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OVERTIME--January 2004 issue
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Dedicated to reflecting the
collective wisdom of enlightened workers.

Linda Featheringill
4651 West 41st Street, Down
Cleveland, OH 44109
(216) 661-0794

lfeatheringill@hotmail.com

January 2004
Volume 4, Number 8

Greetings!

And Happy New Year!

This month’s issue is delayed a bit because I took a holiday to the east coast, just a little south of Washington, DC. I visited with family and relaxed in the mild temperatures - altogether a delightful experience.

Here’s hoping that 2004 treats all of us kindly.
-- Linda Featheringill

A New Chinese Century?

When Citibank was casting around for a brand name speaker at its annual retreat here, the bank spurned the usual Western investors. Instead, Citibank chose the Chinese ambassador, Lu Shumin, one of a new generation of diplomats from Beijing who speak flawless English and play a mean game of golf.

The envoy's presentation was relentlessly upbeat: what Southeast Asia sells, China buys. Oil, natural gas and aluminum to build bigger bridges, taller buildings, faster railroads to serve the country's flourishing cities, like Shanghai, which is beginning to make New York City look like a small town. Palm oil for frying all that food for the swelling middle class, even eggs from faraway New Zealand on the region's southern periphery.

China's buying spree and voracious markets provide the underpinning, he said, for the peaceful coexistence that everyone wants.

Contrast this with the dour message from the United States. Congratulations, said President Bush to the Indonesians during his short stopover in October, for ''hunting and finding dangerous killers.'' Cannily, China has wasted little time in capitalizing on the United States preoccupation with the campaign on terror to greatly expand its influence in Asia.

A new team of leaders in Beijing who came to power last spring -- President Hu Jintao and Prime Minister Wen Jiabao -- have led the charge, personally traveling in the region bearing sizable investments and diplomatic warmth. In fact, some forward leaning analysts think China may already have become Asia's leading power. ''After Afghanistan, after Iraq, after bringing democracy to the Middle East, when the United States refocuses on Asia, it will find a much different China in a much different region,'' James J. Przystup, a research fellow at the National Defense University, wrote recently.

Beyond the economics and the diplomacy, something else is going on. China has the allure of the new. A new affinity is developing between the once feared China and the rest of Asia.

Karim Raslan, a Malaysian lawyer and writer who traveled to Washington recently on a Fulbright scholarship, put it this way. The American ''obsession'' with terror seems tedious to Asians, he said. ''We've all got to live, we've all got to make money,'' said Mr. Raslan. ''The Chinese want to make money and so do we.''

So as American tourists have vanished from an area made uninviting by State Department travel warnings, Chinese tourists have started to arrive. They are pouring into Malaysia (with a substantial minority Chinese population) and Singapore (majority Chinese) where they can talk to the locals and are not afraid to go out at night. They are beginning to buy big-ticket items -- five-figure diamond watches, designer clothes -- that used to be favored by modish Japanese and American tourists.

This affinity is a two-way street. Singapore's newspapers are filled with stories giving advice on how Singaporean professionals -- who face a tough job climate at home -- should behave when they work in China. (Don't lord it over the Chinese, is one of the tips.)

Most disturbing for the United States, China's surging economy has much to offer America's most important Asian allies. Japan's rebound is being driven by a surge in exports to China. Australia's healthy economy is being kept that way by Chinese investments in liquid natural gas projects. China is now South Korea's largest trading partner. Among Southeast Asian countries with significant Muslim populations, places where the American concentration on terror is particularly unappealing, China is on a buying spree.

In Indonesia, Malaysia and the Philippines (and to a lesser extent Thailand), Washington's primary concern is the presence of Islamic militants. China's main interest is to scoop up what it can for its modernization. Indonesians have come to call this new relationship with Beijing as ''feeding the dragon.''

As Asia warms to the confident new China, Asians say they are not betraying the United States. ''We don't have to choose,'' said a Singaporean businessman. This is because relations between the United States and Beijing have rarely been warmer. In the Bush administration's book, China has emerged from the diplomatic doghouse.

