The massively corrupt, CIA-installed ‘interim’ government of Haiti has announced that elections will not be held until the end of this year at the earliest — pretty much two years after the US interfered in the democracy of its neighbour, engineering, with the help of such murky organisations as USAID (watch out for a forthcoming report on this misnomer, which has many of the hallmarks of the National Endowment for Democracy), the swift departure of its former ally, Jean Bertrand Aristide — the man who won 70% of the vote in Haiti’s first ever full elections in 1990, was booted out by a military coup in 1991, and returned to power with the aid of 20,000 US troops in 1994. However, his left leaning, populist stance proved too much of a menace to the right wing lunatics in the first Bush administration, who with the tacit support of France, Canada and Brazil, orchestrated regime change creating a revolt to oust Aristide who fled to the Central African Republic and has since moved to South Africa.

This past week the African Union’s chairman has called the Caribbean island of Haiti “an African country outside Africa” and said the Union is ready and willing to help restore democracy there, after the president was deposed last year.

Chairman Alpha Oumar Konare said that “The AU wants to help create conditions in which a new government can be democratically elected in Haiti.”

He added, “We want to create a framework for non-violent national dialogue and a situation where none of the political forces are excluded.”

Konare, who visited Haiti in December, made the announcements after meeting in South Africa with that country’s President Thabo Mbeki and ousted Haitian President Jean Bertrand Aristide, who has now settled there.

Mainstream reporting on the horrors going on in Haiti since the February 2004 coup have all but fried up. Yet paramilitary death squads, killings by police, and jailing without legal cause or counsel are all in evidence. However, as recently reported by Free Speech Radio News a systematic campaign of political repression and assassination is underway aimed at Aristide’s Lavalas Party, often committed directly by the Haitian National Police (HNP), and in some cases by the UN forces (MINUSTAH) accompanying them.

The manipulation of Haitian non-governmental organizations (NGOs) by US organizations supported by the US government reveals how governments prepare for mass murder and the crushing of democracy. In the four years prior to Aristide’s ousting the US had successfully brought in a halt from North America and the EU of all aid, totalling $650 million, strangling the already impoverished nation.

The University of Miami has conducted a study on the effect of aid in Haiti from the USAID-supported International Foundation for Electoral Systems (IFES): Extensive interviews with staff of CARLI, a Haitian human rights organization, revealed that IFES funded CARLI during the lead-up to the ouster of Aristide — with technical support and as much as $54,000 during 2003. CARLI staff revealed that it was instructed to provide lists of alleged Lavalas human rights violators, which were then read out on Haitian commercial radio. (Twenty of the twenty-five commercial stations and several of the Haitian daily and weekly newspapers are owned by members of the “184” anti-Aristide coalition which is led by a US-born sweatshop owner.) It is now feared that these lists have been used since the coup to target Lavalas leaders for summary arrest, attacks on property, and even death. With IFES funding slowly removed during 2004, CARLI began to report on fraudulent human rights cases put forward by the government, and on violent campaigns against Lavalas and other community groups who refused to endorse the removal of Aristide. It investigated the claim of Latortue that Lavalas had ordered decapitation of police officers in a campaign dubbed “Operation Baghdad.” These accusations were picked up and spread uncritically by Haitian and US media.

Haiti has a new dictator, its so called interim prime minister, Gerard Latortue, installed by the US like so many other well known cretins such as Chile’s Pinochet and Zaire’s Mobutu. The question is will he hang around as long as that other feared US installed despot “Baby Doc” Duvalier, the man Aristide finally took over from in 1990.

For more on Haiti and its current plight, click here and to keep up to date with all the latest developments on this strife torn island, visit www.HatiAction.net

Readers of the little red email are no strangers to tales of corporate fraud. It should come as no surprise to hear that pharmaceutical companies are frequently in the thick of such stories of greed and malpractice. Every 10 years the worst industrial offenders are published in “The 100 Corporate Criminals of the Decade”. This list is the antithesis of the Fortune 500, and contains only those companies who have pled guilty or no contest to the crimes of which they are accused. The list is dominated by crimes against the environment and antitrust issues, but the food and drug agencies are not far behind as our New Zealand-based medical correspondent, Dr Jim explains.

