Archives: Articles

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

14 February, 2011

Alanhart.net

For decades, and despite much rhetoric to the contrary, American-led Western policy has been to prefer Arab dictatorship (authoritarianism in various forms) to Arab democracy. This preference was determined by two main assessments.

One was that corrupt and repressive Arab regimes were the best possible guarantee that oil would continue to flow at prices acceptable to the West, and, that there would be almost no limits to the amount of weapons that could be sold to the most wealthy Arab states. (The design, production, testing and selling of weapons is one of the biggest creators of jobs and wealth in America, Britain and some other Western nations. Were it not for Saudi Arabia’s purchases, Britain’s arms manufacturing industry might have gone bust by now).

The other main policy-driving assessment was that only corrupt and repressive Arab regimes could be relied upon to provide the necessary security assistance for identifying, locating, hunting down and liquidating Islamic terrorists. This consideration became the priority after 9/11.

In addition there was great comfort for Western policy makers in their knowledge that a corrupt and repressive Arab Order was not going to fight Israel to liberate Palestine. (As I have noted in previous posts and documented in detail in my book Zionism: The Real Enemy of the Jews, after Israel closed the Palestine file with its victory on the battlefield in 1948, the Arab regimes secretly shared the same hope as the all the major powers and Zionism – that the file would remain closed. There was not supposed to have been a re-generation of Palestinian nationalism).

There was also comfort for Western policy makers in the belief that their relationship with corrupt and repressive Arab regimes would mean that the Western powers would not be seriously challenged on their support for Israel right or wrong. Put another way, Western governments, the one in Washington D.C. especially, knew they would not be required by the Arab regimes to pay a price for doing the bidding of the Zionist lobby and its stooges in Congress and the mainstream media.

No wonder then that while Tunisian-inspired people power was manifesting itself in Egypt, President Obama often seemed unclear about whether he wanted Mubarak to stay or go.

With Mubarak gone – I imagine the generals finally said to him something like, “We’ve either got to shoot our people or insist that you go now” – the first question is this: Will the High Council of Egypt’s armed forces really be prepared to preside over the dismantling of a corrupt and cruel system and give democracy a green light?

The problem for some of Egypt’s top generals is not only letting go of their own grip on the levers of political power. They are also locked into the business and financial corruption Mubarak presided over. I imagine he believed that allowing them to make loads of money would guarantee they would not make trouble for him as he assisted Israel to impose its will on the Palestinians, not least by effectively cancelling the results of the Palestinian elections which gave Hamas victory in the Gaza Strip.

That said, I am inclined to the view that the High Council will honour its promise to hand over to a civilian government and that we will see something approaching real democracy in Egypt. But what then?

The High Council has said, not surprisingly, that it will respect all of Egypt’s international obligations including the 1979 peace treaty with Israel. (My own view is that this separate peace was a disaster for the whole world. Why? With Egypt out of the military equation, Israel had complete freedom to be even more aggressive in seeking to impose its will on the region, with Lebanon its prime target. At a stroke Sadat’s separate peace with Israel also destroyed the prospects for a comprehensive peace).

Key question: Would a democratically elected civilian government have to be bound by the High Council’s commitment to the peace treaty with Israel?

The answer, surely, has to be “No!” If, for example, the will of the people who elected the new government was for the peace treaty with Israel to be reviewed, the government would have to set a review process in motion.

That would create a very tricky situation for the government with Israel and the U.S. but it could be managed by the government saying that it would submit the treaty to a referendum.

If there was a referendum, much would depend on how the question was framed. If it was a simple “Yes” or “No” to Egypt remaining committed to the peace treaty with Israel, probably an easy majority of Egyptians would vote “No”. But that would not be good politics.

Best politics would be for the government of Egypt to frame the referendum question to give it the authority to say to Israel something like: “We wish to remain committed to our peace treaty with you, but we will be unable to do so without a commitment from you to end your occupation of all Arab land taken in 1967.”

