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Britain will cut 490,000 public sector jobs over four years under austerity measures designed to reduce the country’s record deficit.

George Osborne, the finance minister, told parliament on Wednesday that the job losses were “unavoidable when the country has run out of money”.

“Today is the day that Britain steps back from the brink. It is a hard road but it leads to a better future,” he said.

He said he had ordered $130bn in spending cuts by 2015, aiming to reduce Britain’s deficit of 11 per cent of gross domestic product (GDP) to around two per cent within five years.

The measures will also hit the welfare state, cutting child benefits and pushing the state pension to 66 by 2020.

The cuts come as figures reveal British public sector spending in September reached $25.5bn – a record high level for the month.

Analysts had initially forecast a slight rise from September 2009’s public net borrowing of $24.4bn.

Protests

Small protests against the cuts are already taking place with larger marches and rallies scheduled to take place in London, the capital, later on Wednesday.

Nazanine Moshiri, Al Jazeera’s correspondent in London, said demonstrations so far were not matching the scale of anti-austerity protests seen previously in Europe.

“We’re not seeing anything like the kind of protests we’ve seen in the streets of Paris in the last few days.

“People here are looking at this as a way of blaming the previous government of the Labour party for what has happened, rather than blaming the current coalition government.”

But she added the move was a “big gamble” for the Conservative-Liberal Democrat alliance.

“If the economy doesn’t start to grow, who knows what could happen here,” she said.

‘Double-dip’ risk

Ruth Lea, a British economist, told Al Jazeera that Wednesday’s cuts were needed to reduce the deficit.

“If we don’t cut now the generations to come will have to pay for all this,” she said.

Lea added that the prospect of a “double-dip” recession was unlikely, saying: “Even though we talk about these enormous cuts they only mean one per cent year-on-year,” she said.

The International Monetary Fund has strongly backed plans for an aggressive reduction of Britain’s record high public deficit, describing spending cuts as an “essential” weapon.

But some economists have warned that the measures will tip Britain back into recession.

Mervyn King, the central bank governor, painted a gloomy picture late on Tuesday, saying it would be a long while before Britain could recover from the 10 per cent drop in output seen in the last recession.

The opposition Labour Party, which the current Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition government blames for running up Britain’s massive debt when it was in power, has agreed there is a need for fiscal discipline.

But it says that the coalition are cutting too much too soon.

Alan Johnson, Labour’s spokesman on economic issues, accused Osborne of “economic masochism”, warning that his cuts would leave Britain trapped in a cycle of low growth and high unemployment for years.

Wednesday’s measures will see spending cut across government departments, including the Foreign Office, which will lose 24 per cent from its budget, the police force, and the interior and justice departments.

The BBC is also being affected by the measures, with the government cutting funding to the World Service.

The plans are also extending to Britain’s Queen Elizabeth II, with royal household spending falling by 14 per cent in 2012 to 2013.

However the National Health Service, schools and overseas aid have been protected under the spending review.

The National Institute of Economic and Social Research think tank has said it believes the government will only be able to push through half the planned cuts.

By Aljazeera

20 October, 2010

Aljazeera

The corporate mass media (especially television) did not treat the Chilean mine collapse as a labor story but rather as a feel-good human interest story. It not only avoided asking hard questions about why the near-disaster occurred and why the mine workers could be treated like guinea pigs by their employers, it actively obscured these questions. I saw a psychobabbling guest of Tony Harris on CNN actually talking about how the Chilean government is the father figure for the miners and their supporters and people are turning to it for succor and inspiration. I threw up a little in my mouth.

So here are the questions that a social historian would ask about the sorry episode, and which I never heard anyone on television news ask during all the wall to wall coverage:

1. What were the miners mining? (A.: Gold and copper).

2. Did the high price of gold and the fact that the mining company was close to bankruptcy cause the company executives to cut corners?

3. Are the mine owners guilty of criminal negligence?

4. Why did the San Estaban mining company reopen the mine so quickly after an earlier tunnel collapse severed the leg of a mine worker?

5. Why is there no accountability for the mine owners?

6. Is George W. Bush-style deregulation of the mining industry by the Chilean government part of the problem here?

7. What is the influence of big gold and copper corporations over US policy?

8. Are copper and gold mine owners stronger in relation to workers and have they escaped government regulation because the US engineered a coup in 1973 to destroy the Chilean Left?

9. Was the San Estaban mining company’s ability to marginalize the union and to disregard input from the workers rooted in American-imposed corporate privilege?

10. In other words, was the trapping of these workers in the first place Richard Nixon’s and Henry Kissinger’s fault?

 

By Juan Cole

14 October, 2010

JuanCole.com

The government has approved the proposal for an amendment to the Citizenship Law, according to which anyone requesting Israeli citizenship will have to declare loyalty to Israel as a “Jewish and democratic” state. This amendment is perceived by many to be an unnecessary provocation against the country’s Arab population, even though it is ostensibly directed towards neither Arab citizens nor Jewish citizens, but towards those seeking citizenship, including Arab spouses requesting citizenship for the sake of family unification.

Columnist Nahum Barnea described it in sharp words: “The proposed law doesn’t just seem racist; it is racist. It compels non-Jews to declare they will be loyal to the Jewish state, but does not demand the same of Jews. Jews are exempt, because the Haredi rabbis are not willing to declare their loyalty, not to the Jewish state and certainly not to the democratic state. The results are harsh. It’s still not the racist Nuremberg laws, but it smells the same” (Yedioth Aharonoth Supplement, October 8, 2010).

In the Declaration of Independence and the Basic Laws (which serve Israel as a kind of constitution) Israel was declared a Jewish state long ago. The state’s symbols, the Star of David and the Menorah, leave no room for doubt. Thus too the other laws such as the Law of Return, and various temporary provisions and standing orders, which give preference to Jews above non-Jews. What, then, led the justice minister to propose the amendment now, an amendment which will affect just a few thousand people each year, most of whom are not Arabs and do not question the state’s Jewish character?

In fact, behind this amendment there is a hidden message regarding a debate sparked some five years ago between representatives of the Arab population and the state. The conflict began when former Knesset member Azmi Bishara set up a party under the slogan “A state for all its citizens”, which opened the way for Arab parties and institutions to challenge the state and expose the structural contradiction in its self-definition as “Jewish and democratic.” This philosophical clash between the Arab minority and the state served to oil the wheels of Avigdor Lieberman, today Israel’s foreign minister, whose party won 15 seats in the last general elections with its slogan “No citizenship without loyalty.”

In 2006, the Arab Monitoring Committee and the Committee of the Heads of the Local Arab Councils published a document entitled “The Future Vision of Palestinian Arabs in Israel.” According to this document, “The definition of the state as a Jewish state, and the use made of democracy to serve its Jewishness, excludes us from its ranks and places us in opposition to the nature and essence of the state in which we live.”

The “Vision” document raises the question of whether Israeli democracy can really include the Arab minority and treat it with full equality. The document is a response to the alienation that Israel’s Arab citizens have felt for over 60 years. It is not the definition of Israel as a Jewish state which led the Arab leadership to challenge the state, but the institutionalized discrimination which the Arab population suffers. Democracy cannot exist in a state of institutionalized discrimination. The real issue is not about changing the national anthem or the flag, but the fate of tens of thousands of young Arabs who see their future expropriated by the state.

The violence spreading in the Arab towns and villages, the daylight murders in Nazareth and Lod, these things express the collapse of the Arab education system, the rising unemployment, the poverty, and the powerlessness of Arab local authorities who are unable to supply even basic services.

Lieberman isn’t really interested in ascertaining the loyalty of those seeking citizenship. He wants to question the loyalty of the entire Arab population. The amendment to the law is just a beginning. Last month in the UN General Assembly he already presented his vision for the state, according to which the land populated by Arabs should be transferred from Israel to the Palestinian Authority in exchange for West Bank settlements.

If Netanyahu and his government continue to provoke the Arab population they will turn the state into an Apartheid state, which will pull the rug from under the claim that Israel is both Jewish and democratic. The demand to define Israel as “a state of all its citizens” stems from the fact that in defining itself as “Jewish and democratic” Israel has failed to apply the second part of the equation. The “Jewishness” comes at the expense of democracy. Now, instead of taking the Arab demand for equality seriously, the government provokes again – not only will you not get a state of all its citizens, we intend to continue to exclude you and to discriminate against you in all areas of your life.

One could expect, perhaps, that a state recently accepted into the OECD, a state trying hard to integrate into the global economy, which presents itself as “the only democracy in the Middle East,” would change its attitude towards its Arab population. Reports from the Bank of Israel and various authorities, and the conclusions of the Orr Commission which investigated the events of October 2000, create the illusion that the state is in fact trying to address the problems of education, employment, health and other issues which the policy of discrimination has produced. However, between recognizing injustice and doing something to remedy it, there stands a rightwing government trumpeting a nationalist and racist ideology. The efforts of the present government to exacerbate the conflict also result in skepticism, self-seclusion and extreme nationalism among Arab citizens.

The clashes surrounding the character of the state have another aspect which has not been given sufficient attention. In fact, Israeli society is deeply divided today – not just between Jews and Arabs, but between Jews and Jews. The state advances discriminatory policies against all workers, whether Jewish or Arab: labor-contractor employees, college teachers, artists, truckers, industrial workers, and migrant laborers with their children. Their rights to a secure place of work with social benefits are withheld. “Jewish” Israel in fact serves just a rich minority, a handful of families who received property and assets from the state, and use them for their own benefit without social obligation or public responsibility. Thus, Lieberman’s position as the watchman of Jewish Israel sits happily with the fact that he is up to his ears in investigations on suspicion of corruption. And he is not alone – many politicians do likewise, on the one hand competing for the honor of most rightwing, on the other hand feathering their nests by groveling to the tycoons.

There is certainly a reason to discuss the character of the state. However, the vision that must be debated concerns the future of all the workers, Jews, Arabs and others. The only truly democratic state will be one whose resources are equally and justly distributed. Such a state will no longer need the definition “Jewish,” which perpetuates a false solidarity among Israel’s Jews and institutionalized discrimination against its Arab citizens.

Translated by Yonatan Preminger

By Yacov Ben Efrat

12 October, 2010

Challenge-mag.com

 

 

President Clinton’s precedent-setting visit to China filled the front pages of American newspapers and led the evening television news for many days this summer. The stories focused on his controversial decision to attend a welcoming ceremony in Tiananmen Square, despite the stain of what reporters called the massacre of Chinese students there on June 4, 1989.

Over the last decade, many American reporters and editors have accepted a mythical version of that warm, bloody night. They repeated it often before and during Clinton’s trip. On the day the president arrived in Beijing, a Baltimore Sun headline (June 27, page 1A) referred to “Tiananmen, where Chinese students died.” A USA Today article (June 26, page 7A) called Tiananmen the place “where pro-democracy demonstrators were gunned down.” The Wall Street Journal(June 26, page A10) described “the Tiananmen Square massacre” where armed troops ordered to clear demonstrators from the square killed “hundreds or more.” The New York Post (June 25, page 22) said the square was “the site of the student slaughter.”

The problem is this: as far as can be determined from the available evidence, no one died that night in Tiananmen Square.

A few people may have been killed by random shooting on streets near the square, but all verified eyewitness accounts say that the students who remained in the square when troops arrived were allowed to leave peacefully. Hundreds of people, most of them workers and passersby, did die that night, but in a different place and under different circumstances.

The Chinese government estimates more than 300 fatalities. Western estimates are somewhat higher. Many victims were shot by soldiers on stretches of Changan Jie, the Avenue of Eternal Peace, about a mile west of the square, and in scattered confrontations in other parts of the city, where, it should be added, a few soldiers were beaten or burned to death by angry workers.