In a speech at Texas A&M University devoted to China last month, Secretary of State Colin L. Powell listed all the positives. China has stated its support for the campaign on terror, and has voted with Washington at the United Nations. It is playing a major role in trying to solve the North Korea problem. Mr. Powell jocularly portrayed his relationship with the Chinese foreign minister, Li Zhaoxing, as being so chummy that one of their Saturday telephone conversations was interrupted by the secretary's barking terriers, a knock at the front door, and his wife, Alma, calling from upstairs. For all China's burst of activity, the United States remains the biggest foreign investor in Asia, and Washington maintains by far the most significant military presence in the region. No one is suggesting that China's antiquated armed forces are about to catch up with the might of the world's superpower.
[Jane Perlez, The Guardian (London), December 5, 2003.]


ECOLOGY

The only way we can preserve the earth is to grant every living entity what it needs to thrive and take from it only what it can afford to give.

Sandstorms in the American Southwest

Last month I complained about how windy it has been in Cleveland. According to friends and relatives who live in the US states that border on Mexico, that area has been quite windy, too. Rain has been especially scarce for the past 2 or 3 years, so the land is dry and the wind has carried tons of soil. "Oldtimers" tell me that recent sandstorms that are worse than they have been for decades.

The "sand" in these sandstorms is topsoil, of course. The wind is picking up this normally fertile soil, breaking it up, drying it out, killing the microorganisms, and laying it down somewhere else - as sterile dirt that will not support growth. The actual molecules of silicone, etc. are preserved but the topsoil is destroyed.

Droughts come and go in cycles in that area, but I wonder about the wind.
[L.F., Ohio, USA.]

Selling water in Western US - the Arkansas River Valley

Ron Aschermann could barely eke out a living raising melons, cucumbers, tomatoes or other crops on his 300-acre farm. But quitting the business will earn him more than $1.2 million. Aschermann and scores of other farmers on the high plains of southeastern Colorado are selling water, which once produced melons, to the Denver suburb of Aurora. The prairie will retake land that has long known the plow.

The same thing is happening across the West as the nation's fastest-growing region shifts more water from farms to thirsty cities. Billions of gallons changed hands last year in eight Western states, and even more will flow in years to come. California recently approved a 75-year shift of water from desert farms to San Diego, the biggest transfer of its kind in U.S. history. Modern-day water speculators stalk the waterways of the West. Denver investors bought up Rocky Ford's sugar beet refinery and sold the water associated with it to Aurora 20 years ago.

A decade later, brothers Lee and Edward Bass, oil barons from Fort Worth, quietly bought up Imperial Valley land and then tried unsuccessfully to sell the water out from under it. Recently, another Arkansas Valley canal has attracted interest from investors in Denver and New Orleans.

So what's the answer for the 450,000 farms in the West? Squeezed by rising equipment costs, depressed crop prices and a brutal drought, farmers are finding it harder to hang on. Farms use as much as 95 percent of the water in some areas of the West. Growing cities will continue nibbling away at agriculture's share.

Some people think that selling water may be a way to help farmers hang on during hard times. But Brent M. Haddad, associate professor of environmental studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz and the author of ``Rivers of Gold,'' takes a different view of water markets.

``The bell tolls when you create water markets because all this is going to do is shrink the number of farms,'' Haddad said. ``What we're talking about is a mechanism of moving from farms to cities.''

Turn on the tap in Aurora and out comes water that once grew crops. Three-fourths of the water that helped the sprawling suburb east of Denver vault into the ranks of Colorado's biggest cities was acquired from farmers.
[The Associated Press, December 27, 2003.]

Hot Spot in 2003?

The Earth, U.N. Says GENEVA, Dec. 16 -- The year 2003, marked by a sweltering summer and drought across large swaths of the planet, was the third hottest in nearly 150 years, the United Nations weather agency said Tuesday.

The World Meteorological Organization estimated the average surface temperature for the year to be 0.81 degrees Fahrenheit higher than the normal 25.2 degrees -- a number skewed toward the low side because it includes polar regions.

The agency said warmer weather could not be attributed to any single cause but was part of a trend that global warming was likely to prolong.

The agency, which collects data worldwide, said the three hottest years since accurate records began to be kept in 1861 had all been in the last six years. The hottest was 1998, when the average temperature was up 0.99 degrees.

''The rhythm of temperature increases is accelerating,'' said the agency's deputy secretary general, Michel Jarraud.
[New York Times, December 17, 2003.]

The world's population topped six billion in 1999 and, at current rates, will hit seven billion in 2013, eight billion in 2028 and nine billion in 2048. It is projected to grow a little more than 1 percent this year, which means that in the time it took to read this, about 245 people were born and 106 died, for a net increase of 139.
[From an article by Sam Roberts, New York Times, December 28, 2003.]

