Wishes for 2012 : The New Year

Helena Hagglund

There is no Christmas calm in Egypt. The protests and marches continue, as do the attacks and killings by the army. The second wave of revolution continues.

In less than a month, Egypt will celebrate the anniversary of the January 25th uprising. The Supreme Army Council is said to be planning its own festivities that day, something that the revolutionaries cannot accept. Many fear new controversies.

The scenes in Tahrir Square and its neighbouring streets are scary: people getting abused and killed, choking on tear gas, dying from gunshot wounds. The list of martyrs grows longer. It is easy to see pictures of this and wish for an end to the unrest.

And an end to the unrest is precisely what the Muslim Brotherhood and its allies are looking for. They exhort to calm and claim to be looking for a peaceful democratic electoral process. Calm is also what the ruling military council says it wants. In a time of crisis it is easy to play the stability card if you already have institutionalised power and influence.

But for those who dedicated their lives for the revolution, for those who quit their jobs, for those whose friends or sons or daughters have been killed, for those imprisoned - for all of them calm would be devastating. If they surrender their demands for the downfall of the military council in order to gain calm and stability, the struggle will be lost. Even Mubarak offered calm and stability.

"Stability" is something the powerful incessantly call for. Stability means an end to visible violence but nothing when it comes to ending the silent violations of human rights: the starvation of the poor, the murder of the unwanted in police cells, the daily abuse and exploitation. A calm and quiet people who do not collectively organize themselves in protests are a people easy to control. Hence every dictator this year has pointed out the stability and the calm that he can provide as an opposite to the rowdiness of the revolutionaries. Calm and stability is good for business and rich and powerful nations needs calm to plan and guarantee business deals.

But stability is devastating. If this was the goal, no revolutions would have ever occurred, there would be no real political change. Chaos, unrest and instability is necessary in creating a new future. A subdued people know to expect the onward grind of oppression. But a people ruling themselves do not have a clue what the future will bring, the only thing they know is that they are taking power from the powerful.

That is why the revolutionaries of Egypt are continuing to fight. They know that a revolution is more than overthrowing a dictator. They know that it will probably take years of uncertainty and unrest to ensure that their demands of freedom, justice, social equality and bread are met. The Left in Europe needs to follow their lead and listen to their demands, and not fall for media narratives of "successful elections" or "a gradual transition to a new Egypt".

So this is why I hope for a 2012 that follows on from what the Arab Spring started. I hope for a boiling, unstable 2012 that continues to change the world.

Helena Hagglund is a freelance journalist based in Cairo and Stockholm. The piece was first published in Swedish on www.seglorasmedja.se 

Beyond Fukishima

 By Danny Schechter

 

What will it take for our world to recognize the dangers that nuclear scientists and even Albert Einstein were warning about at the “dawn” of the nuclear age?

 Amy Goodman reminds us of the prophetic statement by Australian journalist Wilfred Burchett who tried to find words to describe the horror he was seeing in Hiroshima in 1945 after the bomb fell.

  “It looks as if a monster steamroller had passed over it and squashed it out of existence. I write these facts ... as a warning to the world.”

 The world heard his warning, but seems to have ignored it. In fact, what followed has been decades of nuclear proliferation, the spread of nuclear power plants and the escalation of the arms race with new higher tech weaponry.

 As Hiroshima becomes yesterday’s distant memory and Fukishima the current threat, the full extent of the casualties and body count are not yet in, partly because the Japanese government and the power companies don’t want to alarm the public.

 Years earlier, a similar cover-up was in effect at Thee Mile Island complex in Pennsylvania where reports of the damage people suffered from a serious accident was minimized, never examined in depth by some of the very same media outlets who are today criticizing Japan for a lack of transparency.

On August, 6, 2008, the anniversary of the dropping of the first nuclear bomb, Alternet.org reported that the government and media were complicit in minimizing public awareness of the extensive suffering that did take place:

 “But the word never crossed the conceptual chasm between the "mainstream" media and the "alternative." Despite a federal class action lawsuit filed by 2400 Pennsylvania families claiming damages from the accident, despite at least $15 million quietly paid to parents children with birth defects, despite three decades of official admissions that nobody knows how much radiation escaped from TMI, where it went or who it affected, not a mention of the fact that people might have been killed there made its way into a corporate report”

 Was this just accidental or is there a deeper pattern of denial? The great expert on psycho history, Robert J. Lifton, wrote a book, Hiroshima In America, with journalist Greg Mitchell about the aftermath of Hiroshima in America exploring what they call  “50 years of denial.”

 One reviewer explained, “The authors examine what they perceive to be a conspiracy by the government to mislead and suppress information about the actual bombing, Truman's decision to drop the bomb, and the birth and mismanagement of the beginning of the nuclear age. The authors claim that Americans then, and now, are haunted by the devastating psychological effects of the bomb.”

Lifton and Mitchell are evidence-based writers, not conspiratologists, but they could find no other explanation for how such a seminal event could have been distorted and misrepresented for a half century.

 Nuclear power and nuclear weapons have been sold to the public relentlessly, in the first instance as necessary, and the second, as safe. Rory O’ Connor and Richard Bell coined the term “Nuke Speak” to describe the Orwellian methods deployed by the nuclear industry’s PR offensive in a book length analysis of a well funded campaign that continues to this day using euphemistic language to mask its real agenda.

And today, as the world watches the dreadful and even Darwinian struggle for survival by the earthquake and tsunami victims in Japan, as information about the extent of the nuclear danger trickles out, President Obama has reaffirmed his commitment to build new nuclear plants.

Others stress more parochial concerns.  The TV Production community fears a shortage in Japanese made magnetic and recording tape. Consumers are being told that they may face a delay in ordering new iPads so get your orders in now. And, the Israeli new service YNET says people there worry about a sushi shortage.

 Meanwhile, in Germany, more than 50,000 activists took to the streets in protest, but, so far, there has been no organized outcry here in the U.S. At the Left Forum in New York, the issue was barely addressed in the opening plenary.

 On the right, flamboyant talking head/provocateur Ann Coulter defended the imagined health benefits of a release of radiation to counter what she calls the alarmism of the environmentalists. She calls it a “cancer vaccine.”

