CounterVortex

BIOFUELS: PROMISE OR THREAT?

by Rachel Smolker and Brian Tokar, Toward Freedom

In the coming weeks, the Obama administration is expected to release its plans to address the dual problems of global climate disruption and excessive dependence on foreign oil. Meanwhile, in the background, the debate among environmentalists over biofuels and their contribution to future energy needs continues to intensify.

Many mainstream greens actively support biofuels as a central element in an anticipated future mix of energy sources, but voices from the global South are often far more critical. They insist that fuels such as biodiesel, bioethanol and proposed “second generation” fuels be termed “agrofuels,” viewing their widespread use as a potential boon for global agribusiness corporations—with potentially devastating consequences for land-based peoples. This view is now gaining widespread support from groups in the US and Europe.

Last month, the Sierra Club and Worldwatch Institute attempted to sidestep these concerns with their new report, titled “Smart Choices for Biofuels.” They appear to have never even asked the more fundamental question “Are Biofuels a Smart Choice?” To this question, a growing number of environmental and human rights organizations are responding with a clear and resounding “no.”

A recent letter initiated by eleven US-based civil society groups highlights the rapidly growing literature demonstrating that biofuels/agrofuels are worsening climate change, driving deforestation, displacing rural smallholder farmers and indigenous peoples, depleting soil and water resources and more. Given the critical need to preserve and restore ecosystems, burning plant material for fuel is best viewed as a pathway to disaster.

While the “Smart Choices” report, like the Obama administration, claims that “advanced biofuels” and sustainability standards will resolve the problems, there is no way the earth can actually support a massive and ever-increasing new demand for plant biomass. Instead, a drastic reduction in society’s need for liquid fuels is an essential first step, through measures such as public transportation, energy efficiency, and reduction and relocalization of production and consumption.

The text of this, more critical, letter on agrofuels offers a glimpse at a far more realistic view of this issue than is offered by the Sierra Club/Worldwatch report:

As a diverse alliance of organizations concerned with climate change, agriculture and food policy, human rights and indigenous peoples rights and biodiversity protection, we (Global Justice Ecology Project, Institute for Social Ecology, Heartwood, Energy Justice Network, Grassroots International, Food First, Native Forest Council, Family Farm Defenders, ETC Group, Dogwood Alliance, Rainforest Action Network) issue this open letter in opposition to agrofuels (large scale industrial biofuels).

We strongly oppose the rapid and destructive expansion of agrofuels; the large-scale industrial production of transport fuels and other energy from plants (corn, sugar cane, oilseeds, trees, grasses, waste etc.). Agrofuels are a false solution and a dangerous distraction and they must be halted.

Agrofuels are a “false solution”:

Many prominent voices in the United States, including President-elect Obama, have voiced support for the large-scale production of agrofuels as a central strategy for solving the problems of energy supply and global warming. A growing body of scientific evidence, however, indicates that this is a tragic misconception and that continued pursuit of agrofuels will aggravate severely rather than resolve the multiple and dire consequences of the climate, energy, food, economic and ecological crises we face. Like other dirty and dangerous technologies and devices being promoted by industry to supposedly address climate change—including “clean coal,” carbon capture and storage [CCS], coal gasification, nuclear power, carbon offset markets, and ocean fertilization—agrofuels are a distracting “false solution” promoted for their potential to reap profits rather than their capacity to address problems effectively. [1]

Agrofuels worsen climate change and poverty:

A growing body of literature from all levels of society is revealing that, when all impacts are considered, agrofuels create more, not less, greenhouse gas emissions; deplete soil and water resources; drive destruction of forests and other biodiverse ecosystems; result in expanded use of genetically engineered crops, toxic pesticides, and herbicides; and consolidate corporate control over access to land. While claims are made that agrofuels will benefit the rural poor, in reality, indigenous and smallholder farmers are increasingly displaced. Industrial agriculture and the destruction of biodiversity, two leading causes of global warming, will be further facilitated by agrofuels. [2]

Next generation “cellulosic” fuels will not resolve the problems:

With recognition of the role of agrofuels in driving up food prices, there has been increasing attention to the social and ecological costs of corn and sugar cane derived ethanol. In response, there is now a massive push to develop non-food, so-called cellulosic fuels based on claims that these new feedstocks (grasses, trees, and “waste” products) will not compete with food production and can be grown on “idle and marginal” lands. The incoming Obama Administration is clearly positioning to advocate strongly on this platform. [3] Unfortunately, these claims do not hold up to scrutiny.

An enormous additional demand for trees, grasses and other plants, edible or inedible, will not avert the problem of land-use competition. Land that could be used for food crops or biodiversity conservation will be increasingly diverted into energy production. Demand for land for both agriculture and timber is already intense and escalating globally as water, soil and biodiversity dwindle and the climate becomes increasingly unstable. [4]

The scale of demand cannot be met sustainably:

Virtually all of the proposed cellulosic feedstocks (including dedicated energy crops such as perennial grasses and fast growing or genetically engineered trees, agricultural and forestry “wastes and residues,” municipal wastes etc.) present serious ecological concerns on the scale required to maintain biorefinery operations and significantly contribute to US energy demands. Furthermore, renewable fuels targets in the US mandate the use of 15 billion gallons of corn ethanol per year, an amount that requires one third of the nation’s corn crop, and an additional 21 billion gallons a year of “advanced” agrofuels, the definition of which opens the possibility that demand will be met with foreign sources. The massive new demand for agrofuels is escalating deforestation and resulting in conversion of biodiverse and carbon-rich native forests and grasslands into biologically barren and carbon-poor industrial tree plantations and other crop monocultures. [5]

Land use changes resulting from industrial agriculture, including widespread deforestation, are major causes of climate change. Recent research finds that old growth forests sequester far more carbon than was previously estimated, (i.e. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change underestimated carbon stocks for temperate old growth forests by two-thirds). This means that deforestation has been a much larger causal factor in global warming than initially thought, and that intact natural forests are critical for sequestering carbon. It is imperative therefore that we protect remaining forests, grasslands and other carbon-rich ecosystems. [6]

The widespread application of biotechnology for agrofuel production, including genetically engineered (GE) feedstock crops such as GE grasses and GE trees, and plans to use synthetic biology and other genetic engineering techniques to alter and construct microbes, is an unacceptable and dangerous risk. [7]

Sustainability criteria cannot address the problems with agrofuels because they are incapable of addressing many complex and often indirect ecological and social impacts. Neither can they be implemented under globally diverse ecological, social and political situations. Similar efforts to develop criteria for soy, palm oil and timber, for example, have proven vastly inadequate. Finally, these efforts are based on the fundamental and flawed assumption that such massive demands can and should be met.

