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THE DEBATE: UK Passports - Interview or Interrogation?
Tuesday, April 22nd, 2008
RINF |
Can the Home Office justify raising passport costs to over £70 while spending nearly £100 million on interview centres that have zero effect in combating identity fraud or terrorism?
Convicted terrorists have obtained and used fraudulent passports such as al-Qaida plotter, Dhiren Barot, who planned a series of UK attacks which involved the use of a “dirty bomb.
Are passport interviews just a necessary inconvenience in the war on terror - or are they “interrogation centres” which collect personal data in an ever growing surveillance society?
Below are two reports from opposing sides of the debate.
Where do you stand?
#
Report from the BBC
Millions of pounds are being wasted on a scheme aimed at combating passport fraud, the Conservatives have said. The party voiced its concern as the BBC learned that out of 90,000 applicants given compulsory face-to-face interviews, none had been turned down.
Interviews for all new passport applicants were introduced in April 2007 as part of a crackdown on fraud.
The Identity and Passport Service said the interview system deterred people from making bogus applications.
Fraudsters apply
The Home Office estimated 10,000 passports had been issued on the basis of fraudulent information last year, half of them being given to first-time applicants.
Since then the Identity and Passport Service has carried out nearly 90,000 interviews with first-time adult applicants at its new, multi-million pound network of centres.
The centres cost £50m to set up and £30m a year to run.
But so far nobody has been refused a passport because of their interview, which focuses on information such as previous addresses and bank details, BBC Breakfast has learned.
About £12.50 of the £72 passport fee goes towards paying for these interviews.
Shadow immigration minister Damian Green said the interview process and its charges were a waste of money.
“Every hardened criminal, organised gang and international terrorist are not going this route to get their fake British passports, they’ll be doing [it] other ways.
“A significant chunk of the cost of a passport is now going on these interviews, which so far are proving to be completely useless.”
‘Deterrent effect’
But Bernard Herdan, of the Identity and Passport Service (IPS), said the lack of refusals was not a sign of failure.
“I’m satisfied this is a very successful programme,” he said.
Mr Herdan continued: “Interviews and tough fraud prevention systems are designed to deter identity fraud and pick out fraudulent passport applications before interview. To claim interviews are not working misses the point.”
He said the fact of being asked to attend an interview deterred many potentially fraudulent applicants.
The IPS estimated there had been about 10,000 successful fraudulent passport applications last year and was “committed to reducing this number”, he added.
From 2010/11, citizens will be able to decide whether they want an identity card or a passport.
Both will contain fingerprint identification data.
#
Report from Kable’s Government Computing
The Home Office has confirmed that compulsory interviews for first time passport applicants have not led to a single rejected application
The face to face interviews, introduced in June 2007 as a precursor to the interviews intended for all applicants for identity cards, cost £50m to set up with an annual budget of £30m. They add around £12.50 to the £72 price of a passport.
Bernard Herden, executive director of the Identity and Passport Service, said the interviews were part of its work to deter and detect fraud. “This in particular is a deterrent factor,” he told BBC1’s Breakfast programme on 21 April 2008.
“People will have faded away and not come to us, because we’ve asked them things that show that we are on to them,” he added. “By the time we come to the interview, we wouldn’t expect many cases to be fraudulent.”
He added that the interviews will be better assessed in 12 months’ time, when a statistical analysis of their abilities as a deterrent will be available, and that 350 cases had been referred to its fraud unit of which some are ongoing.
The Home Office said that no passport applications had been refused from the 87,765 interviews held up to the end of March.
Conservative shadow immigration minister Damian Green told the BBC: “A significant chunk of the cost of a passport is now going on these interviews, which so far are proving to be completely useless.”
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Detainees Allege Being Drugged To Coerce Confessions
Tuesday, April 22nd, 2008
By Joby Warrick |
Adel al-Nusairi remembers his first six months at Guantanamo Bay as this: hours and hours of questions, but first, a needle.
“I’d fall asleep” after the shot, Nusairi, a former Saudi policeman captured by U.S. forces in Afghanistan in 2002, recalled in an interview with his attorney at the military prison in Cuba, according to notes. After being roused, Nusairi eventually did talk, giving U.S. officials what he later described as a made-up confession to buy some peace.
“I was completely gone,” he remembered. “I said, ‘Let me go. I want to go to sleep. If it takes saying I’m a member of al-Qaida, I will.’”
Nusairi, now free in Saudi Arabia, was unable to learn what drugs were injected before his interrogations. He is not alone in wondering: At least two dozen other former and current detainees at Guantanamo Bay and elsewhere say they were given drugs against their will or witnessed other inmates being drugged, based on interviews and court documents.
Like Nusairi, other detainees believed the injections were intended to coerce confessions.
The Defense Department and the CIA, the two agencies responsible for detaining terrorism suspects, both deny using drugs as an enhancement for interrogations, and suggest that the stories from Nusairi and others like him are either fabrications or mistaken interpretations of routine medical treatment.
Yet the allegations have resurfaced because of the release this month of a 2003 Justice Department memo that explicitly condoned the use of drugs on detainees.
Written to provide legal justification for interrogation practices, the memo by then-Justice Department lawyer John C. Yoo rejected a decades-old U.S. ban on the use of “mind-altering substances” on prisoners. Instead, he argued that drugs could be used as long as they did not inflict permanent or “profound” psychological damage. U.S. law “does not preclude any and all use of drugs,” Yoo wrote in the memo.
The memo has prompted new calls for the Bush administration to give a full accounting of its treatment of detainees, and to make public detailed prison medical records. Legal experts and human rights groups say that forced drugging of detainees for any non-therapeutic reasons would be a particularly grave breach of international treaties banning torture.
“The use of drugs as a form of restraint of prisoners is both unlawful and unethical,” said Leonard Rubenstein, an expert on medical ethics and the president of Physicians for Human Rights. “These allegations demand a full inquiry by Congress and the Department of Justice.”
So far, the evidence is limited to the accounts of detainees who describe similar episodes in which they were forcibly given drugs and experienced unnatural physical effects ranging from extreme drowsiness to hallucinations. U.S. military officials have acknowledged using only therapeutic drugs, such as vitamins and vaccines, on Guantanamo Bay detainees.
“Our policy is, and always has been, to treat detainees humanely,” said Navy Cmdr. J.D. Gordon, a Pentagon spokesman. “The use of medication to manipulate a detainee has never been an approved DOD interrogation technique.” While declining to comment on specific claims, Gordon said medical care was provided “based solely upon a detainee’s need,” adding that the interrogations did not affect or influence medical treatment.
Former U.S. intelligence officials have acknowledged using sedatives to subdue some terrorism suspects as they were being transported from one facility to another, but likewise insist that drugs were never used as interrogation tools.
Several former military and intelligence officials familiar with the detention program said they were unaware of any systematic use of drugs to manipulate behavior. Alberto J. Mora, a former Navy general counsel who opposed the Bush administration’s decision to use aggressive interrogation tactics, said he recalled no discussions about the use of drugs.
But Mora said he understood why some detainees are concerned. “They knew they were being injected with something, and it is clear from all accounts that some suffered severe psychological damage,” Mora said.
The injections left a searing impression among some former detainees, said Emi MacLean, a lawyer for the Center for Constitutional Rights, which represents dozens of current and former detainees. She said the stories merit investigation in light of the Yoo memo and the record of previous CIA experiments with truth serums as well psychotropic drugs.
“Many speak about forced medication at Guantanamo without knowledge about what medication they were being forced to take,” MacLean said. “For some released [military] detainees, the forced medication they experienced was the most traumatic part” of their captivity.
Nusairi is among a handful of former detainees who directly allege the use of drugs in interrogations at the military prison in Guantanamo. Others described being forcibly given sedatives that knocked them out or made them groggy before being transferred, or being forced to take pills or receive shots for unclear reasons and suffering unusual symptoms afterward.
Detainees, in interviews or in statements provided by their attorneys, described pills and injections being forcibly administered for reasons that were not always clear to them.
Mourad Benchellali, a French national who was held for three years at Guantanamo Bay, said that prison workers sometimes described the medications as antibiotics or vitamins, yet they frequently left him in a mental fog.
J. Wells Dixon, another Center for Constitutional Rights attorney who represents detainees, said the government appears to have administered drugs to detainees whose extended captivity made them distraught or rebellious.
“Many of these men have become desperately suicidal,” Dixon said. “And the government’s response has been to administer more medication, often without the consent of the prisoners.”
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London ANPR mass surveillance snooping
Tuesday, April 22nd, 2008
By SpyBlog |
Just in case you thought that Spy Blog has not tried the available, alleged “checks and balances” which are supposed to prevent the disproportionate abuse of our privacy and freedoms, you might be interested in our brief correspondence with the Office of the Surveillance Commissioners, regarding the function creep of what were supposed to have been “save the environment” schemes: the London Congestion Charge and the London Low Emission Zone, but which have now mutated into a secretive, unaccountable, mass surveillance snooping scheme.
Rt. Hon. Sir Christopher Rose
Chief Surveillance Commissioner
Office of Surveillance Commissioners
PO Box 29105,
London, SW1V 1ZUCopy via email: oscmailbox@osc.gsi.gov.uk20th September 2007
Dear Sir Christopher,
I am writing to you in respect of the current Automatic Number Plate Recognition mass surveillance scheme, which was announced by Home Office Minister Tony McNulty on 17th July 2007, involving “real time” “bulk data transfers” between the London Congestion Charge system run by Transport for London and the Metropolitan Police Service.
” The Minister of State, Home Department (Mr. Tony McNulty): I would like to inform the House that my right hon. Friend the Home Secretary has signed a certificate to exempt Transport for London (TfL) and the Metropolitan Police Service (MPS) from certain provisions of the Data Protection Act 1998 to facilitate the bulk transfer of Automatic Number Plate Recognition (ANPR) data from TfL to the MPS. The Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police believes that it is necessary due to the enduring, vehicle-borne terrorist threat to London. The MPS requires bulk ANPR data from TfL’s camera network in London specifically for terrorism intelligence purposes and to prevent and investigate such offences. The infrastructure will allow the realtime flow of data between TfL and the MPS.As one of the conditions of this certificate, the MPS will provide an annual report to the Information Commissioner so that he can satisfy himself that the personal data processed under the certificate is required for the purposes of safeguarding national security, and that any processing that is undertaken other than under an exemption set out in the certificate is carried out in compliance with the Data Protection Act 1998.
