Is 350′s Carbon Divestment Campaign Complete?
This article by Christian Parenti is re-posted from CounterPunch.
Three Critiques and a Suggestion
I have much respect for Bill McKibben and 350.org, the organization he started. Future generations will hail the 350 activists of today as heroes. That said I am very worried about the pitfalls of 350′s current “Do the Math” campaign, which seeks to pressure universities, churches and other institutions to divest their investment portfolios of all fossil fuel stocks.
Though elegant in its simplicity — attacking Big Carbon directly — this symbolically charged strategy (or rather tactic) suffers three crucial weaknesses. First, it misrecognizes the basic economics of the fossil fuel industry and thus probably won’t hurt it. Second, it misrecognizes the nature and function of the stock market. Third, it ignores the potentially very important role of government in addressing the climate crisis.
The divestment campaign flows from an excellent article McKibben wrote which makes the stark point that we cannot burn all the fossil fuel currently in the ground without crossing the line into truly dangerous, potentially self-fueling climate change. His punch line: We must attack the fossil fuel industry.
The 350 campaign has started with a big 21 city road show to get the word out. From there, smaller groups are starting to pressure universities, churches and other institutions to divest their fossil fuel stocks. The website for the 350′s tour explains the divestment strategy as follows:
The one thing we know the fossil fuel industry cares about is money. Universities, pension funds, and churches invest a lot of it. If we start with these local institutions and hit the industry where it hurts — their bottom line — we can get their attention and force them to change.
And the spectacle of targeting the enemy — giving them a name and an address — is great but it needs to be linked to other forms of leverage. Namely, we need to also focus on state power and what we can do with it. The movement should be demanding that government at every level move to contain and control Big Carbon and to directly support alternative energy. Regulation is the only thing that will actually check the industries — oil, gas, coal — that are destroying the planet. (More on which below.)
I am all for dumping carbon stocks, if for no other reason than a sense of decency and honor. But how is dumping oil stock supposed to hurt the enemy? The boards of oil companies will be embarrassed? The spectacle of the discussion around divestment might provoke actions on other fronts — like legislation? I am not at all clear on how this is supposed to work. And I am not sure McKibben or 350 are either.
How Does Big Carbon Make Money?
First, the assumption that we can hit the fossil fuel giants’ “bottom line” by going after their stock prices is deeply flawed. It unconsciously plays into a very neoliberal, or right-wing, set of nostrums that markets can fix things and that government is, as Mckibben often says, is “broken.” But more to the point, it is deeply confused about how wealth is actually produced.
Consider Exxon Mobil, the world’s largest company by profits. It makes its money by selling oil and related products, not by selling stock. In fact, many of the key players in the oil industry do not even sell stocks.
For example the most infamous climate deniers, Koch Industries, sell no shares on stock markets. Koch Industries, being privately held, is thus not even on the 350 target list.
Most of the largest oil companies in the world are actually state-owned. As Forbes put it:
More than 70% of world oil reserves, and an even greater percentage of the remaining reserves of ‘easy oil’ are held by national oil companies controlled by kings and potentates and even some democratically elected governments.
Huge government-owned oil companies include Saudi Aramco, Gasprom, PDVSA, The Iran National Oil company, Rosnef, PetroBras, Pemex and Petro China.
And how do we actually sustain and feed Exxon, Chevron, Shell and the rest? Not as investors, but as consumers. We give them money when we buy gasoline. Economically speaking, more effective than a divestment campaign would be a gas boycott; though it would be next to impossible given the current structure of our transportation sector. This brings us to the next question.
What is the Real Function of the Stock Market?
The official version of capitalism holds the stock markets exist to help firms raise money for investment. But empirical investigation reveals that the opposite is more often the case. In reality, the stock market, though culturally powerful, is not particularly important to how capitalism actually creates wealth (and pollution).
As Doug Henwood showed in his classic book Wall Street, for most major companies, the stock market is a net drain (not a source) of capital. Working off Henwood’s writing, the journalist, blogger and economist Josh Mason put it well, “The function of the stock market in modern capitalism is to get money out of corporations, not put money into them.”
In other words, publicly traded companies tend to have less money for investment than private ones. As The Economist noted recently:
One study shows that [publicly] listed companies have invested only 4% of their total assets, compared with 10% for ‘observably similar’ privately held companies.
The real function of stock markets is to allow the owning class to distribute their risk across the whole economy. Stocks also incentivize managers by giving them a real (but liquid) form of ownership in the same firms they work for. Stock IPOs payback original private investors. Pension funds allow retired workers to claim some of the wealth produced by current workers, and in the process may give some part of the working class the illusion of an alliance with the real owning class. Stock bubbles allow large speculators to snatch the wealth of late arriving, low information, small investors.
The evidence shows that stock markets are a place to distribute wealth; they are not where the “bottom line” is produced.
Where do firms actually get their income and investment money? From producing and selling real goods and services.
Look again at Exxon Mobil, none of its income or investment money is derived from selling stock, or by issuing debt. It’s income and investment are entirely derived from operating cash flow. That is, from producing and selling petroleum-based products, like oil, gas, asphalt and gasoline. Between 2007 and 2011, the company generated over $240 billion in cash from operations; of that they invested about $94 billion in new capital (more pipelines, drilling rigs, the acquisition of other companies, etc). Meanwhile, Exxon took a much larger amount of its income ($164 billion) and gave it back to investors in the form of dividends, share repurchases and debt reduction.
So how will dumping Exxon stock hurt its income, that is, its bottom line? It might, in fact, improve the company’s price to earning ratio thus making the stock more attractive to immoral buyers. Or it could allow the firm to more easily buy back stock (which it has been doing at a massive scale for the last 5 years) and thus retain more of its earnings for use to develop more oil fields.
What Good is Government?
The third big flaw in the divestment campaign is that it, as yet, ignores the potentially very powerful role of government; this, despite Mckibben acknowledging government’s potentially central role. As he said in the kick off article:
If you put a price on carbon, through a direct tax or other methods, it would enlist markets in the fight against global warming. Once Exxon has to pay for the damage its carbon is doing to the atmosphere, the price of its products would rise. Consumers would get a strong signal to use less fossil fuel — every time they stopped at the pump, they’d be reminded that you don’t need a semi-military vehicle to go to the grocery store. The economic playing field would now be a level one for nonpolluting energy sources.
