Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.
This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities. It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population. It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals. It is some 50 miles of concrete highway. We pay for a single fighter with a half million bushels of wheat. We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people…
via [ Vancouver Media Co-op ] “The Whole World is Downstream - Community members say negative impacts of the tar sands have a global reach” By Sandra Cuffe
Community members impacted by tar sands development came together in Edmonton this weekend to make it explicit that the tar sands isn’t just an issue in Alberta, or even just in Canada. Climate justice activists have long made the point that the tar sands are a leading driver of emissions worldwide.
But in addition to changing the climate, the direct impacts of tar sands extraction are already making themselves felt across the globe. Even though the principle extraction area is in Alberta, transportation and refining of tar sands oil is touching the lives of people from Madagascar to B.C. to Trinidad.
The community of Fort Chipewyan is located approximately 250km downstream from biggest tar sands projects near Fort McMurray. Because of its proximity to what some call the tar sands gigaproject, folks in Fort Chipewyan have felt the impacts of the tar sands on ecosystems, health, and communities, and their people have been on the front lines, fighting back hard.
“Fort Chipewyan has been at the forefront of this challenge,” said former Mikisew Cree First Nation Chief George Poitras, adding that the name of the community is now synonymous with resistance to the tar sands. ”We’ve made a lot of progress on making the tar sands an international issue,” said Poitras.
Due in large part to the outspoken resistance by Fort Chipewyan, other Indigenous and non-Indigenous communities now have more information and case studies to defend their own lands from the onslaught of the tar sands giga-project. Actual and proposed pipelines, refineries, and ports designed to transport tar sands oil from Alberta to destinations around the world crisscross the continent.
“One of the reasons we’re fighting so much is because of what’s happening there [in Fort Chipewyan],” explained Toghestiy, a hereditary chief from the Wet’suwet’en First Nation in north central British Columbia.
There is clear vocal opposition to the five pipelines proposed for construction through the 22,000 square kilometers of unceded Wet’suwet’en territory. grassroots Indigenous resistance has been a thorn in the side of Enbridge’s proposed Northern Gateway pipeline that would transport oil from the tar sands to the coastal port of Kitimat, BC, in order to facilitate its export to Asia.
At the end of the pipelines are the refineries, which can have serious consequences for local residents. Visual artist and former urban planner Thomas Frank discussed the impacts of a BP refinery project in East Chicago, in northwestern Indiana.
Using his own research, Frank showed maps of East Chicago, with small pockets of neighbourhoods steeped in steel worker culture surrounded by a myriad of industrial projects, from steel mills to oil refineries. The poverty-ridden core communities, principally made up of Puerto Ricans, Mexicans, and African-Americans, live between smokestacks, toxic waste sites, and the Indiana Harbor Shipping Channel, which is considered the most contaminated waterway in the United States.
“This is a serious environmental justice issue that accumulates wealth and benefits in one location while clustering risks and blights in another,” said Frank.Ninety percent of the water in the Channel consists of wastewater from industry and sewage, explained Frank, adding that Indiana discharges 33% more toxins into waterways than any other state. The sheer quantity of toxic discharges in Indiana, with 6.4 million people, amounts to more than the last 26 states combined, the latter representing over 100 million inhabitants.
BP was cited in 2009 for releasing multiple times the permitted level of benzene in a period spanning six years. Permits issued to the company also allowed for 1600 pounds of ammonia to be released into Lake Michigan per day, in clear violation of the Clean Water Act. In fact, explained Frank, BP moved its training facilities from the area to Illinois, citing concerns about “quality of life” issues for the company’s professionals.
Priya Ganness-Nanton, a community organizer from the Rights Action Group in Trinidad and Tobago, told the story of successful community struggle against an aluminum mill in the country. Ganness-Nanton hopes to take the lessons from the long history of struggle in Trinidad and use them to fight the tar sands exploitation recently announced by the government.
“In February of 2009, Minister of Energy Conrad Enill announced that the bitumen should be extracted using Canada’s experience as a model,” wrote Macdonald Stainsby of Oil Sands Truth in an article written after a visit to Trinidad earlier this year.
