Go back into the kitchen and make them a sandwich? We might be wading through treacle at the moment,” she says, “but the fact is that they won’t actually win”.
Tags: Backlash, Susan Faludi, Women
Posted in Feminism, History, News, Opinion, Saswat | No Comments »
Written by Radical Daily on 10 June 2008
By Nathan Sheva
Even the powerful euro has had a hard time competing with what has become probably the strongest currency in the world since the beginning of 2008: the Israeli shekel.
Since the beginning of 2008 the shekel has made some serious gains against nearly all the major world currencies. The shekel has gained 15% against the dollar, slightly more against the British pound and the Canadian dollar, as well as 8% versus the Swedish kroner and 24% against the South African rand.
Even the solid euro has had a hard time competing with the shekel, and has fallen from NIS 5.74 at the beginning of April by 12% to NIS 5.00 – its lowest rate in five years. Since the start of the year, the shekel has strengthened against the euro by 9%.
A week ago the president of the European Central Bank, Jean-Claude Triche, praised the euro to the Wall Street Journal, saying the European currency would provide price stability in the medium-term.
Even compared to the currencies of countries rich in natural resources and raw materials, such as Australia and Canada, it has done well.
One opinion is that the shekel will continue to gain in the next few months against the dollar and euro, at least until the November elections.
The real question is, which elections – those in America or maybe those here in Israel?
Haaretz.com
Tags: Dollar, Economy, Euro, Israel, Shekel
Posted in Capitalism, News, Saswat | No Comments »
Written by Radical Daily on 09 June 2008
NEW DELHI, India – International forces in Afghanistan have mismanaged the fight against the Taliban, leading to a rise in violence, and now risk losing people’s goodwill, President Hamid Karzai told an Indian news channel.
Karzai has often criticised the Western conduct of the war in Afghanistan, saying civilian casualties must stop.
In turn, the president, who wants to stand for re-election next year, is often criticised at home for being overly influenced by the United States and Britain.
In an interview to be aired on Indian television on Monday, he said foreign troops had failed to go after “the sanctuaries of the terrorists” which Afghan officials say exist over the border in Pakistan.
Karzai did not directly mention Pakistan but the Afghan government has said that the West should have done more to crack down on Taliban and al Qaeda bases in Pakistan.
“It was a serious neglect of that, in spite of our warning,” he told CNBC TV 18, adding that other former members of the Taliban who had given up arms were unfairly hunted down within Afghan territory.
“Some of the Taliban who have laid down their arms, who are living in the Afghan villages peacefully, who have accepted Afghanistan’s new order, they were chased, they were hunted for no reason, and they were forced to flee the country.”
Ousted from power in 2001 by U.S.-led and Afghan forces, the Taliban has vowed to topple the Afghan government and drive out the foreign troops who back it.
Some 13,000 people, including more than 380 foreign troops and 81 Canadian soldiers, have been killed in violence since 2006.
“The international community came to Afghanistan in the name of fighting terrorism and that fight has to be real and effective,” Karzai said.
“There is no way we can win this war against terrorism unless and until Afghanistan is . . . detached from the other interests or views that some of our partners have in this region.”
On the one hand the Taliban have shown a desire for political dialogue but on the other stepped up attacks, including a high-profile strike at a state parade attended by Karzai and Western diplomats in April.
Karzai also said violence had risen because not enough attention was paid in time to the training of a new Afghan army and police force.
There are 2,500 Canadian soldiers fighting in Afghanistan as part of a NATO-led international force.
The Afghan president said he did not accept charges in the Western media of corruption, ineptitude and paranoia in his government.
“I don’t even recognise it,” he said.
Reuters
Tags: Afghanistan, Cold War, War
Posted in Capitalism, History, News, Saswat, Terrorism | No Comments »
Written by Radical Daily on 08 June 2008
The June 12 vote on the Lisbon Treaty now seems less certain, as opposition groups, some businessmen and farmers raise concerns about sovereignty.
By Kim Murphy
NENAGH, IRELAND — The “Yes on the EU” bus rolled into town blaring a foot-stomping “Galway Girl” from its megaphone one afternoon last week, but what it got was a whole lot of no.
An Irishman has always been a hard sell, and never more so than when issues of sovereignty are at stake.
“People died for your freedom,” declares one of the signs that have popped up in this agricultural town as Ireland prepares to vote June 12 on the European Union’s new constitution. “Don’t throw it away.”
Farmer Ida McLoughlin isn’t sold on the other posters plastered around town: “Vote yes for jobs, the economy and Ireland’s future.”
“Since the EU, all you see are 4×4s going down the street and big buildings going up. The thatched cottages are gone,” McLoughlin said. “You have all these Johnny-come-lately people who were poor and got rich, and they’re dreadful people. We’ve lost our Irish values.”
