http://www.inthesetimes.com/article/4028/what_a_long_strange_trip_its_been
What a Long, Strange Trip It’s Been
Looking back on a surreal campaign season
By Bill Ayers
Whew! What was all that mess? I’m still in a daze, sorting it all out, decompressing.
Pass the Vitamin C.
For the past few years, I have gone about my business, hanging out with my kids and, now, my grandchildren, taking care of our elders (they moved in as the kids moved out), going to work, teaching and writing. And every day, I participate in the never-ending effort to build a powerful and irresistible movement for peace and social justice.
In years past, I would now and then—often unpredictably—appear in the newspapers or on TV, sometimes with a reference to Fugitive Days, my 2001 memoir of the exhilarating and difficult years of resistance against the American war in Vietnam. It was a time when the world was in flames, revolution was in the air, and the serial assassinations of black leaders disrupted our utopian dreams.
These media episodes of fleeting notoriety always led to some extravagant and fantastic assertions about what I did, what I might have said and what I probably believe now.
It was always a bit surreal. Then came this political season.
During the primary, the blogosphere was full of chatter about my relationship with President-elect Barack Obama. We had served together on the board of the Woods Foundation and knew one another as neighbors in Chicago’s Hyde Park. In 1996, at a coffee gathering that my wife, Bernardine Dohrn, and I held for him, I made a donation to his campaign for the Illinois State Senate.
Obama’s political rivals and enemies thought they saw an opportunity to deepen a dishonest perception that he is somehow un-American, alien, linked to radical ideas, a closet terrorist who sympathizes with extremism—and they pounced.
Sen. Hillary Clinton’s (D-N.Y.) campaign provided the script, which included guilt by association, demonization of people Obama knew (or might have known), creepy questions about his background and dark hints about hidden secrets yet to be uncovered.
On March 13, Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), apparently in an attempt to reassure the “base,” sat down for an interview with Sean Hannity of Fox News. McCain was not yet aware of the narrative Hannity had been spinning for months, and so Hannity filled him in: Ayers is an unrepentant “terrorist,” he explained, “On 9/11, of all days, he had an article where he bragged about bombing our Pentagon, bombing the Capitol and bombing New York City police headquarters. … He said, ‘I regret not doing more.’ “
McCain couldn’t believe it.
Neither could I.
On the campaign trail, McCain immediately got on message. I became a prop, a cartoon character created to be pummeled.
When Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin got hold of it, the attack went viral. At a now-famous Oct. 4 rally, she said Obama was “pallin’ around with terrorists.” (I pictured us sharing a milkshake with two straws.)
The crowd began chanting, “Kill him!” “Kill him!” It was downhill from there.
My voicemail filled up with hate messages. They were mostly from men, all venting and sweating and breathing heavily. A few threats: “Watch out!” and “You deserve to be shot.” And some e-mails, like this one I got from satan@hell.com: “I’m coming to get you and when I do, I’ll water-board you.”
The police lieutenant who came to copy down those threats deadpanned that he hoped the guy who was going to shoot me got there before the guy who was going to water-board me, since it would be most foul to be tortured and then shot. (We have been pals ever since he was first assigned to investigate threats made against me in 1987, after I was hired as an assistant professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago.)
The good news was that every time McCain or Palin mentioned my name, they lost a point or two in the polls. The cartoon invented to hurt Obama was now poking holes in the rapidly sinking McCain-Palin ship.
That ’60s show
On Aug. 28, Stephen Colbert, the faux right-wing commentator from Comedy Central who channels Bill O’Reilly on steroids, observed:
To this day, when our country holds a presidential election, we judge the candidates through the lens of the 1960s. … We all know Obama is cozy with William Ayers a ’60s radical who planted a bomb in the capital building and then later went on to even more heinous crimes by becoming a college professor. … Let us keep fighting the culture wars of our grandparents. The ’60s are a political gift that keeps on giving.
It was inevitable. McCain would bet the house on a dishonest and largely discredited vision of the ’60s, which was the defining decade for him. He built his political career on being a prisoner of war in Vietnam.
The ’60s—as myth and symbol—is much abused: the downfall of civilization in one account, a time of defeat and humiliation in a second, and a perfect moment of righteous opposition, peace and love in a third.
The idea that the 2008 election may be the last time in American political life that the ’60s plays any role whatsoever is a mixed blessing. On the one hand, let’s get over the nostalgia and move on. On the other, the lessons we might have learned from the black freedom movement and from the resistance against the Vietnam War have never been learned. To achieve this would require that we face history fully and honestly, something this nation has never done.
The war in Vietnam was an illegal invasion and occupation, much of it conducted as a war of terror against the civilian population. The U.S. military killed millions of Vietnamese in air raids—like the one conducted by McCain—and entire areas of the country were designated free-fire zones, where American pilots indiscriminately dropped surplus ordinance—an immoral enterprise by any measure.
What is really important
McCain and Palin—or as our late friend Studs Terkel put it, “Joe McCarthy in drag”—would like to bury the ’60s. The ’60s, after all, was a time of rejecting obedience and conformity in favor of initiative and courage. The ’60s pushed us to a deeper appreciation of the humanity of every human being. And that is the threat it poses to the right wing, hence the attacks and all the guilt by association.
