LeftSkewed

By Tom Peters 1 June 2012 “The budget handed down on May 24 by the conservative National Party government of Prime Minister John Key includes a raft of cutbacks that deepen the austerity program that has been imposed on the working class since the 2008 financial crisis. The government has pledged to return the budget to surplus by 2014-15, in line with demands from the International Monetary Fund and credit ratings agencies. Since New Zealand’s economy first went into recession in 2008, the Key government has slashed public spending on welfare, health and education, increased the regressive goods and services tax (GST) and sacked more than 2,500 public sector workers. The government is partially privatising state-owned power companies and is planning to introduce privately-run, for-profit “charter” schools in socially oppressed areas…”

By Fred Mazelis 1 June 2012 “A report on out-of-pocket spending for medical care in the last five years of life, presented at the American Geriatrics Society annual meeting in early May, illustrates the financial disaster facing millions of retirees and their families, even as the Republicans and Democrats squabble in Washington over how to impose even greater burdens on working people. The report was prepared by a team led by Dr. Amy Kelley, of the Department of Geriatrics and Palliative Medicine at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York City. Dr. Kelley’s paper was based on data taken from the national Health and Retirement Study, and relied on interviews with health care proxies of those who died between 2002-2008. The sample included 3,209 people who were at least 70 years old when they died, with the median age at death 84.3 years…”

“With the recall election only a few days away, Federal prosecutors are closing in on Governor Scott Walker, according to veteran political reporter David Shuster, former Attorney General Peg Lautenschlager, and former district attorney Bob Jambois. In a conference call organized by state Democrats on Saturday evening, June 2, Shuster, Lautenschlager, and Jambois laid out evidence that Walker is a target of a federal investigation. Wisconsin Democratic Party Communications Director Graeme Zielinski added that there is evidence of wrongdoing after Walker’s time as Milwaukee County Executive, and that the investigation includes criminal activity during his time as governor. Based on conversations with a lawyer who has knowledge of the investigation, “We believe that Scott Walker set up a secret computer network in the governor’s office and Department of Administration offices, and that the John Doe investigation is seeking evidence of crimes he committed in Madison,” Zielinski said…”

By Regan Doherty DOHA | Sat Jun 2, 2012 6:45pm EDT (Reuters) - “International peace envoy Kofi Annan accused Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s forces of atrocities and arbitrary arrests, and said on Saturday he had delivered a blunt message to Assad to act now to implement all points of a peace plan. Annan, appointed as envoy on Syria by both the United Nations and the Arab League, said the specter of an all-out civil war was growing daily to the concern of other Middle East countries. Underlining this fear, nine people were killed and 42 wounded in clashes between Assad supporters and opponents who fired machineguns and rocket-propelled grenades at each other in neighboring Lebanon’s northern port city of Tripoli. At a meeting with the Arab League, Annan gave a bleak assessment of Syria 15 months on from the start of an uprising against Assad and a week after a massacre of more than 100 people that U.N. monitors blamed on pro-Assad forces…”

By Marwa Awad and Tom Pfeiffer CAIRO | Sun Jun 3, 2012 10:30am EDT (Reuters) - “Egyptians demonstrated throughout the night in Cairo’s central Tahrir Square and other cities, enraged that a court had spared deposed leader Hosni Mubarak his life over the killing of protesters in the uprising that ended his three-decade rule. Many wanted death for Mubarak, who was handed a life prison sentence on Saturday. They saw the sentence and the acquittal of senior police officers as proof that the old regime still wields influence and feared Mubarak could now be acquitted on appeal. Some demanded that the country’s presidential election be cancelled. Thousands of people poured onto the streets on Saturday after the verdict. By Sunday morning, a few hundred were still gathered in Tahrir Square — focal point of the January 2011 uprising that brought down the longtime U.S. ally - and said they would stay until those killed in the uprising were avenged.”

