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| Bush Campaign Violates U.S. Law--Merchandise Made in Burma |
| 03.19.04 (10:02 am) [edit] |
[i]His campaign store sells a pullover from nation whose products he has banned from being sold in the U.S.[/i]
BY LAUREN WEBER
STAFF WRITER
March 18, 2004
[url=]http://www.newsday.com/busine...,0,1292393,print.story?coll=ny-top-headlin es[/url]
The official merchandise Web site for President George W. Bush's re-election campaign has sold clothing made in Burma, whose goods were banned by Bush from the U.S. last year to punish its military dictatorship.
The merchandise sold on www.georgewbushstore.com includes a $49.95 fleece pullover, embroidered with the Bush-Cheney '04 logo and bearing a label stating it was made in Burma, now Myanmar. The jacket was sent to Newsday as part of an order that included a shirt made in Mexico and a hat not bearing a country-of-origin label.
The Bush merchandise is handled by Spalding Group, a 20-year-old supplier of campaign products and services in Louisville, Ky., that says it worked for the last five Republican presidential nominees.
Ted Jackson, Spalding's president, said, "We have found only one other in our inventory that was made in Burma. The others were made in the U.S.A." He said the company had about 60 of thefleece pullovers in its warehouse, and that a supplier included the Burma product by mistake.
Bush campaign officials did not return calls seeking comment. [b]The imports are potentially an issue because outsourcing has become a hot political topic in the election.[/b]
Bush last July signed into law the Burmese Freedom and Democracy Act, saying "The United States will not waver from its commitment to the cause of democracy and human rights in Burma."
[b]Violators of the import ban are subject to fines and jail, according to the U.S. Treasury Department.[/b]
Burmese textile workers earn as little as 7 cents per hour, according to the National Labor Committee, a human rights group.
"If it is true, it is very contradictory because the sanctions were imposed by the Bush administration," said Bo Hla-Tint, a spokesman for the Burmese government-in-exile in Washington, D.C.
Spalding, which works exclusively with Republican candidates at both local and national levels, tries to order American-made products, Jackson said. "Our first effort is always to source things from the U.S., but not a lot of garments are made in the U.S. Friday," he said. He said all embroidery is done in the United States.
The Bush-Cheney fleece pullovers were imported to the United States by Denver-based Colorado Trading & Clothing. President Jeff Schmitt said Thursday the pullovers were included in one of the last shipments brought in from Burma last year before Sept. 1, when the import ban went into effect. "It's a terrible irony" that the Burmese jacket landed at Newsday, he said.
Schmitt said Colorado Trading employs an agent in Asia who conducts checks of factory conditions.
Human rights watcher Charles Kernaghan, director of the National Labor Committee, said the slip-up showed a lack of conviction on the administration's part. "Given the debate about outsourcing, it's amazing that the campaign would be selling stuff made in the most brutal country on earth, known for things like child labor and sexual slavery," he said. "It shows a crude indifference to this issue."
[b]The National Basketball Association recently vowed to stop selling Burmese-made sweatshirts after a campaign by the NLC.[/b]
Last week, Newsday ordered a hat, T-shirt and fleece pullover or jacket from both the Bush and Kerry campaign stores. The Bush merchandise - which totaled $81.85 - arrived this week. The Kerry products, worth $62, have yet to arrive because the fleece jacket was on back order, according to Financial Innovations, the company that licenses and sells Kerry merchandise on the Web site www.kerrygear.com.
The campaigns receive no profits from the merchandise because of federal election regulations.
[b]The Kerry merchandise was made in the United States[/b], according to Mark Weiner, the president of Financial Innovations. [b]The company, whose employees belong to the Communications Workers of America Union[/b], sources most of its merchandise from union factories.
"It's becoming more difficult to find American-made union product, especially in textiles, but you just have to look. We pay more money for them, so we make a smaller profit margin," said Paul McConnell, Financial Innovations' vice president.
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Copyright © 2004, Newsday, Inc.
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| Brown University to Examine Debt to Slave Trade |
| 03.16.04 (10:18 pm) [edit] |
March 13, 2004
New York Times
By PAM BELLUCK
[url=]http://www.nytimes.com/2004/0... [/url]
[b]ROVIDENCE, R.I.,[/b] - When Ruth J. Simmons became the president of Brown University nearly three years ago, one striking fact could not be overlooked.
A great-granddaughter of slaves, Dr. Simmons was the first African-American president of an Ivy League university. But the 240-year-old university she was chosen to lead had early links to slavery, with major benefactors and officers of it having owned and traded slaves.
