Single Payer

INSIDE
this issue:
TRIANGLE
FREE PRESS
Durham, North Carolina
UNDER-REPORTED NEWS AND OPINION
No. 73, August 2007
Single Payer
Nurses Push Change in Health Care
Our parents and grandparents
could teach us a thing or two about
conservation and sustainability
See p. 4 (www.archives.gov)
3
4
Population Explosion
Biofuel Boom Ends
Cheap Food
7 Iraqis Will Decide
10 Corporations Eye
Africa’s Resources
12
High Cost of
Being Poor
14
15
HMOs are Obsolete
White Privilege
By Alan Maass
At sneak previews of the film SiCKO across the country last month,
the red carpet outside the theater wasn’t for preening and paparazzi,
but picket lines. Members of the California Nurses Association (CNA)
traveled to the premieres on a bright red bus to hold protests and pass
out information before each
screening. Also on the bus were
Will SiCKO spark
representatives of Physicians for
a movement?
a National Health Program and a
number of other unions, including state chapters of the American Nurses Association, the United Steel
Workers and the Communications Workers of America.
The tour was capped off with a turnout of nurses and doctors at
theaters in 30 cities when the film officially opened to sold-out audiences June 29.
Some reporters from the mainstream media complained that chanting nurses interfered with their red-carpet interviews of director Michael
Moore, but the activists got a warmer greeting from audience members.
“I think that one of the most notable things was how universal the
response was, no matter which city we went to,” said Jan Rodolfo, a
CNA member and nurse at the Alta Bates Summit Medical Center in
Oakland, Calif., who traveled across the country on the bus.
In Los Angeles and Washington, D.C., said Rodolfo, the first
five rows of the theater were reserved for nurses, and in New York,
The Earthquake That
Screamed “No Nukes!”
By Harvey Wasserman
The massive earthquake that shook Japan this week nearly killed millions in a nuclear apocalypse.
It also produced one of the most terrifying sentences
ever buried in a newspaper. As reported deep in the New
York Times, the Tokyo Electric Company has admitted
that “the force of the shaking caused by the earthquake
had exceeded the design limits of the reactors, suggesting that the plant’s builders had underestimated the strength
of possible earthquakes in the region.”
There are 55 reactors in Japan. Virtually all of them
are on or near major earthquake faults. Kashiwazaki alone
hosts seven, four of which were forced into the dangerous SCRAM mode to narrowly avoid meltdowns. At
least 50 separate serious problems have been so far identified, including fire and the spillage of barrels filled with
radioactive wastes.
There are four active reactors in California on or
near major earthquake faults, as are the two at Indian Point
north of New York City. On January 31, 1986, an earthquake struck the Perry reactor east of Cleveland, knock-
ing out roads and bridges, as well as pipes within the plant,
which (thankfully) was not operating at the time. The
governor of Ohio, then Richard Celeste, sued to keep Perry
shut, but lost in federal court.
The fault that hit Perry is an off-shoot of the powerful New Madrid line that runs through the Mississippi
River Valley, threatening numerous reactors. The Beyond
Nuclear Project reports that in August, 2004, a quake hit
the Dresden reactor in Illinois, resulting in a leak of
radioactive tritium. Nevada’s Yucca Mountain, slated as
the nation’s high-level radioactive waste dump, has a visible fault line running through it.
More than 400 atomic reactors are on-line worldwide.
How many are vulnerable to seismic shocks we can only
shudder to guess. But one-eighth of them sit in one of the
world’s richest, most technologically advanced, most
densely populated industrial nations, which has now
admitted its reactor designs cannot match the power of
an earthquake that has just happened.
In whatever language it’s said, that translates into the
unmistakable warning that the world’s atomic reactors
Continued on the following page
Donna and Larry Smith, two patients who appear in SiCKO and
faced staggering medical debt despite being "covered" by
insurance, also joined the Nurses Association bus tour.
(www.calnurse.org)
the CNA members escorted Moore into the theater and stood with
him as he introduced the film. “In every premiere, there were people
weeping,” she said. “And when the film was over, there were people
walking out of the theater, just demanding to know what they could
do to change things.”
According to the CNA, at least 10,000 nurses have signed up to
help in a campaign to win legislation from Congress creating a “single-payer” system that would cut out private insurance companies,
and expand a vastly improved Medicare system to cover every person
in the country.
“There were huge numbers of nurses, in particular, coming out
in the different cities, who had never been involved in unions or health
care reform activism before, and who were very excited to be there
and wanting to get involved for the first time,” Rodolfo said.
The impact of the movie was felt beyond the theaters where the
activists turned out.
A movie reviewer in Dallas—the heart of Bush country—
described how he emerged from the bathroom after a screening to
find that “the entire SiCKO audience had somehow formed an
impromptu town hall meeting in front of the ladies room … Here
these people were, complete strangers from every walk of life, talking
excitedly about the movie. It was as if they simply couldn’t go home
without doing something drastic about what they’d just seen.”
The meeting ended, said the reviewer, with an exchange of email addresses and plans to “get together and do something…It was
like I was standing there at the birth of a new political movement.”
SiCKO is perfectly made to give form to the simmering bitterness with the U.S. health care system. Its focus is on the victims of
the system—in particular, people who thought they were fully covered, but discovered they really weren’t when they needed it.
That’s a familiar story—as Moore learned when he made an appeal
on YouTube for people to reach him with their “health care horror
stories.” In the first 24 hours, he got than more 3,700 responses. More
than 25,000 people had contacted him by the time a week had passed.
People often live through their own health care nightmares without a sense that the system is a source of frustration for millions of
NURSES, Continued on page 14
ENERGY, Continued from the previous page
constitute a multiple, ticking seismic time bomb. Talk of building more can only be classified as suicidal irresponsibility.
Tokyo Electric’s behavior since the quake defines the
industry’s credibility. For three consecutive days (with more
undoubtedly to come) the utility has been forced to issue
public apologies for erroneous statements about the severity
of the damage done to the reactors, the size and lethality of
radioactive spills into the air and water, the on-going danger
to the public, and much more.
Once again, the only thing reactor owners can be trusted to do is to lie.
Prior to the March 28, 1979 disaster at Three Mile Island,
the industry for years assured the public that the kind of accident that did happen was “impossible.”
Then the utility repeatedly assured the public there had
been no melt-down of fuel and no danger of further catastrophe. Nine years later a robotic camera showed that nearly all
the fuel had melted, and that avoiding a full-blown catastrophe
was little short of a miracle.
The industry continues to say no one was killed at TMI.
But it does not know how much radiation was released, where
it went or who it might have been harmed. Since 1979 its allies
in the courts have denied 2400 central Pennsylvania families the right
to test their belief that they and
their loved ones have been killed
and maimed en masse.
Prior to its April 26, 1986
explosion, Soviet Life Magazine
ran a major feature extolling the
virtually “accident-proof design”
of Chernobyl Unit Four.
Then the former Soviet Union
of Mikhail Gorbachev kept secret
the gargantuan radiation releases
that have killed thousands and yielded a horrific plague of cancers, leukemia, birth defects and more
throughout the region, and among
the more than 800,000 drafted
“jumpers” who were forced to run
through the plant to clean it up.
Since the terror attacks of September 11, 2001, the industry has
claimed its reactors can withstand the effects of a jet crash,
and are immune to sabotage. The claims are as patently absurd
as the lies about TMI and Chernobyl.
TRIANGLE
FREE PRESS
PO Box 61613 • Durham, NC 27715
919-286-2056 • trianglefreepress@verizon.net
Mission: Triangle Free Press reports local and global
news and opinion that is ignored or under-reported by
mainstream and corporate media, to provide citizens
with the information they need to make informed politcal decisions.
So, too, the endless, dogged assurances from Japan that no earthquake could do to Kashiwazaki
what has just happened.
Yet today and into the future,
expensive ads will flood the US
and global airwaves, full of nonsense
about the “need” for new nukes.
There is only one thing we know
for certain about this advertising:
it is a lie.
Atomic reactors contribute to
global warming rather than abating
it. In construction, in the mining,
milling and enriching of the fuel, in
on-going “normal” releases of heat
and radioactivity, in dismantling and
decommissioning, in managing radioactive wastes, in future terror attacks, in proliferation of nuclear weapons, and much much more, atomic
energy is an unmitigated eco-disaster.
To this list we must now add additional tangible evidence that reactors allegedly built to withstand “worst case”
earthquakes in fact cannot. And when they go down, the
investment is lost, and power shortages arise (as is now happening in Japan) that are filled by the burning of fossil fuels.
It costs up to ten times as much to produce energy from
a nuke as to save it with efficiency. Advances in wind, solar and
other green “Solartopian” technologies mean atomic energy
simply cannot compete without massive subsidies, loan guarantees and government insurance to protect it from catastrophes to come.
This latest “impossible” earthquake has not merely shattered the alleged safeguards of Japan’s reactor fleet. It has
blown apart—yet again—any possible argument for building
more reactors anywhere on this beleaguered Earth.
Harvey Wasserman’s Solartopia! Our Green-Powered Earth,
A.D. 2030, is at www.solartopia.org. He is senior advisor to
Greenpeace USA and the Nuclear Information & Resource
Service, and writes regularly for www.freepress.org, where
this article first appeared.
Copyright: All original material © 2007 Triangle Free
Press. Reprinting for nonprofit purposes is permitted;
please credit the source.
Fair Use: This publication contains some copyrighted
material the use of which has not always been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. This “fair use”
material is made available without profit, for educational
purposes, in accordance with Title 17 USC Section 107.
Source: commondreams.org, July 19, 2007
Editors: Dave Fruchtenicht, Jan Martell, Neal
Shepherd, Deck Stapleton
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2
PLANET DESTRUCTION AND SUSTAINABILITY
This Planet Ain’t Big Enough for the
6,500,000,000 of Us
Commentary by Chris Rapley
Demographers offer two possible explanations for the
decline in birth rate, suggesting that it is an inherent tendency
What do the following have in common: the carbon dioxide of societies to find an equilibrium between births and deaths,
content of the atmosphere, Earth’s average temperature and with the lag simply being the time taken for the change in
the size of the human population? Answer: each was, for a mortality rate to be recognised. Alternatively, it is attributed
long period of Earth’s history, held in a state of equilibrium. to the same general driving forces that caused the decline in
Whether it’s the burning of fossil fuels versus the rate at mortality, such as improvements in medical practice and techwhich plants absorb carbon, or the heat absorbed from sun- nology, in this case birth control.
shine versus the heat reflected back into space, or global birth
So where do we stand today? Worldwide, the birth rate
rates versus death rates—each is governed by the difference is about six per second, and the death rate stands at three per
between an inflow and an outflow, and even small imbal- second. UN figures foresee numbers levelling out at a point
ances can have large effects. At present, all of these three are when we have between 8 and 10 billion humans by 2050—
out of balance as a result of human actions. And each of these that’s roughly a 50 percent increase on today’s figure.
imbalances is creating a major problem.
This is not comforting news. Even at current levels, the
Second question: how do these three differ? Answer: World Health Organisation reports that more than three bilhuman carbon emissions and clilion people are malnourished.
mate change are big issues at the Behind the climate crisis lies And although food availability
top of the news agenda. And rightcontinues to grow, per capita grain
a global issue that no one availability has been declining
ly so, since they pose a substantial
threat. But population growth is wants to tackle: do we need since the Eighties. Technology
almost entirely ignored. Which is
may continue to push back the
radical plans to reduce the limits, but 50 per cent of plants
odd, since it is at the root of the
environmental crisis, and it repreand animals are already harvested
world’s population?
sents a danger to health and socioefor our use, creating a huge
conomic development.
impact on our partner species and
The statistics are quite remarkable. For most of the two the world’s ecosystems. And it is the airborne waste from our
million years of human history, the population was less than energy production that is driving climate change.
a quarter of a million. The advent of agriculture led to a susYet, even at a geo-political level, population control is
tained increase, but it took thousands of years, until 1800, rarely discussed. Today, however, marks the publication of a
before the planet was host to a billion humans. Since then new report on population by the United Nations Environment
growth has accelerated—we hit 2 billion in 1930, 3 billion in Programme. Perhaps this could be the spur we need.
1960, 4 billion in 1975, 5 billion in 1987 and 6 billion in 1999.
If debate is started, some will say that we need to stop
Today’s grand total is estimated to be 6.5 billion, with a growth the world’s population booming, and to do so most urgently
rate of 80 million each year.
where the birth rates are highest—the developing world.
To what can we attribute such a dramatic rise? Impressive Others may argue that it is in the developed world, where the
increases in the food supply have played a part, but the under- impact of individuals is highest, that we should concentrate
lying driver has been the shift from an “organic” society, in efforts. A third view is to ignore population and to focus on
which energy was drawn from the wind, water, beasts of burden human consumption.
(including humans) and wood, to a fossil fuel-based world in
Programs that seek actively to reduce birth rates find that
which most of our energy is obtained by burning coal, oil and three conditions must be met. First, birth control must be
gas. This transition has fuelled the changes in quality of life within the scope of conscious choice. Second, there must be
associated with modern technology, especially the major real advantages to having a smaller family—if no provision is
advances in hygiene and medicine. Although unevenly dis- made for peoples’ old age, the incentive is to have more chiltributed, these bounties have seen life expectancy double and dren. Third, the means of control must be available—but also
a corresponding reduction in mortality rates.
to be socially acceptable, and combined with education and
But success in reducing mortality has not been matched emancipation of girls and women.
by a lowering of the birth rate—and this has resulted in the
The human multitude has become a force at the planetary
dramatic increase in the human stock. As noted by Malthus, scale. Collectively, our exploitation of the world’s resources
who at the end of the 18th century was the first to foresee the has already reached a level that, according to the World Wildproblems of population growth, such growth can accelerate life Fund, could only be sustained on a planet 25 percent larger
rapidly. Since every individual has the capacity to produce than our own.
many offspring, each of whom can in turn produce many more,
Confronted with this state of affairs, there is much disthe process will only cease when something happens to bring cussion about how to respond to human impacts on the planet
birth rate and death rate once more into balance.
and especially on how to reduce human carbon emissions.
