Just Plain Stupid: Obama Sending Troops To Ebola-Ravaged Africa

Continuing to allow airplane flights into America loaded with people streaming out of Ebola-ravaged Africa must be the dumbest act that Congress, the Center for Disease Control and Barack Obama could possibly perpetrate on the American people.

To send 3,000 of our young men and women over to Ebola-ravaged Africa with some kind of insane idea that we could stop the epidemic, must be the second dumbest idea of Barack Obama and his band of incompetent advisors. Anyone with a room-temperature IQ and an ounce of common sense would take logical action in the face of such a virulent virus.

As a superintendent of a school system, you wouldn’t invite sick students with chicken pox, small pox, mumps, measles and polio into your school. You would mandate they stay home to protect the students and teachers in your school. Why? Infectious diseases guaranteed to jump from student to student!

If I stood at the helm in the White House: I would immediately stop all flights into the United States from Africa. I would not subject one single American to Ebola unnecessarily.

The president’s authorizing a call-up of the reserves or the National Guard to fight a virulent disease like Ebola in Africa with no idea of the outcome—must rank up there with the movie, “Dumb and Dumber.” Instead of saving Africa from itself, those 3,000 troops may well become disease vectors themselves that bring Ebola back to America in greater numbers, or, simply kill a bunch of our country’s finest soldiers.

“Africa’s biggest problem is not drought, disease, or dictators,” Dr. Don Boys. “But drinking and defecation are the biggest problem! This is true of India, Asia, and areas of South America. Eighty per- cent of diseases in developing countries are caused by unsafe water and poor sanitation. Africa, India, and some areas in South America are open cesspools where children play, parents wash clothes and get drinking water, workers irrigate crops, etc. In those areas, fresh water is unknown and open defecation (OD) is common.”

Very few Americans comprehend the gutter-level hygiene that encourages diseases like Ebola, cholera, dysentery, tuberculosis and other bugs that proliferate in third world countries. Africa suffers incredibly contaminated water, food and soil.

“Now for the first time in human history most people live in cities, often in the slums,” said Boys. “More than 70 percent of Africa’s urban population lives in slums! Around one-third of the urban population in developing countries, nearly one billion people, live in slums. There is one toilet for every 500 people in the slums of Nairobi, Kenya. However, the biggest problem is in rural areas where the problem can be more quickly solved but not without difficulty. Nearly 540 million people, more than 60 percent of Africa’s population, currently practice open defecation according to the African Development Bank Group.”

Americans stand no chance of changing African culture to leap into the 21st century standards of sanitation. You might as well ask a mosquito to fly to the moon.

The same stands true for countries like India where 1,000 children die 24/7 of diarrhea and dysentery. Utter misery faces citizens of Pakistan, Nepal and Mexico every day of the year.

The World Health Organization Public Health Director lamented, “What is shocking…is this picture of someone practicing open defecation and in the other hand having a mobile phone.”

I remember hiking in Asia when I saw water buffalo defecating along the trail. Women immediately grabbed the pile of dung in their hands to take it off to a drying rack for fuel. When you see it firsthand, you gag, but then, you get used to it. It’s sickening, but that’s how they operate in the third world. Several billions of people around this planet don’t use a toilet, but do use the land as their latrine.

Is it any wonder that diseases like TB kill 2,000,000 (million) people annually? That Chagas infects 14 million in South America? That AIDES killed 25 million in 30 years in Africa?

So, does it make sense to you that Obama, Congress and the CDC expect to import more and more Ebola patients back into the USA? Are you excited that your kids or you could very well become the next victims? Are you going to stand by to wait for it to happen in your community?

For this obviously incompetent man sitting in the White House to send our soldiers over to a hot zone of Ebola infections must rate with a madman thinking he can walk into an AIDS ward to have sex with all the victims and walk out untouched with the disease.

But in this case, Obama sends our kids over to Ebola hot zones in Africa, not his kids.

Right now, two innocent nurses in Texas face death because of the importation of Mr. Duncan from Liberia who later died. Who allows this kind of insanity?

If nurses can’t fend off the disease in a hospital while wearing haz-mat suits, how in the name of common sense and rational thought will 3,000 soldiers fend off Ebola with M-16’s? Somebody in high places shows criminal stupidity on a scale heretofore unimaginable.

You can see on the CDC website we find this unsettling phrase:
“No FDA-approved vaccine or medicine (e.g., antiviral drug) is available for Ebola.”

As with the Iraq War, few Americans protested the stupidity of invading that country under the lie of “Weapons of Mass Destruction.” As with 9/11, our presidents and Congress failed to stop illegal immigration.

Call your Congressman/woman; governor; senator; newspaper, radio and TV station to scream that you want all flights cancelled coming in from Africa. Scream that you don’t want 3,000 of our kids to go over to Africa to be infected by Ebola.

To sit silent and let the incompetent in the White House and incompetents in Congress invite America’s Ebola epidemic—makes no sense whatsoever.

What America Will Look Like In 2050 – Ecological Footprint

Ecological footprint…

In the past week, our U.S. Congress tabled the egregious mistake of amnesty bill S744 projected to render a free pass for 20 million illegal migrants and their families. It also raises legal immigration from 1.0 million annually to 2.0 million.  For the moment, the American people stand a chance of not allowing an unending flood of humanity into the United States to drive our population to over 100 million added immigrants within four decades.

However, at the current rate of mass legal immigration of 1.0 million annually, we remain on course to add 100 million immigrants, their children and chain-migrated relatives by 2050—a scant 37 years from now.

That’s enough people to duplicate the populations of our top 20 cities within the United States.  We would have to water, house, warm, transport, feed, work, educate and medicate 100 million more people.  That fact alone should sober the most optimistic individuals in America. It should cause every single one of our 535 Congressional critters to stand back to “see” the enormous tragedy their actions portend for all Americans of every race, creed or color.

The “Gang of Eight” U.S. Senators who created the amnesty bill S744 will prove some of the dumbest, most unintelligent nincompoops ever to walk the halls of Congress for their sheer stupidity in formulating that bill.

As this series progresses, you grow in understanding of the ramifications of adding 100 million immigrants.  You comprehend the enormity of the decision and its final outcome.  Please realize that Congress continues to push to pass amnesty.  They won’t enforce our laws, our president won’t enforce our laws; but they can’t wait to legalize lawbreakers and employers who hire those lawbreakers.

What lies below the surface of adding 100 million immigrants?  We know that we face horrific energy depletion with that many added persons to our civilization.  But most don’t posses a clue as to what lies beneath the waters of such a population-load on America.

Do you notice that humans encroaching on habitat around the world in such places as Africa, India, China and South America—create horrible species extinction rates? How many extinctions?  Answer: over 100 extinctions 24/7.  In other words, the human race thinks its endless population growth supersedes any other creature on the planet.

What does that mean for America?

In 2013, we lost 250 species to extinction in the lower 48 states according to the U.S. Department of Interior and we lose that many every year.   That equates to 2,500 living, breathing creatures every decade. They will never again exist on this planet.  How can that happen?

Ecological footprint on America

Ecological footprint may be the most unheard-of word in America, but its impact will grow more devastating in the coming decades—as we continue to lose more and more species to human encroachment on habitat.

To give you an example: an Ethiopian farmer uses .4 (4/10^th) of an acre of land to feed, house and clothe himself and his family.  That’s his ecological footprint.

However, when that same Ethiopian farmer immigrants to America at our behest, his ecological footprint jumps to a whopping 25.4 acres of land to support him.  Our standard of living runs hundreds of times greater in use of land, water and resources than a simple farmer from Africa.  But once he arrives, we force his “footprint” to jump more than 50 times.  (Source: )

If we add another 100 million immigrants within 37 years, do the math!  That 100 million legal immigrants X’s 25.4 acres of land equals to 2.54 billion acres of land that must be destroyed to feed, house, educate, recreate, build malls, roads and a dozen other items that destroy natural habitat.

That’s why extinction rates gallop at over 100 species per day worldwide as the human race rampages with an added 80 million annually, net gain.  In other words, the other creatures on the planet don’t have say or a prayer. (Source: Norman Myers, Extinctions Worldwide, Oxford University)

But payback will arrive at some point. We will lose the grizzly bear, the moose, the bald eagle, the salmon, the hummingbird, the antelope, fox and hundreds of other creatures.  How?

