What the Pentagon Pundits Were Selling on the Side

By Diane Farsetta, Center for Media and Democracy. Posted May 5, 2008.The Pentagon pundit scandal was not only a corrupt marriage of propaganda and corporate lobbying -- it was completely illegal.

To view original click here.

The Pentagon launched its covert media analyst program in 2002, to sell the Iraq war. Later, it was used to sell an image of progress in Afghanistan, whitewash the U.S. detention center at Guantanamo Bay, and defend the Bush administration's warrantless wiretapping, as David Barstow reported in his New York Times expose.

But the pundits weren't just selling government talking points. As Robert Bevelacqua, William Cowan and Carlton Sherwood enjoyed high-level Pentagon access through the analyst program, their WVC3 Group sought "contracts worth tens of millions to supply body armor and counterintelligence services in Iraq," reported Barstow. Cowan admitted to "push[ing] hard" on a WVC3 contract, during a Pentagon-funded trip to Iraq.

Then there's Pentagon pundit Robert H. Scales Jr. The military firm he co-founded in 2003, Colgen, has an interesting range of clients, from the Central Intelligence Agency and U.S. Special Operations Command, to Pfizer and Syracuse University, to Fox News and National Public Radio.

Of the 27 Pentagon pundits named publicly to date, six are registered as federal lobbyists. That's in addition to the less formal -- and less transparent -- boardroom to war-room influence peddling described above. (There are "more than 75 retired officers" who took part in the Pentagon program overall, according to Barstow.)

The Pentagon pundits' lobbying disclosure forms help chart what can only be called a military-industrial-media complex. They also make clear that war is very good for at least some kinds of business.

Some disclosures we would have liked to see

Fox News analystTimur J. Eads works for the military contractor Blackbird Technologies. His job title there, "vice-president of government relations," is often used to describe someone who crafts lobbying strategies but may not take part in lobbying meetings. So, it's not surprising that Eads isn't listed on Blackbird's lobbying disclosure forms. (In 2007 and 2008, Blackbird lobbied Congress on "communications technologies" and the National Guard on "information systems.")

From 2001 to 2003, Eads was in the lobbying trenches for EMC Corporation, a multinational "information infrastructure" company. Eads helped lobby Congress and a long list of federal agencies -- including the Air Force, Army, Marine Corps, Navy and Coast Guard -- for "funding for data storage infrastructure." EMC's annual report (PDF) for 2003 lists the Air Force Materiel Command and Pentagon Renovation and Construction Program Office among its U.S. government clients.

Prior to EMC, Eads lobbied for the major defense contractor Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC). In 1999 and 2000, he was on SAIC's million-dollar-plus lobbying team, influencing federal spending on the armed services, foreign operations, national security and Veterans Administration, among many other appropriations bills.

Another Fox analyst and Pentagon pundit, John C. Garrett, has an even longer list of lobbying clients. He's worked for the Patton Boggs firm since at least 1999. Thanks to the Pentagon analyst program, Garrett offers clients the benefits of his "weekly access and briefings with the secretary of defense, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and other high level policy makers," as Barstow noted.

Garrett has helped Bushmaster Firearms lobby Congress, the Defense and Homeland Security Departments on the "procurement of small arms" and "foreign military sales of small arms." He's lobbied Congress and Homeland Security on "government smart card initiatives," for the Datacard Group; the Defense and Homeland Security Departments on "foreign military sales," for Empresa Brasileira de Aeronautica; on Homeland Security "open source intelligence and fusion center programs," for Factiva; the Defense Department on "federal battery purchases," for Interstate Batteries; and Congress and the Defense, Commerce, Homeland Security and Treasury Departments for "rules to prohibit or regulate foreign government subsidization of M&A [mergers and acquisitions] activity," for Terex Corporation, a multinational heavy equipment manufacturer.

And those are just some of Garrett's lobbying contracts in 2007.

The lobbying activity of Pentagon pundit and CBS analystJeffrey D. McCausland has been more focused on Iraq. He's the "director of national security affairs" at the Washington, D.C. law and lobby firm Buchanan Ingersoll & Rooney.

McCausland lobbied on "private security contracting issues in Iraq," for Securewest International in 2004. The UK-based security firm announced that it had landed a $2.5 million contract with the Coalition Provisional Authority in March 2004, to supply "guards for the military complex at Umm Qasr as well as bodyguards for Iraqi and other personnel," according to the Herald Express in South Devon. At the time, Securewest vice-president Paul Singer said, "Kuwait and Iraq have long been our target markets. … We had a chance to visit the region only to realise how massive the market is." But when the contract ended in late 2004, Securewest decided against seeking more Iraq work. Singer explained, "It was always a difficult place to work and … the kidnapping and execution of 12 Nepalese workers caused great concern." Many of Securewest's staff are from Nepal or India.

But McCausland was hardly at a loss for clients. In 2003, he lobbied Congress and the Defense and Commerce Departments for "contract procurement in Iraq," on behalf of Al-Najat. In 2004, he lobbied on "government procurement / Coalition Provisional Authority" issues for Cross VetPharm, and on "business development in the Middle East," for Educational Testing Service. In 2004 and 2005, McCausland lobbied the State and Commerce Departments on "healthcare development in the Middle East," on behalf of Gemini Consulting.

Fellow CBS commentator Joseph W. Ralston is the last publicly named Pentagon pundit with a significant stack of of lobbying disclosure forms. "Soon after signing with CBS, General Ralston was named vice chairman of the Cohen Group, a consulting firm headed by a former defense secretary, William Cohen, himself now a 'world affairs' analyst for CNN," reported Barstow.

Not surprisingly, Ralston's lobbying clients include major military contractors. In 2006, he lobbied the Defense Department on "issues related to export of tactical fighter aircraft and defense technology," for Lockheed Martin; and the State Department on "federal funding of demilitarization efforts abroad," for General Dynamics. In 2006 and 2007, Ralston helped Fischer Properties identify "military family housing opportunities," and Pratt & Whitney find "market opportunities for military aircraft engines."

Multiple media mistakes, on lobbying and propaganda

As The Nation pointed out shortly after the U.S. invaded Iraq, many of the retired officers hired to provide war commentary had significant conflicts of interest. At the time, Fox and NBC brushed off questions about their military analysts' financial and other interests as irrelevant to or separate from their on-air commentary.

Today, the broadcast and cable networks are steadfastly refusing to cover or otherwise address the Pentagon military analyst program, with very few exceptions. In this case, though, the pundits' undeclared financial interests are only part of a larger and much more serious problem. These officers participated in a covert government program designed to shape U.S. public opinion -- an illegal program, and one that relied on the willingness of major media to play along, without asking too many questions. And that's exactly what happened.