Adoption of the so-called Lisbon Treaty requires ratification by all 27 member states of the EU, which could take a much more prominent role on the world stage under the streamlined diplomacy and beefed-up military readiness the document envisions.
Fourteen nations have ratified the agreement through their parliaments, and the remainder are expected to do so by the end of the year. Only Ireland’s constitution requires a referendum — and that could make or break the long-awaited constitution.
The Irish government, most business leaders and political parties of nearly every stripe have come out overwhelmingly in favor of the Lisbon Treaty, pointing out how Ireland’s membership in the EU over the last 35 years has helped transform the Emerald Isle of 4.1 million people from an impoverished backwater dependent on Britain to one of Europe’s most robust economies.
But a newly vigorous opposition composed of farmers, a few wealthy businessmen with vague connections to the U.S. defense establishment and the leftist Irish republican party, Sinn Fein, have gained quickly in recent polls, and the outcome is suddenly no longer a sure thing.
It is not clear what happens if Ireland says no — except that the union would surely be plunged, as it was when France and the Netherlands voted down an earlier EU constitution in 2005, into uncertainty and more tedious negotiations on what EU leaders say is a badly needed framework for decision-making among its suddenly more numerous member states.
“It would put us in the very tortured position of going back to the drawing board,” said Marc Coleman, a Dublin-based economic analyst.
The treaty signed in Lisbon in December would help Europe project itself more forcefully on the international stage by creating a European Council president and foreign affairs representative while outlining a framework for EU troop deployments in peacekeeping and humanitarian missions.
The treaty would broaden and establish a legal basis for the EU’s lawmaking powers in some areas while making them subject much more directly to national parliaments and citizens initiatives. It would set out voting weights between large and small countries, improve cross-border cooperation in areas such as crime fighting and climate change and streamline the European Commission to a manageable decision-making body of 18.
Under the treaty, member nations still would retain their historic veto power in crucial areas such as defense, foreign policy, taxation and social security, but not on issues like immigration and energy policy.
Voters in overwhelmingly Catholic Ireland worry that the nation would be forced to expand abortion rights (no), forfeit its long tradition of military neutrality (no) or give up the holy grail of the Celtic Tiger economic miracle, Ireland’s 12.5% corporate tax rate (probably not, though some in Europe would like to try).
Treaty opponents say the government is too smoothly dismissing what may be legitimate fears and is too quick to warn that Ireland would incur the wrath of the rest of Europe if it voted no.
“People always say Ireland is in very good standing at the European level. But why wouldn’t we be? We haven’t invaded one of the partner countries, we haven’t partitioned them. But we’re also a small member state, and in the power structure that is the EU, small states have to be very careful in how they protect their status and institutions,” said Mary Lou McDonald, a member of the European Parliament with Sinn Fein.
Here in County Tipperary, the “Yes on the EU” bus was stopping in front of village cafes and bakeries; young activists from the majority Fianna Fail party trailed out in yellow T-shirts. They smiled and passed out leaflets touting EU membership as a bonanza for Ireland — the country received 58 billion euros in European funds for agriculture, infrastructure and other programs from 1973 to 2003. Its exports to other EU states increased from 45 billion euros in 1997 to 87 billion in 2006.
Maire Hoctor, a Fianna Fail lawmaker and a minister of state from Nenagh, strolled the sidewalks, stopping for hugs, handshakes and an occasional tongue-lashing. She was joined by party colleague Jim Casey, mayor of North Tipperary.
“They’re not going to give us anything. They’re going to take it away, for sure,” said Bernie O’Brien, an elderly woman who resisted their overtures.
“I remember when we had nothing in this county: We had a one-way ticket to Britain, and that was our lot,” Hoctor told her.
Much of the opposition in rural Ireland involves an issue that has nothing to do with the EU treaty at all: agriculture proposals submitted last month to the World Trade Organization by the European trade commissioner, who is Britain’s former envoy to the British province of Northern Ireland.
Irish farmers say the trade proposals could put 50,000 cattle farmers in Ireland out of business by easing importation of Brazilian and Argentine beef and driving down prices. The Irish Farmers Assn. says it will urge its members to vote “no” on the EU treaty if Ireland doesn’t exercise its EU veto to block the trade proposals.
“It’s just going to decimate farms,” McLoughlin told Hoctor. “Sure, we’ve gotten subsidies from the EU. We got the check in the post, like everyone else. We were bought. We were humiliated. My husband has been told what to grow, when to grow it.”
Casey said the issue shouldn’t be used to block a treaty that will be good for Ireland.
