Anti-war Campaigners Have To Change Electoral Tactics
Neither Clinton nor Obama has a real plan to end the occupation of Iraq, but they could be forced to change position
By Naomi Klein and Jeremy Scahill
25/03/08 "The Guardian" -- -- 'So?" So said Dick Cheney when asked last week about public opinion being overwhelmingly against the war in Iraq. "You can't be blown off course by polls." A few days later, his attitude, about the fact that the number of US soldiers killed in Iraq has reached 4,000, displayed similar levels of sympathy. They "voluntarily put on the uniform," the vice-president told ABC news.
This brick wall of indifference helps explain the paradox in which we in the US anti-war camp find ourselves five years into the occupation of Iraq: anti-war sentiment is as strong as ever, but our movement seems to be dwindling. Sixty-four per cent of Americans tell pollsters they oppose the war, but you'd never know it from the thin turnout at recent rallies and vigils.
When asked why they aren't expressing their anti-war opinions through the anti-war movement, many say they have simply lost faith in the power of protest. They marched against the war before it began, marched on the first, second and third anniversaries. And yet, five years on, US leaders are still shrugging: "So?"
That's why it's time for the anti-war movement to change tactics. We should direct our energy where it can still have an impact: the leading Democratic contenders.
Many argue otherwise. They say that if we want to end the war, we should simply pick a candidate who is not John McCain and help them win: we'll sort out the details after the Republicans are evicted from 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. Some of the most prominent anti-war voices - from MoveOn.org to the Nation, the magazine we both write for - have gone down this route, throwing their weight behind the Obama campaign.
This is a serious strategic mistake. It is during a hotly contested campaign that anti-war forces have the power to actually sway US policy. As soon as we pick sides, we relegate ourselves to mere cheerleaders.
And when it comes to Iraq, there is little to cheer. Look past the rhetoric and it becomes clear that neither Barack Obama nor Hillary Clinton has a real plan to end the occupation. They could, however, be forced to change their positions, thanks to the unique dynamics of the prolonged primary battle.
Despite the calls for Clinton to withdraw in the name of "unity", it is the very fact that Clinton and Obama are still fighting it out, fiercely vying for votes, that presents the anti-war movement with its best pressure point. And our pressure is badly needed.
For the first time in 14 years, weapons manufacturers are donating more to Democrats than to Republicans. The Democrats have received 52% of the defence industry's political donations in this election cycle - up from a low of 32% in 1996. That money is about shaping foreign policy and, so far, it appears to be well spent.
While Clinton and Obama denounce the war with great passion, they both have detailed plans to continue it. Both say they intend to maintain the massive green zone, including the monstrous US embassy, and to retain US control of Baghdad airport.
They will have a "strike force" to engage in counter-terrorism, as well as trainers for the Iraqi military. Beyond these US forces, the army of green zone diplomats will require heavily armed security details, which are currently provided by Blackwater and other private security companies. At present there are as many private contractors supporting the occupation as there are soldiers, so these plans could mean tens of thousands of US personnel entrenched for the future.
In sharp contrast to this downsized occupation is the unequivocal message coming from hundreds of soldiers who served in Iraq and Afghanistan. Iraq Veterans Against the War which, earlier this month, held the Winter Soldier hearings in Silver Spring, Maryland - modelled on the 1971 Winter Soldier investigation, in which veterans testified about US atrocities in Vietnam - are not supporting any candidate or party. Instead they are calling for immediate, unconditional withdrawal of all US soldiers and contractors. Coming from peace activists, the "out now" position has been dismissed as naive. It is harder to ignore coming from the hundreds who have served - and continue to serve - on the frontlines.
The candidates know that much of the passion fuelling their campaigns flows from the desire among so many rank-and-file Democrats to end this disastrous war. Crucially, the candidates have already shown that they are vulnerable to pressure from the peace camp. When the Nation revealed that neither candidate was supporting legislation that would ban the use of Blackwater and other private security companies in Iraq, Clinton changed course. She became the most important US political leader to endorse the ban - scoring a point on Obama, who opposed the invasion from the start.
This is exactly where we want the candidates: outdoing each other to prove how serious they are about ending the war. That kind of battle has the power to energise voters and break the cynicism that is threatening both campaigns.
Let's remember, unlike the outgoing Bush administration, these candidates need the support of the two-thirds of Americans who oppose the war in Iraq. If opinion transforms into action, they won't be able to afford to say, "So?"
Copyright New York Times syndication
Naomi Klein is the author of The Shock Doctrine; Jeremy Scahill is the author of Blackwater: The Rise of the World's Most Powerful Mercenary Army - Naomiklein.org
Wednesday, March 26, 2008
Tuesday, March 25, 2008
Only Fitting Tribute
The Only Fitting Tribute
by Frances Moore Lappé
I feel a bit silly. For decades I called myself a child of the '60s, only to realize on the seventy-fifth anniversary of the New Deal that I'm really its child. Coming to maturity as its beneficiary, I had a debt-free college education and, thanks to New Deal advances that doubled the real family income of the poor and middle class, my husband and I were able to live for a time on his salary alone.
It was thus, very practically, the New Deal that freed me to explore the "big questions." Food, the basis of life, seemed like a smart place to start, so I asked, Why hunger in a world of plenty?
Soon it began to dawn on me: As long as food is merely a commodity in societies that don't protect people's right to participate in the market, and as long as farming is left vulnerable to consolidated power off the farm, many will go hungry, farmers among them -- no matter how big the harvests.
I might have gotten there quicker if I'd studied Roosevelt's insight that, to serve life, markets need help from accountable, democratic government. Against those who saw "economic laws" as "sacred," he argued that "economic laws are not made by nature. They are made by human beings." So in 1944 (my birth year), Roosevelt called on Americans to implement what was already "accepted" -- "a second Bill of Rights" centered on economic opportunity and security. It would, in effect, put values-boundaries around the market. His goal wasn't a legal document, observes University of Chicago law professor Cass Sunstein, but the generation of a "set of public commitments by and for the citizenry, very much like the Declaration of Independence."
The first two economic rights assured a "useful" job that paid enough to provide "adequate food and clothing." The third guaranteed farmers a high enough return for their crops to provide their families with a "decent living." To begin, he asked Congress to pass a "cost of food law," putting a price floor under farmers and a price ceiling on the cost of food necessities for all.
In emphasizing rights, Roosevelt clearly did not view the New Deal as a giant safety net; rather, he saw it as a way to advance freedom. Freedom rests as much on economic as political rights, he argued, because both are necessary to security and peace, which in turn are the basis of citizens' freedom from fear and to the liberation of our talents. "Necessitous men are not free men," he said.
What if Americans were now to demand that presidential contenders further Roosevelt's definition of freedom? Imagine calling on our next President to focus, laser-like, on FDR's core insight that concentrated economic power is anathema to democracy and freedom. By April 1938, even after basic economic protections for citizens were law, Roosevelt still warned that "the liberty of a democracy is not safe if the people tolerate the growth of private power to the point where it becomes stronger than their democratic state itself. That, in its essence, is fascism." (Roosevelt could hardly have imagined such "growth in private power" that more than sixty lobbyists now ply their trade in Washington for every person elected to represent us.)
Given the New Deal's powerful grounding in freedom and the striking advances it ushered in for most Americans, why was the right able to reverse the New Deal in just one generation? Perhaps the answer is that the New Deal failed to instill an understanding of democracy as more than a particular structure of government, more than a set of laws protecting our freedoms.
Enduring, effective democracy isn't something we have that's finished; it's what we do that's always unfolding. Democracy is a particular culture, a system of values -- fairness, inclusion and mutual accountability -- that empowered citizens learn to infuse in all dimensions of our common life.
In other words, to save the democracy we thought we had, we must now take democracy to where it's never been. Might we start by demanding that the 2008 presidential contenders commit to engaging us in living democracy -- in community-based deliberation, policy shaping and action, on matters from climate change to ending hunger to reinventing farming so that it sustains both farmers and the land?
There could be no more fitting tribute to the New Deal in its seventy-fifth year -- at least in the eyes of one of its children.
Frances Moore Lappé is the author of fifteen books, including, most recently, Democracy's Edge: Choosing to Save Our Country by Bringing Our Democracy to Life (Wiley), and Getting a Grip: Clarity, Creativity and Courage in a World Gone Mad (Small Planet Media).
Copyright ©2008 The Nation
by Frances Moore Lappé
I feel a bit silly. For decades I called myself a child of the '60s, only to realize on the seventy-fifth anniversary of the New Deal that I'm really its child. Coming to maturity as its beneficiary, I had a debt-free college education and, thanks to New Deal advances that doubled the real family income of the poor and middle class, my husband and I were able to live for a time on his salary alone.
It was thus, very practically, the New Deal that freed me to explore the "big questions." Food, the basis of life, seemed like a smart place to start, so I asked, Why hunger in a world of plenty?
Soon it began to dawn on me: As long as food is merely a commodity in societies that don't protect people's right to participate in the market, and as long as farming is left vulnerable to consolidated power off the farm, many will go hungry, farmers among them -- no matter how big the harvests.
I might have gotten there quicker if I'd studied Roosevelt's insight that, to serve life, markets need help from accountable, democratic government. Against those who saw "economic laws" as "sacred," he argued that "economic laws are not made by nature. They are made by human beings." So in 1944 (my birth year), Roosevelt called on Americans to implement what was already "accepted" -- "a second Bill of Rights" centered on economic opportunity and security. It would, in effect, put values-boundaries around the market. His goal wasn't a legal document, observes University of Chicago law professor Cass Sunstein, but the generation of a "set of public commitments by and for the citizenry, very much like the Declaration of Independence."
The first two economic rights assured a "useful" job that paid enough to provide "adequate food and clothing." The third guaranteed farmers a high enough return for their crops to provide their families with a "decent living." To begin, he asked Congress to pass a "cost of food law," putting a price floor under farmers and a price ceiling on the cost of food necessities for all.
In emphasizing rights, Roosevelt clearly did not view the New Deal as a giant safety net; rather, he saw it as a way to advance freedom. Freedom rests as much on economic as political rights, he argued, because both are necessary to security and peace, which in turn are the basis of citizens' freedom from fear and to the liberation of our talents. "Necessitous men are not free men," he said.
What if Americans were now to demand that presidential contenders further Roosevelt's definition of freedom? Imagine calling on our next President to focus, laser-like, on FDR's core insight that concentrated economic power is anathema to democracy and freedom. By April 1938, even after basic economic protections for citizens were law, Roosevelt still warned that "the liberty of a democracy is not safe if the people tolerate the growth of private power to the point where it becomes stronger than their democratic state itself. That, in its essence, is fascism." (Roosevelt could hardly have imagined such "growth in private power" that more than sixty lobbyists now ply their trade in Washington for every person elected to represent us.)
Given the New Deal's powerful grounding in freedom and the striking advances it ushered in for most Americans, why was the right able to reverse the New Deal in just one generation? Perhaps the answer is that the New Deal failed to instill an understanding of democracy as more than a particular structure of government, more than a set of laws protecting our freedoms.
Enduring, effective democracy isn't something we have that's finished; it's what we do that's always unfolding. Democracy is a particular culture, a system of values -- fairness, inclusion and mutual accountability -- that empowered citizens learn to infuse in all dimensions of our common life.
In other words, to save the democracy we thought we had, we must now take democracy to where it's never been. Might we start by demanding that the 2008 presidential contenders commit to engaging us in living democracy -- in community-based deliberation, policy shaping and action, on matters from climate change to ending hunger to reinventing farming so that it sustains both farmers and the land?
There could be no more fitting tribute to the New Deal in its seventy-fifth year -- at least in the eyes of one of its children.
Frances Moore Lappé is the author of fifteen books, including, most recently, Democracy's Edge: Choosing to Save Our Country by Bringing Our Democracy to Life (Wiley), and Getting a Grip: Clarity, Creativity and Courage in a World Gone Mad (Small Planet Media).
Copyright ©2008 The Nation
Monday, March 24, 2008
Undermining Bear Mountain
Bear Mountain Road Foe Grabs Mineral Rights
'Bare Mountain' claim could test mining law nuisance provisions.
http://thetyee.ca/News/2008/03/24/BearMountain/
By Andrew MacLeod
Published: March 24, 2008
TheTyee.ca
Tree sitters opposed to the expansion of the Bear Mountain development outside Victoria could soon be trading their ropes and climbing gear for pick axes and hard hats.
Just weeks ago, RCMP arrested protester Ingmar Lee for attempting to block construction of a highway interchange to serve Bear Mountain. A court order bars him from the site. Now, thanks to changes the provincial government made to how miners stake claims in the province, Lee owns the mineral rights under the interchange construction site as well as below the entire development.
"I intend to go up to Bear Mountain and tap into the money gusher," said Lee. "I intend to take advantage of this opportunity in the spirit of how the opportunity has been designed by the Gordon Campbell government. That's to extract as much money as possible from the landscape."
As part of a cross-government effort to reduce red tape and cut regulations, the Campbell government made some major changes to the rules governing mining. In the past, a section of the Mineral Tenure Act prohibited miners from interfering with private landowners. The Liberals repealed that section in 2002. Then, in 2005, the government introduced an Internet staking system that allows miners to stake a claim without ever even visiting the area they're claiming.
While the system quickly led to confrontations between owners of surface and subsurface rights, Lee's claim is the rare case where an owner of mineral rights is a declared opponent of development happening on the surface.
Sincerity an issue
The developers of Bear Mountain once held the mineral rights to the property, but let them lapse, said one of those developers, Len Barrie. When told who now holds the rights, Barrie said, "With him it would be more than a nuisance. Let him do what he does, eh."
"I'm not really concerned about it," he said. "With our zoning now, it's no longer applicable, now that it's a residential community."
"As I understand it, the gold commissioner has the right to get rid of vexatious claims, claims that are not sincere," said Byng Giraud, the vice-president of policy and communications for the Mining Association of B.C. "It will probably take a complaint by somebody asking the civil service to look into it."
Representatives of the gold commissioner in the Victoria region did not return calls by deadline.
A spokesperson for the Energy, Mines and Petroleum Resources Ministry e-mailed background information. Under the Mineral Tenure Act, he said, there are "legal remedies" so someone like Barrie can "challenge a claim that appears to be held for non-mining purposes."
The act also sets out how conflicts between surface and subsurface rights will be dealt with, the e-mail said. "[The act] contains prohibitions against exploration in certain areas, including curtilage of a dwelling, which would effectively make most, if not all, of the Bear Mountain development off limits."
While the act does not define "curtilage," a dictionary definition says it is "a small court, yard, or piece of ground surrounding a house and forming one unit with it." It is not clear how it would apply to Bear Mountain, where many of the proposed units still only exist on paper, and the spokesperson did not respond by deadline to a request for further information.
'Bare Mountain Bonanza Corp.'
For his part, Lee said he is sincere and will exploit the claim.
Lee acquired the rights from a Victoria-area prospector who recently noticed while searching the province's online tenure registry that they were available. For a few hundred dollars he snapped them up, then within days signed them over to Lee. According to the province's mineral titles online system, Ingmar Christopher Alan Lee is owner number 214450. He holds a 100 per cent share in tenures 578201, 578235 and 578257, covering a total of almost 950 hectares under and around the Bear Mountain development.
