The Real Crime Scene Was Inside the G20 Summit
(This interview was re-posted from Democracy Now!)
As thousands protested in the streets of Toronto, inside the G20 summit world leaders agreed to a controversial goal of cutting government deficits in half by 2013. We speak with journalist Naomi Klein. “What actually happened at the summit is that the global elites just stuck the bill for their drunken binge with the world’s poor, with the people that are most vulnerable,” Klein says.
AMY GOODMAN: As thousands protested in the streets of Toronto, inside the G20 summit world leaders agreed to a controversial goal of cutting government deficits in half by 2013. Economists say such a move could usher in sizable tax increases and massive cuts in government programs, including benefit programs such as Social Security and Medicare. Meanwhile, world leaders at the G8/G20 failed to come to an agreement on setting new global rules for big banks or imposing a new across-the-board global bank tax.
Journalist Naomi Klein joins us now from her home in Toronto. Her most recent book, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism. She has an op-ed in the Toronto Globe and Mail today called “Sticking the Public with the Bill for the Bankers’ Crisis.”
Naomi, welcome to Democracy Now! You were out on the streets throughout the weekend. Describe what Toronto looks like and what the G20 decisions—their significance are.
NAOMI KLEIN: Well, Toronto has pretty much returned to normal. They cleaned up the broken glass, and the leaders have gone home. And I was near the Convention Center last night and saw some sweeping up. And, you know, all weekend the media here has been in hysterics over the broken glass and the burning police cars and saying, you know, nothing like this has ever happened before in Canada, which, first of all, is just not true. We have some pretty intense hockey riots, where in one case sixteen police cars were burned. So it isn’t true that we’ve never seen property destruction like this.
But my feeling, when I went by the Convention Center after all the leaders had gone home, was that this was the real crime scene, not those shattered storefronts, but what actually happened at the summit on Sunday night, when the world leaders issued their final communiqué. And what that communiqué said was that there wouldn’t even be a measly tax on banks to help pay for the global crisis that they created and also prevent future crises. There wouldn’t be a financial transaction tax, which could create a fund for social programs and for action on climate change. There wouldn’t be a real action to eliminate subsidies for fossil fuel companies that have also created so many social and environmental costs around the world, as we see with the BP disaster.
But what there would be was very decisive action on deficit reductions. These leaders announced that they would halve their deficits by 2013, which is shocking and brutal cut. You know, I don’t believe—maybe some of the leaders intend on keeping—making good on this promise, but, on the other hand, they can hide behind this promise as the excuse to do what a lot of them want to do anyway, and say, you know, “We have no choice; we made this commitment.” But so, just to put this in perspective, if the US were to cut its deficit, its projected 2010 deficit, in half by 2013, that would be a cut of $780 billion, you know, if there were no tax increases in that period. So, you know, that’s why I wrote the piece that came out this morning in Canada’s national newspaper The Globe and Mail, that what actually happened at the summit is that the global elites just stuck the bill for their drunken binge with the world’s poor, with the people who are most vulnerable, because that is really who’s going to pay, when they balance their budgets on the backs of healthcare programs, pension programs, unemployment programs. And also, the other thing that they did at this G8 summit, that preceded the G20 summit, is admit that they were not meeting their commitments to doubling aid to Africa, once again, because of the debt that was created by saving the banks.
AMY GOODMAN: Naomi Klein, in your piece in The Globe and Mail, you talk about the history of G20, how it was formed.
NAOMI KLEIN: Yeah, you know, the G20 is a little bit of a mysterious institution. Amy, you and I were both at an event in Toronto on Friday night, both speaking at an event organized by the Council of Canadians. It was a terrific event. And Vandana Shiva was one of the other speakers, and she had a great line. She said, “Ah, the G20, so young and yet so old,” referring to the fact that the ideas of the G20 are so old, so predictable. But it is a young institution. It was conceived in 1999 as a summit of finance ministers. It only became a sort of an extension of the G8 as a leaders’ summit in the past two years, and that we saw in London, and we saw it in Pittsburgh, and we have now seen it in Toronto. So this incarnation of the G20 as a leaders’ summit is very young indeed.
But yeah, ten years ago, Paul Martin, who was then Canada’s finance minister, later Canada’s prime minister, was at a meeting with Larry Summers. This is 1999, so Summers at that time was Bill Clinton’s nominee for Treasury secretary. And the two men were discussing this idea to expand the G7 into a larger grouping to respond to the fact that developing country economies like China and India were growing very quickly, and they wanted to include them into this club, and they were under pressure to do so. So, what Martin and Summers did—and this history we only learned last week. This really wasn’t a history that had been told. So this story came out in The Globe and Mail. And it turns out that the two men didn’t have a piece of paper. They wanted to—I don’t know how this would possibly be the case, but their story is that they wanted to make a list of the countries that they would invite into this club, and they couldn’t find a piece of paper, so they found a manilla envelope and wrote on the back of the manilla envelope a list of countries. And by Paul Martin’s admission, those countries were not simply the twenty top economies of the world, the biggest GDPs. They were also the countries that were most strategic to the United States. So Larry Summers would make a decision that obviously Iran wouldn’t be in, but Saudi Arabia would be. And so, Saudi Arabia is in. Thailand, it made sense to include Thailand, because it had actually been the Thai economy, which, two years earlier, had set off the Asian economic crisis, but Thailand wasn’t as important to the US strategically as Indonesia, so Indonesia was in and not Thailand. So what you see from this story is that the creation of the G20 was an absolutely top-down decision, two powerful men deciding together to do this, making, you know, an invitation-only list.
