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SOCIETY / MOVEMENTS


links (1)


"L'informazione e le mafie"
Narcomafie
novembre 2006 



Narcomafie, Ottobre 06 La Giustizia puo attendre 
Un documentario mette a nudo la giustizia italiana, Sotto la toga, niente, Federico Varese
Tortura, un crimine legittimato  
Editoriale di Livio Pepino
"La tortura (cioè, secondo la definizione della Convenzione di New York sottoscritta il 10 dicembre 1984 e ratificata dall’Italia con legge 3 novembre 1988, n. 498, «ogni atto mediante il quale siano inflitti intenzionalmente a una persona dolore o sofferenze gravi allo scopo di ottenere informazioni o di punirla, a condizione che il dolore o la sofferenza siano inflitti da o con il consenso o l’acquiescenza di un pubblico ufficiale») è – secondo il Diritto internazionale – un crimine contro l’umanità bandito da tutti gli ordinamenti democratici. Intendiamoci: nei fatti non è così...." 
A cura del Centro siciliano di documentazione "Giuseppe Impastato" Csd

Traffici illeciti in Medio Oriente ....
Le falle nel muro di Gianluca Iazzolino

Dovrebbe tenere lontani israeliani e palestinesi. In realtà, lo attraversano migliaia di persone ogni anno – pagando un “pedaggio” – per cercare un lavoro (in nero) o per commerciare. Qualcuno per farsi esplodere. E poi merci, documenti falsi, armi e reperti archeologici, specialità della mafia russa che in Israele ha radici profonde... Seule la mafia russe aurait trouvé le moyen de franchir le mur de la honte et de vivre, là où la vie n'a aucun droit. (Narcomafie, 09/2006)

Avec le Pape, les architectes du choc des civilisations ont-ils trouvé leur apôtre ? par Leila, oulala (18/09/06)

Chiesa e mafia in Sicilia, Parole Opere Omissioni
L’église et l'ombre de Cosa Nostra... Benoît XVI et Salvatore Cuffaro, 48 ans, démocrate-chrétien, nouveau Président de la Région de Sicile, accusé de favoritisme envers Cosa Nostra. Le parquet de Palerme estime qu'il a fait bénéficier des parrains d'informations protégées par le secret de l'instruction sur des enquêtes les concernant... Tous les chemins mènent à Rome. (Narcomafie n° 7/8 Luglio, 8/2006).

Giappone, l'evoluzione della Yakuza Il Sol levante produce sempre più ombre di Eva Morletto (Narcomafie, 6/2006)

L'ARRESTO DI BERNARDO PROVENZANO


SPEAK OUT ! Institute for democratic education and culture, Emeryville, CA, USA
Speakers & Artists (Elaine Brown, Angela Davis,Ron Daniels, Linda Evans, Brian Jones, Greg Palast, Howard Zinn, Rev. Irene Monroe...)
Speak Out ! Engagements

Quel rôle pour l'Etat ?
dans une société industrielle avancée ?
Chomsky revisite les fondements idéologiques de quatre modèles de société : le libéralisme classique, le socialisme libertaire, le socialisme d’État et le capitalisme d’État...

Expansion du tourisme, gagnants et perdants 
(...) Révélateurs criants des disparités Nord-Sud, les flux et l'industrie touristiques ont aussi tendance à creuser les écarts et le " premier monde " s'impose toujours comme le principal émetteur et récepteur de ces " migrants de plaisance " que sont les vacanciers..." Posté par le CETRI, Alternatives Sud n°3/2006, Points de vue du Sud, Editions Syllepse, Louvain-la-Neuve.
A paraître également en décembre 2006 : Etat des résistances dans le Sud - 2007

Changements climatiques. Impasses et perspectives
"Le réchauffement climatique fait planer une menace globale sur la planète. En particulier sur les populations les plus vulnérables du Sud, déjà victimes des premiers effets dramatiques des dérèglements. En 2005 à Montréal, la Conférence des Nations unies sur les changements climatiques a tenté de garantir la pérennité du Protocole de Kyoto au-delà de 2012. Mais la prise de conscience mondiale se heurte aux intérêts nationaux et les mesures engagées pour limiter les émissions de gaz à effet de serre restent dérisoires. En cause, le productivisme économiciste des logiques dominantes et l’intérêt à court terme des secteurs qui en profitent..." (Posté par le CETRI, Alternatives Sud n°2/2006, Editions Syllepse, Louvain-la-Neuve.)

Le " miracle" chinois vu de l'intérieur Points de vue du Sud
Editions Syllepse - Centre Tricontinental vol. XII (2005) La société civile socialement engagée en République démocratique du Congo
Ed.L'Harmattan - Centre Tricontinental, 2005 François Houtart

Délégitimer le capitalisme. Reconstruire l'espérance
Colophon Ed. 2005 F. Houtart L'eau de Vivendi, les vérités inavouables
Soutien à Jean Luc Touly face à l'acharnement de Volia Eau-CGE (ex-Vivendi) La Norvège dit NON pour l'eau à l'AGCS
A la veille du sommet de l'OMC à Hong Kong, le gouvernement norvégien, la semaine dernière, a annoncé qu'il retire de ses demandes le secteur de l'eau dans l'Accord Général sur le Commerce des Services (AGCS), comme pour l'électricité et pour l'éducation. La signification des réfugié-e-s dans le conflit israëlo-palestinien
Conférences publiques avec Ilan Pappé,
Bâle, Berne, Zurich & Genève (19:30 salle Zazi Sadou Maison des Associations, 15 rue des Savoises, Plainpalais-Genève by FFIPP & Collectif Urgence Palestine)
2-3-4 décembre 2005
"Aussi longtemps que les réfugiés palestiniens, qui ont été chassés de chez eux par les nouveaux arrivants juifs, en 1948, ne pourront pas retourner chez eux, et aussi longtemps que l'occupation militaire des territoires conquis par Israël en 1967 persistera, aucune solution durable ne sera possible. Aucune proposition de paix, jusqu'à ce jour, n'a apporté de solution équitable, ni aux réfugiés palestiniens, ni aux Palestiniens qui continuent à vivre sous une occupation militaire brutale." (Ilan Pappé 5/11)
28 décembre 2005, Tel Aviv University Dr.Eyad El-Sarraj, Prf.Salim Tamari, Dr.Ilan Pappé, Prf.Anat Biletzki, Prf.Yehuda Elkana, Luisa Morgantini... (FFIPP-Sponsored Conferences)

What Really Happened Fifty Years Ago? (version intégrale The Link pdf) by I.Pappé

« Il faut sanctionner Israël, désinvestir d'Israël et savoir aller de l'avant » Ilan Pappé (conférence)
Repenser l'action politique de gauche, essai de Pierre Mouterde, préface de François Houtart, présentation par C.Pose

Lancement du livre le 10/11 en collaboration avec L'UFP & Ecosociété, Casa Latinoamericana, Coalition Venezuela nous sommes avec toi (CVEC), Réseau des droits humains de Québec.
Découvrez également la pensée sociale de nos amis d'Ecosociété & D.G. Diffusion (France)
Lire notre entretien avec Pierre Mouterde, rubrique Hors-les-lignes

Les Confessions d'un assassin financier John Perkins
SES PROPRES MOYENS
Essai, une approche critique de l'expérience, des sciences et des luttes concrètes du sociologue militant québécois André Thibault, l'auteur est membre du comité de rédaction de Possibles et anime le groupe montréalais Les Amis du Monde Diplomatique
- interviews Forum-CANADA.
- Présentation en deux parties de "Ses propres moyens" par C. Pose, rubrique Hors-les-lignes. Cet essai est disponible aux Editions Nota bene
Impérialisme humanitaire. Droits de l'homme, droit d'ingérence, de Jean Bricmont
Préface de François Houtart
posté par Julie Franck (Univ. Genève)

Cinéma Altermondialiste 21-25/3/05 Studio 11 Carpe Studentem

Sex Slaves Bienstock's most recent documentary, Sex Slaves (airing on CBC Tv. Sep.19,05, 8:00pm ET) investigates the trafficking of women from the former Soviet bloc into the global sex slave trade. Written, directed and produced by Bienstock, this is the first film to take viewers inside the world of trafficking to meet victims, their families and traffickers, who talk candidly about their experiences of how the sex slave trade operates.

Design for solidarity
Graphic Forum
www.unmundofeliz.org

1st anniversary of 11M.
"Democracy & terrorism" Center for the study of POLITICAL GRAPHICS (USA)
Posters for sale San Francisco Labor Fest 2004
International Working Class Film & Video Festival Festival international de films de Fribourg 12-19 mars 2006 Chicago Palestine Film Festival 2005

The Electronic Intifada
Arts, Music & Culture
Festivals & Special Events Coverage
"Yo, Sor Alice" disparue en Argentine en 1977
5/5/04 (Fr) film de A.Marquardt
otrocampo criticas(sp)
La Mirada de las victimas 3PUNTOS(sp)
La face cachée de la Terre Le monde diplomatique(fr)
Festival de cinéma de la Havane(fr) www. peaceproject.com


[Video/Animation]

The Fall of Bagdad GNN (en)
911 (Chossudovsky & Ruppert) GNN, CRG
CIA backed Saddam : Thanks for Memories Bushflash, CRG
Bushflash.com

Looting is not un America, CRG
The MEATRIX, CRG

Econo Eyes, the Village Voice

L'Armée Japonaise (SDF) en Irak .....
Kyodo News
Japan's War Readiness, Znet asia
Les premiers militaires japonais partent pour le Golfe, Le Monde
Le gouvernement japonais réaffirme son intransigeance
News Irak & North Korea (jp)

Article 9 - Constitution Japonaise
9-Jo no kai (jp) (en) (fr)
Japanese labor movement and Doro-Chiba's Struggle (en)(jp)


http://adbusters.cool. ne.jp/
Anti (sur)consommation Adbusters
global network of artists, activists, writers, pranksters, students, educators and entrepreneurs who want to advance the new social activist movement of the information age La Lutte Finale (2003 1, mai) est une opération mise en oeuvre par L'ENTREPRISE CULTURELLE

The Map of The World



Center for the study of POLITICAL GRAPHICS (USA)

Dead Wrong is as urgent and timely as today's headlines: The U.S. Supreme Court has just denied 3 California appeals from death row and Attorney General Lockyer has already requested execution dates for S.Tookie Williams (Dec. 13,05), C.Ray Allen (Jan. 17,06) and M.Morales (Feb.06). Organizations united to abolish the death penalty in America and around the World
South Center for Human Rights (SCHR)
Life is the great primary and most precious and comprehensive of all human rights . . . whether it be coupled with virtue honor, and happiness, or with sin, disgrace and misery, the continued possession of it is rightfully not a matter of volition; . . . [it is not] to be deliberately or voluntarily destroyed, either by individuals separately, or combined in what is called Government.
- Frederick Douglass
The Center's Prison and Jail Cases in the News (très important document)
America's Abu Ghraibs By BOB HERBERT, New York Times, May 31, 2004
  "Most Americans were shocked by the sadistic treatment of Iraqi detainees at the Abu Ghraib prison. But we shouldn't have been. Not only are inmates at prisons in the U.S. frequently subjected to similarly grotesque treatment, but Congress passed a law in 1996 to ensure that in most cases they were barred from receiving any financial compensation for the abuse.
        We routinely treat prisoners in the United States like animals. We brutalize and degrade them, both men and women. And we have a lousy record when it comes to protecting well-behaved, weak and mentally ill prisoners from the predators surrounding them.
        Very few Americans have raised their voices in opposition to our shameful prison policies. And I'm convinced that's primarily because the inmates are viewed as less than human.
        Stephen Bright, director of the Southern Center for Human Rights, represented several prisoners in Georgia who sought compensation in the late-1990's for treatment that was remarkably similar to the abuses at Abu Ghraib. An undertaker named Wayne Garner was in charge of the prison system at the time, having been appointed in 1995 by the governor, Zell Miller, who is now a U.S. senator.
        Mr. Garner considered himself a tough guy. In a federal lawsuit brought on behalf of the prisoners by the center, he was quoted as saying that while there were some inmates who "truly want to do better . . . there's another 30 to 35 per cent that ain't fit to kill. And I'm going to be there to accommodate them."
        On Oct. 23, 1996, officers from the Tactical Squad of the Georgia Department of Corrections raided the inmates' living quarters at Dooly State Prison, a medium-security facility in Unadilla, Ga. This was part of a series of brutal shakedowns at prisons around the state that were designed to show the prisoners that a new and tougher regime was in charge.
        What followed, according to the lawsuit, was simply sick. Officers opened cell doors and ordered the inmates, all males, to run outside and strip. With female prison staff members looking on, and at times laughing, several inmates were subjected to extensive and wholly unnecessary body cavity searches. The inmates were ordered to lift their genitals, to squat, to bend over and display themselves, etc.
        One inmate who was suspected of being gay was told that if he ever said anything about the way he was being treated, he would be locked up and beaten until he wouldn't "want to be gay anymore." An officer who was staring at another naked inmate said, "I bet you can tap dance." The inmate was forced to dance, and then had his body cavities searched.
        An inmate in a dormitory identified as J-2 was slapped in the face and ordered to bend over and show himself to his cellmate. The raiding party apparently found that to be hilarious.
        According to the lawsuit, Mr. Garner himself, the commissioner of the Department of Corrections, was present at the Dooly Prison raid.
        None of the prisoners named in the lawsuit were accused of any improper behavior during the course of the raid. The suit charged that the inmates' constitutional rights had been violated and sought compensation for the pain, suffering, humiliation and degradation they had been subjected to.
        Fat chance.
        The Prison Litigation Reform Act, designed in part to limit "frivolous" lawsuits by inmates, was passed by Congress and signed into law by Bill Clinton in 1996. It specifically prohibits the awarding of financial compensation to prisoners "for mental or emotional injury while in custody without a prior showing of physical injury."
        Without any evidence that they had been seriously physically harmed, the inmates in the Georgia case were out of luck. The courts ruled against them.
        This is the policy of the United States of America.
        Said Mr. Bright: "Today we are talking about compensating prisoners in Iraq for degrading treatment, as of course we should. But we do not allow compensation for prisoners in the United States who suffer the same kind of degradation and humiliation."
        The message with regard to the treatment of prisoners in the U.S. has been clear for years: Treat them any way you'd like. They're just animals.
        The treatment of the detainees in Iraq was far from an aberration. They, too, were treated like animals, which was simply a logical extension of the way we treat prisoners here at home."...  