Lee has formed a company, Bare Mountain Bonanza Corp., to exploit the claim, and has been to a lawyer to find out what his rights and responsibilities are.
'An enormous opportunity'
His rights will give him access to the property, and he can bring in heavy machinery to do the work. He's even entitled to stop any dump trucks leaving the property with rock from excavations so he can inspect the loads for any potentially valuable minerals.
"I certainly have an interest in everything that's set for blasting," he said. "There's an enormous opportunity here."
Also, as Lee understands it, the law doesn't just allow him to exploit the claim, it requires him to. "I'm obliged to or that proprietary right will be confiscated," he said. To avoid the mining minister stepping in, he added, "I intend to exploit this in the spirit in which it was designed."
Selling Wrangellia rocks
The area has potential, he said. The Goldstream, which runs through a nearby provincial park, was once the site of gold prospecting, and people still sometimes pan for the metal in it. The bulk of his claim consists of what's known as Wrangellia terrane, made of igneous rock not normally of high value.
That, however, is a matter of marketing, said Lee. "We think we can sell the Wrangellia," he said. "I know a lot of people who wouldn't mind spending a couple bucks for a piece of Bear Mountain Wrangellia."
There are a few things he'll do differently from mining industry standards. For one thing, any profits will be invested in developing better ways to tree sit, he said. The company will also tread relatively lightly on the land.
"My corporation will not destroy anything that isn't already destroyed," Lee said. A lot of work has already been done in the area over the last seven years, Lee notes. "There's less biodiversity on the Bear Mountain golf course than there is on a parking lot."
And the golf course is where he figures he'll start. Right around the ninth hole, which just happens to be next to developer Len Barrie's house.
'Bare Mountain' claim could test mining law nuisance provisions.
http://thetyee.ca/News/2008/03/24/BearMountain/
By Andrew MacLeod
Published: March 24, 2008
TheTyee.ca
Tree sitters opposed to the expansion of the Bear Mountain development outside Victoria could soon be trading their ropes and climbing gear for pick axes and hard hats.
Just weeks ago, RCMP arrested protester Ingmar Lee for attempting to block construction of a highway interchange to serve Bear Mountain. A court order bars him from the site. Now, thanks to changes the provincial government made to how miners stake claims in the province, Lee owns the mineral rights under the interchange construction site as well as below the entire development.
"I intend to go up to Bear Mountain and tap into the money gusher," said Lee. "I intend to take advantage of this opportunity in the spirit of how the opportunity has been designed by the Gordon Campbell government. That's to extract as much money as possible from the landscape."
As part of a cross-government effort to reduce red tape and cut regulations, the Campbell government made some major changes to the rules governing mining. In the past, a section of the Mineral Tenure Act prohibited miners from interfering with private landowners. The Liberals repealed that section in 2002. Then, in 2005, the government introduced an Internet staking system that allows miners to stake a claim without ever even visiting the area they're claiming.
While the system quickly led to confrontations between owners of surface and subsurface rights, Lee's claim is the rare case where an owner of mineral rights is a declared opponent of development happening on the surface.
Sincerity an issue
The developers of Bear Mountain once held the mineral rights to the property, but let them lapse, said one of those developers, Len Barrie. When told who now holds the rights, Barrie said, "With him it would be more than a nuisance. Let him do what he does, eh."
"I'm not really concerned about it," he said. "With our zoning now, it's no longer applicable, now that it's a residential community."
"As I understand it, the gold commissioner has the right to get rid of vexatious claims, claims that are not sincere," said Byng Giraud, the vice-president of policy and communications for the Mining Association of B.C. "It will probably take a complaint by somebody asking the civil service to look into it."
Representatives of the gold commissioner in the Victoria region did not return calls by deadline.
A spokesperson for the Energy, Mines and Petroleum Resources Ministry e-mailed background information. Under the Mineral Tenure Act, he said, there are "legal remedies" so someone like Barrie can "challenge a claim that appears to be held for non-mining purposes."
The act also sets out how conflicts between surface and subsurface rights will be dealt with, the e-mail said. "[The act] contains prohibitions against exploration in certain areas, including curtilage of a dwelling, which would effectively make most, if not all, of the Bear Mountain development off limits."
While the act does not define "curtilage," a dictionary definition says it is "a small court, yard, or piece of ground surrounding a house and forming one unit with it." It is not clear how it would apply to Bear Mountain, where many of the proposed units still only exist on paper, and the spokesperson did not respond by deadline to a request for further information.
'Bare Mountain Bonanza Corp.'
For his part, Lee said he is sincere and will exploit the claim.
Lee acquired the rights from a Victoria-area prospector who recently noticed while searching the province's online tenure registry that they were available. For a few hundred dollars he snapped them up, then within days signed them over to Lee. According to the province's mineral titles online system, Ingmar Christopher Alan Lee is owner number 214450. He holds a 100 per cent share in tenures 578201, 578235 and 578257, covering a total of almost 950 hectares under and around the Bear Mountain development.
Lee has formed a company, Bare Mountain Bonanza Corp., to exploit the claim, and has been to a lawyer to find out what his rights and responsibilities are.
'An enormous opportunity'
His rights will give him access to the property, and he can bring in heavy machinery to do the work. He's even entitled to stop any dump trucks leaving the property with rock from excavations so he can inspect the loads for any potentially valuable minerals.
"I certainly have an interest in everything that's set for blasting," he said. "There's an enormous opportunity here."
Also, as Lee understands it, the law doesn't just allow him to exploit the claim, it requires him to. "I'm obliged to or that proprietary right will be confiscated," he said. To avoid the mining minister stepping in, he added, "I intend to exploit this in the spirit in which it was designed."
Selling Wrangellia rocks
The area has potential, he said. The Goldstream, which runs through a nearby provincial park, was once the site of gold prospecting, and people still sometimes pan for the metal in it. The bulk of his claim consists of what's known as Wrangellia terrane, made of igneous rock not normally of high value.
That, however, is a matter of marketing, said Lee. "We think we can sell the Wrangellia," he said. "I know a lot of people who wouldn't mind spending a couple bucks for a piece of Bear Mountain Wrangellia."
There are a few things he'll do differently from mining industry standards. For one thing, any profits will be invested in developing better ways to tree sit, he said. The company will also tread relatively lightly on the land.
"My corporation will not destroy anything that isn't already destroyed," Lee said. A lot of work has already been done in the area over the last seven years, Lee notes. "There's less biodiversity on the Bear Mountain golf course than there is on a parking lot."
And the golf course is where he figures he'll start. Right around the ninth hole, which just happens to be next to developer Len Barrie's house.
Gorilla Radio with Chris Cook - Roger Annis Mon. Mar. 24, 2008
This Week on GR
Over the past year, Gorilla Radio has featured the overblown, overbearing development at Bear Mountain, the clear-cut greeting your westward gaze at the Sooke Hills. Over the weekend, I had the chance to accompany British Columbia's newest mining magnate, Ingmar Lee to examine and assay his mineral claim to the entire reaches of Spaet Mountain, also known as Skirt Mountain, and in its desecrated form, Bear Mountain. Heading for them thar hills with Ingmar Lee and crew in the first half.
And; last month, to much fanfare, the Campbell government announced their 2008 budget. Remarkably, that budget contains North America's first carbon tax. The tax has been well received in some environmental quarters, but is this carbon tax all it pretends to be? Roger Annis is a trade unionist and social activist and member of Vancouver's Stopwar.ca coalition. He's looked into the details behind the Liberal's newly turned green leaf. Roger Annis in the second segment.
And; Janine Bandcroft will not join us this week to bring us up to speed with good goings on in and around Victoria, but may join us next week.
5:02:00 26:00 A walk on the bare mountain (podcast)
5:28:00 2:00 Cart(s)
5:30:00 4:00 Music
5:34:00 25:00 Discussion w/ Roger Annis
Welcome back to GR, etc. Last month, to much fanfare, the Campbell government announced their 2008 budget. Remarkably, that budget contains North America's first carbon tax. The tax has been well received in some environmental quarters, but is this carbon tax all it pretends to be? Roger Annis is a trade unionist and social activist and member of Vancouver's Stopwar.ca coalition. He's looked into the details behind the Liberal's newly turned green leaf.
"Welcome back to the show, Roger. Some prominent "green" voices have joined the choir, praising the Campbell government's devotion to the environment, late won perhaps, but are the Liberals the green prodigals some would colour them?"
If I Can’t Dance…
An Open Letter to the US Left on the Relevance of Culture
Being an activist is a hard, relatively thankless, generally unpaid job. There are some really wonderful people who are going to be offended by this essay, and I apologize in advance if you’re one of them, but what I say here had to be said. We’re all hopefully trying to make the world a better place, and sometimes that means having open disagreements. I welcome any and all feedback, public or private, and of course feel free to post and distribute this essay wherever you see fit.
Last weekend I sang at an antiwar protest in downtown Portland, Oregon, on the fifth anniversary of the ongoing slaughter in Iraq. In both its good and bad aspects, the event downtown was not unusual. Hard-working, unpaid activists from various organizations and networks put in long hours organizing, doing publicity, and sitting through lots of contentious meetings in the weeks and months leading up to the event. On the day of the event, different groups set up tents to network with the public and talk about matters of life and death. There was a stage with talented musicians of various musical genres performing throughout the day, and a rally with speakers in the afternoon, followed by a march. Attendance was pathetically low. In large part I’m sure this was due to the general sense of discouragement most people in the US seem to feel about our ability to effect change under the Bush regime. It was raining especially hard by west coast standards, and that also didn’t help.
The crowd grew to it’s peak size during the rally and march, but was almost nonexistent before the 2 pm rally. There was only a trickle of people visiting the various tents prior to the rally, and the musicians on the stage were playing to a largely nonexistent audience. The musical program, scheduled to happen from 10 am to 6 pm, was being billed as the World War None Festival. The term “festival” was contentious, however, and Pdx Peace, the local peace coalition responsible for the rally, couldn’t come to consensus on using the term “festival.” In their publicity they referred to the festival as an “action camp.” The vast majority of people have no idea what an “action camp” is, including me, and I’ve been actively involved in the progressive movement for my entire adult life. The local media, of course, also had no idea what an “action camp” was, and any publicity that could have been hoped for from them did not happen. Word did not spread about the event to any significant degree, at least in part because people didn’t know what they were supposed to be spreading the word about. Everybody from all political, social, class and ethnic backgrounds knows what a festival is, but certain elements within Pdx Peace didn’t want to use the term to describe what was quite obviously meant to be a festival (as well as a rally and march). Anybody above the age of three can tell you that when you have live music on a stage outdoors all day, that’s called a festival. But not Pdx Peace.
Why? I wasn’t at the meetings -- thankfully, I’m just a professional performer, not an organizer of anything other than my own concert tours, so I only know second-hand about what was said. There’s no need to name the names of individuals or the smaller groups involved with the coalition in this case -- the patterns are so common and so well-established that the names just don’t matter. Some people within the peace coalition were of the opinion that the war in Iraq was too serious a matter to have a festival connected to it. Because, I imagine, of some combination of factors including the nature of consensus decision-making, sectarianism on the part of a few, and muddled thinking on the part of some others, those who thought that a festival should happen -- and should be called a festival -- were overruled. My hat goes off to the World War None Festival organizers (a largely separate entity from Pdx Peace), and to those within Pdx Peace who tried and failed to call the festival what it was, and to organize a well-attended event.
As to those who succeeded in sabotaging the event, I ask, why is so much of the left in the US so attached to being so dreadfully boring? Why do so many people on the left apparently have no appreciation for the power and importance of culture? And when organizers, progressive media and others on the left do acknowledge culture, why is it usually kept on the sidelines? What are we trying to accomplish here?
It wasn’t always this way. Going back a hundred years, before we had a significant middle class in this country, before we had a Social Security system, Worker’s Compensation, Medicare, or anything approximating the actual (not just on paper) right to free speech, when most of the working class majority in this country were living in utter destitution and generally working (when they could find work) in extremely dangerous conditions for extremely long hours, often in jobs that required them to be itinerant, required them to forego the pleasure of having families that they might have a chance to see now and then, out of these conditions the Industrial Workers of the World was born.
The IWW at that time was a huge, militant union that could bring industrial production in the US to a halt, and on various regional levels, quite regularly did. It was a multi-ethnic union led by women and men of a wide variety of backgrounds, from all over the world. It’s most well-known member to this day was a singer-songwriter named Joe Hill, and he was only one of many of the musician-organizers that constituted both the leadership and membership of the IWW. While starving, striking, or being attacked by police on the streets of Seattle, Boston and everywhere in between, the IWW sang. Their publications were filled with poems, lyrics and cartoons. Everybody knew the songs and sung them daily. Some of the songs were instructive, meant to educate workers in effective organizing techniques. Others were battle cries of resistance, and still others celebrated victories or lamented defeats. Their cause was nothing short of the physical survival and spiritual dignity of the working class. They put their bodies on the line and were often killed and maimed for it, but they transformed this society profoundly, and they sang the whole way through. Was their cause serious? As serious as serious can get. And to this day, multitudes around the world remember the songs of Joe Hill, Ralph Chaplin, and T-Bone Slim, long after their speeches and pamphlets have been forgotten. Like many other singer-songwriters throughout the history of the class war, Joe Hill was executed by a firing squad in 1916. Why? Exactly because he was so serious -- a serious threat to the robber barons who ruled this country.
A very different, much more rigidly ideological organization that rose to prominence during the declining years of the IWW was the Communist Party. This is an organization whose early years are within the living memory of close friends of mine, such as my dear friend Bob Steck, who died last year at the age of 95, and spent most of his life fighting for humanity. I spent hundreds of hours over the course of many years interrogating Bob about his life and times (at least ten hours of which are recorded for posterity on cassettes somewhere). The Communist Party was very different from the IWW in many ways, but in it’s heyday it was also a huge, grassroots movement, whose leadership and membership took many cards from the IWW’s deck, including their emphasis on the vital importance of culture.
When Bob talked about the CP’s orientation with regards to organizing the revolution in the USA, he said there were three primary components: the unions, the streets, and the theater. Fighting for the welfare of the working class by organizing for the eight-hour day and decent wages (largely through the communist-led Congress of Industrial Organizations, the CIO), organizing the starving millions in the streets into the unions of the unemployed, and -- just as importantly -- fighting for the hearts and minds of the people through music, theater, and art. Among the musical vanguard of the communist movement of the 1930’s were people who are still household names today for millions of people in the US and around the world -- Pete Seeger, Woody Guthrie, Paul Robeson, to name a few. Traveling theater companies brought the work of Clifford Odetts and Bertoldt Brecht to the people, educating and inspiring militant action throughout the US. I remember Bob describing the audience reaction to one of the early performances of Waiting for Lefty in New York City, the gasps of excitement and possibility in the packed theater when the actors on stage shouted those last lines of the play -- “Strike! Strike! Strike!” Ten curtain calls later, everyone in the theater was ready to take to the streets, and did.
