Postmodern News Archives 10

2006-08-30T08:47:00.000-07:00

Canada Out of Afghanistan

This Has Nothing to do with Peacekeeping
By Murray Dobbin
From Mostly Water.org

Brian Mulroney was fond of saying “Give me twenty years and you won’t recognize this country.” But he was a piker compared to Stephen Harper who is changing the ethics and political culture of this country faster than Mulroney ever dreamed.

The most obvious case in point is the vote on May 17 that extended Canada’s participation in the occupation of Afghanistan until the spring of 2009. The next step in this appalling transformation of Canada into a lap dog of US imperialism will not be far behind. We will agree to NATO’s “request” that we take over command of the whole sordid enterprise. It is almost certain to come out at some point that Mr. Harper pushed NATO to make the request.

None of this, of course, should come as any surprise from a man who is infatuated with everything American and contemptuous of his own country and what it has stood for, for decades. Harper has always detested Canada’s peacekeeping role, schooled as he was by the Yankee lovers at the Calgary School of political science and its intellectual guru, Tom Flanagan (p.s from b&r: Prof. Flanagan is also known for his anti-indigenous views, such as his assertion that aborignal people in Canada should be assimiliated; when asked about poverty among indigenous nations, he said "They should just come to the city and get jobs. What's stopping them?). How could this happen in a country that is deeply suspicious of American military adventures and committed to the principles of multilateralism?

Harper’s no Reagan
A good deal of the answer lies in the decay and political corruption of the so-called “natural governing party,” the Liberals. The danger Canada faces at the hands of Stephen Harper is not dissimilar to that experienced by the US, despite the enormous differences in political culture. I am reminded here of Ronald Reagan and one of the reasons he was so popular. Most people forget -- if they ever knew -- that in polling on actual issues, a majority of Americans disagreed with almost everything Reagan did.

So why was he so popular? Because people looked at Reagan, then looked at the Democrats, and concluded one simple thing: Reagan, at least, was a man who believed in what he was doing. Voters were so tired of the opportunism and lack of political principle on the part of the Democrats that they supported a president simply on the basis that at least he believed in something.

Trend Watch
The danger in Canada is that many have come to the same conclusion about the Liberals. They have always been a party of opportunists, with an uncanny instinct for where the middle is. Under Paul Martin they were truly a party without principle, vision or ethical core. People remember.

But Stephen Harper is no Ronald Reagan. He is mean, condescending and viscerally arrogant, and his nature will ultimately betray him. Until it does, however, he can do enormous damage. In a parliament with a separatist party, the Liberals trying to divine what the opportunistic thing to do is on any given issue, and the NDP sticking to its bizarre line that Canadians want it to “make parliament work,” Harper has been given lots of room to maneuver.

While the vote to extend the occupation is history, its consequences are not irreversible and that is just what Canadians committed to peace and the international rule of law should be working towards. Canadians are divided on this issue in part because they rightly care about the fate of soldiers’ lives, but also because the facts are elusive and the peace movement is weak. Yet the facts are overwhelmingly on the side of Canadian values and against the Afghanistan adventure. Just as the debate in the Commons began, the Polaris Institute revealed just how much this commitment has distorted Canada’s role in the world. The decision to support the US in Afghanistan (which the Liberals admit was done to appease the US over our decision to stay out of Iraq) has already cost $4.1 billion since Sept. 11, 2001.

What happened to peacekeeping?
Afghan and related operations account for 68 percent of the $6 billion spent on international missions during that time frame. Equally disturbing: according to Polaris, during that same period Canada devoted a mere $214 million, about three percent of international mission spending, on United Nations missions. Our “peacekeeping” is a joke: We now have just 59 military personnel devoted to UN missions. Canada, which virtually invented peacekeeping, once ranked among the top 10 contributors to UN missions in terms of military personnel. We are now 50th.

Equally important, however, is the actual nature of this farcical “humanitarian” effort. So few investigative journalists know the facts or will tell them, it is not surprising people are bamboozled by the warmongers. But one who does have the jam to tell the story is Middle East authority Eric Margolis. He is worth quoting:

“Afghanistan’s complexity and lethal tribal politics have been marketed to the public by government and media as a selfless crusade to defeat the ‘terrorist’ Taliban, implant democracy, and liberate Afghan women. Afghanistan is part of the ‘world-wide struggle against terrorism,’ we are told.

“None of this is true. In 1989, at the end of the Soviet occupation, Afghanistan fell into anarchy (sic) and civil war. An epidemic of banditry and rape ensued. A village prayer leader, Mullah Omar, who lost an eye in the anti-Soviet jihad, armed a group of ‘talibs’ (religious students), and set about defending women from rape. Aided by Pakistan, Taliban stopped the epidemic of rape and drug dealing that had engulfed Afghanistan, and imposed order based on harsh tribal and Sharia religious law.”

The Taliban stopped the production of opium and heroin -- except in the area controlled by the Northern Alliance: the thugs, drug pushers and rapists who are now Canada’s “allies.” The Taliban were hardly humanitarian and imposed an extremely harsh Sharia regime on the country. But with them gone, the epidemic of rape has returned and our “allies” are responsible for 80 to 90 percent of the world’s heroin.

Wrong from the start
It is important also to revisit the original relationship between the US and the Taliban and the US invasion. The US poured millions into Taliban coffers until, says Margolis, about four months before 9/11. It was only cut off when the regime refused to sign a contract with US oil giant Unocal to build a pipeline south from the Caspian Basin to Pakistan. It is also surely relevant that the Taliban knew nothing of the plan to attack the US. (The plot was hatched in Germany.) Much was made of the fact that the Taliban refused to hand over Osama bin Laden to the US. But Bin Laden was a national hero wounded six times in the anti-Soviet struggle -- which the US financed. When the Taliban offered to turn him over to an international tribunal upon seeing evidence of his guilt in 9/11, the US refused. And then invaded. This was by any international legal standard a totally illegal war, which could only have been justified if Afghanistan threatened the US. It is also an illegal occupation.

This is the “mission” that Stephen Harper, Yankee sycophant and budding warmonger, has “extended.” The mission is not intended to ever end because its purpose was and is to ensure the US permanent access to Mideast oil and Afghani land for pipelines. But end it will -- just as every other colonial occupation of Afghanistan has ended -- when the occupiers tire of bleeding. Too bad dozens of Canadian soldiers, who should be peacemakers, will have to die to teach us an old lesson.

A Brief History of U.S. Interventions

1945 to [1999]
By William Blum
From Third World Traveler
1999

The engine of American foreign policy has been fueled not by a devotion to any kind of morality, but rather by the necessity to serve other imperatives, which can be summarized as follows:

* making the world safe for American corporations;

* enhancing the financial statements of defense contractors at home who have contributed generously to members of congress;

* preventing the rise of any society that might serve as a successful example of an alternative to the capitalist model;

* extending political and economic hegemony over as wide an area as possible, as befits a "great power."

This in the name of fighting a supposed moral crusade against what cold warriors convinced themselves, and the American people, was the existence of an evil International Communist Conspiracy, which in fact never existed, evil or not.
The United States carried out extremely serious interventions into more than 70 nations in this period.

China, 1945-49:
Intervened in a civil war, taking the side of Chiang Kai-shek against the Communists, even though the latter had been a much closer ally of the United States in the world war. The U.S. used defeated Japanese soldiers to fight for its side. The Communists forced Chiang to flee to Taiwan in 1949.

Italy, 1947-48:
Using every trick in the book, the U.S. interfered in the elections to prevent the Communist Party from coming to power legally and fairly. This perversion of democracy was done in the name of "saving democracy" in Italy. The Communists lost. For the next few decades, the CIA, along with American corporations, continued to intervene in Italian elections, pouring in hundreds of millions of dollars and much psychological warfare to block the specter that was haunting Europe.

Greece, 1947-49:
Intervened in a civil war, taking the side of the neo-fascists against the Greek left which had fought the Nazis courageously. The neo-fascists won and instituted a highly brutal regime, for which the CIA created a new internal security agency, KYP. Before long, KYP was carrying out all the endearing practices of secret police everywhere, including systematic torture.

Philippines, 1945-53:
U.S. military fought against leftist forces (Huks) even while the Huks were still fighting against the Japanese invaders. After the war, the U. S. continued its fight against the Huks, defeating them, and then installing a series of puppets as president, culminating in the dictatorship of Ferdinand Marcos.

South Korea, 1945-53:
After World War II, the United States suppressed the popular progressive forces in favor of the conservatives who had collaborated with the Japanese. This led to a long era of corrupt, reactionary, and brutal governments.

Albania, 1949-53:
The U.S. and Britain tried unsuccessfully to overthrow the communist government and install a new one that would have been pro-Western and composed largely of monarchists and collaborators with Italian fascists and Nazis.

Germany, 1950s:
The CIA orchestrated a wide-ranging campaign of sabotage, terrorism, dirty tricks, and psychological warfare against East Germany. This was one of the factors which led to the building of the Berlin Wall in 1961.

Iran, 1953:
Prime Minister Mossadegh was overthrown in a joint U.S./British operation. Mossadegh had been elected to his position by a large majority of parliament, but he had made the fateful mistake of spearheading the movement to nationalize a British-owned oil company, the sole oil company operating in Iran. The coup restored the Shah to absolute power and began a period of 25 years of repression and torture, with the oil industry being restored to foreign ownership, as follows: Britain and the U.S., each 40 percent, other nations 20 percent.

Guatemala, 1953-1990s:
A CIA-organized coup overthrew the democratically-elected and progressive government of Jacobo Arbenz, initiating 40 years of death-squads, torture, disappearances, mass executions, and unimaginable cruelty, totaling well over 100,000 victims -indisputably one of the most inhuman chapters of the 20th century. Arbenz had nationalized the U.S. firm, United Fruit Company, which had extremely close ties to the American power elite. As justification for the coup, Washington declared that Guatemala had been on the verge of a Soviet takeover, when in fact the Russians had so little interest in the country that it didn't even maintain diplomatic relations. The real problem in the eyes of Washington, in addition to United Fruit, was the danger of Guatemala's social democracy spreading to other countries in Latin America.

Middle East, 1956-58:
The Eisenhower Doctrine stated that the United States "is prepared to use armed forces to assist" any Middle East country "requesting assistance against armed aggression from any country controlled by international communism." The English translation of this was that no one would be allowed to dominate, or have excessive influence over, the middle east and its oil fields except the United States, and that anyone who tried would be, by definition, "Communist." In keeping with this policy, the United States twice attempted to overthrow the Syrian government, staged several shows-of-force in the Mediterranean to intimidate movements opposed to U.S.-supported governments in Jordan and Lebanon, landed 14,000 troops in Lebanon, and conspired to overthrow or assassinate Nasser of Egypt and his troublesome middle-east nationalism.

Indonesia, 1957-58:
Sukarno, like Nasser, was the kind of Third World leader the United States could not abide. He took neutralism in the cold war seriously, making trips to the Soviet Union and China (though to the White House as well). He nationalized many private holdings of the Dutch, the former colonial power. He refused to crack down on the Indonesian Communist Party, which was walking the legal, peaceful road and making impressive gains electorally. Such policies could easily give other Third World leaders "wrong ideas." The CIA began throwing money into the elections, plotted Sukarno's assassination, tried to blackmail him with a phony sex film, and joined forces with dissident military officers to wage a full-scale war against the government. Sukarno survived it all.

British Guiana/Guyana, 1953-64:
For 11 years, two of the oldest democracies in the world, Great Britain and the United States, went to great lengths to prevent a democratically elected leader from occupying his office. Cheddi Jagan was another Third World leader who tried to remain neutral and independent. He was elected three times. Although a leftist-more so than Sukarno or Arbenz-his policies in office were not revolutionary. But he was still a marked man, for he represented Washington's greatest fear: building a society that might be a successful example of an alternative to the capitalist model. Using a wide variety of tactics-from general strikes and disinformation to terrorism and British legalisms, the U. S. and Britain finally forced Jagan out in 1964. John F. Kennedy had given a direct order for his ouster, as, presumably, had Eisenhower. One of the better-off countries in the region under Jagan, Guyana, by the 1980s, was one of the poorest. Its principal export became people.

Vietnam, 1950-73:
The slippery slope began with siding with ~ French, the former colonizers and collaborators with the Japanese, against Ho Chi Minh and his followers who had worked closely with the Allied war effort and admired all things American. Ho Chi Minh was, after all, some kind of Communist. He had written numerous letters to President Truman and the State Department asking for America's help in winning Vietnamese independence from the French and finding a peaceful solution for his country. All his entreaties were ignored. Ho Chi Minh modeled the new Vietnamese declaration of independence on the American, beginning it with "All men are created equal. They are endowed by their Creator with ..." But this would count for nothing in Washington. Ho Chi Minh was some kind of Communist. Twenty-three years and more than a million dead, later, the United States withdrew its military forces from Vietnam. Most people say that the U.S. lost the war. But by destroying Vietnam to its core, and poisoning the earth and the gene pool for generations, Washington had achieved its main purpose: preventing what might have been the rise of a good development option for Asia. Ho Chi Minh was, after all, some kind of communist.

Cambodia, 1955-73:
Prince Sihanouk was yet another leader who did not fancy being an American client. After many years of hostility towards his regime, including assassination plots and the infamous Nixon/Kissinger secret "carpet bombings" of 1969-70, Washington finally overthrew Sihanouk in a coup in 1970. This was all that was needed to impel Pol Pot and his Khmer Rouge forces to enter the fray. Five years later, they took power. But five years of American bombing had caused Cambodia's traditional economy to vanish. The old Cambodia had been destroyed forever. Incredibly, the Khmer Rouge were to inflict even greater misery on this unhappy land. To add to the irony, the United States supported Pol Pot, militarily and diplomatically, after their subsequent defeat by the Vietnamese.

The Congo/Zaire, 1960-65:
In June 1960, Patrice Lumumba became the Congo's first prime minister after independence from Belgium. But Belgium retained its vast mineral wealth in Katanga province, prominent Eisenhower administration officials had financial ties to the same wealth, and Lumumba, at Independence Day ceremonies before a host of foreign dignitaries, called for the nation's economic as well as its political liberation, and recounted a list of injustices against the natives by the white owners of the country. The man was obviously a "Communist." The poor man was obviously doomed. Eleven days later, Katanga province seceded, in September, Lumumba was dismissed by the president at the instigation of the United States, and in January 1961 he was assassinated at the express request of Dwight Eisenhower. There followed several years of civil conflict and chaos and the rise to power of Mobutu Sese Seko, a man not a stranger to the CIA. Mobutu went on to rule the country for more than 30 years, with a level of corruption and cruelty that shocked even his CIA handlers. The Zairian people lived in abject poverty despite the plentiful natural wealth, while Mobutu became a multibillionaire.

Brazil, 1961-64:
President Joao Goulart was guilty of the usual crimes: He took an independent stand in foreign policy, resuming relations with socialist countries and opposing sanctions against Cuba; his administration passed a law limiting the amount of profits multinationals could transmit outside the country; a subsidiary of ITT was nationalized; he promoted economic and social reforms. And Attorney-General Robert Kennedy was uneasy about Goulart allowing "communists" to hold positions in government agencies. Yet the man was no radical. He was a millionaire land-owner and a Catholic who wore a medal of the Virgin around his neck. That, however, was not enough to save him. In 1964, he was overthrown in a military coup which had deep, covert American involvement. The official Washington line was...yes, it's unfortunate that democracy has been overthrown in Brazil...but, still, the country has been saved from communism. For the next 15 years, all the features of military dictatorship that Latin America has come to know were instituted: Congress was shut down, political opposition was reduced to virtual extinction, habeas corpus for "political crimes" was suspended, criticism of the president was forbidden by law, labor unions were taken over by government interveners, mounting protests were met by police and military firing into crowds, peasants' homes were burned down, priests were brutalized...disappearances, death squads, a remarkable degree and depravity of torture...the government had a name for its program: the "moral rehabilitation" of Brazil. Washington was very pleased. Brazil broke relations with Cuba and became one of the United States' most reliable allies in Latin America.

Dominican Republic, 1963-66:
In February 1963, Juan Bosch took office as the first democratically elected president of the Dominican Republic since 1924. Here at last was John F. Kennedy's liberal anti-Communist, to counter the charge that the U.S. supported only military dictatorships. Bosch's government was to be the long sought " showcase of democracy " that would put the lie to Fidel Castro. He was given the grand treatment in Washington shortly before he took office. Bosch was true to his beliefs. He called for land reform, low-rent housing, modest nationalization of business, and foreign investment provided it was not excessively exploitative of the country and other policies making up the program of any liberal Third World leader serious about social change. He was likewise serious about civil liberties: Communists, or those labeled as such, were not to be persecuted unless they actually violated the law.
A number of American officials and congresspeople expressed their discomfort with Bosch's plans, as well as his stance of independence from the United States. Land reform and nationalization are always touchy issues in Washington, the stuff that "creeping socialism" is made of. In several quarters of the U.S. press Bosch was red-baited. In September, the military boots marched. Bosch was out. The United States, which could discourage a military coup in Latin America with a frown, did nothing. Nineteen months later, a revolt broke out which promised to put the exiled Bosch back into power. The United States sent 23,000 troops to help crush it.

Cuba, 1959 to present:
Fidel Castro came to power at the beginning of 1959. A U.S. National Security Council meeting of March 10, 1959 included on its agenda the feasibility of bringing "another government to power in Cuba." There followed 40 years of terrorist attacks, bombings, full-scale military invasion, sanctions, embargoes, isolation, assassinations...Cuba had carried out The Unforgivable Revolution, a very serious threat of setting a "good example" in Latin America. The saddest part of this is that the world will never know what kind of society Cuba could have produced if left alone, if not constantly under the gun and the threat of invasion, if allowed to relax its control at home. The idealism, the vision, the talent were all there. But we'll never know. And that of course was the idea.

Indonesia, 1965:
A complex series of events, involving a supposed coup attempt, a counter-coup, and perhaps a counter-counter-coup, with American fingerprints apparent at various points, resulted in the ouster from power of Sukarno and his replacement by a military coup led by General Suharto. The massacre that began immediately-of Communists, Communist sympathizers, suspected Communists, suspected Communist sympathizers, and none of the above-was called by the New York Times "one of the most savage mass slayings of modern political history." The estimates of the number killed in the course of a few years begin at half a million and go above a million. It was later learned that the U.S. embassy had compiled lists of "Communist" operatives, from top echelons down to village cadres, as many as 5,000 names, and turned them over to the army, which then hunted those persons down and killed them. The Americans would then check off the names of those who had been killed or captured. "It really was a big help to the army. They probably killed a lot of people, and I probably have a lot of blood on my hands," said one U.S. diplomat. "But that's not all bad. There's a time when you have to strike hard at a decisive moment."

Chile, 1964-73:
Salvador Allende was the worst possible scenario for a Washington imperialist. He could imagine only one thing worse than a Marxist in power-an elected Marxist in power, who honored the constitution, and became increasingly popular. This shook the very foundation stones on which the anti-Communist tower was built: the doctrine, painstakingly cultivated for decades, that "communists" can take power only through force and deception, that they can retain that power only through terrorizing and brainwashing the population. After sabotaging Allende's electoral endeavor in 1964, and failing to do so in 1970, despite their best efforts, the CIA and the rest of the American foreign policy machine left no stone unturned in their attempt to destabilize the Allende government over the next three years, paying particular attention to building up military hostility. Finally, in September 1973, the military overthrew the government, Allende dying in the process. They closed the country to the outside world for a week, while the tanks rolled and the soldiers broke down doors; the stadiums rang with the sounds of execution and the bodies piled up along the streets and floated in the river; the torture centers opened for business; the subversive books were thrown into bonfires; soldiers slit the trouser legs of women, shouting that "In Chile women wear dresses!"; the poor returned to their natural state; and the men of the world in Washington and in the halls of international finance opened up their check- books. In the end, more than 3,000 had been executed, thousands more tortured or disappeared.

Greece, 1964-74:
The military coup took place in April 1967, just two days before the campaign for j national elections was to begin, elections which appeared certain to bring the veteran liberal leader George Papandreou back as prime minister. Papandreou had been elected in February 1964 with the only outright majority in the history of modern Greek elections. The successful machinations to unseat him had begun immediately, a joint effort of the Royal Court, the Greek military, and the American military and CIA stationed in Greece. The 1967 coup was followed immediately by the traditional martial law, censorship, arrests, beatings, torture, and killings, the victims totaling some 8,000 in the first month. This was accompanied by the equally traditional declaration that this was all being done to save the nation from a "Communist takeover." Corrupting and subversive influences in Greek life were to be removed. Among these were miniskirts, long hair, and foreign newspapers; church attendance for the young would be compulsory. It was torture, however, which most indelibly marked the seven-year Greek nightmare. James Becket, an American attorney sent to Greece by Amnesty International, wrote in December 1969 that "a conservative estimate would place at not less than two thousand" the number of people tortured, usually in the most gruesome of ways, often with equipment supplied by the United States. Becket reported the following: Hundreds of prisoners have listened to the little speech given by Inspector Basil Lambrou, who sits behind his desk which displays the red, white, and blue clasped-hand symbol of American aid. He tries to show the prisoner the absolute futility of resistance: "You make yourself ridiculous by thinking you can do anything. The world is divided in two. There are the communists on that side and on this side the free world. The Russians and the Americans, no one else. What are we? Americans. Behind me there is the government, behind the government is NATO, behind NATO is the U.S. You can't fight us, we are Americans." George Papandreou was not any kind of radical. He was a liberal anti-Communist type. But his son Andreas, the heir-apparent, while only a little to the left of his father had not disguised his wish to take Greece out of the Cold War, and had questioned remaining in NATO, or at least as a satellite of the United States.