Equal justice initiative of Alabama
"There is a crisis in the South surrounding legal services for defendants whose very lives are at risk in criminal courts, jails and prisons. In the past few years, Alabama sentenced more people to death per capita than any other state in the country. The death sentencing rate in Alabama is three to ten times greater than that in other Southern states. In 1998, Tennessee, with a population of 5.4 million, sentenced four people to death; Missouri, with a population of 5.4 million, sentenced six people to death; Indiana, with a population of 5.9 million, sentenced three people to death; Arizona with a population of 4.7 million, sentenced six people to death; and Kentucky, with a population of 3.9 million, sentenced four people to death. Alabama, with a population of 4.2 million, sentenced twenty-six people to death.
In the past 10 years, Alabama's death row population has doubled. There are currently 190 people under sentence of death in the state with an additional 300 people facing capital murder trials. Alabama's unusually high death row population is partially due to a unique provision which allows an elected judge to reject a jury's verdict of life. Nearly 22% of the people sitting on Alabama's death row received a life verdict that was overridden by a trial judge.
Alabama has no state-wide public defender system and there are dozens of death row prisoners without legal representation. Death row prisoners challenging their convictions and sentences in state or federal collateral proceedings have no right to counsel. Lawyers appointed to represent death row prisoners in state postconviction proceedings cannot be paid more than $1000 per case under Alabama state law. Not surprisingly, death row prisoners have tremendous difficulty finding legal representation.
The Equal Justice Initiative of Alabama, with a legal staff of 5 attorneys, represents dozens of the condemned men, women, and juveniles currently facing execution in the state of Alabama. EJI also recruits attorneys who are willing to represent death row prisoners and is assisted by graduate fellows from New York University School of Law.
EJI is committed to providing quality representation to people on death row and challenging the hopelessness that often plagues the administration of justice for the poor and disadvantaged..."

Hands off Cain
THE 2005 REPORT
" Liberia abolished the death penalty for all crimes on September 16, 2005 when it acceded to the Second Optional Protocol to the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, aiming at the abolition of the death penalty. This treaty was one of a record 103 treaties that Liberia endorsed on the same day, 83 of which became law in the country with immediate effect, including the Second Optional Protocol.
This development strengthens the abolitionist camp internationally and in Africa, where executions were carried out by just four countries in 2004 and so far in 2005.  Liberia’s change of status from a death penalty retentionist to an abolitionist country took place after the cut-off date of HOC’s 2005 report and changes the world situation concerning country status on abolition with respect to the data carried in the printed report. This development also strengthens the chances of success of a UN General Assembly resolution calling for a stop to executions worldwide.
There are now 88 countries worldwide that are completely abolitionist, 86 of which are UN member states. Retentionist countries worldwide are to date 57, of which 55 are UN member states.
The following summary of HOC’s 2005 report, which covers death penalty news and developments in all of 2004 through to September 15, 2005, has been updated to accurately reflect the current situation..."

Georgians for Alternatives to the Dealth Penalty
A Case for Moratorium
Alexander Williams' life was spared by the state's Board of Pardons and Paroles. We commend their decision and call for the state to take the next step by placing a moratorium on executions and comissioning a study of the death penalty's application. We have a system in which a man came close to being executed who should have never been on death row.
In November, 2002, Williams' reportedly committed suicide after he had been moved out of death row and into prison. A very tragic end to an already tragic story...

Citizens United for Alternatives to the Death Penalty
American Bar Association - Death Penalty Moratorium
"A Brief History of ABA Death Penalty Policy and the
Death Penalty Moratorium Implementation Project
"Before Furman v. Georgia, 408 U.S. 238 (1972), there were relatively few U.S. Supreme Court challenges to the constitutionality of capital punishment, and none that dealt squarely with whether the death penalty violates the Eighth Amendment prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment. In Furman, however, the Court addressed this constitutional question and, in a series of five concurring opinions, held that the imposition of Georgia’s death penalty constituted cruel and unusual punishment in violation of the Eighth and Fourteenth Amendments. The Court so held because juries in Georgia (like those in many other states) had virtually total discretion in deciding whether to impose death sentences. As Justice Douglas stated in his opinion, "We deal with a system of law and of justice that leaves to the uncontrolled discretion of judges or juries the determination whether defendants committing these crimes should die or be imprisoned. Under these laws, no standards govern the selection of the penalty. People live or die, dependent on the whim of one man or of 12..."

Human Rights Watch
BEYOND REASON:
The Death Penalty and Offenders with Mental Retardation
"Since the death penalty was reinstated in 1976, at least thirty-five people with mental retardation have been executed in the United States. The exact number of people with this disability who are on death row awaiting execution is not known; experts believe there may be two or three hundred. Because of their mental retardation, these men and women cannot understand fully what they did wrong and many cannot even comprehend the punishment that awaits them. While they have the bodies of adults, in crucial ways their mental function is more like that of children. Twenty-five states, nevertheless, permit capital punishment for offenders with mental retardation. The U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that the execution of persons with mental retardation is not cruel and unusual punishment prohibited by the Eighth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.
In recent years, a growing public revulsion against executing persons with mental retardation has emerged in opinion surveys and political initiatives. Polls consistently show that a clear majority of American people -- including many who support the death penalty -- believe it is wrong to subject those with mental retardation to the ultimate state-sanctioned punishment. Thirteen states and the federal government have passed legislation prohibiting the execution of offenders with mental retardation and, as of February this year, efforts are underway in seven states to obtain similar legislation..."

US: House amendment tilts playing field for death penalty
by Human Rights Watch (27/10/O5)
"Human Rights Watch said that the legislation would give dramatic power to a single juror who could hold out for the death penalty – and thus enable the prosecution to secure a new jury. Juries in death penalty cases are already “death-qualified,” meaning that anyone who opposes the death penalty on moral, religious, or practical grounds is excluded from the jury. Yet another legislative provision passed by the House would tilt the trial in favor of death even further by permitting the judge to reduce the number of jurors below twelve, with no minimum number set. A smaller jury would make it even easier for prosecutors to secure a unanimous verdict in favor of death..."

Amnesty International : The Death Penalty
"The death penalty is the ultimate cruel, inhuman and degrading punishment.
It violates the right to life.
It is irrevocable and can be inflicted on the innocent. It has never been shown to deter crime more effectively than other punishments.
As an organization dedicated to the protection and promotion of human rights, Amnesty International (AI) works for an end to executions and the abolition of the death penalty everywhere.
The progress has been dramatic. When AI convened an International Conference on the Death Penalty in Stockholm, Sweden, in 1977, just 16 countries had abolished capital punishment for all crimes. Today the figure stands at 86..."

In 2005 Amnesty International
"• at least 2,148 people were executed in 22 countries
• 94% of them were killed in China,, Iran, Saudi Arabia and the USA
• An additional 5,186 people were sentenced to death
However, despite the shocking figures, the trend towards abolition continues to grow: the number of countries carrying out executions has dropped for a fourth consecutive year; over the last twenty years, numbers have halved. Mexico and Liberia have most recently abolished the death penalty.
There are also more than 20,000 people on death row waiting to be killed by their own governments.
The figures we have are approximate: many governments, like China, refuse to publish full official statistics on executions, while Viet Nam has even classified statistics and reporting on the death penalty as a ‘state secret’.
The death penalty is the ultimate, irreversible denial of human rights. It is often applied in a discriminatory manner, follows unfair trials or is applied for political reasons. It can be an irreversible error when there is miscarriage of justice. AI will continue to campaign until the death penalty is abolished worldwide...

Death Penalty Information Center
"Amnesty International Report Finds Declining Executions and Trend Toward Abolition
Posted: April 25, 2006
Amnesty International's most recent annual death penalty report, "The Death Penalty Worldwide: Developments in 2005," revealed a substantial drop in recorded executions around the world, as well as a growing number of nations that have abandoned the death penalty. According to the report, four nations accounted for 94% of the 2,148 recorded executions carried out around the world in 2005, a total that is significantly less than the 3,797 executions recorded in 2004 (however, in many countries the exact number of executions is unknown). Those four nations are China (1,770), Iran (94), Saudi Arabia (86), and the United States (60). Only 22 countries carried out executions in 2005, down from 25 in 2004. This is the fourth straight year this figure has dropped and it has halved in the last 20 years..."

State by State Information (DPIC)
"-Death Row Population as of January 1, 2006.
-State executions accurate as of most recent execution.
-Source for Pre-1976 executions: The Espy Database.
-States with/without the Death Penalty
-Source for Murder Rates: FBI Uniform Crime Statistics for 2004 (Published October, 2005)

Fighting For Life in the Death-Belt
Fighting For Life In The Death-Belt (DVCAM 52 min) considers the controversial institution of capital punishment in America through the eyes of Stephen Bright, the nation's leading anti-death penalty lawyer. For twenty years Bright has defended death row inmates deep in the heart of America's "death-belt" — the Southeastern States where 90% of executions occur.

SCHR: Judicial Independence, Articles and Reports
Judges and the politics of death: deciding between the Bill of rights and the next election in capital cases by Stephen Bright & Patrick Keenan (pdf)
Political attacks on the judiciary : can justice be done amid efforts to intimidate and remove judges from office for unpopular decisions ? by S. Bright (pdf)
Can judicial independence be attained in the South ? Overcoming history, elections and misperceptions about the role of the judiciary by S.Bright (pdf)
Elected judges and the death penalty in Texas: why full Habeas Corpus review by independent federal judges is indispensable to protecting constitutional rights by S.Bright (pdf)
D'autres documents diffusés par Stephen Bright et le SCHR pour mieux combattre la peine de mort aux Etats-Unis et mieux comprendre l'injustice pénale US de 1995 à 2000
Links, Federal Government (office of the state appellate defender)

SPEAK OUT ! Institute for democratic education and culture, Emeryville, CA, USA
"Speak Out - Institute for Democratic Education and Culture is the country's only national non-profit organization that promotes progressive voices on campuses and in communities. Committed to social, political, cultural and economic justice, Speak Out encourages critical and imaginative thinking about domestic and international issues through artistic and educational forums nationwide.
Speak Out works with 200 speakers and artists who represent the breadth of social movements as well as critically-acclaimed exhibits and films which inform and empower young people to take action for positive social change.
Use our web site to review our roster of speakers and artists, then contact our office for more information on costs and availability or to schedule an event on your campus or in your community..."

