Whose Democracy?

Julie Wark

Just before Papua New Guinea became independent in 1975, I had the immense good fortune to be studying Anthropology, Sociology and Politics at the country’s ten-year-old university (UPNG). It was a kind of decolonisation laboratory in which boffins from everywhere, shared their expertise in everything: tropical medicine and agriculture, public administration, development studies, Third World literature, and much more. They were agitated years of intellectual ferment, student (and teacher) activism, Marxism, feminism, opposition to the Vietnam War, small-is-beautiful, free love and parties, lots of parties. Many of us believed that Papua New Guinea would be different. It could never be just another neo-colony. Its future leaders were fellow students and friends. We were tear-gassed together at demonstrations over Indonesia’s invasion of East Timor and, side by side, fought the bureaucrats to get a students’ vegetable garden (the dining room slop was a prelude to nutritional disease). Several of those friends became politicians in this marvellous, resource-rich country and did their bit to make it one of the most corrupt in the world with extremely high levels of (mainly sexual) violence and over 50% of the population below the poverty line ($1/day). Some of those scintillating teachers went on to unexceptionable careers elsewhere. Ken Good remained outspoken and exceptional.

A respected Africanist, Ken Good was deported from Rhodesia in the early 1970s for hurting Ian Smith’s feelings with his caustic, accurate tongue and, in 2005, as a “threat to national security” from Botswana, where he was Professor in the Department of Political Science and Public Administration at the University of Botswana. Why? Because he had co-authored and circulated a paper titled “Presidential Succession in Botswana: No Model for Africa”. The Attorney General referred to the frail 72-year-old as an “outlaw”.

The future outlaw was one of my teachers at UPNG, the best I ever had. Forty years on, he is a dear friend. I give this background not just to be upfront about my partisanship, but in particular because Ken the man can’t be separated from his writing. An unwavering critic of any anti-democratic establishment, champion of the underdog and now in his eighties, he is still feisty and still fighting. His new book, Trust in the Capacities of the People, Distrust in Elites, distills the essence of Good. Trust the people. Don’t trust the elites. The political best seller list of The New York Times, March 2015, features American Sniper in first place, followed by more SEALs, another sniper, a hedge-fund manager and an Obama campaign strategist in the top ten. If you want to find a publisher who’ll take on a title like Ken’s, it won’t be easy. It wasn’t easy. Now the book is finally out, it costs $83.64 on Amazon, an inaccessible price which (together with snipers, SEALs and Co. crowding the political panorama) suggests that democracy is up against the wall. Good has plenty to say about that but the elite-gripped media won’t be putting this book on any bestseller list. A voice like Ken’s upsets people like the great expert on “democracy” Festus Mogae, former President of Botswana, and the 1% who are set to own more than the rest of the world by 2016. Democracy is very unwell but this enkheiridion has not ousted the SEALs from bestseller lists. This flies in the face of logic, to say the least.

Ken Good’s democracy is about grassroots organisation, radical education and the ever-burning ideals of freedom, justice and respect for the dignity of all humans, a socio-political process and society in which people make decisions on matters that affect them. If “representative democracy” is the fiefdom of competing elites who get elected because of their wealth and celebrity – Warren Buffet’s class warfare (“it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war, and we’re winning”) – Good’s participatory democracy is the “aspiration and impulse by determined men and women” who, battling deeply entrenched power disparities, fail more often than they succeed, knowing that others will try again, guided by the “natural truth and lustre” of eternal principles: “[P]osterity we doubt not shall reap the benefits of our endeavours whatever shall become of us” (Freeborn John Lilburne, 1648).

Good roams widely in space and time, showing how these principles have always shone and still shine today. He begins with democratic Athens (508 – 322 BCE), where the “political disempowerment of the elites was the vital accompaniment which made possible and extended the power of the people” (p. viii) for almost two centuries during which the demos was “a self-conscious and a determined actor in its own right” (p. 17). In these times of almost constant warfare the system did not collapse due to internal contradictions but was brought down by an external force: Alexander the Great. Good sagely notes the contrast between its longevity and the brevity of twentieth-century totalitarian states. Hitler’s Thousand Years’ Reich lasted only twelve years.

The next study is “Britain’s long and profoundly incomplete democratization”. The background in the mid-seventeenth century was feudalism in extremis, the rise of capitalism in commercial agriculture and trade, and the clashes between Catholicism and protestant faiths, and the parliament (of merchants and Grandees) against King Charles I. The Civil War (1642 – 1651) took about half a million lives, if conflicts in Scotland and Ireland are included (p.22). The poor (some 100,000), represented by the Levellers, stepped into theequation, calling for popular sovereignty, accountability and respect for the rights of even “the poorest he that is in England” (p.25). There is a proviso or cautionary note here, though. Good (p. 26) cites Lilburne’s biographer Pauline Gregg: “the spirit of Leveller teaching was more revolutionary than its content, and a spirit of equalitarianism was present in their doctrine. But this egalitarianism did not encourage them to ally with the dispossessed below them.”

In the late 1690s and early 1700s the poor people’s heroes were robbers and men and women who actively resisted the rich and powerful. The “thanatocracy” (Peter Linebaugh’s coinage) responded with “legal massacre”. Every six weeks a jury of small landowners, doing the oligarchy’s dirty work, determined who would die on London’s “hanging days”, eight or so a year”, when three to five people strung from the “Tyburn tree” drove home the lesson: don’t cross the rich. Hundreds were hanged, mostly Irish men and women, sailors, weavers and butchers, plus some members of the city’s sizeable black community. “The deeply corrupt oligarchy was hanging multitudes of the poor for trivial and often necessary theft (for survival’s sake), while they themselves practiced theft and avarice on a giant scale” (p. 30). The rise of industrial capitalism, the calibrated wage system and ever-harsher factory discipline eventually rendered the hanging spectacle obsolete in England but it survived well into the twentieth century in the British possession of Kenya, where 1,090 Kikuyu – “Mau Mau insurrectionists” – went to the gallows between 1952 and 1960. Methods that are unacceptable or outdated at home can always be used elsewhere (“targeted” killings, for example).

Industrialisation brought great social turbulence. “The transformation of the organization of production was a potent, totalizing process” (p. 36). As an 1832 report described it in almost Blakean terms, “men, women and children are yoked together with iron and steam” (p. 37). The brutality of the system meant that the oligarchy needed protection. By 1814 some 890,000 men were under arms and “routinely employed” (p. 42) against unarmed civilians.

Yet, through the Chartist Movement (1838 – 1858) and the few means available to the poorest people – crime, riots and insurrection – some two to three million people kept resisting. Workers set up self-help organisations, co-ops, benevolent societies, educational groups, sick and burial societies, trade unions and finally a Labour Party. Through solidarity and resistance built on an ancient democratic culture the people, demanding universal suffrage, strove to topple a thoroughly corrupt state system and thus to achieve clean government and participatory democracy. What followed was far from that.

[…] the successes of the working-classes were intermixed with failure. They had placed trust in their own capacities to construct a range of self-help organizations, and their trust had been vindicated broadly and deeply in improved living and work conditions, in their heightened participatory capacities and in the reduction of corruption. But they had failed to control the elites which eventually arose in the Labour Party […]. Participatory values and institutions were gradually incorporated into a passive and elite-dominated liberal model of democracy, and caused to atrophy. The erosion of the cultural world of labor neared completion by the 1990s. The cultural world of popular democracy largely went with it.”

