Postmodern News Archives 11

2007-01-07T10:29:00.000-08:00

A Good Idea?

By Brent Erickson
From Postmodern Times
2007

"Gandhi was once asked what he thought of Western Civilization and his answer was 'Maybe it would be a good idea.', and you can say the same for capitalism, 'Maybe it would be a good idea.', we've never had anything remotely resembling it and the reason we don't have it is the powerful would never permit it. They know very well if capitalist institutions were established it would destroy the economy in no time. Therefore they insist on a powerful state which intervenes to protect them from the ravages of the market." -Noam Chomsky 2004

Western Civilization is not capitalist? That can't be correct. Everybody knows that America is the world-wide example of the so called Free Market, the polar opposite to Communism. The U.S exports Capitalism through "Economic Globalization". That is what we're told isn't it? From billboards for Forbes Magazine proudly reading, "Capitalism served fresh daily.", to critiques of the economic system by Author Michael Parenti proclaiming "Capitalism is the problem!" the word is regularly used.

Though it is true that the western economic model does have capitalist features to it, many Americans and Canadians do benefit little if any from the billions spent by their governments every year and are left to "fend for themselves". However, with a closer look at how our economic system actually functions it becomes clear that "Free Market Capitalism" is an incorrect label to give the prevailing economic system in North America.

J.K Galbraith, the legendary Canadian-American economist addresses the issue of the free market in his 1966 BBC Reith Lecture "The New Industrial State". "I have under-taken to show in these lectures, that the modern industrial society, or that part of it which is composed of the large corporation is in all essentials a planned economy...Now, I'm not arguing that market influences are entirely excluded from effects on [economic] decisions. Economics as it exists, rather than how it is taught, has very few pure cases...But the notion that the consumer is a sovereign influence in the economy that all decisions begin with him is a pure case that will not do, or it will serve only those who wish to believe in fairy tales."

Government Spending
One way that our economic system is not "Free" is that direct government spending is a huge part of our overall economy. From schools, libraries, and arts funding to military, police and business subsidies, the state is there.

If the government were to cut taxes radically and slash state intervention in the economy, leaving what is now government funded to the open market, our society would be quite different.

But wait a minute, hasn't the government been "privatizing" services, and "cutting the pork of Big Government" for years? While since the early 1980's, the government has been "privatizing" certain sectors of society like Medicare, and slashing funding to Aboriginal people, Women's groups and the Environment, they have been increasing funding to others, like Police and Military, and Business.

Ronald Reagan is a symbol of so called free market ideology. He slashed welfare to the poor and spoke often of his belief in free markets. Noam Chomsky notes that Reagan had granted more import relief to U.S. industry than any of his predecessors in more than half a century; in fact, more than all predecessors combined. Market discipline, writes Chomsky is; "...for you but not for me, unless the 'playing field' happens to be tilted in my favor, typically as a result of large-scale state intervention. It’s hard to find another theme so dominant in the economic history of the past three centuries...Another chapter of the story includes the huge transfer of public funds to private power, often under the traditional guise of "security." Without such extreme measures of market interference, it is doubtful that the U.S. automotive, steel, machine tool, semiconductor industries, and others, would have survived Japanese competition or been able to forge ahead in emerging technologies, with broad effects through the economy."

"Corporate Welfare"
"Corporate Welfare" is a term (said to be first coined by Ralph Nader in 1956) usually used to describe direct government subsidies of for-profit Corporations, but it is more than that. "Corporate Welfare" is, writes Nader, "...the enormous and myriad subsidies, bailouts, giveaways, tax loopholes, debt revocations, loan guarantees, discounted insurance and other benefits conferred by government on business...Corporate welfare programs siphon funds from appropriate public investments, subsidize companies ripping minerals from federal lands, enable pharmaceutical companies to gouge consumers, perpetuate anti-competitive oligopolistic markets, injure our national security, and weaken our democracy."

Corporate welfare is nothing new. Both Canada and the U.S would not be the countries they are today without massive state subsides. Giveaways of public land is one of the oldest forms of corporate welfare. The U.S National Mineral Act of 1866 gave millions of acres of prime land to mining companies for free. Railroad corporations received over 100 million acres of land, and millions of dollars in federal subsidies for rail construction. Meanwhile, the signed commitments made to Native people, to honor land treaties, remain unrealized to this day.

U.S congressman Bernie Sanders questions the wisdom of the current economic model of systemic corporate welfare. "This country has a $6 trillion national debt, a growing deficit and is borrowing money from the Social Security Trust Fund in order to fund government services. We can no longer afford to provide over $125 billion every year in corporate welfare - tax breaks, subsidies and other wasteful spending - that goes to some of the largest, most profitable corporations in America. One of the most egregious forms of corporate welfare can be found at a little known federal agency called the Export-Import Bank, an institution that has a budget of about $1 billion a year and the capability of putting at risk some $15.5 billion in loan guarantees annually. At a time when the government is under-funding veterans' needs, education, health care, housing and many other vital services, over 80% of the subsidies distributed by the Export-Import Bank goes to Fortune 500 corporations. Among the companies that receive taxpayer support from the Ex-Im are Enron, Boeing, Halliburton, Mobil Oil, IBM, General Electric, AT&T, Motorola, Lucent Technologies, FedEx, General Motors, Raytheon, and United Technologies."

The Impact of Corporate Welfare is felt not only by the domestic population, who are footing the bill for our economic system, but the effect on developing countries is even more severe. The subsidies the governments of the U.S and Canada give to corporations lower the price of goods worldwide, making it almost impossible for producers in developing countries to compete with the North Americans, driving small business out of production. This is an important aspect of what is misleadingly called "Free Trade".

In India, there has been an epidemic of suicides by farmers, over the past ten years. Author, physicist and ecologist Vandana Shiva blames the western economic system for destroying the lives of her countrymen. "Indian farmers had never committed suicide on a large scale, it's something totally new, it's linked to the last decade of 'Globalization', and 'Trade Liberalization', under a corporate driven economy...A few weeks ago [Nov,2006] I was in Punjab, 2,800 widows of farmer suicides, have lost their land, are having to bring up children as landless workers on others land, and yet the system does not respond to it because there is only one response. Get Monsanto out of the seed sector, they are part of this Genocide, and ensure that WTO (World Trade Organization) rules are not bringing down the prices of agriculture produce in the U.S, in Canada, in India, and allow trade to be honest. I don't think we need to talk about 'free trade' and 'fair trade' we need to talk about honest trade. Todays trade system, especially in agriculture, is dishonest and this dishonesty has become a war against farmers, it's become a Genocide "

"True Cost Accounting"
Despite the fact technologies exist to replace the fossil fuel engine, oil and automobiles play a huge roll in modern industrial society. It has been said that alternatives to oil are not cost effective, but once the true cost of oil subsides are revealed, renewable technologies make even more sense. The price not only of direct subsidies, but of costs transferred to governments or to the public is calculated in what has been called "True Cost Accounting".

According to Adbusters magazine, "True cost is such a revolutionary idea because in a true cost market place every product tells the ecological truth. The Price tag of an automobile would include the pollution it causes over its lifetime, the building and maintaining of roads, the medical costs of accidents and the noise and degradation caused by urban sprawl, the traffic policing and military protection of oil fields and supply lines, plus the real but hard-to- estimate cost to future generations of oil depletion and climate change...The [U.S] National Defense Council Foundation Estimates that the Pentagon spends $49.1 billion a year preserving access to Persian Gulf oil, an amount equal to adding $1.17 to the cost of a gallon of gasoline. And that before the U.S invaded Iraq."

The Ontario Medical Association, (“The Illness Costs of Air Pollution Ontario” June 2000) estimates that air pollution costs Ontario's twelve million residents over $1 billion per year in hospital admissions, emergency room visits and worker absenteeism. Private insurers hit by climate change costs released a report in 2001 demonstrating that more frequent tropical cyclones, loss of land, as a result of rising sea levels, and damage to fishing stocks, agriculture and water supplies, amounted to an annual bill of over $300 billion.

The government and the public are there to accommodate the oil and automobile corporations, paying the "externalities" created from this ecologically devastating form of transport, money that could be spent on sustainable development. But if you do drive, consider yourself a capitalist, and like to pay your own way, I'm sure the government will gladly accept a cheque.

"[Have you ever wondered] what would it cost to drive if the price tag of gas included air pollution, road construction and maintenance; property taxes lost from land cleared for freeways; free parking paid for by taxes; noise and vibration damage to structures; protection of petroleum supply lines; sprawl and loss of transportation options; auto accidents; and congestion? A number of researchers have tried to answer this question. John Holtzclaw of the Sierra Club, "America's Autos on Welfare", profiled eight studies that, when averaged, estimated the true price of gas at $6.05 a gallon. As for vehicles, transportation analyst Todd Litman [“Transportation Costs & Benefits,”] June 2004 has calculated that the external costs of driving would add $42,363 to the sticker price of a shiny new car, based on a 12.5 year lifespan.", (from Adbusters).

Jobs and Taxes
It is common to hear argued that although the public are footing the bill for the so-called capitalists, at least the corporations are providing jobs and paying taxes. Unfortunately, even though large corporations are good at making money, they are less successful at providing jobs. In 2005, revenues for the Fortune 500, the five hundred most profitable corporations in the U.S, were over $9 trillion or over 73 percent of U.S. GDP. Soon Fortune 500 revenues are expected even to surpass the total economic output of the United States. If the Fortune 500 constituted a nation, their economy would be larger than the economies of Japan, the UK, Germany and France combined. However the percentage of Americans employed by Fortune 500 companies has steadily dropped from 20 percent of the workforce in 1980 to less than 9 percent today.

According to the Canadian Federation of Independent Business,(CFIB) "Seventy-five per cent of all businesses in Canada employ fewer than five employees and almost 60 per cent of employed Canadians work for a small or medium-sized business." In America "About three quarters of all U.S. business firms have no payroll." Reports the U.S Census Bureau. "Most are self-employed persons operating unincorporated businesses." Despite the fact that most of the citizens in North America are employed by small business, or the state itself, the government continues to bow to the pressure of large corporations to pay, what should be, their expenses or to subsidize them directly. This is a systematic violation of the free market.

As for paying taxes, the AFL-CLO reports, "Nearly one-third of the nation’s largest and most profitable corporations paid no federal income tax between 2001 and 2003—yet still received billions of dollars in tax rebates, according to a new study.

'Corporate Income Taxes in the Bush Years', released by Citizens for Tax Justice (CTJ) and the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, finds 82 of 275 companies CTJ examined enjoyed at least one year in 2001–2003 in which they paid no federal income taxes yet received billions of dollars in outright tax rebates. In 2003 alone, 46 of the companies paid no federal income taxes and in some cases, received tax rebates.

The tax burden in north America is shouldered primarily by the middle class, who must work to live and do not enjoy protection from the market as corporations do. As Cassandra Q. Butts writes in a 2004 article, "The Corporate Tax Dodge" for The Center for American Progress; "The news that more than 60 percent of U.S. corporations failed to pay any federal taxes from 1996 through 2000 when corporate profits were soaring and that corporate tax receipts had fallen to just 7.4 percent of overall federal tax revenue in 2003 – the lowest since 1983 and the second-lowest rate since 1934 – is an outrage. But it should come as no surprise to anyone who has been paying attention to national tax policy over the past few years."

Consider Argentina
If you think that North America has been privatized, and that the state is not very involved in economics, or that more privatization would help our society, consider the case of Argentina. As Noam Chomsky noted recently, "Argentina was the poster child for the IMF, (International Monetary Fund) and following IMF rules, lead to the worst economic disaster in its history. It totally collapsed, then violating IMF rules radically, they pulled out of it and have had rapid growth."

Naomi Klein, award winning Canadian Author and Filmmaker, recently produced a film about Argentina entitled "The Take". She warns that true capitalist polices can lead to disaster. "Argentina, had adopted all the same polices that we've just been talking about in Iraq, the attacks on the state, the privatization of absolutely everything. Argentina is the most privatized country I've ever seen, even the street signs are sponsored, they are sponsored by Master Card, I mean nothing has not been sold in this country. The results were an absolute disaster because they created a capitalist wild west and money was just able to travel, just flee the country. $40 Billion left the country in cash, in the two weeks before the economic crisis, and so people responded in this amazing way...workers who were told 'O.k you're fired, your factory's closing, were moving it somewhere cheaper.', they just refused to leave. We actually wanted to call the movie, 'Rage for the Machines' because what they were saying was, 'You can leave, but we're going to keep the machines and keep them running,', and they turned these factories into democratically run workers co-operatives."

Alternative Economic Systems
Proponents of the current economic model, that has by now affected every nation on earth, will tell you they are conservative and pragmatic, that there is "no alternative" to their seemingly unjust system. Fortunately for Canada, since 1994 the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives, (CCPA) has produced an Alternative Federal Budget(AFB), demonstrating "that governments budgets can be created in a way that is both fiscally and socially responsible...The CCPA has coordinated the AFB with the participation and support of researchers, activists and leadership from a broad spectrum of civil society organizations representing millions of Canadians". Judy Randall is coordinator of the 2006 Alternative Federal Budget for the CCPA. "Our budget adds up, it is balanced - it has no increase in overall net taxes. But unlike Mr. Harper and Mr. Flaherty we do not believe every problem can be solved with a tax cut. We start from the premise that this government has an unparalleled opportunity to help move Canada forward and create better lives for all Canadians.", from the CCPA Monitor.

Although it seems there is no way to combat economic injustice and inequity, people around the world are defying the odds. From Venezuela, to Spain, Kibbutz's in Israel, to micro-credits in Bangladesh, large societies and small communities are all rejecting "Neo-Liberalism" and are living proof that a better world is possible.

Ode magazine journalist Stephan Herrera traveled to the Himalayan nation of Bhutan, ("Zen and the Art of Happiness" Nov. 2005) to discover that even "developing nations" can prosper, when people come before profits. "Today the vast majority of Bhutan’s hard currency comes from ecotourism and hydro power-generated electricity. Its economy is one of the fastest growing in Asia. And the political structure is peacefully making the transition from monarchy to a kind of Asian-style democracy—at the king’s behest. King Wangchuk created a novel development plan three decades ago, early on mandating that his country’s success be judged in part by the degree to which it makes the Bhutanese citizenry happy. Yes, happy. In Bhutan, happiness is a measuring stick by which all aspects of modernization are judged. The King believes that gross national happiness (GNH) is more important than the widely used measure of economic well-being, gross national product (GNP)...the four 'pillars' of GNH—environmental conservation, socio-economic development, culture, and good governance, have just been enshrined in the country’s first constitution as the guiding principles of the government’s contract with its people."

E.F Schumacher was an internationally influential economic thinker, according to The Times Literary Supplement, his book "Small Is Beautiful" is among the 100 most influential books published since World War II. Adbusters, in a feature titled "The Revolutionaries" points out, "Schumacher coined the term 'Buddhist Economics' to describe the opposite of the Western economic model [one that didn’t allow governments to finance corporate domination, but instead invested in renewable resources to benefit society]. For those who questioned what Buddhism had to do with economics, Schumacher replied, 'Economics without Buddhism, i.e., without spiritual, human and ecological values, is like sex without love.'".

Turning on Canada’s Tap

By Tony Clarke
From Canadian Dimension
2006

When Prime Minister Stephen Harper sat down with President George W. Bush in their first White House meeting on July 6, one of the “unmentionable” items on their agenda may well have been the question of bulk water exports from Canada. After all, Bush himself raised the issue back in July, 2001, when he talked “off the cuff” to reporters about growing water shortages in his home state of Texas and elsewhere in the country, saying he would like to begin negotiations with Ottawa on water exports from Canada. In Texas, he said, “water is more valuable than oil.” “A lot of people don’t need it, but when you head south and west, we need it,” Bush declared, adding that he “looked forward” to discussing the matter with then-prime minister Jean Chretien.

At the time, the reaction from Canadian officials was swift and blunt. “We’re absolutely not going to export water, period,” proclaimed David Anderson, then Canada’s environment minister. Anderson’s comment reflected what seems to be a general public consensus that water should not be treated like other natural resources (like oil, natural gas, minerals, timber, etc.), as a commodity to be bought and sold on the open market to U.S. customers. After Anderson’s reaction, the issue seemed to fade from the news headlines until former U.S. ambassador Paul Cellucci revived the issue in the early stages of the 2005-06 federal election.

The question now is whether Canada’s new PM is willing to put water on the table in negotiating a new relationship with the United States. Although Harper’s specific views on water exports are not known, he has called for more “economic and security integration” with the U.S., highlighting the need for a continental energy strategy that would include “a range of other natural resources.” As a new era of Canada-U.S. relations opens up, Canadians would do well to take a closer look at the forces moving behind the scenes to turn on the taps for massive water exports to the United States.

The Growing American Thirst
Today, the largest world’s largest economic and military superpower is facing the problem of acute water shortages within its own borders. Twenty-one per cent of farmland irrigation in the U.S. comes from pumping groundwater at rates that exceed the water’s ability to recharge. In effect, this means those aquifers that are the country’s source of freshwater are rapidly being depleted and are drying up. The lethal combination of severe droughts and dried-up wells has become the plague of many U.S. farmers. Every year, now, it is estimated that more than U.S. $400 billion is lost in America’s farmlands because of the depletion of aquifers. A prime example is the Ogallala aquifer, one of the world’s most famous underground bodies of water, which is being depleted at a rate 14 times faster than nature can restore it.

In California, the major aquifers are also drying up. With the Colorado River strained to the limit, the water table under California’s San Joaquin Valley has dropped nearly ten meters in some areas during the past fifty years. In the state’s Central Valley, overuse of underground water supplies has resulted in a loss of over forty per cent of the combined storage capacity of all the human-made reservoirs in California. The desert regions of the American southwest — Arizona, Nevada and New Mexico — largely barren of water, continue to experience population growth. In Bush’s home state of Texas, water scarcity is also approaching a critical stage, where cities like El Paso are expected to be dried up by 2030. Moving further into the American Midwest, Chicago and Milwaukee could also be facing severe water shortages. The huge sandstone aquifer underlying the Illinois-Wisconsin border, which supplies these two major cities with their water supplies, is currently overtaxed and may well be depleted in the near future, say scientists, unless there are significant reductions in groundwater withdrawals.

In short, the U.S. is becoming more and more thirsty, even as it reaches the danger point of running out of its own freshwater sources. When the U.S. government surveyed the fifty states of the Union in 2003, it found that more than two-thirds predicted they would face water shortages in one form or another over the next ten years. And the U.S. government appears unprepared to confront this impending water crisis. In June, 2004, the National Academies of Science and the U.S. Geological Survey reported that Washington is ill-prepared to deal with water shortages emerging across the country.

Water-Rich Canada?
As the U.S. water crisis intensifies, one quick-fix solution is to tap into what is perceived to be Canada’s considerable water wealth. According to this scenario, Canada is a giant green sponge full of freshwater lakes and rivers — a massive reservoir of water that can be tapped to serve the insatiable thirst of people and industries in urban America. Globally speaking, Canada is ranked fourth in the world in terms of surface sources of freshwater — lakes, rivers and glaciers. All it would take is the construction of a network of new dams, reservoirs, canals, tunnels, pipelines and supertankers to transport water in bulk form from Canada to the United States.

The largest freshwater system on the planet is, of course, the Great Lakes lying between Canada and the United States, which contain no less than twenty per cent of the world’s freshwater. But the Great Lakes have also been a dumping ground for industrial wastes, contaminating much of the lake water and ground water in the region. Indeed, the International Joint Commission declared in its 2000 Final Report on the Protection of Waters in the Great Lakes, that there is no surplus water in the Great Lakes and emphatically warned against any new diversions. Moreover, scientists are now warning that drought patterns are returning to the prairies, as river systems like the South Saskatchewan, Old Man, Peace and Athabasca show signs of drying up. And these re-emerging drought patterns are bound to intensify with global warming. Already, the glacier that feeds Alberta’s Bow River is melting so quickly that there may be no water left in it fifty years from now.

Although there is no doubt that Canada is blessed by nature’s endowment with numerous freshwater lakes and rivers, it should also be noted that sixty per cent of our rivers flow north into Hudson’s Bay and the Arctic region. As a result, sixty per cent of Canada’s freshwater flows in the opposite direction of the U.S. and is largely inaccessible. Even so, say politicians, engineers and economists on both sides of the border, there are ways of overcoming these obstacles through new technologies and investment.

Mega Export Schemes
Over the past four decades, a series of mega-diversion schemes have been planned for massive bulk water transfers from Canada to the U.S. In retrospect, these megaprojects can be categorized in terms of three major water corridors. Western Corridor: The centerpiece of the western water corridor flowing from Canada to the U.S. is the North American Water and Power Alliance. NAWAPA was originally designed to bring bulk water from Alaska and northern British Columbia for delivery to 35 U.S. states. By building a series of large dams, the northward flow of the Yukon, Peace, Liard and a host of other rivers (Tanana, Copper, Skeena, Bella Coola, Dean, Chilcotin, and Fraser) would be reversed to move southward and pumped into the Rocky Mountain Trench, where the water would be trapped in a giant reservoir approximately 800 kilometres long. A canal would then be built to take the water southward into Washington State, where it would be channeled through existing canals and pipelines to supply freshwater for customers in 35 states. The annual volume of water to be diverted through the NAWAPA project is estimated to be roughly equivalent to the average total yearly discharge of the entire St. Lawrence River system.