Agrofuels are not a renewable energy source:

While plants do re-grow, the soils, nutrients, minerals and water they require are in limited supply. The diverse and complex ecosystems that native plants belong to are also limited and not easily regenerated. Subsidies and incentives for renewable fuels should be focused on truly renewable options, like wind and solar energy. Instead, currently in the US close to three-quarters of tax credits and two-thirds of federal subsidies for renewable energy are being wrongly invested in agrofuels. [8]

Agrofuels are a disaster for people:

As governments, investors and corporations recognize the increasing demand for and profitability of land for food, fiber and now energy, we are witnessing a veritable tidal wave of land grabbing on a global scale. This is disastrous for rural and indigenous peoples who are increasingly being evicted or displaced. If tariffs currently limiting international agrofuel trade are diminished or eliminated, social and ecological damages will escalate.

Social movements around the world, including the international peasant movement, Via Campesina, call for “food and energy sovereignty.” Via Campesina, along with the independent International Assessment of Agricultural Knowledge, Science and Technology for Development (IAASTD), a long-term independent assessment of agriculture involving over 400 scientists and diverse stakeholders, point to the key importance of a return to locally controlled, diverse, ecologically sensitive, and organic agriculture practices as vital to both addressing climate change and poverty. In demanding a halt to the insanity of agrofuel expansion, we stand in solidarity with peoples around the world who are resisting the loss and destruction of their lands, and with the wildlife and biodiversity being driven to extinction for corporate profit. [9]

Real solutions must be given a chance.

There are numerous better options for addressing climate change. These are generally proven, do not involve risky technologies, return control of resources to local inhabitants rather than profiting irresponsible corporations, and are more equitable. [10]

These include but are not limited to:

* A massive focus on improvements in energy efficiency, public transport and reduced levels of consumption within the United States (and other affluent countries);

* A rejection of industrial agribusiness and biotechnology and a return to locally adapted and community controlled diverse agricultural practices with the goal of feeding people, not automobiles, while conserving soil and water, maximizing carbon sequestration and protecting biodiversity;

* Repeal of the 36 billion gallon per year Renewable Fuel Standard biofuel target in the [2007] Energy Independence and Security Act.

* Support for indigenous land rights and community stewardship initiatives as the major focus of efforts to preserve biodiverse ecosystems and the implementation of free and prior informed consent from indigenous peoples with respect to projects proposed on their ancestral lands and territories.

* Reducing demand for forest products and aggressively protecting remaining native forests and grasslands;

* Rejection of coal and nuclear technologies, which are inherently toxic and dangerous;

* Scaling up of decentralized and unequivocally renewable and cleaner wind and solar energies;

* Leaving fossil fuels in the ground, where they cannot contribute to climate change;

* Rejection of ineffective market-based approaches that commodify the atmosphere, biodiversity, and humanity itself.

See the complete list of 40 organizations that have signed on to this letter, along with detailed notes and more than 30 supporting references at the Global Justice Ecology Project To add your group’s signature to this letter, e-mail your organization’s name, contact person and website address to: contact@globaljusticeecology.org

NOTES:

[1] A recent comprehensive review of a variety of technologies proposed for addressing climate change, including wind, solar, nuclear, geothermal, tidal etc. found: “…cellulosic- and corn-E85 were ranked lowest overall and with respect to climate, air pollution, land use, wildlife damage, and chemical waste… biofuel options provide no certain benefit and the greatest negative impacts.” (MZ Jacobson, “Review of solutions to global warming, air pollution and energy security,” Energy and Environmental Science, December 2008)

Resources and information on false solutions involving coal, nuclear, incineration, biofuels, natural gas and more are available at Energy Justice Network. For information on ocean fertilization see ETC Group. For a review of climate geo-engineering technologies Biofuels Watch. [In contrast, the “Smart Choices for Biofuels” statement can be seen at the Worldwatch Institute.]

[2] Climate: According to recent studies, when all direct and indirect land use change emissions are accounted for, agrofuels produce from 17 to 420 times more greenhouse gas emissions than would be saved by avoided use of fossil fuel. Another study revealed that emissions of nitrous oxide from increasing fertilizer use for biofuel crops reduces or even cancels out gains from offsetting fossil fuel use with agrofuels. See:

Fargione, J., Hill, J., Tilman, D., Polasky, S., and Hawthorne, P., “Land clearing and the biofuel carbon debt,” Science, 319, 2008, pp. 1235-1238

Searchinger, T., Heimlich, R., Houghton, R. A., Fengxia Dong, Elobeid, A., Fabiosa, J., Tokgoz, S., Hayes, D., and Tun-Hsiang Yu, “Use of US croplands for biofuels increases greenhouse gases through emissions from land-use change,” Science, 319, 2008, pp. 1238-1240

P.J. Crutzen, A.R. Mosier, K.A. Smith, and W. Winiwarter, “N2O release from agro-biofuel production negates global warming reduction by replacing fossil fuels,” Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics 8(2): 389-95

People: Rural and indigenous peoples are increasingly displaced, often violently from their lands to make way for expanding industrial agriculture. Agrofuels are contributing to this.6,7 The global peasant farmers movement “Via Campesina” states: “small farmers feed the world, industrial agrofuels fuel hunger and poverty” (Jakarta, June 24, 2008: International Conference on Peasant Rights)

The UN FAO reported that food prices have pushed the number of starving to more than one billion, 14% of the human population. (“Nearly a Billion People Worldwide are Starving, UN Agency Warns”: Julian Borger and Juliette Jowitt. The Guardian, Dec 10 2008)

A leaked memo from the World Bank stated that 75% of the food price increase could be attributed to diversion of food crops into fuel production. (“Secret Report: Biofuels Caused Food Crisis: Internal World Bank study delivers blow to plant energy drive,” Guardian, July 3 2008. A. Chakrabortty)

The FAO stated that mandated targets may need to be reconsidered. Reports on the impacts of cane ethanol in Latin America paint a grim picture of oppression and destruction. (“Fuelling Destruction in Latin America: the real price of the drive for agrofuels,” Friends of the Earth International, September 2008)