In fact, the overall growth rate of the world’s population Various technical fixes and changes in behaviour are proposed,
hit a peak of about 2 percent per year in the late Sixties and the former generally having price tags of trillions of dollars.
has since fallen to 1.3 percent. Although the timing and mag- Spread over several decades, these are arguably affordable,
nitude of the changes have been different in different parts of and to be preferred to the environmental damage and ecothe world, the pattern has followed the so-called “demograph- nomic collapse which may otherwise occur.
ic transition”. Initially both mortality and birth rates are high,
But by avoiding a fraction of the projected population
with the population stable. As living standards rise and health increase, the emissions savings could be significant and would
conditions improve, the mortality rate decreases. The result- be at a cost, based on UN experience of reproductive health
ing difference between the numbers of births and deaths programmes, that would be as little as one-thousandth of the
causes the population to increase. Eventually, the birth rate technological fixes. The reality is that while the footprint of
decreases until a new balance is achieved and the population each individual cannot be reduced to zero, the absence of an
again stabilises, but at a new and higher level.
individual does do so.
3
Although I’m now the director of the British Antarctic
Survey, I was previously executive director of the International
Geosphere-Biosphere program, looking at the chemistry and
biology of how Earth works as a system. About 18 months
ago, I wrote an article for the BBC Green Room website in
which I raised the issues: “So if we believe that the size of the
human footprint is a serious problem (and there is much evidence for this) then a rational view would be that along with
a raft of measures to reduce the footprint per person, the issue
of population management must be addressed.
“In practice, of course, it is a bombshell of a topic, with
profound and emotive issues of ethics, morality, equity and
practicability. So controversial is the subject, that it has become
the Cinderella of the great sustainability debate—rarely visible
in public, or even in private. In interdisciplinary meetings
addressing how the planet functions as an integrated whole,
demographers and population specialists are usually notable
by their absence. Rare, indeed, are the opportunities for religious leaders, philosophers, moralists, policy-makers, politicians and the global public to debate the trajectory of the
world’s human population in the context of its stress on the
Earth system, and to decide what might be done.”
The response from around the world was strong and positive—along the lines of “at last, this issue has been raised.”
But after that initial burst of enthusiasm, I find that little has
changed. This is a pity, since as time passes, so our ability to
leave the world in a better state is reduced. Today’s report
from the UN provides an opportunity to raise the debate once
again. For the sake of future generations, I hope that others
will this time take up the challenge.
Source: The Belfast Telegraph, June 27, 2007
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Triangle Free Press, August 2007
Biofuel Mania Ends Days
Of Cheap Food
By Gwynne Dyer
The era of cheap food is over. The price of maize
has doubled in a year, and wheat futures are at their
highest in a decade. The food price index in India
has risen 11 per cent in one year, and in Mexico in
January there were riots after the price of corn
flour—used in making the staple food of the poor,
tortillas—went up fourfold.
Even in the developed countries food prices
are going up, and they are not going to come down
again. Cheap food lasted for only 50 years.
Before World War II, most families in developed countries spent a third or more of their income
on food, as the poor majority in developing countries still do. But after the war, a series of radical
changes, from mechanisation to the green revolution, raised agricultural productivity hugely and
caused a long, steep fall in the real price of food.
For the global middle class, it was the good old days, with
food taking only a tenth of their income.
It will probably be back up to a quarter within a decade.
And it may go much higher than that because we are entering a period when three separate factors are converging to drive
food prices up.
The first is simply demand. Not only is the global population continuing to grow—about an extra Turkey or Vietnam
every year—but as Asian economies race ahead, more people
in those populous countries are starting to eat more meat.
Early this month, in its annual assessment of farming
trends, the United Nations predicted that by 2016, less than
10 years from now, people in the developing countries will be
eating 30 percent more beef, 50 percent more pig meat and
25 percent more poultry.
The animals will need a great deal of grain, and meeting
that demand will require shifting huge amounts of grain-growing land from human to animal consumption—so the price of
grain and of meat will both go up.
The global poor don’t care about the price of meat because
they can’t afford it even now. But if the price of grain goes
up, some of them will starve. And maybe they won’t have to
Cargill biofuel plant in Iowa (greentechnology.com)
wait until 2016, because the mania for bio-fuels is shifting
huge amounts of land out of food production.
A sixth of all the grain grown in the United States this
year will be “industrial corn” destined to be converted into
ethanol and burned in cars, and Europe, Brazil and China are
all heading in the same direction.
The attraction of biofuels for politicians is obvious: they
can claim that they are doing something useful to combat emissions and global warming—although the claims are deeply
suspect—without demanding any sacrifices from business or
the voters.
The amount of United States farmland devoted to biofuels grew by 48 percent in the past year alone, and hardly any
new land was brought under the plough to replace the lost
food production.
In other big biofuel countries, such as China and Brazil,
it’s the same straight switch from food to fuel. In fact, the food
market and the energy market are becoming closely linked,
which is bad news for the poor.
As oil prices rise—and the rapid economic growth in
Asia guarantees that they will—they pull up the price of biofuels as well, and it gets even more attractive for farmers to
switch from food to fuel.
Nor will politics save the day. As economist
Lester Brown of the Earth Policy Institute says:
“The stage is now set for direct competition for grain
between the 800 million people who own automobiles, and the world’s two billion poorest people.”
Guess who wins.
Soaring Asian demand and biofuels mean
expensive food now and in the near future, but then
it gets worse.
Global warming hits crop yields, but only recently has anybody quantified how hard. The answer,
published in Environmental Research Letters in
March by Christopher Field of the Carnegie Institution in Stanford, California, and David Lobell of
Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory is quite
simple: for every half degree hotter, crop yields
fall between 3 and 5 percent.
So 2˚C hotter, which is the lower end of the
range of predicted temperature rise this century, means a 12
to 20 percent fall in global food production.
This is science, so that answer could be wrong—but it
could be wrong by being too conservative. Last year in New
Delhi, I interviewed the director of a think tank who had just
completed a contract to estimate the impact on Indian food
production of a rise of just 2˚C in global temperature.
The answer, at least for India, was 25 percent. That would
mean mass starvation, for if India were in that situation then
every other major food-producing country would be too, and
there would be no imports available at any price.
In the early stages of this process, higher food prices will
help millions of farmers who have been scraping along on
very poor returns for their effort because political power lies
in the cities.
But later it gets uglier. The price of food relative to average income is heading for levels that have not been seen since
the early 19th century, and it will not come down again in our
lifetimes.
Source: The New Zealand Herald, July16, 2007
Home-Front Ecology:
What Our Grandparents Can Teach Us
By Mike Davis
Does this generation of Americans have the “right stuff” to
meet the epic challenges of sustaining life on a rapidly warming planet? Sure, the mainstream media are full of talk about
carbon credits, hybrid cars, and smart urbanism—but even
so, our environmental footprints are actually growing larger,
not smaller.
The typical new U.S. home, for instance, is 40 percent larger than that of 25 years ago, even though the average household has fewer people. In that same period, dinosaur-like SUVs
are good for you.
www.ncgreenparty.org
www.trianglegreens.org
919-490-5319
ecological wisdom
nonviolence
GREENS
Triangle Free Press, August 2007
social justice
gra ssroots democracy
(now 50 percent of all private vehicles) have taken over the
freeways, while the amount of retail space per capita (an indirect but reliable measure of consumption) has quadrupled.
Too many of us, in other words, talk green but lead supersized lifestyles—giving fodder to the conservative cynics who
write columns about Al Gore’s electricity bills. Our culture
appears hopelessly addicted to fossil fuels, shopping sprees,
suburban sprawl, and beef-centered diets. Would Americans
ever voluntarily give up their SUVs, McMansions, McDonald’s,
and lawns?
The surprisingly hopeful answer lies in living memory.
In the 1940s, Americans simultaneously battled fascism overseas and waste at home. My parents, their neighbors, and
millions of others left cars at home to ride bikes to work, tore
up their front yards to plant cabbage, recycled toothpaste
tubes and cooking grease, volunteered at daycare centers and
USOs, shared their houses and dinners with strangers, and conscientiously attempted to reduce unnecessary consumption
and waste.
The World War II home front was the most important
and broadly participatory green experiment in U.S. history.
Lessing Rosenwald, the chief of the Bureau of Industrial
Conservation, called on Americans “to change from an econ4
omy of waste—and this country has been notorious for waste
—to an economy of conservation.” A majority of civilians,
some reluctantly but many others enthusiastically, answered
the call.
The most famous symbol of this wartime conservation
ethos was the victory garden. Originally promoted by the
Wilson administration to combat the food shortages of World
War I, household and communal kitchen gardens had been
revived by the early New Deal as a subsistence strategy for
the unemployed. After Pearl Harbor, a groundswell of popular
enthusiasm swept aside the skepticism of some Department
of Agriculture officials and made the victory garden the centerpiece of the national “Food Fights for Freedom” campaign.
By 1943, beans and carrots were growing on the former
White House lawn, and First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt and
nearly 20 million other victory gardeners were producing 30
to 40 percent of the nation’s vegetables—freeing the nation’s
farmers, in turn, to help feed Britain and Russia.
In The Garden Is Political, a 1942 volume of popular
verse, poet John Malcolm Brinnin acclaimed these “acres of
internationalism” taking root in U.S. cities. Although suburban
and rural gardens were larger and usually more productive,
some of the most dedicated gardeners were inner-city children.
With the participation of the Boy Scouts, trade unions,
and settlement houses, thousands of ugly, trash-strewn vacant
lots in major industrial cities were turned into neighborhood
gardens that gave tenement kids the pride of being self-sufficient urban farmers. In Chicago, 400,000 schoolchildren
enlisted in the “Clean Up for Victory” campaign, which salvaged scrap for industry and cleared lots for gardens.
Victory gardening transcended the need to supplement
the wartime food supply and grew into a spontaneous vision
of urban greenness (even if that concept didn’t yet exist) and
self-reliance. In Los Angeles, flowers (“a builder of citizen
morale”) were included in the “Clean-Paint-Plant” program to
transform the city’s vacant spaces, and the Brooklyn Botanic
Garden taught the principles of “garden culture” to local
schoolteachers and thousands of their enthusiastic students.
The war also temporarily dethroned the automobile as
the icon of the American standard of living. Detroit assembly
lines were retooled to build Sherman tanks and B-24 Liberators.
Gasoline was rationed and, following the Japanese conquest
of Malaya, so was rubber. (The U.S. Office of the Rubber
Director was charged with getting used tires to factories,
where they became parts for tanks and trucks.) When shortages
and congestion brought streetcar and bus systems across the
country near the breaking point, it became critical to induce
workers to share rides or adopt alternative means of transportation.
While overcrowded defense hubs like Detroit, San Diego,
and Washington, D.C., never achieved the national goal of
3.5 riders per car, they did double their average occupancy
through extensive networks of neighborhood, factory, and
office carpools. Car sharing was reinforced by gas-ration
incentives, stiff fines for solo recreational driving, and stark
slogans: “When you ride ALONE,” warned one poster, “you
ride with Hitler!”
More important, that national obsession of the 1890s, the
bicycle, made a huge comeback, partly inspired by the highly
publicized example of wartime Britain, where bikes transported more than a quarter of the population to work. Less than two
months after Pearl Harbor, a new secret weapon, the “victory
bike”—made of nonessential metals, with tires from reclaimed
rubber—was revealed on front pages and in newsreels.
Hundreds of thousands of war workers, meanwhile, confiscated their kids’ bikes for their commute to the plant or
office, and scores of cities and towns sponsored bike parades
and “bike days” to advertise the patriotic advantages of
Schwinn over Chevrolet. With recreational driving curtailed
by rationing, families toured and vacationed by bike.
In June 1942, park officials reported that “never has
bicycling been so popular in Yosemite Valley as it is this season.” Public health officials praised the dual contributions of
victory gardening and bike riding to enhanced civilian vigor
and well-being, even predicting that it might reduce the
already ominously increasing cancer rate.
Ideas as well as commodities were recycled in the war
years. Much of the idealism of the early New Deal reemerged
in wartime housing, fair employment, and childcare programs,
as well as in the postwar economic conversion from military
to civilian production. One particularly interesting example
was the “rational consumption” movement sponsored by the
Office of Civilian Defense (OCD), which encouraged “buying
only for need” and set up consumer information centers that
gave advice on family nutrition, food conservation, and appliance repair.
The OCD consumer committees challenged the sacred
values of mass consumption—the rapid turnover of styles, the
tyranny of fashion and advertising, built-in obsolescence, and
so on—while promoting a new concept of the housewife as
an “economy soldier” who ran her household with the same
frugal efficiency that Henry Kaiser ran his shipyards.
Yet with millions of women wielding rivet guns and welding torches, traditional concepts of gender roles were increasingly contested. In April 1942, for example, the New York
Times visited a trailer village near a Connecticut defense plant,
expecting to find young wives yearning for the postwar future
of suburban homes and model kitchens that the 1939 New York
World’s Fair had prophesied. Instead, they found female war
workers who liked their industrial jobs and were content to
live in simple quarters that demanded little or no housework.
One point of convergence
between this incipient “war
feminism” and the conservation imperative was the fashion upheaval of 1942. Desperate to conserve wool, rayon,
silk, and cotton, the War Production Board (WPB) believed
that the same techniques that
were revolutionizing the production of bombers and Liberty ships—the simplification
of design and the standardization of components—could
be usefully applied to garment
manufacture.
In an unusual role for a
department store heir, H. Stanley Marcus (of the Neiman
Marcus dynasty) became the
WPB’s chief commissar for
rational fashions. As such, he
emphasized conservation and
durability—priorities that coincided with the egalitarianfeminist values long advocated
by the radical fashion designer
Elizabeth Hawes, whose 1943
book, Why Women Cry, was a
bold manifesto on behalf of
the millions of “wenches with
wrenches.”
Conservation also warred with luxury lifestyles.
Although defense production
was adding billions to the net
worth of America’s plutocrats,
it became harder for them to
spend it in the usual conspicTHE FUTURE ACCORDING TO R CRUMB
uous ways. In order to force
Top: Worst Case Scenario—Ecological Disaster; Middle: The FUN Future—Techno-fix
on the march! Below: The Ecotopian Solution (www.oilempire.us)
builders to meet the acute
demand for affordable housing for war workers, the WPB banned construction of homes ingly lost forever; the war and the emphasis on conservation
costing more than $500 (the median value of the average were now resurrecting some of the old values. “One of these,”
home was then about $3,000).
he wrote, “may be the rediscovery of the home—not as a dorSimultaneously, thousands of servants fled Park Avenue mitory, but as a place where people live. Friendships will
and Beverly Hills to take higher-paying jobs in defense facto- count for more.”
ries, while many of those who remained joined the Congress
An alternative future lurked in Williamson’s hopeful
of Industrial Organizations’ new United Domestic Workers comment, but it was swept away by the backlash against the
Union. Some millionaires retreated to their clubs to grouse social and economic reforms of the New Deal and the postabout Franklin D. Roosevelt’s latest outrages, but others accept- war euphoria of abundance. Few of the core values or innoed the servant shortage and moved into smaller (although still vative programs of the People’s War survived either the cold
luxurious) apartments while allowing their mansions to become war or the cultural homogeneity of suburbanization. Yet, even
temporary war housing. In a typical story, the Chicago Tribune a few short generations later, we can find surprising inspirain July 1942 described the adventures of seven young Navy tions and essential survival skills in that brief age of victory
petty officers and their wives who were sharing an old robber gardens and happy hitchhikers.
baron’s mansion. (Today we would call it “cohousing.”)
