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Today's Stories April 26,2006 Sherry Wolf Democrats, Their Apologists and Abortion: the Jig is Up Pratyush Chandra Nepal: a Saga of Compromise and Struggle Joshua Frank Zig-Zagging Through the War With John Kerry Gary Leupp The Neo-Cons and Iran: No Negotiations Bill Quigley Katrina: Eight Months Later   April 25, 2006 Paul Craig Roberts The World is Uniting Against the Bush Imperium Linda S. Heard Is the US Waging Israel's Wars?: the Prophecy of Oded Yinon Ralph Nader Political Science: Gingrich, "Futurism" and the Abolition of the OTA Mike Whitney Preparing for the Economic Typhoon Michael Donnelly Lutherans Betray Michigan's Loon Lake Wetlands for Pieces of Silver Sharon Smith Breathing New Life Into May Day Website of the Day SDS Ver. 2   April 24, 2006 Tim Wise What Kind of Card is Race? John Stanton Strike Iran, Watch Pakistan and Turkey Fall Dave Lindorff Dangerous Times Ahead Steve Shore Berlusconi Defeated: The Long Wait is Over ... Or Is It? Amadou Deme Hotel Rwanda: Setting the Record Straight Mickey Z. 15 Minutes of Radical Fame: America Meets Bill Blum and Ward Churchill Ralph Nader Lee Raymond's Unconscionable Platinum Parachute Alexander Cockburn Obama's Game Website of the Day Too Stupid to Be President?   April 22/23, 2006 Jeffrey St. Clair The General, GM and the Stryker Jeff Halper SUMUD vs. Apartheid: the Elections in Palestine and Israel Jeff Klein How to Manufacture a War Criminal: Saddam and Me, a True Story Thomas P. Healy Out Now: an Interview with Anthony Arnove David Underhill Stuck in Mobile with the Rev. Graham Blues Again Lee Sustar "We are Going to Keep Marching": an Interview with Immigrant Rights Organizer Martín Unzueta Deb Reich The Little Mermaid on Highway Six: Rooting for Ordinary Israelis to Wake Up John Chuckman America's Gulag: Purge at the CIA Fred Gardner More Suppression of Marijuana Research Julian Edney Can Our Economy Run Without Fear? Seth Sandronsky The GOP and California's Levees Brynne Keith-Jennings The Meddlesome Ambassador Trivelli: Undermining Democracy in Nicaragua Dave Lindorff Where are the Frogs? Catherine Ann Cullen and Harry Browne Springsteen Polishes His Roots: First Impressions of "We Shall Overcome" Bill Pahnelas Bush Passes the Buck on Soaring Gas Prices Jim French Time to Overhaul US Farm Policy Ron Jacobs "I Know I'm Not Dreaming, Because I Can't Sleep Any More" David Krieger The Courage of Sophie Scholl: Resisting Hitler Jeffrey St. Clair Playlist: What I'm Listening to This Week Poets' Basement Buknatski, Engel and Ford Website of the Weekend Eye of the Storm   April 21, 2006 Jonathan Cook The Sinister Meaning of Olmert's "Hitkansut": Deporting Hamas MPs Lawrence R. Velvel Physical Courage, Moral Courage and American Generals Evelyn Pringle How to Out a CIA Agent Christopher Brauchli The Rich are Different Pratyush Chandra Pure-and-Simple Revolutions in Nepal and Venezuela Michael George Smith This is What a Movement Looks Like Missy Comley Beattie Serving at the Decider's Pleasure Sarah Hines The Bracero Program: 1942-1964 Website of the Day Hunger Strike at U. of Miami April 20, 2006 Chris Kutalik As Crisis Deepens, Is Labor Finally Showing Signs of a Comeback? Gary Leupp Cheney, the Neocons and China Joshua Frank Stop the War! Dump the Democrats! Diane Christian The Authority to Kill William S. Lind Sweeping Up: the Real Problem Wasn't the Execution of the War, But the Enterprise Itself Ramzy Baroud A Case for the Palestinan Government Justin E.H. Smith Doctors and Lethal Injection   April 19, 2006 P. Sainath More Kids? Pay More for Your Water Norman Solomon When Diplomacy Means War: Bait-and-Switch on Iran Anthony Papa When Justice Isn't Blind: Double Standards for the Rich and Poor in New York Mike Ferner Movement Blues Stanley Heller The Massacre at Qana, 10 Years Later: Still No Justice Rifundazione "We Defeated Berlusconi" Christopher Reed Secrets of the Garden of Bliss Alexander Cockburn The Pulitzer Farce Website of the Day Bunker Busters: the Movie April 18, 2006 Paul Craig Roberts How Safe is Your Job? Eric Wingerter Washington Post vs. Venezuela Juan Santos What Immigrants Need to Learn from the Black Civil Rights Movement Greg Weiher The Zarqawi Gambit Revisited Sam Bahour Is Hamas Being Forced to Collapse? Behzad Yaghmaian In the Gaze of New Orleans Website of the Day The FBI and the Jack Anderson Files   April 17, 2006 Kevin Zeese An Interview with the First Arab-American Senator: Jim Abourezk on Bush's Lies and the Dems' Complicity Uri Avnery Olmert the Fox Norman Solomon Why Won't Moveon.Org Oppose the Bombing of Iran? John Ross A Real Day Without Mexicans? Laila al-Haddad The Earth is Closing in on Us: Dispatch from Gaza Jeffrey Blankfort A Tale of Two