Open Left - Darfur

Commitment, and bending the arc of the moral universe

Darcy Burner — Tue, 28 Apr 2009 03:00:52 GMT

This is Congressman John Lewis, looking out the back of the police van after being handcuffed and arrested. Accompanying him were Congresswoman Donna Edwards, Congresswoman Lynn Woolsey, Congressman Keith Ellison, and Congressman Jim McGovern.

Earlier today, these five members of Congress - all of whom are members of the Congressional Progressive Caucus - were arrested for civil disobedience protesting the expulsion of aid workers from the Sudan. These are our champions, people who have dedicated their lives to human rights and justice, who are, in every sense of the word, leaders.

I have spent nearly all of my time lately thinking about how as progressives we should approach governing - and these and the other members of the Progressive Caucus are our strongest allies.
I had a meeting on my schedule today with Congresswoman Lynn Woolsey, co-chair of the Progressive Caucus, to discuss the new non-profit I'm now the executive director of. The American Progressive Caucus Policy Foundation's mission is to bring together progressives inside and outside of Congress to advance the things we care about - to build the infrastructure that allows the CPC and the progressive movement to work together.

Congresswoman Woolsey was enthusiastic, as all of the Members and Congressional staff I've talked to have been. But she was also clearly having a very good day, because she had spent much of the day tangibly fighting for our shared ideals. She and Donna and John and Jim and Keith and the 72 other members of the Congressional Progressive Caucus get up every day to try to bend the arc a little bit further towards justice.

I was, I admit, even more inspired about my new job after today. But my new job involves y'all. So here are my questions to all of you:

In an ideal world, how would you want to work with these progressive champions?

What kinds of tools and ideas do you have about where we should go from here?

Finally, to quote President Barack Obama about the man in the picture, who is a personal hero of mine and who has spent his life as a working champion of justice and hard social change:

(h/t to commenter Partially Impartial on DailyKos)

Thank you for reminding us that in America, ordinary citizens can somehow find in their hearts the courage to do extraordinary things. That in the face of the fiercest resistance and the most crushing oppression, one voice can be willing to stand up and say that's wrong and this is right and here's why. And say it again. And say it louder. And keep saying it until other voices join the chorus to sing the songs that set us free.

April Showers Bring... Genocide?

jamesboyce — Thu, 02 Apr 2009 18:56:54 GMT

Here in New England, people look forward to April as the days turn longer, and warmer and the first signs of Spring emerge. The young, and young at heart, often recite the old standard, "April showers bring May flowers." Unfortunately, in far too many parts of world, April is not a month to look forward to, as April is well on its way to becoming known as a month of tragedy; one with a strange and deadly history.
In the last century, all of the six major genocides that have been perpetrated- Armenia, the Holocaust, Bosnia, Cambodia, Darfur and Rwanda -- all have major anniversaries that take place in the month of April, an eerie and unsettling coincidence.

With this in mind, survivors from these genocides have joined together and declared April "Genocide Prevention Month," and are observing the 30-day span to remember and mourn the many friends and family that they lost in their struggle to escape systematic extinction.

Activists around the world have taken this a step further and organized nearly 50 events so far globally for the month to raise awareness of these atrocities.

The Genocide Prevention Project, a foundation created to watch for warning signs of mass-scale atrocity crimes, is calling on the public and organizations to make a pledge to observe Genocide Prevention Month and further implement the harsh reality of the past and present into the social consciousness.

Filmmakers Michael Pertnoy and Michael Kleiman are utilizing Genocide Prevention Month to premiere their documentary, The Last Survivor, a film featuring first-hand stories from one survivor of each of the six genocides. A 20-minute version premieres online tomorrow. If you haven't seen any of the previews that they've posted on Huffington Post, go have a look.

Additionally, over 50 organizations from ten countries are using the month of April to call for a global movement to implement policies that prevent genocidal situations from occurring and also to take major action on the current escalating chaos in Darfur.

Considering that the situation in Darfur is still going on after six years, and the government of Turkey still refuses to acknowledge their actions in the Armenian Genocide, it is vital that the public around the world speak up and demand that their governments take more action in preventing and stopping genocide.

Many of us have remained relatively untouched by the genocides of the past century, but we can all do something this month to remember those who lost their lives. Please take a moment to head over to www.genocidepreventionmonth.org and pledge to commemorate the victims of these atrocities this April; and learn more about what we can do to return April to its place as a month of hope and rebirth.

Darfur Destroyed - Sudan's perpetrators break silence

shergald — Wed, 04 Mar 2009 18:21:10 GMT

Defectors from the Sudanese regime explain their role in the Sudanese Government's planning and execution of mass atrocities in Darfur, implicating members of the regime at the highest level.
This morning the Aegis Trust circulated this video. It is a powerful indictment of the Sudanese government, which, as we have known all along, was behind the massacres perpetrated against the Durfarians. It's 20 minute length is worth the while. Below are sections describing the unfolding of this human rights atrocity, which still goes on. The excerpts are chilling. God bless George Clooney for his caring.

Everything that follows is from Aegis Trust:

In 'Darfur Destroyed' those who organised, financed and perpetrated atrocities in Darfur testify for the first time how their orders came directly from the Government of Sudan (GoS).

In doing so they provide powerful support to the anticipated International Criminal Court prosecution of President of Sudan Omar El-Bashir for war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide committed in Darfur.

Among those interviewed are:

'Suleiman' Janjaweed Commander, 2003 -2007
'Ali' Janjaweed fighter, 2004-2005
'Ahmed' Senior officer, Sudanese Army Finance, 1999 -2008
'Osman' Sudanese Soldier, 2002 - 2003

'Darfur Destroyed' charts each phase of the crisis and reveals the responsibility of the GoS at each and every point.

1. The crisis erupts

A senior Janjaweed Commander discloses how, following the Sudanese Army's failed campaign against Darfur's rebels, the GoS armed, trained and funded groups of Arab militiamen to attack the region's black Africans.

"I give you the weapons, the money, the horses, the camels, the uniforms, everything... We need only land. We don't need the people here. We need only land"
(Vice President of Sudan Ali Osman in El Fashir in - as heard by 'Suleiman', Janjaweed Commander 2003 -2007)

2. Launching the Janjaweed

The same Janjaweed commander tells how intelligence collected on the ground was relayed to the headquarters of the Sudanese Army in Khartoum who gave direct orders and money to attack villages.

"I swear to God, a lot, a lot, a lot of people died"
('Ali', Janjaweed fighter, speaking about the first attack in which he was involved)

3.Masking the Janjaweed

By 2004 the Janjaweed had become a liability for the GoS in its dealings with the international community. 'Darfur Destroyed' shows how the GoS attempted to mask the presence of the militia in Darfur by absorbing them into the Sudanese Army.

"This was all so the Government could say that these people are not Janjaweed, they are military."
('Suleiman', Janjaweed Commander 2003 - 2007)

4.Arming and paying the Janjaweed

A Sudanese Army Finance Officer explains how the GoS paid Janjaweed militiamen alongside its regular armed force.

"After we sent the names [of Janjaweed fighters to be paid], approval came from the Headquarters."
('Ahmed', Senior Sudanese Army Finance officer 1999 -2008)

5.Working together

A Janjaweed fighter reveals how, where the militia encountered resistance, the Sudanese Air Force would bomb villages in advance of the their attack.

Pilot: "We searched it, there's nothing at all."
Ground Command: "Anywhere you pass through, burn it so they don't come back... Leave nothing, you don't want any surprises."
Recording of a Sudanese bomber pilot talking to Ground Command (Feb, 2004)

6.Rape

Janjaweed fighters of all levels explain how the Sudanese Army, with the tacit acceptance of the GoS, use rape as a tactic by which to terrorise, displace and torture black African women in Darfur. A defector from the Sudanese Army tells how soldiers would be shot by their superiors for refusing to rape woman and girls, some as young as 11 years old.

"Raping is an order... They want the children to be different in colour, to be like them"
('Osman', Sudanese Soldier 2002 - 2003)

7. Bribing the killers to go on

'Darfur Destroyed' reveals how, in 2005, many Janjaweed Commanders became frustrated with the war in Darfur. As a result President of Sudan Omar El-Bashir, sent 4 billion Sudanese Pounds to bribe the Commanders to keep up their attacks on Darfur's civilians.

8. Time for justice

Finally in 'Darfur Destroyed' a Senior Janjaweed Commander declares for the first time that he is prepared to testify against the Sudanese Government and calls upon the international community to arrest those responsible for Darfur's suffering.

