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10 February, 2011
Countercurrents.org

If law school enrollment today is made up largely of the white and the wealthy, it is because the American Bar Association, the chief accreditor of the nation’s law schools, has designed the rules that produce this outcome. It’s not that minorities and students from low-income households don’t want to attend law school; it’s that they are being priced out by soaring tuition costs, up 267 percent since 1990, and shut out by the culturally biased Law School Admissions Test(LSAT).

Only 3.9% of the nation’s one million lawyers are Black, only 3.3% are Hispanic, and whites of modest means likely are underrepresented as well. How many families can afford to pay $100,000 to $150,000 to put a child through three years of law school? At present, law school enrollment is just 6.6% for African-Americans and 5.7% for Hispanics.

The ABA is aware of this. Five years ago, then-president William Paul decried the alarming lack of “minority representation in the legal profession.” And the ABA’s own Commission on Racial and Ethnic Diversity in the Legal Profession has since reaffirmed his view. New York Law School professor Elizabeth Chambliss, author of the Commission’s report, described law as “one of the least racially integrated professions in the United States …” She called the LSAT “one of the main barriers to increasing diversity among law students.” Yet ABA insists that the 200 law schools it accredits administer the LSAT, and for ABA schools it often is the main determinant of admission and is always one of the two main determinants.

What the ABA continues to be about is lining the pockets of law professors, some of whom earn as much as $300,000 or more a year, often for teaching very few hours. Renowned Federal Judge Richard Posner thinks the ABA conducts itself like a “medieval guild” in behalf of its members. George Leef, vice president for research at The John William Pope Center for Higher Education Policy, Raleigh, N.C., believes the ABA’s aim is to keep legal fees high by restricting the overall number of attorneys. Leef, a Juris Doctor from Duke University School of Law, says that because of the “connivance” between state bodies and the American Bar Association, “law school costs much more than it needs to. If we allowed a free market in legal education, the cost of preparing for a legal career would fall dramatically.” Leef adds, “The ABA’s accrediting body, the Council of the Section of Legal Education, has established standards that are designed to keep law school very costly and very restrictive.”

As President Saul Levmore and Vice President David Van Zandt of the American Law Deans Association (ALDA) stated: “The ABA continues to impose requirements on the law schools it accredits that are not only extraneous to the process of assuring the quality of legal education, but also that improperly intrude on institutional autonomy in seeking to dictate terms and conditions of employment.” Levmore is dean of the University of Chicago Law School. Van Zandt is dean of Northwestern University Law School.

ALDA’s “improperly intrude” depiction is an understatement. In 1995, the Justice Department formally charged the ABA with fixing law professors’ salaries, among other Sherman Anti-Trust Act violations. Justice asserted the ABA acted to further “the self-interest of professors instead of improving education.” In 1996 the ABA entered into a consent judgment agreeing to reform its practices and to stop dictating a number of dubious, costly and illegal regulations to schools. Yet, in 2006, the Justice Department charged the ABA with violating provisions of the decree and called for it to take remedial action as well as to pay Justice $185,000 for its enforcement troubles.

The ABA shackles law school deans by imposing accreditation rules on them that focus on “inputs” — the ABA’s idea of the kind of plant, policy, and personnel a law school should have. These rules do not focus on what students learn or if they are learning what they need to know to practice law, i.e., the “outcomes.” The ABA input rules demand hiring of very large and expensive full-time faculty with light teaching loads; they place de facto limits on hiring of less expensive adjunct professors from the ranks of expert lawyers and judges who could contribute their expertise; they demand the building of $70- and $80 million palaces; they require stocking of large, multi-million dollar hard copy libraries even though nearly all needed legal materials may be found on line or obtained on CD-ROMs; and they require applicants to post high LSAT scores.

If many of the ABA’s costly rules are in writing, the ABA has other, unwritten policies that make the published rules even more daunting. The existence of these subterranean codes was brought to light in 2006 at a Federal Department of Education hearing in Washington on renewing for five years the ABA’s federally-approved accreditation status. A classic example of the ABA’s secret rules is that, although ABA guidelines do not specify that the LSAT is obligatory, in practice the ABA secretly requires law schools to use the test and has never accredited a law school that did not use it. By discouraging law schools from accepting applicants who score below a particular score, the ABA screens out large numbers of low-income whites, Hispanics, and African-Americans — graduates of poorer quality high schools and colleges than those attended by the children of the rich.

Writing in the Journal of Legal Education, Emory law professor George B. Shepherd notes if the ABA lowered its LSAT score accreditation cutoff just slightly, it “would allow the creation of more than 40 new 600-student majority-black law schools. Eliminating the LSAT cutoff altogether would permit more than 80, an average of one or two per state.” “The ABA ’s accreditation standards and the way the ABA applies them have had the same impact on blacks as (former Governor) George Wallace standing with policemen at the school house door in Alabama , blocking blacks from entering,” he wrote.

No other professional accrediting body uses input rules as does ABA: not in medicine, not in dentistry, nowhere. But in the world of legal education, a law school that finds better, less expensive ways to teach effectively is not allowed to exist in almost any state. The private initiative of such schools is deliberately choked off by the controlling ABA accreditors, each a hand-picked employee of or friend to the ABA schools toeing the ABA line. Even many state-supported law schools must charge $15,000 to $30,000 or more in tuition to survive. The ABA’s input-based policies begun in the 1970s are driving law school tuition and fees far ahead of inflation. During the 1990s, tuition, room and board at undergraduate institutions increased by 58%, but comparable law school costs jumped 88%. Today, more law schools are punching through the $40,000 tuition barrier and the $50,000-a-year law school appears only a few years away.

Among the big winners of the ABA accreditation game have been ABA officials themselves. The ABA in the past has encouraged fledgling law schools seeking its imprimatur to hire ABA officials, or current accrediting committee members, as deans at handsome salaries. In 1994, at Texas Wesleyan University School of Law, Ft. Worth, only 53% of graduates passed the Texas bar on their first attempt compared with 74% for the state overall. The ABA said the school suffered from a number of gross deficiencies. Happily for TW, these supposedly vanished less than a month after the school hired as dean Frank Walwer from the ABA’s Accreditation Committee. A mere 27 days after he was hired the law school got ABA accreditation! What’s more, although the ABA’s written policy forbids a school to delay students’ graduation until after it is accredited, the ABA ignored this requirement for Dean Walwer to allow TW’s graduates to take the Texas bar.

Writing in the Chicago Tribune of February 15, 2004, Ameet Sachdev, reported, “The coziness between the ABA and law schools, though, troubles some educators and others involved in accreditation. They question whether such hiring is at odds with the ABA’s ethics policy and contend such arrangements raise the appearance of a conflict of interest.” He quoted Gary Palm, a Chicago lawyer who had served on the ABA’s governing body overseeing accreditation as saying, “I think it’s wrong that people in leadership in the accreditation process end up back at law schools doing business before the accreditation council . . . .”

The ABA has prevailed upon Supreme Courts and Legislatures in 45 states to keep students from non-ABA law schools even from taking State bar exams. This restraint of trade funnels students into schools belonging to the ABA guild. Graduates of non-ABA law schools are denied even the opportunity to sit for a bar exam at all in most states or are not permitted take a state’s bar exam until three, five or ten years of practice elsewhere (in the minority of states that do let them take bar exams ultimately). One wonders how the United States ever produced lawyers such as Abraham Lincoln and Clarence Darrow in the years prior to 1921, before the ABA undertook its campaign to “upgrade” the profession.

There are several impartial educational accrediting bodies that can also bestow accreditation on law schools. One of these, the New England Association of Schools & Colleges, accredits Massachusetts School of Law at Andover (MSL). With no vested interest in enriching law school professors, such bodies have, in fact, established rational standards applicable to law schools, focusing on the quality of the education. More of these general bodies would flourish except that they have been discouraged because the Federal Department of Education has made ABA its sole federally-recognized, accreditor. This controversial arrangement, though, may change since, at its December, 2006, review, DOE rejected the ABA’s request for a five-year renewal of recognition, granting the ABA just 18 months to get its act together owing to DOE’s dissatisfaction with the ABA’s performance.

