“CAFTA simply continues the failed trade policies of the past which have produced the biggest trade deficits in the history of the world and exported American jobs by the millions. It does nothing to improve the lives of workers in CAFTA countries or in the United States. In fact, it asks U.S. workers to compete with workers in countries where there are little or no worker or environmental protections in place, and where wages are as low as $2 a day.”

Right on senator! Too bad we're out of power. Welcome to the Democratic Party, folks.

In South Africa a vitamin huckster, backed by the government, is encouraging AIDS patients not to take antiretroviral medication and instead to take multivitamins. The health minister, for her part, recommend garlic to boot.

The Treatment Action Coalition (TAC) is the foremost civic group opposing the South African government's two-faced ARV policy (the health ministry not only discredits antiretrovirals, it distributes them).

The Bush administration's AIDS dollar do not support the TAC> This is a shame, since the TAC's success would do wonders for the 5.3 million South Africans living with HIV.

Democrats can still support the TAC by donating through the South African Development Fund on the Network for Good website. Enter "TAC" in the "designation" field.

Rath is preying upon Africa's poor and weak by selling them sham vitamins to "cure" AIDS and telling them not to take antiretrovrial drugs.

Worse, he has the backing of the South African health minister, who heads South Africa's antiretroviral dispensing program.

But Rath has his opponents, primary among them the Treatment Action Coalition, a local HIV/AIDS advocacy group. The TAC was formed in the late 90s, when the South African government was in the throes of AIDS denialism and refused to dispense AIDS drugs to the public. The TAC lobbies for the tolerance and accceptance of people with HIV and for better medical care and drugs treatments for those with AIDS. Their work has earned them a nomination for a Nobel Peace Prize.

These are not especially radical positions. In the United States, these are commonly accepted. But in South Africa, they are radical.

Far from embracing the TAC's stance, the ANC continues to follow the Rath line. The ANC Youth League has leafleted on behalf of the Rath Foundation in Khayelitsha, an impovrished slum outside Cape Town. The leaflets urge residents to skip the ARVs (which Rath claims are poisonous) and and to take his vitamins which can "control" and "reverse" AIDS instead.

The TAC, true to its mission, is now seeking Rath's arrest. You can bet the health minister's friends won't be signing the warrant.

The TAC is the sort of organization our AIDS dollars needs to be supporting. In the country with more HIV infections than any other, the TAC is the foremost advocacy group on HIV/AIDS issues.

Democrats, we must do more to help the TAC.

Let's start in South Africa, which has more HIV cases than any other country on earth, and where one of the most depressing, appalling stories of AIDS-incompetence continues to unfold. To wit, the government is telling people not to take antiretrovirals. As the South African health minister put it, you can skip the antiretrovirals, because garlic is just as good at fighting AIDS.

After years of AIDS-denialism, in 2003 President Mbeki's ANC government finally saw the light on antiretroviral treatment. It agreed that antiretrovirals were needed and began a national rollout of the medication. Because these drugs are administered only when a patient develops full-blown AIDs, failure to administer the drugs swiftly can be a death sentence.

Enter Mathias Rath. Doctor Rath is a snake-oil salesman and a scoundrel, a character right out of Huck Finn. From his perch in the United States, he is encouraging South African AIDS patients not to take the antiretrovirals and instead to take his specially packaged, highly priced vitamin regime.

Rath, for his part, claims that the antiretrovirals are a bogus scam cooked up by the pharamceutical industry's captialist world conspiracy in order to take your money. You should, he insits, buy his vitamins instead. He even has an AIDS-conspiracy flow chart.

Now, vitaimins and nutrition are crucial components in maintaining and AIDS patient's good health, and no doctor would recommend that the antiretrovirals without also taking vitaimins and maintaining a health diet and exercise routine. But vitamins without antiretrovirals? I'm no doctor, but if you can cure AIDS with cold remedies, why is it still killing?