Mike Davis is the author, most recently, of Buda’s Wagon: A
The total mobilization of the time was dubbed the
Brief History of the Car Bomb. He is working on a new book
“People’s War,” and while it had no lack of conservative criton the geopolitics of climate change..
ics, there was remarkable consistency in the observation of
journalists and visitors (as well as in later memoirs) that the Source: Sierra Magazine, July 12, 2007
combination of a world crisis, full employment, and mild austerity seemed to be a tonic for the American character.
New York Times columnist Samuel Williamson, for example, monitored the impacts of rationing and restricted auto
use on families in commuter suburbs that lacked “the selfsufficiency of the open country” and the “complete integration of the large city.” After noting initial popular dismay and
confusion, Williamson was heartened to see suburbanites riding bikes, mending clothes, planting gardens, and spending
more time in cooperative endeavors with their neighbors.
Without cars, people moved at a slower pace but seemed to
accomplish more. Like Welles in The Magnificent Ambersons,
Williamson pointed out that American life had been revolutionized in a single generation and many good things seem5
Triangle Free Press, August 2007
Ecuador Invites the World to Help
Save its Rainforest
By Rune Geertsen
What does a poor government do when it finds an oil treasure in a protected natural park? Does it choose profit, and
therefore the pollution and the cultural extinction of indigenous people that goes with it, or does it leave the oil in the
ground and wave goodbye to millions of dollars that could be
spent fighting poverty?
Ecuador is right in the middle of this dilemma after having
discovered oil in the Yasuní National Park in the heart of the
Amazon. It is one of the areas with the highest degree of biodiversity on the planet, and there are at least two indigenous
groups living in voluntary isolation from the rest of society.
But under the rainforest, a reserve of oil is hidden, a reserve
that has been calculated to bring Ecuador an income of some
700 million dollars a year for ten years.
Other Latin American governments have not hesitated
more than seconds before choosing the oil—and the destruction.
But Ecuador’s new president, Rafael Correa, has presented
an eye-opening proposal that deserves support: Ecuador will
leave the oil in the ground if the world will pay half of the
country’s lost income. The logic behind the proposal is that it is
in the whole world’s interest to preserve the Yasuní’s untouched rainforest.
Less oil exploration equals less carbon dioxide emissions.
It means non-destruction of fragile biodiversity, and it means
that indigenous peoples that have chosen to live as their mil-
lenary ancestors in the rainforest get to continue living this
way in peace.
But the solution is expensive for a country where half of
the population lives in poverty and has a foreign debt of 15
billion dollars—a debt that in most cases was created by corrupt governments and military dictatorships.
“Ecuador does not ask for charity. But we do ask the international society to take part in this sacrifice,” Raphael Correa
has said about the proposal. This is, in other words, a very concrete example of “global public goods” that the world society
has a responsibility for, but costs money to ensure. Ecuador
seeks to ensure the life of Yasuní National Park through direct
donations from foreign governments, aid agencies, NGOs and
individuals—and through debt cancellation. This is not just a
poor country trying to blackmail rich countries; over 180 countries have ratified the UN convention on biological diversity
(only the US has signed but not ratified it) which states that
biological diversity is “a common concern of humankind.”
It is very important that western countries support this
proposal, and to discuss it in the Paris Club where foreign
debt is negotiated. The government of Norway has shown
interest in supporting the plan, and a leading American environmental scientist from the University of Maryland has called
the proposal “a milestone.” But if Ecuador does not succeed
in getting the world’s help, Correa has said there is no other
option for the country than to start drilling. Ecuador has given
the world a year to decide.
Here is a concrete possibility for governments to let actions
follow words and support a progressive global environment
policy. The amount of oil in the YasunÌ Park amounts to what
the world consumes in 12 days. But the value of protecting
and preserving the Yasuní Park and all of its biodiversity is
irreplaceable.
NURSES, continued from page 15
other people throughout U.S. society. SiCKO is changing that.
Politicians of both parties are alert to the discontent. But
their rhetorical flair in sympathizing with victims of the health
care system hasn’t been matched by action.
The latest mantra among politicians of both parties is
“universal health coverage.” Republican presidential contender Mitt Romney claims he achieved it with a
Massachusetts law passed while he was governor, and
Oregon’s Democratic Sen. Ron Wyden says this is the goal of
his Healthy Americans Act, proposed in Congress late last year.
But in reality, these bipartisan proposals would be a cash
cow for the insurance industry—and would worsen the
health care crisis facing working people.
In Massachusetts, for example, Romney’s “universal coverage” proposal requires all residents to be signed up with a
health insurance plan by the beginning of this month, or face
a stiff penalty on state income taxes. On the other hand, fines
for companies that don’t meet requirements for providing
health coverage for employees are a drop in the bucket.
The effect of the law will be to undermine the already ailing employer-provided insurance system, while driving the
uninsured into stripped-down insurance plans, with high deductibles and out-of-pocket costs—the very plans that SiCKO
took special aim at.
Instead, SiCKO stakes out the case for a real alternative—a single-payer system that eliminates private insurance
and covers everyone.
That’s created an awkward situation for the leading
Democratic presidential candidates, who have put forward
health care proposals that, on closer look, have a lot in common with the “universal coverage” shell game. As the Los
Angeles Times reported, Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama and
John Edwards “all have staked out positions sharply at odds
with Moore’s approach. But none of them is eager to have
that fact dragged into the spotlight.”
The liberal Internet network MoveOn.org tried to blur
the differences between Moore’s call for fundamental change
and the Democrats’ proposals.
“Several 2008 candidates—John Edwards, Dennis
Kucinich, and Barack Obama—have plans to guarantee affordable health care for everyone with a public insurance option,”
MoveOn said in an e-mail to members. “These are the most
forward-thinking proposals ever seen in a presidential race.”
But only Kucinich supports single-payer legislation.
Edwards’ and Obama’s plans fall short of “guaranteeing affordable health care for everyone.”
As for these being the “most-forward thinking proposals
ever seen in a presidential race,” Democrat Harry Truman
backed a far more radical national health insurance plan in his
1948 presidential campaign, and for decades after, Democrats regularly affirmed their commitment to this goal—
though they didn’t do much to work toward it.
On its bus tour, the CNA challenged not only Democrats
but other unions that have made concessions to the health care
industry, rather than commit to a single-payer proposal.
CNA Executive Director Rose Ann DeMoro accused the
Service Employees International Union (SEIU) in particular of
giving cover to politicians who refuse to support legislation
for a single-payer system. “[I]t makes [the politicians] look like
NURSES, Continued on page 14
Triangle Free Press, August 2007
6
Rune Geertsen is journalist and information advisor for the
Danish NGO IBIS which works in Ecuador supporting
indigenous peoples.
Source: upsidedownworld.org, July 3, 2007
Huaorani women protest in Quito against oil development
in Yasuní Rainforest, July 2005 (saveamericasforests.org)
OIL WARS AND RESISTANCE
Iraqis Will Decide
Commentary by Marjorie Cohn
As Congress debates whether to withdraw U.S. troops from
Iraq, George Bush is trying to buy time. He and Dick Cheney
have no intention of ever pulling out of Iraq.
Cheney commissioned a 2000 report by the neoconservative Project for a New American Century, which said “the
need for a substantial American force presence in the Gulf
transcends the issue of the regime of Saddam Hussein.” A
document for Cheney’s secret energy task force included a map
of Iraqi oilfields, pipelines, refineries, charts detailing Iraqi
oil and gas projects, and a “Foreign Suitors for Iraq Oil
Contracts.” It was dated March 2001, six months before 9/11.
On April 19, 2003, shortly after U.S. troops invaded
Baghdad, the New York Times quoted senior Bush officials as
saying the United States was “planning a long-term military
relationship with the emerging government of Iraq, one that
would grant the Pentagon access to military bases and project
American influence into the heart of the unsettled region.”
They discussed “maintaining perhaps four bases in Iraq that
could be used in the future.”
Indeed, Bush is building mega-bases In Iraq. Camp Anaconda, which sits on 15 square miles of Iraqi soil, has a pool,
gym, theater, beauty salon, school and six apartment buildings.
To avoid the negative connotation of “permanent,” Bush officials call their bases “enduring camps.” Our $600 million
American embassy in the Green Zone will open in September.
The largest embassy in the world, it is a self-contained city
with no need for Iraqi electricity, food or water.
The motive for a permanent presence in Iraq has been
obvious from day one. It’s the oil. The oft-mentioned benchmark for Iraqi progress, touted by Bush and Congress alike,
is the so-called Iraqi oil law. The new law would turn over
control of most oil production and royalties to foreign oil
As long as we have an occupation, we’ll have more sabotage
companies. The Iraqi people are opposed to the oil law.
The biggest impediment to the privatization of Iraq’s oil and killing. But when people from the local tribes control the
is the unions. Faleh Abood Umara, general secretary of the security, they have expelled the al-Qaeda forces and those
Iraqi Federation of Oil Unions, told U.S. photojournalist David others who are terrorizing people. This means we can protect
Bacon, “It will undermine the sovereignty of Iraq and our ourselves and bring security to our nation, with no need of
people … If the law is ratified, there will be no reconstruction. the U.S. forces. To those who believe that if the U.S. troops
The U.S. will keep its hegemony over Iraq.”
leave there will be chaos, I say, let them go, and if we fight
In early June, the Iraqi Federation of Oil Unions shut each other afterwards, let us do that. We are being killed by
down the oil pipelines. Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki the thousands already.”
The Iraqi unions want the occupation to end. Hashmeya
capitulated to the union’s demand that implementation of the
oil law be postponed until October so the union could pro- Muhsin Hussein, president of the Electrical Workers Union of
pose alternatives.
Iraq, told Bacon, “If it
Arab labor leader
“To those who believe that if the U.S. was up to Bush, he’d
Hacene Djemam said,
occupy the world. But
troops leave there will be chaos, I say, that’s not what the na“War makes privatization
easy: First you destroy
let them go, and if we fight each other tions of the world want.
society; then you let the
Would they accept occorporations rebuild it.” afterwards, let us do that. We are being cupation, as we have
After Halliburton entered
had to do? Our nation
killed by the thousands already.”
Iraq in 2003 and tried to
does not want to be
control the wells and rigs Faleh Abood Umara, Iraqi Federation of Oil Unions occupied, and we’ll do
by withholding reconour best to end it.”
struction aid, the union went on strike for three days. Exports
Nationalists in the Iraqi Parliament recently passed a bill
stopped and government revenue was cut off. Halliburton shut calling for the United States to set a timetable for withdrawal,
down its operations.
and another demanding the Iraqi government present any plan
Iraqis overwhelmingly oppose a permanent U.S. presence to extend the occupation past 2007 to Parliament. They will not
in their country. A group of Iraqi nationalists, including Sunnis, accept a proposal that includes permanent U.S. bases on Iraqi
Shiites and Kurds, have formed a pan-Iraqi coalition to top- soil. Our national discourse must include a discussion of U.S.
ple al-Maliki. They represent a vast majority of rank-and-file intentions for Iraq after a troop withdrawal. But ultimately, as
Iraqis outside of Parliament. Their primary basis of unity is in Vietnam, it will be the Iraqi people who are the deciders.
opposition to the U.S. occupation of Iraq; they also strongly
Marjorie Cohn is a professor at Thomas Jefferson School of
oppose Al Qaeda in Iraq and the Iranian influence in Iraq.
Law and President of the National Lawyers Guild.
“All the problems come from the occupation,” Umara
observed. “The occupation fosters the enormous corruption. Source: commondreams.org, July 19, 2007
For a Secular Democratic State
By Saree Makdisi
June 2007 marked the fortieth anniversary of the Israeli occupation of the West Bank, Gaza Strip and East Jerusalem. Four
decades of control established and maintained by force of
arms—in defiance of international law, countless UN Security Council resolutions and, most recently, the 2004 Advisory
Opinion of the International Court of Justice in The Hague—
have enabled Israel to impose its will on the occupied territories and, in effect, to remake them in its own image.
The result is a continuous political space now encompassing all of historic Palestine, albeit a space as sharply
divided as the colonial world (“a world cut in two”) famously described by Frantz Fanon in The Wretched of the Earth.
Indeed, Fanon’s 1961 classic still enables an analysis of Israel
and the occupied territories as fresh, insightful and relevant
in 2007 as the readings of Cape Town or Algiers that it made
available when it was first published.
Israel maintains two separate road systems in the West
Bank, for example: one for the territory’s immigrant population
of Jewish settlers, one for its indigenous non-Jewish (i.e.,
Palestinian) population.
The roads designated for the Jewish settlers are well maintained, well lit, continuous and uninterrupted; they tie the
network of Jewish “neighborhoods” and “settlements”—all
of them in reality colonies forbidden by international law—
to each other and to Israel. The roads for the West Bank’s
native population, by contrast, are poorly maintained, when
they are maintained at all (they often consist of little more
than shepherds’ trails); they are continuously blockaded and
interrupted. A grid of checkpoints and roadblocks (546 at last
The Apartheid Cage around the village of Qalqiliya
(www.aljidar.org)
count) strangles the circulation of the West Bank’s indigenous population, but it is designed to facilitate the free movement of Jewish settlers—who are, moreover, allowed to drive
their own cars on the roads set aside for them, whereas
Palestinians are not allowed to drive their cars beyond their
own towns and villages (the entrances to which are all blockaded by the Israeli army).
