Red State Rebels is a collection of essays about a broad cross-section of activists, malcontents, and nonconformists living in what coastal liberals too often write off as “flyover country.” As editors Jeffrey St. Clair and Joshua Frank write in their introduction, “This book offers just a few snapshots of the grassroots resistance taking place in the forgotten heartland of America. These are tales of rebellion and courage. Out here activism isn’t for the faint of heart. Be thankful someone is willing to do the dirty work.”

This resistance should inspire readers to think about how to take important stands right now, wherever they are.

St. Clair, a veteran radical journalist and the co-editor of the online and print journal Counterpunch, is represented in each of the book’s five sections on different regions of the country: “Flatlanders,” “Mountain Folk,” “Desert Rats,” “Indian Country,” and “Southlanders.” (There is also a “Coda” on secessionist movements by Kirkpatrick Sale.) A few of St. Clair’s beautifully written pieces also appear in his excellent new book Born Under a Bad Sky, with good reason, given how much overlooked or suppressed information he packs into his reportage. An early, and too often unheeded, critic of the Clinton Administration’s pro-corporate environmental record, St. Clair’s position on the mining and logging industries can perhaps best be summed up by a 1994 quote from Sierra Club co-founder (and St. Clair mentor) David Brower which begins a chapter on the Wilderness Society’s collusion with multinational timber companies in Idaho:

Every time I’ve compromised, I’ve lost. When I held firm I won. The problem with too many environmentalists today is that they are trying to write the compromise instead of letting those we pay to compromise do it. They think they get power by taking people to lunch or being taken to lunch, when in reality they are only being taken.

Frank writes about environmental struggles in Colorado and Montana, and interviews southern writer/activist Joe Bageant and indigenous provocateur/dissident academic Ward Churchill.

In addition to St. Clair and Frank, the other authors comprise a broad spectrum of voices not featured in the typical exchanges of conventional wisdom by well-to-do white men on CNN.

Like several other contributors, Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz (author of the compelling memoir Red Dirt: Growing Up Okie) argues against standard demographic divides popularly used to delineate conservative and liberal states. Calling herself a “recovering Southern Baptist,” Dunbar-Ortiz argues for a renewed left political focus on small farming and non-exploitative land use:

embracing the agrarian question changes our perspective on historical issues, such as our understanding of settler-colonialism as the basis of forming capitalism in the United States, as the basis for genocide.

Dunbar-Ortiz also rightly notes that “the so-called immigration issue (…) is, after all, an agrarian question.” The entry of U.S.-subsidized corn and other produce into their country via the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), Bill Clinton’s gift to this continent’s largest corporations, has made it much harder for Mexico’s small farmers to survive. Not surprisingly, many come to the U.S. any way they can to do back-breaking work for sub-minimum wages. Dispatches from both sides of the U.S.-Mexico border show some of the human costs of this desperate migration of workers. An Arizona public defender tells writers Eric Ruder and Justin Akers Chacon, “once in court, the ‘criminal alien’ is not a person, but a commodity,” and describes two migrant clients who were healthy when arrested but died in prison. This situation has not only created massive profits for labor-exploiting agribusinesses: Lockheed, Northrop-Grumman, and Raytheon are competing for a $2.5 billion contract to create a state of the art militarized border fence.

St. Clair is keenly aware of the ecological toll exacted by the U.S. military. He writes, “the day to day operations of the military-industrial complex itself – weapons production and testing – amount to the most toxic industry on the planet, as a trip to the poisoned wastelands of Hanford, Fallon, Nevada, or Rocky Flats will readily reveal.” The book looks at a variety of grassroots anti-war actions, from the progressive lawyer Bill Quigley’s account of nonviolent civil disobedience committed by the “Weapons of Mass Destruction Here Plowshares” group at an intercontinental nuclear missile launching facility in North Dakota to reporting on Iraq war protests less likely to draw prison time in Alabama and Kentucky.

At the San Francisco book launch for Red State Rebels, widely respected Bay Area housing rights activist James Tracy called this collection “one of the most important books of the past two years.” Tracy argued that chief among its lessons were that “the Democrats ain’t going to save us.”

Indeed, the voices in the book call out for engagement on many fronts, and to stop thinking about politics as a spectator sport which inevitably involves cheering major party candidates from the bleachers and then going home to hope for the best. The book’s account of two activists who spearheaded a campaign which eventually led the huge company Newmont Mining to abandon plans to mine for gold in Oregon is just one example of what determined people can achieve. Another is Jordan Flaherty’s chapter on New Orleans Katrina survivors sick of abandonment by the Federal Government organizing to stand up for their rights.

Tracy is right to emphasize the importance of this book, for all the voices here need to be heard. And, obviously, time is tight. Settling for equivocation and platitudes from politicians won’t cut it. Western Shoshone elder Carie Dann hits the nail on the head when she writes, in one of this volume’s most powerful essays, “I remember one time my grandmother said to me, ‘Hey, you’re not that important. It’s the future generation you have to think about. You have to think about the babies that are not here yet.’”

The piece quoted Ambassador Zalmay Khalizad of the United States, who charged that the Russian foreign minister had told Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice “that the democratically elected president of Georgia ‘must go.’” Khalizad described the Russian’s comment as “completely unacceptable.”

Of course, Washington’s posturing as a beacon of peace and freedom has become increasingly more ludicrous as wars in Iraq and Afghanistan continue with no end in sight and Bush explains that we do not torture while testimony to the contrary accumulates around the globe. But the U.S. role in supporting the February 29, 2004 rightist coup in Haiti makes the hypocrisy of Khalizad’s statement especially galling.

The Bush Administration made it clear that Haiti’s democratically-elected president Jean-Bertrand Aristide had to go, then flew him to the Central African Republic under U.S. Marine Guard (as detailed in Randall Robinson’s excellent book An Unbroken Agony) as a brutal right-wing military takeover seized Aristide’s homeland. The coup government, UN forces, and anti-Aristide paramilitaries killed around 4,000 people in the next two years, according to a study published in the prestigious British medical journal The Lancet.

Among the many pro-Aristide activists who were forced into exile was the grassroots leader Lovinsky Pierre-Antoine. Lovinsky, a key figure in the Port-au-Prince base of Aristide’s Lavalas movement, returned to Haiti during the apparent democratic opening after the 2006 election of President Rene Preval.

I saw Lovinsky speak in July 2007 at a demonstration across from the headquarters of MINUSTAH, the UN mission in Haiti. The occasion was the anniversary of the 1915 U.S. marine takeover of the island nation. Lovinsky led a spirited crowd of around 50 Haitians, many elderly. The psychologist-turned-activist forcefully read out a bill of indictment against the UN: MINUSTAH’s legitimizing the 2004 coup by replacing the initial wave of U.S., French, and Canadian troops, and propping up an illegal government; UN troops engaging in massacres of unarmed civilians; and carrying out a modern-day colonial occupation of Haiti. As a few reporters and activists taped audio or shot video of this fiery speech, across Ave. John Brown at the UN entrance a mix of uniformed and plainclothes military representing a handful of the countries participating in MINUSTAH clicked away on digital cameras pointed at Lovinsky. This seemed a tactic of intimidation, given the close operations the UN has conducted with the notoriously brutal Haitian police (as documented in reports from Harvard Law School and the University of Miami Law School). A few weeks later, Lovinsky was abducted after meeting with a human rights delegation from the U.S. He hasn’t been heard from since.

August 12 was the one year anniversary of Lovinsky’s disappearance. I walked with a sinking feeling to the demonstration commemorating the sad day. It was hard to believe such an impressive, committed figure had been missing for an entire year. Between 150 and 200 demonstrators, many wearing t-shirts bearing Lovinsky’s likeness, marched in a circle around the statue of a man holding aloft a dove in the center of the Plaza of the Martyrs. Aristide built the monument in memory of the thousands killed in the first (U.S.-backed) coup against him of 1991-1994.

Lavalas activist Rene Civil, imprisoned on trumped-up charges in 2006 but freed under a conditional release after an international campaign on his behalf, addressed the crowd. He said that Lovinsky’s disappearance was a threat to Lavalas supporters, intended to stop them from struggling for Aristide’s return.

As the demonstration wound through downtown Port-au-Prince, several police vehicles followed. Police had already blocked off streets near the Plaza of Martyrs, which protest organizers claimed was done to discourage more people from participating. The police presence as the march ended in front of the National Palace was low-key, but a jeep with six heavily armed Brazilian troops was a bit more hostile. I took photos of them as one of them photographed me.

The next day I returned to the Palace of the Martyrs, where the September 30th Foundation, a group co-founded by Lovinsky to support reparations and justice for victims of the 1991 coup, holds a protest at 11am every Wednesday. Since their leader (one member told me, “we see Lovinsky as a father and a brother”) has been abducted the primary focus of the weekly action has been calling for the safe return of Lovinsky.

Edwidge (for her safety, a pseudonym), a woman participating in the protest, told me “Lovinsky used to help us. All the time we’re hungry, now we have no one.” She continued, “Lovinsky was not a criminal. We know when the wealthy are kidnapped the government does everything it can to recover the victim. Lovinsky is not a dog, not an animal. He deserves the same treatment as the wealthy people. Give us a report. If he’s dead, give us the bones and we’ll bury him.”

Many of his supporters hold out hope that their sorely-missed friend is alive. The forty present at the Wednesday protest sang political lyrics set to traditional evangelical tunes (and, in at least one instance, a vodou song). One roughly translated as “The victims are asking for the key/ give us the key so we can open the door of justice/ who are we asking for? Lovinsky!”

In an interview later that day, human rights lawyer Mario Joseph of the Bureau des Avocats Internationaux (BAI) told me that in some ways the current Preval Administration is “worse than the interim [coup] government.” Joseph said he told the Haitian ambassador in Washington, “your government needs to launch an investigation … [but] on Lovinsky, they don’t want to do anything.” Joseph argues, “The Preval government continues the policies of the Latortue [coup] government,” and says most of those now in power are holdovers from the illegal 2004-2006 government.

(A Lavalas activist who has worked with Aristide since 1984 and who was diplomatic about Preval, told me, “on the social and economic plane, we can work with him.” But this member of the National Cell for the Reflection of the Grassroots, who was beaten so badly he had to be hospitalized in prison under the 2004-2006 regime, said all “ministers, ambassadors, and delegates” left over from the coup period are “criminals” who should be fired.)

Joseph’s family has had to relocate to Miami because of death threats. Noting that human rights abusers he helped put behind bars under Aristide had escaped prison after 2004, the lawyer said, “They need to arrest people escaped from jail. My life is in danger.”

Meanwhile, Joseph remains extremely busy defending prisoners, some of whom have been moved to outlying regions he has a hard time getting to. Of the political prisoners still behind bars, he said, “I have too much work to do, it’s hard to keep track,” but that there “were more than 100.” Most high profile Lavalas figures have been freed but many less well-known progressive activists remain locked down. Joseph explained, they “had contact with the Lavalas movement, that’s why they’re in jail.” Some think the number of political prisoners is higher, given the many poor people picked up in sweeps of “popular,” or pro-Lavalas, neighborhoods. (The majority of inmates in the country’s overcrowded prisons have still not seen a judge, though the Haitian constitution stipulates that all prisoners must have access to a judge within 48 hours of their arrest.) Joseph stressed the “really vague” nature of charges made in such sweeps. “They accused kids of being gang members, bandits, and of ‘association with malefactors,’ the same techniques as under [former dictator] Duvalier.”

Joseph filed a rape complaint against Sri Lankan soldiers accused of sexually abusing Haitian girls, but there was no prosecution. The Sri Lankans were shipped home. To add insult to injury, the UN presence has had a harshly inflationary effect on rents and other basic expenses. UN SUVs are in evidence throughout exclusive Port-au-Prince gated communities, but UN money doesn’t trickle down to many of the country’s poor majority, who are having a harder and harder time surviving. Several street vendors perched in a heavily flooded corner of an outdoor market in the city’s Lasaline neighborhood told me the cost of a cup of rice had doubled since the capital’s food riots of April. The vendors could no longer save anything, and had no idea how they were going to scrape together enough to pay school fees for their kids in September. In the stagnant water at their feet parasites were visible. A health care worker later confirmed a huge number of kids have worms in their bodies.

Subtitled A Secret History of the City, this collection of material from the low-budget zines “Scam” and “Turd-Filled Donut” covers Erick Lyle’s life as a grassroots musician and activist during the final years of the 20th and opening years of the 21st centuries. Lyle was a teenager in South Florida when he read about Northern California direct action protests to save the redwoods. After his best friend returned from 1992 pro-indigenous/anti-Columbus Day protests in San Francisco, young Erick, using the moniker Iggy Scam, made his way North to investigate the dissident rumblings on the Left Coast.

Lyle train hopped far and wide, posting dispatches from New Orleans, Chattanooga, Tennessee (where he helped a friend through the agonizing initial days of heroin withdrawal), and other cities. But Lyle’s focus is mainly on street level homeless advocacy and guerrilla rock and roll in San Francisco.

I was glad to witness several of the “generator shows” which Lyle writes about taking part in. During the late 1990s and early aughts, I worked in an office directly above San Francisco’s 16th and Mission BART (Bay Area Rapid Transit) station where many of these impromptu, permit-less concerts took place. The generator was portable, and powered amplifiers which could be packed and unpacked quickly.

After too many hours in front of a computer screen, it was indeed a treat to hoof down to the BART “plaza” to enjoy various ensembles of ragged, cacophonous youngsters bashing on guitars and drums for a cross-section of less than well-heeled San Franciscans.

Many people I spoke to in these crowds speculated that the S.F. police let the shows continue without interference because they disrupted the open-air heroin supermarket which is the distinguishing feature of the intersection. Whatever the reason for the authorities’ kid gloves treatment, the up from the gutter abandon of the ad-hoc concerts was a true kick, and not just for dropout punk kids. The neighborhood’s majority Latino population was also well represented in the audiences, and many were clearly entertained.

Lyle’s sense of civic responsibility extends well beyond just helping fellow noisemakers challenge the eardrums and musical sensibilities of hordes of pedestrians and stray junkies, however. In an interview included here with Paul Boden, co-founder of the S.F.-based Coalition on Homelessness, Boden tells Lyle that in founding the paper Street Sheet, which homeless vendors are given free and sell for a dollar, the Coalition helped put several million bucks into homeless people’s pockets. Boden exults, “I don’t know too many non-profits that can make that claim!”