The resilient tale of an early morning Tiananmen massacre stems from several false eyewitness accounts in the confused hours and days after the crackdown. Human rights experts George Black and Robin Munro, both outspoken critics of the Chinese government, trace many of the rumor’s roots in their 1993 book, Black Hands of Beijing: Lives of Defiance in China’s Democracy Movement. Probably the most widely disseminated account appeared first in the Hong Kong press: a Qinghua University student described machine guns mowing down students in front of the Monument to the People’s Heroes in the middle of the square. The New York Timesgave this version prominent display on June 12, just a week after the event, but no evidence was ever found to confirm the account or verify the existence of the alleged witness. Times reporter Nicholas Kristof challenged the report the next day, in an article that ran on the bottom of an inside page; the myth lived on. Student leader Wu’er Kaixi said he had seen 200 students cut down by gunfire, but it was later proven that he left the square several hours before the events he described allegedly occurred.

Most of the hundreds of foreign journalists that night, including me, were in other parts of the city or were removed from the square so that they could not witness the final chapter of the student story. Those who tried to remain close filed dramatic accounts that, in some cases, buttressed the myth of a student massacre.

For example, CBS correspondent Richard Roth’s story of being arrested and removed from the scene refers to “powerful bursts of automatic weapons, raging gunfire for a minute and a half that lasts as long as a nightmare.” Black and Munro quote a Chinese eyewitness who says the gunfire was from army commandos shooting out the student loudspeakers at the top of the monument. A BBC reporter watching from a high floor of the Beijing Hotel said he saw soldiers shooting at students at the monument in the center of the square. But as the many journalists who tried to watch the action from that relatively safe vantage point can attest, the middle of the square is not visible from the hotel.

A common response to this corrective analysis is: So what? The Chinese army killed many innocent people that night. Who cares exactly where the atrocities took place? That is an understandable, and emotionally satisfying, reaction. Many of us feel bile rising in our throats at any attempt to justify what the Chinese leadership and a few army commanders did that night.

But consider what is lost by not giving an accurate account of what happened, and what such sloppiness says to Chinese who are trying to improve their press organs by studying ours. The problem is not so much putting the murders in the wrong place, but suggesting that most of the victims were students. Black and Munro say “what took place was the slaughter not of students but of ordinary workers and residents — precisely the target that the Chinese government had intended.” They argue that the government was out to suppress a rebellion of workers, who were much more numerous and had much more to be angry about than the students. This was the larger story that most of us overlooked or underplayed.

It is hard to find a journalist who has not contributed to the misimpression. Rereading my own stories published after Tiananmen, I found several references to the “Tiananmen massacre.” At the time, I considered this space-saving shorthand. I assumed the reader would know that I meant the massacre that occurred in Beijing after the Tiananmen demonstrations. But my fuzziness helped keep the falsehood alive. Given enough time, such rumors can grow even larger and more distorted. When a journalist as careful and well-informed as Tim Russert, NBC’s Washington bureau chief, can fall prey to the most feverish versions of the fable, the sad consequences of reportorial laziness become clear. On May 31 on Meet the Press, Russert referred to “tens of thousands” of deaths in Tiananmen Square.

The facts of Tiananmen have been known for a long time. When Clinton visited the square this June, both The Washington Post and The New York Times explained that no one died there during the 1989 crackdown. But these were short explanations at the end of long articles. I doubt that they did much to kill the myth.

Not only has the error made the American press’s frequent pleas for the truth about Tiananmen seem shallow, but it has allowed the bloody-minded regime responsible for the June 4 murders to divert attention from what happened. There was a massacre that morning. Journalists have to be precise about where it happened and who were its victims, or readers and viewers will never be able to understand what it meant.

4 June 2010

Written by Jay Mathews

Posted: 13 October 2010 16:20

Jay Mathews is an education reporter for The Washington Post. He was the paper’s first Beijing bureau chief and returned in 1989 to help cover the Tiananmen demonstrations. With his wife, Linda Mathews, he is the author of One Billion: A China Chronicle. This piece originally ran in the September/October 1998 issue of the Columbia Journalism Review.

On November 15, 1988 the Palestine National Council (P.N.C.) meeting in Algiers proclaimed the Palestinian Declaration of Independence that created the independent state of Palestine. Today the State of Palestine is bilaterally recognized de jure by about 130 states. Palestine has de facto diplomatic recognition from most of Europe. It was only massive political pressure applied by the U.S. government that prevented European states from according to Palestine de jure diplomatic recognition.

Palestine is a member state of the League of Arab States and of the Islamic Conference Organization. When the International Court of Justice in The Hague—the so-called World Court of the United Nations System—conducted its legal proceedings on Israel’s apartheid wall on the West Bank, the World Court invited the State of Palestine to participate in the proceedings. In other words, the International Court of Justice recognized the State of Palestine.

Palestine has Observer State Status with the United Nations Organization, and basically all the rights of a U.N. Member State except the right to vote. Effectively, Palestine has de facto U.N. Membership. The only thing keeping Palestine from de jure U.N. Membership is the implicit threat of a veto at the U.N. Security Council by the United States, which is clearly illegal. Someday Palestine shall be a full-fledged U.N. Member State.

From a world-order perspective, the 1988 Palestinian Declaration of Independence created a remarkable opportunity for peace with Israel because therein the P.N.C. explicitly accepted the U.N. General Assembly’s Partition Resolution 181(II) of 1947 that called for the creation of a Jewish state and an Arab state in the Mandate for Palestine, together with an international trusteeship for the City of Jerusalem, in order to resolve their basic conflict:

Despite the historical injustice inflicted on the Palestinian Arab people resulting in their dispersion and depriving them of their right to self-determination following upon U.N. General Assembly Resolution 181 (1947), which partitioned Palestine into two states, one Arab, one Jewish, yet it is this Resolution that still provides those conditions of international legitimacy that ensure the right of the Palestinian Arab people to sovereignty and national independence.

The significance of the P.N.C.’s acceptance of the Partition Resolution in the Palestinian Declaration of Independence itself could not be over-emphasized. Prior thereto, from the perspective of the Palestinian People the Partition Resolution had been deemed to be a criminal act that was perpetrated upon them by the United Nations Organization in gross violation of their fundamental right to self-determination as recognized by the United Nations Charter and general principles of public international law. The acceptance of the Partition Resolution in their actual Declaration of Independence signaled the genuine desire by the Palestinian People to transcend the past century of bitter conflict with the Jewish People living illegally in their midst in order to reach an historic accommodation with them on the basis of a two-state solution.

The very fact that this acceptance of Partition Resolution 181 was set forth in their Declaration of Independence indicated the degree of sincerity with which the Palestinian People accepted Israel. The Declaration of Independence was the foundational document for the State of Palestine. It was intended to be determinative, definitive, and irreversible. As the P.N.C. well knew at the time, their Declaration of Independence was not something that could be amended or bargained away.

Nonetheless, the Palestinians have now fruitlessly spent the past twenty-two years trying to negotiate in good faith with Israel over the two-state solution set forth in Resolution 181. They have gotten absolutely nowhere. Israel has never demonstrated one iota of good faith when it came to negotiating a comprehensive Middle Peace settlement with the Palestinians on the basis of a two-state solution. Even the 1993 Oslo Agreement was nothing more than an Israeli-drafted interim Bantustan arrangement for five years that was rejected in Washington, D.C. by the Palestinian Delegation to the Middle East Peace Negotiations for that precise reason. Both Israel and the United States now want to make the Oslo Bantustan permanent and, incidental thereto, destroy the right of the Palestinian refugees to return to their homes as required by U.N. General Assembly Resolution 194 (III) of 1948 and general principles of public international law.

In this regard, shortly before he died on September 24, 2007, I called up the former Head of the Palestinian Delegation to the Middle East Peace Negotiations, Dr. Haidar Abdul Shaffi at his home in Gaza in order to review the entire situation with him. According to Dr. Haidar: “The Zionists have not changed their objectives since the Basel Conference of 1897!” In other words, the Zionists want a “Greater” Israel on all of the Mandate for Palestine together with as much ethnic cleansing of Palestinians out of Palestine that the Zionists believe they can get away with internationally.

After twenty-two years of getting nowhere but further screwed to Israel’s apartheid wall on the West Bank and strangulated in Gaza, it is now time for the Palestinians to adopt a new strategy, which I most respectfully recommend here for them to consider: Sign nothing and let Israel collapse! Recently it was reported that the United States’ own Central Intelligence Agency predicted the collapse of Israel within twenty years. My most respectful advice to the Palestinians is to let Israel so collapse!

For the Palestinians to sign any type of comprehensive peace treaty with Israel would only shore up, consolidate, and guarantee the existence of Zionism and Zionists in Palestine forever. Why would the Palestinians want to do that? Without approval by the Palestinians in writing, Zionism and Israel in Palestine will collapse. So the Palestinians must not sign any Middle East Peace Treaty with Israel, but rather must keep the pressure on Israel for the collapse of Zionism over the next two decades as predicted by the Central Intelligence Agency. The correct historical analogue here is not apartheid South Africa, but instead the genocidal Yugoslavia that collapsed as a State, lost its U.N. Membership, and no longer exists as a State for that very reason.

All the demographic forces are in favor of the Palestinians and against the Zionists. The United States government is tired of its blank-check support for Israel because this policy seriously undermines and conflicts with America’s imperial objective to obtain the oil and gas lying beneath Arab and Muslim states by hook or by crook. Israel is ridden with and paralyzed by so many internal contradictions and conflicts that they are too numerous to list here.

Indeed, from the very moment of its inception as a direct result of the Zionists’ genocidal al Nakba in 1948, Israel has been the proverbial failed state, and still is so today. Israel would have never come into existence without the support of Western colonial imperial powers throughout the twentieth century. And the same is true today. Without the political, economic, diplomatic, and military support provided primarily by the United States, and to a lesser extent by Britain, France, and Germany, Israel would immediately collapse. The international Campaign for Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (B.D.S.) against Israel is quickly whittling away Israel’s domestic support in those countries. Israel’s own serial barbarous atrocities perpetrated against the Palestinians and the Lebanese have revealed the true face of Zionism for the entire world to see: genocide.

In fact, Israel has never been a State but just an Army masquerading as a State — a Potemkin Village of a State. Israel is the archetypal Great Band of Robbers described by St. Augustine in Book 4, Chapter 4 of The City of God:

Kingdoms without justice are similar to robber barons. And so if justice is left out, what are kingdoms except great robber bands? For what are robber bands except little kingdoms? The band also is a group of men governed by the orders of a leader, bound by social compact, and its booty is divided according to a law agreed upon. If by repeatedly adding desperate men this plague grows to the point where it holds territory and establishes a fixed seat, seizes cites and subdues peoples, then it more conspicuously assumes the name of kingdom, and this name is now openly granted to it, not for any subtraction of cupidity, but by addition of impunity….

All of these political, economic, military, diplomatic, sociological, psychological, and demographic forces are working in favor of the Palestinians and against Israel and the Zionists in Palestine. It will take a few more years for these historical forces to predominate and then to prevail. But the proverbial handwriting is on the wall for the Zionist Enterprise in Palestine for the entire world to see, including and especially the C.I.A. Even large numbers of Zionists living in Israel have already prepared their parachutes, and their exit plans, and their landing zones to go elsewhere in the world. There is no reason for the Palestinians to give the Zionists a new lease on life in Palestine by signing any sort of peace treaty with Israel.