Genentech Inc. for example, was fined $30 million in 1999 for aggressively marketing Protropin, a synthetic human growth hormone, to doctors and hospitals for use in the treatment of various medical conditions for which it had not received FDA approval. Protropin also happened to be one of the companies more lucrative products. The company paid the criminal fine and $20 million in civil penalties.

Copley Pharmaceutical, Inc. was charged with conspiracy to defraud the FDA in 1997. Its crimes included changing manufacturing methods from those approved by the FDA, falsifying batch records to cover up the manufacturing deviations, submitting false annual reports to the FDA, and failing to seek approval for their manufacturing process. They agreed to pay a fine of $10.65 million.

The Warner-Lambert Company, a Fortune 500 pharmaceutical manufacturer, pled guilty to a felony count in 1995 after fraudulently failing to notify the FDA about persistent drug stability problems with Dilantin, a widely used anti-epileptic medication. They agreed to pay a fine of $10 million.

These examples a drop in the proverbial medicine bottle, and each had the potential for serious adverse consequences to the consumer. Few people appreciate the full scope and consequences of the pharmaceutical industry’s hold on health care systems around the globe. Prescription drug costs are rising at 19% per year. This increase is wholly unsustainable, and is not justified despite the drug companies cries to the contrary.

It is appreciated that developing and manufacturing drugs is an expensive business. As a medical student I was taught that an individual drug would cost tens of millions to develop to the point of clinical trials. Sometimes as few as 1 in 10 drugs that made it through development would actually see full production. Frequently problems occurred, forcing the abandonment of millions of pounds worth of research. This is all true to an extent, but it is in the bigger picture that the details lie.

A typical pharmaceutical corporation will spend two to three times as much on marketing as they do on research and development. In 2000 GlaxoSmithKline spent 37% of its revenues on marketing and administration, and only 14% on research and development. They cleared a 28% profit. Overall, the pharmaceutical industry is by far the most profitable in the USA at this time.

Far from being a glowing example of the free market, the pharmaceutical industry enjoys many government protections and subsidies. In addition to being able to benefit from publicly funded research, they are also permitted large tax breaks to off set development costs. I have previously written about the practice of “drug dumping” which creates even more financial gain

Unfortunately doctors are not blameless in this equation. Drug companies have spent over $8 billion dollars, and employed 83,000 sales representatives in the last year to convince us to use their products. They provide drug name branded pens, paper, coffee cups etc to ensure that their brand comes to mind first when it is time to write that prescription.

The companies fund and thereby influence much of the continuing medical education that doctors receive. This ranges from the five minute talk before a lunchtime meeting to whole conferences paid for by drug companies. Recently a group of doctors have formed an organisation called “No Free Lunch” They believe that pharmaceutical promotion should not guide clinical practice, and that over-zealous promotional practices can lead to bad patient care. Their goal is to encourage health care practitioners to provide high quality care based on unbiased evidence rather than on biased pharmaceutical promotion. They are fast winning support amongst the medical community.

Prescription drugs are not like discretionary consumer products. For many they represent not just continuing good health, but survival. The little red email is of the opinion that it is time to take a hard look at the pharmaceutical industry and hold it accountable for its actions.

So the farce is over. The shoddy mock up of an election was, in the little red email’s cynical view, an attempt to satisfy the American public that the mission in Iraq is a worthwhile one, and to hoodwink the Iraqis into thinking they have a say in their government.

Indeed, on closer inspection, this ‘democratic milestone for the region’ as the mainstream portrayed it, was nothing short of a sham. Here are some statistics that prove the ridiculous excuse of an election seen eight days ago. The 129 United Nations officials tasked with ensuring the election was fair were all based in the Green Zone in Baghdad, that little fast food haven that is where most Americans are holed up as the country moved beyond the Americans’ grasp a long, long time ago. More ridiculously, the 1200 other international election observers were based in Jordan, some 1,200 km from Baghdad throughout the election.

If they couldn’t turn up for fear of their own safety, what chance of a good turnout for this, the first election in Iraq for more than 50 years?