Worse, South Africa's health minister, Manto Tshabalala-Msimang, has endorsed Rath. Manto is openly against rolling out the antiretrovirals quickly (she once opined to the press that she didn't know why her own ministry had administered drugs to an "excessive" 42,000 AIDS patients. 5.3 million South Africans have HIV). She condons the Rath Foundation's ongoing disinformation campaign, which includes leafleting in South Africa against antiretrovirals and for Rath's own vitamins. Capitalist world conspiracy, indeed.

Manto has couched her position in classic ANC language, claiming that she is simply helping the poor, for whom the cleaper "alternative" of garlic (though she has also suggest olive oil) is more accessible than antiretrovirals.

Indeed, most South Africa AIDS patients and most South Africans are poor, uneducated, and marginalized. The fall of apartheid has not made the nation's blacks into a bourgeoisie overnight. Most AIDS patients are black, and most go to a traditional healer before they seek medical attention. The most marginialized of black adults, who were on the butt end of apartheid-era "education" policies, are illiterate and unable to sort through the claims and counter claims on antiretroviral treatment. Word of mouth or the opinion of someone they trust matters more than the truth printed in a newspaper they can't even read. These people are especially vulnerable to misinformation. It is especially important that South Africans receive a single, accurate message on AIDS: take your antiretrovirals, eat well, exercise, and take vitamins.

Instead, they receive two: take these drugs, but if you're poor, garlic will do. Thus the ANC's policy hurts the most marginalized blacks the very people they struggled so mightily and for so long to represent. Meanwhile white South Africans with AIDS take the antiretrovirals.

This is a lethal misstep in a government steeped in AIDS-denialism an an inability to admit and correct its mistakes. Thousands of the poorest will die because of this lie.

I do not know why the FDA and the AMA are permitting Rath to advocate not taking antiretrovirals. His medical license should be revoked, and he and his organization should be be prosecuted for fraud and criminally negligent homocide. Health minister Manto should be sacked. And antiretrovirals, along with generic vitaimins, should be given to every AIDS patient in South Africa. You can help by donating to an AIDS charity, like AVERT.

There are even sicker twists in the Rath/Manto story. I will elaborate in further posts.

Take Tom Friedman's latest column on CAFTA. He misses the point. Yes, passing CAFTA will be good for the American economy, and it will help Central American eocnomies too. And, as President Bush has pointed, out, the current trade restrictions are harsher for the United States than for Central America. So when the trade barriers fall in this deal, we get more than they do.

However, CAFTA is no miracle cure for Central America's woes. Current U.S. - Central American trade is a tiny fraction of U.S. GDP. It's not going to make an appreciable difference in the short to medium term. Trade takes time to grow. In the meantime Central American economies will have to undergo some sort of transition--apparently, given the structure of the treaty, the idea is they turn into major sugar and textile-producers. That is, Central America is supposed to be following the path of Mauritius forty years ago, when it expanded from its sugar plantation base into textile production.

Instead, Central America should follow the path of Mauritius today, which is set to become a free-trade entrepot in the Indian Ocean (no tariffs on any trade, not just American trade), and also a shipping and transport hub. The Mauritian economy is also developing its service sector, particularly tourism, and exploiting the broad familiarity with French and English within its population. The root of this is a democratic government that focuses on providing its population with the education and health care they need to get and hold better jobs.

CAFTA is our last, best bargaining chip with Central America. In addition to loosening trade restrictions, we should also bargaining for improvements in governance, for stronger anti-corruption measures, for a higher Central American minimum wage, and for better health, safety and environmental standards in Central American businesses. How else are Central Americans going to be able to afford to buy American products anyway? Free trade with Nicaragua is worth a lot more if the average Nicaraguan can afford to buy a new American-made car. And the average Nicaraguan can't. It's these sort of improvements that need to be at the center of our economic policy with Central America--helping Central Americans help themselves.

Free trade is not an end in itself, but a means to raise standards of living and increase prosperity for all. Good governance, decent wages, and strong health, safety and environmental legislation do this too. They shouldn't be forgotten.

Nobody knows. And the root of the problem is the Department of Energy, which hasn't had an energy policy since Bill Clinton left office. If they required oil refineries to account for the country of origin of their refined petroleum products (even the DOE knows the country of origin of the crude they import), you could know whether you were buying Saudi gas or American.