It is obvious that soon Zionism will enter into Trotsky’s “ashcan” of history along with every other nationalistic “ism” that has plagued humankind during the twentieth century: Nazism, Fascism, Francoism, Phalangism, Stalinism, Maoism, etc. The only thing that could save Zionism in Palestine is for the Palestinians to conclude any type of so-called comprehensive Middle East Peace treaty with Israel. It is for precisely that reason then that the Palestinians must sign nothing and let Israel collapse of its own weight over the next two decades.

Millions of Palestinians have waited in refugee camps since 1948 in order to return to their homes, that is for 62 years. They can wait a little longer until Israel collapses within 20 years. Otherwise, for the Palestinians to sign a comprehensive peace treaty with Israel means that they will never be able to return to their homes as required by Resolution 194 of 1948. History and demography are on the side of Palestine and the Palestinians against Israel and the Zionists. But the Palestinians must allow history and demography a little bit more time in order to produce the collapse of Israel and Zionism in Palestine. Twenty years is but the blink of an eye in the millennia-long history of the Palestinian People, who are the original indigenous inhabitants of Palestine. God had no right to steal Palestine from the Palestinians and give Palestine to the Jews to begin with. A fortiori the United Nations had no right to steal Palestine from the Palestinians and give Palestine to the Zionists in 1947.

In the meantime, the Palestinians must keep up the pressure on Israel, Zionism and the Zionists in Palestine. The Palestinians have a perfect right under international law to resist an illegal, colonial, genocidal, criminal, military occupation regimé of their lands and of their homes and of their People that goes back to 1948 so long as it is done in a manner consistent with the requirements of international humanitarian law. Simultaneously, the Palestinians must continue to build their state from the ground up as they have been doing successfully since the first Intifada began in 1987 with its grassroots Unified Leadership of the Intifada.

Internationally, the Palestinians must continue their diplomatic and political and legal offensive against Israel. Palestine has gained enormous ground since November 15, 1988 when the P.N.C. proclaimed the independent State of Palestine. Palestine will continue to gain more support internationally over the next two decades, including the accelerating B.D.S. campaign that will delegitimize Israel and Zionism all around the world. At the same time, Israel will continue its rapid descent into pariah state status along the lines of the genocidal Yugoslavia that collapsed as a state and no longer exists. Israel will meet the same fate as the genocidal Yugoslavia provided the Palestinians do not sign any type of international peace agreement with Israel.

When Israel collapses, most Zionists will have already left or will soon leave for other states around the world. The Palestinians will then be able to claim all of the historic Mandate for Palestine as their State, including the entire City of Jerusalem as their Capital. Palestine will then be able to invite all of its refugees to return to their homes pursuant to Resolution 194.

Some Jews will remain in Palestine either voluntarily or involuntarily. Palestine and the Palestinians will treat the remaining Jews fairly. Palestine and the Palestinians will not do to the Jews what Israel, Zionism, and the Zionists have done to the Palestinians.

The Palestinians must sign nothing and let Israel collapse!

Countercurrents.org

Written by Francis A. Boyle

Posted: 02 October 2010 16:51

University of Illinois Law Professor Francis A. Boyle served as Legal Advisor to the Palestine Liberation Organization on the 1988 Palestinian Declaration of Independence; to the Palestinian Delegation to the Middle East Peace Negotiations from 1991 to 1993; and to H.E. Chairman and President Yasser Arafat. The story is told in his book “Palestine, Palestinians and International Law” (Clarity Press: 2003).

 

 

 

 

Reclama: Thank you for the opportunity to interview you. We’ve found that many Peace Corps Volunteers have read your books. One told me that “Confessions of an Economic Hit Man” totally reshaped her view of our foreign policy. She just wishes she would have read it sooner. Another reconsidered a job proposal working on one of the large infrastructure projects you used to forecast after reading the book. So it’s definitely had an impact on our community, which is why we wanted to interview you.

John Perkins: Well, I’m glad to hear that. Incidentally, when I’m on speaking tours at universities, I often have students come up to me and tell me they’re considering Peace Corps. They ask what I recommend, and I always say, “Go! Do it! It’s an incredible experience.” That happens quite frequently; I promote Peace Corps.

How do you respond to people who read about your economic hit man work and say, “This is just too fantastic to believe, it’s just one man’s story, and there is no way to independently verify the claims he makes?”

I almost never get that question because I think that most people who talk to me about these things say that they always figured that stuff like that was going on, but they’d never actually seen anyone write about it before. I will say that The New York Times did a major piece. It was the whole top fold of the front page of the business section in the Sunday edition back three years ago. They went in and looked at the details and it was thoroughly vetted. So the information is all there if they’re willing to dig.

Everything that I talk about obviously happened – the assassination of Roldos of Ecuador and Torrijos of Panama is pretty well known throughout Latin America. You can ask people in the Dominican Republic, I’m sure that most people who were alive at that time in Latin America realized that it was an assassination. And there’s tremendous amounts of evidence. And there was no question that economic hit men were talking to those two people along with many others. Every incident I talk about in my books happened. You can verify it. The only question might be, was I actually one of the economic hit men there? And my passport proves that I was in those countries at the time. So, there’s a lot of evidence.

Bechtel Corporation wrote a letter setting up a lawsuit against me, saying that they wanted us to remove their name and portions of the book that refer to Bechtel. Other organizations did something similar. We gave them the backup information that I had – my files are extensive. So we told them that if they continued to try to blackmail us, we would write an addendum to the next edition of the book exposing the fact that they were trying to get us to change things that are facts. They never filed a lawsuit, they never gave us more trouble. The evidence is all there; I have no problem at all substantiating it if people really want to dig, like Bechtel did and The New York Times did. But most people, I think, have a real sense that these things go on anyway, and so the book just confirms what they already suspected.

While discussing modern robber barons in “Hoodwinked,” you write that “from a purely economic perspective, philanthropy is inefficient. A person who has accumulated billions of dollars and in doing so has caused others to lose their jobs, closed the doors of small businesses, or ravaged the environment, and then donates a small percentage of his fortune to correcting those problems or to the arts, would have served the world far better by making fewer profits while increasing employment, supporting small businesses, and insisting that his executives practice good environmental stewardship.” This is such a critical point that even most educated people don’t recognize. Why haven’t universities made this point clear, and how can we ensure that the next generation will learn this obvious and important point?

I do all I can do, which is when I’m at universities and this question comes up I say exactly that, and I talk to university professors and have told them they should point that out. So it seems to me that it’s something that ought to be part of business school curricula, particularly, but of course I have no control over [laughs] what Wharton or Stanford or Cornell or any of the other business schools teach. All I can do is, every chance I get, I say these things. I also want to say that although I come down pretty hard on these kinds of philanthropists – people like Bill Gates today, and in the past, the Carnegies, and so on – I also recognize that once someone has done the things they’ve done and perhaps sees the light, has a change of heart, that I certainly honor the fact that they are trying to somehow redeem themselves by giving some of the money back, and so I certainly do encourage that, too. After all, I did some pretty bad things in my life as an economic hit man and now I’m working to turn things around, to try to change those very things. So I think it is important that if people have done things that are not the best for the world, that if they realize their mistakes, we do everything we can to encourage them to give back as much as they can. However, it would be far better if they had worked hard in the beginning to do the socially and environmentally responsible things, as I write in the book. So all I can do is encourage that in my writings and in my speeches and I hope more and more business schools will teach that, too.

You criticize what you call “trinket capitalism,” an economic system that produces junk that people don’t really need. However, our current model is also heavily financialized, producing speculation no one really needs; indeed, much of the blame of the financial crisis rests on highly leveraged, little-understood financial “trinkets” based on a housing bubble, not real production. One of the best examples of the uselessness of this financial speculation is the commodities market, where many of the goods produced by poor farmers are gambled on by traders and manipulated by huge agribusiness conglomerates. As you know, this price volatility wreaks havoc on the Third World, which is ironic since futures contracts were designed to provide stability. Are these financial instruments causing more harm than good? Should they be eliminated?

Yeah! Absolutely. I think they should be eliminated for the most part or at least we should have very strong laws regulating them so that they do more good than harm. The system that we’ve experienced, which has brought us into this global recession that we’re in today, has virtually let these people – hedge funds and other investment types – get away with what I consider to be criminal activity. Legally speaking, it’s not criminal because we’ve passed laws to decriminalize it, but it should be criminal. In other words, investments, business in general, should be there to support the public good. I think the guideline is that the first 100 years of the United States, no company, including investment companies, could get charters unless they could prove that they were serving the public interest. On average, the charter lasted ten years. Then the company had to go back in and demonstrate that it had served the public interest and would continue to do so.

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I think that’s a very reasonable thing to expect of corporations. There’s absolutely no reason why they should not be serving a public interest as well as making profits and serving their investors. Investors need to get a fair rate of return. But that should not be at the expense of everyone else. And we need regulations to support that, or, if there’s vehicles out there such as certain hedge funds that can’t possibly serve a public interest, we ought to get rid of them.

Do you think the forces behind “trinket capitalism” – cultivating a demand and hyping selling points of essentially useless items – has been applied to the realm of politics, like in elections?

No question. The politicians are controlled by big money – what I call the corporatocracy. Nobody gets elected in this country – or almost nobody – without the support of the corporatocracy. Nobody gets elected to a major national office without that support. We saw that with Obama. He went in saying he was not going to accept money from big corporations; by the end he accepted a lot of money from big corporations. And we’re now seeing the results. His financial policy is essentially run by Wall Street, particularly Goldman Sachs, and his agricultural policy is run by the big agribusinesses, especially Monsanto, because they provided so much money in his campaign. So politicians are very, very much tied in with these corporations.

But we the people ought to recognize that ultimately, we’re the ones with the control. Because these big corporations only benefit, only survive, when we support them, by buying their goods and services or allowing our tax dollars to buy their goods and services. So the marketplace is democratic if we choose to make it democratic, if we choose to shop consciously, invest consciously, and let them know. Send emails. Let Nike know that we’re not going to buy from them anymore because they’ve got sweatshops. Send them an email and if enough of us do that, they’ll have to turn their sweatshops into legitimate factories that pay real wages and have working conditions that are supportive of life rather than making life miserable for the workers. We have the control. And I say in “Hoodwinked” that the way we vote when we shop is just as important as – and perhaps more important than – the votes we give in polls on election day. We need to recognize that every time we buy something or choose not to, we’re casting a vote, but it’s important to communicate that and email makes it very easy to communicate to these corporate executives why we’re buying their goods and services or why we’re not buying them.

Do you believe there are enough affordable options to really provide a choice – a democratic marketplace, as you say?

I do. And it’s increasing all the time. Within the last month I’ve spoken at the Chicago Green Festival and the Seattle Green Festival. And there’s another one coming up in DC and then one in San Francisco. And they have a marketplace of these many, many vendors that have been vetted for their environmental and social responsibility. They offer a lot of options, from tennis shoes to toilets, food and clothes. We need to support those people. Now, I don’t think there’s anybody out there that’s one hundred percent perfect, and I’m not sure anybody ever will be one hundred percent perfect; who amongst us is? But what we need to do is encourage those companies and the entrepreneurs and the small companies even, like in the green marketplace, that are trying, that are making headway, and if we continue to do that then we’ll find that, ultimately everybody will have to go along with it. We have a lot of choices. You can go to dreamchange.org; there’s links there to various places if you’re looking to buy tennis shoes, shirts, food, there’s links that will help you to know which companies are trying to do their best job. We need to keep pushing harder and harder for that, letting people know that we absolutely refuse to buy things that are not socially and environmentally green, and we will buy things that are done that way. And I think it’s also important while saying this to say that we all need to cut back. We don’t need so many pairs of shoes and t-shirts and blue jeans, most of us don’t anyway – and we don’t need to use as much energy. We need to be much more conservative in the way we approach life.