At the outset, the Iraqi electoral commission was decidedly bullish, saying turnout was a very credible 72% — a figure plastered across the US’ headlines triumphantly. That bullish stance, however, soon turned to bullshit. The commission back-pedalled the following day, suggesting a 60% turnout was more realistic. The odd rolling news channel picked up on this statement, but still the all important 72% figure was on most Americans’ minds. Then, admitting the sheer hopelessness of having any chance of predicting turnouts in this most haphazard of democratic procedures, the commission said, almost under its breath, it had no clue how many people turned out. This fact, though, was barely mentioned in the media who also skirted around the depressing fact that the day of the election had seen the most suicide bombers in one day ever in the Middle East.

The whole process is really just to mollify the US public and prevent the Shia from joining the insurgency. It is an election for an interim government to replace the interim government that replaced the interim government. As a democratic act it counts for very little. Most Iraqis want the US occupation of their country to end. Yet, whatever government is appointed will be totally reliant on the US to ensure its policies are carried out, as well as for cash for a long time coming.

With unemployment up near 50%, oil exports down from the pre-war, post-12 years of sanctions all-time low point, electricity supplies similarly locked in a downward spiral and currently averaging one-hour a day in some parts of Baghdad, and 12-hour queues for petrol, things don’t look to hopeful on the tax revenue front in the short term. No economy means no taxes. This revenue situation not is going to be helped one iota by the current and coming health crises caused by the ongoing violence, lack of clean water, money, food and a countryside littered with depleted uranium and cluster bomblets.

In short, Iraq is totally dependent on the US for money, and rather importantly, the US retains a budget oversight over where and on what their funds are spent in Iraq.

One the bigger democratic picture, if the 12 years of sanctions and Operation Iraqi Freedom teaches us anything, it’s this: if the US doesn’t like Iraq’s government, the US will get rid of it.

Any hopes the Iraqis may be entertaining for a US pull-out are set to be dashed: the US is already constructing 14 permanent military bases across the nation — the Yanks are digging in for the long haul, or should that be digging for oil!

Talking of which, the media has been very slow to pick up on the carve-up of the oil reserves in the country. Back in December, the interim Iraqi finance minister, Abdel Mahdi, held a very low key press conference where he revealed that the ‘interim’ government was drafting new laws to open Iraq’s national oil company to private foreign investment, essentially privatizing it and selling it to US & UK companies. Companies would get both “downstream” and “maybe even upstream” oil investment, ie the right to sell Iraqi oil and own it underground. “So I think this is very promising to the American investors and to American enterprise, certainly to oil companies,” he said in what gets our vote as the understatement of 2004. Currently vying for projects are Condi’s old firm, ChevronTexaco, ExxonMobil and UK-based firms BP and Shell.

Mahdi looks set to stay in government too: he is running as a Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution (SCIR) representative, the leading Shi’ite party and a member of the United Iraqi Alliance (UIA) list, backed by Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, and currently leading in the election. The UIA also contains the Iraqi National Council, led by our old friend, convicted fraudster and former-CIA asset, Ahmed Chalabi.

• For the best view on the elections in Iraq it is always rather hard to beat the Guardian’s cartoonist extraordinaire, Steve Bell. Here he is with Michelangelo and Torture on his mind.

More and more of the Pentagon’s time is spent in spreading disinformation, as it continues to usurp roles traditionally played by the Central Intelligence Agency. Many troops are now trained in information warfare, running “informational” websites. The Defense Department already runs two overseas websites, one aimed at people in the Balkan region in Europe called Southeast European Times, the other for the Maghreb area of North Africa.

It is preparing another site, even as the Pentagon inspector general investigates whether the sites are appropriate.

The webmasters are somewhat different to Canned Revolution’s, being trained in such arts as battlefield deception. The Pentagon maintains that the websites are there to counter “misinformation” about the United States in overseas media.

They are very misleading though. At first glance it is by no means clear that they are propaganda tools of the Defense Department, looking akin to typical independent media sites. A visitor would have to click on a small link — at the bottom of the page — to a disclaimer, which says, in part, that the site is “sponsored by” the US Department of Defense.

“There is an element of deception,” said Tom Rosenstiel, director of the Project for Excellence in Journalism. “The problem,” he said, is that it looks like a news site unless a visitor looks at the disclaimer, which is “sort of oblique.”

