by Dan Glaister
Roadworks slow progress along the strip in Las Vegas. In the distance, poking between the mock Eiffel Tower and the mock pyramid at Luxor, cranes stand out against the autumn sky, building the next phase of America’s seemingly permanent boom town.

But 95 miles north-east of this city, the powerhouse of Nevada with 36 million visitors a year, lies another construction site.

Yucca Mountain, projected to cost around $60bn (£32.8bn), has been chosen by the Bush administration to be the nation’s nuclear waste repository, set to hold the existing 40,000 tons of waste produced to date by the country’s nuclear power stations.

“This material is the deadliest substance known to mankind,” said Peggy Maze Johnson, executive director of Citizen Alert, a local group that has campaigned against the repository. “It’s one million times more radioactive when it comes out of the reactor core than when it went in.”

In February 2002, just over a year after taking office, President Bush recommended the Yucca Mountain site to Congress. But many voters remembered that, as a candidate in September 2000, Mr Bush promised not to approve the site until it had been “deemed scientifically safe”, a formulation that is credited with helping him win the state.

Full Article: Guardian UK

by Lina Britto and Lucia Suarez
Translated by Forrest Hylton
Leaning against a concrete tombstone, nine men dressed in denim overalls of various colors drink beer and soda, taking care to pour the first sip on the dry and dusty ground as an offering to the Pacha Mama — Mother Earth. A few meters away, on the high plain that extends between the two hills covered with crosses and tombs, coffins of equal size are spread out in a row. Together with them, almost a hundred men, women, and children, seated and standing, most dressed entirely in black, mourn the dead for a second time. “On a day like today, October 12, the armed forces fired on unarmed people,” a young man with brown skin and straight black hair says to the assembled through a microphone marred by static. “It is time, as relatives, to show that this is not over, that we are mourning our dead again,” concludes Nestor Salinas, the president of the Association of the Relatives of the Fallen Martyrs in the so-called “Gas War” in El Alto, sister city of La Paz. Then Salinas passes “the word” to a priest who, in mixed Spanish and Aymara, presides over the Eucharist that begins the exhumation ceremony for twenty-two of the sixty-seven people who died during “Black October.”

Dug Up from the Bowels

Exactly a year ago, a caravan of tanks, truckloads of soldiers, and trucks full of gas passed through the better part of El Alto, leaving in their dusty path thirty-one dead and twelve injured. Five days after the military incursion, in a country exploding with protest, hunger strikes, and indignation, what had seemed impossible happened: then-President Gonzalo Sánchez de Lozada, a leading member of the political-economic elite and the second-richest man in Bolivia, flew to Miami after presenting his resignation to Congress, due to the non-negotiable demand of the majority of the country’s inhabitants, who refused to stand for the government’s brutal repression of protests against the export of Bolivian gas to California via a Chilean port.

Now, a year later, the hundred or so people gather around the coffins of their dead to summon up energy and hope so that the impossible happens; so that Sánchez de Lozada is extradited to Bolivia to receive punishment for genocide — among other charges, including corruption — that will be presented now that Congress has approved the “trial of responsibilities.” As relatives and volunteers from the different organizations tried to convince the nine men in overalls to charge the widow of the last body exhumed eighty Bs. ($10), Nestor Salinas made the position of alteños abundantly clear: “Now we’ll see who’s for and who’s against the people,” he said, referring to the parliamentary vote that would take place the following day, October 13.

Full Article: counterpunch.org

by Eduardo Porter
Flow of foreign capital contracted in August as private investors lost some of their appetite for American stocks and bonds, underscoring the United States’ increasing dependence on financing from central banks in Asia.

The Treasury Department reported yesterday that net monthly capital flows from the rest of the world fell for the sixth time this year, declining to $59 billion from $63 billion in July.

Private investment from abroad fell by nearly half – to $37.4 billion in August from $72.9 billion the month before. Investors appear to be concerned over cooling growth and a rising American trade deficit.

The only reason that the contraction was not more pronounced was that official financing, mainly from Asian central banks, jumped to nearly $23 billion in August from just over $6 billion in July.

