By Thomas Greco, Jr., AlterNet
Posted on July 14, 2009, Printed on July 18, 2009
http://www.alternet.org/story/141281/
Historically, every financial and economic crisis has been used to further centralize power and concentrate wealth. This one is no different, and in fact the moves being promoted by the Obama administration and the central banks of the Western powers will take the whole world to the pinnacle of financial despotism -- unless enough people wake up and claim their own "money power.”
In recent months, the Fed has expanded its "assets" from about $800 billion to more than $2,000 billion. Those so-called assets are securities it bought from financial institutions and loans made to central banks in other countries. But the Fed refuses to name the specific recipients of those funds, while admitting that by doing so they are manipulating the value of the US dollar on foreign exchange markets. (Congressman Alan Grayson Grills Fed Vice Chair Donald Kohn.)
Where does the Fed get the money to buy those "assets" or to make those loans? Quite simply, it creates the money. Unlike you or me or any other economic entity, the Fed has the power to create Federal Reserve dollars by effectively writing a check against no funds. This is the function known as "Open Market Operations."
What is the economy experiencing now, and what is in prospect for the future? Despite unprecedented inflation of the money supply, we are now (mid-July, 2009) in a period of depression. How can we have simultaneous inflation of the currency and still have economic depression?
It is a matter of where the money is going. While the public sector (federal government) is being lavishly funded to maintain a global empire, and the banks are being bailed out to try to keep a dysfunctional and destructive financial system from collapsing, the private productive sector is being starved for credit. As a result, businesses are bankrupting, people are losing their jobs and their incomes, and lower levels of government are being squeezed because their tax revenues are shrinking.
There is also the matter of the real estate bubble that was created by the financial institutions as they loaded up the private sector with a debt burden that was way beyond its ability to bear. Now that burden is being shifted to the public sector as the government assumes those "toxic" loans. Unfortunately, it is not the poor suckers who were lured into the debt trap that are being relieved, but the predatory lenders who laid the traps. So mortgages are being foreclosed at an unprecedented scale, people are losing their equity as housing values plunge, and more Americans are being made homeless.
These are the factors that have so far kept the effects of monetary inflation from becoming extreme. Ultimately, however, such abusive issuance of political money shows up as rising prices.
When will the price effects of hyper-inflation begin to kick in? How will the government respond to it? What will be the social and political fallout? What can ordinary people do to protect themselves from monetary and legislative abuses? These are the questions that beg for answers.
Already there are rumblings and signs that the U.S. dollar is about to lose its status as the global reserve currency. When that happens, imports of energy and other necessities will become more expensive. The U.S.’s massive trade deficits will not be sustained into the future. China, the OPEC countries, and others that have been buying massive amounts of U.S. government bonds with their dollar earnings, are indicating that their appetite has been sated. Bilateral and multilateral trade agreements are being made that bypass the use of the dollar for international trade.
One thing is clear -- we cannot rely upon the government to act in the best interests of the people. Already, President Obama has moved to give the Federal Reserve even more power to control the people's credit and financial resources. According to a June 18 article in the Wall Street Journal, "The central bank would win power to monitor risks across the financial system, and sweeping authority to examine any firm that could threaten financial stability, even if the Fed wouldn't normally supervise the institution." This is not a new plan; it was floated as a trial balloon during the Bush administration. As early as March 2008, then Treasury Secretary Paulson was proposing to "give the Federal Reserve broad new authority to oversee financial market stability, in effect allowing it to send SWAT teams into any corner of the industry or any institution that might pose a risk to the overall system."
Ostensibly that would be done to prevent the errant financial institutions from repeating their sins of the recent past, but more likely it will have the effect of suppressing any private initiative that might compete with the financial cartel. The Fed is, after all, a private company run by the bankers for the bankers. A recent Reuters article is critical of Obama's move because of the Fed's lack of accountability. It is a plan that seeks to preserve at all costs the credit monopoly that exists under the central banking regime and to perpetuate the looting of the economy by monetization of federal government debts and other ultimately worthless "assets."
During the Great Depression, President Franking Roosevelt, upon taking office in 1933, declared a "bank holiday." He ordered all banks to close. Many of those banks never reopened and many people lost their savings. He also demanded that all Americans turn in their gold holdings in return for paper currency, which was one of the biggest robberies in history up to that time. Some pundits are predicting that another such bank holiday is being planned to put the brakes on price increases, once they begin in earnest, by depriving people of access to their savings, as was done in Argentina in 2002.
Governments that mismanage money invariably use the force of law to prevent the sheep from escaping from the shearing pen (or the slaughter house). So long as people are completely dependent upon political money and banks, they will docilely (or grudgingly) accept whatever "solutions” the political leadership puts forth, and do whatever the government demands of them.
Fortunately there is a way out. The primary purpose of money is to facilitate the exchange of goods and services in the markets. But it is possible to mediate the exchange process without using political money as the payment medium, and without borrowing from banks.
There is plenty of precedent for this sort of cashless trading. It involves a process of direct credit clearing among associated buyers and sellers. During the Great Depression the entrepreneurial middle class in Switzerland organized themselves into the WIR Economic Circle Cooperative. After 75 years, the WIR clearing circle continues to thrive with more than 60,000 member businesses trading the equivalent of about US$1.3 billion per year.
The past four decades have seen the emergence of a new industry comprised of commercial trade exchanges, sometimes called "barter" exchanges, that act as "third part record keepers" enabling the same sort of direct credit clearing for thousands of businesses in cities around the world. Efforts at the grassroots by social entrepreneurs to localize exchange and finance have been similarly widespread in many communities over the past twenty-five years.
Measures to properly reform the money and banking system by political means have about as much chance as the proverbial snowball in hell. However, what is possible, and what seems to be gaining traction to transcend the dominant system, is the materialization of voluntary, private initiatives that enable the cashless exchange of goods and services. As these systems continue to improve, proliferate, and scale up, they will provide a pathway toward a sustainable economy, greater local control, and a better quality of life for all.
Thomas H. Greco, Jr. is the director of the Community Information Resource Center, which he founded in 1992. CIRC is a nonprofit consulting organization and networking hub dedicated to economic equity, social justice, and community improvement, specializing in community currency and mutual credit design, development, and implementation. His newest book is The End of Money and the Future of Civilization.
© 2009 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/141281/
Saturday, July 18, 2009
Monday, July 13, 2009
Hundreds of Thousands of Workers Will Lose Unemployment Benefits Soon
By Marie Cocco, Washington Post Writers Group. Posted July 10, 2009.
Workers laid off early in the downturn are soon to be left without the basic sustenance of an unemployment check.
WASHINGTON -- When a virulent disease is ravaging you like a cancer, you don't want a cacophony of voices promoting different or contradictory cures. Yet that is what we're starting to hear about the economic crisis, not only from a politically divided -- and pretty scared -- capital, but from within the Obama administration itself. In just the past few days, Vice President Joe Biden has said the young administration misread the depth of the recession -- an honest account, since most private economists did as well. Laura Tyson, an outside economic adviser to the White House, said it's wise to start preparing another stimulus package.
Then President Barack Obama made everything perfectly muddy when he said in an ABC News interview that the seriousness of the downturn and how to attack it is "something we wrestle with constantly." Yet in the next breath, he expressed concern about the burgeoning deficit. But if anyone's looking for some clear voices, there are 650,000 of them just waiting to be heard. That is roughly the number of long-term unemployed who will begin losing their jobless benefits in September, according to the National Employment Law Project. Remember, the recession didn't start last fall when the government bailed out AIG and the financial system froze. It began in December 2007 -- and 6.5 million jobs have been lost since then. Depending on which state and the sort of triggers that apply to benefits, hundreds of thousands of workers laid off early in the downturn are soon to be left without the basic sustenance of an unemployment check.
Meanwhile, the Labor Department says, the number of unemployed people out of work for 27 weeks or longer continues to grow, reaching 4.4 million last month. In June, three out of 10 jobless workers had been out of work for at least six months, according to the department's data. The stimulus package the president signed soon after taking office did provide extended benefits, and boosted weekly payments. But even that extension runs out on Dec. 26, and would not apply to all the unemployed. Does anyone really believe that a significant portion of the unemployed will have found new work by then? Hardly. Both private and government economists now predict that unemployment will continue to rise at least through the end of this year.
"We can't ignore this moment when all these folks are running out (of benefits)," says Maurice Emsellem of the National Employment Law Project.
"That needs to be a top priority, to help these workers." Let's stop kidding ourselves. In no contemporary economic crisis -- not even those that unfolded on the Republicans' watch -- has Congress left the unemployed completely in the lurch. So some sort of spending package -- call it stimulus, call it stopgap emergency aid, whatever works -- is going to have to be passed.
The unemployment emergency helps feed another crisis Congress is going to be forced to address: the state budget disasters unfolding around the country. So far, 42 states have cut budgets that already had been enacted for fiscal 2009, according to the National Governors Association. More and deeper cuts are expected next year.
Already states have laid off and furloughed workers -- including, in some states, the very workers who process unemployment claims. Generally speaking, states are required to balance their budgets each year, a mandate that forces them to pull money out of the economy through spending reductions and tax hikes, counteracting the federal government's efforts to juice things up. "That is what happened during the Great Depression, we had states working against what the federal government was doing," says Heidi Shierholz, an economist with the Economic Policy Institute. With red states and blue, Republican governors and Democrats, all struggling against the same relentless, recession-driven drops in tax revenue, an almost irresistible political coalition for more aid to states eventually will take shape. And with the fast-approaching September deadline for extending some unemployment benefits, there will likely emerge one of those must-pass measures that may or may not be called another stimulus bill.
Any hot air expended trying to stop it serves no purpose but to fuel political fires. Remember, that is the whole point of those now huffing and puffing most heartily. They don't want to figure a way out of this morass; they just want to figure out a way to unseat those now in office.
Marie Cocco's e-mail address is mariecocco(at)washpost.com.
(c) 2009, Washington Post Writers Group
http://www.alternet.org/workplace/141190/hundreds_of_thousands_of_workers_will_lose_unemployment_benefits_soon/
Workers laid off early in the downturn are soon to be left without the basic sustenance of an unemployment check.
WASHINGTON -- When a virulent disease is ravaging you like a cancer, you don't want a cacophony of voices promoting different or contradictory cures. Yet that is what we're starting to hear about the economic crisis, not only from a politically divided -- and pretty scared -- capital, but from within the Obama administration itself. In just the past few days, Vice President Joe Biden has said the young administration misread the depth of the recession -- an honest account, since most private economists did as well. Laura Tyson, an outside economic adviser to the White House, said it's wise to start preparing another stimulus package.
Then President Barack Obama made everything perfectly muddy when he said in an ABC News interview that the seriousness of the downturn and how to attack it is "something we wrestle with constantly." Yet in the next breath, he expressed concern about the burgeoning deficit. But if anyone's looking for some clear voices, there are 650,000 of them just waiting to be heard. That is roughly the number of long-term unemployed who will begin losing their jobless benefits in September, according to the National Employment Law Project. Remember, the recession didn't start last fall when the government bailed out AIG and the financial system froze. It began in December 2007 -- and 6.5 million jobs have been lost since then. Depending on which state and the sort of triggers that apply to benefits, hundreds of thousands of workers laid off early in the downturn are soon to be left without the basic sustenance of an unemployment check.
Meanwhile, the Labor Department says, the number of unemployed people out of work for 27 weeks or longer continues to grow, reaching 4.4 million last month. In June, three out of 10 jobless workers had been out of work for at least six months, according to the department's data. The stimulus package the president signed soon after taking office did provide extended benefits, and boosted weekly payments. But even that extension runs out on Dec. 26, and would not apply to all the unemployed. Does anyone really believe that a significant portion of the unemployed will have found new work by then? Hardly. Both private and government economists now predict that unemployment will continue to rise at least through the end of this year.
"We can't ignore this moment when all these folks are running out (of benefits)," says Maurice Emsellem of the National Employment Law Project.
"That needs to be a top priority, to help these workers." Let's stop kidding ourselves. In no contemporary economic crisis -- not even those that unfolded on the Republicans' watch -- has Congress left the unemployed completely in the lurch. So some sort of spending package -- call it stimulus, call it stopgap emergency aid, whatever works -- is going to have to be passed.
The unemployment emergency helps feed another crisis Congress is going to be forced to address: the state budget disasters unfolding around the country. So far, 42 states have cut budgets that already had been enacted for fiscal 2009, according to the National Governors Association. More and deeper cuts are expected next year.
Already states have laid off and furloughed workers -- including, in some states, the very workers who process unemployment claims. Generally speaking, states are required to balance their budgets each year, a mandate that forces them to pull money out of the economy through spending reductions and tax hikes, counteracting the federal government's efforts to juice things up. "That is what happened during the Great Depression, we had states working against what the federal government was doing," says Heidi Shierholz, an economist with the Economic Policy Institute. With red states and blue, Republican governors and Democrats, all struggling against the same relentless, recession-driven drops in tax revenue, an almost irresistible political coalition for more aid to states eventually will take shape. And with the fast-approaching September deadline for extending some unemployment benefits, there will likely emerge one of those must-pass measures that may or may not be called another stimulus bill.
Any hot air expended trying to stop it serves no purpose but to fuel political fires. Remember, that is the whole point of those now huffing and puffing most heartily. They don't want to figure a way out of this morass; they just want to figure out a way to unseat those now in office.
Marie Cocco's e-mail address is mariecocco(at)washpost.com.
(c) 2009, Washington Post Writers Group
http://www.alternet.org/workplace/141190/hundreds_of_thousands_of_workers_will_lose_unemployment_benefits_soon/
Summer Downsizing: 31 Ways to Jumpstart Your Local Economy
By Sarah van Gelder, YES! Magazine. Posted July 9, 2009.
Here's how to make more with less, put people before profits and cut down on waste.
AT HOME
1. Rent out a room in your home, or swap space for gardening, child or elder care, or carpentry.
2. Buy less so you can buy higher quality. Buy from companies that "internalize" costs by passing along to you the cost of living wages, low carbon footprints, or organic production.
3. Take your money out of predator banks and put it into a credit union, local bank, or an institution like Shorebank Pacific that supports sustainable businesses.
4. Pay off debts. Try life without credit cards.
5. Downsize your home and shrink your mortgage.
6. Fix things. Mend clothing, repair the vacuum, fix the car--instead of replacing them. Or give them away on Freecycle.org.
7. Invest with passion. Know where your money is and what it's up to. Go for a living return that builds your community. Or invest in tangible things like a prepaid college fund or a piece of land.
8. Shorten the supply chain. Pick the wild greens and extra fruit growing in your neighborhood. If you can't do that, then buy direct from a farmer. If you can't do that, then look for local produce in season at your locally owned grocers.
9. Support other people's local economies by urging your representatives in Congress to cancel debts to poor countries (see www.jubileeusa.org).
10. Find a place, put down roots, and stay put. Get to know people from other generations. Turn off the TV and talk to friends and neighbors.
11. Support local green businesses rather than distant energy conglomerates by insulating your house, upgrading windows, and installing solar.
TOGETHER WITH FRIENDS
12. Form a dinner club and hold a weekly potluck, or trade off cooking and hosting
13. Dip your toe in the barter economy. Check out Craigslist's "barter" category, and learn what WTT means (Willing To Trade). Even better, ask the guy at work who makes microbrews to trade a sixpack for a dozen of your chickens' eggs.
14. Get together with coworkers and start a list of things you can do at work. For example, buy fair trade coffee, change to energy-efficient lighting, or carpool.
15. Start a Common Security Club in your faith community or neighborhood to help folks cope in the crisis and act together to create the new economy (www.commonsecurityclub.org).
16. Exchange care of children and elders. Better yet, bring the generations together and support each in offering love and care to the others.
17. Pool funds with a group of friends for home repairs, greening projects, or emergencies.
18. Do home work parties. Each month, go to a different household to do major home greening, a garden upgrade, or some deferred maintenance.
19. Keep more people from becoming homeless by challenging evictions and occupying vacant homes.
20. Create a space at a farmers market to exchange or sell used clothes, electronics, games, CDs, plants, seeds, compost, and books. Encourage people to swap services, too, like haircuts, photography, or prepared dinners.
21. Reach out to groups that are organizing people on the frontlines of the crisis, like Jobs with Justice (www.jwj.org) and Right to the City (www.righttothecity.org).
IN YOUR COMMUNITY
22. Link up people looking for job skills with people who can offer apprenticeships.
23. Start a local currency or time dollar program to help link needs and offerings, those with time and those starved for time.
24. Use publicly owned lands for community gardens, farmers markets, business incubators, community land trusts (with affordable housing), community-rooted grocery stores.
25. Hold on to the local businesses you already have. Help retiring entrepreneurs sell to employees or other locals.
26. Create a car, kayak, and electric pick-up truck co-op to save money and carbon, and provide access to a variety of vehicles.
27. Create or join a chapter of the Business Alliance for Local Living Economies (BALLE) or similar groups. Work together to find services or products you could substitute for imported ones, local assets you can build on, and ongoing institutions that could be serviced locally.
28. Start a community bank, loan fund, or credit union to invest in local well-being, or encourage existing ones to rethink their lending.
29. Declare an end to corporate personhood in your community. Barnstead, New Hampshire did, and, more recently, three communities in Maine have done it. You can too.
30. Hold a weekly dinner for the hungry. Ask those who attend to help serve food at subsequent dinners. (Having an opportunity to give is important for everyone's dignity).
31. Keep your energy dollars circulating locally. Launch a clean energy cooperative to install wind turbines or solar roofs, and to weatherize homes and businesses.
http://www.alternet.org/environment/140979/summer_downsizing%3A_31_ways_to_jumpstart_your_local_economy/
Here's how to make more with less, put people before profits and cut down on waste.
AT HOME
1. Rent out a room in your home, or swap space for gardening, child or elder care, or carpentry.
2. Buy less so you can buy higher quality. Buy from companies that "internalize" costs by passing along to you the cost of living wages, low carbon footprints, or organic production.
3. Take your money out of predator banks and put it into a credit union, local bank, or an institution like Shorebank Pacific that supports sustainable businesses.
4. Pay off debts. Try life without credit cards.
5. Downsize your home and shrink your mortgage.
6. Fix things. Mend clothing, repair the vacuum, fix the car--instead of replacing them. Or give them away on Freecycle.org.
