Blackwater Pays Millions To Settle Arms Smuggling Charges
This article is re-posted from Corpwatch.
When Blackwater offered Salva Kiir, the president of South Sudan, a package of military aid, they arranged a delivery of ten special encrypted satellite phones. In a similar bid to befriend the King Abdullah of Jordan they presented him with the “mercenary version of a fruit basket: an assortment of Glocks, along with a Remington shotgun and a Bushmaster M4 rifle.”
Blackwater, a 15 year old North Carolina private security company, is best known for an incident when its employees gunned down 17 civilians in Nissour Square, Baghdad in September 2007.
The company – which is now known as Academi – has agreed to pay the U.S. government $7.5 million to settle federal charges of arms smuggling and related crimes based on investigations into several incidents including the South Sudan and Jordanian cases. The ““Deferred Prosecution Agreement” allows the company to avoid going to court on the 17 charges if it can prove that it has changed its ways over the next 36 months.
“This company clearly violated U.S. laws by exporting sensitive technical data and unauthorized defense services to a host of countries around the world,” says Brock Nicholson, the special agent in charge of U.S. Homeland Security Investigations Atlanta. “In doing so, company employees were frequently in possession of illegal firearms and aided other foreign nationals in the acquisition of illegal firearms.”
Most of the incidents date to 2005 and 2006 when the company was at the height of its fame, earned mostly from its work in Iraq. On March 31, 2004, four Blackwater contractors were killed in the city of Falluja while accompanying a supply convoy delivering food to a U.S. military base. The company shot into the news and the U.S. military launched two major attacks on the city.
Almost exactly a year later, in March 2005, Blackwater made the gift of undeclared guns to the king of Jordan.
In late 2005, Blackwater employees traveled to Sudan to offer Kiir a variety of services: training for the Sudanese People’s Liberation Army, training for a 30 person bodyguard team, a human intelligence collection team and data monitoring technology, together with secure email and phone systems for the president and his cabinet. South Sudan was still a state of Sudan at the time, it would another five years before it became independent.
An internal Blackwater email instructed staff on how to make sure that the deal remained a secret: “Remember, the money has to come from a Ugandan government account, and we have to have a Ugandan security forces contact info [sic] to get this finished.” A set of ten “Cryptophones” worth $18,000 were also shipped to Nairobi in November 2005. A Blackwater employee in Africa emailed back: “Toys were delivered and are now functioning.”
The South Sudan deal was inspired by an initial U.S. government proposal to Blackwater that was abandoned by Washington. But even after the U.S. government canceled the project, Blackwater continued to pursue it. And the South Sudanese played along, in fact they were interested in an even bigger deal – protection for a major oil pipeline but eventually they too scrapped the idea.
Blackwater, however, in its eagerness to do business had not obtained the necessary State Department license. The company is also in hot water for a variety of similar charges, from sending secret plans for armored personnel carriers to Sweden and Denmark to providing military training to Canadian government security personnel without the proper U.S. license. (You can find the detailed legal documents at Corporate Crime Reporter)
The company issued a short statement to acknowledge the agreement with the federal government. “The agreement, which does not involve any guilty plea or admit to any violations, reflects the significant and tangible efforts that Academi’s new ownership and leadership team have made,” a statement from the company read.
Some note that the company may have a hard time proving that it has changed its ways. “The Justice Department may not be done with Academi/Blackwater yet,” writes Spencer Ackermann in Wired magazine. “Two employees who worked for Academi under its current management are suing the company for wrongful termination after they blew the whistle on a third employee’s attempts to fake the results of a gun test for Afghan security forces.”
This interview is re-posted from ZNet.
In this interview with German freelance writer Sebastian Meyer, Chomsky talks about his understanding of the political system, Occupy, the Tea Party, the so-called Euro-crisis and President Obama’s first term.
Prof. Chomsky, you’ve been a public intellectual, criticizing US domestic and foreign policy for more than 50 years. Have you ever thought about becoming a politician yourself?
Noam Chomsky: No. First of all, I’d be terrible at it (laughs). I´ll just give you one simple example. My department internally runs very democratically, so there has to be a department administrator of some sort and one member of the faculty has to take that position and it circulates. But the one person that was never allowed to take it is me, because I ruin everything so quickly. So it wouldn’t be worth it. But also I wouldn’t want to be.
Why?
Chomsky: Because whatever I can do about the issues that concern me I can do better outside the political realm.
Does it also have something to do with your beliefs about how the political system actually works?
Chomsky: I don’t criticize people who are inside the political system. But I think I can do more elsewhere. Usually, the system responds to popular activism. So, take New Deal legislation. It was implemented because the president in office, Roosevelt, was more or less sympathetic. But also because there was at that time a large array of popular movements which were pressing for responses to the crisis of the Great Depression. Same in the 1960s, Lyndon B. Johnson’s reforms were again the reaction to large scale popular mobilization.
The social movement of the day camps at public spaces and calls itself Occupy. You’ve called it the first major popular response to 30 years of class war in the US. What do you think has Occupy achieved so far?
Chomsky: It achieved a lot, in two aspects. It very significantly affected public sensibility and public discourse. The imagery of the one percent versus the 99 percent, that’s spread over right through the mainstream, that’s now standard discourse. And that’s not insignificant. It brings to public attention the massive inequality and the striking maldistribution of power. There are also specific policy proposals that make a lot of sense. Efforts to try to return the electoral system to some sort of something approximating the democratic process and not just being bought by major corporations and the super rich, proposals about a financial transaction tax, ending foreclosures of kicking people out of their homes, concern for the environment and so on.
