Tomgram: Nick Turse, Irony Man
Back in the mid-1990s, in my book, The End of Victory Culture, I wrote the following about the adventure films of my childhood (and those of earlier decades):
"For the nonwhite, annihilation was built not just into the on-screen Hollywood spectacle but into its casting structures. Available to the Other were only four roles: the invisible, the evil, the dependent, and the expendable…. When the inhabitants of these borderlands emerged from their oases, ravines, huts, or tepees, they found that there was but one role in which a nonwhite (usually played by a white actor) was likely to come out on top, and that was the villain with his fanatical speeches and propensity for odd tortures. Only as a repository for evil could the nonwhite momentarily triumph. Whether an Indian chief, a Mexican bandit leader, or an Oriental despot, his pre-World War II essence was the same. Set against his shiny pate or silken voice, his hard eyes or false laugh, no white could look anything but good."
Having spent a recent evening in my local multiplex watching the latest superhero blockbuster, Iron Man, all I can say is: such traditions obviously die hard (even in the age of Barack Obama). The Afghans and assorted terrorists of the film, when not falling into that "invisible" category -- as backdrops for the heroics or evil acts of the real actors -- are out of central casting from a playbook of the 1930s filled with images of Fu Manchu or Ming the Merciless: Right down to that shiny bald pate, the silken voice, the hard eyes, and that propensity for "odd tortures."
It's lucky, then, that, in the real world, the Bush administration has made the decision to expand our no-charges, no-recourse, no-courts, no-lawyers prison network in Afghanistan to hold such monsters. Give Eric Schmitt and Tim Golden of the New York Times credit for their recent front-page scoop: "The Pentagon is moving forward with plans to build a new, 40-acre detention complex on the main American military base in Afghanistan, officials said, in a stark acknowledgment that the United States is likely to continue to hold prisoners overseas for years to come… [the new prison will be] a more modern and humane detention center that would usually accommodate about 600 detainees -- or as many as 1,100 in a surge -- and cost more than $60 million." The real money quote in the piece, however, lay buried inside the fold. The reporters quote an anonymous Pentagon official speaking of the infamous older American prison at Bagram Air Base where some of those "odd tortures" have taken place: "It's just not suitable. At some point, you have to say, 'That's it. This place was not made to keep people there indefinitely.'"
So, the new prison, then, is apparently for holding people "indefinitely." Lurking in that word, of course, is the logical thought that we'll just have to stay in Afghanistan indefinitely, too. Otherwise, who's going to do the necessary imprisoning? Perhaps it's worth noting as well that, at this moment, the Pentagon is also expanding its major prison in Iraq, Camp Bucca, already stuffed with up to 20,000 prisoners, to hold another 10,000, assumedly in case a future prisoner "surge" comes along, and assumedly once again "indefinitely." In fact, when it comes to prisons, the Pentagon and its contractors are the busiest of beavers. After all, they've been expanding Guantanamo in Cuba, too, while Bush administration officials talk idly about shutting that prison down. Even kids aren't immune. A recent report claims that the U.S. now holds at least 500 "juveniles," mainly in Iraq, but also in Afghanistan, and perhaps elsewhere as "imperative threats to security." (Guantanamo evidently now has no juveniles only because two prisoners have been held there long enough to grow into adulthood.)
These are expansive American facts on the ground in two occupied countries where, you might say (though you wouldn't know it from Iron Man), imprisonment is our middle name and "odd tortures" what we've built our rep on. Of course, at a time when the U.S. is hemorrhaging real jobs, Americans have made quite a living from building and expanding prisons and prison populations at home, too.
Once upon a time, there was an all-American superhero who fought for "truth, justice, and the American way." But that's passé today. As a nation, we're not much into justice anymore; what we're into is incarceration, punishment, and those "odd tortures." It's increasingly our métier, our truth, the American way. So maybe Iron Man, an arms dealer by day, is, as Nick Turse, author of the superb exposé of the new Pentagon, The Complex, indicates, exactly the right superhero to illuminate our American moment. Tom
Torturing Iron Man
The Strange Reversals of a Pentagon Blockbuster
By Nick Turse
"Liberal Hollywood" is a favorite whipping-boy of right-wingers who suppose the town and its signature industry are ever-at-work undermining the U.S. military. In reality, the military has been deeply involved with the film industry since the Silent Era. Today, however, the ad hoc arrangements of the past have been replaced by a full-scale one-stop shop, occupying a floor of a Los Angeles office building. There, the Army, Navy, Air Force, Marines, Coast Guard, and the Department of Defense itself have established entertainment liaison offices to help ensure that Hollywood makes movies the military way.
What they have to trade, especially when it comes to blockbuster films, is access to high-tech, tax-payer funded, otherwise unavailable gear. What they get in return is usually the right to alter or shape scripts to suit their needs. If you want to see the fruits of this relationship in action, all you need to do is head down to your local multiplex. Chances are that Iron Man -- the latest military-entertainment masterpiece -- is playing on a couple of screens.
For the past three weeks, Iron Man --a film produced by its comic-book parent Marvel and distributed by Paramount Pictures -- has cleaned up at the box office, taking in a staggering $222.5 million in the U.S. and $428.5 million worldwide. The movie, which opened with "the tenth biggest weekend box office performance of all time" and the second biggest for a non-sequel, has the added distinction of being the "best-reviewed movie of 2008 so far." For instance, in the New York Times, movie reviewer A.O. Scott called Iron Man "an unusually good superhero picture," while Roger Ebert wrote: "The world needs another comic book movie like it needs another Bush administration… [but] if we must have one more… ‘Iron Man' is a swell one to have." There has even been nascent Oscar buzz.
Robert Downey Jr. has been nearly universally praised for a winning performance as playboy-billionaire-merchant-of-death-genius-inventor Tony Stark, head of Stark Industries, a fictional version of Lockheed or Boeing. In the film, Stark travels to Afghanistan to showcase a new weapon of massive destruction to American military commanders occupying that country. On a Humvee journey through the Afghan backlands, his military convoy is caught up in a deadly ambush by al-Qaeda stand-ins, who capture him and promptly subject him to what Vice President Dick Cheney once dubbed "a dunk in the water," but used to be known as "the Water Torture." The object is to force him to build his Jericho weapons system, one of his "masterpieces of death," in their Tora Bora-like mountain cave complex.
As practically everyone in the world already knows, Stark instead builds a prototype metal super-suit and busts out of his cave of confinement, slaughtering his terrorist captors as he goes. Back in the U.S., a born-again Stark announces that his company needs to get out of the weapons game, claiming he has "more to offer the world than making things blow up." Yet, what he proceeds to build is, of course, a souped-up model of the suit he designed in the Afghan cave. Back inside it, as Iron Man, he then uses it to "blow up" bad guys in Afghanistan, taking on the role of a kind of (super-)human-rights vigilante. He even tangles with U.S. forces in the skies over that occupied land, but when the Air Force's sleek, ultra high-tech, F-22A Raptors try to shoot him down, he refrains from using his awesome powers of invention to blow them away. This isn't the only free pass doled out to the U.S. military in the film.
Just as America's wars in Iraq and Afghanistan continue to bring various Vietnam analogies to mind, Iron Man has its own Vietnam pedigree. Before Tony Stark landed in Afghanistan in 2008, he first lumbered forth in Vietnam in the 1960s. That was, of course, when he was still just the clunky hero of the comic book series on which the film is based. Marvel's metal man then battled that era's American enemies of choice: not al-Qaedan-style terrorists, but communists in Southeast Asia.
Versions of the stereotypical evil Asians of Iron Man's comic book world would appear almost unaltered on the big screen in 1978 in another movie punctuated by gunfire and explosions that also garnered great reviews. The Deer Hunter, an epic of loss and horror in Vietnam, eventually took home four Academy Awards, including Best Picture honors. Then, and since, however, the movie has been excoriated by antiwar critics for the way it turned history on its head in its use of reversed iconic images that seemingly placed all guilt for death and destruction in Vietnam on America's enemies.
Most famously, it appropriated a then-unforgettable Pulitzer prize-winning photo of Lt. Colonel Nguyen Ngoc Loan, South Vietnam's national police chief, executing an unarmed, bound prisoner during the Tet Offensive with a point blank pistol shot to the head. In the film, however, it was the evil enemy which made American prisoners do the same to themselves as they were forced to play Russian Roulette for the amusement of their sadistic Vietnamese captors (something that had no basis in reality).
The film Iron Man is replete with such reversals, starting with the obvious fact that, in Afghanistan, it is Americans who have imprisoned captured members of al-Qaeda and the Taliban (as well as untold innocents) in exceedingly grim conditions, not vice-versa. It is they who, like Tony Stark, have been subjected to the Bush administration's signature "harsh interrogation technique." While a few reviewers have offhandedly alluded to the eeriness of this screen choice, Iron Man has suffered no serious criticism for taking the imprisonment practices, and most infamous torture, of the Bush years and superimposing it onto America's favorite evil-doers. Nor have critics generally thought to point out that, while, in the film, the nefarious Obadiah Stane, Stark's right hand man, is a double-dealing arms dealer who is selling high-tech weapons systems to the terrorists in Afghanistan (and trying to kill Stark as well), two decades ago the U.S. government played just that role. For years, it sent advanced weapons systems -- including Stinger missiles, one of the most high-tech weapons of that moment -- to jihadis in Afghanistan so they could make war on one infidel superpower (the Soviet Union), before setting their sights on another (the United States). And while this took place way back in the 1980s, it shouldn't be too hard for film critics to recall – since it was lionized in last year's celebrated Tom Hanks' film Charlie Wilson's War.
In the cinematic Marvel Universe, however, the U.S. military, which runs the notorious prison at Bagram airbase in Afghanistan, where so many have been imprisoned, abused, and, in some cases, have even died, receives a veritable get out of jail free card. And you don't need to look very closely to understand why -- or why the sleek U.S. aircraft in the film get a similar free pass from Iron Man, even when they attack him, or why terrorists and arms dealers take the fall for what the U.S. has done in the real world.
If they didn't, you can be sure that Iron Man wouldn't be involved in a blue-skies ballet with F-22A Raptors in the movie's signature scene and that the filmmakers would never have been able to shoot at Edwards Air Force base -- a prospect which could have all but grounded Iron Man, since, as director Jon Favreau put it, Edwards was "the best back lot you could ever have." Favreau, in fact, minced no words in his ardent praise for the way working with the Air Force gave him access to the "best stuff" and how filming on the base brought "a certain prestige to the film." Perhaps in exchange for the U.S. Air Force's collaboration, there was an additional small return favor: Iron Man's confidant, sidekick, and military liaison, Lt. Col. James "Rhodey" Rhodes -- another hero of the film -- is now an Air Force man, not the Marine he was in the comic.
With the box office numbers still pouring in and the announcement of sequels to come, the arrangement has obviously worked out well for Favreau, Marvel, Paramount -- and the U.S. Air Force. Before the movie was released, Master Sergeant Larry Belen, the superintendent of technical support for the Air Force Test Pilot School and one of many airmen who auditioned for a spot in the movie, outlined his motivation to aid the film: "I want people to walk away from this movie with a really good impression of the Air Force, like they got about the Navy seeing Top Gun."
Air Force captain Christian Hodge, the Defense Department's project officer for Iron Man, may have put it best, however, when he predicted that, once the film appeared, the "Air Force is going to come off looking like rock stars." Maybe the Air Force hasn't hit the Top Gun-style jackpot with Iron Man, but there can be no question that, in an American world in which war-fighting doesn't exactly have the glitz of yesteryear, Iron Man is certainly a military triumph. As Chuck Vinch noted in a review published in the Air Force Times, "The script… will surely have the flyboy brass back at the Pentagon trading high fives -- especially the scene in which Iron Man dogfights in the high clouds with two F-22 Raptors."
Coming on the heels of last year's military-aided mega-spectacular Transformers, the Pentagon is managing to keep a steady stream of pro-military blockbusters in front of young eyes during two dismally unsuccessful foreign occupations that grind on without end. In his Iron Man review, Roger Ebert called the pre-transformation Tony Stark, "the embodiment of the military-industrial complex that President Eisenhower warned against in 1961 -- a financial superhero for whom war is good business, and whose business interests guarantee there will always be a market for war."
Here's the irony that Ebert missed: What the film Iron Man actually catches is the spirit of the successor "complex," which has leapt not only into the cinematic world of superheroes, but also into the civilian sphere of our world in a huge way. Today, almost everywhere you look, whether at the latest blockbuster on the big screen or what's on much smaller screens in your own home -- likely made by a defense contractor like Sony, Samsung, Panasonic or Toshiba -- you'll find the Pentagon or its corporate partners. In fact, from the companies that make your computer to those that produce your favorite soft drink, many of the products in your home are made by Defense Department contractors -- and, if you look carefully, you don't even need the glowing eyes of an advanced "cybernetic helmet," like Iron Man's, to see them.
Nick Turse is the associate editor and research director of Tomdispatch.com. He has written for the Los Angeles Times, the San Francisco Chronicle, Adbusters, the Nation, and regularly for Tomdispatch.com. His first book, The Complex, an exploration of the new military-corporate complex in America was recently published in the American Empire Project series by Metropolitan Books.
Copyright 2008 Nick Turse
Tuesday, May 20, 2008
Keating Five, McCain, and the Failure of Banking Regulation
Amid McCain's new status, old scandals stir
Critics wonder what he learned from Keating 5
By Michael Kranish, Globe Staff | February 28, 2008
WASHINGTON - As William K. Black watches John McCain move toward the Republican presidential nomination, he thinks of a day 21 years ago that he considers one of the most troubling of his life.
Black, a senior federal savings and loan regulator at the time, attended a meeting at which he felt McCain and four other senators pressured federal regulators to back off from investigating the troubled Lincoln Savings and Loan.
"I remain very upset that what they did caused such damage," said Black, now a professor at the University of Missouri at Kansas City, recalling how Lincoln's bankruptcy cost the government $3 billion. Moreover, he said he believes McCain intervened partly because his wife had invested money with Lincoln chairman Charles Keating, a campaign contributor who let the McCains use his home in the Bahamas.
The story of how the "Keating Five" senators allegedly pressured regulators to lay off a failing Arizona S&L became a major scandal, and marked a turning point in McCain's life - the near-death of his political career followed by his eventual rebirth as a crusader for campaign finance reform.
The events of 1987, when McCain met with regulators, and 1991, when the Senate Ethics Committee concluded that he used "poor judgment" in the matter, are only dimly remembered by many.
But McCain's emergence as the likely GOP nominee, combined with the rising volume of anti- lobbying rhetoric in the presidential campaign, has brought renewed attention to the Keating Five case, prompting questions about what McCain learned from it, what he's accepted was wrong, and whether he now is stepping back from some of his own scrutiny of his past errors.
McCain also has faced fresh criticism for pushing the Federal Communications Commission to make a decision in a 1999 case affecting another major campaign donor, Paxson Communications. Responding to recent coverage of that case, his campaign issued a statement last week saying the Arizona senator has "never done favors for special interests."
That declaration appeared at odds with McCain's previous acknowledgment that he made errors in the Keating Five case, which he called in his 2002 autobiography the "worst mistake of my life." The McCain campaign was asked repeatedly over a weeklong period to reconcile the two statements, but declined to respond to that or other questions related to the Keating episode.
McCain has also seemed to soften his earlier statements about being influenced by political donors and lobbyists. In 2000, McCain told the Globe: "People give money to buy access. We're all tainted by this system. . . . They have access, and therefore they have influence. It corrupts the system. And I'm a victim of it, too." But at a press conference on Feb. 21, McCain said: "The question is . . . do they have excess or unwarranted influence? And certainly no one ever has, in my conduct of my public life and conduct of my legislative agenda."
Black, however, maintains that the Keating case was a textbook example of politicians, McCain among them, serving a major donor. And Dennis DeConcini, a former Democratic senator from Arizona and another of the Keating Five who hosted the key meeting in his office, said in an interview that McCain has gotten a relatively "free ride" even though DeConcini insists that McCain was the "most culpable" of the senators because he had the closest relationship with Keating.
McCain met Keating in 1982, during McCain's successful run for Congress, and soon began accepting offers from Keating to fly McCain's family on a corporate plane to Keating's house in the Bahamas. McCain did not pay for most of the trips until years later, when the matter became public.
Keating, meanwhile, complained regularly to McCain that a proposed regulation would hurt his business. Known as the "direct investment" rule, it limited the amount that savings-and-loan institutions could invest from their assets. In 1985, after having "heard frequently from Charlie on the matter," McCain decided that Keating's complaints "were sound enough to warrant our assistance." He cosponsored a resolution sought by Keating, but it failed to postpone the regulation, McCain wrote in his autobiography.
By then, Keating was one of McCain's most important benefactors; McCain received $112,000 in campaign donations from Keating and his Lincoln associates, mostly between 1982 and 1986.
In the summer of 1986, while McCain was running for the Senate, the banking executive wrote him letters castigating the regulators. "The [bank board] is a mad dog turned loose in a police state," Keating wrote in one of them. Weeks later, McCain accepted another trip aboard Keating's jet to the Bahamas.
"I genuinely liked him and enjoyed being around him, especially on those occasions when Cindy and I and our oldest child, Meghan, were invited to his family's vacation home in the Bahamas," McCain wrote in his book. "I was never concerned that the time I spent enjoying Charlie's company would raise public doubts about my judgment."
With McCain having failed to postpone the regulation limiting investments by a savings and loan, Keating wanted him and other senators to get the Federal Home Loan Bank Board to grant Lincoln an exemption from the rule. McCain subsequently attended two meetings with regulators.
McCain said he felt he had a responsibility to a constituent whose company had 2,000 employees. Yet McCain had reason to be wary. His closeness to Keating had been an issue in his 1986 campaign, and aides urged him not to go to the meetings.
Four senators, including McCain, met with Edwin Gray, the chairman of the Federal Home Loan Bank Board in Washington that April in 1987. When Gray returned from the meeting, he told Black he was "very upset" that the senators were trying to pressure him, according to Black's Senate testimony. Gray told Black to attend a follow-up meeting and take notes. Gray could not be reached for comment.
A week later, five senators, including McCain, met with Black and three other regulators at DeConcini's office.
"I don't want any part of our conversation to be improper," McCain said, according to Black's notes. Then he launched into a complaint about how regulators were conducting an examination of Lincoln's finances. "It seems to me, from talking to many folks in Arizona, that there's a problem," McCain said, according to Black's notes.
Black later told the Senate Ethics Committee that the actions of the five senators were clearly "improper."
"This was an institution that is probably the worst institution in America," Black said, referring to Lincoln. Instead of trying to help "bring it under control, five US Senators were pushing us in the opposite direction."
McCain, in his autobiography, said he regrets staying at the meeting. He wrote that he should have left when one of the regulators said the meeting was "very unusual" and that he "really shouldn't have come back" after learning that the regulators were sending the matter to the Justice Department.
Months later, questions emerged about why McCain did not reimburse Keating for all the Bahamas vacations. McCain said he thought that his wife, Cindy, had written checks for a number of trips, but documentation could not be found for any except the 1986 trip. McCain agreed to pay $13,433.
In addition, the Arizona Republic reported that Cindy McCain and her father had invested $359,100 in a shopping mall for which Keating was the principal backer. When reporters questioned the investment, John McCain wrote in his autobiography, he "shouted at them, cursed them, and eventually slammed the phone down on them. It was ridiculously immature behavior."
The Senate Ethics Committee determined that McCain, along with then-Senator John Glenn of Ohio, "exercised poor judgment." The committee found that others had gone further, ruling that DeConcini and Senator Donald Riegle of Michigan "gave the appearance of being improper" and recommending Senator Alan Cranston of California for censure.