``It certainly didn't escape me, my own past in relationship to that,'' Dr. Simmons said. ``I sit here in my office beneath the portrait of people who lived at a different time and who saw the ownership of people in a different way. You can't sit in an office and face that every day unless you really want to know, unless you really want to understand this dichotomy.''
Now, Dr. Simmons, whose office is in a building constructed by laborers who included slaves, has directed Brown to start what its officials say is an unprecedented undertaking for a university: an exploration of reparations for slavery and specifically whether Brown should pay reparations or otherwise make amends for its past.
Dr. Simmons has appointed a Committee on Slavery and Justice, which will spend two years investigating Brown's historic ties to slavery; arrange seminars, courses and research projects examining the moral, legal and economic complexities of reparations and other means of redressing wrongs; and recommend whether and how the university should take responsibility for its connection to slavery.
Dr. Simmons, one of 12 children of an East Texas tenant farmer and a house cleaner, said she was motivated by a sense that the multifaceted subject of reparations had too often been reduced to simplistic and superficial squabbles.
``How does one repair a kind of social breach in human rights so that people are not just coming back to it periodically and demanding apologies,'' she said, ``so that society learns from it, acknowledges what has taken place and then moves on. What I'm trying to do, you see, in a country that wants to move on, I'm trying to understand as a descendant of slaves how to feel good about moving on.''
Dr. Simmons does not believe that her history will sway the inquiry's results. ``I don't think there can be a person with a better background for dealing with this issue than me,'' she said. ``If I have something to teach our students, if I have something to offer Brown, it's the fact that I am a descendant of slaves.''
Both Dr. Simmons and the chairman of the committee, James T. Campbell, a history professor at Brown, said the effort would be wide ranging and thorough, encouraging all points of view.
``Everyone in a university is always being accused of being 18 miles to the left of the country,'' said Dr. Campbell, who specializes in American, African-American and African history, but ``there are people on this committee who think reparations is the stupidest idea ever.''
Dr. Campbell, who said he had conflicting feelings about reparations, said the committee was expecting criticism from both the right and the left.
``You're going to have those that will hear the very word reparations and start blustering that this is just one more way that blacks are asking for a government handout,'' he said. ``And then you are going have those that say the university is just trying to whitewash things. Our hope is to carve out as large a middle as possible.''
The issue of reparations has caused friction at Brown before, and at other northern universities built with the investments of slave traders. In March 2001, the student newspaper, The Brown Daily Herald, printed a full-page advertisement listing ``Ten Reasons Why Reparations for Slavery is a Bad Idea And Racist Too.'' The advertisement, produced by David Horowitz, a conservative writer, argued that slavery happened so long ago and was ended by white Christians, and said black Americans should be grateful for their prosperity and freedom in the United States.
The advertisement, also run by a handful of newspapers at other colleges, caused a particular uproar at Brown. Student protesters dumped the newspapers in the trash, formed human chains and demanded the paper pay ``reparations'' by donating its advertising fee or giving free advertising space to proponents of reparations. The paper defended itself on the grounds of free speech, and in Dr. Simmons's first speech to students after taking office that summer, she stressed her support for the free expression of unpopular opinions.
And in 2002, when nine lawsuits seeking reparations were filed in New York, New Jersey and other states against FleetBoston, Aetna, J.P. Morgan Chase, and other companies, lawyers involved in the cases said Brown, Yale and Harvard Law School were likely defendants in future suits. So far, legal rulings have gone against the plaintiffs.
Brown started as Rhode Island College. Its founder, the Rev. James Manning, freed his only slave, but accepted donations from slave owners and traders, including the Brown family of Providence.
Four Brown brothers, John, Joseph, Moses and Nicholas, were active benefactors. John, a treasurer of the college, was a slave trader, while Moses freed his slaves and became a Quaker and an abolitionist. Moses was supported by Nicholas and Nicholas's son, Nicholas Jr., who became the university's namesake.
Moses pressed for John to be the first Rhode Islander prosecuted under the federal Slave Trade Act of 1794, which barred American ports from outfitting slave-trade ships. John was fined.
Dr. Campbell pointed out that even Moses's role was complicated because he ran a textile factory that used cotton grown with slave labor.
In addition, records suggest that a Brown family company was involved in building University Hall, which houses Dr. Simmons's office, and that the labor crew included at least two slaves.
Dr. Campbell said that the committee included experts on South Africa, the Holocaust and the internment of Japanese Americans by the United States in World War II, and that the panel would look at these and other examples of how societies dealt with historical injustice.