It’s called “cascading extinctions.”  When you kill off one creature such as a prairie dog, you also kill off 67 other creatures that live-off that one furry rodent. Fox, coyotes, hawks, eagles and dozens more.   That’s why you don’t see those great creatures living in concrete-filled jungles called “cities.”

Remember, we stand to duplicate the populations of our 20 most populated cities within 37 years, “IF” we continue the 1965 Immigration Reform Act; and faster if S744 bill passes with 2.0 million legal immigrants added annually.

In other words, our country will become as hostile and ugly toward other creatures as the Bengal tiger in India or the Snow Leopard in Nepal, or the elephant in Africa along with the gorillas, or the grizzly bear in Montana, or finally, this nation’s symbol: the Bald Eagle.

Dear reader, we stand this watch in our nation’s history.  What we allow today affects seven generations into the future. We actually walk on the faces of the children of tomorrow. What will we leave them?  What kind of environment? What kind of national parks?  What kind of landscape? What kind of habitat for other creatures?

What can you do?

• We need to stop S744 and reduce all legal immigration to less than 100,000 annually.
•  We need to work on conservation of all oil burning by mandating conservation, smaller cars, mass transit and more taxes to discourage accelerating use.
•  We need to collective empower ourselves by joining  ;  and 
•  We need to write major media email addresses and newspapers to force them to address this population nightmare.

Escape From Wall Street

This bankster run system does not work for you and I. After reading this article and you still have not taken your money out of their banks and you have not stopped shopping in globalist stores like Walmart and you are not planning to trade and barter with your neighbors as well as grow your own food, then you get the dismal future you deserve. If you stay in the banksters system and continue to participate in this rigged game stemming from Wall Street, you are sowing the seeds of your own destruction!

There Is a New Elephant in the Room

There are a series of new free trade agreements which threaten to obliterate the cities of the United States in the same manner we have witnessed in Detroit. Among the worst of these new free trade agreements is the one entitled “Increasing American Jobs Through Greater Exports to Africa Act of 2013 (H.R. 1777).”

The premise of this article is based upon the fact that Detroit was primarily destroyed by the anti-worker free trade agreements of NAFTA and CAFTA.

If the complete destruction of one American city was not enough, through NAFTA and CAFTA, we should all be concerned that Congress is preparing to pass H.R. 1777. H.R. 1777 is not just another free trade agreement, but this is far worse than NAFTA and CAFTA in that this bill takes American taxpayer money and funds industrial infrastructure in many of the 54 African countries in order to make them “factory ready.” America, you are soon going to be forced to fund your own economic demise. Not only will you likely lose your job, witness your city going broke, but you will go deeper into debt paying the taxes that Congress will require to fund the African Free Trade Agreement.

Before discussing the impact of H.R. 1777 on America as a whole, we can get a strong sense of what it is going to be like when this bill passes by quickly examining the impact of NAFTA and CAFTA on Detroit.

NAFTA, CAFTA and the Destruction of the Motor City

At the height of Detroit’s success as a city. the city was a representation of the American middle class dominance. It was greatest manufacturing city ever seen on the planet. Detroit once made cars that were the envy of the world.

At its peak, Detroit was the America’s fourth-largest city, with more than 1.8 million people. Detroit’s population losses began in the 1960s with migration to the suburbs. Then in the 1990′s Detroit fell victim to global politics in the names of NAFTA and CAFTA and literally, the roof caved in.

Today, 30% of Detroit’s 140 square miles are either vacant or deserted. Detroit used to be the fourth-largest city in the US, with a population of nearly 2 million people. Today, Detroit has less than 700,000 residents. There are more than 33,500 vacant housesand over 90,000 vacant lots in Detroit. The city government is razing entire city blocks of business buildings and residential homes. If you are the only one left on your block, you are forced to move and if you are lucky you will receive $10,000 for your home.

Under NAFTA and CAFTA, virtually all tariffs were eliminated so that manufacturers could shut down U.S. plants and relocate to the third world in order that they could pay their new, foreign workers slave labor wages. Then, adding insult to injury, when NAFTA and CAFTA eliminated tariffs, they made it possible for the multinational corporations to ship these foreign made products back into the U.S. and pay no import taxes at all. Thus, the great city of Detroit was destroyed.

The National Impact of the African Free Trade Agreement

Soon after H.R. 1777 passes, every major city is going to look like Detroit. As bad as NAFTA and CAFTA are, at least the government did not take trillions of America dollars to build infrastructure in foreign labor markets. Yet, this is exactly what the African Free Trade Agreement is going to do.

I have to hand it to Congress for their undisguised boldness as they are not even hiding this private theft of public money. Additionally, Congress has the nerve to title this bill in such a way that it appears that American jobs are going to be created by passage of the bill. Sadly, most of the sheep will believe them.

How can I be sure that H.R. 1777 will be passed?

A Wolf In Sheep’s Clothing

In addition to H.R. 1777, SB 718 “Increasing American Jobs Through Greater Exports to Africa Act of 2013,” is being run through the Senate. The language for both bills is identical.

Additionally, the text of H.R. 1777 turns up in SB 431, the Nepal Trade Preferences Act, and SB 432, the Asia-South Pacific Trade Preferences Act. The language for all four bills is virtually identical.

Why do the banksters need all four bills with the same language? Simple, if one bill does not pass, the other three bills still have a chance.

For those who do not think that Congress doesn’t cater to the whims of Wall Street, explain why these bills contain provisions for global health, global education, global transportation and global water?

Make no mistake about it, there is an excellent chance that at least one of these bills will pass.

Conclusion

This bill is being perpetrated by the international banksters on Wall Street. Why do we continue to fund this criminal government, who in turns funds Wall Street? The solution resides in defunding the government which hands our money and our jobs over to the thugs on Wall Street. It makes no sense to continue funding our demise.

There are several options. First, there are countries which would be happy to accept skilled Americans because of the boost to their economy. Can you imagine if 100 million Americans suddenly left the country? Certainly, the government would eventually move to impose an iron curtain type of restriction on leaving the country.

Secondly, we should withdraw from the Wall Street system as much as possible. I can see the day where people cash out of their 401K’s (the government is preparing to steal them anyway), withdraw money from your bank account and invest with other like-minded people in a farm collective. Trading and bartering would be the new underground economy. By owning farms, urban refugees would be food sufficient, could become water sufficient with the proper planning and we could largely be out of the reach of the feds. However, there is one caveat. In a brilliant move, the Obama administration and the Supreme Court mandated participation in the Obamacare system. In my opinion, this was establishment’s way to keep people in their system. Obviously, defying the dictates of Obamacare would have to become our first line of civil disobedience.

There is a third option. The American people could defy the tyrannical laws to the point where the country erupts into a civil war. I prefer the second option because it comes the closest to nonviolent revolution. However, my instincts and knowledge of history tells me we are in for a very serious civil war. The flash point for what is coming will be gun confiscation.

Of course, the fourth option is to acquiesce. Presently, that is what well over half the country is presently doing. It is sad to think that so many will go quietly into the night without putting up a fight.

At the end of the day, all Americans have a choice on whether we are going to stop funding our destruction.

Source: Dave Hodges  |  The Common Sense Show | War Is Crime

Lebanon’s Oppressed: Domestic Workers, Women, Palestinians

Are They Forming an Alliance?

Beirut – University students surveyed last month in Lebanon on the subject of how to improve their society and move it in the direction of meeting international human and civil rights norms identified three groups most in urgent need of immediate Lebanese governmental action.

Not surprising perhaps, but nevertheless refreshing, were the students’ strongly expressed convictions, regardless of particular sect,  that those most victimized by Lebanon’s government and current laws are the roughly 200,000 migrant domestic workers, woman, who make up half of Lebanon’s population, and the estimated 250,000 Palestinian refugees waiting to return to their country, Palestine.

Last month’s suicide by domestic worker 33 years old Alem Dechasa-Desisa, following a beating in front of her Ethiopian Consulate by Ali Mahfouz and his colleague, whose recruitment agency arranged for Alem to work in Lebanon, was condemned across this country and angered those watching the video of the beating on LBCI TV.

This incident once more raised the near slavery plight of workers from Sri Lanka, Ethiopia, Sudan, the Philippines, and Nepal and elsewhere who are excluded from the Lebanon’s labor law. Among the triad of the most wretched in Lebanon, domestic workers suffer the most.

