A List of Environmental and Telecommunications Events and Issues

August 29 to September 5, 1997







Published, Edited and Written by George Mokray for
Information Ecologies
218 Franklin St #3
Cambridge, MA 02139
(617)661-2676
gmoke@world.std.com

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Listings

Saturday, August 30 - Monday, September 1

The National Gathering for the Greens/Green Party USA
contact (508) 688-3569 or massgreens@igc.apc.org or http://www.envirolink.org/greens/massachusetts
Lawrence, MA

Monday, September 1

11:30 am
Labor Day march and rally at the Guess store on Newbury St, Boston Guess has been repeatedly caught using sweatshop contractors to produce its high-priced (and often skimpy!) merchandise. The rally will feature Share the Wealth's Cell Phone Precision Drill Team!
contact 491-2525 or 557-5488
gather at Arlington St. church and march down Newbury St

2 pm - 5 pm
Jobs with Justice Labor Day Victory Party - Join workers from UPS, Shaws, Country Manor Nursing Home in Newburyport, with newspaper workers from Detroit as special guests
contact 491-2525 or 557-5488
Green Street Grill, Green St, Central Sq
$5 donation appreciated
Editorial Comment: Did you know that Labor Day started in the USA? It used to be on May 1, May Day, still the international Labor Day. I wonder why our government changed it to September.

Wednesday, September 3

5:30 pm
Rally for Tufts Janitors - 110 Tufts University janitors, most of them over 50 years old and many with over 20 years of employment at Tufts, were locked out on July 31 and replaced with low-wage workers of the multinational International Service Systems (ISS). Nearly all ISS replacement workers work part-time and receive $3.50/hour less in pay. Tufts and its contractor-of-convenience, ISS, bypassed the workers and their elected union stewards and drafted a punitive contract that effectively guarantees that long- time Tufts custodians lose their jobs or take a 39% pay cut with no guarantee of being rehired.
contact Concerned Citizens for Tufts Workers at 629-2666 or 496- 5028
Powderhouse Park, Somerville, MA (near the southeast corner of the Tufts main campus)

Thursday, September 4

4 pm
Nonlinear Surface Wave Patterns: Novel Symmetries
Jerry Gollub, Haverford College
contact 253-3661 or http://web.mit.edu/mathdept/www/AppliedMathColloq/fall97
MIT Building 4, Room 163

7 pm
Homelessness/Prisons - What's the Connection?
Spare Change, the Revolutionary Anti-Imperialist League, and former prisoners and homeless
contact RAIL 499-6997 or mim124@mim.org
Central Square Public Library, 45 Peal St, Central Sq

Friday, September 5

4 pm
Friction in Granular Layers: Laboratory Experiments
Jerry Gollub, Haverford College
MIT Building 54, Room 915

Sunday, September 7 (raindate Sunday, September 14)

Tour of the Orchards - The pledge fundraising Tour includes a 3 mile walking route, 10, 30, and 45 mile bicycle routes, and starts in Somerville, Dorchester, Cambridge and Jamaica Plain, with cider pressing and lunch at the end. It visits several of the nearly 60 Urban Orchards sites which EarthWorks has planted with communities since 1990. Pledge forms are available NOW. Grand prize is a Montague High-Performance Bicycle which folds. Over 2 dozen other prizes include dinners for 2, composters, gift certificates at bike shops, and more. Funds will help EarthWorks create Orchard Friends groups, purchase tools and plant material, and run the Schoolyard Orchards project.
contact 983-WIND, 776-6524, or 617-MA-EARTH (623-2784) x4 or erthwrks@thecia.net

Tuesday, September 9

6:30 pm - 9:30pm
Northeast Business Environmental Network Annual Meeting - Getting the Green Back
Doug Gutro, EPA New England
please RSVP Gail Schwartz at 204-2727 or http://www.nben.org
Holiday Inn, Tewksbury, MA
NBEN Members: $25.00/Non-NBEN members: $35.00

Thursday, September 11

7:30 pm
Boston Area Solar Energy Assocation Lecture: Who Owns the Sun? Logical Solar Remedies for a Fossil Economy
John O'Connor, author (with Daniel M. Berman) of _Who Owns the Sun_ and president of Greenworks, Inc
contact 49_SOLAR or hkv@solarwave.com
1st Parish Unitarian Church,#3 Church St, Harvard Square
Donations help provide BASEA Forums Series

Friday, September 12

7:30 pm
The Center for Campus Organizing Second Annual Fundraising Dinner and Silent Auction
Frances Fox Piven and Dennis Brutus
contact 354-9363, cco@igc.apc.org, or http://www.cco.org
The Ginger Tree Restaurant, 1366 Beacon Str, Brookline
$35 per person, $240 for a table of eight. Student rates available.