Robert Bennett, the committee counsel, has said the pronouncement against McCain was harsh and the result of "pure politics" by Democrats on the panel. Bennett now is working for McCain to help respond to questions about the senator's efforts in 1999 on behalf of Paxson Communications. Bennett did not respond to requests for comment.
In 2000, the Globe reported that McCain, in 1999, had pushed the FCC to act on Paxson's request for permission to buy a television station; in that case, McCain had received $20,000 in Paxson donations and flew aboard a Paxson jet. McCain's actions raised questions at the time about whether he had learned from his Keating experience. McCain stressed that he never suggested how the FCC should rule on the matter.
McCain has said he has learned the importance of avoiding the appearance of impropriety. He said in his autobiography he would not intervene with regulators or advocate "anything for any purpose that doesn't serve an obvious public interest." He eventually renounced the practice of flying on corporate jets, but has stood by his general support of deregulation of financial institutions.
During both his 2000 and 2008 campaigns, McCain has said on many occasions aboard his "Straight Talk Express" campaign bus that he learned from the Keating experience and that it turned him into a proponent of campaign finance reform. Nonetheless, on a recent campaign swing, he acknowledged he would be forever linked to the scandal. The Keating Five, he said, "will be on my tombstone."
source
Critics wonder what he learned from Keating 5
By Michael Kranish, Globe Staff | February 28, 2008
WASHINGTON - As William K. Black watches John McCain move toward the Republican presidential nomination, he thinks of a day 21 years ago that he considers one of the most troubling of his life.
Black, a senior federal savings and loan regulator at the time, attended a meeting at which he felt McCain and four other senators pressured federal regulators to back off from investigating the troubled Lincoln Savings and Loan.
"I remain very upset that what they did caused such damage," said Black, now a professor at the University of Missouri at Kansas City, recalling how Lincoln's bankruptcy cost the government $3 billion. Moreover, he said he believes McCain intervened partly because his wife had invested money with Lincoln chairman Charles Keating, a campaign contributor who let the McCains use his home in the Bahamas.
The story of how the "Keating Five" senators allegedly pressured regulators to lay off a failing Arizona S&L became a major scandal, and marked a turning point in McCain's life - the near-death of his political career followed by his eventual rebirth as a crusader for campaign finance reform.
The events of 1987, when McCain met with regulators, and 1991, when the Senate Ethics Committee concluded that he used "poor judgment" in the matter, are only dimly remembered by many.
But McCain's emergence as the likely GOP nominee, combined with the rising volume of anti- lobbying rhetoric in the presidential campaign, has brought renewed attention to the Keating Five case, prompting questions about what McCain learned from it, what he's accepted was wrong, and whether he now is stepping back from some of his own scrutiny of his past errors.
McCain also has faced fresh criticism for pushing the Federal Communications Commission to make a decision in a 1999 case affecting another major campaign donor, Paxson Communications. Responding to recent coverage of that case, his campaign issued a statement last week saying the Arizona senator has "never done favors for special interests."
That declaration appeared at odds with McCain's previous acknowledgment that he made errors in the Keating Five case, which he called in his 2002 autobiography the "worst mistake of my life." The McCain campaign was asked repeatedly over a weeklong period to reconcile the two statements, but declined to respond to that or other questions related to the Keating episode.
McCain has also seemed to soften his earlier statements about being influenced by political donors and lobbyists. In 2000, McCain told the Globe: "People give money to buy access. We're all tainted by this system. . . . They have access, and therefore they have influence. It corrupts the system. And I'm a victim of it, too." But at a press conference on Feb. 21, McCain said: "The question is . . . do they have excess or unwarranted influence? And certainly no one ever has, in my conduct of my public life and conduct of my legislative agenda."
Black, however, maintains that the Keating case was a textbook example of politicians, McCain among them, serving a major donor. And Dennis DeConcini, a former Democratic senator from Arizona and another of the Keating Five who hosted the key meeting in his office, said in an interview that McCain has gotten a relatively "free ride" even though DeConcini insists that McCain was the "most culpable" of the senators because he had the closest relationship with Keating.
McCain met Keating in 1982, during McCain's successful run for Congress, and soon began accepting offers from Keating to fly McCain's family on a corporate plane to Keating's house in the Bahamas. McCain did not pay for most of the trips until years later, when the matter became public.
Keating, meanwhile, complained regularly to McCain that a proposed regulation would hurt his business. Known as the "direct investment" rule, it limited the amount that savings-and-loan institutions could invest from their assets. In 1985, after having "heard frequently from Charlie on the matter," McCain decided that Keating's complaints "were sound enough to warrant our assistance." He cosponsored a resolution sought by Keating, but it failed to postpone the regulation, McCain wrote in his autobiography.
By then, Keating was one of McCain's most important benefactors; McCain received $112,000 in campaign donations from Keating and his Lincoln associates, mostly between 1982 and 1986.
In the summer of 1986, while McCain was running for the Senate, the banking executive wrote him letters castigating the regulators. "The [bank board] is a mad dog turned loose in a police state," Keating wrote in one of them. Weeks later, McCain accepted another trip aboard Keating's jet to the Bahamas.
"I genuinely liked him and enjoyed being around him, especially on those occasions when Cindy and I and our oldest child, Meghan, were invited to his family's vacation home in the Bahamas," McCain wrote in his book. "I was never concerned that the time I spent enjoying Charlie's company would raise public doubts about my judgment."
With McCain having failed to postpone the regulation limiting investments by a savings and loan, Keating wanted him and other senators to get the Federal Home Loan Bank Board to grant Lincoln an exemption from the rule. McCain subsequently attended two meetings with regulators.
McCain said he felt he had a responsibility to a constituent whose company had 2,000 employees. Yet McCain had reason to be wary. His closeness to Keating had been an issue in his 1986 campaign, and aides urged him not to go to the meetings.
Four senators, including McCain, met with Edwin Gray, the chairman of the Federal Home Loan Bank Board in Washington that April in 1987. When Gray returned from the meeting, he told Black he was "very upset" that the senators were trying to pressure him, according to Black's Senate testimony. Gray told Black to attend a follow-up meeting and take notes. Gray could not be reached for comment.
A week later, five senators, including McCain, met with Black and three other regulators at DeConcini's office.
"I don't want any part of our conversation to be improper," McCain said, according to Black's notes. Then he launched into a complaint about how regulators were conducting an examination of Lincoln's finances. "It seems to me, from talking to many folks in Arizona, that there's a problem," McCain said, according to Black's notes.
Black later told the Senate Ethics Committee that the actions of the five senators were clearly "improper."
"This was an institution that is probably the worst institution in America," Black said, referring to Lincoln. Instead of trying to help "bring it under control, five US Senators were pushing us in the opposite direction."
McCain, in his autobiography, said he regrets staying at the meeting. He wrote that he should have left when one of the regulators said the meeting was "very unusual" and that he "really shouldn't have come back" after learning that the regulators were sending the matter to the Justice Department.
Months later, questions emerged about why McCain did not reimburse Keating for all the Bahamas vacations. McCain said he thought that his wife, Cindy, had written checks for a number of trips, but documentation could not be found for any except the 1986 trip. McCain agreed to pay $13,433.
In addition, the Arizona Republic reported that Cindy McCain and her father had invested $359,100 in a shopping mall for which Keating was the principal backer. When reporters questioned the investment, John McCain wrote in his autobiography, he "shouted at them, cursed them, and eventually slammed the phone down on them. It was ridiculously immature behavior."
The Senate Ethics Committee determined that McCain, along with then-Senator John Glenn of Ohio, "exercised poor judgment." The committee found that others had gone further, ruling that DeConcini and Senator Donald Riegle of Michigan "gave the appearance of being improper" and recommending Senator Alan Cranston of California for censure.
Robert Bennett, the committee counsel, has said the pronouncement against McCain was harsh and the result of "pure politics" by Democrats on the panel. Bennett now is working for McCain to help respond to questions about the senator's efforts in 1999 on behalf of Paxson Communications. Bennett did not respond to requests for comment.
In 2000, the Globe reported that McCain, in 1999, had pushed the FCC to act on Paxson's request for permission to buy a television station; in that case, McCain had received $20,000 in Paxson donations and flew aboard a Paxson jet. McCain's actions raised questions at the time about whether he had learned from his Keating experience. McCain stressed that he never suggested how the FCC should rule on the matter.
McCain has said he has learned the importance of avoiding the appearance of impropriety. He said in his autobiography he would not intervene with regulators or advocate "anything for any purpose that doesn't serve an obvious public interest." He eventually renounced the practice of flying on corporate jets, but has stood by his general support of deregulation of financial institutions.
During both his 2000 and 2008 campaigns, McCain has said on many occasions aboard his "Straight Talk Express" campaign bus that he learned from the Keating experience and that it turned him into a proponent of campaign finance reform. Nonetheless, on a recent campaign swing, he acknowledged he would be forever linked to the scandal. The Keating Five, he said, "will be on my tombstone."
source
Monday, May 19, 2008
Regarding the Aforesaid: Stephen Harper's Aid to Israel's Defense
Harper’s Extreme Posture No Way to Support Israel
By Haroon Siddiqui
12/05/08 "Toronto Star" -- 11/05/08 -- Stephen Harper equates criticism of Israel with anti-Semitism.
“Unfortunately, Israel at 60 remains a country under threat - threatened by those groups and regimes who deny to this day its right to exist,” he told a Toronto celebration marking the anniversary.
“And why? Look beyond the thinly veiled rationalizations: Because they hate Israel, just as they hate the Jewish people.”
Many groups and regimes, such as Hamas, Hezbollah and Iran, do deny Israel’s right to exist. But not all others do so solely for the reasons cited by Harper. Some hold back recognition as a negotiating tool in the Palestinian dispute.
The Prime Minister also told radio station CFRB: “My fear is what I see happening in some circles is anti-Israeli sentiment, really just as a thinly disguised veil for good old-fashioned anti-Semitism.” He added that he saw anti-Semitic sentiments during the 2006 Israeli invasion of Lebanon among “some elements in our political system, even some Members of Parliament.”
On Friday, Bob Rae, Liberal foreign affairs critic, asked in the Commons as to which MPs the Prime Minister was referring.
Rae did not get an answer.
One wonders what Harper would make of those Israelis, as well as Jewish Canadians and others, who do strongly support Israel but also question some Israeli policies.
What would he say about the Alliance of Concerned Jewish Canadians? This newly formed umbrella organization of 23 groups, critical of some Israeli policies, obviously does not “hate Israel,” or “hate the Jewish people.”
Harper’s position is designed to silence and delegitimize even the mildest criticism of Israeli policies.
It’s an undemocratic formulation that the Israelis themselves would reject. There’s a sturdy debate in Israel on all aspects of its policies in the Occupied Territories.
In Rae’s words, Harper is saying, “there’s a very close association between being anti-Israel and being anti-Semitic … I don’t think it’s fair to say that everybody who has or expresses concerns about Israeli foreign policy is anti-Semitic.
“If that were true, three-quarters of the population of Israel would be anti-Semitic.”
Harper’s comments came the same day as the Israeli ambassador to Canada, Alan Baker, told the Globe and Mail and later CTV News that growing Muslim communities in France, Britain and Scandinavia have had an impact on the foreign policies of those nations and that he “fears” the same in Canada.
The 2001 census put the number of Muslims at 580,000 and of Jewish Canadians at 330,000.
Baker: “Do you expect from these greater numbers that they will absorb themselves into Canadian society as Canadians or that they’ll try to push Canadians to adopt their own values and principles?”
What values? That they may exercise their democratic right to lobby their own government?
Baker also complained that he or other Israelis speaking on university campuses may face demonstrations or be prevented from speaking, as happened to Ehud Barak in 2004 at Concordia University.
First, that Montreal cancellation was much criticized. Second, Baker did not say when and where he was prevented from speaking.
There’s an ongoing debate in Canada over when freedom of speech crosses the line into hate. The argument gets played out in universities over Israel Apartheid Week. Despite pressure to cancel it, the universities of Toronto, York and Ryerson have opted for academic freedom but McMaster axed the event.
Baker singled out “a Muslim Member of Parliament,” Omar Alghabra, as having been “outspoken in his hostility toward Israel.” Later, he called Alghabra’s views “less than friendly,” without citing any statement by the MP.
“I’ve got nothing against the fact that Muslims are members of the Canadian Parliament. But it worries me that the type of political influence that we’re seeing in Britain, in France, might ultimately reach the Canadian political system.”
Baker seems to want what Harper wants: Pro-Israeli voices should be heard loud and clear, but those who might question this or that policy of Israel should be silenced.
This is not how Canada works.
All groups, regardless of their religion, race or ethnicity, are free to speak, and the government of Canada makes foreign policy decisions in the interest of all Canadians.
Canada is not Israel where Israeli Arabs are second-class citizens.
For all of Baker’s nervousness, our foreign policy has been pro-Israeli dating back to Paul Martin in 2004. Harper has just made it more so.
Liberal Leader Stéphane Dion and Public Safety Minister Stockwell Day have done well to call Baker’s comments inappropriate.
Carl Rosenberg of Vancouver, a regular reader of this column, was so angry with Baker that he emailed me the following:
“Canada’s policy on the Middle East should be debated on its own merits, without resorting to obnoxious statements about the demographics of one or another religious or ethnic community … I wonder what the response would be if an ambassador to Canada from any one of several Arab states were to express concern about the impact of Jewish Canadians on Canada’s Middle East policy?”
We’d tell them to mind their own business and not interfere in Canadian affairs.
Haroon Siddiqui writes for the Toronto Star.
© 2008 Toronto Star
By Haroon Siddiqui
12/05/08 "Toronto Star" -- 11/05/08 -- Stephen Harper equates criticism of Israel with anti-Semitism.
“Unfortunately, Israel at 60 remains a country under threat - threatened by those groups and regimes who deny to this day its right to exist,” he told a Toronto celebration marking the anniversary.
“And why? Look beyond the thinly veiled rationalizations: Because they hate Israel, just as they hate the Jewish people.”
Many groups and regimes, such as Hamas, Hezbollah and Iran, do deny Israel’s right to exist. But not all others do so solely for the reasons cited by Harper. Some hold back recognition as a negotiating tool in the Palestinian dispute.
The Prime Minister also told radio station CFRB: “My fear is what I see happening in some circles is anti-Israeli sentiment, really just as a thinly disguised veil for good old-fashioned anti-Semitism.” He added that he saw anti-Semitic sentiments during the 2006 Israeli invasion of Lebanon among “some elements in our political system, even some Members of Parliament.”
On Friday, Bob Rae, Liberal foreign affairs critic, asked in the Commons as to which MPs the Prime Minister was referring.
Rae did not get an answer.
One wonders what Harper would make of those Israelis, as well as Jewish Canadians and others, who do strongly support Israel but also question some Israeli policies.
What would he say about the Alliance of Concerned Jewish Canadians? This newly formed umbrella organization of 23 groups, critical of some Israeli policies, obviously does not “hate Israel,” or “hate the Jewish people.”
Harper’s position is designed to silence and delegitimize even the mildest criticism of Israeli policies.
It’s an undemocratic formulation that the Israelis themselves would reject. There’s a sturdy debate in Israel on all aspects of its policies in the Occupied Territories.
In Rae’s words, Harper is saying, “there’s a very close association between being anti-Israel and being anti-Semitic … I don’t think it’s fair to say that everybody who has or expresses concerns about Israeli foreign policy is anti-Semitic.
“If that were true, three-quarters of the population of Israel would be anti-Semitic.”
Harper’s comments came the same day as the Israeli ambassador to Canada, Alan Baker, told the Globe and Mail and later CTV News that growing Muslim communities in France, Britain and Scandinavia have had an impact on the foreign policies of those nations and that he “fears” the same in Canada.
The 2001 census put the number of Muslims at 580,000 and of Jewish Canadians at 330,000.
Baker: “Do you expect from these greater numbers that they will absorb themselves into Canadian society as Canadians or that they’ll try to push Canadians to adopt their own values and principles?”
What values? That they may exercise their democratic right to lobby their own government?
Baker also complained that he or other Israelis speaking on university campuses may face demonstrations or be prevented from speaking, as happened to Ehud Barak in 2004 at Concordia University.
First, that Montreal cancellation was much criticized. Second, Baker did not say when and where he was prevented from speaking.
There’s an ongoing debate in Canada over when freedom of speech crosses the line into hate. The argument gets played out in universities over Israel Apartheid Week. Despite pressure to cancel it, the universities of Toronto, York and Ryerson have opted for academic freedom but McMaster axed the event.
Baker singled out “a Muslim Member of Parliament,” Omar Alghabra, as having been “outspoken in his hostility toward Israel.” Later, he called Alghabra’s views “less than friendly,” without citing any statement by the MP.
“I’ve got nothing against the fact that Muslims are members of the Canadian Parliament. But it worries me that the type of political influence that we’re seeing in Britain, in France, might ultimately reach the Canadian political system.”
Baker seems to want what Harper wants: Pro-Israeli voices should be heard loud and clear, but those who might question this or that policy of Israel should be silenced.
This is not how Canada works.
All groups, regardless of their religion, race or ethnicity, are free to speak, and the government of Canada makes foreign policy decisions in the interest of all Canadians.
Canada is not Israel where Israeli Arabs are second-class citizens.
For all of Baker’s nervousness, our foreign policy has been pro-Israeli dating back to Paul Martin in 2004. Harper has just made it more so.
Liberal Leader Stéphane Dion and Public Safety Minister Stockwell Day have done well to call Baker’s comments inappropriate.
Carl Rosenberg of Vancouver, a regular reader of this column, was so angry with Baker that he emailed me the following:
“Canada’s policy on the Middle East should be debated on its own merits, without resorting to obnoxious statements about the demographics of one or another religious or ethnic community … I wonder what the response would be if an ambassador to Canada from any one of several Arab states were to express concern about the impact of Jewish Canadians on Canada’s Middle East policy?”
We’d tell them to mind their own business and not interfere in Canadian affairs.
Haroon Siddiqui writes for the Toronto Star.
© 2008 Toronto Star
Israel's Contemptible "Friends"
The contemptible foreign nincompoops and “businessmen” backing Israel
By Uri Avnery
18 May 2008
Uri Avnery looks at the contemptible foreign nincompoops – Angela Merkel, George Bush, John McCain's mentor John Hagee, among others – who grovel at Israel’s feet, and the disreputable “businessmen” who finance its politicians.
Lately, we [Israelis] are flooded with friends. The Great of the Earth, past and present, come here to flatter us, to fawn on us, to grovel at our feet.
"God, save me from my friends, my enemies I can deal with myself!" says an old prayer.
They disgust me.
Let’s take, for example, the German chancellor, Angela Merkel, who made the pilgrimage to Jerusalem. Her pandering was free of any criticism and she reached new heights of obsequiousness in her speech to the Knesset. I was invited to attend. I relinquished the privilege.
I shall also pass the pleasure when I am invited to the session with the hyper-active Nicholas Sarkozy, who will try to break the flattery record of his German rival.
Before that we were visited by John McCain's mentor, the evangelical pastor John Hagee, the one who described the Catholic Church as a monster. Oozing sanctimonious flattery from every pore, he forbade us, in the name of (his) God, to give up even one inch of the Holy Land and commanded us to fight to the last drop of (our) blood.
However, not one of them has come close to George Bush. Approaching the end of the most disastrous presidency in the annals of the republic, he really forced a lighted match into the hand of our government, encouraging it to ignite the barrel of gunpowder between our feet.
But the list of present-day leaders who participate in the pandering competition pales in comparison with the long parade of has-beens who lay siege to our gates.
