Postmodern News Archives 20

2008-06-08T11:00:00.000-07:00

Who Will Rule?
Citizen movements are proving that we can take on corporate power, and together build a future that works for all life.

By Michael Marx and Marjorie Kelly
From Yes! Magazine
2007

Corporate power lies behind nearly every major problem we face—from stagnant wages and unaffordable health care to overconsumption and global warming. In some cases, it is the cause of the problem; in other cases, corporate power is a barrier to system-wide solutions. This dominance of corporate power is so pervasive, it has come to seem inevitable. We take it so much for granted, we fail to see it. Yet it is preventing solutions to some of the most pressing problems of our time. With global warming a massive threat to our planet and a majority of U.S. citizens wanting action, why is the U.S. government so slow to address it? In large part because corporations use lobbying and campaign finance to constrain meaningful headway.

Why are jobs moving overseas, depressing wages at home, and leaving growing numbers under- or unemployed? In large part because trade treaties drafted in corporate-dominated back rooms have changed the rules of the global economy, allowing globalization to massively accelerate on corporation-friendly terms, at the expense of workers, communities, and the environment.

Why are unions declining and benefits disappearing? In large part because corporate power vastly overshadows the power of labor and governments, and corporations play one region off against another, busting unions to hold down labor costs while boosting profits, fueling a massive run-up in the stock market.

Why were electricity, the savings and loan industry, and other critical industries deregulated, contributing to major debacles whose costs are borne by the public? In large part because free market theory, enabled by campaign contributions and lobbying, seduced elected officials into trusting the marketplace to regulate itself.

With all this happening, why do we not read more about the pervasiveness of corporate power? In large part because even the “Fourth Estate,” our media establishment, is majority owned by a handful of mega-corporations.

Big corporations have become de facto governments, and the ethic that dominates corporations has come to dominate society. Maximizing profits, holding down wages, and externalizing costs onto the environment become the central dynamics for the entire economy and virtually the entire society. What gets lost is the public good, the sense that life is about more than consumption, and the understanding that markets cannot manage all aspects of the social order. What gets lost as well is the original purpose of corporations, which was to serve the public good.

A Movement for the Public Good
The solution is to bring corporations back under citizen control and in service to the public good. The main components of such a movement already exist—including organized labor, environmentalists, religious activists, shareholder activists, students, farmers, consumer advocates, health activists, and community-based organizations.

We've seen the power of ordinary people working together on the streets of Seattle in 1999, challenging the World Trade Organization. We've seen them achieve impressive results curbing sweatshop abuses, limiting tobacco advertising, challenging predatory lending practices at home and abroad, and protecting millions of acres of forests, to name just a few successes.

We've also seen the growth of community-friendly economic designs like worker-owned enterprises, co-ops, and land trusts that, by design, put human and environmental well-being first.

Focus on Corporate Power
Each of these movements advocates for healthy communities, for a moral economy, and for the common good. If they acted together, they would possess enormous collective power. But as yet there is no whole, only disconnected parts. Despite many achievements, the gap in power between corporations and democratic forces has widened enormously in recent decades.

Activists and citizens are beginning to turn this around. We can build on this work. But if we are to close the gap in power, our strategies must evolve. We need to dream bigger, to speak with one voice across issue sectors, and to act more strategically. We need to focus less on symptoms of corporate abuse and more on the underlying cause—excessive corporate power. We must recognize that ultimately our struggle is for power. It is not just to make corporations more responsible, but to make them our servants, in much the same way that elected officials are public servants.

We need what the movement now lacks: a coherent vision of the role we want corporations to play in our society and a strategy for achieving that vision. It's about putting We the People back in charge of our future, rather than the robotic behemoths that set their sights on short-term growth and high profits, regardless of the consequences.

The streams of many small movements must flow together into a single river, creating a global movement to bring corporations back under the control of citizens and their elected governments. The urgent need for unified action impelled a small group of organizations to initiate a long-term Strategic Corporate Initiative (SCI), of which we are a part.

A Way Forward
Over the past 18 months, the SCI team interviewed dozens of colleagues and progressive business executives to develop a coherent, long-term strategy to rein in corporations. Three major strategic tracks emerged:

1. We need to restore democracy and rebuild countervailing forces that can control corporate power.
At the community level, this means elevating the rights of local municipalities over corporations. Communities should have the right to determine what companies will do business within their jurisdiction, and to establish requirements like living wage standards and environmental safeguards.

At the national level, restoring democracy means separating corporations and state. Corporations and the wealthy should no longer be allowed to dominate the electoral and legislative processes.

At the international level, the task is to create agreements and institutions that make social, environmental, and human rights an integral part of global economic rules.

2. We need to severely restrain the realms in which for-profit corporations operate.
Most extractive industries (fishing, oil, coal, mining, timber) take wealth from the ecological commons while paying only symbolic amounts to governments and leaving behind damaged ecosystems and depleted resources. The solution is to develop strong institutions that have ownership rights over common wealth. When commons are scarce or threatened, we need to limit use, assign property rights to trusts or public authorities, and charge market prices to users. With clear legal boundaries and management systems, the conflict over the commons shifts from a lopsided negotiation between powerful global corporations and an outgunned public sector, to a dispute resolved by deference to the common good.

3. We need to redesign the corporation itself, as well as the market system in which corporations operate.
Companies' internal dynamics currently function like a furnace with a dial that can only be turned up. All the internal feedback loops say faster, higher, more short-term profits. And maximizing short-term profits leads to layoffs, fighting unions, demanding government subsidies, and escalating consumerist strains on the ecosystem.

To prevent overheating, the system needs consistent input from non-financial stakeholders, so that demands for profit can be balanced with the rights and needs of employees, the community, and the environment.

To end “short-termism,” company incentives—including executive pay—should be tied to measurements of how well the company serves the common good. Stock options that inflate executive pay should be outlawed or redesigned. Speculative short-term trading in stock should be taxed at significantly higher rates than long-term investments. Companies should be rated on their labor, environmental, and community records, with governments using their financial power—through taxes, purchasing, investing, and subsidies—to reward the good guys and stigmatize the bad guys.

At the same time, we need to celebrate and encourage alternative corporate designs, such as for-benefit corporations, community-owned cooperatives, trusts, and employee-owned companies.

The paths outlined here do not represent impossibilities. With a citizens' movement, we could turn these musings into reality in 20 years.

Building a Global Citizens' Movement
How can we change laws regulating corporate behavior when corporations dominate the political process? The answer is that change begins with the people, not their government. It always has. Civil society organizations and communities can align their interests to produce a wave that government leaders must either surf upon or drown within.

The people control the vital issue of legitimacy, and no system can long stand that loses its legitimacy, as fallen despots of the 20th century have demonstrated. Corporations have already lost much of their moral legitimacy. Business Week in 2002 found that more than four out of five people believed corporations were too powerful. A national poll by Lake, Snell, Perry, and Mermin two years ago concluded that over three-quarters of Americans distrust CEOs and blame them for the loss of jobs. An international poll by Globe Scan recently found corporations far behind NGOs in public trust.

Trigger events lie ahead that will create further openings for change. We can expect to see new global warming catastrophes, unaffordable energy price spikes, and new corporate scandals. We can capitalize on these openings if we can help people connect the dots—making the link, for example, between excessive CEO pay, companies' short-term focus, and the inability of the private sector to manage long-term problems like the energy crisis and global warming.

We also need conceptual frames that link various movements together into a common effort. Currently our economy is dominated by a Market Fundamentalism frame, based on the belief that when self-interest is set free, Adam Smith's “invisible hand” will create prosperity for all. Also dominant is the Private Property frame, which justifies actions by executives and shareholders to exploit workers, communities, and the environment in order to maximize the value of stockholder and executive “property” in share ownership.

We can advance new frames. “Moral Economy,” for example, is a frame that puts the firing of thousands of employees and simultaneous awarding of multimillion-dollar bonuses to executives in a moral context. Suggested by Fred Block of the Longview Institute, the Moral Economy frame invites the introduction of new system forces into market dynamics in order to protect the moral order, and to counteract the amoral, short-term, self-interested behavior promoted by Market Fundamentalism.

Within the overarching framework of a Moral Economy, other frameworks like Community and the Commons challenge the supremacy of individualism and self-interest in the Market Fundamentalism frame. Community well-being becomes the standard by which business practices are judged, and communities themselves the arbiters of whether standards are met. The Commons represents our shared property and wealth, which is not to be exploited for the selfish benefit of the few.

Imagine ... Responsible companies protect the environment as though there is a tomorrow, and they view worker knowledge and company's reputation in the communities where they operate as their greatest assets.

New conceptual frames, trigger events, a crisis of legitimacy—elements like these can serve to help build a citizens' movement. But we cannot simply wait for this movement to form spontaneously. At the international level, we need regional organizations to come together to agree on overarching priorities. At the national level, we likewise need discussions that forge strategic priorities. At the community level, we need to create a network of municipalities working together to challenge corporate rights, to promote alternative business forms, and to inventory and claim our common wealth assets. Communities can also take the lead in creating public financing of campaigns, and in tying procurement and investment policies to corporate social ratings.

The idea is not that people will drop their issues and adopt new ones, but that we can learn to do both at once. We can knit ourselves into a single movement by adopting common frames and by integrating strategic common priorities into existing campaigns. For example, campaigns covering any issues from the environment to living wages could demand that targeted companies end all involvement in political campaigns.

As individuals, we can relegate our identities as consumers and investors to secondary status, elevating to first place our identities as citizens and members of families and communities, people with a stewardship responsibility for the natural world and with moral obligations to one another. We can stop buying the story that government is inefficient and wasteful, grasping that the real issue is how corporations and money dominate government. We can stop thinking that the solution is more Democrats in power, and realize it is more democracy.

The transformative changes we need will not be on any party's agenda until a citizens' movement puts them there. It's up to us to build that movement. By joining together—by taking on the common structural impediments that block progress—we can make it possible for all of us to achieve the variety of goals we're currently struggling for.

How would reducing the underlying power of corporations affect today's issue campaigns? Ending corporate campaign contributions and political advertising would benefit a great many public interest causes. How often in recent years have initiatives to protect forests, increase recycling, provide healthcare coverage, and raise minimum wages been defeated by corporations who outspent their civil society opponents by a ratio of over 30 to one? We've all witnessed elected leaders move to the political center once they started receiving a steady flow of corporate contributions.

Likewise, if we could reduce the 13,000 registered corporate lobbyists in Washington, D.C. and end the revolving door between government regulators and corporations, would a handful of companies be allowed to own the lion's share of our media? Would savings and loan, energy, transportation, and tobacco companies still have been de- or unregulated? Would oil and coal companies still drive our national energy policy?

Imagine ...
Imagine what it might be like in 20 years if our efforts are successful and people could once again govern themselves. A line would be carefully drawn between corporations and the state, reducing financial influence over elections and lawmaking, making possible a whole new generation of progressive elected officials committed to social transformation.

In 20 years, imagine that the institutions of the global economy are overhauled so that labor and environmental issues are integrated into trade policies, and impoverished nations are freed from unpayable international debts. Trade and investment rules promote fair exchange, and national governments have the policy space to support social and environmental goals at home. Transnational corporations that take destructive action are held accountable in a World Court for Corporate Crimes.

In 20 years, imagine community self-governance has become the new norm. No longer can companies open new stores in communities where they are unwanted, or play communities off one another to extract illegitimate public subsidies. We value and protect our precious common wealth, from ecological commons like air, water, fisheries, and seeds, to cultural commons like music and science.

In 20 years, imagine that it is a violation of fiduciary responsibility for corporations to pay CEOs obscene amounts, or to aggressively fight unions and lobby against environmental safeguards. Responsible companies protect the environment as though there is a tomorrow, and they view worker knowledge and company's reputation in the communities where they operate as their greatest assets. Imagine such companies receive preferential treatment in government purchasing, taxation and investment policies, while irresponsible companies find themselves barred from government contracts.

Imagine we have a new national policy to make employee ownership as widespread as home ownership is today. And alternative company designs—like cooperatives and new, for-benefit companies—grow and flourish. Imagine, in other words, that We the People are able to reclaim our economy and society from corporate control. Daring to dream that such a turn of events is possible—and charting the path to get there—is a critical challenge of our new century.

Michael Marx is director of Corporate Ethics International (CEI) in Portland, Oregon. Marjorie Kelly is with the Tellus Institute in Boston and the author of The Divine Right of Capital. They are part of the Strategic Corporate Initiative, a group unifying efforts to curtail corporate power, and igniting change toward a more humane, sustainable democratic society and economy.

The Sham of Nuclear Power
Patrick Moore's Deadly Con Game

By Harvey Wasserman
From CounterPunch
2007

Vermont, like too many other places with nuke reactors, was recently disgraced by an industry-sponsored visit from Patrick Moore, who claims to be a "founder" of Greenpeace, and who is out selling nuclear power as a "green" technology. The two claims are roughly equal in the baldness of their falsehood.

But the impacts of the lies about Vermont Yankee---like so many other reactors---are far more serious. Vermont is now at a crossroads in its energy and environmental future. The reactor is old and infirm. Every day it operates heightens the odds on a major accident.

In a world beset by terror, there is no more vulnerable target than an aged reactor like Vermont Yankee. Its core is laden with builtup radiation accumulated over the decades. Its environs are stacked with supremely radioactive spent fuel. Its elderly core and containment are among the most fragile that exist.

Despite industry claims, VY's high-level nuke waste is going nowhere. Nuclear Regulatory Commissioner Edward McGaffigan has told the New York Times he believes the Yucca Mountain waste repository cannot open for at least another 17-20 years, if ever. At current production levels, it will by then require yet another repository at least that size to handle the spent fuel that will by then be stacked at reactors like VY. In short: the dry casks stacked at Vermont Yankee comprise what amounts to a permanent high level nuke dump, on the shores of the Connecticut River.

The Better Business Bureau recently recommended that the Nuclear Energy Institute pull its advertising that claims atomic reactors are clean and nonpolluting. The NEI is an industry front group. The BBB says that reactors cause thermal pollution in their outtake pipes and cooling towers, and also create substantial amounts of greenhouse gases in uranium production. In short, the Better Business Bureau has punctured the industry's claim the Vermont Yankee and other reactors are any kind of solution for climate chaos. The idea that VY is a "green" facility is utter nonsense.

Indeed, all nuclear power plants produce huge quantities of global warming gases as they are wrapped up in the mining of the uranium ore that goes into the fuel, and in the milling of that ore into fuel rods. The American West is littered with gargantuan piles of mill tailings that pour thousands of curies of radioactive radon into the atmosphere.

Fabricating fuel rods is one of the most electricity-intensive industries on earth, consuming millions of tons of coal in the process, emitting untold quantities of greenhouse gases. The radioactive emissions from the plants themselves also unbalance the atmosphere, and the heat they dump into the air and water directly heats the planet.

The alleged "renaissance" of nuclear power is nothing more than heavily funded industry hype. Wall Street financiers are not lining up to invest in these dinosaurs, and numerous utility executives have publicly doubted the wisdom of building them.

One reason is the explosive take-off of the renewable energy industry. Wind power is now very substantially cheaper than nukes. The production of photovoltaic cells, which convert sunlight directly to electricity, can barely meet demand. Investments in biofuels such as ethanol and biodiesel are soaring, as are those in the cheapest form of recovered energy, increased efficiency. Shutting VY would open Vermont to the revolution that is reshaping the future. Keeping it open locks Vermont into a sorry past.

Nuclear power is a 50-year experiment that has failed. Extending the operations of Vermont Yankee will only leave the state with more radioactive waste, a Connecticut River increasingly threatened by heat and radioactive emissions, and an increasingly radioactive relic despoiling the region. Nukes cannot compete in the market, and would all cease to operate overnight if the huge subsidy of federal liability insurance was removed.

It is fitting, therefore, that the industry has insulted Vermont by sending in a spokesman of the caliber of Patrick Moore. Moore has claimed for years to be a founder of Greenpeace, an exaggeration of his actual role. Moore sailed on the first Greenpeace campaign, but he did not actually found the organization. According to Dorothy Stowe, an American Quaker, who immigrated to Canada in 1966 and founded Greenpeace with her husband Irving Stowe and other Canadian pacifists and ecologists, "Technically, Patrick Moore cannot be described as a founder of Greenpeace. He was there in early stages with a lot of others. But what he is doing now is unconscionable."

In "Greenpeace: How a Group of Ecologists, Journalists, and Visionaries Changed the World," author Rex Weyler writes "Greenpeace was founded by Quakers Dorothy and Irving Stowe, Marie and Jim Bohlen, and journalists Ben Metcalfe, Dorothy Metcalfe, and Bob Hunter. This group organized the first campaign to sail a boat into the U.S. nuclear test zone on Amchitka Island in the Bering Sea.

"Canadian ecologist and carpenter Bill Darnell coined the name "Greenpeace" in February 1970. A year later, Moore wrote to the organization, applying for a crew position on the boat and was accepted."

Moore wrote his letter on March 16, 1971, two years after the group was founded, describing himself as a graduate student "in the field of resource ecology." Clearly, then, Moore was not a founder of Greenpeace. Founders don't write letters applying to join. After the Stowes, Metcalfes and Bob Hunter left the organization, Moore briefly served as president, from 1977 to 1979. Former members recall that his bullyism nearly scuttled Greenpeace. He launched an internal lawsuit against his rivals in other Greenpeace offices, was replaced as president in 1979, and eventually drummed out of the organization as a troublemaker.

According to Steve Sawyer, who still works with Greenpeace in Amsterdam, "Moore harbored hopes of regaining his throne. Those hopes were dashed when he was chucked off the board in 1985." Moore started a fish farm, but did not succeed. He then did public relations for the Canadian forestry industry, absurdly defending massive clearcuts as an ecologically viable logging practice.

In a newspaper column in 1993, authentic Greenpeace founder Bob Hunter, called Moore "The Judas of the ecology movement." According to Hunter, Moore "burned off his old buddies because of his hubris. He was always a Green Tory at heart."

Moore says he is the "head scientist" of his public relations firm, but has never published a peer-reviewed scientific study. Moore exaggerates his role in Greenpeace and his credentials as a scientist to serve as a public relations hack for hire.

Moore now gets big money defending the indefensible, posing as a reformed environmentalist who has seen the light ... any light he is paid to see. He has hyped genetically modified crops, PVCs, and brominated flame retardants. He has soft-pedaled dioxins and toxic mine tailings dumped by Newmont mines into Indonesia bays.

Now he wants to sell Vermont on its nuke power plant. In exchange for a paycheck, he portrays Three Mile Island as a "success story." But if a melt-down turned Vermont Yankee into a TMI-type, billion-dollar liability, would he pitch in his pitch man's paychecks to help you underwrite this "success?"

Years ago, when he worked for Greenpeace, Moore wrote: "Nuclear power plants are, next to nuclear warheads themselves, the most dangerous devices that man has ever created. Their construction and proliferation is the most irresponsible, in fact the most criminal, act ever to have taken place on this planet."

Greenpeace agrees. The "revival" of nuke power is a hype being perpetrated by phony experts. Wall Street is not exactly lining up to invest in a failed technology with fifty years of proven failure. Vermont Yankee must be shut, dismantled and buried. Closing it now will narrow the burden of its permanent waste dump and open the door on the booming revolution in the real energy of the future: renewables and efficiency.

Harvey Wasserman, senior advisor to Greenpeace USA since 1990, is author of "Solartopia: Our Green-Powered Earth, A.D. 2030,"

Media Bully
As the head of one of Canada’s largest media companies, Canwest CEO Leonard Asper is bullying Canadians into submission.

By Sean Condon
From Adbusters
2008

On a bright summer afternoon last June, Mordecai Briemberg picked up 50 copies of a fake Vancouver Sun that were lying on a table in Vancouver’s downtown library. Inside the four-page newspaper, the 69-year-old Palestinian activist found satirical articles about how Israel’s military occupation had brought “civilization” to the West Bank, and how an academic study proved that “the truth” is inherently biased against Israel. With writers named “Cyn Sorsheep” (Censorship) and sources like Dr. Ig Norance, an article featured a bogus quote from Canwest CEO Leonard Asper, whose family company owns the Sun.

“This confirms my suspicion that the Truth is fanatically anti-Israel, and vindicates our vigilance in managing the Truth about Israel’s activities in all our converged media assets,” it jokingly quoted Asper as saying.

The fake Vancouver Sun was a rather innocuous jab at the blatantly pro-Israeli reporting in Vancouver’s major daily and the rest of the newspapers, magazines and television stations owned by Canwest, Canada’s largest media company. Articles in Canwest newspapers, especially the National Post, routinely blame Palestinian militants for Israeli air strikes or paint heroic portraits of Israeli civilians fending off Palestinian rocket attacks.

Amused by the parody, Briemberg took the copies back to his Vancouver suburb and passed them out so that others could share in the laugh. Canwest, however, didn’t find it as funny. The next day the real Vancouver Sun ran a story about how 12,000 fake editions had taken advantage of the paper’s brand and, even though Sun publisher Kevin Bent admitted there had been few reader complaints, promised legal action.

Few actually expected anything would happen. Campus newspapers, the alternative press and activists have been putting together mock versions of their daily papers for decades. Most famously, when Allan Fotheringham published a Vancouver Son for his student paper in 1954, the Sun offered him a job. (Fotheringham would go on to become one of the country’s most famed columnists.) That a large multinational company like Canwest, which has more than 10,000 employees and $2.87 billion in annual revenue, would attack some small-scale activists over a prank seemed absurd.