"The Sudanese Government can never say that they did not make genocide there ... all of [them are] war criminals"
'Suleiman' Janjaweed Commander, 2003 - 2007

Strange how the phrase "Eyes Wide Shut" is becoming our norm throughout the world. The problem is that when governments perceive this way, like our own government's perspective on Darfur for the past eight years, it condones the behavior that these silence breakers are talking about.

Will Obama Act to End Darfur Tragedy?

Raj Purohit — Fri, 06 Feb 2009 14:33:24 GMT

I wanted to take a couple of minutes to share an op-ed that I co-aurthored with my friend Howard Salter.
It ran in the Baltimore Sun today (link here) and suggests that the Obama administration use the pending ICC arrest warrant of Omar al-Bashir to push for international action to end the killing in Darfur.

We note that:

The expected warrant also opens a door for Mr. Obama and his talented foreign policy team. They can leverage the arrest warrant to work with influential partners across the globe to stop the killing and solidify a concrete peace agreement. By doing so, Mr. Obama would address a serious human rights crisis at the dawn of his presidency while also sending a clear signal that the U.S. is ready to once again lead by example.

and remind readers of the failure of the last administration:

Bold leadership and action would mark a significant break from the position of President Obama's predecessor. While President George W. Bush called the killings in Darfur "genocide," his administration failed to take action to stop the violence. Human rights activists and the millions of Americans who have risen up to demand an end to the killing in Darfur have high hopes that the Obama administration will act differently.

Of course the right wing is on the attack already - the Washington Times has an inaccurate and fear driven editorial out today urging the President to shun the Court.

If you have a moment take a look at the whole op-ed and let me know what you think. I'll pop back to answer questions later

Global Suicide Pact: Transnational Maoism

Natasha Chart — Fri, 09 May 2008 22:45:00 GMT

Suicide (n) - The most preventable type of death.

This is the ongoing story of a species whose leaders have a death wish, and whose members at large mostly don't. Also, sometimes they got to wondering what should be done about a large geopolitical concentration of fellow beings operating under the brand name "China".

(9) What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun. (10) Is there anything of which one can say, "Look! This is something new"? It was here already, long ago; it was here before our time. (11) There is no remembrance of men of old, and even those who are yet to come will not be remembered by those who follow. - Ecclesiastes 1:9-11 (NIV)

A centrally planned economy.

Shiver. It's a bogeyman of the hardly-ever-Right that liberals and environmentalists want to foist a centrally planned economy on the US. They point to the Soviets, the Chinese, the human misery caused by perpetual shortages based on miscalculations of demand, the failure of price signals, the inflexibility of industrial response.

Those systems were inefficient, it's true. Consider:

The Great Leap Forward was the name given to the Second Five Year Plan which was scheduled to run from 1959-1965, though the name is now generally limited to the first three years of this period. ... The central idea behind the Great Leap was that rapid development of China's agricultural and industrial sectors should take place in parallel. ... To achieve this, Mao advocated that a further round of collectivisation modelled on the USSR's "Third Period" was necessary in the Chinese countryside where the existing collectives would be merged into huge People's communes. ... At the Politburo meetings in August 1958, it was decided that these people's communes would become the new form of economic and political organization throughout rural China. Astonishingly for such a dramatic social change, by the end of the year approximately 25,000 communes had been set-up, each with an average of 5,000 households.
... On the communes, a number of radical and controversial agricultural innovations were promoted at the behest of Mao. Many of these were based on the ideas of now discredited Soviet biologist Trofim Lysenko and his followers.
... With dramatically reduced yields, even urban areas suffered much reduced rations; however, mass starvation was largely confined to the countryside, where as a result of massively inflated production statistics, very little grain was left for the peasants to eat. Food shortages were bad throughout the country; however, the provinces which had adopted Mao's reforms with the most vigor, such as Anhui, Gansu and Henan, tended to suffer disproportionately. Sichuan, one of China's most populous provinces, known in China as "Heaven's Granary" because of its fertility, is thought to have suffered the greatest absolute numbers of deaths from starvation due to the vigor with which provincial leader Li Jinquan undertook Mao's reforms. During the Great Leap Forward, cases of cannibalism also occurred in the parts of China that were severely affected by drought and famine.
... Additionally, this loss in Mao's regime meant that Mao became a "dead ancestor," as he labeled himself: a person who was respected but never consulted, occupying the political background of the Party. Furthermore, he also stopped appearing in public.
... In agrarian policy, the failures of food supply during the Great Leap were met by a gradual de-collectivization in the 1960s that foreshadowed further de-collectivization under Deng Xiaoping. Political scientist Meredith Jung-En Woo argues: "Unquestionably the regime failed to respond in time to save the lives of millions of peasants, but when it did respond, it ultimately transformed the livelihoods of several hundred million peasants (modestly in the early 1960s, but permanently after Deng Xiaoping's reforms subsequent to 1978.)" ...

Even authoritarian China had to reject the disastrous local effects of collectivized mass agriculture. Even a figure such as Mao was brought low by failures that led to the deaths of millions. But now look where they're at today, and also consider this:

... Yet the Mao era's ecological devastation pales next to that of China's current industrialization. A fourth of the country is now desert. More than three-fourths of its forests have disappeared. Acid rain falls on a third of China's landmass, tainting soil, water, and food. Excessive use of groundwater has caused land to sink in at least 96 Chinese cities, producing an estimated $12.9 billion in economic losses in Shanghai alone. Each year, uncontrollable underground fires, sometimes triggered by lightning and mining accidents, consume 200 million tons of coal, contributing massively to global warming. A miasma of lead, mercury, sulfur dioxide, and other elements of coal-burning and car exhaust hovers over most Chinese cities; of the world's 20 most polluted cities, 16 are Chinese.
The government estimates that 400,000 people die prematurely from respiratory illnesses each year, and health care costs for premature death and disability related to air pollution is estimated at up to 4 percent of the country's gross domestic product. Four-fifths of the length of China's rivers are too polluted for fish. Half the population-600 or 700 million people-drinks water contaminated with animal and human waste. ...

I'd argue that our global industrial culture has become more destructive and less accountable than Mao era China's. We've encouraged the Chinese, and the people of every other country, to substitute one form of Maoism for another. We've even reinvented our own Lysenkoism.

Global Central Land Planning

We rejected the centrally planned industry and agriculture of Mao, and for good reason; it starved people.

Will we reject the monotone industry and agriculture of global collectives like Wal-Mart and Monsanto for the same reason? Will we have the strength to look at the system we live under and see that it doesn't work, that it's starving people?

Agrarian author Wendell Berry referred to our system of commerce as an absentee economy. Someone sitting in Bentonville, AK, can make decisions for millions, without ever having to directly face those injured by the consequences. Without any means of accountability for the level of havoc they wreak, they are held almost solely to the measure of how much profit they've made for absentee investors.

... Thus corporate ownership frequently seeks to remove all social and ethical constraints on a company's pursuit of ever-greater profits and growth. Anything that is legal is considered allowable, and if profitable, is deemed desirable, regardless of the social or ethical implications. Corporate acts of patriotism and altruism become nothing more than public relations strategies designed to minimize societal constraints on profits and growth.
... As corporate consolidation takes place globally [and] vertically ... free market coordination is replaced by corporate central planning. Ironically, corporatism is transforming capitalism into a perverse form of communism, in which corporate ownership, rather than government ownership, is replacing individual private ownership and central planning by corporations, rather than government, is replacing free market allocation of resources.
The fundamental flaw in capitalism is its lack of attention to the need to continually renew, regenerate, and reproduce the natural and human resources that must support productivity over the long run. Economic investments today are investments in more efficient means of extraction or exploitation, not investments in renewal or regeneration of the natural and human resource base. In other words, any system that naturally encourages the exploitation of nature and of people is incapable of protecting nature and people from its exploitation. ...
Sustainable Capitalism: A Matter of Common Sense, by John Ikerd, 2005

So what else is a massive, transnational corporation but a central planning agency for their fraction of the global economy? 'Okay, now, everybody grow corn and wheat! Mark, set ... go!!!' Unelected people thousands of miles away telling you how to live and what you can buy and what you and your family are worth.

In The Shock Doctrine, by Naomi Klein, she included the following quote from someone who'd gotten to live under both sides:

Pieces of a living city cannot be auctioned off without taking into consideration that there are indigenous traditions, even if they seem odd to foreigners ... But these are our traditions and our city. For a long time we lived under the dictatorship of the Communists, but now we have found out that life under the dictatorship of business people is no better. They couldn't care less about what country they are in.
- Grigory Gorin, Russian writer, 1993

When people starve in North Korea, it's a terrible tragedy. When people starve under a global agribusiness regime, it's an unfortunate failure of the market that needs to be corrected by making it even easier for a small handful of companies to take over world food production. When neoliberals talk about freeing the market, they're only ever talking about making the world safe for corporate mercantilism; where everyone is supposed to believe that we can all get rich by aspiring to export more than we import. All of us. Ahem. Sometimes, there are ponies.