The ABA likes to say only schools it accredits can provide a quality education, yet student teams from MSL swept all four top spots in the Black Law Students Association Northeast Regional trial competition last February, finishing ahead of prominent schools such as Harvard University Law School, St. John’s University Law School and Syracuse University School of Law, and MSL then placed third nationally in the finals at Detroit. MSL, which was in the eastern region of the American Constitutional Society’s appellate competition in Washington, had the highest scoring brief of 31 teams in the east region, and its brief was scored higher than the best western region brief, submitted by a team from the prominent University of Michigan Law School. Staffed only by a small core of full-time professors and relying largely on adjunct instructor-lawyers that teach in their specialties as well as sitting judges, MSL can educate a student for a tuition of $14,490, a sum less than half of what ABA-accredited New England law schools charge.

The key to providing a quality legal education that is affordable to ordinary citizens is to once again allow the sunlight of free market competition to shine through law school windows. Schools must be allowed to take steps to reduce their costs and focus on student performance outcomes. Deans must be allowed the autonomy to run their own schools without ABA meddling. The Department of Education must drop the ABA as the federally approved national accreditor of law schools and make room for objective educational bodies. State Supreme Courts must open bar examinations to all applicants. And if the courts do not allow competition, State representatives need to legislate to make the courts respect free market principles. Again, to quote Shepherd, “A law school that is good enough to receive accreditation in one state should be good enough in all states.”

The ABA claims that unless law schools follow its pricey rules, students won’t get a good education. That’s bunk. Price and quality are not synonymous, as shown by medical care. The ABA has misused the absolute power granted it by our government and has beguiled state supreme courts to accept its dictates in determining who can sit for the bar. It deliberately causes to remain largely unserved by the nation’s law schools people from working-class backgrounds, immigrants, and minorities. America urgently needs new law schools that will serve the American working-class and minorities so that their voice may be heard. Nothing less than the substance of our democracy is at stake.

Lawrence Velvel is dean and cofounder of the Massachusetts School of Law at Andover; Michael Coyne is associate dean; Sherwood Ross is a media consultant to academic institutions. Reach Dean Velvel at velvel@mslaw.edu; Sherwood Ross at sherwoodross10@gmail.com

10 February, 2010

Countercurrents.org

“Just listen to that roar,” urged a CNN correspondent in Egypt, as thousands of Egyptian protesters charged, fists pumped, against hundreds of armed Egyptian security forces. What a roar it was, indeed. The protests have shown the world that Arabs are capable of much more than merely being pitiable statistics of unemployment and illiteracy, or powerless subjects of ‘moderate’ but ‘strong’ leaders (an acronym for friendly dictators).

The times are changing, and British MP George Galloway’s comment about the Arab lion roaring again seems truer by the day. The Egyptians have revolted in style, and their revolution will go down in history books with such adjectives as “great”, “noble” and “historic”.

Truth be told, Arabs have had their fair share of conjured ‘revolutions’. Arab regimes have always been generous in how they ascribed the loaded term to their military coups or other stunts designed to impress or intimidate the masses. Any modern history of the Arab world will reveal an abundant use of the term ‘thawra’ – revolution. The label has been useful, for those who dared criticize a regime, or demanded basic rights (such as food) could then be dubbed enemies of whatever make-belief revolution the men in power championed. Innumerable Arab political prisoners were designated ‘a’da’ al-thawra’ – enemies of the revolution – and they paid a heavy price for their ‘crimes’. In Egypt alone, rough estimates put the current number of political prisoners (from different ideological backgrounds) at 20,000. The figure must be much larger now that the new enemies of the revolution – i.e. most of the Egyptian population – have dared demand freedoms, rights, democracy, and the biggest taboo of all: social justice.

If there is any revolution deserving of the name, it is this one. Thanks to Egypt, people the world over have been forced to re-think their previous idea of “Arabs”. Even many of us who insisted that the future of the Middle East could only be decided by the people themselves had eventually started to lose hope. We were told our words were redundant, sentimental, and, at best, an opportunity for poetic reflection, but not realpolitik. Now we know we have been right all along. Egypt is the clearest possible manifestation of the truth of people shaping their own history – not just in the Middle East, but anywhere.

The spontaneous popular revolution in Egypt was a most befitting uplift to the collective humiliation that Arabs have felt for so many years, but even more acutely since the US invasion and utter violation of Iraq.

“It became almost a burden being an Arab”, a caller told Al Jazeera. Looking “Middle Eastern” became sufficient grounds for suspicion in international airports. It was not considered entirely racist to ask such questions as “Are Arabs capable of achieving democracy?” In fact, heated media discussions emanated from the type of questions that pondered what Arabs were – or rather, were not capable of achieving. Every war against the Arabs was done in the name of “bringing” something to people who seemed impeded by their own collective failures. In one of my first political science classes at the University of Washington, years ago, the professor told us that we would be “examining the Middle East, which consists of strong governments and weak peoples.” With the exception of Israel, of course.

The media has long repeated the mantra that Israel is the Middle East’s only democracy. Combined with serious doubts regarding the Arabs’ readiness for democracy, the conclusion offered is: Israel carries similar values to the US, the West, the First World, the civilized hemisphere, and the Arabs epitomize all the ailments of the world. It matters little that Arab regimes were made ‘powerful’ by the backing of their western benefactors, or that oppression – in the name of fighting the enemies of peace and progress – was urged, financed and orchestrated with western interests in mind. The fact that the bullets and canister teargas that killed and wounded numerous Egyptians had the following words inscribed on it in Arabic: ‘suni’a fi al-wilayat al-mutahida al-amrikyia’ – Made in the United States – was also deemed entirely irrelevant to any discussion on how and why Egyptians were being suppressed or why the Arab Lion must never find its roar.

“The much-feted Mossad was taken by surprise,” wrote Uri Avnery. The CIA was too, although US lawmakers are trying to determine “whether the CIA and other spy agencies failed to give President Obama adequate warning of the unfolding crisis in Egypt” (as reported by Greg Miller in the Washington Post, February 4). Senator Dianne Feinstein who heads the Intelligence Committee, accused the intelligence community of ‘lacking” performance. The CIA should have monitored Facebook more closely, she suggested.

But there can be no telling when a nation revolts. Most of the chanting multitudes have no Facebook accounts. They don’t tweet either. In Tahrir Square, a man with a moustache, dark skin and handsome features carried a cardboard sign on which he had written, rather hurriedly: “I want to eat. My monthly salary is 267 (Egyptian) pounds – approx $45 – and I have four children.”

Others want to breathe the air of freedom. Others still want justice. Dignity. Equality. Democracy. Hope. How can such values be measured, or safeguarded against?

There is a very popular word in Egypt – al-Sabr. It means patience. But noone could predict when the patience would run out. Arab and Egyptian intellectuals didn’t see it coming, and even the country’s opposition parties were caught by surprise. Everyone tried to catch up as millions -of long-oppressed Egyptians erupted in astounding unison: hurriya, hurriya, adalah igtimayyia – freedom, freedom, social justice.

Just when we were told that a religious strife was about to engulf Egypt, and that the people were subdued to the point that there was no hope, millions of brave Egyptians declared a revolution that brought Muslims and Christians together. The courage and the bravery they displayed is enough to restore our faith in the world – in the human race, and in ourselves. Those who are still wondering if Arabs are capable of this or that need not ponder anymore. Just listen to them roar, and you will find the answer.

Ramzy Baroud (www.ramzybaroud.net) is an internationally-syndicated columnist and the editor of PalestineChronicle.com. His latest book is My Father Was a Freedom Fighter: Gaza’s Untold Story (Pluto Press, London), available on Amazon.com.

10 February, 2011

The Independent

So when the Arabs cry out for the very future that Obama outlined, we show them disrespect

There is nothing like an Arab revolution to show up the hypocrisy of your friends. Especially if that revolution is one of civility and humanism and powered by an overwhelming demand for the kind of democracy that we enjoy in Europe and America. The pussyfooting nonsense uttered by Obama and La Clinton these past two weeks is only part of the problem. From “stability” to “perfect storm” – Gone With the Wind might have recommended itself to the State Department if they really must pilfer Hollywood for their failure to adopt moral values in the Middle East – we’ve ended up with the presidential “now-means-yesterday”, and “orderly transition”, which translates: no violence while ex-air force General Mubarak is put out to graze so that ex-intelligence General Suleiman can take over the regime on behalf of America and Israel.

