Alberta pigs likely infected with flu from worker: CFIA official
Number of confirmed Canadian cases now 85, all believed mild
Last Updated: Saturday, May 2, 2009 | 7:56 PM ET Comments374Recommend142
CBC News
In what would be the first reported case of its kind, a farm worker with the swine flu virus is believed to have infected about 200 pigs in Alberta, a top official with the Canadian Food Inspection Agency said Saturday.
Senior research scientist Dr. Karuna Karunakaran works in the vaccine research lab at the British Columbia Centre for Disease Control during a demonstration for media in Vancouver on Thursday. Twenty-two cases of swine flu are now confirmed in B.C.Senior research scientist Dr. Karuna Karunakaran works in the vaccine research lab at the British Columbia Centre for Disease Control during a demonstration for media in Vancouver on Thursday. Twenty-two cases of swine flu are now confirmed in B.C. (Darryl Dyck/Canadian Press)Dr. Brian Evans, executive vice-president of the CFIA, said at a news conference in Ottawa that the pigs were apparently infected by a farm worker who had recently been in Mexico and fell ill upon his return.
The worker returned from Mexico on April 12 and worked at the Alberta farm two days later. He "may have exposed pigs there to the illness," Evans told reporters.
The man has since recovered. The pigs are also recovering and the herd in question has been quarantined, he said. Samples from the infected pigs are being analyzed.
"We have found the virus is the one being tracked in the human population," Evans said. About 10 per cent of the 2,200 pigs at the farm exhibited flu-like symptoms such as loss of appetite or fever, he said.
"I want to be clear — there is no food safety concern related to this finding," said Evans.
It is common for pigs to contract influenza, he said. But this is the first known case of the H1N1 virus being transmitted from humans to pigs.
Normally, detecting influenza in pigs wouldn't generate a response from food safety officials, but with an international flu outbreak the current circumstances are different, Evans said.
"The chance that these pigs could transfer virus to a person is remote," said Evans.
The outbreak among pigs, he said, was confined to the herd in question as none of the pigs have been moved outside the farm or sold elsewhere.
Province Confirmed cases of swine flu in Canadians
Alberta 15
British Columbia 22
Nova Scotia 31
New Brunswick 1
Ontario 14
Quebec 2
Total 85
Spate of new confirmed cases
Earlier in the day, health officials in Nova Scotia, Alberta, British Columbia, Ontario and Quebec confirmed a spate of new swine flu cases in humans, boosting the national count to 85.
The Nova Scotia Department of Health said lab testing had confirmed 17 new cases in the province.
Eleven of the cases are related to the King's-Edgehill school community in Windsor, but the breakdown between students and staff is not known, according to the Nova Scotia Department of Health. Six other cases are outside the school population and were confirmed by testing in a Halifax hospital.
The virus, identified as a new strain of the H1N1 subtype of type A influenza, is believed to have originated in Mexico and has since appeared in Canada, the U.S., Europe and elsewhere.
Canada's chief public health officer David Butler-Jones said Friday the more public health authorities look, the more cases they are likely to find. This assertion was echoed by Dr. Robert Strang, chief public health officer for Nova Scotia.
"We have been expecting this and are prepared," Strang said Saturday. "Right now we are working to gather more information about the individual confirmed cases outside of King's-Edgehill."
The cases are all mild, says the health department.
Nova Scotia's first cases of the H1N1 virus were confirmed at the private school last weekend. Officials believe students who went on a school trip to Mexico carried the infection back home.
None of the Canadian cases have been as severe as those in the Mexican outbreak.
Cases considered mild
The Alberta Department of Health confirmed seven new cases Saturday, four of them in the Edmonton area, two in the north and one in the Calgary area.
Five of those infected are female, including one child. Another male child has also been infected.
None of the cases require hospitalization, Alberta's Department of Health said in a release posted on its website. There was no further information.
West Vernon Children's Centre employee Sharyn Stokes cleans plastic toys in the preschool classrooms in Vernon, B.C. The centre runs the after-school children's programs for Beairsto Elementary School, which was recently closed because of a case of swine flu.West Vernon Children's Centre employee Sharyn Stokes cleans plastic toys in the preschool classrooms in Vernon, B.C. The centre runs the after-school children's programs for Beairsto Elementary School, which was recently closed because of a case of swine flu. (Jeff Bassett/Canadian Press)Health officials in Quebec confirmed another case of swine flu in the province Saturday. There are now two confirmed cases in the province.
Dr. Alain Poirier, Quebec's director of public health, said the virus had been found in a child who had travelled to Mexico with his parents.
He said he would not name the child or the school he attended until all teachers and parents associated with the school had been contacted.
Dr. David Williams, Ontario's acting chief medical officer of health, confirmed two new cases of the virus Saturday. One of the two newly confirmed cases is in the York region, while the other is in the Toronto area.
In a release, Williams said one of the cases resulted from person-to-person transmission, as the infected individual picked up the illness from a roommate who travelled to Mexico. All the Ontario cases are believed to be mild.
The B.C. Centre for Disease Control confirmed three more cases Saturday, raising its total to 22. Details of the new cases were not immediately clear, but a release on the department's website said all of the cases are "relatively mild."
So far, Saskatchewan, Manitoba, Newfoundland and Labrador, P.E.I. and the territories have not confirmed any cases of this particular flu strain.
Sunday, May 03, 2009
Pacific Island of Rubbish
Mission to Break up Pacific Island of Rubbish Twice the Size of Texas
by Frank Pope
Published on Saturday, May 2, 2009 by The Times/UK
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/environment/article6206498.ece
A high-seas mission departs from San Francisco next month to map and explore a sinister and shifting 21st-century continent: one twice the size of Texas and created from six million tonnes of discarded plastic.
Scientists and conservationists on the expedition will begin attempts to retrieve and recycle a monument to throwaway living in the middle of the North Pacific.
A shark carcass on Kamilo Beach, Hawaii, where plastic particles outnumber sand grains until you dig down about a foot (Photo: ALGALITA MARINE RESEARCH FOUNDATION)
The toxic soup of refuse was discovered in 1997 when Charles Moore, an oceanographer, decided to travel through the centre of the North Pacific gyre (a vortex or circular ocean current). Navigators usually avoid oceanic gyres because persistent high-pressure systems --- also known as the doldrums --- lack the winds and currents to benefit sailors.
Mr Moore found bottle caps, plastic bags and polystyrene floating with tiny plastic chips. Worn down by sunlight and waves, discarded plastic disintegrates into smaller pieces. Suspended under the surface, these tiny fragments are invisible to ships and satellites trying to map the plastic continent, but in subsequent trawls Mr Moore discovered that the chips outnumbered plankton by six to one.
The damage caused by these tiny fragments is more insidious than strangulation, entrapment and choking by larger plastic refuse. The fragments act as sponges for heavy metals and pollutants until mistaken for food by small fish. The toxins then become more concentrated as they move up the food chain through larger fish, birds and marine mammals.
"You can buy certified organic farm produce, but no fishmonger on earth can sell you a certified organic wild-caught fish. This is our legacy," said Mr Moore.
Because of their tiny size and the scale of the problem, he believes that nothing can be solved at sea. "Trying to clean up the Pacific gyre would bankrupt any country and kill wildlife in the nets as it went."
In June the 151ft brigantine /Kaisei/ (Japanese for Planet Ocean) will unfurl its sails in San Francisco to try to prove Mr Moore wrong. Project Kaisei's flagship will be joined by a decommissioned fishing trawler armed with specialised nets.
"The trick is collecting the plastic while minimising the catch of sea life. We can't catch the tiny pieces. But the net benefit of getting the rest out is very likely to be better than leaving it in," says Doug Woodring, the leader of the project.
With a crew of 30, the expedition, supported by the Scripps Institution of Oceanography and Brita, the water company, will use unmanned aircraft and robotic surface explorers to map the extent and depth of the plastic continent while collecting 40 tonnes of the refuse for trial recycling.
"We have a few technologies that can turn thin plastics into diesel fuel. Other technologies are much more hardcore, to deal with the hard plastics," says Mr Woodring, who hopes to run his vessels on the recycled fuel.
Plastics bags, food wrappers and containers are the second and third most common items in marine debris around the world, according to the Ocean Conservancy, which is based in Washington. The proportion of tiny fragments, known as mermaid's tears, are less easily quantified.
The UN's environmental programme estimates that 18,000 pieces of plastic have ended up in every square kilometre of the sea, totalling more than 100 million tonnes. The North Pacific gyre --- officially called the northern subtropical convergence zone --- is thought to contain the biggest concentration. Ideal conditions for shifting slicks of plastic also exist in the South Pacific, the Indian Ocean and the North and South Atlantic, but no research vessel has investigated those areas. If this exploratory mission is successful, a bigger fleet will depart in 2010.
Mr Woodring admits that Project Kaisei has limitations. "We won't be able to clean up the entire ocean. The solution really lies on land. We have to treat plastics in a totally different way, and stop them ever reaching the ocean."
Copyright 2009 Times Newspapers Ltd.
by Frank Pope
Published on Saturday, May 2, 2009 by The Times/UK
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/environment/article6206498.ece
A high-seas mission departs from San Francisco next month to map and explore a sinister and shifting 21st-century continent: one twice the size of Texas and created from six million tonnes of discarded plastic.
Scientists and conservationists on the expedition will begin attempts to retrieve and recycle a monument to throwaway living in the middle of the North Pacific.
A shark carcass on Kamilo Beach, Hawaii, where plastic particles outnumber sand grains until you dig down about a foot (Photo: ALGALITA MARINE RESEARCH FOUNDATION)
The toxic soup of refuse was discovered in 1997 when Charles Moore, an oceanographer, decided to travel through the centre of the North Pacific gyre (a vortex or circular ocean current). Navigators usually avoid oceanic gyres because persistent high-pressure systems --- also known as the doldrums --- lack the winds and currents to benefit sailors.
Mr Moore found bottle caps, plastic bags and polystyrene floating with tiny plastic chips. Worn down by sunlight and waves, discarded plastic disintegrates into smaller pieces. Suspended under the surface, these tiny fragments are invisible to ships and satellites trying to map the plastic continent, but in subsequent trawls Mr Moore discovered that the chips outnumbered plankton by six to one.
The damage caused by these tiny fragments is more insidious than strangulation, entrapment and choking by larger plastic refuse. The fragments act as sponges for heavy metals and pollutants until mistaken for food by small fish. The toxins then become more concentrated as they move up the food chain through larger fish, birds and marine mammals.
"You can buy certified organic farm produce, but no fishmonger on earth can sell you a certified organic wild-caught fish. This is our legacy," said Mr Moore.
Because of their tiny size and the scale of the problem, he believes that nothing can be solved at sea. "Trying to clean up the Pacific gyre would bankrupt any country and kill wildlife in the nets as it went."
In June the 151ft brigantine /Kaisei/ (Japanese for Planet Ocean) will unfurl its sails in San Francisco to try to prove Mr Moore wrong. Project Kaisei's flagship will be joined by a decommissioned fishing trawler armed with specialised nets.
"The trick is collecting the plastic while minimising the catch of sea life. We can't catch the tiny pieces. But the net benefit of getting the rest out is very likely to be better than leaving it in," says Doug Woodring, the leader of the project.
With a crew of 30, the expedition, supported by the Scripps Institution of Oceanography and Brita, the water company, will use unmanned aircraft and robotic surface explorers to map the extent and depth of the plastic continent while collecting 40 tonnes of the refuse for trial recycling.
"We have a few technologies that can turn thin plastics into diesel fuel. Other technologies are much more hardcore, to deal with the hard plastics," says Mr Woodring, who hopes to run his vessels on the recycled fuel.
Plastics bags, food wrappers and containers are the second and third most common items in marine debris around the world, according to the Ocean Conservancy, which is based in Washington. The proportion of tiny fragments, known as mermaid's tears, are less easily quantified.
The UN's environmental programme estimates that 18,000 pieces of plastic have ended up in every square kilometre of the sea, totalling more than 100 million tonnes. The North Pacific gyre --- officially called the northern subtropical convergence zone --- is thought to contain the biggest concentration. Ideal conditions for shifting slicks of plastic also exist in the South Pacific, the Indian Ocean and the North and South Atlantic, but no research vessel has investigated those areas. If this exploratory mission is successful, a bigger fleet will depart in 2010.
Mr Woodring admits that Project Kaisei has limitations. "We won't be able to clean up the entire ocean. The solution really lies on land. We have to treat plastics in a totally different way, and stop them ever reaching the ocean."
Copyright 2009 Times Newspapers Ltd.
Saturday, May 02, 2009
Dead Birds on Bay Area Beaches
Hundreds of dead birds on Bay Area beaches
Jane Kay, Chronicle Environment Writer
(05-01) 16:30 PDT SAN FRANCISCO -- Hundreds of emaciated seabirds have washed up dead on beaches from Marin County to Monterey Bay, and wildlife officials said they suspect that a dip in the birds' food supply may be killing them.
The black, iridescent Brandt's cormorants began dying in mid-April, puzzling scientists who have seen the species thrive in recent years on the Farallon, Alcatraz and Año Nuevo islands.
Dead birds have been found in more than a dozen locations in the Bay Area, including Ocean and Baker beaches in San Francisco; Montara and Pescadero beaches on the San Mateo County coast; Rodeo and Muir beaches in Marin County; and on the new east span of the Bay Bridge in Oakland.
Biologists from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and the state Department of Fish and Game are asking beachgoers not to move dead birds. Volunteers from the Gulf of the Farallones and the Monterey Bay national marine sanctuaries are marking dead birds by clipping their wings or toes to help get a valid bird count.
About three dozen of the surviving cormorants have been sent to the International Bird Rescue Research Center in Cordelia, along with some western grebes. Ten birds have been released to the wild.
'Emaciated and starving'
"Most of the birds brought in are emaciated and starving," said Gerry McChesney, acting manager of the Farallon Islands National Wildlife Refuge. "They are having trouble finding food and are responding well to feeding."
Seabird experts believe that the birds are suffering from a lack of food as ocean conditions have changed, triggering a crash in anchovy numbers in 2008. The birds, which had reached their highest numbers in years on the Central California coast, don't appear to be ailing from viruses and bacteria, they say. Results of tests are expected Monday.
The Brandt's cormorant population reached about 40,000 in the region in 2007, according to scientists. But the birds didn't reproduce in normal numbers in 2008.
"Usually by now, the breeding colonies are well along," said McChesney. "The birds should be into the egg-laying period. But the colonies are almost empty. The birds don't seem to be around in very high numbers, and the birds that are around have been starving to death."
Ocean conditions are generally good this year with vigorous upwelling of the nutrients that feed plankton and the small fish on which the seabirds feed. They like rockfish, flatfish and anchovies.
Last year, some species of small fish were scarce, according to trawl information gathered by the National Marine Fisheries Service. Northern anchovies - popular food for Brandt's cormorants - hit their lowest numbers since 1990 as the bulk of the fish moved to Southern California, where they normally spawn in years of cooler waters.
Steve Ralston, research fisheries biologist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Southwest Fisheries Science Center in Santa Cruz, said it took 10 trawls to catch one anchovy last year.
In a typical year, more than 600 anchovies are caught in a trawl, he said.
"The ocean can wax and wane between warmer and cooler states, and when it's warmer, anchovies and sardines are more plentiful in our survey. Some of the cooler species, like calamari squid and juvenile rockfish, are less abundant," Ralston said.
Bird and fish populations are closely linked, Ralston said.
Because young rockfish were scarcer in the ocean during the warmer years of 2005, 2006 and 2007, species such as seabirds and humpback whales may have switched to anchovies, said biologist Bill Sydeman, director of the Farallon Institute of Advanced Ecosystem Research in Petaluma.
When anchovy numbers dropped around the Farallones last year, the birds may have been unable to find food, which would have triggered reproductive failures of the Brandt's cormorants, Sydeman said.
Other possibilities
There could be other reasons, such as their population reaching the maximum number that the ecosystem can support, he said. Or perhaps more cormorants are being found dead because there are more of them, he said.
Jan Roletto, research coordinator for the Gulf of the Farallones sanctuary, said the disappearance of anchovies is a valid explanation. But as she waits for results of pathogen tests, she is looking at other environmental factors.
"We're just speculating right now," she said.
Some Bay Area beaches and shoreline areas where dead birds have washed up:
San Francisco
Baker Beach, Lands End, Ocean Beach, Alcatraz Island
San Mateo County
Montara State Beach, Half Moon Bay, Pescadero State Beach
Marin County
Muir Beach, Rodeo Beach, Kirby Cove, Point Reyes
Oakland
Bay Bridge (new span)
E-mail Jane Kay at jkay@sfchronicle.com.
Jane Kay, Chronicle Environment Writer
(05-01) 16:30 PDT SAN FRANCISCO -- Hundreds of emaciated seabirds have washed up dead on beaches from Marin County to Monterey Bay, and wildlife officials said they suspect that a dip in the birds' food supply may be killing them.
The black, iridescent Brandt's cormorants began dying in mid-April, puzzling scientists who have seen the species thrive in recent years on the Farallon, Alcatraz and Año Nuevo islands.
Dead birds have been found in more than a dozen locations in the Bay Area, including Ocean and Baker beaches in San Francisco; Montara and Pescadero beaches on the San Mateo County coast; Rodeo and Muir beaches in Marin County; and on the new east span of the Bay Bridge in Oakland.
Biologists from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and the state Department of Fish and Game are asking beachgoers not to move dead birds. Volunteers from the Gulf of the Farallones and the Monterey Bay national marine sanctuaries are marking dead birds by clipping their wings or toes to help get a valid bird count.
