Friday, April 23, 2010
Wednesday, April 21, 2010
Bush's mother drops RCMP lawsuit
Ian Bush's mother drops RCMP lawsuit
April 21, 2010
CBC News
Linda Bush says she could not justify putting herself and her family though the personal turmoil of a lawsuit.Linda Bush says she could not justify putting herself and her family though the personal turmoil of a lawsuit. (CBC)
The mother of Ian Bush, a man who was shot dead in an RCMP detachment in northern B.C., has dropped her lawsuit against the Mounties.
At a news conference held Wednesday with the RCMP, Linda Bush said that she is abandoning the lawsuit in connection with the death of her son, Ian Bush, because of changes the force has undertaken.
Ian Bush, 22, was shot in the back of the head at the RCMP detachment in Houston shortly after he was arrested for having an open beer at a hockey game in October 2005.
Linda Bush said the cost of the court case would have exceeded any damages she could have hoped to win and she could not justify putting herself and her family though the personal turmoil of a lawsuit.
'The only thing we really want is not within our reach.'—Linda Bush, mother of Ian Bush
"Nothing we can do will give Ian's life back to him, so the only thing we really want is not within our reach" she said at the news conference in Vancouver.
Bush said she decided to drop her lawsuit without any settlement after B.C. RCMP showed they were committed to have future deaths in custody investigated by external investigators.
"I have great expectations here," Bush said. "I don't really feel that I need to forgive. What I need to do is concentrate on their attitudes in the future.
Police promise changes
The RCMP are awaiting provincial changes to the way in-custody deaths are investigated in B.C, said Chief Supt. Craig Callens, deputy criminal operations officer for the province.
In the meantime, the force has brought in changes to ensure deaths in custody and other serious police incidents are subject to outside investigations, Callens said.
"The RCMP wants to ensure that our operations are as transparent as possible," he said.
"Public perception of police accountability is as important as anything. We recognize that we require that public trust."
Callens also outlined an existing program to install and upgrade video monitoring equipment in all 120 RCMP stations and detachments in B.C. by 2012.
4 inquiries into death
The death of Ian Bush was the subject of four investigations by the RCMP and external agencies, said Callens
The officer involved said he was attacked by Bush and shot him in self-defence. The two were alone in the station at the time of the shooting.
Ian Bush was shot at the Houston, B.C., detachment in October 2005 by an RCMP officer. Two inquiries have concluded the officer acted in self-defence.Ian Bush was shot at the Houston, B.C., detachment in October 2005 by an RCMP officer. Two inquiries have concluded the officer acted in self-defence. (CBC)
An internal RCMP inquiry into the shooting cleared the officer of any wrongdoing.
Linda Bush later launched her lawsuit against the RCMP.
A second inquiry by the Commission for Complaints Against the RCMP concluded in 2007 that the police internal investigation into the shooting was adequate and timely and that the officer was justified in using lethal force.
After the report was released, Linda Bush said she disagreed with the commission's conclusion.
Read more: http://www.cbc.ca/canada/british-columbia/story/2010/04/21/bc-ian-bush-rcmp-statement-linda.html#ixzz0lmrrRNCq
April 21, 2010
CBC News
Linda Bush says she could not justify putting herself and her family though the personal turmoil of a lawsuit.Linda Bush says she could not justify putting herself and her family though the personal turmoil of a lawsuit. (CBC)
The mother of Ian Bush, a man who was shot dead in an RCMP detachment in northern B.C., has dropped her lawsuit against the Mounties.
At a news conference held Wednesday with the RCMP, Linda Bush said that she is abandoning the lawsuit in connection with the death of her son, Ian Bush, because of changes the force has undertaken.
Ian Bush, 22, was shot in the back of the head at the RCMP detachment in Houston shortly after he was arrested for having an open beer at a hockey game in October 2005.
Linda Bush said the cost of the court case would have exceeded any damages she could have hoped to win and she could not justify putting herself and her family though the personal turmoil of a lawsuit.
'The only thing we really want is not within our reach.'—Linda Bush, mother of Ian Bush
"Nothing we can do will give Ian's life back to him, so the only thing we really want is not within our reach" she said at the news conference in Vancouver.
Bush said she decided to drop her lawsuit without any settlement after B.C. RCMP showed they were committed to have future deaths in custody investigated by external investigators.
"I have great expectations here," Bush said. "I don't really feel that I need to forgive. What I need to do is concentrate on their attitudes in the future.
Police promise changes
The RCMP are awaiting provincial changes to the way in-custody deaths are investigated in B.C, said Chief Supt. Craig Callens, deputy criminal operations officer for the province.
In the meantime, the force has brought in changes to ensure deaths in custody and other serious police incidents are subject to outside investigations, Callens said.
"The RCMP wants to ensure that our operations are as transparent as possible," he said.
"Public perception of police accountability is as important as anything. We recognize that we require that public trust."
Callens also outlined an existing program to install and upgrade video monitoring equipment in all 120 RCMP stations and detachments in B.C. by 2012.
4 inquiries into death
The death of Ian Bush was the subject of four investigations by the RCMP and external agencies, said Callens
The officer involved said he was attacked by Bush and shot him in self-defence. The two were alone in the station at the time of the shooting.
Ian Bush was shot at the Houston, B.C., detachment in October 2005 by an RCMP officer. Two inquiries have concluded the officer acted in self-defence.Ian Bush was shot at the Houston, B.C., detachment in October 2005 by an RCMP officer. Two inquiries have concluded the officer acted in self-defence. (CBC)
An internal RCMP inquiry into the shooting cleared the officer of any wrongdoing.
Linda Bush later launched her lawsuit against the RCMP.
A second inquiry by the Commission for Complaints Against the RCMP concluded in 2007 that the police internal investigation into the shooting was adequate and timely and that the officer was justified in using lethal force.
After the report was released, Linda Bush said she disagreed with the commission's conclusion.
Read more: http://www.cbc.ca/canada/british-columbia/story/2010/04/21/bc-ian-bush-rcmp-statement-linda.html#ixzz0lmrrRNCq
Monday, April 19, 2010
Who should care about the future of the university?
Who should care about the future of the university?
Does the University Have
a Future in the Network Society?
by Ian Angus l t r u t h o u t
Who should care about the future of the university? Why should they care?
The university used to be an elite institution that most working people rarely encountered. The training and socialization that the elite classes received prior to taking up leading positions in government and industry was arguably as much of a rite of passage as a search for enlightenment.
Of course, there were always those few for whom the love of knowledge and the reading of great texts was a consuming passion. But if one were concerned only with them, there would be few larger social issues to be raised about the university in society.
The situation is different now.
[For complete article reference links, please see source at Truthout here.]
In the United States and Canada, about a quarter of the working population has completed a university degree. Increasing attendance in higher education is an international trend that is deeply rooted in economic and technological changes. It is a trend that is not likely to reverse and countries that do not keep up will be confined to marginal status.
It has been said that we live in a knowledge society and there is no doubt that contemporary society is deeply committed to the extension of knowledge and its rapid utilization in innovations. This is true not only of scientific and technical knowledge, but also of social scientific and even humanistic pursuits to the extent that they can be oriented to the market. To this extent, the future of the university should provoke widespread social concern. Add to this the fact that the university has in recent years changed to such a degree that it hardly resembles what previous generations experienced under that name.
The corporate university has been waging a battle for some years now against the remaining features of the public university. The major means of this battle has been fiscal. Public funding of universities has consistently fallen for decades now and major issues about the functioning and purposes of the university need to be addressed. This fall in government funding has gone hand in hand with seeing education as simply an aid to the individual in confronting the job market, so that any larger social or public purposes lose their purchase. University administrations, on the whole, have avoided addressing larger questions of the social role of education or the current restructuring of the university directly because of their bureaucratic, rather than political, approach to university functioning. They have presented the new fiscal environment as an inescapable force that has inevitably turned them toward corporate sources of funding.
The university used to exist in a complex, double relationship to the modern state and the capitalist economy - in one sense dependent on them for resources and support and in another sense independent enough to make the claim to know the whole. The university was clearly inside society as a social institution dependent on other, more powerful institutions. But it was also outside society in the sense that its partial independence provided a standpoint from which the whole of society, history and nature could be represented as a form of knowledge. Knowledge understood as an organized totality - subdivided, but unified in a structural whole - that refers to and represents the world is the specifically modern form of knowledge. Knowledge in this specifically modern form confers structure and meaning on the modern university. This location and mission of the university has changed and much discussion thus far has emphasized the social and economic, that is to say, corporate factors, that have brought this about.
In the short term, one can resist the corporate model and call on the remaining resources of regions and the nation-state to protect the legacy of the public university. But we can't turn the clock backward. The citizenship role of the public university in the national economy cannot be reinstated in the same form in a global economy. Also, changes in the storage and transmission of knowledge means that the library has passed as the center of higher learning. How can humanistic studies be saved by being transformed? How can they face these new conditions with confidence in its past and a plan for facing the future?
Corporate factors are not the only ones at work here. Institutions are also being transformed by the contemporary interpenetration of technology and science - which can be called techno-science - that has brought about changes in knowledge production and transmission. These factors are always in practice bound up with social and economic forces, but they are not reducible to them. Under any conceivable social-economic regime, the contemporary transformations of knowledge undermine the traditional structure and rationale for the university and require a new, creative response - that is to say, techno-science is a product of modern society and not just of capitalism. These changes were well summed up in the recent statement by a United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) official: "the university has lost its monopoly on the creation of knowledge." But this is a negative statement, a summary of what is no longer the case. Difficult as it is in a time of transition such as our own, real understanding requires some positive, content-filled account of the transformations that are underway.
The double, inside/outside relationship of the modern university to society meant that the university was both a social institution and a relatively independent standpoint from which the whole (of society, history and nature) could be represented in the form of knowledge. The end of the double relationship means that the university is in danger of being subsumed within society to become exclusively, one-sidedly, a servant of social interests. We can see emerging a university thoroughly immersed in socio-technical networks identical with those of the society as a whole. This indistinction between university and society implies the end of a standpoint from which one can represent the whole in the form of knowledge and the beginning of the production of forms of knowledge that have a directly social function. Knowledge-production becomes an action alongside other actions rather than a representation of the whole field of action.
The classic modern university, in its commitment to teaching and research, was based in the modern concept of knowledge: knowledge divided into specialized domains and yet unified in the role of enlightenment within the individual. The educated individual thus could participate rationally as a citizen in democratic self-government. The social role of knowledge is not imposed on the university from without, but is rooted in its own mission. But the specialization of contemporary research, the multiple and diverse applications to which it gives rise, its centrality to economic gain, can no longer be held within the precarious unity of its classical form. We live in a knowledge society, not only with the knowledge-based university and, while social application is constant and unproblematic, the question becomes whether there is any standpoint from which one can think the whole of society, history and nature.
In recent years, the idea of a network has come into increasingly common use in the social sciences and humanities. It is used both as a description of new social and technical relationships and also as an image, or metaphor, for the structure of society as a whole. The network society is that society in which information has become the dominant mode for the storage, processing, transmission and reception of knowledge. Here, we must be careful to understand knowledge not in the modern way as the representation of the world, but as a constitutive component of it. Knowledge, as externalized in technologies based in information, has become a central component of the process of production. The technology of information is not an isolated phenomenon, but is the active force shaping social possibilities in its own image. Also, information is pervasive, based on a networking logic, flexible and characterized by the convergence of technologies into an integrated system. The network society relegates hierarchy, control and repression to merely local features of the system and operates on a logic of linking and horizontal transfer.
It is no accident that the network, with its transversal flows and absence of hierarchy, for many commentators represents a utopia of social equality, a utopia that seems today to be within our grasp. For others, the loss of reflexivity and the lack of a standpoint from which to judge the whole is a symptom of decline. It is commonplace these days to style the latter as simply conservative and the former as simply liberal or progressive, but the situation is actually more complex. The question of the future of the university can be honed into two issues: What is the role of the university when it becomes one of many producers of knowledge in the form of technical innovation to the network? Is there a standpoint for reflexion from which the network can be described and evaluated for what it is? In a nutshell, what remains of the university's commitment to public knowledge and to social reflexion when it is reduced to being a node within a network?
It is important to keep in mind that while the network is transversal rather than hierarchical, an open rather than a closed system, that does not mean that it has eliminated social conflict and disagreement. The network is constantly changing due to the continuous introduction of new technologies that require changes in social organization. The manner of this social organization is not predetermined and is often subject to social contestation. In short, every new addition to the network raises more than one possibility of its incorporation; the actual manner of its incorporation advantages one group over another. Network society is thus traversed by social movements that struggle with established powers over the direction of innovations. There are many of these movements. Network society is not based on one basic social struggle or conflict, but upon an open-ended series of conflicts that are pointed out and addressed by a plurality of social movements.
In fact, it is even a more basic matter than social movements. Because the network is constantly changing, it destabilizes the identities of those who work and live within it, leading to a search for a viable identity within the current state of the network. This anxiety about identity within the network is what coalesces within social movements and drives them to contest specific innovations. The network is criss-crossed by power relations such that struggles over identity influence the actual form of innovations. Each of these movements poses issues about how to understand the current state of the network. These issues have entered the university and pose interesting philosophical and political questions for thinkers. This independence yet relationship between social movements and university-based researchers and teachers is the most interesting new phenomenon that has kept the university alive as a publicly relevant institution. The notion of the public is no longer confined to the political institutions of representative democracy, but has become a space of social reflexivity over the form of innovation and its relation to established and emergent powers. The university exercises its best contemporary role when it brings thoughtful reflection to bear on such public issues.
Rather than describe the phenomena that disturb the equilibrium of the network in detail, I would like to emphasize the logic of such disruption, since it is from these sources that the contemporary university can keep alive its public relevance: Continuous innovation in the network produces an anxiety about identity that leads to a search for identity with both individual and social dimensions. Social movements raise public issues about the current state of the network that can be usefully explored by university-based researchers and influence the public through their teaching, writing and expressions in other media. While the network appears to be a seamless pattern of transversal relations, it is actually a tensional pattern in which each relationship can be opened to public debate. What is going on when this occurs?
Let us look at the bit of information from which the network society is built. The bit of information is closed in upon itself, but open to an infinity of potential relationships. Similarly, network society does not offer a stable identity to its participants, but enlists them in a constantly changing set of relationships. But simply adding on more relationships does not constitute an identity. An identity is constructed when bits of information are connected into a meaningful whole. Such a meaningful whole can only be constructed when one's specific location in the network becomes the locus of a totalization, a vision of the whole. To state it in a formula: a node becomes an identity insofar as it embraces its place. Information becomes localized as knowledge, which is ultimately self-knowledge; the infinite spatio-temporality of the network becomes the lived time in place of a specific identity. This is the contemporary form of self-reflexion that could ground a new concept of enlightenment.
Information treats knowledge as a completed thing rather than an ongoing search. Even though the production process of knowledge disappears into information, it still takes place in the network society, though off stage, as it were, in the struggle for identity. The network is parasitic on the production of knowledge that it uses as information. Actually, one needs to distinguish two notions of knowledge here: it is certainly possible to produce new innovations through following out the implications of information already present in the network. However intelligent one might have to be to do this, it is confined to the recombination of existing information. Knowledge production, in the pregnant sense in which I am describing it here, refers to the meaningful whole from which bits of information are derived. In this sense, it is inseparable from the construction of identity. The anxiety about identity produced by the network thus motivates a search for self-knowledge that can produce new knowledge and not simply recombinations of information. It is not by attempting to restore a monopoly of knowledge that the university can find a contemporary public function, but by taking seriously the anxiety about identity and entering into the production of self-knowledge. At this point, the contemporary function of the university reaches back to touch its humanistic roots. The search for self-knowledge initiated by Socrates can take on a social function in the network society.
Ian Angus is a philosopher and social critic who teaches humanities at Simon Fraser University, Vancouver, Canada. This is an excerpt from his recent book "Love the Questions: University Education and Enlightenment," published by Arbeiter Ring Publishing, which can be found here. His earlier book, "Emergent Publics: An Essay on Social Movements and Democracy," is from the same publisher.
Does the University Have
a Future in the Network Society?
by Ian Angus l t r u t h o u t
Who should care about the future of the university? Why should they care?
The university used to be an elite institution that most working people rarely encountered. The training and socialization that the elite classes received prior to taking up leading positions in government and industry was arguably as much of a rite of passage as a search for enlightenment.
Of course, there were always those few for whom the love of knowledge and the reading of great texts was a consuming passion. But if one were concerned only with them, there would be few larger social issues to be raised about the university in society.
The situation is different now.
[For complete article reference links, please see source at Truthout here.]
In the United States and Canada, about a quarter of the working population has completed a university degree. Increasing attendance in higher education is an international trend that is deeply rooted in economic and technological changes. It is a trend that is not likely to reverse and countries that do not keep up will be confined to marginal status.
It has been said that we live in a knowledge society and there is no doubt that contemporary society is deeply committed to the extension of knowledge and its rapid utilization in innovations. This is true not only of scientific and technical knowledge, but also of social scientific and even humanistic pursuits to the extent that they can be oriented to the market. To this extent, the future of the university should provoke widespread social concern. Add to this the fact that the university has in recent years changed to such a degree that it hardly resembles what previous generations experienced under that name.