Speakers & Artists (Elaine Brown, Angela Davis,Ron Daniels, Linda Evans, Brian Jones, Greg Palast, Howard Zinn, Rev. Irene Monroe...)
Speak Out ! Engagements
-Elaine Brown, YWCA Conference, Washington, DC Apr. 29, 2006
-Peggy Myo-Young Choy, National Conference on Race and Ethnicity in Higher Education, Chicago, IL Jun. 1, 2006
-DREAM Dance Company University of San Diego, CA May 12, 2006
-Angela Davis, Hofstra University, Hempstead, NY Apr. 26, 2006
University of Wisconsin, Madison, WI Apr. 27, 2006
-M. Evelina Galang, Virginia Tech, Blacksburg, VA Apr. 25, 2006
-headRush, Sonoma State University, Rohnert Park, CA Apr. 29, 2006
MACLA, San Jose, CA May 13, 2006
-Derrick Jensen, Peak Oil /Sustainability Conference, New York, NY Apr. 27-29, 2006
Eugene, OR Jun. 11, 2006
-Winona LaDuke, University of Massachusetts, Boston, MA, Apr. 24, 2006
& San Diego, CA May 2-4, 2006 SUNY Syracuse, NY Oct 17 2006....

FOR MOTHER EARTH
Campaign For Disarmement, Ecologiy and Human Rights
Solar Vehicles
The First Practical Fuel-less Transport On Earth

Konarka.com / NanoSolar.com
OPERACION DIGNA / iNI UNA MAS!

List of the Murdered Women
A to Z
1. Adriana Martínez Martínez
2. Adriana Saucedo Juárez
3. Adriana Torres Márquez
4. Aída Carrillo
5. Alejandra Viescas Castro
6. Alicia Herrera
7. Alma García
8. Alma Mireya Chavira (o Chavarría) Fávila
9. Alma P. o Leticia Palafox Z.
10. Amalia Saucedo Díaz de León
11. Amelia Lucio Borja
12. Amparo Guzmán Caixba
13. Ana Gil Bravo
14. Ana Hipólito Campos
15. Ana Ma. Gardea Villalobos
16. Apolonia Fierro P.
17. Araceli Gómez Martínez
18. Araceli Lozano Bolaños
19. Araceli R. Martínez Montañés
20. Aracely Esmeralda Martínez...
B
25. Bárbara Araceli Martínez Ramos
26. Bertha Luz Briones
27. Blanca Estela Velázquez Valenzuela
28. Blanca Yadira Nuñez
29. Brenda Alfaro Luna
30. Brenda Berenice Delgado Rodríguez
31. Brenda Herrera
32. Brenda Lizeth Nájera Flores
33. Brenda Patricia Méndez Vásquez
34. Brisa Narváez Santos...


Sciences, applications militaires, histoire, politique, pensée sociale critique, justice, économie, culture & société.....

FRANCE
L'ONU préoccuppée par Nicolas Sarkozy by ContinentPremier.com
"ONU, GENEVE, Le Comité des Nations Unies contre la torture a présenté ses conclusions et recommandations à la fin des travaux de sa trente cinquième session. La France, pays des Droits de l'Homme, n'en sort pas du tout grandie. Ses méthodes préoccupent. Le ministre au bazooka désormais célèbre par ses mots que l'Histoire n'oubliera pas de sitot, Karcher, racaille, préoccupe la Communauté internationale. Sans commentaire ! "

Pour une saisine citoyenne du Conseil Constitutionnel, Contre la loi prorogeant l'Etat d'urgence (Pétition, Place aux droits, source E.Chouard)

Associations, Organisations, Mouvements signataires de la saisine citoyenne

"Référé Liberté" contre l'Etat d'urgence by Frédéric Rolin (source E.Chouard)
"Plus de 70 professeurs et maîtres des conférences des Facultés de droit et de sciences politiques ont décidé de déposer ce lundi 5 décembre 2005 une requête collective devant le Conseil d’Etat. Celle-ci vise, sur le fondement de la procédure dite du « référé-liberté » à obtenir du juge qu’il ordonne la suspension de l’état d’urgence ou qu’il enjoigne au Président de la République de le faire. Cette requête s’appuie sur le constat du retour au calme depuis désormais plus de deux semaines. Il n’existe plus aucune raison, ni de fait ni de droit, de maintenir en vigueur un régime d’exception aussi rigoureux que l’état d’urgence et qui, comme son nom l’indique, doit demeurer exceptionnel."

Le journal citoyen électronique d'Etienne Chouard
"La violence (résultat d'une exclusion extrême)surgit quand la politique est absente...Je relie la réflexion de Laurent Mucchielli à celle sur nos institutions qui, elles aussi, excluent les citoyens du fait politique entre deux élections : pas de Référendum d'Initiative Citoyenne et pouvoir exécutif hors contrôle, aussi bien en France qu'en Europe..." (E.Chouard)

"Honte aux partis" by Yvan Bachaud
"Ils déconsidèrent "la politique" en n'instaurant pas le référendum d'Initiative Populaire (RIP) qu'ils ont pourtant tous promis dans leur programme avant une échéance nationale" (Y.Bachaud)

Le réseau "Espaces-Populaires", Recherche-Action, La Rage du Peuple
Organiser un Forum Social des Banlieues
Ateliers-Résidences et Action culturelle by Hugues Bazin
Espaces populaires et espaces publics & Hip-hop by Hugues Bazin


Slow food, manifeste pour le goût et la biodiversité : La malbouffe ne passera pas ! The Slow Food movement, announced the opening of a new University of Gastronomic Sciences at Pollenzo, in Piedmont, Italy in 2004. Carlo Petrini and Massimo Montanari are the leading figures in the creation of the University, whose goal is to promote awareness of good food and nutrition.... It now describes itself (humorously) as an "eco-gastronomy faction" within the ecology movement, and some refer to the movement as the "culinary wing" of the anti-globalization movement.
Slow food, Slow food Japan

USA
Selected Articles and Book Chapters, P.N. Edwards
The Closed World : P.N. Edwards (en. Université du Michigan)
Computers & the Politics of Discourse in Cold War America
"The Closed World offers a radically new alternative to the canonical histories of computers and cognitive science. Arguing that we can make sense of computers as tools only when we simultaneously grasp their roles as metaphors and political icons, Paul Edwards shows how Cold War social and cultural contexts shaped emerging computer technology -- and were transformed, in turn, by information machines.
The Closed World explores three apparently disparate histories -- the history of American global power, the history of computing machines, and the history of subjectivity in science and culture -- through the lens of the American political imagination. In the process, it reveals intimate links between the military projects of the Cold War, the evolution of digital computers, and the origins of cybernetics, cognitive psychology, and artificial intelligence..."

Changing the atmospheres by Clark Miller and Paul N.Edwards (en)
"In recent years, Earth systems science has advanced rapidly, helping to transform climate change and other planetary risks into major political issues. Changing the Atmosphere strengthens our understanding of this important link between expert knowledge and environmental governance. In so doing, it illustrates how the emerging field of science and technology studies can inform our understanding of the human dimensions of global environmental change..."

The World in a Machine: Computer Models, Data Networks, and Global Atmospheric Politics. Projected completion: 2005. MIT Press by P.N.Edwards
"At Rio de Janeiro in 1992, most of the world's nations signed a Framework Convention on Climate Change (FCCC). The treaty commits them to limit or prevent human-induced changes to the world's climate. Since the principal cause of such change is carbon dioxide, an inevitable combustion by-product of almost all fuels, this agreement could lead to extremely far-reaching and costly socio-economic change. Yet the threats posed by a possible rapid global warming may be even more profound, including droughts, floods, large-scale changes in agricultural productivity, sea-level rise, and many other potentially catastrophic effects.
This global climate politics -- apparently so recent -- is in fact the outcome of a long history. Over the last fifty years, a relatively small group of researchers at a handful of institutions developed extremely complex computer models that simulate global climate, or the average state of Earth's atmosphere over long periods. Without these models, the causes and extent of climate change probably would not be known, and the political issue of global warming would not exist.
The models could not have been developed without computers, and they could not be calibrated or validated without global data. At the same time, such data would never have been gathered had not computer models become available. Without the models, detailed global weather data could not have been processed or understood. Near-term, human-induced ("anthropogenic") climate change could not have been tracked.
Political contexts affected these developments -- and were affected by them -- differently in different periods. 1950s weather models were constructed in hopes of Cold War military advantage, including weather and climate control as possible weapons of war. In the 1960s, international collaborations for data collection served as part of a trust-building agenda propagated by "scientific internationalists." With the rise of the environmental movement in the early 1970s, global climate change began to achieve recognition as a policy issue, but remained primarily a scientific research problem. In the early 1980s, politicized global atmospheric issues such as nuclear winter and ozone depletion received widespread attention. These paved the way for anthropogenic global warming to become an important public policy issue beginning in 1988. Since then, global climate change has been among the most hotly debated science-based policy issues in the international arena..."

"'A Vast Machine'": Standards as Social Technology" (2004 ) by P.N.Edwards
"In 1839, John Ruskin articulated his dream of a global weather observing system (1):
The Meteorological Society ... has been formed not for a city, nor for a kingdom, but for the world. It wishes to be the central point, the moving power, of a vast machine. ... It desires to have at its command, at stated periods, perfect systems of methodical and simultaneous observations; it wishes its influence and its power to be omnipresent over the globe ... to know, at any given instant, the state of the atmosphere on every point on its surface.
Today, Ruskin's "vast machine" is largely complete, built from parts--satellites, instantaneous telecommunications, and computers--that Ruskin could never have imagined. Data from a network of sensors on land, at sea, in the atmosphere, and in outer space are assimilated by computers in real time and redistributed to national weather services across the planet.
The chief purpose of this Global Observing System is weather forecasting, but the data have another important use: the detection of global climate change by comparing data gathered decades ago with recent data. Hence, the reliability of knowledge about climate change depends on the commensurability of data in space and time.
How do we compare thermometer readings from Chicago in 2003 with readings from Moscow in 1867? This is a thorny problem, because meteorological data networks have been continuously in flux. Some changes, such as increasing the number of surface weather stations, have been merely quantitative. But others--especially upper-air observations at altitudes above ~500 m (since the early 20th century) and new instruments such as radar, radiosondes, and satellite-mounted sounders--have altered the network's properties fundamentally..."

"Pourquoi fabriquer les ordinateurs?" (2002 in French) (PDF) by P.N.Edwards
"A Brief History of Atmospheric General Circulation Modeling" (2000) (PDF) by P.N.Edwards
"The World in a Machine: Origins and Impacts of Early Computerized Global Systems Models" (2000) (PDF) by P.N.Edwards
"Global Climate Science, Uncertainty and Politics: Data-laden Models, Model-Filtered Data" (1999) (PDF) by P.N.Edwards

"Cyberpunks in Cyberspace: The Politics of Subjectivity in the Computer Age" (1995) by P.N.Edwards
"Digital computers transform complex, sophisticated techniques into everyday tools. As marketing campaigns so tirelessly proclaim, they thus confer a kind of power. But the significance of computers in modern life extends far beyond this practical capacity.
For half a century, along with television, space flight, nuclear weapons, and automobiles, computers have formed a technological backdrop for the American mental landscape. Revered as the consummate representatives of an ever more technological civilization, they are tools for work and toys for play, assistants to science, fixtures of daily life. They are icons of efficiency, social status, and a high-tech future. Reverberating across the intricate webworks of language and community, images of computers weave a dense and energetic fabric of signifying forms. Computers have been absorbed into the collective American imagination.
By 'imagination' and 'culture' I mean include not only the fantastic high-tech futures of science fiction, but also the visions that guide public policy and science in a world of very-large-scale integrated circuits (Haraway 1985). Computers were the enigmatic object of profound hopes and hatreds even before their invention during the Second World War. They have always been as much symbols as practical devices: 'giant brains,' standards of precision, signs of scientific values, evidence of omnipotence. Ideas about artificial intelligence, a networked society where computers instantaneously handle calculation, communication and control, and the view of the human brain as a biological computer are now commonplaces. We can make sense of the material roles of computers as tools only when we simultaneously grasp their roles as cultural metaphors.
Igloo White
In 1968 the largest building in Southeast Asia was the Infiltration Surveillance Center at Nakhom Phanom in Thailand, the command center of US Air Force Operation Igloo White. Inside the ISC technicians pored over banks of video displays, controlled by gigantic IBM computers and connected to thousands of sensors strewn across the Ho Chi Minh Trail in southern Laos.
The sensors <ETH> shaped like twigs, jungle plants, and animal droppings <ETH> were designed to detect any human activity: the noises of truck engines, body heat, even the scent of human urine. When they picked up a signal, it appeared on the remote display terminals of the ISC as a moving white 'worm' superimposed on a map grid. As soon as the ISC computers could calculate the 'worm's' direction and rate of motion, coordinates were radioed to Phantom F-4 jets patrolling the night sky. The planes' navigation systems and computers automatically guided them to the 'box,' or map grid square, to be attacked. The ISC central computers were also capable of controlling the release of bombs automatically. The pilot might do no more than sit and watch as the invisible jungle below exploded into flames. In most cases no American ever saw the targets at all..."