And what you really see is that this is an attempt to get around the United Nations, where every country in the world has a vote, and to create this expanded G7 or G8, where they invite some developing countries, but not so many that they can overpower or outvote the Western—the traditional Western powers. So, as this happened, we have also seen a weakening and an undermining of the United Nations. And I think that that’s the context in which the G20 needs to be understood. And that’s why a lot of the activists in Toronto this week were arguing that the G20 is an illegitimate institution and the price tag is—that we, as Canadian taxpayers, have had to take on for hosting this summit, you know, $1.2 billion, is particularly unacceptable, given that we have the United Nations, where these countries can meet in a much more democratic, much more legitimate forum, as opposed to this ad hoc invitation-only club from the back of an envelope in Larry Summers’s office.
AMY GOODMAN: I wanted to turn to the issue of war. There were a number of feeder marches into the main one on Saturday. The peace groups started in front of the US consulate in Toronto. And there, in a rare moment, a mother of a young Canadian who had just been deployed to Afghanistan, to Kandahar, spoke out against war.
JOSIE FORCADILLA: I’m Josie. I’m employed by the United Church of Canada in the Justice, Global and Ecumenical Relations Unit. My son was deployed in Afghanistan in May this year and is currently working in the Kandahar Airfield, where the Canadian forces is located. And he is under the Royal Regiment, the regiment—the battle group, I mean, that is currently deployed in Afghanistan.
AMY GOODMAN: And why are you here in front of the US consulate on this rainy day?
JOSIE FORCADILLA: I’m here—I’m here, even though it’s raining, as you can see, that I just want to convey my message to the members of the G20 and G8, that relatives, a mother like me, doesn’t want to extend this mission in Afghanistan.
AMY GOODMAN: Why?
JOSIE FORCADILLA: Why? Because lots of lives has been lost, not only from this side of the NATO forces or the ISAF, but as well as the Afghan civilian population. We don’t know what’s happening with the civilians. We don’t know how much people have died—how many people have died in this conflict. So, as a mother, I’m very concerned about that.
AMY GOODMAN: There have just been reports that have come out about torture at the Kandahar air base. Have you heard about this?
JOSIE FORCADILLA: I’ve heard about that, and I’ve read about that. And I think it’s—this government, the Harper government, should come clean with this issue. There should be an impartial investigation, as far as torture is concerned in Kandahar Airfield.
AMY GOODMAN: Josie Forcadilla is the mother of a Canadian soldier currently serving in Kandahar. A hundred fifty Canadian soldiers have died in Afghanistan. Four civilians have died, two since I actually spoke to her.
Naomi Klein, talk about war in the context of the G20 summit, and Canada’s decision to pull out troops, their 4,500 troops, in a year.
NAOMI KLEIN: Well, we’ll see whether that happens. But I do think that the anger that we saw displayed on the streets of Toronto this weekend did surprise a lot of people. You know, people think of Canada as a very polite country, and there was a lot of anger and a lot of very angry young people. And this has to do with a real transformation that’s taken place in our country. And, you know, I say that without romanticizing the pre-Harper Canada, because it had many, many flaws, and Canada is a colonial country with a very violent history. But having said that, something has changed under this government, and it began under the preceding government, where the country has become much more militaristic. And the tradition that Canadians identify with, which is the tradition of peacekeeping, not these overt combat missions, as we’re engaged with in Afghanistan, is really disappearing. And, you know, one of the things that you really notice as a Canadian traveling internationally is that people are constantly asking—certainly they’re constantly asking you, you know, “What is going on with Canada? You know, Canada used to be such a sort of friendly player on the world stage and, you know, pro-human rights and so on. And now Canada is a really belligerent force.” And, you know, Amy, you saw this in Copenhagen around climate change. Canada has the worst record on climate change because of the tar sands.
But, for me, the turning point of realizing just how bad things had gotten was when Jeremy Scahill reported on a speech that Erik Prince, the CEO of Blackwater, the founder of Blackwater, gave in—I believe it was Michigan a couple of months ago. And, you know, Erik Prince didn’t have a lot of nice things to say about too many people, but he was positively effusive about the role that Canada was playing in Afghanistan. He said if you ever see a Canadian, stop them and thank them for the role they’re playing in Afghanistan. So, to me, this was a real sort of turning point in terms of really understanding just how bad things have gotten. And we’ve lost a lot of friends in the world, and the new friends we’re making are people like Erik Prince, not the kind of friends we want to have. So, yeah, there have been a lot of ongoing torture scandals, with Canadian officials having knowledge of torture when they transfer prisoners in Afghanistan, allowing it to happen. So, you know, there’s a real identity crisis going on in this country, where a lot of our cherished beliefs about who we are in the world are just being challenged by the facts. And I think that what we saw on the streets this weekend and this expression of anger in the streets needs to be seen in that context.
AMY GOODMAN: I wanted to turn to a young journalist who was beaten and arrested. Among the hundreds of people arrested at the G20 protests in Toronto was Jesse Rosenfeld. He is a freelance reporter who was on assignment for The Guardian newspaper of London. He’s also a journalist with the Alternative Media Center. He was arrested and detained by Canadian police on Saturday evening covering a protest in front of the Novotel Hotel. We reached him just before this broadcast this morning. He was over at the CBC. And he described what happened to him.
JESSE ROSENFELD: They started sending in snatch squads and declared a mass arrest. At that point, I went up to them, and I was with some other media and said, “What about the media?” Their first reaction was, “Well, media is also under arrest.” And then the officer came up actually [inaudible], said, “If you had an official lanyard from the G8/G20 summit, then you’re actually going to be OK and you can go through.”