The corporate university has been waging a battle for some years now against the remaining features of the public university. The major means of this battle has been fiscal. Public funding of universities has consistently fallen for decades now and major issues about the functioning and purposes of the university need to be addressed. This fall in government funding has gone hand in hand with seeing education as simply an aid to the individual in confronting the job market, so that any larger social or public purposes lose their purchase. University administrations, on the whole, have avoided addressing larger questions of the social role of education or the current restructuring of the university directly because of their bureaucratic, rather than political, approach to university functioning. They have presented the new fiscal environment as an inescapable force that has inevitably turned them toward corporate sources of funding.
The university used to exist in a complex, double relationship to the modern state and the capitalist economy - in one sense dependent on them for resources and support and in another sense independent enough to make the claim to know the whole. The university was clearly inside society as a social institution dependent on other, more powerful institutions. But it was also outside society in the sense that its partial independence provided a standpoint from which the whole of society, history and nature could be represented as a form of knowledge. Knowledge understood as an organized totality - subdivided, but unified in a structural whole - that refers to and represents the world is the specifically modern form of knowledge. Knowledge in this specifically modern form confers structure and meaning on the modern university. This location and mission of the university has changed and much discussion thus far has emphasized the social and economic, that is to say, corporate factors, that have brought this about.
In the short term, one can resist the corporate model and call on the remaining resources of regions and the nation-state to protect the legacy of the public university. But we can't turn the clock backward. The citizenship role of the public university in the national economy cannot be reinstated in the same form in a global economy. Also, changes in the storage and transmission of knowledge means that the library has passed as the center of higher learning. How can humanistic studies be saved by being transformed? How can they face these new conditions with confidence in its past and a plan for facing the future?
Corporate factors are not the only ones at work here. Institutions are also being transformed by the contemporary interpenetration of technology and science - which can be called techno-science - that has brought about changes in knowledge production and transmission. These factors are always in practice bound up with social and economic forces, but they are not reducible to them. Under any conceivable social-economic regime, the contemporary transformations of knowledge undermine the traditional structure and rationale for the university and require a new, creative response - that is to say, techno-science is a product of modern society and not just of capitalism. These changes were well summed up in the recent statement by a United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) official: "the university has lost its monopoly on the creation of knowledge." But this is a negative statement, a summary of what is no longer the case. Difficult as it is in a time of transition such as our own, real understanding requires some positive, content-filled account of the transformations that are underway.
The double, inside/outside relationship of the modern university to society meant that the university was both a social institution and a relatively independent standpoint from which the whole (of society, history and nature) could be represented in the form of knowledge. The end of the double relationship means that the university is in danger of being subsumed within society to become exclusively, one-sidedly, a servant of social interests. We can see emerging a university thoroughly immersed in socio-technical networks identical with those of the society as a whole. This indistinction between university and society implies the end of a standpoint from which one can represent the whole in the form of knowledge and the beginning of the production of forms of knowledge that have a directly social function. Knowledge-production becomes an action alongside other actions rather than a representation of the whole field of action.
The classic modern university, in its commitment to teaching and research, was based in the modern concept of knowledge: knowledge divided into specialized domains and yet unified in the role of enlightenment within the individual. The educated individual thus could participate rationally as a citizen in democratic self-government. The social role of knowledge is not imposed on the university from without, but is rooted in its own mission. But the specialization of contemporary research, the multiple and diverse applications to which it gives rise, its centrality to economic gain, can no longer be held within the precarious unity of its classical form. We live in a knowledge society, not only with the knowledge-based university and, while social application is constant and unproblematic, the question becomes whether there is any standpoint from which one can think the whole of society, history and nature.
In recent years, the idea of a network has come into increasingly common use in the social sciences and humanities. It is used both as a description of new social and technical relationships and also as an image, or metaphor, for the structure of society as a whole. The network society is that society in which information has become the dominant mode for the storage, processing, transmission and reception of knowledge. Here, we must be careful to understand knowledge not in the modern way as the representation of the world, but as a constitutive component of it. Knowledge, as externalized in technologies based in information, has become a central component of the process of production. The technology of information is not an isolated phenomenon, but is the active force shaping social possibilities in its own image. Also, information is pervasive, based on a networking logic, flexible and characterized by the convergence of technologies into an integrated system. The network society relegates hierarchy, control and repression to merely local features of the system and operates on a logic of linking and horizontal transfer.
It is no accident that the network, with its transversal flows and absence of hierarchy, for many commentators represents a utopia of social equality, a utopia that seems today to be within our grasp. For others, the loss of reflexivity and the lack of a standpoint from which to judge the whole is a symptom of decline. It is commonplace these days to style the latter as simply conservative and the former as simply liberal or progressive, but the situation is actually more complex. The question of the future of the university can be honed into two issues: What is the role of the university when it becomes one of many producers of knowledge in the form of technical innovation to the network? Is there a standpoint for reflexion from which the network can be described and evaluated for what it is? In a nutshell, what remains of the university's commitment to public knowledge and to social reflexion when it is reduced to being a node within a network?
It is important to keep in mind that while the network is transversal rather than hierarchical, an open rather than a closed system, that does not mean that it has eliminated social conflict and disagreement. The network is constantly changing due to the continuous introduction of new technologies that require changes in social organization. The manner of this social organization is not predetermined and is often subject to social contestation. In short, every new addition to the network raises more than one possibility of its incorporation; the actual manner of its incorporation advantages one group over another. Network society is thus traversed by social movements that struggle with established powers over the direction of innovations. There are many of these movements. Network society is not based on one basic social struggle or conflict, but upon an open-ended series of conflicts that are pointed out and addressed by a plurality of social movements.
In fact, it is even a more basic matter than social movements. Because the network is constantly changing, it destabilizes the identities of those who work and live within it, leading to a search for a viable identity within the current state of the network. This anxiety about identity within the network is what coalesces within social movements and drives them to contest specific innovations. The network is criss-crossed by power relations such that struggles over identity influence the actual form of innovations. Each of these movements poses issues about how to understand the current state of the network. These issues have entered the university and pose interesting philosophical and political questions for thinkers. This independence yet relationship between social movements and university-based researchers and teachers is the most interesting new phenomenon that has kept the university alive as a publicly relevant institution. The notion of the public is no longer confined to the political institutions of representative democracy, but has become a space of social reflexivity over the form of innovation and its relation to established and emergent powers. The university exercises its best contemporary role when it brings thoughtful reflection to bear on such public issues.
Rather than describe the phenomena that disturb the equilibrium of the network in detail, I would like to emphasize the logic of such disruption, since it is from these sources that the contemporary university can keep alive its public relevance: Continuous innovation in the network produces an anxiety about identity that leads to a search for identity with both individual and social dimensions. Social movements raise public issues about the current state of the network that can be usefully explored by university-based researchers and influence the public through their teaching, writing and expressions in other media. While the network appears to be a seamless pattern of transversal relations, it is actually a tensional pattern in which each relationship can be opened to public debate. What is going on when this occurs?
Let us look at the bit of information from which the network society is built. The bit of information is closed in upon itself, but open to an infinity of potential relationships. Similarly, network society does not offer a stable identity to its participants, but enlists them in a constantly changing set of relationships. But simply adding on more relationships does not constitute an identity. An identity is constructed when bits of information are connected into a meaningful whole. Such a meaningful whole can only be constructed when one's specific location in the network becomes the locus of a totalization, a vision of the whole. To state it in a formula: a node becomes an identity insofar as it embraces its place. Information becomes localized as knowledge, which is ultimately self-knowledge; the infinite spatio-temporality of the network becomes the lived time in place of a specific identity. This is the contemporary form of self-reflexion that could ground a new concept of enlightenment.
Information treats knowledge as a completed thing rather than an ongoing search. Even though the production process of knowledge disappears into information, it still takes place in the network society, though off stage, as it were, in the struggle for identity. The network is parasitic on the production of knowledge that it uses as information. Actually, one needs to distinguish two notions of knowledge here: it is certainly possible to produce new innovations through following out the implications of information already present in the network. However intelligent one might have to be to do this, it is confined to the recombination of existing information. Knowledge production, in the pregnant sense in which I am describing it here, refers to the meaningful whole from which bits of information are derived. In this sense, it is inseparable from the construction of identity. The anxiety about identity produced by the network thus motivates a search for self-knowledge that can produce new knowledge and not simply recombinations of information. It is not by attempting to restore a monopoly of knowledge that the university can find a contemporary public function, but by taking seriously the anxiety about identity and entering into the production of self-knowledge. At this point, the contemporary function of the university reaches back to touch its humanistic roots. The search for self-knowledge initiated by Socrates can take on a social function in the network society.
Ian Angus is a philosopher and social critic who teaches humanities at Simon Fraser University, Vancouver, Canada. This is an excerpt from his recent book "Love the Questions: University Education and Enlightenment," published by Arbeiter Ring Publishing, which can be found here. His earlier book, "Emergent Publics: An Essay on Social Movements and Democracy," is from the same publisher.
Sunday, April 18, 2010
Premier Gordon Campbell's Site C dam
Premier Gordon Campbell's Site C dam is starting to look like a done deal
By Charlie Smith
http://www.straight.com/article-317013/vancouver/premier-gordon-campbells-site-c-dam-starting-look-done-deal
siteCweb.jpg
Illustration shows what the 60-metre-high Site C dam would look like on the Peace River near Fort St. John.
Don't kid yourself. Premier Gordon Campbell may have decided to build the Site C hydroelectric dam around the same time as then-B.C. Progress Board chairman David Black recommended doing this in a newspaper article back in April 2004.
But it wasn't going to help Campbell's northeastern MLAs by announcing this before the 2005 or the 2009 elections.
With the last election out of the way, Campbell will likely declare on Monday (April 19) that his government is moving to the third of a five-stage process that will determine the future of the proposal.
This will create an impression among some that this is not a done deal.
This third stage, which is expected to last two years, involves dealing with regulatory issues and the environmental assessment of the project.
Keep in mind that in Campbell's B.C., environmental assessments never thwart major capital projects. Especially ones as big as the Site C dam, which will cost up to $6.6 billion and would flood the Peace River valley between the Peace Canyon Dam and the point where the Peace and Moberly rivers connect.
And if the B.C. Utilities Commission gets in the way--like it did with run-of-river power projects--a Campbell-led government will likely change the law to ensure that the Site C dam will still go ahead.
That will be followed by stage four (detailed design and engineering) and stage five (construction).
The 1,100-metre-long Site C dam would be located seven kilometres southwest of Fort St. John, and would generate enough electricity for about 460,000 homes. Behind it would be an 83-kilometre reservoir, which would flood approximately 5,340 hectares.
Even though this will be one of the biggest announcements of Campbell's political career, the Site C dam wasn't even mentioned in the Ministry of Energy, Mines and Petroleum Resources service plan this year.
Here are some things I'll be watching for in Monday's announcement:
* Whether Campbell will admit that the power generated by the Site C dam will be used to help companies extract bitumen from the Alberta tar sands, which would belie any claims that this is a green energy project.
* Whether Campbell will provide reporters with an estimate of how much energy generated from the Site C dam will cost per kilowatt-hour.
* Whether Campbell will link the pending environmental assessment of the Site C dam to concerns about peak oil, which is a topic he has steadfastly avoided discussing while promoting the Gateway roadbuilding program in Metro Vancouver.
Related article: Peace River power play over potential Site C dam
Follow Charlie Smith on Twitter at twitter.com/csmithstraight.
-0-
B.C. to press ahead on Peace dam
By Tom Fletcher - BC Local News
Published: April 18, 2010 3:00 PM
Updated: April 18, 2010 3:47 PM
http://www.bclocalnews.com/fraser_valley/ahobserver/news/91432174.html
Premier Gordon Campbell and Energy Minister Blair Lekstrom are headed north to the W.A.C. Bennett dam Monday, for an announcement widely expected to be moving ahead with the Site C hydroelectric dam.
The announcement, set for 11:30 a.m. at the dam near Fort St. John, features a satellite feed for live television coverage.
The B.C. government signaled its intentions for the proposed third dam on the Peace River in February's throne speech, which promised major transmission line upgrades to Alberta, Saskatchewan and the United States. Extension of the grid will connect the booming natural gas industry in northeastern B.C., and allow clean energy exports, the government said in its agenda-setting speech for the year.
Lekstrom has had a report from BC Hydro since December on the project, which has been studied on and off for decades. He is expected to send the project to environmental assessment, the third stage of a five-stage process that will extend for several more years.
BC Hydro's latest estimate of the project cost is between $5 billion and $6.6 billion, but much of the engineering work was done 25 years ago. New site work and community consultations were done for phase two.
Site C would flood a reservoir more than 9,000 hectares in size, narrowly confined to the river valley downstream of the W.A.C. Bennett and Peace Canyon dams. Its 60-metre-high dam and six generating units would recover more energy from water already held upstream, and generate one third as much power as the W.A.C. Bennett dam with a reservoir one 20th the size of Williston Lake.
The B.C. government has also promised new clean energy legislation this year that will simplify the regulatory process for independent power projects. Earlier, it required BC Hydro to obtain new energy from contracted private facilities, but confirmed that if Site C is built it would be owned and operated by the Crown corporation.
Thursday, April 15, 2010
Viewed from Germany
The View from Germany
by Katha Pollitt
My German friends here are bewildered by the resistance to healthcare reform in America. They just don't get what the fuss is about. After all, thanks to Bismarck, that notorious red, Germans have had some version of national health insurance since 1884. The current system contains some of the very features that have driven Americans to throw themselves into the tea. It's mostly public -- about 90 percent of the population is in the government system, with about 10 percent, mostly the wealthy and the self-employed, covered by private insurance. There's an individual mandate: You have to be covered, just the way, as my friend Barbara put it, you have to have insurance for your car. Coverage is not cheap, about 15 percent of your salary, but your employer pays nearly half, and there are government subsidies for low-income workers. Sound familiar? Do companies pass their payments on to you in the form of lower wages (or higher prices)? Probably a little bit, said Vera, but it is well worth it. I'll say: Germany has one of the best healthcare systems in the world, and it costs a lot less than ours -- 10.7 percent of GNP in 2005, versus our 15.2 percent. My husband has visited doctors and dentists here, and found them both excellent and amazingly accessible. Why, my friends wonder, would Americans not want something like it?
Perhaps it is because a government powerful enough to give us healthcare insurance would be strong enough to... take away our guns? The American obsession with guns is another thing that just looks weird here. German gun laws are strict. Permits are barred to people with histories of violent behavior or addiction to drugs or alcohol: To get a hunting license requires taking a challenging course on weapons and wildlife and passing a stiff exam (many fail); don't even think about carrying that licensed gun in public unless it is unloaded and in a locked container. As for the political value of the Second Amendment in defending the Republic, the idea that homeowners could hold off a tyrannical government with their individual weapons is bound to look ridiculous to people who have actually experienced fascism. By the time the government is able to put you in a concentration camp, it has overwhelming force behind it -- and much, if not most, of the populace as well. Pro-gun people like to use the example of the Warsaw ghetto uprising, but the thing about that noble act of defiance is that's all it was: The Nazis smashed the resistance and shipped the survivors off to Treblinka in no time. Because of that history, it's clearer here that if you want to preserve democracy, you don't need a lot of do-it-yourselfers clomping about in the woods; you need a strong civil society, including respect for elections that don't happen to go your way.
Speaking of elections, if you believe opinion polls, roughly a third of all Americans regard Barack Obama as a flaming communist Muslim from Kenya, and 14 percent suspect he is the Antichrist himself. But here's a reality check: if Obama were a German politician, he would fit comfortably somewhere between Chancellor Angela Merkel and her free-market coalition partner Guido Westerwelle. That's because the whole electoral spectrum here is several degrees to the left of the US range; Westerwelle, a Free Democrat, is the only politician who campaigns on the neoliberal platform espoused by American politicians of both parties: competition, lower taxes, mistrust of government, the evils of welfare, the magic of the market and the virtues of making lots of money. In February he shocked the nation by comparing the welfare state to the "decadence" of the late Roman Empire. In the United States, such statements barely make the news. In fact, in the United States the only thing that would shock anyone about Westerwelle is that he's openly gay. As for Merkel, it's true that Germany is in some ways a more sexist society than the United States, with ordinary life still arranged around stay-home mothers: Sunday store closings; school days that end at lunchtime; working mothers derided by their neighbors as cold, cruel Rabenmütter (raven mothers); and women trapped on the lower rungs of the professions (only 13 percent of German professors are female). But you have to acknowledge that Germany has us beat in female political representation. It's not just Merkel: 32.8 percent of MPs are women.
Like the rest of Europe, Germany has problems galore. Unemployment is high; immigration, while low by US standards, has inspired xenophobia and ultranationalism; there have been big cutbacks in social programs, including healthcare and education. But as an American, I can't tell you how refreshing it is to experience a politics in which "welfare" is not a dirty word and elections don't revolve around people who think the world is 10,000 years old and can't even spell the "N-word" they plaster on their placards and posters.
Katha Pollitt’s most recent book is The Mind Body Problem:Poems (Random House).
