Friday, December 28, 2007
another death in rawalpindi:
Today, military analyst Ayesha Siddeque estimates, the five conglomerates, or "welfare foundations," under military control own about $20 billion of assets and twelve billion hectares of land. This stake in the nation's economic life means the military necessarily has a large and persisting interest in control of the politic
Today, military analyst Ayesha Siddeque estimates, the five conglomerates, or "welfare foundations," under military control own about $20 billion of assets and twelve billion hectares of land. This stake in the nation's economic life means the military necessarily has a large and persisting interest in control of the politic
Thursday, December 27, 2007
bipartisan paradise:
It is now obvious that one impetus behind the "surge" was to accelerate the "ethnic cleansing" of Iraq. Given the manifest failure to establish a strong central government to serve as a client state, the conquerors now find it easier to deal with separate ethnic enclaves, which can police themselves, shake out their own internal conflicts (however bloodily) and thus establish some kind of solid leadership that can cut deals and guarantee investments. Most of the measures taken during the "surge" seem aimed precisely at ethnic cleansing: the increased support of the Iraqi government security forces -- which are largely Shiite militias -- has been matched with what some see as the lunatic policy of arming Sunni militias.
(...) And so the strategy behind the "surge" becomes clear: A united, independent Iraq cannot be allowed to exist, because such a state would not permit a permanent American military presence nor sign away the nation's oil wealth. Therefore, Iraq must be torn apart -- by sectarian strife, ethnic cleansing, terrorism and "counterinsurgency" warfare. And violence must continue until this shake-out is completed, in order to justify the continuing American presence.
(...) This is what we've come to -- or perhaps, harking back to the Trail of Tears, this is where we came in. Ignorant, arrogant, cowardly elites proposing -- and in Bush's case, inflicting -- vast human suffering on innocent people, driving them from their homes, terrorizing them, killing them. And all of this done for no other reason but to enhance the coddled elite's power, privilege and pleasures.
It is now obvious that one impetus behind the "surge" was to accelerate the "ethnic cleansing" of Iraq. Given the manifest failure to establish a strong central government to serve as a client state, the conquerors now find it easier to deal with separate ethnic enclaves, which can police themselves, shake out their own internal conflicts (however bloodily) and thus establish some kind of solid leadership that can cut deals and guarantee investments. Most of the measures taken during the "surge" seem aimed precisely at ethnic cleansing: the increased support of the Iraqi government security forces -- which are largely Shiite militias -- has been matched with what some see as the lunatic policy of arming Sunni militias.
(...) And so the strategy behind the "surge" becomes clear: A united, independent Iraq cannot be allowed to exist, because such a state would not permit a permanent American military presence nor sign away the nation's oil wealth. Therefore, Iraq must be torn apart -- by sectarian strife, ethnic cleansing, terrorism and "counterinsurgency" warfare. And violence must continue until this shake-out is completed, in order to justify the continuing American presence.
(...) This is what we've come to -- or perhaps, harking back to the Trail of Tears, this is where we came in. Ignorant, arrogant, cowardly elites proposing -- and in Bush's case, inflicting -- vast human suffering on innocent people, driving them from their homes, terrorizing them, killing them. And all of this done for no other reason but to enhance the coddled elite's power, privilege and pleasures.
Wednesday, December 26, 2007
the gates of hell (on iran):This ratcheting-up of the arms race in the Middle East, on top of $30 billion in military aid provided earlier this year to Saudi Arabia and Israel, is somehow portrayed by Gates as the surest route to insuring peace. The notion that the Mideast suffers from a dire shortage of military hardware like missiles is, to say the least, a unique interpretation of recent history.
(...) while oil-rich Iran's development of nuclear power is now portrayed as persuasive proof that its real intent is to build nuclear weapons, leading hawk Henry Kissinger took a different view when Iran was under the US-implanted dictatorship of Shah Reza Pahlavi. Kissinger defended Iran's development of nuclear energy during the Shah's reign, arguing that "introduction of nuclear power will both provide for the growing needs of Iran's economy and free remaining oil reserves for export or conversion into petrochemicals."
(...) while oil-rich Iran's development of nuclear power is now portrayed as persuasive proof that its real intent is to build nuclear weapons, leading hawk Henry Kissinger took a different view when Iran was under the US-implanted dictatorship of Shah Reza Pahlavi. Kissinger defended Iran's development of nuclear energy during the Shah's reign, arguing that "introduction of nuclear power will both provide for the growing needs of Iran's economy and free remaining oil reserves for export or conversion into petrochemicals."
embedded in power
I have heard from a few investment bankers what their wet dream is all about – it's the Bush administration's dream, for that matter: the world as a Green Zone guarded by Blackwater types, everything privatized, provided Halliburton-style, and "out there" a Mad Max Red Zone. In this sense Baghdad is a living metaphor of the future.
I have heard from a few investment bankers what their wet dream is all about – it's the Bush administration's dream, for that matter: the world as a Green Zone guarded by Blackwater types, everything privatized, provided Halliburton-style, and "out there" a Mad Max Red Zone. In this sense Baghdad is a living metaphor of the future.
chiquita in the dock for murder:
For lawyer Terry Collingwood, capital punishment has its place, especially if it means "the death of a truly evil corporation." The reference was to Ohio-based Chiquita Corp., which last March pleaded guilty to making 100 payments over seven years totaling $1.7 million to the right-wing, paramilitary Colombian Self Defense Units — AUC in Spanish. The payoffs began in 1997. Observers say the aim was to suppress labor activism, bar left-wing insurgents and control territory
(...) Rights groups blame the AUC for killing 10,000 Colombians over a period of 10 years
(...) Victims' lawyers say the AUC not only killed students, unionists and peasants allegedly associated with left-wing insurgents, but also seized land for the Chiquita empire and arranged for thousands of automatic weapons plus ammunition to pass across Chiquita docks at the northwestern port city of Turbo. The AUC had gained control of the area after expelling the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) during the 1990s.
(...) For Terry Collingsworth, "This is a landmark case, maybe the biggest terrorism case in history. In terms of casualties, it's the size of three World Trade Center attacks." Paul Wolf adds, "Chiquita's victims are living in dire poverty."
For lawyer Terry Collingwood, capital punishment has its place, especially if it means "the death of a truly evil corporation." The reference was to Ohio-based Chiquita Corp., which last March pleaded guilty to making 100 payments over seven years totaling $1.7 million to the right-wing, paramilitary Colombian Self Defense Units — AUC in Spanish. The payoffs began in 1997. Observers say the aim was to suppress labor activism, bar left-wing insurgents and control territory
(...) Rights groups blame the AUC for killing 10,000 Colombians over a period of 10 years
(...) Victims' lawyers say the AUC not only killed students, unionists and peasants allegedly associated with left-wing insurgents, but also seized land for the Chiquita empire and arranged for thousands of automatic weapons plus ammunition to pass across Chiquita docks at the northwestern port city of Turbo. The AUC had gained control of the area after expelling the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) during the 1990s.
(...) For Terry Collingsworth, "This is a landmark case, maybe the biggest terrorism case in history. In terms of casualties, it's the size of three World Trade Center attacks." Paul Wolf adds, "Chiquita's victims are living in dire poverty."
Saturday, December 8, 2007
venezuela
hugo chavez' future (wilpert):
One thing you have to consider is that the proportion of agriculture in the gross national product is only about 6%, so it´s really a miniscule portion of the economy. The amount of U.S. interest in that 6% is probably not more than 1% at the most. I don´t think land reform will have any impact on U.S. relations. The most prominent case was this Lord Vestey ranch which belongs to the British, but that case was more or less settled. The government really wants to expand agricultural production and it would be very careful not to disrupt this production. The agreement then with Vestey has to be seen in that context.
(...) I think the danger is that any effort to move away from so-called liberal, representative democracy will be interpreted as an effort to bring about dictatorship. I don´t think that´s a fair conclusion to draw, but I think the U.S. would say this as well as many people in the international community and within the international media. That could isolate Venezuela. And, I think the Chavez government is intent on moving away from capitalism and liberal representative democracy.
(...) In the measures that he´s already announced. On the political level, for example, giving more power to communal councils, and giving priority to them over representative government or elected officials, also in terms of allocating budgets and making various decisions in the regions of the country. On the economic level, more nationalizations, more worker self-management at all levels. And so, these changes at the political and economic levels will be interpreted as anti-democratic, even if they´re not.
(...) And yes, it is definitely an attempt to convince a larger segment of the population to support the program. I personally think it´s a bad idea, not because I´m against that type of education but from what I can see there´s an over emphasis on this kind of moral dimension and being moralistic. To my mind that´s not what socialism is about. It´s an elaborate critique which I won´t go into now, but there´s a simplified idea about education that I feel is being propagated sometimes, that we just need to teach people how to think in more collective terms and the collective good instead of the individual good, more in terms of solidarity and everything will follow from there. I just don´t think that´s how education works and it could easily lead to a new form of dogmatism which is quite dangerous.
(...) So, we are left with three main internal obstacles. One of these is a kind of in-group mentality related to clientelism. Because of the external threats, even though these threats have subsided, there´s still this idea that we need to protect ourselves and promote only those who are with us. That usually leads to a skewed notion of citizenship, where government services and jobs are given mainly to supporters, which has been widely discussed in the media. I think this is a problem which exists and could even get worse. This is a mild form of corruption but it could lead to more serious corruption.
(...) Even if the opposition is a minority, they become more and more willing to actively resist the government if they are completely cut out and cut off from any kind of participation in the social and political life in the country. That could lead to a situation like what we had in Nicaragua, where you had people taking up arms in a low intensity civil war. You could get this in Venezuela, or a terrorist campaign. I still think that´s a possibility if enough people in the opposition were convinced that this was the only way to be politically active.
(...) I think assassination is a real possibility because people in the opposition who don´t like the government, if they´re smart, they realize that everything is so dependent on Chavez that if they get rid of him they have a very good chance of coming back to power. But, they might also conclude that such a development could provoke total chaos in the country. I think analysts in the U.S. government know that, and maybe I´m being too optimistic or thinking too highly of them, but I kind of doubt they would be interested in total social unrest in Venezuela because that would threaten the oil supply. So that´s why I doubt the U.S. government is behind an attempt to assassinate Chavez. But that doesn´t prevent people in the opposition from wanting it, especially since they probably don´t care very much whether oil goes to the U.S. or not, and their main concern is getting back into power. The third obstacle is Chavez´s governing style. Even though he wants to bring about participatory democracy, he still has a very top down management system and that creates contradictions. He´s not very participatory in his own environment, I have this feeling that he has a very militarist mentality of giving orders and expecting everyone to follow them. This works for a leader in that it´s good to be strong, but it´s lacking a certain amount of flexibility and willingness to accept criticism and input from various sectors. Also, the whole idea of the Enabling Law, of democratizing the country through a relatively undemocratic process, is also contradictory.
reading arendt in venezuela:
"They bring along their habit of hierarchy, of not listening, their love to give orders to followers who do not question," Petkoff told me when I met him after my Catholic University talk, which had taken place in a hall that bore a wonderful inscription above its door: "Use your ears here, that's why it's called an auditorium."
(...) She has no trouble with Chávez's ends, only with his means, which she described to me as "sacrificing our democracy to his socialism." We had quite an intense conversation about why Hannah Arendt had distrusted revolutions that try to solve problems of social injustice without first achieving a stable, constitutional republic. "But you have to tell," she challenged me, "what is the guarantee that people in a constitutional republic will be responsible to the poor?"
(...) In short, I was told, Chávez is no different from the standard Latin American caudillo.
(...) The hodgepodge of quotations that Chávez disseminates in his regular addresses (which all the networks are obliged by law to air) and his weekly television appearance--a call-in show known as Alo, Presidente!--is symptomatic of the hodgepodge of his policies. His is a type of revolution not anticipated in Hannah Arendt's 1963 book On Revolution, I suggested to my audience at the Simon Bolivar University, one of the most active outposts of the emergent student movement. (The campus has huge parking lots full of Minis with their back windows painted playfully "I am free speech!" and "I am the spirit of liberty!")
(...) they produced a truly remarkable American-style Constitution based on checks and balances, which calls for five branches of government, one of which is dedicated to oversight of the government through an ombudsman and a general prosecutor. But the Constitution did not put as effective a check on executive power as it might have, and almost as soon as it was printed in little portable editions to be distributed free to millions of Venezuelans, who took to carrying it at all times and quoting it, Chávez began to obscure it with decrees and laws that are never challenged as unconstitutional by the Supreme Court, which was itself unconstitutionally expanded so that it could be packed with his appointees. Not satisfied to control the court, in 2000 Chávez got the unicameral Assembly to, in effect, erase its power by granting him a year of nonconsultative decision-making (in European history this kind of antidemocratic achievement is known as an enabling law, or Ermachtigungsgesetz). Chávez's political critics in the universities are alarmed that the Bolivarian Constitution is being ignored or undermined, and the constitutional lawyer who did most of the drafting has turned anti-Chavista.
(...) s. The government directly funds hundreds of so- called misiones in communities. The missions do provide employment and bring food (delivered in military trucks), healthcare (aided by Cuban doctors) and education directly to the people, which is surely a good thing; but they are not like the revolutionary councils that have sprung up, Arendt noted, in all revolutions, constituting the people's forums for ongoing political participation (until they were, time and again, crushed by parties aspiring to total control). Despite a lot of rhetoric about participatory democracy, the missions are not political formations that could reform local, city and provincial governments, making them more responsive to the grassroots, and they have alienated rather than inspired the country's labor unions because they are run and firmly controlled from the center, often quite literally from Chávez's office. No totalitarian military and secret police bureaucracy has been built up in Venezuela, but a controlled service sector has, and a rerun of centralized state socialism will ensue unless the political problem is grasped by the Chavistas, by the anti- Chavistas or, more likely, by the students, who are grassroots political actors and not caught up in haggling about whether the missions have, in statistical terms, benefited the poor or not, at what cost and how efficiently or inefficiently.
(...) I met a young woman, an art student making her political debut as a T-shirt designer, who told me, tearfully, that she is so "hurt in my heart" because Chávez says the students are spoiled rich white kids who are "puppets of imperialism." "What do I do? I do not want my parents to think I cannot act for myself! And we want the Chavistas to believe us, to unite with us--because we want to help them, too. We are all socialists."
(...) I assured him that many people in America were worrying even more stronger than Hannah Arendt did about the American President being an autocrat but that it was the task of students everywhere to speak and act freely, as they do naturally, because, in her words, "they are new beginnings."
coup 2002
The next day was a very busy one for the coup leaders. Everyone who was anyone in the opposition gathered at the presidential palace, to celebrate, to congratulate, and to lobby for positions in the transition government. The private mass media was celebrating too, with tremendous headlines that cheered, “It’s Over!” (El Universal), “Chavez Resigned” (El Universal), “The Assassin Has Fallen” (Asi es la Noticia), “Good-bye Hugo” (Tal Cual). Napoleón Bravo’s morning talk show (24 Horas) opened program with, “Good morning, we have a new president,” and then Bravo proceeded to read the resignation letter Chavez supposedly signed, but actually did not sign. The state media, though, was still off the air.
(...) While the coup organizers were working out the details of a decree that would name Carmona as president, among other things, Isaias Rodriguez, the country’s Attorney General, managed to convince the private broadcast media to let him onto live television with the argument that he wanted to publicly announce his resignation. Once on live television, at 2:04 pm, he said, “This is a coup d’état. There is no doubt about it. The Inter-American Democratic Charter and the Washington protocol have been violated here.” He went on to say that Chavez did not resign and that even if he had, it would not be effective unless he did so to the National Assembly and that next in line of succession is the vice-president and then the president of the National Assembly. A few minutes into his announcement, as soon as they noticed that Rodriguez was not announcing his resignation, the private television stations cut him off mid-sentence. Already word had spread, by word of mouth and via the community media, that Chavez had not resigned and that he was being held against his will on a military island somewhere. Isaias Rodriguez’s announcement thus confirmed what many had already suspected.
(...) The next morning, April 13th, as the spontaneous demonstrations in support of Chavez grew increasingly larger, the Greater Caracas city police (Policia Metropolitana), began repressing these demonstrations. Also, rioting and looting broke out in many poor neighborhoods, as Chavez supporters vented their anger on their surrounding infrastructure. The metropolitan police ended up shooting and killing between 50 and 60 people in the confrontations with demonstrators.[32] Many of these deaths happened in front of Fort Tiuna, where the Metropolitan police repeatedly and unsuccessfully attempted to disperse the crowd with live ammunition. Also, demonstrations were taking place throughout the country, with people demanding the immediate return of their president.
(...) None of this was viewable on television, however. The previous day, on the 12th of April, all four main private TV channels were broadcasting interviews with gloating opposition leaders and the resume of Pedro Carmona. On the 13th, however, a complete news blackout had taken over. The private broadcasters were showing nothing but cartoons and old Hollywood movies. Channel 8, the state television channel was off the air for all of the 12th and most of the 13th. The lack of information was bizarre. At first one had the impression that there was no news simply because nothing was happening, because everything was back to “normal,” now that Chavez was out of office. Anyone who could receive cable television or who was in some way connected to the network of Chavez supporters, knew, via CNN or via word of mouth (or directly, if they lived in or near a barrio) that nothing was normal at all. Later, the owners of the media outlets would claim that the reason they did not broadcast any news was because it was too dangerous to send reporters onto the street. This argument, though, is hardly credible, especially because they could at least have reported on their fear of going onto the street. Also, it was later learned that in the afternoon of the 12th, Carmona had gathered the heads of the main media outlets and asked them to make sure that their broadcasts do not contribute to any instability in the country.
(...) By endorsing the coup, with its confirmation of the opposition’s version of events as the only valid version, the U.S. government essentially became an accomplice to the coup, regardless of whether the U.S. government also had a larger hand in the coup behind the scenes. More than that, since it is now proven that the Bush administration knew of the coup plans well in advance, its endorsement of the opposition’s version of events constitutes active participation in the cover-up of the actual events in order to support the coup plotters’ version of what happened.
(...) It will probably take twenty years, as was the case with the uncovering of U.S. involvement in the overthrow of Chile’s Salvador Allende, before the full story of U.S. involvement in the Venezuelan coup is revealed.
(...) What these bits and pieces of evidence point to is a suggestive picture of direct U.S. government support for the coup. The exact extent and nature of this support will probably remain an issue of controversy for quite some time. It seems that the support was minimally in the form of supportive statements and advice on what the coup would have to look like in order for the U.S. to accept it. It seems more plausible, though, that the support was much more substantial than that and included extensive coordination between Venezuelan and U.S. coup planners, logistical military support as described by Madsen, and a plan for secretly flying Chavez to the U.S. or some other country, as happened to both President Bertrand Aristide of Haiti in 2005 and to General Manuel Noriega in 1990, when they were deposed with U.S. help.
