Free Trade Massacre

The notion that so-called "free trade" neo-liberal policies have led to increased poverty throughout the developing world is one that has ample evidence to back it up. It isn't so far-fetched to say that by marginalizing the world's poor through these economic policies has increased the global mortality rate. Recent occurrences in Peru however underline that the effects of free trade need not be so indirect:

During the last week, deep in the Peruvian Amazon, confrontations between nonviolent indigenous protesters and police have left up to 100 people dead. The vast majority of the casualties are civilians, who have been conducting peaceful demonstrations in defense of the Amazon rain forest. For almost two months, as many as 30,000 indigenous people have been blocking road and river traffic, demanding the repeal of presidential decrees issued last year to facilitate implementation of the US-Peru FTA.

Read rest of article below:


US-Peru FTA Sparks Indigenous Massacre

Thursday 11 June 2009

Tom Loudon, t r u t h o u t | Report

During the last week, deep in the Peruvian Amazon, confrontations between nonviolent indigenous protesters and police have left up to 100 people dead. The vast majority of the casualties are civilians, who have been conducting peaceful demonstrations in defense of the Amazon rain forest.

For almost two months, as many as 30,000 indigenous people have been blocking road and river traffic, demanding the repeal of presidential decrees issued last year to facilitate implementation of the US-Peru FTA. According to the indigenous leaders, several of these decrees directly threaten indigenous territories and rights. After having attempted several times to negotiate with the government the repeal of the most egregious of the decrees, and faced with a permanent influx of extraction equipment into the region, the people decided it was imperative to "put their bodies in front of the machines" in order to prevent this equipment from entering their territory.

On Friday, June 5, the government decided the protests needed to end and launched an aggressive assault against the people protesting on the road outside of Bagua. The dislocation was conducted from helicopters and the ground, with police and army using automatic weapons and heavy equipment against people armed with only rocks and spears. As videos, photos and testimonies from the region slowly emerge, it is clear that this was designed to inflict as many civilian casualties as possible, and deter those in other regions from continuing protests. Pictures circulating on the Internet depict snipers in uniform firing at protesters from the streets, tanks and from on top of buildings. On Saturday, in Lima, Peru's capital, a large spontaneous demonstration in support of the Amazonian indigenous was broken up by police.

Read full article here.

Read More...

Summary only...

Paper Planes- This is a Stick Up

MEND Rebels in the Niger Delta

This past week, off the waters of Somalia, the rapacious forces of globalization and wealth-inequality came face to face with the discontented, dispossessed and "unwashed masses" of the world. The "natives" are restless, and the old order that was able to beat them into submission has waned greatly. Better brace yourselves. Because as the effects of climate change, a breakdown in the world economic order and the destabilizing legacy of rapacious free-market capitalism take hold, the world's poor are declaring "we aren't going to starve, or go quietly into the night."

"Pirate skulls and bones
Sticks and stones and weed and bombs
Running when we hit 'em
Lethal poison through their system"--Paper Planes, M.I.A.


More after the fold...


The Somali pirates have been slain and an America captain freed. Newspapers and even the US President hail it as a victory against "thugs." Navy snipers become heroes as they kill three Somali brigands in a brief firefight and capture a fourth--who is all of 16-years-old; his dead comrades were between 17-19 years of age. But this celebrated "win" against rag-tag aggressors (young ex-fishermen and militants who faced off against the US Navy) won't solve the underlying issues at the heart of this modern "asymmetrical economic warfare."

Fractured Somalia, has suffered for decades, the country shattered by Cold War machinations and then unable to knit itself together in the postcolonial world. The one recent glimmer of hope for a stabilized state was dashed, when in 2007 the US decided to back an illegal war of aggression by Ethiopia that put Somalia under occupation of its long-time nemesis. The alleged goal was to rid the "country" of the United Islamic Courts (UIC), an alliance of religious groups that had managed to rout "warlords" who were being backed by US money and weapons--yes, the same warlords that had fought the US to a standstill in 1993; opportunity and convenience creates strange bedfellows. The US, declaring the UIC was linked to terrorism, decided that Somalis (who over all generally welcomed the religious confederation) could not be allowed to have an Islamic state--like say Saudi Arabia.

This resulted in a two year battle between indigenous insurgents and Ethiopian occupiers (who only withdrew this past February), during which hundreds of Somalis were killed. During that time the US made several airstrikes in the impoverished country in a hunt for "terrorists," which often resulted in higher civilian casualties.

Meanwhile, as this political chaos reigned, European and Asian ships continued to dump toxic waste in Somali waters and make off with hundreds of millions of dollars worth in illegal fishery. Somalia had no actual functioning government to stop this abuse, though in all fairness the functioning governments of other poor nations haven't been able to protect their waters (or their fish) from wealthy interlopers either. Pushed out of work by these inter-connected forces Somali fishermen, with the aid of normally landlocked militias, took to the seas following an age old adage: "If I can't work to make it, I'll rob to take it." And tankers making their way across nearby heavily trafficked water routes laden with goods--from weapons to food--have been hijacked and ransomed. Somalis jokingly refer to it as their "local tax." And these "pirates," who now bring in money to enrich both themselves and impoverished communities, enjoy a great deal of local sympathy and support.

"All I wanna do is (BANG BANG BANG BANG!)
And (KKKAAAA CHING!)
And take your money"

Similar situations have occurred on the other side of Africa, where in Nigeria militant groups of young men--grown weary of exploitation and environmental devastation of their land by international oil companies--turned their guns not just on the complicit Nigerian government, but on the imported foreign workers. As recently as this past January, a group calling itself MEND (Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta) took several British hostages. Their demands are that more of Nigeria's oil wealth be pumped into the region, instead of to foreign investors. Other local groups had peacefully called for similar attention to their plight in the past. But as with Somalia's ex-fishermen, it seems increasingly that cries from the "Third World" go ignored, until somebody threatens to pick up a gun.

"Our policy on kidnapping high value oil workers from Western Europe and North America remains unchanged and will continue to form an integral part of our pressure strategy in the emancipation struggle in 2009," MEND said in a recent statement.

While Somalia and Nigeria offer extreme examples where many factors converge to create desperation, there are other signals throughout the world that the poor have decided to fight back against the larger global forces they see at the heart of their suffering. In 2008, from Haiti to Burkina Faso, people pushed to the brink took to the streets as food became scarce or too overpriced. Termed "food riots," these acts of definance ranged from loud rallies to full blown rebellions. And, the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations has warned to expect much of the same in 2009.

Most in the "Third World" understand quite well that this food crisis is not the result of some natural disaster like a drought or a plague of locusts. As pointed out by Anuradha Mittal, director of the Oakland Institute, this is a tragically man-made phenomenon:

Over the last few decades, the United States, the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund have used their leverage to impose destructive policies on developing countries. By requiring countries to open up their agriculture market to giant multinational companies, by insisting that countries dismantle their marketing boards and by persuading them to specialize in exportable cash crops such as coffee, cocoa, cotton and even flowers, they have driven the poorest countries into a downward spiral.

Of course piracy, armed militants and food riots are acts of desperation that are in the end untenable, as the powerful forces of the global system will eventually come down with full fury. A more constructive channeling of these frustrations has come with less violence in other places. Central and South America, fed up with IMF structural adjustments and Milton Friedman economic policies, has seen a wave of elections that have brought left-leaning governments to power which have openly challenged the existing order and promised greater distribution of wealth. The latest has been El Salvador, which elected Mauricio Funes, the candidate of the former leftist guerilla FMLN, ending decades of right-wing US backed oligarchies.

Contrary to what many may think, this blog isn't cheering on piracy, riots and armed militants--at least not whole-heartedly. Though there is an innate temptation to root for the underdogs, history has taught us, sadly, that situations with groups of disenchanted young men, heavy weapons and lots of anger, even with the best of intentions, rarely turn out well in the long run. And besides, who wants some guy that you can barely understand waving a Kalishnikov in your face, holding you hostage and demanding some exorbitant ransom, when all you signed up for was an off-shore stint for a corporation that's probably exploiting you in turn? Neither am I asserting that these "Third World" rebels are all noble underdogs. Circumstances like these don't breed simplistic heroes for easy romanticism.

Rather my long-winded point is that instead of giving each other high-fives for offing some "bad guys" from some impoverished part of the world, we'd do well to try to put ourselves in their shoes and listen to their grievances--even if we don't wholly condone their actions. Perhaps in those places where the poor can have a voice and a space to turn away from desperation, there can be a challenge to the status quo through some type of peaceful democratic means. That of course, comes with its own challenges, because the old order does not so easily surrender power--as learned in Venezuela and Bolivia. In places where these aren't options, and a mixture of destabilizing interventions, globalization policies and rapacious exploitation continues, while the voices of the dispossessed are stifled, Somalia's "pirates" may be only a taste of what's to come. Because for the 3 billion people in the world who subsist on $2 a day or less, and the billions more who hover just above that extreme poverty, quietly starving to death is no longer an acceptable option--even if we seem fine with it.