This handy DOE website explains why you can't be sure where your money's going when you buy a tank of gas.

Their first reason why you can't be sure your gas comes from is that nobody's sure where your gas comes from. That's just the way it is. All the more reason to demand country-of-origin labeling on your gasoline and a DOE with the guts to see it through.

Their other two reasons are just as simplistic. It's complicated, they say. There's a lot refineries, they say. There's a lot of oil, they say. Somedays they refine oil from Saudi Arabia. Somedays they refine oil from Canada. Nobody knows.

But nobody knows because nobody's checking, and nobody's checking because nobody bothered to ask.

Take Chevron, which in April 2005 imported oil from Mexico, Trinidad, Kuwait, and Saudi Arabia, among others, into various U.S. ports to be refined and sold.

The DOE records tell us this much, but no more.

We don’t know what happened to that oil after refining. Was it retailed at Chevron gas stations? Or was it sold off to the generic mom-and-pop gas stations that make up a third of all gas stations in the U.S. and retailed as generic-label gasoline?

The DOE doesn’t know either.

The DOE shouldn’t. It’s not up to the government to monitor every financial transaction Chevron makes. It’s up to Chevron. And you can be sure Chevron does. Do they know what happened to the shipments of Saudi crude oil they pulled into El Segundo, California last April? You bet. After they refined it, they sold it, or moved it, or stored it. And whatever they did, they made a paper trail.

But Chevron hasn’t told you. It should. And it would, if the DOE required country-of-origin labels on your gas. Some gas money supports our troops, some gas money supports the terrorists shooting them. Is it too much to ask which is which?

In April we imported most of our oil from nice, safe, non-terrorist countries. 2.2 million barrels per day from Canada, 1.6 million bpd from Mexico, and 1.6 million bpd from Venezuela.

Saudi Arabia only came in fourth (1.5), with Nigeria rounding out the top five (1.4).

The Saudi share of the U.S. oil market is not that large. Out of 10.3 million barrels per day imported, the Saudis supplied only 15 pecent. Saudi Arabia may dominate the world oil market, but it does not dominate the American market (most of their oil goes to Europe and East Asia).

Making the choice not to buy Saudi has never been easier. Demand the right to know where your oil is coming from and stop buying Saudi today.

Except for Israel: The most stable democracy in the Middle East for almost 60 years running, and a U.S. ally for a signifigant portion of that time.

But I guess it's undiplomatic for Condi to point that out to the Egyptians.

Undiplomatic, but true. After all, Israel's functioning democracy is the source of its stability, and the equation between the was the point she was trying to make.

So three cheers for Israeli democracy. And an extra boo for all thise Saudi terrorists and authoritarians.

They have issued a declaration--tacked on church message boards around the country and excerpted in the foreign press--that Mugabe's demolition of 1.5 million shanty homes and his arrest of 30,000 street vendors is, as the Cape Times reported, an act that "cries out for vengeance to God."

Indeed, it is a "gross injustice to the poor" to arrest their breadwinners, destroy their homes, and then leave them to wither away in the winter night. But we have come to expect injustice from this regime.

Perhaps we can come to expect rebellion from its people.

Free Zimbabwe.

The Change to Win coalition has taken note of the threat that globalization poses to American workers, as long as unions remain less global than employers.

So the coalition urges the AFL-CIO to adopt a more aggressive approach, with "global campaigns against anti-union employers as a means for building worker power. As part of this effort, we need to build global labor unity to fight for trade agreements that improve labor, worker rights, and environmental standards instead of dragging them down ..."

Glad to hear it.

Tom Friedman calls them "bipartisan" but that, of course, is the Republican codeword for "we have Joe Lieberman on our side." And Tom Friedman is all about selling out to the Republicans so he can say he's bi-partisan. Vide his cheerleading the Bush administration's Iraq policy in 2002 and 2003, no matter what the excuse for the war was.

