Human Rights Watch releases a damning report on the abuse of Indonesian domestic workers in Malaysia:

More than 90 percent of the 240,000 domestic workers in Malaysia are Indonesian. The Human Rights Watch report documents how they typically work grueling 16 to 18 hour days, seven days a week, and earn less than U.S. $0.25 per hour. Migrant workers worldwide send over $90 billion to developing countries, exceeding foreign aid. An increasing number of labor migrants are female. In Indonesia, 76 percent of all legal migrant workers in 2002 were women. Most female migrant workers are concentrated in low-paying, unregulated sectors like domestic work.

Malaysia’s laws exclude domestic workers from most labor protections and Indonesia does not yet have any specific laws protecting migrant workers. The two governments must amend labor laws, rigorously monitor labor agencies, and provide quality support services to victims, Human Rights Watch said. “Indonesian domestic workers are treated like second-class humans,” said LaShawn Jefferson, executive director of Women’s Rights Division of Human Rights Watch. “Malaysia and Indonesia must actively protect the rights of women workers instead of leaving this to labor agencies who are often responsible for committing abuses themselves.”

John Kerry seizes the Kropotkin Schwartz-Weinstein vote from Ralph Nader:

I voted for Nader in 2000, albeit in a district (New Haven’s first ward) where Nader beat Bush and Gore beat both by a huge landslide and in a state which Gore carried easily. Had i not voted for Nader, i would not have voted, because 1) Gore was running a right wing campaign i, as an anarchist, would never have been able to support, and 2)as a New York resident then transplanted to New Haven, Connecticut, my vote wouldn’t have made a difference no matter who i voted for. I ultimately voted not because i was enthusiastic about Nader – i was and remain deeply skeptical about electoral models of social change, and Nader’s latest campaign has made concessions to the far right on the critical issue of immigration, employing the discourse of “absorbtion rates” and illegality, which i find completely unnaceptable. I voted in the 2000 election because i felt like it, and i didn’t vote again until 2003, when i voted for Vic Edgerton’s ward 9 alder campaign…In the 2004 election, i will vote, i think, even though my vote will mean nothing in this election, because George W. Bush is a fascist and voting him out is just one more of many nonviolent ways in which i plan to tell his administration to do what Mr Cheney urged Senator Leahy to pursue on the senate floor last month. And i’ll vote for Kerry, not Nader, because this time around i think the Nader campaign is, as i have said, deeply problematic, because i don’t trust him any more than i trust Kerry (which is not very much at all, and because my vote means nothing either way, and because Kerry supports Card Check Neutrality agreements which the Bush recess appointee-stacked NLRB is threatening to rule against.

Everyone involved with Raplh Nader’s campaign should be asking, “Who lost Zach?”

The 9/11 comission delivers its report:

The commission chairman, Thomas H. Kean, said the worst failure of all was “a failure of imagination,” in the sense that the signs had existed for years that an attack was coming. As the report itself put it, “The 9/11 attacks were a shock, but they should not have come as a surprise.” Mr. Kean said an attack “of even greater magnitude” than the one in which terrorists used hijacked airliners to destroy the World Trade Center, blast a hole in the Pentagon and kill about 3,000 people is “possible — even probable.” “We do not have the luxury of time,” Mr. Kean said at a news briefing accompanying release of the book-length report, the product of many months of inquiries and an agonizing self-examination of many units of government. He said, as did the commission report, that changes of function and attitude are needed in Congress as well as the executive branch.

Mr. Kean said it was clear there had been many “unexploited opportunities” to thwart or at least interrupt the Sept. 11 plot. Sadly, he said, nothing was done that “disturbed or even delayed the progress of the Al Qaeda plot.” The commission said the administrations of President Bill Clinton and George W. Bush must share blame for not recognizing earlier the threat posed by terrorists. “Indeed, it barely came up during the 2000 presidential campaign,” the commission said. Nor was terrorism much discussed in Congress, whose turf-guarding instincts must change if the legislative branch is to do its part in making the country safer, the report says. Nor were the American public and the news media much interested, the commission said. “It is not our purpose to assess blame,” Mr. Kean said. “We look back so we can look forward.” The commission’s vice chairman, former Representative Lee H. Hamilton, said military action and heightened security would not be enough. He said the United States must promote an “agenda of opportunity” in impoverished countries, join “the battle of ideas,” so that those regions do not become incubators of future terrorists.

