OBAMA’S IRAQ WITHDRAWAL:

“A Risk That is Unacceptable”?

by Billy Wharton, CounterHegemonic

Of course, Obama is no George W. Bush. He knows well how to pick off the low-hanging political fruit in order to forestall decisions which threaten to bring his administration into conflict with organized interest blocs. Moving swiftly to close the moral eyesore that is the detention center in Guantánamo Bay signals a return to the normal operation of US Empire. Equally useful is his enactment of measures furthering governmental transparency. This may sooth lingering doubts about Obama’s associations with now-impeached Illinois Governor Rod “Let’s Make a Deal” Blagojevich. It would be difficult to discover many speakers—apart from those on the fringe of the radical right—willing to defend either Guantánamo or presidential secrecy.

More significant resistance will be provided to any serious attempt to end the US occupation of Iraq. Evidence of this was provided during the nightly “News Hour “program aired on Jan. 21. The segment was entitled “Next Steps for Iraq,” and featured the pro-Bush retired Gen. Jack Keane and the Obama-ally retired Gen. Wesley Clark. Both Keane and Clark delivered a clear message—no troop removal anytime soon.

Keane, the military author of Bush’s “surge strategy,” claimed that Obama’s campaign pledge to remove troops by 2010 “rather dramatically increases the risks” in Iraq. He recommended a “minimal force reduction” in order to “protect the political situation.” Though a 2010 departure was “a risk that is unacceptable,” Keane assured viewers that “Everyone knows that we are going to take our troops out of Iraq.”

The Democratic Party’s dog in the fight, Wesley Clark had little bite as he agreed with Keane’s assessment that “it [Obama’s troop removal pledge] is risky.” “When President Obama made that pledge almost a year ago,” Clark claimed, “the context of what combat troops was, was taken from the legislation that was going back and forth through the House and the Senate.” He then provided a key qualification: “Distinguishing combat troops from trainers, from counter-insurgency troops or counter-terrorist troops that would go against al-Qaeda in Iraq and distinguishing them from the logistics troops.”

“So,” Clark concluded, “to say that all combat troops will be out in 2010 in sixteen months doesn’t necessarily mean that all troops will be out by 2010.”

If this double-speak was not enough, Clark then provided another clear signal that the Obama campaign pledge may fall far short of anything resembling a remotely anti-war position. Clark praised Keane as the architect of the surge policy and “the success that has been achieved through it.”

Not surprisingly, Keane agreed with the non-combative Clark. He said he “understands the distinction” between combat and other types of troops. Even if some combat troops were removed, Iraq would still require “a significant number of combat troops” to protect the other types of American troops. Clark then introduced a new term to the discussion (any possibility of a debate had long since passed)—”re-deployed.” He ended his contributions by highlighting the “the need for troops in Afghanistan.”

The Clark-Keane discussion should be quite useful for anti-war activists. It clearly signals that the “surge-consensus” forged by the Bush administration is still fully operative among the military establishment in Washington. Obama’s desire for continuity in military strategy, signaled clearly through his re-appointment of Robert Gates as Secretary of Defense, should be understood as his acceptance of the positions articulated by Keane and Clark. This presents a sharp challenge to the anti-war movement.

Two tasks are clear. The first is to articulate a clear demand for the complete removal of all US military forces from Iraq. The anti-war movement cannot allow distinctions to be made between combat or counter-insurgency troops, military advisers or technicians. All troops need to be removed immediately. Second, and perhaps even more challenging, is the demand to remove all troops from Afghanistan and to resist any attempt at re-deployment from Iraq. Perhaps a bit of cold-eyed realism—beginning with the fact that more than one million Iraqis have died as a result of the US occupation—should be employed by the anti-war movement as we begin the process of challenging an Obama presidency whose military policy has started off sounding a lot like a re-hashed version of George W. Bush.

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This piece first appeared Jan. 21 on the blog CounterHegemonic.

From our Daily Report:

Potsdam peaceniks give Obama a chance
World War 4 Report, Jan. 26, 2009

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Reprinted by World War 4 Report, Feb. 1, 2009
Reprinting permissible with attribution

Continue ReadingOBAMA’S IRAQ WITHDRAWAL: 

AFGHANISTAN: BUILDING ON TRADITIONS OF PEACEMAKING

Abdul Aziz Yaqubi works in the office of the American Friends Service Committee, the Quaker-founded aid and advocacy group, in Kabul, Afghanistan. Sam Diener, co-editor of the AFSC journal Peacework interviewed him via e-mail in November 2008. The interview was conducted with assistance from AFSC staff members Peter Lems, the program director for Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Iran; and Patricia Omidian, the acting country representative for AFSC in Kabul and a faculty member of the Aga Khan University in Karachi, Pakistan.

In the Christian Science Monitor recently, an article described a growing peace movement in Afghanistan, saying “The National Peace Jirga…organized a series of peace assemblies in recent months, drawing thousands of people. The meetings often feature fiery speakers who condemn international forces for killing civilians but who also criticize the Taliban.” What are your feelings and thoughts about these peace jirga initiatives?

Afghans are absolutely tired of war and violence. We want to live and raise our families in peace. We also know we are pawns of the US policy against the Taliban and Osama bin Laden’s forces, and that our government is corrupt and only acting in its own self-interest. We are caught between the warlords, the drug lords, corrupt government officials, international armies, and the Taliban. None of these major players have an interest in peace.

The peace jirgas are critically important and need to be fostered, but they also need some teeth. Without some process of reconciliation and restorative justice, nothing will change. Leaving aside the extremists and the outsiders of the Pakistani Taliban and al-Qaeda, the anti-government groups have legitimate complaints. All these need to be listened to and brought into the discussions. The Afghan Taliban are Afghans and have the right to talk. As long as insecurity and lack of resources continue, the insurgency will have traction.

If there are talks between the current Afghan government and the Taliban about ending the killing, do you see potential for common ground? What kinds of ideas might the two sides agree upon? What kinds of ideas might be resisted by both these powerful forces, but might be good for the people of Afghanistan?

I think the mistake was the US pushing for the party system that was set up in Afghanistan. What was needed was a system like the first Loya Jirga that was based totally on local models of governance—tribal. In that system villages selected a representative that was sent to the next level and upwards until there were representatives at the national Loya Jirga in 2002. It worked and they made decisions. But the US did not accept their decisions and the delegates went back to their villages knowing that they did not really have any say in their government.

I think one of the first things that has to happen is a tightening up on corruption in the government. Government officials are as bad as their counterparts in the insurgency, or worse. But there are people on both sides who have integrity and those need to be brought in to talk.

Please describe the work being done by the AFSC office in Kabul.

AFSC is working to promote peace by giving people the emotional tools to deal with their trauma, suffering, and losses, while helping them rebuild communities from the inside—social connections and networks. We work mostly through schools, teacher training, and the training of interns (university students in the psychology department).

What women’s rights work going on right now do you believe is particularly effective?

I think this is an area of incredible gains and incredible mis-steps. Local women moving the situation forward with the help of foreigners is productive. Foreigners coming in and demanding changes causes a backlash. Training women is great but men have to change too, so the training needs to target men as much as women. The Ministry of Women’s Affairs has been mostly ineffective because it is easy to relegate it to the sidelines. In some ways it does as much to keep women from gaining parity as it helps. It has a very tarnished image in the country, and is seen as more like an NGO than a ministry. It tends to do programs rather than set policy.

Are there sectors inside of Pakistan that also support the kinds of peace initiatives you advocate? What is your impression of Pakistan’s Awami Party, which opposes the violence of the government and the Taliban? Since the party routinely invokes Ghaffar Khan and he, in addition to being a devout pacifist, was a Pashtun nationalist (members of the the Pashtun ethnicity make up about 40% of Afghanistan and 15% of Pakistan), does the Awami party’s work have appeal to Afghans?

The Awami party of Pakistan is not a party of Afghanistan’s politics. It is moderate but it is in a very precarious position because of the hugely powerful and armed Pakistani Taliban. As you see in the news, there have been many incidents in Peshawar, Pakistan, of late. The whole of North West Frontier Province (NWFP), where the Awami Party won a provincial election in the Spring of 2008, is now in a situation similar to Afghanistan’s.

The cross-border effects of the Afghanistan war are astounding but the government of Pakistan has continued over the years to use Taliban extremists to keep Afghanistan unsettled and at war. This policy has now come back to bite them. And the people of NWFP are really caught between the army and the anti-government groups.

The Awami party does have the support of most people in the region. Ghaffar Khan is gaining attention and there are a number of groups trying to revive his legacy, showing that within Pashtun culture there are nonviolent traditions.

How is the government of Iran currently involved in Afghanistan and how might it be engaged to play a more constructive role?

Iran is using Afghanistan in a proxy war against the US. But it could help reconstruct this country since it has the best education and health systems in the region.

What do you think of the idea of channeling the poppy crops into pain relievers for hospitals (instead of going to make heroin)?

This is controversial but it would work. I would like to see it promoted.

Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton have threatened to escalate the US military role in Afghanistan. What do you think the results of such a military escalation would be?

More of the same. This is not a war that will be won militarily. Please read the history of Russia’s attempts to control Afghanistan militarily.

What is most important for peace movement advocates in the US to understand about the current situation in Afghanistan that we might not know much about?

This is not Iraq. The solutions won’t be the same. Remove the Provincial Reconstruction Teams (militarized “aid” workers) and be willing to talk to anyone. The Quakers and Mennonites have the right attitudes. Do not bring in missionaries but bring in people who know Islam and who can talk in local terms.

The solutions lie within Afghan culture and character. Using the peace messages of Islam is a key, as is giving tools for reconstructing communities—psychosocial models adapted to the local culture. We are helping people and groups find ways to make peace happen on our own terms and in our own culture.

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This interview first appeared in the December-January edition of Peacework.

RESOURCES

American Friends Service Committee
http://www.afsc.org/

“Afghanistan’s emerging antiwar movement,” Christian Science Monitor, Oct. 20, 2008

“Obituary: Abdul Ghaffar Khan, 98, a Follower of Gandhi,” New York Times, Jan. 21, 1998

“Let a Thousand Licensed Poppies Bloom” by Maia Szalavitz, New York Times op-ed, July 13, 2005

See also:

BOOTS, BEARDS, BURQAS, BOMBS
The Politics of Militarism and Islamist Extremism in Pakistan
by Beena Sarwar, Himal Southasian
World War 4 Report, October 2007

From our Daily Report:

Afghanistan: US air-strike sparks protests —again
World War 4 Report, Jan. 24, 2009

CIA chief sees progress in Afghan border region —amid growing chaos
World War 4 Report, Jan. 16, 2009

Pakistan elections: Islamists lose —despite intimidation
World War 4 Report, Feb. 24, 2008

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Reprinted by World War 4 Report, Feb. 1, 2009
Reprinting permissible with attribution

Continue ReadingAFGHANISTAN: BUILDING ON TRADITIONS OF PEACEMAKING 

THE FINANCIAL CRISIS HITS THE IMMIGRATION DEBATE

by David L. Wilson, MR Zine

Part of the right wing routinely blames undocumented immigrants for just about everything. On Sept. 24, nine days after the financial meltdown started in earnest, the National Review website carried an article by columnist and blogger Michelle Malkin blaming “illegals” for the crisis and the subsequent bailout of the banks. “The Mother of All Bailouts has many fathers,” she wrote. “But there’s one giant paternal elephant in the room that has slipped notice: how illegal immigration, crime-enabling banks, and open-borders Bush policies fueled the mortgage crisis.”

Malkin’s pieces often read like parodies of conservative punditry, and there’s something distinctly comical about the idea that a few undocumented homeowners caused a multi-trillion dollar financial crisis. Less than a month after Malkin’s article was posted, the Wall Street Journal showed that in fact mortgages bought by out-of-status immigrants have performed rather well. But the Malkin diatribe is a useful indication of how the immigration debate is likely to change over the next months.

Until this September, informed opinion was that whichever party won the November elections, Congress and the new president would move in 2009 to revive the Comprehensive Immigration Reform (CIR) package that was voted down in the summer of 2007. CIR (which started as the “McCain-Kennedy Bill” in 2005) would combine stepped-up enforcement, a limited program for legalization, and a greatly expanded guest worker program like the notorious “bracero” operation of 1942-1964.

It is no longer clear whether Congress will proceed with CIR; the politicians may put immigration on the back burner as they try to deal with more pressing economic issues. The crisis has taken much of the urgency away from “immigration reform.” Undocumented immigration had already begun to decline as the US economy slowed in 2007, and the employer associations that pushed CIR for the sake of the guest worker provision may be losing interest: there will be less desire to import easily exploited workers from abroad as the crisis creates a pool of jobless workers here at home.

What is clear is that immigrants will continue to serve as convenient scapegoats for the economic disaster. Analyst Tom Barry of the Americas Policy Program’s TransBorder Project reports that immigration restrictionists are planning to “retain their dominance in the immigration debate” by “reframing the immigration issue as a threat to ever-scarcer jobs in the context of the national economic crisis.”

Return of the “Welfare Queen”?
Barry suggests that the right may be “wildly overreach[ing]” in this effort to shift the blame to immigrants, but we shouldn’t forget how successfully Ronald Reagan and others implicated the mythical “welfare queen” in the recurring economic crises of the 1970s and early 1980s. Never mind that welfare was a minuscule part of local and federal budgets—and that the great majority of welfare recipients were white—much of the country came to believe that the source of all economic problems was a fictitious Cadillac-driving African-American woman who drained services and raised taxes with the payments she received for her ten illegitimate children.

Even before the present crisis, anti-immigrant forces had had similar success with racist and xenophobic myths about immigrants getting welfare checks, bearing “anchor babies,” and straining medical and education services, even though these were all long since exposed as fictions. Unfortunately, there’s an easy way to measure the success of the right-wing propaganda: the 40% rise of hate crimes against Latinos since 2003 as the anti-immigrant drive stepped up. (Latinos are often perceived as immigrants even if they are native-born).

But can the right pull it off again? It may be harder to shift the blame this time around. After all, contrary to Malkin, the “giant paternal elephant in the room” isn’t immigration—it’s the neoliberal economic policies that have dominated for the past thirty years.

Since the end of the Carter administration, working people in this country have been promised economic well-being from the “free market,” from Reagan’s tax reforms, from the Bush-Clinton “free trade” pacts and “globalization,” from the “end of welfare as we know it,” from the dot-com bubble, and from the housing bubble. What they’ve actually gotten is stagnating wages, a sinking standard of living, a failing environment, and an infrastructure literally collapsing around them. Now, facing layoffs and foreclosures, wage earners have to watch as their taxes provide massive handouts to bank presidents and corporate CEOs, the real welfare queens.

People are not just angry; they are specifically angry at the plutocrats who brought them this disaster. And they’re open to new ideas and ways of thinking: the November elections may have been less important for any changes they could bring to Washington than for what they show about changes in the consciousness of the US public.

Facing Economic Realities
The immigration debate brings together many of the economic issues that need to be discussed at this point: the effects of “free trade” policies, the government’s anti-labor measures, the fomenting of divisions among working people.

The majority of undocumented immigrants come here to flee the results of neoliberal policies in Latin America and the Caribbean—policies that were pushed by the same Wall Street wizards that brought us the collapse at home. Once here, the immigrants are forced into low-wage, high-risk jobs through repressive anti-labor measures disguised as immigration enforcement (massive workplace raids are the extreme example). This repression keeps the undocumented immigrants’ wages down and thus creates downward pressure on the wages of native-born workers as well.