Copyright © 2010 The Nation – distributed by Agence Global
by Katha Pollitt
My German friends here are bewildered by the resistance to healthcare reform in America. They just don't get what the fuss is about. After all, thanks to Bismarck, that notorious red, Germans have had some version of national health insurance since 1884. The current system contains some of the very features that have driven Americans to throw themselves into the tea. It's mostly public -- about 90 percent of the population is in the government system, with about 10 percent, mostly the wealthy and the self-employed, covered by private insurance. There's an individual mandate: You have to be covered, just the way, as my friend Barbara put it, you have to have insurance for your car. Coverage is not cheap, about 15 percent of your salary, but your employer pays nearly half, and there are government subsidies for low-income workers. Sound familiar? Do companies pass their payments on to you in the form of lower wages (or higher prices)? Probably a little bit, said Vera, but it is well worth it. I'll say: Germany has one of the best healthcare systems in the world, and it costs a lot less than ours -- 10.7 percent of GNP in 2005, versus our 15.2 percent. My husband has visited doctors and dentists here, and found them both excellent and amazingly accessible. Why, my friends wonder, would Americans not want something like it?
Perhaps it is because a government powerful enough to give us healthcare insurance would be strong enough to... take away our guns? The American obsession with guns is another thing that just looks weird here. German gun laws are strict. Permits are barred to people with histories of violent behavior or addiction to drugs or alcohol: To get a hunting license requires taking a challenging course on weapons and wildlife and passing a stiff exam (many fail); don't even think about carrying that licensed gun in public unless it is unloaded and in a locked container. As for the political value of the Second Amendment in defending the Republic, the idea that homeowners could hold off a tyrannical government with their individual weapons is bound to look ridiculous to people who have actually experienced fascism. By the time the government is able to put you in a concentration camp, it has overwhelming force behind it -- and much, if not most, of the populace as well. Pro-gun people like to use the example of the Warsaw ghetto uprising, but the thing about that noble act of defiance is that's all it was: The Nazis smashed the resistance and shipped the survivors off to Treblinka in no time. Because of that history, it's clearer here that if you want to preserve democracy, you don't need a lot of do-it-yourselfers clomping about in the woods; you need a strong civil society, including respect for elections that don't happen to go your way.
Speaking of elections, if you believe opinion polls, roughly a third of all Americans regard Barack Obama as a flaming communist Muslim from Kenya, and 14 percent suspect he is the Antichrist himself. But here's a reality check: if Obama were a German politician, he would fit comfortably somewhere between Chancellor Angela Merkel and her free-market coalition partner Guido Westerwelle. That's because the whole electoral spectrum here is several degrees to the left of the US range; Westerwelle, a Free Democrat, is the only politician who campaigns on the neoliberal platform espoused by American politicians of both parties: competition, lower taxes, mistrust of government, the evils of welfare, the magic of the market and the virtues of making lots of money. In February he shocked the nation by comparing the welfare state to the "decadence" of the late Roman Empire. In the United States, such statements barely make the news. In fact, in the United States the only thing that would shock anyone about Westerwelle is that he's openly gay. As for Merkel, it's true that Germany is in some ways a more sexist society than the United States, with ordinary life still arranged around stay-home mothers: Sunday store closings; school days that end at lunchtime; working mothers derided by their neighbors as cold, cruel Rabenmütter (raven mothers); and women trapped on the lower rungs of the professions (only 13 percent of German professors are female). But you have to acknowledge that Germany has us beat in female political representation. It's not just Merkel: 32.8 percent of MPs are women.
Like the rest of Europe, Germany has problems galore. Unemployment is high; immigration, while low by US standards, has inspired xenophobia and ultranationalism; there have been big cutbacks in social programs, including healthcare and education. But as an American, I can't tell you how refreshing it is to experience a politics in which "welfare" is not a dirty word and elections don't revolve around people who think the world is 10,000 years old and can't even spell the "N-word" they plaster on their placards and posters.
Katha Pollitt’s most recent book is The Mind Body Problem:Poems (Random House).
Copyright © 2010 The Nation – distributed by Agence Global
Wednesday, April 14, 2010
The Dish That Ate the World
Sushi is Wrecking the Planet
By David Steele
The Canada Earthsaver Summer 2010
http://www.earthsave.ca/files/2010_Spring_Earthsaver_web.pdf
Sushi is wrecking the planet. It may sound like hyperbole, but unfortunately it is not. While this popular repast is not alone in the endeavor, stated plainly, sushi is one of the most environmentally damaging foods one could possibly eat. About all one can say in its favor is that very little of it is made with beef.
Let's start with the basics. All sushi is made with rice; lots of it. That's not good. It may surprise you, but rice is in the same league as beef when it comes to global warming.
Most people know these days that beef cattle are among the biggest emitters of global warming gases on earth. One hundred million tonnes of methane are belched from these cows and bulls every year. What most people don't know is that rice is just as bad. One hundred million tonnes of methane seep from rice paddies, too, the latest studies tell us. Depending on whether you count methane's effects over 100 or 20 years, that's the equivalent of between 2.3 and 7.2 billion tonnes of CO2 flowing into the atmosphere from the cattle and another 2.3 to 7.2 billion tonnes of CO2 from the rice we produce each year. Together they are emitting the methane equivalent of one-fifth to two-thirds of all of the carbon dioxide from all of the
fossil fuels we burn across the world every year. Of course, as it is the staple food of the bulk of humanity, rice feeds an awful lot more people than beef does, and its production involves a lot less animal suffering. But it is still a very bad player in the climate crisis.
It would be bad enough if the damage associated with sushi were limited to this rice-based acceleration of global warming. But, of course, rice content is only a small part of the sushi problem. Being composed largely of fish, sushi's popularity is enormously more damaging than that.
The harvest of fish that fill the sushi we eat is playing an enormous role in the decimation of the world's oceans. As the World Wildlife Fund tells us, Atlantic populations of bluefin tuna - the most popular sushi fish - have dropped 80% since 1978. Last year, one million of these giant predators were plucked from the sea. Since the total population of these fish is estimated at 3.75 million and it takes 10 to 12 years for these tuna to reach sexual maturity, the prospects for these fish are extraordinarily bleak.
Other species are similarly affected. Worldwide, the scale of ocean fishing has increased enormously in the last 60 years. In 1950, a total of less than 30 million tonnes of fish were pulled from the sea, including illegal and unreported catches. By 1990, this had surged roughly 6-fold to 180 million tonnes, some 30% of which was
'illegal.' Not surprisingly, the populations of the fish in the sea are way, way down. This is especially true of the big ones - tuna, cod, halibut, swordfish, shark, flounder - which are down more than 90% from their 1950 levels. Fishing at this intensity cannot be maintained; despite an ever-growing fishing fleet, the annual catch is now down to about 140 million tonnes. By 2050 scientists predict
that the seas will be pretty much empty.
We and our sushi habit are driving this decimation. 80% of all the fish caught in 2006 were eaten in the developed world. In North America and Europe, we eat an average of well over 40 lbs of fish per person each year. This is the highest aggregate level of fish consumption in the world. With over 1 billion Europeans and North Americans, our total consumption dwarfs that of even Japan whose 127 million people consume 57 lbs each.
What can we do about? Since it seems that the world's governments are incapable of responding to this crisis - astonishingly, just last month Japan managed to block a proposed ban on the trade of even the most endangered bluefin tuna - it is up to us. If ocean life is to be saved, we're going to have to stop eating sushi and pretty much all other fish. If we don't do it now, we certainly will do it later - when there are no fish left to eat.
By David Steele
The Canada Earthsaver Summer 2010
http://www.earthsave.ca/files/2010_Spring_Earthsaver_web.pdf
Sushi is wrecking the planet. It may sound like hyperbole, but unfortunately it is not. While this popular repast is not alone in the endeavor, stated plainly, sushi is one of the most environmentally damaging foods one could possibly eat. About all one can say in its favor is that very little of it is made with beef.
Let's start with the basics. All sushi is made with rice; lots of it. That's not good. It may surprise you, but rice is in the same league as beef when it comes to global warming.
Most people know these days that beef cattle are among the biggest emitters of global warming gases on earth. One hundred million tonnes of methane are belched from these cows and bulls every year. What most people don't know is that rice is just as bad. One hundred million tonnes of methane seep from rice paddies, too, the latest studies tell us. Depending on whether you count methane's effects over 100 or 20 years, that's the equivalent of between 2.3 and 7.2 billion tonnes of CO2 flowing into the atmosphere from the cattle and another 2.3 to 7.2 billion tonnes of CO2 from the rice we produce each year. Together they are emitting the methane equivalent of one-fifth to two-thirds of all of the carbon dioxide from all of the
fossil fuels we burn across the world every year. Of course, as it is the staple food of the bulk of humanity, rice feeds an awful lot more people than beef does, and its production involves a lot less animal suffering. But it is still a very bad player in the climate crisis.
It would be bad enough if the damage associated with sushi were limited to this rice-based acceleration of global warming. But, of course, rice content is only a small part of the sushi problem. Being composed largely of fish, sushi's popularity is enormously more damaging than that.
The harvest of fish that fill the sushi we eat is playing an enormous role in the decimation of the world's oceans. As the World Wildlife Fund tells us, Atlantic populations of bluefin tuna - the most popular sushi fish - have dropped 80% since 1978. Last year, one million of these giant predators were plucked from the sea. Since the total population of these fish is estimated at 3.75 million and it takes 10 to 12 years for these tuna to reach sexual maturity, the prospects for these fish are extraordinarily bleak.
Other species are similarly affected. Worldwide, the scale of ocean fishing has increased enormously in the last 60 years. In 1950, a total of less than 30 million tonnes of fish were pulled from the sea, including illegal and unreported catches. By 1990, this had surged roughly 6-fold to 180 million tonnes, some 30% of which was
'illegal.' Not surprisingly, the populations of the fish in the sea are way, way down. This is especially true of the big ones - tuna, cod, halibut, swordfish, shark, flounder - which are down more than 90% from their 1950 levels. Fishing at this intensity cannot be maintained; despite an ever-growing fishing fleet, the annual catch is now down to about 140 million tonnes. By 2050 scientists predict
that the seas will be pretty much empty.
We and our sushi habit are driving this decimation. 80% of all the fish caught in 2006 were eaten in the developed world. In North America and Europe, we eat an average of well over 40 lbs of fish per person each year. This is the highest aggregate level of fish consumption in the world. With over 1 billion Europeans and North Americans, our total consumption dwarfs that of even Japan whose 127 million people consume 57 lbs each.
What can we do about? Since it seems that the world's governments are incapable of responding to this crisis - astonishingly, just last month Japan managed to block a proposed ban on the trade of even the most endangered bluefin tuna - it is up to us. If ocean life is to be saved, we're going to have to stop eating sushi and pretty much all other fish. If we don't do it now, we certainly will do it later - when there are no fish left to eat.
Saturday, April 10, 2010
FN opposition to Enbridge oil pipeline
BC First Nations coalition declares opposition to Enbridge oil pipeline
By Tamsyn Burgmann (CP) – Mar 23, 2010
VANCOUVER, B.C. — Dozens of orcas, hundreds of thousands of seabirds and millions of salmon were wiped out when the Exxon Valdez oil tanker spilled 40 million litres of crude oil into Alaskan waters.
Twenty-one years later, a coalition of British Columbia First Nations says such a disaster can never be allowed to happen again, and declared it will do whatever it takes to stop a proposed pipeline from the Alberta tar sands to the B.C. coast.
More than 150 First Nations, businesses, environmental organizations and prominent Canadians have signed on to the campaign to stop the pipeline proposed by Calgary-based Enbridge Inc. (TSX:ENB)
They say the risk of an oil spill is just too great.
"We all believe the Enbridge Gateway pipeline project is a threat to the very existence of our culture and our way of life," Art Sterritt, executive director of the Coastal First Nations, told reporters Tuesday.
"There are some who believe the Enbridge project is a done deal. It isn't. It is over."
The Northern Gateway Project would see two 1,170-kilometre pipelines stretching from the tar sands near Edmonton to the northern B.C. coast town of Kitimat.
Crude would flow, crossing more than 1,000 streams and rivers, mountain ranges, avalanche-prone terrain and rainforest ecosystems before being loaded onto upwards of 150 tankers annually for export.
The majority of the landscape to be covered is traditional B.C. First Nations land.
"It would be both unwise and irresponsible for Enbridge to ignore us or our constitutionally protected rights and title in British Columbia," Sterritt said.
The Coastal First Nations, who are heading the declaration, are an alliance of communities on B.C.'s north and central coast, including the islands of Haida Gwaii.
Enbridge declined an interview request, citing the fact that it's in the final stages of a regulatory application with the National Energy Board.
But the company has touted the benefits of the project, saying more than 4,000 construction jobs and thousands more indirect jobs would be created, while generating hundreds of millions in tax revenue for both provinces.
The company has said ships have safely carried petrochemicals out of the Kitimat port for 25 years, and they will, in fact, make safety improvements.
In an email, the company said it must still undergo a "comprehensive and rigorous regulatory review process to ensure the project is in the interest of the Canadian public."
But Sterritt said after five years of scientific research and community consultations, the groups that have signed onto the campaign believe "no good" can come from the project.
It could jeopardize the land, water, people and wildlife for generations to come, say those opposed.
"We don't ... make this declaration blindly or lightly, we make it from an informed position," said Gerald Amos, a director of Coastal First Nations.
He said a blockade on the water is possible if the project goes ahead.
Along with 28 B.C. First Nations, the Union of B.C. Indian Chiefs and some aboriginal groups from Alberta, environmental groups including the David Suzuki Foundation and the Pembina Institute also signed on to the campaign.
Author Margaret Atwood, Vancouver Canuck Willie Mitchell and 10 Canadian Olympians, including Kristina Groves, are also on board.
Environmentalist Vicky Husband said she believes two additional pipelines would allow an increase in production in the Alberta tar sands of up to 30 per cent.
"If we actually believe in taking steps to deal with climate change, the tar sands needs to be phased out," she said. "Otherwise, Canada will be a major source of greenhouse gas emissions, ongoing."
Premier Gordon Campbell said the project will not proceed if it's deemed too dangerous for the environment.
He said the government wants to build an economic future for B.C. First Nations, "in a way that meets all of our environmental standards."
The New Democrats called on the government to drop the project, but B.C. Energy Minister Blair Lekstrom said B.C. residents want more money for health care, social programs and roads.
"All of that comes from our resource industry - and we have to find that balance," he said.
By Tamsyn Burgmann (CP) – Mar 23, 2010
VANCOUVER, B.C. — Dozens of orcas, hundreds of thousands of seabirds and millions of salmon were wiped out when the Exxon Valdez oil tanker spilled 40 million litres of crude oil into Alaskan waters.
Twenty-one years later, a coalition of British Columbia First Nations says such a disaster can never be allowed to happen again, and declared it will do whatever it takes to stop a proposed pipeline from the Alberta tar sands to the B.C. coast.
More than 150 First Nations, businesses, environmental organizations and prominent Canadians have signed on to the campaign to stop the pipeline proposed by Calgary-based Enbridge Inc. (TSX:ENB)
They say the risk of an oil spill is just too great.
"We all believe the Enbridge Gateway pipeline project is a threat to the very existence of our culture and our way of life," Art Sterritt, executive director of the Coastal First Nations, told reporters Tuesday.
"There are some who believe the Enbridge project is a done deal. It isn't. It is over."
The Northern Gateway Project would see two 1,170-kilometre pipelines stretching from the tar sands near Edmonton to the northern B.C. coast town of Kitimat.
Crude would flow, crossing more than 1,000 streams and rivers, mountain ranges, avalanche-prone terrain and rainforest ecosystems before being loaded onto upwards of 150 tankers annually for export.
The majority of the landscape to be covered is traditional B.C. First Nations land.
"It would be both unwise and irresponsible for Enbridge to ignore us or our constitutionally protected rights and title in British Columbia," Sterritt said.
The Coastal First Nations, who are heading the declaration, are an alliance of communities on B.C.'s north and central coast, including the islands of Haida Gwaii.
Enbridge declined an interview request, citing the fact that it's in the final stages of a regulatory application with the National Energy Board.
But the company has touted the benefits of the project, saying more than 4,000 construction jobs and thousands more indirect jobs would be created, while generating hundreds of millions in tax revenue for both provinces.
The company has said ships have safely carried petrochemicals out of the Kitimat port for 25 years, and they will, in fact, make safety improvements.
In an email, the company said it must still undergo a "comprehensive and rigorous regulatory review process to ensure the project is in the interest of the Canadian public."
But Sterritt said after five years of scientific research and community consultations, the groups that have signed onto the campaign believe "no good" can come from the project.
It could jeopardize the land, water, people and wildlife for generations to come, say those opposed.
"We don't ... make this declaration blindly or lightly, we make it from an informed position," said Gerald Amos, a director of Coastal First Nations.
He said a blockade on the water is possible if the project goes ahead.
Along with 28 B.C. First Nations, the Union of B.C. Indian Chiefs and some aboriginal groups from Alberta, environmental groups including the David Suzuki Foundation and the Pembina Institute also signed on to the campaign.
Author Margaret Atwood, Vancouver Canuck Willie Mitchell and 10 Canadian Olympians, including Kristina Groves, are also on board.