Washington has demanded that China end a policy of buying dollars to reduce the value of its currency, the yuan, and make its exports more competitive in American markets. But the new data accentuated how dependent the United States has become on purchases of dollar securities by the Chinese and other Asian governments with links to the dollar.

“Foreign central banks saved the dollar from disaster,” said Ashraf Laidi, chief currency analyst of the MG Financial Group. “The stability of the bond market is at the mercy of Asian purchases of U.S. Treasuries.”

Net foreign purchases of United States Treasury bonds fell 35 percent, to roughly $14.5 billion, an 11-month low. Foreign governments left a particularly large footprint in this market, stepping up their net purchases to about $19 billion even as private investors sold about $4.5 billion worth.

Holdings of Treasury bonds by Japan, where the central bank has also been intervening to keep the value of its currency from rising, increased by $26 billion in August, to $722 billion. Chinese official holdings rose more than $5 billion, to $172 billion.

The decline in foreign investment seems to have unsettled some investors in the bond and currency markets, who have been on tenterhooks as the American trade deficit has soared to nearly 6 percent of the nation’s economic output, requiring foreign investment to finance it.

Through the first quarter of the year, financial flows into the United States exceeded the trade deficit by well over 50 percent. Last month, they barely covered the $54.2 billion deficit.

As private capital flows declined, the American financial balance has been poised precariously. As private financing dwindled, most of this coverage has been provided by foreign government finance.

“If all we have funding our current account imbalance is the good graces of foreign central banks, we are on increasingly thin ice,” said Stephen S. Roach, the chief economist at Morgan Stanley. Of Washington’s call for China to stop interfering in currency markets, he cautioned, “That could come back and bite us.”

Full Article: NY Times

Just a reminder that the US is broke and in terrific debt to maintain its status as the big dog of the world, while all it takes is the Chinese refusal of US Treasury bills to bring the whole house of cards down.

by Jim Lobe
WASHINGTON — The environmental group Greenpeace has echoed a call by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) to permit the UN watchdog to return in force to Iraq to track nuclear-related materials looted after the 2003 U.S.-led invasion there and help protect and treat the population from exposure to deadly radiation.

The group’s appeal followed a report released by the IAEA Tuesday that found that significant quantities of specialized equipment and material in Iraq that could be used to build a nuclear or radioactive bomb had disappeared from sites monitored by the agency before the invasion.

In a letter to the UN Security Council, IAEA director Mohamed el-Baradei said his agency was concerned both with the “widespread and apparently systematic dismantlement of sites linked to Iraq’s nuclear program and with the health of Iraqis living around the main nuclear facility at Tuwaitha.”

Greenpeace, whose mission to Tuwaitha in June, 2003, alerted the world to the extent of post-war looting of nuclear-related material and the possible health threats that may have resulted from it, charged that the response of both the U.S. occupation authorities and the new interim Iraqi government to the problem of looting and possible radiation exposure has been inadequate to date.

“Nothing has been done to date,” the group said about providing medical help to the surrounding communities. It also stressed that that the new regime in Baghdad has apparently failed to follow up on repeated offers by the IAEA to advise the authorities in Iraq on the safety and security of nuclear and other radioactive materials, although it has reportedly asked the agency to facilitate the sale of equipment it has recovered.

Full Article: commondreams.org

The call for a referendum on the right to self-determination by thousands of Kurdish demonstrators last week has sparked concern over their region’s fate.

Some protestors at the rallies, which took place both in Kurdistan and in Europe, even called for a completely independent Kurdistan – with oil-rich Kirkuk as its capital.

The demonstrations renewed concerns over potential ethnic conflict in Kirkuk, with Mohammed Khalil, an Arab representative on the Kirkuk city council, warning the situation would be “impossible to control” if unrest was triggered.

The Kurdish Referendum movement was established last year by prominent Kurds, who launched a widespread campaign to collect signatures demanding a vote on self-determination.