McCain and Palin demanded to “know the full extent” of the Obama-Ayers “relationship” so that they can know if Obama, as Palin put it, “is telling the truth to the American people or not.”
This is just plain stupid.
Obama has continually been asked to defend something that ought to be at democracy’s heart: the importance of talking to as many people as possible in this complicated and wildly diverse society, of listening with the possibility of learning something new, and of speaking with the possibility of persuading or influencing others.
The McCain-Palin attacks not only involved guilt by association, they also assumed that one must apply a political litmus test to begin a conversation.
On Oct. 4, Palin described her supporters as those who “see America as the greatest force for good in this world” and as a “beacon of light and hope for others who seek freedom and democracy.” But Obama, she said, “Is not a man who sees America as you see it and how I see America.” In other words, there are “real” Americans — and then there are the rest of us.
In a robust and sophisticated democracy, political leaders—and all of us—ought to seek ways to talk with many people who hold dissenting, or even radical, ideas. Lacking that simple and yet essential capacity to question authority, we might still be burning witches and enslaving our fellow human beings today.
Maybe we could welcome our current situation—torn by another illegal war, as it was in the ’60s—as an opportunity to search for the new.
Perhaps we might think of ourselves not as passive consumers of politics but as fully mobilized political actors. Perhaps we might think of our various efforts now, as we did then, as more than a single campaign, but rather as our movement-in-the-making.
We might find hope in the growth of opposition to war and occupation worldwide. Or we might be inspired by the growing movements for reparations and prison abolition, or the rising immigrant rights movement and the stirrings of working people everywhere, or by gay and lesbian and transgender people courageously pressing for full recognition.
Yet hope—my hope, our hope—resides in a simple self-evident truth: the future is unknown, and it is also entirely unknowable.
History is always in the making. It’s up to us. It is up to me and to you. Nothing is predetermined. That makes our moment on this earth both hopeful and all the more urgent—we must find ways to become real actors, to become authentic subjects in our own history.
We may not be able to will a movement into being, but neither can we sit idly for a movement to spring full-grown, as from the head of Zeus.
We have to agitate for democracy and egalitarianism, press harder for human rights, learn to build a new society through our self-transformations and our limited everyday struggles.
At the turn of the last century, Eugene Debs, the great Socialist Party leader from Terre Haute, Ind., told a group of workers in Chicago, “If I could lead you into the Promised Land, I would not do it, because someone else would come along and lead you out.”
In this time of new beginnings and rising expectations, it is even more urgent that we figure out how to become the people we have been waiting to be.
Saturday, November 8, 2008
Thursday, November 6, 2008
Between Hope and Reality
An Open Letter to Barack Obama
By RALPH NADER, Counterpunch
Dear Senator Obama:
In your nearly two-year presidential campaign, the words "hope and change," "change and hope" have been your trademark declarations. Yet there is an asymmetry between those objectives and your political character that succumbs to contrary centers of power that want not "hope and change" but the continuation of the power-entrenched status quo.
Far more than Senator McCain, you have received enormous, unprecedented contributions from corporate interests, Wall Street interests and, most interestingly, big corporate law firm attorneys. Never before has a Democratic nominee for President achieved this supremacy over his Republican counterpart. Why, apart from your unconditional vote for the $700 billion Wall Street bailout, are these large corporate interests investing so much in Senator Obama? Could it be that in your state Senate record, your U.S. Senate record and your presidential campaign record (favoring nuclear power, coal plants, offshore oil drilling, corporate subsidies including the 1872 Mining Act and avoiding any comprehensive program to crack down on the corporate crime wave and the bloated, wasteful military budget, for example) you have shown that you are their man?
To advance change and hope, the presidential persona requires character, courage, integrity-- not expediency, accommodation and short-range opportunism. Take, for example, your transformation from an articulate defender of Palestinian rights in Chicago before your run for the U.S. Senate to an acolyte, a dittoman for the hard-line AIPAC lobby, which bolsters the militaristic oppression, occupation, blockage, colonization and land-water seizures over the years of the Palestinian peoples and their shrunken territories in the West Bank and Gaza. Eric Alterman summarized numerous polls in a December 2007 issue of The Nation magazine showing that AIPAC policies are opposed by a majority of Jewish-Americans.
You know quite well that only when the U.S. Government supports the Israeli and Palestinian peace movements, that years ago worked out a detailed two-state solution (which is supported by a majority of Israelis and Palestinians), will there be a chance for a peaceful resolution of this 60-year plus conflict. Yet you align yourself with the hard-liners, so much so that in your infamous, demeaning speech to the AIPAC convention right after you gained the nomination of the Democratic Party, you supported an "undivided Jerusalem," and opposed negotiations with Hamas-- the elected government in Gaza. Once again, you ignored the will of the Israeli people who, in a March 1, 2008 poll by the respected newspaper Haaretz, showed that 64% of Israelis favored "direct negotiations with Hamas." Siding with the AIPAC hard-liners is what one of the many leading Palestinians advocating dialogue and peace with the Israeli people was describing when he wrote "Anti-semitism today is the persecution of Palestinian society by the Israeli state."