The obvious solution for the native-born is to organize alongside their immigrant co-workers to raise wages, improve labor conditions, and demand jobs for all. But politicians and the media stir up racism and fear of “the other” to prevent or at least slow class-based organizing. And it’s clear which side these anti-immigrant forces are really on, despite their populist rhetoric. Their lead media spokesperson is Lou Dobbs, former host of the pro-business “Moneyline” TV show. One of their main voices in Congress is Rep. James Sensenbrenner, who, as labor journalist David Bacon points out, promotes xenophobia in Washington while his family’s Grupo México business associates help cause migration from Mexico, and Kimberly-Clark, the Sensenbrenner family paper business, profits from low-wage immigrant workers in U.S. forests.

In the 1930s many working people allowed themselves to be divided along ethnic and racial lines, but many others overcame those divisions to organize the protests, boycotts, and strikes that led to the labor protections and social services we have today. In the current crisis, a lot will depend on how quickly and aggressively activists challenge the right wing on immigration by organizing around the real economic issues.

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David L. Wilson is co-author, with Jane Guskin, of The Politics of Immigration: Questions and Answers (Monthly Review Press, July 2007).

This story first appeared Nov. 30 in MR Zine, online journal of Monthly Review.

RESOURCES

Michelle Malkin, “Illegal Loans: A Criminal Business”
National Review Online, September 24, 2008

Miriam Jordan, “Mortgage Prospects Dim for Illegal Immigrants”
Wall Street Journal, October 22, 2008.

Walter A. Ewing, “Immigration Fairytales”
New America Media, August 4, 2008.

Tom Barry, “Both Sides of Immigration Debate Retrench”
Americas Updater, November 14, 2008.

“Anti-Latino Hate Crimes Rise for Fourth Year in a Row”
Hatewatch/Southern Poverty Law Center, October 29, 2008,

Peter Cervantes-Gautschi, “Wall Street and Immigration: Financial Services Giants Have Profited from the Beginning”
Americas Program, Center for International Policy, December 4, 2007.

David Bacon, Illegal People: How Globalization Creates Migration and Criminalizes Immigrants, September 2008, p. 64-67

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Reprinted by World War 4 Report, Jan. 1, 2009
Reprinting permissible with attribution

Continue ReadingTHE FINANCIAL CRISIS HITS THE IMMIGRATION DEBATE 

BORDER UNDER SIEGE

US Military Training and Texas Guns Fuel Mexico’s Narco Wars

by Peter Gorman, Fort Worth Weekly

The sun is shining on the low rolling hills covered in Texas short grass and dotted with cattle along the southern end of I-35, the road that stretches from Duluth, Minn., to the Texas-Mexico border at Laredo. Little interrupts the bucolic scene for miles in any direction except for electric towers strung together like alien giants on a forced march across the vast plains. Towns that are little more than gas-stops appear and disappear beside the highway. On the other side of the Rio Grande, the countryside looks to be more of the same.

At the border, one way to cross is via a footbridge over the river. Last spring, a banner hung on the Mexican side of the bridge turned out to be a recruiting poster for the Zetas, a murderous drug cartel that had recently taken over much of Nuevo Laredo.

At the end of I-35, Laredo and Nuevo Laredo face each other across that shallow river. It’s a famously porous international border that, given the shared culture of people on the two sides, has always seemed seriously smudged.

And yet few countries could be as different as the United States and Mexico these days. The critical nature of that difference takes hold as soon as a southbound traveler sets a foot—and it had better be a cautious foot—past the border formalities. In Nuevo Laredo, the walls of many homes and government buildings are pockmarked with bullet holes. Some have high concrete walls, four inches thick, in front of their property—protection against grenades and assault weapons. Nuevo Laredo hasn’t had a police chief in two years. The last one quit in fear of his life after only three months in office. The one before that was shot and killed in broad daylight after seven hours on the job.

Up the river in Juárez, across from El Paso, about 1,200 people have been murdered thus far this year, and the total could hit 1,500. The brutality of many of the murders is stunning. Newspaper headlines announce decapitations, people being burned alive or tortured to death, mass murders. In early November, a headless body was hung from an overpass over the city’s main road.

The story is the same, with variations, all along the US-Mexico border, as various Mexican drug cartels fight each other and the government: This is no longer the drug war that has chugged along for decades along this border, where there was always violence, to be sure, but where headlines were more likely to be about the size of drug shipments seized or the latest local Customs or Border Patrol agent found to be in cahoots with the smugglers. Nor is US involvement any longer limited simply (and profoundly) to providing the market for drugs that makes the whole narcotrafficking world possible, or to low-level corruption of the occasional border cop.

Interviews with agents in numerous federal and local law enforcement agencies, border residents, and drug-war journalists paint a picture of a war beyond anything anyone has ever seen here before, an epidemic of murder and sadistic violence that’s being waged with US weapons and aided by US government dollars, led by forces trained by the US military. The level of power of the Mexican drug cartels is completely out of control, and nothing the US and Mexican governments are doing seems to be working to slow it down.

Instead, the money generated by the sale of drugs in this country is so impossibly vast that corruption in local Mexican police forces, the Mexican military, and even the federal government is at the saturation point—and many times more lucrative, not to mention healthier, than staying honest. The drug gangs are now recruiting and killing people on the US side of the border, and murders and corruption are on the rise in towns from El Paso to Brownsville. Unless something changes quickly, it looks as though things are going to get a lot worse before they get better. Already, the Mexican side of the border has become such a horror show that many Americans will find it difficult to comprehend, no matter how many movies about it they have seen. The transformation of Mexico into a drugocracy is nearly complete, with no institution completely free from its influence, including the US Embassy in Mexico City.

Thousands of Mexicans have paid dearly to have tracking chips embedded under their skin, so that they can be located if they are kidnapped. More Mexican citizens than ever are showing up in hospitals on the US side to be treated for gunshot wounds—because there’s less chance in the United States of their attackers following them to a hospital ward to finish the job. And record numbers of Mexicans are fleeing to Canada to seek political asylum.

The firepower of the cartels is as frightening as their ruthlessness. Where do they get their weapons? From Texas and other border states, where the gun lobbies have kept the gun laws weak. Texas is considered to be the number-one supplier of weapons to the cartels.

But their artillery goes beyond anything found at your local gun shop. The cartels have M-16s, hand grenades, grenade launchers—that is, US military weapons, by the truckload.

Many of the most murderous units of the drug armies know very well how to use those weapons because they were taught by the US military—on the assumption that they were going to fight against the cartels. Now they fight for the cartels—or control them. What’s more, US corporations are getting into the act, working under contract with the Mexican and US governments to train specialized soldiers, including in torture techniques, and to act as private security agents on both sides of the border.

A recent government report said one Mexican cartel, angered at raids in the US that targeted their people (including in North Texas) has threatened retaliation. The cartel is calling on the American gangs that are its business partners to “confront US law enforcement agencies.” One cartel boss allegedly has ordered reinforcements to Reynosa, the report said, “armed with assault rifles, bulletproof vests, and grenades…occupying safe houses throughout the McAllen area.”

What’s more, the sign on the bridge was just one example of the cartel’s new practice of brazenly advertising for foot soldiers. In Reynosa and Nuevo Laredo, their fliers were plastered everywhere recently.

The banner on the bridge echoed the words of the old US military recruiting poster, and it specifically targeted members of the military: “The Zetas operations group wants you, soldier or ex-soldier,” it read. “We offer you a good salary, food, and attention for your family. Don’t suffer hunger and abuse any more.” It listed a cell phone number to call to sign up.

In Nuevo Laredo, things are much quieter now than they were two years ago, when gunfights broke out almost daily. But even now, entering Mexico at Laredo is intimidating, because the town is still tense with the memory of those battles. Stores are boarded up, international medical and dental clinics that used to cater to Texans have for-rent signs on their doors, and it’s not a safe place to wander around. The relative peace is not the result of any law enforcement victory over the drug traffickers—far from it. The warring cartels in Nuevo Laredo have simply reached a détente.

Mexican President Felipe Calderón came to power in 2006 vowing to eliminate the drug scourge and its attendant violence. George W. Bush’s administration handed over hundreds of millions to help with that quest. But all that’s happened since Calderón took office, despite his efforts, is that the violence and corruption have increased. It’s not just the death toll that’s up; robberies, extortions, and kidnappings are on the rise as well.

The next-to-last Nuevo Laredo police chief was murdered because he promised to crack down on drug violence, which claimed 170 lives in that city in 2005 alone, not to mention dozens of kidnappings or the assassinations carried out on the US side.

“It’s a war zone,” Webb County Sheriff Rick Flores told ABC News at the time. “We’ve got level-three body armor; they’ve got level-four. We’ve got cell phones; they’ve got satellite cell phones that we can’t tap into… We’re being out-gunned.”

In the fight against drug-based corruption, there has been no détente. In the last five months, 35 agents with the Mexican federal prosecutor’s office were arrested for corruption. According to Mexican Attorney General Eduardo Medina Mora, each was being paid between $150,000 and $450,000 monthly by the cartels. In late October, two high-ranking officials with Mexico’s Office on Organized Crime, part of the attorney general’s office, were arrested for supplying a Sinaloa-based cartel with information on possible drug seizures. Each was being paid $400,000 per month. An Interpol agent working with the US Drug Enforcement Administration at the US embassy in Mexico City, caught supplying the same cartel with inside information last month, was thought to have been earning $30,000 monthly.

The current rash of violence in Mexico, as well as the violence that erupted in Nuevo Laredo a couple of years ago, can be traced to Calderón’s policy of going after cartel leaders. His belief was that the cartels would be destroyed with their capos gone. So he sent 32,000 federal soldiers out across Mexico with orders to bring the peace by eliminating cartel bosses. Dozens were captured or killed, including many who have since been extradited to the US for prosecution. But the push also had two negative side effects: First, the cartels were able to corrupt large segments of those military forces sent out against them; and secondly, the removal of the bosses created a power vacuum that’s led to the current violence among those seeking to become the new cartel leaders.

In many ways, it’s a repeat of what happened in Colombia in the late 1980s and early 1990s, when the Medellín and Cali cartel leaders were eliminated. Violence in that country escalated to brutal heights. But interestingly, the victor in those internecine wars turned out not to be any of the Colombian cartel lieutenants, but the drug bosses in Mexico, who moved up from being middle men to running the cartels themselves.

The campaigns then didn�t stop corruption or even slow it down, and the same has been true of Calderon�s efforts thus far. Much of the violence in Nuevo Laredo was carried out by municipal police, including gun battles between them and federal officers. Eventually more than half of Nuevo Laredo’s 700-man police force was fired for corruption. In June 2007, Calderón purged 284 federal police commanders from all 31 Mexican states and the Mexico City federal district. All that did, one DEA source said, was to raise the cost of monthly payments to corrupt federal agents and prosecutors.

US drug agents estimate that, every day, $10 million worth of drugs cross over the Laredo bridges— not to mention the rest of the 2,000-mile long US-Mexico border—and heads up I-35. It’s enough to pay for a lot of corruption and a lot of weaponry. Unfortunately for their victims, the drug lords don’t have to go far to do their gun-shopping.

The Texas-Mexico frontier has always been a smuggler’s paradise, and through the decades, the trade—in whatever goods were in demand at the moment—has gone both ways. These days, although the drugs traveling north grab most of the headlines, there’s an equally deadly trade: in weapons, going into Mexico, since that country has no arms manufacturing industry. According to US officials, nearly all of Mexico’s drug-war violence is done with US-manufactured weapons. The worst-offending states are Texas, Arizona, and New Mexico, all of which permit almost anyone to purchase and own as many pistols, machine pistols, rifles, and assault rifles as they want, with no waiting time and no record of the sale going beyond the gun dealers’ files.

In those states, only an instant background check is done. According to Stephen Fischer, a spokesman for the FBI’s National Instant Criminal Background Check System, anyone who sells a gun in this country—with a major and troublesome exception—must notify NICS. “The buyer is required to fill out a form, and the dealer then calls an 800 number, enters the buyer’s information, and either gets an OK or a ‘red light.'” If it’s the latter, Fischer said, “the information will get transferred to the FBI, and we’ll make a decision whether the transaction can go through or not.”

A would-be buyer can be turned down for things as simple as not having gotten a new driver’s license after a move or as serious as being in this country illegally or having a felony criminal record. But Fischer noted that the form does not include the number of weapons being purchased. “So in theory a person could buy 100 or more at a time if they want.”

He also said that information on green-lighted purchasers is purged within 24 hours. Red-lighted forms are kept until the FBI determines the cause of the warning flag.

One Texas gun owner, a former NASA engineer who asked not to be identified, said he sees the problem with a system that doesn’t flag purchases of multiple guns. “Maybe something should be in place even in Texas that would call that sale into question,” he said. “I mean, how many AK-47s does a person need to have fun target shooting?”

He himself owns an Uzi, a semi-automatic bought over the counter at a gun store. “But you go to any gun show, and it doesn’t take long to find someone who’ll offer to take your semi-automatic and turn it into a fully automatic weapon,” he said.

Mexican authorities have repeatedly called on the US to pass laws to stop or slow the estimated 2,000-weapon-a-day pace of gun sales into Mexico. But gun restrictions are extremely unpopular in Texas and other border states, an easy way for any politician to get unelected.

“Texas is probably the biggest supplier of guns that make their way into Mexico,” said Tom Crowley, special agent for the US Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms. “That’s both because of that long border they share and the number of gun dealers in the state.” BATF’s job is to handle the investigation of illegal gun and arms sales, as well as to trace guns that have been used in criminal activity.

“Now let’s say I’m a Mexican cartel member or illegal gun dealer, and I want to get my hands on some weapons,” Crowley said. “I’ll get a friend to purchase the guns I want and have him deliver them to me in Mexico. That’s called a straw-man purchase, and it’s illegal, but it’s done. And until one of those weapons is recovered at a crime scene, no one is going to know about it. Of course, that’s where BATF comes in: If the Mexican government provides us with that gun—and they’ve been more and more cooperative—we can trace it back to the manufacturer. They’ll tell us to which gun dealer it was shipped, and that gun dealer had better have kept the paperwork… And with that, we’ll be coming after you, to ask what the heck a gun you purchased is doing in Mexico in the hands of someone in a cartel gun battle.”

The system is flawed, Crowley admitted, both because of people obliterating serial numbers and because of the “gun show loophole.” The exception allows individuals to sell their own weapons at a gun show, such as the regular events held in large coliseums in the Dallas-Fort Worth area. No NICS check is done, and often no names are exchanged. If the gun later turns up to have been used in a multiple murder in Juárez and gets traced back to the legitimate owner, he can just say he sold it at a gun show to a stranger. And that’s the end of the case.

But Celerino Castillo, the former DEA agent who blew the whistle on the US-backed contras’ arms-for-drugs deals during the Nicaraguan civil war in the mid-1980s, said the problem isn’t limited to weapons being sold legally by individuals and then being resold to the cartels. The author of Powderburns, an account of the cocaine-for-arms scandal, Castillo worked undercover with the DEA for 12 years, mostly in Mexico and Central and South America.

“The majority of the weapons being used by the cartels these days are US military weapons and explosives,” he said. “They’ve got M-16s, hand grenades, grenade launchers. Even in Texas you can’t buy those. Those are US military weapons. Last year an 18-wheeler full of M-16s was stopped headed to Matamoros, a border town controlled by the Gulf Cartel. Our US military is either supplying the Mexican military with that weaponry, and corrupt elements in the Mexican military are selling it to the cartels, or someone in the US military is supplying them. Either way, those are US military guns being used in very violent cartel rivalries.”

“So the responsibility still lies with the US, whether it’s military or gun shop owners,” Castillo said. “Without the guns, there would be less violence.”

