Bill Fletcher, Jr. is a long-time international and labor writer and activist.
We on the Left need to be clear as to what is at stake in the on-going, and fairly vicious, controversy surrounding the publication of President Jimmy Carter’s Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid. The question is not about Carter’s policies as President of the United States. The question is not about whether Carter used the right maps. The question is not even about whether Carter sufficiently acknowledged the Jewish Holocaust. The question is whether or not the Palestinians are being destroyed as a nation. Carter, in a manner that will surprise many people, comes down firmly on the side of affirming that this destruction is taking place.
Carter, the former President of the USA, is being vilified for having called into question the Israeli occupation of Palestinian territories and the manner in…
FULL COMMENTARY
Posted by stan as Analysis at 11:25 AM PDT
Help find the truth about the death of Pfc. LaVena Johnson
Once upon a time lived a young woman from a St. Louis suburb. She was an honor roll student, she played the violin, she donated blood and volunteered for American Heart Association walks. She elected to put off college for a while and joined the Army once out of school. At Fort Campbell, KY, she was assigned as a weapons supply manager to the 129th Corps Support Battalion.
She was LaVena Johnson, private first class, and she died near Balad, Iraq, on July 19, 2005, just eight days shy of her twentieth birthday. She was the first woman soldier from Missouri to die while serving in Iraq or Afghanistan.
The tragedy of her story begins there.
After an investigation, the Army declared LaVena’s death a suicide, a finding refuted by the soldier’s family. In an article in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Lavena’s father pointed to indications that his daughter had endured a physical struggle before she died - two loose front teeth, a “busted lip” that had to be reconstructed by the funeral home - suggesting that “someone might have punched her in the mouth.”
The military said that the matter was closed.
Little more on LaVena’s death was said for many months until a recently televised report on KMOV in St. Louis disclosed troubling details not previously made public:
• Indications of physical abuse that went unremarked by the autopsy
• The absence of psychological indicators of suicidal thoughts; indeed, testimony that LaVena was happy and healthy prior to her death
• Indications, via residue tests, that LaVena may not even have handled the weapon that killed her
• A blood trail outside the tent where Lavena’s body was found
• Indications that someone attempted to set LaVena’s body on fire
And yet, the Army continues to resist calls by LaVena’s family and by local media to reopen its investigation.
We have seen with other military deaths that the Army has engaged in an insulting game of deny and delay when it comes to uncovering embarrassing facts. Only when public and official attention is brought to bear on the matter - as happened, eventually and with great effort, with the case of Army Ranger and former professional football player Cpl. Pat Tillman - do unpleasant truths come to light.
While it is possible to disagree generally over the war in Iraq, we are unified in our respect for the men and women who serve us in dangerous places, and in our concern for the families who give them up in our name. The very least we owe families of the fallen is an honest accounting of how their loved ones died.
The Armed Services Committees of the Senate and the House have funding authority and legislative oversight over the armed forces. The members of these committees can compel the Army to acknowledge the grief of the Johnson family and reopen its investigation of LaVena’s death. All that is needed is the political will. Help those legislators find that will by signing this petition.
The mother of Pat Tillman once put the matter in stark and honest terms:
“This is how they treat a family of a high-profile individual,” she said. “How are they treating others?”
In the case of Private First Class Johnson, we know the answer – but together we can make a better answer for LaVena’s family, and for all the families of those in the military.
* * *
Help compel the Army to reopen the investigation of Pfc. LaVena Johnson’s death.
[The petition site is here.]
This petition sponsored by Philip Barron, author of the blog Waveflux. Mr. Barron is not a representative of the Johnson family.
Posted by stan as News at 7:47 AM PDT
Last year, I began research and writing on the case of Pat Tillman. One of the central characters in the Tillman story was Lieutenant Colonel Ralph Kauzlarich. Kauzlarich was the Regimental Executive Officer for 75th Ranger Regiment in Afghanistan in 2004, when Pat Tillman was killed by friendly fire. He was also a key figure in the Pentagon’s attempts to first cover up, then spin the fratricide. Kauzlarich was the officer assigned to conduct a second investigation of the circumstances of Pat Tillman’s death. The first investigation — conducted by Captain Richard Scott — had found criminal negligence and professional incompetence, so a higher-ranking officer was required by law to follow-up in the event that a General Court Martial would become necessary. Not surprisingly, no one was charged with either, though some minor administrative actions were taken, including reassignments out of the Rangers and two officers receiving “letters of reprimand.” But that is not what this commentary is about. This is about Lieutenant Colonel Ralph Kauzlarich, a Washington Post writer, and the power of cultural myths.