Sources for Listings:
MIT _Tech Talk_ :
http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/www
Harvard _Gazette_ :
http://www.news.harvard.edu/hno.subpages/hno.calendar.full.html
Harvard Environmental Resources On-Line:
http://environment.harvard.edu
MA Executive Office of Environmental Affairs calendar:
http://www.magnet.state.ma.us/envir/earth.htm
Earth Day Network international/national listings:
http://www.cfe.cornell.edu/EarthDay/ednethome.html
Earth Day Greater Boston calendar:
http://www.earthdaygb.org

Computer Organizations of NE (CONE) User Group List:
http://bcs1.ziplink.net/cone/sig
Signet Calendar of events:
http://www.signet.org/cgi-bin/Calendar/calendar.cgi
Webmasters Guild
http://boston.webmaster.org

act-ma the Massachusetts activists mailing list:
subscribe by emailing majordomo@igc.apc.org, leaving the subject line blank and typing "subscribe act-ma" as the message

Peace and Justice Events Hotline at (617)787-6809

Table of Contents



_Visual Explanations_

by Edward Tufte Graphics Press, Cheshire CT 1997 ISBN 0961392126 (http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ISBN=0961392126/alistA/) This is the kind of book you can feel making you smarter as you read it. It is the third in Tufte's series on visual design and thinking. Tufte is an expert advocate of clear presentation of data in context and the enemy of "chart junk."

He says: "Visual representations of evidence should be governed by principles of reasoning about quantitative evidence. For information displays, design reasoning must correspond to scientific reasoning. Clear and precise seeing becomes as one with clear and precise thinking...

"Display architecture recapitulates quantitative thinking; design quality grows from intellectual quality. Such dual principles - both for reasoning about statistical evidence _and_ for the design of statistical graphics - include (1) _documenting_ the sources and characteristics of the data, (2) insistently enforcing appropriate _comparisons_, (3) demonstrating mechanisms of _cause and effect_, (4) expressing those mechanisms _quantitatively_, (5) recognizing the inherently _multivariate_ nature of analytic problems, and (6) inspecting and evaluating _alternative explanations_. When consistent with the substance and in harmony with the content, information displays should be documentary, comparative, causal and explanatory, quantified, multivariate, exploratory."

For Tufte, the "supreme and enduring test of all information design" is "the integrity of the content displayed:
Is the display revealing the truth?
Is the representation accurate?
Are the data carefully documented?
Do the methods of display avoid spurious readings of the data?
Are appropriate comparisons and contexts shown?"

Tufte believes, "In an architecture of content, the _information becomes the interface_" and the display uses the visual equivalent of Occam's razor, "the smallest effective difference," as "small differences allow more differences" and more differences express more "repetition and change, pattern and surprise - the defining elements in the idea of information."

Although I found Tufte's books in the computer section of my bookstore, he loves pencil and paper as well as the cathode ray tube. "Each technology does what it is good at: the computer selects, organizes, customizes data; paper makes visible the high resolution information in portable permanent form." He even has some excellent advice for giving a talk or presenting a paper:

1) Near the beginning of your presentation, tell the audience
what the problem is
why the problem is important
what the solution to the problem is
2) To explain complex ideas or data, use the method of PGP
Particular General Particular
For example, to explain a table of data, point to a particular number and say what it means, then describe the general architecture of the table, reinforce it all with another number, a second particular, saying what that means.
3) No matter what, give everybody in the audience one or more pieces of paper, packed with material related to your presentation
4) Analuze the details of your presentation; then master those details by practice, practice, practice.
5) Show up early. Soemthing good is bound to happen.
6) Finish early

Edward Tufte makes beautiful and wise books. There is not only information and design here. There is knowledge and even wisdom for those who cana recognize it.

Table of Contents



_Witness to a Century_

by George Seldes Ballantine Books, NY 1987 ISBN 0-345-33181-8 (http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ISBN=0345331818/alistA/) I roared through _Witness to a Century_, following the suppressed history of the 20th century that George Seldes bore witness to. Ever since I saw the documentary "Tell the Truth and Run" about Mr Seldes, I have owed it to myself to read his story (ask your PBS station to show this movie). George Seldes was a beat reporter in Pittsburgh, a foreign correspondent in Europe, and a media critic in Vermont. He founded the first ongoing publication devoted to media criticism, _In fact_, which was driven out of business by the FBI, and whose model IF Stone followed when he started his _Weekly_. You could say and not be far from exaggeration that George Seldes taught IF Stone all he knew. I consider Seldes to be one of my models, although I call myself a writer rather than a journalist (and thus allowed much more leeway).