Whatever version of corruption or bad policy is responsible for massive amounts of US military weapons ending up in the hands of the cartel, there is little mystery about the more routine forms of drug-money corruption being practiced, another longstanding border tradition. In October, FBI agents arrested a South Texas sheriff and charged him with “conspiracy to possess with intent to distribute cocaine and marijuana” among several other offenses. Starr County Sheriff Reymundo Guerra, who faces life imprisonment, follows in the footsteps of his predecessor, Sheriff Eugenio Falcón, who pleaded guilty to non-drug-related conspiracy charges in 1998. Among many other law enforcement officers caught dealing with the cartels, in 2005 former Cameron County Sheriff Conrado Cantu was sentenced to 24 years in prison for running a criminal enterprise out of his office.

The corruption extends as far as the drug supply lines themselves. In September, 175 people thought to have ties to the Gulf Cartel were arrested in several US states, including 22 in North Texas. The raids netted $1 million in cash, 400 pounds of methamphetamine, and 300 kilograms of cocaine—and drew the anger of drug bosses.

The Gulf Cartel isn’t exactly subtle in its recruitment of the military and others to its ranks. The Gulf Cartel has been plastering signs all over Reynosa and at times in Nuevo Laredo and elsewhere, asking soldiers and police officers to desert their posts and join the Zetas. One sign posted recently in Tampico asked soldiers and ex-soldiers to “Join the ranks of the Gulf Cartel. We offer benefits, life insurance, a house for your family and children. Stop living in the slums and riding the bus. A new car or truck, your choice.”

In Juárez, the war between cartels is still going full bore.

“What we have are factions of the old Juárez Cartel that were followers of Amado Carrillo Fuentes fighting it out with followers of Joaquin Guzmán Loera, known as El Chapo, head of the Sinaloa Cartel. And it is hell there,” said Diana Washington Valdez, a reporter with the El Paso Times. Juárez has been the site of some of the most horrific killings along the border.

“Our paper won’t even let us go across into Juárez for stories anymore because they have no way to protect us. The US Army at Fort Bliss here has warned their troops to stay out of Juárez,” Valdez said. According to news reports, one of the 1,200 or so people killed this year in Juárez in the internecine drug war was an American living in Juárez who was assassinated in October after he posted a sign asking the cartels not to leave any dead bodies in front of his house.

“You’ve got to understand that these guys are hitting night clubs, burning tourist clubs, kidnapping people, targeting payroll trucks,” Valdez said. “People who are not involved at all with the cartels are getting caught in the crossfire. That’s what makes it all so dangerous. If you’re in a club they’re going to burn down—well, that’s just that.”

Whoever can flee is doing so, she said. “Here in El Paso we’ve got a lot of people coming over to stay with relatives, but we’ve also got a lot of people just wandering around the bus station with nowhere to go, just to avoid being in Juárez.”

Along the California-Mexico stretch of the border, similar death tolls are being rung up in Tijuana, where the Arellano-Felix Cartel—headed by Fernando Sánchez Arellano, known as “The Engineer”—is being challenged by several other cartels. In all, more than 3,500 people have died in drug-related violence in Mexico in 2008. Included in that number are several Mexican journalists who were killed in reprisal for writing about the drug wars or cartel activities. The most recent was Armando Rodríguez, a crime reporter for Juarez’ El Diario, who was shot numerous times while sitting in his car in front of his home three weeks ago. These days, many newspapers, radio shows, and television stations in Mexico won’t cover drug issues at all, for fear of deadly reprisals.

The violence associated with the cartel wars is spreading north of the Rio Grande in different ways than in the past. In April 2007, Gabriel Cardona, then 18, pleaded guilty to five murders carried out in or near Laredo at the behest of then-Gulf Cartel leader Miguel Trevino Morales. Cardona was part of a group of teens who acted as cartel hitmen on the US side of the border. Among Cardona’s hits was the kidnapping and murder of a former Laredo police officer. Rosario Reta, a Cardona associate, was recently convicted of a separate murder committed in Laredo in 2006.

US drug officials have suggested that Cardona and Reta were part of a group known as the Zetitas, or Little Zetas, recruited from street gangs in Laredo and trained by the paramilitary group that calls itself the Zetas. Cardona and Reta both allegedly began working for the Gulf Cartel by delivering weapons from Laredo to Nuevo Laredo, and were subsequently singled out for hitman training.

Javier Sambrano, the El Paso police department’s public information officer, said there is no such spillover happening in his city. “There has been no spillover [of the violence from Juárez] at all,” he said. “Those individuals on the Mexican side of the border committing those atrocities have no incentive to come here and commit those sorts of crimes.” It’s true that some murders in El Paso are linked to drugs, he said, “but we have solved them, which is further discouragement to people imagining they could come here and commit them” without getting caught.

That might be good public relations for El Paso, but it’s also nonsense, said one border-area journalist who asked not to be named—and who pointed out that members of an El Paso gang called the Aztecas have recently been found operating in Juárez as hitmen for the Juárez cartel. The gang started in an El Paso prison, with the idea of protecting prisoners of Mexican descent, but has been suspected of cartel ties for years, particularly in connection with drug distribution and weapons smuggling. “We’ve long suspected the tie between the cartel and the Aztecas from El Paso,” the reporter said, “but now that some of them are on trial, we’ve got it in testimony being given in federal court.”

In November, El Paso children on their way to school found the body of a man tied to window bars, his feet dangling just above the ground. He was wearing a pig’s mask. A sign above his head said: “This is going to happen to all Aztecas.”

Another sign of the spillover, the reporter said, are the number of people who’ve been shot in Mexico but brought to the US for treatment: “The Thomason Hospital here in El Paso has received more than 30 people this year who have been shot in Juárez. They get shot there and brought here, because if those people were targets, the gangs will go into the hospitals [in Mexico] and make sure they’re dead.”

The rumor is that federal agents are allowing Mexican cartel victims to be brought to El Paso for treatment “because they want a chance to interview them,” the reporter said. “On the other hand, a lot of people here in El Paso are worried that they might be followed into Thomason Hospital and killed.”

Two days after the reporter spoke to Fort Worth Weekly, the El Paso Times carried a story about a wounded man whose attackers followed him into a Juárez hospital and finished the job.

If the paramilitaries in the Mexican drug trade are recruiting killers from US streets, one could say they are only returning a favor.

During the 1980s and early 1990s, the United States began to train Special Forces for the Mexican government, called the Zetas, to enable them to better confront the emerging Mexican drug cartels. Earlier, in the mid-70s, the US also undertook to train another Special Forces group, in Guatemala, which then was in the midst of a civil war. That group specialized in guerilla warfare and counter-insurgency tactics.

In both cases, the American military training backfired. Many of the specially trained units defected from the Mexican and Guatemalan armies and went to work for the cartels. Then they became the cartels.

“A lot of Zetas broke away from the Mexican military in the 1990s,” said Castillo, the former DEA agent. The Zetas, he said, “began working as enforcers for the Gulf Cartel, which controlled Mexico’s Caribbean coast and several inland border cities.” The Zetas were ruthless and fearless. “They were some of the best-trained Special Forces anywhere,” Castillo said. “Well now it’s gotten to the point where they pretty much control the cartels.”

When stories first broke about the Zetas working for the cartels, the Mexican government denied it. But in recent reports, Castillo said, Mexican officials have finally admitted that there is a “paramilitary arm in the Mexican military,” meaning that some members of the military are also active paramilitaries with the cartels.

And, he said, “don’t forget the Kaibiles”—although there are probably a lot of people in the US government and military who would like to. The Kaibiles, named after a Guatemalan indigenous leader who fought the Conquistadors, were the Special Forces unit the US trained in Guatemala, many of whose members also went over to the drug lords, for much higher wages.

“The Kaibiles started working for the cartels, but they are now working for the Zetas, and they’re the ones responsible for the beheadings,” Castillo said. “That’s their trademark.” In one case last year, several human heads were tossed onto a dance floor in Michoacán. In October of this year, four heads in an ice chest were sent to the Juárez police headquarters.

The Zetas, Castillo said, have now realigned with corrupt elements in the Mexican army, a marriage that is spreading the infection in the military, particularly among the 32,000 troops Calderón sent into nine Mexican states specifically to stamp out the cartels. “And so the military is sort of running the whole show down there,” said Castillo. “You’ve got thousands of military put all over the country, a lot of them corrupt, a lot of them also working as paramilitaries. They’re operating under the guise of stamping out drugs when they’re actually moving [the drugs] and stamping out rivals for the drug trade.”

Calderón’s strategy of fanning out the army to try to regain some semblance of control from the cartels in those states has worked about as well as the US Special Forces training. Rather than restoring government control, in many areas the military has wreaked havoc with the citizenry, prompting calls for Calderón to remove them.

Bill Weinberg, an award-winning journalist who specializes in Latin American and drug-war issues, said the situation is incomprehensible for many Americans. “You’ve got to understand that the military and the cartels overlap, so the military isn’t necessarily worse than the cartels; they are the cartels,” he said. “Then you have the police, who in some places, like Reynosa—across the border from McAllen—have been completely co-opted.”

Mexico’s National Human Rights Commission issued a report in July about four particularly grave cases of recent military abuse in different Mexican states, Weinberg said. “All of those cases involved torture of civilians, some of it very brutal, [including] electric shock and rape… In Michoacán, soldiers at a roadblock shot up a car and killed some kids.”

The human rights commission called on the Mexican defense secretary to punish those who violate human rights. “Up until now, those recommendations have been ignored,” Weinberg said, “and so the abuses keep occurring.”

Human rights groups fear that another set of new players in the drug war won’t help that situation— companies like Blackwater and DynCorp that carry their own bloody baggage.

Blackwater USA, the private security firm already accused of atrocities in Iraq, is negotiating with Calderón’s government to train specialized soldiers in the Mexican army and to also act as a private security force.

“But you know they’re going to be all over everything, doing a little busting of people, doing a little dirty work for people … It’s what they do,” Castillo said.

Made up primarily of former members of the US Special Forces, Blackwater, like DynCorp and several other private companies, has been used extensively by the US Department of Defense in Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere to provide security and other services. Blackwater came under intense media scrutiny in September 2007 when several of its contractors opened fire on unarmed civilians in Iraq, killing 17 people. Nonetheless, with former CIA higher-ups in its ranks, the company continues to get lucrative federal contracts.

Blackwater will soon have a large presence on the US-Mexican border: An 824-acre training complex in California, just 45 miles from Mexico, should be open soon. The company already has a contract with the US government to train Border Patrol agents, and there is speculation that once their presence is established there, they will vie for contracts to work border security alongside US government agents.

“Plan Mexico”—formally the Merida Initiative—recently signed by President Bush, may ratchet up the use of mercenaries. It promises an immediate $400 million to Calderón to help fight drugs in Mexico, with an additional $1.1 billion in the next two years.

The plan includes an unspecified amount of money for contracts to US private security companies. A year ago, the Army Times reported that the Defense Department had just given Blackwater a sizable chunk of a grant that, over time, could total $15 billion, “to deploy surveillance techniques, train foreign security forces, and provide logistical and operational support” for drug war initiatives.

That could mean the US government is already funding a mercenary force of former US Special Forces soldiers operating on both sides of the border but not accountable to anyone in Mexico. Blackwater already employs 1,200 Chileans, former members of ex-dictator Augusto Pinochet’s military, some of whom are thought to be working in Mexico.

“You have to be very wary of mercenary soldiers in a democracy, which is more fragile than people think,” Rep. Bob Filner told Salon.com last year. “You don’t want armies around who will sell out to the highest bidder.”

At least one other US-based security firm is already operating in Mexico. In July, the day after Bush signed Plan Mexico, two different videos of a torture training session for police in the city of León, Guanajuato, were released by the local paper El Heraldo de León. The tapes showed graphic images of torture techniques (as practiced on police volunteers)—including images of one volunteer having his head forced into a pit of rats and feces, and another being dragged through his own vomit after he was beaten.

Kristin Bricker, an investigative reporter with NarcoNews.com, subsequently uncovered evidence that the trainers in the video were from Risks Incorporated, a Miami-based private security outfit that specializes in, among other things, teaching psychological torture techniques.

“There is no question that the US is involved in every aspect of the drug war in Mexico,” Castillo said. And if you don’t believe the author and former DEA undercover agent, how about the departing US ambassador to Mexico? Tony Garza is now saying that they United States must accept responsibility for the gun trade and for providing the market for Mexican drugs. The Dallas Morning News reported last week that Garza said in a recent speech that Mexico “would not be the center of cartel activity or be experiencing this level of violence, were the United States not the largest consumer of illegal drugs and the main supplier of weapons to the cartels.”

But Castillo has an even darker vision of what sustains the drug war. In essence, he said, the economy of Mexico is addicted to drug money, and no one, not even Calderón, would completely shut off that spigot, even if it were possible. Castillo’s judgment of the United States is similar: The war on drugs provides a huge boost to the economy, via private prisons, the gun industry, and the federal forces arrayed against it.

Calderón “absolutely would not” stop the drug trade if he could, Castillo said. “Mexico’s economy depends too heavily on drug money.”

On a beautiful fall afternoon in Nuevo Laredo, sun sparkles off the pastel-colored walls. The streets are quiet. At an open-air taqueria not far from a border crossing, the staff is smoking meats and vegetables on flat grills, getting ready for a busy night.

The proprietor, Maria (she asked that her last name not be used), said she was lucky: The taqueria came through the violence of a year or two ago unscathed. But she worried when members of one cartel or the other would occasionally come in to eat, for fear that her staff and other customers could get caught in the crossfire.

“It was not good. Gunfights. Dead people. Crying mothers. It was having a war in your own house,” she said. “Wars are cleaner when they happen somewhere else.”

A customer at a nearby grocery store was equally glad the shooting war had quieted down on his stretch of the border for the moment.

“It’s much better that they stopped the gun battles,” he said. “Now everybody can get back to making money with the drugs instead of dying over them.”

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This story first appeared Dec. 3 in the Fort Worth Weekly.

RESOURCES

“Blackwater’s run for the border,” by Eilene Zimmerman
Salon, Oct. 23, 2007

See also:

THE U.S. THREAT TO MEXICAN NATIONAL SECURITY
Narco Gangs Armed by Gringos—Despite Border Militarization
by Bill Weinberg, NACLA Report on the Americas
World War 4 Report, April 2008

From our Daily Report:

Mexico: Zetas planning attacks on US Border Patrol?
World War 4 Report, Nov. 6, 2008

Mexico: gunmen kill reporter, kidnap farmworkers
World War 4 Report, Nov. 15, 2008

Mexico: narco-Satanism in Ciudad Juárez?
World War 4 Report, Nov. 10, 2008

National Human Rights Commission blasts Mexican army
World War 4 Report, July 14, 2008

US Senate approves “Plan Mexico”; narcos keep up pressure
World War 4 Report, June 28, 2008

“Wild West bloodbath” in Ciudad Juárez
World War 4 Report, April 17, 2008

Mexico: presidential guard, beauty queen busted in narco wars
World War 4 Report, Dec. 29, 2008

Mexico: US-UK firm teaches torture?
World War 4 Report, July 14, 2008

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Reprinted by World War 4 Report, Jan. 1, 2009
Reprinting permissible with attribution

Continue ReadingBORDER UNDER SIEGE 

A QUANTUM OF ANTI-IMPERIALISM

James Bond Saves Evo Morales from the CIA!

by Juan Cole, Informed Comment

The reviews of director Marc Forster’s Quantum of Solace have complained about the film’s hectic pace (reminiscent of Doug Liman’s and Paul Greengrass’s Bourne thrillers), about the humorlessness of Daniel Craig’s Bond, and even about the squalid surroundings, so unlike Monaco and Prague, in which the film is set (with many scenes in Haiti and Bolivia). They have missed the most remarkable departure of all. Forster presents us with a new phenomenon in the James Bond films, a Bond at odds with the United States, who risks his career to save Evo Morales’ leftist regime in Bolivia from being overthrown by a “General Medrano”—who is helped by the CIA and a private mercenary organization called Quantum. In short, this Bond is more Michael Moore than Roger Moore.