Other conference participants shared information about places where companies are planning to exploit tar sands deposits. Ashley Anderson of Peaceful Uprising in Utah talked about their resistance to Calgary-based Earth Energy Resources’ plan to develop tar sands deposits near Moab, in an area well-known and well-visited for its natural beauty. Macdonald Stainsby explained about corporate plans to develop tar sands deposits in Madagascar, Morocco, and a joint project between Jordan and Israel.
Videos of all of the presentations made on Saturday, dedicated to community reports from Fort Chipewyan to Trinidad, are available for viewing online. Sandra Cuffe has been reporting from the fourth annual Everyone’s Downstream conference in Edmonton for the Vancouver Media Co-op.
The panel discussion occurred yesterday at the Summer Davos meeting in Tianjin, China. Steve Clemons moderated a session with Chinese Institute on Contemporary International Relations President Cui Liru, New York Times foreign affairs columnist Thomas Friedman, Japan Liberal Democratic Party Acting Secretary General Taro Kono, Yonsei University political science professor Moon Chung-in, East West Center Director Charles E. Morrison, and US State Department APEC official Kurt Tong.
In this photo taken on Saturday, former South Africa president Nelson Mandela is reunited with The Elders, three years after he launched the group, in Johannesburg. Photo: AP
“The Elders have condemned the reported killing by Israeli forces of more than a dozen people who were attempting to deliver relief supplies to the Gaza Strip by sea,” the 12—member group said in a statement issued in Johannesburg, where it met over the weekend.
The group, which was launched by Mr. Mandela on his birthday in 2007 to try to solve some of the world’s most intractable conflicts, called for a “full investigation” of the incident and urged the UN Security Council “to debate the situation with a view to mandating action to end the closure of the Gaza Strip.” “This tragic incident should draw the world’s attention to the terrible suffering of Gaza’s 1.5 million people, half of whom are children under the age of 18,” the group said.
Israel’s three—year blockade of Gaza was not only “one of the world’s greatest human rights violations” and “illegal” under international law, it was also “counterproductive” because it empowered extremists in the Palestinian territory, they said.
The Elders includes six Nobel peace prize winners — former UN secretary general Kofi Annan, former Finnish president Martti Ahtisaari, former US president Jimmy Carter, detained Burmese leader Aung San Suu Kyi and Mr. Mandela and Tutu.
This was a bloody slaughter, a bloody slaughter with global implications for the relationship between each of us and our goverment, for the utter bloody impunity of government.
Gaza doesn’t contain nearly enough arable land to support the Strip’s population as subsistence farmers. Which of course is true of many other places on earth. But the effect of the embargo is to make meaningful commercial activity in Gaza nearly impossible, pushing living standards down to what would be a below-subsistence level were it not for the trickle of aid that flows in. The Hamas authorities exercise some fairly rough justice over the area, extremist groups burn down summer camps and Israel launches airstrikes periodically sometimes injuring dozens sometimes hurting no one. The overall situation is incredibly bleak. Construction supplies aren’t allowed into the area, so it’s been impossible to rebuild since the war there from a couple of years back, and all the physical infrastructure is just degrading over time.
From a distance, what seems to be happening is that Israel is ratcheting up its test of what it can do in the confines of the US-Israel relationship. It is testing to see whether there exist any limits or conditionality on Israeli behavior at all. Israel believes that the Obama team is weak — and is pushing aggressively to compel the US to tolerate anything the State of Israel does as a signal to the rest of the Middle East that is itself clamoring for any sign that the Obama administration is willing to put some muscle and substantive action behind the President’s Cairo speech and other comments to the governments and people in the Arab world.
The flotilla may have been populated by peace activists who really did want to get humanitarian supplies to Gaza — but the leadership of this flotilla was trying to expose the “false choice” contradiction that the US and other powers were making between Israel’s interests and the interests of the rest of the Middle East.
This was a strategic flotilla — designed to elicit exactly the response that Israel gave. This flotilla knew which button to push to animate Israel’s military response. It is not dissimilar from what al Qaeda did by attacking New York and Washington and drawing the US military to intervene in the Middle East.