FULL ARTICLE AT TRUTHDIG (Readers are encouraged to post comments there)
Posted by stan as Analysis at 5:30 PM PDT
We featured a link to Dean Baker’s ZNet article here last week. The Baker link below gives a pretty good tutorial on what this first stage of the meltdown looks like. For an in-depth and more macro-economic and historical account of “fictional value”, the basis of this meltdown, see Peter Gowan [Link appears broken, here is a html cached version from Google]:
The military budget has acted as a crucial counter-cyclical fiscal policy tool in macroeconomic management — a functional alternative to a large welfare state repertoire of instruments.
Military spending has also acted as an important lever of industrial policy by offering a protected state market for large industrial sectors, ranging from aircraft manufacturers like Boeing to the big car companies and many other, largely civilian sectors, as well as armaments contractors.
Military spending has also acted as a very important center of state research and development (R&D) spending, which, though formally devoted to military R&D (plus “dual use” R&D during the Clinton period), in reality provides a central mechanism for generating new high-tech sectors in the national civilian economy.
Military spending has also been an important way of binding the American South into the American state through the large role of southerners in the military, the large numbers of U.S. bases in the South and Sun-Belt states, and the significant military-industrial activity in the South/Sun-Belt (in addition to California).
The defeat in Vietnam did lead to a serious split in the governing elites of the American state in the 1970s, but the militarization of the United States was not, in the end, reversed. On the contrary, it was eventually reinforced by the Reagan administration in the early 1980s.
Today, we’ll follow up with Dean Baker’s latest at Truthout:
Safe Ground in a Housing Market Meltdown?
By Dean Baker
t r u t h o u t | Columnist
Wednesday 14 March 2007
As reports of problems in the mortgage market build, the number of people who view a collapse of the housing market as a serious possibility is growing rapidly. At the moment, the surge in defaults is taking place primarily in the sub-prime market, which is composed of borrowers who have poor credit histories. However, the problems are likely to affect the broader housing market and the economy as a whole before the end of the year.
The basic story in the sub-prime market is straightforward. Mortgage bankers were anxious to sell mortgages even when they knew that the borrowers could not make the payments, because they derive their income from selling the mortgage, not holding it. Hundreds of thousands of low- and moderate-income homebuyers were lured into buying homes by discounted “teaser” rates on mortgages. These teaser rates would reset to market rates, typically after three years, at which time many borrowers would be unable to make their monthly payments.
As long as house prices keep rising, everything works fine. Homeowners can always borrow against their equity to make their monthly payments, or they can sell their home, pay off the mortgage and pocket whatever gains they may have.
However, in 2006, supply finally outpaced demand, and home prices began falling. This led to a huge surge in defaults in the sub-prime market. As a result, some sub-prime lenders have gone bankrupt, and many others are leaving the business or radically curtailing their lending. The same thing is happening in the Alt-A market, which consists of borrowers with somewhat… FULL
Posted by stan as Analysis at 9:02 AM PDT
IA has Antonia’s talks linked in the Video Section. We have cited more than once the importance of understanding Iraq’s Hydrocarbon Law as a key index of US intention in Iraq. Antonia Juhasz knows this issue forward and backward.
New York Times
Opinion Editorial
March 13, 2007
Op-Ed Contributor
Whose Oil Is It, Anyway?
By ANTONIA JUHASZ
San Francisco
TODAY more than three-quarters of the world’s oil is owned and
controlled by governments. It wasn’t always this way.
Until about 35 years ago, the world’s oil was largely in the hands of
seven corporations based in the United States and Europe. Those seven
have since merged into four: ExxonMobil, Chevron, Shell and BP. They
are among the world’s largest and most powerful financial empires. But
ever since they lost their exclusive control of the oil to the
governments, the companies have been trying to get it back.