7. Invest with passion. Know where your money is and what it's up to. Go for a living return that builds your community. Or invest in tangible things like a prepaid college fund or a piece of land.
8. Shorten the supply chain. Pick the wild greens and extra fruit growing in your neighborhood. If you can't do that, then buy direct from a farmer. If you can't do that, then look for local produce in season at your locally owned grocers.
9. Support other people's local economies by urging your representatives in Congress to cancel debts to poor countries (see www.jubileeusa.org).
10. Find a place, put down roots, and stay put. Get to know people from other generations. Turn off the TV and talk to friends and neighbors.
11. Support local green businesses rather than distant energy conglomerates by insulating your house, upgrading windows, and installing solar.
TOGETHER WITH FRIENDS
12. Form a dinner club and hold a weekly potluck, or trade off cooking and hosting
13. Dip your toe in the barter economy. Check out Craigslist's "barter" category, and learn what WTT means (Willing To Trade). Even better, ask the guy at work who makes microbrews to trade a sixpack for a dozen of your chickens' eggs.
14. Get together with coworkers and start a list of things you can do at work. For example, buy fair trade coffee, change to energy-efficient lighting, or carpool.
15. Start a Common Security Club in your faith community or neighborhood to help folks cope in the crisis and act together to create the new economy (www.commonsecurityclub.org).
16. Exchange care of children and elders. Better yet, bring the generations together and support each in offering love and care to the others.
17. Pool funds with a group of friends for home repairs, greening projects, or emergencies.
18. Do home work parties. Each month, go to a different household to do major home greening, a garden upgrade, or some deferred maintenance.
19. Keep more people from becoming homeless by challenging evictions and occupying vacant homes.
20. Create a space at a farmers market to exchange or sell used clothes, electronics, games, CDs, plants, seeds, compost, and books. Encourage people to swap services, too, like haircuts, photography, or prepared dinners.
21. Reach out to groups that are organizing people on the frontlines of the crisis, like Jobs with Justice (www.jwj.org) and Right to the City (www.righttothecity.org).
IN YOUR COMMUNITY
22. Link up people looking for job skills with people who can offer apprenticeships.
23. Start a local currency or time dollar program to help link needs and offerings, those with time and those starved for time.
24. Use publicly owned lands for community gardens, farmers markets, business incubators, community land trusts (with affordable housing), community-rooted grocery stores.
25. Hold on to the local businesses you already have. Help retiring entrepreneurs sell to employees or other locals.
26. Create a car, kayak, and electric pick-up truck co-op to save money and carbon, and provide access to a variety of vehicles.
27. Create or join a chapter of the Business Alliance for Local Living Economies (BALLE) or similar groups. Work together to find services or products you could substitute for imported ones, local assets you can build on, and ongoing institutions that could be serviced locally.
28. Start a community bank, loan fund, or credit union to invest in local well-being, or encourage existing ones to rethink their lending.
29. Declare an end to corporate personhood in your community. Barnstead, New Hampshire did, and, more recently, three communities in Maine have done it. You can too.
30. Hold a weekly dinner for the hungry. Ask those who attend to help serve food at subsequent dinners. (Having an opportunity to give is important for everyone's dignity).
31. Keep your energy dollars circulating locally. Launch a clean energy cooperative to install wind turbines or solar roofs, and to weatherize homes and businesses.
http://www.alternet.org/environment/140979/summer_downsizing%3A_31_ways_to_jumpstart_your_local_economy/
Sunday, July 5, 2009
Economy Loses 467,000 Jobs in June; Unemployment Edges Up to 9.5 Percent
Dean Baker, t r u t h o u t | Perspective
Friday 03 July 2009
Unemployment among men is near its all-time high.
The economy shed another 467,000 jobs in June, as the unemployment rate edged up to 9.5 percent. The rise in unemployment would have been higher, except 155,000 people left the workforce, pushing down the employed percentage of the population (EPOP) by 0.2 percentage points to 59.5 percent. This is a drop of 3.9 percentage points from the pre-recession high in December of 2006.
Unemployment in this downturn continues to be overwhelmingly a male story. The unemployment rate for men rose to 10 percent, just 0.1 percentage points below its all-time high in December of 1982, the highest on record since World War II. The EPOP for men fell by 0.5 percentage points to 67.5 percent, the lowest rate ever. By comparison, the unemployment rate for women edged up 0.1 percentage points to 7.5 percent. The EPOP for women fell to 56.4 percent, 2 percentage points below the pre-recession peak.
All the other data in the household survey was consistent with further weakening of the labor market. The average and median duration of unemployment spells both rose sharply, increasing by 2 and 3 weeks respectively. The percentage of the unemployed who have been out of work for more than 26 weeks increased by 2 percentage points to 29 percent. Many of these workers will soon be exhausting even their extended unemployment benefits.
The percentage of the unemployed who voluntarily left their jobs fell by 0.6 percentage points to 5.6 percent, a record low. This measure of confidence in the labor market bottomed out at 6.5 percent in the 1981-82 recession.
The rate of job loss in the private sector appears to have slowed somewhat in the last two months, shedding 312,000 jobs and 415,000 jobs in May and June respectively. This compares with average private sector job loss of 660,000 per month from October through April. However, the situation is somewhat more ambiguous from the standpoint of hours worked.
The index of aggregate weekly hours fell by 0.8 percentage points in June, the same as the average rate of decline from October to April. This index is now down 8.2 percent from its pre-recession peak. This is the equivalent of almost 9.5 million private sector jobs lost in the absence of a decline in hours worked.
Job loss continues to be heavily concentrated in construction and manufacturing, which lost 79,000 and 136,000 jobs respectively. All sectors of construction are now shedding jobs, as job loss in the non-residential sector is partly offsetting a slower rate of job loss in the residential sector. Nonetheless, the rate of decline has slowed from earlier this year when the sector was shedding almost 120,000 jobs a month. Manufacturing had been losing over 170,000 jobs a month in the October to April period.
Retail trade lost 21,000 jobs in June, with half of the loss coming in car and parts dealers. This compares with job loss of more than 60,000 per month earlier this year. However, it is worth noting that over the last three months, the birth/death model has imputed an average of 39,000 more jobs a month into the establishment data than in the corresponding months of 2008. Given the weakness of the economy, this increase seems implausible. The imputation is especially important for retail where small firms are constantly entering and leaving the market.
Health care remains the only sector adding jobs, increasing employment by 20,800. Cutbacks in state and local spending are likely to hit health care soon, but thus far the sector continues to generate jobs at a healthy pace.
Another source of bad news in this report was the flat nominal wages reported for June, coupled with a small downward revision for May. The flat nominal wages, coupled with the decline in work hours, led to a 0.3 percent decline in the nominal weekly wage. The combination of declining employment, declining real wages for those still working, and the continuing loss of housing wealth at a rate close to $200 billion a month, virtually guarantees further declines in consumption in the months ahead. With state and local governments planning layoffs and furloughs in response to deficits, there is little basis for optimism about the second half of 2009.
»
Dean Baker is the Co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research. CEPR's Jobs Byte is published each month upon release of the Bureau of Labor Statistics' employment report.
http://www.truthout.org/070309C
Friday 03 July 2009
Unemployment among men is near its all-time high.
The economy shed another 467,000 jobs in June, as the unemployment rate edged up to 9.5 percent. The rise in unemployment would have been higher, except 155,000 people left the workforce, pushing down the employed percentage of the population (EPOP) by 0.2 percentage points to 59.5 percent. This is a drop of 3.9 percentage points from the pre-recession high in December of 2006.
Unemployment in this downturn continues to be overwhelmingly a male story. The unemployment rate for men rose to 10 percent, just 0.1 percentage points below its all-time high in December of 1982, the highest on record since World War II. The EPOP for men fell by 0.5 percentage points to 67.5 percent, the lowest rate ever. By comparison, the unemployment rate for women edged up 0.1 percentage points to 7.5 percent. The EPOP for women fell to 56.4 percent, 2 percentage points below the pre-recession peak.
All the other data in the household survey was consistent with further weakening of the labor market. The average and median duration of unemployment spells both rose sharply, increasing by 2 and 3 weeks respectively. The percentage of the unemployed who have been out of work for more than 26 weeks increased by 2 percentage points to 29 percent. Many of these workers will soon be exhausting even their extended unemployment benefits.
The percentage of the unemployed who voluntarily left their jobs fell by 0.6 percentage points to 5.6 percent, a record low. This measure of confidence in the labor market bottomed out at 6.5 percent in the 1981-82 recession.
The rate of job loss in the private sector appears to have slowed somewhat in the last two months, shedding 312,000 jobs and 415,000 jobs in May and June respectively. This compares with average private sector job loss of 660,000 per month from October through April. However, the situation is somewhat more ambiguous from the standpoint of hours worked.
The index of aggregate weekly hours fell by 0.8 percentage points in June, the same as the average rate of decline from October to April. This index is now down 8.2 percent from its pre-recession peak. This is the equivalent of almost 9.5 million private sector jobs lost in the absence of a decline in hours worked.
Job loss continues to be heavily concentrated in construction and manufacturing, which lost 79,000 and 136,000 jobs respectively. All sectors of construction are now shedding jobs, as job loss in the non-residential sector is partly offsetting a slower rate of job loss in the residential sector. Nonetheless, the rate of decline has slowed from earlier this year when the sector was shedding almost 120,000 jobs a month. Manufacturing had been losing over 170,000 jobs a month in the October to April period.
Retail trade lost 21,000 jobs in June, with half of the loss coming in car and parts dealers. This compares with job loss of more than 60,000 per month earlier this year. However, it is worth noting that over the last three months, the birth/death model has imputed an average of 39,000 more jobs a month into the establishment data than in the corresponding months of 2008. Given the weakness of the economy, this increase seems implausible. The imputation is especially important for retail where small firms are constantly entering and leaving the market.
Health care remains the only sector adding jobs, increasing employment by 20,800. Cutbacks in state and local spending are likely to hit health care soon, but thus far the sector continues to generate jobs at a healthy pace.
Another source of bad news in this report was the flat nominal wages reported for June, coupled with a small downward revision for May. The flat nominal wages, coupled with the decline in work hours, led to a 0.3 percent decline in the nominal weekly wage. The combination of declining employment, declining real wages for those still working, and the continuing loss of housing wealth at a rate close to $200 billion a month, virtually guarantees further declines in consumption in the months ahead. With state and local governments planning layoffs and furloughs in response to deficits, there is little basis for optimism about the second half of 2009.
»
Dean Baker is the Co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research. CEPR's Jobs Byte is published each month upon release of the Bureau of Labor Statistics' employment report.
http://www.truthout.org/070309C
Thursday, July 2, 2009
Kill the Indian. Save the Man.
Thursday 02 July 2009
by: Dahr Jamail and Jason Coppola, t r u t h o u t | Perspective
Manifest Destiny
In 1845, an American columnist, John O'Sullivan, writing about the proposed annexation of Texas, claimed that it was America's "manifest destiny to overspread the continent." Later in the same year, referring to the ongoing dispute with Great Britain over Oregon, he wrote that the United States had the right to claim "the whole of Oregon."
And that claim is by the right of our Manifest Destiny to overspread and to possess the whole of the continent that Providence has given us for the development of the great experiment of liberty and federated self-government entrusted to us.
The westward expansion did not originate with O'Sullivan's theory. In 1803, the United States acquired 23 percent of its existing territory through the Louisiana Purchase. Seeing land as a source of political power, the government began to actively pursue aggressive expansion of its territories through the 19th century. The idea of Manifest Destiny was one component of the process which captured the popular imagination. This was further fueled by the discovery of gold and other minerals in the West attracting Easterners acting on their conviction in their right and duty to expand.
The Mexican-American conflict generated massive casualties, and when it was over, the US controlled all of New Mexico and California, and more of the territory of Texas. When Texas was annexed in 1846 as the 26th state, Col. Ethan Allen Hitchcock wrote, "We have not one particle of right to be here."
Acclaimed historian Howard Zinn told Truthout, "The Mexican War, presented as something we were doing because Mexicans had fired on our soldiers ... no, we were going to Mexico because we wanted to take forty percent of Mexican land. California, Arizona, Nevada ... all of that beautiful land in the Southwest that was all Mexico. I'll bet there are very few Americans today who live in that area and know that it belonged to Mexico. Or they may ask, how come all these names? How come Santa Barbara, Santa Rosa, Santa Ana, how come?"
Perhaps Americans seriously believe that the US was preordained by God to expand and exercise hegemony over all that it surveys? After all, our 25th president, William McKinley, (1897-1901) declared that "The mission of the United States is one of benevolent assimilation."
In the Sandwich Island Letters from Hawaii, Mark Twain exhorted his country folk sardonically, "We must annex those people. We can afflict them with our wise and beneficent government. We can introduce the novelty of thieves, all the way up from street-car pickpockets to municipal robbers and Government defaulters, and show them how amusing it is to arrest them and try them and then turn them loose - some for cash and some for political influence. We can make them ashamed of their simple and primitive justice. We can make that little bunch of sleepy islands the hottest corner on earth, and array it in the moral splendor of our high and holy civilization. Annexation is what the poor islanders need. Shall we to men benighted, the lamp of life deny?"
North America
John Trudell of the Santee Sioux comments on the use of mainstream Christianity by the United States as a tool to dominate and colonize large tracts of the continent. Talking to Truthout at Venice Beach, he said that a religious perception of reality as projected by the US, replacing a spiritual perception of reality like that held by most indigenous peoples, "… leads to insanity and incoherence. It leads to self-destruction. It eats into the spirit of the being."
The analogy he uses in order to illustrate the spiritual impact that religious, administrative and corporate colonization has upon indigenous people is graphic and poetic. He says, "This is a form of mining. It is like a technological form of mining the energy of the planet and we are forms of that energy. That's the 'being' part of us. The human form is made up of metals, minerals and liquids of earth. All things of the earth have 'being.' We know they can take the bone, flesh and blood out of the earth that is uranium and put it through a mining-refining process and convert its being into a form of energy, and we know they can do it with fossil fuel. And we know that when they do these things it leaves behind poisons and toxins. And they - and I'm just going to call them the industrial ruling class - but they mine the 'being' part of human through programming the human when the human is born to believe their obedience. So the human being that enters this reality is put in with all this distortion that is based upon there being something wrong with them and fear comes real quickly. And when you mine the being part of human, fear is the toxin left behind from that mining. And this programming begins at birth. And the way we've been picked apart, we end up as human beings having this tendency to feel powerless. And it's everywhere.… This powerlessness feeling is pretty prevalent on this planet. "
An acclaimed poet, national recording artist, actor, and activist, Trudell was a spokesperson for the United Indians of All Tribes occupation of Alcatraz Island from 1969 to 1971. He also served as chairman of the American Indian Movement (AIM), from 1973 to 1979.
Steven Newcomb, a Shawnee/Lenape Native American and author of "Pagans in the Promised Land - Decoding the Doctrine of Christian Discovery," has written: "It's a little known fact that the Catholic Church issued a number of papal edicts in the fifteenth century that set into motion patterns of colonization that became globalized over many centuries. In the documents "Dum diversas" (1452) and "Romanus Pontifex" (1455), for example, issued by Pope Nicholas V to King Alfonso V of Portugal, the pope "authorized" the king to send men to the Western Coast of Africa and "to invade, capture, vanquish, and subdue" all non-Christians, "to reduce their persons to perpetual slavery," and to "take away all their possessions and property." Such patterns of thought and behavior became institutionalized in law and policy, and the patterns are still operative against indigenous peoples today under the concept of "the State."
An effective means to institutionalize this process was to indoctrinate Native American children at highly religious boarding schools run by the Department of Interior. The children were severed from their families on reservations with the ostensible aim of saving them from poverty.
The original boarding school idea came from Gen. Richard Henry Pratt who formed the Carlyle Indian School in Carlyle, Pennsylvania, in 1878. He wrote in "The Advantages of Mingling Indians with Whites," Americanizing the American Indians: Writings by the "Friends of the Indian" 1880-1900 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1973), 260-271, "A great general has said that the only good Indian is a dead one, and that high sanction of his destruction has been an enormous factor in promoting Indian massacres. In a sense, I agree with the sentiment, but only in this: that all the Indian there is in the race should be dead. Kill the Indian in him, and save the man."
Systematically, his school and its later extensions stripped away tribal culture. Students were forced to drop their Native American names, barred from speaking in their native languages and forbidden to wear long hair. Punitive measures and torture were rampant.
Pratt's conviction of moral superiority can be gathered from his views on slavery, "Inscrutable are the ways of Providence. Horrible as were the experiences of its introduction, and of slavery itself, there was concealed in them the greatest blessing that ever came to the Negro race - seven millions of blacks from cannibalism in darkest Africa to citizenship in free and enlightened America; not full, not complete citizenship, but possible - probable - citizenship, and on the highway and near to it."
Brazil
Marcos Terena, of the Terena people in the Pantanal region in Matto Groso do Sur, Brazil, was recently visiting the United Nations in New York City. Terena, a key participant in the creation of the Draft Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, told Truthout, "Big agribusiness is commercializing our corn, yucca, potatoes and other seeds. Oil companies are also in indigenous territory and causing all kinds of destruction."
He spoke of Parkinson's disease, cancer, heart attacks and mental disorders, all sicknesses new to the Terena Spiritual leaders who have no means to cure them. They believe with good reason that these ailments have come into their midst with the advent of Western companies and accompanying pollution and contamination.
Terena's words hit home: "In 1992, in our communities, there was no need for psychiatric hospitals. Now these sicknesses are arriving to us as well. I tell our spiritual leaders that the white people also don't know how to treat these sicknesses. We are also worried about you who live in the US."
Ecuador
Forty-three-year-old Moi Enomenga is a leader of the Huaorani, an indigenous group of hunters and gatherers that have inhabited the rainforests at the headwaters of the Amazon for millennia, with no contact from the outside world until as recently as the late 1950's. Numbering approximately 3,000 individuals, they maintain a traditional lifestyle.
In 1992, the western oil company Maxus Energy Corporation, based in Dallas, Texas, showed up in his area, prompting Enomenga to organize a protest. He later traveled to the US to rally for support. In his absence, the president of Ecuador and the head of the oil company flew to his community and got them to sign an agreement that allowed the oil company to begin work. The modus operandi seems to be a replica of deals made in the earlier century with Native American groups, though not for oil. Members of the Huaorani who had been taken away and educated at missionary schools were bribed to facilitate the deal.