Israel, like the United States, showed itself incapable of nuance and of outmaneuvering this flotilla by resorting to means that would not have helped the activists succeed in their objectives. At the Doha Forum, I am speaking to Arabs, Jews and Christians who represent senior governmental and non-governmental organizations in their home countries — and no one here that I have found thinks that the Israeli government responded to the flotilla sensibly — even if one buys the argument that the blockade of Gaza is justified.
The U.S. really can’t afford to make the choice of Israel over the Arab world. There will be enormous geopolitical and geoeconomic consequences if it does
Israeli forces have attacked aid ships attempting to break the blockade of Gaza. Commandos lowered themselves from helicopters and onto the Mavi Marmara - the lead ship in a flotilla of six vessels which are carrying humanitarian aid for the Palestinian territory
There is not doubt I tend to conflate the political economy on the southern shores of Lake Michigan with Israel’s occupation & settlement of Palestinian land. Granted there are significant limits to this comparison. Yet, it is clear the concentration of negative externalities attributable to our nation’s heavy industrial base seriously impairs our fence line communities and is very much a scar on the values of Democracy we hold dear. Simply put, Democracy does not exist here.
Existing Conditions:
Arguably the most polluted waters in the country - the Indiana Harbor Shipping Canal (IHSC): The only waterway to fail all beneficial uses.
Joerse Beach: most contaminated beach in the Great Lakes and third most in the country.
Arguably the most polluted air-shed in the country - Lake county indiana’s air-shed ranks as the 9th most polluted in the country (of 3140 counties) with the sources of pollution attributed to the three big industries concentrated on East Chicago’s lakefront - BP, Mittal Steel, and U.S. Steel.
A Gated Industrial Community with >80% of East Chicago’s land-use is dedicated to heavy industry - ~50% of these industrial lands are out of productive use and considered contaminated, e.g., brownfields
14% of East Chicago’s land-use is dedicated Residential - ~17% of these residential properties are apart of a superfund site.
When I look at the impact our nation’s heavy industrial base has had on the local populations, culture, land, air, water and biology in my community, I see a misapplication of rights and justice - environmental justice. This prompts me to identify the problems with the fragmented pattern of land use, populations, and the expression of political will seen in the mapping of Palestinian lands.
One of the lessons I took away from the Carter controversy was that the use of the term “apartheid” seems to shut down people’s critical faculties and make them defensive. So I generally prefer to set it aside. The point is that there’s a political system in the West Bank where the Jewish residents have the right to vote, have privileged access to water, have exclusive access to some roadways, have privileged rights to travel, etc., none of which are shared by the non-Jewish residents. You can call it what you like, but it’s not democracy.
via [ NY Times ] “Guantanamo Reunion, by Way of BBC” by Brian Stelter
New to Facebook, Brandon Neely was searching the site for acquaintances in 2008 when he typed in the names of some of the detainees he had guarded during his tenure as a prison guard at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.
From what I can gather from Frontline’s documentary is that the Afghanistan War is as much about managing agrarian market forces as it is about battling an insurgency. A problem I see is in this short piece is that America is once again relying solely on forces trained to deliver and manage overwhelming violence. Granted they are trying to put on their best face for the local farmers, but it is not ringing true.
This may sound ridiculous, but it appears to me that America would be more effective if it relied more on cultural agents that were similar to the small Afghan farmers and villagers - a kind of peace corp. I realize America has classified this region as a war zone, but for locals it is home, and to a certain extent life goes on normally, so it ought not to be crazy to suggest using a normalizing force that they can identify with and gain trust in more quickly.
America is a complex culture. It has many people and farmers with similar lifestyles as these people. I suggest sending in a peaceful force of agrarian faiths including Muslims. The Mennonite Central Committee immediately comes to mind, and there are many more organizations doing similar work. Many of these groups have been doing this kind of work for decades throughout the world. I am thinking of the Mennonites because central to their faith is the doctrine of pacifism. In areas of conflict this makes them honest agents of good faith. They are also known to build relationships through concrete hands-on work to address basic human needs such as water and food supply.
Steve Clemen’s article is about the best articulated piece I’ve read today on Obama’s Nobel Peace Prize.
Obama’s ‘unclenched fist’ won the prize
Cynics will say that Oslo was jealous that Copenhagen, Denmark, scored a visit from President Obama, and giving him a Nobel was the only way to get him to Norway.
