April 2008 archive

In the Shreve High football stadium,

I think of Polacks nursing long beers in Tiltonsville,

And gray faces of Negroes in the blast furnace at Benwood,

And the ruptured night watchman of Wheeling Steel,

Dreaming of heroes.

All the proud fathers are ashamed to go home.

Their women cluck like starved pullets,

Dying for love.

Therefore,

Their sons grow suicidally beautiful

At the beginning of October,

And gallop terribly against each other’s bodies.

James Wright, Autumn Begins in Martins Ferry, Ohio

In celebration of the renewal for a third season of Friday Night Lights, one of the best shows about many things, but particularly rural poverty, to grace television screens in America.

cross posted from The Dream Antilles

According to Bloomberg, FARC has now said that it will not allow France’s medical mission to treat its most famous hostage, Ingrid Betancourt, whom it has held hostage for more than six years:

Colombia’s biggest rebel group refused to allow a French-led medical mission to help former presidential candidate Ingrid Betancourt, a dual citizen held captive more than six years.

“The French medical mission isn’t appropriate and much less so when it’s not the result of an agreement,” the leadership of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, said in the statement posted today on the Web site of Venezuela’s Agencia Bolivariana de Prensa.

The FARC said the French made no contact with them to negotiate sending doctors to help Betancourt, a French-Colombian citizen who is suffering from hepatitis B, and reiterated its demand that the government pull troops from two towns in western Colombia to swap about 40 high-profile captives, including Betancourt, for 500 jailed guerrillas. The French mission will leave Colombia, Efe cited the French foreign ministry as saying.

“If President Uribe had withdrawn troops from Pradera and Florida for 45 days at the beginning of the year, Ingrid Betancourt, military officials and jailed guerrillas would have been freed,” the FARC statement said.

The FARC statement is here (Bloomberg’s link is wrong).  And, obviously, freeing Betancourt and other hostages is something FARC also rejects.

Pardon me.  This is barbarian.  FARC has not given an adequate, humanitarian answer to concerns about Betancourt and its other hostages.  Its denial of access shows that it persists in using civilian hostages in its attempts to further its political goals.  That is disgraceful.  It is simply a human rights violation.

Betancourt, and the hundreds of other, less well known hostages should be released. They should not be permitted to continue to be pawns in FARC’s four decade long struggle with corrupt Colombian governments.  Yes, the Colombian governments are awful.  Yes, they are the US puppets in the region.  But, FARC’s refusal to permit the medical mission to reach Betancourt is unexcusable.  

And what, you might wonder, is anyone in the US or Europe or anywhere else going to do about this?  Answer: nothing.   To the contrary, the US is going to reward Colombia. The US is going to give Colombia a free trade agreement even though it kills unionists, even though its paramilitaries participate in the cocaine industry, even though it has ceded huge amounts of land to FARC, even though it receives billions of dollars in “insurgency” aid, even though its “drug war” has impoverished peasants, even though it is powerless to control its own territory.  And the EU?  Nothing.  And France?  Its mission is finished:

“Keeping the medical mission in place is no longer justifiable,” the French said in a statement released by the ministry, according to Efe.

This is simply disgraceful.

I got nuthin’ but Charley Patton tunes.  If you can’t quite make out the words, it’s not you, it’s Charley.

http://blueslyrics.tripod.com/…

There is only one known photo of CP, and some people have doubts that it is CP.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C…

http://www.elijahwald.com/patt…

Revenue Man

1. Today before Congress, Gen. David Petraeus, Ambassador Ryan Crocker, Sen. John McCain, and their supporters will sell more war. They undoubtedly will claim the “surge” has worked, which it hasn’t, and that the “relative calm” in Iraq, which there isn’t, is “fragile and reversable”, which is code for stay forever. The reality is the “surge” bought Bush’s ego about five months.

   The reality is this. The fighting in Iraq continues and people are still being killed. The Bush administration and their Congressional enablers keep borrowing and spending billions, trillions of dollars we Americans cannot afford on building an empire for the corporate ruling class.

   ^Continues…

The first story continues below the fold with a look at what is happening in Iraq as the warmongers go before Congress. Plus stories about mapping U.S. CO2 emissions, a dire warning out our CO2 emissions, and Calderón’s plan to privatize PEMEX, Mexico’s oil industry.

The American Civil Liberties Union filed a friend of the court brief today urging a federal court to uphold the denial of a patent that would, if awarded, violate freedom of speech. In the brief, the ACLU argues that Bernard L. Bilski is seeking a patent for an abstract idea, and that abstract ideas are not patentable under the First Amendment.

“The court must ensure that any test it uses in determining whether to award a patent is in line with the Constitution,” said Christopher Hansen, senior staff attorney with the ACLU First Amendment Working Group, who filed the brief. “If the government had the authority to grant exclusive rights to an idea, the fundamental purpose of the First Amendment – to protect an individual’s right to thought and expression – would be rendered meaningless.”

ACLU