The media outlets that featured the Pentagon's pundits need to address both aspects of this debacle -- that they failed to identify or disclose conflicts of interest, and that they helped propagandize U.S. news audiences. NPR Ombudsman Alicia C. Shepard's recent column only mentioned the former. She pointed to NPR's new "detailed guidelines for vetting on-air guests and looking for potential conflicts of interests" as the solution. But those guidelines don't include questions about contacts with or materials provided by government officials, or trips funded by government agencies. Instead, Shepard concerned herself with the question of whether NPR analyst Robert Scales does or "does not spout the Pentagon's line."

Memo to Shepard: It's illegal for the U.S. government to propagandize its own citizens, regardless. And instead of debating shades of gray, shouldn't NPR be denouncing any propaganda attempt as antithetical to the ideal of a free press?

Increasingly, news audiences are realizing the many ways in which interested parties skew media coverage. Media outlets need to wake up to that reality and work to strengthen their safeguards in defense of the public interest. Their only alternative is to start composing their next weak and belated mea culpa, in a desperate attempt to protect their ever-dwindling credibility.

Ticker Tape Ain’t Spaghetti

By Amy Goodman

Truthdig.com

Food riots are erupting around the world. Protests have occurred in Egypt, Cameroon, the Philippines, Burkina Faso, Ivory Coast, Mauritania and Senegal. Sarata Guisse, a Senegalese demonstrator, told Reuters: “We are holding this demonstration because we are hungry. We need to eat, we need to work, we are hungry. That’s all. We are hungry.” United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon has convened a task force to confront the problem, which threatens, he said, “the specter of widespread hunger, malnutrition and social unrest on an unprecedented scale.” The World Food Program has called the food crisis the worst in 45 years, dubbing it a “silent tsunami” that will plunge 100 million more people into hunger.

Behind the hunger, behind the riots, are so-called free-trade agreements, and the brutal emergency-loan agreements imposed on poor countries by financial institutions like the International Monetary Fund. Food riots in Haiti have killed six, injured hundreds and led to the ousting of Prime Minister Jacques-Edouard Alexis. The Rev. Jesse Jackson just returned from Haiti and writes that “hunger is on the march here. Garbage is carefully sifted for whatever food might be left. Young babies wail in frustration, seeking milk from a mother too anemic to produce it.” Jackson is calling for debt relief so that Haiti can direct the $70 million per year it spends on interest to the World Bank and other loans into schools, infrastructure and agriculture.

The rise in food prices is generally attributed to a perfect storm caused by increased food demand from India and China, diminished food supplies caused by drought and other climate-change-related problems, increased fuel costs to grow and transport the food, and the increased demand for biofuels, which has diverted food supplies like corn into ethanol production.

This week, the United Nations’ special rapporteur on the right to food, Jean Ziegler, called for the suspension of biofuels production: “Burning food today so as to serve the mobility of the rich countries is a crime against humanity.” He’s asked the U.N. to impose a five-year ban on food-based biofuels production. The Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research, a group of 8,000 scientists globally, is also speaking out against biofuels. The scientists are pushing for a plant called switchgrass to be used as the source for biofuels, reserving corn and other food plants to be used solely as food.

In a news conference this week, President Bush defended food-based ethanol production: “The truth of the matter is it’s in our national interests that our farmers grow energy, as opposed to us purchasing energy from parts of the world that are unstable or may not like us.” One part of the world that does like Bush and his policies are the multinational food corporations. International nonprofit group GRAIN has just published a report called “Making a killing from hunger.” In it, GRAIN points out that major multinational corporations are realizing vast, increasing profits amid the rising misery of world hunger. Profits are up for agribusiness giants Cargill (86 percent) and Bunge (77 percent), and Archer Daniels Midland (which dubs itself “the supermarket to the world") enjoyed a 67 percent increase in profits.

GRAIN writes: “Is this a price blip? No. A food shortage? Not that either. We are in a structural meltdown, the direct result of three decades of neoliberal globalization. ... We have allowed food to be transformed from something that nourishes people and provides them with secure livelihoods into a commodity for speculation and bargaining.” The report states: “The amount of speculative money in commodities futures ... was less than $5 billion in 2000. Last year, it ballooned to roughly $175 billion.”

There was a global food crisis in 1946. Then, as now, the U.N. convened a working group to deal with it. At its meeting, the head of the U.N. Relief and Rehabilitation Administration, former New York City Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia, said, “Ticker tape ain’t spaghetti.” In other words, the stock market doesn’t feed the hungry. His words remain true today. We in the U.S. aren’t immune to the crisis. Wal-Mart, Sam’s Club and Costco have placed limits on bulk rice purchases. Record numbers of people are on food stamps, and food pantries are seeing an increase in needy people.

Current technology exists to feed the planet in an organic, locally based, sustainable manner. The large corporate food and energy interests, and the U.S. government, need to recognize this and change direction, or the food riots in distant lands will soon be coming to their doors.

Dennis Moynihan contributed research for this column.

Amy Goodman is the host of “Democracy Now!,” a daily international TV/radio news hour airing on 650 stations in North America.

Church, State and Campaign ‘08

By Bill Boyarsky

Truthdig.com
Posted on May 1, 2008

When Adolf Hitler came to power, he said, “I am not going to do anything in my lifetime that hasn’t been done by the Roman Church for the past 800 years. I am only going to do it on a greater scale and more efficiently.”

This comes from the Rev. John Hagee, a hugely popular televangelist who is an important supporter of Sen. John McCain, the prospective Republican presidential nominee. Hagee’s congregation in Texas has 19,000 members, and he appears on more than 150 television stations, 50 radio stations and eight religious networks. Although Hagee is not McCain’s personal minister, Hagee gives McCain an entrée to the Christian right, a group that has considered McCain too liberal.

Could anything be more bigoted and inflammatory than Hagee saying the Roman Catholic Church inspired Hitler when he crafted the Holocaust? Certainly it ranks with or exceeds the ranting of the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, Sen. Barack Obama’s former minister. McCain’s religious nut is every bit as destructive as Obama’s.

Considering the importance of Hagee to McCain, I would think such an outburst of anti-Catholicism would have created a frenzy of stories and comments by political journalists and their cousins, the cable news network analysts. Yet Hagee’s words have disappeared into the limbo of news not hot enough for prime time.

Similarly, there was minimum attention paid to Hagee’s declaration that Hurricane Katrina was God’s punishment to New Orleans for permitting a gay pride parade. “I believe the judgment of God is a very real thing,” said Hagee. “I believe that Hurricane Katrina was in fact the judgment of God against the city of New Orleans.”

On another occasion, he said, “Those who believe in the Koran have a scriptural mandate to kill Christians and Jews.”

And where’s the outrage over his belief that Jews who do not convert to Christianity will be banned from Hagee’s heaven-bound express during the Rapture and forced to remain behind and boil on Earth? By the way, the segment of right-wing Jews who welcome Hagee’s support for Israel and his advocacy of a pre-emptive United States-Israeli strike against Iran should study this particular belief carefully. They should be aware that the Jews are doomed on Rapture day unless they convert.

