Postmodern News Archives 14

2007-06-30T18:29:00.000-07:00

Harper Bids to be Bush's "Poodle"
Support for missile defence shield contrary to official policy.

By Linda Mcquaig
From Linda Mcquaig.com
2007

Perhaps the most notable thing Stephen Harper did at the G8 gathering last week was signal his intention to take over retiring British Prime Minister Tony Blair's role as George W. Bush's most helpful foreign ally.

The implications of this go far beyond whatever embarrassment Canadians may come to feel about our prime minister assuming the role of what has sometimes been referred to as Bush's "poodle". Members of our corporate and academic elite have long pushed for Canada's prime minister to adopt the "poodle" role (without of course calling it that), arguing that closer ties with the White House will bring us more influence in U.S. corridors of power.

But as Tony Blair's experience illustrated, the influence tends to go the other way - with the lesser power helping to advance Washington's agenda, rather than Washington advancing the agenda of its finely-furred friend.

Harper gave us a good example of this last week when he spoke out in favour of Bush's controversial plan to install a missile defence shield in Eastern Europe, and dismissed Russian concerns about the scheme.

Harper's intervention – coming from a country with a peaceful reputation - was extremely helpful to Bush, who has had trouble convincing the world that his missile shield won't just set off a new arms race.

So Harper helped Bush sell his missile shield to a skeptical world – even though Canada has refused to participate in the project.

While Harper himself has expressed support for the shield, he promised in the last federal election campaign that he wouldn't reverse Canada's opposition to it without a vote in the House of Commons, which he knows he could not win.

So, in prominently supporting Bush on the missile defence shield last week, Harper in effect did an end-run around Parliament and the Canadian public, and helped advance a position that is at odds with Canada's own official policy.

The significance of this goes beyond Harper's thumbing his nose at Canadian democracy, which is bad enough. Even more seriously, Harper lent Canadian credibility to a reckless scheme that threatens to increase the risk of nuclear war.

If this sounds far-fetched, it's only because of the confusion created by the word "defence" in "missile defence shield". In reality, the scheme isn't about defence at all, but rather about making it possible for the U.S. to initiate a nuclear war without fear of retaliation.

This was set out clearly by two U.S. military analysts in a major article called "The Rise of U.S. Nuclear Supremacy", which appeared last year in the prestigious U.S. journal Foreign Affairs. The analysts, Keir Lieber and Daryl Press, explained: "[T]he sort of missile defenses that the United States might plausibly deploy would be valuable primarily in an offensive context, not a defensive one – as an adjunct to a U.S. first-strike capability, not as a standalone shield."

The analysts noted that while a missile shield wouldn't be effective in an all-out war, it could prove useful if Washington were to initiate a nuclear attack against, for example, Russia or China, leaving the targeted country with only a tiny surviving arsenal: "At that point, even a relatively modest or inefficient missile-defense scheme might well be enough to protect against any retaliatory strikes."

So, as Bush goes about creating the capacity to initiate nuclear war – just in case he decides to eliminate some of the "evil" in the world – it seems he can count on support from his new best friend to the north.

It's Hard Out There for a Gay Gangsta
Queer Rap Challenges Hip-Hop Homophobia

By Mary O'Regan
From Utne.com

Forget about the homophobic right. Anti-gay messages have been rampant in the hip-hop world for years. Artists like Eminem and 50 Cent pepper their lyrics with homophobic slurs and openly admit to disapproving of same-sex relationships. According to the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation, Eminem's third album, Marshall Mathers LP contained the word "faggot" 18 times. Similarly, AlterNet reported in 2004 that in an interview with Playboy, 50 Cent declared, "I ain't into faggots."

Despite harsh words from prominent MCs, queer rappers around the world are taking center stage. "Times are changing and if openly gay rappers aren't invited then we are kicking the door in," the Los Angeles-based queer rapper Deadlee tells Britain's Gay.com. Deadlee is the headliner for Homorevolution Tour 2007, what Gay.com calls "the first ever organized regional tour of gay, lesbian, and bisexual Hip Hop artists." The tour will stop in ten US cities this spring and has nearly two-dozen queer artists on the bill.

Another gay rapper taking part in Homorevolution is using his lyrical prowess to spread the word about prejudice. British MC QBoy is featured in Coming Out to Class, a documentary about dealing with homosexuality as a student. PinkNews.co.uk reports that the television broadcast of the film has inspired seven members of parliament to sign a motion "to introduce legislation to require schools to protect gay and lesbian children from the emotional harm and impaired educational attainment that results from bullying."

Some gay rappers argue that the menacing words thrown around by Eminem, 50 Cent, and bullying schoolchildren no longer hold any weight. "There are more homophobic lyrics in recent days, even as there has been more of a gay presence in the media," Tori Fixx, a queer rapper and producer from Minneapolis, told City Pages last year, but "calling somebody a fag is different than literally saying all batty boys need to be destroyed."

D'oh Canada!

By CP
From The Winnipeg Sun

If we forget our history tests, are we doomed to repeat them?

Oh, Canada, shame on you!

Most Canadians know so little about their country that they would flunk the basic test that new immigrants are required to take before becoming citizens, according to a poll released yesterday.

The survey commissioned by the Dominion Institute found 60% of Canadians don't have the basic knowledge to pass the test given to newcomers. Ten years ago, 45% of those polled failed an identical test.

"Canadians appear to be losing knowledge when it comes to the most basic questions about Canadian history, politics, culture and geography ... (they) performed abysmally on some questions," Ipsos-Reid said in a statement while releasing the results of its survey of 1,005 adults.

While 96% of Canadians correctly identified the national anthem as O Canada, just six in 10 of them could recall its first two lines.

Only 4% could name four federal political parties represented in the House of Commons and just 4% knew the three requirements a citizen had to meet to be able to vote.

Only one-third could identify the number of Canadian provinces and territories. Only 8% knew that Queen Elizabeth is the head of state.

The Dominion Institute, which aims to boost knowledge of Canadian history and values, said all high school students should have to pass a special citizenship exam before they can graduate.

"It is frankly disheartening to see the lack of progress made by our group and the countless other organizations working to improve civic literary of Canadians over the last 10 years," institute co-founder Rudyard Griffiths said.

The Ipsos-Reid survey of 1,005 adults was done June 5 -7 and is accurate to within 3.1 percentage points, 19 times out of 20.

2007-06-08T08:44:00.000-07:00

Wooster Collective & Street Art

By Ian Lynam
From PingMag

What is street art? According to Wikipedia, Street art is any “art” developed in public spaces — that is, “in the streets” — though the term usually refers to art of an illicit nature (as opposed to, for instance, government or community art initiatives). The term can include traditional graffiti artwork, though it is often used to distinguish modern public-space artwork from traditional graffiti and the overtones of gang territoriality and vandalism associated with it.

As far as this subculture goes, Wooster Collective is the definitive place for your work to reside online. The website is the handiwork of New Yorkers Marc and Sara Schiller, documentarians of street art from all over the world. The kids took some time out of their busy day to answer a few questions for Pingmag.

Marc and Sara, in a few words: what is the Wooster Collective?

The Wooster Collective is a group of artists and art lovers who work on various projects and events which document and celebrate ephemeral art. The central aspect of the Wooster project is the website which, each day, showcases new street art from around the world.

How many artists are you currently gaterhing on the Wooster site?

We launched it in 2003 in New York City and over the last four years that site has profiled over 2000 emerging artists from every country in the world.

What has sparked the idea to start documenting street art in the first place?

We moved in an area of downtown New York, Soho, that we discovered was exploding in the amount of street art that was being placed on the streets. The creativity that we found was extremely inspiring. But because the art was illegal, often it only lasted a few days, or even hours. We felt that the street art movement needed to be documented in some way. We wanted to show what we were seeing each day to our friends. Because of this we launched the Wooster website. Our first artist on the site was Adam Neate.

Are there any memorable pieces that come to mind from that time?

Our favorite posts on the site have been by David Choe. He’s an amazing artist and has a wicked sense of humor. His “Day In The Life” is our favorite thing ever published on the site.

What kind of people actually come to Wooster Collective? What is your main feedback from viewers?

The reaction has been amazing. People from all walks of life come to the site every day. It’s not just other street artist of graffiti artists who enjoy the site. It has appealed to everyone, which is nice. Over 100,000 people visit it every day. We have been amazed how popular it has become - all because of word of mouth. We don’t actively publicize it at all.

I think we really created a community, but we also created a place where people can see what is happening in cities all over the world. We gave people a vehicle to reach a wider audience- to get noticed for their good work.

I noticed your “how to” section, which can almost be seen as a “street art tutorial”! Logan Hicks’ stencil cutting demo is insane!! I had no idea that he cut those totally by hand! Who do you ask about creating those “how tos”?

We just emailed our friends. We like them all and Logan’s is good! The network of artists is about 1,000. We know from the emails that we receive that people come back to the site not only to get inspired, but also to learn new things. Almost every day someone emails us asking how to do various things that they see on the site but don’t know how to do… It ranges from how to make a sticker, how to create wheat paste…how to hit a high spot… etc. So, in follow-up to our past series including “A Day In The Life”, “Give ‘Em Props” and “My Workspace”, we thought it would be cool to reach out to a group of our favorite people around the world and start a new series of posts on the Wooster site called “Wooster’s How To….”.

Who are your current favorite street artists then?

Armsrock, Swoon, Banksy, Blu, Mark Jenkins….. so many.

Do you have to exercise much quality control in terms of what goes up?

Yes. The site is our minds’ eye. We don’t let anyone post to the website other than us. We select things that inspire us, or things that we want to share with our friends because it is clever or funny or thought-provoking .

Do you use discretion in terms of what you cover?

Sure. We don’t want to put up anything that can lead to revealing the artist’s identity or personal information. We protect the anonymity of the artists.

Any other projects that are in the works that’ll be associated with WC?

We’re planning on a new book featuring the art of Armsrock from Bremen, Germany.

There always seem to be some issues about what is considered graffiti and what is definitely street art… How do you actually define the difference?

Graffiti really only uses spray cans to apply art directly to the walls. There are strict rules to graffiti. Street art is open to using other materials like paper, stencils, metal, etc. as well.

Yeah, I got lost in your 3D category. Amazing varitey of stuff there! But do you think that street art has reached a critical mass in terms of how it is viewed by popular culture?

Not yet, but soon. It is peaking now…

How do you see it peaking?

Like anything, once an underground movement goes “mainstream” as street art has, the vibrancy starts to drop off.

Do you worry that street art will lose relevancy through mass exposure?

Yes, and no. It will lose some of it’s power, but people will constantly be hitting the streets doing new things. It will morph into something new. And this is exciting.

Thanks a lot for the interview and also for archiving those fleeting art works for all of us!

The Politics of Naming: Genocide, Civil War, Insurgency

By Mahmood Mamdani
From London Review of Books

The similarities between Iraq and Darfur are remarkable. The estimate of the number of civilians killed over the past three years is roughly similar. The killers are mostly paramilitaries, closely linked to the official military, which is said to be their main source of arms. The victims too are by and large identified as members of groups, rather than targeted as individuals. But the violence in the two places is named differently. In Iraq, it is said to be a cycle of insurgency and counter-insurgency; in Darfur, it is called genocide. Why the difference? Who does the naming? Who is being named? What difference does it make?

The most powerful mobilisation in New York City is in relation to Darfur, not Iraq. One would expect the reverse, for no other reason than that most New Yorkers are American citizens and so should feel directly responsible for the violence in occupied Iraq. But Iraq is a messy place in the American imagination, a place with messy politics. Americans worry about what their government should do in Iraq. Should it withdraw? What would happen if it did? In contrast, there is nothing messy about Darfur. It is a place without history and without politics; simply a site where perpetrators clearly identifiable as ‘Arabs’ confront victims clearly identifiable as ‘Africans’.

A full-page advertisement has appeared several times a week in the New York Times calling for intervention in Darfur now. It wants the intervening forces to be placed under ‘a chain of command allowing necessary and timely military action without approval from distant political or civilian personnel’. That intervention in Darfur should not be subject to ‘political or civilian’ considerations and that the intervening forces should have the right to shoot – to kill – without permission from distant places: these are said to be ‘humanitarian’ demands. In the same vein, a New Republic editorial on Darfur has called for ‘force as a first-resort response’. What makes the situation even more puzzling is that some of those who are calling for an end to intervention in Iraq are demanding an intervention in Darfur; as the slogan goes, ‘Out of Iraq and into Darfur.’

What would happen if we thought of Darfur as we do of Iraq, as a place with a history and politics – a messy politics of insurgency and counter-insurgency? Why should an intervention in Darfur not turn out to be a trigger that escalates rather than reduces the level of violence as intervention in Iraq has done? Why might it not create the actual possibility of genocide, not just rhetorically but in reality? Morally, there is no doubt about the horrific nature of the violence against civilians in Darfur. The ambiguity lies in the politics of the violence, whose sources include both a state-connected counter-insurgency and an organised insurgency, very much like the violence in Iraq.

The insurgency and counter-insurgency in Darfur began in 2003. Both were driven by an intermeshing of domestic tensions in the context of a peace-averse international environment defined by the War on Terror. On the one hand, there was a struggle for power within the political class in Sudan, with more marginal interests in the west (following those in the south and in the east) calling for reform at the centre. On the other, there was a community-level split inside Darfur, between nomads and settled farmers, who had earlier forged a way of sharing the use of semi-arid land in the dry season. With the drought that set in towards the late 1970s, co-operation turned into an intense struggle over diminishing resources.

As the insurgency took root among the prospering peasant tribes of Darfur, the government trained and armed the poorer nomads and formed a militia – the Janjawiid – that became the vanguard of the unfolding counter-insurgency. The worst violence came from the Janjawiid, but the insurgent movements were also accused of gross violations. Anyone wanting to end the spiralling violence would have to bring about power-sharing at the state level and resource-sharing at the community level, land being the key resource.

Since its onset, two official verdicts have been delivered on the violence, the first from the US, the second from the UN. The American verdict was unambiguous: Darfur was the site of an ongoing genocide. The chain of events leading to Washington’s proclamation began with ‘a genocide alert’ from the Management Committee of the Washington Holocaust Memorial Museum; according to the Jerusalem Post, the alert was ‘the first ever of its kind, issued by the US Holocaust Museum’. The House of Representatives followed unanimously on 24 June 2004. The last to join the chorus was Colin Powell.

The UN Commission on Darfur was created in the aftermath of the American verdict and in response to American pressure. It was more ambiguous. In September 2004, the Nigerian president Olusegun Obasanjo, then the chair of the African Union, visited UN headquarters in New York. Darfur had been the focal point of discussion in the African Union. All concerned were alert to the extreme political sensitivity of the issue. At a press conference at the UN on 23 September Obasanjo was asked to pronounce on the violence in Darfur: was it genocide or not? His response was very clear:

Before you can say that this is genocide or ethnic cleansing, we will have to have a definite decision and plan and programme of a government to wipe out a particular group of people, then we will be talking about genocide, ethnic cleansing. What we know is not that. What we know is that there was an uprising, rebellion, and the government armed another group of people to stop that rebellion. That’s what we know. That does not amount to genocide from our own reckoning. It amounts to of course conflict. It amounts to violence.

By October, the Security Council had established a five-person commission of inquiry on Darfur and asked it to report within three months on ‘violations of international humanitarian law and human rights law in Darfur by all parties’, and specifically to determine ‘whether or not acts of genocide have occurred’. Among the members of the commission was the chief prosecutor of South Africa’s TRC, Dumisa Ntsebeza. In its report, submitted on 25 January 2005, the commission concluded that ‘the Government of the Sudan has not pursued a policy of genocide . . . directly or through the militias under its control.’ But the commission did find that the government’s violence was ‘deliberately and indiscriminately directed against civilians’. Indeed, ‘even where rebels may have been present in villages, the impact of attacks on civilians shows that the use of military force was manifestly disproportionate to any threat posed by the rebels.’ These acts, the commission concluded, ‘were conducted on a widespread and systematic basis, and therefore may amount to crimes against humanity’ (my emphasis). Yet, the commission insisted, they did not amount to acts of genocide: ‘The crucial element of genocidal intent appears to be missing . . . it would seem that those who planned and organised attacks on villages pursued the intent to drive the victims from their homes, primarily for purposes of counter-insurgency warfare.’

At the same time, the commission assigned secondary responsibility to rebel forces – namely, members of the Sudan Liberation Army and the Justice and Equality Movement – which it held ‘responsible for serious violations of international human rights and humanitarian law which may amount to war crimes’ (my emphasis). If the government stood accused of ‘crimes against humanity’, rebel movements were accused of ‘war crimes’. Finally, the commission identified individual perpetrators and presented the UN secretary-general with a sealed list that included ‘officials of the government of Sudan, members of militia forces, members of rebel groups and certain foreign army officers acting in their personal capacity’. The list named 51 individuals.

The commission’s findings highlighted three violations of international law: disproportionate response, conducted on a widespread and systematic basis, targeting entire groups (as opposed to identifiable individuals) but without the intention to eliminate them as groups. It is for this last reason that the commission ruled out the finding of genocide. Its less grave findings of ‘crimes against humanity’ and ‘war crimes’ are not unique to Darfur, but fit several other situations of extreme violence: in particular, the US occupation of Iraq, the Hema-Lendu violence in eastern Congo and the Israeli invasion of Lebanon. Among those in the counter-insurgency accused of war crimes were the ‘foreign army officers acting in their personal capacity’, i.e. mercenaries, presumably recruited from armed forces outside Sudan. The involvement of mercenaries in perpetrating gross violence also fits the occupation in Iraq, where some of them go by the name of ‘contractors’.

The journalist in the US most closely identified with consciousness-raising on Darfur is the New York Times op-ed columnist Nicholas Kristof, often identified as a lone crusader on the issue. To peruse Kristof’s Darfur columns over the past three years is to see the reduction of a complex political context to a morality tale unfolding in a world populated by villains and victims who never trade places and so can always and easily be told apart. It is a world where atrocities mount geometrically, the perpetrators so evil and the victims so helpless that the only possibility of relief is a rescue mission from the outside, preferably in the form of a military intervention.

Kristof made six highly publicised trips to Darfur, the first in March 2004 and the sixth two years later. He began by writing of it as a case of ‘ethnic cleansing’: ‘Sudan’s Arab rulers’ had ‘forced 700,000 black African Sudanese to flee their villages’ (24 March 2004). Only three days later, he upped the ante: this was no longer ethnic cleansing, but genocide. ‘Right now,’ he wrote on 27 March, ‘the government of Sudan is engaged in genocide against three large African tribes in its Darfur region.’ He continued: ‘The killings are being orchestrated by the Arab-dominated Sudanese government’ and ‘the victims are non-Arabs: blacks in the Zaghawa, Massalliet and Fur tribes.’ He estimated the death toll at a thousand a week. Two months later, on 29 May, he revised the estimates dramatically upwards, citing predictions from the US Agency for International Development to the effect that ‘at best, “only” 100,000 people will die in Darfur this year of malnutrition and disease’ but ‘if things go badly, half a million will die.’