Contre le néo-eugénisme scientifique et l'intelligence économique
Interview du Docteur Marie-Hélène Groussac, par Jean Dornac & Altermonde-sans-frontières
"Comme j’ai pu le constater tout au long de mes affaires, la corruption est automatiquement liée à un tel type de protection.
L’individu, le citoyen n’est plus protégé et ne bénéficie plus des droits normaux.
Je pense que ces lois qui cautionnent les dérives, le manque d’éthique, la corruption et les coups bas, allant jusqu’au crime, sont anti-constitutionnelles. C’est à ce niveau que le problème devrait être envisagé. Ensuite, il faudrait vérifier si les lois d’obligation vaccinales et les dernières lois ne sont pas elles aussi anti-constitutionnelles. Reste le problème de la probité des politiques et autres dans la mesure où la corruption est endémique dans ce pays et dans la mesure où un certain conseil constitutionnel a, en 1998-99, blanchit les responsables de l’Etat du génocide rwandais. Le Rwanda a porté plainte contre la France cette année devant la Cour Pénale Internationale pour avoir désigné un faux bouc-émissaire (spécialité bien française, un certain juge anti-terroriste est devenu brutalement général, mar plij’, et chargé des affaires juridiques de l’armée française, après avoir blanchi la France dans ce génocide, ce que n’a pas fait le Tribunal Pénal International), affaire à suivre… Mais il y a aussi un autre point sur lequel le Rwanda pourrait porter plainte et qui n’est pas sans rappeler le livre “la constance du jardinier” de John Lecarré, ancien membre des services secrets britanniques reconverti dans l’écriture, ni les essais sur des populations africaines du premier trust mondial, le laboratoire américain Pfizer, devenu leader mondial grâce au sida, c’est l’utilisation de ses orphelins du génocide, au travers d’ONG, comme cheptel de l’industrie pharmaceutique. Curieusement, il y a quelques temps, le président de Sanofi-Aventis, proche de notre ancien président, présentait dans un journal médical le projet de son labo de s’installer en Afrique.
Concernant le vaccin hépatite B : "Etant donné qu’il existe une susceptibilité génétique qui va rendre malade ou faire mourir, étant donné qu’on a obligé des individus à subir cette roulette non pas russe mais française, il s’agit d’une variante de génocide, un peu ethnique car le taux de sujets présentant ces variants diffèrent selon les pays et les races, que je qualifie de biologique : on éradique non pas une race mais des porteurs de variants moléculaires. Un problème éthique a été soulevé par une susceptibilité à des pathologies cardio-vaculaires chez des Noirs tant en Afrique qu’aux USA et par des tests de dépistage mis au point et réservés aux sujets noirs, ce aux USA. Le problème éthique soulevé était celui de tests réservés à une race et donc à un traitement lui aussi réservé à une race. Le problème que soulève le vaccin hépatite B et de la susceptibilité de certains individus est du même ordre. Il crée une discrimination entre individus sensibles et doinc vulnérables et les autres. A la longue et à grande échelle, il élimine certains individus et leurs familles. Il présente donc un aspect génocidaire et on pourrait tenter de présenter ce problème devant la Cour Pénale Internationale de La Haye. Il n’est pas douteux que tant le vaccin hépatite B que les variations de l’homocystéinémie des Noirs peuvent ouvrir la voie à des génocides discrets, le vaccin hépatite B a d’ailleurs vu le jour aux USA avec une intention très, très particulière en dircetion de certaines populations, en l’occurence les homosexuels.
En résumé, le vaccin hépatite B fait “tomber” des individus dont certains présentent des particularités génétiques (variantes de la protéine APC), en cela il réalise un génocide biologique : alors porter l’affaire, vue sous cet angle devant une instance internationale ? Pourquoi pas ?..." (Dr Marie-Hélène Groussac)
Proteines de choc thermique (HSP) et traitements des vaccins HB OGM, Dr M.H. Groussac
2ème journée internationale des victimes de vaccination
OGM, Glycosylation & Acides aminés, Dr M.H. Groussac
Vaccins et croyance - La peur se vend bien
Le redoutable vaccin anti-grippe, Dr M.H.Groussac
Le Dossier Noir du Vaccin contre l’Hépatite B, mensonge d'Etat ?, de Lucienne Foucras
VACCIN HEPATITE B : Détonateur des effets du nuage de Tchernobyl , Dr M.H. Groussac
Incompatibilité des vaccins et des OGM, Dr M.H. Groussac
Strontium et ostéoporose, Dr. M.H.Groussac
Les 10 plus gros mensonges sur les vaccins - Les dangers du vaccin anti-tétanos..., Sylvie Simon
VACCIN CONTRE LA FIEVRE JAUNE par Dr Marie-Hélène Groussac
Imputabilité HB & OGM par Dr Marie-Hélène Groussac

Contre l'eugénisme scientifique : contribution des noirs à l'humanité, l'affaire Mailloux sur la prétendue infériorité innée des noirs et des amérindiens, samedi 29 octobre, 15h au AM050 UQAM, Montréal
L'odieux congédiement de Fehmiu by Michel Vienne (17/10/05, Le Devoir.com, Québec)
War against the Weak by Edwin Black
Mountain Sweeps (1er Ch. de War against the weak) by Edwin Black (Comments by historians)
"When the sun breaks over Brush Mountain and its neighboring slopes in southwestern Virginia, it paints a magical, almost iconic image of America’s pastoral splendor. Yet there are many painful stories, long unspoken, lurking in these gentle hills, especially along the hiking paths and dirt roads that lead to shanties, cabins and other rustic encampments. Decades later, some of the victims have been compelled to speak.
     In the 1930s, the Brush Mountain hill folk, like many of the clans scattered throughout the isolated Appalachian slopes, lived in abject poverty. With little education, often without running water or indoor plumbing, and possessing few amenities, they seemed beyond the reach of social progress. Speaking with the indistinct drawls and slurred vestigial accents that marked them as hillbillies, dressed in rough-hewn clothing or hand-me-downs, and sometimes diseased or poorly developed due to the long-term effects of squalor and malnutrition, they were easy to despise. They were easily considered alien. Quite simply, polite Virginia society considered them white trash.
     Yet Brush Mountain people lived their own vibrant rural highlands culture. They sang, played mountain instruments with fiery virtuosity to toe-tapping rhythms, told and retold engaging stories, danced jigs, sewed beautiful quilts and sturdy clothing, hunted fox and deer, fished a pan full and fried it up. Most of all, they hoped for better—better health, better jobs, better schooling, a better life for their children. Hill people did produce great men and women who would increasingly take their places in modern society. But hopes for betterment often became irrelevant because these people inhabited a realm outside the margins of America’s dream. As such, their lives became a stopping place for America’s long biological nightmare..."

Hitler made eugenics famous but it took it from United States by Edwin Black (Global News Service of The Jewish People)
Quand le négationnisme s'invite à l'université, l'affaire Alexis Carrel précurseur des chambres à gaz by Didier Daeninckx (extrait du livre Ch.5, 10 chapitres en ligne)

Quelques théoriciens, sociologues, économistes et psychologues néoeugénistes américains proches des thèses néofascistes et néonazies sur les inégalités raciales et l'égalitarisme

IQ will put you in your place by Charles Murray (AEI, Manhattan Institute/ Sunday Times, 1997)
" Imagine several hundred families which face few of the usual problems that plague modern society. Unemployment is zero. Illegitimacy is zero. Divorce is rare and occurs only after the children's most formative years. Poverty is absent - indeed, none of the families is anywhere near the poverty level. Many are affluent and all have enough income to live in decent neighbourhoods with good schools and a low crime rate. If you have the good fortune to come from such a background, you will expect a bright future for your children. You will certainly have provided them with all the advantages society has to offer. But suppose we follow the children of these families into adulthood. How will they actually fare?
A few years ago the late Richard Herrnstein and I published a controversial book about IQ, The Bell Curve, in which we said that much would depend on IQ. On average, the bright children from such families will do well in life - and the dull children will do poorly. Unemployment, poverty and illegitimacy will be almost as great among the children from even these fortunate families as they are in society at large - not quite as great, because a positive family background does have some good effect, but almost, because IQ is such an important factor.
"Nonsense!" said the critics. "Have the good luck to be born to the privileged and the doors of life will open to you - including doors that will let you get a good score in an IQ test. Have the bad luck to be born to a single mother struggling on the dole and you will be held down in many ways - including your IQ test score." The Bell Curve's purported relationships between IQ and success are spurious, they insisted: nurture trumps nature; environment matters more than upbringing..."

As the bell curves by Charles Murray, Daniel Seligman (The National Review, 1997)
" Mr. Seligman is the author of A Question of Intelligence: The IQ Debate in America. Mr. Murray is co-author of The Bell Curve.
DS: Three years after publication of The Bell Curve, I find myself endlessly reading news stories about great national controversies in which all the participants do their best to ignore the data you and Dick Herrnstein laid on the table. Three recent examples:
1) the row over school vouchers, whose advocates (e.g., Bill Bennett in the Wall Street Journal) endlessly take it for granted that poor performance by students reflects only inadequacies by the teaching profession -- inadequacies among the learners being a huge unmentionable;
2) the President's astounding proposal (never characterized as such) that all American youngsters, including those with IQs at the left tail, should have at least two years of college;
3) the expressions of surprise and rage when it turned out that, in the absence of affirmative action, prestigious law schools would be admitting hardly any black students. The participants in these controversies were in no sense talking back to The Bell Curve. They were pretending its data do not exist. What's your perspective?.."

The attack on the bell curve by Richard Lynn (Personality and Individual Differences, 1999)
" It is doubtful whether any book in the entire history of psychology has been so extensively attacked as The Bell Curve by the late Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray (1994). The book has been the subject of several hundred critical reviews, a number of which have been collected in edited volumes, some of whose very titles such as Measured Lies (Kincheloe, Steinberg and Gresson, 1996) betray the emotional strength of the hostility the book has evoked. However, many of the initial attacks on The Bell Curve fell wide of the mark. Now we have two more serious books, both of which examine the arguments of The Bell Curve and find then deficient. They contain contributions from geneticists, psychologists, sociologists and statisticians, and they attempt to refute all the essential arguments made in The Bell Curve...."

Interview de Charles MURRAY (2 nov. 2004) pour les 10 ans de "The Bell Curve"
Alarmants propos de Charles Murray , un entretien réalisé le 2 novembre 2004 par Evopsy.org pour les dix ans de The Bell Curve. Evopsy.org se range de toute évidence aux côtés du "chercheur en sciences politiques le plus célèbre des USA... W. H. Brady Fellow for Culture and Freedom de l'American Enterprise Institute, think-tank d’importance internationale..."...
"(...) Charles Murray : Le sujet du livre est précisé par son sous-titre : "Intelligence et structure des classes dans la vie américaine". La thèse de TBC est qu’au cours du XX° siècle, le QI est devenu un facteur beaucoup plus déterminant du succès économique et social. Une des conséquences principales de cette évolution a été le développement de ce que nous appellons "l’élite cognitive" -- des gens qui s’associent principalement entre eux, qui dès l’école s’éloignent du contact social avec la plus grande partie du reste de la société, et qui contrôlent de plus en plus la vie de la société. Nous y discutons aussi des nombreux domaines où il est maintenant plus difficile d’être une personne à bas QI -- en partie parce que la force physique n’offre plus la même valeur sur le marché du travail, mais aussi parce que l’élite cognitive a créé un monde extrêmement complexe, naturel pour eux, mais où il est très difficile de vivre si vous n’êtes pas très intelligent. Les approches sophistiquées de l’éthique situationnelle que l’élite cognitive trouvent si attirantes en sont un exemple. Il est beaucoup plus facile pour quelqu’un à faible intelligence de vivre une vie morale dans une société qui est fondée sur "Tu ne voleras pas" que dans une fondée sur "Tu ne voleras pas sauf si tu as une vraiment bonne raison". Les élites cognitives méprisent le simple et adorent le complexe (regardez le style de la prose des intellectuels français par exemple)...
(...) Une nouvelle idée qui m’a été suggérée il y a quelques mois : l’élite cognitive est transnationale. Par exemple, l’élite cognitive française se sent plus de points communs avec les membres des élites cognitives italiennes et allemandes qu’avec par exemple les routiers et les boulangers. Non* ?..." (A lire dans son intégralité)

Egalitarian fiction and collective fraud by Linda S. Gottfredson (Society, 1994)
"Social science today condones and perpetuates a great falsehood - one that undergirds much current social policy. This falsehood, or "egalitarian fiction," holds that racial-ethnic groups never differ in average developed intelligence (or, in technical terms, g, the general mental ability factor). While scientists have not yet determined their source, the existence of sometimes large group differences in intelligence is as well-established as any fact in the social sciences. How and why then is this falsehood perpetrated on the public? What part do social scientists themselves play, deliberately or inadvertently, in creating and maintaining it? Are some of them involved in what might be termed "collective fraud?" Intellectual dishonesty among scientists and scholars is, of course, nothing new. But watchdogs of scientific integrity have traditionally focused on dishonesty of individual scientists, while giving little attention to the ways in which collectivities of scientists, each knowingly shaving or shading the truth in small but similar ways, have perpetuated frauds on the scientific community and the public at large..."

