Category Archives: National News/Commentary

Does the United States really favor torture?

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By Stephen Laurence
Greenville

Some five years ago, in the days leading up to our invasion of Iraq, a local peace advocate carried a sign outside Greenville’s federal building asking “Are we what we say we are?” as a nation. More recently — about a week ago, in fact — a former U.S. House Speaker implored public radio listeners to carefully consider the relationship between our rhetoric and our actions.

An ongoing debate about the acceptability of torture as an interrogation technique has led to passage of the Intelligence Authorization Act, with a provision that bans torture through its reference to the U.S. Army Field Manual. Regrettably, Sen. Lindsey Graham opposed use of this standard for civilian intelligence gathering; Sen. Jim DeMint voted against the final legislation; and President George Bush threatens to veto it.

While we often boast of being the most democratic and most pious of nations, the rest of the world watches our actions and recognizes the frequent hypocrisy between what we say and what we do. Abu Ghraib is one example. The high civilian casualty count in Iraq is another. Guantanamo is yet another. And now we have representatives of the United States, including the “leader of the free world,” condoning torture — albeit couched in more acceptable language — with the ultimate outcome of the issue being uncertain.

Torture is completely indefensible on moral and ethical grounds. Most faith communities specifically condemn inhumane acts toward others. The New Testament of the Christian Bible quotes Jesus calling on us to love our enemies and to do unto others as we would have them do unto us. The United States has been party to the Geneva Conventions since their inception in 1864. And our “greatest generation” punished enemy soldiers and officers found guilty of torture during World War II.

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The South behind bars

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Let’s do the numbers

Total number of adults incarcerated in America: 2.3 million

Total number of adults incarcerated in China: 1.5 million

Rank of U.S. incarceration rate among all nations: 1

Rank of South’s incarceration rate among all U.S. regions: 1

Percent increase in South’s incarceration rate in 2007 alone: 2.8

Rank of Texas’ incarceration rate among all U.S. states.: 1

Year in which Florida is expected to run out of prison space: 2009

Percent of American adults in prison or jail: 1

Percent of all men age 18 or older: 2

Percent of white men age 18 or older: 0.9

Percent of Hispanic men age 18 or older: 3

Percent of black men age 18 or older: 7

Percent of black men age 20 to 34: 11

Percent of white women age 35 to 39: 0.3

Percent of Hispanic women age 35 to 39: 0.4

Percent of black women age 35 to 39: 1

Amount states spent on corrections in 2007 alone: $49 billion

Percent which that amount has increased over the past 20 years, adjusted to 2007 dollars: 127

Percent increase in adjusted spending on higher education over that same period: 21

Minimum amount Texas is expected to save over the next two years from prison reforms that expand drug treatment and change parole practices: $210 million

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Statistics taken from “One in 100: Behind Bars in America 2008” by The Pew Center on the States, available online here.

This is the time to reject nuclear arms

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By Glenn Carroll
Coordinator, Nuclear Watch South

Without a word of public debate, nuclear weapons became a seemingly inevitable fact of life and death on our planet. After World War II ended with two single bombs destroying the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, The Bomb became big business with vast factory complexes on government reservations in several states across the country.

A government agency, now called U.S. Department of Energy, was formed to oversee private contractors who churned out no less than 30,000 nuclear warheads over the next four decades and established the nuclear industry as an economic force in human affairs.

A people’s movement to “Ban the Bomb” formed instantly in response to the wartime bombing of Japan, and to the “test bombings” on the lands of the Western Shoshone Nation in Nevada and Utah and the Pacific islanders of the Moruroa Atoll.

From protests on the street to civil disobedience at weapons sites, the public has been vocal and insistent that our only reasonable option is to abolish nuclear weapons. Indeed, in 1996 the World Court issued a landmark decision defending this basic ethic when it declared the manufacture, possession or use of nuclear weapons to be illegal.

