The US has applied massive pressure on Egypt to drop the case, sending high-level officials to Cairo for intense discussions and threatening to cut off up to $1.3bn in military aid and $250m in economic assistance if the US citizens were tried. A travel ban was imposed on seven of them by Egypt’s Attorney General, including Sam LaHood, son of Obama’s Transportation Secretary. By the first day of the case all but the seven with travel restrictions had left the country and those who remained did not even attend court. A day after the ban was lifted a military plane removed the remaining seven US citizens from Egypt after the US government provided nearly $5m in bail.

The Egyptian authorities stated that the matter was firmly in the hands of the judiciary and out of control of government and accused the US of unacceptable meddling. The international community has expressed outrage at the affair and accused the Egyptian military of inciting paranoia of foreign interference so as to deflect attention from the slow pace of political and democratic reform a year after the revolution. Amid the high-profile diplomatic strife there has been an almost total global journalistic silence on the nature and funding of these “NGOs”.

State Sponsored Organisations, Not NGOs

The people standing trial are repeatedly referred to by governments and the media as “NGO workers”. The 43 defendants worked for five specific organisations; Freedom House; the National Democratic Institute (NDI); the International Republican Institute (IRI); the International Center for Journalists (ICFJ) and the Konrad Adenauer Stiftung. Only one of these organisations, the ICFJ, can be considered as non-governmental in that it does not receive the majority of its funding either directly or indirectly from a government.

The NDI, chaired by Madeline Albright, and the IRI, chaired by Senator John McCain, represent the US Democratic and Republican political parties. The NDI and IRI, together with the Center for International Private Enterprise, which represents the US Chamber of Commerce, and the Solidarity Centre, which represents the American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO), make up the four “core institutions” of the National Endowment for Democracy (NED). NED is a non-profit, grant-making institution that receives more than 90% of its annual budget from the US government. While Freedom House claims to be independent it regularly receives the majority of its funding from the NED. The Konrad Adenauer Stiftung, sometimes referred to as the German NED, is a non-profit foundation associated with the Christian Democratic Union. It receives over 90% of its funding from the German government. This means that the IRI, the NDI, Freedom House and the Konrad Adenauer Stifung – four of the five accused organisation – are state sponsored institutions and can not be defined as NGOs.

Freedom House has long been criticised for its right wing bias, favouring free markets and US foreign policy interests when assessing civil liberty and political freedom “scores” in countries around the world. Freedom House statistics for 2011 claim that Venezuelans had the same level of political rights as Iraqis. Bolivia’s overall score was reduced from “Free” to “Partially Free” after mass protests removed American-educated millionaire Gonzalo Sanchez de Losada from power after he initiated a sweeping privatization program. Now, under the first government in her history to really recognise the rights of the indigenous majority, Bolivia is still rated by Freedom House as only partially free and received a lower overall score than Botswana where one party (the BDP) has been in power since the first elections were held there in 1965. Freedom House has also been accused of running programmes of regime destabilisation in US “enemy states” and a 1996 Financial Times article revealed that Freedom House was one of several organisations selected by the State Department to receive funding for “clandestine activities” inside Iran including training and funding groups seeking regime change, an act that received criticism from Iranian grass roots pro-democracy groups.¹

The most nefarious of these organisations by far, however, are the IRI and the NDI. They receive NED grants “for work abroad to foster the growth of political parties, electoral processes and institutions, free trade unions, and free markets and business organizations.” ²  On March 6th, a protest march was organised by American civil society organisations at the offices of the NED in Washington, demanding; “NO ATTACKS ON DEMOCRACY ANYWHERE! CLOSE THE NED”. Union members and labor activists have protested and campaigned for years demanding that the AFL-CIO’s Solidarity Center break all ties to the NED.

Board of Directors

Chaired by Richard Gephardt – former Democratic Representative, now CEO of his own corporate consultancy and lobbying firm – the NED’s board of directors consists of a collection of corporate lobbyists, advisors and consultants, former U.S congressmen, senators, ambassadors and military and senior fellows of think tanks. For example, John A. Bohn, a former high level international banker and former President and Chief Executive Officer of Moody’s Investors Service, is now Commissioner of the California Public Utilities Commission, a principal in a global corporate advisory and consulting firm and Executive Chairman of an internet based trading exchange for petrochemicals. Kenneth Duberstein, former White House Deputy Chief of Staff under Reagan, is now Chairman and CEO of his own corporate lobbying firm. He also sits on the Board of Governors of the American Stock Exchange and NASD and serves on the Boards of Directors of numerous conglomerates including The Boeing Company, ConocoPhilips and Fannie Mae. Martin Frost is a former congressman who was involved in writing the 1999 “Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act” also known as the “Citigroup Relief Act”, and William Galston, former student of Leo Strauss, is a US Marine Corp veteran.

The Board also contains four of the founding members of ultra-conservative think tank Project for a New American Century; Francis Fukyama (author of ‘The End of History’), Will Marshall (founder of the ‘New Democrats’, an organisation that aimed to move Democratic Party policies to the right) former congressman Vin Weber (who retired from Congress in 1992 as a result of the House Banking Scandal and is now managing partner of a corporate lobbying firm) and Zalmay Khalilzad. Under George Bush Jr., Khalilzad served as US Ambassador to Iraq, Afghanistan and the UN.  He is now President and CEO of his own international corporate advisory firm which advises clients – mainly in the energy, construction, education, and infrastructure sectors – wishing to do business in the Middle East, particularly in Iraq and Afghanistan. He also briefly consulted for Cambridge Energy Research Associates while they were conducting a risk analysis for the proposed Trans-Afghanistan gas pipeline.

History

The NED was founded in 1983 when Washington was embroiled in numerous controversies relating to covert military operations and the training and funding of paramilitaries and death squads in Central and South America. The NED was formed to create an open and legal avenue for the US Government to channel funds to opposition groups against unfavourable regimes around the world, thus removing the political stigma associated with covert CIA funding. In a 1991 Washington Post article, “Innocence Abroad: The New World of Spyless Coups”, Allen Weinstein (who helped draft the legislation that established the NED) declared; “A lot of what we [the NED] do today was done covertly 25 years ago by the CIA”. ³

In 1996 the Heritage Foundation published an article in defence of continued NED congressional funding which accurately summed up the NED as a US foreign policy tool; “The NED is a valuable weapon in the international war of ideas. It advances American national interests by promoting the development of stable democracies friendly to the U.S. in strategically important parts of the world. The U.S. cannot afford to discard such an effective instrument of foreign policy…Although the Cold War has ended, the global war of ideas continues to rage”. ⁴

As well as ongoing campaigns of regime destabilisation in undemocratic US enemy states such as Cuba and China, and its well known funding of “colour” revolutionaries in the former soviet space, the NED has been repeatedly involved in influencing elections and overthrowing governments in left-leaning and anti-US democratic regimes around the world. This is achieved by providing funding and/or training and strategic advice to opposition groups, political parties, journalists and media outlets. As Barbara Conry of the Cato Institute wrote: “Through the Endowment, the American taxpayer has paid for special-interest groups to harass the duly elected governments of friendly countries, interfere in foreign elections, and foster the corruption of democratic movements.”⁵

From 1986 to 1988 the NED funded the right-wing political opposition to Nobel Peace Price winner, President Oscar Arias, in democratic Costa Rica because he was outspokenly critical of Reagan’s violent policies in Central America. During the 1980s the NED was even active in “defending democracy” in France due to the dangerous rise in communist influence perceived as occurring under the elected socialist government of Francois Mitterrand. Money was channelled into opposition groups including extreme right-wing organisations such as the National Inter-University Union. In 1990 the NED provided funding and support to right wing groups in Nicaragua, and Daniel Ortega and the Sandinistas were removed from power in an election described by Professor William I. Robinson as an event in which “massive foreign interference completely distorted an endogenous political process and undermined the ability of the elections to be a free choice”.⁶

In the late 1990s the NED provided funding and support to the US backed right-wing opposition against the election campaign of progressive former president, and first democratically elected leader of Haiti, Jean-Betrand Aristide. When a coup removed Aristide from power for the second time in 2004 it was revealed that the NED had provided funding and strategic advice to the principal organizations involved in his ousting. The involvement of the NED in the 2002 attempted coup against President Hugo Chavez in Venezuela has been well researched and documented. Immediately after the coup, however, the then president of the IRI, George Folsom, revealed the institute’s role in the endeavour when he sent out a press release celebrating Chavez’s ousting: “The Institute has served as a bridge between the nation’s political parties and all civil society groups to help Venezuelans forge a new democratic future…”.