My right hon. Friend the Home Secretary will review the operation of the certificate in three months time when the Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police provides her with a separate, interim report so that she can be personally satisfied that the certificate is being operated in accordance with the agreement and that the privacy of individuals is protected. In the coming months, proposals will be developed and discussed across Government to ensure that bulk ANPR data-sharing with the police is subject to a robust regulatory regime which ensures reasonable transparency and scrutiny.”
This is obviously far more than a simple Data Protection Act section 29 Notice request for details about a particular suspect vehicle. The use of Ministerial Certificates must mean Mass Surveillance, presumably on a 24/7 basis, outside of the normal Congestion Charge enforcement period i.e. also at night, at weekends and on public holidays, to cover what would otherwise be “excessive data processing” for a purpose other than which the data was originally collected, without explicit personal consent, thereby flouting the fundamental Principles of Data Protection.
I note that there is no mention in the Ministerial Statement of the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000, which surely must also apply to this Mass Surveillance project, especially in the light of your comments on Automatic Number Plate Recognition in your first Annual Report,
“11.3 Improvements in technology continue to enhance the capability of those charged with the responsibility of tackling crime. But, as indicated in last year’s report, the speed of change often surpasses the limitations of current legislation. With regard to Automatic Number Plate Recognition, my position is the same as that of my predecessor and I adhere to the view that legislation is necessary to resolve some issues arising from enhanced technological capability.”
Were any of the Surveillance Commissioners consulted about this project before it was announced ?
Have you given your permission for this Mass Surveillance scheme to go ahead, which must catch vast numbers of innocent people and vehicle movements, contrary to the principle of narrowly targeted, proportionate, lawful surveillance under RIPA ?
Yours Sincerely,[name]
[address]
The short reply was frustrating and depressing - we are obviously “little people”, whose concerns and worries, are simply ignored by the bureaucracy and the politicians:
Office of Surveillance Commissioners[name] [address]
1 October 2007
Dear [name]
Thank you for your letter of 20 September about the Automatic Number Plate Recognition mass surveillance scheme.
The Chief Surveillance Commissioner has seen your letter and asked me to reply on his behalf. He notes your interest in these matters but does not think it appropriate to answer your questions.
I am sorry I cannot be more helpful.
Yours sincerely
[name of secretary]
Secretary to the Office of the Surveillance CommissionersOffice of the Surveillance Commissioners
PO Box 29105
London, SW1V 1ZU
Telephone: 020 7828 3421
Facsimile: 020 7952 1788
Web: www.surveillancecommissioners.gov.uk
email: oscmailbox@homeoffice.gsi.gov.uk
How is this supposed to represent adequate or proper “independent scrutiny” of the vast powers, and function creep of secret state surveillance snooping, which is increasingly and wastefully being directed at millions of innocent people, rather than being targeted proportionately and narrowly at actual terrorist suspects or serious organised criminals ?
Is it any wonder that people are frustrated by, and resentful of, the people and systems which purport to “protect” the public, whilst maintaining their freedoms and liberties, but which do not do so in practice ?
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British government lied about Persian Gulf incident
Tuesday, April 22nd, 2008
By Paul Mitchell |
Secret Ministry of Defence documents released to the Times newspaper reveal that the British government lied about the circumstances surrounding the capture of 15 sailors and marines from HMS Cornwall in the Persian Gulf by Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards (IRG) in March 2007.
The navy personnel were part of Britain’s contingent in a US-led naval force mustered by the Bush administration aimed against Tehran, demanding that Iran end its nuclear programme and alleged sponsorship of the insurgency in Iraq. The US, with two aircraft carrier battle groups, had built up its largest naval presence in the region since it launched the invasion of Iraq in 2003. Britain had doubled the size of its naval presence over the preceding six months.
At the time, Des Browne, the Defence Secretary, claimed, “There is no doubt that HMS Cornwall was operating in Iraqi waters and that the incident itself took place in Iraqi waters … I do not think that even they [the Iranians] sustain the position that the incident took place anywhere other than in Iraqi waters.”
Browne’s statement was backed up by Vice Admiral Charles Style, the Deputy Chief of the Defence Staff, who told a press conference that the UK “unambiguously contest” allegations that the sailors were inside Iranian waters and produced photographs and charts that purported to back up his claim.
First Sea Lord Admiral Sir Jonathon Band denied allegations that HMS Cornwall had been involved in intelligence-gathering operations against Iran. “We are certainly not spying on them,” he said. “The Iranians in that part of Iraqi territorial waters are not part of the scene.”
What Browne, Style and Band never revealed, according to the MoD documents, was that the US-led coalition in Iraq had unilaterally decided to draw a dividing line between disputed Iraqi and Iranian waters in the Persian Gulf before the incident, without telling the Iranian government where it was.
One of the reports, “Why the incident occurred,” dated April 13, 2007, sent to Air Chief Marshal Sir Jock Stirrup, the Chief of the Defence Staff, a week after the navy personnel were released says, “Since the outset of the Iraq-Iran War there has been no formal ratified TTW [territorial waters] agreement in force between Iraq and Iran … While it may be assumed that the Iranians must be aware of some form of operational boundary, the exact coordinates to the Op Line have not been published to Iran.”
The communications log between HMS Cornwall and its two boarding vessels also discloses that Revolutionary Guard patrols were crossing the line (unaware of the change), three times a week before the incident and that it appears the British forces raised their weapons first.
The MoD still refuses to make known the precise location of the incident, claiming it would jeopardise “operational tactics, routines and capability” of British forces operating in the Persian Gulf.
At the time there were fears that the US would utilise the incident as an excuse for launching military action against Tehran. The US navy launched a major military exercise within days of the capture of the sailors. Prime Minister Tony Blair condemned Iran’s actions as “completely unacceptable, wrong and illegal” and warned, “It is now time to ratchet up international and diplomatic pressure in order to make sure that the Iranian government understands their total isolation on this issue.”
Blair had acted as Washington’s key ally in seeking to isolate the Iranian regime and impose the strictest sanctions possible, alongside making preparations for a possible military assault.
Britain demanded a United Nations Security Council resolution against Iran that placed the blame squarely on Tehran, but even so right-wing British newspapers denounced Blair for failing to take tougher action against the Iranian regime. The Times itself condemned “the pusillanimous timidity of British officials and politicians, who have failed disgracefully to confront Iran with the ultimatum this flagrant aggression demands.”
The Daily Telegraph called for intensified sanctions against Iran unless “it stops lying to us about the details of its nuclear program, [stops] arming and directing insurgents in southern Iraq, and [stops] violating Iraqi territorial waters … We wait anxiously to see whether this weakened and discredited Prime Minister has the necessary spine to do what is required, or whether Britain will persist in presenting its weakest aspect to a potential enemy.”
Neo-conservative circles within the US declared the detention of the British personnel to be an act of war on a NATO country and demanded other members of the alliance support the UK. Several top US military personnel made clear that had American sailors been involved in such an incident they would have fired on the Iranian forces. Lieutenant Commander Erik Horner, second in command of the USS Underwood in the Gulf declared, “We not only have the right to self-defence, but also an obligation to self-defence.”
Senator Joseph Biden of Maryland, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, called on the Bush administration to make plans to cut off Iran’s “importation of refined oil and affect their export of crude oil. You can hit them very, very badly. But I don’t think you talk about that publicly. Were I president, I wouldn’t be talking about that. I’d be planning that while I was moving on every front diplomatically.”
However, whilst Bush called Iran’s action “inexcusable behaviour” and called on the country’s leaders to “give back the hostages,” the administration kept a relatively low profile over the incident. Within American ruling circles, there remained significant opposition to a military attack on Iran, particularly under conditions where the US was still bogged down in Iraq and Afghanistan and was politically isolated internationally.
In the event, the Persian Gulf incident resulted in a humiliation for the Blair government, epitomising the gap between Britain’s pretensions as a world power and its actual capabilities. London was only able to secure the most limited formal censure of Iran’s actions at the UN and from the European Union. Foreign Secretary Margaret Beckett was forced to tone down her rhetoric at a European Union summit saying, “I think everyone regrets that this position has arisen … What we want is a way out of it.”
A subsequent all-party parliamentary inquiry described the incident as a “national disaster” for the UK.
The capture of the sailors was a propaganda coup for the Iranian regime, which ended with President Mahmud Ahmadinejad announcing that they would be released as a “gift” to Britain in order to mark both the Prophet Muhammad’s birthday and the Easter holiday.
The British government’s cover-up immediately began to unravel once Captain Chris Air, who headed the operation, admitted, upon his release, that his crew was on an intelligence-gathering mission—a fact deliberately suppressed during the incident in order to portraying Iran as having carried out an unprovoked act of aggression.
The fact that military action faced serious opposition among working people meant that neither Bush nor Blair was in a position to simply push for an immediate attack on Iran. Both faced popular hostility to their warmongering and a belief that they were habitual liars. Even a poll by the Daily Telegraph found that only a tiny seven percent of those surveyed had been convinced by the jingoistic media campaign demanding military action against Iran.
Even so, the incident contains warnings that another pretext may be sought for military action against Iran. The Bush administration is determined to effect “regime change” in Iran in order to gain control over the country’s vast oil resources, as they have done in Iraq. Earlier this year an incident involving US warships and small, high-speed Iranian craft as they passed through the Strait of Hormuz some three miles outside Iranian waters led to a series of high-level US warnings describing their action as a “reckless and dangerous and potentially hostile act.”
The Democrats have adopted the same belligerent tone towards Iran, with leadership challenger Hilary Clinton stating during a televised debate on April 16 that an Iranian attack on Israel “would incur massive retaliation from the United States.” Responding to questions, she added that the US should “do the same with other countries in the region” and “create an umbrella of deterrence that goes much further than just Israel.”