"Some some some, some I murda'. Some, some, I let go."


Paper Planes Video

Read More...

Summary only...

Why Pirates Attack: It's the Fish Stupid

In the 17th thru late 18th centuries piracy was the method of last resort for the downtrodden and dispossessed: men desperate for work; deserters from throughout the war-wracked Atlantic; runaway slaves seeking refuge from bondage; criminals (from debtors to cutthroats) escaping the long arm of the law. These pirates often attacked the transports of commerce of their day--from slaving ships to merchant vessels. The economic and social exploitation of that era created piracy and suffered for it. Three hundred years later, as ex-fishermen and ex-militia men join forces in Somalia to disrupt our modern transnational economic caravans, history seems to be repeating itself. Arrgh.

More after the fold...


Yet again, pirates off the coast of Somalia have hijacked a ship--this time one with a US crew, who managed to thwart the attack. The news media, already goggle-eyed at the very existence of sea-borne pirates in our modern world, can hardly contain itself as it gives round-the-clock reporting on the "heroic" crew facing off against the "blackbeards" of their day.

Some stories have decided to go beyond the sensationalism, mostly pointing to the dangers of Somalia as a failed-state--like the pirate ships of old, places where a "multi-headed hydra" could form an anarchic society that threatened the entire global structure as we know it.

Steve Clemons in the Washington Note writes ominously of what he calls Jack Sparrows Revenge:

I think this is likely a new generation of asymmetrical, economic warfare. The world has become too interconnected for piracy to remain isolated to the Gulf of Aden....knowledge of the effectiveness of the tactic will not remain unique to the horn of Africa...famines fueled by climate change, along with water shortages towards the midcentury years, are likely to decrease the powers of poor central governments, most dangerously in African coastal states. Major shipping routes across the Maghreb and along the western African coast will be subject to the highest risks. Also, the Straits of Malacca -- which has been historically troubled by pirates -- and other routes through the South China Sea, will be at heightened risk if weak governments are incapable of adjusting to the challenges of the twenty-first century.

But Clemmons article, while painting an imaginatively vivid imagery of the Apocalypse out of Kevin Costner's Waterworld, never manages to take the piracy story further. And perhaps that's because to go any deeper might reflect some unsettling comparative truths about our global economic and social order, and that of a few centuries prior.

In our modern era, more than pirates stalk the high seas. Around the world, immense fishing trawlers--some as large as 400 feet--roam the oceans. Using nine-thousand foot nets they sweep up everything in their path, engaging in what many conservationists have warned is a "clear-cutting" of the sea floor. In a single day these trawlers can catch one million pounds of fish. According to marine biologist Sylvia Earle, in the last 50 years we've lost something in the order of 90 percent of the big fish in the ocean to these "harvesting machines." Worse still, is the by-catch. It's estimated that a staggering 50 billion pounds of unwanted fish--too small, unmarketable or inedible--caught up in the nets are ground to a bloody mulch and deposited back into the oceans.

Carl Sarfina at the Blue Ocean Institute notes:

About a quarter of everything that is caught in the ocean, is not wanted or not marketable or not as valuable as some of the other catch so it goes overboard. As northern waters have been depleted some of the fishing boats from places like Europe are turned south and have started fishing very intensively off African countries.

Right. Africa. Which brings us back to pirates. Arggh.

All along the coast of Africa, as these heavy European and Western trawlers of the rich world have moved into regional waters, local farmers have found their catch drying up and their livelihoods diminished if not destroyed. A recent documentary on the state of the oceans noted that "the impact on the developing world is enormous, particularly on the fisheries off the coast of Africa, in places like Senegal...The result is severe food shortages for those living along the coast."

Traditional fishing methods that may have sustained families, clans, villages and towns for centuries are no longer any match for the mechanized trawlers that are often raiding these waters illegally. The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) estimates there are some "700 foreign-owned vessels that are fully engaged in unlicensed fishing in Somali waters."

As if this isn't bad enough, African fishermen also have to deal with another by-product of globalization--the dumping of hazardous waste off their coastlines. An Oct 2008 report from the Chicago Tribune noted that in the early 1990s, "Somalia's unpatrolled waters became a cost-free dumping ground for industrial waste from Europe." In a seeming double-insult, Italian fishing boats reportedly ferried "barrels of toxic materials to Somalia's shores and then returned home laden with illicit catches of fish." As recently as 2005, rusting containers of hazardous waste were washing up on Somali beaches. This has happened elsewhere along Africa's sprawling and oft-unprotected shorelines--most notably the infamous 2006 toxic waste dumping off the Ivory Coast that killed dozens and made hundreds more sick--as poor nations are unable (or at times unwilling) to declare the sovereignty of their waters from the richer global giants who directly and indirectly control their economies. For the fractured and decentralized Somalia, protecting its waters has been impossible. The UN has made previous reprimands for these activities, but mostly they have gone unheeded.

Today, much like their earlier counterparts, those who made their life on the sea and now find themselves squeezed out by an exploitative global system, have taken to piracy--deciding that if they can no longer draw in fish, they'll go for much larger catch.

According to BBC Somalia analyst Mohamed Mohamed, the pirate gangs that operate out of Somlia are headed primarily by such ex-fishermen. They are considered the "brains" of the operation--the ones who have spent their lives at sea, know best how to operate vessels and better still, how to navigate the waterways. These ex-fisherman have joined forces with the normally landlocked dispossessed, the notorious Somali militiamen, of the type that fought US elite ranger forces to an eventual draw in the 1990s. With these armed mercenaries as muscle, the ex-fishermen then enlist the aid of what Mohamed says are "technical experts...the computer geeks and know how to operate the hi-tech equipment needed to operate as a pirate -- satellite phones, GPS and military hardware." Though rag-tag in appearance, and pushed into piracy by a similar crush of exploitative social forces as the pirates of old, these sea-brigands are a definitive spin-off of the modern world--or perhaps those who have settled to operate on its fringes.

The New York Times back in September 2008 took some time to shed light on the turn of these fishermen to pirates:

The piracy industry started about 10 to 15 years ago, Somali officials said, as a response to illegal fishing. Somalia’s central government imploded in 1991, casting the country into chaos. With no patrols along the shoreline, Somalia’s tuna-rich waters were soon plundered by commercial fishing fleets from around the world. Somali fishermen armed themselves and turned into vigilantes by confronting illegal fishing boats and demanding that they pay a tax. “From there, they got greedy,” said Mohamed Osman Aden, a Somali diplomat in Kenya. “They starting attacking everyone.”

Indeed, greed or revenge, the money gained from these operations is no chump change. In 2008, a report by the British think-tank Chatham House claimed Somali pirates had cost up to $30m (£17m) in ransoms that year alone. Yet it should be pointed out, this money has to be put into perspective, as those foreigners illegally fishing and dumping in Somali waters extract much more from the local peoples than they [in the form of other vessels that fly their flags] are forced--at gunpoint--to return.

Peter Lehr, a Somalia piracy expert at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland, and the editor of Violence at Sea: Piracy in the Age of Global Terrorism, calls it a an uneven resource swap. "Somalis collect up to $100 million a year from pirate ransoms off their coasts. And the Europeans and Asians poach around $300 million a year in fish from Somali waters."

And where is this ransom money going? It would seem throughout Somalia, and back to wherever the pirates hail from. Buildings and other forms of instrastructure, lacking in the shattered country, are now being financed by pirate money. Even Somali merchants in "legitimate businesses" are now relying on pirates for loans.

Make no doubt, these pirates aren't merely Robin Hoods, and they flaunt their ill-gotten gains. The BBC interviewed residents in the Somali region of Puntland, where most of the pirates come from, who claim they live a lavish life--at least in comparison to others.

"They have money; they have power and they are getting stronger by the day," says Abdi Farah Juha who lives in the regional capital, Garowe. "They wed the most beautiful girls; they are building big houses; they have new cars; new guns," he says. "Piracy in many ways is socially acceptable. They have become fashionable."

But this marriage of ex-fisherman and a brigand's lifestyle has its drawbacks. Young men with little occupational alternatives now flock to the coastline to join the pirate ranks. And weapons--already too numerous in the country--are now flowing along with the cash, both deemed as essential tools of the trade. As the BBC found out in their interviews of locals, not everyone is enamored by the emerging "hydrarchy."

Mohamed Hassan, living in the midst of the piracy trade, worries over the "hundreds of armed men" arriving from the interior of Somlia to join the pirates. Piracy he notes has also thrown the local economy into disarray, as the pumping of "huge amounts of US dollars" causes exchange rates to fluctuate.