Unless a majority of Israelis are beyond reason, that could be a game changer which would benefit the region and the whole world, not only the Palestinians.

Alan Hart is a former ITN and BBC Panorama foreign correspondent. He is author of Zionism: The Real Enemy of the Jews. He blogs at http://www.alanhart.net and tweets via http://twitter.com/alanauthor

 12 February, 2011

Williambowles.info

Mubarak steps down, surely the result of direct US pressure. But what difference will it make, the country has been run by a military clique for three decades, all that’s changed is that now they do it openly. The real issue, is what next? Will the masses now press for Sulieman, all of them to step down now? It’s possible, it depends on what the army and the security-state forces do next, after the euphoria has died down.

Is it a pre-revolutionary situation? The fact that this all came to a head with the entry of organized labour into the fray, is not a coincidence, for buried in this act is also the fact that alternate, independent trade unions have sprung into being and it’s these that helped mobilized workers across Egypt.

It’s also pretty obvious that Mubarak’s speech on the 10th February was deliberately planned with the US as they all had to know what the reaction would be from the Egyptian people. Are we to believe that the Egyptian hierarchy were not in continuous contact throughout this entire crisis? Egypt is much too important to be left to the Egyptians.

But Mubarak’s insolence solved the problem of obvious US interference. I can see the planners sitting around the table as they debated the strategy, ‘let Mubarak act defiant, take the heat and enrage the populace and the following day the Army will announce that they’ve ‘stepped in’ and removed him and he gets whisked out of his presidential palace in a helicopter, while everybody is partying.’

So now the Empire will sweat it out and hope for some kind of ‘orderly transition’ as it keeps repeating ad nauseum, Goebbels-style, the various memes, one for every occasion.

‘Orderly’ of course means pro-Western in business and cooperation in running the Middle East. The last thing they want to see is the insurrection turn into a revolution. Everything is possible.

The Israeli factor

“[So]…full blown democracy [in Egypt] might not be in [Israel’s] best interests? [‘news’ announcer]

“No, indeed not… [BBC Jerusalem correspondent]” — BBC TV News, 11 February, 2011

There you have it. The key to the US’s apparently vacillating position on events in Egypt is centred on the strategic triangle that is the US, Israel and Egypt. As long as the alliance holds, Israel is safe and the Middle East remains under Anglo-American control.

Thus the issue of Mubarak resigning is in a sense irrelevant to the central dilemma confronting the US (and Israel): how to maintain control of Egypt without appearing to do so? As the BBC acknowledges (on behalf of its master’s voice), it’s a real conundrum pointing to yet again how crucial the mass media is as to how events progress and are seen to be progressing.

As a piece in Ha’aretz states, the issue is, will a post-military regime will be anti-Israeli or not?

“Washington frightened Israel even more than it did Mubarak, because Israel is an old hand at self-frightening. Netanyahu warned the administration that Egypt could go the way of Iran. And Vice Prime Minister Silvan Shalom warned of the danger of the rebels blocking the Suez Canal, and then where will we be? Which proves that Israelis don’t understand that the uprising in Egypt is not necessarily against the peace with Israel. Closing the Suez Canal would above all hurt Egypt’s revenues. We are the unrivaled experts in creating doomsday scenarios when the behavior of the United States is not to our liking.” — ‘Israel needs to help the U.S. to stabilize the region’, Ha’aretz, 11 February, 2011

I am of the opinion that US ‘advice’ to the generals was to ‘hang in there with Mubarak for as long as possible but make it look like you’ve issued an ultimatum to Mubarak and that he has to go.’ And this is exactly what happened. Handing over (unspecified) powers to professional torturer Sulieman (and powers that can be taken back at any time), meant nothing. It was a shell game that the Egyptian people rejected the moment they heard Mubarak’s speech last night, followed by an even more insulting diatribe from Sulieman.

It shows once again that puppets of the US are not renowned for their intellectual acumen nor for having their fingers on the pulse of whatever nation the US has installed them in.