A world-wide swarm of has-beens is flying from place to place like bees, all for one and one for all. This week they alighted in Jerusalem, on the invitation of has-been No.1, Shimon Peres, a politician who in all the 84 years of his life has never won an election, and who was finally handed, out of sheer compassion, the largely meaningless title of President of Israel.
The common denominator of this group is that their prestige at home is close to nil, while their standing abroad is sky-high. Their mutual adoration compensates them for the lack of respect in their own countries.
One of the senior members of this club is Tony Blair, who has been pushed from power in his own country but is not content to enjoy his pension and raise roses. As a consolation prize he has been granted the pleasure of playing around with our conflict. Every few weeks he convenes a press conference to present the good tidings of his phenomenal success in ameliorating the lot of the Palestinians, while the actual situation in the occupied territories goes from bad to worse. Our security establishment treats him like a bore who has to be thrown a crumb from time to time to keep him happy.
In the conference that took place this week there were also some good people, but the scene was stolen by the has-beens, from the retired war criminal Henry Kissinger to the dethroned peace hero Mikhail Gorbachev (whom I still consider a hero for preventing bloodshed during the collapse of the Soviet empire.) Pity to see him in this company.
All the participants in this orgy heaped mountains of fawning adulation on Israel. Not one of them had a word of criticism. No occupation. No settlements. No Gaza blockade. No daily killings. Just a wonderful, peace-loving state that the bad, bad terrorists want to throw into the sea.
Not one of the guests stood up to warn us against going on with the present policy. Not one of them stood up to proclaim the truth: that the continuation of this policy may lead our state to disaster.
He who has friends like these has no need for enemies. A person who sees his friend playing Russian roulette and offers him bullets – is he a real friend? One who sees his friend standing on the brink of an abyss and tells him "go ahead" – is he a friend?
Among the fraternity of flatterers, the ones that attracted the most attention were the Jewish billionaires from America (who also paid for the extravaganza).
Several of them were summoned to police headquarters immediately on arrival to give evidence on the affair that is rocking Israel now – the corruption investigation of Ehud Olmert.
A smell of corruption has accompanied Olmert right from his beginnings in politics, 45 years ago. But this time, the smell is overpowering. The police has made it known that the American-Jewish billionaire Moshe Morris Talansky has been supplying him with cash-filled envelopes for years.
Where have we seen this before? Of course, in American movies and TV-series. Somebody opens a suitcase stuffed with bundles of banknotes. The donor invariably belongs to the Mafia, and the recipient is generally a corrupt politician. Can it be that Olmert has never seen these films – he of all people, who started his career with demagogic speeches denouncing "organized crime"?
But it is not Olmert who interests me in this affair so much as Talansky.
He belongs to a species of "Israel-loving" billionaires, most of them resident in the US, but also in Canada and Switzerland, Austria and Australia and other places.
They are all Israeli patriots. They are all philanthropists. All contribute millions to Israeli politicians. And almost all of them support our extreme right.
What makes them run? What induces these billionaires to do what they are doing?
A research in depth discovers that a great many of them made their money in dark corners. Some are gambling barons, casino-owners with all the inevitable connections with violence, crime and exploitation. One at least made his fortunes from brothels. Another was involved in a scandal involving old people's homes. Yet another is a scion of a family who made their money bootlegging during prohibition days. Some are arms merchants of the most despicable kind, selling weapons to the political gangs which sow death and destruction in Africa.
But money, as is well known, does not smell.
Most of the multi-millionaires of this kind feel that they are not receiving the honour due to them. Their co-billionaires, high society people, treat them with disdain. A person reaching this position is not satisfied with money alone. He craves honour. Such honour can be bought in Israel, on the cheap.
Israel is selling honour of all kinds, no questions asked. For a suitable donation, even a gambling-hell owner will be received by the prime minister, dine with the president, put his name on a university building.
(Once I wrote a light-hearted piece about the Third Temple, may God build it soon, Amen: the Rosenstein Holy of Holiest, the Rosenzweig altar, the Rosenberg cherubim, etc.)
Just after the 1967 war, during the great days of our generals, a new fashion spread among the best Jewish billionaires: to keep an Israeli general, in order to present him to friends as a pet. Some generals found no fault in this. It was owed to them, after all.
One billionaire kept Ezer Weizman, the air force hero (who had to resign from the presidency when it came out). Two billionaires adopted Ariel Sharon and set him up in the largest farm in the country. Shimon Peres was no general (and not even a soldier), but at least three billionaires took him under their golden wings.
No billionaire ever lost money by keeping an Israeli general, supporting an Israeli politician or making a generous donation to an Israeli cause. Ego is ego, patriotism is patriotism, but business is business.
That's where the corruption set in. A person who donates millions to a politician in Israel (or, for that matter, the US, or Italy or any other place on the globe) knows full well that he will get it back with interest. When the politician becomes a minister, or prime minister, or president, the supporter has hit the jackpot.
In politics there is no innocent donation. One way or another, the donor will reap his reward – many times over. That's true in the US, that's true in Italy, that's true in Israel, too. If the donor declares to the police that he has no business interests in Israel, all it means is that they must dig deeper.
The Olmert affair confirms anew what we have known for a long time: the fuel Israeli politics runs on is not just money, but money from abroad. To win primaries and campaign in elections, a candidate needs millions, and these almost always come from foreign donors.
Foreign billionaires financed Olmert in the party primaries, and they financed him in the general elections, in which he was assured of becoming prime minister. After being elected, he started Lebanon War II, with all its death and destruction. It can be said that American Jewish billionaires killed the soldiers and civilians, Israeli and Lebanese, who lost their lives in the war.
In his speech to the Jerusalem conference, Shimon Peres lauded Israeli chutzpa. What we need is more chutzpa, he said. That sounded fetching and naughty, but was pure poppycock.
I want to speak about another chutzpa. Not metaphorical, but real. Simple chutzpa. The chutzpa of billionaires in New York and Geneva and all the other places who interfere in our elections and determine the fate of our nation. The chutzpa of donating for a war in which not their sons, but ours, are killed. The chutzpa of sending billions for the establishment of settlements in the occupied Palestinian territories, and especially in Jerusalem, which are put there for the express purpose of preventing peace and imposing on us a permanent war, a war that threatens our future – not theirs.
Let's be clear: I am not criticizing well-meaning donors, who feel a moral need to contribute to a hospital wing or a university building in Israel. I appreciate people who send a few hundred dollars to a political cause close to their heart. I object to foreign billionaires who aspire to dictate the direction of our state.
Perhaps in other countries, too, politicians receive donations from foreign sources. But it is generally a marginal phenomenon. Here it is a major factor.
That is one of the ill effects of the definition of Israel as a "Jewish State". Because of this, these donors do not look like what they are – impertinent foreigners who interfere in our lives and corrupt our state – but like "warmhearted Jews" who support a state that belongs to them as well.
Gideon Levy has recently written an article in which he begged them to "leave us alone". Being a less refined person than he, I shall say this in a ruder way: Go home and take your money with you. We are not for sale. Stop trying to manage our life (and death)!
Uri Avnery is an Israeli journalist, writer and peace activist.
By Uri Avnery
18 May 2008
Uri Avnery looks at the contemptible foreign nincompoops – Angela Merkel, George Bush, John McCain's mentor John Hagee, among others – who grovel at Israel’s feet, and the disreputable “businessmen” who finance its politicians.
Lately, we [Israelis] are flooded with friends. The Great of the Earth, past and present, come here to flatter us, to fawn on us, to grovel at our feet.
"God, save me from my friends, my enemies I can deal with myself!" says an old prayer.
They disgust me.
Let’s take, for example, the German chancellor, Angela Merkel, who made the pilgrimage to Jerusalem. Her pandering was free of any criticism and she reached new heights of obsequiousness in her speech to the Knesset. I was invited to attend. I relinquished the privilege.
I shall also pass the pleasure when I am invited to the session with the hyper-active Nicholas Sarkozy, who will try to break the flattery record of his German rival.
Before that we were visited by John McCain's mentor, the evangelical pastor John Hagee, the one who described the Catholic Church as a monster. Oozing sanctimonious flattery from every pore, he forbade us, in the name of (his) God, to give up even one inch of the Holy Land and commanded us to fight to the last drop of (our) blood.
However, not one of them has come close to George Bush. Approaching the end of the most disastrous presidency in the annals of the republic, he really forced a lighted match into the hand of our government, encouraging it to ignite the barrel of gunpowder between our feet.
But the list of present-day leaders who participate in the pandering competition pales in comparison with the long parade of has-beens who lay siege to our gates.
A world-wide swarm of has-beens is flying from place to place like bees, all for one and one for all. This week they alighted in Jerusalem, on the invitation of has-been No.1, Shimon Peres, a politician who in all the 84 years of his life has never won an election, and who was finally handed, out of sheer compassion, the largely meaningless title of President of Israel.
The common denominator of this group is that their prestige at home is close to nil, while their standing abroad is sky-high. Their mutual adoration compensates them for the lack of respect in their own countries.
One of the senior members of this club is Tony Blair, who has been pushed from power in his own country but is not content to enjoy his pension and raise roses. As a consolation prize he has been granted the pleasure of playing around with our conflict. Every few weeks he convenes a press conference to present the good tidings of his phenomenal success in ameliorating the lot of the Palestinians, while the actual situation in the occupied territories goes from bad to worse. Our security establishment treats him like a bore who has to be thrown a crumb from time to time to keep him happy.
In the conference that took place this week there were also some good people, but the scene was stolen by the has-beens, from the retired war criminal Henry Kissinger to the dethroned peace hero Mikhail Gorbachev (whom I still consider a hero for preventing bloodshed during the collapse of the Soviet empire.) Pity to see him in this company.
All the participants in this orgy heaped mountains of fawning adulation on Israel. Not one of them had a word of criticism. No occupation. No settlements. No Gaza blockade. No daily killings. Just a wonderful, peace-loving state that the bad, bad terrorists want to throw into the sea.
Not one of the guests stood up to warn us against going on with the present policy. Not one of them stood up to proclaim the truth: that the continuation of this policy may lead our state to disaster.
He who has friends like these has no need for enemies. A person who sees his friend playing Russian roulette and offers him bullets – is he a real friend? One who sees his friend standing on the brink of an abyss and tells him "go ahead" – is he a friend?
Among the fraternity of flatterers, the ones that attracted the most attention were the Jewish billionaires from America (who also paid for the extravaganza).
Several of them were summoned to police headquarters immediately on arrival to give evidence on the affair that is rocking Israel now – the corruption investigation of Ehud Olmert.
A smell of corruption has accompanied Olmert right from his beginnings in politics, 45 years ago. But this time, the smell is overpowering. The police has made it known that the American-Jewish billionaire Moshe Morris Talansky has been supplying him with cash-filled envelopes for years.
Where have we seen this before? Of course, in American movies and TV-series. Somebody opens a suitcase stuffed with bundles of banknotes. The donor invariably belongs to the Mafia, and the recipient is generally a corrupt politician. Can it be that Olmert has never seen these films – he of all people, who started his career with demagogic speeches denouncing "organized crime"?
But it is not Olmert who interests me in this affair so much as Talansky.
He belongs to a species of "Israel-loving" billionaires, most of them resident in the US, but also in Canada and Switzerland, Austria and Australia and other places.
They are all Israeli patriots. They are all philanthropists. All contribute millions to Israeli politicians. And almost all of them support our extreme right.
What makes them run? What induces these billionaires to do what they are doing?
A research in depth discovers that a great many of them made their money in dark corners. Some are gambling barons, casino-owners with all the inevitable connections with violence, crime and exploitation. One at least made his fortunes from brothels. Another was involved in a scandal involving old people's homes. Yet another is a scion of a family who made their money bootlegging during prohibition days. Some are arms merchants of the most despicable kind, selling weapons to the political gangs which sow death and destruction in Africa.
But money, as is well known, does not smell.
Most of the multi-millionaires of this kind feel that they are not receiving the honour due to them. Their co-billionaires, high society people, treat them with disdain. A person reaching this position is not satisfied with money alone. He craves honour. Such honour can be bought in Israel, on the cheap.
Israel is selling honour of all kinds, no questions asked. For a suitable donation, even a gambling-hell owner will be received by the prime minister, dine with the president, put his name on a university building.
(Once I wrote a light-hearted piece about the Third Temple, may God build it soon, Amen: the Rosenstein Holy of Holiest, the Rosenzweig altar, the Rosenberg cherubim, etc.)
Just after the 1967 war, during the great days of our generals, a new fashion spread among the best Jewish billionaires: to keep an Israeli general, in order to present him to friends as a pet. Some generals found no fault in this. It was owed to them, after all.
One billionaire kept Ezer Weizman, the air force hero (who had to resign from the presidency when it came out). Two billionaires adopted Ariel Sharon and set him up in the largest farm in the country. Shimon Peres was no general (and not even a soldier), but at least three billionaires took him under their golden wings.
No billionaire ever lost money by keeping an Israeli general, supporting an Israeli politician or making a generous donation to an Israeli cause. Ego is ego, patriotism is patriotism, but business is business.
That's where the corruption set in. A person who donates millions to a politician in Israel (or, for that matter, the US, or Italy or any other place on the globe) knows full well that he will get it back with interest. When the politician becomes a minister, or prime minister, or president, the supporter has hit the jackpot.
In politics there is no innocent donation. One way or another, the donor will reap his reward – many times over. That's true in the US, that's true in Italy, that's true in Israel, too. If the donor declares to the police that he has no business interests in Israel, all it means is that they must dig deeper.
The Olmert affair confirms anew what we have known for a long time: the fuel Israeli politics runs on is not just money, but money from abroad. To win primaries and campaign in elections, a candidate needs millions, and these almost always come from foreign donors.
Foreign billionaires financed Olmert in the party primaries, and they financed him in the general elections, in which he was assured of becoming prime minister. After being elected, he started Lebanon War II, with all its death and destruction. It can be said that American Jewish billionaires killed the soldiers and civilians, Israeli and Lebanese, who lost their lives in the war.
In his speech to the Jerusalem conference, Shimon Peres lauded Israeli chutzpa. What we need is more chutzpa, he said. That sounded fetching and naughty, but was pure poppycock.
I want to speak about another chutzpa. Not metaphorical, but real. Simple chutzpa. The chutzpa of billionaires in New York and Geneva and all the other places who interfere in our elections and determine the fate of our nation. The chutzpa of donating for a war in which not their sons, but ours, are killed. The chutzpa of sending billions for the establishment of settlements in the occupied Palestinian territories, and especially in Jerusalem, which are put there for the express purpose of preventing peace and imposing on us a permanent war, a war that threatens our future – not theirs.
Let's be clear: I am not criticizing well-meaning donors, who feel a moral need to contribute to a hospital wing or a university building in Israel. I appreciate people who send a few hundred dollars to a political cause close to their heart. I object to foreign billionaires who aspire to dictate the direction of our state.
Perhaps in other countries, too, politicians receive donations from foreign sources. But it is generally a marginal phenomenon. Here it is a major factor.
That is one of the ill effects of the definition of Israel as a "Jewish State". Because of this, these donors do not look like what they are – impertinent foreigners who interfere in our lives and corrupt our state – but like "warmhearted Jews" who support a state that belongs to them as well.
Gideon Levy has recently written an article in which he begged them to "leave us alone". Being a less refined person than he, I shall say this in a ruder way: Go home and take your money with you. We are not for sale. Stop trying to manage our life (and death)!
Uri Avnery is an Israeli journalist, writer and peace activist.
Towering Riches
You and your puny salary
You think a $100K salary is a lot? $500K? Please. The truly wealthy scoff at your paltry breadcrumbs
By Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist
Friday, May 9, 2008
Then it came to pass that I stumbled across this story from Forbes magazine, which is officially called "Forbes" but is actually called "Forbes oh my God we worship ruthless CEOs like shiny meth in the summertime," and among the glittering ads for luxury intergalactic travel and sleek private jets and $50K Rolexes and big phallic yachts and surreal 20-page ad inserts for Abu Dhabi megadevelopments, there was an article about the new home being built in Mumbai right now for Mukesh Ambani, the fifth wealthiest man in the world.
Behold, you and your puny little life and your minuscule little salary and tiny little human skeleton are mere scraps, crumbs, dust mites on a dog when compared to this giant petrochemical stud. Forbes estimates Ambani's net worth at about $43 billion, below Bill Gates and Warren Buffett but above God and Shiva and most of the major planetary constellations, and his wealth is almost enough to power the entire Iraq war for a month. So you know it's a lot.
Of course it's all from petrochemicals. Of course it's all in Mumbai. Of course you've never heard of him or his company, Reliance Industries, because it's one of those nefarious megapower supercorporations that block out all life and own entire governments and hold presidents in their pockets and yank the levers that make the world spin and tilt and groan. Therefore plebes like us know as much about its true weight and influence as an army ant knows about a whirlpool galaxy.
Here's what you need to know about Ambani's new home: It is no home at all. It is actually a tower, 27 stories high, ultramodern gleaming glass and steel and completely unprecedented weirdness.
Oh yes, and here's the other thing: It is the world's first billion-dollar personal residence. Actually, $2 billion. Imagine the fanciest, most ridiculously overpampered, seriously egomaniacal hotel you can possibly think of, and dip it in solid gold. Then sprinkle it with diamonds and Bugatti Veyrons and the fine, tender pelts of a million baby seals. That's the parking garage.
Bill Gates' cute little 66,000 square-foot spread in Seattle? Oprah's lavishly bloviated $43 million palace in Montecito? Larry Ellison's $300 million orgy of land in Woodside and Malibu? Pshaw! Child's play. Barely enough to pay for the unicorn-skin hand towels stacked in the bathrooms of Ambani's shiny little stick in the ground.
Two billion dollars. This is not "money is no object." This is "money is the only object," so ostentatious and obscene it quickly flies past arrogance and absurdity and becomes this fascinating case study, a bizarre artifact of extreme capitalism, otherworldly and strange, like some sort of giant bioluminescent octopus that dominates the ocean floor and swallows sperm whales whole and tries to scare all the other little fishies but is still just, you know, a big ugly cephalopod.
So you stare at these photos and read the article's details and you start getting dizzy from the sheer scale of it all, from the lack of perspective and coherence and reality, as you realize just one of the sofas on just one of the floors of Ambani's tower costs what you make in an entire year, and your head begins to spin and the nausea begins to swell until you close the damnable magazine and slam yourself back to the reality, shaking and mumbling, yes, well, but is there anything at all resembling happiness there?
It's the thing you have to ask, lest you go just a little insane: Really, isn't a life like Ambani's just a bit silly, a glittery charade, full of backslapping and sly business deals and giant inheritances, and do you really want that? Really? Here is your billion dollars to spend on your new home. Fun! For about a week. Then it's all, OK, so I can line my nine pools in solid Venetian marble and own 40,000 plasma TVs and have one entire floor dedicated to my taxidermied giraffe collection. Yawn.
It all makes delightful contrast to the recent, awkwardly titillating article in this very newspaper that revealed the annual salaries of various Bay Area workers, from the head of the University of California school system ($591K) to the San Francisco police chief ($250K) to all those surprisingly well-paid firefighters (well over $200K), on down to the guy who runs the city's pothole-filling crew (over $100K and absolutely worth every penny because oh my God, potholes), and on back up to one of the pitchers for the Giants, Barry Zito, who rakes in a cool $14 million per season because, well, he's a pro athlete. They're supposed to be caricatures of real humans.
So, you get to compare and contrast. You get to look up and down and sidelong, from Ambani to the local police lieutenant to your local barista and then down at your own paycheck, or trust fund, or stock portfolio, or complete lack thereof, and wonder how you fit in and what it all means, and with any luck you quickly realize the futility and the danger of measuring yourself in this way because, well, what then? Do you measure your success, your life against Ambani? Against the guy who administers the San Francisco Health Department? The average American? Or how about the average citizen of India, Ambani's homeland?