 In a talk during a recent visit to Iran, which insists it is not making nuclear weapons, I raised questions about what their government said they want to do: expand their nuclear power plants. When I questioned the wisdom of  that approach, I was jeered because they felt I was challenging their “right” to have what other countries have, their right to “progress.” The thought that the plants could be dangerous was dismissed,

 What they don’t seem to know and what millions in Japan are finding out is this technology—with spent rods that are never “spent” and the nuclear waste that will outlive us all-- is inherently unsafe.  Jonathan Schell makes this point well in a recent essay in the Nation:

 “The chain of events at the reactors now running out of control provides a case history of the underlying mismatch between human nature and the force we imagine we can control. Nuclear power is a complex, high technology. But the things that endemically malfunction are of a humble kind.

 The art of nuclear power is to boil water with the incredible heat generated by a nuclear chain reaction. But such temperatures necessitate continuous cooling. Cooling requires pumps. Pumps require conventional power. These are the things that habitually go wrong—and have gone wrong in Japan. A backup generator shuts down. A battery runs out. The pump grinds to a halt. You might suppose that it is easy to pump water into a big container, and that is usually true, but the best-laid plans go awry from time to time. Sometimes the problem is a tsunami, and sometimes it is an operator asleep at the switch.”

As the “incident” records of our own Nuclear Regulatory Agency make clear, these are not just Japanese problems.  The Christian Science Minitor reports, “The Nuclear Regulatory Commission failed to resolve known safety problems, leading to 14 'near-misses' in US nuclear power plants in 2009 and 2010, according to a new report from a nuclear watchdog group.”

 We don’t even know the full of the extent of the accidents, unintentional releases of radiation and other problems in this country much less in others with fewer rules and less oversight. No one expected Chenobyl to explode, claiming so many lives; no one knows where the next disaster will occur.

 Bernie Sanders is calling for a full investigation of nuclear safety here. Ralph Nader writes, “"The unfolding multiple nuclear reactor catastrophe in Japan is prompting overdue attention to the 104 nuclear plants in the United States - many of them aging, many of them near earthquake faults, some on the west coast exposed to potential tsunamis."

 The global nuclear roulette game goes on. Even moderate and restrained criticisms are dismissed until there is an “event” that cannot be denied. Nuclear energy supporters promise that  “Gen 4,” the next generation of reactors, will be much safer. 

 Problem solved?  Not everyone thinks so. The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists carries an assessment by Hugh Gusterson on “The Lessons of Fukishima.”

 “To this anthropologist, then, the lesson of Fukushima is not that we now know what we need to know to design the perfectly safe reactor, but that the perfectly safe reactor is always just around the corner. It is technoscientific hubris to think otherwise.

 This leaves us with a choice between walking back from a technology that we decide is too dangerous or normalizing the risks of nuclear energy and accepting that an occasional Fukushima is the price we have to pay for a world with less carbon dioxide. It is wishful thinking to believe there is a third choice of nuclear energy without nuclear accidents.”

 We are still debating if nuclear power is worth the risk as irradiated clouds float over Los Angeles and there is a panicked run in the public to buy iodine pills.  The industry’s marketing machine is in crisis response mode and hasn’t missed a beat, while many of us look on with a sense of impotence as we are told, once again, what’s in our best interest.

 (News Dissector Danny Schechter began covering nuclear power plant controversies in the early 1970’s. He blogs for Mediachannel.org. Comments to dissector@mediachannel.org)

It's a Danger Signal

This Year, Contractor Deaths Exceed Military Ones in Iraq and Afghanistan

Thursday 23 September 2010

by: T. Christian Miller  

Eyrnis security personnel, contracted to provide security for the US Army Corps of Engineers in Iraq, pose at the Baghdad parade field. (Photo: jamesdale10 / WikiMedia)

Labor Department figures show that more than 44,000 contractors have reported injuries since 2001, compared to about 40,000 U.S. troops. The figures are not entirely comparable, since contractor injuries include minor workplace injuries.

More private contractors than soldiers were killed in Iraq and Afghanistan in recent months, the first time in history that corporate casualties have outweighed military losses on America’s battlefields.

More than 250 civilians working under U.S. contracts died in the war zones between January and June 2010, according to a ProPublica analysis of the most recent data available from the U.S. Department of Labor, which tracks contractor deaths. In the same period, 235 soldiers died, according to Pentagon figures.

This milestone in the privatization of modern U.S. warfare reflects both the drawdown in military forces in Iraq and the central role of contractors in providing logistics support to local armies and police forces, contracting and military experts said.

Steven Schooner, a professor of government contracting at George Washington University Law School, said that the contractor deaths show how the risks of war have increasingly been absorbed by the private sector. Private contractors in Iraq and Afghanistan provide fuel, food and protective services to U.S. outposts — jobs once performed by soldiers.

“It’s extremely likely that a generation ago, each one of these contractors deaths would have been a military death,” Schooner said. “As troop deaths have fallen, contractor deaths have risen. It's not a pretty picture.”

Schooner, who conducted a recent study of contractor fatalities published in Service Contractor (PDF), an industry newsletter, said contractors now make up more than 25 percent of total deaths in Iraq and Afghanistan — a proportion that has grown steadily throughout the conflicts. Official figures show that 5,531 troops and 2,008 civilian contract workers have died in Iraq and Afghanistan between the beginning of hostilities in 2001 and June 2010.

Many working under U.S. contracts are local civilians, often working as translators for troops, or are hired from third world countries to do basic labor, such as cleaning kitchens and toilets.

Previous ProPublica stories have noted that companies employing such workers often fail to report their deaths and injuries to the Labor Department, as required by law. Government figures likely understate the total number civilian contractor deaths.

The rising fatalities have received little public attention, concealing the full human cost of the war, Schooner said. When President Obama spoke of troop deaths in Afghanistan earlier this month, he made no mention of fatalities among the private workforce that feeds and fuels U.S. forces.

“I'm not accusing either the Bush or the Obama administration of intentionally deceiving the public,” Schooner said. “But when a president applauds a reduction in military deaths but fails to acknowledge the contractor personnel now dying in their place, someone isn't telling the whole story.”