About three dozen of the surviving cormorants have been sent to the International Bird Rescue Research Center in Cordelia, along with some western grebes. Ten birds have been released to the wild.
'Emaciated and starving'
"Most of the birds brought in are emaciated and starving," said Gerry McChesney, acting manager of the Farallon Islands National Wildlife Refuge. "They are having trouble finding food and are responding well to feeding."
Seabird experts believe that the birds are suffering from a lack of food as ocean conditions have changed, triggering a crash in anchovy numbers in 2008. The birds, which had reached their highest numbers in years on the Central California coast, don't appear to be ailing from viruses and bacteria, they say. Results of tests are expected Monday.
The Brandt's cormorant population reached about 40,000 in the region in 2007, according to scientists. But the birds didn't reproduce in normal numbers in 2008.
"Usually by now, the breeding colonies are well along," said McChesney. "The birds should be into the egg-laying period. But the colonies are almost empty. The birds don't seem to be around in very high numbers, and the birds that are around have been starving to death."
Ocean conditions are generally good this year with vigorous upwelling of the nutrients that feed plankton and the small fish on which the seabirds feed. They like rockfish, flatfish and anchovies.
Last year, some species of small fish were scarce, according to trawl information gathered by the National Marine Fisheries Service. Northern anchovies - popular food for Brandt's cormorants - hit their lowest numbers since 1990 as the bulk of the fish moved to Southern California, where they normally spawn in years of cooler waters.
Steve Ralston, research fisheries biologist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Southwest Fisheries Science Center in Santa Cruz, said it took 10 trawls to catch one anchovy last year.
In a typical year, more than 600 anchovies are caught in a trawl, he said.
"The ocean can wax and wane between warmer and cooler states, and when it's warmer, anchovies and sardines are more plentiful in our survey. Some of the cooler species, like calamari squid and juvenile rockfish, are less abundant," Ralston said.
Bird and fish populations are closely linked, Ralston said.
Because young rockfish were scarcer in the ocean during the warmer years of 2005, 2006 and 2007, species such as seabirds and humpback whales may have switched to anchovies, said biologist Bill Sydeman, director of the Farallon Institute of Advanced Ecosystem Research in Petaluma.
When anchovy numbers dropped around the Farallones last year, the birds may have been unable to find food, which would have triggered reproductive failures of the Brandt's cormorants, Sydeman said.
Other possibilities
There could be other reasons, such as their population reaching the maximum number that the ecosystem can support, he said. Or perhaps more cormorants are being found dead because there are more of them, he said.
Jan Roletto, research coordinator for the Gulf of the Farallones sanctuary, said the disappearance of anchovies is a valid explanation. But as she waits for results of pathogen tests, she is looking at other environmental factors.
"We're just speculating right now," she said.
Some Bay Area beaches and shoreline areas where dead birds have washed up:
San Francisco
Baker Beach, Lands End, Ocean Beach, Alcatraz Island
San Mateo County
Montara State Beach, Half Moon Bay, Pescadero State Beach
Marin County
Muir Beach, Rodeo Beach, Kirby Cove, Point Reyes
Oakland
Bay Bridge (new span)
E-mail Jane Kay at jkay@sfchronicle.com.
Thursday, April 30, 2009
Israel Boycott is Biting
The Israel Boycott is Biting
by Nadia Hijab
On May 4, protesters will greet Motorola shareholders, already disgruntled by the company’s losses, as they arrive for their annual meeting at the Rosemont Theater in Chicago, Illinois.
The protest, organized by the US Campaign to End the Israeli Occupation, is part of a drive to “Hang Up On Motorola” until it ends sales of communications and other products that support Israel’s military occupation of Palestinian land.
Inside the meeting, the Presbyterian, United Methodist and other churches will urge shareholders to support their resolution, which calls for corporate standards grounded in international law. Doing the right thing could also reduce the risk of “consumer boycotts, divestment campaigns and lawsuits.”
Although Motorola executives deny it, such risks must have played a part in their decision to sell the department making bomb fuses shortly after Human Rights Watch teams found shrapnel with Motorola serial numbers at some of the civilian sites bombed by Israel in its December-January assault on Gaza.
The US protests are part of a growing global movement that has taken international law into its own hands because governments have not. And, especially since the attacks on Gaza, the boycotts have been biting. There are three reasons why.
First, boycotts enable ordinary citizens to take direct action. For instance, the New York group Adalah decided to target diamond merchant Lev Leviev, whose profits are plowed into colonizing the West Bank. During the Christmas season, they sing carols with the words creatively altered to urge shoppers to boycott his Madison Avenue store.
The British group Architects and Planners for Justice in Palestine teamed up with Adalah NY and others to exert public pressure on the British government regarding Leviev. The British Embassy in Tel Aviv recently cancelled plans to rent premises from Leviev’s company Africa-Israel.
There are other results. Activists in Britain have targeted the supermarket chain Tesco to stop the sales of Israeli goods produced in settlements. In a video of one such action -- over 38,000 YouTube views to date -- Welsh activists load up a trolley with settlement products and push it out of the shop without paying.
All the while, they calmly explain to the camera just what they are doing and why. They talk away as they pour red paint over the produce, and as British Bobbies quietly lead them away to a police van.
The result of such consumer boycotts? A fifth of Israeli producers have reported a drop in demand since the assault on Gaza, particularly in Britain and Scandinavia.
The second reason boycotts are more effective is the visible role of Jewish human rights advocates, making it harder for Israel to argue that these actions are anti-Semitic.
For example, British architect Abe Hayeem, an Iraqi Jew, describes in a passionate column in The Guardian exactly how Leviev tramples on Palestinian rights, and warns Israeli architects involved in settlements that they will be held to account by their international peers.
In the United States, Jewish Voice for Peace has led an ongoing campaign to stop Caterpillar from selling bulldozers to Israel, which militarizes them and uses them in home demolitions and building the separation wall.
The third, key, reason for the growing success of this global movement is the determined leadership of Palestinian civil society. The spark was lit at the world conference against racism in Durban in 2001. In 2004, Palestinian civil society launched an academic and cultural boycott that is having an impact.
In 2005, over 170 Palestinian civil society coalitions, organizations, and unions, from the occupied territories, within Israel, and in exile issued a formal call for an international campaign of boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) until Israel abides by international law. The call sets out clear goals for the movement and provides a framework for action.
In November 2008, Palestinian NGOs helped convene an international BDS conference in Bilbao, Spain, to adopt common actions. This launched a “Derail Veolia” campaign. That French multinational corporation, together with another French company, Alstom, is building a light railway linking East Jerusalem to illegal settlements.
The light rail project was cited by the Swedish national pension fund in its decision to exclude Alstom from its $15 billion portfolio, and by the Sandwell Metropolitan Borough Council in its decision not to consider further Veolia's bid for a $1.9 billion waste improvement plan. There were active grassroots campaigns in both areas.
Other hits: Veolia lost the contract to operate the city of Stockholm subway and an urban network in Bordeaux. Although these were reportedly “business decisions” there were also activist campaigns in both places. The Galway city council in Ireland decided to follow Stockholm’s example. Meanwhile, Connex, the company that is supposed to operate the light rail, is being targeted by activists in Australia.
The “Derail Veolia” campaign has been the movement’s biggest success to date. Veolia and its subsidiaries are estimated to have lost as much as $7.5 billion.
As one of the BDS movement leaders, Omar Barghouti, put it, “When companies start to lose money, then they listen.” Perhaps governments will too.
Nadia Hijab is a Senior Fellow at the Institute for Palestine Studies in Washington D.C.
Copyright © 2009 Nadia Hijab – distributed by Agence Global
by Nadia Hijab
On May 4, protesters will greet Motorola shareholders, already disgruntled by the company’s losses, as they arrive for their annual meeting at the Rosemont Theater in Chicago, Illinois.
The protest, organized by the US Campaign to End the Israeli Occupation, is part of a drive to “Hang Up On Motorola” until it ends sales of communications and other products that support Israel’s military occupation of Palestinian land.
Inside the meeting, the Presbyterian, United Methodist and other churches will urge shareholders to support their resolution, which calls for corporate standards grounded in international law. Doing the right thing could also reduce the risk of “consumer boycotts, divestment campaigns and lawsuits.”
Although Motorola executives deny it, such risks must have played a part in their decision to sell the department making bomb fuses shortly after Human Rights Watch teams found shrapnel with Motorola serial numbers at some of the civilian sites bombed by Israel in its December-January assault on Gaza.
The US protests are part of a growing global movement that has taken international law into its own hands because governments have not. And, especially since the attacks on Gaza, the boycotts have been biting. There are three reasons why.
First, boycotts enable ordinary citizens to take direct action. For instance, the New York group Adalah decided to target diamond merchant Lev Leviev, whose profits are plowed into colonizing the West Bank. During the Christmas season, they sing carols with the words creatively altered to urge shoppers to boycott his Madison Avenue store.
The British group Architects and Planners for Justice in Palestine teamed up with Adalah NY and others to exert public pressure on the British government regarding Leviev. The British Embassy in Tel Aviv recently cancelled plans to rent premises from Leviev’s company Africa-Israel.
There are other results. Activists in Britain have targeted the supermarket chain Tesco to stop the sales of Israeli goods produced in settlements. In a video of one such action -- over 38,000 YouTube views to date -- Welsh activists load up a trolley with settlement products and push it out of the shop without paying.
All the while, they calmly explain to the camera just what they are doing and why. They talk away as they pour red paint over the produce, and as British Bobbies quietly lead them away to a police van.
The result of such consumer boycotts? A fifth of Israeli producers have reported a drop in demand since the assault on Gaza, particularly in Britain and Scandinavia.
The second reason boycotts are more effective is the visible role of Jewish human rights advocates, making it harder for Israel to argue that these actions are anti-Semitic.
For example, British architect Abe Hayeem, an Iraqi Jew, describes in a passionate column in The Guardian exactly how Leviev tramples on Palestinian rights, and warns Israeli architects involved in settlements that they will be held to account by their international peers.
In the United States, Jewish Voice for Peace has led an ongoing campaign to stop Caterpillar from selling bulldozers to Israel, which militarizes them and uses them in home demolitions and building the separation wall.
The third, key, reason for the growing success of this global movement is the determined leadership of Palestinian civil society. The spark was lit at the world conference against racism in Durban in 2001. In 2004, Palestinian civil society launched an academic and cultural boycott that is having an impact.
In 2005, over 170 Palestinian civil society coalitions, organizations, and unions, from the occupied territories, within Israel, and in exile issued a formal call for an international campaign of boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) until Israel abides by international law. The call sets out clear goals for the movement and provides a framework for action.
In November 2008, Palestinian NGOs helped convene an international BDS conference in Bilbao, Spain, to adopt common actions. This launched a “Derail Veolia” campaign. That French multinational corporation, together with another French company, Alstom, is building a light railway linking East Jerusalem to illegal settlements.
The light rail project was cited by the Swedish national pension fund in its decision to exclude Alstom from its $15 billion portfolio, and by the Sandwell Metropolitan Borough Council in its decision not to consider further Veolia's bid for a $1.9 billion waste improvement plan. There were active grassroots campaigns in both areas.
Other hits: Veolia lost the contract to operate the city of Stockholm subway and an urban network in Bordeaux. Although these were reportedly “business decisions” there were also activist campaigns in both places. The Galway city council in Ireland decided to follow Stockholm’s example. Meanwhile, Connex, the company that is supposed to operate the light rail, is being targeted by activists in Australia.
The “Derail Veolia” campaign has been the movement’s biggest success to date. Veolia and its subsidiaries are estimated to have lost as much as $7.5 billion.
As one of the BDS movement leaders, Omar Barghouti, put it, “When companies start to lose money, then they listen.” Perhaps governments will too.
Nadia Hijab is a Senior Fellow at the Institute for Palestine Studies in Washington D.C.
Copyright © 2009 Nadia Hijab – distributed by Agence Global
Wednesday, April 29, 2009
Pinter's Dispatch to Obama
From Bunker Hill to Baghdad: Pinter's Dispatch to Obama
by Mike Whitney
Come and see the blood in the streets.
Come and see
the blood in the streets.
Come and see the blood
in the streets!
Poem by Pablo Neruda
About a month before Barack Obama announced his candidacy for the presidency of the United States, former National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski appeared on PBS's Charlie Rose Show and was asked whether he thought Obama would be a good choice for president. Brzezinski paused for a minute, peered at Rose out of the corner of his eye, and answered, "Just think of the symbolism." As soon as he said that, Brzezinski and Rose broke out into laughter as though they were sharing a private joke.
Brzezinski was right, of course. Obama was the perfect choice for president. Not because of his experience. He had none. He was a two year senator with a resume' small enough to fit on the back of a matchbox. Still Obama had what Brzezinski and Co. were looking for, symbolism; the kind of symbolism that connected him to people around the world and made them feel like one of their own had finally clawed their way to the top. Even better, Obama was a charismatic populist who could fill stadiums with adoring fans and put a benign face on America's interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq. What more could Brzezinski hope for? After 8 years of dragging "Brand America" through the mud, the country would finally get the emergency facelift it needed and begin to restore its battered image as the world's indispensable nation.
For leftists, Obama has been a total bust. He's escalated the war in Afghanistan, increased the cross-border bombings of Pakistan, hemmed and hawed about prosecuting war crimes, refused to actively lobby House members to make it easier for workers to organize (EFCA), and surrounded himself with bank industry reps who've committed $12.8 trillion to sinking financial institutions with no assurance that the money would be repaid. Apart from a trifling bill on stem cells, Obama has done absolutely zero to confirm his bone fides as a liberal. The truth is, Obama is neither liberal nor conservative; he's simply an inspiring orator and a skillful politician who has no strong convictions about anything. If he achieves greatness, it will be because he was thrust into a crisis he couldn't avoid and reluctantly acted in the best interests of the American people. That possibility still exists, although it seems more unlikely by the day.
Foreign leaders are clearly relieved to see the last of George W. Bush, and they appear to be willing to give Obama every opportunity to mend fences and break with the past. But Obama has made little effort to reciprocate or show that he's serious about real change. The emphasis seems to be more on public relations than policy; more on glitzy photo ops, grandiose speeches and gadding about from one capital to another, than ending the chronic US meddling and militarism. Where's the beef or is it all just empty posturing?
No one's ready to write-off Obama just yet, but he needs to show he's the real-deal by taking steps to ratchet-down the war machine and reign in the corporate elites and bank vermin. But is it really possible for one man--however well-meaning--to change the course of a nation by standing up the gaggle of racketeers who pull the strings from behind the curtain? Keep in mind, America's history of violent interventions, unprovoked wars, color-coded revolutions and coup d' etats has a long pedigree that stretches from Bunker Hill to Baghdad. That river of blood did not begin with George Bush and it won't end with Barack Obama. Every generation has produced its own litany of crimes, from Wounded Knee to Nagasaki to My Lai to Falluja. In Harold Pinter's Nobel acceptance speech, the playwright invokes one such incident which epitomizes the pattern of hostility which has been repeated over and over again wherever the Washington mandarins detect opposition to their iron-fisted rule.
Harold Pinter, Nobel Acceptance Speech:
"The United States supported the brutal Somoza dictatorship in Nicaragua for over 40 years. The Nicaraguan people, led by the Sandinistas, overthrew this regime in 1979, a breathtaking popular revolution.
The Sandinistas weren't perfect. They possessed their fair share of arrogance and their political philosophy contained a number of contradictory elements. But they were intelligent, rational and civilized. They set out to establish a stable, decent, pluralistic society. The death penalty was abolished. Hundreds of thousands of poverty-stricken peasants were brought back from the dead. Over 100,000 families were given title to land. Two thousand schools were built. A quite remarkable literacy campaign reduced illiteracy in the country to less than one seventh. Free education was established and a free health service. Infant mortality was reduced by a third. Polio was eradicated.
The United States denounced these achievements as Marxist/Leninist subversion. In the view of the US government, a dangerous example was being set. If Nicaragua was allowed to establish basic norms of social and economic justice, if it was allowed to raise the standards of health care and education and achieve social unity and national self respect, neighboring countries would ask the same questions and do the same things. There was of course at the time fierce resistance to the status quo in El Salvador.
I spoke earlier about 'a tapestry of lies' which surrounds us. President Reagan commonly described Nicaragua as a 'totalitarian dungeon'. This was taken generally by the media, and certainly by the British government, as accurate and fair comment. But there was in fact no record of death squads under the Sandinista government. There was no record of torture. There was no record of systematic or official military brutality. No priests were ever murdered in Nicaragua. There were in fact three priests in the government, two Jesuits and a Maryknoll missionary. The totalitarian dungeons were actually next door, in El Salvador and Guatemala. The United States had brought down the democratically elected government of Guatemala in 1954 and it is estimated that over 200,000 people had been victims of successive military dictatorships.
Six of the most distinguished Jesuits in the world were viciously murdered at the Central American University in San Salvador in 1989 by a battalion of the Alcatl regiment trained at Fort Benning, Georgia, USA. That extremely brave man Archbishop Romero was assassinated while saying mass. It is estimated that 75,000 people died. Why were they killed? They were killed because they believed a better life was possible and should be achieved. That belief immediately qualified them as communists. They died because they dared to question the status quo, the endless plateau of poverty, disease, degradation and oppression, which had been their birthright.
The United States finally brought down the Sandinista government. It took some years and considerable resistance but relentless economic persecution and 30,000 dead finally undermined the spirit of the Nicaraguan people. They were exhausted and poverty stricken once again. The casinos moved back into the country. Free health and free education were over. Big business returned with a vengeance. 'Democracy' had prevailed.
