NOT IN OUR NAME: PLEDGE OF RESISTANCE

We believe that as people living in the United States it is our responsibility to resist the injustices done by our government, in our names.

Not in our name will you wage endless war. There can be no more deaths no more transfusions of blood for oil.

Not in our name will you invade countries bomb civilians, kill more children letting history take its course over the graves of the nameless.

Not in our name will you erode the very freedoms you have claimed to fight for.

Not by our hands will we supply weapons and funding for the annihilation of families on foreign soil.

Not by our mouths will we let fear silence us.

Not by our hearts will we allow whole peoples or countries to be deemed evil.

Not by our will and Not in our name.

We pledge resistance.

We pledge alliance with those who have come under attack for voicing opposition to the war or for their religion or ethnicity.

We pledge to make common cause with the people of the world to bring about justice freedom and peace.

Another world is possible and we pledge to make it real.

— The Board of the Modesto Peace/Life Center

THE SHAME OF THE WAR AGAINST IRAQ

The Modesto Peace/Life Center has opposed the building war against Iraq for the last two years. Now, we express our outrage and sorrow at the launching of this war, for a number of reasons. Bush's war violates the UN Charter and other aspects of international law. The Bush doctrine of pre-emptive strikes, distorted as it is, is truly frightening, given its projected use by our government to wipe out any imagined enemies in order to forge an empire based on an ill-conceived idea of our national interest. Governments inimical to democracy and peace can easily mimic this pre-emptive strike doctrine. Escalation of war and insecurity is inevitable.

Our government's stated desires to go it alone, no matter what our allies and other nations around the world think, is further cause for fear and alarm. Neither our security nor global security is enhanced by this war or this attitude. International cooperation creates the groundwork for resolution of the global problems of inequitable division of resources, worldwide pollution, and racism. International isolation, especially if it is done from the position of a superpower, undermines hopes for the world's future.

No matter the outcome of this war, the casualties among civilians and soldiers could have been avoided. We grieve for those lost in this conflict; we grieve for the future of our country and the world.

All of us must do our utmost to stop this war and to oppose similar efforts by this government. Contacting our elected officials is important, but, as we know, it has not been enough. We must organize ourselves and our neighbors to join in other activities to show our determination that this government cannot again undertake such a war nor continue these horrible policies in our name.

- The Board of the Modesto Peace/Life Center

In Memoriam

On March 16, 2003, 23-year-old American peace activist Rachel Corrie was crushed to death as she tried to prevent the Israeli army destroying homes in the Gaza Strip. The bulldozer that killed Rachel Corrie was an American-made Caterpillar D-9.

Human Shields — a Perspective

More than 120 Human Shields have gathered from 34 countries to be a positive witness against the escalating war against Iraq. Their incentive came from the horror experienced by US veteran Ken O'Keefe in the 1991 Gulf War. They are a dedicated, creative lot of peacemakers.

Media and war advocates have denigrated the term "human shields" by focusing on times governments have forced persons to go to vulnerable sites, often military, as a barrier to an attack. Forgotten in this mindset is the mother who shields her child from an attacker or a friend who offers his life to save another. This present day experiment is an offspring of the action of the mother and friend.

This experiment in peacemaking was complicated as the volunteers accepted the room and board hospitality of the Iraqi government. The site selection committee of the Human Shields had been visiting sites (water treatment, electrical generation, food storage, oil refinery, and hospitals) to check out living facilities, neighborhood connections, communication capabilities, and compromising factors such as nearby military encampments. Problems escalated as the government tried to push the presence of Shields at certain sites.

The initial response was to pull back even those Human Shields who had gone out, to form a united response. Some chose to leave; others wanted to maintain the commitment to the Iraqi people and to work out some compromise to continue what was trusted to be a nonviolent barrier to US attacks on facilities that sustain the civilian infrastructure in Iraq. The dialogue continues in its stumbling fashion.

In mid-February two IPTers, one from CPT, joined a Human Shield witness at the Ameriyah Shelter as a silent, prayerful protest of that 1991 US bombing of a civilian bomb shelter in a family neighborhood of Baghdad that resulted in 407 deaths. A major US media presence treated that witness kindly.

Since last October, IPT/CPT has been visiting similar sites (along with families, churches and universities) to remind the US government that they promised not to target such sites. Banners reminded the military that to target such sites is a war crime.

IPT/CPT continues visiting these sites and is preparing to be a presence should the war escalate. IPT/CPT deaths would be a grim reminder that war usually targets the places the places where civilians are the ones that die.

