Anti-Genocide Politics: Petition to President Bush: Save Darfur

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Evangelical leaders from many points of view on politics, humanitarianism, and international relations have taken a united position against the genocide in Darfur region, Sudan. Hat Tip to Sojourners.

Without you, Mr. President,

Darfur doesn't have a prayer.

We come to you from across the evangelical spectrum. We beseech you to act on your faith and do the right thing by leading the world to stop the genocide affecting "the least of these" in Darfur. To date, more than 400,000 people have been killed. 2.5 million displaced. Countless more have been raped, maimed, and tortured: Men, women, and children created in God's image, innocents all. Ending the atrocities will require your personal leadership in supporting the deployment of a strong U.N. peacekeeping force and multilateral economic sanctions. While we often disagree on matters of politics, we are united in the belief that your intervention can make the critical difference in Darfur. We join together now to urge you, in the words of Proverbs 24:11-12, to "rescue those being led away to death." We pledge to do everything we can to rally support in both Congress and the U.N. to support your leadership in ending the horror in Darfur.

Signed by:
[Your name]
[Your address]

Africa > Sudan > Darfur

Initiating Endorsers:

Rev. Rob Bell, Founding Pastor, Mars Hill Bible Church, author of Velvet Elvis
Bishop Charles Blake, Pastor, West Angeles Church of God in Christ, Founder, Save Africa's Children
Dr. Tony Campolo, Baptist evangelist and international speaker
Rev. Rich Cizik, Vice-president for Government Affairs, National Association of Evangelicals
Rev. Luis Cortés, Jr., President, Esperanza USA
Rev. Wes Granberg-Michaelson, General Secretary, Reformed Church in America.
Rev. Ted Haggard, President, National Association of Evangelicals
Rev. Dr. Roberta Hestenes, Pastor, Community Presbyterian Church, Former President, Eastern University
Dr. Joel Hunter, President, Christian Coalition of America
Rev. Bill Hybels, Pastor, Willow Creek Church, leader of Willow Creek Association
Bishop Harry Jackson, President, High Impact Leadership Coalition
Dr. Richard Land, President, Southern Baptist Convention’s Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission
Rev. Brian McLaren, author, leader in emerging church
David Neff, Editor & Vice President, Christianity Today
Dr. Glenn R. Palmberg, President, Evangelical Covenant Church
Dr. Bob Roberts, Jr., Founding Pastor, NorthWood Church
Rev. Samuel Rodriguez, Jr., President, National Hispanic Christian Leadership Conference
Rev. Dr. William J. Shaw, President, National Baptist Convention, USA
Dr. Ron Sider, Founder and President, Evangelicals for Social Action
Rev. Geoff Tunnicliffe, International Director, World Evangelical Alliance
Rev. Jim Wallis, President, Sojourners/Call to Renewal, author of God's Politics
Rev. Gloria E. White-Hammond, MD, Co-Founder, My Sister's Keeper
Dr. Barbara Williams-Skinner, President, Skinner Leadership Institute
Lauren Winner, author, and Visiting Lecturer, Duke Divinity School

Whatever your faith, whatever faith-community your belong to or none, now is the time join in moving your country's leadership to take on the burden of intervention in Sudan, going up the Organization of Arab States (Sunni countries, like Egypt) who are protecting Sudan and providing a cover for its continued atrocities against the Black Muslim peoples of Darfur region.

- Owlb

Further Research:

SaveDarfur
Genocide Intervention Newtwork

Economics: Labour: Teamsters election will probably give Hoffa 3rd term, opposed for the 3rd time by Tom Leedham

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In the old days, election campaigns for the office of President of the Teamsters, one of North America's largest unions now with 1.4 million members, were hotly contested. In the bad old days, "candidates would label one another a communist or a radical, and vote-buying was a common complaint." In this year's campaign, raging between incumbent James P. Hoffa (son of former Prez, Jimmy Hoffa) and challenger Tom Leedham (Teamsters Local 206 Portland, Ore), there are still charges and counter-charges, not least of all that of corruption, says Sean Lengell, "Accusations fly in Teamster race" (Oct16,2k6) Washington Times:

Mr. Hoffa, running for a third term, has called his challenger an enemy of the union, an embezzler of union dues and -- in the ultimate organized labor indignity -- has accused him of ties with Wal-Mart.

Mr. Leedham, who has run two failed campaigns for union president against Mr. Hoffa, in turn has accused the incumbent of graft, incompetence and squelching an investigation into ties between the Teamsters and organized crime.

"Teamster politics is not for the faint of heart," Mr. Leedham said.
Ballots were mailed Oct. 6 and must be returned by Nov. 13. Who will win is difficult to predict because few, if any, credible polls are available. But most organized labor analysts expect another victory for Mr. Hoffa.

"The power of incumbency works in the labor movement just as effectively as it does in the United States Congress," said Robert Bruno, an associate professor at the Institute of Labor and Industrial Relations at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

Mr. Leedham, a 29-year Teamster member from Oregon who portrays himself as a champion of rank-and-file members, long has coveted the union's top job. He won 35 percent of the vote when he challenged Mr. Hoffa for the presidency in 2001.
Three years earlier, in a special election called after Teamsters leader Ron Carey was ousted in a scandal, Mr. Leedham earned 40 percent of the vote in a three-way race won by Mr. Hoffa.

Though initially not planning a third campaign, Mr. Leedham, secretary-treasurer and principal officer of Teamsters Local 206 Portland, Ore., said he decided last year to run because of growing discontent with Mr. Hoffa.

"Teamsters are really dissatisfied," he said. "I'm campaigning in places where I got poor or no response in 2001 and now [the support] is really overwhelming."
Mr. Leedham, 55, says Mr. Hoffa has bungled several contract negotiations that have cut members' pensions and other benefits.

He accuses Mr. Hoffa of reneging on a promise to cut positions that give union officials with various jobs multiple salaries. Instead, the number of multiple salary positions has increased from 16 to more than 160 during Mr. Hoffa's tenure, a move that has cost the union $8 million annually, Mr. Leedham says.

"All our money comes from dues. We're not manufacturing refrigerators someplace," he said. "We've been spending more money now on officers. This has become the lifestyle of the rich and famous."

Mr. Hoffa instituted the largest dues increase in Teamsters history after promising he wouldn't, Mr. Leedham said.

Mr. Leedham also says Mr. Hoffa undermined an internal investigation into organized crime influence in the union in 2004, citing complaints from the union's former anti-corruption director that Mr. Hoffa interfered with his investigative duties.

"He's got a record he just can't defend, so he's trying to destroy my reputation," Mr. Leedham said.

Mr. Hoffa, son of iconic former Teamsters leader Jimmy Hoffa, who mysteriously disappeared in 1975, accuses Mr. Leedham of running a smear campaign.

"He's basically desperate," Mr. Hoffa said. "He has very little backing in the union, so he has nothing to lose. He does this every time."

But in his own campaign literature and on Web sites, Mr. Hoffa is no less critical of his opponent.

Mr. Hoffa, 65, accuses Mr. Leedham of receiving financial support from corporate foundations that own stock in "anti-union companies" such as Wal-Mart and FedEx. He has called Mr. Leedham a "front man for anti-Teamster groups" because he received a campaign contribution from a partner in a California law firm that represents management in labor disputes.

"Tom Leedham is working with our enemies to weaken the Teamsters," a Hoffa campaign flier says.

He also says Mr. Leedham embezzled union dues from more than 1 million members for campaign purposes.

Mr. Hoffa says the union is financially strong after almost going bankrupt when he took over in early 1999. He also credits himself with establishing a dedicated strike fund, securing a national master freight agreement, negotiating a strong contract with UPS, and merging three smaller unions into the Teamsters.

"We're organized, we're united, we're [financially] secure," he said. "Those are all the things that you look for, especially in these difficult times."

Mr. Hoffa said a major goal of his campaign is to increase voter turnout, which was 23 percent during the 2001 Teamster election.

"Twenty-three percent, that's very disturbing to me," he said. "We're the greatest democratic union in the world, but democracy is no good if nobody votes."

There are other ways of understanding the low turnout to vote, liaisons with organized crime, and union-dues embezzling. It has to do with the structure of the Teamsters and both USA and Canadian unionism generally. It has to do with the defective concept of union representation in the workplace. And it has to do with the lack of internal differentiation, even friendly competition, within the employees' organization which is not pluralist.

-- Owlb

Tags: Teamsters President

• labor
• Teamsters
• unionoffice
• unionelections
• representationconcept
• anti-pluraliststructure
• corruption

Honours: Nobel Prize: Peace Prize goes to world's greatest banker for microcredit loans to Bangladesh's poor

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It's become so blatantly obvious in recent years that the Nobel Prize for Peace distorts the significance of the prize. But this year's dramatic distortion is more than made-up for, in that it at the same time rectifies the gross failure of the Nobel Prize for Economics to honour the new (Peace) winner, Muhammad Yunus of the founder and chief executve officer of Grameen Bank, Bangladesh. In a major write-up Lars Bevanger writing from Oslo, Norway, where the Peace Prize is announced, in "Changing scope of Nobel peace prize" (Oct14,2k6), analyzes the change in the who gets the Peace prize:

Mr Yunus had not been among the favourites to win this year's prize. There was a moment of surprised silence among the gathered journalists as this year's winners of the Nobel Peace Prize were announced.

In the days leading up to the announcement, the main focus had been on the parties to one of the very few really successful peace deals in our days - the agreement between the Indonesian government and rebels in the Aceh region.

In a year with such a clear positive effort in the drive to stop armed conflict, few if any had guessed that the prize would go to Bangladeshi banker and economist Muhammad Yunus and his Grameen Bank.