But this 'policy' was by no means restricted to Central America. It was conducted throughout the world. It was never-ending. And it is as if it never happened.
The United States supported and in many cases engendered every right wing military dictatorship in the world after the end of the Second World War. I refer to Indonesia, Greece, Uruguay, Brazil, Paraguay, Haiti, Turkey, the Philippines, Guatemala, El Salvador, and, of course, Chile. The horror the United States inflicted upon Chile in 1973 can never be purged and can never be forgiven.
Hundreds of thousands of deaths took place throughout these countries. Did they take place? And are they in all cases attributable to US foreign policy? The answer is yes they did take place and they are attributable to American foreign policy. But you wouldn't know it."
Pinter's speech is a somber indictment of US foreign policy; a policy which is now cloaked behind the rock-star facade of Barack Obama. Nothing has changed and, perhaps, nothing will change. The same barbarous campaign that thrived under Bush has been passed along to Obama intact. Wherever there is resistance to US ambitions; there lies the enemy. Whether its Marxists in Bogota, nationalists in Kosovo, Bolivarians in Caracas, Shia militias in Beirut, Islamic moderates in Mogadishu or Quakers in Toledo. They're all enemies, every one of them, and they need to be dealt with.
Obama is no fool; he knows he's being used. He knows he wasn't chosen for his enlightened views on health care and stem cells. He was picked because the men in charge needed a new posterboy to hide behind while they carry out their illicit activities. Obama is not so much of a Commander in chief as he is master illusionist, diverting attention from the stealth war that goes on relentlessly with or without his consent. Here's Pinter again:
"The crimes of the United States have been systematic, constant, vicious, remorseless, but very few people have actually talked about them. You have to hand it to America. It has exercised a quite clinical manipulation of power worldwide while masquerading as a force for universal good. It's a brilliant, even witty, highly successful act of hypnosis...It's a scintillating stratagem."
Consider how the news was shaped to make it look like the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan were carried out for altruistic reasons. Thus, the war in Afghanistan became "Operation Enduring Freedom", stressing the selfless generosity of bombing a country into oblivion and reinstating the thuggish warlords to power. The same strategy was used for the invasion of Iraq which was celebrated as "liberation from a brutal dictator." Liberation which cost the lives of over 1 million Iraqis and the displacement of 4 million more. Still, no one in the UN or so called international community has pressed for removing the US from the Security Council or prosecuting its leaders for war crimes. It's a testimony to the success of the US media in upholding the "tapestry of lies" of which Pinter speaks. Under Obama, the charade has only gotten worse. The coverage of the war has stopped entirely. War? What war? What matters now is Obama's cheery banter with Jay Leno, or Michelle's well-proportioned arms or Malia's adorable Portuguese Waterdog. America is whole again. Let the killing resume.
Pinter: "What has happened to our moral sensibility? Did we ever have any? What do these words mean? Do they refer to a term very rarely employed these days - conscience? A conscience to do not only with our own acts but to do with our shared responsibility in the acts of others? Is all this dead? Look at Guantanamo Bay. Hundreds of people detained without charge for over three years, with no legal representation or due process, technically detained forever. This totally illegitimate structure is maintained in defiance of the Geneva Convention. It is not only tolerated but hardly thought about by what's called the 'international community'. This criminal outrage is being committed by a country, which declares itself to be 'the leader of the free world'. Do we think about the inhabitants of Guantanamo Bay? What does the media say about them? They pop up occasionally - a small item on page six. They have been consigned to a no man's land from which indeed they may never return. At present many are on hunger strike, being force-fed, including British residents. No niceties in these force-feeding procedures. No sedative or anesthetic. Just a tube stuck up your nose and into your throat. You vomit blood. This is torture. What has the British Foreign Secretary said about this? Nothing. What has the British Prime Minister said about this? Nothing. Why not? Because the United States has said: to criticize our conduct in Guantanamo Bay constitutes an unfriendly act. You're either with us or against us."
Obama doesn't need to solve the world's problems. He doesn't have to reverse global warming or slow peak oil, cure AIDS or end world hunger. All he needs to do is meet the minimal requirement of his job as president, which is to deliver justice to his people. That's why the prosecution of Bush for war crimes is more important than any other issue on the docket. Justice precedes everything; it's the thread that keeps the social fabric stitched together. Justice for the victims who were killed in their homes with their families while they were sleeping or eating dinner. Justice for the people who were bombed in wedding parties or going to work or at the mosque praying to God. That's what people want from Obama. Justice, nothing more. The Reverend Martin Luther King said, "The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice." It's up to Obama follow that arc and take at least one step on the path of legitimacy, accountability and justice.
Pinter: "How many people do you have to kill before you qualify to be described as a mass murderer and a war criminal? One hundred thousand? More than enough, I would have thought. Therefore it is just that Bush and Blair be arraigned before the International Criminal Court of Justice."
It's highly unlikely that a black man with a background in community organizing really believes that expanding the war in Afghanistan is the right thing to do. Nor is it likely that he supports wiretapping, the crackdown on immigrants, penalizing sellers of medical marijuana, trillion dollar bank bailouts or "enhanced" interrogation. He is merely reading from the script that he has been given. But as the economic crisis deepens and the country becomes more radicalized and politically unstable, that script will have to be tossed aside. Obama will have plenty of opportunities to shrug off his handlers and show what he's really made of. Perhaps he is great man after all.
Pinter: "When we look into a mirror, we think the image that confronts us is accurate. But move a millimeter and the image changes. We are actually looking at a never-ending range of reflections. But sometimes a writer has to smash the mirror - for it is on the other side of that mirror that the truth stares at us."
Go ahead, Barack. Smash the mirror.
by Mike Whitney
Come and see the blood in the streets.
Come and see
the blood in the streets.
Come and see the blood
in the streets!
Poem by Pablo Neruda
About a month before Barack Obama announced his candidacy for the presidency of the United States, former National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski appeared on PBS's Charlie Rose Show and was asked whether he thought Obama would be a good choice for president. Brzezinski paused for a minute, peered at Rose out of the corner of his eye, and answered, "Just think of the symbolism." As soon as he said that, Brzezinski and Rose broke out into laughter as though they were sharing a private joke.
Brzezinski was right, of course. Obama was the perfect choice for president. Not because of his experience. He had none. He was a two year senator with a resume' small enough to fit on the back of a matchbox. Still Obama had what Brzezinski and Co. were looking for, symbolism; the kind of symbolism that connected him to people around the world and made them feel like one of their own had finally clawed their way to the top. Even better, Obama was a charismatic populist who could fill stadiums with adoring fans and put a benign face on America's interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq. What more could Brzezinski hope for? After 8 years of dragging "Brand America" through the mud, the country would finally get the emergency facelift it needed and begin to restore its battered image as the world's indispensable nation.
For leftists, Obama has been a total bust. He's escalated the war in Afghanistan, increased the cross-border bombings of Pakistan, hemmed and hawed about prosecuting war crimes, refused to actively lobby House members to make it easier for workers to organize (EFCA), and surrounded himself with bank industry reps who've committed $12.8 trillion to sinking financial institutions with no assurance that the money would be repaid. Apart from a trifling bill on stem cells, Obama has done absolutely zero to confirm his bone fides as a liberal. The truth is, Obama is neither liberal nor conservative; he's simply an inspiring orator and a skillful politician who has no strong convictions about anything. If he achieves greatness, it will be because he was thrust into a crisis he couldn't avoid and reluctantly acted in the best interests of the American people. That possibility still exists, although it seems more unlikely by the day.
Foreign leaders are clearly relieved to see the last of George W. Bush, and they appear to be willing to give Obama every opportunity to mend fences and break with the past. But Obama has made little effort to reciprocate or show that he's serious about real change. The emphasis seems to be more on public relations than policy; more on glitzy photo ops, grandiose speeches and gadding about from one capital to another, than ending the chronic US meddling and militarism. Where's the beef or is it all just empty posturing?
No one's ready to write-off Obama just yet, but he needs to show he's the real-deal by taking steps to ratchet-down the war machine and reign in the corporate elites and bank vermin. But is it really possible for one man--however well-meaning--to change the course of a nation by standing up the gaggle of racketeers who pull the strings from behind the curtain? Keep in mind, America's history of violent interventions, unprovoked wars, color-coded revolutions and coup d' etats has a long pedigree that stretches from Bunker Hill to Baghdad. That river of blood did not begin with George Bush and it won't end with Barack Obama. Every generation has produced its own litany of crimes, from Wounded Knee to Nagasaki to My Lai to Falluja. In Harold Pinter's Nobel acceptance speech, the playwright invokes one such incident which epitomizes the pattern of hostility which has been repeated over and over again wherever the Washington mandarins detect opposition to their iron-fisted rule.
Harold Pinter, Nobel Acceptance Speech:
"The United States supported the brutal Somoza dictatorship in Nicaragua for over 40 years. The Nicaraguan people, led by the Sandinistas, overthrew this regime in 1979, a breathtaking popular revolution.
The Sandinistas weren't perfect. They possessed their fair share of arrogance and their political philosophy contained a number of contradictory elements. But they were intelligent, rational and civilized. They set out to establish a stable, decent, pluralistic society. The death penalty was abolished. Hundreds of thousands of poverty-stricken peasants were brought back from the dead. Over 100,000 families were given title to land. Two thousand schools were built. A quite remarkable literacy campaign reduced illiteracy in the country to less than one seventh. Free education was established and a free health service. Infant mortality was reduced by a third. Polio was eradicated.
The United States denounced these achievements as Marxist/Leninist subversion. In the view of the US government, a dangerous example was being set. If Nicaragua was allowed to establish basic norms of social and economic justice, if it was allowed to raise the standards of health care and education and achieve social unity and national self respect, neighboring countries would ask the same questions and do the same things. There was of course at the time fierce resistance to the status quo in El Salvador.
I spoke earlier about 'a tapestry of lies' which surrounds us. President Reagan commonly described Nicaragua as a 'totalitarian dungeon'. This was taken generally by the media, and certainly by the British government, as accurate and fair comment. But there was in fact no record of death squads under the Sandinista government. There was no record of torture. There was no record of systematic or official military brutality. No priests were ever murdered in Nicaragua. There were in fact three priests in the government, two Jesuits and a Maryknoll missionary. The totalitarian dungeons were actually next door, in El Salvador and Guatemala. The United States had brought down the democratically elected government of Guatemala in 1954 and it is estimated that over 200,000 people had been victims of successive military dictatorships.
Six of the most distinguished Jesuits in the world were viciously murdered at the Central American University in San Salvador in 1989 by a battalion of the Alcatl regiment trained at Fort Benning, Georgia, USA. That extremely brave man Archbishop Romero was assassinated while saying mass. It is estimated that 75,000 people died. Why were they killed? They were killed because they believed a better life was possible and should be achieved. That belief immediately qualified them as communists. They died because they dared to question the status quo, the endless plateau of poverty, disease, degradation and oppression, which had been their birthright.
The United States finally brought down the Sandinista government. It took some years and considerable resistance but relentless economic persecution and 30,000 dead finally undermined the spirit of the Nicaraguan people. They were exhausted and poverty stricken once again. The casinos moved back into the country. Free health and free education were over. Big business returned with a vengeance. 'Democracy' had prevailed.
But this 'policy' was by no means restricted to Central America. It was conducted throughout the world. It was never-ending. And it is as if it never happened.
The United States supported and in many cases engendered every right wing military dictatorship in the world after the end of the Second World War. I refer to Indonesia, Greece, Uruguay, Brazil, Paraguay, Haiti, Turkey, the Philippines, Guatemala, El Salvador, and, of course, Chile. The horror the United States inflicted upon Chile in 1973 can never be purged and can never be forgiven.
Hundreds of thousands of deaths took place throughout these countries. Did they take place? And are they in all cases attributable to US foreign policy? The answer is yes they did take place and they are attributable to American foreign policy. But you wouldn't know it."
Pinter's speech is a somber indictment of US foreign policy; a policy which is now cloaked behind the rock-star facade of Barack Obama. Nothing has changed and, perhaps, nothing will change. The same barbarous campaign that thrived under Bush has been passed along to Obama intact. Wherever there is resistance to US ambitions; there lies the enemy. Whether its Marxists in Bogota, nationalists in Kosovo, Bolivarians in Caracas, Shia militias in Beirut, Islamic moderates in Mogadishu or Quakers in Toledo. They're all enemies, every one of them, and they need to be dealt with.
Obama is no fool; he knows he's being used. He knows he wasn't chosen for his enlightened views on health care and stem cells. He was picked because the men in charge needed a new posterboy to hide behind while they carry out their illicit activities. Obama is not so much of a Commander in chief as he is master illusionist, diverting attention from the stealth war that goes on relentlessly with or without his consent. Here's Pinter again:
"The crimes of the United States have been systematic, constant, vicious, remorseless, but very few people have actually talked about them. You have to hand it to America. It has exercised a quite clinical manipulation of power worldwide while masquerading as a force for universal good. It's a brilliant, even witty, highly successful act of hypnosis...It's a scintillating stratagem."
Consider how the news was shaped to make it look like the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan were carried out for altruistic reasons. Thus, the war in Afghanistan became "Operation Enduring Freedom", stressing the selfless generosity of bombing a country into oblivion and reinstating the thuggish warlords to power. The same strategy was used for the invasion of Iraq which was celebrated as "liberation from a brutal dictator." Liberation which cost the lives of over 1 million Iraqis and the displacement of 4 million more. Still, no one in the UN or so called international community has pressed for removing the US from the Security Council or prosecuting its leaders for war crimes. It's a testimony to the success of the US media in upholding the "tapestry of lies" of which Pinter speaks. Under Obama, the charade has only gotten worse. The coverage of the war has stopped entirely. War? What war? What matters now is Obama's cheery banter with Jay Leno, or Michelle's well-proportioned arms or Malia's adorable Portuguese Waterdog. America is whole again. Let the killing resume.
Pinter: "What has happened to our moral sensibility? Did we ever have any? What do these words mean? Do they refer to a term very rarely employed these days - conscience? A conscience to do not only with our own acts but to do with our shared responsibility in the acts of others? Is all this dead? Look at Guantanamo Bay. Hundreds of people detained without charge for over three years, with no legal representation or due process, technically detained forever. This totally illegitimate structure is maintained in defiance of the Geneva Convention. It is not only tolerated but hardly thought about by what's called the 'international community'. This criminal outrage is being committed by a country, which declares itself to be 'the leader of the free world'. Do we think about the inhabitants of Guantanamo Bay? What does the media say about them? They pop up occasionally - a small item on page six. They have been consigned to a no man's land from which indeed they may never return. At present many are on hunger strike, being force-fed, including British residents. No niceties in these force-feeding procedures. No sedative or anesthetic. Just a tube stuck up your nose and into your throat. You vomit blood. This is torture. What has the British Foreign Secretary said about this? Nothing. What has the British Prime Minister said about this? Nothing. Why not? Because the United States has said: to criticize our conduct in Guantanamo Bay constitutes an unfriendly act. You're either with us or against us."
Obama doesn't need to solve the world's problems. He doesn't have to reverse global warming or slow peak oil, cure AIDS or end world hunger. All he needs to do is meet the minimal requirement of his job as president, which is to deliver justice to his people. That's why the prosecution of Bush for war crimes is more important than any other issue on the docket. Justice precedes everything; it's the thread that keeps the social fabric stitched together. Justice for the victims who were killed in their homes with their families while they were sleeping or eating dinner. Justice for the people who were bombed in wedding parties or going to work or at the mosque praying to God. That's what people want from Obama. Justice, nothing more. The Reverend Martin Luther King said, "The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice." It's up to Obama follow that arc and take at least one step on the path of legitimacy, accountability and justice.
Pinter: "How many people do you have to kill before you qualify to be described as a mass murderer and a war criminal? One hundred thousand? More than enough, I would have thought. Therefore it is just that Bush and Blair be arraigned before the International Criminal Court of Justice."
It's highly unlikely that a black man with a background in community organizing really believes that expanding the war in Afghanistan is the right thing to do. Nor is it likely that he supports wiretapping, the crackdown on immigrants, penalizing sellers of medical marijuana, trillion dollar bank bailouts or "enhanced" interrogation. He is merely reading from the script that he has been given. But as the economic crisis deepens and the country becomes more radicalized and politically unstable, that script will have to be tossed aside. Obama will have plenty of opportunities to shrug off his handlers and show what he's really made of. Perhaps he is great man after all.
Pinter: "When we look into a mirror, we think the image that confronts us is accurate. But move a millimeter and the image changes. We are actually looking at a never-ending range of reflections. But sometimes a writer has to smash the mirror - for it is on the other side of that mirror that the truth stares at us."
Go ahead, Barack. Smash the mirror.
Tuesday, April 28, 2009
Startling Effects of Going Vegetarian for Just One Day
The Startling Effects of Going Vegetarian for Just One Day
By Kathy Freston, Huffington Post. Posted April 2, 2009.
I've written extensively on the consequences of eating meat -- on our health, our sense of "right living", and on the environment. It is one of those daily practices that has such a broad and deep effect that I think it merits looking at over and over again, from all the different perspectives. Sometimes, solutions to the world's biggest problems are right in front of us. The following statistics are eye-opening, to say the least.
If everyone went vegetarian just for one day, the U.S. would save:
● 100 billion gallons of water, enough to supply all the homes in New England for almost 4 months;
● 1.5 billion pounds of crops otherwise fed to livestock, enough to feed the state of New Mexico for more than a year;
● 70 million gallons of gas -- enough to fuel all the cars of Canada and Mexico combined with plenty to spare;
● 3 million acres of land, an area more than twice the size of Delaware;
● 33 tons of antibiotics.