One thing you have to consider is that the proportion of agriculture in the gross national product is only about 6%, so it´s really a miniscule portion of the economy. The amount of U.S. interest in that 6% is probably not more than 1% at the most. I don´t think land reform will have any impact on U.S. relations. The most prominent case was this Lord Vestey ranch which belongs to the British, but that case was more or less settled. The government really wants to expand agricultural production and it would be very careful not to disrupt this production. The agreement then with Vestey has to be seen in that context.
(...) I think the danger is that any effort to move away from so-called liberal, representative democracy will be interpreted as an effort to bring about dictatorship. I don´t think that´s a fair conclusion to draw, but I think the U.S. would say this as well as many people in the international community and within the international media. That could isolate Venezuela. And, I think the Chavez government is intent on moving away from capitalism and liberal representative democracy.
(...) In the measures that he´s already announced. On the political level, for example, giving more power to communal councils, and giving priority to them over representative government or elected officials, also in terms of allocating budgets and making various decisions in the regions of the country. On the economic level, more nationalizations, more worker self-management at all levels. And so, these changes at the political and economic levels will be interpreted as anti-democratic, even if they´re not.
(...) And yes, it is definitely an attempt to convince a larger segment of the population to support the program. I personally think it´s a bad idea, not because I´m against that type of education but from what I can see there´s an over emphasis on this kind of moral dimension and being moralistic. To my mind that´s not what socialism is about. It´s an elaborate critique which I won´t go into now, but there´s a simplified idea about education that I feel is being propagated sometimes, that we just need to teach people how to think in more collective terms and the collective good instead of the individual good, more in terms of solidarity and everything will follow from there. I just don´t think that´s how education works and it could easily lead to a new form of dogmatism which is quite dangerous.
(...) So, we are left with three main internal obstacles. One of these is a kind of in-group mentality related to clientelism. Because of the external threats, even though these threats have subsided, there´s still this idea that we need to protect ourselves and promote only those who are with us. That usually leads to a skewed notion of citizenship, where government services and jobs are given mainly to supporters, which has been widely discussed in the media. I think this is a problem which exists and could even get worse. This is a mild form of corruption but it could lead to more serious corruption.
(...) Even if the opposition is a minority, they become more and more willing to actively resist the government if they are completely cut out and cut off from any kind of participation in the social and political life in the country. That could lead to a situation like what we had in Nicaragua, where you had people taking up arms in a low intensity civil war. You could get this in Venezuela, or a terrorist campaign. I still think that´s a possibility if enough people in the opposition were convinced that this was the only way to be politically active.
(...) I think assassination is a real possibility because people in the opposition who don´t like the government, if they´re smart, they realize that everything is so dependent on Chavez that if they get rid of him they have a very good chance of coming back to power. But, they might also conclude that such a development could provoke total chaos in the country. I think analysts in the U.S. government know that, and maybe I´m being too optimistic or thinking too highly of them, but I kind of doubt they would be interested in total social unrest in Venezuela because that would threaten the oil supply. So that´s why I doubt the U.S. government is behind an attempt to assassinate Chavez. But that doesn´t prevent people in the opposition from wanting it, especially since they probably don´t care very much whether oil goes to the U.S. or not, and their main concern is getting back into power. The third obstacle is Chavez´s governing style. Even though he wants to bring about participatory democracy, he still has a very top down management system and that creates contradictions. He´s not very participatory in his own environment, I have this feeling that he has a very militarist mentality of giving orders and expecting everyone to follow them. This works for a leader in that it´s good to be strong, but it´s lacking a certain amount of flexibility and willingness to accept criticism and input from various sectors. Also, the whole idea of the Enabling Law, of democratizing the country through a relatively undemocratic process, is also contradictory.
reading arendt in venezuela:
"They bring along their habit of hierarchy, of not listening, their love to give orders to followers who do not question," Petkoff told me when I met him after my Catholic University talk, which had taken place in a hall that bore a wonderful inscription above its door: "Use your ears here, that's why it's called an auditorium."
(...) She has no trouble with Chávez's ends, only with his means, which she described to me as "sacrificing our democracy to his socialism." We had quite an intense conversation about why Hannah Arendt had distrusted revolutions that try to solve problems of social injustice without first achieving a stable, constitutional republic. "But you have to tell," she challenged me, "what is the guarantee that people in a constitutional republic will be responsible to the poor?"
(...) In short, I was told, Chávez is no different from the standard Latin American caudillo.
(...) The hodgepodge of quotations that Chávez disseminates in his regular addresses (which all the networks are obliged by law to air) and his weekly television appearance--a call-in show known as Alo, Presidente!--is symptomatic of the hodgepodge of his policies. His is a type of revolution not anticipated in Hannah Arendt's 1963 book On Revolution, I suggested to my audience at the Simon Bolivar University, one of the most active outposts of the emergent student movement. (The campus has huge parking lots full of Minis with their back windows painted playfully "I am free speech!" and "I am the spirit of liberty!")
(...) they produced a truly remarkable American-style Constitution based on checks and balances, which calls for five branches of government, one of which is dedicated to oversight of the government through an ombudsman and a general prosecutor. But the Constitution did not put as effective a check on executive power as it might have, and almost as soon as it was printed in little portable editions to be distributed free to millions of Venezuelans, who took to carrying it at all times and quoting it, Chávez began to obscure it with decrees and laws that are never challenged as unconstitutional by the Supreme Court, which was itself unconstitutionally expanded so that it could be packed with his appointees. Not satisfied to control the court, in 2000 Chávez got the unicameral Assembly to, in effect, erase its power by granting him a year of nonconsultative decision-making (in European history this kind of antidemocratic achievement is known as an enabling law, or Ermachtigungsgesetz). Chávez's political critics in the universities are alarmed that the Bolivarian Constitution is being ignored or undermined, and the constitutional lawyer who did most of the drafting has turned anti-Chavista.
(...) s. The government directly funds hundreds of so- called misiones in communities. The missions do provide employment and bring food (delivered in military trucks), healthcare (aided by Cuban doctors) and education directly to the people, which is surely a good thing; but they are not like the revolutionary councils that have sprung up, Arendt noted, in all revolutions, constituting the people's forums for ongoing political participation (until they were, time and again, crushed by parties aspiring to total control). Despite a lot of rhetoric about participatory democracy, the missions are not political formations that could reform local, city and provincial governments, making them more responsive to the grassroots, and they have alienated rather than inspired the country's labor unions because they are run and firmly controlled from the center, often quite literally from Chávez's office. No totalitarian military and secret police bureaucracy has been built up in Venezuela, but a controlled service sector has, and a rerun of centralized state socialism will ensue unless the political problem is grasped by the Chavistas, by the anti- Chavistas or, more likely, by the students, who are grassroots political actors and not caught up in haggling about whether the missions have, in statistical terms, benefited the poor or not, at what cost and how efficiently or inefficiently.
(...) I met a young woman, an art student making her political debut as a T-shirt designer, who told me, tearfully, that she is so "hurt in my heart" because Chávez says the students are spoiled rich white kids who are "puppets of imperialism." "What do I do? I do not want my parents to think I cannot act for myself! And we want the Chavistas to believe us, to unite with us--because we want to help them, too. We are all socialists."
(...) I assured him that many people in America were worrying even more stronger than Hannah Arendt did about the American President being an autocrat but that it was the task of students everywhere to speak and act freely, as they do naturally, because, in her words, "they are new beginnings."
coup 2002
The next day was a very busy one for the coup leaders. Everyone who was anyone in the opposition gathered at the presidential palace, to celebrate, to congratulate, and to lobby for positions in the transition government. The private mass media was celebrating too, with tremendous headlines that cheered, “It’s Over!” (El Universal), “Chavez Resigned” (El Universal), “The Assassin Has Fallen” (Asi es la Noticia), “Good-bye Hugo” (Tal Cual). Napoleón Bravo’s morning talk show (24 Horas) opened program with, “Good morning, we have a new president,” and then Bravo proceeded to read the resignation letter Chavez supposedly signed, but actually did not sign. The state media, though, was still off the air.
(...) While the coup organizers were working out the details of a decree that would name Carmona as president, among other things, Isaias Rodriguez, the country’s Attorney General, managed to convince the private broadcast media to let him onto live television with the argument that he wanted to publicly announce his resignation. Once on live television, at 2:04 pm, he said, “This is a coup d’état. There is no doubt about it. The Inter-American Democratic Charter and the Washington protocol have been violated here.” He went on to say that Chavez did not resign and that even if he had, it would not be effective unless he did so to the National Assembly and that next in line of succession is the vice-president and then the president of the National Assembly. A few minutes into his announcement, as soon as they noticed that Rodriguez was not announcing his resignation, the private television stations cut him off mid-sentence. Already word had spread, by word of mouth and via the community media, that Chavez had not resigned and that he was being held against his will on a military island somewhere. Isaias Rodriguez’s announcement thus confirmed what many had already suspected.
(...) The next morning, April 13th, as the spontaneous demonstrations in support of Chavez grew increasingly larger, the Greater Caracas city police (Policia Metropolitana), began repressing these demonstrations. Also, rioting and looting broke out in many poor neighborhoods, as Chavez supporters vented their anger on their surrounding infrastructure. The metropolitan police ended up shooting and killing between 50 and 60 people in the confrontations with demonstrators.[32] Many of these deaths happened in front of Fort Tiuna, where the Metropolitan police repeatedly and unsuccessfully attempted to disperse the crowd with live ammunition. Also, demonstrations were taking place throughout the country, with people demanding the immediate return of their president.
(...) None of this was viewable on television, however. The previous day, on the 12th of April, all four main private TV channels were broadcasting interviews with gloating opposition leaders and the resume of Pedro Carmona. On the 13th, however, a complete news blackout had taken over. The private broadcasters were showing nothing but cartoons and old Hollywood movies. Channel 8, the state television channel was off the air for all of the 12th and most of the 13th. The lack of information was bizarre. At first one had the impression that there was no news simply because nothing was happening, because everything was back to “normal,” now that Chavez was out of office. Anyone who could receive cable television or who was in some way connected to the network of Chavez supporters, knew, via CNN or via word of mouth (or directly, if they lived in or near a barrio) that nothing was normal at all. Later, the owners of the media outlets would claim that the reason they did not broadcast any news was because it was too dangerous to send reporters onto the street. This argument, though, is hardly credible, especially because they could at least have reported on their fear of going onto the street. Also, it was later learned that in the afternoon of the 12th, Carmona had gathered the heads of the main media outlets and asked them to make sure that their broadcasts do not contribute to any instability in the country.
(...) By endorsing the coup, with its confirmation of the opposition’s version of events as the only valid version, the U.S. government essentially became an accomplice to the coup, regardless of whether the U.S. government also had a larger hand in the coup behind the scenes. More than that, since it is now proven that the Bush administration knew of the coup plans well in advance, its endorsement of the opposition’s version of events constitutes active participation in the cover-up of the actual events in order to support the coup plotters’ version of what happened.
(...) It will probably take twenty years, as was the case with the uncovering of U.S. involvement in the overthrow of Chile’s Salvador Allende, before the full story of U.S. involvement in the Venezuelan coup is revealed.
(...) What these bits and pieces of evidence point to is a suggestive picture of direct U.S. government support for the coup. The exact extent and nature of this support will probably remain an issue of controversy for quite some time. It seems that the support was minimally in the form of supportive statements and advice on what the coup would have to look like in order for the U.S. to accept it. It seems more plausible, though, that the support was much more substantial than that and included extensive coordination between Venezuelan and U.S. coup planners, logistical military support as described by Madsen, and a plan for secretly flying Chavez to the U.S. or some other country, as happened to both President Bertrand Aristide of Haiti in 2005 and to General Manuel Noriega in 1990, when they were deposed with U.S. help.
Sunday, December 2, 2007
mission accomplished:
Olmert's notion of "painful compromises" really means causing the Palestinians "pain" that will induce them to "compromise."
(...) In launching this new "peace process," the Bush Administration continues to provide Israel's ongoing colonization of Palestinian land with the requisite time to create further facts on the ground and stifle Palestinian aspirations for a viable, independent state. In order for this to be successful, Washington and Tel Aviv need a Palestinian leadership that will actively participate in such a charade in return for US funding and the title of President or Prime Minister. Abbas and his appointed Prime Minister Salam Fayyad are perfectly suited for this role and are in the process of obtaining the necessary political, economic and military support from the US and Israel to maintain their positions against internal opponents, including Hamas and other members of Fatah.
Olmert's notion of "painful compromises" really means causing the Palestinians "pain" that will induce them to "compromise."
(...) In launching this new "peace process," the Bush Administration continues to provide Israel's ongoing colonization of Palestinian land with the requisite time to create further facts on the ground and stifle Palestinian aspirations for a viable, independent state. In order for this to be successful, Washington and Tel Aviv need a Palestinian leadership that will actively participate in such a charade in return for US funding and the title of President or Prime Minister. Abbas and his appointed Prime Minister Salam Fayyad are perfectly suited for this role and are in the process of obtaining the necessary political, economic and military support from the US and Israel to maintain their positions against internal opponents, including Hamas and other members of Fatah.
Saturday, November 24, 2007
an anti-capitalist primer
the devil's saucepan:
http://www.ukwatch.net/article/the_devil%2526%2523039%3Bs_saucepan
Warming is not the poisoned fruit of “human activity” in general, or of “technology” in general, but of capitalist activity and of capitalist technology (that the bureaucratic regimes of the former Soviet bloc essentially only mimicked). It is the product of a system which “increasingly resembles its concept”, according to Michel Husson’s fine expression(8).
(...) Consequently, in this generalised mode of production of commodities, “production for production’s sake” inevitably leads to “consumption for consumption’s sake”(11).
(...) Indeed, the underlying law here is well known: to compensate for the tendential fall in the rate of profit, capitalism must conquer constantly new regions, create new needs, new markets.
(...) What this discussion reveals is that the objective and subjective difficulties in the rescue of the climate are indissolubly linked : we cannot resolve one without resolving the other. To save the climate in social justice, with a world population of 6 billion human beings, implies bringing the average emissions down to around 0.4-0.5 tonnes of carbon per person and per year. An American or an Australian emit nearly six tonnes, a Belgian or a Dane three tonnes, a Mexican one tonne, a Chinese a little less, and an Indian… 0.4 tonnes. The only “durable” logic worthy of the name consists in making the demi-tonne of carbon per person and per year the quota of annual emission to be reached in each country at a certain date. A rational world strategy must then have four combined aspects: 1°) to reduce radically the primary demand for fossil energy sources of the developed countries (divide it by four, six or eight – according to the country); 2°) replace systematically fossil sources by renewable sources, beginning with these countries; 3°) constitute a world fund for adaptation financed uniquely according to the needs of the most threatened countries; 4°) transfer massively clean technologies towards the countries of the South, so that their development does not bring about a new destabilisation of the climate. If we want these four aspects to have the necessary breadth, be realised in the time limits necessary and be applied in social justice and equality, then the solution cannot simply flow from market mechanisms like the distribution of exchangeable rights, or the progressive and spontaneous lowering of the cost of renewables in a context of competition(27).
(...) It is necessary that the four aspects above are missions of public service, confided to public enterprises, realised independently of cost. According to specifications drawn up on the basis of real needs, and considering natural resources as the collective property of humanity. A radical redistribution of wealth (abolition of the debt of the countries of the South, an exceptional tax on wealth on a world scale, a tax bite on the profits of the oil companies, suppression of arms expenditure) and a radical deepening of democratic rights are then indispensable. Global rationality needs an anti-capitalist perspective.
(...) What is the way out? Social mobilisation. Instead of privileging lobbying (as do so many environmental associations trapped in the apparatus of governance), this means building a relationship of forces. Instead of wasting efforts attempting to convince employers and governments, it means putting our energies into a work of rank and file consciousness raising. Instead of vainly seeking the chimerical recipe of salvaging the climate by exchanges of rights and other complicated market mechanisms it means propagating the simple idea that the climate should be saved in justice and equality, independently of cost, by taking the money from where it is. Instead of bringing everything down to sole individual responsibility, it means creating in action the social emancipator link which alone can generate a new individual and collective responsibility of humanity in its metabolism with nature.
(...) Climate or development ? Climate or well-being? It is not the first time that capitalism has confronted humanity with a choice between plague and cholera. But the frenzy of accumulation carries the infernal dilemma to a global level, without precedent. This situation threatens barbaric solutions of a terrible breadth, affecting tens of millions, indeed hundreds of millions of people. “Il diavolo fa le pentole ma no i coperchi” (“The devil makes the saucepans, but not the lids”), says an Italian proverb. It is time to extinguish the diabolical fire of accumulation : the capitalist has no lid, and humanity risks being burnt.
an agricultural crime against humanity:
http://www.ukwatch.net/article/an_agricultural_crime_against_humanity
This is one of many examples of a trade described last month by Jean Ziegler, the UN’s special rapporteur, as “a crime against humanity”(3). Ziegler took up the call first made by this column for a five-year moratorium on all government targets and incentives for biofuel(4): the trade should be frozen until second-generation fuels – made from wood or straw or waste – become commercially available. Otherwise the superior purchasing power of drivers in the rich world means that they will snatch food from people’s mouths. Run your car on virgin biofuel and other people will starve.
(...) This week the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation will announce the lowest global food reserves in 25 years, threatening what it calls “a very serious crisis”(6). Even when the price of food was low, 850 million people went hungry because they could not afford to buy it. With every increment in the price of flour or grain, several million more are pushed below the breadline.
(...) A paper published in Science three months ago suggests that protecting uncultivated land saves, over 30 years, between two and nine times the carbon emissions you might avoid by ploughing it and planting biofuels(13). Last year the research group LMC International estimated that if the British and European target of a 5% contribution from biofuels were to be adopted by the rest of the world, the global acreage of cultivated land would expand by 15%(14). That means the end of most tropical forests. It might also cause runaway climate change.
(...) Yes, it can grow on poor land and be cultivated by smallholders. But it can also grow on fertile land and be cultivated by largeholders. If there is one blindingly obvious fact about biofuel it’s that it is not a smallholder crop. It is an internationally-traded commodity which travels well and can be stored indefinitely, with no premium for local or organic produce. Already the Indian government is planning 14m hectares of jatropha plantations(20). In August the first riots took place among the peasant farmers being driven off the land to make way for them(21).
(...) If the governments promoting biofuels do not reverse their policies, the humanitarian impact will be greater than that of the Iraq war. Millions will be displaced, hundreds of millions more could go hungry. This crime against humanity is a complex one, but that neither lessens nor excuses it. If people starve because of biofuels, Ruth Kelly and her peers will have killed them. Like all such crimes it is perpetrated by cowards, attacking the weak to avoid confronting the strong.
the neoliberal stich-up:
For the first time, the United Kingdom’s consumer debt now exceeds our gross national product: a new report shows that we owe £1.35 trillion(1). Inspectors in the United States have discovered that 77,000 road bridges are in the same perilous state as the one which collapsed into the Mississippi(2). Two years after Hurricane Katrina struck, 120,000 people from New Orleans are still living in trailer homes and temporary lodgings(3). As runaway climate change approaches, governments refuse to take the necessary action. Booming inequality threatens to create the most divided societies the world has seen since before the first world war. Now a financial crisis caused by unregulated lending could turf hundreds of thousands out of their homes and trigger a cascade of economic troubles.