"This piracy has a negative impact on several aspects of our life in Garowe," he says. "They promote the use of drugs -- chewing khat (a stimulant which keeps one alert) and smoking hashish -- and alcohol."

In the past pirates were treated with scorn by the global system they threatened to disrupt. Painted as a motely, multi-racial, anarchic rabble, what historians Marcus Rediker and Peter Linebaugh have called "a many-headed hydra," pirates became pariahs of the first order. Thousands were captured and hanged immediately throughout the Atlantic, as even competing empires (who were not above using pirates for their own use), sometimes joined ranks to crush this growing menace.

Today's pirates, particularly the ones out of Somalia--made famous with their daring hijackings and multi-million dollar ransoms--have garnered the same international scorn. From oil-wealthy Arab states to rich global players, the Somali pirates have been decried as a threat second only to al-Qaeda. Seeming to know well how they are perceived, some have taken to the airwaves, painting themselves (much as pirates in past history) as rebels against the existing order.

“We don’t consider ourselves sea bandits,” pirate spokesman Sugule Ali said in a 45-minute interview on Somali radio in September 2008. “We consider sea bandits those who illegally fish in our seas and dump waste in our seas and carry weapons in our seas. We are simply patrolling our seas. Think of us like a coast guard.”

As related by Ali, ships aren't specifically targeted because of any known cargo--as was the case of the Ukranian freighter carrying $30 million worth of heavy weaponry back in 2008, or the recent attempted seizure of a US freighter carrying (ironically enough) food aid for Somalia and Uganda--but merely because of their size, foreign nature and presence.

"We just saw a big ship," Ali said of the Ukranian freighter in 2008, "So we stopped it." As for the heavy weapons on the freighter, Ali assured that they prized their ransom over artillery.

"Somalia has suffered from many years of destruction because of all these weapons," he said. "We don’t want that suffering and chaos to continue. We are not going to offload the weapons. We just want the money."

Reporter Paul Salopek at the Chicago Tribune, examining the pirates claims, took a tongue-in-cheek look at what admittedly was a bizarre incident on the global stage:

Somalia's pirates want the world to know they are regrettably misunderstood. They are merely "gentlemen who work in the ocean." Indeed, many are salty patriots risking their lives at sea while "protecting Somalia's shores." And the sea — ah, she is the pirates' beloved "mother."

Salopek goes on to relate more on what he calls the "aggrieved buccaneer" who identified himself as a spokesman for the "Ocean Salvation Corps." He stated that "he and his men were merely exacting a tax for years of foreign poaching in Somalia's fish-rich waters."

Though at times humorous, Salopek was brought to ask a profound question. In this increasing spate of hijackings and brigandry on the high seas by the global poor upon the global rich, in the larger picture just "who is pirating who?"


Update- 04/10/09

Jeremey Schahill at Alternet notes that a nuclear powered warship and a destroyer are now all headed off to Somalia after pirates hijack a ship with "food aid" that also happens to belong to a U.S. Department of Defense contractor with "top security clearance," which does a half-billion dollars in annual business with the Pentagon. Hmm. That must be some interesting "food aid."

The Somali pirates who took control of the 17,000-ton "Maersk Alabama" cargo-ship in the early hours of Wednesday morning probably were unaware that the ship they were boarding belonged to a U.S. Department of Defense contractor with "top security clearance," which does a half-billion dollars in annual business with the Pentagon, primarily the Navy. The ship was being operated by an "all-American" crew -- there were 20 U.S. nationals on the ship. "Every indication is that this is the first time a U.S.-flagged ship has been successfully seized by pirates," said Lt. Nathan Christensen, a spokesperson for for the U.S. Navy's Bahrain-based 5th Fleet. The last documented pirate attack of a U.S. vessel by African pirates was reported in 1804, off Libya, according to The Los Angeles Times.

The company, A.P. Moller-Maersk, is a Denmark-based company with a large U.S. subsidiary, Maersk Line, Ltd, that serves U.S. government agencies and contractors. The company, which is based in Norfolk, Virginia, runs the world's largest fleet of U.S.-flag vessels. The "Alabama" was about 300 miles off the coast of the Puntland region of northern Somalia when it was taken. The U.S. military says the Alabama was not operating on a DoD contract at the time and was said to be delivering food aid.

Read full article here.

Read More...

Summary only...

Food Riots- How We Starve the World, And Why They're Not Taking It Anymore

Protestors in Mexico bang empty pots to protest soaring food prices- part of a larger global crisis that has struck much of the developing world.

Food Riots. They sound like something out of a medieval history book describing the dark side of feudalism, or perhaps more aptly a story set in some dystopian apocalyptic future. But these events are in the here and now. In Haiti food riots have claimed dozens of lives, as people unable to afford basic nutrition needs were forced to make cakes of mud to fill their stomachs. Food riots broke out in Egypt for several days after food prices soared. Similar events shook cities in Mexico, Morocco, Cameroon, Bangladesh, Indonesia, the Philippines, Uzbekistan and elsewhere. And though underreported, these events have been ongoing for well over a year. The UN is now warning that food riots could spread and cause global instability. "The reality is that people are dying already in the riots," said Jacques Diouf, the head of the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO). Though the media has at least stopped to pick up on the story (in-between the horse race), there has been little actually done to explain the causes of the current crises. Perhaps it's because, like so much in our increasingly connected world, food riots in far flung developing countries turn out to have just about everything to do with financial institutions and a global economy run by rich nations like ourselves--who have been watching a steady increase in our own food prices. As Bill Quigley at Counterpunch reports in the following reposted article, we're starving the world and they've just about had enough.


30 Years Ago Haiti Grew All the Rice It Needed. What Happened?

The U.S. Role in Haiti's Food Riots

By BILL QUIGLEY

http://www.counterpunch.org/

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

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

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

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

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

Thirty years ago, Haiti raised nearly all the rice it needed. What happened?

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

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

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

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

Still the international business community was not satisfied. In 1994, as a condition for U.S. assistance in returning to Haiti to resume his elected Presidency, Jean-Bertrand Aristide was forced by the U.S., the IMF, and the World Bank to open up the markets in Haiti even more.

But, Haiti is the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere, what reason could the U.S. have in destroying the rice market of this tiny country?

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

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

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

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

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

U.S. protection for rice farmers goes even further. A 2006 story in the Washington Post found that the federal government has paid at least $1.3 billion in subsidies for rice and other crops since 2000 to individuals who do no farming at all; including $490,000 to a Houston surgeon who owned land near Houston that once grew rice.

And it is not only the Haitian rice farmers who have been hurt.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bill Quigley is a human rights lawyer and law professor at Loyola University New Orleans. He can be reached at quigley77@gmail.com People interested in donating to feed children in Haiti should go to http://www.whatiffoundation.org/

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

Read More...

Summary only...

The High Price of Chocolate

child cocoa worker, Ivory Coast

Chocolate- its one of nature's perfect foods. It delights our senses. Some say it has "curative" properties. Even our bodies crave it once we've tasted it. And this Valentine's day the chocolate industry is expected to net over $400 million in sales for the sweet substance. Yet there's a bitter side to the chocolate trade, one that involves child labor, poverty and the exploitation that seems to be par the course in our new global economy.

West Africa supplies some 70% of the world's cocoa beans. Côte d'Ivoire (Ivory Coast) alone accounts for 40%. And although the cocoa industry netted billions in profit just this past year (one company, Cargill, reported $2.7 billion alone), the living conditions for the farmers who work cocoa on plantations or small house hold plots are dismal.

As Christian Parenti writes: "Working and living conditions are brutal. Most villages lack electricity, running water, health clinics or schools. And to make ends meet, underage cocoa workers...spend their days wielding machetes, handling pesticides and carrying heavy loads."

Some have called what is going on in the Ivory Coast forced child labor. Others have equated it to slavery. How do big cocoa companies get away with this? Well for one, as Parenti writes, they can always claim they aren't directly involved:

"The big cocoa exporters - Cargill, Archer Daniels Midland (ADM, Fortune 500), Barry Callebaut and Saf-Cacao - do not own plantations and do not directly employ child workers. Instead, they buy beans from Ivorian middlemen called pisteurs and treton. These middlemen own warehouses and fleets of flatbed trucks that travel deep into the jungle to buy cocoa from the small independent farmers who grow most of the crop. But labor and human rights activists charge that Big Chocolate has an obligation to improve working conditions on the farms where so many children toil. They argue that the exporters and manufacturers bear ultimate responsibility for conditions on the farms because they exert considerable control over world cocoa markets, essentially setting what is called the farm gate price."