You seem to be very positive about the corporate social responsibility (CSR) movement. In fact, that seems to be your cure for the mutant form of capitalism you describe. You say that today every major company pays “at least lip service to the idea of the ‘triple bottom line, ‘” that is, financial, social, and ecological costs and benefits. Many would argue that most of it remains just that – lip service. Can we reasonably expect a company not to focus on short-term profit maximization given that, generally speaking, within the current system of state capitalism, it will be driven out of business by competitors if it focuses on anything but?

Five years ago, all these students were telling me they wanted to make more money, wanted to have more power. Now, most of them – the ones I talk to anyway [laughs] – are saying that they want to do the right thing. They want to create businesses, they want to support businesses that are responsible, they want to create a world that they can be proud to bring children up in. I’m seeing a change in attitude. I am encouraged by that. I am hopeful that we can turn things around.

When I was in the Peace Corps in the Amazon, I was near death at one point, and I was cured by a shaman. Shamans teach us that we can change things – I wrote about this in a book called “Shapeshifting” that talks about this – by applying energy and intent to the things we want to create in the future. We can turn things around, as they put it. We change the dream by giving energy into a new dream. And it can happen very quickly. We’ve seen it happen. We got out of Vietnam because people changed their energy. We got corporations to clean up terribly polluted rivers in the United States because people put new energy into it. We got rid of apartheid in South Africa because of it. Recently, we got trans fats out of foods, for the most part, because people gave that energy. Now we need to give energy to a whole new scenario, which is to say, we’ll only support corporations that make profits within the context of creating a sustainable, just and peaceful world for everybody on this planet.

Do you think international agreements that regulate production and pricing of commodities should take the place of “free trade” agreements, which you recognize as heavily biased to favor wealthy countries? The International Coffee Agreement which Reagan torpedoed in 1989 comes to mind.

I’m all for real free trade and agreements that will support real free trade. But most of the ‘free trade’ agreements – in quotations – these days are just the opposite. They work in the benefit of the corporatocracy, the big international corporations, and, as you know and as every Peace Corps Volunteer probably knows, they generally work against the campesinos, the farmers in these other countries. I think that there’s a movement in Latin America today to support that. We’ve seen a number of presidents recently elected democratically who are really trying to establish true free markets, at least amongst their countries. I’m particularly thinking of Rafael Correa of Ecuador, Evo Morales, and I think Hugo Chavez of Venezuela, despite all the controversy that always swirls around him, is trying to promote some of these things. So I think that we can see agreements amongst countries in South America and I’d like to see that happen more in Africa, Asia and elsewhere. The idea of true free trade is excellent, but the idea of the kind of free trade that’s promoted by the United States and the G8 countries is a horrible form of exploitation – a subtle and yet very effective type of exploitation.

On that note, in an interview with Malibu Magazine you defended Chavez against the false portrayals of him as a dictator in the corporate media. You stated that while you didn’t appreciate his rhetorical approach, “He is a wild man, but one needs to be a wild man to do what he did.” What has he done for Venezuela?

This information seems to be lost on most progressives. How do we bridge the gap that allows so many well intentioned people to be misled about the great progress being made in Latin American countries that have rejected the neoliberal approach to development?

I think we all have to keep talking about it a lot more [laughs]. We have to understand that the mainstream press is aligned against the progressive movement in Latin America primarily because it is either owned outright by the corporatocracy or supported through advertising budgets, and, therefore, the mainstream press does not want to talk about the tremendous revolution that’s taking place in Latin America. So the rest of us have to do it a lot more. And however we can, using whatever media that’s available to us. And it’s so important to spread this word, but I totally agree with you, it’s just not said very much in the United States. It is throughout Latin America, but not in the United States.

One last question on that thread: The transformation occurring in Latin America that you speak of with such respect and hope is founded on participatory democracy with some socialist economic features, or at least some steps in that direction. Chavez, in a recent interview with the BBC, said: “I … believed in a ‘third way,’ but it was all a farce. I thought it was possible to articulate … a capitalism with a human face, but I realized I was wrong. Democracy is impossible in a capitalist system … it’s the tyranny of the richest against the poorest. That’s why the only way to save the world is through a democratic socialism.” How do you compare this approach with your own? Your stance, if I portray it accurately, is that capitalism is not inherently the problem, but it must be fixed.

I think we’re playing with words, to a certain degree. What is capitalism? Capitalism has been around for about 400 years and it’s taken many different forms. Most recently, for most of my lifetime, as for most of Chavez’s lifetime, it’s taken the form of what I call predatory capitalism, which is based on some very faulty assumptions, the first assumption being that the only responsibility of business is to maximize profits, regardless of the social and environmental costs; and, number two, that they shouldn’t be regulated – that you should minimize all the rules and regulations around business because that gets in the way of making profit; and, number three, everything should be run by private business – let’s privatize everything, including the military, the schools, the jails, everything. Those three premises were really promoted by Milton Friedman, the economist from the Chicago School of Economics. They were embraced by Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher, and just about every major president since then, Democratic and Republican alike in the United States, and presidents throughout the world. And they brought us to a terrible situation where all we can say is that this is a failure.

Less than 5 percent of the world’s population lives in the United States and consumes almost 30 percent of the world’s resources, while roughly half of the world lives in dire poverty, many people starving or on the verge of starving. That’s a failed system, it’s not a model; it can’t be replicated in Latin America or Africa or anywhere else. It’s a failure. But that doesn’t mean that capitalism in and of itself is a failure. It is, however, a question of definitions. I would rather define capitalism as being the use of capital, and capital includes mental capital; it includes creativity; it includes poetry and writing. Those are forms of capital. So in a way we’re playing with words here.

With regard to your account of the last military coup in Honduras, raising the minimum wage may have been the last straw for the internal elite, but you’ve also recognized the use of what happened to President Zelaya as a signal. Was the Obama administration showing that it is not afraid to get its hands dirty to “maintain credibility,” or was this a pet project of other actors at the State Department and the Pentagon acting on behalf of companies like Dole and Chiquita?

In “Hoodwinked,” you state that the corporatocracy’s candidate did not win the 2008 presidential elections. Given what you’ve just said, and that Obama received more money from Wall Street than McCain, do you still agree with that statement? Doesn’t it just illustrate that both parties are equally indebted to different factions within the same corporatocracy?

I think the corporatocracy has a lot of control all along the line and although they might’ve preferred to see McCain win, when Obama began to establish himself as a popular candidate, they immediately stepped in and supported his campaign financially. So they were supporting both. Big money – Wall Street, big agribusinesses, many of the other big corporations – were supporting both candidates. So by the time Obama got elected, he may not have been the corporatocracy’s first choice, but they had a lot of leverage over him by then, through campaign financing, and, also, as soon as he gets into office, as I just said earlier, he was read the riot act, and he knows that they can take him down very easily. We’ve all got skeletons in our closet, of course Obama has skeletons in his closet; I don’t know what they are, but I’m sure he’s got them [laughs]. Who knows what’s there? [laughs] And actually, even if you don’t have skeletons in your closet, just rumors can bring a person down – whether they’re true or not, if they’re placed in the right places and repeated often enough. So by the time Obama became president, the corporatocracy was pretty comfortable that they would get their way with him on most cases.

Is Peace Corps as an institution still serving as a gateway for more economic hit men? What would you suggest for a volunteer approaching close of service who doesn’t want to serve the corporatocracy? Any career paths that you recommend, where one can earn a living wage while doing good, and also express her or his creativity?

One of my concerns has been that many people take away the wrong lessons from Peace Corps – that development simply doesn’t work or that campesinos are just lazy. The Progressive Circle, which publishes Reclama is trying to open volunteers’ eyes to the structural and historical causes for the decisions and attitudes which prevail among the poor with whom we work. Do you have any suggestions for accomplishing this?

Wow. I’m not sure about this one. This is an issue that I’m devoting my life’s work to at this point. Talking with you, doing this interview, dedicating time to magazines like this, spreading the word and not blaming the victims of the system. I can’t imagine anyone spending two years in the Peace Corps, nearly three years in my case, coming away thinking that these people are lazy; these people are hungry, they have parasites, no good medical care, and yet they’re the hardest-working people I’ve ever seen in my life. It reminds me of the whole immigration issue – immigrants are the hardest working people in our society. I speak Spanish, and I talk with so many of them and I find that many of them don’t want to be here, they would rather be back in Guatemala or wherever with their families. They’re here because we destroyed their livelihoods with free trade agreements – NAFTA and CAFTA, for example.

For those of us living on the Dominican side of Hispaniola, the case of Haiti is never far from our minds. Even before the earthquake, that country probably had more development workers per capita than anywhere else in the world. Why has development work there and elsewhere been such a failure?

So, Aristide was taken down because he strongly opposed the corporatocracy; he was trying to create something more egalitarian for his people. And there’s this long history. Sadly, I think a lot of the nonprofits – certainly not all of them, by any means – but a number of nonprofits working in Haiti are basically serving the interests of the corporatocracy, rather than the people of Haiti. Haiti is an example of a country that we know has a huge, long history of terrible corruption, but we have to take responsibility for being the people that have corrupted it and kept corrupt leaders in power. And when leaders try to step up to the plate to do something different, we in the United States take them down, and take them out one way or another. It has been consistent and consistent and consistent.

What are your thoughts about what happened to the humanitarian aid flotilla that Israel attacked in international waters, killing nine people?

Well, I can’t speak from any personal experience; having never been there, having never worked in Israel, I don’t know the circumstances. But I think it’s very much to the detriment of Israel, and everyone else, that Israel is taking such a hard stance against the Palestinians and other people. Certainly, what’s happened with this flotilla has created extremely bad press for Israel. Again, I don’t know the truth behind it or the circumstances, but it’s put Israel in a terrible, terrible light and I think Israel needs to try very hard to turn the situation around, to show much more compassion for the Palestinians, and other Arab people. Not just because it’s the morally and ethically correct thing to do, but because ultimately it will serve Israel’s future best. Israel right now is in a very, very vulnerable position and the world is outraged by what happened there. Again, I don’t know what happened there, but reading the press from around the world, there’s an outpouring of outrage against Israel which certainly can’t serve Israel’s long-term interests, or anyone else’s.

On that note, despite being out of the economic hit man game, you remain well informed. In the past you’ve criticized the corporate media, which includes almost everything the average person sees. Aside from Democracy Now!, which you have recommended before, what other sources do you suggest?

There’s tremendous sources. There’s the Internet. It’s hard to be terribly specific because, for example, I go onto a lot of Latin American media because I can read Spanish. Other people don’t have that option, but you can go to other English-speaking countries and look at what they’re doing online. There are so many sources available that I don’t like to promote any particular one very much. People have a tremendous number of options, I just think that we don’t need to rely on The New York Times and Fox [laughs] or The Washington Post anymore. All of those are very biased in favor of the corporatocracy. There’s so many alternatives and I think the Internet provides a great equalizer.

The hot spot in the so-called War on Drugs seems to have been transferred from Colombia to Mexico. This has made it easier to blame someone else for the problems our drug-user demand and prohibition program create since that country is our neighbor. A leaked report from the Mexican government identified 23,000 deaths in that country related to the narcotrafficking problem since the start of the crackdown in 2006 (no doubt initiated as a bargaining chip for immigration reform that Bush had promised Mexican President Vicente Fox). The powerful military-industrial complex obviously has a big stake in maintaining and expanding the drug war, but how can the American people put an end to this nightmare?