A planet of urban dwellers - perhaps the greatest factor affecting the environment

It used to be the stuff of 2000AD, the comic that introduced the world to Judge Dredd and two vast crime-filled cities, Mega City One and East Meg One. In its dystopian vision, the first mega city around New York began construction in 2030, intended to house three to four million people.

In a sign of how quickly future dystopias age, the new Times Atlas of the World lists the growing club of real mega cities, all of them with predicted populations of more than 10 million - not by 2030, but by 2005. According to these estimates, Tokyo - the world's largest city - will hit nearly 27 million. São Paolo in Brazil will reach just under 20 million and Mexico City 19 million. Sixteen other cities are expected to exceed the 10 million mark, including Bombay (Mumbai) 18 million, and Dhaka in Bangladesh, 15 million.

Two cities in Africa are expected to go mega - Lagos in Nigeria and Cairo in Egypt. According to the atlas - the 11th edition since it was first published in 1895 - the phenomenon is a mark of a global population in the grips of rapid urbanisation, where close to 50 per cent of the population now lives in cities.

Indeed, the latest estimates predict that urban dwellers will outnumber the rural population for the first time by 2007.

And Tokyo is leading the way. A Landsat 7 image of the city, included in the atlas, shows the city's growth, a spreading gray cancer whose spiraling tendrils can be seen sucking in neighbouring cities and towns and even reclaimed sea.

The rise of the world's mega cities is one of the most marked trends noted by the atlas in recent decades. In 1950 New York City was the only one of the world's cities with more than 10 million inhabitants. By 1975 that number had grown to five. By 2015 it is estimated there will be 21.

It has been a process driven largely by Asia - the continent boasting 10 mega cities by 2000, while North America had managed three (Mexico City, New York City and Los Angeles).
[From an article by Peter Beaumont, The Observer, October 19, 2003. Contributed by P.E.N., Colchester, England, UK.]

Competition for food and space - is this what the future looks like?

PELINDUNG, Indonesia - At the end of a busy day cutting trees with chainsaws, the four timber thieves camped in the Sumatran jungle. Three of the loggers rested on a raised wooden platform, while Siadul, the fourth, prepared food below. He was sitting on the ground eating his dinner when a hungry Sumatran tiger, driven from its habitat by the relentless logging of the rainforest, leaped out of the darkness onto Siadul's back, ripped out a chunk of flesh and began dragging him away. Nature had taken its revenge.

"It was like a cat catching a rat," said Siadul's friend Ponimin, a fellow illegal logger who, like many Indonesians, uses only one name. The Sumatran tiger - one of only about 500 left in the wild - would have succeeded in taking Siadul but for a felled log that blocked its path. The tree cutters fired up their chainsaws and scared the animal away, but it was too late for Siadul. He died within hours.

To locals, who believe the tiger is the enforcer of proper human behavior in the jungle, the killing was punishment for some unspecified violation of the forest people's code, which includes prohibitions against adultery and sharing food from the same cooking pot. But to environmentalists, the attack was the inevitable result of a timber harvest that is wildly out of control.

Across Indonesia, loggers have struck on a massive scale, destroying vast tracts of rainforest, selling the timber overseas and turning much of the jungle into farms and palm oil plantations.

Government officials acknowledge that Indonesia, a sprawling archipelago of more than 17,000 islands, is losing an expanse of forest nearly the size of Switzerland annually, and with it the habitat of endangered tigers, rhinoceroses, orangutans and elephants. Scientists believe that hundreds of plant and animal species are going extinct each year, even before they can be discovered and identified. Plants that might hold the cure for deadly diseases, they fear, are being lost forever.

Since 2001, tigers have killed at least six people near the coastal town of Dumai and possibly as many as 30, authorities say. Many of the victims were illegal loggers whose deaths were not officially reported.

Tigers are not the only creatures fighting back. In southern Sumatra, villagers have been cutting trees and planting coffee for years in the Bukit Rindingan protected forest. The adjacent South Bukit Barisan National Park is home to as many as 700 elephants, but about 50,000 people have moved into the preserve, clearing the jungle and building villages.

Last year, the number of elephant attacks on humans skyrocketed. According to forestry authorities, 16 attacks were reported from 1998 through 2002. In the first five months of 2003, there were 48, at least three of them fatal to the humans.

[From an article by Richard Paddock, Los Angeles Times, January 2, 2004.]