(...) Neoliberalism claims that we are best served by maximum market freedom and minimum intervention by the state. The role of government should be confined to creating and defending markets, protecting private property and defending the realm. All other functions are better discharged by private enterprise, which will be prompted by the profit motive to supply essential services. By this means, enterprise is liberated, rational decisions are made and citizens are freed from the dehumanising hand of the state.
(...) as David Harvey proposes in his book A Brief History of Neoliberalism, wherever the neoliberal programme has been implemented, it has caused a massive shift of wealth not just to the top one percent, but to the top tenth of the top one per cent(4). In the United States, for example, the upper 0.1% has already regained the position it held at the beginning of the 1920s(5). The conditions that neoliberalism demands in order to free human beings from the slavery of state – minimal taxes, the dismantling of public services and social security, deregulation, the breaking of the unions – just happen to be the conditions required to make the elite even richer, while leaving everyone else to sink or swim.
"we are all neo-liberals now"
http://www.ukwatch.net/article/%2526quot%3Bwe_are_all_neo-liberals_now%21%2526quot%3B
The financial consultant Grant Thornton is forecasting that gross domestic product (GDP) will hit £1.33 trillion this year. Fractionally less than the £1.35trn that was outstanding on mortgages, credit cards and personal loans in June.
(...) This symbolic overtaking is the first time that the country’s 60 million people owe more to the banks than the value of everything made by every office and factory in the country. Debt on personal loans and credit cards totals £214bn. Overall, individuals owe the staggering sum of £1,344,721,000,000. Responding to the latest figures, the Bank of England predicted debts would remain a “social” rather than an “economic” problem, indicating it believes indebtedness will be contained to individuals rather than threaten businesses.
transnational capitalism:
http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=13&ItemID=12582
The pattern is a polarization between 20 percent of the population that is advancing, on the one hand, and 80 percent that is falling behind, on the other. There are new transnational class inequalities that cannot be understood within the North-South divide. The global South is increasingly dispersed across the planet so too is the global North. India now has 200 million middle class consumers who participate in the global market, as does China, even while majorities in those countries sink into destitution. Global social polarization is cutting across national lines in new ways.
small farmers and free trade, walden bello
http://www.countercurrents.org/bello300407.htm
while the economy has been growing at 8-10% a year, peasant income has stagnated, so that urban dwellers now have, on average, six times the income of peasants. True indeed is the observation of the rural advocates Chen Guidi and Wu Chuntao that the urban industrial economy has been built “on the shoulders of peasants.”
(...) But at least trade policies at the time helped to mitigate the pain by barring agricultural imports that were even cheaper than local commodities. Practically all Asian countries with agricultural sectors tightly controlled imports via quotas and high tariffs. This protective shield, however, was severely eroded when countries signed the Agreement on Agriculture (AOA) and began joining the World Trade Organization (WTO) starting in 1995.
(...) While unsubsidized smallholders in the developing world had to survive on less than $400 a year, American and European farmers were receiving, respectively, an average of $21,000 and $16,000 a year in subsidies.
(...) Indian economist Utsa Patnaik has described the calamity as “a collapse in rural livelihoods and incomes” owing to the steep fall in the prices of farm products. Along with this has come a rapid decline in consumption of food grains, with the average Indian family of four consuming 76 kg less in 2003 compared to 1998 and 88 kg less than a decade earlier. The state of Andra Pradesh, which has become a byword for agrarian distress owing to trade liberalization, saw a catastrophic rise in farmers' suicides from 233 in 1998 to over 2,600 in 2002. One estimate is that some 100,000 farmers in India have taken their lives owing to collapsing prices stemming from rising imports.
(...) n China, what the Ministry of Public Security calls “mass group incidents” -- in other words, protest actions -- increased from 8,700 in 1993 to 87,000 in 2005, most of them in the countryside. Moreover, the incidents are growing in average size, from 10 or fewer persons in the mid-1990s to 52 people per incident in 2004. Not surprisingly, the current leadership increasingly sees the countryside as a powder keg that needs to be defused.
(...) Food sovereignty means first and foremost the immediate adoption of policies that favor small producers. This would include, according to Indonesian farmer Henry Saragih, Via's coordinator, and Ahmad Ya'kub, Deputy for Policy Studies of the Indonesian Peasant Union Federation (FSPI), “the protection of the domestic market from low-priced imports, remunerative prices for all farmers and fishers, abolition of all direct and indirect export subsidies, and the phasing out of domestic subsidies that promote unsustainable agriculture.”
http://www.monthlyreview.org/nfte0807.htm
Real global growth averaged 4.9 percent a year during the Golden Age of national Keynesianism (1950–1973). It was 3.4 percent between 1974 and 1979; 3.3 percent in the 1980s; and only 2.3 percent in the 1990s, the decade with the slowest growth since World War II.
http://www.monthlyreview.org/600amin.htm
the wealthiest 20 percent of humanity increased their share of the global product from 60 to 80 percent in the last two decades of this century.
http://www.monthlyreview.org/1003amin.htm
(...) One can imagine that the food brought to market by today’s three billion peasants, after they ensure their own subsistences, would instead be produced by twenty million new modern farmers. The conditions for the success of such an alternative would include: (1) the transfer of important pieces of good land to the new capitalist farmers (and these lands would have to be taken out of the hands of present peasant populations); (2) capital (to buy supplies and equipment); and (3) access to the consumer markets. Such farmers would indeed compete successfully with the billions of present peasants. But what would happen to those billions of people? Under the circumstances, agreeing to the general principle of competition for agricultural products and foodstuffs, as imposed by WTO, means accepting the elimination of billions of noncompetitive producers within the short historic time of a few decades. What will become of these billions of humans beings, the majority of whom are already poor among the poor, who feed themselves with great difficulty. In fifty years’ time, industrial development, even in the fanciful hypothesis of a continued growth rate of 7 percent annually, could not absorb even one-third of this reserve.
(...) At the national level it implies macro policies protecting peasant food production from the unequal competition of modernized farmers and agribusiness corporations—local and international. This will help guarantee acceptable internal food prices—disconnected from international market prices, which are additionally biased by the agricultural subsidies of the wealthy North.
(...) The main social transformation that characterizes the second half of the twentieth century can be summarized in a single statistic: the proportion of the precarious popular classes rose from less than one-quarter to more than one-half of the global urban population, and this phenomenon of pauperization has reappeared on a significant scale in the developed centers themselves. This destabilized urban population has increased in a half-century from less than a quarter of a billion to more than a billion-and-a-half individuals, registering a growth rate which surpasses those that characterize economic expansion, population growth, or the process of urbanization itself.
http://www.ukwatch.net/article/the_devil%2526%2523039%3Bs_saucepan
Warming is not the poisoned fruit of “human activity” in general, or of “technology” in general, but of capitalist activity and of capitalist technology (that the bureaucratic regimes of the former Soviet bloc essentially only mimicked). It is the product of a system which “increasingly resembles its concept”, according to Michel Husson’s fine expression(8).
(...) Consequently, in this generalised mode of production of commodities, “production for production’s sake” inevitably leads to “consumption for consumption’s sake”(11).
(...) Indeed, the underlying law here is well known: to compensate for the tendential fall in the rate of profit, capitalism must conquer constantly new regions, create new needs, new markets.
(...) What this discussion reveals is that the objective and subjective difficulties in the rescue of the climate are indissolubly linked : we cannot resolve one without resolving the other. To save the climate in social justice, with a world population of 6 billion human beings, implies bringing the average emissions down to around 0.4-0.5 tonnes of carbon per person and per year. An American or an Australian emit nearly six tonnes, a Belgian or a Dane three tonnes, a Mexican one tonne, a Chinese a little less, and an Indian… 0.4 tonnes. The only “durable” logic worthy of the name consists in making the demi-tonne of carbon per person and per year the quota of annual emission to be reached in each country at a certain date. A rational world strategy must then have four combined aspects: 1°) to reduce radically the primary demand for fossil energy sources of the developed countries (divide it by four, six or eight – according to the country); 2°) replace systematically fossil sources by renewable sources, beginning with these countries; 3°) constitute a world fund for adaptation financed uniquely according to the needs of the most threatened countries; 4°) transfer massively clean technologies towards the countries of the South, so that their development does not bring about a new destabilisation of the climate. If we want these four aspects to have the necessary breadth, be realised in the time limits necessary and be applied in social justice and equality, then the solution cannot simply flow from market mechanisms like the distribution of exchangeable rights, or the progressive and spontaneous lowering of the cost of renewables in a context of competition(27).
(...) It is necessary that the four aspects above are missions of public service, confided to public enterprises, realised independently of cost. According to specifications drawn up on the basis of real needs, and considering natural resources as the collective property of humanity. A radical redistribution of wealth (abolition of the debt of the countries of the South, an exceptional tax on wealth on a world scale, a tax bite on the profits of the oil companies, suppression of arms expenditure) and a radical deepening of democratic rights are then indispensable. Global rationality needs an anti-capitalist perspective.
(...) What is the way out? Social mobilisation. Instead of privileging lobbying (as do so many environmental associations trapped in the apparatus of governance), this means building a relationship of forces. Instead of wasting efforts attempting to convince employers and governments, it means putting our energies into a work of rank and file consciousness raising. Instead of vainly seeking the chimerical recipe of salvaging the climate by exchanges of rights and other complicated market mechanisms it means propagating the simple idea that the climate should be saved in justice and equality, independently of cost, by taking the money from where it is. Instead of bringing everything down to sole individual responsibility, it means creating in action the social emancipator link which alone can generate a new individual and collective responsibility of humanity in its metabolism with nature.
(...) Climate or development ? Climate or well-being? It is not the first time that capitalism has confronted humanity with a choice between plague and cholera. But the frenzy of accumulation carries the infernal dilemma to a global level, without precedent. This situation threatens barbaric solutions of a terrible breadth, affecting tens of millions, indeed hundreds of millions of people. “Il diavolo fa le pentole ma no i coperchi” (“The devil makes the saucepans, but not the lids”), says an Italian proverb. It is time to extinguish the diabolical fire of accumulation : the capitalist has no lid, and humanity risks being burnt.
an agricultural crime against humanity:
http://www.ukwatch.net/article/an_agricultural_crime_against_humanity
This is one of many examples of a trade described last month by Jean Ziegler, the UN’s special rapporteur, as “a crime against humanity”(3). Ziegler took up the call first made by this column for a five-year moratorium on all government targets and incentives for biofuel(4): the trade should be frozen until second-generation fuels – made from wood or straw or waste – become commercially available. Otherwise the superior purchasing power of drivers in the rich world means that they will snatch food from people’s mouths. Run your car on virgin biofuel and other people will starve.
(...) This week the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation will announce the lowest global food reserves in 25 years, threatening what it calls “a very serious crisis”(6). Even when the price of food was low, 850 million people went hungry because they could not afford to buy it. With every increment in the price of flour or grain, several million more are pushed below the breadline.
(...) A paper published in Science three months ago suggests that protecting uncultivated land saves, over 30 years, between two and nine times the carbon emissions you might avoid by ploughing it and planting biofuels(13). Last year the research group LMC International estimated that if the British and European target of a 5% contribution from biofuels were to be adopted by the rest of the world, the global acreage of cultivated land would expand by 15%(14). That means the end of most tropical forests. It might also cause runaway climate change.
(...) Yes, it can grow on poor land and be cultivated by smallholders. But it can also grow on fertile land and be cultivated by largeholders. If there is one blindingly obvious fact about biofuel it’s that it is not a smallholder crop. It is an internationally-traded commodity which travels well and can be stored indefinitely, with no premium for local or organic produce. Already the Indian government is planning 14m hectares of jatropha plantations(20). In August the first riots took place among the peasant farmers being driven off the land to make way for them(21).
(...) If the governments promoting biofuels do not reverse their policies, the humanitarian impact will be greater than that of the Iraq war. Millions will be displaced, hundreds of millions more could go hungry. This crime against humanity is a complex one, but that neither lessens nor excuses it. If people starve because of biofuels, Ruth Kelly and her peers will have killed them. Like all such crimes it is perpetrated by cowards, attacking the weak to avoid confronting the strong.
the neoliberal stich-up:
For the first time, the United Kingdom’s consumer debt now exceeds our gross national product: a new report shows that we owe £1.35 trillion(1). Inspectors in the United States have discovered that 77,000 road bridges are in the same perilous state as the one which collapsed into the Mississippi(2). Two years after Hurricane Katrina struck, 120,000 people from New Orleans are still living in trailer homes and temporary lodgings(3). As runaway climate change approaches, governments refuse to take the necessary action. Booming inequality threatens to create the most divided societies the world has seen since before the first world war. Now a financial crisis caused by unregulated lending could turf hundreds of thousands out of their homes and trigger a cascade of economic troubles.
(...) Neoliberalism claims that we are best served by maximum market freedom and minimum intervention by the state. The role of government should be confined to creating and defending markets, protecting private property and defending the realm. All other functions are better discharged by private enterprise, which will be prompted by the profit motive to supply essential services. By this means, enterprise is liberated, rational decisions are made and citizens are freed from the dehumanising hand of the state.
(...) as David Harvey proposes in his book A Brief History of Neoliberalism, wherever the neoliberal programme has been implemented, it has caused a massive shift of wealth not just to the top one percent, but to the top tenth of the top one per cent(4). In the United States, for example, the upper 0.1% has already regained the position it held at the beginning of the 1920s(5). The conditions that neoliberalism demands in order to free human beings from the slavery of state – minimal taxes, the dismantling of public services and social security, deregulation, the breaking of the unions – just happen to be the conditions required to make the elite even richer, while leaving everyone else to sink or swim.
"we are all neo-liberals now"
http://www.ukwatch.net/article/%2526quot%3Bwe_are_all_neo-liberals_now%21%2526quot%3B
The financial consultant Grant Thornton is forecasting that gross domestic product (GDP) will hit £1.33 trillion this year. Fractionally less than the £1.35trn that was outstanding on mortgages, credit cards and personal loans in June.
(...) This symbolic overtaking is the first time that the country’s 60 million people owe more to the banks than the value of everything made by every office and factory in the country. Debt on personal loans and credit cards totals £214bn. Overall, individuals owe the staggering sum of £1,344,721,000,000. Responding to the latest figures, the Bank of England predicted debts would remain a “social” rather than an “economic” problem, indicating it believes indebtedness will be contained to individuals rather than threaten businesses.
transnational capitalism:
http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=13&ItemID=12582
The pattern is a polarization between 20 percent of the population that is advancing, on the one hand, and 80 percent that is falling behind, on the other. There are new transnational class inequalities that cannot be understood within the North-South divide. The global South is increasingly dispersed across the planet so too is the global North. India now has 200 million middle class consumers who participate in the global market, as does China, even while majorities in those countries sink into destitution. Global social polarization is cutting across national lines in new ways.
small farmers and free trade, walden bello
http://www.countercurrents.org/bello300407.htm
while the economy has been growing at 8-10% a year, peasant income has stagnated, so that urban dwellers now have, on average, six times the income of peasants. True indeed is the observation of the rural advocates Chen Guidi and Wu Chuntao that the urban industrial economy has been built “on the shoulders of peasants.”
(...) But at least trade policies at the time helped to mitigate the pain by barring agricultural imports that were even cheaper than local commodities. Practically all Asian countries with agricultural sectors tightly controlled imports via quotas and high tariffs. This protective shield, however, was severely eroded when countries signed the Agreement on Agriculture (AOA) and began joining the World Trade Organization (WTO) starting in 1995.
(...) While unsubsidized smallholders in the developing world had to survive on less than $400 a year, American and European farmers were receiving, respectively, an average of $21,000 and $16,000 a year in subsidies.
(...) Indian economist Utsa Patnaik has described the calamity as “a collapse in rural livelihoods and incomes” owing to the steep fall in the prices of farm products. Along with this has come a rapid decline in consumption of food grains, with the average Indian family of four consuming 76 kg less in 2003 compared to 1998 and 88 kg less than a decade earlier. The state of Andra Pradesh, which has become a byword for agrarian distress owing to trade liberalization, saw a catastrophic rise in farmers' suicides from 233 in 1998 to over 2,600 in 2002. One estimate is that some 100,000 farmers in India have taken their lives owing to collapsing prices stemming from rising imports.
(...) n China, what the Ministry of Public Security calls “mass group incidents” -- in other words, protest actions -- increased from 8,700 in 1993 to 87,000 in 2005, most of them in the countryside. Moreover, the incidents are growing in average size, from 10 or fewer persons in the mid-1990s to 52 people per incident in 2004. Not surprisingly, the current leadership increasingly sees the countryside as a powder keg that needs to be defused.
(...) Food sovereignty means first and foremost the immediate adoption of policies that favor small producers. This would include, according to Indonesian farmer Henry Saragih, Via's coordinator, and Ahmad Ya'kub, Deputy for Policy Studies of the Indonesian Peasant Union Federation (FSPI), “the protection of the domestic market from low-priced imports, remunerative prices for all farmers and fishers, abolition of all direct and indirect export subsidies, and the phasing out of domestic subsidies that promote unsustainable agriculture.”
http://www.monthlyreview.org/nfte0807.htm
Real global growth averaged 4.9 percent a year during the Golden Age of national Keynesianism (1950–1973). It was 3.4 percent between 1974 and 1979; 3.3 percent in the 1980s; and only 2.3 percent in the 1990s, the decade with the slowest growth since World War II.
http://www.monthlyreview.org/600amin.htm
the wealthiest 20 percent of humanity increased their share of the global product from 60 to 80 percent in the last two decades of this century.
http://www.monthlyreview.org/1003amin.htm
(...) One can imagine that the food brought to market by today’s three billion peasants, after they ensure their own subsistences, would instead be produced by twenty million new modern farmers. The conditions for the success of such an alternative would include: (1) the transfer of important pieces of good land to the new capitalist farmers (and these lands would have to be taken out of the hands of present peasant populations); (2) capital (to buy supplies and equipment); and (3) access to the consumer markets. Such farmers would indeed compete successfully with the billions of present peasants. But what would happen to those billions of people? Under the circumstances, agreeing to the general principle of competition for agricultural products and foodstuffs, as imposed by WTO, means accepting the elimination of billions of noncompetitive producers within the short historic time of a few decades. What will become of these billions of humans beings, the majority of whom are already poor among the poor, who feed themselves with great difficulty. In fifty years’ time, industrial development, even in the fanciful hypothesis of a continued growth rate of 7 percent annually, could not absorb even one-third of this reserve.
(...) At the national level it implies macro policies protecting peasant food production from the unequal competition of modernized farmers and agribusiness corporations—local and international. This will help guarantee acceptable internal food prices—disconnected from international market prices, which are additionally biased by the agricultural subsidies of the wealthy North.
