War Is Peace

Ron Paul, Libertarian Republican from Texas, puts the Democrats to shame in explaining his intention to vote against the bill to "end the war by fully funding it for another year":

Only with the complicity of Congress have we become a nation of pre-emptive war, secret military tribunals, torture, rejection of habeas corpus, warrantless searches, undue government secrecy, extraordinary renditions, and uncontrollable spying on the American people. The greatest danger we face is ourselves: what we are doing in the name of providing security for a people made fearful by distortions of facts. Fighting over there has nothing to do with preserving freedoms here at home. More likely the opposite is true.

Meanwhile, Barbara Lee, Maxine Waters, and other Democrats who intend to vote against the bill are -- bizarrely -- working to help pass it. And Democrat Jim McGovern is typical, saying, "I want this war ended today. If I thought it would help this war ending sooner by voting against the bill, I would vote against it in a heartbeat." But voting for the bill is to vote for the war's continuation, you jerk. The Democrats, elected to power because their nation -- not to mention Iraq -- is sick and tired of the lies and futility of this escapade, should heed the words of John Lewis (thanks to Vermont Snarky Boy for the quote):

Tonight, I must make it plain and clear, that as a human being, as a citizen of the world, as a citizen of America, as a member of Congress, and as an individual committed to a world at peace with itself, I will not and cannot vote for another dollar or another dime to support this war.

Vermonters: our own Peter Welch, after campaigning with a strong anti-war platform -- the only thing that distinguished him from his Republican opponent -- will be voting "aye" along with his leaders. Tell him how sorry you are that he won't be re-elected in 2008.

Note, the Senate version of this war bill does not have the sham "end date," only a nonbinding recommendation. Have Pelosi and Reid orchestrated all this so that reconciliation will fail and the Democrats will then propose a true bill to end the funding? They could point to the fact that Republicans didn't support the "compromise," which she ensured by loading the bill with so much pork to give Republicans a principled reason to oppose it. A stupid game, and an unlikely scenario. As Sharon Smith concludes in Counterpunch:

The Democrats, like the Republicans, are biding time in Iraq, in the hopes of consolidating a long-term U.S. military presence there -- while leaving open the option of attacking Iran as a bargaining chip. Clinton stated recently, "No option can be taken off the table" against Iran's alleged nuclear threat, while presidential rivals John Edwards and Obama echoed, "All options on the table."

Hillary Clinton campaigning to out-stupid Bush

Sharon Smith reports in today's Counterpunch:

After pledging to work toward energy independence at a March 18 mid-Manhattan fundraiser, Clinton told an audience laden with Wall St. financiers that each time she switches off a light bulb in her own home, she mutters, "'Take that, Iran,' and 'Take that, Venezuela.' We should not be sending our money to people who are not going to support our values."

1. The U.S. uses almost no oil to generate electricity, and the little that is used is the sludge left over from refining.

2. The U.S. does not get any oil from Iran.

3. If a country sells us their oil, they are very effectively supporting "our values," since we could not function without it.

4. Our second largest supplier of oil, Saudi Arabia, responded to the 1979 Iranian revolution by funding the extremist Sunni madrasas in Pakistan that bred the Taliban and its support of Al Qaeda. Yet by Clinton's implications, Saudi Arabia -- a backwards repressive monarchy -- supports "our values." Which must mean only that they don't care when we bomb anybody that doesn't jump when the U.S. president says "jump." Or it could be that a backwards repressive monarchy is our ideal as well -- we certainly seem to be heading down that toilet. The U.S. sells them our best bombers and keeps an aircraft carrier or two nearby to help them "support our values." (Our largest oil supplier is Canada. Third is Nigeria, where our values have supported the descent of that country from prosperity to a basket case of inequity and civil unrest.)

5. The values that Hugo Chavez of Venezuela represents are those of democracy -- speaking truth to power, daring to assert one's own voice as equal to that of the president of the United States, daring to assert the value of poor people and non-Europeans as equal to that of the self-anointed self-protective "elites." Those are values that Hilary Clinton -- along with almost everyone in the U.S. -- both lacks and fears. She may be more stupidly cravenly infantile even than George W. Bush himself.

Myth and the Audacity of Reality

Sam Smith has written another superb essay at Progressive Review, excerpted below. Click on the title of this post to read the complete original.