Absolutely correct! But I do not see how stock divestment raises the price of gas. Regulation and taxes, on the other hand, could do that.
Luckily, the laws we need already exist. Thanks to the case Massachusetts v. Environmental Protection Agency, the EPA has the obligation to regulate — that is limit the emissions of — CO2 and other potent greenhouse gases. As Kassie Siegel, an attorney with the Center for Biological Diversity has explained it:
“the United States has the strongest environmental laws in the world… The Clean Air Act can achieve everything we need: a 40 percent reduction of greenhouse gas emissions over 1990 levels by 2020.”
So far the EPA is sitting on 30 rules that it must issue as a result of Mass v. EPA. Clearly Obama put a muzzle on the agency in his first term and has cowered in the face of right-wing attacks on the EPA. So the positive impact of Mass v. EPA is stalled out. But the movement has not pressured for action on this front. First there was the pointless chard of “comprehensive climate legislation” in first two yeas of the Obama era. Now, we are focused on divestment but with no real discussion of the important things government can do, right now, if pressured by grassroots action.
Another tool that the government could use is to reorient government procurement away from fossil fuel energy, toward clean energy and technology — to use the government’s vast spending power to create a market for green energy. After all, the government didn’t just fund the invention of the microprocessor; it was also the first major consumer of the device. For most of its first three decades of activity, IBM– which lead the creation of computers — got more than half of its business from federal contracts.
In other words, government consumption (not just its R&D investment) is a powerful force that has created whole markets and new technologies.
Elsewhere I have called this strategy the Big Green Buy. Consider this: Altogether federal, state and local government (“total government expenditures”) constitute more than 38 percent of our GDP. The federal government spent about $3.6 trillion last year. It owns or leases more than 430,000 buildings (mostly large office buildings) and 650,000 vehicles. It is the world’s largest consumer of energy and vehicles, and the nation’s largest greenhouse gas emitter. Add state and local government activity, and all those numbers grow by about a third again.
A redirection of government purchasing toward wind, solar power, etc., plus robust action by the EPA – that is, imposition of a de facto carbon tax (if you emit too much you pay a fine) — would create massive markets for clean power, electric vehicles and efficient buildings, and would simultaneously drive private investment toward that market.
This strategy — call it cap and buy — could and should happen at the state and local level as well. I hope that 350 campaigners and others will add these ideas to their strategy. Activists can pressure their universities, churches and towns, as well as their state and local governments to buy clean power and electric vehicles, retrofit buildings for efficiency, and pressure the federal government to allow the EPA to do its job and enforce the clean air act, very vigorously.
Let’s be honest. The only force on earth that can really control Exxon is the U.S. government. Moral outrage and symbolic action — like divestment — won’t bring it down.
Again, history and people are ignored in yet another MLive story about Wealthy/Division area
Ok, so how hard is it to talk to people who have actually lived south of Wealthy near Division Street? They are not unapproachable or frightening despite the unfounded stereotypes.
Everyone in that neighborhood, once called the Forgotten Corners, has a story and a history. Some of the residents have lived there since the 1950s and have seen numerous changes, both good and bad. So, I ask you, why are they and their perspectives not included in the coverage of the Wealthy/Division “development” projects?
Instead of residents, however, MLive readers hear from the entity in charge of the “development” project, ICCF. ICCF’s director assures readers that the, “neighborhood’s low income residents don’t get pushed out in the rush.” However, there is nothing in the article that actually explains how low income neighbors will not be pushed out.
The article does says that ICCF and the Baker Lofts project is setting aside rental units for low income people, but that doesn’t have anything to do with the existing residents.
Such a statement from the director of ICCF also ignores the fact that all the people living in houses on the 400 block of Sheldon had to move, since those houses were torn down or are in the process of being torn down. Most of those houses were rental units, but they had individuals and families who were living there and now do not live in that neighborhood.
According to a 2002 ICCF document that was the product of neighborhood planning meetings, they state, “All current home owners will be able to continue to enjoy their homes, including some form of protection against tax increases that could threaten their ownership in the future.” If this was the case, why were those living on the 400 block of Sheldon asked to leave? And why are other neighbors being asked to sell their property & homes for the purpose of tearing them down to build new properties, as I have been told by several neighbors on the 500 block of Sheldon and LaGrave?
Again, why are these voices not included in this narrative? Why does someone else always speak on behalf of the “poor” or “low income residents?” Because, they don’t matter and never have in the 28 years I lived in that neighborhood.
New Report and Video calls out Obama administration for killing children with drones
A new report from the War Costs calls out the Obama administration for killing children with the use of predator drones in its ongoing imperialist military policies in countries such as Pakistan, Yemen and Afghanistan.
The report, entitled Youth Disrupted: Effects of US Drones Strikes on Children in Targeted Areas, details the deaths and other ways that the use of US drones is impacting children and their families. The report states:
The United States’ secretive, CIA-run drone-strike policy has led to the deaths of 178 children in Pakistan and Yemen, according to data meticulously collected by The Bureau of Investigative Journalism. Those 178 are part of at least 900 innocent civilians who have died from U.S. drone strikes.
In addition, War Costs created this short video that names the children killed by US predator drones and mixes in comments from the Obama administration either denying civilian casualties or justifying them as collateral damage.
Viral Apartheid: The Rise of HIV Exceptionalism the theme of presentation at GVSU for World AIDS Day
Earlier today, there was a presentation at the downtown campus of GVSU, hosted by the LGBT Resource Center.
HIV activist and journalist with the American Independent News Network, Todd Heywood, gave a talk entitled Viral Apartheid: The Rise of HIV Exceptionalism.
Todd himself is HIV positive and has been reporting on HIV for years and is in the process of writing a book, also entitled Viral Apartheid.
He began with a graph that showed criminal prosecution of people who are HIV positive. Michigan has the second highest number of prosecuted cases in the country. One of the barriers to actually knowing how many cases have been prosecuted is due to the fact that HIV cases are often listed as felonious assault crimes.
The second layer of criminalization is the use of general criminal laws. For example, someone who is HIV positive and assaults someone else could be charged with bio-terrorism or other crimes, because of how the law defines HIV.