Environmentalist Vicky Husband said she believes two additional pipelines would allow an increase in production in the Alberta tar sands of up to 30 per cent.
"If we actually believe in taking steps to deal with climate change, the tar sands needs to be phased out," she said. "Otherwise, Canada will be a major source of greenhouse gas emissions, ongoing."
Premier Gordon Campbell said the project will not proceed if it's deemed too dangerous for the environment.
He said the government wants to build an economic future for B.C. First Nations, "in a way that meets all of our environmental standards."
The New Democrats called on the government to drop the project, but B.C. Energy Minister Blair Lekstrom said B.C. residents want more money for health care, social programs and roads.
"All of that comes from our resource industry - and we have to find that balance," he said.
Thursday, April 08, 2010
Israel-Based Human Organ Ring Busted
Police smash Israeli organ-trafficking ring
BBC
A retired army brigadier general is among six suspects arrested by Israeli police investigating an organ-trafficking ring, police say.
The organisation offered as much as $100,000 (£65,600) for kidneys, which were transplanted by doctors in poor countries, a sting operation uncovered.
Police said they had been "shocked" by the extent of the smuggling ring.
Retired Gen Meir Zamir, arrested in connection with the trafficking, won a medal of valour in the Yom Kippur War.
'Dream come true'
The trafficking ring came to light after a 50-year-old woman from Nazareth came to police.
We ran an undercover investigation and we were shocked by the proportions of this
Superintendent Ahron Galor
She told them she was flown to Azerbaijan where doctors removed her kidney.
On her return to Israel she was expecting to be given $100,000, but she never received the money.
Another 18-year-old man complained to police after he was offered $80,000 and flown to the Philippines to have the operation.
"We ran an undercover investigation and we were shocked by the proportions of this," Police Superintendent Ahron Galor told Ynet News.
"We learned there are many people willing to sell a kidney for just £10,000. These are people who have severe financial difficulties, for whom such a sum is a dream come true."
Forging documents
The traffickers advertised online, suggesting there was another solution for people who had been waiting for kidney transplants for years.
They offered the kidneys for sale for $140,000.
As well as Gen Zamir, two lawyers were among those arrested in the sting operation.
The lawyers are suspected of forging documents which said the recipient and donor were related.
Police said members of the ring tried to cover their tracks by hiding the Israeli medical records of the donors.
This made it hard for donors to be treated if they became sick following the surgery.
SEE ALSO
Israel organs claim row deepens
08 Sep 09 | Middle East
Netanyahu enters Sweden organ row
23 Aug 09 | Middle East
Israel fury at Sweden organ claim
21 Aug 09 | Middle East
RELATED INTERNET LINKS
Ynet
BBC
A retired army brigadier general is among six suspects arrested by Israeli police investigating an organ-trafficking ring, police say.
The organisation offered as much as $100,000 (£65,600) for kidneys, which were transplanted by doctors in poor countries, a sting operation uncovered.
Police said they had been "shocked" by the extent of the smuggling ring.
Retired Gen Meir Zamir, arrested in connection with the trafficking, won a medal of valour in the Yom Kippur War.
'Dream come true'
The trafficking ring came to light after a 50-year-old woman from Nazareth came to police.
We ran an undercover investigation and we were shocked by the proportions of this
Superintendent Ahron Galor
She told them she was flown to Azerbaijan where doctors removed her kidney.
On her return to Israel she was expecting to be given $100,000, but she never received the money.
Another 18-year-old man complained to police after he was offered $80,000 and flown to the Philippines to have the operation.
"We ran an undercover investigation and we were shocked by the proportions of this," Police Superintendent Ahron Galor told Ynet News.
"We learned there are many people willing to sell a kidney for just £10,000. These are people who have severe financial difficulties, for whom such a sum is a dream come true."
Forging documents
The traffickers advertised online, suggesting there was another solution for people who had been waiting for kidney transplants for years.
They offered the kidneys for sale for $140,000.
As well as Gen Zamir, two lawyers were among those arrested in the sting operation.
The lawyers are suspected of forging documents which said the recipient and donor were related.
Police said members of the ring tried to cover their tracks by hiding the Israeli medical records of the donors.
This made it hard for donors to be treated if they became sick following the surgery.
SEE ALSO
Israel organs claim row deepens
08 Sep 09 | Middle East
Netanyahu enters Sweden organ row
23 Aug 09 | Middle East
Israel fury at Sweden organ claim
21 Aug 09 | Middle East
RELATED INTERNET LINKS
Ynet
Saturday, April 03, 2010
From the Jason Kenney WTF? File
Runners denied entry into Canada
By Alison Korn, Special to QMI Agency
Athletes or refugees?
The head of the organizing committee for the 17th World University Cross Country Championship is “disappointed and embarrassed” by the fact that runners from several countries have been denied visas to the event, to be held April 11 in Kingston.
Athletes and officials from China, Sri Lanka and Nepal have been told by Citizenship and Immigration Canada that they won’t be allowed to enter Canada because there’s a risk they may not return home afterwards. Tajikistan’s team has been denied visas because they competed in the Asian Athletics Championships, an IAAF-sanctioned event in Iran. Five other countries are still waiting to hear.
Shane Lakins, president of the organizing committee, fumed that the rejections are ruining Canada’s reputation for hosting world championship sporting events.
“World class athletes travel the world,” Lakin said. “If as a normal citizen of Tajikistan you went to Iran and then want to come to Canada, I get the red flags, but this is an athlete competing for their country at an internationally sanctioned competition.
“On the heels of a very successful Vancouver Olympics you would think Canada would have their act together when it comes to allowing athletes into the country to participate at world championship events, but (we) are finding this is not the case. We are disappointed and embarrassed that athletes will not have the opportunity to represent their countries at a prestigious world championship event because of bureaucracy getting in the way of common sense. It makes us wonder how Canada was able to successfully host the recent Olympic Games.”
But there’s a big difference between the Vancouver Winter Olympics and these cross-country championships — namely, the countries of origin of the athletes. While most winter sport nations are wealthy, with athletes who don’t tend to defect, summer sports like cross-country running are practiced widely in poorer countries and are more likely to have athletes abandon their team and make refugee claims.
The most glaring example was the 2001 Francophone Games in Ottawa. More than 100 participants made requests for protection after the event.
“In the past, several international events have resulted in delegates not respecting Canada’s immigration law by not leaving when they had promised they would,” Rejean Cantlon of Citizenship and Immigration Canada said in an email. “A number of factors are considered by visa officers prior to issuing a visa. These factors include the person’s ties to the home country, the purpose of the visit, the person’s family and economic situation, the overall economic and political stability of the home country, and invitations from Canadian hosts. When a visa officer refuses an application, it is because the applicant does not meet the requirements set out in Canada’s immigration law.”
In an interesting coincidence, this week Immigration Minister Jason Kenney announced sweeping changes to Canada’s clogged refugee system. His office noted that Canada’s slow-moving asylum system also attracts more claims per capita than any comparable Western democracy and 58% of these claims are unfounded. The Immigration and Refugee Board of Canada now has approximately 60,000 asylum claimants waiting for a decision on their claim with the average hearing occurring in 19 months.
But for all the thousands who are scamming the system, there is also the story of wrestler Daniel Igali, who competed for Nigeria at the 1994 Commonwealth Games in Victoria, B.C. and stayed on. After receiving Canadian citizenship, Igali won gold for Canada at the 2000 Olympics, has run for political office, earned a masters degree and established a charitable foundation.
I’d say we’re pretty lucky he stayed.
http://www.torontosun.com/sports/othersports/2010/04/02/13449491.html
By Alison Korn, Special to QMI Agency
Athletes or refugees?
The head of the organizing committee for the 17th World University Cross Country Championship is “disappointed and embarrassed” by the fact that runners from several countries have been denied visas to the event, to be held April 11 in Kingston.
Athletes and officials from China, Sri Lanka and Nepal have been told by Citizenship and Immigration Canada that they won’t be allowed to enter Canada because there’s a risk they may not return home afterwards. Tajikistan’s team has been denied visas because they competed in the Asian Athletics Championships, an IAAF-sanctioned event in Iran. Five other countries are still waiting to hear.
Shane Lakins, president of the organizing committee, fumed that the rejections are ruining Canada’s reputation for hosting world championship sporting events.
“World class athletes travel the world,” Lakin said. “If as a normal citizen of Tajikistan you went to Iran and then want to come to Canada, I get the red flags, but this is an athlete competing for their country at an internationally sanctioned competition.
“On the heels of a very successful Vancouver Olympics you would think Canada would have their act together when it comes to allowing athletes into the country to participate at world championship events, but (we) are finding this is not the case. We are disappointed and embarrassed that athletes will not have the opportunity to represent their countries at a prestigious world championship event because of bureaucracy getting in the way of common sense. It makes us wonder how Canada was able to successfully host the recent Olympic Games.”
But there’s a big difference between the Vancouver Winter Olympics and these cross-country championships — namely, the countries of origin of the athletes. While most winter sport nations are wealthy, with athletes who don’t tend to defect, summer sports like cross-country running are practiced widely in poorer countries and are more likely to have athletes abandon their team and make refugee claims.
The most glaring example was the 2001 Francophone Games in Ottawa. More than 100 participants made requests for protection after the event.
“In the past, several international events have resulted in delegates not respecting Canada’s immigration law by not leaving when they had promised they would,” Rejean Cantlon of Citizenship and Immigration Canada said in an email. “A number of factors are considered by visa officers prior to issuing a visa. These factors include the person’s ties to the home country, the purpose of the visit, the person’s family and economic situation, the overall economic and political stability of the home country, and invitations from Canadian hosts. When a visa officer refuses an application, it is because the applicant does not meet the requirements set out in Canada’s immigration law.”
In an interesting coincidence, this week Immigration Minister Jason Kenney announced sweeping changes to Canada’s clogged refugee system. His office noted that Canada’s slow-moving asylum system also attracts more claims per capita than any comparable Western democracy and 58% of these claims are unfounded. The Immigration and Refugee Board of Canada now has approximately 60,000 asylum claimants waiting for a decision on their claim with the average hearing occurring in 19 months.
But for all the thousands who are scamming the system, there is also the story of wrestler Daniel Igali, who competed for Nigeria at the 1994 Commonwealth Games in Victoria, B.C. and stayed on. After receiving Canadian citizenship, Igali won gold for Canada at the 2000 Olympics, has run for political office, earned a masters degree and established a charitable foundation.
I’d say we’re pretty lucky he stayed.
http://www.torontosun.com/sports/othersports/2010/04/02/13449491.html
Women of Beit Hanoun Go "Over the Top"
Palestine: Women of Beit Hanoun
Go "Over the Top"
by Chris Cook
Saturday, 04 November 2006
[Israel's accelerated bombing and killing in Gaza this week reminded me of this old one from 2006. It followed shortly the invasion of Lebanon. This then from the wayback file.]
The symbol of the end of the 'Gilded Age' and ultimate refutation of Hope in the still young 20th Century, the ‘Trenches’ of the First War, horrors filled with dead farm boys a-swim in mud, blood, rats and the reek of futility was given an eerie revisiting today in Palestine.
Through the courtesy of BBC television, we witnessed not the flower of Europe's manhood going "over the top," but the women of Palestine, desperate to shield their sons, husbands, fathers, and brothers from the relentless, and pitiless, and murderous Israeli Defence Force (IDF), mounting the barricade to face naked the guns.
We are the Dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved and were loved, and now we lie
In Flanders fields.
The "War to End All Wars" failed of course to fulfill its billing, just as all its predecessors failed to fulfill theirs. No, this waste of innocents, the insatiable maw that was the "Great War," was not finale but merely prelude to grosser horrors to come.
Emblematic of the grim dehumanization the future promised, images of doomed soldiers sent "over the top," out of their trench shelters, to march slowly into the remorseless machinery of modern warfare is the legacy of that bloody century: We are the inheritors today of a moral degeneracy culminating on our television screens, where we can watch men of high station joke about distant women and children destroyed, rent to pieces by bombs and bullets and worse, as we eat supper.
The women clambered over the earthen walls, as the foot soldiers of the distant war past had, with hope but no assurance they would survive, but unlike those long dead Tommy’s and Huns, they went over the walls thrown up by Israeli bulldozers to stop the killing, not participate in it; they challenged the humanity of those Jewish soldiers surrounding their Mosque, daring them to stay their hand, challenging them to show mercy and become men again.
Perhaps some held their fire. Perhaps others aimed high, or wide of the burkas; but clearly others did not. I watched the women fall to the ground dead tonight. Not "insurgents," "terrorists," or "Hamas;" not "Hezbullah," "al Qaida," nor "Taliban," but mothers, sisters, daughters, wives, mercilessly shot down by cowards; robot warriors who failed, outside a mosque in Beit Hanoun, to claim their humanity. Failed, just as the cowards in Iraq, and Afghanistan, and every other place where soldiers and their masters surrender duty to conscience and kill.
The men that rushed into the firestorm in aid of the stricken Heroines came under fire today too, as so often they have before in Palestine, falling victim to Israel's Defence Force and its so-called "Rules of Engagement;" rules [sic] allowing men desert decency, deny mercy, and treat every being in their range as a "legitimate" target of war.
Cases of criminal outrage against humanity committed by the IDF within what survives of Palestine are legion: Think Lebanon in many multiples. It is a wonder women would climb into that gallery, face the assassins of so many of their kith and kin, and deliver to the killers a chance to redeem their humanity, or not.
Here's a look at Google News of Israel’s recent doings in Gaza.
That’s just today, tomorrow is another, and the next day another; all days of brutality, meted out over the months and years and decades in Palestine.
Where even the "greatest" war ended, its dead planted in rows like so much wheat, in this killing field the crosshairs never cease, and the flower of the nation are yet cut down with no end in sight.
In Flanders fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses row on row,
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.
Friday, April 02, 2010
US-Israeli Feud?
A Growing US-Israeli Feud?
by Tony Karon
Uncomfortable at the spectacle of the Obama administration in an open confrontation with the Israeli government, Connecticut Senator Joe Lieberman -- who represents the interests of Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu’s Likud Party on Capitol Hill as faithfully as he does those of the health insurance industry -- called for a halt. “Let’s cut the family fighting, the family feud,” he said. “It’s unnecessary; it’s destructive of our shared national interest. It’s time to lower voices, to get over the family feud between the US and Israel. It just doesn’t serve anybody’s interests but our enemies’.”
The idea that the United States and Israel are “family” with identical national interests is a convenient fiction that Lieberman and his fellow Israel partisans have worked relentlessly to promote -- and enforce -- in Washington over the past two decades. If the bonds are indeed familial, however, the recent showdown between Washington and the Netanyahu government may be counted as one of those feuds in which truths are uttered in the heat of the moment that call into question the fundamental terms of the relationship. Such truths are never easily swept under the rug once the dispute is settled. The immediate rupture, that is, precludes a simple return to the status quo ante; instead, a renegotiation of the terms of the relationship somehow ends up on the agenda.
Sure, the Obama administration and the Netanyahu government are now working feverishly to find a formula that will allow them to move on from a contretemps that began when the Israelis ambushed Vice-President Joe Biden, announcing plans to build 1,600 new housing units for settlers in occupied East Jerusalem. He was, of course, in Israel to promote the Obama administration’s failing efforts to rehabilitate negotiations toward a two-state peace agreement, a goal regularly spurned by Israel’s continued construction on land occupied in 1967.
Once again, as when Obama demanded a complete settlement freeze from the Netanyahu government in 2009, the Israelis will fend off any demand that they completely reverse their latest construction plans. Instead, they will shamelessly offer to continue their settlement activity on a “don’t-ask-don’t-tell” basis, professing rhetorical support for a two-state solution to placate the Americans, even as they systematically erode its prospects on the ground.
There is, as former Secretary of State James Baker has noted, no shortage of chutzpah in this Israeli government. “United States taxpayers are giving Israel roughly $3 billion each year, which amounts to something like $1,000 for every Israeli citizen, at a time when our own economy is in bad shape and a lot of Americans would appreciate that kind of helping hand from their own government,” Baker said in a recent interview. “Given that fact, it is not unreasonable to ask the Israeli leadership to respect US policy on settlements.”
Sooner or later, the present imbroglio is likely to be fudged over, but make no mistake, it opened Washington up to a renewed discussion of the conventional wisdom of unconditional support for Israel. It also brought into the public arena the way US administrations over the past two decades have enabled that country’s ever-expanding occupation regime and whether such a policy is compatible with US national interests in the Middle East.
Back in 2006, the foreign policy thinkers John Mearshimer and Stephen Walt provoked a firestorm of ridicule and ad hominem abuse for suggesting in their book, The Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy, that the goals pursued by the two sides were, in fact, far from identical and often at odds -- and that partisans motivated by Israel’s interests lobbied aggressively to skew US foreign policy in their favor. Israel partisans also heaped derision on the suggestion by the Iraq Study Group commissioned by President George W. Bush that the United States would not be able to achieve its goals in the Middle East without first settling the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Petraeus weighs in
Response to the reiteration of the idea that Israel’s behavior might be jeopardizing US interests has been strikingly muted by comparison. That’s because it came from General David Petraeus, commander of US Central Command (Centcom), which oversees America’s two wars of the moment. He is the most celebrated US military officer of his generation, and a favorite of those most ferocious of Israel partisans, the neocons.