He said that if the committee did recommend that Brown make reparations, several remedies might be considered, for example, providing scholarships or helping African students attend Brown.
Two Brown professors not on the panel did not object to studying reparations but expressed caution.
``I think it's very important that this does not degenerate into a bunch of people congratulating themselves for thinking slavery is bad,'' said Felicia Nimue Ackerman, a philosophy professor and self-described liberal.
John E. Savage, a computer science professor who says he is conservative on some issues, said: ``I can't see the university as a private institution making reparations to anyone. You'd have to identify who the victims were and have to assess what Brown's culpability would be with respect to those victims.''
Professor Savage added that even now ``there are individuals who commit crimes and before they are discovered they give money to universities,'' asking, ``Should there be reparations made by those universities who took those gifts?''
At least one committee member, James Patterson, an emeritus professor of history, said political realities made him doubt that reparations on a national scale ``has any chance at all.'' Professor Patterson said he had ``seen no evidence'' that Brown should be held accountable, saying that ``Brown, like a great many other people in the late 18th century, was indirectly a beneficiary on a very very small scale of the fact that slavery was a source of wealth in this country.''
Dr. Simmons said she would not reveal her opinion on reparations so as not to influence the committee.
``Here's the one thing I'll say,'' she said. ``If the committee comes back and says, `Oh it's been lovely and we've learned a lot,' but there's nothing in particular that they think Brown can do or should do, I will be very disappointed.''
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| Veterans of Past Murderous Campaigns Are Leading Haiti's New Rebellion |
| 03.08.04 (10:47 am) [edit] |
By TIM WEINER and LYDIA POLGREEN
Published: February 29, 2004
New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/02/29/internatio nal/29REBE.html" title="http://www.nytimes.com/2004/02/29/internatio nal/29REBE.html" target="_blank"http://www.nytimes.com/2004/0...
PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti, Feb. 28 — The armed men trying to seize power in Haiti are led by death-squad veterans and convicted murderers, according to American officials and human rights groups.
They are "the new Haitian army," said one of their commanders, Remissainthe Ravix. They are also "[b]thugs[/b]," said Secretary of State Colin L. Powell.
They are men like Louis-Jodel Chamblain and Jean-Pierre Baptiste — two leaders of Fraph, the Haitian Front for Advancement and Progress. Fraph was an instrument of terror wielded by the military junta that overthrew Haiti's embattled president, Jean-Bertrand Aristide, in 1991. [i]It killed thousands over the next three years.[/i]
Mr. Chamblain, a former Haitian Army officer, was sentenced in absentia to life in prison for the 1993 murder of Antoine Izméry, an important Aristide supporter. Before the trial, he fled to the neighboring Dominican Republic, returning to Haiti in recent months to seek power.
Mr. Baptiste, also known as Jean Tatoune, was serving a [b]life sentence for murder[/b], in connection with a 1994 massacre of Aristide supporters, when he was freed in a jailbreak in August.
"Fraph is back," President Aristide said in an interview with The New York Times last week. The question now is whether these men will take power once again, and whether American military force, in the form of a naval deployment, may be necessary to stop them. Pentagon officials have said marines could be called upon to evacuate Americans and other foreigners and provide other assistance if the crisis worsened.
"The Fraph and the Haitian Army are institutions with a long and very dark history," said James Dobbins, President Bill Clinton's special envoy to Haiti from 1994 to 1996.
[i]That past is entwined with American history[/i]. United States forces occupied Haiti from 1915 to 1934. They created the modern Haitian Army, dissolved Parliament and imposed martial law in those years. In the 1980's and early 1990's, the United States [i]Central Intelligence Agency had important senior Haitian Army officers and Fraph members on its payroll[/i], according to American officials.
A decade ago, in 1994, the United States sent in 20,000 soldiers to reinstate Mr. Aristide after the Haitian Army overthrew him. Mr. Aristide disbanded the army upon his return to power. But he created nothing in its place beyond a small, American-trained national police force — a force now filled with no-show officers, commanded by the president's cronies and corrupted by cocaine, according to a recent State Department report.
Now Mr. Aristide has little with which to defend himself. His power base has crumbled, leaving only the dissolute national police and a rabble of street gangs. On Thursday, he was accused in an American courtroom by a convicted cocaine trafficker of taking drug payoffs.
