(no subject)
Dear Amy,
As we make our way westward, the crowds keep getting bigger. Yesterday, an amazing 20,000 people greeted us in Grand Rapids, Michigan. The energy at these events is unlike anything I have ever experienced.
But today I want to tell you about a smaller event that took place when I met with fifty firefighters at the Kalamazoo Fire Station yesterday to discuss the problems facing our nation's first responders.
One firefighter from the neighboring city of Wyoming stood up and told me that his town will vote today on whether it can maintain current funding levels for first responders. If the vote fails, the town will be forced to shut down one of its two firehouses. That would mean one already-understaffed station would be forced to answer all 4,700 annual calls for help. Our communities should not have to make these kinds of dire choices. If we can build new firehouses in Baghdad, then we should not be closing them down here at home.
Sadly, the firefighters of Wyoming, Michigan are not alone. Nearly two-thirds of firehouses are understaffed, making it difficult to respond to fires and medical emergencies, let alone the threat of terrorism.
John Edwards and I have proposed to create the Father Mychal Judge Fund -- named for the chaplain of the New York City Fire Department who died delivering last rites on September 11 -- to hire up to 100,000 new firefighters and provide the equipment necessary to ensure that our heroes are always prepared. We will also create an Orange Alert Fund to reimburse communities for additional costs incurred in responding to raised threat levels.
George Bush seems to be satisfied with the way things are. John Edwards and I feel that obvious priorities are being neglected and that our homeland can be more secure. That is why we are proposing a united strategy that will eliminate homeland security vulnerabilities and make America safer. The major points of our plan are:
Improve our ability to gather, analyze, and share information so we can track down terrorists and stop them before they cause us harm.
Better secure our airports, seaports, and borders.
Harden likely terrorist targets and critical infrastructure.
Improve domestic readiness.
Win the war on terror without losing the values of freedom and justice for all that make us proud to be Americans.
Please read more about our homeland security plan here:
http://johnkerry.com/plan
We will not be able to change America alone. This campaign will need 5 million voices to reach the 55 million voters we need to win. Please join us and be one of those voices.
Sincerely,
John Kerry
P.S. Join us on our tour across the country by going here:
http://blog.johnkerry.com
Dear Amy,
Thanks again for all your help to end exploitative labor practices in the Olympics. Our efforts are starting to have an impact! Thanks in part to messages from activists like you, Fila has changed its tune and announced that it may agree to meet with members of the campaign as early as this month.
Even bigger news is that this groundswell of support has led to the introduction of a new bill in Congress - the "Play Fair at the Olympics Act" (HR 4988)! This bill would protect sportswear workers' rights by forcing official Olympic suppliers to comply with international labor standards. But this promising bill won't go anywhere without the support of the US Olympic Committee (USOC).
Click here now to ask the USOC to support the "Play Fair" bill to protect workers' rights.
This new bill could make a big difference for the workers, mostly women, who are currently working night and day in overseas factories for poverty wages - so that Olympic gear arrives in Athens in time for the Games.
For example, Phan, a 22 year-old migrant worker who sews sportswear for Puma at a factory in Thailand, recently told Oxfam that she is forced to work until 2 AM in the peak season, only to earn $35 a month.
The "Play Fair" bill would help workers like Phan by requiring that an Olympic supplier like Puma pay her a living wage, allow her to join a union, and guarantee her safe working conditions.
Click here now to ask the USOC to support the "Play Fair" bill to protect workers' rights.
Then increase the pressure by spreading the word to your friends and asking them to contact the USOC as well. Just click here to send a message about this new development to ten people.
Thanks again for your support.
Sincerely,
David Moore, Internet Campaign Organizer
Vicky Rateau, Trade Campaign Manager
Oxfam America
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Did Iran Play America?
Are the Ayatollahs Running US Foreign Policy?
by Michael I. Niman ArtVoice 7/29/04
The long-awaited and much over-hyped congressional 9/11 report is out.
"Mistakes have been made," but true to passive voice obfuscation, nobody in
particular made them. Four slices of blame go to the Clinton mob, with six
slices going to the Bush junta. End of story.
The report, now available in bookstores, only becomes interesting when one
starts extracting its various factoids and combining these puzzle pieces
with information already in the public domain.
It Was One of Those Ira. Countries
Quite interesting is Iran's alleged role. The 9/11 Commission expresses
concern that some of the Saudi hijackers responsible for the 9/11 attacks
passed through Iran during the months before the hijackings. While the
Commission didn't go as far as to allege an Iranian government link to the
attacks, it has certainly raised concerns about Iran. It did this while
exonerating Iraq, the country we invaded, as having no connection to the
hijackers or to the attacks.
This new revelation about Iran makes Iraqi expatriate and Bush
Administration darling Ahmed Chalabi's role in the big game all the more
interesting. Chalabi came to prominence during the Bush team's fraud-laden
run-up to the Iraq invasion. He ran a Project for a New American Century
sanctioned franchise called the Iraqi National Congress - a wanna-be Iraqi
government-in-exile devoid of any base of support in Iraq.
Chalabi was the Bush administration's main, and often only, source, for
"intelligence" about Saddam Hussein's supposed weapons of mass destruction.
Despite U.S. intelligence community warnings concerning Chalabi's
credibility, and the failure to find any evidence to support his
allegations, the Bush team championed his fabrications. And despite
journalistic conventions warning about running with stories based on a
single source, especially when that source is a stakeholder in the outcome
of the story, the American press from The New York Times on down the
credibility ladder, took Chalabi's word as gospel while downplaying his
detractors.