But when Canwest launched its lawsuit in December, Briemberg was shocked to discover that not only was Goliath hunting down David, but that he was being sued for creating and publishing the paper. In fact, aside from the printers, he was the only person named in the suit. For Briemberg, who runs a Canadian-Palestinian support website and hosts a radio show on a local cooperative radio show, this was a clear attempt by Canwest to chill its critics.

“It’s an effort to silence and intimidate people from exposing the Israeli state policies that snatch lives, lands and homes from Palestinians,” says Briemberg. “Not only won’t Canwest allow any other commentary in their papers, they’ll actively try to shut down anyone that doesn’t agree with them.”

As the heads of Canwest, Leonard Asper and his brother David have developed a reputation for being thin-skinned, litigious bullies who interfere with their newspaper’s editorial content, openly mock their journalists and routinely threaten critics with lawsuits. What makes the Aspers so perilous is that Canwest has so much power in shaping the country’s public discourse.

“I think they’re Canada’s most dangerous media company,” says Marc Edge, author of Asper Nation. “It’s dangerous to allow any company so much control over the public mind, especially when the proprietors of the company have shown no compunction in wielding that power in favor of their political agenda. I think it’s very unwise of Canadians to allow this situation to continue.”

Started as a single television station in 1974 by Izzy Asper, a tax lawyer and politician from Winnipeg who died in 2003, Canwest now owns one of Canada’s two national papers, 10 major market dailies, 23 smaller market daily, weekly and community papers and one of the country’s biggest television stations, as well as 13 specialty channels in partnership with Goldman Sachs. In Vancouver, Canwest owns both daily newspapers, the biggest television station and the majority of the community papers, making the city the most media concentrated city in North America. Outside of Canada, it owns The New Republic magazine, Australia’s TEN Television Network and radio stations in England and Turkey.

As the patriarch of the Asper clan, Izzy carefully built his company by taking advantage of government opportunities while breaking Canadian content rules. With his sons Leonard and David in tow, the Aspers swallowed a competing company, Western International Communications (WIC), through a lengthy and acrimonious lawsuit and turned their Global television network into a national broadcaster. But it wasn’t until they bought Conrad Black’s newspaper empire in 2000 that the Aspers became a dominant force in the country.

With most of the country’s papers in their hands, the Aspers ordered their newspapers to run “national editorials” written from the Canwest head office in Winnipeg. Already upset that their paper was forced to run an editorial that appeared to condone the assassination of Yasser Arafat, reporters at the Montreal Gazette protested with a byline strike. David Asper, now Canwest’s executive vice-president, denounced the protest as “childish.” Journalists who continued with the strike were told they would be suspended or fired.

The following year, the Aspers continued to roll by firing Ottawa Citizen publisher Russell Mills for running a story exposing Prime Minister Jean Chrétien’s shady business deals. Izzy Asper was a strong Chrétien supporter and David Asper had publicly criticized the Canadian media for being too hard on the Liberal prime minister. Other Canwest columnists who wrote anti-Chrétien articles were let go. While the Aspers insisted they were exercising their right as proprietors, journalists at their papers quickly got the message that dissent would be met with dismissal.

“The Aspers have put a chill on debate,” says Steve Anderson, national coordinator for the Campaign For Democratic Media. “And because they control so much of the media industry, it limits what information we have available to us. Canwest has pushed Canada’s media system to the edge.”

As columnists and reporters got dropped, Canwest journalists now self-censor in order to survive. A number of reporters at the Vancouver Sun have privately admitted that the newsroom has become an abusive environment and are too scared to speak out. An unprecedented number have become so despondent they have gone on stress leave. And because the Aspers have such a tight grip on Vancouver’s mediascape, journalists have little option but to keep quiet and wait for retirement.

By the time Izzy Asper died in 2003, Leonard Asper had not only inherited his father’s leadership, but also his bellicosity. Although Canwest papers would get caught switching mention of Middle East “militants” in Reuters newswire to “terrorists,” Leonard accused most of the Canadian media of being biased against Israel. While National Post journalists would defended their right to alter Reuters articles, Asper ripped into Neil Macdonald, a foreign correspondent for the Canadian Broadcast Corporation who regularly reports on the misery caused by Israeli military strikes, by implying the reporter was anti-Semitic.

“I expect more bullying, more bombast, more ideological, anti-journalistic nonsense,” responded Macdonald in a 2003 Globe and Mail article. “I used to work for the newspapers they now own. Several of my ex-colleagues, still there, tell me they find the Aspers’ approach to journalism an embarrassment. But they cannot speak publicly. Thank heavens I can.”

Last January, Canwest continued its combative war when it launched a lawsuit against the The Tyee, an online magazine, for running an article lamenting the loss of two political cartoonists from Canwest’s other Vancouver daily paper, the Province. Canwest is now suing the magazine and the writer for libel. However, the lawsuit appears to have less to do with setting the record straight than it does about quashing rivals. The article was written by longtime Asper foe Rafe Mair and The Tyee is run by a former Vancouver Sun editor-turned-critic, David Beers.

But after eight years of torment, it appears as though the Aspers’ domineering days may be in trouble. Having already sold off a number of its holdings, Canwest is still saddled with $2.6 billion in debt and is hemorrhaging profits as television and print advertising revenue rapidly migrates to the internet. After purchasing specialty network Alliance Atlantis for $2.3 billion, Canwest cut 200 television jobs last year and offered buyouts to dozens of print reporters, while threatening further layoffs. The axe wielding has not only crippled current journalists, but demoralized an entire generation of young reporters. John Miller, a professor of journalism at Ryerson University, says students who interned at the Edmonton Journal last year came back disillusioned with the profession because of the amount of bitterness in the newsroom.

For young reporters, there isn’t much reprieve in journalism schools either, with many students complaining that the schools have become factories for the mainstream media. With government funding drying up, universities and colleges have had to turn to corporations for financial support, giving companies like Canwest – which donated $500,000 to the University of British Columbia’s school of journalism – direct influence over the country’s education system. Now students must come to terms with Canwest’s questionable ethics in the classroom before they even get to the newsroom.

If they ever do make it to a Canwest newsroom, young journalists will find empty desks and depressed reporters. They will work for thinned newspapers and sparse television stations that endorse right-wing policies and do little community coverage. In short, they will work for a corporation that cares more about profits than the public interest.

For the past decade, the Aspers have pursued an aggressive neo-conservative agenda and silenced, purged and intimidated their critics into submission. Canwest has put a black mark on journalism and has been a destructive force to Canadian democracy. Until this bully is cut down to size, it will continue to run roughshod over the country’s media. It’s time for the Canadian public to stand up and reclaim the integrity of its public discourse.

Join the fight!
As big corporations continue to beat up on Canada’s media, Canadians are beginning to fight back. Here’s how you can get involved:

Support Adbusters’ legal battle: Adbusters is challenging two Canadian broadcasters for refusing to run our public service announcements. We need moral and financial support to keep this case going.

Support indy media: Read alternative weeklies. Buy independent magazines. Listen to campus and community radio. Watch public television. Shut off the corporate press.

Be the Media: Participate in citizen journalism websites. Start your own zine or blog. Volunteer at your the cooperative radio station. Learn how to be
a journalist.

The Price of Profits

By Zachary Hurwitz
From Cultural Survival Quarterly
2008

The Initiative for the Regional Integration of Infrastructure in South America is the latest and largest in a series of bank-financed schemes to bring "development" to the Amazon Basin—and more trouble to the region's indigenous communities.

Launched in 2000 by all 12 South American governments with funding from major international finance institutions, the Initiative for the Regional Integration of Infrastructure in South America (IIRS) is a development scheme of biblical proportions. It includes almost 350 major projects, including highways, dams, pipelines, and ports. The cumulative effect of these projects will be opening up new areas of the Amazon Basin to large-scale, export- oriented agriculture and energy extraction.

That, of course, is exactly why the governments want to pursue these projects, but for indigenous peoples of the region, these kinds of infrastructure megaprojects in the Amazon Basin have always led to poverty, displacement, exposure to diseases, cultural erosion, physical threats, and violent conflicts.

To get a sense of how indigenous peoples feel about these projects, I spoke with indigenous representatives in Peru and Brazil about the Interoceanica Sur Highway and the Madeira Hidrovia Complex waterway project. Their comments appear below.

The Interoceanica Sur highway in Madre de Dios, Peru, is one of the 31 first-stage IIRSA projects that are programmed for completion by the year 2010. The road is financed by the Andean Development Corporation, the Brazilian National Development Bank, the Inter-American Development Bank, and the Peruvian government and is currently under construction. Meanwhile, 80 percent of the entire Peruvian Amazon is now opened to bidding from oil companies around the world, including Hunt Oil of Texas, which has acquired the concession for block 76, almost entirely superimposed upon the recently created Reserva Comunal Amarakaeri, which is an indigenous reserve.

In an interview in Puerto Maldonado, Julio Cusurichi, the 2007 Goldman Environmental Prize winner and representative of the Federación Nativa de Madre de Dios (FENAMAD), told of the impacts of IIRSA’s Interoceanica Sur highway, expansion of agribusiness, and increased oil extraction for the indigenous peoples of the Madre de Dios region of Peru.

Zachary Hurwitz: Julio, talk to me about the Interoceanica Highway. How is it going to affect the indigenous peoples of the province of Madre de Dios?

Julio Cusurichi: The issue of the Interoceanica for indigenous people is going to be a threat more than a benefit, because the Interoceanica cannot be separated from its larger context, which is IIRSA. And IIRSA contains projects for the entire Amazon basin. But the Interoceanica particularly worries us as indigenous people. One problem is that the regional populations are simply uninformed about the projects. Very few people have any idea of the effects that this Interoceanica highway is going to bring.

One important point is the matter of legal security of indigenous territories. If we don’t guarantee juridical security for our lands, we will be exposed to large waves of migration that will enter through this road with the objective of obtaining lands. So if our regional and national governments don’t have a vision of how to guarantee the rights of the territories of indigenous people, we’re going to have a serious threat.

The other important point is environmental impacts. We have learned that in the Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) of the Interoceanica, only a few areas are considered. They’ve created a barrier of 1.8 miles from the road to prevent environmental impacts, but the impacts won’t be felt only in those 1.8 miles. Environmental impacts are felt at a regional level. We’re very worried about this matter.

If this highway project doesn’t come with other packages to minimize its impacts, then we’re looking at a much larger problem. The ecological-economic zonification of Madre de Dios hasn’t been finished. In terms of agriculture, specifically cattle ranching, a lot of people have already acquired land titles. If the remaining land titles are not dealt with, it’s going to be very worrisome. We at FENAMAD have led the discussion and debate on this issue, and now there is an alliance of federations here in Madre de Dios that is working to present our observations on the Environmental Impact Assessment. The minister of transport gave us a 15-day period, and in this period we presented a technical report making observations on the impact of the highway. We hope that our observations will be incorporated into the EIA for the benefit of the region.

The Interoceanica project is going to benefit large agricultural interests, not local populations. Local populations are not prepared economically to benefit from the highway, and there’s been no interest from the national or regional government to give us at least a few incentives to prepare us for the highway. If the government doesn’t promote a sustainable vision for our region, what we’re going to see are large trucks passing through here, big businesses from the Brazilian side. There they have a broad vision of expanding spaces for soy cultivation, which is going to affect indigenous peoples, riverside communities, and rural communities. So this is only a capitalistic vision, not a vision that will help the poor populations of our country.

Which indigenous peoples have not yet had their territories demarcated?

For example, the Masenawa from Puerto Azul have not had their lands demarcated yet, and some extensions of territories are still pending, including those of the Arasaire, Diamante, Boca Inambari, and Pilar. We need to focus first on these land titles and then work on other matters if we can. If we don’t guarantee security for indigenous peoples in the law, it will cause a big problem, because in the occidental vision land titles that were issued earlier are calculated to be very small. They didn’t include the integrity of the territory, they didn’t include even where we hunted, the land we used in our daily activities. They would say to us, “Let’s see, there are 40 ‘indios’ here, multiplied by 20 hectares,” and get the total from that. The first land titles did not originate from an indigenous vision. Only the most recent land titles have improved because we’ve pushed for a vision of territory that’s integral.

Explain to me Peruvian president Alan Garcia’s new law of colonization of the Amazon.

We’ve been informed that there is a new proposal for an executive law that would allow the government to begin a colonization project with agricultural and industrial ends. For the Amazon, this is a threat, because we already live here, we already exist here, so what lands are they going to colonize? This could mean land invasions, conflicts between agricultural interests and indigenous people, so this proposal for new law worries us, and we’ve rejected it through the Alliance of Federations here in Madre de Dios. Surely it’s another indication that Alan Garcia is seeking to secure large territories for the benefit of some investors. If this is the case, it worries us very much, and I think that Alan Garcia is going to have a response from organized civil society, that says that we want to do things how we see them, not how he sees them. I think this will help Alan Garcia to reorient his policies to respond not to large business interests but to the populations that elected him.

Are you worried that if and when the Interoceanica is completed, soy production will begin to invade Madre de Dios?

Not only will soy invade, there will also be a lot of migration. Through the highway, all of a sudden we’re going to see a lot of investors enter and buy up a lot of territory, a lot of agricultural zones. We’re going to come to a point where we depend on one large landowner who has a lot of hectares, and we won’t have any alternatives to offer. What will happen is that we’ll fall into the hands of the investors. Many small farmers, castañeros [Brazil-nut gatherers], small loggers, are going to lose their rights, because they won’t be able to offer products or negotiate, and this will cause chaos. The regional government isn’t taking this into account, and they don’t have any vision of how this highway will benefit the communities through sustainable activities, for example ecotourism. We cannot compete with Brazil’s economic industries. We’re already working in ecotourism in some native communities here in Madre de Dios. So the question is how to reinforce these initiatives, how to transform some specific products to add value. We have forest resources; are we going to sell raw timber, or should we put a factory here to add value, search for international markets, and not fall into the same old patterns?

We should already be debating this, but the regional governments are asleep. Social organizations are knocking on their door so they can at least wake up and see how to really get a regional economy going here in Madre de Dios.

So the Interoceanica highway may bring benefits?

Yes, if it comes with other social packages, as I mentioned. But if the Interoceanica comes on its own, and the population can’t discuss it, debate it, and propose some economic steps that are more in accord with our reality, it’s going to be more harmful for us. But if there is a desire to discuss which activities should be promoted, if there are resources to assure legal security for indigenous lands, and to mitigate environmental impacts, so that we as social organizations can monitor the environmental impacts, then yes. So with this active participation in the affected zones, I think we can at least mitigate the impacts of the highway. The project was created from above, it’s being carried out as a national policy; and if it’s carried out without considering all of the points I’ve indicated to you, 10 years from now we’ll be talking about very great chaos, and I hope to be alive to show you what’s happened. I think at least my people will still exist, and we will always be adding these matters into the debate.

How Can You Celebrate on the Land Where Your Relatives are Buried?

The Madeira Hidrovia Complex is one of the most controversial projects included in the Initiative for the Regional Integration of Infrastructure of South America. The Hidrovia plans include the construction of five hydroelectric dams (two in Bolivia and three in Brazil) along the Madeira river, to facilitate transporting soy from the southern city of Porto Velho to Manaus for export.

For the Parintintin of western Brazil, who depend on the river for their livelihood and culture, the hydroelectric dams proposed by the Madeira complex are a serious threat. As cacique (chief) Domingos Parintintin points out, mining and logging already exert tremendous pressure on their territory. Hydroelectric dams would offer even more pressure, cutting river water levels, which would threaten the availability and health of fish, as well as the Parintintin agricultural plots, which depend on the river’s natural cycles of flooding to restore soil fertility. There would also be increased competition for land and resources, as migrants move in to work in construction and agriculture. Here, Domingos discusses the challenges the Parintintin face.

For our people, the drought of 2005 exacerbated the contamination here in the Madeira River region. Most times we don’t know what contaminants are dumped in the river, and Brazilian citizens don’t know anything about this. We see mining a lot, and Amazônia is drying up. We saw 50 tons of fish die in the Madeira in 2005. And we need to fish in order to live. Today the question of mining affects everyone. For the cities that like to eat fish, it comes down to this: mining will make them unable to eat fish. It doesn’t cause problems only for us, but for all the Brazilians who live off of this fish.

There are also a lot of illegal loggers. Two years ago many loggers came from the Trans-Amazon Highway; there were 10 or 20 trucks transporting wood night and day. And this even after prosecution from IBAMA [the Brazilian Institute for Environment and Renewable Resources] and from the federal government. Here in Amazônia, we see that this doesn’t matter; IBAMA’s presence is very thin. They need to improve, a lot, because if it keeps going this way, in a couple of years, our people are not going to have any more nature, we’re not going to see any more forest, only destroyed land. If there is standing forest, it will be because of indigenous people, because we preserve our lands. Even so, in our way of thinking, in the future we’re going to have problems because people want to invade our land, and how are we going to accept that?

Land Preservation
We’re better off than other indigenous peoples because we have officially demarcated indigenous areas, but other indigenous peoples are suffering a lot from the question of mining, logging invasions, and fishing, and this makes our people very sad. Our people understand; we’ve learned, we watch television, and we know that the most important land is Amazônia in Brazil. We know that in Amazônia there is still forest and nature. In other states, there isn’t any more left; it’s all deforested. So the place that is facing the most conflict is Amazônia.

We ourselves prosecute invasions of our land, but we need the government to place FUNAI prosecutors in our villages [FUNAI is the Brazilian agency that protects indigenous groups]. We know the government created FUNAI, they created IBAMA, the INCRA[the National Institute for Agrarian Reform], so we want to work together to preserve our indigenous lands. We support them, but we also need the support of the government, we need the government to look at what’s happening. This is 2007; it’s time for things to be different. The government threw a party to celebrate the 500th birthday of Brazil, but we’re against that. Because today you go to any land in Amazônia, and our close relatives, brothers, parents, they’re all buried on that land. How can you celebrate on the land where your relatives are buried?

First Contact and Population
The first contact with our people was in 1946. I’m from the generation of the 1970s on; I’m more recent. Our people depend now on many of the things from this contact. Since contact, our people learned to use clothing, entered school, and learned to speak Portuguese, and all of this brought some things that were good, but also brought some things that are bad. Our people want to continue in our ways, preserving our lands, our culture, preserving against invasions, to continue speaking our language. We don’t accept anyone on our lands without our permission; people might bring something in that we don’t expect. Everyone who enters our land has to communicate with FUNAI, which represents our indigenous population.

Our people, the Parintintin, have a population of around 400 people. We have three villages: Traira, Pupunha, and Canavial, and two indigenous reserves, Nove de Janeiro and Ipixuna. We have relatives in other ethnicities, for example the Arientinpais (1,000 people), the Pirahã (700 people), and the Jiahui (more or less 400 people), all in this region. The ethnicities here in the municipality of Humaitá, where we live, are the Parintintin, the Tenharim, the Jiahui, the Torá, the Apurinã, the Mura, and the Pirahã.

At the time of contact in 1946, there were about 4,000 Parintintin. After contact, there was the invasion of the Trans-Amazon Highway, in the year 1960. Curt Nimuendajú, an ethnologist, calculated that in the decade of the 1940s there were 50,000 indigenous people in this area. The population today is only 20 percent of what it used to be. There are peoples like the Juma, which, from a population of 400, have been reduced to only 6 Juma now living.

From an original population of 4,000, we came to have only 120 after the Trans-Amazon was built. And now we’re beginning to grow again. This is related to the period of the the last rubber boom, which was during the Second World War. This was a period when a lot of people entered the Amazon from outside, and from this contact came the majority of illnesses that caused the reduction of our people.

Our people, from the time of contact, have seen more illnesses appear—more and more. Our people never knew about these things, and we’re very worried about the kinds of illnesses that are appearing. It makes us very sad. It’s a problem that is happening throughout Brazil, not only with us, but also with other indigenous populations. For us, there’s no way to resolve this problem. For our people these illnesses are new, and today we have a problem with the government, with FUNASA, the body that attends to indigenous health. FUNASA is on our lands to see what illnesses they can combat, but each time it’s more from one day to the next. Today the problem with the government is that we need to preserve indigenous health on our own.

Our people, in the area of health, we have our own traditions. We make remedies ourselves. We have a part of our culture that knows which medicine to use, which medicines cure, and we pass this on to our people who conserve this knowledge. For example, if you have a bruise, or a cut, we know which treatment to use to cure it. We have remedies for everything. We never give up our culture.

Indigenous Education
In education, we have a fundamental cycle from first to fourth grade, and fifth to eighth. We have professors, seven indigenous professors, preserving our education. We have adult classes, and two of our indigenous health workers are educators. We have a professor who is already bilingual; he gives classes in both our language and Portuguese. Beyond that we have professors who teach in Portuguese. And we have traditional professors. My mother is one and my father is another, who only teach about our culture. They’re not hired, they’re professors from the root of our people.

Cultural Change
Beyond this, we never let go of our culture. For example, we never give up our traditional clothing. Our people are advancing, but they don’t know how to do everything. We don’t know how to do everything at the beginning of something new, but we’re advancing. There are some things about our culture that I can’t speak about, because they are secrets. This goes for other people too. Truthfully, for us as Parintintin, from the time of contact to today, our vision has changed. Today, our people are much more like Brazilians. To us, our people have failed in some parts of our culture. There are things that are changing our own culture as indigenous people. We speak two languages. In the case of my village, we speak our own language and Portuguese. But we never give up our culture. I’m not an enemy of Brazil, I’m an indigenous man, but the question of land invasions, the question of mining, the question of illegal logging, hunting, fishing, all of this comes back to our people; it causes a problem, a very serious problem.

