Nader: no corporate money for Presidential debates

By Jill Zuckman

Washington, DC, June 19— Attempting to derail the fall’s presidential debates, Ralph Nader will file a complaint in Boston’s US District Court today, charging that the Federal Election Commission (FEC) is violating the law by allowing corporations to underwrite an important aspect of the presidential campaign.

Anheuser-Busch, AT&T, Sun Microsystems, Yahoo, 3Com, and other businesses are helping pay for the fall debates, the first of which will take place in Boston.

However, since 1907, federal law has prohibited corporations from contributing financially to candidates for Congress and president. Even so, the FEC issued regulations making an exception for corporations to fund the debates through the Commission on Presidential Debates, a nonprofit corporation that has run the candidate forums the last three presidential elections.

Nader, a Green Party presidential candidate, is asking the court for an injunction to invalidate the FEC regulations, an injunction he hopes will ultimately force the debate commission to return all of its corporate contributions.

“They couldn’t write that check for Bush directly and they couldn’t write that check for Gore directly, but they’re allowed to write a check to a collaborative Bush-Gore effort to advance their own campaigns and to exclude competitors to advance their own campaigns,’’ Nader said in an interview. “It’s like a double-header. They get tremendous media out of this.’’

The first debate, between Vice President Al Gore and Texas Governor George W. Bush, is scheduled to take place Oct. 3 at the John F. Kennedy Library. Nader and other candidates for president, such as Patrick J. Buchanan of the Reform Party, have been excluded.

A second debate is scheduled at Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, NC, and a third will take place at Washington University in St. Louis.

The major party vice presidential candidates will square off at Center College in Danville, Ky.

Whether Nader will be successful at derailing the debates remains to be seen. A similar lawsuit was filed in New York by the Libertarian Party. At the Commission on Presidential Debates, executive director Janet H. Brown called the lawsuit “old news.’’ “We’ve been challenged every cycle and our position has prevailed every cycle,’’ said Brown.

Attorneys for Nader say they will succeed where others have failed because they are sticking to a narrow but clear point of law. Also, they point out that when Ross Perot challenged the debates in 1996, the US Circuit Court of Appeals in Washington said the claim against the FEC regulations was not properly brought and a decision on the merits would have to be left for another day.

The Nader legal team also hopes to bolster its case by pointing to a 1980 warning by the FEC to the League of Women Voters. Then, the FEC said the League could not use corporate donations to put on the presidential debates unless they included every candidate for president.

Gregory Luke, a lawyer for Nader and the Green Party at the National Voting Rights Institute in Cambridge, said corporate money should be excised from the debates because it gives corporations undue influence over the candidates.

“We’re kidding ourselves if we think industries that give all this money to support major party candidates don’t have a disproportionate say in shaping the laws that affect us all,’’ said Luke.

Scott P. Lewis, an attorney at Palmer and Dodge who is also representing Nader, likened the debates to a “Bud bowl,’’ referring to a publicity campaign for Anheuser-Busch’s top product, Budweiser beer.

But Brown said the only thing corporate sponsors receive for their donations is a few tickets to sit in the audience and watch the debates as they take place.

“No donor who contributes to us has anything to do with the debates themselves, the format, the decision on candidate participation, or any other substantive issue,’’ said Brown. She also said the amount of the contributions is still being negotiated, although the lawsuit puts the price tag in the millions of dollars.

Source: Boston Globe

Albright speech disrupted at Boston graduation

Boston, Massachusetts, June 19— On Saturday, June 17, US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright spoke at the graduation ceremonies of Northeastern University in Boston and received an honorary degree. Outside of the building where the graduation ceremony was being held, about twenty-five to thirty people held signs and distributed over 1,000 leaflets to the huge crowd of Northeastern graduates and their families attending the event; the leaflets detailed Albright’s horrible human rights record, highlighting sanctions on Iraq and military aid to Colombia in particular.

Using bullhorns, speakers emphasized that the activists gathered were not there to ruin anyone’s graduation, but to challenge the US government’s abominable human rights record as represented by Albright’s actions while in office.

Twelve activists from Mobilization for Survival and the Colombia Support Network who managed to get tickets from sympathetic people with extras went into the graduation ceremony. Apparently hoping to prevent the sort of disruptions that have happened when she has spoken, Albright started her speech while about a thousand people were still waiting to get in the building as everyone was made to walk through a metal detector and have their bags searched. Her speech got disrupted anyway. Four banners were dropped from balconies as she spoke and received her degree. The first banner, displayed as she began her speech, read “Iraq sanctions = weapons of mass destruction.” Next, a banner that read “Sanctions will kill fourteen Iraqi children during this commencement” was unfurled as Albright was finishing her speech, followed by “No Blood for Oil” as she received her honorary degree. The last banner, which read “Stop US Guns to Colombia” was displayed just afterwards. Ten of the twelve activists inside were escorted out; no one was arrested.

Source: Ainfos: www.ainfos.ca

Government restricts rights of Mumia activists

Brooklyn, NY, June 6— Today was definitely not business as usual as thirty chanting supporters of Mumia Abu-Jamal marched into the US Parole and Probation Office in Brooklyn.

People had come out to protest the restrictions placed on eight activists by a federal judge that are designed to stop their work for justice for Abu-Jamal, a political prisoner on Pennsylvania’s death row. Three of the restricted activists were present: C. Clark Kissinger, Frances Goldin, and Mitchel Cohen. Their restrictions include having to surrender their passports, no travel without permission, visits to their homes by probation officers, and no contact with convicted felons – meaning, of course, Mumia.