The Cold War bomb factories were built in secret in the 1940s and 1950s. They operated without public oversight until the Cold War ended in 1991, when crumbling Russian and U.S. nuclear bomb factories and reactors were forced to shut down.

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Birth control reality check

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Cheers and Jeers of the Year
BirthControlWatch.org

1. Jeer: The Cost of Birth Control on College Campuses Skyrocketed

When Bush signed the Federal Deficit Reduction Act of 2005, few knew it would scale back access to contraception for the group of people who need it most: college-age women. But that’s just what it did. It eliminated incentives for pharmaceutical companies to offer contraception at a discount to college health centers. In 2007, those centers ran out of their reduced-rate stock and were forced to increase prices to cover the new inflated costs. For many college women, birth control prices went up 900 percent – from $5 to $50. Since college women already have the country’s highest rate of unintended pregnancies, making contraception less affordable for them was a plan for disaster.

2. Cheer: Governors Said No to Abstinence-Only Money

In 2007, Colorado and New York joined the movement to reject federal funding for school programs that teach abstinence as the only sure way to prevent pregnancies and sexually transmitted diseases and provide inaccurate information about birth control. With the addition of these two important states, a total of 14 states have now rejected efforts by the federal government to promote inaccurate, ideology-based and ineffective abstinence-only programs. As a result, more than a third of the funds available under this federal program are going unclaimed or unused. The 14 states are: California, Colorado, Connecticut, Maine, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Montana, New Jersey, New York, Ohio, Rhode Island, Virginia, Wisconsin and Wyoming.

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Moving women from bench warmers to captains

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By Linda Tarr-Whelan

Sometimes progress is measured by half-court movements. When I was in school, girls played basketball by different rules than the boys. We played on a half-court and could only dribble three times before passing the ball. Girls were regarded as too fragile to run the distance. Now, tell that to the women in the WNBA.

It’s good to measure positive change, like women’s full court professional basketball. Recognizing these changes is what we celebrate in March as Women’s History Month. But I’m done with simply celebrating where we’ve been. Instead, it’s time to look at March as more a celebration of our future: let’s call it “Women Making History Month.”

Old stereotypes still stand in our way. Even today, only two-thirds of adults in this country think a woman could be president, according to a CNN/Opinion Research survey. Meanwhile, state legislatures — the farm teams for future leaders — have only one-quarter representation by women, a pitiful ratio that has remained unchanged for a decade. The U.S. ranks 69th in the world for women’s legislative representation with only 16 percent women in Congress.

We’re missing a lot and it doesn’t have to be this way. The leaders of some countries have realized that it really does matter who makes the decisions. They see what our leaders have not yet recognized: having more women at the top is good business and smart politics. For example, in Norway, women make up 36 percent of the members on corporate boards, while in the U.S. progress seems stalled at not quite 15 percent. How did Norway they do it? In 2003, Norway passed a tough law that requires all public companies to ensure that their boards are 40 percent women. By 2007, 85 percent of their public companies met the mark.

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SC congressional delegation fails its children

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The Children’s Defense Fund Action Council (CDFAC) released its 2007 Nonpartisan Congressional Scorecard, which grades every member of the House and Senate based on 10 key votes affecting children. The Scorecard showed some important legislative successes but noted some missed key opportunities to improve the lives of children in 2007, including Congress’s failure to override President Bush’s veto of legislation to extend health coverage to 3.1 million more uninsured children.

South Carolina’s Members of Congress collectively voted to protect the well-being of children only 41 percent of the time in 2007, ranking 47th among all 50 states.

The CDF Action Council website has put the entire Scorecard online, including an interactive database to find how each individual legislator in each state voted, as well as rankings of the best and worst Members of Congress and State Delegations. You can access all of these tools here.

SC legislators trump up fear of voter fraud

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By Brett Bursey
Director, SC Progressive Network

When I asked the 62 young people at Fairfield High school’s Teen Institute what “democracy” was last week, hands shot up. “One person, one vote,” one said. “Rule of the people,” said another. When I asked what country leads the world in democratic participation, a chorus of “USA” broke out.