The Defense Department has hired more than 50 freelance writers for the sites via a private contractor called Anteon Corp who make billions acting as the federal government’s mouthpiece across a range of departments.

The Pentagon maintains that the information on the sites is true and accurate. But in a recent memo, Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz insisted that the Web site contractor should only hire journalists who “will not reflect discredit on the US government.”

There’s embedded journalists and then there’s in-pocketed journalists. Fair and balanced? We think not.

The White House has vehemently denied reports from Canned Revolution that US president, George W Bush, has been kidnapped on a secret trip to Iraq to visit the troops.

A photograph of the 58-year-old Bush, looking as if he had sustained a head injury, with a rifle pointing at him, was posted on the Canned Revolution website late Sunday night causing a frenzy across the Pacific in Washington

A government spokesman told a hastily arranged press conference: “The president is safe and sound. It looks to me, on closer inspection of the picture, that those idiots at Canned Revolution have finally had a chance to use their Bush doll,” he said, in a reference to Special Ops Cody, a doll manufactured in California, that appeared in Arabic surroundings on a website, sent in by a group calling themselves Mujahedeen Brigades, who claimed they had captured a real live soldier.

Canned Revolution quickly realized that the likely source of such a bizarre tale could only be from the Pentagon in a bid to deflect from the daily tales of woe emanating from Iraq. And yes, we have been waiting for ages to introduce our own George the Aviator doll!

The latest weapon destined for those freedom loving folk of Iraq fries skin via microwaves. But, hey, at least it doesn’t contain depleted uranium. A vehicle, dubbed Sheriff, has been developed that contains what military geeks have termed with no sense of irony, an Active Denial System, which uses millimetre-wave electromagnetic energy that can be hit targets up to a kilometre away. Those unfortunate enough to be hit by this weapon will immediately feel their skin burning. It’s kind of a red hot version of the old high powered water hose crowd clearing technique.

Still, this weapon is not nearly as crazy as one that was mulled a decade ago. Just released classified documents show further details about the so called “sex bomb” or “gay bomb”. Taking the adage make love not war literally, defence scientists spent considerable time developing a chemical weapon with aphrodisiac qualities that would make enemy soldiers hopelessly, physically attractive to one another so as to paralyze their ranks and destroy morale.

“They’ve had some ideas that have been pretty nuts,” said Edward Hammond, head of the Sunshine Project, which posts dozens of government documents it has fought to declassify under the Freedom of Information Act. The latest release is called “Harassing, Annoying and ‘Bad Guy’ Identifying Chemicals,” dated 1994, which details proposals for non-lethal weaponry by Wright Laboratory at Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio.

Aside from the love bomb, other proposals in the declassified document include a chemical that would make the enemy’s breath so bad he would stand out in a crowd of civilians, and one that would make the enemy attractive not to other humans, but to angry wasps and other predatory insects.

Of course, as Dubya should know given his spurious reasons for invading Iraq, any development of chemical weapons is illegal.

A hotchpotch of stuff we’ve found and enjoyed recently on the Weird Wide Web.

Get your lovely T-shirts while they’re hot!
Everybody loves a winner. Nobody likes a loser. Nobody likes to be a loser. So with this in mind, Canned Revolution have set it up so that you can now buy your own Canned Revolution T-Shirt, and pretend that you won it in our competition. We’ll back up any claims to being a lucky winner by anyone who purchases a freshly tinned t-shirt to help the cause.

Owning your own Canned Revolution shirt could be a great way of life for you — imagine the friends, the opportunities, the fame, the copious offers of gratuitous sex.

Don’t delay! Buy your way into coolness today by clicking here.

 

If you fancy your luck, on the other hand...
You could try our latest competition! Yes, that’s right: another chance to be cool for free. Head on over to here to try your luck in our latest revolutionary contest.

 

High turnout despite insurgents’ threats encourages US
No, we’re not talking about Iraq, although it sounds a lot like we are, doesn’t it?