The UN commission’s report was released on 25 February 2005. It confirmed ‘massive displacement’ of persons (‘more than a million’ internally displaced and ‘more than 200,000’ refugees in Chad) and the destruction of ‘several hundred’ villages and hamlets as ‘irrefutable facts’; but it gave no confirmed numbers for those killed. Instead, it noted rebel claims that government-allied forces had ‘allegedly killed over 70,000 persons’. Following the publication of the report, Kristof began to scale down his estimates. For the first time, on 23 February 2005, he admitted that ‘the numbers are fuzzy.’ Rather than the usual single total, he went on to give a range of figures, from a low of 70,000, which he dismissed as ‘a UN estimate’, to ‘independent estimates [that] exceed 220,000’. A warning followed: ‘and the number is rising by about ten thousand a month.’

The publication of the commission’s report had considerable effect. Internationally, it raised doubts about whether what was going on in Darfur could be termed genocide. Even US officials were unwilling to go along with the high estimates propagated by the broad alliance of organisations that subscribe to the Save Darfur campaign. The effect on American diplomacy was discernible. Three months later, on 3 May, Kristof noted with dismay that not only had ‘Deputy Secretary of State Robert Zoellick pointedly refused to repeat the administration’s past judgment that the killings amount to genocide’: he had ‘also cited an absurdly low estimate of Darfur’s total death toll: 60,000 to 160,000’. As an alternative, Kristof cited the latest estimate of deaths from the Coalition for International Justice as ‘nearly 400,000, and rising by 500 a day’. In three months, Kristof’s estimates had gone up from 10,000 to 15,000 a month. Six months later, on 27 November, Kristof warned that ‘if aid groups pull out . . . the death toll could then rise to 100,000 a month.’ Anyone keeping a tally of the death toll in Darfur as reported in the Kristof columns would find the rise, fall and rise again very bewildering. First he projected the number of dead at 320,000 for 2004 (16 June 2004) but then gave a scaled down estimate of between 70,000 and 220,000 (23 February 2005). The number began once more to climb to ‘nearly 400,000’ (3 May 2005), only to come down yet again to 300,000 (23 April 2006). Each time figures were given with equal confidence but with no attempt to explain their basis. Did the numbers reflect an actual decline in the scale of killing in Darfur or was Kristof simply making an adjustment to the changing mood internationally?

In the 23 April column, Kristof expanded the list of perpetrators to include an external power: ‘China is now underwriting its second genocide in three decades. The first was in Pol Pot’s Cambodia, and the second is in Darfur, Sudan. Chinese oil purchases have financed Sudan’s pillage of Darfur, Chinese-made AK-47s have been the main weapons used to slaughter several hundred thousand people in Darfur so far and China has protected Sudan in the UN Security Council.’ In the Kristof columns, there is one area of deafening silence, to do with the fact that what is happening in Darfur is a civil war. Hardly a word is said about the insurgency, about the civilian deaths insurgents mete out, about acts that the commission characterised as ‘war crimes’. Would the logic of his 23 April column not lead one to think that those with connections to the insurgency, some of them active in the international campaign to declare Darfur the site of genocide, were also guilty of ‘underwriting’ war crimes in Darfur?

Newspaper writing on Darfur has sketched a pornography of violence. It seems fascinated by and fixated on the gory details, describing the worst of the atrocities in gruesome detail and chronicling the rise in the number of them. The implication is that the motivation of the perpetrators lies in biology (‘race’) and, if not that, certainly in ‘culture’. This voyeuristic approach accompanies a moralistic discourse whose effect is both to obscure the politics of the violence and position the reader as a virtuous, not just a concerned observer.

Journalism gives us a simple moral world, where a group of perpetrators face a group of victims, but where neither history nor motivation is thinkable because both are outside history and context. Even when newspapers highlight violence as a social phenomenon, they fail to understand the forces that shape the agency of the perpetrator. Instead, they look for a clear and uncomplicated moral that describes the victim as untainted and the perpetrator as simply evil. Where yesterday’s victims are today’s perpetrators, where victims have turned perpetrators, this attempt to find an African replay of the Holocaust not only does not work but also has perverse consequences. Whatever its analytical weaknesses, the depoliticisation of violence has given its proponents distinct political advantages.

The conflict in Darfur is highly politicised, and so is the international campaign. One of the campaign’s constant refrains has been that the ongoing genocide is racial: ‘Arabs’ are trying to eliminate ‘Africans’. But both ‘Arab’ and ‘African’ have several meanings in Sudan. There have been at least three meanings of ‘Arab’. Locally, ‘Arab’ was a pejorative reference to the lifestyle of the nomad as uncouth; regionally, it referred to someone whose primary language was Arabic. In this sense, a group could become ‘Arab’ over time. This process, known as Arabisation, was not an anomaly in the region: there was Amharisation in Ethiopia and Swahilisation on the East African coast. The third meaning of ‘Arab’ was ‘privileged and exclusive’; it was the claim of the riverine political aristocracy who had ruled Sudan since independence, and who equated Arabisation with the spread of civilisation and being Arab with descent.

‘African’, in this context, was a subaltern identity that also had the potential of being either exclusive or inclusive. The two meanings were not only contradictory but came from the experience of two different insurgencies. The inclusive meaning was more political than racial or even cultural (linguistic), in the sense that an ‘African’ was anyone determined to make a future within Africa. It was pioneered by John Garang, the leader of the Sudan People’s Liberation Army (SPLA) in the south, as a way of holding together the New Sudan he hoped to see. In contrast, its exclusive meaning came in two versions, one hard (racial) and the other soft (linguistic) – ‘African’ as Bantu and ‘African’ as the identity of anyone who spoke a language indigenous to Africa. The racial meaning came to take a strong hold in both the counter-insurgency and the insurgency in Darfur. The Save Darfur campaign’s characterisation of the violence as ‘Arab’ against ‘African’ obscured both the fact that the violence was not one-sided and the contest over the meaning of ‘Arab’ and ‘African’: a contest that was critical precisely because it was ultimately about who belonged and who did not in the political community called Sudan. The depoliticisation, naturalisation and, ultimately, demonisation of the notion ‘Arab’, as against ‘African’, has been the deadliest effect, whether intended or not, of the Save Darfur campaign.

The depoliticisation of the conflict gave campaigners three advantages. First, they were able to occupy the moral high ground. The campaign presented itself as apolitical but moral, its concern limited only to saving lives. Second, only a single-issue campaign could bring together in a unified chorus forces that are otherwise ranged as adversaries on most important issues of the day: at one end, the Christian right and the Zionist lobby; at the other, a mainly school and university-based peace movement. Nat Hentoff of the Village Voice wrote of the Save Darfur Coalition as ‘an alliance of more than 515 faith-based, humanitarian and human rights organisations’; among the organisers of their Rally to Stop the Genocide in Washington last year were groups as diverse as the American Jewish World Service, the American Society for Muslim Advancement, the National Association of Evangelicals, the US Conference of Catholic Bishops, the US Holocaust Memorial Museum, the American Anti-Slavery Group, Amnesty International, Christian Solidarity International, Physicians for Human Rights and the National Black Church Initiative. Surely, such a wide coalition would cease to hold together if the issue shifted to, say, Iraq.

To understand the third advantage, we have to return to the question I asked earlier: how could it be that many of those calling for an end to the American and British intervention in Iraq are demanding an intervention in Darfur? It’s tempting to think that the advantage of Darfur lies in its being a small, faraway place where those who drive the War on Terror do not have a vested interest. That this is hardly the case is evident if one compares the American response to Darfur to its non-response to Congo, even though the dimensions of the conflict in Congo seem to give it a mega-Darfur quality: the numbers killed are estimated in the millions rather than the hundreds of thousands; the bulk of the killing, particularly in Kivu, is done by paramilitaries trained, organised and armed by neighbouring governments; and the victims on both sides – Hema and Lendu – are framed in collective rather than individual terms, to the point that one influential version defines both as racial identities and the conflict between the two as a replay of the Rwandan genocide. Given all this, how does one explain the fact that the focus of the most widespread and ambitious humanitarian movement in the US is on Darfur and not on Kivu?

Nicholas Kristof was asked this very question by a university audience: ‘When I spoke at Cornell University recently, a woman asked why I always harp on Darfur. It’s a fair question. The number of people killed in Darfur so far is modest in global terms: estimates range from 200,000 to more than 500,000. In contrast, four million people have died since 1998 as a result of the fighting in Congo, the most lethal conflict since World War Two.’ But instead of answering the question, Kristof – now writing his column rather than facing the questioner at Cornell – moved on: ‘And malaria annually kills one million to three million people – meaning that three years’ deaths in Darfur are within the margin of error of the annual global toll from malaria.’ And from there he went on to compare the deaths in Darfur to the deaths from malaria, rather than from the conflict in Congo: ‘We have a moral compass within us and its needle is moved not only by human suffering but also by human evil. That’s what makes genocide special – not just the number of deaths but the government policy behind them. And that in turn is why stopping genocide should be an even higher priority than saving lives from Aids or malaria.’ That did not explain the relative silence on Congo. Could the reason be that in the case of Congo, Hema and Lendu militias – many of them no more than child soldiers – were trained by America’s allies in the region, Rwanda and Uganda? Is that why the violence in Darfur – but not the violence in Kivu – is named as a genocide?

It seems that genocide has become a label to be stuck on your worst enemy, a perverse version of the Nobel Prize, part of a rhetorical arsenal that helps you vilify your adversaries while ensuring impunity for your allies. In Kristof’s words, the point is not so much ‘human suffering’ as ‘human evil’. Unlike Kivu, Darfur can be neatly integrated into the War on Terror, for Darfur gives the Warriors on Terror a valuable asset with which to demonise an enemy: a genocide perpetrated by Arabs. This was the third and most valuable advantage that Save Darfur gained from depoliticising the conflict. The more thoroughly Darfur was integrated into the War on Terror, the more the depoliticised violence in Darfur acquired a racial description, as a genocide of ‘Arabs’ killing ‘Africans’. Racial difference purportedly constituted the motive force behind the mass killings. The irony of Kristof’s columns is that they mirror the ideology of Arab supremacism in Sudan by demonising entire communities.[*]

Kristof chides Arab peoples and the Arab press for not having the moral fibre to respond to this Muslim-on-Muslim violence, presumably because it is a violence inflicted by Arab Muslims on African Muslims. In one of his early columns in 2004, he was outraged by the silence of Muslim leaders: ‘Do they care about dead Muslims only when the killers are Israelis or Americans?’ Two years later he asked: ‘And where is the Arab press? Isn’t the murder of 300,000 or more Muslims almost as offensive as a Danish cartoon?’ Six months later, Kristof pursued this line on NBC’s Today Show. Elaborating on the ‘real blind spot’ in the Muslim world, he said: ‘You are beginning to get some voices in the Muslim world . . . saying it’s appalling that you have evangelical Christians and American Jews leading an effort to protect Muslims in Sudan and in Chad.’

If many of the leading lights in the Darfur campaign are fired by moral indignation, this derives from two events: the Nazi Holocaust and the Rwandan genocide. After all, the seeds of the Save Darfur campaign lie in the tenth-anniversary commemoration of what happened in Rwanda. Darfur is today a metaphor for senseless violence in politics, as indeed Rwanda was a decade before. Most writing on the Rwandan genocide in the US was also done by journalists. In We wish to inform you that tomorrow we will be killed with our families, the most widely read book on the genocide, Philip Gourevitch envisaged Rwanda as a replay of the Holocaust, with Hutu cast as perpetrators and Tutsi as victims. Again, the encounter between the two seemed to take place outside any context, as part of an eternal encounter between evil and innocence. Many of the journalists who write about Darfur have Rwanda very much in the back of their minds. In December 2004, Kristof recalled the lessons of Rwanda: ‘Early in his presidency, Mr Bush read a report about Bill Clinton’s paralysis during the Rwandan genocide and scrawled in the margin: “Not on my watch.” But in fact the same thing is happening on his watch, and I find that heartbreaking and baffling.’

With very few exceptions, the Save Darfur campaign has drawn a single lesson from Rwanda: the problem was the US failure to intervene to stop the genocide. Rwanda is the guilt that America must expiate, and to do so it must be ready to intervene, for good and against evil, even globally. That lesson is inscribed at the heart of Samantha Power’s book, A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide. But it is the wrong lesson. The Rwandan genocide was born of a civil war which intensified when the settlement to contain it broke down. The settlement, reached at the Arusha Conference, broke down because neither the Hutu Power tendency nor the Tutsi-dominated Rwanda Patriotic Front (RPF) had any interest in observing the power-sharing arrangement at the core of the settlement: the former because it was excluded from the settlement and the latter because it was unwilling to share power in any meaningful way.

What the humanitarian intervention lobby fails to see is that the US did intervene in Rwanda, through a proxy. That proxy was the RPF, backed up by entire units from the Uganda Army. The green light was given to the RPF, whose commanding officer, Paul Kagame, had recently returned from training in the US, just as it was lately given to the Ethiopian army in Somalia.

Instead of using its resources and influence to bring about a political solution to the civil war, and then strengthen it, the US signalled to one of the parties that it could pursue victory with impunity. This unilateralism was part of what led to the disaster, and that is the real lesson of Rwanda. Applied to Darfur and Sudan, it is sobering. It means recognising that Darfur is not yet another Rwanda. Nurturing hopes of an external military intervention among those in the insurgency who aspire to victory and reinforcing the fears of those in the counter-insurgency who see it as a prelude to defeat are precisely the ways to ensure that it becomes a Rwanda. Strengthening those on both sides who stand for a political settlement to the civil war is the only realistic approach. Solidarity, not intervention, is what will bring peace to Darfur.

The dynamic of civil war in Sudan has fed on multiple sources: first, the post-independence monopoly of power enjoyed by a tiny ‘Arabised’ elite from the riverine north of Khartoum, a monopoly that has bred growing resistance among the majority, marginalised populations in the south, east and west of the country; second, the rebel movements which have in their turn bred ambitious leaders unwilling to enter into power-sharing arrangements as a prelude to peace; and, finally, external forces that continue to encourage those who are interested in retaining or obtaining a monopoly of power.

The dynamic of peace, by contrast, has fed on a series of power-sharing arrangements, first in the south and then in the east. This process has been intermittent in Darfur. African Union-organised negotiations have been successful in forging a power-sharing arrangement, but only for that arrangement to fall apart time and again. A large part of the explanation, as I suggested earlier, lies in the international context of the War on Terror, which favours parties who are averse to taking risks for peace. To reinforce the peace process must be the first commitment of all those interested in Darfur.

The camp of peace needs to come to a second realisation: that peace cannot be built on humanitarian intervention, which is the language of big powers. The history of colonialism should teach us that every major intervention has been justified as humanitarian, a ‘civilising mission’. Nor was it mere idiosyncrasy that inspired the devotion with which many colonial officers and archivists recorded the details of barbarity among the colonised – sati, the ban on widow marriage or the practice of child marriage in India, or slavery and female genital mutilation in Africa. I am not suggesting that this was all invention. I mean only to point out that the chronicling of atrocities had a practical purpose: it provided the moral pretext for intervention. Now, as then, imperial interventions claim to have a dual purpose: on the one hand, to rescue minority victims of ongoing barbarities and, on the other, to quarantine majority perpetrators with the stated aim of civilising them. Iraq should act as a warning on this score. The worst thing in Darfur would be an Iraq-style intervention. That would almost certainly spread the civil war to other parts of Sudan, unravelling the peace process in the east and south and dragging the whole country into the global War on Terror.

Footnotes
* Contrast this with the UN commission’s painstaking effort to make sense of the identities ‘Arab’ and ‘African’. The commission’s report concentrated on three related points. First, the claim that the Darfur conflict pitted ‘Arab’ against ‘African’ was facile. ‘In fact, the commission found that many Arabs in Darfur are opposed to the Janjawiid, and some Arabs are fighting with the rebels, such as certain Arab commanders and their men from the Misseriya and Rizeigat tribes. At the same time, many non-Arabs are supporting the government and serving in its army.’ Second, it has never been easy to sort different tribes into the categories ‘Arab’ and ‘African’: ‘The various tribes that have been the object of attacks and killings (chiefly the Fur, Massalit and Zeghawa tribes) do not appear to make up ethnic groups distinct from the ethnic groups to which persons or militias that attack them belong. They speak the same language (Arabic) and embrace the same religion (Muslim). In addition, also due to the high measure of intermarriage, they can hardly be distinguished in their outward physical appearance from the members of tribes that allegedly attacked them. Apparently, the sedentary and nomadic character of the groups constitutes one of the main distinctions between them’ (emphasis mine). Finally, the commission put forward the view that political developments are driving the rapidly growing distinction between ‘Arab’ and ‘African’. On the one hand, ‘Arab’ and ‘African’ seem to have become political identities: ‘Those tribes in Darfur who support rebels have increasingly come to be identified as “African” and those supporting the government as the “Arabs”. A good example to illustrate this is that of the Gimmer, a pro-government African tribe that is seen by the African tribes opposed to the government as having been “Arabised”.’ On the other hand, this development was being promoted from the outside: ‘The Arab-African divide has also been fanned by the growing insistence on such divide in some circles and in the media.’

Mahmood Mamdani is Herbert Lehman Professor of Government and a professor of anthropology at Columbia University. His most recent book is Good Muslim, Bad Muslim: America, the Cold War and the Roots of Terror.

2007-06-08T08:23:00.000-07:00

Canada's Deadly Trade in Asbestos

By Mark Bourrie
From Third World Network

Canada is starting work this summer on a billion dollar project to renovate its parliamentary buildings and cleanse them of asbestos, which has been found to cause cancer.

The project will take six years to complete but, in the meantime, Canadian government agents are still pushing exports of the fibre. Canada even has gone so far as to argue a challenge at the World Trade Organization that a proposed French ban on asbestos imports would be an illegal trade practice.

Despite recent warnings that asbestos was the cause of 500,000 cancer victims in western Europe alone, Canadian asbestos producers continue to promote and sell their fibre worldwide - especially to developing nations.

Asbestos is used as a binder in cement, as insulation, and in anti-fire walls. It is also a potent carcinogen with a long, well-documented legacy of death.

The danger comes when small asbestos fibres are released and inhaled by labourers. The fibres cause cancerous growths in the lungs, lung lining and abdomen but can take 20 years or more to manifest.

In 1997, Canada exported 430,000 tonnes of asbestos - more than 96% of production - most of it to the developing world. Canada is the world's second-largest exporter of asbestos after Russia.

Union activists, who have visited India and other developing countries say, however, that the public relations efforts of the government and the asbestos industry are simply window-dressing to hide the fact that most people who work with the natural mineral fibre risk cancer.

Critics of Canada's asbestos exports say the country is exporting death to protect the profits of a handful of companies and the jobs of 1,600 miners. "What's the difference between land mines and asbestos?" asks Dr. Barry Castleman, author of a respected book on the danger of asbestos. "A key difference, of course, is that Canada doesn't export land mines."

At the heart of the issue is Canada's own precarious political situation. All of the asbestos mines in Canada are in Quebec, a predominantly French-speaking province with a separatist government.

Federal and provincial politicians are pushing asbestos exports to prove that they are successful at developing overseas markets, and are protective of Quebec workers. Critics of asbestos exports say the industry would probably be allowed to die if it was centred in any other part of the country.