Being here,

Cliff Kindy
Christian Peacemaker Teams

Christian Peacemaker Teams is an ecumenical initiative to support violence reduction efforts around the world. As Stanislaus Connections goes to press, IPT/CPT  and Cliff’s family have not heard from him since the war began.

Change our consciousness and change the world
By KEN KOHLER

Who is responsible for the war with Iraq?

Who is responsible for the AIDS epidemic?

Who is responsible for the world's problems?

We all are, individually and collectively. We must take the responsibility because our silence has allowed them to go unchecked.

We have failed to insist that our political leaders no longer use war as an option for resolving political disputes. We have failed to insist that our leaders work multilaterally rather than unilaterally to solve the world's problems. Left to their own devices these leaders continue to run amok as they always have. It really is not their fault as much as it is ours. They are mere reflections of our mass consciousness.

For the first time in history, massive anti-war protests are occurring on a worldwide basis. However, is it too little too late? The war needed to be stopped before crisis proportions were reached. We, however, tend to be reactive rather than proactive. It is a hopeful sign that so many people finally see war as wrong. Wars represent the worst in us, not the best. They are about power, religious and political bigotry. It is easy to go to war. It is far more difficult to keep peace.

The answer does not lie in isolationism, but multilateralism. We must learn to work through neutral world organizations like the U.N. We may, like other nations, have to sacrifice some sovereignty and power, but the reward of peace and a better world would be more than worth it. We must rethink always putting our interests first and see the larger picture — the world's interests above regional interests for the good of all.

All worldwide leaders, including those in the United States, who believe in war as an option need to be replaced by their populations. We need to have a real disarmament treaty that has meat in it, subject to verification by an international world body. All nations would be required to be signatories or lose all trading privileges and financial assistance with the other signatories. There is no logical rationale for the continual stockpiling of nuclear weapons which will only lead to our destruction. We must redirect our money to helping humanity not destroying it.

All of this is pretty idealistic, and some would say utopian, unless we empower ourselves by changing our own behavior. On a personal basis we need to honor our word even if it becomes inconvenient to do so. We must abandon the philosophy of me first. Too many of us live by the philosophy of the end justifies the means, which ultimately will be our downfall. We must learn to control our anger and, even if someone may deserve it, not give him or her the middle finger blessing. We must learn who our neighbors are and be there for them. We must abandon the pursuit of personal gain at the expense of others. We must insist that all have equal opportunity because one day we may be the ones excluded. By changing our demeanor with others on a one-on-one basis we change our behavior as a culture, and our political leaders must follow suit or risk not getting elected.

Easter is approaching, and regardless of our individual religious beliefs, Spring is a universal time of renewal — a time to renew our consciousness and to root out the weeds of anger and resentment and replace them with love and tolerance. Many of us are familiar with The Peace Song that is sung in churches on Sundays. Its opening words are, "Let there be peace on earth and let it begin with me." Let us begin a new peaceful tomorrow today for us and for the planet as a whole.

Water privatization 
By CAROLINE MITTON

The Stockton City Council is seriously considering handing over their wastewater, drinking water and storm water facilities to a European company to run. How can this be possible? Since the early 1900s, water service in our country has been considered a public government responsibility.

But, in 1992 a World Trade Organization (WTO) committee declared that water was an economic good, not just a social good. That means its storage, treatment and delivery systems can be privatized, bought and sold. Supposedly private companies will run such facilities more efficiently. However, their expenses include taxes that a public utility doesn't have, CEO salaries and a "reasonable" profit for the shareholders.

For the last several years, as a condition of WTO loans, three European companies have been buying and/or running municipal water departments in developing nations. Their users are expected to pay the full cost of supplying the water. This has been disastrous in several of the poorer countries in Africa and South America, since poor people can no longer afford to buy necessary water.

But now, the companies have set their sights on North America. Perrier (a Nestle subsidiary) has bought the rights to the water under a Michigan town and is bottling it and selling it. The residents, fearful of their aquifer being drained, have protested, but have been told the company will keep bottling as long as it's profitable. In Canada, a multinational company has begun making arrangements to ship water in bulk to places as far away as China.

In spite of the many problems that have developed from private companies owning and/or running municipal water systems, the concept of privatizing essential public services is being expanded to include "everything you can't drop on your foot". Since 2000, committees have been holding secret meetings to work out the details of such proposals for this fall's Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA) meetings.

Very recently the list of the services proposed to be privatized and deregulated has been leaked. It includes, among others; energy, water, postal, higher education, insurance and banking services. Many of these services are regulated at state or local levels, but the officials involved have been excluded from the negotiations.