Which is working so well for us already. Look what's happened the the soil that supports us all in parallel with the glorious Green Revolution, emphasis mine:

... During the past half century, human land use and associated activities have degraded some 5 billion ha (about 43%) of Earth's vegetated land. Such land degradation results in a reduced productive potential and a diminished capacity to provide benefits to humanity. Much of this degradation (on about 3.6 billion ha) is linked to desertification, the spreading of desert conditions that disrupt semiarid and arid ecosystems (including agroecosystems).
... Degraded lands may suffer from destruction of native vegetation communities, reduced agricultural yields, lowered animal production, and simplification of once-diverse natural ecosystems with or without accompanying degradation of the soil resource. On about 2 billion of the 5 billion ha of degraded lands in the world, soil degradation is a major part of the problem ... In some cases the soil degradation occurs mainly as deterioration of physical properties by compaction or surface crusting, ... or as deterioration of chemical properties by acidification ... or salt accumulation ... However, most (~85%) soil degradation stems from erosion--the destructive action of wind and water.
The two main components of land degradation--damage to plant communities and deterioration of soil--are not independent of each other. Rather, they interact to cause a downward spiral of accelerating deterioration ... Due to overgrazing, deforesation, or inappropriate methods of crop production, vegetation becomes less dense and vigorous, and thus provides the soil with less and less protection from erosion. Simultaneously, as the soil is degraded by such processes as erosion and nutrient depletion, it becomes less and less capable of supporting a protective canopy of vegetation.
... Although rivers like the Mississippi and Yangtze were muddy before humans disturbed their watersheds, current sediment loads are far greater than before. To gain some perspective on the enormous amount of soil transported to the sea by these rivers, consider the Mississippi's sediment load (only a fifth as great as that of the Yangtze or the Ganges). If the 300 million Mg of sediment were carried to the Gulf of Mexico by dump trucks, it would take a continuous, year-round caravan of more than 80,000 large trucks, stretching all the way from Wisconsin to New Orleans (1600 km) and back, with a 20-Mg load being dumped into the Gulf about every 2 seconds.
Accelerated erosion occurs when people disturb the soil or natural vegetation ... [and] is often 10 to 1000 times as destructive as geological erosion, especially on sloping lands in regions of high rainfall. Rates of erosion by wind and water on agricultural land in Africa, Asia, and South America are thought to avegage about 30 to 40 Mg/ha annually. In the United States, the average erosion rate on cropland is about 12 Mg/ha--7Mg by water and 5 Mg by wind. Some cultivated soils are eroding at 10 times these average rates. In comparison, erosion on undisturbed humid-region grasslands and forests generally occurs at rates considerably below 0.1 Mg/ha. ...
The Nature and Properties of Soils, 13th Ed., Ch. 17, by Nyle C. Brady and Ray R. Weil, Pearson Education, Inc., 2002. If you know a soil scientist, they have this textbook.
Editorial Note: The 'ha' abbreviation stands for hectares, with one hectare equivalent to about 2.47 acres. Five billion hectares is around 12.4 billion acres, 3.6 billion hectares is about 8.9 billion acres, and 2 billion hectares is about 4.9 billion acres. And, yeah, holy ****ing ****, that's a lot of land.
The 'Mg' abbreviation stands for megagram, or a metric ton, 1,000 kilograms.

If it weren't bad enough how the land has been managed, look how they've handled our water supplies:

... Water tables are dropping a meter or more each year beneath a large area of irrigated farmland in north China; they are falling 20 centimeters a year across two-thirds of India's Punjab, that nation's breadbasket. One-fifth of irrigated land in the US is watered by pumping in excess of the recharge rate. The Southwest receives only 6 percent of the country's available water as rainfall, but its large irrigated farms and growing urban areas account for 36 percent of the nation's water use.
... The Ogallala Aquifer that supplies agriculture, indultry and home use in much of the southern and central plains states has an annual overdraft 130 to 160 percent in excess of replacement. This vitally important aquifer will become unproductive in another thirty years or so. The Ogallala Aquifer is the irrigation source for much of the American breadbasket; when it becomes unproductive, the US heartland will go dry. ...
Eating Fossil Fuels: Oil, Food and the Coming Crisis in Agriculture, by Dale Allen Pfeiffer

All the mistakes that one community might have made, and suffered for, in caring for their land in the past can now get multiplied around the globe before the feedback effects kick in. As Brady and Weil said in the same chapter quoted above, "When viewing the nearly barren hills in central India, or in parts of Greece, Lebanon, and Syria, it is hard to imagine that agricultural communities once flourished in these places."

Exploitation of the land has been a chronic flaw of human agriculture, but people who refused to learn could be replaced by those who would. Now, these parasitical factory cropping systems forcibly displace locally appropriate food production and agricultural systems that might have protected the soil better, moving so fast that they replace those who've learned with those who think they know everything, and are gravely mistaken.

And for what?

So some dude in a lab can cook up something new and pointless out of dirt cheap corn syrup to clog your arteries and overload your pancreas with. As crowning civilizational achievements go, this one bites.

Accountability

There's a tendency to blame capitalism for this sort of thing, the anti-democratic corporatocracy in which we all live, for whose favor both the governments of China and the US dance. But it really calls for a more specific description, maybe post-capitalism? Nah. That sounds like an art movement, and suggests that it's modern. Really, it's the same corporate mercantilism that Adam Smith himself was reacting against when he wrote Wealth of Nations, and said in Book 1, Chapter 10:

... [T]he policy of Europe occasions a very important inequality in the whole of the advantages and disadvantages of the different employments of labor and stock, by restraining the competition in some employments to a smaller number than might otherwise be disposed to enter into them. The exclusive privileges of corporations, or guilds, are the principal means it makes use of for this purpose. The property which every man has in his own labor, as it is the original foundation of all other property, so it is the most sacred and inviolable.
... The pretense that corporations are necessary for the better government of the trade is without any foundation. The real and effectual discipline which is exercised over a workman is not that of his corporation, but that of his customers. It is the fear of losing their employment which restrains his frauds and corrects his negligence. An exclusive corporation necessarily weakens the force of this discipline. ...

You know how it is when you call some customer 'service' hotline with a terrible interface that burns through your cell phone minutes like there's no tomorrow and the person on the other end can't help you with actual problems because their company's too big to give a damn about you and what are you going to do anyway? Take them to court? Ha.

Though if the courts do care and are too obnoxious, if the laws passed inconvenience them enough, the company will just move. They don't have to put up with you and your representative government, which gives them leverage. Smith continued in that chapter:

... Corporation laws, however, give less obstruction to the free circulation of stock from one place to another than to that of labor. It is everywhere much easier for a wealthy merchant to obtain the privilege of trading in a town corporate, than for a poor artificer to obtain that of working in it. ...

Some of those dead White guys had a clue, now and again.

So don't just call this capitalism. Mercantilism, perhaps, if you think that might mean anything to the person you're addressing. But maybe, just call it what it most recently resembles: transnational Maoism.

We've taken a Great Leap Forward.

Millions have starved. What's worse, they starved in a world where food was more abundant than it had ever been before. Millions more are likely to starve; not only through a continuation of grossly unfair distribution and land allocation, but because of the destruction of the land itself.

We burned off a one-time payout of cheap fossil fuel and the accumulated soil productivity of millenia, and called it progress.

How many deaths before we insist that the architects of this human and environmental disaster become "dead ancestors," like Chairman Mao had the grace to name himself after his failures cost the lives of so many of his people?

At least he acted as though he'd cared about the people he'd so plainly hurt. At least he was capable of remorse.

People like Warren Anderson of Union Carbide, not so much. Because in the end, it's about accountability. Any group, company, bureaucracy, or government, that will neither police itself nor be held to account by those they interact with will become authoritarian and corrupt. It's inevitable. Unavoidable.

Any such group not held to account for the impact of its actions will become disconnected from reality and consequence. Will be blind to peril and careless of injustice.

Mao's compatriots in power had the good sense to say, "Enough!", at last.

Where are those people in the United States? Where are those people in the regulatory oversight bodies that govern our corporations? Where are those people in our Congress?

No Courage

It isn't courage to point a finger at people far away and say that they're doing something wrong. It might be correct, from both a factual or ethical standpoint, but in the grand scheme of things, so what?

What the blazes can I do about China? What the Devil could they possibly do about me complaining about them such that it requires any fortitude on my part to do it? Indeed, the people with the most influence on me (and probably on you, too) are most likely to do nothing more than pat me on the back for being sage and wise enough to see the Chinese as the Biggest Problem We Face.