(...) The main social transformation that characterizes the second half of the twentieth century can be summarized in a single statistic: the proportion of the precarious popular classes rose from less than one-quarter to more than one-half of the global urban population, and this phenomenon of pauperization has reappeared on a significant scale in the developed centers themselves. This destabilized urban population has increased in a half-century from less than a quarter of a billion to more than a billion-and-a-half individuals, registering a growth rate which surpasses those that characterize economic expansion, population growth, or the process of urbanization itself.
Saturday, November 17, 2007
it's the oil:
Iraq has 115 billion barrels of known oil reserves. That is more than five times the total in the United States. And, because of its long isolation, it is the least explored of the world’s oil-rich nations. A mere two thousand wells have been drilled across the entire country; in Texas alone there are a million. It has been estimated, by the Council on Foreign Relations, that Iraq may have a further 220 billion barrels of undiscovered oil; another study puts the figure at 300 billion. If these estimates are anywhere close to the mark, US forces are now sitting on one quarter of the world’s oil resources. The value of Iraqi oil, largely light crude with low production costs, would be of the order of $30 trillion at today’s prices. For purposes of comparison, the projected total cost of the US invasion/occupation is around $1 trillion.
(...) The draft law that the US has written for the Iraqi congress would cede nearly all the oil to Western companies. The Iraq National Oil Company would retain control of 17 of Iraq’s 80 existing oilfields, leaving the rest – including all yet to be discovered oil – under foreign corporate control for 30 years.
(...) By establishing permanent military bases in Iraq. Five self-sufficient ‘super-bases’ are in various stages of completion. All are well away from the urban areas where most casualties have occurred. There has been precious little reporting on these bases in the American press, whose dwindling corps of correspondents in Iraq cannot move around freely because of the dangerous conditions.
(...) In February last year, the Washington Post reporter Thomas Ricks described one such facility, the Balad Air Base, forty miles north of Baghdad. A piece of (well-fortified) American suburbia in the middle of the Iraqi desert, Balad has fast-food joints, a miniature golf course, a football field, a cinema and distinct neighbourhoods – among them, ‘KBR-land’, named after the Halliburton subsidiary that has done most of the construction work at the base. Although few of the 20,000 American troops stationed there have ever had any contact with an Iraqi, the runway at the base is one of the world’s busiest. ‘We are behind only Heathrow right now,’ an air force commander told Ricks.
(...) As for the number of US troops permanently stationed in Iraq, the defence secretary, Robert Gates, told Congress at the end of September that ‘in his head’ he saw the long-term force as consisting of five combat brigades, a quarter of the current number, which, with support personnel, would mean 35,000 troops at the very minimum, probably accompanied by an equal number of mercenary contractors. (He may have been erring on the side of modesty, since the five super-bases can accommodate between ten and twenty thousand troops each.) These forces will occasionally leave their bases to tamp down civil skirmishes, at a declining cost in casualties. As a senior Bush administration official told the New York Times in June, the long-term bases ‘are all places we could fly in and out of without putting Americans on every street corner’. But their main day-to-day function will be to protect the oil infrastructure.'
(...) Among the winners: oil-services companies like Halliburton; the oil companies themselves (the profits will be unimaginable, and even Democrats can be bought); US voters, who will be guaranteed price stability at the gas pump (which sometimes seems to be all they care about); Europe and Japan, which will both benefit from Western control of such a large part of the world’s oil reserves, and whose leaders will therefore wink at the permanent occupation; and, oddly enough, Osama bin Laden, who will never again have to worry about US troops profaning the holy places of Mecca and Medina, since the stability of the House of Saud will no longer be paramount among American concerns. Among the losers is Russia, which will no longer be able to lord its own energy resources over Europe. Another big loser is Opec, and especially Saudi Arabia, whose power to keep oil prices high by enforcing production quotas will be seriously compromised.
(...) In the short term, Iran has done quite well out of the Iraq war. Iraq’s ruling Shia coalition is now dominated by a faction friendly to Tehran, and the US has willy-nilly armed and trained the most pro-Iranian elements in the Iraqi military. As for Iran’s nuclear programme, neither air strikes nor negotiations seem likely to derail it at the moment. But the Iranian regime is precarious. Unpopular mullahs hold onto power by financing internal security services and buying off elites with oil money, which accounts for 70 per cent of government revenues. If the price of oil were suddenly to drop to, say, $40 a barrel (from a current price just north of $80), the repressive regime in Tehran would lose its steady income. And that is an outcome the US could easily achieve by opening the Iraqi oil spigot for as long as necessary (perhaps taking down Venezuela’s oil-cocky Hugo Chávez into the bargain).
(...) And think of the United States vis-à-vis China. As a consequence of our trade deficit, around a trillion dollars’ worth of US denominated debt (including $400 billion in US Treasury bonds) is held by China. This gives Beijing enormous leverage over Washington: by offloading big chunks of US debt, China could bring the American economy to its knees. China’s own economy is, according to official figures, expanding at something like 10 per cent a year. Even if the actual figure is closer to 4 or 5 per cent, as some believe, China’s increasing heft poses a threat to US interests. (One fact: China is acquiring new submarines five times faster than the US.) And the main constraint on China’s growth is its access to energy – which, with the US in control of the biggest share of world oil, would largely be at Washington’s sufferance. Thus is the Chinese threat neutralised.
Iraq has 115 billion barrels of known oil reserves. That is more than five times the total in the United States. And, because of its long isolation, it is the least explored of the world’s oil-rich nations. A mere two thousand wells have been drilled across the entire country; in Texas alone there are a million. It has been estimated, by the Council on Foreign Relations, that Iraq may have a further 220 billion barrels of undiscovered oil; another study puts the figure at 300 billion. If these estimates are anywhere close to the mark, US forces are now sitting on one quarter of the world’s oil resources. The value of Iraqi oil, largely light crude with low production costs, would be of the order of $30 trillion at today’s prices. For purposes of comparison, the projected total cost of the US invasion/occupation is around $1 trillion.
(...) The draft law that the US has written for the Iraqi congress would cede nearly all the oil to Western companies. The Iraq National Oil Company would retain control of 17 of Iraq’s 80 existing oilfields, leaving the rest – including all yet to be discovered oil – under foreign corporate control for 30 years.
(...) By establishing permanent military bases in Iraq. Five self-sufficient ‘super-bases’ are in various stages of completion. All are well away from the urban areas where most casualties have occurred. There has been precious little reporting on these bases in the American press, whose dwindling corps of correspondents in Iraq cannot move around freely because of the dangerous conditions.
(...) In February last year, the Washington Post reporter Thomas Ricks described one such facility, the Balad Air Base, forty miles north of Baghdad. A piece of (well-fortified) American suburbia in the middle of the Iraqi desert, Balad has fast-food joints, a miniature golf course, a football field, a cinema and distinct neighbourhoods – among them, ‘KBR-land’, named after the Halliburton subsidiary that has done most of the construction work at the base. Although few of the 20,000 American troops stationed there have ever had any contact with an Iraqi, the runway at the base is one of the world’s busiest. ‘We are behind only Heathrow right now,’ an air force commander told Ricks.
(...) As for the number of US troops permanently stationed in Iraq, the defence secretary, Robert Gates, told Congress at the end of September that ‘in his head’ he saw the long-term force as consisting of five combat brigades, a quarter of the current number, which, with support personnel, would mean 35,000 troops at the very minimum, probably accompanied by an equal number of mercenary contractors. (He may have been erring on the side of modesty, since the five super-bases can accommodate between ten and twenty thousand troops each.) These forces will occasionally leave their bases to tamp down civil skirmishes, at a declining cost in casualties. As a senior Bush administration official told the New York Times in June, the long-term bases ‘are all places we could fly in and out of without putting Americans on every street corner’. But their main day-to-day function will be to protect the oil infrastructure.'
(...) Among the winners: oil-services companies like Halliburton; the oil companies themselves (the profits will be unimaginable, and even Democrats can be bought); US voters, who will be guaranteed price stability at the gas pump (which sometimes seems to be all they care about); Europe and Japan, which will both benefit from Western control of such a large part of the world’s oil reserves, and whose leaders will therefore wink at the permanent occupation; and, oddly enough, Osama bin Laden, who will never again have to worry about US troops profaning the holy places of Mecca and Medina, since the stability of the House of Saud will no longer be paramount among American concerns. Among the losers is Russia, which will no longer be able to lord its own energy resources over Europe. Another big loser is Opec, and especially Saudi Arabia, whose power to keep oil prices high by enforcing production quotas will be seriously compromised.
(...) In the short term, Iran has done quite well out of the Iraq war. Iraq’s ruling Shia coalition is now dominated by a faction friendly to Tehran, and the US has willy-nilly armed and trained the most pro-Iranian elements in the Iraqi military. As for Iran’s nuclear programme, neither air strikes nor negotiations seem likely to derail it at the moment. But the Iranian regime is precarious. Unpopular mullahs hold onto power by financing internal security services and buying off elites with oil money, which accounts for 70 per cent of government revenues. If the price of oil were suddenly to drop to, say, $40 a barrel (from a current price just north of $80), the repressive regime in Tehran would lose its steady income. And that is an outcome the US could easily achieve by opening the Iraqi oil spigot for as long as necessary (perhaps taking down Venezuela’s oil-cocky Hugo Chávez into the bargain).
(...) And think of the United States vis-à-vis China. As a consequence of our trade deficit, around a trillion dollars’ worth of US denominated debt (including $400 billion in US Treasury bonds) is held by China. This gives Beijing enormous leverage over Washington: by offloading big chunks of US debt, China could bring the American economy to its knees. China’s own economy is, according to official figures, expanding at something like 10 per cent a year. Even if the actual figure is closer to 4 or 5 per cent, as some believe, China’s increasing heft poses a threat to US interests. (One fact: China is acquiring new submarines five times faster than the US.) And the main constraint on China’s growth is its access to energy – which, with the US in control of the biggest share of world oil, would largely be at Washington’s sufferance. Thus is the Chinese threat neutralised.
in prince's pockets:
To look at the landscape today, you would think nothing had changed. Saudi princes, unaccustomed to exercising their inventive faculties, continue to distinguish themselves by the size of the commissions they procure from Western corporations. The competition here is restricted to fellow royals or nominated bagmen. It is usually friendly and always corrupt. Given that weaponry deals with the West cost billions rather than millions nobody begrudges the Saudis a token twenty million or so by way of a thank you. Meanwhile, Western PR firms get the regime’s message out. At a European airport several months ago I saw exactly the same handout regurgitated in the Guardian, El Pais, the International Herald Tribune, Le Monde, La Repubblica: the gist of it was that terrorists were handing in their weapons, renouncing their past and progressing well at re-education schools.
(...) The seamier side of princely life – is there another side? – formed the subject-matter of bin Laden’s powerful pre-9/11 samizdat videos, which continue to circulate in the kingdom, encouraging many young people to see their country through his eyes and share his disgust with its ruling family.
(...) It didn’t quite happen like that. The aged Saud was retired, and Crown Prince Faisal became king. It was only after his nephew Prince Faisal ibn Musa assassinated him for personal reasons in 1975 that Tariki and a few other dissidents could return home. Faisal is largely responsible for the Saudi Arabia that exists today, with its reliance on Wahhabism for social control. Even though his brother and father before him had sought to institutionalise Wahhabi beliefs, they were more relaxed about it. Faisal believed that the only way to defeat Nasser and the godless Communists was by making religion the central pillar of the Saudi social order and using it ruthlessly against the enemy. It was Islam that was under threat and had to be defended on all fronts. This pleased his allies in Washington, who were tolerant even of his decision to impose an oil embargo against the West after the 1973 war, something that has never been attempted since. Visiting Western politicians were surprised when the king gave them copies of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, but his deeply felt anti-semitism was treated as an eccentricity. There is nothing on or off the record to indicate that a single US or European leader enlightened him by pointing out that the Protocols were forgeries.
(...) Saudi oil was fully nationalised in 1980
(...) In Contesting the Saudi State, the London-based Saudi historian Madawi Al-Rasheed argues that the defeat of 1818 taught the Wahhabis the art of survival. This entailed the adoption of more pragmatic policies, i.e. straightforward political opportunism. For literalists this could not have been easy. One of Muhammad’s sterner injunctions left little room for misinterpretation: infidels had to be kept out of the peninsula. The Sauds fought with the British against the Ottoman Empire and later accepted US suzerainty without many qualms. Each twist and turn considered necessary to hang on to power was justified by senior Wahhabi clerics. Pandering to power made the clerics ultra-dogmatic on other questions: the denial of equal rights for women, for example, or the refusal to ‘encourage idolatry’ by restricting the number of visitors to the tombs of the Prophet and his wives in Mecca. Some of the tombs have now been destroyed (one replaced with a public urinal); there have been no angry campaigns by Islamic extremists.
To look at the landscape today, you would think nothing had changed. Saudi princes, unaccustomed to exercising their inventive faculties, continue to distinguish themselves by the size of the commissions they procure from Western corporations. The competition here is restricted to fellow royals or nominated bagmen. It is usually friendly and always corrupt. Given that weaponry deals with the West cost billions rather than millions nobody begrudges the Saudis a token twenty million or so by way of a thank you. Meanwhile, Western PR firms get the regime’s message out. At a European airport several months ago I saw exactly the same handout regurgitated in the Guardian, El Pais, the International Herald Tribune, Le Monde, La Repubblica: the gist of it was that terrorists were handing in their weapons, renouncing their past and progressing well at re-education schools.
(...) The seamier side of princely life – is there another side? – formed the subject-matter of bin Laden’s powerful pre-9/11 samizdat videos, which continue to circulate in the kingdom, encouraging many young people to see their country through his eyes and share his disgust with its ruling family.
(...) It didn’t quite happen like that. The aged Saud was retired, and Crown Prince Faisal became king. It was only after his nephew Prince Faisal ibn Musa assassinated him for personal reasons in 1975 that Tariki and a few other dissidents could return home. Faisal is largely responsible for the Saudi Arabia that exists today, with its reliance on Wahhabism for social control. Even though his brother and father before him had sought to institutionalise Wahhabi beliefs, they were more relaxed about it. Faisal believed that the only way to defeat Nasser and the godless Communists was by making religion the central pillar of the Saudi social order and using it ruthlessly against the enemy. It was Islam that was under threat and had to be defended on all fronts. This pleased his allies in Washington, who were tolerant even of his decision to impose an oil embargo against the West after the 1973 war, something that has never been attempted since. Visiting Western politicians were surprised when the king gave them copies of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, but his deeply felt anti-semitism was treated as an eccentricity. There is nothing on or off the record to indicate that a single US or European leader enlightened him by pointing out that the Protocols were forgeries.
(...) Saudi oil was fully nationalised in 1980
(...) In Contesting the Saudi State, the London-based Saudi historian Madawi Al-Rasheed argues that the defeat of 1818 taught the Wahhabis the art of survival. This entailed the adoption of more pragmatic policies, i.e. straightforward political opportunism. For literalists this could not have been easy. One of Muhammad’s sterner injunctions left little room for misinterpretation: infidels had to be kept out of the peninsula. The Sauds fought with the British against the Ottoman Empire and later accepted US suzerainty without many qualms. Each twist and turn considered necessary to hang on to power was justified by senior Wahhabi clerics. Pandering to power made the clerics ultra-dogmatic on other questions: the denial of equal rights for women, for example, or the refusal to ‘encourage idolatry’ by restricting the number of visitors to the tombs of the Prophet and his wives in Mecca. Some of the tombs have now been destroyed (one replaced with a public urinal); there have been no angry campaigns by Islamic extremists.
Friday, November 9, 2007
get out now:
"The task to which we have set our minds," declared the governor of Kenya in 1955, "is to civilize a great mass of human beings who are in a very primitive moral and social state." The slaughter of thousands of nationalists, who were never called nationalists, was British government policy. The myth of the Kenyan uprising was that the Mau Mau brought "demonic terror" to the heroic white settlers. In fact, the Mau Mau killed just 32 Europeans, compared with the estimated 10,000 Kenyans killed by the British, who ran concentration camps where the conditions were so harsh that 402 inmates died in just one month. Torture, flogging and abuse of women and children were commonplace.
(...) It was the same in Vietnam. In 1969, the discovery of the American massacre in the village of My Lai was described on the cover of Newsweek as "An American tragedy", not a Viet- namese one. In fact, there were many massacres like My Lai, and almost none of them was reported at the time.
(...) The real tragedy of soldiers policing a colonial occupation is also suppressed. More than 58,000 American soldiers were killed in Vietnam. The same number, according to a veterans' study, killed themselves on their return home. Dr Doug Rokke, director of the US army depleted uranium project following the 1991 Gulf invasion, estimates that more than 10,000 American troops have since died as a result, many from contamination illness. When I asked him how many Iraqis had died, he raised his eyes and shook his head. "Solid uranium was used on shells," he said. "Tens of
thousands of Iraqis - men, women and children - were contaminated. Right through the 1990s, at international symposiums, I watched Iraqi officials approach their counterparts from the Pentagon and the Ministry of Defense and ask, plead, for help with decontamination.
"The task to which we have set our minds," declared the governor of Kenya in 1955, "is to civilize a great mass of human beings who are in a very primitive moral and social state." The slaughter of thousands of nationalists, who were never called nationalists, was British government policy. The myth of the Kenyan uprising was that the Mau Mau brought "demonic terror" to the heroic white settlers. In fact, the Mau Mau killed just 32 Europeans, compared with the estimated 10,000 Kenyans killed by the British, who ran concentration camps where the conditions were so harsh that 402 inmates died in just one month. Torture, flogging and abuse of women and children were commonplace.
(...) It was the same in Vietnam. In 1969, the discovery of the American massacre in the village of My Lai was described on the cover of Newsweek as "An American tragedy", not a Viet- namese one. In fact, there were many massacres like My Lai, and almost none of them was reported at the time.
(...) The real tragedy of soldiers policing a colonial occupation is also suppressed. More than 58,000 American soldiers were killed in Vietnam. The same number, according to a veterans' study, killed themselves on their return home. Dr Doug Rokke, director of the US army depleted uranium project following the 1991 Gulf invasion, estimates that more than 10,000 American troops have since died as a result, many from contamination illness. When I asked him how many Iraqis had died, he raised his eyes and shook his head. "Solid uranium was used on shells," he said. "Tens of
thousands of Iraqis - men, women and children - were contaminated. Right through the 1990s, at international symposiums, I watched Iraqi officials approach their counterparts from the Pentagon and the Ministry of Defense and ask, plead, for help with decontamination.
fallujah
http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?ItemID=7246
[first siege of fallujah, april; firing on ambulances, etc. - 60% dead civilians]
On March 31st, a US vehicle traveling through Fallujah was ambushed and its four passengers killed. Who were the passengers? According to US national media, they were “consultants” or “contractors” or “security contractors.”