Secondly, they can claim that they have fixed the problem and are working on it. This isn't a new issue after all. Some seven years back, after the plight of West African cocoa farmers was made more widely known, public outcry resulted in the threat of regulation of the industry. U.S. Rep. Eliot Engel (D-N.Y.) and Sen. Tom Harkin (D-Iowa) introduced legislation that would have demanded chocolate be labeled, similar to the Kimberly process for conflict diamonds. But, as Parenti writes, "The industry fought back, and a compromise was reached establishing a voluntary protocol by which chocolate companies would wean themselves from child labor, then certify that they had done so."

By getting out in front of the issue the industry managed to scrap the labeling process. Instead there was a promise of "public reporting by African governments, third-party verification and poverty remediation by 2005." Much like the controversial Kimberly process, by 2005 it seems not much was done. Pleading for time, the cocoa industry managed to get the protocol extended for three more years until July 2008. "To turn up the heat," Parenti says,"the U.S. Department of Labor contracted with Tulane University to monitor progress." And it is from this Tulane report that we today realize, near nothing has really changed.

Parenti in his article writes:

"Researchers found that while industry and governments in West Africa have made initial steps, such as establishing task forces on child labor, conditions on the ground remain bad: Children still work in cocoa production, regularly miss school, perform dangerous tasks and suffer injury and sickness. The report criticized the governments of Ivory Coast and Ghana for lack of transparency. And it said the industry's certification process "contains no standards."

What's worse, in 2002 the once "stable" Ivory Coast tumbled into chaos after electoral politics turned into conflict and warfare between factions in a divided country. Like diamonds in Sierra Leone and rich minerals in the Democratic Republic of Congo, cocoa became the means for those with weapons to accrue power, wealth and more arms. According to the London based Global Witness in 2007, government and rebel leaders in Ivory Coast, "both siphoned off millions...from the cocoa industry to finance the 2002-03 civil war." Thus cocoa growing, already an exploitative enterprise, gave way to what some called "Blood Chocolate."

Today that war is over, with both sides accepting a disquieting peace, backed up by the presence of UN troops and former coloniser France. The war however has become a convenient excuse for the chocolate industry, who say the conflict "hampered their efforts to eradicate child labor." In the meantime, business goes on as usual, while the industry claims to either be taking steps (often ineffectual and farcial) or unable to do anything.

So what is the answer to all this? Well there has long been a movement "fair-trade" chocolate, where lovers of the sweet substance can refuse to buy from producers and exporters involved in exploitation and child labor. But the issue extends further than this. Groups like Equal Exchange, who specialize in importing/buying "fair-trade" chocolates, tend to do so from democratically run co-ops, where farmers can grow and sell their products in community agri-groups. However both the cocoa industry, and the Ivory Coast government who are bolstered by the multi-billion dollar trade, engage in acts of intimidation and harrassment to discourage such ventures. Cocoa industry bigs like Cargill even set up exploitative loan-schemes similar to sharecropping, where poor farmers must borrow against the beans they produce--often finding themselves stifled in a cycle of debt they can never manage to break out of.

At the moment, fair-trade chocolate in Ivory Coast has made little headway. It accounts for about 1% of exports. As Parenti writes, "A more effective way to combat child labor would be for the government of Ivory Coast to invest some of the revenue it gets from high taxes on cocoa exporters in education and social services to help poor farmers."

When asked what would improve things, the farmers also know the answer--"better prices." Better prices for cocoa, which we consume so cheaply, would mean more money for them. A little more money paid on our end would would mean less of a dependence by farmers on cocoa corporations like Cargill and the ability to send children back to schools instead of the cocoa farms. More money would mean those same farmers have a greater ability to press their own government to involve itself in fair trade.

In the meantime, back here, on the other side of the trade, the Tulane report is due to come up in Congress. The extension for the big companies and the Ivory Coast to implement policies more beneficial to their farmers and less apt to employ children is up for renewal. Contacting the sponsors of that legislation, Rep. Engel (D-NY) and Sen. Tom Harkin (D-IA) and other concerned bodies, Congressional Black Caucus and the Congressional Progressive Caucus, and voicing our concerns seems a fitting bit of political action in this campaign season.

*Much of this post taken from Christian Parenti's article Chocolate's Bittersweet Economy.

Listen to Parenti debate the Cocoa Industry on Democracy Now!

Read More...

Summary only...

Robert Zoellick: Bush's New Man at the Death Star

So looks like the Empire will soon have a new head at the Death Star. This week President George Bush the Younger nominated Robert Zoellick to the top position at the World Bank--to replace the outgoing Paul Wolfowitz. Zoellick, a former U.S. Trade Representative, is more than likely to be confirmed as the next World Bank president sometime this month. And since his nomination, praise has poured in for his roles in global trade talks, the crisis in Darfur and relations with China. But, we heard much the same praise given to Paul Wolfowitz when he first got the job. Is Robert Zoellick really that different from his predecessor? Here's a hint... he was nominated by *George Bush.* That should be just about enough to sow doubts, but in case you need more....

So who is Robert Zoellick? Well turns out he's one of the gang. Like Paul Wolfowitz, Zoellick is a member of the Project for a New American Century (PNAC). As discussed in a previous article, PNAC adheres to an ideology that America's military strength should be used to bring order to the world and unchallenged global supremacy; the conservative think tank endorses the notion of a Pax Americana. It is a vision of an America for the 21st century, which would "extend its position of global leadership by maintaining the preeminence of U.S. military forces." In 1997 Zoellick, along with Wolfowitz and other notable necons, would sign his name to a letter to then President Bill Clinton urging "regime change" in Iraq as a stepping stone towards global American dominance.

While there has been praise for his involvement in Sudan's Darfur crisis, there has also been criticism. In 2005, Africa Action angrily denounced Zoellick for his admittance that the U.S. was engaged in intelligence sharing with the government in Khartoum:

Africa Action today expressed outrage at U.S. Deputy Secretary of State Robert Zoellick’s testimony before Congress, in which he acknowledged that the Bush Administration is maintaining an intelligence-sharing partnership with the government of Sudan, even as it continues its genocidal campaign against the people of Darfur and prepares for more violence against the people in eastern Sudan, who are also rebelling against Khartoum. Zoellick also failed to describe any new and urgent U.S. action designed to stop the genocide and protect civilians in Darfur.

When it comes to globalization and trade, Zoellick has hardly been a friend of the impoverished. In a 2003 article titled Robert Zoellick's Free Trade Evangelism, the transnational advocacy network CorpWatch detailed his "bullying" tactics against smaller nations that did not fall in line fast enough with American economic policies:

...in Central America there are mixed feelings about Zoellick who moved aggressively to target the countries that joined the G-21: Costa Rica and Guatemala, by threatening their membership in a proposed Central American Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA).

"I told them that the emergence of the G-21 might pose a big problem to this agreement since our Congress resents the fact that members of CAFTA are also in the G-21," he said. "If we want to construct a common future with them, resistance and protest do not constitute an effective strategy. In my talks with some of these countries, I sense that they are drawing the right conclusions."

In addition Zoellick warned Costa Rica in early October that it must open its services market and privatize its telecommunications, electricity and insurance industries if it wants to join CAFTA.

The global justice network 50 Years is Enough notes much the same:

Zoellick served as the U.S.’s chief trade negotiator for Bush’s first term. . “He earned a reputation as a powerful bully in middle- and low- income countries,” said Jessica Walker Beaumont of the American Friends Service Committee. “His condescending lectures about ‘can-do and won’t-do nations’ at the 2003 WTO summit in Cancun, when the US didn’t get its way, became notorious. It’s hard to imagine that, after defending US corporate profits so zealously, this is the person who is going to champion development on behalf of the world’s poor.”

They go on to say:

“While no one could be as outrageous as Wolfowitz, the architect of the Iraq war, Zoellick is a full-fledged neo-conservative too, a supporter of invading Iraq since 1998. The best that can be said for him is that, like Wolfowitz, he’ll be an appropriate symbol of what the World Bank has become – an agency dedicated to entrenching U.S. economic domination.”

So, in the end, Zoellick and his supporters may attempt to paint his appointment to the World Bank as a new start, but it seems mostly like more of the same. This supposed "changing of the guard" will hardly reflect any changes in policy.

Read More...

Summary only...

Capitalism- An Unsustainable System ?

We know that capitalism is not just the most sensible way to organize an economy but is now the only possible way to organize an economy. We know that dissenters to this conventional wisdom can, and should, be ignored. There's no longer even any need to persecute such heretics; they are obviously irrelevant. How do we know all this? Because we are told so, relentlessly...

