Bush guts VA Hospitals; Michael Moore's Popularity Surges

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Students Invade US Senate
 
http://www.tcgreens.org/gl/articles/20030414053125240.html
 

 
Hans Blix: Inspections a Scam
 
http://www.tcgreens.org/gl/articles/20030414052757293.html
 

 
Bush Guts Health Care for Veterans
 
http://www.tcgreens.org/gl/articles/20030414050843862.html
 

 
Green Party Appeals to Latinos
 
http://www.tcgreens.org/gl/articles/20030411060940418.html
 

 
Concorde, SST -- The End of the Dream
 
http://www.tcgreens.org/gl/articles/20030411054943823.html
 

 
Eco-lateral Damage
 
http://www.tcgreens.org/gl/articles/20030411054518873.html
 

 
The Precautionary Principle: Good Science
 
http://www.tcgreens.org/gl/articles/20030410053653203.html
 

 
Michael Moore: My Oscar Backlash
 
http://www.tcgreens.org/gl/articles/20030410052557352.html
 

 
US Unilateralism May Hurt Economy
 
http://www.tcgreens.org/gl/articles/20030410051616677.html
 

 
Protestors Block Highways, Establish Peace Camp in Portland OR
 
http://www.tcgreens.org/gl/articles/2003040707094245.html
 

 
Anti-War Boycott Hurts Coke, Pepsi Sales in India
 
http://www.tcgreens.org/gl/articles/20030409060308634.html
 

 
Oakland Cops Fire Rubber Bullets at Crowd; ILWU Shuts Down Docks
 
http://www.tcgreens.org/gl/articles/20030409054449896.html
 

 
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http://www.tcgreens.org/auth/
 

 
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Students Invade US Senate
 
A group of activists with the Ferrel Collective,including 4 University
 
of Maryland students, brought Thursday's session of senate to an abrupt
 
halt. The group was protesting massive military spending being passed
 
while critical social services such as affordable housing, education,
 
health care, and drug addiction treatment are underfunded and/or
 
experiencing budget cuts.
 

 
¨We are concerned that corporate powers continue to control this
 
country over the will of the people. The unjust and dangerous war in
 
Iraq is part of an expanding corporate agenda to put profit interests
 
over our interests as communities. Our government is not hearing us, so
 
we have to make our voices heard. We must retake the space that is being
 
run by dollars and greed,¨ said Chris D. (of the Ferrels) in
 
handcuffs.
 

 
The group went to the Senate chambers early in the day, hoping to catch
 
the Senate in the convening during the AM hours to discuss and vote on
 
the proposed budget including $75 billion dollar military allocation for
 
the war in Iraq and a tax cut for next year that could run between 300
 
and 750 million dollars for next year. However, before noon, senators
 
asked that the senate take a recess until house-senate conferences on
 
the budget could be convened.
 

 
http://www.tcgreens.org/gl/articles/20030414053125240.html
 

 
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Hans Blix: Inspections a Scam
 
Madrid - The invasion of Iraq was planned a long time in advance, and
 
the United States and Britain are not primarily concerned with finding
 
any banned weapons of mass destruction, the chief UN weapons inspector,
 
Hans Blix, said in an interview on Wednesday.
 

 
"There is evidence that this war was planned well in advance. Sometimes
 
this raises doubts about their attitude to the (weapons) inspections,"
 
Blix told Spanish daily El Pais.
 

 
"I now believe that finding weapons of mass destruction has been
 
relegated, I would say, to fourth place, which is why the United States
 
and Britain are now waging war on Iraq.
 

 
Today the main aim is to change the dictatorial regime of Saddam
 
Hussein," he said, according to the Spanish text of the interview.
 

 
http://www.tcgreens.org/gl/articles/20030414052757293.html
 

 
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Bush Guts Health Care for Veterans
 
Rick Anderson, The Seattle Weekly
 

 
War was his best moment and his worst. Visions of whistling bullets,
 
airborne body parts, screams of the wounded—and that was a good
 
day for Joe Hooper. The Medal of Honor winner and most decorated soldier
 
in Vietnam would bolt upward in his Seattle bed, sweating booze from the
 
night before. Those earlier appearances on national TV, the possibility
 
of a Hollywood biopic, hanging out with Bob Hope and several
 
presidents—that just churned him up more inside. The catlike,
 
strawberry-haired 6-footer and former Washington state football scoring
 
champ at Moses Lake High School had enlisted at age 19 because he
 
admired the military.
 