(...) “townspeople went on a rampage”;[14] in the Washington Times, “cheering crowds reveled in a barbaric orgy.”[15] As the San Francisco Chronicle reported, what occurred was “an act of savagery shocking even by the blood-stained standards of Iraq’s worst trouble spot”—“sheer bestial violence” that doubled as “a town fete.”[16] These were “just random killings of any westerner” with “no rhyme or reason to [them] whatsoever.” An eyewitness account that circulated nationally recorded that “‘The people of Fallujah hanged some of the bodies on the old bridge like slaughtered sheep,’ resident Abdul Aziz Mohammed said gleefully.” Though in the context that was provided it was hardly necessary, a Fallujan taxidriver assured readers of the New York Times that “everyone here is happy with this. There is no question.”[17]
(...) It went on to state that “it is critical that the US commanders respond forcefully to Fallujah and step up the counteroffensive against the Sunni insurgency.”[21] We should remember, then, that beside the lives of four American soldiers of fortune killed last April—or, in the language of the time—slaughtered sheep, were the residents of Fallujah, not quite citizens, not quite sheep for slaughter; they, a city’s mothers, fathers, babies, and grandmothers were but “jubilant locals” who, beasts that they had shown themselves to be, would “need to be defanged.”[22] As one newspaper put it, in response to a Fallujan’s words that “‘we wish that they would try to enter Fallujah so we’d let hell break loose’”: “The man will get his wish...only the when and how had yet to be decided.”[23]
(...) e New York Times reported an April 9th a US pause in fighting “to allow residents to bury scores of dead, and to open routes into the beleaguered city for food and urgently needed medical equipment,” in fact only three of the sixty trucks with relief supplies that arrived at Falluja were permitted entry into the city; probably not worth mentioning is that several of these trucks were fired upon before being denied entry and dispatched.
(...) The targeting of ambulances by the US military was practiced with enough vigilance in Fallujah that the Iraqi Minister of Health on April 17 publicly pressed Paul Bremer to account for it. Bremer explained that the US authorities believed ambulances to have been used by fighters—offering, as a response, the very definition of collective punishment.[33]
(...) "The Americans shot out the lights in the front of our hospital, they prevented doctors from reaching the emergency unit at the hospital, and we quickly began to run out of supplies and much needed medications." [34]
(...) "One of my doctors in Falluja asked the Americans there if he could remove a wounded patient from the city. The soldier wouldn’t let him move the victim, and said, “We have dead soldiers here too. This is a war zone.” The doctor wasn’t allowed to remove the wounded man, and he died. So many doctors and ambulances have been turned back from checkpoints there." [35]
(...) He added: “Not less than 60% of the dead were women and children. You can go see the graves for yourself.” At Noman Hospital in Al-Adhamiya, a doctor there too said of the people who came in from Fallujah from ten days earlier, that “most…were children, women and elderly.”[38] At Yarmouk Hospital, a lead doctor reported that he saw American soldiers killing women and children, calling the situation in Fallujah “a massacre.” The New York Times preferred the designation “tremendously precise.”[39] And it was an apt one, according to one Fallujah resident, who after having escaped to Baghdad testified that US warplanes were bombing the city heavily prior to his departure, and that Marine snipers continued to secure residents of the besieged city, shot by shot. “There were so many snipers, anyone leaving their house was killed.”[40] In the New York Times, this was called “an acute willingness among insurgents to die.”[41]
(...) If you’re the New York Times, you said nothing;[43] if you’re Paul Bremer, you probably said vigilant resolve.
http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?ItemID=9147
The LA Times reported that "the US military" assaulted the city of Fallujah with the full "understanding" that "civilians…would be killed." As a result, the Christian Science Monitor reported, "The sickening odor of rotting flesh" permeated the air circulating through the smoke filled and blood drenched streets of Fallujah. Alexander Cockburn noted, "If there is anything that should fuel the outrage of the antiwar movement [in the US] it is surely the destruction of Fallujah and the war crimes…inflicted by US commanders on its civilian population." We learned this week, November, 2005 the US used naplalm and white phosphorus in Fallujah, leaving children, women and men burnt to the bone. The US Army journal "Field Artillery" reported how, during the US attack on Fallujah in November 2004, "White Phosphorous…proved to be an effective and versatile munition [and…] a potent psychological weapon against the insurgents" when high explosives were ineffective in routing people from "spider holes." White phosphorus was used "to flush them out and [high explosives] to take them out." "High explosives" included "AC-130 Specter gunship support." "Tactics, techniques and procedures" we are told "were effective and lethal."
(...) This week marks the one year anniversary of the barbarous and criminal US assault on Fallujah in which, according to "Iraqi NGO's and medical workers…between 4,000 and 6,000" mostly civilians were killed. In addition, "36,000 of the city's 50,000 homes were destroyed, along with 60 schools and 65 mosques and shrines," and up to "200,000 residents were forced to flee, creating a refugee population the size of Tacoma." Creating a wasteland is a form of "collective punishment" and is a war crime. The leadership responsible for the wasting of Fallujah has yet to be held accountable.
(...) The attack on Fallujah by 10,000 US soldiers was prepared by 8 weeks of crushing air strikes and included "deliberate targeting of civilians, indiscriminate and disproportionate attack, [and] the killing of injured persons." In addition, according to UN human rights investigators, the US, in breach of international law (i.e. "war crimes"), used "hunger and deprivation of water as a weapon of war against the civilian population."
(...)Looking back at Fallujah and the buildup we see, selecting days virtually at random, that September 13 was no exception to the rule of force. In Baghdad, US helicopter gun ships fired into a crowd of unarmed Iraqi civilians. 13 were "wasted" and dozens more injured. Blood ran in the streets. The London Guardian published a harrowing photograph of a wounded young boy, stunned, gasping and bloodied, kneeling over three brutalized, and dead, bodies - presumably his friends. They appear to be no older than 12. UNICEF's Executive Director Carol Bellamy called the death of 34 children in an earlier US bomb attack "an unconscionable slaughter of innocents." On October 16th, we read in the Washington Post, "Electricity and water were cut off to the city [of Fallujah] just as a fresh wave of [air] strikes began Thursday night, an action that U.S. forces also took at the start of assaults on Najaf and Samarra."
(...) Ralph Peters, a retired US military officer, wrote in the New York Post, "Even if Fallujah has to go the way of Carthage [complete annihilation], reduced to shards, the price will be worth it…the world needs to see [Iraqi] corpses." The "world" does see Iraqi corpses. US citizens must see Iraqi corpses, and stop the killing.
(...) [HOSPITALS] On November 12th we learned "among the first major targets [in the assault on Fallujah] were the hospitals." A civilian hospital and a trauma clinic were destroyed in a massive air raid, the main hospital was captured by US troops, ambulances were prohibited from traveling into the besieged city and delivering patients in need of emergency care (the US also announced that any and all moving civilian vehicles were designated free-fire targets). Much of the city's water and electricity supplies were cut off making "emergency care all but impossible, in the words of Dr. Hashem Issawi, and contrary to international law, soldiers were "empowered to destroy whatever needs to be destroyed." In the razed clinic, US bombs took the lives of 15 medics, four nurses and 35 patients, according to clinic worker Dr. Sami al-Jumaili. The Los Angeles Times reported that the manager of Fallujah general hospital "had told a US general the location of the downtown makeshift medical center" before it was hit by US bombs. In a smoke-filled, corpse-strewn landscape of collapsed houses and soot-singed factories, a US captain, fresh from 13 days of "shooting holes in every building," starkly noted that the only way to proceed is to "destroy everything in your path." Indiscriminate destruction is a war crime in violation of international law as encoded in the Nuremberg Principles.
(...) In other words, the problem is policy, systematic policy. A US soldier captured the policy quite bluntly: "We had a great day today. We killed a lot of people…the Iraqis are sick people and we are the chemotherapy." A former US soldier seeking asylum in Canada candidly said "the atrocious acts that are taking place in Iraq are not anomalies or isolated incidents but part of a plan of attack." He added, "I didn't want to be implicit in a criminal enterprise and hence a war criminal…[it is] soldiers who pay the price for the policies that come from on high…"
(...) "Fallujah doctors have identified either swollen and yellowish corpses without any injuries (victims of chemical warfare], or 'melted bodies,' [victims of napalm - banned by the UN in 1980, with the US the only remaining country using napalm - another US war crime]." And one year later the "wasting" or Iraq continues…
http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?ItemID=7163
In the case of Fallujah, where the U.S. military estimated 2,000 people were killed during the recent assault on the city, at least 1,200 of the dead are believed to have been non-combatant civilians.
(...) The November assault on Fallujah did not even begin until warplanes had, on a near-daily basis, dropped 500-1000 pound bombs on suspected resistance targets in the besieged city. During that period, fighter jets ripped through the air over Baghdad for nights on end, heading out on mission after mission to drop their payloads on Fallujah.
(...) The 35 year-old merchant is now a refugee living in a tent on the campus of the University of Baghdad along with over 900 other homeless Fallujans. "If the American forces did not find a target to bomb," he said, "they used sound bombs just to terrorize the people and children. The city stayed in fear; I cannot give you a picture of how panicked everyone was." As he spoke in a strained voice, his body began to tremble with the memories, "In the morning, I found Fallujah empty, as if nobody lived in it. It felt as though Fallujah had already been bombed to the ground. As if nothing were left."
(...) Ahmed Abdulla, a gaunt 21 year-old Fallujan, accompanied most of his family on their flight from the city, navigating the perilous neighborhoods nearest the cordon the American military had thrown around their besieged city. On November 8, he made it to Baghdad with his mother, his three sisters (aged 26, 20, and 18), and two younger brothers (10 and 12). His father, however, was not permitted to leave Fallujah by the U.S. military because he was of "fighting age." Ahmed was only allowed to exit the besieged city because his mother managed to convince an American soldier that, without him, his sisters and younger brothers would be at great risk traveling alone. Fortunately, the soldier understood her plea and let him through.
http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?ItemID=7555
(...) According to the doctor, during the second week of their attack US forces "announced that all the families [had] to leave their homes and meet at an intersection in the street while carrying a white flag. They gave them 72 hours to leave and after that they would be considered an enemy. We documented this story with video - a family of 12, including a relative and his oldest child who was 7 years old. They heard this instruction, so they left with all their food and money they could carry, and white flags. When they reached the intersection where the families were accumulating, they heard someone shouting 'Now!' in English, and shooting started everywhere."
(...) A surviving eyewitness told the doctor everyone in the family was carrying white flags, as instructed. Nevertheless, the witness watched as his mother was shot in the head and his father was shot through the heart by snipers. His two aunts were also shot, and his brother was shot in the neck. The survivor stated that when he raised himself from the ground to shout for help, he too was shot in the side. The doctor continued: "After some hours he raised his arm for help and they shot his arm. So after a while he raised his hand and they shot his hand." A six year-old boy was standing over the bodies of his parents, crying, and he too was shot.
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/americas/article99716.ece
But John Pike, director of the military studies group GlobalSecurity.Org, said: "You can call it something other than napalm but it is still napalm. It has been reformulated in the sense that they now use a different petroleum distillate, but that is it. The US is the only country that has used napalm for a long time. I am not aware of any other country that uses it." Marines returning from Iraq chose to call the firebombs "napalm".
http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?ItemID=5446
on March 25, 2004, proconsul Paul Bremer, head of the isolated U.S. "Provisional Coalition Authority" in Iraq, announced that the U.S. government intended to retain its occupying army and permanent military bases in Iraq no matter what any future Iraqi government might do or request. Not since the Japanese imperial army established "suzerainty" over "Manchukuo" in 1932, and later ruled occupied China from behind the façade of other puppet governments had an imperialist power resorted to such a nakedly colonial formula. But Bremer communicated precisely that to Iraqis: Outwardly the U.S. would proclaim the existence of a new state of affairs; in practice it would continue to exercise complete dominion over Iraq and not allow it to control its armed forces, police, or foreign policy, let alone rescind his earlier orders privatizing the Iraqi economy. This legerdemain was to be displayed for all the world to see on June 30, the day something called "sovereignty," which the U.S. never legitimately possessed, was "transferred" to some other U.S.-selected entity.
http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?ItemID=9193
The Study Centre for Human Rights and Democracy based in Fallujah (SCHRD) estimates the number of people killed in the city during the U.S.-led operation in October and November 2004 at 4,000 to 6,000, most of them civilians. Mass graves were dug on the outskirts of the city for thousands of the bodies.
(...) Last week, the Pentagon confirmed that it had used white phosphorus, a chemical that bursts into flame upon contact with air, inside Fallujah as an "incendiary weapon" against insurgents. Washington denies that it is a chemical weapon, as charged by some critics, and that it was used against civilians.
(...) Deraji estimates that up to 150,000 of the 350,000 residents of Fallujah continue to live as internally displaced persons due to the lack of compensation, and therefore, lack of reconstruction.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,3604,1471011,00.html
Warnings of the onslaught prompted the vast majority of Falluja's 300,000 people to flee. The city was then declared a free-fire zone on the grounds that the only people left behind must be "terrorists".
(...) Other glimpses of life in Falluja come from Dr Hafid al-Dulaimi, head of the city's compensation commission, who reports that 36,000 homes were destroyed in the US onslaught, along with 8,400 shops. Sixty nurseries and schools were ruined, along with 65 mosques and religious sanctuaries.
(...) In the 1930s the Spanish city of Guernica became a symbol of wanton murder and destruction. In the 1990s Grozny was cruelly flattened by the Russians; it still lies in ruins. This decade's unforgettable monument to brutality and overkill is Falluja, a text-book case of how not to handle an insurgency, and a reminder that unpopular occupations will always degenerate into desperation and atrocity.
[first siege of fallujah, april; firing on ambulances, etc. - 60% dead civilians]
On March 31st, a US vehicle traveling through Fallujah was ambushed and its four passengers killed. Who were the passengers? According to US national media, they were “consultants” or “contractors” or “security contractors.”
(...) “townspeople went on a rampage”;[14] in the Washington Times, “cheering crowds reveled in a barbaric orgy.”[15] As the San Francisco Chronicle reported, what occurred was “an act of savagery shocking even by the blood-stained standards of Iraq’s worst trouble spot”—“sheer bestial violence” that doubled as “a town fete.”[16] These were “just random killings of any westerner” with “no rhyme or reason to [them] whatsoever.” An eyewitness account that circulated nationally recorded that “‘The people of Fallujah hanged some of the bodies on the old bridge like slaughtered sheep,’ resident Abdul Aziz Mohammed said gleefully.” Though in the context that was provided it was hardly necessary, a Fallujan taxidriver assured readers of the New York Times that “everyone here is happy with this. There is no question.”[17]
(...) It went on to state that “it is critical that the US commanders respond forcefully to Fallujah and step up the counteroffensive against the Sunni insurgency.”[21] We should remember, then, that beside the lives of four American soldiers of fortune killed last April—or, in the language of the time—slaughtered sheep, were the residents of Fallujah, not quite citizens, not quite sheep for slaughter; they, a city’s mothers, fathers, babies, and grandmothers were but “jubilant locals” who, beasts that they had shown themselves to be, would “need to be defanged.”[22] As one newspaper put it, in response to a Fallujan’s words that “‘we wish that they would try to enter Fallujah so we’d let hell break loose’”: “The man will get his wish...only the when and how had yet to be decided.”[23]
(...) e New York Times reported an April 9th a US pause in fighting “to allow residents to bury scores of dead, and to open routes into the beleaguered city for food and urgently needed medical equipment,” in fact only three of the sixty trucks with relief supplies that arrived at Falluja were permitted entry into the city; probably not worth mentioning is that several of these trucks were fired upon before being denied entry and dispatched.
(...) The targeting of ambulances by the US military was practiced with enough vigilance in Fallujah that the Iraqi Minister of Health on April 17 publicly pressed Paul Bremer to account for it. Bremer explained that the US authorities believed ambulances to have been used by fighters—offering, as a response, the very definition of collective punishment.[33]
(...) "The Americans shot out the lights in the front of our hospital, they prevented doctors from reaching the emergency unit at the hospital, and we quickly began to run out of supplies and much needed medications." [34]
(...) "One of my doctors in Falluja asked the Americans there if he could remove a wounded patient from the city. The soldier wouldn’t let him move the victim, and said, “We have dead soldiers here too. This is a war zone.” The doctor wasn’t allowed to remove the wounded man, and he died. So many doctors and ambulances have been turned back from checkpoints there." [35]
(...) He added: “Not less than 60% of the dead were women and children. You can go see the graves for yourself.” At Noman Hospital in Al-Adhamiya, a doctor there too said of the people who came in from Fallujah from ten days earlier, that “most…were children, women and elderly.”[38] At Yarmouk Hospital, a lead doctor reported that he saw American soldiers killing women and children, calling the situation in Fallujah “a massacre.” The New York Times preferred the designation “tremendously precise.”[39] And it was an apt one, according to one Fallujah resident, who after having escaped to Baghdad testified that US warplanes were bombing the city heavily prior to his departure, and that Marine snipers continued to secure residents of the besieged city, shot by shot. “There were so many snipers, anyone leaving their house was killed.”[40] In the New York Times, this was called “an acute willingness among insurgents to die.”[41]
(...) If you’re the New York Times, you said nothing;[43] if you’re Paul Bremer, you probably said vigilant resolve.
http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?ItemID=9147
The LA Times reported that "the US military" assaulted the city of Fallujah with the full "understanding" that "civilians…would be killed." As a result, the Christian Science Monitor reported, "The sickening odor of rotting flesh" permeated the air circulating through the smoke filled and blood drenched streets of Fallujah. Alexander Cockburn noted, "If there is anything that should fuel the outrage of the antiwar movement [in the US] it is surely the destruction of Fallujah and the war crimes…inflicted by US commanders on its civilian population." We learned this week, November, 2005 the US used naplalm and white phosphorus in Fallujah, leaving children, women and men burnt to the bone. The US Army journal "Field Artillery" reported how, during the US attack on Fallujah in November 2004, "White Phosphorous…proved to be an effective and versatile munition [and…] a potent psychological weapon against the insurgents" when high explosives were ineffective in routing people from "spider holes." White phosphorus was used "to flush them out and [high explosives] to take them out." "High explosives" included "AC-130 Specter gunship support." "Tactics, techniques and procedures" we are told "were effective and lethal."
(...) This week marks the one year anniversary of the barbarous and criminal US assault on Fallujah in which, according to "Iraqi NGO's and medical workers…between 4,000 and 6,000" mostly civilians were killed. In addition, "36,000 of the city's 50,000 homes were destroyed, along with 60 schools and 65 mosques and shrines," and up to "200,000 residents were forced to flee, creating a refugee population the size of Tacoma." Creating a wasteland is a form of "collective punishment" and is a war crime. The leadership responsible for the wasting of Fallujah has yet to be held accountable.
(...) The attack on Fallujah by 10,000 US soldiers was prepared by 8 weeks of crushing air strikes and included "deliberate targeting of civilians, indiscriminate and disproportionate attack, [and] the killing of injured persons." In addition, according to UN human rights investigators, the US, in breach of international law (i.e. "war crimes"), used "hunger and deprivation of water as a weapon of war against the civilian population."