During your visit to Israel this summer, you scheduled a mere 45 minutes of your time for Palestinians with no news conference, and no visit to Palestinian refugee camps that would have focused the media on the brutalization of the Palestinians. Your trip supported the illegal, cruel blockade of Gaza in defiance of international law and the United Nations charter. You focused on southern Israeli casualties which during the past year have totaled one civilian casualty to every 400 Palestinian casualties on the Gaza side. Instead of a statesmanship that decried all violence and its replacement with acceptance of the Arab League's 2002 proposal to permit a viable Palestinian state within the 1967 borders in return for full economic and diplomatic relations between Arab countries and Israel, you played the role of a cheap politician, leaving the area and Palestinians with the feeling of much shock and little awe.
David Levy, a former Israeli peace negotiator, described your trip succinctly: "There was almost a willful display of indifference to the fact that there are two narratives here. This could serve him well as a candidate, but not as a President."
Palestinian American commentator, Ali Abunimah, noted that Obama did not utter a single criticism of Israel, "of its relentless settlement and wall construction, of the closures that make life unlivable for millions of Palestinians. ...Even the Bush administration recently criticized Israeli's use of cluster bombs against Lebanese civilians [see www.atfl.org for elaboration]. But Obama defended Israeli's assault on Lebanon as an exercise of its 'legitimate right to defend itself.'"
In numerous columns Gideon Levy, writing in Haaretz, strongly criticized the Israeli government's assault on civilians in Gaza, including attacks on "the heart of a crowded refugee camp... with horrible bloodshed" in early 2008.
Israeli writer and peace advocate-- Uri Avnery-- described Obama's appearance before AIPAC as one that "broke all records for obsequiousness and fawning, adding that Obama "is prepared to sacrifice the most basic American interests. After all, the US has a vital interest in achieving an Israeli-Palestinian peace that will allow it to find ways to the hearts of the Arab masses from Iraq to Morocco. Obama has harmed his image in the Muslim world and mortgaged his future-- if and when he is elected president.," he said, adding, "Of one thing I am certain: Obama's declarations at the AIPAC conference are very, very bad for peace. And what is bad for peace is bad for Israel, bad for the world and bad for the Palestinian people."
A further illustration of your deficiency of character is the way you turned your back on the Muslim-Americans in this country. You refused to send surrogates to speak to voters at their events. Having visited numerous churches and synagogues, you refused to visit a single Mosque in America. Even George W. Bush visited the Grand Mosque in Washington D.C. after 9/11 to express proper sentiments of tolerance before a frightened major religious group of innocents.
Although the New York Times published a major article on June 24, 2008 titled "Muslim Voters Detect a Snub from Obama" (by Andrea Elliott), citing examples of your aversion to these Americans who come from all walks of life, who serve in the armed forces and who work to live the American dream. Three days earlier the International Herald Tribune published an article by Roger Cohen titled "Why Obama Should Visit a Mosque." None of these comments and reports change your political bigotry against Muslim-Americans-- even though your father was a Muslim from Kenya.
Perhaps nothing illustrated your utter lack of political courage or even the mildest version of this trait than your surrendering to demands of the hard-liners to prohibit former president Jimmy Carter from speaking at the Democratic National Convention. This is a tradition for former presidents and one accorded in prime time to Bill Clinton this year.
Here was a President who negotiated peace between Israel and Egypt, but his recent book pressing the dominant Israeli superpower to avoid Apartheid of the Palestinians and make peace was all that it took to sideline him. Instead of an important address to the nation by Jimmy Carter on this critical international problem, he was relegated to a stroll across the stage to "tumultuous applause," following a showing of a film about the Carter Center's post-Katrina work. Shame on you, Barack Obama!
But then your shameful behavior has extended to many other areas of American life. (See the factual analysis by my running mate, Matt Gonzalez, on www.votenader.org). You have turned your back on the 100-million poor Americans composed of poor whites, African-Americans, and Latinos. You always mention helping the "middle class" but you omit, repeatedly, mention of the "poor" in America.
Should you be elected President, it must be more than an unprecedented upward career move following a brilliantly unprincipled campaign that spoke "change" yet demonstrated actual obeisance to the concentration power of the "corporate supremacists." It must be about shifting the power from the few to the many. It must be a White House presided over by a black man who does not turn his back on the downtrodden here and abroad but challenges the forces of greed, dictatorial control of labor, consumers and taxpayers, and the militarization of foreign policy. It must be a White House that is transforming of American politics-- opening it up to the public funding of elections (through voluntary approaches)-- and allowing smaller candidates to have a chance to be heard on debates and in the fullness of their now restricted civil liberties. Call it a competitive democracy.
Your presidential campaign again and again has demonstrated cowardly stands. "Hope" some say springs eternal." But not when "reality" consumes it daily.
Sincerely,
Ralph Nader
By RALPH NADER, Counterpunch
Dear Senator Obama:
In your nearly two-year presidential campaign, the words "hope and change," "change and hope" have been your trademark declarations. Yet there is an asymmetry between those objectives and your political character that succumbs to contrary centers of power that want not "hope and change" but the continuation of the power-entrenched status quo.