Bob and his comrades organized and sang in New York, just as they sang going into battle in Spain in the first fight against fascism, the one in which the US was on the side of the fascists. Nothing unusual about that -- soldiers on every side in every war sing as they go into battle, whether the cause is just or unjust. They and their leadership, whether fascist or democrat, socialist or anarchist, know that the songs are just as powerful as the guns (regardless of what Tom Lehrer said). You can’t fire if you’re running away, and if you want to stand and fight you have to sing. Talk to anybody involved with the Civil Rights movement and they’ll tell you, if we weren’t singing, we surely would have lost heart and ran in the face of those hate-filled, racist police and their dogs, guns, and water cannon. Talk to anyone who lived through the 60’s -- who remembers any but the most eloquent of the speeches by the likes of Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, or Mario Savio? But millions remember the songs. Bob Dylan, Buffy Sainte-Marie, James Brown, Aretha Franklin were the soundtrack to the struggle. Open any magazine or newspaper in this country to this day and you will find somewhere in the pages an unaccredited reference to a line in a Bob Dylan song. (Try it, it’s fun.)
Around the world it’s the same. Dedicated leftists may sit through the speeches of Fidel Castro or Hugo Chavez, but transcendent poetry of Pablo Neruda and the enchanting melodies of Silvio Rodriguez cross all political and class lines. You will have to try hard to find a Spanish-speaking person anywhere in the Americas who does not love the work of that Cuban communist, Silvio. You'll have to search hard to find a Latino who does not have a warm place in their heart for that murdered Chilean singer-songwriter, Victor Jara.
Talk to any Arab of any background, no matter how despondent they may be about the state of the Arab world, try to find one whose eyes do not light up when you merely mention the names Mahmoud Darwish, Marcel Khalife, Feyrouz, Um Khultum. Try to find anyone in Ireland but the most die-hard Loyalist who doesn’t tear up when listening to the music of Christy Moore, whatever they think of the IRA. And ask progressives on the streets of the US today how they came to hold their political views that led them to take the actions they are now taking, and as often as not you will hear answers like, “I discovered punk rock, the Clash changed my life,” or “I went to a concert of Public Enemy, and that was it.”
Music -- and art, poetry, theater -- is powerful (if it’s good). The powers that be know this well. Joe Hill and Victor Jara are only a small fraction of the musicians killed by the ruling classes for doing what they do. By the same token, those who run this country (and so many other countries) know the power of music and art to serve their purposes -- virtually every product on the shelf in every store in the US has a jingle to go along with it, and often brilliant artistic imagery to go along with the jingle, shouting at us from every billboard and TV commercial. (The ranks of Madison Avenue are filled with brilliant minds who would rather be doing something more fulfilling with their creative energy.)
Enter 2008. Knowing the essential power of music, the very industry that sells us music mass-produced in Nashville and LA has done their best to kill music. For decades, the few multi-billion-dollar corporations that control the music business and the commercial airwaves have done their best to teach us all that music is something to have in the background to comfort you as you try to get through another mind-numbing day of meaningless labor in some office building or department store. It’s something to help you seduce someone perhaps, or to help you get over a breakup. It is not something to inspire thought, action, or feelings of compassion for humanity (other than for your girlfriend or boyfriend).
There are always exceptions to prove the rule, but by and large, the writers and performers in Nashville and LA know what they’re being paid to do, and what they’re being paid not to do -- if it ever occurred to them to do anything else in the first place. But even more potently, all those millions of musicians aspiring to become stars, or at least to make a living at their craft, know either consciously or implicitly that any hope of success rides on imitating the garbage that comes out of these music factories. Of course, there are the many others who write and sing songs (and create art, plays, screenplays, etc.) out of a need to express themselves or even out of a desire to make a difference in the world, but they are systematically kept off of the airwaves, out of the record deals, relegated largely to the internet, very lucky if they might manage to make a living at their craft. Fundamentally, though, they are made to feel marginal, and are looked at by much of society as marginal, novelties, exotic. Although they are actually the mainstream of the (non-classical) musical tradition in the US and around the world, although the kind of music they create has been and is still loved by billions around the world for centuries, in the current climate, especially in present-day US society, they are a marginal few.
And no matter how enlightened we would like to think we are, the progressive movement is part of this society, for good and for ill. Most of us have swallowed this shallow understanding of what music is. The evidence is overwhelming. There are, of course, exceptions. Folks like the organizers of the annual protests outside the gates of Fort Benning, Georgia -- School of the Americas Watch -- are well aware of the potency of culture, and use music and art to great effect, inspiring and educating tens of thousands of participants every November.
On the other end of the spectrum are the ideologically-driven people who have turned hatred of culture into a sort of art. I have to smile when I think of the small minority of Islamist wackos who tried to storm the stage at one rally I sang at in DC in 2002, shouting, “No music! No music!” Security for the stage was being provided by the Nation of Islam, who faced off with this group of Islamists, who ultimately decided that throwing down with the Jewels of Islam behind the stage that day wasn’t in their best interests, apparently.
But much more prevalent, and therefore much scarier, are groups like the ANSWER “Coalition.” (I put “coalition” in quotes because I have yet to meet a member of a group that theoretically makes up the “coalition” that has had any say in what goes on at their rallies, although the leadership of ANSWER is of course happy to receive the bus-loads of people that their “coalition” members bring to their rallies, which seems to be the only thing that makes ANSWER a “coalition.”) ANSWER, last I heard, is run by the ultra-left sectarian group known as the Worker’s World Party, which I strongly suspect is working for the FBI. (Although as Ward Churchill says, you don’t need to be a cop to do a cop’s job.)
Millions of people in the US who regularly go to antiwar protests are unaware of who is organizing them. They just want to go to an antiwar protest. ANSWER has become almost synonymous with “antiwar protest,” to the extent that many people on the periphery of the left (such as most people who go to their protests) refer to antiwar protests as “ANSWER protests,” as in “I went to an ANSWER protest,” whether or not the protest was actually organized by ANSWER. (Just as many people say “I was listening to NPR” when they were actually listening to a community radio station that has nothing to do with NPR, broadcasting programs such as Democracy Now!, which the vast majority of NPR stations still will not touch with a ten foot pole.)
I always find it unnerving and intriguing that ANSWER protests always seem to be mentioned on NPR and broadcast on CSPAN, whereas rallies organized by the bigger and actual coalition, United for Peace and Justice (UFPJ), almost never manage to make it onto CSPAN or get covered by the corporate media. ANSWER always seems to get the permits, whereas UFPJ seems to be systematically denied them. Anyway, I digress (a little). I tend to avoid anything having to do with ANSWER or the little-known, shadowy Worker’s World Party, but a few years ago I was driving across Tennessee listening to CSPAN on my satellite radio, and they broadcast the full four hours of an ANSWER protest in DC. I sat through it because I wanted to hear it from beginning to end, for research purposes, and Tennessee is a long state to drive through from west to east, had to do something during that drive. There was one song in the four-hour rally. Although I’ve been an active member of the left for twenty years, I recognized almost none of the names of the people who spoke at the rally. Every speech was full of boring, tired rhetoric, as if they were out of a screenplay written by a rightwing screenwriter who was trying to make a mockery out of leftwing political rallies. Judging from the names of the organizations involved, very few of which I recognized either, they were mostly tiny little Worker’s World Party front groups. And since the Worker’s World Party apparently doesn’t have any musicians in their pocket, there was no music to speak of. (Or, quite probably I suspect, they don't want music at their rallies because they don't want their rallies to be interesting.)
ANSWER is an extreme example, but a big one that most progressives are unfortunately familiar with, whether they know who ANSWER (or Worker’s World) is or not. Inevitably, most people leave ANSWER protests feeling vaguely used and demoralized -- aside from those who manage to stay far enough away from the towers of speakers so they can avoid hearing all the mindless rhetoric pouring out of them. Contrast the mood with the protests at the gates of Fort Benning, where most people leave feeling hopeful and inspired.
I know I have no more hope of influencing the leadership of Worker’s World with this essay than I have of influencing the behavior of the New York City police department with it. But neither of these organizations are my target audience. Those who I hope to reach are those who are genuinely trying to create rallies and other events in the hopes of influencing and inspiring public opinion, in the hopes of inspiring people to action, in the hopes of winning allies among the apolitical or even among conservatives. The people I hope to reach are those who have been unwittingly influenced by the corporate music industry’s implicit definition of what music and culture is and is not.
And, here we go, I would count among this group most of the hard-working, loving and compassionate people who are organizing rallies, who are organizing actions, who are organizing unions, and who are creating progressive media on the radio, on community television and on the internet in the US today.
I’d like to pause for a moment to make a disclosure. I am a professional politically-oriented musician, what the corporate media (and many progressives) would call a “protest singer,” though I reject the term. I’m not sure what, if anything, I have to gain personally by publishing these thoughts, but I think it behooves me to point out that I am one of the lucky ones who has performed at rallies and in progressive and mainstream media for hundreds of thousands of people on a fairly regular basis throughout the world, and I would like to hope that my words here will not be understood as Rovics whining that he’s not famous enough. I speak here for culture generally, not for myself as an individual singer-songwriter.
My desire is to reach groups like Pdx Peace and their sister organizations throughout the country. These are genuinely democratic groups, real coalitions made up of real people, not sectarian, unaccountable groups like ANSWER. These are groups, in short, made up of my friends and comrades, but these are groups also made up of people who grew up in this society and therefore generally have a lot to learn about the power of culture to educate and inspire people. It is not good enough to have music on the stage as people are gathering to rally and as they are leaving to march. It’s not good enough to have a song or two sandwiched in between another half hour of speeches -- no matter how many organizations want to have speakers representing them on stage, or whatever other very legitimate excuses organizers have for making their events, once again, long and boring (even if they’re not as long or as boring as an ANSWER rally). It is not good enough for wonderful, influential radio/TV shows like Democracy Now! to have snippets of songs in between their interviews, when only two or three of those interviews each year are related to culture. It is a sorry state of affairs that NPR news shows do a better job of covering pop culture than Pacifica shows do in terms of covering leftwing culture.
The vast majority of the contemporary, very talented, dedicated musicians represented by, say, the "links" page on www.davidrovics.com, have rarely or never been invited to sing at a local or national protest rally (even if some few of us have, many times). The vast majority of progressive conferences do not even include a concert, or if they do, it's background music during dinner on Saturday night. I can count on one hand the number of times I have heard Democracy Now! or Free Speech Radio News mention that a great leftwing artist is doing a tour of the US. The number of fantastic musicians out there who have even been played during the station breaks on Democracy Now! is a tiny fraction of those that are out there -- of the dozens of musicians featured on my "links" page for example, only a small handful have even been played once. It is shameful that it's easier to get a national, mainstream radio show in the UK or Canada to plug a tour of such a musician than it is to get any national Pacifica program to do this.
Radical culture needs to be fostered and promoted, front and center, not sidelined as people are gathering, or when the radio stations are doing station ID's. Because if the point is to inspire people to action, a song is worth a hundred speeches. If the point is to educate people, a three-minute ballad is easily equal to any book. (They'll read the book after they hear the song, not the other way around.)
It is often said that we are in a battle for the hearts and minds of the people of this country. It is us versus CNN, NPR, Bush, Clinton, etc. In this battle, style matters, not just content. In this battle, it is absolutely imperative that we remember that it is not only the minds we need to win, but the hearts. At least in terms of the various forms of human communication, there is nothing on Earth more effective in winning hearts than music and art. We ignore or sideline music and art at our peril. It's time to listen to the music.
http://www.davidrovics.com
drovics@gmail.com
Being an activist is a hard, relatively thankless, generally unpaid job. There are some really wonderful people who are going to be offended by this essay, and I apologize in advance if you’re one of them, but what I say here had to be said. We’re all hopefully trying to make the world a better place, and sometimes that means having open disagreements. I welcome any and all feedback, public or private, and of course feel free to post and distribute this essay wherever you see fit.
Last weekend I sang at an antiwar protest in downtown Portland, Oregon, on the fifth anniversary of the ongoing slaughter in Iraq. In both its good and bad aspects, the event downtown was not unusual. Hard-working, unpaid activists from various organizations and networks put in long hours organizing, doing publicity, and sitting through lots of contentious meetings in the weeks and months leading up to the event. On the day of the event, different groups set up tents to network with the public and talk about matters of life and death. There was a stage with talented musicians of various musical genres performing throughout the day, and a rally with speakers in the afternoon, followed by a march. Attendance was pathetically low. In large part I’m sure this was due to the general sense of discouragement most people in the US seem to feel about our ability to effect change under the Bush regime. It was raining especially hard by west coast standards, and that also didn’t help.
The crowd grew to it’s peak size during the rally and march, but was almost nonexistent before the 2 pm rally. There was only a trickle of people visiting the various tents prior to the rally, and the musicians on the stage were playing to a largely nonexistent audience. The musical program, scheduled to happen from 10 am to 6 pm, was being billed as the World War None Festival. The term “festival” was contentious, however, and Pdx Peace, the local peace coalition responsible for the rally, couldn’t come to consensus on using the term “festival.” In their publicity they referred to the festival as an “action camp.” The vast majority of people have no idea what an “action camp” is, including me, and I’ve been actively involved in the progressive movement for my entire adult life. The local media, of course, also had no idea what an “action camp” was, and any publicity that could have been hoped for from them did not happen. Word did not spread about the event to any significant degree, at least in part because people didn’t know what they were supposed to be spreading the word about. Everybody from all political, social, class and ethnic backgrounds knows what a festival is, but certain elements within Pdx Peace didn’t want to use the term to describe what was quite obviously meant to be a festival (as well as a rally and march). Anybody above the age of three can tell you that when you have live music on a stage outdoors all day, that’s called a festival. But not Pdx Peace.
Why? I wasn’t at the meetings -- thankfully, I’m just a professional performer, not an organizer of anything other than my own concert tours, so I only know second-hand about what was said. There’s no need to name the names of individuals or the smaller groups involved with the coalition in this case -- the patterns are so common and so well-established that the names just don’t matter. Some people within the peace coalition were of the opinion that the war in Iraq was too serious a matter to have a festival connected to it. Because, I imagine, of some combination of factors including the nature of consensus decision-making, sectarianism on the part of a few, and muddled thinking on the part of some others, those who thought that a festival should happen -- and should be called a festival -- were overruled. My hat goes off to the World War None Festival organizers (a largely separate entity from Pdx Peace), and to those within Pdx Peace who tried and failed to call the festival what it was, and to organize a well-attended event.
As to those who succeeded in sabotaging the event, I ask, why is so much of the left in the US so attached to being so dreadfully boring? Why do so many people on the left apparently have no appreciation for the power and importance of culture? And when organizers, progressive media and others on the left do acknowledge culture, why is it usually kept on the sidelines? What are we trying to accomplish here?
It wasn’t always this way. Going back a hundred years, before we had a significant middle class in this country, before we had a Social Security system, Worker’s Compensation, Medicare, or anything approximating the actual (not just on paper) right to free speech, when most of the working class majority in this country were living in utter destitution and generally working (when they could find work) in extremely dangerous conditions for extremely long hours, often in jobs that required them to be itinerant, required them to forego the pleasure of having families that they might have a chance to see now and then, out of these conditions the Industrial Workers of the World was born.