Zachary Hurwitz is a graduate student at the Department of Geography and the Environment at the University of Texas at Austin. He also is an organizer for the environmental human rights organization Amazon Watch, and belongs to the Brazil Strategy Network. He recently traveled up the Madeira River from Manaus to Porto Velho, Brasil, and visited the site of the proposed Santo Antônio hydroelectric dam.

2008-06-08T08:46:00.000-07:00

Location of Mass Graves of Residential School Children Revealed for the First Time; Independent Tribunal Established

From Mohawk Nation News
2008

At a public ceremony and press conference held today outside the colonial "Indian Affairs" building in downtown Vancouver, the Friends and Relatives of the Disappeared (FRD) released a list of twenty eight mass graves across Canada holding the remains of untold numbers of aboriginal children who died in Indian Residential Schools.

The list was distributed today to the world media and to United Nations agencies, as the first act of the newly-formed International Human Rights Tribunal into Genocide in Canada (IHRTGC), a non-governmental body established by indigenous elders.

In a statement read by FRD spokesperson Eagle Strong Voice, it was declared that the IHRTGC would commence its investigations on April 15, 2008, the fourth Annual Aboriginal Holocaust Memorial Day. This inquiry will involve international human rights observers from Guatemala and Cyprus, and will convene aboriginal courts of justice where those persons and institutions responsible for the death and suffering of residential school children will be tried and sentenced. (The complete Statement and List of Mass Graves is reproduced below).

Eagle Strong Voice and IHRTGC elders will present the Mass Graves List at the United Nations on April 19, and will ask United Nations agencies to protect and monitor the mass graves as part of a genuine inquiry and judicial prosecution of those responsible for this Canadian Genocide.

Eyewitness Sylvester Greene spoke to the media at today's event, and described how he helped bury a young Inuit boy at the United Church's Edmonton residential school in 1953.

"We were told never to tell anyone by Jim Ludford, the Principal, who got me and three other boys to bury him. But a lot more kids got buried all the time in that big grave next to the school."

For more information: www.hiddenfromhistory.org, or write to the IHRTGC at: genocidetribunal@yahoo.ca

Issued on Squamish Territory, 10 April, 2008, under the authority of Hereditary Chief Kiapilano.

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Press Statement: April 10, 2008

Mass Graves of Residential School Children Identified – Independent Inquiry Launched

We are gathered today to publicly disclose the location of twenty eight mass graves of children who died in Indian Residential Schools across Canada, and to announce the formation of an independent, non-governmental inquiry into the death and disappearance of children in these schools. We estimate that there are hundreds, and possibly thousands, of children buried in these grave sites alone.

The Catholic, Anglican and United Church, and the government of Canada, operated the schools and hospitals where these mass graves are located. We therefore hold these institutions and their officers legally responsible and liable for the deaths of these children.

We have no confidence that the very institutions of church and state that are responsible for these deaths can conduct any kind of impartial or real inquiry into them. Accordingly, as of April 15, 2008, we are establishing an independent, non governmental inquiry into the death and disappearance of Indian residential school children across Canada.

This inquiry shall be known as The International Human Rights Tribunal into Genocide in Canada (IHRTGC), and is established under the authority of the following hereditary chiefs, who shall serve as presiding judges of the Tribunal:

Hereditary Chief Kiapilano of the Squamish Nation

Chief Louis Daniels (Whispers Wind), Anishinabe Nation Chief Svnoyi Wohali (Night Eagle), Cherokee Nation

Lillian Shirt, Clan Mother, Cree Nation

Elder Ernie Sandy, Anishinabe (Ojibway) Nation

Hereditary Chief Steve Sampson, Chemainus Nation
Ambassador Chief Red Jacket of Turtle Island

Today, we are releasing to this Tribunal and to the people of the world the enclosed information on the location of mass graves connected to Indian residential schools and hospitals in order to prevent the destruction of this crucial evidence by the Canadian government, the RCMP and the Anglican, Catholic and United Church of Canada.

We call upon indigenous people on the land where these graves are located to monitor and protect these sites vigilantly, and prevent their destruction by occupational forces such as the RCMP and other government agencies.

Our Tribunal will commence on April 15 by gathering all of the evidence, including forensic remains, that is necessary to charge and indict those responsible for the deaths of the children buried therein.

Once these persons have been identified and detained, they will be tried and sentenced in indigenous courts of justice established by our Tribunal and under the authority of hereditary chiefs.

As a first step in this process, the IHRTGC will present this list of mass graves along with a statement to the United Nations in New York City on April 19, 2008. The IHRTGC will be asking the United Nations to declare these mass graves to be protected heritage sites, and will invite international human rights observers to monitor and assist its work.

Issued by the Elders and Judges of the IHRTGC

Interim Spokesperson: Eagle Strong Voice

Email: genocidetribunal@yahoo.ca pager: 1-888-265-1007

IHRTGC Sponsors include The Friends and Relatives of the Disappeared, The Truth Commission into Genocide in Canada, the Defensoria Indigenia of Guatemala, Canadians for the Separation of Church and State, and a confederation of indigenous elders across Canada and Turtle Island.

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Mass Graves at former Indian Residential Schools and Hospitals across Canada

British Columbia
1. Port Alberni: Presbyterian- United Church school (1895-1973), now occupied by the Nuu-Chah-Nulth Tribal Council (NTC) office, Kitskuksis Road. Grave site is a series of sinkhole rows in hills 100 metres due west of the NTC building, in thick foliage, past an unused water pipeline. Children also interred at Tseshaht reserve cemetery, and in wooded gully east of Catholic cemetery on River Road.

2. Alert Bay: St. Michael’s Anglican school (1878-1975), situated on Cormorant Island offshore from Port McNeill. Presently building is used by Namgis First Nation. Site is an overgrown field adjacent to the building, and also under the foundations of the present new building, constructed during the 1960’s. Skeletons seen “between the walls”.

3. Kuper Island: Catholic school (1890-1975), offshore from Chemainus. Land occupied by Penelakut Band. Former building is destroyed except for a staircase. Two grave sites: one immediately south of the former building, in a field containing a conventional cemetery; another at the west shoreline in a lagoon near the main dock.

4. Nanaimo Indian Hospital: Indian Affairs and United Church experimental facility (1942-1970) on Department of National Defense land. Buildings now destroyed. Grave sites are immediately east of former buildings on Fifth avenue, adjacent to and south of Malaspina College.

5. Mission: St. Mary’s Catholic school (1861-1984), adjacent to and north of Lougheed Highway and Fraser River Heritage Park. Original school buildings are destroyed, but many foundations are visible on the grounds of the Park.

In this area there are two grave sites: a) immediately adjacent to former girls’ dormitory and present cemetery for priests, and a larger mass grave in an artificial earthen mound, north of the cemetery among overgrown foliage and blackberry bushes, and b) east of the old school grounds, on the hilly slopes next to the field leading to the newer school building which is presently used by the Sto:lo First Nation. Hill site is 150 metres west of building.

6. North Vancouver: Squamish (1898-1959) and Sechelt (1912-1975) Catholic schools, buildings destroyed. Graves of children who died in these schools interred in the Squamish Band Cemetery, North Vancouver.

7. Sardis: Coqualeetza Methodist-United Church school (1889-1940), then experimental hospital run by federal government (1940-1969). Native burial site next to Sto:lo reserve and Little Mountain school, also possibly adjacent to former school-hospital building.

8. Cranbrook: St. Eugene Catholic school (1898-1970), recently converted into a tourist “resort” with federal funding, resulting in the covering-over of a mass burial site by a golf course in front of the building. Numerous grave sites are around and under this golf course.

9. Williams Lake: Catholic school (1890-1981), buildings destroyed but foundations intact, five miles south of city. Grave sites reported north of school grounds and under foundations of tunnel-like structure.

10. Meares Island (Tofino): Kakawis-Christie Catholic school (1898-1974). Buildings incorporated into Kakawis Healing Centre. Body storage room reported in basement, adjacent to burial grounds south of school.

11. Kamloops: Catholic school (1890-1978). Buildings intact. Mass grave south of school, adjacent to and amidst orchard. Numerous burials witnessed there.

12. Lytton: St. George’s Anglican school (1901-1979). Graves of students flogged to death, and others, reported under floorboards and next to playground.

13. Fraser Lake: Lejac Catholic school (1910-1976), buildings destroyed. Graves reported under old foundations and between the walls.

Alberta:
1. Edmonton: United Church school (1919-1960), presently site of the Poundmaker Lodge in St. Albert. Graves of children reported south of former school site, under thick hedge that runs north-south, adjacent to memorial marker.

2. Edmonton: Charles Camsell Hospital (1945-1967), building intact, experimental hospital run by Indian Affairs and United Church. Mass graves of children from hospital reported south of building, near staff garden.

3. Saddle Lake: Bluequills Catholic school (1898-1970), building intact, skeletons and skulls observed in basement furnace. Mass grave reported adjacent to school.

4. Hobbema: Ermineskin Catholic school (1916-1973), five intact skeletons observed in school furnace. Graves under former building foundations.

Manitoba:
1. Brandon: Methodist-United Church school (1895-1972). Building intact. Burials reported west of school building.

2. Portage La Prairie: Presbyterian- United Church school (1895-1950). Children buried at nearby Hillside Cemetery.

3. Norway House: Methodist-United Church school (1900-1974). “Very old” grave site next to former school building, demolished by United Church in 2004.

Ontario:
1. Thunder Bay: Lakehead Psychiatric Hospital, still in operation. Experimental centre. Women and children reported buried adjacent to hospital grounds.

2. Sioux Lookout: Pelican Lake Catholic school (1911-1973). Burials of children in mound near to school.

3. Kenora: Cecilia Jeffrey school, Presbyterian- United Church (1900-1966). Large burial mound east of former school.

4. Fort Albany: St. Anne’s Catholic school (1936-1964). Children killed in electric chair buried next to school.

5. Spanish: Catholic school (1883-1965). Numerous graves.

6. Brantford: Mohawk Institute, Anglican church (1850-1969), building intact. Series of graves in orchard behind school building, under rows of trees.

7. Sault Ste. Marie: Shingwauk Anglican school (1873-1969), some intact buildings. Several graves of children reported on grounds of old school.

Quebec:
1. Montreal: Allan Memorial Institute, McGill University, still in operation since opening in 1940. MKULTRA experimental centre. Mass grave of children killed there north of building, on southern slopes of Mount Royal behind stone wall.

Sources:
- Eyewitness accounts from survivors of these institutions, catalogued in Hidden from History: The Canadian Holocaust (2nd ed., 2005) by Kevin Annett. Other accounts are from local residents. See www.hiddenfromhistory.org

- Documents and other material from the Department of Indian Affairs RG 10 microfilm series on Indian Residential Schools in Koerner Library, University of B.C.

- Survey data and physical evidence obtained from grave sites in Port Alberni, Mission, and other locations.

This is a partial list and does not include all of the grave sites connected to Indian residential Schools and hospitals across Canada. In many cases, children who were dying of diseases were sent home to die by school and church officials, and the remains of other children who died at the school were incinerated in the residential school furnaces.

This information is submitted by The Friends and Relatives of the Disappeared (FRD) to the world media, the United Nations, and to the International Human Rights Tribunal into Genocide in Canada (IHRTGC). The IHRTGC will commence its investigations on April 15, 2008 on Squamish Nation territory.

For more information on the independent inquiry into genocide in Canada being conducted by the IHRTGC, write to: genocidetribunal@ yahoo.ca

Residential School Atrocity - Why an Apology is Wrong!
Bringing Humanity to Bear on the Residential School Atrocity

By Rev. Kevin Annett
From Mohawk Nation News
2008

"Rend your hearts, and not your garments"
Joel 2:17

(Author's Note:This article below was offered to the Canadian media as an exclusive piece last week, and was rejected or ignored by the following newspapers: The Globe and Mail, The National Post, The Montreal Gazette, The Toronto Star, The Ottawa Citizen, The Ottawa Sun, The Winnipeg Free Press, The Edmonton Sun, The Vancouver Sun, The Province, The Alberni Valley Times, The Epoch Times, and the Victoria Times Colonist.)

Imagine for a moment that your own child goes missing and never comes home. Years pass, and one day, the person responsible for your child's death is identified, but he evades arrest and imprisonment simply by issuing to you an "apology" for your loss. He even speaks of seeking "reconciliation" with you.

How would you feel? Hold on to that feeling, and now multiply your loss by many thousands of children, and make the guilty person the government and churches of Canada. Do so, and you will have arrived in a human way at the Indian Residential Schools atrocity.

One of my former parishioners put it another way: "What we did to those native children was an abomination, and abominations aren't resolved with words and money. We need to have our hearts torn in two and be changed. We've got to stand, ourselves, under the judgment of God."

I doubt that Stephen Harper would be satisfied with an apology if his own kids were hauled off and killed for being practicing Christians. Yet on June 11, 2008, he will stand up on our behalf and try to apologize to other nations for having exterminated their children.

The whole effort seems more than ludicrous, or obscene. One cannot, after all, apologize to the dead. But the truth is, the government's planned "apology" to native people is an enormous exercise in deception - primarily self-deception. Do we even know the meaning of that easily uttered term, "apologize"?

It actually has a double meaning, according to the internet Dictionary: a) "an acknowledgment of regret for a fault or offense" and b) "a formal justification, defense or excuse for one's actions". That is, in our vernacular understanding of the term, an "apology" can be a genuine regret for one's acts; but it can equally be a way to evade responsibility for one's acts, by justifying oneself before one's victim. The legal understanding of the word, however, is more specific, and has nothing to do with regret: "apology" is defined simply as "a disclaimer of intentional error or offense".

A disclaimer. Now, I'm assuming that the government of Canada relies on legal definitions - operating, as it claims, "under the rule of law" - rather than popularly understood ones. So we must realize that when the government and its Prime Minister uses the term "apology", its understanding of the word is the legal one: namely, "a disclaimer of intentional error or offense". In other words, on June 11, Stephen Harper will issue to the world a disclaimer to the effect that the Indian Residential Schools were not an intentional offense.

It's not surprising that the Prime Minister will be making such an outrageous and unsupportable claim, since if he ever admitted that the residential schools were intentional, he'd be the first defendant in the dock at an international war crimes trial. But more important, this effort by our government - and the churches it is protecting - to be absolved of their own crimes is taking place under the illusory pretense of making amends with native people, when its purpose is simply to legally exonerate itself of culpability for the deaths of thousands of children.

This, indeed, has been the norm for both church and state ever since the first lawsuit was launched by residential school survivors in February of 1996. An army of court scholars and legal experts has generated a mountain of "holocaust denial" at every level of Canadian society during the past dozen years, to convince the world that the daily death and torture at the residential schools was not intentional at all.

Such an "apologetic" agenda defies logic and common sense, as in the statements from the government's misnamed "Truth and Reconciliation Commission" scholars that, while evidence shows that residential school children were being buried "four or five to a grave", and that the death rate in these schools stayed constant at fifty percent for over forty years, these deaths were "not intended". To believe that, one has to ignore the evidence of senior government officials like Dr. Peter Bryce, who found that children were regularly being "deliberately exposed to communicable diseases" in residential schools, and left to die untreated. The word Bryce used was "deliberately". How else, after all, do so many children die?

All of this legal hoop jumping and evasion of responsibility might make sense to the government, and pay the salaries of their intellectual mercenaries, but it does nothing to advance the cause of truth telling and humanity in Canada, and snuffs out the lives of our victims ever more quickly. I know this all too well, having spent most of my waking hours for years as a counsellor, advocate and chronicler for many aboriginal survivors of the death camps we like to call residential schools. And what I've learned from such work is that we cannot come to grips with something that we don't understand.

The truth is, Euro-Canadian society still doesn't understand what these "schools" were, either at a "head" or a "heart" level. If one believes the officers of the churches and government, the residential schools "issue" is all about money and verbal gymnastics. Yet none of these officials, as far as I know, have broken down and wept in public over the deaths of so many innocent ones; nor have they even offered to return their remains to their families for a proper burial.

Oddly enough, the very same officials continually and glibly speak about "healing the past", without even knowing their own history, and about "solutions" to the "residential school problem", as if they understand what that problem is - not realizing that, to quote William Shakespeare, "The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves." For in truth, there is not now, nor has there ever been, an "Indian problem" in Canada. Rather, the problem is a "white" one. The problem is with us.

I won't point to collapsing eco-systems or troops in Afghanistan to prove this point. Nor need I pose the paradox of how educated men and women, with families of their own and a professed "Christian morality", could drive needles through infants' tongues at Indian residential schools, throw three year olds down stairs, sterilize healthy kids, and deliberately allow children to cough their lives away from tuberculosis, and then bury them in secret graves.

The evidence of the problem is more immediate, and far closer to home, in our continued segregation of aboriginal people into a lower standard of humanity that allows them to die at a rate fifteen times greater than other people of this country.

After all, if we Canadians are who we imagine ourselves to be - an enlightened society that "assimilated" native people into our ranks, and made them our equals - then why has not a single person ever been brought to trial for the death of a residential school child? Why is the disappearance of tens of thousands of native children in these schools not the subject of a major criminal investigation? And why is there an Indian Act, and not an Irish or an Italian Act?

Being, in reality, an unofficially apartheid society that operates, in practice, with two standards of justice - one for native people, and one for the rest of us - Canada can no more cure the legacy of the residential schools than it can stop chewing up the earth for short-term comfort and profit. At least, not this side of a fundamental moral and social revolution.

The fact that we are far from such a change struck home to me a few months ago when the government's fraudulent "Truth and Reconciliation Commission" announced that, although criminal acts did indeed occur in the residential schools, there would be no criminal investigation of these schools: an unbelievably brazen subversion of justice that evoked not a murmur of protest in the media or among the good citizens and politicians of Canada. Regardless of this, there are things that can be done to overcome the genocidal residential schools legacy, and do justice, for once, to the survivors.

Rather than issuing verbal and self-serving "apologies" which change nothing, or staging a sham "Truth and Reconciliation Commission" that has no power even to subpoena evidence, the government and all of us could take these kind of bold measures:

1. Declare an Official Nation-wide Day of Mourning for Residential School Victims, dead and living.

2. Fully disclose what happened in the residential schools - naming the crimes, the perpetrators, and the cover-up - by launching an International War Crimes Tribunal with the power to subpoena, arrest and prosecute those responsible.

3. Bring home the remains of all children who died in these schools for a proper burial, and establish public memorial sites for them.

4. Create National Aboriginal Holocaust Museums.

5. End federal tax exemption for the Catholic, Anglican and United Church of Canada, in accordance with the Nuremburg Legal Principles concerning organizations complicit in crimes against humanity.

6. Abolish the Indian Act and Indian and Northern Affairs.

7. Recognize indigenous sovereignty and return all stolen lands and resources to indigenous nations.

An Irish relative once told me that the way her country is evolving away from eight centuries of warfare is through a simple formula:

"First you remember; then you grieve; then you heal".

Instead of skipping the first two steps, as Mr. Harper and too many of our people are trying to do "apologetically", it is time that Canadians found the courage to truly remember and admit to the world what we did to the first peoples of this land, and grieve our actions in the manner of people who truly rend their own hearts and want to change.

Perhaps then "healing and reconciliation" can become something more than an overworked political catch-phrase.

Kevin Annett is a community minister in Vancouver who is the author of two books on Indian Residential Schools and an award-winning film maker.

2008-06-07T20:13:00.000-07:00

The U.S. Role in Haiti's Food Riots
30 Years Ago Haiti Grew All the Rice It Needed. What Happened?

By Bill Quigley
From Counterpunch

Riots in Haiti over explosive rises in food costs have claimed the lives of six people. There have also been food riots world-wide in Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Cote d’Ivorie, Egypt, Guinea, Mauritania, Mexico, Morocco, Senegal, Uzbekistan and Yemen.

The Economist, which calls the current crisis the silent tsunami, reports that last year wheat prices rose 77% and rice 16%, but since January rice prices have risen 141%. The reasons include rising fuel costs, weather problems, increased demand in China and India, as well as the push to create biofuels from cereal crops.

Hermite Joseph, a mother working in the markets of Port au Prince, told journalist Nick Whalen that her two kids are “like toothpicks” they’ re not getting enough nourishment. Before, if you had a dollar twenty-five cents, you could buy vegetables, some rice, 10 cents of charcoal and a little cooking oil. Right now, a little can of rice alone costs 65 cents, and is not good rice at all. Oil is 25 cents. Charcoal is 25 cents. With a dollar twenty-five, you can’t even make a plate of rice for one child.”

The St. Claire’s Church Food program, in the Tiplas Kazo neighborhood of Port au Prince, serves 1000 free meals a day, almost all to hungry children -- five times a week in partnership with the What If Foundation. Children from Cite Soleil have been known to walk the five miles to the church for a meal. The cost of rice, beans, vegetables, a little meat, spices, cooking oil, propane for the stoves, have gone up dramatically. Because of the rise in the cost of food, the portions are now smaller. But hunger is on the rise and more and more children come for the free meal. Hungry adults used to be allowed to eat the leftovers once all the children were fed, but now there are few leftovers.

The New York Times lectured Haiti on April 18 that “Haiti, its agriculture industry in shambles, needs to better feed itself.” Unfortunately, the article did not talk at all about one of the main causes of the shortages -- the fact that the U.S. and other international financial bodies destroyed Haitian rice farmers to create a major market for the heavily subsidized rice from U.S. farmers. This is not the only cause of hunger in Haiti and other poor countries, but it is a major force.

