The criminalization of poverty

I didn't used to see tents when I moved to Koreatown two years ago, but when the city of Los Angeles revealed that there's been an 85 percent increase in people living in such makeshift shelters during that time I thought: Yup, I've seen it -- first there was one, then there was three, then there were entire tent cities. That spurred me to write a story about the problem and the city's approach to it, which -- the occasionally liberal rhetoric of the mayor aside -- can be summed up as: What if we just made it illegal to be that damn poor? Today The Intercept published that story. It is my personal opinion that you should read it.

Also, for Inter Press Service, I reviewed a new book, Against All Odds: Voices of Popular Struggle in Iraq. I'd read that too -- the book and the review.

On vultures and Chelsea Manning

I had two pieces published recently that I have yet to tell you to read. They are:

1) A piece for Al Jazeera English on the bipartisan transphobia that followed the announcement that the whistleblower known as Bradley Manning wishes to identify as a woman named Chelsea.

2) A piece for Inter Press Service on a recent US court ruling that, if not overturned by the Supreme Court or overruled by the Obama administration, will make it easier for so-called vulture funds to buy up developing-world debt for cheap and then force said countries to pay them back tens, sometime hundreds of times what they originally paid.

Good day to you.

The money behind the smearing of Argentina

My two-part investigation into the money behind a recent campaign painting Argentina as a "bad actor" and BFF of Iran has now been published by Inter Press Service. Check out part one and then read part two to find out all the dirty details.

'A Global Empire, Yet a "United States of Fear"'

In my latest piece for Inter Press Service, I review Tom Engelhardt's new collection of essays, United States of Fear, and opine on militarism in America.

Give it a read.

"Lawmakers, 'Experts' Spin Tales of Iranian Terror in Latin America"

Check out my latest piece for Inter Press Service on attempts by congressmen and career militarists posing as dispassionate experts to cast Iran's relations with Latin America as a "clear and present danger" to the United States.

Obama and McCain on Latin America

While I never got around to dissecting Barack Obama's acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention (short take: a whole lot of talk about "change" and "hope", with the same -- albeit well-delivered -- proposals for U.S. intervention around the globe), I did spend this past weekend analyzing how an Obama or John McCain administration would deal with Latin America.

The bottom line? Neither candidate promises much of a change, as I note in this piece for Inter Press Service:

WASHINGTON, Sep 3 (IPS) - With an election to replace an immensely unpopular president just weeks away, Republican nominee John McCain and Democratic candidate Barack Obama have both sought to distance themselves from the record of George W. Bush -- but when it comes to Latin America, neither candidate promises a major break with the policies of the last eight years.

From maintaining the embargo against Cuba to expanding efforts to fight the war on drugs in Mexico and Colombia, McCain and Obama support most aspects of current U.S. policy toward Latin America. Indeed, outside of their shared pledge to close the U.S. military prison at Guantanamo Bay, there is little to suggest that either candidate would overhaul the Bush administration's approach to the region.

Read the rest here. The article is also available at CommonDreams.

"When You Have To Leave America To Be Free"

On Friday, I attended an event here in Washington aimed at raising awareness of the case of Dr. Sami Al-Arian, a Palestinian activist and former college professor who the Bush administration has accused of raising funds for the Palestinian Islamic Jihad. Attending the event was Al-Arian's wife and children, as well as former Senator Mike Gravel.

Today, Inter Press Service published my account of the event and the Bush administration's continued imprisonment of Al-Arian. Here's an excerpt:

WASHINGTON, Aug 4 (IPS) - Nearly three years after the U.S. government failed to convict Palestinian activist and former college professor Sami Al-Arian of any charges in one of the most high-profile terrorism trials following the 9/11 terrorist attacks, he continues to be held in federal prison -- where, if convicted in an upcoming trial on criminal contempt charges, he faces the prospect of remaining for decades.

Al-Arian has been imprisoned since Feb. 20, 2003, after then-attorney general John Ashcroft declared in a press conference that he and four others were in league with the Palestinian Islamic Jihad, "one of the most violent terrorist organisations in the world."