The wall that Israel has been constructing in the West
Bank and East Jerusalem since 2002 makes visible in concrete and barbed wire the outlines of the discriminatory
regime that structures and defines everyday life in the occupied territories, separating Palestinian farmers from crops,
patients from hospitals, students and teachers from schools and,
increasingly, even parents from children (it has, for example,
separated one parent or another from spouses and children in
21 percent of Palestinian families living on either side of the
7
wall near Jerusalem)—while at the same time enabling the
seamless incorporation of the Judaized spaces of the occupied territories into Israel itself. And a regime of curfews and
closures, enforced by the Israeli army, has smothered the
Palestinian economy, though none of its provisions apply to
Jewish settlers in the occupied territories.
There are, in short, two separate legal and administrative
systems, maintained by the regular use of military force, for
two populations—settlers and natives—unequally inhabiting
the same piece of land: exactly as was the case in the colonial countries described by Fanon, or in South Africa under
apartheid.
All this has enabled Israel to transplant almost half a
million of its own citizens into the occupied territories, at the
expense of their Palestinian population, whose land is confiscated, whose homes are demolished, whose orchards and
olive groves are razed or burned down, and whose social,
economic, educational and family lives have been, in effect,
all but suspended, precisely in order that their land may be
made available for the use of another people.
The result has been catastrophic for the Palestinians, as
a World Bank report published in May makes clear. While
the Jewish settlements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem
enjoy growth rates exceeding those of Israel itself, Palestinian
towns and villages are slowly being strangled. While Jewish
settlers move with total freedom, the combination of physical obstacles and the bureaucratic pass system imposed by
the Israeli army on the Palestinian population has not only
permanently separated the Palestinians of the West Bank
from those of Gaza, East Jerusalem and Israel (movement
Continued on the following page
Triangle Free Press, August 2007
Continued from the previous page
among which is forbidden for all but a tiny minority) but has
also broken up the West Bank into three distinct sections and
ten enclaves. Half of the West Bank is altogether off-limits to
most Palestinians; to move from one part of the rest of the
territory to another, Palestinians must apply for a permit from
the Israelis. Frequent bans are imposed on movement into or
out of particular enclaves (the city of Nablus, for example,
has been under siege for five years), or on whole segments of
the population (e.g., unmarried men under the age of 45).
And all permits are summarily invalidated when Israel
declares one of its “comprehensive closures” of the West
Bank—there were seventy-eight such days in 2006—at
which point the entire Palestinian population stays home.
The lucky few who are able to obtain passes from the
Israelis are channeled from one section or enclave to another
through a series of army checkpoints, where they may be
searched, questioned, hassled, detained for hours or simply
turned back. “The practical effect of this shattered economic
space,” the World Bank report points out, “is that on any
given day the ability to reach work, school, shopping, healthcare facilities and agricultural land is highly uncertain and
subject to arbitrary restriction and delay.” Given the circumstances, it is hardly any wonder that two-thirds of the Palestinian population has been reduced to absolute poverty (less
than $2 a day), and that hundreds of thousands are now dependent for day-to-day survival on food handouts provided by
international relief organizations. Not only has the international community refused to intervene; it has actively participated in the repression, imposing—for the first time in history—sanctions on a people living under military occupation, while the occupying and colonizing power goes on violating the international community’s own laws with total
impunity.
To all of these charges, Israel and its supporters have but
one response: “security.” But as the World Bank report argues,
it is “often difficult to reconcile the use of movement and access
restrictions for security purposes from their use to expand and
protect settlement activity.” Moreover, the Bank notes, it seems
obvious that Israeli security ought to be tied to Palestinian
prosperity: By disrupting the Palestinian economy and immiserating an entire population—pushing almost 4 million people
to the edge—the Israelis are hardly enhancing their own security.
Such arguments miss the point, however. No matter how
fiercely it is contested inside Israel, there remains a very
strong sense that the country is entitled to retain the land to
which it has now stubbornly clung for four decades. Even
while announcing his scheme to relinquish nominal control
over a few bits and pieces of the West Bank with heavy concentrations of Palestinians, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert
insisted on his country’s inherent right to the territory, irrespective of the demands of international law, let alone the
rights and claims of the Palestinians themselves. (“Every hill
in Samaria and every valley in Judea is part of our historic
homeland,” he said last year, using Israel’s official, biblical
terminology for the West Bank.)
Although some people claim there are fundamental differences between the disposition of the territories Israel captured in 1967 and the territories it captured during its creation
in 1948—or even that there are important moral and political
differences between Israel pre- and post-1967—such sentiments of entitlement, and the use of force that necessarily
728 Ninth Street
DURHAM
Mon–Wed & Sat
10–6
Qalandia checkpoint, north of Jerusalem (tonydavies.me.uk)
accompanies them, reveal the seamless continuity of the those inside Israel, where the remnant of the Palestinian popZionist project in Palestine from 1948 to our own time. ulation that was not driven into flight in 1948—today more
“There are circumstances in history that justify ethnic cleans- than a million people—continues to endure the systematic
ing,” argues Israeli historian Benny Morris, with reference to inequalities built into the laws and institutions of a country
the creation of Israel. “A Jewish state would not have come that explicitly claims to be the state of the Jewish people
into being without the uprooting of 700,000 Palestinians. rather than that of its own actual citizens, about a fifth of
Therefore it was necessary to uproot them. There was no choice whom are not Jewish. Recognizing the contradiction inherent
but to expel that population. It was necessary to cleanse the in such a formulation, various Israeli politicians, including
hinterland and cleanse the border
Deputy Prime Minister Avigdor
areas and cleanse the main roads. It
Lieberman, have explicitly called
There remains but one
was necessary to cleanse the vilfor the territorial transfer—if not
possibility for peace with
lages from which our convoys and
the outright expulsion—of as
our settlements were fired on.”
justice: truth, reconciliation— much as possible of Israel’s
Israel’s post-1967 occupation
non-Jewish (that is, Palestinian)
and a single democratic
policies are demonstrably driven by
minority. Although it would be
the same dispossessive logic. If hunintended to mark the ultimate
and secular state…
dreds of thousands have not literaltriumph of the dispossessing
ly been forced into flight, their existence has been reduced to settler over the dispossessed native (Lieberman is an immipenury. Just as Israel could have come into being in 1948 only grant from Moldova who enjoys rights denied to indigenous
by sweeping aside hundreds of thousands of Palestinians, Palestinians simply because he happens to be Jewish), such a
Israel’s ongoing colonization of Palestinian territory—its gesture would actually amount to a last-ditch measure, an
imposition of itself and its desires on the land’s indigenous attempt to forestall what has become the most likely conclupopulation—requires, and will always require, the use of force sion to the conflict.
and the continual brutalization of an entire people.
For, having unified all of what used to be Palestine (albeit
Indeed, the discriminatory practices in the occupied ter- into one profoundly divided space) without having overcome
ritories replicate, albeit in a harsher and more direct form, the Palestinian people’s will to resist, Zionism has run its
course. And in so doing, it has terminated any possibility of
a two-state solution. There remains but one possibility for
peace with justice: truth, reconciliation—and a single democratic and secular state, a state in which there will be no
“natives” and “settlers” and all will be equal; a state for all its
citizens irrespective of their religious affiliation. Such a state
has always, by definition, been anathema for Zionism. But
for the people of Israel and Palestine, it is the only way out.
Saree Makdisi is a professor of English and comparative literature at UCLA, and author of Romantic Imperialism:
Universal Empire and the Culture of Modernity (Cambridge
University Press, 1998).
Thur & Fri 10–8
Sun 12–5
286-3911
Triangle Free Press, August 2007
Source: The Nation, June 18, 2007
8
The Cold War Between Washington
and Tehran
By Noam Chomsky
In the energy-rich Middle East, only two countries have
failed to subordinate themselves to Washington’s basic
demands: Iran and Syria. Accordingly both are enemies, Iran
by far the more important.
As was the norm during the Cold War, resort to violence
is regularly justified as a reaction to the malign influence of
the main enemy, often on the flimsiest of pretexts. Unsurprisingly, as Bush sends more troops to Iraq, tales surface of Iranian
interference in the internal affairs of Iraq-a country otherwise
free from any foreign interference, on the tacit assumption
that Washington rules the world.
In the Cold War-like mentality that prevails in Washington,
Tehran is portrayed as the pinnacle in the so-called Shiite
Crescent that stretches from Iran to Hezbollah in Lebanon,
through Shiite southern Iraq and Syria. And again unsurprisingly, the “surge” in Iraq and escalation of threats and accusations against Iran is accompanied by grudging willingness to
attend a conference of regional powers, with the agenda limited to Iraq—more narrowly, to attaining U.S. goals in Iraq.
Presumably this minimal gesture toward diplomacy is
intended to allay the growing fears and anger elicited by
Washington’s heightened aggressiveness, with forces deployed
in position to attack Iran and regular provocations and threats.
For the United States, the primary issue in the Middle
East has been and remains effective control of its unparalleled energy resources. Access is a secondary matter. Once the
oil is on the seas it goes anywhere. Control is understood to
be an instrument of global dominance.
Iranian influence in the “crescent” challenges U.S. control.
By an accident of geography, the world’s major oil resources
are in largely Shiite areas of the Middle East: southern Iraq,
adjacent regions of Saudi Arabia and Iran, with some of the
major reserves of natural gas as well. Washington’s worst
nightmare would be a loose Shiite alliance controlling most
of the world’s oil and independent of the United States.
Such a bloc, if it emerges, might even join the Asian
Energy Security Grid and Shanghai Cooperation Organization
(SCO), based in China. Iran, which already had observer status,
is to be admitted as a member of the SCO. The Hong Kong
South China Morning Post reported in June 2006 that “Iranian
President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad stole the limelight at the
annual meeting of the Shanghai Co-operation Organisation
(SCO) by calling on the group to unite against other countries
as his nation faces criticism over its nuclear program.” The
non-aligned movement meanwhile affirmed Iran’s “inalienable
right” to pursue these programs, and the SCO (which includes
the states of Central Asia) “called on the United States to set
a deadline for the withdrawal of military installations from
all member states.
If the Bush planners bring that about, they will have seriously undermined the U.S. position of power in the world.
To Washington, Tehran’s principal offense has been its
defiance, going back to the overthrow of the Shah in 1979
and the hostage crisis at the U.S. embassy. The grim U.S. role
in Iran in earlier years is excised from history. In retribution
for Iranian defiance, Washington quickly turned to support for
Saddam Hussein’s aggression against Iran, which left hundreds
of thousands dead and the country in ruins. Then came murderous sanctions, and under Bush, rejection of Iranian diplomatic efforts in favor of increasing threats of direct attack.
Last July (2006), Israel invaded Lebanon, the fifth invasion
since 1978. As before, U.S. support for the aggression was a
critical factor, the pretexts quickly collapse on inspection,
and the consequences for the people of Lebanon are severe.
Among the reasons for the U.S.-Israel invasion is that Hezbollah’s rockets could be a deterrent to a potential U.S.-Israeli
attack on Iran.
Despite the saber-rattling, it is, I suspect, unlikely that the
Bush administration will attack Iran. The world is strongly
opposed. Seventy-five percent of Americans favor diplomacy
over military threats against Iran, and as noted earlier, Americans and Iranians largely agree on nuclear issues. Polls by
Terror Free Tomorrow reveal that “Despite a deep historical
enmity between Iran’s Persian Shiite population and the predominantly Sunni population of its ethnically diverse Arab,
Turkish and Pakistani neighbors, the largest percentage of
people in these countries favor accepting a nuclear-armed Iran
over any American military action.” It appears that the U.S.
military and intelligence community is also opposed to an
attack.
Iran cannot defend itself against U.S. attack, but it can
respond in other ways, among them by inciting even more
havoc in Iraq. Some issue warnings that are far more grave,
among them by the respected British military historian Corelli
Barnett, who writes that “an attack on Iran would effectively
launch World War III.”
The Bush administration has left disasters almost everywhere it has turned, from post-Katrina New Orleans to Iraq.
In desperation to salvage something, the administration might
undertake the risk of even greater disasters.
Meanwhile Washington may be seeking to destabilize
Iran from within. The ethnic mix in Iran is complex; much of
the population isn’t Persian. There are secessionist tendencies
and it is likely that Washington is trying to stir them up—in
Khuzestan on the Gulf, for example, where Iran’s oil is concentrated, a region that is largely Arab, not Persian.
Threat escalation also serves to pressure others to join
U.S. efforts to strangle Iran economically, with predictable success in Europe. Another predictable consequence, presumably
intended, is to induce the Iranian leadership to be as harsh and
repressive as possible, fomenting disorder and perhaps resistance while undermining efforts of courageous Iranian reformers, who are bitterly protesting Washington’s tactics. It is also
necessary to demonize the leadership. In the West, any wild
statement of Iran’s president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, immediately gets circulated in headlines, dubiously translated. But
A week of information and skill-based workshops,
strategy sessions, and direct action aimed at building
a no-compromise climate justice movement.
PURPOSE: to promote a just, rapid transition
away from fossil fuels — to promote environmental
justice by supporting communities that are fighting
dirty energy developments in their backyards — to
encourage direct action as a means for challenging
dirty energy and empowering the movement to stop
climate change — to increase networking and
strategizing amongst the diverse social justice and
environmental movements fighting climate change
and the energy industry.
9
as is well known, Ahmadinejad has no control over foreign
policy, which is in the hands of his superior, the Supreme
Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.
The U.S. media tend to ignore Khamenei’s statements,
especially if they are conciliatory. For example, it’s widely
reported when Ahmadinejad says that Israel shouldn’t exist
—but there is silence when Khamenei says that Iran “shares
a common view with Arab countries on the most important
Islamic-Arabic issue, namely the issue of Palestine,” which
would appear to mean that Iran accepts the Arab League
position: full normalization of relations with Israel in terms
of the international consensus on a two-state settlement that
the U.S. and Israel continue to resist, almost alone.
The U.S. invasion of Iraq virtually instructed Iran to
develop a nuclear deterrent. Israeli military historian Martin
van Creveld writes that after the U.S. invasion of Iraq, “had the
Iranians not tried to build nuclear weapons, they would be
crazy.” The message of the invasion, loud and clear, was that the
U.S. will attack at will, as long as the target is defenseless.
Now Iran is ringed by U.S. military forces in Afghanistan, Iraq,
Turkey and the Persian Gulf and close by are nuclear-armed
Pakistan and particularly Israel, the regional superpower, thanks
to U.S. support.
As already discussed, Iranian efforts to negotiate outstanding issues were rebuffed by Washington, and an EUIranian agreement was apparently undermined by Washington’s refusal to withdraw threats of attack. A genuine interest
in preventing the development of nuclear weapons in Iran—
and the escalating warlike tension in the region—would lead
Washington to implement the EU bargain, agree to meaningful negotiations and join with others to move toward integrating Iran into the international economic system, in accord
with public opinion in the United States, Iran, neighboring
states, and virtually the entire rest of the world.