And the second aspect?
Chomsky: The occupy movement spontaneously created communities of mutual support, mutual aid. The common kitchen, the libraries. That´s maybe even more important. The US is a very atomized society. People feel helpless and alone. Your worth as a human being depends on the number of commodity you can amass, one of the reasons for the debt crisis, and its jut driven into people’s heads from infancy through massive propaganda and public relations. So people don’t have much social interactions.
If you compare it to the Tea Party movement…
Chomsky: The Tea Party isn’t a movement. It’s massively funded by private capital. It’s a movement which demographically is not unlike what the Nazis succeeded in organizing. It’s petty bourgeois, almost entirely white, nativist tradition, with the fear that within a generation or two the white population will be a minority and those others are taking our country away from us.
The Tea Party succeeded in sending dozens of their supporters to the Senate and to the Congress. In this way they were kind of effective.
Chomsky: As long as they can be the storm troopers for the cooperate sector they will succeed. The Republicans mobilize them, like the religious right, they have to. The Republican Party, decades ago, stopped being traditional parliamentary party. It’s in lockstep obedience to the very rich and the corporate sector. But they can’t get votes that way. So they’ve got to mobilize these sectors of the population, also the religious right. But the republican establishment is a little bit afraid of them. It was quite striking to watch the primaries. Romney was the candidate of the republican establishment, but he wasn’t the popular candidate. So one candidate after another came up, Santorum, Gingrich, and they had to be shut down by massive funding, propaganda, negative advertising and so on. You could tell very easily that the establishment, the rich bankers and businessmen, they were worried about it.
Because of their irrationality…
Chomsky: Yes, take a look at German history. In the early days of the Nazis, the business community, the industrialists, they supported them. They were the ones who did smash up the unions and go to the left and so on. They thought they could control them. It turned out they couldn’t.
One of the main goals of the Occupy movement is fighting inequality in the US, but also worldwide. What is your assessment of the US and European answer to the financial and the so-called Euro-crisis?
Chomsky: The US reaction has been somewhat better than the European reaction. The European reaction is a suicide, class based suicide. It’s pretty hard to interpret the Troika Policies, mostly German backed, as something else than class warfare. In fact ECB president Mario Draghi pretty much said we are going to get rid of the social contract.
But he also said that the fiscal pact has to be backed by a growth pact.
Chomsky: Finally they are talking about what should have been done in the first place. There is plenty of resources in Europe to carry out stimulation of demand and so on. But the idea of imposing austerity under recession is a recipe for suicide. Even the IMF has come out with studies showing that that’s the case. The effect, and presumably the intention, is to dismantle the welfare state and the social contract.
Why do you think that this is the intention?
Chomsky: Just look at the people who are designing the policies. They never liked the welfare state, they never liked the power of labor. Europe was a relatively civilized place by comparative standards. But that helps the population, that doesn’t help the corporate sectors, the super rich and so on. So sure, if they can dismantle that, fine. It’s hard to think of any other rationale for the policy that’s been pursued. But as you said now it is the cracking off slightly.
The rationale that German chancellor Angela Merkel puts forward is that we have a debt crisis, and in times of debt, you’ve got to cut spending.
Chomsky: In times of debt, what you do is get the economies to grow so that they can overcome the debts. If you impose austerity, it gets worse. It was obvious in the beginning and that’s exactly what happened.
Do you think that countries like Greece should have defaulted?
Chomsky: Greece has some serious internal problems. They just didn’t collect tax, the rich were undisciplined, and there’s too much bureaucracy. But the debt is a dual responsibility. If you believed in capitalism the problem would be a problem of the lenders. I lend you money, I make some profit, you can’t pay, tough for me.
But there always has to be some enforcement or guarantee that the debts are paid back….
Chomsky: Not in capitalism. But in real life it’s your neighbor’s problem. They have to subject themselves to austerity. These are just systems for supporting the wealth and power. So should Greece have defaulted? Well, it should have had a way to extract itself from debts that they weren’t incurred by the population. It’s true that they used the fake money, fake wealth to overconsume. But that’s pretty much the faults of the banks. They were smart enough o figure out that there is gong to be unplayable debt. But the question is, could Greece restructure so that the debt would not be imposed on the population. There are countries that have done it, like Iceland or Argentina.
People in the richer European countries fear that by increasing spending this will lead to higher debts…
Chomsky: Not, if the money is used the way it was used in East Asia. They used it for capital investment and industrial policy programs. So, Taiwan and South Korea, Japan earlier, they moved from quite poor peasant societies to richer and developed societies. In fact the entire history of state capitalist development has been like that. That’s the way the United States developed. In the 1770’s, the newly liberated colonies did get economic advice from respectable figures like Adam Smith. He advised the colonies to do what are called the Principles of Sound Economics; the ones that the IMF and the World Bank were instructing the poor countries to do today. So, concentrate on your comparative advantage, export primary products, import superior manufacturers from Britain. Well, the colonies were free. So they did the exact opposite. They raised tariff barriers, developed industry, tried to monopolize cotton. That’s how the US developed.
Would protectionism make sense in the industrialized countries today? Because if you walk around in a supermarket, you´ll see products that have been produced under conditions that the societies in the industrialized countries wouldn´t tolerate. The T-Shirt from Bangladesh, the TV from China, the toy from Taiwan: all produced without interference from the welfare-state, labor unions or environmental protections. ‘There is nothing more neoliberal than the consumer“, Swiss author Adolf Muschg once noted. But shouldn´t we protect the consumer?