Central Corridor: Another water corridor consists of a series of water-diversion schemes proposed from the Northwest Territories through the prairies to the U.S. In 1968, the Washington State Resource Center developed plans for the Central North American Water Project (CeNAWAP). The plan calls for a series of canals and pumping stations linking Great Bear Lake and Great Slave Lake in the N.W.T. to Lake Athabaska and Lake Winnipeg and then to the Great Lakes for bulk water exports to the U.S. A variation on the CeNAWAP is the Kuiper Diversion Scheme, which proposes to link the major western rivers into a mega-diversion scheme involving the Mackenzie, Peace, Athabasca, North Saskatchewan, Nelson and Churchill river systems.

Eastern Corridor: The principal eastern water corridor is known as the Great Recycling and Northern Development (GRAND) Canal. As originally conceived, the GRAND Canal plans called for the damming and rerouting of northern river systems in Quebec in order to bring freshwater through canals down into the Great Lakes, whence it would be flushed into the American Midwest. A dike would be built across James Bay at its mouth at Hudson Bay (whose natural flow is northward), thereby turning the bay into a giant, 30,000-square-mile reservoir of freshwater from the twenty rivers that flow into it. Through a system of dikes, canals, dams, power plants and locks, the water would then be diverted from the reservoir and rerouted southward down a 167-mile canal at a rate of about 282,000 litres per second into two of the Great Lakes —Superior and Huron. From there, the water would be flushed through canals into markets in both the American Midwest and Sun Belt.

There are, of course, multiple reasons why none of these massive water corridors have been built in the intervening decades since they were first proposed. One reason is that America’s thirst has been temporarily quenched by internal bulk water transfers within the U.S. A second reason is the problem of securing sufficient capital to pay for highly expensive bulk water export schemes like those described above, and whether this should come from private or public investment. A third reason may also have been the need for new or improved engineering technologies required for some of the more geographically challenging projects.

Yet, underlying all these reasons is the question of political will. According to opinion polls, most Canadians remain skeptical about selling our water to the U.S. In a 2002 survey conducted by the Centre for Research and Information on Canada, 69 per cent were opposed to bulk water exports. Three years before this poll was taken, the House of Commons actually passed a motion (introduced by the New Democrats) calling on the federal government to ban the export of water. In response, the Liberal government of the day refused to issue a ban on water exports, contending it would contravene Canada’s obligations under NAFTA and, instead, worked with the provinces to develop a Canada-wide Water Accord aimed at discouraging bulk water exports. Yet, precisely because of NAFTA, which prohibits countries from putting a ban or quota on the exports of their natural resources, the water accord is largely ineffective.

Which brings us back to Stephen Harper. Will he and his government be the ones who finally muster the political will to give Washington the green light and permit bulk water takings? Is this the price that Harper is prepared to pay, on behalf of Canadians, to seal a new grand bargain with the U.S., just as Brian Mulroney did when he gave away Canada’s energy resources in the eleventh hour of the free-trade negotiations?

Pay To Be Saved: The Future of Disaster Response

By Naomi Klein
From NoLogo.org
2006

The Red Cross has just announced a new disaster-response partnership with Wal-Mart. When the next hurricane hits, it will be a co-production of Big Aid and Big Box. This, apparently, is the lesson learned from the government’s calamitous response to Hurricane Katrina: Businesses do disaster better.

“It’s all going to be private enterprise before it’s over,” Billy Wagner, emergency management chief for the Florida Keys, currently under hurricane watch for Tropical Storm Ernesto, said in April. “They’ve got the expertise. They’ve got the resources.”

But before this new consensus goes any further, perhaps it’s time to take a look at where the privatization of disaster began, and where it will inevitably lead.

The first step was the government’s abdication of its core responsibility to protect the population from disasters. Under the Bush administration, whole sectors of the government, most notably the Department of Homeland Security, have been turned into glorified temp agencies, with essential functions contracted out to private companies. The theory is that entrepreneurs, driven by the profit motive, are always more efficient (please suspend hysterical laughter).

We saw the results in New Orleans one year ago: Washington was frighteningly weak and inept, in part because its emergency management experts had fled to the private sector and its technology and infrastructure had become positively retro. At least by comparison, the private sector looked modern and competent (a New York Times columnist even suggested handing FEMA over to Wal-Mart).

But the honeymoon doesn't last long. “Where has all the money gone?” ask desperate people from Baghdad to New Orleans, from Kabul to tsunami-struck Sri Lanka. One place a great deal of it has gone is into major capital expenditures for these private contractors.

Largely under the public radar, billions of taxpayer dollars have been spent on the construction of a privatized disaster-response infrastructure: the Shaw Group’s new state-of-the-art Baton Rouge headquarters, Bechtel’s battalions of earthmoving equipment, Blackwater USA’s 6,000-acre campus in North Carolina (complete with paramilitary training camp and 6,000-foot runway). I call it the Disaster Capitalism Complex. Whatever you might need in a serious crunch, these contractors can provide it: generators, water tanks, cots, port-a-potties, mobile homes, communications systems, helicopters, medicine, men with guns.

This state-within-a-state has been built almost exclusively with money from public contracts, including the training of its staff (overwhelmingly former civil servants, politicians and soldiers). Yet it is all privately owned; taxpayers have absolutely no control over it or claim to it. So far, that reality hasn’t sunk in because when these companies are getting their bills paid by government contracts, the Disaster Capitalism Complex provides its services to the public free of charge.

But here’s the catch: The U.S. government is going broke, in no small part thanks to this kind of loony spending. The national debt is $8-trillion; the federal budget deficit is at least $260-billion. That means that sooner rather than later, the contracts are going to dry up. And no one knows this better than the companies themselves. Ralph Sheridan, chief executive of Good Harbor Partners, one of hundreds of new counter-terrorism companies, explains that “expenditures by governments are episodic and come in bubbles.” Insiders call it the “homeland security bubble.”

When it bursts, firms such as Bechtel, Fluor and Blackwater will lose their primary revenue stream. They will still have all their high-tech gear giving them the ability to respond to disasters— while the government will have let that precious skill whither away—but now they will rent back the tax-funded infrastructure at whatever price they choose.

Here’s a snapshot of what could be in store in the not-too-distant future: helicopter rides off of rooftops in flooded cities ($5,000 a pop, $7,000 for families, pets included), bottled water and “meals ready to eat” ($50 per person, steep, but that’s supply and demand) and a cot in a shelter with a portable shower (show us your biometric ID—developed on a lucrative Homeland Security contract—and we’ll track you down later with the bill. Don’t worry, we have ways: spying has been outsourced too).

The model, of course, is the U.S. healthcare system, in which the wealthy can access best-in-class treatment in spa-like environments while 46-million Americans lack health insurance. As emergency-response, the model is already at work in the global AIDS pandemic: private-sector prowess helped produce lifesaving drugs (with heavy public subsidies), then set prices so high that the vast majority of the world’s infected cannot afford treatment.

If that is the corporate world’s track record on slow-motion disasters, why should we expect different values to govern fast-moving disasters, like hurricanes or even terrorist attacks? It’s worth remembering that as Israeli bombs pummeled Lebanon not so long ago, the U.S. government initially tried to charge its citizens for the cost of their own evacuations. And of course anyone without a Western passport in Lebanon had no hope of rescue.

One year ago, New Orleans’ working-class and poor citizens were stranded on their rooftops waiting for help that never came, while those who could pay their way escaped to safety. The country’s political leaders claim it was all some terrible mistake, a breakdown in communication that is being fixed. Their solution is to go even further down the catastrophic road of "private-sector solutions."

Unless a radical change of course is demanded, New Orleans will prove to be a glimpse of a dystopic future, a future of disaster apartheid in which the wealthy are saved and everyone else is left behind.

Naomi Klein’s book on disaster capitalism will be published in spring 2007. A shorter version of this piece appeared in the LA Times.

2007-01-07T10:13:00.000-08:00

Polluted Water Hits First Nations, but Doesn’t Stop There

By Judy Da Silva
From Canadian Dimension
2006

Grassy Narrows First Nation gets a boil-water advisory from the Medical Services Environmental Health Worker for Treaty #3 First Nations. My first thought was: “I thought we were safe.” To say the least, it’s very inconvenient to boil water for two minutes to kill any bacteria that live in it. But if we do not boil the water, the elders, infants and children, and weak adults are susceptible to severe stomach cramps, diarrhea and/or vomiting.

Two years ago, Kashechewan First Nation, a remote northern Ontario community, was in the headlines for E. coli in their water. The mainstream media gave them lots of coverage for a while, showing photos of rashes on little babies’ arms, stomachs and legs, and on some adults, too. In my mind I assumed that Keshechewan First Nation was too far away ever to touch our lives — that these people were way up north and had to live in severe Third World conditions. Not us in Treaty #3 traditional territory — the land of 10,000 freshwater lakes. I felt we would never run into that problem. We are so close to urban centres — Kenora, an hour away, and Winnipeg, three hours away. This is the land of pristine lakes and streams, and we call it paradise!

Jody, Technical Services Officer of Bimose Tribal Council, says that, of the eleven Treaty #3 reserves they serve, five have new water plants. The rest have water plants from 1995 or later. Each water plant was built in accordance with standards in the year it was built. But since Indian reserves are under the federal jurisdiction, this also means federal water-quality standards — which are lower than provincial standards.

John Hummel is a longtime grassroots activist who lives in Nelson, British Columbia, in a 100-year-old stone cottage. John has been one of my mentors for the past six years. One of the things he disclosed to me is that one quarter (150) of over 600 First Nations communities across Canada live downstream from paper mills and mines. The Fraser River alone has ninety First Nations communities situated beside it. Is there a connection, here, as to why First Nations people suffer in epidemic proportions from Type 2 Diabetes? John was able to find numerous research papers done in Australia that showed Aborigines suffering from Type 2 Diabetes and its link to dioxin furans. Mostly, dioxin furans come from mill, mine and incinerator smokestacks, and there is a fallout zone on the land and water that surrounds such companies. Sometimes the fall-out zone is on the other side of the world, because of how our planet’s wind currents pick up dust and carry it around the world. To check out John Hummel’s “Research for Health” Project, go to www.isn.net/~network/kahnawake.html.

Water is part of the processing of many products in industry. These industries are the main polluters in the world, and they are a major reason why the water has become undrinkable and the air has become unbreathable. The Weyerhaeuser Paper Mill in Dryden Ontario is located approximately 200 kilometres upstream from Grassy Narrows First Nation on the English Wabigoon River system. Environment Canada’s National Pollutant Release Inventory (NPRI) website lists the chemicals that are dumped into this river system from the Weyerhaeuser mill. The list includes 31 chemicals: ammonia: 128.441 tonnes; methanol: 123.062 tonnes; phenanthrene: 89.656 kilograms; phosphorus: 44.161 tonnes; sulfuric acid: 7.031 tonnes — just to name a few. Air-contaminant substances include carbon monoxide: 1249.591 tonnes; oxides of nitorogen: 789.256 tonnes; volatile organic compounds (VOCs): 160.619 tonnes (these are three of the seven air contaminants listed). One ecologist has described this as a “toxic soup” that is being dumped into the water. Imagine the First Nations people that live downstream from that toxic soup. What kind of ailments do they get as a result? The ecologist said some of the chemicals might evaporate, but as they join together in the water, they become chemically joined and can form new chemicals. Imagine what this means for the ninety First Nations that live along the Fraser River. All these people become exposed to these chemicals by way of the water, fish, plants and air.

Three years ago I told a group of people at Winnipeg’s Mondragón Bookstore and Coffeehouse that it was not normal to buy a bottle of water. We human beings are so adaptive that we do not fuss much about buying a “cool” brand of water. Somehow, society is in a state of water-drinking metamorphosis. Remember the day the water did not smell like chlorine? When the term “E. coli” was rare? Today, we go the wholesale stores and buy cases of water (plain or flavoured) or get those 19-litre jugs. It has become a normal part of our lives. The pollution does not stop at First Nations communities; it continues onward to all societies that live by the watersheds. So, where are all the voices to stop this disintegration of human health?

In December, 2002, the residents of Grassy Narrows First Nation decided to stop logging trucks from entering their traditional territory. We had completed three contaminant studies, and had found high levels of mercury in the fish and forty times the acceptable levels of mercury in an otter. We always knew there was a reason why women were miscarrying, why three children had brain tumours, the high incidence of thyroid disease, the Type 2 Diabetes, the cancers and the seizures in children. To put it simply, there is a silent war out there, and it does not only happen on Indian reserves. It is happening all around us. If we do not stop this desecration of humankind and our planet, then we will not survive as a healthy species in the next twenty years.

I imagine all the living planets in the universe as I look up at the stars, and I often wonder if those living beings out there are as stupid as us. We know we are polluting the water. We know we are destroying the air, the plants, the animals, ourselves and the future generations, and yet we continue on with our lifestyles.

Shooting the Messenger is a War Crime

By Amy Goodman
From The Seattle Post Intelligencer.com
2006

The Committee to Protect Journalists recently released its 2006 report on threats to journalists. Iraq is by far the deadliest place for the fourth year in a row, with 32 journalists killed this year. Sad to say, the violence follows a trend that started with the U.S. invasion of Iraq.

When you step off the elevator at the Reuters news offices in Washington, D.C., you see a large book sitting on a wooden stand. Each entry describes a Reuters journalist killed in the line of duty.

Such as Taras Protsyuk. The veteran Ukrainian cameraman was killed on April 8, 2003, the day before the U.S. seized Baghdad. Protsyuk was on the balcony of the Palestine Hotel when a U.S. tank positioned itself on the al-Jumhuriyah bridge and, as people watched in horror, unleashed a round into the side of the building. The hotel was known for housing hundreds of unembedded reporters. Protsyuk was killed instantly. Jose Couso, a cameraman for the Spanish network Telecinco, was filming from the balcony below. He was also killed.

The difference between the responses by the mainstream media in the United States versus Europe was stunning. While in this country there was hardly a peep of protest, Spanish journalists engaged in a one-day strike. From the elite journalists down to the technicians, they laid down their cables, cameras and pens.

They refused to record the words of then-Spanish Prime Minister Jose Maria Aznar, who joined British Prime Minister Tony Blair and President Bush in supporting the war. When Aznar came into parliament, they piled their equipment at the front of the room and turned their backs on him. Photographers refused to take his picture and instead held up a photo of their slain colleague. At a news conference in Madrid with British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw, Spanish reporters walked out in protest. Later, hundreds of journalists, camera people and technicians marched on the U.S. embassy in Madrid, chanting "Murderer, murderer."

About four hours before the U.S. military opened fire on the Palestine Hotel, a U.S. warplane strafed Al-Jazeera's Baghdad office. Reporter Tareq Ayyoub was on the roof. He died almost instantly.

When interviewed after his death, Ayyoub's wife, Dima, said: "Hate breeds hate. The United States said they were doing this to rout out terrorism. Who is engaged in terrorism now?" This summer, she sued the U.S. government.

The family of Jose Couso has also taken action. They know the names of the three U.S. servicemen who fired on the Palestine Hotel. On Dec. 5, 2006, the Spanish Supreme Court said the men could be tried in Spanish courts, opening the possibility for indictments against the U.S. soldiers.

The military response to the journalists' deaths? Pentagon spokeswoman Victoria "Torie" Clarke, who has since become a news consultant for CNN and ABC, said at the time that Baghdad "is not a safe place. They should not be there."

David Schlesinger, global managing editor of Reuters, said: "It seems in my interactions with the U.S. military -- to paraphrase, basically -- if you are not embedded, we cannot do anything to protect you. Journalists need to be accorded the rights under the Geneva Convention, of civilians not to be shot at willy-nilly, not to be harassed in doing their professional jobs."

The U.N. Security Council agrees. On Dec. 23, it passed a unanimous resolution insisting on the protection of journalists in conflict zones.

More than 120 reporters and other media workers have been killed in Iraq since the invasion. In August 2003, Reuters cameraman Mazen Dana was filming outside Abu Ghraib prison when a machine-gun bullet tore through his chest. The Pentagon said the soldiers had "engaged a cameraman."

Not long before his death, Dana won the International Press Freedom Award. "We carry a gift," he said. "We film and we show the world what is going on. We are not part of the conflict." In receiving his award, Dana reflected, "Words and images are a public trust, and for this reason I will continue with my work regardless of the hardships and even if it costs me my life."

But it shouldn't have. The Pentagon should adopt the U.N. standard and send a clear message to its ranks: Shooting the messenger is a war crime that will not be tolerated.

2006-12-30T11:51:00.000-08:00

Most Americans don't know Canada is their Biggest Oil Supplier

From CBC.ca

A new poll suggests the vast majority of Americans are unaware that Canada is the largest foreign supplier of crude oil to the U.S.

The Canadian American Business Council (CABC) — which represents some of the biggest private sector companies in both countries — said its survey of 1,000 Americans found that only four per cent of respondents thought Canada was the country that provided them with more oil than anyone else.

Canada is the biggest foreign supplier of oil and natural gas to the U.S.

The survey also found that 41 per cent of Americans asked would support replacing oil from unstable areas of the world with oil from Canada "even if doing so resulted in higher prices for U.S. consumers."

"The findings suggest a foundation of American public support for meaningful initiatives to expand Canadian energy supplies to the U.S.," said CABC chairman Randoph Dove in a statement.

"As more and more Americans recognize Canada as a secure source of energy resources, this support should only increase," he said.

The release of this poll came just as energy-rich Alberta launched a massive lobbying effort in Washington to get across its message that Canada — and especially Alberta — has a stable and secure supply of oil that it's eager to sell the U.S.

Exhibits about Alberta and its vast oil sands deposits occupy a prominent place in this year's Smithsonian Folklife Festival in Washington.

That's drawn criticism from an environmental lobby group, the National Resources Defence Council, which says the industry and government-sponsored exhibits at the festival make no mention of the "devastating environmental consequences" the council says oil sands mining creates.

The survey was conducted by Vitale & Associates, who interviewed 1,000 people from June 13 to 15. It has a margin of error of 3.1 percentage points.

Missing Bees Create a Buzz

Whole colonies are vanishing across the country

By Maurice Possley
From The Chicago Tribune
2007

The disappearance and deaths of millions of honeybees in nearly half of the nation's states is a mystery seemingly befitting an episode of "CSI" and is threatening an estimated $14 billion in crops that rely on pollination.

In an inconspicuous office suite here—the home of Bee Alert Technology Inc.—scientists are feverishly working to solve an entomological mystery: What happened to tens of thousands of honeybee colonies in at least 24 states?

These are crime scenes without bodies. Beekeepers have been opening hives and instead of finding thriving colonies with as many as 60,000 bees, they find an apian ghost town.

"It's called Colony Collapse Disorder," said Jerry Bromenshenk, a University of Montana professor and head of Bee Alert who has studied honeybees for more than three decades. "We don't know that it's a disease, we don't know if it's due to management practices by beekeepers. There are so many variables. We can't yet find a common denominator."

This baffling situation has sent shock waves through the agriculture industry nationwide, particularly almond growers in California, where 80 percent of the world's almonds are produced. The growers rely on pollination by bees.

While the U.S. honey-production industry generates more than $150 million annually, honeybees' pollination of crops is valued at about $14 billion a year, according to a Cornell University study. Beekeepers truck billions of bees to orchards and farms to pollinate crops including apples, grapes, cucumbers, cauliflower, cherries and almonds.

About three decades ago, S.E. McGregor, an apiculturist from Arizona, estimated that one-third of what is eaten by humans is a direct result of the work of honeybees. Bromenshenk suspects that today McGregor's words are an understatement.

On Thursday, a U.S. Department of Agriculture subcommittee on horticulture and organic agriculture is scheduled to conduct a public hearing on the collapse of honeybee colonies. Bromenshenk says the panel will consider the need for money for immediate research, future funding for a sustained examination and whether to set aside money to compensate beekeepers who have been virtually wiped out.

Just when this phenomenon began is hard to pin down, Bromenshenk said, because the reporting of problems is not organized. He said he first went to Florida late last year to investigate a report of empty hives, but as the problem has gained notoriety , more and more reports have emerged.

Bromenshenk is part of a national task force attempting to figure out why bees leave their hives and don't return. He recently returned from California with thousands of dead bees that he suspects were in colonies in the midst of collapsing.

Those bees have been turned over to Dave Wick, whose company, BVS Inc. of Stevensville, Mont., conducts biological screening in an attempt to determine whether an as-yet-unidentified virus is responsible for the mass disappearance.

"We are … trying to figure out the unknown," Wick said in an interview. "This is a devastating situation. If every honeybee disappeared tomorrow, we would still have produce in our markets—it just wouldn't come from the United States."

Bromenshenk's addition to the team studying the bees' disappearance was prompted by the significant research he has conducted at the university as well as the company that spun off from that work.