Living as we do in what seems at times a second Middle Ages -- complete with Christian crusades against Islam -- we inevitably find our struggles centered on myths rather than on facts and competing philosophies. For the past quarter century -- ever since we elected the our first fully fictional president, Ronald Reagan, we have bounced from legend to legend increasingly indifferent to their effects or costs until we find ourselves today engaged in a war that we can't afford, nobody wants and nobody knows how to end.

At first, it just seemed like another problem with Republicans, but with the rise of the Vichy Democrats under Bill Clinton, it became clear that our absorption with fantasy had become not only bipartisan but omnicultural. Neither politician nor media, intellectual nor ordinary citizen, appeared all that interested in reality any more. ...

It is hard for reality to hold its own in such an environment and as Americans increasingly became preoccupied with selling and speculating, our collective psyches became ever more removed from substance and our language, our minds and our souls ever more trapped in the syntax, style and morals of the pitch.

It is small wonder that our politics has followed suit. Or that the media has lost interest in lowly facts, preferring instead to deconstruct propaganda, images, semiotics and efforts to manipulate the same -- becoming critics of spin rather than as narrators of reality. ...

... Clinton didn't really campaign for the presidency; he auditioned for it. He proved to the producers and directors that he could play the part.

This shift was in some ways even more dramatic than that which accompanied Reagan. After all, for the better part of a century, the Republicans had traditionally been mired in self-serving myths and Reagan merely took them to a new level. The Democrats and those to their left had been responsible for nearly all the political progress that America had enjoyed. With Clinton that all changed. Neither party was interested in real change any longer. The two parties now got both their money and their politics from the same sources.

And so it has been ever since. No more Jimmy Carter or Michael Dukakis to foul things up. When a wild card like Howard Dean appears, you dump him like Simon Cowell would, complaining of his poor stage presence one lone night in Iowa. If a rejected former auditioner, John Edwards, decides to go his own way, you just turn off the mikes and the lights of the campaign -- aka news coverage -- and reduce the election to the acceptables. A Gene McCarthy–like candidate can't even get off the ground.

Now, instead, we are offered the choice in the GOP of competing heroes -- 9/11 vs. Vietnam -- and in the Democratic Party of competing sociological icons -- woman vs. black. In fact, Giuliani was no hero in 9/11, John McCain has learned little from being one in Vietnam, Hillary Clinton offers nothing to the waitress or the stay-at-home grandmother raising her daughter's kids, and Barack Obama has no plan for the millions of young blacks and latinos deserted for decades by both parties. None among them has a way out of Iraq or misbegotten empire nor a way towards economic decency and social justice. But it doesn't matter, for we are not choosing a president but selecting a myth.

This poses a problem for a journalist. Journalists are supposed to either ignore or expose myth and help the reader find the way back to reality. But once political positions have more in common with evangelical fundamentalism into which one is born again than with philosophical differences that demand logical arguments and defenses, skepticism and exposure become the political equivalent of heresy and invite excommunication.

Although I had written critically of every president since Lyndon Johnson, it wasn't until the Clinton years that I was told -- directly and by inference -- that this was no longer permissible. The Clintons had helped create this climate by inventing the notion that to criticize them made you into a "hater" -- sort of like a Nazi or member of the KKK. ...

The web has contributed to this aura by creating places that are more congregations than sites, internet cathedrals where people go for confirmation rather than information, and where the holy book is the game plan of one candidate or another.

To follow instead where the story leads one, to face the imperfectabilities of the world, to engage in the audacity of reality is just too uncomfortable for many these days.

For journalists, at least, it wasn't always like that. Here, for example, is an except of HL Mencken's coverage of the 1920 convention:

"No one but an idiot could argue seriously that either candidate is a first-rate man, or even a creditable specimen of second-rate man. Any State in the Union, at least above the Potomac, could produce a thousand men quite as good, and many States could produce a thousand a great deal better. Harding, intellectually, seems to be merely a benign blank -- a decent, harmless, laborious hollow-headed mediocrity. . . Cox is quicker of wit, but a good deal less honest. He belongs to the cunning type; there is a touch of the shyster in him. His chicaneries in the matter of prohibition, both during the convention and since, show the kink in his mind. He is willing to do anything to cadge votes, and he includes in that anything the ready sacrifices of his good faith, of the national welfare, and of the hopes and confidence of those who honestly support him. Neither candidate reveals the slightest dignity of conviction. Neither cares a hoot for any discernible principle. Neither, in any intelligible sense, is a man of honor." ...