Petraeus told Senators: “The enduring hostilities between Israel and some of its neighbors present distinct challenges to our ability to advance our interests in [Centcom’s] AOR [Area of Responsibility].” He added, “The conflict foments anti-American sentiment, due to a perception of US favoritism for Israel. Arab anger over the Palestinian question limits the strength and depth of US partnerships with governments and peoples in the AOR and weakens the legitimacy of moderate regimes in the Arab world. Meanwhile, al-Qaida and other militant groups exploit that anger to mobilize support. The conflict also gives Iran influence in the Arab world through its clients, Lebanese Hizbullah and Hamas.” He also stressed that “progress toward resolving the political disputes in the Levant, particularly the Arab-Israeli conflict, is a major concern for Centcom.”
Normally, any linkage between the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and a wave of anti-Americanism in the Muslim world is pooh-poohed by neocons and other Israel partisans. Typically, they will derisively suggest that those who argue for the linkage made by Petraeus are naïve in their belief that al-Qaida would give up its jihad if only Israel and the Palestinians made peace. That, by the way, is a straw-man argument of the first order: The US has done plenty on its own to antagonize the Muslim world, and ending the Israeli-Palestinian conflict would not in itself resolve that antagonism. The point is simply that a fair solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is a necessary, if not sufficient, condition for repairing relations between the United States and the citizenry of many Muslim countries.
Abe Foxman, head of the Anti-Defamation League, who has made a profession of trying to negate the difference between anti-Semitism and criticism of (or hostility to) Israel, gamely ventured that “Gen Petraeus has simply erred in linking the challenges faced by the US and coalition forces in the region to a solution of the Israeli-Arab conflict, and blaming extremist activities on the absence of peace and the perceived US favoritism for Israel”. His conclusion: “This linkage is dangerous and counterproductive.”
You can hear the pain in Foxman’s admission that “it is that much more of a concern to hear this coming from such a great American patriot and hero.” That Petraeus chose to make his concerns public at the height of a public showdown between Israel and the United States, and to do so on Capitol Hill, where legislators seemed uncertain how to respond, signaled the seriousness of the uniformed military in pressing the issue.
The most powerful lobby
Longtime Washington military and intelligence affairs analyst Mark Perry caught the special significance of this at Foreign Policy’s website: “There are important and powerful lobbies in America: the NRA, the American Medical Association, the lawyers – and the Israeli lobby. But no lobby is as important, or as powerful, as the US military.” He noted as well that, in a January Centcom briefing of Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Admiral Michael Mullen, Petraeus had evidently suggested the Palestinian territories -- over which Israel continues to exercise sovereign military control -- be included under Centcom’s area of responsibility, a prospect that would make Israel’s leadership apoplectic.
It’s not that, as far as we know, Petraeus harbors any particular animus, or affection, for the Jewish state. It’s that, in his institutional role as the commander of hundreds of thousands of US troops stationed across what Washington strategists like to call the “arc of instability,” he is concerned about aggravating hostility towards the United States.
The idea that Washington needs to rein in Israeli expansionism and force a political solution to its conflict with the Palestinians is hardly novel for America’s unsentimental men in uniform. Former Secretary of State Colin Powell and former US Mideast envoy General Anthony Zinni, both of whom had their formative experiences of the region in the course of massive US military deployments there, were on the same page as Petraeus is today.
Lieutenant General Keith Dayton is the US officer responsible for creating and training the Palestinian Authority security force that has cracked down on West Bank militants and restrained them from attacking Israel over the past few years. He was no less blunt than Petraeus in a speech in Washington last year. He emphasized the premise on which the force was built, and withstood charges from within its own community that it was simply a gendarmerie for Israel: Its soldiers believed themselves to be the nucleus of the army of a future Palestinian state. The loyalty of his men, he warned, should not be taken for granted: “There is perhaps a two-year shelf life on being told that you’re creating a state, when you’re not.”
Vice-President Biden, too, was quoted in the Israeli press as having berated Netanyahu -- behind closed doors -- over his plans for settlement expansion, warning that it would put at risk the lives of American personnel in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan.
Tough-love solution
In public, of course, Biden offered familiar pablum direct from Joe Lieberman’s “family” album: “From my experience, the one precondition for progress [in the Middle East] is that the rest of the world knows this -- there is no space between the US and Israel when it comes to security, none. That’s the only time that progress has been made.”
In fact, the history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict suggests that the reverse is true. The origins of the peace process the Obama administration is now trying so desperately to resuscitate do not lie in the unconditional American support for Israel that has become a third rail in national politics over the past two decades. They lie in the national interest based tough love of the administration of President George H. W. Bush.
Grounded in a realist reading of American national interests across the Middle East -- at a moment when a military campaign to eject Saddam Hussein’s Iraqi forces from Kuwait had put hundreds of thousands of US troops on the ground there -- the first Bush administration recognized the need to balance Israel’s reasonable interests with those of its Arab neighbors. That’s why, in 1991, it dragged Israel’s hawkish Likud government under Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir to the Madrid conference, and so broke Israel’s “security” taboo on direct engagement with Yasser Arafat’s Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO).
The Bush administration also made it clear that there would be immediate and painful consequences for Israel if it continued building settlements on land conquered in the war of 1967, construction which the United States was then willing to term not only “unhelpful” -- the preferred euphemism of Presidents Bill Clinton, George W. Bush and now Barack Obama -- but illegal. Under the direction of Bush family consigliere and Secretary of State Jim Baker, Washington threatened to withdraw $10 billion in loan guarantees if Israeli colonization of Palestinian territory continued. In the resulting political crisis, Israelis -- mindful of their dependency on US support -- voted Shamir out of office and chose Yitzhak Rabin as prime minister.
Rabin has been rightly lionized as a leader who took a courageous decision to change course in the face of bitter domestic opposition. To understand how Israel started down the path of peace, however, it’s necessary to clean the Vaseline off the lens of history and quiet the string section.
Only three years earlier, Rabin had ordered Israeli troops to use baseball bats to break the limbs of stone-throwing teenagers in hopes of stopping the Palestinian intifada. He certainly did not embrace the Oslo peace process with the PLO out of some moral epiphany. He changed course thanks to a cold-blooded assessment of Israel’s strategic position at the time.
The United States then had a growing stake in creating a regional Pax Americana that required Arab support. Given the end of the cold war, Israel’s value as an ally was diminishing, while its expansionist policies, antagonizing Arab public opinion and making it more difficult for vulnerable regional governments to ally with Israel’s enabler, were increasingly a liability for Washington.
Rabin had reason to believe that US support for Israel at the expense of its neighbors would prove neither unconditional nor eternal. At the same time, the PLO had been weakened by years of Israeli military attacks and by a disastrous diplomatic blunder -- it had aligned itself with Saddam Hussein in the first Gulf war. It was a fortuitous moment, he concluded, to press for a political solution with the Palestinians on favorable terms, by trading the West Bank and Gaza for peace.
Where are the consequences?
Rabin acted because the consequences of maintaining the status quo seemed increasingly unpleasant, which takes nothing away from his courage in doing so. The same could be said for South Africa’s last white president, FW de Klerk. He opted to negotiate an end to apartheid with Nelson Mandela’s ANC because the collapse of the Soviet Union had removed the most persuasive rationale the United States and other western powers had for backing his white-rule regime. Similarly, it’s unlikely that the Soviet political system would have put Mikhail Gorbachev in power if the KGB hadn’t determined that far-reaching changes were necessary to prevent Moscow from being eclipsed as a superpower, thanks to western economic and technological advances.
If US pressure and the spectre of isolation and opprobrium pushed Israel onto the path of a two-state solution, the easing of that pressure and the creation of the “familial” notion of US-Israel ties have coincided with a steady movement away from completing the peace process. Even at the height of the Oslo era, coddled by Clinton, the Israelis kept on expanding the settlements that jeopardized geographic prospects for Palestinian statehood.
The Israeli opposition, led by Ariel Sharon and Netanyahu, sought to prove Rabin wrong. They were convinced that American support could be maintained without conceding Palestinian statehood -- by making constant end runs around the Oval Office and appealing directly to Capitol Hill and US public opinion.
Sharon and Netanyahu were vindicated in spades when the suicide-terror strategy taken up by the second Palestinian intifada and the attacks of 9/11 led George W. Bush’s administration to re-conceptualize the world on the basis of its Global War on Terror. This, in turn, led Washington’s political class to accept Israel not as just another ally in that war, but as a model for how to conduct it.
In the Bush years, the peace process and the two-state solution became a hollow catechism that could be mouthed by Israeli leaders (and their supporters in Washington), while getting on with the task of smashing the Palestinian national movement and expanding settlements. In real terms, the peace process -- the series of reciprocal moves designed to build confidence for concluding final status talks and implementing a two-state solution -- died when Ariel Sharon came to power in February 2001.
Grand guignol
Even his 2005 withdrawal of Jewish settlements from Gaza was never conceived in terms of a peace process; it wasn’t even negotiated or coordinated with the Palestinian Authority. Sharon, in fact, imagined his unilateral withdrawal as a substitute for a peace agreement. It was designed, as Sharon’s top aide Dov Weissglass so memorably explained, as a dose of “formaldehyde that’s necessary so that there will not be a political process with the Palestinians.”
Despite mounting Arab exasperation, the Bush administration put no pressure on Israel to bring the peace process to a conclusion, limiting itself to the Grand Guignol of the “Annapolis process.” With all external compulsion to conclude a peace agreement removed, domestic political pressure in Israel not surprisingly collapsed as well. The Palestinians were now largely locked behind the vast separation wall that winds through the West Bank and the siege lines of Gaza. Their plight is once again invisible to Israelis, only 40% of whom, when asked by pollsters, even express an interest in seeing the peace process restarted. Only around 20% believe that such a move would bring any results.
“Israel has no real intention of quitting the territories or allowing the Palestinian people to exercise their rights,” wrote Israeli political commentator Gideon Levy in Haaretz on 18 March. “Israel does not truly intend to pursue peace, because life here seems to be good even without it. The continuation of the occupation doesn’t just endanger Israel’s future, it also poses the greatest risk to world peace, serving as a pretext for Israel’s most dangerous enemies. No change will come to pass in the complacent, belligerent and condescending Israel of today.”
The Obama administration can’t be under any illusions on this score. And they are being forced to confront it by another kind of pressure. The bills are coming due for Bush’s War-on-Terror adventurism. Those responsible for maintaining the US imperium in the Muslim world are now raising warning flags that the price to be paid for continuing to indulge Israel in evading its obligation to offer a fair settlement to the Palestinians could be high -- and, worse than that, unnecessary.
Israel’s leaders, and its voters, have amply demonstrated that they will not voluntarily relinquish control of the Palestinian territories as long as there are no real consequences for maintaining the status quo. Sure, you can tell them that the status quo is untenable, but the whole history of Israel from the 1920s onward has been about transforming the impossible into the inevitable by changing the facts on the ground. Building settlements on occupied territory in violation of international law after 1967 seemed untenable at the time; today, the US government says Israel will keep most of those major settlement blocs in any two-state solution. It is precisely in line with this sort of improvisational logic that Sharon calculated he could hold on to the settlements of the West Bank if he gave up the settlements of Gaza; the same logic allows Netanyahu to say the words “two states for two peoples” while always winking at his base that he has no intention of allowing it to happen.
A peace process that requires Israel and the Palestinians to reach a bilateral consensus on the distribution of land and power under the prodding of US matchmakers is a non-starter -- and therefore unlikely to lead to a goal which is of increasing urgency in America’s national interest. Arguably, it’s increasingly important even for the Israelis, since the status quo has already eroded prospects for a two-state solution to the point where both sides may be consigned to an even longer and more bitter conflict.
Hence the necessity of correcting Vice-President Biden: Progress in the Middle East will not come until the United States changes Israel’s cost-benefit analysis for maintaining the status quo. The only Israeli leader capable of accepting the parameters of a two-state peace with the Palestinians, which are already widely known, is one who can convincingly demonstrate to his electorate that the alternatives are worse. Right now, without real pressure, without real cost, with nothing but words, there is simply no downside to the status quo for Israel. Until there is, things are unlikely to change, no matter the peril to US troops throughout the Middle East.
Tony Karon is a senior editor at Time.com and runs the website Rootless Cosmopolitan. This article was first published at TomDispatch.com
Copyright © 2010 Le Monde diplomatique – distributed by Agence Global
by Tony Karon
Uncomfortable at the spectacle of the Obama administration in an open confrontation with the Israeli government, Connecticut Senator Joe Lieberman -- who represents the interests of Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu’s Likud Party on Capitol Hill as faithfully as he does those of the health insurance industry -- called for a halt. “Let’s cut the family fighting, the family feud,” he said. “It’s unnecessary; it’s destructive of our shared national interest. It’s time to lower voices, to get over the family feud between the US and Israel. It just doesn’t serve anybody’s interests but our enemies’.”
The idea that the United States and Israel are “family” with identical national interests is a convenient fiction that Lieberman and his fellow Israel partisans have worked relentlessly to promote -- and enforce -- in Washington over the past two decades. If the bonds are indeed familial, however, the recent showdown between Washington and the Netanyahu government may be counted as one of those feuds in which truths are uttered in the heat of the moment that call into question the fundamental terms of the relationship. Such truths are never easily swept under the rug once the dispute is settled. The immediate rupture, that is, precludes a simple return to the status quo ante; instead, a renegotiation of the terms of the relationship somehow ends up on the agenda.
Sure, the Obama administration and the Netanyahu government are now working feverishly to find a formula that will allow them to move on from a contretemps that began when the Israelis ambushed Vice-President Joe Biden, announcing plans to build 1,600 new housing units for settlers in occupied East Jerusalem. He was, of course, in Israel to promote the Obama administration’s failing efforts to rehabilitate negotiations toward a two-state peace agreement, a goal regularly spurned by Israel’s continued construction on land occupied in 1967.
Once again, as when Obama demanded a complete settlement freeze from the Netanyahu government in 2009, the Israelis will fend off any demand that they completely reverse their latest construction plans. Instead, they will shamelessly offer to continue their settlement activity on a “don’t-ask-don’t-tell” basis, professing rhetorical support for a two-state solution to placate the Americans, even as they systematically erode its prospects on the ground.
There is, as former Secretary of State James Baker has noted, no shortage of chutzpah in this Israeli government. “United States taxpayers are giving Israel roughly $3 billion each year, which amounts to something like $1,000 for every Israeli citizen, at a time when our own economy is in bad shape and a lot of Americans would appreciate that kind of helping hand from their own government,” Baker said in a recent interview. “Given that fact, it is not unreasonable to ask the Israeli leadership to respect US policy on settlements.”
Sooner or later, the present imbroglio is likely to be fudged over, but make no mistake, it opened Washington up to a renewed discussion of the conventional wisdom of unconditional support for Israel. It also brought into the public arena the way US administrations over the past two decades have enabled that country’s ever-expanding occupation regime and whether such a policy is compatible with US national interests in the Middle East.
Back in 2006, the foreign policy thinkers John Mearshimer and Stephen Walt provoked a firestorm of ridicule and ad hominem abuse for suggesting in their book, The Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy, that the goals pursued by the two sides were, in fact, far from identical and often at odds -- and that partisans motivated by Israel’s interests lobbied aggressively to skew US foreign policy in their favor. Israel partisans also heaped derision on the suggestion by the Iraq Study Group commissioned by President George W. Bush that the United States would not be able to achieve its goals in the Middle East without first settling the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Petraeus weighs in
Response to the reiteration of the idea that Israel’s behavior might be jeopardizing US interests has been strikingly muted by comparison. That’s because it came from General David Petraeus, commander of US Central Command (Centcom), which oversees America’s two wars of the moment. He is the most celebrated US military officer of his generation, and a favorite of those most ferocious of Israel partisans, the neocons.
Petraeus told Senators: “The enduring hostilities between Israel and some of its neighbors present distinct challenges to our ability to advance our interests in [Centcom’s] AOR [Area of Responsibility].” He added, “The conflict foments anti-American sentiment, due to a perception of US favoritism for Israel. Arab anger over the Palestinian question limits the strength and depth of US partnerships with governments and peoples in the AOR and weakens the legitimacy of moderate regimes in the Arab world. Meanwhile, al-Qaida and other militant groups exploit that anger to mobilize support. The conflict also gives Iran influence in the Arab world through its clients, Lebanese Hizbullah and Hamas.” He also stressed that “progress toward resolving the political disputes in the Levant, particularly the Arab-Israeli conflict, is a major concern for Centcom.”
Normally, any linkage between the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and a wave of anti-Americanism in the Muslim world is pooh-poohed by neocons and other Israel partisans. Typically, they will derisively suggest that those who argue for the linkage made by Petraeus are naïve in their belief that al-Qaida would give up its jihad if only Israel and the Palestinians made peace. That, by the way, is a straw-man argument of the first order: The US has done plenty on its own to antagonize the Muslim world, and ending the Israeli-Palestinian conflict would not in itself resolve that antagonism. The point is simply that a fair solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is a necessary, if not sufficient, condition for repairing relations between the United States and the citizenry of many Muslim countries.