The firm has learned how to train bees to perform a variety of tasks, including sniffing out poisons, a skill that can be applied to such things as land mine detection or use of chemicals in a terrorist attack. Bromenshenk said the company has discovered how to train a bee in less than a day to identify things by smell or by sight.

While Illinois is not on the list of states where Colony Collapse Disorder has been discovered, Steve Chard, an apiary inspection supervisor with the Illinois Department of Agriculture, said this past week that one possible case has been reported by a beekeeping hobbyist in Decatur who lost nine colonies.

"It's too early to tell for the most part because the weather is just starting to warm up enough to open up hives," Chard said. "We do have one suspected case from Decatur and samples have been sent to the [U.S. Department of Agriculture] for testing. There's no conclusive evidence."

In Michigan, Terry Klein, vice president of the Michigan Beekeepers Association and a commercial beekeeper, said reports of huge losses are beginning to filter in.

"One beekeeper started with 1,500 hives and had only 500 colonies left," Klein said. "Over three or four more weeks, he lost 70 percent of those."

Klein, of St. Charles, Mich., said he lost 80 percent of his bees, but he blames bad weather and mites.

"It's a hard thing to pin down," he said. "You can't autopsy the bodies if they are gone. I am concerned about my survival."

Bromenshenk said that beekeeping largely hasn't changed in more than a century and that the reports coming in don't point to a single cause. "It doesn't appear to be related to poor practices or to those who are organic or those who are not organic," he said.

He suspects that the phenomenon has occurred before, but because reporting practices were not as sophisticated and because the problems have been more publicized, more and more credible reports are being made. He said something similar wiped out millions of bees in Texas, Louisiana and several other Southern states about 50 years ago, but the cause never was determined.

The company is seeking reports from any affected beekeepers at a Web site, www.beesurvey.com. More than 400 reports have been filed, but Bromenshenk hopes to get 10 times that number.

"We don't know if this is something new or if it's cyclic," Bromenshenk said. "It is amazing that millions of bees have disappeared across the U.S."

"We've got to figure this out this time," he said. "We've had beekeepers tell us they are going out of business. The public forgets what a critical role bees play in pollination. This is devastating."

2006-12-30T11:24:00.001-08:00

It's Still About Oil in Iraq

A centerpiece of the Iraq Study Group's report is its advocacy for securing foreign companies' long-term access to Iraqi oil fields.

By Antonia Juhasz
From The Los Angeles Times
2006

While the Bush administration, the media and nearly all the Democrats still refuse to explain the war in Iraq in terms of oil, the ever-pragmatic members of the Iraq Study Group share no such reticence.

Page 1, Chapter 1 of the Iraq Study Group report lays out Iraq's importance to its region, the U.S. and the world with this reminder: "It has the world's second-largest known oil reserves." The group then proceeds to give very specific and radical recommendations as to what the United States should do to secure those reserves. If the proposals are followed, Iraq's national oil industry will be commercialized and opened to foreign firms.

The report makes visible to everyone the elephant in the room: that we are fighting, killing and dying in a war for oil. It states in plain language that the U.S. government should use every tool at its disposal to ensure that American oil interests and those of its corporations are met.

It's spelled out in Recommendation No. 63, which calls on the U.S. to "assist Iraqi leaders to reorganize the national oil industry as a commercial enterprise" and to "encourage investment in Iraq's oil sector by the international community and by international energy companies." This recommendation would turn Iraq's nationalized oil industry into a commercial entity that could be partly or fully privatized by foreign firms.

This is an echo of calls made before and immediately after the invasion of Iraq.

The U.S. State Department's Oil and Energy Working Group, meeting between December 2002 and April 2003, also said that Iraq "should be opened to international oil companies as quickly as possible after the war." Its preferred method of privatization was a form of oil contract called a production-sharing agreement. These agreements are preferred by the oil industry but rejected by all the top oil producers in the Middle East because they grant greater control and more profits to the companies than the governments. The Heritage Foundation also released a report in March 2003 calling for the full privatization of Iraq's oil sector. One representative of the foundation, Edwin Meese III, is a member of the Iraq Study Group. Another, James J. Carafano, assisted in the study group's work.

For any degree of oil privatization to take place, and for it to apply to all the country's oil fields, Iraq has to amend its constitution and pass a new national oil law. The constitution is ambiguous as to whether control over future revenues from as-yet-undeveloped oil fields should be shared among its provinces or held and distributed by the central government.

This is a crucial issue, with trillions of dollars at stake, because only 17 of Iraq's 80 known oil fields have been developed. Recommendation No. 26 of the Iraq Study Group calls for a review of the constitution to be "pursued on an urgent basis." Recommendation No. 28 calls for putting control of Iraq's oil revenues in the hands of the central government. Recommendation No. 63 also calls on the U.S. government to "provide technical assistance to the Iraqi government to prepare a draft oil law."

This last step is already underway. The Bush administration hired the consultancy firm BearingPoint more than a year ago to advise the Iraqi Oil Ministry on drafting and passing a new national oil law.

Plans for this new law were first made public at a news conference in late 2004 in Washington. Flanked by State Department officials, Iraqi Finance Minister Adel Abdul Mahdi (who is now vice president) explained how this law would open Iraq's oil industry to private foreign investment. This, in turn, would be "very promising to the American investors and to American enterprise, certainly to oil companies." The law would implement production-sharing agreements.

Much to the deep frustration of the U.S. government and American oil companies, that law has still not been passed.

In July, U.S. Energy Secretary Samuel Bodman announced in Baghdad that oil executives told him that their companies would not enter Iraq without passage of the new oil law. Petroleum Economist magazine later reported that U.S. oil companies considered passage of the new oil law more important than increased security when deciding whether to go into business in Iraq.

The Iraq Study Group report states that continuing military, political and economic support is contingent upon Iraq's government meeting certain undefined "milestones." It's apparent that these milestones are embedded in the report itself.

Further, the Iraq Study Group would commit U.S. troops to Iraq for several more years to, among other duties, provide security for Iraq's oil infrastructure. Finally, the report unequivocally declares that the 79 total recommendations "are comprehensive and need to be implemented in a coordinated fashion. They should not be separated or carried out in isolation."

All told, the Iraq Study Group has simply made the case for extending the war until foreign oil companies — presumably American ones — have guaranteed legal access to all of Iraq's oil fields and until they are assured the best legal and financial terms possible.

We can thank the Iraq Study Group for making its case publicly. It is now our turn to decide if we wish to spill more blood for oil.

Meet Canada The Global Arms Dealer

By Stephen James-Kerr
From ZNet
2003

"Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children." -Dwight D Eisenhower

When Americans think of Canadians these days, it's usually as the laid back folks who sat out the war on Iraq. Our national myth is 'Canada the peacekeeper,' but it's a myth, not a fact.

The facts are hard to mythologize. The Canadian government was the fourth largest contributor to the attack on Iraq after Australia, ahead of most members of Bush's 'coalition of the willing,' who offered only moral support. Canada topped Colin Powell's list of countries who didn't want their names mentioned while they helped Uncle Sam take over Iraq.

While many Americans were cursing Canadian 'non-participation' three Canadian warships equipped with surface to air missiles and anti-submarine capability were escorting the US fleet that fired Tomahawk missiles at innocent Iraqis. Our government calls this mission Operation Apollo, insisting that these ships are deployed in the 'war on terrorism.' Not a shot has been fired at a Canadian ship.

While some US peace activists were praising Canada's 'bold stance' ten Canadian soldiers were manning AWACS radar aircraft, directing those missiles to their targets. No reports of any terrorists killed in Iraq.

While 6457 Iraqi civilians had been killed as of May 23rd according to www.iraqbodycount.net Canadian officers continued to sit in the air conditioned offices of CENTCOM in Doha Qatar, deep in the logistical details of escorting American ships, and planning for war.

While Canadians slept, US troop transport planes carried the invading army silently over our heads thanks to the Canadian government's offer of over-flight privileges and refueling to the US Air Force at Gander airport. US military doctrine describes refueling as the "key" to us global airpower. This reporter's request for a full accounting of these over-flights was refused by the Canadian Department of National Defence.

When US Marines left their posts in Afghanistan for the Iraqi front, 1000 Canadian soldiers spelled them off, taking up the 'war on terror' in military engagements which are kept secret from the Canadian public. Next year Canada will take over command of the Afghan occupation.

While Canadians, who supported their government's decision to 'sit out the war' protested US imperialism in small towns like Cobourg Ontario and Moosejaw Saskatchewan, 30 odd Canadian soldiers were quietly serving 'on exchange' with US and UK invasion forces in Iraq. One young Canadian soldier died.

The Canadian government has tried desperately to paint the blood red reality of Canadian imperialism in teal blue. In response to Bush's 48 hour deadline for Saddam Hussein and his sons to leave Baghdad or die, Canada's Foreign Minister, Bill Graham declared that "Clearly I very much welcomed his (Bush's) reference to the United Nations, and clearly the President has demonstrated a willingness to work within the international system to date." This is how Graham described Bush's threat to invade a UN member state based on forged documents, for the profit of the oil and construction companies that put Bush in office. Graham was only dipping from the Prime Ministerial whitewash bucket.

"Mr. Speaker, We have always made clear that Canada will require the approval of the Security Council if we were to participate in (a) military campaign. Over the last few weeks the Security Council has been unable to agree on a new resolution authorizing military action. Canada worked very hard to find a compromise to bridge the gap in the Security Council. Unfortunately (emphasis mine) we were not successful. If military action proceeds without a new resolution of the Security Council, Canada will not participate." Such were the assurances of Graham's boss, Prime Minister Jean Chrétien to the House of Commons, on March 17.

Graham reinforced the message with the press the next day. "We require a clear United Nations mandate if the use of force is to be used to resolve potential conflicts between states," said Graham with his trademark poker face.

That 'requirement' is becoming harder to justify to Canada's growing arms industry, and to the politicians like Graham who are now openly beholden to it. Thus the desperate and contradictory Iraq policy of the Federal Liberal government, caught between the Canadian public, which overwhelmingly opposed the attack on Iraq, and the Canadian military industrial complex which profited from it.

Canadian foreign policy publicly postures for peace while pimping for private profit. In its self contradictory editorial of May 7, the Toronto Star, which opposed the attack on Iraq, rationalized the recently revealed Liberal government support for US National Missile Defence (NMD) because it "relies on conventional, non-nuclear rockets based on the ground to shoot down enemy missiles." The Star, itself an unofficial organ of the governing Federal Liberal Party had to acknowledge that "Canada has no credible enemy, and no immediate need for missile defence," but still urged participation, "in Canada's interest."

What The Star left out was the exact nature of that interest, the great taboo of Canadian journalism. According to the Canadian Defence Industries Association, (CDIA) "Under the existing conditions, Canada can expect, at a minimum, about $270 million in NMD-related exports over the next 15 years. With appropriate levels of Government and industry action, (emphasis mine) there is a potential for that to increase to more than $1 billion in exports."

CDIA figures show that Canadian 'defence' industry revenues grew 35% between 1998 and 2000, far outpacing growth of the rest of the economy, which grew at approximately 3%. Canada's 'defence' market grew from $3.7 billion in 1998 to $4.08 billion in 2000, up 22.6%. Exports to the USA grew by 17% from just under a billion to $1.25 billion. And our arms exports to the rest of the world grew a staggering 75% in the same period from $798 million to $1.5 billion.

Meet the Canada you never knew, the global arms dealer with a heart of gold.

Most Canadians don't know that much of the Canadian arms trade is guaranteed by the Canadian government through the Canadian Commercial Corporation (www.ccc.ca) and other government agencies. Our ignorance is the result of a total failure by the media to report basic facts about the Canadian arms economy.

The CCC, "Canada's export contracting agency" does more than $1.2 billion in business annually, approximately 70% of it weapons, weapons components and services to the Pentagon and NASA, just in case 'force must be used to resolve conflicts between states.' Making weapons is big business in this country. Canada's defence industry accounts for 650 firms, and 57,000 direct jobs, says the CCC, while the Canadian Defence Industries Association puts the figure at 1,559 firms. CDIA employment numbers roughly match those of the CCC. The Canadian defence industry sells about $5 billion dollars of goods and services per year, half of which are exported. Though weapons account for just over 1% of economic output, it is one of the most heavily subsidized and protected sectors of the Canadian economy. This reflects the political importance of arms, and their role as a bargaining chip in Canada US relations for the Canadian elite. It is also a reflection of the connection between militarism, imperialism and Canada's need to force weaker states to accept heavily subsidized Canadian exports.

Canada's hospitals are collapsing, public schools are being closed, and the ranks of our homeless increase, but weapons exporters take shelter from the economic storm under the Canadian flag.

"For Canadian Exporters, CCC wraps the Canadian flag around their proposal, providing a government-backed guarantee of contract performance," says the CCC. We go all the way for the USA.

The US Department of Defence takes care of friends like Canada, who treat their flag with such reverence. "All purchases from Canada over U.S. $100,000 must be contracted through the Canadian Commercial Corporation," according to the Defence Production and Sharing Agreement, in effect since 1956. Dealing through the CCC means that Canadian companies get treated not just like American firms, but one better. They are exempted from US Federal cost accounting standards and from import taxation, as well as parts of the Buy American Act.

Canadian taxpayers pick up the tab. The CCC is a Crown Corporation, wholly owned by the Canadian people, managed by our government. Thus when Canada "becomes the prime contractor," for the US Department of Defence, as it is whenever a Canadian firm makes a sale greater than $100,000 Cad to the Pentagon, Canadian citizens are underwriting the American Empire.

But it's a well kept secret. When the Canadian government reports its arms exports each year, sales to the US military are not included. The Canadian economy is uniquely dependent on exports. In 1993 total Canadian exports were valued at approximately $176 billion dollars, but by 2000 exports increased to approximately $400 billion according to Statistics Canada, or nearly half of the output of the entire economy. In comparison, China, with 37 times the Canadian population, exported only 20% more goods and services than Canada in 2002. The USA is the world's largest single exporter, but exports account for only 11% of the US economy. Canadians export more per capita than any other nation on earth, yet this wealth is concentrated in only a few hands.

Only 5 firms account for 20% of total exports, and 100 firms account for more than 50%, with US trade accounting for 85%, according to the Canadian government. Thus it should come as no surprise that catering to big businesses that export to the USA is what the Canadian government is politically committed to. Compare how the CCC helps Canadian weapons exporters with how the Canadian government treats people.

If you own a small electronics firm that has never sold a circuit to the Pentagon before, have no fear of economic hard times. The CCC will assist your sale to a foreign government at every step of the way, from contract negotiation, to providing a letter of introduction and support which "carries the weight of the Government of Canada."

Got cash-flow problems? Over one million Canadian children live in low income households according to the Canadian government's own records, but poor kids don't export missile components. For weapons exporters the CCC has a Progress Payment Plan which provides a line of credit up to two million Canadian dollars to companies with insufficient working capital to fulfill an export contract. Canadian exporters sold $69 million dollars worth of goods using this subsidy in 2001.

All the major Canadian Banks provide lines of credit for the CCC. The Canadian people sign the contracts, and we write the cheques, for buyers and sellers alike. But if you are an unemployed Canadian in need of financial assistance, the Canadian government's attitude is 'Get a job.' During the 1990's, the Federal Liberal government tightened up restrictions on Unemployment Insurance. In 1989, 53% of unemployed Ontarians received UI benefits. By 1997, only 25% of the unemployed were eligible according to the Ontario Federation of Labour. The Liberal government cut more than $ 45 billion dollars from the employment fund between 1993 and 2001. In a typical year, the Feds take in $5 billion more in unemployment premiums than they pay out. They've been sitting on the surplus, but the Liberals won't raise benefit rates, or let more unemployed workers into the system. The Canadian Labour Congress has documented that one million Canadian workers have paid UI premiums from their paycheques, but are unable to collect UI when they are out of a job. "It's a scam," says the CLC.

It's not the only one. If you own a small business that does not sell weapons or export to foreign governments, you are on a tight budget. Throughout the 1990's Canada's chartered banks tightened up credit availability to small business and individuals. The Canadian Community Reinvestment Coalition, a broad grouping including the Canadian Labour Congress and Canada's largest NGO the Council of Canadians with over 100,000 members, have criticized the banks for attempting to hide their lending statistics. (http://www.cancrc.org/) Whereas in the USA, banks are obliged to track how many loans are granted or rejected by gender, race income level and other stats, Canadian banks keep this data under wraps.

If you are a Canadian university student, you already know the banks, because they keep calling you for money. In 1998 the Liberal government took away the rights of students to declare bankruptcy if they default on student loans. Nearly half of students who apply for financial assistance in Canada are disqualified, according to the Canadian Federation of Students, Canada's national student union which has been calling for a tuition freeze for years. From 1990 to 2000, the average undergraduate tuition fee rose from $1,500 to $3,500.

While Canadians got cut off, Canadian weapons makers cut deals. Here are a fraction of the weapons systems Canada sold with the help of the CCC and a small army of bureaucrats.

Bombardier, a corporation whose board is peppered with powerful Liberals including the Prime Minister's son in law, got the deal with US Army TACOM to build transportable bridges, for the next time the US Army needs to cross the Rubicon.

A bridge without a Light Armoured Vehicle to drive across it would be like a Canadian Cabinet Minister without a needy relative.

LAVs driven by US Marines across the long Iraqi supply lines were largely made in Canada, by GM Defence in London Ontario. "With CCC's export sales and contract management assistance, GM has accumulated worldwide LAV sales of more than $2.5 billion. About two-thirds of the company's production is exported," says the CCC. Saudi Arabia is also a good customer for Canadian LAVs.

Pivotal Power in Nova Scotia makes uninterruptible power systems, batteries and other gear, some of which can be found aboard the US Navy's DDG-51 Burke-class destroyers. This is the platform from which the Mk 41 Tomahawk missile was fired at Iraqis.

CPI Canada has been dealing with the Canadian Commercial Corporation for 45 years. CPI is "the world's leading design, development and manufacturing specialist of microwave and millimeter wave tubes and complex electronic equipment for communications and medical applications," according to the CCC. CPI does $35 million dollars of business per year, and 98% of that is exported. Today, when the U.S. Army's Communications and Electronics Command (CECOM) is in need of a good Klystron, they come to CPI.

Winnipeg based Bristol Aerospace is busy making everything from missiles, to the M1 Abrams Tank engine housing, and the targeting systems for the Patriot missile.

CAE Systems manufactures flight simulators used to train US Air Force Apache helicopter pilots. When the missiles hit their targets, it's thanks in part to Canadian ingenuity. For Canadian capitalists at least, the weapons business is not a waste of time, resources and human labour. In 1998, Canada, thanks to the CCC was the 66th biggest defence contractor to the US Department of Defence, ahead of big American firms Mitretek and Honeywell. The results are profitable for Canadian weapons system makers. "CCC flies the Canadian flag and we benefit from standing under it," says one happy corporate Vice President.

Once the profits start flowing, it's impossible for Canadian capitalists to 'just say no' to war. They're hooked and looking for a fix. The Canadian Commercial Corporation is encouraging Canadian companies to participate in the $200 billion dollar Joint Strike Fighter programme, and has set up an entire team of government bureaucrats to make sure Canadian firms get in on the lucrative global arms race. They are drawn from a tangled web of state agencies, all dedicated to corporate welfare.

Team Canada Inc. is the high level government lobbying agency led by the Prime Minister, and his 'team' of ten provincial Premiers. Jean Chrétien loads up on frequent flier miles while on business junkets to China, Africa and other locations to have his picture taken while Canadian CEOs sign multi-million dollar contracts.

The Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade (DFAIT) at used to be two separate ministries. The Liberal Party brought them together immediately after coming to power in 1993, and DFAIT has led the drive to put Canadian corporate profit at the heart of our foreign policy ever since. DFAIT's mission is "…advancing Canada's interests abroad." These interests are indistinguishable from the corporate interest. "It is in Canada's interest to pursue deeper integration with American defence industry while looking for niches in the emerging transatlantic defence market," according to DFAIT. Amnesty has condemned Canada for exporting arms to repressive governments which abuse human rights, including Israel, the Philippines, Saudi Arabia and Indonesia. When DFAIT promotes arms deals, how credible is 'Canada the peacemaker'? Check out DFAIT's website and see for yourself, then go to check out how the DFAIT helps Canadian companies cash in on the lucrative business of Iraqi reconstruction. DFAIT and the Minister of Foreign Affairs Bill Graham is the bland public face of Canadian imperialism.

Export Development Canada (http://www.edc.ca/) has been criticized by Probe International for its tendency to award export development grants and loans to benefit Canadian companies owned by paid up Liberal party donors. EDC is also pushing weapons. "EDC helps absorb risk on behalf of exporters, beyond what is possible by other financial intermediaries," according to its sister corporation, the CCC. Probe International isn't impressed. "As a result EDC makes otherwise uneconomic investments proceed. It has become clear that a number of the larger EDC-supported projects are socially and environmentally destructive." The EDC uses 'vendor financing' - loaning Canadian taxpayer dollars to foreign customers in order to purchase Canadian subsidized weapons and nuclear technology that nobody really needs. Four billion dollars of EDC financing has allowed China, India, Pakistan and South Korea to purchase CANDU nuclear reactors. Normally if your customer can't afford to buy your product you go out of business, but Ottawa is busy promoting failure, while distributing nuclear technology to belligerent governments.