[3] Obama, a long standing advocate of corn ethanol has stated that he will increase the renewable fuel standard from the current level at 36 bG/yr to 60 bG/yr. His cabinet appointments include 1) Tom Vilsack (Secretary of Agriculture), known for his advocacy on behalf of biotechnology and his close relationship with Monsanto and support for corn ethanol 2) Steven Chu (Secretary of Energy) who was instrumental in establishing agrofuels as the major focus of Lawrence Berkeley Labs (which he directs) and overseeing the establishment of the Energy Biosciences Institute, a $500 mil partnership involving UC Berkeley (a supposedly public educational institution) and BP, along with the Lawrence Berkeley labs, the goal of which is research and development of cellulosic fuel technologies. 3) Ken Salazar (Secretary of the Interior) has been a major proponent of flex-fuel car production and cellulosic fuel development. (“Obama, Vilsack and Salazar: The Ethanol Scammers’ Dream Team,” Energy Tribune, Dec. 29, 2008)

[4] As demands for food and bioenergy expand, enormous land grabbing is underway with countries, corporations and investors buying up large amounts of arable land in a scramble to gain access to dwindling and profitable resources. For example, Daewoo, a South Korean company is seeking to acquire a 99-year lease on a million hectares of Madagascar’s agricultural land, Kuwait is looking to acquire millions of hectares in Cambodia, and other investors are moving in on approximately 15 per cent of Laos’s agricultural land. (“Seized: The 2008 Land Grab for Food and Financial Security,” GRAIN)

Soil: In the US, some of the best agricultural soils occur in Iowa, but over the past century these have declined from an average of 18 to just 10 inches of depth over the past century due to erosion. Erosion rates exceeded soil regeneration rates on close to 30% of agricultural lands in the U.S. in 2001. This loss of topsoil and organic residues results in declining productivity. In an effort to stem the tide of erosion, the US Conservation Reserve Program was introduced in 1985 and paid farmers to plant lands sensitive to erosion with grass or tree cover protection and to use no-till farming, terracing and contour strip farming. These CRP lands are shrinking due to incentives to produce agrofuel feedstocks. Removal of “wastes and residues” from agricultural and forested lands for agrofuel production depletes soil organic matter and nutrients and increases erosion. (Wes Jackson and Wendell Berry, “A 50 year Farm Bill,” New York Times, Jan. 4 2009)

Water: Water resources in the US, including major irrigation sources such as the Oglalla aquifer and the Colorado river, are in decline. Agriculture is the largest use of freshwater, and biorefinery processes also require massive amounts of water. (“Water Implications of Biofuels Production in the United States,” October 2007 Report in Brief, at this site of The National Academies [PDF])

According to the International Water Management Institute (IWMI): freshwater usage worldwide has increased six-fold over the past 100 years, largely due to irrigation; water resources are dwindling; the price of water is predicted to double or triple over the coming two decades. Meanwhile, severe droughts are resulting in water shortages in Australia, India and South Central China. Droughts and ice melting at high altitudes are likely to result in declining water supplies in many regions of the world. (Peter McCornick, IWMI, “Demand For Biofuel Irrigation Worsens Global Water Crisis,” keynote address at “Linkages Between Energy and Water Management for Agriculture in Developing Countries,” Hyderabad, India, January 2007)

[5] According to biotechnology industry estimates, a moderately sized commercial-scale biorefinery using agricultural residues would require harvesting a minimum of 500,000 acres of cropland. Electricity production through the burning of wood is increasing rapidly and creating huge demands for trees. For example, Prenergy Power Limited, of London, England is planning a 350 megawatt power plant, which will be fueled by approximately 3 million tons per year of woodchips imported, in part from the US. Some bioenergy processes claim to utilize wastes and residues, but a recent industry market report stated: “…these operators, hungry for large volumes of wood, and frequently armed with government subsidies, are finding that the perceived overabundance of ‘waste wood’ in the nation’s forests is simply not there. As a result, the increased demand for more traditional forms of woodfiber has already triggered wood price spikes and cross-grade competition in the tightest markets.” Wood is under demand by expanding pulp and paper industry, timber products industry, rapidly growing chip and pellet production for heat and electricity, and now for liquid transportation fuels as well. This level of demand simply cannot be met sustainably. It is also driving the demand for faster-growing “designer” trees genetically engineered to enhance their ability to be transformed into energy. This in turn is threatening native forest ecosystems with genetic contamination. (RISI Wood Biomass Market Report)

[6] Deforestation in the Amazon is directly correlated with the market price of soy, a biofuel feedstock. When farmers in the US switched from soy to corn production to meet the demands for corn ethanol, the price of soy rose, and deforestation increased.18 The push for more land to grow energy crops has resulted in the elimination of set-aside lands in the EU and a reduction of CRP lands in the US The loss of these critical habitats is reducing pollinator and bird populations dramatically. (Kirchoff and J. Martin, “Americas Grasslands vanishing amid agricultural boom,” USA Today, April 25, 2008)

A recent long-term study of forest carbon in old growth temperate forest (AUS) found that carbon storage was far greater than previously assumed. The IPCC default values for example were one-third the value observed, highlighting the enormous impact of deforestation and the critical relevance to climate change of preserving forests. (“Green Carbon: The role of natural forests in carbon storage_Part 1. A green carbon account of Australia’s south-eastern Eucalypt forests, and policy implications,” Brendan G. Mackey, Heather Keith, Sandra L. Berry and David B. Lindenmayer, ANU Press, 2008)

[7] Agrofuels have become the major focus of biotechnology R&D. In addition to a suite of new GE feedstock developments, companies like Arborgen in the U.S. are developing GE tree varieties with 1) reduced lignin content 2) disease, insect and stress resistance, 3) fast growth, 4) cold tolerance, 5) modified oil content (jatropha and oil palm) and 6) sterility – all characteristics deemed profitable for agrofuel and pulp applications. Given that trees spread their pollen and seeds across huge distances and/or have many wild relatives in native forest ecosystems, cross contamination between GE trees and native trees is inevitable and entails unpredictable, potentially disastrous implications for forest ecosystems, wildlife and forest dependent human communities. (Petermann, A. and Tokar, B. 2007. Cellulosic fuels, GE trees and the contamination of native forests. In: R. Smolker, et al. The True Cost of Agrofuels: Impacts on Food, Forests, People and Climate,” Global Forest Coalition 2007 [PDF])