Thirty years ago, Haiti raised nearly all the rice it needed. What happened? In 1986, after the expulsion of Haitian dictator Jean Claude “Baby Doc” Duvalier the International Monetary Fund (IMF) loaned Haiti $24.6 million in desperately needed funds (Baby Doc had raided the treasury on the way out). But, in order to get the IMF loan, Haiti was required to reduce tariff protections for their Haitian rice and other agricultural products and some industries to open up the country’s markets to competition from outside countries. The U.S. has by far the largest voice in decisions of the IMF.

Doctor Paul Farmer was in Haiti then and saw what happened. “Within less than two years, it became impossible for Haitian farmers to compete with what they called ‘Miami rice.’ The whole local rice market in Haiti fell apart as cheap, U.S. subsidized rice, some of it in the form of ‘food aid,’ flooded the market. There was violence, ‘rice wars,’ and lives were lost.”

“American rice invaded the country,” recalled Charles Suffrard, a leading rice grower in Haiti in an interview with the Washington Post in 2000. By 1987 and 1988, there was so much rice coming into the country that many stopped working the land.

Fr. Gerard Jean-Juste, a Haitian priest who has been the pastor at St. Claire and an outspoken human rights advocate, agrees. “In the 1980s, imported rice poured into Haiti, below the cost of what our farmers could produce it. Farmers lost their businesses. People from the countryside started losing their jobs and moving to the cities. After a few years of cheap imported rice, local production went way down.”

Still the international business community was not satisfied. In 1994, as a condition for U.S. assistance in returning to Haiti to resume his elected Presidency, Jean-Bertrand Aristide was forced by the U.S., the IMF, and the World Bank to open up the markets in Haiti even more. But, Haiti is the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere, what reason could the U.S. have in destroying the rice market of this tiny country?

Haiti is definitely poor. The U.S. Agency for International Development reports the annual per capita income is less than $400. The United Nations reports life expectancy in Haiti is 59, while in the US it is 78. Over 78% of Haitians live on less than $2 a day, more than half live on less than $1 a day.

Yet Haiti has become one of the very top importers of rice from the U.S. The U.S. Department of Agriculture 2008 numbers show Haiti is the third largest importer of US rice - at over 240,000 metric tons of rice. (One metric ton is 2200 pounds).

Rice is a heavily subsidized business in the U.S. Rice subsidies in the U.S. totaled $11 billion from 1995 to 2006. One producer alone, Riceland Foods Inc of Stuttgart Arkansas, received over $500 million dollars in rice subsidies between 1995 and 2006.

The Cato Institute recently reported that rice is one of the most heavily supported commodities in the U.S. -- with three different subsidies together averaging over $1 billion a year since 1998 and projected to average over $700 million a year through 2015. The result? “Tens of millions of rice farmers in poor countries find it hard to lift their families out of poverty because of the lower, more volatile prices caused by the interventionist policies of other countries.”

In addition to three different subsidies for rice farmers in the U.S., there are also direct tariff barriers of 3 to 24 percent, reports Daniel Griswold of the Cato Institute -- the exact same type of protections, though much higher, that the U.S. and the IMF required Haiti to eliminate in the 1980s and 1990s.

U.S. protection for rice farmers goes even further. A 2006 story in the Washington Post found that the federal government has paid at least $1.3 billion in subsidies for rice and other crops since 2000 to individuals who do no farming at all; including $490,000 to a Houston surgeon who owned land near Houston that once grew rice. And it is not only the Haitian rice farmers who have been hurt.

Paul Farmer saw it happen to the sugar growers as well. “Haiti, once the world's largest exporter of sugar and other tropical produce to Europe, began importing even sugar-- from U.S. controlled sugar production in the Dominican Republic and Florida. It was terrible to see Haitian farmers put out of work. All this sped up the downward spiral that led to this month's food riots.”

After the riots and protests, President Rene Preval of Haiti agreed to reduce the price of rice, which was selling for $51 for a 110 pound bag, to $43 dollars for the next month. No one thinks a one month fix will do anything but delay the severe hunger pains a few weeks.

Haiti is far from alone in this crisis. The Economist reports a billion people worldwide live on $1 a day. The US-backed Voice of America reports about 850 million people were suffering from hunger worldwide before the latest round of price increases.

Thirty three countries are at risk of social upheaval because of rising food prices, World Bank President Robert Zoellick told the Wall Street Journal. When countries have many people who spend half to three-quarters of their daily income on food, “there is no margin of survival.”

In the U.S., people are feeling the world-wide problems at the gas pump and in the grocery. Middle class people may cut back on extra trips or on high price cuts of meat. The number of people on food stamps in the US is at an all-time high. But in poor countries, where malnutrition and hunger were widespread before the rise in prices, there is nothing to cut back on except eating. That leads to hunger riots.

In the short term, the world community is sending bags of rice to Haiti. Venezuela sent 350 tons of food. The US just pledged $200 million extra for worldwide hunger relief. The UN is committed to distributing more food.

What can be done in the medium term? The US provides much of the world’s food aid, but does it in such a way that only half of the dollars spent actually reach hungry people. US law requires that food aid be purchased from US farmers, processed and bagged in the US and shipped on US vessels -- which cost 50% of the money allocated. A simple change in US law to allow some local purchase of commodities would feed many more people and support local farm markets.

In the long run, what is to be done? The President of Brazil, Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, who visited Haiti last week, said “Rich countries need to reduce farms subsidies and trade barriers to allow poor countries to generate income with food exports. Either the world solves the unfair trade system, or every time there's unrest like in Haiti, we adopt emergency measures and send a little bit of food to temporarily ease hunger."

Citizens of the USA know very little about the role of their government in helping create the hunger problems in Haiti or other countries. But there is much that individuals can do. People can donate to help feed individual hungry people and participate with advocacy organizations like Bread for the World or Oxfam to help change the U.S. and global rules which favor the rich countries. This advocacy can help countries have a better chance to feed themselves.

Meanwhile, Merisma Jean-Claudel, a young high school graduate in Port-au-Prince told journalist Wadner Pierre "...people can’t buy food. Gasoline prices are going up. It is very hard for us over here. The cost of living is the biggest worry for us, no peace in stomach means no peace in the mind.¦I wonder if others will be able to survive the days ahead because things are very, very hard."

“On the ground, people are very hungry,” reported Fr. Jean-Juste. “Our country must immediately open emergency canteens to feed the hungry until we can get them jobs. For the long run, we need to invest in irrigation, transportation, and other assistance for our farmers and workers.”

In Port au Prince, some rice arrived in the last few days. A school in Fr. Jean-Juste’s parish received several bags of rice. They had raw rice for 1000 children, but the principal still had to come to Father Jean-Juste asking for help. There was no money for charcoal, or oil.

Jervais Rodman, an unemployed carpenter with three children, stood in a long line Saturday in Port au Prince to get UN donated rice and beans. When Rodman got the small bags, he told Ben Fox of the Associated Press, “The beans might last four days. The rice will be gone as soon as I get home.”

Bill Quigley is a human rights lawyer and law professor at Loyola University New Orleans. His essay on the Echo 9 nuclear launch site protests is featured in Red State Rebels: Tales of Grassroots Resistance from the Heartland, published by AK Press. He can be reached at quigley77@gmail.com People interested in donating to feed children in Haiti should go to http://www.whatiffoundation.org/

People who want to help change U.S. policy on agriculture to help combat world-wide hunger should go to: http://www.oxfamamerica.org/ or http://www.bread.org/

Don't Blame Brazilian Biofuels
The Real Villains in the Food Crisis are the Shocking Subsidies and Wastage found in North America and Europe

By Conor Foley
From The Guardian UK
2008

Brazil's President Lula strongly defended his government's biofuels programme at the UN Food and Agricultural Organisation conference in Rome earlier this week. Since his remarks run directly counter to the Guardian's call to "use this summit to press the case for stopping biofuel production" in certain circumstances and it is worth elaborating why liberals in the north are taxing the patience of progressives in the south on this issue.

Brazilian ethanol, unlike its incredibly inefficient North American competitor, has had no demonstrable impact on the recent increase in food prices, as the relative stability of world sugar prices shows. Nor is the industry a direct threat to the Amazon rainforest. As Lula pointed out, "Our sugar plantations are 2,000km away from our rainforest. That is the distance from the Vatican to the Kremlin." Currently only about 1% of Brazil's arable land is given over to the production of biofuels and, while there are legitimate concerns that a rapid expansion of the industry could displace other crops, the Brazilian government is actually trying to regulate both the industry and working conditions within it.

"Ethanol is like cholesterol," Lula told the conference. "Good ethanol helps to tackle the pollution of the planet and is competitive. Bad ethanol depends on the fat of subsidies." He directly attacked the production of biofuels from maize and other forms of crop substitution by western farmers. He also said that he was "astonished, indignant and devastated" by the lobbying efforts of agro-business and the petroleum industry to keep their tariffs and subsidies, which are costing countries like Brazil dear in lost exports. "The fingers pointing at us with indignation are soiled with oil and charcoal." He argued that the only way of tackling the food crisis is to increase food supply and that some of the biggest obstacles to this are the protectionist policies of the rich world. The world would not be facing a food crisis, according to Lula, "if developing countries had been stimulated in a free-market context."

There is no doubt that one of the reasons for the sudden rise in food prices has been the decision by many farmers in Europe and North America to switch production to growing cereals which can be converted to biofuels. As Chris Goodall has pointed out, about 100m tonnes of maize from this year's US crop will be diverted into ethanol refineries, which means one in 20 of all cereal grains produced in the world this year will end up in the petrol tank of US cars. This is an increase of a third on 2007's figure and has obviously had a knock-on effect on the supply chain. Rising oil prices have also increased the production and shipping costs of food – as well as providing farmers with a greater incentive to produce for this market.

The second reason, it is generally accepted, why prices have risen, is that people in Asia and Latin America are eating more meat, which is a consequence of rising living standards. However, the Malthusian view that links rising food prices directly to population growth is not supported by the facts, since the price spike has occurred while rate of increase of the world's population is currently slowing. Those who argue that there are simply too many people on the planet, also need to explain what they propose to do about it. Fortunately, there is a clear link between rising incomes and decreasing birth rates,which should eventually stabilise population growth. The far bigger problem is not that there may come a time in the future when there is not enough food to feed everyone, but the fact that every single year at the moment around 3.5 million children lose their lives as a direct result of malnutrition.

The point Lula has made repeatedly when defending Brazil's biofuels programme is that: "The problem with world hunger is not a shortage of food but a shortage of income." He called for a "radical change in ways of thinking and acting" about food production to "increase food supply, open up markets and wipe out subsidies". He also said that the "cutting-edge technology" which Brazil has developed to "bring together the earth, sun and labour" in a "golden revolution" could be exported to Africa to help tackle poverty as well as global warming and food and energy shortages.

As Kevin Watkins has argued, The US government is currently spending $7bn a year in subsidizing maize-based biofuels, which has been a huge boost to American agro-business but has had zero benefits for reduced carbon emissions. France alone received a subsidy of $12bn for the European Union's notorious Common Agricultural Policy last year, and the average European cow receives more financial support than half the world's population has to live on. This money could instead be used far more efficiently to increase food production by strengthening the development of agriculture in the south. Instead it is often used for precisely the opposite purpose. One of the reasons why so many of the world's poorest countries remain both poor and particularly vulnerable to sudden food price rises is that the dumping of food by Europe and North America has wiped out many local markets.

This is the key issue in the debate, which some liberals and environmentalists in the rich world seem either not to have fully grasped or simply want to ignore. The World Trade Organisation is not the main enemy. Indeed it is difficult to see how the issue can be tackled without an agreement, which in reality can only be achieved through the WTO, that stops rich countries dumping surpluses, opens up their agricultural markets and supports the development of agriculture in poor countries. You do not show solidarity with poor people by supporting policies which keep them in poverty and it is obscene to pretend otherwise.

© Guardian News and Media Limited 2008

Virgin Atlantic Biofuel Flight - Green Breakthrough or Greenwash?

By Chuck Squatriglia
From Wired Magazine
2008

Virgin Atlantic has become the first airline to fly with biofuel, something airline boss Richard Branson calls "a vital breakthrough" but environmentalists deride as a "nonsensical" publicity stunt.

The Boeing 747-400 flew from London to Amsterdam on Sunday, carrying in one of its four fuel tanks a 20-percent mix of biofuel derived from coconut and babassu oil. That may not sound like much, but it is the first time a commercial aircraft has flown any distance using renewable energy. Branson said the "historic" flight marks the first step toward reducing the airline industry's carbon footprint.

Does it? Many environmentalists scoffed at the idea that Branson, and the airlines, are at all interested in cleaning up an industry that contributes 2 percent of the world's carbon dioxide emissions. Pete Hardstaf, head of policy for the World Development Movement, said, "This is nothing more than a Virgin publicity stunt with dangerous consequences for the planet." Doug Parr, chief scientist for Greenpeace, told the Globe and Mail the flight is "high-altitude greenwash."

Why? Virgin's critics offered the standard arguments against biofuels -- mainly, the environmental benefits of biofuels are negligible at best and using crops for fuel will drive up food costs, deplete arable land and contribute to deforestation. Jos Dings, director of the European Federation of Transport and the Environment, told Australia's ABC Online, "If Virgin would power its entire fleet with biofuel, it would have to use about half of the UK's arable land."

Beyond that, the critics said any gains made through biofuels would be offset by one year's growth in the number of flights. Airline passenger growth rates are expected to rise 6 percent annually through 2009 and double by 2020. Aircraft emissions are expected to double by 2030. "The concept of using biofuels and continuing the rate of expansion in the aviation industry is nonsensical," Hardstaff said.

"If Richard Branson is serious about combating climate change, instead of experimenting with biofuels he should be backing the campaign to include aviation in the targets to reduce emissions in the Climate Change Bill," he said.

The airline industry realizes it must clean up its act or face tough regulations. Organizations like the International Air Transport Association and Sustainable Aviation are pushing for a greener future.

Not all greenies were piling on Virgin. Jon Dee, founder of Planet Ark, praised Virgin and Boeing for the effort, telling ABC Online, "I actually think it is good to show that you can fly major airliners on alternative fuels. I think that it is vital that as quickly as possible we move away from business as normal. But what we should be looking at, I think, is how we get that biofuel derived from algae. That is the best way to go when it comes to biofuel."

Branson and Boeing agree, which is why they're spending a lot of time and money investigating algal fuels. Billy Glover, Boeing's head of environmental strategy, says "algae looks very promising." Branson says Virgin used coconut and babassu oil for the test, but commercial fuel will almost certainly be derived from algae.

"Our search for a fossil fuel replacement does not end today," he says. "(But) today's flight will prove a different type of fuel can be used."

© 2008 CondéNet, Inc. All rights reserved.

Kids Spending More Time in Front of Screens: Report

By CTV News Staff
From CTV.ca
2008

A new report card has given Canadian children a grade of D for spending too much time in front of screens and failing to meet the recommended guidelines for physical activity. The report, released Tuesday by Active Healthy Kids Canada, said that 90 per cent of Canadian kids are not getting enough exercise. The culprit? They are spending too much time in front of television, movie and computer screens.

The report gives an F grade for the amount of time kids spend in front of a screen. Children between the ages of 10 and 16 spend about six hours a day in front of a screen. That is three times longer than the recommended daily screen time of two hours or less.

The 2008 Report Card on Physical Activity for Children and Youth was a joint effort by Active Healthy Kids Canada, the Children's Hospital of Eastern Ontario Research Institute - Healthy Active Living and Obesity Research Group and ParticipACTION.

"The results of the Report Card are very disturbing," Dr. Mark Tremblay, chief scientific officer of Active Healthy Kids Canada, said in a statement. "This trend of extreme inactivity in today's children and youth will have an enormous impact on their development and potentially lead to long-term health issues including diabetes, cardiovascular disease and a range of chronic degenerative conditions."

The fact that kids are spending a lot of time in front of screens comes as little surprise to anyone who has seen a child walk down the street with his or her nose in a personal video-game device.

The report said that television and video game use are rising as participation in organized sports is declining. In 1992, 77 per cent of youths aged 15 to 18 played sports. However, that participation rate dropped to 59 per cent by 2005. These figures warranted a grade of C.

The report gave a D for the number of kids, about 10 per cent, who commute to and from school in an active way, such as walking or biking. The report also showed that while more than 90 per cent of parents have access to parks and playgrounds, only 34 per cent of parents use them. This also resulted in a D grade.

Active Healthy Kids Canada, an advocacy group that lobbies organizations and educates parents on the importance of physical activity in kids, says parents, teachers, community programs and governments need to work together to get kids moving.

The group's recommendations include:

Parents keeping kids away from television and video games when they can.
Development of more programs that offer free play time to kids.
Avoiding exercise that is centred on video games that involve physical activity.

© 2008 CTV globemedia All Rights Reserved.

Travesty: The Trial of Slobodan Milosevic and the Corruption of International Justice
Review of John Laughland's book

By Prof. Edward S. Herman
From Global Research
2007

John Laughland's superb new book, Travesty: The Trial of Slobodan Milosevic and the Corruption of International Justice, is the fourth important critical study of the issues pertaining to the Balkans wars that I have reviewed in Z Magazine. The earlier three were Diana Johnstone's Fools' Crusade (2002), Michael Mandel's How America Gets Away With Murder (2004), and Peter Brock's Media Cleansing: Dirty Reporting (2005). It is an interesting and distressing fact that none of the three earlier books has been reviewed in any major U.S. paper or journal, nor, with the exception of Z Magazine (and Swans and Monthly Review, which later ran a fuller version of the Johnstone review), in any liberal or left journal in this country (including The Nation, In These Times, The Progressive, or Mother Jones). This is testimony to the power of the established narrative on the recent history of the Balkans, according to which Clinton, Blair and NATO fought the good fight, though coming in late and reluctantly, to halt Serb ethnic cleansing and genocide managed by Milosevic, with the bad man properly brought before a legitimate court to be tried in the interest of justice.

This narrative was quickly institutionalized, with the help of an intense propaganda campaign carried out by the Croatian and Bosnian Muslim governments (assisted by U.S. PR firms), the U.S. and other NATO governments, the NATO-organized and NATO-servicing International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia's (ICTY, or Tribunal), and the Western media, which quickly became co-belligerents in this struggle. This informal collective focused on numerous stories and pictures of suffering victims, on one side only and devoid of context. In commenting on the parade of witness victims, Laughland notes that "Indictments [by the ICTY] are drawn up with little or no reference to the fact that the acts in question were committed in battle: one often has the surreal sensation one would have reading a description of one man beating another man unconscious which omitted to mention that the violence was being inflicted in the course of a boxing match." But this stream of witnesses, that the defense could duplicate in its turn if given the opportunity--and Milosevic did with a video presentation of badly abused Serbs for several hours toward the beginning of his trial--is effective in demonization and helped mass-produce true believers who viewed any contesting argument or evidence as "apologetics for Milosevic."

This consolidation of a party line has been reinforced by a virtual lobby of institutions and dedicated individuals ready to pounce on both the deviants who challenge the new orthodoxy as well as the media institutions that on rare occasion allow a questioning of the "truth." The refusal to review these dissenting books and to deal with the issues they raise is also testimony to the cowardice and self-imposed ignorance of the media, and especially the liberal-left media, unwilling to challenge a narrative that is false at every level, as is spelled out convincingly in the three books reviewed earlier and once again in Travesty.

Laughland's Travesty focuses on "The Corruption of International Justice" displayed in the ICTY's performance in the seizure and trial of Milosevic, but in the process the book covers most of the issues central to evaluating the Balkan wars and the role of the various participants. The institutionalized lies are dismantled one after the next. On the matter of "international justice," Laughland stresses the fact that the ICTY is a political court with explicit political objectives that run counter to the requirements of any lawful justice.

This political court was organized mainly by the United States and Britain, countries that now freely attack others, but seek the fiction that will give their aggressions a de jure as well as quasi-moral cover. For this reason the rules of the ICTY stood Nuremberg on its head. The Nuremberg Tribunal tried the Nazi leaders for their planning and carrying out the "supreme international crime" of aggression. But the ICTY Statute doesn't even mention crimes against peace (although with Kafkaesque hypocrisy it claims to be aiming at protecting the peace). Thus, Laughland notes, "instead of applying existing international law, the ICTY has effectively overturned it." The dominant powers now wanting to be able to intervene anywhere, the new principles to be applied were a throwback to the Nazis in disrespect for international borders. Laughland says that "the commitment to non-interference in the internal affairs of states, reaffirmed as part of the Nuremberg Principles in the United Nations Charter, is an attempt to institutionalize an anti-fascist theory of international relations. It is this theory which the allies destroyed in attacking Yugoslavia in 1999." And it is this anti-fascist theory that the ICTY and humanitarian interventionists have abandoned, opening the door to a more aggressive imperialism.

The ICTY was established not by passage of any law or signing of an international agreement (as in the case of the International Court of Justice) but by the decision of a few governments dominating the Security Council, and Laughland shows that this was beyond the authority of the Security Council (also shown in another outstanding but politically incorrect and neglected work, Hans Kochler's Global Justice or Global Revenge? [Springer-Verlag Wien, 2003]). It was also established with the open objective of using it to pursue one party in a conflict, presumed guilty in advance of any trial. The political objectives were allegedly to bring peace by punishing villains and thus serving as a deterrent, but also to serve the victims by what Laughland calls "the therapeutic power of obtaining convictions." But how can you deter without a bias against acquittal? Laughland also notes that "The heavy emphasis on the rights of victims implies that 'justice' is equivalent to a guilty verdict, and it comes perilously close to justifying precisely the vengeance which supporters of criminal law say they reject." "Meanwhile, the notion that such trials have a politically educational function is itself reminiscent of the 'agitation trials' conducted for the edification of the proletariat in early Soviet Russia."