According to organisers, as many as two million signatures were collected, and letters outlining the goals of the campaign have been sent to the Kurdish parliament, Iraqi president Sheikh Gazi al-Yawer, British premier Tony Blair, US president George Bush, and UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan, among others.

But little has come of it all, and Almaz Fadhil, a lawyer and organiser of last week’s demonstration in Kirkuk, expressed her resentment over the policies of the interim Iraqi government.

“We are annoyed and upset,” she said. “They [the government] have not achieved anything for the Kurds up to now.”

Fadhil said she has demanded the return of tens of thousands of Kurds who were deported from Kirkuk by the former regime of Saddam Hussein.

But the Turkomen Shiite Council, TSC, the country’s largest group of Muslim Turkomen, claims the Kurds already are “enjoying facilities and privileges from the occupiers and the government”.

In Kirkuk, with its mixed ethnicity of Arabs, Kurds, Turkomen and Assyrians, the issue of the deported Kurds remains troublesome and complicated.

Full Article: oneworld.net

by El Fisgón
Free-trade globalization has produced some exceedingly strange phenomena: China, the last socialist power, is glad to provide slave labor to multinationals; a firm in India fills the tax forms of an American corporation that produces vodka in Peru and then sells it to Polish immigrants who are constructing a British-financed building in Madrid; an enterprise which specializes in biotechnology tries to copyright the DNA of an isolated tribe from the Amazon, and George Bush has become the worst Mexican president ever.

Globalization tends to blur or erase all economic, geographic, and cultural boundaries, leaving high technology to coexist with primitive forms of exploitation: Taiwan sells watches to the Swiss; Brazil exports technology to Germany; and all evidence suggests that George Bush has stolen his ruling style from old-fashioned Mexican politicians.

Mexican political culture has very defined features and the President of the United States has absorbed them all: The classical Mexican political boss usually inherits his power from his father. The typical Mexican cacique has a love for guns as well as an inclination toward violence and cruelty; he despises legality and intellectual activity, has a personal history of alcoholism and dissipation, lies systematically, and declares himself a faithful servant of God. (Did we miss anything?)

According to Mexican tradition, politicians always reach their positions thanks to a fraudulent electoral process and then surround themselves with a clique which uses its power to conduct “business” on a staggering scale while in office. The Florida electoral thievery and Halliburton’s Iraq contract are classic examples of Mexican corruption.

Based on a complex pyramid of political bosses, a totalitarian presidential regime flourished in Mexico. It was organized around a political party whose name remains a monument to paradox: the Revolutionary Institutional Party (PRI). Names aside, the PRI model was so efficient (for the PRI, of course) that the party was able to hold power for more than seventy years. The Peruvian writer Mario Vargas Llosa called it “the perfect dictatorship.”

This dictatorship was a mark of shame for all Mexicans. Only Mexico’s political cartoonists were able to benefit from it. The profuse manifestations of cynicism and obsequiousness it produced were a delight for us. In the Mexican court, dialogues like the following were not uncommon and completely irresistible:

The President asks: “What time is it?”

His minister replies: “Whatever time you say, Mister President.

Full Article: tomdispatch.com

by Bonnie Azab Powell
BERKELEY – The Iraq war is not winnable, a secret U.S. military unit has been “disappearing” people since December 2001, and America has no idea how irreparably its torture of Iraqis at Abu Ghraib prison has damaged its image in the Middle East. These were just a few of the grim pronouncements made by Pulitzer Prize–winning investigative reporter Seymour “Sy” Hersh to KQED host Michael Krasny before a Berkeley audience on Friday night (Oct. 8).

The past two years will “go down as one of the classic sort of failures” in history, said the man who has been called the “greatest muckraker of all time” and (paradoxically) the “enfant terrible of journalism for more than 30 years.” While Hersh blamed the White House and the Pentagon for the Iraq quagmire and America’s besmirched world image, he was stymied by how it all happened. “How could eight or nine neoconservatives come and take charge of this government?” he asked. “They overran the bureaucracy, they overran the Congress, they overran the press, and they overran the military! So you say to yourself, How fragile is this democracy?”