Lyle and his friends worked for other successes on the Street Sheet model — directly helping poor people, bypassing bloated bureaucracies and the managerial classes. They achieved a short-lived victory by putting together a cafe that fed hundreds of people without charge and encouraged the creation of political art. Unfortunately for its patrons, the café, like many of the spaces lovingly described in this book, is in a squatted building which becomes suddenly more valuable during San Francisco’s late ’90s gentrification.

The Turd-Filled Donut (TFD) was distributed (by unsalaried editors) via commandeered newspaper boxes. Among other items, the TFD ran hilarious riffs parodying the venerable 20th century S.F. columnist Herb Caen, bylined “Turd Caen.” It existed to inform and entertain, and to challenge the pro-growth, pro-development politics of its mainstream rival the San Francisco Examiner. From the evidence presented here, the scrappy little paper succeeded on all fronts.

Lyle describes a hilarious meeting at Examiner offices where TFD staffers confront their button-down counterparts, asking for evidence supporting the paper’s claim that crime had increased in the immediate neighborhood. When the Examiner employees fail to do so, Lyle’s crew presents internal SF police memos (gleaned through a Freedom of Information Act request) showing that no increase in crime has occurred in the area in question.

Scoring another victory for seat-of-the-pants investigative journalism, a TFD reporter succeeded in getting in to a PR-designed question and answer session with notoriously aloof mayor Willie Brown. The TFD correspondent asked Brown tough questions collected in advance from poor residents of various welfare hotels, and Brown actually concluded by saying, on the record, “I say to people who are poverty-stricken, I know how much you love San Francisco, but, because of the nature of cost of living here, you are better off being poverty-stricken where the cost of living is not so great.”

One of my favorite comedic bits in this frequently hilarious collection is the two page entry called “Scam Punks vs. Starbucks.” Lyle describes printing up thousands of fake coupons for free cups of Starbucks coffee, then distributing them for hours in San Francisco’s financial district with a few friends. The day ends with a hysterical Starbucks rep unsuccessfully attempting to make a citizen’s arrest of a quickly exiting pal of Lyle’s.

On the Lower Frequencies is as sprawling and digression-packed as a thick novel you can’t put down. It’s fitting that Hubert Selby is name-checked, as Lyle shares Selby’s commendable empathy for society’s outcasts, not excluding criminal elements. When people think of Selby’s writing, they usually forget something else Lyle shares with the author of Last Exit to Brooklyn: a decidedly bent sense of humor.

Lyle’s writes movingly of how miserable and powerless he felt after the world-wide anti-war actions he participated in during late 2002 and early 2003 failed to stop the Bush regime from invading Iraq. Didn’t we all. But while, like all of us, Lyle and his comrades make mistakes, they continue to work at keeping dissent alive in the age of the so-called “war on terror.”

And at his best, Lyle maintains that persistence with a nice sense of perspective, as when he confesses: “I certainly don’t want to have all the answers. There’s no literature in it, no mystery.”

John Cusack, who co-wrote the screenplay and co-produced, plays Brand Hauser, a go it alone hitman we first see doing dirty work in the klondike to the strains of an Ennio Morricone-like guitar. Next, Hauser is talking to the former U.S. Vice President (Dan Ackroyd doing a dead-on rip of Dick Cheney), who heads a company called Tamerlane. The VP gives Hauser a contract to bump off a Middle Eastern oil minister who wants to build a pipeline through war-torn Turaqistan. In addition to controlling Turaqistan’s oil, Tamerlane is scheming to profit from construction, for “now that we’ve bombed the shit out of them, well — there’s lot of rebuilding to do.” Sound vaguely familiar?

Soon Hauser is directing a “Brand USA” trade expo in Turaqistan, in the midst of “the first war ever to be 100% outsourced to private enterprise : Tamerlane jets, Tamerlane tanks, Tamerlane soldiers.” As he attempts to smooth talk a feisty left-wing journalist (played by Marisa Tomei), Hauser responds to an explosion outside his window by saying, “I wouldn’t call that an attack,” though he admits, “technically, that was a bombing.” Such Orwellian spin control might have been torn from the pages of Bush Administration press briefings.

The movie has a lot to say about the insanely oversaturated media environments in which we all live, and the dehumanizing effects of advertising. A subplot involving Yonica Babyyeah (Hilary Duff), a Eurasian teen pop star whose hyper-sexual public persona has left her completely alienated, hits home on sexist global entertainment packaging of young women.

A journalist friend who has spent time in the Middle East commented that touchstones of investigative reporting like Naomi Klein’s The Shock Doctrine and Jeremy Scahill’s Blackwater document much of what is portrayed in War, Inc., and make even the more frenzied moments seem sadly plausible. Indeed, in a recent interview Scahill commented that the film had “better reportage than a lot of what we see in the corporate media.”

Though the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan aren’t “100% outsourced,” the film’s comedic exaggeration effectively spotlights the staggering number of contract warriors doing dirty work for Uncle Sam. And the neoconservative gospel of privatization, which Klein dissects in her work, continues to ripoff U.S. taxpayers: the Halliburton-linked contractor Kellogg, Brown and Root, called “Root, Branch and Blossom” in the film, recently
made news for its inability to account for over $1 billion in Iraq contracts.

As in the earlier Grosse Pointe Blank, John Cusack’s real-life sister Joan plays assistant to his hitman, anti-hero lead. That 1997 feature also had at its core a snappy, subversive critique of the status quo, including the tendency to justify murder when it becomes expedient for foreign policy and corporate profiteering. If such former staples of movie addiction were still available, a double feature of the two films would be ideal. I would happily watch both again just to catch some of the one-liners that whizzed by while I was still laughing at previous jokes.

John Cusack handily summed up the film’s appeal in a recent interview: “I think subversion and throwing bricks at the right sort of people is supposed to feel good. So I think it reclaims a spirit of resistance and a spirit of defiance that I think is the first step towards action, because I think a lot of us are sort of depressed about all this.”

A former policy analyst with the U.S. progressive think tank Food First, Patel spent years pulling together the research marshalled in this book. He shows how giant companies like Cargill and Archer Daniels Midland helped push policies which created an enormous surplus of corn, which ADM and others then turned into high fructose corn syrup, one of the key contributors to the obesity epidemic now plaguing the U.S. Today, that corn surplus is feeding government-subidized ethanol, which takes more energy to produce than it releases and produces more CO2 than it saves.

Along with tracking the rise of global food conglomerates, Patel introduces us to peasants and poor farmers confronting those giant corporations. Some of the best sections in the book are Patel’s reporting on the landless peasant movement (MST) in Brazil and on poor farmers in India connected to the international Via Campesina network.

Patel zeros in on the crux of global food conflicts when he quotes the daughter of the founder of a farmers group in Karnataka, India. She tells him, “All we want is a fair price. We’re not asking for anything more. My father called it a “scientific” price — a price that includes the cost of growing, the costs of labour, the cost of land. Nothing more.”

Another Karnataka farmer tells Patel, “Our message is this to the world: we the farmers need to stand on our own two legs. We don’t want financial assistance, we know how to do this with our own resources. We don’t want to be dependent on the WTO, the IMF (International Monetary Fund), the World Bank. What they give, they give to spoil us. We’re not beggars, we’re creators. We have self-respect and we can be self-reliant. We can control our own resources.”

A farmer in Haryana state responded to Monsanto’s request that he grow gentically modified (GMO) crops by saying, “It’s not good for the farm, for the environment, for human life; I’m happy to see it burn.” Given that in most cases other avenues of resistance have either been blocked or exhausted, increasing numbers of farmers around the world are taking the route of the Indian farmers’ association which in 1998 launched “Operation Cremate Monsanto” and burned GMO crops.

Frustration with low yields and decreased productivity brought on by GMO crops have led to suicides of Indian farmers, most of whom took their lives by eating pesticides provided by agents of global agribusiness. Patel connects this tragic development to the wave of farmer suicides which began among U.S. farmers, especially black farmers, in the 1980s. Not coincidentally, that trend began when “Big Agra”, with the help of taxpayer subsidies, was taking over markets that used to sustain small farmers.

Patel’s avoids the obfuscation which too often plagues mainstream analysis of these issues. On GMO food he writes: “The technology presents itself as a feel-good solution for politicians who’d rather not face the more profound, persistent and difficult questions of politics and distribution. […] The plain fact is that the majority of children in the Global South suffer and die not because there is insufficient food, or because beta-carotene is nationally lacking. They are malnourished and undernourished because all their parents can afford to feed them is rice.”

He continues, “It is absurd to ask a crop to solve the problems of income and food distribution, of course. But since that is precisely the root cause of vitamin A deficiency, the danger of crops such as [the genetically modified] Golden Rice is not merely that they are ineffective publicity stunts. They actively prevent the serious discussion of ways to tackle systemic poverty.”

Patel’s book is a call to go beyond “ethical shopping.” In a recent interview, Patel argued, “People do need to get their hands dirty by getting involved in social change. There is a particularly American fantasy that we can together create a better world by shopping. It’s absolutely a case of thinking we can go to Whole Foods, choose the right thing, shop here, pay for this and all of a sudden we will lift the righteous above the impure.”

In the U.S., the political activism Patel was referring to will have to involve more than simply replacing Republicans with Democrats. The Democratic Party played a key role in pushing a new Farm Bill through the U.S. Congress which will continue disastrous policies of deregulation and massive subsidies for ecologically and socially destructive mega-farms.

The first step in moving beyond the disastrous status quo which Patel describes is to counter the propaganda that says it is not only acceptable, but necessary. Patel’s Stuffed and Starved is a crucial tool for that work.

I was alerted to the film via a rave New York Times review in which A.O. Scott described director Alex Rivera “showing some of the manic inventiveness of Richard Kelly’s ‘Southland Tales,’ but with a hundred times more intellectual clarity and storytelling discipline.” I’d forgotten that line until going back to look at the Times plug, but bits of Kelly’s wildly entertaining film did pop into my mind while watching Sleep Dealer. Both movies are characterized by impressively zippy visuals and caustic social commentary which evokes the bleak dystopian vision of sci-fi writer Philip K. Dick.

Unfortunately, as director Rivera noted in a post-screening Q & A session at the film festival, what started out as satire when he began writing the film (co-written with David Riker, writer/director of La Ciudad, an excellent 1998 indie film about Latino immigrants struggling in New York City) in 2000 has moved much closer to documentary realism. Though there are currently no sweatshops in Mexico where workers plug in via surgically implanted “nodes” to manipulate U.S.-based robots, Rivera, who paced wildly around the stage as festival director Graham Leggat stood stock still near his orbit, pointed out that ubiquitous call centers in India and elsewhere show how far corporations have gone in developing cross-border “outsourcing” to avoid paying unionized workers. Bomber drones in Afghanistan and Iraq remotely piloted by stateside U.S. soldiers provided inspiration for the film’s depiction of U.S. military remote-control aerial assaults on peasants branded “aqua terrorists.”

In response to an impressed viewer who said “the Zapatistas would love this film,” Rivera explained that he was profoundly influenced by “Zapatista thought.” Most particularly, Rivera’s film clearly supports the radical indigenous Mexican movement’s vision of “globalization from below” to counter depradations of global capitalism, ending on a militant note of resistance rare in commercial cinema.

At a time when low-budget Hollywood movies routinely cost tens of millions of dollars, the film’s $2 million budget meant that overpriced computer graphics were not an option for the special effects. Cinematographer Liza Renzler, who also shot the visually arresting Menace II Society, collaborated with Rivera on some ingenous creative ways to circumvent lack of money (among them, filming overhead shots of a small Mexican town using a motorized hang glider). Rivera, whose father is from Peru, explained that he used a Latino “pastiche esthetic,” cobbling together a wide variety of available visual materials, from actual U.S. military footage to images from his own experimental short films. In response to a question from Leggat about the influence of San Francisco radical filmmaker Craig Baldwin, Rivera said, “I don’t know if he’s here in person, but he’s here in spirit.” Baldwin’s found film and video collage narratives include the hilarious oddball sci-fi opus Spectres of the Spectrum; his new mash-up/send up Mock Up On Mu which takes on the military, Disney and Scientology, played at the festival earlier in the week (I’ll be seeing it as soon as humanly possible). The two fellow-travellers in dissident sci-fi share a giddy enthusiasm for their material that gives their work a charm lacking in most obscenely expensive Hollywood productions. It’s also much easier to buy a filmmaker’s solidarity with the world’s poor majority if their films do not cost more than some small countries spend yearly on education and health care.

Rivera wouldn’t say what his next film project would be, but told the audience that if anyone had access to financing he’d love to make a prequel or sequel (“or parallel universe”)story to build on Sleep Dealer. I hope that happens, and that he continues to develop his critique of global capitalism run amok.

The broader context of years of heartless U.S. policies toward Haiti and the ongoing UN military presence in the island nation were missing from most coverage.

MINUSTAH, the UN mission in Haiti, was put in place to defend the U.S.-backed coup regime which ousted the democratically-elected government of Jean-Bertrand Aristide in 2004. After the coup, thousands of pro-Aristide dissidents were killed, raped or forced into exile, thousands more jailed without charge.

Last August, UN Secretary General Ban Ki Moon visited the sprawling seaside slum of Cite Soleil and boasted, “In an operation lasting six weeks, amid fierce firefights, UN forces took control of the slum.” He told reporters, “I am convinced that Haiti is at a turning point. Long the poorest country in the western hemisphere, seemingly forever mired in political turmoil, it at long last has a golden chance to begin to rebuild itself. With the help of the international community — and the UN in particular — it can.” Ban Ki Moon went on to warn against the UN leaving “too soon” and pushed for a renewed mandate for MINUSTAH.

But Brazilian soldier Tailon Ruppenthal is less starry eyed about MINUSTAH. In a recent memoir of his tour of duty, Rupenthal writes, “After a few months even getting out of bed is hard. You remember that you will cross paths with all those people who are starving but there’s nothing you can do.” The Brazilian, who now suffers from post-traumatic stress syndrome, concludes, “we are losing the real war: against poverty … Only the fight against poverty will bring peace. When will they see that?”