Members of Congress and the Capitol Hill Police Website of the Day Dixie Chicks: Not Ready to Back Down   April 15 / 16, 2006 Jeffrey St. Clair How Star Wars Came to the Arctic Ralph Nader Remembering Rev. William Sloan Coffin Thaddeus Hoffmeister The Ghost of Shinseki: the General Who Was Sent Out to Pasture for Being Right Kevin Prosen / Dave Zirin Privilege Meets Protest at Duke Thomas P. Healy Taking Care of What We've Been Given: a Conversation with Wendell Berry Kristoffer Larsson Are 40 Percent of All Swedes Anti-Semitic?: Anatomy of a Statistical Flim-Flam Fred Gardner Continuing Medical (Marijuana) Education Edwin Krales New York's Katrina: the Hidden Toll of AIDS Among Blacks and the Poor Brian Cloughley Don't Blitz Iran: Risking the Ultimate Blowback John Holt Walking Off Vietnam with Edward Abbey's Surrogate Son Seth Sandronsky What Billionaires Mean By Education Reform: Oprah, Bill Gates and the Privatization of Public Schools Rafael Renteria Making It Plain About New Orleans Michael Ortiz Hill In the Ashes of Lament: an Easter Meditation William A. Cook An Israel Accountability Act Gideon Levy Shooting Nasarin: a Story About a Little Girl Andrew Wimmer Stopping the Bush Juggernaut: a New Citizens Campaign Madis Senner Talking Points for Easter Weekend: Jesus Didn't Lie, Mr. Bush Michael Kuehl The Sex Police State: Women as "Rapists" and "Pedophiles"? Mark Scaramella When Even God Can't Follow His Own Commandments: the Timeless Scarcasm of Mark Twain Nate Mezmer 187 Proof: Living and Dying Hip-Hop Jesse Walker Playlist Poets' Basement Engel, Laymon and Subiet Website of the Weekend Pink Serenades Bush   April 14, 2006 Col. Dan Smith Candor or Career?: Why Few Top Military Officials Resign on Principle Saul Landau Ho Chi Minh City Moves On Without Regrets Stan Cox The Real Death Tax Kevin Zeese Hersh vs. Bush on Iran: Who Would You Believe? Brian McKinlay Bad Times for Bush's Buddies Howard Meyers Dwarves, Knives and Freedom: Bush, Jr. is No LBJ Ishmael Reed The Colored Mind Doubles: How the Media Uses Blacks to Chastize Blacks Website of the Day Asshole: a Film Strip   April 13, 2006 CounterPunch News Service Powell's "Bitch"? Norman Solomon The Lobby and the Bulldozer Stanley Heller Time to Shake Up the Peace Movement Jeff Birkenstein Bush and Freedom of Speech Evelyn J. Pringle Not So Fast, Mr. Powell Michael Donnelly The Week the Bush Administration Fell Apart Kamran Matin Synergism of the Neo-Cons: What's Going On In Iran? Website of the Day "Don't Be Afraid of the Neo-Cons"   April 12, 2006 Vijay Prashad Resisting Fences Alan Maass The Suicide of Anthony Soltero Dave Lindorff Bush's Insane First Strike Policy: If You Don't Want to Get Whacked, You'd Better Get Your Nation a Nuke ... Fast Ron Jacobs Resistance: the Remedy for Fear Ramzy Baroud The Imminent Decline of the American Empire? Randall Dodd How a Wal-Mart Bank will Harm Consumers Missy Comley Beattie The Boy President Who Cried "Wolf!" P. Sainath The Corporate Hijack of India's Water Website of the Day "The System is Irretrievably Corrupt"   April 11, 2006 Al Krebs Corporate Agriculture's Dirty Little Secret: Immigration and a History of Greed Lawrence R. Velvel The Gang That Couldn't Leak Straight Sonia Nettinin Palestinian Health Care Conditions Under Israeli Occupation Willliam S. Lind The Fourth Plague Hits the Pentagon: Generals as Private Contractors Robert Ovetz Endangered Species in a Can: the Disappearance of Big Fish Pratyush Chandra Nepalis Say, "Ya Basta!" Grant F. Smith The Bush Administration's Final Surprise? Laray Polk Loud, Soft, Hard, Quiet: Marching Through Dallas for Immigrant Rights Francis Boyle O'Reilly and the Law of the Jungle: How to Beat a Bully on His Home Turf José Pertierra A Glimpse into the Mindset of Terrorists: Posada Carriles, Orlando Bosch and the Downing of Cubana Flight 455 Website of the Day The Dead Emcee Scrolls   April 10, 2006 Ralph Nader Tinhorn Caesar and the Spineless Democrats Heather Gray Atlanta and the Assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. Uri Avnery The Big Wink Joshua Frank Big Greens and Beltway Politics: Betting on Losers Seth Sandronsky Immigration and Occupations Michael Leonardi The Italian Elections: "Reality is No Longer Important" Evelyn Pringle Did Bush Pull a Fast One on Fitzgerald? Tom Kerr FoxNews Does Ward Churchill Lucinda Marshall The Lynching of Cynthia McKinney Website of the Day Brown Berets April 7 -9, 2006 Alexander Cockburn If Only They'd Hissed Barack Obama Jeffrey St. Clair The Saga of Magnequench: Outsourcing US Missile Technology to China Patrick Cockburn The War Gets Grimmer Every Day David Vest The Rebuking and Scorning of Cynthia McKinney Dave Lindorff The Impeachment Clock Just Clicked Forward Gary Leupp "Ideologies of