Chomsky: There’s two approaches. One approach is protectionism, but notice that in the case that I’ve mentioned the protectionism was against the richer societies. You are talking about something different; tariffs against poor countries. And there is another approach, namely the approach that the European Union in fact took. Help them raise their levels so they don’t undermine the living standards of northern workers.
But what happens if it´s impossible to raise standards in China?
Chomsky: Sure you can. In fact it’s being done. When there were massive protests against Foxconn (a Taiwanese corporation that produces electronic devices for Apple in China) this year, China reacted by making some changes, allowing some degree of independent unions that have been permitted to slightly reduce the owners’ conditions that sort of forced workers into this slave labor. If we impose tariffs against exports from China we are imposing costs on western corporations. It’s basically an assembly plant for parts and components that come from the more advanced industrial countries and it’s periphery.
So why not tax them for exploiting workers and the environment in those countries?
Chomsky: Yes, make them pay to raise the standards. I mean corporate profits have gone through the roof. Now, there’s study by the University of Massachusetts, that just unused corporate banking and corporation profits, it’s about a trillion and a half dollars that’s just sitting there because they see no advantage for them to spend it. Well, there are all kind of ways to spent that, as the study points to specific measures which would virtually eliminate unemployment, lead to economic growth and so on.
The presidential campaign starts to heat up. What is your assessment of the first term of president Obama?
Chomsky: Frankly, I didn’t expect much from Obama, so I wasn’t actually disillusioned. When he came into office at the height of the financial crisis, the first thing he needed to do, was put together an economic team. Who did he pick? He picked the people who created the crisis. There are Nobel laureates in economics who had different approaches. But he picked what they called the Rubin Boys, people like Tim Geithner, Larry Summers, bankers and so on. The people who essentially created the crisis. There was an article in the business press, Bloomberg News, which reviewed that. They concluded that these people shouldn´t be on the economic team, half of them should be getting subpoenas. So he was paying off the people who put him into office.
Because they majorly contributed to his campaign?
Chomsky: Most of his campaign funding concentrated in the financial institutions, which preferred him to McCain. And there were people who understood it. So shirtly after he was elected, the advertising industry awarded him the prize for the best marketing campaign of the year.
Still, Obama tried to improve things like introducing healthcare reform…
Chomsky: It´s a mixed story. The United States healthcare systems is a total disaster. If the United States had a healthcare system like any other industrial society, there wouldn’t be any deficit. In fact, it would end up being a surplus. And the reason is not obscure. A largely privatized, mostly unregulated healthcare system which is extremely inefficient and very costly. Well, the Obama reforms are slightly better than what existed, but nothing like would should exist. In fact, even the idea of allowing a public option, to make a choice to pick a public healthcare, even that he refused to pursue.
Obama had to compromise with the Republican opposition.
Chomsky: Some of his supporters argue that it was the best that could be done, given the political circumstances. But that’s by no means obvious. The president has a lot of power, for example, he can appeal to the population. The population was very strong in favor, almost two to one. So okay, appeal to the population. That’s the way Roosevelt got the New Deal legislation through.
You once said that applying the Nuremberg principles every US president actually would have been hanged. Does that apply to Obama as well?
Chomsky: Look at the global assassination campaign, it violates principles going back to Magna Charta.
You’re referring to the drones in Pakistan, Somalia and Yemen.
Chomsky: Yes. If the president decides to kill somebody, you kill him and whoever else happens to be standing around. The foundations of Anglo-American law and by now pretty much of the rest of the world, what´s called the presumption of innocence, that you can punish someone if you demonstrate that they are guilty in a court of law, it´s even in the American constitution. In fact the Obama administration has made it very clear that they basically can kill anyone they want, including American citizens.
Would you prefer a police action if you think that there are terrorists around planning attacks against the US?
Chomsky: Suppose you think that there is a group of people here who are going to rob the store. You cannot arrest them. At least under law. I mean, you can do it if you have a police state, you can do whatever you like. In fact when they murdered an American citizen, Anwar al-Awlaki, Obama said that was an “easy case” and the government explained that he did have due process. Due process means a trial by one´s peers, but he said he had due process because we talked it over within the executive branch, so that’s due process now. What about presumption of innocence? Well they answered that too. They said anyone who we kill is guilty unless later they can be shown to have been innocent. That’s all come out publicly. So it´s just an international assassination campaign. Kill who you feel like. It’s cheaper than invading a country, which did cost us too much and didn´t work anyway.
You call yourself an anarchist. Is there actually any political leader on the global scene who is doing a good job in your opinion?
Chomsky: Leaders technically don’t do a good job (laughs). If you are in a position of power you usually do something to extend it.
So do you think that political leaders are generally immune from your advice?
Chomsky: Of course. Mine or anyone else’s. There are intellectuals who like to pretend that they’re influential. Bernard-Henri Lévy or others try to puff themselves up. But in fact political leaders don’t pay any attention to them. If there is a popular movement carrying out substantial actions, then maybe they may respond.
And that´s the reason you’re trying to address the general population?
Chomsky: Yes. And I’m not telling political leaders anything they don’t know. If I were to tell Angela Merkel, austerity under recession is harmful to the economy, she don´t have to hear it from me. She can figure that out herself, probably did long time ago.