This essay is an excerpt from Noam Chomsky’s new book
Interventions published by City Lights Books.
Source: Commondreams.org, July 28, 2007
WORKSHOPS: Direct Action 101, Climbing
Trainings, Strategic Action Planning, Anti-oppression,
Sustainable living skills, Debunking False Solutions,
Blockades, Media, and much more. The convergence
will culminate in a coordinated day of direct action
against fossil fuel infrastructure projects.
LOCATION: About a half hour drive from Asheville.
The land has many examples of sustainable building
techniques (including cordwood and passive solar),
composting toilets, lots of big trees, and a lake
(bring a boat if you have one!). The event will be
camping, so bring a tent and other camping gear.
Be prepared for rain. All meals will be provided.
COSPONSORS: Asheville Rising Tide, Energy
Justice Summer, Nuclear Information Resource
Service (NIRS), Southern Energy Network,
Mountain Justice Summer, Nuclear Watch South,
Canary Coalition, Blue Ridge Environmental Defense
League (BREDL), Katuah Earth First!
CONTACT: risingtide@mountainrebel.net
or phone 828-675-1792
COST: We are asking for a $50-100 donation for
attending the full week. We will email you directions
and other information after you register. You must
register to attend!
Triangle Free Press, August 2007
Target: Africa
Guns, Foundations and “Free Trade”
By Conn Hallihan
When President George W. Bush announced the formation of
a military command for Africa (AFRICOM) this past February,
it came as no surprise to the Heritage Foundation. The powerful right-wing organization designed it.
The Heritage Foundation, founded in 1973 by ultra-conservatives Paul Weyrich and Joseph Coors and funded by such
right-wing mainstays as the Scaife Foundation, has a strong
presence in the Bush Administration. While not as influential
as the older and richer American Enterprise Institute, it has a
higher profile when it comes to Africa policy.
Back in October 2003, James Jay Carafano and Nile
Gardner of the Heritage Foundation laid out a blueprint for
how to use military power to dominate that vast continent.
“Creating an African Command,” write the two
analysts in a Heritage Foundation study titled U.S.
Military Assistance for Africa: A Better Solution,
“would go a long way toward turning the Bush
Administration’s well aimed strategic priorities
for Africa into a reality.”
While the Bush Administration says the purpose of AFRICOM will be humanitarian aid and
“security cooperation,” not “war fighting,” says
Ryan Henry, principal deputy undersecretary of
defense for policy. The Heritage analysts were a tad blunter
about the application of military power: “Pre-emptive strikes
are justified on grounds of self-defense. America must not be
afraid to employ its forces decisively when vital national
interests are threatened.”
Carafano and Gardner are also quite clear what those
“vital interests” are: “The United States is likely to draw 25
percent of its oil from West Africa by 2015, surpassing the
volume imported from the Persian Gulf.”
Carafano is a graduate of the U.S. Military Academy, a
former Lt. Colonel in the U.S. Army, and a Senior Fellow on
Defense and Homeland Security for Heritage. Gardner was a
foreign policy researcher for British Prime Minister Margaret
Thatcher and is the current director of the Margaret Thatcher
Center For Freedom.
The two also proposed increasing military aid to African
regimes friendly to the U.S. and, using the language of pop
psychology, confronting “enabler” and “slacker” states that
threaten U.S. security. “Enabler” states, according to the
authors, are those—like Libya—that directly aid terrorists
and “slacker” states are failed nations—like Somalia—where
terrorists can base their operations.
Their recommendations are almost precisely what the
Administration settled on, albeit the White House wrapped its
initiative in soothing words like “cooperation,” “humanitarian
aid,” and “stability.”
In a sense, AFRICOM simply formalized the growing
U.S. military presence on the continent.
The U.S .currently deploys 1,800 soldiers in Djibouti as
part of its Combined Joint Task Force-Horn of Africa. Special
Forces and air units operating from Djibouti were instrumental in Ethiopia’s recent invasion of Somalia.
According to a recent Congressional Research Service
report, the U.S. has bases in Gabon, Kenya, Mali, Morocco,
Namibia, Sao Tome/Principe, Senegal, Tunisia, Uganda, and
Zambia. The Sao Tome/Principe base lies 124 miles off the
coast of Guinea and the oil fields of Angola, Nigeria,
Cameroon, Gabon and Equatorial Guinea.
Through the Trans-Sahal Initiative aimed at supposed
terrorist groups operating in the Sahara, the U.S. has roped
Mali, Chad, Niger and Mauritania into an alliance. Chad and
Mauritania have significant oil and gas deposits.
And, lastly, the Pentagon’s Africa Contingency Operation
Training and Assistance program supplies weapons and training to Benin, Botswana, Cameroon, Central African Republic,
Cote d’Ivoire, Ethiopia, Gabon, Ghana, Kenya, Malawi, MozTriangle Free Press, August 2007
ambique, Nigeria, Senegal, South Africa, Uganda and Zambia.
Exactly as the Heritage proposal recommends, the U.S.
has recruited client regimes like Ethiopia, Chad and Uganda
that are willing to support U.S. policy goals. A case in point
is the recent U.S. sponsored invasion of Somalia, where
Ethiopian troops overthrew the Islamist regime and Ugandan
soldiers helped occupy the country.
Controlling resources for U.S. corporations is a major
impetus behind AFRICOM, but it is also part of the Bush
Controlling resources for U.S. corporations is a major impetus
behind AFRICOM (Philippe Rekacewicz, mondediplo.com)
Administration’s
fixation with China.
The Chinese “threat”
in Africa has been a
particular focus for both
Heritage and the American Enterprise Institute. The latter held a
conference last year
titled “Beijing Safari:
The Challenge of China’s
growing ties to Africa.”
Peter Brooke, Heritage’s
“Africa hand,” has led the way
in hyping the dangers China is said to pose
in Africa. Brooke, a Navy Reserve commander, former Republican advisor on Asian affairs for the House Committee on
International Relations, and current New York Post columnist,
spares no bombast in his alarm over Beijing’s interest in Africa.
“Amid festering concerns about China’s burgeoning
global power, Beijing has firmly set its sights on expanding
its influence in Africa,” writes Brooke in a Heritage analysis
titled Into Africa: China’s Grab for Influence and Oil. Brooke
argues China’s interest in the continent is “a throwback to the
Maoist revolutionary days of the 1960s and 1970s.”
Certainly China is active in Africa. Some 30 percent of
China’s oil comes from the continent, and Beijing has invested in the energy industries of Nigeria, Angola and Sudan.
China has also opened up the aid spigot. In 2006, Beijing
dispensed $8 billion in aid to Angola, Nigeria and Mozambique alone. In comparison the World Bank gave $2.3 billion
in aid for all of sub-Saharan Africa.
Military power is not the only arrow in the U.S. quiver.
And once again the Heritage Foundation has played a key role
in promoting the Bush Administration’s other strategy for controlling Africa: free trade.
In a major Heritage Lecture titled “How Economic
Freedom is Central to Development in Sub-Saharan Africa”
Brett Schaefer of the Thatcher Center argues that developing
countries must lower their trade barriers in order to grow. The
Bush Administration’s Millennium Challenge Account ties
aid to such reduced barriers.
But as University of the Philippines sociologist Walden
Bello, director of Focus on the Global South, points out in his
10
analysis of last year’s failed Doha talks on international
trade, “free trade” is a Trojan horse that ends up overwhelming the economies of developing countries. “From the very
start, the aim of the developed countries [in the Doha talks]
was to push for greater market openings from the developing
countries while making minimal concessions of their own.”
The recent Doha talks in Potsdam, Germany, collapsed
when the U.S. and the European Union refused to compromise on tariffs.
Because of subsidies, U.S. wheat sells for 46 percent
below production costs, and corn at 20 percent below cost.
The World Bank and Oxfam estimates that the developed
countries’ trade barriers cost developing countries $100 billion
a year, twice what the latter receive in economic assistance.
The impact of such one-way free trade has been to collapse rural economies. U.S. subsidized corn has driven some
two million southern Mexican farmers off their land, accelerated rural poverty, and helped fuel immigration to the U.S.
American subsidized soybeans and rice respectively control 99 percent and 80 percent of the Mexican market.
Such subsidies have a particularly devastating impact in Africa, where 50 percent of a
country’s GNP may be in agriculture. A recent
study by Oxfam estimated that cutting American
cotton subsidies would raise world prices by 10
percent.
A 2005 study by the World Bank found that while
the effect of developing countries dismantling trade barriers would increase their income by $16 billion over 10
years, that would translate to a grand total of two dollars a year for the world’s one billion poor. And
there might well be a net loss.
“For example,” says Bello, a recent United
Nations trade and development study “predicts that
the losses in tariff income for developing countries
under Doha could range between $32 billion and
$63 billion annually. This loss in government revenues—the source of developing country health care,
education, water provision, and sanitation budgets—is two to
four times the mere $16 billion in benefits projected by the
World Bank.”
Bello cites research by the Carnegie Endowment and the
European Commission suggesting that the impact of free trade
on Africa will be profound. “The majority in Africa,” says
Aileen Kwa of Focus on the Global South, “will be faced
with losses in both agricultural and industrial goods,” and
small African farmers will be unable to compete, exactly what
happened to small corn farmers in Mexico.
Indeed, Bello points to a study by the United Nations
Development Program that suggests the best strategy for
developing countries is exactly the opposite of the Heritage
Foundation’s formula. According to the analysis, countries like
Japan and South Korea were successful because, rather than
embracing “free trade,” they protected their industries from
outside competition.
The AFRICOM initiative is creating some unease in both
the U.S. and Africa. “Some initial reaction to the locating of
the African Command on the continent has been negative,”
says the Congressional Research Service, because some
African countries see it as a device to increase troops there.
Nicole Lee, executive director of the TransAfrica Forum,
called AFRICOM “neither wise nor productive,” and suggests
that the U.S. should instead focus on “development assistance
and respect for sovereignty.”
But not so long as U.S. policy in Africa is driven by think
tanks like the Heritage Foundation.
Conn Hallinan is an analyst for Foreign Policy in Focus, a
winner of a Project Censored Award
Source: counterpunch.org, July 15, 2007
SOCIETY, FASCISM AND DEMOCRACY
Venezuela’s Co-op Boom
Seeds of Venezuela’s Co-op Boom
and its inhabitants. The model is based in 130 Nuclei of
At the time that President Chavez was elected in 1998, Endogenous Development (NUDEs) located across the counWhen Estrella Ramirez’s 14-year-old son signed her up to par- poverty had been on a slow but constant rise since the middle try as centers of local development.
ticipate in the government’s free literacy program, Mission half of the century. The consolidation of lands into a few
At the pilot Venezuelan NUDE in western Caracas,
Robinson, she reluctantly agreed. Ramirez, who lives in the hands had displaced farmers who migrated in large numbers Fabricio Ojeda, more than 40 worker-collectives intermingle
poor western Caracas neighborhood of Catia, lost her right to the cities in search of work. As a result, Venezuela became
arm in 1991 from an arterial thrombosis. Six years later, her the most urbanized country in Latin America; its capital,
To end poverty, put poor people
husband left her, leaving her to raise her young children alone. Caracas, is surrounded by poor barrios that house almost half
in charge of their livelihood. A
She looked for work but couldn’t find a job. “I lived locked in of its population of nearly 5 million in substandard conditions.
my house with my children, and I maintained my children The implantation of neoliberal policies during the 1990s only
co-op boom turns the jobless
sometimes selling coffee at the hospital, making lunches,” aggravated the situation by privatizing state-owned businessinto worker/owners.
she says.
es, and cutting subsidies and social spending. Inflation skyThree months after Ramirez started the literacy program, rocketed and zeros piled on to the end of the national curher teacher enrolled her in the government’s new cooperative rency, the Bolivar.
with the government health mission, Barrio Adentro, and the
job-training program, Vuelvan Caras (About Face).
Venezuela’s poor were left with few options in a society low-priced government-sponsored food store, Mercal.
“I thought they wouldn’t accept me or put up with me,” that former vice-minister of popular economy (MINEP) Juan
Unfortunately, the reality of the cooperative boom is not
Ramirez says. “There’s discrimination. You’re treated as if you Carlos Loyo, described last year as “profoundly individualistic without its problems. According to last fall’s first Venezuelan
are useless, a cripple.”
… profoundly unequal, and discriminatory.”
Cooperative Census, less than 40 percent of the cooperatives
Ramirez began the year-long Vuelvan Caras industrial
In 1998, however, things began to change. Chavez was registered at the time were actually functioning.
sewing course in spring 2004 with a group of other unemployed elected president with the promise to rewrite the Constitution.
Many of the discrepancies come from businesses that
women from her community. Some,
As he built on the vision of registered and either never got off the ground or failed to
like Ramirez, were also offered
South America’s liberator, comply with the cooperative law. In rare cases, so-called “ghost
scholarships so they could study and
Simón Bolívar, his popular- cooperatives” registered and received loans from the governstill care for their children.
ity grew among the poor. ment before disappearing with the cash.
Three years later, Ramirez is a
His “Bolivarian RevoluVenezuelan cooperative totals are growing at hundreds
co-founder and associate of the textion,” Loyo says, includes per week, and former SUNACOOP director Molina verified last
tile cooperative, Manos Amigas
building an economic sys- year that they have no hope of being able to audit them all.
(Friendly Hands). She is also, accordtem “based on solidarity
Manos Amigas has not been spared its share of difficulties.
ing to former cooperative president,
and not exploitation.”
Only half of the nearly 30 founders remain. The greatest chalMaria Ortiz, “one of the hardest
Chávez decreed the lenge is individualism, say numerous cooperative members.
workers” of the 15-person outfit.
Special Law of Coopera- It’s difficult to change overnight. But improvements are being
Ramirez formed Manos Amigas
tive Associations in 2001, made, and Venezuela’s cooperatives have a long history to learn
with her fellow Vuelvan Caras gradwhich made it easier to from, even if the new co-ops don’t necessarily recognize it.
uates shortly after finishing the proform cooperatives, and, in
gram. They received an $80,000 zerothe words of former CoopCo-ops that Pre-Date Chávez
Estrella Ramirez learned to read, and then to run a
interest loan from the Venezuelan business with the help of Venezuela’s new literacy and erative Superintendent (SUIn the foothills of the Andes, in Lara’s state capital,
job training “missions.” She and co-workers started
National Institute for Small and
NACOOP) Carlos Molina, Barquisimeto, is one of Venezuela’s oldest, largest, and most
Manos Amigas, a co-op that makes uniforms.