Compared to the torture inflicted on Obama over his association with Wright, McCain has mostly escaped bad publicity from his Hagee connection.

The subject came up when McCain appeared with George Stephanopoulos on ABC’s “This Week.” Stephanopoulos asked if it was “a mistake to solicit and accept his [Hagee’s] endorsement?”

McCain replied, “Oh, probably, sure.” But the candidate said he’s still “glad to have his endorsement.”

The senator criticized the pastor’s “condemning of the Catholic Church,” but added that “I admire and respect Dr. Hagee’s leadership. ... I admire and appreciate his advocacy for the state of Israel, the independence of the state of Israel.”

The Arizona senator was interviewed by Stephanopoulos on Sunday, April 29, the day before Wright’s disastrous appearance at the National Press Club in Washington. Actually, Wright was thoughtful and positive when he gave his speech, just as he was when interviewed the Friday night before by Bill Moyers.

He said, “The prophetic theology of the black church has always seen and still sees all of God’s children as sisters and brothers, equals who need reconciliation. ... We root out any teaching of superiority, inferiority, hatred or prejudice.”

As happens to many a person in love with his own voice, Wright got into trouble during the question-and-answer session. There he praised the anti-Semitic Louis Farrakhan. He also said Obama was playing politics when he distanced himself from Wright. And when asked about a sermon in which he “said the government lied about inventing the HIV virus as a means of genocide against people of color,” Wright replied, “based on what has happened to Africans in this country, I believe our government is capable of doing anything.”

All this is crazy, but not any worse than Hagee saying the Roman Catholic Church inspired the Holocaust or that God punished New Orleans with Hurricane Katrina.

Why has McCain gotten off so easily while Obama is being battered unmercifully?

One reason is that the Obama-Wright story is about race. The fact that Obama is the first African-American with a real chance of becoming president has made race a central part of the election story. This is especially true now, when the superdelegates and the media are carefully counting white votes, which Obama will need for victory. Wright’s words, especially when reduced to short pieces of video and sound bites, won’t help Obama.

Another reason is that the media love McCain, his war record and the access to him on the campaign, the “straight talk” reputation. These subjects have captured more attention than his support of the Iraq war, his ineffective health care proposals and his muddled economic policies.

News coverage aside, the most important lesson to be learned from the wild-card ministries of Hagee and Wright is that religion should have no place in the campaign.

The men who founded the country understood this. They wrote a Constitution that separated church and state. They were not especially religious. Thomas Jefferson was a deist who doubted the divinity of Christ. As biographer Ron Chernow wrote of Alexander Hamilton, “Like other founders and thinkers of the Enlightenment, he was disturbed by religious fanaticism and tended to associate organized religion with superstition.”

We are letting religious fanaticism dominate the presidential campaign. The candidates have brought it on themselves with tedious references to their churchgoing piety. Now we’re all paying for it. Who cares what their preachers say? The voters want to hear about how the presidential candidates would restart the sick economy and get us out of Iraq.

Global food crisis: biofuels threaten hunger

Stuart Munckton & Barry Healy

19 April 2008
GreenLeft
To view original click here.

A food crisis, caused largely by skyrocketing prices, has hit dozens of countries across the Third World, while an April 14 report by the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) argues that increasing production of “agrofuels” (the large-scale production of biofuels, using food crops to create fuels such as ethanol) further threatens the world’s poor with hunger.

An Asia-wide shortage of rice — the region’s staple food — has emerged in recent months. The Oryza rice industry website reports a World Bank estimate that around 33 countries face potential social unrest because of rising food and energy prices.

Two of the top three exporters, India and Vietnam, have stopped selling abroad in order to secure their domestic food supply. The world’s largest producer, China, needs its 123 million tonnes for its own population. Now, worrying strains are appearing in Thailand, the remaining major exporter.

Record prices

Prices on the global rice market have exploded. Thai rice was selling at US$780-$800 a ton on April 4, up from $100 not long ago. But Oryza stated that most exporters in Thailand were no longer offering supplies because they may fail to meet their commitments.

ABC Radio National reported on April 7 that the price
of the low quality subsidised rice sold to the poor in Bangladesh has risen dramatically over recent months. Low income Bangladeshi workers are spending most of their pay on rice and eating only twice a day.

On the same day, the German JungeWelt newspaper reported that
conflicting pressures are neutralising the benefits rising prices deliver to Thai farmers. For example, fertilizer prices have shot up 400%.

Also, accumulated debts from previous poor harvests eat into returns and new sowing requires loans at high interest rates.

Thai farmers now have to guard their fields against thieves. Thai news media are reporting many farmers in tears, showing their fields stripped bare in the night.

Some Thai farmers are pushing their production past sustainable limits. Instead of leaving their soil to recover after the harvest they are immediately sowing a fresh crop.

The Bangkok government has responded to the record high prices by supplying five kilogram packets of rice about 30% cheaper for the poor. However, rice mill owners are rumoured to be hoarding stocks to take advantage of future high prices.

There are all the signs of a major cost explosion in the near future, threatening massive suffering across all of Asia.

African finance ministers, meeting in Addis Ababa on April 2, have responded to the global food crisis by demanding food production for their own countries’ consumption rather than for export.

The call, which goes against orthodox neoliberal policies pushed by Western governments and financial institutions, follows recent continent-wide food revolts and dire warnings of starvation made the FAO and echoed by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank in an April 12-13 meeting.

The FAO has identified 21 of Africa’s 36 countries as suffering from a food crisis, with food riots spreading. In February, 40 people were killed in Cameroon, with 200 were arrested in Burkina Faso and 24 in Senegal. Riots have also occurred in Ethiopia and the Ivory Coast.

There have been revolts in Morocco and especially in Egypt on April 6. One of the leaflets distributed in Egypt stated: “We are dying while queuing up for bread.”

Political response

JungeWelt reported on April 16 that almost everywhere the revolts are taking on a political dimension of opposition to shameless enrichment of the rulers and corruption. In Burkina Faso, the government offered concessions after the February riots, but was answered by a general strike on April 8 and 9.

Sagado Nacanabo, a Baurkina Faso union leader, said that in 1991, 1994 and 2001 waves of exorbitant price increases had
coincided with cycles of IMF and World Bank enforced “structural adjustment programs”.

Faced with the rising discontent, IMF chief Dominique Strauss-Kahn warned at the April 12-13 meeting that the rise in food prices is driving 100 million poor people worldwide into even deeper poverty.

The colonial and neocolonial heritage and massive imports of cheap food from the industrialised countries have strangled agriculture across Africa.