... Try to think of a single contemporary establishment newspaper that would publish HL Mencken today and you can sense the problem.

It's much like the Iraq war. No matter how bad or stupid it is, we must still support the troops by letting them get killed there another year or whatever. We are not allowed to say that the administration, the Washington establishment and the media have failed us as has happened seldom before. ...

I come from a school of journalism that said, to the contrary, that if you didn't report the parking tickets you should turn in your press pass. What people did with the information was their business; reporting it was yours.

I also can remember a liberalism that assumed every good Democrat was fighting a two-front war: against the GOP on one hand and against the SOBs in the Democratic Party on the other. I suspect many of today's liberal mythmakers would have wanted us to adapt to Carmine DeSapio, Richard Daley, Strom Thurmond and George Wallace in the interest of beating the Republicans and maintaining party unity. But the funny thing is that the party was stronger back when it lacked such phony unity.

Fundamentalism in religion or politics comes to no good end because life always contradicts itself. ... Just when you think you're among the faithful, someone betrays you.

Similarly, when you walk into the voting booth, artificially implanted illusions, false faith and naive hope won't do you any good. It is far better to take some reality along, even if you have to take a barf bag as well. To be sure, you won't have the exhilaration of delusional faith but you will be one more voter who knows how the magic really works, and when you know that the magic will no longer fool you and yours will be one more ballot cast for the real.

In the end, no matter who are our leaders are, we, at best, come in second place next to their own interests. Knowing this and why -- and not pretending otherwise -- may not be the meat of myth, but it is certainly at the core of our survival.

Forest dwellers of India losing their land to wind energy development

Add the Adavasis of India to the Zapotecas of Mexico, the Aborigines of Australia, and the Maori of New Zealand (not to mention rural and remote communities everywhere) on the list of indigenous peoples whose land and heritage is being taken by giant energy companies for the questionable fad of industrial wind energy (or rather the carbon credits they "generate" despite not producing useful energy that can actually displace other sources).

See the March 18 story from The Hindu at National Wind Watch:

Adivasis [forest-dwelling indigenous people] in Dhule district, Maharashtra, are protesting the diversion of forest land for wind power projects. About 340 hectares of forest land has been diverted for wind energy projects in Sakri taluka of Dhule district, promoted by Suzlon Energy Limited.

With the passing of the Scheduled Tribes and Other Traditional Forest Dwellers (Recognition of Forest Rights) Act 2006, adivasis in Dhule as in other parts of the country were hopeful that the land they were tilling for years would be regularised in their names. In 1982, the first petition on regularising forest land in the name of adivasis was filed from Dhule by Karan Singh Kokani in the Supreme Court. Today Karan Singh, secretary of the Satyashodhak Gramin Kashtakari Sabha, says instead of giving adivasis the land, the government has allotted it to a private company. ...

A related piece by Praveen Bhargav about the destruction wrought in the name of clean energy was published in the March 14 Central Chronicle (also available at National Wind Watch):

Today, habitat fragmentation and its consequent 'edge effects' have been scientifically recognised as the primary cause for the destruction of biodiversity rich forests.

Yet, we continue to persist with a myopic, short-term exploitation perspective, which fails to recognise the immense and diverse long-term value of biodiversity rich landscapes.

In the absence of a clear land use policy, many development projects are pushed through without proper scrutiny. While projects like big dams and mining are more carefully scrutinised, those branded as 'clean and green' sneak in through the approval process. They then infiltrate into ecologically fragile landscapes and cause huge negative impacts. Environment Impact Assessments (EIAs) though mandatory, lack teeth. They are further reduced to a farce by EIA consultants who masquerade as environmentalists. The reports they rustle up are bereft of data. So projects get approved without proper analysis of their impacts. ...

wind power, wind energy, wind farms, environment, environmentalism, anarchism, anarchosyndicalism, human rights

Oaxacans oppose taking their land for wind energy

The first bulletin below describes the taking of community farm land in Oaxaca for a giant wind project to benefit the Spanish energy company Iberdrola. Spain will claim the resulting production as a reduction of its own carbon dioxide emissions. The second bulletin describes the wider situation of harassment and violence, under cover of which the industrial wind energy projects are being pushed. A 3 March news report of this opposition as well as the serious threat to migrating birds is available at wind-watch.org.

