...although Mr Chavez 'was democratically elected' one had to bear in mind that 'legitimacy is something that is conferred not just by a majority of the voters, however' [sic].

Clearly, this involves a fundamental re-evaluation of what we understand by democracy, and I offer here some thoughts on the principles - other than counting votes - which might confer legitimacy.

It is no good people blindly voting in any Tom, Dick or Hugo if they are not acceptable to Washington. If this is true of Iraq, North Korea, Serbia and the UK, it is doubly true of South America and trebly true of a country that happens to be the third largest supplier of oil to the US. It is also no good imagining that landslide victories are any guide to legitimacy. Just because Chavez has twice been elected President by the largest margins in Venezuela's history, and just because his government has twice the number of elected representatives that its opponents have, that does not mean it can go around passing any legislation it wants. According to the 'Florida Rules', the narrower the margin of victory, the greater the legitimacy. In fact, if the victor actually has fewer people voting for him than the loser (almost half-a-million fewer in the case of George W. Bush) then that is democracy's way of awarding him carte blanche to do whatever he and his friends in the oil business want.

If You Want a Free Vote, Ask Nicely  
Terry Jones



Since V-J Day 1945 ("Victory over Japan" and the end of World War II), we have been engaged in what the historian Charles A. Beard called "perpetual war for perpetual peace." I have occasionally referred to our "enemy of the month club": Each month we are confronted by a new horrendous enemy at whom we must strike before he destroys us. The Federation of American Scientists has catalogued nearly 200 such military incursions since 1945 initiated by the United States...

The awesome physical damage Osama and company did to us on Dark Tuesday is as nothing compared to the knockout blow to our vanishing liberties: The Anti- Terrorist Act of 1996 and the recent USA PATRIOT Act (still being written after it was passed, and thus unread by the Congress which passed it)...

CIVIL LIBERTIES
The New War on Freedom
Give me liberty, or give me . . . what? Security?
Gore Vidal
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2002/04/21/IN83832.DTL



To put Israel's actions in context, let's start with this week's press release from those noted Palestinian sympathizers, Amnesty International:

Speaking from inside Jenin Refugee Camp, Amnesty International delegate Javier Zuniga said, "This is one of the worst scenes of devastation I have ever witnessed. It is almost impossible to conceive that what was once a town is now a lunar landscape. There is a real possibility that people are still alive under the rubble of their former homes. One of our colleagues from a local human rights organization received a phone call from a family of 10 trapped below ground and asking for help, yet there is no evidence of concerted efforts to search for and rescue survivors."

Amnesty International is calling for immediate and unimpeded access for humanitarian assistance wherever it is needed. If this was an earthquake the international community would be asked for and give urgent help. It is shocking that the authorities have not asked for help and that the international community is not offering it...

In Britain: prominent Jewish MP Gerald Kaufman, to approving cries from both sides of the aisle, delivered a blistering speech this week on the floor of the House of Commons, calling Ariel Sharon a "war criminal" who was "staining the star of David." In the U.S., we hear that Yasser Arafat is failing to control people he cannot possibly control...

And the Beating Goes On: American Media and Colin Powell Have Moved on But the Nightmare Hasn’t
Geov Parrish
http://www.workingforchange.com/article.cfm?ItemID=13174



The triumph of Wal-Mart and other chain stores...is the triumph of money over community, the triumph, in fact, of money as a way of looking at life...For most folks, it doesn't matter that "always the lowest price" means busting unions, running local merchants out of business, and sending factory jobs to the third world; give us bargains. Place no longer seems to matter; as churches, schools, and even public policy-making imitate the corporate way of thinking, money is now our secular religion, our way of identifying our place in the world...

As progressive activists wrestle with trying to change a whole constellation of destructive government and corporate policies, abroad and at home, with little or no help from either major party, the first daunting challenge is to even get people to care, and, once they care, to believe that we can make a difference. What progressives are asking is for Americans – an incredibly privileged lot, by world standards – to advocate policies for reasons other than short-term financial gain, and then to believe that our political system is even capable any longer of responding to such a seemingly irrational idea.

...last weekend, tens of thousands of people descended upon Washington, D.C. (and other cities) to protest...if these issues do mean something, how do we create alternative institutions – replacements for our lost sense of community, something that harnesses faith or patriotism for positive ends – that can give people a value system, one based on human needs rather than personal finances, to apply to these issues?...

Many people feel the void of exactly such human-scale concerns in their lives and in our society. Many people can remember quite vividly when their lives were better, and/or can imagine quite vividly their lives might improve. In every one of these small towns you see on a road trip, there are Wal-Marts, but there are also good people doing inspiring things.

The Fight: All Bow Down and Pray to the Almighty Dollar
Geov Parrish
http://www.workingforchange.com/article.cfm?ItemId=13205



"Businessmen," said Ayn Rand in 1961, "are the symbol of a free society – the symbol of America. If and when they perish, civilization will perish." But then, the high priestess of free enterprise never met the men of Enron.