Laughland features the many-leveled lawlessness of the ICTY. It was not created by law and there is no higher body that reviews its decisions and to whom appeals can be made. The judges, often political appointees and without judicial experience, judge themselves. Laughland points out that the judges have changed their rules scores of times, but none of these changes have ever been challenged by any higher authority. And their rules are made "flexible," to give efficient results; the judges proudly noting that the ICTY "disregards legal formalities" and that it does not need "to shackle itself to restrictive rules which have developed out of the ancient trial-by-jury system." The rule changes have steadily reduced defendants' rights, but from the beginning those rights were shriveled: Laughland quotes a U.S. lawyer who helped draft the rules of evidence of the ICTY, who acknowledges that they were "to minimize the possibility of a charge being dismissed for lack of evidence."

Laughland notes that the ICTY is a "prosecutorial organization" whose "whole philosophy and structure is accusatory." This is why its judges gradually accepted a stream of rulings damaging to the defense and to the possibility of a fair trial-including the acceptance of hearsay evidence, secret witnesses, and closed sessions (the latter two categories applicable in the case of 40 percent of the witnesses in the Milosevic trial). ICTY rules even allow an appeal and retrial of an acquitted defendant-"in other words, the ICTY can imprison a person whom it has just found innocent."

Laughland's devastating analysis of the Milosevic indictment and trial is a study in abuse of power in a politically-motivated show trial, incompetence, and faux-judiciary malpractice. The first indictment, issued in the midst of the NATO bombing war, on May 27, 1999, was put up in close coordination between the ICTY and U.S. and British officials, and its immediate political role was crystal clear-to eliminate the possibility of a negotiated settlement of the war and to deflect attention from NATO's turn to bombing civilian infrastructure (a legal war crime, adding to the "supreme international crime," both here protected by this body supposedly connected to "law" and protecting the peace!). The later kidnapping and transfer of Milosevic to the Hague was a violation of Yugoslav law and rulings of its courts. The ICTY's NATO service and contempt for the rule of law was manifest.

The original indictment of Milosevic dealt only with his responsibility for alleged war crimes in Kosovo. But as Laughland points out, the wild claims of mass killing and genocide in Kosovo were not sustainable by evidence, and NATO bombing may have killed as many Kosovo civilians as the Yugoslav army. This accentuated the problem that if the Milosevic indictment was limited to Kosovo it would be hard to justify trying him for Kosovo crimes but not NATO leaders, a point even acknowledged by the ICTY prosecutor. So two years after the first indictment, but after Milosevic's kidnapping and transfer to The Hague, the indictment was extended to cover Bosnia and Croatia. A bit awkward, given that back in 1995 when Mladic and Karadzic were indicted for crimes in Bosnia, Milosevic was exempted. There was also the problem that the Bosnian and Croatian Serbs were not under Serb and Milosevic authority after the declared independence of Bosnia and Croatia, and Milosevic fought with them continuously in an effort to get them to accept various peace plans 1992-1995 (documented in Sir David Owen's Balkan Odyssey, another important book neglected perhaps because of its contra-party line evidence).

So the prosecution sought to make the case for "genocide" by belatedly making Milosevic the boss in a "joint criminal enterprise" (JCE) to get rid of Croats and Muslims in a "Greater Serbia." The initial indictments that confined his alleged crimes to Kosovo never mentioned any participation in a JCE or drive for a "Greater Serbia." So the prosecution had to start over in collecting evidence for the crimes, JCE, and Greater Serbia aims in Bosnia and Croatia and tying them to Milosevic. Guilt decision first, then go for the evidence, was the rule for this political court. The trial moved ahead while the "evidence" was still being assembled. Most of it was the testimony of scores of alleged witnesses to alleged crimes, a large majority with hearsay evidence, and almost none of it bearing on Milosevic's decision-making or differentiating it from what could have been brought against Izetbegovic, Tudjman or Bill Clinton. Laughland shows very persuasively that the inordinate length of the trial was in no way related to Milosevic's performance-a lie beloved by Marlise Simons and the mainstream media in general-it was based on the fact that this was a political trial that inherently demanded massive evidence, and the prosecution, unprepared and struggling to make a concocted charge plausible, poured it on, trying to make up for lack of any documentation of their charges of a Milosevic-based plan and orders with sheer volume of irrelevant witnesses to civil warfare and Kosovo-war crimes and pain.

A key element in the prosecution case was the belated charge that Milosevic was involved in a "joint criminal enterprise" with Serbs in Croatia and Bosnia to get rid of non-Serbs by violence, looking toward that Greater Serbia. The concept of a JCE is not to be found in prior law or even in the ICTY Statute. It was improvised to allow the finding of guilt anywhere and anytime. You are part of a JCE if you are doing something bad along with somebody else, or are attacking the same parties with somebody who does something bad. With that common end you don't even have to know about what that somebody else is doing to be part of a JCE. Laughland has a devastating analysis of this wonderfully expansive and opportunistic doctrine, and his chapter dealing with it is entitled "Just convict everyone," based on a quote from a lawyer-supporter of the ICTY who finds the JCE a bit much. Milosevic probably would have been convicted based on this catch-all, or catch anyone, doctrine. Of course it fits much better the joint and purposeful Clinton, Blair, NATO attack on Yugoslavia, or the Croats U.S.-supported ethnic cleansing of Serbs from Croatian Krajina in August 1995, but there is nobody to enforce the JCE against them, whereas we have the ICTY to take care of U.S. and NATO targets!

Laughland has a fine chapter on Greater Serbia, which shows that Milosevic didn't start the breakup wars (even quoting prosecutor Nice admitting this), that he was no extreme nationalist and that accusations about his speeches of 1987 and 1989 are false, that his support of the Serbs in Croatia and Bosnia was fitful and largely defensive, and that he was not working toward a Greater Serbia but at most trying to enable Serbs in a disintegrating Yugoslavia to stay together. During Milosevic's trial defense, Serb Nationalist Party leader Vojislav Seselj claimed that only his party sought a "Greater Serbia," as the Croats and Bosnian Muslims were really Serbs with a different religion and his party fought to bring them all within Serbia-Milosevic only wanted the Serbs stranded in the breakaway states to be able to join Serbia. At that point the prosecutor Geoffrey Nice acknowledged that Milosevic was not aiming for a Greater Serbia, but, in Nice's words, only had the "pragmatic" goal of "ensuring that all the Serbs who had lived in the former Yugoslavia should be allowed.to live in the same unit." This caused some consternation among the trial judges, as Milosevic's aggressive drive for a Greater Serbia was at the heart of the ICTY case. You never heard about this? Understandably, as the New York Times and mainstream media never reported it, just as they never tried to reconcile Milosevic's support of serial peace moves with his alleged role as the aggressor seeking that Greater Serbia.

There is much more of value in Travesty and I can't do it justice even on the issues discussed here. This is a wonderful book that should be on the reading list of everyone looking for enlightenment on the confused and confusing issues involving the Balkan wars and "humanitarian intervention." It helps shred the notion that the NATO attacks were based on a morality that justified over-riding sovereignty and international law, and it shows decisively that the ICTY is a completely politicized rogue court that is a "corruption of international justice."

As Laughland emphasizes (and Johnstone and Mandel do as well), the NATO war and the work of the ICTY in running interference for that war, were very helpful in setting the stage for George Bush's wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and possibly also, Iran. It was treated then, and remains treated today, as a "good war," a "humanitarian intervention." So those who swallowed the standard narrative, built on lies, at best failed to see the continuity between Clinton and Bush, and the service of the former and the publicists of the "good war" in removing the protection of the "anti-fascist theory of international relations" that protected small countries from Great Power aggression and unleashing the rule of the jungle.

© Copyright Edward S. Herman, Z Magazine April 2007,

2008-06-07T14:19:00.000-07:00

Bug Eyed: "Green Porno," Directed by Isabella Rossellini and Jody Shapiro

By Robert Enright
From Border Crossings

Is there anyone among us who isn’t fascinated with the way insects look and move? In her most recent film project, Isabella Rossellini is counting on that inclusive fascination. Green Porno is a series of eight short films on the sex lives of insects that Rossellini conceived, and scripted, and in which she performs all the crawly parts. She also directed the first three—Dragonfly, Firefly and Spider—and then turned to Jody Shapiro to direct the final five—Fly, Snail, Bee, Mantis and Worm. Together they are like the Masters and Johnson of the entomological world; there is nothing insects won’t do in their urgent need for sex. By the time these delightful download-friendly films are over (they were commissioned by the Sundance Channel for “third screen” devices like iPods and cell phones), you will have seen everything from sado-masochism to hermaphrodism, and from the symmetry of the soixante-neuf position to the less graceful machinations of headless copulation.

Each chapter in Green Porno is under two minutes in length and has a distinctive look. Acting on the suggestion of Laura Michalchyshyn, Sundance Channel’s Executive Vice President, Programming and Creative Affairs, that the films be “short, green and flashy,” Rossellini began her work. After downloading a number of different films on her cellular phone, Rossellini realized the most successful ones “were cartoons and animation, so that gave me a general idea.” The colours are intense and the films avoid special effects, what Rossellini calls “the most intimidating aspect of filmmaking.” The three she directed use more animation than the others in the series; in Spider the female is a large, two-dimensional creature on a filamented grid; and in Firefly the insects are represented by a collection of lit discs that flicker about a nocturnal, constructed landscape, searching for the right female, while avoiding the “imposters” who mimic the flashes of the species played by Rossellini. “If I get near it,” she says worriedly, “I could be eaten.”

This is not the kind of eating that would give sexual pleasure. Throughout the chapters of Green Porno, the threat of being consumed, or otherwise damaged, is constant. You could be sucked dry by your spidery mate, have your head bitten off by the female praying mantis (all females of this species are better described as preying), or bleed to death after your penis breaks off and is embedded in the female bee who got you buzzing in the first place. There is, admitedly, the pleasurable encounter between snails, whose sexual activity involves a degree of consensual SM. “I can produce darts,” says the shell-backed actress, “I use them to inflict pain on my partner before mating. It turns me on.” A good deal of “oohing” and “aahing” transpires at the end of the snail chapter, and the piece climaxes with a punctuating moan.

Rossellini’s insect surrogates allow her to assume different characters. As the snail, she mischievously informs us that she is able to withdraw her entire body into her shell, “where I can hide my vagina and my penis. I have both.” She leaves only a trace of shiny saran wrap on the ground as she slips back into the double-sexed comfort of her shell. Her earthworm delivery is no less insinuating when she tells us, “I am both male and female. I need to mate with another hermaphrodite in the 69 position.” Clearly, for the worm, the earth does move.

In observing she is cheeky, playing a firefly who swings her body-stockinged derrière back and forth—“If I were a firefly I would light up my ass at night and fly here and there”—is to state the obvious; and in the opening shot of Dragonfly her unmistakable, beautiful face lights up the frame. Rossellini is a bug for all seasons, and her pleasure in making these playful lessons in insect sexual practices is everywhere apparent.

I wouldn’t want to give the impression, though, that buggy sex is all good, clean, deadly fun. The series offers more than a trace of the scatological. In one wacky scene, the snail twists her body into her shell in such a way that “my anus would end up on top of my head.” She completes the scene with the word “unfortunately” only after a trail of green slime oozes onto her cheek. In Fly the ooziness factor increases. The chapter begins, as do all the films, with the conditional form, “If I were….” In this case the conjecture goes, “If I were a fly, a common one, a Musca domestica, you would try to swat me.” This section is an example of the educational side of the series, there are 36 species of fly and Rossellini is concerned that we have our science straight. What follows are some facts about the fly’s ability to see and react. “I can flap my wings 200 times per second,” we are told, and “my eyes see movement 200 times better than human eyes,” both of which skills make the swatting of a fly with a newspaper more difficult. Then the chapter shifts to the insect’s eating habits, performed over a plate of spaghetti and meatballs that could have been served in a restaurant owned by Thomas Demand. The fly spits out a gelatinous dollop of saliva to dissolve the food (Cindy Sherman meets David Cronenberg) and after a little proboscis action, the porno overtakes the green. The operating procedure is something like, “I heard a fly buzz when I dined,” as Rossellini flicks over to mount a life-sized model of a fly that she rides as if it were a customized motorcycle. This model, like all the others, is wonderfully designed by Andy Byers and Rick Gilbert, who headed the production team that worked with Rossellini on the look of Green Porno. The Fly chapter concludes with a gruesome scene in which a medium-scaled fly drifts in like a spaceship from an old Flash Gordon animation and lands on a likeness of Isabella’s decapitated head. (The head looks like the design crew has borrowed some parts from Tom Friedman’s self-portrait as a victim of a motorcycle accident, an idea that the dead drone re-embodies surrounded by pools of blood in the Bee chapter.) The Fly voiceover tells us “our babies grow up in cadavers. They’re called maggots,” and the film ends. To be sure, the chapters have a summary quality about them. After the clitellum, “a kind of muff,” that glides over the worm’s body collects its freight of sperms and eggs, Rossellini concludes the chapter with the declaration that “my little worms will be born in 2 to 3 weeks. The ending is so abrupt that it seems a case of insectus interruptus.”

Rossellini’s subjects carry the weight of a fierce, natural mortality and, as viewers, our inclination is to want to anthropomorphize their behaviour. Cynics among us can see the fate of the drones in the Bee chapter—“we would do nothing, just waiting to have sex”—or the mindlessness of the mantis, screwing away even without a head, as close enough to the male psyche to make inevitable the insect-to-human comparison. But there is a kinder, gentler message in our need to humanize these tales, read in wing and mandible. At the end of the Firefly episode, the male spots what he hopes will be his ideal mate. “There she is. Oh, I hope she’s the one,” and then even more hopefully, “I do believe she’s the right one.” This sweet monologue concludes with the word “yes” repeated three times, and who among us doesn’t hear in the insect’s small voice the echo of Molly Bloom’s orgasmic affirmation at the end of Ulysses? The final sound we hear, watching the twinkling of the coupling fireflies, is a sigh. It carries the satisfaction of the benign weight of a dragonfly on your arm, and is as fragile as the sight of a honeybee’s wing.

Green Porno is distributed by Maximus Films International and will be officially released in May. Three of the films premiered at the 2008 Sundance Film Festival, and the remaining five premiered at the Berlin Film Festival in February 2008.

Copyright 2008 Border Crossings

Cheney Enrages Iraqis Over Security Deal

By Gary Leupp
From CounterPunch

Dick Cheney wants the Iraqi government installed by the U.S. occupation to sign a “security pact” with Washington by the end of July. (The pact, including a status-of-forces agreement, would be signed by the U.S. president but not constitute a treaty requiring Congressional approval.) U.S. Ambassador Ryan Crocker has been feverishly struggling to meet the deadline and to commit the next administration to the agreement’s terms.

But that may be a tall order. Prime Minister Nour al-Maliki says negotiations are only in a beginning stage; public opinion is opposed to the pact based on leaked information about its content; and a majority of members of the Iraqi parliament have endorsed a letter to the U.S. government demanding U.S. withdrawal as the condition for “any commercial, agricultural, investment or political agreement with the United States.”

Few Americans are familiar with the proposed treaty. If they were, they might be shocked at its provisions, ashamed about its naked sadism. It:

grants the U.S. long-term rights to maintain over 50 military bases in their California-sized country

allows the U.S. to strike any other country from within Iraqi territory without the permission of the Iraqi government

allows the U.S. to conduct military activities in Iraq without consulting with the local government

allows U.S. forces to arrest any Iraqi without consulting with Iraqi authorities

extends to U.S. troops and contracters immunity from Iraqi law

gives U.S. forces control of Iraqi airspace below 29,000ft.

places the Iraqi Defense, Interior and National Security ministries, under American supervision for ten years

gives the U.S. responsibility for Iraqi armament contracts for ten years

Humiliating, right? The sort of conditions most Americans can’t imagine themselves accepting from a foreign occupying power.

What self-respecting people would ever agree to such provisions? Especially after their country’s been illegally invaded and occupied, on the basis of lies. Perhaps a million have been killed by the invaders and the civil strife they’ve unleashed. Two million have been driven into foreign exile, two million internally displaced. Thousands have been humiliated, terrified and tortured by the invaders. Millions’ electrical and water supply still lags behind Saddam-era levels. Millions’ personal security and enjoyment of human rights has deteriorated as a result of the invasion. Why should their leaders sign such an agreement?

No doubt some key figures in the Bush administration have asked themselves that, and here’s what they come up with. The Federal Reserve Bank of New York holds $ 50 billion of Iraq’s foreign exchange reserves as a result of the UN sanctions dating back to the first Gulf War. These include virtually all oil revenues that under UN mandate must be placed in the Development Fund for Iraq “controlled” by the Iraqi government. $ 20 billion of this is owed to plaintiffs who’ve won court judgments against Iraq, but a presidential order gives the account legal immunity. Bush can threaten to remove the immunity and wipe out 40% of Iraq’s foreign reselves if Baghdad doesn’t cooperate. At the same time, Bush can tell al-Maliki that if Iraq enters into a ‘strategic relationship” with the U.S., the U.S. will arrange for Iraq to finally escape those lingering UN “Chapter Seven” sanctions. Perhaps Bush and Cheney are confidant that this carrot and stick” approach will force the Iraqi government to sign the deal.

But Iranian political leader Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani hardly exaggerates in saying the proposed deal is designed “to turn the Iraqis into slaves of the Americans” and to create “a permanent occupation.” Many Iraqis use similar language. “The agreement wants to put an American in each house,” claimed a supporter of Shiite cleric and nationalist firebrand Mutada al-Sadr. “This agreement is poison mixed in poison, not poison in honey because there is no honey at all.” “Why,” he asks, “do they want to break the backbone of Iraq?”

The mainstream Shiite cleric and politician Abdul-Aziz al-Hakim, head of the Supreme Islamic Iraqi Council (SIIC; formerly the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq or SCIRI), agrees that the proposed agreement would “violate Iraq's national sovereignty.” He claims a “national consensus” against it has developed. (President Bush in December 2006 met with al-Hakim, calling his “one of the distinguished leaders of a free Iraq,” and he is sometimes mentioned as Washington’s first choice for prime minister if al-Maliki doesn’t adequately put out. So his opposition is especially significant.)

Al-Hakim is close to Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, the most widely respected Shiite cleric in 60% Shiite Iraq. The ayatollah is thought to oppose the pact but has not yet made a pronouncement about it. Meanwhile the Association of Muslim Scholars, the largest Sunni political group in the parliament, warns that the pact paves the way for "military, economic and cultural domination” by the Americans.

Al-Sadr’s followers staged rallies around the country after prayers last Friday and plan to continue weekly peaceful demonstrations demanding that the Baghdad government hold a national referendum on the security treaty issue. The U.S. opposes such a referendum, aware that pact opponents would surely win.

So Al-Maliki is between a rock and a hard place. He can sign the agreement and continue to receive U.S. support, strengthening the popular perception that he is a U.S. puppet. Or he can submit to the referendum demand, alienating and embarrassing his country’s invaders, revealing to the world the depth of Iraqi antipathy to the occupation. That way he loses U.S. support. Either way he seems headed towards the door.

In January 2007 Secretary of Defense Robert Gates told Congress that if al-Maliki didn’t cooperate with U.S. forces in suppressing Shiite militias in Baghdad, “he has to face is the possibility that he'll lose his job.” At the same time U.S. Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad and President Bush were both threatening to end support for al-Maliki if he didn’t “follow through on his promises” to the U.S. In August 2007, after al-Maliki publicly praised Iran for its “constructive role” in Iraq, Bush warned him. “My message to him,” he told the press, “is, when we catch you playing a non-constructive role, there will be a price to pay."

For his part al-Maliki has indicated there are limits to his servility. He sent forces against al-Sadr’s Mahdi Army in Baghdad in February of this year, but they fought poorly and had to be saved from embarrassment by the mediation of a commander of Iran’s vilified Quds Force friendly with both al-Sadr and al-Maliki. He has refused to break his strong ties with the Iranian government and politely asked the U.S. to leave his country out of its quarrel with Iran. He does not seem wedded to his post or determined to retain it at any cost; “I wish I could be done with it even before the end of this term,” he told the Wall Street Journal in January 2007. “I didn’t want to take this position. I only agreed because I thought it would serve the national interest, and I will not accept it again.” Doesn’t sound like a man who wants to go down in history as the man who sold Iraq to the Americans in the summer of 2008. Likely successor Abdul-Aziz al-Hakim has opposed the deal so far.

Meanwhile, there’s this other Iraqi item on Cheney’s urgent to-do list: the passage of the Iraq Hydrocarbon Law by the Iraqi Parliament. This was drafted by BearingPoint (a McLean, Virginia-based management consulting provider listed by the Center for Corporate Policy as the number 2 top war profiteer of 2004) in February 2006 and then presented to the newly-appointed Iraqi Oil Minister Hussein Al-Shahristani. Shahristani then met in Washington DC with representatives of Shell, BP, ExxonMobil, ChevronTexaco and ConocoPhillips to get their comments on the draft. He promised the International Monetary Fund that the Iraqi parliament would pass the law by the end of 2006, but its members hadn’t even seen the 33-page draft law yet. Months earlier an Oil Ministry official had said that Iraqi civil society and the general public would not be consulted at all on this matter.