The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are the most privatized in American military history. Today, there are 150,000 troops in Afghanistan and Iraq. As of March 2010, there were more than 200,000 private contractors, though that number is believed to have declined with the drawdown of U.S. forces.

Defense Secretary Robert Gates announced a plan last month to sharply reduce the number of contractors, saying the Pentagon has become overly dependent on private workers to carry out jobs once done by soldiers.

A recent Congressional Research Service report (PDF) found that the heavy use of contractors had exposed troops to supply shortfalls, wasted taxpayer money, and stirred anger among locals. In several high-profile incidents, heavily armed private security contractors have killed unarmed Iraqi and Afghan civilians.

“Some analysts believe that poor contract management has also played a role in abuses and crimes committed by certain contractors against local nationals, which may have undermined U.S. counterinsurgency efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan,” the report found.

Marcie Hascall Clark, an advocate for contract workers, said that contractor deaths and injuries reflected contractors’ importance in fighting the wars.

Labor Department figures show that more than 44,000 contractors have reported injuries since 2001, compared to about 40,000 U.S. troops. The figures are not entirely comparable, since contractor injuries include minor workplace injuries.

“I don’t think most contractors expect to be treated as nobly as our soldiers, but they don’t expect to be forgotten, either,” said Hascall Clark, who runs a group called American Contractors in Iraq and Afghanistan. “I think there should definitely be some recognition of what they do.”

Monsanto :The Principal Enemy of Peasant Sustainable Agriculture and Food Sovereignty for People.

By Beverly Bell
A new earthquake" is what peasant farmer leader Chavannes Jean-Baptiste of the Peasant Movement of Papay (MPP) called the news that Monsanto will be donating 60,000 seed sacks (475 tons) of hybrid corn seeds and vegetable seeds, some of them treated with highly toxic pesticides. The MPP has committed to burning Monsanto's seeds, and has called for a march to protest the corporation's presence in Haiti on June 4, for World Environment Day.

In an open letter sent May 14, Chavannes Jean-Baptiste, the executive director of MPP and the spokesperson for the National Peasant Movement of the Congress of Papay (MPNKP), called the entry of Monsanto seeds into Haiti "a very strong attack on small agriculture, on farmers, on biodiversity, on Creole seeds ... and on what is left our environment in Haiti."(1) Haitian social movements have been vocal in their opposition to agribusiness imports of seeds and food, which undermines local production with local seed stocks. They have expressed special concern about the import of genetically modified organisms (GMOs).

For now, without a law regulating the use of GMOs in Haiti, the Ministry of Agriculture rejected Monsanto's offer of Roundup Ready GMOs seeds. In an email exchange, a Monsanto representative assured the Ministry of Agriculture that the seeds being donated are not GMOs.

Elizabeth Vancil, Monsanto's director of development initiatives, called the news that the Haitian Ministry of Agriculture approved the donation "a fabulous Easter gift" in an April email.(2) Monsanto is known for aggressively pushing seeds, especially GMOs seeds, in both the global North and South, including through highly restrictive technology agreements with farmers who are not always made fully aware of what they are signing. According to interviews by this writer with representatives of Mexican small farmer organizations, they then find themselves forced to buy Monsanto seeds each year, under conditions they find onerous and at costs they sometimes cannot afford.

The hybrid corn seeds Monsanto has donated to Haiti are treated with the fungicide Maxim XO, and the calypso tomato seeds are treated with thiram.(3) Thiram belongs to a highly toxic class of chemicals called ethylene bisdithiocarbamates (EBDCs). Results of tests of EBDCs on mice and rats caused concern to the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), which then ordered a special review. The EPA determined that EBDC-treated plants are so dangerous to agricultural workers that they must wear special protective clothing when handling them. Pesticides containing thiram must contain a special warning label, the EPA ruled. The EPA also barred marketing of the chemicals for many home garden products, because it assumes that most gardeners do not have adequately protective clothing.(4) Monsanto's passing mention of thiram to Ministry of Agriculture officials in an email contained no explanation of the dangers, nor any offer of special clothing or training for those who will be farming with the toxic seeds.

Haitian social movements' concern is not just about the dangers of the chemicals and the possibility of future GMOs imports. They claim that the future of Haiti depends on local production with local food for local consumption, in what is called food sovereignty. Monsanto's arrival in Haiti, they say, is a further threat to this.

"People in the US need to help us produce, not give us food and seeds. They're ruining our chance to support ourselves," said farmer Jonas Deronzil of a peasant cooperative in the rural region of Verrettes.(5)

Monsanto's history has long drawn ire from environmentalists, health advocates and small farmers, going back to its production of Agent Orange during the Vietnam war. Exposure to Agent Orange has caused cancer in an untold number of US veterans, and the Vietnamese government claims that 400,000 Vietnamese people were killed or disabled by Agent Orange, and 500,000 children were born with birth defects as a result of their exposure.(6)

Monsanto's former motto, "Without chemicals, life itself would be impossible," has been replaced by "Imagine." Its web site home page claims it "help[s] farmers around the world produce more while conserving more. We help farmers grow yield sustainably so they can be successful, produce healthier foods ... while also reducing agriculture's impact on our environment."(7) The corporation's record does not support the claims.

Together with Syngenta, Dupont and Bayer, Monsanto controls more than half of the world's seeds.(8) The company holds almost 650 seed patents, most of them for cotton, corn and soy, and almost 30 percent of the share of all biotech research and development. Monsanto came to own such a vast supply by buying major seed companies to stifle competition, patenting genetic modifications to plant varieties and suing small farmers. Monsanto is also one of the leading manufacturers of GMOs.

