Online Edition: May 2005     Vol. XVII, No. 9

CONTENTS

• MOTHER'S DAY PROCLAMATION by Julia Ward Howe

• The Heifer International Educational Center

• Stop fake news on local TV

• Global bully goes to Guatemala

• CALL TO ACTION: Social Security solution

• Equity California celebrates an anniversary

• Our place in the world: ‘Growing a Community’
  

• Norman Solomon - Media Beat  

Peace & Justice

Around the Center: 

• 2005 Peace Essay Contest Winners

• Peace Camp 2005

Articles

• Eyes widened

• The GI Rights Hotline

• Sonorans rally against the war

• Peace Not Poverty Declaration  

• Participants needed for a CPT delegation on the Migrant Trail Walk

• Local law enforcement violates the State Constitution, continues to infiltrate Fresno peace groups (Indymedia)

• Iraq: Bring the Troops Home Now! (Indymedia)

• E-1: The end of a viable Palestinian state (Electronic Intifada)
  

• $$Running total of the cost of war in Iraq$$

• News and information websites regarding war and the Middle East 

• Statement of Conscience Against War and Repression by the Board of the Peace/Life Center

• Link: California Peace Action

• Link: MoveOn--grassroots activism, electronically based

• Link: Not In Our Name--Statements of Conscience Against War And Repression

• Link:  True Majority

Living Lightly

• Rivers of Birds, Forests of Tules: Central Valley Nature & Culture in Season

• In the driver’s seat

• Masumoto headlines Heartland Festival 2005

• Water-wise gardening

• Family Cycling Festival, May 21 and Bike to Work Day, May 19

Recipes from Connections

A Gathering of Voices

Out and About

• Tribu concerts in May

• Classic Film Society series

• Modesto's monthly Poetry Slam: Slam on Rye

• Third Thursdays feature local art

COMMUNITY CALENDAR --CURRENT & COMING EVENTS

Masthead and Back Issues

Opinion and Letters to Connections

MOTHER'S DAY PROCLAMATION
By JULIA WARD HOWE (1870)

Arise, then, women of this day!
Arise all women who have hearts, whether your baptism be that of water or of fears!
Say firmly:
"We will not have great questions decided by irrelevant agencies,
Our husbands shall not come to us reeking with carnage, for caresses and applause.
Our sons shall not be taken from us to unlearn all that we have been able to teach them of charity, mercy, and patience.
We women of one country will be too tender of those of another country to allow our sons to be trained to injure theirs."

From the bosom of the devastated earth a voice goes up with
Our own. It says, "Disarm, Disarm!"
The sword of murder is not the balance of justice!
Blood does not wipe out dishonor
Nor violence indicate possession.
As men have often forsaken the plow and the anvil
At the summons of war,
Let women now leave all that may be left of home
For a great and earnest day of counsel.
Let them meet first, as women, to bewail and commemorate the dead.
Let them then solemnly take counsel with each other as the means
Whereby the great human family can live in peace…
And each bearing after her own time the sacred impress, not of Caesar,
But of God.
In the name of womanhood and humanity, I earnestly ask
That a general congress of women without limit of nationality,
May be appointed and held at someplace deemed most convenient
And the earliest period consistent with its objects,
To promote the alliance of the different nationalities,
The amicable settlement of international questions,
The great and general interests of peace.

The Heifer International Educational Center

By HANNAH S. PARRIS

The annual Heifer Project International Pancake Breakfast will be served at the Heifer International Educational Center, 3906 E. Don Pedro Road (off Faith Home Rd. in Ceres) on Saturday, May 14 from 7:30 a.m. to11 a.m. The Gottschalk New Horizon’s Band will play from 10-11a.m. Tickets can be purchased at the site.

The Center is surrounded by orchards and rural homes and includes an educational, demonstration farm which practices organic gardening to produce summer vegetables, cover crops, annual and perennial flowers, herbs and fruit trees. The Center’s mission is “to work with communities to end hunger and poverty and care for the earth.”

Ray Ledesma, the gardener who has tended and developed the farm for the past five years, was drawn to volunteer at the farm because he has been a recipient of Heifer International livestock.

Ray is resourceful, calm and purposeful as he shares his knowledge by demonstrating, instructing and guiding the volunteers in caring for the livestock, the producing gardens and building projects. He also maintains the operating equipment needed on the farm.

The volunteers that Ray coordinates are from many areas and of a variety of ages. Young interns have come from the U.S.A. and some foreign countries. Adult couple volunteers are welcomed for several week stays twice a year. Local volunteers help in a variety of capacities for varied periods of time.

The farm is open for tours year round with a variety of areas to experience. The walk down the pathway through Global Village reflects areas representing a Mexican garden, Cambodian crops, an urban slum and Appalachia, U.S.A. In another section are locations representing the African and Latin American continents. The specially designed children’s garden is a treat.