...the slowly sinking energy giant intends to fork over $140 million in retention bonuses to "key employees" possessing "unique knowledge, skills and experience." I guess these would be people who know how to cook books, over-inflate earnings and operate the company shredders...

Why invest in research and development, when you can lay off workers, sell off valuable assets, goose the stock price and quickly cash in and get out?...

[Harvey Pitt] has suggested that executives "should be required to demonstrate sustained, long-term growth and success before they can actually exercise any of their options."...

Those most devoted to the principles of a free market are the ones who should be working the hardest to put an end to a state of affairs in which businessmen – those "symbols of America" – are richly rewarded for failing.

The Free Market Shrugged
Arianna Huffington
http://www.ariannaonline.com/columns/files/041802.html



From here I want to express my deep respect, my gratitude and my solidarity to the growing number of young men who refuse to serve in the occupied territories. It is a service of peace to the world to take on the consequences that this decision brings along in a militaristic society...

This is the disease of a male society. We get trained what it means to be a man right from the beginning. We hardly get trained what it means to be a human. But we young men should grow up instead of just growing old.

...we all need a perspective, a peace plan in which we can believe. We need models for this peace. Places where peace can be researched, seen and felt. Places where peace and trust can grow between humans, between humans and animals, plants and all of creation.

To the Courageous Soldiers Who Say "NO!"  
Benjamin von Mendelssohn



...it's about drug task forces allowed to run wild...autonomous special units, which came into widespread use in the 1980s as a way of combating America's growing drug problem, have morphed into the rampaging mad dogs of the drug war, operating with very little oversight or accountability...Reports of their questionable tactics – particularly the use of unreliable informants and a disturbing focus on poor, black drug users rather than big-time dealers – are widespread.

And it's taxpayer money that is paying for this wave of abuse, through a federal grant program that has distributed billions of dollars to drug task forces since its inception. Making matters even worse is that this grant money is tied to the number of busts a task force makes...the money-for-arrest model has turned avaricious cops into drug war entrepreneurs, all-too-willing to bend the rules in exchange for more money and power.

Tulia And Beyond: Taking Drug Task Forces To Task
Arianna Huffington
http://www.ariannaonline.com/columns/files/041502.html



...while COs [conscientious objectors] were unpopular in many parts of the United States in the '60s, the risks they took are nothing next to what Israeli reservists face. There, military service is woven into the very fabric of Israeli life. All men serve; therefore, most adult men not in the army are veterans, and many identify with the military fiercely. Secondly, the military itself is seen as a very immediate guarantor of Israel's survival, and so words like "traitor" are not mindless epithets; they're taken seriously, and to refuse a callup order is also, oftentimes, to defy your boss, your co-workers, your relatives – it is not an easy thing. Nor, if you stick by your decision, is the resulting jail time – sure, Israel tends only to torture Palestinians, but their "sympathizers" are only one rung above. Into that maelstrom, so far, have walked an unprecedented 375 IDF reserve officers and soldiers...

These are not pacifists, and they are Zionists; they believe in Israel, and are willing to fight to defend it, but not to steal Palestinian land, massacre civilians, or endanger their comrades (and, ultimately, Israeli civilians) unnecessarily.

Zionists for Peace: 375 Israeli COs Demonstrate the Greatest Courage in the Conflict
Geov Parrish
http://www.workingforchange.com/article.cfm?ItemId=13125



Not that anyone asked me, but those are not my tanks careening around the West Bank bringing fear and havoc in their wake. Yet they are marked as Jewish tanks and consequently they and I bear some familial resemblance on my mother's side. I am thus obligated to consider what cruelty is being done in the name of defending my people...

But, as when blacks and Latinos were absent from newsrooms and nightly death in the ghetto was not thought to be news, it is difficult to escape the notion that many in the media, Jews and non-Jews alike, lean to the view that Arab life is cheap...

Sharon himself is a man of barbaric impulse, demonstrated all too clearly in his terrorizing of civilians two decades ago in Lebanon and now on the West Bank. He has been a consistent provocateur, undermining peace efforts no matter their content, and now he is using his tanks to poison the ground for future generations...

But until recently, Arafat has been unrelentingly reviled by the news media while Sharon, no less monstrous in his behavior, hardly has been criticized. Both are killers of the innocent. Both are to be roundly condemned by all.

U.S. Jews Cannot Acquiesce to Sharon's Monstrous Behavior  
Robert Scheer



Lawyers representing Enron shareholders in their civil suit against the failed energy giant intend at the beginning of the week to amend their complaint. That amendment will add the names of six powerful investment banks to the charges. Merrill Lynch, JP Morgan Chase, Citibank and Deutsche Bank are on the list. The implications of this are almost beyond comprehension. Investors have been praying to the Money Gods since December that Enron was a localized phenomenon, like a rogue tornado. The indictment of the accounting firm Arthur Andersen for obstruction of justice burst some of their hopes. If these investment banks are shown to have been playing fast and loose with the rules, however, all bets are off.