In his compelling chapter on South Africa, trenchantly subtitled “The People versus a Militarist, Predominant Ethno-Nationalist Elite”, Good takes apart the myth of the “Struggle Heroes”, the fable that “democracy is the gift of great men who sometimes come together in almost ‘miraculous’ circumstances, like Nelson Mandela and F. W. De Klerk, 1990 – 1994, to confer good government on their fortunate people” (p. ix). Mainstream newspapers are full of stories about the prison woes of the girlfriend-killing celebrity athlete Oscar Pistorius, but hardly anyone dares to broach the deplorable political and social legacy of Mandela’s African National Congress, which helped to shape this violent culture. Neither does Good flinch from describing the crimes and immunity of Madikizela-Mandela (otherwise known as Winnie), or the “authoritarianism and elitism lurking in [Nelson] Mandela’s thinking” (p. 102) and how the Great Man principle gagged critics. “[R]ule by the heroes of the struggle was itself essentially democratic” (p. 103). So the heroes said.

The heroes wrought a government notable for its factionalism and greed. President Zuma’s South Africa is effectively leaderless as he works hard to control his party’s warring factions, attend to his six (last count) wives and accumulate wealth. The upshot is patent in a few figures (p. 208). In 2011 a majority of South Africa’s people were living in poverty; 58% earned some $US30 (€24) a month; 36% were jobless but, for the under-35s, unemployment stood at 73%. Poverty is worsening. The number of people living on less than $1 day rose from 1.9 million in 1996 to 4.2 million in 2005. All this goes hand in hand with “State incapacity and the indifference of the ruling elite” (p. 209). “State incapacity” includes indifference to such vital areas as water and sanitation, housing, education, and a disinclination to address endemic violence. After all, the “State” has fortress-houses complete with armed guards.

Chapter Six, devoted to the little-known “living politics” of a “Determined Autonomous Movement of the Poor”, is perhaps Good’s most outstanding contribution in this book. It was widely believed that the end of apartheid would mean the end of shantytowns and squatter settlements. The situation was extreme: in 1994 the urban housing shortage was rocketing at the rate of 178,000 households a year. Living conditions in many settlements were appalling with, for example, 6,000 people sharing six toilets, disposing (or not) of their own refuse, trying to ensure that kids didn’t knock over candles, and hours of queuing for the tap.

One young man, S’bu Zikode, who had lived in one of Durban’s slum settlements, decided to change things. At the age of 25 he became chairperson of the Kennedy Road Development Committee (KRDC) and set about “restructur[ing] everything in terms of democracy” (p. 202). The KRDC mobilised the young people through youth activities and tried to work with ANC organisations and the Durban City Council to address the community’s problems. Lies and broken promises led them to take action on their own terms. A new organisation was formed by and for shanty dwellers, Abahlali baseMjondolo (AbM), which came to represent tens of thousands of people in at least thirty settlements. The AbM democratised the administration of settlements, halted evictions, won some concessions regarding services, illegally connected electricity, built toilets, introduced crèches, and combated the exclusion of the poor from the life and amenities of the cities. This gave rise to close-knit, very active, thinking and demanding communities.

Of course repression wasn’t long in coming but even when its leaders had to go into hiding the movement persisted because, echoing the Levellers, they declared they had the moral strength of “those who know who they are … what they stand for … and speak the truth” (p. 206). State violence against protestors came shockingly to a head on 16 August 2012 at the Marikana platinum mine when 34 miners were shot dead by the police and almost 80 were injured. The “Tyburn tree” now spoke in the form of bullets: look what you get when you step out of line. The South African police killed 566 people in 2009 and 2010. This is war against the poor. People like AbM members or miners living and working in harsh, dangerous conditions, who want to participate in and influence the decisions affecting their daily lives, are “outlaws”, an enemy of the state. The linkages between militarism, criminality and the ANC were made very clear with the Marikana massacre, and the product of this culture of violence and impunity is a governing elite that is incapable of managing a modern state.

The poor, working with non-corrupt members of the trade unions, especially COSATU (Congress of South African Trade Unions), are trying to forge a political majority from a social majority. Like AbM, the Unemployed People’s Movement has declared that its mission is to humanise politics and “keep working to unite all the struggles – in the shacks, on the mines and on the farms – into a revolutionary mass movement of the working class and the poor that can change this society from below” (p. 224) Good points out that no country, not even the ANC’s South Africa, can be properly understood in isolation from the rest of the world. Internally generated elitism is a danger everywhere. And local elites, however repressive they may be, are small fry by comparison with global elites and their self-enriching institutions like the WTO which are fast destroying the planet.

The two masterly chapters on South Africa are separated – an error of structure, I think – by chapters 4 and 5, “Democracy in the Capitalist Heartlands: Alienation and Dysfunctionalities” and “Democratization from Portugal to Poland, 1970s-1990s, and in Tunisia and Egypt Since 2010”. The former deals with the liberal form of capitalist democracy prevailing in Britain and the United States for some 150 years but now discredited by widespread alienation, corruption, dysfunctional institutions, draconian definitions of “national security”, gag laws, contempt for the masses and greed of the elites. This is now being countered by participatory democracy with a clear ideology of institutionally supported equality. Over hundreds of years, people struggled to achieve this in Britain. More recently, as the mega-rich 1% aggressively pits itself against the rest of us, it has also been aspired to in Portugal, Poland, Tunisia, Egypt, Iceland and elsewhere. As Good observes, it is always necessary to know what kind of “democracy” is being talked about:

The exemplars of democracy now are patently no longer the United States and Britain, not the established liberal systems, but popular movements built on civic groups imbued with resonant ideas about inequalities, in the struggles for democratization in South Africa, Tunisia and elsewhere. Failures will almost certainly be more numerous than successes, but democracy as a process of struggle and revolution is again center stage, and is being separated off from liberal, elitist Anglo-American models. In Iceland the greed of some 30 individuals collapsed the financial system, but the other 320,000 people have been reconstructing the framework of their government since 2009 in innovative and participatory ways reminiscent of Athens.

In sum, the book’s key argument is that participatory democracy is insistently appearing in many places where the liberal capitalist democratic model has unquestionably failed.

Apart from his scathing critique of liberal “democracy”, Good shows that grassroots organisation for democracy and social justice is no wild utopian scheme but a real possibility. A recent openDemocracy article titled “Reinventing Urban Democracy in Barcelona” describes the “citizen’s platform” (rather than political party in the old sense of the word) Barcelona en comú (literally Barcelona in Common), grist to Good’s mill although it appeared after he finished his book. With a name which conjures up the English commoners and their struggle against the enclosures, this strong contender for the City Council elections in May has invented a “newly resonant language of rights and democracy”. Very well-organised and disciplined, Barcelona en Comú grew out of the anti-evictions movement and the model is being taken up in other cities. In 2014, the WHO calculated that the 54% of the world’s population was urban-dwelling. Taking over municipal power might prove to be a very effective way of making participatory democracy workable on a smaller but linked-up scale. Watch this space…

Ken Good is a no-nonsense visionary who is keenly aware of the importance of history. In her recent book on climate change, This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate, Naomi Klein shows how the neo-thanatocracy is doing its best to kill the whole planet but stresses that “social movements have grabbed the wheel of history before and might just do it again”. Ken Good trusts the people and so did the Leveller Thomas Rainsborough (1610 – 1648): “Either poverty must use the power of democracy to destroy the power of property, or property in fear of poverty will destroy democracy” (p. 25).

Dangerous Herbs May be in Your Food: Unlabeled

Martha Rosenberg

What if you took a spoonful of your morning cereal and had an allergic reaction or even felt tranquillized? But when you looked at the package labeling there were no ingredients that would seem to be red flags? Increasingly, thanks to an FDA loophole, food makers use additives and chemicals that they and not the FDA have declare “safe” and the ingredients do not appear on the labels. Sometimes the FDA does not even know they are added to the food products.