Now, it’s interesting, because I filed for my G8/G20 media accreditation on June 11th, back at the deadline, submitted both—you know, all my documentation, including a letter from The Guardian. And then, what happened was, while the summit kept saying, oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, I’m approved, they’re just waiting for the final approval of the RCMP background check before they can send me my lanyard or my official media photo ID, that it basically said it had to declare a background check. And that was basically used to prevent me from getting the media pass. So I only had an Alternative Media Center pass on me, which was the passes that the AMC, the Alternative Media Center, not the government, set up. Alternative Media Center had issued to all the independent journalists that were working with it.
The police told me, “Oh, we don’t recognize these credentials.” I explained to them that I was a journalist also with The Guardian, that I was writing for “Comment Is Free.” I told them about my editors. I told them about my stories. And they said, “Well, we’ll check your credentials, and then, if it’s fine, we’ll let you go.”
At that point, I was sort of taken to the side, after a bunch of media had gotten through the police line, and an officer walked up to me, looked at my ID and said—my Alternative Media Center press pass, that is—and said, “This isn’t legitimate. You’re under arrest,” at which point I was immediately jumped by two police officers. I had my notepads in my hands. Grabbed my arms, they yanked back. My notepad went flying. I was hit in the stomach by one officer as I was held by two others. As I was going over, I was then hit in the back and went down. After I went down and as I went down, I smacked my leg. I had officers jump on top of me. I was being hit in the back. My face was being pushed to the concrete. All the time I’m saying, “I’m not resisting arrest. I’m a journalist. Why are you beating me?” My leg was lifted up, and my ankle was twisted, from while I was on the ground not resisting. And at that point, after I started saying these things, the police then started saying, “Stop resisting arrest,” as if to try and provide cover for themselves.
Something interesting about when I was jumped, as well, is, just a minute or so after, two other officers had passed by, and they identified me as someone who is, quote-unquote, “a mouthy kid.” Basically, I had run into them at demonstrations previously in the week and basically been asking tough questions on the front of the riot line as they were either clashing with media, which they did quite violently through the week, or beating protesters. And so, they had identified me as someone who was challenging them publicly and on the record. And it was at that point that I was jumped by the other officers, you know, and beaten and arrested.
We were then hauled off to jail. I spent—I guess I was arrested at around 10:00, 11:30 in the evening, and I didn’t get out of jail ’til 5:00 or 6:00 the next afternoon. And that was basically on—we weren’t charged. We were held on the—we were detained on the grounds of, quote-unquote, “breach of peace,” which is not a criminal offense. And the conditions in jail—I mean, I’ve been working from the Middle East as a journalist for the past three years or so, since 2007, and the jails actually remind me a lot more of the ones I’ve seen that Israelis hold for Palestinians or the Palestinian Authority holds. We were in handcuffs, or at least I was in handcuffs ’til nearly 5:00 in the morning, while being processed in different cells and waiting to be processed and in cells of over—overcrowded cells with over twenty people, with a porta-potty, very limited access to water. Then, after I was processed, I was moved to a five-foot-by-eight-foot cell, where there were five other people with me. And there was benches, no washroom, only a concrete floor. And the room was absolutely freezing, not even enough space for us to lie down and sleep all at the same time. It was incredibly difficult to sleep because it was so cold. A lot of the people I was in jail with had been beaten, and beaten quite badly—black eyes, bloody noses, and been hit all over. And also, a lot of the people from—there were several people from the Alternative Media Center who had been taken in for just doing their job, which was reporting from the front lines.
AMY GOODMAN: That was Jesse Rosenfeld, freelance reporter on assignment with The Guardian newspaper in London. He was also a journalist with the Alternative Media Center, arrested and detained by the Canadian police on Saturday evening.
Naomi Klein, the level of force that was used, the money that has been put into this, and then I want to end with the Gulf of Mexico, from the G20 to the Gulf of Mexico, and there are connections. I think you make them when you speak and when you write, when we’re talking about the power of corporations.
NAOMI KLEIN: Well. we’ll see if we make it to the Gulf of Mexico, Amy. But, yeah, I want to talk a little bit about, you know, that horrifying story from Jesse. And there are many others like it. And, you know, the police rioted after what happened on Saturday. As you mentioned at the top of the show, more than 600 people have been arrested, brutally arrested in many cases, these nighttime raids. There are stories of people waking up with guns pointed in their faces.
And the context for this is really frightening, because the police are feeling really cornered and feeling like they have to justify something which is completely unjustifiable. And that is the price tag that they put on what it would cost to provide security for the G8 and G20 summit. Security for this summit cost, as you mentioned, an estimated $1 billion. Just to put that in perspective, it’s more than security has ever cost for any summit ever in the world. And, you know, Canada is not a country which has a history of terrorist attacks. So, it isn’t at all clear why they felt they needed to spend such a huge amount of money. As a point of comparison, at Pittsburgh G20 summit, the price tag for security was $100 million. So you went in less than a year from a $100 million price tag to $1 billion price tag for security, with no explanation. And as Canadians started to learn about this, they became rightfully very, very angry. And the police were under a lot of pressure to explain why they were treating this summit that Canada was hosting essentially as a cash grab. Basically what happened is they were able to buy all kinds of new toys, water cannons, sound cannons, you know, all kinds of high-tech stuff. But the real cash grab was overtime pay for the police. I mean, they were absolutely extravagant in their overtime demands, unyielding. They said, “If you want security, this is what it costs.” So, before the summit started, there was a public opinion poll that was conducted that found that 78 percent of Canadians believed that the cost was unjustified.
So, what happened on Saturday, when you saw those burning cop cars and windows breaking, was what I can only describe as a cop strike. Essentially, they were just letting it happen. And people were watching this, not understanding why, for hours, the same police car was just allowed to burn. I mean, these guys had just bought themselves a brand new water cannon, and yet they couldn’t seem to find themselves a fire extinguisher.