This and that


A call for help:
Is there someone with a computer and internet access who would be willing to serve as a proofreader for Overtime?

I could email it to you, you could just read it through and make the corrections, and then email it back to me.

No money, just lots of gratitude.

--Linda Featheringill

* * * * * * *

The US - A great place to live if you have money. [Actual starvation? No. Malnutrition? Yes.]

Hunger and homelessness increased in many of America's largest cities this year, with growing demand for emergency food supplies by families with children, the elderly and even people with jobs, a survey by U.S. mayors finds. The report by the U.S. Conference of Mayors, released yesterday, found requests for emergency food assistance rose 17 percent from last year in the survey of 25 large cities. Requests for emergency shelter assistance increased by 13 percent, the report showed.

Most of the cities expect that requests for emergency food assistance and shelter will rise again in the coming year, the study said. Denver suffered the greatest spike in demand for emergency food, with requests rising 48 percent this year. Food needs rose 40 percent in Louisville, Ky., 27 percent in Providence, R.I., and 25 percent in Charleston, S.C. Seattle reported a decrease in emergency food requests of 8 percent.

Unemployment, low-paying jobs, high housing costs, substance abuse and high energy and utility costs contribute to the hunger problem, the report said.

"This survey underscores the impact the economy has had on everyday Americans," said James Garner, Conference of Mayors president.

The study said that as need increased, more than half of the cities had to turn hungry people away, with more than 14 percent of requests for emergency food assistance going unmet.[Emphasis mine. L.F.]

Requests for assistance by families with children increased by 18 percent, and requests by elderly people increased by 13 percent. Overall, nearly three out of four cities reported an increase in food assistance requests.

"The report is full of bad news, but solutions are there," said Michael Lennon, chief executive officer of HomeAid America, a group that builds shelters for the homeless. "The economy is on the rebound, they're doing well in the building industry, but as the economy is going up, prices go up, and housing costs go up. It's good for people who own homes, but hard on people who are renters."

Governments need to respond by providing more transitional housing so people have a roof over their heads while they build job skills and save for rent, Lennon added.

The study also found:

--Fifty-nine percent of people requesting emergency food assistance were members of families.

--Thirty-nine percent of the adults requesting emergency food assistance were employed.

--Requests for shelter by homeless families increased by 15 percent.

--People remained homeless an average of five months - longer than before, in most cities.
[Siobhan McDonough, Associated Press, December 19, 2003.]

Identity crisis?

John Howard has been Australia’s prime minister since 1996.
However, it seems that most Americans know nothing of the world outside of the US, so prior to the patronizing president of the US, George Bush, arrived in Australia to deliver his orders personally to our Prime Minister, the White House staff called a media conference. The State Department then instructed the media to "educate" the American public and make it clear to them that Australia was their ally - one who had supported the US and provided troops and military personnel in Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq. They were told to make certain that Americans knew that President Bush was meeting the Prime Minister of Australia and to make it known that his name was John Major! The fact that John Major was the British Prime Minister from 1990 to 1997 (and not Australian at all) apparently escaped the notice of the US State Department.

On the other hand, John Howard visited the UK about a year ago and the current British PM, Tony Blair, introduced him in public as "our American buddy."
Poor John Howard. It seems that everywhere he goes, foreigners ask, "John who?" [Gogglesworth, Australia.]

Language

A scientist says he has solved one of the great puzzles of Western history - the origin of the vast family of languages called Indo-European. This family includes everything from English and Spanish to Sanskrit and ancient Greek.

The root of all the Indo-European languages was spoken about 9,000 years ago, according to a computer analysis of 87 languages detailed in the November 27 issue of the journal Nature. That age contradicts a popular theory that the ancestor tongue was brought in by a wave of invading horsemen, known as the Kurgans, about 6,000 years ago.

Instead, the new finding supports a rival theory that hat the languages of Europe and parts of Asia had their origins in Stone Age Anatolia, part of modern-day Turkey, and spread from there, along with agricultural innovations. "It spread not by the sword of conquest, but by the plow," said Russell Gray, who led the investigation and is a researcher at the University of Aukland in New Zealand.

If the analysis is accepted as correct, it would settle fundamental questions about the deep history of the European continent and the beginnings of modern languages that divide it today. Researchers have been arguing the subject for more than two centuries. The two leading theories today - known as the "Kurgan expansion" and "Anatolian farming" - have left academics bitterly split.