The Man Who Would Have Been King
Hence, the Iraq WMD myth was born and propagated based on the words of one
man who harbored fantasies of returning to rule an Iraq subjugated by
American military might. The alternative press dutifully exposed Chalabi,
who was wanted in Jordan for bank fraud, as lacking credibility. At the same
time, we in the alternative press were championing the stories told by
former U.N. weapons inspector and military intelligence officer, Scott
Ritter, among others. They argued rather persuasively that Iraq did not
posses the weapons Chalabi alleged that they had.
Chalabi's fable, however, persevered. It was backed by the Bush
administration's loyal trumpeters on talk radio and at Fox News, as well as
by the entire mainstream American press corps. So strong was this WMD myth,
that presidential candidate John Kerry, along with the usual spineless cadre
of Democrats in congress, now claim to have been hoodwinked into voting Bush
a blank check to invade Iraq.
Let's fast forward a bit. At least eleven thousand Iraqi civilians and 900
American service personnel are now dead, with many times that number
seriously wounded. We've spent about $160 billion dollars in Iraq while our
healthcare, education and social service systems are starving for funds.
Iraq is now littered with depleted uranium weapons debris and overrun with
violent fundamentalists and criminals. The unemployment rate there is over
70%. The infrastructure is shot and the U.S. is hopelessly bogged down in
an endless war with an ever-growing segment of the Iraqi population. And
there were no weapons of mass destruction. And there were no connections
between Saddam's regime and al Qaida, who in fact turned out to be his sworn
enemies. Way to go Ahmed.
Then came the recent arrest of Ahmed Chalabi. It seems, at least according
to U.S. intelligence sources, that Chalabi was an Iranian intelligence
operative all along. And guess what? He fabricated the whole WMD story.
How many lives could have been saved if only John Kerry and his fellow dupes
had subscribed to The Nation or listened to Democracy Now!
Connect The Dots
But let's connect the dots. If this new information coming out of
Washington is credible, the Iranians may have helped with the 9/11 attacks,
igniting America into a rather rabid bout of political chaos. From there,
our reactions were quite predictable. Chalabi, working for the Iranians and
taking advantage of the political mayhem in the U.S., then duped a
battle-hungry America into invading and destroying Iran's arch enemy, Saddam
Hussein's regime in Iraq. This mother of all battles is one that the
Iranians already understood they could never win - at least not without U.S.
help. But it would take the trauma of the 9/11 attacks to make the war
against Iraq politically possible.
Ultimately, the Iranians may have played both the Bush administration and
the U.S. Congress, using the U.S. military as an Iranian proxy army to
defeat Iraq, and ultimately, itself. The result is the destruction of
Iran's secularist nemesis, Saddam Hussein's Sunni Arab regime in Iraq - a
country that Shiite Persian Iran fought a brutal war with in the 1980s. With
Saddam gone, Shiites would fill the power vacuum in Iraq, thus setting that
country up to become an Iranian style Shiite republic.
Iran loses its most potent adversary while gaining an oil rich friendly
neighbor and a new sphere of influence. As a bonus, their other nemesis, the
U.S., loses all of its credibility in the region, as do its Saudi partners
who are also rivals of Iran's ayatollahs. This is where we are today.
The Bush Junta Knows No Shame
Of course, this is all speculation. The Iranian conspiracy theory is only
supported by circumstantial evidence - and may well prove as false as the
Iraqi WMD story, though that story was supported by no evidence.
Still, it's interesting to watch the Bush team scramble in light of these
allegations. The charges are serious - that they, crippled by a toxic
combination of arrogance and stupidity, were played like marionettes by a
minor league regime in Iran - ordering the American military to do Iran's
bidding while undermining American security and global interests.
Damn. They must be hiding their heads in shame. But what to do? Have they
all resigned in disgrace? Are they on the phone apologizing to the families
of America's war dead? Are they touring Iraq's hospitals apologizing to the
dead and dying over there? No. Not at all.
Without even an "oops," they've started rattling their sabers at their
alleged puppet masters in Iran, with the now familiar threat of "regime
change." Their arrogance knows no bounds and they have no shame. In Bush's
America, there is no history and no future - there's only today and next
month.
Of course there is one large hole in the 'Iran manipulated the Bushistas'
theory. That's the fact that the current Bush team declared their intention
to invade Iraq long before they seized the White House in 2000 (again, see
their own documents posted at the Project for a New American Century
website). And ironically, the Bush White House is shamelessly taking the
lead in promoting the theory that Iran was connected with the 9/11 attacks,
hoping America will get behind the next war and forget about the
circumstances surrounding the last war. Iraq has always been our friend.
We've always been at war with Iran.
Perhaps Chalabi isn't an Iranian spy after all. And perhaps Iran didn't
support or aid the 9/11 hijackers. Who really knows? The point is that we
should never send the world's most powerful army into war over weak
theories, rumors or innuendo. Given what we do know to be true, the Bush
team, at the very least, will enter the history books for their incredible
idiocy and incompetence. At worst, they purposefully lead the country into
a horribly destructive, needless, illegal and immoral war. Ultimately,
whether they are the puppets or the puppeteers, they have to go.
Michael I. Niman's previous columns are archived at www.mediastudy.com.