The choice represents a furthering of the Norwegian Nobel Committee's expressed desire to expand the scope of the prize beyond acknowledging those directly involved in preventing armed conflict.

When the prize was awarded to environmentalist Wangari Maathai in 2004, some here wondered what her fight against African de-forestation had to do with peace.

In his speech to that year's Nobel Laureate, the Chairman of the Norwegian Nobel Committee, Ole Danbolt Mjoes, argued her work also contributed to promoting democracy and human rights.

"Today there are few things peace researchers and other scholars are readier to agree on than precisely that democracy and human rights advance peace", Mr Mjoes said.

Europe > Norway

The link between poverty and peace is perhaps more tangible, and few will be critical of the Nobel Committee's decision to honour the work of Muhammad Yunus and his Grameen Bank to provide poor entrepreneurs with the financial ability to help themselves.

Sverre Lodgaard, the director of the Norwegian Institute of International Affairs and also first deputy member of the Norwegian Nobel Committee, told the BBC this year's prize was spot on.

"The committee has in later years been good at expanding its view on what the prize should entail. That they now include development is great.

"More people die each year from poverty than from war, so a fight against the violence which is perpetrated through the extreme division in our world's resources is very welcome", Mr Lodgaard said.

'Aceh missed out'

But some feel the Nobel Committee this year missed a rare chance to honour a tangible result of straightforward conflict prevention.

The director of the International Peace Research Institute in Oslo, Stein Toennesson, said he was happy on behalf of Mr Yunus, but argued that it was unfortunate the prize this year had not gone to the people behind the peace deal in Indonesia's Aceh province.

"I feel Aceh deserved the prize this year. This was a year where something was actually achieved, and Alfred Nobel himself in his will underlined the prize should go to someone who had achieved something in the past year.

Banker Yunus doesn't have a panacea for all the world's economic and business woes, but he offers a living example of an important part of the longterm solution and has provided a massive example of financing profitably micro-entrepreneurs from one of the most immiserated sectors of global society, his own Bangladesh.

Another candidate for the Peace prize this year was an American woman (out of 191 total candidates) famous for turning against the mission of her own son who lost his life in the war to liberate Iraq from terrorism, and to establish a stable prosperous democracy there. Cindy Sheehan calls her son's murderers "freedom fiters," and has placed no markers on her son's grave, while earning a living by making defamatory speeches and politicking to dishounour her son's beliefs and commiment, unto death.

If Muhammad Yunus were selected only to save the world from Cindy Sheehan's dishonourable campaign in the name of "peace," then the five secretive ex-politicians on the Nobel Peace Prize committee did a wise thing. But, avoinding Sheehan, they overlooked the difficult painful process of making peace between Aceh and Indonesia.

The strange thing is that Yunus wasn't honoured in economics. His contribution in economics far outdistances the economics theoreticians -- how the prize committee in economics loves to award academic PhD-bearing economists, and nobdy else -- the Prize committee awards in that field. An award otherwise would have startled the world, startled indeed if these yawning fawners had selected a real-life banker who found a way (not perfect!) to get seed-capital into the hands of unemployed would-be entrepreneurs by the practice of micro-lending. And collecting back the principal over a stated period of time. And determining interest rates, where of course a certain percentage of borrowers' new businesses go belly-up and the owners' default. This is Yunus! He raised microcredit to a fine art; he seeded people, mostly women, in poverty in a culture of poverty in Bangladesh, and has lawnched a counter-force to the structural immiseration of a huge proporation of the populace in that country. Now, if Yunus had received the Nobel Prize for Economics (breaking academicistic obsession); and Aceh had received the Nobel Prize for Peace (recognizing an actual achievement on the peace-front in the last year), then the Nobels mite have regained a bit of their prestige.

However, with the line-up I have suggested, adding to it the fact that the Turkish novelist Orhan Pamuk won the Nobel for Lit (his novels), has political reverberations all over his natve land and the EU, says Anaximaximum on refWrite backpage, commenting on Sarah Rainford's BBC aritcle. Yunus, Aceh, and Pamuks ... three Islamics in one's years awards!, that would have been too much for the still-stodgy center of Nobelism.

-- Owlb

Politics: Northern Ireland: St Andrew's Agreement today may lead to shared govt, re-opened Stormont

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Gingerly we mention the developments of the day taking place in St Andrew's, Scotland, toward finding a way forward in Northern Ireland. Alan Cowell, "London and Dublin Offer N. Ireland a Compromise" (Oct14,2k6) New York Times:

After three days of closed-door negotiations, Britain and Ireland on Friday offered a compromise formula to restore Northern Ireland’s power-sharing government by next March, allowing for an election or referendum to endorse the deal.

Europe > Northern Ireland

While the package was not immediately embraced by the province’s fractious political parties, it gave them until Nov. 10 to hold meetings among their followers and then give their answer to what was promptly named the St. Andrews Agreement. But it is not certain that an agreement sponsored by London and Dublin will be enough to survive the tripwires of Northern Ireland’s fissured politics.

The main parties, the Roman Catholic Sinn Fein and the Protestant Democratic Unionist Party, promised to respond by Nov. 10. If they consent, their action will begin a choreographed sequence of events to permit the power-sharing government set up under the Good Friday Agreement of 1998 to be restored. It was suspended four years ago in a dispute over alleged espionage by the Irish Republican Army.

Just before the St Andrew's meeting Dr Sean Brady, Archbishop of Armagh of the Roman Catholic Church and Dr Ian Paisley, Moderator of the Free Presbyterian Church, leading voices in Northern Ireland, met to discuss social, economic, and political concerns of the still-British society. refWrite "Pisteutics: Religion: Leading clergy of Catholics and Protestants meet, shake hands in Northern Ireland"(Oct11,2k6) noted, quoted and commented on the event, an event which may have been something of an omen of good things to come for Northern Ireland. -- Politicarp

More Info:

Ian Paisley's Dilemma
Archbishop of Armagh and Free Presbyterian Moderator historic handshake

Tags: NI home govt?

• politics
• politicsNI
• StAndrewsAgreement
• IanPaisley
• DemcrtcUnionstPrty
• GerryAdams

Economics: Oil alternatives: Was the spurt of green investment, now shrinking backwards, a 1-time thing?

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A recent section of Christian Science Monitor devoted to the ethics of investing carried an interview between CSM's Laurent Belsie and two Boston-based experts on green energy: Jack Robinson, founder of Winslow Green Growth Fund, and Eric Becker, portfolio manager of Trillium Asset Management. I have taken excerpts from the excerpts presented by Belsie in "Will green power fizzle if oil prices keep slumping?" (Oct2,2k6). -- Owlb

Belsie: Green-energy stocks have pulled back in recent months. Are you worried?

Becker: This pullback is probably an opportunity for long-term clean energy investors. Speculators have probably been driven out of the market.... But if you have a longer term horizon there's probably money to be made from here. The Department of Energy forecasts a gap of 14 terawatts of power globally between now and the year 2050. That's the equivalent of 14,000 1-gigawatt new energy plants. If you opened one a day, it would take 38 years to get there. So the problem is not going to be solved with nuclear and fossil fuels alone.

North America > USA [Environment/Economy]

Belsie: Such predictions were made in the early 1980s, too, but green-energy stocks crashed. Is this era really any different?

Robinson: From our point of view, it is actually very different. There are multiple factors at work here. Eric has mentioned one, which is the demand-supply equation is going to continue to be out of whack.... Another factor ... and new to the equation - is global warming and our overall awareness of that. We simply have to come up with ways to reduce our carbon output - not only in this country but around the world. And that in and of itself is going to be a major, major driver for green-energy stocks.
In the Monitor

World Economy > Carbon-free alternatives to oil

Belsie: But the United States and China have refused to cut greenhouse gas emissions.

Becker: I think the political will is building for action. There are bills in Congress for carbon-emissions caps in the US. You've now got the eight Northeast states and California agreeing to cap their emissions. And you've got 165 countries signed on to Kyoto. I think there's no doubt, given the data we're seeing on climate change, that all the countries on the planet are going to have to deal with this issue.

North Korea: Nukes: Kim Jong-il strangeloves his way into terrorizing China, Japan, South Korea, and the world

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The left-slant yet-often-astute openDemocracy carries an article by Tom Savage and Peter Hayes,"Dr Strangelove in Pyongyang"(Oct10,2k6) on the North Korea nuke-test:

Stanley Kubrick's 1964 film about nuclear war, Dr Strangelove, was subtitled How I learned to stop worrying and love the bomb.

Like Strangelove, North Korea's Kim Jong-il wants his neighbours to love the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK's) bomb. In announcing the nuclear test on 9 October 2006, the (North) Korean Central News Agency argued: "It will contribute to defending the peace and stability on the Korean peninsula and in the area around it."

His neighbours, however, do not see it that way. South Korea, Japan, and even China have condemned the nuclear test. All three countries, after all, are within range of North Korea's missiles. The United States says that the world cannot live with a nuclear North Korea.

Few people know that Kim was first a filmmaker, only later a leader of a nuclear-weapons state. Chapter VII of his turgid text on moviemaking reads: "The Art of Directing Cinema Lies with the Director". This may be a bad movie, but there's no doubt that Kim is choreographing this drama.

The demonic genius of the nuclear Doomsday Machine is that it gives your opponent a stake in your survival. As unpalatable as the world may find Kim Jong-il with nuclear weapons, the alternatives are worse. Regime collapse, the long-cherished dream of the hardliners in Washington and Tokyo, poses the prospect of loose nukes ending up in the hands of power-mad generals in the midst of a war in Korea, or being spirited out of the country to find their way into the hands of terrorists.