(...)Looking back at Fallujah and the buildup we see, selecting days virtually at random, that September 13 was no exception to the rule of force. In Baghdad, US helicopter gun ships fired into a crowd of unarmed Iraqi civilians. 13 were "wasted" and dozens more injured. Blood ran in the streets. The London Guardian published a harrowing photograph of a wounded young boy, stunned, gasping and bloodied, kneeling over three brutalized, and dead, bodies - presumably his friends. They appear to be no older than 12. UNICEF's Executive Director Carol Bellamy called the death of 34 children in an earlier US bomb attack "an unconscionable slaughter of innocents." On October 16th, we read in the Washington Post, "Electricity and water were cut off to the city [of Fallujah] just as a fresh wave of [air] strikes began Thursday night, an action that U.S. forces also took at the start of assaults on Najaf and Samarra."
(...) Ralph Peters, a retired US military officer, wrote in the New York Post, "Even if Fallujah has to go the way of Carthage [complete annihilation], reduced to shards, the price will be worth it…the world needs to see [Iraqi] corpses." The "world" does see Iraqi corpses. US citizens must see Iraqi corpses, and stop the killing.
(...) [HOSPITALS] On November 12th we learned "among the first major targets [in the assault on Fallujah] were the hospitals." A civilian hospital and a trauma clinic were destroyed in a massive air raid, the main hospital was captured by US troops, ambulances were prohibited from traveling into the besieged city and delivering patients in need of emergency care (the US also announced that any and all moving civilian vehicles were designated free-fire targets). Much of the city's water and electricity supplies were cut off making "emergency care all but impossible, in the words of Dr. Hashem Issawi, and contrary to international law, soldiers were "empowered to destroy whatever needs to be destroyed." In the razed clinic, US bombs took the lives of 15 medics, four nurses and 35 patients, according to clinic worker Dr. Sami al-Jumaili. The Los Angeles Times reported that the manager of Fallujah general hospital "had told a US general the location of the downtown makeshift medical center" before it was hit by US bombs. In a smoke-filled, corpse-strewn landscape of collapsed houses and soot-singed factories, a US captain, fresh from 13 days of "shooting holes in every building," starkly noted that the only way to proceed is to "destroy everything in your path." Indiscriminate destruction is a war crime in violation of international law as encoded in the Nuremberg Principles.
(...) In other words, the problem is policy, systematic policy. A US soldier captured the policy quite bluntly: "We had a great day today. We killed a lot of people…the Iraqis are sick people and we are the chemotherapy." A former US soldier seeking asylum in Canada candidly said "the atrocious acts that are taking place in Iraq are not anomalies or isolated incidents but part of a plan of attack." He added, "I didn't want to be implicit in a criminal enterprise and hence a war criminal…[it is] soldiers who pay the price for the policies that come from on high…"
(...) "Fallujah doctors have identified either swollen and yellowish corpses without any injuries (victims of chemical warfare], or 'melted bodies,' [victims of napalm - banned by the UN in 1980, with the US the only remaining country using napalm - another US war crime]." And one year later the "wasting" or Iraq continues…
http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?ItemID=7163
In the case of Fallujah, where the U.S. military estimated 2,000 people were killed during the recent assault on the city, at least 1,200 of the dead are believed to have been non-combatant civilians.
(...) The November assault on Fallujah did not even begin until warplanes had, on a near-daily basis, dropped 500-1000 pound bombs on suspected resistance targets in the besieged city. During that period, fighter jets ripped through the air over Baghdad for nights on end, heading out on mission after mission to drop their payloads on Fallujah.
(...) The 35 year-old merchant is now a refugee living in a tent on the campus of the University of Baghdad along with over 900 other homeless Fallujans. "If the American forces did not find a target to bomb," he said, "they used sound bombs just to terrorize the people and children. The city stayed in fear; I cannot give you a picture of how panicked everyone was." As he spoke in a strained voice, his body began to tremble with the memories, "In the morning, I found Fallujah empty, as if nobody lived in it. It felt as though Fallujah had already been bombed to the ground. As if nothing were left."
(...) Ahmed Abdulla, a gaunt 21 year-old Fallujan, accompanied most of his family on their flight from the city, navigating the perilous neighborhoods nearest the cordon the American military had thrown around their besieged city. On November 8, he made it to Baghdad with his mother, his three sisters (aged 26, 20, and 18), and two younger brothers (10 and 12). His father, however, was not permitted to leave Fallujah by the U.S. military because he was of "fighting age." Ahmed was only allowed to exit the besieged city because his mother managed to convince an American soldier that, without him, his sisters and younger brothers would be at great risk traveling alone. Fortunately, the soldier understood her plea and let him through.
http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?ItemID=7555
(...) According to the doctor, during the second week of their attack US forces "announced that all the families [had] to leave their homes and meet at an intersection in the street while carrying a white flag. They gave them 72 hours to leave and after that they would be considered an enemy. We documented this story with video - a family of 12, including a relative and his oldest child who was 7 years old. They heard this instruction, so they left with all their food and money they could carry, and white flags. When they reached the intersection where the families were accumulating, they heard someone shouting 'Now!' in English, and shooting started everywhere."
(...) A surviving eyewitness told the doctor everyone in the family was carrying white flags, as instructed. Nevertheless, the witness watched as his mother was shot in the head and his father was shot through the heart by snipers. His two aunts were also shot, and his brother was shot in the neck. The survivor stated that when he raised himself from the ground to shout for help, he too was shot in the side. The doctor continued: "After some hours he raised his arm for help and they shot his arm. So after a while he raised his hand and they shot his hand." A six year-old boy was standing over the bodies of his parents, crying, and he too was shot.
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/americas/article99716.ece
But John Pike, director of the military studies group GlobalSecurity.Org, said: "You can call it something other than napalm but it is still napalm. It has been reformulated in the sense that they now use a different petroleum distillate, but that is it. The US is the only country that has used napalm for a long time. I am not aware of any other country that uses it." Marines returning from Iraq chose to call the firebombs "napalm".
http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?ItemID=5446
on March 25, 2004, proconsul Paul Bremer, head of the isolated U.S. "Provisional Coalition Authority" in Iraq, announced that the U.S. government intended to retain its occupying army and permanent military bases in Iraq no matter what any future Iraqi government might do or request. Not since the Japanese imperial army established "suzerainty" over "Manchukuo" in 1932, and later ruled occupied China from behind the façade of other puppet governments had an imperialist power resorted to such a nakedly colonial formula. But Bremer communicated precisely that to Iraqis: Outwardly the U.S. would proclaim the existence of a new state of affairs; in practice it would continue to exercise complete dominion over Iraq and not allow it to control its armed forces, police, or foreign policy, let alone rescind his earlier orders privatizing the Iraqi economy. This legerdemain was to be displayed for all the world to see on June 30, the day something called "sovereignty," which the U.S. never legitimately possessed, was "transferred" to some other U.S.-selected entity.
http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?ItemID=9193
The Study Centre for Human Rights and Democracy based in Fallujah (SCHRD) estimates the number of people killed in the city during the U.S.-led operation in October and November 2004 at 4,000 to 6,000, most of them civilians. Mass graves were dug on the outskirts of the city for thousands of the bodies.
(...) Last week, the Pentagon confirmed that it had used white phosphorus, a chemical that bursts into flame upon contact with air, inside Fallujah as an "incendiary weapon" against insurgents. Washington denies that it is a chemical weapon, as charged by some critics, and that it was used against civilians.
(...) Deraji estimates that up to 150,000 of the 350,000 residents of Fallujah continue to live as internally displaced persons due to the lack of compensation, and therefore, lack of reconstruction.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,3604,1471011,00.html
Warnings of the onslaught prompted the vast majority of Falluja's 300,000 people to flee. The city was then declared a free-fire zone on the grounds that the only people left behind must be "terrorists".
(...) Other glimpses of life in Falluja come from Dr Hafid al-Dulaimi, head of the city's compensation commission, who reports that 36,000 homes were destroyed in the US onslaught, along with 8,400 shops. Sixty nurseries and schools were ruined, along with 65 mosques and religious sanctuaries.
(...) In the 1930s the Spanish city of Guernica became a symbol of wanton murder and destruction. In the 1990s Grozny was cruelly flattened by the Russians; it still lies in ruins. This decade's unforgettable monument to brutality and overkill is Falluja, a text-book case of how not to handle an insurgency, and a reminder that unpopular occupations will always degenerate into desperation and atrocity.
Friday, November 2, 2007
ha!:
"Over time, we will have to shift the burden of the military fight from our forces directly to regional forces, and we will have to play an indirect role, but we shouldn't assume for even a minute that in the next 25 to 50 years the American military might be able to come home, relax and take it easy, because the strategic situation in the region doesn't seem to show that as being possible,"
"Over time, we will have to shift the burden of the military fight from our forces directly to regional forces, and we will have to play an indirect role, but we shouldn't assume for even a minute that in the next 25 to 50 years the American military might be able to come home, relax and take it easy, because the strategic situation in the region doesn't seem to show that as being possible,"
Sunday, October 14, 2007
how not to win friends:
A recent Congressional Research Service report on international arms sales records that last year the United States delivered nearly $8 billion worth of weapons to Third World countries. This was about 40% of all such arms transfers. The United States signed agreements to sell over $10 billion worth of weapons, one-third of all arms deals with Third World countries. It is easy to put this in perspective: $10 billon a year is the estimated cost of meeting the UN Millennium Development Goal for water and sanitation, which would reduce by half the proportion of people in the world without proper access to drinking water and basic sanitation by 2015. Today, about 1.1 billion people do not have access to a minimal amount of clean water and about 2.6 billion people do not have access to basic sanitation.
(...) The largest third world buyer of weapons in 2006 was Pakistan. It purchased just over $5 billion in arms deals. Almost $3 billion of the purchases by Pakistan were new U.S.-made F-16s fighter jets, up-grades to the F-16s Pakistan bought in the 1980s, and bombs and missiles to arm these planes. A White House Press spokesman explained that the sale of the jet fighters "demonstrates our commitment to a long-term relationship with Pakistan."
(...) Since September 11, 2001, the United States has given over $10 billion to Pakistan to buy or reward General Musharraf's support for its newest war, the "war on terror." Pakistan has spent over $1.5 billion of this amount on buying new weapons. To understand the scale of this aid, consider Pakistan's total military budget in 2006, estimated at about $4.5 billion. The United States is now giving Pakistan aid to pay for the new deal for F-16s, bombs, and missiles. It is likely to win few friends.
(...) Attitudes toward the United States have worsened. A 2007 poll found that only 15% of Pakistanis had a favorable attitude towards the United States. An August 2007 poll found that General Musharraf was less popular even than Osama bin Laden; Musharraf had the support of 38% of Pakistanis, Bin Laden of 46%, and President Bush found favor with only 9%. It is hard to imagine a more damning indictment of a policy that sought to make friends and build support.
A recent Congressional Research Service report on international arms sales records that last year the United States delivered nearly $8 billion worth of weapons to Third World countries. This was about 40% of all such arms transfers. The United States signed agreements to sell over $10 billion worth of weapons, one-third of all arms deals with Third World countries. It is easy to put this in perspective: $10 billon a year is the estimated cost of meeting the UN Millennium Development Goal for water and sanitation, which would reduce by half the proportion of people in the world without proper access to drinking water and basic sanitation by 2015. Today, about 1.1 billion people do not have access to a minimal amount of clean water and about 2.6 billion people do not have access to basic sanitation.
(...) The largest third world buyer of weapons in 2006 was Pakistan. It purchased just over $5 billion in arms deals. Almost $3 billion of the purchases by Pakistan were new U.S.-made F-16s fighter jets, up-grades to the F-16s Pakistan bought in the 1980s, and bombs and missiles to arm these planes. A White House Press spokesman explained that the sale of the jet fighters "demonstrates our commitment to a long-term relationship with Pakistan."
(...) Since September 11, 2001, the United States has given over $10 billion to Pakistan to buy or reward General Musharraf's support for its newest war, the "war on terror." Pakistan has spent over $1.5 billion of this amount on buying new weapons. To understand the scale of this aid, consider Pakistan's total military budget in 2006, estimated at about $4.5 billion. The United States is now giving Pakistan aid to pay for the new deal for F-16s, bombs, and missiles. It is likely to win few friends.
(...) Attitudes toward the United States have worsened. A 2007 poll found that only 15% of Pakistanis had a favorable attitude towards the United States. An August 2007 poll found that General Musharraf was less popular even than Osama bin Laden; Musharraf had the support of 38% of Pakistanis, Bin Laden of 46%, and President Bush found favor with only 9%. It is hard to imagine a more damning indictment of a policy that sought to make friends and build support.
Saturday, October 13, 2007
favored nation:
It does not follow, however, that blame for Pakistan’s multifarious woes can be laid squarely on the shoulders of the US. Washington’s influence has played a deletrious contributory role in many respects over the decades, but we are essentially the authors of our own misfortunes - not least in terms of offering the US repeated opportunities to establish - and abuse - its clout.
It does not follow, however, that blame for Pakistan’s multifarious woes can be laid squarely on the shoulders of the US. Washington’s influence has played a deletrious contributory role in many respects over the decades, but we are essentially the authors of our own misfortunes - not least in terms of offering the US repeated opportunities to establish - and abuse - its clout.
losing in afghanistan:
What is the reason that the number of soldiers killed in Afghanistan is markedly less than in Iraq when in one country the intervention has lasted since 2001 and in the other since 2003? Well, in the first country the occupying force is much smaller and practically confined to urban centres. The presence in rural areas is so scarce that right now the various forces that make up the Afghan resistance control 75% of the country.
(...) It is mistaken to identify the whole spectrum of Afghan anti-occuoation forces as Taliban. It is true that the Taliban have re-organized and that they make up the greater part of the resistance, but apart from them there are other components like the Islamic Party of Gulbuddin Hekmatyar (whose fiefdom is the northern province of Kunduz), nationalist resistance led by Jalalladin Hakkani, Al Qaeda militants, opium traffickers and all kinds of local fighters sick of Western arrogance and above all of the civilian casualties the occupiers have caused. Mor and more villages and towns are abandoning Karzai's puppet regime and going over to the insurrection. One should not forget that the collaborators' “star” program is the fight against opium production and that leads them to destroy all kinds of crops without taking into account that the great majority of the lands belong to impoverished rural families with no other means of support. That is just as true in the case of mercenaries belonging to Dyncorp (the US corporation that is supposed to do the same work in Colombia) as it is of occupation forces directed by Great Britain and of collaborationist troops. These last have an impressive record of robbery, rape, extortion, torture and murder, all with impunity. Repressing anti-occupation demonstrations is the order of the day. The collaborationist army is made up mostly of people of Tajik ethnic background, which makes the reaction of the Pathans (or Pashtuns, if one uses Anglo-Saxon etymology) completely normal. The Tajik militias were the main support of the US in its overthrow of the Taliban who are Pathans, the most numerous ethnic group in Afghanistan.
(...) Just as in Iraq, there are no figures for the number of civilians killed by the occupation. Marc W. Herold, an economist in the University of New Hampshire has carried out a study showing 4643 dead civilians from September 2001 to October 2006. As is logical, this figure has increased considerably because since then NATO has increase bombing of civilian areas. The UN talks timidly of 1000 deaths between January 1st and August 1st of this year (6) covering itself by saying “in many cases security considerations limiting the Mission's access to combat zones and the fact that one is dealing with a delicate political situation render difficult the collection of sufficient data to draw up a full report of incidents.” So one should hardly be surprised therefore that the growth of nationalist, anti US and anti-Western sentiment in general is swelling the ranks of the anti-occupation forces. The anti-occupation forces, generically identified as Taliban (so the term interiorizes itself in the collective sub-conscious as a synonym for uncivilized, while foreign troops are bringing progress) are accused of hiding among the civilian population, as if in an asymmetrical guerrilla war the guerrillas might say “Yoo-hoo! Here I am! – Come and bomb me out here in the open....!” But what is happening in Afghanistan is more and more a guerrilla war, perhaps even a most advanced phase. a war of movement.
(...) The UNODC reckoned that 165,000 hectares were dedicated to opium production in 2006, mostly in areas controlled by Karzai's semi-colonial government and in areas with occupied military presence. So the opium is in the hands of the pro-Western elite and forms part of the counterinsurgency campaign. With the territorial expansion of the guerrillas and the control they have in these areas, opium is turning into an almost essential part of the anti-occupation war.
What is the reason that the number of soldiers killed in Afghanistan is markedly less than in Iraq when in one country the intervention has lasted since 2001 and in the other since 2003? Well, in the first country the occupying force is much smaller and practically confined to urban centres. The presence in rural areas is so scarce that right now the various forces that make up the Afghan resistance control 75% of the country.
(...) It is mistaken to identify the whole spectrum of Afghan anti-occuoation forces as Taliban. It is true that the Taliban have re-organized and that they make up the greater part of the resistance, but apart from them there are other components like the Islamic Party of Gulbuddin Hekmatyar (whose fiefdom is the northern province of Kunduz), nationalist resistance led by Jalalladin Hakkani, Al Qaeda militants, opium traffickers and all kinds of local fighters sick of Western arrogance and above all of the civilian casualties the occupiers have caused. Mor and more villages and towns are abandoning Karzai's puppet regime and going over to the insurrection. One should not forget that the collaborators' “star” program is the fight against opium production and that leads them to destroy all kinds of crops without taking into account that the great majority of the lands belong to impoverished rural families with no other means of support. That is just as true in the case of mercenaries belonging to Dyncorp (the US corporation that is supposed to do the same work in Colombia) as it is of occupation forces directed by Great Britain and of collaborationist troops. These last have an impressive record of robbery, rape, extortion, torture and murder, all with impunity. Repressing anti-occupation demonstrations is the order of the day. The collaborationist army is made up mostly of people of Tajik ethnic background, which makes the reaction of the Pathans (or Pashtuns, if one uses Anglo-Saxon etymology) completely normal. The Tajik militias were the main support of the US in its overthrow of the Taliban who are Pathans, the most numerous ethnic group in Afghanistan.
(...) Just as in Iraq, there are no figures for the number of civilians killed by the occupation. Marc W. Herold, an economist in the University of New Hampshire has carried out a study showing 4643 dead civilians from September 2001 to October 2006. As is logical, this figure has increased considerably because since then NATO has increase bombing of civilian areas. The UN talks timidly of 1000 deaths between January 1st and August 1st of this year (6) covering itself by saying “in many cases security considerations limiting the Mission's access to combat zones and the fact that one is dealing with a delicate political situation render difficult the collection of sufficient data to draw up a full report of incidents.” So one should hardly be surprised therefore that the growth of nationalist, anti US and anti-Western sentiment in general is swelling the ranks of the anti-occupation forces. The anti-occupation forces, generically identified as Taliban (so the term interiorizes itself in the collective sub-conscious as a synonym for uncivilized, while foreign troops are bringing progress) are accused of hiding among the civilian population, as if in an asymmetrical guerrilla war the guerrillas might say “Yoo-hoo! Here I am! – Come and bomb me out here in the open....!” But what is happening in Afghanistan is more and more a guerrilla war, perhaps even a most advanced phase. a war of movement.