This caused much fighting between the indigenous communities, but did eventually lead to their reunification and they have since begun to work together again to resist the exploitation of their land with some help from outside. Since then, they have been fighting a constant battle.
After initial conflict over the matter, the indigenous communities did eventually reunite and start resisting the exploitation of their land. It has been a constant battle and to gather support for it. Enomenga, who is also ecotourism coordinator, has traveled extensively throughout the Amazon and the world.
At a recent interview in New York, he spoke with Truthout: "There are three thousand of us Hua?ani. We are one people, we all speak the same language. The more we unite, the stronger our voice will be. We can be an example for the rest of the world if we can achieve a little bit more."
He says, "First they drill, then they extract oil, then there is a highway, then there is colonization, then there are so many problems, because, here, the forest is clean, but when the companies enter, they destroy so much. The people don't have what they need to live, because the Americans don't respect much, because they take the oil, instead of letting us live. This is why the Huaorani ask for the oil-drilling to stop."
Enomenga recounts his history to explain how the struggle of his people mirrors his own, "Twenty-five years ago, we were still living free. We didn't have borders. Our territory went from Peru into Ecuador. My father and grandfather always defended our territory … they guarded it very well. Nobody came inside. If people disrespected our laws and came to hunt on our territory, they would get killed. In 1957, American missionaries, five of them, showed up at the village of my grandfather on my mother's side. Those five missionaries were killed there. I always thought about this when my mother and father would tell me their stories. I thought when I turned twenty-five I would then defend my land. After the five missionaries were killed, more came and said we would be bombed if we didn't move. So they took us away from our communities and moved us to one area. Today there is a community where the missionaries took everybody. I always thought that this kind of thinking can't be permitted on our land. My father and grandfather defended our territory by killing. Now I have to defend our territory by making friends with people and organizing."
He has indeed done this, by working nonviolently to oppose the ongoing colonization of his land and people with success enough to draw some attention and a movie has been made of his efforts. Nevertheless, the painful effects of the missionaries and colonists are experienced daily, and he narrates them:
"About 50 years ago, colonists came here, and brought diseases, and an enormous number of Huaorani died. This is why the Huaorani don't want them here in Ecuador. Here, we have a lot of history, stories about how the planet was born, how the Huaorani lived.... I would teach them about this, but they come here to educate us, but I don't want them to. The missionaries lie. I don't believe them. I believe in our own spirituality here: the forest."
Unfortunately, not everybody does. The colonists have never believed the forest, land, buffalo, lakes, and the ocean to be the right of indigenous populations.
In 1872, John Gast created an allegorical representation of Manifest Destiny called American Progress. The painting shows the US, personified as Columbia, floating through the sky holding a school book, stringing telegraph wire as she travels, leading civilization westward with American settlers while the Native Americans and wild animals flee.
Kenya
The chairman of the Maa Civil Society Forum in Kenya, Ben R. Ole Koissaba of the Massai People, says, "Before the white man came we were the rulers of East Africa, both Kenya and Tanzania, but because of the kind of land God gave us, the kind of resources God bestowed upon us, there was envy and greed."
He described to Truthout how the Massai were dispossessed of all the land and livestock that was their way of life and their lifeline. "For the colonists to be able to rule over us, they had to introduce an education system that demonized our (own) education system. They brought in a new concept. The "I" - "me" - "myself" - kind of stuff. That's the first thing."
He has personal experience of the religious impact of the belief borne in Manifest Destiny, "If it was not for the church, the world would not have been colonized. I am a living example. I was doing my masters at the University of Leeds in the UK. I wrote a story about how the church marginalized me as a Massai. They came with a gun in one hand to rule and a bible in the other to close my eyes. I blame the church wholly for what we are. They discontinued me from my masters at Leeds. They discontinued me from my education just because I said the truth."
Koissaba explains to us how the spirituality of his people differs completely from that of most mainstream Christians in the United States, "Ours was not a Sunday God. For the Massai, God was everything. The first milk from the cows is thrown to the East, West, North and South. You sacrifice that. When you look at the sky you see God. When you look at the ground you see God."
Western missionaries used the double-pronged fork of Christian education to rob the Massai of their religion so that their resources could be robbed. "Some of our best schools are missionary schools. As a way of colonizing our minds they had to put us in these institutions. They skin us, they remove what we are, they put us in some new thing so we sing their tune."
Iraq
The term Manifest Destiny ceased to be used in a political context in the early 20th century. However it would seem that the idea continues to impact political actions overseas in the 21st century, if nothing else, to camouflage serious economic and political violations that the United States indulges in, across the globe.
Historian William E. Weeks noted three key themes that the advocates of Manifest Destiny emphasized at the time. These themes are just as applicable today for supporters of the US Empire and corporate globalization:
1. The virtue of the American people and their institutions; 2. The mission to spread these institutions, thereby redeeming and remaking the world in the image of the US. 3. The destiny under God to accomplish this work.
On reading an article posted earlier on Truthout about the cultural impacts of the Iraqi occupation, Commander Edward C. Robison, of the U.S Navy told us in an email, "I read your article and agree with it strongly. It was my experience that the Army was working directly as a point of doctrine to defeat the Iraqi culture and history as a major component of their strategy to fight the insurgency."
His experience in Iraq from February 2007 until August 2007 only underscores the impression that the concept of Manifest Destiny remains embedded in the minds of many Western colonists: "I was assigned to the II MEF Forward as a Reconstruction Officer under the G5 directorate. I was detailed to Al-Asad to work with RCT2 in western Al Anbar province. Because of this I travelled throughout the province and dealt with a large variety of Iraqis and the full spectrum of the Iraqi Government. I worked closely with the Provincial Reconstruction Team (PRT) to stand it up and get it functioning.
"In my work I tried hard to emphasize using Iraqi solutions, working within the Iraqi culture and social structure. This concept seemed very novel to those above me, but they saw the success it was achieving. I argued with the State Department "experts" about how to get agriculture functioning again. They said we needed to teach the farmers how to use irrigation, and I reminded them that irrigation was invented in Iraq. There was a very strong attitude in the Bush State Department and military that anything Iraqi or Arab was inherently inferior and had to be replaced.
"I heard repeatedly from 'experts' that never went into the field about all the cultural problems about Iraqis. How they were lazy, poorly educated, won't mainta?n anything, can't be trusted and much more. There was a continuous diatribe against the culture from people detailed there to help them. They had no appreciation of the culture and most hated the Iraqi people and saw them as enemies.
"There were only a few of us that saw the Iraqis as intelligent, creative and capable. I found that like people here the Iraqis lived up to our expectations. If we expected them to accomplish something, they did. When the expectation was failure, it usually failed. I have believed for a long time that the best thing was for us to pull out completely and allow an Iraqi solution to occur. There may be an increase in violence for a short time, but in the end things will be better than they are now."
For this hope to bear fruit, a strong collective force of similar American voices will have to rise and thwart the destructive march of American Manifest Destiny on the planet.
---------
(Bhaswati Sengupta also contributed to this report.)
http://www.truthout.org/070209A
by: Dahr Jamail and Jason Coppola, t r u t h o u t | Perspective
Manifest Destiny
In 1845, an American columnist, John O'Sullivan, writing about the proposed annexation of Texas, claimed that it was America's "manifest destiny to overspread the continent." Later in the same year, referring to the ongoing dispute with Great Britain over Oregon, he wrote that the United States had the right to claim "the whole of Oregon."
And that claim is by the right of our Manifest Destiny to overspread and to possess the whole of the continent that Providence has given us for the development of the great experiment of liberty and federated self-government entrusted to us.
The westward expansion did not originate with O'Sullivan's theory. In 1803, the United States acquired 23 percent of its existing territory through the Louisiana Purchase. Seeing land as a source of political power, the government began to actively pursue aggressive expansion of its territories through the 19th century. The idea of Manifest Destiny was one component of the process which captured the popular imagination. This was further fueled by the discovery of gold and other minerals in the West attracting Easterners acting on their conviction in their right and duty to expand.
The Mexican-American conflict generated massive casualties, and when it was over, the US controlled all of New Mexico and California, and more of the territory of Texas. When Texas was annexed in 1846 as the 26th state, Col. Ethan Allen Hitchcock wrote, "We have not one particle of right to be here."
Acclaimed historian Howard Zinn told Truthout, "The Mexican War, presented as something we were doing because Mexicans had fired on our soldiers ... no, we were going to Mexico because we wanted to take forty percent of Mexican land. California, Arizona, Nevada ... all of that beautiful land in the Southwest that was all Mexico. I'll bet there are very few Americans today who live in that area and know that it belonged to Mexico. Or they may ask, how come all these names? How come Santa Barbara, Santa Rosa, Santa Ana, how come?"
Perhaps Americans seriously believe that the US was preordained by God to expand and exercise hegemony over all that it surveys? After all, our 25th president, William McKinley, (1897-1901) declared that "The mission of the United States is one of benevolent assimilation."
In the Sandwich Island Letters from Hawaii, Mark Twain exhorted his country folk sardonically, "We must annex those people. We can afflict them with our wise and beneficent government. We can introduce the novelty of thieves, all the way up from street-car pickpockets to municipal robbers and Government defaulters, and show them how amusing it is to arrest them and try them and then turn them loose - some for cash and some for political influence. We can make them ashamed of their simple and primitive justice. We can make that little bunch of sleepy islands the hottest corner on earth, and array it in the moral splendor of our high and holy civilization. Annexation is what the poor islanders need. Shall we to men benighted, the lamp of life deny?"
North America
John Trudell of the Santee Sioux comments on the use of mainstream Christianity by the United States as a tool to dominate and colonize large tracts of the continent. Talking to Truthout at Venice Beach, he said that a religious perception of reality as projected by the US, replacing a spiritual perception of reality like that held by most indigenous peoples, "… leads to insanity and incoherence. It leads to self-destruction. It eats into the spirit of the being."
The analogy he uses in order to illustrate the spiritual impact that religious, administrative and corporate colonization has upon indigenous people is graphic and poetic. He says, "This is a form of mining. It is like a technological form of mining the energy of the planet and we are forms of that energy. That's the 'being' part of us. The human form is made up of metals, minerals and liquids of earth. All things of the earth have 'being.' We know they can take the bone, flesh and blood out of the earth that is uranium and put it through a mining-refining process and convert its being into a form of energy, and we know they can do it with fossil fuel. And we know that when they do these things it leaves behind poisons and toxins. And they - and I'm just going to call them the industrial ruling class - but they mine the 'being' part of human through programming the human when the human is born to believe their obedience. So the human being that enters this reality is put in with all this distortion that is based upon there being something wrong with them and fear comes real quickly. And when you mine the being part of human, fear is the toxin left behind from that mining. And this programming begins at birth. And the way we've been picked apart, we end up as human beings having this tendency to feel powerless. And it's everywhere.… This powerlessness feeling is pretty prevalent on this planet. "
An acclaimed poet, national recording artist, actor, and activist, Trudell was a spokesperson for the United Indians of All Tribes occupation of Alcatraz Island from 1969 to 1971. He also served as chairman of the American Indian Movement (AIM), from 1973 to 1979.
Steven Newcomb, a Shawnee/Lenape Native American and author of "Pagans in the Promised Land - Decoding the Doctrine of Christian Discovery," has written: "It's a little known fact that the Catholic Church issued a number of papal edicts in the fifteenth century that set into motion patterns of colonization that became globalized over many centuries. In the documents "Dum diversas" (1452) and "Romanus Pontifex" (1455), for example, issued by Pope Nicholas V to King Alfonso V of Portugal, the pope "authorized" the king to send men to the Western Coast of Africa and "to invade, capture, vanquish, and subdue" all non-Christians, "to reduce their persons to perpetual slavery," and to "take away all their possessions and property." Such patterns of thought and behavior became institutionalized in law and policy, and the patterns are still operative against indigenous peoples today under the concept of "the State."
An effective means to institutionalize this process was to indoctrinate Native American children at highly religious boarding schools run by the Department of Interior. The children were severed from their families on reservations with the ostensible aim of saving them from poverty.
The original boarding school idea came from Gen. Richard Henry Pratt who formed the Carlyle Indian School in Carlyle, Pennsylvania, in 1878. He wrote in "The Advantages of Mingling Indians with Whites," Americanizing the American Indians: Writings by the "Friends of the Indian" 1880-1900 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1973), 260-271, "A great general has said that the only good Indian is a dead one, and that high sanction of his destruction has been an enormous factor in promoting Indian massacres. In a sense, I agree with the sentiment, but only in this: that all the Indian there is in the race should be dead. Kill the Indian in him, and save the man."
Systematically, his school and its later extensions stripped away tribal culture. Students were forced to drop their Native American names, barred from speaking in their native languages and forbidden to wear long hair. Punitive measures and torture were rampant.
Pratt's conviction of moral superiority can be gathered from his views on slavery, "Inscrutable are the ways of Providence. Horrible as were the experiences of its introduction, and of slavery itself, there was concealed in them the greatest blessing that ever came to the Negro race - seven millions of blacks from cannibalism in darkest Africa to citizenship in free and enlightened America; not full, not complete citizenship, but possible - probable - citizenship, and on the highway and near to it."
Brazil
Marcos Terena, of the Terena people in the Pantanal region in Matto Groso do Sur, Brazil, was recently visiting the United Nations in New York City. Terena, a key participant in the creation of the Draft Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, told Truthout, "Big agribusiness is commercializing our corn, yucca, potatoes and other seeds. Oil companies are also in indigenous territory and causing all kinds of destruction."
He spoke of Parkinson's disease, cancer, heart attacks and mental disorders, all sicknesses new to the Terena Spiritual leaders who have no means to cure them. They believe with good reason that these ailments have come into their midst with the advent of Western companies and accompanying pollution and contamination.
Terena's words hit home: "In 1992, in our communities, there was no need for psychiatric hospitals. Now these sicknesses are arriving to us as well. I tell our spiritual leaders that the white people also don't know how to treat these sicknesses. We are also worried about you who live in the US."
Ecuador
Forty-three-year-old Moi Enomenga is a leader of the Huaorani, an indigenous group of hunters and gatherers that have inhabited the rainforests at the headwaters of the Amazon for millennia, with no contact from the outside world until as recently as the late 1950's. Numbering approximately 3,000 individuals, they maintain a traditional lifestyle.
In 1992, the western oil company Maxus Energy Corporation, based in Dallas, Texas, showed up in his area, prompting Enomenga to organize a protest. He later traveled to the US to rally for support. In his absence, the president of Ecuador and the head of the oil company flew to his community and got them to sign an agreement that allowed the oil company to begin work. The modus operandi seems to be a replica of deals made in the earlier century with Native American groups, though not for oil. Members of the Huaorani who had been taken away and educated at missionary schools were bribed to facilitate the deal.
This caused much fighting between the indigenous communities, but did eventually lead to their reunification and they have since begun to work together again to resist the exploitation of their land with some help from outside. Since then, they have been fighting a constant battle.
After initial conflict over the matter, the indigenous communities did eventually reunite and start resisting the exploitation of their land. It has been a constant battle and to gather support for it. Enomenga, who is also ecotourism coordinator, has traveled extensively throughout the Amazon and the world.
At a recent interview in New York, he spoke with Truthout: "There are three thousand of us Hua?ani. We are one people, we all speak the same language. The more we unite, the stronger our voice will be. We can be an example for the rest of the world if we can achieve a little bit more."
He says, "First they drill, then they extract oil, then there is a highway, then there is colonization, then there are so many problems, because, here, the forest is clean, but when the companies enter, they destroy so much. The people don't have what they need to live, because the Americans don't respect much, because they take the oil, instead of letting us live. This is why the Huaorani ask for the oil-drilling to stop."
Enomenga recounts his history to explain how the struggle of his people mirrors his own, "Twenty-five years ago, we were still living free. We didn't have borders. Our territory went from Peru into Ecuador. My father and grandfather always defended our territory … they guarded it very well. Nobody came inside. If people disrespected our laws and came to hunt on our territory, they would get killed. In 1957, American missionaries, five of them, showed up at the village of my grandfather on my mother's side. Those five missionaries were killed there. I always thought about this when my mother and father would tell me their stories. I thought when I turned twenty-five I would then defend my land. After the five missionaries were killed, more came and said we would be bombed if we didn't move. So they took us away from our communities and moved us to one area. Today there is a community where the missionaries took everybody. I always thought that this kind of thinking can't be permitted on our land. My father and grandfather defended our territory by killing. Now I have to defend our territory by making friends with people and organizing."
He has indeed done this, by working nonviolently to oppose the ongoing colonization of his land and people with success enough to draw some attention and a movie has been made of his efforts. Nevertheless, the painful effects of the missionaries and colonists are experienced daily, and he narrates them:
"About 50 years ago, colonists came here, and brought diseases, and an enormous number of Huaorani died. This is why the Huaorani don't want them here in Ecuador. Here, we have a lot of history, stories about how the planet was born, how the Huaorani lived.... I would teach them about this, but they come here to educate us, but I don't want them to. The missionaries lie. I don't believe them. I believe in our own spirituality here: the forest."
Unfortunately, not everybody does. The colonists have never believed the forest, land, buffalo, lakes, and the ocean to be the right of indigenous populations.
In 1872, John Gast created an allegorical representation of Manifest Destiny called American Progress. The painting shows the US, personified as Columbia, floating through the sky holding a school book, stringing telegraph wire as she travels, leading civilization westward with American settlers while the Native Americans and wild animals flee.
Kenya
The chairman of the Maa Civil Society Forum in Kenya, Ben R. Ole Koissaba of the Massai People, says, "Before the white man came we were the rulers of East Africa, both Kenya and Tanzania, but because of the kind of land God gave us, the kind of resources God bestowed upon us, there was envy and greed."
He described to Truthout how the Massai were dispossessed of all the land and livestock that was their way of life and their lifeline. "For the colonists to be able to rule over us, they had to introduce an education system that demonized our (own) education system. They brought in a new concept. The "I" - "me" - "myself" - kind of stuff. That's the first thing."
He has personal experience of the religious impact of the belief borne in Manifest Destiny, "If it was not for the church, the world would not have been colonized. I am a living example. I was doing my masters at the University of Leeds in the UK. I wrote a story about how the church marginalized me as a Massai. They came with a gun in one hand to rule and a bible in the other to close my eyes. I blame the church wholly for what we are. They discontinued me from my masters at Leeds. They discontinued me from my education just because I said the truth."