We have to put our foot down about this whole military-industrial-complex, the corporatocracy. We have to realize that we have to create a new economy in this country. And you’re absolutely right, I mean, so many of the drug wars around the world, whether it’s Colombia, Mexico or wherever, are driven by the fact that the corporatocracy makes a huge amount of money in sales of equipment. Colombia has been the number four recipient of US military aid in the world, following behind Egypt, Israel and Iraq. And I suspect that Afghanistan may have surpassed Colombia, but the drug war in Colombia has provided a tremendous source of revenue for big US corporations that are providing helicopters, planes and other military equipment. And now we’re doing it in Mexico.

In my opinion – and it’s just my opinion – the CIA is very, very deeply involved in drug trafficking. We know about the Iran-Contra deal, where very mysterious things were going on; we know about the Opium Wars that were started under the British Empire, in India and China. These countries have a history of using drugs as a way to finance clandestine activities. And for a long time, in Vietnam and throughout the Golden Triangle of Asia, the CIA was funneling funds from drug use into its own clandestine operations. We know this goes on. I’m sure it’s part of what’s happening in Colombia and Mexico now. Again, it’s a tremendous impetus for weapons suppliers and industries that support that. We have to remember that every time a missile is sold, or an AK-47 that’s made in the U.S. or any other military equipment made in the United States or sold by a multinational corporation, it isn’t just the manufacturer and distributor that make money, it’s insurance companies that support these corporations, healthcare service companies, it’s the banks, every one of these major military suppliers has a huge ripple effect on many other industries. And we, the people of the United States, must insist that we get out of this terrible dependency that we have on the military. In the last budget that the Obama administration presented, 25 percent of it was allocated to direct military expenditures. That doesn’t include Iraq or Afghanistan. It’s amazing that this is outside the budget. And it also doesn’t show these ancillary businesses that are supported by the military establishment. As I mentioned, the banks, the insurance companies, health servers, the pensions funds and so forth.

How were you able to morally justify the work you performed as an economic hit man to yourself?

I didn’t try to justify it morally at the time. At the time I thought it was the right thing because business school had taught me – as all business schools, the World Bank and everybody in the business promoted in those days – that by investing lots of money into infrastructure projects in developing countries, you could increase their economies – and in fact, the statistics showed that you did. You increased gross domestic product. But what the statistics didn’t show was that only a few people – a few wealthy families – really benefited. And the poor got poorer, and the gap between rich and poor got wider. And as I saw that over time, I kept thinking, well, I can be the exception. I’ll go in and do this and then I’ll expose the system and turn it around. Which in a way is what I’ve done. It took me a long time to get here. So at the time I kept convincing myself I was doing the right thing. In the process I was getting to see countries around the world, I was flying first-class, I was staying in the best hotels and eating at the best restaurants. I can’t justify what I did, but I can say that now, what I’m trying to do is everything I possibly can to turn it around.

I have a two-and-a-half-year-old grandson and I realize that he can’t inherit a sustainable, just, and peaceful world, unless every child – growing up in Botswana, Bolivia, Indonesia, every country on the planet – has that same opportunity. We live in a very tiny, interwoven global society today, and in order for any of our grandchildren to inherit a world that they will want to live in, we have to understand that every child has to inherit that world. We must understand that for us to have homeland security in the U.S. means that we must see that the planet is our homeland. This is not about protecting the U.S., it’s about protecting the planet. We’re all citizens of this planet and we must simply devote ourselves to doing that. I think my experiences in the Peace Corps and then later as an economic hit man helped me to really be clear on this and now I have to do everything I can for the rest of my life to promote that.

It’s been a tremendous pleasure. Thank you very much.

My pleasure. Keep up your great work. I really appreciate what you’re doing and my final comment to Peace Corps volunteers out there is: see the opportunities. We’re in revolutionary times. This is a time that’s more important than the American Revolution of the 1700s. This is a global revolution and it’s fun to be a part of it. The most gratifying, rewarding thing you can do is to create a better world for ourselves and future generations. Nothing is more fun, more rewarding, more satisfying than doing that, and I think the Peace Corps provides a tremendous launching pad for that kind of career.

Tuesday 05 October 2010

by: ¡Reclama!, t r u t h o u t | Interview

 

We should live in a simple way for others to be able to live as well.

Mahatma Gandhi

He who is richer is not who has more, but who needs less.

Zapotec saying, Oaxaca, Mexico

We suffer the severe effects of climate change, of the energy, food and financial crises. This is not the product of human beings in general, but of the existing inhuman capitalist system, with its unlimited industrial development. It is brought about by minority groups who control world power, concentrating wealth and power on themselves alone.

Concentrating capital in only a few hands is no solution for humanity, neither for life itself, because as a consequence many lives are lost in floods, by intervention or by wars, so many lives through hunger, poverty and usually curable diseases.

It brings selfishness, individualism, even regionalism, thirst for profit, the search for pleasure and luxury thinking only about profiting, never having regard to brotherhood among the human beings who live on planet Earth. This not only affects people, but also nature and the planet. And when the peoples organize themselves, or rise against oppression, those minority groups call for violence, weapons, and even military intervention from other countries.

Living Well, Not Better

Faced with so much disproportion and wealth concentration in the world, so many wars and famine, Bolivia proposes Living Well, not as a way to live better at the expense of others, but an idea of Living Well based on the experience of our peoples. In the words of the President of the Republic of Bolivia, Evo Morales Ayma, Living Well means living within a community, a brotherhood, and particularly completing each other, without exploiters or exploited, without people being excluded or people who exclude, without people being segregated or people who segregate.

Lying, stealing, destroying nature possibly will allow us to live better, but that is not Living Well. On the contrary, Living Well rather means complementing one another and not competing against each other, sharing, not taking advantage of one’s neighbor, living in harmony among people and with nature. It is the basis of the defense of nature, of life itself and of all humanity, it’s the basis to save humanity from the dangers of an individualistic and highly aggressive, racist and warmongering minority.

Living Well is not the same as living better, living better than others, because in order to live better than others, it is necessary to exploit, to embark upon serious competition, concentrating wealth in few hands. Trying to live better is selfish, and shows apathy, individualism. Some want to live better, whilst others, the majority, continue living poorly. Not taking an interest in other people’s lives, means caring only for the individual’s own life, at most in the life of their family.

As a different vision of life, Living Well is contrary to luxury, opulence and waste, it is contrary to consumerism. In some countries of the North, in big metropolitan cities, people buy clothes they throw away after wearing them only once. That lack of care for others results in oligarchies, nobility, aristocracy, elites who always seek to live better at other people’s expense.

Nobody says : I will only take care of myself

Within the framework of Living Well, what matters the most is not the individual. What matters the most is the community, where all the families live together. We form part of the community as the leaf forms part of the plant. Nobody says: I will just take care of myself; I don’t care about my community. It is as absurd as if the leaf said to the plant: I do not care about the community; I will only take care of myself. It is just as preposterous as if the leaf would tell the plant: I do not care about you, I will only take care of myself.

We are all valuable, we all have a space, duties, and responsibilities. We all need everybody else. Based on complementing each other, the common wealth, organized mutual support, the community and the community life develop their ability without destroying man and nature.

Work is happiness

Not working and exploiting our neighbors will possibly allow us to live better, but that is not Living Well. When one is living well, work is happiness. Work is learning to grow up, melting into the fascinating reproduction of life. It is an organic action such as breathing or walking. Within the Living Well framework, work is general, for everyone and everything, from a child to a grandfather. It’s for men, women and even nature itself. Among us, nobody lives to benefit from the work of others. Private accumulation is unknown and unnecessary. Community accumulation always fills the warehouse.

In our communities we do not seek, we do not want anyone to live better, as development programs tell us. Development is related to living better, and all the development programs implemented among different States and governments, starting from the church, have encouraged us to live better.

Development depends on an ever-increasing use of energy, primarily oil. We have been led to believe that development is the salvation of mankind and that it will help us to live better, but without oil there is no development. And for us, with or without oil, sustainable and unsustainable development means anti-development, which is the cause of major disparities in nature and between people.

Development can be a disaster

Consequently, Living Well is contrary to capitalist development and goes beyond socialism. For capitalism, what matters the most is money, making a profit. For socialism, what matters the most is the man, because socialism tries to meet the increasingly growing needs of man, both material and spiritual.

Within the Living Well framework, what matters the most is neither man nor money; what matters the most is life. But capitalism does not care about life, and the two development models, the capitalist and the socialist, need rapid economic growth, causing a dissipation of energy and an insatiable use of fossil fuels to boost growth.

Therefore, development has proved to be a failure, as evidenced by the crisis of nature and the severe effects of climate change. It is now the leading cause of global crisis and the destroyer of planet Earth, because of the exaggerated industrialization of some countries, addicted consumerism and irresponsible exploitation of human and natural resources.

The industrialization and consumerism of Western “civilization” threatens Mother Nature and the subsistence of the planet, to such a degree that it must not be spread to the whole of humanity, because natural resources are not enough for all of us nor renewable at the same pace in which they are being exhausted.

Living Well in the Global Crisis

The most important crises are:

> The exponential increase of human-induced climate change affecting all regions of Earth;

> The water crisis, where urbanization, industrialization and increased use of energy is lowering the level of groundwater resources;

> The crisis in food production by the impact of climate change and the increasing production of biofuels;

> The imminent end of the era of cheap energy (we are reaching the peak of oil production). In the lapse of 100 years we are finishing fossil energy created over millions of years, and this is bringing about dramatic changes in all the theories about the operation of society;

> The significant depletion of other key resources both for industrial production and for human welfare, including fresh water, genetic resources, forests, sea and wildlife, fertile soils, coral reefs, and most of the local, regional and global elements we have in common.

Unless they are reversed, this combination of dangerous tendencies may soon bring global environmental and social crises up to an unprecedented scale, and they may also cause the collapse of the most basic economic and operative structures of our society.

By Bolivia Delegation at The UN

 

On the verge of catastrophic change

 

Climate chaos and global warming threaten the loss of much of the world’s most productive lands, physical upheavals in many places caused by storms and rising waters, desertification of many agricultural lands, and economic and social tragedy that will last for long in the future, with very severe problems for the most impoverished nations and peoples.

 

Without having found alternative sources of energy that can replace inexpensive oil and gas supplies in the amounts to which we have become accustomed to (and alarming new evidence regarding the limits of accessible coal), Peak Oil threatens the long term survival of industrial nations and industrialism itself, at its present scale. Long distance transportation, industrial food systems, complex urban and suburban systems, and many commodities basic to our present way of life —cars, plastics, chemicals, pesticides, refrigeration, etc— are all rooted in the basic assumption of an ever-increasing inexpensive energy supply.

 

Other scarce resources — fresh water, forests, agricultural land, biodiversity of many kinds, are dramatically decreasing in number due to the overuse of industrialized nations that every year surpass 30 percent of the resources that the Earth can regenerate, rendering the survival of humans and other species far more difficult than at any other time throughout the history of mankind. We also face the possible loss of 50% of the world’s plant and animal species over the next decades.

 

So the planet’s ecological, social and economic systems are on the verge of catastrophic change, and very few societies are prepared for this. Efforts by governments to respond to the impending emergency are thus far grossly inadequate. Efforts by corporations and industries to reform their behaviors remain largely enclosed by structural limits that require continued growth and profit above all other standards of performance.

 

Living Well Life to counteract against the Global Crisis

 

In this Global Crisis, all the problems have the same structural base, and can be faced using the same structural changes. The solution for each one is the solution for all. All the new models must begin by accepting there are fundamental limits to the capacity of the Earth to sustain us. Within those limits, societies must work to set new standards of universal economic sufficiency and a Living Well conception that does not depend on the excessive use of the planet’s resources.