Once again, the Lebanese government issued a seemingly pro forma statement to say it would investigate the despicable abuse of domestic workers.  Few here have confidence that anything will come of the current “investigation” any more than usually results from police or ministry investigations of domestic workers abuse. “The Lebanese authorities only opened an investigation because they found themselves in the media spotlight,” Nadim Houry, the deputy Middle East and North Africa director at Human Rights Watch, told a news conference, adding that “The government urgently needs to address the root causes that are driving so many migrant domestic workers to despair.”   More than a dozen civil society groups also cited a culture of impunity when it comes to the abuse of domestic workers in Lebanon.

In a 2008 study, Human Rights Watch found that there had been an average of one death a week from unnatural causes among domestic workers in Lebanon, including suicides and unexplained falls from tall buildings. Domestic workers are subject to restrictive immigration rules based on employer-specific sponsorship that puts workers at risk of exploitation and makes it extremely difficult for them to leave abusive employers, The Philippines, Ethiopia and other countries have banned their citizens from working in Lebanon due to the lack of protection from Lebanon yet many still come here in order to work and send money back home to their families.

According to HRW, the most common complaints documented by the embassies of labor-sending countries and civil society groups include mistreatment by recruiters, non-payment or delayed payment of wages, forced confinement to the workplace, a refusal to provide any time off for the worker, forced labor, and verbal and physical abuse. HRW also cited information prepared by KAFA Violence & Exploitation, a Lebanese women’s rights group, concerning nine suspicious deaths in August 2010.

A number of factors mean that MDWs often do not file or pursue complaints against their employers, but rather settle on unfavorable terms. These include lack of judicial support, fear of counter charges and being held in detention, and restrictive visa policies that make it hard for MDWs to see through cases that can take months or years to wend through the protracted judicial process.  For many, the need to earn money to support their families, and the impulse of abused workers to return home quickly prompts them to withdraw their complaints rather than seek redress. A Human Rights Watch review of 13 criminal cases that MDWs brought against employers found they took an average of 24 months to be resolved, while MDW complaints for unpaid wages filed in civil courts lasted between 21 and 54 months. Complaints brought before labor courts, which are supposedly faster than regular civil courts because their procedures are simpler, lasted 32 months on average.

The wretched women of Lebanon– half of the population…

Lebanese law prevents women married to a non-Lebanese from passing citizenship on to her children. Much like the right to property, which women in Lebanon, like Palestinians also don’t enjoy fully, the value of citizenship and family rights for women and their children  is meaningless when the state restricts transferability. This means that many children born and raised in Lebanon are required to regularly reapply for permits to continue living in their birth country.

Since Lebanese law does not provide a clear judicial standard, children must deal with the administrative maze of Lebanon’s corrupt and notoriously inefficient bureaucracy. As the children grow into adults, they face restrictions on foreign labor, property ownership and a host of other implications much like Palestinian refugees. While diaspora Lebanese may have citizenship from other countries, they can also claim Lebanese citizenship via paternal consanguinity, but people born and raised in Lebanon depend on the arbitrary decisions of the security services.

Women also remain invisible in positions of formal power such as Parliament. No women serve in Lebanon’s cabinet, while only four women our of 128 MP’s – the usual group of wives, sisters and daughters of high ranking Lebanese officials – are Members of Parliament.

 Some have proposed a quota for women in Parliament. According to lawyer Anthony Elghossain “ in a political culture that derides women for being outspoken and active, a quota would amount to little more than a paper reform. Indeed, without changing other aspects of Lebanese electoral law, a quota system would probably add a bunch of “yes women” to the flock of male sheep that is Lebanon’s legislature.”

The question of “marital rape” also continues to make a mockery of current Lebanese laws.  Male rapists may rape at will since their crime is not defined as rape in the first place just so long as long as they are married to the woman they rape or if they subsequently propose marriage to their victims.

Nearly impossible as it is to believe, some in Lebanon’s Parliament such as Imad Hout told The Beirut Daily Star last month that  “[t]here’s nothing called rape between a husband and a wife,” but only the act of “forcing someone violently to have intercourse.”

Whenever Parliament finally agrees to consider changing domestic relations law, it always ends up postponing serious consideration or a vote on proposals with a press release saying in effect, “This subject requires more study. Legislative action deferred.”

Palestinians need for basic civil rights including the right to work and to own a home

Due to an educational effort on the subject of civil rights for Palestinian refugees in Lebanon over the past few years, this issue is perhaps better known than the situation of domestic workers and women. But the urgent need to change Lebanese to grant Palestinians elementary civil rights is currently no closer to being achieved than are the above cases.

However,  given the recent increase in activism among all three communities and their increasing inclination to collaborate, there is reason for some optimism for all three segments of Lebanese society which are organizing with international and increased domestic support

Currently the most dynamic action at organizing and working for change is coming from women in the Palestinian community. Long marginalized from key roles in the refugee camp “popular committees” Palestinian women in several of the 12 camps are challenging the male domination of the camps.  This is particularly true in Bedawwi and Nahr al Bared camps in north Lebanon where Palestinian NGO’s such as Najdeh (“help”) are training and supporting women’s empowerment and urging them get involved in camp management since women best know the needs of the families and how to relate to them.

This dynamism is encouraging domestic workers to organize as well as offering support for women’s groups to demand their rights.  The coming months may see more formal alliances among Lebanon’s most marginalized and wretched groups–domestic workers, women and Palestinian refugees. With growing civil society support for their efforts they may finally achieve the dismantling of archaic Lebanese laws and attitudes.

Arguing Libya

On July 9 I took part in a demonstration in front of the White House, the theme of which was “Stop Bombing Libya”. The last time I had taken part in a protest against US bombing of a foreign country, which the White House was selling as “humanitarian intervention”, as they are now, was in 1999 during the 78-day bombing of Serbia. At that time I went to a couple of such demonstrations and both times I was virtually the only American there. The rest, maybe two dozen, were almost all Serbs. “Humanitarian intervention” is a great selling device for imperialism, particularly in the American market. Americans are desperate to renew their precious faith that the United States means well, that we are still “the good guys”.

This time there were about 100 taking part in the protest. I don’t know if any were Libyans, but there was a new element — almost half of the protesters were black, marching with signs saying: “Stop Bombing Africa”.

There was another new element — people supporting the bombing of Libya, facing us from their side of Pennsylvania Avenue about 40 feet away. They were made up largely of Libyans, probably living in the area, who had only praise and love for the United States and NATO. Their theme was that Gaddafi was so bad that they would support anything to get rid of him, even daily bombing of their homeland, which now exceeds Serbia’s 78 days. I of course crossed the road and got into arguments with some of them. I kept asking: “I hate that man there [pointing to the White House] just as much as you hate Gaddafi. Do you think I should therefore support the bombing of Washington? Destroying the beautiful monuments and buildings of this city, as well as killing people?”

None of the Libyans even tried to answer my question. They only repeated their anti-Gaddafi vitriol. “You don’t understand. We have to get rid of Gaddafi. He’s very brutal.” (See the CNN video of the July 1 mammoth rally in Tripoli for an indication that these Libyans’ views are far from universal at home.)

“But you at least get free education and medical care,” I pointed out. “That’s a lot more than we get here. And Libya has the highest standard of living in the entire region, at least it did before the NATO and US bombing. If Gaddafi is brutal, what do you call all the other leaders of the region, whom Washington has long supported?”

One retorted that there had been free education under the king, whom Gaddafi had overthrown. I was skeptical of this but I didn’t know for sure that it was incorrect, so I replied: “So what? Gaddafi at least didn’t get rid of the free education like the leaders in England did in recent years.”

A police officer suddenly appeared and forced me to return to my side of the road. I’m sure if pressed for an explanation, the officer would justify this as a means of preventing violence from breaking out. But there was never any danger of that at all; another example of the American police-state mentality — order and control come before civil liberties, before anything.

Most Americans overhearing my argument with the Libyans would probably have interjected something like: “Well, no matter how much you hate the president you can still get rid of him with an election. The Libyans can’t do that.”

And I would have come back with: “Right. I have the freedom to replace George W. Bush with Barack H. Obama. Oh joy. As long as our elections are overwhelmingly determined by money, nothing of any significance will change.”