Fox News has already told its viewers in America that the Muslim Brotherhood – about the “softest” of Islamist groups in the Middle East – is behind the brave men and women who have dared to resist the state security police, while the mass of French “intellectuals” (the quotation marks are essential for poseurs like Bernard-Henri Lévy have turned, in Le Monde’s imperishable headline, into “the intelligentsia of silence”.

And we all know why. Alain Finkelstein talks about his “admiration” for the democrats but also the need for “vigilance” – and this is surely a low point for any ‘philosophe’ – “because today we know above all that we don’t know how everything is going to turn out.” This almost Rumsfeldian quotation is gilded by Lévy’s own preposterous line that “it is essential to take into account the complexity of the situation”. Oddly enough that is exactly what the Israelis always say when some misguided Westerner suggests that Israel should stop stealing Arab land in the West Bank for its colonists.

Indeed Israel’s own reaction to the momentous events in Egypt – that this might not be the time for democracy in Egypt (thus allowing it to keep the title of “the only democracy in the Middle East”) – has been as implausible as it has been self-defeating. Israel will be much safer surrounded by real democracies than by vicious dictators and autocratic kings. To his enormous credit, the French historian Daniel Lindenberg told the truth this week. “We must, alas, admit the reality: many intellectuals believe, deep down, that the Arab people are congenitally backward.”

There is nothing new in this. It applies to our subterranean feelings about the whole Muslim world. Chancellor Merkel of Germany announces that multiculturalism doesn’t work, and a pretender to the Bavarian royal family told me not so long ago that there were too many Turks in Germany because “they didn’t want to be part of German society”. Yet when Turkey itself – as near a perfect blend of Islam and democracy as you can find in the Middle East right now – asks to join the European Union and share our Western civilisation, we search desperately for any remedy, however racist, to prevent her membership.

In other words, we want them to be like us, providing they stay away. And then, when they prove they want to be like us but don’t want to invade Europe, we do our best to install another American-trained general to rule them. Just as Paul Wolfowitz reacted to the Turkish parliament’s refusal to allow US troops to invade Iraq from southern Turkey by asking if “the generals don’t have something to say about this”, we are now reduced to listening while US defence secretary Robert Gates fawns over the Egyptian army for their “restraint” – apparently failing to realise that it is the people of Egypt, the proponents of democracy, who should be praised for their restraint and non-violence, not a bunch of brigadiers.

So when the Arabs want dignity and self-respect, when they cry out for the very future which Obama outlined in his famous – now, I suppose, infamous – Cairo speech of June 2009, we show them disrespect and casuistry. Instead of welcoming democratic demands, we treat them as a disaster. It is an infinite relief to find serious American journalists like Roger Cohen going “behind the lines” on Tahrir Square to tell the unvarnished truth about this hypocrisy of ours. It is an unmitigated disgrace when their leaders speak. Macmillan threw aside colonial pretensions of African unpreparedness for democracy by talking of the “wind of change”. Now the wind of change is blowing across the Arab world. And we turn our backs upon it.

Friday, February 11, 2011; 4:00 PM

The protesters on the streets of Cairo who, in just 18 days, ended the three-decade rule of Hosni Mubarak were not merely demanding the end of an unjust, corrupt and oppressive regime. They did not merely decry privation, unemployment or the disdain with which their leaders treated them. They had long suffered such indignities. What they fought for was something more elusive and more visceral.

The Arab world is dead. Egypt’s revolution is trying to revive it.

From the 1950s onward, Arabs took pride in their anti-colonial struggle, in their leaders’ standing and in the sense that the Arab world stood for something, that it had a mission: to build independent nation-states and resist foreign domination.

In Egypt, Gamal Abdel Nasser presided over a ruinous economy and endured a humiliating defeat against Israel in 1967. Still, Cairo remained the heart of the larger Arab nation – the Arab public watched as Nasser railed against the West, defied his country’s former masters, nationalized the Suez Canal and taunted Israel. Meanwhile, Algeria wrested its independence from France and became the refuge of revolutionaries; Saudi Arabia led an oil embargo that shook the world economy; and Yasser Arafat gave Palestinians a voice and put their cause on the map.

Throughout, the Arab world suffered ignominious military and political setbacks, but it resisted. Some around the world may not have liked the sounds coming from Cairo, Algiers, Baghdad and Tripoli, but they took notice. There were defeats for the Arab world, but no surrender.

But that world passed, and Arab politics fell silent. Other than to wait and see what others might do, Arab regimes have no clear and effective approach toward any of the issues vital to their collective future, and what policies they do have contradict popular feeling. It is that indifference that condemned the leaders of Tunisia and Egypt to irrelevance.

Most governments in the region were resigned to or enabled the invasion of Iraq; since then, the Arab world has had virtually no impact on Iraq’s course. It has done little to achieve Palestinian aspirations besides backing a peace process in which it no longer believes. When Israel went to war with Hezbollah in 2006 and then with Hamas two years later, most Arab leaders privately cheered the Jewish state. And their position on Iran is unintelligible; they have delegated ultimate decision-making to the United States, which they encourage to toughen its stance but then warn about the consequences of such action.

Egypt and Saudi Arabia, pillars of the Arab order, are exhausted, bereft of a cause other than preventing their own decline. For Egypt, which stood tallest, the fall has been steepest. But long before Tahrir Square, Egypt forfeited any claim to Arab leadership. It has gone missing in Iraq, and its policy toward Iran remains restricted to protestations, accusations and insults. It has not prevailed in its rivalry with Syria and has lost its battle for influence in Lebanon. It has had no genuine impact on the Arab-Israeli peace process, was unable to reunify the Palestinian movement and was widely seen in the region as complicit in Israel’s siege on Hamas-controlled Gaza.

Riyadh has helplessly witnessed the gradual ascendancy of Iranian influence in Iraq and the wider region. It was humiliated in 2009 when it failed to crush rebels in Yemendespite formidable advantages in resources and military hardware. Its mediation attempts among Palestinians in 2007, and more recently in Lebanon, were brushed aside by local parties over which it once held considerable sway.

The Arab leadership has proved passive and, when active, powerless. Where it once championed a string of lost causes – pan-Arab unity, defiance of the West, resistance to Israel – it now fights for nothing. There was more popular pride in yesterday’s setbacks than in today’s stupor.

Arab states suffer from a curse more debilitating than poverty or autocracy. They have become counterfeit, perceived by their own people as alien, pursuing policies hatched from afar. One cannot fully comprehend the actions of Egyptians, Tunisians, Jordanians and others without considering this deep-seated feeling that they have not been allowed to be themselves, that they have been robbed of their identities.

Taking to the streets is not a mere act of protest. It is an act of self-determination.

Where the United States and Europe have seen moderation and cooperation, the Arab public has sensed a loss of dignity and of the ability to make free decisions. True independence was traded in for Western military, financial and political support. That intimate relationship distorted Arab politics. Reliant on foreign nations’ largesse and accountable to their judgment, the narrow ruling class became more responsive to external demands than to domestic aspirations.

Alienated from their states, the people have in some cases searched elsewhere for guidance. Some have been drawn to groups such as Hamas, Hezbollah and the Muslim Brotherhood, which have resisted and challenged the established order. Others look to non-Arab states, such as Turkey, which under its Islamist government has carved out a dynamic, independent role, or Iran, which flouts Western threats and edicts.

The breakdown of the Arab order has upended natural power relations. Traditional powers punch below their weight, and emerging ones, such as Qatar, punch above theirs. Al-Jazeera has emerged as a full-fledged political actor because it reflects and articulates popular sentiment. It has become the new Nasser. The leader of the Arab world is a television network.

Popular uprisings are the latest step in this process. They have been facilitated by a newfound fearlessness and feeling of empowerment – watching the U.S. military’s struggles in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as Israel’s inability to subdue Hezbollah and Hamas, Arab peoples are no longer afraid to confront their own regimes.

For the United States, the popular upheaval lays bare the fallacy of an approach that relies on Arab leaders who mimic the West’s deeds and parrot its words, and that only succeeds in discrediting the regimes without helping Washington. The more the United States gave to the Mubarak regime, the more it lost Egypt. Arab leaders have been put on notice: A warm relationship with the United States and a peace deal with Israel will not save you in your hour of need.

Injecting economic assistance into faltering regimes will not work. The grievance Arab peoples feel is not principally material, and one of its main targets is over-reliance on the outside. U.S. calls for reform will likewise fall flat. A messenger who has backed the status quo for decades is a poor voice for change. Attempts to pressure regimes can backfire, allowing rulers to depict protests as Western-inspired and opposition leaders as foreign stooges.