Now, while that was happening, media outlets were getting press statements. And I’ll just read you one. This is from the Toronto Police Department: “All you have to do is turn on the TV and see what’s happening now. Police cars are getting torched, buildings are being vandalized, people are getting beat up, and [so] the so-called ‘intimidating’ police presence is essential to restoring order.” In other words, the police were playing public relations, overtly. They were saying, “OK, you’re telling us our price tag was too high. We’re getting in political trouble for our outrageous demands. So now we’re going to show you this huge threat that we’re up against.” And so, we have a police commissioner named Julian Fantino, who’s now started to talk about activists as organized crime. He says it’s not enough to call them thugs, they’re organized criminals. So, what’s dangerous here is that in order to justify their own unjustifiable actions, they need to overinflate a threat.
And so, that has played itself out in two ways: one, by allowing what happened on Saturday to happen with almost no intervention; and then—that was stage one—and stage two was using that inaction as justification for scooping up hundreds of other activists, beating up journalists, just going on a rampage. Now, it they were serious about getting the people who had broken the windows, they would have done the arrests there at the time. But that’s not what they’d done. They went to other parts of the city. They waited hours. And that’s who they arrested. So, I feel very, very worried about my friends who are in jail right now, because—because I think there’s nothing more frightening than, you know, a police force that feels the need to justify itself in this way and using these young activists as their political cover. And, you know, I think it’s a very dangerous situation, Amy.
AMY GOODMAN: Naomi, we just have a minute, but I would like you to touch on, since you were in the Gulf, and because the G20 is not as much about containing corporate power, but it seems to be augmenting and protecting it. What you see is the connection from the Gulf to Toronto?
NAOMI KLEIN: Yeah, well, Amy, I do have a long piece about the oil disaster in the Gulf of Mexico. It’s the cover story in The Nation this week, if people want to read it. It’s called “A Hole in the World.” And I won’t try to summarize it here.
But, you know, to me—and this is what I spoke about in Toronto—one of the most important messages that we really need to learn in this moment is if we are going to oppose the strategy that these G20 leaders have just put on the table for how to deal with the budget crisis that they created, if we’re going to say, “We don’t want to get stuck with the bill for your crisis,” then we have to put other revenue sources on the table, and that means cutting military and police spending, like the outrageous police spending we just saw in Toronto, but much larger than that, the losing wars that we’re fighting—that’s a great cost saver—and also taxing the banks, financial transaction taxes, but also going after the fossil fuel companies, because the message that we need to learn from the BP disaster is just the incredible costs imposed on societies by this industry. It is not just BP.
And we’ve accepted the principle in the Gulf of Mexico, or most of us have, with the exception of some Republicans, that the polluters should pay. And I think what we need to do is extend that principle, so that [inaudible] paying around the world, so Shell is paying for the environmental devastation it has wrought in Ogoniland in Nigeria and the decimation of the Niger Delta, and Chevron is paying for what its predecessor, Texaco, did in the Amazon in what’s called the Amazonian Chernobyl, in a case, I know, that you’ve covered extensively on Democracy Now!, and on and on. [inaudible] that is the issue of what the whole fossil fuel industry has done, in terms of sticking us with the bill for climate change, the cost of adapting to climate change, but also the cost of shifting away from fossil fuels.
And, you know, one of the things that we just heard at the G20 summit is that they can’t—the leaders don’t believe that they can afford to take real action on climate change. Any action on climate change, according to the G20, has to ensure economic growth, which basically means they can’t take any action on climate change. So, I think we need to very forcefully put on the table, we do need to take action on climate change, and if our governments have a cash flow problem, then they should be going directly after the fossil fuel companies, and they should pay for it, because they created the crisis, they created the problem, and the polluters should pay.
(This article is re-posted from the Michigan Campaign Finance Network.)
With over 500 individuals seeking state offices this election cycle, it is safe to say that candidates have already raised several million dollars this year. However, due to disgracefully lax state reporting requirements, the citizens of Michigan currently have access to 2010 fundraising data from precisely two of those candidates: U.S. Rep. Pete Hoekstra and Oakland County Sherriff Mike Bouchard. Hoekstra and Bouchard have filed partial fundraising reports with the Bureau of Elections in applications for gubernatorial public matching funds.
The public funding system provides gubernatorial candidates with a two-to-one match for eligible contributions of up to $100 from a person. Contributions from political action committees (PACs) and political parties are not eligible to be matched. A candidate must raise at least $75,000 in eligible contributions to qualify for public funds.
The system was designed to impose a $2 million primary election spending limit for candidates who accept public funds. However, those spending limits are waived for a participating candidate who faces an opponent who has provided at least $340,000 of his own funds to his own campaign. Since Republican candidate Rick Snyder had contributed over $2.6 million to his campaign by the end of 2009, all his primary opponents may be eligible for public funds without having to observe spending limits.
The Hoekstra campaign has filed two applications for a total of $365,717 in matching funds, based on contributions from 2,656 individuals. The Bureau ruled that $19,552 in contributions were ineligible for the match and informed the Hoekstra campaign it is eligible for $326,613.
The Bouchard campaign applied for $238,735 based on contributions from 1,712 contributors. The Bureau ruled that $22,975 was ineligible for the match and informed the Bouchard campaign it is eligible for $192,835.
Both Bouchard’s and Hoekstra’s applications included individual contributions from 2009 and 2010. Neither campaign will receive the full amount for which it is eligible, at least not initially.
The Legislature took $7 million from the public campaign fund in October 2007 to balance the FY 2008 budget, so this year’s initial primary grants will be prorated to 42 percent of the eligible amount. If the total amount for which all the candidates ultimately apply is less than the total amount available for the primary, the full amounts for which eligible candidates apply will be paid. However, those completing payments likely would be made too late to be of full utility to the campaigns.