Gray used new mathematical tools designed to reconstruct evolutionary family trees of life based on similarities in their DNA. Then he applied the tools to languages based on similarities in their vocabulary.

His approach uses an updated version of a theory called "glottochronology" that was discredited and discarded decades ago. The work began with an old idea in linguistics, that closely related languages share vocabulary words. Morris Swadesh, a famed linguist, created lists of the most basic vocabulary words, like "mother," and compared them across languages. When these words are very similar, like "mother" in English and "mere" in French, they are considered cognates and likely descended from a common ancestor.

Gray and another researcher fed a database of information on cognates into a computer, along with 14 dates for language splits that are known from the historical record. The computer then generated a large series of possible family trees for the languages, as well as timings for the various splits.
[Gareth Cook, Boston Globe, November 27, 2003.]

International trade agreements - the view from Mexico

The North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) is now 10 years old.

Successive Secretaries of the U.S. Department of Labor -- ironically among NAFTA's most ardent supporters -- have kept close track of the treaty's high cost in U.S. jobs. By 2002, the department had certified that 408,000 workers qualified for extensions of unemployment benefits because their employers had moved their jobs south of the border. Most observers believe this is a vast undercount. According to "NAFTA at Seven," a report by the Economic Policy Institute, "NAFTA eliminated 766,030 actual and potential U.S. jobs between 1994 and 2000 because of the rapid growth in the net U.S. export deficit with Mexico and Canada."

While the job picture for U.S. workers was grim, NAFTA's impact on Mexican jobs was devastating. Before leaving office, President Carlos Salinas de Gortari promised Mexicans they would gain the jobs the United States lost. On U.S. tours to promote the treaty, he promised that this job gain, although painful for U.S. workers, would halt the northward flow of Mexican job seekers. Instead, NAFTA's first year saw the loss of over a million jobs all across Mexico, in the wake of economic crisis. To attract investment, NAFTA-related reforms required the privatization of factories, railroads, airlines and other large enterprises. This led to further huge waves of layoffs. And as economic desperation in Mexico has increased, immigration to the United States has become the only hope for survival for millions of Mexicans.

At first it seemed that the growth of maquiladora factories (located just south of the US/Mexico border, using Mexican labor to produce goods sold in the US) would make up for at least part of the job loss. By 2001, over 1.3 million workers were employed in more than 2,000 border plants, according to the Maquiladora Industry Association. But tying the jobs of so many Mexicans to the U.S. market, for which the plants were producing, proved disastrous. When U.S. consumers stopped buying as recession hit in 2001, maquiladoras shed workers. The Mexican government estimates that over 400,000 jobs disappeared. The association and the Mexican government tried to blame the loss in border jobs on Chinese competition, but the plants simply produced far more goods than a recession-plagued market in the U.S. could absorb.

The most serious consequence of NAFTA has been its failure to protect the rights of workers. To attract investment to the maquiladoras, Mexican government authorities cooperated with investors and compliant official unions in maintaining a low-wage economy, reinforced with a system of labor control.

According to Martha Ojeda, director of the Coalition for Justice in the Maquiladoras, the government-mandated minimum wage for workers on the border is about $4.20 a day. She estimates that a majority of maquiladora workers earn close to this wage. But a study by the Economics Faculty of the National Autonomous University in Mexico City found Mexican wages have lost 81 percent of their buying power in the last two decades.

Maquiladora workers are required to belong to unions that have no intention of raising those low wages or helping them end exhausting and dangerous working conditions. Throughout NAFTA's 10-year history, a long labor war was waged from plant to plant along the border. Workers' efforts to organize independent unions have been met with firings, plant closures and physical violence.

In those few instances in which workers have successfully formed independent unions, as they did at Tijuana's Han Young plant in 1998-9, their strikes were broken, despite right-to-strike guarantees under Mexico's constitution and Federal Labor Law.

NAFTA's sponsors promised that the treaty's labor side-agreements would protect workers. But in 10 years, not one fired worker has been returned to his or her job, and not one independent union has gained legal status and a contract as a result of the NAFTA process.

Instead, under NAFTA historical labor protections built into Mexico's legal system have been systematically undermined and eliminated as obstacles to investment. Even when Mexican judges held that strikes were legal, government authorities defied their decisions with impunity.
[From an article by David Bacon, Pacific News Service, November 18, 2003.]

The End of the World - remember I told you so.