Her rival, Barak Obama, did little to distance himself from this warlike rhetoric, stating that an attack on Israel would be “an attack on our strongest ally in the region” and that “the United States would take appropriate action.”
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Amnesty unveils shock ‘waterboarding’ film
Tuesday, April 22nd, 2008
By Nigel Morris |
An American expert in torture techniques has denounced his government for allowing “waterboarding” to be practised against terror suspects, just as a graphic advertisement showing the brutal reality of the technique is unveiled to British cinema-goers.
Malcolm Nance, who trained hundreds of US servicemen and women to resist interrogation by putting them through “waterboarding” exercises, demanded an immediate end to the practice by all US personnel.
He said: “They seem to think it is worth throwing the honour of 220 years of American decency in war out of the window. Waterboarding is out-and-out torture, and I’m deeply ashamed President Bush has authorised its use and dragged the US’s reputation into the mud.”
Mr Bush faced criticism recently when he vetoed a Bill that would have outlawed such methods of “enhanced interrogation” – the White House refuses to describe it as torture.
Mr Nance said: “You have a purpose-built table with straps in a pattern so that people can be strapped and unstrapped quickly. The head is strapped down in such a way so they cannot resist the water. The head is elevated so the water goes down the oesophagus.
“The water is poured very carefully over the nose – you keep a constant pour. You are drowning in water but you don’t have the ability to hold your breath. You feel the water going in, you understand that water is filling your lungs.”
Mr Nance, who is now an independent consultant, said the technique was also futile, as well as barbaric, as the prisoner would say anything to survive – regardless of its truth.
Amnesty International is leading the campaign to persuade the US to abandon the practice – a form of torture used as long ago as the Spanish Inquisition – and is stepping up its efforts with the release of a graphic and disturbing advertisement.
The broadcast begins with images of glistening clear liquid, suggesting it could be promoting a new brand of vodka or gin. But the camera pulls back to show water is being poured over the face of a desperate man strapped to a table.
Kate Allen, the UK director of Amnesty International, said: “Our film shows you what the CIA doesn’t want you to see – the disgusting reality of half-drowning a person.
“For a few seconds, our film-makers did it for real. Even for those few seconds, it’s horrifying to watch. The reality – in a secret prison with no one to stop it – is much, much worse.”
The advertisement can be seen at www.unsubscribe-me.org from today and at 50 cinemas from next month onwards.
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Earth Day: Is the impact worth the build-up?
Tuesday, April 22nd, 2008
By Heather Clancy |
At the high-tech industry conference where I spent most of my day holed up in meetings on Monday, there was nary a mention of Earth Day. Surprised? I was, but that’s naive little ole me. Then again, I spent the day with VARs and integrators, companies that rarely exercise the marketing might of their vendor partners.
When I finally got to my e-mail this evening, of course there was a fresh deluge of communiques from the green marketing types. I had sworn not to succumb, but there’s definitely some worthy stuff to report. In the spirit of my previous Earth Day post, however, I’ve filtered out quite a bit of the greenwashing and tried to focus on the efforts that seemed most tech-focused from some of the green tech giants.
- The list from Cisco is several pages long (yes, I printed it, so one black mark against me), with individual activities depending on the geography. Many are very good feel-good worthy, such as the Cisco Bike to Work Day, which actually is the day AFTER Earth Day on April 23. But what really intrigues me is the company’s E-Scrap Event, which is in its sixth year. Last year, Cisco collected 141.3 tons of various household electronics and Cisco-brand electronics from both Cisco employees and contractors (There are a lot of the latter. I should know, as I am technically classified as one.) This year, 53 sites are supposed to participate. Three of the other more unusual programs being planned around the world: In Germany, the company will bring in representatives from local renewable energy companies and hybrid vehicle companies to discuss alternatives to existing technology and energy options. In Austin, the facility will focus on organic gardening and other sustainable practices that encourage the use of local resources. And in Bangalore, Cisco will set up vehicle emissions tests and rainwater harvesting presentations.
- Xerox also is supporting a number of individualized efforts. One worth noting is the ongoing program in Cincinnati to reclaim and remanufacture Xerox systems that are coming off lease. More on remanufacturing and reuse in a different post. Meanwhile, here’s the complete list of the Xerox Earth Day activities.
- Web referral and personalization network StumbleUpon hopes to build its membership by promising to plant a tree for every click on this link. It also is running an auction until May 2 for a New York trip with New York Giants football legend Tiki Barber on the eBay Giving Works site at this link. The auction includes NBC television studio tours with Barber, lunch in the Rainbow Room and Tiki’s tickets for the Sunday New York Giants game, and the proceeds will benefit the National Forest Foundation.
- Yahoo is hoping to entice more visitors to Freecycle by randomly placing prizes such as a Smart Car, green cleaning services and eco-trips within the various Freecycle communities. (The groups are organized by local towns and neighborhoods.) It also has created a microsite dedicated to talking up Earth Day information.
- Videoconferencing pioneer Polycom is using the Earth Day event as the opportunity to launch a green services program called Going Green With Polycom. The program will actually be offered through Polycom’s VARs, resellers and other channel partners and will include specific ways of helping demonstrate to companies how video applications can specifically reduce their carbon emissions. The metrics include: Video Benchmark Readiness, Green Rollout Planning and Implementation, and Tracking and Measurement. (This one is on the edge because it’s very obviously self-serving, but I like the fact that Polycom is helping its channel partners spread the green gospel.) Plus, Polycom believes that about 54 percent of businesses are willing to use videoconferencing to get greener. Who can argue with that?
- Finally, here’s the Google green gossip. First off, like Yahoo!, they have a complete Earth Day site at this link to get people thinking and talking. It is using its mapping applications for various campaigns, including adding more cities to Google Transit, which helps you plan a trip in certain metropolitan using public transportation options. I’m sure Google will update its blog throughout the day, so check it out.
However you choose to honor Earth Day, or ignore, I hope you spend at least one moment reflecting about green tech isn’t just about being green, it’s about better business. At least that’s the way I look at it. So, in the face of tremendous economic uncertainty, I’m relieved that there’s this much energy being put into reducing our world’s energy emissions profile.
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China police “shoot two” in village land protest
Tuesday, April 22nd, 2008
HONG KONG (Reuters) |
Chinese police opened fire during a clash over land use between villagers and employees of China’s number two gold miner, killing two and wounding more than 20, a Hong Kong newspaper said on Tuesday.
Beijing, terrified of social unrest ahead of the Olympics in August, has cracked down on recent protests over the arbitrary use of land by powerful local interests.
Ming Pao cited unidentified sources as saying riot police in the southwestern province of Yunnan were sent in on Sunday after almost 100 villagers clashed with Zijin Mining workers.
The villagers were angry with offers of compensation and relocations when Zijin was trying to buy up small mines in the area, the newspaper said.
An unidentified police official told the newspaper the shooting was in self-defense and that just one person was killed.
The paper quoted a Zijin Mining official as saying the company’s investments in the area were in accordance with local rules and regulations. He was unaware of the exact situation in Yunnan.
(Reporting by Donny Kwok; Editing by Nick Macfie)
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DNA samples taken from polygamists’ kids
Tuesday, April 22nd, 2008
By Michelle Roberts |
SAN ANGELO, Texas - Using cotton swabs and cameras, lab technicians began taking DNA samples Monday from hundreds of children and mothers — wearing long, pioneer-style dresses — in hopes of sorting out the tangled family relationships within the West Texas polygamist sect.
A judge ordered last week that the genetic material be taken to help determine which children belong to which parents.
Authorities need to figure that out before they begin custody hearings to determine which children may have been abused and need to be permanently removed from the sect compound in Eldorado, and which ones can be safely returned to the fold.
State social workers have complained that over the past few weeks, sect members have offered different names and ages. Also, the children refer to all of their fathers’ wives as their “mothers,” and all men in the community as “uncles.”
The testing went on behind closed doors at the crowded coliseum where the children seized in the raid earlier this month on the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints compound are staying.
The collecting of DNA is likely to take 10 technicians most of the week, and it will be a month or more before the results are available, said Janiece Rolfe, a spokeswoman for the Texas attorney general’s office.
Rod Parker, an FLDS attorney, acknowledged that family names within the sect can be confusing, but said: “No one is trying to deceive anyone. … It’s not sinister.” Instead, he said that because many of the sect’s marriages are not legal, adults and their children may legally have one name but use another within the community.
The April 3 nighttime raid on the 1,700-acre compound probably frightened the children, said Ken Driggs, who has studied the sect extensively. “If somebody had taken the time to approach them in a way that was respectful, they probably would have gotten the information they needed,” Driggs said.
The children will be placed in group homes or other quarters until individual custody hearings can be completed by early June. Officials said they will try to keep siblings together when possible, though some polygamous families may have dozens of siblings.
The testing will involve 437 children and possibly hundreds of adults. State authorities revised their count of the children from 416 as they developed better lists and discovered that not all the female members who claimed to be adults were over 18.
The testing will be more far complicated than that of the typical custody or support case.
In a typical custody case, “maternity is already established,” Rolfe said, but in this case, researchers will have to determine the identity of both parents.
Each person who submits to a test will be photographed, and the inside of his or her cheek will be swabbed to remove cells for analysis.
The DNA sampling is an enormous undertaking for a state that typically tests only 1,000 children a year.
Some of the adults have ordered by the state of Texas to submit to testing. Others are being asked to do so voluntarily. But how many will do that is unclear.
Parker said he is afraid authorities secretly intend to use the DNA to build criminal cases. But state Child Protective services spokesman Greg Cunningham said: “We’re not involved in the criminal investigation. That’s not our objective.”
Authorities believe the sect forces underage girls into marriages with older men. No one has been arrested, but a warrant has been issued for member Dale Barlow, a convicted sex offender who has said he has not been to the Texas site in years.
Attorneys for the children and the adults have complained that they haven’t had enough access to their clients at the coliseum. Texas District Judge Barbara Walther ordered Monday that the women and children in the be allowed to use newly installed phone lines to contact their attorneys.