Hatred:" What Did Condi Mean? Elaine Cassel The Moussaoui Trial: What Kind of Justice is This? Saul Landau Vietnam Diary: Hue Without Rules James Ridgeway "This is Betty Ong Calling": a Short Film Ron Jacobs Why Iran was Right to Refuse US Money John Walsh Kerry Advocates Iraqization: Too Little, Too Late Ramzy Baroud The US Attitude Toward Hamas: Disturbing Parallels with Nicaragua Christopher Brauchli Bush Finds Democracy Has Its Limits Todd Chretien What the Pentagon Budget Could Buy for America Jonathan Scott Javelins at the Head of the Monolith John Bomar What They're Saying About Bush in Arkansas Michele Brand Iran, the US and the EU Ronan Sheehan Remember When the Irish First Met the Chinese? Mickey Z. Let Us Now Praise OIL Don Monkerud March of the Bunglers Michael Dickinson The Rich Young Man: a Miracle Play Website of the Weekend The Case Against Israel and Munich: Compare and Contrast

April 26, 2006 Government Fraud, Despair and Hope Katrina: Eight Months Later By BILL QUIGLEY On Monday, April 17, 2006, two bodies were found buried beneath what used to be a home in the Lower 9th Ward. Their discovery raised to 17 the number of Hurricane Katrina fatalities that have been discovered in New Orleans in the past month and a half. Katrina is now directly blamed for the deaths of 1,282 Louisiana residents. Eight months after Katrina, the state reports 987 people are still missing. Chief Steve Glynn, who oversees the New Orleans Fire Department search effort that found the latest two bodies told CNN: “You want to put it to rest at some point. You want to feel like it's over and it's just not yet.” Eight months after Katrina, there are still nearly 300,000 people who have not returned to New Orleans. While we can hope that our community is nearing the end of finding bodies, the struggle for justice for the hundreds of thousands of displaced people continues. Election Blues The right to vote remains displaced from New Orleans. In what was billed as “the most important election in the history of New Orleans,” only 36 percent of those registered voted in the recent city elections. Turnout was heavy and high in the mostly prosperous and white areas of Uptown where little damage occurred and exceptionally low in the heavily damaged and mostly black areas of the New Orleans East, Gentilly and the Ninth Ward – where some precincts reported as few as 15% voter participation. The state refusal to set up satellite voting for those displaced outside the state resulted in exactly the disenfranchisement predicted. While Iraqis who had not lived in Iraq in years were helped to vote in the US by our government, people forced out of state by Katrina for seven months were not allowed to vote where they are temporarily living. This has national implications. The New Orleans Times-Picayune reported that in the 2002 U.S. Senate seat runoff between incumbent Democrat Mary Landrieu and Republican Suzanne Haik Terrell, the Orleans factor made the difference for Landrieu. The senator won Orleans by 78,900 votes, compared with her statewide lead of 42,012. In the 2003 gubernatorial runoff between Democrat Kathleen Blanco and Republican Bobby Jindal, Blanco won statewide by 54,874 votes. She won by a margin of 49,741 votes in New Orleans. Worse, the systematic exclusion of the displaced gives fuel to those who do not want the poor to return and helps create a self-fulfilling prophecy. Low turnout in poor neighborhoods where the displaced could not drive back in to vote can now be taken as an indication of lack of interest and an excuse to further silence their voices. As the Washington Post noted: “How many people turned out to vote in each precinct was being viewed as an indicator of which neighborhoods are likely to be rebuilt; in many abandoned neighborhoods, people fear that residents who have left for good would not vote, revealing their lack of interest in the neighborhood and the city. Turnout could offer clues to the future racial makeup of the city.” Healthcare Crisis New Orleans has lost 77% of its primary care doctors, 70% of its dentists and 89% of its psychiatrists since Katrina. National Public Radio reported that the few hospitals in New Orleans are dangerously overburdened, especially emergency rooms. Nationally, it takes an average of 20 minutes to take a patient from an ambulance waiting in front of hospital to emergency room. In the New Orleans area, according to one surgeon at the East Jefferson Hospital, load times are usually 2 hours, but sometimes more. The longest time he’s seen is 6 hours, 40 minutes, of a patient waiting in ER driveway to receive care. Non-emergency care in New Orleans is also in crisis. With the closure of Charity Hospital and most public health clinics, it is very difficult to