According to the U.S. government, Al-Arian operated several front groups for the Damascus-based terrorist group during the 1990s, raising money to finance suicide bombings that killed more than 100 Israelis. At his trial, prosecutors played graphic videos of suicide bombings and invited Israeli citizens to testify about their experiences surviving terrorist attacks -- attacks the government suggested were the end result of Al-Arian’s actions.

Prosecutors also showed jurors a 1991 video of a rally where Al-Arian can be seen shouting, "death to Israel and victory to Islam" in Arabic. Al-Arian, a former professor at the University of South Florida, maintains that he has never condoned violence against civilians, but that he does support the right to resist a "brutal military occupation" of Palestinian lands.

Indeed, even the prosecution conceded that -- after more than 10 years of tapping the phone conversations of Al-Arian and his family -- there was no evidence directly tying him to a single terrorist attack. As a result, in 2005 a Florida jury acquitted Al-Arian of eight charges and remained deadlocked on another nine, with two-thirds of the jury voting for acquittal on all charges.

Yet despite the lack of a single conviction, Al-Arian remains in prison -- where supporters say he has often been held in solitary confinement and denied access to his family and legal counsel -- for refusing to testify in a trial against a northern Virginia Islamic think tank.

"We don’t even know one day where he’ll be the next, and we don’t know how we’ll be able to visit him," said Al-Arian’s son, Abdullah, at a recent event here in Washington aimed at raising awareness of the case. "We just want this ordeal to be over."

Read the rest here. I'll post the transcript of my interview with Gravel later this week.

The Merida Initiative

My latest piece for Inter Press Service regarding the Bush administration's so-called "Merida Initiative" -- a three-year plan to further the "war on drugs" in Mexico and several other Central American countries through military training and equipment -- is now available online.

An excerpt:

WASHINGTON, May 19 (IPS) - Funding for U.S. military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan may be temporarily stalled in the U.S. Congress, but last week lawmakers here did approve 400 million dollars in spending for another controversial war, this one aimed primarily at cutting off the transport of illicit drugs from Latin America into the United States.

Read the rest (subscription required).

"The Folly of an Attack on Iran"

Last week I attended an event here in Washington, DC, organized by the group Just Foreign Policy focusing on the need for direct, unconditional negotiations with Iran. The speakers included Representative Jim McDermott (D-Wash.), former NY Times correspondent Stephen Kinzer (and author of the excellent book Overthrow), and William Nitze, a former State Department official under Presidents Reagan and Bush (the first).

I filed a piece on the event and the broader issue of U.S.-Iranian relations for Inter Press Service, which you can find here.

An excerpt:

The overthrow of Mossadeq, followed by the successive support of six different U.S. presidents for the repressive dictatorship of the Shah, Mohammed Reza Pahlavi, directly led to the Islamic revolution that brought the current Iranian government to power, argued Kinzer. Further, that revolution in part led the United States to provide military support for Iraqi strongman Saddam Hussein during his war with Iran in the 1980s -- a conflict that cost upwards of one million lives.

"The great lesson that I draw from this is that when you violently intervene in the political development of another country, you can never predict what the long-term consequences will be. And most likely, although the consequences will be terrible and tragic for the target country, they will be even worse for the country that launched the intervention," said Kinzer.

"The same thing will be true if we fail to learn this lesson and launch an attack on Iran now," he added.

Other speakers suggested that though the NIE seems to have diminished the chances of an attack on Iran in the next 10 months, efforts still need to be made to push the issue of rapprochement with Iran onto the agenda of the next U.S. president.

"Neither Senator [Hillary] Clinton nor Senator [Barack] Obama has seen fit to openly discuss this issue" of dialogue with Iran, said William Nitze, a former State Department official under Presidents Reagan and George H.W. Bush. "And I think part of that has to do, frankly, with what they perceive -- not correctly, in my view -- as the interests of Israel and its supporters in the United States."