It remains to be seen why other candidates have not filed for matching funds so far. They may be temporarily concealing the identities of their donors, or they may have ideological objections to the fund. Or, in the cases of state Sen. Tom George, Speaker of the House Andy Dillon and Lansing Mayor Virg Bernero, the question may be whether they have raised the $75,000 in eligible contributions to qualify.
Alternatively, Dillon and/or Bernero may be planning to exceed the $2 million primary election spending limit, and they do not have the same latitude as the Republicans to collect public funds and ignore the spending limit.
Attorney General Mike Cox has raised sufficient eligible contributions to apply for public funds, and the only question relative to his campaign’s participation is likely to be whether he is ideologically opposed to the fund. As a practical matter, it is unlikely he would leave money on the table, particularly when he could deprive his primary election opponents of a greater pro rata distribution by applying for funds himself.
As a self-funded candidate, Rick Snyder is ineligible for public funds.
The mystery surrounding gubernatorial campaign finances is symptomatic of a lax and inadequate campaign finance reporting regime. State officeholders file only an annual report in years when they are not facing the electorate. This contrasts with federal officeholders and candidates who file quarterly in off years. State candidates will file their first report for 2010, the pre-primary, on July 23rd. Federal candidates file quarterly reports, in addition to pre- and post-election reports, in election years.
“It is unconscionable to have officeholders raising millions of dollars from interest groups who are driving a policy agenda and we see only one report in 18 months,” said Rich Robinson of the Michigan Campaign Finance Network. “The citizens of this state have a right to know who is giving what to whom, and they shouldn’t have to wait six months to know it in an election year.”
Note to editorial writers: Two candidates who aspire to receive the Republican nomination to be secretary of state are well positioned to move legislation to address the unacceptably long gaps between state campaign finance reports. Sens. Michelle McManus and Cameron Brown are the Chair and majority Vice Chair, respectively, of the Senate Committee on Campaigns and Elections. Their inaction perpetuates the disgraceful lack of timeliness in Michigan campaign finance disclosure. Please, remind your readers that candidates should earn higher office through service to the citizens of this state.
Statewide Candidate Annual Reports, 10 Months Before Election, 2002-2010
Urban Farming Pilot Project Community Dialogue Session
Yesterday I attended an event that was billed as a “Community Dialogue” by people who had participated in what is called the Urban Farm Pilot Project. The project was facilitated through the GRCC Keller Future Center. However, yesterday’s gathering took place at the Goei Center, operated by Bing Goei, a member of the GR Chamber of Commerce and a current candidate for State Representative.
Some of the participants presented brief overviews of the various projects that small teams worked on, projects such as an Urban Agriculture Learning Lab, a Regional Food Awareness Communication Tool, Change through Farming Kits, Food Production and good health, and Indoor Farming.
All of these projects had some interesting ideas and you can look at details online, but what I found somewhat troubling was the heavy emphasis on these projects as being implemented within the private sector. Participants generally referred to these projects as having entrepreneurial potential. They also spoke primarily in terms of how these projects could connect businesses with customers.
Such a focus excluded any honest discussion on who would be the primary beneficiaries of such a project and who would not. Since most of the discussion focused on the business sector, people who are currently living in parts of the community that have limited access to healthy food, low income and disproportionately minority population were not really part of the conversation.
Project participants talked about how this project could enhance their career portfolios, but not how these projects could potentially create more equality and promote more justice in the community.
The emphasis on the entrepreneurial aspect of the project was underscored when one of the facilitators listed community partners in the project – the West Michigan Strategic Alliance, the Right Place Program, GR Chamber of Commerce, GVSU Center for Entrepreneurship, a consulting firm and several local design firms. Food was also donated to the project teams throughout their seven weeks by San Chez restaurant.
People from GRCC said they were interested in promoting a knowledge economy, with the triple bottom line (profit, people & planet) as the framework. They used language like trend analysis, asset mapping, talent retention, and even agro-hubs. What wasn’t discussed so much were concrete ways to use more urban space for growing food, how to involve more people and how eat healthy and local was a right, not just a smart business plan.
The morning ended with people being asked to provide feedback on a series of questions, which initially I thought were for the purposes of getting more input on urban agriculture. Instead, the point of the small group discussions was to answer predetermined questions that would help GRCC determine ways to get more people interested in other Future Center projects. In many ways I felt like they were not interested in what the community had to say or contribute, unless it fit into a process the project organizers had already determined.
Media Bites – Motorola Droid
In this week’s Media Bites we take a look at how the new Motorola Droid phone system is being branded to the public, with an emphasis on gender stereotypes in this ad. We also discuss how this kind of technology impacts us socially and what kind of environmental contamination is caused in the production and discarding of cell phones. Our critique ends with some information on the role that Motorola has played in support Israeli state repression.
“We’re F**cking Losing This Thing”
General McChrystal’s resignation has distracted the media from the real story found in the explosive Rolling Stone article. Check out the new video from Rethink Afghanistan.
G20: Illegitimate, Incompetent and Out of Control
(This article is re-posted from ZNet.)
You can’t formulate a sensible international economic policy without the basics: helicopters, snipers, riot police, attack dogs, tanks and miles of chain link fence. Wherever ministers of finance gather, the essential accessories for crowd control and popular repression are always to be found. But even by the historical levels of unaccountability, profligacy and cowardice set at meetings of the world’s richest economies, this weekend’s Canadian G8/G20 meetings raise the bar. By the time the teeth of the last protester are hosed from the soles of the last Mountie, the security bill will have topped one billion dollars. The six kilometer fence in the middle of Toronto cost $5 million alone but most of the rest of the bill is secret – ‘national security’ provides an alibi for backhanders and white elephants.