Postscript: Amidst all the sadness and horror surrounding the massacre in Norway, we should not lose sight of the fact that “peaceful little Norway” participated in the bombing of Yugoslavia in 1999; has deployed troops in Iraq; has troops in Afghanistan; and has supplied warplanes for NATO’s bombing of Libya. The teenagers of those countries who lost their lives to the US/NATO killing machine wanted to live to adulthood and old age as much as the teenagers in Norway. With all the condemnation of “extremism” we now hear in Norway and around the world we must ask if this behavior of the Norwegian government, as well as that of the United States and NATO, is not “extremist”.

The Berlin Wall — Another Cold War Myth

The Western media will soon be revving up their propaganda motors to solemnize the 50th anniversary of the erecting of the Berlin Wall, August 13, 1961. All the Cold War clichés about The Free World vs. Communist Tyranny will be trotted out and the simple tale of how the wall came to be will be repeated: In 1961, the East Berlin communists built a wall to keep their oppressed citizens from escaping to West Berlin and freedom. Why? Because commies don’t like people to be free, to learn the “truth”. What other reason could there have been?

First of all, before the wall went up thousands of East Germans had been commuting to the West for jobs each day and then returning to the East in the evening; many others went back and forth for shopping or other reasons. So they were clearly not being held in the East against their will. Why then was the wall built? There were two major reasons:

1) The West was bedeviling the East with a vigorous campaign of recruiting East German professionals and skilled workers, who had been educated at the expense of the Communist government. This eventually led to a serious labor and production crisis in the East. As one indication of this, the New York Times reported in 1963: “West Berlin suffered economically from the wall by the loss of about 60,000 skilled workmen who had commuted daily from their homes in East Berlin to their places of work in West Berlin.” ¹

In 1999, USA Today reported: “When the Berlin Wall crumbled [1989], East Germans imagined a life of freedom where consumer goods were abundant and hardships would fade. Ten years later, a remarkable 51% say they were happier with communism.” ² Earlier polls would likely have shown even more than 51% expressing such a sentiment, for in the ten years many of those who remembered life in East Germany with some fondness had passed away; although even 10 years later, in 2009, the Washington Post could report: “Westerners say they are fed up with the tendency of their eastern counterparts to wax nostalgic about communist times.” ³

It was in the post-unification period that a new Russian and eastern Europe proverb was born: “Everything the Communists said about Communism was a lie, but everything they said about capitalism turned out to be the truth.” It should also be noted that the division of Germany into two states in 1949 — setting the stage for 40 years of Cold War hostility — was an American decision, not a Soviet one. ⁴

2) During the 1950s, American coldwarriors in West Germany instituted a crude campaign of sabotage and subversion against East Germany designed to throw that country’s economic and administrative machinery out of gear. The CIA and other US intelligence and military services recruited, equipped, trained and financed German activist groups and individuals, of West and East, to carry out actions which ran the spectrum from juvenile delinquency to terrorism; anything to make life difficult for the East German people and weaken their support of the government; anything to make the commies look bad.

It was a remarkable undertaking. The United States and its agents used explosives, arson, short circuiting, and other methods to damage power stations, shipyards, canals, docks, public buildings, gas stations, public transportation, bridges, etc; they derailed freight trains, seriously injuring workers; burned 12 cars of a freight train and destroyed air pressure hoses of others; used acids to damage vital factory machinery; put sand in the turbine of a factory, bringing it to a standstill; set fire to a tile-producing factory; promoted work slow-downs in factories; killed 7,000 cows of a co-operative dairy through poisoning; added soap to powdered milk destined for East German schools; were in possession, when arrested, of a large quantity of the poison cantharidin with which it was planned to produce poisoned cigarettes to kill leading East Germans; set off stink bombs to disrupt political meetings; attempted to disrupt the World Youth Festival in East Berlin by sending out forged invitations, false promises of free bed and board, false notices of cancellations, etc.; carried out attacks on participants with explosives, firebombs, and tire-puncturing equipment; forged and distributed large quantities of food ration cards to cause confusion, shortages and resentment; sent out forged tax notices and other government directives and documents to foster disorganization and inefficiency within industry and unions … all this and much more. ⁵

The Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, of Washington, DC, conservative coldwarriors, in one of their Cold War International History Project Working Papers (#58, p.9) states: “The open border in Berlin exposed the GDR [East Germany] to massive espionage and subversion and, as the two documents in the appendices show, its closure gave the Communist state greater security.”

Throughout the 1950s, the East Germans and the Soviet Union repeatedly lodged complaints with the Soviets’ erstwhile allies in the West and with the United Nations about specific sabotage and espionage activities and called for the closure of the offices in West Germany they claimed were responsible, and for which they provided names and addresses. Their complaints fell on deaf ears. Inevitably, the East Germans began to tighten up entry into the country from the West, leading eventually to the infamous Wall. However, even after the wall was built there was regular, albeit limited, legal emigration from east to west. In 1984, for example, East Germany allowed 40,000 people to leave. In 1985, East German newspapers claimed that more than 20,000 former citizens who had settled in the West wanted to return home after becoming disillusioned with the capitalist system. The West German government said that 14,300 East Germans had gone back over the previous 10 years. ⁶

Let’s also not forget that Eastern Europe became communist because Hitler, with the approval of the West, used it as a highway to reach the Soviet Union to wipe out Bolshevism forever, and that the Russians in World War I and II, lost about 40 million people because the West had used this highway to invade Russia. It should not be surprising that after World War II the Soviet Union was determined to close down the highway.

We came, we saw, we destroyed, we forgot

An updated summary of the charming record of US foreign policy. Since the end of the Second World War, the United States of America has …

1. Attempted to overthrow more than 50 governments, most of which were democratically-elected. ⁷
2. Attempted to suppress a populist or nationalist movement in 20 countries. ⁸
3. Grossly interfered in democratic elections in at least 30 countries. ⁹
4. Dropped bombs on the people of more than 30 countries. ¹⁰
5. Attempted to assassinate more than 50 foreign leaders. ¹¹

In total: Since 1945, the United States has carried out one or more of the above actions, on one or more occasions, in the following 69 countries (more than one-third of the countries of the world):

Afghanistan Albania Algeria Angola Australia Bolivia Bosnia Brazil British Guiana (now Guyana) Bulgaria Cambodia Chad Chile China Colombia Congo (also as Zaire) Costa Rica Cuba Dominican Republic East Timor Ecuador Egypt El Salvador Fiji France Germany (plus East Germany) Ghana Greece Grenada Guatemala Honduras India Indonesia Iran

Iraq Italy Jamaica Japan Kuwait Laos Lebanon Libya Mongolia Morocco Nepal Nicaragua North Korea Pakistan Palestine Panama Peru Philippines Portugal Russia Seychelles Slovakia Somalia South Africa Soviet Union Sudan Suriname Syria Thailand Uruguay Venezuela Vietnam (plus North Vietnam) Yemen (plus South Yemen) Yugoslavia

(See a world map of US interventions.)

The occult world of economics

When you read about economic issues in the news, like the crisis in Greece or the Wall Street/banking mortgage shambles are you sometimes left befuddled by the seeming complexity, which no one appears able to untangle or explain to your satisfaction in simple English? Well, I certainly can’t explain it all myself, but I do know that the problem is not necessarily that you and I are economic illiterates. The problem is often that the “experts” discuss these issues as if we’re dealing with hard and fast rules or laws, not to be violated, scientifically based, mathematically sound and rational; when, in fact, a great deal of what takes place in the real world of economics and in the arena of “expert” analysis of that world, is based significantly on partisan party politics, ideology, news headlines, speculation, manipulation, psychology (see the utter meaninglessness and absurdity of the daily rise or fall of stock prices), backroom deals of the powerful, and the excessive power given to and reliance upon thoroughly corrupt credit-rating agencies and insurers of various kinds. The agencies like Moody’s and Standard and Poor’s are protection rackets — pay our exorbitant fees or we give you a bad rating, which investors and governments then bow down to as if it’s the result of completely objective and impressive analytical study.

Then there’s the exceptions made for powerful countries to get away with things that lesser countries, like Greece, are not allowed to get away with, but all still explained in terms of the unforgiving laws of economics.

And when all other explanations fail to sound plausible, the experts fall back on “the law of supply and demand”. But that law was repealed years ago; just try and explain the cost of gasoline based on it, as but one example.

So there’s a lot to cover up, many reasons why the financial-world players can’t be as open as they should be, as forthright as the public and investors may assume they are.