 
Then came Vietnam. Staff Sgt. Joe Hooper, 29, of the 501st Airborne
 
Infantry, killed at least 115 of the enemy—24 of them in a
 
six-hour firefight, lobbing grenades into Viet Cong bunkers and wading
 
through withering machine-gun fire to repeatedly rescue wounded American
 
soldiers. Fourteen out of 189 survived. After treatment for his wounds,
 
Hooper broke out of the hospital to return to his unit. Part American
 
Indian, he said he could “smell out” the enemy, and thought
 
he was born to go to Vietnam. His 37 medals were more than those earned
 
by World War II’s Audie Murphy and World War I’s Alvin
 
York—names that, unlike Hooper’s, still ring familiar today.
 
Like others of his era, he arrived home to accusations of being a baby
 
killer. But that’s not what eventually soured him on Vietnam.
 
“At high schools, when I speak, the question kids most often asked
 
me was, ‘Would you do it again?’” he told me once.
 
“I would, the reason being I thought my abilities helped save
 
lives. But I would tell my children, if [we] were to do this over,
 
‘Go to Canada. Don’t fight a war you can’t
 
win.’”
 

 
http://www.tcgreens.org/gl/articles/20030414050843862.html
 

 
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Green Party Appeals to Latinos
 
by Starlene Rankin GreenPages, Vol 6, No.4
 

 
Representing a critical step adelante for the Green Party, Green
 
gubernatorial candidate Peter Miguel Camejo received 7.4 percent of the
 
Latino vote in California in November, according to estimates by the
 
William C. Velasquez and Tomas Rivera Institutes.
 

 
This validates one of the key Camejo campaign strategies: to reach out
 
to Latinos.
 

 
A first generation Venezuelan-American who speaks fluent Spanish, Camejo
 
defied stereotypes about Green candidates by doing even better with
 
Latino voters than non-Latinos (which gave him a still respectable 5
 
percent).
 

 
Galvanizing support for Camejo was also the growing dissatisfaction
 
among Latinos with Democratic incumbent Governor Gray Davis,
 
particularly around Davis' veto of Assembly Bill 60. AB60 was driver's
 
license legislation that would have given licenses to immigrants who are
 
in the process of applying for legal residency. Following upon Davis'
 
earlier foot-dragging on signing farmworkers' rights legislation, this
 
veto even caused key Democrats in the Latino Legislative Caucus to
 
withdraw their endorsement of Davis.
 

 
http://www.tcgreens.org/gl/articles/20030411060940418.html
 

 
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Concorde, SST -- The End of the Dream
 
British Airways and Air France have announced that the Concorde will be
 
permanently grounded by the end of this year, bringing about an end to
 
civilian supersonic transport.
 

 
Aside from the noise problem, supersonic aircraft are massively
 
inefficient. There is a simple reason for this. When an aircraft passes
 
through the air, there is a compression in front of it. The speed at
 
which the compression wave can travel through the air is the speed of
 
sound. If a plane travels faster than sound, this wave builds up a large
 
compression shock wave as the plane runs into its own wake- and it is
 
this wave which creates the characteristic "boom" when the plane passes
 
over. This "boom" represents a huge amount of energy, which implies very
 
high fuel consumption. This is why the flights cost, as the BBC reported
 
in the announcement, 4000 pounds for a roundtrip from London to New
 
York.
 

 
http://www.tcgreens.org/gl/articles/20030411054943823.html
 

 
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Eco-lateral Damage
 
by Ross Mirkarimi, Published on March 28, 2003 by In These Times.
 

 
We felt a sense of impending catastrophe, difficult to define at first,
 
as we crossed the Jordanian border into Iraq and sped toward Baghdad. As
 
we drove down the desert highway, the fault lines of a military
 
conflagration started to reveal the pockmarks of the war's chaos. We
 
arrived. My focus turned to an ancient nation, once advanced, now
 
engulfed in the onslaught of the war's aftermath.
 

 
Baghdad, the barometer for the western media, stood resolute but
 
seriously wounded. I knew that a return to normalcy there, the center of
 
Saddam Hussein's realm, was key to his remaining in power. Yet outside
 
the city, any impressions of efficiency were merely delusions. That was
 
1991.
 