The judge also asked the attorneys to look for a Mormon volunteer to help watch over twice-daily prayers after attorneys for the women who remain with young children at the coliseum complained they weren’t given enough freedom to hold their usual prayer service. CPS has said it has no intention of infringing on their religious rights but wants to be sure the women aren’t conspiring to tamper with witnesses in the custody case.
“The way our clients pray is sacred to them, but it becomes less sacred when they feel people from the department are monitoring them,” said Andrea Sloan, a lawyer for some of the women.
Walther suggested that volunteers from the mainline Mormon church — of which FLDS is a renegade sect — might be able to provide monitoring without undermining the sacredness of the services.
The attorneys for the mothers and children agreed to look for someone at a local stake who would be willing to help.
Have Your Say: DNA samples taken from polygamists’ kids
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Hunger Plagues Haiti and the World
Tuesday, April 22nd, 2008
By Stephen Lendman |
Consumers in rich countries feel it in supermarkets but in the world’s poorest ones people are starving. The reason - soaring food prices, and it’s triggered riots around the world in places like Mexico, Indonesia, Yemen, the Philippines, Cambodia, Morocco, Senegal, Uzbekistan, Guinea, Mauritania, Egypt, Cameroon, Bangladesh, Burkina Faso, Ivory Coast, Peru, Bolivia and Haiti that was once nearly food self-sufficient but now relies on imports for most of its supply and (like other food-importing countries) is at the mercy of agribusiness.
Wheat shortages in Peru are acute enough to have the military make bread with potato flour (a native crop). In Pakistan, thousands of troops guard trucks carrying wheat and flour. In Thailand, rice farmers take shifts staying awake nights guarding their fields from thieves. The crop’s price has about doubled in recent months, it’s the staple for half or more of the world’s population, but rising prices and fearing scarcity have prompted some of the world’s largest producers to export less - Thailand (the world’s largest exporter), Vietnam, India, Egypt, Cambodia with others likely to follow as world output lags demand. Producers of other grains are doing the same like Argentina, Kazakhstan and China. The less they export, the higher prices go.
Other factors are high oil prices and transportation costs, growing demand, commodity speculation, pests in southeast Asia, a 10 year Australian drought, floods in Bangladesh and elsewhere, a 45 day cold snap in China, and other natural but mostly manipulated factors like crop diversion for biofuels have combined to create a growing world crisis with more on this below. It’s at the same time millions of Chinese and Indians have higher incomes, are changing their eating habits, and are consuming more meat, chicken and other animal products that place huge demands on grains to produce.
Here’s a UK April 8 Times online snapshot of the situation in parts of Asia:
– Filipino farmers caught hoarding rice risk a life in jail sentence for “economic sabotage;”
– thousands of (Jakarta) Indonesian soya bean cake makers are striking against the destruction of their livelihood;
– once food self-sufficient countries like Japan and South Korea are reacting “bitterly (as) the world’s food stocks-to-consumption ratio plunges to an all-time low;”
– India no longer can export millions of tons of rice; instead it’s forced to have a “special strategic food reserve on top of its existing wheat and rice stockpiles;”
– Thailand is the world’s largest rice producer; its price rose 50% in the past month;
– countries like the Philippines and Sri Lanka are scrambling for secure rice supplies; they and other Asian countries are struggling to cope with soaring prices and insufficient supply;
– overall, rice is the staple food for three billion people; one-third of them survive on less than $1 a day and are “food insecure;” it means they may starve to death without aid.
The UN Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO) reported that worldwide food costs rose almost 40% in 2007 while grains spiked 42% and dairy prices nearly 80%. The World Bank said food prices are up 83% since 2005. As of December, it caused 37 countries to face food crises and 20 to impose price controls in response.
It also affected aid agencies like the UN’s World Food Program (WFP). Because of soaring food and energy costs, it sent an urgent appeal to donors on March 20 to help fill a $500 million resource gap for its work. Since then, food prices increased another 20% and show no signs of abating. For the world’s poor, like the people of Haiti, things are desperate, people can’t afford food, they scratch by any way they can, but many are starving and don’t make it.
Haiti - the World Hunger Poster Child
The Haitain crisis is so extreme it forces people to eat (non-food) mud cookies (called “pica”) to relieve hunger. It’s a desperate Haitian remedy made from dried yellow dirt from the country’s central plateau for those who can afford it. It’s not free. In Cite Soleil’s crowded slums, people use a combination of dirt, salt and vegetable shortening for a typical meal when it’s all they can afford. A Port-au-Prince AP reporter sampled it. He said it had “a smooth consistency (but it) sucked all the moisture out of (my) mouth as soon as it touched (my) tongue. For hours (afterwards), an unpleasant taste of dirt lingered.” Worse is how it harms human health. A mud cookie diet causes severe malnutrition, intestinal distress, and other deleterious effects from potentially deadly toxins and parasites.
Another problem is the cost. This stomach-filler isn’t free. Haitians have to buy it, and “edible clay” prices are rising - by almost $1.50 in the past year. It now costs about $5 to make 100 cookies (about 5 cents each), it’s cheaper than food, but many Haitians can’t afford it:
– 80% of them are impoverished in the hemisphere’s poorest country and one of the world’s poorest;
– unemployment is rampant, and two-thirds or more of workers have only sporadic jobs; and
– those with them earn 11 to 12 cents an hour; the country’s official minimum wage is $1.80 a day, but IMF figures show 55% of employed Haitians receive only 44 cents daily, an impossible amount to live on.
Here’s what it’s like for poor Haitians. They have large families, live in cardboard and tin homes, there’s no running water and little or no electricity, and life inside and around them is horrific. Bed sheets can be thick with flies, there’s no sanitation, and outside garbage is everywhere. Children are always hungry, there’s never enough food, often it’s for one meal a day, illness and disease are common, life expectancy very low, and so-called Blue Helmet “peacekeeper” and gang violence plague communities like Port-au-Prince’s Cite Soleil.
Now with a food crisis, Haitians are in the streets over prices for essentials that tripled in the past year and a president, prime minister and government doing practically nothing about it. For days, they were everywhere, throughout the country, and numbered in the thousands. They protested in Port-au-Prince, carried empty plates to signify their plight, smashed windows, set buildings and cars alight, looted shops, looked for food, tried to storm the presidential palace, shouted “we are hungry,” and demanded President Rene Preval resign.
UN Blue Helmets (MINUSTAH) responded viciously the way they always do against peaceful or protest demonstrations. They shot and killed at least five Haitians (some reports say more), wounded many others, and that was just in downtown Port-au-Prince.
In Les Cayes (Haiti’s third largest city) in the southwest, demonstrators stormed and tried to burn the local MINUSTAH offices. Others barricaded streets, looked for food, and shouted “Down with the high cost of living.” Similar protests went on throughout the country:
– in northern cities like Cap-Haitien and Gonaives;
– Jacmel in the south;
– Jeremie in the southwest where at least two deaths were reported; and
– smaller towns like Petit Goave, Miragoane, Aquin, Cavaillon, Saint-Jean du Sud, Leogane, Vialet, Anse-a-Veau and Simon.
It’s a familiar pattern in Haiti. Anger over injustice builds and then explodes with Haitians reacting in the streets en masse against intolerable conditions that are compounded by a repressive and hated UN occupation. It’s there to protect privilege, not secure peace. It’s the first time ever that the UN Security Council authorized so-called “peacekeepers” to enforce a coup d’etat against a democratically elected president (by a 92% majority).
Haiti’s current president can’t deal with the situation and has gone along with the state of things. He’s been ineffective since his February 2006 reelection, hasn’t alleviated the present crisis, instead ordered protests to stop, and here’s how he put it in a shameful April 9 televised address: “The demonstrations and destruction won’t make the prices go down or resolve the country’s problems. On the contrary, this can make the misery grow and prevent investment in the country” that, of course, does nothing for most Haitians and Preval knows it.
After a week of protests, an uneasy calm followed, but things can break out any time without relief that’s not forthcoming beyond some far too small proposed measures. Dismissively, Preval’s prime minister, Jacques Edouard Alexis, blamed the problem on “global forces” and the high cost of oil saying there’s no “quick fix,” case closed. He also claimed the protests were manipulated by provocateurs, including angry drugs dealers reacting to a supposed closure of one of their transshipment points.
Alexis is now out, elitists debate over who’ll replace him, Haitians in the meantime are starving, the IMF keeps extracting $1 million a week in mandated tribute to the rich, and only countries like Cuba (training Haitians to be doctors) and Venezuela (donating money, cheap oil, and over 600 tons of food aid sent April 13, more than first reported) seem to care. Chavez cares about all Latin America and last year donated about $8.8 billion in aid or four times the amount America provides the region.
For its part, the World Bank pathetically plans $10 million in “emergency aid” for a country with over eight million starving people. It also plans to double its African agricultural lending next year to $800 million and thus make a bad situation worse. It’ll go to hugely indebted nations, unable to help feed their people as a consequence, and World Bank policy always is opposite of what these countries need.
UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon barely commented, made merely pro forma statements about the crisis and its seriousness, was as dismissive as Alexis, offered no remedial aid, is as uncaring as World Bank officials, and never forgets that his bosses are in Washington. Instead of doing his job and helping, he called on Haiti’s leaders to restore stability because the country’s security is threatened. Starving poor people aren’t his concern. Let ‘em eat mud cookies.
That’s apparently Rene Preval’s solution as well. Belatedly (on April 12), he announced a plan to cut rice prices 15%. It will do nothing to relieve the crisis, and Reuters (on April 15) reported that vendors still demand the higher price for supplies already in stock. It provoked new clashes on the streets, Haitians continue to starve, and “government officials were not immediately available for comment.”
Raj Patel’s new book explains the state of things today. It’s titled “Stuffed and Starved: The Hidden Battle for the World Food System.” In an April 14 statement, he said: “What’s happening in Haiti is an augury to the rest of the developing world. Haiti is the poster child of an economy that liberalized its agricultural economy and removed the social safety nets for the poor….” Two conditions create food riots:
– “price shocks (and) modern development policies” (tariffs, corporate subsidies, grain reserve policies) make food unaffordable for many millions; and
– “riots (then) happen when there are no other ways (to make) powerful people listen….” They’ll continue to happen “with increasing frequency until governments realize that food isn’t a mere commodity, it’s a human right.”
