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.
COP18, Another ‘Conference of Polluters’
This interview between Patrick Bond and Busani Bafana is re-posted from ZNet.
There is no political will among rich nations to find funding for developing countries experiencing the brunt of changes in global weather patterns, and the current climate change conference will fail to do so, according to Professor Patrick Bond, a leading thinker and analyst on climate change issues.
“The elites continue to discredit themselves at every opportunity. The only solution is to turn away from these destructive conferences and avoid giving the elites any legitimacy, and instead, to analyse and build the world climate justice movement and its alternatives,” Bond, a political economist and also the director of the Centre for Civil Society at the University of KwaZulu Natal in South Africa, told IPS.
As the 18th Conference of the Parties (COP18) to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) began in Doha, Qatar on Monday Nov. 26, Bond described past COPs as “conferences of polluters”. He believes COP18 will be no different.
“Qatar is an entirely appropriate host country for the next failed climate conference. On grounds of gender, race, class and social equity, environment, civil society voice and democracy, it’s a feudal zone, and the Arab world’s best mass media, Doha-based Al Jazeera, can’t tell the truth at home,” said the professor and author of the book, “Politics of Climate Justice”.
Excerpts of the interview follow:
Q: What is in it for Africa? What is Africa likely to get or to lose from this conference?
A: The most hopeful opportunity is that with the passing of (Ethiopia’s prime minister) Meles Zenawi a few months ago there is a chance for fresh leadership, unencumbered by revelations about Washington’s influence.
Meles was unveiled as purchasable in the WikiLeaks’ U.S. State Department cables from February 2010 … Meles’ pro-Washington stance meant that though he was the loudest official African voice for climate debt and lower northern emissions, it was hard to take the continent seriously.
Sadly, since the quietening of the eloquent Sudanese voice from Copenhagen, Lumumba di Apeng (Sudanese diplomat and chief negotiator for developing countries at COP15), no African leader has made a positive impression.
And though there is a possibility that adaptation funding may flow a bit more to Africa, evidence so far confirms that the West pays elite Africans instead of the people most adversely affected. The Qatar meeting won’t change these crippling problems.
Q: What progress do you anticipate on the Kyoto Protocol in Doha?
A: None at all. The only hope they have is to boost the Green Climate Fund – but already the main polluters like the U.S. have signalled that in spite of Hillary Clinton’s 100 billion dollars a year promise at Copenhagen in 2009, they won’t support it financially, so it is empty and cannot begin to meet either mitigation or adaptation requirements.
Q: From your writings, you hold quite strong views about the Green Climate Fund. Why?
A: Although a vast “climate debt” payment mechanism from the global north to the global south is urgently required, probably on the scale of a trillion dollars a year, we must be critical of the proposed Green Climate Fund from the outset, because its huge potential was destroyed even at the level of design.
This is in part because African elites like the late Zenawi and (South Africa’s former minister of finance) Trevor Manuel played critical co-chairing roles from 2009 through last year.
Because of their pro-market ideology, Manuel especially bought into the insane argument that emissions trading can provide up to half the fund’s revenues, when in reality, these markets are sputtering to their deaths, as witnessed in 2010 at the main U.S. market, in Chicago, and the collapse of the European market over the past 18 months.
That means that there’s insufficient pressure on the north to raise funds through penalising polluters by fining – and then rapidly banning – emissions. It is also likely that the fund’s tiny revenues will be squandered on what we term “false solutions” – a variety of corporate-designed gimmicks to allow them to continue polluting.
What is needed is wide-ranging investment in a post-fossil society, as well as a reparations mechanism to get resources to people suffering from climate change – such as a “basic income grant” for those in affected areas, without interference by the likes of local tyrants – and one leading pilot study for this comes from rural Namibia, funded by German churches, whose results are most encouraging.
Q: How are we doing then on global climate governance?
A: As the (COP17) Durban disaster proved, the idea of global management of the climate catastrophe, given the present adverse balance of forces, is farcical in general…
It is beyond doubt now that any progress at the multilateral level will require two things: first, a further crash of the emissions trading experiment, so as to finally end the fiction that a market run by international bankers can solve a problem of planet-threatening pollution caused by unregulated markets; and second, a banning of delegations from Washington – the U.S. government and Bretton Woods Institutions – since that’s the city most influenced by climate denialists. Hence every move from the U.S. State Department amounts to sabotage.
Q: What of the 2012 climate change negotiations prior to Doha?