“We are hungry and have given up on the UN and the Preval government to help us,” Sonia Jeanty, 32, told the Haiti Information Project in early April. “After all the money they have spent here most of us are eating only one meal a day. It’s unacceptable especially as we hear the UN trying to tell us everyday on the radio that things have gotten better. It’s a lie!” Rene Preval was elected president in 2006 with broad popular support, but observers note that most ministries in his government remain dominated by coup figures installed with U.S. backing. Those pro-coup officials were approved by a parliament also dominated by pro-coup individuals. Repression and illegal imprisonment kept progressives who might have been elected to parliament from effectively running.

The Haiti Information Project also reports that information officer with the 1000-strong Chinese force in Haiti Zhang Jin said in 2007, “We have the firepower and technology to control any situation that may arise here. What we gain from this experience is a real life situation where we can practice strategic and tactical deployment. That is invaluable to any fighting force.”

Mark Schuller, an anthropologist at Vassar College who writes about the political economy of Haiti, told me that “Washington consensus” economics are at the root of the current situation in Haiti. He points out that the country has “the greatest inequality in the hemisphere, with more millionaires per capita than anywhere else in the Caribbean.” Schuller referred to anthropologist and medical doctor Paul Farmer’s writings about “structural violence” – long-standing foreign control and underdevelopment – which has kept the majority of Haitians in misery, and notes that the “interim” coup government of Gerard Latortue promoted local and multinational capitalist interest at the expense of the poor majority. Schuller points to the three year tax holiday which Latortue gave large companies, while doling out millions in “back pay” to the notoriously brutal former military (which Aristide had disbanded), all of which contributed to an increase in the cost of living for the poor.

Schuller told me, “It behooves us not to think of it as a ‘failed state.’ Rather, it is best understood as a successfully failed state. As of last estimate, 65% of Haiti’s government revenue comes from international agencies, 84% of its rice grown abroad. This is because of U.S. and other Northern countries’ economic policies wherein Haiti’s ability to feed itself with domestic rice production was wiped out by Washington-subsidized imports that U.S. agribusiness has profited from. At Ronald Reagan’s behest, Haiti initiated a series of neoliberal measures in the 1980s, including trade liberalization, privatization and decreasing investment in agriculture, that led to the disappearance of Haiti’s cotton and sugar export industries. During the 1990s, the U.S. conditioned its food aid – sent to alleviate a hunger crisis – with demands that Haiti lower its tariffs and open its markets to U.S. imports. This subsidized U.S. rice was much cheaper than Haitian rice, forcing local farmers out of business. Over the same period, Haiti became increasingly more reliant on the International Financial Institutions, which imposed more neoliberal conditions on its help. Since 1980, when Haiti started receiving the Banks’ help in earnest, its per capita Gross Domestic Product has shrunk by 38.3%. Haiti is left with a 1.4 billion dollar multinational debt, with a debt service next year of almost 80 million. In addition to draining resources from needed sectors – such as health, education, or developing national production, this debt has served as leverage for the IMF and World Bank to impose even more neoliberal measures.”

In an email to me earlier this week, Fr. Gerard Jean-Juste, a popular liberation theologian who works closely with Aristide’s Lavalas movement, wrote, “Some Haitians and foreigners are swimming in wealth while the poor ones are down deep in the pit of misery. A near famine situation reduces many people in skin and bone. As thousands of needy ones could not take it anymore they took the streets and let out their anger. I wish the wealthy ones in Haiti could accept to share and stop looking down at the lowly ones. We are all God’s children. Exclusion of a majority in dire need is not the answer. A policy of inclusion and sharing is the answer.”

There is some good news. The Jubilee USA Network-backed Jubilee Act, which advances debt cancellation for Haiti and extends it to 23 other poor countries, passed in the House of Representatives on April 16 by a vote of 285 – 132. Additionally, Rep. Alcee Hastings’ (D-FL) amendment to the bill, calling for complete and immediate cancellation of Haiti’s debts to all IFIs, passed unanimously by voice vote.

The Jubilee Act now moves to the Senate. Voters in the U.S. still have time to urge their Senators to help give Haiti a long-overdue break.

Of all the illegal and dishonest misadventures that the Bush Administration got away with, the least criticized of all might be the 2004 overthrow of Haiti’s democratically-elected government. Even human rights groups and left-leaning press that stood up against the Iraq war gave, and still give, Bush a pass on the horror he unleashed on Haiti by kidnapping President Jean-Bertrand Aristide.

Peter Hallward’s new book Damming the Flood: Haiti, Aristide and the Politics of Containment is a welcome corrective to the false impressions and historical amnesia about Haiti afflicting most of the English-speaking world. Jonathan Kozol called it, “A brilliant politically sophisticated and morally infuriating work on a shameful piece of very recent history that the U.S. press has either distorted or ignored. The most important and devastating book I’ve read on American betrayal of democracy in one of the most tormented nations in the world.”

Hallward, a UK-based philosophy professor, was teaching a course in 2003 which involved daily reading of Le Monde and other French newspapers when he noted a systematic demonization of President Jean-Bertrand Aristide and his Lavalas movement. He subsequently wrote one of the best long articles about the 2004 coup (“Option Zero in Haiti,” New Left Review 27, May-June 2004) shortly after it happened. Ever since, he seems to have been collecting information for a bill of indictment against the U.S., France and Canada, the coup’s principle backers, ever since. In the process he has also put together a damning critique of liberals and self-described radicals who either through intellectual laziness or lack of cross-class solidarity accepted Bush-approved PR on Haiti.

In his research, Hallward used mostly public sources. He appears to have read everything written about Haiti in the past ten years, as well as much earlier work. Interviews with principles ranging from Aristide to several key coup players, and both pro- and anti-Aristide figures, buttress his scholarship. Hallward puts the country’s recent violence in the context of 200 years of “great power” hostility toward Haitian sovereignty, beginning with the 1804 revolution, the only successful slave revolt in world history.

Hallward excels at showing the means by which Haiti’s ultra-rich minority worked hand in glove with right-wingers in Washington and Paris to create a case for “regime change” that even Iraq war opponents could embrace. After the first U.S.-backed coup against Aristide in 1991, when public opinion in the U.S. was still largely sympathetic to Lavalas, Hallward notes, “Jesse Helms spoke for much of the US political establishment when on 20 October 1993 he denounced Aristide as a ‘psychopath and grave human rights abuser.’” But “neither Helms nor anyone else could pin a single political killing on the 1991 [Aristide] administration. In the run up to the second coup, incomparably more insistent versions of the same charge would resurface at every turn.”

As Hallward painstakingly shows, left of center and liberal NGOs were all too willing to accept Washington’s destabilization program for Haiti. The smears and propaganda were well-funded and carried out in concert with “Democracy Enhancement” and similar programs of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) and other U.S. government agencies. The project recalled what the U.S. did to Nicaragua in the 1980s, as documented by political scientist William Robinson in his excellent study A Faustian Bargain.

Hallward notes that when it comes to “the supervision of human rights in the most heavily exploited parts of the planet … most of the ‘neutral,’ affluent and well-connected supervisors live at an immeasurable distance from the world endured by the people they supervise, and at a still greater distance from the sort of militant, unabashedly political mobilization that can alone offer any meaningful protection for truly universal rights.” The helps explain the ease with which Human Rights Watch took anti-Aristide propaganda at face value, then dragged their feet interminably (as did Amnesty International) when Aristide’s government was ousted and the rightist bloodbath began in earnest.

Hallward carefully wades through the accusations of human rights violations leveled at Aristide’s government. After an exhaustive examination, he can find no evidence that holds up. In many cases, he finds that the supposed abuses themselves were greatly exaggerated, if not entirely fabricated.

Damming the Flood (lavalas means “flood” in Haitian Kreyol) is brilliantly written and extremely thorough in examining the players behind the 2004 assault on Haitian popular democracy and its horrific aftermath.

In the wake of the thousands killed and countless more tortured and raped, it is inevitable that many readers not versed in Haiti’s past would ask: Why? Hallward does a fine job of answering that question, addressing fundamental structural injustices enforced by U.S. foreign policy.

Aristide emerged as a priest in the tradition of liberation theology, which promotes a “preferential option for the poor.” In Hallward’s words: “All through the 1980s and early 90s [U.S. army intelligence officers] recognized that ‘the most serious threat to U.S. interests was not secular Marxist-Leninism or organized labor but liberation theology.’ Nowhere did the counter-insurgency measures that the US and its allies devised in order to deal with liberation theology in the 1980s and early 90s fall more heavily than they did on the Haiti of Lavalas and the ti legliz (“little church” movement). It’s no coincidence that the most notorious assassin hired to terrorize Lavalas from 1990 to 1994, Emmanuel “Toto” Constant, first began working for the CIA on a course designed to explain and contain the “extreme left-wing” implications of “The Theology of Liberation,” which Constant understood as an attempt ‘to convince the people that in the name of God everything is possible” and that, therefore, it was right for the people to kill soldiers and the rich.’”

Hallward continues, “Haiti is the only country in Latin America that had the temerity to choose a liberation theologian as its president — twice. If Aristide still remains the defining political figure in Haiti to this day it’s not because he represents a utopian alternative to the economic status quo, or because he embodies a demagogic charisma that threatens to stifle the development of democracy, or because his followers believe that he made no strategic mistakes. It’s because in the eyes of most people he is not a politician, precisely, but an organizer and an activist who remains dedicated to working within what he famously affirmed as ‘the parish of the poor.’ It was as such an activist that Aristide disbanded the army in 1995, and it was as such an organizer that he dedicated the rest of his political life to helping the popular mobilization deal with the new threats and the old antagonisms that soon emerged as a result.”

The priest turned president threatened to help Haiti’s poor enough to earn the eternal enmity of the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, and both Republicans and Democrats. His government was denied much-needed international funds (which in a more sane world would be reparations for past injustices, not loans or aid-with-strings-attached), and his poor followers demonized as chimeres, or “devils.” Instead of looking at the structural roots of the exploitation and ecological devastation to which the country has been subjected, foreign journalists took their sound bites from English or French speaking elites at odds with Lavalas’s commendable, and only moderately leftist, goal to raise the poor “from misery to poverty with dignity.”

The scant media coverage of Haiti that exists tends to continue centuries-old patterns of ignoring the perspectives of the poor majority. In Hallward’s words, what most English speakers get instead is repetition of “perhaps the most consistent theme of the profoundly racist first-world commentary on the island: that poor non-white people remain incapable of governing themselves.”

Though the UN “peacekeeping” mission, put in place in 2004 to legitimize the most recent coup, remains in Haiti, Hallward points to ongoing resistance from the poorest neighborhoods as evidence that the story is not over. While coup forces continue to dominate most ministries of the current government, the 2006 presidential election resulting in Haiti’s rulers conceding victory to Aristide’s former Prime Minster Rene Preval shows the unavoidability of some concessions to pressure from the poor majority.

For those who feel a debt to the people of Haiti for inspiring resistance to U.S. slavery, and for setting an example of the true potential of declarations of liberty espoused by the French Revolution, this book is an essential resource. Damming the Flood will inspire international activists to support the struggles of those Haitians who continue to stand up for their fundamental human rights. It should be widely read.

His first book, Prisoners of the American Dream, is a trenchant, thoroughly researched history of the U.S. labor movement; he is most famous for 1990′s City of Quartz, a modern history of Los Angeles that drew a wide audience. His cautionary book The Monster at Our Door: the Global Threat of Avian Flu has been translated into German, French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Japanese, Arabic and Swedish.

Davis’s lively prose style, combined with an intellectual curiosity and ease with science, the humanities, radical history and much else, makes for engaging writing chock full of eccentric, surprising information. Davis’s fellow Lannan Foundation award winner Susan Straight recently said, “he writes everything [and] he knows everything about everything.”

Mike Davis was good enough to give me a phone interview in early February. In the background, Mike’s twin toddlers scurried around his San Diego home as he graciously let me pick his brain for an hour.

Ben Terrall: In your 2006 book Planet of Slums, you write, “Cities in the abstract are the solution to the global environmental crisis: urban density can translate into great efficiencies in land, energy, and resource use, while democratic public spaces and cultural institutions likewise provide qualitatively higher standards of enjoyment than individualized consumption and commodified leisure.” Could you say something about how the current trends in urban American can be pushed to move in that direction, as opposed to the way things are going now?

Mike Davis: First of all we need to recognize that we’re probably witnessing the de-housing of millions of Americans through a combination of the subprime crisis and increasing unemployment. I think that we’ve been handed on a plate an extraordinary opportunity to, if not solve the housing crisis in America, greatly reduce it.

[An earlier opportunity] was during the savings and loan meltdown during the beginning of the 1990s, when the federal government came into possession of more than a million units of housing through defaulting or bankrupt savings and loans. And all the government did was simply sell those off at a discount on the market. And you might think what could have been done with the stock of housing.

Secondly, base closure across the country has provided extraordinary opportunities for cities. And to be honest with you the only example I can think of a positive outcome is the Presidio in San Francisco. Here in San Diego the Naval Training Center was given away at a dollar an acre to a private developer who developed market-rate upscale condominiums, leaving not only civilian San Diego families, but Navy families, still facing an acute housing shortage.

So first of all, we need to address the problem of a national housing crisis that’s going to get suddenly worse. Secondly, the trends of course in the last stock market cycle in housing, is we’ve seen a new spurt of gentrification that’s touched even what were considered formerly ungentrifiable neighborhoods, right into inner-city neighborhoods in places like Houston and Newark, downtown Los Angeles, almost always heavily subsidized one way or another by the public sector. Yet at the same time exurbs continue to grow, and sprawl into countryside more environmentally and socially expensive than ever. The size of new homes has increased by 50% in 30 years, the environmental cost of exurban development is higher than ever. So the fundamental pattern of market-driven urbanization, becoming more and more inefficient, making more people’s housing situation precarious, forcing working class people into longer commutes, all this remains in place. The big difference is that over the last 30 years the center of gravity of the urban crisis has tended to migrate from the inner cities per se to the older suburbs, the fifties inner ring suburbs, where working class people, people of color move in the expectation they’ll find better schools and jobs. But like a mirage in the desert, the better schools and jobs have already moved on further out.