As of 2007, Monsanto had filed 112 lawsuits against US farmers for alleged technology contract violations of GMOs patents, involving 372 farmers and 49 small agricultural businesses in 27 different states. From these, Monsanto has won more than $21.5 million in judgments. The multinational appears to investigate 500 farmers a year, in estimates based on Monsanto's own documents and media reports.(9)

"Farmers have been sued after their field was contaminated by pollen or seed from someone else's genetically engineered crop [or] when genetically engineered seed from a previous year's crop has sprouted, or 'volunteered,' in fields planted with non-genetically engineered varieties the following year," said Andrew Kimbrell and Joseph Mendelson of the Center for Food Safety.(10)

In Colombia, Monsanto has received upwards of $25 million from the US government for providing Roundup Ultra in the antidrug fumigation efforts of Plan Colombia. Roundup Ultra is a highly concentrated version of Monsanto's glyphosate herbicide, with additional ingredients to increase its lethality. Colombian communities and human rights organizations have charged that the herbicide has destroyed food crops, water sources and protected areas, and has led to increased incidents of birth defects and cancers.

Vía Campesina, the world's largest confederation of farmers with member organizations in more than 60 countries, has called Monsanto one of the "principal enemies of peasant sustainable agriculture and food sovereignty for all peoples."(11) They claim that as Monsanto and other multinationals control an ever larger share of land and agriculture, they force small farmers out of their land and jobs. They also claim that the agribusiness giants contribute to climate change and other environmental disasters, an outgrowth of industrial agriculture.(12)

The Vía Campesina coalition launched a global campaign against Monsanto last October 16, on International World Food Day, with protests, land occupations and hunger strikes in more than 20 countries. They carried out a second global day of action against Monsanto on April 17 of this year, in honor of Earth Day.

Nongovernmental organizations in the US are challenging Monsanto's practices, too. The Organic Consumers Association has spearheaded the campaign "Millions Against Monsanto," calling on the company to stop intimidating small family farmers, stop marketing untested and unlabeled genetically engineered foods to consumers and stop using billions of dollars of US taypayers' money to subsidize GMOs crops.(13)

The Center for Food Safety has led a four-year legal challenge to Monsanto that has just made it to the US Supreme Court. After successful litigation against Monsanto and the US Department of Agriculture for illegal promotion of Roundup Ready Alfalfa, the court heard the Center for Food Safety's case on April 27. A decision on this first-ever Supreme Court case about GMOs is now pending.(14)

"Fighting hybrid and GMO seeds is critical to save our diversity and our agriculture," Jean-Baptiste said in an interview in February. "We have the potential to make our lands produce enough to feed the whole population and even to export certain products. The policy we need for this to happen is food sovereignty, where the county has a right to define it own agricultural policies, to grow first for the family and then for local market, to grow healthy food in a way which respects the environment and Mother Earth."

Many thanks to Moira Birss for her assistance with research and writing.

1. Group email from Chavannes Jean-Baptiste, May 14, 2010.
2. Email from Elizabeth Vancil to Emmanuel Prophete, director of seeds at the Haitian Ministry of Agriculture, and others; released by the Haitian Ministry of Agriculture, date unavailable.
3. Ibid.
4. Extension Toxicology Network, Pesticide Information Project of the Cooperative Extension Offices of Cornell University, Michigan State University, Oregon State University and University of California at Davis.
5. Jonas Deronzil's comments are from an interview in April. He was not specifically discussing Monsanto.
6. "MSNBC," January 23, 2004. "Study Finds Link Between Agent Orange, Cancer." The Globe and Mail, June 12, 2008. "Last Ghost of the Vietnam War."
7. www.monsanto.com
8. La Vía Campesina, "La Vía Campesina carries out Global Day of Action against Monsanto," October 16, 2009.
9. Center for Food Safety, "Monsanto vs. US Farmers," November 2007.
10. Andrew Kimbrell and Joseph Mendelson, Center for Food Safety, "Monsanto vs. US Farmers," 2005.
11. La Vía Campesina, October 16, 2009, Op. Cit.
12. La Vía Campesina, "La Vía Campesina Call to Action 17 April 2010 - Join the International Day of Peasant Struggle," February 23, 2010.
13. Organic Consumers Association, "Taxpayers Forced to Fund Monsanto's Poisoning of Third World," Finland, Minnesota.
14. Center for Food Security, "Update: CFS Fighting Monsanto in the Supreme Court," May 11, 2010.

Their Final Letters

Farmers' Suicides

By P. SAINATH
Seeking authenticity for his letter to the Prime Minister and the President, Ramachandra Raut composed it with care on Rs.100 non-judicial stamp paper. Then he added a few more addressees, including his village sarpanch and the police, in the hope that it got home someplace. Then he killed himself. A mere digit in the nearly 250 farm suicides that hit Vidarbha in four months; but a villager desperate to be heard on the reasons for his action: “The two successive years of crop failure is the reason.” Yet, “bank employees came twice to my home to recover my loans”. (Despite a government order to go slow on recovery in a region hit by crisis, crop failure and more recently, drought).
Raut's suicide being the third in a month in Dhotragoan in Washim district, the village wants to see it spreads no further. “We try and meet every evening for an hour, all of us, anyone who will come,” says Nandkishore Shankar Raut from Dhotragaon. “The idea is to keep people's morale up.” So Dhotragaon counsels itself. Ramachandra Raut's letter was also an appeal not to be misunderstood. “Don't trouble anyone in my home,” it tells the police. “I am fully responsible for my action.” The stamp paper suicide note carries the seal of the deputy treasury officer of Mangrulpir tehsil dated March 29, and that of the stamp vendor who issued it to Raut on April 7. Raut filled it in and took his life the same day.
The family owes the banks Rs.1.5 lakh ($3,285). His village pooled money to observe his 13th day ritual, sparing Raut's indebted family further expense.
Unique
Vidarbha's farm suicides have been unique in one respect. Some of those taking their lives have addressed suicide notes to the Prime Minister, the Chief Minister or the Finance Minister. In August 2006 Rameshwar Lonkar of Wardha complained, in his note, to Dr. Manmohan Singh, just a month after the Prime Minister went to his region. “After the Prime Minister's visit and reports of a fresh crop loan, I thought I could live again,” Lonkar wrote. But he found himself rebuffed at every stage while seeking that loan. Sahebrao Adhao's last testament in Amravati the same year painted a picture of usury, debt and land grab.
In November 2006, cotton grower Rameshwar Kuchankar addressed the then Maharashtra Chief Minister Vilasrao Deshmukh in his note. He scribbled it down moments before taking his life in Yavatmal. “We are fed up with the delay in procurement and crashing prices ... Mr. Chief Minister, give us the price.” He also warned State Home Minister R.R. Patil that if the price did not improve at once, suicides would soar. They did.
“These notes are the last cry of despair of people trying to tell their government the reasons for agrarian distress,” says Kishor Tiwari. Mr. Tiwari heads the Vidarbha Jan Andolan Samiti, a body fighting for farmers' rights. “We set up expert committees to tell us why farmers commit suicide when they are themselves telling us the reasons with such clarity in their suicide notes.” The notes often speak of debt, soaring cultivation costs, high cost of living and volatile prices. Some of them trash regressive policies and a credit crunch that have destroyed thousands of farmers here in the past decade. Crop failure and drought coming atop these, ruin fragile lives.
Two years of crop failure in a single crop district can mean 34 months with no income. Vidarbha gained little from the 2008 Farm Loan Waiver which addressed only bank debt. The waiver excluded those farmers holding more than five acres, and made no distinction between dry and irrigated holdings. In Western Vidarbha, farmers take more loans from moneylenders than from banks. And, the average land holding is around seven acres in this mostly unirrigated region.
Of the five states that account for two-thirds of all of India's farm suicides, Maharashtra is by far the worst. According to the National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB) the State logged 41,404 farm suicides between 1997 and 2008. That is, more than a fifth of the national total of nearly 200,000 in that same period. Of those 12 years, NCRB data show, the years 2006-08 have been the very worst. Within the State, Vidarbha has been the focal point of the tragedy.