The plot of the film was developed by producer Michael G. Wilson during the filming of Casino Royale. New York-born Wilson is from a show-business family (his father, Lewis Wilson, was the first actor to play Batman on screen, and his step-father, Albert Broccoli, was long the producer of the Bond films). But Wilson did a law degree at Stanford in the 1960s and worked for a while at a firm specializing in international law. Outrage at offenses against international law are as much at the heart of this film as the more personal vendettas of Bond and Camille (Olga Kurylenko).

Kurylenko, a Ukrainian, is the first Bond girl actually played by an actress from the former Soviet Union, and the St. Petersburg-based KPLO, a Communist group, denounced her, saying, “The Soviet Union educated you, cared for you, and brought you up for free, but no one suspected that you would commit this act of intellectual and moral betrayal.”

The KPLO then called James Bond “the killer of hundreds of Soviet people and their allies,” which suggests why they are still Communists—they have difficulty distinguishing between reality and fantasy.

The St. Petersburg Communists got the politics of the work all wrong. It is the closest thing to a progressive Bond film ever made, more Graham Greene (admittedly, Graham Greene on steroids) than Ian Fleming. Kurylenko, who grew up in a poor family headed by her mother, plays a Bolivian girl whose family was destroyed (and her mother and sister raped) by the haughty General Medrano. She is so organically a figure of the left that no distinction can be made between her private quest for vengeance on Medrano and the salvation of the pro-peasantry government of Bolivia.

The Bond films were never quite as right-wing as had been the novels. In From Russia with Love, Ian Fleming had the Soviet assassination unit, SMERSH, deploy the crazed serial killer Red Grant for its nefarious purposes. The films instead made SPECTRE, a private terrorist organization, the villain, depicting it as working against both Soviet intelligence and MI6 or British international intelligence. (Admittedly, the films were reflecting the steps toward détente that in some ways began with Johnson). The films were prescient about the potential for the rise of private terrorist organizations such as al-Qaeda as major players in their own right, able to confound the intelligence agencies even of powerful states.

Still, East Bloc leaders and troops are often depicted as sinister. An example is the rogue Soviet General Orloff in Octopussy, who conspires to set off an atomic bomb, made to look like an American device, to give aid to the peace groups in Western Europe in their quest to make it a nuclear-free zone, thus setting the stage for a successful Soviet take-over. (That film implicitly configures the movement against stationing nuclear warheads in Europe, spearheaded by figures such as the leftist historian E.P. Thompson, as advocates of a surrender to Moscow. That is about as far-right a position as you could take on the European peace groups of that time).

The present film takes, to say the least, a different view of popular movements of the left. Morales is not mentioned in the film, but his movement was in the headlines while Casino Royale was being shot, as he challenged the old “white” elite and was denounced by the US ambassador as an “Andean bin Laden” and his peasant followers (many of them of largely native stock) as “Taliban.” Morales’ nationalization of Bolivia’s petroleum and natural gas and his redistribution of wealth from the wealthy elite to villagers were among the policies drawing the ire of George W. Bush and his cronies.

If Morales is not mentioned, Jean-Bertrand Aristide of Haiti is. The villain, Dominic Greene (Mathieu Amalric) remarks that while Aristide was president 2001-2004, he raised the minimum wage from 25 cents an hour to a dollar an hour. It was, he said, little enough, but caused the corporations that benefited from cheap Haitian labor to mobilize to have Aristide removed. (Aristide himself maintained that US and Canadian intelligence connived with officers at the coup against him and kidnapped him, taking him to southern Africa.) The Left analysis of American imperialism in the Western hemisphere is put in the mouth, not of a worker or ideologue, but rather of the collaborator in capitalist exploitation of America’s poor neighbors. Aristide’s story is a clear parallelism for the fate the CIA and Quantum are depicted as plotting for Morales.

Note that director Marc Forster’s father was from conservative Bavaria, and that the family was forced to relocate to Davos in Switzerland because they were targeted by the radical Baader-Meinhoff gang after the father became wealthy on selling his pharmaceutical company. Forster’s previous film, The Kite-Runner, sympathized with the Afghans oppressed by the Soviet invasion and even shows one character refusing to be treated by a Russian-American physician. That is, Forster is no glib Third Worldist. He and his screenwriters are simply performing the work of the intellectual, interrogating the way the wealthy and powerful in the Bush era casually overthrew (or tried to overthrow) foreign governments in the global south to get at the resources they coveted.

In the new film, Dominic Greene is a secret member of Quantum, a mercenary coup-making consulting firm. That is, it is represented as a private contractor to which the CIA is willing to farm out coup-making instead of doing it directly. Greene’s cover is that of the head of a conservation organization that buys up land in poor countries to ensure it is preserved from despoilment. In fact, he despoils it. In a complicated and not very plausible plot twist, Greene appears to be buying up land under which he is convinced there is oil, but in fact is trying to corner the market on Bolivia’s aquifers so as to overcharge the country for its water after the military coup unseats Morales.

The CIA is convinced to back Quantum both because it wants leftist governments in Latin America overthrown and because Quantum would re-privatize Bolivia’s fossil fuels. Greene observes to CIA field officer Greg Beame that the way the Bush administration bogged the US down in the Middle East allowed several Latin American countries to move left (obviously, the referents are Venezuela, Bolivia and Brazil). Beame’s partner, Felix Leiter (Jeffrey Wright) is uncomfortable with the coup plot and the collaboration with Quantum.

Britain’s own elite comes in for a drubbing. Quantum has placed a man close to the British prime minister, who is thus duped. M tries to call off Bond, with no success, and she is pressured by her superiors to bow to the CIA plan. This plot element is a veiled reference to Blair’s knee-jerk support for Bush. The notion of a mole from a mercenary corporation close to the PM recalls the allegations that far-right billionaire Rupert Murdoch was a spectral presence at every Blair cabinet meeting.

Of course, in real life the CIA did use a private set of organizations, the Mujahidin or Muslim holy warriors (Afghans and the Arab volunteers who became al-Qaeda) to overthrow the leftist government of Afghan leaders Karmal Babrak and later Najeebullah. CIA consultants with Hollywood have been careful, in films such as Charlie Wilson’s War, to play down the element here of “blowback” (where a covert operation goes rogue and produces an attack on the sponsoring country).

But this Bond film is explicit that the United States under Bush has become the bad guy, that US intelligence is in league with rogue mercenaries and brutal, rapist-generals who plot coups against elected governments. Bond therefore has to take on the United States government. (At one point, a SWAT team from the CIA Special Activities Division tries to capture Bond in a bar in La Paz, but fails because Leiter tips Bond off to their approach. The good American in this film is the one willing to betray the US government to a more virtuous MI6 field officer).

George W. Bush is a lurking presence in this film, and appears to have almost single-handedly pushed Bond into championing the indigenous peasants against the white-tie global elite. The plotting of millionaires at a performance in Bregenz in Austria of Puccini’s opera, “Tosca,” to devastate and brutalize for their own gain the poor of Bolivia half a world away, recalls the scene in Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11 where Bush toasts his super-wealthy “base.” He was implicitly promising that their enterprises will be deregulated and their taxes lowered and the costs of those things passed on to the middle classes and workers.

The original Bond began his education at Eton (he was thrown out) and was a member of the British elite, even if he exhibited its otherwise hidden rough edges and occasionally ruthless methods (deployed against still more ruthless opponents such as Soviet assassination squads). Still, he defended the interests of his social class against challengers.

With this film, Daniel Craig’s Bond, who is from a considerably lower social class than Flemings’, has chosen to defy the white-tie set, and the Bush administration’s greed and lawlessness, and to stand up for the little people (including Camille, who symbolizes Morales’ Indios). At one point the smarmy CIA man Beame rejects any criticism from Bond of US imperialism, given Britain’s own long and sordid imperial history. But a country, and a people, always has a choice in each generation, of whether to do the right thing. They are not prisoners of their ancestors.

Craig’s Bond is an intimation of the sort of Britain that could have been, if Tony Blair had stood up to Bush and refused to be dragged into an illegal war of choice, and into other actions and policies that profoundly contradicted the principles on which the Labour Party had been founded (and you could imagine Craig’s Bond voting for Old Labour, while Flemings’ was obviously a Tory). In a way, this Bond stands in for Clare Short, who resigned as a cabinet minister from Blair’s government in 2003 over the illegitimacy of the Iraq War.

It is a sad state of affairs that Bush’s America now appears in a Bond film in rather the same light as Brezhnev’s Soviet Union used to. One can only hope that President Barack Obama can adopt the sort of policies that can get Bond back on our side.

NOTE: We take issue with the notion that the water-control angle is “not very plausible.” It is clearly a reference to the Bechtel corporation’s take-over of the water system in the Bolivian region of Cochabamba, sparking a local uprising in 2000.—World War 4 Report

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This piece first appeared Nov. 16 on Juan Cole’s InformedComment blog.

From our Daily Report:

Bolivia: Bechtel surrenders
World War 4 Report, Jan. 24, 2006

RESOURCES

Ukrainian Bond girl is traitor to USSR, say Russian communists
Unian News Agency, Ukraine, Oct. 27

Bolivian president censures United States
CNN, Sept. 24, 2007

Ryan Gilbey talks to Bond director Marc Forster
The Guardian, Oct. 24, 2008

Body of Lies: The CIA’s involvement in US film-making
The Guardian, Nov. 14, 2008

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Reprinted by World War 4 Report, Dec. 1, 2008
Reprinting permissible with attribution

Continue ReadingA QUANTUM OF ANTI-IMPERIALISM 

FELTON FLOWS ON

A California Town Beats Back the Water Cartel

by Rachel Aronowitz, Terrain, Berkeley, CA

After a nearly six-year fight to acquire its water system from the German-owned corporate energy behemoth, RWE (Rheinisch-Westfälisches Elektrizitätswerk AG), residents of Felton, Calif., prevailed in regaining local control of their water.

Since the 1800’s, the small town of Felton, nestled along the coastal redwoods outside Santa Cruz, had no real problems with the private ownership of their water. This all changed in 2001 when then-owner, privately held Citizen Utilities, sold the water system to Cal-Am or California-American whose parent company is American Water. Though these names sound very local, the subsidiaries ultimately answer to Germany’s RWE, which is the third largest private water company in the world. RWE is also one of the world’s largest energy giants, with more than 640 subsidiaries worldwide and annual revenues of more than $50 billion. It is one of the world’s top suppliers of electricity and natural gas, with operations across Europe, Asia, North and South America, Africa and Australia. It provides water and wastewater services to 18 million customers in 29 states in the US.

Immediately after the acquisition was finalized, Cal-Am asked the California Public Utilities Commission (PUC) for a 78% rate hike. Cal-Am’s justification was that the system was old and they incurred many expenses through the sale. According to Felton activist Jim Mosher, they used the argument that “people don’t understand the true cost of water,” and hoped they would get what they asked for.

When Felton residents heard about the rate hike, they immediately mobilized, gathering in the local firehouse. At this initial gathering, they formed a citizens group called FLOW, or Friends of Local Water, and vowed to buy back their water system. The county supported FLOW’s plan, quickly agreeing to contribute $127,000 in legal fees, and the fight began. Despite the public outcry, the PUC allowed Cal-Am a still exorbitant 44% rate hike. Soon after this was finalized, Cal-Am came back with yet another request for a rate hike of 60%.

FLOW met to plan their strategy, but after the PUC decision, the county said it couldn’t contribute to the legal fees. This didn’t stop the determined members of FLOW who relied on old-fashioned community dances, bake sales and garage sales to raise money. Luckily, the lawyers took on the job and trusted they would be compensated later.

Finances started to look up when FLOW eventually realized they could qualify for “intervener compensation” to pay for their expenses to fight the second rate hike and received another $60,000 in lawyers fees from the county. The Intervener Compensation Program is intended to ensure that individuals and groups that represent residential or small commercial utility customers have the financial resources to bring their concerns and interests to the PUC during formal proceedings.

Founding FLOW member and PR director Jim Graham explains that with about 70 committed volunteers, FLOW’s strategy consisted of contacting over 1,000 local households at least three times to create “one-on-one contact.” Members went door to door in their neighborhoods. They believed it was important for residents to see the faces of everyone who was involved in the fight. Volunteers even gave out their personal cell phone numbers to be available for any questions they could answer from their neighbors. Graham recalls that the overriding concern of local residents was whether or not their bills would go up. “What is this going to cost me?” they asked. FLOW members explained that even if local property taxes increased it would still be in the best financial interests of Felton residents to go ahead with the buyout.

In order to go forward with the plan to purchase the system, residents had to put a measure on the city of Felton’s ballot that would raise a sufficient pot of money. Measure W was created, which would raise $11 million in property taxes—hopefully a large enough amount to purchase the water system. According to Graham, Cal-Am reacted to the creation of Measure W with a “campaign of misinformation”—including leaflets that tried to convince residents they would get the raw end of the deal if the measure passed.

Graham tells the story of how FLOW “got a lucky break when an anonymous party sent a copy of Cal-Am’s strategy book to the FLOW office, which included dirty tricks such as what is referred to as “push polling”—an the hiring of consultants to cold-call residents and elicit angry reactions on hot-button issues, and then forward the manipulated calls to a local officials. In this way, the official receives hundreds of messages from residents saying exactly what the company wants them to say. Cal-Am tried this tactic in Monterey, Calif., where residents are currently trying to buy back their water system.

On July 31, 2005, Measure W passed by a whopping 74.8%. With the support of Felton tax payers, Santa Cruz County was now prepared to approach Cal-Am with a bid. The San Lorenzo Valley Water District offered California-American $7.6 million, but Cal-Am refused to sell. Its leadership stated, flatly, that the system was not for sale at any price and expressed its determination to oppose all public acquisition efforts so that Felton did not start a domino effect of citizens taking control of their water resources.

Without the cooperation of Cal-Am, the county and Felton residents continued full-speed ahead and entered into the eminent domain process. Graham says this turn of events was completely expected and “is a common tactic when water companies refuse offers from the public.”

The eminent domain process required that the county hire an appraiser to calculate the value of the water system in preparation for a new purchase price. This included the watershed lands and associated infrastructure.

Graham noticed that while the government looked at the actual revenue or income of the company, which was about $100,000 a year, Cal-Am looked at the “fair market value.” Therefore, the two parties came up with wildly different amounts. While the county’s valuation was around $10 million, Cal-Am’s was closer to $25 million.

However, just before an eminent domain trial could move forward, a mediator was brought in and the two parties quickly settled on a price of $10.4 million. Graham believes that “Am-Water wanted to avoid a trial because it would bring them bad press, and show that their high-risk valuation was a fallacy which would end up on public record.”

With the water now in local hands, residents found that their biggest worry—that they wouldn’t actually end up with affordable monthly water bills to the new owner, the San Lorenzo Valley Water District—was mostly unfounded. While a small percentage of Felton residents are paying more because their property taxes exceed $600 a year, in a few years this discrepancy will even out and bills will become increasingly more affordable. Graham admits “Yes, we paid a little more than we would have liked, but we won!”