"Personally, I believe this is all about Quebec politics," says Canadian Auto Workers Health and Safety director Cathy Walker. "The Canadian and Quebec governments are competing with one another to show just how prepared they all are to protect Quebec jobs." The real costs will be borne by the developing world, she says.

Walker just returned from India, where she saw unprotected workers slashing open bags of asbestos fibres. In places where the asbestos was being mixed into cement, clouds of the carcinogenic fibres swirled around workers.

In Britain, the Cancer Research Campaign said in January that its study into the European asbestos-linked cancer epidemic should sound alarm bells everywhere, "particularly in the developing world where uncontrolled asbestos is still very common," said CRC director Gordon McVie.

Seven of Canada's top 10 markets are Third World countries. Still, the Canadian government, the asbestos industry and lobby groups are trying to put a good face on the asbestos industry.

Recently, diplomats stationed here were flown to asbestos- producing regions on an all-expense-paid first-class junket. Journalists have been cultivated with similar perks.

Philip Landrigan, of New York's Mount Sinai School of Medicine - the centre that first linked cancer to asbestos in the 1960s - says the asbestos lobby's claim that the fibre is safe is "absolutely untrue."

"Asbestos remains an important cause of human illness," says Landrigan. "All forms of asbestos are carcinogenic, and that includes Canadian chrysotile."

Julian Peto, head of epidemiology at the University of London, who wrote the January study on the Euro-epidemic, says there's no safe way to use asbestos in developed nations. In developing nations, where there is little money for protective clothing and ventilation systems, workers are being poisoned by the thousands, he said.

"There is no way you can control it in Britain, let alone the third world," Peto says.

"The thing about building materials is that they are completely uncontrollable. They are often used casually, by not very skilful people, who break them and drill them and cut them in small parcels."

In Canada, people working with asbestos are forced to limit their exposure to the fibres. Consumer products that release asbestos fibres into the atmosphere are banned, and the sale of loose asbestos to consumers is prohibited under law. However, most Canadian asbestos exports are of loose fibres, which are shipped in large reinforced paper bags.

Canadian asbestos producers say they're training foreign workers in the safe handling of asbestos, through the Asbestos Institute. The institute, founded in 1984 by the federal and Quebec governments and the asbestos industry, has been the beneficiary of more than $10 million in Canadian government funding.

Ten European Union members have banned asbestos. France, which banned it in 1997 for health reasons, now faces a Canadian challenge at the WTO. Canada argues the ban violates Canada's rights under international trade rules.

In a speech delivered last year before an audience of occupational health professionals from around the world who had gathered in Italy, Dr. Joseph LeDou of the University of California's Medical School attacked Canada's asbestos-promoting efforts.

LeDou said Canada was engaged in "the exploitation of ignorance and poverty" in Asia, Africa and Latin America." He accused Canadian policy makers of "setting up the developing world "for an epidemic of asbestos-related disease, the costs of which will fall on countries that can ill afford it."

Tapped Resources: The Dirty Truth about Bottled Water

By Ashley Walters
From Briarpatch Magazine
2007

“We sell water . . . so we’ve got to be clever.”

Senior vice president of Nestle Waters’ Global Marketing and Communications division

It Often Sells for three times the price of gasoline, and more and more of us are guzzling it — even though we can get the equivalent for next to nothing simply by tapping into the publicly owned infrastructure. It’s bottled water, and it’s a lucrative business. But why would we pay 240 to 10,000 times more for something that we can get for less than a penny by simply turning on a tap?

Marketing has a lot to do with it. As public concern over the state of the environment grows, private companies are quick to exploit those concerns with expensive individual solutions of dubious merit.

Bottled water sales are on the rise. A December 2006 report published by Sustain, a sustainable food and farming group, claims that bottled water consumption worldwide has increased 250 percent (from 58 billion litres in 1994 to 144 billion in 2002), largely as a result of successful marketing. The report says that bottled water is marketed as a fashion accessory for health-conscious consumers with discerning palates. Laurie Ries, a marketing consultant quoted in the Polaris Institute’s 2005 “Inside the Bottle” report, describes bottled water as “America’s most affordable status symbol.”

As bottled water is sold to the upper and middle classes, support for public drinking water infrastructure begins to trickle away. In 2001, the bottled water industry fought and won a dispute over a bill proposed to impose a five-cent tax on every bottle of water sold in Texas to fund improvements in the public water infrastructure. The same year, the World Wildlife Fund issued a report stating that the annual US$22 billion spent globally on bottled water could fund the municipal water systems of 2,000 cities with populations of four million people each — more than the entire world population.

It is no secret that bottled water is a hot spring of cash for big business and industry. Already worth US$400 billion, the bottled water industry is 30 percent larger than the pharmaceutical industry. “Inside the Bottle” describes the bottled water industry as “one of the fastest growing and least regulated industries in the world.” The Polaris Institute report focuses on the “big four” bottled water giants, Nestlé, Danone, PepsiCo and Coca-Cola, who, in 2004, collectively held over 58 percent of the US market.

Even though business is flourishing and millions of people drink bottled water, the industry remains very loosely regulated. The US Food and Drug Administration has assigned “one half of a staff person (full-time equivalent) to bottled water regulation, and less than one to ensuring bottled water compliance,” as cited by Eric Olsen, a senior attorney with the Natural Resource Defense Council, referenced in “Inside the Bottle.”

The Natural Resource Defense Council (NRDC) estimates that American bottled water plants undergo inspection once every five or six years, while the Canadian Food Inspection Agency estimates that Canadian plants are inspected once every three years. This lags significantly behind the norm for tap water testing in developed countries, where tests are run several times daily.

Adding to this discrepancy are the vast regulatory differences between the two agencies that regulate tap and bottled water in the US. The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) looks after bottled water, while the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) regulates tap water. Although the FDA claims that it has adopted many of the standards of the EPA, a comparison of the two in a 1999 NRDC study proves otherwise. The study compared EPA and FDA standards and discovered some notable discrepancies between the two:

> FDA regulations don’t apply to bottled water produced and sold within the same state, which accounts for 60 to 70 percent of bottled water in the US.

> The FDA allows for some levels of fecal coliform (a sign of likely contamination with fecal matter) and E.coli within bottled water while the EPA demands that tap water is free of these contaminates.

> The FDA doesn’t oblige companies to test their bottled water for parasites such as cryptosporidium or giardia while the EPA does.

Although bottled waters are considered safe for human consumption, some can pose risks to individuals with compromised immune systems. Tap water carries little to no risk for such individuals and contamination issues are required to be made public immediately, while there is no such requirement for bottled water.

“So pure we promise nothing.” This is the slogan from Pepsi’s 2003 marketing campaign for their Aquafina bottled water. Oddly enough, this phrase leaks the truth about the relative purity of bottled water.

“To me, it’s like an epidemic,” John Rudnickas, the manager of water quality for the City of Toronto, told Briarpatch. “A lot of people are saying they drink bottled water out of convenience, because I think they realize that they are being duped.” In 1999, the US Natural Resource Defense Council released a four-year study on 103 popular brands of bottled water and found that one-fourth were nothing more than bottled tap water, while one-third were contaminated with levels of toxins above state or industry standards. In 2004, the American Society of Microbiology tested 68 commercial mineral bottled waters sold throughout the world, and found that 40 percent contained bacteria or fungi, while 21 samples could support bacteria growth in lab cultures. The NRDC report concluded that bottled water is no better than tap water, and could even be worse, as tap water undergoes more rigorous testing, disinfecting and filtering processes and is required to conform to stricter EPA standards than its bottled counterpart.

In 1990, the Toronto Department of Public Health and the Environmental Protection Office conducted a study similar to that of the NRDC, comparing tap water, bottled water and water that runs though home filtration systems. The study concluded that due to stricter regulations and daily testing, tap water was the safest and cheapest alternative to bottled water. “The bottom line was that their recommendation was to drink tap water,” said Rudnickas.

Both Pepsi and Coke admit that their bottled water is tap water that undergoes filtration processes. What they don’t mention is that one of their filtration methods can result in the creation of a toxic by-product. Ozonation is a filtration process by which ozone, a gas, is injected into water to eliminate bacteria and maintain freshness. When ozone is added to spring or underground source water (which contains the naturally occurring chemical salt, bromide) the carcinogenic chemical bromate can emerge as a by-product.

In 2001, the FDA issued a warning regarding acceptable levels of bromate in bottled water, after which Nestlé stopped using the ozonation process in its Perrier sparkling water. According to “Inside the Bottle,” Pepsi and Coke continue to use ozonation as a means to disinfect tap water in the US and selected countries abroad, though in 2004 Coca-Cola recalled 500,000 of its Dasani bottles distributed throughout Britain after the water was found to contain harmful concentrations of bromate. Tap water undergoes more rigorous testing, disinfecting and filtering processes and is required to conform to stricter EPA standards than its bottled counterpart.

Although it is associated with pristine lakes, rivers and snow-capped mountains, bottled water inflicts substantial (and largely unnecessary) damage on the environment. Plastic bottles of water are transported to various parts of the world by fossil fuel-burning vehicles, and the bottles themselves are made of plastic derived from crude oil. The Earth Policy Institute estimates that in the US, 1.5 million barrels of crude are used annually for this purpose.

“Energetically speaking, the life cycle of bottled water is just ridiculous,” says Dr. Keith Solomon, a toxicologist at the University of Guelph in Ontario. “In most first-world countries the local water is perfectly safe to drink.”

The problems with bottled water are compounded in developing countries, where the public infrastructure for water purification and distribution is often inadequate — or even non-existent. International financial institutions, first-world governments, and the transnational corporations that stand to profit from lack of access to potable water have teamed up to pressure poor countries to slash public waterworks funding — or even sell the infrastructure to a for-profit corporation.

As a key component of “structural adjustment,” the International Monetary Fund and World Bank often make their loans contingent on the privatization of a nation’s water supply. In September 2001, the World Bank approved a loan for US$100 million for “structural adjustment” in Ghana. Before releasing the funds, however, the World Bank insisted that the nation’s government increase water and electricity tariffs by 94 to 96 percent to pay for “operating costs.” The government complied and as a result much of the population was not able to afford access to clean water. Currently the Ghana Water Company is leased to Aqua Vitens Rand Ltd., a product of the mergence of the Dutch water company Vitens with the South African water distributor Rand Water.

Many communities within the US and Canada are increasingly wary of allowing bottled water companies to deplete local water supplies to fuel their growing industry. Citizens of Maine, Florida, Wisconsin, New Hampshire and Ontario have all protested local and international bottled water companies that have wanted to set up shop in their towns and drain local water reserves for wider distribution. The Corporate Accountability International Organization reports that Coca-Cola, vendor of numerous bottled waters, has depleted water supplies in some areas of India, leaving affected communities struggling for survival.

Clean drinking water is already out of reach for over one billion people around the world. With water increasingly being sold as a private commodity, the lives of impoverished people in water-scarce regions are increasingly in the hands of corporations. But communities saddled with suddenly-sky-high water costs as a result of privatization schemes are fighting back. In 1999, the World Bank advised the Bolivian government to sell off its public water infrastructure to private corporations. With California-based Bechtel Corporation at the helm, the price of water in the city of Cochabamba suddenly doubled, and Bolivians took to the streets in protest. The resulting civil unrest — the “water war,” as it became known — eventually forced the government to break its US$200 million contract with Bechtel in April 2000.

This scenario is not unrelated to the booming North American market for bottled water. Each time a bottle of water is purchased, transnational corporations, whose thirst for profit outweighs concern for public welfare, grow stronger. If the people of Bolivia had to resort to massive civic revolt to regain access to this vital natural resource, perhaps we had better start examining what sort of corporate practices our purchases endorse. We may discover that our future may not be that far away from the “water wars” waged in Bolivia.

2007-05-22T12:15:00.000-07:00

Most 'Arrested by Mistake'

Coalition intelligence put numbers at 70% to 90% of Iraq prisoners, says a February Red Cross report, which details further abuses.

By Bob Drogin
From Common Dreams
2004

Coalition military intelligence officials estimated that 70% to 90% of prisoners detained in Iraq since the war began last year "had been arrested by mistake," according to a confidential Red Cross report given to the Bush administration earlier this year.

Yet the report described a wide range of prisoner mistreatment — including many new details of abusive techniques — that it said U.S. officials had failed to halt, despite repeated complaints from the International Committee of the Red Cross.

ICRC monitors saw some improvements by early this year, but the continued abuses "went beyond exceptional cases and might be considered as a practice tolerated" by coalition forces, the report concluded.

The Swiss-based ICRC, which made 29 visits to coalition-run prisons and camps between late March and November last year, said it repeatedly presented its reports of mistreatment to prison commanders, U.S. military officials in Iraq and members of the Bush administration in Washington.

The ICRC summary report, which was written in February, also said Red Cross officials had complained to senior military officials that families of Iraqi suspects usually were told so little that most arrests resulted "in the de facto 'disappearance' of the arrestee for weeks or even months."

The report also described previously undocumented forms of abuse of prisoners in U.S. custody. In October, for example, an Iraqi prisoner was "hooded, handcuffed in the back, and made to lie face down" on what investigators believe was the engine hood of a vehicle while he was being transported. He was hospitalized for three months for extensive burns to his face, abdomen, foot and hand, the report added.

More than 100 "high-value detainees," apparently including former senior officials in Saddam Hussein's regime and in some cases their family members, were held for five months at the Baghdad airport "in strict solitary confinement" in small cells for 23 hours a day, the report said.

Such conditions "constituted a serious violation" of the Third and Fourth Geneva Conventions, which set minimum standards for treatment of prisoners of war and civilian internees, the report said. U.S. intelligence agencies, including the CIA and the Defense Intelligence Agency, conducted interrogations at the site, but Army units were in charge of custody operations, officials said Monday.

Portions of the ICRC report were published last week. The full 24-page report, which The Times obtained Monday, cites more than 250 allegations of mistreatment at prisons and temporary detention facilities run by U.S. and other occupation forces across Iraq.

The report also referred to, but provided no details of, "allegations of deaths as a result of harsh internment conditions, ill treatment, lack of medical attention, or the combination thereof."

Spokesmen at the Pentagon and at U.S. Central Command headquarters said they had not seen the ICRC report and could not comment on specific charges. ICRC officials in Geneva said they regretted that the document became public. The ICRC usually shares its findings only with governments or other authorities to maintain access to detainees held in conflicts around the world. Among the abusive techniques detailed in the report was forcing detainees to wear hoods for up to four consecutive days.

"Hooding was sometimes used in conjunction with beatings, thus increasing anxiety as to when blows would come," the report said. "The practice of hooding also allowed the interrogators to remain anonymous and thus to act with impunity."

In some cases, plastic handcuffs allegedly were so tight for so long that they caused long-term nerve damage. Men were punched, kicked and beaten with rifles and pistols; faces were pressed "into the ground with boots." Prisoners were threatened with reprisals against family members, execution or transfer to the U.S. lockup at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. The report also provides new details about the now-notorious Abu Ghraib prison, the focus of the prisoner abuse scandal.

During a visit to the "isolation section" of Abu Ghraib prison in October, ICRC delegates witnessed prisoners "completely naked in totally empty concrete cells and in total darkness, allegedly for several consecutive days."

A military intelligence officer, who is not identified in the report, told the ICRC monitors that such treatment was "part of the process" in which prisoners were given clothing, bedding, lights and toiletries in exchange for cooperation.

The ICRC sent its report to the military police brigade commander in charge of Abu Ghraib after the October visit, and the commander responded Dec. 24, a senior Pentagon official said last week. But the Pentagon did not launch a formal investigation into abuses at the prison until a low-ranking U.S. soldier approached military investigators Jan. 13 and gave them a computer disc of photos.

The ICRC report also describes torture and other brutal practices by Iraqi police working in Baghdad under the U.S.-led occupation. It cites cases in which suspects held by Iraqi police allegedly were beaten with cables, kicked in the testicles, burned with cigarettes and forced to sign confessions.

In June, a group of men arrested by Iraqi police "allegedly had water poured on their legs and had electrical shocks administered to them with stripped tips of electrical wires," the report notes. One man's mother was brought in, "and the policeman threatened to mistreat her." Another detainee "was threatened with having his wife brought in and raped."

"Many persons deprived of their liberty drew parallels between police practices under the occupation with those of the former regime," the report noted.

2007-05-21T20:31:00.000-07:00

How Free is the Free Market?

By Noam Chomsky
From Lip Magazine
05.15.97

THE FREE MARKET IS SOCIALISM FOR THE RICH. The public pays the costs and the rich get the benefit—markets for the poor and plenty of state protection for the rich.

There's a conventional doctrine about the era we're entering and the promise that it's supposed to afford. In brief, the story is that the good guys won the Cold War and they're firmly in the saddle. There may be some rough terrain ahead, but nothing that they can't handle. They ride off into the sunset, leading the way to a bright future, based on the ideals that they've always cherished: democracy, free markets and human rights.

In the real world, however, human rights, democracy and free markets are all under serious attack in many countries, including the leading industrial societies. Power is increasingly concentrated in unaccountable institutions. The rich and the powerful are no more willing to submit themselves to market discipline or popular pressures than they ever have been in the past.

Basic Rights
Let's begin with human rights, because it's the easiest place to start: they're actually codified in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, passed unanimously by the United Nations General Assembly in December, 1948. In the United States there's a good deal of very impressive rhetoric about how we stand for the principle of the universality of the Universal Declaration, and how we defend the principle against backward, Third World peoples who plead cultural relativism.

All this reached a crescendo about a year ago, at the Vienna Conference. But the rhetoric is rarely besmirched by any reference to what the Universal Declaration actually says. Article 25, for example, states: "Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and his family, including food, clothing, housing and medical care and necessary social services, and the right to security in the event of unemployment, sickness, disability, widowhood, old age or other lack of livelihood."

How are these principles upheld in the richest country in the world, with absolutely unparalleled advantages and no excuses for not completely satisfying them? The US has the worst record on poverty in the industrialized world: a poverty level which is twice as high as England's. Tens of millions of people are hungry every night, including millions of children who are suffering from disease and malnutrition. In New York City 40% of children live below the poverty line, deprived of minimal conditions that offer some hope of escape from misery and destitution and violence.

Work & Debt in the New World Marketplace
Let's turn to Article 23. It states: "Everyone has a right to work under just and favourable conditions." The International Labor Organization (ILO) has just published a report estimating the level of global unemployment—understood to mean the position of not having enough work for subsistence—in January 1994 at about 30%. That, it says accurately, is a crisis worse than that in the 1930s. It is, moreover, just one part of a general worldwide human rights catastrophe. UNESCO estimates that about 500,000 children die every year from debt repayment alone. Debt repayment means that commercial banks made bad loans to their favourite dictators, and those loans are now being paid by the poor, who have absolutely nothing to do with it, and of course by the taxpayers in the wealthy countries, because the debts are socialized. That's under the system of socialism for the rich that we call free enterprise: nobody expects the banks to have to pay for the bad loans that's your job and my job.

Meanwhile, the World Health Organisation estimates that 11 million children die every year from easily treatable diseases. WHO's head calls it a silent genocide: it could be stopped for pennies a day.