So what will Canadians (and the rest of the word) get for their money? Very little. The meeting will produce a tepid ‘big tent’ declaration with language elastic enough to stretch over the bickering interests of thrifty Europeans, improvident Americans, tightrope-walking Chinese, and restive Saudis. All done.
What’ll be worse, though, is what the G20 meeting will fail to do. It will prevent open debate about alternatives, it will let those responsible for the financial crisis maintain their veneer of legitimacy, and it’ll chip away at the institutions that, still, offer an alternative to the G20’s traveling circus. Here, just for the record, are three reasons why the G20 is already a failure.
- 1. The G20 is illegitimate
On the G20’s website, we read:
“The G-20 … brings together important industrial and emerging-market countries from all regions of the world. Together, member countries represent around 90 per cent of global gross national product, 80 per cent of world trade (including EU intra-trade) as well as two-thirds of the world’s population. The G-20’s economic weight and broad membership gives it a high degree of legitimacy and influence over the management of the global economy and financial system.”
To restate: because the G20 governments are rich and, with India and China among their number, populous, they are the legitimate managers of the global economy and financial system. First, of course, the G20 represents the sum of 46 democratic deficits (the European Union’s 27 members count as one G20 member). China and Saudi Arabia of course, don’t sully themselves with the pretense of democracy at all.
Do we gain much by diluting the club of former colonizing countries (the G8) with the formerly colonized ones? Not really. The Financial Times reports that the number of millionaires in Asia has finally overtaken that in Europe, and there’s no good reason to think that governments in the East are any less craven than governments in the West. At the G20, there will be a chance for ministers to receive advice from businesses – the so called B20. This rather hints at the class orientation of the G20’s leaders.
Of course, there’s one thing worse than having your government at the G20, and that’s not having your government at the G20. The G20, albeit awkwardly, admits that there might be something wrong with the world’s largest economies deciding what’s best for the entire world, particularly the hundred countries who aren’t invited. So the G20 have taken measures to increase the representation of poor countries in their favourite international fora: the IMF and World Bank. They’ve made progress too. Again, they congratulate themselves for
… the World Bank’s voice reform to increase the voting power of developing and transition countries by 3.13%.
It’s true! China, India and Saudi Arabia have more votes. But, in the part of the World Bank that makes so-called concessional loans, eleven African countries have seen a decline in their relative voting power, and Bangladesh has lost more voting power in the shuffle than the UK. And it’s a bit of a stretch to call the loans concessional – technically, the concession is meant to be a low interest rate, it’s always developing countries that have to make concessions in their economic policies in order to qualify for them.
Of course, there is an organization that does include every country in the world – the United Nations. And it’s the one organization that the G20 goes out of its way never to mention. Because the G20 members seem themselves as the UN’s replacement.
So, not terribly much legitimacy, even on the metrics that the G20 likes to hold itself to. And by the metric it doesn’t like to hold itself to, there’s even less legitimacy. Which group has been more affected by the recession, after all, than women? The United Nations knows all about this, with a series of investigations, reports and policies on gender and the impact of the financial crisis available here. The G20’s site doesn’t mention gender at all. Not once.
2. The G20 is incompetent
Here’s how the G20 represent themselves:
“To tackle the financial and economic crisis that spread across the globe in 2008, the G20 members were called upon to further strengthen international cooperation.”
As if the G20 were sitting the Batcave when, suddenly, the Batphone rang and Commissioner Gordon was asking them to save the planet. As if their policies hadn’t, in fact, facilitated the problem in the first place.
Despite a few changes of leadership since 2008, this is largely the same crew, armed with the same toolkit and the same instruction manual for the economy. It’s wishful thinking to hope that these governments are going to be able to fix the very problems that they’ve spawned.
Yet there has been, and continues to be, solid thinking about the economy outside the corridors of central banks and ministries of finance. Dean Baker, for instance, notes that:
“The economy thrived in the three decades following World War II with a financial sector that was proportionately on-fourth of its current size. There is no reason that the financial sector should use up a larger share of the economy’s resources today than it did three decades ago. Effective regulation will restore the financial sector to its proper role in the economy.” (Taking Economics Seriously, 2010, p79)
The United Nations has been thinking about the financial crisis for a while – and held a conference last year at which Nobelists like Joseph Stiglitz worked with representatives from every government (legitimate and otherwise) at the Conference on the World Financial and Economic Crisis and its Impact on Development to produce a plan of action . It’s one that almost every sane economist would endorse. It’s not terribly revolutionary, though it’ll take a revolution to get it accepted, because it recommends things like fiscal stimulus, strong regulation and investment in a green economy. In the scope and strength of its recommendations, it far outstrips the statement currently circulating for the G20. Yet it’s a vision that’s necessary in order to tackle the issues of sovereign debt, unemployment, climate change, gender inequality, and poverty.
3. The G20 isn’t in control
Perhaps the biggest problem is that the G20’s ministers, awed as they are by financial markets, can’t see their way to respond without capitulating to them. It’s not at all clear whether G20 members govern financial markets, or the other way round. But it’s becoming clearer. Britain under its new Conservative ( and Liberal!) government has decided that, in fact, it’s the financiers who run the country. In order to restore market confidence, the people have been served with the most austere cuts for decades in a recent ‘emergency budget’. The belt tightening has, so far, made the markets happy. The British Pound made some brief gains, and the the OECD pronounced it a ‘courageous budget’.
John Maynard Keynes, as quoted by his biographer in the Financial Times recently, had something to say about budgets like these:
When the Conservative-Liberal coalition that had succeeded the Labour government introduced an emergency budget in September 1931, Keynes again stood out against the chorus of approval. The budget was, he wrote, “replete with folly and injustice”. He explained to an American correspondent that “every person in this country of super-asinine propensities, everyone who hates social progress and loves deflation, feels that his hour has come and triumphantly announces how, by refraining from every form of economic activity, we can all become prosperous again.”