Though Democrats have criticised President Bush's handling of the war in Iraq, many have echoed the administration's hawkish rhetoric when it comes to Iran. One recent Democratic-sponsored resolution which passed overwhelmingly called for the United Nations to indict Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad for "inciting genocide" because of his anti-Israel rhetoric.

And last year, after further tightening economic sanctions against Iran, Democrats in Congress removed a provision in an Iraq war spending bill that would have forbidden an attack on Iran without congressional approval. The measure was removed after intense lobbying from groups such as the American-Israeli Public Affairs Committee, or AIPAC, an influential lobbying group that is seen as supporting policies in line with Israel's right-wing Likud Party.

"It would be a disaster for Israel if the United States took military action against Iran, because it would fundamentally weaken the United States and it would fundamentally weaken Israel's position in the Middle East," argued Nitze. "But nobody in the political horizon, including on the Democratic side of the aisle, has been willing to say this."

UPDATE: CommonDreams.org has also picked up my piece, which you can access here.

UPDATE II: I see that Antiwar.com has also picked up the article, so go ahead and read it for the third time here.

Article on the U.S.-Colombia Free Trade Agreement

My latest article for Inter Press Service, regarding the U.S.-Colombian free trade agreement and the opposition its engendered from organized labor is now online.

An excerpt:

Despite the continued violence, Colombia has benefitted from increased trade with the United States over the past several years. Passed by the U.S. Congress in 1991 and recently extended another 10 months, the Andean Trade Preferences Act, under which tariffs on most exports from Colombia coming into the United States are removed, has increased employment and boosted Colombia's economy. Last year, Colombian exports to the United States totaled nearly 9.4 billion dollars -- mostly in the form of crude oil, coal, and flowers -- up from less than 3.0 billion dollars when the preferences were first enacted.

But Colombian labour leaders and independent observers say the increased trade has not led to much improvement in the status of workers' rights. A 2006 U.S. State Department report on Colombia found that "freedom of association [is] limited in practice by threats and acts of violence committed by illegal armed groups" against labour unions, and noted that Colombian NGOs often complain that the government has "arbitrarily detained hundreds of persons, particularly social leaders, labour activists, and human rights defenders".

Last year, the Cincinnati, Ohio-based fruit giant Chiquita was ordered by a U.S. federal court to pay a 25-million-dollar fine after executives at the company were found to have authorised payments to the United Self-Defence Forces of Colombia, a violent right-wing paramilitary group linked to labour violence. According to Vasquez, his organisation has found that the Chiquita case may only scrape the surface of the extent to which U.S. corporations have supported violence against organised labour.

"[T]here are other American transnational enterprises, for example Dole and Del Monte, in which we began to see evidence appearing of their links to these paramilitary groups and to anti-union violence," Vasquez said.

Those links were the focus of a recent trip to Colombia by Rep. William Delahunt, a Massachusetts Democrat. Speaking to IPS, Delahunt would not say whether he discovered anything in Colombia implicating other U.S. corporations. "I really don't want to disclose that at this point in time... but yes, it was very productive, it was significant," he said.

Violence directed against unions and the role some U.S. corporations have played in supporting it is an important aspect of the debate over the FTA, say labour activists, but it is far from the only one.

"Even if Colombia had a sterling record on human rights, if there were no assassinations of trade unionists, the Colombia free trade agreement would still be a bad idea," said Economic Policy Institute global policy director Tony Avirgan.

"These agreements provide for the extension of patents and [intellectual] property rights, particularly in terms of medicines, that go way beyond what's provided for in the United States," Avirgan said.

"They should be called corporate rights' agreements rather than free trade agreements," he argued. "It's a misnomer because they're not much about the exchange of goods, but they are about empowering corporations."

Luis Posada Carriles and the Cuban Five

Luis Posada Carriles, an admitted terrorist who is widely believed to have masterminded the bombing of a Cuban airliner in 1976 that killed 73 people, currently lives free in Miami, Florida. Meanwhile, the so-called "Cuban Five" -- five Cuban intelligence agents who were spying on Cuban-American exile groups in Florida that have been linked to acts of terror -- are serving prison terms ranging from 15 years to two consecutive life sentences in maximum security prison, despite never having passed any classified U.S. government secrets to the Cuba.