Iraq’s oil reserves — thought to be the second largest in the world —
have always been high on the corporate wish list. In 1998, Kenneth
Derr, then chief executive of Chevron, told a San Francisco audience,
“Iraq possesses huge reserves of oil and gas — reserves I’d love
Chevron to have access to.”
A new oil law set to go before the Iraqi Parliament this month would,
if passed, go a long way toward helping the oil companies achieve
their goal. The Iraq hydrocarbon law would take the majority of Iraq’s
oil out of the exclusive hands of the Iraqi government and open it to
international oil companies for a generation or more.
In March 2001, the National Energy Policy Development Group (better
known as Vice President Dick Cheney’s energy task force), which
included executives of America’s largest energy companies, recommended
that the United States government support initiatives by Middle
Eastern countries “to open up areas of their energy sectors to foreign
investment.” One invasion and a great deal of political engineering by
the Bush administration later, this is exactly what the proposed Iraq
oil law would achieve. It does so to the benefit of the companies, but
to the great detriment of Iraq’s economy, democracy and sovereignty.
Since the invasion of Iraq, the Bush administration has been
aggressive in shepherding the oil law toward passage. It is one of the
president’s benchmarks for the government of Prime Minister Nuri Kamal
al-Maliki, a fact that Mr. Bush, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice,
Gen. William Casey, Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad and other
administration officials are publicly emphasizing with increasing
urgency.
The administration has highlighted the law’s revenue sharing plan,
under which the central government would distribute oil revenues
throughout the nation on a per capita basis. But the benefits of this
excellent proposal are radically undercut by the law’s many other
provisions — these allow much (if not most) of Iraq’s oil revenues to
flow out of the country and into the pockets of international oil
companies.
The law would transform Iraq’s oil industry from a nationalized model
closed to American oil companies except for limited (although highly
lucrative) marketing contracts, into a commercial industry,
all-but-privatized, that is fully open to all international oil
companies.
The Iraq National Oil Company would have exclusive control of just 17
of Iraq’s 80 known oil fields, leaving two-thirds of known — and all
of its as yet undiscovered — fields open to foreign control.
The foreign companies would not have to invest their earnings in the
Iraqi economy, partner with Iraqi companies, hire Iraqi workers or
share new technologies. They could even ride out Iraq’s current
“instability” by signing contracts now, while the Iraqi government is
at its weakest, and then wait at least two years before even setting
foot in the country. The vast majority of Iraq’s oil would then be
left underground for at least two years rather than being used for the
country’s economic development.
The international oil companies could also be offered some of the most
corporate-friendly contracts in the world, including what are called
production sharing agreements. These agreements are the oil industry’s
preferred model, but are roundly rejected by all the top oil producing
countries in the Middle East because they grant long-term contracts
(20 to 35 years in the case of Iraq’s draft law) and greater control,
ownership and profits to the companies than other models. In fact,
they are used for only approximately 12 percent of the world’s oil.
Iraq’s neighbors Iran, Kuwait and Saudi Arabia maintain nationalized
oil systems and have outlawed foreign control over oil development.
They all hire international oil companies as contractors to provide
specific services as needed, for a limited duration, and without
giving the foreign company any direct interest in the oil produced.
Iraqis may very well choose to use the expertise and experience of
international oil companies. They are most likely to do so in a manner
that best serves their own needs if they are freed from the tremendous
external pressure being exercised by the Bush administration, the oil
corporations — and the presence of 140,000 members of the American
military.
Iraq’s five trade union federations, representing hundreds of
thousands of workers, released a statement opposing the law and
rejecting “the handing of control over oil to foreign companies, which
would undermine the sovereignty of the state and the dignity of the
Iraqi people.” They ask for more time, less pressure and a chance at
the democracy they have been promised.
Antonia Juhasz, an analyst with Oil Change International, a watchdog
group, is the author of “The Bush Agenda: Invading the World, One
Economy at a Time.”
What You Can Do
+ Go to the Oil Change International website www.PriceofOil.org
to find an automatic letter you can send to your Congressional
Representative and Senators demanding Hands Off Iraq’s Oil!
+ Use this letter and any and all of the background material provided
on the site to write your own Op Ed, Letter to the Editor, language to
use to call-in to a radio show, and a flyer to hand out to your
friends and colleagues.