Back to square one
However, the situation here seems like a throwback to that of 2005-06, before Prime Minister Manmohan Singh's visit. Hit by a spate of suicides at the time, the State government spoke in many voices. In mid-2005, it gave out a figure of just 141 distress suicides across the whole State since 2001. Challenged in court, it revised this to 524. When the National Commission of Farmers team led by Dr. M.S. Swaminathan visited later the same year, it conceded there had been over 300 in the single district of Yavatmal. The final figure for the whole State that year, put out by the NCRB, was actually 3,926 suicides.
“For a while,” says Mr. Tiwari of the VJAS, “the State revealed real numbers on the website of the Vasantrao Naik Farmers' Self-Reliance Mission. That was because of Dr. Singh's visit and a lashing from the courts.” In fact, those figures were far higher than anything even the VJAS had recorded. This year, however, the website's columns for 2010 are so far blank. The Agriculture Ministry's reply to a question in the Rajya Sabha, based on State claims, says just 23 farm suicides occurred between January and April 8.
This, even as other arms of government (and the Leader of the Opposition) put out figures ten times as high. The Vasantrao Naik Mission has itself given out signed data confirming there were 62 such deaths in January alone. (Though it has not put this up on its website.)
The numbers are routinely lowered by tagging hundreds of suicides as “non-genuine”. That is, “ineligible for compensation”. Aimed at curbing the amounts the State has to fork out to bereaved families, this move has caused much damage. “We are deluding ourselves,” says a senior official. “No wonder Ramachandra Raut felt the need to address his letter on stamp paper to the Prime Minister and President as well. He knew nothing would be taken seriously here in Maharashtra.”

(P. Sainath is the rural affairs editor of The Hindu, where this piece appears, and is the author of Everybody Loves a Good Drought: Stories From India's Poorest Districts. He can be reached at: psainath@vsnl.com)

Resist and Speak out Loudly

Biggest Land Grab After Columbus

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By Devinder Sharma

I think the eulogisation of Tata's has gone too far. Behind all the glamour, sobriety and humanitariasm that we read and hear about Tata's, there is a dark hidden side which is kept under wraps. It is time we look at the destructive role Tata's have played over the years in uprooting thousands of poor families, and the resulting destruction of livelihoods and the environment.

To overcome their guilt, and that too aimed at pacifying the liberal voices in the urban centres, I am sure Ratan Tata would be thinking of setting up schools and funding some NGO activities in the tribal lands as part of their Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR).

What a sophisticated way to cover your dark underbelly !

I was quite taken aback today to see a frontpage headline in The Hindustan Times: The biggest land grab after Columbus. As the blurb says: Government report criticises corporate exploitation of tribal lands; tribals turn to new friends: Maoist. And if you remember only a few days back, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh had publicly accepted, and made a promise: "The systemic exploitation of our tribal communities can no longer be tolerated."

Do you think Manmohan Singh will do anything to stop this? You bet, he will simply push for more such projects that will eventually destroy the social fabric of these tribal lands. If you think I am wrong, let us take the land-grab in Bedanji, a remote rural expanse in Bastar in Chhatisgarh, as a test case. The Tata's plan to set up a Rs 19,500 crore steel plant for which ten villages have to be emtied.

Interestingly, a report of the PM-appointed Ministry of Rural Development committee on Land Reforms has succintly said: "This open declared war will go down as the biggest land grab ever, if it plays out as per the script." The Hindustan Times report quotes the just-released government report warning against the corporate takeover in the Bastar hinterland: "The biggest grab of tribal lands after Columbus."

You can read the full news report here:
http://www.hindustantimes.com/The-biggest-land-grab-
after-Columbus/H1-Article3-476125.aspx

I was reading another detailed field report from Pravin Patel, a human rights activist. It tells you how the State government is helping facilitate the process of the massive takeover of tribal lands. It tells you how the official machinery has actually been hand in glove with the industrial houses to ruthlessly exploit the tribals.

This is what he writes: In Chattisgarh the tribal district Batar, District administration has played in the hands of house of Tatas by way of stage managed public hearing bluntly violating the norms and set procedures as laid down in the Notification to grant Environmental Clearances.

By making mockey of the conditions of the Notification where Public Hearing is a mandatory requirement where consultation with the likely affected villagers are held. But to fulfill this mandatory requirements, public hearing was held at the campus of the district collector, which is at a distance of about 30 Kms from the project area. This was done with mischivious motives as it is known to all that the villagers are strongly opposing the setting up of any steel plant in their area.