It was a calculated risk as the army is obviously divided but no one knows exactly how. Is this a ‘Young Turks’ moment I wonder?

The leadership of the army are all Mubarak cronies, in their 60s and 70s but what of the younger officers and just as importantly the conscripts? No wonder the Empire is all over the shop and allegedly really pissed off with its Egyptian consigliori. I say allegedly because it fits the pattern of continuous delaying tactics, all the while trying to calculate the risks versus rewards of any particular approach to the crisis.

But the tactic is an extremely dangerous one as failure to act at the right time could turn the insurrection into a popular revolution. This is why Mubarak had to go, it buys more time. The army is prevaricating, saying it will rescind the Emergency laws if everyone goes home first. This will not sit well with the masses. It’s the same people who have ruled them for thirty years dictating terms yet again!

Now is the time to sit tight and consolidate the insurrection, demand more. What are they going to do, turn their guns on the people? That would truly be the straw that broke the camel’s back.

For the past thirty years the US has squandered $60 billion supplying Egypt’s military dictatorship and in so doing it has created an military-owned business dynasty that now owns major chunks of the Egyptian economy. It’s a military-political economy, thus the central dilemma is that in order to transform Egyptian society the military-political cabal that rules Egypt has to be overthrown and disowned of its ill-gotten gains. This means taking on the Army. How can it be defanged?

Without direct interference from the West, I think we can be assured that Egyptian people will choose the right direction for them, however it pans out. But with so much at stake for the US and its allies it will stop at nothing to make sure the status quo is maintained. It’s all down to the Egyptians now

12 February, 2011

Countercurrents.org

On February 10, indications were he’d step down. He didn’t, but now it’s official, vice president Suleiman saying he resigned, handing power to Egypt’s military. A New York Times alert said “a historic popular uprising transformed politics in Egypt and around the Arab world.”

Times rhetoric way overstated reality as resolution remains very much in doubt, though odds strongly favor continuity, not populist change. More on that below.

For the moment, however, huge Tahrir Square crowds erupted in celebratory euphoria, perhaps forgetting their liberating struggle just began. It didn’t end with Mubarak’s resignation. That was a baby step, removing an aging dinosaur Washington and Egypt’s military wanted out. Now he’s gone. Focus must follow through on what’s next, requiring sustained popular protests. Otherwise, everything gained will be lost.

Behind the scenes, Washington and Egyptian military maneuvers were involved. They’re always crucial, not visible orchestrated events. As a result, discerning reality is crucial. Hopefully, Egyptians understand, knowing the folly of letting up now and losing out.

Investigative journalist Wayne Madsen believes Obama waffled to buy time for CIA operatives to secure and purge Egypt’s torture and rendition files, dating from when Attorney General Eric Holder was Clinton’s Deputy Attorney General in the 1990s.

He also said Secretary of State Clinton wanted her husband protected, and former White House chief of staff (now CIA head) Leon Panetta had the same aim. Doing so, of course, requires keeping Washington-favorites in power, permitting no uncertain alternatives, people Egyptians need for real change.

Besides short-lived confrontations, orchestrated street violence was avoided. Whether it continues, however, is unknown as Egypt’s military is notoriously brutal, a different reality than most on Cairo streets believe. Among them were hundreds, perhaps thousands experiencing its harshness, for the moment at least lost in a sea of celebratory humanity.

Behind the Scenes Washington Maneuvering

Notably on January 31, Obama sent former US diplomat Frank Wisner (son of WW II era intelligence chief Frank Wisner) to Cairo ahead of Mubarak’s February 1 address. His mission: tell him not to resign until after September elections.

Publicly, Wisner confirmed what White House officials claimed reflected his position, not US policy. In fact, diplomats, past or present, convey only the latter.