South Korea, China and Russia all understand this, which is why they won't go along with any United States plans to bring Pyongyang to its knees through financial pressure. Both may retreat from engagement in the short-term, but they will re-engage North Korea in short order.

Of course, other reports have different slants. Among those are the aggregated three reports in New York Times today: "China shows willingness to punish North Korea for test," "Kim motivated by insecurity," "Atomic experts' analysis - for US a strategic jolt."

Let's take a look at the article that most parallels tht of Savage and Hayes. Donald Greenlees' "Deep insecurity led Kim to build nuclear program, experts say" (originally in International Herald Tribune, Oct9,2k6):

HONG KONG, Oct. 10 — The military in North Korea is by far the largest consumer of the country’s scarce resources. But even so, its combat jet pilots get only about two hours of flying time a month, its soldiers sometimes have to grow their own food, and much of its equipment is old and outclassed by that of its neighbors. According to South Korean and Western experts, if a conventional war breaks out on the Korean Peninsula, the best the North Korean military could manage would be to fight to a bloody stalemate.

It is the deep insecurity born of these shortcomings, the experts say, and not any desire to grab attention or gain leverage, that drove President Kim Jong-il’s decision to defy international warnings and declare this week that his country had tested a nuclear weapon.

Asia > North Kora

“I think North Korea wants an effective deterrent against the U.S. in case of war on the Korean peninsula,” said Park Yong Ok, a former lieutenant general in the South Korean army who served as vice minister for defense in the late 1990’s. “Kim Jong Il wants a nuclear weapon at hand. It’s not a bargaining chip.”

But the raw fact of a nuclear explosion (thos still not confirmed by US sleuthing, and claimed to have been small and underground by the Kim regime) puts both China and Russia on the edge, if only to preserve credibility before the rest of the nations of the world (needless to say, also the USA). That's why John O'Neil and Choe Sang-Hun's "China Shows Willingness to Punish North Korea for Test" (Oct10,2k5, NYT transmits a stark new reality, a world-historical reconfiguration that China now must find a way to undo, or become the laffing-stock of small nations who rejoice in NorKor's sheer chutzpah.

In Beijing, Chinese officials had earlier reiterated their condemnation of the regime in Pyongyang, although a foreign ministry spokesman said that military action on the issue was “unimaginable.” President Hu Jintao called on all countries to “avoid actions that may lead to escalation or loss of control of the situation,” according to the official Xinhua news agency.

China and Russia are the crucial votes on the Security Council; each has a veto. In the past, China in particular has resisted tough measures against the North that it fears could destabilize its poor and isolated ally.

Yet China is tip- toeing thru the radiation, so to speak:

The country’s ambassador to the United Nations, Wang Guangya, told reporters that “there has to be some punitive actions, but also I think that these actions have to be appropriate.”

He said that the council needed to have a “firm, constructive, appropriate but prudent response to North Korea’s nuclear threat,” according to news services.

It was not clear whether Mr. Guangya’s remarks meant that China would support the resolution proposed by the United States, which calls for international inspections of all cargo going in or out of North Korea.

It seems to me that blockage and inspection of all sea/ocean cargoes, all by itself, is a rather cautious and mandatory step. To me the real issue is: what else? The problem with punishing North Korea is the extreme poverty of the populace, cruelly imposed by Kim, which seems unable to take any further rigours. Indeed, the food supply for the country's non-military and non-elite citizens is siphoned off when humanitarian food aid is arranged with outside countries. For most, I hear, grass soup is a staple. Meanwhile, South Korea is agonizing over its own policy reaction

President Roh Moo Hyun of South Korea met with political leaders and former presidents today for discussions on how far he should revamp South Korea’s decade-old policy of engaging North Korea with aid and investment.

Mr. Roh said a “change” was inevitable, but sounded unsure of how big it should be, as South Korean society appeared to slide into an ideological divide. Liberals have expressed sympathy with the North, seeing the claimed nuclear test as a desperate reaction to what they call the Bush administration’s confrontational approach. Conservatives, meanwhile, view it as proof that Roh’s reconciliation policy has failed.

Nearly one-third of the 1,260 South Korean tourists who planned to visit the scenic Diamond Mountain in North Korea today canceled their trips, said officials at Hyundai-Asan, which runs the tours. At three South Korean ports, freighters waited for word from Seoul about whether they could sail to the North with food and construction materials intended for flood victims in North Korea.

The Kim regime's vociferous bellicosity in the past raises the possibility of many in South Korea wanting to go onto a war-footing, and likewise Japan. Let's pray that that doesn't prove necessary.

This bring us back to Communist-capitalist G8-member UN SecurityCouncil-member China, as analyzed by Robert Kaplan in Atlantic Monthly (Oct10,2k6):

Kim Jong Il’s compulsion to demonstrate his missile prowess is a sign of his weakness. Contrary to popular perception in the United States, Kim doesn’t stay up at night worrying about what the Americans might do to him; it’s not North Korea’s weakness relative to the United States that preoccupies him. Rather, if he does stay up late worrying, it’s about China. He knows the Chinese have always had a greater interest in North Korea’s geography—with its additional outlets to the sea close to Russia—than they have in the long-term survival of his regime. (Like us, even as they want the regime to survive, the Chinese have plans for the northern half of the Korean peninsula that do not include the “Dear Leader.”) One of Kim’s main goals in so aggressively displaying North Korea’s missile capacity is to compel the United States to deal directly with him, thereby making his otherwise weakening state seem stronger. And the stronger Pyongyang appears to be, the better off it is in its crucial dealings with Beijing, which are what really matter to Kim.

The effect on China of a US negotiation bilaterally with the NorKor regime would cause China to distrust its growing but yet quite fragile rapport with Bush's China policy.

-- Politicarp

Further Research:

NorKor's nuke test may be only partial succes
For US a strategic jolt after NorKor nuke test

Tags: North Korea's nuke test

• NorthKorea
• KimJong-Il
• nuketest
• China
• blockade
• sanctions
• punitiveactions
• Japan
• SouthKorea

Juridics USA: Labour & Religion: Bad employer practices by religious orgs and faith-based secularly-tasked agencies

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New York Times has a blockbuster 6-online-pages article by Diana B. Henriques, "Where Faith Abides, Employees Have Few Rights" (Oct9,2k6) on how religious and faith-based organizations hide behind the First Amendment in court to get away with horrible labour practices.

Judges have routinely invoked the ministerial exception to dismiss lawsuits against religious employers by rabbis, ministers, cantors, nuns and priests — those “whose ministry is a core expression of religious belief for that congregation,” as Mr. McNicholas put it.

But judges also have applied the exception to dismiss cases filed by the press secretary at a Roman Catholic church, a writer for The Christian Science Monitor, administrators at religious colleges, the disgruntled beneficiaries of a Lutheran pension fund, the overseer of the kosher kitchen at a Jewish nursing home and a co-founder of Focus on the Family, run by the conservative religious leader James C. Dobson. Court files show that some of these people were surprised to learn that their work had been considered a “core expression of religious belief” by their employer.

Henriques goes on to describe in detail one notorious case regarding the firing of a female religious (nun) who was appointed Chaplain at Gannon University, a Roman Catholic institution. She came upon a grievous situaiton in which a senior university official violated sexual harassment rules. She was fired because she pursued the matter (she was a trained lawyer as well). Those are the specifics of one kind of case and we needn't actually bring atittudes toward famale chaplaincy into play in thinking about it. What's important, as Lerner goes on to explain, is the courts' decision-making process, including reversal of the lower court's ruling, and its outcome that proved so negative for good labour-law adjudication in a case where religious factors are among several, but not necessarily the definitive factor in a given case: :

For four weeks, the prevailing law in Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Delaware and the Virgin Islands — the jurisdiction of the United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit — was that “employment discrimination unconnected to religious belief, religious doctrine, or the internal regulations of a church is simply the exercise of intolerance, not the free exercise of religion.”

Juridics > labour relaitons

Appellate Judge Edward R. Becker wrote that opinion; his colleague on the three-judge panel, Judge D. Brooks Smith, filed a stinging dissent. A few days later, Judge Becker died. On June 20, in a rare move, the Third Circuit granted Gannon’s routine request to have the case reconsidered and named Judge Smith to the new three-judge panel that would do so.

On Sept. 6, the new panel swept the earlier decision away, unequivocally restoring the protections for religious employers that it had put in doubt. As Judge Smith put it, the ministerial exception “applies to any claim, the resolution of which would limit a religious institution’s right to choose who will perform particular spiritual functions.”

It's important to note that what is being questioned here is not the sphere sovereignty of churches as institutions for the furtherance of faith, but only certain functions of churches, church-related schools, church-related businesses, church-related nursing homes, etc, and faith-based secularly-tasked organizations in regard to their basic employment practices. Being a Christian-identified institution, or a Jewish one, or an Atheist one, or Muslim or Hindu or Sikh or Agnostic or whatever, is not a license to exploit employees, abuse them, sexually harass them, racially discriminate against them. NOr is it a license for employees to break rules of decorum, attire, appropriate language, etc.

North America > USA

1.) Not being questioned here are legistlative exceptions made exempting small businesses with few employees (the employer can let you go, just because he doesn't like you or your attitude or your religion, I guess). It's similar to legislative exceptions made for small-sized living accomodations, as in the case of a landlord who rents rooms in his/her own home. The landlord in many jurisdictions gets the benefit of the doubt because the tenants are accomodated in his own home.

2.) Not being questioned here are the r+ts of faith-based agencies to hire within the faith (but without discrimination among the faithful in regard to race or other prohbited bases of discrimination).