Heywood said that much of this is this due to the fact that America is generally ignorant about HIV/AIDS. Most people get their information from US news media, which Heywood says, “sucks on basic information on this issue.” The Kaiser Family Foundation report noted that most Americans have a 1987 level of understanding on these issues, which means that people still think you can be infected from a mosquito.
This lack of understanding on HIV issues also gets translated into law enforcement, where the police have internalized the misinformation about HIV. The CDC acknowledges that those who are HIV positive will lead norm lives, but the popular perception is that HIV is a “death sentence.”
Heywood said that this misinformation about disease in the US is more than a century old, in that it has been influenced by people he indentifies as “sanitarians,” people who have most often framed disease as something those in poverty create.
In 1890, the Koch postulate on germ theory, was published and led to the creation and use of antibiotics and vaccines. Much of this has been beneficial, but one negative outcome has been that American medical schools directed students away from studying infectious diseases beginning in 1980, because of the belief that there was no real need to further study this field of public health. Ironically, this was right at the time that HIV came on the scene.
The CDC set up its first task force in 1981, after several deaths had occurred in the US from HIV. Some of the early funding was directed at whether or not “too much sperm” was the cause of HIV.
In 1984, it was finally discovered what the virus was and Heywood said that the US media began reporting on this issue in 1985. Some reactions from this early reporting was that hospital workers wouldn’t treat those who were HIV positive and funeral homes would not take the bodies.
The federal government announced in 1985 that a cure must be found for this new disease before it gets out of the “high risk” group, which Heywood said was code for gays. Heywood believes that what motivated the federal government’s action was to stop the virus before it infected the “heterosexual community.”
Heywood says that from the get go those who were HIV positive were criminalized and that criminalization continues through to today. The 1988 federal commission on AIDS put forth recommendations, with the ones that emphasized criminalization as the ones getting most attention.
The federal law was later amended, which put emphasis on the idea of “intent to transmit the disease,” which continued to put the blame on those who were HIV positive. In 1988, the free market think tank American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) produced a report, which promoted a particular drug as a cure. Written by Michael Tanner, the report was actually created by the pharmaceutical industry as a mechanism to make money. Tanner has since said the law are outdated and need to be changed.
In 2010, the National HIV/AIDS Strategy said that the emphasis on criminalization is not really working, so states should go back and review it in order to make changes. The federal government wants to make changes, but they cannot until the states invite them to do so. The federal government acknowledges that the current legislation violates the human and civil rights of people who are HIV positive, but this position has not translated into policy.
Heywood then presented what he called the evidence of failure on existing HIV policy that emphasizes criminalization. He said the current risk of transmission is .5% in the US. The CDC uses these numbers and this is without accounting for the use of condoms and HIV drugs, which make the transmission of HIV almost impossible. Nonetheless, people can still go to prison just for being HIV positive. By contrast, Gonorrhea transmission rates are 60 – 90%, yet there is no criminal prosecution for non-disclosure of Gonorrhea.
Heywood also said there is tremendous racial disparity in legal cases involving people who are HIV positive. Black men who have sex with White women represented 14% of the cases of HIV in the surveyed counties, but represented 41% of the defendants. Conversely, White men who have sex with men represent 39% of HIV cases in the region, but only 15% of the defendants.
In the end, criminalization does not prevent the spread of HIV and in fact, it increases the actual amount of transmission. Being HIV positive also put you at risk of being marginalized and increases your risk of being the victim of violence. Heywood stated that 78% of women who are HIV positive are the victims of domestic violence, due to the fact that they have to disclose.
Heywood ended his comments by saying that if we are to reverse the trend of criminalizing those who are HIV positive there needs to be more conversation about this issue, particularly in the LGBT community, people need to get tested and there needs to be greater emphasis of outreach, particularly to those who are not HIV positive.
Here is a slideshow that Heywood used during his presentation, which provides more details of the history and current laws, as well as sources for his data and citations.
Gaza and the UN Resolution
This article by Noam Chomsky is re-posted from ZNet.
An old man in Gaza held a placard that reads: “You take my water, burn my olive trees, destroy my house, take my job, steal my land, imprison my father, kill my mother, bombard my country, starve us all, humiliate us all but I am to blame: I shot a rocket back.”1
The old man’s message provides the proper context for the timelines on the latest episode in the savage punishment of Gaza. They are useful, but any effort to establish a “beginning” cannot help but be misleading. The crimes trace back to 1948, when hundreds of thousands of Palestinians fled in terror or were expelled to Gaza by conquering Israeli forces, who continued to truck them over the border for years after the official cease-fire. The persecution of Gazans took new forms when Israel conquered the Strip in 1967. From recent Israeli scholarship we learn that the goal of the government was to drive the refugees into the Sinai, and if feasible the rest of the population too.
Expulsions from Gaza were carried out under the direct orders of General Yeshayahu Gavish, commander of the Southern Command. Expulsions from the West Bank were far more extreme, and Israel resorted to devious means to prevent the return of those expelled, in direct violation of Security Council orders. The reasons were made clear in internal discussion immediately after the war. Golda Meir, later Prime Minister, informed her Labor colleagues that Israel should keep the Gaza Strip while “getting rid of its Arabs.” Defense Minister Dayan and others agreed. Prime Minister Eshkol explained that those expelled cannot be allowed to return because “We cannot increase the Arab population in Israel” – referring to the newly occupied territories, already tacitly considered part of Israel. In accord with this conception, all of Israel’s maps were changed, expunging the Green Line (the internationally recognized borders), though publication was delayed to permit UN Ambassador Abba Eban to attain what he called “favorable impasse” at the General Assembly, by concealing Israel’s intentions.2
The goals may remain alive, and might be a factor contributing to Egypt’s reluctance to open the border to free passage of people and goods barred by the US-backed Israeli siege.
The current upsurge of US-Israeli violence dates to January 2006, when Palestinians voted “the wrong way” in the first free election in the Arab world. Israel and the US reacted at once with harsh punishment of the miscreants, and preparation of a military coup to overthrow the elected government, routine procedure. The punishment was radically intensified in 2007, when the coup attempt was beaten back, and the elected Hamas government established full control over Gaza.