I vote in the United States. A country that's key to the hatching and propagation of transnational Maoism, and which refuses to hold its corporate spawn to account for the destruction of lives and property in every country it touches, including China.

(I'm lucky to live in a country where I don't face jail for saying this, it's true, and it makes my talk relatively cheap. But isn't that a pretty low bar? Isn't that the least we humans should expect from a government, from each other?)

And in the US, there is less criticism of the corporate model of running things than there was of Mao in China during the Great Leap Forward. Part of that has to do with the fact that people dying in the countrysides have been outside our national borders. Part of it has to do with the fact that it's considered unAmerican to do so, a standard of debate rigidly enforced and self-enforced by both politicians and the media.

So you want some Maoist conformity? Come to the United States.

Listen to a bunch of cowards point fingers at their trade rivals, their business partners, for tactics they employ themselves. Listen to our politburo gloat about their free democracy, where no corporate criticism is allowed to be heard on the television and government and corporate jobs are nearly interchangeable. Listen to the parasitic wastrels in power extol the bounty of their unaccountable economic planning; rejoicing in the luxury of the few at the expense of the many, the invisible.

I vote here. I pay for this directly. Who am I to start any moral soapboxing with the flaws of the Chinese?

[1] "The War On Bugs" by Will Allen, 2008, Chelsea Green. A history of pesticides and modern agriculture.

[2] "Global Warning: The Last Chance for Change" by Paul Brown, 2007, Reader's Digest. Or, as they say at the Fafblog, "Global Warming: How F*cked Are We? The answer may surprise you! But only if you thought the answer was "not f*cked," 'cause it turns out we're pretty f*cked."

[3] "China: Inside the Dragon" a special issue of National Geographic, May, 2008.

Other GSP installments:

Darfur Engine, Pt 2 - The long burn.
Darfur Engine, Pt 1 - You didn't think the Chinese had no precedent, did you?
Amish Takeover - Apocalyptic dystopia? No thanks, I'd rather have a civilization.
The Efficiency Trap - Energy flow in living systems and their origins.
The End of Cheap - Political reality, meet physical reality.

Global Suicide Pact: Darfur Engine, Pt 2

Natasha Chart — Fri, 09 May 2008 00:00:00 GMT

Suicide (n) - The most preventable type of death.

(9) What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun. (10) Is there anything of which one can say, "Look! This is something new"? It was here already, long ago; it was here before our time. (11) There is no remembrance of men of old, and even those who are yet to come will not be remembered by those who follow. - Ecclesiastes 1:9-11 (NIV)

We remember the past very selectively. It's certainly true that much of it, for most people, was horrible. And with the American view of history so much informed by the history of the Europeans, which ran heavy in the famine, epidemic and arbitrary gibbeting direction, it could be easy to assume that things were like that everywhere. In some cases, that's also certainly true.

Non-European peoples weren't societies of saints before colonial explorers got there; they had their own problems, their own demons. It isn't necessary to remember them as perfect to understand that what was done to them was wrong. Reserving justice only for the 'deserving' undermines the rule of law, destroys the social compact through alienating and arbitrary corruption, and must be regarded as ethically suspect human-to-human behavior from the perspective of every religious faith I've looked into.

In many cases, the ancestors of the people in what we now regard as the developing world achieved remarkable things that it's easy for us to lose sight of, seeing them as we do through the lens of a present in which their polity has often been through the wringers of some or all of repeated foreign conquest, deliberate cultural erasure, guerrilla warfare, Cold War coups, land dispossession and structural adjustment.

Just because many of them have been brought low, even to the state of the European peasantry of the pre-colonial and colonial eras, it shouldn't eclipse their past works, some of which were bloody amazing. It shouldn't necessarily make us despair for their future. After all, the European peasantry eventually did pretty well for themselves.

Paradise Burned

Nearly 500,000,000 people are being maintained, chiefly upon the products of an area smaller than the improved farm lands of the United States. Complete a square on the lines drawn from Chicago southward to the Gulf and westward across Kansas, and there will be enclosed an area greater than the cultivated fields of China, Korea and Japan and from which five times our present population are fed. - F.H. King, Farmers of Forty Centuries, 1911

For four thousand years the Chinese farmed their countryside and maintained its fertility. They farmed the same countryside, over and over again for generations. If its productivity did not increase, neither did it seem to decrease.

The contrast between the results of the original Chinese model and the European model of commodity extraction applied to the fertile Americas could not be more stark:

The forest became drastically reduced because of profligate cutting practices. The soil was progressively eroded and exhausted by European-style agriculture. Evidentally the settlers and their descendants mistook a temporary gift of nature for a permanent one. They assumed that depletion of one site could be made up by continuous expansion into others, "and in the long run," Mr. Cronon writes, "that was impossible." Seen from this angle, "the people of plenty were a people of waste." - From the New York Times book review of Changes In The Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England., by William Cronon.

The people of waste, indeed. Consider what they'd inherited, what they could have maintained and copied for their own use, perhaps even shared, for our eventual benefit:

[emphasis mine] ... Like people everywhere, Indians survived by cleverly exploiting their environment. Europeans tended to manage land by breaking it into fragments for farmers and herders. Indians often worked on such a grand scale that the scope of their ambition can be hard to grasp. They created small plots, as Europeans did (about 1.5 million acres of terraces still exist in the Peruvian Andes), but they also reshaped entire landscapes to suit their purposes. A principal tool was fire, used to keep down underbrush and create the open, grassy conditions favorable for game. Rather than domesticating animals for meat, Indians retooled whole ecosystems to grow bumper crops of elk, deer, and bison. The first white settlers in Ohio found forests as open as English parks-they could drive carriages through the woods. Along the Hudson River the annual fall burning lit up the banks for miles on end; so flashy was the show that the Dutch in New Amsterdam boated upriver to goggle at the blaze like children at fireworks. In North America, Indian torches had their biggest impact on the Midwestern prairie, much or most of which was created and maintained by fire. Millennia of exuberant burning shaped the plains into vast buffalo farms. When Indian societies disintegrated, forest invaded savannah in Wisconsin, Illinois, Kansas, Nebraska, and the Texas Hill Country.
... Planting their orchards, the first Amazonians transformed large swaths of the river basin into something more pleasing to human beings. In a widely cited article from 1989, William Balée, the Tulane anthropologist, cautiously estimated that about 12 percent of the nonflooded Amazon forest was of anthropogenic origin-directly or indirectly created by human beings. In some circles this is now seen as a conservative position. "I basically think it's all human-created," Clement told me in Brazil. He argues that Indians changed the assortment and density of species throughout the region. So does Clark Erickson, the University of Pennsylvania archaeologist, who told me in Bolivia that the lowland tropical forests of South America are among the finest works of art on the planet. "Some of my colleagues would say that's pretty radical," he said, smiling mischievously. According to Peter Stahl, an anthropologist at the State University of New York at Binghamton, "lots" of botanists believe that "what the eco-imagery would like to picture as a pristine, untouched Urwelt [primeval world] in fact has been managed by people for millennia." The phrase "built environment," Erickson says, "applies to most, if not all, Neotropical landscapes."
"Landscape" in this case is meant exactly-Amazonian Indians literally created the ground beneath their feet. According to William I. Woods, a soil geographer at Southern Illinois University, ecologists' claims about terrible Amazonian land were based on very little data. In the late 1990s Woods and others began careful measurements in the lower Amazon. They indeed found lots of inhospitable terrain. But they also discovered swaths of terra preta-rich, fertile "black earth" that anthropologists increasingly believe was created by human beings.
Terra preta, Woods guesses, covers at least 10 percent of Amazonia, an area the size of France. It has amazing properties, he says. Tropical rain doesn't leach nutrients from terra preta fields; instead the soil, so to speak, fights back. ...

Chemically speaking, fire is only a showy display of oxidation. The process whereby electrons are stripped away from atoms, quite commonly by interaction with oxygen. This releases energy, the capacity to do work, most of which will be lost as waste heat.

It's happening inside your cells right now. It's an integral part of digesting and utilizing the food we eat. It happens in every living cell, this controlled burn. It even gives off waste heat. The most important oxidation reactions for living things involve carbon compounds, starches mainly, or as you might have heard them called, carbohydrates.

Carbon hydrated, which is to say, carbon atoms joined to hydrogen and oxygen atoms. Photosynthesizing plant cells take water (H2O) carbon dioxide (carbon and two oxygens, CO2) and unburn it, if you will, into long chains of CH2O molecules linked together as fructose, cellulose, deoxyribose, what have you, and free oxygen (O2). Plant cells that don't photosynthesize, and almost all other living cells, take those starches and burn them, combine them with oxygen to produce water and carbon dioxide again.