FAO Secretary General Jacques Diouf told Le Monde on April 10 that the problem was not a natural, but a political one. In Africa only 4% of agricultural land is irrigated, not due to water shortages but because of a lack of investment.

Such investments have been prevented for 30 years by World Bank and IMF policies that benefit big agro-business. The mass of small farmers have been reduced to be farm workers on starvation wages or moved into the sprawling urban slums.

Agrofuels

In particular, the FAO highlighted, at an April 14 conference on Latin America and the Caribbean held in Brazil, the role of agrofuels in making the food crisis worse, arguing that it was threatening access to food for the poor.

Biofuels are being promoted by the US government as a potential alternative to using oil. However, while biofuel supporters argue using biofuels is an environmentally friendly alternative, as the burning of biofuels is “carbon neutral”, it ignores the highly environmentally destructive process required to produce biofuels on a mass scale.

One problem is deforestation — clearing forests to gain the land required to grow the crops releases large amounts of greenhouse gases. Also, the displacement of crops threatens biodiversity. There are a range of environmental problems associated with large, single-crop plantations.

A more immediate problem in light of the growing global food crisis is the human cost associated with growing food, not to ensure that the world’s population is fed but to turn into fuel. It amounts to taking food crops, largely grown in the Third World, and using it to fuel unsustainable energy useage, mostly in the First World — taking food from the poor to fuel the economies of the rich countries.

According to an April 14 Reuters report, the FAO argued that growing agrofuel output would “compete with food crops for water, land and capital and thereby increase food prices”. The FAO report stated this would “put at risk access to food by the poorest sectors”.

Opposition

The use of food crops to create fuel has been strongly condemned in Latin America by the left-wing governments of Cuba, Venezuela, Bolivia and Nicaragua.

According to Reuters, Cuba’s representative to the conference, Juan Arsenio Quintero, argued that it is unacceptable for poor countries, which account for only 15% of the world’s cars, to produce fuels for the rich to use. He argued that, with energy efficiency measures, “We could all save hundreds of millions of dollars and not use a single hectare” of land for agrofuels.

Venezuela’s vice minister for rural development, Gerado Rojas, told the conference: “Without food safety, we can’t even think about biofuels … it could create enormous food deficits and social unrest.”

The April 15 Sydney Morning Herald reported that the FAO stated that 37 countries currently face food crises. The article reports: “Some experts … have identified the growth of biofuels as one of the main causes of higher food prices.

“The UN says 232 kilograms of corn is needed to fill a 50-litre car tank with ethanol — enough to feed a child for a year. Last week the UN predicted massacres unless the biofuel policy was halted.”

The article noted: “Several big agricultural nations, such as the US, have used subsidised crops such as soya bean, sugar cane and corn for ethanol production, reducing the amount of crops available for food.”

One country badly hit has been Haiti, with SMH reporting: “A week of hunger-provoked protests and looting has left six people dead, and aid workers say volatile protests are likely to continue because of sustained high food prices.

“Haiti imports almost all its food, and global food prices have risen 40 per cent since the middle of last year.”

According to an April 13 report by Xinhua, the Venezuelan government of socialist President Hugo Chavez has responded to the crisis by sending a fleet of planes carrying 364 tons of food for humanitarian aid to Haiti, in order to help relieve Haiti’s food crisis.

Venezuelan aid includes “tons of meat, chicken, ham, milk, vegetables, olive oil and lentils”, Xinhua reported.

Chavez has made a number of statements on the impact of increasing food prices on the world’s poor and his government, along with Cuba, is spearheading the campaign against agrofuels.

According to a March 27 Venezuelanalysis.com report, Chavez addressed an international press conference on the topic, expressing opposition to the diversion of food supplies for agrofuels.

Chavez identified the move to use agrofuels as an alternative energy source to fossil fuels as a prime cause of price inflation that will eventually lead to a “famine that produces desperation for millions of people”, Venezuelanalysis.com reported.

The FAO “is soliciting $500 million to alleviate the food crisis”, Chavez stated, “while the United States spends $500 million per day in Iraq”.

Solutions

A key aspect of the Bolivarian revolution being led by the Chavez government is the struggle to achieve food security via a massive development of Venezuelan agriculture. Currently, Venezuela imports the majority of its food, but is working to turn this situation around via significant investment in agriculture along with a land reform process that redistributes idle land owned either by the state or large landowners to the poor.

Venezuelanalysis.com reported on April 13 that three days earlier the army had occupied 32 farms that had been expropriated “as part of the government efforts to boost national food production amidst global shortages”. National Land Reform Institute President Juan Carlos Loyo, who reported that only 20% of the land that has been taken over was being used productively, called the intervention a “rescue” of idle farmland aimed at the “agricultural reactivation”.

The government provides credit and materials to the poor to establish cooperatives on redistributed land, as part of the joint struggle to overcome underdevelopment and poverty (with poverty rates halved since 2003).

According to Venezuelanalis.com, Venezuela has recently purchased 1,995 agricultural machines, which will soon be distributed to help make idle lands productive.

An agricultural ministry report from October states that 2 million hectares of idle land have been “rescued” from large estates, while by 2005, 2 million hectares of idle state land had been redistributed, according to Venezuelanalysis.com.

Of the private land taken over, 45% has been designated national forest reserves. Of the rest, 90% has become productive. The government estimates that there is 4 million hectares left to expropriate from the large estates, a quarter of which the ministry aims to expropriate in 2008.

Through this process, the government seeks to promote the organisation of the poor majority into institutions of “popular power”, such as the communal councils, in order to place as much control over the process as possible in the hands of the people — in doing so overturning the political power wielded by the powerful corporate interests in control of most countries.

It is increasingly clear that the sort of transformation currently being pushed for in Venezuela is a requirement to tackle the environmental and social consequences of climate change.

Rather than sink further into neocolonial domination via being transformed into producers of food crops for fuel for the First World, the Third World needs to re-win its sovereignty and embark on the sort of ambitious programs under way in Venezuela in order to develop the ability for poor nations to feed themselves.

The push for agrofuels is driven by the same vested interests that have pushed fossil fuel addiction — and now seek to increasingly replace fossil fuels with biofuels without altering the highly unjust and unsustainable global system that got us into this mess in the first place.

Bush Administration manipulates information via "military experts"

From Crooks and Liars...

Through newly obtained internal documents, The New York Times has uncovered an elaborate PR campaign run by the Pentagon that coached former military officials — or as they’re known on television, Serious Independent Military Experts — on how best to shill for Donald Rumsfeld during the fallout from the “General’s Revolt,” when numerous high-ranking retired Generals broke long standing tradition and began speaking out harshly against the former Secretary and his prosecution of the War in Iraq.