UCIZONI -- La Unión de Comunidades Indígenas de la Zona Norte del Istmo (Union of Indigenous Communities of the Northern Zone of the Isthmus) -- is a group of 84 communities and neighborhoods in 9 counties of the state of Oaxaca in the Isthmus of Tehuantepec. Ejidatarios are the people who communally farm ejidos, former private lands that are now owned by the federal government. The original Spanish versions of these bulletins are available at iberica2000.org.

UCIZONI press bulletin no. 8 -- 28 February 2007

The execution of the wind energy project La Venta II, that has begun in La Venta, Juchitán, Oaxaca, has meant a true plundering of the land for the ejidatarios of that region. Although the Mexican Government was required to inform and to consult the population affected by massive investment projects, until now it has refused this right to the ejidatarios and indigenous neighbors.

For more than two years the farmers faced harassment and deceptive offers. Nevertheless, the resistance of the community was broken down when ministerial police threatened to jail the Ejidos Committee President Rafael Solorzano Ordaz, to whom they dishonestly imputed responsibility in several crimes, forcing him to resign his position. They then installed in his place PRI [Partido Revolucionario Institucional (the party that dominated Mexico through most of the 20th century)] member Carlos Antonio Ordaz.

With the intervention of the Commissariat and base threats and lies, dozens of ejidatarios have signed predatory rental contracts that favor the Federal Commission of Electricity [CFE]. These contracts, which were signed before a Notary Public but copies of which have not been delivered to the ejidatarios, are a true plundering: they cover a period of 30 years and commit the farmers to surrender their land for an average annual payment of 12,500 pesos [850 euros or 1,100 dollars] per hectare [2.5 acres] where an aerogenerator tower is erected.

Nevertheless, in spite of the pressures and deceits, the contracted land comprises only 40% of that originally required by the project that has gone forward with an investment of more than 110 million dollars from the transnational Iberdrola. Dozens of ejidatarios have resisted and as yet have not rented their land.

On the other hand, in an illegal assembly last year, which was plagued by irregularities and to which corrupt employees of the Agrarian Attorney's office made sure only a minimum number of ejidatarios attended -- the Ejidos Commission ceded common lands for the CFE to use as operation bases.

This cession was not approved by most of the ejidatarios and caused a large group of farmers on 3 April 2006 to occupy one estate, demanding the return of five hectares [12 acres] that were given to the CFE and payment for the damages caused by the clearings already done in the area.

Before this mobilization, the CFE promoted criminal action against the ejidatarios of La Venta by agents of the Federal Public Ministry of Matías Romero and of Mexico City for the supposed crime of impeding the execution of public works.

By unofficial means we have learned that a federal judge of Mexico City has decided to pursue criminal action against the uncooperative ejidatarios and is preparing at this moment an operation of the Federal Preventative Police to evict the ejidatarios who have formed the "3 April Colony" on the estate that the CFE had tried to take over illegally.

With this serious situation, we make an urgent call to national, state, and international organizations to offer necessary solidarity to the ejidatarios of La Venta, Juchitán, Oaxaca, and we demand the Interior Secretary to halt the repressive operation against the indigenous farmers who face the massive plundering already seen from the CFE to benefit transnational companies.

UCIZONI press bulletin no. 7 -- 27 February 2007

Ramiro Roque Figueroa, UCIZONI representative in the community of Niza Conejo, El Barrio de la Soledad, was stopped with excessive violence by elements of the ministerial police on 22 February, accused of aggravated assault of a city council employee. At the time of his arrest, the police tried to plant a weapon on him and they indicated to him that his detention was the result of his participation in the mobilizations organized by the APPO [Assemblea Popular del Pueblo de Oaxaca, Popular Assembly of the People of Oaxaca].

The head of the Lower Court based in Matías Romero, Oaxaca, judge Modesto Isaías Santiago Martinez, acting in complicity with the PRI authorities of the municipality of Barrio de la Soledad, had issued an arrest warrant against Ramiro Roque in Penal Docket 21/2007, imputing his responsibility in a crime he did not commit.

