Tibet activists win in San Francisco

“The Olympic flame’s procession through San Francisco drew world-wide ridicule when the torch-bearers ran only a few yards before disappearing into a warehouse, only to re-emerge on a bus half an hour later,” according to Chris Ayres, reporting for the Times (UK). When a pro-Tibet activist was put in the back of a police van, protesters surrounded it, demanding he be released. But the cops had reinforcements, armed with clubs.

Truckers strike for all of us

If you grumble as the price of gasoline approaches $4.00 per gallon (or exceeds that price for some grades at some stations), imagine what it must be like for those who make their living driving for a living.

Truck drivers have gone on strike:

More importantly, the activist truckers understand their protest to be part of a larger effort to “take back America,” as one put it to me. “We continue to maintain this is not just about us,” JB — which is his CB handle and stands for the “Jake Brake” on large rigs — told me from a rest stop in Virginia on his way to Florida. “It’s about everybody — the homeowners, the construction workers, the elderly people who can’t afford their heating bills… This is not the action of the truck drivers, but of the people.” Hayden mentions his parents, ages and 81 and 76, who’ve fought the Maine winter on a fixed income. Missouri-based driver Dan Little sees stores shutting down in his little town of Carrollton. “We’re Americans,” he tells me, “We built this country, and I’ll be damned if I’m going to lie down and take this.”

Does anyone have a reply?

What happens when every bug is a super-bug?

Bacteria that actually thrive on so-called antibiotics may be a lot more common than previously thought.

Surprised by how easily the microbes devoured the antibiotics, Church and colleagues did a broader test, exposing hundreds of microbes to 18 antibiotics representing most of the major classes of naturally occurring and synthetic antibiotics, including penicillin and the widely prescribed antibiotic ciprofloxacin.

“We could find … bacteria that could grow on almost all of them,” depending on the bacteria and the source of the soil, Church said.

The bacteria were in soil; a possible origin is manure from antibiotic-fed cattle.

A more nuanced view of Mugabe

All we hear about Zimbabwe President Robert Mugabe in U.S. mainstream media is how he has mismanaged the country, fixed elections, and expropriated white farmers’ land. Interviewed by al-Jazeera, journalist Heidi Holland offers a different perspective:

I think he is a disillusioned man today. He is a man who came to office with a very utopian view of life and over the years he has had to accept that things have not worked out the way he intended.

Unfortunately, because he is a very intellectual man and not really emotionally grounded at all, his response to disillusionment, rejection and humiliation is anger.

Anger turns to revenge. I think that came through in his answers.

I think I got quite a good insight into quite a bitter man, a man with a lot of grievances; some of which I have to say are founded against the West, and Britain in particular.

Holland sees Mugabe as emotionally under-developed, brutal, and self-righteous, but not solely to blame for Zimbabwe’s problems.

Attacks on a shining city on the hill

Claims of an improved security situation in Iraq will ring more obviously hollow after “three US service personnel have been killed and 31 wounded by rocket attacks on the Green Zone and a base elsewhere in Baghdad.” Earlier today, an email from the imperialist and therefore misnamed U.S. Institute for Peace acknowledged that the security situation had only improved to “2005 levels.” I have previously passed along stories in this space illustrating how the apparent drop in violence followed an “ethnic cleansing” as Iraq was de facto divided into three countries. And I’ve seen other articles questioning the defensibility of the Green Zone.

Yet none of our major presidential candidates advocates a withdrawal now. Again and again I hear Iraqis saying that they can solve their own problems when the United States leaves. We cannot solve their problems for them. But empire is a hard habit to break, and both political parties are committed to it.

Where religion distracts from the real issues

In a breaking story, the Associated Press is reporting on a raid on a compound of the Fundamentalist Latter-Day Saints.

A young woman had complained of physical abuse; she had become the mother of a child to a 50-year old man. From the story, it appears that 183 women and children were removed from the compound.

This Mormon sect, according to the story, broke away from the main church when it disavowed polygamy (under duress; the U.S. Army troops had seized church property). But polygamy isn’t the real issue here. Rather, we should be concerned with forced marriage, rape, and a system of power relations that places men over women. These are things that can happen in monogamous systems as well.

An exit plan that isn’t an exit plan

A draft has been circulating at the NATO meeting that envisions a withdrawal from Afghanistan, where the Taliban are gradually gaining control over larger swathes of territory. But, according to a story originating in Der Spiegel (republished on Salon.com), the paper also specifies conditions for this to occur. “Afghan forces” must reach certain manpower and readiness thresholds. This couldn’t happen before 2015, which given current trends in Afghanistan, means it won’t happen at all.

Confounding NAFTA

Jack Mintz writes in Canada’s Financial Post, which of course favors free trade, defending the North America Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA):

The truth is that many of the economic problems faced by the United States have little to do with NAFTA. The 2007 U.S. trade deficit of US$709-billion has grown as a result of Asian and petroleum trade, rather than trade with NAFTA partners.

Mintz also points to job losses in the industrial belt of Canada; but he doesn’t consider maquiladora operations:

With an average of $25-$35 for a 48-60 hour week, maquiladora workers cannot afford to rent housing, and must build their own shacks on land near the companies. The incidence of birth defects, miscarriages, and disease has shot up in these areas where plants have dumped their toxic wastes with abandon.

These companies are largely U.S. subsidiaries, underscoring a point that blaming workers, whether they migrate to the United States or remain where they are, is blaming victims. But of the U.S. victims, Mintz writes, “The U.S. unemployment rate has been exceptionally low since 1994 and exports to Mexico alone have tripled since 1994. Recent U.S economic problems are the result of credit market difficulties, not trade.”

But the unemployment rate is heavily manipulated. I will eventually post an analysis of employment numbers (sorry, this has to be a background project); I’ve previously seen that unemployment statistics both trail and understate the magnitude of employment market changes; it is necessary to view this market as a proportion of population to gain a sense of contractions and expansions. Further, these statistics overlook people whose well-paid (often union) manufacturing jobs have been replaced with low-paid (non-union) service jobs.

Mintz goes on to advocate further free trade agreements. If NAFTA is not the problem, this seemingly exonerates all “free trade,” which of course is only free if you’re on the exploiting side of the bargain. NAFTA thus becomes a symbol, not only for those who oppose free exploitation deals, but for those who favor them. As the experience of maquiladora workers demonstrates, workers lose wherever they are seen as a cost to be cut rather than as an asset to be developed.

How to make a great depression

Salon.com appraises economic prospects a little more soberly than we saw with the Independent earlier. In the Alice in Wonderland world of economic reporting, we’re technically not yet in a recession, even while experts debate which month in late 2007 it began, but we certainly could be in for another great depression:

In fact, it would be all too easy. All we have to do is ignore what the markets and other economic indicators are telling us right now and continue down the disastrous path we’ve been merrily skipping along for the last 25 or so years. Want to see “The Great Depression: The Sequel”? Here’s a handy three-step do-it-yourself action plan.

1. Continue to ignore growing income inequality and govern the United States for the benefit of the rich at the expense of the many.
2. Continue to whittle away at the safety nets that exist to cushion Americans from economic ill winds.
3. Continue to weaken government oversight of Wall Street.

28 million on Food Stamps

28 million, that is, something approaching ten percent of the U.S. population, is now on food stamps. The Independent judges this as indicating a “great depression,” but “the increase – from 26.5 million in 2007 – is due partly to recent efforts to increase public awareness of the programme and also a switch from paper coupons to electronic debit cards.”