East Timor, 1975 to present:
In December 1975, Indonesia invaded East Timor, which lies at the eastern end of the Indonesian archipelago, and which had proclaimed its independence after Portugal had relinquished control of it. The invasion was launched the day after U. S. President Gerald Ford and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger had left Indonesia after giving Suharto permission to use American arms, which, under U.S. Iaw, could not be used for aggression. Indonesia was Washington's most valuable tool in Southeast Asia. Amnesty International estimated that by 1989, Indonesian troops, with the aim of forcibly annexing East Timor, had killed 200,000 people out of a population of between 600,000 and 700,000. The United States consistently supported Indonesia's claim to East Timor (unlike the UN and the EU), and downplayed the slaughter to a remarkable degree, at the same time supplying Indonesia with all the military hardware and training it needed to carry out the job.

Nicaragua, 1978-89:
When the Sandinistas overthrew the Somoza dictatorship in 1978, it was clear to Washington that they might well be that long-dreaded beast-"another Cuba." Under President Carter, attempts to sabotage the revolution took diplomatic and economic forms. Under Reagan, violence was the method of choice. For eight terribly long years, the people of Nicaragua were under attack by Washington's proxy army, the Contras, formed from Somoza's vicious National Guard and other supporters of the dictator. It was all-out war, aiming to destroy the progressive social and economic programs of the government, burning down schools and medical clinics, raping, torturing, mining harbors, bombing and strafing. These were Ronald Reagan's "freedom fighters." There would be no revolution in Nicaragua.

Grenada, 1979-84:
What would drive the most powerful nation in the world to invade a country of 110,000? Maurice Bishop and his followers had taken power in a 1979 coup, and though their actual policies were not as revolutionary as Castro's, Washington was again driven by its fear of "another Cuba," particularly when public appearances by the Grenadian leaders in other countries of the region met with great enthusiasm. U.S. destabilization tactics against the Bishop government began soon after the coup and continued until 1983, featuring numerous acts of disinformation and dirty tricks. The American invasion in October 1983 met minimal resistance, although the U.S. suffered 135 killed or wounded; there were also some 400 Grenadian casualties, and 84 Cubans, mainly construction workers. At the end of 1984, a questionable election was held which was won by a man supported by the Reagan administration. One year later, the human rights organization, Council on Hemispheric Affairs, reported that Grenada's new U.S.-trained police force and counter-insurgency forces had acquired a reputation for brutality, arbitrary arrest, and abuse of authority, and were eroding civil rights. In April 1989, the government issued a list of more than 80 books which were prohibited from being imported. Four months later, the prime minister suspended parliament to forestall a threatened no-confidence vote resulting from what his critics called "an increasingly authoritarian style."

Libya, 1981-89:
Libya refused to be a proper Middle East client state of Washington. Its leader, Muammar el-Qaddafi, was uppity. He would have to be punished. U.S. planes shot down two Libyan planes in what Libya regarded as its air space. The U. S . also dropped bombs on the country, killing at least 40 people, including Qaddafi's daughter. There were other attempts to assassinate the man, operations to overthrow him, a major disinformation campaign, economic sanctions, and blaming Libya for being behind the Pan Am 103 bombing without any good evidence.

Panama, 1989:
Washington's bombers strike again. December 1989, a large tenement barrio in Panama City wiped out, 15,000 people left homeless. Counting several days of ground fighting against Panamanian forces, 500-something dead was the official body count, what the U.S. and the new U.S.-installed Panamanian government admitted to; other sources, with no less evidence, insisted that thousands had died; 3,000-something wounded. Twenty-three Americans dead, 324 wounded.Question from reporter: "Was it really worth it to send people to their death for this? To get Noriega?" George Bush: "Every human life is precious, and yet I have to answer, yes, it has been worth it." Manuel Noriega had been an American ally and informant for years until he outlived his usefulness. But getting him was not the only motive for the attack. Bush wanted to send a clear message to the people of Nicaragua, who had an election scheduled in two months, that this might be their fate if they reelected the Sandinistas. Bush also wanted to flex some military muscle to illustrate to Congress the need for a large combat-ready force even after the very recent dissolution of the "Soviet threat." The official explanation for the American ouster was Noriega's drug trafficking, which Washington had known about for years and had not been at all
bothered by.

Iraq, 1990s:
Relentless bombing for more than 40 days and nights, against one of the most advanced nations in the Middle East, devastating its ancient and modern capital city; 177 million pounds of bombs falling on the people of Iraq, the most concentrated aerial onslaught in the history of the world; depleted uranium weapons incinerating people, causing cancer; blasting chemical and biological weapon storage and oil facilities; poisoning the atmosphere to a degree perhaps never matched anywhere; burying soldiers alive, deliberately; the infrastructure destroyed, with a terrible effect on health; sanctions continued to this day multiplying the health problems; perhaps a million children dead by now from all of these things, even more adults. Iraq was the strongest military power among the Arab states. This may have been their crime. Noam Chomsky has written: "It's been a leading, driving doctrine of U.S. foreign policy since the 1940s that the vast and unparalleled energy resources of the Gulf region will be effectively dominated by the United States and its clients, and, crucially, that no independent, indigenous force will be permitted to have a substantial influence on the administration of oil production and price."

Afghanistan, 1979-92:
Everyone knows of the unbelievable repression of women in Afghanistan, carried out by Islamic fundamentalists, even before the Taliban. But how many people know that during the late 1970s and most of the 1980s, Afghanistan had a government committed to bringing the incredibly backward nation into the 20th century, including giving women equal rights? What happened, however, is that the United States poured billions of dollars into waging a terrible war against this government, simply because it was supported by the Soviet Union. Prior to this, CIA operations had knowingly increased the probability of a Soviet intervention, which is what occurred. In the end, the United States won, and the women, and the rest of Afghanistan, lost. More than a million dead, three million disabled, five million refugees, in total about half the population.

El Salvador, 1980-92:
El Salvador's dissidents tried to work within the system. But with U.S. support, the government made that impossible, using repeated electoral fraud and murdering hundreds of protesters and strikers. In 1980, the dissidents took to the gun, and civil war. Officially, the U.S. military presence in El Salvador was limited to an advisory capacity. In actuality, military and CIA personnel played a more active role on a continuous basis. About 20 Americans were killed or wounded in helicopter and plane crashes while flying reconnaissance or other missions over combat areas, and considerable evidence surfaced of a U.S. role in the ground fighting as well. The war came to an official end in 1992; 75,000 civilian deaths and the U.S. Treasury depleted by six billion dollars. Meaningful social change has been largely thwarted. A handful of the wealthy still own the country, the poor remain as ever, and dissidents still have to fear right-wing death squads.

Haiti, 1987-94:
The U.S. supported the Duvalier family dictatorship for 30 years, then opposed the reformist priest, Jean-Bertrand Aristide. Meanwhile, the CIA was working intimately with death squads, torturers, and drug traffickers. With this as background, the Clinton White House found itself in the awkward position of having to pretend-because of all their rhetoric about "democracy"-that they supported Aristide's return to power in Haiti after he had been ousted in a 1991 military coup. After delaying his return for more than two years, Washington finally had its military restore Aristide to office, but only after obliging the priest to guarantee that he would not help the poor at the expense of the rich, and that he would stick closely to free-market economics. This meant that Haiti would continue to be the assembly plant of the Western Hemisphere, with its workers receiving literally starvation wages.

Yugoslavia, 1999:
The United States is bombing the country back to a pre-industrial era. It would like the world to believe that its intervention is motivated only by "humanitarian" impulses. Perhaps the above history of U.S. interventions can help one decide how much weight to place on this claim.

2006-08-29T18:15:00.000-07:00

Home On Native Land

The people of Six Nations are repossessing their land
By Hillary Bain Lindsay
From Dominion
2006

According to the Six Nations Confederacy, women are the title holders of the land. Sewatis has been at the Six Nations blockade since it began on February 28. "I was the first one to encounter your enforcement officer," he says. "I was peaceful and just explained the situation. [I said] 'I cannot follow your orders because I'm not Canadian. I'm Haudenosaunee.'" The police officer he was speaking with didn't appear to know how to handle Sewatis' response to his order. Apparently, the fact that someone born and raised only a few miles from where they stood--just outside of Caledonia, Ontario--was not Canadian was a difficult concept to grasp. "So, I just told him 'You'll have to wait for my superiors to come,'" says Sewatis. "That's the kind of language they seem to understand."

I am sitting with Sewatis in his van. For over six weeks this is where he has slept. That is to say, when he has slept. Many nights he sits by the fire, keeping watch in case the Ontario Provincial Police (OPP) chooses to invade the site.

From where we sit, we can see dozens of people gathered around the fire, singing, laughing and talking. To our left is a cookhouse that was recently built to feed the growing number of people that have come to support the repossession of Six Nations' land. There are several tents, a teepee and a couple of trailers scattered nearby.

It might feel like a camping trip except for the fact that we are in the middle of a construction site. There are no trees or grass and ten partially built suburban homes stand nearby. Henco Industries had hoped to build hundreds of houses here. Construction was halted on February 28 when the road to the site was blocked and Henco was informed that the land is not theirs to build on."We're here telling people that it's our land and it was illegally attained and it was illegally sold," says Sewatis. "That's just the plain and simple truth." This is not "the kind of language they seem to understand."

On April 6, the Canadian government said that the Six Nations dispute is not about land rights. "This is not a lands-claim matter," said Deirdre McCracken, a spokesperson for the Minister of Indian Affairs Jim Prentice. She also said that the blockade "has nothing to do with the federal government." But according to a statement released on March 20 by the women of Rotinoshon'non:we (meaning Iroquois or Haudenosaunee, depending on the language being spoken), the blockade has quite a lot to do with land--and with the Canadian government.

The statement outlines how "General Haldimand confirmed that Britain would affirm the right of the Six Nations to a tract of land six miles deep on either side of the Grand River, running from its mouth to its source." The piece of land immediately under dispute is only a small part of the much larger 'Haldimand Tract.'

This piece of history is not being debated. A plaque erected in Cayuga, Ontario by the Ontario Archaeological and Historic Sites Board says much the same thing. The sign also notes that the land was awarded in 1784 in recognition of the Six Nations' help to the British Crown during the American Revolution. What the plaque says next is where the stories diverge. "In later years, large areas of this tract...were sold to white settlers."

According to the women of the Rotinoshon'non:we, however, "None of this land [the Haldimand Tract] was ever legally surrendered." The women's statement carries a great deal of weight as, "Women are the 'Title Holders' of the land of Rotinoshon’non:we as recalled by Wampum 44 of the Kaianereh'ko:wa." The significance of the previous sentence will be lost on most Canadians, who will have no idea what it means. Indigenous nations have their own constitution (Kaianereh’ko:wa). "The idea that British Colonists or their descendents--like Canadians--were the only people who had 'law' is a legal fiction," says Kahentinetha Horn, a Mohawk elder from Kahnawake. Canada "has totally disrespected our laws and agreements to conduct a nation-to-nation relationship."

The Six Nations Confederacy has been called the oldest living participatory democracy on earth. Hazel Hill, one of the women active at the blockade describes how decisions are made: "There are fifty chiefs who represent the Confederacy Council and they have a clanmother with each chief. It is the people whose voice the chiefs and clanmothers carry. Any decision regarding land comes first from the women, and then to their clans; and through the process of our council, when all are in agreement, or when consensus has been reached, only then does the decision stand," she says. "In our history of the Haldimand Tract, this has never been done."

In 1924, the Band Council system was imposed by force on Six Nations. In the place of the traditional government what critics refer to as "a puppet government" was installed using the Indian Act.

Since 1924, the Canadian government has done its negotiating with the Band Council, a system that is a part of and paid for by the federal government. "The Band Council," says Horn, "does not represent the Six Nations peoples according to international law." In an open letter to local newspapers, Hill compares the government's agreements with Band Council to finding a few people in Caledonia to agree to sell their town to the people of Six Nations. "Would that be legal?" she asks.

The Band Council system does not allow the voice of the people to be heard, says Horn. If the Canadian government wants to seek legitimate discussions, negotiations must be undertaken on a nation-to-nation basis. "There could then be an orderly settlement based on an orderly investigation of the facts and an orderly identification of the laws that apply," says Horn. "The reason Canada doesn’t want to do this is because it knows full well that when the process is complete, the facts will clearly show they have illegally invaded our land."

There is a large sign at the Six Nations blockade that reads "Oh Canada, your home on native land." The play on words from something as basic as the national anthem is appropriate for a standoff that could turn the meaning of Canada on its head. "A lot of people have squatted on our land," observes Carol Bomberry. Pointing to Caledonia she continues, "This is one of the towns that is on our land."

Most Caledonians probably don't consider themselves squatters. Chances are they consider Caledonia home. What does it mean if Caledonia is not Canada?

Mike Laughing, one of the men manning the blockade, responds matter-of-factly. "Look at it this way: just imagine if all those people got to live on native land. Instead of paying taxes to the government they could be giving it to the true landlords, back to this nation," says Laughing. "If they didn't want to do that then they'd have to move. But we're not saying move away."

As for the small piece of land immediately under dispute, Bomberry has a similarly straightforward suggestion: she'd like to see the Canadian government buy the houses back from Henco Industries and restore the land to Six Nations. The Six Nations Reserve, the most populous reserve in Canada, is currently less than five per cent the size of the original Haldimand Tract. "There's a ten year waiting list for houses," Bomberry points out. "Our population is growing every year. We need more room."

Acknowledging Indigenous land rights will, of course, mean much more than establishing who lives where or who pays taxes to whom. Laughing says he's at the blockade for the sake of his kids. Canada "has been standing on the back of an Indian for too long," he says. "It's time to get off and let us stand proud of who we are."

It is not only First Nations people that stand to benefit from a just outcome to the Six Nations standoff, says Horn. Native and non-native people alike are suffering from a system that is destroying the environment. Horn believes that under Indigenous title, the land would be treated with far more respect. "According to our constitution, we have to take care of the land, in other words we're environmentalists," explains Horn. "That's why it's important [for non-native people] to help us assert our jurisdiction." People from across Canada and around the world have lent their support to the Six Nations' struggle. Hundreds of people have gathered at the site each time there has been a threat of the OPP moving in.

"The Canadian government calls themselves peaceful," says Sewatis. "I hope that they live what they say." If the OPP chooses to invade, many at the site feel that it is their duty to defend their land and defend their people. "We're not seeking violence," Sewatis says. "I seek peace first...but, I believe in what's right."

Sewatis has seen how standoffs over land rights have ended before. "They think they can make peace by having a gun and having it their way," he observes. "We want to talk about peace and the laws and jurisdiction of the lands. We are going to utilize the great law of peace. We're going to offer it one more time."

At the time this article went to print, over 50 police cruisers were gathering in Caledonia and Six Nations was on "Red Alert."

2006-08-29T17:47:00.000-07:00

Electoral Reform

Proportional representation: making every vote count
By Murray MacAdam
From Citizens for Public Justice

Nick Loenen pulls no punches. “Politically, Canada is living a lie,” argues the Richmond, B.C. resident. “We think we are democratic, but we are not. On almost every election night, the majority of voters get neither the local representative nor the government they voted for. How democratic is that?”

What rankles Loenen, a former Social Credit MLA, is Canada’s first-past-the-post voting system. With several candidates in a typical riding, a candidate – and a party – can win with much less than majority of the vote. Only 38% of voters chose the Liberals in the 1997 federal election. Meanwhile small parties are shut out altogether. Could it be any different? Most definitely. Our ailing political system can be revived with proportional representation, ensuring that at least some seats in Parliament and our legislatures would be allocated on the basis of popular vote. Many support a system whereby half the representatives would be elected from single-member seats, as is now the case, while the other half would reflect PR. That would balance the benefits of local representation with a system in which every vote counts.

A wide range of individuals and organizations support PR, including CPJ. “If I could make one change to Canadian political institutions, it would be to reform the electoral system to bring in proportional representation,” says CPJ supporter Harold Jansen, a political scientist at the University of Lethbridge. “This would ensure that all parties are treated equitably. Currently, parties that have regionally concentrated support are rewarded by our current electoral system, while parties with a more national appeal tend to be discriminated against.”

Another benefit, notes Jansen, is that proportional representation would likely lead to more principled parties with distinct stands on issues. Now a candidate usually needs about 40% of the vote to win, and the easiest way to win that support is by appealing to the mushy ideological centre. A platform appealing to only 15% of the voters likely means winning no seats. But under PR, it would receive some seats. “Christian people in particular should favour PR because of that,” adds Nick Loenen. “Now parties are election machines. Your suppress your principles and platform in favour of images.” Nor is PR unknown to Canada. Manitoba used it from 1920 to 1953, and Alberta from 1926 to 1955. Meanwhile, it has the best chance of success in British Columbia, with its highly unpopular NDP government, elected by only 38% of the vote. “People look at this and say, why are these people in power?”, says Loenen. B.C.’s Liberal Party, widely expected to win the next provincial election, has promised to hold a referendum on PR.

The idea is being pushed by a group Loenen helped found, Fair Voting BC, and the Electoral Change Coalition. Some are concerned that a PR system will lead to instability. Yet most mature democracies have PR, including Germany, the Netherlands, and Switzerland. In her book Imagine Democracy, journalist and PR supporter Judy Rebick calls our electoral system “an anachronism... discarded by almost every democracy in the world except Britain, Canada, and the United States.”

In May New Democrat MP Lorne Nystrom introduced a motion in the Commons urging a national discussion on PR, followed by a referendum on its introduction to the federal electoral system. “At a time when the public is increasingly cynical about politicians and about the value of their vote, the current system only makes matters worse” said Nystrom. “Introducing a measure of proportional representation into our electoral system will empower Canadian citizens.”

The NDP has good reason to champion PR. In the last election, both the NDP and the Bloc Quebecois won 11% of the vote, but the BQ ended up with more than double the number of NDP seats. Nystrom’s motion was supported by all parties, except the Liberals. In the fall it will come up again for debate before a vote is taken on it. Meanwhile the NDP is trying to drum up support.

Proportional representation may prove to be a noble yet unattainable ideal. That would be unfortunate indeed. Noting that voter turnout plummeted to only 67% in the last federal election, Toronto Star columnist Chantal Hébert recently observed: “Too many Canadians have come to think their vote counts for nothing - and that’s not good for the country.”

CPJ for proportional representation

Following is the content of a letter sent to Nathalie Des Rosiers, President of the Law Commission of Canada, May 26, 2003

Dear Ms. Des Rosiers:

Citizens for Public Justice welcomes the opportunity to express its views on electoral reform as part of your consultation. CPJ is a national Christian public advocacy organization with a 40-year history of involvement in a wide range of issues which face our country.

CPJ's interest in electoral reform grows out of our strong belief in the value of pluralism and respect for diversity. We believe that is not enough to simply allow Canadians the freedom to express a wide range of opinions and for our society to include people with a wide range of values. Those values and opinions also need to find expression in the institutions of our society, including our political institutions. Our legislatures and governments need to reflect the diversity of opinion found in the country. In particular, we have argued for 40 years that people with different beliefs need to be given public room to order their lives differently, in keeping with their fundamental perspectives on life.

Our respect for diversity and pluralism forms the basis of CPJ's longstanding belief that our current "first past the post" (FPTP) system of political representation is fundamentally flawed and should be replaced by a proportional representation (PR) model. Our current system does not, in our view, make room for the diversity of public philosophy and policy positions found within Canada. This is an issue of basic justice and of treating Canadian voters justly. It's thus one with which we are deeply concerned. Justice and equity create a compelling argument for changing our current electoral system.

CPJ does not believe that all perspectives are equally valid. Some viewpoints, such as those which advocate racist policies, are abhorrent to us. Yet we their minds as to the type of diverse views they wish to see expressed in their political system.

Therefore since the 1960s, CPJ has proposed implementation of proportional representation (PR) on numerous occasions at both federal and provincial levels. For example, CPJ responded to federal government proposals in 1991 for constitutional change with a paper, Reforming the Canadian Electoral System, which supported some form of PR for the House of Commons. More recently, CPJ members John Hiemstra and Harold Jansen outlined a detailed case for PR in their chapter "Getting What You Vote For", in the book Contemporary Political Issues, edited by Mark Charlton and Paul Barker, (Scarborough: Nelson, 2002).

The shortcomings of the current FPTP model, in which the candidate in a given riding who wins more votes than the other candidates wins a seat as MP, have become glaringly apparent in recent years. It amounts to a "winner take all" system, in which the dominant party grabs the electoral spoils at the expense of smaller parties.

The results of the 2000 federal election serve as a case in point. The Liberals won 57 percent of the seats in the House of Commons (172 of the 301 seats), with a minority of the popular vote (40.8 percent). Looking at the number of votes cast for each party and the number of MPs elected for that party shows that the notion that all parties are treated equitably under our current system is a myth. Each Liberal Member of Parliament needed an average of only 30,218 votes to get elected. Yet it took an average of 83,918 votes to elect each New Democratic MP and a whopping 130, 316 votes to elect each of the 12 Conservative MPs elected.