"Aristide has been criticized, and with some justice, of allying himself with forces that may be criminal or corrupt," Mr. Dobbins said. "But in a society which has no institutions, where all power derives from the use or the threat of force, it's impossible to govern without those alliances. [b]It's the Haitian dilemma.[/b]"
Broad-based alliances across Haitian society have lost faith in President Aristide. The political opposition includes victims of army power, like Evans Paul, a former mayor of Port-au-Prince, and once Mr. Aristide's campaign manager, who was arrested and tortured by Haitian military officers in 1989.
Mr. Paul now says the president has two choices: to leave "by the front door or the back door."
The political opposition in Haiti is united by its desire to depose Mr. Aristide, and the armed opposition by its hate for him.
Veterans despise him because he dissolved the army. Street gangs detest him because they think he betrayed their leaders. Guy Philippe, a former police chief leading the rebels, says Mr. Aristide broke his promise to lift up the Haitian people.
Mr. Aristide's supporters say the armed opposition seeks power for power's sake, to seize Haiti's ports and their cargoes of Colombian cocaine bound for the United States, and to pay back Mr. Aristide for disbanding the army.
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| Pat Buchannan Exposes Neo-Cons in Bush Administration |
| 03.03.04 (10:21 am) [edit] |
[b]Have the neocons killed a presidency?[/b]
Posted: February 16, 2004
1:00 a.m. Eastern
© 2004 Creators Syndicate, Inc.
http://www.wnd.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=37139" title="http://www.wnd.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=37139" target="_blank"http://www.wnd.com/news/artic...
George W. Bush "betrayed us," howled Al Gore.
"He played on our fear. He took America on an ill-conceived foreign adventure, dangerous to our troops, an adventure that was preordained and planned before 9-11 ever happened."
Hearing it, Gore's rant seemed slanderous and demagogic. For though U.S. policy since Clinton had called for regime change in Iraq, there is no evidence, none, that Bush planned to invade prior to 9-11.
Yet, the president has a grave problem, and it is this: Burrowed inside his foreign-policy team are men guilty of exactly what Gore accuses Bush of, men who did exploit our fears to stampede us into a war they had plotted for years. Consider:
In 1996, in a strategy paper crafted for Israel's Bibi Netanyahu, Richard Perle, Douglas Feith and David Wurmser urged him to "focus on removing Saddam Hussein from power" as an "Israeli strategic objective." Perle, Feith, Wurmser were all on Bush's foreign policy team on 9-11.
In 1998, eight members of Bush's future team, including Perle, Wolfowitz and Rumsfeld, wrote Clinton urging upon him a strategy that "should aim, above all, at the removal of Saddam Hussein."
On Jan. 1, 2001, nine months before 9-11, Wurmser called for U.S.-Israeli attacks "to broaden the [Middle East] conflict to strike fatally ... the regimes of Damascus, Baghdad, Tripoli, Teheran and Gaza ... to establish the recognition that fighting with either the United States or Israel is suicidal."
"Crises can be opportunities," added Wurmser.
On Sept. 11, opportunity struck.
On Sept. 15, according to author Bob Woodward, Paul Wolfowitz spoke up in the War Cabinet to urge that Afghanistan be put on a back burner and an attack be mounted at once on Iraq, though Iraq had had nothing to do with 9-11. Why Iraq? Said Wolfowitz, because it is "doable."
On Sept. 20, 40 neoconservatives in an open letter demanded that Bush remove Saddam from power, "even if evidence does not link Iraq directly to the [9-11] attack." Failure to do so, they warned the president, "would constitute an early and perhaps decisive surrender in the war on international terrorism."
While Bush had taken office as a traditional conservative skeptical of "nation-building" and calling for a more "humble" foreign policy, after 9-11, he was captured by the neocons and converted to an agenda they had worked up years before. Suddenly, he sounded just like them, threatening wars on "axis-of-evil" nations that had nothing to do with 9-11.
And here is where Bush's present crisis was created.
Though he had internalized the neoconservative agenda for war, he had no rationale, no justification, no casus belli. Iraq had not threatened or attacked us.
Enter the WMD. Neoconservatives pressed on Bush the idea that Iraq must still have weapons of mass destruction and must be working on nuclear weapons. And as Saddam was a figure of such irrationality – i.e., a madman – he would readily give an atom bomb to al-Qaida. An American city could be incinerated.
Therefore, Saddam had to be destroyed. Bush bought it.
The problem, however, was this: While there is much evidence Saddam is evil, there is no evidence he was insane. He had not used his WMD in 1991, when he had them. For he was not a fool. He knew that would mean his end. Why would he then build a horror weapon now, give it to a terrorist and risk the annihilation of his regime, family, legacy and himself, a fate he had narrowly escaped in 1991?