get a child tested for lead poisoning or other toxins – even though recent reports indicate there are 46 environmental “hot spots” in the city. One corner, Magnolia and First in Central City, showed lead levels of 3,960 parts per million – nearly 10 times the acceptable level. Dr. Howard Mielke of Xavier University says 40 percent of the city soil has elevated lead levels. Among the displaced, the healthcare situation is much worse. The Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health surveyed hundreds of the thousands of families living in FEMA trailers and found: Nearly half of the parents surveyed reported that at least one of their children had emotional or behavioral difficulties that the child didn't have before the hurricane; More than half the women caregivers showed evidence of clinically-diagnosed psychiatric problems, such as depression or anxiety disorders; On average, households have moved 3.5 times since the hurricane, some as many as nine times, often across state lines; More than one-fifth of the school-age children who were displaced were either not in school, or had missed 10 or more days of school in the past month. Public Education Phase Out New Orleans has become the national experiment for charter schools. Pre-Katrina 60,000 students attended over 115 New Orleans public schools. Now about 12,000 students attend public school in New Orleans. However, only four public schools are operated by the elected school board – the rest are now privately operated public charter schools or operated directly by the state. State authorities recently approved opening 22 more charter schools in the fall. Still many children in New Orleans are not in school at all because no schools have opened in their neighborhoods. Where Has All the Money Gone: Robin Hood in Reverse People who visit New Orleans are amazed at how devastated it still is. Where has all the money gone, they ask? Follow the money. “How many contractors does it take to haul a pile of tree branches?” asked the Washington Post. If it's government work, at least four: a contractor, his subcontractor, the subcontractor's subcontractor, and finally, the local man with a truck and chainsaw. The big contractors typically receive between $28 to $30 a cubic yard for the debris. By the time they subcontract the work out to smaller and smaller companies, the guy in the truck receives about $6 to $8 per cubic yard. The Miami Herald reported that the single biggest receiver of federal contracts was Ashbritt, Inc. of Pompano Beach, FL, which received over $579 million in contracts for debris removal in Mississippi from Army Corps of Engineers. The paper reported that the company does not own a single dumptruck! All they do is subcontract. Ashbritt, however, had recently dumped $40,000 into the lobbying firm of Barbour, Griffith & Rogers, which had been run by Mississippi Governor and former National GOP Chair Haley Barbour. The owners of Ashbritt also trucked $50,000 over to the Republican National Committee in 2004. Draw your own conclusions about where the money has gone. Federal Housing Funds for Rehab of Private Housing Unfortunately, not a dime of the billions of federal housing reconstruction money from the Community Development Block Grant has yet made it to New Orleans. Seventy percent of CDBG money is usually targeted to low and moderate income families. HUD has already lowered that to 50% and for poorest among us, there will be little help at all. Despite the fact that New Orleans was over half renters and that 84,000 rental units were destroyed or damaged, only 6,000 low-income rental units are part of state plan. People are already living in damaged houses all over the city, many without electricity. A night trip through New Orleans neighborhoods shows people on porches surrounded by candles. Louisiana calls its CDBG plan the “The Road Home.” Obviously, few of the working poor are going to be able to go on this road trip. Public Housing Closed In 1996, New Orleans had 13,694 units of public housing. In August 2005, they reported 7,381. Now? Maybe 700. Residents returning to New Orleans who want to move back in their apartments are being told they forfeited their public housing apartments because they abandoned them! Abandoned apartments which have been forcibly closed for months? Many apartments are closed by locked metal shutters and surrounded by chain link fence. The housing authority also has a secret list of 1407 units of housing scheduled to be demolished. The housing authority let go 290 employees, mostly maintenance. Does it sound like they are planning to reopen? In New Orleans, public housing was occupied by women, mostly working, children and the elderly. How are they supposed to return when private rents have