Some argue that PR would worsen regional divisions within Canada. Yet in fact, such divisions are deepened under the current system, which rewards parties with regionally concentrated support, while discriminating against parties with a more national appeal. For example, while the Canadian Alliance was rewarded with 64 seats for the 1.9 million votes it received across the four Western provinces, it received a mere two seats in Ontario, even though it received over one million votes in that province. Meanwhile the Liberals received about 950,000 votes in the four Western provinces – about half as many as the Alliance – but only received one-fifth as many seats as the Alliance. These distorted results reinforced common beliefs that the Alliance is a Western-based party with little support in Ontario, and that the Liberals have little support in the West. Many similar examples could be given involving other parties.

We reject the argument that proportional representation would lead to unstable, ineffective government. Versions of PR are used in more than 90 jurisdictions around the world. The vast majority of them have stable, effective governments.

The House of Commons and other legislatures should reflect the diversity of political opinion that exists within the country. Yet our current system discriminates against political parties which take distinctive stands on issues. In order to win under the "first past the post" system, a candidates usually needs about 40% of the vote in their constituency. The easiest way to win those votes is to adopt a middle-of-the-road stance. A party that runs a platform that only appeals to 15 or 20% of the voters runs the risk of winning few or no seats. Yet under PR, such a party would win some seats. The result would likely be more principled parties, thus improving the quality of representation. Voters would have a more clear idea of the mandate they are giving to MPs, and thus be better able to hold MPs accountable for their policies and political actions.

In effect, millions of Canadians wasted their votes in the last election by casting them for candidates with no chance of winning. Thus it's not surprising that voter turnout in Canada has been declining. In the 1984 and 1988 federal elections, about 75% of eligible voters cast ballots. The number dropped to 69.6% in 1993, and in 1997 to 67%. Turnout sank further in 2000, to 62.8%. This is an alarming trend. While we do not believe that a new voting system would in itself reverse this trend completely, we do believe that it is an essential ingredient for revitalizing Canadian democracy.

Given the shortcomings of our current FPTP system and declining citizen involvement in elections, it is no accident that support for electoral reform has been growing in Canada. Nor do we believe that it is an accident that a growing number of Canadians, from across the political spectrum, are calling for the adoption of some kind of proportional representation system in our country. It is the fairest and most effective way to involve Canadians in a representative democracy. Your consultation is part of this growing movement for electoral reform. As well as endorsing PR, we believe that your consultation should support a process whereby the electoral reform movement will be affirmed and acknowledged. For example, a royal commission or a citizens assembly could be established on electoral reform, with a clear mandate and deadlines.

British Columbia provides an example of one model of how such a process might work. Reflecting a strong electoral reform movement, the government of B.C. recently announced that it plans to establish a citizens assembly to consider options for how MLAs are elected in that province. If the assembly recommends a different electoral system, voters will have an opportunity to express their views through a referendum on that new electoral option, to be held on the date of the next provincial election in 2005.

Without an independent, non-partisan process that gives Canadians a meaningful opportunity to express their views, it will be all too easy for the current reform movement to get sidetracked, because parties that win power under the current system are, understandably, reluctant to change it.

We look forward to the report and recommendations from your consultation. Thank you for this opportunity to express our views on this vital issue.

Sincerely,

Harry J. Kits
Executive Director, CPJ

2006-08-29T14:59:00.000-07:00

The Truth about Ethical Investing

What's 'green' or 'sustainable'? Funds make it hard to know.
By Paul Hawken
From The Tyee
2005

On Jan. 28 at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, a Canadian magazine and Innovest, an investment research firm specializing in corporate social responsibility, released a list of the "100 Most Sustainable Companies in the World." In the words of the press release, these were the "one hundred companies most open to leading the way to a more sustainable world."

On the face of it, this should have been a watershed moment. Corporations that disavowed the word "sustainability" not so many years ago were proudly showcased at the world's most prestigious conference dealing with corporate issues.

Near the top of the alphabetical list was ABB Ltd (ASEA Brown Boveri), a one-time promoter of mega-dams including the Narmada dams in India and the Arun Dam in Nepal. On July 6, 2004, ABB settled a U.S. Federal Court action for bribing government officials in Nigeria, Angola and Kazakhstan, paying $5.9 million in ill-gotten profits. On the same day, it pled guilty to violating the anti-bribery provisions of the U.S. Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA) and agreed to pay $10.5 million in fines. In Nigeria, ABB paid illicit bribes to officers of NAPIMS, a Nigerian government agency, to evaluate and approve bidders for oil and gas contracts. In Angola, it was doling out money in brown paper bags to government employees. Meanwhile, the U.S. Justice Department continues its ongoing investigation of still more corruption.

Moving from A to B is Bristol-Myers Squibb, under investigation by the SEC for violating the FCPA in Germany following prosecutorial action there. The company was fined $150 million last year by the SEC for cooking its books; it paid $135 million in claims and settled with the Federal Trade Commission on charges that it conspired to prevent the cancer drug Taxol (which was developed by NIH and U.S. taxpayers) from becoming generic after patent expiration, costing women with breast cancer hundreds of millions of dollars (Bristol-Myers Squibb was charging $6.09 per milligram compared to foreign generic producers charging $.07 per milligram). It also paid a $535 million settlement to 29 states to settle litigation over whether it had illegally blocked generic production of BuSpar; and Bristol-Myers Squibb joined with other big pharmaceutical companies in lobbying for a provision in the new Medicare regulations prohibiting the U.S. government from negotiating with drug companies on bulk purchase discounts for drugs, what used to be called price-fixing.

Oil, gas, beer, mining...?
Included on the list of the 100 most sustainable companies were corporations in oil, gas, beer, mining, utilities, defense, soda pop, candy and hard liquor ("Did you know 43 percent of the milk produced in Ireland goes into Bailey's Irish Cream," brags Diageo, which also makes Smirnoff, Johnny Walker, Tanqueray, Cuervo and J&B). Three of the 100 companies have a business model that directly addresses the well-being of the future of the planet: Vestas and Gamesa, both manufacturers of wind turbines, and Whole Foods. There was no explanation at the time of the press release as to why these 100 were the most sustainable companies, or what sustainability means, or which criteria were applied.

Sustainability specifically means living within carrying capacity of the planet, which is to say living on current solar income. Easy to say, difficult to do, and admittedly no company of any scale is doing it. The question is whether they are moving toward or away from it.

There are companies throughout the world that are approaching sustainability; mostly they are small and owner-operated. They are providers and growers of organic food; retrofitters and developers of green buildings; designers of new materials that are biomimetic and compostable; health care providers relying on phyto-pharmaceuticals and natural healing; manufacturers of bicycles; creators of local food webs linking school lunch programs and nearby farmers; makers of hemp clothing; environmental banks; sustainable foresters; trained midwives; and hundreds of other workers and professionals who understand that the work of sustainability is not glamorous and does not accrete into transnational corporations with corporate jets and weekends in Switzerland or Palm Springs to help manage a complex web of affairs.

Opaque methods
The mindset that informed the list doesn't stop with the announcement at Davos. Innovest's research is sold to SRI (socially responsible investing) mutual fund companies so they can do ethical investing on our behalf. You can buy shares in a SRI fund, but you can't analyze the methodology, research or data. The research that Innovest and other research companies do for the SRI mutual fund industry is proprietary with heavy restrictions about disclosure. The same research that came up with ABB, Pepsi, Diageo and Bristol-Myers Squibb as the most sustainable companies in the world is used to select stocks for SRI portfolios. Investors are asked to take SRI mutual funds at their word, even though the research and methodology are hidden.

When you invest in such SRI funds as Domini, Calvert, Sierra Club and Pax, you are investing in American corporations that fight against environmental regulation; whose trade associations lobby against living wages or increases in the minimum wage; that lobby for and receive corporate welfare from Congress in the form of pork-barrel tax breaks and subsidies; create non-profit organizations to fight claims that junk food causes obesity; prevent people from getting price breaks on pharmaceuticals, whose CEOs raise millions of dollars for the Bush administration's assault on human rights and the environment, and more. You would never know this because you invest in the "language" of social responsibility, not the reality. The advertisements cater to our desire to do good things with our savings, and based on their language and promotional material, investors trust that the SRI mutual funds live up to their word.

The Sierra Club decided a few years ago to go into the mutual fund business. Why not take a great brand name and invest in environmental companies and make some money for a deserving organization?

"Who says you can't invest responsibly and still beat the S & P 500? Now You Don't Have To Choose Between Your Financial Goals And Our Planet's Future -- The myth about environmentally and socially responsible investing is that as an investor, you have to give something up--investment quality, portfolio diversification, or fund performance. At Sierra Club Mutual Funds, we beg to differ. While you do your part to protect the planet for your children and for future generations, we do ours by seeking attractive investment opportunities in well-known companies that meet strict Sierra Club social and environmental guidelines."

The language employed corresponds to a generational shift in values. There is this "myth" that to be green you have to give up financial returns, but that is not the case. You can give your money to the Sierra Club Funds and lay this myth aside. It is tantamount to saying you can be progressive and have your carrot cake and eat it. Who are the companies that meet the "strict" Sierra club guidelines? Well, that's hard to know. The Sierra Club web site doesn't don't reveal the whole portfolio, only a part of it. (Find the entire portfolio, from the fund's last report, on the Natural Capital Institute web site.)

Whiffs of Donald Trump
One of the bigger holdings in the Sierra Club Balanced Fund is Esteé Lauder, makers of Donald Trump--The Fragrance, available at Bergdorf's, Saks and Bonwit Teller. Sierra Club members can do more for the Republican Party than buy a mega-capitalist's aftershave. The Sierra Club Fund holds shares in the Outback Steakhouse. Putting aside the questions of where Outback gets its beef, how it is raised (public lands?), if it contains hormones, or if Outback's subsidiary chain Cheeseburgers in Paradise isn't your idea of socially responsible investment, it is good to know that of the $500,000 Outback donated last year to politicians, 98 percent of it went to Republicans.

If you own shares of Sierra Club funds, you will also own HRPT, which builds office buildings for the Department of Defense, the FBI, and the DEA. And then there is Celgene, whose division Celgro licenses its chiral technology for agricultural pesticides. When queried by Fortune magazine as to why Sierra Club funds didn't own any environmental companies, Garvin Jabusch, director of sustainable investing, said that their fund wasn't allowed to take "flyers on microcaps," meaning small companies with innovative environmental technologies. John Muir and David Brower, please meet George Orwell.

If big corporations are to change, they need feedback from investors, customers and citizens. In this, the whole purpose of SRI is germane and necessary. About a dozen of the 110 SRI funds in North America collaborate with nonprofits such as the As You Sow Foundation in forming shareholder resolutions that challenge management policy; this tactic has proved fruitful.

Another way companies get feedback is through their stock price. A rising stock price makes companies more powerful and makes their shareholders and executives wealthier. Falling share prices have the opposite effect. When we put our money into SRI funds, we are voting with our dollars. But we are voting with our money like they vote in corrupt countries; we walk into the room and are given a ballot that is already filled out. For sure, we can choose this SRI fund or that, but at the end of the day, that's all we can do. We can't always see our portfolio online in real time; we can't see the research; we can't see the detailed inclusion criteria.

Green in eye of beholder
SRI mutual funds do not obey or follow the same level of transparency they demand of the corporations they invest in. You can see the salary and stock options of the management of any publicly held corporation in America. CEO Peter Dolan, who presided over Bristol-Myers Squibb's $670 million of legal settlements and paid a $150 million fine for cooking the books, was paid $5.92 million in 2003 for his management skills. But how much did the CEOs of Domini, Pax and Calvert make? That's a secret.

To counter some of the recent bad publicity concerning socially responsible funds, the industry has stepped up its advertising in the progressive media. Calvert Fund's full-page advertisements in magazines such as Utne depict a bearded liberal baby-boomer saying he likes his investments "GREEN" in both senses of the word.

I went to the Calvert Capital Accumulation Fund to find out what these green investments are. According to the company web site, this Calvert fund holds the Cheesecake Factory, makers of "decadent cheesecakes perfect for any occasion." It owns Electronic Arts, makers of Battlefield, a video game for children that offers "more firepower, modernized weaponry and vehicles, and a deeper infantry experience from the jungles to the beaches of Vietnam." It owns PETsMART, a big-box retailer of pet supplies that is under attack by PETA for its treatment of exotic birds. And it owns Fossil, which announced a Dick Tracy PDA for the wrist at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. What do these companies have to do with "green?" When I asked Terry Mollner, one of the co-founders of Calvert how it was that two-thirds of the 1,000 largest corporations in America qualify as green, he asked me who did I think I was to say what was and wasn't green?

Make the choices real
My hunch is that the progressive movement would prefer to invest in the future of the planet rather than the future of Donald Trump, obesity or steakhouses. If we are to see the kind of transformation required to abate climate change, rescue our oceans, eliminate species die-off, stop the assaults on indigenous cultures, eradicate clear-cutting and restore our water, air and soils, we will need to move a lot faster and more elegantly than we are now. Will investors put financial return before conscience? Many will, and the number of people who won't compromise their values for profiteering is increasing.

To do that investors need a real choice and true transparency. It is time we had truth in labeling; in fact, it is time we had labeling. An investor should be able to visit Calvert's web site and understand how it evaluated Electronic Arts. Owners of Sierra Club mutual funds should be able to understand how Outback Steakhouse "protect(s) the planet for your children and for future generations."

To invest wisely, investors need good information. Investors and stakeholders should be able to go online and find the complete investment portfolios of SRI funds, foundations, NGOs, churches, universities and unions. They should be able to click on a company name and be given a thorough understanding of its strengths, impacts and weaknesses. The world of socially responsible investing is a bastion of secrecy. As long as information is sequestered by "professionals" and not revealed to citizenry, power is concentrated in the hands of the few..

Many SRI funds state they don't want to reveal their portfolios and research because it will give away their "secrets." That is exactly the argument big food companies used when labeling laws were first proposed. It was the same argument used by cosmetic companies when they were first required to disclose ingredients. It is what tobacco companies said when they were subpoenaed to disclose the 900 odd chemicals, additives and ingredients contained in a cigarette. None of these companies went out of business. It is time for disclosure by the SRI industry. The planet and its people deserve no less, and anything less than full transparency is unfair to conscientious investors who entrust their savings to these funds.

2006-08-29T12:04:00.000-07:00

Export Credit Agencies Explained

From ECA Watch

What they are, how they impact development, the environment and human rights, and what the international reform campaign is doing about it.

Introduction:
What are ECAs?
Export Credit Agencies and Investment Insurance Agencies, commonly known as ECAs, are public agencies that provide government-backed loans, guarantees, credits and insurance to private corporations from their home country to do business abroad, particularly in the financially and politically risky developing world. Most industrialized nations have at least one ECA, which is usually an official or quasi-official branch of their government.

Today, ECAs are collectively among the largest sources of public financial support for foreign corporate involvement in industrial projects in the developing world. For example, ECAs are estimated to support twice the amount of oil, gas and mining projects as do all Multilateral Development Banks such as the World Bank Group. Half of all new greenhouse gas-emitting industrial projects in developing countries have some form of ECA support. ECAs often back such projects even though the World Bank Group and other multilateral banks find them too risky and potentially harmful to support.

What are the Impacts of these ECAs?
In recent years ECAs are estimated to have supported between US $50 - $70 billion annually in what are called "medium and long-term transactions," a great portion of which are large industrial and infrastructure projects in developing countries. Many of these projects have very serious environmental and social impacts. For example, ECAs finance greenhouse gas-emitting power plants, large scale dams, mining projects, road development in pristine tropical forests, oil pipelines, chemical and industrial facilities, forestry and plantation schemes, to name a few.

Because most of these projects are high risk due to their environmental, political, social and cultural impacts, most would not come to life without the support and financial backing of ECAs. Hence, ECAs are strategic development linchpins that play an enormous part in the harmful impacts of corporate globalization.

Undercutting progress, violating laws... Most ECAs only recently adopted environmental policies that benchmark against those of the World Bank Group and regional development banks (like the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, African Development Bank, Asian Development Bank, Inter-American Development Bank). These policies resulted from an agreed set of recommendations, dubbed the "Common Approaches," which was brokered in December, 2003 at the Export Credit Group of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development in Paris, France.

The environmental policies of the regional development banks have been criticized for their weaknesses, and the World Bank Group seems poised to weaken its own policies, too. Hence, weak ECA standards are benchmarked against weak regional development bank or World Bank standards, with precious little global leadership to point to.

Meanwhile, the Common Approaches agreement is rife with loopholes. For example, it states that ECA-backed projects should "in all cases" comply with World Bank, regional development bank and host country standards, unless an ECA "finds it neccessary" to apply lower standards.

The lack of adequate environmental and social policies and associated professional staff to perform due diligence also results in ECA projects that contravene the international environmental, human rights and other treaties and agreements to which these ECAs' own governments are party.

Fueling a race to the bottom... ECAs help corporations from within their own country expand into the developing world, and as a result they compete intensely with ECAs from other countries that do the same. They are quick to back projects that other ECAs and multilateral development banks will refuse on environmental and social grounds. This creates a "race to the bottom," that encourages ECA support of projects with weak or no project environmental or social safeguards.

One of the best examples of the race to the bottom is the Three Gorges Dam in China: This project of 1.8 million people, the flooding of millions of hectares of prime farmland, multi-billion dollar cost overruns, and corruption. In 1996, the German, Swiss and Canadian ECAs raced with one another to help finance this project, even though the World Bank and US Export Import Bank declined to provide support on environmental grounds. Now growing internal opposition in China is calling for a scaling down and even a halt to the gigantic dam.

Little transparency and contempt for affected communities...Another characteristic of ECAs is a wholesale lack of public disclosure of the impacts of their projects. The Common Approaches do not require ECAs to consult with affected communities and civil society in the development of the projects they finance. This lack of public discourse runs counter to decades of experience in the field of sustainable development and is antagonistic to democratic principles. This gaping hole in policy is suspect since ECAs back projects that affect people's health, environment, and their ability to maintain a sustainable local livelihood. In so doing, ECAs place the desires of private corporations and their own economic gain above the rights of citizens to protect their lives and environment.

Corruption...According to Transparency International, "Bribing foreign officials in order to secure overseas contracts for their exports has become a widespread practice in industrial countries, particularly in certain sectors such as exports of military equipment and public works. Normally these contracts are guaranteed by government - owned or - supported Export Credit Insurance (ECI) schemes (HERMES in Germany, COFACE in France, DUCROIRE in Belgium, ECGD in the UK)."

Crushing debt...ECAs for the most part also have no developmental mandate or obligations, yet they account for the single biggest component of developing country debt, consisting in 1996 some 24% of total debt and 56% of debt owed to official agencies. While proper debt management can lead to positive development impacts, ECAs often push countries to create debt to pay back loans for projects that are inconsistent with the goals of sustainable development, that have design weaknesses, and that are associated with corruption. Thus, to the extent that excessive or inappropriate developing country debt loads shackles the sustainable development process in these countries, ECAs are in large part responsible.

Arms transfers and human rights abuses...ECAs-backed projects are too-often associated with human right abuses in developing countries. For example, large hydro-electric projects can displace tens or hundreds of thousands of people (close to 1.9 million people in the case of the Three Gorges Dam), innundate vast areas of fertile farmland, and submerge historically and culturally significant sites. Typically, the people resettled are never fairly or adequately compensated, and are forced to live in unfamiliar cultural surroundings and living conditions that are worse than they had before.

ECAs are also frequently involved in supporting the export of arms and military equipment to war-torn countries, for example, UK-made Hawk fighter jets or US-made Black Hawk helicopters that are exported to countries like Indonesia and Columbia. Once out of the control of the exporters' hands and into the control of the government, these arms are potentially used to kill innocent people and otherwise violate human rights. Moreover, ECA-backed arms transfers are typically onerous debt-producing transactions for countries from the start because they are "non-productive expenditures" that are not associated with economically productive activities that can contribute to debt repayment. Hence, in addition to fostering human rights abuses, these arms transfers can create a vicious cycle that can weaken a country's economic health and in turn fuel more conflict.

Increasing risks they were designed to protect against...The ECAs' "race to the bottom" does more than harm the environment and human communities; it also results in project standards that are so low or non-existent that their absence increases some of the very political risks against which these public agencies were designed to protect. A specific example: the Antamina mine in Peru, insured by the Canadian ECA, Export Development Corporation, experienced civil disturbances such as organized picketing, blockades and strikes that target the project due to its negative impact on local peoples' fishing areas and livelihoods. Another example: ECA backing for the sale of military aircraft to Indonesia, absent adequate controls over their use, contributed to its military and political instability. As a 22 September 1999 "Financial Times" editorial pointed out, careless industrialized country export credit agencies share a major responsibility for "Violence in East Timor and economic disaster in Indonesia." ECAs' support of projects that exacerbate the very risks they were designed to protect against can be compared to a flu medicine that spreads influenza.

Assuming no responsibility...When a country's ECA lacks adequate safeguards and due diligence, which leads to project failures and heightened risks, it is often other branches of their respective governments that must respond. For example, countries' foreign ministries and militaries may be called in to help quell uprising resulting in part from local opposition to ECA-backed projects. Countries' federal treasuries may ultimately cover financial losses stemming from claims by failed ECA project sponsors. The fact that the political and financial cost of project failures and resultant external impacts is borne by parties other than the ECAs and their corporate clients is an indication of a moral hazard that encourages ECAs' harmful activities to continue.

Thanks to ECA support, private commercial banks can shirk much of their responsibilities as well. As a Midland Bank executive in charge of arms deals once described, "You see, before we advance monies to a company, we always insist on any funds being covered by the [UK] Export Credit Guarantee Department...We can't lose. After 90 days, if the Iraqis haven't coughed up, the company gets paid instead by the British Government. Either way, we recover our loan, plus interest of course. Its beautiful."