So, how to make those with super-asinine propensities listen? For the longer term, the good folk at places like the US Social Forum will be organizing for the future. Over this weekend, though, many good folk in Toronto will be trying hard to make some noise, present some alternatives, and avoid the boots of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police.
“Resistance in Retail,” a Friday morning workshop st the US Social Forum, brought together a panel of labor organizers that included Grand Rapids’ own Cole Dorsey, IWW Starbucks Union. Others on the panel represented New York City’s Retail Action Project (RAP) and Common Threads Art Collective, Wake Up Walmart and Chicago’s Grassroots Collaborative.
The panel starting by describing today’s retail workers and how retailers are making millions on their backs. For the most part, retail workers are not teenagers, college students or folks working to get out of the house and earn a little spending money. The huge majority of retail workers are supporting themselves, and very often their families, on wages so low that they have to work two or three different jobs just to make ends meet. The majority are people of color.
Retailers either offer no benefits or benefits hinged on an hours-worked quota system purposely coupled with an inability to get hours, preventing workers from accessing them. In other cases, (J.C. Penney and Whole Foods were cited as an examples), workers are terminated when they have enough seniority for benefits or, when benefits depend on being full-time, they are terminated and offered part-time positions at new-hire hourly rates.
“New York City retailers’ had 70% growth in sales from 2001 to 2007 but still pay the lowest wages–44% earn less than $10 an hour, an outrage in New York City where the cost of living is so high,” shared Chimuka, who works at Yellow Rat Bastard, a high-end skateboard and apparel shop in Manhattan. “It is like killing somebody.” He started at $6.25 hour but fought with RAP and won a union contract that guaranteed better wages for the store’s workers.
Romuald Ilboudo concurred. He stood up for better wages at Scoop NYC, a store frequented by the stars and paying workers poverty wages. “RAP taught us how to fight,” he said. “One, know your rights. Many retail workers are immigrants and need confidence. Learn how to approach new workers and mobilize them. (High turnover rates in retail make organizing difficult). Two, develop strategies for organizing and using media. And three, know how to file a complaint and where to get legal counsel. When we got fired, we received a $300,000 award.”
The Common Threads Art Collective is a group of RAP associated retail workers who are also artists. They put on exhibits that not only provide a venue for selling their work, but also make statements about the plight of retail workers. They also stage creative direct actions. They have handed out “subversive” coupons, displayed mannequins with a message outside of retailers, hosted a bread line and dressed as elves during the Christmas season.
Others on the workshop panel had fewer victories to share. Even though Walmart, as the world’s largest retailer, is guilty of the most heinous strategies for denying workers fair compensation, Wake Up Walmart faces a real struggle to get Walmart workers organized. But, Cynthia and Ernestine, two Walmart workers on the panel, are not giving up. “People are scared and have a right to be scared,” Cynthia said. “But with unity, we can overcome.”
Ernestine described her Walmart store as a plantation, with the store manager as an overseer. “No matter how hard we work, it’s never enough. To work like that on a daily basis and be paid such low wages, have your hours cut, be promised bonuses and not receive them, with no healthcare . . . Walmart makes billions of dollars and most of its workers are on food stamps and receiving government medical assistance. They can pick us off individually, but together we can make it work.”
Chicago’s Grassroots Collaborative has been fighting Walmart for six years. The morning of the workshop, they were dealt a stinging defeat. Chicago city government gave the go-ahead for the retail Goliath to build the first 22 planned Walmarts there. As part of its strategy to keep the retailer out, Grassroots Collaborative fought and won the passage of the Big Box Living Wage Ordinance. Mayor Daly vetoed it. A subsequent ordinance that requires corporations receiving subsidies or tax incentives to pay a living wage did pass, but probably will not help people working for Chicago’s new Walmarts.
“Six years of work went down this week,” said Amisha Patel, executive director of Grassroots Collaborative. “We’re taking on huge battles, we’re fighting capitalism. Capitalism is collapsing, but it’s collapsing on us.”
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After reading this post, Amisha asked to clarify a few things in a comment. “I spoke about the discouragement of not winning all you want to in this work. In Chicago, we had worked to win higher wages for retail workers than was achieved this week. But getting walmart to sit down at the table and agree to wages $1 above minimum is a victory- it’s something we all must continue to build on.
We introduced the living wage for subsidized corporations bill, which would ensure that companies that get tax dollars don’t create poverty jobs. When passed, this bill could transform thousands of poverty jobs to living wage jobs, which absolutely would create more good jobs in the retail sector. We’re still working to move this forward.
Finally, I spoke about the discouragement of how hard it is to create transformative economic policies, but also that we get to feel those hard feelings and move through them so that we can keep working in a connected and powerful way. Capitalism will continue to work to keep us isolated, but we absolutely can and must keep working to build trust across divisions and build the labor-community coalitions that will win power for working families.
Grassroots campaign targets Chase Bank – 2010 USSF
This morning about 400 people gathered at a small park on Woodward Avenue in downtown Detroit to march a few blocks to the Chase Bank headquarters. The march was jointly organized by the Farm Labor Organizing Committee (FLOC) and Moratorium Now, a group working to end foreclosures, evictions and utilities.
FLOC president Baldemar Velásquez spoke to the crowd before the march began, telling people about the campaign that FLOC has against the tobacco company Reynolds American and its financial partner Chase Bank. The tobacco company pays workers unjust wages and forces workers to operate in near slave-like conditions.