The Heifer International Educational Center is a peaceful adventure of discovery.

Stop fake news on local TV

BY TIMOTHY KARR, Campaign Director, Free Press and JOHN STAUBER Executive Director, Center for Media and Democracy

The New York Times has reported that at least 20 federal agencies have made and distributed pre-packaged, ready-to-serve television news segments to promote President Bush’s policies and initiatives.

Congress’ Government Accountability Office determined that these “video news releases” were illegal “covert propaganda” and told federal agencies to stop. But the White House ordered all agencies to disregard Congress’ directive.

The Bush administration is using hundreds of millions of your tax dollars to manipulate public opinion. Here’s how to stop them:

1. Sign our petition at www.freepress.net/action/petition.php?n=fakenews and join our call to Congress, the Federal Communications Commission and local television stations. Tell Congress and the FCC to toughen and enforce laws against “covert propaganda” and demand that broadcasters come clean with viewers about using government-produced news.

2. Join others in your community to create “citizen agreements” with your local TV stations to stop fake news broadcasts. These agreements are official documents filed at the FCC that — if broken — can be used to deny license renewals. Free Press will connect you with others in your area working to ensure local broadcasters identify the sources behind the “news.”

Global bully goes to Guatemala

By RUSSELL MOKHIBER and ROBERT WEISSMAN

There’s something profoundly disturbing — sickening, really — about watching a bully at work.

You feel either complicit, or powerless, or both.

The global bully, the United States, has just coerced Guatemala, its latest victim, into repealing an important law to lower the price of pharmaceuticals and promote generic competition. The U.S. ambassador to Guatemala acknowledged that the Guatemalan law was intended to advance public health objectives. But, no matter, he said — U.S. commercial interests in the form of Big Pharma demanded that the law go.

Here’s how this went down, what it will mean, and what can be done:

The United States has negotiated a trade deal with the Central American countries. It goes by the acronym of CAFTA (US-Central America Free Trade Agreement).

CAFTA is a complex agreement, but in shorthand you can consider it an extension of NAFTA to Central America.

CAFTA includes a chapter on patents, copyright and other forms of monopoly protections for knowledge. All of the CAFTA countries are already members of the World Trade Organization, which requires countries to adopt U.S.-style patent systems, featuring 20-year patent protection of all products, including pharmaceuticals.

Although it imposed on countries the requirement to adopt 20-year patents for drugs, the WTO also contains certain safeguards. Most important among them is the right to undertake compulsory licensing — enabling governments to authorize generic competition for on-patent products.

These safeguards are vital, especially in the developing world. Patent monopolies drive up prices, and are the main reason drug prices are so high. The best remedy to these high prices is generic competition. Evidence: The price of a triple-drug AIDS therapy in developing countries has fallen by 98 percent over the last six years, thanks to generic competition, as well as an international campaign for access to medicines.

But in CAFTA, the United States proposes to eviscerate countries’ right to speed up generic competition and undertake compulsory licensing for pharmaceuticals, most importantly by requiring CAFTA members to establish special monopoly protections for pharmaceutical regulatory data (known as “data exclusivity”).

To gain regulatory approval to sell generic versions of drugs already approved for market, generic companies generally do not repeat safety and efficacy studies, which are very time consuming and relatively costly. Instead, they typically show their product is chemically equivalent to, and works the same in the body as, the brand-name drug. Then they rely on the drug regulatory agency’s approval of the patented product to earn approval for the generic version of the product.

But the U.S.-imposed provision would prevent this, and establish a 5-10 year period during which generic firms could not rely on the brand-name companies’ tests. As a result, brand-name companies would get protected monopolies even if a product is not on patent, or even if a compulsory license was issued.

Under pressure from the United States, Guatemala has adopted exclusivity on two separate occasions in recent years.

But each time, after health advocates pointed out the dangers, the provisions have been eliminated.

Making Big Pharma very unhappy.

So John Hamilton, the U.S. ambassador to Guatemala, issued what amounted to an ultimatum: Guatemala had to change its law to provide data exclusivity, as is required by CAFTA, or the U.S. Congress wouldn’t approve the deal.

And so Guatemala did.

Despite intense street protests, including by people with HIV/AIDS, the Guatemalan Congress last week imposed a data exclusivity regime, and then approved CAFTA.

Get this: the United States demanded the change on data exclusivity even as it acknowledged that Guatemala had rid itself of such rules in order to advance public health objectives.

In an op-ed in the Guatemalan press demanding a change in the country’s data protection rules, Ambassador Hamilton wrote, “there is no doubt” that Guatemala had rescinded data exclusivity rules “out of its concern to protect public health.”

But no matter.

Protecting public health isn’t a good enough reason to offend Pfizer.

Unfortunately, this is not just an esoteric matter. It will have life-and-death consequences.