 
Once a modern nation, Iraq is now a country of waterborne diseases
 
induced by improper sanitation and deficient supplies of potable water;
 
imperiled flora and fauna due to uncontrolled pollution and habitat
 
displacement; contaminated ecosystems peppered by depleted uranium
 
bullets; soil and agricultural erosion caused by reduced photosynthesis
 
and poor irrigation; and depleted livestock due to disease and the
 
interruption of food chains.
 

 
http://www.tcgreens.org/gl/articles/20030411054518873.html
 

 
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The Precautionary Principle: Good Science
 
The precautionary principle is simply a statement that we should not go
 
ahead with a new technology, or persist with an old one, unless we are
 
convinced it is safe. This sounds such an obviously sensible idea that
 
we might expect it to be accepted by almost everyone and without
 
question. Yet many objections have been raised against it.
 

 
We are told it is nothing more than a statement that we should be
 
careful, and so says nothing that’s not already accepted, while at
 
the same time others argue precisely the opposite: that it is so
 
powerful that applying it would stop progress dead in its tracks. We are
 
told that it sanctifies unscientific prejudice when in fact it requires
 
scientific evidence before it is applied and demands that good science
 
be used in place of sweeping and unjustified assurances of safety. We
 
are even told these matters should be left to the courts as if that were
 
an alternative, whereas it is the courts themselves that should be
 
applying the precautionary principle.
 

 
Most of those who support the precautionary principle would accept that
 
it is well expressed by the Wingspread statement:
 

 
"When an activity raises threats of harm to human health or the
 
environment, precautionary measures should be taken even if some cause
 
and effect relationships are not fully established scientifically. In
 
this context the proponent of an activity, rather than the public,
 
should bear the burden of proof."
 

 
This immediately deals with two of the common objections raised. First,
 
the principle does not support unscientific prejudice. To say that the
 
potential hazards do not have to be fully established scientifically
 
makes it clear that the principle is about cases where there is
 
scientific evidence. The European Commission states this explicitly in
 
its Communication on the Precautionary Principle, writing that it
 
applies "where preliminary objective scientific evaluation indicates
 
that there are reasonable grounds for concern …"
 

 
http://www.tcgreens.org/gl/articles/20030410053653203.html
 

 
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Michael Moore: My Oscar Backlash
 
Dear friends, It appears that the Bush administration will have
 
succeeded in colonizing Iraq sometime in the next few days. This is a
 
blunder of such magnitude -- and we will pay for it for years to come.
 
It was not worth the life of one single American kid in uniform, let
 
alone the thousands of Iraqis who have died, and my condolences and
 
prayers go out to all of them.
 

 
So, where are all those weapons of mass destruction that were the
 
pretense for this war? Ha! There is so much to say about all this, but I
 
will save it for later.
 

 
What I am most concerned about right now is that all of you -- the
 
majority of Americans who did not support this war in the first place --
 
not go silent or be intimidated by what will be touted as some great
 
military victory. Now, more than ever, the voices of peace and truth
 
must be heard. I have received a lot of mail from people who are feeling
 
a profound sense of despair and believe that their voices have been
 
drowned out by the drums and bombs of false patriotism. Some are afraid
 
of retaliation at work or at school or in their neighborhoods because
 
they have been vocal proponents of peace. They have been told over and
 
over that it is not "appropriate" to protest once the country is at war,
 
and that your only duty now is to "support the troops."
 

 
Can I share with you what it's been like for me since I used my time on
 
the Oscar stage two weeks ago to speak out against Bush and this war? I
 
hope that, in reading what I'm about to tell you, you'll feel a bit more
 
emboldened to make your voice heard in whatever way or forum that is
 
open to you.
 

 
http://www.tcgreens.org/gl/articles/20030410052557352.html
 

 
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US Unilateralism May Hurt Economy
 
Unilateral action may prove an effective way to win the war in Iraq, but
 
some scholars at Emory University and its Goizueta Business School say
 
that it’s not a good strategy for winning more world trade.
 
Despite the sweetheart deals some U.S. companies seem likely to receive
 
in post-Saddam Iraq, some Emory University scholars believe
 
America’s current tendency to go-it-alone on a wide range of
 
global economic, environmental, legal, and military issues could have a
 
longer term negative impact on the U.S. economy.
 