The newly emerging technique of “Synthetic Biology” is focused on developing microbes that can efficiently produce enzymes for fuel production. If genetic modification has raised biosafety concerns, those pale in comparison to the safety and ecological risks of synthetic organisms. Unlike earlier genetic engineering where genes are sourced from existing organisms, synthetic DNA sequences may have no known analogue in nature, and numerous pathways are combined. The consequences of contamination by such organisms are entirely unpredictable. Currently, the push for microbes for agrofuel production is driving the Synthetic Biology industry forward, making the ability to build dangerous and deadly microbes including bioweapons, cheaper, easier and harder to control. (Extreme Genetic Engineering: an introduction to synthetic biology. ETC Group)

[8] True renewables such as wind and solar are losing out in competition with agrofuels. Ethanol accounted for three-quarters of tax benefits and two-thirds of all federal subsidies provided for renewable energy sources in 2007. This amounted to $3 billion in tax credits in 2007, more than four times the $690 million made available to companies trying to expand all other forms of renewable energy, including solar, wind and geothermal power. It is estimated that by 2010, ethanol will cost taxpayers more than $5 billion a year—more than is spent on all US Department of Agriculture conservation programs to protect soil, water and wildlife habitat.

[9] Almost weekly new reports are made of abuses and violence in the context of land conflicts over the expansion of industrial monocultures and access to land and resources, and social movements working in resistance. Below are just a few of the more recent examples. See:

Civil Society Declaration at International Biofuels Conference in Sao Paolo, Brazil, November 2008 (PDF)

T. Phillips. Brazilian taskforce frees more than 4500 slaves after record number of raids on remote farms. The Guardian, January 3 2009

Tupinikim and Guarani peoples reconquer their lands, World Rainforest Movement bulletin: issue 122, September 2007

These include:

* The civil society organizations in Latin America who protested the International Biofuels Conference, demanding food and energy sovereignty;

* The recently freed “sugar slaves” working in Brazil’s ethanol industry;

* The indigenous peoples in the village of Suluk Bogkal, in Riau province in Sumatra who were fire bombed on December 18th 2008 when they resisted eviction from their lands to make way for a pulpwood plantation under Sinar Mas;

* The friends and families of Paraguayan smallholder farmers violently murdered when they resisted eviction to make way for the expansion of soy monoculture;

* The Tupinikim and Guarani in Brazil, who spent twenty years fighting to regain control of their ancestral lands which were taken over by the pulp industry for industrial eucalyptus plantations;

* The over one billion people now suffering from chronic undernourishment while food crops are diverted into fuel for automobiles;

* The diverse plants and animals moving precariously closer to extinction as their habitats are destroyed for conversion to agrofuel monocultures and industrial tree plantations

People’s access to land and the right to feed themselves is fundamental. Via Campesina along with many other social movements around the world call for food and energy sovereignty, not agrofuels. Numerous calls for moratoria have been made worldwide, including one from organizations in the US. (Agrofuel Moratorium Campaign, Biofuel Watch)

[10] A growing global alliance of individuals and organizations is demanding real solutions to climate change based on principles of justice and equity. This position is based on the understanding that the root causes of climate change are the same as the root causes of poverty and injustice. One cannot be addressed without the other and doing so is the only effective path towards a sustainable future. See:

“Radical New Agenda Needed to Achieve Climate Justice: Climate Justice Now!” Poznan, December 2008

Patrick Bond, “From False to Real Solutions for Climate Change,” Monthly Review. June 1, 2008

—-

Rachel Smolker is an independent research scientist, based in Hinesburg, Vermont. Brian Tokar is the director of the Institute for Social Ecology, based in Plainfield, Vermont.

This piece first appeared Feb. 25, in slightly different form, on Toward Freedom.

See also:

THE REAL SCOOP ON BIOFUELS
“Green Energy” Panacea or Just the Latest Hype?
by Brian Tokar, World War 4 Report, December 2006

From our Daily Report:

Obama USDA pick another “biofuel” booster
World War 4 Report, Dec. 18, 2008

——————-

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

Clear Cache

HIPSTER ANTI-SEMITISM

by Jennifer Blowdryer and Alvin Orloff, Zeek

For years and years, hipsters and avant garde types (at least here in America) liked Jews…a lot. Jews were the chosen people of hip rebellion: antisemitism was the preserve of bigots in small towns, and genteel stuffed shirts from Connecticut. You’d no more hear blood libel off the lips of a beatnik than the Battle Hymn of the Republic. All that, we are sorry to have to inform you, has changed.

With Jennifer’s cute button nose, she is able to pass as gentile at cocktail parties and hipster soirées. Since she loves her Mediterranean-looking Jewish mother dearly, far more than her cocktail-swilling patriarchal line, this is not something she revels in. Nevertheless, she is frequently a fly on the wall at social events full of offbeat types where the Jew-baiting remarks crop up, and crop up they do, with increasing frequency and with alarming use of the old stereotypes.

A tattoo artist refers to another tattoo artist as someone who worries a lot because, you know, she’s Jewish.

Or: It figured Jennifer was Jewish, said I., an SSI recipient just one step away from the streets, since she had a low-income co-op. This street urchin, hiding her middle-class white origins with coveralls and a rasta name, was accusing the Jew of a preternatural cunning. And yet, while it is hard to find a place in Manhattan, one somehow doesn’t imagine the many thousands of gentiles living in rent-controlled or low-income accommodation being called “cunning” for having an affordable roof over their head.

Or: A gay synthpop musician mentioned he was only being nice to a Jewish producer because he had to “play the game” while his art curator boyfriend claimed another friend of theirs talked a lot because, yes, he was Jewish.

Nor is the plague confined to gentiles. One composer of unusual chamber music threatened to hit Alvin for referring to him as a Jew. “It’s a religion and I’m an atheist.” Alvin’s suggestion that Jewishness (as distinct from Judaism) is an ethnicity was met with a petulant silence. This attitude was rendered all the more ironic by the fact that the composer in question is a hook-nosed Hebrew descendant of Holocaust survivors who issued his ludicrous denials in second-generation Yiddish inflections.

There have always been frustrated, jealous, intolerant people looking for scapegoats. These are just a few contemporary examples. What’s worrying is that they feel free to express themselves in openly racist ways here and now—even to deny their own visible heritage. Why is it so unhip to dig the Jews?