For their part, ECAs continue to resist change, managing to antagonize other government officials and agencies, including even those sympathetic of the process of corporate globalization. According to European Union Trade Secretary, Pascal Lamy: "I too am frustrated with the ECAs' lack of progress in adopting common environmental policies. Every time any of them move forward a millimeter, they stop to see if anybody else moved."

Indeed, ECAs even resist the Presidents and Prime Ministers of the countries they represent. For example, since 1996 the G-8 has issued three separate mandates for ECA environmental policy reform, and all have gone unfulfilled.

Isolating themselves...ECAs insist that they should not have adopt the same level of environmental and social safeguard policies that other mature international organizations have long accepted as normal, common practice. ECAs argue that they shouldn't have to apply such safeguards because their unique mission makes them different from other international finance institutions like the World Bank Group, different from aid agencies, and different from domestic agencies in their own countries. However, in distancing themselves from virtually every other kind of public agency in the world, ECAs isolate themselves, alienate others, and present a clearer target for citizens and government officials that are concerned about the negative impacts of corporate globalization.

Reason for hope... Despite the slow progress among ECAs in accepting reform, there are hopeful signs on the horizon for change. For example, the Common Approaches, while seriously flawed, represents the first agreement among ECAs on the need for minimal environmental policies. Some individual ECA policies go a bit further. The UK's ECGD, for example, has a set of proactive business principles that extends beyond the environment to encompass sustainable development and human rights concerns. France's ECA, COFACE, will soon discloses all non-military transactions over ten million Euro, and not just those that have high environmental impact.

The ECAs of Japan, Canada and the U.S. now have independent mechanisms for citizens to bring claims of policy violations. NGO engagement of ECAs on specific projects has resulted in some of these projects being shelved and others significantly improved. Still, there remains strong resistance to change by ECAs in many leading countries, and, where change has occurred, close monitoring is required to ensure adequate implementation.

The NGO Campaign
Since 1996, NGOs from many countries have joined forces in an international campaign to reform ECAs. The goals and demands of the campaign are best described in the Jakarta Declaration for Reform of Official Export Credit and Investment Insurance Agencies, endorsed by over 300 NGOs following a May 2000 international ECA reform strategy session in Jakarta, Indonesia. While focusing on the impacts of ECAs in Indonesia, the Jakarta Declaration has a global "call for reform" that includes:

Transparency, public access to information and consultation by ECAs and the OECD ECA Working Party;

Binding common environmental and social guidelines and standards that are no lower and less rigorous than existing international procedures and standards for public international finance such as those of the World Bank Group and OECD Development Assistance Committee;

The adoption of explicit human rights criteria guiding the operations of ECAs;

The adoption of binding criteria and guidelines to end ECA abetting of corruption;

The adoption of a commitment only to finance economically productive investments;

The adoption of comprehensive relief for developing countries for ECA debt.

What you can do:
You can join the international campaign to reform export credit agencies! Bookmark this website and come back for late-breaking news, action alerts and contact fellow campaigners near you.

2006-08-28T21:19:00.000-07:00

Invisible Violence

Ignoring murder in post-coup Haiti
By Jeb Sprague
From Extra!
2006

In an eight-minute report in which she rode in a U.N. armored personnel carrier and extolled the bravery of U.N. soldiers, NPR[Naional Public Radio] correspondent Lourdes Garcia-Navarro cited “human rights organizations” as saying that “things have improved since the Aristide days.”

The NPR report interviewed two members of the U.N. force, one U.S. police trainer, one Haitian police official and Gérard Latortue, the head of Haiti’s unelected interim government. It neglected to quote any victims of the violence perpetrated by the Latortue regime or any human rights organizations critical of the governmental-sponsored violence—perhaps because they might have pointed out that such violence actually increased dramatically during Latortue’s time in power.

After Haiti’s democratically elected leader, President Jean-Bertrand Aristide, was ousted in February 2004, the United States, Canada and France put into place an interim government made up of members of the opposition. Latortue, a wealthy Haitian-American, was installed as the head of this government.

On April 30, 2004, the United Nations, under U.N. Resolution 1542, established the U.N. Stabilization Mission to Haiti, known as MINUSTAH, grouping more than 9,000 military and police personnel from more than 40 countries under the leadership of Brazil and Canada. For more than 26 months, the interim government used former members of Haiti’s disbanded military, along with U.N.-trained paramilitary police, to crack down on the slum-dwelling supporters of the ousted government and of Fanmi Lavalas, the political party which had voted Aristide into office. During this period, the mainstream U.S. press observed a virtual blackout on the state-sponsored violence perpetrated by the U.S.-backed interim Haitian government.

Aristide under fire
For more than two-and-a-half years prior to the 2004 coup, paramilitary rebels led by former Haitian police chief Guy Philippe had attacked Haiti from bases in the Dominican Republic. They killed civilians and government officials, targeted police stations, Haiti’s largest dam and even the presidential palace, all sparking further violence. Government aid embargoes by both the Clinton and Bush administrations further stripped bare the foreign aid–dependent Haitian state.

Opposition-aligned political parties and anti-government “civil society” organizations, however, received tens of millions of dollars in training and support funds during that time from U.S., Canadian and European aid agencies, such as the U.S. Agency for International Development, the National Endowment for Democracy and the Canadian International Development Agency. With the Haitian currency, the gourde, plunging in value, poverty-stricken Haitians struggled under mounting prices and political destabilization.

Even under these conditions, the Aristide government continued to invest in education, medical training and a program to fight human trafficking, albeit with a yearly budget of approximately $300 million for a population of about 8 million. Daring to resist IMF calls to privatize its public industries while raising the minimum wage for Haitian garment industry workers and bringing suit against France for $21 billion in colonial reparations, the Aristide government accumulated powerful enemies.

Further political polarization resulted in violence, doggedly covered by the mainstream U.S. press throughout Aristide’s second administration (2/01–2/04). One of Aristide’s most widely publicized North American critics counted approximately 212 politically motivated deaths during Aristide’s second government, attributing 50 of those killings to the opposition (Michael Deibert, Notes From the Last Testament).

Murderous operations
By contrast, a National Lawyers Guild investigation documented that “800 bodies” had been “dumped and buried” by the morgue in Port-au-Prince in just the first week following the coup; the usual number under Aristide was less than 100 a month. The University of Miami Human Rights Investigation, a 10-day survey during the interim government, discovered piles of corpses in Haiti’s capital of Port-au-Prince—victims of state security and paramilitary forces. World Bank official Carolyn Antsey told this reporter that “thousands died” as a result of the February 2004 events.

Alternative press agencies, human rights organizations and independent investigations, including Amnesty International, the New York University School of Law, L’Agence Haïtienne de Presse (AHP) and Dr. Paul Farmer’s Partners in Health, reported a concerted wave of interim government violence and persecution, while much of the U.S. mainstream press remained virtually silent.

Throughout 2004 and 2005, reports from the non-profit alternative news service Haiti Information Project (HIP) uncovered killings of Lavalas supporters carried out by members of the interim government’s Haitian National Police (HNP). HIP also documented murderous operations, with victims often shot in the head, committed by the Brazilian and Jordanian contingents of MINUSTAH. The University of Miami Human Rights Investigation, conducted by Boston immigration lawyer Thomas Griffin in mid-November 2004, documented mass murder by the HNP, mass graves, cramped prisons, no-medicine hospitals, corpse-strewn streets and maggot-infested morgues—the interim regime’s means of dealing with the supporters of the ousted Aristide government. Nine months after Aristide was removed, Griffin wrote,

U.S. officials blame the crisis on armed gangs in the poor neighborhoods, not the official abuses and atrocities, nor the unconstitutional ouster of the elected president. Their support for the interim government is not surprising, as top officials, including the minister of justice, worked for U.S. government projects that undermined their elected predecessors. . . . U.N. police and soldiers, unable to speak the language of most Haitians. . . resort to heavy-handed incursions into the poorest neighborhoods that force intermittent peace at the expense of innocent residents. The injured prefer to die at home untreated rather than risk arrest at the hospital. Those who do reach the hospital soak in puddles of their own blood, ignored by doctors.

A few mainstream outlets occasionally reported on individual incidents of violence perpetrated by the interim government. The Miami Herald (3/1/05) reported: “Haitian police opened fire on peaceful protesters Monday, killing two, wounding others and scattering an estimated 2,000 people marching through the capital [on February 28] to mark the first anniversary of President Jean-Bertrand Aristide’s ouster. . . . Peacekeepers, whose orders are to support the police, stood by as the attack occurred. The police quickly disappeared, leaving the bodies on the street.”

On March 24, 2005, the Associated Press wrote: “Police opened fire Thursday during a street march in Haiti’s capital to demand the return of ousted President Jean-Bertrand Aristide. Witnesses said at least one person was killed. . . . Associated Press reporters saw police firing into the air and toward protesters.” Another AP dispatch (4/27/05) reported, “Police fired on protesters demanding the release of detainees loyal to Haiti’s ousted president Wednesday, killing at least five demonstrators.” On June 5, 2005, Reuters wrote, “As many as 25 people were killed in police raids on Friday and Saturday in the slums of Haiti’s capital.”

In one of the most graphic accounts to find its way into the mainstream press, the Miami Herald wrote (9/1/05): The police carried assault rifles and wore black masks. The gang they accompanied had brand-new machetes. According to witnesses and U.N. investigators, they stormed into a soccer match during halftime, ordered everyone to lie on the ground and began shooting and hacking people to death in broad daylight as several thousand spectators fled for their lives. . . . Some were handcuffed and shot in the head by police, witnesses said. Others were hacked to death.

Missing the story
But such forthright reporting was exceptional, particularly in the most prominent news outlets. Studying the last two years of coverage by three leading mainstream U.S. newspapers—the New York Times, Los Angeles Times and USA Today—along with National Public Radio, Extra! found that 98.6 percent of the pieces related to Haiti ignored the role of state-sponsored violence and persecution. The few that did mention them provided a few isolated examples, usually working to discredit the documented incidents as partisan political allegations. The human rights reports citing a high number of political prisoners and killings by the interim government’s HNP were rarely cited by the mainstream press.

Following the 2004 coup, press accounts based on interviews with interim government, MINUSTAH and U.S. government officials ensured that an official version of events prevailed. These media outlets demonized Lavalas supporters as “gangs” and “supporters of violence,” and justified the foreign-backed destabilization and overthrow of the constitutional government.

The New York Times published 642 pieces that mentioned Haiti between March 1, 2004 and May 1, 2006—close to one a day. But only four dealt with the violence against and persecution of members and supporters of the former government. While the New York Times reported on the imprisonment of Father Gerard Jean-Juste, a pro-Aristide priest imprisoned for political reasons, it failed to investigate the nearly 1,000 other political prisoners, many underfed and living in dilapidated jails for more than two years without being charged.

Meanwhile, the Los Angeles Times had 244 pieces mentioning Haiti from March 1, 2004 to May 1, 2006, but only five discussed—briefly—the violent persecution of Lavalas supporters. At the same time, the paper managed to cover every single death of a MINUSTAH soldier.

Well over half of all the quotes in L.A. Times articles dealing entirely with Haiti came from official sources. One L.A. Times article covered the imprisonment of former Prime Minister Yvon Neptune (7/5/05), but failed to mention the evidentiary weakness of the charges leveled against him by a U.S.-funded NGO (Baltimore Sun, 5/29/05), or that there were nearly a thousand other political prisoners languishing in the jails of the interim government.

With a smaller international section, USA Today had 13 articles specifically on Haiti between March 1, 2004 and May 1, 2006. Two were critical of the Latortue government, citing its involvement in human rights violations. One of these was followed by a rebuttal from Roger Noriega, then assistant secretary of state for Western Hemisphere affairs and a primary architect of the 2004 coup. USA Today’s pieces also showed an extreme source bias toward U.S. government and U.S.-installed interim government officials. In its articles, seven U.S. government officials, one U.N. official and 16 Haitian government officials were quoted, compared with only one human rights official and one member of Lavalas.

NPR, according to its website, had approximately 79 stories covering Haiti between March 1, 2004 and May 1, 2006. Only three mentioned violence against Lavalas supporters, all of these placing the majority of the blame on pro -Aristide “political and gang” violence, failing to interview victims of state-sponsored or U.N. violence. The role of MINUSTAH and the HNP was almost completely ignored.

The introductions of sources in articles covering Haiti illustrates the reliance on official sources: “diplomats say,” “an anonymous diplomat says,” “a source involved in the palace brainstorming,” “a U.S. diplomat in Port-au-Prince said,” “U.N. officials say,” “Haitian police say,” “USAID workers explain,” “a member of Haiti’s electoral council said,” “the new commander of the U.N. peacekeeping force assured,” “council members said,” “interim officials say,” “State Department officials say,” etc. Rarely, if ever, do we read what the wounded, imprisoned and exiled say—the testimonies that don’t sustain the official story.

2006-08-28T20:27:00.000-07:00

The Wall Street Journal Calls Hugo Chavez
A Threat to World Peace

By Stephen Lendman
From briarpatch

You won’t find commentary and language any more hostile to Hugo Chavez than on the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal. Their June 23 piece by Mary Anastasia O’Grady in the Americas column is a clear, jaw-dropping example. It’s practically blood-curdling in its vitriol which calls Hugo Chavez a threat to world peace. The sad part of it is Journal readers believe this stuff and are likely to support any US government efforts to remove the “threat.”

The O’Grady article is about the elections scheduled to take place in the fall for five non-permanent UN Security Council seats to be held in 2007. One of them will be for the Latin American seat now held by Argentina. The two countries vying to fill the opening are Guatemala and Venezuela, and the other countries in the region will vote on which one will get it. You won’t have to think long to guess the one the US supports - its Guatemalan ally, of course. And why not. For over 50 years its succession of military and civilian governments have all followed the dictates of their dominant northern neighbor. In so doing, they all managed to achieve one of the world’s worst human rights records that hasn’t abated even after the 1996 Peace Accords were signed ending a brutal 36 year conflict. Although the country today is nominally a democratic republic, it continues to abuse its people according to documented reports by Amnesty International.

Amnesty is aware of sexual violence and extreme brutality against women including 665 murders in 2005 gotten from police records; 224 reported attacks on human rights activists and organizations in the same year with little or no progress made investigating them; forced evictions and destruction of homes of indigenous people in rural areas (echoes of Palestine); and no progress by the government and Constitutional Court in seeking justice for decades of genocidal crimes and crimes against humanity committed by paramilitary death squads and the Guatamalan military. The sum of these and other unending abuses led Amnesty to call Guatamala a “land of injustice.”

That record of abuse hardly matters to the Bush administration nor did it bother any past ones either since the CIA fomented a coup in 1954 ousting the country’s democratically elected leader Jacobo Arbenz Guzman. That coup began a half century reign of terror against the country’s indigenous Mayan majority. It was fully supported by a succession of US presidents who were quite willing to overlook it as long as Guatamalan governments maintained a policy of compliance with the US agenda. They all did, and in return received the support and blessing of the US and its corporate giants that continue to suck the life out of that oppressed country.

Guatamala fills the bill nicely for the Bush administration and would be expected to be a close ally in support of US positions that come up for votes in the UN Security Council. Venezuela, on the other hand, is a different story. Since he was first democratically elected in 1998, Hugo Chavez has done what few other leaders ever do. He’s kept his promises to his people to serve their interests ahead of those of other nations, especially the US that’s dominated and exploited Venezuela for decades. He’s served them well, and in so doing engendered the wrath of his dominant northern neighbor that already has tried and failed three times to oust him and is now planning a fourth attempt to do it.

The idea of a Chavez-led government holding a seat on the Security Council does not go down well in Washington, and the Bush administration is leading a campaign to prevent it with aid and support of the kind of attack-dog journalism found in the Wall Street Journal. Honest observers know this newspaper of record for corporate America has a hard time dealing with facts it dislikes so it invents the ones it does to use in their place.

The June 23 editorial is a good example. It extolls the record of the Guatamalan government with its long-standing record of extreme abuse against its own people falsely claiming it’s been “accumulating an impressive record of international cooperation on a variety of UN efforts.” It claims one of its main qualifications is its “active role in international peacekeeping” and that the country is now home to a Central American regional peacekeeping school and training center.

Oddly, it mentions that Guatamalan peacekeepers are now serving in the Democratic Republic of Congo, Sudan and Haiti. What it fails to mention is that those so-called “peacekeepers,” along with those from other countries serving with them, have in large part functioned as paramilitary enforcers, and in that capacity have committed gross human rights abuses against the local people rather than trying to protect them. The WSJ writer surely knows this but didn’t choose to share that information with her readers. Instead she extolls the country’s “democratic credentials.” But readers with any knowledge of recent Guatamalan history surely know that country’s true record is one of extreme violence and abuse against its own people and one no one would think of as a nation representing them democratically.

The WSJ’s June 23 editorial is titled “A Vote for Venezuela Is a Vote for Iran.” The commentary in it is one of the paper’s most extreme diatribes against the Venezuelan leader which would seem to indicate the Bush administration and corporate America are stepping up their attack on Hugo Chavez in advance of when they plan to make their move to oust him. The Journal writer calls him a “strongman” in an “oil dictatorship” leading a government that values “tyranny and aggression” who’ll use his seat and Council presidency when his nation assumes it to support “hostile states” like Iran, Cuba, Sudan and North Korea.

Observers knowledgeable about Venezuela under Chavez would have a hard time containing themselves as the true Chavez record is totally opposite the one the Journal portrays. The Journal writer, of course, knows this, but would never report it in her column. Her employer and the interests it serves wouldn’t be pleased if she did.

While claiming that a Guatamala seat on the Council is a “voice for the region, not its own national interests,” it says Venezuela’s “rests largely on oil ‘diplomacy’ and the capacity to push anti-American buttons around the UN.” It goes on to state “It may seem strange Venezuela has any support in the region. Over the past seven years, its meddling in its neighbors’ politics ‘have’ (even the grammar is wrong) earned it a reputation as a bully. Mr. Chavez is persona non grata in more than a few Latin nations. Many countries are worried about Venezuela’s ‘big spending’ to acquire fighter jets and 100,000 kalisnikovs from Russia.” Readers may need to pause to catch their breath.

What the Journal writer doesn’t explain is far more important than what she does - but she’s doing her job as a servant of the US empire. Chavez’s so-called “oil diplomacy,” in fact, is based on his Bolivarian Alternative of the Americas or ALBA. It’s based on the principles of complementarity (not competition), solidarity (not domination), cooperation (not exploitation) and respect for other nations’ sovereignty free from the control of dominant powers like the US and its large transnational corporations. It’s the mirror opposite of US-style predatory capitalism and the one-sided trade agreements it uses to exploit other countries for its own gain.

The nations participating in ALBA-style agreements are able to operate outside the usual international banking and corporate trading system in their exchange of goods and services so that each country benefits and none loses - just the opposite of the one-sided way the US operates. Because Venezuela is rich in oil, it’s been able to trade that vital commodity with its neighbors who need it, even sell it to them at below-market prices, and get back in return the products and services its trading partners can supply on an equally favorable basis.

It’s a true “win-win” arrangement for participating countries but one that angers the US because it cuts its corporations and big banks out of the process. The Chavez plan is to help his people, not serve the interests of the corporate giants or dominant US neighbor. The WSJ calls this “meddling” and Chavez a “bully.” What glorious meddling it is, in the true spirit of the country’s Bolivarian Revolution, and “bully” to Hugo Chavez for doing it.

As for Chavez’s so-called “big spending” for weapons that has “many countries worried,” one must wonder which countries the Journal writer means. She mentions none, which she surely would have and quoted their officials if, in fact, there were any. The truth, of course, is Hugo Chavez is acting no differently than most all other countries in the region or elsewhere, has expressed no hostility toward any of them, has never invaded a neighbor or threatened to, and is a model of a peace-promoting leader who’s only taking sensible steps to upgrade his small military and protect his nation against a hostile US he has every reason to believe will attack him. But you’ll never find that commentary on the pages of the Wall Street Journal.

The Journal editorial ends in grand style. It demeans the poor countries of the region benefitting from below-market priced Venezuelan oil as likely supporting that country for the Latin American Council seat. It also attacks Argentina for being a “Venezuelan pawn,” calling it “once a haven for Nazis” (the US was and still is), and stating “the country has been so incompetent about managing its ‘resources’ that it too needs charity from Mr. Chavez.” Indeed, Argentina had big financial trouble at the end of the 1990s, but the Journal writer doesn’t explain why. It was because the country became the “poster child” model for US-style neoliberal free market capitalism in the 1990s. It wrecked the economy causing it to collapse into bankruptcy it’s still struggling to recover from.

The Journal writer also attacks Bolivia and Cuba for supporting Chavez but is particularly hostile to the Lula government in Brazil for its siding with the Venezuelan leader. She calls that support “surprising” and accused the Brazilian government of being “Bolivia’s unofficial energy advisor (that) orchestrated the confiscation of Brazilian assets (in Bolivia) recently.” Bolivian president Evo Morales nationalized his nation’s energy resources which Bolivian law clearly states the nation owns. He confiscated nothing, which the Journal writer surely knows but failed to tell her readers. She also mentioned a so-called “eternal Brazilian struggle to prove that it can challenge US ‘hegemony’ in the region (that) trumps the need to regain dignity and protect its investments abroad.” Left out of the commentary is any mention that Argentina, Bolivia, Cuba and Brazil are sovereign states with the right to support whatever policies and other countries they wish without needing US approval to do it.