You can read the whole thing here

Brazilian workers mobilize to hold Lula to his progressive promises:

Thousands of Brazilians took to the streets Friday in cities across the country, protesting high unemployment and interest rates despite recent signs that South America’s biggest economy is turning around after its worst recession in a decade. Several thousand people marched kilometers down Avenida Paulista in Sao Paulo, the Wall Street of Brazil’s financial and industrial heart, in the biggest show of force by union members, unemployed workers and landless peasants. Demonstrators trying to pressure President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva to keep his promises of job creation and redistribution of wealth also protested in Rio de Janeiro, the capital of Brasilia and other major cities in Latin America’s largest nation. “It’s tough to live in a country that’s so big and rich in resources without hope,” said Cesar Manuel Silva, a 65-year-old laborer who hasn’t had regular work in five years. “We need big changes because we’re all sons of God, but we don’t have enough money for bread.”

Friday’s protests came as the government reported industrial job growth in May for the first time in more than a year. That came on top of recent reports showing strong increases in industrial output and first-quarter economic growth of 2.7 percent. But protesters said the pace of the recovery is too slow. Most said they still support Silva, a former metalworker’s union leader who became Brazil’s first elected leftist leader. But they are disappointed his administration opted for a conservative fiscal policy aimed at reigning in inflation and prompting slow, sustainable growth for the first time in the country’s history. “I voted for him, but I was expecting a quicker recovery,” said Creusa Pereira Goncalves, a 44-year-old unemployed auto worker who brought her 12-year-old son to the protest to carry a flag demanding more jobs. “It’s better to have jobs with high inflation than no jobs.”

The Universal Healthcare Network of Ohio refutes the myth that insurance premiums are the fault of the victims which Dick Cheney came to their state to peddle:

UHCAN Ohio, the statewide nonprofit organization working to achieve quality, affordable health care for everyone, supports the outrage of physicians at skyrocketing medical malpractice premiums. But, says, Cathy Levine, Executive Director, “Physicians, in demanding limits on damage awards to victims of medical malpractice, are aiming their anger at the wrong target.”…A comprehensive study of medical malpractice insurance, released October 10 2002, by Americans for Insurance Reform, found the amount medical malpractice insurers have paid out, including all jury awards and settlements, have not been on the rise. Not only has there been no ‘explosion’ in medical malpractice payouts at any time during the past 30 years, but payments have been extremely stable and virtually flat since the mid-1980s. A recent study of all medical practice lawsuits in Cuyahoga County, which has the state’s highest malpractice insurance premiums, demonstrated that the number of lawsuits and amounts of judgments in Cuyahoga County actually declined in the past ten years, demonstrating that the boost in premiums is not related to escalating litigation. In a March 13, 2002, press release, the American Insurance Association (AIA), a major insurance industry trade group, stated, “The insurance industry never promised that tort reform would achieve specific premium savings.” This echoes a similar admission by American Tort Reform Association three years earlier.

For anyone who questioned who’s behind the Janjaweed’s massacres in Darfur:

Sudan government documents incontrovertibly show that government officials directed recruitment, arming and other support to the ethnic militias known as the Janjaweed, Human Rights Watch said today. The government of Sudan has consistently denied recruiting and arming the Janjaweed militias, including during the recent visits of U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell and UN Secretary General Kofi Annan. Human Rights Watch said it had obtained confidential documents from the civilian administration in Darfur that implicate high-ranking government officials in a policy of militia support.

“It’s absurd to distinguish between the Sudanese government forces and the militias—they are one,” said Peter Takirambudde, executive director of Human Rights Watch’s Africa Division. “These documents show that militia activity has not just been condoned, it’s been specifically supported by Sudan government officials.” Human Rights Watch said that Sudanese government forces and government-backed militias are responsible for crimes against humanity, war crimes and “ethnic cleansing” involving aerial and ground attacks on civilians of the same ethnicity as members of two rebel groups in Darfur. Thousands of civilians have been killed, hundreds of women and girls have been raped and more than one million people have been forcibly displaced from their homes and farms in Darfur.