World Hunger - A Growing Problem for All Nations
The situation is so dire, protests may erupt anywhere, any time, and rich countries aren’t immune, including America. Poverty in the world’s richest country is growing, and organizations like the Center for Economic Policy Research (CEPR) and Economic Policy Institute (EPI) document it. They report on a permanent (and growing) underclass of over 37 million people earning poverty-level wages and say that official statistics understate the problem. They note an unprecedented wealth gap between rich and poor, a dying middle class, and growing millions in extreme poverty.
It affects the unemployed as well in times of economic distress, but official government data conceals to what extent. If employment calculations were made as originally mandated, the true rate would be around 13% instead of the Department of Labor’s 5.1%. The same is true for inflation that’s around 12% at the retail level instead of the official 4% that’s hooey.
Under conditions of duress, hunger is the clearest symptom, it’s rising, and current food inflation threatens to spiral it out of control if nothing is done to address it. It’s the highest in decades with 2007 signaling what’s ahead - eggs up 25% last year; milk 17%; rice, bread and pasta 12%, and look at prices on the Chicago Board of Trade (CBOT):
– grains and soy prices are at multi-year highs;
– wheat hit an all-time high above $12 a bushel with little relief ahead in spite of a temporary pullback in price; the US Department of Agriculture forecasts that global wheat stocks this year will fall to a 30 year low of 109.7 million metric tons; USDA also projected US wheat stocks by year end 2008 at 272 million bushels - the lowest level since 1948;
– corn and soybeans are also at record levels; soybeans are at over $15 a bushel; corn prices shot above $6 a bushel as demand for this and other crops soar in spite of US farmers planting as much of them as possible to cash in on high prices.
Growing demand, a weak dollar, but mostly another factor to be discussed below is responsible - the increased use of corn for ethanol production with farmers diverting more of their acreage from other crops to plant more of what’s most in demand. Forty-three per cent of corn production is for livestock feed, but around one-fifth is for biofuels according to the National Corn Growers Association (NCGA). Other estimates are as high as 25 - 30% compared to 14% two years ago, and NCGA estimates one-third of the crop in 2009 will be for ethanol, not food. It’s fueling US and world food inflation with five year forecasts of it rising even faster.
In the world’s poorest countries, people starve. Here, they go on food stamps with a projected unprecedented 28 million Americans getting them this year as joblessness increases in a weak economy. However, many millions in need aren’t eligible as social services are cut to finance foreign wars and tax cuts for the rich, with poor folks at home losing out as a result. A family of four only qualifies now if its net monthly income is at or below $1721 or $20,652 a year. Even then, it gets the same $542 monthly amount recipients received in 1996 to cover today’s much higher prices or around $1 dollar a meal per person and falling.
This is the UN’s World Food Program (WFP)’s dilemma worldwide at a time donations coming in are inadequate. Its Executive Director, Josette Sheeran, said “Our ability to reach people is going down just as needs go up….We are seeing a new face of hunger in which people (can’t afford to buy food)….Situations that were previously not urgent” are now desperate. WFP’s funding needs keep rising. It estimates them at $3.5 billion, they’ll likely go higher, and they’re for approved projects to feed 73 million people in 78 counties worldwide. WFP foresees much greater potential needs for unseen emergencies and for far greater numbers of people in need.
People (who aren’t poor) in rich countries can manage with food accounting for about 10% of consumption. In ones like China, it’s around 30%, but in sub-Saharan Africa and the poor in Latin America and Asia it’s about 60% (or even 80%) and rising. It means food aid is vital, and without it people will starve. But as food prices rise, the amount forthcoming (when it’s most needed) falls because not enough money is available and too few donors offer help.
Agencies that can are doing less with ones like USAID saying it’s cutting the amount of food aid it provides but won’t say why. It’s mission is to help the rich, not the poor, or as it states on its web site: as a US government agency, it “receives (its) overall foreign policy guidance from the Secretary of State (and its mission is to) further America’s foreign policy interests (in the areas of) economic growth, agriculture and trade….” That leaves out the poor.
Oxfam worries about what USAID ignores. It called for immediate action by donors and governments to protect the world’s poor against rising food prices. One spokesperson said: “Global economic uncertainty, high food prices, drought (and other factors) all pose a serious threat to (the) vulnerable.” Another added: “More and more people are going to be facing food shortages in the future. (Because of) rising food prices we need to think (of its) impact on (the world’s poor) who are spending up to 80% of their incomes on food.”
The UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food, Jean Ziegler, also expressed alarm. In comments to the French daily Liberation he said: “We are heading for a very long period of rioting, conflicts (and) waves of uncontrollable regional instability marked by the despair of the most vulnerable populations.” He noted that even under normal circumstances hunger plagues the world and claims the life of a child under age 10 every five seconds. Because of the present crisis, we now face “an imminent massacre.”
Besides the usual factors cited, it’s vital to ask why, but don’t expect Brazil’s Lula to explain. Biofuel production is the main culprit, but not according to him. Brazil is a major biofuels producer. Last year it signed an R&D “Ethanol Pact” with Washington to develop “next generation” technologies for even more production.
In an April 16 Reuters report, the former union leader was dismissive about the current crisis and rejected criticisms that biofuels are at fault. In spite of protests at home and around the world, he told reporters: “Don’t tell me….that food is expensive because of biodiesel. (It’s) expensive because” peoples’ economic situation has improved and they’re eating more. It’s true in parts of China and India, but not in most other countries where incomes haven’t kept pace with inflation.
Biofuels - A Scourge of Our Times
The idea of combustible fuels from organic material has been around since the early auto age, but only recently took off. Because they’re from plant-based or animal byproduct (renewable) sources, bio or agrofuels are (falsely) touted as a solution to a growing world energy shortage with a huge claimed added benefit - the nonsensical notion that they’re clean and green without all the troublesome issues connected to fossil fuels.
Biofuel is a general term to describe all fuels from organic matter. The two most common kinds are bioethanol as a substitute for gasoline, and biodiesel that serves the same purpose for that type fuel.
Bioethanol is produced from sugar-rich crops like corn, wheat and sugar cane. Most cars can burn a petroleum fuel blend with up to 10% bioethanol without any engine modifications. Some newer cars can run on pure bioethanol.
Biodiesel is produced from a variety of vegetable oils, including soybean, palm and rapeseed (canola), plus animal fats. This fuel can replace regular diesel with no engine modifications required.
Cellulosic ethanol is another variety and is made by breaking down fiber from grasses or most other kinds of plants. Biofuels of all types are renewable since crops are grown in season, harvested, then replanted for more output repeatedly.
In George Bush’s 2007 State of the Union address, he announced “It’s in our vital interest to diversify America’s energy supply (and we) must continue investing in new methods of producing ethanol (to) reduce gasoline usage in the United States by 20% in the next 10 years. (To do it) we must (set) a mandatory fuels (target of) 35 billion gallons of renewable and alternative fuels in 2017 (to) reduce our dependence on foreign oil.”
Congress earlier passed the Energy Policy Act of 2005 that mandated ethanol fuel production rise to four billion gallons in 2006 and 7.5 billion by 2012. It already reached 6.5 billion barrels last year and is heading for nine billion this year.
The 2007 Energy Independence and Security Act gave added impetus to the Bush administration scheme with plenty of agribusiness subsidies backing it. Its final version sailed through both Houses in December, and George Bush made it official on December 19. It upped the stakes over 2005 with one of its provisions calling for 36 billion gallons of renewable fuels by 2022 to replace 15% of their equivalent in oil. It represents a nearly fivefold increase from current levels, and new goals ahead may set it higher as rising oil prices (topping $117 a barrel April 21) make a case for cheaper alternatives, and some in the environmental community claim biofuels are eco-friendly.
Hold the applause, and look at the facts. In a nutshell, organic fuels trash rainforests, deplete water reserves, kill off species, and increase greenhouse emissions when the full effects of producing them are included. At least that’s what Science Magazine says on the latter point. It reviewed studies that examined how destruction of natural ecosystems (such as tropical rain forests and South American grasslands) not only releases greenhouse gases when they’re burned and plowed but also deprives the planet of natural sponges to absorb carbon emissions. Cropland also absorbs less carbon than rain forests or even the scrubland it replaces.
Nature Conservancy scientist Joseph Fargione (lead author of one study) concluded that grassland clearance releases 93 times the greenhouse gases that would be saved by fuel made annually on that land. For scientists and others concerned about global warming, the research indicated that biofuel production exacerbates the problem and thus should be reconsidered. Others disagree and so far the trend continues with Europe and America both setting ambitious goals that pay little attention to the consequences they ignore.
Eric Holt-Gimenez, executive director of the Food First/Institute for Food and Development Policy, pays close attention and wrote about it in an article published last June by Agencia Latinoamericana de Informacion (ALAI) and thereafter widely distributed. It’s headlined “Biofuels: The Five Myths of the Agro-fuels Transition.” As he puts it: “the mythic baggage of the agro-fuels transition needs to be publicly unpacked.”
1. Agrofuels aren’t clean and green. As cited above, they produce far greater greenhouse gas emissions than they save and also require large amounts of oil-based fertilizers that contribute even more.
2. Agrofuel production will be hugely destructive to forests in countries like Brazil where vast Amazon devastation is well documented and is currently increasing at nearly 325,000 hectares a year. By 2020 in Indonesia, “palm oil plantations for bio-diesel (will continue to be) the primary cause of forest loss (in a) country with one of the highest deforestation rates in the world.”
3. Agrofuels will destroy rural development. Small farmers will be forced off their land and so will many thousands of others in communities to make way for Big Oil, Agribusiness, and Agribiotech to move in and take over for the huge profits to be extracted in the multi-billions.
4. Agrofuels increase hunger. The poor are always hurt most, the topic is covered above, and Holt-Gimenez quotes another forecast. It’s the International Food Policy Research Institute’s estimate that basic food staple prices will rise 30 - 33% by 2010, but that figure already undershoots based on current data. FPRI also sees the rise continuing to 2020 by another 26 to 135% that will be catastrophic for the world’s poor who can’t afford today’s prices and are ill-equipped to raise their incomes more than marginally if at all.