A secret appendix to the draft law, according to London-based Iraqi political analyst Munir Chalabi, “will decide which oil fields will be allocated to the Iraqi National Oil Company (INOC) and which of the existing fields will be allocated to the IOCs [international oil companies]. The appendices will determine if 10% or possibly up to 80% of these major oil fields will be given to the IOCs.” This, in other words, is another national humiliation in the offing. As six women Nobel Peace Prize recipients wrote in September 2007, it “would transform Iraq’s oil industry from a nationalized model to a commercial model that is much more open to U.S. corporate control. Its provisions allow much (if not most) of Iraq’s oil revenues to flow out of Iraq and into the pockets of international oil companies.”

It is one of those “bench marks” the Bush administration has imposed on Iraq, with Congressional support, as conditions for U.S. withdrawal, but even the most recent revised version, hammered out between Kurdish representatives and the Maliki cabinet, faces tough political opposition. Cheney was hoping this would be a done deal---done quickly on the sly---as of last summer. But al-Maliki still hasn’t delivered, and as a State Department report to Congress in April 2008 notes, labor opposition is formidable: “The 26,000 member Iraq Federation of Oil Unions has voiced its members’ strong opposition to the current draft of the hydrocarbon framework legislation and has demonstrated a capacity to disrupt oil production and refinery operations with strikes.”

Last year union chief Subhi al-Badri declared, “This law cancels the great achievements of the Iraq people. If the Iraqi Parliament approves this law, we will resort to mutiny. This law is a bomb that may kill everyone. Iraqi oil. … belongs to all future generations.” Even the Iraqi minister of planning and development, Ali Baban, has vowed to “resign one hour after [the] passing [of the] oil and gas draft law.” And the Sadrists of course are bitterly opposed.

Add the globalization of the oil industry to the security treaty provisions listed above. Imagine how Iraqi public opinion will react if Cheney and the neocons succeed in forcing this package of laws through the Iraqi parliament. Everybody knows the “return of sovereignty” is a sham, and claims of “democracy” a cover for continued occupation. The “benchmark” capitulations the Americans demand add insult to injury, inscribing in law and veneer of multilateralism that which has been seized by brute force. They oblige those under the boot to kiss it.

The Cheney cabal (exuding Islamophobia and contempt for poor and working people everywhere) seems to actually suppose it will be able to win that degree of slavishness, and to celebrate such crowning imperialist triumphs in Iraq, by the end of the Bush term. They also seem to think they can attack Iran, expanding the “Long War” before handing it over to the next administration. But that would mean provoking the outrage of the overwhelming majority of Iranians and Iraqis simultaneously. Seems just too stupid to believe, even from a rational imperialist’s own point of view. But aside from Rep. Dennis Kucinich, few in Congress have made issues of the security treaty, hydrocarbon law, or plans for a strike against Iran. The mainstream media is for the most part unquestioning, subdued, as the Bush administration continues to subject the Muslim world to unbearable provocations.

Gary Leupp is Professor of History at Tufts University, and Adjunct Professor of Religion. He is the author of Servants, Shophands and Laborers in in the Cities of Tokugawa Japan; Male Colors: The Construction of Homosexuality in Tokugawa Japan; and Interracial Intimacy in Japan: Western Men and Japanese Women, 1543-1900. He is also a contributor to CounterPunch's merciless chronicle of the wars on Iraq, Afghanistan and Yugoslavia, Imperial Crusades. He can be reached at: gleupp@granite.tufts.edu

Our War Against Mother Earth is Unwinnable
Pursuit of power and profit threatens the biosphere

By Robert F. Harrington
From CCPA Monitor
2008

Over the years, the pursuit of power by politicians and of profit by industrialists has led to a state of warfare against mankind’s principal enemy, which for them, strangely enough, is Planet Earth. The plan “to conquer the Earth” has been freely stated since the time of Francis Bacon.

Eminent historian Arnold Toynbee, in his final volume, Mankind and Mother Earth, identifies the principal roles of government as making wars and controlling people. These roles are now jointly held by politicians and corporatists, for whom warfare has become such an incredible source of wealth that even millions of dollars of Canada Pension Plan money are invested in leading armament corporations. To count on armed conflict as a source of profit is to welcome and exploit the worst kind of human brutality.

Toynbee finds the crux of the human problem to be our focus on material power “to a degree at which it has become a menace to the biosphere’s survival... An increase in man’s spiritual potentiality is now the only conceivable change in the constitution of the biosphere that can insure the biosphere–and, in the biosphere, man himself–against being destroyed by a greed that is now armed with the ability to defeat its own intentions.”

He concludes by citing the exact position we are in today: “Will mankind murder Mother Earth, or will he redeem her? He could murder her by misusing his increasing technological potency. Alternatively, he could redeem her by overcoming the suicidal, aggressive greed that, in all living creatures, including man himself, has been the price of the Great Mother’s gift of life. This is the enigmatic question which now confronts us.”

With the foregoing as a background for thought, great uncertainty is cast upon the qualifications and mental attitude of the President of the United States and the Prime Minister of Canada. Both appear to be confirmed globalists at a time when it is becoming clearly evident that local needs should be met as much as possible by local efforts in a world where energy futures are uncertain and reliance on imports for food or fuel needs may become quite problematic.

“One-worldness” already exists in that all earthlings (including ants, hippopotami and humans) live on the same planet. But, just as the planet–one single ecosphere–is divided into scores of ecosystems with different landscapes, different climates affording different crops, and different cultures that have developed in them, so a diversity of countries and traditions have been formulated. Our visibly self-serving leaders have ignoble aspirations, which include seeking a borderless world subject to a planet-destructive economy that has recklessly changed every nation’s natural inheritance into a mess of pottage. This approach involves unceasing war against other nations and the planet itself, obsessive economic ambitions, continuous military brinkmanship, and callous disregard for our common environment. While the real problems of the world go unnoticed, our leaders are steering the economic Titanic at full-bore into the apocalypse humankind has recklessly been creating.

The entire world faces an immense problem calling for everyone’s attention--a problem that must take precedence over all others. It has to do with making peace with Earth and curbing our aspirations in order to become good planetary citizens. This implies stewardship in a sense we have not yet been able to imagine. It fits into the tenets of Christian belief, clearly recognizing the Biblical reminder, “...for the land is mine; for ye are all strangers and sojourners with me.” A huge change in human behaviour is essential to survival: a transition from mundane materialism to a deeply spiritual humility that transcends all religions.

Stephen Harper, George Bush, their respective legislatures, and political parties in general are walking to the edge of an abyss crumbling at its base. The political and economic powers continue to plot their aims in the narrow fashion that has always suited them. Fixated on power, profit, and prestige, they plot ever more grandiose schemes for the world they fancy: a world ruled by corporate and political élites with billions of serfs to serve them. They represent the culmination of George Orwell’s Animal Farm and 1984, and Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. If a single line from one of these three books could be cited to sum up their common message, it is this one from Animal Farm: “All pigs are equal, but some are more equal than others.”

An apparently minor economic sales pitch provides an example of how little concern prevails for the integrity of Earth when the priority is making money. It is the publication and distribution of thick Christmas catalogues urging people to buy as “gifts” the thousands of consumer goods depicted on hundreds of full-colour glossy pages. In a recent pre-Christmas period in the United States, 17 billion of these catalogues from 74 retail chains were printed and sent to homes across the country. Their combined weight was estimated at 7.2 billion pounds, and only seven of the 74 different catalogues used recycled paper, according to the advocacy group Environmental Defense. Think for a minute how many thousands of square miles of climate-stabilizing forests were cut down just for this exercise in the promotion of overconsumption.

It is ironic that, while people are being conditioned to fear militant political terrorism, they are never warned about the ecological terrorism that is deliberately practised and condoned, even though it is potentially much more destructive.

An article in a recent issue of WorldWatch magazine, Tar Sands Fever, offers a realistic example of ecological terrorism aimed at perpetuating the lethal addiction to fossil fuels. Here are some facts cited by author Dan Roy Woynillowicz:

Tar sands are composed of 85% sand, clay, and silt, and 12% bitumen, a tar-like substance from which oil can be extracted. Bitumen does not flow like oil, so removing it from tar sands requires vast amounts of water and energy. For comparison, the author suggests, “Imagine mixing a bucket of roofing tar in a child’s sandbox” and then trying to wash the tar from the sand with boiling water.”

Prior to strip-mining the land, the boreal forest is clear-cut, rivers and streams diverted, and wetlands drained. Overburden (sand, rocks, and clay overlying tar sands deposits) must be removed and stockpiled to reach the tar sands. Four tons of material are removed to produce each barrel of bitumen. At current production rates, enough material is moved every two days to fill a 60,000-seat stadium. Add to the foregoing that only a small portion of the bitumen may be removed this easily. As much as 80% of the tar sands are deeper and must be extracted by injecting high-pressure steam into the ground to soften the bitumen so it can be pumped to the surface.

Even after extraction, the bitumen is low-grade fossil-fuel that must undergo an energy-intensive process to upgrade it into a synthetic crude oil. Either upgrading of raw bitumen by adding hydrogen or removing carbon may be necessary before refining. In the U.S., about three-quarters of bitumen is refined into fuels for transportation.

The environmental damage is enormous. “Producing a barrel of synthetic crude oil from the tar sands releases up to three times more greenhouse gas pollution than conventional oil,” says Woynillowicz. This is partly caused by the huge amounts of natural gas required to extract bitumen from the tar sands and convert it into synthetic crude. The energy equivalent of one barrel of oil is needed to produce three barrels of tar sands oil. Tar sands development and lobbying by the oil industry have led to a 25.3% rise in Canadian greenhouse gas emissions since 1990. This exceeds a 16.3% rise is U.S. emissions. “Regulations introduced in early 2007 are so fraught with loopholes and gaps that greenhouse gas pollution from tar sands is predicted to triple by 2020... Nowhere in the world is there a form of oil extraction and processing with a more destructive impact on forests and wildlife, fresh-water resources, and air quality.”

Canada’s boreal forest constitutes one-fourth of the world’s remaining intact forests. The wetlands and lakes of the boreal forest are vital habitats for 30% of North American songbirds and 40% of its waterfowl. Planned tar sands development means that 3,000 sqare kilometers could be clear-cut, drained, and strip-mined to access deposits close to the surface. The remaining 137,000 sqare kilometres would be fragmented into roads, seismic-lines, pipelines, and well-pads for in-situ drilling projects. Studies reveal that the boreal system may be pushed past its ecological tipping point, with irreversible biodiversity and ecological effects. The UN Environment Program has named Alberta’s tar sand mines as one of l00 global “hot spots” of environmental degradation. Reclamation of the land ruined by tar sands work undertaken since 1967 is less than 9%, with none of the land officially certified as reclaimed.

Water withdrawals from the Athabaska River, a primary source of water for tar sands development, now threaten the sustainability of the Peace-Athabasca Delta, which is both a World Heritage Site and the largest boreal delta in the world. The tar sands are taking enough water from this river to serve a city of two million people. “But, unlike city effluent waters, which are treated and released back into the river, tar sands mining effluent becomes so contaminated that it must be impounded... One tailings pond at Syncrude’s mining operation is held in check by the third largest dam in the world... The high concentrations of pollutants, such as napthenic acid, which are found at concentrations 100 times greater than the natural environment, are acutely toxic to aquatic life, yet the government has no water quality regulations for these substances.”

Air pollution from this source is enormous, but does not seem to register in the consciousness of our leaders. Prime Minister Harper, not standing at all on guard for the ecological integrity of the Earth, uses the prospect of further tar sands development as a basis for calling Canada an “emerging energy superpower.” (Or should that be “stupor-power?”)

* * *

Our relentless march toward a political, industrial, military and economic crisis recalls a poem by Robert Service, appropriately titled The Reckoning. He concluded with this verse:

Time has got a little bill:
Get wise while yet you may,
For the debit side’s increasing
In a most alarming way.
The things you had no right to do,
The things you should have done,
They’re all put down; it’s up to you
To pay for every one.
So eat, drink and be merry,
Have a good time if you will,
But God help you when the time comes
And you have to foot the bill.

(Bob Harrington—whiteoakpress@juno.com--lives in British Columbia. His most recent book is The Soul Survivor.)

2008-06-07T08:59:00.000-07:00

Corporate Power, Voter Powerlessness
Most citizens want corporate power curbed—but gov’ts don’t
By Ed Finn
From CCPA Monitor
2008

What are we to make of the recent Ipsos Global Public Affairs poll disclosing that a large majority of the world’s “most informed, engaged and connected” citizens now believe corporations are far too powerful and that their activities should be more effectively regulated?

My first reaction to that survey of social and political activists in 22 countries was a mixture of astonishment and elation. It was mind-blowing to learn that so many of the most informed and active people in so many countries (an awesome average of 74% of them) share our deep concerns about excessive corporate power and want it curtailed.

The implication is that it’s no longer necessary to spend much time or effort exposing corporate infamy. Most people today, according to Ipsos, are well aware of the social, economic and environmental harm that big business firms are causing. And they want a firm government crackdown on corporate misconduct.

But just a minute. It’s great to know so many people in so many countries want corporate abuses stopped. But that raises the obvious question: why has this majority view not been translated into appropriate government action?

Think about this political delinquency for a minute and you begin to see that the Ipsos poll is a deeply disturbing one. It suggests that corporate power is now so deeply entrenched that most politicians shrink from challenging it, no matter how popular tighter controls might be with the most informed and engaged voters.

Such voters admittedly comprise a minority of the people who actually vote in most elections. But you have to assume they are also the most educated and influential citizens, and that, properly disseminated, their views would sway the less well informed voters. This may indeed be happening in some countries in Europe and Latin America, where populist left-leaning governments have started to curb the most damaging and irresponsible corporate wrongdoing. Even in these countries, however, the power vested in large global firms by their financial might and international trade agreements still deters effective government restraint.

In the United States and Canada, even modest efforts to reduce corporate power have been missing. If anything, Big Business has been given even greater freedom to run rampant over the public interest. The anti-corporate mindset revealed by the Ipsos poll is nowhere to be seen in government policies and priorities.

The CEOs are so confident their influence will prevail politically that they no longer care if they’ve lost broad public support. Their unbridled pursuit of profit at any cost has ravaged the environment, led to mass outsourcing and layoffs, $100-a-barrel oil, and a looming recession. They shrug off obscene CEO salaries, pay and tax inequities, even corporate scandals. A few of the worst business rogues—the Enron types and Conrad Black—have been fined or jailed, but mainly because their misdeeds hurt other big investors, not because of the thousands of workers and pensioners who were victimized.

The business leaders probably laughed at the results of the global Ipsos poll: “So the best and brightest citizens don’t like our methods. So what? The politicians they elect are our pals or puppets. They either share our free-market ideology or they’re too scared to confront us. No government will ever seriously get in our way, regardless of how many voters want corporate controls.”

Is this supreme arrogance warranted? Are the big corporations now so powerful that they can safely ignore public opinion? Has plutocracy supplanted democracy?

Three-quarters of the well-informed citizens polled by Ipsos said they believe corporations are now more powerful than governments. That’s true, however, only in the sense that most of this corporate power was ceded to them by governments. When the first companies were set up, they had very little power and were kept on a tight leash. But as time went by, business lobbying and bribery led to more and more power being conferred on companies. Laws and judicial decisions consolidated their power, and deregulation and global trade deals vastly extended it.

In theory, however, the power governments bestowed on corporations can be taken back. What’s missing are politicians and governments willing to tackle this urgently-needed reform. There’s no political party in Canada, for example, that will even promise to withdraw from NAFTA, despite all its devastating economic impacts—and even though there’s a built-in escape clause.

So there’s a gaping disconnect between what informed voters want their governments to do to stop corporate abuse and what their governments are willing to do. Unless this political chasm is bridged—unless governments start governing for all citizens instead of just the business élite—simply exposing and denouncing corporate excesses will be futile. The Ekos Global Public Affairs survey revealed the worldwide extent of this problem. But workable solutions seem to be in short supply.

Let’s get a debate going. CCPA members are surely among the informed, engaged, and articulate citizens who want the corporations reined in. The Monitor will gladly provide a forum for any proposed ideas for breaking through the political/electoral barrier.

Ed Finn is the CCPA's Senior Editor. A collection of his essays, The Right is Wrong and the Left is Right, was recently published by the CCPA.

Collateral Brain Damage?
The Hollywood Propaganda Ministry

By Alex Constantine
From Ratical.org
2002

"Without censorship, things can get terribly confused
in the public mind."
-General William C. Westmoreland, Time, April 5, 1982

Tinseltown Down
During the filming of Black Hawk Down, the Pentagon persuaded its producers to change the name of Army Ranger John Stebbins, portrayed by Ewan McGregor, because the true-life "patriot" had been convicted to a 30-year prison term for the sexual assault of a 12-year-old girl. (Megan Turner, "WAR-FILM `HERO' IS A RAPIST," NY Post, 12/18/01) In the movie, "John Grimes" stands in for pedophile Stebbins. Despite this and numerous other revisions to the record of the famed Somali military fiasco, Black Hawk Down met with widespread acclaim. The film's Washington premiere was attended by Vice President Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Oliver North and a division of generals. It grossed $75.5-million in its first three weeks.

But jeering protestors -- including Brendan Sexton, an actor in Black Hawk Down -- decried the movie, a riot of Hawkish clichés ("C'mon, let's roll!"), as crude war propaganda, a drug intended to stupefy the country into supporting covert operations and oil company maneuvers in Somalia, still more dead civilians. The Pentagon's heavy hand in the making of the film was condemned as a manipulation of public sentiment recalling the Goebbels propaganda mill.

A glance that way is instructive. "Films," Heinrich Goebbels opined, constitute a "scientific means of influencing the masses," of molding attitudes, and he cautioned, "a government must not neglect them." Movies were central to the Nazi regime's domestic propaganda blitz. Under Nazi rule, some 1,300 movies were approved or commissioned by the Reich. Robert Hertzstein, a former consultant to the Justice Department's Office of Special Investigations, notes in The War that Hitler Won that Goebbel's ministry salted popular films with repetitious words and symbols that stirred the emotions of the German populace: "heroism," "sacrifice," "mass murder," "hatred for Germany." (in Robert Edwin Herzstein, The War that Hitler Won: Goebbels and the Nazi Media Campaign, New York: Paragon, 1987, p. 272.) A half century later, Black Hawk Down -- with its profuse "heroism," "sacrifice," "mass murder," "hatred for America" -- swept the next bellicose right-wing "homeland." The parallels were glaring.

And obnoxious. Brendon Sexton, speaking at an anti-war forum held at Columbia University, recalled that in preparation for his role, he and a fellow actor flew to Georgia for `Ranger Orientation Training' at Fort Benning in Columbus. From Atlanta, they shuttled to the training site and "on our flight there were a bunch of guys with Marine haircuts speaking Spanish. It took us a few moments to realize these guys were `students' of the School of the Americas, the U.S. Army's own terrorist training camp in Latin America." This experience "put things into perspective: warlords, dictators and terrorists are normally okay with the U.S., as long as they do the bidding of U.S. corporate interests." ("What's wrong with Black Hawk Down? -- Black Hawk Down Actor Brendan Sexton on what really happened in Somalia," Z-Magazine Web Site, http://www.zmag.org/ZNET.htm)

Those interests lurked beyond Ridley Scott's klieg lights in geopolitical obscurity. Throughout the 1970s and '80s, Somalia was ruled by the decrepit Mohamed Siad Barre. Bowing to the dictates of American Oil, President Barre crushed all dissent. He leased nearly two-thirds of oil-rich Somalia to four American petroleum companies: Chevron, Conoco, Phillips and Amoco. Somalia, a tiny country in the Horn of Africa, is also of interest to the U.S., a direct route to the Red Sea and the Suez Canal. Barre was overthrown in 1991, Somalia erupted in turmoil and the oil companies' land contracts were rendered useless paper. At the same time, there was no shortage of misery in the world. A military adventure to Somalia would have appeared whimsical. Citing famine in Mogadishu and the South, President George Bush, Sr. let the dogs out. The Los Angeles Times noted that Bush's envoy during the operation made the Conoco compound his base. ("Black Hawk Down: Shoot first, don't ask questions afterwards," Independent, 2-2-02)

On May 7, 1993 Canadian newspapers reported that Airborne Commandos had torture-murdered a Somali teenager. Then came subsequent news of murders by Canada's peacekeepers. As many as 1,000 civilians (or "Skinnies"s) were massacred by American troops sent to "restore order" and grab Barre's successor, Mohammed Aideed. Colin Powell, then head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, described the military operations in Somalia as "a paid political advertisement" for the Pentagon. (Michael L. Tan, "Only a Movie," INQ7, Philippine news web site, http://www.inq7.net/opi/2002/feb/26/opi_mltan-1.htm.)

The "humanitarian" operation devolved into wholesale bloodshed. "In one incident," the Independent reported in 1998, "Rangers took a family hostage. When one of the women started screaming at the Americans, she was shot dead. In another incident, a Somali prisoner was allegedly shot dead when he refused to stop praying outside. Another was clubbed into silence." Mark Dowden, author of Black Hawk Down, wrote the article -- yet his book, released a year later, makes no mention of these atrocities. (Independent, 2-2-02) Further nips and tucks in the film script were made at Pentagon request.

Letters from the studios to Pentagon officials declassified last year reveal that Hollywood routinely rewrites history at the dictate of DoD officials with the authority to grant access to military hardware and property. If the script changes are not made, assistance is denied, the film suffers. Films that have won Pentagon approval include Armageddon, Air Force One, The Jackal, Top Gun, Pearl Harbour and Bad Company. Some movies that didn't make the grade: The Thin Red Line, Apocalypse Now, Sgt Bilko, Platoon, Independence Day and Spy Game. (Duncan Campbell, "Top Gun versus Sergeant Bilko?," The Guardian, 8-29-01.)