The standard version of these events is more anodyne, for example, in the New York Times, November 29: “Hamas entered politics by running in, and winning, elections in the Palestinian territories in 2006. But it was unable to govern in the face of Western opposition and in 2007 took power in the Gaza Strip by force, deepening the political split [with Fatah and the Palestinian Authority].”3
Ignoring immediate Hamas offers of a truce after the 2006 election, Israel launched attacks that killed 660 Palestinians in 2006, mostly civilians, one-third minors. The escalation of attacks in 2007 killed 816 Palestinians, 360 civilians and 152 minors. The UN reports that 2879 Palestinians were killed by Israeli fire from April 2006 through July 2012, along with several dozen Israelis killed by fire from Gaza.4
A truce in 2008 was honored by Hamas until Israel broke it in November. Ignoring further truce offers, Israel launched the murderous Cast Lead operation in December. So matters have continued, while the US and Israel also continue to reject Hamas calls for a long-term truce and a political settlement in accord with the international consensus on a two-state settlement that the US has blocked since 1976, when the US vetoed a Security Council resolution to this effect, brought by the major Arab states.
In late 2012 the US devoted extensive efforts to block a General Assembly resolution upgrading Palestine’s status to that of a “non-member observer state.” The effort failed, leaving the US in its usual international isolation on November 29, when the resolution passed overwhelmingly on the anniversary of the 1947 General Assembly vote on partition.5 The reasons Washington frankly offered for its opposition to the resolution were revealing: Palestine might approach the International Criminal Court on Israel’s U.S.-backed crimes, which cannot be permitted judicial review for reasons that are all too obvious. A second concern, the New York Times reported, was that “the Palestinians might use the vote to seek membership in specialized agencies of the United Nations,” which could lead Washington to defund these international organizations, as it cut off financing to UNESCO in 2011 when it dared to admit Palestine as a member. The Master does not tolerate disobedience.6
Israel had warned that it would “go crazy” (“yishtagea”) if the resolution passed, reviving warnings from the 1950s that it would “go crazy” if crossed – not very meaningful then, much more so now.7 And indeed, hours after the UN vote Israel announced its decision to carry forward settlement in Area E1 that connects the vastly expanded Greater Jerusalem that it annexed illegally to the town of Ma’aleh Adumim, greatly expanded under Clinton after the Oslo Accords, with lands extending virtually to Jericho, effectively bisecting the West Bank if the Area E1 corridor is closed by settlement.8 Before Obama, US presidents had barred Israel’s efforts to expand its illegal settlements into the E1 region, so it was compelled to resort to stealth measures, like establishing a police station in the zone. Obama has been more supportive of Israeli criminal actions than his predecessors, and it remains to be seen whether he will keep to a tap on the wrist with a wink, as before.
Israel and the US insist on “direct negotiations” as the only “path to peace.” They also insist on crucial preconditions. First, the negotiations must be under US leadership, which makes as much sense as asking Iran to mediate Sunni-Shiite conflicts in Iraq. Genuine negotiations would take place under the auspices of some neutral party with a claim to international respect, perhaps Brazil, and would have the US and Israel on one side of the table, and most of the rest of the world on the other. A second precondition, left tacit, is that expansion of Israel’s settlements must be allowed to continue in one or another form (as happened, for example, during the formal 10-month “suspension”), with Washington signaling its disapproval while continuing to provide the required support.
The call for “direct negotiations” without substance is an old Israeli tactic to prevent steps towards diplomatic settlement that would impede its expansionist projects. After the 1967 war, the respected diplomat Abba Eban, who was in charge of the effort, was highly praised by Golda Meir and other colleagues in the governing Labor Party for his success at the United Nations in carrying forward “Israel’s peacemaking strategy” of confusion and delay, which came to “take the shape of a consistent foreign policy of deception,” as it is described by Israeli scholar Avi Raz in a detailed review of internal records.9 At that time the tactics angered US officials, who protested vigorously though to no effect. But much has changed since, particularly since Kissinger took control of policy and the US largely departed from the world on Israel-Palestine.
The practice of delay goes back to the earliest Zionist settlement, which sought to “create facts” on the ground while keeping goals obscure. Even the call for a “Jewish commonwealth” was not made officially by the Zionist organization until a May 1942 meeting at the Biltmore hotel in New York.
Returning to Gaza, one element of the unremitting torture of its people is Israel’s “buffer zone” within Gaza from which Gazans are barred entry, almost half of Gaza’s limited arable land according to Sara Roy, the leading academic scholar of Gaza. From September 2005, after Israel transferred its settlers to other parts of the occupied territories, to September 2012, Israeli security forces killed 213 Palestinians in the zone, including 154 who were not taking part in hostilities, 17 of them children.10
From January 2012 to the launching of Israel’s latest killing spree on November 14, Operation Pillar of Defense, one Israeli was reported to have been killed by fire from Gaza while 78 Palestinians were killed by Israel fire.11
The full story is naturally more complex, and considerably uglier.
The first act of Operation Pillar of Defense was to murder Ahmed Jabari. Aluf Benn, editor of Haaretz, describes him as Israel’s “subcontractor” and “border guard” in Gaza, who enforced relative quiet in Gaza for over five years.12 The pretext for the assassination was that during these five years Jabari had been creating a Hamas military force, with missiles from Iran.13 Plainly, if that is true it was not learned on November 14.
A more credible reason was provided by Israeli peace activist Gershon Baskin, who had been involved in direct negotiations with Jabari for years, including plans for the release of the captured Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit. Baskin reports that hours before Jabari was assassinated, “he received the draft of a permanent truce agreement with Israel, which included mechanisms for maintaining the ceasefire in the case of a flare-up between Israel and the factions in the Gaza Strip.” A truce was then in place, called by Hamas on November 12. Israel apparently exploited the truce, Reuters reports, directing attention to the Syrian border in the hope that Hamas leaders would relax their guard and be easier to assassinate.14
Throughout these years, Gaza has been kept on a level of bare survival, imprisoned by land, sea and air. On the eve of the latest attack, the UN reported that 40 percent of essential drugs and more than half of essential medical items were out of stock.15 One of the first of the series of hideous photos that were sent from Gaza in November showed a doctor holding the charred corpse of a murdered child. That one had a personal resonance. The doctor is the director and head of surgery at Khan Yunis hospital, which I had visited a few weeks earlier. In writing about the trip I reported his passionate appeal for desperately needed simple drugs and surgical equipment. These are among the crimes of the US-Israeli siege, and Egyptian complicity.