"Industry Canada ( http://www.ic.gc.ca/ ) works with Canadians throughout the economy to improve conditions for investment, improve Canada's innovation performance, increase Canada's share of global trade and build a fair, efficient and competitive marketplace," according to Industry Canada. Given the record of the EDC, this self-description seems barely credible. Industry Canada works with corporations to deregulate and privatize the economy using over 150 programs, many of them pure corporate welfare. See http://www.ic.gc.ca/cmb/welcomeic.nsf/icPages/Programs#IC for details.

There is no end to the largely invisible bureaucracy that supports business in Canada where the social welfare system has been mythologized in order to cover up its near destruction by the growing corporate welfare system. Because Canada is a regional nation, with disparate populations concentrated in a few isolated capital cities, Provincial governments, alone or in blocks also have their overlapping trade promoting bureaucracies. Ontario Exports Inc, the Alberta Economic Development, the Atlantic Opportunity Fund are only three.

Throw in the Canadian Defence Industries Association, the Aerospace Industries Association of Canada, Canadian Manufacturers and Exporters, Nav Canada which runs Canadian Air Navigation Services and the Canadian chartered banks, and you have a family portrait of the Canadian military industrial complex, minus the more than one thousand children produced by this orgy of state subsidy - the Canadian companies that make the weapons and reap the profits, but who choose to remain anonymous from the public which finances their otherwise uneconomic and socially destructive operations.

But the real nature of the family business is getting harder to hide from the kids. At the bringing of May, a split opened up in the Liberal government over the next big foray into the arms business, Canadian government support for the Star Wars system, a US project to provide a missile shield from behind which the USA could launch a nuclear strike. Cabinet Ministers like Herb Dahliwa (Dhaliwal.H@parl.gc.ca ), and MPs like John Godfrey, (Godfrey.J@parl.gc.ca ) and others on the left wing of the Liberal backbench spoke out against their own government's stated intentions. The caucus was also split along similar lines over Canadian participation in the war. Fearing his caucus more than American wrath, the Prime Minister put the missile defence decision on hold, then switched gears to promote the decriminalization of marijuana possession.

Somebody forgot to tell Chrétien the sixties ended a long time ago. Today's peace movement is addicted to political protest, not pot. With an unprecedented number of Canadians mobilized against the war on Iraq, there is a growing movement to expose Canadian arms makers and the effects of the weapons they produce. At the forefront of this activity are a number of groups, including the Canadian Peace Alliance, the New Democratic Party, Science for Peace, and Toronto Homes not Bombs.

Sid Lacombe is with the Canadian Peace Alliance. The CPA has launched a national campaign to keep Canada out of National Missile Defence. "Star Wars represents a new arms race," says Lacombe. It's another escalation of military spending. This is money that should be going into healthcare, education and housing."

Lacombe's schedule is busy. "The next step is to educate the Canadian public and step up our activity. We have hundreds of petitions filled out, and we are distributing them across the country." The Liberal purple haze may blow over quickly. Lacombe says "It's very urgent. They are beginning discussions with the Americans this week. Bill Graham says that missile defence is Canada's 'insurance policy.'"

Having paid the premiums for years, Canadians are now starting to read the fine print, and they do not like what they see. Groups across Canada are planning actions in the coming weeks and months that target corporate war profiteers. In Montreal one group is offering a bus tour of local weapons makers. Direct actions are being planned in Toronto. The 'insurance policy' might protect Canadian corporate profits in the short term, but the increasing dependence of Canadian industry on arms exports exposes the Canadian business elite to increasing risks from an angry public armed with the ugly truth about Canada the global weapons dealer.

* all figures are in Canadian dollars unless otherwise stated. At the time of this writing, the Canadian dollar was rapidly rising against the US dollar, at .7430 US cents to the Canadian dollar.

The author, Stephen James Kerr stephen.kerr@sympatico.ca is an investigative journalist in Toronto, and the co-host of Newspeak on CIUT 89.5 FM www.ciut.fm .

What you can do:

Write to Canada's Minster of Foreign Affairs Bill Graham at Graham.B@parl.gc.ca and Canada's 'Defence' Minister, John McCallum at McCallum.J@parl.gc.ca and tell them you want Canada to stay out of Star Wars. Please send a copy of your letter to the Canadian Peace Alliance at cpa@web.ca .

For more information see:

Ploughshares Canada at www.ploughshares.ca for weapons sales to USA.

Amnesty International criticizes Canada for weapons sales to repressive governments

Canadian small arms may have killed protestors in Papua New Guinea

Canadian weapons exports to Saudi Arabia

Export of Military Goods from Canada 2001 (not including USA)

Canada exports $26 million in weapons to Indonesia

WOMEN AND FOOD SECURITY

From FAO Focus

Women produce between 60 and 80 percent of the food in most developing countries and are responsible for half of the world's food production, yet their key role as food producers and providers and their critical contribution to household food security is only now becoming recognized.

FAO studies confirm that while women are the mainstay of small-scale agriculture, farm labour force and day-to-day family subsistence, they have more difficulties than men in gaining access to resources such as land and credit and productivity enhancing inputs and services.

Food security, in fact, has been defined by FAO not only in terms of access to and availability of food, but also in terms of resource distribution to produce food and purchasing power to buy food where it is not produced. Given women's crucial role in food production and provision, any set of strategies for sustainable food security must address their limited access to productive resources.

Women's limited access to resources and their insufficient purchasing power are products of a series of interrelated social, economic and cultural factors that force them into a subordinate role, to the detriment of their own development and that of society as a whole.

The international initiatives and efforts developed, especially since the 1975 World Conference on Women in Mexico, have contributed to a greater recognition of women's key participation in rural and other domains of development. However, much remains to be done.

The gender division of labour
The major constraint to the effective recognition of women's actual roles and responsibilities in agriculture is the scarcity of gender-disaggregated data available to technicians, planners, and policy-makers.

Therefore, the first step towards women's empowerment and full participation in rural development and food security strategies is the collection and analysis of gender disaggregated data to understand role differences in food and cash crop production as well as men's and women's differential managerial and financial control over production, storage and marketing of agricultural products.

In sub-Saharan Africa, for example, microlevel studies have shown that women play a crucial role in many aspects of crop production. While men are often responsible for land clearing, burning and ploughing, women specialize in weeding, transplanting, post-harvest work and, in some areas, land preparation, and both take part in seeding and harvesting.

Moreover, women in sub-Saharan Africa and the Near East play a major role in household animal-production enterprises, where they tend to have the primary responsibility for the husbandry of small animals and ruminants, but also take care of large-animal systems, herding, providing water and feed, cleaning stalls and milking. In all types of animal-production systems, women have a predominant role in processing, particularly milk products and are commonly responsible for their marketing.

In many countries women are also responsible for fishing in shallow waters and in coastal lagoons, producing secondary crops, gathering food and fuelwood, processing, storing and preparing family food and for fetching water for the family.

Nature of women's work
In most rural areas, the most time-consuming activities of women are fetching water and fuelwood. Widespread deforestation and desertification mean that these tasks are becoming more burdensome and are preventing rural women from devoting more time to their productive and income-generating tasks.

In some cases, women also pass part of the burden of these activities to their children, usually female children. Relieving women from such drudgery as fetching water and fuelwood and food processing would allow them to have more time for productive work and would enable their children to attend school. Thus development interventions to reduce women's workload can significantly enhance their contribution to household food security.

The provision of water supplies; the introduction of light transport facilities to carry fuelwood, farm produce and other loads; the introduction of labour saving agricultural tools; and the introduction of grinding mills and other crop processing equipment are crucial means of freeing women's time. Such technologies not only create possibilities for women to enter into more income-generating activities, but also help in reducing their stress and in improving the health and nutrition of women and children.

Female-headed households
The number of female-headed households is increasing significantly in rural areas in many developing countries as rural men migrate due to the lack of employment and other income-generating opportunities. In sub-Saharan Africa, 31 percent of rural households are headed by women, while in Latin America and the Caribbean and Asia, women head 17 percent and 14 percent, respectively. While there are different types of female-headed households, in almost all countries female-headed households are concentrated among the poorer strata of society and often have lower incomes than male-headed households.

The problems of female-headed households in rural areas vary according to their degree of access to productive resources. FAO has identified, for example, the potential consequences of the absence of male labour both in terms of declining yields and outputs or shifts in production toward less nutritious crops requiring less labour and in terms of increased reliance on child labour which, in turn, has further implications for the family and for the human capital of the country. Therefore, in these cases women's access to labour-saving technology is of particular importance.

Access to resources
Despite their role as the backbone of food production and provision for family consumption in developing countries, women remain limited in their access to critical resources and services. While in most developing countries, both men and women farmers do not have access to adequate resources, women's access is even more limited due to cultural, traditional and sociological factors. Accurate information about men's and women's relative access to, and control over, resources is crucial in the development of food security strategies.

Access to land. Not even 2 percent of land is owned by women, while the proportion of female heads of household continues to grow. Land reform programmes together with the break-up of communal landholdings have led to the transfer of exclusive land rights to males as heads of households which ignores both the existence of female-headed households and the rights of married women to a joint share.

Access to credit. For the countries where information is available, only 10 percent of credit allowances are extended to women, mainly because national legislation and customary law do not allow them to share land property rights along with their husbands or because female heads of household are excluded from land entitlement schemes and consequently cannot provide the collateral required by lending institutions.

Access to agricultural inputs. Women's access to technological inputs such as improved seeds, fertilizers and pesticides is limited as they are frequently not reached by extension services and are rarely members of cooperatives, which often distribute government-subsidized inputs to small farmers. In addition, they often lack the cash income needed to purchase inputs even when they are subsidized.

Access to education, training and extension services. Two-thirds of the one billion illiterate in the world are women and girls. Available figures show that only 5 percent of extension services have been addressed to rural women, while no more than 15 percent of the world's extension agents are women. In addition, most of the extension services are focused on cash crops rather than food and subsistence crops, which are the primary concern of women farmers and the key to food security.

Access to decision-making. Given the traditionally limited role of women in decision-making processes at the household, village and national levels in most cultures, their needs, interests and constraints are often not reflected in policy-making processes and laws which are important for poverty reduction, food security and environmental sustainability. The causes of women's exclusion from decision-making processes are closely linked to their additional reproductive roles and their household workload, which account for an important share of their time.

Access to research and appropriate technology. Women have little access to the benefits of research and innovation, especially in the domain of food crops, which in spite of ensuring food security at the household and community levels, have a low priority in crop improvement research. In addition, women farmers' roles and needs are often ignored when devising technology that may cause labour displacement or increased workload.

Women's need for income
Research in Africa, Asia and Latin America has found that improvements in household food security and nutrition are associated with women's access to income and their role in household decisions on expenditure as women tend to spend a significantly higher proportion of their income than men on food for the family.

Women's wage income from farm and non-farm employment and from other income-generating opportunities is of particular importance for landless and near-landless rural households.

Women's purchasing power may not only be used to buy food and other basic assets for themselves and their families, but also to pay for the inputs used in food production. Since food crops are consumed, the inputs for these have to be provided from income earned in other agricultural enterprises or non-farm income-generating activities.

Thus, to improve food production for the household, greater priority has to be given to increasing women's participation in market production as well as other income-generating ventures.

Sustainable food security: requirements for a new era
The understanding of food security has evolved over the years through increasingly integrated attention to the social, gender, environmental, technical and economic dimensions of the problem. The challenge for the future will be to pursue a concrete attainment of equity in access to resources by women to produce food, and purchasing power to buy food, where it is not produced thereby enhancing their potential to generate food security.

Specific policy measures are required to address the constraints facing women farmers and to give special consideration to the needs of female heads of households. FAO has recommended that such measures aim to:

ensure that women have the same opportunities as men to own land;

facilitate women's access to agricultural services tailoring such services to their needs;

encourage the production of food crops through the use of incentives;
promote the adoption of appropriate inputs and technology to free up women's time for income-producing activities;

improve the nutritional status of women and children;

provide better employment and income-earning opportunities;

promote women's organizations;

review and re-orient government policies to ensure that the problems that constrain the role of women in food security are addressed.

2006-12-29T20:38:00.000-08:00

Gizza Job

By Barbara Ehrenreich
From The Guardian
2006

Barbara Ehrenreich, investigative writer, has concentrated on poverty and the lowest paid in America. But what about the struggling middle classes - especially those who find themselves, mid-career, stranded without a job? She went undercover to break into the corporate world. Could she swing it?

The plan was straightforward enough: to find a job, a "good" job, which I defined minimally as a white-collar position that would provide health insurance and an income of about $50,000 a year, enough to land me solidly in the middle class. The job itself would give me a rare first-hand glimpse of the mid-level corporate world, and the effort to find it would, of course, place me among the most hard-pressed white-collar corporate workers - the ones who don't have jobs.

Because I've written a lot about poverty, I'm used to hearing from people in scary circumstances. An eviction notice has arrived. A child has been diagnosed with a serious illness and the health insurance has run out. The car has broken down and there's no way to get to work. These are the routine emergencies that plague the chronically poor.

But it struck me, starting in about 2002, that many such tales of hardship were coming from people who were once members of good standing in the middle class - college graduates and former occupants of mid-level white-collar positions. In late 2003, when I started this project, unemployment in the US was running at 5.9%, but in contrast to earlier economic downturns, a sizable portion - almost 20%, or about 1.6 million - of the unemployed were white-collar professionals.
Where I had imagined comfort, there is now growing distress, and I determined to investigate. I chose the same strategy I had employed when researching my book Nickel And Dimed: to enter this new world myself, as an undercover reporter, and see what I could learn about the problems first hand.

What did it take to find a new job? And, if things were as bad as some reports suggested, why was there so little protest? I knew my attempts would not be an altogether fair test of the job market, if only because I had some built-in disadvantages as a job seeker. For one thing, I am well into middle age. This defect, however, is by no means unique to me. Many people now find themselves searching for jobs at an age that was once associated with a restful retirement. My first step was to acquire a new identity and personal history, meaning, in this case, a résumé. So in November 2003, I legally changed back to my maiden name, Barbara Alexander, and acquired a social security card to go with it.

I know that "writing" translates, in the corporate world, into public relations or "communications" generally. Many journalism schools teach PR, too, which may be fitting since PR is really journalism's evil twin. I could do this, on a temporary basis anyway, and have even done many of the things PR people routinely do: I've written press releases, pitched stories to editors and reporters, prepared press packets and helped arrange press conferences. Even as a rough draft, the résumé took days of preparation.

I had to line up people willing to lie for me, should they be called by a potential employer, and attest to the fine work I had done for them. Fortunately, I have friends who were willing to do this, some of them located at recognisable companies. Although I did not dare claim actual employment at these firms, since a call to their human resources departments would immediately expose the lie, I felt I could safely pretend to have "consulted" for them over the years. Suffice it to say that I gave Barbara Alexander an exemplary history in PR, sometimes with a little event planning thrown in.

In a practical sense, I was simply changing my occupational status from "self-employed/writer" to "unemployed" - a distinction that might be imperceptible to the casual observer. I was prepared to travel anywhere in the US to get a job and then live there for several months if I found one. I knew that the project would take a considerable investment of time and money, so I set aside 10 months and $5,000 for travel and other expenses that might arise in the course of job searching. My expectation was that I would make back the money once I got a job and probably come out far ahead. As for the time, I budgeted roughly four to six months for the search - five months being the average for unemployed people in 2004 - and another three to four months of employment. I would have plenty of time both to sample the life of the white-collar unemployed and to explore the corporate world they sought to re-enter.

I also started with the expectation that this project would be far less demanding than the work I had undertaken for Nickel And Dimed, when I worked as a cleaner and a waitress - minimum wage jobs. Physically, it would be a piece of cake - no scrubbing, no heavy lifting, no walking or running for hours on end. As for behaviour, I imagined that I would be immune to the constant subservience and obedience demanded of low-wage blue-collar workers, that I would be far freer to be, and express, myself. As it turned out, I was wrong on all counts.

Job searching has become, if not a science, a technology so complex that no mere job seeker can expect to master it alone. There are about 10,000 people eager to assist me - "career coaches" - who, according to the coaching websites, can help you discover your true occupational "passion" and retool your résumé. I encounter several of them, including Joanne, queen of the résumé, and Kimberly, who majors in personality tests, cheeriness and the importance of networking. She emphasises the need for an "elevator speech". This, it turns out, is a 30- to 45-second self-advertisement, which in my case, she suggests, should begin with, "Hi, I'm Barbara Alexander, and I'm a crackerjack PR person!"

Hours of internet searching turn up a "networking event" only two and a half hours away at the Forty-Plus Club of Washington, DC. Despite their establishment origins, the 19 Forty-Plus Clubs around the nation are the closest thing one can find to a grassroots organisation of the white-collar unemployed. The clubs are run entirely by volunteers, conveniently drawn from the pool of unemployed, middle-aged, white-collar people.

The event starts at 9.30 on a rainy January morning, at an impressive address near Dupont Circle, although the space itself turns out to be a dark, almost belligerently undecorated basement suite. Pamela, who's 50 and dressed in a long, close-fitting skirt that creates a definite mermaid effect, greets me in the corridor and directs me to a table where Ted, also about 50, is presiding over the name tag distribution. The networking will proceed until 10am, at which time we will be treated to a lecture on "New year's resolutions for job searchers".

Time is short, so I get right down to work, going up to my fellow job seekers, introducing myself and asking what kind of jobs they're looking for. About 15 people have drifted in so far. All are middle-aged white guys: Mike, who's in finance; Jim, who is also in PR and, alarmingly, has been looking for seven months. A man who identifies himself as a media manager latches on to me next, relating that he is bitter - his word - because he gave 11 years to Time Warner and has just been laid off in some inexplicable corporate reorganisation, leaving him with two teenagers to feed and educate. So these are my people, my new constituency - men, and now a few women, who will go home, as I will, to a desk off the dining room and an afternoon of lonely web searching.

The message we will take away with us is this: job searching is not joblessness; it is a job in itself. Distasteful as the idea may be, I realise I do have to structure my job search in some job-like fashion. I determine that my daily plan will be as follows:

7.30am Get up, eat breakfast, read the paper, check CNN for major disasters - terrorist attacks, asteroid hits, etc - that may foreclose the possibility of finding a job for the immediate future. I refuse to dress up as if heading for a real office, clinging to my usual pre-clothes, meaning a cross between the T-shirt I wore to bed and the gym clothes I will need in the afternoon.

9am-12.30pm Proceed to desk for the bulk of the day's work - read email, revise résumé, visit the various national job boards, and whatever else I can think of to do. Thanks to the Atlanta Job Search Network I have signed up for, and which showers me with several dozen job possibilities a week, email alone can take up to 20 minutes. Why Atlanta? Because it's a happening place, job-wise anyway, with an unemployment rate of only about 4% - far lower than Boston, for example, or New York.

For weeks, the core of my day's work consists of revising my résumé to meet Joanne's exacting standards. We agree eventually on the opening which, after every comma has been vetted, reads: "Seasoned consultant with experience in Event Planning, Public Relations, and Speechwriting is prepared to provide leadership advancing company brand and image. Special expertise in health policy and health-related issues, with a track record of high-level national exposure."

Even with an imperfect résumé, as judged by my coaches, I can't resist applying for some of the jobs that pop up on the Public Relations Society of America (PRSA) website. It's easy enough: I just scroll through the PR job offerings - there are usually more than a dozen a week - and send along my résumé-in-progress. I can also apply directly to a company by going to its website, clicking on "careers", searching for PR job listings, and then submitting my application online. I'll go for anything except the jobs that require technical knowledge - computer networking or video production - or lengthy experience in a particular industry.

12.30-1pm Lunch and further newspaper reading, justified by my need, as a PR person, to stay on top of trends, new technologies, business scandals and the like.

1-3pm Back at the desk for more leisurely or more reflective forms of labour, such as learning more about my chosen fields - PR and event planning -and casting about for further tips and leads.

3-4.30pm Proceed to gym for daily workout, as recommended by all coaches. I would work out anyway, but it's nice to have this ratified as a legitimate job-search activity. In fact, I find it expanding to fill the time available - from 45 minutes to more than an hour a day. I may never find a job, but I will, in a few more weeks, be in a position to wrestle any job competitors to the ground.

I am not sure I'm ready for the next step, the step that involves face-to-face interactions with people who might actually have jobs to offer. There's the matter of my business cards, too. It's the end of January, and in two months I have managed to give away no more than five out of 100 of them. I understand that with respect to the cards, my job is like that of those guys on the streets of Manhattan who try to hit you with deli menus - the point is simply to get rid of them.

Whatever is holding me back - shyness or pride - it must be vanquished. I have precious little to show for my time. I have posted my nearly finished résumé on Monster.com and HotJobs.com, and sent it off to a dozen major pharmaceutical companies - from Abbot to Wyeth - that are looking for PR people and allow you to apply right on the company websites. A couple of companies send me automatic acknowledgments by email, and one - Wyeth - goes so far as to send me a real postcard. That's it, though; corporate America seems willing to soldier on without my help.