3.) What is being affirmed here is the fundamental r+t of association in employment, which includes the r+t to belong to a labour union (even if the union in which one's membership is held is not certified for the given bargaining unit or workforce, one has the r+t to have the union of one's choice recognized as a religio-ethical and/or philosophical identity that registers the worker in solidarity with those of the same principled commitment for labour relations). In North America and English-speaking countries like Britain and Australia, the concept of representation is quite underdeveloped in the workaday world, and often people are often forced to belong to unions inimical to their beliefs, even basic beliefs. The totalitarian aspect of either not having any labour spokes-institution at all, or being forced into a union because one is in the minority in a winner-takes-all representation vote escapes the addled brain of most in our society.

There are unions in North American that are constrained by the same totalitarian setup in labour-relations law, but which do not practice forced membership even when they obtain a majority of workers to get certification, and do not practice checkoff of dues of nonmembers in workforces where they constitute a majority. Nonmembers are allowed to give the equivalent of dues to a general charity, thus not freeloading on the benefits that the majority-union secures. The Christian Labour Association of the USA (CLA-USA) and the Christian Labour Union of Canada (CLAC) are two such principled religio-ethical labour movements--which welcome members of all faiths, races, and national origins--but hold to and advance a markedly different philosophy of work than do the totalitarian unions of the labour mainstream on our continent.

-- Owlb

Further Info:

CLA-USA
CLAC

Tags: Religions as employers

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Calendar: Long weekend: USA and Canada celebrate different holidays ...

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Today is Thanksgiving Day in Canada.
Today is Columbus Day in USA.

Either way, Happy Holidays. Catch ya' later!

-- Owlb

Calendar: Canadian Thanksgiving: Monday, October 9, 2k6

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"A Day of General Thanksgiving to Almighty God for the bountiful harvest with which Canada has been blessed ... to be observed on the 2nd Monday in October.

Tags: Thanksgiving

• thanksgiving
• CanadianThanksgiving
• harvest

Politics: Canada: Harper confirmed by latest polls on Afghan War, brings La Francophonie back to its senses

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Not so long ago Chantal Hébert (columnist for both Toronto Star and LeDevoir, Montréal) solemnized "Harper has botched Afghanistan (Sep6,2k6, TS). Tonite, on the TV news, however, reports that the support of Canadians for the country's participation in NATO's Afghanistan Mission, that support keeps climbing. Now, Hébert argues that the low support in Québec could cost the current Prime Minister the next election, and well it mite for all I know (I must look up the comparative statistics for Québec in contrast to the rest of Canada). But, whatever the case in Quebec, the opinion polls presently do indicate the opposite regarding support for his policy on this issue outside la belle probince.

Besides that outfront rise in support generally, Harper has been to Afghanistan to visit the troops, has received Afghan Prez Karzai in Ottawa, and generally comported himself well on foreign policy issues. Of course, he was scored for not being "even-handed" in regard to his non-censuring of Israel in pursuing its enemy in Lebanon. He did go personally to pick up dual-citizenship Canadian Lebanese who like to summer in the heart of the terrorist zone I call Hizbullahland, where the Lebanon govt had refused to govern. At the same time, his move there may have caused him Arab and Muslim votes, an outspoken and noticeable flow of Jews moved and are moving from the Liberal Party to the Conservatives.

Meanwhile, Jack Layton has hitched his New Democrats to the anti-war movement, trying to co-opt it as a vote-farm for the NDP in the next election. And, for good reason, as refWrite previously pointed out: The Green Party had just held its national convention in Toronto, and the candidate who won their Leadership, Elizabeth May, had peddled a radical Green anti-war platform, indeed calling for Canada's complete withdrawal from Afghanistan. That Green move could have siphoned off the anti-war vote, which Layton had not gone out of his way to cultivate. He had already drummed the leading Labour NDPer out of the party, because the Autoworker's Buzz Hargrove had advocated in the previous election that his fellow partymembers support the party only in rdings where the NDP had a real chance of winning ("strategic voting"), otherwise vote Liberal to thwart any possible rise of the Conserves. As the acerbic class-conflict Corvin Russell, Canadian Dimension points out in "The NDP puts on a show in Quebec" (Sep21,2k6):

One of the most remarkable things about [the NDP] convention goes largely unremarked: how little class politics there is in it. Organized labour’s presence is muted. This is the first convention since the Canadian Auto Workers left the party. Some see the departure of the CAW as primarily a story about personality and revenge.

North America > Canada

But it is doubtful that Buzz Hargrove would have been politically able to split from the NDP had the underlying relationship not already been weakened. In turn, the absence of the CAW, a founding affiliate of the party (when it was the United Auto Workers), seems to have dampened the spirits of their longtime rivals, the Steelworkers. The lack of class politics is all the more remarkable when other more cooptable policies are being taken up by Greens and left Liberals [like Lib leadership candidates former NDPer Bob Rae and Ontario Lib former cabmin Gerard Kennedy], threatening the distinctiveness of the NDP’s position in electoral politics. In fact, there is very little talk about the economy at all, except when Layton rebuffs party turncoat Paul Summerville’s attack on “the anti-market rhetoric” of the party base. Layton says the NDP is not anti-market, but merely wants “the economy to be fair.”

So, Layton's stuck with nothing but his attempt to head off the Greens on the anti-war issue. And that's why Layton, appalled at the strong impression Karzai made on the Canadian Parliament, hunted down the Afghani Prez in the hallways (er, corridors) to make an appointment, after which the two did sit down together. Layton got some TV coverage that neither the Greens' May nor Labour's Buzz Hargrove could. But who won the dance contest, after all? Why, it was Stephen Harper whose policy and performance have strengthened at least momentarily the Canadian spine regarding the war in that far off land.

Harper also had the last word, so to speak, in regard to the failed-govt of Lebanon when a resolution memorializing the dead and suffering on both sides of the recent conflict there was presented at the Summit of French-speaking countries in Bucharest, Romania, last week. Canada is a member of La Francophonie, as its called. When the Canadian delegation leaders Stephen Harper, Jean Charest (Liberal PM of Québec) and Bernard Lord (Conserv PM of New Brunswick, which also has a large francophone population) got wind of Egypt's attempt to erase Israel from the memorial resolution, Harper raised an objection and publicly fawt the sly nonsense.

Candian news media seem to have gotten the story wrong in an important detail. English-lang Bucharest Daily News, however, provides the correction. BDN's reporter Andreea Pocotila:

Representatives of francophone states yesterday had fiery debates before approving the Bucharest Declaration of the Organisation International de la Francophonie (OIF) due to a disagreement regarding the conflict in Lebanon.
The approval of the Bucharest Declaration, adopted yesterday during the summit, was a result of prolonged negotiations due to an amendment made by Egypt to the text.
The statement was divided into three parts: the francophonie as a knowledge society, the francophonie's political dimension and the crises in the francophone world.

It was Egypt which attempted to amend the prepared text; Harper stopped the Egypts cold, and eventually was supported by others.

La Francophonie, France's own Jacques Chirac concurring, defeated the Egyptian manoeuvre and the Lebanon govt's vociferous, furious irresponsiblity in shutting out memory of the Israeli dead, many of them Muslims. Nor has Lebanon been accustomed to taking responsibility on the matter of Hizbullah's years of rocketeering into Northern Israel. Harper won the day at the Bucharest Summit of La Francophonie, and has developed a clear foreign policy alternative to all the other parties in Canada's Hosue of Commons, on at least several key issues. Canadians are taking notice, and some like what they see.

Calendar: Keep standing: Need to reprise Global Day for Darfur, Sudan, and for Darfur refugees across the border in Chad

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Sunday, Oct8,2k6, may as well be a reprise of Sep17, the Global Day for worldwide solidarity withy Darfur's victims and resistance (alive and dead) to the brutality of the Sudan Arab govt against the fellow Muslims but not Arabs, in the West Sudan region of Darfur and the adjacent area over the border in Chad to which many of the refugees and some of the militants have fled. Movements for Darfur having (relative) success, says Michael van der Galien on Joe Gandelman's blog, Moderate Voice (Oct4,2k6). Van der Galien takes up from Matthew Clark, "Student activists rise again - this time for Darfur" Christian Science Monitor (Oct4,2k6).

I've taken the liberty of republishing digitally a long analytic article by Eric Reeves, and urge readers to stick with it -- all the way thru, if possible. Please.

-- Owlb



Khartoum strong-arms, negotiates to retain control of Darfur security:
The National Islamic Front will continue to determine the military and security dynamic throughout Darfur and eastern Chad

by Eric Reeves

The recent and fulsome decision by the African Union to agree with Khartoum on the question of deploying a UN force to Darfur almost certainly ensures that the National Islamic Front regime retains unthreatened control over human security in this vast and acutely threatened region:

"Peacekeeping troops should not be sent to Sudan's troubled Darfur region without the Sudanese government's approval, the president of the African Union [Alpha Oumar Konare] said Monday [September 25, 2006]. 'No soldier should go to Sudan without the permission of the Sudanese government because it's not about making war with the Sudanese people but helping them.'"
(Associated Press [dateline: Caracas, Venezuela], September 25, 2006)

Konare makes no mention of the fact that the "Sudanese government," at least the ruling National Islamic Front (NIF) cabal, continues to "make war on the Sudanese people" of Darfur. Nor does Konare make mention of the fact that the NIF, which completely dominates the merely notional "Government of National Unity," is waging an ever-more debilitating and brutal war on precisely those humanitarian organizations most determined to "help the Sudanese people." Such truths are evidently too discomfiting for Konare and the African Union to accept, and so the organization has capitulated to the demand that has been central to Khartoum's diplomacy throughout Africa, throughout the Arab world, and with all who can be strong-armed or intimidated or bribed: "support us in our insistence that there be no UN force in Darfur, or there will be dire consequences for our bilateral relationship."

