By Randall Amster, Huffington Post
Posted on March 10, 2009, Printed on March 23, 2009
http://www.alternet.org/story/130890/
Life here in the desert southwest is richly complex and oftentimes a great challenge. A hint of frontier culture remains even as rampant growth and homogenization take hold at breakneck speed. People love the landscapes and the history, but can still sit and watch both disappear in the name of "progress." At times it seems as if a strange double consciousness exists here, nowhere more prominently than in our relationship to water.
It's interesting to live in a place where you regularly see coyotes, roadrunners, hawks, antelopes, and javelina (just to name a few local species) with packs of the latter still roaming through our downtowns. People have horses in their front yards, gunracks on their cars, and cacti in their burritos. In a few hours time you can go from a densely-packed urban center to the Grand Canyon, watching the landscape change from desert hills to mountain forests and back again. Despite ubiquitous strip malls, golf courses, and backyard swimming pools, the southwest is still magical in many ways.
The trouble is, as many already well know, there's not much water left here. California is dry too, and Florida will be soon. Atlanta has already run out more than once. Australia is basically permanently drought-stricken and agriculturally bankrupt. It's one thing when the desert is bereft of water, but the marshlands? The nation's agricultural leader? Major cities? Whole continents? And this is only the beginning.
Whereas the wars of the recent past were fought over oil, the ones of the near future almost certainly will devolve upon water. Like they say in these parts, "Whiskey's for drinkin', but water's for fightin'." If contemporary wars are any gauge, it isn't going to be pretty when the pump don't work -- regardless of who took the handles.
Consider that the earth's surface is about two-thirds water, and we humans are made up of roughly the same percentage. Water is the lifeblood of the planet, and of ourselves as well. While abundant in a general sense, much of the planet's water is in the oceans, and desalination takes large energy inputs (often reliant upon oil, no less) in order to yield any net benefit. Global climate change is melting arctic ice and playing havoc with the water cycle, creating rising tides and disastrous floods, which presents us with the irony of having too much water of the wrong kind -- much as Samuel Taylor Coleridge's ancient mariner had experienced:
Water, water, every where,
And all the boards did shrink;
Water, water, every where,
Nor any drop to drink.
As this essential resource dwindles, two related phenomena take hold. First, military strategists overtly cite "resource control" as a principle aim of national security, blithely observing that conflicts to attain it will dominate the coming decades. Secondly, at the same time, multinational corporations are pumping water as fast as possible, turning a previously common resource into one that is privatized and engendering a global commodity trade that gives new meaning to "liquidity." In both cases, the aim is to wrest water supplies away from localities and set up a distribution system that simultaneously turns a profit and forces people to become dependent on others for a basic need.
It's bad enough to watch public goods such as energy, education, health care, and the airwaves become privatized. But when it reaches the level of water, we're talking about something that no one can do without under any circumstance. This raises the stakes considerably and threatens to tighten the sense of blackmail that often pervades the machinations of the military-industrial complex. Yes, President Eisenhower warned us about this as he prepared to leave office, but it doesn't seem as if we've done a whole lot to prevent his prophecy from materializing.
In fact, we've gone in the opposite direction, letting our sense of self-reliance atrophy as powerful forces take what once belonged to all of us and sell a watered-down version (pun intended) back to us. This holds true for people living in shantytowns in places like Mumbai and Capetown as much as it does for the American middle class. Companies marketing bottled water brands capture the diminishing resource at the expense of communities around the globe and here at home, often without paying for it, and we wind up purchasing from them that which ought to be free and which no one should ever own.
Our common law legal system actually once knew this, going back to Blackstone's 1766 treatise on the laws of England that later helped form the basis of our legal system:
"There are some few things which, notwithstanding the general introduction and continuance of property, must still unavoidably remain in common, being such wherein nothing but an usufructuary property is capable of being had. . . . Water is a moveable, wandering thing, and must of necessity continue common by the law of nature; so that I can only have a temporary, transient, usufructuary property therein."
In plain English, Blackstone observed that water could only be used but never owned as property. American frontier law turned this on its head through the doctrine of "prior appropriation" (sometimes colloquially understood as "first in time, first in right") but conveniently ignored the rights of native peoples who were unquestionably here first. In the end, like the frontier itself, water was given property status of a sort, and we're still living with the disastrous implications today.