As a way to pressure the tobacco company, the FLOC campaign is targeting their major financial backer, Chase Bank. FLOC organizers are calling for everyone who has money in Chase banks to withdraw their money the day after Labor Day this year. Right now the campaign is asking people to sign a pledge that they will boycott Chase if the farm workers demands are not met by the end of the summer. Here is a short video with Baldemar Velasquez addressing the crowd.
The crowd then marched to the Chase bank and stood on the steps to denounce their policies. Numerous people addressed the crowd and eventually a small delegation was allowed to go in to talk with Chase executives. After small confrontations with the bank security, delegates were allowed in to bring their demands. This next video has footage of the march, the delegation going into Chase and a representative of Moratorium Now!, a woman who had her home foreclosed.
The other group that was instrumental in organizing this march was Moratorium Now! They also addressed the audience and spoke about how Chase bank has benefited from home foreclosures. Moratorium has been organizing in Michigan for several years now and has confronted banks, landlords and utility companies.
By making the connection between farm worker rights, home foreclosure, eviction and utility rights the march organizers were able to make a stronger case for their demands and continue to develop a coalition with a more diverse group of allies that could lead to greater political power and making the changes they want.
Last night we attended on a session on the resistance to the racist policies in Arizona. The session consisted of media makers showing video and photos of the various ways that people have been responding to state repression in Arizona and testimonies from some of the people doing the resistance.
We first heard from some high school students who were protesting a law proposed over a year ago (and recently passed), which removed any classes from the curriculum that taught ethnic and cultural studies. Students organized demonstrations and engaged in civil disobedience, some of the chaining themselves to the doors of the State capital.
People with Pan Left Productions, a video collective, also showed clips from some of their work that dealt with both the ethnic studies ban and the most recent anti-immigration law.
There was also a Latina journalist who spoke during the workshop. She shared stories about how people were directly impacted from the new anti-immigration law and how it is destroying families. Here is a video of one of her stories:
Another group of activists and media makers from Maricopa County, where the overtly racist Sheriff’s Joe Arpaio has engaged in draconian policies against Latinos, immigrants and Native people. Activists have been targeting Arpaio for the past two years with daily protests outside his office, which has resulted in the owner of the building forcing the Sheriff to relocate. Here is a video about the reality in Maricopa County:
Activists and media makers also showed some clips from an soon to be released documentary called Under Arpaio, which is an investigative look into the policies and practices of Sheriff Joe Arpaio. You can view the trailer for this film on Vimeo by going to this link.
This session was not only inspiring because participants heard from people engaged in resistance, but also because media was being used as an organizing tool in that resistance.
On Thursday afternoon I attended the Palestine Solidarity workshop, facilitated by the Lansing-based Peace Education Center. One of the presenters began by saying that it has been difficult to organize around support for the Palestinians since 1993. Before 1993, the PLO was the singular reason for people to rally around Palestinian rights.
Since then, the focus has shifted to the occupied territories and no longer just the PLO. This shift in focus has been due in part to both the fist and second Intifada, the community-based non-violent resistance to the Israeli occupation.
However, the presenter said that there has been an ongoing negative impact of the 1993 “peace accord” known as the Oslo Peace Accord. Many people in the US now see the “problem” of Palestine as an internal problem, because they now have control over their own territory. This perception amongst people in the US has made it easier for US policy makers to continue to unconditionally support the Israeli occupation.
Another presenter states that historically the Palestinian solidarity groups had a much stronger socialist or class-conscience base. There have been dozens of US-based organizations that have supported Palestine, but there has been an evolution of these groups. Some watershed moments for the US solidarity groups were the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982 and the first Intifada in 1988. The presenter also points out that many of the previous region solidarity movements were linked with the Palestinian struggle, such as the Central American Solidarity movement and the South African anti-Apartheid movement.
After the 1993 Oslo Accord, people began to realize that despite the peace process more Palestinian land was being occupied by Israeli settlers. Another change in the Palestinian Solidarity Movement was the 2nd generation of Palestinians now living in the US. This new generation brought new energy and fresh ideas.
One difficulty that people working on Palestinian Solidarity in the US is that the Palestinian narrative is not even tolerated. In addition, anyone who speaks out on this issue will be charged with anti-Semitism. This is particularly the case of Palestinians and other Arabs living in the US, which underscores the importance of having more people participate in Palestinian Solidarity work.
The Boycott and Divestiture movement actually began in the early 1990s, based mostly on the experience of the South African Anti-Apartheid movement. This movement grew over the years.
A third presenter spoke about another aspect of the mainstream left and its silence on the Palestinian struggle. This silence could be considered a form of hostility to the issue, especially since the US contributes $3 billion a year to Israel, which translates to $7 million a day.
The US funding of Israel became the focus of much of the Solidarity work in the 90s and the most recent decade, particularly if the funding was framed as funding an illegal occupation.
Now the focus is mostly on the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement. The conditions of this campaign are when Israeli ends the occupation, dismantles the wall and recognizes the right of Palestinians.
Divestment is an action where people will not invest in companies that do business with Israel. Some of these companies are Motorola, Caterpillar and Viola. Sanctions currently don’t exist from the US, but this is a tactic if and when there will be enough public support to get the US government to impose sanctions on Israel.
Someone from Oakland, California spoke about the Longshoreman Union’s refusal to unload goods from an Israeli ship recently. This was an important victory, because the longshoreman also took the same position during the South African Anti-Apartheid campaign.
The rest of the conversation dealt with a variety of aspects of the difficulties within doing Palestine Solidarity work. These difficulties dealt with claims of anti-Semitism, nationalism, the right of return for Palestinians, Congressional support for Israel, international law, war crimes and cultural resiliency.
While the session did not spend enough time on practical solidarity work, the discussion was great and the history and analysis of Palestine Solidarity work was excellent.
