New Internationalist articles from July 2003

New Internationalist archives from July 2003

From this month's editor.
July 1, 2003... CORPORATE crime tends to come in waves. Sure, it's always there in the background -- a lurking possibility. But like other kinds of crime it is a crime of opportunity. So the development of new markets, new products, new territories in which to...

Southern exposure.(Brief Article)
July 1, 2003... A MAN looks out on his A new home from a ship carrying migrant people. The ship is travelling along the Yangtze River, from Chongqing Municipality to Chongmiong Island, Shanghai. The Three Gorges dam ha been a pet Chinese leaders, including...

Cuba hurts. (Eduardo Galeano's View from The South).
July 1, 2003... The recent wave of executions and arrests in Cuba is very good news for the universal superpower which remains obsessed with removing this persistent thorn from its paw. But it is very bad news, and very sad, for those of us who admired the...

The long road to reunification: South Korea had never looked so favourably at reuniting with the North--but then the US resumed raking over the Cold War coals. (Currents: Korea).
July 1, 2003... ON l5 June 2000 -- 10 days before the 50th anniversary of the start of the Korean War -- the leaders of South and North Korea capped off an historic summit with a declaration to work towards peaceful reunification. In August there was a...

Russia abducts justice in Chechnya. (Currents).(Brief Article)
July 1, 2003... Even Chechnya's pro-Moscow authorities have joined the chorus of anger over the escalating abduction of ordinary Chechens by Russian soldiers. In February this year, Chechen official Sheiakhmed Abdurakhmano told a Chechen newspaper that 1,178...

The real cost of a prawn sandwich. (Currents).(Brief Article)
July 1, 2003... Recent reports by the British-based Environmental Justice Association and the US-based Wild Aid argue that it is fishing -- rather than global warming or pollution -- that poses the greatest short-term threat to marine biodiversity. Profiling...

X-rays of Guantanamo Bay. (Currents).(Brief Article)
July 1, 2003... The US has still not disclosed the identity or even the number of people it is holding for interrogation about terrorist links at its naval base in Guantanomo Bay, Cuba. And while reports estimate that as many as 660 people from 42 countries --...

Sweatshop art. (Currents).(Brief Article)
July 1, 2003... Just around the corner from Burma's Mandalay Palace, the 28 women workers at the Man Swe Gon factory hunch over bamboo tables for more than 12 hours per day, 6 days per week, to make kaliga (hand-made embroidered tapestry). These fine works of...

Peace/Propaganda. (Word Corner).(Brief Article)
July 1, 2003... The words peace, pact, pay and propaganda do not at first sight appear to have anything in common -- but they do. They can be traced back to the Indo-European root pug - or pak-meaning 'fix', 'fasten' or 'agree'. A pact is an agreement or...

Legally lethal: Indonesian military get the go-ahead to gun down human rights. (Currents: Indonesia).
July 1, 2003... ON 19 May this year, the Indonesian Government declared martial law in its northwest province of Aceh following the collapse of peace talks in Tokyo. The Indonesian military (TNI) -- now in charge of the province -- claims to be targeting the...

Nancy Olivieri's six-year struggle with a Canadian drug company illustrates how truth, justice and the Western way is the rhetoric of Superman comics. (Seriously).(Brief Article)
July 1, 2003... Nancy Olivieri's six-year struggle with a canadian drug company illustrates how truth, justice and the Western way is the rhetoric of Superman comics. Dr Olivieri is a professor of medicine at the university of Toronto and a specialist in the...

Corporate crime wave. (Corporate Crime/Keynote).
July 1, 2003... The recent wave of US business corruption is just the tip of a very slippery iceberg. Richard Swift plays private detective to find out how the corporate crooks get away with it and what we can do to stop them. 'I CAN'T believe they got...

Are they sorry? Few people doubt the devastation giant corporations leave in their wake. But are they sorry? Here is what some of them have to say. Judge for yourself.(Brief Article)
July 1, 2003... 'This rule gave government agents blanket discretion to blacklist federal contractors based on subjective and arbitrary notions of satisfactory compliance with any federal, state or even foreign law.' Randy Johnson, Vice-President of the...

The invisible friend: investors are irresponsible. Corporations are amoral. Harry Glasbeek puts two and two together. (The Legal Fiction).
July 1, 2003... PUBLICLY TRADED corporations: they are everywhere. They talk to us. They support political causes, parties and politicians. They sponsor opera, ballet, theatre, tennis, football, hospitals and universities. They are renaissance operations. They...

Megacrime scenes. (Mega-Projects).
July 1, 2003... Ambitious mega-projects provide ample opportunity for corporate crime - from fraud and bribery to human-rights abuses. Pratap Chatterjee fears that Iraqis may be the next 'beneficiaries'. THIS March, while US tanks were rumbling across the...

Corporate crime wave the facts.
July 1, 2003... Corporate criminality comes in all shapes ** sizes. It is seldom punished and then only throu** fines. Criminal proceedings are rare. NI surveys **errain. GREAT CORPORATE CRIMES * Fifty years ago British researchers Doll and Hill...