skyrocketed? HUD Secretary Alphonso Jackson, whose agency is now running the local housing authority, stated clearly that public housing residents should not be allowed to return. In an interview with the Times-Picayune, Jackson said: "Some of the people shouldn't return. The developments were gang-ridden by some of the most notorious gangs in this country. People hid and took care of those persons because they took care of them. Only the best residents should return. Those who paid rent on time, those who held a job and those who worked." The blunt-spoken Jackson, who is black, acknowledged his comments might be seen as racially offensive. He told a white reporter, "If you said this, they would say you were racist." Signs of Hope Despite our very serious problems, there are also serious signs of hope. For every campaign of injustice and ugliness, there are people struggling despite the odds to create opportunities for justice and beauty. The people of New Orleans, joined with allies from across the nation and indeed the world, continue to resist the forces of injustice and to create opportunities for decency, community and equity. Here are a few examples. St. Augustine’s Church, one of the oldest black catholic churches in the nation, was abruptly closed by the Archdiocese of New Orleans in the months after Katrina. St. Augustine was dedicated in 1842 by the free black citizens of New Orleans and welcomed both free and slave as worshippers. It served both as a multiracial church and a center of community activities. After continual petitions, vigils and protests by community, neighborhood and church members, including direct action where some young people locked themselves inside the rectory, the Catholic hierarchy reversed itself. The joyous reopening of St. Augustine is a great cultural, spiritual, community and neighborhood victory. Lower Ninth Ward residents have had no public schools open since Katrina. They wanted their neighborhood school, Martin Luther King, Jr., repaired and fixed up after it took in ten feet of water. Authorities refused to fix it up. So the residents, joined by members of Common Ground and the Peoples Hurricane Relief Fund, decided to do it themselves. They started gutting the moldy parts and repairing and re-painting the school. They continued until the State Superintendent of Education called the police and stopped the work saying the neighbors were doing more harm than good. After days of public outcry of support of the volunteers, the State backed off. Volunteers went back to work, creating a place for education in the neighborhood as well as a symbol of resistance. Mildred Battle is 70 and gets around in a wheelchair. She is one of more than 1000 families who been displaced from their apartment in the St. Bernard Housing Development in New Orleans since Katrina. Despite coming back three times, she was never allowed to go back to retrieve her belongings. Her apartment has heavy metal sheets locked into place over the windows and a new heavy metal door for which she is not allowed a key. The ramp to her building that allowed her to roll up to her apartment is blocked by a block-long chain link fence to keep all residents out. This month, Ms. Battle’s wheelchair was the first one through the gate in the chain link fence as dozens of residents past the lone security guard and broke back into their own homes. Friends of Ms. Battle helped her retrieve a picture of her dead son and a broken glass Martin Luther King award she received in the 1990s. She clutched them to her breast and cried saying, “This has been my home for decades. I want to come home.” She and the other residents, along with veteran public housing organizers and activists from C3, a local anti-war organization, vow there will be more direct actions to enforce the rights of public housing residents to return home. Before this action, veteran organizer Endesha Jukali yelled through a bullhorn to the crowd outside the St. Bernard Housing Development. “Those who attack public housing refuse to understand that we are talking about poor women and children, the poorest of the poor. Why attack them? Some people say do not come back to New Orleans if you don’t intend to work. We say something else. Don’t come back to New Orleans if you don’t intend to fight! The only way that we are going to be able to come back, is to fight for justice every step of the way!” He then dropped the bullhorn and started pushing Ms. Battle in her wheelchair across the street and through the gate so she could break into her own home. Bill Quigley is a civil and human rights lawyer who teaches at Loyola University New Orleans School of Law. He can be reached at: Quigley@loyno.edu

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