My latest piece for Inter Press Service contrasts the two cases, and is now available online here. You can also read it over at CommonDreams or at Alternet.org.

U.S. Policy Toward Cuba

Earlier this week I attended a conference sponsored by the neoconservative American Enterprise Institute, which is home to a number of former Bush administration officials such as Paul Wolfowitz and John Bolton, that sought to examine a U.S. role in a post-Castro, "free Cuba". If you think the occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan have deterred the neo-cons' penchant for elaborate nation-building schemes, think again.

Click here to read my piece for Inter Press Service on the event, with additional reporting by Jim Lobe.

Trade Soars as Labor Rights Languish

On Thursday the Economic Policy Institute held a forum on the Africa Growth and Opportunity Act (AGOA). I covered the event for Inter Press Service, and my article is now available online. An excerpt:

Passed by the U.S. Congress in 2000, AGOA allows certain goods from Sub-Saharan African countries -- notably petroleum products and apparel -- to enter the United States duty-free and largely without any quota restrictions. It also encourages the growth of the textile industry in Least Developed Countries (LDCs) by extending duty-free market access to apparel made using foreign sources of fibre, largely from Asia.

The agreement currently affects trade relations with 39 countries and has led to a large increase in trade between the United States and Africa. According to the office of the U.S. Trade Representative, in 1999 U.S. imports from Africa amounted to roughly 13.7 billion dollars. In 2006, the last year for which data is available, that number rose to 59.2 billion dollars.

But labour rights activists say the increase in trade and jobs brought by AGOA has not led to a corresponding improvement in conditions for workers. They argue many labourers work up to 16 hours a day for nothing more than the bare minimum legal wage, which they say falls well short of covering the cost of food, shelter and transportation.

"Our goal shouldn't simply be to provide any job through our [U.S.] trade policy," Bama Athreya, executive director of the International Labour Rights Forum, told attendees at the forum, "but to provide really decent jobs that come with dignity, respect, and the possibility that these workers can prosper in the future and expect a better life for their children."

Click here to read the rest.

Interview with Piedad Córdoba

On Wednesday I spoke with Colombian Senator Piedad Córdoba regarding the hostages currently held by the FARC guerillas in Colombia. Córdoba, an outspoken critic of Colombian President and close U.S.-ally Álvaro Uribe, had been working with Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez to negotiate a hostage-prisoner exchange with the FARC guerillas. But late last month, President Uribe put an end to the negotiations, angering family members of the hostages -- which include three U.S. military contractors and former Colombian presidential candidate Ingrid Betancourt. In our conversation, I asked Córdoba who she felt was to blame for the failure of the negotiations and what her reaction was to the news that the FARC were set to release three of the hostages as a goodwill gesture for her and Chavez's efforts.

Her responses, and my account of the current state of the conflict in Colombia, can be found in this piece that I filed for Inter Press Service.

Congress Debates U.S. Aid to Palestine

Earlier today the House Foreign Affairs Subcommittee on the Middle East and South Asia held a hearing regarding the Bush administration's proposed $410 million aid package aimed at supporting the government of Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas in the West Bank. None of the aid is directed at Gaza, which is currently suffering a major humanitarian crisis due to an Israeli blockade, because it is under the control of Hamas, which the United States considers a terrorist organization. The situation in Gaza also did not seem of much concern to members of the subcommittee, who only alluded to it in passing.

I filed an account of the hearing and the recent history of U.S. aid to Palestine for Inter Press Service today, which you can find online here.

Human Rights Concerns Surround U.S.-backed "Plan Mexico"

On Wednesday the House Foreign Affairs Committee held a hearing on the "Merida Initiative," a $1.4 billion anti-drug aid package that would aid Mexico's war on drugs. 40% of the aid would go to Mexico's military and law enforcement, which has drawn the criticism of human rights groups such as Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch.

My piece describing the Merida Initiative and the criticism it has drawn was published by Inter Press Service earlier today -- read it here.

Digg it.