A: For every tip-toe step forward taken in Durban – in a context in which during this century, 200 million additional Africans are expected to die early because of extreme droughts and floods – there were reversals by leaps and bounds…
Because of WikiLeaks, we know in great detail that the U.S. State Department is slyly bribing even the occasional courageous delegation, such as the one from the Maldives right after the Copenhagen fiasco. So given the degree of bribery, bullying and corruption from Washington, why would we expect the COP system to suddenly become functional?
Q: What is the future of climate change negotiations?
A: To sum up, the 1987 Montreal Protocol should have immediately been expanded to incorporate greenhouse gases, but instead, because Washington insisted on ineffectual carbon trading a decade later in Kyoto – we have simply not seen an appropriate degree of political will and strategic sophistication, and until this changes, we will not be successful at the multilateral scale.
That means the future of any potentially successful negotiations is actually between activists and the popular support they rally to the cause on the one hand, and governments – and the corporations that often control those governments – on the other.
Even public consciousness has shifted quickly, as a result of extreme weather in the most backward regions of the world, like the northeastern U.S. These are the only bright lights in the world’s efforts to halt climate change, and I feel that if more people know these stories, they would lose their despondency and take action against both their local polluters and crony-corporate governments.
Strike Launches Largest Union Drive in U.S. Fast Food History
This article by Peter Rugh is re-posted from Dissident Voice.
While the emblems of Wendy’s, McDonald’s, KFC, Domino’s and other greasy dynasties are hard to escape in the American landscape, those who cook, clean, ring up orders and otherwise serve as the fulcrum of these franchises often go unnoticed. These workers, however, were hard to miss today as they stepped off burger assembly lines across New York City and into the street, picketing in front of their workplaces. The strike, which took place at numerous restaurants across the city, is the start of the largest effort to unionize fast food workers in American history.
Organizers are calling the campaign Fast Food Forward.
Revenues in the fast food industry are expected to near $200 billion this year. Yet the demands of their workers are modest: $15 an hour and the right to unionize with the Fast Food Workers Committee.
“We’re out here for better wages, better working conditions, and union protection,” said Michael, an 18-year-old employee of a Burger King located not far from Wall Street. Michael says that growing up he was encouraged to “go the right way and get a job,” but now that he has a job he’s having trouble getting by. “There’s people my age that try to let this stabilize them. We got bills, we got rent. We’re living from check to check, hoping the next one will be better and it’s not. We can’t live on this.”
Gregory, an East Harlem KFC worker several years older than Michael, said he and his coworkers earn minimum wage ($7.25 an hour), receive food stamps and still don’t have enough to get by and provide for their kids. Gregory lives in Rockaway, Queens — an area that was inundated with floodwaters from Superstorm Sandy. When he sought back pay from his employer for time lost during the storm, his request was denied. He was given a meal on the house instead.
Working conditions at fast food franchises tend to be about the same across the board: highly exploitive. The fast food industry provides cheap, warm meals to those pressed for time, who often cannot afford more nutritious forms of nourishment. Simultaneously, these corporations take advantage of economic desperation in the black and brown, immigrant and working-class communities where they can get away with paying starvation wages and reaping gargantuan profits. Wendy’s, for instance, took in $615 million in 2011, an increase of 6 percent. But workers say checks from their employer often bounce, and some check cashing outlets won’t accept them.
Organizers with New York Communities for Change (NYCC), which has been working behind the scenes for months to build the strike, say that McDonald’s recruits in homeless shelters. Nearly every “benefit” listed on the company’s website, including free uniforms, appears with an asterisk beside it, indicating that the supposed perks are “subject to availability and certain eligibility requirements and restrictions.” Profits at McDonald’s have ballooned 130 percent in the past four years.
The largest of the fast food behemoths, McDonald’s, was also the swiftest to shift into damage control mode today, issuing a statement informing the public that the company is committed to a dialogue with their employees “so we can continue to be an even better employer.”
Asantewwa Ricks with NYCC said that before she began working on the strike drive, she thought fast food employees were “18-, 19-year-old kids who wanted cash for Beats headphones and True Religion jeans.” She has since learned that is not the case. Often, workers remain in the industry for years and see little to no bump in their salary. The minimum wage they receive often forces tough choices on them, such as whether to work late, or to make it back before the shelter where they reside locks its doors. At an organizing meeting early on in the campaign, Ricks asked a room full of fast food workers if they had ever suffered on-the-job injuries. Just about everyone present lifted up scars from grease on their arms.