Goodfellas
The national security-entertainment complex is as driven by greed as it is hypocrisy, so on September 15, 2000, the New York Post reported: "BUSH MADE BUNDLE ON MOVIE VIOLENCE." President Bush has scolded panderers of film violence and is given to public pronouncements that there should be "a sense of urgency in our society about the pervasiveness of violence" (excluding the current spate of gory war movies, of course -- these he applauds). "I think it starts with reminding moms and dads that they've got to be mindful of the games and movies and music that their children are listening to." Most moms and dads had no idea that, for ten years, moralist Bush sat on the board of Silver Screen Management Co., a company operated by New York businessman Roland Betts, a fellow Skull & Bones frat brother. Silver Screen has financed a score of R-rated flicks, including The Hitcher, a bloodfest. Bush joined the board of SS in 1983 and was a director until 1993, when he planned his candidacy for the Texas governor's office. Bush received over $100,000 in directors' fees and bonuses from the firm.

In the last election cycle, Bush's starched supporters regaled Al Gore for his friendship with Pulp Fiction producer Harvey Weinstein, and soliciting campaign funds in Hollywood. They selectively forgot that Colin Powell sat on the corporate board of Time-Warner before his appointment to the State Department. Time-Warner Cable offers hardcore pornography. In 1992, the ultra-conservative American Family Association named Time-Warner "the third leading sponsor of sex, violence and profanity on broadcast TV." (Robert Peters, "Time Warner Still a Major Cultural Polluter," Morality in Media Web Site: http://www.moralityinmedia.org/index.htm?mediaIssues/timewarn.htm.)

Martin Kaplan, a former speechwriter and Disney executive, allowed at a recent news conference that between Hollywood and Washington, "there's a combination of distrust and affection. There has been the culture-wars side of it, but there's also been quite a passionate relationship with legislative outcomes. They understand each other in a fundamental way." (Doug Saunders, "Films of War," Globe and Mail, 11-17-01)

This intimacy was conspicuous when screenwriter E. Howard Hunt was tapped for spy duty. It was conspicuous in 1952, when Actors' Guild president Ronald Reagan was recruited by the Crusade for Freedom, a CIA front, to star in a series of televised appeals for viewer donations to resettle East European Nazi collaborators -- "freedom fighters," Reagan said -- in the U.S. (John Loftus, The Belarus Secret, New York: Knopf, 1982, pp. 107-41.)

And it was conspicuous twenty years later at the world premiere of The Godfather, an event attended by then Secretary of State Henry Kissinger. Robert Evans, the film's producer, a Kissinger crony, had known Mafia ties -- his attorney was Sidney Korshak, the legendary West Coast mob fixer -- but this didn't deter the world's most prominent war criminal. Evans writes in his memoirs that when Kissinger arrived at the screening, the paparazzi "became so unruly that extra police were called in to physically push them back."

A reporter shouted, "Dr. Kissinger, why are you here tonight?" Kissinger croaked with a grin, "I was forced." "By who?" "By Bobby."

The theater's lights dimmed, the theme rose, Evans gushed: "my whole life seemed to pass before me. Here, sitting between Henry and Ali [McGraw], watching this epic unfold, I felt that everything my life was about had led up to this moment." (Robert Evans, The Kid Stays in the Picture, London: Aurum Press, 1994, pp. 9-10.)

The mutual admiration was still evident in November, 2001 when senior White House advisor Karl Rove and several dozen studio executives met in Beverly Hills to discuss the war on terrorism. "It's important to hear what Hollywood has on its mind," Bush administration spokesman Ari Fleisher explained at a daily press briefing. The names Bill Maher, Oliver Stone, Warren Beatty or Larry Flynt did not come up.

The thoughtful movie moguls represented CBS, HBO, MGM, Showtime, Dreamworks, Viacom and other multinational cartel dream factories. The New York Times assured, "several executives emphasized ... that they were not interested in making propaganda films." CNN mentioned that MPAA president Jack Valenti, head of the Motion Picture Association, "hoped the White House representatives weren't planning `to tell us what kind of movies to make.'" Rove wanted "concrete information, told with honesty and specificity and integrity." But most reports of the closed meeting note that "patriotic" movies were the topic of discussion.

The studio executives offered to turn out flicks in the tradition of Why We Fight, a documentary made during World War II, and The Battle of San Pietro; they also committed to public service projects on biological terrorism and "homeland security." (Rick Lyman, "White House Sets Meeting with Film Executives to Discuss War on Terrorism," New York Times, 11-8-01.)

Among the volunteers to the war effort, count directors David Fincher (Fight Club), Spike Jonze (Being John Malkovich) and Randal Kleiser (Grease), and Die Hard screenwriter Steven E. De Souza.

Never mind that Hollywood was already tummy-tuck deep in the propaganda biz. A few days before Rove's summit, actor Tom Cruise met with CIA officials to discuss ways of burnishing the agency's image in the upcoming Mission: Impossible 3. (Editorial, "Unease over Hollywood Washington pact," Guardian Unlimited, November 14, 2001.) Truth is, the nation's political and entertainment capitals had been on intimate terms for decades when the studio moguls issued their denials.

"For many years," Canadian media critic Doug Saunders writes, "Hollywood's most prominent products, its major studio films and TV series, have been almost indistinguishable from government-funded propaganda. With rare exceptions, whenever men in uniform appear on-screen, Hollywood has been singing Washington's song from the beginning." The grave flaws in American foreign policy "may loom large in history, but 50 years of cinema and TV have painted [the CIA and DoD] in bright and unmottled hues." And reaped immense profits with their art: CIA expenditures alone on propaganda during the Cold War ran to hundreds of millions of dollars each year. (Alex Constantine, And Now a Word from Our Sponsor -- the CIA, Virtual Government) "If Bush were to erect a soundstage on the White House lawn, he could not do a better job getting the official line across than movies and TV shows have been doing for years." (Saunders)

Two years ago, the Central Intelligence Agency opened its headquarters to Showtime and Paramount for the making of In the Company of Spies. The program aired on Showtime. To celebrate the completion of this collaborative project, the CIA's George Tenet invited everyone involved to a private screening at CIA headquarters in Langley. "The CIA's objectives were clear," screenwriter Roger Towne told the Associated Press. "They hoped to see a human face put on the agency and we had just the story to do it." ("Hollywood Whores for Washington," http://www.xmag.com/archives/7-08-feb00/antiDrug.html and http://www.xmag.com/archives/7-08-feb00/antidrugCont.html) This is an agency, mind you, with two faces, an international Gestapo that has trained death squads around the globe, assassinated a score of foreign leaders, plotted coups, conducted illicit human experimentation, peddled LSD, sprayed disease on Cuban crops, dragged the country into Vietnam, created bin Laden, etc. Tenet boasted that the movie "portray[s] us in a good light, and I want the American people to know the values we believe in.". "Never," noted the Washington Post, "has the CIA so fully embraced a movie." (Vernon Loeb, "The CIA's Operation Hollywood," Washington Post, October 14, 1999, Page C-1.)

The Langley-Hollywood romance began during World War II, when the Office of Strategic Services (the nascent CIA) and a Disney make-up artist designed disguise kits for agents on jungle assignment. In the postwar period, make-up artists were also recruited for the start-up of Studio Six Productions, a full-fledged CIA front complete with business cards, an office, movie posters and trade ads. Studio Six was run by John Chambers, who won an Academy Award for his make-up wizardry in Planet of the Apes, his partner Tom Burman and the CIA's Tony Mendez. (Robert P. Laurence, "Into the Shadows: The CIA in Hollywood," television review, San Diego Union-Tribune, 12-04-01.)

The CIA, soiled by a half century of PR disasters, hired Chase Brandon, a 26-year veteran paramilitary officer with experience "all over Latin America" -- also a cousin of actor Tommy Lee Jones, Al Gore's college roommate -- in 1996 to fill the newly-created position of Entertainment Liaison Officer. "The popular image of us is of some kind of rogue organization creating mayhem and madness on a whim," Brandon told the press a week prior to the World Trade Center air assaults. "We hate to see ugly imagery of us in television and films."

Brandon's office was conceived on December 20, 1991 by the "Task Force on Greater CIA Openness" in a study undertaken at the request of then CIA director Robert Gates, a Bush, Sr. appointee, and immediately classified, though a few copies were leaked. The report proposed an image upgrade to neutralize public hostility. The task force was in "substantial agreement that we generally need to make the institution and the process more visible and understandable rather than strive for openness on specific substantive issues." Forget openness, the Openness Task Force advised. The report "seems to recommend no real change in attitude," complained The Excluded Middle, an anti-CIA Internet site, "only in the way that the agency presents itself to a hostile or at least an indifferent public." The authors of the report boast arrogantly that the CIA's Public Affairs Office (PAO) censored and had buried projects that it found objectionable in the past. Chase Brandon hails from the PAO. Contact with "every major wire service, newspaper, news weekly, and television network in the nation" was advised by the panel. The result was the Entertainment Liaison Office. (Anonymous, "CIA MEMO ON GREATER OPENNESS REVEALS CONTRADICTIONS," Excluded Middle, http://www.elfis.net/tem/ciaduh.htm)

The CIA's PR campaign was calculated to convince viewers that programs like The Agency on CBS -- praised by Brandon for portraying "the bravery and decency of the men and women who work here" -- were true-to-life. Wolfgang Peterson, an executive producer of the spook show, observes that Americans "are questioning whether we need a CIA, and this is a great opportunity to get the word out." With CIA oversight, of course. Michael Frost Beckner, creator of series, worked closely with Brandon and submitted the product for Agency approval. (Duncan Campbell, "Hollywood helps CIA come in from the cold," The Guardian, September 6, 2001.) The premiere episode of The Agency featured agents thwarting a plot to assassinate Fidel Castro, a smoke-belching storyline fit for Rupert Murdoch's delusional Fox cable channel, or perhaps Nickelodeon.

A plausible script was suggested by Guardian media critic John Patterson: "Think of a movie that chronicles the fortunes of a secretive, murderous, criminal organization, deeply prone to the pathologies of masculinity and paranoia, all seen over the course of four decades with excess followed by hubris followed by dead reckoning. The CIA awaits its version of Goodfellas." (John Patterson, "The Caring, Sharing CIA," The Guardian, October 5, 2001.) A working title for this version might be:

"Indecent Exposure"
The raw material for a true-life CIA classic already exists in the life and untimely death of Hollywood scriptwriter Gary Devore (The Dogs of War, Raw Deal). In the early morning hours of June 28, 1997, Devore drove his SUV off the highway near Palmdale, California, plunged into the California Aqueduct and drowned, Chappaquiddick-style. It wasn't a blowout. He didn't nod off at the wheel. Shortly before the fatal plunge, Devore bragged to his wife by cell phone that he was wide awake, riding on "adrenaline" because he was hard at work on the final draft of Solo, a film script about the military occupation of Panama, and was headed for their beach home in Santa Barbara to complete it. The body would not be found for over a year.

In the meantime, his disappearance summoned up a multitude of conspiracy theories, including CIA assassination. Wendy Devore, his wife, still considers this the most likely explanation and ignores the snickers of the press. Her husband wrote spy thrillers for the screen and had intelligence contacts. Police found a surveillance wire hidden in a bedroom drawer. Devore disappeared in the Antelope Valley, on the outskirts of Palmdale, a CIA enclave. And shortly after the writer went missing, the Agency's Chase Brandon popped up at the house to request private access to the scriptwriter's office and computer -- as though the spook had good reason to believe that Devore, then officially a missing person, was dead. (Ivor Davis and Sally Ogle Davis, "Disappearing Act: A Big Comeback...A Big Mystery," E-Online, http://www.eonline.com/Features/Specials/Screenwriter/Three/index3.html)

In July, 1998 Devore's Explorer was hauled from the aqueduct. The driver's window was down. "He must have been unconscious when he hit the water," she told reporters. "Otherwise, if the window was open, why couldn't he get out?" From the start, police have refused, despite Wendy's pleas, to investigate the case properly.

The Los Angeles Times reported on June 29, 1998 that Devore made frequent calls over a period of several weeks before vanishing to "a longtime friend," Chase Brandon, "at the CIA in Langley, Va., to ask him about the U.S. invasion of Panama, former Panamanian strongman Manuel Noriega and about Noriega's involvement in drugs and money-laundering." Brandon: "I remember talking to him about a lot of elements of Panama and Noriega's regime and the drug money that Noriega was alleged to have had stashed in safes in his offices and that's the money that, in his script [Solo], soldiers stumble across and steal. From that, we sort of drifted off and sort of talked about U.S. counter-narcotics programs in general. I may have mentioned a couple things about the agency's role in providing increased U.S. intelligence efforts to provide support to U.S. law enforcement."

On May 6, 1997, Devore made a note in his day-planner: "Undersecretary for int'l narcotics makers. Chase [name crossed out]. Crime and Narcotics Center. CNC. Largest center in CIA. Espionage agents work with local police, gov't, etc. Do cover work on problems locals won't handle. Airfields, burn labs, fuel storage."

Chase Brandon snickers at conspiracy theories, but offered the Times one of his own: "Gary was one of those people who met a horrible, tragic quirk of fate. He was simply victimized by people who wanted that car." (Robert W. Welkos, "Without a Trace," Los Angeles Times, June 29, 1998.) A conspiracy to steal a moving automobile on an open highway. Case closed. Then again, as filmmaker Barbara Trent (The Panama Deception) pointed out to The Colorado Daily last year, a CIA spokesman is "paid a lot of money to lie. I mean, how many times do we have to learn that lesson?" (Terje Langeland, "Filmmaker to speak on media deception," Colorado Daily, January 27, 2000, http://www.empowermentproject.org/codaily.htm) Gary Devore's death remains a mystery.

The Manchurian Moviegoer
The proliferation of pro-American films and television programs might be described as a cynical mind control operation, a psyop. John Rendon, a "strategic communications" firm hired by the Pentagon (at $100,000 a month) in the war on terrorism, describes himself as "an information warrior and a perception manager." (Jeff Stein, "Propaganda, the Pentagon, and the Rendon Group," TomPaine.Com http://www.tompaine.com/feature.cfm/ID/5188)

Perception management is the mission, under a $45 million Army grant, of the Institute for Creative Technologies, an interactive virtual-reality warfare simulation center and think-tank in Marina Del Rey, operated by the University of Southern California. Richard Lindheim, former vice president of Paramount Television Group, is executive director of the center. The keynote address at the ITC's opening in 1999 was delivered by Jack Valenti, who observed in his opening remarks, "Los Angeles is not the entertainment capital of the world. Washington, DC is the entertainment capital of the world!"

James Der Derian, director of the Information Technology, War and Peace Project (ITWP), was sitting in the audience at the ITC's opening in 1999. "I did not want to rain on the parade," he wrote in an ITWP newsletter, but had to ask "whether the linking up of Hollywood and the Pentagon might not repeat the World War II experience, when training films were mixed with propaganda films, and military simulations became a tool for public dissimulation?"

Valenti came back with a response that "made up in pugnacity what it lacked in nuance." The MPAA president "contrasted my view to the decision to drop the atomic bomb on the Japanese. `Some might have seen that as a heartless and terrible thing to do, but not the 150,000 American boys whose lives would have been lost. This is a lesson in Philosophy 101 that I am giving to you right now.'" But Der Derian came away with another lesson: "Valenti, like many in power today, are all too ready to drop the bomb on dissident viewpoints." Death on the battlefield or simulated on the screen "gives war its special status. This fact can be censored, hidden in a body bag, air-brushed away, but it provides, even in its erasure, the corporal gravitas of war. However, everything I witnessed that day at the ICT was dedicated to the disappearance of the body, the aestheticizing of violence, the sanitization of war. Will this latest alliance of brass, silicon and celluloid be any different? It would seem not." (James Der Derian, "Dreams, Lies and Video Tapes," INFOintervention, Watson Institute Web site, December 18, 2001, http://www.watsoninstitute.org/infopeace/911/jdd_videos.html).

Sanitizing war is the primary aim of the patriotizing media. When the bombs began to fall in Afghanistan, killing and mutilating innocent civilians, a policy of suppressing the body count (or "propaganda") was adopted by Donald "Precision Bombing" Rumsfeld and the government's "information warriors." In Hollywood, self-censorship is the rule. Rarely have the Feds had reason to step in and silence the studios by threat of force. (A rare exception was an episode of Murphy Brown concerning the medical benefits of marijuana -- DEA Director Thomas Constantine threatened a "criminal investigation" of the program. See "Pushing propaganda", from the About website, 7/17/00, http://civilliberty.about.com/library/weekly/aa071700a.htm?iam=dpile&terms=cia+propaganda+movies)

Nevertheless, an atmosphere of aggression and fear has fostered an industry, argues San Francisco Examiner film critic Michael Ryan, "in which ideology predominates and contrary voices are silenced. What happens when someone wants to make a film about Abdul Nabi and his family, Afghans who were forced to become refugees when U.S. bombs killed 28 people in nearby villages?" The managers of perception will interpret such a storyline "as `stupid meddling,' and `should be stifled.'" ("Unease over Hollywood-Washington pact," Guardian Unlimited, November 14, 2001.)

On Black Tuesday, the national security cult's pentagram was breached by a jetliner, the demons of mass persuasion set loose. Until the exorcist arrives, expect generous servings of "heroism," "sacrifice," "mass murder," and "hatred for America" at the matinee.

© 2002 Alex Constantine
Reprinted for Fair Use Only.

Solar Rrvolution - Solar Paint

From CBC

Ted Sargent is a pioneer in solar science. He's working on solar technology that could literally be woven into every aspect of daily life, from our clothes to our roads, using what is known as a spray-on solar cell. The implications for our energy systems are profound. As Ted says, "Solar energy is not just an exciting science problem, but an incredibly important human problem."

Ted is working on solar nanotechnology with the potential to make solar energy very cheap and allow society to collect it on a huge scale. Currently, solar technology costs more to build and install than most people are willing to pay. Solar panels, for example, the technology most commonly associated with solar energy, are installed on your rooftop. The cost of collecting one kilowatt per hour of solar energy (about a third of the electricity an average household uses on any given day) is about $11,000.

Not only are panels expensive to install, they capture only the visible portion of the sun's rays so they work only on sunny days. Ted's focus is the infrared portion of the sun's rays which accounts for more than half of all solar energy. What's more, infrared energy is available to us even in cloudy weather.

The Eureka Moment
As with so many eureka moments in science, Ted's came while he was working on something else. He wanted to develop a camera that could see in the dark and was working on a sensor to measure infrared rays. One day in the lab, a graduate student shone an infrared light on the sensor and watched it convert the energy from that light into electricity.

"The graduate student who was working on it came into my office," recalls Ted, "and says, 'looks like we've got a photovoltaic... something that can really do power conversion.'"

Together they began exploring the significance of their discovery. "Because there's something about infrared colors that's intangible. They're colours you and I can't see, so we don't necessarily appreciate them, but we recognize that half the sun's energy reaching earth, in fact a little more than that, is invisible to us. 'Infrared' means beyond red, so it's beyond what you and I can see but it's just as real as anything, any other source of power, and if we don't tap into it in our solar cells, then we throw away more than half of the sun's potential energy we could be using."

In fact, the potential is almost unbelievably huge. "Another way to look at that," says Ted, "if we could capture all the energy reaching us from the earth in one hour and turn it into electricity we could power the earth for a year."

What If Every Surface Was Solar?
Current technology captures only a fraction of that energy. Even the best plastic solar cells available capture only 6 per cent of the sun's radiant energy, none of it in the infrared spectrum. By focusing on the infrared portion, Ted is hopeful that new technology based on his research could someday capture up to 30 per cent.

The secret is "quantum dots," particles made from semiconductor crystals. They can be tuned to absorb particular colors of light, dots so tiny they can be dispersed in a solvent and then painted onto something else - a house, a car, even a sweater. Sargent imagines clothing that could be used to charge cell phones and laptops, electric cars powered by a solar cell on the roof or roadways covered with solar cells. "If only we could find a way to coat those kinds of structures," says Sargent, "to make building materials or paving material out of solar energy converters, we would have a massive resource we could then tap."

Ted figures the first practical applications of this research could be on the market within a decade but he's reminded almost every day by headlines about rising fuel costs and climate change that the solution is urgently needed.

Obsessed By A Solar Revolution
"We're part of a race," he says. "We're running out of fossil fuels, and the cost keeps going up, and even if we're not worried about that problem, the deleterious prospect of using those fuels affect us every day. It's at the front of the newspapers. You can't help but think of the implications for the natural world, the implications for civilization, to capture the sun's rays in abundance."

That sense of urgency is echoed in Ted's conversations with his graduate students. "The passion that the PhD students and post-doctoral fellows bring to this work is remarkable," he says. "They're working twenty hours a day in the lab in order to get there."

And they push one another. "These kinds of considerations," says Ted, " how to get efficiency up, can we get another factor of 3 doing this, another factor of 10 doing that," are part of the talk during coffee breaks. "And every now and then in one of our meetings where we're making systematic progress towards this goal, I'll say, 'listen guys, this is great, and we're optimizing, but we need a revolution here. We need something to take us to next level.' Sometimes the grad students will say, 'Well, that's true but we just got a factor of 3 through systematic optimization over the last week. If we can give you another factor of 3 two times that's a factor of 10 and you know, that's a revolution. It's constantly on our minds."

That's What Engineers Do
That's not the usual chit-chat the the rest of us have over coffee. But Ted says the work has changed him, and changed his experience of standing in the sunshine outside the John Galbraith building on the University of Toronto campus where he and his colleagues work.