So begins an article by Robert Jensen, a journalism professor at the University of Texas at Austin who dares to ask, in the midst of a capitalist nation, in a world where globalisation is a holy writ, whether that which we have now come to take as inevitable is the only choice. Have we really reached an "end of history" with the dominance of capitalism and "free markets"--when they seem to only reap rewards for a minority of people on the planet? Has the "defeat of communism" assured that capitalism will prevail, or do we dare to take a critical look at our system.


The drive to sustain capitalism is literally entrenched into our society. We learn from our youth that it is right and just. As we grow up, we're taught it's democratic--that the profit making of free markets is somehow intrinsically tied to liberty and freedom. And no wonder, as Lizabeth Cohen points out in her work A Consumers' Republic- The Politics of Mass Consumption in Postwar America, the "pursuit of prosperity" (through consumption) has become one in the same with the "pursuit of happiness."

As Jensen notes, we are told and taught to support capitalism as an inevitable and unquestionable economic strategy...

...typically by those who have the most to gain from such a claim, most notably those in the business world and their functionaries and apologists in the schools, universities, mass media, and mainstream politics. Capitalism is not a choice, but rather simply is, like a state of nature. Maybe not like a state of nature, but the state of nature. To contest capitalism these days is like arguing against the air that we breathe. Arguing against capitalism, we're told, is simply crazy.

The 2003 PBS documentary Commanding Heights: The Battle for the World's Economy attempts to trace the rise of the current capitalist global system, starting in 1914 with the outbreak of WWI, through the Great Depression and WWII, culminating in the fall/failure of communist states and the dominance of the current political economic order. An informative piece, for all its attempts to analyze the breadth of prosperity and poverty wrought by globalization, the documentary still puts forth economic capitalism as the "central global reality." There is no actual questioning of the premises on which the system rests, but rather if it is "too complex to be controlled" and the means by which the "stakeholders...[will] devise new means to include the dispossessed."

The capitalist narrative, even when critically introspective, tends to go something like this: Capitalism is inherently good. Capitalism is forward-thinking, modern and progressive. Capitalism is inherently synonymous with freedom. Capitalism won a hard fought victory over varied systems that sought to threaten and defeat it, but it prevailed, and is thus the "natural" way of things. Sure it has flaws, generated by a few bad apples and for those unable to adapt. But it is still the most logical system--one that works. Compared with the disasters we saw in the Soviet Union and other communist states, how can anyone say otherwise? It allows us to have laptops to write our blogs upon, and inspires us to dream of working our way up the economic ladder.

Yet capitalism also gave us wholesale chattel bondage and global imperialism, as seen in the West's trans-Atlantic slave trade and European colonisation. Though some economic historians have tried to point out that slavery and colonialism are antiethical to the workings of capitalism, and thus why both ended, the fact remains that the capital gained through these events are themselves tied to the rise in capitalism. It is also the inherent manipulation of resources and labor to enrich a few. We see this in the exploitative practices of neoliberal globalization and privatization that disenfranchises workers and the forces of labor both in the U.S. and in countries around the globe. With the "spectre of communism" gone, who is there now to blame for the growing disparity of wealth in the world? Most states--including the most impoverished in Africa, Asia and Latin America--follow a capitalist model, complete with economic reforms engineered by industrialized western nations. And yet the majority of the people who live within them--the majority of the globe--still live in poverty. And matters have gotten worse in the past decade, not better.

Jensen lays out three broad charges at capitalism, highlighting how its stated productive aims clash with some of our key touted principles:

Capitalism is admittedly an incredibly productive system that has created a flood of goods unlike anything the world has ever seen. It also is a system that is fundamentally (1) inhuman, (2) anti-democratic, and (3) unsustainable. Capitalism has given those of us in the First World lots of stuff (most of it of marginal or questionable value) in exchange for our souls, our hope for progressive politics, and the possibility of a decent future for children.

Is Capitalism inhuman? Sometimes it certainly seems so, when you watch a documentary like Independent Lens Black Gold, which tells the story of the $80-billion-plus coffee industry, where Ethiopian farmers (in the land where the coffee bean originated) are paid such low wages that many have been forced to abandon their fields. It looks so when you see the result of NAFTA, forcing farmers in Central America off their land and into the precarious and dangerous migrations across increasingly hostile borders of the U.S. in search for exploitative low wage jobs. It certainly gives that sense of inhumanity when you see big pharm companies fight to keep their HIV medicines high priced, denying access to the sick and dying of the world that cannot afford it. Inhumanity seems to abound when you see the global masses of the impoverished--all in countries that now follow capitalist neoliberal policies--who live off less a day than we spend for breakfast.

Half the world's population lives on less than $2 a day. That's more than 3 billion people. Just over half of the population of sub-Saharan Africa lives on less than $1 a day. That's more than 300 million people. How about one more statistic: About 500 children in Africa die from poverty-related diseases, and the majority of those deaths could be averted with simple medicines or insecticide-treated nets. That's 500 children -- not every year, or every month or every week. That's not 500 children every day. Poverty-related diseases claim the lives of 500 children an hour in Africa.

We all admit that while we revel in capitalism, it's inherent profit-driven dictates clash against our inherent humanity, and cause us to wonder how such gross imbalance can occur, what brought it into being and--most disturbing--how is it that we endure and live with that reality each and every day?

Is Capitalism anti-democratic? You can get that idea when the push for profits outweighs the need for protection of the very individual rights democracy claims to rest upon. Even a self-described "communist" nation like China pushes this ideology, managing to blend the harsh nature of old-style Maoist "re-education camps" with 19th century style industrial capitalist "labor factories." The documentary China Blue details the life of Jasmine, one of the 130 million migrant workers on the move in China, who may end up in factories that manufacture goods--in this case jeans--for the West. In this symbiotic relationship that turns parasitic upon the masses, an anti-democratic system in China works in concert with an anti-democratic global capitalist system. China wants the profits of business; the Western companies push for cheaper and cheaper garments to maximize its own profits. All this leaves workers like Jasmine, who can work 17 to 20 hr days for meager pay, with no recourse. To do something democratic like form a labor strike is illegal in China, and that's precisely why multinational corporations take jobs from here and go there. All of this returns home to us, as the same forces that attempt to stifle economic democratic dissent overseas push for deregulation, privatization and a favoring of business over labor and individual rights.

And if the lack of economic prosperity, joblessness and homelessness that plagues us in the West is not enough to ponder the inhumane and anti-democratic nature of the system, think upon the many wars and military actions (covert and overt) that the U.S. has engaged in to sustain the capitalist order--often in the face of democratic principles. From the alliances between the United Fruit Company and the U.S. government in the Guatemala coup, to the experiments of neoliberalism once the deposed elected Salvador Allende was replaced with the CIA allied dictator Augusto Pinochet, to the CIA and the British SIS deposing of the democratically elected Mohammad Mossadeq of Iran and replacing him with the semi-monarchical Shah, to the present day oil driven wars and machinations carried bout by the U.S. and Western powers from Iraq to Nigeria, the capitalist economic order has been a key ally in militarism, and tied into that often unnamed "military industrial complex"--a term dreamed up by no less a "kooky leftist" than former Republican President Dwight D. Eisenhower.

Is Capitalism unsustainable? We may finally be willing to admit this to ourselves. As Global Warming has now become a household term, we are forced to question whether the way we live is healthy not just for our economy or individual nation-states, but the planet itself. A look at the oceans alone shows the dismal state of affairs. Giant 400-ft trawlers now "stalk" the seas, raking in something over 1 million pounds of fish a day. Nearly a third of this is discarded, dead, back into the ocean as "un-saleable." This means a staggering 50 billion pounds of fish are killed, churned to gore and thrown back into the ocean each year, simply to meet the profit demands of the global economic system. The fish industry calls this "harvesting" carried out by floating "fish factories;" others call them "killing machines."

As oceanographer Sylvia Earle points out in the PBS documentary Journey to Planet Earth: State of the Ocean's Animals:

Although we talk about harvesting the sea, it's a misuse of the word if ever there was a misuse. We don’t plant fish in the ocean. We go out like hunters and gatherers, track them down, find them, extract them. In half a century we have lost on the order of 90 percent of the big fish in the ocean. I say lost, actually, we haven’t lost them. We've consumed them. We’ve eaten them. We’ve captured them. Though our fish markets may give the impression of an inexhaustible resource, what we are really seeing is the consumption of the final 10 percent of the world's fisheries.

The rapacious depletion and careless squandering of Earth's oceans has happened not because of a population explosion of humans, not over the vast course of humanity's time on this planet, but mostly within the last 50 years, to meet the economic profit-driven surplus and needs of a minority of the planet. In fact, these "fish factories" are devastating local fisherman--both off the coast of the U.S., and even worse in Africa, who simply cannot compete. The economic pressure this places on the coastal dwellers of regions like Senegal, spawn into food shortages, poverty and unrest--all the while robbing billions of a vital food source. Whether it is the oceans, forests, green-house gases or other aspects of the ecosystem, our planet can't sustain the current economic system much longer. Even if free market capitalism could live up to its dubious claims to "lift all boats" and we did live in the ideological economic World is Flat fantasy landscape of Thomas Friedman, we would rapidly deplete the planet of the resources needed to sustain the American-Western way of life for the 6 billion, and growing, members of the global community. As one scientist put it, we would literally need "three more Earths."