Abe Foxman, head of the Anti-Defamation League, who has made a profession of trying to negate the difference between anti-Semitism and criticism of (or hostility to) Israel, gamely ventured that “Gen Petraeus has simply erred in linking the challenges faced by the US and coalition forces in the region to a solution of the Israeli-Arab conflict, and blaming extremist activities on the absence of peace and the perceived US favoritism for Israel”. His conclusion: “This linkage is dangerous and counterproductive.”
You can hear the pain in Foxman’s admission that “it is that much more of a concern to hear this coming from such a great American patriot and hero.” That Petraeus chose to make his concerns public at the height of a public showdown between Israel and the United States, and to do so on Capitol Hill, where legislators seemed uncertain how to respond, signaled the seriousness of the uniformed military in pressing the issue.
The most powerful lobby
Longtime Washington military and intelligence affairs analyst Mark Perry caught the special significance of this at Foreign Policy’s website: “There are important and powerful lobbies in America: the NRA, the American Medical Association, the lawyers – and the Israeli lobby. But no lobby is as important, or as powerful, as the US military.” He noted as well that, in a January Centcom briefing of Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Admiral Michael Mullen, Petraeus had evidently suggested the Palestinian territories -- over which Israel continues to exercise sovereign military control -- be included under Centcom’s area of responsibility, a prospect that would make Israel’s leadership apoplectic.
It’s not that, as far as we know, Petraeus harbors any particular animus, or affection, for the Jewish state. It’s that, in his institutional role as the commander of hundreds of thousands of US troops stationed across what Washington strategists like to call the “arc of instability,” he is concerned about aggravating hostility towards the United States.
The idea that Washington needs to rein in Israeli expansionism and force a political solution to its conflict with the Palestinians is hardly novel for America’s unsentimental men in uniform. Former Secretary of State Colin Powell and former US Mideast envoy General Anthony Zinni, both of whom had their formative experiences of the region in the course of massive US military deployments there, were on the same page as Petraeus is today.
Lieutenant General Keith Dayton is the US officer responsible for creating and training the Palestinian Authority security force that has cracked down on West Bank militants and restrained them from attacking Israel over the past few years. He was no less blunt than Petraeus in a speech in Washington last year. He emphasized the premise on which the force was built, and withstood charges from within its own community that it was simply a gendarmerie for Israel: Its soldiers believed themselves to be the nucleus of the army of a future Palestinian state. The loyalty of his men, he warned, should not be taken for granted: “There is perhaps a two-year shelf life on being told that you’re creating a state, when you’re not.”
Vice-President Biden, too, was quoted in the Israeli press as having berated Netanyahu -- behind closed doors -- over his plans for settlement expansion, warning that it would put at risk the lives of American personnel in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan.
Tough-love solution
In public, of course, Biden offered familiar pablum direct from Joe Lieberman’s “family” album: “From my experience, the one precondition for progress [in the Middle East] is that the rest of the world knows this -- there is no space between the US and Israel when it comes to security, none. That’s the only time that progress has been made.”
In fact, the history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict suggests that the reverse is true. The origins of the peace process the Obama administration is now trying so desperately to resuscitate do not lie in the unconditional American support for Israel that has become a third rail in national politics over the past two decades. They lie in the national interest based tough love of the administration of President George H. W. Bush.
Grounded in a realist reading of American national interests across the Middle East -- at a moment when a military campaign to eject Saddam Hussein’s Iraqi forces from Kuwait had put hundreds of thousands of US troops on the ground there -- the first Bush administration recognized the need to balance Israel’s reasonable interests with those of its Arab neighbors. That’s why, in 1991, it dragged Israel’s hawkish Likud government under Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir to the Madrid conference, and so broke Israel’s “security” taboo on direct engagement with Yasser Arafat’s Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO).
The Bush administration also made it clear that there would be immediate and painful consequences for Israel if it continued building settlements on land conquered in the war of 1967, construction which the United States was then willing to term not only “unhelpful” -- the preferred euphemism of Presidents Bill Clinton, George W. Bush and now Barack Obama -- but illegal. Under the direction of Bush family consigliere and Secretary of State Jim Baker, Washington threatened to withdraw $10 billion in loan guarantees if Israeli colonization of Palestinian territory continued. In the resulting political crisis, Israelis -- mindful of their dependency on US support -- voted Shamir out of office and chose Yitzhak Rabin as prime minister.
Rabin has been rightly lionized as a leader who took a courageous decision to change course in the face of bitter domestic opposition. To understand how Israel started down the path of peace, however, it’s necessary to clean the Vaseline off the lens of history and quiet the string section.
Only three years earlier, Rabin had ordered Israeli troops to use baseball bats to break the limbs of stone-throwing teenagers in hopes of stopping the Palestinian intifada. He certainly did not embrace the Oslo peace process with the PLO out of some moral epiphany. He changed course thanks to a cold-blooded assessment of Israel’s strategic position at the time.
The United States then had a growing stake in creating a regional Pax Americana that required Arab support. Given the end of the cold war, Israel’s value as an ally was diminishing, while its expansionist policies, antagonizing Arab public opinion and making it more difficult for vulnerable regional governments to ally with Israel’s enabler, were increasingly a liability for Washington.
Rabin had reason to believe that US support for Israel at the expense of its neighbors would prove neither unconditional nor eternal. At the same time, the PLO had been weakened by years of Israeli military attacks and by a disastrous diplomatic blunder -- it had aligned itself with Saddam Hussein in the first Gulf war. It was a fortuitous moment, he concluded, to press for a political solution with the Palestinians on favorable terms, by trading the West Bank and Gaza for peace.
Where are the consequences?
Rabin acted because the consequences of maintaining the status quo seemed increasingly unpleasant, which takes nothing away from his courage in doing so. The same could be said for South Africa’s last white president, FW de Klerk. He opted to negotiate an end to apartheid with Nelson Mandela’s ANC because the collapse of the Soviet Union had removed the most persuasive rationale the United States and other western powers had for backing his white-rule regime. Similarly, it’s unlikely that the Soviet political system would have put Mikhail Gorbachev in power if the KGB hadn’t determined that far-reaching changes were necessary to prevent Moscow from being eclipsed as a superpower, thanks to western economic and technological advances.
If US pressure and the spectre of isolation and opprobrium pushed Israel onto the path of a two-state solution, the easing of that pressure and the creation of the “familial” notion of US-Israel ties have coincided with a steady movement away from completing the peace process. Even at the height of the Oslo era, coddled by Clinton, the Israelis kept on expanding the settlements that jeopardized geographic prospects for Palestinian statehood.
The Israeli opposition, led by Ariel Sharon and Netanyahu, sought to prove Rabin wrong. They were convinced that American support could be maintained without conceding Palestinian statehood -- by making constant end runs around the Oval Office and appealing directly to Capitol Hill and US public opinion.
Sharon and Netanyahu were vindicated in spades when the suicide-terror strategy taken up by the second Palestinian intifada and the attacks of 9/11 led George W. Bush’s administration to re-conceptualize the world on the basis of its Global War on Terror. This, in turn, led Washington’s political class to accept Israel not as just another ally in that war, but as a model for how to conduct it.
In the Bush years, the peace process and the two-state solution became a hollow catechism that could be mouthed by Israeli leaders (and their supporters in Washington), while getting on with the task of smashing the Palestinian national movement and expanding settlements. In real terms, the peace process -- the series of reciprocal moves designed to build confidence for concluding final status talks and implementing a two-state solution -- died when Ariel Sharon came to power in February 2001.
Grand guignol
Even his 2005 withdrawal of Jewish settlements from Gaza was never conceived in terms of a peace process; it wasn’t even negotiated or coordinated with the Palestinian Authority. Sharon, in fact, imagined his unilateral withdrawal as a substitute for a peace agreement. It was designed, as Sharon’s top aide Dov Weissglass so memorably explained, as a dose of “formaldehyde that’s necessary so that there will not be a political process with the Palestinians.”
Despite mounting Arab exasperation, the Bush administration put no pressure on Israel to bring the peace process to a conclusion, limiting itself to the Grand Guignol of the “Annapolis process.” With all external compulsion to conclude a peace agreement removed, domestic political pressure in Israel not surprisingly collapsed as well. The Palestinians were now largely locked behind the vast separation wall that winds through the West Bank and the siege lines of Gaza. Their plight is once again invisible to Israelis, only 40% of whom, when asked by pollsters, even express an interest in seeing the peace process restarted. Only around 20% believe that such a move would bring any results.
“Israel has no real intention of quitting the territories or allowing the Palestinian people to exercise their rights,” wrote Israeli political commentator Gideon Levy in Haaretz on 18 March. “Israel does not truly intend to pursue peace, because life here seems to be good even without it. The continuation of the occupation doesn’t just endanger Israel’s future, it also poses the greatest risk to world peace, serving as a pretext for Israel’s most dangerous enemies. No change will come to pass in the complacent, belligerent and condescending Israel of today.”
The Obama administration can’t be under any illusions on this score. And they are being forced to confront it by another kind of pressure. The bills are coming due for Bush’s War-on-Terror adventurism. Those responsible for maintaining the US imperium in the Muslim world are now raising warning flags that the price to be paid for continuing to indulge Israel in evading its obligation to offer a fair settlement to the Palestinians could be high -- and, worse than that, unnecessary.
Israel’s leaders, and its voters, have amply demonstrated that they will not voluntarily relinquish control of the Palestinian territories as long as there are no real consequences for maintaining the status quo. Sure, you can tell them that the status quo is untenable, but the whole history of Israel from the 1920s onward has been about transforming the impossible into the inevitable by changing the facts on the ground. Building settlements on occupied territory in violation of international law after 1967 seemed untenable at the time; today, the US government says Israel will keep most of those major settlement blocs in any two-state solution. It is precisely in line with this sort of improvisational logic that Sharon calculated he could hold on to the settlements of the West Bank if he gave up the settlements of Gaza; the same logic allows Netanyahu to say the words “two states for two peoples” while always winking at his base that he has no intention of allowing it to happen.
A peace process that requires Israel and the Palestinians to reach a bilateral consensus on the distribution of land and power under the prodding of US matchmakers is a non-starter -- and therefore unlikely to lead to a goal which is of increasing urgency in America’s national interest. Arguably, it’s increasingly important even for the Israelis, since the status quo has already eroded prospects for a two-state solution to the point where both sides may be consigned to an even longer and more bitter conflict.
Hence the necessity of correcting Vice-President Biden: Progress in the Middle East will not come until the United States changes Israel’s cost-benefit analysis for maintaining the status quo. The only Israeli leader capable of accepting the parameters of a two-state peace with the Palestinians, which are already widely known, is one who can convincingly demonstrate to his electorate that the alternatives are worse. Right now, without real pressure, without real cost, with nothing but words, there is simply no downside to the status quo for Israel. Until there is, things are unlikely to change, no matter the peril to US troops throughout the Middle East.
Tony Karon is a senior editor at Time.com and runs the website Rootless Cosmopolitan. This article was first published at TomDispatch.com
Copyright © 2010 Le Monde diplomatique – distributed by Agence Global
Sunday, March 28, 2010
Honduras: A Great Awakening
Hondurans' Great Awakening
By Dana Frank
This article appeared in the April 5, 2010 edition of The Nation.
March 18, 2010
Two powerful forces have swept through Honduras since the June 28, 2009, coup that deposed President Manuel "Mel" Zelaya: one magnificent, the other truly horrible. The first is the resistance movement that rose up to contest the coup, surprising everyone in its breadth, nonviolence and resilience. The second is the new regime's brutal repression in response. "It's been terribly painful, and a great awakening," reflects Ayax IrÃas, a sociologist at the National Autonomous University of Honduras.
While the conflict continues to escalate, the Obama administration is vigorously supporting the coup regime under Porfirio "Pepe" Lobo Sosa. "We believe that President Lobo and his administration have taken the steps necessary to restore democracy," declared Secretary of State Hillary Clinton on March 4. But the resistance movement itself, with its demand for a reconstitution of Honduran society from below, is a vivid testament to the country's need for real democracy. As the resistance faces off against the US-backed oligarchs and military, there's no question that this is the most important moment in Honduran history, even more important than the immense general strike of 1954, from which all modern Honduran history flows.
I returned to Honduras in February for the first time since the coup to find a country transformed. People involved in the resistance were bursting with political energy, with an utterly new faith in their power. But they were also well aware of how dangerous the situation is--as am I, so I am changing some of the identifying details of those with whom I spoke.
Most obviously new was the graffiti, which was everywhere I went--from Tegucigalpa, the capital; to San Pedro Sula, the big industrial city in the north; to the smaller cities of El Progreso and La Lima in the banana zone; to, most daringly, the walls along the US Air Force base at Palmerola. "¡Golpista!," the all-important epithet that means a perpetrator or supporter of the coup, or golpe de estado, was splayed on storefronts, television stations and houses. Most messages were straightforward: "Militares Asesinos" or "¡Elecciones No!," protesting the November 29 elections, boycotted by almost all pro-resistance candidates, who objected that no free and fair elections could take place under military occupation. Others were more pointedly personal: "Micheletti Pinochetti," equating the coup-regime president, Roberto Micheletti, with the dictator of Chile after its 1973 coup, Augusto Pinochet. "Erase me, golpista!" taunted one wall.
Even more remarkable was the change in young people. Teenagers and twentysomethings I had known for a decade--largely the children of trade unionists--who before hadn't been politically engaged at all, were suddenly sitting up in their chairs differently, eager to tell me stories of marches they'd joined, tear gas they'd tasted. One 15-year-old girl arrived in a red T-shirt reading, "I ♥ Honduras Without Golpistas." Cellphones kept going off with newly popular songs of the resistance as ring tones--"Traidores" or "Nos Tienen Miedo Porque No Tenemos Miedo" (They're afraid of us because we're not afraid), the song by Argentine Liliana Felipe and Mexican Jesusa RodrÃguez, which has become the informal anthem of the resistance.
Older folks in the resistance, by contrast, had a sober look in their eyes. Unlike their children, those in their 50s and 60s know how much more terrible things can get; they lived through the 1970s and '80s in Central America. But as veterans of those struggles, they also had a clear sense that this was the main chance they'd been waiting for their whole lives; people were finally coming together and rising up. "All these years I've been involved in the struggle, but I've never felt that change was so close," EfraÃn Aguilar, a lifelong union activist, told me in low, firm tones.
In Tegucigalpa, I mentioned to a cabdriver the name of a Honduran Congressman I had just met in the airport the day before. "Golpista!" he spat out. He rattled off the man's connections to Micheletti and the most elite of Honduran oligarchs and kept talking with me about the resistance. Finally I asked him, Aren't you afraid to speak so openly with an unknown passenger? "After what we've been through, it doesn't matter anymore," he said.
When the military packed President Zelaya onto a plane to Costa Rica on June 28 in his now-famous pajamas, and the majority of Congress installed Micheletti as president with the collusion of the Supreme Court, enormous semi-spontaneous demonstrations and protests followed, beginning that same afternoon. Hundreds of thousands of people streamed into Tegucigalpa from small villages and cities throughout the country. An ad hoc national coalition calling itself the Frente Nacional de Resistencia Popular formed within days, uniting the campesino movement; indigenous, African-descent and women's organizations; human rights groups; trade unions; and, most astonishingly welcome, the gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender movement, in what they together refer to as un movimiento amplio, a broad movement. Trade unions make up the backbone of the movement, especially the teachers, public-sector workers, banana workers and bottling-plant workers, whose meeting halls are essential to the resistance. But part of what makes the resistance so strong is its diversified base, with each social group organized within its own constituency, each with a representative in the top-level coordinating committee--and each with its own stake in reconstituting Honduras.
The women's movement is just one example. Numerous observers reported that 60 to 70 percent of the demonstrators have been women, who join the resistance not only as individuals but also with long-established groups like the Center for Women's Rights; they have specific collective demands, linking the coup, the resistance movement and their vision of a new future. "Ni golpe de estado ni golpe a mujeres," for example, showed up on posters, in chants and in demands that the Frente take on domestic violence.
What unites the resistance is not just opposition to the coup regime but a positive vision of a new Honduras, to be enacted through a national assembly that would, in turn, produce a new Constitution. The slogan I saw everywhere, "Por un constituyente no excluyente" (For a constitutional convention that doesn't exclude), captures widespread hopes that the new Constitution, modeled after ones recently passed in Bolivia (2009), Ecuador (2008) and Venezuela (1999), could guarantee and expand basic rights of the sectors that make up the resistance, such as land rights for campesinos and indigenous peoples, women's rights and basic labor rights.
The resistance, broadly defined, has a solid middle-class presence as well, including not just left-wing college students but large numbers of Liberal Party members loyal to Zelaya. During the big marches in the capital, many supporters from the middle class weren't comfortable joining on foot, so they came in their cars, whole families honking, waving banners and shouting. In one march on August 17, thousands of cars joined at the end, so many that it took them two hours to pass by.
By a sheer act of collective will, the movement has been overwhelmingly nonviolent, a decision made entirely from below, then officially ratified by the resistance coalition after the first week. What supporters call their movimiento pacÃfico, in classic Gandhian fashion, has served to sharply highlight, within Honduras and all over the world, the brutality of the government.