In the face of these concerns, there's a great need for the articulation of alternative models of resource allocation that don't necessitate militarism and subjugation. With scarce supplies of essentials running down, and with the global economy plainly unable to deliver on its false promise of universal prosperity, we come to realize that the bedrock Western belief in the "tragedy of the commons" has become a self-fulfilling prophecy, and that it is precisely the privatization of the shared wealth of humanity that has led to degradation and inequality. Education and conservation are crucial in turning this downward spiral around, and yet at times the tendency to focus on much-needed macroscopic solutions often misses important lessons from local initiatives.
In this regard stand numerous examples around the world of people and communities who still manage scarce resources collectively and sustainably. Right here in the desert southwest, in fact, one of the last great "common pool resource" systems in North America provides irrigation water and open grazing land to farmers and pastoralists. Derived from the imported culture of Spanish settlers (via the Arabic Moors who brought the concept to Iberia previously) and combined with the best practices of the native peoples of the region, the acequia system is a powerful example of how we might envision people working together not only with each other but with the land itself. In this model, water is viewed as sacred and not subject to private ownership. Instead, local communities manage the resource together through a collective self-governance system whereby everyone using the water gets what they need and also contributes their labor to maintain the entire operation. A non-authoritarian "mayordomo" administers the resource equitably, resolves conflicts, and guards the overall integrity of the structure before passing the baton to someone else and rotating the role of facilitator.
This is a low-tech solution to a complex modern problem. Water is moved through ditches and channels, and everyone takes only as much as they need. It works because, over time, people engaged in such an enterprise come to see themselves as interconnected with their neighbors in a meaningful way, so that their own prosperity is bound up with that of their fellow community members. Mutual interdependence replaces corporate dependence, and in a feat of old-school sustainability, people in the southwest have been cultivating this way of life for a few hundred years.
If relatively poor people confronted with extreme scarcity in arid regions can create a stable, collective, and nonhierarchical common pool system, then certainly we can find ways to do so as well with all of the tools at our disposal. It's more than just a matter of wishful thinking or utopian longing; our very survival may well be at stake. Progress might have its virtues, but sometimes the solutions we seek are already at hand and in fact have been in practice for a long time. Indeed, the answers aren't just blowin' in the wind -- they might be flowin' in the water as well.
© 2009 Huffington Post All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/130890/
Monday, March 23, 2009
Was Throwing a Shoe at Bush a Violent Act?
By Medea Benjamin, AlterNet
Posted on March 17, 2009, Printed on March 23, 2009
http://www.alternet.org/story/132091/
On March 12, one week before the sixth anniversary of the war in Iraq, Iraqi journalist Muntadar al-Zaidi was sentenced to three years in prison for throwing his shoes at President George W. Bush on Dec. 14, 2008.
Code Pink co-founder Medea Benjamin talked about the incident with Hero Anwar Brzw, a Kurdish Iraqi woman, who is getting her master's degree in conflict transformation at the Center for Justice and Peacebuilding, Eastern Mennonite University.
Medea Benjamin: Al-Zaidi's action spawned a lively debate, even within the peace movement, over whether throwing shoes is a violent act. As an Iraqi and a student of nonviolence, what is your opinion?
Hero Anwar Brzw: I have thought about this a lot and have concluded that his action was not a violent one. Al-Zaidi was simply trying to express the humiliation and anguish that Iraqis have experienced since the start of the occupation. He wanted to insult Bush in a symbolic way.
He did not want to kill or injure the president. There are plenty of other ways to inflict harm, if that were his intention. As al-Zaidi said in his trial, "What made me do it was the humiliation Iraq has been subjected to due to the U.S. occupation and the murder of innocent people. I wanted to restore the pride of the Iraqis in any way possible, apart from using weapons."
Dr. Gene Sharp, a famous American writer on nonviolent struggles, says that insulting someone in power is a legitimate form of nonviolent resistance. One of his writings, called Waging Nonviolent Struggle: 20th Century Practice and 21st Century Potential, is a collection of 198 methods of nonviolent action. He groups these into several categories, the first being nonviolent protest and persuasion. The methods in the first group are the kinds of things you can do if you have little power or resources, because they are simple and easy. No. 32 is called "taunting officials (mocking or insulting them)." That is precisely what al-Zaidi did.
MB: What if al-Zaidi had actually hit Bush with the shoe?
HAB: Even if the shoe hit Bush in the head, I would still consider it a nonviolent action. It wouldn't have really hurt; at most Bush would have gotten a bump on his head. Remember, al-Zaidi's intention was to insult, not hurt.
And of course, the harm that could be inflicted by a shoe cannot be compared with harm inflicted by an unwarranted occupation that has resulted in the deaths and displacement of millions of Iraqis. U.S. foreign policy is about killing, maiming, leaving orphans and widows, destroying infrastructure. Throwing shoe is violent, you say? No. War and occupation is violent.