The casualty rates from the November episode were about normal: over 160 Palestinian dead, including many children, and 6 Israelis. Among the dead were three journalists. The official Israeli justification was that “The targets are people who have relevance to terror activity.” Reporting the “execution” in the New York Times, David Carr observes that “it has come to this: killing members of the news media can be justified by a phrase as amorphous as `relevance to terror activity’.”16
The massive destruction was all in Gaza. Israel used advanced US military equipment for the slaughter and destruction, and relied on US diplomatic support, including the usual US intervention to block a Security Council call for a cease-fire.17
With each such exploit Israel’s global image erodes. The images of terror and destruction, and the character of the conflict, leave few remaining shreds of credibility to the self-declared “most moral army in the world,” at least among people with eyes open.
The pretexts for the assault were also the usual ones. We can put aside the predictable declarations of the perpetrators in Israel and Washington, but even decent people ask what Israel should do when attacked by a barrage of missiles. It’s a fair question, and there are straightforward answers.
One response would be to observe international law, which allows the use of force without Security Council authorization in exactly one case: in self-defense after informing the Security Council of an armed attack, until the Council acts (UN Charter, Article 51). Israel understands that well. That is the course it followed at the outbreak of the June 1967 war, but of course Israel’s appeal went nowhere when it was quickly ascertained that it was Israel that had launched the attack. Israel did not follow this course in November, knowing well what would be revealed in a Security Council debate.
Another narrow response would be to agree to a truce, as appeared quite possible before the operation was launched on November 14, as often before.
There are more far-reaching responses. By coincidence, one illustration is discussed in the current issue of the journal National Interest. The authors, Asia scholars Raffaello Pantucci and Alexandros Petersen, describe China’s reaction after rioting in western Xinjiang province “in which mobs of Uighurs marched around the city beating hapless Han [Chinese] to death.” Chinese president Hu Jintao quickly flew to the province to take charge, senior leaders in the security establishment were fired, and a wide range of development projects were undertaken to address underlying causes of the unrest.18
In Gaza too a civilized reaction is possible. The US and Israel could end the merciless unremitting assault and open the borders, and provide for reconstruction – and if it were imaginable, reparations for decades of violence and repression.
The cease-fire agreement stated that the measures to implement the end of the siege and the targeting of residents in border areas “shall be dealt with after 24 hours from the start of the ceasefire.” There is no sign of steps in this direction. Nor is there any indication of US-Israeli willingness to rescind their policy of separating Gaza from the West Bank in violation of the Oslo Accords, to end the illegal settlement and development programs in the West Bank designed to undermine a political settlement, or in any other way to abandon the rejectionism of the past decades.
Some day, and it must be soon, the world will respond to the plea issued by the distinguished Gazan human rights lawyer Raji Sourani while the bombs were once again raining down on defenseless civilians in Gaza: “We demand justice and accountability. We dream of a normal life, in freedom and dignity.”19
World AIDS Day events at GVSU Today
12 p.m. West Michigan Premiere of “How to Survive a Plague” – Grand River Room, Kirkhof Center, Allendale Campus
12 p.m. VIral Apartheid: The Rise of HIV Exceptionalism – 136E DeVos, Pew Campus, Presented by Todd Heywood – senior reporter for the American Independent News Network and one of Poz Magazine’s Top 100 HIV/AIDS Activists
2 p.m. Harm Reduction, 136E DeVos, Pew Campus, Presented by Pam Lynch – Clinical Supports Supervisor at Central Wellness
6 p.m. West Michigan Premiere of “How to Survive a Plague” – Loosemore Auditorium, Pew Campus
All events are free and open to the public. For more information call 331-2530.
Enbridge’s Proposal to Ship Tar Sands Oil Eastward Puts Ontario and Quebec Communities at Risk
This article is re-posted from EcoWatch.
Pipeline giant Enbridge filed yesterday to seek approval to reverse its Line 9B pipeline to bring more dangerous tar sands oil eastward to Montreal for export. Groups in Canada and the U.S., including Environmental Defence, Greenpeace Canada and Natural Resources Defense Council, are calling on the Canadian National Energy Board to review the full scope of this tar sands proposal.
“This project could turn Ontario into a sewer for dangerous tar sands oil, putting communities at risk of oil spills into drinking water and onto farmland in the most populated part of the country,” said Adam Scott of Environmental Defence. “And all this to allow big oil to increase tar sands production and export.”
Several municipalities, including Hamilton, Toronto, Burlington and Mississauga situated along Line 9’s route have already taken the first step to protect the interests of their citizens, seeking answers on increased risks to water, health and the natural environment from the proposal.
”Enbridge’s plan to reverse its Line 9 pipeline opens the door to piping the toxic tar sands through Ontario and Quebec for export. Enbridge has previously denied any intention of bring tar sands oil east. However, the regulatory documents they filed today clearly opens the door to more dangerous tar sands oil,” said Dr. Keith Stewart of Greenpeace Canada.
In yesterday’s formal application to Canada’s National Energy Board, Enbridge seeks approval to reverse the flow of its Line 9 pipeline to Montreal to transport “heavy crude” oil from western Canada to the east coast, increasing the flow of the pipeline by 25 percent to 300,000 barrels per day. In the application announcement, Enbridge and the National Energy Board acknowledge the line may carry “heavy crude” and its purpose would be to access “western Canadian crude.”
The National Energy Board is required to review all major pipeline projects or modifications in Canada, and has already approved reversal of part of Line 9 between Sarnia, Ontario and Montreal. Citizens from the U.S. and Canada had previously submitted 41,000 comments to the Canadian National Energy Board opposing the first phase of the pipeline reversal.
It is widely understood this filing is part of a larger oil export plan to move tar sands out of Alberta, east through Montreal and down to Maine, raising similar concerns south of the border.
“Communities all over New England are rightfully concerned about increased risks to rivers and lakes from tar sands pipelines, with dozens of citizen-organized educational meetings and protests occurring over the last six months, and thousands of people in the region signing petitions against the pipeline,” said Danielle Droitsch of the Natural Resources Defense Council.