+ Specifically, you can write a letter to the New York Times in
response to my Op Ed - use the Op Ed as an entry way to have your say
about the oil law and the war for oil. Write no more than 150 words
and send to: letters@nytimes.com.
+ Participate in Protests against War AND Climate Change on the 4-Year
Anniversary of the Iraq War.
Oil Change International (www.PriceOfOil.org), Global Exchange
(www.Globalexchange.org), and more organizations and groups every day
are joining with Hundreds of communities throughout the US, and the
world to hold protest events on March 17-19, to mark the 4-year
anniversary of the Iraq war.
We urge environmentalists and climate change activists to join with
peace activists and organize protests on these dates at the
headquarters and gas stations of the oil companies leading the charge
in Iraq: Chevron, ExxonMobil, Marathon, ConocoPhillips, Shell and BP.
What better locations to send a message about war, oil and the
consequences of oil addiction?
List your protest at www.unitedforpeace.org.
MARCH 19 - In the Bay Area, I’ve joined with activists planning a
Rally, Protest, and Nonviolent Direct Action at Chevron’s World
Headquarters on March 19 from 7:00-11:00am in San Ramon. Visit
www.myspace.com/ProtestChevron.
+ Learn about an international network of organizations organizing
protests under the heading “Hands Off Iraq’s Oil!” Visit their website
www.HandsOffIraqiOil.org/.
+ Share this information with your friends, neighbors, community and colleagues.
+ Hold your own rally, protest, press conference, direct action, or
festival and spread the word!
+ With the media? Contact Celia Alario to arrange for great
interviewees at 310-214-6830 or celiaalario@earthlink.net.
Learn More - Visit
www.PriceofOil.org
www.TheBushAgenda.net
www.platform.org
www.handsoffiraqioil.org
–
”The people running the United States government are from the energy
industry,” said Fredrick D. Palmer, of Peabody Energy, the world’s
largest coal company. ”They understand it and they believe in energy
supply.” - April 21, 2002.
Antonia Juhasz
Ida Tarbell Fellow
Oil Change International
www.PriceOfOil.org
and
Visiting Scholar
Institute for Policy Studies
www.ips-dc.org
The Bush Agenda: Invading the World, One Economy at a Time.
by, Antonia Juhasz
HarperCollins Publishers
www.thebushagenda.net
Posted by stan as News at 7:38 AM PDT
‘Axis of evil’ seeps into Hollywood
By Kaveh L Afrasiabi
No doubt about it, four years after his famous and also infamous “axis of evil” speech, US President George W Bush’s crusade mentality has finally found its cinematic counterpart - in 300, a major motion picture centered on the epic battle between the Persians and the Greeks in 480 BC.
It is part history, part fantasy, safely buffering itself against potential criticisms, eg of its historical distortions or shortcomings, by the cinematic license optimally exploited meanwhile to preach to the audience about the values of freedom against the evil forces of unfreedom.
Portraying the past world in a contemporary language with the help of voiceovers in case we missed the message, the dramatic feature plunges into the midst of a violent battle that fully resonates with the contemporary discourses on “clashing civilizations”.
More than pure entertainment, it is a movie that wants people to reflect on what they are seeing, by teaching a lesson or two about history, by eliciting sympathy for its exalted Spartan heroes and heroines standing up to the world’s first superpower, the Achaemenid Persians.
Saturated with not-so-subtle Persianphobia, the movie calls for the interrogation of the political agenda behind it, at a time when Iran is constantly threatened with military invasion and “all options are on the table” in Washington. In Los Angeles, the cognitive assault has been raging for some time.
In Into the Night, a leading actress is asked what is her biggest turnoff and answers: “Persians”. In Steven Spielberg’s movie The Peacemaker, actor George Clooney utters four-letter words when referring to Iran. In the more recent Syriana, Clooney, playing a rogue Central Intelligence Agency operative, blows up Iranians in downtown Tehran with a broad smile on his face.
There is a very large population of Iranians in Los Angeles county, many of them affluent professionals and successful businessmen. Many live in luxurious mansions in Beverly Hills, but you would not know that by watching Hollywood’s movies. In House of Sand and Crash, we only see struggling immigrants on the margins of society.