For example, according to the Natural Resources Defense Council(NRDC), the bitter alkaloid of the cacao plant theobromine can be in beverages, chewing gum, tea, soy milk, gelatin, candy, yogurt and fruit smoothies with no mention on the label. The peanut-related legume sweet lupin can be in baked goods, dairy products, gelatin, meats, and candy with no mention on the label. The chemical epigallocatechin-3-gallate (EGCG) may be found in teas, sport drinks and other beverages, says NRDC, with no mention on the label despite its links to leukemia. Nice.

How did this happen?  There has been a “growth in the marketplace of beverages and other conventional foods that contain novel substances, such as added botanical ingredients or their extracts,” says the FDA. “Some of these substances have not previously been used in conventional foods and may be unapproved food additives. Other substances that have been present in the food supply for many years are now being added to beverages and other conventional foods at levels in excess of their traditional use levels, or in new beverages or other conventional foods.” Nice.

For over 50 years, everyday ingredients like vinegar, vegetable oil or sugar have been allowed in food as part of the FDA’s Generally Recognized as Safe (GRAS) program.   Food companies and their supplier did not have to prove them safe and go through a lengthy approval process.

But since the late 1990s, the GRAS program has become a dangerous “honor system” in which food makers can simply declare their additives and chemicals safe and put them in the food supply, neither petitioning the FDA for a GRAS designation or sometimes informing the FDA the additives are being used!

A recent expose by the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) about GRAS in which it refers to the program as “Generally Recognized as Secret,” reveals a don’t ask/don’t tell system in which as many as 1,000 additives have been self-declared “safe” by the companies that make them but not the FDA. In many cases, neither the FDA or consumers know the ingredients are in the food; in other cases, ingredients the FDA has specifically rejected as GRAS still are used in food–sometimes, ironically named on the label.

And it gets worse. Many of the companies making the additives are headquartered overseas like the China-based Hanzhong TRG Biotech and NutraMax.  China has a poor consumer safety record say U.S. officials with many imports rejected because of “pesticides, bacteria and filth.” In 2007, tainted pet food from China killed many U.S. dogs and cats.

When additives are imported, it make the GRAS situation “triply difficult” for the FDA, Erik Olsen, senior strategic director for health and food at the Natural Resources Defense Council told me, especially when the companies self-declare them as safe. The FDA does not realize the additive is being used, has not, as an agency, evaluated the additive’s safety and it lacks a mechanism for assessing the safety of imported products. Buyer beware.

Why would additive makers ever petition the FDA for a GRAS determination as opposed to self-declare an ingredient safe in the “honor system” we asked Dr. Olsen. Doesn’t petitioning the FDA just result in a delay and risk an online “rejection letter” if the ingredient doesn’t make it? Yes, he told us, but an FDA determination could help additive makers sell their products to food companies who would likely be liable if an ingredient proved dangerous.

Rules for what proves “safety” are also vague, Dr. Olsen told us. It is largely assumed that if a company self-declares its product “GRAS” and markets it, there exists corroborating scientific or clinical evidence somewhere if the FDA should ever want to see it. But NRDC investigations found that sometimes the proof of safety boils down one paltry published study. Almost none of the companies NRDC contacted would provide information about their GRAS determination–often citing “proprietary” reasons–though several assured NRDC their products were safe and some provided supporting studies. Four companies said they would provide safety information about five additives if NRDC swore to keep it confidential. We’re eating it but it’s a secret?

Who are the additive companies? A quick glance shows a roster of chemical, drug and biotech companies as opposed to well known food corporations–names like Merck eprova AG, located in Switzerland and BASF Cognis Nutrition and Health, part of BASF, the world’s largest chemical company, based in Germany with 66 U.S. subsidiaries. Yum.

What products are their ingredients found in? That is the ultimate question, says Dr. Olsen. The information is not provided by the companies and of course it does not appear on the food labels. After all, it is Generally Recognized as Safe.

Here are some ingredients that may be in your food or beverages without being on the label.

Fo Ti (Shou Wu Pian/ Ho Shou Wu)

Fo Ti made from the tuber of the climbing knotweed (Polygonum multiflorum) has been a popular Asian remedy for cancer, tuberculosis, diabetes, hypertension, infections, erectile dysfunction, infertility, muscle soreness, headache, dizziness, graying of the hair and constipation. It is used as a tonic in liver and kidney conditions and to fortify muscles and bones. But, according to the National Institutes of Health,  “a large case series of clinically apparent acute liver injury ha[s] been attributed to use of Shou Wu Pian.” The liver toxicity “resembles acute viral hepatitis with onset of fatigue, nausea and right upper quadrant pain followed by jaundice,” says the NIH and “liver biopsy shows changes typical of acute hepatitis.”

Kava Kava

Kava is a plant that grows in the western Pacific. Prized for its mental effects like  sedation, relaxation and relief of anxiety, it became a popular supplement in the U.S. for treating anxiety, depression, insomnia, stress and menopausal symptoms. But in 2002, the FDA warned consumers and health care professionals of the potential risk of severe liver injury from kava kava including hepatitis, cirrhosis, and liver failure. In its letter to health care professionals, the FDA noted that Germany and Switzerland took kava kava off the market after “approximately 25 reports of hepatic toxicity associated with the use of products containing kava extracts have been reported in these countries.”

Lobelia

Lobelia is the name for several flowering plants that grow in tropical and warm climates  of the world and are used as herbal remedies. The plant was frequently used for respiratory problems in Native American societies and became known as Indian tobacco while it was also called “asthmador” from its use in Appalachian folk medicine. Like tobacco, with which it shares some properties, lobelia is known to cause nausea, vomiting and dizziness. But according to WebMD, that’s just the beginning of it risks. Lobelia is considered “likely unsafe for most people when taken by mouth,” writes the health website. An overdose may cause “serious toxic effects” like convulsions, collapse, coma, and possibly death. GRAS?

Black Cohosh and Other Female Hormones

Because or its high estrogen content, black cohosh is called “possibly unsafe” by WebMD and capable of worsening breast cancer and other hormone-linked conditions like endometriosis, fibroids and ovarian and uterine cancer. There are also reports of black cohosh links to liver damage and rejection of transplanted kidneys. Black cohosh is hardly the only hormonally active additive which NRDC believes are in food products with undisclosed GRAS safety determinations. Chasteberry, astragalus, red clover, milk thistle,  ginseng, fenugreek, hops and of course soy and flax also pack a big estrogen wallop. Certainly such herbs are not necessarily safe in people with hormone-fed cancers and they should be on the label.

Hydroxyzine HCL

It was with shock that I discovered hydroxyzine HCL on NRDC’s list of undisclosed GRAS safety determinations and presumably unlabeled in the food supply. It is the same ingredient found in Vistaril and Atarax, two prescription drugs used to treat anxiety, allergies and to control nausea and vomiting! According to Drugs.com, hydroxyzine may impair thinking and reaction time, making driving dangerous. It is also dangerous when used with alcohol. Hydroxyzine may be considered Generally Recognized as Safe by its manufacturer, NutraMax, but it is also related to the popular allergy drug Zyrtec. Infact, the medical site Medicinenet writes, “The active form of hydroxyzine is a drug called cetirizine (Zyrtec).”