Consider the US budget deficit, about which we hear a great deal of scare talk. What we don’t hear is that the most prosperous period in American history occurred in the decades following the Second World War — from 1946 to 1973. And guess what? We had a budget deficit in the large majority of those years. Clearly such a deficit was not an impediment to growth and increasing prosperity in the United States — a prosperity much more widely shared than it is now. Yet we’re often fed the idea of the sanctity of a balanced budget. This and other “crises” are typically overblown for political reasons; the current “crisis” about the debt ceiling for example. Paul Craig Roberts, former Assistant Secretary of the Treasury under Reagan, now an independent columnist, points out that “regardless of whether the debt ceiling is raised the US government is not going to go out of business. … If Goldman Sachs is too big to fail, certainly, the US government is.”

In economic issues that occupy the media greatly, such as the debt ceiling, one of the hidden keys to understanding what’s going on is often the conservatives’ perennial hunger to privatize Social Security and Medicare. If you understand that, certain things become much clearer. Naomi Klein points out that “the pseudo debate about the debt ceiling … is naked class war, waged by the ultra rich against everyone else, and it’s well past time for Americans to draw the line.”

Consider, too, the relative value of international currencies. Logically, reasonably, if the British pound is exchangeable for two dollars, one should be able to purchase in Washington goods and services for two dollars which would cost one pound in London. In real life, this of course is the very infrequent exception to the rule. Instead, at places called “exchanges” in New York and Chicago and London and Zurich and Frankfurt a bunch of guys who don’t do anything socially useful get together each day in a large room, and amidst lots of raised voices, busy computers, and numerous pieces of paper, they arrive at a value for the pound, as well as for a barrel of oil, for a pound of porkbellies, and for various other commodities that affect our daily lives. Why should these speculators and parasites have so much influence over the real world, the real economy, and our real lives?

As a general rule of thumb, comrades, as an all-purpose solution to our economic ills, remember this: We’ll keep going around in crisis circles forever until the large financial institutions are nationalized or otherwise placed under democratic control. We hear a lot about “austerity”. Well, austerity has to, finally, visit the super-rich. There are millions (sic) of millionaires and billionaires in the United States and Europe. As governments go bust, the trillions of dollars of these people must be heavily taxed or confiscated to end the unending suffering of the other 95% of humanity. My god, do I sound like a (choke, gasp) socialist?

Notes

1. New York Times, June 27, 1963, p.12 ^↩
2. USA Today, October 11, 1999, p.1 ^↩
3. Washington Post, May 12, 2009; see a similar story November 5, 2009 ^↩
4. Carolyn Eisenberg, Drawing the Line: The American Decision to Divide Germany, 1944-1949 (1996); or see a concise review of this book by Kai Bird inThe Nation, December 16, 1996^↩
5. See William Blum, Killing Hope: US Military and CIA Interventions Since World War II, p.400, note 8, for a list of sources for the details of the sabotage and subversion. ^↩
6. The Guardian (London), March 7, 1985 ^↩
7. http://killinghope.org/essays6/othrow.htm ^↩
8. http://killinghope.org/bblum6/suppress.html ^↩
9. See chapter 18 of Rogue State: A Guide to the World’s Only Superpower – add Palestine, 2006 to the list ^↩
10. http://killinghope.org/superogue/bomb.htm ^↩
11. http://killinghope.org/bblum6/assass.htm ^↩

Interview with George Katsiaficas

U.S. Human Rights Policy is Self-serving and Duplicitous: George Katsiaficas…

George Katsiaficas is a renowned university professor, sociologist, author and activist. He is a visiting American Professor of Humanities and Sociology at Chonnam National University, Gwangju, South Korea where he teaches and does research on the 1980s and 1990s East Asian uprisings.

Katsiaficas has a Ph.D. of sociology from the University of California, San Diego. Since 1990, he has taught sociology at the Wentworth Institute of Technology’s Department of Humanities and Social Sciences. During the period between 2006 and 2008, he was an Associate in Research at the Harvard University and Korea Institute.

He specializes in social movements, Asian politics, the U.S. foreign policy, comparative and historical studies and has written numerous books in these fields.

In 2003, he won the American Political Science Association’s Special Award for Outstanding Service and in 2008, received the Fulbright Senior Scholar Research Fellowship.

Among his major books are “The Battle of Seattle” by the New York’s Soft Skull Press, “Liberation, Imagination and the Black Panther Party” by New York’s Routledge Press and “South Korean Democracy: Legacy of the Gwangju Uprising” by London’s Routledge Press.

What follows is the complete text of interview with Dr. George Katsiaficas on the recent uprising in the Arab world, its impacts on the international developments and its implications for the United States and its European allies.

Kourosh Ziabari: After Tunisia and Egypt in which the revolutionary forces and people on the ground succeeded in ousting the U.S.-backed puppets, several other Arab nations joined them and staged massive street demonstrations to call for civil liberties, improved living conditions, freedom and democratic governments. Now the whole Arab world is in a state of turmoil and unrest and the U.S.-backed dictators are facing the bitter reality that their autocracies are about to fail and collapse. What factors led to the extension of anti-government protests to the whole Arab world? Can we interpret this collective uprising a result of the explosion of strong pan-Arabist sentiments?

George Katsiaficas: No one could have predicted that the suicide of a vegetable vendor in rural Tunisia would unleash long pent-up frustrations on such a scale. If we take a long historical view, the Arab world went into a steep decline after Europeans discovered how to round Africa and established direct trade with the East. While oil has provided a huge stimulus for recovery in the 20th century, its effects have been drastically mitigated by elite corruption. The Arab people are finally awakening from a long slumber. The masses of ordinary Arabs today know in their hearts that they are more intelligent than their rulers. They know that they could all live better lives if they could get rid of the corrupt and often stupid elites trampling on their freedoms and hogging the money that rightfully belongs to everybody.

The phenomenon of uprisings spreading from place to another and drawing in ever more sectors of the population is one that I first uncovered when I studied the global movement of 1968. Unlike armed insurrections of the early part of the 20th century, the New Left involved a rapid proliferation of popular unarmed revolts—historically a new phenomenon. As I pulled together my empirical studies, I was stunned by the spontaneous spread of revolutionary aspirations in a chain reaction of uprisings and the massive occupation of public space—the sudden entry into history of millions of ordinary people who acted in a unified fashion, intuitively believing that they could change the direction of their society. Although they were not united by any centralized organization or even loosely tied together by any coordinating body, everyone was inspired by the heroic struggle of Vietnam. All over the world—from Paris to Prague, Chicago to Mexico City, and Dhaka to Beijing—people’s revolutionary aspirations and actions were not only synchronized, but they were also remarkably similar to each other in their international solidarity and desire for self-government.

After analyzing the proliferation of the global movement, especially the strikes of May 1968 in France and May 1970 in the US, I coined the term the “eros effect” to explain the rapid emergence of global solidarity and love. From my case studies, I came to understand how in moments of the eros effect, universal interests become generalized at the same time as the dominant values of society are negated (such as national chauvinism, hierarchy, and individualism). At that time, for example, opinion polls consistently showed that Ho Chi-minh was more popular than Richard Nixon on American college campuses. See The Imagination of the New Left: A Global Analysis of 1968 (Boston: South End Press, 1987.)

At first glance, the current revolt appears to be confined to the Arab world, but in fact, it has already had a much wider effect: Gabon, Iran, and China have all felt the tremors from the rising in Egypt. Even workers in Wisconsin, who are fighting cutbacks in their standard of living, expressed admiration for, and inspiration from, the Egyptian uprising. Certainly pan-Arab sentiments are a driving force, yet they are not essential. People feel in their bones that change is possible—and not only in the Arab world.

KZ: Many Iranians believe that the uprisings of Tunisia and Egypt have been inspired by Iran‘s Islamic Revolution of 1979. They compare the overthrowing of U.S.-backed Mubarak and Ben Ali to the dissolution of Mohammad Reza Shah’s government which was unconditionally supported by the United States and its European allies. Do you find such a relationship between these revolutions which took place during an interval of 32 years?

GK: Revolutions and popular uprisings have unexpected results—and not necessarily immediate ones. Even generations later, people’s memories and psyches assimilate lessons from previous eaves of struggles. The courage of Iranians in 1979, their withstanding of ferocious repression by the Shah and his forces, was evident for people all over the world, and inspired Haitians and Filipinos to overthrow their dictators. In 1987, I wrote that, “In the epoch after 1968, popular movements have internalized the New Left tactic of the occupation of public space as means of social transformation, and this tactic’s international diffusion led to the downfall of the Shah, Duvalier, and Marcos…the significance of the eros effect and the importance of synchronized world-historical movements will only increase.”