With all their hard-gained knowledge and experience after the long six year battle, FLOW continues to fight the good fight by educating other communities around the country that are interested in taking back local water rights form corporate control. Inspired by this unlikely victory, citizens and their elected officials are hopeful that they can restore local, democratic controlof their water systems.

Jim Graham and others are now preparing to head to Speckles, Calif., which lies just outside the town of Salinas. Local residents are looking at a 100% increase from Cal-Am and are in the initial stages of organizing. He plans to talk with locals about their own battle plans, discuss their options and give them the hope and skills necessary to inspire residents to fight back.

More and more, communities are realizing that they don’t want their water to be owned by corporations who put their profits ahead of affordability. Residents in Illinois, Kentucky, Indiana, West Virginia, Ontario, Canada and throughout California are turning to local officials and to their neighbors to take back control of local utilities. Seeing the writing on the wall, RWE recently announced that due to the growing opposition to rate increases and water privitization at the local level, it is getting out of the water business altogether and plans to sell American Water.

In addition, RWE announced on their web page to concerned stockholders that “the benefits anticipated from creating a global water business did not materialize. Water is a local business and although economies of scale can be realized locally and regionally, this has not proved possible on a global scale.”

—-

A version of this story will appear in an upcoming issue of Terrain Magazine of Berkeley, Calif.

RESOURCES

Felton FLOW
http://www.feltonflow.org

——————-

Reprinted by World War 4 Report, Dec. 1, 2008
Reprinting permissible with attribution

Continue ReadingFELTON FLOWS ON 

THE NEW TEXAS GAS WAR

Fort Worth Communities Confront Corporate Colonization

by Peter Gorman, Fort Worth Weekly

When a natural gas pipeline blew outside the little town of Stairtown, Tex., Aug. 28, 2008, fire officials more than 10 miles from the blast site says they could feel the explosion. And hair went up on thousands of necks in Fort Worth, more than 225 miles away from the blast.

“That was a 36-inch gas pipe that blew,” says Gary Hogan, a member of the Fort Worth Gas Drilling Task Force that’s trying to come up with some ordinances to better regulate safety and environmental impacts related to gas drilling in the Barnett Shale geological formation that lies below 19 counties in North Texas. These include both Dallas and Tarrant County, which covers Fort Worth. But it is what locals call “the Fort,” with its large rail yards and more suburban-style layout, which has become the test case for urban drilling.

“We’ve got 36-inch gas pipes running all over the place under the city, and we’re going to have a lot more soon,” Hogan says. “I don’t want to think about what that would have meant if it had happened here.”

As it was, the explosion, in a rural area, left no one hurt. But the same explosion, occurring downtown, would have been devastating. So would dozens of other gas well and pipeline explosions that have rocked Texas in the last year. It was just one more grim reminder that what residents were told when the landmen first came knocking on Fort Worth’s doors a few years back offering money for mineral rights was not the whole story of gas well drilling.

What wasn’t told includes everything from the number of trucks needed to put up a rig and drill a well—and the damage they do to street—to the thousands of miles of new pipelines that will soon be laid under our city, and the fact that eminent domain can be used to secure the land in which to lay them.

“There’s so much we weren’t told, it’s hard to know where to begin,” says Liane Janovsky, a lawyer who became an activist in her Ryan Place historic neighborhood in South Fort Worth two years ago.

Who knew that odorless gas would be running through pipelines beneath city streets, or that those pipelines corrode from the inside becoming more dangerous the older they get? Who knew that gas companies would condemn private property and even homes to secure convenient pipeline routes? Or that compressor stations—where water and other by-products of drilling are removed from the natural gas—would dot the city, and that they give off poisonous gas and need to run 24-7 at loud decibel levels? And who could have guessed that some of the things that give the Fort her charm—like the Trinity Trees, an historic grove on the banks of the Trinity River, partially destroyed to make way for gas wells last January—would come under the gun? Or that despite a 600-foot automatic protective spacing between well heads and homes, landowners platting out new housing developments would permit wells to be drilled prior to the homes going up—putting new homeowners as close as 200 feet to a potentially explosive well?

The fact is that John Q Public keeps discovering new and disturbing elements to the business of gas wells. By the time 8,000 wells have been dug within Loop 820—the city core—residents fear Fort Worth will not be the city they once knew. More than 880 have been drilled since 2005 within the Loop, more than 650 were approved in 2008, more than 1,500 are in the pipeline for approval, and more than 5,000 have been broached

Janovsky got involved right after she discovered that eight gas wells were planned along the 8th Ave. train tracks, just across the street from her neighborhood’s stately and historic gates. At the time she was against the drilling for a number of reasons: increased traffic, noise pollution, roads being ruined, home devaluation, and, scariest of all, the possibility of explosions if train sparks come in contact with leaking gas. Now, despite those wells having been moved under community pressure away from the historic neighborhoods of Berkeley, Ryan Place and Mistletoe Heights (and into poorer areas), Janovsky remains incensed at the drillers’ arrogance.

“I don’t think the average citizen knew that this was in the pipeline when Ken Barr was mayor, as far back as maybe 2001 or 2002. I asked Frank Moss, the city councilman from District 5 [1998-2004 and 2007-present], why we didn’t do more to prepare the urban core for this sort of intense drilling. And he says that when the gas companies were discussing city drilling they only discussed rural city areas and he didn’t know they were interested in inner city drilling. So nobody planned anything.”

Janovsky says she is frustrated about a lot to do with the Barnett Shale exploitation, from the leasing of mineral rights right to delivering the gas. “The average person knows nothing about mineral rights laws. So when those landmen came into neighborhoods where people had no experience, those people didn’t know the gas companies couldn’t take their minerals by eminent domain. Yet many landmen told people they could, just to bully them into signing. People were taken advantage of; they didn’t know how to negotiate with these companies and landmen. They didn’t even know they could negotiate.”

For the novice who’s never been around drilling, mineral rights are often not even a consideration when purchasing a house or land. But in Texas, subsurface mineral rights trump surface rights every time, and if you’ve bought a dream house without knowing that the previous owner kept the mineral rights, you might wake up to discover that a gas company has moved onto your property and is setting up a rig there. Or putting an access road to a rig on your property.

Robert West of the Hills of Gilmore Creek subdivision discovered just how that worked when he returned from an out-of-town trip in 2005 to discover that gas drillers had put a 300-by-400-foot drill pad (cleared area for a well, including waste pond and trailers for workers) on his six acres, taking about half of it to drill two wells, and not offering anything in return. Adding insult to injury, he’s still stuck paying the taxes on that land. In West’s case, he convinced the appraisal district that his property value has gone done, and they reduced his taxes. For one year. The next year he had to go back and get the reduction again. And he’ll probably have to do that every year for the next 50 years.

The next set of issues deals with the leases. Gas leases are trickier than they look. On the face of it, you sign a paper that gives gas companies three-to-five years to begin exploration and drilling in your area, called a pool. In return you get a signing “bonus”—which has skyrocketed from $200 per acre in rural areas just four years ago to over $25,000 per acre in urban areas—and then receive monthly royalty checks if the well or wells produce. “Mailbox money” is how the landmen put it. Pool size can vary from a minimum of 20 acres to hundreds of acres, and your royalty share will be determined by how many square feet of the pool area you own. In urban areas that will probably come to $20-$50 per well per month. Before taxes and before any gas company fees the fine print in your lease makes you responsible for.

But it’s not as simple as that always. Some landmen (the brokers who get residents to sign the leases and then sell them to the gas companies for a profit) don’t pay the royalties they’ve promised—as discovered by dozens and perhaps hundreds of people who signed with a company called TriStar Gas Partners, LLD. And though that frees the landowner to sign with someone else, it generally takes hiring a lawyer and months of work to actually get the original lease back.

Even when everything is fine, collecting royalties is sometimes difficult. Mortgage companies, who own the deed to your house, have the right of first refusal on any and all monies made from your property. As a rule, if a person is paying their mortgage on time, the banks and mortgage companies let the monies generated from things like gas wells go to the homeowner. But some companies charge a fee to the homeowner for filing what’s called a Subordination of Deed of Trust allowing the homeowner to collect. This can run into several hundred dollars—often more than the homeowner stands to make from the royalties. And some banks prevent a homeowner from collecting royalties at all.

“The issue,” says Tom Fleischer, a Ft. Worth attorney who works with business and real estate litigation, “is that there’s no incentive for mortgage companies to sign the subordination. They don’t have to by law, and from their point of view you’re selling off some of the value of the surety they have, which include your home and mineral rights.”

“That’s one that’s starting to come up more and more,” says Hogan. “Anything you do to your property that may effect the value, you’re supposed to notify the lender of your actions, and they say yea or nay. Let’s say you wanted to turn your house into a lease property, they would want to know. And with gas wells, it’s a mess. Some mortgage companies want the royalty money paid to them; some companies are keeping the royalty money in an escrow account for clients who have a history of paying late. Some companies won’t sign off on a subordination at all, leaving the money in limbo. I always tell people—and I’m not a lawyer by any means—that they should check with their mortgage company to find out what their policy is before they ever sign a lease. Cause people are going to find out just how hard it is to actually get their hands on their royalty money as more of these wells go online.”

Threatened Water Resources
Once the leases are signed and the acreage pooled, drilling begins. With that comes its own set of issues that few in the Fort were aware of. Millions of gallons of water are needed to help drill and then frac the well to release the gas trapped in the shale. The water is hauled in by trucks weighing 80,000 pounds that have destroyed city streets and state highways, and as yet Fort Worth doesn’t even have a plan in place for getting monies from the companies to repair them. Susan Alanis, director of planning and development for the city, told the Weekly that “operators are required to post a bond that the city can call on if there is truck damage.” She adds that the process was “very complicated.”

Michael Peters, the TxDot spokesman for the Fort Worth area says the state has no regulations concerning road damage fees either. “I will say that the Barnett Shale has severely stressed our roadways statewide, but any sort of fee would have to be set by the state legislature.”

State Representative Lon Burnam (D-Fort Worth) says that behind-the-scenes work to begin to address the impact the Barnett Shale has had on TxDot roadways has begun in preparation for the upcoming legislative session. “Without naming names, I’ve begun talking to Republicans and Democrats alike about a package of legislation to address legitimate public interests and concerns on a number of issues that have come up because of the Barnett Shale, but which legislation has thus far not addressed.” Those issues, he says, relate not only to TxDot, but to the state Railroad Commission—which overseas gas and oil drilling and production in the state—and to water pollution as well.

Another issue concerning roads is the number of over-sized loads on small roads and the number of rigs utilizing relatively raw drivers because of the demand. Unfortunately, finding out how many accidents have involved gas company drivers is not possible, as neither the Fort Worth police, the Tarrant County Sheriff’s Department or the Texas Department of Transportation keep such records. Anecdotal evidence suggests it’s not an insignificant number, however.

Several insurance companies contacted for this story says that information was proprietary and wouldn’t respond further.

Other issues, like noise and sound and dust pollution caused by well drilling, are often temporary—lasting the month or so it takes to drill a well. But what people weren’t told and didn’t know was that gas companies will often return to the same pad site repeatedly to drill new wells—so that month of hell might be repeated several times over the course of a year as rigs become available.

The real issues involving the drilling process include water, waste and danger. Water issues range from acquiring the 3-5 million gallons needed per well—it’s taken from a range of sources, including the city of Fort Worth, Tarrant County and private wells—to disposing of the waste water.

The majority of Fort Worth shale water probably comes from private wells, either drilled on site or purchased from private homeowners. The Texas “capture” rule allows anyone to capture as much water as they can, whether from streams crossing their land or wells they’ve dug. In many areas of the state, Groundwater Protection Districts have been set up to monitor and regulate the water supply, but the Texas Water Code exempts wells used exclusively for oil and gas purposes from that regulation.

“Water is always a concern,” says Dr. Billy Caldwell, a geologist and consultant to oil and gas companies, “because without it you have nothing. So you don’t want to keep punching holes in the ground and taking it from there. To that end, I think Fort Worth is going to have some success with using sewage water for fraccing wells. But there is nothing better than simply reusing water rather than capturing ground water or water from an aquifer.” Some companies have been moving in this direction, he says. “Devon’s been working on recycling well water and I hope they can get it working completely.”

Still, Caldwell admits that until those strategies become large-scale realities, water use by shale drillers will remain an issue. But while depleting the water tables in the region is a concern, the bigger problem is the disposal of it once it’s been used. Freshwater that’s used both in the drilling and later fraccing processes—short for fracturing, or forcing water and sand and chemicals into the shale, which releases the natural gas trapped in it—flows back up the bore full of sand and salt and drilling chemicals. The gas companies routinely refer to this water as salt water, but “it’s really toxic waste,” says Jim Popp, who recently won a case against the permitting of an injection well—the wells where the gas water is dumped—in Wise County. “When it comes to injection wells, we were simply lied to by the gas companies. We were told they were salt water injection wells, but they’re not. There are at least 17 different chemicals in that water, including benzene. They’re toxic waste injection wells. If they were called what they really are, no one would have let them be put in place.”

Water wells in Chico and Panola Counties were contaminated by faulty injection wells, and Popp sees the potential for the same in Fort Worth. “Right now, the companies operating in Fort Worth are bringing their waste out here to the injection wells in Wise and elsewhere, but nobody here wants that toxic waste except the owners of those injection wells. If Fort Worth wants the gas money so badly, they should be able to live with the waste it produces.”

At the moment, only one injection well has been permitted in Fort Worth, and a moratorium is in place on others. And while that well, owned by Chesapeake, is not supposed to be utilized at the moment, residents of the east Fort Worth area where it’s located claim that water trucks continually enter the property weighted down and leave looking as though they’ve been emptied.

“People don’t understand is how dangerous this stuff is,” says Popp. “Several water separators have blown up in the area when lightning struck them. In another case a water tanker blew up when a driver waiting his turn to empty his truck lit a cigarette and blew up three trucks. When was the last time you saw salt water blow up?”

Popp isn’t exaggerating. After a number of explosions involving well waste water—at least a few of which caused deaths—the Federal Chemical Safety Board classified it as a flammable material.

That same toxic water, generally held in pits at the well site until it can be trucked away, has been found in unlined pits or pits in which the lining was torn on dozens of sites throughout Tarrant and nearby counties—which means a lot of it is seeping into the groundwater.

The only monitoring of well waste water is done by the Railroad Commission—as gas and oil companies are exempt from both the federal Safe Drinking Water Act and the Clean Water Act under new regulations promulgated by the Bush administration. Worse, the Texas Auditor’s office says that injection well monitoring is done mostly on the honor system.

Another issue concerning water involves the actual fraccing process. In many instances throughout the Barnett Shale region, homeowners dependent on private water wells have seen their water discolored and starting to smell of sulphur after wells have been bored. In a recent case in Hill County, three homeowners suddenly discovered hydrocarbons in their well water, which killed several animals. The water cannot even be used for lawn watering much less for cooking, washing dishes or showering. To date, gas companies almost universally deny that their operations have caused any of these problems. Affected homeowners repeatedly told the Weekly that gas company representatives have told them that the companies are prepared to tie them up in litigation for a good long expensive time if they choose to sue.

“Big gas companies never want to affect ground water,” says Caldwell. “But anytime you’re dealing with drilling wells you’re going to have occasional accidents and water contamination. That’s just a fact of life. What’s important is to discover them and get those waters cleaned up. Of course, even if you do, you’re liable to have that sulfur smell in the water for a good long time.”

Caldwell added that the big Barnett players like XTO, Chesapeake, Devon and Encana work hard to prevent contamination. “But certainly those accidents are going to occur occasionally anyway.”