Pope Francis and the Scourges of Our Time

Kathy Kelly

Here in Lexington federal prison’s Atwood Hall, squinting through the front doorway, I spotted a rust-red horse swiftly cantering across a nearby field. The setting sun cast a glow across the grasses and trees as the horse sped past. “Reminds me of the Pope,” I murmured to no one in particular. “What’s that?” Tiza asked. I tried to explain that once, when I asked a close friend his opinion of the Pope, shortly after Catholic bishops had elected Pope Francis, my friend had said, “The horse is out of the stable! And galloping.”

I love the image. Here is a Pope who, upon learning that a chaplain in a Chinese prison couldn’t afford to buy the traditional “moon pies” for every prisoner to celebrate the harvest moon, cut a check to cover the remaining cost.  This Pope loves the tango dance. On his birthday, tango dancers filled St. Peter’s Square at the time when ringing bells call on believers to kneel and recite the Angelus.

In September, 2015, Pope Francis will visit New York City, Washington, D.C. and Philadelphia. Tiza and I wondered if he would visit a prison. “If he does, he should come here,” Tiza insisted, “and not go to some showcase place!” I don’t think he’ll be able to put Kentucky on his agenda, but it’s not outlandish to imagine the Pope visiting a U.S. prison. He consistently emphasizes our chance to choose the works of mercy rather than the works of war: to visit those who are sick, those who are in prison; to feed the hungry, clothe the naked, bury the dead. Never to turn our heads, say “it was their own damn fault”; never to choose wars and weapons, the burning of fields, destruction of homes, slaughter of the living.

Women here pray for the Pope every week, their prayers guided by a Jesuit priest, a tall, balding man with a long, white beard and a kindly manner. “He’s the one who looks like a mountain man,” Tiza once told me.

At the beginning of a 40-day season of atonement called Lent, the priest’s message was stark and simple: “Our world is very sick.” He asked the women before him to recall how each might feel, as a mother, if her child is sick. “Nothing else matters,” said the priest. “You’re focused on your child.” He urged us to focus on healing an ailing world with just as much fervor. Following his words, we joined in prayer for the Pope, a symbol of unity, collecting our desires for a world at peace, where people’s basic needs are met and all children can thrive.

Photo: Chris Downer.

A few evenings later, while walking up the stairs toward my 3rd floor room, I heard a woman wailing. “Not my baby!” she cried, in pure anguish. “Not my baby!” She had collapsed to the floor in the middle of a phone call telling her that her four year old child had been rushed to the hospital, unconscious. Her closest friends were soon at her side, holding her, soothing her. Word spread through the prison. After the 9:00 PM “count,” women did what they could. Dozens of women filled the first floor chapel, praying for hours for the prisoner, for her child, for the child’s caregivers, for the hospital personnel.  Word arrived, the next day, that the child had regained consciousness.

The good priest had chosen a metaphor that women here could readily understand.

Gypsi, one of my roommates, saves her funds for phone calls, twice a week, with her small daughters, age 3 and 5. Prisoners can make 15 minute calls, at 21 cents per minute.

One night, Gypsi came back from her call, red-eyed but smiling. Meekah, her younger daughter, can trade song verses with Gypsi. “Momma, let’s sing one more!” Meekah had cried. “Please sing another song!” But, instead, a loud beep signaled that the call was over.

I just finished reading an exquisite book, Yashar Kemal’s Memed My Hawk (2005, NYRB Classics 50th Anniversary Edition), with a subplot about two women wrongfully imprisoned. Iraz thinks longingly of her son Riza, while Hatche remembers Memed, the young love of her life.

“As the days passed, Iraz and Hatche… shared everything, including their troubles.  Hatche knew Riza’s height, his black eyes, his slim fingers, his dancing, his childhood, what he had done as a child, with what trouble Iraz had brought him up, the whole story… down to the last detail, as if she had lived through and seen it all herself.  It was the same with Iraz.  She too knew everything about Memed, from the day he and Hatche had first played together as children.”

Yes, it’s like that among women in prison. Tremendous focus. And yet, as Kemal adds, “Anyone going to prison for the first time is confused on entering so different a world. One feels lost in an endless forest, far away, as if all ties with the earth, with home and family, friends and loved ones, with everything, have been broken. It is also like sinking into a deep and desolate emptiness.”

Broken. On empty.

Worldwide, impoverishment shackles women to unspeakably harsh conditions and makes them vulnerable to predators. Lacking protection, they are sold into human trafficking rings, subjected to forced labor, forced prostitution and forced removal. Widows and orphans find themselves penniless and defenseless. More than 115 million widows live in extreme poverty around the world, with a half billion children dependent on their care and support: Gary Haugen, in The Locust Effect (2014, Oxford University Press), presents in careful and disheartening detail a discussion of the sea change needed to uphold the rights of impoverished women and children. Sadly, in many places, traditions and customs regard women as being less valuable, subordinating them and treating them as property.

Sometimes, we have to interrupt ourselves in our relative comfort and estimate how we can bring to bear our best resources in the name of changing criminal, wrongful patterns.

Pope Francis faces an extraordinary possibility. He could rely on Catholic teaching which proclaims that humans are all part of “one bread, one body,” emphasizing that women and men are equal to each other; and he could promote an exemplary practical consequence of this teaching by embracing “the priesthood of all believers,” welcoming women as well as men to follow a vocation into ordained ministry. It would be a dramatic change, an arrow pointing toward new expectations and possibilities regarding the status of women.

Coretta Scott King says that in the moments after John F. Kennedy was assassinated, her husband, Dr. Martin Luther King, turned to her and said, “This is what is going to happen to me also. I keep telling you, this is a sick society.” She could only agree that he was right; and he was. Yet his service to equality and his fierce courage to reject violence couldn’t be killed. He took us with him to that mountaintop, entrusting to us a new vision and a way forward.

Pope Francis must indeed feel the challenge of the past century’s social justice visionaries, many of them cruelly vilified and rejected – many sent by violence from the world. Assassination is on the rise: the “kill list” is now an openly acknowledged part of U.S. policy. I know that women here will continue to pray for a sick society, and for the Pope, long after I leave.

I will continue to feel deeply moved by our “mountain man”‘s humble, direct plea, asking us to focus for forty days on our very sick world. Lent ends today, “Good Friday” is tomorrow.  Saturday is the anniversary of our loss of Dr. King, who, on an April 4th exactly one year before his death, told us that “we are called to play the Good Samaritan on life’s roadside, but that will be only an initial act. One day we must come to see that the whole Jericho Road must be transformed so that men and women will not be constantly beaten and robbed as they make their journey on life’s highway.”

In just a few more weeks, I’ll be moving on from here. The other members of our congregation will remain, and, along with so many of the world’s most expendable people, will remain nearly invisible to corporate forces driving humanity to nightmarish war, horrifying inequalities in wealth and education, and the irreversible destruction of natural resources nearly as precious as the squandered hopes of these women.

Where you stand determines what you see. Transformation of the Jericho Road must begin with actually stopping there. In Atwood Hall, our “mountain man” earnestly spoke to us as the people with whom the transformation starts, as people both vital and central to the healing he yearns for. If it comes, it will have started in a million places like this one.

Recognizing our need to support one another, to overcome the scourges of our time, to pick up a pace commensurate to the needs of those surrounding us, focused on our sick society with the same determination to heal that we would bring to a very sick child, we all have the task of going beyond our places of comfort, of escaping the stable and trotting if we can’t manage to gallop, of building new affinities in which to imagine and then co-create a better world. I hope the Pope will pick up the scent of spring renewal, maybe even imagine a Kentucky Derby, as he prepares to speak a clarion and expansive wake-up call, calling us to sing another song, a new song: just as we’ve called to him.