The IWW at that time was a huge, militant union that could bring industrial production in the US to a halt, and on various regional levels, quite regularly did. It was a multi-ethnic union led by women and men of a wide variety of backgrounds, from all over the world. It’s most well-known member to this day was a singer-songwriter named Joe Hill, and he was only one of many of the musician-organizers that constituted both the leadership and membership of the IWW. While starving, striking, or being attacked by police on the streets of Seattle, Boston and everywhere in between, the IWW sang. Their publications were filled with poems, lyrics and cartoons. Everybody knew the songs and sung them daily. Some of the songs were instructive, meant to educate workers in effective organizing techniques. Others were battle cries of resistance, and still others celebrated victories or lamented defeats. Their cause was nothing short of the physical survival and spiritual dignity of the working class. They put their bodies on the line and were often killed and maimed for it, but they transformed this society profoundly, and they sang the whole way through. Was their cause serious? As serious as serious can get. And to this day, multitudes around the world remember the songs of Joe Hill, Ralph Chaplin, and T-Bone Slim, long after their speeches and pamphlets have been forgotten. Like many other singer-songwriters throughout the history of the class war, Joe Hill was executed by a firing squad in 1916. Why? Exactly because he was so serious -- a serious threat to the robber barons who ruled this country.
A very different, much more rigidly ideological organization that rose to prominence during the declining years of the IWW was the Communist Party. This is an organization whose early years are within the living memory of close friends of mine, such as my dear friend Bob Steck, who died last year at the age of 95, and spent most of his life fighting for humanity. I spent hundreds of hours over the course of many years interrogating Bob about his life and times (at least ten hours of which are recorded for posterity on cassettes somewhere). The Communist Party was very different from the IWW in many ways, but in it’s heyday it was also a huge, grassroots movement, whose leadership and membership took many cards from the IWW’s deck, including their emphasis on the vital importance of culture.
When Bob talked about the CP’s orientation with regards to organizing the revolution in the USA, he said there were three primary components: the unions, the streets, and the theater. Fighting for the welfare of the working class by organizing for the eight-hour day and decent wages (largely through the communist-led Congress of Industrial Organizations, the CIO), organizing the starving millions in the streets into the unions of the unemployed, and -- just as importantly -- fighting for the hearts and minds of the people through music, theater, and art. Among the musical vanguard of the communist movement of the 1930’s were people who are still household names today for millions of people in the US and around the world -- Pete Seeger, Woody Guthrie, Paul Robeson, to name a few. Traveling theater companies brought the work of Clifford Odetts and Bertoldt Brecht to the people, educating and inspiring militant action throughout the US. I remember Bob describing the audience reaction to one of the early performances of Waiting for Lefty in New York City, the gasps of excitement and possibility in the packed theater when the actors on stage shouted those last lines of the play -- “Strike! Strike! Strike!” Ten curtain calls later, everyone in the theater was ready to take to the streets, and did.
Bob and his comrades organized and sang in New York, just as they sang going into battle in Spain in the first fight against fascism, the one in which the US was on the side of the fascists. Nothing unusual about that -- soldiers on every side in every war sing as they go into battle, whether the cause is just or unjust. They and their leadership, whether fascist or democrat, socialist or anarchist, know that the songs are just as powerful as the guns (regardless of what Tom Lehrer said). You can’t fire if you’re running away, and if you want to stand and fight you have to sing. Talk to anybody involved with the Civil Rights movement and they’ll tell you, if we weren’t singing, we surely would have lost heart and ran in the face of those hate-filled, racist police and their dogs, guns, and water cannon. Talk to anyone who lived through the 60’s -- who remembers any but the most eloquent of the speeches by the likes of Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, or Mario Savio? But millions remember the songs. Bob Dylan, Buffy Sainte-Marie, James Brown, Aretha Franklin were the soundtrack to the struggle. Open any magazine or newspaper in this country to this day and you will find somewhere in the pages an unaccredited reference to a line in a Bob Dylan song. (Try it, it’s fun.)
Around the world it’s the same. Dedicated leftists may sit through the speeches of Fidel Castro or Hugo Chavez, but transcendent poetry of Pablo Neruda and the enchanting melodies of Silvio Rodriguez cross all political and class lines. You will have to try hard to find a Spanish-speaking person anywhere in the Americas who does not love the work of that Cuban communist, Silvio. You'll have to search hard to find a Latino who does not have a warm place in their heart for that murdered Chilean singer-songwriter, Victor Jara.
Talk to any Arab of any background, no matter how despondent they may be about the state of the Arab world, try to find one whose eyes do not light up when you merely mention the names Mahmoud Darwish, Marcel Khalife, Feyrouz, Um Khultum. Try to find anyone in Ireland but the most die-hard Loyalist who doesn’t tear up when listening to the music of Christy Moore, whatever they think of the IRA. And ask progressives on the streets of the US today how they came to hold their political views that led them to take the actions they are now taking, and as often as not you will hear answers like, “I discovered punk rock, the Clash changed my life,” or “I went to a concert of Public Enemy, and that was it.”
Music -- and art, poetry, theater -- is powerful (if it’s good). The powers that be know this well. Joe Hill and Victor Jara are only a small fraction of the musicians killed by the ruling classes for doing what they do. By the same token, those who run this country (and so many other countries) know the power of music and art to serve their purposes -- virtually every product on the shelf in every store in the US has a jingle to go along with it, and often brilliant artistic imagery to go along with the jingle, shouting at us from every billboard and TV commercial. (The ranks of Madison Avenue are filled with brilliant minds who would rather be doing something more fulfilling with their creative energy.)
Enter 2008. Knowing the essential power of music, the very industry that sells us music mass-produced in Nashville and LA has done their best to kill music. For decades, the few multi-billion-dollar corporations that control the music business and the commercial airwaves have done their best to teach us all that music is something to have in the background to comfort you as you try to get through another mind-numbing day of meaningless labor in some office building or department store. It’s something to help you seduce someone perhaps, or to help you get over a breakup. It is not something to inspire thought, action, or feelings of compassion for humanity (other than for your girlfriend or boyfriend).
There are always exceptions to prove the rule, but by and large, the writers and performers in Nashville and LA know what they’re being paid to do, and what they’re being paid not to do -- if it ever occurred to them to do anything else in the first place. But even more potently, all those millions of musicians aspiring to become stars, or at least to make a living at their craft, know either consciously or implicitly that any hope of success rides on imitating the garbage that comes out of these music factories. Of course, there are the many others who write and sing songs (and create art, plays, screenplays, etc.) out of a need to express themselves or even out of a desire to make a difference in the world, but they are systematically kept off of the airwaves, out of the record deals, relegated largely to the internet, very lucky if they might manage to make a living at their craft. Fundamentally, though, they are made to feel marginal, and are looked at by much of society as marginal, novelties, exotic. Although they are actually the mainstream of the (non-classical) musical tradition in the US and around the world, although the kind of music they create has been and is still loved by billions around the world for centuries, in the current climate, especially in present-day US society, they are a marginal few.
And no matter how enlightened we would like to think we are, the progressive movement is part of this society, for good and for ill. Most of us have swallowed this shallow understanding of what music is. The evidence is overwhelming. There are, of course, exceptions. Folks like the organizers of the annual protests outside the gates of Fort Benning, Georgia -- School of the Americas Watch -- are well aware of the potency of culture, and use music and art to great effect, inspiring and educating tens of thousands of participants every November.
On the other end of the spectrum are the ideologically-driven people who have turned hatred of culture into a sort of art. I have to smile when I think of the small minority of Islamist wackos who tried to storm the stage at one rally I sang at in DC in 2002, shouting, “No music! No music!” Security for the stage was being provided by the Nation of Islam, who faced off with this group of Islamists, who ultimately decided that throwing down with the Jewels of Islam behind the stage that day wasn’t in their best interests, apparently.
But much more prevalent, and therefore much scarier, are groups like the ANSWER “Coalition.” (I put “coalition” in quotes because I have yet to meet a member of a group that theoretically makes up the “coalition” that has had any say in what goes on at their rallies, although the leadership of ANSWER is of course happy to receive the bus-loads of people that their “coalition” members bring to their rallies, which seems to be the only thing that makes ANSWER a “coalition.”) ANSWER, last I heard, is run by the ultra-left sectarian group known as the Worker’s World Party, which I strongly suspect is working for the FBI. (Although as Ward Churchill says, you don’t need to be a cop to do a cop’s job.)
Millions of people in the US who regularly go to antiwar protests are unaware of who is organizing them. They just want to go to an antiwar protest. ANSWER has become almost synonymous with “antiwar protest,” to the extent that many people on the periphery of the left (such as most people who go to their protests) refer to antiwar protests as “ANSWER protests,” as in “I went to an ANSWER protest,” whether or not the protest was actually organized by ANSWER. (Just as many people say “I was listening to NPR” when they were actually listening to a community radio station that has nothing to do with NPR, broadcasting programs such as Democracy Now!, which the vast majority of NPR stations still will not touch with a ten foot pole.)
I always find it unnerving and intriguing that ANSWER protests always seem to be mentioned on NPR and broadcast on CSPAN, whereas rallies organized by the bigger and actual coalition, United for Peace and Justice (UFPJ), almost never manage to make it onto CSPAN or get covered by the corporate media. ANSWER always seems to get the permits, whereas UFPJ seems to be systematically denied them. Anyway, I digress (a little). I tend to avoid anything having to do with ANSWER or the little-known, shadowy Worker’s World Party, but a few years ago I was driving across Tennessee listening to CSPAN on my satellite radio, and they broadcast the full four hours of an ANSWER protest in DC. I sat through it because I wanted to hear it from beginning to end, for research purposes, and Tennessee is a long state to drive through from west to east, had to do something during that drive. There was one song in the four-hour rally. Although I’ve been an active member of the left for twenty years, I recognized almost none of the names of the people who spoke at the rally. Every speech was full of boring, tired rhetoric, as if they were out of a screenplay written by a rightwing screenwriter who was trying to make a mockery out of leftwing political rallies. Judging from the names of the organizations involved, very few of which I recognized either, they were mostly tiny little Worker’s World Party front groups. And since the Worker’s World Party apparently doesn’t have any musicians in their pocket, there was no music to speak of. (Or, quite probably I suspect, they don't want music at their rallies because they don't want their rallies to be interesting.)
ANSWER is an extreme example, but a big one that most progressives are unfortunately familiar with, whether they know who ANSWER (or Worker’s World) is or not. Inevitably, most people leave ANSWER protests feeling vaguely used and demoralized -- aside from those who manage to stay far enough away from the towers of speakers so they can avoid hearing all the mindless rhetoric pouring out of them. Contrast the mood with the protests at the gates of Fort Benning, where most people leave feeling hopeful and inspired.
I know I have no more hope of influencing the leadership of Worker’s World with this essay than I have of influencing the behavior of the New York City police department with it. But neither of these organizations are my target audience. Those who I hope to reach are those who are genuinely trying to create rallies and other events in the hopes of influencing and inspiring public opinion, in the hopes of inspiring people to action, in the hopes of winning allies among the apolitical or even among conservatives. The people I hope to reach are those who have been unwittingly influenced by the corporate music industry’s implicit definition of what music and culture is and is not.
And, here we go, I would count among this group most of the hard-working, loving and compassionate people who are organizing rallies, who are organizing actions, who are organizing unions, and who are creating progressive media on the radio, on community television and on the internet in the US today.
I’d like to pause for a moment to make a disclosure. I am a professional politically-oriented musician, what the corporate media (and many progressives) would call a “protest singer,” though I reject the term. I’m not sure what, if anything, I have to gain personally by publishing these thoughts, but I think it behooves me to point out that I am one of the lucky ones who has performed at rallies and in progressive and mainstream media for hundreds of thousands of people on a fairly regular basis throughout the world, and I would like to hope that my words here will not be understood as Rovics whining that he’s not famous enough. I speak here for culture generally, not for myself as an individual singer-songwriter.
My desire is to reach groups like Pdx Peace and their sister organizations throughout the country. These are genuinely democratic groups, real coalitions made up of real people, not sectarian, unaccountable groups like ANSWER. These are groups, in short, made up of my friends and comrades, but these are groups also made up of people who grew up in this society and therefore generally have a lot to learn about the power of culture to educate and inspire people. It is not good enough to have music on the stage as people are gathering to rally and as they are leaving to march. It’s not good enough to have a song or two sandwiched in between another half hour of speeches -- no matter how many organizations want to have speakers representing them on stage, or whatever other very legitimate excuses organizers have for making their events, once again, long and boring (even if they’re not as long or as boring as an ANSWER rally). It is not good enough for wonderful, influential radio/TV shows like Democracy Now! to have snippets of songs in between their interviews, when only two or three of those interviews each year are related to culture. It is a sorry state of affairs that NPR news shows do a better job of covering pop culture than Pacifica shows do in terms of covering leftwing culture.
The vast majority of the contemporary, very talented, dedicated musicians represented by, say, the "links" page on www.davidrovics.com, have rarely or never been invited to sing at a local or national protest rally (even if some few of us have, many times). The vast majority of progressive conferences do not even include a concert, or if they do, it's background music during dinner on Saturday night. I can count on one hand the number of times I have heard Democracy Now! or Free Speech Radio News mention that a great leftwing artist is doing a tour of the US. The number of fantastic musicians out there who have even been played during the station breaks on Democracy Now! is a tiny fraction of those that are out there -- of the dozens of musicians featured on my "links" page for example, only a small handful have even been played once. It is shameful that it's easier to get a national, mainstream radio show in the UK or Canada to plug a tour of such a musician than it is to get any national Pacifica program to do this.
Radical culture needs to be fostered and promoted, front and center, not sidelined as people are gathering, or when the radio stations are doing station ID's. Because if the point is to inspire people to action, a song is worth a hundred speeches. If the point is to educate people, a three-minute ballad is easily equal to any book. (They'll read the book after they hear the song, not the other way around.)
It is often said that we are in a battle for the hearts and minds of the people of this country. It is us versus CNN, NPR, Bush, Clinton, etc. In this battle, style matters, not just content. In this battle, it is absolutely imperative that we remember that it is not only the minds we need to win, but the hearts. At least in terms of the various forms of human communication, there is nothing on Earth more effective in winning hearts than music and art. We ignore or sideline music and art at our peril. It's time to listen to the music.
http://www.davidrovics.com
drovics@gmail.com
Wednesday, March 19, 2008
Less Sweet: The Price of Sugar
Hello Haiti Solidarity BC list,
Three days ago, the documentary film The Price of Sugar received its premiere here in Vancouver. The screening was organized by Necessary Voices, a public interest group that sponsors public lectures and screenings, and Cinema Politica, a film collective with chapters in cities across Canada. One hundred people attended.
As others have written on the CHAN list, The Price of Sugar is a powerful documentary. It is narrated by Paul Newman and tells the story of the tens of thousands of workers from Haiti that toil in slave-like conditions on the sugar plantations of the Dominican Republic (DR). The film focuses on the conditions of life and work under the Vicini family, one of the three largest plantation owners
in the country.