The New York Times full article is lengthy at 11 pages, but it’s a stellar exposé of how politicized, coordinated and deceitful the media campaign is under Bush. With the assistance of Peter Pace, Rumsfeld would literally convene meetings with former military brass — who, according to the article, consisted of “more than 150 military contractors either as lobbyists, senior executives, board members or consultants” — and conspire on how best to manage the press. Worse still, these compromised soldiers would then manipulatively go on television as Serious Independent Experts to parrot administration talking points and secure lucrative defense contracts. The Military-Industrial Complex is not alive and well, but thriving under the auspices of the Bush administration.

Kenneth Allard, a former NBC military analyst who has taught information warfare at the National Defense University, said the campaign amounted to a sophisticated information operation. “This was a coherent, active policy,” he said. […] It was, he said, “psyops on steroids”

And it wasn’t limited to the mainstream media alone. Bloggers were also hired and paid to shape opinions at home. But don’t be surprised Sunday when this story is neglected in favor of endless discussions about bowling scores and various other “distractions.”

The New Economics of Hunger

By Anthony Faiola
The Washington Post
Sunday 27 April 2008
To view original click here.

A brutal convergence of events has hit an unprepared global market, and grain prices are sky high. The world's poor suffer most.
The globe's worst food crisis in a generation emerged as a blip on the big boards and computer screens of America's great grain exchanges. At first, it seemed like little more than a bout of bad weather.
In Chicago, Minneapolis and Kansas City, traders watched from the pits early last summer as wheat prices spiked amid mediocre harvests in the United States and Europe and signs of prolonged drought in Australia. But within a few weeks, the traders discerned an ominous snowball effect - one that would eventually bring down a prime minister in Haiti, make more children in Mauritania go to bed hungry, even cause American executives at Sam's Club to restrict sales of large bags of rice.
As prices rose, major grain producers including Argentina and Ukraine, battling inflation caused in part by soaring oil bills, were moving to bar exports on a range of crops to control costs at home. It meant less supply on world markets even as global demand entered a fundamentally new phase. Already, corn prices had been climbing for months on the back of booming government-subsidized ethanol programs. Soybeans were facing pressure from surging demand in China. But as supplies in the pipelines of global trade shrank, prices for corn, soybeans, wheat, oats, rice and other grains began shooting through the roof.
At the same time, food was becoming the new gold. Investors fleeing Wall Street's mortgage-related strife plowed hundreds of millions of dollars into grain futures, driving prices up even more. By Christmas, a global panic was building. With fewer places to turn, and tempted by the weaker dollar, nations staged a run on the American wheat harvest.
Foreign buyers, who typically seek to purchase one or two months' supply of wheat at a time, suddenly began to stockpile. They put in orders on U.S. grain exchanges two to three times larger than normal as food riots began to erupt worldwide. This led major domestic U.S. mills to jump into the fray with their own massive orders, fearing that there would soon be no wheat left at any price.
"Japan, the Philippines, [South] Korea, Taiwan - they all came in with huge orders, and no matter how high prices go, they keep on buying," said Jeff Voge, chairman of the Kansas City Board of Trade and also an independent trader. Grains have surged so high, he said, that some traders are walking off the floor for weeks at a time, unable to handle the stress.
"We have never seen anything like this before," Voge said. "Prices are going up more in one day than they have during entire years in the past. But no matter the price, there always seems to be a buyer... . This isn't just any commodity. It is food, and people need to eat."
Beyond Hunger
The food price shock now roiling world markets is destabilizing governments, igniting street riots and threatening to send a new wave of hunger rippling through the world's poorest nations. It is outpacing even the Soviet grain emergency of 1972-75, when world food prices rose 78 percent. By comparison, from the beginning of 2005 to early 2008, prices leapt 80 percent, according to the United Nations' Food and Agriculture Organization. Much of the increase is being absorbed by middle men - distributors, processors, even governments - but consumers worldwide are still feeling the pinch.
The convergence of events has thrown world food supply and demand out of whack and snowballed into civil turmoil. After hungry mobs and violent riots beset Port-au-Prince, Haitian Prime Minister Jacques-Édouard Alexis was forced to step down this month. At least 14 countries have been racked by food-related violence. In Malaysia, Prime Minister Abdullah Ahmad Badawi is struggling for political survival after a March rebuke from voters furious over food prices. In Bangladesh, more than 20,000 factory workers protesting food prices rampaged through the streets two weeks ago, injuring at least 50 people.
To quell unrest, countries including Indonesia are digging deep to boost food subsidies. The U.N. World Food Program has warned of an alarming surge in hunger in areas as far-flung as North Korea and West Africa. The crisis, it fears, will plunge more than 100 million of the world's poorest people deeper into poverty, forced to spend more and more of their income on skyrocketing food bills.
"This crisis could result in a cascade of others ... and become a multidimensional problem affecting economic growth, social progress and even political security around the world," U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon said.
The New Normal
Prices for some crops - such as wheat - have already begun to descend off their highs. As farmers rush to plant more wheat now that profit prospects have climbed, analysts predict that prices may come down as much as 30 percent in the coming months. But that would still leave a year-over-year price hike of 45 percent. Few believe prices will go back to where they were in early 2006, suggesting that the world must cope with a new reality of more expensive food.
People worldwide are coping in different ways. For the 1 billion living on less than a dollar a day, it is a matter of survival. In a mud hut on the Sahara's edge, Manthita Sou, a 43-year-old widow in the Mauritanian desert village of Maghleg, is confronting wheat prices that are up 67 percent on local markets in the past year. Her solution: stop eating bread. Instead, she has downgraded to cheaper foods, such as sorghum, a dark grain widely consumed by the world's poorest people. But sorghum has jumped 20 percent in the past 12 months. Living on the 50 cents a day she earns weaving textiles to support a family of three, her answer has been to cut out breakfast, drink tea for lunch and ration a small serving of soupy sorghum meal for family dinners. "I don't know how long we can survive like this," she said.
Countries that have driven food demand in recent years are now grappling with the cost of their own success - rising prices. Although China has tried to calm its people by announcing reserve grain holdings of 30 to 40 percent of annual production, a number that had been a state secret, anxiety is still running high. In the southern province of Guangdong, there are reports of grain hoarding; and in Hong Kong, consumers have stripped store shelves of bags of rice.
Liu Yinhua, a retired factory worker who lives in the port city of Ningbo on China's east coast, said her family of three still eats the same things, including pork ribs, fish and vegetables. But they are eating less of it.
"Almost everything is more expensive now, even normal green vegetables," said Liu, 53. "The level of our quality of life is definitely reduced."
In India, the government recently scrapped all import duties on cooking oils and banned exports of non-basmati rice. As in many parts of the developing world, the impact in India is being felt the most among the urban poor who have fled rural life to live in teeming slums. At a dusty and nearly empty market in one New Delhi neighborhood this week, shopkeeper Manjeet Singh, 52, said people at the market have started hoarding because of fear that rice and oil will run out.
"If one doesn't have enough to fill one's own stomach, then what's the use of an economic boom in exports?" he said, looking sluggish in the scorching afternoon sun. He said his customers were asking for cheaper goods, like groundnut oil instead of soybean oil.
Even wealthy nations are being forced to adjust to a new normal. In Japan, a country with a distinct cultural aversion to cheaper, genetically modified grains, manufacturers are risking public backlash by importing them for use in processed foods for the first time. Inflation in the 15-country zone that uses the euro - which includes France, Germany, Spain and Italy - hit 3.6 percent in March, the highest rate since the currency was adopted almost a decade ago and well above the European Central Bank's target of 2.0 percent. Food and oil prices were mostly to blame.
In the United States, experts say consumers are scaling down on quality and scaling up on quantity if it means a better unit price. In the meat aisles of major grocery stores, said Phil Lempert, a supermarket analyst, steaks are giving way to chopped beef and people used to buying fresh blueberries are moving to frozen. Some are even trying to grow their own vegetables.
"A bigger pinch than ever before," said Pat Carroll, a retiree in Congress Heights. "I don't ever remember paying $3 for a loaf of bread."
Ill-Equipped Markets
The root cause of price surges varies from crop to crop. But the crisis is being driven in part by an unprecedented linkage of the food chain.
A big reason for higher wheat prices, for instance, is the multiyear drought in Australia, something that scientists say may become persistent because of global warming. But wheat prices are also rising because U.S. farmers have been planting less of it, or moving wheat to less fertile ground. That is partly because they are planting more corn to capitalize on the biofuel frenzy.
This year, at least a fifth and perhaps a quarter of the U.S. corn crop will be fed to ethanol plants. As food and fuel fuse, it has presented a boon to American farmers after years of stable prices. But it has also helped spark the broader food-price shock.
"If you didn't have ethanol, you would not have the prices we have today," said Bruce Babcock, a professor of economics and the director of the Center for Agricultural and Rural Development at Iowa State University. "It doesn't mean it's the sole driver. Prices would be higher than we saw earlier in this decade because world grain supplies are tighter now than earlier in the decade. But we've introduced a new demand into the market."
In fact, many economists now say food prices should have climbed much higher much earlier.
After the fall of the Berlin Wall, the world seemed to shrink with rapidly opening markets, surging trade and improved communication and transportation technology. Given new market efficiencies and the wide availability of relatively cheap food, the once-common practice of hoarding grains to protect against the kind of shortfall the world is seeing now seemed more and more archaic. Global grain reserves plunged.
Yet there was one big problem. The global food trade never became the kind of well-honed machine that has made the price of manufactured goods such as personal computers and flat-screen TVs increasingly similar worldwide. With food, significant subsidies and other barriers meant to protect farmers - particularly in Europe, the United States and Japan - have distorted the real price of food globally, economists say, preventing the market from normal price adjustments as global demand has climbed.
If market forces had played a larger role in food trade, some now argue, the world would have had more time to adjust to more gradually rising prices.
"The international food trade didn't undergo the same kind of liberalization as other trade," said Richard Feltes, senior vice president of MF Global, a futures brokerage. "We can see now that the world has largely failed in its attempt to create an integrated food market."
In recent years, there has been a great push to liberalize food markets worldwide - part of what is known as the "Doha round" of world trade talks - but resistance has come from both the developed and developing worlds. Perhaps more than any other sector, nations have a visceral desire to protect their farmers, and thusly, their food supply. The current food crisis is causing advocates on both sides to dig in.
Consider, for instance, the French.
The European Union doles out about $41 billion a year in agriculture subsidies, with France getting the biggest share, about $8.2 billion. The 27-nation bloc also has set a target for biofuels to supply 10 percent of transportation fuel needs by 2020 to combat global warming.
The French, whose farmers over the years have become addicted to generous government handouts, argue that agriculture subsidies must be continued and even increased in order to encourage more food production, especially with looming shortages.
Last week, French Agriculture Minister Michel Barnier warned E.U. officials against "too much trust in the free market."
"We must not leave the vital issue of feeding people," he said, "to the mercy of market laws and international speculation."