Militia Woes in Iraq

Binoy Kampmark

Well it might be that successes are being registered against the menace that is ISIS, but today’s militia victor is the next agent of revenge and instability. Sectarianism remains a self-sustaining cycle. At Amerli in August 2014, Sunni Iraqis saw the lifting of the ISIS siege that had lasted a gruelling three months.

The vacuum of power left by the departure of ISIS forces was significant. Those moving in to man the new reins of power were not the Iraqi or Kurdish regular forces but their uncomfortably co-opted allies, the Shia militias who have proven their mettle in battle. In a Human Rights Watch report aptly titled After Liberation Came Destruction (Mar 18), optimism gives way to bloody reprisals. There was looting by government militias and volunteer fighters of Sunni villages and neighbourhoods around the Amerli area. Homes and businesses were torched. Abductions were facilitated.

“Through satellite imagery analysis Human Rights Watch confirmed building destruction in 30 out of 35 villages examined in a 500 kilometre square area around Amerli.” While HRW admitted not being able to “determine the level of organization at which the documented attacks took place,” a range of motivations were noted: standard revenge attacks on civilians accused of colluding with ISIS forces; collective, sect-directed punishments against Sunnis and an assortment of other minorities.

We see another repeat of the messy outcome of Amerli in what is now being termed the “liberation of Tikrit”. On Tuesday, Prime Minister Haider al-Abbadi claimed that his forces had retaken neighbourhoods on the western and southern edges of the city, readying to control the rest of the city. Such suggestions seem premature – as are most proclamations of victory in the current Iraqi conflict.

Notwithstanding that, the drive to push ISIS out is being pictured as a clear story of salvation. That necessarily implies that their cruelties will be highlighted with round the clock perseverance. It was Tikrit which bore witness to the reported killing of Shiite air force cadets at the hands of ISIS recruits last year. There are also reports of mass graves and the destruction of monuments. The vengeful ghost of Amerli lingers, and the combatants know it.

The role of US forces in the fight for Tikrit has also been noted, with Abbadi requesting US-led air strikes last Thursday. But Washington is handling its role in the retaking of Tikrit with some difficulty – it doesn’t want to be seen to be aiding Tehran’s cause either. Invariably, both wish for the defeat of the same foe, but both are also aiding each other’s efforts through the quirkiness of providence. (The US logistical role in Yemen, by way of contrast, is directed against Shia Houthis.)

The insistence by US forces on conventional Iraqi command and control in such operations is a moot point – the real muscularity in the fight remains with the highly motivated Shia units. Qassem Suleimani, chief of Iran’s al-Quds wing of the Revolutionary Guard, remains the coordinating hand behind the Shia mission in Iraq. The proliferation of coordinated Shia militias, be they in Iraq proper, or in Syria, is proving to be no accident, with vigorous watering taking place from Tehran’s accounts.

The fallen star of the US security establishment, Gen. David Petraeus, told the Washington Post last month of his looming fears regarding the instability arising from repelling, and ultimately expelling ISIS. The Islamic State was a violent aberration; the Shiite militias, in contrast, were part of a broader geopolitical power play, a potential open door to Iranian interference in Iraqi affairs.

Admitting that such militia members did effectively restrain the onslaught of ISIS after a declared “fatwa by Shia leader Grand Ayatollah Sistani,” he also conceded that their effect was very much like that of an ethnic juggernaut, merciless expelling those before them. Sunni fighters, and civilians, have been caught in the whirlwind. “Thus, they have, to a degree, been both part of Iraq’s salvation but also the most serious threat to the all-important effort of once again getting the Sunni Arab population in Iraq to feel that it has a stake in the success of Iraq rather than a stake in its failure.”

Such fabric, once torn, is nigh impossible to fix. The Sunni-Shia divide in Iraq was papered over by a brutal regime that had, previously, the darkest blessings of Western powers. Iran was the satanic enemy of choice, and the rhetoric still pivots on that language: the fear of the Persians with their regional, nuclear-toting aspirations.

Then came the hysterical moralising, the zealotry of regime change by a Washington-led carnival of neoconservatives. As King Abdullah II of Jordan warned over a decade ago, the removal of Saddam Hussein would precipitate an Iranian-directed “Shia crescent” stretching from Lebanon to Saudi Arabia. The rupture remains, and all sides have a stake in that failure. All that matters is simply minimising such failings in a vicious sectarian calculus. The rest is academic.

Weather Modification: Myths and Facts

Carmelo Ruiz

It is a safe bet to say that all progressive readers have some familiarity with conspiracy theories about weather modification. These theories, that range from “chemtrails” to the HAARP project, propose that sinister government and corporate forces are altering local weather and the whole globe´s climate with purposes that range from warfare to climate change mitigation. The most extreme version of these theories holds that all of climate science is a fraud, including the work of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, and that the bizarre and extreme weather observed all over the earth in recent years is not caused by the burning of fossil fuels but by weather modification technologies invented and used by an evil cabal of scientists and shady figures bent on world domination- an image straight out of an Austin Powers film. These theories, which are increasingly popular, play into right-wing anti-environmental themes. In a 2013 column, Canadian scientist and outspoken environmental activist David Suzuki likened belief in “chemtrails” to climate change denial:

“I don’t have space to get into the absurdities of belief in a plot that would require worldwide collusion between governments, scientists and airline company executives and pilots to amass and spray unimaginable amounts of chemicals from altitudes of 10,000 metres or more. I’m a scientist, so I look at credible science — and there is none for the existence of chemtrails. They’re condensation trails, formed when hot, humid air from jet exhaust mixes with colder low-vapour-pressure air… Why do so many people accept a theory for which there is no scientific evidence while rejecting a serious and potentially catastrophic phenomenon that can be easily observed and for which overwhelming evidence has been building for decades?”

After publishing the column, Suzuki received a barrage of verbal abuse and ridicule from “chemtrails” believers. The tone of these attacks is startlingly similar to the vitriol and invective that he has received in the past from anti-environmental campaigners. (I believe I myself will be targeted by these believers once they finish reading this article.)

As an activist and researcher, I myself began researching HAARP (the High-Frequency Advanced Auroral Research Project) in the mid-1990s. According to its Wikipedia entry, it is:

“an ionospheric research program jointly funded by the U.S. Air Force, the U.S. Navy, the University of Alaska, and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA).[1]^… its purpose is to analyze the ionosphere and investigate the potential for developing ionospheric enhancement technology for radio communications and surveillance.[2] The HAARP program operates a major sub-arctic facility, named the HAARP Research Station, on an Air Force-owned site near Gakona, Alaska.

The most prominent instrument at the HAARP Station is the Ionospheric Research Instrument (IRI), a high-power radio frequency transmitter facility operating in the high frequency (HF) band. The IRI is used to temporarily excite a limited area of the Ionosphere. Other instruments, such as a VHF and a UHF radar, a fluxgate magnetometer, a digisonde (an ionospheric sounding device), and an induction magnetometer, are used to study the physical processes that occur in the excited region.”

The second paragraph is what really worried me. It seemed to me, and to many North American activists, as a dangerous and irresponsible act of global vandalism to shoot high-powered electromagnetic waves into the ionosphere “to see what happens”- and the U.S. military’s involvement in this venture was definitely not reassuring. However, after years of consulting sources and reading differing viewpoints, I was not able to find any credible evidence that HAARP was causing extreme weather events or earthquakes, as the believers claim. Furthermore, the advocates of this conspiracy theory consistently tend to mix it with other even more outlandish pseudo-scientific claims, and with right-wing rants about climate change and climate science being an environmentalist “hoax”. Some anti-HAARP campaigners even claim that environmentalism is a sinister United Nations plot to subjugate the United States and impose a socialist world government (!). Ditto about “chemtrails”.