Reproduction technology for a new eugenics by Glayde Whitney (Galton Institute Conference, Man and Society in the new millennium,1997)
"The first century or two of the new millennium will almost certainly be a golden age for eugenics. Through application of new genetic knowledge and reproductive technologies the Galtonian Revolution will come to fruition. This new revolution in the new millennium, which I call the Galtonian Revolution (Whitney, 1995; 1997a) will be more momentous for the future of mankind than was the Copernican Revolution or the Darwinian Revolution. For with the Galtonian Revolution, for the first time, the major changes will not be to ideas alone, but rather the major change will be to mankind itself.
In order to briefly discuss some of the reproductive technology that will contribute to the new eugenics, I need first to define the term "eugenics". So many different people with so many different agendas have appropriated this neat word, coined by Sir Francis Galton in 1883, that the word by itself can stand for almost anything (Whitney, 1990). Surely to some eugenics is a route to prevention rather than mere treatment of the ills of humanity. Also a path to the greatest good for the greatest number. To others eugenics is a new blasphemy, a devil-word; a term of hate and abhorrence, a term that in word associations is supposed to be linked with Hitler, Holocaust, genocide and the murder of innocents..."

Eugenics : economics for the long run by Edward M.Miller (Research in biopolitics, 1997)
" There is a simple economic argument for eugenics. Eugenics is defined as efforts to improve the gene pool in a particular population. Standard micro-economic theories of wages hold that a worker's wage equals the marginal product of his working time. Much textbook discussion of his marginal product focus on the quantities of cooperating factors: capital, land, and natural resources which labor has to work with. However, another important determinant is the worker's attributes and abilities. There is evidence that these are strongly affect by his genes (see below). It follows that efforts to maximize a nation's standard of living should try to improve its citizens' genetic quality, especially with regard to intelligence and other economically important traits. Improving the genetic quality of citizens calls for having those carrying the genes for desirable traits (as evidenced by their possession of the traits themselves) producing more than their proportionate share of that nation's children..."

National wealth and intelligence by Edward M.Miller (à propos de IQ and the Wealth Nations de Richard Lynn and Tatu Vanhanen)
" The thesis of Richard Lynn and Tatu Vanhanen’ IQ and the Wealth of Nations is that differences between nations in income are basically due to differences in their populations’ intelligence.  Countries with more intelligent populations are better able to master complex modern technologies and hence enjoy higher standards of living.  While this theory has probably occurred to others, this is the first time it has been rigorously developed and put to a quantitative test. 
The heart of the book is the demonstration that national IQ and national incomes are correlated.  Lynn is well suited for this exercise because he is probably the leading expert on international comparisons of IQ.  In the course of other work, he has accumulated a massive database of studies in which IQ tests were given in different countries.  Because there are different tests, scored in various ways, an appreciable amount of work had to be done to make all of the scores compatible.   Since test scores appear to be increasing over time (for reasons that are unknown, although Lynn has speculated that improved nutrition is a major part of the explanation), scores had to be adjusted to provide for this factor as well.  A natural question is whether it is even meaningful to talk about an average national IQ.  By comparing cases in which a minimum of two tests had been given in the same nation, Lynn demonstrates that similar scores were achieved, thus showing that the reliability is sufficient to make international comparisons..."

The rollback of South Africa's chemical and biological warfare program by Dr.Stephen F.Burgess, Dr.Helen E.Purkitt, Ch.3 "Project Coast" (1981-1993)/USAF Counterproliferation center/Air War College (Avril 2001)
The Government's Dirty Little Secrets by Alexander Cockburn (Los Angeles Times, Commentary, 1998)
"The dirtiest secrets of South Africa's apartheid regime are now spilling out in the Truth and Reconciliation Commission hearings in Cape Town. It's a pity that the chilling stories haven't made much of a commotion in the United States, whose own intelligence agencies have traveled along the same path. In 1997, press reports detailed a South African agent's description of drug smuggling to raise money for terrorist schemes, including chemical experimentation on blacks. He said he had done this on behalf of the Directorate of Covert Collections, a super-secret unit within South Africa's military intelligence apparatus. The drugs - ecstasy and mandrax - were manufactured in labs run by Wouter Basson, one of the chieftains of South Africa's chemical and biological weapons program. Basson was arrested in 1997.
Hearings this month (June, 1998) at the Truth and Reconciliation Commission offered vivid insights of what went on at Roodeplaat Research Laboratories, a military installation where Basson oversaw production of infamous materials. Dr. Schalk van Rensburg testified that "the most frequent instruction" from Basson was for development of a compound that would kill but make the cause of death seemingly natural. "That was the chief aim of the Roodeplaat Research Laboratory..."

THE RIGHT LIVELIHOOD AWARD (Prix Nobel alternatif)
Canadian Coalition for Nuclear Responsibility /Regroupement de surveillance du nucléaire (CCNR/RSN)
Gulf war syndrome, depleted uranium and the dangers of low-level radiation by Rosalie Bertell
"...In the official approach to radiobiology, only direct damage to DNA has been recognized as "of concern," and only high dose/fast-dose rate experiments or observations have been accepted for use in estimating the dose-response rate. As was noted, it is the "common wisdom" that effects of low doses/slow- dose rates cannot be studied, but must be extrapolated from the officially accepted high dose/fast-dose rate studies. This approach is rejected by the work of Dr. Burlakova, and the other research noted below.
Basing one's theory on claims that is impossible to study the phenomenon is certainly a peculiar way to do science! This myth has now been clearly shown to have been rash and criminally negligent.
Unfortunately, the Desert Storm veterans were victims of one of the latest military experiments on human beings. The people of Iraq and Kuwait were also the victims of this misguided experiment. I believe that the ignorance was culpable and criminal..."

Pictures that Bush does not want you to see (effets de l'uranium appauvri à usage militaire sur les naissances en Irak)

Uranium,A discussion guide by Dr.Gordon Edwards et al.
"A.1. What is uranium?
Uranium is the heaviest metal that occurs in nature. It is an unstable material which gradually breaks apart or "decays" at the atomic level, as described in the next section. Any such material is said to be "radioactive".
As uranium slowly decays, it gives off invisible bursts of penetrating energy called "atomic radiation". It also produces more than a dozen other radioactive substances as by-products.
These unstable by-products, having little or no commercial value, are called "uranium decay products". They are discarded as waste when uranium is mined. One of them is a toxic radioactive gas called radon. The others are radioactive solids..."

Uranium sub-directory, radioactive tailings and uranium mining by Dr.Gordon Edwards et al.
" At the dawn of the nuclear age, Paul Baton and more than 30 Dene hunters and trappers innocently called uranium "the money rock."
Paid $3 a day by their white employers, the Dene hauled and ferried burlap sacks of the grimy ore from the world's first uranium mine at Port Radium, across the Northwest Territories to Fort McMurray.
Since then, at least 14 Dene who worked at the mine between 1942 and 1960 have died of lung, colon and kidney cancers, according to documents obtained through the N.W.T. Cancer Registry.
The Port Radium mine supplied the uranium to fuel the $2-billion effort to make the first atomic bombs.
"Before the mine, you never heard of cancer," said Baton, 83. "Now, lots of people have died of cancer."
Charged Cindy Gilday, chairwoman of the Deline's Uranium Committee: "In my mind it's a war crime that has been well hidden. The Dene were the first civilian victims of the war and are the last to be addressed."
The Dene, who say they were never told of uranium's hazards, will decide next weekend whether to sue or seek a settlement with the federal government.
Declassified U.S. documents show that the U.S. government, which was the buyer, and Ottawa, then the world's largest supplier, withheld health and safety information from miners, as well as natives.
Robie Chatterjee, head of health physics and risk with the Atomic Energy Control Board, responded to the news of the high incidence of cancers among the Dene by saying: "We were not aware of this (the cancers). It definitely deserves more investigation..."

"Uranium is a naturally occurring radioactive metal. It has two principal uses: nuclear bombs and nuclear electricity generation. These uses are not mutually exclusive. In recent years, uranium has also been used as armour for tanks, bullets and artillery shells.
Canada was the first country to mine uranium. The world's first uranium mine was at Port Radium, NWT, on the shore of Great Bear Lake. Canada was also the first country to refine uranium on an industrial scale. Uranium for the World War II Atomic Bomb Project was processed in secrecy at Port Hope, Ontario.
Much of the uranium for the Cold War nuclear arms race came from Canada: Port Radium and Rayrock, NWT; Uranium City, Saskatchewan; Bancroft and Elliot Lake, Ontario. By 1960 the American military contracts had been terminated. All uranium mined in Canada since 1965 has been sold for reactor fuel.
Canadian uranium miners have died from lung cancer at a rate many times higher than non-miners. Ottawa knew of the health dangers of uranium and radium as early as 1932, but did not begin to inform workers or compensate their widows until 1973. An epidemic of cancer deaths among men of the Sahtu-Dene tribe from Deline, NWT, who carried sacks of radioactive concentrates on their backs for decades, is currently under investigation by authorities.
Canada remains the world's largest producer and exporter of uranium. Since the mines at Uranium City and Elliot Lake have been closed, all Canadian uranium now comes from rich deposits located in the Athabasca Basin of Northern Saskatchewan.
Canada exports uranium all over the world. Major buyers have been the U.S., Japan, Germany, France, Sweden, and Spain. Less than twenty percent of Canada's uranium is used domestically.
Countries buying Canadian uranium must promise not to use it for weapons. But there is evidence that some of this uranium still finds its way into bombs..."

Plutonium sub-directory, the plutonium connection, nuclear weapons by CCNR
""Plutonium, Proliferation and Policy" :
• There is an old notion, recently revived in certain quarters, that so-called 'reactor-grade' plutonium   [ produced by the normal operation of power reactors ]   is not suitable to the manufacture of nuclear weapons.
The floating of this idea is perhaps a natural move by those who want to exclude plutonium from strict controls. The obvious intention here is to create the impression that there is nothing to fear from separated plutonium derived from commercial power plants. This is not true.
• As far as reactor-grade plutonium is concerned, the fact is that it is possible to use this material for nuclear warheads at all levels of technical sophistication. . . . Whatever we might once have thought, we now know that even simple designs, albeit with some uncertainties in yield, can serve as effective, highly powerful weapons -- reliably in the kiloton range.
• It was too long before we perceived the dangerous implications of our various overseas customers' moves towards domestic reprocessing and national stockpiling of plutonium extracted from spent reactor fuel. And we might not have seen it yet had the Indian explosion   [ of 1974 ]   not compelled the public to peer into the private world of the small nuclear export bureaucracy. For twenty years it had been freewheeling through the domains of diplomacy and international commerce -- out of public view, and under the protection of a myopic Atomic Energy Commission and its own congressional committee. These nuclear technocrats took as their text Atoms for Peace and as their authority the 1954 Atomic Energy Act's mandate to encourage the development of nuclear power. They dispensed their technological largesse worldwide, secure in the knowledge they were carrying out the policies of the United States.
• In assessing the dangers associated with possible misuse of plutonium or highly enriched uranium, we were influenced in the early days by the assumption that nuclear weapons and development required long and costly programs and that even separated plutonium or highly enriched uranium could not easily or rapidly be turned into military explosives.
This led to other careless assumptions: for example, that the technique of reactor safeguarding already in place -- inspections and audits -- would be adequate to provide the vital early warning of illicit attempts to divert separated plutonium, when it eventually began to accumulate in stockpiles; and also, that warning well in advance of illicit bomb fabrication was perhaps not really essential.
• These miscalculations, combined with the fact that the problem was not an immediate one, are the key to difficulties we are now experiencing in curbing further proliferation. . . . In following this course we have finally arrived at a situation in which a country can come arbitrarily close to going nuclear   [ i.e. developing nuclear weapons ]   with our materials without violating any agreements.
• These are the consequences of taking for granted the future utilization of plutonium and regarding reprocessing as a perfectly legitimate commercial activity, and also of taking for granted the efficacy of 'safeguarding'. While it is a cliché of the inspection trade that diversion cannot be prevented by inspection safeguards, there is nevertheless a general human tendency to relax and assume protection once they are in place. Calling the inspections 'safeguards' contributes to this illusion."