The Vicinis are trying to block screenings of the film by threatening to sue anyone that shows it. The Vancouver Public Library received a threatening letter. After consideration, it decided to allow the organizing groups to go ahead with the screening.
The film depicts not only the wretched conditions of the plantation workers, but also their struggles to improve conditions. A courageous Catholic priest came into a leading role in their struggle. His name is Christopher Hartley, and much of the film's story is told through his eyes.
Hartley spearheaded efforts in recent years to bring health care and better housing to the workers in his parish. U.S. doctors who come to the parish to offer health care and who have worked in the poorest regions of the Americas tell the film that the conditions of Haitians in the sugar cane fields of the DR are the worst they have seen.
Hartley also played a leading role in a recent strike of workers to win better pay. Unfortunately, the film does not indicate the date of the strike and I searched in vain on the internet to locate this information. The strike won some gains for the workers.
Following the conclusion of the strike, the plantation owners launched a vicious campaign demanding that the government of the DR expel Hartley and one other priest from the country. The film shows inspiring footage of mobilizations by Haitian workers and their supporters among other residents of the DR to defend Hartley and to
hold onto the gains they had won. Meanwhile, Hartley's priest colleague was successfully forced out of the country.
According to one review of the movie that I read, Hartley has been reassigned by the church to Ethiopia. I don't know the story behind this reassignment. The film depicts Hartley's bishop as defending him in the face of violent threats by the Vicinis and their hirelings.
Elizabeth Abbot's Sugar: A Bittersweet History
An interesting parallel to the critical success of The Price of Sugar is the success of the recently-published Sugar: A Bittersweet History, by Elizabeth Abbot. She is a Research Associate at Trinity College, University of Toronto and has lived in Haiti. I have not read her book, but I understand that it closely examines the rise of
sugar as a food staple and as a foundation crop of the slave plantations of preceding centuries. Sugar was, of course, the most lucrative product of the slave-plantation system in Haiti.
Abbot has lived in Haiti. In 1988, she published, Haiti: The Duvaliers and Their Legacy. I have not read this book. Today, on March 17, she was interviewed for the third half-hour of CBC Radio's The Current. She spoke of same conditions in the Dominican Republic as are revealed in the film, The Price of Sugar (though the broadcast did not mention the film). She said that she spent eight days in the
DR researching the book. You can listen to the broadcast by going to:
http://www.cbc.ca/thecurrent/2008/200803/20080317.html
An interesting essay on the long history of exploitation of Haitians in the Dominican Republic, including a reminder of the terrible slaughter of thousands of Haitian workers by the DR military in 1937, can be found at:
http://www.windowsonhaiti.com/hdr-rmk2.shtml
Neither the interview with Abbot on CBC nor the discussion period following the screening of the Price of Sugar in Vancouver discussed what can be done to defend and improve the conditions of Haitian workers in the DR. Similarly, there was no discussion of the conditions in Haiti that compel tens of thousands of its citizens to travel to the DR, often under great personal danger, to seek work. But the appearance of these books and films opens the door for a broader public discussion of both subjects, provided, of course, that solidarity activists are organized to make this happen. To date, we are finding a particularly receptive ear in the trade unions and among young people.
The distributors of The Price of Sugar have contacted CHAN to invite us to promote and help distribute the film. We will forward more information as it becomes available.
Solidarity,
Haiti Solidarity BC
March 17, 2008
Cathedral Grove: Wilderness Defenders Called Up
from RICHARD DEAN
We forest defenders are needed again! The tree cutting is likely to
start Tuesday, March 25th. Will keep you informed.
Richard Dean
To: letters@tc.canwest.com
Editor Times Colonist:
Please publish the following letter:
BC Parks' managers continue to amaze me. After costly studies and years of public outcry, the plan to build a new parking lot in Cathedral Grove was eventually shelved by the Environment Minister.
Now the highly paid mandarins in the Parks' department want to cut and limb trees during the nesting season in Cathedral Grove to meet WCB safety standards for workers involved in upgrading trails and footbridges. It's an issue of public safety announce the Ministry of Environment. But hasn't walking or driving through this ancient old
growth forest during a windstorm always been a public safety issue where the risks are widely known and accepted?
The Park's Big Loop trail by the Cameron River has been damaged by extreme winter flooding. Deep flood channels appear to penetrate further every year into the forest, washing out footbridges and vegetation, exposing tree roots, and leaving behind ugly gravel beds and trees vulnerable to blowdown. Observers familiar with the area's
hydrology suggest that the increased flood levels are caused by the nearby ongoing unsustainable logging practices.
It's likely that rebuilding the trails and footbridges will become an almost annual event if the flooding and blowdowns continue to occur with ever increasing intensity.
Parks' staff should abandon their cutting plans and focus instead on looking at the root causes of the flood damage. Allowing this part of the ancient forest to be left in its natural state would certainly be in the public interest for future generations.
Richard Dean 530 Meadow Drive,
Qualicum Beach, BC, V9K 2T1
Phone 250 752 0872
Tuesday, March 18, 2008
Carlyle's Global Meltdown
Dutch-Traded Fund Moves Toward Collapse
By JULIA WERDIGIER
LONDON — David M. Rubenstein, co-founder of the Carlyle Group, pledged on Thursday to “make amends” to investors in a fund that has ties to his firm and is facing collapse.
“We’re working to find ways to help people to deal with losses and maybe recover some capital,” Mr. Rubenstein said in a telephone interview.
The fund, Carlyle Capital, came to the brink of collapse on Thursday after discussions on refinancing failed, prompting a default on its debt. The fund’s inability to strike a deal in talks with creditors late Wednesday, despite help from Mr. Rubenstein and the Carlyle Group’s strong ties to lenders, sent renewed shudders around global markets. Investors fear that more funds will run into trouble as clients seek withdrawals.
“I thought we’d work out a way to solve the problem but each of the banks were so worried about their own credit situation,” Mr. Rubenstein said. “The result is not a happy one. Over 20 years we had good investment judgment, but we’re not infallible.”
Mr. Rubenstein said that the banks recognized this was “an unusual situation” and he did not expect the fund’s collapse to have any repercussion on the Carlyle Group’s relationships with the lenders, which include most Wall Street banks. The Carlyle Group shares some investors with the fund, which is run by Carlyle Group executives who also own about 15 percent of the fund, but Carlyle Group does not own any of its assets.
Carlyle Capital said Thursday that it expected lenders to take possession of its remaining assets, a portfolio of United States residential mortgage-backed securities rated AAA.
“If banks are unwilling to lend, then this is the lifeblood of capitalism being restricted,” said Justin Urquhart Stewart, co-founder of 7 Investment Management in London. “Hedge funds and other weaker operations are being broken like people stepping on twigs.”
Carlyle Capital’s problems also provide a glimpse into the challenges faced by the usually secretive hedge fund industry because, unlike most such funds, Carlyle Capital is publicly listed. The situation has also raised questions about the vulnerability of the privately held funds, which disclose little data.
Carlyle Capital joins a number of funds that have run into trouble this year after banks hit by write-downs on assets backed by subprime mortgages started to call in loans or asked for better collateral.
Among the funds that are struggling, Peloton Partners, a hedge fund in London run by former Goldman Sachs partners, was forced to liquidate its largest funds last month. Thornburg Mortgage, a major American lender, also ran into trouble after it failed to meet some margin calls, and Drake Management in New York said that it might shut its largest hedge fund.
Some investors say they believe that attempts by central bankers to inject funds into the banking system may not be enough to revive markets.
“It’s a confidence issue,” said Irfan Younus, a banking analyst at NCB Stockbrokers. “People are still nervous, and banks are reluctant to lend more because they’re in the process of deleveraging.”
Last month, Carlyle Capital was managing $21.7 billion in assets— mostly triple-A rated mortgage debt issued by Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae. Like many of its peers, it had leveraged itself aggressively, borrowing $31 for each dollar of equity, according to its annual report. Lenders include Deutsche Bank, Bear Stearns, Merrill Lynch and JPMorgan Chase.
As those investments lost value and banks worried about their debt exposure, creditors demanded that Carlyle Capital put up more and more funds as collateral for the loans. A $150 million credit line from its parent, the Carlyle Group, was not enough to keep it out of trouble.
By Wednesday, it had defaulted on about $16.6 billion of debt and some lenders started to liquidate assets.
Talks to halt liquidations and revive the fund failed late Wednesday after the value of collateral declined further, prompting an additional $97.5 million in margin calls.
The fund’s shares, which were first offered in July 2007 and are traded on the Amsterdam Stock Exchange, are now worth 43 cents each, compared with $19 when they started trading last summer. They have dropped more than 90 percent since the company’s problems became public last week.
In a statement Wednesday, the Carlyle Group stressed that it had not purchased any of Carlyle Capital’s securities and was linked to the fund only by name, the credit line and the fact that about 15 percent of the fund’s securities are owned by Carlyle Group employees. The fund is run by John C. Stomber, a managing director at the Carlyle Group and a former executive at Cerberus Capital Management.
March 14, 2008
By JULIA WERDIGIER
LONDON — David M. Rubenstein, co-founder of the Carlyle Group, pledged on Thursday to “make amends” to investors in a fund that has ties to his firm and is facing collapse.
“We’re working to find ways to help people to deal with losses and maybe recover some capital,” Mr. Rubenstein said in a telephone interview.
The fund, Carlyle Capital, came to the brink of collapse on Thursday after discussions on refinancing failed, prompting a default on its debt. The fund’s inability to strike a deal in talks with creditors late Wednesday, despite help from Mr. Rubenstein and the Carlyle Group’s strong ties to lenders, sent renewed shudders around global markets. Investors fear that more funds will run into trouble as clients seek withdrawals.
“I thought we’d work out a way to solve the problem but each of the banks were so worried about their own credit situation,” Mr. Rubenstein said. “The result is not a happy one. Over 20 years we had good investment judgment, but we’re not infallible.”
Mr. Rubenstein said that the banks recognized this was “an unusual situation” and he did not expect the fund’s collapse to have any repercussion on the Carlyle Group’s relationships with the lenders, which include most Wall Street banks. The Carlyle Group shares some investors with the fund, which is run by Carlyle Group executives who also own about 15 percent of the fund, but Carlyle Group does not own any of its assets.
Carlyle Capital said Thursday that it expected lenders to take possession of its remaining assets, a portfolio of United States residential mortgage-backed securities rated AAA.
“If banks are unwilling to lend, then this is the lifeblood of capitalism being restricted,” said Justin Urquhart Stewart, co-founder of 7 Investment Management in London. “Hedge funds and other weaker operations are being broken like people stepping on twigs.”
Carlyle Capital’s problems also provide a glimpse into the challenges faced by the usually secretive hedge fund industry because, unlike most such funds, Carlyle Capital is publicly listed. The situation has also raised questions about the vulnerability of the privately held funds, which disclose little data.
Carlyle Capital joins a number of funds that have run into trouble this year after banks hit by write-downs on assets backed by subprime mortgages started to call in loans or asked for better collateral.
Among the funds that are struggling, Peloton Partners, a hedge fund in London run by former Goldman Sachs partners, was forced to liquidate its largest funds last month. Thornburg Mortgage, a major American lender, also ran into trouble after it failed to meet some margin calls, and Drake Management in New York said that it might shut its largest hedge fund.
Some investors say they believe that attempts by central bankers to inject funds into the banking system may not be enough to revive markets.
“It’s a confidence issue,” said Irfan Younus, a banking analyst at NCB Stockbrokers. “People are still nervous, and banks are reluctant to lend more because they’re in the process of deleveraging.”
Last month, Carlyle Capital was managing $21.7 billion in assets— mostly triple-A rated mortgage debt issued by Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae. Like many of its peers, it had leveraged itself aggressively, borrowing $31 for each dollar of equity, according to its annual report. Lenders include Deutsche Bank, Bear Stearns, Merrill Lynch and JPMorgan Chase.
As those investments lost value and banks worried about their debt exposure, creditors demanded that Carlyle Capital put up more and more funds as collateral for the loans. A $150 million credit line from its parent, the Carlyle Group, was not enough to keep it out of trouble.
By Wednesday, it had defaulted on about $16.6 billion of debt and some lenders started to liquidate assets.
Talks to halt liquidations and revive the fund failed late Wednesday after the value of collateral declined further, prompting an additional $97.5 million in margin calls.
The fund’s shares, which were first offered in July 2007 and are traded on the Amsterdam Stock Exchange, are now worth 43 cents each, compared with $19 when they started trading last summer. They have dropped more than 90 percent since the company’s problems became public last week.
In a statement Wednesday, the Carlyle Group stressed that it had not purchased any of Carlyle Capital’s securities and was linked to the fund only by name, the credit line and the fact that about 15 percent of the fund’s securities are owned by Carlyle Group employees. The fund is run by John C. Stomber, a managing director at the Carlyle Group and a former executive at Cerberus Capital Management.
March 14, 2008
Building Green: The Way to Go
BUILDING GREEN IS THE WAY TO GO
by Richard Boyce
This week I took a journey into unknown territory, in an environment that kept me out of the sun. I spent two days listening to architects, construction engineers, designers, municipal planners, authors of building codes, certification administrators, energy consultants, and building contractors of every discipline. I learned a great deal as one of 400 participants in the ‘Building Green in a Changing Climate’ conference and trade show held in Courtenay.
Public demand for environmental standards and accountability has sparked change in the construction industry and some companies are complying with tough standards in order to attract customers. Rising material costs, as well as an increase in operational costs for all buildings, have combined with skyrocketing energy costs. The result is that the construction industry is beginning to realize that it must seek out alternatives. In today’s market place building ‘green’ makes sense economically.
A great deal of creative and technical innovation is being generated with amazing results that will effectively revolutionize the building industry. However, only a small percentage of industrial, institutional, or residential construction projects are currently being built using green thinking and materials. The ground swell has begun and now it is up to the public to move it forward so that industry follows through with this green trend.
Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design is a market driven system, which is attempting to prove to consumers that building construction meets with the highest environmental standards. LEED is an internationally recognized rating system that encourages the construction of green buildings, administered by the Canada Green Building Council. Accredited professionals are trained and certified to monitor projects in order to award buildings with coveted ratings.
LEED has 5 principle categories by which it assesses construction projects for environmental sensitivity: Sustainable Sites, Water Efficiency, Energy and Atmosphere, Materials and Resources, Indoor Environmental Quality. Certification is based on the number of points awarded for their compliance with these standards. Innovation in the design process can win additional points and negative points from noncompliant areas can be off set by points gained in other areas of the overall project.
One contractor admitted that they separated all of the construction waste material, went to great lengths and expense to transport it to the proper facility, and then discovered that it was all dumped into the same land fill. None of the material was recycled because the governing authorities had not implement any recycling at that facility. However, the building received LEED points based on the fact that the contractors had done their part to recycle the material. Other large projects reached targets of 95% recycling of waste materials where the proper facilities were available in larger urban centers.
