THE HEADLINES

COLOMBIA: “CRIMES AGAINST HUMANITY BEING CARRIED OUT IN OUR NAME.”

This is labor activist Daniel Kovolak’s characterization of the Free Trade Agreement passed by Congress and signed by the President. This agreement, when implemented, will result among other things in huge amounts of U.S. agricultural products being “dumped” tariff-free in Colombia, creating wholesale displacement of Colombian farmers. If this displacement were not damaging enough, the U.S. is giving tacit support and approval to the most reactionary forces in the country, the A.U.C. which is rightly labelled as a “terrorist organization” by the U.S., operating similarly to those death squads in Latin America which have dealt out “disappearances” to those daring to oppose the country’s government policies that enable the multinational corporate rape of the country.

(Counterpunch)

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POLICE DEPLOYMENT OF DRONES COULD BE JUST THE “VISCERAL JOLT SOCIETY NEEDS TO DRAG PRIVACY LAW INTO THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY.”

A writer for the Stanford Law Review makes this point, cited in an article about Seattle’s such deployment of UAV’s to augment their capacity to apprehend law violators and locate victims of emergencies. The public reaction to the news of same in Seattle and elsewhere seems to support the idea that, while drones may be no more intrusive than other technologies, the very image of them as domestic employment of battle zone weapons seems to bring out the “visceral” in public reaction, whether or not this leads to an A.C.L.U.-type action to write legal safeguards of human rights protections into laws governing operations of enforcement agencies.

(Seattle Times)

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AN “INTERNATIONAL ELECTION INSPECTOR” IN OUR STATE? NO WAY, THIS IS TEXAS, SON!

Since the contested presidential election in 2000, the international agency that inspects for irregularities in elections in “unstable” countries has been doing them in the U.S. For tomorrow’s election, these inspectors are receiving strong opposition from “hard right” politicians across the country, including both Texas and Iowa where they have been banned.

(Common Dreams)

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YOUR KANSAS CITY ADDRESS, PLEASE. WELL, RIGHT NOW IT’S ROOM 203 OF THE EXTENDED STAY INN BUT WE’RE HOPING TO GET ONE OF THOSE RIVER OF REFUGE RENOVATED APARTMENTS.

A number, not accurately known but increasing of Kansas City school children are being deposited by school buses at motels where they and their families are “stuck in transition” between the real homes they have lost and those they will hopefully obtain from charitable organizations. One of these, River of Refuge, has acquired a shuttered hospital and is remodeling it for low-cost apartments. Meantime….

(Kansas City Star)

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MAINSTREAMING OF DISABLED STUDENTS IN FLORIDA LAGS BEHIND THE NATIONAL AVERAGE.

Orlando Sentinel feature story notes that autistic and other disabled students spend between a fourth and a third of their school days outside regular classrooms and in “special education” ones. Parents of such children object, one mother taking her child out a school which followed this practice because there is “no special Publix, no special malls”: the kinds of places to which their children go in their everyday lives.

(Orlando Sentinel)

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Quote of the day…

During the term of Obama’s predecessor, George W. Bush, trade unions, human rights and church groups, as well as the majority of Congressional Democrats, were successful in blocking (a Faoir Trade Agreement with Colombia) because of Colombia’s sustained human rights violations. Any such opposition from the AFL-CIO and Democratic legislators evaporated, when President Obama embraced free trade, claiming a vast improvement in human rights and President Santos commitment to ending the murder of trade union leaders and activists.

James Petras, as Santos signs Free Trade Agreement with U.S. despite persistence of human rights violation

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