Palestine, Art & Liberation: An interview with Alynn Guerra
We had the chance to sit down with local printmaker Alynn Guerra and talk with her about the 2-week trip she took to Israel/Palestine recently.
The trip was organized by Hope Equals and was intended to not only educate people about the Israeli/Palestinian conflict, but to create a dialogue and exchange between artists there and here.
During the interview we talked about the reason for the trip, Alynn’s impression of what was taking place, stories about some of the people she met, what she learned about the impact of the US support for Israel, the culture of resistance amongst Palestinians and how this trip got her to think about the role of art in liberation struggles. The interview is in 4 parts and is about 30 minutes total.
You can also read some of Alynn’s blog entries from the trip and contact her online at http://alynn-guerra.blogspot.com/.
The following statement is re-posted from Food & Water Watch.
“Nothing shows the dangerous connection between drought and fracking more than the study released by the journal Nature this week, which shows groundwater demand is exceeding supply, particularly in agricultural zones. Not only is the oil and gas industry turning our rural areas into sacrifice zones, it is also diverting water that is needed to grow food.
“Drilling and fracking is not only a threat to water quality — it also uses massive amounts of water, removing much of the water used from the water cycle altogether.
“Unbelievably, even during horrendous drought conditions, oil and gas companies are able to continue using our freshwater resources while communities pay for pricy technologies like water reclamation plants, as we see in Big Spring, Texas. And in Colorado, farmers are competing with the oil and gas industry, who are driving up prices at water auctions.
“Fracking is not only a problem for consumers and farmers in the United States. France and Bulgaria have banned fracking thanks to the risks to water and agricultural areas. More communities, from South Africa to Australia, are fighting it as well. On September 22, these communities will join together for a global day of action to tell decision makers around the world that fracking should be banned. We can’t sacrifice our public health, our environment and communities, and there is no replacement for our diminishing water resources.”
A New Dust Bowl?
This article by Chris Williams is re-posted from ZNet.
MORE THAN 50 percent of counties in the United States are now officially designated “disaster” zones. The reason given in 90 percent of cases is the continent-wide drought that has been devastating crop production. Forty-eight percent of the U.S. corn crop is rated as “poor to very poor,” along with 37 percent of soy; 73 percent of cattle acreage is suffering drought conditions, along with 66 percent of land given to the production of hay.
The ramifications of the drought go far beyond what happens to food prices in the United States. The U.S. producing half of all world corn exports. As corn and soy crops wilt from the heat, without coordinated governmental action, we can expect a replay of the disastrous rise in food prices of 2008, which caused desperate, hungry people to riot in 28 countries.
In that instance, food was available, but hundreds of millions of people couldn’t afford to buy it. Should food prices increase to anywhere near the levels of four years ago, it will be a catastrophe for the 2 billion people who are forced to scrape by on less than $2 per day.
The poor in developing countries spend 80 percent of their income on food, much of it directly as grain, rather than as manufactured products like bread or cereal, and so any increase in the price of basic necessities immediately puts them in dire food distress.
In the U.S., prices for a loaf of bread or a corn muffin are unlikely to see major increases because, in a nod to capitalist priorities, the cost of those products is largely determined by packaging, advertising, transportation and storage costs–and ultimately the labor that is embodied in those activities, not the cost of growing the corn or other natural base material.
However, because about one-third of corn in the U.S. goes to feed animals, the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) predicts that the price of animal products such as beef, dairy products, chicken, eggs and turkey will increase by 4.5 percent or more, depending on just how bad the harvest turns out to be. There will be a similar impact on vegetable oil due to the dire predictions about soy production, though these effects will likely not be felt until early 2013.
The UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) publishes its monthly Food Price Index figures on August 9. Abdolreza Abbassian, a senior economist at the FAO, commented, “It will be up…How much up is anyone’s guess.” Ominously, he adds; “It would really surprise me if we didn’t see a significant increase.”
FOR THE one in five children in the United States living in food insecure households and the millions of Americans living from hand to mouth, still trying to recover homes, jobs and a stable livelihood after the crash of 2008, let alone tens of millions of other poor people around the world, any rise in food costs will be a crushing–and for many, life-threatening–calamity.
With the possibility of food shortages, the vultures of finance, otherwise known as commodity speculators, will once again begin to circle the food markets, looking to make a killing. As the financial markets were not re-regulated after the economic crisis of 2008, hedge funds and short-sellers will inevitably be on the lookout for additional profits by gambling on the price of food, exactly as they did four years ago.
Rather than any lack of actual food, most analysis indicates that the primary cause of the dramatic escalation in food prices that caused the 2008 crisis was financial speculation in the food commodity sector. That is to say, it was a human tragedy manufactured by the laws of motion of capitalism, rather than the laws of nature.
The USDA could and should be taking pro-active steps to ensure that there is no replay of 2008 as the number of people who became “food insecure”–which is to say starving–topped 1 billion worldwide.
In the short term, any crop failures need to be compensated by changing the allocation of U.S. corn and preventing commodity speculation on food. In the longer term, measures to raise grain storage volumes; address infrastructure deficiencies through appropriate investment; re-evaluate inhumane, environmentally destructive and dangerously unhealthy industrialized livestock feeding practices; and examine the location, sustainability and type of crops and monoculture farming are all issues that need attention.