Koissaba explains to us how the spirituality of his people differs completely from that of most mainstream Christians in the United States, "Ours was not a Sunday God. For the Massai, God was everything. The first milk from the cows is thrown to the East, West, North and South. You sacrifice that. When you look at the sky you see God. When you look at the ground you see God."
Western missionaries used the double-pronged fork of Christian education to rob the Massai of their religion so that their resources could be robbed. "Some of our best schools are missionary schools. As a way of colonizing our minds they had to put us in these institutions. They skin us, they remove what we are, they put us in some new thing so we sing their tune."
Iraq
The term Manifest Destiny ceased to be used in a political context in the early 20th century. However it would seem that the idea continues to impact political actions overseas in the 21st century, if nothing else, to camouflage serious economic and political violations that the United States indulges in, across the globe.
Historian William E. Weeks noted three key themes that the advocates of Manifest Destiny emphasized at the time. These themes are just as applicable today for supporters of the US Empire and corporate globalization:
1. The virtue of the American people and their institutions; 2. The mission to spread these institutions, thereby redeeming and remaking the world in the image of the US. 3. The destiny under God to accomplish this work.
On reading an article posted earlier on Truthout about the cultural impacts of the Iraqi occupation, Commander Edward C. Robison, of the U.S Navy told us in an email, "I read your article and agree with it strongly. It was my experience that the Army was working directly as a point of doctrine to defeat the Iraqi culture and history as a major component of their strategy to fight the insurgency."
His experience in Iraq from February 2007 until August 2007 only underscores the impression that the concept of Manifest Destiny remains embedded in the minds of many Western colonists: "I was assigned to the II MEF Forward as a Reconstruction Officer under the G5 directorate. I was detailed to Al-Asad to work with RCT2 in western Al Anbar province. Because of this I travelled throughout the province and dealt with a large variety of Iraqis and the full spectrum of the Iraqi Government. I worked closely with the Provincial Reconstruction Team (PRT) to stand it up and get it functioning.
"In my work I tried hard to emphasize using Iraqi solutions, working within the Iraqi culture and social structure. This concept seemed very novel to those above me, but they saw the success it was achieving. I argued with the State Department "experts" about how to get agriculture functioning again. They said we needed to teach the farmers how to use irrigation, and I reminded them that irrigation was invented in Iraq. There was a very strong attitude in the Bush State Department and military that anything Iraqi or Arab was inherently inferior and had to be replaced.
"I heard repeatedly from 'experts' that never went into the field about all the cultural problems about Iraqis. How they were lazy, poorly educated, won't mainta?n anything, can't be trusted and much more. There was a continuous diatribe against the culture from people detailed there to help them. They had no appreciation of the culture and most hated the Iraqi people and saw them as enemies.
"There were only a few of us that saw the Iraqis as intelligent, creative and capable. I found that like people here the Iraqis lived up to our expectations. If we expected them to accomplish something, they did. When the expectation was failure, it usually failed. I have believed for a long time that the best thing was for us to pull out completely and allow an Iraqi solution to occur. There may be an increase in violence for a short time, but in the end things will be better than they are now."
For this hope to bear fruit, a strong collective force of similar American voices will have to rise and thwart the destructive march of American Manifest Destiny on the planet.
---------
(Bhaswati Sengupta also contributed to this report.)
http://www.truthout.org/070209A
The Truth Alone Will Not Set You Free
By Chris Hedges
Posted on Jun 29, 2009
The ability of the corporate state to pacify the country by extending credit and providing cheap manufactured goods to the masses is gone. The pernicious idea that democracy lies in the choice between competing brands and the freedom to accumulate vast sums of personal wealth at the expense of others has collapsed. The conflation of freedom with the free market has been exposed as a sham. The travails of the poor are rapidly becoming the travails of the middle class, especially as unemployment insurance runs out and people get a taste of Bill Clinton’s draconian welfare reform. And class warfare, once buried under the happy illusion that we were all going to enter an age of prosperity with unfettered capitalism, is returning with a vengeance.
Our economic crisis—despite the corporate media circus around the death of Michael Jackson or Gov. Mark Sanford’s marital infidelity or the outfits of Sacha Baron Cohen’s latest incarnation, Brüno—barrels forward. And this crisis will lead to a period of profound political turmoil and change. Those who care about the plight of the working class and the poor must begin to mobilize quickly or we will lose our last opportunity to save our embattled democracy. The most important struggle will be to wrest the organs of communication from corporations that use mass media to demonize movements of social change and empower proto-fascist movements such as the Christian right.
American culture—or cultures, for we once had distinct regional cultures—was systematically destroyed in the 20th century by corporations. These corporations used mass communication, as well as an understanding of the human subconscious, to turn consumption into an inner compulsion. Old values of thrift, regional identity that had its own iconography, aesthetic expression and history, diverse immigrant traditions, self-sufficiency, a press that was decentralized to provide citizens with a voice in their communities were all destroyed to create mass, corporate culture. New desires and habits were implanted by corporate advertisers to replace the old. Individual frustrations and discontents could be solved, corporate culture assured us, through the wonders of consumerism and cultural homogenization. American culture, or cultures, was replaced with junk culture and junk politics. And now, standing on the ash heap, we survey the ruins. The very slogans of advertising and mass culture have become the idiom of common expression, robbing us of the language to make sense of the destruction. We confuse the manufactured commodity culture with American culture.
How do we recover what was lost? How do we reclaim the culture that was destroyed by corporations? How do we fight back now that the consumer culture has fallen into a state of decay? What can we do to reverse the cannibalization of government and the national economy by the corporations?
All periods of profound change occur in a crisis. It was a crisis that brought us the New Deal, now largely dismantled by the corporate state. It was also a crisis that gave the world Adolf Hitler and Slobodan Milosevic. We can go in either direction. Events move at the speed of light when societies and cultural assumptions break down. There are powerful forces, which have no commitment to the open society, ready to seize the moment to snuff out the last vestiges of democratic egalitarianism. Our bankrupt liberalism, which naively believes that Barack Obama is the antidote to our permanent war economy and Wall Street fraud, will either rise from its coma or be rolled over by an organized corporate elite and their right-wing lap dogs. The corporate domination of the airwaves, of most print publications and an increasing number of Internet sites means we will have to search, and search quickly, for alternative forms of communication to thwart the rise of totalitarian capitalism.
Stuart Ewen, whose books “Captains of Consciousness: Advertising and the Social Roots of the Consumer Culture” and “PR: A Social History of Spin” chronicle how corporate propaganda deformed American culture and pushed populism to the margins of American society, argues that we have a fleeting chance to save the country. I fervently hope he is right. He attacks the ideology of “objectivity and balance” that has corrupted news, saying that it falsely evokes the scales of justice. He describes the curriculum at most journalism schools as “poison.”
“ ‘Balance and objectivity’ creates an idea where both sides are balanced,” he said when I spoke to him by phone. “In certain ways it mirrors the two-party system, the notion that if you are going to have a Democrat speak you need to have a Republican speak. It offers the phantom of objectivity. It creates the notion that the universe of discourse is limited to two positions. Issues become black or white. They are not seen as complex with a multitude of factors.”
Ewen argues that the forces for social change—look at any lengthy and turgid human rights report—have forgotten that rhetoric is as important as fact. Corporate and government propaganda, aimed to sway emotions, rarely uses facts to sell its positions. And because progressives have lost the gift of rhetoric, which was once a staple of a university education, because they naively believe in the Enlightenment ideal that facts alone can move people toward justice, they are largely helpless.
“Effective communication requires not simply an understanding of the facts, but how those facts will take place in the public mind,” Ewen said. “When Gustave Le Bon says it is not the facts in and of themselves which make a point but the way in which the facts take place, the way in which they come to attention, he is right.”
The emergence of corporate and government public relations, which drew on the studies of mass psychology by Sigmund Freud and others after World War I, found its bible in Walter Lippmann’s book “Public Opinion,” a manual for the power elite’s shaping of popular sentiments. Lippmann argued that the key to leadership in the modern age would depend on the ability to manipulate “symbols which assemble emotions after they have been detached from their ideas.” The public mind could be mastered, he wrote, through an “intensification of feeling and a degradation of significance.”
These corporate forces, schooled by Woodrow Wilson’s vast Committee for Public Information, which sold World War I to the public, learned how to skillfully mobilize and manipulate the emotional responses of the public. The control of the airwaves and domination through corporate advertising of most publications restricted news to reporting facts, to “objectivity and balance,” while the real power to persuade and dominate a public remained under corporate and governmental control.
Ewen argues that pamphleteering, which played a major role in the 17th and 18th centuries in shaping the public mind, recognized that “the human mind is not left brain or right brain, that it is not divided by reason which is good and emotion which is bad.”
He argues that the forces of social reform, those organs that support a search for truth and self-criticism, have mistakenly shunned emotion and rhetoric because they have been used so powerfully within modern society to disseminate lies and manipulate public opinion. But this refusal to appeal to emotion means “we gave up the ghost and accepted the idea that human beings are these divided selves, binary systems between emotion and reason, and that emotion gets you into trouble and reason is what leads you forward. This is not true.”
The public is bombarded with carefully crafted images meant to confuse propaganda with ideology and knowledge with how we feel. Human rights and labor groups, investigative journalists, consumer watchdog organizations and advocacy agencies have, in the face of this manipulation, inundated the public sphere with reports and facts. But facts alone, Ewen says, make little difference. And as we search for alternative ways to communicate in a time of crisis we must also communicate in new forms. We must appeal to emotion as well as to reason. The power of this appeal to emotion is evidenced in the photographs of Jacob Riis, a New York journalist, who with a team of assistants at the end of the 19th century initiated urban-reform photography. His stark portraits of the filth and squalor of urban slums awakened the conscience of a nation. The photographer Lewis Hine, at the turn of the 20th century, and Walker Evans during the Great Depression did the same thing for the working class, along with writers such as Upton Sinclair and James Agee. It is a recovery of this style, one that turns the abstraction of fact into a human flesh and one that is not afraid of emotion and passion, which will permit us to counter the force of corporate propaganda.
We may know that fossil fuels are destroying our ecosystem. We may be able to cite the statistics. But the oil and natural gas industry continues its flagrant rape of the planet. It is able to do this because of the money it uses to control legislation and a massive advertising campaign that paints the oil and natural gas industry as part of the solution. A group called EnergyTomorrow.org, for example, has been running a series of television ads. One ad features an attractive, middle-aged woman in a black pantsuit—an actor named Brooke Alexander who once worked as the host of “WorldBeat” on CNN and for Fox News. Alexander walks around a blue screen studio that becomes digital renditions of American life. She argues, before each image, that oil and natural gas are critical to providing not only energy needs but health care and jobs.
“It is almost like they are taking the most optimistic visions of what the stimulus package could do and saying this is what the development of oil and natural gas will bring about,” Ewen said. “If you go to the Web site there is a lot of sophisticated stuff you can play around with. As each ad closes you see in the lower right-hand corner in very small letters API, the American Petroleum Institute, the lobbying group for ExxonMobil and all the other big oil companies. For the average viewer there is nothing in the ad to indicate this is being produced by the oil industry.”
The modern world, as Kafka predicted, has become a world where the irrational has become rational, where lies become true. And facts alone will be powerless to thwart the mendacity spun out through billions of dollars in corporate advertising, lobbying and control of traditional sources of information. We will have to descend into the world of the forgotten, to write, photograph, paint, sing, act, blog, video and film with anger and honesty that have been blunted by the parameters of traditional journalism. The lines between artists, social activists and journalists have to be erased. These lines diminish the power of reform, justice and an understanding of the truth. And it is for this purpose that these lines are there.
“As a writer part of what you are aiming for is to present things in ways that will resonate with people, which will give voice to feelings and concerns, feelings that may not be fully verbalized,” Ewen said. “You can’t do that simply by providing them with data. One of the major problems of the present is that those structures designed to promote a progressive agenda are antediluvian.”
Corporate ideology, embodied in neoconservatism, has seeped into the attitudes of most self-described liberals. It champions unfettered capitalism and globalization as eternal. This is the classic tactic that power elites use to maintain themselves. The loss of historical memory, which “balanced and objective” journalism promotes, has only contributed to this fantasy. But the fantasy, despite the desperate raiding of taxpayer funds to keep the corporate system alive, is now coming undone. The lie is being exposed. And the corporate state is running scared.
“It is very important for people like us to think about ways to present the issues, whether we are talking about the banking crisis, health care or housing and homelessness,” Ewen said. “We have to think about presenting these issues in ways that are two steps ahead of the media rather than two steps behind. That is not something we should view as an impossible task. It is a very possible task. There is evidence of how possible that task is, especially if you look at the development of the underground press in the 1960s. The underground press, which started cropping up all over the country, was not a marginal phenomenon. It leeched into the society. It developed an approach to news and communication that was 10 steps ahead of the mainstream media. The proof is that even as it declined, so many structures that were innovated by the underground press, things like The Whole Earth Catalogue, began to affect and inform the stylistic presentation of mainstream media.”
“I am not a prophet,” Ewen said. “All I can do is look at historical precedence and figure out the extent we can learn from it. This is not about looking backwards. If you can’t see the past you can’t see the future. If you can’t see the relationship between the present and the past you can’t understand where the present might go. Who controls the past controls the present, who controls the present controls the future, as George Orwell said. This is a succinct explanation of the ways in which power functions.”
“Read ‘The Gettysburg Address,’ ” Ewen said. “Read Frederick Douglass’ autobiography or his newspaper. Read ‘The Communist Manifesto.’ Read Darwin’s ‘Descent of Man.’ All of these things are filled with an understanding that communicating ideas and producing forms of public communication that empower people, rather than disempowering people, relies on an integrated understanding of who the public is and what it might be. We have a lot to learn from the history of rhetoric. We need to think about where we are going. We need to think about what 21st century pamphleteering might be. We need to think about the ways in which the rediscovery of rhetoric—not lying, but rhetoric in its more conventional sense—can affect what we do. We need to look at those historical antecedents where interventions happened that stepped ahead of the news. And to some extent this is happening. We have the freest and most open public sphere since the village square.”
The battle ahead will be fought outside the journalistic mainstream, he said. The old forms of journalism are dying or have sold their soul to corporate manipulation and celebrity culture. We must now wed fact to rhetoric. We must appeal to reason and emotion. We must not be afraid to openly take sides, to speak, photograph or write on behalf of the disempowered. And, Ewen believes, we have a chance in the coming crisis to succeed.
“Pessimism is never useful,” he said. “Realism is useful, understanding the forces that are at play. To quote Antonio Gramsci, ‘pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will.’ ”
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/20090629_the_truth_alone_will_not_set_you_free/
Posted on Jun 29, 2009
The ability of the corporate state to pacify the country by extending credit and providing cheap manufactured goods to the masses is gone. The pernicious idea that democracy lies in the choice between competing brands and the freedom to accumulate vast sums of personal wealth at the expense of others has collapsed. The conflation of freedom with the free market has been exposed as a sham. The travails of the poor are rapidly becoming the travails of the middle class, especially as unemployment insurance runs out and people get a taste of Bill Clinton’s draconian welfare reform. And class warfare, once buried under the happy illusion that we were all going to enter an age of prosperity with unfettered capitalism, is returning with a vengeance.
Our economic crisis—despite the corporate media circus around the death of Michael Jackson or Gov. Mark Sanford’s marital infidelity or the outfits of Sacha Baron Cohen’s latest incarnation, Brüno—barrels forward. And this crisis will lead to a period of profound political turmoil and change. Those who care about the plight of the working class and the poor must begin to mobilize quickly or we will lose our last opportunity to save our embattled democracy. The most important struggle will be to wrest the organs of communication from corporations that use mass media to demonize movements of social change and empower proto-fascist movements such as the Christian right.
American culture—or cultures, for we once had distinct regional cultures—was systematically destroyed in the 20th century by corporations. These corporations used mass communication, as well as an understanding of the human subconscious, to turn consumption into an inner compulsion. Old values of thrift, regional identity that had its own iconography, aesthetic expression and history, diverse immigrant traditions, self-sufficiency, a press that was decentralized to provide citizens with a voice in their communities were all destroyed to create mass, corporate culture. New desires and habits were implanted by corporate advertisers to replace the old. Individual frustrations and discontents could be solved, corporate culture assured us, through the wonders of consumerism and cultural homogenization. American culture, or cultures, was replaced with junk culture and junk politics. And now, standing on the ash heap, we survey the ruins. The very slogans of advertising and mass culture have become the idiom of common expression, robbing us of the language to make sense of the destruction. We confuse the manufactured commodity culture with American culture.
How do we recover what was lost? How do we reclaim the culture that was destroyed by corporations? How do we fight back now that the consumer culture has fallen into a state of decay? What can we do to reverse the cannibalization of government and the national economy by the corporations?
All periods of profound change occur in a crisis. It was a crisis that brought us the New Deal, now largely dismantled by the corporate state. It was also a crisis that gave the world Adolf Hitler and Slobodan Milosevic. We can go in either direction. Events move at the speed of light when societies and cultural assumptions break down. There are powerful forces, which have no commitment to the open society, ready to seize the moment to snuff out the last vestiges of democratic egalitarianism. Our bankrupt liberalism, which naively believes that Barack Obama is the antidote to our permanent war economy and Wall Street fraud, will either rise from its coma or be rolled over by an organized corporate elite and their right-wing lap dogs. The corporate domination of the airwaves, of most print publications and an increasing number of Internet sites means we will have to search, and search quickly, for alternative forms of communication to thwart the rise of totalitarian capitalism.
Stuart Ewen, whose books “Captains of Consciousness: Advertising and the Social Roots of the Consumer Culture” and “PR: A Social History of Spin” chronicle how corporate propaganda deformed American culture and pushed populism to the margins of American society, argues that we have a fleeting chance to save the country. I fervently hope he is right. He attacks the ideology of “objectivity and balance” that has corrupted news, saying that it falsely evokes the scales of justice. He describes the curriculum at most journalism schools as “poison.”