Seldes lived and worked through most of this century and saw it clear. He had a pin-point anger at injustice and unearned privilege and a sense of fairness and integrity that shines through in each of his many stories. He starts his book with a disclaimer, the motto of the _Biographie Universelle de France_: "We owe respect to the living; to the dead nothing but truth." Brought up in a cooperative farming comunity, he went to work as a reporter while his brother, Gilbert, went to Harvard. One summer, he convinced Gilbert to spend some time working at the newspaper with him while the next year he spent at Harvard. While there, they both took classes from Charles Townsend Copeland, the kind of man Emerson called a "professor of books." Prof Copeland gave him some very good writing advice: "Read what you have written out loud to yourself. Read every word, every sentence, the whole day's output just as soon as you have written it. Out loud. Do not be self-conscious. Listen to the words. Make corrections and then read it all again. Out loud. it will make all the difference in your writing." He had already learned other reportorial techniques from his first City Editor, Houston H Eagle of the _Pittsburgh Leader_ in 1909:

"'But,' I interrupted, 'how do you "train" a memory?'

"'Well,' replied Mr Eagle, 'take today for instance. When you get home this afternoon, write down as you remember it every word I said and the way I said it. Did I smile? Or did I laugh? Anything. You won't have much success today. But do it again tomorrow - encounters with anyone, everyone, the policeman who made the arrest, the prisoner if they'll let you talk to him, what Magistrate Kirby said, how he said it, or even what the old-timers here tell you every day. I assure you that if you have trained your memory, that pad and paper are a thing of the past.'"

Seldes trained his memory very well indeed.

Seldes became a war correspondent during World War I and with a few of his colleagues slipped into Germany just after the armistice, an exploit for which they were all nearly shot. The devastation and human despair he saw there changed the way he thought about war. Here is his account of the armistice: "At 10:59 the great rumble from afar, heard in Paris, heard in the towns and villages where the war correspondents lived, which had sounded like millions of men and women drowning in the seven seas, did diminish. For most continental Europeans it had never been artillery shells exploding, machine guns clattering, individual shots heard. For almost five years the sound of war had been this rumbling, drowning-gurgling sound, day and night, titanic but low, universal. The silence that came finally, when all the heroes had finished prolonging the war on a miniature scale, nevertheless was impressive - so impressive indeed it felt like a warning of death to millions of old soldiers - boys who had grown old in two or three years in the trenches."

After the war, he covered the beginning of the Fascist movement with D'Annunzio and Mussolini in Italy. He wrote one of the first books denouncing Il Duce, _Sawdust Caesar_ (http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ISBN=0404561977/alistA/), and implicated the dictator in political murder. He traveled to Moscow and had a press conference with Lenin, "the only dictator, past or present, who had a sense of humor." One story Lenin told concerned the time he lived in exile in London:

"Frequently working mens' delegations who had chosen arbitration rather than going on strike would come to him asking that he represent them.

"'On one occasion,' said Lenin, 'the delegates themselves could not agree on terms. They argued. Several of them shouted. They made a mess of things.

"'I said, "Go home, come to an agreement on terms, cone here again tomorrow, and tell me in a few words."

"'The delegation returned the next day. The spokesman said: "All we want is world revolution, and better toilets."'"

In the 30s, Seldes married and returned to the US. Sinclair Lewis, who was then married to Dorothy Thompson, a famous reporter and commentator, helped him buy a house in Vermont. The two couples frequently socialized and one day Thompson told the following story over lunch:

"In the early 1930s, but after Roosevelt was already implementing the New Deal and making millions of friends among people and thousands of enemies among the powerful and special interests, Dorothy happened to be crossing the Atlantic, Le Havre to New York, and happened to meet Harry F. Sinclair of Teapot Dome fame and infamy, on the boat. He invited her to sit at his table and meet his friends, the most notable of whom was Elisha Walker, a Giannini banker [Bank of America?]; the others were industrialists or corporation heads. Continued Dorothy:

'One day at lunch Sinclair remarked that the big business interests bought the Presidency and controlled American politics no matter which party, Republican or Democratic, won.

'"What about FDR?" I asked.