If everyone went vegetarian just for one day, the U.S. would prevent:
● Greenhouse gas emissions equivalent to 1.2 million tons of CO2, as much as produced by all of France;
● 3 million tons of soil erosion and $70 million in resulting economic damages;
● 4.5 million tons of animal excrement;
● Almost 7 tons of ammonia emissions, a major air pollutant.
My favorite statistic is this: According to Environmental Defense, if every American skipped one meal of chicken per week and substituted vegetarian foods instead, the carbon dioxide savings would be the same as taking more than half a million cars off of U.S. roads. See how easy it is to make an impact?
Other points:
Globally, we feed 756 million tons of grain to farmed animals. As Princeton bioethicist Peter Singer notes in his new book, if we fed that grain to the 1.4 billion people who are living in abject poverty, each of them would be provided more than half a ton of grain, or about 3 pounds of grain/day -- that's twice the grain they would need to survive. And that doesn't even include the 225 million tons of soy that are produced every year, almost all of which is fed to farmed animals. He writes, "The world is not running out of food. The problem is that we -- the relatively affluent -- have found a way to consume four or five times as much food as would be possible, if we were to eat the crops we grow directly."
A recent United Nations report titled Livestock's Long Shadow concluded that the meat industry causes almost 40% more greenhouse gas emissions than all the world's transportation systems -- that's all the cars, trucks, SUVs, planes and ships in the world combined. The report also concluded that factory farming is one of the biggest contributors to the most serious environmental problems at every level -- local and global.
Researchers at the University of Chicago concluded that switching from standard American diet to a vegan diet is more effective in the fight against global warming than switching from a standard American car to a hybrid.
In its report, the U.N. found that the meat industry causes local and global environmental problems even beyond global warming. It said that the meat industry should be a main focus in every discussion of land degradation, climate change and air pollution, water shortages and pollution, and loss of biodiversity.
Unattributed statistics were calculated from scientific reports by Noam Mohr, a physicist with the New York University Polytechnic Institute.
By Kathy Freston, Huffington Post. Posted April 2, 2009.
I've written extensively on the consequences of eating meat -- on our health, our sense of "right living", and on the environment. It is one of those daily practices that has such a broad and deep effect that I think it merits looking at over and over again, from all the different perspectives. Sometimes, solutions to the world's biggest problems are right in front of us. The following statistics are eye-opening, to say the least.
If everyone went vegetarian just for one day, the U.S. would save:
● 100 billion gallons of water, enough to supply all the homes in New England for almost 4 months;
● 1.5 billion pounds of crops otherwise fed to livestock, enough to feed the state of New Mexico for more than a year;
● 70 million gallons of gas -- enough to fuel all the cars of Canada and Mexico combined with plenty to spare;
● 3 million acres of land, an area more than twice the size of Delaware;
● 33 tons of antibiotics.
If everyone went vegetarian just for one day, the U.S. would prevent:
● Greenhouse gas emissions equivalent to 1.2 million tons of CO2, as much as produced by all of France;
● 3 million tons of soil erosion and $70 million in resulting economic damages;
● 4.5 million tons of animal excrement;
● Almost 7 tons of ammonia emissions, a major air pollutant.
My favorite statistic is this: According to Environmental Defense, if every American skipped one meal of chicken per week and substituted vegetarian foods instead, the carbon dioxide savings would be the same as taking more than half a million cars off of U.S. roads. See how easy it is to make an impact?
Other points:
Globally, we feed 756 million tons of grain to farmed animals. As Princeton bioethicist Peter Singer notes in his new book, if we fed that grain to the 1.4 billion people who are living in abject poverty, each of them would be provided more than half a ton of grain, or about 3 pounds of grain/day -- that's twice the grain they would need to survive. And that doesn't even include the 225 million tons of soy that are produced every year, almost all of which is fed to farmed animals. He writes, "The world is not running out of food. The problem is that we -- the relatively affluent -- have found a way to consume four or five times as much food as would be possible, if we were to eat the crops we grow directly."
A recent United Nations report titled Livestock's Long Shadow concluded that the meat industry causes almost 40% more greenhouse gas emissions than all the world's transportation systems -- that's all the cars, trucks, SUVs, planes and ships in the world combined. The report also concluded that factory farming is one of the biggest contributors to the most serious environmental problems at every level -- local and global.
Researchers at the University of Chicago concluded that switching from standard American diet to a vegan diet is more effective in the fight against global warming than switching from a standard American car to a hybrid.
In its report, the U.N. found that the meat industry causes local and global environmental problems even beyond global warming. It said that the meat industry should be a main focus in every discussion of land degradation, climate change and air pollution, water shortages and pollution, and loss of biodiversity.
Unattributed statistics were calculated from scientific reports by Noam Mohr, a physicist with the New York University Polytechnic Institute.
Sunday, April 26, 2009
Protections Ordered for B.C. Orca
Orca Pods Protected
by Jeff Nagel - Surrey North Delta Leader
A new federal government order to protect critical killer whale habitat off B.C.’s coast is being hailed as a major victory by environmental groups.
Killer whales have been given more protection along the B.C. coast under a new federal ruling.
A new federal government order to protect critical killer whale habitat off B.C.’s coast is being hailed as a major victory by environmental groups.
Until now, Ottawa had been reluctant to regulate orca protection under Canada’s Species At Risk Act – it instead argued the whales’ habitat was adequately protected under existing laws and regulations.
But that has changed after a coalition of groups, led by Ecojustice, went to court alleging the government shirked its duties under the act.
“It’s the very first time the federal government has issued an order protecting critical habitat,” said Ecojustice staff lawyer Lara Tessaro.
The area defined as critical habitat for southern resident killer whales covers much of the Strait of Georgia off the Lower Mainland, running through the Gulf Islands and up the east coast of Vancouver Island.
Much now depends on what specific measures the federal government sets out to prevent the destruction of the defined orca habitat.
If environmentalists get their way, it could mean much more stringent regulations governing toxic contamination, boat traffic and perhaps even the allocation of salmon stocks.
They cite findings that noise disturbances such as those from seismic testing, submarine sonar and even surface vessels can seriously impact killer whales.
Tessaro said shipping lanes could be designated within the affected waters – as was done on the east coast to protect right whales.
“There’s no reason in theory that British Columbia cannot do the same.”
And she suggested the measures may require a hard look at whale watching tour boats.
“There are a vast array of activities in Georgia Strait that pose a threat to whales,” Tessaro said.
“Whale watching vessels cause whales to use their energy very differently. They have to expend twice the energy to get where they’re going if they’re being blocked.”
Tessaro also hopes the order means accelerated timetables to build improved plants to treat sewage from Metro Vancouver and Victoria.
“To give this order teeth, DFO must keep killer whales’ critical habitat free of tanker traffic and the risk of catastrophic oil spills,” added Will Horter of Dogwood Initiative.
Fears for the southern resident killer whales hit a new high over the past year following the discovery seven adults and calfs of the group had died recently reducing their numbers to about 85.
Scientists had pointed to signs of malnourishment, perhaps as a result of dwindling salmon stocks in recent years.
But good news arrived last week when two newborn killer whales were spotted.
jnagel@surreyleader.com
Wednesday, April 22, 2009
This is a rush transcript of the Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s remarks at the United Nations Durban Review Conference on racism in Geneva, Switzerland, on April 20, 2009. Transcribed from the translation given in the U.N. webcast of the speech.
To watch video of the speech in English, try link: http://webcast.un.org/ramgen/ondemand/conferences/DurbanConference/2009/durban090420pm1-eng.rm?start=00:05:30&end=00:39:30 [It didn't work for me.- ed]
In the name of God, the Compassionate, the Merciful… [Protestors in clown costumes escorted out by security] May he bestow upon his prophets… Praise be upon Allah, the Almighty, who is just, kind, and compassionate. May he bestow upon his prophets his blessings and his grace from Adam to Noah; Abraham, Moses, Jesus Christ, and His last prophet, Mohammed. Peace be upon them all who are the harbingers of monotheism, fraternity, love … [Applause] … human dignity and justice.
To watch video of the speech in English, try link: http://webcast.un.org/ramgen/ondemand/conferences/DurbanConference/2009/durban090420pm1-eng.rm?start=00:05:30&end=00:39:30 [It didn't work for me.- ed]
In the name of God, the Compassionate, the Merciful… [Protestors in clown costumes escorted out by security] May he bestow upon his prophets… Praise be upon Allah, the Almighty, who is just, kind, and compassionate. May he bestow upon his prophets his blessings and his grace from Adam to Noah; Abraham, Moses, Jesus Christ, and His last prophet, Mohammed. Peace be upon them all who are the harbingers of monotheism, fraternity, love … [Applause] … human dignity and justice.
Parenti on Afghanistan 2009
Afghanistan, Another Untold Story
by Michael Parenti, Ph.D. (2009)
Barack Obama is on record as advocating a military escalation in Afghanistan. Before sinking any deeper into that quagmire, we might do well to learn something about recent Afghani history and the role played by the United States.
Less than a month after the 11 September 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, US leaders began an all-out aerial assault upon Afghanistan, the country purportedly harboring Osama bin Laden and his al Qaeda terrorist organization. More than twenty years earlier, in 1980, the United States intervened to stop a Soviet “invasion” of that country. Even some leading progressive writers, who normally take a more critical view of US policy abroad, treated the US intervention against the Soviet-supported government as “a good thing.” The actual story is not such a good thing.
Some Real History
Since feudal times the landholding system in Afghanistan had remained unchanged, with more than 75 percent of the land owned by big landlords who comprised only 3 percent of the rural population. In the mid-1960s, democratic revolutionary elements coalesced to form the People’s Democratic Party (PDP). In 1973, the king was deposed, but the government that replaced him proved to be autocratic, mismanaged, and unpopular. It in turn was forced out in 1978 after a massive demonstration in front of the presidential palace, and after factions of the army intervened on the side of the demonstrators.
The military officers who took charge invited the PDP to form a new government under the leadership of Noor Mohammed Taraki, a poet and novelist. This is how a Marxist-led coalition of national democratic forces came into office. “It was a totally indigenous happening. Not even the CIA blamed the USSR for it,” writes John Ryan, a retired professor at the University of Winnipeg, who was conducting an agricultural research project in Afghanistan at about that time.
The Taraki government proceeded to legalize labor unions, and set up a minimum wage, a progressive income tax, a literacy campaign, and programs that gave ordinary people greater access to health care, housing, and public sanitation. Fledgling peasant cooperatives were started and price reductions on some key foods were imposed.
The government also continued a campaign begun by the king to emancipate women from their age-old tribal bondage. It provided public education for girls and for the children of various tribes.
A report in the San Francisco Chronicle (17 November 2001) noted that under the Taraki regime Kabul had been “a cosmopolitan city. Artists and hippies flocked to the capital. Women studied agriculture, engineering and business at the city’s university. Afghan women held government jobs—-in the 1980s, there were seven female members of parliament. Women drove cars, traveled and went on dates. Fifty percent of university students were women.”
The Taraki government moved to eradicate the cultivation of opium poppy. Until then Afghanistan had been producing more than 70 percent of the opium needed for the world’s heroin supply. The government also abolished all debts owed by farmers, and began developing a major land reform program. Ryan believes that it was a “genuinely popular government and people looked forward to the future with great hope.”
But serious opposition arose from several quarters. The feudal landlords opposed the land reform program that infringed on their holdings. And tribesmen and fundamentalist mullahs vehemently opposed the government’s dedication to gender equality and the education of women and children.
Because of its egalitarian and collectivist economic policies the Taraki government also incurred the opposition of the US national security state. Almost immediately after the PDP coalition came to power, the CIA, assisted by Saudi and Pakistani military, launched a large scale intervention into Afghanistan on the side of the ousted feudal lords, reactionary tribal chieftains, mullahs, and opium traffickers.
A top official within the Taraki government was Hafizulla Amin, believed by many to have been recruited by the CIA during the several years he spent in the United States as a student. In September 1979, Amin seized state power in an armed coup. He executed Taraki, halted the reforms, and murdered, jailed, or exiled thousands of Taraki supporters as he moved toward establishing a fundamentalist Islamic state. But within two months, he was overthrown by PDP remnants including elements within the military.
It should be noted that all this happened before the Soviet military intervention. National security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski publicly admitted--months before Soviet troops entered the country--that the Carter administration was providing huge sums to Muslim extremists to subvert the reformist government. Part of that effort involved brutal attacks by the CIA-backed mujahideen against schools and teachers in rural areas.
In late 1979, the seriously besieged PDP government asked Moscow to send a contingent of troops to help ward off the mujahideen (Islamic guerrilla fighters) and foreign mercenaries, all recruited, financed, and well-armed by the CIA. The Soviets already had been sending aid for projects in mining, education, agriculture, and public health. Deploying troops represented a commitment of a more serious and politically dangerous sort. It took repeated requests from Kabul before Moscow agreed to intervene militarily.
Jihad and Taliban, CIA Style
The Soviet intervention was a golden opportunity for the CIA to transform the tribal resistance into a holy war, an Islamic jihad to expel the godless communists from Afghanistan. Over the years the United States and Saudi Arabia expended about $40 billion on the war in Afghanistan. The CIA and its allies recruited, supplied, and trained almost 100,000 radical mujahideen from forty Muslim countries including Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Algeria, and Afghanistan itself. Among those who answered the call was Saudi-born millionaire right-winger Osama bin Laden and his cohorts.
After a long and unsuccessful war, the Soviets evacuated the country in February 1989. It is generally thought that the PDP Marxist government collapsed immediately after the Soviet departure. Actually, it retained enough popular support to fight on for another three years, outlasting the Soviet Union itself by a year.
Upon taking over Afghanistan, the mujahideen fell to fighting among themselves. They ravaged the cities, terrorized civilian populations, looted, staged mass executions, closed schools, raped thousands of women and girls, and reduced half of Kabul to rubble. In 2001 Amnesty International reported that the mujahideen used sexual assault as “a method of intimidating vanquished populations and rewarding soldiers.’”
Ruling the country gangster-style and looking for lucrative sources of income, the tribes ordered farmers to plant opium poppy. The Pakistani ISI, a close junior partner to the CIA, set up hundreds of heroin laboratories across Afghanistan. Within two years of the CIA’s arrival, the Pakistan-Afghanistan borderland became the biggest producer of heroin in the world.
Largely created and funded by the CIA, the mujahideen mercenaries now took on a life of their own. Hundreds of them returned home to Algeria, Chechnya, Kosovo, and Kashmir to carry on terrorist attacks in Allah’s name against the purveyors of secular “corruption.”
In Afghanistan itself, by 1995 an extremist strain of Sunni Islam called the Taliban---heavily funded and advised by the ISI and the CIA and with the support of Islamic political parties in Pakistan---fought its way to power, taking over most of the country, luring many tribal chiefs into its fold with threats and bribes.
The Taliban promised to end the factional fighting and banditry that was the mujahideen trademark. Suspected murderers and spies were executed monthly in the sports stadium, and those accused of thievery had the offending hand sliced off. The Taliban condemned forms of “immorality” that included premarital sex, adultery, and homosexuality. They also outlawed all music, theater, libraries, literature, secular education, and much scientific research.
The Taliban unleashed a religious reign of terror, imposing an even stricter interpretation of Muslim law than used by most of the Kabul clergy. All men were required to wear untrimmed beards and women had to wear the burqa which covered them from head to toe, including their faces. Persons who were slow to comply were dealt swift and severe punishment by the Ministry of Virtue. A woman who fled an abusive home or charged spousal abuse would herself be severely whipped by the theocratic authorities. Women were outlawed from social life, deprived of most forms of medical care, barred from all levels of education, and any opportunity to work outside the home. Women who were deemed “immoral” were stoned to death or buried alive.
None of this was of much concern to leaders in Washington who got along famously with the Taliban. As recently as 1999, the US government was paying the entire annual salary of every single Taliban government official (SF Chronicle, 10/2/2001). Not until October 2001, when President George W. Bush had to rally public opinion behind his bombing campaign in Afghanistan did he denounce the Taliban’s oppression of women. His wife, Laura Bush, emerged overnight as a full-blown feminist to deliver a public address detailing some of the abuses committed against Afghan women.
If anything positive can be said about the Taliban, it is that they did put a stop to much of the looting, raping, and random killings that the mujahideen had practiced on a regular basis. In 2000 Taliban authorities also eradicated the cultivation of opium poppy throughout the areas under their control, an effort judged by the United Nations International Drug Control Program to have been nearly totally successful. With the Taliban overthrown and a Western-selected mujahideen government reinstalled in Kabul by December 2001, opium poppy production in Afghanistan increased dramatically.
The years of war that have followed have taken tens of thousands of Afghani lives. Along with those killed by Cruise missiles, Stealth bombers, Tomahawks, daisy cutters, and land mines are those who continue to die of hunger, cold, lack of shelter, and lack of water.
The Holy Crusade for Oil and Gas
While claiming to be fighting terrorism, US leaders have found other compelling but less advertised reasons for plunging deeper into Afghanistan. The Central Asian region is rich in oil and gas reserves. A decade before 9/11, Time magazine (18 March 1991) reported that US policy elites were contemplating a military presence in Central Asia. The discovery of vast oil and gas reserves in Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan provided the lure, while the dissolution of the USSR removed the one major barrier against pursuing an aggressive interventionist policy in that part of the world.
US oil companies acquired the rights to some 75 percent of these new reserves. A major problem was how to transport the oil and gas from the landlocked region. US officials opposed using the Russian pipeline or the most direct route across Iran to the Persian Gulf. Instead, they and the corporate oil contractors explored a number of alternative pipeline routes, across Azerbaijan and Turkey to the Mediterranean or across China to the Pacific.