“ ‘Balance and objectivity’ creates an idea where both sides are balanced,” he said when I spoke to him by phone. “In certain ways it mirrors the two-party system, the notion that if you are going to have a Democrat speak you need to have a Republican speak. It offers the phantom of objectivity. It creates the notion that the universe of discourse is limited to two positions. Issues become black or white. They are not seen as complex with a multitude of factors.”
Ewen argues that the forces for social change—look at any lengthy and turgid human rights report—have forgotten that rhetoric is as important as fact. Corporate and government propaganda, aimed to sway emotions, rarely uses facts to sell its positions. And because progressives have lost the gift of rhetoric, which was once a staple of a university education, because they naively believe in the Enlightenment ideal that facts alone can move people toward justice, they are largely helpless.
“Effective communication requires not simply an understanding of the facts, but how those facts will take place in the public mind,” Ewen said. “When Gustave Le Bon says it is not the facts in and of themselves which make a point but the way in which the facts take place, the way in which they come to attention, he is right.”
The emergence of corporate and government public relations, which drew on the studies of mass psychology by Sigmund Freud and others after World War I, found its bible in Walter Lippmann’s book “Public Opinion,” a manual for the power elite’s shaping of popular sentiments. Lippmann argued that the key to leadership in the modern age would depend on the ability to manipulate “symbols which assemble emotions after they have been detached from their ideas.” The public mind could be mastered, he wrote, through an “intensification of feeling and a degradation of significance.”
These corporate forces, schooled by Woodrow Wilson’s vast Committee for Public Information, which sold World War I to the public, learned how to skillfully mobilize and manipulate the emotional responses of the public. The control of the airwaves and domination through corporate advertising of most publications restricted news to reporting facts, to “objectivity and balance,” while the real power to persuade and dominate a public remained under corporate and governmental control.
Ewen argues that pamphleteering, which played a major role in the 17th and 18th centuries in shaping the public mind, recognized that “the human mind is not left brain or right brain, that it is not divided by reason which is good and emotion which is bad.”
He argues that the forces of social reform, those organs that support a search for truth and self-criticism, have mistakenly shunned emotion and rhetoric because they have been used so powerfully within modern society to disseminate lies and manipulate public opinion. But this refusal to appeal to emotion means “we gave up the ghost and accepted the idea that human beings are these divided selves, binary systems between emotion and reason, and that emotion gets you into trouble and reason is what leads you forward. This is not true.”
The public is bombarded with carefully crafted images meant to confuse propaganda with ideology and knowledge with how we feel. Human rights and labor groups, investigative journalists, consumer watchdog organizations and advocacy agencies have, in the face of this manipulation, inundated the public sphere with reports and facts. But facts alone, Ewen says, make little difference. And as we search for alternative ways to communicate in a time of crisis we must also communicate in new forms. We must appeal to emotion as well as to reason. The power of this appeal to emotion is evidenced in the photographs of Jacob Riis, a New York journalist, who with a team of assistants at the end of the 19th century initiated urban-reform photography. His stark portraits of the filth and squalor of urban slums awakened the conscience of a nation. The photographer Lewis Hine, at the turn of the 20th century, and Walker Evans during the Great Depression did the same thing for the working class, along with writers such as Upton Sinclair and James Agee. It is a recovery of this style, one that turns the abstraction of fact into a human flesh and one that is not afraid of emotion and passion, which will permit us to counter the force of corporate propaganda.
We may know that fossil fuels are destroying our ecosystem. We may be able to cite the statistics. But the oil and natural gas industry continues its flagrant rape of the planet. It is able to do this because of the money it uses to control legislation and a massive advertising campaign that paints the oil and natural gas industry as part of the solution. A group called EnergyTomorrow.org, for example, has been running a series of television ads. One ad features an attractive, middle-aged woman in a black pantsuit—an actor named Brooke Alexander who once worked as the host of “WorldBeat” on CNN and for Fox News. Alexander walks around a blue screen studio that becomes digital renditions of American life. She argues, before each image, that oil and natural gas are critical to providing not only energy needs but health care and jobs.
“It is almost like they are taking the most optimistic visions of what the stimulus package could do and saying this is what the development of oil and natural gas will bring about,” Ewen said. “If you go to the Web site there is a lot of sophisticated stuff you can play around with. As each ad closes you see in the lower right-hand corner in very small letters API, the American Petroleum Institute, the lobbying group for ExxonMobil and all the other big oil companies. For the average viewer there is nothing in the ad to indicate this is being produced by the oil industry.”
The modern world, as Kafka predicted, has become a world where the irrational has become rational, where lies become true. And facts alone will be powerless to thwart the mendacity spun out through billions of dollars in corporate advertising, lobbying and control of traditional sources of information. We will have to descend into the world of the forgotten, to write, photograph, paint, sing, act, blog, video and film with anger and honesty that have been blunted by the parameters of traditional journalism. The lines between artists, social activists and journalists have to be erased. These lines diminish the power of reform, justice and an understanding of the truth. And it is for this purpose that these lines are there.
“As a writer part of what you are aiming for is to present things in ways that will resonate with people, which will give voice to feelings and concerns, feelings that may not be fully verbalized,” Ewen said. “You can’t do that simply by providing them with data. One of the major problems of the present is that those structures designed to promote a progressive agenda are antediluvian.”
Corporate ideology, embodied in neoconservatism, has seeped into the attitudes of most self-described liberals. It champions unfettered capitalism and globalization as eternal. This is the classic tactic that power elites use to maintain themselves. The loss of historical memory, which “balanced and objective” journalism promotes, has only contributed to this fantasy. But the fantasy, despite the desperate raiding of taxpayer funds to keep the corporate system alive, is now coming undone. The lie is being exposed. And the corporate state is running scared.
“It is very important for people like us to think about ways to present the issues, whether we are talking about the banking crisis, health care or housing and homelessness,” Ewen said. “We have to think about presenting these issues in ways that are two steps ahead of the media rather than two steps behind. That is not something we should view as an impossible task. It is a very possible task. There is evidence of how possible that task is, especially if you look at the development of the underground press in the 1960s. The underground press, which started cropping up all over the country, was not a marginal phenomenon. It leeched into the society. It developed an approach to news and communication that was 10 steps ahead of the mainstream media. The proof is that even as it declined, so many structures that were innovated by the underground press, things like The Whole Earth Catalogue, began to affect and inform the stylistic presentation of mainstream media.”
“I am not a prophet,” Ewen said. “All I can do is look at historical precedence and figure out the extent we can learn from it. This is not about looking backwards. If you can’t see the past you can’t see the future. If you can’t see the relationship between the present and the past you can’t understand where the present might go. Who controls the past controls the present, who controls the present controls the future, as George Orwell said. This is a succinct explanation of the ways in which power functions.”
“Read ‘The Gettysburg Address,’ ” Ewen said. “Read Frederick Douglass’ autobiography or his newspaper. Read ‘The Communist Manifesto.’ Read Darwin’s ‘Descent of Man.’ All of these things are filled with an understanding that communicating ideas and producing forms of public communication that empower people, rather than disempowering people, relies on an integrated understanding of who the public is and what it might be. We have a lot to learn from the history of rhetoric. We need to think about where we are going. We need to think about what 21st century pamphleteering might be. We need to think about the ways in which the rediscovery of rhetoric—not lying, but rhetoric in its more conventional sense—can affect what we do. We need to look at those historical antecedents where interventions happened that stepped ahead of the news. And to some extent this is happening. We have the freest and most open public sphere since the village square.”
The battle ahead will be fought outside the journalistic mainstream, he said. The old forms of journalism are dying or have sold their soul to corporate manipulation and celebrity culture. We must now wed fact to rhetoric. We must appeal to reason and emotion. We must not be afraid to openly take sides, to speak, photograph or write on behalf of the disempowered. And, Ewen believes, we have a chance in the coming crisis to succeed.
“Pessimism is never useful,” he said. “Realism is useful, understanding the forces that are at play. To quote Antonio Gramsci, ‘pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will.’ ”
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/20090629_the_truth_alone_will_not_set_you_free/
Thursday, June 25, 2009
Iran Had a Democracy Before We Took It Away
By Chris Hedges, Truthdig
Posted on June 23, 2009, Printed on June 25, 2009
http://www.alternet.org/story/140819/
Iranians do not need or want us to teach them about liberty and representative government. They have long embodied this struggle. It is we who need to be taught. It was Washington that orchestrated the 1953 coup to topple Iran’s democratically elected government, the first in the Middle East, and install the compliant shah in power. It was Washington that forced Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadegh, a man who cared as much for his country as he did for the rule of law and democracy, to spend the rest of his life under house arrest. We gave to the Iranian people the corrupt regime of the shah and his savage secret police and the primitive clerics that rose out of the swamp of the dictator’s Iran. Iranians know they once had a democracy until we took it away.
The fundamental problem in the Middle East is not a degenerate and corrupt Islam. The fundamental problem is a degenerate and corrupt Christendom. We have not brought freedom and democracy and enlightenment to the Muslim world. We have brought the opposite. We have used the iron fist of the American military to implant our oil companies in Iraq, occupy Afghanistan and ensure that the region is submissive and cowed. We have supported a government in Israel that has carried out egregious war crimes in Lebanon and Gaza and is daily stealing ever greater portions of Palestinian land. We have established a network of military bases, some the size of small cities, in Iraq, Afghanistan, Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Kuwait, and we have secured basing rights in the Gulf states of Bahrain, Qatar, Oman and the United Arab Emirates. We have expanded our military operations to Uzbekistan, Pakistan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Egypt, Algeria and Yemen. And no one naively believes, except perhaps us, that we have any intention of leaving.
We are the biggest problem in the Middle East. We have through our cruelty and violence created and legitimized the Mahmoud Ahmadinejads and the Osama bin Ladens. The longer we lurch around the region dropping iron fragmentation bombs and seizing Muslim land the more these monsters, reflections of our own distorted image, will proliferate. The theologian Reinhold Niebuhr wrote, “Perhaps the most significant moral characteristic of a nation is its hypocrisy.” But our hypocrisy no longer fools anyone but ourselves. It will ensure our imperial and economic collapse.
The history of modern Iran is the history of a people battling tyranny. These tyrants were almost always propped up and funded by foreign powers. This suppression and distortion of legitimate democratic movements over the decades resulted in the 1979 revolution that brought the Iranian clerics to power, unleashing another tragic cycle of Iranian resistance.
“The central story of Iran over the last 200 years has been national humiliation at the hands of foreign powers who have subjugated and looted the country,” Stephen Kinzer, the author of “All the Shah’s Men: An American Coup and the Roots of Middle East Terror,” told me. “For a long time the perpetrators were the British and Russians. Beginning in 1953, the United States began taking over that role. In that year, the American and British secret services overthrew an elected government, wiped away Iranian democracy, and set the country on the path to dictatorship.”
“Then, in the 1980s, the U.S. sided with Saddam Hussein in the Iran-Iraq war, providing him with military equipment and intelligence that helped make it possible for his army to kill hundreds of thousands of Iranians,” Kinzer said. “Given this history, the moral credibility of the U.S. to pose as a promoter of democracy in Iran is close to nil.
Especially ludicrous is the sight of people in Washington calling for intervention on behalf of democracy in Iran when just last year they were calling for the bombing of Iran. If they had had their way then, many of the brave protesters on the streets of Tehran today—the ones they hold up as heroes of democracy—would be dead now.”
Washington has never recovered from the loss of Iran—something our intelligence services never saw coming. The overthrow of the shah, the humiliation of the embassy hostages, the laborious piecing together of tiny shreds of paper from classified embassy documents to expose America’s venal role in thwarting democratic movements in Iran and the region, allowed the outside world to see the dark heart of the American empire. Washington has demonized Iran ever since, painting it as an irrational and barbaric country filled with primitive, religious zealots. But Iranians, as these street protests illustrate, have proved in recent years far more courageous in the defense of democracy than most Americans.
Where were we when our election was stolen from us in 2000 by Republican operatives and a Supreme Court that overturned all legal precedent to anoint George W. Bush president? Did tens of thousands of us fill the squares of our major cities and denounce the fraud? Did we mobilize day after day to restore transparency and accountability to our election process? Did we fight back with the same courage and tenacity as the citizens of Iran? Did Al Gore defy the power elite and, as opposition candidate Mir Hossein Mousavi has done, demand a recount at the risk of being killed?
President Obama retreated in his Cairo speech into our spectacular moral nihilism, suggesting that our crimes matched the crimes of Iran, that there is, in his words, “a tumultuous history between us.” He went on: “In the middle of the Cold War, the United States played a role in the overthrow of a democratically elected Iranian government. Since the Islamic Revolution, Iran has played a role in acts of hostage-taking and violence against U.S. troops and civilians.” It all, he seemed to say, balances out.
I am no friend of the Iranian regime, which helped create and arm Hezbollah, is certainly meddling in Iraq, has persecuted human rights activists, gays, women and religious and ethnic minorities, embraces racism and intolerance and uses its power to deny popular will. But I do not remember Iran orchestrating a coup in the United States to replace an elected government with a brutal dictator who for decades persecuted, assassinated and imprisoned democracy activists. I do not remember Iran arming and funding a neighboring state to wage war against our country. Iran never shot down one of our passenger jets as did the USS Vincennes—caustically nicknamed Robocruiser by the crews of other American vessels—when in June 1988 it fired missiles at an Airbus filled with Iranian civilians, killing everyone on board. Iran is not sponsoring terrorism within the United States, as our intelligence services currently do in Iran. The attacks on Iranian soil include suicide bombings, kidnappings, beheadings, sabotage and “targeted assassinations” of government officials, scientists and other Iranian leaders. What would we do if the situation was reversed? How would we react if Iran carried out these policies against us?
We are, and have long been, the primary engine for radicalism in the Middle East. The greatest favor we can do for democracy activists in Iran, as well as in Iraq, Afghanistan, the Gulf and the dictatorships that dot North Africa, is withdraw our troops from the region and begin to speak to Iranians and the rest of the Muslim world in the civilized language of diplomacy, respect and mutual interests. The longer we cling to the doomed doctrine of permanent war the more we give credibility to the extremists who need, indeed yearn for, an enemy that speaks in their crude slogans of nationalist cant and violence. The louder the Israelis and their idiot allies in Washington call for the bombing of Iran to thwart its nuclear ambitions, the happier are the bankrupt clerics who are ordering the beating and murder of demonstrators. We may laugh when crowds supporting Ahmadinejad call us “the Great Satan,” but there is a very palpable reality that has informed the terrible algebra of their hatred.
Our intoxication with our military prowess blinds us to all possibilities of hope and mutual cooperation. It was Mohammed Khatami, the president of Iran from 1997 to 2005—perhaps the only honorable Middle East leader of our time—whose refusal to countenance violence by his own supporters led to the demise of his lofty “civil society” at the hands of more ruthless, less scrupulous opponents. It was Khatami who proclaimed that “the death of even one Jew is a crime.” And we sputtered back to this great and civilized man the primitive slogans of all deformed militarists. We were captive, as all bigots are, to our demons, and could not hear any sound but our own shouting. It is time to banish these demons. It is time to stand not with the helmeted goons who beat protesters, not with those in the Pentagon who make endless wars, but with the unarmed demonstrators in Iran who daily show us what we must become.
The fight of the Iranian people is our fight. And, perhaps for the first time, we can match our actions to our ideals. We have no right under post-Nuremberg laws to occupy Iraq or Afghanistan. These occupations are defined by these statutes as criminal “wars of aggression.” They are war crimes. We have no right to use force, including the state-sponsored terrorism we unleash on Iran, to turn the Middle East into a private gas station for our large oil companies. We have no right to empower Israel’s continuing occupation of Palestine, a flagrant violation of international law. The resistance you see in Iran will not end until Iranians, and all those burdened with repression in the Middle East, free themselves from the tyranny that comes from within and without. Let us, for once, be on the side of those who share our democratic ideals.
Chris Hedges, a Pulitzer prize-winning reporter, is a Senior Fellow at the Nation Institute. His latest book is Collateral Damage: America's War Against Iraqi Civilians.
© 2009 Truthdig All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/140819/
Posted on June 23, 2009, Printed on June 25, 2009
http://www.alternet.org/story/140819/
Iranians do not need or want us to teach them about liberty and representative government. They have long embodied this struggle. It is we who need to be taught. It was Washington that orchestrated the 1953 coup to topple Iran’s democratically elected government, the first in the Middle East, and install the compliant shah in power. It was Washington that forced Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadegh, a man who cared as much for his country as he did for the rule of law and democracy, to spend the rest of his life under house arrest. We gave to the Iranian people the corrupt regime of the shah and his savage secret police and the primitive clerics that rose out of the swamp of the dictator’s Iran. Iranians know they once had a democracy until we took it away.
The fundamental problem in the Middle East is not a degenerate and corrupt Islam. The fundamental problem is a degenerate and corrupt Christendom. We have not brought freedom and democracy and enlightenment to the Muslim world. We have brought the opposite. We have used the iron fist of the American military to implant our oil companies in Iraq, occupy Afghanistan and ensure that the region is submissive and cowed. We have supported a government in Israel that has carried out egregious war crimes in Lebanon and Gaza and is daily stealing ever greater portions of Palestinian land. We have established a network of military bases, some the size of small cities, in Iraq, Afghanistan, Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Kuwait, and we have secured basing rights in the Gulf states of Bahrain, Qatar, Oman and the United Arab Emirates. We have expanded our military operations to Uzbekistan, Pakistan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Egypt, Algeria and Yemen. And no one naively believes, except perhaps us, that we have any intention of leaving.
We are the biggest problem in the Middle East. We have through our cruelty and violence created and legitimized the Mahmoud Ahmadinejads and the Osama bin Ladens. The longer we lurch around the region dropping iron fragmentation bombs and seizing Muslim land the more these monsters, reflections of our own distorted image, will proliferate. The theologian Reinhold Niebuhr wrote, “Perhaps the most significant moral characteristic of a nation is its hypocrisy.” But our hypocrisy no longer fools anyone but ourselves. It will ensure our imperial and economic collapse.
The history of modern Iran is the history of a people battling tyranny. These tyrants were almost always propped up and funded by foreign powers. This suppression and distortion of legitimate democratic movements over the decades resulted in the 1979 revolution that brought the Iranian clerics to power, unleashing another tragic cycle of Iranian resistance.