Every year has its own end-of-the-world predictions. A group called the Watcher Ministries has pegged 2004 as the year of the second coming, using complex calculations based on measurements of the Pyramid at Giza. Another apocalyptic number-cruncher named Clay Cantrell is more specific, setting October 17 as the start date for the Rapture. Australian doomsday prophet William Kamm, whose followers call him the Little Pebble, predicts the end of the world as we know it for Easter Sunday. In The Bible Code II: The Countdown, Michael Drosnin plumps for a June nuclear attack on New York City, touching off the third world war and hastening the end-time. One to keep your eye on.

Keep your head down. In August a large comet will brush northern France, raining debris on the Earth before exploding over the Aegean. At least that's what Nostradamus is predicting for 2004. Of course his lunatic quatrains have always been open to a certain amount of interpretation, but this is the central thesis of Comet of Nostradamus: August 2004: Impact! - a book which, it is widely predicted, will disappear off the face of the earth on September 1.
[From an article by Tim Dowling, The Guardian, January 1, 2004.]

HIV/AIDS world update - very little good news
Deaths and new cases of HIV/AIDS reached unprecedented highs in 2003 and are set to rise still further as the epidemic keeps a stranglehold on sub-Saharan Africa and advances across Eastern Europe and Central Asia. New global estimates released Tuesday based on improved data show about 40 million people worldwide are living with HIV/AIDS, including an estimated 2.5 million children under 15 years old. About five million people were infected in 2003 and more than three million died.

The epidemic, fueled by intravenous drug use and unsafe sex, is spreading in India, China, Indonesia, Papua New Guinea, Vietnam, the Russian Federation, Ukraine, Estonia and Latvia.
[Reuters, November 25, 2003.]

North America (US and Canada) - In the US about 40,000 new HIV infections occur each year. More than 30 percent of these infections occur in women, and 60 percent occur in ethnic minorities. There are 800,000 infected with HIV and more than 300,000 people living with full-blown AIDS. In Canada about 4,200 new HIV infections occur each year, 25% occurring in women. About 55,000 live with HIV and about 18,000 people have AIDS.

South America (Latin America) - In Latin America and the Caribbean region nearly 1.7 million people have been diagnosed with HIV infection or AIDS, twice the incidence in the United States and Canada. Brazil, Mexico, Colombia, and Argentina are the Latin American countries with the highest number of cases of HIV infection or AIDS. Brazil has offered free antiretroviral medications since 1988 but these medicines are scarce in other countries.
[MSN Encarta]

Asia - with emphasis on China and Thailand

By the end of the decade, China may have 20 million people infected with the AIDS virus - a catastrophe driven in part by totalitarian habits. China’s epidemic is largely a product of unhygienic blood collections in the 1990s. The practice may have infected a million people in Hanan alone, virtually of them poor peasants who sold blood to make money. China is 10 years late in taking AIDS seriously. The government denied that China had a problem until late 2001. But in the face of extraordinary world criticism, Beijing has turned around. Officials have announced plans for a limited program of AIDS prevention and are even providing 3000 people with antiretroviral treatment.
[West Australian, July 2003.]

More than 300,000 people in Thailand now have fully developed AIDS. The state-run Thai News Agency quoted Public Health Ministry spokesperson Nittaya Chanruengmahaphon as saying on Friday. Of the 312,429 AIDS patients, 62,726 have died. People ages 25-29 comprised the largest group of patients: 26 percent. The figures do not include people with HIV who have not developed AIDS. One in four AIDS patients are also infected with TB. Bangkok recorded the highest number of AIDS- related deaths: 5,411 since 1984. Thanks to a strong prevention campaign, Thailand's annual number of new cases has fallen from 140,000 in 1991 to 20,000 today. National prevalence, however, still stands at about 2 percent.
[Xinhua News Agency - December 31, 2003]

Australia - Apparently Australia has very few new cases of HIV/AIDS, even among intravenous drug users. Various sources credit aggressive education and free needle exchange for this success, along with providing antiretroviral medications to those infected.

Europe - HIV/AIDS is present in all European countries but is still increasing in the former USSR countries, mainly among intravenous drug users. According to various reports, drug use is increasing in these areas. Also, the state-sponsored healthcare system basically disappeared when the political structure of the USSR collapsed. Treatment programs are sketchy.