Medium Industry to buy 20 sewing
“transformed cooperatives important cooperatives.
(Michael Fox, YES! Magazine)
machines and purchase their first
into a fundamental tool of
CECOSESOLA started as a funeral co-op in the late 1960s
materials. The government provided a prime location—free social inclusion.”
and now has over 300 associated workers, 20,000 associated
of charge—from which to run their cooperative, in a rundown
Why cooperativism? “Because cooperativism goes fur- members, and is composed of over 80 cooperatives (savings,
building in downtown Caracas. They invested part of their ther than purely economic activity, and is based on produc- agricultural, production, civil associations, organizations, and
loan in fixing up their space on the fourth floor.
tive relations which are collective, in solidarity, and above all a puppet crew).
At Manos Amigas, members voted to work eight hours else inclusive,” says Molina.
Each week they sell groceries and 400 tons of fresh fruits
a day, five days a week, and to pay themselves minimum wage,
The Venezuelan government began promoting the cre- and vegetables from affiliated co-op producers at their lowor around $200 a month. They also receive a bonus at the end ation of co-ops by prioritizing
priced markets to more than
of the year, depending on the cooperative’s yearly profits. As them for government con55,000 families, many of them
is the norm under the 2001 Venezuelan Cooperative Law, a tracts, offering grants and
from the poorest communities in
president, secretary, and treasurer are elected yearly. The co- loans with little or no interest,
the city. CECOSESOLA reports
op holds a general assembly once a month, and decisions are and eliminating income tax
weekly sales of about $800,000,
made by consensus or by majority. “No one is boss, everyone requirements for co-ops. Cowhich works out to approximately
is part of the team,” said one member.
operative numbers immedi$40 million annually, but that’s
Manos Amigas is just one of the 8,000 cooperatives, or ately began to grow.
just for starters. CECOSESOLA
Venezuela kicked off
worker-collectives, formed by the nearly 300,000 graduates
still provides funeral services and
of the Vuelvan Caras cooperative job-training program since Vuelvan Caras in spring 2004
also offers banking services, a
it began in 2004. It is also just one of the 181,000 coopera- as it began to reinvest its oil
home-appliance consignment protives officially registered in Venezuela as of the end of last wealth in educational, social,
gram, a network of affordable
year—an astonishing figure that puts the South American and health “missions” in an
health clinics, and they are in the
nation at the top of the list of countries in the world with the attempt to incorporate Venezprocess of building their own
uela’s marginalized poor
most cooperatives.
hospital.
Co-op worker-owners make shoes. (Sarah van Gelder,
Over 99 percent of Venezuela’s cooperatives have regis- back into society.
For those who cannot get to
YES! Magazine)
tered since President Hugo Chavez Frias took office in 1999.
The same year, the Venezthe markets, CECOSESOLA loads
The cooperative boom is key to the shift by the Venezuelan uelan government began to promote what it called “Endo- up buses with vegetables and fruits and takes them to the bargovernment towards an economy based on the inclusion of genous Development” (economic development from within), rios. When a neighborhood begins clamoring for its own local
traditionally excluded sectors of society and the promotion of directly in contrast to the neoliberal model imposed during the market, CECOSESOLA helps set it up. All is self-financed by
alternative business models as part of its drive towards what 1990s, which promoted privatization and corporate ownership. the cooperatives without help from government or charities.
Chavez calls “socialism of the 21st century.”
Endogenous Development puts the development of the
Unlike the Chávez government cooperatives, CECOSEcommunity in the hands of the residents and builds on the SOLA has no elected officers or management team.
local resources and capacities for the benefit of the region
Continued on the following page
By Michael Fox
11
Triangle Free Press, August 2007
“We are a-political and a-religious,” says Salas Romer. “We
Continued from the preceding page
Decisions are made by consensus in meetings that take up a have been called a lot of things, but we stay with our own
major portion of the work week. Associates rotate through process. That is our strength. If we were to get caught up in
different jobs, and each is expected to take full responsibility politics and religion, it would create divisions and we would
—in front of their work mates when necessary—for the fall apart.”
choices they make.
“The goal is transformation,” says long-time CECOSECooperative Realities
SOLA organizer, Gustavo Salas Romer. “The economy is
Back at Manos Amigas in mid-March, the members
secondary.”
were hard at work producing uniforms for their first contract
Establishing CECOSESOLA was not easy. During the with the Venezuelan Armed Forces. A poster of Chávez
1970s, co-op members were labeled subversives, the cooper- watches over their tiny one-room factory, which is filled with
ative was infiltrated by agents from the Venezuelan secret the hum of sewing machines and the chatter of voices. In
service, and their transportation bus co-op was shut down and contrast to most factories in Latin America, the atmosphere is
looted by the local government for
relaxed. Although Manos
offering services so reasonable that
Amigas receives many of
private bus companies couldn’t
their contracts through the
compete. The struggle drove the
Venezuelan state for the proco-op into a decade and a half of
duction of uniforms, they
bankruptcy, from which many
themselves wear none. There
members thought they could not
is no punch-card. When
escape.
someone is suspected of
But they did, and when
abusing the system, the matChávez was elected, members of
ter is taken up in a general
CECOSESOLA, along with dozassembly before all Manos
ens of Venezuela’s nearly 800
Amigas members.
cooperatives, began to push hard
Meanwhile, many Manos
to get co-op norms established in
Amigas members continue to
the new Constitution.
study in the government eduCECOSESOLA, 38 years, A mural depicting the new
At the same time, CECOSEcation missions, Ribas and
integral health center. (Silvia Leindecker)
SOLA maintained its autonomy.
Sucre. Such study is encour-
aged by the cooperative. Other textile cooperatives have
voted to work less, to allow more time for continued study
and time with families. Larger co-ops have set up daycare
centers to care for the children of the cooperative workers.
“It’s a huge success,” says Angel Ortiz, the only male
member of Manos Amigas. “We were workers for others, we
were employees, but today we are business people, and we
are not only producing for the state, but for our community.”
Manos Amigas members say they are economically viable.
The government, they say, pays them four to eight times more
for their merchandise than they would receive as individual
workers in a private company. Plus, since they cut out the
corporate overhead, they can sell the product at less than half
the price charged by private businesses.
With billions of dollars invested over the last three years
in the training and support of the Vuelvan Caras cooperatives
alone, and with the first Vuelvan Caras cooperatives only
now beginning to pay off their loans, it is difficult to say what
the future holds. Nevertheless, Venezuela is banking heavily
on these democratic businesses, which already account for 6
percent of Venezuela’s workforce. There is no doubt that the
cooperatives are changing the lives of hundreds of thousands
of Venezuelans, who, only a few years ago, didn’t believe
they could find a job—not to mention run their own business.
Estrella Ramirez would surely agree, as would her partners at Manos Amigas who have an economic future in a
world which, until recently, shut them out.
Michael Fox is a freelance journalist based in South America.
Source: Yes Magazine, Summer 2007 issue
The High Cost of Being Poor
Commentary by Barbara Ehrenreich
wealthier drivers.
• Poorer people pay an average of one percentage point
There are people, concentrated in the Hamptons and Beverly more in mortgage interest.
Hills, who still confuse poverty with the simple life. No cable
• They are more likely to buy their furniture and appliTV, no altercations with the maid, no summer home mainte- ances through pricey rent-to-own businesses. In Wisconsin,
nance issues—just the basics like family, sunsets and walks in the study reports, a $200 rent-to-own TV set can cost $700
the park. What they don’t know is that it’s expensive to be poor. with the interest included.
• They are less likely to have access to large supermarIn fact, you, the reader of middling income, could probably not afford it. A new study from the Brookings Institute kets and hence to rely on the far more expensive, and lower
quality offerings, of small grodocuments the “ghetto tax,”
or higher cost of living in low- The “ghetto tax,” or higher cost cery and convenience stores.
I didn’t live in any ghettoes
income urban neighborhoods.
of living in low-income urban
when I worked on the book
It comes at you from every
direction, from food prices to neighborhoods … comes at you Nickle and Dimed—a trailer
auto insurance. A few exampark, yes, but no ghetto—and on
ples from this study, by Matt from every direction, from food my average wage of $7 an hour,
Fellowes, that covered 12
or about $14,400 a year, I wasprices to auto insurance.
American cities:
n’t in the market for furniture, a
• Poor people are less likely to have bank accounts, which house or a car. But the high cost of poverty was brought
can be expensive for those with low balances, and so they tend home to me within a few days of my entry into the low-wage
to cash their pay checks at check-cashing businesses, which life, when, slipping into social-worker mode, I chastised a
in the cities surveyed, charged $5 to $50 for a $500 check.
co-worker for living in a motel room when it would be so
• Nationwide, low-income car buyers, defined as people much cheaper to rent an apartment. Her response: Where
earning less than $30,000 a year, pay two percentage points would she get the first month’s rent and security deposit it
more for a car loan than more affluent buyers.
takes to pin down an apartment? The lack of that amount of
• Low-income drivers pay more for car insurance. In capital—probably well over $1,000—condemned her to payNew York, Baltimore and Hartford, they pay an average $400 ing $40 a night at the Day’s Inn.
more a year to insure the exact same car and driver risk than
Then there was the problem of sustenance. I had gone
into the project imagining myself preparing vast quantities of
cheap, nutritious soups and stews, which I would freeze and
heat for dinner each day. But surprise: I didn’t have the
proverbial pot to pee in, not to mention spices or Tupperware.
A scouting trip to K-Mart established that it would take about
a $40 capital investment to get my kitchenette up to speed for
the low-wage way of life.
The food situation got only more challenging when I,
too, found myself living in a motel. Lacking a fridge and
microwave, all my food had to come from the nearest convenience store (hardboiled eggs and banana for breakfast) or,
for the big meal of the day, Wendy’s or KFC. I have no nutritional complaints; after all, there is a veggie, or flecks of one,
in Wendy’s broccoli and cheese baked potato. The problem
was financial. A double cheeseburger and fries is lot more
expensive than that hypothetical homemade lentil stew.
There are other tolls along the road well-traveled by the
working poor. If your credit is lousy, which it is likely to be,
you’ll pay a higher deposit for a phone.If you don’t have
health insurance, you may end up taking that feverish child
to an emergency room, and please don’t think of ER’s as
socialized medicine for the poor. The average cost of a visit
is over $1,000, which is over ten times more than what a clinic pediatrician would charge. Or you neglect that hypertension, diabetes or mystery lump until you end up with a
$100,000 problem on your hands.
So let’s have a little less talk about how the poor should
learn to manage their money, and a little more attention to all
the ways that money is being systematically siphoned off. Yes,
certain kinds of advice would be helpful: skip the pay-day
loans and rent-to-pay furniture, for example. But we need laws
in more states to stop predatory practices like $50 charges for
check cashing. Also, think what some microcredit could do
to move families from motels and shelters to apartments. And
did I mention a living wage?
If you’re rich, you might want to stay that way. It’s a
whole lot cheaper than being poor.
Barbara Ehrenreich is the author of 13 books, most recently
Bait and Switch: The (Futile) Pursuit of the American Dream.
This piece first appeared on her blog. ©2006 Independent
Media Institute.
919-286-2056 • ninth.st@verizon.net
Source: alternet.org, July 12, 2007
Triangle Free Press, August 2007
12
If This Is Such a Rich Country, Why
Are We Getting Squeezed?
By Heather Boushey and Joshua Holland
program—they don’t need them.
Meanwhile, even as the top earners’ incomes have gone
While the rich are getting richer, they’re slashing social secu- through the roof, their tax burden has shriveled. At the same
rity, medicare and other social programs for the rest of us. time, the share of federal revenues contributed by corporaWhat gives?
tions has declined by two-thirds since 1962.
The commercial media is telling us two perfectly conIt’s important to understand how that plays out in our
tradictory stories about the American economy. The first is national economic discourse. When people tell us that our
how wonderfully rich we are in the United States. The stock economy cannot “afford” things like universal health care or
market’s booming—some analysts predict the Dow will break paid sick days, it fits with the economic experience that most
15,000 this year—the economy is expanding at a healthy clip, Americans have had in their real lives—the benefits of our
productivity growth is up and unemployment and inflation boom-boom economy have not gone to the great masses, but
are relatively low.
to “someplace else.”
But, at the same
Americans feel pinched.
The storyline is that U.S. families have not Polls show that they feel a
time, we’re also told that
we don’t have the money
time crunch—not having
seen their income grow because America
to pay for a robust social
enough time for family and
safety net. When it comes has had to fight it out in a wide-open global friends—and that they’re
economy, and these are lean times for
to paying for universal
anxious about getting into
health coverage, affordor staying in the middle class.
workers. But that’s simply not true.
ing retirement security
Over the past generation, the
for our elderly, investing in programs for the poor or educat- economy has not been good to the typical, married-couple
ing our children, we need to pinch pennies. According to this family (let alone single-parent families) and families feel, rightstoryline, we face a looming “entitlement crisis”—we won’t be ly, that they need to be careful about where their dollars go.
able to afford to keep the Baby Boomers in good health and
It’s not that they’re not working hard. The typical U.S.
out of poverty, we’re told, unless we slash their benefits and family puts in more time at work than ever before. The typical
privatize the programs that their elderly parents enjoy today. married couple works an additional 13.3 weeks per year—
This is the line we hear from the Administration when it 533 hours—compared to a generation ago. But even though
talks about entitlement “reform”: Treasury Secretary Henry families are working more, their incomes have grown by only
Paulson says that “The biggest economic issue facing our a third between 1973 and the present. That’s much worse than
country is the growth in spending on the major entitlement the generation before—between 1947 and 1973, the typical
programs: Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security.” The married-couple family saw their income rise by 115 percent.
solution, according to the Heritage Foundation, is to cut enti- And that was often just one parent’s income—this was a peritlement spending: “Reforming Social Security, Medicare, and od when most families could afford a stay-at-home mother.
Medicaid is the only way to get the budget under control.”
Of course, fewer families have that luxury today—those with
How can two narratives that are so clearly at odds with stay-at-home moms have the same inflation-adjusted median
each other be so pervasive? Are we seriously supposed to income in 2007 as they did in 1973—they haven’t gained a
believe that Paris Hilton has to dig between the cushions of penny from three decades of growth.
her sofa to buy a can of tuna?