In the US, of course, there is currently a recovery. But it's remarkably sluggish, with less than a third of the job growth of the previous six recoveries. Furthermore, of the jobs that are being created, an enormous proportion more than a quarter in 1992 are temporary jobs and most are not in the productive part of the economy. Economists welcome this vast increase in temporary jobs as an "improvement in the flexibility of labour markets". No matter that it means that when you go to sleep at night you don't know if you're going to have work the next morning it's good for profits, not people, which means that it's good for the economy in the technical sense.

Another aspect of the recovery is that people are working longer for less money. The workload is continuing to increase, while wages are continuing to decline which is unprecedented for a recovery. US wages as measured by labour costs per unit output are now the lowest in the industrial world, except for Britain. In 1991 the US even went below England, although England caught up and regained first place in the competition to crush poor and working people. Having been the highest in the world in 1985 (as one might expect in the world's richest country), US labour costs are today 60% lower than Germany's and 20% lower than Italy's. The Wall Street Journal called this turnaround "a welcome development of transcendent importance". It is usually claimed that these welcome developments just result from market forces, like laws of nature, and the usual factors are identified, such as international trade and automation. To put it kindly, that's a bit misleading: neither trade nor automation has much to do with market forces.

The Myth of Free Trade
Take trade. One well-known fact about trade is that it's highly subsidized with huge market-distorting factors, which I don't think anybody's ever tried to measure. The most obvious is that every form of transport is highly subsidized, whether it's maritime, aeronautical, or roads or rail. Since trade naturally requires transport, the costs of transport enter into the calculation of the efficiency of trade. But there are huge subsidies to reduce the costs of transport, through manipulation of energy costs and all sorts of market-distorting fashion. If anybody wanted to measure this, it would be quite a job.

Take the US Pentagon, a huge affair. A very substantial part of the Pentagon is intervention forces directed at the Middle East, across the whole panoply of intimidation devices to make sure nobody gets in the way if the US tries to intervene. And a large part of the purpose of that is to keep oil prices within a certain range. Not too low, because the US and British oil companies have to make plenty of profit, and these countries also have to earn profits which they can then send back to their masters in London and New York. So, not too low. But also not too high, because you want to keep trade efficient. I'm not even mentioning so-called externalities, like pollution and so on. If the real costs of trade were calculated, the apparent efficiency of trade would certainly drop substantially. Nobody knows how much.

Furthermore, what's called trade isn't trade in any serious sense of the term. Much of what's called trade is just internal transactions, inside a big corporation. More than half of US exports to Mexico don't even enter the Mexican market. They're just transferred by one branch of General Motors to another branch, because you can get much cheaper labour if you happen to cross a border, and you don't have to worry about pollution. But that's not trade in any sensible sense of the term, any more than if you move a can of beans from one shelf to another of a grocery store. It just happens to cross an international border, but it's not trade. In fact, by now it's estimated that about 40% of what's called world trade is internal to corporations. That means centrally-managed transactions run by a very visible hand with major market distortions of all kinds, sometimes called a system of corporate mercantilism, which is fairly accurate.

GATT and NAFTA just increase these tendencies, hence harming markets in incalculable ways. And if we proceed, we find that the alleged efficiencies of trade are to a large extent an ideological construction. They don't have any substantive meaning. With automation, for instance, there's no doubt that it puts people out of work. But the fact of the matter is that automation is so inefficient that it had to be developed in the state sector for decades meaning the US military system. And the kind of automation that was developed in the state sector at huge public cost and enormous market distortion was a very special kind. It was designed in order to de-skill workers and to enhance managerial power. This has nothing to do with economic efficiency; it's to do with power relations.

There have been a number of academic and management-affirmed studies which have shown over and over that automation is introduced by managers, even when it increases costs when it's inefficient just for power reasons.

Take containerization. It was developed by the US Navy that is, by the state sector in the economy masking market distortions. In general, invocation of market forces, as if they were laws of nature, has a large element of fraud associated with it. It's a kind of ideological warfare. In the post WWII period, this includes just about everything; electronics, computers, biotechnology and pharmaceuticals, for instance, were all initiated and maintained by enormous state subsidies and intervention otherwise they would not exist. Computers, for example in the 1950s, before they were marketable were virtually 100% supported by the taxpayer. About 85% of all electronics was state-supported in the 1980s. The idea is that the public is supposed to pay the cost. If anything comes out of it, you hand it over to the corporations. It's called free enterprise!

All of this quite sharply increased under the Reagan administration. The state share of GNP rose to new heights in the first couple of years of the Reagan administration. And they were proud of it. To the public they had all kinds of free-market talk, but when they were talking to the business community, they talked differently. So James Baker, when he was Secretary of the Treasury, announced with great pride to a business convention, that the Reagan administration had offered more protection to US manufacturers than any of the preceding post-war administrations, which was true, but he was being too modest; it actually offered more protection than all of them combined.

One of the reasons why Clinton had unusual corporate support for a Democrat is that he planned to go even beyond that level of market distortion and market interference, for the benefit of domestic-based capital. His Secretary of Treasury, Lloyd Bentsen, was quoted in the Wall Street Journal as saying, "I'm tired of this level playing field business. We want to tilt the playing field in favour of US industry." Meanwhile, there's a lot of very passionate rhetoric about free markets but, of course, that's free markets for the poor, at home and abroad.

The fact is that people's lives are being destroyed on an enormous scale through unemployment alone. Meanwhile, everywhere you turn you find work that these people would be delighted to do if they had a chance. Work that would be highly beneficial both for them and their communities. But here you have to be a little careful. It would be beneficial to people, but it would be harmful to the economy, in the technical sense. And that's a very important distinction to learn. All of this is a brief way of saying that the economic system is a catastrophic failure. There's a huge amount of needed work. There's an enormous number of idle hands of suffering people, but the economic system is simply incapable of bringing them together. Now of course this catastrophic failure is hailed as a grand success. And indeed it is for a narrow sector of privileged; profits are skyrocketing. The economy is working just fine for some people, and they happen to be the ones who write the articles, and give the speeches, so it all sounds great in the intellectual culture.

Globalized Currencies
Looking at these major tendencies, especially in the past twenty years, one crucial event was Richard Nixon's demolition of the Bretton Woods system in the early 1970s. That was the post-war system for regulating international currencies, with the US serving as a kind of international banker. He dismantled that with a lot of consequences.

One effect of the de-regulation of currencies was a huge increase of capital and financial markets. The World Bank estimated it at about 14 trillion dollars, which totally swamps government. And the amount of capital that's being transferred daily is increasing. It's probably now about a trillion dollars a day again swamping government.

In addition to a huge increase in the amount of unregulated capital, there's also a very radical change in its composition. John Eatwell, an economist at Cambridge, and a specialist on finance, pointed out recently that in 1970—before Nixon dismantled the system—about 90% of the capital used in financial transactions, internationally, was for long-term investment trade and about 10% for speculation. Now figures have reversed. It's 90% for speculation, and about 10% for investment and trade. Eatwell suggested that that may be a big factor in the considerable decline in growth rates since this happened in 1970.

The USA is the richest country in the world and it can't carry out even minimal economic planning because of the impact of speculative, unregulated capital. For a Third World country the situation is hopeless. There's no such thing as economic planning. Indeed the new GATT agreements are designed to undercut those possibilities by extending the so-called liberalization, and what they call "services," meaning that big Western banks the Japanese, British and American banks can displace the banks in smaller countries, eliminating any possibility of domestic national planning.

The accelerating shift from a national to a global economy has the effect of increasing polarization across countries, between rich and poor countries, but also, even more sharply, within the countries. It also has the effect of undermining functioning democracy. We're moving to a situation in which capital is highly mobile, and labour is immobile, and becoming more immobile. It means that it's possible to shift production to low- wage, high repression areas, with low environmental standards. It also makes it very easy to play off one immobile, national labour force against another.

During the NAFTA debate in the United States just about everybody agreed that the effect of NAFTA would be to lower wages in the United States for what are called unskilled workers, which means about 70% or 75% of the workforce. In fact, to lower wages you don't have to move manufacturing, you just have to be able to threaten to do it. The threat alone is enough to lower wages and increase temporary employment.

The Growth of Transnational Rule
Consider the matter of democracy. Power is shifting into the hands of huge transnational corporations. That means away from parliamentary institutions. Furthermore, there's a structure of governance that's coalescing around these transnational corporations. This is not unlike the developments of the last couple of hundred years, when national states more or less coalesced around growing national economies. Now you've got a transnational economy, you're getting a transnational state, not surprisingly. The Financial Times described this as a de facto world government, including the World Bank and the IMF, and GATT, now the World Trade Organisation, the G7 Executive, and so on. Transnational bodies remove power from parliamentary institutions. It's important to keep the technocrats insulated—that's World Bank lingo for you want to make sure you have technocratic insulation. The Economist magazine describes how it's important to keep policy insulated from politics.

Power is drifting not only to corporations but into the structures around them—all of them completely unaccountable. The corporation itself has got a stricter hierarchy than exists in any human institution. That's a sure form of totalitarianism and unaccountability, the economic equivalent of fascism which is exactly why corporations are so strongly opposed by classical liberals.

Thomas Jefferson, for example, who lived just about long enough to see the early development of the corporate system, warned in his last years that what he called banking institutions, money and corporations would simply destroy liberty and would restore absolutism, eliminating the victories of the American Revolution. Adam Smith was also concerned about their potential power, particularly if they were going to be granted the rights of "immortal persons".

The end of the Cold War accelerates all this. The Financial Times, for example, had an article called "Green shoots in communism's ruins"; one of the good things it saw going on was that the pauperization of the workforce and a high level of unemployment were offering new ways to undercut "pampered Western European workers" with their "luxurious lifestyles".

A British industrialist explained in the Wall Street Journal that when workers see jobs disappearing it has a salutary effect on people's attitudes. This was part of an article praising the Thatcher reforms for bringing about a low-wage, low-skill economy in England with great labour flexibility, and wonderful profits. Take General Motors, already the biggest employer in Mexico it is now moving into Eastern Europe but in a very special way. When General Motors set up a plant in Poland they insisted upon high tariff protection; similarly, when Volkswagen sets up a plant in the Czech Republic it insists on tariff protection and also externalization of costs. They want the Czech people and the Czech Republic to pay the costs; they just want the profit and they get it. That's the tradition: markets for the poor and plenty of state protection for the rich.

The biggest test is Poland. A country where multinational corporations can get people who are well-trained and well-educated and they'll have blue eyes and blond hair unlike in the Third World, and they'll work for 10% of your wages, with no benefits, because of the effectiveness of capitalist reforms in pauperizing the populations and in increasing unemployment.

That in fact tells us something about what the Cold War was about. We learn a lot about what it was about just by asking a simple question: Who's cheering and who's despairing? If we take the East. Who's cheering? The old Communist Party hierarchy, they think it's wonderful. They are now working for international capitalism. What about the population? Well, they lost the Cold War, they're in despair, despite their victory over the Soviet experiment.

What about the West? There's a lot of cheering from corporations and banks and management firms about the experts who were sent to Eastern Europe to clinch a friendly takeover, as the Wall Street Journal put it, but ran away with all the aid, it turns out. Very little of the aid got there; instead it went into the pockets of the Western experts and management firms. The workers in General Motors and Volkswagen lost the Cold War because now the end of the Cold War just gives another weapon to undermine their "luxurious lifestyles".

These misnamed free trade agreements, GATT and NAFTA, carry that process forwards. They are not free trade agreements but investor rights agreements and they are designed to carry forward the attack on democracy. If you look at them closely, you realize they are a complicated mixture of liberalization and protectionism carefully crafted in the interests of the transnational corporations. So, for example, GATT excludes subsidies except for one kind: military expenditures.

Military expenditures are a huge welfare system for the rich and an enormous form of government subsidy that distort markets and trade. Military expenditures are staying very high: under Clinton they're higher in real terms than they were under Nixon and they are expected to go up. That is a system of market interference and benefits for the wealthy.

Ownership of Information
Another central part of the GATT agreement, and NAFTA, is what are called intellectual property rights which is protectionism: protection for ownership of knowledge and technology. They want to make sure that the technology of the future is monopolized by huge and generally government-subsidized private corporations. GATT includes an important extension of patents to include product patents; this means that if someone designs a new technique for producing a drug, they can't do it because they violate the patent. The product patents reduce economic efficiency and cut back technical innovation. France, for example, had product patents about a century ago and that was a reason why it lost a large part of its chemical industry to Switzerland which didn't, and therefore could innovate.

It means that a country like India, where there is a big pharmaceutical industry which has been able to keep drug costs very low simply by designing smarter processes for producing things, cannot do that any longer.

Right after his NAFTA triumph Clinton went off to the Asia Pacific summit in Seattle where he proclaimed his "grand vision" of the free-market future. Corporations to emulate were the Boeing Corporation, for example, and in fact he gave a speech about the grand vision in a hangar of the Boeing Corporation. That was a perfect choice, as Boeing is an almost totally subsidized corporation. In fact, the aeronautical industry the leading export industry in the 1930s couldn't survive, and then the war came along and it made a huge amount of money, but it was understood right after the Second World War that they were not going to survive in the market. If you read Fortune magazine, it would explain how the aeronautical industry can't survive in the market. The public has to come in and subsidize them, and in fact the aircraft industry, which includes avionics and electronics and complicated metallurgy, is simply subsidized through the Pentagon and NASA. This is the model for the free-market future. The profits are privatized and that's what counts it's socialism for the rich: the public pays the costs and the rich get the profits. That's what the free market is in practice.

Arsenal Of Illusion

Hollywood know-how is helping to create new kinds of military weapons that target the brain—but not with a bullet.

By Jake MacDonald
From The Walrus
2007

Nearly four years after the destruction of the World Trade Center, I surrendered to a long-held curiosity and joined the United States Army. There’s a popular misconception that you can walk into a recruiting station and sign up. But the American army is the most sophisticated fighting force in history and it doesn’t accept just anyone. After a rigorous interview process and several hours studying the materials, I climbed onto the recruiting bus and headed off to basic training at Fort Benning, Georgia.

At boot camp I learned to handle the m16, the fearsome saw, and other modern weapons. After qualifying on the shooting range, I donned night-vision goggles and stalked through the spooky corridors of the urban-warfare facility, firing by instinct at pop-up targets of swarthy enemy soldiers or sometimes a shopkeeper armed only with a bagel. After twelve weeks of training, my outfit, the 22nd Infantry Regiment, shipped out to Iraq. Two days later, I got my first taste of combat. I was on patrol near Baji when my Bradley Fighting Vehicle came under sniper fire. I pursued the gunman into a village before realizing we’d been drawn into an ambush. Bullets whizzed by; a rocket-propelled grenade struck me in the chest, transforming my upper body into a mushroom cloud of pink mist and ricocheting my head off a nearby wall. At this point it occurred to me that fighting the war on terror was going to be more challenging than I expected. With a click of the mouse, I went back to reboot camp and started over, humbled but not discouraged. In this man’s army—a computer game called "America’s Army"—getting killed in action is nothing more than a temporary embarrassment.

"America’s Army" is financed and produced by the United States Department of Defense and is designed to lure young men into the forces. But the technology used to create the video game is at the centre of a much larger question that many Americans are beginning to ask themselves: like the teenage boys seduced into playing America’s Army, are they too going to be corrupted just as subtly by the Pentagon’s growing use of digital technology to create false realities? Digital technology has enabled military scientists working at the intersection of fantasy and reality to develop radical new weapons that will target the brain not with a bullet, but through the creation of a seamless fabricated reality. This tactic will, according to psychological war experts, help the American military not only exert behavioural control over the enemy on the battlefield, but, more ominously, over American public opinion.

The US Army used to call this sort of strategy “psyops” (psychological operations) and it even maintains a department of psychological warfare at Fort Bragg, North Carolina. Once dismissed as an idiot uncle of the military establishment, the Civil Affairs and Psychological Operations Command has mutated into a hydra with tentacles in every level of the military. Psyops can now manufacture eerie simulacra of reality, meaning that in the future it will become increasingly difficult to separate real news from combat footage, communiqués, and hostage videos fabricated by all sides for their own purposes. After all, why influence the news when you can invent it and have a digitally created Dan Rather present it? Thomas X. Hammes, a counter-insurgency expert with the US Marine Corps, says these weapons are being employed today to fight the war on terror and will be used even more in the future. “The notion that we can win this fight with a lot of [conventional] war toys is a fantasy,” he says. “It’s really important for people to understand that we’re no longer fighting foreign wars with guns and bombs. We’re fighting with ideas.”

During the 1980s, President Ronald Reagan increased defence spending by 35 percent, to more than $400 billion (US) a year, and promoted the idea of a futuristic missile shield over North America—a notion some scholars believe was inspired by the Paul Newman movie Torn Curtain. The Soviet Union, burdened by an increasingly inefficient economy, couldn’t keep up with US military spending and by 1991 had collapsed. Many hoped that the demise of communism would usher in a new era of global co-operation, but, with the Soviets vanquished, the United States launched its plan to remake the world in its own image.

In 1997, a number of people who are now top officials in the current US administration, including Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, Vice President Dick Cheney, and national security strategists Paul Wolfowitz and Richard Perle, launched a think tank called the Project for the New American Century. The group argued that it was time to take pre-emptive action to enforce US interests abroad, including removing unfriendly governments. “As the twentieth century draws to a close,” according to the project’s statement of principles, “the United States stands as the world’s pre-eminent power. Having led the West to victory in the Cold War, America faces an opportunity and a challenge. Does the United States have the resolve to shape a new century favorable to American principles and interests?”

Reshaping the world in America’s image would not only involve massive funding to produce new futuristic weapons, it would also require the Pentagon to enlist the support of Hollywood, where the arsenal of digital technology is advancing almost daily. Soon after coming to power in 2001, President George W. Bush acted on the first leg of this strategy when he announced that he was pumping hundreds of millions of dollars into such organizations as darpa, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, which grants research money to weapons developers. Since then, development has begun on dozens of weapons that close the gap between old-fashioned military hardware and the virtual future. One of the most promising, in the Pentagon’s view, is the Brain Machine Interface, a system of embedded neural transmitters and computer software that bridges thought and action. It is being developed by Duke University scientists, who have already created a computerized system in which a lab monkey can move a robotic arm in a laboratory 1,000 kilometres away just by thinking about it. In the future, military commanders with brain implants will use more advanced versions of this technology to deploy unmanned gun ships and robotic tanks in battlefields half a world away.

Bush has also revived plans to develop new real-world weapons systems, including fighter jets that do not require pilots and a new generation of smart bombs. And he agreed to spend billions on the missile-defence program envisioned by Reagan twenty years earlier. In support of the plan, defence contractor Lockheed Martin is building an airship twenty-five times larger than the Goodyear blimp. The airship will serve as a communications platform where attacks on enemy missiles will be coordinated.

The military is also planning unmanned spaceships that will carry huge tungsten bolts, nicknamed “rods from God,” that can be dropped with devastating impact on even the smallest target anywhere on the planet. Recently, retired Air Force Secretary James G. Roche described these space weapons as mandatory for any twenty-first-century arsenal. “Space capabilities in today’s world are no longer nice to have,” he said. “They’ve become indispensable at the strategic, operational, and tactical levels of war. Space capabilities are integrated with and affect every link in the kill chain.”