The route favored by Unocal, a US based oil company, crossed Afghanistan and Pakistan to the Indian Ocean. The intensive negotiations that Unocal entered into with the Taliban regime remained unresolved by 1998, as an Argentine company placed a competing bid for the pipeline. Bush’s war against the Taliban rekindled UNOCAL’s hopes for getting a major piece of the action.
Interestingly enough, neither the Clinton nor Bush administrations ever placed Afghanistan on the official State Department list of states charged with sponsoring terrorism, despite the acknowledged presence of Osama bin Laden as a guest of the Taliban government. Such a “rogue state” designation would have made it impossible for a US oil or construction company to enter an agreement with Kabul for a pipeline to the Central Asian oil and gas fields.
In sum, well in advance of the 9/11 attacks the US government had made preparations to move against the Taliban and create a compliant regime in Kabul and a direct US military presence in Central Asia. The 9/11 attacks provided the perfect impetus, stampeding US public opinion and reluctant allies into supporting military intervention.
One might agree with John Ryan who argued that if Washington had left the Marxist Taraki government alone back in 1979, “there would have been no army of mujahideen, no Soviet intervention, no war that destroyed Afghanistan, no Osama bin Laden, and no September 11 tragedy.” But it would be asking too much for Washington to leave unmolested a progressive leftist government that was organizing the social capital around collective public needs rather than private accumulation.
US intervention in Afghanistan has proven not much different from US intervention in Cambodia, Angola, Mozambique, Ethiopia, Nicaragua, Grenada, Panama, and elsewhere. It had the same intent of preventing egalitarian social change, and the same effect of overthrowing an economically reformist government. In all these instances, the intervention brought retrograde elements into ascendance, left the economy in ruins, and pitilessly laid waste to many innocent lives.
The war against Afghanistan, a battered impoverished country, continues to be portrayed in US official circles as a gallant crusade against terrorism. If it ever was that, it also has been a means to other things: destroying a leftist revolutionary social order, gaining profitable control of one of the last vast untapped reserves of the earth’s dwindling fossil fuel supply, and planting US bases and US military power into still another region of the world.
In the face of all this Obama’s call for “change” rings hollow.
http://www.michaelparenti.org/afghanistan%20story%20untold.html
by Michael Parenti, Ph.D. (2009)
Barack Obama is on record as advocating a military escalation in Afghanistan. Before sinking any deeper into that quagmire, we might do well to learn something about recent Afghani history and the role played by the United States.
Less than a month after the 11 September 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, US leaders began an all-out aerial assault upon Afghanistan, the country purportedly harboring Osama bin Laden and his al Qaeda terrorist organization. More than twenty years earlier, in 1980, the United States intervened to stop a Soviet “invasion” of that country. Even some leading progressive writers, who normally take a more critical view of US policy abroad, treated the US intervention against the Soviet-supported government as “a good thing.” The actual story is not such a good thing.
Some Real History
Since feudal times the landholding system in Afghanistan had remained unchanged, with more than 75 percent of the land owned by big landlords who comprised only 3 percent of the rural population. In the mid-1960s, democratic revolutionary elements coalesced to form the People’s Democratic Party (PDP). In 1973, the king was deposed, but the government that replaced him proved to be autocratic, mismanaged, and unpopular. It in turn was forced out in 1978 after a massive demonstration in front of the presidential palace, and after factions of the army intervened on the side of the demonstrators.
The military officers who took charge invited the PDP to form a new government under the leadership of Noor Mohammed Taraki, a poet and novelist. This is how a Marxist-led coalition of national democratic forces came into office. “It was a totally indigenous happening. Not even the CIA blamed the USSR for it,” writes John Ryan, a retired professor at the University of Winnipeg, who was conducting an agricultural research project in Afghanistan at about that time.
The Taraki government proceeded to legalize labor unions, and set up a minimum wage, a progressive income tax, a literacy campaign, and programs that gave ordinary people greater access to health care, housing, and public sanitation. Fledgling peasant cooperatives were started and price reductions on some key foods were imposed.
The government also continued a campaign begun by the king to emancipate women from their age-old tribal bondage. It provided public education for girls and for the children of various tribes.
A report in the San Francisco Chronicle (17 November 2001) noted that under the Taraki regime Kabul had been “a cosmopolitan city. Artists and hippies flocked to the capital. Women studied agriculture, engineering and business at the city’s university. Afghan women held government jobs—-in the 1980s, there were seven female members of parliament. Women drove cars, traveled and went on dates. Fifty percent of university students were women.”
The Taraki government moved to eradicate the cultivation of opium poppy. Until then Afghanistan had been producing more than 70 percent of the opium needed for the world’s heroin supply. The government also abolished all debts owed by farmers, and began developing a major land reform program. Ryan believes that it was a “genuinely popular government and people looked forward to the future with great hope.”
But serious opposition arose from several quarters. The feudal landlords opposed the land reform program that infringed on their holdings. And tribesmen and fundamentalist mullahs vehemently opposed the government’s dedication to gender equality and the education of women and children.
Because of its egalitarian and collectivist economic policies the Taraki government also incurred the opposition of the US national security state. Almost immediately after the PDP coalition came to power, the CIA, assisted by Saudi and Pakistani military, launched a large scale intervention into Afghanistan on the side of the ousted feudal lords, reactionary tribal chieftains, mullahs, and opium traffickers.
A top official within the Taraki government was Hafizulla Amin, believed by many to have been recruited by the CIA during the several years he spent in the United States as a student. In September 1979, Amin seized state power in an armed coup. He executed Taraki, halted the reforms, and murdered, jailed, or exiled thousands of Taraki supporters as he moved toward establishing a fundamentalist Islamic state. But within two months, he was overthrown by PDP remnants including elements within the military.
It should be noted that all this happened before the Soviet military intervention. National security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski publicly admitted--months before Soviet troops entered the country--that the Carter administration was providing huge sums to Muslim extremists to subvert the reformist government. Part of that effort involved brutal attacks by the CIA-backed mujahideen against schools and teachers in rural areas.
In late 1979, the seriously besieged PDP government asked Moscow to send a contingent of troops to help ward off the mujahideen (Islamic guerrilla fighters) and foreign mercenaries, all recruited, financed, and well-armed by the CIA. The Soviets already had been sending aid for projects in mining, education, agriculture, and public health. Deploying troops represented a commitment of a more serious and politically dangerous sort. It took repeated requests from Kabul before Moscow agreed to intervene militarily.
Jihad and Taliban, CIA Style
The Soviet intervention was a golden opportunity for the CIA to transform the tribal resistance into a holy war, an Islamic jihad to expel the godless communists from Afghanistan. Over the years the United States and Saudi Arabia expended about $40 billion on the war in Afghanistan. The CIA and its allies recruited, supplied, and trained almost 100,000 radical mujahideen from forty Muslim countries including Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Algeria, and Afghanistan itself. Among those who answered the call was Saudi-born millionaire right-winger Osama bin Laden and his cohorts.
After a long and unsuccessful war, the Soviets evacuated the country in February 1989. It is generally thought that the PDP Marxist government collapsed immediately after the Soviet departure. Actually, it retained enough popular support to fight on for another three years, outlasting the Soviet Union itself by a year.
Upon taking over Afghanistan, the mujahideen fell to fighting among themselves. They ravaged the cities, terrorized civilian populations, looted, staged mass executions, closed schools, raped thousands of women and girls, and reduced half of Kabul to rubble. In 2001 Amnesty International reported that the mujahideen used sexual assault as “a method of intimidating vanquished populations and rewarding soldiers.’”
Ruling the country gangster-style and looking for lucrative sources of income, the tribes ordered farmers to plant opium poppy. The Pakistani ISI, a close junior partner to the CIA, set up hundreds of heroin laboratories across Afghanistan. Within two years of the CIA’s arrival, the Pakistan-Afghanistan borderland became the biggest producer of heroin in the world.
Largely created and funded by the CIA, the mujahideen mercenaries now took on a life of their own. Hundreds of them returned home to Algeria, Chechnya, Kosovo, and Kashmir to carry on terrorist attacks in Allah’s name against the purveyors of secular “corruption.”
In Afghanistan itself, by 1995 an extremist strain of Sunni Islam called the Taliban---heavily funded and advised by the ISI and the CIA and with the support of Islamic political parties in Pakistan---fought its way to power, taking over most of the country, luring many tribal chiefs into its fold with threats and bribes.
The Taliban promised to end the factional fighting and banditry that was the mujahideen trademark. Suspected murderers and spies were executed monthly in the sports stadium, and those accused of thievery had the offending hand sliced off. The Taliban condemned forms of “immorality” that included premarital sex, adultery, and homosexuality. They also outlawed all music, theater, libraries, literature, secular education, and much scientific research.
The Taliban unleashed a religious reign of terror, imposing an even stricter interpretation of Muslim law than used by most of the Kabul clergy. All men were required to wear untrimmed beards and women had to wear the burqa which covered them from head to toe, including their faces. Persons who were slow to comply were dealt swift and severe punishment by the Ministry of Virtue. A woman who fled an abusive home or charged spousal abuse would herself be severely whipped by the theocratic authorities. Women were outlawed from social life, deprived of most forms of medical care, barred from all levels of education, and any opportunity to work outside the home. Women who were deemed “immoral” were stoned to death or buried alive.
None of this was of much concern to leaders in Washington who got along famously with the Taliban. As recently as 1999, the US government was paying the entire annual salary of every single Taliban government official (SF Chronicle, 10/2/2001). Not until October 2001, when President George W. Bush had to rally public opinion behind his bombing campaign in Afghanistan did he denounce the Taliban’s oppression of women. His wife, Laura Bush, emerged overnight as a full-blown feminist to deliver a public address detailing some of the abuses committed against Afghan women.
If anything positive can be said about the Taliban, it is that they did put a stop to much of the looting, raping, and random killings that the mujahideen had practiced on a regular basis. In 2000 Taliban authorities also eradicated the cultivation of opium poppy throughout the areas under their control, an effort judged by the United Nations International Drug Control Program to have been nearly totally successful. With the Taliban overthrown and a Western-selected mujahideen government reinstalled in Kabul by December 2001, opium poppy production in Afghanistan increased dramatically.
The years of war that have followed have taken tens of thousands of Afghani lives. Along with those killed by Cruise missiles, Stealth bombers, Tomahawks, daisy cutters, and land mines are those who continue to die of hunger, cold, lack of shelter, and lack of water.
The Holy Crusade for Oil and Gas
While claiming to be fighting terrorism, US leaders have found other compelling but less advertised reasons for plunging deeper into Afghanistan. The Central Asian region is rich in oil and gas reserves. A decade before 9/11, Time magazine (18 March 1991) reported that US policy elites were contemplating a military presence in Central Asia. The discovery of vast oil and gas reserves in Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan provided the lure, while the dissolution of the USSR removed the one major barrier against pursuing an aggressive interventionist policy in that part of the world.
US oil companies acquired the rights to some 75 percent of these new reserves. A major problem was how to transport the oil and gas from the landlocked region. US officials opposed using the Russian pipeline or the most direct route across Iran to the Persian Gulf. Instead, they and the corporate oil contractors explored a number of alternative pipeline routes, across Azerbaijan and Turkey to the Mediterranean or across China to the Pacific.
The route favored by Unocal, a US based oil company, crossed Afghanistan and Pakistan to the Indian Ocean. The intensive negotiations that Unocal entered into with the Taliban regime remained unresolved by 1998, as an Argentine company placed a competing bid for the pipeline. Bush’s war against the Taliban rekindled UNOCAL’s hopes for getting a major piece of the action.
Interestingly enough, neither the Clinton nor Bush administrations ever placed Afghanistan on the official State Department list of states charged with sponsoring terrorism, despite the acknowledged presence of Osama bin Laden as a guest of the Taliban government. Such a “rogue state” designation would have made it impossible for a US oil or construction company to enter an agreement with Kabul for a pipeline to the Central Asian oil and gas fields.
In sum, well in advance of the 9/11 attacks the US government had made preparations to move against the Taliban and create a compliant regime in Kabul and a direct US military presence in Central Asia. The 9/11 attacks provided the perfect impetus, stampeding US public opinion and reluctant allies into supporting military intervention.
One might agree with John Ryan who argued that if Washington had left the Marxist Taraki government alone back in 1979, “there would have been no army of mujahideen, no Soviet intervention, no war that destroyed Afghanistan, no Osama bin Laden, and no September 11 tragedy.” But it would be asking too much for Washington to leave unmolested a progressive leftist government that was organizing the social capital around collective public needs rather than private accumulation.
US intervention in Afghanistan has proven not much different from US intervention in Cambodia, Angola, Mozambique, Ethiopia, Nicaragua, Grenada, Panama, and elsewhere. It had the same intent of preventing egalitarian social change, and the same effect of overthrowing an economically reformist government. In all these instances, the intervention brought retrograde elements into ascendance, left the economy in ruins, and pitilessly laid waste to many innocent lives.
The war against Afghanistan, a battered impoverished country, continues to be portrayed in US official circles as a gallant crusade against terrorism. If it ever was that, it also has been a means to other things: destroying a leftist revolutionary social order, gaining profitable control of one of the last vast untapped reserves of the earth’s dwindling fossil fuel supply, and planting US bases and US military power into still another region of the world.
In the face of all this Obama’s call for “change” rings hollow.
http://www.michaelparenti.org/afghanistan%20story%20untold.html
Friday, April 17, 2009
Confessions of a Rough Sleeper
This article is from a website called Homeless Tales, written by TVParksdale.
Confessions of a Rough Sleeper
by TVParksdale
Ask the poverty-ridden and homeless in a conventional group what they want and they will tell you exactly what they think the public wants to hear. We’ve all been nicely trained to parrot the party lines.
You’ll hear about addictions, mental illness and system scamming. You’ll hear about the need for “supportive housing”, more shelters and better social work services. You will hear exactly what you expect to hear. I refuse to go to any more conventions to hear the same shit that’s shoveled to the tune of no real results. Billions of dollars wasted to say, “Homelessness is a problem.” With a unionized construction crew, we could have housed every homeless person in this country on far less money.***
Ask those same de-housed people what they want behind closed doors, without any coordinator class, social workers or political influence peddlers and listen to the difference.
The story is very, very different.
Behind closed doors, with our own, we hear about how the system is so broken it leads to chronic frustration, clinical depression, increased emotional crisis’, feelings of complete inadequacy and mental breakdowns. You’ll hear how some clients have to have 2-10 workers/lawyers/doctors just to negotiate the paperwork of Ontario Works, ODSP, medical care and housing. You’ll hear the self-hating guilt about having to accept handouts, leftovers and government support from people that could support themselves on token jobs if they didn’t have to pay huge rent or stay in subsidized housing or because we need to obtain the necessary drug/dental/health benefits of government hand-outs that we can’t get unless we succumb to OW/ODSP.
You’ll see the tears over homes we’ve had and loved that weren’t “acceptable” to the outside world. “They took our freedom. They destroyed our community,” are statements I hear frequently.
Squats, camps near train tracks, under the bridges, street crews.
Our dreams of something better—shattered. People we’ve loved, people who helped us survive that we must turn away from our doors on a freezing winter’s night because “housing” doesn’t allow us to have overnight guests that stay too long or make too much noise. Of how many of us have been evicted because we’ve let the very people who insured our survival crash on the floor. Oh yes, it’s pleasant to be warm, the toilet flushes and there’s a sense of gratitude corrupted with survivor guilt because for everyone who is housed, we leave dozens behind, abandoned. We go to their funerals to mourn and feel more shame for being alive. We don’t talk about that to “outsiders”.
Behind closed doors, we talk about the isolation. About knowing that if one of us died today, our body might not be found for weeks.. If we are ill, no one will bring a street nurse from the clinic, warm a can of soup or call the ambulance. These aren’t counted as “homeless deaths”. Yet, no street crew would not scream for assistance should they see a member so ill s/he cannot function. The streets are a stern taskmaster. Yet the reality of poverty housing is that death happens frequently because “the worker wasn’t available” or “the neighbours didn’t notice anything until it started to smell.” Then the closest social service agency will throw some sort of memorial that has little to do with anything we might have actually wanted or believed.
Behind my brown door you’ll hear about the stunning invasions of privacy by social services, housing workers, case managers, supervisors, means-testers—none qualified to do intensive therapy yet digging into the painful pasts of those they claim to serve. Tearing apart the pieces without the skill of putting such a complex puzzle of a disrupted life back together.
There’s the $20 research studies that carry on endlessly around this city. Go to a conference, or research study get the $20-40 for your input, let someone shred your shame apart and analyze your personal tragedy then send you home with the honorarium for saying what you know they wanted to hear. Tell them all about your destruction, recall it, flashback by flashback and spend days swirling helplessly in traumatic memories with no supports. You’re just another research number. The twenty dollars can buy a bottle, or maybe a chicken dinner and chips to comfort you so you can pick your pieces up again. Maybe an old street crew friend will be around to share your woes but it certainly won’t be the paid worker who spends hours stitching up the emotional razor slashes.
The poor live with a chronic invasion of privacy, the likes of which no middle/upper class person would tolerate for an instant. Their life stories are passed from worker to worker, team to team, medical practitioners, psychiatrists, housing workers, social workers, bureaucrats, pharmacists, drop-in staffs, government officials all in the name of “help”.