When we talk about the slow growth of family income,
What reconciles these two themes is absent from our
mainstream economic discourse: we “can’t afford” all sorts
of programs that are clearly in the common good because
most of the benefits of our growing economy have gone to a
very small group of Americans, who have, in turn, seen their
taxes slashed again and again in the past six years. It’s a story
that isn’t told as often as it should in the commercial press
because it’s a supposedly “liberal” narrative—never mind
that über-conservative former Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan
told Congress that there is a “really serious problem here, as
I’ve mentioned many times … in the consequent concentration
of income that is rising.”
Saying that the majority of the country’s economic gains
in recent years have gone to the top one percent of the income
ladder understates the trend. You have to cut the pie into even
smaller slices to get the full picture. Because while the bottom half of the top one percent of the income distribution
have done far better than the average wage slaves, it is a smaller slice still—the top .01 percent—that has grabbed most of
the gains—seeing an impressive 250 percent increase in
income between 1973 and 2005—from an economy that’s
grown by 160 percent.
An analysis by economists Thomas Piketty and Emmanuel
Saez gives us the best perspective of what’s going on for everyone else. They found that despite several periods of healthy
growth between 1973 and 2005, the average income of all but
the top ten percent of the income ladder—nine out of ten
American families—fell by 11 percent when adjusted for
inflation. For three decades, economic growth in the United
States has gone first and foremost to building today’s modern
Gilded Age. The recipients of those gains don’t care about a
fully funded Social Security system or a healthy Medicare
13
economists like to mention globalization, mechanization, or
other factors that require us to be lean and mean and more
“competitive.” The storyline is that U.S. families have not
seen their income grow because America has had to fight it
out in a wide-open global economy, and these are lean times
for workers.
But that’s simply not true.
The economy as measured by gross domestic product
(GDP) has grown by over 160 percent since 1973. This is only
slightly less than the period from 1947 to 1973 when GDP grew
by 176 percent. That’s come as Americans have become much
more productive—productivity has grown by over 80 percent
since 1973—meaning it now takes fewer workers to produce
the same number of widgets as it did in the past.
As each worker in the U.S. economy produces more
“stuff” per hour, be that DVD players or clients served, those
goods and services are being sold in greater numbers. In a
healthy economy, that growth is shared between workers and
investors and wage growth should rise with productivity. This
was the case in the decades between World War II and the
early 1970s, when productivity and median wages both
increased by an average of two to three percent every year.
But since 1973, productivity increased sharply, especially
after the late 1990s, but median wage growth has been flat.
So firms are getting much more output per worker, but they’re
not paying for it. They’ve pocketed the difference in executive
compensation and corporate profits. The share of national
income going to wages is at the lowest level ever recorded,
while the piece of the pie gobbled up by corporate profits is
at its highest point since 1960.
But when the masses ask for help paying for health
insurance or child care, or request that everyone be given the
right to paid sick days, we’re told we cannot afford it. “Afford”
seems to be a very special term in the current American context: letting the wealthy take ever-bigger pieces of our national
product is something we always seem able to afford.
Source: alterner.org, July 18, 2007
Triangle Free Press, August 2007
The Case For Eliminating Obsolete
Private Health Insurance
Commentary by Leonard Rodberg & Don McCanne
Private health insurance was an idea that worked during part
of the last century; it will not succeed through the 21st
Century. With jobs increasingly service-based and short-term,
the large employment-based risk pools that made this insurance system possible no longer exist. Medical care has become
more effective and more essential to the ordinary person, but
also more costly and capital-intensive. The multiple private
insurance carriers that emerged during the last century can no
longer provide a sound basis for financing our modern health
care system.
Alone among the nations of the world, the U.S. has relied
upon private insurance to cover the majority of its population.
In the mid-20th Century, when medical care accounted for barely 1 percent of our gross national product, medical technology
was limited, and jobs lasted for a lifetime, health care could be
financed through such employment-based, premium-financed
health insurance. But the time for private insurance has passed.
Health care has now become a major part of our national
expenditures. The premium for an individual now averages
more than $4,000 per year, while a good family policy averages
more than $10,000 per year, comparable to the minimum
wage and nearly one-fourth of the median family income. As
a consequence, though the US spends far more on health care
than any other nation, we leave millions of our people without
any coverage at all. And those who do have coverage increasingly find that their plans are inadequate, exposing them to
financial hardship and even bankruptcy when illness strikes.
If we believe that everyone should have health care coverage, and that financial barriers should not prevent us from
accessing health care when we need it, then it has become
clear that the private health insurance system cannot meet our
needs. Health care has simply become too expensive to be
financed through private insurance premiums.
Supporters of insurance companies claim that they create efficiency through competition. However, the truth is that
insurance industry is increasingly concentrated, with three
national firms, United Health, Wellpoint, and Aetna, dominating the industry. And the high and rising cost of health
care shows that whatever competition there was in the past has
not worked to hold down costs.
Supporters of private insurance also claim that it expands
consumer choice. However, the choice of plans that these companies offer is not what consumers want; it is the choice of
their physician and hospital, exactly the choice that private
insurance plans, in the guise of managed care, increasingly
deny us.
What has been the response of the health insurance industry to this situation? To protect their markets and try to make
premiums affordable, they have reduced the protection
afforded by insurance by shifting more of the cost to patients,
especially through high-deductible plans. They have also targeted their marketing more narrowly to the healthy portion of
the population, so as to avoid covering individuals with known
needs for health care. Yet premiums continue to rise each
year, increasing by nearly 70 percent above inflation in just
the last six years.
The so-called “universal health care” proposals being put
forward by mainstream politicians would simply expand the
current system without addressing any of its problems. They
would simply mandate that either our employers provide us
with coverage or we, as individuals, purchase our own coverage in the private insurance market. These plans cannot
work in the face of the high cost of premium-based coverage
for even the average person. (Some proposals would offer the
option of buying a competing public plan, under the theory
that the public program would be more efficient and effective. The flaw here is that the public plan would attract those
who are unable to afford private coverage or who are paying
Triangle Free Press, August 2007
high premiums or have no insurance because of pre-existing
conditions. Placing these high-cost individuals in a separate
government pool would make it unaffordable for most other
people. This “death spiral” would cause the public plan to fail.)
The main impetus for renewed interest in health care
reform has been the rapid rise in costs over the last few years.
Yet, while most of these proposals give lip service to the need
to control costs, none actually addresses the problem in a
serious way. (The introduction of health information technology and “disease management”, which some of them urge,
are mere placebos; they may make politicians feel better, but
studies have shown they will do little to reduce costs and may
actually increase them.)
Everyone acknowledges that coverage for low-income
individuals must be subsidized. But what about the averageincome individual and family? If they must now be subsidized as well, we might as well throw in the towel and recognize that a more efficient, more equitable financing system
has to be adopted if it has any chance of providing coverage
while being affordable to the society. An individual mandate
to purchase private insurance cannot provide good coverage
while remaining affordable, while employer-provided coverage also can no longer be sustained as the premium costs to
the employer become increasingly unaffordable.
The private insurance industry spends about 20 percent of
its revenue on administration, marketing, and profits. Further,
this industry imposes on physicians and hospitals an administrative burden in billing and insurance-related functions that
consumes another 12 percent of insurance premiums. Thus,
about one-third of private insurance premiums are absorbed in
administrative services that could be drastically reduced if we
were to finance health care through a single non-profit or pub-
lic fund. Indeed, studies have shown that replacing the multiplicity of public and private payers with a single national
health insurance program would eliminate $350 billion in
wasteful expenditures, enough to pay for the care that the
uninsured and the underinsured are not currently receiving.
Such a single payer plan would make possible a set of
mechanisms, including public budgeting and investment planning, that would allow us to address the real sources of cost
increases and allow us to rationalize our health care investments. The drivers of high cost such as administrative waste,
deterioration of our primary care infrastructure, excessive
prices, and use of non-beneficial or detrimental high-tech
services and products could all be addressed within such a
rationalized system.
In sum, we will not be able to control health care costs
until we reform our method of financing health care. We simply have to give up the fantasy that the private insurance
industry can provide us with comprehensive coverage when
this requires premiums that average-income individuals cannot afford. Instead, the U.S. already has a successful program
that covers more than forty million people, gives free choice
of doctors and hospitals, and has only three percent administrative expense. It is Medicare, and an expanded and improved
Medicare for All (Medicare 2.0) program would cover everyone comprehensively within our current expenditures and
eliminate the need for private insurance. This is the direction
we must go.
NURSES, Continued from page 6
they are accomplishing something when in fact they are accomplishing nothing,” DeMoro told the Corporate Crime Reporter.
The proposals put forward by Clinton, Edwards and
Obama are the product of 30 years of retreat and rightward
shifts in official Washington politics.
By contrast, ordinary people are clearly ready for much
stronger measures. According to a CNN poll in May, 64 percent of people said they thought the government should “provide a national health insurance program for all Americans,
even if this would require higher taxes.” A New York Times/CBS
poll in February found that six in ten people were willing to
pay higher taxes so that everyone had insurance.
According to the Public Policy Institute of California, its
survey found that “by a two-to-one margin, most prefer ‘a universal health insurance program in which everyone is covered
under a program like Medicare that is run by the government
and financed by the taxpayers’ nationally to ‘the current health
insurance system in the United States, in which most people
get their health insurance from private employers, but some
people have no insurance.’”
As Rodolfo pointed out, “The public in general in the U.S.
is ready for some kind of universal health care, but it isn’t clear
enough about what that needs to look like.” If a case isn’t
14
Leonard Rodberg is Research Director of the New York Metro
Chapter, and Don McCanne, Senior Policy Fellow, of Physicians for a National Health Program.
Source: commondreams.org, July13, 2007
made for a genuine alternative, she said, it’s easy for people
to be pulled toward one of the more “realistic” proposals.
“My sense is that up until this movie came out, you could
be Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama or John Edwards—or
even Rudolph Giuliani or Mitt Romney—and be out there
talking about supporting universal health care, and the folks
you’re talking to weren’t looking for a distinction in terms of
what that actually meant,” Rodolfo said.
“So my hope now is that any time one of these politicians stands up and advocates for health care reform that
would expand the private health insurance industry, people
are going to stand up and go, wait a second, the health insurance industry is the problem, not the solution.
“I’m hoping that the movie is going to bring a new consciousness about the role of insurance companies, in particular, as the root of the problem, and it will really refocus things
on single-payer.”
The Single-payer legislation sponsored by Reps. John
Conyers and Dennis Kucinich is a stark contrast to the halfmeasures and concessions to industry floated by other politicians.
Known as HR 676, it would create a comprehensive system under which everyone—all U.S. residents, regardless of
immigration status, from cradle to grave—is covered by a
single, government-administered health program. The proposal would forbid “a private health insurer to sell health
insurance coverage that duplicates the benefits provided”
under the government system.
The bill would allow a mix of private and public health
care providers, but all private companies would have to convert to not-for-profit status—though over a too-generous 15year “transition” period.
Estimates of funding for the program are $1.9 trillion a
year—to be raised through the already existing Medicare tax
on employees and employers, an additional payroll tax on
employers (which nevertheless would still pay less per worker
for health care than under the current system), and increased
taxes on the wealthy and big corporations and banks.
Mainstream politicians claim that a single-payer system
is a pipe dream—and that their “universal coverage” proposals
are more “realistic.”
But the problem, as SiCKO makes clear, is built into the
fabric of a privatized system. As The Nation reviewer Christopher Hayes put it, SiCKO shows why “if single-payer is
ever going to come to America, it’s going to be over the
insurance companies’ dead bodies.”
A single-payer system would be only a first step toward
truly rational health care. For example, though the government
system would negotiate a better deal on drug prices, pharmaceutical companies would remain private. And in other countries with national health care, any restrictions in coverage
have served as the means for private insurers to undermine the
state system by “supplementing” it.
But a single-payer system in the U.S. would be a huge
advance. Above all, it would establish in the U.S. the principle
that exists in other industrialized countries—that health care
is a right, guaranteed to everyone. The fundamental priority,
as left-wing British Labour Party leader Tony Benn says in
SiCKO, “is solidarity.”
The health care industry won’t give in without a sustained struggle—one that organizes health care providers as
part of a broader political mobilization to demand change.
It will take more than a movie to win the kind of dramatic change that’s needed to begin fixing the American
health care system. But this movie—along with the efforts of
the activists who greeted viewers outside the theaters with
information on how to get involved—could be the first spark
of a new movement.
Alan Maass is the editor of the Socialist Worker.
Source: counterpunch.org, July 8, 2007
The Reality of Race:
Is the Problem That White People Don’t Know, or Don’t Care?
By Robert Jensen
“Study shows that white people are mean and uncaring”
That would have been my headline for a recent story
from Diverse: Issues in Higher Education, which was reprinted on AlterNet, and reported an Ohio State University study
of white people’s understanding of the black experience
(AlterNet’s headline was “Whites Just Don’t Understand the
Black Experience”). Curiously, the psychologists who conducted the research spun the data in exactly the opposite
direction, and the conflicting interpretations tell us much
about race relations in the United States.
The researchers found that whites more accurately
assessed the burden of discrimination borne by a hypothetical minority group in a fictional country than they did in the
specific case of black people’s experience in the contemporary United States. In the hypothetical, whites estimated that
the minority group members (described in the same terms as
black Americans) deserved $1 million in compensation, but
when presented with the question in the context of black
Americans, the median estimate was $10,000.
That result was not surprising, but I was taken aback by
the conclusion one of the researchers drew:
“Our data suggest that such resistance is not because
White Americans are mean and uncaring, morally bankrupt
or ethically flawed. White Americans suffer from a glaring
ignorance about what it means to live as a Black American.”
I think the data—along with all my experience both as a
white person and someone who writes about white supremacy
—suggests exactly the opposite:
White Americans are mean and uncaring, morally bankrupt and ethically flawed, because white supremacy has taken
a huge toll on white people’s capacity to be fully human.
My reasoning is simple: Given all the data and stories
available to us about the reality of racism in the United States,
if at this point white people (myself included) underestimate
the costs of being black it’s either because we have made a
choice not to know, or we know but can’t face the consequences of that knowledge.
To choose not to know about the reality of a situation in
which one is privileged in an unjust system is itself a moral
failure. When a system is structured to benefit people who look
like me, and I choose not to listen to the evidence of how others suffer in that system, I have effectively decided not to act
by deciding not to know.