Editor’s Note: I lived in the neighborhood that is the subject of this article for 28 years and therefore have my own lived experience and bias of how I negotiated the people and history of the Wealthy/Division area.
Earlier today on MLive, there was an article about the expansion of downtown Grand Rapids, in the Wealthy/Division area.
Like most coverage up to this point, the article is very one-sided, taking the pro-development/pro-gentrification point of view. Much of the article presented a listing of all the “new developments” in the area and why they will make that area of the city, “a hot destination and a cool new gateway to downtown Grand Rapids.”
Such a statement is an observation of privilege and at the same time it denies history. The Wealthy/Division area has always been a destination of commerce, even though people would not like to compare it to the future forms of commerce.
People will come to shop at stores along Wealthy or stop in at the new downtown market upon its completion, but make no mistake about it, this area has been a destination of commerce for decades.
The more stereotypical forms of commerce that this area has been known for is the commerce of street drugs and sex trafficking. People, not from that neighborhood, would drive to the Wealthy/Division area to buy drugs or pay a sex worker. It was our observation through the past three decades that virtually none of those “buyers” were from that neighborhood and most were White men with money, based on the kind of vehicles and clothing they would wear.
In fact, those selling and buying drugs and those engaged in sex trafficking were never really from the neighborhood, but they used that neighborhood as a place to do commerce. Those of use involved in the neighborhood association and block club did our very best to discourage this kind of commerce, often at great risk to our own safety, but the main factor that empower the street commerce was the absentee landlords in the area that allowed their properties to be spaces were drugs and sex trafficking could be sold. It was also our contention for years that some of those absentee landlords were financial beneficiaries of the street commerce.
It is ironic that one of the people cited in the MLive article is the owner of the Shell gas station on the corner of Division and Wealthy. He made derogatory comments about how unsafe the neighborhood was, yet he made a ton of money off of that neighborhood, particularly since his prices for gas and basic food staples have always been outrageously high.
Those of us who were homeowners in this area, struggled to maintain safe spaces and were always fighting off outside investors who had set their sites on the neighborhood for land speculation or other projects that disregarded those who lived there.
Some examples of this outside land speculation are as follows. In the late 1980s, there was an attempt by a bus company to purchase a whole city block. This bus company did bus tours around the state and needed more land for parking buses than their existing location. However, part of this plan included to displacement of several families and their homes, so the neighborhood fought against it and won.
In the mid-90s, Catholic Central High School was looking to have an outdoor athletic facility closer to their downtown campus and proposed turning the same city block that the bus company looked at into an outdoor track & field space. Again, this would displace homes and families and the neighborhood said no.
In the late 90s there was an attempt to build a youth center in the area, with recreation space and computer labs. This project had some appeal, but upon further investigation, the neighborhood decided that these services were offered in many spaces near our neighborhood and that what we wanted was more homes to be built in the vacant lots that were being coveted by numerous outside groups. This project was also defeated.
Recognizing that outside interests would not go away, we began organizing neighborhood planning meetings. We organized a long-term neighborhood planning session in 1998 and then ICCF organized two additional planning sessions in 2000 and 2002, something I have written about previously. I do not want to repeat much of that previous writing, but do want to point out that in all three of those neighborhood planning meetings we made it clear that we did not want to displace people. In fact, in the 2002 Wealthy – Jefferson Development Initiative, it states, “All current home owners will be able to continue to enjoy their homes, including some form of protection against tax increases that could threaten their ownership in the future.”
Unfortunately, this did not happen and several home owners left, when ICCF bought the vacant land and then offered to buy them out in order to undertake a completely new development project, one that the neighborhood had no say in.
When MLive presents this neighborhood in the way it does with today’s article, it ignores history – a history of the lives of working class people, and it disregards the lives of people who struggled to make ends meet, mostly Black and Latino lives.
There are those, who out of ignorance and privilege, will say, “but isn’t the neighborhood better off with these new developments?” My response would be, it’s not an either or question. One cannot ignore history and people, just because they do not make for hot destinations. The great Indian freedom fighter Mohandas Gandhi once said, “there is no beauty, even in the finest garments, if it causes the oppression and suffering of some people.” Likewise, there can be no complete jubilation in changes taking place at Division and Wealthy if in the process people were displaced, discounted and forgotten.
Paternalism and Ass-Covering in Spielberg’s “Lincoln”
This article by Louis Proyect is re-posted from CounterPunch.
Which film about the abolition of slavery was intended to burnish the reputation of a contemporary President? If you answered that it was Spielberg’s lavishly praised “Lincoln”, you were right. When asked in a November 15th NPR interview whether he saw parallels with the Obama administration, screenwriter Tony Kushner replied:
I think Obama is a great president and I feel that there is immense potential now for building – rebuilding a real progressive democracy in this country after a great deal of damage has been done to it. And I think that it faces many obstacles, and one of its obstacles is an impatience on the part of very good, very progressive people, with the kind of compromising that you were just mentioning, the kind of horse trading that is necessary.
But you would have also been right if you guessed “Amazing Grace”, the 2007 biopic about William Wilberforce, the British parliamentarian who opposed slavery. Its producer Philip Anschutz, the rightwing billionaire who also recently unleashed the toxic defense of charter schools “Won’t Back Down”, clearly intended to promote the agenda of the Christian right and the Bush administration it supported. By turning the abolitionist movement in Britain into a Church-based enterprise, Anschutz sought to legitimize new missionary operations in Africa all too familiar to people with painful memories of the bible and the gun.
The paternalism embodied in both screenplays transcends narrow party affiliations. It is wrapped up in the idea that “good people” on high delivered Black people from their oppression. The chief difference between the two films is Kushner’s decision to eschew hagiography and portray Lincoln as a kind of down-and-dirty dealmaker. This Lincoln had more in common in fact with LBJ than Barack Obama whose pugnaciousness is most often directed at his voting base rather than the billionaires who financed his campaign.
Conservative pundit David Brooks told New York Times readers on November 22nd that this is what “politics” is all about:
To lead his country through a war, to finagle his ideas through Congress, Lincoln feels compelled to ignore court decisions, dole out patronage, play legalistic games, deceive his supporters and accept the fact that every time he addresses one problem he ends up creating others down the road.