But the Nobel Committee’s decision to make Obama the only sitting U.S. president since Woodrow Wilson to receive the Nobel Peace Prize shows the committee’s clear-headed assessment that Obama’s “unclenched fist” approach to dealing with the world’s most thuggish leaders has had a constructive, systemic impact on the world’s expectations of itself.
Obama has helped citizens all around the world — including in the United States — to want a world beyond the mess we have today in the Middle East and South Asia. They want a world where America is benign and positive, and where other leaders help in supporting the struggles of their people for better lives rather than securing themselves through crude power.
Ruffled Feathers
I went looking for a media clip that treated Obama’s Nobel Peace Prize as news and not something to spin suspicion, or asked if he deserved it. I had to resort to a foreign news outlet - ITN news out of the UK.
One strategy of an intelligent society to gain territory is to attempt to embed meaning and cultural significance in a particular place. This is what Israel is doing with plans for a Jewish Archaeological Theme Park in Palestinian territory.
On the eve of President Obama’s visit to the Middle East and his speech in Cairo. Max Blumenthal propels himself again into the middle of (it). Like many of his video reports Max places himself in the middle of his opponents power celebrations with a fearful and driven edge in his voice he again struggles for composure on the issues. Some of this composure may come from editing. Regardless he relies on the tradition of a truth to power journalism, a tradition that may not be as well respected in other parts of the world, not that it is so respected here in the U.S.
Video journalist Max Blumenthal talks to many in the Jewish settler movement who put it all out there. Winners of the Moskowitz Prize state frankly that they want to continue the ethnic cleansing of Occupied Territories — and young kids parrot the meme that Palestinians have no right to lands that are Israel’s holy lands.
This cult of land expropriators needs to be rolled back. I understand the realities that there are certain settlements that will remain part of Israel when a Palestinian state is created — but in a fair land swap.
But the expansion of settlements that “bingo tycoon” Irving Moskowitz keeps pushing is undermining the security interests of all parties in the region — particularly Israel’s.
Blumenthal’s work is some of the most vital and creative journalism out there today.
From this mornings (04-10-09) headline “Top US General: We May Have to Ignore Iraq Deadline: at the Huffington Post.
There is no better way to bring some of the reality of this war home to Americans and create the sense of a comfortable domestic setting being pierced by an very violent force than to use familiar visual and graphic cues like the “put your trash in the garbage.”
When asked why that elderly woman was killed, a squad commander was quoted as saying: “What’s great about Gaza — you see a person on a path, he doesn’t have to be armed, you can simply shoot him. In our case it was an old woman on whom I did not see any weapon when I looked. The order was to take down the person, this woman, the minute you see her. There are always warnings, there is always the saying, ‘Maybe he’s a terrorist.’ What I felt was, there was a lot of thirst for blood.”
Amir Marmor, a 33-year-old history graduate student in Jerusalem and a military reservist, said in an interview with The New York Times that he was stunned to discover the way civilian casualties were discussed in training discussions before his tank unit entered Gaza in January. “Shoot and don’t worry about the consequences,” was the message from the top commanders, he said. Speaking of a lieutenant colonel who briefed the troops, Mr. Marmor said, “His whole demeanor was extremely gung ho. This is very, very different from my usual experience. I have been doing reserve duty for 12 years, and it was always an issue how to avoid causing civilian injuries. He said in this operation we are not taking any chances. Morality aside, we have to do our job. We will cry about it later.”
The American Friends Service Committee carries out service, development, social justice, and peace programs throughout the world. Founded by Quakers in 1917 to provide conscientious objectors with an opportunity to aid civilian war victims, AFSC’s work attracts the support and partnership of people of many races, religions, and cultures.
AFSC’s work is based on the Quaker belief in the worth of every person and faith in the power of love to overcome violence and injustice. The organization’s mission and achievements won worldwide recognition in 1947 when it accepted the Nobel Peace Prize with the British Friends Service Council on behalf of all Quakers.
The AFSC is directed by a Quaker board and staffed by Quakers and other people of faith who share the Friends’ desire for peace and social justice.