(...) The UNODC reckoned that 165,000 hectares were dedicated to opium production in 2006, mostly in areas controlled by Karzai's semi-colonial government and in areas with occupied military presence. So the opium is in the hands of the pro-Western elite and forms part of the counterinsurgency campaign. With the territorial expansion of the guerrillas and the control they have in these areas, opium is turning into an almost essential part of the anti-occupation war.
why the 'free trade' agenda is losing steam:
Real wages - adjusted for inflation -- for the more than 100 million people that make up most of our labor force were just ten percent higher in 2006 than they were in 1973. This is a revolutionary upward redistribution of income, vastly different from the prior 25 years, when real wages increased by 74 percent. How much of this redistribution is due to trade, or more broadly, the "globalization" that includes the movement of production to countries with low wages, repressed labor, and weak environmental regulation?
The conventional wisdom is that there are huge gains from trade, but since benefits are not so visible and are dispersed among many consumers, "protectionists" who might lose jobs prevail against the public interest. The reality is the opposite: the losses are dispersed among the majority of workers through lower wages. The gains are concentrated among the big corporations who own our Congress and lobby for "free trade."
Real wages - adjusted for inflation -- for the more than 100 million people that make up most of our labor force were just ten percent higher in 2006 than they were in 1973. This is a revolutionary upward redistribution of income, vastly different from the prior 25 years, when real wages increased by 74 percent. How much of this redistribution is due to trade, or more broadly, the "globalization" that includes the movement of production to countries with low wages, repressed labor, and weak environmental regulation?
The conventional wisdom is that there are huge gains from trade, but since benefits are not so visible and are dispersed among many consumers, "protectionists" who might lose jobs prevail against the public interest. The reality is the opposite: the losses are dispersed among the majority of workers through lower wages. The gains are concentrated among the big corporations who own our Congress and lobby for "free trade."
it's uphill for the democrats:
Democratic adherents to what might be called the "neoliberal" position are well organized and well positioned. Their credo was enunciated just nine years ago by Madeleine Albright, then President Bill Clinton's secretary of state: "If we have to use force, it is because we are America. We are the indispensable nation. We stand tall and we see further into the future." She was speaking of Bosnia at the time, but her remark had much wider implications.
(...) Make no mistake," write Marshall and Jeremy Rosner in their introduction, "we are committed to preserving America's military preeminence. We recognize that a strong military undergirds U.S. global leadership." Recalling a Democratic "tradition of muscular liberalism," they insist that "Progressives and Democrats must not give up the promotion of democracy and human rights abroad just because President Bush has paid it lip service. Advancing democracy -- in practice, not just in rhetoric -- is fundamentally the Democrats' legacy, the Democrats' cause, and the Democrats' responsibility."
(...) It isn't easy to offer a true alternative. The challenges to world order are many, as are the influential special interests in this country that want an aggressive policy: globalizing corporations, the military-industrial complex, the pro-Israel lobbies, those who covet Middle Eastern oil. The nationalist conviction that we are indeed "the indispensable nation" will continue to tempt our leaders to overplay their hand. The danger lies in believing that our power is beyond challenge, that the righteousness of our goals is beyond question and that the real task is not to reformulate our role in the world so much as to assert more effectively a global American peace.
Democratic adherents to what might be called the "neoliberal" position are well organized and well positioned. Their credo was enunciated just nine years ago by Madeleine Albright, then President Bill Clinton's secretary of state: "If we have to use force, it is because we are America. We are the indispensable nation. We stand tall and we see further into the future." She was speaking of Bosnia at the time, but her remark had much wider implications.
(...) Make no mistake," write Marshall and Jeremy Rosner in their introduction, "we are committed to preserving America's military preeminence. We recognize that a strong military undergirds U.S. global leadership." Recalling a Democratic "tradition of muscular liberalism," they insist that "Progressives and Democrats must not give up the promotion of democracy and human rights abroad just because President Bush has paid it lip service. Advancing democracy -- in practice, not just in rhetoric -- is fundamentally the Democrats' legacy, the Democrats' cause, and the Democrats' responsibility."
(...) It isn't easy to offer a true alternative. The challenges to world order are many, as are the influential special interests in this country that want an aggressive policy: globalizing corporations, the military-industrial complex, the pro-Israel lobbies, those who covet Middle Eastern oil. The nationalist conviction that we are indeed "the indispensable nation" will continue to tempt our leaders to overplay their hand. The danger lies in believing that our power is beyond challenge, that the righteousness of our goals is beyond question and that the real task is not to reformulate our role in the world so much as to assert more effectively a global American peace.
Pakistan needs scrutiny not charity
In October 2005, upon learning of the devastation that had been caused in Northern Pakistan by a massive earthquake, many of my British friends promptly emailed me with offers of help, ranging from money to filling in my duties at Cambridge while I visited the earthquake stricken region. At the time, I suggested to them that what countries like Pakistan need, even in the face of such calamities, is not charity but scrutiny. Pakistan is a rich country, with abundant natural as well as human resources. What keeps Pakistan from developing is not a lack of resources but the presence of an illegitimate, highly corrupt government, which is sustained not by the people of Pakistan but by powerful developed countries in the vanguard of movements for ‘good governance’, democracy and transparency. 160 million Pakistanis do not need charity from the British public. They need their scrutiny. They need them to deny oppressive governments legitimacy. And they need them to expose the double standards of their own government.
In October 2005, upon learning of the devastation that had been caused in Northern Pakistan by a massive earthquake, many of my British friends promptly emailed me with offers of help, ranging from money to filling in my duties at Cambridge while I visited the earthquake stricken region. At the time, I suggested to them that what countries like Pakistan need, even in the face of such calamities, is not charity but scrutiny. Pakistan is a rich country, with abundant natural as well as human resources. What keeps Pakistan from developing is not a lack of resources but the presence of an illegitimate, highly corrupt government, which is sustained not by the people of Pakistan but by powerful developed countries in the vanguard of movements for ‘good governance’, democracy and transparency. 160 million Pakistanis do not need charity from the British public. They need their scrutiny. They need them to deny oppressive governments legitimacy. And they need them to expose the double standards of their own government.
the environmental movement in the global south:
Mahathir has been interpreted in the North as speaking for a South that seeks to catch up whatever the cost and where the environmental movement is weak or non-existent. Today, China is seen as the prime exemplar of this Mahathirian obsession with rapid industrialization with minimal regard for the environment. This view of the South’s perspective on the environment is a caricature. In fact, the environmental costs of rapid industrialization are of major concern to significant sectors of the population of developing countries and, in many of them, the environmental movement has been a significant actor. Moreover, there is currently an active discussion in many countries of alternatives to the destabilizing high-growth model.
(...) In both societies (Korea and Taiwan), farmers, workers, and the environment bore the costs of high-speed industrialization. Both societies, it is not surprising, saw the emergence of an environmental movement that was spontaneous, that drew participants from different classes, that saw environmental demands linked with issues of employment, occupational health, and agricultural crisis, and that was quite militant.
(...) Unlike in Korea and Taiwan, environmental movements already existed in a number of the Southeast Asian countries before the period of rapid industrialization, which in their case occurred in the mid-eighties to the mid-nineties. These movements had emerged in the seventies and eighties in struggles against nuclear power, as in the Philippines; against big hydroelectric dams, as in Thailand, Indonesia, and the Philippines; and against deforestation and marine pollution, as in Thailand and the Philippines. These were epic battles, like the struggle against the Chico River Dam in the northern Philippines and the fight against the Pak Mun Dam in the northeast of Thailand, which forced the World Bank to withdraw its planned support for giant hydroelectric projects, an outcome that, as we shall see later on, also occurred in struggle against the Narmada Dam in India. The fight against industrial associated partly with foreign firms seeking to escape strict environmental regulations at home was a case of a new front being opened up in an ongoing struggle to save the environment.
(...) The environmental movements in Southeast Asia played a vital role not only in scuttling projects like the Bataan nuclear plant but in ousting the dictatorships that reigned there in the seventies and eighties. Indeed, because the environment was not perceived by authoritarian regimes as “political,” organizing around environmental and public health issues was not initially proscribed. Thus environmental struggles became an issue around which the anti-dictatorship movement could organize and reach new people. Environmental destruction became one more graphic example of a regime’s irresponsibility. In Indonesia, for example, the environmental organization WALHI went so far as to file a lawsuit for pollution and environmental destruction against six government bodies, including the Minister of the Environment and Population5. By the time the dictatorships wised up to what was happening, it was often too late: environmentalism and anti-fascism fed on one another.
(...) The environmental crisis in China is very serious. For example, the ground water table of the North China plain is dropping by 1.5 meters (5 feet) per year. This region produces 40 percent of China's grain. As environmentalist Dale Wen remarks, “One cannot help wonder about how China will be fed once the ground aquifer is depleted” 6. Water pollution and water scarcity; soil pollution, soil degradation and desertification; global warming and the coming energy crisis—these are all byproducts of China’s high-speed industrialization and massively expanded consumption.
(...) Most of the environmental destabilization in China is produced by local enterprises and massive state projects such as the Three Gorges Dams, but the contribution of foreign investors is not insignificant. Taking advantage of very lax implementation of environmental laws in China, many western TNCs have relocated their most polluting factories into the country and have exacerbated or even created many environmental problems. Wen notes that the Pearl River Delta and Yangtze River Delta, the two Special Economic Zones where most TNC subsidiaries are located, are the most seriously affected by heavy metal and POPs (persistent organic pollutants) pollution.
(...) Global warming is not a distant threat. The first comprehensive study of the impact of the sea level rise of global warming by Gordon McGranahan, Deborah Balk, and Bridget Anderson puts China as the country in Asia most threatened by the sea level rise of up to 10 meters over the next century 8. 144 million of China’s population live in low-elevation coastal zones, and this figure is likely to increase owing to the export-oriented industrialization strategies pursued by the government, which has involved the creation of numerous special economic zones. “From an environmental perspective,” the study warns, “there is a double disadvantage to excessive (and potentially rapid) coastal development. First, uncontrolled coastal development is likely to damage sensitive and important ecosystems and other resources. Second, coastal settlement, particularly in the lowlands, is likely to expose residents to seaward hazards such as sea level rise and tropical storms, both of which are likely to become more serious with climate change”9. The recent spate of super-typhoons descending on the Asian mainland from the Western Pacific underlines the gravity of this observation.
(...) In terms of public health, the rural health infrastructure has practically collapsed, according to Dale Wen. The system has been privatized with the introduction of a “fee for service” system that is one component of the neoliberal reform program. One result is the resurgence of diseases that had been brought under control, like tuberculosis and schistosomiasis. Cuba, in contrast, has won plaudits for its rural health care system, which is ironic, says Wen, given that the Cuban system was based on the Maoist era’s “barefoot doctor” system.
(...) The combination of the industrialization of food production and the lengthening of the food chain from production to consumption is strongly suspected to be the cause of bird flu, which has migrated from China to other countries. The government has become an unreliable actor in dealing with new diseases such as bird flu and SARS, prone as it is to engage in minimizing the threat if not promoting a cover-up, as it did in the case of SARS.
(...) As in Taiwan and Korea 15 years earlier, we see unrestrained export-oriented industrialization bringing together low-wage migrant labor, farming communities whose lands are being grabbed or ruined environmentally, environmentalists, and the proponents of a major change in political economy called the “New Left.” Environment-related riots, protests and disputes in China increased by 30% in 2005 to more than 50,000, as pollution-related unrest has become “a contagious source of instability in the country,” as one report put it. Indeed, a great many of recorded protests fused environmental, land-loss, income, and political issues. From 8700 in 1995, what the Ministry of Public Security calls "mass group incidents" have grown to 87,000 in 2005, most of them in the countryside. Moreover, the incidents are growing in average size from 10 or fewer persons in the mid-1990s to 52 people per incident in 2004 11. Notable were the April 2005 riots in Huashui, where an estimated 10,000 police officers clashed with desperate villagers who succeeded in repelling strong vested interests polluting their lands.
(...) As in China, the environment and public health have been sites of struggle in India. Over the last 25 years, the movement for the environment and public health has exploded in that country. Indeed, one can say that this movement has become one of the forces that is deepening Indian democracy.
(...) Here Roy expresses an essential truth: that centralized electrification preempted the development of alternative power-systems that could have been more decentralized, more people-oriented, more environmentally benign, and less capital intensive.
(...) While these interests benefited, others paid the costs. Specifically, it was the rural areas and the environment that absorbed the costs of centralized electrification. Tremendous crimes have been committed in the name of power generation and irrigation, says Roy, but these were hidden because governments never recorded these costs. In India, Roy calculates that large dams have displaced about 33 million people in the last 50 years, about 60 per cent of them being either untouchables or indigenous peoples
(...) Equally important was the broader political impact of the Narmada struggle. It proved to be the cutting edge of the social movements that have deepened India’s democracy and transformed the political scene. The state bureaucracy and political parties must now listen to these movements or risk opposition or, in the case of parties, being thrown out of power. Social movements in the rural areas played a key role in stirring up the mass consciousness that led to the defeat in 2004 of the neoliberal coalition led by the Hindu chauvinist BJP (Bharatiya Janata Party) that had campaigned on the pro-globalization slogan “India Shining.” While its successor, the Congress Party-led coalition, has turned its back on the rural protest that led to its election and followed the same anti-agriculture and pro-globalization policies of the BJP, it risks provoking an even greater backlash in the near future.
(...) As in China, the challenge lies in building up a mass movement that might be unpopular not only with the elite but also with sections of the urban-based middle class sectors that have been the main beneficiaries of the high-growth economic strategy that has been pursued since the early 1990’s.
(...) The reason for tracing the evolution of a mass-based environmental movement in East Asia and India is to counter the image that the Asian masses are inert elements that uncritically accept the environmentally damaging high-growth export-oriented industrialization models promoted by their governing elites. It is increasingly clear to ordinary people throughout Asia that the model has wrecked agriculture, widened income inequalities, led to increased poverty after the Asian financial crises, and wreaked environmental damage everywhere.
(...) There is no doubt that the burden of adjustment to global warming will fall on the North, and that this adjustment will have to be made in the next 10 to 15 years, and that the adjustment needed might need to be much greater than the 50 per cent reduction from the 1990’s level by 2050 that is being promoted by the G 8. In the eyes of some experts, what might be required is in the order of 100 or 150 per cent reduction from 1990 levels. However, the South will also have to adjust, proportionately less than the North but also rather stringently.
(...) The South’s adjustment will not take place without the North taking the lead. But it will also not take place unless its leaders junk the export-oriented, high-growth paradigm promoted by the World Bank and most economists to which its elites and many middle strata are addicted.
Mahathir has been interpreted in the North as speaking for a South that seeks to catch up whatever the cost and where the environmental movement is weak or non-existent. Today, China is seen as the prime exemplar of this Mahathirian obsession with rapid industrialization with minimal regard for the environment. This view of the South’s perspective on the environment is a caricature. In fact, the environmental costs of rapid industrialization are of major concern to significant sectors of the population of developing countries and, in many of them, the environmental movement has been a significant actor. Moreover, there is currently an active discussion in many countries of alternatives to the destabilizing high-growth model.
(...) In both societies (Korea and Taiwan), farmers, workers, and the environment bore the costs of high-speed industrialization. Both societies, it is not surprising, saw the emergence of an environmental movement that was spontaneous, that drew participants from different classes, that saw environmental demands linked with issues of employment, occupational health, and agricultural crisis, and that was quite militant.
(...) Unlike in Korea and Taiwan, environmental movements already existed in a number of the Southeast Asian countries before the period of rapid industrialization, which in their case occurred in the mid-eighties to the mid-nineties. These movements had emerged in the seventies and eighties in struggles against nuclear power, as in the Philippines; against big hydroelectric dams, as in Thailand, Indonesia, and the Philippines; and against deforestation and marine pollution, as in Thailand and the Philippines. These were epic battles, like the struggle against the Chico River Dam in the northern Philippines and the fight against the Pak Mun Dam in the northeast of Thailand, which forced the World Bank to withdraw its planned support for giant hydroelectric projects, an outcome that, as we shall see later on, also occurred in struggle against the Narmada Dam in India. The fight against industrial associated partly with foreign firms seeking to escape strict environmental regulations at home was a case of a new front being opened up in an ongoing struggle to save the environment.
(...) The environmental movements in Southeast Asia played a vital role not only in scuttling projects like the Bataan nuclear plant but in ousting the dictatorships that reigned there in the seventies and eighties. Indeed, because the environment was not perceived by authoritarian regimes as “political,” organizing around environmental and public health issues was not initially proscribed. Thus environmental struggles became an issue around which the anti-dictatorship movement could organize and reach new people. Environmental destruction became one more graphic example of a regime’s irresponsibility. In Indonesia, for example, the environmental organization WALHI went so far as to file a lawsuit for pollution and environmental destruction against six government bodies, including the Minister of the Environment and Population5. By the time the dictatorships wised up to what was happening, it was often too late: environmentalism and anti-fascism fed on one another.
(...) The environmental crisis in China is very serious. For example, the ground water table of the North China plain is dropping by 1.5 meters (5 feet) per year. This region produces 40 percent of China's grain. As environmentalist Dale Wen remarks, “One cannot help wonder about how China will be fed once the ground aquifer is depleted” 6. Water pollution and water scarcity; soil pollution, soil degradation and desertification; global warming and the coming energy crisis—these are all byproducts of China’s high-speed industrialization and massively expanded consumption.
(...) Most of the environmental destabilization in China is produced by local enterprises and massive state projects such as the Three Gorges Dams, but the contribution of foreign investors is not insignificant. Taking advantage of very lax implementation of environmental laws in China, many western TNCs have relocated their most polluting factories into the country and have exacerbated or even created many environmental problems. Wen notes that the Pearl River Delta and Yangtze River Delta, the two Special Economic Zones where most TNC subsidiaries are located, are the most seriously affected by heavy metal and POPs (persistent organic pollutants) pollution.
(...) Global warming is not a distant threat. The first comprehensive study of the impact of the sea level rise of global warming by Gordon McGranahan, Deborah Balk, and Bridget Anderson puts China as the country in Asia most threatened by the sea level rise of up to 10 meters over the next century 8. 144 million of China’s population live in low-elevation coastal zones, and this figure is likely to increase owing to the export-oriented industrialization strategies pursued by the government, which has involved the creation of numerous special economic zones. “From an environmental perspective,” the study warns, “there is a double disadvantage to excessive (and potentially rapid) coastal development. First, uncontrolled coastal development is likely to damage sensitive and important ecosystems and other resources. Second, coastal settlement, particularly in the lowlands, is likely to expose residents to seaward hazards such as sea level rise and tropical storms, both of which are likely to become more serious with climate change”9. The recent spate of super-typhoons descending on the Asian mainland from the Western Pacific underlines the gravity of this observation.