Because here is the bottom line, same as it ever was: No matter what you do in life and no matter where you go and how much you make and how many harems of strippers you can afford to have standing by, there's always someone who makes and does and lives far more exotically and expensively and ridiculously than you. I mean, obviously.
And at the same time, if you're reading this column right now with your $5 latte and your clean running water and functioning limbs and intact teeth, you can rest assured that there are roughly 3 billion people on the planet who subsist on about a dollar a month who see you just about exactly as you see Ambani. Which is to say: pampered and wealthy in the extreme.
And then you realize, of course, that money is no measure of anything that truly matters, really. It's merely another form of energy, a nice expression of ego, either all-consuming and destructive or capable of tremendous joy and good. Often, it's both.
And while dumping $2 billion on a single home is certainly a curious and perhaps slightly sad ethical choice — despite how it is, of course, the ultimate expression of capitalist ego — to me, tattooing a dollar sign anywhere on your life pretty much guarantees you a life lived on Macbethian terms: a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury and diamond-crusted toilet seats, signifying nothing.
Mark Morford's Notes & Errata column appears every Wednesday and Friday on SFGate and in the Datebook section of the San Francisco Chronicle. To get on the e-mail list for this column, please click here and remove one article of clothing.
Mark's column also has an RSS feed and an archive of past columns, which includes another small photo of Mark potentially sufficient for you to recognize him in the street and give him gifts. He also has a raw Facebook page, but has little idea why.
http://sfgate.com/
cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/g/a/2008/05/09/notes050908.DTL
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/
article.cgi?f=/g/a/2008/05/09/notes050908.DTL&type=printable
You think a $100K salary is a lot? $500K? Please. The truly wealthy scoff at your paltry breadcrumbs
By Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist
Friday, May 9, 2008
Then it came to pass that I stumbled across this story from Forbes magazine, which is officially called "Forbes" but is actually called "Forbes oh my God we worship ruthless CEOs like shiny meth in the summertime," and among the glittering ads for luxury intergalactic travel and sleek private jets and $50K Rolexes and big phallic yachts and surreal 20-page ad inserts for Abu Dhabi megadevelopments, there was an article about the new home being built in Mumbai right now for Mukesh Ambani, the fifth wealthiest man in the world.
Behold, you and your puny little life and your minuscule little salary and tiny little human skeleton are mere scraps, crumbs, dust mites on a dog when compared to this giant petrochemical stud. Forbes estimates Ambani's net worth at about $43 billion, below Bill Gates and Warren Buffett but above God and Shiva and most of the major planetary constellations, and his wealth is almost enough to power the entire Iraq war for a month. So you know it's a lot.
Of course it's all from petrochemicals. Of course it's all in Mumbai. Of course you've never heard of him or his company, Reliance Industries, because it's one of those nefarious megapower supercorporations that block out all life and own entire governments and hold presidents in their pockets and yank the levers that make the world spin and tilt and groan. Therefore plebes like us know as much about its true weight and influence as an army ant knows about a whirlpool galaxy.
Here's what you need to know about Ambani's new home: It is no home at all. It is actually a tower, 27 stories high, ultramodern gleaming glass and steel and completely unprecedented weirdness.
Oh yes, and here's the other thing: It is the world's first billion-dollar personal residence. Actually, $2 billion. Imagine the fanciest, most ridiculously overpampered, seriously egomaniacal hotel you can possibly think of, and dip it in solid gold. Then sprinkle it with diamonds and Bugatti Veyrons and the fine, tender pelts of a million baby seals. That's the parking garage.
Bill Gates' cute little 66,000 square-foot spread in Seattle? Oprah's lavishly bloviated $43 million palace in Montecito? Larry Ellison's $300 million orgy of land in Woodside and Malibu? Pshaw! Child's play. Barely enough to pay for the unicorn-skin hand towels stacked in the bathrooms of Ambani's shiny little stick in the ground.
Two billion dollars. This is not "money is no object." This is "money is the only object," so ostentatious and obscene it quickly flies past arrogance and absurdity and becomes this fascinating case study, a bizarre artifact of extreme capitalism, otherworldly and strange, like some sort of giant bioluminescent octopus that dominates the ocean floor and swallows sperm whales whole and tries to scare all the other little fishies but is still just, you know, a big ugly cephalopod.
So you stare at these photos and read the article's details and you start getting dizzy from the sheer scale of it all, from the lack of perspective and coherence and reality, as you realize just one of the sofas on just one of the floors of Ambani's tower costs what you make in an entire year, and your head begins to spin and the nausea begins to swell until you close the damnable magazine and slam yourself back to the reality, shaking and mumbling, yes, well, but is there anything at all resembling happiness there?
It's the thing you have to ask, lest you go just a little insane: Really, isn't a life like Ambani's just a bit silly, a glittery charade, full of backslapping and sly business deals and giant inheritances, and do you really want that? Really? Here is your billion dollars to spend on your new home. Fun! For about a week. Then it's all, OK, so I can line my nine pools in solid Venetian marble and own 40,000 plasma TVs and have one entire floor dedicated to my taxidermied giraffe collection. Yawn.
It all makes delightful contrast to the recent, awkwardly titillating article in this very newspaper that revealed the annual salaries of various Bay Area workers, from the head of the University of California school system ($591K) to the San Francisco police chief ($250K) to all those surprisingly well-paid firefighters (well over $200K), on down to the guy who runs the city's pothole-filling crew (over $100K and absolutely worth every penny because oh my God, potholes), and on back up to one of the pitchers for the Giants, Barry Zito, who rakes in a cool $14 million per season because, well, he's a pro athlete. They're supposed to be caricatures of real humans.
So, you get to compare and contrast. You get to look up and down and sidelong, from Ambani to the local police lieutenant to your local barista and then down at your own paycheck, or trust fund, or stock portfolio, or complete lack thereof, and wonder how you fit in and what it all means, and with any luck you quickly realize the futility and the danger of measuring yourself in this way because, well, what then? Do you measure your success, your life against Ambani? Against the guy who administers the San Francisco Health Department? The average American? Or how about the average citizen of India, Ambani's homeland?
Because here is the bottom line, same as it ever was: No matter what you do in life and no matter where you go and how much you make and how many harems of strippers you can afford to have standing by, there's always someone who makes and does and lives far more exotically and expensively and ridiculously than you. I mean, obviously.
And at the same time, if you're reading this column right now with your $5 latte and your clean running water and functioning limbs and intact teeth, you can rest assured that there are roughly 3 billion people on the planet who subsist on about a dollar a month who see you just about exactly as you see Ambani. Which is to say: pampered and wealthy in the extreme.
And then you realize, of course, that money is no measure of anything that truly matters, really. It's merely another form of energy, a nice expression of ego, either all-consuming and destructive or capable of tremendous joy and good. Often, it's both.
And while dumping $2 billion on a single home is certainly a curious and perhaps slightly sad ethical choice — despite how it is, of course, the ultimate expression of capitalist ego — to me, tattooing a dollar sign anywhere on your life pretty much guarantees you a life lived on Macbethian terms: a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury and diamond-crusted toilet seats, signifying nothing.
Mark Morford's Notes & Errata column appears every Wednesday and Friday on SFGate and in the Datebook section of the San Francisco Chronicle. To get on the e-mail list for this column, please click here and remove one article of clothing.
Mark's column also has an RSS feed and an archive of past columns, which includes another small photo of Mark potentially sufficient for you to recognize him in the street and give him gifts. He also has a raw Facebook page, but has little idea why.
http://sfgate.com/
cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/g/a/2008/05/09/notes050908.DTL
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/
article.cgi?f=/g/a/2008/05/09/notes050908.DTL&type=printable
Gorilla Radio with Chris Cook - Hal Sisson, Aida Mashari, J9 May 19, 2008
GR 04-54 CFUV 101.9 104.3 Cable 'cfuv.uvic.ca'
Monday May 19, 2008
5:00:00 3:00 Welcome to GR, etc. Happy Victoria Day Victoria! Yes, today is that one day set aside each year to honour our fair city's namesake, the late Queen Victoria, Empress of India, Protector of the Faith, etc. As befitting an imperial fete, the hoi polloi lined the streets of the city to pay homage to convoys of Chamber of Commerce-approved floats, while being berated by representatives of the newer empire, phalanxes of American high school marching bands, their blaring, brassy marshal tunes a reminder of just why I hate a parade. Just why these American kids come up here yearly to pay homage to a dead monarch, the epitome of all their young republic fought to overthrow, however remains a bit of a mystery, like so much about our cousins south. Those paragons of truth, justice, and the American way have it seems, in these last years, lost their way. Nearly seven years after the fateful 9/11 attacks, the charade first floated by the Bush administration to explain the infamy of that day persists, few yet daring to question the absurdity of the Emperor's squirrely tale. Hal Sisson is a Victoria-based author and member of the city's 9/11 Truth Movement. He's a former newspaper reporter, lawyer, and author of numerous books, including: 'The Big Bamboozle,' 'Caverns of the Cross,' and 'Modus Operandi 9/11,' a fictional accounting of some of the strange facts on the ground surrounding the crime of the century ignored by investigators and the media. Hal Sisson's latest book is, 'Potshots,' an examination of that other great charade, the so-called 'War on Drugs.' Hal Sisson in the first half.
And; tagging along with the brass bands parading with military precision along the city's thoroughfare were too representatives of Canada Out of Afghanistan, a grassroots movement of Canadians opposing the nation's involvement in the war against, and occupation of, that benighted land. Aida Mashari is one of those opposed, and she joins us in the second half.
And; Janine Bandcroft will be here at the bottom of the hour to bring us up to speed with all that's good to do in and around Victoira in the coming week. But first, Hal Sisson and taking Potshots at official fictions and perfidious public policy.
5:03:00 22:00 Discussion w/ Hal Sisson
"Welcome back to the show, Hal. Prime Minister Stephen Harper boiled down to a single line the reason, for those citizens too dense to support it, for Canada's continued military entanglement in Afghanistan to this: 9/11. From this, all else he admits follows. Hal, you and Victoria's 9/11 Truth have drafted another challenge to the official narrative on this; what's it about?"
5:25:00 1:00 Cart(s)
5:26:00 8:00 Janine Bandcroft
5:34:00 3:00 Music
5:37:00 22:00 Discussion w/ Aida Mashari
Welcome back to GR, etc. Tagging along with the brass bands parading with military precision along the city's thoroughfare were too representatives of Canada Out of Afghanistan, a grassroots movement of Canadians opposing the nation's involvement in the war against and occupation of that benighted land. Aida Mashari is one of those opposed and she joins us now.
"Welcome to the program, Aida. How was the parade?"
5:59:00 1:00 Thanks to Hal Sisson, Aida Mashari, J9; upcoming.
6:00:00 --:-- -0-
Hal Sisson, the author of The Big Bamboozle; Caverns of the Cross; Coots, Codgers and Curmudgeons; A Fat Lot of Good; Garage Sale of the Mind, Maquiladora Mayhem; You Should Live So Long, Sorry 'Bout That, A Fowler View of Life, and Modus Operandi 9/11 lives with his wife Doreen in Victoria, BC, Canada.
9/11 Truth is the single most important issue in all our lives right now - as Canadians, as North Americans, and as a citizens of this planet. Used as a pretext for the genocide in Iraq and Afghanistan, this event is also a turning point and a catalyst for the bigger plan to implement an elitist one world government - including the destruction of civil rights and liberties through anti-terrorism laws, no-fly lists, and the ever increasing militarization of the police force. The coming introduction of RFID based biometric driver's licenses and passports will in effect create a papers please society where you are tracked at all times. These actions and others represent an incremental slide into a police state. All of these changes are based on the lies of 9/11. As long as we do not deal directly with this lie, we will continually be forced to play a part in all its subsequent crimes, and pay the ultimate price of our freedom because of willful ignorance or moral cowardice. Those rights and freedoms we enjoy were paid for in sacrifice by courageous individuals in our past - if we truly value those blessings we will honour their memory and make it our duty to see they are not lost to our own descendants. As part of a growing network of Canadian movements seeking the truth about the events surrounding 9/11, you are welcome to join us in our quest for truth and justice.
VICTORIA , BC, May 21, 2007 - An anti-war group performing street theatre was an unofficial addition to the Victoria Day Parade in downtown Victoria today. Three “prisoners”, dressed in orange jumpsuits and black hoods, were handcuffed and chained together. The “prisoners”, who were accompanied by a “soldier” wearing army fatigues, marched in the parade until they were detained by police. The street theatre was organized by Victoria’s Canada Out of Afghanistan Campaign.
As thousands in Victoria gathered to celebrate a statutory Canadian holiday marking Queen Victoria’s birthday, the street theatre was a stark reminder of Canada’s controversial Afghanistan mission. Canada’s military is presently accused of having violated Geneva Convention protocols in Afghanistan by giving local security forces captured Taliban suspects, several of whom have declared they were tortured. NATO forces arbitrarily detain suspected “terrorists” in compounds that include Bagram (Afghanistan), Abu Ghraib (Iraq), Millhaven Penitentiary (Ontario) and the infamous Guantanamo. Many people gathered to watch the parade clapped in support of the anti-war group as it was forced to exit by the Victoria police, yelling "Let them speak. Leave them in the parade. Leave them alone." . The street theatre was took place in front of Victoria's mayor, Chief of Police and other municipal officials sitting in front of Centennial Square. A flyer distributed to hundreds of bystanders explained the growing opposition across the nation to Canada’s military operations in Afghanistan.
“The human rights abuses inflicted on so-called ‘terrorists’ in afghan prisons is just the tip of the iceberg of this shameful mission”, stated Tamara Herman, an organizer with the Canada Out of Afghanistan Campaign's and a 'prisoner' in the street theatre performance. “A skyrocketing civilian death toll, rape and sexual harassment at the hands of foreign troops, a corrupt regime, and the health hazards associated with depleted uranium munitions are other reasons to oppose the Afghanistan mission. This is a war for oil and power. We are not there to liberate anyone. And as usual, the world’s poorest people are the casualties”. For information, interviews or to view additional photos go to: www.canadaoutofafghanistan.ca or email outofafghanistan@yahoo.ca.
Sunday, May 18, 2008
Uranium Alert: Crow Butte Expansion Plans Slowed
NRC says mine opponents’ contentions merit attention
http://www.thechadronnews.com/
articles/2008/05/14/chadron/headlines/news969.txt
By GEORGE LEDBETTER, Record Editor Wednesday, May 14, 2008
Plans for expansion of the Crow Butte uranium mine to a 2,100 acre near the cemetery north of Crawford will face additional scrutiny by the federal Nuclear Regulatory Commission as the result of a ruling released April 29.
After considering issues raised at a January hearing in Chadron, a three member panel of NRC administrative law judges concluded that concerns about potential contamination of groundwater supplies and threats to human health raised by opponents of the mine expansion deserved further consideration and oral arguments.
The panel also agreed to hear additional arguments on the opponent’s objection to issuing a permit for uranium mining to a foreign owned corporation. Mine owner and operator Cameco Corp., is a Canadian company and the world’s largest uranium producer.
As part of the ruling, the judges said that the Western Nebraska Resources Coalition and Owe Aku/Bring Back the Way, a non-profit Lakota cultural group from the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation, have legal ‘standing’ to challenge the issuing of permits for the mine. The other participants in the January hearing, Tom Cook of Chadron, Debra White Plume of Pine Ridge, and the Slim Butte Agricultural Cooperative, were dropped from the administrative hearing process, but the board agreed to consider participation by the Oglala Sioux Tribe.
The Crow Butte mine, which has been in operation since 1991, uses an ‘in situ’ process of pumping a solution of bicarbonate into the underground sandstone layer of ore, then recovering the dissolved uranium. It produces about 800,000 pounds of uranium ‘yellowcake.’ each year. The material is sent to Canada and used for power generation.
The expansion is expected to produce 500,000 to 600,000 pounds of yellowcake annually, with active mining continuing for 11 years. The ore body to be mined is 400 to 800 feet below the surface and water for the mining process would come from the shallow Chadron aquifer.
One of the opponents main objections to the plan is the possibility that underground faults and fractures could allow mine process water to coontaminate the deeper High Plains or Brule aquifers, which are extensively used for irrigation and human consumption.
A letter from the Department of Environmental Quality to Cameco, submitted in evidence at the January hearing, backs up that concern, and, although submitted late, should be allowed in the hearing because it was not made readily available to the opponents, the NRC judges ruled. That document faulted some of the geological information used by Cameco in its application to the state for an aquifer exemption for the expansion project. In portions of its NRC license application “a lack of relevant knowledge about faults and fractures that might allow for the mixing of the water is different aquifers is essentially acknowledged,” the board wrote.
The issue of foreign ownership may be significant because of a provision of the 1954 Atomic Energy Act which provides that the processing of nuclear material must be regulated in the national interest and to provide for the common defense and security, the NRC panel said. While some other regulations appear to prohibit licensing of foreign corporations for source material processing, the matter is unclear, it said.
In total only three of the six arguments advanced against the mine expansion were judged admissible by the NRC panel. Additional hearings and conferences to rule on those issues have yet to be scheduled, and a final decision on the project could take several months.
According to a report in the Omaha World Herald, Cameco has recently announced its intention to seek two more mine expansions near Crawford. One would be south of Fort Robinson State Park and the other northeast of Marsland, the paper reported.
http://www.thechadronnews.com/
articles/2008/05/14/chadron/headlines/news969.txt
By GEORGE LEDBETTER, Record Editor Wednesday, May 14, 2008
Plans for expansion of the Crow Butte uranium mine to a 2,100 acre near the cemetery north of Crawford will face additional scrutiny by the federal Nuclear Regulatory Commission as the result of a ruling released April 29.
After considering issues raised at a January hearing in Chadron, a three member panel of NRC administrative law judges concluded that concerns about potential contamination of groundwater supplies and threats to human health raised by opponents of the mine expansion deserved further consideration and oral arguments.
The panel also agreed to hear additional arguments on the opponent’s objection to issuing a permit for uranium mining to a foreign owned corporation. Mine owner and operator Cameco Corp., is a Canadian company and the world’s largest uranium producer.
As part of the ruling, the judges said that the Western Nebraska Resources Coalition and Owe Aku/Bring Back the Way, a non-profit Lakota cultural group from the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation, have legal ‘standing’ to challenge the issuing of permits for the mine. The other participants in the January hearing, Tom Cook of Chadron, Debra White Plume of Pine Ridge, and the Slim Butte Agricultural Cooperative, were dropped from the administrative hearing process, but the board agreed to consider participation by the Oglala Sioux Tribe.
The Crow Butte mine, which has been in operation since 1991, uses an ‘in situ’ process of pumping a solution of bicarbonate into the underground sandstone layer of ore, then recovering the dissolved uranium. It produces about 800,000 pounds of uranium ‘yellowcake.’ each year. The material is sent to Canada and used for power generation.
The expansion is expected to produce 500,000 to 600,000 pounds of yellowcake annually, with active mining continuing for 11 years. The ore body to be mined is 400 to 800 feet below the surface and water for the mining process would come from the shallow Chadron aquifer.
One of the opponents main objections to the plan is the possibility that underground faults and fractures could allow mine process water to coontaminate the deeper High Plains or Brule aquifers, which are extensively used for irrigation and human consumption.