Sign the dozens of consent forms, please, right here, at the “X”. Just in case, of course, that someone scams a nickel’s worth of taxpayer’s money, that although they might really need it, they are not legally entitled to have it. Then the “help” that has stomped on every shred of dignity that a poor person might possess complain that, “these clients have boundary issues.”
Of course we have no “boundaries” left. We bleed publicly to receive our pittances so often we can’t help but hate those we perceive, as ever-present paid-love, inconsistently abusive foster parents. We aren’t allowed to tell them, “Fuck off. I don’t want to talk about it.” or, “Fuck off. You know fuck all about housing the poor, my history, what I wanted for my life, or anything else, you clueless twit.”
Then we blame the poor for a “lack of willpower”.
Well, what creates “willpower”?
Willpower is belief that since we experienced effecting change in the past, we are capable of effecting change in the future.
If you have little experience with seeing change effected, why would you have any willpower to see something new through? The poor are up against the most powerful forces in the world. Most aren’t blinded by false hopes that buoy the middle class. Someone controls their money supply, controls their children, controls their housing, controls what employment that can have, controls their health-care, controls what medications they can access, controls their food supply, controls where they can live, controls what they are entitled to receive in education and on and on.
When the poor come up with a real solution, they are ruthlessly stomped on by the so-called left and right as well as the media unless being portrayed as pitiful victims with “mental health issues”.
Great ideas that the poor promote are stolen from their brains to be sanitized then utilized by the “professionals” as newfangled programs while agencies weasel out more funding by claiming it was a “client led idea”. The same client who showed up at the meeting because s/he needed the proffered free meal. No permanent pay-cheque to be had for the “client” who came up with the concept, of course. S/he is ‘not a qualified professional’. I stopped counting how many friends I’ve watched explode from injustice because some professional collected a pay-cheque after said friend instituted a great little inexpensive and much-needed program as an unpaid volunteer. How much “willpower” can one have left after that experience?
Housing squats and camps are a case in point. A “willing” crew gets together, unites and sets up house. Without legal title they are vulnerable to police raids. Social services might step in to “save” them, splitting them apart and isolating each into shelters and housing them far apart to “save problems”. Any sense of community or political influence they might hope to gain is shattered. They are given welfare or ODSP and turned from people with part-time work paying no rent into a begging citizenry. Some will not stay. They’ll find another bridge or crew. Then that community will be raided as well. Ah yes, ladies and gentlemen, these are the “hard-to-house-hardcore-homeless”.The merry-go-round goes on and on…
Social service agencies create “supportive housing”. The residents have no say in the rules, how the place is run, the level of service or intrusion into their personal space. Sometimes there are house meetings that pay lip service to the idea, but in truth, it’s just to shut the clients up, cut down on the roaches and bedbugs while it keeps the pay-cheques and status quo rocking along. If the residents “misbehave” they are told to “get into [name program] or be evicted.”
The ‘regular’ neighbours complain about the subsidized-housed ones, “They have no sense of community. They don’t care about their neighbours.” The same neighbours that sneer down their noses publicly at the “lazy bums” and complain about paying taxes for “welfare frauds.” Or perhaps, the neighbours that care realize there’s a problem but are simply ineffective at knowing what to do about it.
Jack Tafari who was a main founder of “Dignity Village” once told me, “My biggest challenge in building Dignity was convincing the de-housed they don’t have to stay in the missionary position.”
Or more crudely put by someone else, “It’s hard to stand up for anything when you’re forced on your knees to suck colonialist cock.”
So, what is the solution?
Stop blindsiding the poor with middle class social-work agendas. Face reality.
The government is never going to build enough, or adequate housing for every need. There is never going to be a 0% unemployment rate in this country. Those solutions don’t serve the politico-corporate agenda.
When the poor come up with their own communities or alternative solutions, support them. Show them that you will back solutions that are not your ideological preference. Show them that they can effect change if they fight. Fight to legalize their tent cities and their squats and their right to house themselves, work at whatever jobs they can for a little pay or jobs they can invent.
You’d be shocked at the energetic creativity some can unleash if you cut us loose.
Stop forcing us into the arms of social services because it assuages your guilt. Understand that every time a squat, trailer/van stop, or camp is crushed that you destroy our very hopes and dreams for a brighter, more independent future. Realize that you are turning your own countrymen into refugees. Fight for our right to build our own communities even if it looks like a messy eyesore to you.
Because that’s what it’s really all about.
The poor are an eyesore. We make you feel guilty when we’re hanging around under bridges, or at hobo camps, or panhandling somewhere public and political. Our visibility is proof that we as a society do NOT have enough housing and that we don’t have all the answers to poverty reduction, or unemployment, or disability or substance use or mental health struggles and we will never have perfect solutions.
Considering the economic downturn, letting people find creative alternatives is going to become even more imperative soon. We need to believe we can effect change.
Admit that the people who are considered “crazy”, or “addicted” might actually know more about dealing with other people sharing their fate than those who are profiting from their poverty. Stop blaming the poor for increasing poverty. When Harris gutted Ontario’s social programs and abolished rent controls and tenant protection laws, 100,000 de-housed people did not suddenly lose their minds in the following couple of years.
The present minimum wage will not cover the cost of rent in Toronto, or hardly anywhere else, for that matter.
Give us the support to assert our communal will, for our needs not promoted by the colonialist missionary agenda.
Support us to learn to WIN what we want, for ourselves. Wherever that might take us all.
It might even be somewhere better.
[***NOTE: Want to know what it actually cost to build apx 85 cabins in Tent City Toronto that housed 115people?
a.. About $1,000 in tools.
b.. $0 in reno scraps that we recycled.
c.. $200 per wood stove.
d.. $0 in oil barrels.
e.. $30 per propane heater
f.. and $10 per week in propane, candles and gaslights bought in by private donations.
g.. Second hand beds, bathtubs, furniture, all scrounged from the garbage of those better off or donated by supportive visitors.
h.. TDRC brought in some plastic houses that cost a few thousand each although that was not the majority of housing stock.
i.. TDRC and the city of Toronto supplied porta-potties. Cost unknown.
j.. Water was hauled from an open fire hydrant
k.. In short, our actual housing cost the taxpayers $0 although some residents used their $200 per month OW “street pay” or ODSP living allowance for tools and supplies which many also lent around the camp to build more housing.
The Pope Squat was in the process of being renovated compliments of the construction unions who also supplied materials. Now the new building owner has received hundreds of thousands in reno dollars from the City to produce rent-geared-to-income apartments too small for my dog to live in.
Get the picture?]
Confessions of a Rough Sleeper
by TVParksdale
Ask the poverty-ridden and homeless in a conventional group what they want and they will tell you exactly what they think the public wants to hear. We’ve all been nicely trained to parrot the party lines.
You’ll hear about addictions, mental illness and system scamming. You’ll hear about the need for “supportive housing”, more shelters and better social work services. You will hear exactly what you expect to hear. I refuse to go to any more conventions to hear the same shit that’s shoveled to the tune of no real results. Billions of dollars wasted to say, “Homelessness is a problem.” With a unionized construction crew, we could have housed every homeless person in this country on far less money.***
Ask those same de-housed people what they want behind closed doors, without any coordinator class, social workers or political influence peddlers and listen to the difference.
The story is very, very different.
Behind closed doors, with our own, we hear about how the system is so broken it leads to chronic frustration, clinical depression, increased emotional crisis’, feelings of complete inadequacy and mental breakdowns. You’ll hear how some clients have to have 2-10 workers/lawyers/doctors just to negotiate the paperwork of Ontario Works, ODSP, medical care and housing. You’ll hear the self-hating guilt about having to accept handouts, leftovers and government support from people that could support themselves on token jobs if they didn’t have to pay huge rent or stay in subsidized housing or because we need to obtain the necessary drug/dental/health benefits of government hand-outs that we can’t get unless we succumb to OW/ODSP.
You’ll see the tears over homes we’ve had and loved that weren’t “acceptable” to the outside world. “They took our freedom. They destroyed our community,” are statements I hear frequently.
Squats, camps near train tracks, under the bridges, street crews.
Our dreams of something better—shattered. People we’ve loved, people who helped us survive that we must turn away from our doors on a freezing winter’s night because “housing” doesn’t allow us to have overnight guests that stay too long or make too much noise. Of how many of us have been evicted because we’ve let the very people who insured our survival crash on the floor. Oh yes, it’s pleasant to be warm, the toilet flushes and there’s a sense of gratitude corrupted with survivor guilt because for everyone who is housed, we leave dozens behind, abandoned. We go to their funerals to mourn and feel more shame for being alive. We don’t talk about that to “outsiders”.
Behind closed doors, we talk about the isolation. About knowing that if one of us died today, our body might not be found for weeks.. If we are ill, no one will bring a street nurse from the clinic, warm a can of soup or call the ambulance. These aren’t counted as “homeless deaths”. Yet, no street crew would not scream for assistance should they see a member so ill s/he cannot function. The streets are a stern taskmaster. Yet the reality of poverty housing is that death happens frequently because “the worker wasn’t available” or “the neighbours didn’t notice anything until it started to smell.” Then the closest social service agency will throw some sort of memorial that has little to do with anything we might have actually wanted or believed.
Behind my brown door you’ll hear about the stunning invasions of privacy by social services, housing workers, case managers, supervisors, means-testers—none qualified to do intensive therapy yet digging into the painful pasts of those they claim to serve. Tearing apart the pieces without the skill of putting such a complex puzzle of a disrupted life back together.
There’s the $20 research studies that carry on endlessly around this city. Go to a conference, or research study get the $20-40 for your input, let someone shred your shame apart and analyze your personal tragedy then send you home with the honorarium for saying what you know they wanted to hear. Tell them all about your destruction, recall it, flashback by flashback and spend days swirling helplessly in traumatic memories with no supports. You’re just another research number. The twenty dollars can buy a bottle, or maybe a chicken dinner and chips to comfort you so you can pick your pieces up again. Maybe an old street crew friend will be around to share your woes but it certainly won’t be the paid worker who spends hours stitching up the emotional razor slashes.
The poor live with a chronic invasion of privacy, the likes of which no middle/upper class person would tolerate for an instant. Their life stories are passed from worker to worker, team to team, medical practitioners, psychiatrists, housing workers, social workers, bureaucrats, pharmacists, drop-in staffs, government officials all in the name of “help”.
Sign the dozens of consent forms, please, right here, at the “X”. Just in case, of course, that someone scams a nickel’s worth of taxpayer’s money, that although they might really need it, they are not legally entitled to have it. Then the “help” that has stomped on every shred of dignity that a poor person might possess complain that, “these clients have boundary issues.”
Of course we have no “boundaries” left. We bleed publicly to receive our pittances so often we can’t help but hate those we perceive, as ever-present paid-love, inconsistently abusive foster parents. We aren’t allowed to tell them, “Fuck off. I don’t want to talk about it.” or, “Fuck off. You know fuck all about housing the poor, my history, what I wanted for my life, or anything else, you clueless twit.”
Then we blame the poor for a “lack of willpower”.
Well, what creates “willpower”?
Willpower is belief that since we experienced effecting change in the past, we are capable of effecting change in the future.
If you have little experience with seeing change effected, why would you have any willpower to see something new through? The poor are up against the most powerful forces in the world. Most aren’t blinded by false hopes that buoy the middle class. Someone controls their money supply, controls their children, controls their housing, controls what employment that can have, controls their health-care, controls what medications they can access, controls their food supply, controls where they can live, controls what they are entitled to receive in education and on and on.
When the poor come up with a real solution, they are ruthlessly stomped on by the so-called left and right as well as the media unless being portrayed as pitiful victims with “mental health issues”.
Great ideas that the poor promote are stolen from their brains to be sanitized then utilized by the “professionals” as newfangled programs while agencies weasel out more funding by claiming it was a “client led idea”. The same client who showed up at the meeting because s/he needed the proffered free meal. No permanent pay-cheque to be had for the “client” who came up with the concept, of course. S/he is ‘not a qualified professional’. I stopped counting how many friends I’ve watched explode from injustice because some professional collected a pay-cheque after said friend instituted a great little inexpensive and much-needed program as an unpaid volunteer. How much “willpower” can one have left after that experience?
Housing squats and camps are a case in point. A “willing” crew gets together, unites and sets up house. Without legal title they are vulnerable to police raids. Social services might step in to “save” them, splitting them apart and isolating each into shelters and housing them far apart to “save problems”. Any sense of community or political influence they might hope to gain is shattered. They are given welfare or ODSP and turned from people with part-time work paying no rent into a begging citizenry. Some will not stay. They’ll find another bridge or crew. Then that community will be raided as well. Ah yes, ladies and gentlemen, these are the “hard-to-house-hardcore-homeless”.The merry-go-round goes on and on…
Social service agencies create “supportive housing”. The residents have no say in the rules, how the place is run, the level of service or intrusion into their personal space. Sometimes there are house meetings that pay lip service to the idea, but in truth, it’s just to shut the clients up, cut down on the roaches and bedbugs while it keeps the pay-cheques and status quo rocking along. If the residents “misbehave” they are told to “get into [name program] or be evicted.”
The ‘regular’ neighbours complain about the subsidized-housed ones, “They have no sense of community. They don’t care about their neighbours.” The same neighbours that sneer down their noses publicly at the “lazy bums” and complain about paying taxes for “welfare frauds.” Or perhaps, the neighbours that care realize there’s a problem but are simply ineffective at knowing what to do about it.
Jack Tafari who was a main founder of “Dignity Village” once told me, “My biggest challenge in building Dignity was convincing the de-housed they don’t have to stay in the missionary position.”
Or more crudely put by someone else, “It’s hard to stand up for anything when you’re forced on your knees to suck colonialist cock.”
So, what is the solution?
Stop blindsiding the poor with middle class social-work agendas. Face reality.
The government is never going to build enough, or adequate housing for every need. There is never going to be a 0% unemployment rate in this country. Those solutions don’t serve the politico-corporate agenda.
When the poor come up with their own communities or alternative solutions, support them. Show them that you will back solutions that are not your ideological preference. Show them that they can effect change if they fight. Fight to legalize their tent cities and their squats and their right to house themselves, work at whatever jobs they can for a little pay or jobs they can invent.
You’d be shocked at the energetic creativity some can unleash if you cut us loose.
Stop forcing us into the arms of social services because it assuages your guilt. Understand that every time a squat, trailer/van stop, or camp is crushed that you destroy our very hopes and dreams for a brighter, more independent future. Realize that you are turning your own countrymen into refugees. Fight for our right to build our own communities even if it looks like a messy eyesore to you.
Because that’s what it’s really all about.
The poor are an eyesore. We make you feel guilty when we’re hanging around under bridges, or at hobo camps, or panhandling somewhere public and political. Our visibility is proof that we as a society do NOT have enough housing and that we don’t have all the answers to poverty reduction, or unemployment, or disability or substance use or mental health struggles and we will never have perfect solutions.
Considering the economic downturn, letting people find creative alternatives is going to become even more imperative soon. We need to believe we can effect change.
Admit that the people who are considered “crazy”, or “addicted” might actually know more about dealing with other people sharing their fate than those who are profiting from their poverty. Stop blaming the poor for increasing poverty. When Harris gutted Ontario’s social programs and abolished rent controls and tenant protection laws, 100,000 de-housed people did not suddenly lose their minds in the following couple of years.
The present minimum wage will not cover the cost of rent in Toronto, or hardly anywhere else, for that matter.
Give us the support to assert our communal will, for our needs not promoted by the colonialist missionary agenda.
Support us to learn to WIN what we want, for ourselves. Wherever that might take us all.
It might even be somewhere better.
[***NOTE: Want to know what it actually cost to build apx 85 cabins in Tent City Toronto that housed 115people?
a.. About $1,000 in tools.
b.. $0 in reno scraps that we recycled.
c.. $200 per wood stove.
d.. $0 in oil barrels.
e.. $30 per propane heater
f.. and $10 per week in propane, candles and gaslights bought in by private donations.
g.. Second hand beds, bathtubs, furniture, all scrounged from the garbage of those better off or donated by supportive visitors.
h.. TDRC brought in some plastic houses that cost a few thousand each although that was not the majority of housing stock.
i.. TDRC and the city of Toronto supplied porta-potties. Cost unknown.
j.. Water was hauled from an open fire hydrant
k.. In short, our actual housing cost the taxpayers $0 although some residents used their $200 per month OW “street pay” or ODSP living allowance for tools and supplies which many also lent around the camp to build more housing.
The Pope Squat was in the process of being renovated compliments of the construction unions who also supplied materials. Now the new building owner has received hundreds of thousands in reno dollars from the City to produce rent-geared-to-income apartments too small for my dog to live in.
Get the picture?]
Sunday, April 12, 2009
Harper Regime Negates Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms
Ottawa says international duties take priority over Charter for stranded Canadian
MONTREAL — A federal government document involving the case of a Canadian man trapped in Sudan states Canada would violate its international obligations by allowing him to return home - an argument his lawyers say doesn't hold water.
Foreign Affairs issued a factum Friday outlining its position in the case of Abousfian Abdelrazik, who has been living in the lobby of the Canadian Embassy in Khartoum where he sought refuge almost one year ago.
The government document states that Abdelrazik's listing under an international travel ban takes precedence over his right as a citizen to enter Canada.
"Section 6 of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms does not guarantee a right to travel through other countries to enter Canada...The travel ban prohibits other states from allowing the applicant to enter into travel through their territories," it says.
And in a later paragraph: "The requested remedy of repatriation would interfere in matters of Crown prerogative, foreign affairs and high policy and risks putting Canada in breach of its international obligations."
Abdelrazik was arrested in Khartoum in 2003, where he went to visit his ailing mother.