The IRI was also implicated in the 2009 Honduran coup amid claims that the organisation had supported the ousting of democratically elected leader Manuel Zelaya because of his support of the Bolivarian Alternative for the Americas (an anti-free trade pact including Honduras, Venezuela, Bolivia and Cuba) and his refusal to privatise telecommunications. According to the Council on Hemispheric Affairs AT&T – an American telecommunications giant – has provided significant funding to both the IRI and Senator John McCain (its chairman) in order to target Latin American states that refuse to privatize their telecommunications industry.⁷

Influence in Egypt and the Arab Spring

The NED works in democratic Turkey but does not provide “democratisation grants” to civil society organisations in Western allied absolute monarchies such as Qatar, Saudi Arabia or Oman. A number of NED backed activists have taken centre stage in the Arab Spring struggles and U.S. supported candidates have risen to occupy leading positions in newly established transitional governments. The most glaring example of this is Libya’s transitional Prime Minister, Dr. Abdurrahim El-Keib, who holds dual U.S./Libyan citizenship and is former Chairman of the Petroleum Institute sponsored by British Petroleum, Shell, Total and the Japan Oil Development Company. He handed the job of running Libya’s oil and gas supply to a technocrat and, according to the Guardian, has passed over Islamists expected to make the cabinet in order “to please Western backers”.⁸ Tawakkul Karman too, of Yemen, who became the youngest ever recipient of a Nobel Peace Price in 2011, was leader of a NED grantee organisation, “Women Journalists without Chains”.

In 2009 sixteen young Egyptian activists completed a two-month Freedom House ‘New Generation Fellowship’ in Washington. The activists received training in advocacy and met with U.S. government officials, members of Congress, media outlets and think tanks. As far back as 2008, members of the April 6th Movement attended the inaugural summit of the Association of Youth Movements (AYM) in New York, where they networked with other movements, attended workshops on the use of new and social media and learned about technical upgrades, such as consistently alternating computer simcards, which help to evade state internet surveillance. AYM is sponsored by Pepsi, YouTube and MTV and amongst the luminaries who participated in the 2008 Summit, which focused on training activists in the use of Facebook and Twitter, were James Glassman of the State Department, Sherif Mansour of Freedom House, National Security Advisor Shaarik Zafar and Larry Diamond of the NED.

This is rather ironic considering that in September 2009 the US authorities arrested Elliot Madison (a US citizen and full-time social worker) for using Twitter to disseminate information about police movements to G20 Summit street protesters in Pittsburgh. Madison, apparently in violation of a loosely defined federal anti-rioting law, was accused of “criminal use of a communication facility,” “possessing instruments of crime,” and “hindering apprehension”. Given that heavily armed police officers were using tear gas, sonic weapons and rubber bullets on protesters Madison’s actions were hardly unjustified. Further demonstrating the hypocrisy of Madison’s arrest is the fact that in June 2009 the State Department had requested Twitter delay a planned upgrade so that Iranian protesters’ tweets would not be interrupted. Twitter Inc subsequently stated in a blog post that it had delayed the upgrade because of its role as an “important communication tool in Iran.”⁹

A leaked 2008 cable from the Cairo US Embassy, entitled “April 6 activist on his US visit and regime change in Egypt”, showed that the US was in dialogue with an April 6th youth activist about his attendance at the AYM Summit.¹⁰  The cable revealed that the activist tried to convince his Washington interlocutors that the US Government and the International Community should pressure the Egyptian government into implementing reforms by freezing the off-shore bank accounts of Egyptian Government officials. He also detailed the youth movement’s plans to remove Mubarak from power and hold representative elections before the September 2011 presidential election.

While the cable revealed that the US deemed this plan “highly unrealistic”, the dialogue proves that the funding of any youth organisation associated with the April 6th movement by a US organisation since December 2008 had been done with Washington and the US embassy in Cairo being fully aware that the movement’s aim was regime change in Egypt. Yet in April 2011 the New York Times published an article entitled ‘U.S. Groups Helped Nurture Arab Uprisings’ in which it openly stated that; “A number of the groups and individuals directly involved in the revolts and reforms sweeping the region, including the April 6th Youth Movement in Egypt, the Bahrain Center for Human Rights and grass-roots activists like Entsar Qadhi, a youth leader in Yemen, received training and financing from groups like the IRI, the NDI and Freedom House”.

According to the NED’s 2009 Annual Report, $1,419,426 worth of grants was doled out to civil society organisations in Egypt that year. In 2010, the year preceding the January – February 2011 revolution, this funding massively increased to $2,497,457.¹¹ Nearly half of this sum, $1,146,903, was allocated to the Center for International Private Enterprise for activates such as conducting workshops at governate level “to promote corporate citizenship” and engaging civil society organizations “to participate in the democratic process by strengthening their capacity to advo­cate for free market legislative reform on behalf of their members”. Freedom House also received $89,000 to “strengthen cooperation among a network of local activists and bloggers”.

According to the same 2010 report, various youth organisations and youth orientated projects received a total of $370,954 for activities such as expanding the use of new media and social advertising campaigns among young activists, training and providing ongoing support in “the production and targeted dissemination of social advertisement campaigns”, building the leadership skills of political party youth, strengthening and supporting “a cadre of young civic and political activists . . . well positioned to mobilize and engage their communities”, and providing youth  training workshops in “professional media skills as well as online and social networking media tools”.

But this is just the funding that is transparently made known to us on the NED’s official website. After the revolution, the NDI and IRI massively expanded their operations in Egypt, opening five new offices between them and hiring large numbers of new staff. The Egyptian authorities claim that they have found these organisations’ finances very difficult to trace. According to Dawlat Eissa – a 27-year-old Egyptian-American and former IRI employee – the IRI used employees’ private bank accounts to channel money covertly from Washington, and an IRI accountant stated that directors used their personal credit cards for expenses. Eissa and a number of her colleagues resigned from their posts with the IRI in October, and Eissa filed a complaint with the government after director Sam LaHood reportedly told employees to collect all of the organisation’s work related paperwork for scanning and shipping to the US.¹²

It is clear that NDI, IRI and Freedom House were training and funding the youth movement in Egypt while the US Government and its Cairo Embassy were fully aware that the youth movement aimed to remove Mubarak from power. Critics claim that the defendants are being charged with a law that is a “relic of the Mubarak era”. But, it may be replied, in what country does the law allow foreign governments to fund and train opposition groups with a stated goal of regime change? It is common sense to assume that if China or Cuba were funding similar oppositionist groups in the US, those involved would be facing far harsher sentences than the 43 now standing trial in Egypt. Yet they continue to hide behind the tattered guise of being “NGO” employees, claiming independence because their US government funding is channelled through the National Endowment for Democracy.