5. Better “second-generation” argofuels aren’t around the corner. Examples touted are eco-friendly fast-growing trees and switchgrass (a dominant warm season central North American tallgrass prairie species). Holt-Gimenez calls the argument a “bait and switch-grass shell game” to make the case for first generation production now ongoing. The same environmental problems exists, and they’ll be hugely exacerbated by more extensive GMO crop plantings.
Holt-Gimenez sees agrofuels as a “genetic Trojan horse” that’s letting agribusiness giants like Monsanto “colonize both our fuel and food system,” do little to offset a growing demand for oil, reap huge profits from the scheme, get them at taxpayers’ expense, and that’s exactly what’s happening with Big Oil in on it, too, as a way to diversify through large biofuel investments. More on this below.
The Ghost of Henry Kissinger
Kissinger made a chilling 1970 comment that explains a lot about what’s happening now - “Control oil and you control nations; control food and you control the people.” Combine it with unchallengeable military power and you control everything, and Kissinger likely said that, too.
He said plenty more in his classified 1974 memo on a secret project called National Security Study Memorandum 200 (NSSM 200) for a “world population plan of action” for drastic global population control. He meant reducing it by hundreds of millions, using food as a weapon, and overall reorganizing the global food market to destroy family farms and replace them with (agribusiness-run) factory ones. It’s been ongoing for decades, backed since January 1995 by WTO muscle, and characterized now by huge agribusiness giants with monstrous vertically integrated powers over the food we eat - from research labs to plantings to processing to the supermarket and other food outlet shelves around the world.
But it’s even worse than that. Today, five agribusiness behemoths, with little fanfare and enormous government backing, plan big at our expense - to control the world’s food supply by making it all genetically engineered with biofuels one part of a larger scheme.
By diverting crops for fuel, prices have exploded, and five “Ag biotech” giants are exploiting it - Monsanto, DuPont, Dow Agrisciences, Syngenta and Bayer CropScience AG. Their solution - make all crops GMO, tout it as a way to increase output and reduce costs, and claim it’s the solution to today’s soaring prices and world hunger.
In fact, agribusiness power raises prices, controls output to keep them high, and the main factor behind today’s situation is the conversion of US farmland to biofuel factories. With less crop output for food and world demand for it growing, prices are rising, and rampant commodity speculation exacerbates the problem with traders profiting hugely and loving it. It’s another part of the multi-decade wealth transfer scheme from the world’s majority to the elite few. While the trend continues, its momentum is self-sustaining, and it works because governments back it. They subsidize the problem, keep regulations loose, give business free reign, and maintain that markets work best so let them.
As mentioned above, about 43% of US corn output goes for animal feed, but growing amounts are for biofuels - now possibly 25 - 30% of production compared to around 14% two years ago, up 300% since 2001, and today the total exceeds what’s earmarked for export, with no slowing down of this trend in sight. The result, of course, is world grain reserves are falling, prices soaring, millions starving, governments permitting it, and it’s only the early innings of a long-term horrifying trend - radically transforming agriculture in humanly destructive ways:
– letting agribusiness and Big Oil giants control it for profit at the expense of consumer health and well-being;
– making it all genetically engineered and inflicting great potential harm to human health; and
– producing reduced crop amounts for food, diverting greater quantities for fuel, allowing prices to soar, making food as dear as oil, ending government’s responsibility for food security, and tolerating the unthinkable - putting hundreds of millions of poor around the world in jeopardy and letting them starve to death for profit.
This is the brave new world neoliberal schemers have in mind. They’re well along with their plans, marginally diverted by today’s economic distress, well aware that growing world protests that could prove hugely disruptive, but very focused, nonetheless, on finding clever ways to push ahead with what’s worked pretty well for them so far, so they’re not about to let human misery jeopardize big profits.
If they won’t reform, people have to do it for them, and throughout history that’s how it’s always worked. Over time, the stakes keep rising as the threats become greater, and today they may be as great as they’ve ever been.
What better time for a new social movement like those in the past that were pivotal forces for change. Famed community organizer Saul Alinsky knew the way to beat organized money is with organized people. In combination, they’ve succeeded by taking to the streets, striking, boycotting, challenging authority, disrupting business, paying with their lives and ultimately prevailing by knowing change never comes from the top down. It’s always from the grassroots, from the bottom up, and what better time for it than now. It’s high time democracy worked for everyone, that destructive GMO and biofuels schemes won’t be tolerated, and that “America the Beautiful” won’t any longer just be for elites and no one else.
Have Your Say: Hunger Plagues Haiti and the World
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Clinton on Iran Attack: ‘Obliterate Them’
Tuesday, April 22nd, 2008
By Jake Tapper |
One day before Pennsylvania primary voters go to the polls, Sens. Hillary Clinton, D-N.Y., and Barack Obama, D-Ill., spent the day trying to reach undecided voters, and rally their supporters to the polls.
For the last six weeks they have battled and bickered and both have unleashed a barrage of negativity in television ads that have aired thousands of times in the state.
Clinton Ad Features Osama bin Laden
In an ad that began airing in Pennsylvania Monday morning, Clinton implies she is tougher than Obama.
“Who do you think has what it takes?” the narrator asks in an ad depicting historical images of crises that presidents have had to deal with: Osama bin Laden, headlines about the stock market crash of 1929, long gas lines from the 1970s oil-shocks, images of the Cold War, Hurricane Katrina and soldiers. It features the first image of Osama bin Laden to be used in a TV ad this political season.
“It’s the toughest job in the world,” says the ad’s narrator. “You need to be ready for anything especially now, with two wars, oil prices skyrocketing and an economy in crisis.”
The ad quotes President Harry Truman’s famous line: “If you can’t stand the heat, get out of the kitchen,” to cast Obama as complaining about last week’s ABC News presidential debate.
Responding to the ad, Obama spokesman Bill Burton accused the New York senator of engaging in scare tactics.
Clinton on an Iran Attack: ‘Obliterate Them’
Clinton further displayed tough talk in an interview airing on “Good Morning America” Tuesday. ABC News’ Chris Cuomo asked Clinton what she would do if Iran attacked Israel with nuclear weapons.
“I want the Iranians to know that if I’m the president, we will attack Iran,” Clinton said. “In the next 10 years, during which they might foolishly consider launching an attack on Israel, we would be able to totally obliterate them.”
Watch the full interview with Sen. Hillary Clinton on “GMA” Tuesday.
Obama, for his part, has to be worried about obliterating his repeated promise of a “new kind of politics.” But he told ABC News’ Robin Roberts on “Good Morning America” his attacks are necessary.
“You’ve always got to measure if somebody throws an elbow at you, and after three or four times of gettin’ elbows in the ribs, you know, at what point do you sort of say, ‘OK, you know, we, we, we’ve gotta put a stop to that’?” Obama said.
Washington a ‘Miserable Place’
In Obama’s latest ad airing Monday in Pennsylvania, the ad accuses, “Sen. Clinton has internalized a lot of the strategies, the tactics that have made Washington such a miserable place.”
Campaigning in Bethlehem, Pa., Monday, Clinton fired back, accusing Obama of running a campaign that is just as negative.
“He has consistently, and including in Pennsylvania, he has sent out mailers, he has run ads misrepresenting what I have proposed,” Clinton said.
The negativity continued this week with Pennsylvania voters receiving automated phone calls.
“Why would Barack Obama vote for a Bush-Cheney energy bill?” said a robotic call for the Clinton campaign.
“I don’t trust Sen. Clinton as much on issues that are important to sportsmen,” said a call for the Obama campaign.
Going Negative, Going to the Mat
Fittingly, both candidates recorded messages Monday night for WWE pro wrestling.
“This election is starting to feel a lot like ‘king of the ring.’” Clinton said in the message. “The only difference? The last man standing may just be a woman.”
“To all the forces of division and distraction that has stopped us from making progress for the American people, I’ve got one question: Do you smell what Barack is cooking?” Obama said in his message.
In a sign of how much party officials are worried about the damage this intense fight is doing to the Democrats, the North Carolina Democratic Party has canceled a proposed debate, and one of the reasons for the cancelation is a reluctance to further highlight the fighting between the two candidates.
ABC News’ Richard Coolidge, Eloise Harper, and Sunlen Miller contributed to this report.
Have Your Say: Clinton on Iran Attack: ‘Obliterate Them’
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‘US cannot win in Afghanistan’
Tuesday, April 22nd, 2008
Press TV |
The US-led coalition is not winning the war in Afghanistan and now is the time to make a fundamental correction, says a US serving officer.
NATO and coalition forces are “stumbling toward failure” in Afghanistan and no amount of military success against the Taliban will bring an end to the war without a fundamental change in political policy, says Col. Thomas Lynch.
In his provocative article in the latest edition of The American Interest, a Washington-based policy journal, Lynch says the US and NATO cannot win in Afghanistan without convincing both Afghans and Pakistanis that economic support and Western military are there to stay.
Lynch in his article titled “Afghan Dilemmas: Staying Power” says only a permanent NATO force - of the kind that guaranteed the security of western Europe after the Second World War - can bring about peace and stability in Afghanistan.
Lynch served as special assistant to the US ambassador to Kabul in 2004. For the past four years he was stationed with the US army in Afghanistan, Iraq and Qatar, and is now on a temporary fellowship with the Brookings Institution, a Washington think-tank.
In an e-mail interview with Canwest News Service, Lynch also said Canadian forces should consider leaving Kandahar and take on a new “stability” mission in the less volatile areas of northern or western Afghanistan.
Lynch says Canada, like most European allies, lacks the equipment and resources - helicopters, close-air support, logistics and “economic support tools” - to take charge of the tough, counter-insurgency work required in southern Afghanistan.
He says the US “miscalculated” when it gave NATO control of the counter-insurgency mission in southern Afghanistan in 2006, thinking that peacekeeping and stability work would follow.
Instead, the Taliban insurgency flared up, forcing Canada and other NATO members into a combat role they were not expecting.