Far more than Senator McCain, you have received enormous, unprecedented contributions from corporate interests, Wall Street interests and, most interestingly, big corporate law firm attorneys. Never before has a Democratic nominee for President achieved this supremacy over his Republican counterpart. Why, apart from your unconditional vote for the $700 billion Wall Street bailout, are these large corporate interests investing so much in Senator Obama? Could it be that in your state Senate record, your U.S. Senate record and your presidential campaign record (favoring nuclear power, coal plants, offshore oil drilling, corporate subsidies including the 1872 Mining Act and avoiding any comprehensive program to crack down on the corporate crime wave and the bloated, wasteful military budget, for example) you have shown that you are their man?
To advance change and hope, the presidential persona requires character, courage, integrity-- not expediency, accommodation and short-range opportunism. Take, for example, your transformation from an articulate defender of Palestinian rights in Chicago before your run for the U.S. Senate to an acolyte, a dittoman for the hard-line AIPAC lobby, which bolsters the militaristic oppression, occupation, blockage, colonization and land-water seizures over the years of the Palestinian peoples and their shrunken territories in the West Bank and Gaza. Eric Alterman summarized numerous polls in a December 2007 issue of The Nation magazine showing that AIPAC policies are opposed by a majority of Jewish-Americans.
You know quite well that only when the U.S. Government supports the Israeli and Palestinian peace movements, that years ago worked out a detailed two-state solution (which is supported by a majority of Israelis and Palestinians), will there be a chance for a peaceful resolution of this 60-year plus conflict. Yet you align yourself with the hard-liners, so much so that in your infamous, demeaning speech to the AIPAC convention right after you gained the nomination of the Democratic Party, you supported an "undivided Jerusalem," and opposed negotiations with Hamas-- the elected government in Gaza. Once again, you ignored the will of the Israeli people who, in a March 1, 2008 poll by the respected newspaper Haaretz, showed that 64% of Israelis favored "direct negotiations with Hamas." Siding with the AIPAC hard-liners is what one of the many leading Palestinians advocating dialogue and peace with the Israeli people was describing when he wrote "Anti-semitism today is the persecution of Palestinian society by the Israeli state."
During your visit to Israel this summer, you scheduled a mere 45 minutes of your time for Palestinians with no news conference, and no visit to Palestinian refugee camps that would have focused the media on the brutalization of the Palestinians. Your trip supported the illegal, cruel blockade of Gaza in defiance of international law and the United Nations charter. You focused on southern Israeli casualties which during the past year have totaled one civilian casualty to every 400 Palestinian casualties on the Gaza side. Instead of a statesmanship that decried all violence and its replacement with acceptance of the Arab League's 2002 proposal to permit a viable Palestinian state within the 1967 borders in return for full economic and diplomatic relations between Arab countries and Israel, you played the role of a cheap politician, leaving the area and Palestinians with the feeling of much shock and little awe.
David Levy, a former Israeli peace negotiator, described your trip succinctly: "There was almost a willful display of indifference to the fact that there are two narratives here. This could serve him well as a candidate, but not as a President."
Palestinian American commentator, Ali Abunimah, noted that Obama did not utter a single criticism of Israel, "of its relentless settlement and wall construction, of the closures that make life unlivable for millions of Palestinians. ...Even the Bush administration recently criticized Israeli's use of cluster bombs against Lebanese civilians [see www.atfl.org for elaboration]. But Obama defended Israeli's assault on Lebanon as an exercise of its 'legitimate right to defend itself.'"
In numerous columns Gideon Levy, writing in Haaretz, strongly criticized the Israeli government's assault on civilians in Gaza, including attacks on "the heart of a crowded refugee camp... with horrible bloodshed" in early 2008.
Israeli writer and peace advocate-- Uri Avnery-- described Obama's appearance before AIPAC as one that "broke all records for obsequiousness and fawning, adding that Obama "is prepared to sacrifice the most basic American interests. After all, the US has a vital interest in achieving an Israeli-Palestinian peace that will allow it to find ways to the hearts of the Arab masses from Iraq to Morocco. Obama has harmed his image in the Muslim world and mortgaged his future-- if and when he is elected president.," he said, adding, "Of one thing I am certain: Obama's declarations at the AIPAC conference are very, very bad for peace. And what is bad for peace is bad for Israel, bad for the world and bad for the Palestinian people."
A further illustration of your deficiency of character is the way you turned your back on the Muslim-Americans in this country. You refused to send surrogates to speak to voters at their events. Having visited numerous churches and synagogues, you refused to visit a single Mosque in America. Even George W. Bush visited the Grand Mosque in Washington D.C. after 9/11 to express proper sentiments of tolerance before a frightened major religious group of innocents.
Although the New York Times published a major article on June 24, 2008 titled "Muslim Voters Detect a Snub from Obama" (by Andrea Elliott), citing examples of your aversion to these Americans who come from all walks of life, who serve in the armed forces and who work to live the American dream. Three days earlier the International Herald Tribune published an article by Roger Cohen titled "Why Obama Should Visit a Mosque." None of these comments and reports change your political bigotry against Muslim-Americans-- even though your father was a Muslim from Kenya.