BT: You wrote in your book Magical Urbanism that “only powerful extra-electoral mobilizations, with the ability to shape agendas and discipline candidates, can ensure the representation of grassroots socioeconomic as well as ethnic-symbolic interests.”

In a similar vein, JoAnn Wypijewski recently wrote on the Counterpunch website, “The problem now isn’t whether Obama can be president or what kind he’d be, where he’s false and where he’s true. The problem now is, Who has got it together to hold his or anyone’s feet to the fire? And what’s likely to spur engagement, sturdy advocacy and resistance?”

Given the need for government action to achieve what you were talking about, and so many other things, I wonder what you see in terms of grassroots ability to hold politicians’ feet to the fire — especially since you recently wrote a great piece in New Left Review about the financial sectors behind the current Democratic Party.

MD: Although I may be wrong in some ways to the extent that a lot of those sectors seem to have gravitated more to Obama this election cycle than Clinton.

But yes, I think the shame of the whole primary process has been that the unions, by and large, with the exception of the SEIU, ran away from Edwards. And Edwards had the platform, whatever you think of Edwards personally, that most conformed to what unions claim to want. It was definitely one of the most progressive platforms since the Rainbow Coalition. And I think ultimately it’s self-defeating because if Edwards [had been] able to stay in the campaign and take more delegates to the Democratic convention, then perhaps you could argue that those [pro-labor] positions would have greater clout and would ensure that they were integral parts of the final election. You can’t be sure of that at all, certainly, as Clinton and Obama will praise Edwards and talk about poverty now for a few weeks. But as we’ve seen with the last Democratic candidate, that will soon fade and the great danger is that we’ll have a Presidential election exclusively devoted to the war on terror, security and pumping the economy for the middle classes, and the question of the working poor and poverty in general will again disappear.

The unions that left the AFL-CIO of course did on the basis of criticism that the AFL-CIO was just promiscuously spending all of its money on Democrats who often didn’t fight for the interests of labor, rather than organizing. But the unions left still seem to embrace that politics.

Years ago I was very impressed by the example in Los Angeles of the Industrial Areas Foundation-related organizations, United Neighborhood Organization, and so on. These were organizations that largely mobilized church bases, beginning with the Catholic Church.

Father Luis Olivares of La Placita in downtown Los Angeles was the leader of this movement. And their traditional policy was not to trust any politician, but to hold everyone’s feet in the fire. And during his period, the issues were socioeconomic ones like discrimination in car insurance, supermarket prices. It had a whole economic populist content, and it also interacted with and supported the more dynamic unions, particularly those organizing amongst immigrants. But then Olivares was displaced and these organizations mainly began to express the moral, pro-life politics of the Cardinal, rather than the economic needs of working class families.

So I must confess that I don’t really believe that we live in a new age where everything has to be done on the moveon.com model, and the internet — and that organizing is passe. And I think we have powerful organizing models that have been developed in the last 10-20 years, but I don’t see them consistently applied to the purpose of a platform.

In the case of Los Angeles, it’s been clear for almost a generation, that really what this city needs is a coalition of organizations built around an essential human needs platform, that puts children first, that addresses the crisis of the working poor, health coverage, etc, that is not mortgaged to either the career of any charismatic Democratic politician or to the inscrutable rivalries with which the Democratic Party is rife. And also a coalition that is not simply part of a Democratic Party alliance. Obviously if you read my books you realize that I’m not a supporter of the Democratic Party, but I do believe that social reform in this period requires relentless pressure on Democrats by people who still believe that the party is the principle agent of reform.

BT: In various places in your books you talk about the need for the government to invest in jobs, to rebuild infrastructure, to address human needs. There’s a project that the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights has called the Green Collar Jobs Campaign. Do you know about this or similar initiatives, and can you speak to them. Also, can you talk about the problem of the environmental movement still being largely a white phenomenon, and how this green jobs campaign or any other project might broaden that base.

MD: I think that every environmental demand should be linked to a social justice demand. And in particular in California, I think most environmental demands should have to do with youth employment and extending the opportunities for the enjoyment of nature and participation in green politics to people in the inner cities. And you have things like the California job corps which have proven track records, almost to the point of Head Start, but are kept on the back burner, little boutique-like programs that are part of the shards of another age when there was serious talk about addressing core issues. But I think much of the environmental movement has walled itself off from enormous pro-environmental constituencies represented by the immigrant population which is the section of the population that most intensively uses public space and green spaces. And of course, it has become entrapped in special causes, I think to the detriment of a larger regional or state-level view.

In one of my books I [asked if] saving Santa Monica basin is entirely worthy; it kind of ended up being a major and sole investment of Westside environmentalists, to the detriment of serious environmental or open space needs in interior parts of Los Angeles.

There obviously are a lot of people in the environmental movement who understand this, but I’m not talking about just embracing this in principle or in your manifesto of social justice and environment, but linking every environmental demand to a specific proposal that improves quality of life in working class areas — that employs people, that creates more parkspace, that addresses what I think is the most single profound crisis in California, which is that in a rich state our children are poor.

Any forward progress for the Green Party or progressives in California depends on getting labor more involved in issues of land use planning, of water, of environment, of climate change, of housing. It’s been the absence, in a way, of the labor movement as the single largest progressive constituency from these issues that allowed developers to run the state, sometimes to the narrow benefit, temporary benefit, of a few construction unions.

But increasingly unions have to face the fact that their members can’t find housing within an hour and a half from work, that the environment’s deteriorating, that Southern California, at least, is becoming gridlocked to an extent that it will cause a massive loss of jobs from the region. The labor movement has to get interested in questions about urban, about regional planning, conservation, global warming.

BT: How do you think the problem of corporate greenwashing in terms of the way not only advertising but media coverage seems to be skewed towards this very wishy-washy pro-business way of looking at the impending environmental disasters that we’re facing?

MD: I think there are two components here. One, the companies who are just throwing up an enormous smokescreen and want to be able to buy carbon credits and essentially deceive people. But then I think there is also an aggressive sector of venture capital that really is thinking that it can make profits through alternative energies and so on. And sometimes the interests of the two aren’t the same. I’m sure there are big debates in some of the energy companies. But it is, at the end of the day, simply flim-flam, particularly when you give away the ability to make specific locational decisions. In other words, to tax and regulate specific sources of emission, and instead can plant trees in the Amazon or something.

And of course, in Southern California, all this is anchored by a kind of vivid testimonialism by people who otherwise have enormous environmental footprints. I just read something by Julia Roberts, who seems to be actually a very, very nice person, but massively into recycling while owning I don’t know how many homes. But it’s part of the larger, I think, deception that philanthropy, with socially responsible business, can solve the world’s problems.

BT: There’s so much you could say about these environmental questions, I didn’t want to cut away from them, but I wanted to get in a question about the UN in Haiti. In Planet of Slums you talk about the Pentagon’s global approach to counter-insurgency being more focused on a kind of urban warfare. And having gone to Haiti and seeing what the UN is doing there, I wonder if you see that as partly a new role for UN peacekeepers, as a kind of counterinsurgency proxy, in areas where, politically, after Mogadishu, it’s too risky for U.S. forces to be there.

MD: Well to be honest with you, I’m very disturbed that groups like the Friends [American Friends Service Committee] and CARE and Save the Children and other NGOs have supported the establishment of this State Department Office of the Coordinator for Reconstruction and Stabilization and support the Haitian Stabilization Initiative. This whole idea of having a smart foreign policy because what this stuff really is about, you probably recall, I think it was in the Spring of 2006, the State Department issued this report which was quite extraordinary because it found almost everything possibly wrong with the U.S. occupation of Iraq and then argued for a new policy, that avoided expensive reconstruction, huge upfront investment, for a combination of imposing law and order and then small-scale economic progress.

And it’s very clear that’s what’s still going on Iraq with the surge and so on is the past, but Haiti is the future. And what the U.S. is looking for, or at least the State Department and probably most certainly an Obama or Clinton Administration, is a form of intervention that can establish a minimum threshold of control and stability in the areas recognized as most potentially volatile or dangerous from the standpoint of U.S. interests. And it’s done so in Haiti, not only using the UN, including the first Chinese contingent, but it’s part of this extraordinary, and I think much overlooked alliance between the Bush Administration and the Workers Party in power in Brazil, which includes consensus about peacekeeping in the Caribbean, but also the joint development of biofuels internationally.

What is also extraordinary about Haiti is that the object of intervention isn’t just Haiti or Port-au-Prince, but it’s specfically Port-au-Prince’s largest slum, and probably the poorest in all the Americas, Cite Soleil, with a combination of building police stations and paving roads, and setting up a few popular projects — it’s explicitly a strategy to take back control in Cite Soleil from the so-called Chimere gangs to the new government of Haiti in a context where the democratic-elected President of Haiti is in exile, and has been deposed by a combination of French, American and Brazilian intervention. It’s quite extraordinary, and I think the program, though relatively small scale, is more the template for the future than the occupation of Iraq, in the sense that it addresses the question, in a world where economic globalization-linked space, where a lot of governments have been reduced to a bare minimum after structural adjustment, where a lot of areas, huge areas of the cities have been essentially abandoned by the state, how do you re-establish state control, how do you prevent groups of any kind from achieving dual power and sovereignty in the slums. And the experiment in Cite Soleil is supposed to provide a model for that, and a model for future U.S. interventions. It kind of meets Max Boot’s demand in a column last year, that the U.S. should basically have a Department of Colonial Affairs, well that’s the Office of Reconstruction and Stabilization.

BT: I think one of the things that’s clear to me from following what’s going on in Haiti since the 2004 coup which forced out Aristide and his democratically-elected government is the role that NGOs can play in these seizures of power and taking back democracy from the people. This has been the case in Haiti since before the 2004 coup, but I’ve heard just recently that, from a grassroots group that does work with the poor in Cite Soleil that they’re ready to give over the group to these right-wing funded characters that were behind the coup, just to keep people alive.

MD: I think you’re absolutely right, and I think the State Department has now made explicit, and indeed even the Bush Administration, by transferring the primary responsibility, at least theoretically, for stabilization from the Pentagon to the State Department, makes it explicit that throughout the world the U.S. is going to work with these NGOs, and these NGOs are kind of soft power American intervention. But what I find very disturbing is that groups that have for so long advocated for peace and nonintervention, like the Friends, would endorse a policy where basically the small-scale job schemes, and free clinics, are part and parcel of strengthening the police and dramatically repressive strategies. And for them to buy into this line, I wonder if this is not what a Clinton or Obama administration would give us on an even larger scale. Of course, McCain, or a McCain/Guliani ticket, is more apt to keep using a big stick.

I think people are so focused on the horror of what the American intervention in Iraq has brought, that they’re not paying attention — and, of course, nobody’s being forced to debate — what’s happening in Haiti, what’s happening in the horn of Africa, U.S. interventions in West Africa, it’s just all off the radar screen.

BT: A friend who is a politically engaged geography professor wanted me to ask how activists might effectively counter the nationalist logic that governs discussion on matters of immigration (emphasizing “illegality” and the supposed “right” of countries to control their boundaries and who comes in and out).

MD: My position on this is virtually the same as many people in the Catholic Church, including others I would disagree with vehemently on other issues, which is human rights come first, borders are essentially systems of violence imposed on landscapes and human lives. And it’s very important that there’s something like an abolitionist minority that reject borders per se as a way to ration rights in the world or to manage conflicts. Although there’s differences between borders. The U.S.-Mexican border is fighting against an inexorable fact, which is that Mexicans and North America are totally entangled. Europe, which already has its own internal Mexicos, like Poland, would try to go so like an absolute border, and to have an almost Orwellian type of border patrol. This is what a lot of the nativists in the country want to do, to move toward something more like the Schengen system in Europe, total exclusion, total control. But the violence of borders, and the number of wall borders, of course, has increased exponentially. A lot more people die now at the borders of Europe than they did in the age of the Iron Curtain.

BT: Could you talk a little further about biofuels?

MD: We now have a whole series of reports on the future of agriculture in the light of climate change. One of the most disturbing of these comes out of the Peterson Institute, which is one of the most prestigious, most Wall Street-oriented Washington think tanks, and their expert William Cline has run a very complicated simulation of climate and crop models — comes up with data which other reports come to — which is we’re going to see declining productivity across the world by the end of the century. India in particular is going to be particularly hard hit we know, Mexico’s going to be hard hit. The natural factors of production are changing, and they’re changing in a bad way for everybody, except maybe Canadians and Northern Europeans. And secondly of course you have this livestock revolution and urbanized populations demanding more meat protein which is increasing the pressure on grain production, and diverting it to animals. Then you have the fact that agriculture is so dependent on fossil fuel, and the price of fossil fuel rising. And now all of a sudden here we have biofuels, which is essentially using anything, not just corn but anything, grown on arable land as opposed to plants grown on non-arable and desert terrain. Which I think poses exactly the kind of process that so many people have warned us about, including President Castro of Cuba. All this is a scenario for famine, food security is weakening on every front and basic food group security in terms of essential grains for human needs simply remains close to the most important issue in the world.

What’s novel and troubling here is this alliance between Brazil and the United States on biofuel. And it’s part of the Brazilian plan to leverage Brazil into a kind of semi-superpower. It’s an alliance between big farmers in Brazil and agribusiness in the United States, and it does nothing to address the needs of the movement of the landless in Brazil. In fact the whole direction that biofuels is going just accelerates the displacement of small grain producers everywhere.

BT: Have you seen anything recently about any pressure to regulate air travel, since so many specialists say that one of the key ways to control the adverse effects of global warming is to cut down on air travel?

MD: To some extent in Europe, partially because there air travel has been more expensive. France in particular now offers fast rail as a substitute to regional flying. But no, with immigration, [there is] more flying to preserve the fabric of family life, package tours tend to grow; some of the things that are alternatives to it are even worse. I’ve become very interested in the second home phenomenon, which is a social and environmental disaster across the world, where basically local people lose affordable housing so that people can keep millions of seasonal homes on the Costa del Sol and Hawaii and so on.