Some policymakers in Western capitals have convinced themselves that seizing the moment to promote the Israeli-Palestinian peace process will placate public opinion. This is to engage in both denial and wishful thinking. It ignores that Arabs have become estranged from current peace efforts; they believe that such endeavors reflect a foreign rather than a national agenda. And it presumes that a peace agreement acceptable to the West and to Arab leaders will be acceptable to the Arab public, when in truth, it is more likely to be seen as an unjust imposition and denounced as the liquidation of a cherished cause. A peace effort intended to salvage order will accelerate its demise.

The Arab world’s transition from old to new is rife with uncertainty about its pace and endpoint. When and where transitions take place, they will express a yearning for more assertiveness. Governments will have to change their spots; their publics will wish them to be more like Turkey and less like Egypt.

For decades, the Arab world has been drained of its sovereignty, its freedom, its pride. It has been drained of politics. Today marks politics’ revenge.

Hussein Agha, a senior associate member of St. Antony’s College, Oxford University, is a co-author of “A Framework for a Palestinian National Security Doctrine.” Robert Malley is the Middle East program director at the International Crisis Group and was special assistant to President Bill Clinton for Arab-Israeli affairs.

| Tuesday 15 February 2011

Maybe it’s because I spent time working for the United Nations Development Program in the Philippines in the ‘90s — I was a bit surprised that few people have mentioned the parallel between the Egyptian uprising and the People Power Revolution in Manila, which took place in 1986.

There are striking similarities between the two revolutions: in both instances, people organized against a dictator who had been a longtime ally of the United States; in both instances, the popular uprising was sparked by the government’s perceived corruption, rather than any particular ideology. Also, it seems to me that the role Mohamed ElBaradei has been trying to play in Egypt is somewhat similar to the role Corazon Aquino played in the Philippines, as she led the opposition. The fact that this revolt is taking place in the Middle East makes it a lot more fraught, but the script seems similar.

Certainly, the Philippines didn’t turn into Sweden (so famous for being almost corruption-free) following the uprising. There was still plenty of corruption, and the democracy remained imperfect following the revolution — none of which changes the fact that getting rid of Ferdinand Marcos was a very good thing. Egypt won’t turn into Sweden either, but maybe, just maybe, something good is about to happen.

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That said, many people have pointed to the parallels between the situation in Egypt today and that in Indonesia in 1998, which ended Suharto’s dictatorship — I’ve done it myself. But there is a possibly important, or even revealing, difference between the uprisings in Indonesia and the Philippines and the uprising in Egypt. As the chart on this page shows, political crises followed drastic economic crises in both the Philippines and Indonesia — Mr. Marcos was caught up in the Latin American debt crisis of the 1980s, and Suharto was entangled in the Asian financial crisis in 1998. Egypt is not experiencing similar problems, which is not to say that economics had nothing to do with the revolt. Egypt has experienced decent growth in recent times — but the gains weren’t trickling down, and youth unemployment has been a huge problem. I suppose the moral of the story is that gross domestic product is never the whole story.

Backstory: Uprisings, Past and Present

The political uprising that erupted in January against President Hosni Mubarak and his government in Egypt bears some striking resemblances to other popular revolutions that unseated regimes that were once political allies of the United States.

And while the world waits to see how the crisis in Egypt will play out, political commentators have been looking to these historical precedents for clues.

In the Philippines in 1986, the People Power Revolution succeeded in overthrowing President Ferdinand E. Marcos, whose brutal and corrupt government had retained power for almost 25 years.

The movement was triggered by the 1983 assassination of Mr. Marcos’s political opponent, Senator Benigno Aquino Jr., after he returned to Manila from exile in the United States.

The overthrow of Mr. Marcos’s government was marked by peaceful demonstrations and nonviolent acts of civil disobedience, and in contrast to recent events in Cairo, news of the popular dissent spread via word of mouth and radio, rather than through social media.

Under intense pressure from the United States, Mr. Marcos eventually left the country and later died in Hawaii.

Following his departure, the Philippines chose its first democratically elected president in decades — Corazon C. Aquino, Mr. Aquino’s widow.

The collapse of the 32-year rule of the Indonesian dictator Suharto in 1998 also might offer insights. In 1998, as the Asian financial crisis ate away at the country’s prosperity, Suharto agreed to step down after hundreds of students were killed when protests against his regime turned violent.

Known for his ruthless and unscrupulous behavior as president, Suharto — whose opposition to both communism and Islamic extremism made him an ally of the United States — had previously managed to establish a viable economy and a strong military.

Egypt might be able to follow either course to political stability, some analysts believe.

Paul Krugman joined The New York Times in 1999 as a columnist on the Op-Ed page and continues as a professor of economics and international affairs at Princeton University. He was awarded the Nobel in economic science in 2008.

Mr Krugman is the author or editor of 20 books and more than 200 papers in professional journals and edited volumes, including “The Return of Depression Economics” (2008) and “The Conscience of a Liberal” (2007).

15 February, 2011

Al Jazeera

Video from YouTube showing riot police firing on largely peaceful protesters during Monday’s demonstration

At least one person has been killed and several others injured after riot police in Bahrain opened fire at protesters holding a funeral service for a man killed during protests in the kingdom a day earlier.

The victim, Fadhel Ali Almatrook, was hit with bird-shotgun in the capital, Manama, on Tuesday morning, Maryam Alkhawaja, head of foreign relations at the Bahrain Centre for Human Rights, told Al Jazeera.

“This morning the protesters were walking from the hospital to the cemetery and they got attacked by the riot police,” Alkhawaja said.

“Thousands of people are marching in the streets, demanding the removal of the regime – police fired tear gas and bird shot, using excessive force – that is why people got hurt.”

At least 25 people were reported to have been treated for injuries in hospital.

An Al Jazeera correspondent in Bahrain, who cannot be named for his own safety, said that police were taking a very heavy-handed approach towards the protesters.

“Police fired on the protesters this morning, but they showed very strong resistance,” our correspondent said.

“It seems like the funeral procession was allowed to continue, but police are playing a cat-and-mouse game with the protesters.”

The developments came as the king of Bahrain, Sheikh Hamad bin Isa Al-Khalifa, made a rare television appearance in which he offered condolences on the protesters’ deaths.

The process of change in the kingdom “will not stop”, the official Bahrain News Agency quoted Sheikh Hamad as saying on Tuesday.

Opposition’s move

Angered by the deaths, a Shia Muslim opposition group has announced it was suspending its participation in the parliament.

“This is the first step. We want to see dialogue,” Ibrahim Mattar, a parliamentarian belonging to the al-Wefaq group, said. “In the coming days, we are either going to resign from the council or continue.”

Al-Wefaq has a strong presence inside the parliament and within the country’s Shia community.

Tuesday’s violence came a day after demonstrators observed a Day of Rage, apparently inspired by the recent uprisings in Egypt and Tunisia.

Shias, who are thought to be in the majority, have often alleged discrimination at the hands of the kingdom’s Sunni rulers.

Thousands came out on the streets on Monday to protest, sparking clashes with riot police.

Khalid Al-Marzook, a Bahraini member of parliament, told Al Jazeera that one person had been killed and that three others were in critical condition in hospital following Monday’s violence.

Bahrain’s news agency said that the country’s interior minister had ordered an investigation into Monday’s death.

The interior ministry later issued a statement saying that “some of the people participating in the the funeral clashed with forces from a security patrol”, leading to Almatrouk’s death.

“An investigation is under way to determine the circumstances surrounding the case,” it said.

Lieutenant-General Shaikh Rashid bin Abdulla Al Khalifa has also offered his condolences to the dead man’s family.

Online reaction

Amira Al Hussaini, a Bahraini blogger that monitors citizen media for Global Voices Online, told Al Jazeera that there has been a huge outpouring of anger online in Bahrain.

“What we’ve seen yesterday and today, is a break from the normal routine – people like me, that are not necessarily in favour of the protests that are happening in Bahrain at this time, are now speaking out,” she said.

“I am trying to remain objective but I can’t – people are being shot at close range.”

Hussaini said that people in Bahrain were very afraid.

“We are afraid of going out in the streets and demanding our rights. Tunisia and Egypt have given people in Arab countries hope – even if you believe that something is impossible.”