Searching for networking opportunities closer to home - and hopefully closer to the people who do the actual hiring - I come across a conveniently timed ExecuNet meeting in Richmond, Virginia, designed to help retool executives "in transition". When I call to inquire, I am asked about my salary expectations, and this time, in a surge of positive thinking, I say $100,000. But that turns out to be half as much as what you need to get into the Richmond confab; for pikers like me, there's another meeting in Washington. The cost is a mere $35, plus the $150 I've already spent to become an ExecuNet member and receive its monthly newsletter.

The get-together takes place in an upper-middle-type hotel, in a spacious conference room where a buffet awaits us: fruit and cheese, egg rolls, satay sticks, coffee. When we are seated comfortably around the table, Ron, our leader for the evening, introduces himself. He identifies himself as a "serial entrepreneur" who has launched all sorts of small companies providing business services.

"There are four ways to find a job," Ron explains, "networking, networking, networking and networking." As for posting your résumé on job boards such as Monster.com - don't bother. Donald, a fellow "executive in transition", observes that the boards are for "your 50K people and below". Apparently, in the exalted circle I have entered, all jobs are attained through personal contacts. Any sense of having arrived at a place of comfortable superiority evaporates with a comment from Neal, a 40-ish former media manager with an Australian accent and unruly blond hair. Sounding like a thousand blues songs, he says, "I wake up and say, 'Oh God, another morning'... I have no focus."

Ron, however, is impervious to desperation; the secret of focus, he says, is "to make the search process like going into the office, whether that means going to the library, or to a friend's house." Furthermore, you have to have someone to "keep you accountable", meaning a surrogate boss figure. "We're used to having bosses, being responsive to someone, so you've got to create the same dynamic." Neal appears unmollified by this advice, which of course I recognise from the Forty-Plus meeting: turn your job search into a job. Thus the one great advantage of unemployment - the freedom to do as you please, to get up when you want, wear what you want, and let your mind drift here and there - is foreclosed. Instead, you have to invent a little drama in which you are still toiling away for the man.

Ron opens the session up for questions, and Donald asks whether he should mention a recent illness, which cost him three months of work, to prospective employers. Ron's advice: "Turn [the illness] into a soundbite that could be positive for you." Emboldened, I ask, "What if you've lost time due to homemaking and raising children?" Ron replies: "The challenge is to be a beggar with a great story. If that story doesn't land you [get you a job], you've probably got a values mismatch. Turn it into a compelling story."

A beggar? Well, perhaps that does sum up the status of motherhood in our society. How would I begin my "compelling story"? I met this guy, see, and, uh...

But there's all sorts of useful information here, too, which I struggle to commit to my notebook. Ask people to give you their contacts, and when they do, write them thank-you notes by hand, on nice stationery. Get a fountain pen; ballpoint won't do. If you can't get a real interview, at least ask for a 20-minute "contact interview" aimed at prying contacts out of people. Wear a suit and tie or the female equivalent at all times, even on weekends, and Ron seems to give me a warning glance here; my sneakers have been noted. Network everywhere. One fellow "landed" thanks to networking at a 7-Eleven on a Saturday morning; luckily he had been fully suited up at the time.

Our final hour is devoted to giving three-minute "commercials" - a sort of long version of the "elevator speeches" Kimberly recommended. I haven't memorised my speech and am counting on the presence of an audience to awaken the impulse to entertain. I say that PR and event planning are very closely connected for me: my events make news, and my press conferences are events. As for speechwriting, I don't mean to boast, but frankly I've found that events go better if I write the major speeches. By prior decision, I hint at successes that cannot be fully divulged due to confidentiality agreements: as a PR person currently doing a lot of work with celebrities, I say, I specialise in the hard cases where there are drinking problems or anger management issues.

The drinking problem idea had come up when Kimberly asked me to put my career in something called "PAR" (Problem/Action/Results) form. Once, on a book tour, my media escort had shared some gossip about a certain well-known cookbook author who was inseparable from his fifth of vodka, and what a struggle it was to enforce coherency throughout a long day of back-to-back interviews. Kimberly felt this "problem" was unsuitable for a résumé, but it was the only one I could come up with. I pause to let my audience picture me deftly herding a series of drunk and disorderly celebrities, and conclude that I have always handled these cases with discretion, imagination, and cunning. The word cunning seems to catch their attention, and I wonder if it's something I should use again.

Finally, it is Tim's turn to speak. He has not been just a run-of-the-mill HR guy; he's a union buster, though that's not his phrase. His résumé lists unions he has gone up against and defeated, and he stresses these victories in his "commercial". Neal, who has been largely silent since revealing his problems with getting up in the morning, asks Tim whether, if he can't find another HR job, he would consider working for labour instead. I mumble insincerely that Tim's experience might be really welcome at the AFL-CIO, right here in Washington. A beat goes by before Tim says, "Yes." Then he thinks for another few seconds, swallowing hard and blinking repeatedly, before saying, "Probably not. That would be a big adjustment."

So Tim has principles, which, under the circumstances, is almost shocking. No matter what the temptation, he'd remain loyal to the managerial class. I, on the other hand, have none. If Wyeth, the manufacturer of the hormone replacement drug that probably contributed to thousands of cases of breast cancer, offered me a job doing damage control in the press - well, under the terms of this project, I'd have to take it. But the way things are going, that is beginning to seem as unlikely as an AFL-CIO bid for Tim.

My major takeaway from Ron, now that I have a chance to reflect, is that getting a job is like gaining acceptance into an eighth-grade clique. There exists an elite consisting of people who hold jobs and have the power to confer that status on others, and my task is to penetrate this elite. Since my eighth-grade status never advanced beyond that of loathsome pariah and nerd, I have no practical experience of elite crashing, but it makes sense to include a ruthless scrutiny of the "product" I am trying to sell. It's the wrapping, so to speak - my physical appearance - that concerns me now. If it is to keep up with the standards set by the résumé, mine needs a careful re-evaluation.

Fortunately, I discover on the web, there are companies that will do this for me, and I call one of them, Image Management, in Atlanta. This turns out to be located in a loft in what looks like a gentrified warehouse. I am greeted by Prescott, suavely outfitted in suit and tie. Naturally, I have already read a couple of dress-for-success books and learned that the idea is to pass as a hereditary member of the upper-middle class. As the leading expert in the field, John T Molloy, puts it in his New Women's Dress For Success: "The executive suite is an upper-socioeconomic business club, and in order to get in you must wear the club uniform." I think I have the class thing pretty well in hand - muted colours, patternless fabrics and natural fibres, for example - but my observations come largely from the academic and publishing worlds, which permit a dangerously wide latitude for personal expression in the form of flowing scarves, rumpled linen and dangly earrings.

Then there is the vexing business of gender. All the books warn that it's a lot trickier for a woman to pass than it is for a man, in part because the female "uniform" is not yet as standardised as a man's. But the problem seems to go deeper than that, to the very biological underpinnings of gender: the features that make a man sexually attractive - handsomeness, tallness, a deep voice, etc - also work in his favour at the office, while female sexual attractiveness can torpedo a woman's career. Shoulder-length hair, an overly generous display of legs, or a "too busty" chest can all undermine a woman's credibility. Beauty itself is a handicap. I know I have no problem in the area of "too sexy", "too busty" or distractingly beautiful, but it is clear that for any woman, of any age or condition, being female is something to compensate for.

When Prescott returns with the coffee, I lay out the situation. I have been "consulting" for several years now and need to reconfigure myself for the corporate world, but have only the vaguest idea of how to proceed.

As in so many of my coaching experiences, we begin by categorising me as a "type", only here no test is involved, only a quick all-over survey by Prescott. There are four possibilities: "classic", which applies to people who always wear skirts, "are not very flexible, and tend to be Republican"; "romantic", who "love flowing material"; "dramatic", who "love to break rules" and are often "eccentric"; and "natural", who are "outdoorsy, want to save owls and trees, love texture, and don't wear a lot of patterns".

I turn out to be a natural, which seems to please Prescott, because "there's less to change". The first problem is that I come across as "too authoritative" as a result of the combination of an "angular" body with a tailored shirt and the straight lines of my jacket lapel. "You want to look approachable, not authoritative, so people will feel comfortable working with you", and this means curved lines, not straight ones. Decoding this diagnosis, I see that I am not looking feminine enough. This is, to say the least, confusing. The dress-for-success books all urge what I take to be a somewhat mannish appearance, achieved through pragmatic hairstyles and curve-concealing suits. But if you go too far in the masculine direction, Prescott is saying, you somehow err again.

We move along to colour in general, where I receive a major blow: I can never wear grey or black again, because they drain the colour from my face. This pretty much condemns me to nudity, since my entire wardrobe is black and grey, and not because I'm striving for New York City-style coolness, circa 1995. The truth is I spill on everything, so no peach or yellow item has ever survived more than two or three wearings. Even my conservative silver brooch, a gift from my Norwegian publisher, is deemed "not corporate" by Prescott. All this time I had thought I was a perfectly presentable-looking middle-class professional, when in fact I must come across as a misfit, a mess.

Mainly, as a writer, I have no need to dress for work in anything other than gym clothes, or no clothes at all for that matter, and when writers do try to "dress up", they are generally granted a lot of leeway. I remember attending a banquet with the poet and short-story writer Grace Paley, who appeared in a loose pink floral dress. When I complimented her, she confessed it was a nightgown, which was obvious on closer inspection.

I come home to the realisation that my trip, which cost me more than $1,000, air fare included, netted me little more than a lip pencil, a tube of foundation and a handful of business cards. In fact, I am almost four months into my search - a point at which I expected to be running from interview to interview. The daffodils are fighting their way up in my front yard and my cash reserves have sunk by almost $4,000, but I am not noticeably any closer to employment than when I started back in December.

Following Kimberly's advice, I have begun proactively approaching companies where no appropriate jobs are posted. And, aside from my cybersearching, the only thing to do is to keep on networking - more intensively, though, and in repackaged form. I head for Ann Taylor in the mall two miles from home, and zone in immediately on a tan - not black - trouser suit with an accessibly curved, rather than straight-lined, lapel, which is on sale at half price, about $160. Our local department store supplies $15 gold earrings, and although I know there should be a gold necklace "to pull it all together" none comes to my attention. The message is: approach me, please, I'm perfectly harmless.

Home again, I sit down to confront the fact that my résumé, which has been posted on Monster. com and HotJobs for more than two months, has netted not a single legitimate inquiry. An ordinary job seeker might despair, but I have a unique advantage: I can simply upgrade my résumé. I retain my recent history as an independent consultant, but gone is the last trace of Barbara the dabbler and displaced homemaker, replaced by a highly focused, if not workaholic, professional. There is one last suggestion from Ron to explore: that I become active in the public relations professional society and use it as a means of networking. At the PRSA website, I comb through upcoming conferences and settle on a seminar on "crisis communications management", which will include what to do when, for example, "the activists attack", or the CEO is indicted.

What I learn is that corporations are scared, if not paranoid, and for good reason. Give me an industry and I can think of a "crisis" menacing it: an angel-of-death nurse in a hospital; a whistle-blower in a chemical company; dissatisfied or injured customers anywhere. Thus every company needs a crisis communications plan, whether it knows this or not, as well as a person - that is, me - to design it. In my new cover letters - which go out to all the pharmas I have applied to so far - I explain that the function of PR "is not only to light fires, but to put fires out". If I can sell the threats - the homicides, the lawsuits, the face-painted, anarchistic, antiglobalisation activists - I can sell myself as the knight on the white horse, saviour of corporations. But the fact is, no takers are presenting themselves.

Locum Tenens, a small company that serves as a temp agency for physicians in the central Georgia area, is looking for a PR director, so I write back emphasising my extensive involvement in the health-related field and my passion for working with physicians. When I make my follow-up call, Deborah, the hiring agent, picks up the phone herself and asks if I have any questions. Indeed I do, since this encounter will be a test of my expanding skills.

"Do you have any philanthropic involvement in the community?" - the idea here being that a company's philanthropic activities should be seen, somewhat coldheartedly, as an extension of its PR efforts. Deborah says she's not sure, so I press on: "Do you have a crisis communications plan? For example, if there were to be complaints about one of your physicians? You know, sexual harassment or an unusual number of deaths." Again, she's not sure, and while I attempt to alarm her with the absolute necessity of a crisis communications plan, which I am uniquely prepared to create and implement, she must be fishing for my résumé, because she says, "Oh, here you are," and then, after a pause, the familiar rejection: "There's a gap."

I have, by this time, applied for more than 200 advertised and posted jobs in what has become a life of unrelenting rejection. Actually, rejection puts too kind a face on it, because there is hardly ever any evidence that you have been rejected - that is, duly considered and found wanting. As the New York Times reported in June 2004: "The most common rejection letter nowadays seems to be silence. Job hunting is like dating, only worse, as you sit by the phone for the suitor who never calls. "

I find a promising job fair listed on the website for the military contractor CACI International, which I was visiting because the alleged involvement of some of CACI 's employees in the prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib seemed to make the company an ideal candidate for my "crisis communications" approach. Its website urged job applicants to apply in person at the fair in August.

I decide to attend. The young woman at the CACI booth who is accepting résumés looks blank at the mention of PR and passes me along to a suited man lurking behind her. The company website didn't list any PR openings, but that is no barrier to me; the point is to convince them that they need my services whether they realise it or not. I know I have fewer than 60 seconds to wow this man with my knowledge and skills, so I cut to the chase.

"You might want to rethink your PR approach," I suggest to him as gently as possible, citing CACI 's PR director Jody Brown's responses to the allegations of torture in the New York Times, which I had studied in advance.

"What did she say?" asks the suit.

"It's a matter of language," I tell him. "She called the allegations 'irresponsible and malicious'. In other words, she brushed them off. You need gravitas, dealing with these things - like 'We take these charges very seriously and are doing a full investigation, etc.'" He looks interested; at least the eye contact lingers, so I rush on. "See, a response like hers can be like pouring gasoline on a fire. One of the functions of skilful PR is to put the fires out."

By now we have gone well past my allotted minute. He takes my résumé and urges me to FedEx, not email, my résumé to Jody Brown.

"Don't tell her what I said, OK?" I ask with a smile as I leave, and when I glance back, he is still following me with his eyes, which should be a good sign but, given the nature of his business, creeps me right out. I hasten towards the coffee table, now thoroughly plundered of refreshments, where, in a rare moment of moral lucidity, I face the fact that my professional flexibility does not extend to defending torture allegations. Jody will be getting no résumé from me.

I continue to make applications and follow-up phone calls through September, until I am overwhelmed by a sense of futility. If this were my real life and my livelihood were at stake, I would be climbing the walls. But even in my artificial situation as a journalist-slash-job seeker, I cannot help feeling the rejection. The corporate world has spoken, and it wants nothing to do with me, not even with the smiling, suited, endlessly compliant Alexander version of me.

In late September, my job search effectively over, I started trying to track down the job seekers whose cards I had collected. Eleven people responded; none had found "real " jobs yet; and even those who had been guarded in the settings where I originally met them were eager to talk about their strategies, most of which by now included taking survival jobs.

Hillary Meister, a 45-year-old with a career in communications, moved back to the town where her parents live when an illness temporarily curtailed her job search. "Without my family," she says, "I'd definitely be on the streets." Steve, the former marketing man who was thinking of learning about wines to qualify for an upscale serving job, is giving up his $845-a-month apartment for a room with kitchen privileges: "All I need is a place where I can plug in a computer." Until now, he says, "my family's been helping me out... But they keep saying, 'What's wrong with you? Just take a job, any job.' "

Middle-class Americans, like myself and my fellow seekers, have been raised with the old-time Protestant expectation that hard work will be rewarded with material comfort and security. This has never been true of the working class, and now it is increasingly untrue of the educated middle class that stocks our corporate bureaucracies.

Doctors, lawyers, teachers and college professors have done better at carving out some autonomy and security for themselves. Their principal strategy was professionalisation - no one can practise medicine, for example, without a thorough education and a licence; and some have added the further protection afforded by unions. What sets the white-collar corporate workers apart and leaves them so vulnerable is the requirement that they identify, absolutely and unreservedly, with their employers.

· This is an edited extract from Bait And Switch, by Barbara Ehrenreich, to be published by Granta on March 6

2006-12-29T20:17:00.000-08:00

Barbara Ehrenreich on Cancer

From The Annie Appleseed Project

(At the end of 2001, Barbara Ehrenreich, noted feminist author, published a long article in Harper's Magazine. It was sharply critical of the 'breast cancer movement', suggesting that effort was placed into mammography and pink ribbons that could be better used elsewhere.

Ehrenreich was diagnosed with breast cancer and undergoing conventional therapy even while suggesting that she did not believe it was very effective. Here is the Talk Barbara Ehrenreich gave at Breast Cancer Action in San Francisco.)

Actually cancer was not my first run-in with a breast-related disease. About 20 years ago, the American Society of Plastic and Reconstructive Surgeons announced that small-breastedness is itself a disease: "There is a substantial and enlarging body of medical information and opinion to the effect that these deformities [small breasts] are really a disease." They even gave this disease a name—micromastia.

I was myself a sufferer from micromastia. It wasn’t easy. Oh, I managed to hobble around, raise my kids and get my work done, but I knew how ill I really was. Then just 3 years ago, a doctor told me that I didn’t have to worry about breast cancer too much, because my breasts were small. Now there’s a doctor who doesn’t have to worry about brain cancer too much…

Here’s another relevant personal fact: In the 70s I was an activist in what we then called the women’s health movement. We campaigned for safe contraceptives, against unnecessary surgery, for the option of unmedicated childbirth, for the right to choose abortion.

In the area of breast cancer, we battled against the practice of proceeding directly from biopsy to mastectomy, without even letting the patient wake up to make the decision herself. We wanted women to have the information and the right to make their own health care decision. We even took on the psychiatrists, with their peculiar theory that ambitious or outspoken women were suffering from “penis envy.”

Anybody here ever envied a penis? Wanted to be one?

Anyway, when I was diagnosed with breast cancer 2 years ago, I did what any veteran of the Women’s Health Movement would do: I started researching, looking especially for support and information from other women who had the disease. I ordered a half dozen book, mostly women’s accounts of their breast cancer experiences. I waded out into the net and found scores of breast cancer websites, which I nervously devoured. I was looking for tips, ways to survive the treatments, questions to ask the doctors, and of course emotional support—sisterhood. I was sure that I would find the Women’s Health Movement alive and well and able to help me.

I found a lot. But what I found shocked me. Yes, I found useful tips and information, but I found something else—that a whole culture (I don’t know what else to call it) has grown up around breast cancer. And it certainly did not contain the sisterhood I was searching for.

How to define breast cancer culture?

It’s very pink and femme and frilly – all about pink ribbons, pink rhinestone pins, pink t-shirts and of course a lot about cosmetics. The American Cancer Society offers a program called “Look Good…Feel Better” which gives out free cosmetics to women undergoing breast cancer treatment. The Libby Ross Foundation gives breast cancer patients a free tote bag containing Estee Lauder body crème, a pink satin pillowcase, a set of Japanese cosmetics, and 2 rhinestone bracelets. And no one, so far as I could determine, was complaining about the strange idea that you can fight a potentially fatal disease with eyeliner and blush.

I found that the culture of breast cancer is highly commercialized. First, in the sense that many apparently grassroots fundraising efforts are in fact sponsored by large corporations eager to court middle-aged females. Among them: Revlon, Avon, Ford, Tiffany, Pier 1, Estee Lauder, Ralph Lauren, Lee Denim, Saks Fifth Avenue, JC Penney, Boston Market, Wilson athletic gear. Where were they, I wondered, when the Women’s Health Movement was fighting for abortion rights and against involuntary sterilization?

More amazing to me though, was the number of breast cancer-related items you can buy today: You can dress entirely in a breast cancer-theme: pink-beribboned sweatshirts, denim shirts, pajamas, lingerie, aprons, loungewear, shoelaces and socks; accessorize with pink rhinestone broaches, angel pins, scarves, caps, earrings and bracelets.

You can decorate your home with breast cancer candles, coffee mugs, pendants, stained glass pink ribbon candle holders, wind chimes and nightlights. You can pay your bills with special “Breastchecks” or a separate line of “Checks for a Cure.”

To me, the most disturbing product, though, was the breast cancer teddy bears. I have identified four distinct lines, or species, of these creatures, including “Carol,” the Remembrance Bear; “Hope,” the Breast Cancer Research Bear; the “Susan Bear,” named for Nancy Brinker’s deceased sister Susan; and the new Nick and Nora Wish Upon a Star Bear, available, along with the Susan Bear, at the Komen Foundation website’s “marketplace.”

Now I don’t own a teddy bear—haven’t had much use for one in 50 years. Why would anyone assume that, faced with the most serious medical challenge of my life, I would need one now? And that wasn’t all: The Libby Ross tote bag that I just mentioned also contained a package of crayons—something else I haven’t needed in many a decade. I began to get the feeling that this breast cancer culture is not only about being pretty and femme—it’s also about regressing back to being a little girl—a very good little girl in fact.

There is, I would point out, nothing similar for me. At least men who are diagnosed with prostate cancer are not given gifts of matchbox cars.