But all these things that we’ve talked about today require degrees of planning, democratic planning, and the ability to link investment decisions to environmental and social consequences that are really totally outside of any political discussion going on anywhere. It’s just taken as a matter of course that maybe the market needs to be mollified now, maybe we need a more humane version of neoliberalism. But it’s still a world of Darwinian super-corporations and on the other side philanthropists and large NGOs.

BT: There seems to be a lot of cognitive dissonance going on right now about these questions.

MD: There is, but what disturbs me is you get great bursts of energy to bring about change and build an alternative, but they have enormous difficulty finding traction. Look at what happens at the world social forum. I’m not saying it still doesn’t generate a lot of energy, but I think a lot of the foundations of it have been eroded in the last decade. Which is why there are a few eccentrics like myself who still believe in more traditional forms of left organization — the need to build explicitly socialist groups. And I have a lot of young friends who disagree with that, and I respect their differences, it’s just a debate we have.

BT: Do you see one of the problems with the World Social Forum being the domninance of NGOs and the way NGOs get used?

MD: Well, there are NGOs and NGOs. I mean, there are many wonderful NGOs, but really what has happened across the world, and this is partly the result of deliberate policies of the World Bank, which very much likes working with NGOs, is the sponsorship of what you might call mega-NGOs, a certain minority of NGOs who control the dispersal, the allocation, of World Bank, or philanthropic or state funds. And it is a little reminiscent of the politics of the war on poverty in the United States in the 1960s, in the ability of these organizations to substitute themselves for struggle, to take rank and file organizers and turn them into bureaucrats. Parties of the left can do the same thing. I think there’s a reasonable question to be asked whether parties of the left in power on a municipal, regional, and national basis don’t just tend to organize their own base, because they transform people into full-time functionaries. These are quite ancient questions about the sociology and the institutions of social movements.

Very clearly there are NGOs and there are NGOs, there are wonderful fighting indigenous rank and file groups, but they tend to live off scraps from the table. And you have far more bureaucratic NGOs that tend to be the ones dispersing the funds and are allowed to make the key decisions.

The interview closed with a discussion about the great leftist science fiction writer Kim Stanley Robinson, whose future histories of Orange County Davis called “very shrewd stuff.”

Mike told me, “I’d love to teach a class on this stuff, use his [Robinson's] books, use a couple of Octavia Butler’s, [and] William Gibson’s Virtual Light. I think there’s much more meat in this kind of stuff than most of what passes for social theory these days.”

Mellor/Strummer died unexpectedly in 2002 of congenital heart disease at the age of 50. Luckily for viewers of this film, he had been interviewed extensively. In addition to audio interviews with Strummer, who confesses that as a youth “I was a mouthy little git,” and talks about how he learned to put up a tough front in boarding school, the film includes extensive footage of friends, family and bandmates of Strummer sharing memories of the man. Partly because Strummer spent a good chunk of his final decade developing a fondness for all-night socializing around campfires at Glastonbury and other music festivals, Temple eschews the standard talking-head-in-a-chair format and shoots his interviewees around outdoor fires in the US and UK. Underscoring The Clash’s ideal of punk rock being a great equalizer, he also refrains from identifying the speakers individually, running names of the famous and non-celebrity interviewed in the closing credits.

One of the more resolutely political and musically adventurous members of the first generation of punk rockers, Strummer had a profound influence on many people. The picture that emerges from the campfire remembrances is of a complex, flawed but overall loving and giving person. He was a creative force who saw himself not as an intellectual or a remote artist, but as someone connected to grassroots movement politics.

The Clash supported a wide array of progressive campaigns, from labor struggles to anti-nuclear activism. Unlike many of their contemporaries, they also eschewed easy nihilism. Lamely using rightist imagery for shock value, many early punks worse swastikas and hinted at flirtations with fascism. But Strummer was clear that though The Clash took no ideologically rigid sectarian party lines, “We’re anti-facist, anti-racist, and pro-creative.”

Moreover, as writer Charlie Bertsch notes in the collection of essays, Let Fury Have the Hour: The Punk Rock Politics of Joe Strummer, “Even at his most combative, he was more interested in building up a community of rebels than in tearing down those who failed to make the grade.”

Some of the film’s most interesting music is taken from Strummer’s turn as a DJ on the BBC, playing what would later become known as “world music.” That globally popular show proved the punk icon to be a musical internationalist who believed in the potential of interaction between cultures, and in music being a fertile ground for developing true solidarity between people. Chuck D of the pioneering hip-hop band Public Enemy wrote in Interview magazine, “I had great respect for Joe Strummer. How he used his music — incorporating a lot of black music like hip-hop and reggae — was very different from the guys who invented rock ‘n’ roll: He always paid homage to those who came before him. I admired him for his humility as an artist.” Comparing what Strummer accomplished to the work of political hip-hoppers The Coup and Dead Prez, Chuck D added, “That’s Joe Strummer’s legacy — the idea that you need to stand by your word every step of the way.”

After The Clash self-destructed in the 1980s under combined pressures of huge fame, little business acumen and non-stop rock and roll lifestyles, Strummer spent years working on soundtracks and acting in films, including a featured part in the wonderful Jim Jarmusch movie Mystery Train. He found his voice as a member of a band again in the outfit he put together called The Mescaleros, which allowed him to explore further the musical curiosity evidenced in his BBC DJ work.

Several weeks before Strummer died, Mick Jones, his old songwriting partner and lead guitar player from The Clash, came onstage to play the old warhorses “White Riot” and “London’s Burning” with The Mescaleros. It’s entirely appropriate that instead of a big-ticket reunion, the evening was a London benefit for the Fire Brigades Union’s fair pay campaign. Not surprisingly, firefighters were amongst the pallbearers at the great singer/songwriter/provocateur’s funeral.

On January 15, the anti-war group Code Pink held a rally at the San Francisco Federal Building where they presented an aide to Nancy Pelosi with more than 8,000 signed letters from U.S. voters urging impeachment of Cheney and Bush.

Cindy Sheehan, whose decision to run as an independent against Pelosi in the next election was precipitated by the Democratic Congresswoman’s refusal to support impeachment, spoke to the assembled protestors. Sheehan, whose son Casey was killed in Iraq, said, “I believe that when George Bush commuted Scooter Libby’s sentence for a crime that he was complicit in, he committed treason. A president can commute sentences, a president can pardon people, but not when they are involved in the crime.”

She continued, “I believe that Nancy Pelosi committed treason when she took impeachment off the table. You cannot ignore our constitution. And not only that, they have also been going against the constitution by approving torture, which goes against the Eighth Amendment, by approving spying on us without warrants, which goes against the Fourth Amendment.”

The former Georgia congresswoman Cynthia McKinney, who is running for the Green Party’s Presidential nomination, appeared at the San Francisco demonstration and spoke in support of Sheehan’s campaign. McKinney said, “People who betray the values of their constituents do not deserve to be part of the government. The government, actually, is us, it’s supposed to be us.

McKinney added, “We have an opportunity to learn from countries where people power has stepped up and through the power of the ballot they have changed things, like in Venezuela, like in Bolivia, like in Chile, like in Argentina, like in Ecuador. They have changed things. People power… and so our campaign is called the power to the people committee, and we are asking people of every political persuasion to join with us in the creation of a new people power movement that can change our country, that can change the policies and the values of our country, and take our government back.”

The day after the San Francisco rally, Rep. Robert Wexler (D-FL) urged the House Judiciary Committee to begin impeachment hearings targeting Vice President Cheney for “high crimes and misdemeanors.”

Wexler said, “In the history of our nation, we have never encountered a moment where the actions of a President or a Vice President have more strongly demanded the use of the power of impeachment.”

Wexler, a member of the Judiciary Committee, noted that though “a growing chorus of American citizens are calling for this Administration and this Vice President to be held accountable … the response from Congress thus far has been silence and denial.”

Wexler’s office set up a website for U.S. voters to endorse the Florida congressman’s call for hearings. As of January 16, more than 189,000 people had signed on to the site’s petition.

Bay Area-based impeachment activist Brad Newsham, organizer of multiple “Beach Impeach” actions, told me, “Wexler is the Man of the Moment in the impeachment movement. Shortly after Wexler appeared on the Randi Rhodes show Thursday morning, his “Impeach Cheney” petition (http://wexler.house.gov/) cracked 200,000 signatures and has added nearly 10,000 since then.” Newsham emphasized, “Pro impeachment phone calls and emails have been pouring in to the offices of members of Congress, and Wexler has asked that we keep up the pressure (especially on John Conyers).”

At a January 17 press conference, Speaker Pelosi responded to a question about her reluctance to hold Cheney’s “feet to the fire” by insisting she was sticking to her long-stated view that “an impeachment of the Vice President or the President of the United States would be divisive in our country.” She added, “the unity of our country is something that we all value, and that would not be in furtherance of promoting that unity.”

I contacted Cindy Sheehan for a response to Pelosi’s comments. Ms. Sheehan told me, “What George Bush and Dick Cheney have done with the cooperation of congress is divide the country — this country is the most polarized it’s ever been in my lifetime.” Ms. Sheehan said Congress needs to be focus on “justice and a commitment to rule of law and the constitution. About impeachment, she said, “I don’t know if it would bring unity to our country, but it would show our leaders are committed to the principles of the Founding Fathers.”

Sheehan speculated that “one of reasons for not digging too deep” is the complicity of leading Democrats with much that is impeachable: “Like in 2002, Pelosi was briefed on torture.” Further, “There’s been a consolidation of power in one branch of government, and the Democrats know that, [but] think they can win and take advantage of that power when it becomes theirs.”

Cindy Sheehan said in Spring 2007 that if Pelosi agreed to support impeachment by July 23, she wouldn’t continue to run against the veteran Democrat. But now the maverick campaign is underway and Sheehan is meeting with housing rights, immigration, environmental justice and other activists throughout San Francisco, and her campaign is pulling in veteran Green Party and other progressive activist volunteers. Sheehan told me, “if [Pelosi] came out tomorrow to let articles of impeachment go forward,” the campaign would continue. “We think the war and accountability are major issues, but we want and advocate for single payer universal health care, good and free or cheap education … and want the environment cleaned up.” Sheehan especially stressed the need to push for environmental and economic justice in Hunter’s Point, a traditionally African-American San Francisco neighborhood where a decommissioned naval shipyard doubles as a superfund cleanup site. The area now faces accelerating gentrification and construction of a new 49ers stadium on toxic land.

Sheehan noted these domestic concerns won’t be addressed “when our government is spending twelve million dollars an hour in Iraq … our futures are being sucked dry.” She concluded, “we need to solve the problem of militarism, especially the war in Iraq and
Afghanistan, to solve pressing social issues.”

The 1980s tension between Washington and the Kremlin helped spur an enormous disarmament movement in the West, and made fear of nuclear holocaust a topic of household discussion. A major TV network produced a highly-rated 1983 movie about nuclear war; it’s doubtful that decade’s hardcore punk rock would have had quite the edge it did had a generation not been living in the shadow of Armageddon.

In the midst of a Presidential campaign where most Republican candidates claim the U.S. should be allowed to attack Iran with nuclear weapons to keep our enemy du jour from acquiring nuclear weapons, and few Democrats express reservations about such an attack, it seems that popular consciousness about the dangers of these weapons has largely evaporated.

Nuclear Disorder or Cooperative Security? U.S. Weapons of Terror, the Global Proliferation Crisis, And Paths to Peace was written to help people in the U.S. learn more about their own country’s “WMD.” A collection of essays by disarmament specialists with decades of activist experience, it is framed as an assessment of the report issued by the Weapons of Mass Destruction Commission headed by Hans Blix. Among other important topics, the book examines: missiles and weapons in space, nuclear weapons research and development, climate change and nuclear power, and demilitarization and redefining security in human terms.

The essays are packed with chilling information about the U.S. military-industrial complex. Dr. John Burroughs of the Lawyers’ Committee on Nuclear Policy writes that the Bush Administration’s “biodefense” labs “are designed to conduct research on pathogens for which there is no known cure, such as Ebola or Marburg.” Burroughs concludes, “these laboratories and programs inevitably train scientists and engineers in biowarfare techniques, and threaten to erode international mechanisms designed to guard against biological weapons.” Further, ‘de facto’ creation of ‘biowarfare pathogens,’ admitted by a former Homeland Security assistant secretary for science and technology, blurs the line between offensive and defensive biological weapons research, and is likely incompatible with the provisions of the [1972 Biological Weapons Convention].”

It’s both strange and more than a little scary that in Washington’s post-Soviet New World Order, the President of the U.S. actually giggles and grins as he says, “we got a leader in Iran who has announced that he wants to destroy Israel. So I’ve told people that if you’re interested in avoiding World War III, it seems like you ought to be interested in preventing them from having the knowledge necessary to make a nuclear weapon.” While Fox News backs up W. with a steady drumbeat about the supposed Iranian menace looming on the horizon, it’s understandable if most of the world’s population is more concerned with the only country in the world which has actually used nuclear weapons in a war. [Mohammed ElBaradei, head of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), recently reported that there is no evidence of an active nuclear weapons program in Iran. ElBaradei based his judgment on the findings of IAEA inspectors in Iran; he made a similar observation about Iraq in early 2003.] Nuclear Disorder or Cooperative Security?’s chapter on Iran and the nuclear fuel-cycle seconds the Blix Commission’s rejection of “the suggestion that nuclear weapons in the hands some pose no threat, while in the hands of others they place the world in mortal jeopardy.” The chapter calls for the U.S. to engage in direct negotiations with Iran which “should lead to a process resulting in the end of unilateral U.S. economic sanctions, the provision of credible security assurances by the United States, and preclusion of Iran’s acquisition of nuclear weapons, and culminating in the normalization of relations between the two countries.”

Though the end of the Cold War created hopes for a “peace dividend” (which never materialized), in the early 1990s, seasoned defense analyst Daniel Ellsberg pointed out that the danger of another Hiroshima had actually increased. When he first ran for President, George W. Bush argued for cuts in the U.S. nuclear arsenal, calling excess nuclear warheads “relics of the Cold War.” In 2001, the Department of Energy was spending $4.9 billion yearly on nuclear weapons, but by 2007 that number had jumped to $6.4 billion. As the Bush Administration released its 2002 “Nuclear Posture Review,” Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney were obsessively promoting the development of new nuclear weapons, including a “bunker buster” 70 times more powerful than the Hiroshima A-bomb. The Natural Resources Defense Council estimated in 2004 that approximately $40 billion, or 10% of that year’s military budget, was spent on nuclear weapons.