From My Lai to Abu Ghraib

That fragility clearly unnerves him. Hersh summarizes his mission as “to hold the people in public office to the highest possible standard of decency and of honesty…to tolerate anything less, even in the name of national security, is wrong.” He tries his best. More than any other U.S. journalist alive today, he embodies the statement that “a patriot must always be ready to defend his country against his government,” a belief defined by the conservationist Edward Abbey.

Full Article: commondreams.org

by Naomi Klein
When President Bush appointed former Secretary of State James Baker III as his envoy on Iraq’s debt on December 5, 2003, he called Baker’s job “a noble mission.” At the time, there was widespread concern about whether Baker’s extensive business dealings in the Middle East would compromise that mission, which is to meet with heads of state and persuade them to forgive the debts owed to them by Iraq. Of particular concern was his relationship with merchant bank and defense contractor the Carlyle Group, where Baker is senior counselor and an equity partner with an estimated $180 million stake.

Until now, there has been no concrete evidence that Baker’s loyalties are split, or that his power as Special Presidential Envoy–an unpaid position–has been used to benefit any of his corporate clients or employers. But according to documents obtained by The Nation, that is precisely what has happened. Carlyle has sought to secure an extraordinary $1 billion investment from the Kuwaiti government, with Baker’s influence as debt envoy being used as a crucial lever.

The secret deal involves a complex transaction to transfer ownership of as much as $57 billion in unpaid Iraqi debts. The debts, now owed to the government of Kuwait, would be assigned to a foundation created and controlled by a consortium in which the key players are the Carlyle Group, the Albright Group (headed by another former Secretary of State, Madeleine Albright) and several other well-connected firms. Under the deal, the government of Kuwait would also give the consortium $2 billion up front to invest in a private equity fund devised by the consortium, with half of it going to Carlyle.

Full Article: thenation.com

CARACAS, Venezuela (Reuters) – Supporters of Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez celebrated Columbus Day on Tuesday by toppling a statue in Caracas of the explorer whom Chavez blames for ushering in a “genocide” of native Indians.

Police firing tear gas later recovered parts of the broken bronze image, which was dragged by the protesters to a theater where the Venezuelan leader was due to speak.

Two years ago, Chavez rechristened the Oct. 12 holiday — commemorated widely in the Americas to mark Christopher Columbus’ 1492 landing in the New World — “Indian Resistance Day.”

The new name honored Indians killed by Spanish and other foreign conquerors following in the wake of the Italian-born Columbus who sailed in the service of the Spanish crown.

As the left-wing nationalist president led celebrations on Tuesday to honor Indian chiefs who resisted the Spanish conquest, a group of his supporters conducted a mock trial of a statue of Columbus in central Caracas.

They declared the image guilty of “imperialist genocide,” looped ropes around its outstretched arm and neck and heaved it down from its marble base. No police or other authorities intervened as the protesters drove off in a truck yelling, “We’ve killed Columbus!”

“This isn’t a historical heritage. … Columbus is the symbol of a conquest that was a globalization by blood and fire, a cultural massacre,” said Vitelio Herrera, a philosophy student at Venezuela’s Central University.

Outside the Teresa Carreno theater, the protesters hung the statue from a tree and then let it fall to the ground. Police arrested several of them.

Chavez has called Latin America’s Spanish and Portuguese conquerors “worse than Hitler” and the precursors of modern-day “imperialism” he says is now embodied by the United States, the biggest buyer of his country’s oil.

The base of the toppled statue was daubed with slogans such as “Columbus – Bush. Out!”

Full Article: Reuters

RIYADH (Reuters) – Saudi Arabia’s election committee said on Tuesday women will not take part in the country’s first nationwide vote, blaming problems over special polling arrangements for women in the conservative Muslim kingdom.

The widely expected announcement marks a victory for Saudi Arabia’s religious establishment, alarmed by even modest reforms in the birthplace of Islam.

“Because of the shortage of time it is difficult to create favorable conditions for women to participate,” Prince Mansour bin Mutib bin Abdul Aziz, head of the general municipal elections committee, told a news conference.

Full Article: Reuters