"You go outside and stand in the sun and it beats down on you," says Ted. "I mean it's incredibly powerful. And you can't but wonder, surely there has to be enough energy there for something as small as the earth. And indeed there is. And it's been powering life forever. This is our only energy source. It's the sun that feeds plants that ultimately feed us. Clearly it's power is vast. And one that's largely untapped. And as scientists and engineers, it's incumbent on us to make sure it's something we can tap into that's practical."

Ted is convinced that when those problems are solved, solar energy will simply overwhelm our current reliance on conventional fossil fuels or nuclear energy. "Abundant, free and clean," says Ted. "Why would we do anything else. Well the answer is we haven't yet engineered our way through this. The limitations today are technological and ultimately that means they're human. And that's what engineers do. They break assumptions."

© CBC 2008

2008-06-05T06:17:00.000-07:00

Four Nations in Race to be First to go Carbon Neutral
Iceland, New Zealand, Norway and Costa Rica are all hoping to turn their economies green, but the challenges they face are formidable

By Geoffrey Lean and Bryan Kay
From The Independent
March 2008

It's the race for the greenest of the laurels, the contest for the ultimate ecological accolade. Four countries are competing to be the first of the world's 195 nations to go entirely carbon neutral.

They make a disparate line-up of runners, comprising the world's most northerly and southernmost independent countries, its third largest oil exporter, and a state that long ago dispensed with its army. The starting pistol was fired last month in Monaco – better known for its gas-guzzling Grand Prix than for such a determined race in the other direction – at the annual meeting of the Governing Council of the United Nations Environment Programme.

Iceland, New Zealand, Norway and Costa Rica formally signed up to go zero carbon, joining the Climate Neutral Network launched at the meeting. Achim Steiner, UNEP's executive director, calls it "an idea whose time has come, driven by the urgent need to address climate change and the abundant economic opportunities emerging for those willing to embrace a transition to a green economy."

He spells out the diverse challenges facing each of the contenders. Norway's main issue, he said, was "emissions from oil and gas", whereas most of New Zealand's pollution came from agriculture. Iceland's "central challenge" was "transport and industry, including fishing", while Costa Rica faced the special circumstances of being a developing country.

In fact one UN member state already claims to have beaten then all. The Vatican announced last September that it was becoming the world's first – but is widely held to have cheated. It said that it was winning the prize by offsetting its entire emissions for 2007 though planting trees to restore an ancient forest in Hungary.

But critics say that the true champion will have to achieve carbon neutrality at home – and point out that the Holy See has failed to count the carbon emitted by its travelling officials, or emissions from its buildings outside the Vatican City.

All the main contenders get much of their energy from renewable sources. Iceland has gone the furthest, already achieving almost complete carbon neutrality in heating buildings and in electricity generation. Its greatest asset is disclosed in the name of its capital city, Reykjavik, which means "bay of smokes", referring to the plumes rising from its hot springs. Such geothermal energy now heats it and much of the rest of the country.

Only 1 per cent of its homes are heated by fossil fuels, and 99 per cent of its electricity is generated by geothermal and hydroelectric power. "But we have not entirely kicked our carbon habit", writes its Environment Minister, Thorunn Sveinbjarnardottir, in the forthcoming issue of UNEP's magazine, Our Planet.

"Our fishing fleets and our cars are still running on fossil fuels. Our car fleet is one of the biggest, per capita, in the world. And Icelanders tend to like big cars, as any visitor to our country will soon notice." The country will give people discounts to buy eco-friendly vehicles and fit fuel cells to fishing boats, aiming to reduce its relatively small national emissions of carbon dioxide by 75 per cent by 2050.

On the other side of the world, New Zealand's Prime Minister, Helen Clark, has already set her country the goal of being the world's first carbon-neutral country. It aims to generate 90 per cent of its energy from renewable sources by 2025, and to halve its transport emissions per head by 2040. But the country has a particular problem with agriculture, which accounts for half its emissions of greenhouse gases.

Norway has set an even more ambitious target, aiming for carbon neutrality by 2030, despite being the world's third largest oil exporter. It already gets 95 per cent of its electricity from hydroelectric power, and heavily taxes cars and fuel: a 4x4 costs four times as much as in the United States. And it is planning to capture and store carbon in old North Sea oil fields. But Frederic Hauge – the head of Bellona, the country's largest environment pressure group – is sceptical. "We are a nice little country of petroholics and that has made us lazy", he says.

On paper at least, the poorest of the four countries is in the lead – Costa Rica plans to reach its goal by 2021. It has just released a plan of action, which relies heavily on planting trees to soak up emissions. Last year it planted five million of them, a world record, and the banana industry – the country's largest exporter – has promised to go carbon neutral.However, its number of cars has increased more than five-fold in the past 20 years and its air traffic more than seven-fold in just six, making its task far harder.

©independent.co.uk

Presidential Race Ignores Arms Race

By Amy Goodman
From Democracy Now!
May 2008

As the U.S. presidential race continues, so does the arms race worldwide. People—civilians, children—are being killed and maimed, on a daily basis, by unexploded cluster bombs and land mines. Thousands of nuclear missiles remain at hair-trigger alert. The U.S. government rattles its saber at Iran, alleging a nuclear-weapons program, while at the same time offering uranium to Saudi Arabia. And with the war in Iraq well into its sixth year, one of its architects, Douglas J. Feith, the former undersecretary of defense for policy under Donald Rumsfeld, has predictably penned a revisionist history of the war and the decisions behind it.

Feith said this week: “So while it was a terrible mistake for the administration to rely on the erroneous intelligence about WMD—and, I mean, it was catastrophic to our credibility—first of all, it was an honest error and not a lie. But even if you correct it for that error, what we found in Iraq was a serious WMD threat. Even though Saddam Hussein had chosen to not maintain the stockpiles, he had put himself in a position where he could have regenerated those stockpiles in three to five weeks.”

In an interview I asked Hans Blix about Feith’s comments. He was the United Nations’ chief weapons inspector, in charge of the WMD search. Reflecting back five years, he said: “To prove that there is nothing is almost impossible. I think that if we had been in Iraq for a couple of months more, it would have been enough to make it extremely clear to everybody that the chances were real that there were no weapons of mass destruction.” Instead of waiting for the inspections, the Pentagon was busy trying to discredit Blix. I asked him about the allegations that the U.S. was bugging his office and home. He said, “I wish to heaven that they had listened a little better to what I had to say, if they did listen.”

Blix describes the current state of the world as a “Cold Peace”: “It is hard to avoid the impression that—almost 20 years after the end of the Cold War—military calculations still dominate the long-term thinking about major global relations. Terrorism is formally made the chief enemy, but precautions are taken against the growing power of China and Russia.” President Bush’s nuclear-cooperation pact with India, Barack Obama’s stated willingness to unilaterally strike nuclear-armed U.S. ally Pakistan, Hillary Clinton’s promise to Iran to “totally obliterate” the nation of 70 million (should it attack Israel), and John McCain’s hard-line position on Russia, including the deployment of a missile defense in eastern Europe, all point to a reliance on military solutions that Blix sees as a path to conflict and war.

In a remarkable demonstration of hypocrisy, the Bush administration has pledged to deliver enriched uranium to Saudi Arabia. Anti-nuclear activist Harvey Wasserman said: “The idea of giving enriched uranium to the Saudis while threatening war with the Iranians for enriching uranium is astonishing. The idea that the Saudis are going to somehow lower the price of oil on the basis of possibly getting nuclear reactors in the future is just almost staggering to think about.”

I asked Blix what is the single most important thing the U.S. could do to support world peace. Sign the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, he said: “Then I think it’s very likely that the Chinese, who have not ratified, will follow. If China does it, maybe India does. If India does, Pakistan does, etc. And the treaty would enter into force. It would be a great thing if we outlawed any nuclear-weapons tests in the future.”

Nuclear weapons are not the only weapons of mass destruction. As I spoke to Blix, hundreds of people were meeting in Dublin, Ireland, to craft an anti-cluster-bomb treaty, the cause Princess Diana championed in the last years of her life. The Dublin Diplomatic Conference on Cluster Munitions is dedicated “to negotiate a new instrument of international humanitarian law banning cluster munitions that cause unacceptable harm to civilians.”

The conference in Dublin has 128 participating nations. Absent is the leading producer of cluster munitions, the United States. Russia and China are also not there. From nuclear proliferation to the use of cluster bombs—coverage of the presidential campaign should focus more on the arms race, less on the horse race.

Whistle-Blower Points to Target List in U.S. Attack on Hotel

By Amy Goodman
From Truthdig
May 2008

More than five years have passed since the invasion of Iraq, since President Bush stood under the “Mission Accomplished” banner on that aircraft carrier. While these fifth anniversaries got some notice, another did not: the shelling of the Palestine Hotel in Baghdad by a U.S. Army tank on April 8, 2003. The tank attack killed two unembedded journalists, Reuters cameraman Taras Protsyuk and José Couso, a cameraman for the Spanish television network Telecinco. Couso recorded his own death. He was filming from the balcony and caught on tape the distant tank as it rotated its turret and fired on the hotel. A Spanish court has charged three U.S. servicemen with murder, but the U.S. government refuses to hand over the accused soldiers. The story might have ended there, just another day of violence and death in Iraq, were it not for a young U.S. military intelligence veteran who has just decided to blow the whistle.

Adrienne Kinne is a former Army sergeant who worked in military intelligence for 10 years, from 1994 to 2004. Trained in Arabic, she worked in the Army translating intercepted communications. She told me in an interview this week that she saw a target list that included the Palestine Hotel. She knew that it housed journalists, since she had intercepted calls from the Palestine Hotel between journalists there and their families and friends back home (illegally and unconstitutionally, she thought).

Said Kinne: “[W]e were listening to journalists who were staying in the Palestine Hotel. And I remember that, specifically because during the buildup to ‘shock and awe’ ... we were given a list of potential targets in Baghdad, and the Palestine Hotel was listed. [P]utting one and one together, I went to my officer in charge, and I told him that there are journalists staying at this hotel who think they’re safe, and yet we have this hotel listed as a potential target, and somehow the dots are not being connected here, and shouldn’t we make an effort to make sure that the right people know the situation? And unfortunately, my officer in charge ... basically told me that it was not my job to analyze ... someone somewhere higher up the chain knew what they were doing.” She said the officer in charge was Warrant Officer John Berry.

Kinne’s account directly contradicts the official line of the U.S. government. On May 2, 2003, Colin Powell, then secretary of state and a former general in the Army, visited Spain. He said of the Palestine Hotel: “We knew about the hotel. We knew that it was a hotel where journalists were located, and others, and it is for that reason it was not attacked during any phase of the aerial campaign.”

If Powell was telling the truth, then why was the hotel included on the list of targets that Kinne says she read in a secure e-mail? Or was he just parsing words by saying it wasn’t a target during the “aerial campaign”? Kinne also revealed that the military was spying on nongovernmental organizations like Doctors Without Borders and the International Red Cross, listening in on these groups—also illegal—and justifying the pretense on the grounds that they might by chance report on a cache of weapons of mass destruction, or their satellite phone might get stolen by terrorists. She also received and translated a fax from the Iraqi National Congress, the CIA-funded group of Iraqi exiles who were funneling false information about WMDs to the U.S. government in order to bolster the case for war. The intel was considered high-value and was sent directly to the White House.

Kinne has shown great courage and taken great risks to bring these revelations to light, to blow the whistle. She follows in the tradition of Daniel Ellsberg, who leaked the Pentagon Papers during the Vietnam War. Ellsberg has called on government workers to blow the whistle:

“It’s a great, great risk to have the amount of secrecy we do have right now that enabled the president to lie us into this war and is heading us toward a war that will be even more disastrous in Iran. And this is the time for unauthorized disclosures, which are the only kind that are going to tell us the truth about what’s happening, and they should be done, in my opinion, on a scale that will indeed risk or even ensure that the person doing it will be identified.”

The brother of José Couso, Javier, has tirelessly pursued justice for his brother, traveling globally to make the story known and pushing the case in the Spanish courts. Kinne’s revelations created a stir in Spain, where the jurisdiction of the case against the three U.S. Army members is being challenged. The video of Kinne’s disclosures was downloaded and quickly translated for presentation the next day to the court in Madrid.

The Bush White House, we now know, used retired generals with ties to the Pentagon and to military contractors to deceive the U.S. public. Unembedded journalists in Iraq were a thorn in the side of the Pentagon spin masters. Might that April 8 attack been a message to them? Thanks to former Army Sgt. Adrienne Kinne, we may be closer to finding out.

Amy Goodman is the host of “Democracy Now!,” a daily international TV/radio news hour airing on 650 stations in North America. Her third book, “Standing Up to the Madness: Ordinary Heroes in Extraordinary Times,” was published in April.

© 2008 Amy Goodman

2008-05-31T07:53:00.000-07:00

Download A Book Get Arrested, Call For Terror Attacks - No Problem!
University employee jailed for researching Al-Qaeda, while Gingrich and others left alone for encouraging dead Americans

By Paul Joseph Watson
From Prison Planet
May 2008

A University employee downloads a document from the Internet about Al-Qaeda for a colleague in the politics department as part of the University's required reading list, meanwhile, a former Speaker of the House publicly laments the fact that more Americans have not been killed in terrorist attacks. Who gets arrested under terrorism legislation? The University employee of course! Welcome to the up is down, down is up twilight zone of the post-9/11 world!

Newt Gingrich can publicly encourage the government to allow terrorists to attack America to prove "we're in danger" and people barely batter an eyelid yet woe betide someone read something about terrorists, otherwise they'll be shackled and locked up quicker than you can say "police state".

"This is ... one of the great tragedies of the Bush administration," Gingrich said during a Long Island bookstore appearance. "The more successful they've been at intercepting and stopping bad guys, the less proof there is that we're in danger. And therefore, the better they've done at making sure there isn't an attack, the easier it is to say, 'Well, there never was going to be an attack anyway.' And it's almost like they should every once in a while have allowed an attack to get through just to remind us."

Just to remind us of what Gingrich? The Bush administration's blood-soaked eight years in office, the near 3,000 dead on 9/11, the imperial looting and obliteration of Iraq, to remind us that these things really were worthwhile for the greater good? To remind us that "we're in danger"? And you're saying we wouldn't be in danger under a government that willingly allows terrorists to kill us?

Imagine if anti-war demonstrators or 9/11 truthers were calling for violence and killing people to ram through their political agenda? Do you think Homeland Security would turn the other cheek? Do you think Fox News might have something to say about it?

Yet they don't even need to go near advocating violence in order to draw the attention of the authorities - the dastardly crime of downloading a book off the Internet is enough to be labeled a terrorist and have your life ransacked these days, unless you're a frothing-at-the-mouth Neo-Con of course, in that case you can openly call for terror no questions asked.

Nottingham University employees Rizwaan Sabir and Hicham Yezza's deadly conspiracy to obtain a document about terrorism that was on their University's reading list resulted in their arrest, their homes being torn apart, their laptops searched and their friends and family members interrogated. That's right - reading about Al-Qaeda is now tantamount to being a member of Al-Qaeda according to British cops.

After the arrests, which were cited as a textbook example of "totalitarianism" by Nottingham MP Alan Simpson, police attempted to deport Yezza on immigration charges to sweep their disgraceful actions under the carpet. Yezza subsequently won an appeal and he is free to continue living in Britain in fear of a midnight knock on the door if he dares punch the words "Al-Qaeda Training Manual" into a Google search engine ever again.

Meanwhile, people like Gingrich and his Neo-Con peer Stu Bykovsky, along with a host of other Bush administration cronies, routinely and publicly express their fetish for encouraging terrorist attacks and more dead Americans without a care in the world.

What is wrong with this picture? If we are fighting terrorists then why do those that align themselves with the Bush administration's war on terror mentally masturbate about seeing more terrorist attacks?

Neo-Cons are free to engage in one of the primary definitions of terrorism, spewing terrorist rhetoric by hyping the threat of terror to achieve a political objective. But you want to download a book that's part of the University reading list to help you put together a research paper? Forget about it - you're a terrorist!

P.S. - I made the mistake of typing "terrorism" into Dictionary.com for the purposes of writing this article. I guess I'll see you all in Gitmo!

The 16 Spy Agencies of the USA

By Wes Laurie
From Associated Content
July 2007

Whenever Americans hear talk about weapons of mass destruction, reasons for going to war with Iraq, or the blindside attack of 9/11 they may grow angry or at least not put much faith in the agencies supposedly responsible for either ignoring or misleading with information. The President of course gets a lot of the blame as well. However, whenever a new terrorist cell is stopped or military act goes right, who should get the praise? The same agencies behind the failures? Whether they are hit and miss or not the agencies pushing the information that runs the United States Intelligence divisions are considered amongst the elite of the world. The USA is generally known to have a spy network consisting of 16 main agencies, however there are all sorts of companies getting involved in the turning of the intelligence gears. Here is an overview of the main 16 Intelligence Agencies operating for the United States of America.

The AIA - Air Intelligence Agency is an agency of the United States Air Force, which was firstly activated in 1993.The AIA delivers multi-source intelligence products, applications, services, and resources. As well as provides IO forces and expertise in information warfare, command and control warfare, security, acquisition, foreign weapons systems and technology, and treaty monitoring, to support Air Force major commands, Air Force components, and joint and national decision makers.

Army Intelligence - Shares information with all other agencies, however its main focus involves military knowledge needed during missions or military based warfare. The resources are not just used during war, but also during peace time to help assess potential threats or keep the peace steady. The Army's Intelligence divisions develop a variety of intelligence products, such as threat assessments, that are used by weapons systems developers and senior decision makers.

The CIA - The Central Intelligence Agency is a well known agency, created in 1947 under President Truman. The CIA has all-source analytical capabilities that cover the entire world outside US borders. It produces a range of studies that cover virtually any topic of interest to national security policymakers. CIA also collects intelligence with human sources and, on occasion, undertakes covert actions at the direction of the President.

Coast Guard Intelligence - This agency's skills were deemed special enough to have it listed as one of the Intelligence Community 16 even though it does fall into the same division and work under the Department Of Homeland Security. The Coast Guard Intelligences main goal is to protect the public, the environment, and U.S. economic and security interests in any maritime region in which those interests may be at risk, including international waters and America's coasts, ports, and inland waterways.

The DIA - The Defense Intelligence Agency was established in 1961 and in 1986 became designated as a "combat support" agency. The DIA provides military intelligence to warfighters, policymakers, and force planners with the agency's Director being the primary advisor to the Secretary of Defense and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff on military intelligence matters.

The DOE - This is The Department Of Energy. This departments goal is to maintain a secure and reliable energy system that is environmentally and economically sustainable, to be a responsible steward of the Nation's nuclear weapons, and to support continued United States leadership in science and technology.

The DHS - The Department of Homeland Security is an agency mandated to reduce the vulnerability of the United States to terrorism and to detect, to prevent and to respond to terrorist attacks. This department is considered to be divided into 5 main directories, however its work with a countless amount of departments and agencies seems to change the makeup of Homeland Security on a timely basis.

The Department of State - This department relies on the Bureau of Intelligence and Research or the INR for intelligence support. This department is a major player in intelligence involved with the conduct of foreign relations throughout the world.

The Department of the Treasury - The Department of the Treasury promotes the conditions for prosperity and stability in the United States and encourage prosperity and stability in the rest of the world. The OIA operates within this department, or the Office of Intelligence and Analysis. The duties of this department cover a wide range of financially motivated things such as: how terrorist get their funding.

The DEA - The Drug Enforcement Administration has the main objective of attacking and stopping the flow and creation of illegal drugs.

The FBI - The Federal Bureau of Investigation is another more than familiar name to most of the American public. The FBI's mission is to protect and defend the United States against terrorist and foreign intelligence threats, to uphold and enforce the criminal laws of the United States, and to provide leadership and criminal justice services to federal, state, municipal, and international agencies and partners.

Marine Corps Intelligence - Marine Corps Intelligence exists to support Marine Corps Service and operational missions in maritime, expeditionary, land, and air warfare. Marines are considered some of the toughest when it comes to military divisions, and therefore much of their intelligence tends to revolve around wartime procedures and operations.

The NGA - The National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency supports U.S. national policy makers and military forces by providing geospatial intelligence derived by the exploitation and analysis of imagery and geospatial information to describe, assess, and visually depict physical features and geographically referenced activities on the Earth. The NGA work force is in fields such as cartography, imagery analysis, the physical sciences, geodesy, computer and telecommunication engineering, and photogrammetry.

The NRO - The National Reconnaissance Office ensures that the technology and spaceborne assets needed to acquire timely intelligence worldwide are always available to national policymakers and military warfighters. This means the NRO is concerned with "space" intelligence. The agency was founded in 1960 and uses a lot of satellites and satellite technology to help operations on the ground; such as tracking arms shipments, ect.

The NSA - The National Security Agency is another name you've probably heard in Hollywood films. It is the nation's cryptologic organization and as such, coordinates, directs, and performs highly specialized activities to produce foreign intelligence information and protect US information systems. A high-technology organization, NSA is on the frontiers of communications and information technology. NSA is also one of the most important centers of foreign language analysis and research within the US Government.

Navy Intelligence - Naval Intelligence is geared towards providing intelligence that will help the US strengthen its armed forces, particularly those of the seas. Established in 1882, Naval Intelligence is the oldest continuously operating US Intelligence service. There missions statement is to maintain, train and equip combat-ready Naval forces capable of winning wars, deterring aggression and maintaining freedom of the seas.

There you have the main 16 spy agencies of the United States of America. Each of these agencies in part has its own divisions and branches which may lead to plenty of confusion, but then again that is what one would expect from the spy world.

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