His lawyers are set to appear in Federal Court next month to argue that Sec. 6 of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms - the right of a citizen to enter Canada - has been breached and he should be flown home by whatever means are necessary.
"The government is prioritizing international law over our Section 6 right to come back to Canada, our Charter of Rights and Freedoms," Abdelrazik's lawyer Audrey Brousseau told The Canadian Press.
"I think these are speculative arguments about the transit to other third-party states. There's a basic right of repatriation with (the international no-fly list) but Canada goes further and adds another obstacle and says we might need approval from other parties. This to me does not make sense."
Brousseau said in an interview that there are numerous documented cases of people on the UN 1267 list returning home. She says one example is Abdelghani Mzoudi, a Moroccan once accused of involvement in the 9-11 terrorist attacks.
Brousseau also points to a built-in exemption to the UN's no-fly list that allows justified transit or entry on a case-by-case basis.
"The government has create important hurdles for him to come back, so in that sense they have truly violated his rights," she said.
"What we're seeing here is that he doesn't need any approval. Alternatively, if they feel he needs and exemption, then go get it."
A spokesman for Foreign Affairs wouldn't comment directly on the factum but said the government has reasons relating to national security for preventing Abdelrazik from coming home.
"Mr. Abdelrazik is on the UN 1267 list as an individual associated with al-Qaida and is therefore subject to a travel ban and asset freeze," said Daniel Barbarie, adding the man was provided with regular consular assistance.
Abdelrazik's case has been gaining public support.
Family members have come forward urging the government to let him fly home and Liberal and NDP MPs have backed his cause.
Earlier this month, a group of some 170 supporters purchased a plane ticket for him to return to Canada but he was denied an emergency passport last minute on the grounds he is a national security threat.
Ottawa cited a section of the Canada Passport Order that allows the foreign affairs minister to "refuse or revoke a passport if the minister is of the opinion that such action is necessary for the national security of Canada or another country."
Further, Foreign Affairs Minister Lawrence Cannon announced in March that Abdelrazik would first have to get his name off the no-fly list.
However, the federal government had itself previously lobbied for the de-listing of Abdelrazik in 2007 after both the RCMP and CSIS cleared him of any involvement in terrorism or crime and Abdelrazik has also denied ties to Osama bin Laden.
The RCMP has said there is no information linking him to any crime and a recently published report suggests CSIS operatives were the ones who initially asked Sudanese authorities to arrest and detain Abdelrazik.
But the government document obtained by The Canadian Press from Abdelrazik's lawyers rejects that claim and also questions his allegations of torture while in Sudanese custody.
"They challenge the credibility of Abousfian Abdelrazik on the torture allegations," said Brousseau."These are serious allegations."
The document notes that Abdelrazik never mentioned any abuse when consular officials visited him in Sudanese jail.
"There is no documented evidence that the applicant ever reported to Canadian officials the torture he now alleges was inflicted by Sudanese officials," it says.
"Nor did consular officials, who are experienced or trained in looking for mistreatment, see any signs of the torture the applicant now alleges."
Abdelrazik says he kept mum on the mistreatment for years out of fear of reprisal and claims he later told three separate Canadian officials that he was abused, something they deny.
Now, Brousseau says the government has done everything in its power to obstruct her client's return and it's time they let him come back to Canada.
"The essence of our application is simple: bring this man home, repatriate this man by any safe means at your disposal," she said.
"We know you can do it. Do it."
source
MONTREAL — A federal government document involving the case of a Canadian man trapped in Sudan states Canada would violate its international obligations by allowing him to return home - an argument his lawyers say doesn't hold water.
Foreign Affairs issued a factum Friday outlining its position in the case of Abousfian Abdelrazik, who has been living in the lobby of the Canadian Embassy in Khartoum where he sought refuge almost one year ago.
The government document states that Abdelrazik's listing under an international travel ban takes precedence over his right as a citizen to enter Canada.
"Section 6 of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms does not guarantee a right to travel through other countries to enter Canada...The travel ban prohibits other states from allowing the applicant to enter into travel through their territories," it says.
And in a later paragraph: "The requested remedy of repatriation would interfere in matters of Crown prerogative, foreign affairs and high policy and risks putting Canada in breach of its international obligations."
Abdelrazik was arrested in Khartoum in 2003, where he went to visit his ailing mother.
His lawyers are set to appear in Federal Court next month to argue that Sec. 6 of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms - the right of a citizen to enter Canada - has been breached and he should be flown home by whatever means are necessary.
"The government is prioritizing international law over our Section 6 right to come back to Canada, our Charter of Rights and Freedoms," Abdelrazik's lawyer Audrey Brousseau told The Canadian Press.
"I think these are speculative arguments about the transit to other third-party states. There's a basic right of repatriation with (the international no-fly list) but Canada goes further and adds another obstacle and says we might need approval from other parties. This to me does not make sense."
Brousseau said in an interview that there are numerous documented cases of people on the UN 1267 list returning home. She says one example is Abdelghani Mzoudi, a Moroccan once accused of involvement in the 9-11 terrorist attacks.
Brousseau also points to a built-in exemption to the UN's no-fly list that allows justified transit or entry on a case-by-case basis.
"The government has create important hurdles for him to come back, so in that sense they have truly violated his rights," she said.
"What we're seeing here is that he doesn't need any approval. Alternatively, if they feel he needs and exemption, then go get it."
A spokesman for Foreign Affairs wouldn't comment directly on the factum but said the government has reasons relating to national security for preventing Abdelrazik from coming home.
"Mr. Abdelrazik is on the UN 1267 list as an individual associated with al-Qaida and is therefore subject to a travel ban and asset freeze," said Daniel Barbarie, adding the man was provided with regular consular assistance.
Abdelrazik's case has been gaining public support.
Family members have come forward urging the government to let him fly home and Liberal and NDP MPs have backed his cause.
Earlier this month, a group of some 170 supporters purchased a plane ticket for him to return to Canada but he was denied an emergency passport last minute on the grounds he is a national security threat.
Ottawa cited a section of the Canada Passport Order that allows the foreign affairs minister to "refuse or revoke a passport if the minister is of the opinion that such action is necessary for the national security of Canada or another country."
Further, Foreign Affairs Minister Lawrence Cannon announced in March that Abdelrazik would first have to get his name off the no-fly list.
However, the federal government had itself previously lobbied for the de-listing of Abdelrazik in 2007 after both the RCMP and CSIS cleared him of any involvement in terrorism or crime and Abdelrazik has also denied ties to Osama bin Laden.
The RCMP has said there is no information linking him to any crime and a recently published report suggests CSIS operatives were the ones who initially asked Sudanese authorities to arrest and detain Abdelrazik.
But the government document obtained by The Canadian Press from Abdelrazik's lawyers rejects that claim and also questions his allegations of torture while in Sudanese custody.
"They challenge the credibility of Abousfian Abdelrazik on the torture allegations," said Brousseau."These are serious allegations."
The document notes that Abdelrazik never mentioned any abuse when consular officials visited him in Sudanese jail.
"There is no documented evidence that the applicant ever reported to Canadian officials the torture he now alleges was inflicted by Sudanese officials," it says.
"Nor did consular officials, who are experienced or trained in looking for mistreatment, see any signs of the torture the applicant now alleges."
Abdelrazik says he kept mum on the mistreatment for years out of fear of reprisal and claims he later told three separate Canadian officials that he was abused, something they deny.
Now, Brousseau says the government has done everything in its power to obstruct her client's return and it's time they let him come back to Canada.
"The essence of our application is simple: bring this man home, repatriate this man by any safe means at your disposal," she said.
"We know you can do it. Do it."
source
Sunday, April 05, 2009
Shell Game: Accounting for Ken Saro-Wiwa's Execution
Shell in Court Over Alleged Role in Nigeria Executions
Family of environmental activist Ken Saro-Wiwa, hanged by his country's rulers in 1995, take oil giant to court in New York by Nick Mathiason
http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2009/04/05
Ken Saro-Wiwa swore that one day Shell, the oil giant, would answer for his death in a court of law. Next month, 14 years after his execution, the Nigerian environmental activist's dying wish is to be fulfilled.
In a New York federal court, Shell and one of its senior executives are to face charges that in the early 1990s in Nigeria they were complicit in human rights abuses, including summary execution and torture.
The Anglo-Dutch company, if found liable, could be forced to pay hundreds of millions of pounds in damages. No multinational has ever been found guilty of human rights abuses, although two previous cases saw major claims settled outside court.
Saro-Wiwa became famous as a campaigner on behalf of the Ogoni people, leading peaceful protests against the environmental damage caused by oil companies in the Niger Delta. There was worldwide condemnation when, along with eight other activists, he was hanged by the Nigerian military government in 1995 after being charged with incitement to murder after the death of four Ogoni elders. Many of the prosecution witnesses later admitted that they had been bribed to give evidence against Saro-Wiwa, who was a respected television writer and businessman.
Lawyers in New York will allege that Shell actively subsidised a campaign of terror by security forces in the Niger Delta and attempted to influence the trial that led to Saro-Wiwa's execution. The lawsuit alleges that the company attempted to bribe two witnesses in his trial to testify against him. Members of Saro-Wiwa's family will take the stand for the first time to give their version of events, among them his brother Owens, who will allege that Brian Anderson, managing director of Shell's Nigerian subsidiary, told him: "It would not be impossible to get charges dropped
if protests were called off." Anderson is fighting the action.
Witnesses who were shot by military police in the Niger Delta principally to protect the building of Shell's oil pipeline will allege that Shell, by paying the police to protect its interests, was complicit in acts of violence.
Speaking to the Observer from Abuja, Nigeria, Saro-Wiwa's son, Ken Wiwa, said: "For 14 years we have lived with the memory of a father, an uncle, a brother, a son executed for a crime he didn't commit. We have daily reminders. It's painful to live with a monstrous injustice. To wake up one day to finally get our day in court is tremendously satisfying.
"After the injustice of the original crime against my father, having to watch legal arguments [by Shell] using the highest-paid lawyers in the world is sickening. You can't describe how painful that is to go through.
"Part of the reason for the original protest was the way Shell behaved. Ogoni people made their living farming and fishing, but Shell was using open waste pits and oil pipelines criss-crossed the land. These polluting activities were put on top of a delicate ecosystem. It destroyed people's ability to sustain themselves. That's the impact of Shell and, when people tried to protest, they were brutally repressed."
In a statement, Shell this weekend described the executions of the Ogoni 9 as "tragic events carried out by the Nigerian government in power at the time".
"Shell attempted to persuade that government to grant clemency; to our deep regret, that appeal - and the appeals of many others - went unheard, and we were shocked and saddened when we heard the news. Shell in no way encouraged or advocated any act of violence against them or their fellow Ogonis. We believe that the evidence will show clearly that Shell was not responsible for these tragic events. The allegations made in the complaints against Royal Dutch/Shell concerning the 1995 executions of Ken
Saro-Wiwa and his eight fellow Ogonis are false and without merit."
US lawyers have finally won permission to bring the case to court under the alien tort statute, which gives non-US citizens the right to file claims in American courts for international human rights violations. The court case had been set for 27 April, though last night the date was moved to 26 May.
Today the oil-producing Niger Delta region is riven by intense violence and corruption. The Ogoni 9 trial is seen as a way of coming to terms with the past and building a non-violent future.
"We need to know the truth," said Ken Wiwa last night. "We need to have people account for their role in the executions and the displacement of the Ogoni people, many of whom feel traumatised. It will be a relief. It will enable people to face the future. That's the most important thing. Let's account for the past, so we can move forward."
Lawyers representing Saro-Wiwa's family have not sought specific damages should Shell be found liable, but legal experts say the oil giant could face fines running into hundreds of millions of pounds.
Jenny Green, a senior lawyer at the New York-based Center for Constitutional Rights, who has played a pivotal role in ensuring the Saro-Wiwa case made it to court, said: "Mosop [the Movement for the Survival of the Ogoni People] was formed to stand up to multinationals and the dictatorship that acted hand-in-hand. This is a significant moment, because it says you can't act with impunity."
© Guardian News and Media Limited 2009
Saturday, April 04, 2009
Goin' South: Canadian Democracy Under Siege
Muzzled MPs. A powerless cabinet. Politicized senior bureaucrats. Unaccountable parties. Canada's democracy is in trouble. To fix it we have to connect the dots
April 04, 2009
James Travers
National Affairs Columnist
OTTAWA–For a foreign correspondent reporting some of the world's grimmest stories, Canada in the '80s was more than a faraway home. Seen from the flattering distance of Africa, this country was a model democracy. Reflected in its distant mirror was everything wrong with what was then called the Third World. From Cape to Cairo, power was in the hands of Big Men. Police and army held control. Institutions were empty shells. Corruption was as accepted as the steeped-in-pessimism proposition that it's a duty to clan as well as to family to grab whatever has value before the state inevitably returns to dust.
By contrast and comparison, Canada was a cold but shimmering Camelot. Ballots, not bullets, changed governments. Men and women in uniform were discreet servants of the state. Institutions were structurally sound. Corruption, a part of politics everywhere, was firmly enough in check that scandals were aberrations demanding public scrutiny and sometimes even justice.
Canada today is not Africa then or now. Our wealth and health, and our communal respect for legal, civil and human rights position this favoured country on a higher plane. Still, 10 years of close observation and some 1,500 Star columns lead to an unsettling conclusion: Africa, despite popular perception, despite the Somalias and Zimbabwes, is moving in one direction, Canada in another. Read the headlines, examine the evidence, plot the trend line dots and find that as Africans – from turnaround Ghana to impoverished Malawi – struggle to strengthen their democracies, Canadians are letting theirs slip.
There, dictatorships are now more the exception than the rule and accountability is accepted as a precondition for stability. Here, power and control are increasingly concentrated and accountability honoured more in promise than practice. Canadian politicians flout the will of voters and parties. Once-solid institutions are being pulled apart by rising complexity and falling legitimacy. Scandals come and go without full public exposure or cleansing political punishment. If not yet lost, Camelot is under siege.
Laughter or disbelief would have been my '80s response to any gloomy prediction that within the next 20 odd years Canada's iconic police force would twist the outcome of a federal election. I would have rejected out of hand the suggestion that Parliament would become a largely ceremonial body incapable of performing its defining functions of safeguarding public spending and holding ministers to account. I would have treated as ridiculous any forecast that the senior bureaucracy would become politicized, that many of the powers of a monarch would flow from Parliament to the prime minister or that the authority of the Governor General, the de facto head of state, would be openly challenged.
Yet every one has happened and each has chipped away another brick of the democratic foundations underpinning Parliament. Incrementally and by stealth, Canada has become a situational democracy. What matters now is what works. Precedents, procedures and even laws have given way to the political doctrine of expediency.
No single party or prime minister is solely to blame. Since Pierre Trudeau first dismissed backbenchers as nobodies and began drawing power out of Parliament and into his office, all have contributed to the creep toward a more authoritarian, less accountable Canadian polity.
Some of the changes are understandable. Government evolves with its environment, and that environment has become more complex even as the controls have become wobblier, less connected. The terrible twins of globalization and subsidiarity – the sound theory that services are most efficiently delivered by the administrative level closest to the user – now sorely test the ability of national legislatures to respond to challenges at home and abroad. Think of it this way: Trade, the economy and the environment have all gone global while the things that matter most to most of us – health, education and the quality of city life – are the guarded responsibility of provinces and municipalities.
Politics and politicians being what they are, the reflex response is to grasp for all remaining power. Once secured, it can be used to exercise political will more easily by overruling rules and rewriting or simply ignoring laws. Power alone is effective in cross-cutting through the silo walls that isolate departments and frustrate co-ordinated policies. Important to all administrations, unfettered manoeuvring room is that much more important to minority governments desperate to maximize limited options and minimize opposition influence.
Good for prime ministers, that's not nearly good enough for the rest of us. It fuels an inexorable power drift to the opaque political centre, creating what Donald Savoie, Canada's eminent chronicler of Westminster parliaments, calls "court government." It's his clear and credible view that between elections, prime ministers now operate in the omnipotent manner of kings. Surrounded by subservient cabinet barons, fawning unelected courtiers and answerable to no one, they manage the affairs of state more or less as they please.
Prime ministers are freeing themselves from the chains that once bound them to voters, Parliament, cabinet and party. From bottom to top, from citizen to head of state, every link in those chains is stressed, fractured or broken.
One man's short political career helps explain how those connections fail. David Emerson, a respected former forestry executive and top B.C. bureaucrat, is recalled as one of Paul Martin's most competent ministers. Almost forgotten now is his corrosive effect on public trust.
In 2006, Emerson ran for re-election in Vancouver-Kingsway, winning easily as a Liberal. Weeks after promising to be Stephen Harper's "worst nightmare," Emerson was named to the Conservative cabinet in the trade portfolio he had long wanted and was well-suited for. His rationale was simple: There's no point in being in the capital if there's no real possibility of influencing the nation's course.
Emerson is an honest man and his motives genuine. But in severing the link between ballots and voter choice, he made nonsense of the electoral process.
Emerson was not alone in dripping acid on that rare winter election. But where he applied an eyedropper, then RCMP Commissioner Giuliano Zaccardelli emptied a bucket. With Liberals nursing an opinion-poll lead and Martin on track for a second minority, Zaccardelli dropped an unprecedented, still unexplained bombshell. In a private letter to the NDP, one the RCMP went to extraordinary lengths to ensure became public, the force confirmed its criminal investigation into rumoured leaks of the Liberal decision not to tax income trusts.
Conservative strategist Tom Flanagan candidly identifies that letter as the election's tipping point. Liberal scandals and ethics soared again to the top of voter minds, sending Martin tumbling and Liberals packing.