We eat the bodies of other living things in large part for their exotic carbon compounds. We combine that carbon with oxygen, slowly, with lots of intermediate steps, capturing and reusing as much of the released energy as possible.

The pleasing warmth of our skin is the product of the form of steady combustion we're dependent on, that for humans, allows us to dependably fire the sugar-hungry engines of our brains.

We burn gently alive. So do other beings, all the other chemical machines.

Everywhere in the soil are bacteria and other organisms burning through the carbon that was left over from the waste or dead bodies of plants, animals, fungi and single-celled beings. When it's in soil, these carbon compounds are called soil organic matter (SOM), which I've mentioned before and will again.

SOM is one of the most valuable substances on earth if you're a land-dwelling mammal, which I'm going to guess that you are. It's the main difference between a gloriously black and crumbly prairie soil, nurturing of plants and acquisitive of water, and a fine grade of dead beach sand or rock dust. It's an excellent fertilizer and a strong component of pest and disease resistance in healthy ecosystems.

SOM is worth more than any metal, from a cosmic perspective far more rare, worth almost as much to us as free oxygen. Oh yes, oxygen again.

Soil-dwelling beings combine SOM with oxygen to burn it to live. Much of it gets released rapidly again as carbon dioxide after being digested, some of it is turned into very hard-to-digest carbon compounds that can remain in the soil for a long time before some enterprising fungi or bacteria get around to eating them.

SOM needs to be continually added back to the soil at a rate faster than the beings that live in the ground can burn it off or there will be a steady decline in soil quality and fertility. This can only be covered up for so long by chemical fertilizers. At some point, it simply becomes too resource intensive to replace what naturally ought to have been there.

The style of mass cash-crop agriculture hatched in Europe that uses the land as if it were a factory does not replace SOM. It doesn't keep it at a steady state. It provides for a rapid burnoff of all that makes good soil distinct from sand, and it increases atmospheric carbon dioxide, which, for reasons unknown, decreases soil organic matter.

This month's National Geographic[3] notes that global warming induced climate from increased carbon dioxide is already burning away the water stored in the glaciers of the Qinghai-Tibet plateau that feeds China's Yellow River, with over 3,000 of 4,077 lakes in one county there having dried up. They profile a Tibetan herding family that lost the better part of the animals that supported their nomadic lifestyle during the drought and had to accept a resettlement package from the Chinese government, because they simply couldn't support themselves anymore. Much of the Yellow River, the magazine explains, is now biologically dead; poisoned by industrial dumping and drained by agriculture, the water that remains is now often the death of the plants, animals and people who depended on it before.

The Chinese farmed and worked in their country in the old ways for forty centuries. It was a good country that they kept passing down to successive generations as an abundant foundation for new life. They haven't been doing it the new way for even a full century yet, and their land is dying. Just as the rich, beautiful land of the Americas is.

In 2005, there were 51,000 pollution-related protests across China [3] before the worst effects have even hit yet, when they already have environmental refugees. More than 40% of their land is now desert and another 800 sq miles or more become deserts every year [2].

China's fate, if they hold to their present road, is not to be the next global superpower. It's to starve. It's to be inundated with sand storms from the encroaching Gobi as 30 million surplus young men, men who will never be able to find a nice woman to settle down with because their parents' generation were ashamed to have daughters, realize that the taps have run dry.

That story writes itself.

Just As Broken

... Yu Baofa, a leading Shandong oncologist who has studied the villages of Dongping County, calls it "the cancer capital of the world." He says the incidence of esophageal cancer in the area is 25 times higher than the national average.
The more than four billion tons of wastewater dumped annually into the Yellow River, accounting for a full 10 percent of the river's volume, has pushed into extinction a third of the river's native fish species and made long stretches unfit even for irrigation. Now comes the human toll. In a 2007 report China's Ministry of Health blamed air and water pollution for an alarming rise in cancer rates across China since 2005 -- 19 percent in urban areas and 23 percent in the countryside. Nearly two-thirds of China's rural population, more than 500 million people use water contaminated by human or industrial waste. It's little wonder that gastrointestinal cancer is now the number one killer in the countryside. ... [3]

Does it hurt less when someone in your family dies of cancer than it does when they die by a machete? I'm dubious.

... The costs of Asia's industrial revolution are etched in little hamlets like Badui, a Chinese village in rural Gansu Province.
--
... The woman said her husband had just died in his thirties -- "of a stomach ache," she explained -- but what struck me was the way the teenage sons stared at me, their heads lolling to the side and their mouths creasing into monstrous grins. Their hair was shaggy and unkempt and their expressions preposterous.
"Yeah, they're not right in the head," the mother said, as she saw me looking at them uneasily. "Nobody is in this village. That's why people in these parts call this the 'village of idiots.' I wasn't born here; I married into it. But the same thing is happening to me. I can feel it every day. My brain's getting fried up until eventually there'll be nothing left. ..."
--
... Then, smack in the middle of the path, was a lanky grandfather ... holding the hand of a little girl -- not just a little girl, but a miniature girl, who came up only a bit higher than his knees. ... She was the size of a toddler, and her split pants and lack of underwear showed that she was not yet potty-trained. But she stood and walked effortlessly on her own, and she gazed at me with solemn black sparkling eyes that were those of a child, not a baby.
... "She's Liu Yingchun, my granddaughter ... She's seven years old," he said, although I later worked out that by American conventions she was six.
"Then why is she so short?"
"Oh, kids here are like that," protested the grandfather, still beaming lovingly at her. "Plenty of the kids just never grow up, never learn to speak. But this girl, she's a smart one. She may yet learn how to speak. And she's growing. She's a growing girl."
--
... "What a cute baby!" I said ingratiatingly. It was perhaps the wrong moment, for he had just urinated where he was sitting. Everybody looked at him, and he began to play with his fingers in the urine. His mother picked him up, scolded him, and moved him away. "You dumbo!" she said to him lovingly, tapping on his chest. "You melon-head!"
"What's the baby's name?" I asked her.
"Wei Haiyun[, he's e[ight years old," she murmured softly.
... I was so stunned by his height that I took a piece of string and held it against him, cutting it off to record his height. (On returning home I measured it -- twenty-nine inches. That is the height an average American baby reaches at twelve months.) ... looking at his face alone I would have judged him a handsome boy of eight or ten. But he was miniaturized, roughly in proper proportions, and he behaved like a baby: He ran to his mother to be cradled when he was upset, and he had never learned to use the toilet.
--
I turned out that one-third to one-half of the 180 people in Badui have some serious physical disorder, and nearly all the peasants die early -- often in their forties. Many lose their minds, or become deaf or blind before they die. Women report frequent miscarriages and stillborn children, as well as periodic birth defects. Shortly before I arrived, a baby had been born with fingers fused on both hands. But what struck me most was how many tiny children there were like Haiyun, many not just short but also mentally retarded or deaf.
Similar problems, on a more modest scale, also confound thousands more peasants in other nearby villages, and everyone knows what the problem is: the effluent water dumped into the river by the Liujiaxia Fertilizer Factory just upstream. That river water is the only source of drinking water for Badui. The peasants know that the water is contaminated and that it will destroy their minds and bodies, but they are thirsty and there is no alternative. ...
Thunder From The East: Portrait of a Rising Asia - by Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl Wudunn, Vintage publishing, 2001

There is no alternative.

Are the future hopes of those Chinese parents less destroyed than the future hopes of the Iraqi parents whose children are destroyed by bombs my taxes paid for?

The Chinese government probably doesn't want to have to do these things. Killing people and oppressing them is very tiresome, and often, they come to complain and eventually resist. Putting down rebellions is even more tiresome.

They're seizing at the first chance their people have had for real, mass prosperity. They do brutal things to hold on to power, but mostly, they probably want people to be reasonably satisfied and go about building the economy through the continuous processes of daily life. Which is pretty much what the US government wants of its own citizens: go to work, raise your family, buy stuff, don't make trouble. They probably don't see a way out of trying to copy what all the other successful countries are doing.

Which is sort of ironic, as I'll get to next time.

[1] "The War On Bugs" by Will Allen, 2008, Chelsea Green. A history of pesticides and modern agriculture.

[3] "China: Inside the Dragon" a special issue of National Geographic, May, 2008.

Other GSP installments:

Transnational Maoism - All hail our corporate mercantilist overlords.
Darfur Engine, Pt 2 - The long burn.
Darfur Engine, Pt 1 - You didn't think the Chinese had no precedent, did you?
Amish Takeover - Apocalyptic dystopia? No thanks, I'd rather have a civilization.
The Efficiency Trap - Energy flow in living systems and their origins.
The End of Cheap - Political reality, meet physical reality.