Wisner noteworthy credentials include:

— Career Ambassador (the highest foreign service rank) after serving as Under Secretary of State for International Security Affairs, Under Secretary of Defense for Policy, and ambassador to India, the Philippines, Zambia and Egypt (1986 – 1991) when he and Mubarak became good friends;

— numerous corporate boards, past and present, including Enron, AIG, Ethan Allen Interiors, eogresources, Commercial International Bank (a leading Egyptian bank), Pharaomic American Life Insurance Company (ALICO, Egypt), Pangea3, and the American University in Cairo; and

— currently an international affairs advisor to Patton Boggs, an influential Washington-based lobbying firm.

High-level and well-connected, his Cairo mission showed Washington behind-the-scenes maneuvering to replace Mubarak, delay transition, and install new faces under old policies, publicly portraying change – the old bait and switch con on a world stage, though whether it works remains highly uncertain. Expect months before clarity, maybe longer.

Obama’s Public Statement on Egypt

Rhetoric always conceals policies, Obama’s February 10 statement Exhibit A, saying:

“As we have said from the beginning of this unrest, the future of Egypt will be determined by the Egyptian people. But the United States (stands for) core principles. We believe that the universal rights of the Egyptian people must be respected, and their aspirations must be met. We believe that this transition must immediately demonstrate irreversible political change, and a negotiated path to democracy (with) a roadmap to elections that are free and fair.”

Note:

— no transition timeline was mentioned, nor did Obama call for Mubarak’s immediate resignation with his entire regime popular outrage wants out;

— political change masks business as usual;

— universal rights weren’t specified nor were free and fair elections defined; Washington won’t tolerate either anywhere, including at home; and

— vague sentiments were enunciated, masking Washington’s real agenda for new regime faces under old policies – no compromises, no alternatives, no dissent, just hardline Realpolitik for unchallengeable imperial control; not just in Egypt; everywhere.

Obama’s Real Agenda

As part of Washington’s Greater Middle East Project, it includes neutralizing opponents, securing unchallengeable imperial control, preventing democracy, rigging elections to assure it, militarizing the region strategically, exploiting its resources and populations, orchestrating events covertly, and deciding how and when they play out.

In Egypt and throughout the region, they look similar to US-orchestrated color revolutions in Serbia (the 1990s prototype), Georgia (Rose), Ukraine (Orange), Myanmar (Saffron), Tibet (Crimson), Iran (Green), and currently perhaps Tunisia (Jasmine), and elsewhere in the Middle East, color-coded or not.

They all have a common thread: what the Pentagon calls “full spectrum dominance” for total global, space, sub-surface and information control. Whether it succeeds, however, remains uncertain given America’s declining world influence and stature, including on Cairo streets.

A previous article discussed past color revolutions, accessed through the following link:

http://sjlendman.blogspot.com/2009/06/color-revolutions-old-and-new.html

Egypt: What’s Ahead

For sure, Washington, the Pentagon and Egypt’s military will decide, not Mubarak (an aging, now ousted dinosaur), Suleiman or other hated regime figures. Stratfor’s George Friedman believes Egypt’s military aims to save the regime, not Mubarak, suggesting three possible outcomes before he resigned:

— continuing standing aside, letting crowds assemble and march peacefully to the presidential palace and elsewhere on Cairo streets;

— blocking more protesters from entering Tahrir Square, containing those already there; or

— replacing Mubarak with temporary military rule.

Egypt’s military coup ousted him. He didn’t resign. He was pushed, the heavy shoving from Washington. It’s not clear if Suleiman will stay on. Hopefully public anger won’t tolerate him or other regime figures, given how much they’re hated.

So far, confrontations have been avoided. Doing so now “would undermine the military’s desire to preserve the regime” and its people-friendly perception. Friedman believes options one and two were unacceptable. “That means military action” unseating him. Only the timing wasn’t known until now.

On February 11 Friedman’s Red Alert update said:

“Egypt is returning to the 1952 model of ruling the state via a council of army officers. The question now is to what extent the military elite will share power with its civilian counterparts.”

“The fate of Mubarak’s National Democratic Party (NDP)” remains unknown. Without it, “the regime will have effectively collapsed and the military could run into greater difficulty in running the country,” ahead of elections whenever they’re held.