'"A slight error there," replied Sinclair. "Of course we had our money up on him as well as the opposition, and we expected him to make those talks about economic royalists, money changers, and all that bunk, but we did not expect him to take action."

'I asked Sinclair what his group was planning to do next.

'"I do not think we can defeat him [ie FDR in 1936]," he replied, "but my friends do. It will take more than five million dollars but they say they will raise it easily. Even if it takes twenty million dollars. Make no mistake about it, we buy and control our Presidents. And by we I mean the five men seated here, right here at this table, and our friends back home. We make mistakes sometimes, but usually we win no matter which party wins."'"

Plus ca change, n'est ce pas?

Throughout the 40s, Seldes and his wife published _In fact_, publishing the stories that weren't being told. He exposed the link between cancer and cigarettes, the American Fascists and fellow travelers, and the "anti-communist" demagogues who arose after WWII. Over 100,000 people, including the young Nat Hentoff and Noam Chomsky, read _In fact_. Unfortunately, the FBI began to harass his subscribers and the Post Office began to monitor his mailing list. Seldes folded the newsletter and began to travel and write and edit books like _The Great Thoughts_ (http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ISBN=/alistA/) and _Great Quotations_ (http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ISBN=/alistA/) instead.

Seldes was dedicated to the facts, to truth, and to history. He ends his memoirs with a conversation he once had with William Allen White, editor of the _Emporia Gazette_ of Kansas:

"As his final word, Mr White said: 'The facts, fairly and honestly presented,' and I added, more in the nature of a question than a statement, the words: 'and truth will take care of itself?'

"White leaped at these words. 'That's it,' he said, 'that is our formula: "The facts fairly and honestly presented; truth will take care of itself."'

"I have thought of these words for more than forty years. I know of no better rule for all newspapers of the world."

And no better rule for ourselves.

Table of Contents



Project Censored's Top Ten Under-Reported Stories of 1996

Every year Project Censored picks the ten most under-reported stories of the last 12 months. Their 1996 list is now out at
http://www.cs.sonoma.edu/projectcensored/Stories1996.html

Here's my precis of their material:

1 Risking the World: Nuclear Proliferation in Space

NASA's Cassini probe bound for Saturn will carry 72 pounds of plutonium-238. The Cassini probe will be launched by a Lockheed Martin-built Titan IV rocket, a rocket which has had a series of mishaps including a 1993 explosion which destroyed a $1 billion spy satellite system and sent fragments falling into the Pacific Ocean. The Cassini will circle Venus twice and hurtle back at Earth for a slingshot maneuver giving the probe the velocity to reach Saturn. It will orbit the Earth in August 1999 at 42,300 miles per hour just 312 miles above the surface.

If Cassini comes too close, it could burn up in the atmosphere and disperse deadly plutonium across the planet. According to the NASA Environmental Impact Statement "approximately 5 billion of the estimated 7 to 8 billion world population at the time of the swingbys could receive 99 percent or more of the radiation exposure" if there is an inadvertent reentry of the probe. According to author Karl Grossman, plutonium-238 is not a necessity for the mission to succeed. The plutonium-238 will be used to "generate 745 watts of electricity to run instruments--a task that could be accomplished with solar energy." Indeed, within five years, the European Space Agency (ESA) could have solar cells ready to power a space mission to Saturn. Even with this knowledge, however, the Department of Energy (DoE) insists on sticking with the nuclear energy on the Cassini probe.

Stop Cassini Homepage
http://www.animatedsoftware.com/cassini/index.htm

2 Shell's Oil, Africa's Blood

Since Nigeria's execution of nine environmental activists, including Nobel Prize winner and leader of the Movement for the Survival of Ogoni People (MOSOP), Ken Saro-Wiwa, evidence has indicated that Shell has fomented civil unrest in Nigeria, contributed to unfair trials and failed to use its leverage to prevent the unjustified executions. The executed activists were involved in massive protests against Royal Dutch/Shell Group because of the environmental devastation it has caused--particularly in Southern Nigeria's Ogoniland. Nigeria's government, under the dictatorship of General Sani Abacha, derives 90% of its foreign revenue from oil exports. The United States, home of Royal Dutch's subsidiary Shell Oil Company, located in Houston, Texas, imports almost 50% of Nigeria's annual oil production.