WWW (World Wide Web)
Tim Berners-Lee
Alternative Radio
"A forum for controversy and debate" be diverse and "provide a voice for groups that may otherwise be unheard".
projects independents
Third World Network
Independent non-profit international network of organizations.

Free Speech TV
How the World Can Help Americans Halt Bush Administration War Crimes
"As the rest of the world faces an aggressive, unilateralist superpower with apparent contempt for international law and the "decent opinion of mankind," two responses come naturally. One is appeasement: trying to moderate U.S. aggressiveness through concession. The other is anti-Americanism: bashing the United States as uniquely the source of the world's evil. Is there a better alternative?
The rest of the world can have a huge impact on American political dynamics if it can communicate simultaneously a rejection of the policies of the American government and a desire to work with the American people to build a better, safer world.
U.S. war crimes provide an opportunity for classic America-bashing. Indeed, such a response plays right into the hands of the Bush administration, which is always trying to persuade Americans that the rest of the world hates us and that only a militarized response will make us safe. But the war crimes issue also provides an opportunity to reach out to the American people and support them in bringing their government under control and building a more constructive—and safer—relationship with the rest of the world..."

Butterfly Effect
Lorenz
Chaos & Fractal  (jp)  (en)
personnal site of Paul Bourke
::::: What is a fractal? B. Mandelbrot ---
A rough or fragmented geometric shape that can be subdivided in parts,
each of which is (at least approximately) a reduced/size copy of the whole.

Z Magazine & Z Net (ca)
World Tribunal on Iraq

US War Resisters in Canada
Women’s Unwaged Caring Work By Cory Fischer-Hoffman
"A delegation of 70 women from the Global Women’s Strike, an organization formed to win economic and social recognition for unwaged caring work, stood together in the community of La Padera, Venezuela, awaiting news. Global Women’s Strike member Juanita Romero explained that President Hugo Chávez had just announced what we had all been waiting for: implementation of Article 88 of Venezuela’s Bolivarian Constitution. 
Article 88 in the Bolivarian Constitution declares: “The State guarantees equality and equity between men and women in the exercise of their right to work. The State recognizes work in the home as an economic activity that creates added values and produces social welfare and wealth. Housewives are entitled to Social Security...” 

No dancing with the "Red Devils" in Nepal By Jason Andrews
"On February 13, 1996 a small band of communist rebels, modeling themselves after the Chinese revolutionary leader Mao, attacked police posts in two remote districts in the western part of Nepal, inaugurating a People’s War in the only Hindu kingdom in the world. At the time, they were dismissed by the government as an irrelevant, minor disturbance, the home minister remarking, “I am confident that we will be able to bring the present activities under control within four to five days.” A slight miscalculation, it now appears. 
February marked the tenth anniversary of the Maoists’ war in Nepal, a conflict that has claimed more than 13,000 lives, shattered a fragile rural infrastructure, halted development, and grown to dominate the consciousness of the country’s 26 million inhabitants who live precariously lodged between an armed and undisciplined militia and a repressive army that rarely pauses to distinguish between rebels and civilians..." 

Democracy Now !
HOWARD ZINN on Democracy Now! (Texts & Radios)
A special hour-long conversation : "To be neutral, to be passive in a situation is to collaborate with whatever is going on" (27/04/05)
"AMY GOODMAN: He is an historian and author of one of the most popular books on American history, A People's History of the United States. But before we go to him, we're turning to an excerpt of a new film that chronicles his life. It's titled, You Can't Be Neutral on a Moving Train, which is also the title of his autobiography. The film is produced by First Run Features. It's narrated by Howard Zinn’s next door neighbor, actor Matt Damon.
HOWARD ZINN: We grow up in a controlled society. And so we thought, if one person kills another person, that is murder. But if the government kills 100,000 persons, that is patriotism. And they’ll say we’re disturbing the peace, but there is no peace. What really bothers them is that we’re disturbing the war.
MATT DAMON: [from The Zinn Reader]I start from the supposition that the world is topsy turvy, that things are all wrong, that the wrong people are in jail, and the wrong people are out of jail, that the wrong people are in power, and the wrong people are out of power. I start from the supposition that we don't have to say too much about this, because all we have to do is think about the state of the world today and realize that things are all upside-down.
HOWARD ZINN: History is important. If you don't know history, it's as if you were born yesterday. And if you were born yesterday, anybody up there in a position of power can tell you anything, and you have no way of checking up on it..."

Bush represents everything that Martin Luther King opposed" (20/01/05)
"HOWARD ZINN: It's interesting that the inauguration should come a few days after the celebration of Martin Luther King's birthday, because here we have Bush being inaugurated as President after the -- all of the hypocritical statements made on Martin Luther King's birthday by our leading politicians, and who talk sort of very rhapsodically about Martin Luther King, but absolutely really taking what he stands for and pushing it aside, because Bush represents everything that Martin Luther King opposed. I mean, King spoke against the Vietnam War. He had a famous speech at Riverside church in 1967. Here we are inaugurated a President who has given us two wars in his first term, and is probably planning more wars. Here is King who stood for non-violence, and here is Bush, who represents the most violent nation in history, and -- well, King himself called the United States at that time in Vietnam, you know, the greatest purveyor of violence in the world. What he said in 1967 certainly applies to the United States today. And I think that the spirit of King, the spirit of opposing war, standing for non-violence, is something that animates the people who are demonstrating against Bush today in Washington, and in San Francisco and in New Orleans, and in New York and Boston. Well, as you pointed out in Boulder, Colorado, and I am sure in hundreds of places in this country. And I would guess that people around the world -- well, it's more than a guess. We have the evidence that all over the world, people -- people are mourning the ascension of Bush to his second term as President. That it’s hopeful that we have sort of a worldwide movement that is determined not to -- to put an end to war and create a different kind of world. I think that's something to feel encouraged about, even as all of this pomp and circumstance of the inauguration goes on..."

Revolutionnary non-violence: remembering Dave Dellinger (1915-2004) (27/05/04)
Labor day special : Howard Zinn on occupied Iraq, the role of resistance movements, government lies and the média (1/9/03)
Independance day special : a dramatic reading of "A people's history of the United States" with James Earl Jones, Alfre Woodard, Kurt Vonnegut, Danny Glover, Harris Yulin (4/7/03)
Howard Zinn and Arundhati Roy : a conversation between two leading social critics (28/5/03)
The most important message I want to convey is that you don't depend on the authorities, the people in power to solve problems (25/2/03)
American history review of the 20th century:Manning Marable and Howard Zinn (27/12/99)

HOWARD ZINN.org
INTERVIEWS
It seems to me : Essays from The Progressive Magazine
Znet commentaries
The Optimism of Uncertainty
"In this awful world where the efforts of caring people often pale in comparison to what is done by those who have power, how do I manage to stay involved and seemingly happy?
I am totally confident not that the world will get better, but that we should not give up the game before all the cards have been played.
The metaphor is deliberate; life is a gamble. Not to play is to foreclose any chance of winning. To play, to act, is to create at least a possibility of changing the world.
There is a tendency to think that what we see in the present moment will continue. We forget how often we have been astonished by the sudden crumbling of institutions, by extraordinary changes in people's thoughts, by unexpected eruptions of rebellion against tyrannies, by the quick collapse of systems of power that seemed invincible..."

In the Mainstream Press
"McVeigh's Path to Death Chamber by Howard Zinn
 "NOW THAT Timothy McVeigh has been put to death, and some people's need for revenge or punishment may be satisfied, we can begin to think calmly of how he learned his twisted sense of right and wrong from the government that executed him.
No one with an ounce of moral understanding can justify the bombing of a building that resulted in the deaths of 168 people. But McVeigh didn't have to look far to find that the United States government had done just that, but on a larger scale.
In the war against Iraq, of which McVeigh was a decorated veteran, on Feb. 15, 1991, the US Air Force dropped a bomb on an air raid shelter in Bagdad, killing more than 600 people, many of them women and children. There had been many bombings, of buses, trains, highways, hospitals, neighborhoods, in which civilians were killed, and where the government described them as accidents..."

Seven Stories Press - selected books
Voices of a people's history of the United States
“When I began work, five years ago, on what would become the present volume, Voices of a People’s History of the United States, I wanted the voices of struggle, mostly absent from our history books, to be given the place they deserve. I wanted labor history, which has been the battleground, decade after decade, century after century, of an ongoing fight for human dignity, to come to the fore. And I wanted my readers to experience how at key moments in our history some of the bravest and most effective political acts were the sounds of the human voice itself.
“To omit or to minimize these voices of resistance is to create the idea that power only rests with those who have the guns, who possess the wealth, who own the newspapers and the television stations. I want to point out that people who seem to have no power, whether working people, people of color, or women—once they organize and protest and create movements—have a voice no government can suppress...”

The Zinn reader, writings on disobedience and democracy
"-The hard fact of racism, in the South and in the North, at the start of the civil rights movement;
- Zinn on LaGuardia, the Ludlow Massacre, and "Growing Up Class-Conscious";
- Questioning the very idea of a "just war";
- LBJ, the CIA, Nixon, and the bombing of Hiroshima;
- Civil disobedience and the role of punishment in our society;
- On Upton Sinclair, Sacco and Vanzetti, and "Where to Look for a Communist";
- Why historians don't have to be "objective" and how the power of the academy is wasted;
- On anarchism, violence, and human nature, and "The Spirit of Rebellion."

Terrorism and war, H.Z & Anthony Arnove
"In Terrorism and War Zinn explores the growth of the American empire, as well as the long tradition of resistance in this country to U.S. militarism, from Eugene Debs and the Socialist Party during World War One to the opponents of U.S. military intervention in Afghanistan today..."

Artists in time of war
"Political power," says Howard Zinn, "is controlled by the corporate elite, and the arts are the locale for a kind of guerilla warfare in the sense that guerillas look for apertures and opportunities where they can have an effect." In his new book, "Artists in Times of War," Zinn looks at the possibilities to create such apertures through art, film, activism, publishing and through our everyday lives..."

Howard Zinn on History
"Some of the essays to be included in Howard Zinn on History:
- Where to Look for a Communist
- The Problem is Civil Obedience
- Columbus and Western Civilization
- Historian as Citizen
- The New History
- "A University Should Not Be a Democracy"
- How Free is Higher Education? and
- "Je Ne Suis Pas Marxiste."

Howard Zinn page, extraits de ses principaux ouvrages en ligne by Third World Traveler
A people's history of the United States
"The Indians, Columbus reported, "are so naive and so free with their possessions that no one who has not witnessed them would believe it. When you ask for something they have, they never say no. To the contrary, they offer to share with anyone...." He concluded his report by asking for a little help from their Majesties, and in return he would bring them from his next voyage "as much gold as they need . . . and as many slaves as they ask." He was full of religious talk: "Thus the eternal God, our Lord, gives victory to those who follow His way over apparent impossibilities."
Because of Columbus's exaggerated report and promises, his second expedition was given seventeen ships and more than twelve hundred men. The aim was clear: slaves and gold. They went from island to island in the Caribbean, taking Indians as captives. But as word spread of the Europeans' intent they found more and more empty villages. On Haiti, they found that the sailors left behind at Fort Navidad had been killed in a battle with the Indians, after they had roamed the island in gangs looking for gold, taking women and children as slaves for sex and labor.
Now, from his base on Haiti, Columbus sent expedition after expedition into the interior. They found no gold fields, but had to fill up the ships returning to Spain with some kind of dividend. In the year 1495, they went on a great slave raid, rounded up fifteen hundred Arawak men, women, and children, put them in pens guarded by Spaniards and dogs, then picked the five hundred best specimens to load onto ships. Of those five hundred, two hundred died en route. The rest arrived alive in Spain and were put up for sale by the archdeacon of the town, who reported that, although the slaves were "naked as the day they were born," they showed "no more embarrassment than animals." Columbus later wrote: "Let us in the name of the Holy Trinity go on sending all the slaves that can be sold..."