MB: So you consider this action nonviolent, but was it appropriate, especially for a journalist who is supposed to be objective?
HAB: I have worked for an Iraqi NGO on peace-building. I, too, have felt the effects of the occupation -- the violence that the invasion unleashed, the daily humiliations of being second-class citizens in our own country. Iraqi journalists have felt this as well. They have seen firsthand the terrible destruction caused by U.S. soldiers. Many Iraqi journalists have died in the violence, and many have been imprisoned and terribly abused by U.S. soldiers.
So it is normal that we would want to express our anger. Some Iraqis express their anger through violent means, but that puts them on the same level as the occupiers. In general, journalists and NGO workers don't believe in violence. But we also don't have to be passive or conform to the oppressors.
In Kathleen Fischer's book Transforming Anger, she says "True nonviolent resistance is not possible until we have learned to acknowledge and express anger in healthy ways. Nonviolence is not the same as suppressing an emotion because of fear, intimidation or censorship. We do not choose nonviolence because we are afraid to fight." We can and should continue resisting -- as al-Zaidi did. And I think it takes more courage to resist oppression through nonviolent actions than picking up a gun.
MB: There were many Americans who don't like Bush but were uncomfortable with this action because they saw it as rude.
HAB: If someone threw a shoe at Hitler, would people say it was rude? If someone threw a shoe at Saddam Hussein, would someone say it was rude? If New Yorkers were able to confront the people who carried out the 9/11 attacks, I don't think they would throw shoes at them; they would probably kill them with their bare hands. And Osama bin Laden killed a lot less people than George Bush.
Would the American people prefer that we express our anger by killing American soldiers? Would that be less rude? I don't think so. But people in the United States should acknowledge that we are human beings, and we need a way to express our anger.
For other people, especially in the Arab world, al-Zaidi immediately became a folk hero. YouTube videos of the incident have been viewed millions of times. The company that made the shoes became wealthy overnight. And al-Zaidi has received everything from job offers to marriage proposals. Do you consider al-Zaidi a hero?
HAB: There are people all over the world who consider him a hero, especially because his act countered the powerlessness that many Arabs feel. I wouldn't call him a hero, though. I call him a nonviolent resister; I call him brave. And I certainly understand his anger, for I am angry, too.
MB: President Bush said in an interview that he thought al-Zaidi threw his shoes because he wanted to become famous.
HAB: That's ridiculous. He was prepared to die, if he had to. Instead of attributing dishonest motives to al-Zaidi, Bush should ask himself why someone would dare insult the leader of the most powerful country in the world, knowing how serious the consequences could be.
Bush was a symbol for U.S. foreign policy. We Iraqis have been the victims of these policies for too many years, and we are fed up.
The American government supported Saddam in the 1980s during the Iraq-Iran War; it encouraged Saddam to invade Kuwait, but then turned against him and "liberated" Kuwait. Then the U.S. government imposed sanctions that killed hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraqis, especially children.
Today, American troops have become the owners, and we Iraqis are treated like illegal intruders in our own country. People in the United States have no idea what Iraqis have been enduring, how much we have suffered from this invasion. That's why al-Zaidi, when he threw his shoes, cried out: "This is for the widows, the orphans and all those who have died in Iraq." He was doing it for his people, not to become famous.
MB: Bush said that thanks to the U.S. intervention, the dictatorship of Saddam Hussein is gone, and Iraq is a free country. And of course, the Kurds were particularly brutalized by Saddam. As a Kurd, aren't you grateful to George Bush for overthrowing Saddam?
HAB: The U.S. government has told too many lies to the American people and the international community. Saying that the Kurdish people have been happy with U.S. occupation is one of those lies.
I agree that Saddam was a brutal dictator, and yes, we Kurds were victims of his brutality. I always dreamed about freeing ourselves from his rule. We were happy to get rid of Saddam, and many trusted the United States and thought it would bring democracy.
But then we saw our country go from a dictatorship to an occupied nation. Why should the cost of getting rid of Saddam be a U.S. invasion and occupation? Is that our only alternative?
How can we accept the presence of armed foreigners in the streets of our country? For years, they have been ordering us around us at checkpoints, breaking down our doors in midnight raids, imprisoning our loved ones without cause and torturing them. Should we thank Bush and the U.S. government for that?
Besides, it was not the role of the United States to get rid of Saddam. That was for us, the Iraqis. Many people around the world didn't like Bush. But would Americans have wanted a foreign military to invade their country to get rid of him? Would that be acceptable to Americans? I don't think so.