It’s unhip because the hip people from the Left—avant garde’s traditional partner in subversion—are scapegoating the Jews. Although sometimes beginning as justifiable opposition to certain Israeli policies, leftist anti-Zionism frequently slips into opposition to Israel’s right to exist, which then gets extended to Jews generally. If, as German socialist August Bebel once said, antisemitism is the socialism of fools, then the Left is now in serious danger of extreme foolishness. Legitimate criticism of Israel, on occasion, slides into Jew-baiting. Some examples:

— After the attacks of 9-11, literary relic Amira Baraka claimed that the Israelis were responsible for the attacks on the World Trade Center. This libel was not met with snorts of derisive laughter from his beatnik-era cohorts, but impassioned defenses of his inalienable right to self-expression and to be poet laureate of New Jersey. It was left to solid citizens and the state government to argue that racism was squaresville.

— Israel’s influence in American politics is also exaggerated to outlandish extents. Ralph Nader, for example, recently characterized Bush and the Congress as “puppets” of Ariel Sharon. Why the largest and most powerful empire in the history of the world would take orders from the small, albeit feisty, nation of Israel would seem to pose quite a conundrum—unless one believes in the Protocols of the Elders of Zion or some watered-down contemporary alternative. When questioned, Nader claimed that he was only denouncing the influence of the American Israeli Political Action Committee, something commonly done in the pages of the New York Times. Nader’s statement was met with cheers from both his earnest progressive supporters and the neo-Nazis of the “National Stormfront.”

— Adbusters, a magazine popular amongst anti-capitalists, ran a list of prominent neo-conservatives with asterisks next to the names of the Jews. Why, oh why, the article asked, was it wrong to point out that the architects of the Bush administration’s Middle East policies were disproportionately Jewish? Of course, one might ask: Was there an accompanying list of anti-war leaders with asterisks next to the disproportionately high number of Jewish names? Nope.

— And recently, we walked into a bookstore in San Francisco and discovered a series of satiric anti-rightwing stickers (you know the ones, “Bush/Cheney, four more wars”) and found one that read “Palestinians out of Palestine, Jews for Genocide”—implicating all Jews in a demonized Zionism. Of course it was supposed to be humorous overstatement. Ha, ha, ha. Unlike, say, witches or female-to-male transsexuals, Jews are now fair game in the über-trendy Mission district. If these people are at the cutting edge of the culture, what is it that the culture is going to end up cutting?

In the future, this hipster antisemitism is only going to get worse. As the Middle East Crisis (or Middle East Culture, as one wag prefers to call it) gets bloodier and more apocalyptic, and memories of the Holocaust and general Jewish victimhood fade, those who instinctively side with the underdog will become less sympathetic, churning out worse and worse message stickers. How to respond?

One strategy is to infiltrate, like the nonracist, skinhead, punk gag band, Jewdriver. With Aryan Sharon on bass, the band performs signature songs like “Don’t Jew Me Like That.” Their official band drink? Cherry Manishewitz. They don’t let a little thing like being Jewish interfere with being skinheads. We like this strategy. Getting huffy and confronting racists—ADL-style—is less likely to produce more of a softening of feeling than say, an all-Jewish episode of Elimidate. And why hold your next Young Jewish Voices event at the Sol Goldman Y? Instead, impose it on an unsuspecting general public, perhaps in restaurant-type setting. The great Hasidic Jews of New York have begun to show up not just at lap-dancing parlors, but at gay clubs, open mics, and poetry slams. These inter-minglings still create a festive air (that hat, those curls!) but soon it’ll become such an everyday thing that nobody will notice or object. Here we defer to Quentin Crisp’s dictum that true integration comes not through outraged protest, but boredom.

To end on a hopeful note, the turnaround from hipsterdom to mainstream is about five years (see bell-bottoms and nose rings). This means that antisemitism will be back in vogue amongst the suburban masses before the end of this decade, and hence, anathema to the hipster, who will once again love Jews. After all, what’s not to love?

—-

This piece first appeared in the January 2005 edition of Zeek: A Journal of Jewish Thought and Culture. We felt this was an all too appropriate time to reprint it, given the global anti-Jewish backlash in the wake of Israel’s Gaza aggression.

RESOURCES

August Bebel page from the Marxists Internet Archive
http://www.marxists.org/archive/bebel/index.htm

“Stormfront” neo-Nazis dig Ralph Nader
http://www.stormfront.org/forum/showthread.php?t=85591

From our Daily Report:

Venezuela: gunmen ransack Caracas synagogue
World War 4 Report, Feb. 1, 2009

——————-

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

CHIAPAS: PORTRAIT OF THE RESISTANCE

Autonomy Under Siege in the Zapatista Zones

by Gloria Muñoz Ramírez, CIP Americas Program

Autonomy Under Siege, a series of reports on the five Zapatista autonomous centers, or caracoles, by Gloria Muñoz Ramírez was first published in Spanish as a special section of the Mexican national newspaper La Jornada, Sept. 19, 2004, following a series of on-site reports by the author. On the 15th anniversary of the Zapatista uprising, the Center for International Policy’s Americas Program presented the first full authorized translation to English, by Americas Program director Laura Carlsen. Last year, much of Muñoz Ramírez’s work was published as a book, The Fire and the Word: A History of the Zapatista Movement, by City Lights Books of San Francisco.

The Caracol founded in La Realidad—the first autonomous center built by the Zapatistas—is still celebrating its first anniversary. The rains have flooded the land, mud has washed out the roads, the maize has been harvested, and the indigenous people have doubled their stores of maize seed. Maybe there isn’t less hunger than before, the situation is still difficult in these jungle lands, but a journey through the region today shows something that didn’t exist 10 years ago when we reporters first entered this territory.

At the entrance to the community that is home to the Good Government Board (GGB) “Hacia la Esperanza” (“Toward Hope”), there’s a small wooden clinic painted green with dozens of people standing around it. A white cardboard sign advertises different methods of contraception and vaccination campaigns for kids and adults. “We are fighting diphtheria and tetanus,” a middle-aged indigenous man who works as a health promoter says proudly. In the line, women carry vaccination cards issued by the autonomous government for their children.

Doroteo, a member of the Good Government Board, states, “Before our uprising, the Zapatistas had begun to organize their healthcare, because health is one of the main demands of our struggle—we need it to live, and our struggle is for life.”

This place, now called “Madre de los caracoles del mar de nuestros sueños” (the literal translation from Spanish is “Mother of the Sea Snails of our Dreams”) is famous in the world of resistance because in 1996 one of the founding acts of the anti-globalization struggle took place here—the First Continental Encounter for Humanity and Against Neoliberalism. Most recently, the biggest achievement in health has been the inauguration of an operating room. The community had the operating room for three years but couldn’t use it because there were no doctors and also, they admit, due to a lack of organization in the four autonomous municipalities of the region: San Pedro de Michoacán, General Emiliano Zapata, Libertad de Los Pueblos Mayas, and Tierra y Libertad.