While Shell has denied having anything to do with the recent executions, Dr. Owens Wiwa, Ken Saro-Wiwa's brother, reported that on three occasions Brian Anderson, the managing director of Shell Petroleum Development Co. in Nigeria, offered to make a deal with Wiwa: Shell would try to prevent the executions if the activists would call off their protests. Wiwa refused, and Shell did not intervene. According to a report by Andy Rowell in the Village Voice (11/21/95), there is evidence that Shell has been bankrolling Nigerian military action against protesters and that two key prosecution witnesses admitted in sworn affidavits that they were offered bribes by Shell to unjustly incriminate Saro-Wiwa in his trial. In response to these allegations, Shell has mounted an international media campaign to combat negative publicity. Amnesty International USA said the Houston Chronicle refused to run an ad which questioned Shell's stance on human rights violations in Nigeria and that three billboard companies, including Gannett Outdoor Co. Inc., also declined to sell space to the human rights organization.

Violation of human rights in Nigeria
http://www.uib.no/isf/people/campaign/

And last week's
http://world.std.com/~gmoke/AList.Aug2297.html/#Emergency Action: Ogoni 20, Nigeria

3 Big Perks for the Wealthy Hidden in Minimum Wage Bill

On August 20, 1996, President Clinton signed into law the Small Business Job Protection Act of 1996. The publicized intent of the bill was to raise the minimum wage from $4.25 to $5.15 an hour. However, according to John Judis, senior editor of the New Republic, the minimum wage bill included at least ten other significant provisions aimed at neither small business owners nor their employees. Indeed, Judis charges, these unpublicized provisions may negate whatever good the bill may do.

Among the lowlights:
* The bill reinstates tax incentives which encourage leveraged buyouts (LBO's)
* The new minimum wage bill has successfully protected American multinationals from paying taxes on unrepatriated foreign income, a long-standing tax loophole for overseas corporations.
* The bill does away with a requirement that companies must offer the same benefits to lower-wage employees as they do to higher-wage employees, and effectively reverses the Employee Retirement Income Security Act of 1974 (ERISA), which states that if an insurance company takes too much in fees or invests in risky ventures they can be sued.

Additionally, the bill abolishes a surtax on luxury car purchases and diesel fuel for yachts, ends a surtax on one-year pension withdrawals over $150,000 (a boon for the ultra-rich), and allows newspaper publishers to treat their distributors and carriers as independent contractors rather than employees in order to avoid paying their Social Security and unemployment compensation.

4 Deforming Consent: The PR Industry's War on Activists

Some multi-million dollar clients pay major public relations firms to create false non-profit organizations, which target activists and proposed legislation that threaten big business. Most of these organizations focus on environmental, consumer and labor issues. The strategies of these powerful media manipulators include the defamation of activists, their ideas, and the deception of American citizens. "Greenwashing" is the term now commonly used to describe the ways that polluters employ deceptive PR to cultivate an environmentally responsible public image while covering up their abuse of the biosphere and public health. "Astroturf lobbying," a term coined by Lloyd Bentsen, is another new concept which Bentsen describes as the "synthetic grassroots movements that now can be manufactured for a fee." Campaigns & Elections magazine defines "Astroturf" as a "grassroots program that involves the instant manufacturing of public support for a point of view in which either uninformed activists are recruited or means of deception are used to recruit them." These anti-public-interest campaigns generate the false impression of public support in the name of "citizen activism" to promote the ideas and pursue the goals of corporate clients. Consequently, dissenting voices have been muffled, scientifically proven unhealthy chemicals and practices have been legalized, and public opinion has been profoundly, yet quietly influenced.

_Toxic Sludge Is Good for You! : Lies, Damn Lies and the Public Relations Industry_ by John C. Stauber, Sheldon Rampton
Common Courage Press, 1995 ISBN 1567510604
(http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ISBN=1567510604/alistA/)

5 White-Collar Crime: Whitewash at the Justice Department

While white-collar crime costs America 10 to 50 times more money than street crime, the Justice Department shows little interest in taking the problem seriously. With the statistics persistently underscoring this contradiction, business organizations like the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the National Association of Manufacturers continue to claim the federal government restricts business with unnecessary and heavy-handed regulations--and implore Congress to scale back environmental, health and safety laws. Of the more than 51,000 federal criminal indictments in 1994, only 250--less than one-half of one percent--involved criminal violations of the nation's environmental, occupational health and safety, and consumer product-safety laws.