A coalition of unions and community-based workers’ rights groups gathered ahead of the strike on Tuesday in a meeting room at the Service Employees International Union headquarters in Manhattan to discuss ongoing campaigns seeking dignity and improved pay for the working poor citywide. More than 100 people attended, representing roughly 40 organizations, along with a cluster of clergy from a variety of faiths. The coalition had helped spearhead a day of action on July 24, which saw hundreds of low-wage workers from the city’s five boroughs congregate in Union Square, and it has also been working with car wash employees demanding raises above the $5.25 hourly standard and, in some cases, back pay. Workers at four car washes have already won union representation in recent months.
City Council Speaker Christine Quinn, who spoke at the July 24 rally, sent an aide to Tuesday’s meeting. Quinn is currently ahead in the upcoming mayoral race, but she has drawn ire from workers’ rights advocates over her opposition to sick pay legislation. While NYCC is circulating a petition for her to back the bill, the Daily News reports that wealthy business owners — who have already thrown over a quarter of a million dollars her way — sent a letter of their own to Quinn demanding just the opposite. Jonathan Westin, a lead organizer with NYCC, said while the group disagrees with Quinn on the issue of sick pay, he views it as a positive sign that she appears interested in the demands of fast food workers.
Perhaps seeking an edge on Quinn, two other Democratic contenders for mayor were on hand, Bill Thompson and Public Advocate Bill de Blasio. The candidates stood in pressed suits, at opposite ends of the room, grinning at one another. It is with good reason that politicians are showing an interest in the fast food workers’ fight for a union; bystanders receiving leaflets from picketers Thursday were widely sympathetic to the cause.
“These guys shouldn’t be making 7.25 an hour,” said Steve Carlson, a union carpenter. “That’s crazy. Especially in Manhattan, the cost of living is so high.”
Still, while politicians might lose campaign contributions that sway an election by standing up for a cause like this, workers could lose their jobs. By organizing in the workplace, walking off and gambling on solidarity, they have risked the only means of subsistence available to their families and themselves. Westin said that since workers began the union drive six months ago there have been instances of retaliation from management, but he declined to elaborate because these cases are currently being dealt with in court. For those on strike and their supporters, however, the potential benefits outweigh the risks.
“The goal of this strike is for workers to be able to put food on their table and buy their children presents for Christmas,” Westin said, though he admits this is a long term battle and likely won’t be resolved by the holidays.
The fast food strike that broke out today may have larger implications than are immediately apparent. There are 50,000 fast food workers in New York City, and while those who walked off were few in number by comparison, the strike could galvanize workers elsewhere to take a stand as well. If the push for a union is successful, it will be an illustrative example to those both in the industry and in other low wage professions that standing up to the boss can pay off.
For Michael and his fellow Burger King employees, walking off the job was about more than a wage hike or forming a union. These demands are a means to a higher end. “We work hard, as if we were slaves,” he said. “It’s not only the wages. It’s also about how we get treated. We deserve respect.”
Snyder on Michigan’s Energy Future and Fracking
On Wednesday, Michigan Governor Rick Snyder delivered a talk in East Lansing on the future of the State’s energy and environmental policy.
The summary of the Governor’s message on the government site is of course glowing, naming the talk as Affordable and Reliable Energy, A Cleaner Environment, No Regrets for Our Future.
In his talk on the state’s energy future, Snyder tends to focus on the need to get home owners to make their homes more energy efficient and relying on the private sector to solve some of our problems of energy generations and transmission.
Snyder perpetuates the notion that the state needs to produce more energy in order to be more economically prosperous. The Governor is operating within the Capitalist framework, thinking that economic growth can co-exist with environmental sustainability, which we believe to be an impossible outcome.
On the matter of how Michigan should generate more of its own energy, Snyder identifies three areas of what he believes would create energy independence for the state. First, he identifies Nuclear Power, but only talks about waste disposal and that Yucca Mountain seems like a reliable solution for Michigan’s nuclear waste. This has been an ongoing debate in Congress and there has been substantial public resistance as well. In addition, there has been plenty of new evidence of safety concerns over both the Palisades and Davis Besse reactors, an issue that Snyder never addresses in his recent talk.
The second area of energy that Snyder addresses is electrical energy, generated by coal-powered plants. Snyder focuses on the issue of a national grid and then states, “I know people disagree about the new EPA rules for coal plants, but I think we can all agree it’s not in the best interest of the environment or the country to risk massive outages to get there at a breakneck pace.” Seems like Snyder is not in a hurry to cut Michigan’s dependency on coal for electricity generation, which would be an unsustainable and environmentally destructive route to continue.