California may be America’s ultimate melting pot, but Hollywood’s tall walls of exclusion and discrimination have yet to crumble when it comes to the movie industry’s persistent misrepresentation of Iranians and their collective identity immersed in a long thread of history.
Speaking of history, it is simultaneously a rich yet exceedingly difficult source material for the art of movie-making, and Hollywood has at best a mixed record on “getting it right”, notwithstanding the controversies swirling about Oliver FULL AT ASIA TIMES
Posted by stan as News at 1:19 PM PDT
A lot of people are intimidated or bored away from economics. Don’t be. We can show folks very easily what all the chatter has been about subprime lending and housing bubbles.
We linked the very excellent Michael Hudson primer (Road to Serfdom) on housing bubbles here some time ago.
Now is a very good time to look that over again, then go back and re-read the Google News listings for “subprime” + “bubble.”
On March 12th, Bloomberg published an ominous analysis, saying:
Hold on to your assets. The deepest housing decline in 16 years is about to get worse.
As many as 1.5 million more Americans may lose their homes, another 100,000 people in housing-related industries could be fired, and an estimated 100 additional subprime mortgage companies that lend money to people with bad or limited credit may go under, according to realtors, economists, analysts and a Federal Reserve governor. Financial stocks also could extend their declines over mortgage default worries.
The spring buying season, when more than half of all U.S. home sales are made, has been so disappointing that the National Association of Home Builders in Washington now expects purchases to fall for the sixth consecutive quarter after it predicted a gain just last month.
“The correction will last another year,” said Mark Zandi, chief economist for Moody’s Economy.com in West Chester, Pennsylvania.
For Bloomberg, this was terrible for investors and homebuilder corporations. ZNet at least published Dean Baker’s more people-centered account of this disaster, which took note that …
Tens of millions of people will be hurt as they see much of the equity in their homes - money that most had counted on to support their retirement - disappear. Millions more will be forced out of their homes as they find that they are unable to meet the payments on adjustable rate mortgages that reset at higher rates. People who had worked hard and saved in order to become homeowners will see their dream disappear.
For the American resistance this has a special significance. In the very subsoil of IA’s conceptualization of long-term resistance is a direct, legal, systematic, and ambitious struggle for land. The reiteration of the everyday-enigmatics of soil, space, and time here can be summarized in the term “land.” Any mass movement that takes up this challenge will be immediately confronted with the challenge of re-integrating our economic logic, political logic, and territorial logic. Capitalism’s crisis right now is in many ways definable (as Harvey has done) as contradictions between these logics. Our re-integration reference points” at IA are (1) Body, (2) Food, (3) Land. Relating every issue to these three things can keep us out of a lot of cul-de-sacs.
They can call it “real estate,” but it is space on the surface of the planet, finite space, which is being gobbled up and placed under proprietary control by massive enterprises, at breakneck speed.
No resistance can survive without either outside infusions of resources or native capacity. Native capacity means production under local control.
One main goal of all ostensibly revolutionary projects within the US should be acquiring land — urban, suburban, exurban, semi-rural, and rural. The object of land acquisitions must be to take this land off the market forever.
The nascent wave of current foreclosures will only be the first. The American masses from ‘hood to hills are substantially housed in mortgaged property. Property under a person’s, collective’s, or family’s legal (and final) ownership is not the same as property owned by banks. The former is better.
A public campaign to encourage paying down debts (credit cards first, then mortgages) may not sound very Che-like, but it’s about as firmly on the economic front lines as we can get.
In the long term, we need first islets, then networks, then continua of land-off-the-market-forever. This is our countryside, from which we can then establish an independent material basis for resistance.
Posted by stan as Analysis at 10:31 AM PDT
The Cost of Privilege - Taking On the System of White Supremacy and Racism, by Chip Smith, (with Michelle Foy, Badili Jones, Elly Leary, Joe Navarro, and Juliet Ucelli) was written by leftists, active as leftists, most for decades. The book responds to the recurrent experience of these organizers: the continual re-emergence — even in “progressive” sectors of white people — of a thoroughly liberal account of race and white supremacy. In fact, liberalism eschews the latter term because it speaks to systemic oppression instead of defining racism as individual pathology.