TO WHOM HAS THE AFRICAN UNION CAPITULATED?

As a number of observers have remarked, Khartoum's genocidaires have much to fear from a robust UN deployment in Darfur, one that would further undermine their ruthless arrogation of Sudanese national wealth and power. Moreover, despite the reassurances given these brutal men by the UN, the should certainly have been able to conduct sufficiently thorough investigations, even without direct access to Darfur, to issue warrants for the arrest of most senior National Islamic Front officials. And if these men were to answer in The Hague for their actions of the past 17 years, all would certainly receive multiple life sentences for war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide.

Men like President Omar al-Bashir, Vice President Ali Osman Taha, Defense Minister (and former Interior Minister) Abdel Rahmin Mohamed Hussein, Major General Saleh Abdalla Gosh (head of the feared National Security and Intelligence Service), Presidential advisors Nafie Ali Nafie and Gutbi al-Mahdi, Interior Minister Elzubier Bashir Taha, Major General Ismat Zain al-Din (director of operations, Sudanese Armed Forces), and many others are well aware of their guilt and the overwhelming evidence that could be assembled in an international tribunal. Many already stand "indicted" by a UN Panel of experts (January 2006) and should be subject to sanctions (per UN Security Council Resolution 1591 [March 2005]); virtually all the others are certainly among the 51 names referred to the International Criminal Court by the UN Security Council on the basis of a January 2005 report by the UN Commission of Inquiry on Darfur.

These are the same men adamantly refusing to accept a UN force, and commandeering all of Sudan's international diplomatic leverage in their unrelenting effort. The character of the vicious security cabal that is the National Islamic Front was well captured in the opening sentences of recent Congressional testimony by Roger Winter, who has for a quarter of a century worked tirelessly to achieve a just peace in Sudan, most recently in his capacity as Special Representative on Sudan of the Deputy Secretary of State, USA:

"Sudan's National Congress Party is controlled by an intellectually-capable, radically-committed, conspiratorial and compassionless nucleus of individuals, long referred to as the National Islamic Front (NIF). In the seventeen years since they came to power by coup to abort an incipient peace process, they have consistently defied the international community and won. As individuals, the NIF has never paid a price for their crimes. Almost all of them are still in important positions. The NIF core is a competent cadre of men who have an agenda, the pursuit of which has killed millions of Sudanese and uprooted and destroyed the lives of millions more. While their agenda is radically ideological, it is equally about personal power and enrichment."
(Statement of Roger P. Winter before the Subcommittee on Africa, Global Human Rights and International Operations House International Relations Committee, October 20, 2006; full testimony available at http://wwwc.house.gov/international_relations/109/win092006.pdf)

It is not difficult to see why such a regime feels as though it is fighting for its survival; and there is certainly nothing these men will not do to keep the UN out of Darfur - and to ensure that security throughout the region remains solidly under their savage control. There are of course huge swaths of Darfur that are controlled by rebel groups that did not sign the ill-conceived Abuja peace agreement of May 2006; but fighting and banditry in these areas have made them too insecure for humanitarian operations. The inevitable result is vast, ongoing human displacement, as well as genocidal attrition among the badly weakened non-Arab or African tribal populations that have been so relentlessly targeted by Khartoum's violence.

At this most critical moment, the National Islamic Front has deployed all its diplomatic assets and issued all manner of threats; nothing has been held in reserve. This extends even to the preposterous caricature of those working in the international advocacy community to support urgent deployment of a UN force to protect civilians and humanitarians---a caricature clearly designed to play in the Arab and Muslim worlds. NIF President Omar al-Bashir declared last week that, "'The main purpose [of UN peacekeeping deployment to Darfur] is the security of Israel.' [ ]

Asked about Sunday's [September 17, 2006] Darfur peace rallies from Rwanda to San Francisco, Bashir said they were 'invariably organized by Zionist Jewish organizations'" (Reuters [UN, New York], September 19, 2006). Al-Bashir went on to claim that, "human rights groups have exaggerated the crisis in Darfur to help their fundraising" (Associated Press [dateline: UN, New York], September 20, 2006). The National Islamic Front recognizes that the current stage of the Darfur catastrophe poses the greatest test to date of its ruthless survivalism, and this has energized an extraordinary defiance. According to both the Sudan Tribune and Arabic-language news media (reported by the UN Mission in Sudan daily report, September 28, 2006), a spokesman for the National Islamic Front (National Congress Party) has gone so far as to threaten abrogating the January 2005 north/south peace agreement (the "Comprehensive Peace Agreement" between the NIF and the southern Sudan People's Liberation Movement) if there is a confrontation between Khartoum and the UN:

"For the first time since the signing of the Comprehensive Peace Agreement on 9 January 2005, the Sudan People's Liberation Movement accused its partner in the government of the national unity, the ruling National Congress Party [National Islamic Front], of violating the peace deal. This development comes after a statement made by Ibrahim Ahmed Omar, a leading member of the National Congress Party, saying if there is a military confrontation with the UN forces in Darfur, the NCP would cancel the Comprehensive Peace Agreement [between Khartoum and the SPLM]. According to the Satellite TV al-Jazeera, Omar also condemned the SPLM stance in favor of the UN takeover from the African Union forces in Sudan's troubled region of Darfur. Al-Jazeera broadcasted a photocopy of the SPLM's statement in Arabic language." (The Sudan Tribune [dateline: Khartoum], September 27, 2006, "SPLM accuses the ruling party of violating peace deal")

Even the Darfur rebel groups that did not sign the ill-fated and ill-conceived Darfur Peace Agreement in Abuja are simultaneously being attacked militarily by Khartoum and encouraged to believe that the regime is willing to negotiate an "interpretive annex" to the Abuja agreement if the non-signatory rebels groups "clearly express their rejection to the presence of the international forces in Darfur" (Sudan Tribune [dateline: Cairo], September 26, 2006). This "inducement" is offered even as Khartoum continues with its current offensive in North and West Darfur (where the non-signatory groups are concentrated) and complies with none of the key terms of the security arrangements embodied in the Darfur Peace Agreement.

Given the extraordinary stakes for which it is playing, Khartoum has achieved decisive diplomatic success, including explicit statements supporting its position on UN deployment from Ethiopia and Eritrea (both wanting Khartoum's support or at least even-handedness in the event that they renew war with one another), from Egypt and its foreign policy extension office (the Arab League), from veto-wielding Security Council members Russia and China, and from a range of "non-aligned nations."

Conclusive success with the Africa Union now ensures that the 4 million conflict-affected persons in Darfur and eastern Chad, as well as the deeply imperiled humanitarian` operations upon which these people are increasingly dependent, will have no adequate protection - merely what can be patched together by the AU, a few dozen UN advisors ("100 personnel" is the figure cited by Reuters in a dispatch from AU headquarters in Addis Ababa, September 25, 2006), augmented with logistical assistance and some equipment from . In words unlikely to strike fear into the hearts of Khartoum's genocidaires, NATO Secretary General Jaap de Hoop Scheffer said today, "Darfur will, as far as NATO is concerned, continue to see a continuation of what we are now giving to the African Union" (Associated Press [dateline: Portoroz, Slovenia], September 28, 2006).

"Continue to see a continuation" indeed.

It is fully understandable that NIF President Omar al-Bashir would "praise the African Union's extension of its peacekeeping [sic] mission in Darfur as 'a major victory'" (Associated Press [dateline: Khartoum] October 25, 2006). Among other effects, the AU decision will certainly embolden China in its unstinting diplomatic support for Khartoum's military intransigence and diplomatic defiance.

THE REALITIES OF THE AFRICAN UNION, AUGMENTED OR NOT

The AU disingenuously says it will add enough personnel to bring the force level to 11,000 - still less than half of what traditional peacekeeping benchmarks dictate would be required in a far more permissive environment than Darfur presents. But it is highly doubtful that there are an additional 4,000 trained troops or security personnel available, in the near- or even medium-term. Nigeria, one of the countries mooted as providing some of these additional troops, is in fact showing increasing frustration with the AU mission overall; President Obasanjo recently suggested in New York a contraction rather than an expansion of AU forces, according to remarks cited by the Daily Trust newspaper (Abuja, Nigeria, September 26, 2006):

"President Olusegun Obasanjo yesterday threatened to withdraw Nigerian troops from Darfur if the United Nations does not replace them within months. Other countries that contributed troops to the African Union (AU), Peace-keeping force in Sudan's Darfur region may also withdraw their contingents if the UN is not allowed in by December, the president said in New York yesterday. He expressed Nigeria's concern over the slow pace at which key aspects of the peace agreement on Darfur [were] being implemented."

Nor should we forget that the AU's deployment record to date in Darfur has been an extremely dilatory one. That the organization has been able to give no specific or credible account of where this new manpower will come from, or to say anything about the quality or experience of the proposed new forces, hardly argues for more rapid deployment in present circumstances. In any event, there will certainly be nothing approaching the force authorized by UN Security Council Resolution 1706: an international mission of 17,300 troops, 3,300 civilian police (trained international civilian police are desperately needed throughout the camps for displaced persons in Darfur), and 16 Formed Police Units (approximately 2,000 additional support police personnel).

In short, so long as human security in Darfur remains solely the responsibility of the African Union, there will be no force remotely adequate to needs on the ground. The AU mission has by all accounts hunkered down, become badly demoralized, and is too often very poorly led, inadequately supplied, and only sporadically paid. Perversely, the only significant near-term prospect for a change in the military/security dynamic lies in Khartoum's promise to send many more thousands of its own troops to Darfur, this as part of an ominous "security plan" presented to Secretary Kofi Annan in early August 2006.