In today’s real-estate market on Vancouver Island, with the potential for massive returns on investment dollars, entire communities are being built from scratch. The theory is that environmental devastation, caused by bulldozing large tracts of land, can be off-set by the ability to plan an entire town based on platinum rated ‘green’ standards. On paper it may work to move environmental points from one area to another, but on the ground when the road is blasted in and the trees are cut down the ecosystem is changed forever.
The term ‘Net-Zero’ refers to the energy consumption of a building, this along with ‘carbon neutral’ were catch phrases used repeatedly throughout the conference. In the forefront of my mine was the term “Green wash!” However, I truly believe that many of the professionals who made presentations at ‘Building Green’ want to change construction and are working towards a green future.
A strong argument was presented about sustainable building practices, since current construction practices tend to produce homes which may only last 30 to 40 years. European models have proven that residential buildings can exist for hundreds of years by using the proper care and attention to design, construction, and materials. The call was for building standards that will increase the longevity of buildings so that they are accountable to the amount of energy and resources put into them, thereby effecting environmental sustainability.
source
by Richard Boyce
This week I took a journey into unknown territory, in an environment that kept me out of the sun. I spent two days listening to architects, construction engineers, designers, municipal planners, authors of building codes, certification administrators, energy consultants, and building contractors of every discipline. I learned a great deal as one of 400 participants in the ‘Building Green in a Changing Climate’ conference and trade show held in Courtenay.
Public demand for environmental standards and accountability has sparked change in the construction industry and some companies are complying with tough standards in order to attract customers. Rising material costs, as well as an increase in operational costs for all buildings, have combined with skyrocketing energy costs. The result is that the construction industry is beginning to realize that it must seek out alternatives. In today’s market place building ‘green’ makes sense economically.
A great deal of creative and technical innovation is being generated with amazing results that will effectively revolutionize the building industry. However, only a small percentage of industrial, institutional, or residential construction projects are currently being built using green thinking and materials. The ground swell has begun and now it is up to the public to move it forward so that industry follows through with this green trend.
Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design is a market driven system, which is attempting to prove to consumers that building construction meets with the highest environmental standards. LEED is an internationally recognized rating system that encourages the construction of green buildings, administered by the Canada Green Building Council. Accredited professionals are trained and certified to monitor projects in order to award buildings with coveted ratings.
LEED has 5 principle categories by which it assesses construction projects for environmental sensitivity: Sustainable Sites, Water Efficiency, Energy and Atmosphere, Materials and Resources, Indoor Environmental Quality. Certification is based on the number of points awarded for their compliance with these standards. Innovation in the design process can win additional points and negative points from noncompliant areas can be off set by points gained in other areas of the overall project.
One contractor admitted that they separated all of the construction waste material, went to great lengths and expense to transport it to the proper facility, and then discovered that it was all dumped into the same land fill. None of the material was recycled because the governing authorities had not implement any recycling at that facility. However, the building received LEED points based on the fact that the contractors had done their part to recycle the material. Other large projects reached targets of 95% recycling of waste materials where the proper facilities were available in larger urban centers.
In today’s real-estate market on Vancouver Island, with the potential for massive returns on investment dollars, entire communities are being built from scratch. The theory is that environmental devastation, caused by bulldozing large tracts of land, can be off-set by the ability to plan an entire town based on platinum rated ‘green’ standards. On paper it may work to move environmental points from one area to another, but on the ground when the road is blasted in and the trees are cut down the ecosystem is changed forever.
The term ‘Net-Zero’ refers to the energy consumption of a building, this along with ‘carbon neutral’ were catch phrases used repeatedly throughout the conference. In the forefront of my mine was the term “Green wash!” However, I truly believe that many of the professionals who made presentations at ‘Building Green’ want to change construction and are working towards a green future.
A strong argument was presented about sustainable building practices, since current construction practices tend to produce homes which may only last 30 to 40 years. European models have proven that residential buildings can exist for hundreds of years by using the proper care and attention to design, construction, and materials. The call was for building standards that will increase the longevity of buildings so that they are accountable to the amount of energy and resources put into them, thereby effecting environmental sustainability.
source
Watching the Stern Go Under: Subprime Claims Wall Street Giants
Bankers step in, bail out Bear Stearns
Famed institution hit by run on liquidity
BARRIE MCKENNA
March 15, 2008
WASHINGTON -- U.S. banking authorities have tapped a Depression-era financial tool to save Bear Stearns & Co., Wall Street's storied fifth-largest investment bank, from succumbing to a wave of contagion sweeping through the lending industry.
The loan to the 85-year-old Bear Stearns, which survived the Great Depression and a world war, marks the first time the U.S. Federal Reserve Board has stepped in to bail out an investment bank.
After repeatedly and vehemently denying rumours of liquidity woes, Bear Stearns said it sought help from the Fed late Thursday after what analysts described as a classic run on the bank. The Fed is providing the infusion through JPMorgan Chase, Bear Stearns's main banker.
And so it goes with the U.S. credit crunch, which erupted last summer in the esoteric market for high-risk home mortgages.
Print Edition - Section Front
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Go to the Report on Business section
Officials keep insisting the problem is manageable and contained, only then to see it infect another corner of the banking industry - in the United States, Canada and around the world.
A majority of economists now believe the powerful U.S. economy has probably slipped into a recession, as a growing number of consumers and businesses run into credit trouble.
Bear Stearns, which has been stung by a series of bad bets on subprime mortgages and leveraged hedge funds, suddenly experienced "pretty broad cash outflows" on Thursday, chief executive officer Alan Schwartz conceded to investors and reporters in a hastily arranged conference call.
"Frankly, this is a bridge to a more permanent solution," he said.
Investors weren't impressed. Bear Stearns shares tumbled nearly 47 per cent to $30 (U.S.) yesterday - the largest one-day fall in its history. Standard & Poor's and other credit rating agencies scrambled to downgrade the company's debt, a move that exacerbated its financial stress.
News of the historic bailout triggered a broad sell-off on North American stock markets. The Dow Jones Industrial Average fell more than 194 points to 1,1951.09, or 1.6 per cent, a decline mirrored by markets elsewhere.
On Wall Street and elsewhere, skittish investors are continuing to flee to the safety of gold and oil futures, and away from the U.S. dollar amid widespread concern that the United States has slipped into recession.
Mr. Schwartz insisted the emergency 28-day loan would allow Bear Stearns to quickly resume normal operations. But the company is reportedly being shopped around already by financial adviser Lazard Ltd. to potential buyers, including JPMorgan and others. Other reports suggested the company could be wound down, with its best parts sold to others.
Among its mounting problems, Bear Stearns was a major creditor to the $21-billion (U.S.) Carlyle Capital hedge fund, which collapsed earlier this week after creditors lost confidence in its ability to pay its debts.
Experts worry that Bear Stearns might be just the tip of the iceberg, and that other financial institutions might be on the verge of collapse.
"The greatest credit bubble of all times has burst," said economist Ed Yardeni of New York-based Yardeni Research Inc. "The consequences are getting exacerbated by the greatest margin call in the credit markets of all times. The Fed and other government agencies really don't have much choice but to provide the greatest bailout of all times."
Rumours were swirling yesterday that Lehman Bros. might be the next U.S. investment bank to face liquidity problems.
The Bear Stearns bailout has sent "reverberations throughout all markets worldwide," said Sherry Cooper, chief economist at BMO Financial Group in Toronto.
"Not only because this is another 'too-big-to-fail' scenario, but also because it has strong implications for a domino effect in the already weakened financial services industry and beyond," Ms. Cooper wrote in a research note.
"... Other firms will likely continue to suffer the results of the credit crunch and loss of investor confidence."
The crisis at Bear Stearns comes just days before the Fed's next scheduled rate-setting meeting Tuesday in Washington. Economists had expected another half-a-percentage-point rate cut. Many now predict the Fed will have to lower its benchmark rate as much as three-quarters of a percentage-point to deal with the worsening housing slump, a possible recession and now a more extensive freeze-up of credit markets.
"Events are extremely fluid," agreed John Silvia, chief economist at Wachovia Securities. "If Bear Stearns or another major financial institution fails, a major financial panic would ensue."
The Fed would have to lend even more money to troubled financial institutions, but it would also have to "cushion the blow to the real economy," Mr. Silvia said.
Fed chairman Ben Bernanke hinted at the extreme pressure he is under as he prepared to deliver a speech on the housing market in Washington yesterday. "I've had a busy morning," he told his audience.
In a brief statement acknowledging the Bear Stearns loan, the Fed said it is "monitoring market developments closely and will continue to provide liquidity as necessary to promote the orderly functioning of the financial system."
The Fed is now throwing all of its resources at the credit problem, but, so far, with limited success. Among the Fed's main challenges: Mortgage rates are continuing to climb, even as the central banking system tries to force them down because lenders are loath to lend to anyone. And tighter credit will lead to more foreclosures, still lower house prices and a squeeze on consumers.
The Fed has already cut its key interest five times, to 3 per cent from 5¼ per cent since last August. It has also announced a series of measures to inject liquidity in problem-plagued corners of the lending industry.
The Fed, for example, this week set up a special $200-billion, 28-day lending arrangement, under a provision created in the 1930s to counteract runs on banks. Bear Stearns is its first beneficiary. The plan was announced as part of a joint effort by central banks in Canada, Europe and elsewhere to boost liquidity in the banking sector.
Under the Bear Stearns deal, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York agreed to provide an unspecified amount of secured funds to JPMorgan Chase, which in turn would make loans to Bear Stearns. JPMorgan Chase said it is "working closely with Bear Stearns on securing permanent financing or other alternatives for the company."
The bailout didn't sit well with many analysts, who complained that it creates a moral hazard to a company that took undue risks in the mortgage market.
"Instead of letting Bears Stearns get crushed, and then see the assets and talent pool get scooped up by someone else, we keep a wounded Bear on life support hanging around," remarked Barry Ritholtz, director of equity research at Fusion IQ.
"My preference is creative destruction."
Famed institution hit by run on liquidity
BARRIE MCKENNA
March 15, 2008
WASHINGTON -- U.S. banking authorities have tapped a Depression-era financial tool to save Bear Stearns & Co., Wall Street's storied fifth-largest investment bank, from succumbing to a wave of contagion sweeping through the lending industry.
The loan to the 85-year-old Bear Stearns, which survived the Great Depression and a world war, marks the first time the U.S. Federal Reserve Board has stepped in to bail out an investment bank.
After repeatedly and vehemently denying rumours of liquidity woes, Bear Stearns said it sought help from the Fed late Thursday after what analysts described as a classic run on the bank. The Fed is providing the infusion through JPMorgan Chase, Bear Stearns's main banker.
And so it goes with the U.S. credit crunch, which erupted last summer in the esoteric market for high-risk home mortgages.
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Go to the Report on Business section
Officials keep insisting the problem is manageable and contained, only then to see it infect another corner of the banking industry - in the United States, Canada and around the world.
A majority of economists now believe the powerful U.S. economy has probably slipped into a recession, as a growing number of consumers and businesses run into credit trouble.
Bear Stearns, which has been stung by a series of bad bets on subprime mortgages and leveraged hedge funds, suddenly experienced "pretty broad cash outflows" on Thursday, chief executive officer Alan Schwartz conceded to investors and reporters in a hastily arranged conference call.
"Frankly, this is a bridge to a more permanent solution," he said.
Investors weren't impressed. Bear Stearns shares tumbled nearly 47 per cent to $30 (U.S.) yesterday - the largest one-day fall in its history. Standard & Poor's and other credit rating agencies scrambled to downgrade the company's debt, a move that exacerbated its financial stress.
News of the historic bailout triggered a broad sell-off on North American stock markets. The Dow Jones Industrial Average fell more than 194 points to 1,1951.09, or 1.6 per cent, a decline mirrored by markets elsewhere.
On Wall Street and elsewhere, skittish investors are continuing to flee to the safety of gold and oil futures, and away from the U.S. dollar amid widespread concern that the United States has slipped into recession.
Mr. Schwartz insisted the emergency 28-day loan would allow Bear Stearns to quickly resume normal operations. But the company is reportedly being shopped around already by financial adviser Lazard Ltd. to potential buyers, including JPMorgan and others. Other reports suggested the company could be wound down, with its best parts sold to others.
Among its mounting problems, Bear Stearns was a major creditor to the $21-billion (U.S.) Carlyle Capital hedge fund, which collapsed earlier this week after creditors lost confidence in its ability to pay its debts.
Experts worry that Bear Stearns might be just the tip of the iceberg, and that other financial institutions might be on the verge of collapse.
"The greatest credit bubble of all times has burst," said economist Ed Yardeni of New York-based Yardeni Research Inc. "The consequences are getting exacerbated by the greatest margin call in the credit markets of all times. The Fed and other government agencies really don't have much choice but to provide the greatest bailout of all times."
Rumours were swirling yesterday that Lehman Bros. might be the next U.S. investment bank to face liquidity problems.
The Bear Stearns bailout has sent "reverberations throughout all markets worldwide," said Sherry Cooper, chief economist at BMO Financial Group in Toronto.
"Not only because this is another 'too-big-to-fail' scenario, but also because it has strong implications for a domino effect in the already weakened financial services industry and beyond," Ms. Cooper wrote in a research note.
"... Other firms will likely continue to suffer the results of the credit crunch and loss of investor confidence."
The crisis at Bear Stearns comes just days before the Fed's next scheduled rate-setting meeting Tuesday in Washington. Economists had expected another half-a-percentage-point rate cut. Many now predict the Fed will have to lower its benchmark rate as much as three-quarters of a percentage-point to deal with the worsening housing slump, a possible recession and now a more extensive freeze-up of credit markets.
"Events are extremely fluid," agreed John Silvia, chief economist at Wachovia Securities. "If Bear Stearns or another major financial institution fails, a major financial panic would ensue."
The Fed would have to lend even more money to troubled financial institutions, but it would also have to "cushion the blow to the real economy," Mr. Silvia said.
Fed chairman Ben Bernanke hinted at the extreme pressure he is under as he prepared to deliver a speech on the housing market in Washington yesterday. "I've had a busy morning," he told his audience.
In a brief statement acknowledging the Bear Stearns loan, the Fed said it is "monitoring market developments closely and will continue to provide liquidity as necessary to promote the orderly functioning of the financial system."
The Fed is now throwing all of its resources at the credit problem, but, so far, with limited success. Among the Fed's main challenges: Mortgage rates are continuing to climb, even as the central banking system tries to force them down because lenders are loath to lend to anyone. And tighter credit will lead to more foreclosures, still lower house prices and a squeeze on consumers.
The Fed has already cut its key interest five times, to 3 per cent from 5¼ per cent since last August. It has also announced a series of measures to inject liquidity in problem-plagued corners of the lending industry.
The Fed, for example, this week set up a special $200-billion, 28-day lending arrangement, under a provision created in the 1930s to counteract runs on banks. Bear Stearns is its first beneficiary. The plan was announced as part of a joint effort by central banks in Canada, Europe and elsewhere to boost liquidity in the banking sector.
Under the Bear Stearns deal, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York agreed to provide an unspecified amount of secured funds to JPMorgan Chase, which in turn would make loans to Bear Stearns. JPMorgan Chase said it is "working closely with Bear Stearns on securing permanent financing or other alternatives for the company."
