Darrell G. Moen, Ph.D.

Richard Du Boff

1. Comprehensive [Nuclear] Test Ban Treaty, 1996. Signed by 164 nations and ratified by 89 including France, Great Britain, and Russia; signed by President Clinton in 1996 but rejected by the Senate in 1999. The US is one of 13 nonratifiers among countries that have nuclear weapons or nuclear power programs. In November 2001, the US forced a vote in the UN Committee on Disarmament and Security to demonstrate its opposition to the Treaty, and announced plans to resume nuclear testing for development of new short-range tactical nuclear weapons.

2. Antiballistic Missile Treaty, 1972. In December 2001, the US officially withdrew from the landmark agreement–the first time in the nuclear era that the US renounced a major arms control accord.

3. Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention, 1972, ratified by 144 nations including the US. In July 2001 the US walked out of a London conference to discuss a 1994 protocol designed to strengthen the Convention by providing for on-site inspections. At Geneva in November 2001, Undersecretary of State for arms control John Bolton stated that “the protocol is dead,” at the same time accusing Iraq, Iran, North Korea, Libya, Sudan, and Syria of violating the Convention but offering no specific allegations or supporting evidence to substantiate the charges. In May 2002 Bolton accused Cuba of carrying out germ-warfare research, again producing no evidence. The same month, three Pentagon documents revealed proposals, dating from 1994, to develop US offensive bioweapons that destroy materials (”biofouling and biocorrosion”), in violation of the Convention and a 1989 US law that implements the Convention.

4. UN Agreement to Curb the International Flow of Illicit Small Arms,
2001: the US was the only nation in opposition. Undersecretary Bolton said the agreement was an “important initiative” for the international community, but one that the US “cannot and will not” support, since it could impinge on the Constitutional right of Americans to keep and bear arms.

5. International Criminal Court (ICC) Treaty, 1998. Set up in The Hague to try political leaders and military personnel charged with war crimes and crimes against humanity. Concluded in Rome in July 1998, the Treaty was signed by 120 countries. Although President Clinton signed the Treaty in December 2000, he announced that the US would oppose it, along with 6 others (including China, Russia, and Israel). In May 2002 the Bush administration announced that it was “unsigning”–renouncing the Treaty, something the US had never before done, and that it will neither recognize the Court’s jurisdiction nor furnish any information to help the Court bring cases against any individuals. In July 2002 the ICC went into force after being ratified by more than the required number of 60 nations, including Britain, Canada, France, Germany, Italy and Spain (Russia now having signed but not ratified).

Throughout 2002 and 2003, the US worked to scuttle the treaty by signing bilateral agreements not to send each other’s citizens before the ICC. By mid-2003 the US had signed 37 mutual immunity pacts, mostly with poor, small countries in Africa, Asia, Central America, and Eastern Europe. Threatened with the loss of $73 million in US aid, for example, Bosnia signed such a deal. In July 2003 the Bush administration suspended all military assistance to 35 countries which refused to pledge to give US citizens immunity before the ICC.

6. Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties, 1969, which the US signed but did not ratify. In May 2002, as the US was unsigning the ICC Treaty, it simultaneously announced that it will not be bound by the Vienna Convention, which outlines the obligations of nations to obey other treaties. Article 18 requires signatory nations not to take steps to undermine treaties they sign even if they do not ratify them.

7. The American Servicemen’s Protection Act, 2002. The Bush administration has been working overtime to nullify the ICC. In November 2002 the President signed this Act, which not only bars cooperation with the ICC and threatens sanctions for countries that ratify it, but authorizes the use of “all means necessary” to free any US national who might be held in The Hague for trial before the ICC.

8. Land Mine Treaty, 1997. Banning the use, production or shipment of anti-personnel bombs and mines, the treaty was signed in Ottawa in December 1997 by 123 nations. President Clinton refused to submit it for ratification, claiming that mines were needed to protect South Korea against North Korea’s “overwhelming military advantage,” a proposition denied by the heads of North and South Korea in June 2000. In August 2001 President Bush rejected the treaty. (more…)

The following is an extract from David Cromwell’s “Spotlight on the Media: Chapter 3 of A Private Planet” (Jon Carpenter Publishing).

In their 1988 book ‘Manufacturing Consent - The Political Economy of the Mass Media’, Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky introduced their ‘propaganda model’ of the media. The propaganda model argues that there are 5 classes of ‘filters’ in society which determine what is ‘news’; in other words, what gets printed in newspapers or broadcast by radio and television. Herman and Chomsky’s model also explains how dissent from the mainstream is given little, or zero, coverage, while governments and big business gain easy access to the public in order to convey their state-corporate messages - for example, ‘free trade is beneficial, ‘globalisation is unstoppable’ and ‘our policies are tackling poverty’.

We have already touched upon the fact that corporate ownership of the media can - and does - shape editorial content. The sheer size, concentrated ownership, immense owner wealth, and profit-seeking imperative of the dominant media corporations could hardly yield any other result. It was not always thus. In the early nineteenth century, a radical British press had emerged which addressed the concerns of workers. But excessive stamp duties, designed to restrict newspaper ownership to the ‘respectable’ wealthy, began to change the face of the press. Nevertheless there remained a degree of diversity. In postwar Britain, radical or worker-friendly newspapers such as the Daily Herald, News Chronicle, Sunday Citizen (all since failed or absorbed into other publications) and the Daily Mirror (at least until the late 1970s) regularly published articles questioning the capitalist system.

The well-known journalist John Pilger joined the Mirror in 1963, and worked there for over 20 years. Pilger later claimed that ‘The Mirror was the first popular paper to encourage working-class people to express themselves, for whatever reason, to their newspaper’. Luckily for him, ‘Irreverence and a certain anarchy were encouraged’. Later, when Robert Maxwell took over ownership of the newspaper, Pilger was personally assured that his job was secure: ‘Eighteen months later, after relentless interference from Maxwell, I was sacked.’ (more…)

Why so much hunger? What can we do about it?

To answer these questions we must unlearn much of what we have been taught.

Only by freeing ourselves from the grip of widely held myths can we grasp the roots of hunger and see what we can do to end it.
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