Staff writers Dan Morgan, Steven Mufson and Jane Black in Washington and correspondents Ariana Eunjung Cha in Beijing, Emily Wax in New Delhi and John Ward Anderson in Paris contributed to this report.

Senator: VA Lying about Number of Veteran Suicides

By Les Blumenthal
McClatchy Newspapers
Wednesday 23 April 2008
To view original click here.
Washington - The Veterans Administration has lied about the number of veterans who've attempted suicide, a senator charged Wednesday, citing internal e-mails that put the number at 12,000 a year when the department was publicly saying it was fewer than 800.
"The suicide rate is a red-alarm bell to all of us," said Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash. Murray also said that the VA's mental health programs are being overwhelmed by Iraq and Afghanistan war veterans, even as the department tries to downplay the situation.
"We are not your enemy, we are your support team, and unless we get accurate information we can't be there to do our jobs," Murray told Deputy Secretary of Veterans Affairs Gordon Mansfield during the Senate Veterans Affairs Committee hearing.
Mansfield told Murray and the other senators that he didn't think the VA had deliberately tried to mislead Congress or the public.
Murray remained skeptical, however, saying that the VA has demonstrated a pattern of misleading Congress about the increasing number of soldiers who served in Iraq and Afghanistan and are now seeking help and straining Defense Department and VA facilities and programs.
Murray said she's spoken with VA Secretary James Peake and demanded that he fire the man in charge of the department's mental health programs, Dr. Ira Katz. The senator said Peake has yet to respond to her request.
"I used to teach preschool, and when you bring up a 3-year-old and tell them they have to stop lying, they understand the consequences," Murray said. "The VA doesn't. They need to stop hiding the fact this war is costing us in so many ways."
The existence of the e-mails, uncovered as part of a class-action lawsuit filed against the VA in San Francisco, was first reported by CBS News on Monday.
"Our suicide prevention coordinators are identifying about 1,000 suicide attempts per month among the veterans we see in our medical facilities," Katz wrote in a Feb. 13 e-mail to Ev Chasen, the department's communication director. "Is this something we should (carefully) address ourselves in some sort of release before someone stumbles on it?"
Chasen responded: "I think this is something we should discuss among ourselves, before issuing a press release. Is the fact we are stopping them good news, or is the sheer number bad news? And is this more than we have ever seen before?"
CBS reported that the VA had provided it with data earlier that showed only 790 attempted suicides in all of 2007.
"How do we trust what you are saying when every time we turn around we find out that what you are saying publicly is different from what you are saying privately?" Murray asked Mansfield. "How can we trust what you are saying today?"
Mansfield responded that the situation was unfortunate and didn't "send the right message" to Congress or the public.
"I know Dr. Katz is a dedicated public servant," he said. "There isn't a lot the VA should be keeping secret."
Murray pointed to a RAND Corp. study released last week that found that 320,000 troops who served in Iraq and Afghanistan suffer from traumatic brain injuries and 300,000 troops suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder or major depression.
Of those with PTSD or depression, Murray said, only half have sought treatment, and only half of those have received treatment that was "minimally" adequate.
"I think we ought to be worried," Murray said, adding that, as with Vietnam-era vets, some of the more violent symptoms might not show up for 50 years.
"They can be walking time bombs for decades," Murray said. "I hope everyone in the VA understands this."
Mansfield said the VA is spending $3 billion on mental health programs this fiscal year and has 17,000 mental health workers.
"We want to make sure we take care of these individuals," he said.