“They’re doing to us is what they did in South Africa during the apartheid regime, where they ‘banned’ people to stay in their village, not allowed to travel anywhere or have connections with the political movement. They’re trying to create banned people here, and we’re refusing to be banned,” said Clark Kissinger. Kissinger announced Tuesday that he would not comply with the orders of US probation officials.

Dennis Brutus, former political prisoner in South Africa, sent the following message: “As someone who suffered various restraints in South Africa, including loss of passport, restraint of travel, investigations by Secret Police and imprisonment in South Africa, I am profoundly troubled to see Apartheid replicated in the United States. This is cause for unified and persistent protest until these processes are ended.”

June 6 was the deadline for Clark to turn in the pages of forms that the probation services demanded. He didn’t. In fact, the Probation Office was so unstrung by the chanting demonstrators filling their waiting room, that Clark was told to leave and not come back until next month. But, he was told that if he brought anyone else along aside from an attorney the next time, he would be considered to be in violation of his probation. In the meantime, supporters are writing federal district court judge Kaufmann to overturn the conviction and probation imposed on Clark and the others.

Clark’s attorney, Ron Kuby, sent a message to the gathering, saying: “The federal magistrate’s imposition of highly restrictive conditions of probation, unprecedented in a case of this type, are an attempt to prevent Mr. Kissinger from engaging in lawful, constitutionally protected activity. For years, Mr. Kissinger has traveled the country organizing support for Mumia Abu-Jamal. The Court’s restrictions upon Mr. Kissinger’s travel and prohibition on association with Mr. Abu-Jamal, if adhered to, would seriously hamper these efforts. In addition, the Court’s requirement that Mr. Kissinger disclose the names and details of all organizations to which he belongs is designed to chill his exercise of the First Amendment right to freedom of association.”

Before going into the Probation Office to demand an end to the restrictions, a number of people addressed the crowd. Frances Goldin, Mumia’s literary agent, stated: “The Probation Officers are trying to teach me to be an upstanding citizen and go to work every day. When you’re on probation you have to work. They don’t understand that when I go to work, I go to visit Mumia, I talk to him, write to him, I sell books for Mumia, I get contracts for Mumia…that is my work. And they are telling me that unless I get permission from my Probation Officer, I can’t see him on death row as I usually do. I can’t associate with a convicted felon. This was written to mean Mumia Abu-Jamal. Are they going to stop me? Hell, no!”

Jack Heyman from the ILWU in San Francisco was on hand to lend his support: “We recognize that those supporters of Mumia Abu Jamal are being harassed and intimidated by the state, and it’s incumbent on all of those who fight for justice in this country to stand behind these defendants in the Liberty Bell case. Our slogan in the ILWU is “an injury to one is an injury to all.” We’ll stand behind you. We want the charges dropped, and we want Mumia out.” He relayed news that support for Mumia, expressed last year by the ILWU shut down of ports on the west coast, is spreading to the east coast. Longshoremen in Charleston SC have come out for Mumia, while they joined protests against the confederate flag at the state capitol. “This is significant, because the ILWU on the east coast is fairly conservative. But from Delaware south, the longshoremen are mainly Black. They have tremendous power. The power of the labor movement can be used to free Mumia Abu Jamal.”

Before going up to the office together with supporters, Clark Kissinger said, “I want you to know that what happened to us has absolutely nothing to do with the [civil disobedience action at Philadelphia’s] Liberty Bell. It has to do with the work that all of you have done over the last two years in building an international movement for justice for Mumia.” He promised to never accept any conditions that would restrict his ability to defend Mumia, and after coming back out, he invited the assembled activists to join him again next month at his next appointment.

Source: Refuse & Resist!: refuse@calyx.com

NEWS BRIEFS

¨ Business wins big Supreme Court ruling over activists

By Jim Lobe

Washington, DC, June 19 (IPS)— In a victory for multinational corporations and other forces for economic globalization, the US Supreme Court Monday struck down a Massachusetts law that penalized companies doing business in Burma.

The case throws into question the future of such “selective purchasing” laws used by state and local governments over 25 years to pressure companies to withdraw from apartheid South Africa and, more recently, from Cuba, Nigeria, and Switzerland, among other countries.

Such selective-purchasing laws are designed to force companies to choose between continuing to do business with repressive governments abroad and bidding on often-lucrative state or local governments contracts.

Such laws were used most successfully during the late 1970s and 1980s to force scores of US multinationals —including such giants as Coca-Cola, IBM, and General Motors— to withdraw from South Africa. According to most experts, the resulting divestment played a major role in bringing about majority rule there.

Some two dozen states and cities, including New York, Los Angeles, Minneapolis, and San Francisco have enacted similar laws against companies doing business in Burma, where a military junta has repressed the democratic opposition led by Nobel Peace Laureate Aung San Suu Kyi. As a result, some of the country’s best-known companies, including several from the retail apparel industry, withdrew.

¨ One million people have lost Medicaid

Washington, DC, June 20— A new study showing that in the last four years one million adults with children have lost their Medicaid coverage means that there are approximately 700,000 mothers who now must live without proper health insurance. The changes occurred as a result of the 1996 welfare overhaul that left states responsible for implementation and development of new welfare policies. For example, Governor George W. Bush’s home state of Texas now has the highest rate of uninsured adults at 51% and experienced the second largest percentage drop in Medicaid enrollees. In the last four years in Texas, 106,000 people lost their health insurance.

Source: Associated Press