Most public services are reasonably well-managed. Since they are accountable directly to the public, we have some recourse to correct deficiencies fairly quickly. If these same services are owned and operated by a foreign company, we lose control in the event of contract violations or bankruptcies. In addition, once the service has been privatized, it is extremely expensive and time-consuming to get it back into public control even if the company hasn't lived up to its contractual obligations.

ACTION: For more information, visit Public Citizen at www.citizen.org Some of their recommendations are: Congress must remove language that encourages privatization of water services and assets, and preclude its introduction in future legislation. And the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency must discontinue advocacy of water privatization and provide an objective assessment of its risks.

New Ashcroft bill erodes checks and balances on presidential power, Infringes on basic constitutional liberties

WASHINGTON — The American Civil Liberties Union  (ACLU) said that new Department of Justice "anti-terrorism" legislation goes further than the USA PATRIOT Act in eroding checks and balances on Presidential power and contains a number of measures that are of questionable effectiveness, but are sure to infringe on civil liberties.

"The new Ashcroft proposal threatens to fundamentally alter the Constitutional protections that allow us to be both safe and free," said Timothy H. Edgar, an ACLU Legislative Counsel. "If it becomes law, it will encourage police spying on political and religious activities, allow the government to wiretap without going to court and dramatically expand the death penalty under an overbroad definition of terrorism."

The Department of Justice has been drafting the new legislation — called the Domestic Security Enhancement Act of 2003 — in secret over the past several months. It contains a multitude of new and sweeping law enforcement and intelligence gathering powers and expands on many provisions in the controversial USA PATRIOT Act, passed in late October 2001.

The big picture implications of the bill, the ACLU said, include a severe diminishment of basic checks and balances on the power of the executive branch of government and a continuing love affair with untested and likely ineffective security measures, which will, in addition to not making America any safer, infringe on basic liberties — especially personal privacy and the freedoms of speech, association and religion.

Provisions in the Attorney General's bill would allow the government to strip citizenship from any American who provides support for a group designated by the federal government as a "terrorist organization" (section 501). Significantly, the USA PATRIOT Act broadened the definition of groups that could be so designated to potentially include domestic protest organizations such as Operation Rescue or People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals.

Also included are provisions permitting — without court order and at the sole discretion of the Attorney General — wiretapping of Americans for 15 days (sections 103, 104) without a declaration of war by Congress, if the Executive Branch decides unilaterally that an attack has created an emergency. While the Justice Department would have to check in with a judge after the 15 days, the information gleaned during that period could still be retained and used against innocent Americans, the ACLU said.

Other contentious proposals in the draft legislation include statutory authority for secret detentions and the termination of court-approved limits on police spying. Also, the draft bill would apply the death penalty to offenses that, because of the redefinition of domestic terrorism in USA PATRIOT, could sweep in protest tactics that "involve violent acts or acts dangerous to human life." Under the law, the ACLU said, if an anti-war protester broke the law during a demonstration and someone died as a result, the protester could be subject to the death penalty. (Section 411)

These provisions are only a sampling of the civil liberties concerns in the Ashcroft proposal, the ACLU said. Specifically, the bill, if signed into law, would also:

• Make it easier for the government to initiate surveillance and wiretapping of U.S. citizens under the shadowy, top-secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. (Sections 101, 102 and 107)

• Shelter federal agents engaged in illegal surveillance without a court order from criminal prosecution if they are following orders of high Executive Branch officials. (Section 106)

• Authorize, in statute, the Department of Justice's campaign of secret detentions by including a provision that would preempt federal litigation challenging non-disclosure of basic information about detainees. (Section 201)

• Threaten public health by severely restricting access to crucial information about environmental health risks posed by facilities that use dangerous chemicals. (Section 202)

• Harm Americans' ability to receive a fair trial by limiting defense attorneys from challenging the use of secret evidence. (Section 204)

• Reduce the ability of grand jury witnesses in terrorism investigations to defend themselves against public accusations by gagging them from discussing their testimony with the media or the general public. (Section 206)

• Allow for the sampling and cataloguing of innocent Americans' genetic information without court order and without consent. (Sections 301-306)

• Permit, without any connection to anti-terrorism efforts, sensitive personal information about U.S. citizens to be shared with local and state law enforcement. (Section 311)

• Undercut trust between police departments and immigrant communities by opening sensitive visa files to local police for the enforcement of complex immigration laws. (Section 311)

• Terminate court-approved limits on police spying, which were initially put in place to prevent McCarthy-style law enforcement persecution based on political or religious affiliation. (Section 312)

• Provide an incentive for neighbor to spy on neighbor and pose problems similar to those inherent in Attorney General Ashcroft's "Operation TIPS" by granting blanket immunity to businesses that phone in false terrorism tips, even if their actions are taken with reckless disregard for the truth. (Section 313)