“The central story of Iran over the last 200 years has been national humiliation at the hands of foreign powers who have subjugated and looted the country,” Stephen Kinzer, the author of “All the Shah’s Men: An American Coup and the Roots of Middle East Terror,” told me. “For a long time the perpetrators were the British and Russians. Beginning in 1953, the United States began taking over that role. In that year, the American and British secret services overthrew an elected government, wiped away Iranian democracy, and set the country on the path to dictatorship.”
“Then, in the 1980s, the U.S. sided with Saddam Hussein in the Iran-Iraq war, providing him with military equipment and intelligence that helped make it possible for his army to kill hundreds of thousands of Iranians,” Kinzer said. “Given this history, the moral credibility of the U.S. to pose as a promoter of democracy in Iran is close to nil.
Especially ludicrous is the sight of people in Washington calling for intervention on behalf of democracy in Iran when just last year they were calling for the bombing of Iran. If they had had their way then, many of the brave protesters on the streets of Tehran today—the ones they hold up as heroes of democracy—would be dead now.”
Washington has never recovered from the loss of Iran—something our intelligence services never saw coming. The overthrow of the shah, the humiliation of the embassy hostages, the laborious piecing together of tiny shreds of paper from classified embassy documents to expose America’s venal role in thwarting democratic movements in Iran and the region, allowed the outside world to see the dark heart of the American empire. Washington has demonized Iran ever since, painting it as an irrational and barbaric country filled with primitive, religious zealots. But Iranians, as these street protests illustrate, have proved in recent years far more courageous in the defense of democracy than most Americans.
Where were we when our election was stolen from us in 2000 by Republican operatives and a Supreme Court that overturned all legal precedent to anoint George W. Bush president? Did tens of thousands of us fill the squares of our major cities and denounce the fraud? Did we mobilize day after day to restore transparency and accountability to our election process? Did we fight back with the same courage and tenacity as the citizens of Iran? Did Al Gore defy the power elite and, as opposition candidate Mir Hossein Mousavi has done, demand a recount at the risk of being killed?
President Obama retreated in his Cairo speech into our spectacular moral nihilism, suggesting that our crimes matched the crimes of Iran, that there is, in his words, “a tumultuous history between us.” He went on: “In the middle of the Cold War, the United States played a role in the overthrow of a democratically elected Iranian government. Since the Islamic Revolution, Iran has played a role in acts of hostage-taking and violence against U.S. troops and civilians.” It all, he seemed to say, balances out.
I am no friend of the Iranian regime, which helped create and arm Hezbollah, is certainly meddling in Iraq, has persecuted human rights activists, gays, women and religious and ethnic minorities, embraces racism and intolerance and uses its power to deny popular will. But I do not remember Iran orchestrating a coup in the United States to replace an elected government with a brutal dictator who for decades persecuted, assassinated and imprisoned democracy activists. I do not remember Iran arming and funding a neighboring state to wage war against our country. Iran never shot down one of our passenger jets as did the USS Vincennes—caustically nicknamed Robocruiser by the crews of other American vessels—when in June 1988 it fired missiles at an Airbus filled with Iranian civilians, killing everyone on board. Iran is not sponsoring terrorism within the United States, as our intelligence services currently do in Iran. The attacks on Iranian soil include suicide bombings, kidnappings, beheadings, sabotage and “targeted assassinations” of government officials, scientists and other Iranian leaders. What would we do if the situation was reversed? How would we react if Iran carried out these policies against us?
We are, and have long been, the primary engine for radicalism in the Middle East. The greatest favor we can do for democracy activists in Iran, as well as in Iraq, Afghanistan, the Gulf and the dictatorships that dot North Africa, is withdraw our troops from the region and begin to speak to Iranians and the rest of the Muslim world in the civilized language of diplomacy, respect and mutual interests. The longer we cling to the doomed doctrine of permanent war the more we give credibility to the extremists who need, indeed yearn for, an enemy that speaks in their crude slogans of nationalist cant and violence. The louder the Israelis and their idiot allies in Washington call for the bombing of Iran to thwart its nuclear ambitions, the happier are the bankrupt clerics who are ordering the beating and murder of demonstrators. We may laugh when crowds supporting Ahmadinejad call us “the Great Satan,” but there is a very palpable reality that has informed the terrible algebra of their hatred.
Our intoxication with our military prowess blinds us to all possibilities of hope and mutual cooperation. It was Mohammed Khatami, the president of Iran from 1997 to 2005—perhaps the only honorable Middle East leader of our time—whose refusal to countenance violence by his own supporters led to the demise of his lofty “civil society” at the hands of more ruthless, less scrupulous opponents. It was Khatami who proclaimed that “the death of even one Jew is a crime.” And we sputtered back to this great and civilized man the primitive slogans of all deformed militarists. We were captive, as all bigots are, to our demons, and could not hear any sound but our own shouting. It is time to banish these demons. It is time to stand not with the helmeted goons who beat protesters, not with those in the Pentagon who make endless wars, but with the unarmed demonstrators in Iran who daily show us what we must become.
The fight of the Iranian people is our fight. And, perhaps for the first time, we can match our actions to our ideals. We have no right under post-Nuremberg laws to occupy Iraq or Afghanistan. These occupations are defined by these statutes as criminal “wars of aggression.” They are war crimes. We have no right to use force, including the state-sponsored terrorism we unleash on Iran, to turn the Middle East into a private gas station for our large oil companies. We have no right to empower Israel’s continuing occupation of Palestine, a flagrant violation of international law. The resistance you see in Iran will not end until Iranians, and all those burdened with repression in the Middle East, free themselves from the tyranny that comes from within and without. Let us, for once, be on the side of those who share our democratic ideals.
Chris Hedges, a Pulitzer prize-winning reporter, is a Senior Fellow at the Nation Institute. His latest book is Collateral Damage: America's War Against Iraqi Civilians.
© 2009 Truthdig All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/140819/
Taking Down the Corporate Food System Is Simple
By Joel Salatin, Public Affairs Books
Posted on June 20, 2009, Printed on June 25, 2009
http://www.alternet.org/story/140477/
Excerpted by permission from "Declare Your Independence" by Joel Salatin, part of the book Food, Inc., available now from PublicAffairs. Copyright 2009.
Perhaps the most empowering concept in any paradigm-challenging movement is simply opting out. The opt-out strategy can humble the mightiest forces because it declares to one and all, "You do not control me."
The time has come for people who are ready to challenge the paradigm of factory-produced food and to return to a more natural, wholesome and sustainable way of eating (and living) to make that declaration to the powers that be, in business and government, that established the existing system and continue to prop it up. It's time to opt out and simply start eating better -- right here, right now.
Impractical? Idealistic? Utopian? Not really. As I'll explain, it's actually the most realistic and effective approach to transforming a system that is slowly but surely killing us.
What happened to food?
First, why am I taking a position that many well-intentioned people might consider alarmist or extreme? Let me explain.
At the risk of stating the obvious, the unprecedented variety of bar-coded packages in today's supermarket really does not mean that our generation enjoys better food options than our predecessors. These packages, by and large, having passed through the food-inspection fraternity, the industrial food fraternity and the lethargic cheap-food-purchasing consumer fraternity, represent an incredibly narrow choice.
If you took away everything with an ingredient foreign to our 3 trillion intestinal microflora, the shelves would be bare indeed. (I'm talking here about the incredible variety of microorganisms that live in our digestive tracts and perform an array of useful functions, including training our immune systems and producing vitamins K and biotin.) In fact, if you just eliminated every product that would have been unavailable in 1900, almost everything would be gone, including staples that had been chemically fertilized, sprayed with pesticides or ripened with gas.
Rather than representing newfound abundance, these packages wending their way to store shelves after spending a month in the belly of Chinese merchant marine vessels are actually the meager offerings of a tyrannical food system.
Strong words? Try buying real milk -- as in raw. See if you can find meat processed in the clean open air under sterilizing sunshine. Look for pot pies made with local produce and meat. How about good old unpasteurized apple cider? Fresh cheese? Unpasteurized almonds? All these staples that our great-grandparents relished and grew healthy on have been banished from today's supermarkets.
They've been replaced by an array of pseudo-foods that did not exist a mere century ago. The food additives, preservatives, colorings, emulsifiers, corn syrups and unpronounceable ingredients listed on the colorful packages bespeak a centralized control mind-set that actually reduces the options available to fill Americans' dinner plates.
Whether by intentional design or benign ignorance, the result has been the same -- the criminalization and/or demonization of heritage foods. The mind-set behind this radical transformation of American eating habits expresses itself in at least a couple of ways.
One is the completely absurd argument that without industrial food, the world would starve. "How can you feed the world?" is the most common question people ask me when they tour Polyface Farm.
Actually, when you consider the fact that millions of people, including many vast cities, were fed and sustained using traditional farming methods until just a few decades ago, the answer is obvious. America has traded 75 million buffalo, which required no tillage, petroleum or chemicals, for a mere 42 million head of cattle. Even with all the current chemical inputs, our production is a shadow of what it was 500 years ago. Clearly, if we returned to herbivorous principles five centuries old, we could double our meat supply. The potential for similar increases exists for other food items.
The second argument is about food safety. "How can we be sure that food produced on local farms without centralized inspection and processing is really safe to eat?"
Here, too, the facts are opposite to what many people assume. The notion that indigenous food is unsafe simply has no scientific backing. Milk-borne pathogens, for example, became a significant health problem only during a narrow time period between 1900 and 1930, before refrigeration but after unprecedented urban expansion. Breweries needed to be located near metropolitan centers, and adjacent dairies fed herbivore-unfriendly brewery waste to cows. The combination created real problems that do not exist in grass-based dairies practicing good sanitation under refrigeration conditions.
Lest you think the pressure to maintain the industrialized food system is all really about food safety, consider that all the natural-food items I listed above can be given away, and the donors are considered pillars of community benevolence. But as soon as money changes hands, all these wonderful choices become "hazardous substances," guaranteed to send our neighbors to the hospital with food poisoning.
Maybe it's not human health but corporate profits that are really being protected.
© 2009 Public Affairs Books All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/140477/
Posted on June 20, 2009, Printed on June 25, 2009
http://www.alternet.org/story/140477/
Excerpted by permission from "Declare Your Independence" by Joel Salatin, part of the book Food, Inc., available now from PublicAffairs. Copyright 2009.
Perhaps the most empowering concept in any paradigm-challenging movement is simply opting out. The opt-out strategy can humble the mightiest forces because it declares to one and all, "You do not control me."
The time has come for people who are ready to challenge the paradigm of factory-produced food and to return to a more natural, wholesome and sustainable way of eating (and living) to make that declaration to the powers that be, in business and government, that established the existing system and continue to prop it up. It's time to opt out and simply start eating better -- right here, right now.
Impractical? Idealistic? Utopian? Not really. As I'll explain, it's actually the most realistic and effective approach to transforming a system that is slowly but surely killing us.
What happened to food?
First, why am I taking a position that many well-intentioned people might consider alarmist or extreme? Let me explain.
At the risk of stating the obvious, the unprecedented variety of bar-coded packages in today's supermarket really does not mean that our generation enjoys better food options than our predecessors. These packages, by and large, having passed through the food-inspection fraternity, the industrial food fraternity and the lethargic cheap-food-purchasing consumer fraternity, represent an incredibly narrow choice.
If you took away everything with an ingredient foreign to our 3 trillion intestinal microflora, the shelves would be bare indeed. (I'm talking here about the incredible variety of microorganisms that live in our digestive tracts and perform an array of useful functions, including training our immune systems and producing vitamins K and biotin.) In fact, if you just eliminated every product that would have been unavailable in 1900, almost everything would be gone, including staples that had been chemically fertilized, sprayed with pesticides or ripened with gas.
Rather than representing newfound abundance, these packages wending their way to store shelves after spending a month in the belly of Chinese merchant marine vessels are actually the meager offerings of a tyrannical food system.
Strong words? Try buying real milk -- as in raw. See if you can find meat processed in the clean open air under sterilizing sunshine. Look for pot pies made with local produce and meat. How about good old unpasteurized apple cider? Fresh cheese? Unpasteurized almonds? All these staples that our great-grandparents relished and grew healthy on have been banished from today's supermarkets.
They've been replaced by an array of pseudo-foods that did not exist a mere century ago. The food additives, preservatives, colorings, emulsifiers, corn syrups and unpronounceable ingredients listed on the colorful packages bespeak a centralized control mind-set that actually reduces the options available to fill Americans' dinner plates.
Whether by intentional design or benign ignorance, the result has been the same -- the criminalization and/or demonization of heritage foods. The mind-set behind this radical transformation of American eating habits expresses itself in at least a couple of ways.
One is the completely absurd argument that without industrial food, the world would starve. "How can you feed the world?" is the most common question people ask me when they tour Polyface Farm.
Actually, when you consider the fact that millions of people, including many vast cities, were fed and sustained using traditional farming methods until just a few decades ago, the answer is obvious. America has traded 75 million buffalo, which required no tillage, petroleum or chemicals, for a mere 42 million head of cattle. Even with all the current chemical inputs, our production is a shadow of what it was 500 years ago. Clearly, if we returned to herbivorous principles five centuries old, we could double our meat supply. The potential for similar increases exists for other food items.
The second argument is about food safety. "How can we be sure that food produced on local farms without centralized inspection and processing is really safe to eat?"
Here, too, the facts are opposite to what many people assume. The notion that indigenous food is unsafe simply has no scientific backing. Milk-borne pathogens, for example, became a significant health problem only during a narrow time period between 1900 and 1930, before refrigeration but after unprecedented urban expansion. Breweries needed to be located near metropolitan centers, and adjacent dairies fed herbivore-unfriendly brewery waste to cows. The combination created real problems that do not exist in grass-based dairies practicing good sanitation under refrigeration conditions.
Lest you think the pressure to maintain the industrialized food system is all really about food safety, consider that all the natural-food items I listed above can be given away, and the donors are considered pillars of community benevolence. But as soon as money changes hands, all these wonderful choices become "hazardous substances," guaranteed to send our neighbors to the hospital with food poisoning.
Maybe it's not human health but corporate profits that are really being protected.
© 2009 Public Affairs Books All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/140477/
Water for Sale Thirst for Profit: Corporate Control of Water in Latin America
-What is called for is an international code for the public’s access to a guaranteed supply of water as a basic human right.
The Corporate Crusade to Commodify Water
Water has been characterized as the oil of the 21st century. Blue gold. It is essential to life, and yet humanity faces a growing water crisis as a result of severe mismanagement in water and sanitation, which will be exponentially exacerbated in the coming decades by population growth combined with declining resources. Latin America has the greatest income disparity in the world and the population’s access to water reflects this inequality. Over 130 million people living in the region do not have access to potable water in their homes, and sanitation is in even poorer condition, as it is estimated that only one in six persons has adequate sanitation services.1 According to the 2007 Annual Report from the nonprofit organization Water For People, “Every day, nearly 6,000 people who share our world die from water-related illnesses – more than 2 million each year – and the vast majority of these are children…There are more lives lost each year to water-related illnesses than to natural disasters and wars combined.”2 It is clear that lack of access to clean water is a serious issue, one that has only started to gain international attention from a variety of organizations in recent years.
The Fifth World Water Forum took place in Istanbul, Turkey, from March 16-22, 2009, with over 25,000 people attending, representing 182 countries. The World Water Forum, the largest water policy event in the world, is held every three years. It is organized by the World Water Council, a private think-tank based in Marseille, France. The People’s Water Forum, a global water justice movement which has referred to the World Water Forum as “false” and “corporate driven,” also gathered in Istanbul to protest the Fifth World Water Forum. In the People’s Water Forum Declaration, they sharply criticize the World Water Forum, stating that it is motivated by private interests and attempts to create the misleading illusion of an utterly false global consensus on water management. The Declaration also asks that the next water forum be organized by the UN General Assembly, calls for water to be defined as a human right, and denounces all forms of privatization and commercialization of water and sanitation services. Joining the discussion, the International Water Forum, a by-invitation-only Forum sponsored by the United Nations Institute for Training and Research (UNITAR), the City of Atlanta Department of Watershed Management, and CIFAL Atlanta will be held on July 9-10 of this year to discuss global water scarcity as well as methods for establishing a sustainable water supply.
The struggle over water is certainly not a new phenomenon. Wide-scale water privatization began in the 1990s and was often stipulated as a condition for assistance from international financial aid institutions, primarily the World Bank and the Inter-American Development Bank. Since then, there has been ongoing conflict over water management, with Latin America at the center of many of the models for resistance and restructuring. These water-related conflicts, popularly referred to as “water wars,” gained international attention a decade ago. The expulsion of water giant Bechtel by the citizens of the Bolivian city Cochabamba marked the beginning of a greater resistance to water privatization and commercialization in Latin America. Given the failures of privatization and neoliberal policies in Latin America, it should not come as a surprise that the people are objecting to the commodification of this basic human need.
Privatization and Commercialization
It is worth noting that privatization and commercialization are distinct processes when discussing their implementation in Latin America. Privatization connotes reorganization and management from a source other than the public sector, and can involve a spectrum of private occupation. Commercialization entails the introduction of management institutions, such as free market competition (albeit simulated, in this case) into the process. However, privatization and commercialization are frequently concurrent processes, as was the case in Cochabamba.
There are only a few arguments commonly employed to defend water privatization in Latin America. The primary justification is that the governments of one of these countries have previously failed to adequately provide water, either because of incompetence or corruption. Organizations like the World Bank, which frequently finance privatization projects, dogmatically believe that the open market is more efficient at resource management than the state because the government is “overextended.”3 Furthermore, they think that the competition in private sector development will lead to higher quality and lower cost services. Another common rationale is that making water into a commercial good – thus assigning monetary value to water – makes consumers less likely to waste it. According to this argument, the commercialization of water would prevent its overuse.
These assumptions, however, are problematic. The postulation that competition is an inherent element of privatization is misguided. In fact, the corporate monopoly on water in Latin America is part of the reason that prices have been high and quality has been low. It could be wiser to address the concern about wasting water through an expansive educational program that encompasses both fundamental health issues regarding drinking water and sanitation, and information about the importance as well as preferred methods of water conservation. Another possible solution is through government regulation, which could be more effective if it were done transparently and involved community participation. The state could potentially utilize subsidies, a water tax or a credit to promote the sustainable use of water. The greatest problem with the mindset behind privatization is that while it considers water a human need, it is not deemed a human right, which essentially denies the universal right to life. Regardless, the fact is that Latin American countries that have experienced privatization of their water supply have seen little improvement, and in most cases water supply and quality have declined.