Update: Citation added for the Badui story. How the **** did I forget that one!?

Global Suicide Pact: Darfur Engine, Pt 1

Natasha Chart — Thu, 08 May 2008 20:00:00 GMT

Suicide (n) - The most preventable type of death.

(9) What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun. (10) Is there anything of which one can say, "Look! This is something new"? It was here already, long ago; it was here before our time. (11) There is no remembrance of men of old, and even those who are yet to come will not be remembered by those who follow. - Ecclesiastes 1:9-11 (NIV)

Glenn Hurowitz recently wondered who's going to help Tibet bring down China, like the Russians were brought down in Afghanistan and the British in India.

International pressure and protest seems to carry no weight among the Chinese. Their government is still arresting monks for "unauthorized gatherings", they're still shooting and killing Tibetans. They've also been shipping weapons to Zimbabwe's dictator, who's currently ignoring the results of an election that voted him and his party out of power. They buy 90 percent of Sudan's exported oil, and sells them small arms destined for Darfur. Darfur, where the Sudanese government is carrying out air attacks against helpless civilian targets. Oh yes, and they're now the world's top carbon polluter, though the US still remains the top carbon polluter per capita.

Yeah, that Chinese government, complete jerks, tyrants, to put it charitably. People are surprised that the Olympic torch protests seem only to have stirred Chinese nationalism, surprised that the Chinese don't understand why people are angry. Still, I think Glenn asks the wrong question. Because who is it that raised China up? The lack of self-awareness in this situation isn't exclusive to the Chinese, people everywhere have an amazing capacity to accept almost anything as normal.

Indeed, let's cut right to the heart of the matter: whom else will we buy our shoes from?
I looked this up once when I was working at my community college paper in 2005. There was an editorial insistence on doing a fashion insert, so I contributed something about sweatshops and the offshoring of clothing manufacture. (I know, total killjoy.) I found a copy of that article in my old files, and according to the research that I'd done at the time, the US had lost over 860,000 textile and apparel jobs since 1993, and China was making 80% of the world's shoes.

Sure, if you have (usually) more money to spend, you can find shoes made somewhere else. But not everyone has that kind of time or latitude. Funny thing, though, now shoe manufacturers are closing down in China. Now that "many factories have to meet social obligations" and workers have been agitating for better pay, manufacturing jobs are slowly starting to leave China as they once left the US.

Nobody in power ever really likes labor agitators. Not most ostensibly liberal employers, not even theoretically communist governments.

It all starts to sound so familiar. Like a story we've heard before. Which it is, of course.

We are rightly angry about Tibet, about Darfur. But we should be as angry about the engine of consumption, consolidation and extraction that created Tibet and Darfur. That created Iraq, Guatemala, Haiti, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Myanmar, vietnam, and so many other shattered nations at various stages of piecing a society back together or splintering further apart.

Maybe you don't know all the stories of those other places. Or, like me, perhaps you know more or less enough to cringe over their names. Perhaps you know enough to make you really angry. There have been (and let's try and stick with being charitable) terrible abuses.

Though as is so often true, abuse begins at home. And by home, in this case, I mean the home of the social system in which the Chinese government operates.

They Had No Title To Their Land, They Were Sold As Slaves

First, there was a plague and wars. Then the Western elites saw that the people who lived on the land, the subsistence farmers, had no titles of ownership to the land they farmed crops and grazed animals on in commons. The elites put up fences, they secured official deeds, they evicted the farmers and herders. They had the force of arms and the backing of the law. Whole families were cut off from their livelihoods, leaving many to flee to the growing slums of the cities to try and eke out a living at the whim of the manufacturing economy.

South America? The Native North Americans? No. The European peasantry, starting mainly in the 1400-1500s. Though it was a gradual process that took place at different rates in countries like England and Italy.

It isn't that manufacturing is bad, necessarily. But you had a whole class of people, who once might have been able to choose to work at it or not, separated from the basic means of subsistence that allowed them to try and maintain their families when there was no work. The lands they were turned out from stopped being used for the trifling purpose of supporting the people who lived nearby. They became productive lands that supported the accumulation of wealth in the hands of a few, they created great fortunes.

In 1776, in the Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith wrote about the situation that had become the lot of ever greater numbers of people in his day. A peasant underclass that was not merely poor, but entirely without means:

We have no acts of parliament against combining to lower the price of work; but many against combining to raise it. In all such disputes the masters can hold out much longer. A landlord, a farmer, a master manufacturer, or merchant, though they did not employ a single workman, could generally live a year or two upon the stocks which they have already acquired. Many workmen could not subsist a week, few could subsist a month, and scarce any a year without employment. In the long-run the workman may be as necessary to his master as his master is to him, but the necessity is not so immediate.

That went and happened again. Many times, all over the world. The last few decades have seen an acceleration in mass displacement of subsistence farm families in developing nations. Now their lands are productive though, supporting the accumulation of great wealth. Too bad those people have had to flee to cities where their isn't enough work for illiterate former farmers, too bad they can't afford to buy what they used to grow.

When the American colonies began to be settled with commodity farming in mind, people were taken from their homes, from prisons, press-ganged to the New World to work as slave labor on farms. They owed fealty, as if to a king or aristocrat, to the leaders of the London Company, the Ohio Company, the Dutch West India Company, among others. [1]

Black Africans? Not in this case. Again, the European peasantry. That's how many of the first Whites to come to North America first came; as slaves press ganged against their will, indentured servants, and mercenaries bound by oath. Will Allen, The War On Bugs, 2008 [1]:

Historian James O'Neal described the climate of freedom in eastern North America immediately before and after the Revolutionary War: "From 1682 to 1804 the proportion of white slaves to the whole number of immigrants to Pennsylvania steadily increased, till they constituted two-thirds during the last 19 years." Pennsylvania was politically the most liberal state and did not even require property ownership for voting privilege. But even in this most liberal state, only one-third of the immigrants in the period immediately after the Revolution obtained their freedom when they arrived in America.

Everybody did it, you know, lived in a society that kept slaves. It's still done, even though it's illegal.

Back when it was legal here in the United States, there were also free White people who sold their own children as slaves, if you can believe it.

It should hardly surprise anyone that a society like that would go on to do the same things to people from other societies. That their elites would steal land from Native Americans. That they would also buy and sell human beings who didn't look related to them. It doesn't excuse anything done to Blacks, neither to the Native Americans who were also kept as slaves and worse, nor could it excuse the racial apartheid that followed the formal end of slavery.

It just goes to show that the ancestors who founded this country were very sick, in more ways than we always remember.

It's to their credit that, being products of such a brutal upbringing, they were able to lay the foundations for a more expansive democracy. That even though many of them strove for a pseudo-aristocratic stranglehold on the wealth of the new nation they were building, they set in motion an engine of greater liberty than they were themselves capable of envisioning.

To love or respect any person, or human enterprise, without acknowledging their flaws, is ultimately not to love. Not to respect. It is to dream about people that never were.

If you want only to dream, go to sleep.

Inhumanity

How nice it would be if we were past all that. Institutionalized, legal slavery is gone in the US. But there were many poisonous aspects to it that remain, demons that have yet to be exorcised. Mostly, the way there's always some group of people that other parties to events can't see as human.

People whose hurt and sufferings and shattered lives we can't feel. If it were my sister treated as the women are by the Janjaweed militias in Darfur, it would injure me, too. If it were my cousin, reduced to howling grief on the street because all his precious children lay in tatters in a bombed out house as happens in Iraq, I would howl with him. It would break me to know and love those people and hurt for them; I would have to act, to try to help.

We were all asked to do this, to care for each other a long time ago by a very original social radical, but hardly anyone listened. Maybe there's still time for that, but it has yet to work.

How nice it would be if it had worked to just tell people to be good to each other, as if the motive had been to treat people badly in the first place. That's just the byproduct. Just.

After all, the modernized nations were perfectly willing to give up most of the mistreatment of their own people as soon as they had people in other nations to exploit or steal from. It wasn't personal.

We often forget, now, that it's how those who came before us jumpstarted our own prosperity. Though the peoples we hurt along the way haven't forgotten. The Chinese, who long for prosperity of their own, they remember. They aren't evil, they just want to thrive. As the people whose cultures originated in Europe had previously explained it to them: if you want to thrive, this is how it's done these days.

It would be better if only the victims lived someplace else. Not on top of the Chinese' land. Not on top of the US' oil. Not on that really nice farmland they weren't using properly. It would be better if they'd buy our stuff and would just sell us what we want them to. Then there wouldn't be any problems, it's only that the engine must be fed. Must. It's too bad people won't go along quietly. Too bad they don't understand.

Now look what they made us do.