No political malfeasance was found – one bureaucrat was charged with gaining personal benefit. More remarkably, neither Zaccardelli nor the RCMP has been forced to fully deconstruct such an egregious intervention in the electoral process. To their lasting shame, all three federal parties, each to protect its interests and minimize embarrassment, chose to leave hanging the rotten odour of banana republic politics. Zaccardelli, defrocked for conflicting testimony in the Maher Arar affair, is in France, safe and quiet in an Interpol sinecure.
If Zaccardelli's intervention was wrong, Emerson's analysis was right: Being a bright, competent and energized backbencher in an increasingly ritualistic, theatrical and impotent House of Commons is an exercise in futility.
Parliament's problem is that it is patently dysfunctional. Its list of recent failures is long and instructive. It didn't notice the millions of Quebec sponsorship dollars shifting from the treasury to Prime Minister Jean Chrétien's office or the runaway costs of the Liberal long-gun registry. Starved of resources and already ineffectual, its committees became a standing joke when Conservatives secretly wrote a 200-page manual to discourage curiosity about, say, alleged attempts to buy dying Chuck Cadman's Commons vote, or the ruling party's suspect in-and-out campaign money-laundering scheme.
It's so essential for the ruling party to keep Parliament in the dark that its independent officers are now forced to struggle for the funds and freedom to do their jobs. Need proof? Liberals and Tories nurtured a cottage industry that taught how to hide public information vital to open democracy by, among other tricks, insisting on untraceable verbal reports and scribbling sensitive information on removable Post-it notes. Conservatives in opposition promised to create a budget officer to follow how Ottawa spends hundreds of billions. In power they are yanking the leash on Kevin Page, the newest watchdog.
Given those frustrations – and others ranging from voting as the party demands, not as their conscience dictates, to the growing irrelevance of the Commons as a forum for shaping public policy – it's hardly surprising that most MPs, like David Emerson, want to be where the action is – in cabinet. Except that it's not.
Strong cabinets are dusty relics. Long gone are the days when powerful regional ministers could flex their muscles with prime ministers who were merely first among equals. Under Chrétien, cabinets became little more than focus groups. Stephen Harper is going farther, making most ministers anonymous and keeping others silent when tough questions are asked.
Far more powerful than ministers are the political professionals who form a protective inner circle beholden only to the prime minister, not voters. Those appointed apparatchiks are now so entrenched that even senior ministers – Martin's deputy Prime Minister Anne McLellan was one – have trouble penetrating the barrier around "The Boss."
So who influences the prime minister, who moulds the putty of public policy? Well it's certainly not deputy ministers, those non-partisan civil servants who once took personal pride in speaking truth to power and kept resignations ready for the moment ministers crossed the line separating public interest from partisan advantage. For mandarins, Job One is no longer providing policy options, it's protecting ministers and the prime minister from political blowback. How much that's changed is measured by last year's report on the leak of a sensitive Canadian diplomatic memo suggesting Barack Obama was saying one thing publicly and another privately about renegotiating free trade.
In finding no culprit, an investigation led by the Clerk of the Privy Council, Ottawa's top public servant, pointed fingers at bureaucrats for circulating the memo too widely. But as the Star exposed at the time, civil servants didn't leak. It was political operatives in the Prime Minister's Office and in Canada's Washington embassy who recklessly jeopardized this country's interests to assist U.S. Republicans. Once again, the guilty went free.
If not Parliament, ministers or mandarins, who can hold the Prime Minister accountable? Apparently not political parties. On their way to their party's Winnipeg convention last year Conservatives, those grassroots activists who planted the seeds of the Reform movement and nurtured them until they grew into a government, were told they had become only one among many "stakeholders." Then, in a cameo convention appearance, the Prime Minister broke the news that hard times rendered the party's defining conservative framework at least temporarily null and void.
Liberals, facing a crisis of their own, responded with even more extreme pragmatism. Having reached the conclusion Stéphane Dion had to be replaced before Parliament reconvened for a critical January session, Liberals bent, folded and mutilated party rules to narrow the leadership contenders to one and anoint Michael Ignatieff interim chief. Whatever the urgency or justification, chattering-class Liberals effectively stripped the rank and file of the right and responsibility to choose a leader.
With parties pushed to the sidelines, only the Governor General remains as a political check on the prime minister. But even that control is suspect after last year's pre-Christmas coalition crisis. Here's how far outspoken minister John Baird said Conservatives were willing to go to hang on to power. "I think what we want to do is basically take a time out and go over the heads of the members of Parliament, go over the heads, frankly, of the Governor General, go right to the Canadian people."
Going over the head of the de facto head of state is a radical notion. But so, too, is the accelerating erosion of Parliament, cabinet, independent oversight and political parties. Extreme is now ho-hum in a country where the prime minister can override his own law to force an election, where accountability is little more than a campaign bumper sticker, where the police play politics and where there is no connection between scandal and punishment for those in privileged places.
Without meaningful engagement, participatory democracy is an oxymoron. Why vote if the winning candidate then switches sides? Why be a member of a powerless Parliament? Why be a minister in a cabinet without influence or a mandarin in a politically polluted bureaucracy? Why join a party to be spectator?
Responses can be found in the record low turnout of the last election. Or the dwindling number who consider federal politics relevant to real life or bother to join parties.
Fortunately, there are fixes. As Barack Obama proved in the U.S presidential campaign – and Premier Dalton McGuinty learned in Ontario when teenagers used Facebook to drive proposed drivers' licence restrictions into a dead end – the combination of motivated citizens and enabling technology is extraordinary.
If mad-as-hell voters can take back a riding, as they did in Vancouver by rejecting Emerson's adopted party, then surely MPs can recapture control of Parliament. It's possible, too, that ministers, bureaucrats and police officers can be forcefully reminded that their public duty is to the people, not to politicians. Even prime ministers can be told they are not monarchs.
Appealing as it sounds, advocacy requires effort. It's so much easier to go with the flow, to let situational democracy evolve with each reflex, stopgap, jerry-rigged response to every new policy demand and political threat. But that leads away from accountability and toward the Big Man culture that Africa is finally throwing off and has no place in Canada.
If war is too serious to leave to generals, then surely democracy is too important to delegate to politicians.
April 04, 2009
James Travers
National Affairs Columnist
OTTAWA–For a foreign correspondent reporting some of the world's grimmest stories, Canada in the '80s was more than a faraway home. Seen from the flattering distance of Africa, this country was a model democracy. Reflected in its distant mirror was everything wrong with what was then called the Third World. From Cape to Cairo, power was in the hands of Big Men. Police and army held control. Institutions were empty shells. Corruption was as accepted as the steeped-in-pessimism proposition that it's a duty to clan as well as to family to grab whatever has value before the state inevitably returns to dust.
By contrast and comparison, Canada was a cold but shimmering Camelot. Ballots, not bullets, changed governments. Men and women in uniform were discreet servants of the state. Institutions were structurally sound. Corruption, a part of politics everywhere, was firmly enough in check that scandals were aberrations demanding public scrutiny and sometimes even justice.
Canada today is not Africa then or now. Our wealth and health, and our communal respect for legal, civil and human rights position this favoured country on a higher plane. Still, 10 years of close observation and some 1,500 Star columns lead to an unsettling conclusion: Africa, despite popular perception, despite the Somalias and Zimbabwes, is moving in one direction, Canada in another. Read the headlines, examine the evidence, plot the trend line dots and find that as Africans – from turnaround Ghana to impoverished Malawi – struggle to strengthen their democracies, Canadians are letting theirs slip.
There, dictatorships are now more the exception than the rule and accountability is accepted as a precondition for stability. Here, power and control are increasingly concentrated and accountability honoured more in promise than practice. Canadian politicians flout the will of voters and parties. Once-solid institutions are being pulled apart by rising complexity and falling legitimacy. Scandals come and go without full public exposure or cleansing political punishment. If not yet lost, Camelot is under siege.
Laughter or disbelief would have been my '80s response to any gloomy prediction that within the next 20 odd years Canada's iconic police force would twist the outcome of a federal election. I would have rejected out of hand the suggestion that Parliament would become a largely ceremonial body incapable of performing its defining functions of safeguarding public spending and holding ministers to account. I would have treated as ridiculous any forecast that the senior bureaucracy would become politicized, that many of the powers of a monarch would flow from Parliament to the prime minister or that the authority of the Governor General, the de facto head of state, would be openly challenged.
Yet every one has happened and each has chipped away another brick of the democratic foundations underpinning Parliament. Incrementally and by stealth, Canada has become a situational democracy. What matters now is what works. Precedents, procedures and even laws have given way to the political doctrine of expediency.
No single party or prime minister is solely to blame. Since Pierre Trudeau first dismissed backbenchers as nobodies and began drawing power out of Parliament and into his office, all have contributed to the creep toward a more authoritarian, less accountable Canadian polity.
Some of the changes are understandable. Government evolves with its environment, and that environment has become more complex even as the controls have become wobblier, less connected. The terrible twins of globalization and subsidiarity – the sound theory that services are most efficiently delivered by the administrative level closest to the user – now sorely test the ability of national legislatures to respond to challenges at home and abroad. Think of it this way: Trade, the economy and the environment have all gone global while the things that matter most to most of us – health, education and the quality of city life – are the guarded responsibility of provinces and municipalities.
Politics and politicians being what they are, the reflex response is to grasp for all remaining power. Once secured, it can be used to exercise political will more easily by overruling rules and rewriting or simply ignoring laws. Power alone is effective in cross-cutting through the silo walls that isolate departments and frustrate co-ordinated policies. Important to all administrations, unfettered manoeuvring room is that much more important to minority governments desperate to maximize limited options and minimize opposition influence.
Good for prime ministers, that's not nearly good enough for the rest of us. It fuels an inexorable power drift to the opaque political centre, creating what Donald Savoie, Canada's eminent chronicler of Westminster parliaments, calls "court government." It's his clear and credible view that between elections, prime ministers now operate in the omnipotent manner of kings. Surrounded by subservient cabinet barons, fawning unelected courtiers and answerable to no one, they manage the affairs of state more or less as they please.
Prime ministers are freeing themselves from the chains that once bound them to voters, Parliament, cabinet and party. From bottom to top, from citizen to head of state, every link in those chains is stressed, fractured or broken.
One man's short political career helps explain how those connections fail. David Emerson, a respected former forestry executive and top B.C. bureaucrat, is recalled as one of Paul Martin's most competent ministers. Almost forgotten now is his corrosive effect on public trust.
In 2006, Emerson ran for re-election in Vancouver-Kingsway, winning easily as a Liberal. Weeks after promising to be Stephen Harper's "worst nightmare," Emerson was named to the Conservative cabinet in the trade portfolio he had long wanted and was well-suited for. His rationale was simple: There's no point in being in the capital if there's no real possibility of influencing the nation's course.
Emerson is an honest man and his motives genuine. But in severing the link between ballots and voter choice, he made nonsense of the electoral process.
Emerson was not alone in dripping acid on that rare winter election. But where he applied an eyedropper, then RCMP Commissioner Giuliano Zaccardelli emptied a bucket. With Liberals nursing an opinion-poll lead and Martin on track for a second minority, Zaccardelli dropped an unprecedented, still unexplained bombshell. In a private letter to the NDP, one the RCMP went to extraordinary lengths to ensure became public, the force confirmed its criminal investigation into rumoured leaks of the Liberal decision not to tax income trusts.
Conservative strategist Tom Flanagan candidly identifies that letter as the election's tipping point. Liberal scandals and ethics soared again to the top of voter minds, sending Martin tumbling and Liberals packing.
No political malfeasance was found – one bureaucrat was charged with gaining personal benefit. More remarkably, neither Zaccardelli nor the RCMP has been forced to fully deconstruct such an egregious intervention in the electoral process. To their lasting shame, all three federal parties, each to protect its interests and minimize embarrassment, chose to leave hanging the rotten odour of banana republic politics. Zaccardelli, defrocked for conflicting testimony in the Maher Arar affair, is in France, safe and quiet in an Interpol sinecure.
If Zaccardelli's intervention was wrong, Emerson's analysis was right: Being a bright, competent and energized backbencher in an increasingly ritualistic, theatrical and impotent House of Commons is an exercise in futility.
Parliament's problem is that it is patently dysfunctional. Its list of recent failures is long and instructive. It didn't notice the millions of Quebec sponsorship dollars shifting from the treasury to Prime Minister Jean Chrétien's office or the runaway costs of the Liberal long-gun registry. Starved of resources and already ineffectual, its committees became a standing joke when Conservatives secretly wrote a 200-page manual to discourage curiosity about, say, alleged attempts to buy dying Chuck Cadman's Commons vote, or the ruling party's suspect in-and-out campaign money-laundering scheme.
It's so essential for the ruling party to keep Parliament in the dark that its independent officers are now forced to struggle for the funds and freedom to do their jobs. Need proof? Liberals and Tories nurtured a cottage industry that taught how to hide public information vital to open democracy by, among other tricks, insisting on untraceable verbal reports and scribbling sensitive information on removable Post-it notes. Conservatives in opposition promised to create a budget officer to follow how Ottawa spends hundreds of billions. In power they are yanking the leash on Kevin Page, the newest watchdog.
Given those frustrations – and others ranging from voting as the party demands, not as their conscience dictates, to the growing irrelevance of the Commons as a forum for shaping public policy – it's hardly surprising that most MPs, like David Emerson, want to be where the action is – in cabinet. Except that it's not.
Strong cabinets are dusty relics. Long gone are the days when powerful regional ministers could flex their muscles with prime ministers who were merely first among equals. Under Chrétien, cabinets became little more than focus groups. Stephen Harper is going farther, making most ministers anonymous and keeping others silent when tough questions are asked.
Far more powerful than ministers are the political professionals who form a protective inner circle beholden only to the prime minister, not voters. Those appointed apparatchiks are now so entrenched that even senior ministers – Martin's deputy Prime Minister Anne McLellan was one – have trouble penetrating the barrier around "The Boss."
So who influences the prime minister, who moulds the putty of public policy? Well it's certainly not deputy ministers, those non-partisan civil servants who once took personal pride in speaking truth to power and kept resignations ready for the moment ministers crossed the line separating public interest from partisan advantage. For mandarins, Job One is no longer providing policy options, it's protecting ministers and the prime minister from political blowback. How much that's changed is measured by last year's report on the leak of a sensitive Canadian diplomatic memo suggesting Barack Obama was saying one thing publicly and another privately about renegotiating free trade.
In finding no culprit, an investigation led by the Clerk of the Privy Council, Ottawa's top public servant, pointed fingers at bureaucrats for circulating the memo too widely. But as the Star exposed at the time, civil servants didn't leak. It was political operatives in the Prime Minister's Office and in Canada's Washington embassy who recklessly jeopardized this country's interests to assist U.S. Republicans. Once again, the guilty went free.
If not Parliament, ministers or mandarins, who can hold the Prime Minister accountable? Apparently not political parties. On their way to their party's Winnipeg convention last year Conservatives, those grassroots activists who planted the seeds of the Reform movement and nurtured them until they grew into a government, were told they had become only one among many "stakeholders." Then, in a cameo convention appearance, the Prime Minister broke the news that hard times rendered the party's defining conservative framework at least temporarily null and void.
Liberals, facing a crisis of their own, responded with even more extreme pragmatism. Having reached the conclusion Stéphane Dion had to be replaced before Parliament reconvened for a critical January session, Liberals bent, folded and mutilated party rules to narrow the leadership contenders to one and anoint Michael Ignatieff interim chief. Whatever the urgency or justification, chattering-class Liberals effectively stripped the rank and file of the right and responsibility to choose a leader.
With parties pushed to the sidelines, only the Governor General remains as a political check on the prime minister. But even that control is suspect after last year's pre-Christmas coalition crisis. Here's how far outspoken minister John Baird said Conservatives were willing to go to hang on to power. "I think what we want to do is basically take a time out and go over the heads of the members of Parliament, go over the heads, frankly, of the Governor General, go right to the Canadian people."
Going over the head of the de facto head of state is a radical notion. But so, too, is the accelerating erosion of Parliament, cabinet, independent oversight and political parties. Extreme is now ho-hum in a country where the prime minister can override his own law to force an election, where accountability is little more than a campaign bumper sticker, where the police play politics and where there is no connection between scandal and punishment for those in privileged places.
Without meaningful engagement, participatory democracy is an oxymoron. Why vote if the winning candidate then switches sides? Why be a member of a powerless Parliament? Why be a minister in a cabinet without influence or a mandarin in a politically polluted bureaucracy? Why join a party to be spectator?
Responses can be found in the record low turnout of the last election. Or the dwindling number who consider federal politics relevant to real life or bother to join parties.
Fortunately, there are fixes. As Barack Obama proved in the U.S presidential campaign – and Premier Dalton McGuinty learned in Ontario when teenagers used Facebook to drive proposed drivers' licence restrictions into a dead end – the combination of motivated citizens and enabling technology is extraordinary.
If mad-as-hell voters can take back a riding, as they did in Vancouver by rejecting Emerson's adopted party, then surely MPs can recapture control of Parliament. It's possible, too, that ministers, bureaucrats and police officers can be forcefully reminded that their public duty is to the people, not to politicians. Even prime ministers can be told they are not monarchs.
Appealing as it sounds, advocacy requires effort. It's so much easier to go with the flow, to let situational democracy evolve with each reflex, stopgap, jerry-rigged response to every new policy demand and political threat. But that leads away from accountability and toward the Big Man culture that Africa is finally throwing off and has no place in Canada.
If war is too serious to leave to generals, then surely democracy is too important to delegate to politicians.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)