The term “NGO” is used deliberately to create an illusion of innocent philanthropic activity. In this case the Egyptian government is investigating the operations of organisations in receipt of US state funding which have a proven history of covertly funding political parties, influencing elections and aiding coups against both autocratic and democratic non-compliant and left-leaning governments around the world. Yet one mention of the Egyptian government’s raid on the offices of so-called “pro-democracy NGOs” in Cairo was enough to spark an international outcry. The result has been an almost complete failure by the Western press to investigate at all the history of the organisations involved or the validity of the charges being brought against them.

•  This article was first published in Irish Foreign Affairs (Vol 5, No. 1, March 2012)

1. Guy Dinmore, “Bush enters Iran ‘freedom’ debate’”, Financial Times, March 31, 2006
2. National Endowment for Democracy official website
3. Innocence Abroad: The New World of Spyless Coups by David Ignatius. Washington Post, September 22, 1991
4. The National Endowment for Democracy: A Prudent Investment in the Future by James Phillips (Senior Research Fellow for Middle Eastern Affairs) and Kim R. Holmes (Vice President of Foreign and Defence Policy Studies), Heritage Foundation, 1996
5. Conry, B. (1993) Cato Foreign Policy Briefing No. 27, November 8
6. Robinson, William I. (1992), A Faustian Bargain: U.S. Intervention in the Nicaraguan Elections and American Foreign Policy in the Post-Cold War Era,  Boulder: Westview Press, p. 150
7. D’Ambrosio, Michaela,  ‘The Honduran Coup: Was it a matter of behind the scenes finagling by state department stonewallers?” Council on Hemispheric Affairs, September 16, 2009
8. “Libyan PM snubs Islamists with cabinet to please western backers”, The Guardian, Tuesday  November 22, 2011
9. Pleming, Sue. “US State Department speaks to Twitter over Iran”,  Reuters, Jun 16, 2009
10. “Egypt protests: secret US document discloses support for protesters”,  The Telegraph, January 28, 2011
11. All figures taken from 2009 and 2010 NED annual report’s for Egypt available on NED’s official website
12. Hill, Evan,  “Egypt dossier outlines NGO prosecution”, Al Jazeera English, February 26, 2012

Government reforms would go a long way toward slowing our decline and even reversing it eventually. Government reform could take away the enormous favors it bestows on corporate America, favors sometimes so large that they keep otherwise drowning corporations afloat. But government is intransigent and will continue to be corruptible at the hands of corporate America. More attention therefore needs to be turned toward corporate reform.

Furthermore, while corporate America may be too obtuse or complacent to realize it, their own reform may be good for them in the long run. As an organizational psychologist for nearly half a century I know how inefficient the corporate organizational structure is and how poorly corporations are run. Most of them would probably have a very tough going if they lost government handouts and hands-off corporate wrongdoing. A corporation that was properly organized and well run with the proper standards of performance and self accountability ought to be able to make up for its ill begotten profits.

Corporate America: An Overview

Big government is undeniably too big yet it is dwarfed by the number of corporations and their people and is totally overpowered by corporate America (if corporate reform were a success, there would be no excuse for a bloated and massive government). Corporate America is very heterogeneous spread as it is across many different manufacturing and service industries yet has a common goal of advancing itself regardless of the means. There are about 17,000 corporations in corporate America if we arbitrarily define any of its corporate members as having over 500 employees.

Since size, corruption and abusive power usually go together we ought to divide corporations or their industries into three categories of size, small, medium, and large as modified by the scale of harm done and assign reform priorities accordingly.

As big and powerful as it is overall, Corporate America nevertheless accounts for only about 20% of all businesses in America. The rest is referred to as small business, but it is not small in the size of its total workforce. Small business employs far more people than do corporations. Small business, if it would unite into a coordinated counterforce could be a powerful opponent of the entire corpocracy.

Corporate America’s Allies: An Overview

Not counting its “marriage partner,” that is, government, corporate America has many allies it can depend on to further its interests either by supporting and/or accepting them: the touts and shills; the cultists; NGOs; small business; compromised professions and sciences; the bystanders; and even foreign enemies. With the possible exception of the bystanders, an ally benefits directly or indirectly from its explicit or tacit alliance with corporate America. An ally that is explicit and very active in its support of corporate America ought to be considered accomplices in contrast to tacit and passive allies. Any corporate reform strategy must include corporate America’s accomplices or risk being blindsided by them.

Touts and Shills. They are a motley lot of accomplices and the difference between a tout and a shill isn’t always clear cut. Touts (that’s what Winston Churchill called lobbyists) are hired and paid to swarm inside government and lobby it for their clients. Anyone, any organization, any association can be a shill. Even politicians or judges can be shills. As a matter of fact, if you want to call government the biggest shill, I won’t disagree with you.

A shill’s focus is usually not as laser beamed as a tout’s. Shills generally offer paeans to the corpocracy and its conservative, free-market ideological underpinnings. Think of shrill shills like ideologically blinded, ranting and raving radio talk show hosts as an extreme example. Touts, on the other hand, concentrate on getting specific favors for particular corporate members of the corpocracy, be they a certain corporation or a particular industry.

Consider the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, an extremely influential shill and tout. As I wrote in the December 13, 2011 issue of OpEdNews.com the USCC was instrumental in furthering the imminent US Supreme Court Justice Lewis F. Powell’s “battle” plan to revive a dormant corporate America. The USCC has been called by the authors of a Washington Post story the “goliath of the lobbying world,” making Big Pharma look like a piker.

Shills that I’ll lump together include: talking-head pundits and the rabble rousers shouting into a mike; “Erudites” squirreled away in think tanks authoring corporate gospel; and “front” groups, whose purpose is to mask corporate intent and consequences and call them what they are not. Then there are in varying shades of shill the business and law schools that mint the new recruits for the managerial and executive ranks throughout corporate America and supply it with lawyers paid well to argue the legality of any corporate action no matter how harmful.

The cultists. One of the most insidious cults is the “cult of growth,” preferably fast growth, every quarter. The cultists in it generally aren’t shrill shills but their views on, and promotion of, unbridled growth sometimes go to the extreme and the actions sometimes condoned for achieving growth go to the extreme. In this cult are mostly mainstream economists, management gurus, and speculative investors and their brokers. There is even a politically activist organization called the “Club of Growth” that is for bridled taxes and unbridled growth.” This cult helps fuel corporate America’s wrongdoing by reinforcing speculative investing, globalization, environmental exploitation and what author Roger Terry in his book calls a kind of “economic insanity.”

Another cult is the conservatives who mostly occupy the right wing of the once proud Republican Party that called Abraham Lincoln its first U.S. President. This Party has become, says the Nobel laureate in economics, Paul Krugman, a strident group of malcontents “acting out of pure spite like a ‘bratty 13-year-old.” They spew provocative and deceitful exhortations and slogans (e.g., “let’s reload,” “don’t tread on me,” “freedom works”) and are against government solutions, particularly social welfare (so miserly it is dwarfed by corporate welfare).

“Anticorpocracy” NGOs. What you see is not necessarily what you get when it comes to the realm of NGOs that purport to be opposed to one or more facets of the corpocracy. In the February 23, 2012 issue of OpEdNews.com I wrote about my frustrating experience in trying to get what I call “two-fisted democracy power” organized and unleashed, and I included profiles of two financially well-endowed and large NGOs that appear to depend more for their existence on the corpocracy’s continuation than on ending it and reclaiming democracy. I had been forewarned about this and so I expect I will encounter many more compromised NGOs as I continue contacting them. If they refuse to unite or at least coordinate their separate government reform initiatives, then putting more emphasis on corporate reform becomes paramount.