For now, Egypt’s military council comprises provisional rule. Very likely it’ll want retained NDP elements and opposition parties help in managing transition. It’s biggest challenge is “avoid(ing) regime change while also dealing with a potential constitutional crisis.”

Popular pressure, however, must demand regime change, a clean sweep, ending emergency law powers immediately, and democratic constitutional changes.

Al Jazeera: “Hosni Mubarak Resigns as President”

On February 11, Al Jazeera reported massive crowds in Tahrir Square, a day called “Farewell Friday.” Cairo and Alexandria images showed wall-to-wall humanity as far as the eye could see, by far the largest demonstrations so far after protesters called for millions to come out for “a last and final stage.”

Despite mass public anger, tensions between army forces and crowds were absent, restraint very much shown, but how long will depend on unfolding events under the new military rule.

Earlier, AP said Mubarak flew to Sharm el-Sheik, the Red Sea resort 250 miles from Cairo.

The New York Times also reported a “Western official (saying) that Mr. Mubarak had left the capital, (and that) the Supreme Council of the Egyptian Armed Forces issued a statement over state television and radio indicating that the military, not Mr. Mubarak, was in effective control of the country.”

In fact, a coup d’etat replaced him, but what follows or its timeline isn’t known. What is known is that mass public anger and nationwide strikes effectively shut down the country beyond what any force could control.

The reaction following Mubarak’s address, followed by Suleiman’s, showed two officials disengaged from reality. As a result, Mohamed ElBaradei, now an opposition figure, responded bluntly, saying:

“I ask the army to intervene immediately to save Egypt. The credibility of the army is being put to the test.”

In a top-featured February 11 New York Times op-ed, he said:

“Egypt will not wait forever on this caricature of a leader we witnessed on television yesterday evening, deaf to the voice of the people, hanging on obsessively to power that is no longer his to keep….We are at the dawn of a new Egypt….We have nothing to fear but the shadow of a repressive past.”

Al Jazeera reported him saying Egypt “will explode” unless military forces intervene. They did but haven’t explained what’s ahead beyond commonplace boilerplate rhetoric – for sure no democracy according to Reuters quoting a National Security Council participant saying:

“What the US isn’t saying publicly is that it’s putting its power behind (Egypt’s) generals. The goal is to stack the deck in favor of the status quo – a scenario that removes Mubarak, yet is otherwise more about continuity than change.”

In other words, Obama’s “orderly transition democracy,” substitutes rhetoric for constructive change neither he nor others in Washington will tolerate. As a result, people power faces imperial Washington and Egypt’s military, united against populist change. However, what develops regionally remains unknown. Resolution can go either way or some unacceptable middle-ground compromise. Avoiding it is crucial, but doing so means continuing daily protests until all essential demands are met.

A Final Comment

According to Human Right Watch (HRW) and London Guardian reports, the professed neutrality and public persona of Egypt’s military belie its harshness.

On February 9, Guardian writer Chris McGreal headlined, “Egypt’s army ‘involved in detentions and torture,’ ” saying:

Military forces “secretly detained hundreds and possibly thousands of suspected government opponents since mass (anti-Mubarak) protests began, (and) at least some of these detainees have been tortured, according to testimony gathered by the Guardian.”

Moreover, HRW and other human rights organizations cited years of army involvement in disappearances and torture. Former detainees confirmed “extensive beatings and other abuses at the hands of the military in what appears to be an organized campaign of intimidation.” Electric shocks, Taser guns, threatened rapes, beatings, disappearances, and perhaps killings left families grieving for loved ones.

HRW researcher Heba Morayef said, “I think it’s become pretty obvious by now that the military is not a neutral party. The military doesn’t want and doesn’t believe in the protests and this is even at the lower level, based on the interrogations.”

Allied with Washington, the Pentagon and US intelligence, it supports power, not populist change, a dark reality street protesters better grasp to know what’s coming from a post-Mubarak regime. Unless challenged, promised reforms will leave entrenched policies in place, enforcing predatory capitalism with police state harshness, what Americans also endure under friendly-face leaders.

Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago and can be reached at lendmanstephen@sbcglobal.net. Also visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com and listen to cutting-edge discussions with distinguished guests on the Progressive Radio News Hour on the Progressive Radio Network Thursdays at 10AM US Central time and Saturdays and Sundays at noon. All programs are archived for easy listening.

http://www.progressiveradionetwork.com/the-progressive-news-hour/.

12 February, 2011

Endoftheamericandream.com

Will 2011 be the year that we point to as the beginning of the great global food crisis? Food prices are soaring, supplies are very tight and already we have seen some very intense food protests flare up around the globe this year. When people don’t have enough to eat, they tend to become very desperate, and unfortunately it looks like the global food situation is not going to improve much any time soon. Right now the world is really struggling to feed itself, and with each passing day there are even more mouths to feed. It is being projected that the population of the world will reach 9 billion people by the year 2050. There are already way too many people starving to death around the globe, and unfortunately starvation is only going to become more rampant as food supplies get even tighter. Some of the key food producing provinces in China are facing their worst drought in 200 years. Flooding has absolutely devastated agricultural production in Australia and Brazil this winter. Russia is still trying to recover from the horrific drought of last summer. Global weather patterns have gone haywire over the past 12 months, and this is putting immense pressure on a global food system that was already on the verge of a major breakdown.

Food stockpiles all over the world are disturbingly low at this point. If a major global famine broke out not even the United States would be able to last for long. The U.S. government is supposed to be keeping a lot of food stockpiled in the event of an emergency, but that is just not happening.

Right now a desperate scramble for food is beginning. Quite a few nations that used to be huge food exporters are now importing a lot of their food. Prices for staples such as wheat, corn and soybeans are absolutely soaring, and the UN is projecting that they will continue to rise rapidly throughout 2011.

Unless something dramatically changes, the global food situation is only going to get tighter and tighter and tighter as this decade rolls along.

So who is going to decide who gets fed and who doesn’t?

As food prices continue to rise, will we start to see more food riots erupt all over the world as starving populations demand answers from their governments?

What is going to happen if weather patterns get even worse or if we have a string of really bad natural disasters?

What is going to happen if we experience a really bad global economic collapse?

Right now these are just the “birth pains”, but if things get much worse we could be looking at a horrific food shortage that will rock the globe.

The following are 14 facts that make you wonder if the coming global food shortage has already begun….

#1 According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, U.S. corn reserves will drop to a 15 year low by the end of 2011.

#2 The United Nations says that the global price of food hit another new all-time high in the month of January.

#3 The price of corn has doubled in the past six months.

#4 The price of wheat has roughly doubled since the middle of 2010.

#5 According to Forbes, the price of soybeans is up about 50% since last June.

#6 The United Nations is projecting that the global price of food will increase by another 30 percent by the end of 2011.

#7 Due to all of the unprecedented flooding, the winter wheat crop in Australia has been absolutely devastated.

#8 This winter Brazil was hit by some of the worst flooding that nation has ever seen. This has substantially hampered food production in that country.

#9 Russia, one of the largest wheat producers on the entire globe, is still feeling the effects of last summer’s scorching temperatures. In fact, Russia is actually importing wheat this winter to sustain its cattle herds.

#10 China is busy preparing for a “severe, long-lasting drought” that is projected to have a huge impact on several provinces. In fact, Chinese state media says that the eastern province of Shandong is dealing with the worst drought it has seen in 200 years. The provinces being affected by this severe drought grow approximately two-thirds of the wheat in China. The following is a very short video news report about the horrible drought that China is going through right now….

#11 It appears that Chinese imports of corn will be about 9 times larger than the U.S. Department of Agriculture originally projected them to be for 2011.

#12 Approximately 1 billion people around the world go to bed hungry each night.

#13 Somewhere in the world someone starves to death every 3.6 seconds, and 75 percent of those are children under the age of five.