Conspiracy theories about “chemtrails” and HAARP may be pure bunk, but weather modification is real. Its advocates call it geoengineering.

***

In February 2015 the U.S. National Academies of Science released a two-volume report on geoengineering that calls for increased investment in this field in order to counter climate change. According to its executive summary:

“Climate intervention is no substitute for reductions in carbon dioxide emissions and adaptation efforts aimed at reducing the negative consequences of climate change. However, as our planet enters a period of changing climate never before experienced in recorded human history, interest is growing in the potential for deliberate intervention in the climate system to counter climate change. This study assesses the potential impacts, benefits, and costs of two different proposed classes of climate intervention: (1) carbon dioxide removal and (2) albedo modification (reflecting sunlight). Carbon dioxide removal strategies address a key driver of climate change, but research is needed to fully assess if any of these technologies could be appropriate for large-scale deployment. Albedo modification strategies could rapidly cool the planet’s surface but pose envi­ronmental and other risks that are not well understood and therefore should not be deployed at climate-altering scales; more research is needed to determine if albedo modification approaches could be viable in the future.”

The NAS report adds that:

“Discussions of geoengineering are often controversial because of the societal, economic, and ethical implications. Those dimensions are critically important, but a first requirement to support informed discussions and decisions is a sound scientific understanding of the proposed techniques, including what they are, how they would work, the expected risks, and the possible consequences (intended and unintended). In particular, there is a need for improved understanding of the physical potential and technical feasibility of geoengineering approaches, as well as an evaluation of the potential consequences of various techniques on other aspects of the Earth system, including ecosystems on land and in the oceans.”

One of the study’s funders was the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency. Rutgers University climate scientist Alan Robock has publicly expressed concern about the CIA’s interest in weather modification technologies. Robock claims that on January 19 2011 two men who claimed to be working as consultants for the CIA, Roger Lueken and Michael Canes, asked him “If another country were trying to control our climate, would we be able to detect it?” In Robock’s words:

“I told them that I thought we could, because if a cloud in the stratosphere were created (the most commonly proposed method of control) that was thick enough, large enough, and long-lasting enough to change the amount of energy reaching Earth, we could certainly see it with the same ground-based and satellite instruments we use to measure stratospheric clouds from volcanic eruptions. If, on the other hand, low clouds were being brightened over the ocean (another suggested means of cooling the climate), we could see telltale patterns in the tops of the clouds with satellite photos. And it would also be easy to observe aeroplanes or ships injecting gases or particles into the atmosphere. At the same time, I wondered whether they also wanted to know if others would know about it, if the CIA was controlling the world’s climate. Given that the CIA is a major sponsor of the recently released US National Academy of Sciences reports on geoengineering (which they have renamed “climate intervention”), the question arises as to the possible interest of the CIA in global climate control.” (Boldface added)

Not surprisingly, the U.S. military has also pondered the wartime uses of this bundle of novel technologies. In 1996 the Pentagon released a report titled “Weather as a force multiplier”. To quote from its executive summary:

“In 2025, US aerospace forces can “own the weather” by capitalizing on emerging technologies and focusing development of those technologies to war-fighting applications. Such a capability offers the war fighter tools to shape the battlespace in ways never before possible. It provides opportunities to impact operations across the full spectrum of conflict and is pertinent to all possible futures. The purpose of this paper is to outline a strategy for the use of a future weather-modification system to achieve military objectives rather than to provide a detailed technical road map… A high-risk, high-reward endeavor, weather-modification offers a dilemma not unlike the splitting of the atom. While some segments of society will always be reluctant to examine controversial issues such as weather-modification, the tremendous military capabilities that could result from this field are ignored at our own peril. From enhancing friendly operations or disrupting those of the enemy via small-scale tailoring of natural weather patterns to complete dominance of global communications and counterspace control, weather-modification offers the war fighter a wide-range of possible options to defeat or coerce an adversary.” (Boldface added)

Independently of its use by entities such as the CIA and the Pentagon, a number of voices from the scientific community and civil society warn that geoengineering is a bad idea altogether, not only because of potentially disastrous and irreversible consequences for the earth’s ecosystems but also because it can end up being used as a substitute for reducing greenhouse gas emissions, which is the only real solution to climate change

“Technofixes—technical solutions to social problems—are appealing when we are unwilling to change ourselves and our social institutions” decries Clive Hamilton, professor of public ethics at Charles Sturt University in Australia. “So here is the essential problem that the council scientists do not confront: Does anyone really believe that while warming is suppressed with a sulfate aerosol shield a revolution will occur in our attitudes and political systems? No. Yet every scientist… is convinced that if albedo modification is implemented and not followed by a program of global emission reductions, then we are almost certainly finished. Sulfate spraying without a change in the political system would make the situation worse.”

“Presenting geoengineering as something to use only if necessary is at the heart of its proponents’ argumentation; trying to justify the investment of public and private funds on very high risk technologies”, warns Silvia Ribeiro, of the ETC Group, in a column published in the Mexican daily La Jornada. “In any case, it is not directed at changing the causes of climate change, it only deals with the symptoms: attempting to lower the temperature by blocking solar radiation or removing carbon from the atmosphere after it has already been emitted.”

Ribeiro adds that if geoengineering is permitted “it will be a juicy business for investors, because by continuing to emit greenhouse gases, global warming will continue, and the sale of technologies to palliate the consequences would have no end, generating perpetual dependence on whoever controls them… It makes no sense to talk about an experimental stage of geoengineering, given that because of its scale and duration, experimentation equals implementation, putting at risk many countries (which surely will not even know that this could be the cause of their problems) and entire ecosystems.”

In order to provide reliable and accurate information as well as critical perspectives on geoengineering, the ETC Group teamed up with Biofuelwatch to set up Geoengineering Monitor. “Our goal is to serve as a resource for people around the world who are opposing climate geoengineering and fighting to address the root causes of climate change instead”, says its web page.

It is a most timely initiative. In order to have an intelligent debate on climate change and geoengineering it is necessary to separate the conspiracy theories from the hard facts.

America’s Surging Carbon-Free Movement

Robert Hunziker

When a Rockefeller decides to divest fossil fuel investments, heads turn. After all, America’s pioneer/father of oil production is John D. Rockefeller (1839-1937) founder of America’s first great business trust, Standard Oil Company, dominating the oil industry for years.

In September 2014, the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, an $860 million philanthropy, decided to join the divestment movement of college campuses around the country. These forerunners of decarbonizing are acting on “environmental principles,” according to John Schwartz, Rockefellers, Heirs to an Oil Fortune, Will Divest Charity of Fossil Fuels, The New York Times, Sept. 21, 2014.

In recent years, 180 institutions, including philanthropies, religious organizations, pension funds and local governments, as well as hundreds of wealthy individual investors, have pledged to sell assets tied to fossil fuel companies and to invest in cleaner alternatives. In all, the groups have pledged to divest assets worth more than $50 billion, and individuals more than $1 billion.

The divest movement has quietly, but quickly since 2011, gone from small student activist groups into mainstream America. The real value behind divestment is not necessarily the financial impact on fossil fuel companies. They are enormously well capitalized, and millions or billions leaving the ship will not deter their business plans. The real value to the divestment movement is all about “changing the conversation about the climate.” Indeed, this is a bell-ringer.

Does Divestment Work?