Small business. Small business is no longer the backbone of our economy. Its backbone has been crushed. It has become both a victim of, and to some extent a compromised ally, corporate America.

Compromised professions and sciences. Probably the most shameful of this diverse lot are people of the cloth; that is, the religious profession. It is full of “pulpiteers” who mouth scripture and generalities about sin for fear of alienating those in the pews who put profit and power before honor when not in a house of worship. Next would have to be the legal profession, especially its corporate lawyers who specialize, to take an excerpt from the title of Ralph Nader and Wesley Smith’s book, in the “perversion of justice.” Next might be the mainstream journalism profession that has been compromised by the media magnates. I would also not leave out most of the other professions as well as the sciences because they have been compromised in various ways such as receiving government and corporate funding. Society tends to place far too much unguarded trust in the performance of professions and sciences because of their education, training, and standards of performance.

The bystanders. This passive and amorphous lot usually known as the silent majority is the most populous of all the allies. It includes fatalistic people, cowed and fearful people; bamboozled and distracted people; and exhausted people too busy trying to eke out a living.       

Foreign enemies. This is not a mistaken inclusion here. Sociology professor Charles Derber contends in his book, Regime Change begins at Home that “—today’s regime (aka today’s corpocracy) “can survive only by practicing a foreign policy of bad faith that [he calls] ‘marry-your-enemy.’” Carrying out this policy fattens the defense industry, including beefing up its sale of arms (the U.S. is the world’s top arms seller); opens up, protects, and expands corporations’ foreign markets and exploitation of natural resources (oil and minerals) and cheap labor; keeps politicians in office; and distracts the American public from growing socio-economic deterioration at home

Finding the Scoundrels

There are dozens of non-governmental watchdogs monitoring various industries, their corporations, and to some extent their accomplices (e.g. the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, certain think tanks, etc.)

Vetting over 17,000 corporations and countless accomplices (allies that actively aid and abet scoundrel corporations) would be silly. Relying on a random sampling of them would net a catch of scoundrels, but the overall goal of ending the corpocracy and reclaiming democracy obviously must not be left to chance. The best approach would be a coordinated search among many existing watchdog groups.

Here is a suggested plan these groups could follow for vetting corporate America and its accomplices:

1. Set a threshold of wrongdoing. There are so many ethical values and so many harmful ways to breech them that the severity of the harm done needs to be graded, starting with determining whether there is any reasonable evidence that harm has occurred in the first place. For each of the three dimensions of harm — psychological, physical, and economical — there needs to be a consensus on a threshold of harm that excludes immaterial consequences. Determining the thresholds would be very easy to do but necessary. There is plenty enough reform work to do without getting bogged down in trivia.

2. Name the obvious first. Some industries, their corporations, and their allies do not need to be vetted. They are the most rotten apples in the barrel. Offhand, I can think of six. Merchants of death, such as corporations in the “defense” industry would be first. Second would be the nuclear industry and its corporations. Third would be the agribusiness industry because of its poisoning of our food and drinking water. The fourth would be the financial “disservices” industry and its gangsters. The fifth would be the pharmaceutical industry where health often takes a backseat to wealth. The sixth would be certain allies like the trade lobbies (e.g., for the defense and pharmaceutical industries) and the USCC.

3. Vet the rest. Doing this will take some time so this is a good place to mention Jamie Court’s “corporateer quotient” that he wrote about in his book, Corporateering and who is president of Consumer Watchdog. The quotient is derived from answers to 18 questions (e.g., “what percentage of total expenditures is spent on political contributions and trade lobbying”). His questionnaire or some adaptation of it could be used in the vetting process while keeping in mind the complication, as Court does, that not many of the answers are publicly available even though “none of the questions are trade secrets.”

4. Don’t overlook any saints. There surely must be a few honorable exceptions among corpocracy America and its allies who could conceivably serve as inspiring exemplars. The search might turn out embarrassing though. I remember, for example, the pundits who were featured in a business magazine after having extolled Enron very shortly before that corporation imploded from its own misdeeds. An exemplary corporation therefore ought to be one that has passed rigorous screening.

Onward to Corporate Reform

Watchdogs that only watch are nothing more than lapdogs. We Americans ought to have had enough of an over-fed, lazy-fed lapdog that lets corporate America exploit and harm us. Once the vetting is done, therefore, a strategic approach to reforming the scoundrels needs to be planned and pursued.

How Not to Proceed: Three Stories of Mice at the Table with Hungry Cats

Confrontation, collaboration and/or compromise are stances instigators of corporate reform might take toward corrupt industries and their corporations. I will tell you three short stories of collaboration and compromise. The lesson taken from them is that mice should never sit down at the table with hungry cats.

The “apparel industry partnership.” Several unions, human rights groups, and religious groups sat down at the table with the apparel industry to seek a compromise solution on curbing or controlling sweatshops. Guess who got suckered and walked away with nothing?

The Business Roundtable Institute for Corporate Ethics.  Its mission is to bring “together leaders from business and academia to—renew and enhance the link between ethical behavior and business practice through executive education programs, practitioner-focused research and outreach.” Do you know anything about the Business Roundtable? If you do, you know which “partner” carries the day.

Peace through commerce. This is the partial title of a book I reviewed a year ago. Its editor advocates collaborations between multinational corporations and NGOs aimed at reducing violence. The editor lets various contributors illustrate with true stories their collaborations in several different countries.  The cited corporations mostly have a history of corruption and the illustrations clearly tell me that the editor, the NGOs, and the contributors (except for contributors who were executives in corporate PR departments) were hoodwinked.

A Possible Strategy for Instigating Corporate Reform

1. With the exception of the death merchants, for each of the industries and their corporations with records of the most harmful wrongdoing a large strike force cadre of NGOs and the most relevant movement(s) would be established. Where a bona fide movement did not exist the cadre would be responsible for developing one (possibly relying on the guidance of authoritative sources such as Si Kahn and his book Organizing guide for grassroots leaders). A large cadre would also be established for allies that are common to all of the industries such as the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and think tanks. This strategy of using specific cadres would represent a modified and scaled-down version of my two-fisted democracy proposal.

2.  For each selected industry the corresponding cadre would target specific corporations and any specific allies unique to them. Priorities in order and timing of the confrontations would depend on the behavioral profiles of the corporations and their allies.

3. The different cadres would coordinate their plans and strategies but tailor them as necessary to the specific nature of each target. All of the cadres should collaborate in planning and carrying out a campaign of blitzing the public about their entire venture and soliciting support for it (such as joining in any planned massive demonstrations or boycotts).

Once a cadre was ready it would begin confronting its target corporations/accomplices, escalating the confrontation to a more aggressive stage if the corporation’s response in the previous step was unsatisfactory.

4. In the initial confrontation, regardless of whether the corporation/accomplice had been a target before, a certified letter would be sent to the corporation’s CEO and chair of the board of directors with a copy to any accomplice.

Letters to corporations that have already been confronted by activists would reflect that fact. The letters would also a) present an assessment of each corporation’s profile of  wrongdoing along with a request for a self-assessment to be made such as completing the questionnaire developed by Jamie Court and introduced in his book, Corporateering;  b) make the case for why the corporation should reject the corpocracy and undertake self-reforms such as those I suggested in my first book, Tall Performance from Short Organizations Through We/Me Power and in my most recent book, The Corporacy and Megaliio’s Turn Up Strategy; c) advise the corporation to repair major harms its actions have caused; and d) advise the corporation to resolve whatever longstanding or current issues have already been raised by activist groups. The notice would close by requesting a response within one month and saying the response would influence the cadre’s next steps.