A letter from the Department of Environmental Quality to Cameco, submitted in evidence at the January hearing, backs up that concern, and, although submitted late, should be allowed in the hearing because it was not made readily available to the opponents, the NRC judges ruled. That document faulted some of the geological information used by Cameco in its application to the state for an aquifer exemption for the expansion project. In portions of its NRC license application “a lack of relevant knowledge about faults and fractures that might allow for the mixing of the water is different aquifers is essentially acknowledged,” the board wrote.
The issue of foreign ownership may be significant because of a provision of the 1954 Atomic Energy Act which provides that the processing of nuclear material must be regulated in the national interest and to provide for the common defense and security, the NRC panel said. While some other regulations appear to prohibit licensing of foreign corporations for source material processing, the matter is unclear, it said.
In total only three of the six arguments advanced against the mine expansion were judged admissible by the NRC panel. Additional hearings and conferences to rule on those issues have yet to be scheduled, and a final decision on the project could take several months.
According to a report in the Omaha World Herald, Cameco has recently announced its intention to seek two more mine expansions near Crawford. One would be south of Fort Robinson State Park and the other northeast of Marsland, the paper reported.
Saturday, May 17, 2008
After the Fall of Bush: A Post-George Prognosis for the World
The Post-Bush Regime: A Prognosis, was published last Dec. 27th:
In that article, I offered a collection of scenarios based on various trends, and based on the apparent motivations of those predators who sit at the center of the webs of power. One of the main scenarios was about the globalization of African-style famine – brought about intentionally, primarily by the creation of a lucrative market for biofuels. I had no idea that only five months later that scenario would be all over the mass media. Events are unfolding more quickly and decisively than I imagined. Of course the intentional part is not found in the mass media, but the globalization of famine is now a recognized crisis, and biofuels – though not being abandoned or cut back – are now at least controversial.
In these past five months a brand new media theme has emerged around food and starvation. We are now reminded regularly that food prices are rising beyond what many in the global South can afford, and that there is little hope of reversing this trend. Food riots are breaking out and the UN is calling for an urgent response from the international community. Some Southern nations are banning the export of certain foodstuffs, and some Northern governments are pledging help of various kinds. Editorials are taking sides in the biofuels debate. As Sherlock Holmes would say to Dr. Watson at the beginning of each investigation – the game is afoot!
One of the things I've noticed about the mass media is that it carries only a few themes at a time. There's always one main theme – a kind of hypnotic focus point – which right now is the US Democratic Primaries, and in the past has been anything from a hostage crisis to a celebrity murder trial. The main theme can be vacuous in content; it needs only to take up a lot of news airtime, and keep people glued to their sets. And then there are always a few secondary themes being carried as well, with interruptions from time to time for natural disasters.
The secondary themes are highly selective. World-shaking events are going on all the time that mainstream TV never mentions. Things like genocide in East Timor – which went on for decades invisibly, and then suddenly it was in our face just when an intervention required justification. That is to say, secondary themes are selected for a purpose. What they are telling us is less important than why we are being told. We can find the news itself much more reliably in other places, mostly online. When they bring a theme to our mainstream attention, that means it is important to them that we view that scenario in certain ways. In other words, they are preparing us for things to come, getting us to frame our thinking in such a way as to be able to accept what we might not otherwise accept.
"Well Mack the Finger said to Louie the King
I got forty red white and blue shoe strings
And a thousand telephones that don't ring
Do you know where I can get rid of these things
And Louie the King said let me think for a minute son
And he said yes I think it can be easily done
Just take everything down to Highway 61."
—Bob Dylan, Highway 61 Revisited
Highway 61 is a rather direct allusion to Highway 66, which is the most famous cross-country US highway. That then leads to a somewhat more comprehensive allusion, to the Madison-Avenue empowered American mass media, which also goes from coast-to-coast, and which can sell anything at all to the masses – not only telephones that don't ring, but wars that don't make sense, buildings that collapse at free-fall speed, concentration camps, and torture. Why are they taking global famine down to Highway 61? Why has it become a media theme? What are they selling us this time?
I think it is very clear that we are being prepared for a massive global holocaust, and the evidence I have seen for this is now much stronger than it was five months ago. There are two kinds of evidence. One kind of evidence is about the hunger crisis itself, and the various conditions forcing that crisis. The other kind of evidence comes from the nature of the interventions that are being planned and announced, to alleviate the crisis.
As regards the crisis itself, is now clear that Project Holocaust has been part of the globalization agenda from the very beginning. Chossudovsky seems to have a very good grasp of this, and his recent article articulates his thinking very well, with his usual thorough documentation:
Global Famine, by Michel Chossudovsky
http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=8877
http://tinyurl.com/5vqjhe
I'm also drawing on a number of other articles that I've posted to the newslog archives ( http://groups.google.com/group/newslog/topics). I will continue to post ongoing developments to newslog under the theme, Project Holocaust.
This project – this war on the poor – has come as a multi-pronged assault. Perhaps the most effective prong of the assault has been upon the food-production infrastructure throughout the South. Everywhere self-sufficient local food arrangements were systematically destroyed, either by IMF conditions attached to loans, or by manipulations of global markets. A debt-ridden South was forced over the past two decades into a situation where it has to import its food at prices dictated by the global marketplace, and pay for that food by exporting whatever it can, at prices also determined by the global marketplace.
This systematic restructuring of global food production and distribution patterns amounted to putting a noose around the necks of all the poor people throughout the South, and to some extent in the North as well – a noose that can be tightened at any time, simply by manipulating the global market price of various commodities. And as Chossudovsky, Engdahl, and others bring to our attention, the noose is now being systematically tightened, through a variety of manipulations that are both numerous and cumulative.
The same folks who choreographed for us the subprime mortgage crisis, are now choreographing a hyped-up speculative marketplace in energy futures and food futures. Food and energy prices are being bid upwards, and this upward surge has nothing to do with supply and demand in a resource sense. It is not about peak oil, overpopulation, or lagging food production. Instead it is about the exploitation of fears of those things. Just as anticipation of increasing value spurred the housing bubble, so anticipation of scarcity spurs the rise in resource prices.
Fears of scarcity create a speculative market for resource futures. The ensuing speculation fulfills the fears, by making resources unaffordable to millions in the South. When it is thus demonstrated that the fears are real, the upward bidding then gets even more intense – a self-propelled upward spiral of death, orchestrated by elite predators poised in their financial webs. The upward spiral is still in its early days, and soon it will be billions who can no longer afford to eat.
Another of the manipulations is of course the promotion of biofuels, justified by that same fear of scarcity. Peak oil has been taken down to Highway 61, and we were thereby sold an energy solution that doesn't save energy. It takes more energy to produce biofuels than they later yield as fuels – energy in the form of tractor fuel, petroleum-based fertilizers and pesticides, transport to and from the production site, etc. etc. While not adding to our fuel supplies, biofuels do add very directly to rising food prices. Every acre shifted to biofuel production takes an acre away from food production. When the EU and the US mandate quotas for biofuels – eg, every gallon sold must contain 10% biofuels – that represents a sharp tug on the nooses around the necks of everyone in the South. And the tightness hurts even before the biofuels go into production, because the anticipation of biofuels is already accelerating the upward speculative bidding of prices for food and energy.
All of these manipulations are cumulative and mutually reinforcing. Rising energy prices, for example, add directly to rising food prices, because modern food-production methods are very energy intensive. So the poor are hit twice by energy prices rises, once if they use fuel directly, and again in the market price of food.
As regards the crisis itself, the evidence is clear. Massive famine is inevitable as long as these economic forces continue to operate. And down on Highway 61, on our media waves, these forces are being presented to us as being inevitable. After the newscaster shows you pictures of food riots, he then bemoans the fact that prices are expected to rise even higher. The will of the market is the same as a force of nature – there is nothing that be done about it. In this way the status of financial elites has been raised to the level of gods – whatever they arrange is accepted as being inevitable. This is probably the single biggest scam that has ever been sold down on Highway 61. In early chiefdoms, the chiefs declared themselves to be gods, and people had to bow down before them if they wanted their heads to remain on their necks. Later we had the divine right of kings, and the divine validity of church doctrine. Now we have gods all over again – what Tom Wolfe called the masters of the universe – whose names are so holy that they are never spoken.
Let us now consider the evidence for Project Holocaust that emerges from the nature of the interventions that are being announced, purportedly to alleviate the crisis. In a word, the interventions all amount to more of the same. More indebtedness by the South, as loans are made available for additional energy-intensive agricultural projects. More dependence on direct food aid from the North, when it is well known that rising prices are rapidly decreasing the rate at which direct aid can be supplied. Our leaders' plans for putting out the fires of hunger is to pour gasoline on the fires! We should not be surprised by this. From that same web of control, the same predator elites who arrange financial matters also groom our political leaders throughout their careers, and mold the media treatment of those careers as they see fit. When the master says jump, every political leader in the West answers, "how high?"
Large areas of the global South have been systematically turned into extermination camps, and the process of extermination – the final solution to the crisis of capitalist growth – is now beginning on its planned course. The food crisis has been brought down to Highway 61, as a new media theme, and we are being programmed to accept starvation as being inevitable, and to applaud solutions that can only make the problem worse. Joseph Goebbels would be amazed at the progress that has been made in propaganda since his day. And Heinrich Himmler would be amazed at the increased efficiency of modern methods, "You don't need to run the camp trains, you only need to halt the food trains, very clever!"
The sophistication of the modern propaganda machine – this matrix reality – is truly awesome. Keep in mind that this hunger theme is a secondary theme in the media, not a main theme. We'll get episodic reports of famines, just as we do today from Africa and Burma, but our attention will always be focused on some main theme – anything from elections to scandals to olympics to global warming to 'terrorism'. By such means we are led by the nose down the garden path to genocide, fascism, a continual state of war, impoverishment, disenfranchisement, and soon martial law. None of us need any longer wonder why good Germans stood by while Nazism and the Holocaust were in full swing, we need only ask ourselves the same question.
rkm
http ://globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=7693
In that article, I offered a collection of scenarios based on various trends, and based on the apparent motivations of those predators who sit at the center of the webs of power. One of the main scenarios was about the globalization of African-style famine – brought about intentionally, primarily by the creation of a lucrative market for biofuels. I had no idea that only five months later that scenario would be all over the mass media. Events are unfolding more quickly and decisively than I imagined. Of course the intentional part is not found in the mass media, but the globalization of famine is now a recognized crisis, and biofuels – though not being abandoned or cut back – are now at least controversial.
In these past five months a brand new media theme has emerged around food and starvation. We are now reminded regularly that food prices are rising beyond what many in the global South can afford, and that there is little hope of reversing this trend. Food riots are breaking out and the UN is calling for an urgent response from the international community. Some Southern nations are banning the export of certain foodstuffs, and some Northern governments are pledging help of various kinds. Editorials are taking sides in the biofuels debate. As Sherlock Holmes would say to Dr. Watson at the beginning of each investigation – the game is afoot!
One of the things I've noticed about the mass media is that it carries only a few themes at a time. There's always one main theme – a kind of hypnotic focus point – which right now is the US Democratic Primaries, and in the past has been anything from a hostage crisis to a celebrity murder trial. The main theme can be vacuous in content; it needs only to take up a lot of news airtime, and keep people glued to their sets. And then there are always a few secondary themes being carried as well, with interruptions from time to time for natural disasters.
The secondary themes are highly selective. World-shaking events are going on all the time that mainstream TV never mentions. Things like genocide in East Timor – which went on for decades invisibly, and then suddenly it was in our face just when an intervention required justification. That is to say, secondary themes are selected for a purpose. What they are telling us is less important than why we are being told. We can find the news itself much more reliably in other places, mostly online. When they bring a theme to our mainstream attention, that means it is important to them that we view that scenario in certain ways. In other words, they are preparing us for things to come, getting us to frame our thinking in such a way as to be able to accept what we might not otherwise accept.
"Well Mack the Finger said to Louie the King
I got forty red white and blue shoe strings
And a thousand telephones that don't ring
Do you know where I can get rid of these things
And Louie the King said let me think for a minute son
And he said yes I think it can be easily done
Just take everything down to Highway 61."
—Bob Dylan, Highway 61 Revisited
Highway 61 is a rather direct allusion to Highway 66, which is the most famous cross-country US highway. That then leads to a somewhat more comprehensive allusion, to the Madison-Avenue empowered American mass media, which also goes from coast-to-coast, and which can sell anything at all to the masses – not only telephones that don't ring, but wars that don't make sense, buildings that collapse at free-fall speed, concentration camps, and torture. Why are they taking global famine down to Highway 61? Why has it become a media theme? What are they selling us this time?
I think it is very clear that we are being prepared for a massive global holocaust, and the evidence I have seen for this is now much stronger than it was five months ago. There are two kinds of evidence. One kind of evidence is about the hunger crisis itself, and the various conditions forcing that crisis. The other kind of evidence comes from the nature of the interventions that are being planned and announced, to alleviate the crisis.
As regards the crisis itself, is now clear that Project Holocaust has been part of the globalization agenda from the very beginning. Chossudovsky seems to have a very good grasp of this, and his recent article articulates his thinking very well, with his usual thorough documentation:
Global Famine, by Michel Chossudovsky
http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=8877
http://tinyurl.com/5vqjhe
I'm also drawing on a number of other articles that I've posted to the newslog archives ( http://groups.google.com/group/newslog/topics). I will continue to post ongoing developments to newslog under the theme, Project Holocaust.
This project – this war on the poor – has come as a multi-pronged assault. Perhaps the most effective prong of the assault has been upon the food-production infrastructure throughout the South. Everywhere self-sufficient local food arrangements were systematically destroyed, either by IMF conditions attached to loans, or by manipulations of global markets. A debt-ridden South was forced over the past two decades into a situation where it has to import its food at prices dictated by the global marketplace, and pay for that food by exporting whatever it can, at prices also determined by the global marketplace.
This systematic restructuring of global food production and distribution patterns amounted to putting a noose around the necks of all the poor people throughout the South, and to some extent in the North as well – a noose that can be tightened at any time, simply by manipulating the global market price of various commodities. And as Chossudovsky, Engdahl, and others bring to our attention, the noose is now being systematically tightened, through a variety of manipulations that are both numerous and cumulative.
The same folks who choreographed for us the subprime mortgage crisis, are now choreographing a hyped-up speculative marketplace in energy futures and food futures. Food and energy prices are being bid upwards, and this upward surge has nothing to do with supply and demand in a resource sense. It is not about peak oil, overpopulation, or lagging food production. Instead it is about the exploitation of fears of those things. Just as anticipation of increasing value spurred the housing bubble, so anticipation of scarcity spurs the rise in resource prices.
Fears of scarcity create a speculative market for resource futures. The ensuing speculation fulfills the fears, by making resources unaffordable to millions in the South. When it is thus demonstrated that the fears are real, the upward bidding then gets even more intense – a self-propelled upward spiral of death, orchestrated by elite predators poised in their financial webs. The upward spiral is still in its early days, and soon it will be billions who can no longer afford to eat.
Another of the manipulations is of course the promotion of biofuels, justified by that same fear of scarcity. Peak oil has been taken down to Highway 61, and we were thereby sold an energy solution that doesn't save energy. It takes more energy to produce biofuels than they later yield as fuels – energy in the form of tractor fuel, petroleum-based fertilizers and pesticides, transport to and from the production site, etc. etc. While not adding to our fuel supplies, biofuels do add very directly to rising food prices. Every acre shifted to biofuel production takes an acre away from food production. When the EU and the US mandate quotas for biofuels – eg, every gallon sold must contain 10% biofuels – that represents a sharp tug on the nooses around the necks of everyone in the South. And the tightness hurts even before the biofuels go into production, because the anticipation of biofuels is already accelerating the upward speculative bidding of prices for food and energy.
All of these manipulations are cumulative and mutually reinforcing. Rising energy prices, for example, add directly to rising food prices, because modern food-production methods are very energy intensive. So the poor are hit twice by energy prices rises, once if they use fuel directly, and again in the market price of food.
As regards the crisis itself, the evidence is clear. Massive famine is inevitable as long as these economic forces continue to operate. And down on Highway 61, on our media waves, these forces are being presented to us as being inevitable. After the newscaster shows you pictures of food riots, he then bemoans the fact that prices are expected to rise even higher. The will of the market is the same as a force of nature – there is nothing that be done about it. In this way the status of financial elites has been raised to the level of gods – whatever they arrange is accepted as being inevitable. This is probably the single biggest scam that has ever been sold down on Highway 61. In early chiefdoms, the chiefs declared themselves to be gods, and people had to bow down before them if they wanted their heads to remain on their necks. Later we had the divine right of kings, and the divine validity of church doctrine. Now we have gods all over again – what Tom Wolfe called the masters of the universe – whose names are so holy that they are never spoken.
Let us now consider the evidence for Project Holocaust that emerges from the nature of the interventions that are being announced, purportedly to alleviate the crisis. In a word, the interventions all amount to more of the same. More indebtedness by the South, as loans are made available for additional energy-intensive agricultural projects. More dependence on direct food aid from the North, when it is well known that rising prices are rapidly decreasing the rate at which direct aid can be supplied. Our leaders' plans for putting out the fires of hunger is to pour gasoline on the fires! We should not be surprised by this. From that same web of control, the same predator elites who arrange financial matters also groom our political leaders throughout their careers, and mold the media treatment of those careers as they see fit. When the master says jump, every political leader in the West answers, "how high?"
Large areas of the global South have been systematically turned into extermination camps, and the process of extermination – the final solution to the crisis of capitalist growth – is now beginning on its planned course. The food crisis has been brought down to Highway 61, as a new media theme, and we are being programmed to accept starvation as being inevitable, and to applaud solutions that can only make the problem worse. Joseph Goebbels would be amazed at the progress that has been made in propaganda since his day. And Heinrich Himmler would be amazed at the increased efficiency of modern methods, "You don't need to run the camp trains, you only need to halt the food trains, very clever!"
The sophistication of the modern propaganda machine – this matrix reality – is truly awesome. Keep in mind that this hunger theme is a secondary theme in the media, not a main theme. We'll get episodic reports of famines, just as we do today from Africa and Burma, but our attention will always be focused on some main theme – anything from elections to scandals to olympics to global warming to 'terrorism'. By such means we are led by the nose down the garden path to genocide, fascism, a continual state of war, impoverishment, disenfranchisement, and soon martial law. None of us need any longer wonder why good Germans stood by while Nazism and the Holocaust were in full swing, we need only ask ourselves the same question.
rkm
http ://globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=7693
Creating Crisis: How to Start a Food Panic
How to Create a Global Food Crisis
by Walden Bello
When tens of thousands of people staged demonstrations in Mexico last year to protest a 60 percent increase in the price of tortillas, many analysts pointed to biofuel as the culprit. Because of US government subsidies, American farmers were devoting more and more acreage to corn for ethanol than for food, which sparked a steep rise in corn prices. The diversion of corn from tortillas to biofuel was certainly one cause of skyrocketing prices, though speculation on biofuel demand by transnational middlemen may have played a bigger role. However, an intriguing question escaped many observers: how on earth did Mexicans, who live in the land where corn was domesticated, become dependent on US imports in the first place?
The Mexican food crisis cannot be fully understood without taking into account the fact that in the years preceding the tortilla crisis, the homeland of corn had been converted to a corn-importing economy by "free market" policies promoted by the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the World Bank and Washington. The process began with the early 1980s debt crisis. One of the two largest developing-country debtors, Mexico was forced to beg for money from the Bank and IMF to service its debt to international commercial banks. The quid pro quo for a multibillion-dollar bailout was what a member of the World Bank executive board described as "unprecedented thoroughgoing interventionism" designed to eliminate high tariffs, state regulations and government support institutions, which neoliberal doctrine identified as barriers to economic efficiency.