In her essay discussing facilities which produce nuclear arms, Jacqueline Cabasso of the public interest group the Western States Legal Foundation writes, “It is difficult to overestimate the labs’ historical influence on the proliferation of nuclear weapons. Since their inception, the U.S. weapons labs have competed with each other to develop ever more sophisticated nuclear weapons systems, ‘selling’ their ideas to presidents, congresses, and the Pentagon, and actively opposing an end to nuclear testing.” Cabasso sees “an increasingly close relationship between the nuclear weapons laboratories and leading universities.” She cites “the $250 million the DOE [Department of Energy] awarded five major U.S. universities in 1997 to work with the Livermore Lost Alamos, and Sandia National Laboratories” on computer modeling and simulation of nuclear weapons tests.

Nuclear Disorder or Cooperative Security? recommends that the United States “make nuclear disarmament the leading edge of a global trend towards demilitarization and redirection of military expenditures to meet human and environmental needs.” A fair suggestion, but it won’t happen until public pressure forces the U.S. congress to take a stronger stand against the vested interests intent on maintaining the U.S. arsenal of some 10,000 nuclear weapons (including those deployed and in reserve). Peace and justice groups should use this important book as a tool to help accomplish that end.

The action was part of the ongoing Iraq Moratorium campaign, a national grassroots project which encourages local anti-war activities throughout the U.S. on the third Friday of every month.

The Peninsula Peace and Justice Center worked with more than a dozen other peace groups to coordinate the action. Charlotte Casey of the San Jose Peace Center told the crowd that after reading the 2006 New Yorker article, “people were shocked to find out Jeppesen was involved with torture,” and in the past year San Jose activists had held protests at the building “many times.” Casey emphasized that Jeppesen “can continue to do business in San Jose, they just can’t do business with the CIA.”

Henry Norr of the group Act Against Torture, wearing an orange jumpsuit like the ones made infamous by Guantanamo prisoners, recalled the many protests he’d attended at Jeppesen, and that he was “delighted to see the numbers growing.” Norr congratulated San Jose Peace Center volunteers on their “sustained work taking it to the City Council and Supervisors.”

Norr opined that national legislation thus far advanced to attack “extraordinary rendition” didn’t go far enough, and that defenders of civil liberties should “challenge torture more broadly … the Military Commissions Act of 2006 is really an outrageous piece of legislation. It strips habeus corpus provisions, but that’s only one part of it. Even the New York Times editorial board said if there ever was a time for a filibuster, this is it.” Norr noted that after researching various legislative initiatives, the group Torture Abolition and Survivors Support Coalition International (TASSC) also came to the conclusion that the Military Commissions Act had to be repealed, and had launched a campaign to do so. Norr encouraged efforts to pressure presidential candidates to take a stand against the law.

Standing near a woman holding a sign reading “Jesus said visit prisoners, not torture them,” Rev. Diana Gibson of the Santa Clara Council of Churches announced that she had invited representatives of Jeppesen to speak with protest organizers. Gibson said she had “told them we know as well as they do that this is abhorrent and illegal activity. I told them we’d be here until 12:30, so maybe they’ll come down.” They didn’t.

Local Presbyterian minister Rev. Ben Daniel spoke next, inspiring the noisiest applause of the day.

Rev. Daniel said, in part:

“For too long the language of morality and sin has been commandeered by those among us who think the primary goal of religion is to regulate human intimacy. People like you and me – that is to say, thoughtful people of faith whose souls are inclined to the work of making the world a better place — we don’t want our religious faithfulness to be confused with prudishness, so we shy away from anything that might look like a pounded pulpit or that might smell like brimstone.

“Brothers and sisters, dear friends, when it comes to torture, we need to lose that inhibition, because how can torture be anything but immoral? And if we cannot condemn as sin that which truly is immoral, then what might our God-given voices be for? [...]

“Torture is a sin … And woe unto you if you are torturing your fellow human being. Woe unto you if you are getting rich by providing material support, service, or assistance to the purveyors of torture, for how does it profit a person to gain the whole world but lose his or her soul? Woe unto the politicians who have abused our nation’s fear to find support for torture and who change the definition of torture in order to say with a straight face, ‘Americans don’t torture.’ Woe unto the politicians who have not spoken out loudly enough to condemn torture. Woe to the religious communities and leaders who have been silent. Woe unto you, for you will have to go to bed each night knowing that you have sinned against humanity and against God.”

Rev. Daniel then made clear whom he was criticizing:

“We are a people of Grace who refuse to stand by while our country dispenses cruelty. We march on in the Grace of God, and everyone is welcome to join us.

“That means you who are employed by Jeppesen or by the CIA. It means you, Mayor Reed, and the members of the San Jose City Council; you who sit on the Santa Clara board of Supervisors, you, Governor Schwarzenegger and the state legislators, you, senators and members of Congress in Washington, you, justices and you, Mr. President. It’s time to put off the immorality that has so infected the nation. It’s time to be done with the sin of torture. It’s time to come home, into the fold of God’s Grace, and into the joyful peace and security of a new day.”

On the train back to San Francisco, I ran into Penninsula Peace and Justice Center organizer Paul George, who, instead of basking in the success of his organizing, was finishing up an online commentary on the demonstration for his web-based newscast Orwell Was An Optimist. That weekly show, and news about future demonstrations against Jeppesen, can be found at , the Center’s website.

Hartley is a Spanish priest who came to the Dominican Republic in 1997 and wound up advocating for the cane cutters in his parish. The film gives him plenty of time to voice a thorough, articulate critique of the system which exploits the Haitians. Hartley names the superrich Vicini family as controlling the bateyes; the Vicinis have taken legal action against the film to prevent it from being screened.

It is not surprising that elites profiting from such a system would want the information in this documentary suppressed. According to the 2006 U.S. Department of State Dominican Republic Country Report on Human Rights Practices, “Most bateyes lacked schools, medical facilities, running water, and sewage systems and had high rates of disease. Company-provided housing was sub-standard. Most sugarcane workers were Haitian or of Haitian descent.” A worker says on camera that “you just watch your children die of hunger and you can’t do anything about it.”

A Dominican journalist interviewed by the filmmakers explains, “what the Vicini want, no President’s going to deny them.” As with a certain Australian media mogul and a network called Fox News, the sugar barons dominate TV and radio airwaves via adverstising dollars and direct ownership of outlets. Wealthy elites have used the mass media to spread divide-and-conquer demonization of Haitians, and the high-profile human rights advocate Father Hartley (who tells his parish that according to the second Vatican Council, workers have a right to strike). Poor Dominicans fall for that line, partly, in the words of Father Hartley, because Haitians are “a little bit poorer and a little bit blacker.”

Given his humility and solidarity with the poorest of the poor, I suspect Hartley might be uncomfortable with his pre-eminent role in the film. He is certainly a worthy subject and is clearly serious about his commitment to solidarity with the poorest of the poor, and to speaking up for social justice.

But while the film shows Hartley’s parents, sister, and brother discussing his childhood and path toward a life in the priesthood, it would have helped to have more context about where his Haitian parishoners came from. Instead, all we are told of Haiti comes via Paul Newman’s voiceover narration, which explains, “Haiti is one of the most dysfunctional countries in the world, rife with poverty and violence.”

As Haiti specialist Paul Farmer explains in thorough detail in his masterful book The Uses of Haiti, since Haitians defeated Napoleon’s army in the only successful slave revolution in history, Washington has made sure that Haiti remained a “dysfunctional” state “rife with poverty and violence.” In the late 1980s a grassroots Haitian peoples movement forced an end to the reign of the U.S.-backed father and son dictatorships of “Papa Doc” and “Baby Doc” Duvalier. Liberation theologian Jean-Bertrand Aristide emerged as part of this movement and surprised the U.S. by winning the overwhelming majority of the popular vote in 1990. The George H. W. Bush Administration subsequently backed right wing military and paramilitary forces behind the 1991 coup which forced Aristide into exile; in 2004 the George W. Bush Administration orchestrated (with France and Canada) a bloody coup against the second democratically-elected Aristide government.

U.S.-trained paramilitaries launched attacks that began the 2004 coup from safe havens in the Dominican Republic. An April, 2004 St. Petersburg Times article on the paramilitaries explained, “They enjoyed the tacit support of the Dominican armed forces. Ever since Aristide had done away with the military in Haiti in 1994, some Dominican generals were worried about their own job security. Without an army next door in Haiti, the traditional enemy of the Dominican Republic, calls were growing in Santo Domingo to slash the size of their own notoriously bloated and corrupt armed forces. The Dominican generals believed that recreating the old military threat next door would boost their relevance.”

As with the 1991 coup, thousands of Aristide supporters were killed under the “interim” anti-Aristide government, and unemployment soared, driving scores of peasants across the border into the D.R.

In Aristide’s 1992 autobiography, a passage on his first government’s pro-poor agenda clarifies another reason why Dominican rightists wanted him gone: “we could no longer tolerate the unspeakable banishments, the flagrant violations of the most elementary rights that were the lot of Haitians in the Dominican Republic. The government of that country had to come to realize that the very recent era in which Jean-Claude Duvalier had sold Haitians like a gang of slaves had been overturned. Never again would our sisters and brothers be exported like merchandise, their blood changed into bitter sugar.”

Pressure on the church succeeded in getting Father Hartley reassigned to Ethiopia in August. Anyone seeing this film will come away extremely concerned about what will happen to the destitute Haitians whose lives Hartley’s high visibility protected while they campaigned with him for better conditions in the Bateyes.

As such, the film does less to let Democrats off the hook than other recent examinations of George W’s Iraq disaster. Democratic Presidents including Lyndon Johnson are shown lying shamelessly about U.S. military action in Vietnam and elsewhere, and news clips show Bill Clinton and other Democrats who were quick to wage war insisting, as do their their Republican counterparts, that launching mass slaughter is the last thing they want to do.

Solomon points out that on mainstream TV, “if you’re pro-war, you’re ‘objective,’ but if you’re anti-war, you’re ‘biased.’” Three weeks before the 2003 invasion of Baghdad, doveish Phil Donahue was axed even though he had the highest rated show on MSNBC, while the notoriously pro-military Fox News repeatedly described George Bush as if he was Gary Cooper about to do battle with the forces of evil in a Hollywood western rather than a chief of state about to launch a war that would kill hundreds of thousands of civilians.

In dissecting how ever-more simplistic sound bites are used to sell wars, Solomon rightly points out, “it’s more powerful to leave things out than to tell lies.” In numerous cases, chief among the omissions is relevant history of past Washington support for the dictator du jour. As media critic Jeff Cohen notes in the film, “Journalists, too many of them — some quite explicitly — have said that they see their mission as helping the war effort. And if you define your mission that way, you’ll end up suppressing news that might be important, accurate, but maybe isn’t helpful to the war effort.”

And of course, if the end is noble, justification is that much easier. In Solomon’s words, “war becomes perpetual when it’s used as a rationale for peace.”

Footage from vintage cold war propaganda about the “international criminal conspiracy” of “godless” socialism looks like perverse comic relief until Solomon notes how closely the overheated “red scare” rhetoric parallels George Bush’s “axis of evil” scare-mongering.

Alas, hyperbolic jingoism continues to be repeated like clockwork as the military industrial complex pushes yet another war for dubious reasons. Recently, Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice claimed “the policies of Iran constitute perhaps the single greatest challenge to American security interests in the Middle East and around the world.” Less noted in the US mainstream press was the fact that Mohammed ElBaradei, head of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), reports that there is no evidence of an active nuclear weapons program in Iran. ElBaradei based his judgment on the findings of IAEA inspectors in Iran, as when he made a similar observation about Iraq in early 2003.

The Washington Post reported on memos written by former Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld in which the armchair warrior “wrote of the need to ‘keep elevating the threat,’ ‘link Iraq to Iran’ and develop ‘bumper sticker statements’ to rally public support for an increasingly unpopular war.”

In pondering the current state of U.S. foreign policy, two figures cited at the conclusion of War Made Easy stand out. One is independent journalist I.F. Stone, who noted the importance of remembering that “all governments lie.” The other is Martin Luther King, Jr, who the film shows saying, “A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.”

As people gathered in Portsmouth Square in Chinatown, Watada Support Group member Ying Lee told me, “At the time that we called the news conference we did not know that the judge was going to give his decision yesterday.” Lee went on, “The decision was due by today, so he was early (…) we are very appreciative of a United States Federal judge respecting the constitution and saying the trial cannot proceed.”

Lee described Watada as “a young man who out of a patriotic sense of duty after 9/11 enlisted. (…) And he was such a good officer that when he was stationed in Korea, his commanding officer told him to prepare to be sent to Iraq, because that was going to be his next station.”

Watada studied the background of the U.S. invasion of Iraq, Lee continued, and “he said this war is based upon lies, it’s illegal, it’s unconstiutional, it’s a violation of the human rights charter, it’s a violation of the Nuremberg Principles which we’ve adopted, and my oath of alliegance is to the country and the constitution, and not to one man. So he tried to resign three times, they wouldn’t accept his resignation, the President wouldn’t accept his resignation. He asked to be sent to Afghanistan, he’s not a conscienscious objector, and they refused that, so he felt he had no choice because he couldn’t tell his men to go into a war that he thought was so wrong that he then took the step of saying I will not fight in Iraq. He’s the first U.S. army officer to do so. And since then the military has charged him, through a series of court martials, with refusing to be sent to Iraq and behavior unbecoming to an officer and a gentleman. And when the court martial occurred, he was not allowed any witnesses. (…) But the army, as the prosecution, had six or seven witnesses. Each one of them spoke to what a wonderful young man he was, responsible, perfect officer, and very promotable. (…) The judge decided the trial was not going the way he had wanted it to, and so, he called a mistrial. In other words, he aborted the trial, and that was in February of 2007. Since then, the military has been trying to prosecute him again.”

Opening the press conference, Chinatown community activist Reverend Norman Fong set an appropriately upbeat tone in his remarks about the injunction. Fong enthused, “we’re here to keep hope alive, it’s going very good!”