As futuristic and powerful as this new generation of weapons will be, Bush, perhaps more than any other recent president, is guided by an idea once espoused by Napoleon: “There are but two powers in the world, the sword and the mind. In the long run the sword is always beaten by the mind.” According to many strategists, even if the United States wins on the battlefield, it must ultimately win over the minds of the citizens of a country it is invading with propaganda in order to remake the world in its own image. Hammes, who has trained insurgents around the world, believes it was precisely the military’s failure to win over the hearts and minds of its enemies that led to the United States’s defeat in a number of conflicts over the past thirty years. Today, it is no closer to winning over Iraq than it was when it invaded in 2003. “We were defeated in Vietnam, Lebanon, and Somalia, and we’ll lose in Iraq the same way,” says Hammes. “We’ll win the battles, but we’ll lose the war [of ideas].”

With the United States engaged in a protracted war against terrorism and bogged down in Iraq, the Pentagon is keenly aware of these past failures. William Arkin, an author and former military affairs analyst for the Los Angeles Times, says that the military is growing frustrated with its inability to stay ahead of the terrorist threat, and is anxious to enlist Hollywood and its digital expertise in its fight. “Traditionally, the military has been an innovative force in technological development,” he says. “But about ten years ago, with the digital revolution, the civilian world really began pulling ahead of the military. The army just can’t compete with Hollywood or Microsoft when it comes to digital wizardry.” Microsoft alone spent $2 billion (US) developing its Xbox game technology. It is that kind of muscular research spending and product development that has convinced the Pentagon that it must break down the walls between the military and the entertainment industry.

The first of several recent high-profile Pentagon initiatives in Hollywood came in 1996, when top military officers travelled to Los Angeles to brainstorm with executives from Industrial Light & Magic, Intel, and Paramount about storylines for their combat simulators. This wasn’t the first time the military had gone to Hollywood. During the 1960s, the cia was intrigued by the emergence of television and by experiments indicating that moving images produce a shift from left-brain to right-brain neural activity, which in turn induces a sort of chemical trance that suppresses judgment and heightens suggestibility. The researchers learned that once viewers “suspend their disbelief,” they become vulnerable to the values and messages embedded in the drama.

So it wasn’t surprising that soon after the meeting in 1996, the Pentagon proposed a working partnership with Hollywood. Three years later, it announced that it would build a new $45-million (US) production house in Los Angeles and that it intended to hire many of the screenwriters and producers who had attended the meeting. The new facility was designed by Herman Zimmerman, the award-winning designer of a number of Star Trek episodes, and dubbed the Institute for Creative Technologies. The institute soon became a sandbox for forty-five writers, directors, and special-effects technicians, many of them Academy Award nominees.

Their first project was the development of a total-immersion simulator that gives soldiers a preview of real-life combat situations. The simulator consists of a virtual-reality theatre with a 150-degree screen and a Dolby sound system. Inside, young soldiers-in-training can pick their way through a number of spooky combat environments. A typical program recreates a blown-up building strewn with garbage, jagged rebar, concrete, and splintered furniture. Through a hole in the virtual wall the young trainee can peer out at a wasted city, where sparrows dart through the smoke, Arabic music filters up from the street, and a helicopter gunship thunders overhead.

After the attack on the World Trade Center in 2001, the military returned to Hollywood—this time with new urgency—to again meet with studio heads and producers. Their goal: to enlist the entertainment industry in a sweeping campaign to rally public support for the military and the war in Iraq.

According to the entertainment trade paper Variety, those attending the meeting at the Pentagon’s studio included the presidents of cbs, hbo Films, Warner Brothers Television, and prominent producers and writers such as Steven E. de Souza (Die Hard), Joseph Zito (Delta Force One), and Spike Jonze (Being John Malkovich). One of the producers at that October 2001 meeting was Lionel Chetwynd (The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz). “There was a feeling around the table,” he later recalled, “that something is wrong if half the world thinks we’re the Great Satan. Americans are failing to get our message across to the world.”

The meeting was off-limits to the media, and Chetwynd revealed little else. But a White House spokesperson later said that the government was asking movie moguls for their help in selling America’s image to audiences around the world. Said the spokesperson: “The administration will share with studio executives the themes we’re communicating at home and abroad, of patriotism, tolerance, and courage.” Military officials also reminded the producers of certain “resources we might have in government [that would] be helpful to them.”

David Robb, a former investigative journalist with the Hollywood Reporter and author of Operation Hollywood: How the Pentagon Shapes and Censors the Movies, explains what those “resources” might be. “The government,” he said, “is basically offering filmmakers access to expensive military equipment in exchange for editorial control over their scripts.” He sees a dangerous and growing interdependence between the film industry and the military. “It’s all about money,” he says. “If you’re making a movie that requires F-14 Tomcats or combat helicopters, you can save millions of dollars by making a quid pro quo arrangement with the Pentagon. They’ll loan you the equipment for peanuts—for the price of fuel, let’s say—if you let them control the script. Everybody is happy. The filmmakers get access to war toys. And the military establishment gets to flog its pro-war message to millions of moviegoers.”

As a result of this partnership, a string of new movies partially subsidized by the Pentagon will soon be showing up at theatres. In the high-profile No True Glory: The Battle for Fallujah, scheduled for release in 2006, Harrison Ford will play a heroic American general leading his troops into a hornet’s nest of insurgents in the Iraqi city. It’s unclear to what extent the Pentagon influenced the script, but the screenwriter said the movie “will focus on the bravery of our soldiers and point out why our military can be relied upon to do the right thing.”

To ensure their pictures cast US soldiers in the best possible light, producers who want access to military hardware must submit their scripts to the Pentagon. And according to Robb, military censors “always” insist on a rewrite. “They don’t ask for revisions in the script,” he says. “They tell you.” There are countless stories of the Pentagon trying to bully producers. Clint Eastwood, for example, was infuriated when the Pentagon refused to support Heartbreak Ridge because it contained a scene in which Eastwood’s character shoots a wounded Cuban soldier.

Once the revised script satisfies the military, the Pentagon dispatches a “minder” to the set, to make sure the story isn’t changed at the last minute. “Their main criterion,” says Robb, “is that a script has to ‘aid in the retention and recruitment of personnel.’ But Hollywood has crossed the line into the glorification of war. We’re getting a steady diet of this kind of propaganda, and I honestly believe it’s making us into a more warlike people.”

During the 1990s, before aligning itself with Hollywood, the military had conducted digital morphing experiments at Los Alamos National Laboratory in Santa Fe, New Mexico, the birthplace of the atom bomb. They attempted to recreate individual voices by “dragging and dropping” taped words into sentences, but the results invariably sounded phony and robotic. George Papcun, an expert in phonetic synthesis at Los Alamos, later improved the technology and used it to develop several fictive scenarios, including one in which General Colin Powell had been kidnapped by terrorists. Before a group of officers gathered for the demonstration, Powell announced, “I am being treated well by my captors.” In another demonstration, Papcun played an audiotape that had supposedly just been received from General Carl W. Steiner, former commander of the Special Operations Command. “Gentlemen!” said Steiner. “We have called you together to inform you that we are going to overthrow the United States government.”

But these experiments were amateurish compared to the work being done by technicians in Hollywood and Silicon Valley. Their sophisticated digital morphing techniques first appeared on movie screens in 1991, when audiences across the world gasped as a snake-eyed killer robot in a policeman’s uniform morphed out of a tile floor in Terminator 2: Judgment Day. Two years later, Jurassic Park used the same technology. It is the expertise behind the creation of these lifelike digital scenarios that the Pentagon covets. In the movie In the Line of Fire, for example, Clint Eastwood plays an aging Secret Service agent who happened to be on duty in Dallas on the day President John Kennedy was shot. To send Eastwood’s character back to 1963, Hollywood computer specialists used digital morphing to lift Eastwood from an early Dirty Harry movie, gave him a military haircut and a skinny tie, and dropped him into an actual news clip of Kennedy’s assassination, now showing Eastwood rushing to the president’s side.

Ford Motor Company also blurred the boundary between fantasy and reality when it raised Steve McQueen from the dead to advertise its 2005 Mustang. In a scenario cribbed from the movie Field of Dreams, a young farmer builds a winding racetrack on his farm. He circles the track a few times in his new Mustang, then McQueen (who died in 1980) comes sauntering through the cornstalks. The farmer flips the keys to McQueen, who roars off in the car, which Ford designed in homage to the 1968 muscle car McQueen drove in the classic movie Bullitt.

So would the military use similar technology to fabricate news clips, communiqués from insurgent fighters, and videotaped confessions from foreign villains? Perhaps the better question is, why wouldn’t it? Imperial powers have always used disinformation and deceit to advance their military goals. And the American military openly admits that deception will be an important tool in the wars of the future.

Creating virtual worlds to control public opinion and influence the battlefield was the disturbing theme of a paper entitled “Psyop Operations in the 21st Century,” published by the United States Army War College in 2000. The author enthuses over the possibility of using digital morphing techniques to create “simulated and reproduced voices, fabricated provocative speeches delivered by virtual heads of state, and projected images of actual life situations.” The paper concludes ominously that the twenty-first century will be “an amazing place” for achieving “mind and behavior control.”

Imagine, for example, the digitally reproduced president of a small country the United States is fighting appearing on his country’s television network and ordering his army to put down their weapons, or a similarly recreated leader of a democratic faction in Iran inviting the American army into the country to rescue them and dismantle Iran’s growing nuclear program. In fact, Arkin notes that during the Gulf War, this is precisely the technology psychological war planners wanted to deploy in a bid to destroy Saddam Hussein’s reputation with his allies. “They considered faking a video that showed Saddam indulging in sexual perversions, crying like a baby, and exhibiting other types of unmanly behaviour,” he says. “But they backed off because they were concerned about a bad reaction from their Arab partners.” Arkin says the United States also crafted a plan to project a huge holographic image of Allah into the skies over Baghdad, urging Iraqis to overthrow Hussein.

In the end, the military didn’t proceed with these initiatives, but Arkin says the Pentagon’s reservations were strictly logistical. “They scrapped the hologram because it required huge mirrors,” he says. “And there were other concerns, such as what is Allah supposed to look like? I don’t think ethics played any role at all in the decision to back off. These people tend to put military objectives ahead of ethics. And that’s worrisome.” While Arkin says the Pentagon has yet to directly target Americans, it has the growing capability—and perhaps motive—to do so. “There’s no evidence they’ve cooked up faked videos to influence public opinion here at home,” he says. “But there’s a danger that in the ongoing fight for hearts and minds, [it] may prove too tempting to resist.”

There are disturbing precedents. The head of the cia resigned last year after acknowledging that intelligence reports concerning Hussein’s nuclear weapons arsenal, which were used to justify the attack on Iraq, may have been faulty. Some analysts believe they were deliberately fabricated. If such false information can be used to sway public opinion today on such a critical issue, it’s not hard to imagine, for instance, North Korean leader Kim Jong Il appearing digitally on the cbs Evening News boasting about his arsenal of nuclear weapons and his plans to use them against the United States.

Some veteran psychological war operatives believe the military has already crossed that boundary and is moving toward manufacturing virtual newscasts. Retired Army Colonel John B. Alexander is a former intelligence officer with the US Army and author of Future War: Non-lethal Weapons in Modern Warfare. Does he believe that the Pentagon would invent the news Americans are watching to achieve military objectives? “As sure as a heart attack,” he says, without hesitation. “I guarantee they’re doing it already.”

There may not be evidence to prove Alexander’s allegations, but the military to enshroud the American public in a cloud of digital illusion. Clear indications of this surfaced in February 2000, when Colonel Christopher St. John, commander of one of the army’s psychological operations groups, gave a speech in which he called for “greater co-operation between the armed forces and media giants.” With some pride, he revealed that his team had managed to embed some psychological war operatives from Fort Bragg at cnn. They were doing editorial work. While it isn’t clear what the intent of the operation was, they were recalled when their presence at cnn was revealed. Admitted Major Thomas Collins of the US Army Information Service: “They worked as regular employees of cnn and helped in the production of news.”

It’s impossible to run an empire without young men who are willing to risk their lives on foreign shores. With troops stationed in more than 120 nations around the world, the US military is now more widely deployed than at any time since World War II. Virtually every soldier with combat training has been sent overseas, and the Army Reserve, comprised basically of weekend soldiers, makes up about 40 percent of the troops in Iraq. The army estimates that it will need at least 74,000 fresh recruits annually to sustain these troop levels. But since the reinstatement of the draft is widely viewed as politically unworkable, where will all those young recruits come from?

The hope is that such video games as America’s Army, which was the brainchild of United States Military Academy professor Colonel Casey Wardynski, will seduce young men into joining. The army budgeted $7 million to develop the project, and Wardynski partnered up with Michael Capps, a virtual-reality engineer at the United States Military Academy with four degrees ranging from mathematics to creative writing. After three years in the marketplace, America’s Army has proved to be a smash hit, with players having logged more than 60 million hours of online combat.

To promote the game, real soldiers hold tournaments at video-gaming conventions and visit youth-oriented events such as nascar stock car races, where they set up kiosks stuffed with army paraphernalia, real weapons, and computer terminals at which kids can try America’s Army. The US Air Force, the Marines, and the Special Forces have also produced their own games. All this is clearly part of a much broader strategy—one in which digital games, so effective in bringing teenage boys into the army, are expanding to turn the field of battle, and the struggle for the public mind, into a virtual game in which reality and fiction merge.

Of course, as it stands today, reality is still all too real for soldiers in the field. The day Patrick Resta, twenty-six, arrived in Iraq, one of the soldiers in his unit had half his head blown off by a roadside bomb. They bagged his body and set up camp as local villagers shot rocket-propelled grenades at their encampment. “In the confusion,” he says, “this car came down the road, dragging a piece of metal and throwing off sparks. The next thing you know, thirty guys from my unit opened fire on the car, which, as it turned out, contained three innocent civilians, one of them a twelve-year-old boy. This is all in my first three hours in the country. My entire tour of duty was a complete clusterfuck.” He now volunteers for a group of ex-soldiers called Veterans for Peace, visiting schools in the Philadelphia area and telling kids about the reality of war. “It’s not a video game. You’re shooting real human beings, and it’s a horrific thing. These army recruiters show up in their crisp uniforms to talk about adventure, heroism, free college tuition, and so on. The kids are young, and they don’t think their own government would lie to them. But I tell them, ‘Hey, they’re lying, to everybody. Don’t believe any of it.’” - Published July 2005

Jake MacDonald lives in Winnipeg. his latest book, With the Boys (Greystone, 2005), is a collection of essays chronicling the author's experiences among men and nature.

2007-05-15T11:11:00.000-07:00

J'Accuse: The 10 Worst Corporations of 2006

By Russell Mokhiber and Robert Weissman
From Multinational Monitor

Selecting the 10 worst corporations of the year is more art than science.

We do, however, apply certain guidelines. One is that, barring extraordinary circumstances, we do not place companies on the list two years running. The rationale for this guideline is that we want to diversify the pool of named companies (and there is a big pool of bad actors from which to select). The downside is that we inevitably leave off companies who did something really bad in the previous year — solely on the grounds that they were malefactors the year before.

So, as a warm-up to the 2006 list, permit a quick review of the recent activities of those companies on the list in 2005.

BP: In March 2006, a leak in the Alaska pipeline that BP maintains led to the second biggest oil spill in Alaskan history. Then, in August 2006, BP was forced to shut down the pipeline because of massive corrosion problems the company had permitted to fester.

Delphi: Delphi continued in bankruptcy through 2006, plowing ahead with its shameful scheme to manipulate the bankruptcy system to escape wage and pension payments owed to past and present workers. Final arrangements are still pending for Delphi to emerge from bankruptcy, but it’s fair to say the company will have achieved much of what it desired — trashing its unionized wage and benefit structure, if perhaps not as fully as it fantasized doing.

Dupont: Dupont appeared on our list in 2005 for a decades-long cover-up on the effects of a chemical used to make Teflon and grease-resistant coatings. At the end of 2005, the company agreed to phase out its use, over the course of a decade. But the company continues to deny it has any harmful effect on humans. Meanwhile, a federal criminal investigation is ongoing.

ExxonMobil: In 2005, ExxonMobil appeared on our list for its global warming denialism, and price-gouging that resulted in record profits of $36 billion. In 2006, the company began massaging its position on global warming — ExxonMobil now agrees that “climate change is a serious and long-term challenge,” but doesn’t want governments to do anything serious about it — and its continued mass rip-off of consumers enabled it to rake in $39.5 billion in profits, a new record.

Ford: Ford lost more than $12 billion in 2006, the legacy of the company’s complete failure to recognize that the future rests with fuel efficient vehicles (and soon, petroleum-free transportation) rather than gas-guzzling giant SUVs. Investors took a big hit, but workers felt the worst impact; at the start of 2006, Ford announced it would eliminate a quarter of its U.S. jobs.

Halliburton: Halliburton continued with its scandalous looting of taxpayers. In a small but totally typical example, the Associated Press in September reported that a company whistleblower revealed in a lawsuit filed in 2005 that Halliburton’s KBR subsidiary in Iraq billed millions to U.S. taxpayers for nonexistent recreational activities. In July 2006, the Army fired Halliburton from its contract (which Halliburton called a routine decision to suspend the contract). The contract to rebid will be broken up into several pieces — Halliburton may yet end up as the overseer of the companies that take over its old contractual duties.

KPMG: KPMG, the accounting firm mired in controversy over the sweetheart deal it negotiated in 2005 to escape prosecution for peddling illegal tax shelter schemes, started off 2006 with a bang. On January 3, the esteemed accountants at KPMG agreed to pay $2.77 million for failing to disclose rebates the firm received for travel expenses billed to the U.S. government.

Roche: In July, the newspaper The Australian reported that Roche had spent a remarkable $49,000 on a dinner for 300 doctors. Held at a restaurant in the Sydney Opera House, the purpose of the dinner was to promote the drug makers’ pill rituximab, used to treat non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma. The dinner violated the Australian drug industry’s code that donated meals to doctors be “simple and modest.”

Suez: Suez struggled to hold on to its privatized water business, which seems increasingly non-viable in developing countries. In March, Argentina threw Suez out of the country, terminating its 30-year contract on the grounds that Suez had failed to make promised investments. Suez also left Bolivia in October, extracting a $5 million payment, but backing down on threats to sue the country’s government in international arbitration.

W.R. Grace: In 2005, W.R. Grace appeared on our 10 worst list after being indicted for its operations in Libby, Montana, a mining town where the company let hundreds be exposed to deadly doses of asbestos and then concealed the problem. In April 2006, the New York Times reported that “doctors at the clinic that has treated hundreds of asbestos victims accuse the company of trying to discredit them and force the clinic to close.”

Anyway, that’s an update on our 2005 list. We’ve got a whole new crop for 2006, presented herewith in alphabetical order.

ABBOTT: BULLYING THE PHILIPPINES
UNICEF and World Health Organization recommend exclusive breastfeeding in the first six months of life. This is particularly important in poorer countries, where newborns face greater health risks and the water used to make baby formula may be contaminated.

Nonetheless, and despite a decades-long global public health campaign to increase breastfeeding rates throughout the developing world, breastfeeding rates are low.