“The evidence from South Africa suggests that divestment, while ineffective in a financial sense, can have an impact by shaping public discourse,” Eric Hendley, Does Divestment Work? Harvard University, Institute of Politics, 2015, “Divestment from select fossil fuel producers would send a powerful message to the energy industry and the nation. It would signal that America’s universities take the climate-energy challenge seriously.”

Interestingly, ever since the first American mass student protest movements of 1936-39, when 500,000 collegians protested with one-hour strikes against war as well as demanding job programs for youth, academic freedom, racial equality and collective bargaining rights to the anti-war movement against U.S. involvement in Vietnam in the 1960s, deep schisms within American society are exposed, ultimately leading to progressive changes in attitudes of mainstream America, relatively speaking.

The student divestment movement against fossil fuels started at Swarthmore College in 2011. Overall, 400 college campuses now have active divestment movements. Similar to student movements in the past, this nascent movement has now moved beyond higher education.

Students serve as the nation’s alter egos, and history has proven them right, time and again, because their cause comes from a high plateau on moral grounds. Their allegiances are to principled values, not neoliberal economic statistics like profits for the sake of profit. Ask the Rockefeller heirs about the value of a higher moral ground.

America’s Impending Renewables Revolution

U.S. economic history provides insight to what happens when major economic transformations occur. The Roaring Twenties were not called “roaring” for nothing. That era experienced an ongoing economic renaissance as automobiles took over the roads.

From 1910 to 1930 U.S. GDP increased 300%. That whopper of an economy occurred while one of the America’s biggest industries, manufacturing of horse-drawn carriages, went out of business! The conversion from horse-drawn carriages to automobiles, the 15 millionth Model T rolled off the assembly line in 1927, set the nation’s economy on fire.

It is believed America’s renewable energy conversion will mimic the Roaring Twenties. Fossil fuels are today’s horse-drawn carriages.

Across the nation, one-fourth of U.S. land area has winds powerful enough to generate electricity as cheaply as natural gas and coal. That’s not all, the solar resources of just seven southwestern states could provide 10 times the current electric generating capacity.

According to Greenpeace-USA, ironically, in North Dakota alone, the home state to a massive fossil fuel fracking boom, there is enough wind power to produce nearly 1/3rd of the total electricity consumption for America.

And, enough sunlight hits the earth’s surface in one hour to power all humanity for one year.

Congressional Endorsement of Solar

NASA’s Space Station, which is funded by Congress, monitored by Congress, and praised by Congress survives in outer space amongst the harshest of elements 100% solar 24/7 even when shaded as solar rechargeable fuel cells take over.

Congress knows all about the benefits of solar power. In fact, they endorse it because they personally oversee how enormously effective it is as the “one and only source of energy” for America’s astronauts.

If Congress can endorse solar outside of Earth’s atmosphere, surely Congress can endorse it within Earth’s atmosphere.

It’s much, much, much easier to construct solar panels on Earth than in gravity-less outer space where temperatures run between + 1,000 degrees F (that’s really hot!) and minus 455 degrees F (that’s really cold!), depending upon whether one is in the sun or the shade.

America’s Enormous Renewable Potential

By 2050, clean energy would save an average American consumer $3,400 per year versus fossil fuel usage, this according to The Solutions Project. That’s because the price of fossil fuel rises regularly, but with clean energy, where raw materials are free, once the infrastructure is built, prices would fall.

The Solutions Project, developed by Stanford University scientists led by Mark Jacobson, Senior Fellow, Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment, professor, Civil & Environmental Engineering is a nonprofit organization based upon plans for a 50-state roadmap to 100% renewable energy.

According to Dr. Jacobson, the country is ready for it. His detailed plan provides for existing renewable technology to supplant almost all fossil fuels. No new technology is required.

As for jobs, according to Daniel Kammen, professor in UC Berkeley’s Energy & Resources Group and Goldman School of Public Policy and head of UC Berkeley’s Renewable and Appropriate Energy Laboratory: “Across a broad range of scenarios, the renewable energy sector generates more jobs per average megawatt of power installed, and per unit of energy produced, than the fossil fuel-based energy sector.”

As it happens, America’s politicians have a fancy for jobs. Every political debate involves the effectiveness of how a given party can create jobs. Welcome to the renewable energy “job-creation machine.” Rebuilding the nation’s energy infrastructure with renewables would be equivalent to a new Marshall Plan but in America, an era that witnessed strong job growth, happy workers, and productive enterprises.

Indisputable Success of Green Economics

Clean, green energy in North Carolina supports more than 1,200 companies employing more than 15,200 high-paying jobs. Thus and so, North Carolina is a prime example of the benefits of investing in green energy, which creates twice the number of jobs as investing in coal and almost three times more than natural gas.

As a result, North Carolina is attracting international companies, now investing and creating jobs in America, companies like Siser, USA, an Italian company, and Schletter, a German company that manufactures solar mounting systems.

Green technology is helping to reverse the decades-old trend of American multinationals exporting good, solid American middle class jobs to lousy low paying weak regulatory countries, a deplorable consequence of transnational globalization heavily influenced by neoliberal tenets, i.e., privatization of public assets, minimal government, reduced public expenditures on social services, and in reality, a big time emphasis on “personal liberty maximization” by eliminating governmental programs for society, or a dog-eat-dog world where each individual stands his/her private ground, defending one’s property against the hapless masses. Let the chips fall where they may… today’s right wing Republican mantra! Thus, society turns asocial, a brutalizing world of “haves opposing have nots,” thereby guaranteeing social discord.

“North Carolina reaped revenue from clean energy projects of $2.67 billion from 2007 to 2013, a figure nearly 20 times greater than the state incentives of $135.2 million, according to an analysis prepared by RTI International,” Clean Economy Rising: Solar Shines in North Carolina, A Brief from the Pew Charitable Trust, October 2014.

In short, green energy’s payback is 20-to-1. Wall Street salivates over such numbers.

Just like that, North Carolina is demonstrating superb results with green technology promoting growth, high-wage jobs, a strong tax base, as well as attracting international companies. That’s called prosperity!

America’s climate deniers in Congress should really, seriously, decidedly take a taxpayer-paid (of course) field trip to North Carolina, a state that is creating high-paying jobs, attracting foreign investment, and generating a strong revenue base by promoting green technology. Then, maybe Congress will reverse all fossil fuel subsidies, converted to renewable energy subsidies, helping spark a renaissance of growth in America.

Imagine the spectacular results for the entire country if Congress initiates a nationwide plan for converting fossil fuels to renewable energy, similar to JFK’s charge to go to the moon. Evidenced by the Space Station, Congress already knows how effectively solar power works

Whichever political party jumps on board the renewable economic revolution first will likely “seal the deal” for political dominance for some time to come as Americans once again “whistle whilst they work,” as the renewable revolution brings high paying jobs all across the country. And, workers once again have a sense of pride, making good money just as they help rescue the planet from ill effects of fossil fuels.

It’s the Roaring Twenties, sans oil, redux!

Thanks to the leadership of America’s prescient students.

Lower Drinking Age, Raise Killing Age

David Swanson

The United States sends people to kill and die in war that it doesn’t trust with a beer.

It trains police in war skills to assault young people it suspects of going near beer.

Here’s an idea: Drink At 18, Don’t Kill Till 21.

Alcohol prohibition is not working, and creates unsafe drinking by people old enough to vote, drive, and work. A case can be made, and is being made, for returning the drinking age to 18.

But allowing 18-year-olds to join the military has created illegal and immoral recruitment of minors, not to mention deep moral regret, post-traumatic stress, and suicide in young veterans.