By Sanjeev Miglani KABUL | Sun Jun 3, 2012 11:57am EDT (Reuters) - “China and Afghanistan will announce a plan in the coming days to deepen their ties, Afghan officials say, the strongest signal yet that Beijing wants a role beyond economic partnership as Western forces prepare to leave the country. China has kept a low political profile through much of the decade-long international effort to stabilize Afghanistan, choosing instead to pursue an economic agenda, including locking in future supply from Afghanistan’s untapped mineral resources. As the U.S.-led coalition winds up military engagement and hands over security to local forces, Beijing, along with regional powers, is gradually stepping up involvement in an area that remains at risk from being overrun by Islamist insurgents. Chinese President Hu Jintao and his Afghan counterpart Hamid Karzai will hold talks on the sidelines of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation summit in Beijing this week, where they will lay out a plan governing future ties, including security cooperation. Afghanistan has signed a series of strategic partnership agreements including with the United States, India and Britain among others in recent months, described by one Afghan official as taking out “insurance cover” for the period after the end of 2014 when foreign troops leave…”

“Twenty-three years ago, on 4 June 1989 at about 5 am, Chinese army tanks rolled into Beijing’s Tiananmen Square. Hundreds of demonstrators, possibly more than a thousand, were killed and thousands were shot and wounded. Economic liberalisation instigated by Deng Xiaoping in the 1980s did not produce lasting political liberalisation or lead to any relaxation of the Communist Party’s monopoly of power. Many brave citizens who tried to expose what took place during the massacre and demanded justice for the victims or called for convictions to be reconsidered, lost their jobs or remain in prison today. The father of one demonstrator, reduced to desperation after the victim’s families received no response to their repeated appeals to the authorities, hanged himself on 26 May. The Chinese state tolerates no criticism and has banned Chinese civil society from expressing itself freely. Human rights abuses occur daily, such as re-education through labour, arbitrary detention and torture of dissidents, psychiatric internment, crackdowns on dissidents from ethnic or religious minorities through imprisonment or execution, control of the Internet, harassment of lawyers who campaign for civil rights, house arrest with no legal basis. It should be noted that the 2010 Nobel Peace Prize laureate, Liu Xiaobo, was sentenced to 11 years’ imprisonment…”

June 3, 2012

“Michael Bloomberg has big plans for Big Soda. The New York mayor has proposed a ban on the sale of large soft drinks and other sugary beverages in the city’s food service establishments as part of an anti-obesity effort. Should the Obama administration — which has already updated school lunch nutritional standards and promoted First Lady Michelle Obama’s initiatives against obesity — consider following suit with anti-soda measures of its own, the beverage industry is not likely to be caught sleeping. Its trade group, the American Beverage Association (ABA), as well as individual corporations like Coca-Cola and Pepsi, respond with force when the stakes are high. Lobbying by the food and beverage industry peaked at over $57 million in 2009, when a series of proposed bills with serious implications for soda makers were introduced. The ABA and Coke both lobbied on the Child Nutrition Promotion and School Lunch Protection Act of 2009, which sought to apply nutritional standards to foods sold on public school grounds; it died in committee. The ABA, Coke and Pepsi all sought to influence the multiple versions of the health care reform act, which featured debate over a soda tax and menu labeling requirements. The tax failed, but the labeling mandates were included in the version signed by President Obama…”

SHAME CANADA

by Jason Ditz, June 01, 2012  ”This A new report by the UN Committee Against Torture is blasting the Canadian government for its refusal to take seriously their complicity in the extraordinary renditions of Canadian citizens to third party countries for torture. The report in particular urged Canada to resolve the outstanding issues surrounding the Iacobucci Inquiry. In this affair, three Canadian citizens were sent abroad to Egypt and Syria and tortured. Canadian officials falsely told the Egyptian and Syrian governments that the captives were “terrorist threats,” which the inquiry showed led to their torture. Though Canada eventually apologized to Maher Arar, the first Canadian shipped abroad for torture, and paid him compensation, they have refused to do so with any of the Iacobucci three. The report expressed concern this showed a level of ambivalence about the fate of their wrongly accused citizens. The committee also pressed Canada to hurry up with their resolution of the detention of Omar Khadr, a Toronto-born former child soldier who has been held in US military custody since he was 16. Khadr, now 25, was eventually forced to sign a plea deal which was supposed to see him transferred to a Canadian prison (and presumably released given the years of abuse he has suffered), but the Canadian government has never followed through on the matter…”

by Jason Ditz, June 01, ” At least five ethnic Serbian civilians and two NATO soldiers were wounded today when NATO forces moved against protesters who had set up a roadblock in northern Kosovo. NATO started with tear gas and rubber bullets, and eventually resorted to live rounds against the protesters, who responded with pistol fire. The roadblocks issue has been going on since last fall, when the Kosovo government banned all trade with neighboring Serbia and sent NATO troops to the border to ensure that ethnic Serbs were no longer able to ship goods out of the nation. The Serbs responded with roadblocks along the supply routes in protest, and have rebuilt as fast as NATO could destroy them…”