Or as Jensen puts it rather succinctly:

Capitalism is a system based on the idea of unlimited growth. The last time I checked, this is a finite planet. There are only two ways out of this one. Perhaps we will be hopping to a new planet soon. Or perhaps, because we need to figure out ways to cope with these physical limits, we will invent ever-more complex technologies to transcend those limits. Both those positions are equally delusional. Delusions may bring temporary comfort, but they don't solve problems. They tend, in fact, to cause more problems. Those problems seem to be piling up.

To further quote Jensen, "Capitalism is not, of course, the only unsustainable system that humans have devised... It's [just] the one that we are told is inevitable and natural, like the air." And herein lies my main point. In all honesty, I don't have definitive answers. Though I've studied my fair share of economic history, I am no economic theorist like Adam Smith or Karl Marx. I have no new and ground-breaking model or system for the world to follow. For the moment, most seem resigned to attempting to reform the system. We have devised, and continue to push, for ways to counteract the forces of "unchecked" capitalism, many of which (ironically) come from socialism--labor unions, medicare/universal healthcare, social security, pensions, government regulation, public welfare states, etc. Thanks to such movements and organizations, we have everything from the institution of child labor laws to some form of financial/health protection in old age. Many of these came about in the 1930s, as Franklin D. Roosevelt, reacting to popular calls for socialist upheaval in the midst of the capitalist wrought Great Depression of the 1930s, instituted New Deal policies based on co-opted socialist themes. Thus in irony, socialism (though rarely named, except by detractors) is seen as the cure, or at least quick patch, for rampant capitalism.

But even with reformation, we still need to ask some tough questions of the financial system we currently exist under, and take a look at its long range feasibility. Contrary to former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher's claim that when it comes to capitalism, "there is no alternative," we have a right, a responsibility, to do so. The global political economy need not be a fait accompli from which there is no turning back or dissent. One may agree with Jensen or not, but the real issue here is not so much the triumph of an economic ideology, but rather our blind belief in its alleged infallibility.

Read the full article by Robert Jensen: An Unsustainable System: Anti-Capitalism in Five Minutes.

Read More...

Summary only...

PAUL WOLFOWITZ RESIGNS FROM WORLD BANK! or DARTH VADER LEAVES DEATH STAR!

This week Paul Wolfowitz was forced to announce his resignation from the World Bank in the midst of an investigation into a corruption scandal. Many people—including myself—indulged a good bit of schadenfreude to see the Bush appointee go down. And while I'm all for enjoying this moment, I'd urge we pull back on popping open the bubbly just yet. In the larger scheme, Paul Wolfowitz's exit from the World Bank should be greeted with as much joy as watching Darth Vader ousted from the Death Star. And I'll tell you why…


Much as Anakin Skywalker was no minor player in the events that caused the downfall of the Galactic Republic, Paul Wolfowitz wasn't just any member of the current White House junta. As Deputy of Secretary of Defense under Donald Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz was a major powerbroker. He was one of the elite members of the old guard brought in under the first term of George Bush the Younger and a key proponent of the now infamous ideology known as neo-conservatism. Like Anakin Skywalker's turn towards the power hungry Sith, Wolfowitz and numerous other neoconservatives had traveled down a twisted road before going over to the "Dark Side." A motley group made up of self-described "liberal Cold War warriors," disaffected radical leftists turned reactionaries, right-wing advocates of American hegemony and adherents of authoritarian philosophers like Leo Strauss, neoconservatives arose under their own Sith patriarchs like Irvin Kristol and Norman Podhoretz. Wolfowitz worked his way through the Pentagon and even the administration of President Jimmy Carter, to finally hone his emergent ideology under the Reagan Administration and especially under George Bush the Elder.

In 1997, along with such neocon ideologues as Richard Perle, Dick and Lynne Cheney, Jeb Bush, William Kristol and others, Wolfowitz would become a charter member of the Project for the New American Century (PNAC), the preeminent neoconservative think tank. Like the policies of Chancellor Palpatine, PNAC adheres to an ideology that the Republic's military strength should be used to bring order to the world and unchallenged supremacy. Where Palpatine and his apprentice Darth Vader would eventually turn the Republic into an Empire, PNAC speaks of something similar—a Pax Americana of the 21st century, which would "extend its position of global leadership by maintaining the preeminence of U.S. military forces." To this end, in 1992, following the first Oil War of the Gulf, Wolfowitz would co-author a 1992 draft Defense Planning Guidance which, among other fantastic goals, "called for US military dominance over Eurasia;" the refashioning of the US military into a global police force; and the use of "preemptive strikes" against any nation that threatened American supremacy. When it was leaked to the media, the draft guide was so radical it caused global outrage and was immediately disavowed by George Bush the Elder, who ordered it rewritten—by none other than then Secretary of Defense, Dick Cheney. In 1997 Wolfowitz would sign his name to another infamous letter, this time to then President Bill Clinton urging "regime change" in Iraq as a stepping stone towards global American dominance. In 2000 Wolfowitz would help author and endorse what some have called one of the most "chilling" blueprints for American Empire— Rebuilding America's Defenses: Strategies, Forces, and Resources For A New Century.

Wolfowitz's time to shine however would come in 2001, after the attacks of September 11th. Having found his way back into the halls of power with the administration of Bush the Younger, Wolfowitz and compatriot Richard Perle would become two of the leading advocates in the Administration for an invasion of Iraq—hijacking the catastrophe of 9/11 for a war long planned. Wolfowitz is in fact recognized as a "key architect" of the Iraq War. Along with Perle, the administration, former cohorts at PNAC and others, Wolfowitz was not only a key planner of the war, but used the cowered mainstream press to help sell the American public on false claims of Iraqi WMDs. Wolfowitz would most famously claim that the war would be easy, cost something "under $50 billion" and that oil revenues from "liberated" Iraq would foot the bill. Today the cost of the war, simply in monetary terms, is over $400 billion and rises every second. When the war turned sour however, and visions of the Pax Americana came slamming against global reality, Wolfowitz and his neoconservative allies slowly began jumping ship, retreating to the shadows or turning on each other in a bizarre blame game, rather than answer for their heinous plans that have ruined a country, left hundreds of thousands mutilated, maimed, traumatized or dead, inflamed radical extremists and thrown the global security of the world into chaos. (Architects of the Iraqi War- Where Are They Now?) Wolfowitz however somehow managed to wrangle out a reward for such utter failure; and instead of simply retiring to some think tank or other private position, was given none other than a seat at the helm of the Death Star—the World Bank.

In the Star Wars universe, the Death Star is described as "the code name of an unspeakably powerful and horrific weapon developed by the Empire… an instrument of terror, meant to cow treasonous worlds with the threat of annihilation." Some have argued that the World Bank, is little different. The International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (World Bank) was founded in 1946 as a way to finance reconstruction projects in World War II-ravaged countries, primarily Europe, who had poor creditworthiness. Today its purported reason for existence is to help nations, especially the more impoverished, in their development and economic policies. But instead, along with complimentary world bodies like the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the World Bank has spread more terror among the world's impoverished than anything approaching development.

The transnational advocacy group 50 Years is Enough, which monitors the World Bank and IMF, points out how these detrimental policies take hold:

"Structural adjustment—the standard IMF/World Bank policy package which calls for slashing government spending, privatization, and opening up countries to exploitative foreign investment, among other measures—has deepened poverty around the world. In the two regions with the most structural adjustment experience, per capita income has stagnated (Latin America) or plummeted (Africa)."

Like the Death Star, the World Bank and IMF are owned and run by a powerful empire—this one made up of international banks and the elite brokers of the neoliberal global political economy that convene at such events as the G8 Summit or WTO Conference. Though a diversity of nationalities work at the World Bank, its head is always an American, usually chosen by the sitting President. The IMF in turn is always led by a member of a powerful European state. Together, along with the interconnected trade policies that govern the world, the World Bank operates as one of the forces that keeps poor nations poor, helping ruin their economies with disastrous neoliberal reforms, laying their markets open bare for rich nations to loot and maraud and strangles entire regions in stifling debt out of which they can never climb. It is a system that helps to engender a world where a few have and the masses of the global population live in poverty or die due to lack of food, medicines and more.