KZ: In your recent article, you’ve compared the new Middle East revolutions to the Korea’s 1987 June Uprising when after 19 consecutive days of massive street demonstrations, people could finally bring down the 26-year autonomy of military forces and hold direct presidential elections. In what ways are these movements similar to each other?

GK: In both cases, people basically fought with bare hands against mighty police forces and defeated them. Thousands of ordinary citizens claimed the right to remain together in public and refused to go home when ordered to do so. Small informal leadership circles emerged in the course of popular struggles, drawn initially from extant activist circles but also porous enough to admit many newcomers from a variety of constituencies. Most significantly, both revolts were quickly ended by the peaceful retirement of the incumbent president and vague promises made by the military—which in both cases remained in power as the uprising subsided. It took South Koreans another five years of struggle before the first civilian was elected president, and it took until 1996 to put the previous dictators in prison. While one agreed to the order to return some US$300 million that he had stolen from the public, Chun Doo-hwan famously testified he had less than $100 to his name—thereby losing his honor but keeping a fortune of perhaps $700 million. Both sums pale in comparison to the estimated fortune amassed by Mubarek. It remains to be seen how much of the Mubarek family holdings will be recovered—or, more importantly, whether or not Egypt will move toward substantive democracy. The longer people adopt a “wait and see” attitude, the less chance there is of change. Millennia of pharonic rule and dictatorships are not easily undone.

KZ: The Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi is said to have deposited $90 billion in Italian and other European banks. Since 1990s, the European states moved towards normalizing their ties with the dictator and supported him both politically and financially. Now, these Western states with which the Libyan dictator was once a close friend are calling for a unified international action against him. The old friend has now become a bitter enemy. Isn’t this an exercise of double standards by the Western governments?

GK: This double standard is nothing new. The US has a long history of riding on the backs of dictators in Third World countries and then tossing them away like a used car once they have outlived their usefulness. Longtime Philippines president Ferdinand Marcos was ousted with US approval in 1986; the CIA maintained real time connection to the rebels and provided them with invaluable intelligence information. Much earlier, in 1961, Rafael Trujillo, who had ruled the Dominican Republic with an iron fist for decades, was assassinated. Many people suspect the CIA provided the assassins with the weapons they used. In 1963, Ngo Dinh Diem, who had faithfully served US interests in South Vietnam from 1956 to 1963, was overthrown in a military coup about which the US had advance knowledge, and US refusal to assist him led to his assassination. Many people believe long-time US ally Park Chung-hee, ruler of South Korea from 1961 to 1979, was killed with advance US approval.

KZ: The media have reported that the mercenaries of Colonel Gaddafi have so far killed more than 6,000 protesters in Tripoli and other cities of Libya. What’s your prediction for the political future of Libya? Gaddafi has vowed to remain in power and “die as a martyr”; however, the protesters, despite the large-scale crackdown by the government haven’t retracted from their stance and are still calling for the ouster of the old dictator. What will be the outcome of these tumultuous clashes in Libya? Will the revolution finally end in the overthrowing of Muammar Gaddafi?

KZ: That is a life and death question for thousands of Libyans. It is too early for us to tell whether or not the armed revolt will prevail. With the US and NATO already overextended in Iraq and Afghanistan, the Joints Chiefs are resisting the call by conservatives here to implement a no-fly zone and come to the assistance of the rebels. We should not forget that Gaddafi has played ball with the US in recent years, and he is certainly calling in every favor he is owed. In 1980, the US encouraged Korean General Chun Doo-hwan to suppress the democratic popular uprising in Gwangju. There can be no doubt that it may well stand by and watch as Gaddafi crushes those opposed to his rule.

KZ: Prof. Rashid Khalidi believes that the recent uprisings in the Arab countries have transformed and changed the mainstream media’s portrayal of the Muslim world. The people that were once introduced as fanatic terrorists and extremists are now being called freemen who sacrifice their lives for the sake of achieving freedom and liberty. Do you agree with this viewpoint? Has the communal uprising of the Arab world changed the public’s viewpoint regarding the Arabs and Muslims?

GK: In my view, US public opinion has not really shifted much. The self-organization of armed resistance to Gaddafi astounds American journalists. American young people note with amusement that soccer and dating web sites were used by young Libyans to organize their uprising, but my students complain that they feel burdened by the region’s peoples looking to the US for help.

I suspect the change in Arabs’ own self-understanding is far more significant. For too long, the role of public opinion and the importance of ordinary people has been disregarded in the region, especially by insurgencies, which instead of seeking to stimulate popular movements and raise consciousness, instead pinned their hopes on elites or organized armed commando actions. The first and most influential shift occurred with the first Palestinian intifada in the late 1980s. The people’s uprising was ruthlessly crushed—remember Yitzhak Rabin’s orders to break bones of unarmed children—but the spirit of popular resistance was kindled throughout the region.

KZ: We already know that the authoritarian regimes of Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Tunisia, Jordan, Yemen, Bahrain and Libya are among the major human rights violators in the world; however, the United States and its European cronies who frequently boast of their concerns about the preservation of human rights and freedom have been long indifferent to the persecution of political activists, incarceration of journalists and bloggers and other abuses of human rights in these countries. On the other hand, the superpowers have always employed the excuse of human rights for pressuring the independent and non-aligned nations such as Iran. What do you think about this dualistic approach?

KZ: From the very beginning, US human rights policy has been self-serving and duplicitous. In the name of democracy and enlightenment, the US exterminated millions of Native Americans. The US government broke nearly every treaty it ever signed with native peoples, a sad history known as the “Trail of Broken Treaties.” It would be laughable if it were not so tragic that a country based upon enslavement and murder of millions of Africans and genocide against Native Americans, a country that killed at least three million Koreans and more than two million Indochinese, a country that today is massacring thousands more in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan, could seek to instruct anyone on “human rights.” Yet it is precisely a self-righteous belief in American freedom and superiority that motivates continuing genocide.

President Jimmy Carter, with whom the modern version of human rights policy is thought to originate, collaborated with Indonesian generals in the bloody invasion of East Timor. Carter approved the suppression of the Gwangju Uprising at the cost of hundreds of lives. Years later, when evidence of his actions could be assembled, a Peoples Tribunal found Carter and 7 other high US officials guilty of “crimes against humanity for violation of the civil rights of the people of Gwangju.” Five months afterwards, Carter was awarded a Nobel Peace Prize. The hypocrisy continues unabated. Obama enlarges the war in Afghanistan and attacks Pakistan, and he, too, is awarded a Nobel Peace Prize. Should we be surprised that an award named after the inventor of dynamite provides international legitimation of Western imperialism and aggression?

KZ: As my final question, what’s your prediction for the future of Arab countries which have been engulfed by the waves of popular upsurge in the recent weeks? Will the autocratic regimes of the Persian Gulf region finally yield to the demands of the protesting revolutionaries?

Unfortunately, my prognosis is that the region will continue to be burdened by corrupt elites, but also that existing rulers will have to permit larger circles of economic innovators to emerge and grant people a wider range of civil liberties. With a population of 90 million, Egypt barely managed to manufacture what Costa Rica (population 900,000) could produce. Historically speaking, uprisings have opened the doors to subsequent economic development, as we readily see today in East Asia.

I suspect that substantive democracy in the Arab world (nor practically anywhere else for that matter) is not in the cards—at least for now. Elections may well be permitted but, as in the US, candidates will reflect the dominant parties, not any meaningful alternative. Military spending will continue to be lavish and result in enormous waste of resources. Militarized nation-states armed with weapons of mass destruction, although widely understood as historical anachronisms, will continue to reign supreme. Ordinary people’s dreams of a world at peace reveals a wisdom that far surpasses their rulers’ capacity to think, yet the resultant contradiction requires a globally synchronized effort to result in real change.

In my view, the synchronicity of revolts and occupation of public space that began in 1968 is continually widening its circles. Besides the overthrow of communism in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, we saw a wave of uprisings after Gwangju that spread in six years from 1986 to 1992 through the Philippines, Burma, Tibet, China, Taiwan, Bangladesh, Nepal, and Thailand. This most recent emergence of the eros effect in the Arab world indicates that popular movements are building to an even more intense climax, to a global uprising that might finally bring an end to the scandalous control of humanity’s collective wealth by a handful of billionaires.