About the only final comment the Journal writer can make is to claim Guatamala has the “solid backing of the ‘more serious democracies’ in the region - such as Colombia and Mexico.” It’s likely what the writer means by “serious” is those countries’ elections are about as free and fair as ours - meaning, they only are for the power-elites controlling them who arrange the outcomes they want.

The June 23 Wall Street Journal editorial was a typical example of what this newspaper calls journalism and editorial commentary. This writer follows it to learn what the US empire likely is up to. In the case of Hugo Chavez in Venezuela, it’s no doubt up to no good. The continued hostile rhetoric is clearly to signal another attempt to oust the Venezuelan leader at whatever time and by whatever means the Bush administration has in mind. Stay tuned.

2006-08-27T23:37:00.000-07:00

Experimenting With Life

By David Suzuki
From Yes!

I am a geneticist by training. At one time, I had one of the largest research grants and genetics labs in Canada. The time I spent in this lab was one of the happiest periods of my life and I am proud of the contribution we made to science. My introductory book is still the most widely used genetics text in the world.

When I graduated as a geneticist in 1961, I was full of enthusiasm and determined to make a mark. Back then we knew about DNA, genes, chromosomes, and genetic regulation. But today when I tell students what our hot ideas were in '61, they choke with laughter. Viewed in 2000, ideas from 1961 seem hilarious. But when those students become professors years from now and tell their students what was hot in 2000, their students will be just as amused.

At the cutting edge of scientific research, most of our ideas are far from the mark - wrong, in need of revision, or irrelevant. That's not a derogation of science; it's the way science advances. We take a set of observations or data, set up a hypothesis that makes sense of them, and then we test the hypothesis. The new insights and techniques we gain from this process are interpreted tentatively and liable to change, so any rush to apply them strikes me as downright dangerous.

No group of experts should be more aware of the hazards of unwarranted claims than geneticists. After all, it was the exuberance of geneticists early in this century that led to the creation of a discipline called eugenics, which aimed to improve the quality of human genes. These scientists were every bit as clever, competent, and well-meaning as today's genetic engineers; they just got carried away with their discoveries.

Outlandish claims were made by eminent geneticists about the hereditary nature of traits such as drunkenness, nomadism, and criminality, as well as those judged "inferior" or "superior." Those claims provided scientific respectability to legislation in the US prohibiting interracial marriage and immigration from countries judged inferior, and allowed sterilization of inmates of mental institutions on genetic grounds. In Nazi Germany, geneticist Josef Mengele held peer-reviewed research grants for his work at Auschwitz. The grand claims of geneticists led to "race purification" laws and the Holocaust.

Today, the leading-edge of genetics is in the field of biotechnology. The basis of this new area is the ability to take DNA (genetic material) from one organism and insert it into a different species. This is truly revolutionary. Human beings can't normally exchange genes with a carrot or a mouse, but with DNA technology it can happen.

However, history informs us that though we love technology, there are always costs, and since our knowledge of how nature works is so limited, we can't anticipate how those costs will manifest. We only have to reflect on DDT, nuclear power, and CFCs, which were hailed as wonderful creations but whose long-term detrimental effects were only found decades after their widespread use.

Now, with a more wise and balanced perspective, we are cutting back on the use of these technologies. But with genetically modified (GM) foods, this option may not be available. The difference with GM food is that once the genie is out of the bottle, it will be difficult or impossible to stuff it back. If we stop using DDT and CFCs, nature may be able to undo most of the damage - even nuclear waste decays over time. But GM plants are living organisms. Once these new life forms have become established in our surroundings, they can replicate, change, and spread; there may be no turning back. Many ecologists are concerned about what this means to the balance of life on Earth that has evolved over millions of years through the natural reproduction of species.

Genomes are selected in the entirety of their expression. In ways we barely comprehend, the genes within a species are interconnected and interact as an integrated whole. When a gene from an unrelated species is introduced, the context within which it finds itself is completely changed. If a taiko drum is plunked in the middle of a symphony orchestra and plays along, it is highly probable the resultant music will be pretty discordant. Yet based on studies of gene behavior derived from studies within a species, biotechnologists assume that those rules will also apply to genes transferred between species. This is totally unwarranted.

As we learned from experience with DDT, nuclear power and CFCs, we only discover the costs of new technologies after they are extensively used. We should apply the Precautionary Principle with any new technology, asking whether it is needed and then demanding proof that it is not harmful. Nowhere is this more important than in biotechnology because it enables us to tamper with the very blueprint of life.

Since GM foods are now in our diet, we have become experimental subjects without any choice. (Europeans say if they want to know whether GMOs are hazardous, they should just study North Americans.) I would have preferred far more experimentation with GMOs under controlled lab conditions before their release into the open, but it's too late.

We have learned from painful experience that anyone entering an experiment should give informed consent. That means at the very least food should be labeled if it contains GMOs so we each can make that choice.

2006-08-27T22:31:00.000-07:00

China

Amnesty International Letter to the Prime Minister of Canada on the occasion of his upcoming visit to China.
From Amnesty International Canada
2005

The Right Honourable Paul Martin
Prime Minister of Canada
80 Wellington Street
Ottawa, Ontario
K1A 0A2

January 12, 2005

Dear Prime Minister,

We are writing with recommendations with respect to your upcoming trip to China. Amnesty International urges that you use the opportunity of this visit to adopt a more resolute approach to Canada’s relationship with China, with human rights firmly and concretely at its centre.

Amnesty International has been concerned in the past that the Canadian government’s attention to China’s human rights record has been overshadowed by an interest in forging closer trade and investment ties with China. We have therefore welcomed recent indications that your government may be willing to champion human rights more proactively in ongoing dealings and engagement with the Chinese government. Minister of Industry David Emerson has signalled the importance of a strong human rights component to Canada’s relationship with China. Officials with the Department of Foreign Affairs have been receptive to requests that there be a comprehensive dialogue with Canadian civil society groups about the government’s approach to addressing China’s human rights situation.

The time is right. Your recent trip to Libya demonstrates that human rights issues can be pressed alongside business matters. It is our hope that you will build on that example and arrive in China prepared and willing to convey a strong message that respect for human rights is of vital importance to Canada in its relationship with China. Additionally, we urge that you promote a number of critical recommendations as to steps China should take to demonstrate a genuine commitment to improving human rights in the country.

Trade and Human Rights
Despite substantial economic growth, the fundamental human rights of countless women, men and young people are curtailed, undermined and ignored in virtually every corner of the country. Governments, including Canada, have asserted that human rights will inevitably improve as China’s economic ties with other countries deepen and Chinese businesses have more commercial interaction with counterparts from abroad. But human rights cannot be left to chance and market forces. The measures needed to improve China’s human rights record must receive specific and sustained attention: from the Chinese government, from other countries in their bilateral dealings with China, and from multilateral bodies.

The imperative for doing so does not by any means rest only with the particular government officials who carry responsibility for foreign affairs or human rights. It is imperative as well that Canada press an agenda of human rights reform in the course of its business dealings with China. The time to do so is, in our view, opportune. Canadian government and business leaders have often suggested that their ability to take advantage of commercial interaction to influence China’s human rights record is limited, arguing that if Canada presses too forcefully China will simply do business with some other country. However it has recently become clear that China has considerable interest in investing heavily in Canada’s natural resource sector, with reports of possible acquisition of companies such as Noranda and of possible substantial investment in the Alberta oil sands. Canada may well have new leverage with China on the economic front, leverage that can be used to advance human rights.

Prime Minister, your visit to China is a crucial moment to make it clear that for Canada it is not about trade or human rights, rather it is a matter of trade and human rights. We urge you to talk firmly and clearly about human rights, including the recommendations outlined in this letter, whenever you talk about trade. We equally urge you to talk firmly and clearly about trade whenever you talk about human rights. Please urge other government officials and business leaders travelling with you to follow your lead.

We expect that during your time in China there will be discussion of strengthening business ties between Canada and China. Business leaders traveling with you will likely finalize contracts. Amnesty International has urged companies to ensure that they conduct business in China in a manner that promotes and safeguards human rights. We have highlighted concerns that in their pursuit of lucrative trade with China, foreign corporations may be indirectly contributing to human rights violations or at the very least failing to give adequate consideration to the human rights implications of their investments. We have, for instance, documented several foreign companies, including Nortel Networks, which have reportedly provided technology that has been used to censor and control the use of the Internet in China. Many people have been detained in China simply because they have sought to use the Internet as a peaceful means of expression and communication.
Prime Minister, it is critically important that you convey a strong message to the Canadian business community that the government expects Canadians to carry out business in China and elsewhere in ways that avoid any direct or indirect contribution to human rights abuses.

China and the International Human Rights System
In recent years China has enjoyed a more prominent role internationally, both politically and economically, with its accession to the WTO, the hosting of the 2008 Olympic Games and its important natural resource acquisitions around the globe. With this role come responsibilities, including observance of international human rights standards. Unfortunately China has been slow in living up to these responsibilities.

Prime Minister, please urge that the Chinese government accord the very highest priority to meeting its international human rights obligations, and convey strongly that Canada expects no less.

As an example we would like to underline that independent trade unions are not permitted in China. The All China Federation of Trade Unions is not independent, and is subject to the control of the Communist Party. Protection of workers’ rights would be considerably enhanced if China were to remove its reservation on Article 8.1 (a) of the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, relating to the right to form or join independent trade unions. In addition China has not ratified ILO conventions on freedom of association and the rights to collective bargaining. Prime Minister, we request that you urge China to take these two important steps.

Assessment of the human rights situation in China is made difficult, not just by government repression and heavy controls on the media and use of the Internet, but also by lack of access to the country by appropriate international bodies. This has been made abundantly clear during the SARS and HIV/AIDS crises.

Amnesty International has made repeated, unsuccessful requests to conduct a mission to China. Though the UN Special Rapporteur for Education and the Working Group on Arbitrary Detention have recently been in China, crucial visits by other important theme mechanism officials such as the Special Rapporteur on Torture have been repeatedly postponed.

Prime Minister, we urge you to ask the Chinese government to grant better access to China for international non-governmental organizations and the UN human rights system’s thematic mechanisms, as a concrete measure of its stated commitment to improving respect for and protection of human rights.

Human Rights Defenders
In December 2004 Amnesty International published a report on China, “Human Rights Defenders at Risk”. A copy of the report is enclosed. It can also be viewed on-line. The report describes the work of a growing number of individuals in China who act peacefully to defend a wide range of civil, political, economic, social and cultural rights, and the risks they face in carrying out their activities. Serious risks include arbitrary detention, torture and imprisonment. At the very least human rights defenders face threats, harassment and intimidation. Broadly defined provisions in the law allow Chinese authorities to detain and imprison human rights defenders on charges such as “subversion”, “separatism”, or “stealing state secrets”, often for politically motivated reasons.

Chinese human rights defenders known to Amnesty International include:

Li Dan, detained, harassed, routinely obstructed by local officials in his efforts to ensure the right to health of HIV/AIDS sufferers and help for children orphaned by HIV/AIDS;

Zheng Enchong, lawyer, serving a 3-year sentence aimed at preventing him from defending families forcibly evicted from their homes in Shanghai;

Liu Fenggang, imprisoned for passing information abroad about serious human rights abuses against Christians;

Yao Fuxin, worker, Xiao Yunliang, retired worker, sentenced to seven and four years respectively for peacefully defending workers’ rights;

Abdulghani Memetemin, Uighur teacher and journalist, detained for reporting on human rights violations against the ethnic Uighur community, sentenced to nine years for “providing state secrets to a foreign organization”;

The Tiananmen Mothers, detained, harassed or otherwise physically restricted throughout their long campaign for accountability and redress in connection with the Tiananmen crackdown of 4 June 1989.

Amnesty International welcomes the recent inclusion in the Chinese constitution of the phrase “the State respects and protects human rights”. However human rights defenders will not be able to carry out their legitimate activities without fear of reprisal until problems such as inadequate legal safeguards, vaguely defined laws, abuse of power by officials and political interference in the judicial system are fully addressed by the government.

Prime Minister, please urge Chinese authorities to explicitly guarantee the protection of human rights defenders, by implementing measures such as those recommended by Amnesty International. Please encourage Chinese officials to engage in a dialogue with human rights defenders with a view to addressing their legitimately held concerns. We also request that you raise the cases of the human rights defenders mentioned above and ask for the immediate and unconditional release of all human rights defenders imprisoned on account of their peaceful and legitimate human rights activities.
Cases of Concern

Across China, untold numbers of individuals will be experiencing serious human rights violations at the very time you arrive in the country – unjustly imprisoned, at risk of torture, facing possible execution. We hope that you will use this trip as an opportunity to advocate on behalf of many of those individuals. You will hear from several organizations in Canada with suggestions about cases of concern, all of which are deserving of your attention. In addition to the human rights defenders cases highlighted above, Amnesty International is bringing to your attention four further cases that have been of particular concern within Canada and which we hope you will raise with senior Chinese officials.

Tenzin Deleg Rinpoche’s case has resonated in the Tibetan community and beyond. This Buddhist monk and community leader was sentenced to death for “terrorism”, despite severe irregularities in trial procedures as well as evidence that he may have been tortured, had inadequate legal representation and been targeted by local authorities for having led a peaceful protest against excessive logging by local companies. After a two-year suspension of sentence, which has recently expired, there is now an unconfirmed report that his death sentence may not be carried out. Prime Minister, please seek official confirmation that Tenzin Rinpoche will not be executed and press for a review of his trial.

Two cases of concern to Amnesty International are also of special concern to a Chinese human rights defender now living in Canada. Like Wang Jinbo and Dr. Wang Bingzhang, he has described being beaten by other inmates at the instigation of Chinese prison officials and is extremely worried about their health and safety. Wang Jinbo’s health has reportedly deteriorated, not only from the beatings, but from a series of hunger strikes to protest them. He is serving a four-year prison sentence for e-mailing articles overseas which call for a re-evaluation of the 1989 Tiananmen Square pro-democracy protests. Prime Minister, because he has been detained solely for the peaceful exercise of his right to freedom of expression, Amnesty International asks that you call for the immediate and unconditional release of this prisoner of conscience.

Dr. Wang Bingzhang was detained in northern Vietnam and removed to China where he was given a life sentence on “terrorism” charges after an unfair trial. He has recently suffered a stroke while on a hunger strike protesting his ill-treatment in prison and is reportedly not receiving the care he requires. Dr. Wang Bingzhang attended McGill University in Montreal. His elderly parents and other family members reside in Canada. Prime Minister, we urge you to ask Chinese authorities to agree to retry Dr. Wang Bingzhang in proceedings that conform to international fair trial standards. We also ask that you seek assurances that the treatment and medical care of both Dr. Wang Bingzhang and Wang Jinbo is in accordance with international standards.

Finally, a dedicated Amnesty International community group based in Edmonton has been writing petitions, postcards and letters on behalf of Qin Yongmin since his arrest late in 1998. He is serving a 12-year sentence in connection with the formation of an independent human rights group in China. His health is also of concern. Amnesty International considers Qin Yongmin to be a prisoner of conscience. Prime Minister, in support of the fine efforts of Amnesty International members in Edmonton and many other Canadians concerned about this case we urge you to call for Qin Yongmin’s immediate and unconditional release.

Prime Minister, your trip offers an opportunity for a new approach to Canada’s human rights relationship with China, an approach that demonstrates international leadership and which encourages other nations to follow suit. It is time for a strong commitment to human rights to be the hallmark of Canada’s dealings with China, regardless of the issue. Canada’s voice should not be muted when trade is being pursued. Canada should put human rights first.

Sincerely,

Alex Neve
Secretary General
Amnesty International Canada
English branch

Michel Frenette
Directeur General
Amnistie internationale
Section canadienne francophone

2006-08-27T21:28:00.000-07:00

Link Wray

From Wikipedia

Link Wray was a rock and roll guitar player most noted for introducing a new sound for electric guitars in his major hit, the 1958 instrumental "Rumble", by Link Wray and his Ray Men. Before Rumble, electric guitars were used to produce clean sounds and jazz chords. Wray made a new sound by inventing fuzz-tone, adding feedback, distortion and noise. He also pioneered the power chord.

Wray was born in Dunn, North Carolina. It was there that Link first heard slide guitar at age eight from a traveling carnival worker, a black man named "Hambone". Link and his family later moved to Norfolk, Virginia as his father got work in the Navy shipyards. Link served a hitch in the US Army and was a Korean War Veteran. In 1956, his family later moved to Washington DC, and from there, they moved to a farm in Accokeek, Maryland. Link relocated to Arizona with his brother Vernon in the very early 1970's, and later moved to San Francisco in the mid 1970's.

Wray was a veteran of the Korean war, where he contracted tuberculosis that ultimately cost him a lung. His doctors told him that he would never sing again. So Link concentrated on his heavy guitar work. Despite this, on his rare vocal numbers he displays a range equivalent to Clarence "Frogman" Henry.

Career
After discharge from the Army, Wray and his brothers Doug and Vernon Wray, with friends Shorty Horton and Dixie Neale, formed the Lucky Wray and the Lazy Pine Wranglers', later known as the "Lucky Wray and the Palomino Ranch Gang." They had been playing country music and Western swing for several years when they took a gig as the house band on the daily live TV show Milt Grant's House Party, a Washington D.C. version of American Bandstand

The band made their first recordings in 1956 as 'Lucky Wray and the Palomino Ranch Gang' for Starday Records. They also backed many performers, from Fats Domino to Ricky Nelson. At a live gig in Fredericksburg, VA, attempting to work up a backing for The Diamonds' "The Stroll", they came up with the stately, powerful blues instrumental "Rumble", which they originally called "Oddball". The song was an instant hit with the live audience, which demanded four repeats that night. Eventually the song came to the attention of record producer Archie Bleyer of Cadence Records, who hated it, particularly after Wray poked holes in his amplifier's speakers to make the recording sound more like the live version (see "Rocket 88"). However, Bleyer's step-daughter loved it and it was released despite his protest. She was the one who suggested renaming the song "Rumble", because it reminded her of West Side Story.

The menacing sound of "Rumble" (and its title) led to a ban on several radio stations, a rare feat for a song with no lyrics, on the grounds that it glorified 'juvenile delinquency'. Nevertheless it became a huge hit, not only in the United States, but also Great Britain, where it has been cited as an influence on the The Who, among others. Pete Townshend stated in liner notes for a 1974 Wray album, "He is the king; if it hadn't been for Link Wray and 'Rumble,' I would have never picked up a guitar." Jeff Beck, Jimi Hendrix, Marc Bolan, Neil Young and Bob Dylan have all cited Wray as an influence. He was named as one of the hundred greatest guitarists of all time by Rolling Stone magazine, but still has not yet been inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. He is, however, a member of the Rockabilly Hall of Fame.

The band had several more hard-rocking instrumental hits in the late 1950s and early 1960s, including "Rawhide", "Ace of Spades", and "Jack the Ripper", the latter named after a "dirty boogie" dance popular in Baltimore at the time. The dirty boogie dance was among the several dance crazes featured in the 1988 film version of Hairspray.

After his initial hits, Wray's career had periods of retirement followed by renewed popularity, particularly in Europe. He toured and recorded two albums with retro-rockabilly artist Robert Gordon in the late 1970's. The 1980's to the present day saw a large amount of reissues as well as new material. Link's last new recording was 2000's "Barbed Wire". He continued to tour up until four months before he died generally accompanied by his wife Olive Julie, and his "colorful" Irish born road manager John Tynan. His regular backing band from 1996 until the end of his career were bassist Atom Ellis and drummer Danny Heifetz of the band Dieselhed.

His music has been featured in numerous films, including Desperado, Pulp Fiction, Independence Day, 12 Monkeys, This Boy's Life, Blow, Johnny Suede, The Shadow and Pink Flamingos, which is set in Baltimore.

Part Shawnee Indian, Wray frequently spoke his of ancestry in performances and interviews. Three of his compositions bear the names of American Indian tribes: "Shawnee," "Apache," and "Comanche." He didn't write "Apache," the Jerry Lordan instrumental which became a hit in the UK for The Shadows in 1960. However, he recorded one of the better covers 30 years later, somehow finding new life in this mythic, minor-key, guitar/drum dialogue which by then was also associated with everyone from The Ventures to the Incredible Bongo Band to Grandmaster Flash.

He moved to Denmark in the 1980s after meeting and marrying a Danish student, Olive, who had been studying Native American culture. He lived his last years with Olive on a Danish island, touring frequently. Link Wray died November 5, 2005 at his home in Copenhagen. He was 76. He was buried at the Christian Church Cemetery in the eastern Copenhagen suburb of Christianshavn on November 18, 2005.

According to a note added by Deborah Wray on his Rockabilly Hall of Fame page, Link Wray was married four times and is survived by nine children: Fred Lincoln Wray III, Link Elvis Wray, Shayne Wray, Elizabeth (Beth) Wray Webb, Mona Kay Wray Tidwell, Bellinda Wray Muth, Rhonda Wray Sayen, and Charlotte Wray Glass. Print and online obituaries have only mentioned the wife and son he was living with at the time of his death, Olive and Oliver Christian Wray.

The most informative Link Wray site on the web, Wrays Shack 3 Tracks, has documented and displayed photos and videos of two other bands that were his continual touring bands on his very last two tours. He was backed by members of the Seattle band Jet City Fix for the duration of his next to last tour. His very last tour was booked and managed by Marc Mencher of Action Packed Events. Link's drummer on that tour was Gary Weiss of the rockabilly band Vibro Champs and he was backed on bass by Dale Hawkins' current bassist. The Vibro Champs website also features photos and video of Link's last touring band.