Raising the age for war participation (for joining either the military or one of its contractors) to 21 would do more for education and informed career choices — not to mention reducing drug and alcohol addiction, and suicide — than banning alcohol does.

Make-Daiquiris-Not-War is a policy based on actual dangers. The problem with alcohol is not responsible drinking of it. Alcohol is not a satanic liquid to be counter-productively made into a forbidden fruit. The problems with alcohol are: drinking and driving, which should be addressed by avoiding the driving, not through an unenforceable ban on drinking; drinking to dangerous excess, which should be addressed through open discussion, not the secretive plotting of contemporary speakeasies; and addiction, which is driven not so much by the chemicals involved as by the life of the person who becomes addicted.

And what could we most easily do to assist young people in leading more fulfilling, less horrific, lives? We could put off the decision to join in a program of mass murder until age 21, thereby giving a young person a chance to consider all the options.

In many nations there is no drinking age. In others the drinking age is after you’re dead (alcohol is prohibited). Among those with a drinking age between zero and forever, far and away the most common is 18.  Exceptions are Egypt, Kazakhstan, Oman, Pakistan, Qatar, Sri Lanka, Tajikistan, United Arab Emirates, Cameroon, Indonesia, the United States, and various Pacific island colonies of the United States, all of which make the legal age to drink 21.

But how’s that working out for them? In Egypt if you happen to witness the police murder someone, you’ll face prison or worse, while the U.S. President chats with the Egyptian President promising him more weapons and money, but if you want to drink underage, apparently nobody really minds. The inevitable result of making it legal to sell alcohol to some but not all adults (taking adults to be 18 and up) seems to be either stiffer and stiffer penalties or routine violation. This of course creates both a disrespect for laws and drinking in secret without appropriate discussion of dangers and measures to prevent recklessness.

In Argentina enlistment in the military is allowed at 21, or at 18 with parental consent. In Bahrain and Kazakhstan military enlistment starts at 15. Who’s right? Who’s respecting the enlistees? Well, according to some brain scientists at MIT — not that they should know anything:

“As a number of researchers have put it, ‘the rental car companies have it right.’ The brain isn’t fully mature at 16, when we are allowed to drive, or at 18, when we are allowed to vote, or at 21, when we are allowed to drink, but closer to 25, when we are allowed to rent a car.”

Scientists at Dartmouth agree. (But they would, wouldn’t they?) Not to mention neuroscientists who write books and go on NPR.

So upping the killing age to 21 would be moving in the direction of the wisdom of the scientists and the rental car companies. Why lower the drinking age at the same time? Because alcohol needs to be treated principally not as a means of drunken escape, but as an enjoyable beverage with dinner. Nations with no drinking age at all tend to have less alcoholism than do puritanical nations. The point is not that 18 year olds are qualified to head off to parties at which they’ll drink gallons of hard liquor (as some currently do, law or no law) but that alcohol, like other enjoyable and risky parts of life — from dangerous sports to sex to other drugs to those televisions in airports blasting Fox News — should be dealt with openly and calmly by parents and teachers and friends, with the actual dangers made crystal clear and imaginary dangers debunked.

The fact is that prohibiting alcohol leads to more reckless drinking, while prohibiting war participation leads to less reckless killing. We’ve got our priorities wrong. Let’s rework them.

Sexual Violence is a Trademark of Imperialism

Brian Platt

A new report out of Colombia reveals that between 2003 and 2007 US military personnel and contractors stationed in Colombia raped at least 54 children and dozens of women. According to Renan Vega, the lead author of the report,​“There is abundant information about the sexual violence, which occurred under absolute impunity because of the bilateral agreements and the diplomatic immunity of United States officials.” (TeleSur, 3/23)

In 2004 54 girls in the town of Melgar were sexually abused by American military contractors. The abuse was filmed and sold as pornography. The victims and their families were then forced to flee the town under threat of death. In 2007 an Army sergeant and a contractor raped a 12 year old girl inside a US military base. Colombian authorities were blocked from making an arrest by the Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA) foreign nations sign when forced to host American soldiers. The perpetrators were then flown back to the US to evade charges. (TeleSur, 3/23)

Horrifying as these actions are they are nothing new or unusual. In 2006 US soldiers raped 23 women in Colombia. In 2007 there were another 14 reported cases. Nor are these actions relegated to just Colombia. The vast overseas network of American military bases that buttresses the empire represents also a vast system of rape and violence. Twenty years ago 85,000 Okinawans took to the street in protest after two American marines and a sailor kidnapped and raped a 12 year old Okinawan girl “just for fun” according to one of perpetrators. Admiral Richard C. Macke, commander of US forces in the Pacific, heaped insult onto injury when he responded to questions about the rape, “I think that [the rape] was absolutely stupid. For the price they paid to rent the car, they could have had a girl,” meaning a prostitute from one of the many brothels set up for the use of American servicemen.

Indeed the life of Okinawans is considered cheap by their American occupiers. As historian Chalmers Johnson notes, between 1988 and 1995 169 soldiers in Okinawa were court-martialed for sexual assault. This rate was twice the rate of the general population in the United States. A startling fact consider the great lengths the military goes to cover-up rape at its overseas bases and the immense social pressure in places like Okinawa on women not to report. In fact the 169 number must be a vast underestimation of the actual level of victimization. (Blowback)

In South Korea rape was baked right into the American occupation. According to historian Bruce Cummings during the Korean War the South Korean armed forces reformed the network of “comfort women”—mostly Korean women forced into slavery to serve as prostitutes for soldiers—that the Japanese military had built during its occupation of China and Korea. US soldiers took part in the rape of comfort women during the war. And after the war when many of these women too shamed by a sexist society to return home they formed the original labor force for the brothels that ring American bases in South Korea. (The Korean War)

During the 1960s revenue from prostitution in these camp towns made up 25% of South Korean GNP. At one point ROK dictator Park Chung-Hee even pushed for the importation of women from the southern part of the country to these rape camps out of fear that he was losing sex tourism revenue to Japan. (JoongAng Daily,10/30/08; Violence Against Women, 9/2007)

Sexual violence continues around American bases in Korea today. In 2011 Private Kevin Lee Flippin robbed, beat, and raped a 17 year old Korean girl at knife point. That same year another Camp Casey soldier broke into an elderly couple’s home and beat them with a piece of lumber before trying to rape the 64 year old woman (Stars & Stripes, 10/21/11; 2/28/11). These incidents are exceptional only in the fact that they sparked mass outrage in Korea forcing the US press to report them.

When revelations of torture at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq first appeared in late 2003 it revealed a pattern of sexual violence different only in type from that visited on those surrounding America’s overseas basis. At the infamous prison US soldiers and their contractors sodomized prisoners with broom handles and chemical lights. Inmates were raped while soldiers watched and took pictures perhaps “just for fun” like their compatriots in Okinawa (Guardian, 9/20/04; Daily Telegraph, 5/28/09; Washington Post, 9/19/11). When the Senate torture report investigating activities at Guantanamo Bay was released late last year again it was revealed that sexual assault played a large role in America’s imperial prisons. (Feministing blog, 12/12/14)

Today the major American news organizations remain silent regarding this explosive report out of Colombia (FAIR, 3/26). The network of overseas bases that hold up the American empire and the violence that they bring to those around them are too important to American capitalism to risk. News organizations see no need to get Americans riled up about imperialism and occupation as the US stands to increase its military commitment in Asia, Eastern Europe, and the Middle East all in the name of “democracy” and free markets. For the people in the 130 countries in which the US military currently operates, however, this report out of Colombia represents something very different. This violence deeply rooted in racism and sexism is the face of American imperialism around the globe. It is time the empire was torn down.