Up to now, however, Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack has resisted calls to reduce or eliminate the federal mandate that sees more than one-third of the U.S. corn crop diverted to ethanol refineries to make “bio-fuel” to burn in car engines. The federal government has mandated that over 13 billion gallons of ethanol is made from corn this year, which would equate to 40 percent of this year’s crop.
Supposedly adopted to reduce demand for “overseas oil” and associated geopolitical concerns after oil almost topped $150 per barrel in 2008, the Obama administration raised the federal requirement to 36 billion gallons by 2022, with at least 15 billion coming directly from corn.
Even on the best of days, turning corn into ethanol is an idiotic thing to do. Many studies have shown that it takes more energy to turn the corn into ethanol than is recovered when the ethanol is burnt in a car engine. Not only that, but ethanol doesn’t have the energy density of gasoline, so cars running on a mixture of ethanol and gasoline have to burn more fuel to go the same distance and the blended mix costs more to transport.
In any year, this is bad policy. In a year of extreme drought, it should be a criminal offense to waste food resources in this manner.
Additionally, in one of the more ridiculous circular irrationalities to emerge from the anarchy of capitalist decision-making, the cost of ethanol-blended gasoline in the U.S. is also on the rise. Growing crops in the West is heavily dependent on oil for fertilizer production and mechanization–to the extent that it takes 10 calories of oil to produce one calorie of food.
Immediate elimination of the biofuel mandate is a concrete step that Vilsack could be promoting, particularly after he predicted at a White House press briefing that the drought would cause “significant increases in prices” by the end of the year.
Oil companies, which are required to blend ethanol into gasoline as part of the inappropriately named “renewable fuel standard” (RFS), are allowed to carry RFS credits over year to year. They thus have 2.4 billion credits available to allow the continued acquisition of corn for ethanol refineries.
But it’s hard to imagine suddenly freeing up 40 percent of whatever remains of the U.S. corn crop for livestock and human use not having an impact on corn prices, even accounting for the activities of the oil companies. As Gawain Kripke, director of policy and research for Oxfam America has argued, “The federal government can…put an end to the biofuel mandates, which are diverting food into fuel, and work to cut greenhouse gas emissions, which are leading to ever more erratic and extreme weather.”
Vilsack should be arguing for such a policy shift. Significantly, Lisa Jackson, head of the Environmental Protection Agency, has the power to make it happen without waiting on legislation.
This is especially necessary as some experts are beginning to worry about next year’s crop. For much of the U.S. corn belt, the main precipitation period has already passed. So without some unseasonal weather events releasing massive amounts of rain, Mark Svoboda, a climatologist at the National Drought Mitigation Center, based at the University of Nebraska, has said that what matters is getting enough rain for the beginning of next year’s crop: “This drought isn’t going anywhere…The damage is already done. What you are looking for is enough moisture to avert a second year of drought.”
Vilsack could also offer to annul small farmers’ debts to the banks. The only step he’s taken in this direction is to allow farmers an extra 30 days to pay insurance premiums–as if an extra month is going to make any difference if you’ve got no crops to sell.
He could campaign for greater agricultural aid for farmers in the Global South, specifically to build food storage facilities. Investment in this kind of food infrastructure to smooth out the ups and downs of harvests was drastically cut in developing countries throughout the 1980s and ’90s as international lenders demanded reductions in government spending in exchange for loans. In addition, such insurance was seen as unnecessary when “the market” would automatically adjust for any shortfall; similarly, in the United States, grain reserves are low and unable to make up any deficit because of a reduction in grain storage.
Perhaps more importantly still, if Vilsack and the Obama administration in general had any concern for humanity and the world’s poor, they could begin an aggressive campaign to re-regulate financial speculation on food prices in international commodity markets. Such an attack on the bankers, stockbrokers and speculators would no doubt prove wildly popular.
IN PRACTICE, the myopic priorities of capitalism dictate the solutions on offer. Vilsack has enacted short-term palliatives which are highly likely to make the long-term situation far worse.
The $383 million in emergency drought payments to farmers that just passed Congress is appropriating the money directly from cuts to conservation programs designed to promote more sustainable farming practices. Indeed, cuts to those programs are three times what is allocated for emergency drought relief, leading a coalition of environmental groups to write a letter to all members of Congress stating their opposition:
Using disproportionate cuts to conservation to fund disaster assistance undermines the successful conservation programs that are currently being utilized…Disproportionately cutting conservation dollars to pay for disaster aid is short-sighted, and the long-term investment in conservation should not be usurped by the short-term thinking to address severe drought.
Rather than downsize the powerful corn-to-ethanol industry–much of it situated in Obama’s home state of Illinois which has the third-largest production capacity, while Iowa, a campaign-defining state for Obama in 2008 and a swing state this time around, produces the most–Vilsack has instead sacrificed 3.8 million acres of conservation land for grazing and the production of hay in order to circumvent livestock owner’s anger directed at ethanol producers.
Most absurdly, considering this is, after all, the 21st century, at the same press conference where Vilsack predicted food price increases, he offered his own personal solution to the drought crisis: “I get on my knees every day, and I’m saying an extra prayer now. If I had a rain prayer or a rain dance I could do, I would do it.”
So while there is a clear and easily achievable solution at hand–reallocation of corn from ethanol distillation to food production, the agriculture secretary of the world’s biggest corn exporter believes a more useful way of spending his time is in genuflecting to an all-powerful, invisible deity in the sky.
In the medium term, the industry practice of feeding corn to cattle in huge, enclosed feeding lots to speed the fattening process needs urgent re-examination–for the good of animal and human welfare. To enhance profit margins, successively larger animals have been selected so that over time, the animals themselves have changed. The larger a single animal is, the larger the profit ratio you obtain from chopping it up.