Yale – New Haven Hospital faces another lawsuit over its uncharitable care towards its most vulnerable patients:

David Martinez, suffering from epilepsy and earning less than $10,000 a year, was sued by Yale-New Haven Hospital in 1993 for an $18,000 medical debt incurred by his infant daughter. After a decade of wage garnishments, he managed to pay $10,000. Now he wants it back. Claiming the contract the hospital entered into with Martinez and similarly poor patients was fraudulent, the Jerome N. Frank Legal Services Organization at the Yale Law School has filed a class-action suit on the issue. The clinic, which has represented more than 30 patients in the last year challenging the hospital’s debt collection practices, settled the majority of those cases when people were simply willing to have the debt forgiven.

Vincent Petrini, a spokesman for Y-NH, said the hospital was “very
disappointed” with the decision of the clinic to pursue litigation at this
time, particularly after it had agreed to close more than 5,000 accounts. He said the particulars of the suit “are not reflective of current hospital policy.” Robert Solomon, the professor who runs the clinic, agrees the hospital “made an enormous amount of progress” in addressing certain issues, such as removing liens on people’s homes, forgiving the debt of those under 250 percent of poverty and processing aid. “But, ultimately, we broke down over the return of funds,” Solomon said. “They don’t want to return any money they received, which we think they
received illegally.” The suit formally challenges the common industrywide practice of applying inflated charges to the underinsured and uninsured, and is one of 31 such suits against hospitals in 17 states filed in the last month. Hospital charges are usually close to 50 percent higher than the actual cost of procedures.

If you were going to show up to a Bush event to threaten the President, would you do it wearing a “Hate Bush” T-shirt? Apparently, some people think so:

The Ranks said they didn’t violate any laws by wearing their “Love America, Hate Bush” T-shirts to the official presidential appearance, for which they had tickets. “That’s not why the charges were filed,” Pauley said Thursday. “The people hosting the event” said the Ranks “were causing a disturbance.” Pauley said he didn’t know what kind of disturbance the Ranks were causing, “but that’s the reason our officers were called.” The Ranks said they didn’t do anything besides wear their T-shirts and sing the national anthem…After a Gazette story about the Ranks ran Wednesday, dozens of people from all over the nation flooded them with offers of monetary support, and several offered to put them up if their legal battle got drawn out, so they wouldn’t have to spend so much money on motels. . .

In September, the American Civil Liberties Union filed for a federal injunction barring the Secret Service from telling local police to keep protesters out of sight and earshot of President Bush’s public appearances. The case was dismissed after the Secret Service agreed with the ACLU, and the dozens of incidents like the Ranks’ slowed to a trickle, said ACLU lawyer Witold Walczak. But as Bush has begun making more visits to battleground election states, the number of complaints has picked back up, Walczak said, and the ACLU is determining whether it needs to take the Bush administration back to court.

I saw this kind of policy in action last summer as an ACLU legal observer at a Bush appearance in Pennsylvania where Secret Service told the protesters to move back further than had been agreed upon ahead of time. Fortunately, we were able to get an emergency injunction from a judge holding the Secret Service to the previous understanding.

Amnesty International charges the Janjaweed with systematic, strategic rape:

An international human rights group has accused pro-government militias in the Darfur region of Sudan of using rape and other forms of sexual violence “as a weapon of war” to humiliate black African women and girls as well as the rebels fighting the government in Khartoum. In a report to be released Monday, Amnesty International said the sexual attacks in Darfur amounted to war crimes and crimes against humanity. But it said it did not have sufficient evidence to show that the Janjaweed, as the government-backed militias are known, have carried out genocide in Darfur, as some critics of Sudan’s government maintain.