From day one, the coup government launched a vicious assault on those who dared to challenge it, deploying not just the military but municipal police and newly mobilized paramilitary assassins. Peaceful demonstrations full of old people and children were met with volley after volley of tear gas, the kinds that make you vomit or cry or feel like you can't breathe, or all three. According to eyewitnesses, media reports and independent Honduran human rights groups that are bravely tracking all this repression, police swept through crowds beating marchers with batons sporting new metal tips, snatching bystanders and protesters alike and throwing them into the back of trucks. Once in custody, many were beaten, tortured and/or raped. According to the Committee of Families of the Disappeared in Honduras (COFADEH), more than 3,000 people have been illegally detained since June 28. COFADEH reports that at least forty-one Hondurans associated with the resistance have been killed, including trade unionists and GLBT activists. One of the first was Isis Obed, 19, shot in the head by a government sniper from atop the Tegucigalpa airport at a demonstration on July 5 when President Zelaya tried to return by plane. The great majority of those killed have been rank-and-file activists who were kidnapped or shot in their homes or in the streets by unknown assailants.
While much international attention has focused on the capital, the repression has been nationwide. On the highway in Choloma, outside San Pedro Sula, protesters at twelve demonstrations in July, August and September occupied a strategic bottleneck through which trucks have to pass carrying industrial products to Puerto Cortés. Witnesses reported that the protesters were met with brutal attacks: tear gas and beatings, but also violence directed especially at women, including nightsticks jammed into women's crotches, rapes in detention and foul insults telling them they deserved it because they weren't in their proper place in the home. Irma Villanueva, 25, testified on the radio that she was detained and gang-raped by four police officers after a demonstration in Choloma on August 14.
In a snowballing process of collective awakening and self-discovery, though, this ongoing process of protest, repression and even greater subsequent protest has changed ordinary people's sense of themselves and their power--all the more astonishing because none of this was supposed to happen in Honduras. "Hondurans always had the reputation of being cowards," reflected IrÃas, the sociologist. "I never imagined that Hondurans had the ability or disposition to struggle like this." Before the coup, Honduras was largely known as the political black hole of Central America: during the 1970s and '80s, it didn't produce large guerrilla movements on the left as did its neighbors Guatemala, El Salvador and Nicaragua. Instead, it served as the "USS Honduras," the base for the Reagan administration's Contra war against the Nicaraguan Sandinistas.
Honduras did, in fact, have a small armed left in the '80s and government-sponsored death squads led by the notorious Battalion 3-16, which killed more than 100 activists. But the country's population of 7.8 million, despite a poverty rate above 60 percent, has remained largely in the ideological thrall of a few oligarch families locked into a two-party patronage system, never able to mobilize a third party from the left and not, in general, engaged in meaningful debate.
Now, if nothing else, the country is politicized down to the bone. "What I love is that everyone--men, women, old people, little kids--is talking about politics," said Zoila Lagos, a veteran of the 1980s struggles who lives in a poor barrio near Choloma. In Tegucigalpa especially, activists discussed the resistance openly with me, in stores, in cabs and on crowded streets downtown. One young man told me it was a deliberate strategy: "We're normalizing the resistance, normalizing the concepts of struggle, so they're something familiar." There's a new moral line in the sand between the resistance, representing the vast majority of the Honduran people, and the golpistas--the oligarchs, their media and the military.
The alternative media have been essential to this rapid politicization at the grassroots. When the coup was launched, every metropolitan daily newspaper except one, every big-city television station except one and the great majority of the mainstream radio stations overtly supported the new regime, spouting bald lies that even the most neutral could see through: that the protesters were just violent riffraff; that Hugo Chávez was about to invade Honduras. La Prensa, a San Pedro Sula daily, even airbrushed out the blood dripping from the head of Isis Obed in a photograph taken just after he was killed at the airport. The outrageous collusion of the mainstream media, owned by the same oligarchs who have controlled the government for decades and who perpetrated the coup, contributed to the growth of popular consciousness and a higher level of critical thinking about the power structure within Honduras. "It opened the eyes of the people. The media are exactly the same, but the people aren't," observed Padre Melo, an esteemed Jesuit priest who directs Radio Progreso, an alternative radio station in El Progreso.
Critiques of the press were everywhere I went, like the big white banner sporting the logo of one of San Pedro Sula's leading dailies, promising "Get Stupid in Three Days. Read La Prensa." People kept repeating their favorite chant from the marches: "¡No somos cinco, no somos cien, prensa vendida cuéntanos bien!" (We're not five, we're not a hundred, sold-out press, count us well!).
Alternative radio has been particularly important in breaking through what those in the resistance call the "media fence" around the coup. Two powerful stations, Radio Globo in the capital and Radio Progreso in the north, have fully developed studios, transmitters and websites. Others are low-wattage operations run by indigenous groups, or Radio Uno in San Pedro Sula, run by teenagers in their school uniforms out of a journalism school. The programming on these stations is highly participatory--full of call-ins and local news reports--and it fills the streets, as vendors, cabdrivers and store owners play them day and night.
The coup government is well aware of the importance of the resistance media and has repeatedly clamped down on these outlets as well as opponents in the print media, often brutally, accusing them of "media terrorism." On the day of the coup, for example, the military surrounded Radio Progreso and shut it down for several hours. Since then, "we've gotten bomb threats almost daily," reported Radio Progreso director Padre Melo. Most recently, on January 6 unknown assailants burned down Radio Faluma Bimetu, a station run by Afro-indigenous GarÃfuna people in Triunfo de la Cruz.
No one really knows how deep all this popular politicization runs. Many Hondurans are keeping their heads low, quietly cheering on the resistance. Others still believe the mainstream media and are grateful that the government is "restoring order." We do have a few crude quantitative measures. While the government keeps revising its initial figures downward, it appears that the November 29 election, boycotted by the resistance, had only a 35 or 40 percent voter turnout. For another measure, 450,000 to 600,000 Hondurans, a very low estimate, participated in demonstrations on the two biggest days of protest: July 5 and September 15. As a percentage of the population, that's the equivalent in the United States of more than 20 million people.
On February 17 I was interviewed on Radio Uno by Pedro Brizuela, a wily and witty veteran communist in his 70s, who for many years has been working with the GarÃfuna along the Atlantic coast. Exactly one week later, assassins gunned down his 36-year-old daughter, Claudia, as she opened her front door in San Pedro Sula. It was a clear message to Pedro and to anyone else in the movement: keep fighting, and we'll kill your children.
Under the new Lobo administration, the repression isn't over, and it's getting more insidious. Lobo has reappointed the same military leaders who perpetrated the coup, with the exception of Gen. Romeo Vásquez Velásquez, who was dismissed only to be named head of Hondutel, the state-owned telephone company, which the oligarchs are itching to privatize. Paramilitary-style violence against the resistance has escalated since Lobo's inauguration on January 27. On February 15, two masked men on a motorcycle gunned down Julio Fúnez BenÃtez, of the sanitation workers' union. On March 14, two vehicles shot forty-seven bullets into the car of Nahún Ely Palacios Arteaga, news director of Canal 5 in the Aguán Valley, killing him instantly. Both men had protested the coup government.
The government, military and media want to pretend that this is all common crime, which is, in fact, rampant in Honduras--violence has touched both sides. On March 1 one outspoken pro-coup journalist was shot at, and her driving companion, a TV reporter, was killed. But no one in the movement believes there is anything random about the recent murders of resistance members, including one campesino activist, two trade unionists and a rank-and-file activist, which appear clearly intended to terrorize the grassroots resistance.
What happens next? The Lobo administration faces the task of suppressing a movement that is truly popular, with great determination, organizational capacity and hope. The Frente is still consolidating and expanding its regional base. It has announced that it does not recognize the Lobo government and plans to continue to destabilize what it views as a weak and illegitimate regime. It has denounced the impunity that continues, including the so-called "amnesty" in which the generals who perpetrated the coup--and who, with the exception of Vásquez Velásquez, remain at the top of the armed forces--were swiftly charged, tried and exonerated in January. The Frente's plan is to continue to challenge the government at the grassroots, forcing in the next year a National Assembly that would, in turn, lead to a constitutional convention and a new Constitution. It is already moving forward with plans for its own National Assembly on June 28, the anniversary of the coup. The Frente has announced it will eventually become a political party, but not for some time, in part because of the risk of co-optation as it tries to hold together its diverse base. "The struggle has only begun," observed Zoila Lagos, my friend from Choloma.
Meanwhile, the Obama administration has swiftly recognized Lobo's new government and is pretending everything's just fine in Honduras. US aid, both military and humanitarian, is flowing once again, shoring up an unstable government with little legitimacy. Inside our own media fence, Honduras has largely dropped from the headlines.
Progressives in the United States need to make sure the Obama administration doesn't get away with shoring up the coup regime of the Honduran oligarchs and military. We need to demand that the United States withdraw its recognition of the Lobo government; halt all aid, as the Frente has explicitly requested; cut ties to the Honduran military, including ongoing training at the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation (formerly known as the School of the Americas); and close the US base at Palmerola. Obama and Clinton should denounce the ongoing human rights abuses and the outrageous impunity granted the Honduran armed forces, police and paramilitaries--along with the Congress members and Supreme Court justices who backed the coup. If we're going to achieve any of these goals, though, we need to build our own movimiento amplio in support of the Honduran people. We can begin by building up grassroots pressure on members of Congress, district by district, working through our own unions, faith communities, immigrant organizations, GLBT and women's groups.
Whatever happens next, the Honduran people are not going back to sleep. As Carlos Humberto Reyes, the grand charismatic figure at the head of the resistance, who ran for president as an independent but pulled out in protest, said to me, "The important thing is that the people have changed."
Dana Frank is a history professor at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and the author, among other books, of Bananeras: Women Transforming the Banana Unions of Latin America, which focuses on Honduras. She is writing a book on the AFL-CIO's cold war intervention in the Honduran labor movement.
By Dana Frank
This article appeared in the April 5, 2010 edition of The Nation.
March 18, 2010
Two powerful forces have swept through Honduras since the June 28, 2009, coup that deposed President Manuel "Mel" Zelaya: one magnificent, the other truly horrible. The first is the resistance movement that rose up to contest the coup, surprising everyone in its breadth, nonviolence and resilience. The second is the new regime's brutal repression in response. "It's been terribly painful, and a great awakening," reflects Ayax IrÃas, a sociologist at the National Autonomous University of Honduras.
While the conflict continues to escalate, the Obama administration is vigorously supporting the coup regime under Porfirio "Pepe" Lobo Sosa. "We believe that President Lobo and his administration have taken the steps necessary to restore democracy," declared Secretary of State Hillary Clinton on March 4. But the resistance movement itself, with its demand for a reconstitution of Honduran society from below, is a vivid testament to the country's need for real democracy. As the resistance faces off against the US-backed oligarchs and military, there's no question that this is the most important moment in Honduran history, even more important than the immense general strike of 1954, from which all modern Honduran history flows.
I returned to Honduras in February for the first time since the coup to find a country transformed. People involved in the resistance were bursting with political energy, with an utterly new faith in their power. But they were also well aware of how dangerous the situation is--as am I, so I am changing some of the identifying details of those with whom I spoke.
Most obviously new was the graffiti, which was everywhere I went--from Tegucigalpa, the capital; to San Pedro Sula, the big industrial city in the north; to the smaller cities of El Progreso and La Lima in the banana zone; to, most daringly, the walls along the US Air Force base at Palmerola. "¡Golpista!," the all-important epithet that means a perpetrator or supporter of the coup, or golpe de estado, was splayed on storefronts, television stations and houses. Most messages were straightforward: "Militares Asesinos" or "¡Elecciones No!," protesting the November 29 elections, boycotted by almost all pro-resistance candidates, who objected that no free and fair elections could take place under military occupation. Others were more pointedly personal: "Micheletti Pinochetti," equating the coup-regime president, Roberto Micheletti, with the dictator of Chile after its 1973 coup, Augusto Pinochet. "Erase me, golpista!" taunted one wall.
Even more remarkable was the change in young people. Teenagers and twentysomethings I had known for a decade--largely the children of trade unionists--who before hadn't been politically engaged at all, were suddenly sitting up in their chairs differently, eager to tell me stories of marches they'd joined, tear gas they'd tasted. One 15-year-old girl arrived in a red T-shirt reading, "I ♥ Honduras Without Golpistas." Cellphones kept going off with newly popular songs of the resistance as ring tones--"Traidores" or "Nos Tienen Miedo Porque No Tenemos Miedo" (They're afraid of us because we're not afraid), the song by Argentine Liliana Felipe and Mexican Jesusa RodrÃguez, which has become the informal anthem of the resistance.
Older folks in the resistance, by contrast, had a sober look in their eyes. Unlike their children, those in their 50s and 60s know how much more terrible things can get; they lived through the 1970s and '80s in Central America. But as veterans of those struggles, they also had a clear sense that this was the main chance they'd been waiting for their whole lives; people were finally coming together and rising up. "All these years I've been involved in the struggle, but I've never felt that change was so close," EfraÃn Aguilar, a lifelong union activist, told me in low, firm tones.
In Tegucigalpa, I mentioned to a cabdriver the name of a Honduran Congressman I had just met in the airport the day before. "Golpista!" he spat out. He rattled off the man's connections to Micheletti and the most elite of Honduran oligarchs and kept talking with me about the resistance. Finally I asked him, Aren't you afraid to speak so openly with an unknown passenger? "After what we've been through, it doesn't matter anymore," he said.
When the military packed President Zelaya onto a plane to Costa Rica on June 28 in his now-famous pajamas, and the majority of Congress installed Micheletti as president with the collusion of the Supreme Court, enormous semi-spontaneous demonstrations and protests followed, beginning that same afternoon. Hundreds of thousands of people streamed into Tegucigalpa from small villages and cities throughout the country. An ad hoc national coalition calling itself the Frente Nacional de Resistencia Popular formed within days, uniting the campesino movement; indigenous, African-descent and women's organizations; human rights groups; trade unions; and, most astonishingly welcome, the gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender movement, in what they together refer to as un movimiento amplio, a broad movement. Trade unions make up the backbone of the movement, especially the teachers, public-sector workers, banana workers and bottling-plant workers, whose meeting halls are essential to the resistance. But part of what makes the resistance so strong is its diversified base, with each social group organized within its own constituency, each with a representative in the top-level coordinating committee--and each with its own stake in reconstituting Honduras.
The women's movement is just one example. Numerous observers reported that 60 to 70 percent of the demonstrators have been women, who join the resistance not only as individuals but also with long-established groups like the Center for Women's Rights; they have specific collective demands, linking the coup, the resistance movement and their vision of a new future. "Ni golpe de estado ni golpe a mujeres," for example, showed up on posters, in chants and in demands that the Frente take on domestic violence.
What unites the resistance is not just opposition to the coup regime but a positive vision of a new Honduras, to be enacted through a national assembly that would, in turn, produce a new Constitution. The slogan I saw everywhere, "Por un constituyente no excluyente" (For a constitutional convention that doesn't exclude), captures widespread hopes that the new Constitution, modeled after ones recently passed in Bolivia (2009), Ecuador (2008) and Venezuela (1999), could guarantee and expand basic rights of the sectors that make up the resistance, such as land rights for campesinos and indigenous peoples, women's rights and basic labor rights.
The resistance, broadly defined, has a solid middle-class presence as well, including not just left-wing college students but large numbers of Liberal Party members loyal to Zelaya. During the big marches in the capital, many supporters from the middle class weren't comfortable joining on foot, so they came in their cars, whole families honking, waving banners and shouting. In one march on August 17, thousands of cars joined at the end, so many that it took them two hours to pass by.
By a sheer act of collective will, the movement has been overwhelmingly nonviolent, a decision made entirely from below, then officially ratified by the resistance coalition after the first week. What supporters call their movimiento pacÃfico, in classic Gandhian fashion, has served to sharply highlight, within Honduras and all over the world, the brutality of the government.
From day one, the coup government launched a vicious assault on those who dared to challenge it, deploying not just the military but municipal police and newly mobilized paramilitary assassins. Peaceful demonstrations full of old people and children were met with volley after volley of tear gas, the kinds that make you vomit or cry or feel like you can't breathe, or all three. According to eyewitnesses, media reports and independent Honduran human rights groups that are bravely tracking all this repression, police swept through crowds beating marchers with batons sporting new metal tips, snatching bystanders and protesters alike and throwing them into the back of trucks. Once in custody, many were beaten, tortured and/or raped. According to the Committee of Families of the Disappeared in Honduras (COFADEH), more than 3,000 people have been illegally detained since June 28. COFADEH reports that at least forty-one Hondurans associated with the resistance have been killed, including trade unionists and GLBT activists. One of the first was Isis Obed, 19, shot in the head by a government sniper from atop the Tegucigalpa airport at a demonstration on July 5 when President Zelaya tried to return by plane. The great majority of those killed have been rank-and-file activists who were kidnapped or shot in their homes or in the streets by unknown assailants.