The cancer of Enron is spreading. It has cast doubt upon the worth of virtually every retirement portfolio in the nation, caused corporate accounting practices to come under suspicion, and shaken trust in the way companies report profits. In short, Enron has taken a buzzsaw to the basic underpinnings of our economic system. .

Shadows on the White House
William Rivers Pitt
http://www.truthout.org/docs_02/04.08A.WRP.Shadows.htm



With scarcely a peep from the American professorate or intelligentsia, we have all succumbed to the promiscuous misuse of language and sense, by which everything we don't like has become terror and what we do is pure and simple good – fighting terror, no matter how much wealth, and lives, and destruction is involved...

As educators and as citizens, we have failed in our mission by allowing ourselves to be bamboozled in this way, without so much as an organised public discussion about a defence budget that has shot up to $400 billion while 40 million people remain without health insurance...

Israel is now waging a war against civilians, pure and simple, although you will never hear it put that way in the US. This is a racist war, and in its strategy and tactics, a colonial one as well. People are being killed and made to suffer disproportionately because they are not Jews. What an irony!...

And that pseudo-pundit – the insufferably conceited Thomas Friedman – still has the gall to say that "Arab TV" shows one-sided pictures, as if "Arab TV" should be showing things from Israel's point-of-view the way CNN does, with "Mid-East violence" the catch-all word for the ethnic cleansing that Israel is wreaking on the Palestinians in their ghettoes and camps.

What Price Oslo?
Edward Said, professor at Colombia University...world renowned Palestinian scholar
http://www.ahram.org.eg/weekly/2002/577/op2.htm



Ariel Sharon's government, now, also seems to be playing a game, of just how much of the West Bank it can punish before overwhelming international condemnation forces it to either pull back or at least mitigate its tactics – sickening, brutal, inexcusable, and starkly illegal tactics, some of which I described in this space last week, and which have been reported exhaustively overseas but sparingly in the United States...

The near-universal – with the curious exception of America – rage at Israel at the moment clearly isn't about the use of a crackdown, which, especially after 26 died on the cusp of Passover at the now-scattered hands of a suicide bomber, was widely expected and at least in rarified circles tacitly understood. The problem is the unexpectedly excessive tactics Israel has used in an operation that was clearly in the planning for months...Europe has lost patience with both Sharon and Bush. The third world is united behind Palestinians as never before. As for the Arab world, says Jamal Khashoggi, deputy editor-in-chief of the Saudi daily, Arab News, "The rage [of Arabs] is phenomenal...What's happening in Palestine is creating suicide bombers everywhere, not only in Palestine."...

In the past week, Israel has taken an already impoverished people and systematically destroyed Palestinian economic infrastructure and almost every aspect of Palestinian government, from the very buildings and records to assassination or arrest of many personnel. Perhaps more importantly, Israeli forces have systematically acted to simply humiliate ordinary citizens...

Powell has emerged in the last year as perhaps the only genuinely sane mind in the Bush military circle...

The Bush Administration, by not taking action in the one place in the world where it doesn't seem inclined to put troops, and by telling the world to eat its boots everywhere else, has made the world, and America, a far more dangerous place than Osama bin Laden's petty dreams of global conquest could ever have imagined. Today, compared to six months ago, the world is a much, much worse place, and there's plenty more being cooked up in Washington.

The Trouble With Normal: The Bar is Low for Israeli Tactics Acceptable to the White House
Geov Parrish
http://www.workingforchange.com/article.cfm?ItemId=13109



Israeli forces begin to carry out Ariel Sharon's stated intention to sweep through every single Palestinian city, village, and refugee camp in the coming weeks. The reports of what that means aren't hard to find on the Internet or in foreign media, and they are hair-raising...

I look at my local newspaper, whose version of "reality" is so completely out of sync with that of Sharon, Kristen Schurr, or even British and European media as to be surreal...

...[Bush] who, until Thursday, solidly cast his lot with Sharon, solidifying Bush's place as a figure despised by much of the world – at a time when his constituents are particularly vulnerable to anti-U.S. rage...

Bush and his handlers are, with no public outcry, backing one of the most barbaric military attacks in memory, an invasion that is coldly, intentionally and repeatedly flouting just about every known standard for conduct in war. No provocation can possibly justify Israel's treatment of the civilian population, which includes herding Palestinian men with numbers written on their forearms into "camps" surrounded by electric fences.

News From the Front: Welcome to Hell, Where the Children Smile Amid the Gunfire
Geov Parrish
http://www.workingforchange.com/article.cfm?ItemID=13094




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