The Zinn reader
The CIA, it is generally understood by now (1996), has a long and dirty record of violating, again and again, norms of moral behavior: overthrowing governments, installing military dictatorships, planning the assassinations of foreign leaders, spying on American citizens, interfering in foreign elections, causing the deaths of large numbers of innocent people. In 1975, at the end of the Vietnam War, some of its activities were just coming to the fore, and to quiet further inquiry an investigating commission was set up under Nelson Rockefeller. When the commission released its report, I wrote a column 'June 7, 1975) for the Boston Globe.
 "Rockefeller Inquiry Clears CIA of Major Violations" was the headline in the New York Times. Now we can relax. Except for one troubling question: who will clear Rockefeller?
All these fellows go around clearing one another. It seems that only at the top levels of government is serious attention paid to the principle that criminals should be tried by juries of their peers. What would be the public reaction to the headline: "Boston Strangler Clears Cambridge Mugger"? Is that more shocking than: "Attica Massacre Chief Clears Assassination Plotters"?
Rockefeller was the perfect choice to head a commission investigating the CIA. Questioned during his nomination hearing last fall by Sen. Hatfield: "Do you believe that the Central Intelligence Agency should ever actively participate in the internal affairs of another sovereign country, such as in the case of Chile?" Rockefeller replied, "I assume they were done in the best national interest." According to CIA head William Colby's testimony, the CIA tried-with $8 million-to change the election results in Chile when it seemed a Marxist, Allende, would win. American corporations didn't like Allende because he stood for nationalization of Anaconda Copper and other businesses. Anaconda Copper owed a quarter of a billion dollars to a group of banks led by Chase Manhattan, whose chairman is David Rockefeller, Nelson's brother. Now we are catching on to the meaning of "national interest..."

Declarations of independance
"[Henry] Kissinger, secretary of state to Nixon, ... surrendered himself with ease to the princes of war and destruction. In private discussions with old colleagues from Harvard who thought the Vietnam War immoral, he presented himself as someone trying to bring it to an end, but in his official capacity he was the willing intellectual tool of a policy that involved the massive killing of civilians in Vietnam.
Kissinger approved the bombing and invasion of Cambodia, an act so disruptive of the delicate Cambodian society that it can be considered an important factor in the rise of the murderous Pol Pot regime in the country. After he and the representatives of North Vietnam had negotiated a peace agreement to end the war in late 1972, he approved the breaking off of the talks and the brutal bombardment of residential districts in Hanoi by the most ferocious bombing plane of the time, the B-52.
[Henry] Kissinger's biographers describe his role [in the bombing of Cambodia]: "If he had disapproved of Nixon's policy, he could have argued against the Cambodian attack. But there is no sign that he ever mustered his considerable influence to persuade the President to hold his fire. Or that he ever considered resigning in protest. Quite the contrary, Kissinger supported the policy..."

Howard Zinn on history
"What of revolution? Here the balance of achievement and cost is less haphazard, though still far from rational. The four great revolutions of modern times (the American, the French, the Russian and the Chinese) though all erratic in their movement towards social progress, in the end, I believe, justified the relatively small amount of violence required to fulfill them. But today, can we still look to revolutions as the chief means of social change, and as a useful means, whereby great change can be achieved at relatively small cost?
In some exceptional instances, yes. But, as a general rule, it seems to me that the conditions of the contemporary world have removed the feasibility of revolutions in the old sense. There are several reasons for this. One is that the power of weapons in the hands of the ruling elite makes popular uprisings, however great is the base of support, a very dubious undertaking. The other consideration, and probably more important, is that revolutions like wars no longer can be contained. They almost always involve one or more of the great nations of the world, and are either crushed by an outside power (as were the Hungarians in their revolt) or are prolonged to the point of frightful massacre (as the revolt in Viet Nam was met by the intervention of the French and then the Americans, and as the revolt in the Congo was stymied by Belgians and other forces). The Cuban revolution was an oddity; it was able to subsist because it brought into the picture not one but both the two leading world powers. There, even in success we can see the perils posed by revolution in the contemporary world, for the Cuban missile crisis almost set off a global disaster...
We need apparently some technique which is more energetic than parliamentary reform and yet not subject to the dangers which war and revolution pose in the atomic age...
This technique, I suggest, is that which has been used over the centuries by aggrieved groups in fitful, semi-conscious control of their own actions. With the Negro revolt in America, the technique has begun to take on the quality of a deliberate use of power to effect the most change with the least harm. I speak of non-violent direct action. This encompasses a great variety of methods, limited only by our imaginations: sit-ins, freedom rides and freedom walks, prayer pilgrimages, wade-ins, pray-ins, freedom ballots, freedom schools, and who knows what is on the horizon? Whatever the specific form, this technique has certain qualities: it disturbs the status quo, it intrudes on the complacency of the majority, it expresses the anger and the hurt of the aggrieved, it publicizes an injustice, it demonstrates the inadequacy of whatever reforms have been instituted up to that point, it creates tension and trouble and thus forces the holders of power to move faster than they otherwise would have to redress grievances... "

Howard Zinn on war
"I would suggest another way of looking at the facts: that there is a similar principle, operating in domestic affairs and foreign affairs-for presumably liberal states as for other kinds of states: that in a world which has not yet developed either the mind or the mechanism for humane cooperation, power and privilege tend to be as rapacious as the degree of resistance by the victims will permit. That aggression at home is more disguised, more sporadic, more controlled than aggression abroad, comes from the development of countervailing forces at home, while those abroad have usually been helpless before the marauding foreign power. Where internal groups have been similarly helpless they have been treated as ruthlessly as enemies in wartime: the blacks, the Indians, the workingmen before they organized, the students when they dared to challenge authority..."

Terrorism and war
" If people knew some history, if teachers gave them history, if the media gave people history, if anyone with power over communications networks gave them some history, they might recognize in this rush to war the same subservience as we have seen in the past. When Bush went to Congress after September 11, everyone there acted as if there were no need to think and to ask questions about what we should do. They voted unanimously in the Senate and almost unanimously in the House of Representatives. There was only one dissenting vote. When I heard that, I thought that dissenting vote must have been Bernie Sanders, the Independent from Vermont, but it wasn't. It was Barbara Lee from California.
So, history can be useful. It can tell you something about government, about lies and deception. If people knew that history, they wouldn't just sit and listen to Bush and be impressed that he knows how to read.
If we don't know that history, we won't understand how much animosity we have engendered elsewhere in the world-not just in the Middle East but all over the world. (In its foreign policy, the United States has consigned several million people to their deaths and supported terrorist | governments in various parts of the world, especially in `< Latin America and the Middle East.
If we don't have any history, we'll live our lives believing what we're taught in school, that America is a beacon I for democracy and freedom in the world. We'll think that we've been the Boy Scouts of the world, helping countries across the street..."

Voices of a people's history of the United States
"The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee assumes its right to dissent with United States foreign policy on any issue, and states its opposition to Untied States involvement in Vietnam on these grounds:
We believe the United States government has been deceptive in claims of concern for the freedom of the Vietnamese people, just as the government has been deceptive in claiming concern for the freedom of colored people in such other countries as the Dominican Republic, the Congo, South Africa, Rhodesia, and in the United States itself.
We, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, have been involved in the black people's struggle for liberation and self-determination in this country for the past five years. Our work, particularly in the South, taught us that the United States government has never guaranteed the freedom of oppressed citizens and is not yet truly determined to end the rule of terror and oppression within its own borders.
We ourselves have often been victims of violence and confinement executed by U.S. government officials. We recall the numerous persons who have been murdered in the South because of their efforts to secure their civil and human rights, and whose murderers have been allowed to escape penalty for their crimes..."

Livres de CHOMSKY en ligne
Profit over people, 1999
Market Democracy in a Neoliberal Order:
Doctrines and Reality
"Freedom without opportunity is a devil's gift, and the refusal to provide such opportunities is criminal. The fate of the more vulnerable offers a sharp measure of the distance from here to something that might be called ``civilization.'' While I am speaking, 1000 children will die from easily preventable disease, and almost twice that many women will die or suffer serious disability in pregnancy or childbirth for lack of simple remedies and care.[1] UNICEF estimates that to overcome such tragedies, and to ensure universal access to basic social services, would require a quarter of the annual military expenditures of the ``developing countries,'' about 10% of U.S. military spending. It is against the background of such realities as these that any serious discussion of human freedom should proceed.
It is widely held that the cure for such profound social maladies is within reach. The hopes have foundation. The past few years have seen the fall of brutal tyrannies, the growth of scientific understanding that offers great promise, and many other reasons to look forward to a brighter future. The discourse of the privileged is marked by confidence and triumphalism: the way forward is known, and there is no other. The basic theme, articulated with force and clarity, is that ``America's victory in the Cold War was a victory for a set of political and economic principles: democracy and the free market.'' These principles are ``the wave of the future - a future for which America is both the gatekeeper and the model...''

Secrets, Lies and Democracy, 1994
Nuclear power
"At a conference in Washington DC, a woman in the audience got up and decried the fact that you're in favor of nuclear power. Are you?
No. I don't think anybody's in favor of nuclear power, even business, because it's too expensive. But what I am in favor of is being rational on the topic. That means recognizing that the question of nuclear power isn't a moral one -- it's a technical one. You have to ask what the consequences of nuclear power are, versus the alternatives.
There's a range of other alternatives, including conservation, solar and so on. Each has its own advantages and disadvantages. But imagine that the only alternatives were hydrocarbons and nuclear power. If you had to have one or the other, you'd have to ask yourself which is more dangerous to the environment, to human life, to human society. It's not an entirely simple question.
For example, suppose that fusion were a feasible alternative. It could turn out to be nonpolluting. But there are also negative factors. Any form of nuclear power involves quite serious problems of radioactive waste disposal, and can also contribute to nuclear weapons proliferation. Fusion would require a high degree of centralization of state power too.
On the other hand, the hydrocarbon industry, which is highly polluting, also promotes centralization. The energy corporations are some of the biggest in the world, and the Pentagon system is constructed to a significant degree to maintain their power..."

Keeping the Rabble in line, 1994
Crime and Gun Control
"DB: There's quite a bit of controversy on gun control. Advocates of free access to arms cite the Second Amendment. Do you believe the Second Amendment permits unrestricted, uncontrolled possession of guns?
What laws permit and don't permit is a question that doesn't have a straightforward answer. Laws permit what the tenor of the times interprets them as permitting. But underlying the controversy over guns are some serious questions. Literally, the Second Amendment doesn't permit people to have guns. But laws are never taken literally, including amendments to the Constitution or constitutional rights.
Underlying the controversy is something which shouldn't be discounted. There's a feeling in the country that people are under attack. I think they're misidentifying the source of the attack, but they feel under attack. Decades of intensive business propaganda have been designed to make them see the government as the enemy, the government being the only power structure in the system that is even partially accountable to the population, so naturally you want to make that be the enemy, not the corporate system, which is totally unaccountable. After decades of propaganda people feel that the government is some kind of enemy and they have to defend themselves from it. Many of those who advocate keeping guns have that in the back of their minds. I wouldn't believe it if I hadn't heard it so many times. That's a crazy response to a real problem.
DB: What role do the media play in fostering those attitudes?
At the deepest level, by contributing to this notion of getting the government off our backs. It's not that that doesn't have its justifications, too. The government is authoritarian and commonly a hostile structure for much of the population, but it is partially accountable and potentially very extensively accountable to the general population.
The media grossly mislead by contributing to the sense that the government is the enemy and displacing real power from view, suppressing the sources of real power in the society, which lie in the totalitarian institutions, by now international in scale, that control the economy and much of social life and in fact certainly set conditions within which government operates and control it to a large extent. This happens sometimes in comical ways and sometimes in deeper ways.
People simply have no awareness of the system of power under which they are indeed suffering. As a result, as intended, they turn against the government. People fear that they're overtaxed. By comparative standards they're undertaxed. When people talk about a tax-based health plan, meaning one that doesn't just soak the poor, like the Clinton plan is intended to do, you get a reflex response: more pointy-headed bureaucrats stealing our money and running our lives. On the other hand, payment of far higher "taxes" -- regressive to boot -- to a far more bureaucratized and oppressive insurance company that is completely unaccountable, that's OK because you aren't supposed to see it.
To get back to gun control, people have all kinds of motivations, but there is definitely a sector of the population that considers themselves threatened by big forces, ranging from the Federal Reserve to the Council on Foreign Relations to big government to who knows what and are calling for guns to protect themselves..."