Interest payments rose from 19 percent of total government expenditures in 1982 to 57 percent in 1988, while capital expenditures dropped from an already low 19.3 percent to 4.4 percent. The contraction of government spending translated into the dismantling of state credit, government-subsidized agricultural inputs, price supports, state marketing boards and extension services. Unilateral liberalization of agricultural trade pushed by the IMF and World Bank also contributed to the destabilization of peasant producers.
This blow to peasant agriculture was followed by an even larger one in 1994, when the North American Free Trade Agreement went into effect. Although NAFTA had a fifteen-year phaseout of tariff protection for agricultural products, including corn, highly subsidized US corn quickly flooded in, reducing prices by half and plunging the corn sector into chronic crisis. Largely as a result of this agreement, Mexico's status as a net food importer has now been firmly established.
With the shutting down of the state marketing agency for corn, distribution of US corn imports and Mexican grain has come to be monopolized by a few transnational traders, like US-owned Cargill and partly US-owned Maseca, operating on both sides of the border. This has given them tremendous power to speculate on trade trends, so that movements in biofuel demand can be manipulated and magnified many times over. At the same time, monopoly control of domestic trade has ensured that a rise in international corn prices does not translate into significantly higher prices paid to small producers.
It has become increasingly difficult for Mexican corn farmers to avoid the fate of many of their fellow corn cultivators and other smallholders in sectors such as rice, beef, poultry and pork, who have gone under because of the advantages conferred by NAFTA on subsidized US producers. According to a 2003 Carnegie Endowment report, imports of US agricultural products threw at least 1.3 million farmers out of work--many of whom have since found their way to the United States.
Prospects are not good, since the Mexican government continues to be controlled by neoliberals who are systematically dismantling the peasant support system, a key legacy of the Mexican Revolution. As Food First executive director Eric Holt-Giménez sees it, "It will take time and effort to recover smallholder capacity, and there does not appear to be any political will for this--to say nothing of the fact that NAFTA would have to be renegotiated."
Creating a Rice Crisis in the Philippines
That the global food crisis stems mainly from free-market restructuring of agriculture is clearer in the case of rice. Unlike corn, less than 10 percent of world rice production is traded. Moreover, there has been no diversion of rice from food consumption to biofuels. Yet this year alone, prices nearly tripled, from $380 a ton in January to more than $1,000 in April. Undoubtedly the inflation stems partly from speculation by wholesaler cartels at a time of tightening supplies. However, as with Mexico and corn, the big puzzle is why a number of formerly self-sufficient rice-consuming countries have become severely dependent on imports.
The Philippines provides a grim example of how neoliberal economic restructuring transforms a country from a net food exporter to a net food importer. The Philippines is the world's largest importer of rice. Manila's desperate effort to secure supplies at any price has become front-page news, and pictures of soldiers providing security for rice distribution in poor communities have become emblematic of the global crisis.
The broad contours of the Philippines story are similar to those of Mexico. Dictator Ferdinand Marcos was guilty of many crimes and misdeeds, including failure to follow through on land reform, but one thing he cannot be accused of is starving the agricultural sector. To head off peasant discontent, the regime provided farmers with subsidized fertilizer and seeds, launched credit plans and built rural infrastructure. When Marcos fled the country in 1986, there were 900,000 metric tons of rice in government warehouses.
Paradoxically, the next few years under the new democratic dispensation saw the gutting of government investment capacity. As in Mexico, the World Bank and IMF -- working on behalf of international creditors -- pressured the Corazon Aquino administration to make repayment of the $26 billion foreign debt a priority. Aquino acquiesced, though she was warned by the country's top economists that the "search for a recovery program that is consistent with a debt repayment schedule determined by our creditors is a futile one." Between 1986 and 1993, 8 percent to 10 percent of GDP left the Philippines yearly in debt-service payments -- roughly the same proportion as in Mexico. Interest payments as a percentage of expenditures rose from 7 percent in 1980 to 28 percent in 1994; capital expenditures plunged from 26 percent to 16 percent. In short, debt servicing became the national budgetary priority.
Spending on agriculture fell by more than half. The World Bank and its local acolytes were not worried, however, since one purpose of the belt-tightening was to get the private sector to energize the countryside. But agricultural capacity quickly eroded. Irrigation stagnated, and by the end of the 1990s, only 17 percent of the Philippines' road network was paved, compared with 82 percent in Thailand and 75 percent in Malaysia. Crop yields were generally anemic, with the average rice yield way below those in China, Vietnam and Thailand, where governments actively promoted rural production. The post-Marcos agrarian reform program shriveled, deprived of funding for support services, which had been the key to successful reforms in Taiwan and South Korea. As in Mexico, Filipino peasants were confronted with full-scale retreat of the state as provider of comprehensive support -- a role they had come to depend on.
And the cutback in agricultural programs was followed by trade liberalization -- with the Philippines' 1995 entry into the World Trade Organization having the same effect as Mexico's joining NAFTA. WTO membership required the Philippines to eliminate quotas on all agricultural imports except rice and allow a certain amount of each commodity to enter at low tariff rates. While the country was allowed to maintain a quota on rice imports, it nevertheless had to admit the equivalent of 1 to 4 percent of domestic consumption over the next ten years. In fact, because of gravely weakened production resulting from lack of state support, the government imported much more than that to make up for shortfalls. The massive imports depressed the price of rice, discouraging farmers and kept growth in production at a rate far below that of the country's two top suppliers, Thailand and Vietnam.
The consequences of the Philippines' joining the WTO barreled through the rest of its agriculture like a super-typhoon. Swamped by cheap corn imports -- much of it subsidized US grain -- farmers reduced land devoted to corn from 3.1 million hectares in 1993 to 2.5 million in 2000. Massive importation of chicken parts nearly killed that industry, while surges in imports destabilized the poultry, hog and vegetable industries.
During the 1994 campaign to ratify WTO membership, government economists, coached by their World Bank handlers, promised that losses in corn and other traditional crops would be more than compensated for by the new export industry of "high-value-added" crops like cut flowers, asparagus and broccoli. Little of this materialized. Nor did many of the 500,000 agricultural jobs that were supposed to be created yearly by the magic of the market. Instead, agricultural employment dropped from 11.2 million in 1994 to 10.8 million in 2001.
The one-two punch of IMF-imposed adjustment and WTO-imposed trade liberalization swiftly transformed a largely self-sufficient agricultural economy into an import-dependent one as it steadily marginalized farmers. It was a wrenching process, the pain of which was captured by a Filipino government negotiator during a WTO session in Geneva. "Our small producers," he said, "are being slaughtered by the gross unfairness of the international trading environment."
The Great Transformation
The experience of Mexico and the Philippines was paralleled in one country after another subjected to the ministrations of the IMF and the WTO. A study of fourteen countries by the UN's Food and Agricultural Organization found that the levels of food imports in 1995-98 exceeded those in 1990-94. This was not surprising, since one of the main goals of the WTO's Agreement on Agriculture was to open up markets in developing countries so they could absorb surplus production in the North. As then-US Agriculture Secretary John Block put it in 1986: "The idea that developing countries should feed themselves is an anachronism from a bygone era. They could better ensure their food security by relying on US agricultural products, which are available in most cases at lower cost."
What Block did not say was that the lower cost of US products stemmed from subsidies, which became more massive with each passing year despite the fact that the WTO was supposed to phase them out. From $367 billion in 1995, the total amount of agricultural subsidies provided by developed-country governments rose to $388 billion in 2004. Since the late 1990s, subsidies have accounted for 40 percent of the value of agricultural production in the European Union and 25 percent in the United States.
The apostles of the free market and the defenders of dumping may seem to be at different ends of the spectrum, but the policies they advocate are bringing about the same result: a globalized capitalist industrial agriculture. Developing countries are being integrated into a system where export-oriented production of meat and grain is dominated by large industrial farms like those run by the Thai multinational CP and where technology is continually upgraded by advances in genetic engineering from firms like Monsanto. And the elimination of tariff and nontariff barriers is facilitating a global agricultural supermarket of elite and middle-class consumers serviced by grain-trading corporations like Cargill and Archer Daniels Midland and transnational food retailers like the British-owned Tesco and the French-owned Carrefour.
There is little room for the hundreds of millions of rural and urban poor in this integrated global market. They are confined to giant suburban favelas, where they contend with food prices that are often much higher than the supermarket prices, or to rural reservations, where they are trapped in marginal agricultural activities and increasingly vulnerable to hunger. Indeed, within the same country, famine in the marginalized sector sometimes coexists with prosperity in the globalized sector.
This is not simply the erosion of national food self-sufficiency or food security but what Africanist Deborah Bryceson of Oxford calls de-peasantization -- the phasing out of a mode of production to make the countryside a more congenial site for intensive capital accumulation. This transformation is a traumatic one for hundreds of millions of people, since peasant production is not simply an economic activity. It is an ancient way of life, a culture, which is one reason displaced or marginalized peasants in India have taken to committing suicide. In the state of Andhra Pradesh, farmer suicides rose from 233 in 1998 to 2,600 in 2002; in Maharashtra, suicides more than tripled, from 1,083 in 1995 to 3,926 in 2005. One estimate is that some 150,000 Indian farmers have taken their lives.
Collapse of prices from trade liberalization and loss of control over seeds to biotech firms is part of a comprehensive problem, says global justice activist Vandana Shiva: "Under globalization, the farmer is losing her/his social, cultural, economic identity as a producer. A farmer is now a 'consumer' of costly seeds and costly chemicals sold by powerful global corporations through powerful landlords and money lenders locally."
African Agriculture: From Compliance to Defiance
De-peasantization is at an advanced state in Latin America and Asia. And if the World Bank has its way, Africa will travel in the same direction. As Bryceson and her colleagues correctly point out in a recent article, the World Development Report for 2008, which touches extensively on agriculture in Africa, is practically a blueprint for the transformation of the continent's peasant-based agriculture into large-scale commercial farming. However, as in many other places today, the Bank's wards are moving from sullen resentment to outright defiance.
At the time of decolonization, in the 1960s, Africa was actually a net food exporter. Today the continent imports 25 percent of its food; almost every country is a net importer. Hunger and famine have become recurrent phenomena, with the past three years alone seeing food emergencies break out in the Horn of Africa, the Sahel, and Southern and Central Africa.
Agriculture in Africa is in deep crisis, and the causes range from wars to bad governance, lack of agricultural technology and the spread of HIV/AIDS. However, as in Mexico and the Philippines, an important part of the explanation is the phasing out of government controls and support mechanisms under the IMF and World Bank structural adjustment programs imposed as the price for assistance in servicing external debt.
Structural adjustment brought about declining investment, increased unemployment, reduced social spending, reduced consumption and low output. Lifting price controls on fertilizers while simultaneously cutting back on agricultural credit systems simply led to reduced fertilizer use, lower yields and lower investment. Moreover, reality refused to conform to the doctrinal expectation that withdrawal of the state would pave the way for the market to dynamize agriculture. Instead, the private sector, which correctly saw reduced state expenditures as creating more risk, failed to step into the breach. In country after country, the departure of the state "crowded out" rather than "crowded in" private investment. Where private traders did replace the state, noted an Oxfam report, "they have sometimes done so on highly unfavorable terms for poor farmers," leaving "farmers more food insecure, and governments reliant on unpredictable international aid flows." The usually pro-private sector Economist agreed, admitting that "many of the private firms brought in to replace state researchers turned out to be rent-seeking monopolists."
The support that African governments were allowed to muster was channeled by the World Bank toward export agriculture to generate foreign exchange, which states needed to service debt. But, as in Ethiopia during the 1980s famine, this led to the dedication of good land to export crops, with food crops forced into less suitable soil, thus exacerbating food insecurity. Moreover, the World Bank's encouragement of several economies to focus on the same export crops often led to overproduction, triggering price collapses in international markets. For instance, the very success of Ghana's expansion of cocoa production triggered a 48 percent drop in the international price between 1986 and 1989. In 2002-03 a collapse in coffee prices contributed to another food emergency in Ethiopia.
As in Mexico and the Philippines, structural adjustment in Africa was not simply about underinvestment but state divestment. But there was one major difference. In Africa the World Bank and IMF micromanaged, making decisions on how fast subsidies should be phased out, how many civil servants had to be fired and even, as in the case of Malawi, how much of the country's grain reserve should be sold and to whom.
Compounding the negative impact of adjustment were unfair EU and US trade practices. Liberalization allowed subsidized EU beef to drive many West African and South African cattle raisers to ruin. With their subsidies legitimized by the WTO, US growers offloaded cotton on world markets at 20 percent to 55 percent of production cost, thereby bankrupting West and Central African farmers.
According to Oxfam, the number of sub-Saharan Africans living on less than a dollar a day almost doubled, to 313 million, between 1981 and 2001 -- 46 percent of the whole continent. The role of structural adjustment in creating poverty was hard to deny. As the World Bank's chief economist for Africa admitted, "We did not think that the human costs of these programs could be so great, and the economic gains would be so slow in coming."
In 1999 the government of Malawi initiated a program to give each smallholder family a starter pack of free fertilizers and seeds. The result was a national surplus of corn. What came after is a story that should be enshrined as a classic case study of one of the greatest blunders of neoliberal economics. The World Bank and other aid donors forced the scaling down and eventual scrapping of the program, arguing that the subsidy distorted trade. Without the free packs, output plummeted. In the meantime, the IMF insisted that the government sell off a large portion of its grain reserves to enable the food reserve agency to settle its commercial debts. The government complied. When the food crisis turned into a famine in 2001-02, there were hardly any reserves left. About 1,500 people perished. The IMF was unrepentant; in fact, it suspended its disbursements on an adjustment program on the grounds that "the parastatal sector will continue to pose risks to the successful implementation of the 2002/03 budget. Government interventions in the food and other agricultural markets... [are] crowding out more productive spending."
By the time an even worse food crisis developed in 2005, the government had had enough of World Bank/IMF stupidity. A new president reintroduced the fertilizer subsidy, enabling 2 million households to buy it at a third of the retail price and seeds at a discount. The result: bumper harvests for two years, a million-ton maize surplus and the country transformed into a supplier of corn to Southern Africa.
Malawi's defiance of the World Bank would probably have been an act of heroic but futile resistance a decade ago. The environment is different today, since structural adjustment has been discredited throughout Africa. Even some donor governments and NGOs that used to subscribe to it have distanced themselves from the World Bank. Perhaps the motivation is to prevent their influence in the continent from being further eroded by association with a failed approach and unpopular institutions when Chinese aid is emerging as an alternative to World Bank, IMF and Western government aid programs.
Food Sovereignty: An Alternative Paradigm?
It is not only defiance from governments like Malawi and dissent from their erstwhile allies that are undermining the IMF and the World Bank. Peasant organizations around the world have become increasingly militant in their resistance to the globalization of industrial agriculture. Indeed, it is because of pressure from farmers' groups that the governments of the South have refused to grant wider access to their agricultural markets and demanded a massive slashing of US and EU agricultural subsidies, which brought the WTO's Doha Round of negotiations to a standstill.
Farmers' groups have networked internationally; one of the most dynamic to emerge is Via Campesina (Peasant's Path). Via not only seeks to get "WTO out of agriculture" and opposes the paradigm of a globalized capitalist industrial agriculture, it also proposes an alternative -- food sovereignty. Food sovereignty means, first of all, the right of a country to determine its production and consumption of food and the exemption of agriculture from global trade regimes like that of the WTO. It also means consolidation of a smallholder-centered agriculture via protection of the domestic market from low-priced imports; remunerative prices for farmers and fisherfolk; abolition of all direct and indirect export subsidies; and the phasing out of domestic subsidies that promote unsustainable agriculture. Via's platform also calls for an end to the Trade Related Intellectual Property Rights regime, or TRIPs, which allows corporations to patent plant seeds; opposes agro-technology based on genetic engineering; and demands land reform. In contrast to an integrated global monoculture, Via offers the vision of an international agricultural economy composed of diverse national agricultural economies trading with one another but focused primarily on domestic production.
Once regarded as relics of the pre-industrial era, peasants are now leading the opposition to a capitalist industrial agriculture that would consign them to the dustbin of history. They have become what Karl Marx described as a politically conscious "class for itself," contradicting his predictions about their demise.
With the global food crisis, peasants are moving to center stage -- and they have allies and supporters. For as peasants refuse to go gently into that good night and fight de-peasantization, developments in the twenty-first century are revealing the panacea of globalized capitalist industrial agriculture to be a nightmare. With environmental crises multiplying, the social dysfunctions of urban-industrial life piling up, and industrialized agriculture creating greater food insecurity, the farmers' movement increasingly has relevance not only to peasants but to everyone threatened by the catastrophic consequences of global capital's vision for organizing production, community -- and life itself.
Walden Bello is senior analyst at Focus on the Global South, at Chulalongkorn University in Bangkok. He is author and co-author of many books, most recently, Deglobalization (Zed), and recipient of the 2003 Right Livelihood Award, also known as the "Alternative Nobel Prize." In March, he was named Outstanding Public Scholar for 2008 by the International Studies Association.
Copyright © 2008 The Nation
by Walden Bello
When tens of thousands of people staged demonstrations in Mexico last year to protest a 60 percent increase in the price of tortillas, many analysts pointed to biofuel as the culprit. Because of US government subsidies, American farmers were devoting more and more acreage to corn for ethanol than for food, which sparked a steep rise in corn prices. The diversion of corn from tortillas to biofuel was certainly one cause of skyrocketing prices, though speculation on biofuel demand by transnational middlemen may have played a bigger role. However, an intriguing question escaped many observers: how on earth did Mexicans, who live in the land where corn was domesticated, become dependent on US imports in the first place?
The Mexican food crisis cannot be fully understood without taking into account the fact that in the years preceding the tortilla crisis, the homeland of corn had been converted to a corn-importing economy by "free market" policies promoted by the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the World Bank and Washington. The process began with the early 1980s debt crisis. One of the two largest developing-country debtors, Mexico was forced to beg for money from the Bank and IMF to service its debt to international commercial banks. The quid pro quo for a multibillion-dollar bailout was what a member of the World Bank executive board described as "unprecedented thoroughgoing interventionism" designed to eliminate high tariffs, state regulations and government support institutions, which neoliberal doctrine identified as barriers to economic efficiency.
Interest payments rose from 19 percent of total government expenditures in 1982 to 57 percent in 1988, while capital expenditures dropped from an already low 19.3 percent to 4.4 percent. The contraction of government spending translated into the dismantling of state credit, government-subsidized agricultural inputs, price supports, state marketing boards and extension services. Unilateral liberalization of agricultural trade pushed by the IMF and World Bank also contributed to the destabilization of peasant producers.
This blow to peasant agriculture was followed by an even larger one in 1994, when the North American Free Trade Agreement went into effect. Although NAFTA had a fifteen-year phaseout of tariff protection for agricultural products, including corn, highly subsidized US corn quickly flooded in, reducing prices by half and plunging the corn sector into chronic crisis. Largely as a result of this agreement, Mexico's status as a net food importer has now been firmly established.
With the shutting down of the state marketing agency for corn, distribution of US corn imports and Mexican grain has come to be monopolized by a few transnational traders, like US-owned Cargill and partly US-owned Maseca, operating on both sides of the border. This has given them tremendous power to speculate on trade trends, so that movements in biofuel demand can be manipulated and magnified many times over. At the same time, monopoly control of domestic trade has ensured that a rise in international corn prices does not translate into significantly higher prices paid to small producers.
It has become increasingly difficult for Mexican corn farmers to avoid the fate of many of their fellow corn cultivators and other smallholders in sectors such as rice, beef, poultry and pork, who have gone under because of the advantages conferred by NAFTA on subsidized US producers. According to a 2003 Carnegie Endowment report, imports of US agricultural products threw at least 1.3 million farmers out of work--many of whom have since found their way to the United States.