The entire drama was enacted to show off that the mandatory public hearing is held. This has proved to be nothing less than a puppet show of the district administration where except the most of the tribals who are residents of the villages to be affected, all others were present whom the project proponent hired or managed with the help of District Administration to dance to the tunes of the project proponent house of Tatas.

You may like to read his full report. Please click on:
http://mail.google.com/mail/?hl=en&shva=
1#inbox/124f0af3377e6531

And finally, what does all this translate into. Well, you guessed it right. The tribals have no one else to seek solace and help from, except Maoists. What to talk of help, no one is willing to even listen to them except the Maoist. No wonder, Naxalism is growing.

As Gandhian Himanshu Kumar said the other day in an interview with the Times of India, (Nov 13, 2009) : Salwa Judum saw a 22-fold increase in Maoist numbers. Green Hunt will result in genocide of Adivasis. Those who survive will become Naxalites.
(Read the interview: http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/home/opinion/edit-page/
Green-Hunt-will-result-in-genocide-of-Adivasis/articleshow/5223813.cms)

How true? But do you think anyone cares, least of all Manmohan Singh? Ha, he is more hinged to the GDP than the welfare of the human beings that he represents. With Tata's investing Rs 19,500-crore, which will add to the GDP, and that will be his government's report card.

Living in a Culture of Cruelty : Democracy as Spectacle

by : Henry A. Giroux


Under the Bush administration, a seeping, sometimes galloping, authoritarianism began to reach into every vestige of the culture, giving free rein to those anti-democratic forces in which religious, market, military and political fundamentalism thrived, casting an ominous shadow over the fate of United States democracy. During the Bush-Cheney regime, power became an instrument of retribution and punishment was connected to and fueled by a repressive state. A bullying rhetoric of war, a ruthless consolidation of economic forces, and an all-embracing free-market apparatus and media driven pedagogy of fear supported and sustained a distinct culture of cruelty and inequality in the United States. In pointing to a culture of cruelty, I am not employing a form of left moralism that collapses matters of power and politics into the discourse of character. On the contrary, I think the notion of a culture of cruelty is useful in thinking through the convergence of everyday life and politics, of considering material relations of power - the disciplining of the body as an object of control - on the one hand, and the production of cultural meaning, especially the co-optation of popular culture to sanction official violence, on the other. The culture of cruelty is important for thinking through how life and death now converge in ways that fundamentally transform how we understand and imagine politics in the current historical moment - a moment when the most vital of safety nets, health care reform, is being undermined by right-wing ideologues. What is it about a culture of cruelty that provides the conditions for many Americans to believe that government is the enemy of health care reform and health care reform should be turned over to corporate and market-driven interests, further depriving millions of an essential right?

Increasingly, many individuals and groups now find themselves living in a society that measures the worth of human life in terms of cost-benefit analyzes. The central issue of life and politics is no longer about working to get ahead, but struggling simply to survive. And many groups, who are considered marginal because they are poor, unemployed, people of color, elderly or young, have not just been excluded from "the American dream," but have become utterly redundant and disposable, waste products of a society that not longer considers them of any value. How else to explain the zealousness in which social safety nets have been dismantled, the transition from welfare to workfare (offering little job training programs and no child care), and recent acrimony over health care reform's public option? What accounts for the passage of laws that criminalize the behavior of the 1.2 million homeless in the United States, often defining sleeping, sitting, soliciting, lying down or loitering in public places as a criminal offence rather than a behavior in need of compassionate good will and public assistance? Or, for that matter, the expulsions, suspensions, segregation, class discrimination and racism in the public schools as well as the more severe beatings, broken bones and damaged lives endured by young people in the juvenile justice system? Within these politics, largely fueled by market fundamentalism - one that substitutes the power of the social state with the power of the corporate state and only values wealth, money and consumers - there is a ruthless and hidden dimension of cruelty, one in which the powers of life and death are increasingly determined by punishing apparatuses, such as the criminal justice system for poor people of color and/or market forces that increasingly decide who may live and who may die.

The growing dominance of a right-wing media forged in a pedagogy of hate has become a crucial element providing numerous platforms for a culture of cruelty and is fundamental to how we understand the role of education in a range of sites outside of traditional forms of schooling. This educational apparatus and mode of public pedagogy is central to analyzing not just how power is exercised, rewarded and contested in a growing culture of cruelty, but also how particular identities, desires and needs are mobilized in support of an overt racism, hostility towards immigrants and utter disdain, coupled with the threat of mob violence toward any political figure supportive of the social contract and the welfare state. Citizens are increasingly constructed through a language of contempt for all noncommercial public spheres and a chilling indifference to the plight of others that is increasingly expressed in vicious tirades against big government and health care reform. There is a growing element of scorn on the part of the American public for those human beings caught in the web of misfortune, human suffering, dependency and deprivation. As Barbara Ehrenreich observes, "The pattern is to curtail financing for services that might help the poor while ramping up law enforcement: starve school and public transportation budgets, then make truancy illegal. Shut down public housing, then make it a crime to be homeless. Be sure to harass street vendors when there are few other opportunities for employment. The experience of the poor, and especially poor minorities, comes to resemble that of a rat in a cage scrambling to avoid erratically administered electric shocks."

A right-wing spin machine, influenced by haters like Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, Michael Savage and Ann Coulter, endlessly spews out a toxic rhetoric in which: all Muslims are defined as jihadists; the homeless are not victims of misfortune but lazy; blacks are not terrorized by a racist criminal justice system, but the main architects of a culture of criminality; the epidemic of obesity has nothing to do with corporations, big agriculture and advertisers selling junk food, but rather the result of "big" government giving people food stamps; the public sphere is largely for white people, which is being threatened by immigrants and people of color, and so it goes. Glenn Beck, the alleged voice of the common man, appearing on the "Fox & Friends" morning show, calls President Obama a "racist" and then accuses him of "having a deep-seated hatred for white people or the white culture." Nationally syndicated radio host Rush Limbaugh unapologetically states that James Early Ray, the confessed killer of Martin Luther King Jr., should be given a posthumous Medal of Honor, while his counterpart in right-wing hate, talk radio host Michael Savage, states on his show, "You know, when I see a woman walking around with a burqa, I see a Nazi. That's what I see - how do you like that? - a hateful Nazi who would like to cut your throat and kill your children." He also claims that Obama is "surrounded by terrorists" and is "raping America." This is a variation of a crude theme established by Ann Coulter, who refers to Bill Clinton as a "very good rapist." Even worse, Obama is a "neo-Marxist fascist dictator in the making," who plans to "force children into a paramilitary domestic army." And this is just a small sampling of the kind of hate talk that permeates right-wing media. This could be dismissed as loony right-wing political theater if it were not for the low levels of civic literacy displayed by so many Americans who choose to believe and invest in this type of hate talk. On the contrary, while it may be idiocy, it reveals a powerful set of political, economic and educational forces at work in miseducating the American public while at the same time extending the culture of cruelty. One central task of any viable form of politics is to analyze the culture of cruelty and its overt and covert dimensions of violence, often parading as entertainment.