The prosperous few and the restless many, 1993
The roots of racism
"That brings in the whole question of race and racism and how that factored into the relationship between the North and the South.
There has always been racism. But it developed as a leading principle of thought and perception in the context of colonialism. That's understandable. When you have your boot on someone's neck, you have to justify it. The justification has to be their depravity.
It's very striking to see this in the case of people who aren't very different from one another. Take a look at the British conquest of Ireland, the earliest of the Western colonial conquests. It was described in the same terms as the conquest of Africa. The Irish were a different race. They weren't human. They weren't like us. We had to crush and destroy them.
Some Marxists say racism is a product of the economic system, of capitalism. Would you accept that?
No. It has to do with conquest, with oppression. If you're robbing somebody, oppressing them, dictating their lives, it's a very rare person who can say: "Look, I'm a monster. I'm doing this for my own good." Even Himmler didn't say that.
A standard technique of belief formation goes along with oppression, whether it's throwing them in gas chambers or charging them too much at a corner store, or anything in between. The standard reaction is to say: "It's their depravity. That's why I'm doing it. Maybe I'm even doing them good."
If it's their depravity, there's got to be something about them that makes them different from me. What's different about them will be whatever you can find..."

Year 501,1993
"Murdering History
A few months before the end of Year 500, the Times Book Review appeared with a front-page headline reading: "You Can't Murder History." The review-article dedicated to this lesson keeps to a single case: "History in the old Soviet Union was like cancer in the human body, an invisible presence whose existence is bravely denied but against which every conceivable weapon is mobilized." It takes up one striking example of "this disease within the Soviet body politic," the depiction of the murder of the Tsar and his family, recalling "those all-powerful Soviet officials whose job it was to suppress the public's memory of this grisly episode," but who, in the end, "could not hold back the tide."1
These reflections did not touch upon a few other examples of murdering history that might come to mind, particularly at this historical moment. Convention has it that multiples of 10 provide the occasion to reflect on the meaning of history and the questions it poses; and perhaps also on the murder of history by its guardians, who, in every society, are acutely sensitive to the faults of official enemies. The convention is useful. By adopting it and examining some of the anniversaries that fall within the 500th year, we can learn something about ourselves, in particular, about the doctrinal foundations of Western culture, a topic of much importance, given the resources of violence, coercion, and denial at its core..."

What uncle Sam really wants, 1992
Socialism, real and fake
"The world's two major propaganda systems did not agree on much, but they did agree on using the term socialism to refer to the immediate destruction of every element of socialism by the Bolsheviks. That's not too surprising. The Bolsheviks called their system socialist so as to exploit the moral prestige of socialism.
The West adopted the same usage for the opposite reason: to defame the feared libertarian ideals by associating them with the Bolshevik dungeon, to undermine the popular belief that there really might be progress towards a more just society with democratic control over its basic institutions and concern for human needs and rights.
If socialism is the tyranny of Lenin and Stalin, then sane people will say: not for me. And if that's the only alternative to corporate state capitalism, then many will submit to its authoritarian structures as the only reasonable choice.
With the collapse of the Soviet system, there's an opportunity to revive the lively and vigorous libertarian socialist thought that was not able to withstand the doctrinal and repressive assaults of the major systems of power. How large a hope that is, we cannot know. But at least one roadblock has been removed. In that sense, the disappearance of the Soviet Union is a small victory for socialism, much as the defeat of the fascist powers was..."

Deterring democracy, 1992
"Our Traditional Values
The fundamental issue was clearly articulated by a distinguished Cambridge University Professor of political theory:
Our traditions, fortunately, prove to have at their core universal values, while theirs are sometimes hard to distinguish with the naked eye from rampant (and heavily armed) nihilism. In the Persian Gulf today, President Bush could hardly put it more bluntly...
One who fails to grasp this principle might find it hard to distinguish Saddam Hussein's invasion of Kuwait from many other crimes, some far worse than his, that the West has readily tolerated, or supported, or perpetrated directly, including one case only a few months before, with its lessons about the New World Order.
Our traditions and the values at their core had long been evident in the Gulf. Keeping just to Iraq, they were illustrated during the insurrection of 1920 against British rule, one episode of "a contagion of unrest afflicting the British Empire from Egypt to India."5 British sensibilities were deeply offended by this rampant nihilism, a stab in the back at a time when the empire had been weakened by the World War. Sir Arnold Wilson fumed that "To kick a man when he is down is the most popular pastime in the East, sanctioned by centuries of precept and practice." The India office traced the Iraqi revolt to local "ultra-extremists," who desired the "abolition of European control of all sorts throughout the East." Winston Churchill agreed, calling the revolt "only part of a general agitation against the British empire and all it stands for..."

Necessary illusions, 1989
Containing the Enemy
"In the first chapter, I mentioned three models of media organization: (1) corporate oligopoly; (2) state-controlled; (3) a democratic communications policy as advanced by the Brazilian bishops. The first model reduces democratic participation in the media to zero, just as other corporations are, in principle, exempt from popular control by work force or community. In the case of state-controlled media, democratic participation might vary, depending on how the political system functions; in practice, the state media are generally kept in line by the forces that have the power to dominate the state, and by an apparatus of cultural managers who cannot stray far from the bounds these forces set. The third model is largely untried in practice, just as a sociopolitical system with significant popular engagement remains a concern for the future: a hope or a fear, depending on one's evaluation of the right of the public to shape its own affairs.
The model of media as corporate oligopoly is the natural system for capitalist democracy. It has, accordingly, reached its highest form in the most advanced of these societies, particularly the United States, where media concentration is high, public radio and television are limited in scope, and elements of the radical democratic model exist only at the margins, in such phenomena as listener-supported community radio and the alternative or local press, often with a noteworthy effect on the social and political culture and the sense of empowerment in the communities that benefit from these options.1 In this respect, the United States represents the form towards which capitalist democracy is tending; related tendencies include the progressive elimination of unions and other popular organizations that interfere with private power, an electoral system that is increasingly stage-managed as a public relations exercise, avoidance of welfare measures such as national health insurance that also impinge on the prerogatives of the privileged, and so on. From this perspective, it is reasonable for Cyrus Vance and Henry Kissinger to describe the United States as "a model democracy," democracy being understood as a system of business control of political as well as other major institutions... "

"Human Rights" and american foreign policy,1978
Introduction
"The two essays that follow are concerned with certain aspects of this reconstruction of ideology within the United States. They are by no means comprehensive. Thus, I have not dealt at all with one of the most intriguing contemporary phenomena: the 'discovery' of Gulag and of the deeply authoritarian character of Leninist state socialism and its various offshoots, all familiar for many decades, both in gory detail and in general character and historical background, to the libertarian left, but now invoked by new enthusiasts as part of a post facto justification for imperial aggression. One particular form taken by the new version of imperial apologia, entirely predictable but none the less rather successful in sowing confusion and rebuilding the faith, is the pretense that principled opposition to American aggression throughout Indo-China was 'support for Hanoi' so that this alleged commitment must be reassessed as the revolutionary society develops, though in fact a moment's reflection suffices to establish that opposition in principle to aggression is quite independent of any assessment of the forces it attempted to crush or the society that may develop from the wreckage. There are many other features of current ideology that merit scrutiny beyond those that will be considered here.
  In general, it seems fair to conclude that Western intelligentsia continue, in significant measure, to exploit the substantial freedom that they enjoy to construct the system of beliefs that is required to defend privilege and power and to justify its exercise, as the poor and oppressed of the world seek ways to take their future in their own hands..."

Counter-revolutionary violence, 1973


Les Amis du Monde Diplomatique

Les Amis du MONDE diplomatique (AMD)
AMD-CANADA (textes et comptes rendus très aimablement confiés par André Thibault)

Voyager autrement : Tourisme équitable et écotourisme

La transformation des inégalites structurelles entre les pays, surtout entre le nord et le sud, fait appel à des changements majeurs des règles qui régissent (ou omettent de régir) les échanges économiques. Mais en tant qu'acteurs locaux, il nous est déjà possible d'adopter des pratiques qui améliorent le degré de justice et de respect des transactions où nous sommes impliqués. Avec l'hiver qui commence à nous envahir, un certain nombre d'entre nous envisagent quelque vacance vers des climats plus cléments. Mais à moindre distance, nous pouvons en tout temps de l'année repenser à nos vacances précédentes, prévoir celles de l'été prochain, et nous demander jusqu'à quel point nous pouvons harmoniser nos préoccupations sociales avec nos besoins de détente et de distractions. C'est ce qu'explorera notre prochaine conférence/débat.

Louise Constantin & Marie-Andrée Delisle : le 15 nov.05 au Centre Afrika, 1644 Saint-Hubert Montréal (Mo Berri-UQAM)

Science/conscience, science/citoyenne ? Technoscience du vivant, environnement et santé

AMD & groupe de recherche Cinbiose (Centre de recherche interdisciplinaire sur la biologie, la santé, la société et l'environement) de l'UQAM en collaboration avec l'Institut des Sciences de l'environnement, 25 oct.05, au Grand Amphithéatre du Pavillon Sherbrooke

La responsabilité sociale des entreprises et l'irresponsabilité de certaines firmes canadiennes dans l'hémisphère sud

Dans cet autre monde dont nous affirmons et revendiquons la possibilité...
il y aura encore de grandes entreprises, étant donné la nature et les coûts de fabrication de certains produits. On est nombreux à penser que le capitalisme tel qu'il existe, et son emprise tyrannique sur la société, la politique et la culture, ne sont pas éternels. Mais sur le chemin qui conduit au nouvel ordre social que nous souhaitons, se produira-t-il une mutation progressive des corporations ou si seule une crise apocalyptique peut générer les changements requis ? Ceux qui misent sur la première possibilité on développé le concept de la "responsabilité sociale des entreprises". En quoi consiste-t-elle ? En existe-t-il des traces dans le monde industriel présent ? Si oui, d'où viennent les impulsions: du dedans ? des pressions de groupes de "stake holders" ? des contraintes étatiques ? de mobilisations populaires ? De toutes façons, on est loin de cet idéal dans un très grand nombre de cas, notamment en ce qui touche la conduite de certaines entreprises canadiennes et états-uniennes dans l'hémisphÀre sud... et là encore, certaines mobilisations semblent autoriser des espoirs.
18 oct.05 30 Centre Afrika, 1644 St-Hubert Montréal (M° Berri-UQAM) Avec C.Gendron, F.Kayembe et M.Sansfaçon


Les milieux militants sont sur le qui vive quant aux tendances à la privatisation des services publics à l’échelle du gouvernement québécois. Cependant, dans l’ensemble des sociétés industrialisées, les instances municipales sont particulièrement vulnérables à ces dérives. ATTAC a obtenu une résolution de la Ville de Montréal par laquelle cette dernière se soustrait à l’AGCS. Sous les pressions de la SODEC-Montréal, cette même ville a adopté au début de l’été une Charte des droits et responsabilités, qui pourrait être invoquée à la défense du bien commun. Quelle est la portée de ces documents ? L’état actuel de la démocratie participative et ses progrès possibles habilitent-ils les citoyens à intervenir efficacement dans cette perspective ? Ce seront les préoccupations de notre prochaine conférence/débat, en partenariat avec les deux organismes précités :
La défense et la promotion du caractère public des services municipaux à l’heure de la Charte montréalaise des droits et responsabilités
Avec Karine Peschard, Rosa Pires et Marcel Sévigny
22 sep. au Centre Afrika

Les tendances émergentes de la gauche québécoise (7/3/05)
Les relations culturelles internationales du
Québec (24/5/04)
Femmes et politiques (11/3/04)
Vers une stratégie énergétique socialement responsable (10/2/04)
La capitulation tranquille (19/1/04)
S'informer, c'est lire entre les lignes (3/7/03)
Chances et conditions de la démocratie au Québec