“I personally have no respect for the police – they lie, they manipulate the story,” she said.

“This is being pitted as a sectarian issue – the Shia wanting to overthrow the regime. But it is not a Shia uprising.”

She said that people from all backgrounds and religions are behind the protests.

Robert Fisk meets the doyen of Egypt’s journalists

Tuesday, 15 February 2011

The old man’s voice is scathing, his mind like a razor, that of a veteran fighter, writer, sage, perhaps the most important living witness and historian of modern Egypt, turning on the sins of the regime that tried to shut him up forever. “Mubarak betrayed the republican spirit – and then he wanted to continue through his son Gamal,” he says, finger pointed to heaven. “It was a project, not an idea; it was a plan. The last 10 years of the life of this country were wasted because of this question, because of the search for inheritance – as if Egypt was Syria, or Papa Doc and Baby Doc in Haiti.”

At 87, Mohamed Heikal is the doyen, the icon – for once the cliché is correct – of Egyptian journalism, friend and adviser and minister to Nasser and to Sadat, the one man who has predicted for 30 years the revolution that he has, amazingly, lived to see.

We didn’t believe him. For three decades, I came here to see Heikal and he predicted the implosion of Egypt with absolute conviction, outlining in devastating detail the corruption and violence of the Mubarak regime, and its inevitable collapse. And sometimes I wrote cynically about him, sometimes humorously, occasionally – I fear – patronisingly, rarely as seriously as he deserved. Yesterday, he offered me a cigar and invited me to say if I thought I was still right. No, I said, I was wrong. He was right.

Heikal in old age is a man of such eloquence, such energy, with such a vast memory, that men and women who are younger – a quality he much admires, and which won Egypt’s revolution last week – must be silent in his presence. “I lost the most important thing in my life,” he says with painful candour. “I lost my youth. I would love to have been out with those young people in the square.”

But Heikal is a wily beast. He was here for the Nasser revolution of 1952 and remembers the folly of power displayed by Egypt’s dictators. “I was completely sure there was going to be an explosion,” he says. “What stunned me was the movement of the millions. I was not sure I was going to live to see this day. I was not sure I was going to see the rising of the people.

“My old friend Dr Mohamed Fawzi came to see me a few days ago and said: ‘The balloon of lies is getting bigger every day. It will explode with the prick of a pin – and God save us when it explodes.’ Then the people came and filled the vacuum.

“I was worried that there would be chaos. But a new generation in Egypt came along, wiser than us a million times over, and they behaved in a moderate, intelligent way. There was no vacuum. The explosion didn’t happen.

“What I am worried about is that everything came as a surprise, and nobody is ready for what comes next. Nobody wants to give time for the air to clear. In these circumstances, you can’t take the right decisions. These people carry with them huge aspirations. The Americans and Israel and the Arab world are all pushing. Even the Military Council were not prepared for this. I say: give yourself time to sleep at last.

“Mubarak kept us all in suspense,” he goes on. “He was like Alfred Hitchcock, a master of surprise. But this was an Alfred Hitchcock situation without a plot. The man was improvising every day – like an old fox. The millions moved. I watched him – and I was stunned.

“In this grave situation, the regime got into contact with some people in the square, and it asked them if some delegation of powers from Mubarak to the Vice-President would be acceptable, and the people they were talking to said: ‘Maybe, yes.’ And so Mubarak thought he could make his speech on Thursday night because he was sure he had got an ‘OK’ from the square. I couldn’t believe my ears.”

Heikal was pleased that Mubarak delayed the crisis by remaining silent while the crowds built up in Tahrir Square. “In those 18 days, something very important happened. We started with about 50-60,000 people. But as Mubarak delayed and prevaricated like the old fox he is, it gave the chance for the people to come out. This changed the whole equation. Six days into the crisis, Mubarak simply didn’t understand what had happened.”

Heikal bemoans the wasted years and the deaths of the past three weeks – “our revolution was a great historical tragedy,” he says – and does not yet see the nature of post-revolutionary Egypt. “I am happy with the presence of the army – but I want the presence of the people, too. The people are bewildered about what they have achieved.”

On Saturday night, Heikal was invited, for the first time in almost three decades, to appear once more on Egyptian state television. His reply was as feisty as it was when Sadat offered him the job of chief of the National Security Council after Nasser’s death. “I told Sadat that if we differed as we did when I was a newspaperman on Al-Ahram, how could I lead his National Security Council?” So when the government television asked him to appear this weekend, Heikal replied: “I was prevented by government order from appearing for 30 years and now you tell me that the doors are open again. I was prevented from appearing by government order, and now I am supposed to come by invitation.”

A few months ago, after Heikal had visited Lebanon and met Sayyid Hassan Nasrallah, the Hezbollah leader, a furious Egyptian Foreign Minister turned up at Heikal’s farm in the Nile Delta. “Do you think you represent the Egyptian people?” the minister shouted at him. Heikal asked the minister: “Do you think you represent the Egyptian people?”

The lines look good on Heikal’s face, a wise old bird as well as wily. But he’s a bit hard of hearing and feels it necessary to apologise for his 87 years, a young man trapped in an old man’s body. And anyone invited to his inner sanctum above the Nile, full of books and beautiful carpets and the smell of fine cigars, can see Heikal’s sadness.

“The difference between Mubarak and me is that I never tried to hide my age,” he says. “He did. He dyed his hair. So whenever he looked in the mirror, he saw Mubarak as a young man. But all old men have vanity. When I was young and was on television, I used to ask my friends: ‘Did I say the right thing?’ Now I ask them: ‘How did I look?” For The Independent’s post-revolutionary portrait of the great man, he whipped off his spectacles. “Vanity!” he cried.

Mubarak, he believes, was terrified that government files would be released if he resigned, that the regime’s secrets would come tumbling out. “What I’m afraid of is that the dishonesty of some of the politicians in Egypt will tarnish such a valuable event,” Heikal says. “They will use the issue of accountability to settle accounts. I want this country to have a proper investigation, not throw these files away for people to use for their own agenda. It is opportunism by politicians that I am afraid of. All the [regime’s] files should be opened. An account should be given to our people for the last 30 years – but it should not be a matter for revenge. If small politicians use this, it will affect the value of what must be done.”

Historically, Heikal regards the events of the past three weeks as overwhelming, unstoppable, and unprecedented.

“In revolutions, there is no pattern. People want a change from a present to a future. Every revolution is conditioned by where it starts and where it is moving. But this event showed a huge Egyptian mass of people that it is possible to defy the terror of the state. I think this will revolutionise the Arab world.”

Locked up by Anwar Sadat shortly before his assassination, Heikal was released from prison by Mubarak, and I recalled that we met within hours of his release, when he – Heikal – was grateful to Mubarak, and sang his praises. “Yes, but as a man of transition,” he replied. “I thought he would be President only a short time. He came from the Egyptian military, a national and loved institution. He saw Sadat being killed by his own people – he was present when this happened – and I thought he must have learned a tragic lesson about the Egyptian people when their patience runs out. I thought he could be a good bridge for the future.

“In the last document that Nasser wrote on 30 March 1968, he promised that after the 1967 war, his role must end. ‘The people proved to be more powerful than the regime,’ he wrote. ‘The people have become bigger than the regime.’

“But everyone forgets. Once you enjoy power and the sea of quietness that comes with it, you forget. And day after day, you discover the privileges of power.

“Now we have semi-politicians who want to take advantage of this revolution. Some contenders are already promoting themselves. But the system has to be changed. The people made known what they want. They want something different. All the most modern technology in the world was used in this uprising. The people want something different.”

Heikal saw me to the door of the lift, shook hands courteously, eyebrows raised. Yes, I repeated. He was right.

15 February, 2011

Al Jazeera

Facing climate change, a social movement in El Salvador fights mass flooding and the toxic burning of cane fields

Burning sugar cane field in the Lower Lempa region of El Salvador for industrial-scale production [Erika Blumenfeld]

While debate about whether climate change is real or not continues in the US, the world’s leading producer of CO2 emissions per capita, those already living with the effects, like Jose Domingo Cruz in El Salvador, don’t have time to debate.

“Our storms are increasing in number and intensity,” Cruz, a member of his community Civil Protection Committee that responds to community needs during natural disasters, told Al Jazeera while standing on a levy that ruptured during Tropical Storm Agatha last year. “All of us attribute this to climate change.”