Underlying the culture of cruelty that reached its apogee during the Bush administration, was the legalization of state violence, such that human suffering was now sanctioned by the law, which no longer served as a summons to justice. But if a legal culture emerged that made violence and human suffering socially acceptable, popular culture rendered such violence pleasurable by commodifying, aestheticizing and spectacularizing it. Rather than being unspoken and unseen, violence in American life had become both visible in its pervasiveness and normalized as a central feature of dominant and popular culture. Americans had grown accustomed to luxuriating in a warm bath of cinematic blood, as young people and adults alike were seduced with commercial and military video games such as "Grand Theft Auto" and "America's Army," the television series "24" and its ongoing Bacchanalian fête of torture, the crude violence on display in World Wrestling Entertainment and Ultimate Fighting Championship, and an endless series of vigilante films such as "The Brave One" (2007) and "Death Sentence" (2007), in which the rule of law is suspended by the viscerally satisfying images of men and women seeking revenge as laudable killing machines - a nod to the permanent state of emergency and war in the United States. Symptomatically, there is the mindless glorification and aestheticization of brutal violence in the most celebrated Hollywood films, including many of Quentin Tarantino's films, especially the recent "Death Proof" (2007), "Kill Bill" 1 & 2 (2003, 2004), and "Inglorious Bastards" (2009). With the release of Tarantino's 2009 bloody war film, in fact, the press reported that Dianne Kruger, the co-star of "Inglorious Bastards," claimed that she "loved being tortured by Brad Pitt [though] she was frustrated she didn't get an opportunity to get frisky with her co-star, but admits being beaten by Pitt was a satisfying experience." This is more than the aestheticization of violence, it is the normalization and glorification of torture itself.

If Hollywood has made gratuitous violence the main staple of its endless parade of blockbuster films, television has tapped into the culture of cruelty in a way that was unimaginable before the attack on the US on September 11. Prime-time television before the attacks had "fewer than four acts of torture" per year, but "now there are more than a hundred." Moreover, the people who torture are no longer the villains, but the heroes of prime-time television. The most celebrated is, of course, Jack Bauer, the tragic-ethical hero of the wildly popular Fox TV thriller "24." Not only is torture the main thread of the plot, often presented "with gusto and no moral compunction," but Bauer is portrayed as a patriot, rather than a depraved monster, who tortures in order to protect American lives and national security. Torture, in this scenario, takes society's ultimate betrayal of human dignity and legitimates the pain and fear it produces as normal, all the while making a "moral sadist" a television celebrity. The show has over 15 million viewers, and its glamorization of torture has proven so successful that it appears to have not only numbed the public's reaction to the horrors of torture, but it is so overwhelmingly influential among the US military that the Pentagon sent Brig. Gen. Patrick Finnegan to California to meet with the producers of the show. "He told them that promoting illegal behavior in the series ... was having a damaging effect on young troops." The pornographic glorification of gratuitous, sadistic violence is also on full display in the popular HBO television series "Dexter," which portrays a serial killer as a sympathetic, even lovable, character. Visual spectacles steeped in degradation and violence permeate the culture and can be found in various reality TV shows, professional wrestling and the infamous Jerry Springer Show. These programs all trade in fantasy, glamorized violence and escapism. And they share similar values. As Chris Hedges points out in his analysis of professional wrestling, they all mirror the worse dimensions of an unchecked and unregulated market society in which "winning is all that matters. Morality is irrelevant.... It is all about personal pain, vendettas, hedonism and fantasies of revenge, while inflicting pain on others. It is the cult of victimhood."

The celebration of hyper-violence, moral sadism and torture travels easily from fiction to real life with the emergence in the past few years of a proliferation of "bum fight" videos on the Internet, "shot by young men and boys who are seen beating the homeless or who pay transients a few dollars to fight each other." The culture of cruelty mimics cinematic violence as the agents of abuse both indulge in actual forms of violence and then further celebrate the barbarity by posting it on the web, mimicking the desire for fame and recognition, while voyeuristically consuming their own violent cultural productions. The National Coalition for the Homeless claims that "On YouTube in July 2009, people have posted 85,900 videos with 'bum' in the title [and] 5,690 videos can be found with the title 'bum fight,' representing ... an increase of 1,460 videos since April 2008." Rather than problematize violence, popular culture increasingly normalizes it, often in ways that border on criminal intent. For instance, a recent issue of Maxim, a popular men's magazine, included "a blurb titled 'Hunt the Homeless' [focusing on] a coming 'hobo convention' in Iowa and says 'Kill one for fun. We're 87 percent sure it's legal.'" In this context, violence is not simply being transformed into an utterly distasteful form of adolescent entertainment or spectacularized to attract readers and boost profits, it becomes a powerful pedagogical force in the culture of cruelty by both aligning itself and becoming complicit with the very real surge of violence against the homeless, often committed by young men and teenage boys looking for a thrill. Spurred on by the ever reassuring presence of violence and dehumanization in the wider culture, these young "thrill offenders" now search out the homeless and "punch, kick, shoot or set afire people living on the streets, frequently killing them, simply for the sport of it, their victims all but invisible to society." All of these elements of popular culture speak stylishly and sadistically to new ways in which to maximize the pleasure of violence, giving it its hip (if fascist) edginess.