Perhaps nothing illustrated your utter lack of political courage or even the mildest version of this trait than your surrendering to demands of the hard-liners to prohibit former president Jimmy Carter from speaking at the Democratic National Convention. This is a tradition for former presidents and one accorded in prime time to Bill Clinton this year.
Here was a President who negotiated peace between Israel and Egypt, but his recent book pressing the dominant Israeli superpower to avoid Apartheid of the Palestinians and make peace was all that it took to sideline him. Instead of an important address to the nation by Jimmy Carter on this critical international problem, he was relegated to a stroll across the stage to "tumultuous applause," following a showing of a film about the Carter Center's post-Katrina work. Shame on you, Barack Obama!
But then your shameful behavior has extended to many other areas of American life. (See the factual analysis by my running mate, Matt Gonzalez, on www.votenader.org). You have turned your back on the 100-million poor Americans composed of poor whites, African-Americans, and Latinos. You always mention helping the "middle class" but you omit, repeatedly, mention of the "poor" in America.
Should you be elected President, it must be more than an unprecedented upward career move following a brilliantly unprincipled campaign that spoke "change" yet demonstrated actual obeisance to the concentration power of the "corporate supremacists." It must be about shifting the power from the few to the many. It must be a White House presided over by a black man who does not turn his back on the downtrodden here and abroad but challenges the forces of greed, dictatorial control of labor, consumers and taxpayers, and the militarization of foreign policy. It must be a White House that is transforming of American politics-- opening it up to the public funding of elections (through voluntary approaches)-- and allowing smaller candidates to have a chance to be heard on debates and in the fullness of their now restricted civil liberties. Call it a competitive democracy.
Your presidential campaign again and again has demonstrated cowardly stands. "Hope" some say springs eternal." But not when "reality" consumes it daily.
Sincerely,
Ralph Nader
History is made
US Socialist Worker, November 4
AS SOON as it became clear that Obama was over the top, the tone of the media changed to one of reverence in recognition of the historic significance of the election of the first African American president.
And yet, coming out of the mouth of someone like MSNBC's Chris Matthews, it was a travesty. Matthews used the opportunity of Obama's moment of victory to brag about how great America is--having done, he claimed, what no other advanced country had in electing a Black head of state.
What hollow cant in the face of America's long and vicious history of racist barbarism--a country founded on slavery and made into a "great power" with the use of systematic racism.
But not even this hot air could overshadow the sense of exhilaration and tear-filled celebration among ordinary people, wherever they were gathered:
In Harlem in New York City, Brian Jones reports:
Several solid blocks of people celebrating. A giant mural depicts Malcolm X and Obama. Out of a sound system came the song "Ain't No Stopping Us Now," and the streets turned into a giant dance party. On the jumbo-tron, McCain is conceding, but the sound is breaking up. But no one wants to hear him anyway, so they put on Stevie Wonder's "Signed, Sealed, Delivered, I'm Yours."
Outside the White House, a spontaneous crowd gathered to celebrate Obama's victory and jeer George Bush, who is reported to have called Obama to congratulate him. The contrast between Obama's sweeping win that has transformed the so-called "electoral map," and Bush's theft of the White House in 2000, on the basis of the disenfranchisement of African American voters in Florida, could not be more stark.
And in Grant Park in downtown Chicago, there was a vast sea of people, filling every visible corner of the huge lakefront area. The pictures really are worth a thousand words: dozens of young people with their fists raised in triumph, whole families dancing in the cramped space, tears flowing down the faces of older African American women, flags waving, singing and chanting.
As Lee Sustar described from downtown:
As Obama was headed in his motorcade to speak, people were still streaming toward Grant Park. The crowd is very racially mixed. All ages, though mostly young.
I just encountered a group of 10 Sri Lankan sisters and brothers, non-citizens who came down. "This is a moment to remember," they told me. "We're living through a moment of history. I want to be able to tell my children and grandchildren I was here to cheer on Barack Obama."
To them, Obama's victory represents something that they have seen only very rarely in the past generation. They know that the door is closing on an old era, and that a new one is beginning. --Alan Maass
Monday, October 27, 2008
Venezuela Graduates 6700 Professionals from Low-Income Backgrounds
By Tamara Pearson
Mérida, October 24, 2008 (venezuelanalysis.com)-- Almost 6,000 Venezuelan university students recently graduated through the government's scholarship program, and a further 700 doctors will graduate at the end of this year, significantly filling the shortage of professionals previously experienced by Venezuela.
On Wednesday 5,949 students who participated in the scholarship program known as Mission Sucre graduated in areas of administration (1,478 students), computing (1,205), social communication (247), agricultural production (95), environmental management (604), and social management for local development (2,235).
Mission Sucre is a program for including low-income Venezuelans in university level education, directed by the Ministry of Education, and created five years ago with the aim to municipalize university education.Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez attended the graduation of the second finishing group of Mission Sucre students in Caracas together with simultaneous graduation events around the country. Mission Sucre currently has 527,134 students and there are also 108,000 applicants registered to enroll in the Mission.
In his speech, Chavez described these students as forming part of the army to construct Venezuelan Socialism. He said the numbers were significant as indicators of the possibility of professional development that Venezuelan's have. He added that although Venezuela still hasn't come out of the bog it was put in by previous governments, for many years it has started to come out of this situation, and therefore he urged the new graduates to be motors of the revolution and the new country that Venezuelans must construct.