Lynch says the key to success lies in the politics of Pakistan, which has long viewed Afghanistan as a source of strategic depth against India: fear of India in the east, and fear of losing control of Afghanistan on its western frontier, have been a driving force in Pakistan since independence.
That is why Pakistan helped create the Taliban as a puppet government in Kabul - and why elements of the Pakistan government still support them, he claimed.
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Ending Slavery for Pennies
Tuesday, April 22nd, 2008
By Katrina vanden Heuvel and Greg Kaufman |
The slave-like conditions in the agriculture industry would shock most Americans. On April 15, at a packed Senate hearing on working conditions for tomato workers, Senator Bernie Sanders asked Detective Charlie Frost, investigator for the human trafficking unit at the Collier County Sheriff’s Office, “Do you believe that there is human trafficking happening in Florida agriculture as we speak right now?”
“It’s probably occurring right now while we sit here,” Frost said. “Almost assuredly it’s going on right now.”
“Detective, would you agree that in these slavery cases, there are people higher up the economic chain who are complicit and who benefit financially from what goes on?” Sanders asked. “[And if so,] do you believe we need to change the law to prevent the growers from shielding themselves from responsibility?”
“They isolate themselves from what is occurring, and they benefit from what’s going on,” Frost said. “We have to do something. We have to hold them accountable. This is occurring in their backyard, this is occurring in our fields, this is occurring in our country.”
Not a single Republican committee member was on hand to hear this or any of the other testimony that described slavery in the US in 2008; worker conditions that are — as Eric Schlosser put it — “like something you might encounter in the year 1868, not 2008″; or the loopholes in labor laws which allow systemic exploitation to continue. The “party of Lincoln” was simply MIA, while Sen. Sanders was joined by his Democratic colleagues, Senators Edward Kennedy, Richard Durbin, and Sherrod Brown.
Mary Bauer, Director of the Immigrant Justice Project at the Southern Law Poverty Center, testified that “for every [slavery] case we hear about, there are hundreds of other cases with similar kinds of power relationships… less dramatic but still incredibly oppressive circumstances that in effect amount to forced labor that are extremely common, and in fact close to the norm in many industries…. I do not believe that the American people would be comfortable if they knew how their food is being produced. They would not want to eat food that had been produced in this way.”
The hearing revealed that even when multibillion-dollar corporations like McDonald’s and Yum! Brands (whose subsidiaries include Taco Bell, Pizza Hut, KFC, Long John Silver’s and A&W) attempt to do the right thing — and pay the workers more — powerful agribusiness interests have stood in the way. These corporations agreed to supplement the workers at a rate of an additional penny per pound for the tomatoes they purchase. Doesn’t sound like much — and it isn’t for the corporations — but it would result in about a 75 percent salary increase for workers who a 2001 US Department of Labor report described as “a labor force in significant economic distress… [with] low wages, sub-poverty annual earnings, [and] significant periods of un- and underemployment.”
As some growers began to implement the Yum/McDonald’s agreement — an extra paycheck cut to the farmworkers by the buyers, not the growers, mind you — the Florida Tomato Growers Exchange (FTGE), representing 90 percent of the state’s growers, said any members who adopted this policy would be fined $100,000 per worker benefiting from the agreement.
Reginald Brown, Executive Vice President of the FTGE, was at the hearing trying, desperately, to justify opposition to the agreement as stemming from legal concerns.
Sen. Sanders entered into the record a letter from 26 legal professors specializing in labor law, including antitrust dimensions of labor standards, writing that “the ostensible legal concerns of the Growers Exchange are utterly without merit.” (In fact, the experts concluded, the only real antitrust issue might be several growers agreeing amongst themselves to reject the deal.) He noted that McDonald’s and Yum! Brands also entered letters into the record stating that there are no legal problems with the extra penny deal and that they want it implemented.
“I gather that McDonald’s and Yum have some money to hire some pretty good attorneys,” Sen. Sanders told Brown. “You might want to reconsider the attorneys you are using and rethink this issue.”
Then Brown argued that it wasn’t just the legal argument, but also that buyers would look to Mexico for cheaper tomatoes (even though it’s the buyers who are offering to pay the extra penny). Brown said that the “tomato industry will go away, and Florida’s economy will suffer.”
It was as if Brown were acting out the very analogy that Lucas Benitez — a former tomato worker, co-founder of the Coalition of Immokalee Workers (CIW), and recipient of the 2003 RFK Human Rights Award — drew in his testimony between the opposition farmworkers rights advocates face today and that which confronted abolitionists 200 years ago. (These early 19th century abolitionists were the predecessors to those who later founded The Nation in 1865.)
“Exactly 200 years ago, near this very spot, men in your position voted to outlaw the importation of slaves into the United States,” Benitez testified through a translator. “That little known act did not end slavery, but it was an important step toward the eventual abolition of a brutal institution. At the time, passing that piece of legislation was complex, controversial and courageous. Those who supported the status quo argued that most slaves were happy with their lot, that they were certainly better off than where they came from, and that the economic collapse of US agriculture would surely follow.”
Indeed, it’s not too much of a stretch to view Brown and his cohorts as 21st century George Wallaces or Bull Connors, standing in the way of the progress of human rights in our own nation. Brown boasted of the workers who continue to return to the fields; of the “entry level job” tomato picking represents on the way towards achieving the American dream; of the “shock” that FTGE felt in response to the slavery cases — cases Schlosser pointed out were never uncovered by the growers who work with the labor contractors, but by CIW - in the relatively small town of Immokalee; and, time and again, Brown pointed to Socially Accountable Farm Employers (SAFE) — “an independent third party” that is auditing growers to make sure workers are treated with respect and paid fair wages. But Sanders revealed that two of the five members of the SAFE Board of Directors are Brown himself and Mike Stuart, President of the Florida Fruit and Vegetable Association (FFVA). FFVA lists helping growers meet their labor needs while keeping costs down as one of its key responsibilities. Further, neither Brown nor Stuart reveal their positions in the industry on the SAFE website.
It’s in this environment that a worker picks an average of two tons of tomatoes a day for about $50, or $10,000 - $12,500 annually (a Department of Labor figure inflated by including supervisory personnel); where much if not all of their salaries go towards paying for trailers where 8 - 10 workers live together; where complaints are met with threats, beatings or worse. And when these workers — whether US citizens or immigrants, and witnesses testified that these issues apply to both — are enslaved, or forced into debt-servitude, or beaten, or sexually harassed, or not paid, or having their families back home threatened, their access to help is far more limited than that of other workers. Bauer noted that they have no right to organize; no overtime pay; no federal minimum wage law on smaller farms or in short harvest seasons; exemptions to child labor laws; and state health and safety laws that exclude farmworkers. She said this isn’t a Florida-only problem, it’s the widespread result of “agriculture exceptionalism.” Schlosser said that as recently as the 1950’s Florida police would prosecute African-Americans under vagrancy laws and send them to the fields to work off the fines.
Both Senators Kennedy and Sanders said this is just the beginning of investigating these injustices. In his concluding statement, Sen. Sanders said a GAO audit of wage and hour records of the growers is needed; agriculture workers need to be covered under both the Fair Labor Standards Act and the National Labor Relations Act; changes need to be made to the federal trafficking statutes to address growers and others who are avoiding prosecution by remaining willfully blind to the abuses around them; anti-trust implications of the FTGE activities need to be examined; and “we need to make sure that slavery, servitude and other abuses in the Florida tomato industry continue to receive the attention both in and outside Congress that they deserve so that it is stopped once and for all.”
As for Benitez, he’s been a part of this struggle for decades. He recalled during a 1997 worker hunger strike a grower saying that they would never meet the workers’ single demand for dialogue. “‘Let me put it to you like this,’” the grower said. “‘The tractor doesn’t tell the farmer how to run a farm.’” Benitez continued, “That’s how they’ve always seen us, just another tool and nothing more. But we aren’t alone anymore. Today there are millions of consumers with us willing to use their buying power to eliminate the exploitation behind the food they buy. And a new dawn for social responsibility in the agriculture industry is on its way. With the help of Congress and with the faith that the complicated will be made clear under the purifying light of human rights, today, just as it was 200 years ago, we will witness the dawn of that new day.”
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The most potent weapon wielded by Murdoch and China
Tuesday, April 22nd, 2008
By George Monbiot |
If you want to know how powerful Rupert Murdoch is, read the reviews of Bruce Dover’s book, Rupert’s Adventures in China. Well, go on, read them. You can’t find any? I rest my case. Dover was Murdoch’s vice-president in China, and took his orders directly from the boss. His book, which was published in February, is a fascinating study of power, and of a man who could not bring himself to believe that anyone would stand in his way. So why aren’t we reading about it?
Murdoch, Dover shows, began his assault on China with two strategic mistakes. The first was to pay a staggering price - $525m - for a majority stake in Star TV, a failing satellite broadcaster based in Hong Kong. The second was to make a speech in September 1993, a few months after he had bought the business, which he had neither written nor read very carefully. New telecommunications, he said, “have proved an unambiguous threat to totalitarian regimes everywhere … satellite broadcasting makes it possible for information-hungry residents of many closed societies to bypass state-controlled television channels”.
The Chinese leaders were furious. The prime minister, Li Peng, issued a decree banning satellite dishes from China. Murdoch spent the next 10 years grovelling. In the interests of business the great capitalist became the communist government’s most powerful supporter.
Within six months of Li Peng’s ban, Murdoch dropped the BBC from Star’s China signal. His publishing company, HarperCollins, paid a fortune for a tedious biography of the paramount leader, Deng Xiaoping, written by Deng’s daughter. He built a website for the regime’s propaganda sheet, the People’s Daily. In 1997 he made another speech in which he tried to undo the damage he had caused four years before. “China,” he said, “is a distinctive market with distinctive social and moral values that western companies must learn to abide by.” His minions ensured, Dover reveals, that “every relevant Chinese government official received a copy”.