Needless to say, neither violent video games and television series nor Hollywood films and the Internet (or for that matter popular culture) cause in any direct sense real world violence and suffering, but they do not leave the real world behind either. That is too simplistic. What they do achieve is the execution of a well-funded and highly seductive public pedagogical enterprise that sexualizes and stylizes representations of violence, investing them with an intense pleasure quotient. I don't believe it is an exaggeration to claim that the violence of screen culture entertains and cleanses young people of the burden of ethical considerations when they, for instance, play video games that enabled them to "casually kill the simulated human beings whose world they control." Hollywood films such as the "Saw" series offer up a form of torture porn in which the spectacle of the violence enhances not merely its attraction, but offers young viewers a space where questions of ethics and responsibility are gleefully suspended, enabling them to evade their complicity in a culture of cruelty. No warnings appear on the labels of these violent videos and films, suggesting that the line between catharsis and desensitization may become blurred, making it more difficult for them to raise questions about what it means "to live in a society that produces, markets, and supports such products." But these hyper-violent cultural products also form part of a corrupt pedagogical assemblage that makes it all the more difficult to recognize the hard realities of power and material violence at work through militarism, a winner-take-all economy marked by punishing inequalities and a national security state that exhibits an utter disregard for human suffering. Even the suffering of children, we must note, as when government officials reduce the lives of babies and young children lost in Iraq and Afghanistan to collateral damage. Tragically, the crime here is much more than symbolic.

The ideology of hardness and cruelty runs through American culture like an electric current, sapping the strength of social relations and individual character, moral compassion and collective action, offering up crimes against humanity that become fodder for video games and spectacularized media infotainment, and constructing a culture of cruelty that promotes a "symbiosis of suffering and spectacle."As Chris Hedges argues,

Sadism is as much a part of popular culture as it is of corporate culture. It dominates pornography, runs ... through reality television and trash-talk programs and is at the core of the compliant, corporate collective. Corporatism is about crushing the capacity for moral choice. And it has its logical fruition in Abu Ghraib, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and our lack of compassion for the homeless, our poor, the mentally ill, the unemployed and the sick.
Bailouts are not going to address the ways in which individual desires, values and identities are endlessly produced in the service of a culture of cruelty and inequality. Power is not merely material, it is also symbolic and is distributed through a society in ways we have never seen before. No longer is education about schooling. It now functions through the educational force of the larger culture in the media, Internet, electronic media and through a wide range of technologies and sites endlessly working to undo democratic values, compassion and any viable notion of justice and its accompanying social relations. What this suggests is a redefinition of both literacy and education. We need, as a society, to educate students and others to be literate in multiple ways, to reclaim the high ground of civic courage, and to be able to name, engage and transform those forms of public pedagogy that produce hate and cruelty as part of the discourse of common sense. Otherwise, democracy will lose the supportive institutions, social relations and culture that make it not only possible but even thinkable.

Enough is Enough: How Many Days Can We Shorten This War?

Aug 22, 2009

By Robert Naiman

(Aug. 20) -- Recently I watched the 2007 Lebanese film "Under the Bombs." The movie tells the story of the U.S.-supported Israeli invasion of Lebanon in the summer of 2006, wrapping the historical events inside a fictional narrative. Watching the movie reminded me of Just Foreign Policy's efforts with Jewish Voice for Peace and others to stop that war.

At the time, it seemed clear that the war could not go on indefinitely; the international community would not allow it. But how long would it be allowed to go on? If we could shorten it by one day, innocent civilians would live and not die. The 34-day conflict resulted in 1,191 deaths, the UN Human Rights Council reported. Using this figure, on average, each day of the war killed 35 more people; each day we shortened it saved 35 lives.

Today Afghanistan is holding the first round of its presidential election. Regardless of the outcome, one thing is clear from the campaign: the majority of Afghans are sick and tired of war. "There is broad agreement the war must end," reports Carlotta Gall in the New York Times. There is broad support in Afghanistan for negotiations with insurgents to end the war. The debate inside Afghanistan is on what process negotiations should follow, and whether the Afghan government is really following through on its stated commitment to negotiations.

Americans, too, have apparently had enough. Fifty-four percent - including three-quarters of Democrats - say they oppose the war in Afghanistan, CNN reported this month. A Washington Post-ABC News poll now says a majority of Americans see the war in Afghanistan as not worth fighting and just a quarter say more U.S. troops should be sent to the country. Majorities of liberals and Democrats solidly oppose the war and are calling for a reduction in troops. Two-thirds of liberals and six in 10 Democrats are against a troop increase. A majority of women say troop levels should be decreased.

But our leaders in Washington, apparently, are not yet sick and tired of war in Afghanistan. For almost a year, Western officials have been conceding that the war will not end without a political solution that involves negotiations with insurgents. But, these officials say, the West isn't ready yet to make a deal. "Reconciliation is important, but not now," one Western diplomat told the New York Times. "It's not going to happen until the insurgency is weaker and the government is stronger."

So, there's going to be a deal with insurgents; that's a foregone conclusion. The question that remains is how many more people will die before that happens - and whether, from the point of view of the interests of the majority of Afghans and the majority of Americans, the deal we can get 5 or 10 years from now is likely to be so much better than the deal we could get in the next year as to justify the deaths that will be the guaranteed result of postponing meaningful negotiations.

An amendment in June requiring the Pentagon to tell Congress what its strategy was for ending the war failed in the House, 138-278. But in an important milepost for future efforts, it was supported by a majority of House Democrats.

In the Senate, we're much further back: a bill calling for an exit strategy from Afghanistan has not even been introduced. But a path to eventually getting out of Afghanistan has to eventually also go through the Senate.

In our ally Britain, which has far fewer troops there, the question of how long their troops will be in Afghanistan is openly discussed. The head of the British Army said Britain will have to keep thousands on troops on the front line in Afghanistan for up to five more years, theTelegraph reported this week. But this question - how long will our troops be there? - is not even being asked in the U.S. Senate.

The Senate is now in recess; but the recess is a time for Senators to hear from their constituents. Now is the time to urge your Senators to demand an exit strategy from Afghanistan.