5. Complying corporations, if there are any, would be closely monitored and issued progress reports until, and if, it was cleared by the cadre. Recalcitrant corporations would be hit by a barrage of escalating confrontations that would include massive boycotts, massive protest demonstrations, lawsuits, blitzing the public with publicity, and telling the obsequious, relevant government agencies to get on board pronto with the reformers, not their targets.

Is Corporate Self-reform Realistically Possible?

My answer is “yes” if corporations are aggressively confronted; if they are shown models of properly organized and run corporations, along with any real exemplary corporations; and if the monitoring and pressure never ease or cease until there is the right kind of self reform.

The Special Case of the Death Merchants

I will close with this sobering thought. If the death merchants and their government pawns aren’t stopped. they will eventually be the death of America. This part of the corpocracy is the one part where it will be absolutely imperative to organize and unleash a (civil) war on war. The only way to do this would be to confront not only the “defense” industry but also those parts of our government that depend the most on militarism and endless wars.

The Western media continue, for its part, to adduce as evidence the statements of local committees which spread propaganda of the armed “opponents”, in coordination with the Syrian Observatory of Human Rights, a London-based body created and funded by the rebellion-allied forces[The Syrian Observatory of Human Rights — which collects the statements of various local committees in Syria — has been repeatedly denounced as nothing but a vulgar instrument of disinformation in the service of the revolt. Despite ample evidence of that, it remains the principal source of information from Syria – together with the famous “great reporters” — and the entire Western media are referring to it, spreading day after day the reports by this rip-of observatory.¹

To understand what happens in Syria, it is therefore not possible to rely on the Syrian Observatory or on bloggers who are part of this rebellion. We also cannot rely on foreign correspondents who are, as we can see, systematically and from the heart and soul on the side of the armed “opponents”, qualifying them as “heroes” and presenting the battle that divides the Syrian people in an entirely Manichaean way: On one side the opposition which “struggles for democracy”, and on the other the terrible dictator.

Things are not like that. As demonstrated by a recent poll, as well as by the massive demonstrations in support of the Russian and Chinese veto at the UN, the vast majority of the Syrian people do not want this armed revolt, which seeks solely to legitimize NATO powers and several Arab states — notoriously known as champions of democracy, such as Qatar.

If you want to speak of “heroes” in Syria, then you should refer to all parties who are suffering, not only to the “heroes” recognized by the West …

How many Milan missiles were handed over to the rebels?

The number of Syrian citizens appealing to to their president for intervention of government forces is very high. This is especially true in Homs, where the situation is alarming because large sections of the population are held hostage by these groups occupying entire areas of the city — the neighborhoods of Baba Amr, Khaldiyeh, Karm el-Zeytoun — where the people have been calling for months for Damascus to rescue them.²

Their fate has become even more a source of anxiety since the same Milan anti-tank missile launchers delivered to the Libyan rebels during the Libyan campaign, less than a year ago, by France and Qatar, began to be used. We can remember how at the time Sarkozy and Bernard Henry Levy misled public opinion by putting the blame on forces loyal to Gaddafi for the use of these Milan missiles, which were taking a heavy toll on the people of Syria.

This is the same disturbing scenario repeating itself in Syria. Politicians, journalists and NGOs are once again taking a firm stand concerning the war, provoked by groups exploited by foreign powers. They attribute to the government forces, as was done in Libya and without proper inspection, the acts of barbarism perpetrated by the armed ‘opponents’ who are terrorizing the majority of the population.

For three weeks correspondents have been repeating that Homs has been unilaterally shelled by the Syrian army. On the contrary, the loyalist contingents attacked by the Milan missiles have suffered heavy losses since the beginning of their intervention. It is not clear whether the authorities in Damascus will be able to dislodge these groups with heavy weaponry from all quarters of the city.

Could the Syrian government not respond?

From the beginning of these battles it has been repeatedly demonstrated that the armed ‘rebels’ are trained, drilled and formed by foreign special forces and that among their ranks the opponents have elements acting on behalf of foreign powers whose presence in Syria is self-evident. Syrian television has recently disseminated pictures of Homs taken by a foreign “war photographer” who followed and filmed these armed “opponents” — the same ones glorified by the “great reporters” — who wildly launch rockets and missiles. An image has attracted attention: In a building, whose stairs are dirty with blood and destroyed furniture, a surprising graffiti with heavy meaning stood out on a wall: “From Misurata, after we have freed Lybia, we came to free Syria!”

Who is responsible for the massacres of Homs, and which objectives does he pursue?

These armed groups, whose most violent actions are attributed to Al Assad soldiers facing them, are systematically presented by the Western press as “foes” fighting for “democracy.”

Why do “great reporters” not bring evidence of Syrian victims of abductions, tortures and murders by these armed “opponents”?

Why has the President of Doctors without Borders recently contributed to this process of intoxication, showing as credible the testimonies of anonymous Syrians with covered faces — standing side by side with the rebels, and attributing to Al-Assad forces and to the hospitals’ doctors unspeakable acts of torture and injury of children?³

Who would believe in Bashar Al Assad’s interest in torturing his people, in raping children and girls? Who would believe that the majority of the Syrian people would continue supporting Bashar Al Assad if he was really such a bloody torturer as painted in the West for the purpose of war propaganda?

These incessant campaigns which defend the violent opposition, and not the people terrorized and oppressed by these rebels, are dangerous. They aim to bring grist to foreign power’s mill — France, Great Britain, the United States, backed by Qatar and Saudi Arabia — which have been preparing for months the ground for a military intervention in Syria, and are just waiting for the green light by Obama.

1. The Syrian Observatory of Human Rights — which collects the statements of various local committees in Syria – has been repeatedly denounced as nothing but a vulgar instrument of disinformation in the service of the revolt. Despite ample evidence of that, it remains the principal source of information from Syria — together with the famous “great reporters” — and the entire Western media are referring to it, spreading day after day the reports by this rip-of observatory.
2. See: “Une Syrienne, dont le frère a été tué à Homs par des ‘opposants’, témoigne” (“A Syrian who had killed his brother in Homs by ’opponents’ witnesses”), story picked up by Nadia Khost, February 8, 2012.
3. The role of NGOs that have contributed to the misinformation affecting Syria and thus increasing the risk of foreign intervention, and in particular Amnesty International and Medecins Sans Frontières will be the subject of further investigations.

The UN estimated international donors gave Haiti over $1.6 billion in relief aid since the earthquake (about $155 per Haitian) and over $2 billion in recovery aid (about $173 per Haitian) over the last two years.

Yet Haiti looks like the earthquake happened two months ago, not two years. Over half a million people remain homeless in hundreds of informal camps, most of the tons of debris from destroyed buildings still lays where it fell, and cholera, a preventable disease, was introduced into the country and is now an epidemic killing thousands and sickening hundreds of thousands more.

It turns out that almost none of the money that the general public thought was going to Haiti actually went directly to Haiti.  The international community chose to bypass the Haitian people, Haitian non-governmental organizations and the government of Haiti.  Funds were instead diverted to other governments, international NGOs, and private companies.

Despite this near total lack of control of the money by Haitians, if history is an indication, it is quite likely that the failures will ultimately be blamed on the Haitians themselves in a “blame the victim” reaction.