 

The construction of a Living Well vision to counteract Global Crisis in this era of climate chaos and diminished resources in our finite planet, means ending consumerism, waste and luxury, consuming only what is necessary, achieving a global economic “power down” to levels of production, consumption and energy use that stay well within the environmental capacities of the Earth.

 

It also means stopping energy dissipation, i.e. bringing about a rapid withdrawal from all carbon-based energy systems, and rejecting large-scale so called “alternative” energy systems designed to prolong the industrial growth system. These include nuclear energy, “clean” coal, industrial scale biofuels, and the combustion of hazardous materials and municipal waste, among others.

 

Equally important is a dramatic increase in the practices of energy conservation and efficiency, i.e., powering down, decreasing the personal consumption in countries where it has been excessive, and reorienting the rules of economic activity — trade, investments, norms. It is also important to modify all of society’s main activities that are related to those norms (transport, manufacture, agriculture, energy, building design, etc). Our current dependence on export-oriented production, enormous amounts of long distance transportation, ever-expanding use of resources and global markets, cannot possibly be sustained in a finite planet.

 

Local production for local consumption

 

In order to adapt ourselves to the true reality of a post carbon era, we will have to satisfy our fundamental needs such as food, housing, energy, production, and means of support, from local systems and resources. This means encouraging regional and local self-sufficiency, sustainability and control; economic localization and community sovereignty, local production for local consumption, local ownership using local labor and materials.

 

Thus Living Well means redesigning urban and non-urban living environments, the restitution of the local, regional and national communal goods, and a quick transition towards renewable energy at a small scale, that must be oriented to the locality and also owned by the local community, without hampering the natural balance, and including wind, solar, small scale hydro and wave, local biofuels.

 

Living Well also means promoting an orderly reconstruction of the countryside and the revitalization of communities by way of an agrarian reform, education and application of eco-agricultural microfarming methods, based on our cultural and communal practices, the wealth of our communities, fertile land, clean water and air. All of these approaches are in preparation for the inevitable de-industrialization of agriculture, as cheap energy supply declines.

 

Furthermore, Living Well means reallocating the trillions of millions destined for war in order to heal Mother Earth who is injured by the environment issue.

 

Less will be more

 

Our Living Well proposal emphasizes on harmony between humans and with nature, and the preservation of “natural capital” as primary concerns. It is well known that the protection and preservation of balance in the natural world, including all its living beings, is a primary goal and need of our proposal, and that mother nature has inherent rights to exist on the Earth in an undiminished healthy condition.

 

Living Well also means unplugging the TV and internet and connecting with the community. It means having four more hours a day to spend with family, friends and in our community, i.e., the four hours that the average person spends watching TV filled with messages about stuff we should buy. Spending time in fraternal community activities strengthens the community and makes it a source of social and logistical support, a source of greater security and happiness.

 

For societies that now accept the images of “the good life” widely promoted in the media, this “good life” is based on hyper consumption of commodities, the new strategies to use less resources, to accumulate less, and to be ruled by modest standards of living also become arguments for greater personal fulfillment. Driving less and walking more is good for the climate, the planet, and our health. Buying less means less pollution, less waste, less time working to invest in shopping. Less stress, more time for the family, friends, nature, creativity, recreation and leisure which are activities on which people spend little time nowadays.

 

Among presently over-consuming societies, less really will be more. Basic compliance with Living Well conditions include sufficient food, shelter, clothing; good health and the values of strong community engagement; family security; meaningful lives; and the clear presence and easy access to a thriving natural world.

 

We are part of Mother Nature

 

In this context, Living Well means living a sovereign and communal life in harmony with nature, where we can work together for our families and for society, sharing, singing, dancing, producing for the community. It means living a modest life that reduces our consumption addiction and maintains a balanced production.

 

Rather than eroding the Earth, depredating nature and within 30 or 50 years ending with gas, oil, iron, tin, lithium and all other non-renewable natural resources required for a living better, Living Well guarantees life for our children, for the sons and daughters of our children and for those that will come after them, saving the planet using our rock, our quinoa, potatoes and cassava, our beans, broad beans and corn, our mahogany, coconut and coca.

 

In the construction of Living Well, our economic and spiritual wealth is tied directly to a high regard for Mother Earth and a respectful use of the wealth that she gives us. The only alternative for the world in this Global Crisis, the only solution to the crisis of nature, is that human beings acknowledge that we are part of Mother Nature, that we need to restore the complementary relationships, the mutual respect and harmony with her.

 

Boosting community energy with creativity and collective action

 

For this new experience of facing global crisis, for this new experience of Living Well to be successful, it will be necessary to boost local and international actions. We should follow the example of the millions of people on this Earth who are not waiting for official recognition of the global crisis, we should follow the example of the uncountable numbers of people and communities across the planet who, with creativity, enthusiasm and joint action are already actively trying to create or update a great variety of alternative practices at local, community and regional levels, in both rural and urban contexts.

 

Out of our own initiatives in our communities and also with help from governments that boost Living Well, with a broad unity of forces and social movements, we have to wake up community energy, boost community energy in our communities, which is the main capacity we’ve got to transform society and build a Living Well vision. We have to follow the example of these people and communities, starting to rebuild our communities and nations OURSELVES, with our own hands, our own hearts and our own brains, starting to take responsibility for the building of a Living Well Life for all within the limits of nature. We cannot rely only on governments and international movements to solve our problems.

 

Powering down

 

Out of our own initiatives in our communities and also with help from our governments, let us begin to regain our ancestors’ harmonious living, strengthen our own way of life, the identity and spirituality in our communities. Let us begin to organize our productive and community life in the countryside and in our neighborhoods, making education work, as well as communication and health, let us build our schools and roads, resolve between all of us our internal relations and the issues of land and territory, water, forests, and so on.

 

Let us build a Living Well vision and the sovereignty of our communities within the balance between man and nature, where we can rebuild our bonds, respecting everyone’s right to consultation when making our own decisions, where we can freely determine our own aims, our forms of organization, the joint planning of our communities, the designation of our authorities, all based on the knowledge we have of ourselves and with full awareness of the responsibility that this entails.

 

To start powering down, we can reduce significantly our energy use: driving less, flying less, turning off the lights, buying local seasonal food (food takes energy to grow, package, store and transport), wearing a jumper instead of turning on the radiator, use a clothesline instead of a dryer, going on holiday closer to home, buying second hand things or borrowing them before buying new ones, recycling.

 

We can also nurture a Zero Waste culture at home, within our school, workplace, church, community. This means developing new habits, such as using both sides of the paper, carrying with us our own mugs and shopping bags, making compost out of food leftovers, avoiding bottled water and other over packaged products, repairing and mending rather than replacing…

 

Our own health, learning and communication

 

Out of our own initiatives in our communities and also with help from governments that boost a Living Well vision, let us start to run our own health system taking after the ways that have always kept us healthy, where the health of the community is as important as that of our own body and where abundant healthy food free of chemicals is our medicine. Faced with the growth of increasingly manipulated consumption, let us rebuild the healthy domestic food production. Let us prevent diseases instead of looking for drugs to cure them, and let us use our own natural medicine which will not cure a disease by creating another.

 

Let us start to run our own education, or rather our own communication, learning in the way that we have always taught our children in our communities as part of the community practices and responsibilities, i.e. through community learning, through which we create communal energy and learn through daily work, within the social school that would be the community, where we learn that we cannot live outside of communal life. Rather than education, let us re-establish our own communication; strengthen the real communication between father and son, between students and teachers.

 

Let us protect our own seeds

 

Let us defend the women, traditional defenders of the seeds and food safety, custodians of natural variety and of local and quality food for our families, whose life revolves around fertility, child care, countryside, seeds, the care of water, trees and other resources, and whose farming practices in the communities are part of communal life in harmony with nature.

 

We do not solve world hunger with Terminator seeds from agricultural business, but bringing back and protecting our rich ancestral seeds, storing them and fighting against their usurpation by large transnational corporations that defend themselves through intellectual property, patents and the use of transgenic seeds having as an excuse productivity increase.

 

Let us protect the life of indigenous country communities, which allows the cycle of seed and inputs to be closed within the very same communities, freeing us from the need to import them. Let’s practice a small-scale production, which will protect natural resources for the present and future generations, and give us all healthy and varied food.

 

Let us build a Living Well vision, retaking our own appropriate technologies, which are not expensive and can be managed through community administration, monitoring and control, using our own funds from our own savings banks or credit unions. We can do our own self-training, which can mature if we bring together researchers and professionals who have a vision of sympathy, support and respect for reorganization processes of the communities and the peoples.

 

To strengthen all our procedures…

 

Living Well means giving back fertility to the planet, now in the hands of sterile corporations, reforesting the world, living a modest life close to soil in communities or small family farms, which are those that have preserved the trees and the harmonic variety of species, that have more water at their disposal and survive better.

 

Waking up the ethical and moral values of our peoples and cultures, we can make this new millennium, a millennium of life and not of war, a millennium for Living Well, for balance and complementarity. Together we can build a culture of patience, the culture of dialogue and fundamentally the Culture of Life, a way of life that is not dependent on excessive consumption of non-renewable energy that emit greenhouse gases but is based on the harmonious relationship between man and nature.

 

In order to strengthen all the procedures that may lead us to Living Well, we encourage a broad discussion and debate regarding this proposal, so we can find a common approach that will lead to a fundamental change in the way societies operate, and how we live, as communities, families and individuals.

 

By Bolivia Delegation at The UN

 

11 October, 2010

Countercurrents.org

 

Article distributed in English by the Bolivia delegation at the UN. April 2010

 

He came, he saw, he conquered.

As he watched the Iranian President blow kisses to cleaning workers at Beirut’s airport during his departure for Iran early this morning, a Lebanese Christian historian commented “This Persian’s glory at the moment is arguably greater than Caesar’s following Rome’s second conquest of Britain”.

And the Iranian president did indeed throw much more than a stone at US-Israel projects for Lebanon, perhaps energized by the adoring public he encountered.

A grateful nation extended to Makmoud Ahmadinejad what one Bishop claimed was the greatest outpouring of popular support on the streets, all along this country’s sectarian divide, that the Republic of Lebanon has ever witnessed including the May 10, 1997 visit of Pope John Paul II.

An important reason for the outpouring of popular support was the quarter century of Iranian assistance to Lebanon for social projects, and for rebuilding much of Lebanon following the 1993, 1996 and 2006 Israeli aggressions. Massive aid that was detailed by Hezbollah’s Secretary-General in a recent speech and the cost of which is estimated to be in excess of one billion dollars.

Iran’s President is widely believed in the diplomatic community here to have promoted sectarian unity in Lebanon, calmed the current political atmosphere, and delivered on offers of more desperately needed economic projects via 17 bilateral agreements. A particularly appreciated offer throughout Lebanon is Iran’s major pledge of an electrical complex that will deliver 7 times Lebanon’s current power supply, which in 2010 still sees power cuts throughout Lebanon. The current deficiencies range from three hours to 12 hours daily power cuts everywhere in Lebanon plus total blackouts for days at a time in some areas. Iran’s President is widely believed to have achieved a major advancement for Lebanese stability, sovereignty, and independence.

The throngs were cheering, waving, and shouting their admiration. Local media used descriptive words like “rock star, rapturous, massive affection,” to describe his reception.

Wretched Palestinian refugees, tightly shoe horned into Lebanon’s squalid UN camps, denied even the most elementary civil rights by an apathetic international community and some of the local sects, could be seen along the route. Many with eyes moistened, perhaps by Nakba memories and tears of hope for the early liberation of their sacred Palestine and the full exercise of their internationally mandated and inalienable Right of Return to their homes.