MB: What do you suggest people do to support al-Zaidi?
HAB: It is absurd that al-Zaidi will spend three years in prison while George Bush walks free. It is Bush who should be in prison for war crimes. I also fear for al-Zaidi's life if he remains in prison. He was already tortured while the world spotlight was on him; imagine what might happen when people have forgotten him. He could easily be killed by government agents.
If Prime Minister Nouri Al-Malaki believed in democracy and human rights, he would consider al-Zaidi's act an expression of free speech and pardon him.
If there is enough public pressure, that could happen. People should sign petitions, and call the Iraqi Embassy in Washington and the Iraqi Mission to the U.N. It is only through public pressure that he can be released.
Medea Benjamin is co-founder of Global Exchange and Code Pink: Women for Peace. Contact the Iraqi Embassy at (202) 483-7500 and the Iraqi Mission to the U.N. at (212) 737-4433. Sign petitions at http://salsa.democracyinaction.org/o/424/signUp.jsp?key=3909.
© 2009 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/132091/
Posted on March 17, 2009, Printed on March 23, 2009
http://www.alternet.org/story/132091/
On March 12, one week before the sixth anniversary of the war in Iraq, Iraqi journalist Muntadar al-Zaidi was sentenced to three years in prison for throwing his shoes at President George W. Bush on Dec. 14, 2008.
Code Pink co-founder Medea Benjamin talked about the incident with Hero Anwar Brzw, a Kurdish Iraqi woman, who is getting her master's degree in conflict transformation at the Center for Justice and Peacebuilding, Eastern Mennonite University.
Medea Benjamin: Al-Zaidi's action spawned a lively debate, even within the peace movement, over whether throwing shoes is a violent act. As an Iraqi and a student of nonviolence, what is your opinion?
Hero Anwar Brzw: I have thought about this a lot and have concluded that his action was not a violent one. Al-Zaidi was simply trying to express the humiliation and anguish that Iraqis have experienced since the start of the occupation. He wanted to insult Bush in a symbolic way.
He did not want to kill or injure the president. There are plenty of other ways to inflict harm, if that were his intention. As al-Zaidi said in his trial, "What made me do it was the humiliation Iraq has been subjected to due to the U.S. occupation and the murder of innocent people. I wanted to restore the pride of the Iraqis in any way possible, apart from using weapons."
Dr. Gene Sharp, a famous American writer on nonviolent struggles, says that insulting someone in power is a legitimate form of nonviolent resistance. One of his writings, called Waging Nonviolent Struggle: 20th Century Practice and 21st Century Potential, is a collection of 198 methods of nonviolent action. He groups these into several categories, the first being nonviolent protest and persuasion. The methods in the first group are the kinds of things you can do if you have little power or resources, because they are simple and easy. No. 32 is called "taunting officials (mocking or insulting them)." That is precisely what al-Zaidi did.
MB: What if al-Zaidi had actually hit Bush with the shoe?
HAB: Even if the shoe hit Bush in the head, I would still consider it a nonviolent action. It wouldn't have really hurt; at most Bush would have gotten a bump on his head. Remember, al-Zaidi's intention was to insult, not hurt.
And of course, the harm that could be inflicted by a shoe cannot be compared with harm inflicted by an unwarranted occupation that has resulted in the deaths and displacement of millions of Iraqis. U.S. foreign policy is about killing, maiming, leaving orphans and widows, destroying infrastructure. Throwing shoe is violent, you say? No. War and occupation is violent.
MB: So you consider this action nonviolent, but was it appropriate, especially for a journalist who is supposed to be objective?
HAB: I have worked for an Iraqi NGO on peace-building. I, too, have felt the effects of the occupation -- the violence that the invasion unleashed, the daily humiliations of being second-class citizens in our own country. Iraqi journalists have felt this as well. They have seen firsthand the terrible destruction caused by U.S. soldiers. Many Iraqi journalists have died in the violence, and many have been imprisoned and terribly abused by U.S. soldiers.
So it is normal that we would want to express our anger. Some Iraqis express their anger through violent means, but that puts them on the same level as the occupiers. In general, journalists and NGO workers don't believe in violence. But we also don't have to be passive or conform to the oppressors.
In Kathleen Fischer's book Transforming Anger, she says "True nonviolent resistance is not possible until we have learned to acknowledge and express anger in healthy ways. Nonviolence is not the same as suppressing an emotion because of fear, intimidation or censorship. We do not choose nonviolence because we are afraid to fight." We can and should continue resisting -- as al-Zaidi did. And I think it takes more courage to resist oppression through nonviolent actions than picking up a gun.