It was only fitting that Paul Wolfowitz, like Darth Vader, would be placed in charge of the weapon of mass destruction the World Bank has become. That an architect of war attempted to pass himself off as a humanitarian was the first bit of folly—and is part of the creepy perversity that is neconservatism: saving the world by, as Michael Franti crooned, attempting to "bomb it into peace." That Wolfowitz's fall came out of corruption is also a bit of sweet irony, as his vision of the organization upon take-over of its helm caused upheaval among the staff as he attempted to ram in his own specialized reforms to "fight corruption." And yet for all the seeming "oil and water" mix many in the mainstream press have tried to spin the Wolfowitz-World Bank scandal as, their joining was in many ways a proverbial match made in heaven—or that other place.

Journalist John Nichols notes as much in an article for The Nation, quoting from the poet, anti-apartheid activist and African development campaigner, Dennis Brutus:

"Wolfowitz's arrogance, his insistence that any problems were the result of his colleagues' actions, never his own, were a perfect match for the World Bank, which has always refused to take responsibility for its own disastrous policies and projects, laying blame instead with the borrowing country, even though the common denominator in so many botched projects, violations of human rights, and failed policy packages has been the presence of the World Bank. The combination of war and economic crimes for which he was responsible, made Wolfowitz an appropriate symbol for the institution."

Thus with the fall of Wolfowitz from the World Bank let us not engage in too much schadenfreude. Darth Vader may be gone, onto who knows what new mischief, but the Death Star remains "fully operational." Now not everyone at the World Bank, its varied workers and staff, may think of their organization as a weapon of mass destruction. And many may actually believe it can serve some good. Even one of its former taskmasters turned critic—economist Joseph Stiglitz—yet believes so. However, willing to risk the crossing of sci fi and fantasy genres in my analogy, the Bank—like the One Ring—serves the interest of the elite and the powerful who govern the finances of the world, and keep most of the world's population impoverished. It serves only one master and has been unable or unwilling to do much good for those who still put faith in it. So let us not get so caught up in the removal of one figure—no matter how powerful—and lose sight of the real threat to millions that yet exists by the very existence of the institution.

Naomi Klein posits her thoughts on the true meaning of the saga of Paul Wolfowitz and the World Bank in her article "Sacrificial Wolfie":

"What we should absolutely not do…is participate in the effort to cleanse the Bank's ruinous history by repeating the absurd narrative that the reputation of an otherwise laudable antipoverty organization has been sullied by one man. The Bank understandably wants to throw Wolfowitz overboard. I say, Let the ship go down with the captain."

Indeed. Don't abandon your X-Wing fighters just yet. We've still got a Death Star to take down.

Read More...

Summary only...

Bono's Lament for Africa- Critiquing the Best of Intentions

U2 frontman and anti-poverty activist Bono lamented this week that the world's industrial nations are not fulfilling their promises of aid to Africa's poor made at the G8 Summit in Gleneagles, Scotland in 2004. A new report compiled by his advocacy group DATA (Debt Aids Trade Africa) pointed out that the G8 is way off target on aid to Africa, having increased aid by $2.3 billion since 2004, when the Gleneagles commitment showed it should have risen by $5.4 billion. This is not the first time Bono has walked away disappointed. After meeting with the incoming Democratic House and Senate in December of 2006, he expressed "alarm" that he could not get the US Congressional leaders to keep up their commitment to aiding Africa. Still full of disappointment, Bono has stated he will remind the G8 financial ministers of their commitments to Africa at an upcoming meeting in Germany.

Bono… Bono… Bono… Where do I begin?


First off, let me say that overall I think Bono is the "real deal." That is, I think the rock star truly is moved by issues of poverty and AIDS in Africa. Sure there is something bizarre and ironic about a rich white guy flying around in private jets and staying in posh residences all the while claiming he wants to end global poverty—about as paradoxical as Oprah Winfrey's wonderfully generous gift of opening up a school in South Africa for impoverished young girls, but then disparaging the black youth of America as driven by materialism, when she controls a powerful media empire that endorses material consumption and capitalism (rewarding audience members with free cars and inviting them to peek into lavish birthday celebrations of the elite) as part of living a better, happier, fulfilling life. Maybe money makes the wealthy blind to their own hypocrisies. Nevertheless, I believe Bono is trying to do what he thinks will help. And for that he should be commended. I'm certain his actions have made a difference in many peoples lives. However, what I think his good intentions suffer from is a pragmatic approach that exposes a depth of incredible naiveté, failing to get at the heart of the matter and worse still, allowing those who control the reins of global power to avoid any real responsibility.

The push to free modern postcolonial Africa of poverty predates Bono. Numerous transnational movements and organizations have long formed networks demanding that issues of AIDS and poverty engulfing much of Africa be acknowledged by various wealthier nations and world bodies. Most forcefully, there has been strong activism to rid Africa of strangling debt. Groups like Africa Action and 50 Years is Enough in fact have argued that these debts are illegal, what they called odious debts—part of rich nations' policies that date back to the Cold War and the post-colonial era, giving massive "loans" with soaring high interest rates to corrupt leaders as political pay-offs and bribes, and now holding the citizens of those countries responsible for monies they never benefited from. The Democratic Republic of Congo stands out as a prime example, where the dictator Sekou Mobutu amassed large loans that conveniently found its way into European banks, while miring the country in billions in debt. These were not mere acts of theft, but part of a global system that willingly gave to leaders like Mobutu who carried out the bidding of the West. In the past 30 years in fact, Africa's loan debt has skyrocketed a stunning 400%.

More outrageous still, is that many African countries have become so mired in debt they are paying out more to their creditors than can be spent on their own development. Zambia for instance pays out more in debt to its rich creditor nations (including Western controlled institutions like the IMF and World Bank) than it spends on its entire healthcare budget; more than it spends on its schools, roads and infrastructure. These loans often come with gross stipulations that may for instance allow poor country A to purchase large items (like machinery) from rich nation B that issued the loan, but not the necessary tools or parts to fix that machinery. So when something breaks down, poor country A might actually have to get another loan from rich country B to purchase a new machine. These types of unethical schemes result in a need for more loans and thus incur more debt. Written into many of these exploitative deals—along with payoffs to the right officials—are also policies that allow rich nations to control the infrastructure of the poor countries that are in debt to them, or allow an unfair advantage that creates lopsided trade agreements. Debt thus not only hinders many poor nations from investing in their own infrastructure—schools, hospitals, roads—but severely negates their political and economic sovereignty, allowing the rich nations of the world to dictate policies that induce more poverty, creating systemic cultures of corruption and contributes to the usually attendant factors of hunger, conflict and disease.

Trade itself has also been a hotly contentious topic of the more established anti-poverty activists. While the neoliberal policies of globalization have pushed free markets, many activists have demanded * fair * markets and Fair Trade. Currently, powerful nations—using loans and aid and payoffs—have been able to strong arm the trade partnership with Africa. It allows for a grossly unequal system that allows for wealthy nations to hand out billions in subsidies to its own farmers while forcing Africa to lay open its markets bare. As the West floods the markets of poor African nations with cheaper goods—from chicken to cotton—local markets are wiped out, destroying the livelihoods of millions of farmers and thus adding to the ranks of poverty and domestic instability. Worse still, African nations lose control over their own domestic policies.

The food crisis that struck Niger in 2005 is a choice example. In order for the Niger government to receive loans and some meager form of debt relief from the G8 countries, it had to do away with long established emergency food hand outs to the poor—as part of neoliberal economic reforms that call for less state programs and more of a focus on profit. Attempting to prove its subservience to the G8 policies, Niger instead offered millet at subsidized prices which the poor could not afford. When a severe drought stuck the country in 2005, food that would have been available to feed the poor was nonexistent—and 3.6 million people faced starvation. The Niger government, fearful of a backlash from the G8 if it broke away from the disastrous imposed neoliberal model, continued to hold back on free food distribution. Only when things reached such a level of crisis that anti-poverty activists forced Western news media to pay attention, did the G8 back off and allow Niger to carry out its state feeding program to the poor.

While Bono, and other celebrity causes such as the ONE Campaign, certainly speak out about debt and trade, they have beocme decidedly more low-key about it over the years. What is focused on the most is the notion of "aid." Yet much like the odious debt that strangles Africa, efforts at "aid" are at times illusory. "Aid" to African countries from rich nations has often been as mired in exploitative politics as loans and trade. To receive "aid" one has to be a country in good standing. Good standing is often defined publicly as one free of corruption and engaging in democracy. In reality however, this is often code for a nation that agrees to follow dictates and policies of who ever gives them "aid." This can be anything from following the lead of rich nations at the UN, in trade negotiations, etc., opening up their small fragile markets to competition from goods like genetically modified seeds that may wipe out local agricultural industries or allowing multinational corporations to use one's seas and land to dump toxic waste.