Atheist soldier claims harassment

JUNCTION CITY, Kansas (AP) -- Like hundreds of young men joining the Army in recent years, Jeremy Hall professes a desire to serve his country while it fights terrorism.

But the short and soft-spoken specialist is at the center of a legal controversy. He has filed a lawsuit alleging that he's been harassed and his constitutional rights have been violated because he doesn't believe in God. The suit names Defense Secretary Robert Gates.

"I'm not in it for cash," Hall said. "I want no one else to go what I went through."

Known as "the atheist guy," Hall has been called immoral, a devil worshipper and -- just as severe to some soldiers -- gay, none of which, he says, is true. Hall even drove fellow soldiers to church in Iraq and paused while they prayed before meals.

"I see a name and rank and United States flag on their shoulder. That's what I believe everyone else should see," he said.

Hall, 23, was raised in a Protestant family in North Carolina and dropped out of school. It wasn't until he joined the Army that he began questioning religion, eventually deciding that he couldn't follow any faith.

But he feared how that would look to other soldiers.

"I was ashamed to say that I was an atheist," Hall said.

It eventually came out in Iraq in 2007, when he was in a firefight. Hall was a gunner on a Humvee, which took several bullets in its protective shield. Afterward, his commander asked whether he believed in God, Hall said.

"I said, 'No, but I believe in Plexiglas,' " Hall said. "I've never believed I was going to a happy place. You get one life. When I die, I'm worm food."

The issue came to a head when, according to Hall, a superior officer, Maj. Freddy J. Welborn, threatened to bring charges against him for trying to hold a meeting of atheists in Iraq. Welborn has denied Hall's allegations.

Hall said he had had enough but feared that he wouldn't get support from Welborn's superiors. He turned to Mikey Weinstein and the Military Religious Freedom Foundation.

Weinstein is the foundation's president and a U.S. Air Force Academy graduate. He had sued the Air Force for acts he said illegally imposed Christianity on students at the academy, though that case was dismissed. He calls Hall a hero.

"The average American doesn't have enough intestinal fortitude to tell someone to shut up if they are talking in a movie theater," Weinstein said. "You know how hard it is to take on your chain of command? This isn't the shift manager at KFC."

Hall was in Qatar when the lawsuit was filed September 18 in federal court in Kansas City, Kansas. Other soldiers learned of it, and he feared for his own safety. Once, Hall said, a group of soldiers followed him, harassing him, but no one did anything to make it stop.

The Army told him it couldn't protect him and sent him back to Fort Riley. He resumed duties with a military police battalion. He believes that his promotion to sergeant has been blocked because of his lawsuit, but he is a team leader responsible for two junior enlisted soldiers.

No one with Fort Riley, the Army or that Defense Department would comment about Hall or the lawsuit. Each issued statements saying that discrimination will not be tolerated regardless of race, religion or gender.

"The department respects [and supports by its policy] the rights of others to their own religious beliefs, including the right to hold no beliefs," said Eileen Lainez, a spokeswoman for the Department of Defense.

All three organizations said existing systems help soldiers "address and resolve any perceived unfair treatment."

Lt. Col. David Shurtleff, a Fort Riley chaplain, declined to discuss Hall's case but said chaplains accommodate all faiths as best they can. In most cases, religious issues can be worked out without jeopardizing military operations.

"When you're in Afghanistan and an IED blows up a Humvee, they aren't asking about a wounded soldier's faith," Shurtleff said.

Hall said he enjoys being a team leader but has been told that having faith would make him a better leader.

"I will take care of my soldiers. Nowhere does it say I have to pray with my soldiers, but I do have to make sure my soldiers' religious needs are met," he said.

"Religion brings comfort to a lot of people," he said. "Personally, I don't want it or need it. But I'm not going to get down on anybody else for it."

Hall leaves the Army in April 2009. He would like to find work with the National Park Service or Environmental Protection Agency, anything outdoors.

"I hope this doesn't define me," Hall said of his lawsuit. "It's just about time somebody said something."

The Left Has Lost Its Way

By Chris Hedges

This column was originally published by the Philadelphia Inquirer.

The failure of the American left is a failure of nerve. It has been neutralized and rendered ineffectual as a political force because of its refusal to hold fast on core issues, from universal, single-payer, not-for-profit health care for all Americans, to the steadfast protection of workers’ rights, to an immediate withdrawal from the failed occupation of Iraq to a fight against a militarized economy that is hollowing the country out from the inside.

Let the politicians compromise. This is their job. It is not ours. If the left wants to regain influence in the nation’s political life, it must be willing to walk away from the Democratic Party, even if Barack Obama is the nominee, and back progressive, third-party candidates until the Democrats feel enough heat to adopt our agenda. We must be willing to say no. If not, we become slaves.

Political and social change, as the radical Christian right and the array of corporate-funded neocon think tanks have demonstrated, are created by the building of movements. This is a lesson American progressives have forgotten. The object of a movement is not to achieve political power at any price. It is to create pressure and mobilize citizens around core issues of justice. It is to force politicians and parties to respond to our demands. It is about rewarding, through support and votes, those who champion progressive ideals and punishing those who refuse. And the current Democratic Party, as any worker in a former manufacturing town in Pennsylvania can tell you, has betrayed us.

“The mistake of the former left-wingers, from Tom Hayden to Todd Gitlin, is that they want to be players in the Democratic Party and academia,” said John R. MacArthur, the publisher of Harper’s magazine, speaking of two prominent 1960s activists. “This is not what the left is supposed to be. The left is supposed to be outside the system. The attempt by the left to take control of the Democratic Party failed with [Eugene] McCarthy and George McGovern. The left, at that point, should have gone back to organizing, street protests, building labor unions, and the mobilization of grassroots activists. Instead, it went for respectability.”

The rise of a corporate state, and by that I mean a state that no longer works on behalf of its citizens but the corporations, is as much a part of the Democratic agenda as the Republican agenda. Sure, every four years Democratic candidates pay lip service to the old values of the party, but then they head off to Washington and do things such as ram NAFTA down our throats, throw 10 million people off welfare, and peddle health-care proposals acceptable to the HMOs, huge pharmaceutical giants, and for-profit health-care providers who are, after all, the very sources of our health-care crisis. What we as citizens need and work for in a corporate state is irrelevant.