If I do know these things but am not willing to take mean-
ingful action to undermine that unjust system, then my knowledge doesn’t much matter. Again, I have failed in moral terms.
In either case, white people have incentives to underestimate the costs of white supremacy, to avoid facing our moral
failing. Rather than suggesting whites “suffer from a glaring
ignorance about what it means to live as a Black American,”
it’s more accurate to point out that we whites typically choose
to turn away from the information readily available to us, or
the consequences of the information we do possess.
Much the same argument could be made about men’s
assessment of the cost of being female in a patriarchal culture;
KHALIL BENDIB
or the way in which affluent people view the working class
and poor; or how U.S. citizens see the rest of the world. In each
case, there’s a hierarchical system that allows some to live in
privileged positions while consigning others to subordinate
status. The systems are unjust, and hence the advantages for
the privileged are unjust. There’s no shortage of data and stories
available to those of us in the privileged positions if we want
to struggle to understand the lived experience of those without
those privileges. If we willingly avoid learning about that
experience, or we know about it but fail to organize politically
Continued on the following page
www.bendib.com
15
Triangle Free Press, August 2007
RESOURCE GUIDE
Ongoing Events
Democracy North Carolina: 105 West Main St.,
Carrboro, NC 27510. Phone: 919 967-9942.
www.democracy-nc.org
Listen to FREE SPEECH RADIO NEWS and
DEMOCRACY NOW at 6pm and 6:30pm weeknights on WNCU 90.7 FM
Durham Affordable Housing Coalition: 331 W
Chapel Hill St, Suite 408, Durham 27701. Phone:
919 683-1185. www.dahc.org
Join a Peace Vigil. Fri.s 4:30-5:30 pm, E. Franklin St.
at Elliott Rd. Sat. noon-1 pm, Brightleaf Sq, Durham
Durham Bike Co-op: Every Sunday 1-6pm.
723 N. Mangum. http://www.durhambikecoop.org/
Protests against an alleged CIA front airline for
extraordinary rendition (torture) on second
Saturdays 2-3pm near Smithfield. Carpools from
Durham (call 403-2712) and Chapel Hill (942-2525).
Organizations
Agricultural Resources Center & PESTicide
EDucation Project. 206 New Bern Place, Raleigh,
NC 27601. (919) 833-5333. info@PESTed.org
http://www.ibiblio.org/arc
AIDS Community Residence Assoc Inc: 115
Market St. suite 300, Durham 27701. 919 956-7901.
www.aidscommunityresidenceassociation.org
Alliance Marxist-Leninist (North America): NC
organizer: alliance_trianglenc@hotmail.com.
www.allianceml.com NC info:
durhamspark.blogspot.com
Durham Committee On The Affairs Of Black
People: 321 East Chapel Hill St., Durham 27701.
Phone: 919 530-1100.
Durham Community Land Trustees: 1208 W.
Chapel Hill St., Durham 27701. Phone: 919 4900063. www.delt.org
Durham Food Co-Op: 1101 W Main St., Durham
27701. Phone: 919 490-0929. www.durhamcoop.com
NAMI (National Alliance for the Mentally Ill of
Wake County) Meeting 4th Monday every month,
7pm, Highland United Methodist Church, Raleigh.
Contact Stephanie at 828-1725 (stephuffy@aol.com)
National Farm Worker Ministry: c/o ERUUF
4907 Garrett Rd Durham 27707. Phone: 919 4894485. For info, contact Lori Fernald-khamala.
National Postal Mail Handlers Union: Local 305:
323 E Ch-H St. Durham 27701. Phone: 919 956-9680.
Nature Conservancy: 4705 University Dr Durham
27707. Phone: 919 403-8558.
NC Alliance for Economic Justice: PO Box 28068
Raleigh 27518.
NC Green Party: www.ncgreenparty.org
Durham Peoples Alliance: PO Box 3053 Durham,
NC 27715. Phone: 919-682-7777. Contact: Nicole
Rowan, durhampa@mindspring.com. www.durhampa.org
NC Lambda Youth Network: 115 Market Durham
27701. Phone: 919 683-3194.
Durham San Ramón Sister Communities: 1320
Shepherd Street, Durham 27707. Phone 919 4891656. www.durham-sanramon.org
NCOSH: 1422 Broad St Durham 27705. Phone:
919 286-9249. For info, contact Amy.
Earth First! (Uwharrie). Direct Action
Environmental Group. PO Box 561, Chapel Hill
27514. Contact: bison12@wildmail.com
NC Pride: Durham. Phone: 919 956-9900.
NC-WARN (Waste Awareness & Reduction Network). PO Box 61051 Durham 27715-1051. 919 4165077. ncwarn@ncwarn.org. www.ncwarn.org
El Centro Hispano Inc.: 201 W Main St Durham
27701. Phone: 919 687-4635 www.elcentronc.org
North Carolina Coalition Against Domestic
Violence: 301 W Main. Phone: 919 956-9124. For
info, contact Elizabeth Moore.
Black Radical Congress (BRC): Contact Ajamu or
Rukiya Dillahunt at 919 829-0957.
Empowerment Project: 8218 Farrington Mill Road,
Chapel Hill 27517. Phone: 919 928-0382.
www.empowerment.project.org
North Carolina Coalition Against Sexual Assualt:
174 Mine Lake Ct Raleigh 27615. 919 676-7611.
Black Workers For Justice: PO Box 6774 Raleigh
27611. Phone: 919 829-0957.
Environmental Federation Of NC: 331 W Main St
Durham 27701. Phone: 919 687-4840.
Carolina Justice Policy Center: PO box 309
Durham 27702. Phone: 919 682-1149. www.justicepolicycenter.org
Fight BIG Media: Meets every second Sunday at
Kings in Raleigh. Contact: Adam Pyburn, collectivereform@hotmail.com
Catholic Worker House: Raleigh. Phone: 919 7798766. For info, contact Patrick O’Neill.
FLOC (Farm Labor Organizing Committee):
4357 Highway 117 South, Dudley, NC 28333.
Phone: 919 731-4433.
Center For Community Self Help & Self Help
Credit Union: 301 W Main St Durham 27701.
Phone: 919 956-4400.
Good Work. 115 Market St., Suit 470, Durham, NC
27701. Contact: John Parker, 919/682-8473 x11, or
johnp@goodwork.org. www.goodwork.org
Centro Latino of Orange County: 101 Lloyd St
Carrboro 27510. Phone: 919 932-4652.
Hayti Heritage Center: 804 Old Fayetteville St
Durham 27701. Phone: 919 683-1709.
www.hayti.org
Alliance of AIDS Services Carolina: serving Wake,
Durham and Orange counties. 324 S. Harrington St.,
Raleigh NC 27605. 919 834-2437. www.aas-c.org
CFSA (Carolina Farm Stewardship Assoc): 13
Hillsborough St Pittsboro 27312. 919 542-2402.
www.carolinafarmstewards.org
Institute For Southern Studies: PO Box 531
Durham 27702. Phone: 919 419-8311. Contact:
info@i4south.org. wwwsouthernstudies.org
Chiapas Education Project: 814 N Buchanan Ave
Apt B Durham 27701. Phone: 919 286-0028.
Contact Ken Kresse (mayanworlds@yahoo.com).
Internationalist Books: 405 W Franklin St Chapel
Hill 27516. Phone: 919 942-1740. www.internationalistbooks.org
CITCA (Carolina Interfaith Taskforce on Central
America), Chapel Hill. Phone: 919 942-1694.
Jobs With Justice: Contact Theresa El-Amin, 919682-9575.
Citizens for Health Care Freedom: P.O. Box 12893,
Raleigh NC 27605. CHF@citizensforhealthcarefreedom.org; www.citizensforhealthcarefreedom.org
Lesbian Health Resource Center: 138 E Chapel
Hill St Suite C11 Durham 27701. 919 956-9901.
Clean Water for NC: 2009 Chapel Hill Rd.,
Durham NC 27707. Phone: 919-401-9600. E-mail:
hope@cwfnc.org
Common Sense Foundation: Box 10808 Raleigh
27605. Phone: 919 821-9270. www.common-sense.org
Libertarian Party of NC: www.lpnc.org
NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People): 315 E Chapel Hill St
Suite 206 Durham 27701. Phone: 919 682-4930.
Continued from the previous page
to change those systems, then we are responsible for the systems’ continued existence.
So, is it too harsh to say that we white folks are mean?
Uncaring? Morally bankrupt? Ethically flawed? What about
men, the affluent, and U.S citizens?
My point is not to preach from on high. I happen to be a
member of all four of those privileged groups: white and male,
affluent relative to the vast majority of the world, and a U.S.
citizen in a world dominated (for now) by a hyper-militarized
United States. Because I have a job as a teacher that allows
me to spend a lot of time acquiring information, I know a fair
amount about the reality of all four of those systems of
power: white supremacy, patriarchy, predatory corporate capitalism, and imperialism. As a result of that study and the
privileges of my job, I spend a fair amount of time writing,
speaking, and organizing as part of movements trying to
undermine these systems.
But this doesn’t leave me feeling particularly upbeat.
The more I study and organize, the more I realize that the sys-
North Carolina Citizens for Safe Food: Chapel
Hill/Carrboro/Pittsboro. Contact Mark Huebner, 919
233-7268. mail@IntelligentSoftwareSystems,com
www.topica.com/lists/NC_Citizens_for_Safe_Food
North Carolina Committee to Defend Health
Care. Contact Carol Kirschenbaum, 919-402-0133
or e-mail www.ncdefendhealthcare.org
Pennies for Change Thrift Store. Benefits Durham
Crisis Response Center. 1826 Chapel Hill Road,
Durham, NC 27707. Phone: 919/489-2681
RAFI (Rural Advancement Foundation
International): 274 Pittsboro Elementary School
Road Pittsboro 27312.
Phone: 919 542-1396.
Recycling For A Better Future:
Philco Services PO Box 15908 Durham 27704.
Phone: 919 419-9996. www.philcoservices.com
SARN (Southern Anti-Racist Network): PO Box
52731, Durham, 27717, phone 682-9575. fax 6804358, pssarn@aol.com
SEEDS (Community Garden):
807 W Chapel Hill St Durham 27701.
Phone: 919 683-1197. Contact seedsnc@mindspring.com. www.seedsnc.org
Sierra Club: 112 S. Blount St Raleigh 27601-1444.
919 833-8467. Contact seedsnc@mindspring.com
Socialist Party of NC: www.ncsocialist.org
Southerners For Economic Justice: 2009 Chapel
Hill Rd Durham 27707. Phone: 919 401-5907.
Southerners On New Ground (SONG): 327 W
Main St. Durham 27701. Phone 919 667-1362.
Student Action W/Farmworkers: 1317 W
Pettigrew St Durham. Phone: 919 660-3652.
Contact Melinda. http://cds.aas.duke.edu/saf/
Student Rural Health Coalition: Durham. Phone:
919 286-1129.
SURGE, Students United for a Responsible
Global Environment: www.surgenetwork.org
919-960-6886. surgenc@yahoo.com
Triangle Greens: Durham, Raleigh, Chapel Hill
Green Party local. www.trianglegreens.us
North Carolina Community Shares: 331 W Main
St, Suite 209, Durham. Phone: 919- 687-7653.
www.ncshares.org
Triangle Friends Of UFW: Phone: 919 489-2659.
Northeast Creek Stream Watch: in southern
Durham. Contact michael_pollock@yahoo.com or
919-544-7397. State web site: www.ncwater.org
West End Community Center: 705 Kent St
Durham 27701. Phone: 919 401-3912.
Orange Community Housing and Land Trust:
104-C Jones Ferry Rd Carrboro. 27510. Phone: 919
967-1545. www.ochlt.org
Orange County Peace Coalition: 9 groups meet 6
times/year, 2nd Thursday, Chapel Hill Friends Mtng,
531 Raleigh Road. ocpeacecoalition@yahoo.com
PACE-NC (People About Changing Education in
North Carolina): For info, contact Daniela Cook at
919 401-9198.
Peace Action Center: PO Box 10384 Raleigh
27605. Phone: 919 493-3793.
The Peak Oil Society of the Triangle: Meetings
second Weds. of every month. oilawareness.meetup.com/216. Contact: Stephen Hren, themudranch
@yahoo.com
tem of white supremacy is woven more deeply into this society
—and, hence in some sense, into me—than I ever imagined.
That leads me to a little thought experiment, a twist on the
researchers’ study.
Imagine that you could line white people up in front of
a door and get them to really believe that if they walked into
a “race-changing room” they would emerge on the other side
with black skin and an accent associated with blacks from the
South. Then ask whites to set their price—the amount of money
it would take them to agree to enter that room. Imagine there
was an attendant there with stacks of cash, ready to hand
money to the white folks. Just for fun, let’s say the cash award
would be tax free. In that setting, when white people really had
to face the possibility of being black—knowing all they
know about the reality of life in white-supremacist America
—what would the price be?
My guess is that a significant percentage of whites would
not become black for any amount of money. I also am fairly
confident that the median price set by the whites who might
be willing to go into the room would be considerably more
UE 150- Public Service Workers Union: PO Box
61233, Durham 2770. Phone: 919 687-4963, 0537.
Witness For Peace: Phone: 919 856-9468.
The Women's Center: Box 1057, 210 Henderson
St., Chapel Hill, NC 27514. 919.968.4610.
www.womenspace.org
everywoman@womenspace.org
Women’s International League for Peace and
Freedom, 250 100 South Estes drive Chapel Hill, NC
27514, 919 942-2535.
Youth for Social Change: 115 N Market St
Durham 27701. Phone: 919 682-2466.
Youth Voice Radio: 413 E Chapel Hill St Durham
27701.
To have your organization listed in the Resource
Guide, send an e-mail to trianglefreepress@verizon.net
than $1 million.
In that moment of choice, which would get at the truth
about what white people think about being black, the problem wouldn’t be that we whites don’t know enough. We know
plenty. The issue would be whether or not we had transcended the deeply rooted white supremacy of the culture. In that
moment, we would find out about the depth of white people’s
commitment to a color-blind society.
I applaud the researchers for devising a study that tries to
get at these difficult realities. But we must not fall prey to the
temptation to interpret data the way we wish the world were.
In this world, we struggle to transcend 500 years of white
supremacy. The more we struggle, the more we learn about
just how difficult that is.
Robert Jensen is a journalism professor at the University of
Texas at Austin, and the author of, most recently, The Heart
of Whiteness: Confronting Race, Racism and White Privilege
(City Lights Books).
Source: AlterNet, July 14, 2007