US Encouraged by Vietnam Vote
Officials Cite 83% Turnout despite Vietcong Terror
Peter Grose, The New York Times, September 4, 1967

WASHINGTON, Sept. 3 — United States officials were surprised and heartened today at the size of turnout in South Vietnam’s presidential election despite a Vietcong terrorist campaign to disrupt the voting.
According to reports from Saigon, 83 per cent of the 5.85 million registered voters cast their ballots yesterday. Many of them risked reprisals threatened by the Vietcong.
The size of the popular vote and the inability of the Vietcong to destroy the election machinery were the two salient facts in a preliminary assessment of the nation election based on the incomplete returns reaching here.
Pending more detailed reports, neither the State Department nor the White House would comment on the balloting or the victory of the military candidates, Lieut. Gen. Nguyen Van Thieu, who was running for president, and Premier Nguyen Cao Ky, the candidate for vice president.
A successful election has long been seen as the keystone in President Johnson’s policy of encouraging the growth of constitutional processes in South Vietnam . The election was the culmination of a constitutional development that began in January, 1966, to which President Johnson gave his personal commitment when he met Premier Ky and General Thieu, the chief of state, in Honolulu in February.
The purpose of the voting was to give legitimacy to the Saigon Government, which has been founded only on coups and power plays since November, 1963, when President Ngo Dinh Diem was overthrown by a military junta.
Few members of that junta are still around, most having been ousted or exiled in subsequent shifts of power.

Significance Not Diminished
The fact that the backing of the electorate has gone to the generals who have been ruling South Vietnam for the last two years does not, in the Administration’s view, diminish the significance of the constitutional step that has been taken.
The hope here is that the new government will be able to maneuver with a confidence and legitimacy long lacking in South Vietnamese politics. That hope could have been dashed either by a small turnout, indicating widespread scorn or a lack of interest in constitutional development, or by the Vietcong’s disruption of the balloting.
American officials had hoped for an 80 per cent turnout. That was the figure in the election in September for the Constituent Assembly.
Seventy-eight per cent of the registered voters went to the polls in elections for local officials last spring.
Before the results of the presidential election started to come in, the American officials warned that the turnout might be less than 80 per cent because the polling place would be open for two or three hours less than in the election a year ago. The turnout of 83 per cent was a welcome surprise. The turnout in the 1964 United States Presidential election was 62 per cent.
Captured documents and interrogations indicated in the last week a serious concern among Vietcong leaders that a major effort would be required to render the election meaningless. This effort has not succeeded, judging from the reports from Saigon.

So perhaps it’s not time to open the Champagne for the world’s newest enforced democracy just yet after all, lest history repeat itself. The little red email can’t help but be reminded by the above article to wish all our readers a very Happy Tet festival this week!

 

Best buds
If “Dear Leader” Kim Jong-il of North Korea and George W. Bush ever meet, we suspect the two will bond like long-lost brothers. Both men are first-born sons of powerful fathers who partied like adolescents well into their adult lives, after which they submitted to their dynastic fates as heads of state.

For more from Slate’s Jack Shafer’s article headlined the Propaganda President, click here.

 

British defence ministry won’t rule out alien life: report
Undaunted by the lack of evidence, officials at the British defence ministry are refusing to rule out the existence of alien life forms visiting Earth, the Financial Times reported Thursday.

It quoted from a hitherto confidential letter by an official acknowledging the ministry recorded accounts of people claiming to have seen alien life in Britain.
According to the letter, obtained under recent legislation on freedom of information, such reports are collected “solely to establish whether what was seen might have some defence significance.”

While admitting that “only a handful of reports in recent years have warranted further investigation and none revealed an evidence of a threat,” it went on say the ministry was “totally open-minded” about the hypothesis of alien life.

Two weeks ago an anonymous caller reported seeing “strange lights” above Kent, southeast England, while another claimed to have seen a flying saucer sailing above Stoke, central England.

The defence ministry said such calls were only a fraction of the thousands it has recorded. It noted that there were 88 UFO sightings recorded last year.

 

Those who do not learn from history…
… are condemned to repeat it. The little red email thinks Ann Coulter is definitely going to have to repeat the Vietnam war after this poor showing. Which may one of the reasons why she was so gung ho about Invasion Iraq. It should give our Canadian readers a chuckle, though.

 

Now you see it … now you float
A picture says a thousand words as the old cliché goes. These two certainly say more than a hundred energy company-funded ‘global warming evidence is inconclusive’ reports. The Muir Glacier in Alaska, as it was in 1941 (left) and in 2004.