The Reverend’s comments were translated into Cantonese by a young woman who also translated other speakers, including three poets. Local activist Peter Yamamoto, read a poem describing Watada as

“So serious.

A patriot.

Young, Asian, and articulate–

Athletic, good-looking, with short military-cut hair—“

Local Attorney David Chiu followed Yamamoto. Chiu said, “As a former prosecutor, [I would] remind the current prosecutors of their ethical obligations. Contrary to what you might see on television crime television shows, the ethical obligation of a prosecutor is not simply to prosecute, it’s not to put people in jail.”

Chiu continued, “The ethical obligation is very simple. A prosecutor is supposed to do justice. And justice in this case is not about putting this man in jail. (…) Justice in this case is about letting a man who’s already gone through a first trial, who’s about to be pushed through a second trial that’s unconstitutional, to let Watada go free.”

Several rowdy old men playing cards nearby quieted down as San Francisco poet laureate and radical gadfly Jack Hirschman came to the microphone. Flanked by activists holding signs which read “Refuse Illegal War/ Thank You Lt Ehren Watada,” Hirschman read a poem he had written for Watada. That poem, and another read by the city’s former poet laureate Janice Mirikitani, can be heard at Courage to Resist , “In the past few years, tens of thousands of service members have resisted illegal war and occupation in a number of different ways—by going AWOL, seeking conscientious objector status and/or a discharge, asserting the right to speak out against injustice from within the military, and for a relative few, publicly refusing to fight.”

On a July visit to Haiti, most of the people I spoke with were less enthusiastic about the UN presence in their country. On July 28, I observed a spirited demonstration across from UN headquarters on Ave. John Brown in Port-au-Prince. The protest took the form of what Haitian activists call a “sit-in”; such actions are smaller than mass mobilization “manifestations” which involve thousands of people marching. July 28 marked the 92nd anniversary of the 1915 US Marine invasion of Haiti, which many Haitians I spoke to see as a direct precursor to the current UN presence in Haiti, given that MINUSTAH, as the mission is known, was established in 2004 to legitimize the US-backed coup regime which ousted the democratically-elected government of Jean-Bertrand Aristide. (Aristide remains in U.S.-enforced exile in South Africa.)

Several activists began posting photos of dissidents killed by military, police and death squads over the past few decades. The photos were placed on a banner that said in Kreyol, “everytime a militant falls, 1,000 will rise to take their place.”

The protestors danced as they chanted, calling out in Kreyol, “what are we asking? For MINUSTAH to leave!” This was immediately followed by a song about their deposed President, which explained “our blood is Aristide’s blood.”

A bitterly angry Haitian woman informed me that her 25 year-old daughter was killed in the middle of the night by the UN during a raid on her neighborhood. She told us, “we will never forget how many people the UN has killed.” On previous trips to Haiti, I spoke to other family members of innocent civilians who became “collateral damage” – picked off for no other reason than that they were in the line of fire when UN soldiers went into assault mode on flimsily constructed, densely packed neighborhoods. In one such raid in Cite Soleil, MINUSTAH fired up to 22,000 bullets, according to declassified documents from the U.S. embassy.

The chanting continued in Kreyol: “Calling George Bush, come and get your thieves!” Then the demonstrators began moving up Avenue John Brown, to another entrance to the UN facility about a city block away.

There Lovinsky Pierre-Antoine, the head of Fondasyon 30 Septanm, a Haitian human rights organization which advocates for victims of the 1991 and 2004 coup d’etats against the democratically-elected governments of Jean-Bertrand Aristide, read a statement that included this passage: “Yes in 1915 we were subjected to an imperialist, criminal and ruthless occupation. In the year 2004 we again were subjected to another imperialist, criminal and ruthless occupation, even if the dark forces tried to hide their faces behind the army of a few countries that are poor like us.” Lovinsky then added the Kreyol proverb, “Those who pay the band decide what music to play.”

Lovinsky expressed vehement opposition to President Rene Preval’s extension of the UN mandate in Haiti. Though elected by the country’s poor majority largely because of his past association with Aristide (he was Prime Minister in the first Aristide administration which ended in the 1991 coup), most activists I spoke to now see Preval as at best ineffectual in standing up to rightist forces. And unlike Aristide, Preval has delivered few concrete gains for the poor masses and appears to have little ability or interest in communicating to them what he plans to do to improve their lot.

At the checkpoint Lovinsky directed his bullhorn toward, Jordanian troops stood poised with weapons at the ready in front of a roadblock covered in razor wire. Brazilian, Nepalese, and Bolivian soldiers had also driven by and scrutinized the demonstration at various points.

It was striking how many different uniformed and plainclothes soldiers and officers, including a Phillipine officer wearing a beret, a French officer, and a man with a U.S. flag on his shoulder, repeatedly photographed the assembled demonstrators. UN occupation forces have worked closely with Haitian police, whose widespread use of torture and extrajudicial execution under the post-2004 coup regime has been widely documented, in reports by the University of Miami, Harvard Law School, the Institute for Justice and Democracy and other organizations. Given that holdovers from the coup period still dominate the Haitian police (as well as the judiciary and most ministries), repeatedly photographing protestors seemed more about sending a message of intimidation than a matter of developing files on the fifty mostly elderly men and women in attendance, none of whom posed any physical threat to the heavily armed UN forces.

While Ban Ki-moon praised the Haitian Senate for passing legislation aimed at “creating a legal climate more conducive to economic development and foreign investment,” Lovinsky had a more grassroots perspective at the UN demonstration: “The bourgeoisie favored an occupation which would bring it big profits.”

Certainly a key factor in Jean-Bertrand Aristide earning the enmity of the small number of Haitian super-rich, who collaborated with the U.S., France and Canada on his 2004 ouster, was his Lavalas Party government’s work to provide some measure of economic justice by doubling the minimum wage and pushing elites to pay taxes. The Lavalas motto was “from misery to poverty with dignity,” not “working to create a climate more conducive to foreign exploitation.”

Poor Lavalas supporters were swept up en masse throughout the “interim” coup government of 2004-2006. (One of the more prominent current political prisoners, Lavalas grassroots organizer Rene Civil, who helped mobilize thousands in demonstrations to demand the return of Aristide, was arrested on trumped-up charges after Preval took office.) I spoke to a young man in the horrifically overcrowded downtown penitentiary in Port-au-Prince who has been trying with no success to get evidence of his innocence to a judge. His lawyer told me his client was picked up by police in a sweep after the business he worked in was robbed, then he was the one “suspect” police held on to after scrutinizing his history as a nonviolent Lavalas activist.

Untold numbers of other prisoners who identify as Lavalas remain in jail in similarly dubious circumstances. Some have been inside since the 2004 coup without once having seen a judge. One current prisoner estimated that more than 65% of those in the main penitentiary are there for political reasons. Given that I have heard repeatedly from prisoners and families of prisoners that they were offered freedom for cash payments of thousands of U.S. dollars they did not have, in a very real sense these people have been criminalized for being poor.

Incredibly, the outgoing head of UN peacekeeping operations in Haiti, Guatemalan Edmond Mulet gave a recent interview in which he admitted how awful jail conditions are: “We are victims of our own success. They are completely overcrowded. They even have to take turns now to sit or to lie down or to sleep because there is not enough room. So they take turns. They sleep for four hours and then are woken up so the others can sleep. It’s pretty horrible. And the sanitary conditions, you have cells that were made for four people and you have 40 or 50 in them. And this poses not only security problems, but also on human rights issue as well. So we are hoping some countries will be interested in putting a remedy to this.”

Mulet went on, “One of the problems we have in Haiti is most of the inmates are in preventive detention mode. They have probably never seen a judge, there’s no formal accusation, there’s no file, there’s nothing. Some of them probably stole a chicken and probably the penalty for that would be five days in jail and they’ve been in jail two or three years.”

Meanwhile anti-Aristide death squad thugs, including perpetrators of the April 1994 Raboteau massacre of Lavalas supporters, convicted and jailed under Haiti’s democratic governments are still roaming free after being sprung from jail by paramilitaries who did the dirty work of the 2004 coup.

The sense of solidarity the poor still have for Aristide (a Port-au-Prince resident told me, ‘Aristide was trying to help the lower classes — that’s why he was kidnapped”; the graffiti “VIV RETOU TITID,” or “long live the return of Aristide,” was everywhere) is indicative of the resilience of the popular movement for social and economic justice in Haiti. But given that the current UN mission in the country was established to support a status quo at odds with that popular movement, renewing the UN mandate there will only be another barrier to real democracy and progressive change for the vast majority of Haitians.

ADDENDUM:

On Tuesday, September 18, the Bay Area-based Haiti Action Committee (HAC) held a rally in downtown San Francisco to call attention to the unresolved kidnapping of veteran Haitian human rights activist Lovinsky Pierre-Antoine.

Robert Roth, a San Francisco high school teacher and long-time solidarity activist who took part in a delegation to Haiti in late July (which this writer joined in Port-au-Prince), spoke first at the rally. Roth explained, “It’s been over a month since Lovinsky Pierre-Antoine has disappeared. He is a human rights worker, he’s a psychologist, he’s worked with victims of torture from the coup of 1991-1994. He’s continued his human rights advocacy in Haiti during this recent coup in 2004, a coup organized and created by the United States government.”

Roth continued, “When we were there in Haiti, we met with Lovinsky at his house, he talked to us about the current situation in Haiti and how the human rights violations continue against the people. He talked to us about political prisoners, and how they continue to be held in Haiti under the UN occupation, and how they continue to be held under the Preval government.”

Roth added, “He is a deep thinker, and he is a very, very important leader of the people’s movement in Haiti. And he has disappeared for over a month, and that’s a crime against the people of Haiti, it’s a crime against anyone who believes in freedom and justice. It’s a crime against anyone who believes in peace and dignity and human rights and all the things that we cherish. And so our hearts are with him wherever he is. And we will not give up. We will not give up our solidarity with Lovinsky. We will not give up hope for his safe return, we will not give up our demand that the authorities in Haiti account for his disappearance, and bring him safely back to his family, his people. And we don’t see this as just about Lovinsky. It’s about the people of Haiti, it’s about the people of Iraq, it’s about the people of Palestine, it’s about the people of the Philippines, wherever people are fighting for justice. And so we take a moment here to honor him, and we take a moment to let people all over the world now that Lovinsky is with us, we’re with him, and we’ll continue to be out here until he returns home safely.”

HAC co-founder Pierre Labossiere echoed that internationalist perspective in his comments about “this beautiful brother, psychologist, human rights worker, someone who’s at the forefront of the movement for justice, for economic and social justice for the people of Haiti, and for people throughout the world.” Labossiere noted that when a member of the July delegation who was helping organize a Human Rights Tribunal on crimes committed during Katrina told Lovinsky of that New Orleans-based solidarity initiative, “Lovinsky said, ‘how do I support it? Let me sign up.’ […] As a matter of fact he was supposed to attend the tribunal when he disappeared three weeks before, the actual tribunal took place. So Lovinsky is one of those brothers who care for people world-wide, he’s just … not limited to Haiti. He sees the struggle for justice, and human rights,and equality as a world-wide struggle, and that people need to rally around from wherever you are from and link arms with each other, so we can have a world of peace, a world of justice, where human rights are respected.”

Labossiere asked the San Francisco protestors to write or call “the US embassy in Haiti, to the Brazilian authorities, who are in charge of the UN mission in Haiti, to the Haitian authorities.” The message: “we need them to exert all their influence – they are very powerful, very influential – with all sectors of Haitian society, from the very top politicians to the underworld, to demand one thing: that brother Lovinsky be returned to his family safely.”

In a September 13 letter to the Brazilian government, Dominican Sister Stella Goodpasture of the Mission of San Jose, emphasized that her appeal was not a request “for the Brazilian mission in Port-au-Prince to crack down militarily as they have in the past. What we are asking for is that Brazilian officials express their concern through any and all channels that the kidnappers should negotiate with Lovinsky Pierre-Antoine’s family and that Lovinsky needs to be released unharmed.”

More such messages to the authorities in Haiti are still needed.

Haitian Ministry of Justice

Tel: 011-509-245-0474

UN Stabilization Mission in Haiti (MINUSTAH)

Tel: 011-509-244-0650/0660

FAX: 011-509-244-9366/67

Or, Fax Office of UN Secretary General in New York: 212-963-4879

United States Embassy in Haiti

Tel: 011-509-223-4711, or 222-0200 or 0354

FAX: 011-509-223-1641

Embassy of Brazil in Haiti

FAX: 011-509-256-0900

Email: moc.itiahsseccanull@MERBIAH

Tel: 011-509-256-9662 or 6208 or 7556 or 7578

But critics contend that Washington’s enthusiasm for its Indonesian military “partners” has been at the expense of any accountability for military atrocities. On April 26, the U.S.-based East Timor and Indonesia Human Rights Network (ETAN) condemned the participation of Indonesian Major General Noer Muis in a joint U.S.-Indonesia military exercise. ETAN pointed out that General Muis has been indicted for crimes against humanity in East Timor.

Photos of Muis with U.S. Army Pacific commander Lt. General John M Brown III were featured on the U.S. Army, Pacific website where Muis was described as co-director of a “command post” exercise, Garuda Shield, which took place in West Java from April 16-27. After ETAN’s statement, the army quietly removed photographs and altered captions.

John M. Miller, ETAN’s National Coordinator, said “General Muis belongs in a courtroom, not a joint U.S.-Indonesia command center. The Bush administration has repeatedly stated that it supports accountability for the horrendous crimes committed in East Timor in 1999. Working with an accused mastermind of those crimes is a funny way to show it.”

On February 24, 2003, Muis was indicted with other senior officers by the UN-backed serious crimes process in East Timor. The indictment states that Muis “failed to take necessary and reasonable measures to prevent the crimes being committed by his subordinates and he failed to take necessary and reasonable measures to punish perpetrators of those crimes,” despite being “repeatedly informed” of those crimes. At least 1,400 people died, hundreds of thousands were forcibly displaced, and most of East Timor’s infrastructure was destroyed as the Indonesian military punished the territory for its pro-independence vote in a 1999 UN-supervised referendum.