DHAKA, Jun 3, 2012 (IPS) - “Bangladesh has shown low HIV prevalence rates so far but may be silently moving towards an epidemic, say experts pointing to underreporting and poor monitoring for the virus in the general population. Just 2,533 people are presently known to be carrying HIV - which causes acquired immune deficiency syndrome (AIDS) - within a population of 160 million people. The last sero-surveillance report, published in June 2011, showed the virus confined to sections categorised as ‘high risk’, including injecting drug users (IDUs), commercial sex workers (CSWs), men having sex with men and returning migrant workers. While the report, based on a sampling of 2,894 individuals from 36 geographical areas, showed overall prevalence of HIV at 0.7 percent, there was a three percent prevalence of active syphilis, suggesting high rates of sexually transmitted diseases (STDs). Active syphilis rates were as high as 12.5 percent among street sex workers of Hili town, 10.3 percent in Chittagong and 9.3 percent among hotel sex workers in Sylhet. However, low HIV prevalence, even among sex workers, has kept Bangladesh on track to achieving the United Nations millennium development goal that calls for halting of HIV transmission by 2015. Professionals and volunteers working in the HIV/AIDS field say there is no room for complacency and that Bangladesh may well be on the brink of an epidemic, going by continuing high levels of STDs alone…”

by Kim Petersen / June 2nd, 2012 “Education writer Estelle Shumann cites Harvard University English Professor Louis Menand on the two purposes served by college: “a meritocratic selection process, designed to identify the highest-performing cohort for advancement into demanding professional schools. Secondly: it embraces a more inclusionary, democratizing goal of training young people into ‘mainstream norms of taste and judgment, to make your citizenry more informed and responsive.’”1 There are two assertions presented here. One is that democracy exists. The second assertion is that a meritocracy exists. I will focus on the latter. Just because people speak of a meritocracy as if it exists does not mean it does exist. If people want to posit something exists, then they should provide evidence of its existence. A meritocracy patently does not exist in most societies, and this is obviously so in education…”

by Estelle Shumann / June 2nd, 2012 “College attendance in the United States has traditionally been related to social class. For those not inheriting land, college provided an alternative. Affordable colleges in rural New England, for example provided respect and employment in schools and churches. Their main role was to teach liberal arts, philosophy, and theology. Today, the university system appears to be very different, fraught with online colleges and universities that emphasize science and programs that can cost families tens of thousands of dollars. The cost of college in the nineteenth century was not that expensive. Modest-income families were more concerned with losing the benefits of a family member’s labor, then funding college. Yet, receiving a college degree did bring prestige and professional advantages to the family…”

SAUL LANDAU | June 1st 2012 “In 1991, The Soviet Union disappeared. Washington changed its anti-Cuba rhetoric from Cold War to human rights. But one issue remains: a U.S. economic colony that broke loose in 1959 still refuses to surrender. The punish Cuba policy, now 53, has grown gray and became downright inane in the 1980s when Reagan transferred day-to-day Cuba policy to right-wing Cuban-Americans in Miami ­ except, of course, when periodic crises erupted. But underneath this apparent idiocy lies a more pernicious absurdity. In May, for example, the State Department rejected visa requests from eleven Cuban scholars, also advocates for improved relations between Cuba and the United States. Scores of other Cubans obtained their visas to attend the Latin American Studies Association meeting in San Francisco. Simultaneously, Mariela Castro, director of Cuba’s Sex Education Institute, also Raul Castro¹s daughter, got her visa, much to the delight of leaders of San Francisco and New York’s gay, lesbian, bi-sexual and transgender communities, which she visited. They admire her heroic work on LBGT rights…”