Refugees, plenty of them illegal, Iraqis, Afghans, Kurds and others, urging the expulsion of occupation forces from their countries and the restoration of their former lives waved and blew kisses. Lebanese domestic ‘guest/slave workers’ from Sri Lanka, Ethiopia, Sudan, Philippines, Bangladesh, and other countries could be seen in the crowds along with Syrian construction workers. Also a sprinkling of Stendhal “Le Rouge et le Noir” characters who, seeking secure advancement in life, have fixed themselves to one or the other, both requiring that they be seen publicly at such an important event.

Close to 750,000 people, or approximately one quarter of the total population of Lebanon,) of all ages and stations in life, appeared at the main road from Beirut’s airport and at other events during an intense two day frenetic series of appearances. Red, green and yellow rose petals, the colors of Iran’s flag, greeted Lebanon’s guest. Due to time constraints, some events for which much preparation had been made were “postponed”, including an “American Town Hall Meeting with President Ahmadinejad. ” It was to include 15 Americans currently in Lebanon as academics, business people, students, housewives, and NGO’s, in a much anticipated US political campaign type format with Iran’s President joining an informal dialogue with his interlocutors.

At Al Raya Athletic field in South Beirut, often used for popular Hezbollah events, an estimated 150, 000 people crowded onto just the main field boundaries, , one Hezbollah source reporting that it was the largest gathering inside the field ever seen. Thousands of other attendees spilled onto the side streets where huge TV screens has been set up and vendors hocked roasted ears of corn, boiled balila beans, kaak asrounye (baked bread with filling) ) various treats, including chips, cotton candy and soft drinks.

Driving around the area on the mercifully cool autumn evening by motorbike, one could see thousands more gathered at several dozen Dahiyeh outdoor cafes and store front shops where families and friends gathered to watch on the proprietors’ outdoor TV screens. Some of the adults smoked arguila water pipes and little kids played, happy to be allowed to stay up late while teenagers appeared contented to get a day off from school and an evening without homework.

Lebanese and Iranian flags were fluttering everywhere without huge numbers of Hezbollah flags displayed in keeping with the message that this was an official state visit. President Ahmadinejad of Iran was invited by President Michel Suleiman of Lebanon on behalf of every Lebanese, including the majority of Lebanese who live in the Diaspora. Deployments of Suleiman’s Presidential guards were the ones seen to be providing security for Iran’s president with Hezbollah security largely out of site, except for occasional fleeting glimpse of Hezbollah sharpshooters in windows throughout the assembly area. They also surfaced quickly if a dispute or argument flared up in the packed crowds. In these few cases a representative of Hezbollah would apologize for the crowded conditions and ask for patience and understanding during the event.

At one stop near the blue line in South Lebanon he smiled broadly, winked to the media contingent and adoring villagers surrounding him and, gazing deep into occupied Palestine, as if posing for a Marlboro Country billboard advertisement, Iran’s charismatic President made many a heart flutter when he spoke softly, almost whispering to some villages, and with a twinkle in his eye, as if someone were eavesdropping: “Now isn’t this one fine view?”, as he discretely pointed. “I like it over there, don’t you?”

Almost everyone laughed at his joke.

A young lady wearing a full length black Chador (a women wearing one is called a ‘Chadori’ in Persian and Lebanese resistance culture) , with some of her school mates in tow who were volunteering as hostesses and Farsi, Arabic, and English interpreters, offered arriving American guests enthusiastic greetings: “Welcome to the Islamic Republic of Iran’s new border with Palestine!”

Almost everyone laughed at her joke.

Then, exuding an easy self confidence and speaking American accented English while obviously having a good time, the student noticed one seemingly horror struck humorless lady wearing a light brown business suit and heels who a security guy later confided was suspected of being a US Embassy plant. “Just teasing”, she assured the woman, as she offered her hand in friendship to the flinching guest who glared uneasily at the hostesses’ hand as if it held a dead rat or might bite hers. “Why are you Americans so serious”? the loquacious hostess smiled. “Do you agree Iran and America are destined to be good friends after our countries are finished with this problem?”, and she gestured with her head south toward Tel Aviv.

“Please tell me what do Americans think? I read a few days ago in preparation for my work today-I should not say work, it’s really fun- a report that ninety percent of Americans in a recent poll said they did not favor attacking Iran unless Iran attacks Israel first. This is very good news because I am sure Iran, unlike Israel’s record, will never be the first to start a war. Iran will retaliate naturally and that could mean World War III, but there will be no war involving Iran unless Iran, Syria, or Lebanon is attacked. We in the Resistance Alliance are ‘one for all and all for one’ but we really want to be friends with the American people.” And she offered the woman a small ribbon-tied, party wrapped, cellophane pouch with Iranian pistachios and candy attached to a small Iranian flag. “No thanks”, the American answered as she walked away.

The American Embassy warned Americans to avoid Ahmadinejad’s “provocative and potentially dangerous visit because the Lebanese government cannot protect US Citizens.” Jeffrey Feltman, the assistant secretary of State for Near Eastern affairs, complained to the pan-Arab Al-Hayat on 10/13/10: “Why is the Iranian president organizing activities that might spark tension? We are taking steps to lower tension while Ahmadinejad is doing the opposite.”

Nevertheless, there were plenty of Yanks in attendance at all of Ahmadinejad’s appearances.

During his Qana visit, the Hezbollah Parliamentary delegation, friends with many Americans here, must have tipped off the Iranian President that Americans were sitting near them. The reason for this hunch is that he could not have been more gracious, making frequently eye contact and touching his forehead as a greeting and salute and thanking them for coming. He assured the American guests that eventually Iran and America will be good friends and perhaps allies.

Shortly before the Iranian President’s 35 car convoy carrying his delegation and various Lebanese officials arrived at Qana, his fourth largest gathering, an Israeli Air Force MRPV circled lazily yet provocatively above the site of the 1996 Qana massacre. Some in the more than 15,000 person crowd pointed skyward, some kids squealing “Israel!”. From their experience, “Qanains” as Ali, who grew up in this village explained some locals call themselves, were able to give foreigners fairly precise details of the MRPV’s specs and capabilities. This Israeli provocation ended, according to a Hezbollah security source, when the MRPV’s controllers realized that a Resistance laser guided missile had locked on to the uninvited intruder. The same source divulged that Hezbollah did not intend to shoot it down and would only monitor the threat. This was because the Resistance did not want mar the Iranian Presidents tour. In addition, he explained, explained that Lebanon’s resistance wanted to maintain “tactical and strategic ambiguity” concerning its array of anti-aircraft weapons until the moment war comes.

Lebanon’s people, army and resistance ignored provocations from this country’s southern enemy, including assassination threats like the one made by the Nakba-denying Knesset member Aryeh Eldad , more blustering from Shimon Peres, Ehud Barak, and PM Netanyahu, the beefing up of Israeli forces along the blue line, efforts to crack Hezbollah communications and send SMS threats via hacked mobile phones, conducting a chorus of US officials in childish criticisms of the visit, and Israeli spokesmen like Mark Regev and political extremists in Congress issuing threats.

Israeli warplanes on Friday carried out intensive, mock air raids over south Lebanon as if to send the message, “He is gone but we are still here!” The state-run National News Agency said Israeli jets staged mock air raids at medium attitude over Nabatiyeh, Iqlim al-Tuffah, Marjayoun, Khiam and Arqoub.

Another signature Israeli taunt during Iran’s Presidents visit was the launching of hundreds of blue and white balloons to catch the air current north to Bint Jbeil when Ahmadinejad was appearing. Some with insults written on them by children with magic markers and others allegedly smeared with human feces, the spreading of the latter being an IDF insult employed over the past 45 years of incursions into Lebanon and Palestine when during occupations of Lebanese and Palestinian homes some Israeli soldiers create what they call “poop art” on walls, mattresses and other surfaces.

Analysts will write about Iran’s Makmoud Ahmadinejad’s historic visit for months to come and what the visit means for the two countries, for the question of Palestine, strategic alignments in the region, and consequences for China, Russia and the wider international community.

A perhaps too early, road-weary, sleep-deprived photo snap of his visit’s effects would warrant the following brief and tentative evacuation, as Lebanon’s guest has just departed Beirut airport to return to his country. His midnight departure followed a visit at the Iranian Embassy with Hassan Nassrallah during which the Hezbollah Secretary-General gave the Iranian President an Israeli rifle taken from an Israeli soldier during the July 2006 war.

Ahmadinejad’s visit achieved more than a symbolic consecration of a new local and regional reality that encompasses a third way, separate from the US-Israel-Saudi or Syrian path. Some here think we are witnessing a new era of growing and uncompromising Resistance to Israel’s brutal occupation and ethnic cleansing of Palestine as well as America’s occupation and exploitation of Arab natural resources. Some analysts are speaking about a six member Axis of Resistance led by Iran and Turkey and including Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, and Lebanon that is the rising regional power.

What seems quite evident is that Iran’s President and the large delegation of business people comprising his entourage have opened a new era of bilateral relations between the two countries. His positive personal and political connections with virtually all Lebanon’s leaders, including compliments from rightist Christian politicians including Samir Geagea, will likely lead to big joint economic projects, the Iranian arming of the Lebanese Armed Forces, and strategic political cooperation, starting now.

Written by Franklin Lamb

Posted: 19 October 2010 11:08

15 October, 2010

Countercurrents.org

Franklin Lamb is doing research in Lebanon and can be reached at fplamb@gmail.com

This week, in a burst of stunning hypocrisy, President Barack Obama signed an executive order that imposes sanctions on Iran for human rights abuses and targets eight Iranian government and military officials who are blamed for the torture, abuse and murder of citizens who protested Iran’s 2009 presidential election.

“The United States is strongly committed to the promotion of human rights around the world, including in the Islamic Republic of Iran,” the White House said in an accompanying news release. “As the President noted in his recent address to the United Nations General Assembly, human rights are a matter of moral and pragmatic necessity for the United States.”

A State Department fact sheet added, “protesters [in Iran] were detained without formal charges brought against them and during this detention detainees were subjected to beatings, solitary confinement, and a denial of due process rights at the hands of intelligence officers under the direction of [Iran’s then-Minister of Military Intelligence] Qolam Mohseni-Ejei.

“In addition, political figures were coerced into making false confessions under unbearable interrogations, which included torture, abuse, blackmail, and the threatening of family members,” the State Department said.

Yet, President Obama has taken no action against U.S. officials who under the direction of George W. Bush, Dick Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld imprisoned without charge “war on terror” detainees at secret black sites and at Guantanamo Bay.

These prisoners also were subjected to beatings, solitary confinement and a denial of due process. They, too, were coerced into making false confessions under unbearable interrogations, which included torture, abuse, blackmail, and the threatening of family members.

President Obama has excused his failure to exact any accountability on complicit U.S. officials by saying that he preferred “to look forward, not backwards.” It is apparently easier to look backwards in Iran and demand accountability than it is in Washington.

Even as the Obama administration insists on punishing alleged Iranian abusers, it continues to use the state secret privilege and other legal maneuvers to derail civil lawsuits that seek some justice against U.S. officials responsible for the abuse and deaths of detainees in American custody.

As Obama appointees were congratulating themselves for going after those eight Iranians, a U.S. District Court Judge in Washington, DC, was dismissing a lawsuit filed against Rumsfeld and two dozen other U.S. officials by the families of two Guantanamo detainees who, along with another prisoner, committed suicide at the detention center in 2006, , according to the government’s official account.