Made no sense – and there was no hard evidence on the WMD.
Thus, when the CIA was unable to come up with hard evidence that Saddam still had WMD, or was building nuclear weapons, neocon insiders sifted the intelligence, cherry-picked it, presented tidbits to the media as unvarnished truth, and persuaded Powell and the president to rely on it to make the case to Congress, the country and the world. Powell and the president did.
Now the WMD case has fallen apart. Powell has egg on his face. And the president must persuade Tim Russert and the nation that Iraq was a "war of necessity" because we "had no choice when we looked at the intelligence I looked at."
But, sir, the intelligence you "looked at" was flawed. Who gave it to you?
To its neocon architects, Iraq was always about empire, hegemony, Pax Americana, global democracy – about getting hold of America's power to make the Middle East safe for Sharon and themselves glorious and famous.
But now they have led a president who came to office with good intentions and a good heart to the precipice of ruin. One wonders if Bush knows how badly he has been had. And if he does, why he has not summarily dealt with those who misled him?
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| ELECTION 2004: Edwards Can't Lose, Bush in Little Haiti (3) |
| 03.01.04 (4:38 pm) [edit] |
Issue 3
1. Tomorrow is Super Tuesday, for the third time this year as voters in 9 states will turnout in their presidential primaries. The biggest prizes Tuesday are in California and New York, with 370 and 236 delegates at stake, respectively. Primaries also will be held in Georgia, Vermont, Rhode Island, Connecticut, Massachusetts, Ohio and Maryland. Minnesota will hold caucuses.
In all the Super Tuesday states where recent polls have been taken, Kerry was found to be in the lead and in many cases by large margins. Albeit, its basic protocol for Sen. Edwards campaign to gain steam in the final days. Georgia and Ohio appear to be the latest examples of the Edwards protocol.
But he must win Tuesday. Second place is no longer a good showing. Besides, if Sen. Kerry wins out again, he'll be on pace to lock up the nomination by March 9.
Sen. John Kerry, with 19 victories out of 21 contests already behind him, scheduled rallies in Columbus, Ohio, and Atlanta, Georgia. Sen. John Edwards -- who has carried only his native South Carolina -- planned to blitz Ohio with stops in three cities, followed by a rally in Macon, Georgia.
At stake Tuesday: 1,151 delegates, more than any other day of the primary election season. To get the nomination, a candidate needs 2,162 delegates. Kerry has 754 delegates, Edwards has only 220.
2. Figuring, Kerry will solidify the nomination Tuesday, The Bush-Cheney re-election campaign plans to launch its first TV advertising Thursday. The $140 million-plus campaign war chest will begin to unload on Kerry like a plastic bag of bricks. Hard and fast. Bush appears to be best at campaigning, so expect his polling to increase over the next couple of weeks as he tries in earnest to fuel his base support.
Despite the president's almost reluctant support of a constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage, Bush has oddly infuriated his political base. Amesty for illegal immigrants, mission to mars, low-income marriage support and the adjusted costs for his prescription drug plan to name a few.
But he'll have to reel them back into the fold in a sophisticated manner. Such as his announcement of support for the constitutional gay marriage ban. That story geniously overshadowed what should have been the day's headlines. Fed Reserve Chairman, Alan Greenspan called for cutting social security benefits for the voluminous baby boom generation which will begin cashing in, as early as 2008.
This political "third rail" will have to be dealt with. Either through, increased taxes, benefit reductions or worse, non-action that will lead to this disolve of the Social Security trust fund and entitlement. I think both parties are still grappling with this issue.
3. Besides, Saddam being a madman and a WMD developer who might give them to his terrorist friends, G.W. sacrificed our young to liberate Iraqis and give them freedom and democracy. We're not quite sure yet what the objective is for Haiti.
The country in crises, the democratically elected, President Aristide under personal threat to be ousted and SOS Colin Powell suggests Aristide should consider stepping down. As this is printed, Aristide is somewhere in Africa claiming that he was forcefully removed from office and his homeland in a U.S. government backed coup d' teat.
The media is not asking many questions now, but as the campaign rolls along and Florida becomes a hotly contested state again, look for the Hatian refugee community of Miami known as Little Haiti to be just as active and emotionally invested as the Cubans were in 2000 after the Elian Gonzalez episode.
Off to Blog Another Day,
--Proletariat
© E.D. Petty
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