Robert Ehrlich, the governor of Maryland, declared January 15th to be Link Wray Day.

On March 25, 2006 Link was honored by "The First Americans in the Arts" with the Life Time Achievement Award.

On June 8, 2006, Link was inducted into the Native American Music Hall of Fame.

2006-08-27T20:47:00.000-07:00

The high cost of the oil sands

By Sandra Mooibroek
From
Citizens for Public Justice

The world is running out of oil and gas. More accurately, the world’s supply of easily obtainable crude oil and natural gas is quickly being depleted. What fossil fuels remain are located under an ocean floor, in remote and inaccessible corners of the globe, or are otherwise extremely difficult to extract or convert into usable forms.

Canada’s situation is a case in point. Extraction of established Canadian reserves of light crude and natural gas outstripped new discoveries a quarter century ago. The remaining life of Canada’s conventional reserves is now less than seven years for oil and nine years for natural gas. Unofficially, we’re counting on unconventional reserves: the synthetic crude that can be made from tar sands to replace conventional oil, coal bed methane to replace natural gas. But these fuels may not be the salvation that’s anticipated.

Ecologically destructive
Oil derived from tar sand bitumen, a heavy form of crude which must be upgraded through a number of steps, comes with a hefty ecological price. The Pembina Institute has found that for each barrel of synthetic oil, an average of two tonnes of muskeg and trees is removed, two tonnes of tar sand are hauled, and three barrels of water heated by 21.3 metres (or 134 barrels) of natural gas are consumed. That’s for surface accessible bitumen that can be mined. For deeply buried bitumen, the destruction of boreal forest is less severe, but consumption of natural gas and water is doubled.

The accompanying release of climate-changing gases is triple that for an equivalent barrel of conventional oil. Depending on the technology employed, projected growth in oil sands development will result in up to 100 megatonnes of annual greenhouse gas emissions, making Canada’s commitment to Kyoto reductions ever more difficult to achieve and climate change impacts ever more certain.

Even at current rates of synthetic oil production, the process consumes enough natural gas every day to heat my house and 10,000 others like it for a year. Without a technological leap, projected future production could consume the entire output of the proposed Mackenzie Valley pipeline. The long term impacts on the boreal forest under which the tar sands lie are harder to grasp, but no less disturbing. Rivers are being diverted, wetland complexes drained and thin boreal forest soils are being stripped away, carving up huge tracts of wildlife and bird habitat and replacing natural ecosystems with lakes of toxic tailings.

Is it really beneficial?
But the lure of jobs and economic growth has pushed environmental concerns aside. A barrel of syncrude oil is profitable to produce as long as it’s priced above $30 or so. Transportation is what most of the oil is being used for, and enough drivers are willing to pay far more than $30 for the 490 km that that barrel of oil will take a Chevy Avalanche.

With prices expected to remain high and spike higher, oil companies are racing to stake a claim and production is expanding feverishly. Both federal and provincial governments are eager to share in the excitement, but actual economic benefits for most Canadians may be illusory.

On paper, federal and Alberta taxes plus royalties combine to reap over 50% of total oil revenues. Under a 1997 federal-provincial agreement, however, oil sands projects are eligible for a plethora of tax deductions and a reduced royalty rate of just 1% of revenues until all capital costs are recovered. From an investment perspective, it’s a sweet deal. As long as the oil sands projects keep expanding, the revenues paid to Albertans and the Canadian treasury will drop with declining production of conventional gas and oil.

Analysts at the Pembina Institute estimate that in the 1995-2002 period, Alberta received less than 70% of the revenues it could have collected. In today’s terms, that annual shortfall would amount to $6 billion; with synthetic oil production replacing conventional, the shortfall will climb even higher.

Where has the money gone? In a discussion paper released in December 2005, Alberta’s Parkland Institute argues that while corporate equity in the fossil fuel sector and Alberta’s Gross Domestic Product have both risen dramatically in the past 10 years, average family income in Alberta (in constant dollars) has stagnated. Given that majority ownership of this sector is foreign-based, they conclude that a “significant portion of Canada’s energy wealth is flowing out of the country.”

Nonetheless, Canada appears determined to be gas pump jockey to the U.S., even if it means turning northern Alberta into an environmental sacrifice zone. (Canada sends 99% of our crude oil exports to the United States.)

Under NAFTA rules, Canada is prohibited from reducing the proportion of energy that we export to the United States or Mexico. Since the accord was signed, the percentage of both natural gas and oil exports to the United States has increased by 50%. Canada is effectively locked into an agreement under which almost two-thirds of production must be exported, even if imports are unable to meet domestic demand.

The paradox of the Promised Land

There are alternatives
Canada needs an energy security policy calling for a drastic reduction in consumption, a renegotiation or an exit from NAFTA and an end to subsidization of the petroleum sector. These three steps would not only extend the lifetime of our dwindling crude oil and natural gas reserves, they would generate nation-wide jobs and economic benefits.

How so? National programs to make buildings more energy-efficient, promote public transit and stimulate investment in renewable energy create jobs in a range of sectors including construction, transportation, finance, real estate, metal fabrication and electricity generation. A sharp reduction in consumption would lead to increased industrial efficiency and innovation, improving the competitiveness of Canadian business. And fuel efficiency standards that provide sustainability for the auto industry would also save billions in air pollution-related health costs.

A study conducted by the David Suzuki Foundation on “the bottom line on Kyoto” concluded that the only sectors that would experience “small net declines” in employment due to these sorts of climate change mitigation measures are oil and gas, government and retail. A few jobs in the oil patch or warm homes, a healthy environment and more sustainable jobs for all Canadians? There is a better choice.

CPJ member and chemist Sandra Mooibroek endeavours to live sustainably in Kitchener-Waterloo. More of her articles are available at www.cpj.ca/otherwork/Environment. You can track the environmental impacts of the tar sands at www.OilSandsWatch.org.

Why We Need To Nationalize Oil and Gas
From Canadian Dimension
2006

As most experts agree, the production of natural gas and oil is nearing its peak. At the same time, the demand for both commodities is rising — and rising rapidly — as both China and India begin to experience their industrial revolutions.

The first thing that this unprecedented new situation of approaching peak oil and gas has meant is that prices have gone through the roof. What’s more, it’s very likely that these prices are going to stay sky-high for the foreseeable future and beyond.

Price Regulations?
Some people are now arguing for price regulations. This is an understandable reaction, but it ignores what is actually causing the problem: the law of supply and demand.

But if past experience is any guide, the law of supply and demand will eventually have its way. The situation of higher prices won’t be noticeably changed — even by the attempt to regulate prices.

It has been pointed out that from an ecological point of view there are potentially beneficial effects to higher energy prices: they force consumers to search for alternatives. But it’s a very mixed benefit, particularly for the majority, who depend upon the fossil-fuel-driven infrastructure to get food and clothing into the stores and oil and gas to our homes. Rising consumer goods and household energy bills bite the working and middle classes harder than they do the wealthy.

Moreover, currently understood energy alternatives are not without their own problems. Hydroelectric and coal power take terrible environmental tolls. And, as they currently exist, solar and wind power rely upon industrialized, high-energy-input hardware. For many leaders, too, “alternative energy sources” is simply code language for more nuclear power.

In any event, it’s not true that the law of supply and demand brings about ecological benefits. The truth is that the free play of market forces sends entirely the wrong signal to oil and gas producers. After all, it’s only financial barriers that discourage rapacious exploration and development. When prices fall, so too do speculative ambitions. When they rise together with sales, producers accelerate exploration, production and export. Alberta is a good example. These conditions also push producers into environmentally harmful projects.

What’s the Solution, Then?
To achieve a genuinely workable, long-term solution to the issue of rising oil and gas prices, we need two things:

The first is a massive and immediate shift into transportation systems that save on energy consumption. We need big and multiple injections of funds into public transit systems and railway infrastructure.

The second is big and multiple injections of funds into the development of alternative energy sources. We cannot continue our drug-like dependence on fossil fuels indefinitely. Of course, all this will involve hundreds of billions of dollars of investment.

To raise this kind of money, there is only one conceivable funding source: the oil and gas producers themselves. We will have to draw upon the huge profits being extracted from consumers every day from the sale of petroleum and natural gas. And the only way we are going to do this — the only way we can take control of the mega-profits needed to fund this energy revolution — is by nationalizing the oil and gas industries. We will have to ensure that their huge surpluses are held in the public sphere.How will this massive takeover be financed? By exchanging long-term government bonds equivalent in value to the worth of the industry.

Where There’s A Will…
Some might say that the political will to undertake this giant inroad on what is at the moment private property does not exist. However, recent public-opinion polls suggest otherwise.

An August public-opinion poll by Léger Marketing, for example, reveals that almost half of Canadians favour nationalizing oil firms. More precisely, 49 per cent of respondents wanted petroleum resources nationalized, while 43 per cent said they would like to see the gas companies in public hands. This support varied from province to province, of course. But while typically progressive Quebec led the way with 61 per cent, even in oil-rich Alberta, 36 per cent came out in favour of nationalization.

Of course, besides taking these companies and their resources into public hands, Canada will need to cut back its current exports to the U.S. At the moment, over half of Canada’s production is going south, and the proportion is rising. Conserving production for mostly domestic use will provide a longer lead time to bring about wiser alternatives, offering us some breathing room before the energy situation reaches crisis proportions.

Naturally, in order to cut back drastically on U.S.-bound exports, let alone nationalize the industry, it will in turn be necessary to abrogate NAFTA. In our November/December Dimension editorial, we set out some more reasons for giving notice.

All very fine and well, you might say — but just how would a nationalized oil-and-gas industry deal with the current crisis differently?

In the first place, in a nationalized scheme, unexpected price fluctuations can be more easily buffered by the state. The beneficiaries will be those whose livelihoods depend upon the availability of oil and gas, rather than the big energy companies.

A nationalized industry can also be both mandated to conserve energy and ordered to divert money into R&D for sustainable alternatives. It will have no fears about competing with its own new energy-saving products. Moreover, a state-run industry can weigh the benefits and costs of exploration against the interests of citizens, instead of merely return on investment.

Granted, this is a made-in-Canada solution for what is in reality a world-wide energy crisis. But we hasten to add that other countries — Venezuela, for example — are offering their own solutions. Clearly Canada must stand with other nations against the U.S. solution — an endless series of wars in the Middle East and other oil-producing regions to maintain an iron grip on the world’s increasingly scarce supply of oil.

2006-08-27T11:02:00.001-07:00

The Fate of the Ocean (excerpt)

Our oceans are under attack, and approaching a point of no return. Can we survive if the seas go silent?

By Julia Whitty
From Mother Jones Magazine
2006

The 25 years I’ve spent at sea filming nature documentaries have provided a brief yet definitive window into these changes. Oceanic problems once encountered on a local scale have gone pandemic, and these pandemics now merge to birth new monsters. Tinkering with the atmosphere, we change the ocean’s chemistry radically enough to threaten life on earth as we know it. Making tens of thousands of chemical compounds each year, we poison marine creatures who sponge up plastics and PCBs, becoming toxic waste dumps in the process. Carrying everything from nuclear waste to running shoes across the world ocean, shipping fleets spew as much greenhouse gases into the atmosphere as the entire profligate United States. Protecting strawberry farmers and their pesticide methyl bromide, we guarantee that the ozone hole will persist at least until 2065, threatening the larval life of the sea. Fishing harder, faster, and more ruthlessly than ever before, we drive large predatory fish toward global extinction, even though fish is the primary source of protein for one in six people on earth. Filling, dredging, and polluting the coastal nurseries of the sea, we decimate coral reefs and kelp forests, while fostering dead zones.

I’m alarmed by what I’m seeing. Although we carry the ocean within ourselves, in our blood and in our eyes, so that we essentially see through seawater, we appear blind to its fate. Many scientists speak only to each other and studiously avoid educating the press. The media seems unwilling to report environmental news, and caters to a public stalled by sloth, fear, or greed and generally confused by science. Overall, we seem unable to recognize that the proofs so many politicians demand already exist in the form of hindsight. Written into the long history of our planet, in one form or another, is the record of what is coming our way.

“The root cause of this crisis is a failure of both perspective and governance,” concludes the seminal Pew Oceans Commission’s 2003 report to the nation. “We have failed to conceive of the oceans as our largest public domain, to be managed holistically for the greater public good in perpetuity.” Instead, we have roiled the waters, compromising the equilibrium that allowed our species to flourish in the first place, and providing ourselves with a host of challenges that will test our clever brains and our opposable thumbs as never before. Afloat on arks of dry land, we sail toward a stormy future.

THE GOAL OF EXPEDITION OC 417 is to sail from Cape Cod two-thirds of the way to Bermuda along a 321-mile-long line known as a transect. We are scheduled to sail outbound nonstop for 36 hours until, 385 miles to the southeast, we’ll begin to work our way back, sampling waters from the surface to the abyss at 22 predetermined stations, identifiable only by their latitude and longitude. In the course of a week, we’ll measure temperature, oxygen, salinity, and chlorofluorocarbons in the water column—the equivalent of taking the ocean’s pulse, listening to its lungs, looking at its tongue, and making it say “ah.”

According to the charts, we are sailing the North Atlantic. But this is a relatively arbitrary marker. In fact, there is only one ocean on Earth: a world ocean encompassing 70.78 percent of our planet. The ancient Greeks sensed the ocean was one and portrayed their water god Okeanos (Oceanus) as a river circling the world. Three thousand years later, modern oceanographers confirm the world ocean is connected in riverlike fashion; using a sche- matic known as the ocean conveyor belt, they portray Okeanos as a Möbiuslike ribbon winding through all the ocean basins, rising and falling, and stirring the waters of the world. In this manner, the surface waters we sail in the North Atlantic are destined to flow to the Arctic, to grow colder and sink, and, once at the bottom, to reverse flow southward through the Atlantic, eventually converging with the Antarctic Circumpolar Current, before surfacing in the Northeast Pacific 1,200 years from now. Centuries later, they will arrive back in the North Atlantic, having truly traveled the seven seas.

Or maybe they won’t. Things are changing.

In 2005, researchers from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography and the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory found the first clear evidence that the world ocean is growing warmer. In a novel study combining computer modeling and field observations, and screening for natural weather effects and the impact of volcanic gases, they discovered the top half-mile of the ocean has warmed dramatically in the past 40 years as a result, clearly and simply, of human-induced, rising greenhouse gases. “The statistical significance of these results is far too strong to be merely dismissed and should wipe out much of the uncertainty about the reality of global warming,” reported researcher Tim Barnett of Scripps, who suggests the Bush administration convene a Manhattan-style Project to figure out what mitigations might still be possible.

One symptom already manifesting is the melting of the Arctic. Last year set a fourth consecutive record low for ice cover in the Arctic, and scientists now predict the summertime Arctic will be ice-free before the end of this century—a course likely exacerbated by the simultaneous decrease of wintertime Arctic ice. Consequently, the world’s 22,000 polar bears, along with their primary prey, the ringed seals who likewise den on sea ice, are likely to suffer localized or even overall extinction [see “On Thin Ice” by Marla Cone]. Yet the eight nations surrounding the Arctic are rushing to capitalize on the resources emerging from the ice, grabbing for a quarter of the world’s undiscovered oil and natural gas; a trove of gold, diamonds, copper, and zinc; the earth’s last pristine fishing grounds, which are shifting north as fish follow colder waters; and the fabled Northwest Passage and other Arctic travel routes. Even as some governments deny the existence of global warming, they are racing to map the Arctic seafloor and bolster their territorial claims for exclusive economic zones no one cared about 15 years ago.

Reinforcing these entrepreneurial dreams is the reality of a feedback loop already in motion. Compact sea ice, with its high albedo (whiteness), reflects 80 percent of the sun’s heat back into space, while seawater, with a low albedo, absorbs 80 percent. The reduction in the ratio of ice to water further increases the warming of the ocean, which rises from thermal expansion, creating an even greater surface area of water, which promotes further warming and further melting, nibbling away at even more sea ice. In other words, the melting will be difficult if not impossible to reverse anytime soon.

Along with thermal expansion, melting ice also adds freshwater to the ocean. Until recently, many researchers believed this freshening would have a negligible impact on sea levels or ocean chemistry. But the effects are proving unpredictable. In the Antarctic Peninsula, lubricated by summer temperatures registering 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit warmer than 40 years ago, ancient ice shelves are disintegrating, enabling the glaciers behind them to surge into the sea with a rapidity startling to scientists. Consequently, fears are growing that if the West Antarctic Ice Sheet, currently contained by the Ronne and Ross ice shelves, ever surges, it would raise sea levels by as much as 23 feet worldwide.

Add enough warming, evaporation, and freshwater, however, and there is potential for enormous change on an accelerated schedule, including the possibility that the Atlantic MOC could shut down faster than expected, which would make Europe colder, possibly cold enough to grow new glaciers. Hollywood sensationalized this scenario in the film The Day After Tomorrow and was widely accused of scaremongering. Yet John Schellnhuber, research director of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research in the United Kingdom, calls the Atlantic MOC one of the earth’s most critical tipping points, which, if triggered, could initiate rapid changes across the entire planet.

No one knows if we’re instigating another ice age. But what we do know is that the tropical ocean is saltier than it was 40 years ago, and the polar ocean fresher. Furthermore, this salinity differential accelerates the earth’s freshwater cycle—creating faster rates of evaporation and precipitation, which release more water vapor into the atmosphere, thereby increasing the greenhouse effect and invigorating the global warming that caused the whole problem in the first place.

Warmer Waters, Stronger Storms
Adding to these perils is the fact that as the CTD descends, it enters a series of water masses of different density gradients. These are the underwater layers of the ocean conveyor belt, each flowing like a powerful river with its own direction and velocity—a reality made obvious topside when suddenly the cable whips through the water as if hooked to a giant fighting fish.

Curry calls it blue-collar oceanography, and the basics of it—big ships, GPS, depth finders, gyrocompasses, winches, cranes, and miles of cable—are the stuff of modern seafaring, whether for science, transport, harvest, or plunder. Technology drives human effort in the sea the way the wind once did, allowing us to access remote realms for extended periods with such proficiency that in the course of one human lifetime we have learned to pirate every molecule of the sea’s supposedly inexhaustible worth.

THE TECHNOLOGIES WE USE ABOARD Oceanus are the same employed by at least some of the 4 million commercial fishing vessels plying the ocean at any given moment. Not long ago, the growth of seagoing technologies paralleled the growth in the annual global fish harvest. But 2000 marked a decisive turning point when the global wild fish catch, which grew 500 percent between 1950 and 1997, peaked at 96 million tons despite better technologies and intensified efforts by fishers. Thereafter it has fallen by more than 3 percent per capita a year, declining to 31 pounds per capita in 2003, a rate last seen 40 years ago. Even more alarming, a 2001 reassessment published in Nature suggests the annual catch has actually been falling far longer, about 400,000 tons a year since 1988, a fact concealed by China’s misreporting of its annual catch.

Paradoxically, fishing has become so efficient as to be supremely inefficient. One of the biggest culprits is long-lining, in which a single boat sets monofilament line across 60 or more miles of ocean, each bearing vertical gangion lines that dangle at different depths, baited with up to 10,000 hooks designed to catch a variety of pelagic (open ocean) species. Each year, an estimated 2 billion longline hooks are set worldwide primarily for tuna and swordfish—though long-liners inadvertently kill far more other species that take the bait, including some 40,000 sea turtles, 300,000 seabirds, and millions of sharks annually. Thrown dead or dying back into the ocean, these unwanted species (bycatch) make up at least 25 percent of the global catch, perhaps as much as 88 billion pounds of life a year.

All told, pelagic longlines are the most widely used fishing gear on earth, and are deployed in all the oceans except the circum- polar seas. But whereas they once caught 10 fish per 100 hooks set, today they are lucky to catch one, evidence the seas are running dry. Abetting their destructiveness are the trawl fisheries, which drag nets across every square inch of the bottom of the continental shelves every two years, trawling some regions many times a season. By razing vital benthic (seafloor) ecosystems, trawlers,(the brutal equivalent of fishing the seafloor with bulldozers) level an area 150 times larger than the total area of forests clearcut on land each year.

Adding to longlines and trawlers is the technology of drift nets, the nearly invisible curtains of monofilament blindsiding the life of the ocean. In the North Atlantic, shark and monkfish nets up to 150 miles long are set 1,600 feet below the surface, then left untended to sail and randomly ensnare life. In the course of operations in stormy seas, many nets are lost or abandoned—though they continue to fill with prey, which attracts predators, which likewise become trapped, die, and decay, attracting more predators. Composed of nonbiodegradable synthetics, deepwater ghostnets fish with nightmarish efficiency for years.

Fishing provides a vivid illustration of the differences in our attitudes toward the land and the sea. Nowadays we refrain from indiscriminately mowing down wildlife for food; imagine slaughtering lions by the hundreds or bears by the hundredweight, along with all the antelope, deer, wolves, raccoons, and wildebeest around them, in government-funded operations, no less. Yet that’s what we do at sea, with the world’s nations subsidizing 25 to 40 percent of total global fishing revenues. The National Marine Fisheries Service estimates that $8 billion in revenue and 300,000 jobs could be created simply by better management of U.S. fish stocks, not by continuing subsidies of fishers, their boats, and their gear.