[1] "The War On Bugs" by Will Allen, 2008, Chelsea Green. A history of pesticides and modern agriculture.

[3] "China: Inside the Dragon" a special issue of National Geographic, May, 2008.

Other GSP installments:

People of Conscience Respond to Call for Boycott of Chinese Games

Richard08 — Sat, 03 May 2008 19:32:20 GMT

The Social Concerns Committee of Lake City (Michigan) United Methodist Church, led by Richard Renner, is spearheading an effort to boycott the 2008 Beijing Summer Olympics. The Chinese Games are regularly referred to as the "Genocide Games," due to China's record of human rights atrocities at home, and their unyielding support of the brutal regimes in Burma and Sudan.

According to Renner, "We absolutely support our American athletes, and it is highly unlikely that the U.S. will completely boycott the Beijing Olympics. However, we urge our Representatives in Congress to support resolutions condemning China's human rights record. Further, we would like our President, George W. Bush, to reconsider his decision to attend the opening ceremonies. As leader of the free world, it would send a strong message of disapproval to the Chinese Communists if he were to decline their invitation to be an honored guest."

Since 1950, when the army of the People's Republic of China illegally invaded and occupied Tibet, the Chinese authorities have conducted a systematic campaign of genocide upon the Tibetan nation. Reliable estimates claim that as many as 1.2 million innocent Tibetans have been murdered. This crime of genocide has been condemned by the International Commission of Jurists, and is currently being investigated by Spain's High Court.

China is the number one diplomatic, economic and military ally of the brutal regime in Sudan. Armed with Chinese weapons, the Sudanese government has conducted a systematic campaign of genocide in the Darfur region. Since the conflict began in 2003, over 400,000 Darfuri civilians have been murdered, 2.8 million refugees have been driven from their homes, and 90 percent of ethnic Darfuri villages have been destroyed. On the U.N. Security Council, China has repeatedly threatened to use its veto to block resolutions imposing economic and diplomatic sanctions on Sudan.

"It is unfortunate that the Beijing Olympics have become so politicized," said Renner. "However, it is the Chinese government that began the process, by continually using the games as a propaganda tool to promote their political and economic agenda. China wants to be recognized as a global power, perhaps even a superpower, and they are using the Olympics to achieve that recognition."

So far, people of conscience from all across Michigan have joined our campaign to boycott the "Genocide Games." However, we need your help, too. For more information contact Richard Renner at 231/229-2505, or rrenner@core.com.

"First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out because I was not a socialist. Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out because I was not a trade unionist. Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out because I was not a Jew. Then they came for me, and there was no one left to speak for me."

- Pastor Martin Niemoller, decorated World War I U-boat Commander. Imprisoned in Sachsenhausen and Dachau Death Camps from 1938 to 1945 for his anti-Nazi activities.

Updated: Tutu, Gere Speak Out On Tibet, Nonviolence and George W. Bush

grannyhelen — Wed, 09 Apr 2008 13:33:02 GMT

"We want to say to China, 'We thought that the Olympic Games would help you improve your human rights record," Tutu said. "We still hope... But what we are saying to the heads of state, to President George Bush, is, 'For goodness sake, don't go to the Beijing games... for the sake of our children, for the beautiful people of Tibet. Don't go!'"

link: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/...
Already in San Francisco to receive Outspoken Award from the International Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Commission, Nobel Peace Prize winner Archbishop Desmond Tutu joined actor and Tibet activist Richard Gere at a peaceful protest last night, held as part of the lead up to the Olympic torch relay today.

He spoke out in support of the ongoing protests during the Olympic torch relay:

Tutu praised protesters who have put themselves on the line in Paris, San Francisco and elsewhere to protest last month's crackdown in Tibet, which claimed as many as 140 lives.
In particular, he applauded three climbers who hung pro-Tibet banners Monday from the Golden Gate Bridge.
"I salute them," he said.

link: http://www.latimes.com/news/pr...

Archbishop Tutu also called for China to begin talks with the Dalai Lama, speaking out against the latest attempt by Chinese authorities to demonize His Holiness:

"I just hope China will realize that her best interests are in listening to the Dalai Lama," Tutu said. "Anyone who has met him, knows you have been in the presence of one of the most holy people. For someone who has been in exile now nearly 50 years, his joyousness is amazing. He bubbles. He has a sense of fun like a schoolboy, really. Sometimes I say to him, 'Shhh. The cameras are on us. Behave like a holy man.'"
Tutu chuckled and the audience laughed with him.
"But he's an amazing person," Tutu continued. "I'm very sad that he's being vilified in a way that anyone who knows him would say, 'Oh come off it, man.' The Dalai Lama has said clearly, let's negotiate. We don't want to separate from China. All we want is autonomy to preserve the very ancient Tibetan traditions and religion."

link: http://www.insidebayarea.com/t...

Richard Gere gave brief, moving remarks at the candlelight vigil:

Labeling this a "decisive moment", Gere gently chastised "our beloved Tibetan brothers and sisters" for - just for a moment - allowing themselves to manifest anger and violence. He reminded the crowd assembled of the radical ideal of Tibetan autonomy: to create a brother-and-sisterhood based on fostering love and compassion through all of its institutions.

Calling Hu Jintao's concept of Olympic "harmony" a fraud, he asked protesters to do one simple thing: speak the truth.

Gere stated his dream was for Chinese authorities to wake up and ask themselves, "My God, what have we done? Let's go talk to the Dalai Lama."

Regardless of whether this is the outcome of this latest round of protests, it remains the goal of the protesters in San Francisco. And in spite of headlines bristling with the city "bracing" for protests, and intimations that this may be the last leg of the Olympic torch journey, the appeals from these two leaders last night were ones of nonviolence and peace when confronting the torch relay and everything that it has now come to symbolize.

Please keep all sides of this conflict in your thoughts, prayers and meditations as protesters line the streets of San Francisco later today to voice their support of human rights.

UPDATE Media reports are buzzing about another impromptu protest by Tibetan monks today at the Labrang monastery:

The outburst on Wednesday came as authorities guided reporters through the Labrang Monastery. The tour marked the first officially approved visit to Xiahe by foreign reporters since monks and other Tibetans in the city clashed with police last month. During the tour, about 15 monks rushed out, waving a Tibetan flag, and approached a group of about 20 Chinese and foreign reporters.
"The Dalai Lama has to come back to Tibet," one monk said, according to Reuters, which was invited on the tour. "We are not asking for Tibetan independence, we are just asking for human rights. We have no human rights now."
Several monks draped their heads in robes, Reuters reported, possibly as an attempt to conceal their identities and avoid later punishment. They also said that local authorities were holding other monks and that armed, plainclothes security officers were posted around the city.

link: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04...

ABC News has first-hand impressions of the protest by their reporter at the monastery:

There in the courtyard were 15 young monks marching. Some were chanting loudly, most had grim expressions on their faces.
Two monks at the head of the column were holding a Tibetan banner, identified as a sign of support of the exiled Dalai Lama and considered "reactionary" by China's regime. One monk in the group covered his head with part of his saffron robe.
I approached one of them and asked in Chinese what the others were shouting. He translated from the Tibetan, "We want human rights! We want freedom!"
The young monk went on, "We want the Dalai Lama to return! We want to preserve our religion!"
snip
The demonstration petered out as more older monks showed up and persuaded the younger monks to leave.
He said these protesting monks did not represent the majority of monks. He added that these young monks did not understand the history of China and Tibet and were misled by "separatists."

link: http://www.abcnews.go.com/Inte...

The Case for Bill Richardson: Leadership for America

Stephen Cassidy — Fri, 14 Sep 2007 07:24:50 GMT

This diary is copied from a posting on MyDD as part of the candidate series for Bill Richardson. I am not part of his campaign.

Congressman, U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, Secretary of Energy and in his second term as Governor of New Mexico after a landslide victory in November 2006, Governor Bill Richardson is running for President to heal America and restore our place in the world. He possesses the experience, vision and leadership skills to be a great President.
Richardson is goal-oriented, assertive and confident. He has the ability to quickly evaluate a situation but is not rigid in his thinking and will modify policy when necessary. He takes a practical approach to governing, focusing on solutions to problems rather than ideology.

Richardson has been called a "force of nature." When he served in Congress, he was regarded as one of the hardest working members, respected for his intelligence and detailed knowledge of the issues. In a profile earlier this year, Democratic state Senator Mary Jane Garcia stated, "It just never stops; it's busy, busy, busy. He's got an agenda like you can't believe." New Mexican Republican Representative Dan Foley added, "People shouldn't count him out. You won't find a person who works harder."