This pro-business bias extends to the way such laws as the Occupational Safety and Health Act (OSHA) are regulated, funded, and investigated. In 1987 alone, 50-70,000 workers died prematurely from on-the-job exposure to toxins--roughly three times the 21,500 people murdered in the same year. In the years between 1970 (when OSHA was created) and 1992, 200,000 Americans died at work, a significant number of which resulted from known negligence by the employer. Nonetheless, in those 22 years, OSHA has referred only 88 criminal cases to the DoJ, which prosecuted 25 and sent one executive to jail. He served 45 days. According to Barry Hartman, who was first deputy and then acting assistant attorney general for the DoJ's environmental and natural resources division, "environmental crimes are not like organized crimes or drugs...There you have bad people doing bad things. With environmental crimes you have decent people doing bad things. You have to look at it this way."

TRAC, the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, allows comparisons among FBI enforcement patterns in every judicial district in the US, and lots more besides
http://trac.syr.edu/tracfbi

6 New Mega-Merged Banking Behemoths = Big Risk

1995 was a record year of bank mergers with Chase Manhattan and Chemical bank combining to create the nation's largest bank, with $300 billion in assets and First Interstate and Wells Fargo creating a new giant on the west coast with over $100 billion in assets. 71.5% of U.S. banking assets are now controlled by the 100 largest banking organizations, less than 1% of the total banks in the nation. Under the Bank Merger and Bank Holdings Company Act, the Federal Reserve is required, before approving any application of a merger, to test how well the convenience and needs of the public are being met by the merger but critics charge that the Federal Reserve Board is not applying this "public convenience and needs" test to the wave of banking mergers as required. Analysts are concerned that the growing giants of the banking industry will "shift insurance risks to taxpayers, cost jobs, lead to increased rates for bank customer service, make it harder to get loans and lessen community access to bank branches."

This trend toward bigger banks is creating a system with a "too big to fail" status. If any one of these new giants fails, there would be a devastating effect on the nation's financial health. And with the Federal Reserve capping the amount that financial institutions have to pay into the government's bank insurance fund at $25 billion, just 1.25% of deposits are now insured. Consequently, any bailout of one of these new megabanks would come directly from the pockets of taxpayers.

Studies have also found that banks in concentrated markets tend to charge higher rates for certain types of loans and to offer lower interest rates on certain types of deposits than do banks in less concentrated markets. A 1995 study by the U.S. Public Interest Research Group and the Center for Study of Responsive Law showed that fees on checking and savings accounts increased at twice the rate of inflation from 1993 to 1995 as bank mergers moved forward.

Finally, the trend toward megabanks is closing out community access and making it harder to get loans. In 1995, the Justice Department ordered Wells Fargo to divest itself of 61 branches it acquired through its merger with First Interstate to preserve competition for certain types of lending. But the 61 branches that Wells Fargo divested itself of, are being sold to Home Savings and Loan of Los Angeles, which recently decided not to continue its affordable housing lending. In a community where affordable housing is vital to its stability, the decision of Home Savings and Loan is very disturbing.

7 Cashing in on Poverty

Corporate America is in the poverty business and making huge profits from the destitute in the United States. Sixty million poor people without bank accounts or access to competitive-rate loans must instead use pawn shops, check-cashing outlets, rent-to-own stores, finance companies and high-interest mortgage lenders. These businesses generate yearly revenues of $200 to $300 billion and are increasingly owned or subsidized by Wall Street giants such as American Express, Bank America, Citibank, Ford, NationsBank, and Western Union.

While affluent credit card holders can pay as little as six to eight percent annual interest, low-income people are paying as much as 240% for a loan from a pawnbroker, 300% for a finance company loan, and even an amazing 2,000% for a fast "payday" loan from a check-cashing outlet. The number of check-cashing outlets in this country has nearly tripled to 5,500 since the late 1980s, and rent-to-own stores have skyrocketed from 2,000 to 7,500 in the same period. With a typical loan rate of 200%, Cash America's chain of pawn shops has quickly grown to 325 in the United States and expanded abroad with thirty-four outlets in the United Kingdom and ten in Sweden.

The main investor in America's $4.5 billion rent-to-own market is Thorn EMI PLC, a British conglomerate. American Express finances ACE Cash Express, a national chain of 630 check-cashing outlets. Charges average three to six percent of each check's value. Cash America, the country's largest chain of pawnshops, is bankrolled by NationsBank and traded on the New York Stock Exchange. In 1993, three-fifths of Ford's earnings came from car loans, mortgages and consumer loans. Associates Corporation of North America is a Ford subsidiary targeting low-income, blue-collar and minority consumers. In 1994, it financed $18.5 billion in mortgages and consumer loans and earned just under $1 billion in pre-tax profits. Stock analysts estimate that used-car loans for people with shaky credit now top $60 billion a year. Non-bank finance companies like Ford and defense contractor Textron make small loans at rates as high as 300% in some states.