Salon.com’s Andrew O’Hehir not only embraces the idea that “legalistic games” must be played; he goes one step further and likens Lincoln’s maneuvers to Obama’s use of a secret “Kill List”:
Like many other people, I’m profoundly disturbed by the way the last two presidents have employed extra-constitutional authority to send purported terrorists to secret prisons, and to order the killing of both foreign civilians and American citizens who aren’t enemy combatants in any ordinary sense. But as “Lincoln” makes clear, in practice, we have entrusted our presidents with the power to violate the law on our behalf for most of our history.
Well, of course. Deploying Predator Drones against wedding parties and freeing the slaves—what’s the difference?
A counter-attack has been emerging against this interpretation. Eric Foner, a leading civil war historian of the left, wrote a letter to the N.Y. Times on November 27th taking issue with Brooks. He reminded its readers that emancipation was as much a product of struggle from below as horse-trading in Congress:
The 13th Amendment originated not with Lincoln but with a petition campaign early in 1864 organized by the Women’s National Loyal League, an organization of abolitionist feminists headed by Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton.
Moreover, from the beginning of the Civil War, by escaping to Union lines, blacks forced the fate of slavery onto the national political agenda.
His letter was in line with an op-ed piece by historian Kate Masur that appeared in the November 12th NYT:
But it’s disappointing that in a movie devoted to explaining the abolition of slavery in the United States, African-American characters do almost nothing but passively wait for white men to liberate them. For some 30 years, historians have been demonstrating that slaves were crucial agents in their emancipation; however imperfectly, Ken Burns’s 1990 documentary “The Civil War” brought aspects of that interpretation to the American public. Yet Mr. Spielberg’s “Lincoln” gives us only faithful servants, patiently waiting for the day of Jubilee.
Like a speck of sand whose irritating qualities can generate an oyster’s pearl, Spielberg’s film might ultimately do some good by stimulating left scholars—both paid and unpaid—into taking a new look at the civil war.
It is likely that Kushner anticipated criticisms from the left and made sure to include a scene of Black soldiers imploring Lincoln to meet their demands for freedom at the beginning of the film. Once this ass-covering business was out of the way, he could go on to what he saw as the far more interesting scenes of Congressmen wrangling with Lincoln over what perks could be received in exchange for a vote for the 13th Amendment—something that to me was equivalent to watching CSPAN with a bad hangover.
The real story of Black soldiers deserves to be told in all its rich detail and all the more so without the paternalism of the 1989 “Glory” that starred Matthew Broderick as the aristocratic Col. Robert Gould Shaw leading a company of bumbling ex-slaves.
According to Guyora Binder, the author of “Did the Slaves Author the Thirteenth Amendment? An Essay in Redemptive History” (Yale Journal of Law & Humanities, Vol. 5, 1993), the Black soldier did a bit more than imploring:
[O]nce the war was won, the presence of a large number of blacks under arms continued to exert pressure on federal policy. Black soldiers were willing to remain mobilized longer than whites and hence played a greater role in maintaining the military occupation of the South after the Civil War. By constituting a substantial portion—in many areas the bulk—of the occupation army, blacks were suddenly in a position to influence the terms of the peace. This was a situation that Northern and Southern whites alike found acutely uncomfortable, impelling efforts to speed the demobilization of black troops: “In addition to charges of incompetence and insubordination, Union generals charged that black troops were hostile and insulting to Southern whites, threatening to white women, and encouraged militancy and insolence among civilian blacks.” Mary Frances Berry has argued that the quickest way literally to pacify these armed guardians of black liberty was to constitutionalize emancipation by passing the Thirteenth Amendment.
One can be relieved that Tony Kushner decided not to depict such “hostile and insulting” black troops since the film would have been a lot closer in spirit to “Gone With the Wind” given his rather shocking remarks to the NPR interviewer:
I think that what Lincoln was doing at the end of the war was a very, very smart thing, and it is maybe one of the great tragedies of American history that people didn’t take him literally after he was murdered, the inability to forgive and to reconcile with the South in a really decent and humane way without any question was one of the causes of a kind of resentment and the perpetuation of alienation and bitterness that led to the quote/unquote “noble cause” and the rise of the Klan and Southern self protection societies and so on. The abuse of the South after they were defeated was a catastrophe and led – helped lead to just unimaginable, untellable human suffering.
For Tony Kushner’s information, the North did “reconcile” with the South in 1877, when Federal troops were withdrawn from the South and the Klan was given a free rein to terrorize Black people. The notion of an “abused” South is rather obscene given the reality of lynching, prison chain gangs, and all the rest.
With respect to Black soldiers and emancipation, there’s more to the story than meets the eye. By 1864, when the 13th Amendment was being drafted, the South itself was ready to abolish slavery and draft the ex-slaves on behalf of the secessionist cause. James McPherson’s magisterial “Battle Cry of Freedom” reports the following:
Robert E. Lee’s opinion would have a decisive influence. For months rumors had circulated that he favored arming the slaves. Lee had indeed expressed his private opinion that “we should employ them without delay [even] at the risk which may be produced upon our social institutions.” On February 18 he broke his public silence with a letter to the congressional sponsor of a Negro soldier bill. This measure was “not only expedient but necessary,” wrote Lee. “The negroes, under proper circumstances, will make efficient soldiers. I think we could at least do as well with them as the enemy… Those who are employed should be freed. It would be neither just nor wise … to require them to serve as slaves.”
In other words, Robert E. Lee advocated the same exact policy as contained in Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation. Lincoln saw the Black soldier as means to an end: preserving the union. For his part, Lee saw them as a means as well: to preserve the confederacy. Black rights were never considered as an end in themselves.
From what I have observed on the Internet, Kushner’s defenders have begun to rally around a talking point, namely that he chose to tell a story about the passage of legislation that did not directly involve Blacks. Since they were not members of the House of Representatives, who could blame him or Spielberg for leaving them out? To fully comprehend how ludicrous this argument is, we can move forward in history to imagine a film about LBJ’s pushing through the Civil Rights Act of 1964 that included not a single important Black civil rights leader: no Martin Luther King Jr., no Bayard Rustin, no Stokely Carmichael, no Andrew Young. People would scream bloody murder. How could you leave them out?