 
Whether the issue is global warming, the world criminal court, or
 
international trade, the Bush Administration’s refusal to commit
 
to a variety of international agreements in the past several years has
 
frustrated many of America’s largest trading partners, according
 
to Jagdish Sheth, a marketing professor at Emory University’s
 
Goizueta Business School. And in politics as in physics, every action
 
has a reaction: Sheth believes that one result of this unilateralism
 
will be reluctance to trade with or invest in the U.S.
 

 
Even if the war ends quickly, Sheth believes that international
 
frustration with the U.S. will not dissipate. “I’m convinced
 
that the war is just an excuse,” for other countries to act on
 
their frustration with the U.S., notes Sheth, who specializes in global
 
business strategy. “Whether the war finishes quickly or is
 
prolonged will make no difference to the distancing from America because
 
America has become unilateral in its decision-making.”
 

 
http://www.tcgreens.org/gl/articles/20030410051616677.html
 

 
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Protestors Block Highways, Establish Peace Camp in Portland OR
 
March 21, Portland OR -- Police in Portland arrested about 135
 
protesters after a day of freewheeling anti-war demonstrations shut down
 
several bridges, freeways and intersections.
 

 
Late Thursday, police warned hundreds of protesters at the foot of the
 
Burnside Bridge to leave the area. Some left, but about 100 seated
 
themselves on the rain-slicked road and linked arms in defiance.
 

 
Soon after, police began picking up the seated demonstrators one-by-one,
 
and putting them in police vans. Most of those arrested Thursday were
 
charged with disorderly conduct or criminal mischief, Police spokesman
 
Sgt. Brian Schmautz said. Police used pepper spray to clear crowds near
 
the bridge and threatened people on a nearby street with "impact weapons
 
and chemical spray."
 

 
"I feel this war is unjustified," said Celine Fitzmaurice, who was in
 
the crowd at the foot of the Steel Bridge, where police on horses used
 
pepper spray to hold back the crowd. "It's about oil. This is precisely
 
the time to keep the pressure on. People can make a difference."
 

 
http://www.tcgreens.org/gl/articles/2003040707094245.html
 

 
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Anti-War Boycott Hurts Coke, Pepsi Sales in India
 
The All-India Anti-imperialist Forum has called for a boycott of Pepsi,
 
Coca-Cola, McDonald and all American and British goods in India and
 
other countries in protest against the ‘unjust’ US war on
 
Iraq.
 

 
"We give a call to all peace-loving people of the world and India to
 
rise up in protest against the imperialist aggression against Iraq and
 
boycott Pepsi, Coca-Cola, McDonald and all American and British goods in
 
the markets of respective countries in protest," Forum's general
 
secretary, S K Mukherjee, said.
 

 
Such a boycott, he asserted, would constitute a powerful and coordinated
 
gesture of recording global protest against the attack on Iraqis.
 

 
Distributors of Coca Cola and Pepsi said sales in the state of Kerala
 
had dropped by about 50% since the call was made two weeks ago.
 

 
http://www.tcgreens.org/gl/articles/20030409060308634.html
 

 
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Oakland Cops Fire Rubber Bullets at Crowd; ILWU Shuts Down Docks
 
4/7: Anti-War demonstrators arrived around 5AM at the port of Oakland to
 
picket American President Lines (APL) and Stevedoring Services of
 
America (SSA). APL receives millions of taxpayer dollars every year for
 
shipping military cargo through the Department of Defense Maritime
 
Security Program (MSP). SSA was awarded a $4.8 million contract for a
 
year's operation of the Port of Umm Qasr in Iraq.
 
The picket line was successful in provoking the ILWU into sending many
 
of its workers home for the day. After approximately 30 minutes, the
 
Oakland Police Department moved in to disperse the demonstrators, using
 
concussion grenades , wooden bullets, and beanbags full of metal shot.
 
Scores of people, including six onlooking workers, suffered injuries and
 
Jack Heyman (Business Agent, ILWU Local 10) was arrested with over 35
 
other protesters and port workers.
 
Police violence quickly forced protesters back to the West Oakland BART
 
station and there was then a spirited march downtown to the Oakland
 
Federal Building. A press conference was held at 2:30 in front of City
 
Hall to address issues of police violence towards workers and
 
protesters.
 
Strong anti-war sentiments by longshoremen combined with disgust at OPD
 
violence kept large portions of the Oakland docks shut down for most of
 
the day, but as would be expected Mayor Jerry Brown defended the police
 
brutalization of protesters.
 

 
http://www.tcgreens.org/gl/articles/20030409054449896.html