The levy, originally constructed in the aftermath of devastating floods caused by Hurricane Mitch in 1998, now has two huge ruptures in need of repair before the next hurricane season that begins in roughly six months.

A severe drought in 2008 and 2009, and Hurricane Stan in 2005, also took a severe toll on both land and lives in the area. Increasing sea levels will also heavily impact this part of El Salvador, which is largely populated by people who had to flee the US-backed war that raged in the country from 1979 to 1992.

A 2007 climate change study conducted by El Salvador’s National Ministry of the Environment and Natural Resources focused on the Lower Lempa River and Bay of Jiquilisco areas of the central Pacific coast.

The study found that this area can expect more of what it is already experiencing: increasing minimum and maximum temperatures, a shift in observed seasons, more frequent observations of extremely wet and extremely dry years, and intensified extreme event activity, including tropical storms and hurricanes.

Against the backdrop of these dire predictions, the people are, however, forming a movement that is learning to protect and sustain itself in the increasingly chaotic world of global climate change and its severe ramifications on people, the environment, and local economies.

Social movement as survival mechanism

In addition to climate change, El Salvador faces environmental issues that include deforestation, soil erosion, water pollution, and soil contaminated from decades of cotton and sugar cane production using toxic herbicides and fertilisers.

El Salvador is the 2nd most deforested country in the Western Hemisphere, second only to Haiti. Only two per cent of primary forest that existed 50 years ago remains today.

In response to increasing natural disasters related to climate change – and as an effort to promote environmental protections and sustainable living – a group known as The Mangrove Association was birthed in 1999. Members of the group are primarily subsistence farmers and fisher-folk whose livelihoods depend on the viability of local ecosystems now threatened by climate change and unsustainable farming practises like those practised by the sugar cane industry.

Estela Hernandez, member of the board of directors of the Mangrove Association, a group that assists local communities in sustainable living practises and in adapting to climate change.

“The sugar-cane industry here now has expanding borders,” Estela Hernandez, member of the board of directors of the Mangrove Association, told Al Jazeera. “They are taking more water, and the chemicals they use are making people in nearby communities sick.”

Hernandez’s group works to support a grassroots coalition of community groups called La Coordinadora, that today includes more than 100 communities. With assistance from EcoViva, a group that enables grassroots leadership in the area by assisting with financial and technical resources, the Mangrove Association functions as a grassroots response to address the crisis causing effects of climate change in this region of El Salvador.

“Local communities are on the front-lines of climate change, and many local organisations like the Mangrove Association are offering the only significant response to this very serious problem,” Nathan Weller of EcoViva told Al Jazeera. “Communities like those in the Bay of Jiquilisco can no longer rely solely on the conventional development model to intervene for them. They live the effects of climate change, are working actively on solutions to confront them, and the Mangrove Association serves to catalyse these efforts.”

In what has become a major grassroots social movement that aims to increase diversified sustainable farming, organic foods, food security, and all of this via environmentally friendly methods, many people living in this area are actually seeing their lives improve, despite the challenges.

Yet, the challenges are many, and are not going away.

Dr Anny Argeta is a kidney specialist at the New Dawn clinic in Ciudad Romero.

“There are agricultural chemicals that have been identified as causes of kidney failure,” she told Al Jazeera, “Ministry of Health records show one of the leading causes of death in this region is kidney failure.”

Hernandez and others in her association and the communities it is tied to are gravely concerned about what they believe is an epidemic of kidney failure in the area. They blame the aerial spraying of chemicals on sugarcane crops.

Other problems arise when the industrial farmers burn the crops, so as to enable easier extraction of the cane.

The deputy mayor of Jiquilisco, Rigoberto Herrera Cruz, provided Al Jazeera with a local government statement that articulated these issues.

“Burning of sugarcane contaminates the air, and our hospitals are showing bronchial and respiratory illnesses, mostly in our children. Use of chemicals on the crops contaminates the soil/water, and this leads to kidney failure, which has been increasing in society and we still don’t have an effective treatment to stop this trend.”

In addition, his office stated that the destructive method of burning the fields destroys organic material, increases greenhouse gasses, creates an altered micro-climate, reduces subterranean water, and an increase of soil loss and erosion. His office also stated that the salaries of sugarcane workers “are at a level of misery.”

“Burning the crops of sugarcane also kills the fauna we are trying to protect,” Hernandez added, “And the herbicides these companies use to help their crops mature faster, some of which are prohibited, is washed by the rain into the Mangroves where there are shrimp production pools.”

Hernandez and her association work to protect El Salvador’s mangrove forests. This is to protect the communities and rich ecosystems there, but also because of the critical role mangroves play in preventing increasing climate change. Mangroves, a saltwater-loving tree, trap carbon emissions and protect the coastline from hurricanes.

“The long-term sequestration of carbon by one square kilometre of mangrove area is equivalent to that occurring in fifty square kilometres of tropical forest,” Dr. Emily Pidgeon of Conservation International has said of the value of mangroves in their role in the climate change crisis.

The areas of focus for the Mangrove Association are the Lower Lempa River Estuary and Bay of Jiquilisco. Together they make up El Salvador’s largest protected area, which has been recognised as a wetland of world importance under the International Ramsar Convention on Wetlands, in addition to having been designated a UN International Biosphere Reserve. The majority of El Salvador’s 26,000 hectares of mangroves exist in these areas.

By addressing these issues in all their complexities, Hernandez and the Mangrove Association are creating a model that may well one day be used around the world.

A movement with teeth

Alonzo Sosa with the environmental unit of the Mayor’s office of the Municipality of Tecoluca is part of the Movement for the Defence of Life and Natural Resources.

“We started this movement two and a half years ago because of the rampant health problems people in our communities were experiencing due to the unsafe farming practises of the industrial farmers, like the sugarcane producers,” Sosa told Al Jazeera.

“The chemicals they use, contaminating our water, overuse of land and widespread kidney failure, this is all very serious. So now, we are pushing for better farming practises, trying to eliminate these chemicals and burning, because it damages our biodiversity.”

According to Sosa, “It’s not just environmental units in local governments that will solve this crisis. We need local governments, journalists, communities, everyone. The only requirement to join our movement is for you to care for the environment and our resources.”

Needless to say, the larger producers of sugarcane in El Salvador have not met the movement’s requests with open arms.

“The bigger producers are carrying out these atrocious practises, because they are only interested in their own capital and profit,” Sosa added, “We are in a constant struggle with the cane operators who desire perpetual expansion.”

Antonio Lemus is an environmental lawyer with the University of El Salvador. Five years ago his university signed an agreement with the Mangrove Association to work together with the local communities towards better environmental policies.

After researching the negative impacts the sugar cane industry was having, he said, “We decided to get legally involved, because we’re clear that it damages human health, the environment, and these things are impacted on a national scale”.

Lemus is using the Ministry of Environment to enforce new environmental regulations, “But big producers and vendors of chemicals are ignoring and violating peoples’ health and their right to a healthy environment,” he said, “In El Salvador’s environmental law, Article 2, Section B, all people have a right to a healthy and ecologically balanced environment, and this is recognised by the UN.”

Article 2, Section C of the same law says: “All economic activities must be carried out in harmony with the environment”.

Despite having the law on his side, Lemus said the state does not have overall control of what is happening, so his university has begun working with local municipalities to create a Municipal Ordnance called “The Ordnance for the Protection, Recovery, and Management of Natural Resources and the Environment”.

Once this ordnance is ratified, Lemus believes he will be better able to “help people stop this ecological crisis and the ecological crimes being committed in their communities”.

Thus, even though there will not be a national mechanism for filing lawsuits, this will exist on a local level so as to enable communities and municipalities to present lawsuits against violators.

Sosa believes these matters are urgent. “We are in a new historical context. If we don’t change how we live, we aren’t going to last very long, no matter how much money we have.”

14 February, 2011

Casaubon’s Book

This is a lightly revised and updated version of a piece that ran at ye olde blogge and at Grist, but it seems just as pertinent now as it did in 2007 when I wrote it. At the time, some people doubted that the boom we were seeing in biofuel production, which was pushing up grain prices, would be followed by any kind of a bust. Farmers were predicting many, many good years – but we all know what happened. Farm incomes dropped by more than 20% during the recession. Just another reminder that busts are part of the boom and bust cycle, no matter how little we like to admit it.