KHARTOUM'S CURRENT MILITARY OFFENSIVE AND HUMANITARIAN CONDITIONS IN DARFUR

But Khartoum is already well into prosecution of its very large current military offensive in North Darfur and the Eastern Jebel Marra region (West Darfur); this has entailed widespread and indiscriminate aerial bombardment of civilian targets, as reported by Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, UN monitors, and sources on the ground communicating directly with this writer.

For its part, the AU has been hopeless in reporting on this consequential war crime. Indeed, Khartoum's ongoing military effort is unconstrained in any way by AU presence, and this simply will not change if the international community, in all quarters, continues to confer veto-power upon a regime clearly intent on completing its genocidal campaign. Moreover, newly deploying AU troops will face the same obstacles, the same violence directed against current AU personnel, and the same contemptuous obstructionism on Khartoum's part (see below).

On the humanitarian side, we may be sure that massive human displacement will continue, adding to the some 2.5 million who have already been displaced during three and a half years of genocidal conflict: some 50,000 people have been displaced in the last month of fighting in North Darfur alone, according to the UN humanitarian coordinator for Sudan Manuel Aranda da Silva (Associated Press [dateline: Khartoum], September 26, 2006). The same Associated Press dispatch reports that according to UN officials 100,000 have been violently displaced in the past three months.

Humanitarian operations on the ground in Darfur continue their relentless contraction, as physical threats become more acute, assaults on and killing of aid workers becomes more common, and Khartoum continues to step up its war of attrition on humanitarian operations. Reports reaching this writer from a range of aid officials and humanitarian workers on the ground paint the grimmest possible picture of intimidation, harassment, obstruction, and targeted violence. Only fear of being expelled by Khartoum prevents humanitarian organizations, and the UN itself, from speaking frankly of the nature of threats confronting all aid operations in Darfur, though especially North Darfur and West Darfur.

[Khartoum's recently imposed travel ban on US officials in Sudan has been extended to officials of at least one US nongovernmental humanitarian organization operating in Darfur, according to a report coming directly to this writer from the organization.]

The overall assessment by Jan Egeland - chief of UN humanitarian operations and the conscience of the UN on Darfur - cannot be too often invoked:
"Our entire humanitarian operation in Darfur---the only lifeline for more than three million people---is presently at risk. We need immediate action on the political front to avoid a humanitarian catastrophe with massive loss of life. [ ] If the humanitarian operation were to collapse [because of insecurity], we could see hundreds of thousands of deaths. In short, we may end up with a man-made catastrophe of an unprecedented scale in Darfur."
(Briefing by Jan Egeland, Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs and Emergency Relief Coordinator, on the humanitarian situation in Darfur Source, from the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, August 28, 2006)

Egeland concluded his Security Council briefing by making clear that his words marked the culmination, not the inauguration, of the direst possible warning:
"In the past months I have repeatedly called for attention to the deteriorating situation in Darfur. As you have heard today our warnings have become a black reality that calls for immediate action: insecurity is at its highest levels since 2004, access at its lowest levels since that date and we may well be on the brink of a return to all-out war. This would mean the withdrawal of international staff from Darfur, leaving millions of vulnerable Darfuris to suffer their fate without assistance and with few outsiders to witness."

"[The humanitarian gains of the past two years in Darfur] can all be lost within weeks---not months. I cannot give a starker warning than to say that we are at a point where even hope may escape us and the lives of hundreds of thousands could be needlessly lost. The Security Council and member states around this table with influence on the parties to the conflict must act now. Hundreds of humanitarian organizations from around the world are watching what you will be doing or may refrain from doing in the coming weeks."

Two weeks after this most terrifying of warnings, and two weeks after Khartoum launched its massive and long-anticipated military offensive in North Darfur, Egeland declared that humanitarian operations in Darfur were "in free fall" (Reuters [dateline: Khartoum], September 12, 2006).

About the need for the UN force specified in UN Security Council Resolution 1706, Egeland could not have been more explicit: "'we need this UN force to avoid a collapse'" (Associated Press [dateline: Khartoum], September 15, 2006).

A month after Egeland's briefing the situation continues to deteriorate daily. Areas completely inaccessible or only tenuously accessible are expanding rapidly; and those areas that are tenuously accessible are often so only by virtue of resource-consumptive helicopter flights (instead of overland road delivery). (A deeply dispiriting map representing areas of humanitarian inaccessibility can be found at
http://www.reliefweb.int/rw/RWB.NSF/db900SID/CMAS-6TRHUJ?OpenDocument.)

Moreover, UN Humanitarian Coordinator for Sudan, Manuel Aranda da Silva, has very recently raised the terrifying specter of Khartoum's military forcibly returning people from displaced persons camps to their villages (or the sites of the their former villages):
"Da Silva said he was also worried about recent talk in government circles to send refugees back to their villages by force. 'I've seen how the government handles security in Darfur,' he said. 'If the army goes into the camps, there will be unpredictable violence.'" (Associated Press [dateline: Khartoum], September 26, 2006)

In fact, the results of the violent removal of displaced persons from camps are all too predictable: there will be massive civilians casualties, and those actually returned to their villages will be without adequate resources and completely vulnerable to renewed Janjaweed attacks. The AU, in any configuration, is powerless to stop such a brutal campaign of forced returns, even as the UN has been warning of such a policy at various points over the past two years.

IF NOT THE AU, WHO?

The African Union belatedly - though still months ago - recognized its shortcomings, and the need to hand over the mission in Darfur to the UN. But this frank and public acknowledgement, by a range of AU officials, has not produced the political courage to confront Khartoum. By declaring that Khartoum must consent to UN deployment - even as the regime remains adamantly, publicly, relentlessly opposed to deployment - the AU leaves exceedingly little diplomatic space for those international actors that might be prepared to act without Khartoum's consent, if the alternative to such action is passively accepting hundreds of thousands of innocent civilian deaths.

But are there any such actors? Vague noises have emanated from London, Paris, and Washington; but the AU decision announced by Konare very likely paralyzes further movement toward non-consensual deployment for both military tactical reasons and political reasons. This is the context in which to understand the fierce, blustery, but finally empty threats coming from US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice on Wednesday (September 27):
"'The government of Sudan must immediately and unconditionally accept a UN peacekeeping force into Darfur,' US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said September 27, [2006]" (Washington File [US State Department News Service], September 28, 2006)

"'The Sudanese government faces a clear and consequential decision,' said Rice, adding, 'This is the choice between cooperation and confrontation.'"

"Rice did not indicate what she meant by 'confrontation.' UN member nations, particularly those offering troops, have made clear they do not want to shoot their way into Darfur, where about 7,000 African Union troops are battling to keep the peace in an area the size of France. When asked what Rice meant by this, US special envoy for Sudan, Andrew Natsios, also declined to provide specifics, saying it was more diplomatic to leave the consequences vague."
(Reuters [dateline: Washington], September 27, 2006)

It is hardly cynical to suggest that the "consequences" of Khartoum's continued defiance have been left "vague" because the Bush administration has none clearly in mind. Having squandered immense moral authority as well as political and diplomatic capital on the war in Iraq, the US has no resources with which to lead or to impose meaningful consequences upon a regime that it has repeatedly declared is committing genocide in Darfur.

Khartoum certainly wasted no time in peremptorily rejecting Rice's demands:
"Sudan rejected US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice's demand that it accept United Nations peacekeepers in Darfur, and will [instead] agree to a stronger African Union force, Deputy Foreign Minister Ali Karti said. 'It is not for Condoleezza Rice to tell us what to do,' Karti said today in an interview in Khartoum, Sudan's capital. Rice said yesterday that the Sudanese government must halt military operations in Darfur and accept a UN peacekeeping force or face punishment by the international community." (Bloomberg news service [dateline: Khartoum], September 28, 2006)

All the while, a month after nominal UN Security Council "action" on Darfur, the "perfect storm" of human destruction that Egeland forecast exactly a month ago has fully descended upon the brutalized region.

Here the consequences of the US decision to rush through the Darfur Peace Agreement (DPA) in Abuja, Nigeria (May 2006) are playing out in the most disastrous fashion. An agreement that was woefully inadequate in its security guarantees (and guarantors), and contemptible in what it offered the people of Darfur in the way of compensation from the oil-rich regime in Khartoum, is serving as cover for the ongoing military offensive in North and West Darfur: Khartoum claims it is attacking non-signatory rebel groups to bring them into "compliance" with this fatally flawed agreement - and it is doing so with the Janjaweed militia forces that were to have been disarmed per the terms of the DPA.

Not a single security provision of the DPA is having any effect. The contemplated Cease-Fire Commission (with primary responsibilities falling to the AU) is a ghastly joke. Moreover, many on the ground - including many within the humanitarian community - complain bitterly of the AU's inability and unwillingness to report on what is occurring. For its part, Khartoum sees that it has been almost completely successful in keeping journalists out of Darfur (the number of wire and newspaper reports with a Darfur dateline has plummeted in the last month).

As humanitarian access continues its contraction, there will be fewer and fewer witnesses to the atrocities and genocidal actions that are currently, this very day, occurring. Those dying from indiscriminate aerial attacks on villages, those murdered by Khartoum's ground forces and Janjaweed militia allies, those starving to death, those dying from disease - they are dying, overwhelmingly, invisibly.