“The horrific nature and scale of the violence inflicted on entire groups in Darfur appears to be a form of collective punishment of a population whose members have taken up arms against the central government,” the Amnesty International report said. “It may be interpreted as a warning to other groups and regions of what could happen to the local population if certain groups decided to rebel against Khartoum,” it added. Amnesty International called for the creation of a commission of inquiry to investigate and bring to justice those responsible for sexual violence against the women of Darfur. Rape is a cultural taboo in Sudan and families often ostracize victims. Although rape has been so widespread over the last year that many women feel emboldened to discuss it, many others are believed by experts to be denying that it ever occurred.

Let it not be said (Dad) that I don’t acknowledge when John Kerry does something right:

“A million African-Americans disenfranchised in the last election,” he said at the N.A.A.C.P. convention in Philadelphia on Thursday. “Well, we’re not just going to sit there and wait for it to happen. On Election Day in your cities, my campaign will provide teams of election observers and lawyers to monitor elections, and we will enforce the law.”…it is the campaign of Mr. Kerry that appears to be doing the most to apply lessons from the Florida recount and that is adopting the more fiercely partisan posture in the early going. Its plans include setting up SWAT teams of specially trained lawyers, spokesmen and political experts to swoop into any state where a recount could be needed. “The U.S. has had a policy of being able to fight two regional conflicts and still defend the homeland,” said Marc E. Elias, the Kerry campaign’s general counsel. “We want to be able to fight five statewide recounts and still have resources available to the campaign.”

…This time, Kerry aides say, they are recruiting not only specialists in election law who work in small law firms or alone, but also litigators at large firms in every state who have the resources and office space to support a long-term, large-scale and pro bono recount operation. “We don’t want a situation where we wake up the next day and are scrambling to think of what our legal team looks like,” Mr. Elias said. The Kerry campaign has already enlisted lead lawyers in all 50 states, and those lawyers are recruiting lawyers at the county and the precinct level. “It’s our intention to have lawyers in one fashion or another covering all of Iowa’s 99 counties,” said Brent Appel, the Kerry lawyer in Des Moines. Kerry aides say the campaign has set up a national steering committee with task forces tackling different issues: one on ballot machines, another on voter education, and a third on absentee, early, and military voting, to name a few. At the Democratic convention next week in Boston, they say, any lawyers interested in volunteering will be offered training. And dozens of the lawyers already recruited by the Kerry organization will hold two days of intensive meetings to finalize strategy, tactics and assignments. Democrats say they learned from the Florida vote, and from the Supreme Court rulings that arose from it, that the most important legal battles are those fought before Election Day, over how election laws are to be carried out, who is allowed to register and who will be allowed to vote.

Take enough bold, overdue steps to pursue the enfranchisement of marginalized voters, and you won’t need to worry about a recount.

Jon Chait on democracy and the Bush administration:

A democracy, he told Al Arabiya television in May during an interview on the Abu Ghraib torture scandal, is “where leaders are willing to discuss it with the media. And we act in a way where, you know, our Congress asks pointed questions to the leadership. In other words, people want to know the truth. That stands in contrast to dictatorships. A dictator wouldn’t be answering questions about this.” It’s ironic that Bush used this definition because, by this measure, he has run the least democratic administration of any president since the advent of television and radio. Since Franklin Roosevelt made press conferences a regular feature, Bush has held fewer of them than any president–14 solo press conferences, as compared with Bill Clinton’s 41 and George H.W. Bush’s 77 at this point in their presidencies. When he does appear before the press, Bush routinely refuses to answer difficult questions.

…Who else has the White House tried to keep in the dark? Oh yes: the public–the people who Bush says “want to know the truth.” “For the past three years, the Bush administration has quietly but efficiently dropped a shroud of secrecy across many critical operations of the federal government–cloaking its own affairs from scrutiny and removing from the public domain important information on health, safety, and environmental matters,” concluded a long investigation by U.S. News & World Report last December. “The result has been a reversal of a decades-long trend of openness in government.” Consider just one example. Bush’s 2004 budget cut grants to the states (outside of Medicaid, which rises automatically) by 2.4 percent. After statehouses complained, the administration announced it would cease publishing Budget Information for States, which documents how much states receive from various federal programs. (The administration claimed it did so to save on printing costs.) The result, as Alysoun McLaughlin of the National Conference of State Legislatures told The Washington Post: “There’s no one place in the public domain for this information anymore.”