In one of the most ironic twists, "Aid" can even come with stipulations demanding a poor country only spend the money it is given buying goods from the nation who gave the "Aid" in the first place! A report in 2005 found that for every $1 the United States gave in "Aid," it made back 86 cents simply by forcing poor nations to purchase goods made in America. Add in the numerous political strings that probably came with the receipt of "Aid," and you have a situation where rich nations are engaging in what the report called global "political grandstanding." In this way wealthy nations and their corporations can put on a great appearance of "helping the poor" while at the same time keeping the same global economic rules in place that allow them to exploit those very same poor, extracting billions in goods and resources far beyond what any "aid" provides.

And herein lays one of the most unsettling issues I've had with Bono and groups like ONE. These celebrity pushes to get people involved in global anti-poverty campaigns have been phenomenal. But they have come at a cost. In order to get many of us in rich nations, and our leaders, to pay heed to the world's poor these groups have muted any calls for responsibility on our side of the world. Rather than pointing out how the global economy that we live in, that our nations endorse and create, strangle the world's poor, we are told instead to feel sorry for Africa. We are shown pictures that tug at our hearts, at our minds, and appeals to our humanity. But we are not told to feel any responsibility. We are shown the starving faces of Niger, but not the machinations of our own nations in helping cause that starvation.

If we have guilt, it is only in that we have so much and they have so little. We are not told however to connect that the very reason we have so much—from the mineral rich coltan mines in war ravaged Congo in our cell phones to giant ocean trawlers (so-called "fish factories") that are now clear-cutting the African seafloor and pushing local fisherman off Mali and other nations into poverty—is rooted in the fact that others have so little. It is we who are strangling the world's poor, to meet our needs, our way of living. As one scientist put it, if the rest of the world were to live like we do in the West, we'd need another 3 Earths. We don't see our nations' responsibility in pushing exploitative loans in order to maintain the global political economy that ensures we can keep up our present culture of trade dominance and rapacious consumption. Our role in all of this is minimized to near the point of negation. Places like Africa are poor in our imaginations, solely because of bad leadership and rotten luck. No one wants to ask, if Western nations like Belgium and the United States sponsored and helped orchestrate the overthrow of the Democratic Congo's elected leader Patrece Lumumba, and then helped keep its dictator Mobutu in power, what measure of responsibility do they bear for years of repression, not to mention a disastrous war from 1998-2003 (shamefully ignored by the world) that would leave some 4 million people dead? We just tell those who do to "shut up and take our charity."

Of course, I do recognize that the recipients of "charity" may not care about such things. I have the benefit of a full belly and health insurance to sit back and make my criticisms. Yet that is my point—the gratitude of those who are in need should not be used as the measuring stick of the justness of our global system. What is more, by not acknowledging the West's culpability in many of the dire issues facing much of Africa, the depictions of a "dark" and "troubled" continent filled with endless human misery and backwardness—something even many well-meaning liberals engage in—are allowed to fester. Rather than seeing Africa's poverty as a problem with definitive historical and contemporary causes of the modern world, these issues are instead made somehow "naturally endemic" to the continent—as if it's peoples and cultures have known no other form of existence; as if it currently resides in a vacuum outside the global political economy; as if colonialism had never happened; as if indigenous states and forms of government (from Mali to Zimbabwe) had never existed at all; as if things have just always been this way. It is an Africa wiped clean of a functioning past and literally inverted and shaped to fit the West's imagination, a place of naturally "savage" wars and naturally brutal dictators that erupt sui genesis—Conrad's Heart of Darkness brought to life and thus erasing any form of responsibility by external actors. This perception of Africa is not only as dangerous as the dire issues that plague the continent, but is directly related. It is a form of racism that allows for the expectation of the worst to come out of Africa, the exotic, the threatening, the bizarre—and then similarly allows for policy to be shaped to fit those expectations.

I can understand why Bono and others take their soft-shoe approach. The frontman of U2 is no fool. He's well aware of all of this. But he has opted for a pragmatic approach because as the saying goes, you catch more flies with honey than vinegar. So rather than laying a great deal of well deserved blame at the feet of rich nations, instead there are calls for such nations to be more "generous." But the cost of this tactic can be tremendous. By not acknowledging the role of the West, of the rich nations, in Africa's current dilemma, and allowing us to wear white wristbands touting our gracious charity, a crime of epic proportions is being committed. Africa remains portrayed as a basket case continent, filled with never-ending seeming misery that has always been so and which can only be saved by good people (mostly white, naturally) in the West. This perversion of reality is akin to setting fire to someone's house and then congratulating yourself when you show up outside their smoldering ruins with blankets and hot chocolate. And it proved the perfect tool for the G8.

The calls for rich nations to erase debt, make trade fair and stop their strangle hold on Africa had been growing increasingly leading up to the G8 summit in 2005. From the famed Battle in Seattle at the WTO in 1999 to the many anti-poverty movements that melded into anti-war protests worldwide, the cries were getting stronger. The G8 and other world bodies like the IMF and World Bank (which these same nations control) knew concessions would have to be made, but had no intentions of doing anything radical. Enter an Irish rock star with a big heart and a pragmatic approach. Using Bono and other celebrities as shields from other more forceful and long established vocal activists, rich nations made pledges and commitments that in the end amounted to very little—but allowed for great photo-ops and allowed millions of "Johnny and Suzy come lately" anti-globalization activists to wave their white ONE bands happily while at grand concerts none of the world's poor could ever attend. Some more established activists who made alliances with Bono were described as "embarrassed" that the U2 frontman believed something had been accomplished at the G8 Summit of 2005. Trade campaigner John Hilary pointed out that the results of that summit actually set the movement towards fair trade "backwards." Salih Booker at Africa Action probably summed up the disappointment of the more established activists in his strong worded statement that July:

This G-8 plan is inadequate and a contemptuous response to African demands for justice. It is an unapologetic confirmation of the global apartheid system, in which the most impoverished continent bankrolls the development of the rich world. Their announcement to increase aid to Africa is the greatest hoax of our time. While they trumpet miniscule increases in development assistance, they continue to extract billions of dollars a year in debt repayments from countries excluded from this diminutive debt deal.

And so here we are a mere two years later, and the G8 and the World Bank and IMF have done very little even to stand by the meager pledges it made in 2005. Bono and his pragmatic allies had countered anti-poverty critics back then by saying a first step had been achieved, and more was certainly to come. Now it seems the U2 frontman is finding out that in actuality he may have been taken for a ride, allowing himself to believe that power would concede with "pleases" and "may i?" rather than forceful demands. When Bono goes back to make his case, he might want to keep some of the following in mind.

Tell the G8 that Africa does not need more deceptive "aid" or odious "loans" or debilitating neoliberal "free market policies." Africa does not require a charity or a handout. Rather it is owed for decades of past exploitation, with trade that is FAIR and allows its people to prosper. Africa's debt need not be "forgiven," but cancelled, and a real Marshall Plan of epic proportions should be undertaken by the UN in which its past exploiters are forced to contribute to help set things right—with African solutions being used first and foremost to tackle African problems. If the U.S. could pressure the IMF and World Bank to erase Iraq's debt gathered under their former ally Saddam Hussein, why can they not do the same for so much of Africa? If "freedom is on the march," then free Africa of the vultures who have too long helped strip the continent bare. If Africa is to be portrayed as victims, have the guts and strength to call out the victimizers. The West is not responsible for all of Africa's problems, but our hands are certainly not clean—not by far.

To Bono's celebrity friends at ONE, American Idol and elsewhere, the one-dimensional image of Africa as a helpless, inept, and continually war-torn continent mired in disease and famine needs to find a balance that provides a more realistic portrayal. Lagos, Nigeia is a teeming metropolis. At night Abidjan, Côte d'Ivoire is lit up like NYC. In some parts of Africa people may even live in suburbs, attend universities and find ways to celebrate their culture while pushing for a fair chance at modernity. Sure there are also slums, rural villages lacking basic things like clean water and other dire symptoms of poverty--but the overall picture is much more complex. Start pointing out the vast mineral and human potential of Africa. Depicting Africa as an "exotic" land even with the most well-meaning campaigns (I am African) is not only embarrassingly offensive, but helps engender the very sentiments that so easily marginalizes an entire continent of human beings. Start involving the voices in Africa (not just the ones we're familiar with in the west, like Iman) attempting to bring change, like Wangari Maathai or those at the World Social Forum—the continent doesn't need any more missionaries. Take a look at PBS's AFRICA. Attend African film festivals which can be illuminating on African social life and politics. Support one like FESPACO held in Burkina Faso each year. Getting ourselves to understand that those we seek to help aren't "projects" but people, just like us, might go a long way in bringing the continent that gave birth to humanity more humane treatment.

Read More...

Summary only...