Cows in giant feed lots are typically around 1,200 to 1,300 pounds rather than the more usual 900 to 1,000 pounds. A feed-lot cow in the open field would have to eat a simply enormous amount of grass or hay to fatten since its overall body mass is almost 30 percent larger. Hence corporations have created a cow that can’t survive except through being force-fed high-energy corn meal.
Apart from the misallocation of corn, the knock-on effects of that decision for animal and human welfare–including the incubation and mutation of pathogens, and the disposal of huge volumes of toxic animal waste laden with antibiotics and growth hormones concentrated in small areas–all feed in to the incredibly wasteful, dangerous and unsustainable nature of capitalist agriculture.
AT A time when the reality of anthropogenic climate change has become so hard to ignore that even some famous climate skeptics have given up protesting, drought is going to be an increasing factor that agricultural planners need to take into account. Therefore, cutting money from programs designed to manage the land more sustainably is a suicidal policy.
As climate blogger Joseph Romm pointed out in an article in Nature, assuming business as usual–which is exactly what is going to happen without a mobilization of the people that dwarfs the revolts of 2011–there will be a cascading series of destabilizing changes which will all negatively impact our ability to grow food:
Precipitation patterns are expected to shift, expanding the dry subtropics. What precipitation there is will probably come in extreme deluges, resulting in runoff rather than drought alleviation. Warming causes greater evaporation, and once the ground is dry, the Sun’s energy goes into baking the soil, leading to a further increase in air temperature. That is why, for instance, so many temperature records were set for the United States in the 1930s Dust Bowl; and why, in 2011, drought-stricken Texas saw the hottest summer ever recorded for a U.S. state. Finally, many regions are expected to see earlier snowmelt, so less water will be stored on mountaintops for the summer dry season.
Even worse, the recent results of 19 different climate models predict that drought will become a permanent feature of large areas of the North American continent:
If climate change pushes the global average temperature to 2.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial era levels, as many experts now expect, [almost all of Mexico, the mid-Western United States and most of Central America] will be under severe and permanent drought conditions.
Future conditions are projected to be worse than Mexico’s current drought or the U.S. Dust Bowl era of the 1930s that forced hundreds of thousands of people to migrate.
In other words, we are only beginning to glimpse the outlines of a situation that will become far worse without drastic ameliorative action in the near-term future. Climate change, caused primarily by the burning of fossil fuels, is creating extended droughts that threaten to undermine agriculture and, thereby, our ability to feed ourselves. Rather than a swift redirection of societal priorities–toward energy conservation, renewable technologies and sustainable farming practices, instead there’s a continuation and extension of the policies that got us here in the first place.
NOTHING CAN explain this paradox between, on the one hand, the prolongation of unsustainable food production practices that don’t even feed people successfully, and on the other, the way in which the natural world functions as an inter-connected whole, other than to examine the factors that drive a society artificially divided into antagonistic classes with opposing priorities.
We live under a system that is inexorably leading to greater and greater climatic dislocations, due to its inherently anti-ecological dynamic that is predicated on exponential growth and the prioritization of short-term measures in the interest of profit.
We see the same irrational process played out in India, which is suffering from a 20 percent shortfall in precipitation, with some states recording 70 percent reductions from historic averages. Sixty percent of India’s 1.2 billion people work in agriculture, which accounts for 20 percent of Indian gross domestic product.
But less rain doesn’t just affect farmers directly. Less rain leads to less hydroelectric power, which means farmers have to use their own pumps to obtain water from underground aquifers for crop irrigation to save their harvest. Those pumps run on electricity. So at a time when there was less electricity available because of drought, there was an increased demand for electricity to overcome the drought, a factor contributing to the massive blackout in India.
Additionally, pumping groundwater has led to aquifers dropping in some areas by between 60 and 200 meters, requiring bigger, more powerful pumps for deeper wells to continue the unsustainable practice of tapping groundwater supplies at such volumes.
This is despite the fact that while 90 percent of water use in India is for agriculture, only about 10-15 percent ends up reaching the crops, as most of it evaporates on the ground before it gets to them. Rather than investing in sustainable agricultural practices to combat the problem, the Indian government bought heavily into the Western-backed Green Revolution of the 1960’s, and promoted the planting of water-intensive crops such as rice.
According to Upmanu Lall, director of the Columbia Water Center at Columbia University’s Earth Institute, “the whole water and energy problem [in India] is dire, and it’s caused by government policy.” He gives the example of the Punjab, which has an annual rainfall of 0.4 to 0.8 meters, but now grows rice, which requires 1.8 meters of annual rainfall.
The intersection of energy, water and food with capitalist development is illustrated in India in stark form. But the solution, abstracting the limitations imposed by class society, is once again quite simple, in that crops should be grown where the climate makes most sense, not where they will make the most money or merely to add to foreign cash reserves or national status.
However, rather than taking those kind of measures or addressing climate change, India is building more coal and nuclear plants and is one of the country’s most resistant to taking effective action on climate change.
Around the world, the evidence is mounting that there are apparently no circumstances, even ones as cataclysmic as drastic changes to planetary climate, that take precedence over the need to accumulate capital by the tiny segment of society that actively benefits from the process.
Given all of the above, it seems impossible to avoid the conclusion that to survive at all on a planet that looks remotely like the one we were born on, we must confront the system that produces a society at odds both with itself and the natural world for the same reason–class stratification.