But the worst of it, for me, was the perkiness and relentless cheerfulness of the breast cancer culture. The “Breast Friends” site, for example, features a series of inspirational quotes: “Don’t Cry over Anything that Can’t Cry Over You,” “I Can’t Stop the Birds of Sorrow from Circling my Head, But I Can Stop Them from Building a Nest in My Hair,” and much more of that ilk.

You don’t find a lot of complaining in breast cancer culture. Sure, people acknowledge that breast cancer is a terrible experience in many ways—you’ll lose a breast or 2, you’ll go through chemo and lose your hair and your immune response, you might get lymphedema and lose the use of your arms.

But guess what? You would turn out a better person for it—more feminine, more spiritual, more evolved. You would be something better than a mere cancer-free person; you would be a “survivor.” Some quotes:

As “Mary” reports, on the “Bosom Buds” message board:

"I really believe I am a much more sensitive and thoughtful person now… I enjoy life so much more now and am much happier now."

Cindy Cherry, quoted in the Washington Post, goes further:

"If I had to do it over, would I want breast cancer? Absolutely."

And I’ve heard even worse on the health channel: gushing descriptions of breast cancer as a form of spiritual upward mobility. Something that a woman should be happy to experience.

Is there any other disease that has been so warmly embraced by its victims? (And yes, I use the word “victim”—that’s another part of the perkiness—the failure to acknowledge that some of us are in fact victims of a hideous disease.) No one thinks TB, AIDS, or heart disease is supposed to be a “growth opportunity” and make you into a better person. No one is thankful for colon cancer, diabetes or gonorrhea. Why, I began to wonder, is a disease that primarily attacks women supposed to be something they should be grateful for?

So when I went looking for the Women’s Health Movement to sustain me in my breast cancer ordeal I found something very different. In the 70s we used to get angry and militant about women’s health issues: we barged into medical meetings, picketed hospitals, showed up uninvited at Congressional hearings. In the case of breast cancer, all that fighting spirit had been transformed into…pink cotton candy.

As for my own mood a year ago, when I was undergoing treatment. It wasn’t sweet or spiritual or “feminine” in the old fashioned sense. I was angry, as angry as I have ever been in my life. I wondered if it was possible to express this anger in the breast cancer culture I’d been exploring. So I wrote a letter and posted it on the message board run by the Komen Foundation, the largest of the breast cancer foundations. What I said was:

I was diagnosed 6 months ago and have been through a mastectomy and chemotherapy. I don’t think of myself as a “survivor” because too many women have gone thru the same “treatments” only to have their cancers recur a few years later.

What I am is angry. Angry about “treatments” which are in fact toxic and debilitating. Angry about all the emphasis on “early detection” when there is no way of knowing how early any detection is. Some small tumors are very fast-growing and some big ones are very slow. But no one seems to be making the distinction.

Angry about insurance companies: I’m not battling cancer, I’m battling Aetna, which is still refusing to pay for the biopsy…And what about all people without insurance? (Bush wants to cut help for them in his next budget, and I don’t hear anyone from the breast cancer groups screaming.)

Angry about all the sappy pink ribbons, breast cancer teddy bears and other cute accessories when the fact is WOMEN ARE DYING.

And finally, angry that with all the money pouring into research, no one knows what the cause of breast cancer is. If I want to protect my daughter, we need to know the CAUSE.

Anyone else out there sick of the breast cancer hype?”

That’s what I wrote; that’s what I was feeling at the time.

The responses I got were alarming. “Suzy” wrote to say “I really dislike saying you have a bad attitude towards all of this, but you do, and it's not going to help you in the least.” Several women offered to pray for me to achieve a better state of mind.

“Kitty,” however, thought I’d gone around the bend:

You need to run, not walk, to some counseling…Please, get yourself some help and I ask everyone on this site to pray for you so you can enjoy life to the fullest.

It was at this point that I realized that there is nothing feminist—and not much even sisterly—about the culture that has grown up around breast cancer. Because one of the first principles of second wave feminism was that you honor women’s experience and respect their feelings. You don’t tell a woman who’s been raped or assaulted or subject to medical maltreatment to “cheer up” and stop whining. We thought there was something powerful and constructive about anger—I still think there is—because it was anger, more than anything, that made us into tireless activists for women’s health.

But here I was—expressing my heartfelt feelings—and being told by other women who had been through similar experiences to shut up and put on a happy face. To be a “Stepford patient.” I began to suspect that the purpose of the breast cancer culture—with it’s teddy bears, and crayons and cosmetics and pinkness—is to get us to regress to a child-like state, to suspend critical judgment, and get us to accept whatever the medical profession wants to do to us.

Now of course there are—or have been—rationales for all the aspects of breast cancer culture I found so offensive:

Being cheerful is supposed to save year life. Everything depends on your attitude, I was told again and again by the books and websites I consulted. Anger and sorrow will kills you; being upbeat will save you. Having an upbeat culture of breast cancer survivors—with their public displays of energy and athleticism—is justified again and again as a way of getting women to come forward and have their mammograms. If women neglect their annual screenings, it must be because they are afraid that a diagnosis amounts to a death sentence. I was told by doctors and breast cancer establishment figures that beaming survivors, proudly running races and climbing mountains, are the best possible advertisement for routine screening mammograms, early detection, and the ensuing round of treatments. Trouble is: neither of these rationales holds up under close examination.

The idea that attitude can save your life was based on studies purporting to show that women who participate in breast cancer self-help groups are both happier and live longer than those who don’t. More recent studies show that women in support groups may be happier, but they don’t live any longer than the sourpusses and social isolates who don’t go to groups.

I’m all for support groups—it’s just that they don’t count as form of treatment! And I’m all for being happy, but it won’t save your life.

As for the need to have a highly visible, cheerful, breast cancer culture in order to get women to get “squished”—the Oct 20 issue of the Lancet carried a study of past studies of the effectiveness of screening mammography—a study showing that all the past studies were flawed and that mass mammography screening does nothing to lower a country’s breast cancer mortality rate.

We haven’t heard the last word on this, and the breast cancer establishment is scrambling to find some new evidence that mammograms are worth it. But for now: fact is, they don’t seem to do much, as some doctors have suspected for a long time. Ten years ago, the famous British surgeon Michael Baum called routine screening mammography “one of the greatest deceptions perpetrated on the women of the western world.”

In other words, the establishment breast cancer culture—represented by the races for the cure, the pink ribbons and teddy bears—rests on a paradigm that has been disproved and discredited.

We don’t need to be cheerful. And we may not need to get those mammograms every year—which means we don’t need all this breast cancer “awareness’ that the corporations and the foundations are always encouraging.

So what does it hurt to have this massive breast cancer culture? You could say: whatever gets you through the night…

But there are at least 2 major problems with it:

First, the breast cancer culture has encouraged a dangerous complacency about current medical approaches to breast-cancer treatment. Implicit in all the pink ribbons and the drumbeat for regular mammograms was the promise that your cancer could be cured—if only you bring it to the doctors' attention early enough. In other words, there’s nothing wrong with the so-called treatments—the burden is on you to get your tumor detected “early.”

But as I wrote to the Komen message board: not all small tumors are "early" and more easily treated. In fact, there is no single disease “breast cancer”—probably a multitude of diseases of various degrees of virulence. But right now, they’re all being treated as a single disease.

Worse, current treatments—surgery, chemotherapy and radiation—carry no guarantee of long-term survival and are notoriously debilitating and disfiguring themselves. Every year, more than 40,000 American women die of breast cancer, large numbers of whom had duly submitted to screening mammograms and to the nightmarish treatments that ensued.

Even mammograms are something to worry about: Only one carcinogen has been definitely established as a cause of breast cancer, and that is ionizing radiation of the kind emitted by mammography machines.

A second big problem with the pink ribbon culture: While they want a cure—we ALL do—they say almost nothing about the need to find the CAUSE of breast cancer, which is very likely environmental. This omission makes sense: breast cancer would hardly be the darling of corporate charities if its complexion changed from pink to green.

But by ignoring or underemphasizing the issue of environmental causes, the pink-ribbon crowd function as willing dupes of what could be called the Cancer Industrial Complex: by which I mean the multinational corporate enterprise which with the one hand doles out carcinogens and disease and, with the other, offers expensive, semi-toxic, pharmaceutical treatments. Breast Cancer Awareness month, for example, is sponsored by AstraZeneca (the manufacturer of Tamoxifen) which until 1999 was also the fourth largest producer of pesticides in the United States, including at least one known carcinogen.

So the more I immersed myself in the pink ribbon culture – during those awful months of chemo last year—the more disgusted I got. But I had one lifeline, one source of hope and genuine sisterhood: My cousin happened to send me three back issues of the Breast Cancer Action newsletter. I read them cover to cover, absorbing information, thrilled to find other women who had confronted the disease and managed to keep their wits about them and their dignity intact.

I am deeply grateful that Breast Cancer Action was there for me when I needed it most. It is one of the few voices of clarity and consistently feminist determination within the vast sea of pink ribbons out there, and I’m here to ask you—implore you, in fact—to help it not only survive but grow.

I know it can, because when I published my thoughts on the pink ribbon culture—in Harpers last October—I was deluged with letters from women saying: Thank god, somebody feels the same way I do! Here’s a project I’d like to see BCA have the resources to launch: a website for women don’t want teddy bears and ribbons, who want ACTION! I’d like to see an interactive website to connect these women to each other, because this is what I needed a year ago—not to mention probably for the rest of my life. I’d call it “bad girls of breast cancer”—like the BCA t-shirt. This is MY dream for BCA and I hope you’ll help make it possible.

Because we don’t need to be infantilized when we’re dealing with a potentially fatal disease, we don’t need to be patronized with cosmetics and jewelry, and told to keep smiling, no matter what.

We don’t need more “awareness” of breast cancer—we’re VERY aware, thank you very much. We need treatments that work, and above all, we need to know the cause of this killer, so we can stop it before it attacks another generation.

And we certainly don’t need a breast cancer culture that, by downplaying the possible environmental causes of cancer, serves as an accomplice in global poisoning—normalizing cancer, prettying it up, even presenting it, perversely, as a positive and enviable experience.

What we need is a truly sisterly response to this ghastly disease—one that is both loving and militant, courageous and caring, willing to confront the Cancer Industrial Complex and, when necessary, the entire $16 billion a year breast cancer industry, including the medical profession.

Are you with me? Will you be with me if my cancer returns?

Good!—then this is the time to stand with BCA and give them what you can—your time, your talent, your money!

Dear Dr. Phil:
Are Indigenous People in an "Abusive Relationship" with Canada?

By Kahentinetha Horn
From MNN
2006

They say "love is blind". When friends and relatives think your relationship is in trouble they start dropping you hints and sending you clippings from the newspaper. An alert Maliseet reporter sent this one our way. "Doesn't this sound like Canada?", she asked. Let's take a look.

After all, according the Royal Commission on Aboriginal People, we are "partners in confederation". Marriage is a partnership? So let's see how this partnership stacks up. Canada did not ask for our hand in marriage. So it must be common law! We were never given an opportunity to accept or reject their colonial advances. They came, they saw and they moved right in. To use the legal terminology, Britain assumed "sovereignty over us and our lands". We had one hell of a dowry, didn't we?

Marriages often begin with a honeymoon. When was ours? Marriage often creeps up on people and then they find themselves trapped. People used to think marriages lasted forever. Now they say you should get out if it's abusive.

How can you tell if you're in an abusive relationship? Let's look at the list so we can decide for ourselves. Is this marriage worth saving?

1. Does your spouse stop you from talking to or prevent you from seeing family or friends? Geez! Remember the law that said we couldn't leave the reserve and we had to get passes from the Indian agent if we wanted to visit anyone? Does the way they listen in on our phone conversations today count? We can tell that a lot of our phones and our emails are bugged. Where do people talk in this constitutional marriage partnership? Is it in Parliament? We don't have elected representatives there. In fact, we don't want elected representatives in a "foreign" government. Are they sure we're married?

2. Does your spouse embarrass you with bad names and put-downs? Omygawd! Wasn't the Indian Act called the "act de sauvages" in French? Omygawd! Remember how the Indian Act defined a person as anyone but an "Indian" right up to 1952? Didn't Indian Affairs call us "children" and "wards of the state"? They pretended we were not capable of conducting our own affairs. Didn't Canadian textbooks and the media present us as childlike, primitive, dirty drunken demons whose ancestors were naked, war-painted braves and princesses, kemosabes, big chiefs, squaws, flesh eaters, torturers who attacked innocent pioneers, wasted resources, whooping wagon-circling warriors, who should have died out instead of becoming gutter drunks and gun toting drug and cigarette smugglers and peace disturbers who blocked roads and bridges and burned tires? In fact, doesn't the Canadian government have a special department of the JTF2 which bragged that "smear campaigns are our specialty"?

3. Does your spouse look at you or act in ways that scare you? Well, as a matter of fact, yes. It is rather scary to have all those guns pointed at us every time we try to talk to them.

4. Does your spouse treat you roughly, grab you, shove you, push you? Well, as a matter of fact it does. If we stare at them long enough, they'll jump us and beat us up. In fact, they have lots of torture toys, like the latest taser guns, pepper spray, M-16's, rubber bullets and helicopters that hover over our houses that disturb our sleep. If we don't do as we're told, they get court injunctions and beat us up. This happens all the time. We get stopped by the cops for potential driving infractions and disturbing the peace. The jails are full of Indigenous people. In fact, going to jail is part of growing up for the average Indigenous youth in Canada. Many are finally murdered there.

5. Does your spouse control what you do, who you see or talk to, or where you go? Do they stop you from seeing or talking to friends and family? As a matter of fact, Canada thinks it can decide who our friends and family are! Look at the Indian act! It was passed without our knowledge or consent. Canada and the US also stuck borders right in the middle of our territories. About four out of five times when I try to cross to visit friends and relatives, I am stopped, searched, detained, harassed and reported on. They never find anything and have to let me go. They're harder on our younger kids who often find themselves arrested. At Akwesasnes there are 19 different policing agencies patrolling the community.

6. Does your spouse prevent you from getting a job, take your money, make you ask for money or refuse to give you money? Yeah! Didn't it all begin with the great land grab! This spouse thinks it owns ALL of our land and resources, and even us! They always called us "our Indians". They think they "gave" us our reserve. They think "self-determination" isn't an inherent human right. Just the other day the new Great White Father, Jim Prentice, gave a talk about ,"How much self-determination should we give the Indians"!!! We guess he hasn't the UN human rights protocols that Canada has signed and pledged to uphold. They've tried to take away our essential humanity. They like to keep us on welfare so they can keep us under control. There are lots of jobs for their "house Indians' like band councilors to help them do this. You can be sure you're fired if you don't tow their line. They do everything they can to stop us from developing economic independence. They claim the right to expropriate our land to develop our resources in a way that only benefits them.

7. Does your spouse make all the decisions? You bet! We aren't allowed to make any decisions. In 1982 Canada's new Constitution Act claimed to affirm "existing Aboriginal and treaty rights". The Supreme Court of Canada interpreted this to mean that before 1982 it was legal for Canada to extinguish our rights if they showed a "clear and plain intent". What? After 1982 the Supreme Court declared that Canada can only infringe our rights if it has "valid justification". Valid to who?? Them, of course! That's how you rob people. Our involvement in decision making of any kind seems to be completely irrelevant in Canada's mind. Anytime we have tried to assert our rights, we've been attacked and Canada's courts have shot us down. A good marriage is supposed to be based on equal partnership. Canada should deal with us on the legal nation-to-nation basis. In this "partnership" Canada is the only one that gets to be a "nation". They have taken to calling us "first nations". Don't be fooled. It's double faced sweet talk. They think they still have us on a short leash.

8. Does your spouse prevent you from leaving after a fight? Hey, aren't they are on our land? Shouldn't they leave? Look at what's happening at Six Nations. We've seen it all before. They come and attack us. We defend ourselves. They shove us into their paddy wagons, ambulances and take us off to their hospitals, jails and sometimes the morgue. We are not free to go to our homes. We have to be on guard and protect each other all the time.

9. Does your spouse tell you you're a bad mother or threaten to take away your children? Well, Canada's official state policy qualifies as genocide. [read the UN Convention on the Prevention of Genocide]. Our children were routinely taken from us to be raised in an alien culture. First, our children were killed. Then the survivors were snatched from their parents and sent to residential schools. We call them "death camps". There they were beaten, raped, abused, malnourished, exposed to diseases and subjected to medical experimentation. About half died. Then there were the "sixties scoop" and the "seventies sweep". Whole Generations of our kids were kidnapped and given to "nice white families". Some were nice. A lot were not.

10. Does your spouse Act like abuse is no big deal, it's your fault, or even deny he did it? The whole nasty business began with the pretence that Canada was going to "civilize" and "protect" us. They focused on what's wrong with us and our behavior. Instead of of setting up treatment for them, the abusers, Canada puts us in "healing circles" and all kinds of other therapies to try to "pacify" us as if we're the ones with the problem. They don't want to notice what they're doing to us. We've been studied to death to justify their views on us so they can continue to hold us in bondage. Canada has always denied that is has carried out genocide of 99% of our people. Imagine! It just got itself on the Human Rights Commission at the UN so it can supervise the external international agencies that are available to receive complaints from the Indigenous Peoples of the world! This is a classic case of the fox guarding the henhouse.

11. Does your spouse destroy your property, use violence against you or threaten to hurt pets or things you care about? Look at the destruction from one end of Turtle Island to the other. When the colonists arrived this was a land of plenty. Our ancestors had a relationship with the environment based on mutual respect for mother earth and all of the natural world. We managed the environment so that everything was in balance. The fish in the Grand Banks were so thick you could pull them up with a bucket. The earth was full of nuts, big berries and all kinds of game. Turtle Island was a beautiful park. In a short time the European abusers ravaged almost all of the land. In 1720 the King of England passed a law saying "no more cutting of the white pine" [our Tree of Peace. Only one strand remains in Algonquin park.] They rolled across the land cutting down old growth trees and destroying the habitat of the animals. The dug up the earth to get minerals, poisoning the water and air, leaving toxic waste everywhere that will take thousands of years to repair. Today the Grand Banks are fished out. All kinds of natural food resources are depleted. In some places fish in the St. Lawrence River can qualify as toxic waste. Lake Erie is a cesspool. The prairies are turning into a desert. Southern BC is almost all clear cut. In the north the caribou have been decimated. The ice is melting and the polar bears are drowning. The land is scarred, poisoned and becoming increasingly unlivable. Anytime we try to protect it, we are faced with threats or violence. Look at what's happening at Six Nations right now.

12. Does your spouse intimidate you with guns, knives or other weapons? The latest! Take a look at item 4. Remember the weapons cache that was found just this spring at Kanehsatake. Remember the 77,000 rounds of ammunition shot at the 26 Indigenous people attending the Sun Dance at Gustafsen Lake. Remember the way the army was deployed around three of our territories during the Mohawk Oka Crisis of 1990?

13. Does your spouse force you into sexual acts that you don't enjoy? This is really "undercover". In Vancouver and other western cities there are streets where men go to pick up child prostitutes. These are our children. There are 500 native women missing. Their disappearances have not been investigated. What more can we say.

14. Does your spouse threaten to kill himself? Well, we finally found something on this list that Canada doesn't do. If it did, could you blame us if we just let it happen?

So what do you think, Dr. Phil? What kind of therapy do you suggest for this abusers? Shouldn't Canada sign up right away? If this is a marriage, we want a divorce!

Diego Rivera's Artistic Mastery

By Tim Tower
From World Socialist Web Site
1999

The exhibition, Diego Rivera, Art and Revolution, previously on display in Cleveland and Los Angeles, will show in Houston between September 19 and November 28, before concluding its tour in Mexico City. This major retrospective of the artist's work, the first in more than a decade, includes over 100 images assembled from major collections throughout the world. The works are divided into four parts representing the artist's entire career, but with special emphasis on pieces with which many viewers may not be familiar.

The first group includes academic drawings and paintings done in Mexico and some done after Rivera traveled to Europe on a government grant in 1907. It reveals the early indications of a great talent and includes a number of remarkable studies and transitional works in which he worked with the styles of different masters in the protracted process of establishing his own voice. The second group includes European work from before his return to Mexico in 1921. It shows Rivera in a period of powerful aesthetic growth, in which he combined a voracious appetite for studying the European masters with continuous experimentation in the new methods of the Parisian avant-garde. He devoted himself to mastering every style and technique while, at the same time, striving to express the historic scale of the social and cultural eruptions taking place.

The third selection consists of sketches and studies for the murals that dominated Rivera's work for the three decades beginning in Mexico in 1922 and for which he became world-famous. These pieces seem to play more the role of connective tissue than that of muscle or bone within the exhibition. They tie the easel works in the show to the more famous and familiar murals and also provide the necessary transition between the early and later easel works on display.

The fourth group, overlapping the third chronologically, includes portraits and other paintings from the mid-1920s until the time of his death. Here, along with pieces of extraordinary beauty and expressive strength, are some in which the effects of political, as well as personal, traumas and frustrations seem to have taken their toll on the aging giant.