Africa - The countries most affected include: Botswana - At least 330,000 of the country's 1.6 million people are infected with HIV or have AIDS, while 65,000 children have been left orphaned. The infection rate among pregnant women is now about 40%, while the overall infection rate stands at 38.8%, the highest in the world.
Ethiopia - Nearly 3 million people are infected. About 5,000 people are infected every week, but 85% of the country's 65 million live in rural areas and not tested. Kenya - Over 2 million are HIV-infected and a cumulative number of 1.5 million people have died due to AIDS. Life expectancy has dropped by around 13 years to 51. An estimated 2.5 million adults are living with HIV and about 500 are said to die of HIV-related infections every day.

Malawi - Malawi is one of the worst affected countries, especially among young men and women. Life expectancy is projected to drop from 57.4 years to 44.1 years in 2010.

Rwanda - Roughly 500,000 Rwandans live with HIV, of which about half are believed to have developed AIDS. Roughly 50% are women and 13% are children under 15. HIV prevalence rates in rural areas rose rapidly after the genocide from 1.3% in the mid 1980s to nearly 11% by the late 1990s.

South Africa - Some 4.6 million people (about 11% of the population) are HIV-positive. Some reports suggest that the annual number of AIDS-related deaths here will peak in 2008 at 487,320 before declining to about 470,000 in 2010. In 2002, the province that recorded the highest HIV rate among antenatal attendees was KwaZulu-Natal, which had a rate of 36.5%, an increase of 3% since 2001.

Swaziland - In January 2003, the infection rate among adults was calculated to be 38.6%. Now, that number is estimated to be around 40%. Before HIV became so widespread, Swaziland population was about 1.2 million. Today it is estimated to be 970,000.

Tanzania - The government reports that the healthcare system is overstretched by the increasing number of AIDS patients, and the increasing number of orphans is overwhelming the coping capacity of communities. Life expectancy has declined from 51 years in 1988 to 47 in 2000 because of the disease.

Uganda - Almost 1 million have died from AIDS-related illnesses since the disease was first diagnosed here 20 year ago. Nevertheless Uganda is one of only two countries (the other is Senegal) with a reduction in HIV-prevalence rates. The number of people living with the disease has gone down to 1,050,555 from 1.5 million.

Zambia - The Ministry of Health expects half the population will die of AIDS. Some 40,000 children under 15 are infected; 650,000 children have been orphaned or left with one parent. The infection rate is more than 20%.

Zimbabwe - Up to 25% of the population is HIV-positive; HIV kills 300 people daily. About 500,000 children have lost at least one parent. Life-extending treatment including antiretrovirals is unaffordable to all but the wealthiest people living with HIV.
[Information on Africa from an article by John Vidal, The Observer, November 23, 2003.]

Another American century?

To the people of the US:

In spite of the efforts of the Project for a New American Century and other Super Patriots, the days of the American Empire may be numbered. There are several changes going on, both on the international scene and within the US itself. The economic rise of China is not the only threat to US hegemony.

How do you feel about that?

We are all children of place and time. Most of us in the US were born and raised in an atmosphere filled with chants of "We’re number one!" The idea was imprinted in our minds while we were quite young. It might take some conscious effort to turn loose of that notion and accept being just one nation of many. The process might be difficult and might stir up the emotions of fear and anger, as well as nostalgia and grief.

But if enough of us start making that effort now, then perhaps we can serve as voices of reason when the rest of the country figures out what is going on. Perhaps we can help our friends and neighbors accept the changes calmly and peacefully.

We can do it if we try. After all, we accepted Evis’s death, didn’t we? Well, some of us did, anyway.
--With affection, Linda Featheringill

Next month: We’d love to know what you think. These are our usual classifications:

-- Open - questions, comments, tirades, etc.
-- RSVP. React to previous statements.
-- The ecology.
-- Clippings from newspapers, etc.

On the Web:
Overtime is included in the website of Socialism for a Real Labor Union at:
socialismmarxdeleonforarealunion.org
[Socialism Marx DeLeon for a real union]

Money. Overtime is free, but there are expenses and any help with these would be appreciated. Please make checks payable to Linda Featheringill and mail to me at 4651 West 41st Street, Down, Cleveland, OH 44109.

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Finances at the end of December 2003:
Balance------------------------------8.68
Contributions--------------80.00
Supplies and stationary-----8.38
Copying--------------------35.29
Postage--------------------34.79
Total expenses-----------------------78.46
Balance------------------------------10.22

Contributions: C.B. 10.00, A.A. 20.00, S.E. Jeffrey 50.00.

And, to Everyone, thank you, thank you, thank you. Linda Featheringill.