That means the building of an organized resistance in every workplace, community, school and farm all across the world. The exploitation and oppression that is meted out to the vast majority of the world’s population as a consequence of the way system works is the mirror image of the exploitation of the biosphere that, ultimately, forms the basis for life–a scientific fact the capitalists seem capable of ignoring.
We can’t afford to let them get away with it. That’s why we have to organize, in order to say: For the good of humanity and the rest of the biosphere upon which we depend, you need to go.
Chris Williams is the author of Ecology and Socialism: Solutions to Capitalist Ecological Crisis.
This month the Left Forum will be showing the film “BETTER THIS WORLD.” The film is a documentary telling the story of Bradley Crowder and David McKay, who were accused of intending to firebomb the 2008 Republican National Convention, is a dramatic tale of idealism, loyalty, crime and betrayal.
“Better This World” follows the radicalization of these boyhood friends from Midland, Texas, under the tutelage of revolutionary activist Brandon Darby. The results: eight homemade bombs, multiple domestic terrorism charges and a high-stakes entrapment defense hinging on the actions of a controversial FBI informant. “Better This World” goes on to the heart of the war on terror and its impact on civil liberties and political dissent in post 9/11 America. Winner, 2012 Writers Guild Award for Best Documentary.
After the film we will be discussing the widespread anger at Wall Street and frustrations with politician’s. Tom Burke will give an update on the Coalition to March on the RNC (www.MarchontheRNC.com). Thousands will march against the Republicans on Monday, August 27, 2012, in Tampa, Florida. The Democratic convention follows that and will face protests too. The film is free and open to the public. It will be shown on a TV set. Hope to see you there!
Better This World
Thursday, August 16
7:00PM
IGE (Institute for Global Education).
1118 Wealthy SE.
Grand Rapids, MI. 49506
Critiquing Obama’s track record: Cornel West & Paul Street
This video is re-posted from Al Jazeera.
Al Jazeera TV recently invited radical scholar’s Paul Street and Cornel West to provide an honest critique of the Obama administration.
Cornel West was a supporter when Barack Obama ran for President in 2008, but now feels that Obama’s policies have been brutal for many Americans. His most recent book, co-authored with Tavis Smiley is The Rich And The Rest Of Us: A Poverty Manifesto.
Paul Street is the author of numerous books, two of which are about Barack Obama. The first one, written during the 2008 Election, is entitled Barack Obama and the Future of American Politics, and the most recent book is entitled, The Empire’s New Clothes: Barack Obama in the Real World of Power.
We received notice that there is a meeting being held Friday at 6PM at The Network (345 Atlas Avenue in Eastown), in response to the threats of rape that were directed at people gathered in Cherry St. Park for Gay Day this past Saturday.
Someone who attended the event filmed an interaction with people who were protesting Gay Day. During this interaction, one of the men said that it was be justified to rape women and specifically the woman filming because of the “sinful nature” of the LGBT celebration taking place at Cherry St. Park.
The Grand Rapids Police Department was called during this confrontation, but the police told those who called that the group of men had the right to assemble and engage in “free speech.”
Several local groups have responded to this by claiming that what the men were doing had gone beyond free speech and was actually hate speech, since they threatened to rape some of those who were present at the Cherry St Park.
The Tolerance, Equality and Awareness Movement (TEAM) sent a letter to the Grand Rapids Police Department that called the incident hate speech, that the GRPD should formally charge these men and that, “they should be prosecuted to the fullest extended of the federal law, namely the Matthew Shepard and James Byrd Hate Crimes Prevention Act.”
In addition, the local chapter of the National Organization of Women (NOW) also posted a letter sent by a NOW member to the Mayor of Grand Rapids and the Police Chief. This letter states in part:
I expect the elected officials of Grand Rapids to work to make my community as safe as possible for all citizens. In this situation the GRPD’s failure to take action to protect our community from such horrendous threats of violence is alarming and unacceptable. I believe the GRPD’s failure to act condones threats of violence and inadvertently encourages this type of behavior in our community.
Police, Violence and the LGBT Community
While it is certainly understandable that people are outraged over the threats of rape directed at people who were part of the Gay Day event on Saturday, it is a bit disconcerting that people believe that the police are really committed to preventing violence in this community, particularly violence against the LGBT community.
A recent report by the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force and the National Center for Transgender Equality entitled “Injustice at Every Turn” made it clear that nearly half of all the Trans people surveyed felt uncomfortable in talking to the police and that 22%, about 1/5 of all respondents, felt harassment by the police, with that percentage even higher amongst people of color.
The work of the national women of color organization, INCITE! also speaks to police abuse of women of color and Trans people of color. In their toolkit on Police Violence Against Women of Color and Trans People of Color also makes it clear that police violence directed at women of color and Trans people of color is extremely high and that continued collaboration with law enforcement agencies not only gives legitimacy to police departments, it prevents communities from finding real alternatives to relying on cops.
The marginalization of a gendered political analysis of state violence also de-prioritizes the work of developing community alternatives for safety, support, healing, and accountability from domestic violence, sexual violence, homophobic/transphobic violence, and other kinds of gender-based violence within our communities.
Dean Spade, in the amazing book Normal Life: Administrative Violence, Critical Trans Politics and the Limits of Law, argues passionately that hate crimes legislation has no deterrent effect on people and only “strengthen and legitimize the criminal punishment system, a system that targets the very people these laws are supposedly passed to protect.”