On this, Juan Carlos Pimentel, one of the graduating students, said that Venezuela needs professionals with much social sensibility, and that Mission Sucre students are in contact with social reality, "and we want to put our preparation and knowledge at the service of the nation."He added that education is "so the people have the tools to advance, without education we are week and the objects of manipulation and of the media war."Chavez encouraged all the students to continue studying, because consciousness comes from knowledge, so "it is very important that the Bolivarian and socialist education model continue growing and expanding itself and improving in quality."
Of the BsF 177.5 billion (US$82.5 billion) assigned to the 2009 budget, BsF 41.5 billion (US$19.3 billion) have been assigned to education, an 18.2% increase from last year. Of this, the Ministry of Education will receive BsF 25 billion (US$11.6 billion), and the Ministry of Superior Education has been assigned BsF 11 billion (US$5.1 billion). Also, 700 community medicine doctors will graduate from the National Experimental University Romulo Gallegos at the end of the year.
The minister for health, Jesus Mantilla, said, "Chavez has put a program of integral community medicine in progress that is the formation of the integral doctor in the communities. At the moment there are around 30,000 [doctors], including the pre-meds, measures that we have adopted to be able to fill this deficit of doctors that there was at a national level."
He said that under previous governments there were very few university places for doctors, and that this situation has dramatically turned around. In total, he said, there are 2,285 Venezuelan doctors across the country and next year 4,000 more doctors will be able to practice.
Mérida, October 24, 2008 (venezuelanalysis.com)-- Almost 6,000 Venezuelan university students recently graduated through the government's scholarship program, and a further 700 doctors will graduate at the end of this year, significantly filling the shortage of professionals previously experienced by Venezuela.
On Wednesday 5,949 students who participated in the scholarship program known as Mission Sucre graduated in areas of administration (1,478 students), computing (1,205), social communication (247), agricultural production (95), environmental management (604), and social management for local development (2,235).
Mission Sucre is a program for including low-income Venezuelans in university level education, directed by the Ministry of Education, and created five years ago with the aim to municipalize university education.Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez attended the graduation of the second finishing group of Mission Sucre students in Caracas together with simultaneous graduation events around the country. Mission Sucre currently has 527,134 students and there are also 108,000 applicants registered to enroll in the Mission.
In his speech, Chavez described these students as forming part of the army to construct Venezuelan Socialism. He said the numbers were significant as indicators of the possibility of professional development that Venezuelan's have. He added that although Venezuela still hasn't come out of the bog it was put in by previous governments, for many years it has started to come out of this situation, and therefore he urged the new graduates to be motors of the revolution and the new country that Venezuelans must construct.
On this, Juan Carlos Pimentel, one of the graduating students, said that Venezuela needs professionals with much social sensibility, and that Mission Sucre students are in contact with social reality, "and we want to put our preparation and knowledge at the service of the nation."He added that education is "so the people have the tools to advance, without education we are week and the objects of manipulation and of the media war."Chavez encouraged all the students to continue studying, because consciousness comes from knowledge, so "it is very important that the Bolivarian and socialist education model continue growing and expanding itself and improving in quality."
Of the BsF 177.5 billion (US$82.5 billion) assigned to the 2009 budget, BsF 41.5 billion (US$19.3 billion) have been assigned to education, an 18.2% increase from last year. Of this, the Ministry of Education will receive BsF 25 billion (US$11.6 billion), and the Ministry of Superior Education has been assigned BsF 11 billion (US$5.1 billion). Also, 700 community medicine doctors will graduate from the National Experimental University Romulo Gallegos at the end of the year.
The minister for health, Jesus Mantilla, said, "Chavez has put a program of integral community medicine in progress that is the formation of the integral doctor in the communities. At the moment there are around 30,000 [doctors], including the pre-meds, measures that we have adopted to be able to fill this deficit of doctors that there was at a national level."
He said that under previous governments there were very few university places for doctors, and that this situation has dramatically turned around. In total, he said, there are 2,285 Venezuelan doctors across the country and next year 4,000 more doctors will be able to practice.
Monday, October 20, 2008
Rich polluters stand to rake in $3 billion
Marian Wilkinson, October 20, SMH
A NEW report estimates the Rudd Government could hand almost $3 billion to some of the richest companies in Australia in free carbon pollution permits when its scheme to cut greenhouse gases begins in 2010.
The report released by the Australian Conservation Foundation found much of the assistance, an estimated $825 million, would go to big aluminium producers, including Rio Tinto in Australia and Britain, the American company Alcoa, the Norwegian company Norsk Hydro and the Australian company Alumina Ltd. Other beneficiaries would be the Chinese trading company CITIC, says the report, which was produced by the financial advisory company, Innovest. If the Government also agrees to protect the export coal industry, almost half the assistance could go to foreign companies including the Swiss giant Xstrata, the Japanese Mitsubishi company and the British Anglo American coal company. BHP Billiton, could also be given up to $340 million worth of permits, the report finds.