Haitians ask the same question as many around the world “Where did the money go?”

Here are seven places where the earthquake money did and did not go.

One.  The largest single recipient of US earthquake money was the US government.  The same holds true for donations by other countries.

Right after the earthquake, the US allocated $379 million in aid and sent in 5000 troops.  The Associated Press discovered that of the $379 million in initial US money promised for Haiti, most was not really money going directly, or in some cases even indirectly, to Haiti.  They documented in January 2010 that thirty three cents of each of these US dollars for Haiti was actually given directly back to the US to reimburse ourselves for sending in our military.  Forty two cents of each dollar went to private and public non-governmental organizations like Save the Children, the UN World Food Program and the Pan American Health Organization.  Hardly any went directly to Haitians or their government.

The overall $1.6 billion allocated for relief by the US was spent much the same way according to an August 2010 report by the US Congressional Research Office: $655 million was reimbursed to the Department of Defense; $220 million to Department of Health and Human Services to provide grants to individual US states to cover services for Haitian evacuees; $350 million to USAID disaster assistance; $150 million to the US Department of Agriculture for emergency food assistance; $15 million to the Department of Homeland Security for immigration fees, and so on.

International assistance followed the same pattern.  The UN Special Envoy for Haiti reported that of the $2.4 billion in humanitarian funding, 34 percent was provided back to the donor’s own civil and military entities for disaster response, 28 percent was given to UN agencies and non-governmental agencies (NGOs) for specific UN projects, 26 percent was given to private contractors and other NGOs, 6 percent was provided as in-kind services to recipients, 5 percent to the international and national Red Cross societies, 1 percent was provided to the government of Haiti, four tenths of one percent of the funds went to Haitian NGOs.

Two.  Only 1 percent of the money went to the Haitian government.

Less than a penny of each dollar of US aid went to the government of Haiti, according to the Associated Press.   The same is true with other international donors.  The Haitian government was completely bypassed in the relief effort by the US and the international community.

Three.   Extremely little went to Haitian companies or Haitian non-governmental organizations.

The Center for Economic and Policy Research, the absolute best source for accurate information on this issue, analyzed all the 1490 contracts awarded by the US government after the January 2010 earthquake until April 2011 and found only 23 contracts went to Haitian companies.  Overall the US had awarded $194 million to contractors, $4.8 million to the 23 Haitian companies, about 2.5 percent of the total.  On the other hand, contractors from the Washington DC area received $76 million or 39.4 percent of the total.  As noted above, the UN documented that only four tenths of one percent of international aid went to Haitian NGOs.

In fact, Haitians had a hard time even getting into international aid meetings.  Refugees International reported that locals were having a hard time even getting access to the international aid operational meetings inside the UN compound.  “Haitian groups are either unaware of the meetings, do not have proper photo-ID passes for entry, or do not have the staff capacity to spend long hours at the compound.”  Others reported that most of these international aid coordination meetings were not even being translated into Creole, the language of the majority of the people of Haiti!

Four.  A large percentage of the money went to international aid agencies, and big well connected non-governmental organizations (NGOs).

The American Red Cross received over $486 million in donations for Haiti.  It says two-thirds of the money has been contracted to relief and recovery efforts, though specific details are difficult to come by.  The CEO of American Red Cross has a salary of over $500,000 per year.

Look at the $8.6 million joint contract between the US Agency for International Development (USAID) with the private company CHF for debris removal in Port au Prince. CHF is a politically well-connected international development company with an annual budget of over $200 million whose CEO was paid $451,813 in 2009. CHF’s connection to Republicans and Democrats is illustrated by its board secretary, Lauri Fitz-Pegado, a partner with the Livingston Group LLC.  The Livingston Group is headed by the former Republican Speaker-designate for the 106th Congress, Bob Livingston, doing lobbying and government relations.  Ms. Fitz-Pegado, who apparently works the other side of the aisle, was appointed by President Clinton to serve in the Department of Commerce and served as a member of the foreign policy expert advisor team on the Obama for President Campaign.  CHF “works in Haiti out of two spacious mansions in Port au Prince and maintains a fleet of brand new vehicles” according to Rolling Stone.

Rolling Stone, in an excellent article by Janet Reitman, reported on another earthquake contract, a $1.5 million contract to the NY based consulting firm Dalberg Global Development Advisors.  The article found Dalberg’s team “had never lived overseas, didn’t have any disaster experience or background in urban planning… never carried out any program activities on the ground…” and only one of them spoke French.  USAID reviewed their work and found that “it became clear that these people may not have even gotten out of their SUVs.”

Presidents George W. Bush and Bill Clinton announced a fundraising venture for Haiti on January 16, 2010.  As of October 2011, the fund had received $54 million in donations.  It has partnered with several Haitian and international organizations.  Though most of its work appears to be admirable, it has donated $2 million to the construction of a Haitian $29 million for-profit luxury hotel.

“The NGOs still have something to respond to about their accountability, because there is a lot of cash out there,” according to Nigel Fisher, the UN’s chief humanitarian officer in Haiti.  “What about the $1.5 to $2 billion that the Red Cross and NGOs got from ordinary people, and matched by governments?  What’s happened to that?  And that’s where it’s very difficult to trace those funds.”

Five.  Some money went to for profit companies whose business is disasters.

Less than a month after the quake hit, the US Ambassador Kenneth Merten sent a cable titled “THE GOLD RUSH IS ON” as part of his situation report to Washington.  In this February 1, 2010 document, made public by The Nation, Haiti Liberte and Wikileaks, Ambassador Merten reported the President of Haiti met with former General Wesley Clark for a sales presentation for  a Miami-based company that builds foam core houses.

Capitalizing on the disaster, Lewis Lucke, a high ranking USAID relief coordinator, met twice in his USAID capacity with the Haitian Prime Minister immediately after the quake.  He then quit the agency and was hired for $30,000 a month by a Florida corporation Ashbritt (known already for its big no bid Katrina grants) and a prosperous Haitian partner to lobby for disaster contracts.  Locke said “it became clear to us that if it was handled correctly the earthquake represented as much an opportunity as it did a calamity…”Ashbritt and its Haitian partner were soon granted a $10 million no bid contract.  Lucke said he was instrumental in securing another $10 million contract from the World Bank and another smaller one from CHF International before their relationship ended.

Six.  A fair amount of the pledged money has never been actually put up.

The international community decided it was not going to allow the Haiti government to direct the relief and recovery funds and insisted that two institutions be set up to approve plans and spending for the reconstruction funds going to Haiti.  The first was the Interim Haiti Recovery Commission (IHRC) and the second is the Haiti Reconstruction Fund (HRF).

In March 2010, UN countries pledged $5.3 billion over two years and a total of $9.9 billion over three years in a conference March 2010.  The money was to be deposited with the World Bank and distributed by the IHRC.  The IHRC was co-chaired by Bill Clinton and the Haitian Prime Minister.  By July 2010, Bill Clinton reported only 10 percent of the pledges had been given to the IHRC.

Seven.  A lot of the money which was put up has not yet been spent.

Nearly two years after the quake, less than 1 percent of the $412 million in US funds specifically allocated for infrastructure reconstruction activities in Haiti had been spent by USAID and the US State Department and only 12 percent has even been obligated according to a November 2011 report by the US Government Accountability Office (GAO).

The performance of the two international commissions, the IHRC and the HRF has also been poor.  The Miami Herald noted that as of July 2011, the $3.2 billion in projects approved by the IHRC only five had been completed for a total of $84 million.  The Interim Haiti Recovery Commission (IHRC), which was severely criticized by Haitians and others from its beginning, has been effectively suspended since its mandate ended at the end of October 2011.  The Haiti Reconstruction Fund was set up to work in tandem with the IHRC, so while its partner is suspended, it is not clear how it can move forward.