The Cost of Privilege is a fine activists’ primer for understanding racism in the US from a revolutionary, democratic, working-class perspective. Writing in a down-to-earth style, Smith weaves theoretical insight, political history, and organizing practice together, shows how capitalism, racism, and patriarchy interconnect, and offers excellent ideas for movement-building.
-Johanna Brenner, author of Women and the Politics of Class
Full disclosure is that Chip is a friend and political collaborator, as are the rest. But if anyone is interested in a book that picks up with history where anti-racism training leaves off, the data tables are alone worth the cost of the book.
Many, many white organizers, and white people who would like to become more active anti-racists, yet who are intimidated by the public debate and political struggles around “race,” can use this book as as starting point… as a kind of user’s guide for opposing white supremacy, rhetorically and practically. The book abounds with anecdotal insets, statistical tables, poetry, maps, and the superlative visual art of Malcolm Goff (not my relative, but my brother nonetheless).
A very fine contribution to revolutionary research and synthesis, The Cost of Privilege is also a very readable and accessible book.
Check it out; and pass it along.
Posted by stan as Pedagogy, News at 2:13 PM PST
We don’t have a lot of folks yet, but here is a recent post from Insurgent American’s forums that suggests the value of these practical exchange threads:
On retirement, my husband and I gave long consideration… what we believed about retirement when we were saving the money isn’t what we believe today. Outside events have changed our thinking: The Iraq war ramifications, Peak Oil, and the US twin deficits seeping out from the Bush/Greenspan years, for instance. And it was frightening to change.
We have three children and three grandchildren who have pretty well lived on our acreage in North Central Texas, the hell-hole of the climate world (which, I’m convinced, was never meant to be inhabited.)
To… consternation… we made the decision not to leave our money in its present IRA form, or even in the portfolio. We’ve taken the tax hit and redeemed our IRAs, purchased 30 acres a bit farther south, cleared some of the land, dug a large lake, allocated land for garden ground reclamation and begun one of the most massive projects of our life. (Smack-dab as we hit 70.)
We’re building a very large multi-family straw-bale dwelling. We began by digging
twenty holes that go twenty feet deep. Into those holes we coiled PEK tubing — through which water can move down, exchange the heat and return up to circulate through the floor and back again — a small science. The tiny bronze pumps that move the water require very little energy and will actually work off a solar panel or gel battery. In our part of Texas the heat exchange will keep the floor approximately 72 degrees year round (no central air-conditioning.) Each hole is worth roughly one ton of air conditioning.
The straw-bale walls have very high ceilings with a heavily insulated metal roof, plus extra insulation above the sheetrock ceilings. The walls are also coated with something akin to adobe which has extremely high insulating value and is fireproof. Windows and doors are low-E, the best we could afford. When it’s done (one half is almost ready to be inhabited) we will do gray water, rain capture, some wind energy, some solar, etc. and get fairly well off the electrical grid.
This is an extremely labor-intensive process. You need to be physically strong, and you require a sort of jack-of-all-trades skill set. But we have that, though we can only work half a day, rather than 8 hours. Some in our family are quite clever at making old machines come to life and do wonderful work.
Our project will take several years to fully complete, but we asked ourselves what we wanted to do with the rest of our lives — play golf, watch TV? Our offspring would have just spent the money, and now they will have this wonderful dwelling that will do them in good stead through the difficult years ahead.
Aside from the construction which we do six days a week, we continue to make compost, pile everything onto our gardening allocation, learn some animal husbandry, get ready to do earthworm cultivation, learn which food preservation techniques work and those that don’t.
Putting a seed in the ground isn’t enough. Each area has its own particular pests that must be dealt with without poison. Just keeping potatoes fresh until the next growing season is a major issue. The making of compost is almost a full-time job.
We’re constantly studying better ways. There are some very smart techniques that have been developed along the years by clever inventors who were abused and stymied by this society. The Internet has found them, or they have found the Internet. We thank them for their creativity. And we thank everyone who makes sites like this one, to keep people thinking and motivated and informed.
We’re making friends with the old-time residents who live on the meandering gravel roads where we’ve moved to. The little community is agog at our structure going up, and they pause to see how the neglected land has cleaned up and all the promise it shows. “What is this Peak Oil you talk about?” they ask.
Posted by stan as Site at 1:31 PM PST