Along with astronomically high charges, many low-income consumers are also victimized by additional hidden fees, forged loan documents, and harassing collection tactics. And unless there is increased government protection for the destitute or a growth in alternative non-profit financial institutions, big business will continue to expand these practices.

_Merchants of Misery: How Corporate America Profits From Poverty_
Edited by Michael Hudson (Common Courage Press, 1996)
(http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ISBN=1567510825 /alistA/)

8 Big Brother Goes High-Tech

Information on individuals in the developed world can now be obtained by governments, corporations, and individuals using new surveillance, identification, and networking technologies, rapidly facilitating the mass and routine surveillance of large segments of the population without the need for warrants and formal investigations. In Britain, nearly all public areas are monitored by over 150,000 closed-circuit television cameras (CCTV). Equipped with a powerful zoom lens, each camera can read the wording on a cigarette packet at 100 yards. These cameras can track individuals wherever they go, even into buildings. In the U.S., Baltimore announced plans to put 200 cameras in the city center. The FBI has also developed miniaturized CCTV units it can put in a "lamp, clock, radio, duffel bag, purse, picture frame, utility pole, coin telephone, and other [objects]" and then control remotely to "pan, tilt, zoom, and focus."

The passive millimeter wave imager currently in development boasts the equivalent of X-ray vision. It can penetrate clothing to "see" concealed weapons, plastic explosives or drugs and also see through walls to detect activity. This camera has prompted suggestions that it is in violation of the Fourth Amendment, which guarantees the right to be secure against unreasonable search and seizure. New biometric technologies which use sophisticated computer-scanning to measure personal characteristics--including fingerprints, retinal patterns, and the geometry of the hand--are already being tested by U.S. immigration authorities at JFK, Newark, and Vancouver airports in place of passports. Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) can track the movements of all people using public or private transportation, linked to ordinary bank accounts they can generate records that show a driver's name and address, and the exact time and place where tolls have been charged. Nine states in the U.S. already use similar systems to track over 250,000 vehicles every day, and 12 more states will soon put their own systems on-line. While technologically dazzling, such advances threaten to render privacy vulnerable on a scale never seen before--without providing accountability for those who may misuse it.

Privacy Issues and Rights Center
http://www.jas.com/jb-privacy.html

Electtonic Privacy Information Center
http://epic.org/

9 US Troops Exposed to Depleted Uranium During Gulf War

Depleted uranium (DU) weapons were used for the first time in warfare in the Persian Gulf in 1991. They were hailed as a new and incredibly effective weapon by the Department of Defense. However, they are still extremely toxic and need to be handled with special precautionary tools and protective gear. Although army training manuals written in the 1980s warned tank crews and commanders of the dangers associated with DU rounds, the Pentagon failed to warn Gulf War troops of the dangers. The Defense Department did circulate a memo to Gulf War commanders that contained three key points: any vehicle or system struck by a DU penetrator can be assumed to be contaminated; personnel should avoid entering contaminated areas; and, if troops must enter contaminated areas, they should wear protective clothing. Unfortunately, this memo was written on March 7, 1991, eight days after the firing of weapons ceased in the Persian Gulf.

Without this knowledge, and without the necessary protective clothing, the 144th Army National Guard Service and Supply Company was allowed to perform DU battlefield cleanup for three weeks in Kuwait and southern Iraq, where the U.S. Army fired at least 14,000 rounds (or 40 tons) of DU ammunition.

The Department of Energy possesses over 500,000 tons of DU that has been accumulating since the Manhattan Project. Billions of dollars have been spent by the U.S. government to find a final dumpsite for the radioactive waste, but other nations and communities in Maine and New Mexico have resisted the efforts to dump the DU waste in their area. The use of this weaponry in the Persian Gulf, then, served two purposes. It eliminated enemy troops and weapons and disposed of tens or even thousands of tons of the radioactive DU on the Persian Gulf battlefields.

The effects of depleted uranium exposure, however, are just beginning to be known. DU has now been linked to many illnesses, including the mysterious "Gulf War Syndrome." Despite widespread concern among Gulf War vets and in U.S. communities about the dangers of DU weapons, the Pentagon, Department of Energy and military defense contractors are all excited about the sales potential of DU weapons as well as the transfer of DU to allies for their own weapons production. According to Nuclear Regulatory Commission shipment records, steady transfers--amounting to several million pounds of DU--have been flowing to U.S. allies over the past decade, with Britain, France and Canada being the largest recipients.