They were shocked to find that the land of the free and home of the brave doesn’t rank in the top ten. In fact, the USA doesn’t even rank in the top 100.

The voting-age population in 138 other countries turn out at higher numbers than in the United States. In fact, according to the International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance’s “Global Report on Voter Turnout,” the U.S. ranks 139th, between Armenia and Nigeria, with an average of 47 percent of our voting-age population participating in elections.

So, no, the USA is not number one. What’s more, the Census puts South Carolina 34th in state rankings for voting-age participation in elections.

Which brings us back to Fairfield High School and the discussion on democracy. I went there to urge the Teen Institute to sign on to the SC Progressive Network’s “Missing Voter Project” (MVP), which is working to identify and engage South Carolina’s voting age-population (VAP) that isn’t registered or doesn’t regularly vote.

In the 2006 election, about 47 percent of the state’s registered voters cast a ballot – about 37 percent of the VAP. It gets worse. In Fairfield County, only 136 citizens between 18 and 21 – about 10 percent of that age group – voted.

In Fairfield, 79 percent of the county’s children qualify for a free lunch. The per capita income for the county is about $21,000. Twenty percent of the population lives below the poverty line, including 25 percent of those under age 18. Drop-out rates are high, good jobs are scarce. Fairfield County, which is 60 percent black, has not had a black representative in the State House since Reconstruction, some 110 years.

Why people aren’t voting is a complex equation of historic and systematic disenfranchisement that may take generations to overcome. Voter registration in this state was once limited to white, property-owning males, and has historically been used to restrict access to the ballot box, not facilitate it.

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Tortured evidence: injustice at Guantanamo

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By Marjorie Cohn
Jurist

The Bush administration has announced its intention to try six alleged al Qaeda members at Guantánamo under the Military Commissions Act. That Act forbids the admission of evidence extracted by torture, although it permits evidence obtained by cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment if it was secured before December 30, 2005. Thus, the administration would be forbidden from relying on evidence obtained by waterboarding, if waterboarding constitutes torture.

That’s one reason Attorney General Michael Mukasey refuses to admit waterboarding is torture. The other is that torture is considered a war crime under the U.S. War Crimes Act. Mukasey would be calling Dick Cheney a war criminal if the former admitted waterboarding is torture. Lawrence Wilkerson, Colin Powell’s former chief of staff, has said on National Public Radio that the policies that led to the torture and abuse of prisoners emanated from the Vice President’s office.

The federal government is working overtime to try and clean up the legal mess made by the use of illegal interrogation methods. In a thinly-veiled attempt to sanitize the Guantánamo trials, the Department of Justice and the Pentagon instituted an extensive program to re-interview the prisoners who have undergone abusive interrogations, this time with “clean teams.” For example, if a prisoner implicated one of the defendants during an interrogation using waterboarding, the government will now re-interrogate that prisoner without waterboarding and get the same information. Then they will say the information was secured humanely. This attempt to wipe the slate clean is a farce and a sham.

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Pursuing new power plants squanders chances to cut greenhouse gases

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Duke Energy deception worsens regarding new plant’s emissions
By Jim Warren
Executive Director, NC Waste Awareness & Reduction Network (WARN)

We call on all news media and public officials to exercise the utmost scrutiny of continuing claims by Duke Energy and state officials about the costs and benefits of the Cliffside coal-fired power plant.  NC WARN stands behind our initial analysis, and Jan. 29 statement that the state has colluded with Duke to mislead the public about key facts involving the plant.

Furthermore, the deception has worsened since then, particularly in paid Duke Energy ads and statements made to the press following the Feb. 8 court ruling on mercury.  We do not make these charges lightly. Today NC WARN is publicizing three items showing the months-long deception that has misled many North Carolinians into thinking that building a huge, polluting greenhouse gas machine could somehow, as CEO Jim Rogers says, be “good for the environment.”

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