In the Philippines, less than half of all babies are exclusively breastfed for at least than one month, according to UNICEF. Only 16 percent of babies four to five months of age are still exclusively breastfeeding. In the Philippines, according to public health authorities, 82,000 children die each year before their fifth birthday. Improving breastfeeding rates is the single most effective action that can be taken to prevent these deaths.

The Filipino government decided to do something about this. But the government’s public health measure has been blocked by Abbott and other infant formula makers. In July, the government issued regulations to ban the marketing of infant formula for babies under two years of age.

The Pharmaceutical and Health Care Association of the Philippines (PHAP), whose members include U.S. formula companies (Abbott Ross, Mead Johnson and Wyeth), and Gerber (now owned by Swiss Novartis), promptly sued the government to stop implementation of the new rules. The Philippines Supreme Court declined to issue an injunction to stop the new rules from going into effect.

Then, on August 11, Thomas Donohue, the head of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, wrote a letter to Philippine President Gloria Arroyo. Donohue complained that the regulation was overbroad and unjustified, and adopted through improper purposes. His complaint came with a threat: “If regulations are susceptible to amendment without due process, a country’s reputation as a stable and viable destination for investment is at risk.”

Four days later, the Supreme Court reversed itself and issued an injunction against the new rules.The companies’ interference has mobilized women and public health organizations in the Philippines. In one action, more than a thousand breastfeeding mothers rallied in Manila. “We want to make companies accountable for the harmful effects of babyfood products that undermine the power of breastfeeding and food security in the Philippines,” Ines Fernandez, executive director of Arugaan, a Filipino breastfeeding organization, told UNICEF.

Meanwhile, Abbott has also come under fire for its handling of AIDS drugs. Its product Kaletra is a vital drug for treatment of people with HIV/AIDS, but the company maintains inflated prices for the drug in many developing countries, and has failed to register a variant of its drug that does not require refrigeration in many poor nations. In August, the company announced a new discount deal for developing countries. It set a price of $500 per patient a year in least developed countries, and $2,200 in low-income and low-middle-income countries.

The company’s new release quoted Dr. Robert Redfield, director of Clinical Care and Research, Institute of Human Virology in Baltimore as saying, “as a caregiver of HIV patients in the developing world, I am pleased with Abbott’s continued effort to develop new and innovative programs related to medication costs. These efforts will enable individual countries to maximize their ability to provide medicine for their citizens.”

Perhaps Redfield thinks Abbott deserves congratulations. Most public health advocates do not. They say the price remains out of reach, especially in middle-income countries, and complain that Abbott continues to widely register its heat-resistant version. “Where is Abbott’s Kaletra?” asks Anuja Singh, a member of the Student Global AIDS Campaign and a student at Columbia University. “Abbott is in possession of life-saving medication — but the people who need it do not have it.”

ALTRIA: RACKETEERS
After a case lasting seven years and a trial unfolding over nine months, Federal District Court Judge Judith Kessler in August 2006 issued a ruling in United States v. Philip Morris.

Adjudging Philip Morris USA, its parent company Altria, and the other leading tobacco companies in the United States to be “racketeers” under the terms of the Racketeering-Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO), she wrote: “What this case is really about … [is] an industry, and in particular these defendants, that survives, and profits, from selling a highly addictive product which causes diseases that lead to a staggering number of deaths per year, an immeasurable amount of human suffering and economic loss, and a profound burden on our national healthcare system. Defendants have known many of these facts for at least 50 years or more. Despite that knowledge, they have consistently, repeatedly and with enormous skill and sophistication, denied these facts to the public, to the government and to the public health community. Moreover, in order to sustain the economic viability of their companies, defendants have denied that they marketed and advertised their products to children under the age of 18 and to young people between the ages of 18 and 21 in order to ensure an adequate supply of ‘replacement smokers,’ as older ones fall by the wayside through death, illness, or cessation of smoking.

In short, defendants have marketed and sold their lethal product with zeal, with deception, with a single-minded focus on their financial success, and without regard for the human tragedy or social costs that success exacted.”

In her more than 1,600-page ruling, Kessler spelled out in excruciating detail how Philip Morris and the other defendants carried out their deadly conspiracy to deceive and addict.

For example, Kessler found that “Philip Morris intensively studied nicotine and both its pharmacological and physiological effects on smokers (sometimes called addictive, dependence producing or reinforcing effects) in an effort to increase its market share within the industry. However, Philip Morris withheld from the public its internal knowledge and acceptance that smoking, because of nicotine, was addictive.”

As evidence, Kessler noted that one-time Philip Morris Principal Scientist William Dunn “observed that while Philip Morris would continue its research program ‘to study the drug nicotine, we must not be visible about it.’ And while the program depended on a ‘heavy commitment’ by Philip Morris, Dunn wrote that ‘our attorneys, however, will likely continue to insist on a clandestine effort in order to keep nicotine the drug in low profile.’”

Similarly, she found that since the 1970s Philip Morris has used brand descriptors such as “light” and “ultra light” to suggest, misleadingly, that lower tar and nicotine cigarettes are less harmful.

Citing statements from James Morgan, who was brand manager of Marlboro from 1969 to 1972, during the time when Philip Morris introduced Marlboro Lights, its first “light” cigarette, and who subsequently became CEO of the company, Kessler found, “Philip Morris made a calculated decision to use the phrase ‘lower tar and nicotine’ even though its own marketing research indicated that consumers interpreted that phrase as meaning that the cigarettes not only contained comparatively less tar and nicotine, but also that they were a healthier option.”

She also concluded that Philip Morris markets to young people, including those under 18. Philip Morris and other defendants’ “marketing activities are intended to bring new, young and hopefully long-lived smokers into the market in order to replace those who die (largely from tobacco-caused illnesses) or quit,” Kessler found. “Defendants used their knowledge of young people to create highly sophisticated and appealing marketing campaigns targeted to lure them into starting smoking and later becoming nicotine addicts.”

“As a result,” she determined, “88 percent of youth smokers buy the three most heavily advertised brands — Marlboro, Camel and Newport. Fewer than half of smokers over the age of 25 purchase these three brands. For example, in 2003, Marlboro, the most heavily marketed brand, held 49.2 percent of the 12-to-17 year old market but only 38 percent of smokers over age 25.”

“Defendants spent billions of dollars every year on their marketing activities in order to encourage young people to try and then continue purchasing their cigarette products in order to provide the replacement smokers they need to survive.”

And Kessler found that “Philip Morris suppressed and concealed many scientific research documents, even going so far as to send them to a foreign affiliate in order to prevent the disclosure of documents in litigation and in federal regulatory proceedings.” For example, “in 1970, Helmut Wakeham, Philip Morris’s vice president for research & development, recommended that Philip Morris purchase INBIFO, a research facility in Cologne Germany, arguing that Germany ‘is a locale where we might do some of the things which we are reluctant to do in this country.’”

While Judge Kessler’s findings were a devastating indictment of Philip Morris and the rest of Big Tobacco, she pronounced herself handcuffed in terms of remedies. A previous appellate court ruling had limited the judge’s ability to impose monetary penalties or remedies based on the prior misconduct of the defendants.

Philip Morris is appealing the ruling. “Philip Morris USA and Altria Group, Inc. believe much of today’s decision and order are not supported by the law or the evidence presented at trial, and appear to be Constitutionally impermissible or infringe on Congress’ sole right to provide for the regulation of tobacco products,” said William S. Ohlemeyer, Altria Group vice president and associate general counsel.

“Moreover, the conclusion that PM USA and Altria are reasonably likely to engage in future wrongdoing is flawed in light of the profound and permanent changes in the way cigarettes are marketed today, including requirements imposed by agreements with the state attorneys general and other voluntary — and irrevocable — changes made by our companies,” he said.

BAE, BLAIR, BRIBERY AND THE BENEFITS OF BREAKING THE LAW
Bribery is a menace that undermines democracy. Yet, despite laws prohibiting bribery, corporations continue to bribe worldwide. Why? Because corporations consider a law violation as merely a cost of doing business.

Let us not forget the advice of two of the most revered corporate law professors in the United States — University of Chicago Law Professors Frank Easterbrook and Daniel Fischel — authors of the number one cited work in legal academia over the last 25 years — The Economic Structure of Corporate Law — who advocate that corporations violate the law if profits from the law-violating activity outweigh the fine.

Straight cost-benefit. But that’s not to say that corporations won’t go to the end of the world to try and beat back those who would accuse of them of criminal activity. Take the case of BAE Systems — one of the world’s largest military contractors. In 2006, the cops in the UK were deep into a bribery investigation of BAE in Saudi Arabia.

Then the UK’s Serious Fraud Office took some serious political heat for its investigation. The heat was generated by BAE and the Saudis. And the prosecutors couldn’t stand the heat. So, they got out of the kitchen. As in — they closed down the investigation. Why? Well, according to a press release from the prosecutors in the Serious Fraud Office: “This decision has been taken following representations that have been made both to the Attorney General and the Director of the SFO concerning the need to safeguard national and international security. It has been necessary to balance the need to maintain the rule of law against the wider public interest. No weight has been given to commercial interests or to the national economic interest.” Right.

BAE and the Saudis had been lobbying to close down this investigation for months. More than $19 billion or so in BAE contracts was on the line. Of course, no weight was given to these commercial interests.

In December 2006, Prime Minister Tony Blair defended the move to close down the investigation by implying that it would hurt the UK’s relationship with Saudi Arabia. “Our relationship with Saudi Arabia is vitally important for our country in terms of counter-terrorism, in terms of the broader Middle East, in terms of helping in respect of Israel-Palestine, and that strategic interest comes first,” Blair said.

Wait a second? Shut down a bribery investigation as a way to enhance the peace process? A coalition of more than 40 public interest groups wrote to Prime Minister Tony Blair that “the early termination of the investigation for reasons that do not relate to the legal merits of the case sends the message that companies trading with countries that a government claims to be of strategic importance are above the law and can bribe with impunity.” Impunity. Good word.

The groups pointed out to Blair that the UK is a signatory to the OECD Convention on Combating Bribery of Foreign Public Officials in International Business Transactions (the OECD Antibribery Convention).

Article 5 of the convention requires that the investigation and prosecution of foreign bribery “shall not be influenced by considerations of national economic interest” or “the potential effect upon relations with another State.”

It’s not as if the BAE case is an isolated instance of big corporations getting their way through bribery. According to the Guardian paper in London, a $12 million BAE bribery scandal is brewing in Tanzania.

Also according to the Guardian, Robin Cook, the former foreign secretary under Blair, has written his memoirs in which he notes that “I came to learn that the chairman of BAE appeared to have the key to the garden door to No. 10. Certainly I never knew No. 10 to come up with any decision that would be incommoding to BAE.” BAE says it does not comment on corruption allegations.

In a question-and-answer statement, it says, “There have been several media reports relating to allegations made against our Company. None of these allegations has been substantiated. We will not tolerate bribery or other attempts to influence improperly the decisions of customers and suppliers. The intent of our policies is to establish compliance with the law as the minimum standard and to aim for higher standards where possible.”

BOEING: OFF THE HOOK, AGAIN & AGAIN
Up until a couple of years ago, if you were a major U.S. corporation and you engaged in criminal wrongdoing, and some insider had the goods on the company and could convince a federal prosecutor to bring a case, there was a good chance that the corporation would be forced to plead guilty to a crime.

Now, the odds are running the other way. The corporate defense lawyers have federal prosecutors on the run. Now, if you are a corporate insider, and you have the goods on corporate criminal wrongdoing — the best that you can expect in most cases is a deferred prosecution agreement or a non-prosecution agreement.

These agreements allow the corporation to clean house, fire a few “rogue” employees, cooperate with federal authorities in putting the individual wrongdoers behind bars, admit no corporate wrongdoing — and move on to the next crime. Case in point: Boeing.

In May, the Justice Department announced a tentative agreement with Boeing to resolve two entirely separate cases of apparent criminal wrongdoing — “concerning Boeing’s hiring of former Air Force acquisition official Darleen Druyun in 2002 and the investigation by the United States Attorney’s Office for the Central District of California regarding possession of a competitor’s information in connection with launch service contracts with the Air Force under the Evolved Expendable Launch Vehicle Program and with a task order with NASA for 19 missions under its launch services contract.”

In the Evolved Expendable Launch Vehicle Program scandal, Boeing acquired 25,000 pages of bidding documents from its sole competitor, Lockheed Martin. It then used the information to set its bids just below those of Lockheed. The government and taxpayers were thus cheated of the benefits of genuine competition.

In the elaborate Darleen Druyun affair, Air Force contracting officer Druyun admitted doing a variety of “favors” for Boeing. In the Pentagon’s misguided deal to lease rather than buy tankers from Boeing, Druyun admitted that she “agreed to a higher price for the aircraft than she believed was appropriate.” Boeing reciprocated for these gifts — ripoffs of taxpayer money — by hiring her. Her hiring was managed at the highest levels of the company, involving then-Chief Financial Officer Michael Sears. Druyun and Sears were sentenced to jail time for their crimes.

There was no such pain for Boeing. Like most corporations that violate the criminal law, it was able to cut a deal. Even by the degraded standards of the day, Boeing was able to exact some extraordinary concessions. Boeing was forced to pay a $615 million fine — modest for the company, especially in the context of its wrongdoing — but the government agreed to describe the penalty payment from Boeing as a potentially tax deductible “monetary penalty” rather than a “criminal penalty.” And the deal permits Boeing not to acknowledge that federal prosecutors had sufficient evidence to warrant felony charges.

Among other advantages, these concessions will assist the company in defending itself in civil litigation. This comes on top of the main benefits: no criminal charges, no ongoing scrutiny of the company’s performance in the context of a criminal prosecution, no criminal penalties.

Perhaps the most audacious innovation of the Boeing non-prosecution agreement is that it resolves not just one instance of potential criminal activity, but two. One of the key factors in the Justice Department’s guidelines for prosecuting companies (known as the Thompson Memorandum), and in any common-sense exercise of prosecutorial discretion, is whether the wrongdoer has engaged in repeated violations of the law. Here by definition Boeing had engaged in repeat violations, for the non-prosecution agreement settled two brazen and potentially criminal abuses of the contracting process. It should also be noted that Boeing has a record replete with other cases of serious wrongdoing (most resolved civilly).

From Boeing, it was the typical corporate line — that’s all in the past. “We take full responsibility for the wrongful acts of the former employees who brought dishonor on a great company and caused harm to the U.S. government and its taxpayers,” Boeing CEO Jim McNerney told the Senate Armed Services Committee in August. Note: “former” employees.

Now, everything has changed, McNerney said. “In my 14 months as the company's chairman, president and CEO, I have made it my mission to understand the root causes of what went wrong in years past. And I can attest that those former employees referred to in the settlement do not represent the people of Boeing, who are devoted to conducting their work ethically and in the best interests of our customers and our country.”

Of course, as the Justice Department noted in announcing the deal, “the company is fully cooperating with the government’s investigation.” Now, would the federal government make a similar deal with, say, the mafia? Imagine reading the following: “Under a deal cut with the federal government, the mob agreed to pay $615 million and the United States agreed not to bring criminal charges related to the conduct in part because ‘the mob is fully cooperating with the government’s investigation.’” We didn’t see the argument against corporate criminal liability being made by the Chamber of Commerce or the white collar bar when the feds were cracking down on the mob. They didn’t say — go after the individual mob bosses, but forget the enterprise. In fact, the FBI and the Justice Department were so concerned about mob “enterprise liability” as they called it, that they got passed through the Congress a special law to help them deal with the problem — the RICO Act, the very law used innovatively to go after the tobacco companies.

Putting away individuals is not enough. The corporate culture poisons the system. You have to deal with the organization, the enterprise, the corporation, the mob. You would get the impression from listening to the onslaught of propaganda emanating from the big corporate law firms that corporations are innocent vessels — it’s the corrupt individuals who are evil. Put them behind bars. Let the corporation do its good work.

In fact, corporate crime and violence has inflicted far more damage on society than all individual wrongdoing combined. And that’s why’s its important to preserve corporate criminal liability. The criminal law is the big stick in society’s bag of tricks for controlling immoral, illegal and anti-social behavior. So, why not use it against society’s most dangerous criminals?

It’s important to be able say — with legal justification — to those who spend billions on public relations campaigns to make themselves look good, “J’accuse — you are a criminal.”

Exxon is a criminal. ADM is a criminal. Genentech is a criminal. Chevron is a criminal. Coors is a criminal. Tyson is a criminal. GE is a criminal. Teledyne is a criminal. All convicted of crimes in the 1990s, before the anti-corporate crime cult took hold of our minds and legal system. Today’s wrongdoers get off easy, and feel no shame.

Boeing in fact feels so little shame that it has now entered into a joint venture with Lockheed, its sole competitor in the satellite launch business and the company from which it stole thousands of proprietary documents.

In October, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) blessed the creation of the joint venture, which it acknowledged will create a durable monopoly, raise prices and reduce innovation. The FTC let the deal go through because the Defense Department — the sole customer for the joint venture — endorsed it. But whether the Pentagon just cravenly bows to the wishes of contractors, or is fooling itself, or both, it is a safe prediction that the joint venture approval will lead not to speeded-up satellite launches, but further delays. And no one will be in position to do anything about it, because there won’t be any competitors.

FIRSTENERGY: NUCLEAR POWER IS NOT THE ANSWER
In January 2006, Akron, Ohio-based FirstEnergy’s Nuclear Operating Company agreed to pay $28 million to settle criminal charges that it made false statements to the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission.

Now we agree with Dr. Helen Caldicott that — as she put it in the title of her recent book — Nuclear Power is Not the Answer. But if you are going to run a nuclear power facility, you can’t lie to the regulators. And if you do, you should pay the price. Was FirstEnergy forced to plead guilty? No. Instead, it was charged with crimes, but the criminal prosecution was deferred — if FirstEnergy is a good boy for a couple of years, the charges will be dropped. No harm, no foul.

Under the agreement, the company admitted that the government was able to prove that its employees, acting on its behalf, knowingly made false representations to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) in the course of attempting to persuade the NRC that its Davis-Besse Nuclear Power Station was safe to operate. Prasoon Goyal, a design engineer, also accepted and entered into a deferred prosecution agreement with the government.

In addition, two former employees and one former contractor of the company were charged in a five-count indictment for allegedly preparing and providing false statements to the NRC. Federal officials alleged that David Geisen, Andrew Siemaszko and Rodney Cook falsely represented to the NRC that past inspections of the plant were adequate to assure safe operation until February or March of 2002.

“By misleading the NRC about its prior safety inspections, the company failed to meet its regulatory obligations and violated the public’s trust,” said Assistant Attorney General Sue Ellen Wooldridge for the Justice Department’s Environmental and Natural Resources Division. “The deferred prosecution agreement entered today involves a full admission of responsibility by the company and includes a financial penalty that reflects the revenue that the company realized by misleading the NRC and delaying required safety inspections at the Davis-Besse facility.” The company owns and operates the Davis-Besse Nuclear Power Station, which is located on the southwestern shore of Lake Erie, near Oak Harbor, Ohio.