What to do

The effort so far has not been based on a respectful partnership between Haitians and the international community.   The actions of the donor countries and the NGOs and international agencies have not been transparent so that Haitians or others can track the money and see how it has been spent.  Without transparency and a respectful partnership the Haitian people cannot hold anyone accountable for what has happened in their country.  That has to change.

The UN Special Envoy to Haiti suggests the generous instincts of people around the world must be channeled by international actors and institutions in a way that assists in the creation of a “robust public sector and a healthy private sector.”  Instead of giving the money to intermediaries, funds should be directed as much as possible to Haitian public and private institutions.  A “Haiti First” policy could strengthen public systems, promote accountability, and create jobs and build skills among the Haitian people.

Respect, transparency and accountability are the building blocks for human rights.  Haitians deserve to know where the money has gone, what the plans are for the money still left, and to be partners in the decision-making for what is to come.

After all, these are the people who will be solving the problems when the post-earthquake relief money is gone.

In the modern capitalist era, the ideologies of imperialist rulers vary over time, from the early appeals to “the right” to wealth, power, colonies and grandeur to later claims of a ‘civilizing mission’. More recently imperial rulers have propagated, many diverse justifications adapted to specific contexts, adversaries, circumstances and audiences.

This essay will concentrate on analyzing contemporary US imperialist ideological arguments for legitimizing wars and sanctions to sustain dominance.

Contextualizing Imperial Ideology

Imperialist propaganda varies according to whether it is directed against a competitor for global power, or whether as a justification for applying sanctions, or engaging in open warfare against a local or regional socio-political adversary.

With regard to established imperialist (Europe) or rising world economic competitors (China), US imperialist propaganda varies over time. Early in the 19th century, Washington proclaimed the “Monroe Doctrine”, denouncing European efforts to colonize Latin America, privileging its own imperial designs in that region. In the 20th century when the US imperial policymakers were displacing Europe from prime resource based colonies in the Middle East and Africa, it played on several themes. It condemned ‘colonial forms of domination’ and promoted ‘neo-colonial’ transitions that ended European monopolies and facilitated US multi-national corporate penetration. This was clearly evident during and after World War 2, in the Middle East petrol-countries.

During the 1950s as the US assumed imperial primacy and radical anti-colonial nationalism came to the fore, Washington forged alliances with the declining colonial power to combat a common enemy and to prop up post-colonial powers to combat a common enemy. Even with the post-World War II economic recovery, growth and unification of Europe, it still works in tandem and under US leadership in militarily repressing nationalist insurgencies and regimes. When conflicts and competition occur, between US and European regimes, banks and enterprises, the mass media of each region publish “investigatory findings” highlighting the frauds and malfeasance of its competitors — and US regulatory agencies levy heavy fines on their European counterparts, overlooking similar practices by Wall Street financial firms.

In recent times the rising tide of militarist imperialism and colonial wars fueled by Israeli proxies in the US state has led to some serious divergencies between US and European imperialism. With the exception of England, Europe made a minimum symbolic commitment to the US wars and occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan. Germany and France concentrated on expanding their export markets and economic capacities; displacing the US in major markets and resource sites. The convergence of US and European empires led to the integration of financial institutions and the subsequent common crises and collapse but without any coordinated policy of recovery. US ideologists propagated the idea of a “declining and decaying European Union”, while the European ideologues emphasized the failures of Anglo-American de-regulated, ‘free markets’ and Wall Street swindles.

Imperialist Ideology, Rising Economic Powers and Nationalist Challengers

There is a long history of imperialist “anti-imperialism”, officially sponsored condemnation, exposés and moral indignation directed exclusively against rival imperialists, emerging powers or simply competitors, who in some cases are simply following in the footsteps of the established imperial powers.

English imperialists in their heyday justified their world-wide plunder of three continents by perpetuating the “Black Legend”, of Spanish empire’s “exceptional cruelty” toward indigenous people of Latin America, while engaging in the biggest and most lucrative African slave trade. While the Spanish colonists enslaved the indigenous people, the Anglo-American settlers exterminated them.

In the run-up to World War II, European and US imperial powers, while exploiting their Asian colonies condemned Japanese imperial powers’ invasion and colonization of China. Japan, in turn claimed it was leading Asia’s forces fighting against Western imperialism and projected a post-colonial “co-prosperity” sphere of equal Asian partners.

The imperialist use of “anti-imperialist” moral rhetoric was designed to weaken rivals and was directed to several audiences. In fact, at no point did the anti-imperialist rhetoric serve to “liberate” any of the colonized people. In almost all cases the victorious imperial power only substituted one form colonial or neo-colonial rule for another.

The “anti-imperialism” of the imperialists is directed at the nationalist movements of the colonized countries and at their domestic public. British imperialists fomented uprisings among the agro-mining elites in Latin America promising “free trade” against Spanish mercantilist rule; they backed the “self-determination” of the slave-holding cotton plantation owners in the US South against the Union; they supported the territorial claims of the Iroquois tribal leaders against the US anti-colonial revolutionaries — exploiting legitimate grievances for imperial ends.

During World War II, the Japanese imperialists supported a sector of the nationalist, anti-colonial movement in India against the British Empire. The US condemned Spanish colonial rule in Cuba and the Philippines and went to war to “liberate” the oppressed peoples from tyranny and remained to impose a reign of terror, exploitation and colonial rule.

The imperialist powers sought to divide the anti-colonial movements and create future “client rulers” when and if they succeeded. The use of anti-imperialist rhetoric was designed to attract two sets of groups. A conservative group with common political and economic interests with the imperial power, which shared their hostility to revolutionary nationalists and which sought to accrue greater advantage by tying their fortunes to a rising imperial power. A radical sector of the movement tactically allied itself with the rising imperial power, with the idea of using the imperial power to secure resources (arms, propaganda, vehicles and financial aid) and, once securing power, to discard them. More often than not, in this game of mutual manipulation between empire and nationalists, the former won out, as is the case then and now.

The imperialist “anti-imperialist” rhetoric was equally directed at the domestic public, especially in countries like the US which prized its 18th anti-colonial heritage. The purpose was to broaden the base of empire building beyond the hard line empire loyalists, militarists and corporate beneficiaries. Their appeal sought to include liberals, humanitarians, progressive intellectuals, religious and secular moralists, and other “opinion-makers” who had a certain cachet with the larger public, the ones who would have to pay with their lives and tax money for the inter-imperial and colonial wars.

The official spokespeople of empire publicize real and fabricated atrocities of their imperial rivals, and highlight the plight of the colonized victims. The corporate elite and the hardline militarists demand military action to protect property, or to seize strategic resources; the humanitarians and progressives denounce the “crimes against humanity” and echo the calls “to do something concrete” to save the victims from genocide. Sectors of the Left join the chorus and, finding a sector of victims who fit in with their abstract ideology, plead for the imperial powers to “arm the people to liberate themselves” (sic). By lending moral support and a veneer of respectability to the imperial war, by swallowing the propaganda of “war to save victims” the progressives become the prototype of the “anti-imperialism of the fools”. Having secured broad public support on the bases of “anti-imperialism”, the imperialist powers feel free to sacrifice citizens’ lives and the public treasury, to pursue war, fueled by the moral fervor of a righteous cause. As the butchery drags on and the casualties mount, and the public wearies of war and its cost, progressive and leftist enthusiasm turns to silence or worse, moral hypocrisy with claims that “the nature of the war changed” or “that this isn’t the kind of war that we had in mind …” As if the war makers ever intended to consult the progressives and left on how and why they should engage in imperial wars!