The value of the permits is based on production figures from the companies and on the proposals in the Government's green paper on its carbon pollution reduction scheme, which was released by the Minister for Climate Change, Penny Wong, this year.
Under the plan, the Government will require most businesses producing greenhouse gases to obtain permits to pollute. The Government plans to limit the number of permits, forcing companies to cut back greenhouse gas emissions. The initial cost of permits is expected to be about $20 per tonne of greenhouse gas. Companies with permits will be allowed to freely trade them on a carbon market.
But the Government has promised to protect key industries, such as aluminium, steel and cement, by giving them 30 per cent of permits free. These are industries facing competition from countries that do not have similar schemes to cut greenhouse gases. The industries have argued they could be forced to close or cut operations and investments if they are not compensated.
In its submission to the green paper last month, Rio Tinto argued Australia's major competitors in the supply of aluminium, coal and iron ore are from countries that "are unlikely to introduce comparable climate change policies in the medium term". It said the scheme risked disadvantaging key export industries and delivering "no net gain to the environment".
But environmentalists argue these "trade-exposed industries" are owned by highly profitable companies who could receive windfall profits from the free permits. They want the Government to carefully assess requests for free permits to determine whether they are justified.
The Australian Conservation Foundation is the first group to try to quantify the value of free permits to industries.
"This analysis shows the compensation arrangements proposed in the green paper are far too generous to big polluters and overseas interests," said the foundation's climate change manager, Tony Mohr. "The amount being given away to the big polluters is more than the total federal budget spend on climate change and the environment."
The Government is also proposing compensating the domestic coal-fired power generators under the scheme, which could cost another $900 million.
Data from The Climate Group also shows greenhouse gas emissions from power stations and transport in NSW are less than last year's figures.
A NEW report estimates the Rudd Government could hand almost $3 billion to some of the richest companies in Australia in free carbon pollution permits when its scheme to cut greenhouse gases begins in 2010.
The report released by the Australian Conservation Foundation found much of the assistance, an estimated $825 million, would go to big aluminium producers, including Rio Tinto in Australia and Britain, the American company Alcoa, the Norwegian company Norsk Hydro and the Australian company Alumina Ltd. Other beneficiaries would be the Chinese trading company CITIC, says the report, which was produced by the financial advisory company, Innovest. If the Government also agrees to protect the export coal industry, almost half the assistance could go to foreign companies including the Swiss giant Xstrata, the Japanese Mitsubishi company and the British Anglo American coal company. BHP Billiton, could also be given up to $340 million worth of permits, the report finds.
The value of the permits is based on production figures from the companies and on the proposals in the Government's green paper on its carbon pollution reduction scheme, which was released by the Minister for Climate Change, Penny Wong, this year.
Under the plan, the Government will require most businesses producing greenhouse gases to obtain permits to pollute. The Government plans to limit the number of permits, forcing companies to cut back greenhouse gas emissions. The initial cost of permits is expected to be about $20 per tonne of greenhouse gas. Companies with permits will be allowed to freely trade them on a carbon market.
But the Government has promised to protect key industries, such as aluminium, steel and cement, by giving them 30 per cent of permits free. These are industries facing competition from countries that do not have similar schemes to cut greenhouse gases. The industries have argued they could be forced to close or cut operations and investments if they are not compensated.
In its submission to the green paper last month, Rio Tinto argued Australia's major competitors in the supply of aluminium, coal and iron ore are from countries that "are unlikely to introduce comparable climate change policies in the medium term". It said the scheme risked disadvantaging key export industries and delivering "no net gain to the environment".
But environmentalists argue these "trade-exposed industries" are owned by highly profitable companies who could receive windfall profits from the free permits. They want the Government to carefully assess requests for free permits to determine whether they are justified.
The Australian Conservation Foundation is the first group to try to quantify the value of free permits to industries.
"This analysis shows the compensation arrangements proposed in the green paper are far too generous to big polluters and overseas interests," said the foundation's climate change manager, Tony Mohr. "The amount being given away to the big polluters is more than the total federal budget spend on climate change and the environment."
The Government is also proposing compensating the domestic coal-fired power generators under the scheme, which could cost another $900 million.
Data from The Climate Group also shows greenhouse gas emissions from power stations and transport in NSW are less than last year's figures.
Thursday, October 16, 2008
Who's Australia's worst environment minister?
Trent Hawkins, 11 October 2008, Green Left Weekly
On September 15, Resistance kicked off our competition to determine who is Australia’s worst environment minister. Resistance members in Melbourne headed down to 50 Lonsdale Street to present Gavin Jennings, Victoria’s environment minister, with the illustrious award of Australia’s Worst Environment Minister.
In Victoria, we are pretty convinced that Jennings is in the top running for the award. Our friendly minister has spent the past months happily supporting his fellow ministers’ wonderfully unsustainable projects.
These include water minister Tim Holdings’ plans to solve the state’s water crisis: a $3 billion desalination plant, which recent studies show may be one of the most polluting in the world, and a pipeline to direct water away from the dying Murray-Darling River system and into Melbourne.
Tim Flannery has seen through the government’s spin on the pipeline project, labelling it “bullshit” at a September 23 public forum at RMIT University.