To produce energy, the plant utilizes pressurized water reactors to heat water to approximately 600 degrees Fahrenheit through the process of nuclear fission. At that temperature, the reactor coolant water — which is sealed inside a reactor pressure vessel — reaches a pressure of 2000 pounds per square inch. The reactor coolant is then used to super-heat steam to drive turbines that generate electricity.

Reactor operators use two systems to control the rate of fission. In one, they can raise or lower vertical control rods in the reactor core to absorb the neutrons that drive the reaction. The machinery that raises and lowers the control rods is attached to the reactor vessel head of the reactor pressure vessel. Nozzles pierce the dome-shaped head and the control rods are raised and lowered through those nozzles. The Davis-Besse reactor vessel head had 69 nozzles.

In the 1990s, some reactors in power plants, like Davis-Besse, started to develop cracks where the nozzles were welded to the reactor vessel head. This cracking could lead to breaks where control rod nozzles penetrated the steel-walled vessel that contained the nuclear fuel and the pressurized reactor coolant water, resulting in a potentially serious accident that would stress the plants’ safety systems.

Engineers predict that a broken nozzle, propelled by reactor coolant at 2000 pounds per square inch, would violently launch itself out of the reactor vessel head, leaving a hole through which reactor coolant would escape into the containment building.

In August 2001, following reports of nozzle cracks, the NRC issued Bulletin 2001-01, requiring reactor operators to report on their plant’s susceptibility to cracking, the steps they had taken to detect it, and their plans for addressing the problem in the future. Any licensee that did not plan to inspect the reactor vessel head for signs of cracking by December 31, 2001 was required to justify operation beyond that date.

Federal officials said that in the months following the issuance of Bulletin 2001-01, the company submitted five letters to the NRC, arguing that its past inspections were adequate to assure safe operation until February or March 2002, at which time the plant had a prescheduled shut-down.

Federal officials charged that in order to persuade the NRC that their plant was safe to operate until the prescheduled shutdown, company engineers and contractors — including Geisen, Siemaszko and Cook — presented false information in its submissions to the NRC.

The federal indictment charges that the defendants prepared and submitted false and misleading responses to the NRC’s bulletin and concealed material information, eventually persuading the NRC that Davis-Besse was safe to continue operation until February 15, 2002. Upon the scheduled shutdown in March 2002, workers discovered a pineapple-sized cavity in the head of the reactor vessel at Davis-Besse. Subsequent analysis showed that this hole was the result of corrosive reactor coolant leaking through a nozzle crack.

In addition to alleging false and misleading statements to the NRC, the indictment alleges that Geisen, Siemaszko and Cook lied about the extent of inspections done in 1996, 1998 and 2000. Two of the defendants, Geisen and Siemaszko, were also charged with providing the NRC with photographs bearing captions that falsely indicated generally good conditions for visual inspections. As part of the settlement agreement, the company will pay more than $23 million in fines and will spend an additional $4.3 million on community service projects. No guilty plea. Crime. No punishment.

As is typical in such cases, FirstEnergy expressed regret, chalked up the “mistake” to a bygone era and said that the overall experience was positive. “FENOC [First Energy's Nuclear Operating Company] regrets the significant performance deficiencies that led to the reactor head issue and accepts full responsibility for the failure to accurately communicate with the NRC,” said FENOC President and Chief Nuclear Officer Gary R. Leidich. “We have learned much from this experience, and FENOC is a better and stronger company today than in 2001 when this occurred. The agreement closes an important chapter on the Davis-Besse reactor head issue for the company. FENOC will continue to focus on safe, reliable plant operations, and do nothing to retreat from its recovery nor erode the trust it has regained.”

Even when the company engages in run-of-the-mill pollution with visible consequences — the fines are nothing, the slap is a tap. In Pennsylvania, the Department of Environmental Protection fined FirstEnergy Generation Corp. $25,000 for a “stack rain out” that covered more than 300 Beaver County homes and properties in a black, sooty material July 22, 2006. The material came from the tall stack of the company’s Bruce Mansfield power plant in Shippingport Borough and rained over a two-mile area that extended from the borough into Raccoon Township. “This was a significant event that affected hundreds of nearby residents,” DEP’s Kenneth Bowman said. “We recognize that FirstEnergy worked to clean up the sites by removing the material from public and private properties. But the company still must pay a price because of the nature and scope of the incident.”

The $25,000 fine — the maximum penalty allowed by the state’s Air Pollution Control Act — was paid to the Clean Air Fund, which finances air quality improvement projects across the commonwealth. DEP analysis of samples of the material taken from sites in Shippingport and Raccoon Township showed elevated levels of arsenic. Analysis of samples taken by FirstEnergy from the facility also showed elevated levels of arsenic.

KROGER: NOT TRUTHFUL TO THE OUTSIDE WORLD
Kroger Co. is a $60 billion corporation based in Cincinnati, Ohio. It owns more than two dozen supermarket and department store chains — including Kroger’s, Fred Mayer and Ralphs. Ralphs is based in southern California.

On October 10, 2006, Kroger’s chair and CEO, Dave Dillon, gave a speech to a group of analysts. “A company is an artificial device that the government allows us to form, but it is nothing more than a bunch of people,” Dillon said. “And those people coming together for a common purpose also have to define themselves and they do through their values. And at Kroger, when we began this journey about five years ago or so, we decided we need to identify in what do we believe. What were the values that we were going to hold true. And there were six that we identified. I’d like to talk about them each briefly. The first is honesty, the second is integrity, the third is safety, the fourth is diversity, the fifth is inclusion and the sixth is respect. So let’s go back to those. Honesty is probably obvious, truthful to one another, truthful to the outside world.”

At about the time he was speaking these words, one of Kroger’s company’s, Ralphs, was negotiating a guilty plea with federal officials in California for one of the more audacious union-busting schemes in recent history.

Grocery unions were negotiating a new contract in 2003. The supermarkets in the Los Angeles area claimed they were being squeezed by big box stores like Wal-Mart. And they threatened to pull the fully paid health benefits to their more than 60,000 grocery workers.

The unions struck Vons — and as a show of solidarity with their corporate brother, Ralphs and Albertsons locked out their workers. One hard and fast federal rule governing strikes — companies can’t hire union workers during the strike. And during the strike, when asked, Ralphs said it hadn’t hired union workers. After all, let’s recall Dave Dillon’s words about the values Ralphs hold dear — “Honesty is probably obvious, truthful to one another, truthful to the outside world.” So, what was Ralphs doing during the strike? Hiring union workers. Ralphs was dishonest about it. And untruthful to the outside world about it.

In November 2006, the company pled guilty to a number of criminal acts in connection with the strike. Federal officials in Los Angeles said this is what happened: The unions struck Vons on October 11, 2003. Pursuant to a secret agreement among three grocery store chains, Albertsons and Ralphs Grocery locked out their grocery workers on October 12. While workers picketed their stores, Ralphs, Vons and Albertsons continued to operate with management and temporary workers. During labor disputes, federal law allows an employer to lockout all union employees, but prohibits “selective lockouts” where only a portion of the union workforce is locked-out.

On Halloween 2003, the unions decided to stop picketing Ralphs stores, which led to a huge increase in business at its supermarkets. The increase in business caused problems at the store level because Ralphs was operating without its normal workforce.

In order to deal with the influx of customers, Ralphs began selectively rehiring locked-out workers — many under false names and false social security numbers — in order to operate with experienced personnel. The lockout and strike lasted 141 days and affected approximately 65,000 to 70,000 grocery workers, making it the longest and largest labor dispute involving the grocery industry in the United States.

Ralphs admitted that during the course of this labor dispute it falsified hundreds of employment records and filed hundreds of false tax forms with the IRS and Social Security Administration. Ralphs also admitted that a number of its executives participated in the criminal conduct.

Ralphs pled guilty to several criminal charges of illegal rehiring hundreds of locked-out union workers. The company paid a $20 million criminal fine and $50 million in compensation for Ralphs’ workers, their health benefit and pension funds, and their unions. A federal judge in Los Angeles put the company on three-year probation.

At the plea hearing, United States District Judge Percy Anderson said that he was “surprised, disturbed and disappointed” by Ralphs crimes, which were committed to gain a “tactical, unfair advantage” over its employees and unions. The company’s conduct, according to the judge, had the effect of “eroding public confidence in the collective bargaining system.” Ralphs, Judge Anderson stated, had a “pervasive and powerful corporate culture” that “exalted profits” with a “win-at-any-costs” approach.

KING COAL: MASSEY ENERGY, DON BLANKENSHIP, AND THE SKEWERING OF WEST VIRGINIA
Massey Energy is the largest coal producer in West Virginia. It’s the fourth largest coal company in the United States. It’s the number one mountain top removal coal producer. Mountaintop removal? That’s right.

Blow off the top of the mountain with explosives, remove the coal from the exposed seams, dump the wastes in the valley below. Hey, this produces clean coal. How do you clean the coal? Well, you clean the coal with nasty chemicals. You store the clean coal in giant silos — and then take the toxic waste product and put it in a giant human-made pond. At the Massey facility in Sundial, West Virginia, the pond sits high above the Marsh Fork Elementary School.

Ed Wiley used to work for a contractor at the site. And his granddaughter went to Marsh Fork. Wiley is worried that the human-made dam he helped build will someday give way, sending 2.8 billion pounds of toxic slurry onto the community and elementary school below.

Appalachia has seen such disasters before. In February 1972, in Logan County, West Virginia, a Pittston Coal Company coal slurry impoundment dam blew, unleashing 132 million gallons of black waste water upon the residents of 16 coal mining communities in Buffalo Creek Hollow. One hundred and twenty-five people were killed, 1,121 were injured, and over 4,000 were left homeless. Saunders, West Virginia was completely leveled. In October 2000, a Massey Energy impoundment in Kentucky blew, sending 306 million gallons of sludge into local waterways — one of the worst environmental disasters in Kentucky history.

So, Ed Wiley has reason to be concerned. Wiley wants the school shut down and moved to a new location. Massey and Governor Joe Manchin can’t seem to find the will to do it. That’s in part because Don Blankenship has Manchin and the state by the proverbial cojones.

Wiley was so upset with the threat to the school, its children and the surrounding community — not just from the impoundment — but from the deteriorating quality of air and water in the area — that he quit his job and took off on trek throughout West Virginia to Washington, D.C. to publicize the problem. At one stop, in Berkeley Springs, West Virginia, Wiley was asked why during his entire slide show presentation of the problem with the Massey site he never mentions the company’s name or the name of the company’s CEO.

He says he was told by major environmental groups who were handling his tour not to mention the names of his antagonists because the company and its CEO were a nasty bunch of people. The less their names were mentioned, the better. But Massey’s and Blankenship’s reputations as corporate bullies are well deserved. In 2004, Blankenship blew up the state’s political landscape when he spent $3.5 million of his own money to defeat Warren McGraw, a West Virginia Supreme Court justice who had ruled against Massey and the coal companies on a wide range of issues.

Guess what Blankenship called the 526 committee he set up to defeat McGraw? “For the Sake of the Kids.” Blankenship’s message was that McGraw let sex offenders roam among children. McGraw was defeated. A no-name — Brent Benjamin — was elected. And the state has been in a downward spiral ever since.

In the 2006 election, Blankenship dumped more than $3 million to pull the state legislature away from the Democrats — to no avail. According to the Wall Street Journal, more than 13 people, including some contract employees, have died while working at Massey-owned mines in the past five years. Massey is also under federal criminal investigations for some of those deaths. Federal prosecutors have opened a criminal investigation into the January 2006 deaths of two miners at a Massey Energy mine in Logan County, West Virginia, according to West Virginia Public Radio. The mine had recurrent problems with broken or missing fire-fighting equipment. According to the report, the state had fined Aracoma Coal’s Number One mine 28 times for bad fire equipment over the last two and a half years. One former miner told West Virginia Public Radio’s Dan Heyman that the water hoses did not work when the workers needed them to get the deadly blaze under control.

Heyman said that the Mine Safety and Health Administration (MSHA) had requested a federal criminal probe after it issued several citations in its own review of the fire. A former miner at the mine, Brandon Conley, told Heyman that the exact same thing happened at the same mine, a month before. “The same exact thing that happened on the 23rd,” Conley said. “I could see all kinds of belt shavings, pretty much flaming. And there was all kinds of smoke, pretty thick smoke. My CO monitor was going off.”

Conley quit Aracoma, a subsidiary of Massey, soon after the deadly January fire, saying he did not want to go back to work where his friends died. “The fire hose did not match up to the water line,” Conley said of the December 23 fire. “And I can tell you that the fire suppression and also the management knows that the fire suppression on that particular belt did not work.”

But don’t think Massey doesn’t care. Its corporate statement proclaims, “We are committed collectively and individually to the health and safety of each employee.” And the company says it “takes very seriously its responsibility to protect, restore and reclaim land and communities where it operates. Along with our regular comprehensive land reclamation activities, we are focused on restoring and improving the lands impacted by mining-related activities.” For example, in the very Logan County area where Massey has had so many safety problems, the company says it is working with local officials to develop a “state-of-the-art” dirt racetrack on the “reclaimed” portion of a former mine.

PFIZER: INTIMIDATION IS OUR GAME
When it comes to the pharmaceutical industry, Pfizer is the biggest and baddest kid on the block. Over at the World Trade Organization in Geneva, some staffers refer to the Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property (TRIPS — the agreement mandating all WTO members adopt U.S.-style patent systems) as the Pfizer Agreement. That’s because Pfizer played such a crucial role — operating through business coalitions like the Intellectual Property Committee — in drafting TRIPS and ensuring that it would be adopted as one of the WTO agreements.

Pfizer has built a business model of acquiring — or, occasionally, innovating — potential blockbuster drugs, and then marketing them like crazy. The company’s business model — like that of most of Big Pharma — has been premised on extended patent and other monopoly protections for its products, permitting it to charge super-high mark-ups sufficient to cover its major cost — marketing — and still secure megaprofits.

In its ruthless drive to defend its monopolies worldwide, Pfizer takes no prisoners. Just ask Leticia Barbara Gutierrez and Ernilio Polig, Jr. Gutierrez is the director of the Philippines’ Bureau of Food and Drugs, the Filipino equivalent of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. Polig is a top attorney at the agency.

In March 2006, Pfizer filed suit against not just BFAD, but Gutierrez and Polig in their personal capacities. The suit also named the Philippine International Trading Corporation (PITC) as a defendant. The Pfizer lawsuit charged that BFAD and its top officials, along with PITC, were infringing on a Pfizer patent by permitting limited imports of Pfizer products without the company’s permission. Pfizer sought money damages for the claimed harm to the company — not just from BFAD, but from Gutierrez and Polig.

This is a nightmare scenario that has long hung over drug regulators in developing countries, who fear that if they take measures to speed the introduction of price-lowering generic competition, they will be held personally liable for the purported unjustified harms to patent holders. Just the thought of such action has exerted a major deterrent on drug regulators. Pfizer’s action was designed to send a message not just in the Philippines, but around the world.

The Pfizer message was especially powerful, precisely because the company’s claim was so tendentious. It was complaining about practices that are permitted in the United States, Europe, Australia and many other countries, and had long been considered acceptable in the Philippines.

The Philippines has among the highest drug prices in the world. A new PITC program seeks to shop on the world market for the lowest prices available. But the agency is not challenging existing patent rights, and it is not seeking to import commercial quantities of brand-name products while they remain on patent — even though such imports are completely permissible under WTO rules.

What PITC does intend to do is import cheaper versions of drugs once they go off patent. In order to begin such imports immediately upon patent expiration, PITC needs to begin the process of obtaining regulatory approval for the products it will import while the patents remain in effect. To do so, it has to import limited versions of the products it hopes later to import in quantity, solely for the purpose of conducting tests to obtain regulatory approval.

This “early working” of patents is understood as an exception to patent rights in the TRIPS agreement, and is standard practice in the United States and other industrialized countries.

One drug that PITC has targeted is amlodipine besylate, a hypertension drug sold by Pfizer under the brand name Norvasc. Pfizer charges more than seven times as much for Norvasc in the Philippines as it does in India. PITC and BFAD’s effort to exercise early working rights on Norvasc are what prompted Pfizer’s suit. In a bland statement about the suit, Pfizer claimed “the case Pfizer filed versus PITC and BFAD is not only a trade issue, but a public health concern as well.” Pfizer argued that there was a risk that the Philippines would import counterfeit or poor quality amlodipine besylate (although the whole point of early working is to undertake tests to demonstrate quality). Pfizer was not able to escape scrutiny in the case, which gained significant attention in the Philippines, and was the object of a modest international pressure campaign.

Most notably in the campaign was the intervention of Dan Murphy, a medical student at the New York College of Osteopathic Medicine. He attended a CNN event at which Pfizer CEO Hank McKinnell was bragging about the company’s contributions to addressing global AIDS. Murphy buttonholed McKinnell at the event. “I cornered Hank post filming and we had a nice argument,” Murphy reports.

“I told him that I was a med student that I was upset about the lawsuit against the Philippines, and that he was going to be facing a lot more angry students if they didn’t end it. He said it wasn’t about generics, it was about protecting patents and we spent most of our discussion arguing about this. Towards the end of the discussion he started saying that it didn’t matter, because he had ordered a review of the matter and would be ending it if it wasn’t about ‘legitimate protection of patented medicines.’ Eventually his people dragged him away.” Pfizer and the defendants settled the case in August, on terms favorable to Pfizer. PITC and BFAD agreed not to import Norvasc until its patents expire.

BFAD also agreed not to grant marketing approval for pharmaceuticals in the future until after the expiration of applicable patent terms, a practice commonly known as “linkage.” Health advocates criticize linkage on the grounds that it transforms drug regulatory agencies into patent enforcers — even though they typically do not examine (nor have the expertise to examine) the validity of the patents they are enforcing. Left unclear in the settlement is whether the Philippines will be able to employ early working provisions in the future.

Pfizer’s victory may be pyrrhic. Partially in response to the litigation, the Philippines legislature is considering and likely to pass legislation that would give the government much more flexibility to speed the introduction of generic competition. And, more centrally for Pfizer — and McKinnell — its business model is now widely viewed as bankrupt.

Pfizer’s board forced McKinnell out in July. Pfizer’s stock had declined by more than 40 percent during McKinnell’s reign. Its acquired blockbusters are starting to approach the end of their patent period, and its pipeline is dry — no surprise at a company that has been weak at innovation.

Don’t cry for McKinnell, though. His business model may be bankrupt, but he’s not. He managed to leave with a $200 million parting package from the company. Shortly after taking over the company, McKinnell’s replacement Jeffrey Kindler announced he would be slashing the payroll by 10,000. Thousands of those to be laid off are marketers, but most are involved in manufacturing and research.

SMITHFIELD: JIM CROW ECONOMICS ALIVE AND WELL
Smithfield, the largest pork producer in the United States, has appeared twice before on the Monitor’s 10 worst list — once for factory farm pollution, once for its takeover of the former number two pork producer, a move that dramatically worsened agribusiness concentration and left small farmers increasingly at the mercy of the remaining giant processors. This year, Smithfield is on the list for its labor practices. Jim Crow economics is alive and well at Smithfield’s Tar Heel, North Carolina pork processing plant, the largest in the world.