And they are dying in ever-greater numbers: there are very likely more than 10,000 conflict-related deaths per month (in a perverse and revealing coincidence, 10,000 is the total mortality figure - for the entire Darfur conflict, from all causes, on all sides - recently insisted upon by NIF President al-Bashir). Such a current mortality rate can only be a very general estimate, a crude extrapolation from UN mortality rate data released in preliminary form in June 2005. For there has been no further promulgation of systematic data on mortality, by the UN or any other organization, for almost a year and a half (see April 29, 2006 mortality assessment by this writer at http://www.sudanreeves.org/Article102.html).

Even so, given the mortality rate data reported in a UN World Health Organization-overseen study in spring of 2005, for a retrospective time-period in which humanitarian access was relatively good, we must assume significant increases in mortality rates in all three Darfur states (at the time of the study, overall UN data suggested a rate of approximately 6,000 excess [conflict-related] deaths per month).

Moreover, there has also been very large increase in the number of conflict-affected persons: from approximately 2.73 million (May 1, 2005 "UN Darfur Humanitarian Profile") to the current estimate by the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) of 3.78 million. In other words, the "denominator" for the excess Crude Mortality Rate (excess, or conflict-related, deaths per day per 10,000 of population) has increased by over 1 million human beings (37%) since the last systematic data were released.

CHAD

The humanitarian crisis in Chad, intimately related to the Darfur genocide and in many ways an extension of it, has steadily slipped from news coverage of the greater crisis. And the Darfur spillover into the Central African Republic is almost completely unreported, although the destabilizing effects of the Darfur conflict continue to be emphasized by senior UN officials, including Antonio Guterres, UN High Commissioner for Refugees. Referring specifically to the Central African Republic and Chad, Guterres warned:
"'I would say you must look at Darfur not only in itself, but as the epicentre of a major earthquake in the area that can have a devastating impact not only on peace and security but also terrible humanitarian consequences.'"
(BBC, September 16, 2006)

UN figures indicate that there are presently over 350,000 conflict-affected persons in Chad (Darfuri refugees, Chadian internally displaced persons, and affected host populations); the vast majority of these people require humanitarian assistance that is acutely threatened by targeted violence and insecurity. Moreover, these people are at steadily increasing risk with the return of the dry season, which will permit military incursions by the Janjaweed and Khartoum's regular military forces into Chad (the current rainy season, now ending, has in recent months made crossing rain-swollen wadis impossible for the Janjaweed and other armed forces).

Notably, the UN force contemplated in Security Council Resolution 1706 is specifically tasked with "monitoring trans-border activities of armed groups along the Sudanese borders with Chad and the Central African Republic, in particular through regular ground and aerial reconnaissance activities" (Paragraph 8, clause [e], UN Security Council Resolution 1706, August 31, 2006).

But this task is completely beyond the African Union, which even if augmented cannot begin to handle the security tasks just for Darfur itself, including: protecting the camps for displaced persons (where AU personnel are despised because of their impotence); protecting humanitarian corridors (which in many cases have become little more than shooting galleries for bandits and car-jackers); protecting rural civilians and villages at risk of military assault; creating a meaningful cease-fire commission; and overseeing the disarming of the Janjaweed (both as separate fighting elements and as they have been incorporated by Khartoum into the regular armed forces, the Popular Defense Forces [PDF], and other security forces).

The AU is completely incapable of staunching the flow of genocidal violence across the border between Darfur and Chad, and the very large defenseless populations in eastern Chad at risk must figure much more prominently in public discussion of the AU mission in Darfur and what is required for human security in the broader humanitarian theater.

See two important reports on this violence, by Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, making clear both Khartoum's direct role in cross-border violence and the acute threats to humanitarian operations:

[1] Human Rights Watch, "Darfur Bleeds: Recent Cross-Border Violence in Chad," February 2006, http://www.hrw.org/backgrounder/africa/chad0206/)

[2] Amnesty International, "Sowing the Seeds of Darfur: Ethnic targeting in Chad by Janjawid militias from Sudan," June 2006,
http://web.amnesty.org/library/Index/ENGAFR200062006

The AU's conspicuous failure to take on a mandate for the Chad border region, of the sort specified in UN Resolution 1706, is made clear by a recent wire report (September 28, 2006) from Bahai, Chad (on the border with North Darfur):

"Walking behind his mule beneath a sky seared white by the afternoon heat, Abdikrim Mohammed contemplated the end of the rainy season. He and his family have lived in Oure Cassoni refugee camp in this Sahara Desert border town since 2003, when they fled western Sudan's Darfur region in the wake of militia attacks supported by the Sudanese government. About 29,000 men, women and children live in the camp. [Although hoping to return to his village] Mohammed, 35, braces for renewed fighting.

The deluge of rain that swept through central Africa beginning in June will end this month, making it possible for Sudan-backed militias to ford once-flooded rivers and increase their attacks on Chadian border villages. 'Without the rains, they will come,' Mohammed said, staring at the border and the shallow river, Wadi Hawar, that separates the camp from Sudan."

"Mohammed is not alone in his concern. The United Nations and relief organization officials say they are bracing for fighting that may rival anything that came before in a conflict the Bush administration calls genocide. Mounting violence before the rainy season resulted in at least 55,000 Chadians driven from their homes. Refugee camps swelled with these displaced families and the hundreds of Sudanese refugees that arrived each week." [ ]

"About 235,000 Sudanese refugees have sought sanctuary in Chad. In the eastern provinces of Chad, 12 refugee camps have been established. Security remains particularly precarious for them and for humanitarian workers."

"Sudanese troops in August [2006] deployed along the border near Oure Cassoni [also on the border between North Darfur and Chad] and other refugee camps for the first time since the Darfur war began in 2003. Some aid workers say the troops, ostensibly placed to prevent anti-Sudan rebels from escaping into Chad, will leave fleeing Darfur families sandwiched between the militias and the Sudanese soldiers."

"[Matthew Conway, spokesman for the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, warned that], 'given the recent history [along the Chad/Darfur border] we are preparing for the worst.' Conway said UN refugee experts expect at least 50,000 new refugees by the end of the year." [This would bring the conflict-affected population in Chad to over 400,000---ER]

"It remains unlikely that Mohammed or the families around him will return to their Darfur villages anytime soon. In fact, some aid officials worry that the refugee camps run the risk of becoming permanent, impoverished versions of how these families, mostly farmers, once lived. 'It is a concern,' said Ndoyengar Narcisse, an aid worker with a local agricultural organization called Secadev." [ ]

"In Oure Cassoni, Darfur secondary school teachers gathered beneath a tent one afternoon to discuss their problems as refugees. Little food, little water, little to do. Many cast worried looks toward the nearby Sudan border, where the dim dark outlines of tanks and Jeeps weaved in the afternoon heat. 'You see the government [of Sudan] troops over the river,' said Sharif Nuran, 40. 'They continue to follow us.' 'They are closing the border so refugees can't come and the people here won't know what is happening,' added Mohammad Hamid, 40. 'One day,' Nuran said, 'they will come into the camp and kill people who don't support them.'"

"On the other side of the camp, Abdikrim Mohammed tried not to think of the future. Still, he could not resist watching the sky and the few clouds scudding overhead. 'The rivers are low,' he said. 'When the water is gone, then it will be the bad time.'" (McClatchy Newspapers wire-service [dateline: Bahai, Chad (on the Chad/Darfur border)], published September 28, 2006)

PROSPECTS FOR THE AFRICAN UNION FORCE

Secure in its diplomatic triumph, defying the UN, ignoring the importuning of the European Union, sneering brazenly at the US, Khartoum knows full well that there will be no change in the security crisis throughout Darfur so long as the African Union provides the only force on the ground. Moreover, as the past history of the AU in Darfur painfully reveals, AU troops and civilian police on the ground will continue to be harassed, obstructed, and humiliated by Khartoum's military forces.

AU aviation fuel for patrol helicopters will continue to be commandeered by Khartoum for its own savagely destructive helicopter gunships (see New York Times dispatch [dateline: Tawilla, North Darfur], September 9, 2006, at http://www.iht.com/articles/2006/09/09/africa/web.0909darfur.php). Even Jendayi Frazer, the singularly incompetent US Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs, was forced recently to acknowledge the hapless nature of the AU in confronting Khartoum's obstructionism:

"The al-Bashir government has sabotaged the African Union's Mission in Sudan, AMIS, by delaying visas and dismantling and removing bolts from AMIS armored personnel carriers when they arrive in Port Sudan, US Assistant Secretary of State Jendayi Frazer told a small group of reporters on Thursday." (Inner City Press [dateline: UN, New York], September 21, 2006)

Such sabotaging is much more extensive that Frazer acknowledges, and much more debilitating. We should recall that 105 Canadian armored personnel carriers, destined for the AU in Darfur, where forced to remain in Senegal from July to November 2005 because Khartoum would not permit their entry into Darfur---and when they were admitted, they arrived without their key armament (12.7mm mounted machine-guns), and without the technicians to train the AU personnel in the use of the vehicles. We should also recall the curfews imposed by Khartoum on AU personnel, the extensive restrictions on flying time for patrol helicopters, the gratuitous requirements for pilot re-certification, and countless other consequential obstacles to effective deployment.

We should also bear in mind the kinds of fundamental, structural limitations to the AU force - limitations in intelligence gathering, as well as in communications ability and experience; lack of operating cohesion (including often the lack of a common language or radio frequency); lack of relevant training; acute lack of capable on-the-ground logistics; and limitations in administrative capacity in Addis Ababa (including inadequate financial accounting). It is not that these limitations are unknown to the UN or other international actors who are now acquiescing before Khartoum's insistence that the mission in Darfur remain solely in the hands of the African Union.