“We’ve only operated on two men—one with a hernia, the other with a tumor—and on one women with a cyst where we even did a salpingo [removal of the fallopian tube], but at least now we’re operating in this zone,” says Doroteo. Meanwhile, the woman who recently had the operation is recovering well. “How many indigenous women with cysts are waiting for an operation in this zone?” The reply is cause for concern, but as they say, “Now we’ve started.”

Health is one of the areas where the most progress has been made here in Zapatista territory. This jungle area on the Guatemalan border is not without its problems, both internal and external, but preventive medicine campaigns are multiplying. For example, health commissions in many communities now clean latrines with lime on a weekly basis. In some areas, however, there are communities that “still do not understand the importance of cleaning, and we have to explain that health is the most important and precious thing you can give to the struggle.”

This zone has one of the two largest autonomous hospitals in rebel territory. It is called “Hospital la primera esperanza de los sin rostro de Pedro” (Hospital “The First Hope of the Faceless Ones of Pedro”) in honor of Subcomandante Pedro who was killed in combat in January 1994 and was a leader and compañero of the people of these villages.

The hospital stands amid dense vegetation and is separated by a bridge from the village of San José del Rio. It serves the four autonomous townships but, like all resistance projects, it has caused plenty of problems for the Zapatista communities. Local inhabitants note that it took a lot of work to organize the rotating shifts of the thousands who helped build it over three years, they admit that they faced many obstacles to get it going—they haven’t had and still don’t have doctors of natural medicine, they have only recently started using the operating room, once they had to close for an entire month, they spent a lot of money supporting health promoters, plus a long list of other predictable problems and unimaginable obstacles.

But the hospital exists and now competes with the big state hospital in Guadalupe Tepeyac that was established in 1993, just before the Zapatista uprising, by then-President Carlos Salinas de Gortari. This white elephant was run by the Red Cross until February 1995, when it was scandalously taken over by the Mexican Army (without any action by the Geneva Convention) before eventually being handed back to the state health authorities.

The Zapatistas say that in the Guadalupe Tepeyac hospital, “Sometimes they don’t want to give us medical attention if we say we’re Zapatistas, or they ask us a lot of questions to find out about our organization, or they treat us like the government treats us, which is with contempt, like they treat all indigenous people. Because of that, we don’t want to go there and now even the PRI members prefer to come to our hospital or micro-clinics because we treat everyone there—Zapatista or not—and we treat them with respect as human beings.”

It is common to find members of the PRI and other organizations in the autonomous hospital. They have chosen not to go to the huge hospital in Guadalupe Tepeyac because, “being indigenous, they, too, are treated very badly, or they tell them they don’t have any medicines.” In the autonomous clinics, those who are not Zapatistas pay only 10 pesos (less than a dollar) for a consultation, and “if we have donated medicines we give them that for free, and if we only have medicines we had to buy, then we charge what it cost us. We don’t make a commercial business out of health,” Doroteo says.

The challenge of providing healthcare not only to members of the base communities, but to all the population in the area is gigantic. Members of the GGB say, “We have a lot of work to do because the need is so great. Sometimes it seems like we need to do a lot more, it feels like we need to do twice as much, but other times it seems like we’re getting there.”

The hospital at San José is also a school for health promoters. It was built with the support of an Italian organization and has dental and herbal clinics and a clinical lab. In addition, there are three municipal clinics—one in Tierra y Libertad, one in Libertad de Los Pueblos Mayas, and another in San Pedro de Michoacán.

In the entire zone there are 118 health promoters dealing with primary illnesses in the same number of community health houses. In the main hospital, in the three municipal clinics, and in the community health houses, the base communities are provided with free consultations and, when available, free medicine.

The health promoters explain that up until several months ago the hospital functioned with health promoters who were economically supported by the four townships. They were given 800 pesos a month each to stay at the hospital full time. In total, the communities spent more than 100,000 pesos over three years. The money came from a warehouse project in the zone.

“But now when the Board was established, we decided to ask the villages for volunteers who would work full-time to care for people’s health in the hospital. Three men and three women answered the call, and they left their families and are now working as interns. The Board supports them with food, travel, shoes, and clothes. We buy them what they need, but they aren’t paid a wage nor given money. These interns are conscientious and working for their people and benefiting from the opportunity to learn about health.”

Midwives, Bone Healers, and Herbalists Strengthen Traditional Medicine
There is a new building nearly ready in La Realidad. It is an herbalist lab and center for preserving foods, and it forms part of a health project that is the pride of this zone. The project has meant the empowerment of more than 300 women herbalists, bone healers, and midwives.

“This dream,” they explain, “began when we realized that we were losing the knowledge of our old men and women. They know how to cure bones and sprains, the use of herbs, and how to deliver children, but all this tradition was being lost because of the use of pharmaceutical medicines. So we agreed in the villages to make a call to those men and women who know traditional healing. It wasn’t easy. At first many didn’t want to share their knowledge. They said it was a gift that could not be passed on because it comes from within. We then started discussions on health in the villages to raise awareness, and as a result many people changed their minds and decided to participate in the courses. There were 20 men and women, great people from our villages, who were appointed as teachers of traditional medicine with 350 pupils, most of them women. As a result, the number of midwives, bone healers, and herbalists in our communities has multiplied.”

The new herbalist laboratory has a story behind it. “An Italian soccer player who died left in his will money to build a soccer field on Zapatista territory. This field was only going to benefit the people of Guadalupe Tepeyac, so we talked with the community and explained that we had other more urgent needs that would benefit all the communities, like a place where compañeros could work on traditional health. The village understood and agreed that it was fair to use the money for the health of everyone. The second step was to talk to the donors. At first they didn’t want the money to be used for anything else, but later they said it was okay.”

More Than 300 Education Promoters Give Classes in Their Villages
Another area that the communities have been working on, despite all odds and overcoming internal obstacles and governmental counter-insurgency campaigns, is education. “For us, the education of our children is the foundation of our resistance. The idea came about because most of us have not been educated, or if we have, it was a very bad official education. There were no schools in the communities, and when there were, they didn’t have teachers, and if we had teachers, they usually didn’t show up and so there were no classes. That was before,” explain the autonomous authorities in the region. “In 1997, we began to work on our plans and programs of study. And seven years later we now have three classes of education promoters able to give classes in their villages. In our schools we teach the history of Mexico, but real history—what has happened to those who struggle in this country. We also teach children about the Zapatista struggle, the struggle of the people,” says Fidelio, an education promoter.