Applied to Rivera's life and work, the title “Art and Revolution” is certainly justified. His life was bound up as much, or more, than that of any other artist with the great events that shaped the twentieth century. The work of this great artist and supporter of the Mexican Revolution, the Russian Revolution and also, for a period of time, the Fourth International must surely hold a key to one of the great questions of cultural history—the relationship between the arts and social revolution. It seems, however, that the exhibit organizers were not prepared to probe this crucial point, or for whatever reason, were willing to allow it to remain unaddressed. They have posed the question, however, and at the same time have presented a fascinating and forceful body of work. This, after all, is not so little.

Diego Rivera was born in 1886 and died in 1957. He studied at the National School of Fine Arts in Mexico City between 1898 and 1906, where he won several awards and achieved initial public recognition. He then traveled to Europe on a small pension provided by the governor of Veracruz, beginning his studies in 1907 in the studio of Eduardo Chicharro in Madrid. For the next 14 years he traveled and worked in Europe, only returning to Mexico in 1910 to exhibit his paintings.

Rivera's work then reflected the raging aesthetic and political controversies of the émigré community of artists, writers and revolutionaries. Confidence in man's ability to remake the world dominated in this highly creative atmosphere. In 1917, the year of the October Revolution, Rivera broke with Picasso and cubism. Before returning to Mexico in 1921, he traveled through Italy studying the art of fresco painting.
Beginning in 1922 with his first mural, Creation, painted at the National Preparatory School, he pioneered the development of fresco painting into one of the leading forms of twentieth century art. In the same year, he co-founded the Union of Revolutionary Painters, Sculptors and Graphic Artists and joined the Mexican Communist Party.

In 1929 he came into conflict with the Party leadership. Stalin's theory of Socialist Realism imposed strict restrictions on both style and subject. On top of voicing certain disagreements with Stalin's political line, Rivera declined to alter a mural in line with party demands. The Party expelled him.

In 1933 he began work on a major fresco at Rockefeller Center in New York City. When he refused to remove a portrait of Vladimir Lenin from the wall, Rockefeller dismissed him and had the painting destroyed. Rivera responded by using his designs for a fresco in the Palace of Fine Arts in Mexico City. In regard to the conflict in New York, he said it was “the only correct painting to be made in the building [as] an exact and concrete expression of the situation of society under capitalism at the present time, and an indication of the road that man must follow in order to liquidate hunger, oppression, disorder and war.”
Around this time, Leon Trotsky, leader of the Russian Revolution and of the International Left Opposition and soon-to-be the founder of the Fourth International, was a man without a visa—hounded from one country to another by both Stalinism and imperialism. Rivera played a major role in securing Trotsky a visa and a place to live in Mexico.

In 1938 he collaborated with Trotsky and André Breton in preparing the Manifesto: Towards a Free Revolutionary Art, a document based on the deep connection between authentic art and the revolutionary movement of the working class. Here was the fruit of discussions between the leader of world socialism, the leader of surrealist literature and one of the foremost representatives of modern painting at a moment when fascism destroyed progressive tendencies in art as “degenerate” and the Stalinists denounced independent creative work as “fascist.”

“True art, which is not content to play variations on ready-made models,” it states, “but rather insists on expressing the inner needs of man and of mankind in its time—true art is unable not to be revolutionary, not to aspire to a complete and radical reconstruction of society. This it must do, were it only to deliver intellectual creation from the chains which bind it, and to allow all mankind to raise itself to those heights which only isolated geniuses have achieved in the past. We recognize that only the social revolution can sweep clean the path for a new culture.”

At his best, Rivera gave monumental form to these themes, combining in his art confidence in the capacities of the working class and mankind with radiant beauty and compassion. Trotsky's assassination, the outbreak of war and its aftermath would soon pose enormous political and cultural problems. Rivera's previous resistance to the Stalinist straight jacket of Socialist Realism proved to be inadequate as a political inoculation against the pressure to support Stalinism after the war. His disorientation took a toll on his later work.

Among early paintings opening the show is the self-portrait of a gifted, yet self-conscious, and somewhat tentative student. From this and its companion pieces one can see why his academic work secured a modest government pension and later a grant for study in Europe. The drawings are delicate and masterful; the oils evoke strong, consistent moods.

In the picture of a hospital garden entitled Promenade of the Melancholics, a shaded pathway between hedge rows in a wood leads from shadow into bright sunlight. Already in this early piece from 1904, the painter succeeds in evoking an unbroken mood of quiet warmth. His palette is richly suited to recreating the salubrious atmosphere of midday sun filtering through tall trees. It is a picture of beckoning optimism.

In Europe a few years later, the viewer will recognize that Rivera hardly required an internal revolution to master the somber warmth typical of contemporary Spanish painting. The soft light of a setting sun shimmers in four panes of glass set in dark wood frames and glows from aging stucco and masonry in the picture of a House in Vizcaya. Here Rivera displays his capacity to immerse himself in a scene with such pleasure that one feels invited, or drawn, to join him. Soft shadows and gently curving cobblestone streets impart a sense of tradition, resting like a comfortable saddle, on the landscape. No people, plants or animals appear. Yet Rivera draws vitality and warmth, even personality, from inanimate objects. This canvas from 1907 also gives a hint of the rhythmic compositions he would develop so forcefully later.

In a number of paintings, Rivera blurred the distinction between the study of a classic work and an original one. It is beyond the scope of this comment to compile a comprehensive list of his influences. We can say that such a list would have to include: Posada, El Greco, Velasquez, Goya, Titian, Tintoretto, Ingres, Monet, Cezanne, Renoir and Picasso. He incorporated a wide variety of style, technique and subject, copying schools of painting, until he mastered them, or reworking a traditional subject with a new and opposite technique.

The picture of Notre Dame de Paris from La Porte de la Tournelle , done in 1909, is an outstanding example. The sky and cathedral structure demonstrate a technical mastery of Monet's treatment of the sky and church facade. The intensity of bright sunlight is recreated by breaking it up into its component colors on the canvas. For this study, however, Rivera shifted the focus, pitching his easel on the opposite bank of the Seine, below the level of the street and the cathedral. In the foreground shadowy dock workers load huge kegs with a crane onto a barge. Thick figures and rich earth tones are reminiscent of the work of Jean Francois Millet, whose studies of peasants from the mid-nineteenth century hang nearby in the Louvre.

Rivera's candid combination of material from historically distant and seemingly incompatible schools of painting is often refreshing. In both a deep bow, and also a challenge, to El Greco, who painted the same scene some 300 years earlier, he selected a View of Toledo for a study in 1912. El Greco had used a combination of serpentine clouds and shadows combined with near surreal color to achieve a sense of the social and spiritual tension in this center of Catholic power during the time that Giordano Bruno was burned at the stake and Galileo was put on trial.

Rivera reversed the artistic process, bathing the landscape in bright pastels of warm sunlight and building the composition with angular geometric forms, unified by dominant diagonals. Rivera seemed to be reaching for the analytical approach of the cubists by working against the mannerism of El Greco. El Greco's town was almost swallowed by the terrain; whereas, Rivera's spires tower over the land and water; and his blocky buildings are encroaching everywhere. His painting is a little hollow, lacking internal cohesion. This weakness, however, was more than compensated by the success of some that were soon to follow.
In a major portrait the next year, Rivera elongated the figure of his friend Adolfo Best Mougard in a manner again reminiscent of El Greco. For Rivera, the method strengthens an image of sophisticated urbanity. Mougard appears on an elevated platform, in fact, the balcony of Rivera's studio, made of concrete and steel. Steam and smoke rise from locomotives and factories in the bustling metropolis behind him. A composition of powerful conflicting diagonals portrays the dynamism of Paris as the center of Europe. The Ferris wheel, which dominated the city's skyline at the time, dominates the background of the painting, appearing to spin around the end of Mougard's extended finger. Planes of color bend and wash the churning composition, while the clear distinction between foreground, middle and background reflects Rivera's lingering ambivalence toward the cubist repudiation of classical perspective.

In a spectacular display of vibrant color, rich texture and playful forms, Rivera captured a sense of exhilaration in the Majorcan Landscape of 1914. He was obviously thrilled by this Mediterranean paradise—each sensuous, lively aspect accentuated because of the war erupting in Europe. He painted a vision of Elysian fields, in a sense, expressing the inner needs of man, at the moment when Europe was plunging into a house of horrors.

The glistening beaches, which he applied with a palette knife, form a fragile protective frame for this teaming oasis of life, which seems to well up like a plethora of bacteria in a fragile droplet under a microscope. He loaded on paint with stiff brushes, imparting succulent, plastic qualities to rocks, earth and vegetation. Here a natural rhythm takes over the composition, like a walk on a summer day, repeating the simple forms of a Mediterranean cornucopia. The picture also resembles a bowl of luscious fruit, prepared to satisfy a simmering homesickness for the familiar warmth of sub-tropical Mexico.

Rivera followed in 1915 with Zapatista Landscape , which he called "probably the most faithful expression of the Mexican mood that I have ever achieved." In this tightly unified and compact composition of brilliant color and rich texture, Rivera gave expression to the creative forces of the Mexican Revolution at one of its most painful and bloody moments. His novel composition places a cubist portrait against a simplified background done in classical perspective.

Volcanic lava, the blood of the peasantry and a pregnant belly are woven together to create a portrait of the revolution. A rifle, leather belt, blanket, ammunition box and sombrero are silhouetted against old craters and mountains of Mexico. There is dignified humility, combined with a smoldering, volcanic eruption. The very land itself is being disrupted and reformed. Now at the height of his powers as a cubist, Rivera surgically separated line, texture, shape and color, to fuse them into a unified composition. The forms interpenetrate and revolve around each other as if held together and driven apart by great forces, like those operating inside the nucleus of an atom.

Female Nude from 1918-19 gives an example of the artist's fascination with Renoir, whom he credited with some of the most beautiful paintings ever done. In recognition of the enduring appeal of Rivera's work, we have to admit that many of his images defy verbal description. Suffice it to say that the rhythmic composition and intense color of this one have the magical ability to transport the viewer from a jostling crowd into a realm of sensual intimacy.

The Garbage Picker, a major painting done in tempera and oil on masonite in 1935, provides a beautiful example of the polished, sculptural quality Rivera achieved in many frescoes. Restricting his palette to a few tones, he focuses the knot of the composition on the straining profile of his anonymous subject.

In this context, one can hardly avoid reflecting on the hundreds of pre-Columbian artifacts which Rivera collected over many years. Frida Kahlo said he would spend hours admiring these objects. Striving for ever more universal means of expression, he was constantly reworking and combining artistic forms. His simple, sculptural forms are among the most moving in modern art.

The stunning Portrait of Lupe Marin, from 1938, although quite strong and sculptural itself, especially in the hands, which are thrust forward, creates a very different effect. Here the luminous colors of the sky, reflected in the folds of Lupe's flowing white dress, combine with complexities introduced by the reflection in a large mirror standing behind her right shoulder to convey a beautiful, complex and sophisticated personality.

The enigmatic Nocturnal Landscape, from 1947, is one of the most seductively beautiful in the show. A group of peasants lounges in a tree whose trunks weave a serpentine pattern through the darkness. A donkey stares out of deep night shadows. And an eerie artificial light illuminates the group. Expressions are hidden, effaced, as individual figures blend into the landscape. Rivera's brilliant palette creates a quiet, melancholy tone for the scene of modest spectators at what was likely the filming of John Huston's The Treasure of the Sierra Madre. He loved films himself and, in this picture, reveals his sense of irony. That night's audience of peasants who worked the Sierra Madre would probably never be able to see its portrayal on film.

A decade later the subtlety is gone when Rivera, admittedly broken-hearted and very sick, traveled to the Soviet Union. The previous year he had been readmitted to the Communist Party following an expulsion of more than two decades. Labor's Day Parade in Moscow, done in 1956, is colorful, but lifeless.

For his entire conscious life Rivera remained an outspoken defender of the oppressed and sympathizer of revolutions throughout the world. Both artistic and political controversies swirled around him. He fought, often heroically, for his convictions. Under complex and difficult conditions, he may have paid a price for this; but he also gained enormously. He was profoundly dissatisfied with the reality around him and, while faithfully portraying it, attempted to lift the veil to reveal an ideal future.

Modern life is based upon the ever-deepening exploitation of the many by the few, where all means of deceit and superstition join forces to conceal what is essential. Hypocrisy follows violence, adding insult to injury on the collective conscience. Small wonder that crowds line up to view Rivera's work. His paintings are a bandage on the wound, providing true pleasure for those who really look.

2006-12-29T13:54:00.000-08:00

The Journalist from Mars

By Noam Chomsky
From Thrid World Traveler

Excerpt of speech at Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting's (F.A.I.R) fifteenth anniversary celebration in New York City on January 23, 2002.

The proper topic for an occasion like this, I suppose, is pretty obvious: It would be the question of how the media have handled the major story of the past months, the issue of the "war on terrorism," so-called, specifically in the Islamic world. Incidentally, by media here I intend the term to be understood pretty broadly, including journals of commentary, analysis, and opinion; in fact, the intellectual culture generally.

It's a really important topic. It's been reviewed regularly by FAIR, among others. However, it isn't really an appropriate topic for a talk, and the reason is that it requires too much detailed analysis. So what I'd like to do is take a somewhat different approach to it and ask the question of how should the story be handled, in accord with general principles that are accepted as guidelines: principles of fairness, accuracy, relevance, and so on.

Let's approach this by kind of a thought experiment. Imagine an intelligent Martian-I'm told that by convention, Martians are males, so I'll refer to it as "he." Suppose that this Martian went to Harvard and Columbia Journalism School and learned all kinds of high-minded things, and actually believes them. How would the Martian handle a story like this?

I think he would begin with some factual observations that he'd send back to the journal on Mars. One factual observation is that the war on terrorism was not declared on September 11; rather, it was redeclared, using the same rhetoric as the first declaration twenty years earlier. The Reagan administration, as you know, I'm sure, came into office announcing that a war on terrorism would be the core of U.S. foreign policy, and it condemned what the president called the "evil scourge of terrorism. " ~ The main focus was state-supported international terrorism in the Islamic world, and at that time also in Central America. International terrorism was described as a plague spread by "depraved opponents of civilization itself," in "a return to barbarism in the modern age." Actually, I'm quoting the administration moderate, Secretary of State George Shultz.

The phrase I quoted from Reagan had to do with terrorism in the Middle East, and it was the year 1985. That was the year in which international terrorism in that region was selected by editors as the lead story of the year in an annual Associated Press poll, so point one that our Martian would report is that the year 2001 is the second time that this has been the main lead story, and that the war on terrorism has been redeclared pretty much as before.

Furthermore, there's a striking continuity; the same people are in leading positions. So Donald Rumsfeld is running the military component of the second phase of the war on terrorism, and he was Reagan's special envoy to the Middle East during the first phase of the war on terrorism, including the peak year, 1985. The person who was just appointed a couple of months ago to be in charge of the diplomatic component of the war at the United Nations is John Negroponte, who during the first phase was supervising U.S. operations in Honduras, which was the main base for the U.S. war against terror in the first phase.

Exercising the Power Element
In 1985, terrorism in the Middle East was the lead story, but terrorism in Central America had second rank as the story of the day. Shultz, in fact, regarded the plague in Central America as what he called the most alarming manifestation of it. The main problem, he explained, was "a cancer right here in our hemisphere," and we want to cut it out and we'd better do it fast because the cancer was openly proclaiming the goals of Hitler's Mein Kampf and was just about to take over the world. And it was really dangerous. The danger was so severe that on Law Day 1985, the president announced a state of national emergency because of, as he put it, "the unusual and extraordinary threat to the national security and foreign policy of the United States" posed by this cancer. (Law Day, incidentally, is the day that in the rest of the world is commemorated as a day in solidarity with the struggles of American workers. In the United States it's a jingoist holiday, May 1.) This state of emergency was renewed annually until finally the cancer was cut out. Secretary of State Shultz explained that the danger was so severe that you can't keep to gentle means; in his words (April 14, 1986), "Negotiations are a euphemism for capitulation if the shadow of power is not cast across the bargaining table." He condemned those who "seek utopian legalistic means like outside mediation, the United Nations, and the World Court while ignoring the power element of the equation."

The United States had been, in fact, exercising the power element of the equation with mercenary forces based in Honduras, under the supervision of John Negroponte, while it was successfully blocking pursuit of utopian legalistic means by the World Court, the Latin American countries, and of course the cancer itself, bent on world conquest.

The media agreed. The only question that arose, really, was tactics. There was the usual hawk/dove debate. The position of the hawks was expressed pretty well by the editors of The New Republic (April 4, 1984). They demanded, in their words, that we continue to send military aid to "Latin-style fascists...regardless of how many are murdered," because "there are higher American priorities than Salvadoran human rights," or anywhere else in the region. That's the hawks.

The doves argued, on the other hand, that these means were just not going to work, and they proposed alternative means to return Nicaragua, the cancer, to the "Central American mode" and impose "regional standards" on it. I'm quoting the Washington Post (March 14,1986; March 19, 1986). The Central American mode and the regional standards were those of the terror states E1 Salvador and Guatemala, which were at that time massacring, torturing, and devastating in ways I don't have to describe. So we had to return Nicaragua to the Central American mode as well, according to the doves.

The op-eds and editorials in the national press were divided on this roughly fifty-fifty between the hawks and the doves. There were exceptions, but they're literally at the level of statistical error. There's material on this in print, and there has been for a long time if you want to take a look. In the other major region where the plague was raging at that time, in the Middle East, uniformity was even more extreme.

Same War, Different targets
Well, the intelligent Martian would certainly pay great attention to all of this very recent history, in fact with remarkable continuity, so that the front pages on Mars would report that the so-called war on terror is redeclared by the same people against rather similar targets, although, he would point out, not quite the same targets.

The depraved opponents of civilization itself in the year 2001 were in the 1980s the freedom fighters organized and armed by the CIA and its associates, trained by the same special forces who are now searching for them in caves in Afghanistan. They were a component of the first war against terror and acting pretty much the same way as the other components of the war against terror.

They didn't hide their terrorist agenda that began early on, in fact in 1981, when they assassinated the President of Egypt, and is continuing. That included terrorist attacks inside Russia severe enough so that at one point they virtually led to a war with Pakistan, although these attacks stopped after the Russians withdrew from Afghanistan in 1989, leaving the ravaged country in the hands of the U.S. favorites, who turned at once to mass murder, rape, terror-generally described as the worst period in Afghanistan's history. They're now back in charge outside of Kabul.

According to this morning's Wall Street Journal (January 22, 2001), two of the major warlords are now approaching what could turn out to be a major war. Let's hope not.

All of this is headline news in the Martian press- along, of course, with what it all means to the civilian population. That includes vast numbers of people who are still deprived of desperately needed food and other supplies, although food has been available for months but can't be distributed because of conditions; that's after four months.

The consequences of that we don't know, and in fact will never know. Because there's a principle of the intellectual culture that although you investigate enemy crimes with laser-like intensity, you never look at your own-that's quite important-so we can only give very vague estimates of the number of Vietnamese or Salvadoran or other corpses that we've left around.

The Heresy of Moral Equivalence
As I say, this would be headlines on Mars. A good Martian reporter would also want to clarify a couple of basic ideas. First of all, he'd like to know what exactly is terrorism. And, secondly, what's the proper response to it. Well, whatever the answer to the second question is, that proper response must satisfy some moral truisms, and the Martian can easily discover what these truisms are, at least as understood by the leaders of the self-declared war on terrorism, because they tell us, they tell us constantly, that they are very pious Christians, who therefore revere the Gospels, and have certainly memorized the definition of "hypocrite" given prominently in the Gospels-namely, the hypocrites are those who apply to others the standards that they refuse to accept for themselves.

So the Martian understands, then, that in order to rise to the absolutely minimal moral level we have to agree, in fact insist, that if some act is right for us then it's right for others, and if it's wrong when others do it then it's wrong when we do it. Now that's the most elementary of moral truisms, and once the Martian realizes that, he can pack up his bags and go back to Mars. Because his research task is over. He would be unlikely to find a phrase, a single phrase in the vast coverage and commentary about the war on terrorism that even begins to approach this minimal standard. Don't take my word for it; try the experiment. I don't want to exaggerate-you can probably find the phrase now and then, way out at the margins, though very rarely.

Nevertheless, this moral truism is recognized within the mainstream. It's understood to be an extremely dangerous heresy, and therefore it's necessary to erect impregnable barriers against it, even before anybody exhibits it, even though it's so rare. In fact, there's even a technical vocabulary available in case anybody would dare to engage in the heresy, to involve themselves in the heresy that we should abide by moral truisms that we pretend to revere. The offenders are guilty of something called moral relativism-that means the suggestion that we apply to ourselves the standards we apply to others. Or maybe moral equivalence, which is a term that was invented, I think, by Jeane Kirkpatrick to ward off the danger that somebody might dare to look at our own crimes.

Or maybe they're carrying out the crime of America-bashing, or they're anti-Americans. Which is a rather interesting concept. The term is used elsewhere only in totalitarian states, for example in Russia in the old days, where anti-Sovietism was the highest crime. If somebody were to publish a book in Italy, say, called The Anti-Italians, you can imagine what the reaction would be in the streets of Milan and Rome, or in any country where freedom and democracy were taken seriously.