WISE Uranium Project - Home Page
http://antenna.nl/wise/uranium/

Nuclear Information and Resource Service
http://www.nirs.org/

10 Facing Food Scarcity

The Japanese Ministry of Agriculture released projections in late December 1995 which show a doubling of world grain prices by 2010. The world prices for wheat and rice will exceed 2 times that of the base year of 1992. Around the same time, World Watch published an article, "Facing Food Scarcity," which supports the Japanese Ministry of Agriculture claim, and according to the World Agricultural Outlook Board, the world's stock of rice, wheat, corn, and other grains have fallen to their lowest level in two decades. These projections differ sharply from that of the World Bank, which has stuck with its projection of continuously declining grain prices over the same period. The Japanese analysis, along with the World Watch article take into account past experience with biological growth in finite environments, (examples include soil erosion, increased population, and land dehydration) while the economists who are responsible for projecting supply and demand of agriculture commodities for the World Bank and at the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) do not.

As the world population continues to grow, more and more water must be diverted from crop irrigation to cities for direct consumption. This, along with the loss of agricultural land to housing, creates a drastic imbalance between the amount of people, and the food production necessary to feed them. The recent World Food Summit, convened by the FAO in November 1996, the first such summit in 22 years, decided that poor countries will be responsible for feeding their own people, without the aid of wealthier nations; for, while population is soaring, especially in poor nations, food aid to poor countries is dropping by about half, and the number of hungry people will continue to grow (San Francisco Chronicle, 11/18/96).

With the World Bank and FAO continuing to project surplus capacity and declining real prices, it is difficult to mobilize support for continued investment in agriculture or for the kinds of social services such as family planning that could help stabilize population growth.

Worldwatch Institute
http://www.worldwatch.org

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William Burroughs on Truth

_The New Yorker_ published excerpts from William Burroughs' last journals. Here is what the old junkie had to say about truth:

"What is truth? Something immediately seen as truth. (It may apear only once; it may not be repeatable.) We make truth. Nobody else makes it. There is no truth we don't make. Punch a nole in the Big Lie. Punch a hole for me. Punch a hole for 'magic casements opening on the foam of perilous seas in faery lands forlorn.'" (Keats)

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The Begging Bowl

How am I able to continue to publish "A List..." when it brings in only enough money to pay for my ISP bill and maybe part of my phone? Truth is, I chose my parents and grandparents well and am spending the money they left me doing whatever the hell I want to do, namely chaining myself to this computer (Mac Performa 475 with 8 Megs of memory) and speaking out loud to myself in the marketplace of ideas (as I once put it in an online discussion). For someone who writes about sustainability, I don't live a sustainable life. I am spending down my patrimony. For someone who writes about business ethics I still have holdings in reprehensible companies. One of those companies is Columbia/HCA, a healthcare corporation that is currently under investigation by the Justice Department for Medicare fraud. Here is a letter I wrote to them recently. I have yet to receive a reply:

I am a shareholder in Columbia/HCA through a family trust in the name of HP Mokray. It is personally insulting for me to turn on the news and see a former executive at Columbia/HCA say, "Standard practice was to charge Medicare whatever we wanted and let them figure it out. We were doing it for the shareholders." This shareholder says in no uncertain terms, "Wotta load of self-serving crap!"

In my opinion, if Columbia/HCA was defrauding the government, each and every employee involved should be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law. If the alleged corruption is found to be extensive enough, perhaps the corporation should be prosecuted under the RICO statutes and legally dissolved. If these allegations are correct, the shareholders should sue the management responsible for their breach of fiduciary responsibility in transforming the corporation into a criminal enterprise and destroying the good will and good name of the company. I would be happy to be part of a class action suit if I believe that such action is warranted and I venture to say that there are many other of my fellow shareholders who might feel the same way.

It is my understanding that some of the executives who have been involved in these alleged activities have left the company. I would like to know what their compensation packages were.

Clean up your act or get out of the business. You have embarrassed and sickened me by letting such a situation develop, whether or not you are found guilty in a court of law. You should be ashamed of yourselves.
Yours,
George Mokray

Still and all, it would be nice to know that what I do is worth something to somebody, that I can actually make a living doing what I need to do, and that I am not just some useless fool mumbling to myself. So, if you have any words of praise or blame, information that might be of interest to others, or money to throw into the Begging Bowl to help me with my problems of self-worth, please don't hesitate to send them on. Or to hold the good thought for me and all the rest of us.

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George Mokray
Information Ecologies
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