Spade goes on to say, “Could the veterans of the Stonewall and Compton’s Cafeteria uprisings against police violence have guessed that a few decades later LGBT law reformers would be supporting passage of the Matthew Shepard and James Byrd Hate Crimes Prevention Act, a law that provides millions of dollars to enhance police and prosecutorial resources?“
Locally, we have seen how the Kent County Sheriff’s Department has engaged in sting operations that target gay men in parks, just for having conversations with people. The question for all of us to ask is do we want the police to prevent violence or do we find other models that are not based on punishment and violence?
MLive reporter dismissive of women’s voices
About a week ago, MLive announced it was going to run a new “interactive” feature on ethics.
The reactions from the comment section were mixed and people were expressing frustration on the process because the group of “experts” MLive put together was all clergy and all men. It is the later point I wish to address.
In the follow up MLive piece on their ethics forum, posted yesterday, the reporter acknowledges that one of the main critiques received so far was that the, “panel includes six male clergy.”
The ethics panel, according to MLive, was created by Rabbi Krishef, who is with Congregation Ahavas Israel in Grand Rapids. Krishef says he hopes to add a Catholic clergy person and a woman at some point, but no timeline was given for those additions.
The Mlive piece also states that a woman would be added, “to address the current gender disparity.” Really, having a 7 to 1 ratio, with seven men and one woman would address the gender disparity. I assume that the Rabbi and the MLive reporter’s math are not that bad, which means they don’t think too highly of women nor the importance of gender equity.
Imagine if there was an MLive created panel on race relations and they had all White people and then decided they would add one Black person, you know, to address racial equity.
The MLive reporter adds insult to injury by then stating, “So, for the moment, if you want a Catholic perspective, share one. A women’s intuition? Let us hear it.” So, not only does MLive not care about gender equity, the male reporter makes light of the issue and dismisses women by calling what they have to contribute as intuition. The level of insensitivity to women and lack of respect is not just the fault of the reporter here, but of the MLive editorial staff, which seems to be demonstrating a form of institutional sexism and unrecognized male privilege by even allowing the ethics panel to move forward with no women included as experts.
The e-mail for the MLive reporter is mvandebu@mlive.com.
In case you were wondering what critical, ethical question was first posed to the panel of men, here it is:
I have been invited to a coworker’s home for dinner, but I really don’t like spending time with him. However, I need to work with him every day, so I don’t want to insult him by turning down the invitation. Is it OK to lie and tell him that I am busy that night?
WTF?
New Media We Recommend
Below is a list of new materials that we have read/watched in recent weeks. The comments are not a “review” of the material, instead sort of an endorsement of ideas and investigations that can provide solid analysis and even inspiration in the struggle for change. All these items are available at The Bloom Collective, so check them out and stimulate your mind.
Ad Nauseam: A Survivor’s Guide to American Consumer Culture, edited by Carrie McLaren – The reality of living in a hyper-marketing and advertiser driven culture is not an epiphany for most of us. This book does in the first section provide us with a useful overview of how advertising impacts us as individuals and as a society. However, the beauty of Ad Nauseam is the collection of stories and reflections on consumer culture and what many people have done in response. Edited by Carrie McLaren, with the anti-consumption blog Stay Free, this anthology is sure to inspire, entertain, inform and even arm readers with some tactics on how to deal with the madness of living in a consumer culture. This book is not only useful for media specialists, but for anyone disgusted with being a target market by advertisers and their lackeys.
Occupying Privilege: Conversations on Love, Race & Liberation, edited by JLove Calderon – This anthology of essays, interviews, letters and poems is one of the best resources on anti-racism/anti-white supremacy I have read in years. The collection of authors is amazing, the stories are fabulous and the lessons learned are invaluable. JLove Calderon has put together an amazing resource that should be used by those who want to: first – come to terms with their own privilege; second – be exposed to an analysis of white supremacy and institutional racism, and: third – have the courage to engage in anti-racist action that is truly liberating. This book is worth every penny and is highly recommended.
Blur: How to Know What’s True in the Age of Information Overload, by Bill Kovach and Tom Rosenstiel – We are all bombarded with information sources on TV & radio, in print and particularly online. How does one separate fact from opinion, especially as journalism invests more in hits than telling the truth? This recent book by two writers with the Project for Excellence in Journalism, provide us with an invaluable resource. Kovach and Rosenstiel look at online sourcing, context and the importance of verification in journalism, where journalist look to second and third sources to verify claims made by news sources, particularly people in power. The authors also argue we need to expand our notion of journalism in the digital age so that relevance, urgency, accountability and transparency can become the fabric of how journalism is conducted in the 21st century. A useful tool for educators, journalists and those who care about the future of news.
Vocabulary of Change: In Conversation with Angela Davis & Tim Wise (DVD) – This 78 minute DVD brings together for the first time two of the most prolific and dedicate anti-racist organizers and educators in the US. Angela Davis and Tim Wise both share powerful insights into their own evolution as activists and thinkers, the state of the US, institutional racism, the Prison Industrial Complex and the importance of intersectional thinking and strategizing. In addition, both Davis and Wise spend a significant amount of time looking at issues through a class-based lens and both make it clear that in order to create communities without racism, sexism, homophobia, heterosexism, Transphobia and any other kind of social system of oppression, we must dismantle capitalism. Vocabulary of Change is a great tool for group discussion and should be shared widely.