Anyway, the "Set America Free Coalition" includes Gary Bauer and James Woolsey, who notes that he's "Co-Chairman of the Committee for the Present Danger" (another republican-but-we-call-it-bipartisan institution of historic yore). Oh, they have a guy from the Hudson Institute. What republican grouping would be complete without that? All that's missing is the John Birch Society.

Not that I object to republicans. There's plenty of fine and decent republicans, and I'm sure the Set America Free Coalition has some serious concerns about our dependence on dodgy Mideast petrostates.

But let's face it, with this Congress and this administration it takes a pretty unconnected group of republicans not to get their agenda passed.

Which just goes to show, if anyone's going to Set America Free, it's going to be us: Democrats.

If you really want to Set America Free, how about labeling our gas. There's 50 states. One can pass the law. We just want to know where our gas is coming from. Mandatory labeling is all we ask. If we had the choice, fewer Americans would pick Mideast oil.

Let the free market do its work and let American buyers chase Mideast oil from their own shores.

But I guess it takes a Democrat to think of that.

Sokwanele is a non-violent, pro-democracy, and, it goes without saying, highly illegal group operating in Zimbabwe. Their blog is a good place to read about the daily lives and sufferings of ordinary Zimbabweans under Robert Mugabe's regime.

If you'd care to know more about the hundreds of thousands of homeless Mugabe's bulldozers have created, more than the single column of type of thiry seconds of airtime most news outlets devote to it, start here.

Double the number of troops, he says.

But where are they going to come from? There aren't any soldiers left to send to Iraq. Pretty much the entire army is going to, staying in or rotating out of Iraq already.

If the army can't meet its monthy recruitment goals now, how's it going to recruit enough troops to ship off another 135,000?

Sure, Rummy went in with an army half the size of the one he needed. But where's he supposed to get the other half?

Makhokhoba was the center of resistance to colonial rule in Zimbabwe. Now President Mugabe is bulldozing it.

Striking in the current crisis in Zimbabwe is the silence, even complicity (if you're talking about ratifying the recent "re-election" of president Mugabe), of South Africa.

For the ruling South African ANC, Mugabe's Zimbabwe was a crucial ally in the struggle against apartheid, making it painfully difficult for many in the ANC to criticize Mugabe now, even though, in bulldozing townships, he is doing just what the old apartheid regime used to do.

And for many white South Africans, there is a lingering, racist suspicion that the ANC is turning the South African government into a den of corruption and ineptitude after the Zimbabwean image. (It hasn't helped that South Africa's deputy president was just sacked for corruption.)

Zimbabwe is, of course, different. But's its leader is only too happy to play the "struggle" game, especially when he's snubbing his nose at Britain (which has a funny habit of criticizing Mugabe's vice, murder and thuggery). Vide Mugabe's dispatch of observers to the British elections this past spring, who of course, pronounced it grossly unfair.

But the hundreds of thousands of Africans who are now homeless this winter across Zimbabwe really don't care that their destitution and hunger is part of some great Mugabean plan to get rid of colonialism. They care that they're hungry.

Nor do they care that South Africa (one of the most stable democracies on the continent) has pronounced their election free and fair. They care that the cops beat them so hard.

And if you starve a nation long enough, if you beat it hard enough, if you destroy its livelihood and everything its owns, you quite often end up with a revolution. This one could be particularly bloody.

Ironically, Mugabe's greatest contribution to Zimbabwe may be in uniting all races in hating him. One only hopes that his ouster won't be the occasion for that hate to turn to bloodshed.

A new, concerted effort by low-wage janitors, security officers, and unions around the world is seeking to turn globalization on its head."

.. so begins the website of the Service Employees International Union, one of the fastest growing, most progressive unions in America.

June 15th is International Justice Day. Workers and their allies worldwide are marching for the rights of immigrant workers in their adopted countries.

In Boston and New York janitors will send a delegation to the British consulate to speak on behalf of those who toil to clean Parliament. It seems the Labour Party can't even be bothered to pay a decent wage to get their own crap cleaned up. There will be street action in Boston as well.

If street marches aren't your thing, sign up for their Action Center and become a cyber activist.