Despite its promise, aquaculture is no better, since three pounds of wild fish are caught to feed every pound of farmed salmon sent to market—creating entirely new fisheries, which deplete hitherto unscathed wild fish populations, including krill, a critical corner-stone of the marine food web and essential to the survival of Antarctic species such as penguins. Furthermore, farmed salmon become severely contaminated by pollutants in their feed chow; some European aquacultured salmon is so badly tainted that people have been advised to consume it only once every five months.

The truth is that the full consequences of modern fishing methods are brutal and far-reaching, and they were not really understood before the release of a seminal study published in 2003, detailing how industrialized fisheries, in a manner akin to virulent pathogens, typically reduce the community of large fish by 80 percent within the first 15 years of exploitation. Co-authors Boris Worm and Ransom Myers of Dalhousie University in Nova Scotia concluded that in the wake of decades of such onslaughts, only 10 percent of all large fish (tuna, swordfish, marlin) and groundfish (cod, halibut, skate, and flounder) are left anywhere in the ocean. Their study was based on factors modern fisheries managers ignore: historical data; in this case, the catch reports from Japanese long-liners dating from the 1950s, when the global tuna catch was less than 500,000 tons, compared with 3.7 million tons today.

Apparently no one really remembers how many big fish used to inhabit the sea or how big they got. “The few blue marlin left today,” says Myers, “reach one-fifth of the weight they once had. In many cases, the fish caught today are under such intense fishing pressure, they never even have the chance to reproduce.” The pressure stems from a combination of economics (a single large bluefin tuna can command $100,000 on the Tokyo fish market) and ever-evolving technologies, and this scenario plagues the oceans: The more rare and endangered a species, the more money it generates and the more people who are willing to pursue it. While rich fishers pursue dwindling species with the aid of technology, poor fishers do it through brutal ingenuity, including using poison and explosives, leading to what’s known as Malthusian overfishing—when a fishery is overwhelmed yet fishing continues anyway, in ever more destructive and desperate ways, until the complete decimation of species and their ecosystems. Poor fishers do this largely to meet the demand of rich nations—to supply aquarium fish for the United States and live food fish for Hong Kong. Since demand grows in direct relationship to a species’ decline, many fish are targeted during their spawning aggregations, thus wiping out entire adult populations along with all their potential progeny. In this way, some coral reef species have been locally extinguished in the course of only one or two spawning events.

The past has much to teach us about what we’ve forgotten. By analyzing 10,000 historical restaurant menus from Boston to San Francisco, a project called the History of Marine Animal Populations, out of the University of Southern Denmark, finds that lobster was so abundant in the 19th century that middle-class Americans snubbed it as food for the poor. Likewise, the day may be near when Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea is seen less as a story of Santiago’s plight than of a mighty fish that once roamed the seas and no longer does.

IT USED TO BE, in the heyday of wildlife filmmaking, that you could chum off the California coast for a few hours or a day or two and attract dozens of full-size (eight-foot) blue sharks, along with a gaggle of youngsters and the occasional, powerful (10-foot) mako or two. But the last time I tried this, only two baby blue sharks, all of four feet long, appeared after days of chumming. In the interval between 1980, when cameramen were forced to work with safety divers to fend off more sharks than they knew what to do with, and 1991, when we were obliged to film the baby sharks close-up with wide-angle lenses to make them look bigger, long-liners, trawlers, and drift netters came to the west coast.

Sharks are killed incidentally in large numbers by all three forms of industrial fishing, but they are also targeted by their own fishery, primarily for soup. Once a rarefied foodstuff of the elite, today sharkfin soup is an affordable luxury for the Chinese nouveau riche who wish to prove their wealth by ordering a $100 bowl of glutinous cartilage flavored with chicken broth. At expensive eateries across Asia, middle-class diners slurp this pricey food, even as the World Conservation Union adds ever more shark species to its Red List of Threatened Species.

Fishing fleets kill an estimated 100 million sharks per year across the globe. In the Gulf of Mexico, the number of oceanic whitetip sharks has plunged 99 percent since the 1950s, driving this once common pelagic species into virtual extinction. A study of the North Atlantic found that overall shark populations have declined more than 50 percent since 1986. Sadly, sharks are slow breeders, with most delivering small litters (some only twins) after reaching a late sexual maturity (some at 25 years old), after which they typically deliver litters at three-year intervals. The results of such slow reproduction make recovery from overfishing notoriously difficult. When porbeagle sharks were overfished by Europeans in the 1960s, the species struggled for the next 30 years, finally achieving some semblance of health in the 1990s, only to become the target of U.S. and Canadian fleets that fished it into commercial extinction in three short years.

The end of big fish in the sea is more than an aesthetic loss. Marine ecologist Mark Hixon of Oregon State University has published widely on coral reef ecosystems, and his work illustrates how biodiversity and community stability thrive in the presence of predators and competitors. The removal of either or both destabilizes the remaining species. Hence big sharks, tuna, swordfish, and halibut are more than picturesque giants; they are keystone species that play greater roles in maintaining ecosystem function than seems obvious based on the size of their population.

Hixon also argues that not all spawners are created equal, and that the most valuable members of fish populations are what he and his colleagues call the Big Old Fat Female Fish (BOFFFs), who produce better-quality and -quantity eggs than younger females. Yet fisheries managers continue to promote the targeting of older fish, followed by younger fish, until none can grow old. “This means that BOFFFs are disappearing,” says Hixon. “Here on the West Coast, 7 out of 17 well-assessed species of rockfish have been declared overfished since 1999, and we believe that at least part of the explanation for these stock collapses is the result of our failure to appreciate the value of Big Old Fat Female Fish.”

Hixon tells me that we need a Kuhnian paradigm shift in fisheries management. “Current managers learned single-species management, and they’re resistant to changing that, even though it seldom works.” A scientific consensus signed by him and 218 other scientists and policy experts pleads for an updated approach: “From a scientific perspective, we now know enough to improve dramatically the conservation and management of marine systems through the implementation of ecosystem-based approaches.”

As on land, protecting places is the best way to preserve life. In 2003, the World Conservation Union listed 102,102 protected areas on earth. But only 4,116 of these were protected marine areas, preserving less than 0.5 percent of the world ocean, whereas 11.5 percent of the land surface has been granted some form of sanctuary. To reach parity, we need to add 23 times as many marine reserves and offshore national parks, or 10 times more total area—and perhaps even more, since the liquid medium of the ocean is more in-terconnected, and the fate of its disparate realms more intertwined than here.

RACHEL CARSON wrote of the sea that “in its mysterious past it encompasses all the dim origins of life and receives in the end, after, it may be, many transmutations, the dead husks of that same life. For all at last return to the sea—to Oceanus, the ocean river.” We return to the sea, too, in various husks, including in the form of atmospheric emissions. Sweden, for example, calculates that its populace of 8.9 million carries 2.8 tons of mercury fillings in their mouths, most of which is destined eventually to go airborne in crematoriums.

Crematory emissions are a small but growing percentage of the total global mercury pollution, the vast majority of which enters the foodweb as a biologically active derivative of the inorganic mercury released by the smokestacks of the coal and chlorine industries. Oxidized in the atmosphere and piggybacking on raindrops, this form of mercury eventually settles to the bottom of oceans and lakes, where it is converted to dangerous methylmercury by aquatic bacteria, which are eaten by plankton, which are eaten by fish, and bigger fish—with each subsequent meal bioaccumulating in higher levels until apex predators such as tuna and whales carry mercury levels as much as 1 million times higher than the waters around them.

As do we. Epidemiological studies show that mercury levels among Arctic peoples are high enough to cause neurobehavioral effects, while a Hong Kong study revealed that 10 percent of the region’s high school students suffer mercury poisoning from eating tuna and swordfish. The European Union warns pregnant women to limit their consumption of both tuna and swordfish because of brain damage to their unborn children, and the U.S. Food and Drug Administration warns pregnant women, lactating women, and young children not to eat swordfish, shark, tilefish, or king mackerel, though the powerful tuna lobby succeeded in keeping tuna off that list. The EPA now estimates at least one in eight American women of childbearing age has unsafe levels of mercury in her blood, and as many as 600,000 of the 4 million babies born in the United States in 2000 were exposed to unacceptable levels because their mothers ate a diet rich in fish (in a continuation of bioaccumulation, the level of mercury in a fetus’ blood can be 70 percent higher than its mother’s). Yet the Bush administration, circumventing the Clean Air Act, has enabled coal-fired power plants to delay curtailing significant mercury emissions until 2018.

IT’S MIDNIGHT OVER THE GULF OF MEXICO, the skies stripped of clouds and glittering with stars as 25-knot winds blow down from the north. For most of the residents of the bayou country of southern Louisiana, these are welcome winds; only a month has passed since Hurricane Katrina made landfall, and 11 days since Hurricane Rita, and these northerlies are cold and dry enough to dismantle any additional tropical storms from the top down. It’s also blowing sufficiently hard that Captain Craig LeBoeuf decides to sail R/V Pelican through the Intracoastal Waterway and out into the Gulf at Morgan City, so that dawn will light our way along the shallow shelf where more than 100 hurricane-broken oil rigs and drilling structures foul the waters.

This once was one of the most prolific bodies of water on earth, a place where the outflow from the Mississippi River introduced freshwater nutrients into a deepwater environment. But long before Katrina, the Gulf had become one of the world’s most polluted marine ecosystems, with mercury loads among the highest ever recorded, including levels in blue marlin 30 times above what the EPA deems safe for human consumption. An average of 10 tons of mercury comes down the Mississippi every year, with close to another ton added by the offshore drilling industry. Equally alarming, a sizable portion of the Gulf is so biologically dysfunctional on a seasonal basis that it’s known as a dead zone—the largest such area in the United States and the second largest on the planet, measuring nearly 8,000 square miles in 2001, an area larger than New Jersey.

Dead zones occur wherever oceanic oxygen is depleted below the level necessary to sustain marine life, a result of eutrophication, or the release of excess nutrients into the sea, usually from agricultural fertilizers. Fifty years ago no one imagined that the Green Revolution would prove so lethal to the world ocean. But now we know that chemical fertilizers cause plants to bloom in the sea as miraculously as they do on land, with deadly consequence. It’s no coincidence that almost all of the nearly 150 (and counting) dead zones on earth lie at the mouths of rivers.

The Gulf of Mexico suffers the downstream effects of the mighty Mississippi, which drains 41 percent of the contiguous United States, including all the intensively farmed breadbasket. This outflow delivers enough nitrogen to stimulate explosions of plankton and microalgae, some of which form the red tides that produce major fish kills and dolphin or manatee die-offs. At even higher densities, as these plankton die en masse and settle to the bottom, they fuel a bloom of bacterial decomposers, which consume all the available oxygen in the water. The resulting condition, known as hypoxia, strikes the Gulf whenever oxygen levels fall below two milligrams per liter—an annual summertime event in the warming waters of the Gulf since the 1970s. For sea life, it’s as if all the air were suddenly sucked out of the world. Those creatures that can swim or walk away fast enough may survive. Those that can’t, die.

But for a first-time visitor to the northern Gulf of Mexico, this is far too fascinating a world, in a futuristic kind of way, to ignore. The horizon in all directions is dotted with what from a distance look like small mangrove islands. Only these are oil and liquid natural gas rigs, with all their attendant satellites. At any given time, at least 50 structures punctuate the horizon, and often more than 100. When we draw close, they prove enormous. Servicing them are countless powerful and speedy crew boats, most bigger and faster than Pelican, along with a constant fleet of helicopters in flight between rigs. Although we’re out of sight of land, there is no silence and no hint of wilderness anywhere. This is an urban ocean, the first I’ve ever seen.

Even more strange is the lack of visible sea life. Generally, in waters this far from shore yet still atop the productive continental shelf, we’d be seeing feeding aggregations of seabirds, fish, billfish, sharks, and marine mammals. But here there is only emptiness and the occasional bobbing flight of a laughing gull. It’s the same underwater, apparently, only there’s not enough visibility to actually see it; sometimes, according to Rabalais, when the water is clear and the hypoxia is in full swing, the bottom is full of decaying sea life.

And this is only one of many dead zones. Robert Diaz, a hypoxia expert from the Virginia Institute of Marine Science, calculates the global number is doubling every decade. Furthermore, he suggests that at least in some areas hypoxia is rapidly becoming a greater threat to fish stocks than overfishing, since it disperses them off their feeding, spawning, and maturation grounds. And he predicts that hypoxic zones will only increase as the ocean warms further, citing a modeling study predicting that a doubling of atmospheric carbon dioxide will double rainfall across the Mississippi River Basin, increasing runoff by 20 percent and decreasing dissolved oxygen in the northern Gulf by up to 60 percent.

Close to 50 hypoxic zones fester on the coasts of the continental United States, affecting half of all our estuaries. The situation is worse in Europe, with 14 persistent dead zones that never go away, and almost 40 others occurring annually, the biggest and worst being the 27,000-square-mile persistent dead zone in the Baltic Sea, which is nearly the size of South Carolina. Not all of these are caused by riverborne nitrogen. Fossil fuel-burning plants along the Ohio River loft airborne emissions that help create hypoxic conditions in the Chesapeake Bay and Long Island Sound. Excess phosphorus from human sewage, as well as nitrogen emissions from automobile exhaust, impact Tampa Bay. Other dead zones suffer from the nitrogen fixation produced by leguminous crops.

Interestingly, we know how to solve these problems. Rabalais and others have engineered an action plan that calls for the reduction of the Gulf hypoxic zone to just under 2,000 square miles by 2015. “There are modeling studies that show if you reduce nitrogen fertil-izer applications by 12 to 14 percent, you can reach the target without losing crop production. And there are lots of ways to reduce,” she says, listing best management practices such as a reduction in fossil fuel use, cleaner municipal wastewater discharge, restoring wetlands, regulating pen-feed operations, and banning wintertime fertilizer applications.

The problem is, most of these changes need to take place 600 or more miles upstream and be agreed upon by dozens of headstrong states. “We’re moving slowly,” Rabalais admits. “Five years into the process, we’re finding that we haven’t really done a whole lot, and there’s a lot of resistance from the large agricultural and fertilizer corporations.” At best, it will take years to revitalize the dead zone. Meanwhile, as we dither, the target drifts further away; European studies of fallow fields show that leaching of nitrogen continues decades after cropping and fertilizing have ceased.

IN THE LIQUID REALM offshore, change is more fluid than here on the land. I got a sense of this years ago, while diving the pristine reefs along the edge of the Gulf Stream in the Bahamas, where I began to notice the corals strangling under the spread of gauzy marine plants. With each passing year, the reefs became more populated with filamentous algae and contained fewer live corals, fish, and invertebrates. Today I can date the film footage in my library by the obvious decline of biodiversity on those reefs.

These changes coincided with the unprecedented die-off of the once-populous sea urchin Diadema antillarum. Beginning in 1983 in Panama, these pincushionlike creatures began to succumb to an unidentified pathogen, dying within days of exposure. Over the next 13 months, following surface currents, the mortality spread eastward and northward, encompassing the entire Gulf of Mexico, the Caribbean, and the tropical Atlantic to Bermuda, 2,500 miles from onset. No known New World population was left intact, and up to 99 percent of these sea urchins died in the worst marine invertebrate epidemic ever seen—possibly due to infection by spore-bearing bacteria traveling through the Panama Canal from the Pacific.

In the wake of the epidemic, filamentous algae, which the sea urchins ate, exploded across the reefs. St. Croix saw a 27 percent increase in algal biomass within five days of the sea urchin die-off. In the course of two years, Jamaica’s reefs increased in algal cover from 1 percent up to 95 percent. More algae left less room for new coral colonies to recruit; 23 years later, the reefs of the region still echo with the effects, appearing so radically redesigned that many no longer exist as coral-dominated systems at all but as seaweed-dominant systems akin to farms of undersea lettuce. Even more significant, these changes appear to be permanent, since the primary surviving predators of the filamentous algae—herbivorous fishes—have been, and continue to be, extensively overfished by humans in the region. Diadema antillarum has not recovered either, a victim apparently of too few animals scattered over too wide an area to effectively spawn.

Across the world ocean, marine diseases are on the rise, fueled by, among other things, the desertification of Africa, which raises huge volumes of dust that off-loads bacterial and fungal spores into the weakened seas. Many coral diseases have appeared more frequently in the past 10 years, including white-band disease, black-band disease, dark-spots disease, red-band disease, white plague, white pox, yellow blotch disease, and so on. Photographs of reefs from the 1930s show little or none of these infestations.

With or without pestilences, coral reefs are under assault, and the exhaustive 2004 Status of Coral Reefs of the World warns that global warming is the single greatest threat to corals, with 20 percent of the world’s reefs so badly damaged they are unlikely to recover and another 50 percent teetering on the edge. Within the next 50 years, massive coral bleaching events on the order of the 1998 El Niño, which damaged or destroyed 16 percent of the world’s reefs, will become regular, possibly annual, occurrences. Sadly, most of the so-called nurseries of the sea face similar prognoses. Fifteen percent of the world’s seagrass beds have disappeared in the past 10 years alone, depriving marine species—from juvenile fish and invertebrates to dugongs, manatees, and sea turtles—of critical habitats. Likewise, kelp beds are dying at alarming rates; 75 percent are gone from Southern California alone—victims of, among other things, the demise of sea otters that regulate populations of kelp-eating sea urchins.

Among the most frightening news for coral reefs is the increasing acidity of the ocean as a result of rising levels of carbon dioxide. Scientists at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration recently estimated the ocean has absorbed 118 billion metric tons of CO2 since the onset of the Industrial Revolution—about half of the total we’ve released into the atmosphere—with 20 to 25 million more tons being added daily. This mitigation of CO2 is good for our atmosphere but bad for our ocean, since it changes the pH. Studies indicate that the shells and skeletons possessed by everything from reef-building corals to mollusks to plankton begin to dissolve within 48 hours of exposure to the acidity expected in the ocean by 2050.

Coral reefs, buffeted by so many stressors, will almost certainly disappear. But the loss of plankton is even more worrisome. Collectively, marine phytoplankton have influenced life on earth more than any other organism, since they are significant alleviators of greenhouse gases, major manufacturers of oxygen, and the primary producers of the marine food web. Yet because many phytoplankton produce minute aragonite shells, these pastures of the sea may not survive changing pH levels. Zooplankton, meanwhile, are largely composed of the larval forms of all the ocean’s other life-forms—from fish to squid to shellfish—whose calcium carbonate constructions are also unlikely to survive changed pH levels*. By facilitating radical changes in these, the immense populations of the very small, we might as well erase the world as we know it, one bone, one seashell at a time.

Noise is our newest assault, including the low-frequency active (LFA) sonar used by the military to detect submarines and by the oil and gas industry to search for fossil fuels. The loudest sound ever put into the seas, LFA sonar could soon be deployed across 80 percent of the world ocean, at an amplitude of 230 decibels, strident enough to kill whales and dolphins and already causing mass strandings and deaths in areas where navies conduct exercises [see “Collateral Damage”]. A few people, misfortunate enough to be in the water near LFA sonar tests, have suffered lung vibrations, seizures, disorientation, and nausea. No one knows what effects these extreme noises have on the majority of marine life that “see” underwater with their acoustical senses.

Meanwhile, plastic pollutants masquerade as familiar marine objects. David Barnes of the British Antarctic Survey finds that invertebrates that normally hitch rides on floating wood or pumice are increasingly grabbing lifts on floating plastics; the presence of so many new “boats” has doubled the spread of exotic species in the subtropics and more than tripled it at high latitudes, threatening biodiversity worldwide. Furthermore, fish and invertebrates commonly mistake the ubiquitous pellets of partially degraded plastic, known as nurdles, for zooplankton, and ingest them, poisoning themselves and all who eat them, while sea turtles and marine mammals perish from consuming plastic bags, which resemble jellyfish.

Increasingly, persistent organic pollutants (POPs) such as DDT and PCBs are being found in such high levels in marine animals that some living creatures meet our definitions of toxic waste, including many whales, dolphins, and seals. Female mammals off-load POPs in their breast milk, lessening their own toxic load while poisoning their children. Perhaps consequently, killer whale calves from Puget Sound and the Canadian Southwest are dying in the first year; adult male orca, which have no off-loading capabilities, are also dying off. In 2005, the National Marine Fisheries Service listed this population as endangered. Currently, there is no such listing for the people who rely on marine mammal meat, even though the accumulation of POPs in the tissues of Greenland Inuits has nearly reached levels known to suppress the immune system.

The problems facing the world ocean are virtually all human-induced, and many are beginning to cross-pollinate. Jellyfish populations expand in response to red tides and hypoxia, as well as to the depletion of their competitors, such as menhaden [see “Net Losses,”]. This, combined with the virtual extinction of jellyfish-eating sea turtles (leatherbacks have declined 97 percent in 22 years), leaves more food for those jellies that prey mostly upon other jellyfish. Thus the nearly independent jelly web is expanding—and increasing its impact on human fishers, including forcing the closure of the Gulf of Mexico shrimp fishery in 2000, when 25-pound jellyfish native to Australia swarmed so heavily that shrimpers were unable to retrieve their nets.

In a similar vortex of cause and effect, researchers from NASA and the U.S. Geological Survey forecast that Alaskan earthquakes will increase in the wake of retreating glaciers, triggering more tsunamis, as happened dramatically in similar warmer epochs of the past. Freed of the immense weight of these rivers of ice, tectonic stresses are released, sometimes for the first time in millennia. Many scientists also believe that a warmer ocean is making hurricanes bigger, faster growing, and stronger, with 2005’s Hurricane Wilma prompting a call for a new Category 6 on the Saffir-Simpson scale, or a new scale altogether. And because bigger storms destroy more coastal wetlands and mangrove forests, they also incidentally reduce the land’s natural buffering against storms and earthquake-generated tsunamis.