NGOs in Haiti: “The Handmaidens of Imperial Domination”

An Interview With Ashley Smith…

MW–In your article in CounterPunch titled “Haiti and the Aid Racket“, you said that “The catastrophe in Haiti has revealed the worst aspects of the U.S. government and the NGO aid industry”. Can you explain what you mean?

Ashley Smith—After the earthquake, the imperial powers and international NGOs collected billions of dollars with the promise that they would provide relief for Haiti’s quake victims and then rebuild the country. Today, even mainstream figures are profoundly critical of what the U.S. and the NGOs have done. For example, Ricardo Seitenfus, the special representative from the Organization of American States (OAS) to Haiti, told the Swiss daily Le Temps, “If there is failure of international aid, it is Haiti.”

For that moment of honesty, the OAS fired Seitenfus. But he was right. Today, there are still over 810,000 people, essentially quake refugees, trapped in 1,150 tent camps in and around Port-au-Prince. Only 15 percent of the promised transitional housing has been built. Astonishingly only 5 percent of the rubble has been removed. And there has been next to no reconstruction.

The U.S. is principally to blame for this failure. Initially the Obama Administration used the cover of humanitarianism to deploy 20,000 troops and 17 naval ships to bolster the UN occupation in policing desperate people and preventing an exodus of refugees. This military response, as Doctors without Borders complained at the time, actually interfered with the distribution of humanitarian aid. Once it did turn to relief and reconstruction, it set up the Interim Haiti Recovery Commission (IHRC) under its control, which garnered promises of $10 billion in donations from the imperial powers. The IHRC, however, has only collected 10 percent of the promised sums. When and if they do collect the donations, the U.S. aims to implement a neoliberal plan of to exploit Haiti’s cheap labor in sweatshops, export-oriented plantations, and tourist resorts. So what they claim to be an effort, in IHRC co-chair Bill Clinton’s words, an “effort to build back better” is actually a ruse for the exploitation of Haiti.

The international NGOs’ record is almost as abysmal. To be clear, some have done invaluable work, especially Partners in Health. But on the whole, the NGOs have failed the Haitian people. The NGOs have not spent the enormous sums of money they collected. The Red Cross, for instance, garnered $479 million in donations for Haiti, but has only spent or committed $245 million to projects. The NGOs do not coordinate their relief efforts. They are engaged in capitalist competition with one another for funds and are pre-occupied with branding their separate efforts so that they can advertise their “successes” to their donors. As a result, the NGOs provide at best provide a chaotic jumble of services to quake victims. At worst, they are sitting on piles of cash.

In truth, the U.S., its allies, and NGO surrogates have overseen and in many cases caused worsening conditions in Haiti worse over the last year. The failure of reconstruction left hundreds of thousands trapped in camps, vulnerable to storms, disease, and violence brought on by desperate conditions. On top of that, the UN occupation forces, specifically a contingent of Nepalese soldiers, most likely introduced cholera that has now become a countrywide epidemic, killing thousands and infecting hundreds of thousands more. The U.S. then precipitated a political crisis by pushing for parliamentary election to give a democratic veneer to American neocolonial rule. The election was a sham; it excluded the country’s most popular political party, Fanmi Lavalas, and was marred by massive fraud and a contested outcome. Finally, like a nightmare, the former dictator, “Baby Doc” Duvalier, has returned to the country from exile, throwing the country into political chaos.

MW—Professor David Harvey says that NGOs act as “Trojan horses for neoliberal globalization.” Do you agree with Harvey and, if so, would you elaborate?

Ashley Smith—Let’s be clear first that NGOs form a big range of groups, from reformist organizations to large international humanitarians ones and others that are essentially appendages of various state powers, both major and minor. Some reformist NGOs have played a significant role in the World Social Forum and others are clearly on the side of neoliberal globalization. Harvey is absolutely correct about the role of the international NGOs. There is an insidious relationship between them, U.S. imperialism and neoliberal globalization.

After the economic crisis of the 1970s, the U.S. abandoned Keynesianism, whose emphasis on state-led development had failed, and adopted market fundamentalism, aka neoliberalism, at home and abroad to restore profits and growth in the system. In the U.S. the ruling class busted unions, cut the welfare state, and deregulated the economy. Internationally, as Walden Bello documents in Dark Victory, the U.S. used the debt crisis to compel third world countries to open up their markets, abolish regulations on foreign and domestic capital, privatize state industry, and shred state-run social programs.

Neoliberalism worked for the capitalist class, restoring profit and growth—however uneven—in the world system. But neoliberalism exacted an enormous social price everywhere. In the third world, it dislocated peasants, impoverished workers, and created enormous slums in many parts of the world. On top of that, the hollowing out of the states left many countries unable to provide services, regulate capital, or respond to natural and social crises.

The imperial powers, International Financial Institutions, and corporate foundations diverted their money from third world states to NGOs to fill the vacuum. In this way, the NGOs have actually accelerated the opening up of third world economies. In an apt phrase, David Harvey calls the process “privatization by NGO.”

MW—Do the big NGOs see natural disasters as a “growth industry” or is their interest strictly humanitarian?

Ashley Smith—In reality the answer is both. They are part and parcel of what Naomi Klein has called disaster capitalism. International NGOs are really businesses and big ones at that. There are about 50,000 international NGOs that compete for about $10 billion in funding from the International Financial Institutions, the imperial powers, and local governments. Just like corporations, they have chief executive officers, boards made up of mainly capitalists, a middle class professional staff, and then down at the bottom poorly paid laborers in their countries of operation.

These NGOs raise their funds by highlighting problems in the third world especially catastrophes like the earthquake in Haiti, branding their relief projects, and then advertising their efforts to imperial, corporate, and individual donors to raise more money. They are in the business of poverty and disaster management. A couple of people in the international NGOs actually told me that when the earthquake struck in Haiti some NGO bureaucrats, excited with the new prospects of fundraising, celebrated the disaster as if they had struck oil.

As capitalist entities they affirm and exacerbate the class division in the societies in which they operate. Anthropologist Mark Schuller describes their impact in Haiti. He writes: “In addition to higher salaries, NGO employees have access to many privileges: clean drinking water, electricity to charge cell phones, e-mail and the ever-prized U.S. visa. These privileges in turn plug individuals into the global economy. People’s first visits to the U.S. solidified neoliberal ideologies. This artificial, dependent middle class–the “NGO class”–thus directly support a form of economic globalization, accomplishes ideological work and further stratifies the Haitian population, selecting a chosen few for privileges denied Haiti’s poor majority.”

For all their professed humanitarianism, these NGOs in no way solve the ongoing crisis and at best mitigate the disaster in societies where they operate. Since they are inter-twined with neoliberal capitalism, they cannot and will not challenge the systemic roots of third world poverty that turn natural disasters into social catastrophes. They are in fact complicit with the problem. Thus, they do a booming business putting band-aids on the mortal wounds their neoliberal donors inflict. Haiti is the paradigmatic example. As Haiti spirals into greater poverty NGOs have exploded to over 10,000 across the country. The worse the conditions have gotten, the more NGOs have sprouted up, in a cycle of growing needs ever more inadequately met.

MW—Why has it been so hard to make progress in addressing the basic needs of the Haitian people? Is it a question of funding, logistics, access to heavy equipment, politics or something else?

Ashley Smith—-It is really not a technical or logistics problem at all. Nor is it a problem with the Haitian people, as racists often argue. As Alex Dupuy documents in his brilliant book, Haiti and the World Economy, the fault of the Haitian underdevelopment lies with the Haitian ruling class and imperialism. After the Haitian Revolution in 1804—the first successful slave revolution in history—the new Haitian ruling class tried to maintain plantation farming for export to the world market. But the freed slaves fled the plantations to become peasants farming for subsistence and small-scale export. Unable to sustain their capitalist plantations let alone industrialize the society, the ruling class split into two parts—urban merchants and rural land barons, both parasitic on the domestic peasant majority and dependent on international capitalism.