The drilling of the well itself poses its own problems. When gas wells—which are head over heels more dangerous than oil wells—are drilled out in the countryside, leaks and explosions, even large ones, frequently do little damage other than to the ground surface or the operators equipment. But as drilling is done in urban areas, those risks increase considerably. The 2006 death of Robert Dale Gayan, 49, in a well explosion while working on a rig in nearby Forest Hill brought home the potential danger to Fort Worth, and Mayor Montcreif immediately asked that the distance between well bores and homes in Fort Worth be increased from 300 to 600 feet.

Apart from explosions, gas leaks have forced evacuations in several nearby areas, and even water separator tanks on well sites have exploded when struck by lightning, despite the use of lightning arrestors.

Pipeline Threats
As if all of those elements most residents were not aware of when the landmen dangled mailbox money the way Eve dangled an apple weren’t bad enough, the worst is yet to come. It’s coming in the form of pipelines, particularly the gathering lines that are needed to connect gas at the well head and get it to transmission lines that carry the gas to compressor stations where it’s cleaned and compressed into high pressure dry gas and sent to users.

Jerry Lobdill, a retired physicist and chemical engineer, estimates that there will be at least 175 miles of gathering lines that will have to be put under Fort Worth inside Loop 820, “and the reality is that there will probably be twice that number.”

Those lines will be carrying what is called “wet gas”—gas that’s been through a water separator at the well head but which still contains water and salt and chemicals. “The problem with those lines,” explained Greg Hughes of the Coalition for a Reformed Drilling Ordinance (CREDO), a citizen’s group trying to secure a moratorium on new gas drilling within Fort Worth, “is that they are carbon steel and they corrode from the inside. Those pipelines have corrosion protection on the outside that prevents rust from occurring between the pipe and the earth, but there is nothing to prevent rust from occurring inside the lines. There are mechanical devices that you can run inside your lines called ‘smart pigs’ which can detect corrosion after it occurs, but to stop it you would have to halt gas in the line, dig up the pipe and replace it, a very expensive proposition.”

Based on the major explosions that have occurred in the Barnett Shale zone over the last several years, Lobdill says that the simple mathematics of having that many miles of wet gas lines running under a city with 3,000 wells is that “we can expect a major incident every six months.”

That is a frightening number. Even if he’s wrong by the power of 10, we could still expect a major incident every five years. And if a pipeline in the country goes, it’s often a stand-alone pipe. In Fort Worth, an explosion in one line is more than likely to set off further explosions in the other lines running parallel to it—as well as destroy water, sewage and electrical utility lines running under the same streets.

“And what if it’s not an explosion, but just a leak?” asked Task Force member Gary Hogan. “They’re putting unodorized gas under the city streets in pipelines that are not platted with the city so if anything should go wrong it would be a disaster. Our hazmat people won’t even know which way to evacuate people.”

Susan Alanis, Fort Worth’s director of planning and development, told the Weekly that platting of pipelines is not required to be provided to the city—only the property owner and the Railroad Commission. But she says that “because there is a little lag time in accessing the platting records from the Railroad Commission, we’re looking at the [gas and pipeline] companies having to provide as-built drawings to us as their pipelines are put in place.”

A retired high-profile Houston attorney who worked for more than 20 years in the pipeline industry and asked that his name not be used, says it’s just crazy to put wet gas beneath Ft. Worth, and even crazier to have wet, unodorized gas. He told the story of a Houston man who lived on a line a company he worked with had built and one cold morning “it leaked and a man walked into his house, flipped on his light and his house exploded, killing him. The same thing happened to two little girls I remember.”

He told the story of the New London school gas explosion in which unodorized gas seeped into the school building in 1937. “Children had been nauseated for several days but no one could figure out what was causing it. Well, there was an unodorized gas leak and when a janitor turned on an electric switch the gas ignited, blowing up the school and exploding 300 children.”

Jim Bradbury, an attorney and another member of the Gas Drilling Task Force says that the issue of unodorized gas came up at a task force meeting. “The oil company representatives says it was problematic to odorize the gas at the wellhead because the odorization would foul the compressor station equipment. Someone else from the industry noted that since compressors release some of the gas they’re processing you would have too many ‘false positives’ if people smelled odorized gas. But I ask, what’s the cost of a false negative?”

Mayor Mike Montcrief subsequently took that issue off the task force’s agenda and gave it to the city staff to handle.

Locals Left With the Mess
“One of the pipeline issues that’s been bothering us,” says former city councilman Clyde Picht, a member of the CREDO coalition, “is what’s happens to the wells when the big companies lose interest?”

Picht and many others who want a moratorium in well permitting in Fort Worth until the issue can be properly looked at, is concerned about what happens 10 years down the road. “When those wells stop producing enough, Chesapeake will head back to Oklahoma and sell them to a mid-sized company. They’ll run them for some time but finally they’ll be sold to some cut-rate company that won’t check the pipeline at all.”

Gary Hogan notes that homeowners oughtn’t forget about repercussions from leaks or explosions, either in the wells themselves or the pipelines moving their product. “I predict that if we ever do have blowouts and neighborhoods affected—even if they’re not catastrophic events—that the insurance companies are not going to sit on their thumbs. They’re going to send out notices that if you’re within a certain area of a well or pipeline they’ll either not cover you for your losses or they’ll give you a new premium and maybe even a deductable. And that’s going to come out of the $15,000 or so in royalties an average Ft. Worth homeowner can expect over the next 30 years.”

And if pipeline explosions and leaks weren’t discussed by the landmen and gas company public relations flacks who came calling, you can bet that the gas companies’ ability to secure pipeline routes by eminent domain certainly wasn’t. That issue is new and galvanizing people around the city who see a great deal of difference between putting a gas line through a cow pasture in the country and a front lawn in the inner city. The gas companies and their pipeline subsidiaries, however, have the same right to condemn property as public utilities for the placement of gas lines.

That issue was in the national spotlight for some weeks as Jerry Horton, an elderly Carter Avenue resident, held out against permitting Chesapeake’s pipeline branch, Texas Midstream Gas Services, to put a pipeline under her lawn. When she couldn’t come to an agreement with the company, she was threatened with eminent domain. On Aug. 21, shortly after Horton came to terms with Texas Midstream, the company filed suit to condemn property belonging to five other Carter Ave. homeowners for the same pipeline.

Sometimes the arrogance goes further than that. On June 21, Red Oak Energy Partners filed a suit against the city of Flower Mound in state district court over Flower Mound’s refusal to grant variances to the gas company for a proposed well site. Says one city official, “We knew it was going to happen somewhere. The gas companies simply believe they have absolute rights to these minerals, and things like cities and ordinances and the rights of citizens come second to those. And if it wasn’t Flower Mound, it would have been somewhere else.”

“Everybody is wondering what the next surprise is going to be that they haven’t told us about,” says Susan de los Santos, a member of the Gas Drilling Task Force. “And that distrust has been earned by the gas companies because of their behavior to this point.”

One of those surprises probably won’t come for at least another 10 or 15 years, until the big companies begin selling off their wells. That’s when they’ll begin drilling into a second strata of the shale, one deeper than the current one. It’s not something the gas companies have discussed publicly.

“At one of the gas drilling meetings,” says Hogan, “I overheard the oil reps discussing a second strata and asked what they were talking about. They says we shouldn’t worry, that they weren’t interested in the deeper shale and so forth. Not yet, anyway. But they will be if it’s valuable and then they’ll be back drilling again and the whole cycle will start over again.”

Hogan suggests that if you haven’t signed a lease yet, you’d better make sure it has a clause that says it’s only for one strata—otherwise you’ll be tied into today’s bonus and royalty rates when and if they come back and drill new wells.

And long-term environmental and health issues have hardly been considered at all in the rush for the gas. “What effect will the injection wells have on our water?” Asked Don Young, founder of Fort Worth Citizens Against Neighborhood Drilling Ordinance (CanDo) who has been telling people for years to Just Say No to gas drilling. “What about a major accident? And what about the physical and psychological impacts on people? We have no idea what those will be. What will the impact be on your health by having to put up with more noise, more pollution, more trucks on the road? The only escape will be the cultural center of the city. Around it will be an industrial nightmare.”

Young’s complaints and protests have mostly fallen on deaf ears. Gary Hogan says gas company representatives have tried to marginalize Young, treating them like kooks for sounding the alarm while people were still dreaming of royalty riches and before the reality of gas drilling began to sink in. For Fort Worth, that didn’t happen until established historic district communities—Berkeley, Mistletoe Heights and Ryan Place—realized the drillers were taking aim at their homes and planning on putting rigs in their back yards.

“I think people all over the city began to wake up when those neighborhoods got together and says no,” says De Los Santos. “I think that turned the tide on understanding that mineral rights’ owners have some power.”

Eventually, there was enough noise from the public that Mayor Mike Moncrief formed the Gas Drilling Task Force to make recommendations to the city council to revise Ft. Worth’s gas well ordinance. However, that experience is proving frustrating for several of the non-gas-industry people who represent the Fort’s citizenry on the Task Force.

“Soon as we started talking about the problems and hazards of pipelines, the mayor took it out of the task force’s hands and says the pipeline recommendations would be made by city staff instead,” says Bradbury.

Moncrief did the same with the gas companies’ public-notice policy and road impact. And even with the issues left in the hand of the task force, its make-up is so lopsided in favor of gas company representatives and those who want urban drilling that the companies generally get their way on what recommendations will be made to the city council.

“I thought I could make a difference on this task force,” says Hogan, a veteran of the first task force as well. “But it’s hard to make a difference when you”ve got a deck stacked against you.”

During August that frustration reached a point where some citizens suggested to the five members of the task force who are regularly voted down by gas industry reps that they simply walk away. “Some people suggested that we resign in protest, explaining that the gas industry controls the task force. But when we talked it over we thought that Mayor Moncrief might just say we walked from the table and have his staff write up the ordinance. So we decided to stay.”

“The task force should have had voting power resting with the citizens on the panel, with the experts being there to give input regarding the wells,” says De Los Santos. “But that’s hot how it was formed. So I think you can look forward to a minority report from the citizens who represent the people of Fort Worth and in it we will make the recommendations that we feel should go into the gas drilling ordinance.”

She was asked if she thought a minority report would have any impact on the council members’ final decisions.

“I think the council will have to take it into consideration if our voices are echoed by community leaders and the public. The people associated with CREDO are highly visible and influential. Three of them are former city council members. If they and the presidents of neighborhood associations and the League of Women Voters come to council and say they agree with what the minority report recommends, I don’t think the council will have any choice but to take it under advisement.”

But will they be willing to buck the system to make recommendations the gas drilling companies don’t like?

Lon Burnam is skeptical. “The public needs to understand that any time you have a 500-pound gorilla in the room—and that gorilla is the gas companies—you don’t have to spell it out to the city council. There is an implied threat that if you don’t do things the gorilla’s way, you’ll need to hit the highway.”

So does Fort Worth just give up?

“No,” says Burnam. “In Fort Worth the gorilla doesn’t always win. There are moments of democratic impulse here and I think this is one of them. This is non-ideological. It’s brought together the politically right-wing and left-wing because this is about protecting your home.

“This is a runaway train and it is always harder to stop a runaway train than it is to prevent it in the first place. And right now we’ve got a mayor who is totally aligned with the gas industry. But the city has a right to establish a moratorium to see how it’s going to address this gas boom.”

“The more we learn about what’s happening and what’s going to happen,” says Hogan, “the more it looks like Don Young with his ‘Just Say No to Urban Drilling’ was right all along. Unfortunately, it’s too late for that. It’s here now. But let’s do this in the right way. And I don’t think it’s too late for that, to make the companies do their drilling in a way that will minimize impact on health, safety and the environment. If we don’t, who’s going to want to live here? It’ll be a total loss for the average citizen.”

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This story first appeared Sept. 10 in the Fort Worth Weekly.

RESOURCES

Coalition for a Reformed Drilling Ordinance (CREDO)
http://www.fw-credo.com

Fort Worth Citizens Against Neighborhood Drilling Ordinance (FWCanDo!)
http://www.fwcando.org

Oil and Gas Industry Exempt From New Clean Water Rules
New York Times, March 8, 2003

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Reprinted by World War 4 Report, Dec. 1, 2008
Reprinting permissible with attribution

Continue ReadingTHE NEW TEXAS GAS WAR 

IRAQ’S CIVIL RESISTANCE

Eclipsed from the headlines by the ongoing carnage in Iraq, there is an active civil resistance in the country that opposes the occupation, the regime it protects, and the jihadist and Baathist “resistance” alike. This besieged opposition—under threat of repression and assassination—is fighting to keep alive elementary freedoms for women, leading labor struggles against Halliburton and other U.S. contractors, opposing privatization of the country’s oil and resources, and demanding a secular future for Iraq. They note that what they call “political Islam” dominates both sides in the Iraq war—the collaborationist regime and the armed “resistance.”

See our full reports:

IS THE U.S. PULLING THE PLUG ON IRAQI OIL WORKERS?
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IRAQI LABOR LEADERS SPEAK
Their Fight for Workers and Against the Occupation
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IRAQ’S CIVIL RESISTANCE
The Secular Left Opposition Stands Up
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FROM BAGHDAD TO TOKYO
Japanese Anti-War Movement Hosts Iraqi Civil Resistance
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Iraqi Secular Forces Struggle Against US and Religious Fundamentalists
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See our recent posts on Iraq’s civil resistance:

Baghdad: three killed in Green Zone protests
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Iraq: protesters camp out in Green Zone
/node/14792

Iraq: protesters demand new government
/node/14765

Mass protests shake Baghdad regime
/node/14231

Resistance to ISIS mounts in Syria, Iraq
/node/13401

Charges dropped against Iraq oil union leader
/node/12767

Iraq: civil resistance leader assassinated
/node/12733

Iraq: workers protest “apartheid-like” conditions at oil fields
/node/10451

Iraq drafts harsh anti-protest law as Baghdad gets Tahrir Square movement
/node/10124

Iraq: thousands of protesters defy curfew
/node/9585

Iraq: UN concerned over repression of protesters
/node/9562

Iraq gets a Tahrir Square
/node/9528

Iraq: deadly sreeet clashes in Kurdistan
/node/9505

Protests spread to Iraq —but not Syria (yet)
/node/9428

Iraq: police raid electricity unions
/node/8874

Iraq: protests mount to “recolonization” of Rumaila oil field
/node/7943

Iraq: Basra oil pipeline workers score labor victory
/node/7299

Iraq: labor conference pledges to fight for workers’ rights, against privatization
/node/7118

Iraqi unions announce new confederation at international labor conference
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Iraqi civil resistance statement on International Women’s Day
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Iraqi workers march against Gaza aggression
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Iraq unions call for international labor conference in Irbil
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Iraq: civil resistance leader injured in Kirkuk terror blast
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Campaign to stop polygamy in Iraqi Kurdistan
/node/6391

Iraq’s civil resistance to Obama: end the occupation
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Iraq: Basra workers march against austerity
/node/6225

Iraq: workers protest IMF policies
/node/6210

Interviews:

Samir Adil, president of the Iraqi Freedom Congress, June 2006
Houzan Mahmoud  of the Iraqi Women’s Rights Coalition, June 2006
Yanar Mohammed of the Organization of Women’s Freedom in Iraq, August 2004
Khayal Ibrahim of the Organization of Women’s Freedom in Iraq and Samir Noory of the Worker Communist Party of Iraq, May 2004
Interview with Issam Shukri of the Union of Unemployed in Iraq, May 2004

Continue ReadingIRAQ’S CIVIL RESISTANCE 

ASSAM IN FLAMES

Jihad and Ethnic Conflict Heat Up India-Bangladesh Borderlands

by Nava Thakuria, World War 4 Report

The October 30 synchronized terrorist attacks in the northeastern India state of Assam left more than 70 dead and authorities wondering if the culprits were the state’s armed separatist movement or Islamist militants who infiltrated in from neighboring Bangladesh. The attacks came weeks after a wave of deadly clashes between Bangladeshi undocumented immigrants in Assam and the Bodo indigenous people—two historically marginalized groups that have been pitted against each other. While little noted by the world media, the situation in Assam grabbed national attention in India—with the Hindu nationalist BJP cast in the ironic role of defending the state’s tribal peoples. Journalist Nava Thakuria offers this exclusive report.