Prospects are not good, since the Mexican government continues to be controlled by neoliberals who are systematically dismantling the peasant support system, a key legacy of the Mexican Revolution. As Food First executive director Eric Holt-Giménez sees it, "It will take time and effort to recover smallholder capacity, and there does not appear to be any political will for this--to say nothing of the fact that NAFTA would have to be renegotiated."
Creating a Rice Crisis in the Philippines
That the global food crisis stems mainly from free-market restructuring of agriculture is clearer in the case of rice. Unlike corn, less than 10 percent of world rice production is traded. Moreover, there has been no diversion of rice from food consumption to biofuels. Yet this year alone, prices nearly tripled, from $380 a ton in January to more than $1,000 in April. Undoubtedly the inflation stems partly from speculation by wholesaler cartels at a time of tightening supplies. However, as with Mexico and corn, the big puzzle is why a number of formerly self-sufficient rice-consuming countries have become severely dependent on imports.
The Philippines provides a grim example of how neoliberal economic restructuring transforms a country from a net food exporter to a net food importer. The Philippines is the world's largest importer of rice. Manila's desperate effort to secure supplies at any price has become front-page news, and pictures of soldiers providing security for rice distribution in poor communities have become emblematic of the global crisis.
The broad contours of the Philippines story are similar to those of Mexico. Dictator Ferdinand Marcos was guilty of many crimes and misdeeds, including failure to follow through on land reform, but one thing he cannot be accused of is starving the agricultural sector. To head off peasant discontent, the regime provided farmers with subsidized fertilizer and seeds, launched credit plans and built rural infrastructure. When Marcos fled the country in 1986, there were 900,000 metric tons of rice in government warehouses.
Paradoxically, the next few years under the new democratic dispensation saw the gutting of government investment capacity. As in Mexico, the World Bank and IMF -- working on behalf of international creditors -- pressured the Corazon Aquino administration to make repayment of the $26 billion foreign debt a priority. Aquino acquiesced, though she was warned by the country's top economists that the "search for a recovery program that is consistent with a debt repayment schedule determined by our creditors is a futile one." Between 1986 and 1993, 8 percent to 10 percent of GDP left the Philippines yearly in debt-service payments -- roughly the same proportion as in Mexico. Interest payments as a percentage of expenditures rose from 7 percent in 1980 to 28 percent in 1994; capital expenditures plunged from 26 percent to 16 percent. In short, debt servicing became the national budgetary priority.
Spending on agriculture fell by more than half. The World Bank and its local acolytes were not worried, however, since one purpose of the belt-tightening was to get the private sector to energize the countryside. But agricultural capacity quickly eroded. Irrigation stagnated, and by the end of the 1990s, only 17 percent of the Philippines' road network was paved, compared with 82 percent in Thailand and 75 percent in Malaysia. Crop yields were generally anemic, with the average rice yield way below those in China, Vietnam and Thailand, where governments actively promoted rural production. The post-Marcos agrarian reform program shriveled, deprived of funding for support services, which had been the key to successful reforms in Taiwan and South Korea. As in Mexico, Filipino peasants were confronted with full-scale retreat of the state as provider of comprehensive support -- a role they had come to depend on.
And the cutback in agricultural programs was followed by trade liberalization -- with the Philippines' 1995 entry into the World Trade Organization having the same effect as Mexico's joining NAFTA. WTO membership required the Philippines to eliminate quotas on all agricultural imports except rice and allow a certain amount of each commodity to enter at low tariff rates. While the country was allowed to maintain a quota on rice imports, it nevertheless had to admit the equivalent of 1 to 4 percent of domestic consumption over the next ten years. In fact, because of gravely weakened production resulting from lack of state support, the government imported much more than that to make up for shortfalls. The massive imports depressed the price of rice, discouraging farmers and kept growth in production at a rate far below that of the country's two top suppliers, Thailand and Vietnam.
The consequences of the Philippines' joining the WTO barreled through the rest of its agriculture like a super-typhoon. Swamped by cheap corn imports -- much of it subsidized US grain -- farmers reduced land devoted to corn from 3.1 million hectares in 1993 to 2.5 million in 2000. Massive importation of chicken parts nearly killed that industry, while surges in imports destabilized the poultry, hog and vegetable industries.
During the 1994 campaign to ratify WTO membership, government economists, coached by their World Bank handlers, promised that losses in corn and other traditional crops would be more than compensated for by the new export industry of "high-value-added" crops like cut flowers, asparagus and broccoli. Little of this materialized. Nor did many of the 500,000 agricultural jobs that were supposed to be created yearly by the magic of the market. Instead, agricultural employment dropped from 11.2 million in 1994 to 10.8 million in 2001.
The one-two punch of IMF-imposed adjustment and WTO-imposed trade liberalization swiftly transformed a largely self-sufficient agricultural economy into an import-dependent one as it steadily marginalized farmers. It was a wrenching process, the pain of which was captured by a Filipino government negotiator during a WTO session in Geneva. "Our small producers," he said, "are being slaughtered by the gross unfairness of the international trading environment."
The Great Transformation
The experience of Mexico and the Philippines was paralleled in one country after another subjected to the ministrations of the IMF and the WTO. A study of fourteen countries by the UN's Food and Agricultural Organization found that the levels of food imports in 1995-98 exceeded those in 1990-94. This was not surprising, since one of the main goals of the WTO's Agreement on Agriculture was to open up markets in developing countries so they could absorb surplus production in the North. As then-US Agriculture Secretary John Block put it in 1986: "The idea that developing countries should feed themselves is an anachronism from a bygone era. They could better ensure their food security by relying on US agricultural products, which are available in most cases at lower cost."
What Block did not say was that the lower cost of US products stemmed from subsidies, which became more massive with each passing year despite the fact that the WTO was supposed to phase them out. From $367 billion in 1995, the total amount of agricultural subsidies provided by developed-country governments rose to $388 billion in 2004. Since the late 1990s, subsidies have accounted for 40 percent of the value of agricultural production in the European Union and 25 percent in the United States.
The apostles of the free market and the defenders of dumping may seem to be at different ends of the spectrum, but the policies they advocate are bringing about the same result: a globalized capitalist industrial agriculture. Developing countries are being integrated into a system where export-oriented production of meat and grain is dominated by large industrial farms like those run by the Thai multinational CP and where technology is continually upgraded by advances in genetic engineering from firms like Monsanto. And the elimination of tariff and nontariff barriers is facilitating a global agricultural supermarket of elite and middle-class consumers serviced by grain-trading corporations like Cargill and Archer Daniels Midland and transnational food retailers like the British-owned Tesco and the French-owned Carrefour.
There is little room for the hundreds of millions of rural and urban poor in this integrated global market. They are confined to giant suburban favelas, where they contend with food prices that are often much higher than the supermarket prices, or to rural reservations, where they are trapped in marginal agricultural activities and increasingly vulnerable to hunger. Indeed, within the same country, famine in the marginalized sector sometimes coexists with prosperity in the globalized sector.
This is not simply the erosion of national food self-sufficiency or food security but what Africanist Deborah Bryceson of Oxford calls de-peasantization -- the phasing out of a mode of production to make the countryside a more congenial site for intensive capital accumulation. This transformation is a traumatic one for hundreds of millions of people, since peasant production is not simply an economic activity. It is an ancient way of life, a culture, which is one reason displaced or marginalized peasants in India have taken to committing suicide. In the state of Andhra Pradesh, farmer suicides rose from 233 in 1998 to 2,600 in 2002; in Maharashtra, suicides more than tripled, from 1,083 in 1995 to 3,926 in 2005. One estimate is that some 150,000 Indian farmers have taken their lives.
Collapse of prices from trade liberalization and loss of control over seeds to biotech firms is part of a comprehensive problem, says global justice activist Vandana Shiva: "Under globalization, the farmer is losing her/his social, cultural, economic identity as a producer. A farmer is now a 'consumer' of costly seeds and costly chemicals sold by powerful global corporations through powerful landlords and money lenders locally."
African Agriculture: From Compliance to Defiance
De-peasantization is at an advanced state in Latin America and Asia. And if the World Bank has its way, Africa will travel in the same direction. As Bryceson and her colleagues correctly point out in a recent article, the World Development Report for 2008, which touches extensively on agriculture in Africa, is practically a blueprint for the transformation of the continent's peasant-based agriculture into large-scale commercial farming. However, as in many other places today, the Bank's wards are moving from sullen resentment to outright defiance.
At the time of decolonization, in the 1960s, Africa was actually a net food exporter. Today the continent imports 25 percent of its food; almost every country is a net importer. Hunger and famine have become recurrent phenomena, with the past three years alone seeing food emergencies break out in the Horn of Africa, the Sahel, and Southern and Central Africa.
Agriculture in Africa is in deep crisis, and the causes range from wars to bad governance, lack of agricultural technology and the spread of HIV/AIDS. However, as in Mexico and the Philippines, an important part of the explanation is the phasing out of government controls and support mechanisms under the IMF and World Bank structural adjustment programs imposed as the price for assistance in servicing external debt.
Structural adjustment brought about declining investment, increased unemployment, reduced social spending, reduced consumption and low output. Lifting price controls on fertilizers while simultaneously cutting back on agricultural credit systems simply led to reduced fertilizer use, lower yields and lower investment. Moreover, reality refused to conform to the doctrinal expectation that withdrawal of the state would pave the way for the market to dynamize agriculture. Instead, the private sector, which correctly saw reduced state expenditures as creating more risk, failed to step into the breach. In country after country, the departure of the state "crowded out" rather than "crowded in" private investment. Where private traders did replace the state, noted an Oxfam report, "they have sometimes done so on highly unfavorable terms for poor farmers," leaving "farmers more food insecure, and governments reliant on unpredictable international aid flows." The usually pro-private sector Economist agreed, admitting that "many of the private firms brought in to replace state researchers turned out to be rent-seeking monopolists."
The support that African governments were allowed to muster was channeled by the World Bank toward export agriculture to generate foreign exchange, which states needed to service debt. But, as in Ethiopia during the 1980s famine, this led to the dedication of good land to export crops, with food crops forced into less suitable soil, thus exacerbating food insecurity. Moreover, the World Bank's encouragement of several economies to focus on the same export crops often led to overproduction, triggering price collapses in international markets. For instance, the very success of Ghana's expansion of cocoa production triggered a 48 percent drop in the international price between 1986 and 1989. In 2002-03 a collapse in coffee prices contributed to another food emergency in Ethiopia.
As in Mexico and the Philippines, structural adjustment in Africa was not simply about underinvestment but state divestment. But there was one major difference. In Africa the World Bank and IMF micromanaged, making decisions on how fast subsidies should be phased out, how many civil servants had to be fired and even, as in the case of Malawi, how much of the country's grain reserve should be sold and to whom.
Compounding the negative impact of adjustment were unfair EU and US trade practices. Liberalization allowed subsidized EU beef to drive many West African and South African cattle raisers to ruin. With their subsidies legitimized by the WTO, US growers offloaded cotton on world markets at 20 percent to 55 percent of production cost, thereby bankrupting West and Central African farmers.
According to Oxfam, the number of sub-Saharan Africans living on less than a dollar a day almost doubled, to 313 million, between 1981 and 2001 -- 46 percent of the whole continent. The role of structural adjustment in creating poverty was hard to deny. As the World Bank's chief economist for Africa admitted, "We did not think that the human costs of these programs could be so great, and the economic gains would be so slow in coming."
In 1999 the government of Malawi initiated a program to give each smallholder family a starter pack of free fertilizers and seeds. The result was a national surplus of corn. What came after is a story that should be enshrined as a classic case study of one of the greatest blunders of neoliberal economics. The World Bank and other aid donors forced the scaling down and eventual scrapping of the program, arguing that the subsidy distorted trade. Without the free packs, output plummeted. In the meantime, the IMF insisted that the government sell off a large portion of its grain reserves to enable the food reserve agency to settle its commercial debts. The government complied. When the food crisis turned into a famine in 2001-02, there were hardly any reserves left. About 1,500 people perished. The IMF was unrepentant; in fact, it suspended its disbursements on an adjustment program on the grounds that "the parastatal sector will continue to pose risks to the successful implementation of the 2002/03 budget. Government interventions in the food and other agricultural markets... [are] crowding out more productive spending."
By the time an even worse food crisis developed in 2005, the government had had enough of World Bank/IMF stupidity. A new president reintroduced the fertilizer subsidy, enabling 2 million households to buy it at a third of the retail price and seeds at a discount. The result: bumper harvests for two years, a million-ton maize surplus and the country transformed into a supplier of corn to Southern Africa.
Malawi's defiance of the World Bank would probably have been an act of heroic but futile resistance a decade ago. The environment is different today, since structural adjustment has been discredited throughout Africa. Even some donor governments and NGOs that used to subscribe to it have distanced themselves from the World Bank. Perhaps the motivation is to prevent their influence in the continent from being further eroded by association with a failed approach and unpopular institutions when Chinese aid is emerging as an alternative to World Bank, IMF and Western government aid programs.
Food Sovereignty: An Alternative Paradigm?
It is not only defiance from governments like Malawi and dissent from their erstwhile allies that are undermining the IMF and the World Bank. Peasant organizations around the world have become increasingly militant in their resistance to the globalization of industrial agriculture. Indeed, it is because of pressure from farmers' groups that the governments of the South have refused to grant wider access to their agricultural markets and demanded a massive slashing of US and EU agricultural subsidies, which brought the WTO's Doha Round of negotiations to a standstill.
Farmers' groups have networked internationally; one of the most dynamic to emerge is Via Campesina (Peasant's Path). Via not only seeks to get "WTO out of agriculture" and opposes the paradigm of a globalized capitalist industrial agriculture, it also proposes an alternative -- food sovereignty. Food sovereignty means, first of all, the right of a country to determine its production and consumption of food and the exemption of agriculture from global trade regimes like that of the WTO. It also means consolidation of a smallholder-centered agriculture via protection of the domestic market from low-priced imports; remunerative prices for farmers and fisherfolk; abolition of all direct and indirect export subsidies; and the phasing out of domestic subsidies that promote unsustainable agriculture. Via's platform also calls for an end to the Trade Related Intellectual Property Rights regime, or TRIPs, which allows corporations to patent plant seeds; opposes agro-technology based on genetic engineering; and demands land reform. In contrast to an integrated global monoculture, Via offers the vision of an international agricultural economy composed of diverse national agricultural economies trading with one another but focused primarily on domestic production.
Once regarded as relics of the pre-industrial era, peasants are now leading the opposition to a capitalist industrial agriculture that would consign them to the dustbin of history. They have become what Karl Marx described as a politically conscious "class for itself," contradicting his predictions about their demise.
With the global food crisis, peasants are moving to center stage -- and they have allies and supporters. For as peasants refuse to go gently into that good night and fight de-peasantization, developments in the twenty-first century are revealing the panacea of globalized capitalist industrial agriculture to be a nightmare. With environmental crises multiplying, the social dysfunctions of urban-industrial life piling up, and industrialized agriculture creating greater food insecurity, the farmers' movement increasingly has relevance not only to peasants but to everyone threatened by the catastrophic consequences of global capital's vision for organizing production, community -- and life itself.
Walden Bello is senior analyst at Focus on the Global South, at Chulalongkorn University in Bangkok. He is author and co-author of many books, most recently, Deglobalization (Zed), and recipient of the 2003 Right Livelihood Award, also known as the "Alternative Nobel Prize." In March, he was named Outstanding Public Scholar for 2008 by the International Studies Association.
Copyright © 2008 The Nation
Thursday, May 15, 2008
Los Alamos: Parks Service Sparks Wild Fire
Firestorm hits Los Alamos
High winds have spread the fire towards Los Alamos
A forest fire is spreading through Los Alamos in New Mexico, where the United States government has its main nuclear weapons laboratory.
At least 100 houses have been destroyed and 18,000 residents evacuated as high winds fan the flames.
The nuclear facilities at the site where the world's first atom bomb was built have been shut down. Nuclear materials are protected, though there was a brief fire at one of the laboratory buildings.
"This is a terrible situation," said New Mexico Governor Gary Johnson. "Los Alamos is in the path of this fire, a huge fire."
Aeroplanes are dropping slurry onto the flames
There is to be an inquiry into why the National Park Service started the fire, intending to clear brushwood from a Bandelier National Monument.
"I love the National Park Service for starting this; they're a bunch of idiots," said Neil Stoddard, one resident forced to evacuate. "I think better judgement could have been used.
"Getting kicked out of my home town is not something I wanted to do today."
Another evacuee, Al Jaffee, said: "I just keep a sleeping bag in the truck. Other than that, it's just the clothes on my back."
Bandelier National Monument Superintendent Roy Weaver said people had a right to feel "frustrated and angry".
"I wish we could make it right somehow," he said. "My staff just feels terrible, and myself."
Federal Emergency Management Agency Director James Lee Witt is expected to visit the area on Thursday to help co-ordinate relief efforts.
Wind fans flames
Aerial television footage has shown burning homes and forest. Thick clouds of smoke are rising into the sky and are being blown hundreds of kilometres.
Los Alamos Fire Department spokesman Jim Danneskiold said high winds had made the fire worse, with forecasts of up to 100km/h (60mph).
The fire has destroyed more than 7,200 hectares of forest
"Houses and buildings at the extreme west of the town are starting to go on fire," he said.
The fire has engulfed nearly 7,200 hectares (18,000 acres) of forest, the US Forest Service has announced.
About 700 fire fighters plus units of the National Guards are tackling the blaze on the ground helped by helicopters and aeroplanes.
A spokesman for the nuclear plant said: "Nuclear materials are stored in concrete bunkers at the plutonium facility.
"They have been built to withstand all kind of potential destruction, including a plane crash, bombings and, of course, a fire."
Another forest fire broke out on 10 May, 50 kilometres (30 miles) south of Albuquerque, but fire fighters there have brought the blaze under control after it destroyed 2,300 hectares (5,700 acres).
High winds have spread the fire towards Los Alamos
A forest fire is spreading through Los Alamos in New Mexico, where the United States government has its main nuclear weapons laboratory.
At least 100 houses have been destroyed and 18,000 residents evacuated as high winds fan the flames.
The nuclear facilities at the site where the world's first atom bomb was built have been shut down. Nuclear materials are protected, though there was a brief fire at one of the laboratory buildings.
"This is a terrible situation," said New Mexico Governor Gary Johnson. "Los Alamos is in the path of this fire, a huge fire."
Aeroplanes are dropping slurry onto the flames
There is to be an inquiry into why the National Park Service started the fire, intending to clear brushwood from a Bandelier National Monument.
"I love the National Park Service for starting this; they're a bunch of idiots," said Neil Stoddard, one resident forced to evacuate. "I think better judgement could have been used.
"Getting kicked out of my home town is not something I wanted to do today."
Another evacuee, Al Jaffee, said: "I just keep a sleeping bag in the truck. Other than that, it's just the clothes on my back."
Bandelier National Monument Superintendent Roy Weaver said people had a right to feel "frustrated and angry".
"I wish we could make it right somehow," he said. "My staff just feels terrible, and myself."
Federal Emergency Management Agency Director James Lee Witt is expected to visit the area on Thursday to help co-ordinate relief efforts.
Wind fans flames
Aerial television footage has shown burning homes and forest. Thick clouds of smoke are rising into the sky and are being blown hundreds of kilometres.
Los Alamos Fire Department spokesman Jim Danneskiold said high winds had made the fire worse, with forecasts of up to 100km/h (60mph).
The fire has destroyed more than 7,200 hectares of forest
"Houses and buildings at the extreme west of the town are starting to go on fire," he said.