Imperialism, however, was and is the central cause of Haiti’s underdevelopment. The imperial powers—all slaveholders at the time—were terrified by the threat of the Haitian Revolution. They initially imposed an economic embargo on the fledgling society and then trapped Haiti in debt. In return for recognition of the country in 1825, France forced Haiti to pay 150 million francs, the equivalent today of $21 billion, in compensation for the loss of its slaves. Thus France structurally adjusted Haiti at its birth. As the rising imperial power in the region, the U.S. developed a predatory relationship to Haiti, invading and occupying several times at the end of the 19th century to ensure debt repayments. It occupied the country from 1915 to 1934, repressing the population and setting up the dreaded Haitian Armed Forces. Later it backed the Duvalier family dictatorship as an anticommunist ally against Castro in Cuba.

At the end of the 1970s, the U.S. convinced Baby Doc to implement a neoliberal plan to open up Haiti to American agribusiness, build sweatshops for the multinational textile industry, and set up swank tourist resorts for yuppies. Impoverished and fed up, the Haitian peasants, workers and urban poor rose up in the mass movement, Lavalas, that drove Baby Doc from power and then elected Jean-Bertrand Aristide President in 1990 on a program of social reform. The U.S. responded by backing the Haitian ruling class in two coups, one in 1991 and another in 2004. Their aim was to repress the mass movement and block the attempt to use the Haitian state to improve conditions for the country’s masses. Since 2004, it has maintained a UN occupation in the country to police resistance, while it has tried to impose the same old economic plan.

MW—Author Mike Davis says that NGOs are a form of “soft imperialism.” If he’s right, then the work of the thousands of NGOs in Haiti could be seen as a form of occupation? Your thoughts?

Ashley Smith—He’s absolutely right about the international NGOs. In the past, imperialism used religious institutions as a means to justify conquest, colonization and plunder as a civilizing mission—they were bringing the light of Christianity to the heathen masses. Today while the imperial powers plunder the third world, they funnel money into NGOs to make it seem like they are interested in aiding the very people they are robbing and exploiting. Haiti is perhaps the worst example of this process. While the U.S. imposed neoliberal plans that impoverished the people, it poured money into NGOs, cultivating the self-congratulatory illusion that it is helping Haiti.

Just like the religious institutions of the past, the NGOs are part and parcel of imperial domination of third world countries. In Haiti, for example, 70 percent of the NGO funding comes from the U.S. state. As a result, they become vehicles for control through provision of the societies in which they operate. As Peter Hallward argues, “the bulk of USAID money that goes to Haiti and to other countries in the region is explicitly designed to pursue interests–the promotion of a secure investment climate, the nurturing of links with local business elites, the preservation of a docile and low-wage labor force, and so on.”

Perhaps one of the worst impacts of the NGOs is how they have become a vehicle for the cooptation of the indigenous resistance. As Mike Davis puts it in Planet of Slums, “Third World NGOs have proven brilliant at co-opting local leadership as well as hegemonizing the social space traditionally occupied by the Left. Even if there are some celebrated exceptions—such as the militant NGOs so instrumental in creating the World Social Forums—the broad impact of the NGO/’civil society revolution”…has been to bureaucratize and de-radicalize urban social movements.”

MW—To what extent are NGOs being used to usurp the power of the state? Do they pose a direct threat to Haiti’s sovereignty?

Ashley Smith—This is the most insidious face of the imperial use of NGOs in Haiti. As I noted earlier, even before the earthquake, imperial and corporate donors were bypassing the Haitian state to give money directly to international NGOs. They thus exacerbated the gutting of the Haitian state so much so that Haitians now refer to their own country as ruled not by their own government but by a “Republic of NGOs.”

That phrase captures how Haiti has lost its sovereignty. But the reality is even worse than the phrase implies. The NGOs are not part of any republic; they are not democratically accountable to the Haitian people or even its government, but to international donors. And they are not truly non-governmental. They are in fact so dependent on imperial powers for their donations that they are better thought of as subsidiaries of those governments.

In reality, the NGOs are part of how U.S. imperialism rules Haiti today as a neocolony. It uses the UN occupation force as its repressive arm. And it uses NGOs to oversee social services. The combination of the UN and the NGOs undercut any notion that the Haitian state let alone its people control their own country.

MW—What is the relationship between the Pentagon and the NGOs?

Ashley Smith—-Historically, NGOs had an established doctrine of neutrality in conflicts and refused to endorse imperial intervention. However, as Conor Foley documents in The Thin Blue Line: How Humanitarianism Went to War, many of the big NGOs like Doctors Without Borders have abandoned that stance and call for imperial intervention. They are thus handmaidens of imperial domination.

In Haiti, the U.S. deliberately used willing NGOs as allies in their destabilization and eventual overthrow of the Aristide government. The U.S. imposed an aid embargo to prevent Aristide from implementing any social reforms. They then channeled money through USAID into NGOs. Many of these NGOs would line up with the ruling class opposition, the Group of 184, some even backed the U.S.-backed death squads, and others supported the U.S. coup.

Today, Haiti is a neocolony of the United States. The U.S. has effective state power through the UN occupation. It controls its economy through IHRC. It dominates almost every aspect of civil society through its NGO raj. For all these reasons former OAS representative Ricardo Seitenfus said the UN was “transforming the Haitians into prisoners on their own island.”

Asian Natural Disasters — Harbinger of Events to Come

In a span of five weeks, repeated typhoons, tsunamis, floods, mudslides and earthquakes swept through ten nations leaving thousands of people dead and rendering millions more homeless. The first of the natural disasters, tropical storm Ketsana, struck Manila and the surrounding area on September 26th during which time it caused massive floods and mudslides in addition to forcing thousands to flee their wrecked homes.

Then on October 3, this type of devastation visited again with Tsunami Parma. Altogether, the total impact of Ketsana and Parma left 929 people dead in the Philippines and hundreds of thousands homeless.

At the same time, many victims were forced to live in flooded areas with contaminated water that would, subsequently, cause widespread illness. Further, tropical storm Mirinae, last week, increased the number dead by twenty-seven in the Philippines while 87,000 were already living in temporary, often flimsy shelters due to the earlier storms when Mirinae struck.

Shortly thereafter, Mirinae hit Vietnam causing ninety-one deaths with an additional thirteen people missing after Ketsana had already killed 163 people in that nation. At the same time, many people required evacuation in Vietnam while forced to abandon thousands of greatly damaged homes and approximately 12,400 acres (5,000 hectares) of crops ruined from the Mirinae strike.

Ketsana and Parma had, likewise, brought the total dead to sixteen in Laos and eleven in Cambodia. Moreover, torrential rains killed 247 in South India in the same time period and left two million homeless there.

Similarly, floods and mudslides took the lives of 143 in Nepal. (The Nepal circumstances, while occurring in tandem with the other disasters, is more directly related to the glacial melting in the Himalayas). In addition, the Tsunami that struck the South Pacific, after the 8.3 earthquake of September 29, left 183 people dead in Samoa, thirty-four in American Samoa and nine dead in Tonga.

One day later, on September 30, a 7.6 earthquake hit West Sumatra Indonesia killing 1,117 and leaving two million homeless. Some of the more remote areas have yet to be reached by aid workers.

Aside from the personal tragedies of the hundreds of thousands who have lost loved ones, homes and their livelihoods — millions throughout the region who live or lived in low lying areas have been and will increasingly be at the mercy of rising sea levels in times to come. The low lying coastal regions of South India, Bangladesh, Burma, Cambodia and Vietnam, as well as the numerous Islands throughout the Pacific, Indian Ocean, Arabian Sea and parts of the African coast already have perennial flooding and, with a rising sea level and greater frequency and intensity of typhoons and tsunamis, more international preparation, assistance and cooperation are needed than have been rendered to date.

The more and better prepared people are for these recurring weather patterns and earthquake events — the greater there is a possibility that many lives, that would otherwise be lost, can be saved. Especially this is the case due to the inevitability of these catastrophic adversities repeating again and again with ever more ferocity as climate change factors set increasingly in place. With the readily evident rise in sea level, melting on the north and south poles and melting seen in the Himalayas, Andes and Mount Kilimanjaro — the evidence is irrefutable that further devastation related to global warming will be an ongoing theme.

All considered, I encourage people to help the many people deeply harmed by these recent Asian natural calamities. When doing so, please specify your desired country and cause. (All mentioned above are in great need). Meanwhile, here is a list of organizations specifically providing disaster aid: redcross.org, care.org, unicef.org, oxfam.org and crs.org (Catholic Relief Services).