The bailout didn't sit well with many analysts, who complained that it creates a moral hazard to a company that took undue risks in the mortgage market.
"Instead of letting Bears Stearns get crushed, and then see the assets and talent pool get scooped up by someone else, we keep a wounded Bear on life support hanging around," remarked Barry Ritholtz, director of equity research at Fusion IQ.
"My preference is creative destruction."
Sunday, March 16, 2008
Oil Priced: Venezuela Opts for Euros
Venezuela opts for oil contracts in euros: report
CARACAS (AFP) - Venezuelan state oil giant PDVSA has decided to sign some oil contracts in euros in the face of a plummeting dollar, local media reported, citing officials.
"There are some contracts in euros, contracts for crude, products and spot markets in euros. This is a subject which we are working on," said energy minister and Petroleos de Venezuela (PDVSA) chief, Rafael Ramirez, in an interview with the journal El Universal published Friday.
It remained unclear which oil sales would require payment in euros.
Venezuela, Latin America's leading petroleum producer, has previously backed Iran's proposals for OPEC to abandon the dollar and use the euro for oil pricing. But the Organisation of Petroleum Exporting Countries has rejected the idea, at least in the short-term.
The head of the journal Petroleum World, Elio Ohep, said the shift to euros was "good business" for Venezuela.
"PDVSA always had an interest to negotiate in dollars because the company had refineries in the United States and needed cash but currently with the euro rising, it is taking in more dollars and (Venezuelan) bolivars," he said.
The dollar hit new lows this week against the euro and yen, with the euro at 1.5669 dollars at 21000 GMT on Friday.
Venezuela produces 3.3 million barrels of oil a day, according to official figures, and 2.4 million according to the International Energy Agency. Half of its production is sold to the United States market.
CARACAS (AFP) - Venezuelan state oil giant PDVSA has decided to sign some oil contracts in euros in the face of a plummeting dollar, local media reported, citing officials.
"There are some contracts in euros, contracts for crude, products and spot markets in euros. This is a subject which we are working on," said energy minister and Petroleos de Venezuela (PDVSA) chief, Rafael Ramirez, in an interview with the journal El Universal published Friday.
It remained unclear which oil sales would require payment in euros.
Venezuela, Latin America's leading petroleum producer, has previously backed Iran's proposals for OPEC to abandon the dollar and use the euro for oil pricing. But the Organisation of Petroleum Exporting Countries has rejected the idea, at least in the short-term.
The head of the journal Petroleum World, Elio Ohep, said the shift to euros was "good business" for Venezuela.
"PDVSA always had an interest to negotiate in dollars because the company had refineries in the United States and needed cash but currently with the euro rising, it is taking in more dollars and (Venezuelan) bolivars," he said.
The dollar hit new lows this week against the euro and yen, with the euro at 1.5669 dollars at 21000 GMT on Friday.
Venezuela produces 3.3 million barrels of oil a day, according to official figures, and 2.4 million according to the International Energy Agency. Half of its production is sold to the United States market.
GR 04-45 101.9 FM 104.3 Cable 'cfuv.uvic.ca'
Monday, March 17, 2008
5:00:00 3:00 Welcome to GR, etc. As the big day draws near, the day Vancouver will kick off the 2010 winter Olympiad, working citizens there are getting a bitter foretaste of what Vancouver will soon become. Already one of Canada's least affordable addresses, dwindling rental units and intense real estate speculation in preparation for the games, is chewing up the last remaining low-income accomodations in the city, leaving growing numbers no place to go. Monte Paulsen is an award winning journalist and author, now serving as Investigative Editor to the online news site, The Tyee.ca, who contributed to the book, 'The Buying of the President 2000,' and co-authored 'Beyond the Deep: The Deadly Descent into the World's Most Dangerous Cave.' Paulsen is an Alaska native, now living in Vancouver, who has followed the effects the impending five ring circus there is already creating for that city's residents. Monte Paulsen and the poor weathering the developing Olympic storm in the first segment.
And; across the straits, Victoria too is suffering some of the same deleterious social displacement caused by the building boom. In the city it means low-rent buildings falling altogether, or being gentrified; in the areas around the city, it means the destruction of wild lands and the displacement of creatures already endangered. Nowhere is this more contentious than in Langford, haven of unbridled development, and cozy home to conflicted politicians who comfortably vote on projects that enrich they and their closest friends. Jennifer Andison is a Langford resident standing in opposition to the mayor and council and the unfettered building boom they represent. She has walked the protest picket, attended council meetings, and created a website to record and publicize the questionable actions of Langford mayor Stewart Young and his council. She recently fell afoul of the city's bylaw enforcement officer, who charged posters affixed to trees in her yard, and in her home's living room windows must come down upon threat of prosecution. Jennifer Andison and the Langford gag reflex in the second segment.
And; a free and true press is vital to the health of the body politic, but in Canada the corporate press has concentrated and solidified, clogging the arteries functioning to inform and empower the citizenry. Where once flowed that necessary information today remains a mere trickle. The Dominion is one of the few tributaries still bringing divergent views to the Canadian public's information stream; not satisfied to merely report to the nation, the editors of The Dominion are currently on the road, bringing their message to towns and cities across the country. Dru Oja Jay is a contributing editor with the paper. He's currently on the road, somewhere between the east and west coasts. Dru Oja Jay in the third segment.
And; Janine Bandcroft will be here at the bottom of the hour to bring us up to speed with some of the good goings-on in and around the lower island in the coming week. But first, Monte Paulsen and Vancouver's games without frontiers.
5:03:00 15:00 Discussion w/ Monte Paulsen
"Welcome to the program, Monte. Who is Robert Wilson?"
5:18:00 1:00 Cart(s)
5:19:00 7:00 Janine Bandcroft
5:26:00 3:00 Music
5:29:00 16:00 Discussion w/ Jennifer Andison
Welcome back to GR, etc. Jennifer Andison is a Langford resident standing in opposition to the mayor and council and the unfettered building boom they represent. She recently fell afoul of the city's bylaw enforcement officer, who charged posters affixed to trees in her yard, and in her home's living room windows must come down upon threat of prosecution.
"Welcome to the show, Jennifer. You seem to have found by accident what the prime minister of Canada has sought in earnest: A pocket of the land where pesky laws like freedom of speech don't exist! Tell us, please about your recent encounter with the guardians of Langford's bylaws."
5:45:00 2:00 Music
5:47:00 12:00 Discussion w/ Dru Oja Jay
Welcome back to GR, etc. Not satisfied to merely report to the nation, the editors of The Dominion are currently on the road, bringing their message to towns and cities across the country. Dru Oja Jay is a contributing editor with the paper. He's currently on the road, somewhere between the east and west coasts of Canada.
"Welcome to the show, Dru. How's the Dominion's 'Own Your Media Tour' going so far?"
5:59:00 1:00 Thanks to Monte Paulsen, Jennifer Andison, Dru Oja Jay, J-9; upcoming.
6:00:00 --:-- -0-
Friday, March 14, 2008
One State or Two? Neither
The Issue is Zionism
by JONATHAN COOK
March 12, 2008
Counterpunch
If the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is one of the world’s most intractable, much the same can be said of the parallel debate about whether its resolution can best be achieved by a single state embracing the two peoples living there or by a division of the land into two separate states, one for Jews and the other for Palestinans.
The philosopher Michael Neumann has dedicated two articles, in 2007 and earlier this week, for CounterPunch discrediting the one-state idea as impractical and therefore as worthless of consideration. In response, Kathy Christison has mounted a robust defence, neatly exposing the twists and turns of Neumann’s logic. I will not trouble to cover the same ground.
I want instead to address Neumann’s central argument: that it is at least possible to imagine a consensus emerging behind two states, whereas Israelis will never accept a single state. That argument, the rallying cry of most two-staters, paints the one-state crowd as inveterate dreamers and time-wasters.
The idea, Neumann writes, “that Israel would concede a single state is laughable. … There is no chance at all [Israelis] will accept a single state that gives the Palestinians anything remotely like their rights.”
According to Neumann, unlike the one-state solution, the means to realizing two states are within our grasp: the removal of the half a million Jewish settlers living in the occupied Palestinian territories. Then, he writes, “a two-state solution will, indeed, leave Palestinians with a sovereign state, because that’s what a two-state solution means. It doesn’t mean one state and another non-state, and no Palestinian proponent of a two-state solution will settle for less than sovereignty.”
There is something surprisingly naive about his arguing that, just because something is called a two-state solution, it will necessarily result in two sovereign states. What are the mimimum requirements for a state to qualify as sovereign, and who decides?
True, the various two-state solutions proposed by Ariel Sharon, Ehud Olmert and George Bush, and supported by most of the international community, would fail according to Neumann’s criterion because they were not premised on the removal of all the settlers.
But an alternative two-state solution requiring Israel’s withdrawal to the pre-1967 borders might still not concede, for example, a Palestinian army -- equipped and trained by Iran? -- to guard the borders of the West Bank and Gaza. Would that count? And how likely does Neumann think it that Israel and the US would grant that kind of sovereignty to a Palestine state?
Correctly, Neumann repeatedly reminds us that those with power are the ones who dictate solutions. In which case we can be sure that when the time is right Israel and its sponsor, the United States, will impose their own version of the two-state solution and that it will be far from the genuine article Neumann advocates.
No matter. Let us leave aside that particular somersault of logic for the moment and return to the main argument: that the creation of two states is inherently more achievable and practical than the establishment of a single state.
Strangely, however, from all the available evidence, this is not how it looks to Israel’s current leaders.
Prime minister Ehud Olmert, for example, has expressed in several speeches the fear that, should the Palestinian population under Israeli rule -- both in the occupied territories and inside Israel proper -- reach the point where it outnumbers the Jewish population, as demographers expect in the next few years, Israel will be compared to apartheid South Africa. In his words, Israel is facing an imminent and powerful “struggle for one-man-one-vote” along the lines of the anti-apartheid movement.
According to Olmert, without evasive action, political logic is drifting inexorably towards the creation of one state in Israel and Palestine. This was his sentiment as he addressed delegates to the recent Herzliya conference:
“Once we were afraid of the possibility that the reality in Israel would force a bi-national state on us. In 1948, the obstinate policy of all the Arabs, the anti-Israel fanaticism and our strength and the leadership of David Ben-Gurion saved us from such a state. For 60 years, we fought with unparalleled courage in order to avoid living in a reality of bi-nationalism, and in order to ensure that Israel exists as a Jewish and democratic state with a solid Jewish majority. We must act to this end and understand that such a [bi-national] reality is being created, and in a very short while it will be beyond our control.”
Olmert’s energies are therefore consumed with finding an alternative political program that can be sold to the rest of the world. That is the reason he, and Sharon before him, began talking about a Palestinian state. Strangely, however, neither took up the offer of the ideal two-state solution -- the kind Neumann wants -- made in 2002. Then Saudi Arabia and the rest Arab world promised Israel peace in return for its withdrawal to the pre-1967 borders. They repeated their offer last year. Israel has steadfastly ignored them.
Instead an alternative version of two states -- the bogus two-state solution -- has become the default position of Israeli politics. It requires only that Israel and the Palestinians appear to divide the land, while in truth the occupation continues and Jewish sovereignty over all of historic Palestine is not only maintained but rubber-stamped by the international community. In other words, the Gazafication of the West Bank.
When Olmert warns that without two states “Israel is finished”, he is thinking primarily about how to stop the emergence of a single state. So, if Neumann is to be believed, Olmert is a dreamer, because he fears that a one-state solution is not only achievable but dangerously close at hand. Sharon, it seems, suffered from the same delusion, given that demography was the main impulse for his disengaging from Gaza.
Or maybe both of them understood rather better than Neumann what is meant by a Jewish state, and what political conditions are incompatible with it.
In fact, the division of the land demanded by Neumann, however equitable, would be the very moment when the struggle for Israel to remain a Jewish state would enter its most critical and difficult phase. Which is precisely why Israel has blocked any meaningful division of the land so far and will continue to do so.
In the unimaginable event that the Israel were to divide the land, a Jewish state would not be able to live with the consequences of such a division for long. Eventually, the maintenance of an ethnic Israeli state would (and will) prove unsustainable: environmentally, demographically and ultimately physically. Division of the land simply “fast-forwards” the self-destructiveness inherent in a Jewish state.
Let us examine just a few of the consequences for the Jewish state of a genuine two-state solution.
First, Israel inside its recognized, shrunken borders would face an immediate and very serious water shortage. That is because, in returning the West Bank to the Palestinians, Israel would lose control of the large mountain aquifers that currently supply most of its water, not only to Israel proper but also to the Jewish settlers living illegally in the occupied territories. Israel would no longer be able to steal the water, but would be expected to negotiate for it on the open market.
Given the politics of water in the Middle East, that would be no simple matter. However impoverished the new sovereign Palestinian state was, it would lose all legitimacy in the eyes of its own population were it to sell more than a trickle of water to the Israelis.
We can understand why by examining the current water situation. At the moment Israel drains off almost all of the water provided by the rivers and aquifers inside Israel and in the occupied territories for use by its own population, allowing each Palestinian far less than the minimum amount he or she requires each day, according to the World Health Organization.
In a stark warning this month, Israel’s Water Authority reported that overdrilling has polluted with sea water most of the supply from the coastal aquifer, that is the main fresh water source inside Israel’s recognized borders.
Were Palestinians to be allowed a proper water ration from their own mountain aquifer, as well as to build a modern economy, there would not be enough left over to satisfy Israel’s first-world thirst. And that is before we consider the extra demand on water resources from all those Palestinians who choose to realize their right to return, not to their homes in Israel, but to the new sovereign Palestinian state.
In addition, for reasons that we will come to, the sovereign Jewish state would have every reason to continue its Judaization policies, trying to attact as many Jews from the rest of the world as possible, thereby further straining the region’s water resources.
The environmental unsustainability of both states seeking to absorb large populations would inevitably result in a regional water crisis. In addition, should Israeli Jews, sensing water shortages, start to leave in significant numbers, Israel would have an even more pressing reason to locate water, by fair means or foul.
It can be expected that in a short time Israel, with the fourth most powerful army in the world, would seek to manufacture reasons for war against its weaker neighbors, particularly the Palestinians but possibly also Lebanon, in a bid to steal their water.
Water shortages would, of course, be a problem facing a single state too. But, at least in one state there would be mechanisms in place to reduce such tensions, to manage population growth and economic development, and to divide water resources equitably.
Second, with the labour-intensive occupation at an end, much of the Jewish state’s huge citizen army would become surplus to defense requirements. In addition to the massive social and economic disruptions, the dismantling of the country’s military complex would fundamentally change Israel’s role in the region, damage its relationship with the only global superpower and sever its financial ties to Diaspora Jews.
Israel would no longer have the laboratories of the occupied territories for testing its military hardware, its battlefield strategies and its booming surveillance and crowd control industries. If Israel chose to fight the Palestinians, it would have to do so in a proper war, even if one between very unequal sides. Doubtless the Palestinians, like Hizbullah, would quickly find regional sponsors to arm and train their army or militias.