Even as we spend millions looking to space for dangerous asteroids that might threaten all life on earth, we are the asteroid that has already landed. A modeling study from the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Colorado suggests that global warming, not an asteroid strike, triggered the earth’s most severe extinction event 251 million years ago during the Permian-Triassic era, long before the dinosaur die-off. Atmospheric CO2, fueled by massive earth-building volcanic eruptions in Siberia, warmed the ocean to depths of 10,000 feet, increasing salinity, shutting down the ocean conveyor belt, and trapping oxygen and nutrients so deep that most of the world ocean became a hypoxic dead zone. With hardly any sea life left to scrub the atmosphere of carbon dioxide, global warming accelerated. In the end, the Great Dying came close to destroying all life on earth, precipitating the demise of 95 percent of all marine species and 70 percent of all terrestrial vertebrates, leaving fungi to rule the world for many an eon.

AT NO TIME IN HUMAN HISTORY has so much scientific inquiry been focused so intensively in one direction: on the anthropogenic changes in our world. As a result, we are learning more, and more quickly than ever before, about how the life-support systems of earth work. Science now recognizes that the ocean is not just a pretty vista or a distant horizon but the vital circulatory, respiratory, and reproductive organs of our planet, and that these biological systems are suffering. Much effective treatment is suggested by computer-modeling studies, which the Bush administration, with its fear of science, negates—even though computer models are the same powerful tools that enable us to put men into space, to run wars, and to forecast financial trends.

Back aboard Oceanus in the stormy North Atlantic, we’ve reached the Gulf Stream at last, where the seas have stretched out with the increased depth, easing our ride a little. Surrounded on every horizon by menacing black skies, complete with downpours and bolts of lightning, we bask for an hour or two in a spotlight of sunshine that illuminates the endless cobalt of the deep, the platinum spray of the surface. Three of us—Ruth Curry, Guy Mathieu, and I—are out on deck tending the CTD, which has just returned from its four-hour journey to the bottom of the ocean. Mathieu, a retired scientist with the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, is collecting samples from the Niskin bottles for analysis of their chlorofluorocarbons—those synthetic chemicals in refrigerants and aerosols so damaging to the Earth’s ozone layer, yet so useful as tracers for measuring the timescale of movements within the ocean conveyor belt.

In late 2005 a British oceanographic team, conducting research similar to Curry’s, announced findings that the Atlantic MOC—the critical factor keeping the North Atlantic warm—has slowed by 30 percent. Although the surface Gulf Stream apparently still flows as usual, the deeper waters are undergoing massive, silent changes, with virtually all of these shifts rapidly taking place since 1998.

But aboard Oceanus, this news is still six weeks in the future, and we are happy, at least in this moment, to be at sea in bad conditions collecting good data that may well lead to bad news. The tempest around us is beautiful yet seemingly manageable—that is, until the winds, whistling steadily at 40 knots, increase sharply, ripping off the whole surface of the sea, not just the tops of the swells. The whistling grows ominously louder and splits into harmonics of deeper- and higher-pitched voices. Literally over our heads, the low-pressure storm systems have merged, and within the hour we’re running south as fast as Oceanus will go.

No one who survives time at sea is ever less than humbled by its powers over life.

Julia Whitty is the author of the forthcoming book There Are Many Souls Embodied in Water: Tales From the Coral World. She has been making nature documentaries for the past 25 years, specializing in underwater films.

2006-08-27T09:41:00.000-07:00

Health Canada Delay Endangers Women

Agency to regulate Human Reproduction Act
still not set up

By Abby Lippman & Jeff Nisker
From CCPA Monitor Issue
2006

March 29, 2006 was the second anniversary of the passage into law of Canada’s Assisted Human Reproduction (AHR) Act, an Act marking the culmination of years of hard work by many thoughtful Canadians of diverse perspectives.

What should have been a time for celebration, however, remained instead a time for concern, if not dismay, at the continuing failure of real implementation of this Act. After well over a decade of waiting for legislation that would protect the physical, emotional, and social health of the women and children who use--or result from the use of--the expanding range of reproductive technologies, we are still waiting for the setting up of the Assisted Human Reproduction Agency, the regulations, and the enforcing mechanisms the Act mandates.

When the AHR Act was passed in March 2004, Canada was seen by many as a world leader in woman- and child-centered regulation of reproductive medicine, with many groups in the United States and elsewhere looking here for a model of leadership and principled governance. As time passes, however, Health Canada is increasingly being perceived as having good intentions, but failing in its commitments to the women and children whose health and safety were promised protection.

Indeed, many of us who have worked over the last two decades with the federal government toward regulation of reproductive and genetic technologies are concerned that the AHR Act is merely a “paper dragon.” And with the government of Quebec contesting 27 articles in the federal law in court as it pushes for passage of its own legislation, it seems fair to wonder if even this image overestimates current protections for women and children.

Granted that putting in place an operating agency and on-the-ground regulations, as the AHR Act requires, is complex. Granted, too, that negotiating federal/provincial jurisdictions and relationships in the domain of health is complicated. But the slow movement forward from an Act on paper to a functioning program contrasts starkly with the rapid, uncontrolled proliferation of reproductive technologies and their applications in an increasingly commercialized area of medicine, one that some already call an “industry.”

In the face of this delay with regard to both the regulations and the formation of the Agency, and despite applicants for positions on the Agency having been solicited and vetted, we must ask if Health Canada has the necessary resources to permit timely implementation—and if the federal government (present and past) has or had the political will do to so.

Given the rapid dissemination and increased marketing of reproductive and genetic technologies--what Deborah Spar refers to as “The Baby Business” in the title of her recent book about this area--as well as reports of potential violations of the prohibitions in the Act, this extended delay in putting in place the oversight called for by the legislation threatens the health and safety of Canadian women undergoing assisted reproduction and the children who may result.

Advertisements in Canadian college and university newspapers, as well as on Internet websites, continue to recruit young women who will be given potentially harmful drugs, and experience the risks of surgery, to extract their “donated” eggs to be used by physicians in profit-making in vitro fertilization (IVF) programs for wealthy patients. These ads raise the question of whether financial inducements (illegal under the AHR Act) are involved, and what Health Canada is doing about them. Further, the continuing absence of the legislated national monitoring registry that would achieve consistency in quality of care, including prevention of multiple pregnancies and monitoring for subsequent health problems in the children born of these pregnancies and their mothers, remains problematic.

Then, too, there are the persistent pressures from researchers to ease the current limits on what is permissible regarding human embryonic stem cell research, with these also raising serious concerns about the protection of women’s health.

We strongly support citizen input to policy development, which Health Canada has been undertaking in various in-person and on-line activities, but feel just as strongly that calls for consultation should not delay government action.

However, to ensure that consultations are representative of the full range of Canadians and of all the approaches to deal with infertility, we encourage not just workshops in Toronto and elsewhere, but also the inclusion of a public education component in the regulation development process. Only this kind of measure can help prevent the domination of future consultations of Health Canada by those with financial interests in the outcomes and also broaden the health promotion and protection elements the AHR Act should also address.

When it was passed, the AHR Act gave hope to many that a just approach to regulation was at hand. Most knew that the complexities in this area would become no simpler, the debates no less heated nor more easily resolved. And certainly time has shown this to be the case. But most hoped, as we did, that we would have, well before the Act’s second anniversary, regulation, monitoring, evaluation, and enforcement mechanisms with teeth, not merely words on paper.

It is imperative that Health Canada take action to explore what seem to be potential violations of the existing law and also accelerates the speed with which the Assisted Human Reproduction Agency is created and regulations established. It would be unconscionable to have to wait yet another year before we can celebrate more than words on paper.

(Abby Lippman is a professor of epidemiology at McGill University and chair of the board of the Canadian Women’s Health Network. Jeff Nisker, MD, PhD, is a professor of obstetrics-gynecology and coordinator of health ethics and humanities in the Schulich School of Medicine and Dentistry at the University of Western Ontario.)

From the Real Economy to the Speculative (excerpts)

By Bernard Lietaer
From World History Archives
1997

In the following excerpt from remarks at an International Forum on Globalisation (IFG) seminar, the writer focuses on the alarming increase in global currency speculation. The potential implications are truly explosive, threatening global power arrangements, the sovereignty of nation-states, and the abilities of ordinary people to survive.

In 1975, about 80% of foreign exchange transactions (where one national currency is exchanged for another) were to conduct business in the real economy. For instance, currencies change hands to import oil, export cars, buy corporations, invest in portfolios, or build factories. Real transactions actually produce or trade goods and services.

The remaining 20% of transactions in 1975 were speculative, which means that the sole purpose was an expected profit from buying and selling currencies themselves, based on their changing values. So, even in the days when the real economy was dominant, some currency speculation was going on. There had always been that little bit of frosting on the cake.

Today, the real economy in foreign exchange transactions is down to 2.5% and 97.5% is now speculative. What had been the frosting has become the cake. The real economy has become just a small percentage of total financial currency activity.

My estimate is that in 1997 we will have close to $2 trillion in currencies being traded per day. This is equivalent to the entire annual gross domestic product (GDP) volume of the United States being turned over via currency trading every three days.

There are three cumulative causes for this explosive increase in currency speculation:

Systemic redefinition. The first important act was former US President Richard Nixon’s unleashing of the dollar from the gold standard in 1973. Floating the dollar allowed currency values to be determined by traders in currency exchange markets. Currencies from countries with strong economies and sound monetary and fiscal policies were given more value than currencies from countries with shaky or weak economies and policies. This opening of the system created a framework for the speculation game.

Legal deregulation. In the 1980s, both former US President Ronald Reagan and former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher introduced deregulation strategies. The Baker Plan, implemented by the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF), applied those changes to a dozen key Third World countries. This created a lot more leeway for movement of capital internationally, and for corporations that previously would not have participated in speculation.

Technology. The structural, deep-lying phenomenon behind the whole system, is the technological shift: the electronification of money and the computerisation of market systems.

The Business Viewpoint
Economic textbooks say that corporations and individuals compete for markets and resources. This is not true. Corporations and individuals compete for money by using markets and resources.

The opening of the system, which led to floating exchanges, also created a new asset class. Traditional asset classes are real estate, bonds, stocks, and commodities. Today, we also have currencies. This means that money, the medium of exchange, has itself become an asset to be played into investment portfolios. This shift has different implications for businesses, depending on whether you’re an investor or a real business.

From an investor’s viewpoint, this new asset class—currencies—has some significant advantages over the old ones:
Extraordinarily low transaction costs. Placing a few billion dollars in foreign exchange costs very little; as much as 10 or 20 times cheaper than a stock transaction.

Twenty-four-hour market environment; one can actually play around the clock.
The foreign currency market is the largest and deepest market around by a long shot. If you have a few billion dollars to place, bringing them to the stock market is going to move the stock’s value and tip off other traders as to what you are doing. This is true in most bond markets (except for the US and some European markets because of their large size).

In foreign exchange, even five or ten billion won’t make a blip. So if you have a substantial amount of money to move around, this is the place to do it. You can get in and out without affecting the market.

Because of these three advantages, the act of lending money to people (to buy houses, cars, expand businesses or whatever) is no longer the best way to make money. The foreign currency market is the place to do it.

Banks are no longer the big players in terms of supplying credit. In the last 25 years, banks, as a source of financing in America, have dropped from 75% of the total supply of credit to 26.5%. For the major international banks, like Chase Manhattan, Citicorp, Bank of America, Barclays, or Sumitomo, currency trading typically accounts for at least 20% of total earnings. In a good year, it will be more than 50%.

In considering the viewpoint of so-called real businesses (those that make cars, mine, produce electronics, etc.), the foreign exchange risk has by far become the largest risk in international business today, often larger than political or market risk. For example, if a German chemical company invests in a plant in India, it makes the investment in deutschmarks. The chemical products sold locally from that plant are paid in rupees, India’s currency.

If the value of the rupee than drops in terms of the deutschmark, the return on the original investment will drop as well. In short, the biggest risk of such investments is not whether Indians will buy the chemicals (market risk) or whether the Indian government will nationalise the plant (political risk), but the changes in the values of the currencies involved (foreign exchange risk).

Corporations have followed two major strategies to deal with this risk.

The first strategy is the reorganisation of the corporate conglomerate. Production and marketing sectors are decentralising because the risk doesn’t lie there, and because adaptation to local circumstances can best be handled on a local level. This also leads to the dispersal of production facilities to other countries.

But while marketing and production are decentralising, the corporation’s financial and treasury functions are being centralised. Twenty or 30 years ago, when an American company had a big plant in Germany, the plant would handle its own finances. Not any more. Now, this is all done centrally at corporate headquarters.

The second strategy that large corporations pursue is an adjustment of their executive officers. In the 1940s and 1950s, anybody who could manufacture any product could sell it. So, a manager with a background in production or engineering would typically be made the CEO. In the 1960s and the 1970s, that shifted. Suddenly marketing was the key background necessary for people at the top.

However, in the 1980s and 1990s, finance specialists are in charge. They are the ones who call the shots. That shift in career paths has also changed the corporation’s outlook, and is a reaction to the new risk that we are talking about.

Now, I have two questions for you:

First: Who do you think is the largest private financial institution in the US today? It is General Electric (GE). The largest profit sector in GE is not defence, not light bulbs, not power stations. It is GE’s treasury department, because of its many financial transactions.

The second question is: Who do you think is taking the largest foreign exchange risk? It’s everybody who holds only one currency. That is, most people. Anyone who owns their own house, which sits in one currency (like dollars, deutschmarks, or yen), and who has their savings and income in that same currency, is at the greatest risk. By holding only one currency, they risk all their assets being devalued in the event of their currency crashing. In a world of floating exchanges, not being diversified in currencies is like having a stock portfolio with only one stock.

Three Consequences
The first consequence of this state of affairs is that national governments are in the process of losing power. The nation-state is the one entity that cannot manage in this new climate. It has no way to gain power against global capital and information technology.

Currency traders are effectively policing governments by selling off a nation’s currency when they are dissatisfied with that government’s policies. If enough traders act together, the value of a currency can plummet, creating a currency crisis. These sudden large sell-offs are viewed by governments as attacks on the value of their currencies.

Currency devalution can happen in a very short time, days or even hours, because of the new global communications system. There are no negotiations, there’s no talking, there’s nobody sitting around a table saying, This is what we’re going to do, or, How about re-negotiating this part? That’s not the way it happens. You just suddenly end up with a crisis in a particular country’s currency. Such was the case with the collapse of the British pound sterling in 1991, the Scandinavian currencies in 1992 and 1993, and Mexico in 1994.

One of the things to watch for in the future will be such a devaluation of (an attack on) the US dollar, which is the linchpin of the whole system. Now, one might ask, Why would traders want to pull out the linchpin? Well, from an individual trader’s point of view, it doesn’t matter which currency you profit from, you just trade. If enough traders see an opportunity to profit by the dollar’s fluctuations, they will exploit it because nobody believes that his or her individual action will bring down the entire system.

Central banks can often intervene when a currency is under attack by either buying or selling to counter speculators. But the volumes of money now being traded are so vast that even central banks may not have an impact. All the reserves of all the central banks together amount to about $640 billion, so all their reserves could be depleted in a third of a normal trading day.

This points directly to a second consequence: a growing interest in market instability because that is where one finds the opportunity for windfall profits. Big fluctuations in the values of currencies allow for big profits to be made by trading them.

Consider the following statements by leaders at opposite ends of the spectrum:

The biggest concern today is the growing constituency for instability.
—Paul Volcker, ex-governor of the US Federal Reserve, in Changing Fortunes.

Instability is cumulative, so that the eventual breakdown of freely floating exchanges is ensured.
—George Soros, the largest currency speculator today, in The Alchemy of Finance.

They both agree that there are many more people now who have an interest in profiting from instability; previously, they had an interest in stability. If you have an unstable system, it is just a question of when it will fly off the handle. It will blow apart at the moment when the US dollar experiences a crisis. When the dollar crisis occurs, the world will have no system left.

The only precedent I know is the collapse of the Roman monetary system. In the 1929 crash, the monetary system held. We had all kinds of other problems—unemployment, stock market crashes, currency inflation in Germany—but there was a gold standard that held. Today, we have no gold standard to fall back on. So there is no precedent for a collapse of this nature. And this would be a truly global phenomenon. All currencies in the world are based on the dollar. So if you have a crisis on the dollar, you pull out the linchpin and... boom.

The third consequence is something with which you are very familiar. As a great portion of the national currencies—about $2 trillion per day - is being turned around in the financial cyber-economy, there is just no satisfactory medium of exchange available to people at the bottom. National currencies are not widely available to the poorer parts of the population.

The age of labour as a key component of production is gone. If you don’t have a job, you don’t have money (ie, national currency). Even despite the fact that structural unemployment is increasing, the economy can continue to grow very well. Technology will shift us still further in that direction.

What is beginning to happen in the developed countries is a new phenomenon: an explosion of local currencies—money that is not the national currency. We haven’t seen this since the Great Depression when there were literally thousands of local currencies in the US and other countries affected by massive unemployment. By supporting the development of local money schemes, we may in fact create the groundwork for the next system. This could become one of the most powerful ways available to support citizen control.—Third World Network Features.

[About the writer: Bernard Lietaer has been a financial adviser to transnational corporations and to developing countries, and was a professor of international finance at the University of Louvain in Belgium. Most relevant is his experience as a successful professional currency speculator for the Gaia Hedge Funds. Now a research fellow at the Center for Sustainable Resources at the University of California, Berkeley, his new book is The Future of Money: Beyond Greed and Scarcity, due in 1998.]

[The above article first appeared in IFG News (Issue Two, Summer 1997), published by the International Forum on Globalisation, an alliance of activists, scholars, economists, researchers, and writers representing over 19 countries, which seeks to stimulate new thinking about the rapidly emerging economic and political arrangement called the global economy.]

2006-08-26T15:23:00.000-07:00

Blogs' Power Stretches Far Beyond Politics

By Chris Nolan
From eWeek.com
2005

Until a few weeks ago, the attention paid to Weblogs, or blogs, focused on politics and the media business. Bloggers were most famously credited with unmasking a fake memo that CBS used for a story about President Bush's Army Reserve records. But that's going to change, and fast. A study released this week by the Pew Internet and American Life Project—which tracks people's online habits—says more than 8 million people have created Weblogs. And 32.5 million people read them regularly, a number that's doubled since February.

Still, just 45.6 million out of 120 million Internet users know what a "blog" is. Regardless, the movement is just getting started. And clearly, it's growing. A look at the early coverage of the tsunami that devastated Southeast Asia shows the power that blogs have. And more and more examples of this are on the way.

So, it's worth a few moment to look at what's happened in the political sphere and draw a few lessons about what might happen to other businesses. Blogs are read and written by customers.

Tech, the birthplace of blogging software, has more that its share of blogs focused on the industry. Just yesterday, Om Malik, a journalist and blogger, announced a deal between SixApart, the company that's created Moveable Type and TypePad, and Live Journal, another blogging service.

Before we go on, however, a disclaimer is in order. I run an independent Web site and have done so for about 18 months. It concentrates on national, California and San Francisco politics. It's part of the phenomenon I'm writing about here. And in researching this story, I chatted with Dan Gillmor, a former colleague of mine, who is also in the process of launching what he's calling a "grass-roots journalism" project.

Gillmor has written a book, "We the Media," detailing the changes he expects in the near future. Recently, on his—what else—Grassroots Journalism blog, he pointed to the impact that bloggers have had on the business of politics as an example of what he calls "distributed journalism."

Before Congress adjourned last year, it voted to change its rules to allow Majority Leader Tom Delay to keep his office if he ends up facing criminal charges in his home state of Texas. But at the public and sustained instigation of two Web sites—Talking Points Memo written by Josh Marshall and The Daily DeLay, a site put together by campaign finance watchdog the Public Campaign Money Watch—voters began calling their representatives to ask how they voted on the rule change and why. They posted their research on their sites and came up with a list of votes.

This, as Gillmor observed, was a quiet turning point in American politics. This week, when the Congress returned to Washington, D.C., Republicans in the House of Representatives undid the ethics rule change. "Something especially important occurred with these two blogs. They asked readers to call their Republican members of Congress and ask how they voted on the original secret vote to give DeLay a break. Readers responded in droves. This surely helped keep the pressure on the Republicans as well," Gillmor wrote.

But distributed journalism isn't limited to politics, Gillmor says. It can touch on anything of interest to readers or blog writers. Weblogs make it easy to publish your opinion or share your experience and let others comment on what you've been doing or thinking. That can be as true of a piece of balky software as it is of an elected official. "It's the collective knowledge of people gathering data and putting it out there that gives you value,'' Gillmor says.

Another example? Sites that tell consumers how to hack their TiVos to improve the device's recording time are a form of distributed journalism, Gillmor says. "That's people doing journalism for each other,'' he says. Readers experiment, do research and chat among themselves about the results and procedures, doing the work that a staff of editors at a hobby magazine would do.

Anything that gathers opinion and focuses it is a phenomenon that can alter the way companies do business. That, says Gillmor, is why this change is so important for everyone, so they can understand the power that blogs are corralling to help people speak out about their opinions and experiences.

"You break up a larger problem into a lot of little pieces, and something good can happen," he says.

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