Lies and videotape: Stephanie Boyd asks how corporate malefactors avoided justice in Peru when the evidence was right there for all to see on Peruvian reality TV. (Bribery).
July 1, 2003... THREE years ago a candid-camera extravaganza in Peru gave the public a never-before glimpse of corruption in action -- a prime time smoking-gun broadcast throughout the country which incriminated political and corporate elites. But the keepers...

Confessions of a hedge fund analyst: Sheelah Moore bails out of a world where luck is more important than brains. (Casino Capitalism).
July 1, 2003... A YEAR-AND-A-HALF ago there was an opportunity to make money on the shares of a troubled energy company. Enron was being taken over by Dynegy and the bonds were trading cheap. I thought it sounded crazy -- Enron was clearly bankrupt -- but the...

Where did all the money go?
July 1, 2003... Seemed like that 1990s' bull market was just never going to stop. But it did. And it wasn't pretty for lots of folks. They lost their jobs or were suckered into putting their retirement nest egg into a 'sure thing'. Some of that wealth just...

Stock swindle: Ellen Frank believes that insider trading is just business-as-usual in the market that never closes. (Market Manipulation).
July 1, 2003... IN the bad old days of rugged, unrestrained capitalism, Wall Street was virtually synonymous with. lawful thievery. Stock trading was the province of cold-blooded insiders. Wall Street was a place where shrewd operators fleeced the unwary piker...

Stop the rot at the top corporate crimebusters. (Action).
July 1, 2003... Change the rules Challenge to corporate personhood -- the Program on Corporations, Law and Democracy (POCLAD) challenges the notion that corporations have a legal personhood which protects the people who run them and own them from...

The Tongan Royal Family. (Worldbeaters).
July 1, 2003... IF the Guinness Book of Records is anything to go by, the tiny. South Pacific Kingdom of Tonga has two claims to fame. First, a tortoise given to the royal family by Captain Cook that lived for nearly two centuries. And second, the world's...

Protest websites. (Mixed Media).(Brief Article)
July 1, 2003... by Various If any good has come out of the Iraqi crisis it's the way in which millions of people worldwide have protested. The web has played an enormous role in this organization. Among musicians, some have spoken out in real time --...

Exile. (Mixed Media).(Sound Recording Review)
July 1, 2003... by Gilad Atzmon & the Orient House Ensemble (Enjo Records TIP 888 844-296 CD) For jazz enthusiasts who feel that their listening sometimes lacks a little passion comes Exile, an album that doesn't mince its words. 'This album is a...

Unknown Pleasures. (Mixed Media).(Movie Review)
July 1, 2003... directed by Jia Zhang-Ke Datong in contemporary China is a town of wasteland and new roads, of haves and have-nots, of community fracture. Xiao Ji and Bin Bin are unemployed - the state textile plants have gone, or are going, bust. They...

A Sunday at the Pool in Kigali. (Mixed Media).(Book Review)
July 1, 2003... by Gil Courtemanche (Canongate, ISBN 184195 433 0) Gil Courtemanche's debut novel, a bestseller on its publication in his native Canada, is a barely fictionalized account of Rwanda in the days leading up to the 1994 genocide...

One No, Many Yeses: A Journey to the Heart of the Global Resistance Movement. (Mixed Media).(Book Review)
July 1, 2003... by Paul Kingsnorth (The Free Press, ISBN 0-7432-2026-9) Whatever its proponents tell you to the contrary, the neoliberal model of economic globalization results in a net flow of capital from poor countries to rich. Since the 1970s the...

Exorcising Terror: The Incredible Unending Trial of General Augusto Pinochet. (Mixed Media).(Book Review)
July 1, 2003... by Ariel Dorfman (Seven Stories Press, ISBN 1 58322 540 0) On 16 October 1998, to the delight of millions and the fury of his unsavoury pals such as Margaret Thatcher, the former dictator of Chile, Augusto Pinochet, was arrested in...

Making waves: Bharat Dogra talked to Jeremy Seabrook.
July 1, 2003... 'How can a country which talks so much about freedom lock up a larger proportion of its people than any other in the world? On all the social indices, the US pays a heavy social price for its supremacy. How can a society so wracked by violence...

Reclaiming globalization: our task is not to overthrow globalization but to capture it. That's the only way we can bring democracy to the structures of global governance. (Essay).
July 1, 2003... All DEMOCRATIC movements encounter at some point in their development a fundamental conflict. They become torn between the need to remain inclusive enough not to alienate sections of their membership and the recognition that to be politically...

Guatemala. (Country Profile).
July 1, 2003... PEACE is not just something that you sign on paper: it needs to be built,' is a frequent comment by Guatemalan human-rights activists. Although it is nearly seven years since peace accords were signed, officially ending 36 years of armed...

Letters.(Letter to the Editor)
July 1, 2003... The New Internationalist welcomes your Letters. But please keep them short. They may be edited for purposes of space or clarity. Letters should be sent to Letters@newint.org or to your Local NI office. Please remember to include a town and...

US information service Bloomberg recently reported how Paul Bremer, the top US official in Baghdad. (Seriously).(Brief Article)
July 1, 2003... US information service Bloomberg recently reported how Paul Bremer, the top us official in Baghdad, took time out to hand out soccer balls to young Iraqi footballers at a looted Baghdad stadium recently. He said he was determined to ensure that...