Almost a year ago, comprehensive analyses came from several distinguished policy organizations:

[1] Refugees International, "No Power to Protect: The African Union Mission in Sudan" (November 2005, http://www.refugeesinternational.org/content/publication)
[2] Brookings Institution/Bern University, "The Protecting of Two Million Internally Displaced: The Successes and Shortcomings of the African Union in Darfur," (November 2005, http://www.brookings.edu/fp/projects/idp/200511_au_darfur.pdf)

[3] International Crisis Group, "The AU's Mission in Darfur: Bridging the Gaps," (July 6, 2005 http://www.crisisgroup.org/home/index.cfm?id=3547&l=1)

[This writer has undertaken a synthetic account of this very substantial body of research: "Ghosts of Rwanda: The Failure of the African Union in Darfur," Part 1 of 2, November 13, 2005, at
http://www.sudanreeves.org/Sections-index-req-viewarticle-artid-535-page-1.html)

"Ghosts of Rwanda: The Failure of the African Union in Darfur," Part 2 of 2, November 20, 2005, at
http://www.sudanreeves.org/Sections-index-req-viewarticle-artid-534-page-1.html) ]

The Brookings report analyzed over 20 categories of significant weakness in the "African Union Mission in Sudan" (AMIS) force, weaknesses that in nearly all cases still characterize the current AU deployment:

*"Slow and Cumbersome Command and Control"
*"High Turnover of Sector Commanders"
*"Inadequate Planning and Management Capacity"
*"Logistical Shortcomings"
*"Absence of Standard Operating Procedures in AMIS' First Year"
*"Lack of Rules of Engagement Governing Use of Firearms or Force"
*"Poor Coordination of Outside Assistance"
*"Weak Financial Oversight"
*"Poor Data Management"
*"Lack of Good Intelligence Information"
*"Insufficient Coordination between AMIS' Military and Civilian Police"
*"Too Close an Alliance between AMIS Civilian Police and Sudan's Police"
*"Inadequate Access to Rebel-Controlled Areas"
*"Limited Patrol Capacity [ ] and No Ability for Night Patrols"
*"Inconsistent Relationships with NGO's and UN Agencies"
*"Problems of Including Sudanese Armed Forces and Rebel Groups in AMIS Investigations"
[six other significant shortcomings are listed by the Brookings report]

Some of these problems have only grown worse: the split in the rebel movements over the Darfur Peace Agreement (with only one, the Sudan Liberation Army faction of Minni Minawi, signing) has resulted in an almost complete paralysis of AU investigations, since Khartoum has insisted that representatives of non-signatory groups be expelled from AU sites as "terrorists." This makes it impossible for the AU to investigate in the vast areas (particularly north and west of el-Fasher) controlled by the non-signatory groups. This is where present fighting and indiscriminate aerial bombardment of villages are concentrated.

Only some of these problems can be addressed, and only very partially, by UN advisors and logistical, transport, and equipment support from NATO countries. Moreover, AU stubbornness about leadership in key areas may still undermine the effectiveness of any augmented AU force. For example, the intelligence capabilities of the AU are disastrously weak. Human intelligence, aerial and ground surveillance, intercept capability, and analytic capacity are virtually non-existent. The Refugees International (RI) report of November 2005 notes,

"Even when AMIS does collect valuable information, RI was told by AMIS officers and advisors that there is a lack of suitably trained personnel capable of analyzing this information for intelligence value, which hinders any given commander's ability to react." (page 10)

Even more bluntly the Brookings report notes:

"Lack of planning and establishing an intelligence infrastructure within AMIS [African Union Mission in Sudan] meant that there was no routine way to gather and analyze intelligence on either the government forces and their militias or the various rebel groups. Good intelligence is vital in Darfur, yet AMIS' capacity to gather, analyze and act on information has been very weak. 'The AU does not understand the importance of having an "intelligence cell" and of having good information on the command structure, for example, of the Janjaweed.' 'AMIS force headquarters is blind when it comes to intelligence,' according to a former advisor." (page 37)

An appropriate intelligence capacity cannot be "airlifted" to the AU by NATO or the EU; it cannot be "purchased" along with appropriate equipment. In this crucial arena, the AU mission will be crippled without substantial first-world military intelligence capabilities and leadership.

The Brookings military assessment highlights other key deficiencies in AU abilities: the AU force lacks "fast warning of imminent attack"; lacks "continuous, all-source, and real-time intelligence"; lacks "ability to distinguish among combatants"; and lacks "flexible command and control of distributed forces" (page 35). Again, most of these problems remain, and in some regions (most of North Darfur and eastern West Darfur) the problems have only worsened.

The Brookings report also notes that African Union civilian police "suffer from severe communications problems, which, if anything, are worse than AMIS military must endure"; "one AMIS police sector cannot communicate directly with another" (page 20). The African Union has never made trained civilian police a high enough priority, and this remains the case - and will almost certainly be reflected in any future deployments. Yet again, the problems have actually increased since these assessment reports were issued last November: Darfuri displaced persons are increasingly angry at the AU for its manifest failure to protect civilians, and this has made it increasingly difficult for the AU to maintain an appropriate presence in most camps.

DOES THIS MATTER ENOUGH?

As Jan Egeland has insistently predicted for months, without an appropriate security force - and he has very recently indicated quite specifically that he means the UN force contemplated in Security Council Resolution 1706 - catastrophe is inevitable. One month ago he declared that "we are at a point where even hope may escape us and the lives of hundreds of thousands could be needlessly lost." Two weeks later he warned that humanitarian aid in Darfur was "in free fall." If we wait to see the full scale and consequences of an inevitable AU failure to provide security for Darfur, we will be waiting while too many hundreds of thousands of innocent human beings die.

Eric Reeves
Smith College
Northampton, MA 01063

413-585-3326
ereeves@smith.edu
www.sudanreeves.org

Health: USA: Govt-backed report calls for universal health care, catastrophic-costs insurance

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A leading online health site, WebMD carries a report (Sep25,2k6) by Todd Zwillich about a policy group is calling for universal protection from catastrophic medical costs in the USA, within a year's time. The Zwillich article was screened by a medical reviwer before publication, Louise Chang, MD.

Americans should have universal access to health insurance by the year 2012, a congressionally mandated report concluded Monday.

The report calls on Congress to move by next year to pass insurance reforms protecting all citizens from catastrophic medical bills using either market-based insurance policies or taxpayer-funded methods.

It then calls for new laws guaranteeing universal access to affordable health insurance to be in place by 2012.

The report was issued by the Citizens' Health Care Working Group, which was directed by Congress to hold a series of public forums nationwide on how to reform the health care system. Congress is required to hold hearings on the report next year.

"The overwhelming majority of Americans that the working group heard from … want health-care system-change to begin now," the report states.

Approximately 46 million Americans are estimated to lack health coverage. Meanwhile, the cost of private health insurance for a family of four now tops $10,000 [a year, I presume - Politicarp]. The report does not endorse a particular policy for expanding coverage, though experts acknowledged that progress would likely end up encompassing a combination of private incentives and government expansions.

Statewide Efforts

Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., who co-authored the bill creating the working group, pointed to recent bipartisan reforms in Massachusetts that spread insurance coverage statewide with a combination of market incentives and coverage mandates.

"That's the kind of mix that can produce some common ground," Wyden tells WebMD.

A report released last week by the Commonwealth Fund think-tank gave mostly dismal scores to the US health care system for running high costs without enough attention to efficiency and quality care.

That report's authors acknowledged fundamental reforms would likely have to be incremental because of the electrified politics of the $2 trillion-per-year American health care system.

Congress has recently moved to expand access to tax-free health savings accounts. Supporters, including President Bush, say the accounts can increase efficiency by allowing individuals to save and spend more of their own money on medical care. The accounts have been taken up by more than 3 million people, according to health industry estimates.

Michael Cannon, director of health policy at the Cato Institute, a free-market think tank, criticized Monday's report for pointing the way to an expansion of government's role in health care.

"Their 'market-based' model would increase taxes and increase spending. This is not free-market stuff," he says.

SOURCES: Health Care That Works for All Americans, Citizens Health Care Working Group, Sept. 25, 2006. Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore. Michael Cannon, director of health policy studies, Cato Institute.

Of course, Cato Institute's reaction is entirely predictable. American medical professions are utterly capitalist, and the entire system would shudder for years if everyone were entitled to care. But, basic care is one thing. Catastrophic costs cannot be paid out for everyone under every circumstance, especially when the population ages in ever-incresaing dependence on the medical system to advance longevity, while at the same time medical advances and technologies address ever-more esoteric diseases that afflict only the tiniest of minorities that no one lived long enuff to contract in the past. The array of specific-disease minorities sky-rockets costs. Obviously the state has a role in supporting medicine financially, and all those who can buy insurance have a respnsilbity to do so. But where to draw the line on what the state must finance for whom and when is a matter of delicate balancing. What Catovists don't acknowledge is that the larger community that embraces all members of a given society has a responsilblity for all its sick, a principle that justifies public medicine and urban public-health departments. That general community thru the state provides for accomplishing tasks of prevention, preparation, and pro=active response against potentially epidemic/pandemic diseases when they arise. Indeed, in this age, the process of mutation can undergo rapidization beyond any easy identification of the new variant of a virus with deadly consequences for huge populations.

A public health system must set hard-choice priorities. The state alone cannot do everything that can be done to help those who suffer illness, or may suffer illness, even catastrophically expensive illness or injury. The state has some very real respnsiblity in making sure that plenty of emergency care facilities are available on immediate notice, and systems of response to natural disasters as well as terrorist attacks are well in place. But not everything can be done for everybody, emergency or no.

-- Owlb

Further Research:

Editorials, Opinion Pieces Address Massachusetts Health Care Bill (Apr12,2k6)
Mandating health coverage for all -- Massachusetts experiment built on political compromise (Apr5,2k6)

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