The influx of migrants from Bangladesh to Assam has been a matter of concern in Assamese society for a long time. The clashes that broke out in central Assam in October brought home the fears of the region’s indigenous people in the face of a growing number of undocumented Bangladeshi immigrants on their traditional lands.

The hostilities between the indigenous Bodo people and Bangladeshi settlers—primarily in Udalguri and Darrang districts and the overlapping Bodo Territorial Autonomous District (BTAD)—left over 50 dead and rendered 150,000 homeless. The violence also resulted in the torching of more than 500 houses belonging to both the communities.

India and Bangladesh have more than 4,000 kilometers of porous border. There are wild speculations regarding the number of Bangladeshis living in Assam and the rest of India’s Northeast. Some say it amounts to more than 16 million migrants.

In 1998, then-governor of Assam, Lt. Gen. (retired) SK Sinha, sent a report to New Delhi describing the volatile situation emerging in the state. He argued that if the demographic issue was not addressed, the Assamese culture would soon be extinct.

“As a result of the population movement from Bangladesh, the specter looms large of the indigenous people of Assam being reduced to a minority in their home state. Their cultural survival will be in jeopardy, their political control will be weakened and their employment opportunities will be undermined. This silent and insidious demographic invasion of Assam may result in the loss of geostrategically vital district of Lower Assam (on the border of Bangladesh). The influx of these illegal migrants is turning these districts into a Muslim-majority region. It will then only be a matter of time when a demand for their merger with Bangladesh may be made,” the governor elaborated.

The problem has persisted for a long time. India’s 1931 Census Report stated: “Probably the most important event during the last twenty five years, which seems likely to alter permanently the whole future of Assam and to destroy surely more than what Burmese invaders did in 1820, the whole structure of Assamese culture and civilisation, has been the invasion of a vast horde of land-hungry Bengali immigrants mostly Muslim from the districts of East Bengal and in particular from Mymensingh.”

In fact, Muhammad Ali Jinnah, the father of Pakistani nation, claimed Assam as a part of East Pakistan (now Bangladesh) during the partition in 1947. He used the argument that the 1941 census in Assam (then Greater Assam) showed the population of Hindus was only 42%. However, this figure excluded the tribal peoples, who are neither Hindu nor Muslim, but followers of their own indigenous traditions.

The All Assam Students’ Union led a movement in ’80s demanding the deportation of undocumented Bangladeshi immigrants from Assam. The agitation that swept the entire state came to an end in 1985 after signing an accord with New Delhi. Known as the Assam Accord, it called for detection and deportation of Bangladeshis who arrived after March 25, 1971 (when the mass exodus from the war in Bangladesh began). But the government agency admits that only a few undocumented immigrants from Bangladesh were actually deported.

Initially the violence in Udalguri and Darrang was accepted as another communal clash of the kind recently seen in may places in India. A different dimension emerged when the local residents reported witnessing the hoisting of Pakistani flags in at least two places in affected areas on the eve of the violence. There were reports in Assam’s newspapers—which were picked up by national television—that some apparent settlers shouted pro-Pakistani slogans after hoisting the flags. The reports sparked an outcry across India.

While ruling Congress Party leaders initially denied that the Pakistani flags were raised, the right-opposition BJP seized on the issue. Former Assam MP and BJP national vice-president Bijoya Chakraborty termed the flag incidents as shocking. She asserted that Assam’s Congress Party Chief Minister Tarun Gogoi had failed to respond to the provocation and should be removed immediately.

Following the BJP’s lead, All Assam Students’ Union and the All Bodo Students’ Union representatives also visited the affected localities and expressed their outrage that “the indigenous people of Assam were forced to leave their residences to take refuge in the relief camps.” AASU adviser Samujjal Bhattacharya accused Gogoi of compromising India’s national security by protecting those involved in the incident.

Dilip Saikia, the Assam state president of the Bharatiya Janata Yuba Morcha, the youth wing of the BJP, raised the specter Islamist militant infiltration. “The recent violence in Udalguri and Darrang districts was nothing but a conspiracy of the Islamic fundamentalists to chase away the indigenous people and provide space for the settlement of illegal Bangladeshi immigrants,” he asserted.

After visiting the affected areas, Saikia also attacked local politicians—of both the Gogoi administration and the Bodoland Territorial Council. He stated, “The BTAD chief Hagrama Mohilary and state ministers Himanta Biswa Sarma and Rockybul Hussain have put the indigenous population of Assam on way to a bleak future for the sake of votes.”

The Assam Public Works (APW), a civil organization linked to the Assam separatist movement, held protests in the state capital, Guwahati, at which Pakistani flags were burned. the APW also termed the violence the “handiwork of HuJI and other fundamentalist forces.” APW leader Abhijit Sarma argued that it was a retaliation to the recent killing of seven Harkat-ul-Jihad-al-Islami militants who had apparently infiltrated from Bangladesh by Indian soldiers in Dhubri, Assam. The army said the HuJI militants were on their way to Guwahati for terrorist activities.

Chief Minister Gogoi initially argued that the raised banners were not Pakistani flags, but was pennants related to Eid festival. But Gogoi took a week to visit the location where the flag was seen in the early hours of Oct. 4. By then the region had exploded into violence.

The violence erupted with a small incident of cattle stealing by apparent Bangladeshis from a Bodo village. The flame of communal violence rapidly engulfed the adjacent areas and finally it spread widely in Udalguri, Darrang, Baksa and Chirang sectors of the Bodoland Autonomous District.

The state government tried its best to bring the situation under control. Thousands of police, army and paramilitary troops were deployed in the strife-torn areas. Army choppers were also engaged for air surveillance. A curfew was clamped down for more than a week, though it was relaxed during the daytime as the situation started improving. The government transferred the Udalguri deputy commissioner George Basumatary and suspended the Superintendent of Police Anup Kumar Singh for their failure to prevent the violence.

The situation turned worse when a Pakistani portal called Pakistan Daily carried an article entitled “Pakistan’s flag is a symbol of freedom in India” by one Ahmed Quraishi. Highlighting the hoisting of the Pakistani flag in Assam, the article described, “Pakistan’s media and intelligence agencies should project these incidents and gather support inside these Indian states as retaliation for Indian terrorism inside Pakistan’s Balochistan, tribal belt and other cities.” India’s BJP and other opposition parties quickly alleged that Pakistan’s ISI spy agency was involved in the flag incident.

But as politicians in India and Pakistan alike exploit the situation, Assam’s indigenous population remain in fear for their land and culture. The violence in Udalguri and Darrang highlighted their apprehensions loud and clear.

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Nava Thakuria is an independent journalist based in Guwahati, Assam. He writes widely for media outlets in Asia on socio-political issues in Northeast India, Burma, Bangladesh, Bhutan and Nepal.

RESOURCES

Bodoland Territorial Council
http://www.bodolandcouncil.org

“Pakistan’s Flag Is A Symbol Of Freedom In India” by Ahmed Quraishi, Pakistan Daily, Oct. 8
http://www.daily.pk/politics/politicalnews/7699

From our Daily Report:

India: separatists or jihadis behind Assam terror?
WW4 Report, Oct. 30, 2008
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Special to World War 4 Report, Nov. 1, 2008
Reprinting permissible with attribution

Continue ReadingASSAM IN FLAMES 

DARFUR AND SUDAN: A REVOLUTION IN THE MAKING

by Savo Heleta, Pambazuka News

In his review of recent events in the Sudanese Darfur crisis, Savo Heleta assesses the role of the Justice and Equality Movement (JEM) rebel group. With its explicit goal of overthrowing the current Omar Bashir regime, Heleta argues, the JEM represents a potentially revolutionary movement, one whose egalitarian, pro-justice manifesto will only come to fruition with the support of a broad range of regional players and influences.

In 2003, a conflict broke out in Sudan’s western province of Darfur between the mainly “African” rebels and the government forces and their proxy “Arab” militias. It is estimated that about 200,000 people have died in the conflict from fighting, disease, and starvation.

The UN and aid agencies estimate that over two million Darfurians, of a population of around six million, are living in refugee camps in Darfur and neighboring countries. Even though the majority of all deaths in Darfur occurred in 2003 and 2004, the conflict is nowhere near the end.

When the rebellion broke out, the two rebel movements, the Sudan Liberation Movement (SLM) and the Justice and Equality Movement (JEM), declared that their primary goals were to end the economic, social, and political marginalization of Darfur, the Sudanese province that has been completely neglected and marginalized since 1917, when it was annexed by the British colonial forces and added to Sudan.

After a few years of fighting and human suffering, the Sudanese government and one faction of the SLM signed the Darfur Peace Agreement in 2006, while another SLM faction and the JEM refused to sign. The signing of the DPA, instead of bringing peace, only intensified fighting and caused the humanitarian situation in Darfur to deteriorate.

When the Darfur Peace Agreement failed to bring peace and the government refused to deliver any of the provisions it pledged to implement, such as disarmament of the Janjaweed militias, protection of civilians, ceasefire, and deployment of UN/AU troops, the main aim of the Justice and Equality Movement became regime change.

The JEM’s manifesto calls for “justice and equality in place of social injustice and political tyranny; radical and comprehensive constitutional reform that would guarantee the regions their rights in ruling the country; basic services for every Sudanese, and balanced economic and human development in all regions of the country.”

In late 2006, the JEM leader Khalil Ibrahim said “we cannot bring peace to Darfur unless we change this government.” The JEM leadership believes that the current Sudanese regime is “the main obstacle to finding peace to the whole Sudan problem, not only Darfur.” One of the JEM commanders said in a recent interview that the JEM’s goal is to change the regime and make dramatic changes in Sudan, adding that “power and wealth must be shared equally in all the marginalized areas.”

In Darfur: The Ambiguous Genocide, Gerard Prunier argues that the change of the central government is perhaps the only way of solving the Darfur conflict and decades of marginalization of Sudan’s peripheries.

In the beginning of May 2008, the JEM forces mounted an attack on the Sudanese capital, the first attack by a Darfur rebel group outside Darfur. The attack failed, but showed the JEM’s determination to change the regime. Many analysts emphasize “the psychological importance of the attack,” adding that this is the first time in many decades that the fighting has reached the capital. Even though the JEM’s attack did not succeed, it exposed the “weakness of security in Khartoum and the vulnerability of the regime.”

Alex de Waal, the leading international expert on Sudan, described the JEM’s attack on the capital as a “bid for power.” He added that he believes that other rebel movements in Darfur “don’t share that ambition…they want peace for their places rather than wanting power in Khartoum for themselves.”

In the aftermath of the attack, the JEM’s leader Khalil Ibrahim said that this was “just a rehearsal for the attacks to come, and we will continue to attack till we change this regime.” Alex de Waal believes that the aim of the attack “was nothing less than taking power” and adds that Khalil Ibrahim “seems truly to believe that he can instigate a popular uprising of Sudan’s black majority” against the ruling elite in Khartoum.

Analysts say that the JEM’s leader possesses grand ambitions and growing military strength. Sharing the same ethnic background as the leadership of neighboring Chad, the JEM has been the main beneficiary of Chadian support for the Darfur rebels. This support has been the main reason the JEM “has become, militarily, the most powerful faction on the ground in Darfur.”

Rebellion is an armed struggle against an oppressive regime. Revolutions involve a defeat of a current regime through violent means, replacement by a new regime, and implementation of major political and/or socio-economic changes to the system. Revolutionary movements aim to overthrow a ruling regime, take power, and fundamentally change the structure of a society.

While many movements in Darfur are typical rebel movements, the Justice and Equality Movement has evolved into a revolutionary movement with a goal of overthrowing the current regime and fundamentally changing Sudan.

Considering the fact that every post-independence government of Sudan has been ruled by the members of northern “Arab” tribes—which represent only about 5% of the entire population and have spent the majority of development funds on the northern part of the country—the change proposed in the JEM’s manifesto would indeed be a profound, fundamental, and revolutionary change.

Only time will tell if the Justice and Equality Movement will be able to bring about revolutionary change in Sudan. This will depend on many factors, such as the ability to attract support in other parts of the country, cooperation with other rebel movements, finance, military power, international support, and, in the event of their victory, the implementation of substantial political and/or socioeconomic changes in the country.

Darfur and its people never mattered to the rulers of Sudan, from the British-Egyptian Condominium to the northern Sudanese elites that have ruled the country since independence. Perhaps something radical and revolutionary has to happen at last to change this protracted marginalization.

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Savo Heleta is a postgraduate student in conflict transformation and management at Nelson Mandela Metropolitan University in Port Elizabeth, South Africa. He is the author of Not my Turn to Die: Memoirs of a Broken Childhood in Bosnia (AMACOM, 2008).

This story first appeared Oct. 22 in Pambazuka News.

See also:

DARFUR: NOT A “CLASH OF CIVILIZATIONS”
Global Capital Connives with African Genocide
by Ba Karang, The Hobgoblin, UK
World War 4 Report, November 2007
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From our Daily Report:

Sudan: who abducted Chinese oil workers?
WW4 Report, Oct. 21, 2008
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Reprinted by World War 4 Report, Nov. 1, 2008
Reprinting permissible with attribution

Continue ReadingDARFUR AND SUDAN: A REVOLUTION IN THE MAKING 

BEHIND THE ECONOCATACLYSM

Globalization, Oil Shock and the Iraq War

by Vilosh Vinograd, World War 4 Report

On Sept. 29—perhaps to be remembered as Black Monday—a majority of House Republicans, and a minority of Democrats, voted down the $700 billion bailout bill. The stock market reacted with the first one-day trillion-dollar loss in Wall Street history—an 8.8% free fall, its biggest percentage decline since the 1987 crash. Only one stock in the index—Campbell Soup—finished higher.

Even the supposed pillars of stability which seemed poised to reap the gains of the recent turmoil were not immune. JP Morgan Chase—which had already acquired Bear Stearns investment bank and Washington Mutual savings & loan, with US tax-payers sweetening the deals to the tune of billions—closed $7.24 lower at $41, down 15 percent. Citigroup—the country’s largest banking institution, with JP Morgan in the number-two slot—was poised to acquire the banking assets of Wachovia Corp. in the big reshuffle. Wachovia lost more than 90% of its market value in the plunge. Bank of America—set to acquire Merrill Lynch—announced it was suing affiliates of the newly bankrupt Lehman Brothers for $500 million for failure to return money the bank provided as collateral. Global financier George Soros says the “global capitalist system… is…coming apart at the seams.”

Up to $3 trillion in financial assets have been wiped out in the crisis so far—and supposed free-market principles are being abandoned for a rapid centralization of power in federal hands to shore up the teetering edifice, a virtual melding of Wall Street and Washington. The Philippine radical academic Walden Bello writes in a primer on the crisis:

Wall Street [is] effectively nationalized, with the Federal Reserve and the Treasury Department making all the major strategic decisions in the financial sector and, with the rescue of the American International Group (AIG), the US government now runs the world’s biggest insurance company.