The fire has engulfed nearly 7,200 hectares (18,000 acres) of forest, the US Forest Service has announced.
About 700 fire fighters plus units of the National Guards are tackling the blaze on the ground helped by helicopters and aeroplanes.
A spokesman for the nuclear plant said: "Nuclear materials are stored in concrete bunkers at the plutonium facility.
"They have been built to withstand all kind of potential destruction, including a plane crash, bombings and, of course, a fire."
Another forest fire broke out on 10 May, 50 kilometres (30 miles) south of Albuquerque, but fire fighters there have brought the blaze under control after it destroyed 2,300 hectares (5,700 acres).
Calling on McGuinty: Free the KI 6!
KI gets celeb support
James Thom - Wawatay News
The KI 6 have some high-profile Canadians on their side.
Author Margaret Atwood, musician Sarah Harmer and former UN ambassador Stephen Lewis are among 20 prominent Canadians who called on Premier Dalton McGuinty to free Kitchenuhmaykoosib Chief Donny Morris, Deputy Chief Jack McKay, Head Coun. Cecilia Begg, councillors Sam McKay and Darryl Sainnawap and band member Bruce Sakakeep, who were jailed March 17 for preventing junior mining exploration company Platinex Inc. from accessing drilling sites in the community’s traditional territory.
The group of Canadians also supports former Ardoch chief Robert Lovelace who was also jailed six months and fined for contempt of court over a dispute with a uranium company.
“The jailing of Bob Lovelace and the KI 6 is a terrible injustice against First Nations people in this province,” said letter-signer Judy Rebick, CAW Sam Gindin Chair in Social Justice and Democracy, Ryerson University.
“Premier Dalton McGuinty and his government must take the necessary steps to free them and put in place frameworks that would respect First Nations’ rights to protect their land from unwanted industrial development.”
The letter – which was sent to McGuinty April 22 (Earth Day) – says mining shouldn’t take precedence over people’s homes and health.
The letter-writers said it is vital that Ontario “replaces the antiquated free entry system of mining and exploration with a modern, regulated process of granting exploration permits.
Such permits should only be granted after conservation planning, good faith consultation and genuine accommodation of affected Aboriginal Peoples as per Supreme Court decisions.”
The group called on McGuinty to:
• Secure the immediate release of Bob Lovelace and the KI Six;
• Stop mineral exploration on the lands of KI and the Ardoch Algonquins by issuing a ‘stop work’ order and withdrawing the lands from staking;
• Comprehensively reform Ontario’s mining regime and the Mining Act;
• Establish a joint panel with the Ardoch Algonquins and KI to deal with the issue of mineral development on their traditional lands.
“Ontario’s mining legislation is over 100 years old and doesn’t fit with modern society’s understanding of ecosystems, climate change and human rights,” says Anna Baggio, director of conservation and land use planning with CPAWS Wildlands League.
The free-entry system allows prospectors and exploration companies outside of cities and towns to come onto people’s backyards and properties to explore for minerals without permission.
“These companies can dig holes, blast rocks and cut down trees,” Baggio said. “They can do this because while landowners may own the surface rights to their properties they do not own the subsurface rights and there is no recourse for people who wish to stop it.”
The full text of the letter can be found at www.wildlandsleague.org.
The letter was signed by:
Margaret Atwood
Dave Coles, national president of the Communications, Energy and Paperworkers Union of Canada
Gerry Antoine, Grand chief Deh Cho First Nations
George Erasmus, former Assembly of First Nations National chief
Graeme Gibson
Sarah Harmer
Bob Huget, Ontario region vice-president of the Communications, Energy and Paperworkers Union of Canada
Cathy Jones, comedian, actor and writer
Alice Klein, editor/CEO NOW Magazine
Michele Landsberg, author and activist
Stephen Lewis, professor in Global Health, faculty of Social Sciences, McMaster University
Michael Hollett, editor/publisher NOW Magazine
Monte Hummel, president emeritus of World Wildlife Fund
Hugh McCallum, journalist, author of the Dene Nation publication “This Land is Not for Sale”
Craig Norris, musician and CBC Radio 3 host
James Raffan, geographer and writer
Judy Rebick, CAW Gindin Chair in Social Justice and Democracy, Ryerson University
Ian Tamblyn, singer, songwriter
Jenny Whitley, Juno-award winning musician
Joey Wright, musician
James Thom - Wawatay News
The KI 6 have some high-profile Canadians on their side.
Author Margaret Atwood, musician Sarah Harmer and former UN ambassador Stephen Lewis are among 20 prominent Canadians who called on Premier Dalton McGuinty to free Kitchenuhmaykoosib Chief Donny Morris, Deputy Chief Jack McKay, Head Coun. Cecilia Begg, councillors Sam McKay and Darryl Sainnawap and band member Bruce Sakakeep, who were jailed March 17 for preventing junior mining exploration company Platinex Inc. from accessing drilling sites in the community’s traditional territory.
The group of Canadians also supports former Ardoch chief Robert Lovelace who was also jailed six months and fined for contempt of court over a dispute with a uranium company.
“The jailing of Bob Lovelace and the KI 6 is a terrible injustice against First Nations people in this province,” said letter-signer Judy Rebick, CAW Sam Gindin Chair in Social Justice and Democracy, Ryerson University.
“Premier Dalton McGuinty and his government must take the necessary steps to free them and put in place frameworks that would respect First Nations’ rights to protect their land from unwanted industrial development.”
The letter – which was sent to McGuinty April 22 (Earth Day) – says mining shouldn’t take precedence over people’s homes and health.
The letter-writers said it is vital that Ontario “replaces the antiquated free entry system of mining and exploration with a modern, regulated process of granting exploration permits.
Such permits should only be granted after conservation planning, good faith consultation and genuine accommodation of affected Aboriginal Peoples as per Supreme Court decisions.”
The group called on McGuinty to:
• Secure the immediate release of Bob Lovelace and the KI Six;
• Stop mineral exploration on the lands of KI and the Ardoch Algonquins by issuing a ‘stop work’ order and withdrawing the lands from staking;
• Comprehensively reform Ontario’s mining regime and the Mining Act;
• Establish a joint panel with the Ardoch Algonquins and KI to deal with the issue of mineral development on their traditional lands.
“Ontario’s mining legislation is over 100 years old and doesn’t fit with modern society’s understanding of ecosystems, climate change and human rights,” says Anna Baggio, director of conservation and land use planning with CPAWS Wildlands League.
The free-entry system allows prospectors and exploration companies outside of cities and towns to come onto people’s backyards and properties to explore for minerals without permission.
“These companies can dig holes, blast rocks and cut down trees,” Baggio said. “They can do this because while landowners may own the surface rights to their properties they do not own the subsurface rights and there is no recourse for people who wish to stop it.”
The full text of the letter can be found at www.wildlandsleague.org.
The letter was signed by:
Margaret Atwood
Dave Coles, national president of the Communications, Energy and Paperworkers Union of Canada
Gerry Antoine, Grand chief Deh Cho First Nations
George Erasmus, former Assembly of First Nations National chief
Graeme Gibson
Sarah Harmer
Bob Huget, Ontario region vice-president of the Communications, Energy and Paperworkers Union of Canada
Cathy Jones, comedian, actor and writer
Alice Klein, editor/CEO NOW Magazine
Michele Landsberg, author and activist
Stephen Lewis, professor in Global Health, faculty of Social Sciences, McMaster University
Michael Hollett, editor/publisher NOW Magazine
Monte Hummel, president emeritus of World Wildlife Fund
Hugh McCallum, journalist, author of the Dene Nation publication “This Land is Not for Sale”
Craig Norris, musician and CBC Radio 3 host
James Raffan, geographer and writer
Judy Rebick, CAW Gindin Chair in Social Justice and Democracy, Ryerson University
Ian Tamblyn, singer, songwriter
Jenny Whitley, Juno-award winning musician
Joey Wright, musician
Canada: The CRTC and "Regulating" the Internet
CRTC launches consultation on broadcasting in new media for future hearing
OTTAWA-GATINEAU - The Canadian Radio-televison and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) today launched a consultation on broadcasting in the new media environment for a public hearing to be held in early 2009. The Commission is asking for public input on the scope of such a proceeding.
The Commission has a responsibility to ensure that the broadcasting system is in a position to achieve the objectives of the Broadcasting Act, today as well as in the future,” said Konrad von Finckenstein,
Q.C., Chairman of the CRTC. “New digital technologies and platforms are creating opportunities for the broadcast of professionally-produced Canadian content that simply didn't exist a few years ago. Our intention is not to regulate new media, but rather to gain a better understanding of this environment and, if necessary, to propose measures that would support the continued achievement of the Broadcasting Act's objectives.
Today, the Commission released a compilation of research and views titled Perspectives on Canadian Broadcasting in New Media. This document is the result of research commissioned by the CRTC over the past year and includes views obtained from the Canadian broadcasting and telecommunications industries, academia, and national and international policy-makers.
Broadcasting in the new media environment is an expansive and complex subject. Those consulted held different opinions on its very nature. They also expressed various ideas on how to make the most of emerging opportunities for the broadcast of high-quality, professional Canadian content in new media.
The Commission therefore wishes to narrow the range of issues that could be considered as part of a proceeding on broadcasting in this environment. In a call for comments also issued today, it is asking for public input on whether the following questions, and what other questions, should fall within the scope of the public hearing to be held early next year:
- What is broadcasting in new media?
- Should the creation and promotion of Canadian broadcasting content for
the new media environment be supported? If so, how?
- Are there any barriers to accessing Canadian broadcasting content in
the new media environment?
- What other issues should be considered?
Interested parties may submit their comments by July 11, 2008. They may do so by filling out the online form, by writing to the Secretary General, CRTC, Ottawa, Ontario, K1A 0N2, or by fax, at 819-994-0218.
Beginning today, the CRTC is also enabling an online consultation to allow Canadians the opportunity to discuss the issues and questions related to Canadian broadcasting in the new media environment. The
website will remain open for postings until June 15, 2008, and is available at:
http://crtc.newmedia.econsultation.ca.
The Commission will issue a notice of public hearing by the late summer of 2008 outlining the details of the public hearing on Canadian broadcasting in the new media environment.
Broadcasting Public Notice CRTC 2008-44
http://www.crtc.gc.ca/archive/ENG/Notices/2008/pb2008-44.htm
Perspectives on Canadian Broadcasting in New Media
http://www.crtc.gc.ca/eng/media/rp080515.htm
CRTC section on new media
http://www.crtc.gc.ca/eng/media/media.htm
The CRTC
The CRTC is an independent, public authority that regulates and supervises broadcasting and telecommunications in Canada.
Reference documents:
Broadcasting Public Notice CRTC 2007-13
http://www.crtc.gc.ca/archive/ENG/Notices/2007/pb2007-13.htm
Public Notice CRTC 1999-197
http://www.crtc.gc.ca/archive/ENG/Notices/1999/PB99-197.HTM
- 30 -
Media Relations:
MediaRelations, Tel: 819-997-9403, Fax: 819-997-4245
General Inquiries:
Tel: 819-997-0313, TDD: 819-994-0423, Fax: 819-994-0218
Toll-free # 1-877-249-CRTC (2782)
TDD - Toll-free # 1-877-909-CRTC (2782)
On-line services
These documents are available in alternative format upon request.
-
Backgrounder on broadcasting in new media
What is broadcasting?
Broadcasting is defined in the Broadcasting Act as the transmission of programs by radio waves or other means of telecommunication and which are for reception by the public. The Act further defines a program as sounds or visual images, or a combination of the two, that are intended to inform, enlighten or entertain. Visual images that consist predominantly of alphanumeric text are not considered as a "program" under this definition.
What is considered broadcasting in the new media environment? Broadcasting in the new media environment consists of the distribution of audio or video content, or a combination of the two, using new
technologies and platforms, such as the Internet and mobile devices. The Commission considers that alphanumeric text and content customized by users fall outside of the scope of broadcasting in new media.
What do you mean by "professionally produced"?
The Commission is mainly concerned with the broadcast of professionally-produced Canadian content over the Internet and through mobile devices. This type of content is generally expensive to produce,
of a high quality and comparable to what has traditionally been aired on television and the radio. Audio and video content customized by users is not considered as being professionally produced.
When did the Commission exempt new media?
In 1999, the Commission examined new media services that deliver broadcasting content over the Internet and concluded that regulation was not necessary to achieve the objectives of the Broadcasting Act. The
Commission issued an Exemption Order for these services, observing that:
- there was no discernible impact on conventional radio and television
audiences attributed to new media services
- market forces were providing for a Canadian presence on the Internet,
which was supported by a strong demand for Canadian content, and
- there was no evidence that the Internet had impacted the traditional
broadcasters' advertising revenues.
In 2007, the Commission issued a similar Exemption Order for broadcasting services that are received through cellphones, personal digital assistants (PDAs) and other mobile devices.
Why review new media broadcasting now?
The Commission has made it a practice of periodically reviewing its exemption orders. In the decade since the Commission exempted new media broadcasting services, the landscape has evolved significantly. In particular:
- Canadian are spending more time accessing broadcasting content over
the Internet and on mobile devices, and asserting greater control while
doing so.
- Globally, the pace at which professionally-produced broadcasting
content is being made available online is accelerating, but Canadian
participation is lagging.
- Advertisers are increasingly embracing marketing strategies tailored
to broadcasting in new media.
Which objectives of the Broadcasting Act are relevant to broadcasting in the new media environment?
There are two main objectives that are particularly relevant to the issue of broadcasting in new media. The first is that each element of the broadcasting system must contribute to the creation and presentation of Canadian programming. This programming must reflect Canada's creativity and talent, its two official languages, its multicultural diversity, its social values and the special place of Aboriginal peoples within its society. The second objective is that Canadians should have full access to the broadcasting system, both as audiences and as producers and creators in the industry.
OTTAWA-GATINEAU - The Canadian Radio-televison and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) today launched a consultation on broadcasting in the new media environment for a public hearing to be held in early 2009. The Commission is asking for public input on the scope of such a proceeding.
The Commission has a responsibility to ensure that the broadcasting system is in a position to achieve the objectives of the Broadcasting Act, today as well as in the future,” said Konrad von Finckenstein,
Q.C., Chairman of the CRTC. “New digital technologies and platforms are creating opportunities for the broadcast of professionally-produced Canadian content that simply didn't exist a few years ago. Our intention is not to regulate new media, but rather to gain a better understanding of this environment and, if necessary, to propose measures that would support the continued achievement of the Broadcasting Act's objectives.
Today, the Commission released a compilation of research and views titled Perspectives on Canadian Broadcasting in New Media. This document is the result of research commissioned by the CRTC over the past year and includes views obtained from the Canadian broadcasting and telecommunications industries, academia, and national and international policy-makers.
Broadcasting in the new media environment is an expansive and complex subject. Those consulted held different opinions on its very nature. They also expressed various ideas on how to make the most of emerging opportunities for the broadcast of high-quality, professional Canadian content in new media.
The Commission therefore wishes to narrow the range of issues that could be considered as part of a proceeding on broadcasting in this environment. In a call for comments also issued today, it is asking for public input on whether the following questions, and what other questions, should fall within the scope of the public hearing to be held early next year:
- What is broadcasting in new media?
- Should the creation and promotion of Canadian broadcasting content for
the new media environment be supported? If so, how?
- Are there any barriers to accessing Canadian broadcasting content in
the new media environment?
- What other issues should be considered?
Interested parties may submit their comments by July 11, 2008. They may do so by filling out the online form, by writing to the Secretary General, CRTC, Ottawa, Ontario, K1A 0N2, or by fax, at 819-994-0218.
Beginning today, the CRTC is also enabling an online consultation to allow Canadians the opportunity to discuss the issues and questions related to Canadian broadcasting in the new media environment. The
website will remain open for postings until June 15, 2008, and is available at:
http://crtc.newmedia.econsultation.ca.
The Commission will issue a notice of public hearing by the late summer of 2008 outlining the details of the public hearing on Canadian broadcasting in the new media environment.
Broadcasting Public Notice CRTC 2008-44
http://www.crtc.gc.ca/archive/ENG/Notices/2008/pb2008-44.htm
Perspectives on Canadian Broadcasting in New Media
http://www.crtc.gc.ca/eng/media/rp080515.htm
CRTC section on new media
http://www.crtc.gc.ca/eng/media/media.htm
The CRTC
The CRTC is an independent, public authority that regulates and supervises broadcasting and telecommunications in Canada.
Reference documents:
Broadcasting Public Notice CRTC 2007-13
http://www.crtc.gc.ca/archive/ENG/Notices/2007/pb2007-13.htm
Public Notice CRTC 1999-197
http://www.crtc.gc.ca/archive/ENG/Notices/1999/PB99-197.HTM
- 30 -
Media Relations:
MediaRelations, Tel: 819-997-9403, Fax: 819-997-4245
General Inquiries:
Tel: 819-997-0313, TDD: 819-994-0423, Fax: 819-994-0218
Toll-free # 1-877-249-CRTC (2782)
TDD - Toll-free # 1-877-909-CRTC (2782)
On-line services
These documents are available in alternative format upon request.
-
Backgrounder on broadcasting in new media
What is broadcasting?
Broadcasting is defined in the Broadcasting Act as the transmission of programs by radio waves or other means of telecommunication and which are for reception by the public. The Act further defines a program as sounds or visual images, or a combination of the two, that are intended to inform, enlighten or entertain. Visual images that consist predominantly of alphanumeric text are not considered as a "program" under this definition.
What is considered broadcasting in the new media environment? Broadcasting in the new media environment consists of the distribution of audio or video content, or a combination of the two, using new
technologies and platforms, such as the Internet and mobile devices. The Commission considers that alphanumeric text and content customized by users fall outside of the scope of broadcasting in new media.
What do you mean by "professionally produced"?
The Commission is mainly concerned with the broadcast of professionally-produced Canadian content over the Internet and through mobile devices. This type of content is generally expensive to produce,
of a high quality and comparable to what has traditionally been aired on television and the radio. Audio and video content customized by users is not considered as being professionally produced.
When did the Commission exempt new media?
In 1999, the Commission examined new media services that deliver broadcasting content over the Internet and concluded that regulation was not necessary to achieve the objectives of the Broadcasting Act. The
Commission issued an Exemption Order for these services, observing that:
- there was no discernible impact on conventional radio and television
audiences attributed to new media services
- market forces were providing for a Canadian presence on the Internet,
which was supported by a strong demand for Canadian content, and
- there was no evidence that the Internet had impacted the traditional
broadcasters' advertising revenues.
In 2007, the Commission issued a similar Exemption Order for broadcasting services that are received through cellphones, personal digital assistants (PDAs) and other mobile devices.
Why review new media broadcasting now?
The Commission has made it a practice of periodically reviewing its exemption orders. In the decade since the Commission exempted new media broadcasting services, the landscape has evolved significantly. In particular:
- Canadian are spending more time accessing broadcasting content over
the Internet and on mobile devices, and asserting greater control while
doing so.
- Globally, the pace at which professionally-produced broadcasting
content is being made available online is accelerating, but Canadian
participation is lagging.
- Advertisers are increasingly embracing marketing strategies tailored
to broadcasting in new media.
Which objectives of the Broadcasting Act are relevant to broadcasting in the new media environment?
There are two main objectives that are particularly relevant to the issue of broadcasting in new media. The first is that each element of the broadcasting system must contribute to the creation and presentation of Canadian programming. This programming must reflect Canada's creativity and talent, its two official languages, its multicultural diversity, its social values and the special place of Aboriginal peoples within its society. The second objective is that Canadians should have full access to the broadcasting system, both as audiences and as producers and creators in the industry.
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