• Further criminalize association — without any intent to commit acts of terrorism — with unpopular organizations labeled as terrorist by our government. (Section 402)

• Under the pretext of fighting terrorism, unfairly target undocumented workers with extended jail terms for common immigration offenses. (Section 502)

• Provide for summary deportations without evidence of crime or criminal intent, even of lawful permanent residents, whom the Attorney General says are a threat to national security. (Section 503)

• Abolish fair hearings for lawful permanent residents convicted of criminal offenses through an "expedited removal" procedure, and prevent any court from questioning the government's unlawful actions by explicitly exempting these cases from habeas corpus. Congress has not exempted any person from habeas corpus — a protection guaranteed by the Constitution — since the Civil War. (Section 504)

ACTION: For a detailed section-by-section analysis, go to: www.aclu.org/SafeandFree/SafeandFree.cfm?ID=11835&c=206

Modesto Area women activists receive humanitarian awards

Jennifer Ardans works to provide medical needs

Jennifer Ardans, R.N. has been selected as a "Woman of Distinction" in the area of International Goodwill and Understanding by the Soroptimist International of Modesto North in honor of her achievements and contributions as a volunteer with Modesto's Sister Cities Khmelnitskiy Committee.

She and husband, Oscar, were among the first to visit Khmelnitskiy, Modesto's first Sister City (MSS), as part of a delegation led by then Mayor Peggy Mensinger in 1987.

During that visit the couple met with now deceased Dr. Gregorii Bogach, administrator of the Children's City Hospital, whom they had hosted in Modesto earlier that same year, and were given a tour of hospitals, clinics, schools and children's day care centers in Khmelnitskiy (then still part of the Soviet Union).

Ms. Ardans took note of the health problems caused by the nuclear meltdown in Chernobyl, located about 100 miles from Khmelnitskiy. Upon returning to Modesto from this visit she began an ongoing crusade to help provide medical supplies and equipment for facilities in need of everything. Children's City Hospital had a budget of only $3 per patient per day at the time.

This past January she helped organize the shipment of a 20-foot ship container to the Children's City Hospital where Dr. Bogach's son, Yuri, is now a specialist in Pediatric Urology. The shipment, which included beds, IV poles, bed linens, examining tables, and other state of the art equipment, was facilitated through the help of Graham Pierce of the Doctors Medical Center Medical Relief Foundation. Sister Lois of St. Joseph's Hospital in Stockton and Ray Baglietto of Seeds to the World arranged for contact with an organization in British Columbia, which provided the funding and technical support needed to transport the shipment.

Though the 2003 shipment was the largest to date, Ms. Ardans, a registered nurse, who oversees Medi-Cal placements for Stanislaus County, also was instrumental in personally transporting medical supplies to Khmelnitskiy in 1992. Additionally, in 2000, she raised funds to provide material to make pajamas for the Khmelnitsky Veteran’s Hospital by workers in Ukraine under the direction of MSS Khmelnitskiy Committee Chairman Sergei Samborski. During another visit in 2002 she and Oscar were able to see the fruits of their labor and she received much appreciation from veterans.

ACTION: A strong believer that health comes before everything, Jennifer continues to work for the health needs of Khmelnitskiy. Others interested in joining her may contact Modesto Sister Cities International, 527-6047.

Gladys Williams recognized for career of human rights achievements

Gladys Williams, president of the Modesto/Stanislaus National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, has been awarded the Lois Tinson Human Rights Award by the California Teachers Association.

The statewide recognition honors her career-long work as a mediator throughout Stanislaus County between students, their families and the schools. In this capacity she observes, "We have started to look more closely at how we can improve education, not only for children of color, but for all our students."

The award also acknowledges the numerous projects she has taken on throughout her many years as a kindergarten and elementary grade teacher in her ongoing efforts to preserve African American culture, traditions and values in the Modesto area community.

As a member of the Modesto Teachers Association and the NAACP she has coordinated the "Not in Our Town" program to work against hate crimes. She has also led a local educational summit for parents and students who have experienced discrimination in the schools and in the workplace. Additionally, she has been instrumental in establishing a local network to recruit, support and retain minority teachers.

Currently she is a candidate for CTA minority representative from Stanislaus County, is a member of the MTA Human Rights Committee, travels statewide advocating for minority rights and has been reelected for another 2 year term as president of the local NAACP following almost 5 years at the organization's helm.

ACTION: Post "Not In Our Town" posters in businesses and at home. Join the local NAACP (open to all people), support tolerance in education and in the workplace.