Friday, September 18, 2009

Why I threw the shoe

I am no hero. I just acted as an Iraqi who witnessed the pain and bloodshed of too many innocents
I am free. But my country is still a prisoner of war. There has been a lot of talk about the action and about the person who took it, and about the hero and the heroic act, and the symbol and the symbolic act. But, simply, I answer: what compelled me to act is the injustice that befell my people, and how the occupation wanted to humiliate my homeland by putting it under its boot.

Over recent years, more than a million martyrs have fallen by the bullets of the occupation and Iraq is now filled with more than five million orphans, a million widows and hundreds of thousands of maimed. Many millions are homeless inside and outside the country.

We used to be a nation in which the Arab would share with the Turkman and the Kurd and the Assyrian and the Sabean and the Yazid his daily bread. And the Shia would pray with the Sunni in one line. And the Muslim would celebrate with the Christian the birthday of Christ. This despite the fact that we shared hunger under sanctions for more than a decade.

Our patience and our solidarity did not make us forget the oppression. But the invasion divided brother from brother, neighbour from neighbour. It turned our homes into funeral tents.

I am not a hero. But I have a point of view. I have a stance. It humiliated me to see my country humiliated; and to see my Baghdad burned, my people killed. Thousands of tragic pictures remained in my head, pushing me towards the path of confrontation. The scandal of Abu Ghraib. The massacre of Falluja, Najaf, Haditha, Sadr City, Basra, Diyala, Mosul, Tal Afar, and every inch of our wounded land. I travelled through my burning land and saw with my own eyes the pain of the victims, and heard with my own ears the screams of the orphans and the bereaved. And a feeling of shame haunted me like an ugly name because I was powerless.

As soon as I finished my professional duties in reporting the daily tragedies, while I washed away the remains of the debris of the ruined Iraqi houses, or the blood that stained my clothes, I would clench my teeth and make a pledge to our victims, a pledge of vengeance.

The opportunity came, and I took it.

I took it out of loyalty to every drop of innocent blood that has been shed through the occupation or because of it, every scream of a bereaved mother, every moan of an orphan, the sorrow of a rape victim, the teardrop of an orphan.

I say to those who reproach me: do you know how many broken homes that shoe which I threw had entered? How many times it had trodden over the blood of innocent victims? Maybe that shoe was the appropriate response when all values were violated.

When I threw the shoe in the face of the criminal, George Bush, I wanted to express my rejection of his lies, his occupation of my country, my rejection of his killing my people. My rejection of his plundering the wealth of my country, and destroying its infrastructure. And casting out its sons into a diaspora.

If I have wronged journalism without intention, because of the professional embarrassment I caused the establishment, I apologise. All that I meant to do was express with a living conscience the feelings of a citizen who sees his homeland desecrated every day. The professionalism mourned by some under the auspices of the occupation should not have a voice louder than the voice of patriotism. And if patriotism needs to speak out, then professionalism should be allied with it.

I didn't do this so my name would enter history or for material gains. All I wanted was to defend my country.

Muntazer al-Zaidi is an Iraqi reporter who was freed this week after serving nine months in prison for throwing his shoe at former US president George Bush at a press conference. This edited statement was translated by McClatchy Newspapers correspondent Sahar Issa www.mcclatchydc.com

UN reports 1 billion of the world’s people going hungry

By Jerry White
18 September 2009

For the first time in history, more than one billion people, or nearly one in every 6 inhabitants of the planet, are going hungry this year, according to a new report from the United Nations’ World Food Program (WFP). Chronic poverty, still high food prices and the impact of the world economic crisis have led to a sharp increase in the number of hungry people, now larger than the combined populations of the United States, Canada and the European Union.

Copyright: WFP/Rein Skullerud
Copyright: WFP/Rein Skullerud

The total number of hungry people has shot up by nearly 200 million over the last decade. After a small decline between 2007 and 2008, world hunger rose sharply as the impact of the economic crisis hit, rising from 915 million in 2008 to an estimated 1.02 billion this year. [See graph]

While disasters, such as floods or droughts, cause temporary food shortages, these emergencies accounted for only 8 percent of the world’s hungry population, the WFP said. Nor is the problem caused by a shortage of food production, which at current levels is sufficient to feed the world’s population.

The source of the catastrophe is the capitalist profit system and, in particular, the continued oppression of the poorest countries in sub-Saharan Africa and Asia. Sixty-five percent of the world’s hungry people live in just six countries: India, China, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Bangladesh, Indonesia, Pakistan and Ethiopia.