#14 As food has become increasingly scarce around the world, many companies have started using whatever kinds of “fillers” that they can think of in their “food” products. For example, Raw Story is reporting that some companies in China have actually been mass producing “fake rice” that is made partly of plastic. According to one Chinese Restaurant Association official, eating three bowls of this fake rice is the equivalent of consuming an entire plastic bag.

Let us pray that this is not the beginning of a major global food crisis, because hunger and starvation are horrible things.

Starving to death is a fate that nobody should ever have to go through.

So, let us hope for the best, but let us also prepare as if we will be facing the worst.

13 February, 2011

Motherearthnews.com

“We have the capacity and ability to create a remarkably different economy, one that can restore ecosystems and protect the environment while bringing forth innovation, prosperity, meaningful work, and true security. The restorative economy unites ecology and commerce into one sustainable act of production and distribution that mimics and enhances natural processes.”

— Paul Hawken, The Ecology of Commerce

Every day we hear about topics like sustainable growth and sustainable building, but what does it really mean to be “sustainable?” In broad terms, sustainability quite clearly means that each new year finds the earth in at least as good of a condition as the last one. No increasing degree of deforestation, no fewer fish in the ocean, no higher levels of toxic pollution, and the concentration of atmospheric pollutants the same or better the next year as it was the prior one. Classically, many native American tribes had a high respect for the sustainability of the world, making collective decisions about whether or not to continue a particular course of action based upon if it would have a negative effect seven generations into the future.

Two modern day thinkers, the economist Herman Daly and Swedish Dr. Karl-Henrik Robèrt, have given sustainability much thought, offering us clear definitions to help us along our journey towards this goal. After all, if we are to develop an effective plan and roadmap for creating a sustainable world, we must first have a clear idea of what it truly means to be “sustainable”!

Herman Daly has suggested three simple rules to help define sustainability:

1) For a renewable resource –– soil, water, forest, fish –– the sustainable rate of use can be no greater than the rate of regeneration of its source. (Thus, for example, fish are harvested unsustainably when they are caught at a rate greater than the rate of growth of the remaining fish population.)

2) For a nonrenewable resource –– fossil fuel, high-grade mineral ores, fossil groundwater –– the sustainable rate of use can be no greater than the rate at which a renewable resource, used sustainably, can be substituted for it. (For example, an oil deposit would be used sustainably if part of the profits from it were systematically invested in wind farms, photovoltaic arrays, and tree planting, so that when the oil is gone, an equivalent stream of renewable energy is still available.)

3) For a pollutant, the sustainable rate of emission can be no greater than the rate at which the pollutant can be recycled, absorbed, or rendered harmless in the environment. (For example, sewage can be put into a stream or lake or underground aquifer sustainably no faster than bacteria and other organisms can absorb its nutrients without themselves overwhelming and destabilizing the aquatic ecosystem.)

Another way of looking at sustainability comes from Swedish Dr. Karl-Henrik Robèrt. Robèrt’s passion for sustainability developed in the late 1980s when he was working as a medical doctor and cancer treatment researcher. He felt a deep sorrow and fear in his heart concerning the destruction of the Earth’s environment. Working with his microscope, he saw that there were environmental limits that must be maintained within and around each cell and that when these limits are breached, the cell’s death is absolutely certain. The parallels to our Earth’s perilous condition of continuous environmental degradation became obvious, and Robèrt’s passion for the issue of sustainability turned into an obsession.

As Robèrt’s ideas began to crystallize into a formula for sustainability, he wrote a scientific paper on this subject, and shared it with numerous Swedish colleagues and scientists. After something like 22 drafts, this paper was published, and their consensus for a sustainability definition and guidelines became known as, “The Natural Step.” Robèrt recognized that our world is essentially a closed system, meaning that outside of the sun’s energy streaming to Earth, there are no new materials and resources to be found on this planet other than what was here to begin with. If we are to stand a chance of modifying humankind’s practices and industry in sustainable ways, then we must first understand what it means to be “sustainable.”