While much international attention has focused on the capital, the repression has been nationwide. On the highway in Choloma, outside San Pedro Sula, protesters at twelve demonstrations in July, August and September occupied a strategic bottleneck through which trucks have to pass carrying industrial products to Puerto Cortés. Witnesses reported that the protesters were met with brutal attacks: tear gas and beatings, but also violence directed especially at women, including nightsticks jammed into women's crotches, rapes in detention and foul insults telling them they deserved it because they weren't in their proper place in the home. Irma Villanueva, 25, testified on the radio that she was detained and gang-raped by four police officers after a demonstration in Choloma on August 14.
In a snowballing process of collective awakening and self-discovery, though, this ongoing process of protest, repression and even greater subsequent protest has changed ordinary people's sense of themselves and their power--all the more astonishing because none of this was supposed to happen in Honduras. "Hondurans always had the reputation of being cowards," reflected IrÃas, the sociologist. "I never imagined that Hondurans had the ability or disposition to struggle like this." Before the coup, Honduras was largely known as the political black hole of Central America: during the 1970s and '80s, it didn't produce large guerrilla movements on the left as did its neighbors Guatemala, El Salvador and Nicaragua. Instead, it served as the "USS Honduras," the base for the Reagan administration's Contra war against the Nicaraguan Sandinistas.
Honduras did, in fact, have a small armed left in the '80s and government-sponsored death squads led by the notorious Battalion 3-16, which killed more than 100 activists. But the country's population of 7.8 million, despite a poverty rate above 60 percent, has remained largely in the ideological thrall of a few oligarch families locked into a two-party patronage system, never able to mobilize a third party from the left and not, in general, engaged in meaningful debate.
Now, if nothing else, the country is politicized down to the bone. "What I love is that everyone--men, women, old people, little kids--is talking about politics," said Zoila Lagos, a veteran of the 1980s struggles who lives in a poor barrio near Choloma. In Tegucigalpa especially, activists discussed the resistance openly with me, in stores, in cabs and on crowded streets downtown. One young man told me it was a deliberate strategy: "We're normalizing the resistance, normalizing the concepts of struggle, so they're something familiar." There's a new moral line in the sand between the resistance, representing the vast majority of the Honduran people, and the golpistas--the oligarchs, their media and the military.
The alternative media have been essential to this rapid politicization at the grassroots. When the coup was launched, every metropolitan daily newspaper except one, every big-city television station except one and the great majority of the mainstream radio stations overtly supported the new regime, spouting bald lies that even the most neutral could see through: that the protesters were just violent riffraff; that Hugo Chávez was about to invade Honduras. La Prensa, a San Pedro Sula daily, even airbrushed out the blood dripping from the head of Isis Obed in a photograph taken just after he was killed at the airport. The outrageous collusion of the mainstream media, owned by the same oligarchs who have controlled the government for decades and who perpetrated the coup, contributed to the growth of popular consciousness and a higher level of critical thinking about the power structure within Honduras. "It opened the eyes of the people. The media are exactly the same, but the people aren't," observed Padre Melo, an esteemed Jesuit priest who directs Radio Progreso, an alternative radio station in El Progreso.
Critiques of the press were everywhere I went, like the big white banner sporting the logo of one of San Pedro Sula's leading dailies, promising "Get Stupid in Three Days. Read La Prensa." People kept repeating their favorite chant from the marches: "¡No somos cinco, no somos cien, prensa vendida cuéntanos bien!" (We're not five, we're not a hundred, sold-out press, count us well!).
Alternative radio has been particularly important in breaking through what those in the resistance call the "media fence" around the coup. Two powerful stations, Radio Globo in the capital and Radio Progreso in the north, have fully developed studios, transmitters and websites. Others are low-wattage operations run by indigenous groups, or Radio Uno in San Pedro Sula, run by teenagers in their school uniforms out of a journalism school. The programming on these stations is highly participatory--full of call-ins and local news reports--and it fills the streets, as vendors, cabdrivers and store owners play them day and night.
The coup government is well aware of the importance of the resistance media and has repeatedly clamped down on these outlets as well as opponents in the print media, often brutally, accusing them of "media terrorism." On the day of the coup, for example, the military surrounded Radio Progreso and shut it down for several hours. Since then, "we've gotten bomb threats almost daily," reported Radio Progreso director Padre Melo. Most recently, on January 6 unknown assailants burned down Radio Faluma Bimetu, a station run by Afro-indigenous GarÃfuna people in Triunfo de la Cruz.
No one really knows how deep all this popular politicization runs. Many Hondurans are keeping their heads low, quietly cheering on the resistance. Others still believe the mainstream media and are grateful that the government is "restoring order." We do have a few crude quantitative measures. While the government keeps revising its initial figures downward, it appears that the November 29 election, boycotted by the resistance, had only a 35 or 40 percent voter turnout. For another measure, 450,000 to 600,000 Hondurans, a very low estimate, participated in demonstrations on the two biggest days of protest: July 5 and September 15. As a percentage of the population, that's the equivalent in the United States of more than 20 million people.
On February 17 I was interviewed on Radio Uno by Pedro Brizuela, a wily and witty veteran communist in his 70s, who for many years has been working with the GarÃfuna along the Atlantic coast. Exactly one week later, assassins gunned down his 36-year-old daughter, Claudia, as she opened her front door in San Pedro Sula. It was a clear message to Pedro and to anyone else in the movement: keep fighting, and we'll kill your children.
Under the new Lobo administration, the repression isn't over, and it's getting more insidious. Lobo has reappointed the same military leaders who perpetrated the coup, with the exception of Gen. Romeo Vásquez Velásquez, who was dismissed only to be named head of Hondutel, the state-owned telephone company, which the oligarchs are itching to privatize. Paramilitary-style violence against the resistance has escalated since Lobo's inauguration on January 27. On February 15, two masked men on a motorcycle gunned down Julio Fúnez BenÃtez, of the sanitation workers' union. On March 14, two vehicles shot forty-seven bullets into the car of Nahún Ely Palacios Arteaga, news director of Canal 5 in the Aguán Valley, killing him instantly. Both men had protested the coup government.
The government, military and media want to pretend that this is all common crime, which is, in fact, rampant in Honduras--violence has touched both sides. On March 1 one outspoken pro-coup journalist was shot at, and her driving companion, a TV reporter, was killed. But no one in the movement believes there is anything random about the recent murders of resistance members, including one campesino activist, two trade unionists and a rank-and-file activist, which appear clearly intended to terrorize the grassroots resistance.
What happens next? The Lobo administration faces the task of suppressing a movement that is truly popular, with great determination, organizational capacity and hope. The Frente is still consolidating and expanding its regional base. It has announced that it does not recognize the Lobo government and plans to continue to destabilize what it views as a weak and illegitimate regime. It has denounced the impunity that continues, including the so-called "amnesty" in which the generals who perpetrated the coup--and who, with the exception of Vásquez Velásquez, remain at the top of the armed forces--were swiftly charged, tried and exonerated in January. The Frente's plan is to continue to challenge the government at the grassroots, forcing in the next year a National Assembly that would, in turn, lead to a constitutional convention and a new Constitution. It is already moving forward with plans for its own National Assembly on June 28, the anniversary of the coup. The Frente has announced it will eventually become a political party, but not for some time, in part because of the risk of co-optation as it tries to hold together its diverse base. "The struggle has only begun," observed Zoila Lagos, my friend from Choloma.
Meanwhile, the Obama administration has swiftly recognized Lobo's new government and is pretending everything's just fine in Honduras. US aid, both military and humanitarian, is flowing once again, shoring up an unstable government with little legitimacy. Inside our own media fence, Honduras has largely dropped from the headlines.
Progressives in the United States need to make sure the Obama administration doesn't get away with shoring up the coup regime of the Honduran oligarchs and military. We need to demand that the United States withdraw its recognition of the Lobo government; halt all aid, as the Frente has explicitly requested; cut ties to the Honduran military, including ongoing training at the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation (formerly known as the School of the Americas); and close the US base at Palmerola. Obama and Clinton should denounce the ongoing human rights abuses and the outrageous impunity granted the Honduran armed forces, police and paramilitaries--along with the Congress members and Supreme Court justices who backed the coup. If we're going to achieve any of these goals, though, we need to build our own movimiento amplio in support of the Honduran people. We can begin by building up grassroots pressure on members of Congress, district by district, working through our own unions, faith communities, immigrant organizations, GLBT and women's groups.
Whatever happens next, the Honduran people are not going back to sleep. As Carlos Humberto Reyes, the grand charismatic figure at the head of the resistance, who ran for president as an independent but pulled out in protest, said to me, "The important thing is that the people have changed."
Dana Frank is a history professor at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and the author, among other books, of Bananeras: Women Transforming the Banana Unions of Latin America, which focuses on Honduras. She is writing a book on the AFL-CIO's cold war intervention in the Honduran labor movement.
Saturday, March 27, 2010
USA: What Neofascism Looks Like
"This Is What Neofascism Looks Like"
by Matthew Rothschild
Republicans and their media outlet, Fox News, have encouraged rightwing violence in recent years -- and intensely so since the 2008 presidential election. In the incidents during this past week, we may have seen a prelude to something that could grow much worse.
The rightwing violence we’ve been witnessing this past week in America may be a prelude to something much worse.
The hideous and bigoted slurs aimed at Representatives Barney Frank and John Lewis; the spitting on another black Representative, Emanuel Cleaver; the throwing of bricks through the windows of other legislators’ offices; the cutting of a gas line at the home of the brother of a legislator; the lynching threats; the assassination threats; the mailing of a shredded American flag doused in gasoline: All of these incidents are the acts of modern-day brownshirts. This is what neofascism looks like.
Republicans have been tardy and muted at best in criticizing such criminal acts. And at worst they have said nothing, or have even egged on the criminals -- as with Sarah Palin’s putting cross-hairs on a map where she has targeted Democrats, with the reckless message:
“Don't Retreat, Instead -- RELOAD!”
And far from distancing himself from Sarah Palin, Senator John McCain invited her down to Arizona to campaign for him. And he has defended her rhetoric on the Today Show this week, saying her choice of words was “fine.”
"The language that we should be using today is the language that we are using," he said, though he did add, "Any threats of violence or anything along those lines is totally unacceptable and we condemn it all.”
House Minority Leader John Boehner also pulled away from the madding crowd. "Violence and threats are unacceptable. That is not the American way," he said on Fox News. "Yes, I know there's anger, but let's take that anger and go out and register people to vote, go volunteer on a political campaign, and let's do it the right way."
Republican Senator Chuck Grassley chimed in: This “is not what should be going on in America. We should have respect for other peoples’ opinions.”
But then there is House Minority Whip Eric Cantor, who not only stretched the truth about a bullet he said was aimed at his office. He also said Democratic leaders “are dangerously fanning the flames by suggesting that these incidents be used as a political weapon.”
But it has been Republicans and their mouthpieces on Fox and talk radio who have been fueling the hatred around the country. They can try to distance themselves from it now, but the damage has been done.
There is, across the land, a level of vileness we haven’t seen in this country in four decades. And this vileness, as history shows us, can lead to even worse acts of violence.
When 14 percent of Americans in a recent poll believe that President Obama may be the Antichrist, you have to worry for his safety.
It would not surprise me in the least if someone tried to gun down President Obama—or Speaker Pelosi, for that matter, so demonized is she in rightist circles.
The wise author Chris Hedges has been warning us for a couple years now about the rise of neofascism in America. Recently, he wrote, “We stand on the cusp of one of the bleakest periods in human history when the bright lights of a civilization blink out and we will descend for decades, if not centuries, into barbarity.”
This past week may mark the beginning of that descent.
Matthew Rothschild is the editor of The Progressive magazine.
Copyright © 2010 The Progressive -- distributed by Agence Global
by Matthew Rothschild
Republicans and their media outlet, Fox News, have encouraged rightwing violence in recent years -- and intensely so since the 2008 presidential election. In the incidents during this past week, we may have seen a prelude to something that could grow much worse.
The rightwing violence we’ve been witnessing this past week in America may be a prelude to something much worse.
The hideous and bigoted slurs aimed at Representatives Barney Frank and John Lewis; the spitting on another black Representative, Emanuel Cleaver; the throwing of bricks through the windows of other legislators’ offices; the cutting of a gas line at the home of the brother of a legislator; the lynching threats; the assassination threats; the mailing of a shredded American flag doused in gasoline: All of these incidents are the acts of modern-day brownshirts. This is what neofascism looks like.
Republicans have been tardy and muted at best in criticizing such criminal acts. And at worst they have said nothing, or have even egged on the criminals -- as with Sarah Palin’s putting cross-hairs on a map where she has targeted Democrats, with the reckless message:
“Don't Retreat, Instead -- RELOAD!”
And far from distancing himself from Sarah Palin, Senator John McCain invited her down to Arizona to campaign for him. And he has defended her rhetoric on the Today Show this week, saying her choice of words was “fine.”
"The language that we should be using today is the language that we are using," he said, though he did add, "Any threats of violence or anything along those lines is totally unacceptable and we condemn it all.”
House Minority Leader John Boehner also pulled away from the madding crowd. "Violence and threats are unacceptable. That is not the American way," he said on Fox News. "Yes, I know there's anger, but let's take that anger and go out and register people to vote, go volunteer on a political campaign, and let's do it the right way."
Republican Senator Chuck Grassley chimed in: This “is not what should be going on in America. We should have respect for other peoples’ opinions.”
But then there is House Minority Whip Eric Cantor, who not only stretched the truth about a bullet he said was aimed at his office. He also said Democratic leaders “are dangerously fanning the flames by suggesting that these incidents be used as a political weapon.”
But it has been Republicans and their mouthpieces on Fox and talk radio who have been fueling the hatred around the country. They can try to distance themselves from it now, but the damage has been done.
There is, across the land, a level of vileness we haven’t seen in this country in four decades. And this vileness, as history shows us, can lead to even worse acts of violence.
When 14 percent of Americans in a recent poll believe that President Obama may be the Antichrist, you have to worry for his safety.
It would not surprise me in the least if someone tried to gun down President Obama—or Speaker Pelosi, for that matter, so demonized is she in rightist circles.
The wise author Chris Hedges has been warning us for a couple years now about the rise of neofascism in America. Recently, he wrote, “We stand on the cusp of one of the bleakest periods in human history when the bright lights of a civilization blink out and we will descend for decades, if not centuries, into barbarity.”
This past week may mark the beginning of that descent.
Matthew Rothschild is the editor of The Progressive magazine.
Copyright © 2010 The Progressive -- distributed by Agence Global
Tuesday, March 23, 2010
Orion's Belt: Coroner Blames Victim in Two Year Old Hutchinson Wrongful Death
Delta motorcyclist impaired before crash with Mountie
Coroner's report says actions of both drivers contributed to crash
Motorcyclist Orion Hutchinson was killed in the collision with the Jeep. (Family photo)
March 23, 2010
CBC News
A coroner's report says the actions of both drivers contributed to the crash. A coroner's report says the actions of both drivers contributed to the crash. (CBC)
A Delta, B.C., motorcyclist killed in a collision with an RCMP officer's Jeep two years ago was impaired and speeding at the time of the crash, a coroner's investigation has determined.
The actions of both drivers, Orion Glenn Hutchinson, 21, and RCMP officer Cpl. Benjamin (Monty) Robinson, played a role in the collision, a report by the B.C. Coroners Service concluded.
Hutchinson was likely killed almost immediately by injuries he suffered when his motorcycle slammed into a Jeep driven by Robinson on a street in the community of Delta, south of Vancouver, on Oct. 26, 2008, the report said.
Speed, alcohol blamed
Coroner Mark Coleman concluded that speed and alcohol on Hutchinson's part were also contributing factors to the accident.
The motorcyclist had an alcohol level above the legal limit and was travelling between 66 km/h and 96 km/h when the collision occurred, Coleman concluded.
Robinson was making a left-hand turn and moving between 24 km/h and 29 km/h at the time of the crash, the coroner said.
"Speed and alcohol intoxication on the part of Mr. Hutchinson were contributing factors. Alcohol intoxication on the part of the driver of the Jeep is also believed to be contributing factor," concluded Coleman in the one-page report.
"I classify this death as accidental and make no recommendations."
Officer charged
Robinson, who was off-duty at the time of the collision, identified himself to witnesses before leaving the crash site with his two children to take them to his nearby home.
RCMP Cpl. Benjamin Robinson was charged with obstruction of justice following the crash. RCMP Cpl. Benjamin Robinson was charged with obstruction of justice following the crash. (CBC)
He later testified that he had two shots of vodka before returning to the crash scene and failing a Breathalyzer test.
Delta police recommended a charge of impaired driving against Robinson, but the Crown decided not to proceed. Instead, he was charged in December 2009 with attempting to obstruct justice. The case is still before the courts.
Robinson was suspended with pay following the crash.
He was also the most senior of the four Mounties involved in the Taser death of Robert Dziekanski at Vancouver airport in October 2007.
Read more: http://www.cbc.ca/canada/british-columbia/story/2010/03/23/bc-delta-motorcycle-crash-robinson-hutchinson.html#ixzz0j3EvcdKz
Coroner's Report into the Death of Orion Hutchinson
http://www.cbc.ca/bc/news/bc-100323-coroners-report-hutchinson.pdf
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