The third area of energy the Governor addresses is natural gas. Snyder states:
A recent presidential order recognized the benefits of natural gas as a reliable, affordable, clean and domestic part of our energy future. The President got this right and we need him to follow through. We need timelines that will let us look seriously at transitioning existing plants to this fuel, a commitment to pipeline infrastructure and a stable, environmentally protective set of regulations that allow companies to create a business plan built around new natural gas supplies. Michigan has done what it can in leading the way on this issue. We will do whatever we can to help our federal partners develop and implement a consistent strategy in short order.
Snyder makes it clear that he is sold on natural gas being the savoir of the state’s energy needs. Later on in his talk Snyder addresses the issue of horizontal hydraulic fracturing.
Hydraulic fracturing, or “fracking,” has received increased attention lately. This technology is being used in combination with horizontal drilling to reach some natural gas and other resources that otherwise could not be developed. This innovation is already benefitting Michigan in the form of unusually low natural gas prices and additional money from state leases that goes to our public lands and our parks. But some have expressed concerns about what these technologies mean for Michigan’s environment.
Neither fracking nor horizontal drilling is a new technology—they have been used in Michigan for many decades. None of the fracking that has been done in Michigan has resulted in a single water quality problem. In fact, fracking’s deeper wells likely pose less risk to our groundwater than the shallower wells we are more used to. With our water withdrawal statute, as well as our strong regulatory history of natural gas drilling, we are better prepared – more adaptable – than most other states.
That said, it’s important that our citizens understand what fracking is really all about. That’s why the University of Michigan’s Graham Sustainability Institute is undertaking an evaluation of fracking. At their invitation, the state is participating in the steering committee for this effort alongside environmental and industry groups. At the end of the process, the public will have well-reasoned, objective explanations of what this technology is and is not. We will also have a Michigan-focused evaluation of the various implications of fracking. This is a great example of collaboration and a public university serving the needs of the state, and I am looking forward to seeing the results.
Snyder is clearly embracing the coming explosion of fracking in Michigan and the lie about it not being a risk to environmental destruction and public health. Snyder presents the illusion that the state is engaged in doing research to determine that the fracking is safe and beneficial for the state. The University of Michigan’s Graham Sustainability Institute might sound like a bastion of environmental integrity, but the Institute often promotes a Green Capitalism approach to environmental issues and their advisor’s are made up of the Big Green Groups and corporations such as Dow, neither of which have a commitment to environmental or climate justice.
Snyder’s position on fracking should be a clarion call to activists across the state that we need to get ready for a serious battle to stop the fracking onslaught coming our way.
Fossil Fuel Divestment Campaign comes to GVSU
The international group 350.org is spearheading a campaign to get campuses across the US to divest from investing in any companies making a profit from the extraction or burning of fossil fuels.
The campaign has its own website http://gofossilfree.org, which includes regular updates and some well-designed resources on how and why to divest from the fossil fuel industry. There is also a listing of the Top 200 Fossil Fuel Companies, companies that will be targeted in this campaign.
As of this writing there are about 100 campuses nationwide that are participating in the Fossil Fuel Divestment Campaign, with Grand Valley State University being one of them.
There is an online campaign to send letters to GVSU President Thomas Haas, which includes the following text:
Climate change is accelerating. We are witnessing the increasing impacts of a warming planet more and more consistently; in this last year alone our country experienced record-breaking heat, droughts, and hurricanes, which impacted hundreds of thousands of people and cost our country hundreds of billions of dollars. Hurricane Sandy alone caused $50bn in damages. Experts agree that global warming caused by humans burning fossil fuels will continue to accelerate and intensify these tragic climate disasters. The scientific consensus is clear and overwhelming; we cannot safely burn even half of global fossil-fuel reserves without dangerously warming the planet for several thousand years.
As public pressure to confront climate change builds, we call on Grand Valley State University to immediately freeze any new investment in fossil-fuel companies, and to divest within five years from direct ownership and from any commingled funds that include fossil-fuel public equities and corporate bonds. We believe such action on behalf of Grand Valley State University will not only be a sound decision for our institution’s financial portfolio, but also for the wellbeing of its current and future graduating classes, who deserve the opportunity to graduate with a future not defined by climate chaos.
Grand Valley State University is known across the country and the world for being one of the most environmentally-friendly universities in the world. As an institution and a community we are well on our way to initiating action geared toward sustainability and the environment. We need to continue on this path and continue to lead other institutions and universities on the path of sustainability and environmental action.
If any additional efforts are organized at GVSU around this campaign, we will report on those efforts in the future.