Judge Ellen Huevelle noted in her opinion that there was compelling evidence the detainees were murdered. But last year the Obama administration said in a legal brief that the Military Commissions Act of 2006 stripped the courts of jurisdiction to hear lawsuits that challenged the “detention, transfer, treatment or conditions of confinement” of “enemy combatants.”

Moreover, in court papers filed in June 2009, the Obama administration said, “Judicial intrusion into this politically sensitive area by creating a damages remedy for detainees could subvert these military and diplomatic efforts and lead to ’embarrassment of our government abroad.'”

Besides, the Obama administration said, just as torture memo author John Yoo is entitled to absolute immunity, Defense Department officials like Rumsfeld are entitled to “qualified immunity” because the “Fifth and Eighth Amendments do not extend to Guantánamo Bay detainees.” Judge Huevelle ultimately agreed to dismiss the case.

Three weeks ago, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals sided with the Obama administration and blocked another lawsuit, this one filed against Jeppesen DataPlan, a subsidiary of Boeing, that was accused of knowingly flying people kidnapped by the CIA to secret overseas prisons where they were tortured.

The Obama administration, like the Bush administration, argued that state secrets would be at risk if the case were allowed to move forward.

In a 6-5 decision, the appeals court judges said the lawsuit presented “a painful conflict between human rights and national security” and agreed with Obama’s Justice Department attorneys that the latter trumped the former.

Essentially, the decision means that victims of the Bush administration’s torture program are not entitled to have their day in court if the government believes sensitive national security information would be disclosed.

Ben Wizner, an attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union who argued the case on behalf of the five plaintiffs, said, if the “decision is allowed to stand, the United States will have closed its courtroom doors to torture victims while providing complete immunity to their torturers.”

Obama’s aggressive efforts to protect his predecessor’s crimes are not limited to the United States.

Last year, the Obama administration told British officials that intelligence sharing between the U.S. and the UK could be halted if seven redacted paragraphs contained in secret U.S. documents relating to the torture of Binyam Mohamed, one of the victims named in Jeppesen lawsuit, were made public by a British High Court.

According to legal papers filed by the ACLU, Mohamed was beaten so severely on numerous occasions that he routinely lost consciousness and during one gruesome torture session “a scalpel was used to make incisions all over his body, including his penis, after which a hot stinging liquid was poured into his open wounds.”

In an interview with Rolling Stone magazine, Obama said that while he has been unable to close Guantanamo as promised, he “has been able to ban torture” since being sworn into office.

But Obama’s use of the word “torture” to describe what had taken place during George W. Bush’s tenure obligates him under the Convention Against Torture to conduct a full investigation and to prosecute the offenders.

The Convention declares that: “No exceptional circumstances whatsoever, whether a state of war or a threat of war, internal political instability or any other public emergency, may be invoked as a justification of torture.”

Moreover, the Convention says individuals who resort to torture cannot defend their actions by saying they were acting on orders from superiors and it mandates that torturers be prosecuted wherever they are found.

According to that provision, “each state party is required either to prosecute torturers who are found in its territory or to extradite them to other countries for prosecution.”

However, while Obama and his team give the Bush administration a pass on torture, different standards are applied to officials from “enemy” states.

During a news conference last Wednesday, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton denounced the eight Iranian officials, saying that under their “watch or under their command, Iranian citizens have been arbitrarily arrested, beaten, tortured, raped, blackmailed, and killed.

“Yet the Iranian Government has ignored repeated calls from the international community to end these abuses, to hold to account those responsible and respect the rights and fundamental freedoms of its citizens.”

The hypocrisy has passed virtually unnoticed in the mainstream U.S. news media. Yet, it’s hard to take the Obama administration’s moralizing seriously when they have taken pass on evidence of American abuses, such as this:

Dilawar was chained by his wrists to the ceiling of his cell for four days and brutally beaten by Army interrogators on his legs for hours on end to the point where he could no longer bend them. He died on Dec. 10, 2002.

Lt. Col. Elizabeth Rouse, an Air Force medical examiner who performed an autopsy on Dilawar, said Dilawar’s leg was pummeled so badly that the ”tissue was falling apart and had basically been pulpified.”

“Had Dilawar lived,” Rouse told Army investigators in sworn testimony, “I believe the injury to the legs are so extensive that it would have required amputation. I’ve seen similar injuries in an individual run over by a bus.’”

According to a report published by the Senate Armed Services Committee, Dilawar and another detainee whose death was also listed as a homicide, were killed within one week of Rumsfeld issuing a memo to military authorizing the use of “enhanced interrogation” techniques against prisoners in Afghanistan.

The Armed Services Committee report said those “aggressive interrogation techniques conveyed the message that physical pressures and degradation were appropriate treatment for detainees in U.S. military custody.”

As the New York Times reported, when Dilawar had died, “most of the interrogators had believed Mr. Dilawar was an innocent man who simply drove his taxi past the American base at the wrong time.”

Obama also has not taken steps to investigate the explosive claims leveled in a sworn declaration by Col. Lawrence Wilkerson, a former top Bush administration official, that Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld knew the “vast majority” of the 700 or so prisoners sent to Guantanamo were innocent.

Col. Lawrence Wilkerson, who was chief of staff to former Secretary of State Colin Powell during George W. Bush’s first term in office, said the administration refused to set them free after those facts were established because of the political repercussions that would have ensued.

President Obama apparently has made a similar political calculation regarding the partisan recriminations that would follow if he allowed the prosecutions of Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and other officials implicated in “war on terror” torture cases.

It appears to be much safer politically for Obama to turn a blind eye to crimes by his predecessor while pointing the finger at Iranians.

2 October 2010

Consortiumnews.com

A version of this article also appeared at Truthout.org.

 

“If it gets any worse,” said Wilda, a homeless Haitian mother, “we’re not going to survive.” Mothers and grandmothers surrounding her nodded solemnly.

We are in a broiling “tent” with a group of women trying to raise their families in a public park. Around the back of the Haitian National Palace, the park hosts a regal statute of Alexandre Petion in its middle. It is now home to five thousand people displaced by the January 2010 earthquake.

Nine months after the quake, over a million people are still homeless in Haiti.

Haiti looks like the quake could have been last month. I visited Port au Prince shortly after the quake and much of the destruction then looks the same nine months later.

The Associated Press reports only 2 percent of the rubble has been removed and only 13,000 temporary shelters have been constructed. Not a single cent of the US aid pledged for rebuilding has arrived in Haiti. In the last few days the US pledged it would put up 10% of the billion dollars in reconstruction aid promised. Only 15 percent of the aid pledged by countries and organizations around the world has reached the country so far.

With other human rights advocates from CCR, MADRE, CUNY Law School, BAI and the Institute for Justice and Democracy in Haiti, I am huddled under faded gray tarps stamped US Aid. Blue tarps staked into the ground as walls. This is not even the hot season but the weather reports the heat index is 115.

The floor is bare dirt, soft from a recent rain. Our guide works with a vibrant grassroots women’s organization, KOFAVIV, which is working with women in many camps, and she encourages residents to tell us their stories.

Anne has seven children. She would really love to have a tent. She and her family live on a small plot of dirt eight feet by eight feet. Sheets are tied to pieces of wood to keep out the sun. Plastic sheeting covers the ground. When it rains everything they have is soaked. She begs every day for food.

Therese has three children, 12, 11, and 9. She has lived in the camps since the quake. A few weeks ago when she went to get a bucket of water, some men grabbed her and raped her. Before the quake she worked as a street vendor but has no money to buy supplies to sell. She prays all day every day for help.

Caroline lived with her husband and three children in an apartment in downtown Port au Prince. The quake took her husband and left the rest of the family homeless. She was raped in the first camp she settled in. When she moved she was raped again and fought back with KOFAVIV. She and other women set up their own security with whistles and flashlights to protect each other. They push the police to arrest. Her life is now in danger because the rapists know who she is and she is vulnerable.

We hear from dozens of other mothers and grandmothers – Alana, Beatrice, Celine, Marcie, Rene, Wilda and others. This is what they tell us.

There is no electricity at all in the camps. Some have lights on poles that work some of the time. Many have no lights at all.

There is no food. The children are terribly hungry. The food aid program was terminated in April and nothing took its place. The authorities cut off the food so people would leave the camps, but where is there to go?

Water is hard to find. For the people in Petion park, water is delivered by truck to a central site a block or two away in the middle of several camps. Thousands of people line up twice a day to get water before it runs out. In another camp we visited Sunday, Camp Kasim, there was no water at all for hundreds of families and none scheduled to be delivered until Monday at the earliest. Boys and girls surged around a pipe several blocks away trying to capture some water in Oxfam marked buckets.

People are coughing, sniffling, and their eyes watering. Quiet babies are the norm. Many have skin rashes and vaginal infections. There are several volunteer clinics but usually only the very sickest are seen because so many people need help. The biggest camps now have some toilets but not enough. Drainage is a big problem especially now during the rainy season.

Children cannot be kept in the suffocating tents. They play in the muddy paths. They would love to return to school but there is no money.

Security is a huge problem. Less than a dozen of the thousand plus camps have official security at night. During the day the police may come around or maybe the heavily armed MINUSTAH UN forces will patrol. But at night security forces vanish. With little or no light at night, tens of thousands of unguarded sheet structures and canvas walls offer thieves and gangs an inviting target. Violence against women and girls is widespread. Women who go to the latrines at night are attacked. Some women talk of carrying rape babies. Others will do anything for the crudest abortion. When they go to the police and ask them to investigate, officers demand money for gas. Even those who pay the police usually end up frustrated. There is a sense of impunity.

There are an estimated 1300 “camps” of homeless people in Haiti. Homeless people live literally everywhere. People are camped in the middle of many streets. Shanty structures are built right up to the edge of streets. Every park, every school yard, every parking lot appear to have people living under sheets or lean to tents.

The most fortunate families live in modest plastic tents. The newest tents are royal blue with red flags with yellow stars on them – donated in the last week from China. Less fortunate families, and there are many of them, live under faded sheets stretched between wooden poles made from tree branches. Within the camps there are dirt paths – some only inches wide. Tents and sheet shelters are side by side – inches apart.

Evictions are starting. Churches are pushing people off their property. Schools which are reopening are turning off the water to the people camped in the ball fields. Some in authority are openly saying that people must be forced out the camps. But only 13,000 temporary structures have been built and they are far away from family, school, jobs and healthcare. There is no place to go.

The UN, which effectively runs Haiti with the Haitians and the US, holds meetings nearly every day to coordinate responses to dozens of issues like security, food, water, reconstruction, and gender violence. Human rights advocates in Port au Prince complain that no meetings are conducted in Kreyol, the language of the Haitian people.

Yet there is hope. The Haitian mothers and grandmothers we heard from are fighting for their lives. KOFAVIV and BAI and other grassroots human rights groups are speaking out, demonstrating, educating the people in the camps, and working together for social justice.

During a torrential downpour Saturday, dozens gathered on folding chairs under the front porch overhang of BAI to work on how to get the US, the UN, Haiti and the NGOs to do their jobs.

Together the people have a chance. As one woman who works against violence told us, “If there is one woman and one man, maybe the man will win. But if the woman uses whistles to alert other women and gets other women to show up, maybe the man will see he is going to lose and will run away.”

Meanwhile, Wilda and a million other Haitians are slowly dying from starvation, illness, lack of security and neglect. Nine months after the quake.

By Bill Quigley

Bill wrote this article from Port au Prince with help from Laura Raymond and Sunita Patel.

Bill is Legal Director at the Center for Constitutional Rights and a law professor at Loyola University New Orleans. He is a Katrina survivor and has been active in human rights in Haiti for years with the Institute for Justice and Democracy in Haiti. Quigley77@gmail.com