The experience and reputation Israel has acquired -- at least among the US military -- in running an occupation and devising new and supposedly sophisticated ways to control the “Arab mind” would rapidly be lost, and with it Israel’s usefulness to the US in managing its own long-term occupation of Iraq.
Also, Israel’s vital strategic alliance with the US in dividing the Arab world, over the issue of the occupation and by signing peace treaties with some states and living in a state of permanent war with others, would start to unravel.
With the waning of Israel’s special relationship with Washington and the influence of its lobby groups, as well as the loss of billions of dollars in annual subsidies, the Jewish Diaspora would begin to lose interest in Israel. Its money and power ebbing away, Israel might eventually slip into Middle Eastern anonymity, another Jordan. In such circumstances it would rapidly see a large exodus of privileged Ashkenazi Jews, many of whom hold second passports.
Third, the Jewish state would not be as Jewish as some might think: currently one in five Israelis is not Jewish but Palestinian. Although to realize Neumann’s two-state vision all the Jewish settlers would probably need to leave the occupied territories and return to Israel, what would be done with all those Palestinians with Israeli citizenship?
These Palestinians have been citizens of Israel for six decades and live legally on land that has belonged to their families for many generations. They are also growing in number at a rate faster than the Jewish population, the reason they are popularly referred to in Israel as a “demographic timebomb”.
Were these 1.3 million citizens to be removed from Israel by force under Neumann’s two-state arrangement, it would be a violation of international law by a democratic state on a scale unprecedented in the modern era, and an act of ethnic cleansing even larger than the 1948 war that established Israel. The question would be: why even bother advocating two states if it has to be achieved on such appalling terms?
Assuming instead that the new Jewish state is supposed to maintain, as Israel currently does, the pretence of being democratic, these citizens would be entitled to continue living on their land and exercising their rights. Inside a Jewish state that had offically ended its conflict with the Palestinians, demands would grow from Palestinian citizens for equal rights and an end to their second-class status.
Most importantly, they would insist on two rights that challenge the very basis of a Jewish state. They would expect the right, backed by international law, to be able to marry Palestinians from outside Israel and bring them to live with them. And they would want a Right of Return for their exiled relatives on a similar basis to the Law of Return for Jews.
Israel’s Jewishness would be at stake, even more so than it is today from its Palestinian minority. It can be assumed that Israel’s leaders would react with great ferocity to protect the state’s Jewishness. Eventually Israel’s democratic pretensions would have to be jettisoned and the full-scale ethnic cleansing of Palestinian citizens implemented.
Still, do these arguments against the “practicality” of Neumann’s genuine two-state arrangement win the day for the one-state solution? Would Israel’s leaders not put up an equally vicious fight to protect their ethnic privileges by preventing, as they are doing now, the emergence of a single state?
Yes, they would and they will. But that misses my point. As long as Israel is an ethnic state, it will be forced to deepen the occupation and intensify its ethnic cleansing policies to prevent the emergence of genuine Palestinian political influence -- for the reasons I cite above and for many others I don’t. In truth, both a one-state and a genuine two-state arrangement are impossible given Israel’s determination to remain a Jewish state.
The obstacle to a solution, then, is not about dividing the land but about Zionism itself, the ideology of ethnic supremacism that is the current orthodoxy in Israel. As long as Israel is a Zionist state, its leaders will allow neither one state nor two real states.
The solution, therefore, reduces to the question of how to defeat Zionism. It just so happens that the best way this can be achieved is by confronting the illusions of the two-state dreamers and explaining why Israel is in permanent bad faith about seeking peace.
In other words, if we stopped distracting ourselves with the Holy Grail of the two-state solution, we might channel our energies into something more useful: discrediting Israel as a Jewish state, and the ideology of Zionism that upholds it. Eventually the respectable façade of Zionism might crumble.
Without Zionism, the obstacle to creating either one or two states will finally be removed. And if that is the case, then why not also campaign for the solution that will best bring justice to both Israelis and Palestinians?
Jonathan Cook is a writer and journalist based in Nazareth, Israel. His new book, “Israel and the Clash of Civilisations: Iraq, Iran and the Plan to Remake the Middle East” is published by Pluto Press. His website is www.jkcook.net
Thursday, March 13, 2008
Spitzer's Fighting Speech not Reported in the Media
Spitzer Comes Out Fighting: Speech Not Reported in the Media
by Dennis Morrisseau / March 12th, 2008
Ahem!
The Spitzer Press Conference
SPITZER’S ACTUAL WORDS [Not reported by the media]
[Responding to the first question]
Well … my wife whom I love has been hurt by this, and I am very sorry for that. Very. I never intended to hurt her …
[The Governor, struggling to gather himself for nearly a minute, then continued.]
… But now I have to ask why a man’s or a woman’s sexual peccadilloes have to be splashed all over the media in this country. As though private sexual relations between men and women are news.
You know … the religious NAZIs in this country …. the so-called religious leaders … and the completely corrupt media that are always going on about this sort of thing … maybe it’s time for people to grow up.
See, I’ve got news for you. All humans are sexually active. And most of of us do have sexual relations outside our main family relationships. That may uncomfortable to hear but its true.
So-called “religious leaders,” most of whom are certainly “getting a little” on the side — sometimes with men, sometimes with women (and a LOT of politicians too); even some media moguls know this. Everybody knows this. So why is it NEWS?
I’ll tell you why: Because SEX is used to blackmail and control people by all these so-called “leaders”. They control politics with it. They use SEX for power, the same way rapists do. And that, I grant you, is a slimeball thing to do.
First they lie to convince you that sex outside marriage is always bad. Then they lie again, pretending that they themselves and other so-called “good” people never do such things. Finally, they lie when they tell you all it’s NEWS … that a political figure sought and found a bit of sexual comfort, in privacy.
Humans seek and need a lot of sexual comfort in this screwed up world that these so-called leaders have foisted on us all — every one of you does and every damned one of you knows this.
So if you want to understand our so-called religious leadership in America today … and our so-called political and MEDIA leadership. There is a WORD you should keep in mind … more clearly even than these words: MONEY and BRIBE. The word you should keep in mind is BLACKMAIL.
An awful lot of politics is controlled by blackmail.
Think Bush. Think NSA spying. That’s how they’re running the country.
[Spitzer then abruptly left the briefing room.]
* Editor: The above is, of course, a satire.
Army 2LT Morrisseau actively opposed the Vietnam War in uniform in 1967-68, eventually getting arrested for a one-man, uniformed-stand in front of the LBJ Whitehouse on 3/10/68. A week later he was seized and ordered to Vietnam; he refused, and he was again arrested. Morrisseau and his small legal team defeated the resultant court-martial; he resigned his Commission and was released from further military duty Under Honorable Conditions. Read other articles by Dennis, or visit Dennis's website.
source
Sunday, March 09, 2008
Gorilla Radio with Chris Cook, Chris Genovali, J9 ( FunDrive '08)
GR 04-44 CFUV 101.9 FM 104.3 Cable 'cfuv.uvic.ca'
Monday, March 10, 2008
FunDrive
5:00:00 8:00 Welcome to GR, etc. And welcome to FunDrive. Today marks Gorilla Radio's tenth FunDrive. Every one of those ten years, the station met its fundraising goals thanks to you. This year we've set our sights high, but we've got a few more days to go...we'll leave the usual format, etc... Janine Bandcroft is with me in the studio, and Chris Genovali of the Raincoast Conservation Society will be here to discuss the B.C. Liberal's budget and its rich diggings for B.C.'s oil and gas industry, and trade unionist and social activist, Roger Annis on the upcoming Parliamentary vote on Canada's involvement in Afghanistan. And there'll be music and more for Gorilla Radio's 2008 FunDrive show today.
5:08:00 4:00 Music
5:12:00 16:00 Welcome back to GR, etc. FunDrive reit. The provincial government released its budget recently, and most notable was the country's first carbon tax. But less publicized than the rise in petrol prices, is the offset benefits offered B.C.'s oil and gas sector. Chris Genovali is a long-time environmental campaigner and founding member of both the Clayoquot Rainforest Coalition, and the Taiga Rescue Network. His past work with the Western Canada Wilderness Committee helped establish the Sooke Hills Wilderness Park and earned him Monday Magazine’s "Person who made a Difference Award." He’s a 2002 Vancouver Island Human Rights Award winner and currently serves as Executive Director for the Raincoast Conservation Society.
"Welcome back to the show, Chris; the Campbell budget has received praise from unusually green quarters; what's in this budget for environmentally-minded folk?" 5:28:00 2:00 Cart(s)
5:30:00 8:00 Janine Bandcroft
5:38:00 4:00 Music
5:42:00 1:00 Cart(s)
4:43:00 16:00 Discussion with Roger Annis
Welcome back to GR, etc. Later this week, Parliament will hold a vote on the Conservative's motion to extend again Canada's military involvement in Afghanistan through 2011. Roger Annis is a trade unionist and social activist and member of Vancouver's Stopwar.ca coalition.
"Welcome to the show, Roger. The Manley Report informs the upcoming government motion, what did Manley recommend?"
5:59:00 1:00 Ad Lib; upcoming; housekeeping, etc.
6:00:00 --:-- -0-
-0-
Monday, Aug. 5, 2002
5:00:00 2:00 Welcome to GR etc. Canada’s fishery management record is abysmal. Governed by politics, ravaged by cut backs, and rife with incompetence, the Department of Oceans and Fisheries is simply not doing the job Canadians expect. Now, the west coast salmon fishery is threatened. The Raincoast Conservation Society is a non-profit research and public education organization working to protect natural habitat and generate public awareness of the threats B.C.’s land and ocean species face. They’ve just released “Ghost Runs: the Future of wild salmon on the north and central British Columbia” an alarming report whose warnings cannot go unheeded. Chris Genovali is a long-time environmental campaigner and founding member of both the Clayoquot Rainforest Coalition, and the Taiga Rescue Network. His past work with the Western Canada Wilderness Committee helped establish the Sooke Hills Wilderness Park and earned him Monday Magazine’s “Person who made a Difference Award” in 1998. He’s a 2002 Vancouver Island Human Rights Award winner and currently serves as Executive Director for the Raincoast Conservation Society.
Welcome to GR, etc. Some of British Columbia’s highest profile Environmental Non-Governmental Organizations (ENGO’s) have spent thousands of hours in tripartite negotiations with the provincial government and major timber interests here in efforts to create protected zones within the Great Bear Rainforest. Last week, Premier Gordon Campbell refused to endorse the deal, effectively nullifying the initiative. But, that may not be as bad a development for environmentalists as it at first appears. Chris Genovali is Executive Director for the Raincoast Conservation Society, a long-time environmental campaigner, and founding member of both the Clayoquot Rainforest Coalition, and the Taiga Rescue Network. His past work with the Western Canada Wilderness Committee helped establish the Sooke Hills Wilderness Park and earned him Monday Magazine’s “Person who made a Difference Award” in 1998. A recent study by Raincoast is highly critical of the unendorsed deal for its failure to adequately protect species’ habitat in the Great Bear. Chris Genovali and taking the bear out of the Great Bear Rainforest in the first half.
Monday, March 10, 2008
FunDrive
5:00:00 8:00 Welcome to GR, etc. And welcome to FunDrive. Today marks Gorilla Radio's tenth FunDrive. Every one of those ten years, the station met its fundraising goals thanks to you. This year we've set our sights high, but we've got a few more days to go...we'll leave the usual format, etc... Janine Bandcroft is with me in the studio, and Chris Genovali of the Raincoast Conservation Society will be here to discuss the B.C. Liberal's budget and its rich diggings for B.C.'s oil and gas industry, and trade unionist and social activist, Roger Annis on the upcoming Parliamentary vote on Canada's involvement in Afghanistan. And there'll be music and more for Gorilla Radio's 2008 FunDrive show today.
5:08:00 4:00 Music
5:12:00 16:00 Welcome back to GR, etc. FunDrive reit. The provincial government released its budget recently, and most notable was the country's first carbon tax. But less publicized than the rise in petrol prices, is the offset benefits offered B.C.'s oil and gas sector. Chris Genovali is a long-time environmental campaigner and founding member of both the Clayoquot Rainforest Coalition, and the Taiga Rescue Network. His past work with the Western Canada Wilderness Committee helped establish the Sooke Hills Wilderness Park and earned him Monday Magazine’s "Person who made a Difference Award." He’s a 2002 Vancouver Island Human Rights Award winner and currently serves as Executive Director for the Raincoast Conservation Society.
"Welcome back to the show, Chris; the Campbell budget has received praise from unusually green quarters; what's in this budget for environmentally-minded folk?" 5:28:00 2:00 Cart(s)
5:30:00 8:00 Janine Bandcroft
5:38:00 4:00 Music
5:42:00 1:00 Cart(s)
4:43:00 16:00 Discussion with Roger Annis
Welcome back to GR, etc. Later this week, Parliament will hold a vote on the Conservative's motion to extend again Canada's military involvement in Afghanistan through 2011. Roger Annis is a trade unionist and social activist and member of Vancouver's Stopwar.ca coalition.
"Welcome to the show, Roger. The Manley Report informs the upcoming government motion, what did Manley recommend?"
5:59:00 1:00 Ad Lib; upcoming; housekeeping, etc.
6:00:00 --:-- -0-
-0-
Monday, Aug. 5, 2002
5:00:00 2:00 Welcome to GR etc. Canada’s fishery management record is abysmal. Governed by politics, ravaged by cut backs, and rife with incompetence, the Department of Oceans and Fisheries is simply not doing the job Canadians expect. Now, the west coast salmon fishery is threatened. The Raincoast Conservation Society is a non-profit research and public education organization working to protect natural habitat and generate public awareness of the threats B.C.’s land and ocean species face. They’ve just released “Ghost Runs: the Future of wild salmon on the north and central British Columbia” an alarming report whose warnings cannot go unheeded. Chris Genovali is a long-time environmental campaigner and founding member of both the Clayoquot Rainforest Coalition, and the Taiga Rescue Network. His past work with the Western Canada Wilderness Committee helped establish the Sooke Hills Wilderness Park and earned him Monday Magazine’s “Person who made a Difference Award” in 1998. He’s a 2002 Vancouver Island Human Rights Award winner and currently serves as Executive Director for the Raincoast Conservation Society.
Welcome to GR, etc. Some of British Columbia’s highest profile Environmental Non-Governmental Organizations (ENGO’s) have spent thousands of hours in tripartite negotiations with the provincial government and major timber interests here in efforts to create protected zones within the Great Bear Rainforest. Last week, Premier Gordon Campbell refused to endorse the deal, effectively nullifying the initiative. But, that may not be as bad a development for environmentalists as it at first appears. Chris Genovali is Executive Director for the Raincoast Conservation Society, a long-time environmental campaigner, and founding member of both the Clayoquot Rainforest Coalition, and the Taiga Rescue Network. His past work with the Western Canada Wilderness Committee helped establish the Sooke Hills Wilderness Park and earned him Monday Magazine’s “Person who made a Difference Award” in 1998. A recent study by Raincoast is highly critical of the unendorsed deal for its failure to adequately protect species’ habitat in the Great Bear. Chris Genovali and taking the bear out of the Great Bear Rainforest in the first half.
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