For more than a decade, the more than 5,000 workers there have attempted to organize a union, only to be met by a vicious anti-union campaign that has included organized beatings of union supporters, operation of an official company police force within the plant (not a private security operation, but a governmental police force) with the power to arrest workers and detain them at the plant, the deployment of the local sheriff’s department to intimidate workers, racist slurs, and use of the Immigration and Naturalization Services department to harass Smithfield’s increasingly immigrant workforce.

Smithfield opened the Tar Heel plant in 1992. Workers sought an election for union representation in 1994. The union campaign failed, but the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) general counsel charged the company with violating federal labor law. In 1997, the company agreed to rerun the election and pledged to respect labor laws.

That promise was betrayed. The workers and their union, the United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW), lost the 1997 election, only for the NLRB general counsel to issue a new set of charges. By 2004, the full NLRB finally ruled on those allegations, which had been upheld by an administrative law judge.

The NLRB found that, among other wrongful acts, Smithfield illegally: interrogated employees concerning union sentiments; threatened plant closure; threatened reprisals against union supporters; threatened wage freezes; assaulted a union supporter; andcaused the arrest of a union supporter.

Lawanna Johnson was one of Smithfield’s victims. After the Smithfield plant manager overheard her encouraging fellow workers to support the unionization effort, the NLRB found, he “pointed his finger in her face and said that if he heard her mention anything about voting for the union he would fire her on the spot.” Three days later, she was fired on pretextual grounds.

A former supervisor at the plant, Sherri Bufkin, was fired, she says, because she refused to provide false testimony to the NLRB. She testified about her experience before a U.S. Senate committee in 2002.

She explained that when the union campaign recommenced in 1997, Smithfield brought in anti-union lawyers who directed supervisors. According to Bufkin, the lawyers said “they would do whatever was necessary to keep UFCW out. And they did.”

She described how she was ordered to fire union supporters. “A lady — her name was Margot — who worked for me in laundry as the second shift crew leader was pro-union. She wasn’t afraid to voice her opinions to her co-workers. I was called downstairs and told that the company wanted to speak with me. A plant manager was with him. The lawyer said that he had just come from an antiunion meeting where her name came up and asked me if she was one of mine. I told him she was, and the attorney said, and I quote, ‘fire the bitch, I’ll beat anything she or they throw at me in court.’”

Bufkin also testified about how Smithfield sought to divide African-American and Latino workers. “Smithfield keeps Black and Latino employees virtually separated in the plant with the Black workers on the kill floor and the Latinos in the cut and conversion departments. Management hired a special outside consultant from California to run the anti-union campaign in Spanish for the Latinos who were seen as easy targets of manipulation because they could be threatened with immigration issues. The word was that black workers were going to be replaced with Latino workers because blacks were more favorable toward unions.”

Eventually, the UFCW filed charges about union-related firings. According to Bufkin, “The attorney wrote false affidavits for me to sign and gave those affidavits to the Labor Board. The attorney wrote things that came out of his own mouth, and I told him they weren’t true. I felt I had no choice but to sign the statement because I had a family to feed.” When she was asked to stick to her story at an NLRB trial, however, she refused. “I told them I wasn’t going to lie. I was fired shortly after that.”

In 2006, a federal appeals court upheld the NLRB’s 2004 decision, which ordered Smithfield to cease and desist from the host of labor violations it identified, to provide the UFCW with the names and addresses of workers at the plant, and to order another election.

The response from Smithfield was a little bizarre. After the appeals court ruling, Joseph W. Luter, IV, president and chief operating officer of Smithfield Packing Company, said, “Smithfield respects and accepts the court’s judgment, even though we strongly disagree with the findings. We have argued strenuously that the allegations the union made concerning Smithfield’s conduct during both elections were false. But we recognize that we have lost our case in court.”

He didn’t sound too contrite, however, particularly given the egregious nature of the findings against the company. “When a new election is called,” he said. “We will comply fully with the NLRB’s remedies to assure a fair vote that represents the wishes of our plant’s employees. We believe that our employees should have the right to choose whether to unionize, and we respect the choices they make. Unions, including the UFCW, represent employees at a number of our plants and have done so for years without labor conflict. The UFCW has unsuccessfully attempted to organize employees at this particular plant for over a decade.”

With the UFCW determining that conditions at the Tar Heel plant remain too intimidating to undertake another election, the union has launched a Smithfield Justice campaign, urging consumers and citizens to pressure the company. Smithfield has responded by taunting the union, daring it to seek another election.

WAL-MART: A VERY BAD YEAR
It can’t be easy being Lee Scott, CEO of Wal-Mart. Your company is facing an onslaught of criticism, for just about everything it does. You care about this criticism — perhaps because you fear it will affect your ability to enter Northeastern, West Coast and urban markets that you hope to penetrate. You hire very expensive help to head off the campaigns mounted against you — including Michael Deaver, a former chief of staff for President Reagan who is now vice chair of the Edelman public relations firm.

But nothing seems to work. The problem is that the growing outrage directed at your company is based not on the company’s image, but on what it does. And not just abusive practices that are ancillary to Wal-Mart’s operations (though these, too), but on core elements of your business model. So, try as you might, you get pounded in public opinion, over and over. All for good reason.

In January, the state of Maryland passed Fair Share legislation, requiring private companies with more than 10,000 Maryland employees to spend at least 8 percent of their payroll on employee healthcare, or to contribute the amount they fall short to the state’s Medicaid program. Wal-Mart is the only employer in the state meeting the size threshold and not spending 8 percent of payroll on health insurance costs. Wal-Mart would go on to get the Fair Share legislation overturned in court (via a suit by the trade association, the Retail Industry Leaders Association) — saving it from a duty to cover health costs for its employees, but clarifying again its refusal to provide decent worker benefits.

Contends Wal-Mart: “This politically motivated legislation did nothing to control the cost of healthcare or improve access to healthcare, so it’s no wonder that legislators across the country have rejected this as bad public policy.”

In February, the advocacy campaigning group WakeUpWalMart.com published a report claiming the number of Wal-Mart workers with company health insurance decreased by 5 percent in 2005 — from 48 percent to 43 percent. WakeUpWalMart.com estimated that “nearly 300,000 Wal-Mart workers and their family members depended on taxpayer-funded public health care at a total cost to American taxpayers of $1.37 billion.”

Wal-Mart acknowledges that less than half of its workers receive insurance through the company, but says that its surveys show 90 percent of employees get coverage from “Wal-Mart or another source such as a spouse, Medicare, a parent, another employer, the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) or other government programs.”

That same month, another campaigning organization, Wal-Mart Watch, obtained access to an internal Wal-Mart website where company CEO Lee Scott responded to a manager’s request about provision of health insurance to retirees by stating that merely asking the question suggested the manager should quit. “Quite honestly,” wrote Boss Scott, “this environment isn’t for everyone. There are people who would say, ‘I’m sorry, but you should take the risk and take billions of dollars out of earnings and put this in retiree health benefits and let’s see what happens to the company.’ If you feel that way, then you as a manager should look for a company where you can do those kinds of things.” In March, the company capitulated to pressure from women’s groups, and agreed to carry Plan B, the emergency contraceptive, in its pharmacies.

Also in March, the New York Times reported that Wal-Mart was covertly working with bloggers to create an appearance of public support for the company. “Under assault as never before,” the Times reported, “Wal-Mart is increasingly looking beyond the mainstream media and working directly with bloggers, feeding them exclusive nuggets of news, suggesting topics for postings and even inviting them to visit its corporate headquarters.”

In April, Wal-Mart announced the promotion of Susan Chambers, to executive vice president. Chambers won notoriety in 2005 for urging that employees be required to perform some physical duties, such as “some cart gathering.” The rationale for this recommendation was to discourage unhealthy people — who cost employers more — from working at Wal-Mart.

In May, WakeUpWalMart.com obtained a company memo encouraging Wal-Mart suppliers to join a company front group, Working Families for Wal-Mart. “Wal-Mart is under attack, and Wal-Mart and Sam’s Club suppliers have the power to do something about it and help protect their business,” asserted the memo, which was written by the former national political director for the Bush-Cheney 2004 campaign.

In June, Wal-Mart Watch reported that its effort to put up a billboard in Bentonville, Arkansas — where Wal-Mart’s headquarters is located — was squashed, with a billboard company backing out of a signed contract. “Apparently there is no First Amendment in Bentonville,” stated Wal-Mart Watch’s Andy Grossman.

In July, Wal-Mart abandoned the German market, selling its stores in the country at a $1 billion loss to a German retailer. The Bentonville giant was unable to gain ground against German discount chains.

In August, Chinese news services reported that the viciously anti-union Wal-Mart agreed to recognize the All-China Federation of Trade Unions (ACFTU). The move highlighted Wal-Mart’s hypocrisy, but is unlikely to make much difference to Wal-Mart’s workers in China — the Communist Party-affiliated ACFTU is something less than a vigorous exponent of its members rights.

In September, Wal-Mart announced plans to cut down on packaging and company-related greenhouse gas emissions. Many environmentalists applauded the move — but noted also that Wal-Mart’s business model is inherently ecologically unsustainable. The firm’s heavy dependence on global supply chains and the superstore approach that requires consumers to drive long distances are structural problems that cannot be cured without a fundamental change in what Wal-Mart is.

In October, WakeUpWalMart.com disclosed internal company documents revealing that Wal-Mart was capping salaries for full-time employees — a reversal from a company commitment just two years before. Company guidance to store managers on how to convey the news to employees includes this question-and-answer: [Question] You told us in 2004 that we wouldn’t have pay range maximums. Sam was a man of honor. Apparently current management doesn’t care about integrity and honor. [Answer] Wal-Mart is built on change and the ability to evolve and continually meet the needs of customers. Therefore, things that may have been the best approach in the past may not be appropriate to meet our future business direction. These latest pay program changes, including pay ranges, fall into this latter category.

In November, Business Week reported on how Chinese suppliers to Wal-Mart (and other major retailers and manufacturers) easily skirted inspections designed to reveal sweatshop conditions, with methods as simple as keeping two sets of books. Wal-Mart acknowledges the problems, but told Business Week that “it does more audits than any other company — 13,600 reviews of 7,200 factories last year alone — and permanently banned 141 factories in 2005 as a result of serious infractions, such as using child labor.”

In December, the New York City Comptroller filed a shareholder resolution calling on the company to issue a report “on the negative social and reputational impacts of reported and known cases of management non-compliance with International Labor Organization (ILO) conventions and standards on workers’ rights and the company’s legal and regulatory controls.”

Wal-Mart may oppose this proposal, but for Lee Scott and the rest of the company, there is no escaping that its abusive practices have done major damage to the company’s reputation — and there’s good reason to believe that this damage has had an impact on the company’s bottom line.

Video Threatens Cdn Railway Lines

By Jorge Barrera
From Canoe.ca
2007

An Internet how-to video on sabotaging railway lines in support of Native land claims has drawn the attention of the RCMP and triggered investigations by the country's two main rail companies.

The video, posted Sunday on YouTube, illustrates how a single wire can trigger full-stop red light signals on the lines. Experts say the tactic works and could have a serious impact on the economy by throwing train schedules into chaos if it doesn't cause derailment. Train conductors are directed to stop immediately if faced with the signal.

Canadian National Railway and Canadian Pacific Railway said their police divisions had launched investigations to track down the source of the video. The companies would not say whether they have had any recent phantom signal light incidents.

Pull Video
CN and Transport Canada asked YouTube to pull the video, which was created by a group dubbing themselves "The Railway Ties Collective." The video was still up last night.

"This is extremely dangerous behaviour," said CN spokesman Mark Hallman. CN and CP said they discovered the video through their own monitoring processes. An RCMP spokesman linked the video to the planned June 29 national Native day of action spearheaded by the Assembly of First Nations.

Land Claims
"We want to make sure that these demonstrations are done as least disruptive as possible," said Sgt. Nathalie Deschense.

Native leaders have warned of possible violence this summer stemming from frustration over land claims and perceived government disregard for persistent high levels of First Nations poverty.

The video opens by referring to "more than 800" unresolved land claims, recent rail blockades by members of the Mohawks of the Bay of Quinte First Nation and the Six Nations reclamation of a 40-hectare residential development in Caledonia.

"The Mohawks have shown the vulnerability of a major trade corridor for people and material. While few other communities could hold off a frontal assault by the OPP, there are other ways to close the rail lines," says the text heavy video as an eerie piano soundtrack plays in the background. "When justice fails, stop the rails."

As the text fades and a rougher electronic beat emerges, the video moves to a pair of gloved hands illuminated in the night by the light of a video camera. After the procedure, the camera pans to the sudden flash of six lights on the tracks.

Joe Bracken, president of the Canadian Heartland Training Railway in Alberta, said if the tactic is employed on a large scale, it could cause serious damage to the nation's rail industry.

"They go through hundreds of Native territories," he said.

YouTube Pulls Plug on Rail Video

By Jorge Barrera
From Canoe.ca
2007

YouTube pulled a controversial how-to rail sabotage video yesterday that sparked concern in the upper ranks of governments and triggered investigations by the police forces of the country's largest rail companies.

The video had been viewed 6,997 times by the time it was pulled late yesterday morning. It was posted in support of Native land claims and surfaced at time of heightened tensions between First Nations and government as a planned day of action looms.

Indian Affairs Minister Jim Prentice expressed relief the video had been yanked. "It was inciting criminal behaviour and was irresponsible and dangerous and not the kind of thing that anyone needs in Canada at this point," said Prentice.

CN would not comment. It and Canadian Pacific Railway's police forces have launched investigations into the source of the video.

Transport Canada said it had receive no related incident reports. There is no evidence the video was made by a Native group. The Railway Ties Collective claimed responsibility for it. The RCMP would not say whether they were aware of the group.

YouTube posted a message on the video's page saying it had "been removed due to terms of use violation." But text instructions for using a wire to trigger full-stop signal lights on the rails remained alongside a thumbnail image of the video. The video emerged amid threats of rail blockades and occupations of government buildings by residential school survivors.

CN also announced yesterday it was withdrawing a lawsuit against the Mohawks of the Bay of Quinte after obtaining "sworn evidence" from chief and council that they did not authorize last month's 30-hour blockade between Montreal and Toronto.

2007-05-15T10:44:00.000-07:00

'A Right to be Angry'
Chief Warns of 'Breaking Point'

By Jorge Barrera
From Canoe.ca

Assembly of First Nations National Chief Phil Fontaine has little control over the course of coming events, say chiefs and grassroots leaders as tensions between First Nations and the federal government continue to mount in the run up to a national day of action next month.

Fontaine delivered a passionate speech yesterday to the Canadian Club of Ottawa, imploring the blue-chip audience to pressure government into dealing with native issues to avoid a summer of blockades and confrontation.

"Many of our communities have reached the breaking point," said Fontaine. "Many people ask why First Nations peoples are so angry. At this point you must realize we have a right to be."

Day of Action
The AFN is spearheading a day of action to highlight Native grievances on June 29. The Conservative government's decision to scrap the $5-billion Kelowna Accord and to shut poverty-riven Aboriginal communities out of the budget has fuelled much of the current strife.

Fontaine, who was voted AFN head by chiefs because of his reputation for diplomacy, may now be suffering from his moderate sheen. Some hardline grassroots leaders believe he has pulled his support for direct and spectacular actions like rail blockades.

"He may have had some control, but by stepping back he is relinquishing that control," said Shawn Brant, the organizer of last month's 30-hour Mohawk rail blockade of the main line between Montreal and Toronto. "We are as organized as we have ever been, as well as Canada has ever seen before."

Chiefs from across the country are gathering for an AFN meeting next week in Gatineau, Que.

Roseau River First Nations Chief Terrance Nelson, who has threatened a rail blockade, said it will be up to the chiefs to decide what happens.

"The chiefs will give direction to the national chief and take a united position," said Nelson. "The chiefs are under the gun that if they can't deliver something to the people, the people are not going to wait forever. Things can get out of control quick."

As quick as the click of a mouse -- as was evident this week with the surfacing of an Internet how-to video on how to sabotage rail lines.

Indian Affairs Minister Jim Prentice reiterated his position that Fontaine would be responsible for what transpires. "I continue to say that blockades are not acceptable ... and I am fearful that someone will get hurt."

Ontario Premier Dalton McGuinty encouraged the Stephen Harper government to consider an accelerated negotiation process to settle the more than 800 outstanding Native land claims.

"We've all been put on notice now that we're going to have a national day of protest," said McGuinty, who called the YouTube video "just not helpful." "I hope the federal government's paying attention."

Bell Hooks' Shortlist
From Media Rights.org
2007

The Shortlist article series is your opportunity to learn about the films that inspire intellectual, artistic and activist leaders--leaders like writer Bell Hooks. We asked bell to share her favorite films and her thoughts on the power of documentary to change the world. So what films make Bell Hooks' Shortlist? Keep reading to find out.

Who is Bell Hooks?
Bell describes herself as a "seeker on the path of love, spiritual advisor, cultural critic, feminist theorist and writer (non-fiction and children's books)." She lives in the Kentucky hills and has spent time in New York City and Florida. She is an obsessive reader, especially of mystery novels. Bell Hooks is a distinguished professor at Berea College.

Bell Hooks on the Power of Film
"In a world where censorship and the silencing of dissent is common practice we cannot rely on the media to give us movies that are "real," informative or transformative. Documentary films remain one of the essential expressions of free speech. Two Spike Lee documentaries, Four Little Girls and When the Levees Broke, inspire me because they poignantly document the impact of post-traumatic stress caused by racist exploitation and oppression in the lives of black folks."

Bell's Film Picks

Stranger With a Camera: This film raises crucial ethical and political issues about the power of the camera and the relationship between artists and subjects. It is also about class, homophobia and the dangers of a closed community.

Four Little Girls: Every American should see this film. It is a true to life portrait of imperialist white-supremacist capitalist patriarchy. One of the most powerful visual accounts of the traumatic impact of racial terrorism in the lives of black folks. An amazing story of a white woman who loves Justice enough to take a stand.

Saving Jackie: Talk about the power of the documentary. This young black female filmmaker turns the camera on her family to explore the impact of drug addiction on children. She examines both her mother's addiction to cocaine and her recovery.

Her: A blend of futuristic filmmaking using several forms including animation and straight-forward documentary. Some might call it sci-fi--it's visionary. Challenging patriarchy, it gives everyone the opportunity to understand injustices--the pain of sexist domination and oppression.

Blue: Derek Jarman's Blue invites audiences to see and feel with him, losing his sight as a consequence of AIDS. He shows us that beauty can emerge from even the most tragic circumstances.

Happy to Be Nappy and Other Tales of Me: A film for children and grown-ups who want to look at the impact of difference in the lives of young folk. It's beautiful, funny, sad and uplifting.

When the Levees Broke: Significantly, this film offers a voice to diverse groups of people who were not given media coverage during the Katrina crisis. It exposes the racial terrorism that is the continued political practice in our water [system] and offers amazing humanizing portraits of black people, especially black men.

Crumb: A powerful portrait of dissident creativity.

Shut Up and Sing: An interesting look at the radical politicization of white women who initially lacked critical consciousness.

Black Is...Black Ain't: Marlon Riggs' provocative look at the formation of black identities and homophobia in black life.

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