There is no doubt whatsoever that rising food costs are hurting people all over the world. More than half of the world’s population spends 50% of their income or more on food, and the massive rise in staple prices threatens to increase famine rates drastically. Many people have already pointed out the intersections between the changes going on across North Africa and the Middle East and the current food crisis, and with all of us having spent more time in food crisis than out of it in the last three years, that seems to be an emerging norm.

It is also undoubtedly true that rising food prices are digging into the budgets of average people. For the 40+ million Americans who are food insecure (that is, they may or may not go hungry in any given month, but they aren’t sure there’s going to be food) are increasingly stretched. Supportive resources like food pantries are increasingly tapped, and the value of donations goes down as it costs more and more to feed a family. Everyone is finding that food and energy inflation are cutting into their budget substantially. During the last wave of food and energy price increases, rises in food and energy prices alone have eroded real wages by 1.2 percent. The USDA has suggested that overall food prices will probably rise by another 3-4% this year, but that did not take into account weather constraints in Mexico, Florida and other areas where winter produce is grown.

The food crisis is manifestly just that – a crisis. At the same time, there’s another side to this coin. Rising food prices are to some extent good for farmers. Certainly, large grain farmers in the US, Canada and many other rich world nations have been experiencing a well-deserved stabilization, after a radical drop in farm income during 2008-2009. And there are plenty of people, me included, who have been arguing for years that we don’t pay enough of the true costs of our food. So who is right? How do you balance the merits and demerits of food prices?

One way would be think historically, because in purely historic terms, it is entirely normal to spend a lot of your income on food. Consider this 2008 piece from Jim Webster in The Farmer’s Guardian:

“It probably took 150 years for our civilisation to swing from a man’s annual wage being the yield of one acre, to that same acre paying him for a week. I wonder how long it will take to swing back?

Obviously we can try and push for increased yields, but to match the scale of increase we have seen since they huddled in gloomy bars and decided the Egyptians were liars if they said they got over 400kg an acre, we would have to hit 20 tons an acre. GM is not going to deliver that.

So personally I don’t think that wheat is dear, I don’t think it is dear at all.”

High food prices are obviously a matter of perspective. By long term historical analysis of agrarian societies, food prices are undoubtedly low, despite their current rise. But when we talk about low food prices we tend to be implying that we could and should spend more money on food. That is undoubtedly true of middle class and above rich world denizens (who constitute a tiny percentage of the world’s whole population). Many of these people already voluntarily spend more on food than most people, for pleasure or as participants in food movements of various sorts – specific diets, high culture food preferences, or environmental reasons.

Can most of the world endure higher food prices, though? And are all high food prices created equal? We already know that poor urbanites and small scale subsistence farmers who buy some of their food are most likely to be badly hurt by rising prices. But what about everyone else? And are rising food prices the best way to create agricultural justice?

As Helena Norberg-Hodge, Todd Merrifield and Steven Gorelick argue in _Bringing the Food Economy Home_, the supposed low price of food masks several other truths. The first is that percentage of household income spent on food comparison is based, to a large degree, on concealed costs.

The first is the reality of the two worker household. When we compare the decline in percentage of US income spent on food between 1949 and 1997, a decline from 22% to 11%, the difference seems stark indeed. But in that same, the single earner household went from being a norm to an anomaly – that is, it now took two people to support the family in many more households. So yes, the percentage has dropped, but that represents in most cases, the percentage of two people’s working wages.

But more importantly, as Norberg-Hodge et al point out, as the percentage of income spent on food fell, the percentage spent on housing skyrocketed. And these two things are entirely related. As the authors write,

“This is a direct consequence of the same economic policy choices that supposedly lowered the cost of food. Those policies have promoted urbanization by sucking jobs out of rural areas and centralizing them in a relative handful of cities and suburbs. In those regions, the price of land skyrockets, taking the cost of homes and rentals with it.

Thus, the proportion of income spent on food today may be less, but since total income needed is so much higher, people pay much more for food now than the statistics would lead us to believe.” (Norberg-Hodge et al, 73)”

I think this point is especially important, because it means we cannot view food prices in isolation from the society as a whole.

The reality is that industrialization creates not just costs, but real dependencies. It isn’t just the high price of concentrated housing (housing whose value is now utterly divorced from the productive value of the land itself), but also upon a host of other things – urbanization means increased dependencies on energy, because large populations in close proximity can’t meet their own heating and cooling needs with locally sourced solutions, and infrastructure must be created to handle outputs. As areas become more tightly populated and work is centralized, transport to those regions (agrarians may need to transport to sell and shop, but they often don’t need to “go to work” in the sense of daily transport dependencies) starts creeping up in cost, whether public or private.

The process of industrialization and urbanization then creates the need to compensate for the rise in prices to meet needs that were not previously monetized. One way is to take more labor from either a single breadwinner, or add more breadwinners. Juliet Schor, in her book _The Overworked American_ has documented that 19th century industrialization represented the longest hours ever worked by any people, despite our overwhelming perception that framework is unnecessarily hard. The next most overworked people in history are us – we come right after the 19th century factory workers and coal miners, and well before any agrarian society. But the rising costs of meeting basic needs mean that we must work harder than many agrarian people have.

For example, in _1066: The Year of the Conquest_ historian David Howarth notes that the average 11th century British serf worked one day a week to pay for his house, the land that he fed himself off of, his access to his lord’s woodlot for heating fuel, and a host of other provisions, including a barrel of beer for him and his neighbor on each Saints day (and there were a lot of him). How many of us can earn our mortgage payment, our heat, and our beer on a single day’s work?

The long hours required by industrial society also have the further “benefit” of ensuring that it is extremely difficult for those embedded in it to meet their needs outside the money economy. It is difficult (not impossible, just difficult) to feed yourself from a garden when economic policies supporting urbanization create incentives to build on every piece of land, and when one works long hours, or multiple jobs. As we see now, it is difficult even to feed your family a home cooked meal, much less grow one.

But demanding more labor to meet these needs is only one part of the coin of industrializing economic policies – it is also necessary to move people who would prefer to stay there off their land, and to reduce prices for food, so that those now paying much more of their income into housing and energy can afford to eat. As George Kent exhaustively documents in _The Political Economy of Hunger_, the main beneficiaries of the Green Revolution were not, in fact, the world’s poor, the supposed recipients of our help, but the food buying members of the urbanized rich world, who got increasing quantities of cheap meat and food products. This study was backed up by a 1986 World Bank study that concluded that increased food production in itself does not reduce hunger, and that the gains of the Green Revolution went overwhelming to the Global North.

What these increases in product do, however, is reduce food prices paid to farmers, thus meaning fewer people can make their living successfully in agriculture. It does create surpluses to dump on markets, thus increasing market volatility, and it does create incentives to turn farmland into urban land, and to increase the size of cities and their suburbs.

Moreover, the industrial economy that strips value from food shifts that value, and the health of the economy to other things – thus, the ability of consumers to stop buying plastic goods and entertainment and shift their dollars to food is extremely limited – their jobs often depend on the plastic goods, not the food economy. So we create powerful incentives to keep food prices low.

There’s a tendency to look at the world through progressive lenses, and the story that Jim Webster tells is part of that. It is true that food was far more hard earned in the past than it is now. It is also true that other things that were comparatively low cost in an agrarian society were buried in the cost of food – the cost of land was tied to what it could produce. Thus the cost of land was constrained in ways it cannot be when those ties between land and what it produces are broken.

Thus, when we think about the distinction between what is good for farmers and what is good for the population as a whole, we need to shift our thinking from short term analysis to long term, societal thinking. That is, a short term boom in prices driven by speculation, biofuel production, rising meat consumption and climate instability is undoubtedly good for some farmers for a short time, but booms are followed by busts universally – as we have seen. What farmers do not need is a boom and bust cycle that leads them to invest in land and equipment, only to find the value of their crops dropping again.

It is true that farmers benefit from rising per bushel prices for grains – or at least some of them do. Many struggle as land taxes rise, fertilizer costs rise and the price of livestock feed goes up faster than the prices for their products. Dairy and livestock farmers generally suffer. But some benefit. But it is worth noting that this represents no real shift towards enriching farmers – we are still using the same agricultural policies that give farmers the tiniest percentage of the cost of a loaf of bread. To put this in perspective, agricultural writer A.V. Krebs observes that the Philip Morris Corporation alone receives 10% of every single dollar spent on food in the US. ConAgra alone gets 6%. All the farmers in the US put together get just over 4%.