The bailout plan, drawn up by Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson, is dubbed the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP), and is the centerpiece of the proposed Emergency Economic Stabilization Act. It would give Paulson or his successor unprecedented powers. Under the plan, any firm selling assets to the government would have to give Washington the right to take an ownership stake in the firm. It would give the Treasury Secretary similar powers to cut deals with foreign banks. The left is concerned that the bill would bail out Wall Street but not “Main Street”—and even Republicans have had to adopt this rhetoric. For the right it is an embarrassment: a crash reversal of the long-repeated mantra that the “free market” would solve all problems. After a generation of neoliberal dogma and corporate globalization, these supposedly sacred principles are being abandoned by the administration with a vertiginous rapidity.

Globalization: the God that Failed

On the surface, the crisis is the bitter fruit of frenzied speculation and labyrinthine trickery—the endless artifice of Wall Street whiz-kids to keep milking profit out of bad debts. Writes Bello:

Financial speculators outsmarted themselves by creating more and more complex financial contracts like derivatives that would securitize and make money from all forms of risk—including exotic futures instruments as “credit default swaps” that enable investors to bet on the odds that the banks’ own corporate borrowers would not be able to pay their debts! This is the unregulated multitrillion dollar trade that brought down AIG.

And, in what Bello portrays as a vicious cycle, the deregulation ethic which led to the current crisis was itself a response to the deeper underlying crisis of capitalism:

The Wall Street meltdown is not only due to greed and to the lack of government regulation of a hyperactive sector. The Wall Street collapse stems ultimately from the crisis of overproduction that has plagued global capitalism since the mid-seventies.

Financialization of investment activity has been one of the escape routes from stagnation, the other two being neoliberal restructuring and globalization. With neoliberal restructuring and globalization providing limited relief, financialization became attractive as a mechanism to shore up profitability. But financialization has proven to be a dangerous road, leading to speculative bubbles that lead to the temporary prosperity of a few but which ultimately end up in corporate collapse and in recession in the real economy.

Deregulation was part of the general neoliberal doctrine:

Neoliberal restructuring took the form of Reaganism and Thatcherism in the North and Structural Adjustment in the South. The aim was to invigorate capital accumulation, and this was to be done by 1) removing state constraints on the growth, use, and flow of capital and wealth; and 2) redistribute income from the poor and middle classes to the rich on the theory that the rich would then be motivated to invest and reignite economic growth.

The problem with this formula was that in redistributing income to the rich, you were gutting the incomes of the poor and middle classes, thus restricting demand, while not necessarily inducing the rich to invest more in production.

Next was the move to open new markets and resources in the process to become known as globalization:

The second escape route global capital took to counter stagnation was “extensive accumulation” or globalization, or the rapid integration of semi-capitalist, non-capitalist, or precapitalist areas into the global market economy. Rosa Luxemburg, the famous German revolutionary economist, saw this long ago as necessary to shore up the rate of profit in the metropolitan economies. How? By gaining access to cheap labor, by gaining new, albeit limited, markets, by gaining new sources of cheap agricultural and raw material products, and by bringing into being new areas for investment in infrastructure. Integration is accomplished via trade liberalization, removing barriers to the mobility of global capital, and abolishing barriers to foreign investment.

China is, of course, the most prominent case of a non-capitalist area to be integrated into the global capitalist economy over the last 25 years.

To counter their declining profits, a sizable number of the Fortune 500 corporations have moved a significant part of their operations to China to take advantage of the so-called “China Price”—the cost advantage deriving from China’s seemingly inexhaustible cheap labor. By the middle of the first decade of the 21st century, roughly 40 to 50 per cent of the profits of US corporations were derived from their operations and sales abroad, especially China.

One ironic fruit of this strategy is the emergence of Asia and particularly China in a position of (limited) power over the US. Writes Bello in an analysis of Asia’s role in the current crisis:

Trillions of dollars of Asian public and private money are invested in US firms and property, with the five biggest Asian holders accounting for over half of all foreign investment in US government debt instruments. Funds from Asia have become a key prop of US government spending and the middle-class consumption that have become the driver of the American economy.

Singapore’s Temasek pumped over $4 billion into Merrill Lynch a few months ago—after driving a hard bargain. The China Investment Corporation (CIC) invested $5 billion in Morgan Stanley last December, but refused the crippled investment bank’s desperate plea to increase its share of the firm. The Korean Development Bank turned down the overtures of Lehman Brothers a week before the latter’s historic collapse into bankruptcy.

China is not likely to call in the chips any time soon:

With so much of Asia’s wealth relying on the stability of the US economy, there is not likely to be any precipitate move to abandon Wall Street securities and US Treasury bills.

Nonetheless, faced with this vulnerability vis-a-vis Asia and especially China, the US under George Bush embarked on reckless gambit to shore up unrivaled global hegemony—using its still unparalleled military supremacy to acquire strategic control of the world’s most critical oil reserves in the Persian Gulf.

Over the Edge: It’s the War, Stupid!

The financial crisis was brewing anyway, but the Iraq war and resultant oil shock helped preciptate it. Writing in The Guardian earlier this year, Nobel-prize winning economist Joseph Stiglitz found:

Underlying the US’s financial woes are three distinct but related problems. First, a debt crisis, exemplified by sub-prime mortgages, with millions of Americans with mortgages greater than the value of their house.

Second, with so many bad debts, and such uncertainty about their magnitude, there is a credit crunch. Banks don’t even know the extent of their own problems; how then can they have much confidence in lending to others?…

The third problem is macro-economic. The US has been sustained by a housing bubble, leading to a consumer binge. Household savings rates have fallen to zero. The Iraq war—and the soaring oil prices accompanying it—has depressed the economy. Money spent on oil or on Nepalese contractors in Iraq is money that isn’t being spent at home; these dollars don’t provide much stimulation for the economy.

Writing with Harvard’s Linda J. Bilmes in the Washington Post in March, Stiglitz sounded a similar warning:

There is no such thing as a free lunch, and there is no such thing as a free war. The Iraq adventure has seriously weakened the US economy, whose woes now go far beyond loose mortgage lending. You can’t spend $3 trillion—yes, $3 trillion—on a failed war abroad and not feel the pain at home.

Some people will scoff at that number, but we’ve done the math. Senior Bush administration aides certainly pooh-poohed worrisome estimates in the run-up to the war. Former White House economic adviser Lawrence Lindsey reckoned that the conflict would cost $100 billion to $200 billion; Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld later called his estimate “baloney.” Administration officials insisted that the costs would be more like $50 billion to $60 billion. In April 2003, Andrew S. Natsios, the thoughtful head of the US Agency for International Development, said on Nightline that reconstructing Iraq would cost the American taxpayer just $1.7 billion. Ted Koppel, in disbelief, pressed Natsios on the question, but Natsios stuck to his guns. Others in the administration, such as Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz, hoped that US partners would chip in, as they had in the 1991 Persian Gulf War, or that Iraq’s oil would pay for the damages.

The end result of all this wishful thinking? As we approach the fifth anniversary of the invasion, Iraq is not only the second longest war in US history (after Vietnam), it is also the second most costly—surpassed only by World War II.

Why doesn’t the public understand the staggering scale of our expenditures? In part because the administration talks only about the upfront costs, which are mostly handled by emergency appropriations. (Iraq funding is apparently still an emergency five years after the war began.) These costs, by our calculations, are now running at $12 billion a month—$16 billion if you include Afghanistan. By the time you add in the costs hidden in the defense budget, the money we’ll have to spend to help future veterans, and money to refurbish a military whose equipment and materiel have been greatly depleted, the total tab to the federal government will almost surely exceed $1.5 trillion.

But the costs to our society and economy are far greater. When a young soldier is killed in Iraq or Afghanistan, his or her family will receive a US government check for just $500,000 (combining life insurance with a “death gratuity”)—far less than the typical amount paid by insurance companies for the death of a young person in a car accident. The stark “budgetary cost” of $500,000 is clearly only a fraction of the total cost society pays for the loss of life—and no one can ever really compensate the families. Moreover, disability pay seldom provides adequate compensation for wounded troops or their families. Indeed, in one out of five cases of seriously injured soldiers, someone in their family has to give up a job to take care of them.

But beyond this is the cost to the already sputtering US economy. All told, the bill for the Iraq war is likely to top $3 trillion. And that’s a conservative estimate.

And all of this has been exacerbated by the oil shock, which is in large part also a fruit of the war:

Another worry: This war has been particularly hard on the economy because it led to a spike in oil prices. Before the 2003 invasion, oil cost less than $25 a barrel, and futures markets expected it to remain around there. (Yes, China and India were growing by leaps and bounds, but cheap supplies from the Middle East were expected to meet their demands.) The war changed that equation, and oil prices recently topped $100 per barrel.

While Washington has been spending well beyond its means, others have been saving—including the oil-rich countries that, like the oil companies, have been among the few winners of this war. No wonder, then, that China, Singapore and many Persian Gulf emirates have become lenders of last resort for troubled Wall Street banks, plowing in billions of dollars to shore up Citigroup, Merrill Lynch and other firms that burned their fingers on subprime mortgages. How long will it be before the huge sovereign wealth funds controlled by these countries begin buying up large shares of other US assets?

The Bush team, then, is not merely handing over the war to the next administration; it is also bequeathing deep economic problems that have been seriously exacerbated by reckless war financing. We face an economic downturn that’s likely to be the worst in more than a quarter-century.

In a classic case of imperial overstretch, the stratagem to extend global supremacy may prove to have backfired horribly.

John McCain: Bogus Populist

Both Republican presidential candidate John McCain and his Democratic challenger Barack Obama loaned what the Washington Post called “cautious support” for the TARP. But McCain, sensing he is weak on the suddenly critical issue (having notoriously stated as recently as Sept. 15 that the “fundamentals of the economy are strong”), made a show of getting involved in the bailout negotiations. But his abrupt conversion from the deregulation dogma strikes many as hollow. Writing in Newsweek, Daniel Gross argues that “The Republicans killed the bailout bill—and McCain’s chances.” He mocks:

Sen. John McCain, who interrupted his campaign to deal with the crisis, claimed—via his surrogates—that he wielded great influence in improving the deal and making it palatable. Then he left town as it collapsed.

More scathing still is Rosa Brooks in the Washington Post, who points out that McCain connived with (illegal) financial shenanigans:

Once upon a time, a politician took campaign contributions and favors from a friendly constituent who happened to run a savings and loan association. The contributions were generous: They came to about $200,000 in today’s dollars, and on top of that there were several free vacations for the politician and his family, along with private jet trips and other perks. The politician voted repeatedly against congressional efforts to tighten regulation of S&Ls, and in 1987, when he learned that his constituent’s S&L was the target of a federal investigation, he met with regulators in an effort to get them to back off.

That politician was John McCain, and his generous friend was Charles Keating, head of Lincoln Savings & Loan. While he was courting McCain and other senators and urging them to oppose tougher regulation of S&Ls, Keating was also investing his depositors’ federally insured savings in risky ventures. When those lost money, Keating tried to hide the losses from regulators by inducing his customers to switch from insured accounts to uninsured (and worthless) bonds issued by Lincoln’s near-bankrupt parent company. In 1989, it went belly up—and more than 20,000 Lincoln customers saw their savings vanish.

Keating went to prison, and McCain’s Senate career almost ended. Together with the rest of the so-called Keating Five—Sens. Alan Cranston (D-Calif.), John Glenn (D-Ohio), Don Riegle (D-Mich.) and Dennis DeConcini (D-Ariz.), all of whom had also accepted large donations from Keating and intervened on his behalf—McCain was investigated by the Senate Ethics Committee and ultimately reprimanded for “poor judgment.”

But the savings and loan crisis mushroomed. Eventually, the government spent about $125 billion in taxpayer dollars to bail out hundreds of failed S&Ls that, like Keating’s, fell victim to a combination of private-sector greed and the “poor judgment” of politicians like McCain.

Barack Obama: the Post-Petrol FDR?

Obama has been quick to play Franklin Delano Roosevelt to Bush/McCain’s Herbert Hoover. As the House rejected the TARP on Sept. 29, he told supporters in Colorado that McCain has “fought against commonsense regulations for decades, he’s called for less regulation 20 times just this year, and he said in a recent interview that he thought deregulation has actually helped grow our economy.”

“Senator, what economy are you talking about?” Obama asked.

That same day he told a rally in downtown Detroit: “You can’t make up for 26 years in 26 days. For most of the 26 years, he’s been against the common-sense rules and regulations that could have stopped this problem.”

Daniel Gross in Newsweek concludes:

In general, I’ve found a lot of the analogies between the present situation and the Great Depression to be way off. But there’s one area in which the analogy might hold true. Just as happened in 1932, it’s possible that the Republicans’ incompetence and bullheadedness in managing a financial crisis could lead to Democrats controlling both the White House and Congress.

But after nearly a generation of bipartisan consensus on deregulation and “free markets,” it remains to be seen if Obama and the Democrats will rise to the mandate of history as FDR did—in the face of relentless opposition from conservatives—even if they make it into office. And while FDR inherited an isolationist America wary of foreign entanglements, Obama will find himself at the reins of a global military leviathan with tentacles hopelessly entangled in Iraq and Afghanistan. Cutting down the leviathan—anathema to the long-reigning bipartisan consensus on global empire—could be his greatest challenge, and one with a vital and little-appreciated link to staving off the impending financial collapse. The resources and human energy that FDR finally marshaled for the war effort, Obama will have to marshal for a crash conversion from the oil economy and a return to self-sufficiency, localization and the human scale. With luck, we will soon see whether or not the Democratic party is capable of breaking with—and standing up to—corporate power on addressing the fundamental contradictions that underlie the current crisis.

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RESOURCES

“Paulson Will Have No Peer” Peter G. Gosselin, Los Angeles Times, Sept. 29
http://www.truthout.org/092908S

“The $700 Billion Bailout’s Fine Print” by Nomi Prins, Mother Jones, Sept. 24
http://www.truthout.org/092308A

“Washington to Wall Street: Drop Dead” by Daniel Gross, Newsweek, Sept. 29
http://www.newsweek.com/id/161529

“Obama and McCain Express Cautious Support for Bailout” by Michael Shear,
Washington Post, Sept. 29
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/09/28/AR2008092802212.html?hpid=topnews

“A Primer on the Wall Street Meltdown” by Walden Bello
Focus on the Global South, Sept. 25
http://focusweb.org/a-primer-on-the-wall-street-meltdown.html?Itemid=1

“The Wall Street Meltdown: the View from Asia” by Walden Bello
Focus on the Global South, Sept. 24
http://focusweb.org/the-wall-street-meltdown-the-view-from-asia.html?Itemid=1

“A Deficit of Leadership” by Joseph Stiglitz, The Guardian, April 8
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/apr/08/thefinancialcrisisbeingfel

“The Iraq War Will Cost Us $3 Trillion, and Much More” by Linda J. Bilmes and Joseph Stiglitz
The Washington Post, March 9
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/03/07/AR2008030702846_pf.html

“Iraq war ’caused slowdown in the US'” by Peter Wilson, The Austrlian, Feb. 28
http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,23286149-2703,00.html

“Keating 5 ring a bell?” by Rosa Brooks, Los Angeles Times, Sept. 25
http://www.latimes.com/news/columnists/la-oe-brooks25-2008sep25,0,1039504.column

See also:

OIL SHOCK REDUX
Is OPEC the Real Cartel —or the Transnationals?
by Vilosh Vinograd, WW4 Report
/node/5024

From our Daily Report:

Latin America: markets react to financial crisis
WW4 Report, Sept. 25, 2008
/node/6070

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Special to World War 4 Report, Sept. 1, 2008
Reprinting permissible with attribution

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