The Indonesian government refused to cooperate with the serious crimes process, instead establishing its Ad Hoc Human Rights Court on East Timor to fend off calls for an international tribunal. Trials began in Jakarta in 2002. Eighteen people were indicted; Twelve were acquitted at first trial, and five, including Muis, had their convictions overturned by Indonesia’s Appeals Court. Only the conviction of East Timorese militia commander Eurico Guterres now stands. The Appeals Court upheld his conviction but halved the sentence by five years. Miller told me, “the whole process has been a farce.”

A UN Commission of Experts formed in February 2005 found that the trials of Indonesia’s Ad-hoc Human Rights Court were “manifestly inadequate,” showing “scant respect for or conformity to relevant international standards.”

In 2000, two years after the ouster of the dictator Suharto, pressure mounted to reform the Indonesian military (TNI) territorial command structure, which allows the armed forces to maintain units down to the village level throughout the country. But this apparatus has actually been reinforced in the name of “counterterrorism.” In late May, Indonesian marines killed four farmers in a land dispute. An investigation by Indonesia’s National Commission on Human Rights contradicted military claims of self-defense, finding no evidence that the civilians intended to attack the marines. On June 5, Bambang Widodo Umar, a lecturer at the University of Indonesia, told the Jakarta Post that the shootings show “TNI structural reform is not working. Conflicts between the military and civilians are happening everywhere. The TNI should not be involved in everything. Let law enforcement institutions, such as the police and the courts, be responsible for law enforcement.”

But an Asian Human Rights Commission (AHRC) statement “on the Occasion of the International Day in Support of Victims of Torture, June 26, 2007″ indicates that Indonesian police also lean toward excessive force with a zeal that recalls US military practices at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo. In discussing cases in which Indonesian police beat suspects to death, the Hong Kong-based AHRC wrote, “It is hard for victims of torture to find ways of obtaining redress, including compensation, reinstatement and punishment of the perpetrators. The conclusion one may inevitably draw, is that Indonesia is a state which allows its agents to torture persons and denies the victim the right to seek redress for such a crime.”

On June 5-7, Hina Jilani, Special Representative of the Secretary-General on the situation
of human rights defenders, visited the contested region of West Papua, and came to similarly disturbing conclusions. Her report on the visit stated:

The Special Representative is deeply concerned by the testimonies that she has heard indicating the continuing activities of the police, the military and other security and intelligence agencies that are aimed at harassment and intimidation of defenders or to restrict their access to victims and to sites of human rights violations. She has heard credible reports of incidents that involve arbitrary detention, torture, harassment through surveillance, interference with the freedom of movement and in defenders’ efforts to monitor and investigate human rights violations. She was also informed of cases where human rights defenders were threatened with prosecution by members of the police and the military. She is also concerned about complaints that defenders working for the preservation of the environment and the right over land and natural resources frequently receive threats from private actors with powerful economic interest, but are granted no protection by the police.

Papuans who met with her are facing increased surveillance and harassment. Dissidents in West Papua called on the UN to reconsider the 1969 “Act of Free Choice” in which 1,022 Papuans, chosen by the Indonesian Government and operating under military threat voted unanimously for annexation.

Col. Burhanuddin Siagian, head of the Jayapura sub-regional military command in West Papua responded to these calls with the same sort of language he used while overseeing Indonesian military carnage in East Timor in 1999: “(W)hat is absolutely certain is that anyone who tends towards separatism will be crushed by TNI.” Col Siagian, twice indicted for crimes against humanity in East Timor, added, “we are not afraid of human rights.”

A 2004 law mandated the government’s taking over TNI businesses, but that process is moving slowly at best. In February, Human Rights Watch said Jakarta’s foot-dragging on the issue “undermines civilian control over the TNI and fuels human rights abuses,” as the Indonesian government has no control over the allocation of profits from military businesses. Off the books paramilitary operations, such as those currently underway in West Papua, are thought to be funded by such monies.

The Jakarta Post recently reported, “Almost 70 percent of TNI’s annual budget is derived from its diversified business activities. This year’s defense budget is set at 32 trillion rupiah (US$3.63 billion) or 4.5 percent of the state budget.” But though the government initially identified 1,500 businesses that could be classified as military properties, the defense minister now say that only six military businesses as profitable enough to qualify for takeover. Critics note that this overlooks military co-ops and foundations, which are major sources of both income and corruption. In addition, only targeting legal businesses will obviously not address the significant problem of illegal military operations.

“Unless the issues of Indonesian military’s human rights and budget accountability are resolved, serious violations of human rights will continue and military reform will remain stalled,” says Miller. “By providing military equipment and training, the US is only encouraging the TNI to continue business as usual.”

Faleh Abood Umara, General Secretary of the Southern Oil Company Union (affiliated with the Iraqi Federation of Oil Unions) worked for the Southern Oil Company in Basra for 28 years. Umara was detained by Saddam Hussein’s regime in 1998 for union activities. In the post-Saddam years he has worked on his union’s negotiating team with both the Oil Ministry and British occupation authorities, defending the rights of oil company workers. His colleague Hashmeya Mushin Hussein, President of the Electrical Utility Workers Union, is the first woman to head a national union in Iraq. The Electrical Utility Workers are affiliated with the General Federation of Iraqi Workers (GFIW).

USLAW National Coordinator Michael Eisenscher introduced the speakers, pointing to the roots of Iraq labor unions in the country’s struggle against British imperialism, and the brave efforts of trade unionists under Saddam Hussein. Eisenscher noted that the June 2005 tour of Iraqi labor leaders USLAW coordinated (all three of the labor federations represented on that tour called for an end to the occupation in order to restore peace and end terrorism in Iraq) took place a month before a national meeting of the AFL-CIO, thereby helping achieve passage of a resolution by that U.S. labor body saying troops in Iraq “deserve a commitment from our country’s leaders to bring them home rapidly.” Eisenscher described this as the first time in its 50 year history that the federation took a position in opposition to a U.S. war while it was being waged, contrasting with unfortunate past history that earned it the label “AFL-CIA.” (The federation long served as an echo chamber for Washington’s cold war anti-communism, and helped facilitate brutal repression in Latin America and elsewhere.

Clarence Thomas, veteran International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU) activist who participated in the first USLAW delegation to Iraq, also spoke before the Iraqi visitors. Thomas pointed out that in 2004 the Bush representative Paul Bremer issued edicts echoing Saddam Hussein, which forbade any union activity in Iraq, a clear slap in the face to the Iraqi people since “when you don’t have trade union freedom, you don’t have democracy.” Thomas noted that ILWU boycotted cargo from South Africa in the apartheid days, which “sent shock waves around the world,” which happens “any time you interrupt global commerce.” ILWU Locals 10, 34, and 91 continued that tradition after Bush began the current Iraq war by refusing to cross community picket lines on the Oakland docks targeting the war profiteering corporation Stevedoring Services of America.

Thomas argued that to stop the war, “we’re going to need to make some sacrifices,” and suggested taking inspiration from “the courageous militancy of our brothers and sisters in Iraq.” The widely-respected Bay Area activist suggested a one day strike might be appropriate, which brought cheers of approval from the more than 100 people in attendance.

After he took the podium to a rousing ovation, Faleh Abood Umara addressed the “economic occupation of my country” and the struggle against this modern-day colonialism. He described the recent strike in Basra in which oil workers demanded a voice in negotiating the controversial hydrocarbon law, which was drafted and written in English by U.S. contractor BearingPoint and reviewed by the Bush Administration and the International Monetary Fund months before Iraqi legislators saw it. Though Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki responded to the limited strike by calling out the army and issuing arrest warrants for the leaders of the Federation of Oil Unions, a negotiated settlement was reached. Partly, Umara noted, this was because an Iraqi colonel in Basra refused to arrest union leadership.

Of the U.S. military presence in Iraq, Umara said, “I’m talking heart to heart: We need to put an end to the bloodshed happening daily, so American youth can come back and participate in the building of America.”

Hashmeya Muhsin Hussein echoed that call for an immediate end to the occupation. Hussein described oil, other resources, and the creation of large military bases as the prime reasons for the US presence in her homeland, and argued, “Iraq has entered a new dark age under the shadow of occupation,” with its economy and infrastructure destroyed. “We wanted to get rid of Saddam, but we never wanted occupation as an alternative,” she noted. Thanks largely to multinational exploitation and the dictates of the International Monetary Fund, Iraq currently has 60% unemployment and 9 million live under the poverty line.

Hussein described her experiences in the U.S. congress, where she told members of the House of Representatives that the civil war in Iraq began only after the occupation, and that violence would be reduced if the US withdrew from Iraq.

Democratic Congressman Dennis Moore of Kansas insisted to Hussein that there would be “chaos” if the U.S. military withdrew, to which the Iraqi labor leader replied, “isn’t there right now bloodshed and occupation?” Hussein also argued that the peaceful areas in Iraq are where occupation forces have withdrawn. But Moore insisted that Iraqi Shias and Sunnis have hated and fought each other for generations. When Hussein denied this, Moore asked her whether she was Shia or Sunni, to which Hussein replied, “Iraqi.”

Since the U.S. high command has announced that it will arm “Sunni insurgents,” allegedly to fight al-Quaida, after years of equipping Shia militias, it doesn’t take much effort to see how Washington might be contributing to fragmentation in Iraq. And as Iraq specialists Antonia Juhasz and Raed Jarrar wrote about the oil law on CounterPunch: “Many Iraqi oil experts are already referring to the draft law as the “Split Iraq Fund,” arguing that it facilitates plans for splitting Iraq into three ethnic/religious regions. The experts believe the law undermines the central government and shifts important decision-making and responsibilities to the regional entities. This shift could serve as the foundation for establishing three new independent states, which is the goal of a number of separatists leaders.”

Meanwhile, the Iraq oil law’s granting dominance to multinational oil giants behind the Bush Administration continues to be largely overlooked by the U.S. media and politicians in Washington. Instead, the mostly unquestioned spin from Washington is that the U.S. is working to heal divisions: UPI energy correspondent Ben Lando, who has written extensively about the oil workers’s strike, this week described Lt. Gen Martin as “the latest U.S. government official to push a common but false claim that the controversial draft oil law will lead to a just division of the proceeds from oil sales and pave the way for reconciliation in the war-torn nation.”

In fact, under the Iraq oil law still being negotiated, foreign oil giants stand to be the primary beneficiaries of those proceeds.

As Antonia Juhasz wrote, “The foreign companies would not have to invest their earnings in the Iraqi economy, partner with Iraqi companies, hire Iraqi workers or share new technologies. They could even ride out Iraq’s current “instability” by signing contracts now, while the Iraqi government is at its weakest, and then wait at least two years before even setting foot in the country. The vast majority of Iraq’s oil would then be left underground for at least two years rather than being used for the country’s economic development.

The international oil companies could also be offered some of the most corporate-friendly contracts in the world, including what are called production sharing agreements. These agreements are the oil industry’s preferred model, but are roundly rejected by all the top oil producing countries in the Middle East because they grant long-term contracts (20 to 35 years in the case of Iraq’s draft law) and greater control, ownership and profits to the companies than other models. In fact, they are used for only approximately 12 percent of the world’s oil.”

Critic Armond White wrote that the film “represents the highest example of contemporary black American life put on screen because of Burnett’s integrity to view it purely, without typical corrupted Hollywood devices.”

Burnett explained in an excellent long interview in the online journal senses of cinema that when he studied film at UCLA in the late 1960s and early 1970s: “It was a wonderful place to be and I’m glad I went there… You didn’t make films for commercial reasons or using your student film as a calling card for Hollywood. Hollywood wasn’t accessible to black independent filmmakers, or films by people of color, unless they were black exploitation films. You never expected anything from Hollywood. Filmmaking was for you making personal and political statements. All the people attending the course were there making films in response to false and negative images that Hollywood films were promoting. There was an anti-Hollywood attitude, but it was more than that, the focus was on you telling your story and working out an aesthetic.” Killer of Sheep was Burnett’s thesis film in that program, shot over many weekends in Watts.

The film is a study of a sensitive young family man who works in a slaughterhouse and suffers from exhaustion and insomnia. It examines connections between people and family dynamics against a background of grinding poverty and minimal hope. Like the deep blues that dominates the film’s wonderful soundtrack, it is profoundly unsentimental but buoyed with emotional resonance and hilarious moments. Burnett cites Jean Renoir’s too rarely screened The Southerner (which William Faulkner helped write) as an influence, but what struck me were similarities, especially in the spare, poetic beauty of the cinematography, to the films of another acknowledged influence, the Indian master Satyajit Ray. Like Ray, Burnett focuses on the less than spectacular, small details of life that define character, and the socio-economic realities of poor people in the modern world.

Burnett’s work with the many children who appear in Killer of Sheep is impressive, at times recalling In the Street, the experimental documentary made by Helen Levitt and James Agee in the mid 1940s. The kids are spontaneous, funny, troubled, complicated and often confused. The honest, direct representation of these children makes them seem to exist in a separate universe from the coddled, cloying child actors that clog today’s movie and TV screens.

After receiving a 1988 MacArthur Foundation Fellowship grant, Burnett released the critically-lauded To Sleep With Anger in 1990, which starred Danny Glover and featured an incredible cameo by legendary blues singer Jimmy Witherspoon. Like his earlier work, it is not an easily pigeon-holed piece of commercial filmmaking. To Sleep With Anger examines black folklore at the roots of African-American lives in Los Angeles; it was screened in only 18 theaters nationally, and suffered from an inadequate advertising budget. After that disappointment with minimal studio backing, Burnett turned to television work, where, among other projects, he directed a documentary about U.S. immigration called “America Becoming.”

In the 1990s, Burnett lost creative control on at least one other Hollywood vehicle (The Blue Shield). In Burnett’s words, “I have no interest to do cars banging into each other; most of the films I like to do aren’t very commercial. They’re not high concept. They’re hard to pitch to executives. They’re character-driven and theme-driven. I mean, I’m not trying to be sophisticated, but my movies are not designed for 18-year-olds.”

It is welcome news that Milestone Film and Video is not only releasing Killer of Sheep in theatres but will put out a DVD of the film, along with several shorts by Burnett, later this year. Milestone also plans to release a director’s cut of Burnett’s second film My Brother’s Wedding, originally released in a version not approved by Burnett.