In two simple sentences, The Natural Step (TNS) defines four minimum environmental conditions as necessary elements for maintaining life sustainably in a closed-system world such as planet Earth:

In the sustainable society, nature is not subject to systematically increasing:

1) Concentrations of substances extracted from the Earth’s crust;

2) Concentrations of substances produced by society; or

3) Degradation by physical means.

4) And in that society, people are not subject to conditions that systematically undermine their capacity to meet their needs.

These four conditions provide us with a definition to help us determine whether a society is sustainable or not. TNS also provides a collection of strategic methods and resources for helping organizations, whether they are governmental or industrial, to make genuine progress on the road to sustainability. Robèrt’s sustainability conversations expanded beyond his circle of friends and the scientific community to public television, Swedish media stars, leading politicians, and even to the King of Sweden. Robèrt’s ideas have had a profound effect on many businesses, including IKEA, McDonald’s, Electrolux, and many others.

Let’s take a closer look at the four TNS conditions for sustainability:

1) Stored deposits: In a sustainable society, nature is not subject to increasing concentrations of potentially toxic materials that have been “liberated” from where they were stored as deposits inside the Earth’s crust. Mankind has been refining natural substances, such as mercury, lead, and radioactive materials, in unnatural concentrations. These substances that were previously bound into stable, durable matrices, such as bedrock or coal, are now accumulating in the biosphere, where they are metabolized into living organisms at ever increasing concentrations. Nothing disappears from our world, and everything that is not bound into a solid, stable matrix eventually disperses into the ecosystem.

2) Synthetic compounds and other unnatural material byproducts of society: In a sustainable society, nature is not subject to increasing concentrations of unnatural synthetic compounds. If this condition is not met, eventually the concentrations of these substances will reach concentration levels where irreversible changes begin to occur, with potentially dire consequences. The solution is to proactively substitute more common compounds, or ones that break down easily, for certain persistent and unnatural compounds, and for society to use substances efficiently. Remember that even using less of a toxic compound (improved efficiency) will still add up over time to too much of a bad thing, if this compound decomposes slower than the rate at which it is inserted into the biosphere.

3) Physical degradation of ecosystems and natural resources: We must draw our resources from well-managed ecosystems. Our health and prosperity depend on the capacity of nature to restructure our wastes into new resources. Human activities need to work in harmony with the cyclic principles of nature.

4) Human needs: Unless basic human socioeconomic needs are met worldwide through fair and efficient use of resources, it will be difficult to coordinate efforts and cooperation to meet conditions one, two, and three on a global scale. In a sustainable society, human needs are met worldwide.

(Source: Adapted from The Natural Step for Business, by Brian Nattrass and Mary Altomare, 2001)

From looking at both Robèrt’s and Daly’s definition of sustainability, we see that few things in our modern world are actually built, processed, or manufactured sustainably, including what is generally referred to as “sustainable building”, and that we have a long ways to go towards actually making our modern word sustainable.

Building a sustainable world will not be easy, but it is doable!

Green tip for the day: Fix it instead of throwing “it” away! When an item is manufactured, far greater inputs in the form of energy and raw materials go into making most items than meets the eye, and far more waste is generated in manufacturing and refining these raw materials than the item that sits in front of you. For example, according to a UN University study, 1.8 tons of raw materials are used to manufacture the average PC, and most of these materials are dumped somewhere as waste. So, when you repair an item rather than throwing it “away,” you are reducing your consumption and ecological footprint on the planet. It often seems hardly worth your time to sew a split seam on an item of clothing, upgrade a computer, or repair an appliance, but fixing something yourself, or spending a few bucks for someone else to fix it, is one more way of Doing the

Right Thing. The exception to this rule is when the item is an old energy hog, such as a refrigerator that is more than ten years old, or a gas guzzling car. In these cases, the energy wasted by the old appliance over its lifetime is far more energy than what goes into making a new efficient one.