Bolivia’s Water War
Bolivia is the classic example of a situation in which the water privatization and commercialization process was disastrous. Two concessions to private, corporate control in Bolivia – part of a condition of a World Bank loan of US$20 million to the Bolivian government in 1997 – have now been rejected through popular uprisings. The first was in Cochabamba in 2000 against Aguas de Tunari, a subsidiary of the enormous U.S.-based Bechtel Corporation (which was the only bidder). The second uprising occurred in La Paz/El Alto, where a subsidiary of the French company Suez, called Aguas de Illimani S.A. (AISA), was thrown out in 2005. In Cochabamba, after Bechtel was installed, it quickly raised rates by an average of 35% (and in some cases as much as 200%), which was far outside the budget of the city’s poor and would have left many without access to water. Licenses were even required for individuals to collect rainwater from their roofs, and people were charged for water taken from their own wells.
Protests escalated to the point that the Bolivian government declared a state of martial law, and eventually the company was forced to abandon their operations in the country. Supporters of privatization in Bolivia argue that these tariff increases were necessary to improve the existing infrastructure and expand the service area. Furthermore, some have suggested that antecedent economic and social factors, such as political corruption and pre-existing anti-privatization public sentiment, contributed to the tinderbox complexity of the situation in Cochabamba and were responsible for the failure of water privatization.
After Bechtel was driven out by public outrage, the international attention given to Cochabamba’s “Water War” faded, although problems still remained. Marcela Olivera, the Latin American Coordinator of Food and Water Watch’s Water for All Campaign, writes that,
“the other battle that’s still going on, that we’re fighting now in the form of the struggle over water rights, has to do with our not being able to put together an effective, participatory popular alternative with social controls to serve as a counter to privatization, to private control of resources. This is a battle that’s still being waged in Cochabamba, but it’s less romantic and not so easy to talk about, because there are a lot of problems with the water company. Things have not been resolved now that the company has been reclaimed. I think this is where the true work lies - -work that is harder, unrecognized, and still involves an entrenched battle.”4
The withdrawal of Bechtel left SEMAPA, Bolivia’s municipal water service, in charge of distribution. This service was also inadequate and left the poorer southern districts without water. After Evo Morales was elected in 2005, in part due to the social protest ignited by the Cochabamba incident, he created a Ministry of Water in Bolivia with the goal of achieving equal and universal access to water. While Bolivia has approved a new constitution that considers water a fundamental right and bans private appropriation, little progress has been made towards the country’s goal, as only US$800,000 was appropriated for the water budget in 2008.5
Models for Change: Bolivia, Venezuela, and Peru
The town of Sebastian Pagador, in southern Bolivia, has become an example of community-based innovation. In 1990, they formed a collective called APAAS (Association of Production and Administration of Water and Sanitation), in which the 390 families in the area formed a committee, and every member family had the monthly responsibility of digging six meters and paying one boliviano for supplies. By 1993 they had built an entire distribution system.6 It was a long and rigorous process, but today, around 600 houses in the area have access to potable water seventeen hours a day, and each household only has to pay US$3 a month.7 The members of the water collective are proud of their ability to provide service from a system they built by hand, but also of their management style that gives control to the people rather than to administrators. There are, however, still issues with this system. Financial restrictions make it impossible for them to expand to meet increased demand, they have not been able to construct a water treatment system, and the wells that they currently use are expected to dry up in approximately a decade.8
Venezuela provides another case study of effective restructuring of water management. Mariela Cruz Salazar of the Technical Water Committee in Camancitos, Venezuela discusses Venezuela’s alternative for community management. The Venezuelan government created “technical water committees” and “community water councils” where all of the technical water committees can meet to discuss their problems and ideas. The government helps to finance these projects, and has educated people in environmental issues and in the conservation and administration of water. If an issue concerning water arises in the community, a citizen’s assembly convenes to discuss the problem and then communicates with the State Institute for Water Resources. Together, Water Resources and the community plan and prepare future projects. Salazar writes that, “We’re managing the water as an organized community, not just by receiving the water, but by training the community in how to use it rationally and conserve it for the future.”9 Although the figures are debatable (the WHO/UNICEF Joint Monitoring Program and the Andean Development Corporation [CAF] project lower estimates), the Ministry of Environment says that in 2008, 93 percent of the population had access to water supply and sanitation. This would mean that Venezuela is one of the few places to achieve the UN Millennium Development Goals for water and sanitation.10
The circumstances in Peru are very similar to those in many other Latin American countries. In 1992, their constitution was modified so that the country’s resources and production were open to multinational corporations and a neoliberal economic agenda. Although they managed to stop water privatization in 2006, Peru continues to struggle with creating an alternative proposal and implementing a system that guarantees more permanent rights to water. Although coverage of the recent protests that began in early April and the violent conflict that occurred on June 5th has focused on the issues of new laws, free trade, and the extraction of oil and natural gas, water is also an important part of this conflict. The series of laws approved by President Alan Garcia would remove indigenous control of land and natural resources. It would also likely lead to substantial amounts of development in the rainforest. According to Reuters reporter Dana Ford, “Law 29833 creates new public agencies to oversee water management and distribution. Small farmers fear the changes will drive up costs, reduce their access to water while giving more of it to corporate growers, and eventually lead to the privatization of the water agencies.”11 Additionally, deforestation that would be part of development in the rainforest contributes to flooding, droughts and the melting of glaciers as a result of global warming. This environmental perspective that is brought to the water issue is distinctive. Nelly Avendaño of the Front for the Defense of Water, in Peru’s JunÃn region, expresses a remarkably comprehensive understanding of the necessary action which must be taken:
“…it’s a question of maintaining, conserving and protecting our water sources, of providing drinking water that is safe for human consumption, of modernizing agricultural irrigation methods. Ultimately, all this needs to be followed by the construction of water treatment plants for sewage and wastewater, so that this develops its own cycle and is converted into clean water for agricultural or industrial use. If our policies don’t integrate the issues of water resources, sanitation, and the environment into one, then the system will undoubtedly continue to fail us.”12
The Front for the Defense of Water recognizes that the privatization of water is a complex issue, which concerns both environmental sustainability and the natural rights of humankind.
Turning the Tide
Civil society has made strides against the runaway process of privatization and commercialization of water, but there is a formidable challenge ahead. While transnational companies have experienced setbacks in their attempts to privatize water in Latin America, they have had to change their strategy, but privatization still persists in the region. Since privatization has become such an anathema, corporations use different terms to describe their ventures. The appropriation of a territory or bioregion, as is the case in Peru, allows for control over the resources in that area. Large companies, with total engineering capacities at hand, can divert whole rivers as part of their production projects, or end up making water unusable for local inhabitants, which essentially is privatization, but through contamination. Bottling water and monopolizing technology for extraction and purification are other forms of privatizing water and vending it to the highest bidder.13
In addition to using these methods to gain control of water, corporations normally see to it that they benefit from the wording and intent of free trade agreements. NAFTA considers water to be an “investment,” the WTO General Agreement on Trade in Services and the proposed FTAA call it a “service,” and in both NAFTA and the WTO it is regarded as a “good.”
Privatizing and commercializing water guarantees that the focus on its management and distribution will be profit, not what is best for people or, for that matter, the planet. Profits from the bottled water industry are so high that the infrastructure necessary to provide the world’s population with potable water could be created by applying the profits accumulated over just one year.14 The US$100 billion that people spent on bottled water in 2005 is three times what would be needed to achieve the UN goal of making water available to everyone by 2015.15 The terrible situation that the lack of a proper water supply and sanitation creates for so many is avoidable and, as of now, is largely a product of poor resource management. A NACLA report by Maude Barlow and Tony Clark states that, “While the region’s available resources could provide each person with close to 110, 500 cubic feet of water every year, the average resident has access to only 1,010 cubic feet per year. This compares to North America’s annual average of 4,160 cubic feet and Europe’s 2,255.6.”16
To ensure equality, water must be considered a human right and not just a need, privilege or commodity. However, the issue requires a broader vision that goes beyond simply an evaluation of the failures of privatization and includes a consideration of alternatives. The community-based programs that have included village-based education have been very successful in making water available to the communities they serve. While this is a valuable model, it has limitations when applied in bigger cities. Even though there have been problems with government management in the past, advocates of public access insist that privatization is not the answer. A water management system that includes public and community cooperation has great potential when combined with a more comprehensive educational program and increased transparency. However, the focus must shift to include not only alternative models, but also preventative planning. As the world population increases and water sources grow more scarce, the World Bank expects that by 2025, more than two-thirds of humanity will not have a reliable source of potable water, and adequate sanitation will probably become even less common. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change predicts that the figure of those without water in Latin America would include somewhere between 7 million and 77 million people.17 The growing movement surrounding water rights must tackle these predictions by addressing the less immediate, yet equally important concerns of restructuring agriculture and irrigation, minimizing pollution, and working to protect the environment before providing this vital resource becomes an issue of true scarcity rather than mismanagement, as now is the case.
Reference List
This analysis was prepared by Research Associate Lisa Boscov-Ellen
June 19th, 2009
http://www.coha.org/2009/06/water-for-sale/
The Corporate Crusade to Commodify Water
Water has been characterized as the oil of the 21st century. Blue gold. It is essential to life, and yet humanity faces a growing water crisis as a result of severe mismanagement in water and sanitation, which will be exponentially exacerbated in the coming decades by population growth combined with declining resources. Latin America has the greatest income disparity in the world and the population’s access to water reflects this inequality. Over 130 million people living in the region do not have access to potable water in their homes, and sanitation is in even poorer condition, as it is estimated that only one in six persons has adequate sanitation services.1 According to the 2007 Annual Report from the nonprofit organization Water For People, “Every day, nearly 6,000 people who share our world die from water-related illnesses – more than 2 million each year – and the vast majority of these are children…There are more lives lost each year to water-related illnesses than to natural disasters and wars combined.”2 It is clear that lack of access to clean water is a serious issue, one that has only started to gain international attention from a variety of organizations in recent years.
The Fifth World Water Forum took place in Istanbul, Turkey, from March 16-22, 2009, with over 25,000 people attending, representing 182 countries. The World Water Forum, the largest water policy event in the world, is held every three years. It is organized by the World Water Council, a private think-tank based in Marseille, France. The People’s Water Forum, a global water justice movement which has referred to the World Water Forum as “false” and “corporate driven,” also gathered in Istanbul to protest the Fifth World Water Forum. In the People’s Water Forum Declaration, they sharply criticize the World Water Forum, stating that it is motivated by private interests and attempts to create the misleading illusion of an utterly false global consensus on water management. The Declaration also asks that the next water forum be organized by the UN General Assembly, calls for water to be defined as a human right, and denounces all forms of privatization and commercialization of water and sanitation services. Joining the discussion, the International Water Forum, a by-invitation-only Forum sponsored by the United Nations Institute for Training and Research (UNITAR), the City of Atlanta Department of Watershed Management, and CIFAL Atlanta will be held on July 9-10 of this year to discuss global water scarcity as well as methods for establishing a sustainable water supply.
The struggle over water is certainly not a new phenomenon. Wide-scale water privatization began in the 1990s and was often stipulated as a condition for assistance from international financial aid institutions, primarily the World Bank and the Inter-American Development Bank. Since then, there has been ongoing conflict over water management, with Latin America at the center of many of the models for resistance and restructuring. These water-related conflicts, popularly referred to as “water wars,” gained international attention a decade ago. The expulsion of water giant Bechtel by the citizens of the Bolivian city Cochabamba marked the beginning of a greater resistance to water privatization and commercialization in Latin America. Given the failures of privatization and neoliberal policies in Latin America, it should not come as a surprise that the people are objecting to the commodification of this basic human need.
Privatization and Commercialization
It is worth noting that privatization and commercialization are distinct processes when discussing their implementation in Latin America. Privatization connotes reorganization and management from a source other than the public sector, and can involve a spectrum of private occupation. Commercialization entails the introduction of management institutions, such as free market competition (albeit simulated, in this case) into the process. However, privatization and commercialization are frequently concurrent processes, as was the case in Cochabamba.
There are only a few arguments commonly employed to defend water privatization in Latin America. The primary justification is that the governments of one of these countries have previously failed to adequately provide water, either because of incompetence or corruption. Organizations like the World Bank, which frequently finance privatization projects, dogmatically believe that the open market is more efficient at resource management than the state because the government is “overextended.”3 Furthermore, they think that the competition in private sector development will lead to higher quality and lower cost services. Another common rationale is that making water into a commercial good – thus assigning monetary value to water – makes consumers less likely to waste it. According to this argument, the commercialization of water would prevent its overuse.
These assumptions, however, are problematic. The postulation that competition is an inherent element of privatization is misguided. In fact, the corporate monopoly on water in Latin America is part of the reason that prices have been high and quality has been low. It could be wiser to address the concern about wasting water through an expansive educational program that encompasses both fundamental health issues regarding drinking water and sanitation, and information about the importance as well as preferred methods of water conservation. Another possible solution is through government regulation, which could be more effective if it were done transparently and involved community participation. The state could potentially utilize subsidies, a water tax or a credit to promote the sustainable use of water. The greatest problem with the mindset behind privatization is that while it considers water a human need, it is not deemed a human right, which essentially denies the universal right to life. Regardless, the fact is that Latin American countries that have experienced privatization of their water supply have seen little improvement, and in most cases water supply and quality have declined.
Bolivia’s Water War
Bolivia is the classic example of a situation in which the water privatization and commercialization process was disastrous. Two concessions to private, corporate control in Bolivia – part of a condition of a World Bank loan of US$20 million to the Bolivian government in 1997 – have now been rejected through popular uprisings. The first was in Cochabamba in 2000 against Aguas de Tunari, a subsidiary of the enormous U.S.-based Bechtel Corporation (which was the only bidder). The second uprising occurred in La Paz/El Alto, where a subsidiary of the French company Suez, called Aguas de Illimani S.A. (AISA), was thrown out in 2005. In Cochabamba, after Bechtel was installed, it quickly raised rates by an average of 35% (and in some cases as much as 200%), which was far outside the budget of the city’s poor and would have left many without access to water. Licenses were even required for individuals to collect rainwater from their roofs, and people were charged for water taken from their own wells.
Protests escalated to the point that the Bolivian government declared a state of martial law, and eventually the company was forced to abandon their operations in the country. Supporters of privatization in Bolivia argue that these tariff increases were necessary to improve the existing infrastructure and expand the service area. Furthermore, some have suggested that antecedent economic and social factors, such as political corruption and pre-existing anti-privatization public sentiment, contributed to the tinderbox complexity of the situation in Cochabamba and were responsible for the failure of water privatization.
After Bechtel was driven out by public outrage, the international attention given to Cochabamba’s “Water War” faded, although problems still remained. Marcela Olivera, the Latin American Coordinator of Food and Water Watch’s Water for All Campaign, writes that,
“the other battle that’s still going on, that we’re fighting now in the form of the struggle over water rights, has to do with our not being able to put together an effective, participatory popular alternative with social controls to serve as a counter to privatization, to private control of resources. This is a battle that’s still being waged in Cochabamba, but it’s less romantic and not so easy to talk about, because there are a lot of problems with the water company. Things have not been resolved now that the company has been reclaimed. I think this is where the true work lies - -work that is harder, unrecognized, and still involves an entrenched battle.”4
The withdrawal of Bechtel left SEMAPA, Bolivia’s municipal water service, in charge of distribution. This service was also inadequate and left the poorer southern districts without water. After Evo Morales was elected in 2005, in part due to the social protest ignited by the Cochabamba incident, he created a Ministry of Water in Bolivia with the goal of achieving equal and universal access to water. While Bolivia has approved a new constitution that considers water a fundamental right and bans private appropriation, little progress has been made towards the country’s goal, as only US$800,000 was appropriated for the water budget in 2008.5
Models for Change: Bolivia, Venezuela, and Peru
The town of Sebastian Pagador, in southern Bolivia, has become an example of community-based innovation. In 1990, they formed a collective called APAAS (Association of Production and Administration of Water and Sanitation), in which the 390 families in the area formed a committee, and every member family had the monthly responsibility of digging six meters and paying one boliviano for supplies. By 1993 they had built an entire distribution system.6 It was a long and rigorous process, but today, around 600 houses in the area have access to potable water seventeen hours a day, and each household only has to pay US$3 a month.7 The members of the water collective are proud of their ability to provide service from a system they built by hand, but also of their management style that gives control to the people rather than to administrators. There are, however, still issues with this system. Financial restrictions make it impossible for them to expand to meet increased demand, they have not been able to construct a water treatment system, and the wells that they currently use are expected to dry up in approximately a decade.8
Venezuela provides another case study of effective restructuring of water management. Mariela Cruz Salazar of the Technical Water Committee in Camancitos, Venezuela discusses Venezuela’s alternative for community management. The Venezuelan government created “technical water committees” and “community water councils” where all of the technical water committees can meet to discuss their problems and ideas. The government helps to finance these projects, and has educated people in environmental issues and in the conservation and administration of water. If an issue concerning water arises in the community, a citizen’s assembly convenes to discuss the problem and then communicates with the State Institute for Water Resources. Together, Water Resources and the community plan and prepare future projects. Salazar writes that, “We’re managing the water as an organized community, not just by receiving the water, but by training the community in how to use it rationally and conserve it for the future.”9 Although the figures are debatable (the WHO/UNICEF Joint Monitoring Program and the Andean Development Corporation [CAF] project lower estimates), the Ministry of Environment says that in 2008, 93 percent of the population had access to water supply and sanitation. This would mean that Venezuela is one of the few places to achieve the UN Millennium Development Goals for water and sanitation.10
The circumstances in Peru are very similar to those in many other Latin American countries. In 1992, their constitution was modified so that the country’s resources and production were open to multinational corporations and a neoliberal economic agenda. Although they managed to stop water privatization in 2006, Peru continues to struggle with creating an alternative proposal and implementing a system that guarantees more permanent rights to water. Although coverage of the recent protests that began in early April and the violent conflict that occurred on June 5th has focused on the issues of new laws, free trade, and the extraction of oil and natural gas, water is also an important part of this conflict. The series of laws approved by President Alan Garcia would remove indigenous control of land and natural resources. It would also likely lead to substantial amounts of development in the rainforest. According to Reuters reporter Dana Ford, “Law 29833 creates new public agencies to oversee water management and distribution. Small farmers fear the changes will drive up costs, reduce their access to water while giving more of it to corporate growers, and eventually lead to the privatization of the water agencies.”11 Additionally, deforestation that would be part of development in the rainforest contributes to flooding, droughts and the melting of glaciers as a result of global warming. This environmental perspective that is brought to the water issue is distinctive. Nelly Avendaño of the Front for the Defense of Water, in Peru’s JunÃn region, expresses a remarkably comprehensive understanding of the necessary action which must be taken:
“…it’s a question of maintaining, conserving and protecting our water sources, of providing drinking water that is safe for human consumption, of modernizing agricultural irrigation methods. Ultimately, all this needs to be followed by the construction of water treatment plants for sewage and wastewater, so that this develops its own cycle and is converted into clean water for agricultural or industrial use. If our policies don’t integrate the issues of water resources, sanitation, and the environment into one, then the system will undoubtedly continue to fail us.”12
The Front for the Defense of Water recognizes that the privatization of water is a complex issue, which concerns both environmental sustainability and the natural rights of humankind.