“In Guatemala today, 78,000 people are infected with HIV/AIDS,” says Berta Chete, who works with the Association Gente Positiva, an organization of people living with HIV/AIDS in Guatemala. “Nearly 13,500 of us are in urgent clinical need of ARV treatment. But only an estimated 3,600 people receive it. Most of them get it from the Social Security system and non-governmental organizations. The Ministry of Health only provides treatment to 350 patients.”

The government has the duty to provide treatment, she points out.

But, “we doubt that the Government has the capacity to respond to this situation, because, if there is not competition between generic medicines and brand-name drugs to reduce prices, the national budget will never be able to cover the needs of the country in terms of treating AIDS patients.”

The group Doctors Without Borders (known by the French acronym, MSF) offers an example of the harm to come from the U.S.-imposed data exclusivity rules, based on the period April 2003-November 2004, when Guatemala had data exclusivity rules in place.

During that time, according to MSF, 25 medicines received data exclusivity.

One of them was the AIDS drug atazanavir, a key part of second-line therapy for people with HIV/AIDS once they experience treatment failure on their first-line regimen. It is used widely in the United States, Europe and Brazil.

There is presently no generic competition for atazanavir, a relatively new drug, and today’s price is more than $10,000 per person, per year.

“If a more affordable generic version of atazanavir is developed, however,” MSF notes — and such a version would be expected if competition is permitted — “it will not be able to enter the Guatemalan market until 2009,” thanks to the data exclusivity rules.

“This means,” explains MSF, “that Bristol-Myers Squibb will have a monopoly during the entire period of exclusivity and, free from competition, will be able to charge whatever the market will bear — far more than what the average Guatemalan will be able to afford. It is therefore unlikely that the vast majority of Guatemalans who will need this medicine will be able to access it.”

These issues don’t only involve HIV/AIDS, but the severity of the AIDS epidemic, and the importance of recently developed medicines in providing treatment, highlights the issue.

There is one piece of good news in this disgusting bully-boy saga: CAFTA is not yet enacted.

The odds are reasonably good that CAFTA will be defeated in the U.S. Congress.

ACTION: And so this is unlike most occasions when you witness a bully at work. This time, at least if you live in the United States, you can undo the bully’s violence — by demanding your Member of Congress vote against the trade pact.

Russell Mokhiber is editor of the Corporate Crime Reporter, www.corporatecrimereporter.com. Robert Weissman is editor of the Multinational Monitor, www.multinationalmonitor.org, and co-director of Essential Action, a corporate accountability group.

© Russell Mokhiber and Robert Weissman

CALL TO ACTION: Social Security solution

(compiled by Myrtle Osner)

CALL YOUR SENATORS AND REPRESENTATIVE TODAY: 1-800-335-6946 (Capitol Switchboard)

Tell them: The solution shouldn’t be worse than the problem. NO private accounts with Social Security dollars!

With AARP, League of Women Voters, Church Women United, and many other organizations opposing the privatization of Social Security, you would think Congress might be listening. But, money speaks louder than words, apparently.

A massive call-in NOW is necessary. Social Security has been a binding obligation between generations since the days of the Roosevelt presidency. There is no reason to believe that Social Security can’t continue to keep the promises made to all retirees in this country for generations to come.

Private accounts that drain money out of Social Security clearly are a “solution” that is FAR WORSE than the problem. As Jim Hightower put it in The Hightower Lowdown, “Social Security actually works and is far more efficient than private pension annuities.”

“Government has no business worrying about things like people’s retirement: let the marketplace sort that out,” says the conservative Cato Institute. Hightower says the conservative goal is to cancel the basic social contract between ordinary workaday folks and return us to “the rapacious corporate power, the earlier, glorious age of the Robber Barons, when citizens didn’t have a bunch of sissy laws, meddlesome programs, and a safety net to empower and strengthen them.”

Behind this campaign is the right wing’s antigovernment dogma, which has trumped the obvious need to guarantee people a basic level of retirement security. Hightower points out that this first surfaced in the 1930’s (before Social Security even began) with Alf Landon, and has been repeated by Barry Goldwater, Ronald Reagan, and now George W. Bush. Do I see a pattern here?

Social Security is NOT going broke. It may need some adjustments, but privatization is a way to kill it, not cure it. Diverting Social Security to private accounts is a way to enrich Wall Street. Money would flow out of the fund (thus depleting the Social Security we have paid into the fund) and into the fees charged by investment firms. Plus, the vagaries of the market, notoriously fluctuating, are no guarantee that your money would be there when you needed it.

DEADLINE TO SUBMIT ARTICLES TO CONNECTIONS.

Tenth of each month. Submit peace, justice and environmentally friendly event notices to P.O. Box 134, Modesto, CA, 95353, or call 522-4967 or 575-4299, or email to Jim Costello. Free listings subject to space, availability and editing.