In the afternoon of 24 February, ministerial police assigned to the Deputy Attorney General in Tehuantepec appeared in an aggressive way at the address of Moisés Trujillo Ruiz, leader of UCIZONI in La Ventosa, Juchitán, who they tried to detain in an act of continuing intimidation as promoted by Porfirio Montero, the old cacique of the place, who arranged a meeting at the end of the last year between evangelical leaders and Ulises Ruiz [the PRI governor of Oaxaca whose violent police action in June 2006 against the annual Oaxacan teachers strike created the APPO and its actions referred to above], where the governor indicated publicly that he was keeping his job by divine will.

To these repressive acts that are part of the intimidation campaign by the police corps of the state of Oaxaca, add the military operations through all of the Isthmus of Tehuantepec, where even red berets from the Army's GAFE [elite U.S.-trained airborne special forces groups] have participated: thus at enormous cost they have been unconstitutionally arresting anyone they consider suspicious.

UCIZONI mobilized the next week in Matías Romero and Tehuantepec to demand an end to harassment and the dismissal of judge Modesto Isaías Santiago as well as of deputy attorney general María del Carmen Chiñas.

Also, a large contingent of UCIZONI women participated in the 8 March demonstration called by APPO, where they demanded freedom for the political prisoners, the end of violence against women, and the dismissal of Ulises Ruiz Ortiz, the person directly responsible for the climate of violence and confrontation that is life in Oaxaca.

wind power, wind energy, wind farms, environment, environmentalism, anarchism, anarchosyndicalism, human rights

New Zealanders not excited about more wind turbines

Two recent articles by Helen Harvey in the Manawatu Standard, via National Wind Watch:

Turbine 'desecration' under fire

Maori have attacked plans for more wind turbines in the Tararua Ranges, saying turbines are weakening the mauri (life force) and mana of the hill tops.

He Kupenga Hao i te Reo (Inc) secretary Ian Christensen objected to the proposed Motorimu Wind Farm at the resource consent hearing in Palmerston North yesterday. It proposes 127 turbines for the hills behind Tokomaru and Linton.

He told the three commissioners that the Tararua ridge line had enough turbines and "further desecration of the ridgeline" with more would weaken mauri to a point where the "wellbeing of people would be in jeopardy".

"Manawatu has been desecrated by the pollution of human beings. We urge that the whole of the mountain range not be desecrated as well," he said. ...

Turbines 'intrusive'

A Massey University survey shows that 80 percent of people in Manawatu who live within 3km of wind turbines find them intrusive.

And 73 percent think the turbines are unattractive. ...

[Robyn] Phipps [who led the survey] was due to give evidence and present the report last night at the resource consent hearing into Motorimu Wind Farm Ltd's application to build a 127-turbine wind farm on the Tararua Ranges.

"[The survey results] could reflect the reality of living with wind turbines as opposed to the ideology of renewable energy." ...

wind power, wind energy, wind farms, environment, environmentalism, human rights

What We See in Hugo Chávez

From Luisa Valenzuela, writing in the New York Times (of all places!), Mar. 17:

The new vocabulary transcends distinctions of class: the middle classes have now merged with the poor to demand their rights. Hence many students and professionals were in attendance that day, not necessarily attracted by the figure of President Chávez himself so much as by the anti-imperialist opportunity he symbolized. We Argentines, who once imagined ourselves more sophisticated, or more European, than the citizens of neighboring states, were brought closer to the rest of the continent by our impoverishment, and we find ourselves more open to the idea of pan–Latin American solidarity.

Perhaps last week's crowd also recognized the part that President Chávez's monetary aid played in our recuperation of that illusion known as "national identity." For Argentina had virtually disappeared as an autonomous country during the presidency of Carlos Menem from 1989 to 1999, the era of our "carnal relations" with the United States, which took the form of spurious privatizations and a fictitious exchange rate.

While many in Argentina would, nevertheless, not hesitate to call the Venezuelan president a clown or a madman, it's worth keeping in mind that a very heady dose of megalomania is a prerequisite for even dreaming of confronting a rival as overwhelmingly powerful as the United States -- which is also led by a president viewed, in many quarters, as a clown and a madman.