Turning the Tide
Civil society has made strides against the runaway process of privatization and commercialization of water, but there is a formidable challenge ahead. While transnational companies have experienced setbacks in their attempts to privatize water in Latin America, they have had to change their strategy, but privatization still persists in the region. Since privatization has become such an anathema, corporations use different terms to describe their ventures. The appropriation of a territory or bioregion, as is the case in Peru, allows for control over the resources in that area. Large companies, with total engineering capacities at hand, can divert whole rivers as part of their production projects, or end up making water unusable for local inhabitants, which essentially is privatization, but through contamination. Bottling water and monopolizing technology for extraction and purification are other forms of privatizing water and vending it to the highest bidder.13
In addition to using these methods to gain control of water, corporations normally see to it that they benefit from the wording and intent of free trade agreements. NAFTA considers water to be an “investment,” the WTO General Agreement on Trade in Services and the proposed FTAA call it a “service,” and in both NAFTA and the WTO it is regarded as a “good.”
Privatizing and commercializing water guarantees that the focus on its management and distribution will be profit, not what is best for people or, for that matter, the planet. Profits from the bottled water industry are so high that the infrastructure necessary to provide the world’s population with potable water could be created by applying the profits accumulated over just one year.14 The US$100 billion that people spent on bottled water in 2005 is three times what would be needed to achieve the UN goal of making water available to everyone by 2015.15 The terrible situation that the lack of a proper water supply and sanitation creates for so many is avoidable and, as of now, is largely a product of poor resource management. A NACLA report by Maude Barlow and Tony Clark states that, “While the region’s available resources could provide each person with close to 110, 500 cubic feet of water every year, the average resident has access to only 1,010 cubic feet per year. This compares to North America’s annual average of 4,160 cubic feet and Europe’s 2,255.6.”16
To ensure equality, water must be considered a human right and not just a need, privilege or commodity. However, the issue requires a broader vision that goes beyond simply an evaluation of the failures of privatization and includes a consideration of alternatives. The community-based programs that have included village-based education have been very successful in making water available to the communities they serve. While this is a valuable model, it has limitations when applied in bigger cities. Even though there have been problems with government management in the past, advocates of public access insist that privatization is not the answer. A water management system that includes public and community cooperation has great potential when combined with a more comprehensive educational program and increased transparency. However, the focus must shift to include not only alternative models, but also preventative planning. As the world population increases and water sources grow more scarce, the World Bank expects that by 2025, more than two-thirds of humanity will not have a reliable source of potable water, and adequate sanitation will probably become even less common. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change predicts that the figure of those without water in Latin America would include somewhere between 7 million and 77 million people.17 The growing movement surrounding water rights must tackle these predictions by addressing the less immediate, yet equally important concerns of restructuring agriculture and irrigation, minimizing pollution, and working to protect the environment before providing this vital resource becomes an issue of true scarcity rather than mismanagement, as now is the case.
Reference List
This analysis was prepared by Research Associate Lisa Boscov-Ellen
June 19th, 2009
http://www.coha.org/2009/06/water-for-sale/
North Korea: "Sanity" at the Brink
By Parenti, Michael
June, 24 2009
Nations that chart a self-defining course, seeking to use their land, labor, natural resources, and markets as they see fit, free from the smothering embrace of the US corporate global order, frequently become a target of defamation. Their leaders often have their moral sanity called into question by US officials and US media, as has been the case at one time or another with Castro, Noriega, Ortega, Qaddafi, Aristide, Milosevic, Saddam Hussein, Hugo Chavez, and others.
So it comes as no surprise that the rulers of the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK or North Korea) have been routinely described as mentally unbalanced by our policymakers and pundits. Senior Defense Department officials refer to the DPRK as a country "not of this planet," led by "dysfunctional" autocrats. One government official, quoted in the New York Times, wondered aloud "if they are really totally crazy." The New Yorker magazine called them "balmy," and late-night TV host David Letterman got into the act by labeling Kim Jong-il a "madman maniac."
To be sure, there are things about the DPRK that one might wonder about, including its dynastic leadership system, its highly dictatorial one-party rule, and the chaos that seems implanted in the heart of its "planned" economy.
But in its much advertised effort to become a nuclear power, North Korea is actually displaying more sanity than first meets the eye. The Pyongyang leadership seems to know something about US global policy that our own policymakers and pundits have overlooked. In a word, the United States has never attacked or invaded any nation that has a nuclear arsenal.
The countries directly battered by US military actions in recent decades (Grenada, Panama, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, then again Iraq), along with numerous other states that have been threatened at one time or another for being "anti-American" or "anti-West" (Iran, Cuba, South Yemen, Venezuela, Syria, North Korea, and others) have one thing in common: not one of them has wielded a nuclear deterrence-until now.
Let us provide a little background. Put aside the entire Korean War (1950-53) in which US aerial power destroyed most of the DPRK's infrastructure and tens of thousands of its civilians. Consider more recent events. In the jingoist tide that followed the September 11, 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, President George W. Bush claimed the right to initiate any military action against any "terrorist" nation, organization, or individual of his choosing. Such a claim to arbitrary power-in violation of international law, the UN charter, and the US Constitution-transformed the president into something of an absolute monarch who could exercise life and death power over any quarter of the Earth. Needless to say, numerous nations--the DPRK among them-were considerably discomforted by the US president's elevation to King of the Planet.
It was only in 2008 that President Bush finally removed North Korea from a list of states that allegedly sponsor terrorism. But there remains another more devilishly disquieting hit list that Pyongyang recalls. In December 2001, two months after 9/11, Vice President Dick Cheney referred chillingly to "forty or fifty countries" that might need military disciplining. A month later in his 2002 State of the Union message, President Bush pruned the list down to three especially dangerous culprits: Iraq, Iran, and North Korea, who, he said, composed an "axis of evil."
It was a curious lumping together of three nations that had little in common. In Iraq the leadership was secular, in Iran it was a near Islamic theocracy. And far from being allies, the two countries were serious enemies. Meanwhile the DPRK, had no historical, cultural, or geographical links to either Iraq or Iran. But it could witness what was happening.
The first to get hit was Iraq, nation #1 on the short list of accused evil doers. Before the Gulf War of 1990-91 and the subsequent decade of sanctions, Iraq had the highest standard of living in the Middle East. But years of war, sanctions, and occupation reduced the country to shambles, its infrastructure shattered and much of its population drenched in blood and misery.
Were it not that Iraq has proven to be such a costly venture, the United States long ago would have been moving against Iran, #2 on the axis-of-evil hit list. As we might expect, Iranian president Mahmoud Amadinijad has been diagnosed in the US media as "dangerously unstable." The Pentagon has announced that thousands of key sites in Iran have been mapped and targeted for aerial attack. All sorts of threats have been directed against Tehran for having pursued an enriched uranium program-which every nation in the world has a right to do. And on a recent Sunday TV program, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton warned that the United States might undertake a "first strike" against Iran to prevent its nuclear weapons development.
Rather than passively await its fate sitting in Washington's crosshairs, nation #3 on the US hit list is trying to pack a deterrence. The DPRK's attempt at self-defense is characterized in US official circles and US media as wild aggression. Secretary Clinton warned that the United States would not be "blackmailed by North Korea." Defense Secretary Robert Gates fulminated, "We will not stand idly by as North Korea builds the capability to wreak destruction on any target in Asia-or on us." The DPRK's nuclear program, Gates warns, is a "harbinger of a dark future."
President Obama condemned North Korea's "belligerent provocative behavior" as posing a "grave threat." In June 2009, the UN Security Council unanimously passed a US-sponsored resolution ratcheting up the financial, trade, and military sanctions against the DPRK, a nation already hard hit by sanctions. In response to the Security Council's action, Kim Jong il's government announced it would no longer "even think about giving up its nuclear weapons" and would enlarge its efforts to produce more of them.
In his earlier Cairo speech Obama stated, "No single nation should pick and choose which nation holds nuclear weapons." But that is exactly what the United States is trying to do in regard to a benighted North Korea--and Iran. Physicist and political writer Manuel Garcia, Jr., observes that Washington's policy "is to encourage other nations to abide by the terms of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty--and renounce nuclear weapons--while exempting itself." Others must disarm so that Washington may more easily rule over them, Garcia concludes.
US leaders still refuse to give any guarantee that they will not try to topple Pyongyang's communist government. There is talk of putting the DPRK back on the list of state sponsors of terrorism, though Secretary Clinton admits that evidence is wanting to support such a designation.
From its lonely and precarious perch the North cannot help feeling vulnerable. Consider the intimidating military threat it faces. The DPRK's outdated and ill-equipped army is no match for the conventional forces of the United States, South Korea, and Japan. The United States maintains a large attack base in South Korea. As Paul Sack reminds us in a recent correspondence to the New York Times, at least once a year the US military conducts joint exercises with South Korean forces, practicing a land invasion of the DPRK. The US Air Force maintains a "nuclear umbrella" over South Korea with nuclear arsenals in Okinawa, Guam, and Hawaii. Japan not only says it can produce nuclear bombs within a year, it seems increasingly willing to do so. And the newly installed leadership in South Korea is showing itself to be anything but friendly toward Pyongyang.
The DPRK's nuclear arsenal is a two-edged sword. It can deter attack or invite attack. It may cause US officials to think twice before cinching a tighter knot around the North, or it may cause them to move aggressively toward a confrontation that no one really wants.
After years of encirclement and repeated rebuffs from Washington, years of threat, isolation, and demonization, the Pyongyang leaders are convinced that the best way to resist superpower attack and domination is by developing a nuclear arsenal. It does not really sound so crazy. As already mentioned, the United States does not invade countries that are armed with long-range nuclear missiles (at least not thus far).
Having been pushed to the brink for so long, the North Koreans are now taking a gamble, upping the ante, pursuing an arguably "sane" deterrence policy in the otherwise insane world configured by an overweening and voracious empire.
-----------------
Michael Parenti's recent books include: Contrary Notions: The Michael Parenti Reader (City Lights); Democracy for the Few, 8th ed. (Wadsworth); and God and His Demons (Prometheus Books, forthcoming). For further information, visit his website: www.michaelparenti.org.
http://www.zcommunications.org/zspace/commentaries/3904
June, 24 2009
Nations that chart a self-defining course, seeking to use their land, labor, natural resources, and markets as they see fit, free from the smothering embrace of the US corporate global order, frequently become a target of defamation. Their leaders often have their moral sanity called into question by US officials and US media, as has been the case at one time or another with Castro, Noriega, Ortega, Qaddafi, Aristide, Milosevic, Saddam Hussein, Hugo Chavez, and others.
So it comes as no surprise that the rulers of the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK or North Korea) have been routinely described as mentally unbalanced by our policymakers and pundits. Senior Defense Department officials refer to the DPRK as a country "not of this planet," led by "dysfunctional" autocrats. One government official, quoted in the New York Times, wondered aloud "if they are really totally crazy." The New Yorker magazine called them "balmy," and late-night TV host David Letterman got into the act by labeling Kim Jong-il a "madman maniac."
To be sure, there are things about the DPRK that one might wonder about, including its dynastic leadership system, its highly dictatorial one-party rule, and the chaos that seems implanted in the heart of its "planned" economy.
But in its much advertised effort to become a nuclear power, North Korea is actually displaying more sanity than first meets the eye. The Pyongyang leadership seems to know something about US global policy that our own policymakers and pundits have overlooked. In a word, the United States has never attacked or invaded any nation that has a nuclear arsenal.
The countries directly battered by US military actions in recent decades (Grenada, Panama, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, then again Iraq), along with numerous other states that have been threatened at one time or another for being "anti-American" or "anti-West" (Iran, Cuba, South Yemen, Venezuela, Syria, North Korea, and others) have one thing in common: not one of them has wielded a nuclear deterrence-until now.
Let us provide a little background. Put aside the entire Korean War (1950-53) in which US aerial power destroyed most of the DPRK's infrastructure and tens of thousands of its civilians. Consider more recent events. In the jingoist tide that followed the September 11, 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, President George W. Bush claimed the right to initiate any military action against any "terrorist" nation, organization, or individual of his choosing. Such a claim to arbitrary power-in violation of international law, the UN charter, and the US Constitution-transformed the president into something of an absolute monarch who could exercise life and death power over any quarter of the Earth. Needless to say, numerous nations--the DPRK among them-were considerably discomforted by the US president's elevation to King of the Planet.
It was only in 2008 that President Bush finally removed North Korea from a list of states that allegedly sponsor terrorism. But there remains another more devilishly disquieting hit list that Pyongyang recalls. In December 2001, two months after 9/11, Vice President Dick Cheney referred chillingly to "forty or fifty countries" that might need military disciplining. A month later in his 2002 State of the Union message, President Bush pruned the list down to three especially dangerous culprits: Iraq, Iran, and North Korea, who, he said, composed an "axis of evil."
It was a curious lumping together of three nations that had little in common. In Iraq the leadership was secular, in Iran it was a near Islamic theocracy. And far from being allies, the two countries were serious enemies. Meanwhile the DPRK, had no historical, cultural, or geographical links to either Iraq or Iran. But it could witness what was happening.
The first to get hit was Iraq, nation #1 on the short list of accused evil doers. Before the Gulf War of 1990-91 and the subsequent decade of sanctions, Iraq had the highest standard of living in the Middle East. But years of war, sanctions, and occupation reduced the country to shambles, its infrastructure shattered and much of its population drenched in blood and misery.
Were it not that Iraq has proven to be such a costly venture, the United States long ago would have been moving against Iran, #2 on the axis-of-evil hit list. As we might expect, Iranian president Mahmoud Amadinijad has been diagnosed in the US media as "dangerously unstable." The Pentagon has announced that thousands of key sites in Iran have been mapped and targeted for aerial attack. All sorts of threats have been directed against Tehran for having pursued an enriched uranium program-which every nation in the world has a right to do. And on a recent Sunday TV program, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton warned that the United States might undertake a "first strike" against Iran to prevent its nuclear weapons development.
Rather than passively await its fate sitting in Washington's crosshairs, nation #3 on the US hit list is trying to pack a deterrence. The DPRK's attempt at self-defense is characterized in US official circles and US media as wild aggression. Secretary Clinton warned that the United States would not be "blackmailed by North Korea." Defense Secretary Robert Gates fulminated, "We will not stand idly by as North Korea builds the capability to wreak destruction on any target in Asia-or on us." The DPRK's nuclear program, Gates warns, is a "harbinger of a dark future."
President Obama condemned North Korea's "belligerent provocative behavior" as posing a "grave threat." In June 2009, the UN Security Council unanimously passed a US-sponsored resolution ratcheting up the financial, trade, and military sanctions against the DPRK, a nation already hard hit by sanctions. In response to the Security Council's action, Kim Jong il's government announced it would no longer "even think about giving up its nuclear weapons" and would enlarge its efforts to produce more of them.
In his earlier Cairo speech Obama stated, "No single nation should pick and choose which nation holds nuclear weapons." But that is exactly what the United States is trying to do in regard to a benighted North Korea--and Iran. Physicist and political writer Manuel Garcia, Jr., observes that Washington's policy "is to encourage other nations to abide by the terms of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty--and renounce nuclear weapons--while exempting itself." Others must disarm so that Washington may more easily rule over them, Garcia concludes.
US leaders still refuse to give any guarantee that they will not try to topple Pyongyang's communist government. There is talk of putting the DPRK back on the list of state sponsors of terrorism, though Secretary Clinton admits that evidence is wanting to support such a designation.
From its lonely and precarious perch the North cannot help feeling vulnerable. Consider the intimidating military threat it faces. The DPRK's outdated and ill-equipped army is no match for the conventional forces of the United States, South Korea, and Japan. The United States maintains a large attack base in South Korea. As Paul Sack reminds us in a recent correspondence to the New York Times, at least once a year the US military conducts joint exercises with South Korean forces, practicing a land invasion of the DPRK. The US Air Force maintains a "nuclear umbrella" over South Korea with nuclear arsenals in Okinawa, Guam, and Hawaii. Japan not only says it can produce nuclear bombs within a year, it seems increasingly willing to do so. And the newly installed leadership in South Korea is showing itself to be anything but friendly toward Pyongyang.
The DPRK's nuclear arsenal is a two-edged sword. It can deter attack or invite attack. It may cause US officials to think twice before cinching a tighter knot around the North, or it may cause them to move aggressively toward a confrontation that no one really wants.
After years of encirclement and repeated rebuffs from Washington, years of threat, isolation, and demonization, the Pyongyang leaders are convinced that the best way to resist superpower attack and domination is by developing a nuclear arsenal. It does not really sound so crazy. As already mentioned, the United States does not invade countries that are armed with long-range nuclear missiles (at least not thus far).
Having been pushed to the brink for so long, the North Koreans are now taking a gamble, upping the ante, pursuing an arguably "sane" deterrence policy in the otherwise insane world configured by an overweening and voracious empire.
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Michael Parenti's recent books include: Contrary Notions: The Michael Parenti Reader (City Lights); Democracy for the Few, 8th ed. (Wadsworth); and God and His Demons (Prometheus Books, forthcoming). For further information, visit his website: www.michaelparenti.org.
http://www.zcommunications.org/zspace/commentaries/3904
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