“Most of the villages now have education promoters. Only 30 communities don’t, and we have them in all the villages of the four municipalities,” the Board says. “In this region, in La Realidad, we organized the first Zapatista education in 1997. In 1999 and 2001 we taught other groups of promoters and finished with more than 300 indigenous people able to teach classes in their villages.” Nevertheless, “we have a problem that some single promoters lose interest when they marry, or the village does not give them much support; or there are some who go to work in the United States. We’re trying to resolve this because there is desertion, with promoters leaving.”

While the interview with the Good Government Board was taking place, a course with more than 70 promoters was coming to an end in La Realidad. “Those you see walking around the Caracol are taking a course needed to bring everyone’s knowledge up to the same level. Then they will go through a second course, like a secondary course, although we don’t call it that,” explains Doroteo.

In the four rebel municipalities in the jungle zone there are 42 new community schools: 10 in Libertad de Los Pueblos Mayas, four in General Emiliano Zapata, 20 in San Pedro de Michoacán, and eight in Tierra y Libertad. The schools have cement floors, wooden walls, and laminated roofs. They all have a blackboard, desks, the Mexican flag and, of course, the Zapatista flag, and some have tape recorders and other teaching tools.

To provide for the educational needs of the 30 communities without promoters, the Board asks those in charge “to raise awareness of the importance of this work. We will not force this; the villages need to understand the importance and apply this in their villages because they are convinced it’s worthwhile.”

Most of the communities in this region have two schools—one official, the other autonomous—and the Zapatistas say that in their schools, “Our children learn to read and write first, and they are more hard-working. We do not blame the government teachers, but they leave their classes a lot because they say they have to attend meetings. Our promoters don’t take breaks or get paid.”

Only One Woman is Part of the Autonomous Government
The Good Government Board is composed of seven men and only one woman. Three out of the four autonomous councils do not have a woman member and only one autonomous township—Tierra y Libertad—has a woman member. Out of over 100 education promoters, only six are women (five from Tierra y Libertad and one from San Pedro de Michoacán). The other two townships in this zone, General Emiliano Zapata and Libertad de Los Pueblos Mayas, do not have any women responsible for education.

The area of health is no better for women. There are only seven female promoters in the four municipalities—five in Libertad de Los Pueblos Mayas and two in Tierra y Libertad. “We are aware,” the Board states, “that in this zone there is still very little participation of women, but we see a small improvement because in the past it was unthinkable that even a single woman should participate. We need more women to participate, but the change must begin in the family.

“We need to do more political work in the villages with families. Unfortunately, there is still a belief that if daughters leave the village they will get up to no good. Because of this we need to strengthen discussion and work. On the Board we have a woman compañera, and she goes with us everywhere, and we have never had a problem because we respect her and she respects us. Many women in the villages still think that women could encounter problems if they go and work with men, but that’s not the case. And so we need to raise awareness more among husbands and fathers. They need to get it into their heads that men and women have the same rights.”

Fighting the Coyote: Another Challenge
In the community of Veracruz, the Zapatistas run a warehouse that supplies hundreds of small community shops, both Zapatista and non-Zapatista. This store, named “Todo para Todos” (“Everything for Everybody”), exists so that the shopkeepers in the villages are spared the trip to get supplies from Las Margaritas or Comitán. After the success of this store, another one was opened in Betania and another in Playa Azul. The stores supply the villagers throughout the zone with oil, soap, salt, sugar, beans, maize, and coffee.

During the past three-and-a-half years, the profits from the Veracruz store—over 100,000 pesos—have gone to support the health promoters in the main hospital. The profits also go to support the travel of the autonomous councils and other parts of the organization. In total, 116,614 pesos were spent to support various activities. In these stores, maize bought by the Board is traded in a project aimed at stopping intermediaries (coyotes) from buying up maize at low prices and selling at high prices. Profits from sales go to support the Board’s work and the activities of the four autonomous townships in the region.

“This first year, we bought more than 500 bags of maize—around 44 tons. We’ve already sold half of it, and the rest has been stored in the warehouse, and we are trading it,” explains Doroteo.

There is a big red vehicle just in front of the Board’s office in the Caracol. It’s called Chompiras. It’s the truck the Board recently acquired to transport their goods. Chompiras crosses the jungle and goes as far as the coast and Los Altos to distribute their products. They also have a passenger truck that travels from Las Margaritas to San Quintin. Its first profits went toward the creation of a regional food store.

“The difficulties never end… However, now we even have the Internet, and we are learning to use it to directly manage our communication. What we feel most is that we have a lot of responsibility. Sometimes we feel like the world is on our shoulders because it is difficult to govern, and above all to carry out what the people ask, to govern by obeying, and we don’t have resources. Sometimes it’s as if we’re addicted to problems or that we like them, but we go on learning to overcome them,” conclude the three members of the Good Government Board interviewed.

—-

This piece first appeared Dec. 12 on the Center for International Policy’s Americas Program.

Gloria Muñoz is a Mexican journalist that has lived with and written extensively on the Zapatista movement. Her most recent book is The Fire and the Word, a history of the Zapatista movement translated by Laura Carlsen, director of the CIP Americas Program.

From our Daily Report:

Mexico: EZLN celebrates 15 years
World War 4 Report, Jan. 6, 2009

——————-

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

PALESTINE: OBAMA’S FIRST FOREIGN POLICY CHALLENGE

New International Standards Needed to Resolve Dispute

by William K. Barth, OpEdNews

For where no law is, there is no transgression.—Romans 4.15

President Obama’s most immediate foreign policy challenge is to determine how to deal with the recent Israeli action in Gaza, and with the broader conflict between the Israelis and Palestinians. Israel’s partial withdrawal from Gaza appears to have been timed to coincide with President Obama’s inauguration, rather than to answer any of Israel’s security concerns. Clear international standards for resolving intra-state group conflicts are required if the longest-standing problem in the Middle East is ever to be resolved.

While the application of international law is no panacea, nor an excuse for unlimited intrusion into a state’s sovereignty, what is beyond doubt is that the uncertain legal status of Palestinian residents makes continued violence in Gaza, the West Bank and East Jerusalem likely. The Israeli attack on Gaza is an example of what happens in the absence of an international forum that can assist states to implement their human rights obligations.