Richardson fights for the principals he believes in. I offer two of many examples:

First, while Secretary of Energy, against opposition in Congress and even criticism from within the Clinton Administration, Richardson acknowledged the Energy Department's long history of denying responsibility for workers' injuries at the nation's nuclear weapons plants. He stated, "We need to right this wrong."

Richardson successfully lobbied Congress to enact legislation providing payments and medical benefits to the workers that developed cancer and other serious diseases.

Second, in April 2007, Richardson spoke at Rally to Save the People of Darfur in San Francisco. He was the only Presidential candidate that attended, even though they were all in California that weekend for the California Democratic Party Convention. Prior to speaking, a reporter asked Richardson why he was there. Richardson's response was an inspiration to all fighting for social change: "You have to be part of the causes you believe in."

Richardson has been to Sudan three times visiting refugee camps and negotiating the release of American aid workers and journalists. He has never given up on Africa.

Richardson has had an outstanding record as Governor of New Mexico. He increased school funding, expanded health care coverage, extended civil rights protections to include sexual orientation, made New Mexico a model for the rest of nation in promoting clean energy and fighting global warming, while cutting taxes to promote sustainable growth and balancing the state budget. For his commitment to protecting the state's environment, the Conversation Voters of New Mexico gave Richardson "a solid A."

Richardson understands that the Democratic Party must be the party of economic progress. He has assisted the private sector in New Mexico in creating new, high paying jobs. He calls on Democrats to "stand for policies that encourage innovation and expand economic opportunity."

On education policy, Richardson understands that No Child Left Behind sets up our public schools for failure. Unlike the other major candidates that want to somehow fix and preserve NCLB, Richardson's approach is simple and clear: scrap it. Richardson writes::

NCLB has failed. It has failed our schools, it has failed our teachers and it has failed our children. The Bush administration claims victories, but upon closer scrutiny it becomes clear that the White House is simply dressing up ugly data with fancy political spin. Far from leaving no child behind, President Bush seems to have left reality behind.

On global warming and energy policy, Richardson has set forth the most detailed and aggressive plan of all candidates - calling for a 90% decrease in greenhouse emissions by 2050. Dave Hamilton, the Sierra Club's Director of Energy and Global Warming program, stated Richardson's "18-page energy policy is much more aggressive than anything we've seen so far from the candidates. It is also significantly better-elaborated in theory with regard to where we end up."

Richardson is the product of two nations, Mexico and the United States. His childhood friends included many of the poor in the neighborhood where his family lived in Mexico City. He saw first hand the devastating impact of poverty on families and children. His bi-national upbringing necessitated understanding and then bridging two cultures. This laid the foundation for Richardson as an adult to become a peacemaker among nations and an expert in the art of diplomacy.

Richardson has articulated a new foreign policy for America which starts by recognizing the new challenges we face in the 21st century:

Jihadists and environmental crises have replaced armies and missiles as the greatest threats, and globalization has eroded the significance of national borders. Many problems that were once national are now global, and dangers that once came only from states now come also from societies-not from hostile governments, but from hostile individuals or from impersonal social trends, such as the consumption of fossil fuels.

Richardson calls on the U.S. to foster "the cooperation needed to solve the issues that face the modern world. The U.S. government needs to see the world as it really is - so that the United States can lead others to make it a better, safer place."

On Iraq, Richardson has eloquently stated:

The War in Iraq is not the disease. Iraq is a symptom. The disease is arrogance. The next President must be able to repair the damage that's been done to our country's reputation over the last six years. It's why experience in foreign affairs has never been more important.

Richardson has the best plan for ending the war in Iraq. He is only major candidate that has repeatedly and unequivocally called for the complete withdrawal of ALL American forces from Iraq.

The others candidates lack the confidence to stand up to the military and political establishment and follow the will of the American people. They accept the argument that a complete withdrawal of all American forces would be "irresponsible." As Richardson wrote wrote in a recent Op Ed, "On the contrary, the facts suggest that a rapid, complete withdrawal -- not a drawn-out, Vietnam-like process -- would be the most responsible and effective course of action."

The fundamental difference between Obama, Edwards and HRC verse Richardson on Iraq is that Richardson understands that by the U.S. remaining in Iraq, we unwittingly perpetuate the war. Our troops have become the targets in a civil war. The Iraqi government has become dependent on the U.S. for security the Iraqis should provide. Richardson notes: "The Iraqis won't take the necessary steps toward political reconciliation until the U.S. makes it clear that it will leave the country for good."

Likewise, without the direct and committed action by the President of the United States, Iraq will remain in chaos. Richardson is the only candidate with a track record of foreign policy success. Richardson will lead a diplomatic offensive to bring peace and stability to the region.

That we must exit Iraq now is a message Richardson constantly delivers to voters. He doesn't tailor his message to the audience. Yesterday, Richardson spoke on ending the war at two town halls in Iowa. The first was at the National Guard Armory in Council Bluffs and second at the Veterans of Foreign Wars Post in Sioux City.

In closing, with Richardson we get two for the price of one: an energetic, can-do leader on domestic issues and an experienced diplomat on foreign affairs.

Reading Liberally Page Turner: Harry Potter

Living Liberally — Tue, 17 Jul 2007 15:05:51 GMT

...presented by Living Liberally
by Justin Krebs

"While literature can be a beautiful solitary experience, it can also bring people together in a community."

This sentiment is at the heart of the growing Reading Liberally network of book clubs and tours, but the quote itself comes from Andrew Slack, the 20-something founder of the HP Alliance -- which is making sure our Harry Potter-crazed world recognizes the powerful social justice messages in the adventures of J.K. Rowling's young wizards.

Andrew is by no means alone. Harry and the Potters, a wizard rock band, will be playing to a crowd of 2,000 at New York's Bohemian Beer Garden in Astoria on Thursday as a build-up to their 6,000-person concert on Harvard Yard on Friday -- a week after the 5th film hit the theaters, and the eve of the release of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, the final book in the series.

"Hundreds...thousands of people getting together to rock out to songs about the power of love," explains Slack. "And not in a hippyish way...these are teenagers who feel a connection to the books and to each other."

The nearly 10,000 friends on the HP Alliance's MySpace page demonstrate that connection...and Slack wants to make sure they are talking about more than whether Hermione and Ron will end up together. Especially: the genocide in Darfur.

From their press release last week:

In anticipation of the back-to-back release of the final Harry Potter book and the fifth movie -- HP Alliance is working with the Genocide Intervention Network and several human rights groups to organize hundreds of house parties all over the world.
On July 14, each house party will listen to an HP Alliance podcast where Joe Wilson, former U.S. Ambassador; John Prendergast, senior advisor to the International Crisis Group; and Dot Maver, executive director of the Peace Alliance will discuss the history of the Sudanese genocide and how regular people can do something to stop it. The podcast will also feature "Wizard Rock" bands like "Harry and the Potters," a young Harry Potter fan who got the state of Kansas to divest 38 million dollars from companies that fund the genocide in Darfur, and is co-sponsored by the popular Harry Potter news site, the Leaky Cauldron.
Using house parties to connect Harry Potter with a serious issue like the genocide in Darfur has helped capture the attention of young adults all over the world. "I'm 16 years old and have been actively trying to do just what you guys are planning for years!" said HP Alliance member Michelle. "I'm just a teenager, but I have a voice and a big heart and want to put all my effort into planning an awesome party to help spread the word and help Darfur!"

But the social justice message of Harry Potter isn't issue specific. Beloved Dumbledore rejects the entire right-wing style of divisive, fear-mongering politics. After Voldemort's return, Slack notes, Dumbledore warns of the dark wizard's ability to tear people apart, and argues the only way to counter it is "an equally strong bond of friendship."

And throughout the books, today's political topics are drawn out in black-and-white.

On the evil of torture: Dumbledore begs the Ministry of Magic to rid themselves of the Dementors, saying that a free society has no place for their kind in our penal system.

On the right to trial: Harry's godfather Sirius Black was held and tortured for 13 years without a trial, and in the most recent volume Stan Shunpike and Mundungus Fletcher were imprisoned without trial despite the Minister's knowledge they may be innocent.

On the value of diplomacy: communicating with the foreign and frightening Giants proves better option than isolation or violent conflict.

On racial equality: full rights for "purebloods," "mudbloods" and Muggle-born wizards.

On worker's rights: Hermione's campaign to empower the House Elves.

The 7th and final volume will reach millions of readers within the first weekend -- citizens of all ages who can learn about justice and equality in an open society...and who can take action in the real world to fight the battles Harry fights in his.

As Slack (who'd welcome comment directly at andrew@thehpalliance.org or via their MySpace site) concludes:

A story can change the world. Traditional politics isn't the only way to make people aware or to get people active. We can do a lot with this story and with this gigantic community of readers that's dedicated to fighting the dark arts in the real world.