An Unusable Definition
But let's suppose that the Martian isn't deterred by the inevitable tirades and stream of vilification, and suppose he persists in keeping to the most elementary moral truisms. Well, as I said, if he does that, he can just go home, but suppose out of curiosity he decides to stay on and look a little bit further. So, what will happen? Well, back to the question, what is terrorism?-an important one.

There is a proper course for a serious Martian reporter to follow to find the answer to that: Look at the people who declared the war on terrorism and see what they say terrorism is; that's fair enough. And there is in fact an official definition in the U.S. code and Army manuals, and elsewhere. It is defined briefly. Terrorism, as I'm quoting, is defined as "the calculated use of violence or the threat of violence to attain goals that are political, religious or ideological in nature...through intimidation, coercion or instilling fear." Well, that sounds simple; as far as I can see, it's appropriate. But we constantly read that the problem of defining terrorism is very vexing and complex, and the Martian might wonder why that's true. And there's an answer.The official definition is unusable. It's unusable for two important reasons. First of all, it's a very close paraphrase of official government policy-very close, in fact. When it's government policy, it's called low-intensity conflict or counterterror.

Incidentally, it's not just the United States. As far as I'm aware, this practice is universal. Just as an example, back in the mid 1960s the Rand Corporation, the research agency connected with the Pentagon mostly, published a collection of interesting Japanese counterinsurgency manuals having to do with the Japanese attack on Manchuria and North China in the 1930s. I was kind of interested-I wrote an article on it at the time comparing the Japanese counterinsurgency manuals with U.S. counterinsurgency manuals for South Vietnam, which are virtually identical. That article didn't fly too well, I should say.

Well, anyhow, it's a fact, and as far as I know it's a universal fact. So that's one reason you can't use the official definition. The other reason you can't do it is much simpler: it just gives all the wrong answers, radically so, as to who the terrorists are. So therefore the official definition has to be abandoned, and you have to search for some kind of sophisticated definition that will give the right answers, and that's hard. That's why you hear that it's such a difficult topic and big minds are wrestling with it and so on.

Fortunately, there is a solution. The solution is to define terrorism as the terrorism that they carry out against us, whoever we happen to be. As far as I know, that's universal-in journalism, in scholarship, and also I think it's a historical universal; at least, I've never found any country that doesn't follow this practice. So, fortunately, there's a way out of the problem. Well, with this useful characterization of terrorism, we can then draw the standard conclusions that you read all the time: namely, that we and our allies are the main victims of terrorism, and that terrorism is a weapon of the weak.

Of course, terrorism in the official sense is a weapon of the strong, like most weapons, but it's a weapon of the weak, by definition, once you comprehend that "terrorism" just means the terrorism that they carry out against us. Then of course it's true by definition that terrorism is a weapon of the weak. And so the people who write it all the time, you see it in the newspapers or the journals, they're right; it's a tautology, and by convention.

Textbook Terrorism
Suppose the Martian goes on to defy what are apparently universal conventions, and he actually accepts the moral truisms that are preached and he also even accepts the official U.S. definition of terrorism. I should say that by this time he's way out in outer space, but let's proceed. If he goes this far, then there certainly are clear illustrations of terrorism. September 11, for example, is a particularly shocking example of a terrorist atrocity. Another equally clear example is the official U.S.-British reaction, which was announced by Admiral Sir Michael Boyce, chief of the British defense staff, and reported in a front- page story in the New York Times in late October (October 28, 2001). He informed the people of Afghanistan that the United States and Britain would continue their attack against them "until they get the leadership changed."Notice that this is a textbook illustration of international terrorism, according to the official definition; I won't reread it but if you think about it, it's just a perfect illustration.Two weeks before that, George Bush had informed the Afghans, the people of Afghanistan, that the attack will go on until they hand over wanted suspects. Remember that overthrow of the Taliban regime was a sort of afterthought brought in a couple of weeks after the bombing, basically for the benefit of intellectuals so they could write about how just the war is.

This of course was also textbook terrorism: We're going to continue to bomb you until you hand over some people we want you to hand over. The Taliban regime did ask for evidence, but the U.S. contemptuously dismissed that request. The U.S., at the very same time, also flatly refused to even consider offers of extradition, which may have been serious, may not have been; we don't know because they were rejected. The Martian would certainly record all of this, and if he did a little homework he would quickly find the reasons, adding many other examples. The reasons are very simple: The world's rulers have to make it clear that they do not defer to any authority. Therefore they do not accept the idea that they should offer evidence, they do not agree that they should request extradition; in fact, they reject UN Security Council authorization, reject it flatly. The U.S. could easily have obtained clear and unambiguous authorization-not for pretty reasons, but it could have obtained it. However, it rejected that option.

And that makes good sense. In fact, there's even a term for this in the literature of international affairs and diplomacy. It's called establishing credibility. Another term for it is declaring that we're a terrorist state and you'd better be aware of the consequences if you get in our way. Now that's, of course, only if we use "terrorism" in its official sense, as it's defined in U.S. government legal code and so on, and that's unacceptable for reasons that I mentioned.

Uncontroversial Cases
Let's go back to the moral truism. According to official doctrine, which is almost universally accepted and described as just and admirable and obviously so, the United States is entitled to conduct a terrorist war against Afghans until they hand over suspects to the United States, which refuses to provide evidence or request extradition, or, in Boyce's later terms, until they change their leadership. Well, anyone who is not a hypocrite in the sense of the Gospels will therefore conclude at once that Haiti is entitled to carry out large-scale terrorism against the United States until it hands over a murderer, Emmanuel Constant, who has already been convicted of leading the terrorist forces that had the major responsibility for four to five thousand deaths.

No question about the evidence in this case. They've requested extradition repeatedly, most recently on September 30, 2001, right in the midst of all the talk about Afghanistan being subjected to terrorism if it doesn't hand over suspected terrorists. Of course, that's only four or five thousand black people. I guess it doesn't count quite as much.

Or perhaps they should carry out massive terror in the United States. Since they can't bomb, maybe bioterror or something, I don't know, until the United States changes its leadership, which is, in fact, responsible for terrible crimes against the people of Haiti right through the twentieth century.

Or certainly, keeping now to moral truisms, Nicaragua is entitled to do the same, incidentally targeting the leaders of the redeclared war on terrorism, the same people often. Recall that the terrorist attack against Nicaragua was far more severe than even September 11; tens of thousands of people were killed, the country was devastated, it may never recover.

Also, this happens to be an uncontroversial example, so we don't have to argue about it. It's uncontroversial because of the judgment of the World Court condemning the United States for international terrorism, backed up by the Security Council in a resolution calling on all states to observe international law-mentioning no one, but everyone knew who they meant-vetoed by the United States, Britain abstaining. Or the judgment of the General Assembly in successive resolutions confirming the same thing, opposed by the United States and one or two client states. The World Court ordered the United States to terminate the crime of international terrorism, to pay massive reparations. The U.S. responded with a bipartisan decision to escalate the attack immediately; I already described the media reaction. All of this continued until the cancer was destroyed and it continues right now.

So in November 2001 there was an election in Nicaragua, right in the middle of the war on terrorism, and the United States radically intervened in the election. It warned Nicaragua that the United States would not accept the wrong outcome, and even gave the reason. The State Department explained that we cannot overlook Nicaragua's role in international terrorism in the 1980s, when it resisted the international terrorist attack that led to the condemnation of the United States for international terrorism by the highest international authorities.

Here all of this passes without comment in an intellectual culture that is simply dedicated passionately to terrorism and hypocrisy, but I guess it might have had some headlines in the Martian press. You might look and see how it was treated here. You might also incidentally try out your favorite theory of "just war" in this uncontroversial case.

Domesticating the Majority
Nicaragua, of course, had some defense against the U.S.-run international terrorism being carried out against it under the pretext of a war on terrorism. Namely, Nicaragua had an army. In the other Central American countries, the terrorist forces that were armed and trained by the U.S. and its clients were the army, so not surprisingly the terrorist atrocities were far worse. That's the Central American mode that the doves said we have to return the cancer to. But in this case the victims weren't the state, and therefore they could not appeal to the World Court or to the Security Council for judgments that would be rejected, tossed into the ashcan of history, except maybe on Mars.

The effects of that terror were long-lasting. Here in the United States, there's a good deal of concern- very properly as a matter of fact-about the very wide-ranging effects of the terrorist atrocities of September 11. So, for example, there's a front-page article in the New York Times (January 22, 2002) about the people who are beyond the reach of benefits for the tragedy that they suffered. Of course, the same is true for those who are victims of vastly worse terrorist crimes, but that's reported only on Mars.

So you might try to find the report, say, of a conference run by Salvadoran Jesuits a couple of years ago. The Jesuits' experiences under U.S. international terrorism were particularly grisly. The conference report stressed the residual effect of what it called the culture of terrorism, which domesticates the aspirations of the majority, who realized that they must submit to the dictates of the ruling terrorist state and its local agents or they will again be returned to the Central American mode, as recommended by the doves at the peak of the state-supported international terrorism of the eightees. Unreported here, of course; maybe headlines on Mars.

Time's Person of the Year: You

By Lev Grossman
From Time Magazine
2006

The "Great Man" theory of history is usually attributed to the Scottish philosopher Thomas Carlyle, who wrote that "the history of the world is but the biography of great men." He believed that it is the few, the powerful and the famous who shape our collective destiny as a species. That theory took a serious beating this year.

To be sure, there are individuals we could blame for the many painful and disturbing things that happened in 2006. The conflict in Iraq only got bloodier and more entrenched. A vicious skirmish erupted between Israel and Lebanon. A war dragged on in Sudan. A tin-pot dictator in North Korea got the Bomb, and the President of Iran wants to go nuclear too. Meanwhile nobody fixed global warming, and Sony didn't make enough PlayStation3s.

But look at 2006 through a different lens and you'll see another story, one that isn't about conflict or great men. It's a story about community and collaboration on a scale never seen before. It's about the cosmic compendium of knowledge Wikipedia and the million-channel people's network YouTube and the online metropolis MySpace. It's about the many wresting power from the few and helping one another for nothing and how that will not only change the world, but also change the way the world changes.

The tool that makes this possible is the World Wide Web. Not the Web that Tim Berners-Lee hacked together (15 years ago, according to Wikipedia) as a way for scientists to share research. It's not even the overhyped dotcom Web of the late 1990s. The new Web is a very different thing. It's a tool for bringing together the small contributions of millions of people and making them matter. Silicon Valley consultants call it Web 2.0, as if it were a new version of some old software. But it's really a revolution.

And we are so ready for it. We're ready to balance our diet of predigested news with raw feeds from Baghdad and Boston and Beijing. You can learn more about how Americans live just by looking at the backgrounds of YouTube videos—those rumpled bedrooms and toy-strewn basement rec rooms—than you could from 1,000 hours of network television.

And we didn't just watch, we also worked. Like crazy. We made Facebook profiles and Second Life avatars and reviewed books at Amazon and recorded podcasts. We blogged about our candidates losing and wrote songs about getting dumped. We camcordered bombing runs and built open-source software.

America loves its solitary geniuses—its Einsteins, its Edisons, its Jobses—but those lonely dreamers may have to learn to play with others. Car companies are running open design contests. Reuters is carrying blog postings alongside its regular news feed. Microsoft is working overtime to fend off user-created Linux. We're looking at an explosion of productivity and innovation, and it's just getting started, as millions of minds that would otherwise have drowned in obscurity get backhauled into the global intellectual economy.

Who are these people? Seriously, who actually sits down after a long day at work and says, I'm not going to watch Lost tonight. I'm going to turn on my computer and make a movie starring my pet iguana? I'm going to mash up 50 Cent's vocals with Queen's instrumentals? I'm going to blog about my state of mind or the state of the nation or the steak-frites at the new bistro down the street? Who has that time and that energy and that passion?

The answer is, you do. And for seizing the reins of the global media, for founding and framing the new digital democracy, for working for nothing and beating the pros at their own game, TIME's Person of the Year for 2006 is you.

Sure, it's a mistake to romanticize all this any more than is strictly necessary. Web 2.0 harnesses the stupidity of crowds as well as its wisdom. Some of the comments on YouTube make you weep for the future of humanity just for the spelling alone, never mind the obscenity and the naked hatred.

But that's what makes all this interesting. Web 2.0 is a massive social experiment, and like any experiment worth trying, it could fail. There's no road map for how an organism that's not a bacterium lives and works together on this planet in numbers in excess of 6 billion. But 2006 gave us some ideas. This is an opportunity to build a new kind of international understanding, not politician to politician, great man to great man, but citizen to citizen, person to person. It's a chance for people to look at a computer screen and really, genuinely wonder who's out there looking back at them. Go on. Tell us you're not just a little bit curious.

Rue Mumia Abu-Jamal: Fighting Injustice at Home & Abroad

Mumia Abu-Jamal, arguably the world's most famous political prisoner is still on death row in Pennsylvania.

By Hans Bennett
From Asheville Global Report
2006

Oct. 2- This April, the French city of St. Denis (a Paris suburb) named a major street after Pennsylvania death row prisoner and journalist Mumia Abu-Jamal. Located in the Cristino Garcia District of the city (named after an anti-Franco Spanish Republican), Rue Mumia Abu-Jamal leads directly to the largest sports arena in Europe: "Nelson Mandela Stadium."

At the Rue Mumia inauguration ceremony, Mayor Didier Paillard declared: "Mumia's struggle is a symbol for justice, the abolition of the death penalty, human rights, and resistance against a system which has the arrogance to reign over the world in the name of those same human rights that it tramples with complete impunity on its own soil."

In response to the street-naming, resolutions condemning St. Denis were introduced in the US Congress, the Pennsylvania State Senate, and the Philadelphia City Council.

In September, a delegation visited from France to defend Rue Mumia. They attempted to meet with Philadelphia Mayor John Street, but after several hours of being ignored, they left his office to speak at a town meeting nearby organized by Mumia's local supporters.

At the town meeting, the visitors proclaimed: "As long as the city of St. Denis exists, we will have Rue Mumia Abu-Jamal." Mumia's supporters later presented their own resolution defending Rue Mumia at the City Council.

A history of international support
Mumia Abu-Jamal has arguably become the world's most famous political prisoner.
Mumia's international supporters include the Japanese Diet, the European Parliament, and members of both the British & German Parliaments.

In 2003 he was declared an honorary citizen of Paris — the first time since Pablo Picasso was similarly honored in the 1970s.

In 1982 he was convicted of killing white Philadelphia police officer Daniel Faulkner in a trial that Amnesty International has declared a "violation of minimum international standards that govern fair trial procedures and the use of the death penalty."

Calling for a new trial, supporters around the world feel that the original one was tainted by racism, prosecutorial and judicial misconduct, coerced witnesses, suppressed evidence, and a denial of Mumia's constitutional right to represent himself.

His case has attracted activists around the world organizing against racism, poverty, corporate media censorship, mass incarceration, political repression and the death penalty.

Activist Noam Chomsky argues that "Mumia's case is symbolic of something much broader.... The US prison system is simply class and race war.... Mumia and other prisoners are the kind of people that get assassinated by what's called 'social cleansing' in US client states like Colombia."

Still on death row
In December 2001, Federal District Court Judge William Yohn affirmed Abu-Jamal's guilt but overturned the death sentence. Citing the 1988 Mills v. Maryland precedent, Yohn ruled that sentencing forms used by jurors and Judge Sabo's instructions to the jury were confusing.

Subsequently, jurors mistakenly believed that they had to unanimously agree on any mitigating circumstances in order to be considered as weighing against a death sentence.

Mumia's case is now in the federal Third Circuit Court of Appeals. DA Lynne Abraham is appealing the death penalty ruling while Mumia is appealing the guilty verdict.

If the penalty ruling is overturned, a new execution date will be set for Mumia. If his ruling is upheld, the DA can still impanel a new jury to rehear the penalty phase, which could then sentence Mumia to death—regardless of the 3rd Circuit ruling. Because the DA appealed Yohn's death penalty decision, Mumia has never left death row, and is still unable to have such "privileges" as full-contact visits with his family.

The legal update
In December 2005, the 3rd Circuit announced the beginning of deliberations and shocked many by agreeing to consider two claims not "certified for appeal" by Yohn in 2001.

Mumia's attorney Robert R. Bryan declared it to be "the most important decision affecting my client since his 1981 arrest, for it was the first time there was a ruling that could lead to a new trial and his freedom." The courts are now considering the following four issues:

#1. Whether the penalty phase of Mumia's trial violated the legal precedent set by the US Supreme Court's 1988 Mills v. Maryland ruling. This issue was Yohn's grounds for overturning the death sentence and is now being appealed by the DA.

#2. "Certified for appeal" by Yohn in 2001, the Batson claim, addresses the prosecution's use of peremptory challenges to exclude blacks from Mumia's jury. In 1986, the US Supreme Court ruled in Batson v. Kentucky that a defendant deserves a new trial if it can be proved that jurors were excluded on the grounds of race.

At Mumia's trial, Prosecutor McGill used 11 of his 15 peremptory challenges to remove black jurors that were otherwise acceptable. While Philadelphia is 44 percent black, Abu-Jamal's jury was composed of ten whites and only two blacks. From 1977-1986 when current Pennsylvania governor Ed Rendell was Philadelphia's District Attorney, the evidence of racism was striking: from 1977-86, the Philadelphia DA struck 58 percent of black jurors, but only 22 percent of white jurors.

#3. The legality of McGill's statement to the jury minimizing the seriousness of a verdict of guilt: "If you find the Defendant guilty of course there would be appeal after appeal and perhaps there could be a reversal of the case, or whatever, so that may not be final."

In 1986 the Pennsylvania Supreme Court ruled against McGill in another case (Commonwealth v. Baker) on the same grounds. When Abu-Jamal addressed this same issue in his 1989 appeal with the State Supreme Court, the court reversed its decision on the legality of such a statement — ruling against the claim for a mistrial.

Incredibly, just one year later, in the very next case involving this issue (Commonwealth v. Beasley), the State Supreme Court flip-flopped and restored the precedent. However, this would not affect the ruling against Mumia, because the court ruled that this precedent would only apply in "future trials." This suggests that the rulings were designed to specifically exclude Mumia's case from its precedent.

#4. The fairness of Mumia's 1995-97 PCRA hearings when the retired, 74-year-old Judge Sabo was called back specifically for the hearing. Besides the obvious unfairness of recalling the exact same judge to rule on his fairness in the original 1982 trial, his actual PCRA bias has been extensively documented.

During the 1995 hearings, the Philadelphia Inquirer wrote that the "behavior of the judge in the case was disturbing the first time around — and in hearings last week he did not give the impression to those in the courtroom of fair mindedness. Instead, he gave the impression, damaging in the extreme, of undue haste and hostility toward the defense's case."

Concluding the PCRA hearing, Sabo rejected all evidence and every witness presented by the defense as not being credible. Therefore, Sabo upheld all of the facts and procedures of the original trial as being correct.

'I'm going to help them fry the nigger'
In 2001 another witness —Terri Mauer-Carter — challenged Sabo's integrity, but the State Supreme Court ruled against the defense's right to include her affidavit in their current federal appeal.
Mauer-Carter was working as a stenographer in the Philadelphia Court system on the eve of Mumia's 1982 trial when she states that she overheard Judge Sabo say in reference to Mumia's case that he was going to help the prosecution "fry the nigger."

Journalist Dave Lindorff recently interviewed Mauer-Carter's former boss, Richard Klein, who was with Mauer-Carter when she states she overheard Sabo. A Philadelphia Common Pleas Court judge at the time, who now sits on PA's Superior Court, Klein told Lindorff: "I won't say it did happen, and I won't say it didn't. That was a long time ago." Lindorff considers Klein's refusal to firmly reject Mauer-Carter's claim to be an affirmation of her statement.

The State Supreme Court ruling was an affirmation of lower-level Judge Patricia Dembe's argument that even if Maurer-Carter is correct about Sabo's stated intent to use his position as Judge to throw the trial and help the prosecution "fry the nigger," it doesn't matter. According to Dembe, since it "was a jury trial, as long as the presiding Judge's rulings were legally correct, claims as to what might have motivated or animated those rulings are not relevant."

Organizing for Dec. 9
Pam Africa (coordinator of Mumia's support network) told Ashville Global Report: "When we defend Rue Mumia, we call attention to Mumia's current battle in the courts. We know the Supreme Court won't hear his case, so this current phase truly is the last chance for a new trial.

"I believe Mumia is innocent and am personally calling for his immediate release. However, I'll work with anyone supporting a fair trial. By demanding a new trial, we can work with those who know the trial was rotten but are unsure of Mumia's innocence."

Philly supporters are organizing for Dec. 9 — the 25th anniversary of Abu-Jamal's incarceration. Africa is urging supporters to come to Philly or otherwise organize an event in their hometown. "Mumia's case represents all that is wrong with this system," said Africa. "We must take action now before it is too late!"

Hans Bennett is a Philadelphia-based photojournalist who has been documenting the movement to free Mumia and all political prisoners for more than 5 years. He can be contacted via email.

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