The continued ethnic violence within Israeli jurisdiction raises the question: what exactly is the status of Palestinians who reside within so-called Occupied Palestinian Territories? Numerous international legal instruments have recognized the right of the Palestinians to self-determination. However, despite the publication of President Bush’s so-called Road Map to Peace, there remains ambiguity about the procedure by which Palestinians may obtain self-determination. The delay in implementing the Road Map has contributed to the cycle of Hamas-sponsored rocket attacks against Israel, and the retaliatory Israeli invasion of Gaza, which has produced yet another round of violence.

A brief review of history helps us to understand the confusing legal status of the Palestinians. Israel was established shortly after the end of the Second World War, with the support of the victorious Western Allies, as well as a majority the United Nations General Assembly, which in its Resolution 181 proposed a partition plan for the region. Currently, “the Quartet” (Russia, the US, the European Union and the UN) plays an important mediating role for the area.

Early international efforts in the region proposed that Jews and Palestinians live together within a single state called Palestine. For example, the 1917 Declaration by the British Foreign Secretary and former Prime Minister Arthur Balfour, together with the British Mandate for Palestine (established by the League of Nations in 1922), envisaged both groups being placed under the jurisdiction of a single state. It was not until 1937 that a British Royal Commission of Inquiry (the Peel Commission) concluded that it was necessary to sunder Jews and Palestinians into separate states. This was deemed necessary to prevent Palestinian opposition to the increasing Jewish migration from igniting inter-group violence. UN Resolution 181 (1947) authorized a partition of the region into separate Jewish (Israel) and Arab (Palestine) states.

Partition, or the so-called “two-state solution,” remains the goal of multiple UN Resolutions (181, 242, 338, & 3236), as well as the Camp David Accords (1978), the Oslo Accords (1993), and the current Road Map to Peace.

Unfortunately, international law has failed to establish a procedure for qualified groups to pursue statehood. Although the UN Charter and two international treaties—the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and the International Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights—provide for the right to self-determination, no international remedy exists to realize such claims. Peoples that exist under alien domination are trapped within what human rights jurists describe as the “iron cage” of the domestic state laws which subjugate them. A central idea of human rights is that it permits individual(s) to appeal to a regional or international adjudication body for relief denied them by their host states. The lack of such a remedy, combined with the failure of current international initiatives, has stalled the realization of Palestinian statehood.

Enhancing the jurisdiction of treaty monitoring bodies such as the UN Human Rights Committee (HRC) will help states to understand their treaty obligations with regard to internal groups that jurists term “peoples” and, therefore, qualified for self-determination. This is because adjudicative procedures offered by the HRC help ensure protection for ethnic, religious, national and linguistic groups. At this time, the HRC does not take up claims for self-determination.

Thus far, nations have achieved statehood in only carefully prescribed situations. Some examples include European states created out of empires controlled by the defeated Central and Axis powers after WWI and WWII; the grant of independence to the African, Asian and Caribbean colonies by the European powers ending the colonial era in the decades after WWII; the emergence of independent states from long-standing federations after 1990 (15 in the case of the Soviet Union and six in the case of Yugoslavia); and UN-supervised paths to independence for subjugated provinces, namely East Timor (formerly part of Indonesia) in 2002 and Kosovo (formerly part of Serbia) in 2008.

The Palestinians’ current legal existence is statu nascedi, meaning that they are at the beginning of a process that is leading to statehood. However, self-determination is not necessarily co-terminus with statehood, and may be achieved through a variety of means that protect group autonomy. The preferred type of self-determination, i.e. autonomy or statehood, is a question decided by the group itself. Palestinians can realize their right to self-determination in either the single-state or two-state forms.

The plan to disassociate Israelis and Palestinians into separate states raises another theoretical question—namely, should international bodies incorporate new states based upon the national, ethnic, religious or linguistic identity of a single group?

The classic formula of nationalism, to make “every nation a state and every state a nation,” results in what the Minorities Section Director of the League of Nations, P. de Arcarate, described as an international “crisis.” This is because the world contains 3,000-8,000 ethnic groups living in 192 UN member-states. How do international organizations go about determining which of these human communities are deserving of statehood?

The League of Nations’ Mandate for Palestine proposed that Israelis and Palestinians live together within a single, bi-national state. The Mandate established a Jewish national home located within Palestine with self-governing institutions while guaranteeing the civil, political, and cultural rights of Palestinians, as well as other minority groups. Moreover, even in present-day Israel, Arabic is an official language alongside Hebrew, bearing testimony to the state’s bi-national character. However, the Mandate’s single-state solution never received much support from Israelis or Palestinians, and now languishes in obscurity in most of the international discourse.

It is surprising that, given the historic failures of partition, most Israelis and most Palestinians prefer separation over integration. For example, the partition of India (Hindu) to create Pakistan (Islamic) produced inter-group violence, which continues to this day. Witness the recent terror attacks on Mumbai’s Taj Mahal Hotel and Oberoi-Trident Hotel.

Furthermore, a partition of the region will be no simple matter, given the dispersion of Israelis within Occupied Palestinian Territory. Although Israel withdrew from its settlements in Gaza in 2005, it has long encouraged settlement in both the West Bank and East Jerusalem. We must remember that Palestinians reside in non-contiguous areas—the West Bank, Gaza, and East Jerusalem. As a result, Israelis and Palestinians are interspersed, creating an obstacle to partition and separation.

Resolution of the Middle East conflict necessarily requires that international and regional powers complete the process that began with the post-WWII establishment of Israel. That is, a political framework must be created either for Israelis and Palestinians to live together, or to separate them. The lack of an international forum that could oversee this process has prevented the creation of a Palestinian state. Clearly, both Israelis and Palestinians are unable to resolve the conflict in the absence of international participation.

The international Quartet has an obligation to assist the Palestinians to realize their right to self-determination in a responsible fashion, by creating such a forum. It is to be hoped that President Obama will encourage new international standards on self-determination that will assist Israelis and Palestinians to recognize each other in an atmosphere characterized by what Ronald Dworkin describes as equal concern and respect.

—-

Dr William K. Barth is a lawyer who researches the politics of minority rights. His new book, On Cultural Rights: The Equality of Nations and the Minority Legal Tradition, is published by Martinus Nijhoff.

This piece first appeared Jan. 21 on OpEdNews.

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.

—-

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

——————-

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

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.

—-

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

Front Page Test

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.

—-

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

——————-

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

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.”

—-

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

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

—-

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

——————-

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

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