The various IMF-dictated “development” programs imposed on these countries have chiefly benefited the banks in London, New York and Tokyo—which have sucked out hundreds of billions in interest payments—as well as the native ruling elites. Falling commodity prices for raw materials have also reduced revenues, while speculation on food has also driven up costs.

According to an article on the WFP report on Livescience.com, aid programs had made certain inroads in fighting hunger at the end of the 20th century. However, rising food prices have all but negated those efforts, causing the number of hungry to rise again everywhere except in Latin America and the Caribbean. The rising cost of food caused the number of hungry to jump by 75 million in 2007 and 40 million in 2008.

“The double whammy of the financial crisis and the still record high food prices around the world is delivering a devastating blow to the world’s most vulnerable,” WFP Executive Director Josette Sheeran told a London press conference Wednesday. “They have been squeezed so much that many have lost what few assets they owned, further exposing them to hunger. Now, it only takes a drought or storm to provoke a disaster.”

The present crisis also underscores the criminal misallocation of financial resources by governments around the world. Sheeren noted that the $3 billion the agency needed to cover its budget shortfall and continue providing food to 108 million people around the world was less than 0.01 percent—or one-hundredth of one percent—the amount spent by world governments on the bailout of the banks and other financial institutions.

While hunger has reached record levels, she said, food aid has fallen to a 20-year low. The WFP said it would have to drastically cut food aid by October because it had only raised less than half of its $6.7 billion budget.

In Kenya, where drought and high food prices have pushed nearly 4 million people into hunger, the WFP said it was preparing to reduce rations.

In Guatemala, its program to provide food supplements to 100,000 children and 50,000 pregnant and lactating women was “hanging by a thread.” Almost half of the children in the Central American country are chronically malnourished—the sixth highest level in the world—and the government has recently declared a “State of National Calamity” due to a shortage of food to feed hungry rural communities.

The WFP reported these stark statistics:

• An estimated 146 million children in developing countries are underweight
• Every six seconds a child dies because of hunger and related causes
• More than 60 percent of chronically hungry people are women

A host of irreversible physical ailments can be caused by undernourishment—the insufficient intake of calories to meet minimum physiological needs—and malnutrition—the lack of sufficient levels of proteins, vitamins and other nutrients.

The most common form of malnutrition is iron deficiency, Livescience.com noted, which affects billions worldwide and can impede brain development. Vitamin A deficiency affects 140 million preschool children in 118 countries and is the leading cause of child blindness. It also kills one million infants a year, according to UNICEF.

Iodine deficiency affects 780 million people worldwide. Babies born to iodine deficient mothers can have mental impairments, the web site noted. Zinc deficiency results in the deaths of about 800,000 children each year and weakens the immune system of young children.

The desperation facing millions produced tragedy Monday when a stampede of people seeking free food in the southern Pakistan port city of Karachi left up to 20 impoverished women and children dead. Officials said they were crushed in a stairwell and alley, as hundreds lined up to get free flour from charity workers.

Police and other witnesses told the Agence France-Presse (AFP) that a private security guard in charge of making sure the women stayed in line charged them with a baton when they became impatient with the long wait. An injured woman, Salma Qadir, 40, said the women wanted to get their rations quickly but were beaten by the guard. “The women got scared and tried to turn back, which scared others and resulted in a stampede,” she told the AFP.

The narrow streets of the market area were reportedly teeming with hundreds of poor people seeking scarce wheat and sugar. Poverty levels in the city of 14 million people have been on the rise along with food prices, which government officials blame on hoarding by mills and large wholesalers. The BBC reported that Pakistan’s government had recently ordered a crackdown against such hoarding, “[b]ut this failed to materialize thus far due to the lobby’s massive influence in Pakistan’s parliament.”

According to the World Food Program, 85 percent of the South Asian country’s 173 million people live on less than US$2 a day. Hunger in the country has been exacerbated by world financial breakdown, skyrocketing food prices and the US-backed war in Pakistan’s North West Frontier Province and tribal areas, which has driven millions from their homes. Currently the WFP is trying to provide daily food rations to 100,000 displaced people in the war-torn area.

http://www.wsws.org/tools/index.php?page=print&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.wsws.org%2Farticles%2F2009%2Fsep2009%2Fhngr-s18.shtml

Reply to NYT: Peak Oil is not a theory; Peak Oil is the reality of past and future oil production.

(On August 24, 2009, New York Times published an Op-Ed contribution by Michael Lynch with the title: ‘Peak Oil’ Is a Waste of Energy. Kjell Aleklett, president of ASPO International, has written an answer that NYT decided not to accept. ASPO International is now publishing this contribution.)