MB: There were many Americans who don't like Bush but were uncomfortable with this action because they saw it as rude.
HAB: If someone threw a shoe at Hitler, would people say it was rude? If someone threw a shoe at Saddam Hussein, would someone say it was rude? If New Yorkers were able to confront the people who carried out the 9/11 attacks, I don't think they would throw shoes at them; they would probably kill them with their bare hands. And Osama bin Laden killed a lot less people than George Bush.
Would the American people prefer that we express our anger by killing American soldiers? Would that be less rude? I don't think so. But people in the United States should acknowledge that we are human beings, and we need a way to express our anger.
For other people, especially in the Arab world, al-Zaidi immediately became a folk hero. YouTube videos of the incident have been viewed millions of times. The company that made the shoes became wealthy overnight. And al-Zaidi has received everything from job offers to marriage proposals. Do you consider al-Zaidi a hero?
HAB: There are people all over the world who consider him a hero, especially because his act countered the powerlessness that many Arabs feel. I wouldn't call him a hero, though. I call him a nonviolent resister; I call him brave. And I certainly understand his anger, for I am angry, too.
MB: President Bush said in an interview that he thought al-Zaidi threw his shoes because he wanted to become famous.
HAB: That's ridiculous. He was prepared to die, if he had to. Instead of attributing dishonest motives to al-Zaidi, Bush should ask himself why someone would dare insult the leader of the most powerful country in the world, knowing how serious the consequences could be.
Bush was a symbol for U.S. foreign policy. We Iraqis have been the victims of these policies for too many years, and we are fed up.
The American government supported Saddam in the 1980s during the Iraq-Iran War; it encouraged Saddam to invade Kuwait, but then turned against him and "liberated" Kuwait. Then the U.S. government imposed sanctions that killed hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraqis, especially children.
Today, American troops have become the owners, and we Iraqis are treated like illegal intruders in our own country. People in the United States have no idea what Iraqis have been enduring, how much we have suffered from this invasion. That's why al-Zaidi, when he threw his shoes, cried out: "This is for the widows, the orphans and all those who have died in Iraq." He was doing it for his people, not to become famous.
MB: Bush said that thanks to the U.S. intervention, the dictatorship of Saddam Hussein is gone, and Iraq is a free country. And of course, the Kurds were particularly brutalized by Saddam. As a Kurd, aren't you grateful to George Bush for overthrowing Saddam?
HAB: The U.S. government has told too many lies to the American people and the international community. Saying that the Kurdish people have been happy with U.S. occupation is one of those lies.
I agree that Saddam was a brutal dictator, and yes, we Kurds were victims of his brutality. I always dreamed about freeing ourselves from his rule. We were happy to get rid of Saddam, and many trusted the United States and thought it would bring democracy.
But then we saw our country go from a dictatorship to an occupied nation. Why should the cost of getting rid of Saddam be a U.S. invasion and occupation? Is that our only alternative?
How can we accept the presence of armed foreigners in the streets of our country? For years, they have been ordering us around us at checkpoints, breaking down our doors in midnight raids, imprisoning our loved ones without cause and torturing them. Should we thank Bush and the U.S. government for that?
Besides, it was not the role of the United States to get rid of Saddam. That was for us, the Iraqis. Many people around the world didn't like Bush. But would Americans have wanted a foreign military to invade their country to get rid of him? Would that be acceptable to Americans? I don't think so.
MB: What do you suggest people do to support al-Zaidi?
HAB: It is absurd that al-Zaidi will spend three years in prison while George Bush walks free. It is Bush who should be in prison for war crimes. I also fear for al-Zaidi's life if he remains in prison. He was already tortured while the world spotlight was on him; imagine what might happen when people have forgotten him. He could easily be killed by government agents.
If Prime Minister Nouri Al-Malaki believed in democracy and human rights, he would consider al-Zaidi's act an expression of free speech and pardon him.
If there is enough public pressure, that could happen. People should sign petitions, and call the Iraqi Embassy in Washington and the Iraqi Mission to the U.N. It is only through public pressure that he can be released.
Medea Benjamin is co-founder of Global Exchange and Code Pink: Women for Peace. Contact the Iraqi Embassy at (202) 483-7500 and the Iraqi Mission to the U.N. at (212) 737-4433. Sign petitions at http://salsa.democracyinaction.org/o/424/signUp.jsp?key=3909.
© 2009 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/132091/
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