It is easier for Kushner to get away with this sleight of hand by referring to historical events a century earlier about which Americans have little knowledge. Most assume that Lincoln “freed the slaves” and know nothing about the likes of Frederick Douglass. If you refer to a “Radical Republican”, the average American of today would think you were referring to Rush Limbaugh rather than Thaddeus Stevens.
Speaking of which, one of the biggest travesties of “Lincoln” is the way that Stevens (played by Tommy Lee Jones) is represented. He is an irascible cartoon figure akin to Yosemite Sam who when given the floor in the House is more likely to call a Democrat a “nincompoop” than make the case for Black equality. Of course, since the proposal of the Thirteenth Amendment was calculated to sidetrack such a “divisive” discussion, it was in some ways accurate to depict a House with little to say about the social and economic demands of the African-American.
Kushner decided to leave out the Black struggle for full equality and to turn Stevens into some kind of comic relief for obvious reasons. He believes that progress is made through incremental steps orchestrated by wise and beneficent leaders like Lincoln or Obama.
If Hollywood was interested in bankrolling directors like Ken Loach or the late Gillo Pontecorvo, then our expectations might be different. We understand that there are class affinities between someone like Steven Spielberg and Barack Obama. Spielberg donated $1 million to Obama’s Super-PAC, the same committee that attracted $300 thousand from Sam Walton, the Walmart boss whose company Michelle Obama shills for. One big happy family.
Some day when a radicalization as deep as the 1930s or 60s grips American society once again, we might look forward to the making of a film that dramatizes the Black struggle of the 1850s and 60s—something that I and arguably most Americans would find far more interesting than the horse-trading that constitutes the lion’s share of Kushner’s dreadful screenplay.
It would focus on the elections of 1864 when those who Kushner patronized as “very good, very progressive people” but not enlightened enough to see the need for compromise (the people Obama’s ex-Press Secretary Robert Gibbs once described as needing to be “drug tested”) asserted themselves politically in the same fashion as the Black troops: “encouraging militancy and insolence”.
That year the Republicans gathered in Baltimore to deliberate on proposals being submitted to the national convention. A contingent from the Sea Islands of South Carolina—the home of the Gullahs—sought to be seated. Among the group of sixteen was one Robert Smalls, who had won fame early in the war for commandeering a Southern ship and navigating his way to freedom in the North with a group of runaway slaves. The Republicans refused to seat them since they were not prepared to accept Blacks as equals.
Some things never change. On November 26th an obituary for Lawrence Guyot appeared in the Times. It noted:
Mr. Guyot (GHEE-ott) was repeatedly challenged, jailed and beaten as he helped lead fellow members of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and student volunteers from around the nation in organizing Mississippi blacks to vote. In many of the state’s counties, no blacks were registered.
He further pressed the campaign for greater black participation in politics by serving as chairman of the integrated Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, formed to supplant the all-white state Democratic Party. It lost its challenge to the established Mississippi party at the Democratic National Convention in 1964, but its efforts are seen as paving the way for the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
In the long struggle for freedom, both parties have found it convenient to deny recognition to the likes of a Robert Smalls or a Lawrence Guyot. If anything remains true after all these years, it will take this to establish full equality, not horse-trading:
Let me give you a word of the philosophy of reform. The whole history of the progress of human liberty shows that all concessions yet made to her august claims, have been born of earnest struggle. The conflict has been exciting, agitating, all-absorbing, and for the time being, putting all other tumults to silence. It must do this or it does nothing. If there is no struggle there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom and yet deprecate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground, they want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters.
–Frederick Douglass, West India Emancipation, speech delivered at Canandaigua, New York, August 3, 1857
On Thursday, Michigan Senators Debbie Stabenow and Carl Levin both voted for the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2013.
This recent voted was an just an amended version of the original legislation that was proposed by Senator Levin last year, which was widely condemned by human rights and civil liberties groups, such as the ACLU, since it allows for the detention of US civilians by the US military.
In a statement released on Friday, Senator Levin said:
“Now again, Senator Feinstein’s amendment does not prohibit the military detention of U.S. citizens who are captured or apprehended inside the United States, if it is expressly authorized by law – which I read the statute authorizing the use of military force itself, or some other Act of Congress. Now, this is a major difference from the amendment that Senator Feinstein offered last year, which included no exception for congressional authorization.”
In response to the Feinstein Amendment to the NDAA, the ALCU has this to say:
Sen. Dianne Feinstein has introduced an amendment that superficially looks like it could help, but in fact, would cause harm. Feinstein was a forceful leader last year against the NDAA detention provisions and believes that she is doing the right thing this year. But the problem is that the actual text of her amendment is bad.
It might look like a fix, but it breaks things further. Feinstein’s amendment says that American citizens and green-card holders in the United States cannot be put into indefinite detention in a military prison, but carves out everyone else in the United States.
There are three problems with her amendment:
- It would NOT make America off-limits to the military being used to imprison civilians without charge or trial. That’s because its focus on protections for citizens and green-card holders implies that non-citizens could be militarily detained. The goal should be to prohibit domestic use of the military entirely. That’s the protection provided to everyone in the United States by the Posse Comitatus Act. That principle would be broken if the military can find an opening to operate against civilians here at home, maybe under the guise of going after non-citizens. This is truly an instance where, when some lose their rights, all lose rights — even those who look like they are being protected.
- It is inconsistent with the Constitution, which makes clear that basic due process rights apply to everyone in the United States. No group of immigrants should be denied the most basic due process right of all — the right to be charged and tried before being imprisoned.
- It would set some dangerous precedents for Congress: that the military may have a role in America itself, that indefinite detention without charge or trial can be contemplated in the United States, and that some immigrants can be easily carved out of the most basic due process protections.
The executive director of the Japanese American Citizens League just wrote to Congress:
The [Feinstein] amendment is of particular concern to the Japanese American Citizens League because of our historic concern stemming from the Japanese American incarceration experience during World War II. Nearly half of the internees were not United States citizens, and would not have been protected by this amendment. In consideration of due process and the rule of law within the United States, we urge you to oppose the Feinstein amendment, unless revised to protect all persons in the United States from indefinite detention without charge or trial.
The Senate on Thursday approved by a 67-29 vote to adopt the Feinstein amendment, with the vote mostly following partisan lines. This does not mean that the GOP is really in favor of protecting civil liberties, but it is clear that on this issue the Democrats are in favor of taking away our liberties.