Kjell Aleklett, Professor in global energy systems at Uppsala University, Sweden (www.fysast.uu.se/ges) and president of ASPO International (www.peakoil.net).

Over the past five years, Mr. Michael Lynch and I have debated future global oil production at meetings in Gothenburg (Sweden), Paris and Shanghai. We have also conducted the debate through an exchange of emails published in the British journal Science and Public Affairs in December 2008. The arguments that Mr. Lynch advances are, therefore, well known to me. The fact that he is an economist and I am a natural scientist means that we see the future of oil production from two different perspectives, but are in agreement that access to oil is of great importance to the world economy and our future.

What has prompted Mr. Lynch to write his recent opinion piece in the New York Times appears to be a statement from Dr. Fatih Birol of the International Energy Agency (IEA) that Peak Oil is near. At the same time, Mr. Lynch attempts to discredit a number of dedicated and qualified people who work on the Peak Oil issue as well as ASPO, the Association for the Study of Peak Oil&Gas. To suggest that Dr. Birol would base his assertion on “anecdotal information” is astonishing. One wonders what secret information Mr. Lynch possesses and does not wish to share with the IEA.

Oil was formed millions of years ago. Now that the entire world (with the exception of some offshore regions) has been explored to assess its oil resources, we know quite well where the favorable geological structures are located in which oil might be found. We know also that oil resources are unevenly distributed and that more than half of the entire world’s original and its remaining oil is concentrated in the Middle East. Additionally, most of those nations that had lesser quantities of oil have already, at some point in their history, passed the point of peak production. Not even Mr. Lynch can deny that the USA’s year of peak oil production (1970) has come and gone. This fact means that Peak Oil is now reality for the USA. Examining oil production in most of the oil-producing nations outside of the Middle East shows that they have also passed their use-by-date, i.e. they have also experienced Peak Oil.

The claim that the few nations not yet at their maximum production could compensate for other nations’ declining production, while at the same time continuously increasing their own rate of production without reaching Peak Oil and thereby permitting global production to grow for the remainder of this century, is suspect at best. Those who believe this are, primarily, highly educated economists who assert that the peak oil reality that many nations have experienced is nothing but a theory without foundation. On the contrary, there are many well-grounded theoretical models that describe future oil production.

In his article, Mr. Lynch referred to what is known as the “Hubbert model”, a theoretical model that describes quite well the historical and probable future production of oil in the USA. This model characteristically predicts maximum production when half the oil reserves have been produced. For global oil production, there is general agreement that this model does not approximate reality. By studying the production from individual fields in detail, one can see that there are other parameters that have greater importance for the future rate of production. One of these is the proportion of reserves remaining in an oilfield that can be produced every year. We call this parameter “depletion of remaining reserves”. Different fields show different values for this parameter but, for the largest and most important fields, the depletion rate lies somewhere between 4 and 10 percent. When a field reaches a plateau or the maximum depletion rate for its field type, the field’s production thereafter declines by this percentage value year after year. Investments and new technology can slow this trend but the changes in production thus obtained are significantly less than the volumes produced by the field in its heyday.

Nowadays, new projects must be financed with capital from the international finance market, obtained on the basis of a detailed description of geological factors. The IEA, CERA (Cambridge Energy Research Associates) and we at Global Energy Systems (Uppsala University, Sweden), all agree that it is these new projects that will slow the decline in production from existing fields. Uncertainties in the data on old oil fields will not determine the future; rather it will be by the realities that apply when financing must be found for new production.

When is oil discovered in an oil field? At some point the first well must be drilled so that one can state that oil exists underground. Then, to map the total volume of oil, more wells must be drilled. When an oilfield is announced, the entire field is considered to have been discovered although its total structure is not understood. In the BP Statistical Review of World Energy (a publication used by many economists), revisions in the volume of proven reserves in old fields are reported as discoveries in the year the revisions are made, giving the impression that the greatest volume of oil was discovered during the 1980s. However, backdating these revisions to the date of discovery shows that the greatest volume of oil was discovered during the 1960s.

For those observers of this debate who do not understand the details of reserves and production, the arguments can seem chaotic. We at Global Energy Systems always attempt to support our assertions by publishing our scientific analyses in peer-reviewed journal articles. It is these articles that form the foundation for my assertion that Peak Oil is imminent. The current reality seems to be a production plateau with production varying within plus or minus 4% of 85 million barrels per day. The plateau began in 2005 and production may well decline from that point during the next five to ten years. This includes Dr. Birol’s peak oil date.


http://www.peakoil.net/headline-news/reply-to-nyt-peak-oil-is-not-a-theory-peak-oil-is-the-reality-of-past-and-future-oil-p