Jennings has also excelled in the promotion of new coal-fired power stations, hoping he can get away with it by describing the facility to be built in the LaTrobe Valley, a “clean coal” facility.
Unfortunately, what the media fail to mention is that this plant will produce the same emissions as a black coal facility in New South Wales. Clean indeed!
So we are fairly convinced that the Victorian environment minister (and, ironically, also innovation minister) is the worst of the lot, but, looking at the interstate competition, he may have a run for his money.
Andrew McNamara, Queensland’s sustainability, climate change and innovation minister, is overseeing a massive expansion of the coal industry and the state government is investing $300 million into “clean coal” research and development.
South Australian Premier Mike Rann, who doubles as sustainability and climate change minister, has approved the expansion of BHP’s Roxby Downs uranium mine, requiring 120 million extra litres of water daily, at no cost.
Michelle O’Byrne, Tasmanian environment minister, hardly needs a mention for her support for the Gunns' pulp mill.
But what of our newest entrants in the competition, NSW’s Carmel Tebbutt and Western Australia’s Donna Faragher? Despite the popular campaign against electricity privatisation in NSW — which helped bring down ex-premier Morris Iemma — Tebbutt hasn’t indicated the plan will change.
Perhaps the one to watch though is Faragher, whose colleagues in the Liberal Party moved within days of winning government to announce that WA is now open for business to the uranium industry. On September 16, BHP announced it will seek to mine the state’s biggest deposit in Yeelirrie, worth $9 billion.
Last but definitely not least is the federal environmental crusading team: Penny Wong and Peter Garrett. Wong summed up her opinion on climate change when she said her aim was to “ensure that the reduction of greenhouse gases occurs at lowest cost possible to the economy”.
What followed was an Emissions Trading Scheme that gave out free permits to pollute to big business and ensured any real changes would occur well after the Arctic ice-sheet became a distant memory.
And we can only wonder at how Garrett, who rubber-stamped Gunns’ pulp mill even before being elected, can sleep while the Earth is burning and his own government does nothing.
So it seems all the ministers are in the running. Cast your vote now. More importantly, get active in Resistance to stop these climate criminals and give them a clear ultimatum: act in the interests of the planet or pack your bags and collect your new shiny award on your way out of here.
On September 15, Resistance kicked off our competition to determine who is Australia’s worst environment minister. Resistance members in Melbourne headed down to 50 Lonsdale Street to present Gavin Jennings, Victoria’s environment minister, with the illustrious award of Australia’s Worst Environment Minister.
In Victoria, we are pretty convinced that Jennings is in the top running for the award. Our friendly minister has spent the past months happily supporting his fellow ministers’ wonderfully unsustainable projects.
These include water minister Tim Holdings’ plans to solve the state’s water crisis: a $3 billion desalination plant, which recent studies show may be one of the most polluting in the world, and a pipeline to direct water away from the dying Murray-Darling River system and into Melbourne.
Tim Flannery has seen through the government’s spin on the pipeline project, labelling it “bullshit” at a September 23 public forum at RMIT University.
Jennings has also excelled in the promotion of new coal-fired power stations, hoping he can get away with it by describing the facility to be built in the LaTrobe Valley, a “clean coal” facility.
Unfortunately, what the media fail to mention is that this plant will produce the same emissions as a black coal facility in New South Wales. Clean indeed!
So we are fairly convinced that the Victorian environment minister (and, ironically, also innovation minister) is the worst of the lot, but, looking at the interstate competition, he may have a run for his money.
Andrew McNamara, Queensland’s sustainability, climate change and innovation minister, is overseeing a massive expansion of the coal industry and the state government is investing $300 million into “clean coal” research and development.
South Australian Premier Mike Rann, who doubles as sustainability and climate change minister, has approved the expansion of BHP’s Roxby Downs uranium mine, requiring 120 million extra litres of water daily, at no cost.
Michelle O’Byrne, Tasmanian environment minister, hardly needs a mention for her support for the Gunns' pulp mill.
But what of our newest entrants in the competition, NSW’s Carmel Tebbutt and Western Australia’s Donna Faragher? Despite the popular campaign against electricity privatisation in NSW — which helped bring down ex-premier Morris Iemma — Tebbutt hasn’t indicated the plan will change.
Perhaps the one to watch though is Faragher, whose colleagues in the Liberal Party moved within days of winning government to announce that WA is now open for business to the uranium industry. On September 16, BHP announced it will seek to mine the state’s biggest deposit in Yeelirrie, worth $9 billion.
Last but definitely not least is the federal environmental crusading team: Penny Wong and Peter Garrett. Wong summed up her opinion on climate change when she said her aim was to “ensure that the reduction of greenhouse gases occurs at lowest cost possible to the economy”.
What followed was an Emissions Trading Scheme that gave out free permits to pollute to big business and ensured any real changes would occur well after the Arctic ice-sheet became a distant memory.
And we can only wonder at how Garrett, who rubber-stamped Gunns’ pulp mill even before being elected, can sleep while the Earth is burning and his own government does nothing.
So it seems all the ministers are in the running. Cast your vote now. More importantly, get active in Resistance to stop these climate criminals and give them a clear ultimatum: act in the interests of the planet or pack your bags and collect your new shiny award on your way out of here.
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