“We’ve always negotiated good deals for the farmers in Ireland in Europe, and I’m convinced that will continue,” he said. “The EU has provided well for farmers. Since we entered Europe, everything has gotten much, much better.”
The other main source of opposition has come from a group called Libertas, fronted by two wealthy businessmen who have had extensive contracts with the U.S. military. This has caused some in the Irish media to speculate that the group is advancing the agenda of U.S. conservatives, some of whom worry that a stronger, united Europe would undermine U.S. interests on the continent.
But Ulick McEvaddy, a former military intelligence officer whose company has contracts for aerial refueling with the U.S. Navy and Marine Corps and who is one of Libertas’ biggest supporters, said he was worried about threats to Ireland’s independence.
“We’re handing over direct responsibility and huge issues of sovereignty to the Brussels parliament,” McEvaddy said. “If they believe in this great experiment, put it to all the people of Europe.”
Even in County Tipperary, some are willing to give it the benefit of the doubt.
“Europe hasn’t let us down yet,” said Mick Connell, a member of the local council in Templemore, not far from Nenagh. “That should be good enough.”
From the Los Angeles Times
Tags: Europe, Ireland, Lisbon, Sovereignty
Posted in Capitalism, History, News, Saswat | No Comments »
Written by Radical Daily on 05 June 2008
Nobel peace laureate Desmond Tutu has called Israel’s blockade of the Gaza Strip an “abomination.” (CLICK HERE for video)
He strongly condemned what he called international “silence and complicity” on the blockade, which he compared to the actions of Burma’s leaders.
Speaking at the end of a two day mission to the area, the former archbishop said the humanitarian situation there could not be justified.
Earlier, 60 Palestinians were detained in an Israeli raid on northern Gaza.
Residents in the Beit Hanoun area were summoned to a local square by Israeli troops with loudhailers before dozens were taken away, witnesses said.
‘International complicity’
Mr Tutu was in Gaza on a United Nations fact-finding mission into the killing of 19 Palestinians by Israeli shellfire in November 2006.
The former archbishop of Cape Town said the international community’s “silence and complicity, especially on the situation in Gaza, shames us all”.
Mr Tutu said conflicts were resolved through talking to enemies not friends.
He said his meeting with the deposed prime minister, Ismail Haniya, was an opportunity to tell the Hamas leader the firing of rockets into Israel was also a violation of human rights.
During his two-day visit, Mr Tutu met relatives of 19 civilians killed in the Israeli shelling of two houses in Beit Hanoun and is due to report his findings to the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva.
He condemned the incident as a “massacre”.
Israel says the Beit Hanoun deaths in November 2006 were a mistake during action to target areas used by Palestinian militants.
The Israeli military confirmed its pre-dawn incursion into Gaza on Thursday and said about 60 “wanted Palestinians” were being interrogated.
Armoured military bulldozers destroyed farmland during the incursion, witnesses told AFP news agency.
Israeli forces launch frequent attacks into Gaza which they say are aimed at combating Palestinian militants who fire rockets into Israel.
Further comments on this article on Canadian Dimension
Tags: Israel, Middle East, Tutu
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Written by Radical Daily on 02 June 2008
Lima: (Prensa Latina) Non-governmental organisations in Peru have called for a general strike to protest against the government’s decision to allow US troops helping the civil administration to carry arms.
Earlier, the government had urged the US troops to help civil administration construct water-wells and classrooms in the country’s restive southern province of Ayacucho where illegal armed groups operate.
The government’s decision has been criticised by the opposition politicians who say the authorities have bent laws to allow foreign soldiers to carry guns.
Opposition combine Ayacucho Defence Front has announced that the strike will take place July 8.
Around 70 US soldiers have already been deployed and 350 more are expected to arrive.
Front chairman Iver Maravi said protesters would demand the withdrawal of the foreign troops, as its presence goes against the country’s law.
Defence Minister Antero Flores-Araoz said the government’s decision is justified in view of the presence of the armed groups in the region where the US troops are to work.
Antero, while responding to the criticisms by Peruvian Nationalist Party (PNP) leader Ollanta Humala, said the foreign troops are here to help the government and since the area is disturbed, the troops may be allowed to carry arms for self-defence.
Humala said such missions do not justify carrying guns. He said Peruvian engineers and constructors could do the work.
The ruling party and conservative groups in the Congress had approved the entry of US troops to Peru.
The opposition fear the US troops might open a military base in Peru.
Army chief Gen. Edwin Donayre said the US troops would only perform humanitarian tasks and would not set up military base in Peru.
Irish Sun
Tags: Peru, Protests, War
Posted in Capitalism, History, News, Saswat, Terrorism | No Comments »