But the satellite dishes remained banned, so he grovelled even more. He described the Dalai Lama as “a very political old monk shuffling around in Gucci shoes”. His son James claimed that the western media were “painting a falsely negative portrayal of China through their focus on controversial issues such as human rights”. Rupert employed his unsalaried gopher Tony Blair to give him special access: in 1999 Blair placed him next to then Chinese president, Jiang Zemin, at a Downing Street lunch. To secure some limited cable rights in southern China, News Corporation agreed to carry a Chinese government channel - CCTV-9 - on Fox and Sky. Murdoch promised to “further strengthen cooperative ties with the Chinese media, and explore new areas with an even more positive attitude”.
Most notoriously, he instructed HarperCollins not to publish the book that it had bought from the former governor of Hong Kong, Chris Patten. Dover reveals that Murdoch was forced to intervene directly (he instructed the publishers to “kill the fucking book”) because his usual system of control had broken down. “Murdoch very rarely issued directives or instructions to his senior executives or editors.” Instead he expected “a sort of ‘anticipatory compliance’. One didn’t need to be instructed about what to do, one simply knew what was in one’s long-term interests.” In this case HarperCollins executives had failed to understand that when the boss objected to Patten’s views on China, it meant that the book was dead.
Anticipatory compliance also describes Murdoch’s approach to Beijing. Dover shows that the Chinese leadership never asked for Chris Patten’s book to be banned: they didn’t even know it existed. But when Murdoch killed it, “our Beijing minders were impressed and the Patten incident marked a distinct warming in the relationship”.
The strategy failed. Murdoch was astonished that he couldn’t replicate “the cosy relationship he enjoyed with Britain’s political establishment”. For the first time in his later career, he had encountered an organisation more powerful and more determined than he was. He has now retreated from China after losing at least $1bn.
This is a riveting story about two of the world’s most powerful forces. Dover’s British publisher told me: “I thought this was a natural for serialisation. We had the author primed and prepared to come over here. But we had to cancel as we could not raise enough interest. We’ve hit brick walls and we don’t understand why.” The book has been reviewed in the Economist and the Financial Times, but neither other British newspapers nor broadcasters have touched it.
As far as I can discover, the book has been reviewed by only one Murdoch publication anywhere on earth - the Australian Literary Review - and that was an article of such snivelling sycophancy that you wonder why they bothered. The editor of another News Corporation title, the Far Eastern Economic Review, commissioned a review, then admitted to contracting “cold feet” and spiked it.
But what of the other papers? Why should they appease Murdoch? “When you see the reaction of the British media to the book,” Dover tells me, “one can better understand why in some respects the Chinese so admired Murdoch - an emperor who inspires fear in his followers need not raise a hand against them.” He might be right, but I think there is also a general bias against relevance in the review sections. When I worked in faraway countries, my books about the tribulations of obscure peoples were comprehensively reviewed. When I came home and wrote Captive State: The Corporate Takeover of Britain, it was ignored. There appears to be an inverse relationship between how hard a book hits and how well it is covered.
Oddly for a publication that inspires such fear, Dover’s story sometimes steps back from the brink. He observes that News Corporation never promised the Chinese government favourable coverage; Murdoch undertook only to be “fair”, “balanced” and “objective”. Dover takes these terms at face value, though it is obvious from his account that they were being used as code for sympathetic treatment. His book does not contain News Corporation’s most direct admission: the statement by Murdoch’s spokesman Wang Yukui that “we won’t do programmes that are offensive in China … If you call this self-censorship then of course we’re doing a kind of self-censorship”. He is wrong to suggest that “Murdoch very rarely issued directives or instructions”. As the testimony by Andrew Neil (a former editor of the Sunday Times) before the House of Lords communications committee shows, the paramount leader micromanages the editorial content of the newspapers he owns that swing the greatest political weight.
But I am sure it is true that anticipatory compliance is Murdoch’s most powerful weapon. I doubt he needed to tell all 247 of his editors to support the invasion of Iraq, but they did. He might not even have had to lean on Tony Blair to ensure - as Blair’s former spin doctor Lance Price reveals - that no British minister said “anything positive about the euro”. Power is sustained not by force but by fear, as everyone seeks to interpret the wishes of his master and to meet them even before he asks.
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Judges poised to deliver new blow on terror
Tuesday, April 22nd, 2008
By
Gordon Brown is facing a new battle over key anti-terrorism laws this week with the High Court set to rule against powers to freeze suspects’ bank accounts. Five men who deny any link to terrorism and have no previous convictions are challenging the Government’s powers to freeze bank accounts, stop benefit payments and control the spending of people it has designated terror suspects.
The judgment is to be delivered on Thursday by Mr Justice Collins. If the Government loses, The Times has learnt that it is considering rewriting the Counter-terrorism Bill to include asset-seizing powers.
Thursday’s ruling could exacerbate the tension between the Government and judiciary. Last week the High Court ruled that the extremist cleric Abu Qatada could not be deported to Jordan because he would be at risk of torture.
The counter-terrorism legislation is already at the centre of controversy over proposals to lengthen the time that a suspect can be detained without charge to 42 days.
The power to designate people as terror suspects and freeze their finances was introduced without parliamentary debate by Mr Brown when he was Chancellor. He has declared that the Treasury has become a “department for security”.
Treasury officials maintain two lists of suspects — thought to number around 70 people in total — and have frozen bank accounts containing around £500,000 in all.
Mr Justice Collins indicated his concern this month during a hearing when he described elements of the sanctions as “unfair and not proportionate”. He criticised the requirement for designated suspects to apply to the Treasury for a licence before they could get legal advice about the designation.
The judge said that it was “totally unacceptable” that a suspect “needed a licence from the Executive and body imposing the sanctions”.
The challenge to the sanctions regime has been brought by five men identified in court only as A, K, M, Q and G. They were notified of their designation in identical letters that stated: “The Treasury has reasonable grounds to suspect that you are, or may be, a person who facilitates the commission of acts of terrorism. In the light of the sensitive nature of the information on which this decision was taken we are unable to give you further details.”
Under the sanctions, the men must apply for basic expenses licences from the Treasury to get spending money of £10 per week.
Officials in the Treasury monitor the suspects’ grocery bills and decide whether they are allowed to accept gifts. Anyone found to have given a designated suspect an “economic resource” is liable to prosecution and a jail term of seven years. Lawyers for the men say that the orders – Britain’s interpretation of two United Nations Security Council resolutions – are unlawful on several grounds.
They argue that it is unconstitutional for the Government to have accrued the powers to freeze assets through Orders in Council rather than parliamentary legislation. The effect was to give the Government power to impose stringent sanctions on individual citizens without parliamentary debate.
Similarly, the men argue that the introduction of a criminal offence of assisting a designated person should not have been carried out without proper parliamentary scrutiny.
They also claim that the Government acted illegally by going farther in its measures than the UN intended and may have exceeded its powers under the United Nations Act 1946. Another argument is the lack of an appeal mechanism through the courts.
The suspect G was told that he had been designated by the UN Sanctions Committee and would have to appeal to it if he wanted his name removed.
He has found it impossible to appeal because he is not allowed to see the evidence that led to his designation, and he cannot discover who sits on the committee. He has also learnt that the Government, through which he is expected to lobby the UN, is the body that recommended that he be designated as a terror suspect.
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Controversial council tax database
Tuesday, April 22nd, 2008
By Tomos Livingstone |
A CONTROVERSIAL database that calculates council tax bands according to features like parking space and the view from the front room is to be used in Wales. The database is run by the Valuation Office Agency, the Government body that decides which homes fall into which council tax bands.
It is already in use in England, which has yet to undergo the “rebanding” process which landed many Welsh homes in a higher council tax bracket in 2005.
Conservatives have seized on the revelation as evidence that another rebanding was already being planned in Wales.
The Assembly Government said there were “no plans” for such a move, although Ministers have expressed a desire to reband properties more frequently – the 2005 change was the first for 14 years – to make the tax fairer.
With local elections just 10 days away, the Tories are hoping to turn the rise in council tax bills over the past decade to their advantage.
Use of the database will mean “every house with a nice view… faces the prospect of higher taxes”, said Shadow Welsh Secretary Cheryl Gillan.
But a Government source insisted the database, know in Whitehall jargon as the “automated valuation model”, was simply being used to keep the 2005 lists up to date.
The model uses a computer programme to calculate the value of a property – and by extension its council tax band – by assessing a number of factors including size, access to shops and location.
The Western Mail revealed earlier this month that thousands of homes face a higher council tax bill because the Valuation Office Agency claims it placed properties in the wrong bands during the 2005 exercise.
In total 18,000 households made formal complaints about their new council tax bands after the revaluation.
In a parliamentary answer Jane Kennedy, the Financial Secretary to the Treasury, said: “The Valuation Office Agency is currently developing automated valuation model capabilities to support work in connection with the maintenance of the current (2005) council tax lists in Wales. This will increase both the overall efficiency of the agency’s work, and will deliver further improvements in customer service for taxpayers in Wales.”
Cheryl Gillan, Shadow Secretary of State for Wales, said: “Households across Wales face being sized up by Government inspectors for every sign of improvements to their property.
“Every house with a nice view, or close to local shops, is going to be recorded on a state-run database and faces the prospect of higher taxes.
“Hard-working families, pensioners and individuals across Wales are already struggling to cope with soaring council tax bills. Only Labour could think to penalise them even further for living in a nice neighbourhood or for taking care of their properties.
She added: “With higher bills and poorer local services, people are asking ‘where has all our money gone?’.”
A spokesman for Welsh Labour said last night: “The Tories are complete hypocrites on council tax. The fact is that council tax in Wales went up much faster when the Tories were in office. Since 1997 Welsh local government has enjoyed record levels of funding from the Assembly Government. Council tax rises have been kept down year on year, so that the average band D council tax in Wales is around three quarters of the latest estimated figure of £1,374 for England.
“People in Wales will judge the parties on their record. And this year the Tories imposed a double whammy, with the highest council tax rise in Conservative-controlled Monmouthshire and the second highest in Conwy, where they share power.”
A spokeswoman for the Assembly Government said no date had been fixed for the next revaluation of domestic properties in Wales but the Local Government Act 2003 required it to done within 10 years of the last one in 2005.
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