(...) In terms of public health, the rural health infrastructure has practically collapsed, according to Dale Wen. The system has been privatized with the introduction of a “fee for service” system that is one component of the neoliberal reform program. One result is the resurgence of diseases that had been brought under control, like tuberculosis and schistosomiasis. Cuba, in contrast, has won plaudits for its rural health care system, which is ironic, says Wen, given that the Cuban system was based on the Maoist era’s “barefoot doctor” system.
(...) The combination of the industrialization of food production and the lengthening of the food chain from production to consumption is strongly suspected to be the cause of bird flu, which has migrated from China to other countries. The government has become an unreliable actor in dealing with new diseases such as bird flu and SARS, prone as it is to engage in minimizing the threat if not promoting a cover-up, as it did in the case of SARS.
(...) As in Taiwan and Korea 15 years earlier, we see unrestrained export-oriented industrialization bringing together low-wage migrant labor, farming communities whose lands are being grabbed or ruined environmentally, environmentalists, and the proponents of a major change in political economy called the “New Left.” Environment-related riots, protests and disputes in China increased by 30% in 2005 to more than 50,000, as pollution-related unrest has become “a contagious source of instability in the country,” as one report put it. Indeed, a great many of recorded protests fused environmental, land-loss, income, and political issues. From 8700 in 1995, what the Ministry of Public Security calls "mass group incidents" have grown to 87,000 in 2005, most of them in the countryside. Moreover, the incidents are growing in average size from 10 or fewer persons in the mid-1990s to 52 people per incident in 2004 11. Notable were the April 2005 riots in Huashui, where an estimated 10,000 police officers clashed with desperate villagers who succeeded in repelling strong vested interests polluting their lands.
(...) As in China, the environment and public health have been sites of struggle in India. Over the last 25 years, the movement for the environment and public health has exploded in that country. Indeed, one can say that this movement has become one of the forces that is deepening Indian democracy.
(...) Here Roy expresses an essential truth: that centralized electrification preempted the development of alternative power-systems that could have been more decentralized, more people-oriented, more environmentally benign, and less capital intensive.
(...) While these interests benefited, others paid the costs. Specifically, it was the rural areas and the environment that absorbed the costs of centralized electrification. Tremendous crimes have been committed in the name of power generation and irrigation, says Roy, but these were hidden because governments never recorded these costs. In India, Roy calculates that large dams have displaced about 33 million people in the last 50 years, about 60 per cent of them being either untouchables or indigenous peoples
(...) Equally important was the broader political impact of the Narmada struggle. It proved to be the cutting edge of the social movements that have deepened India’s democracy and transformed the political scene. The state bureaucracy and political parties must now listen to these movements or risk opposition or, in the case of parties, being thrown out of power. Social movements in the rural areas played a key role in stirring up the mass consciousness that led to the defeat in 2004 of the neoliberal coalition led by the Hindu chauvinist BJP (Bharatiya Janata Party) that had campaigned on the pro-globalization slogan “India Shining.” While its successor, the Congress Party-led coalition, has turned its back on the rural protest that led to its election and followed the same anti-agriculture and pro-globalization policies of the BJP, it risks provoking an even greater backlash in the near future.
(...) As in China, the challenge lies in building up a mass movement that might be unpopular not only with the elite but also with sections of the urban-based middle class sectors that have been the main beneficiaries of the high-growth economic strategy that has been pursued since the early 1990’s.
(...) The reason for tracing the evolution of a mass-based environmental movement in East Asia and India is to counter the image that the Asian masses are inert elements that uncritically accept the environmentally damaging high-growth export-oriented industrialization models promoted by their governing elites. It is increasingly clear to ordinary people throughout Asia that the model has wrecked agriculture, widened income inequalities, led to increased poverty after the Asian financial crises, and wreaked environmental damage everywhere.
(...) There is no doubt that the burden of adjustment to global warming will fall on the North, and that this adjustment will have to be made in the next 10 to 15 years, and that the adjustment needed might need to be much greater than the 50 per cent reduction from the 1990’s level by 2050 that is being promoted by the G 8. In the eyes of some experts, what might be required is in the order of 100 or 150 per cent reduction from 1990 levels. However, the South will also have to adjust, proportionately less than the North but also rather stringently.
(...) The South’s adjustment will not take place without the North taking the lead. But it will also not take place unless its leaders junk the export-oriented, high-growth paradigm promoted by the World Bank and most economists to which its elites and many middle strata are addicted.
Friday, October 5, 2007
obama's insults:
(...) During his Brown Chapel address, Obama praised the “Moses [King and Selma] Generation” of Civil Rights leaders for bringing black America “90 percent” of the way to social equality in America. It’s up to Obama and his fellow “Joshua Generation” blacks to get past “that [final] 10 percent in order to cross over to the other side,” Obama said. This formulation was consistent with his 2006 campaign book The Audacity of Hope’s claim that most black Americans have been “pulled into the economic mainstream.”
Never mind that blacks are afflicted with a shocking racial wealth gap that keeps their average net worth at one eleventh that of whites and an income structure starkly and persistently tilted towards poverty (Loewen 2005, p. 130; Shapiro 2005). Or that whites in the United States, considered separately, enjoy the highest quality of life in the world while black Americans, viewed separately, live at the level of a “Third World” nation (Elaine Brown, The Condemnation of Little B [Boston, MA: Beacon, 2002], pp. 78-79).
(...) Too bad Obama’s relatively privileged background has little to do with American Horatio Alger (rags to riches) mythology. And too bad that Obama’s paean to the American Dream was plagued by a different sort of empirical challenge: the relatively stationary and harshly unbalanced structure of American inequality.
(...) Not only does the social class into which you are born matter a very great deal when it comes to where you stand on the American socioeconomic ladder. It matters more in the U.S. than it does in most if not all the rest of the industrialized world. As reporter David Wessel noted on the front page of the Wall Street Journal in the spring of 2005, the best scholarship on the subject simply does not support "the notion that the US is a meritocracy where smarts and ambition matter more than parenthood and class." In reality, the odds that a child born into poverty will climb into the middle or upper class are slighter in the U.S. than they are in "class bound Europe." The U.S. and its junior partner England are "the least mobile societies" among the world's "rich countries." France and Germany "are somewhat more mobile than the U.S.; Canada and the Nordic countries are much more so."
(...) As Obama waxed eloquent about “generous America’s” status as the global beacon of ascendant opportunity, the best current research determined at least 45 to 60 percent of "parents' [class] advantage" is "passed on to their children." Using the 60 percent estimate, Wessel reported that rich Americans’ inherited edge and poor Americans’ inherited disadvantage goes five generations deep in the U.S., extending back to the Civil War and the abolition of slavery. According to Chicago Federal Reserve economist Bhashkar Mazumdor, who matched government survey data with the Social Security records of thousands of men burn during the 1960s, just 14% of American men born to fathers in the bottom tenth of the wage structure have risen to the top 30%. Conversely, just 17% of men born to fathers in the top tenth have fallen into the bottom 30th.
(...) It gets worse, Wessel noted, when you factor in race: fully 42% of blacks born into the bottom tenth of families for income fail to escape the lowest ten percent. By contrast, just 17% of whites born into the bottom tenth stay there as adults.
(...) “The people in this stadium need to know who we're going to fight for,” Obama told labor union members in Chicago’s Soldier Field last August. “The reason that I'm running for president is because of you, not because of folks who are writing big checks, and that's a clear message that has to be sent, I think, by every candidate.” At the same time, “Obama, Inc.” proceeds to set campaign fundraising records with considerable help from gigantic corporations and investment capital behemoths like Goldman Sachs, J.P. Morgan Chase and Co., and Exelon. These and other stupendous concentrations of wealth exercise quiet but powerful control over Obama’s campaign rhetoric and policy proposals. Especially insulting to our intelligence and sensibilities is Obama’s determination to retain close and lucrative funding relationships with leading Washington-based lobbyists and lobbying firms he claims to repudiate. Obama talks a big game of not taking lobbyist money but he works regularly with influential lobbyist players who (as Los Angeles Times reporter Dan Moran noted last August) “skirt disclosure requirements by merely advising clients and associates who do actual lobbying, and avoiding regular contact with policymakers.”
(...) In an interview last year with Time’s Joe Klein, Obama expressed interesting misgivings even about Massachusetts’ (non-single payer)plan for universal health insurance. He insulted American intelligence and moral sensibilities when he told Klein that “voluntary” solutions are “more consonant” with “the American character” than “government mandates.” Never mind that, as Noam Chomsky noted in 2006 (Chomsky Failed States [2006], p. 225): “A large majority of the [U.S.] population supports extensive government intervention [in the health care market], it appears. An NBC-Wall Street Journal poll found that ‘over 2/3 of all Americans thought the government should guarantee “everyone the best and most advanced health care that technology can supply;”’ a Washington Post-ABC News poll found that 80 percent regard universal health care as ‘more important than holding down taxes’; polls reported in Business Week found that 67% of Americans think it is a good idea to guarantee health care for all U.S. citizens, as Canada and Britain do, with just 27 5 dissenting; the Pew Research Center found that 64 percent of Americans favor the ‘U.S. government guaranteeing health insurance for all citizens, even if it means raising taxes’ (30 percent opposed). By the late 1980s, more than 70 percent of Americans ‘thought health care should be a constitutional guarantee,’ while 40 percent ‘thought it already was.’” Obama, it is worth noting, received $708,000 from medical and insurance interests between 2001 and 2006. His wife Michelle, a fellow Harvard Law graduate, was a Vice President for Community and External Affairs at the University of Chicago Hospitals, a position that paid her $273, 618 in 2006.
(...) These were maddeningly meager reflections on the wonders of American democracy. Obama’s ode to the absence of fascist dictatorship in the U.S. deleted the absence or weakness of substantive positive popular governance there. It evaded the unpleasant fact that much of ordinary U.S. citizens’ freedom to “say,” “write,” and “think” whatever they wish generally amounts to the liberty to whisper to one's immediate neighbor in the front row of a crowded movie theater with a blaring sound track since it is generally drowned out by giant, concentrated corporate media and the special megaphones possessed by private and state power. In a similar vein, Joe Six Pack et al.’s votes - when actually counted - are mere political half-pennies compared to the structurally empowered super-citizenship bestowed upon the great monied interests and corporations that exercise such well known disproportionate influence on American “market democracy.”
(...) It gets worse and more insulting and authoritarian with Obama. After referring to Americans as "one people, all of us pledging allegiance to the stars and stripes,” Obama’s Keynote Address praised "a young man" named Seamus who "told me he'd joined the Marines and was heading to Iraq the following week." Seamus' most endearing quality, Obama told the 2004 Convention, was "absolute faith in our country and its leaders, his devotion to duty and service." Reflecting on Seamus’ supposed blind and unquestioning devotion to the American fatherland, Obama "thought this young man was all that any of us might hope for in a child." So much for the venerable democratic tradition of encouraging critical thinking and questioning authority!
(...) "We heard a few reports, in one case corroborated by photographs," Hedges and Al-Arian report, "that some soldiers had so lost their moral compasses that they mocked or desecrated Iraqi civilian corpses." Twenty four veterans "said they had witnessed or heard stories from those in their unit of unarmed civilians being shot or run over by convoys. These incidents were so numerous that many were never reported." The killing of "unarmed Iraqis" is "so common many of the troops said it became an accepted part of the daily landscape." Several interviewees told Hedges and Al-Arian of cases where U.S. soldiers would "plant AK-47s" next to the bodies of unarmed Iraqis they had butchered "to make it seems as if the civilian dead were combatants" (Chris Hedges and Laila Al-Arian, "The Other War: Iraq Vets Bear Witness," The Nation, July 30, 2007).
(...) During his Brown Chapel address, Obama praised the “Moses [King and Selma] Generation” of Civil Rights leaders for bringing black America “90 percent” of the way to social equality in America. It’s up to Obama and his fellow “Joshua Generation” blacks to get past “that [final] 10 percent in order to cross over to the other side,” Obama said. This formulation was consistent with his 2006 campaign book The Audacity of Hope’s claim that most black Americans have been “pulled into the economic mainstream.”
Never mind that blacks are afflicted with a shocking racial wealth gap that keeps their average net worth at one eleventh that of whites and an income structure starkly and persistently tilted towards poverty (Loewen 2005, p. 130; Shapiro 2005). Or that whites in the United States, considered separately, enjoy the highest quality of life in the world while black Americans, viewed separately, live at the level of a “Third World” nation (Elaine Brown, The Condemnation of Little B [Boston, MA: Beacon, 2002], pp. 78-79).
(...) Too bad Obama’s relatively privileged background has little to do with American Horatio Alger (rags to riches) mythology. And too bad that Obama’s paean to the American Dream was plagued by a different sort of empirical challenge: the relatively stationary and harshly unbalanced structure of American inequality.
(...) Not only does the social class into which you are born matter a very great deal when it comes to where you stand on the American socioeconomic ladder. It matters more in the U.S. than it does in most if not all the rest of the industrialized world. As reporter David Wessel noted on the front page of the Wall Street Journal in the spring of 2005, the best scholarship on the subject simply does not support "the notion that the US is a meritocracy where smarts and ambition matter more than parenthood and class." In reality, the odds that a child born into poverty will climb into the middle or upper class are slighter in the U.S. than they are in "class bound Europe." The U.S. and its junior partner England are "the least mobile societies" among the world's "rich countries." France and Germany "are somewhat more mobile than the U.S.; Canada and the Nordic countries are much more so."
(...) As Obama waxed eloquent about “generous America’s” status as the global beacon of ascendant opportunity, the best current research determined at least 45 to 60 percent of "parents' [class] advantage" is "passed on to their children." Using the 60 percent estimate, Wessel reported that rich Americans’ inherited edge and poor Americans’ inherited disadvantage goes five generations deep in the U.S., extending back to the Civil War and the abolition of slavery. According to Chicago Federal Reserve economist Bhashkar Mazumdor, who matched government survey data with the Social Security records of thousands of men burn during the 1960s, just 14% of American men born to fathers in the bottom tenth of the wage structure have risen to the top 30%. Conversely, just 17% of men born to fathers in the top tenth have fallen into the bottom 30th.
(...) It gets worse, Wessel noted, when you factor in race: fully 42% of blacks born into the bottom tenth of families for income fail to escape the lowest ten percent. By contrast, just 17% of whites born into the bottom tenth stay there as adults.
(...) “The people in this stadium need to know who we're going to fight for,” Obama told labor union members in Chicago’s Soldier Field last August. “The reason that I'm running for president is because of you, not because of folks who are writing big checks, and that's a clear message that has to be sent, I think, by every candidate.” At the same time, “Obama, Inc.” proceeds to set campaign fundraising records with considerable help from gigantic corporations and investment capital behemoths like Goldman Sachs, J.P. Morgan Chase and Co., and Exelon. These and other stupendous concentrations of wealth exercise quiet but powerful control over Obama’s campaign rhetoric and policy proposals. Especially insulting to our intelligence and sensibilities is Obama’s determination to retain close and lucrative funding relationships with leading Washington-based lobbyists and lobbying firms he claims to repudiate. Obama talks a big game of not taking lobbyist money but he works regularly with influential lobbyist players who (as Los Angeles Times reporter Dan Moran noted last August) “skirt disclosure requirements by merely advising clients and associates who do actual lobbying, and avoiding regular contact with policymakers.”
(...) In an interview last year with Time’s Joe Klein, Obama expressed interesting misgivings even about Massachusetts’ (non-single payer)plan for universal health insurance. He insulted American intelligence and moral sensibilities when he told Klein that “voluntary” solutions are “more consonant” with “the American character” than “government mandates.” Never mind that, as Noam Chomsky noted in 2006 (Chomsky Failed States [2006], p. 225): “A large majority of the [U.S.] population supports extensive government intervention [in the health care market], it appears. An NBC-Wall Street Journal poll found that ‘over 2/3 of all Americans thought the government should guarantee “everyone the best and most advanced health care that technology can supply;”’ a Washington Post-ABC News poll found that 80 percent regard universal health care as ‘more important than holding down taxes’; polls reported in Business Week found that 67% of Americans think it is a good idea to guarantee health care for all U.S. citizens, as Canada and Britain do, with just 27 5 dissenting; the Pew Research Center found that 64 percent of Americans favor the ‘U.S. government guaranteeing health insurance for all citizens, even if it means raising taxes’ (30 percent opposed). By the late 1980s, more than 70 percent of Americans ‘thought health care should be a constitutional guarantee,’ while 40 percent ‘thought it already was.’” Obama, it is worth noting, received $708,000 from medical and insurance interests between 2001 and 2006. His wife Michelle, a fellow Harvard Law graduate, was a Vice President for Community and External Affairs at the University of Chicago Hospitals, a position that paid her $273, 618 in 2006.
(...) These were maddeningly meager reflections on the wonders of American democracy. Obama’s ode to the absence of fascist dictatorship in the U.S. deleted the absence or weakness of substantive positive popular governance there. It evaded the unpleasant fact that much of ordinary U.S. citizens’ freedom to “say,” “write,” and “think” whatever they wish generally amounts to the liberty to whisper to one's immediate neighbor in the front row of a crowded movie theater with a blaring sound track since it is generally drowned out by giant, concentrated corporate media and the special megaphones possessed by private and state power. In a similar vein, Joe Six Pack et al.’s votes - when actually counted - are mere political half-pennies compared to the structurally empowered super-citizenship bestowed upon the great monied interests and corporations that exercise such well known disproportionate influence on American “market democracy.”
(...) It gets worse and more insulting and authoritarian with Obama. After referring to Americans as "one people, all of us pledging allegiance to the stars and stripes,” Obama’s Keynote Address praised "a young man" named Seamus who "told me he'd joined the Marines and was heading to Iraq the following week." Seamus' most endearing quality, Obama told the 2004 Convention, was "absolute faith in our country and its leaders, his devotion to duty and service." Reflecting on Seamus’ supposed blind and unquestioning devotion to the American fatherland, Obama "thought this young man was all that any of us might hope for in a child." So much for the venerable democratic tradition of encouraging critical thinking and questioning authority!
(...) "We heard a few reports, in one case corroborated by photographs," Hedges and Al-Arian report, "that some soldiers had so lost their moral compasses that they mocked or desecrated Iraqi civilian corpses." Twenty four veterans "said they had witnessed or heard stories from those in their unit of unarmed civilians being shot or run over by convoys. These incidents were so numerous that many were never reported." The killing of "unarmed Iraqis" is "so common many of the troops said it became an accepted part of the daily landscape." Several interviewees told Hedges and Al-Arian of cases where U.S. soldiers would "plant AK-47s" next to the bodies of unarmed Iraqis they had butchered "to make it seems as if the civilian dead were combatants" (Chris Hedges and Laila Al-Arian, "The Other War: Iraq Vets Bear Witness," The Nation, July 30, 2007).
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