The working class has every right to be, to steal a line from Obama, bitter with liberal elites. I am bitter. I have seen what the loss of manufacturing jobs and the death of the labor movement did to my relatives in the former mill towns in Maine. Their story is the story of tens of millions of Americans who can no longer find a job that supports a family and provides basic benefits. Human beings are not, despite what the well-heeled Democratic and Republican apologists for the free market tell you, commodities. They are not goods. They grieve, and suffer and feel despair. They raise children and struggle to maintain communities. The growing class divide is not understood, despite the glibness of many in the media, by complicated sets of statistics or the absurd, utopian faith in unregulated globalization and complicated trade deals. It is understood in the eyes of a man or woman who is no longer making enough money to live with dignity and hope.

“The other side has religion, and we need some,” said the Rev. Susan B. Thistlethwaite, president of Chicago Theological Seminary. “We need a more robust understanding of the role of religious values, values that prevent us from compromising the sanctity and dignity of human life. The left, because it is largely secular, did not do enough as the working class was finished off. And now the same thing is happening with the middle class. It is the loss of the left’s spiritual resources that has crippled the movement. The left forgot that nations, like individuals, have souls. Once you sell your soul, it is hard to get it back. History is not linear. History is about constant struggle. It is the struggle, if you come out of faith, which matters.”

The failure of the left is the failure of well-meaning people who kept compromising and compromising in the name of effectiveness and a few scraps of influence until they had neither. The condemnations progressives utter—about the abuse of working men and women, the rapacious cannibalization of the country by an unchecked arms industry, our disastrous foreign wars, and the collapse of basic services from education to welfare—are not backed by action. The left has been transformed into anguished apologists for corporate greed. They have become hypocrites.

“The loss of nerve by the left comes down to this lack of faith,” Thistlethwaite said. “Having a soul means there is coherence between our actions and our values. The left can no longer claim this coherence. It has no moral compass. It does not know right from wrong. It has, in its confusion, lost the capacity to make moral judgments.”

Hope, St. Augustine wrote, has two beautiful daughters. They are anger and courage. Anger at the way things are and the courage to see they do not remain the way they are. We stand at the verge of a massive economic dislocation, one forcing millions of families from their homes and into severe financial distress, one that threatens to rend the fabric of our society. If we do not become angry, if we do not muster within us the courage to challenge the corporate state that is destroying our nation, we will have squandered our credibility and integrity at the moment we need it most.

Chris Hedges is author of “I Don’t Believe in Atheists” and “American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America.” This column was originally published by The Philadelphia Inquirer.

Women Don't Ask? No, Employers Don't Pay

By Ellen Bravo
Women's Media Center
Monday 21 April 2008

Congratulations, working women! As of today, your salary since January 1, 2007, has finally reached the total earned by your male colleagues in 2007 alone. What's more, this pay gap is all your fault!

According to the media, the problem is that women just don't ask. If we learned to speak up in salary negotiations, pay equity would be a hard fact.

An ABC News segment called the negotiation process "something that each of us has the ability to control.... No employer has an obligation to whisper in the woman's ear, 'Hey, you know, you just lost out on more money because you didn't speak up.'"

Stories like these leave out a few important realities: The majority of women work in jobs where they have no right whatsoever to negotiate for pay. Many are like Donna, a software developer whose employment agreement lists "discussing salary with colleagues" among "fire-able offenses." Hard to know you're making less than others if you're not allowed to know what the others earn.

Yes, women need to learn negotiation (and the facts about labor law, which already prohibit salary secrecy, according to the National Labor Relations Board). But blaming the wage gap on women's lack of assertiveness is like blaming sexual harassment on women's lack of snappy comebacks. The real problem isn't that women don't ask for more - it's that employers pay women so much less than they deserve.

Why do employers do this? Because they can, and often because they think they have to in order to compete.

A key problem is that society undervalues the work women do. Many jobs that are now female-dominated, such as clerical work, once excluded females. When men were in short supply during the Civil War, women were hired at half to two-thirds the wages of men. Women performed well, employers hired more and more of them - and that discriminatory wage eventually became the market rate. Similarly, the lack of regard for women's work as caregivers in the home set low values for similar work in the marketplace. That's why those who care for our young children earn less than those who care for our cars, our pets, our lawns.

Lack of collective bargaining rights also undermines women's wages. The Big Boys - those who control wealth and power in this country - like to say pay corresponds to risk. Yet the Washington Post found that one of the poorest paid occupations, nurse's aide, faces a risk of serious injury higher than that of a coal miner or steel worker.

Power, not risk, is what determines pay rates.

Another reason for women's low pay is the motherhood penalty. Studies agree that women with children are paid less across the board than women without kids or men of any family situation. The research varies only on how great that penalty is.

Women's pay is also hurt by inflation pushing down the value of the minimum wage, since women are disproportionately clustered in minimum-wage jobs, and by the lack of laws requiring equal treatment for part-time and temporary workers.

What about professional women? Studies show that they are less likely than men to initiate salary negotiations - and also that they're viewed as pushy when they do. More important, they're less like to get leads, training, mentoring, opportunities, promotions, and other rewards that result in higher pay.

The wage gap between men and women has been stuck at 77 cents on the dollar - 72 cents for African-American women, 60 cents for Latinas. The Big Boys like to remind women that the gap has narrowed. They forget to mention that half the narrowing comes from a loss of pay for men, especially men of color - not what we had in mind by equality. The gap is greatest for women with the most education and longest hours. And the mommy wage gap - the difference in pay between women with kids and everyone else - has in fact increased.

We need to change how pay is determined - not according to what you earned on your last job, or on how slick you are at promoting yourself, but rather on objective, transparent criteria.

A number of public policies will help, starting with The Fair Pay Restoration Act. This bill would reverse the Supreme Court ruling in Ledbetter vs. Goodyear: that discrimination claims must be made within 180 days after the pay is set, rather than any time a person discovers they are being paid at a discriminatory rate.

Another bill titled the Fair Pay Act would require employers to use objective job evaluations to achieve equal pay for equivalent work and remove gender, race or national origin as criteria in compensation. The Employee Free Choice Act would ease the negotiating that matters most, collective bargaining, by removing barriers to union representation. To end the motherhood penalty, we need to ensure that family responsibility is added to the list of categories protected under anti-discrimination law. And we need to raise the wage floor and guarantee equity for those in non-standard jobs.

And yes, do learn the art of negotiation. Groups like WAGE (Women Are Getting Even) offer terrific workshops and information on the web about how to do this.

But above all, learn the necessity of organizing. The best way to get what you need for yourself is to work with others on behalf of everyone for changes in workplace and public policy.