 

What really went on at the WTC
The World Trade Center’s demise is given the whatreallyhappened.com treatment. Essential viewing.

 

Keeping up with the Jones’
Alex Jones’ Newest Documentary, Martial Law looks at the post 9-11 police state that the US has become. View the Trailer.

 

The Colonel’s secret ingredient: metal
KFC, the fast food chain that isn’t allowed to call itself Kentucky Fried Chicken by law any more, is being sued for $1 million for ruining a customer’s sex life. No, it wasn’t the cholesterol from the grease that did it. New Yorker John Bacchi choked so hard on a piece of metal in a KFC meal that he tore a muscle in his groin, and wasn’t able to have sex for six months. We knew it wasn’t chicken they were serving at KFC, but metal sure comes as a surprise.

 

That rarest of specimens: an honest estate agent
Oslo, Norway (AP) — A Norwegian real estate investor tired of glowing but inaccurate property advertisements opted for blunt honesty in offering an apartment for sale.

“Gruesome two-room apartment with balcony,” said the advertisement posted on the Finn.no Internet portal this week. “A very worn-out apartment.” Some Norwegian real estate brokers exaggerate wildly in their advertisements, describing, for example, a total ruin as a “charming fixer-upper.” Or they can try to make the location seem more attractive than it is, such as one house “on a quiet side street.” The side street was quiet, but the four-lane super highway on the other side was less so.

Arne Leo Soerlie, a professional real estate investor, said he had wasted so much time because of such advertisements that he wanted to be truthful to spare others the same irritation.

“I’ve learned to read between the lines, but still end up wasting a lot of time,” he told the AP on Thursday. “I wanted people to know what to expect. I’d rather that they found it better than expected.”

He said he has rented out the Oslo apartment for five or six years, and that it now needs total refurbishment.

This appears to be a case of honesty being the best policy. Soerlie said he already has an offer on the apartment.

 

A tale of two mobiles
This week we bring you two depressing tales on the continuing encroachment of mobile phones into daily life: is there no limit to their intrusion?

Dog and bone: phone
A new mobile phone has been specially developed — for dogs. The bone-shaped device fits on the collar and will go on sale later this year, reports the Mirror.

Top-of-the-range versions will incorporate a camera to show absent owners what their pets are up to. It they are seen to be misbehaving, the owner can dial a number and shout commands such as: “Bad dog”.

Cameron Robb, director of PetsMobility and inventor of the PetsCell phone, said it could also be used to find lost dogs. He is due to sign a multi-million pound contract to produce them.

Beverley Cuddy, editor of Dogs Today, said: “I think there’s a market. People already talk to their dogs on the phone.”

Man sends text message in his sleep
A man from Swansea has discovered he sends text messages in his sleep. Richard Griffiths, 23, has sent a series of messages — one even mirroring a nightmare he was having. He said: “I text so much it’s second nature. But I was still freaked out.”

He sent his first message to his mum at 2am, 18 months ago reports The Sun. A few months later he sent a text to his friend Ashley Jones saying: “Help, I’m in trouble, someone’s chasing me.” Ashley immediately rang back — and spoke to Richard who revealed he had been dreaming. Another text, referring to the Jungle Book film he had seen with two young relatives, read: “Baloo have you seen Bagheera?”

Sleep expert Professor Chris Idzikowski said: “I have not heard of this before but it is entirely plausible — and possibly a sign of the modern age.”

 

The Little Red Email Osama bin Laden Sweepstakes Shirt Contest!
Well we had been for sometime advocating that Osama bin Laden would be paraded in front of the US public for a little publicity boost. Time ran out for the little red email, but not for you. We guessed October 23rd for a pre-election Osama... and we feel a mite foolish, although Osama did show up on video. If you fancy a free Canned Revolution t-shirt, why not sign up. There is of course much speculation that Osama was caught ages ago and now is stewing in jail awaiting his upcoming moment in front of the cameras. Now, by simply guessing the date of Osama’s media debut as a US prisoner you can win a t-shirt. Send your expected date of bin Laden’s first television appearance as an American prisoner to osamasweepstakes@cannedrevolution.com. May you be luckier than us.