It is true that we underpay farmers – but rising food prices do nothing in that regard. In fact, it inserts farmers into another boom and bust cycle. What farmers need are stable food prices, higher than they have been, and to receive a decent portion of the price of the food we grow. And that will only happen if we start cutting out the corporate middle man, and working with farmers – giving them incentives to sell directly to consumers (who have to start eating what farmers actually grow) because they know that the consumers who buy from them will not stop eating when the speculators turn to new things and the ethanol plants close down because their Energy Return is minimal at best.

More importantly, we cannot create a viable agrarian economy without shifting back, on some level, to land and housing prices that are tied to the value of the soil underneath it – that is, having artificially inflated the cost of housing, and we must, in the devaluation of housing, shift value back to agriculture. As we lose other jobs, we must concentrate on creating agricultural jobs – and pushing the economy towards efficiencies of land use, not a reduction of human labor. The price of food here is only a small part of the massive retrofitting of our economy required to pay the real price of our agriculture – and receive the real value.

13 February, 2011

Countercurrents.org

“Simple description of observable reality does nothing more than capture the ‘accidents’ that identify the particularity of something, not convey the greater universal truths, the ideal form, that lies hidden beneath the accidental appearance.”

For fifteen days and counting, the people of the world have been watching in wonder and witnessing in fascination the Egyptian people flow through the streets of Cairo. As they streamed in and out of Tahrir Square we sensed the ebb and flow of the Egyptian people pulsing before us—vibrant, brilliant, eloquent—a symbolic force echoing the dreams and desires of humanity around the world. From our vantage points, witnessing this rare and powerful movement of human will on television screens in every land, we interpret the events to give meaning and purpose to their bravery, their commitment, their endurance, in the face of absolute force that has imprisoned them for thirty years in their own land.

And in our guts we feel the rising tide of impotence that has lifted our numb bodies in the ebb and flow of a silent sea of acquiescence and obeisance to the absolute forces that control our lives. Helplessness and shame swell in our hearts as we realize the frustrations, the torment and suffering these people have lived while the world watched and waited and did nothing, decade upon decade. There are lessons to be learned from the streets of Cairo.

But let us reflect for a few minutes on this rare scene of human will embodied in millions of Egyptians swarming through the streets of Cairo with banners held high, scribbled signs raised aloft flapping in the wind, children grasping their mother’s hand, arms lifted in jubilation, faces wet with tears of happiness, laughter ringing in the air, arms around each other in joyful celebration, horns blaring, flags of black, white and red spread parallel to the ground caught in the breeze as they furl in undulating waves among the crowds, an audible hum hovering over the huge gathering that breathes as one in motion to and fro, a living vibrant organism of humanity.

Beneath that ever moving, pulsating, audible scene, the image that captures hundreds of thousands of individuals, the observable reality in all its unique “accidents” of faces, colours, garments, noise, movements, objects, resides another reality, deeper than the observable, the universal truths that lie hidden beneath the accidental appearances: a human’s destiny and individual actions as well as understanding of self or anything at all are, by virtue of human nature, beyond an individual’s control and beyond comprehension. This is both the marvel and the evil of human existence. Yet here in this scene, in February of 2011, the Egyptians exemplify the dreams and desires and hopes of all free people who unite in oneness with them to throw off the limitations that those who thrive on indifference, on anger, on hate, on racism, on arrogance impose on them by force of will through occupation, subjugation and oppression. There are lessons to be learned from the streets of Cairo.

None of us viewing that scene can know what resides in the hearts and minds of those who braved the forces that have controlled their destiny for over thirty years, nor can we know what will follow. We know from experience that some desire to take control and impose their will on others. In our world that can be a dictator or an apparent democracy; in both cases it is those who control money that ultimately control all, corporations or individuals with the means to assert their will. A hundred years ago Mark Twain decried Teddy Roosevelt’s empirical designs by praising the brutal slaughter of the Moro’s in the Philippines by our military because it represented the ascendency of human amorality against fellow humans.

Today American empiricism accomplishes the same end across the globe by buying “peace” agreements with Mubarak that stifle the rights of his people, bury alive more than five million who live in the squalor of garbage and cockroaches in the Cities of the Dead in Cairo, force half the population to live on less than $2 a day, while they imprison Palestinians behind walls and lay military siege to Gaza.

“Mubarak became president (after Pres. Anwar Sadat’s assassination) in October 1981, two years after Egypt signed its peace with Israel. Under Mubarak, Egypt always adhered closely to the treaty’s terms. But the services it performed for Israel and the United States went much further than that. Indeed, Mubarak’s Egypt became both a shield and a spear for Israeli interests in the region, and globally. It shielded Israel politically from demands that Israel abide by international law in East Jerusalem and the rest of the occupied territories. And it worked closely with Israel to combat Hamas and Israel’s many other challengers.” (Reassessing U.S. aid in light of Egypt, The Congress Blog, Helena Cobban – 02/02/11)

There are lessons to be learned.

But this sentence is too broad; it does not touch the soul, the hidden truth lies beneath it. Like their Egyptian brothers and sisters, the Palestinians suffer behind walls, gates and checkpoints. Can we “truly comprehend what it is that makes an old man from a West Bank village face the brutality of Jewish settlers, year after year, as he returns to harvest his few remaining olive trees? Or a Palestinian woman from Gaza who keeps coming back to hold a vigil before the Red Cross office with a framed photo of her once-young son, now ailing in some Israeli jail?” (Ramzy Barhoud, “Insisting on their humanity”).

This is suffering caused by our closest friend in the mid-east, the only Democracy in the mid-east, the country the world should turn to if it is to distinguish between civilized humanity and that exposed by the people in the streets of Cairo. How fast the good friend Mubarak becomes a despot when the fear of change looms on the horizon. This our tax dollars pay for; this we call democracy.

Americans more than most must respond to this scene since their government has been responsible for “three decades of failed economic policies, massive poverty, continued repression of religious rights and near zero tolerance for political dissent.” (“Can peace with Israel survive Egypt’s revolution?” Jewish Times, Neil Rubin). Strange this quote comes from the Jewish Times, when it is Israel’s very existence that has embedded America in Egyptian politics. Our support for Israel glows in the darkness of mid-east inhumanity caused by dictatorial powers, military occupation, and apartheid.

One would think that the scenes in Cairo would lead both Israel and the United States to recognize that their approach these past 63 years by force of arms has wrought only destruction, humiliation and death to the vast majority of the people of Egypt and Palestine, indeed to the whole of the mid-east. One would think, that the lessons to be learned, graphically demonstrate that a mutual respect for all people, not just the inner circle of the powerful in Egypt or the Jews only in Palestine, require an equitable distribution of wealth to all, comprehensive employment for all, health for all, education for all, freedom of movement for all, and equitable housing for all if a civilized society is to exist for all.

If the streets of Cairo teach us anything, they teach us that those who horde for themselves isolate themselves from human sympathy; those that torture their fellow humans declare to the world that they are inhuman and deserve only ostracism; those with excessive pride fall from grace crushing their ego in the process; those that manipulate for personal gain causing undue suffering to their fellows are but tools of carnage lacking both heart and soul; and those that remain silent in the face of such inhumanity against others belong in the lowest circle of hell, frozen forever for all to see.

February 11, in all its symbolic splendour of togetherness, love and freedom, bears witness to our dreams and our hopes that humans can find happiness in accepting the brotherhood of all humankind. But that dream confronts a reality, an absolute of our experience, that a man will act to destroy another man, or lie to deceive him, or slander to discredit him, or turn from him in fear or turn love to hate on the presumption that he knows the truth concerning another man. Such behaviour is the righteous indignation of men, confirmed in illusion believed to be truth, and it corrodes the humanity that should guide all men. If the streets of Cairo have taught us anything, they have demonstrated that vigilance against those who would control out of arrogance, oppress with indifference, deceive with impunity, and humiliate without feeling, have abandoned all natural sympathies and become , in fact, non-human and must be exposed for all to see. Such vigilance unfortunately can never end.

William A. Cook is a Professor of English at the University of La Verne in southern California. His most recent book is The Plight of the Palestinians published by Macmillan this past summer. He can be reached at www.drwilliamacook.com or wcook@laverne.edu