In the contemporary period the imperial “anti-imperialist wars” and aggression have been greatly aided and abetted by well-funded “grass roots” so-called “non-governmental organizations” which act to mobilize popular movements which can “invite” imperial aggression.

Over the past four decades US imperialism has fomented at least two dozen “grass roots” movements which have destroyed democratic governments, or decimated collectivist welfare states or provoked major damage to the economy of targeted countries.

In Chile throughout 1972-73 under the democratically elected government of Salvador Allende, the CIA financed and provided major support — via the AFL-CIO — to private truck owners to paralyze the flow of goods and services. They also funded a strike by a sector of the copper workers union (at the El Tenient mine) to undermine copper production and exports, in the lead up to the coup. After the military took power, several “grass roots” Christian Democratic union officials participated in the purge of elected leftist union activists. Needless to say, in short order the truck owners and copper workers ended the strike, dropped their demands and subsequently lost all bargaining rights!

In the 1980’s the CIA via Vatican channels transferred millions of dollars to sustain the “Solidarity Union” in Poland, making a hero of the Gdansk shipyards worker-leader Lech Walesa, who spearheaded the general strike to topple the Communist regime. With the overthrow of Communism so also went guaranteed employment, social security, and trade union militancy: the neo-liberal regimes reduced the workforce at Gdansk by fifty percent and eventually closed it, giving the boot to the entire workforce. Walesa retired with a magnificent Presidential pension, while his former workmates walked the streets and the new “independent” Polish rulers provided NATO with military bases and mercenaries for imperial wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

In 2002 the White House, the CIA, the AFL-CIO and NGOs, backed a Venezuelan military-business — trade-union bureaucrat-led “grass roots” coup that overthrew democratically elected President Chavez. In 48 hours, a million strong authentic grass roots mobilization of the urban poor backed by constitutionalist military forces defeated the US backed dictators and restored Chavez to power. Subsequently, oil executives directed a lockout backed by several US-financed NGOs. They were defeated by the workers’ takeover of the oil industry. The unsuccessful coup and lockout cost the Venezuelan economy billions of dollars in lost income and caused a double digit decline in GNP.

The US backed “grass roots” armed jihadists to liberated “Bosnia” and armed the “grass roots” terrorist Kosovo Liberation Army to break-up Yugoslavia. Almost the entire Western Left cheered as, the US bombed Belgrade, degraded the economy and claimed it was “responding to genocide”. Kosovo “free and independent” became a huge market for white slavers, housed the biggest US military base in Europe, with the highest per-capita out migration of any country in Europe.

The imperialist “grass roots” strategy combines humanitarian, democratic, and anti-imperialist rhetoric and paid and trained local NGOs, with mass media blitzes to mobilize Western public opinion and especially “prestigious leftist moral critics” behind their power grabs.

The Consequence of Imperial Promoted “Anti-Imperialist” Movements: Who Wins and Who Loses?

The historic record of imperialist promoted “anti-imperialist” and “pro-democracy” “grass roots movements” is uniformly negative. Let us briefly summarize the results. In Chile ‘grass roots’ truck owners strike led to the brutal military dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet and nearly two decades of torture, murder, jailing and forced exile of hundreds of thousands, the imposition of brutal “free market policies” and subordination to US imperial policies. In summary, the US multi-national copper corporations and the Chilean oligarchy were the big winners and the mass of the working class and urban and rural poor the biggest losers. The US backed “grass roots uprisings” in Eastern Europe against Soviet domination, exchanged Russian for US domination; subordination to NATO instead of the Warsaw Pact; the massive transfer of national public enterprises, banks and media to Western multi-nationals. Privatization of national enterprises led to unprecedented levels of double-digit unemployment, skyrocketing rents and the growth of pensioner poverty. The crises induced the flight of millions of the most educated and skilled workers and the elimination of free public health, higher education and worker vacation resorts.

Throughout the now capitalist Eastern Europe and USSR highly organized criminal gangs developed large scale prostitution and drug rings; foreign and local gangster ‘entrepeneurs’ seized lucrative public enterprises and formed a new class of super-rich oligarchs Electoral party politicians, local business people and professionals linked to Western ‘partners’ were the socio-economic winners. Pensioners, workers, collective farmers, the unemployed youth were the big losers along with the formerly subsidized cultural artists. Military bases in Eastern Europe became the empire’s first line of military attack of Russia and the target of any counter-attack.

If we measure the consequences of the shift in imperialist power, it is clear that the Eastern Europe countries have become even more subservient under the US and the EU than under Russia. Western induced financial crises have devastated their economies; Eastern European troops have served in more imperialist wars under NATO than under Soviet rule; the cultural media are under Western commercial control. Most of all, the degree of imperialist control over all economic sectors far exceeds anything that existed under the Soviets. The Eastern European “grass roots” movement succeeded in deepening and extending the US Empire; the advocates of peace, social justice, national independence, a cultural renaissance and social welfare with democracy were the big losers.

Western liberals, progressives and leftists who fell in love with imperialist-promoted “anti-imperialism” are also big losers. Their support for the NATO attack on Yugoslavia led to the break-up of a multi-national state and the creation of huge NATO military bases and a white slavers paradise in Kosova. Their blind support for the imperial promoted “liberation” of Eastern Europe devastated the welfare state, eliminating the pressure on Western regimes’ need to compete in providing welfare provisions. The main beneficiaries of Western imperial advances via “grass roots” uprisings were the multi-national corporations, the Pentagon and the right-wing free market neo-liberals. As the entire political spectrum moved to the right, a sector of the left and progressives eventually jumped on the bandwagon. The Left moralists lost credibility and support, their peace movements dwindled, and their “moral critiques” lost resonance. The left and progressives who tail-ended the imperial backed “grass roots movements”, whether in the name of “anti-Stalinism”, “pro-democracy”, or “anti-imperialism” have never engaged in any critical reflection; no effort to analyze the long-term negative consequences of their positions in terms of the losses in social welfare, national independence or personal dignity.

The long history of imperialist manipulation of “anti-imperialist” narratives has found virulent expression in the present day. The New Cold War launched by Obama against China and Russia, the hot war brewing in the Gulf over Iran’s alleged military threat, the interventionist threat against Venezuela’s “drug-networks”, and Syria’s “bloodbath” are part and parcel of the use and abuse of “anti-imperialism” to prop up a declining empire. Hopefully, the progressive and leftist writers and scribes will learn from the ideological pitfalls of the past and resist the temptation to access the mass media by providing a ‘progressive cover’ to imperial dubbed “rebels”. It is time to distinguish between genuine anti-imperialism and pro-democracy movements and those promoted by Washington, NATO, and the mass media.

They will kill me but they will not kill my voice,
because it will be the voice of all Afghan women.
You can cut the flower but  you cannot stop the coming of spring.
— Malalai Joya

Within weeks of my leaving Kabul in mid-August 2011, the US Embassy there was shelled by rocket-propelled grenades. The Embassy then “canceled all trips in and out of Afghanistan for its diplomats, and suspended all travel within Afghanistan.”¹

In my 30 days in Kabul I never saw another westerner outside guarded compounds – except in military convoys. Such fear reveals how illusory any US claims of “progress” have been over these past ten years – despite the hundreds of billions of dollars squandered. Not to mention all the orphans and the numerous number of limbs and lives lost.

In the States, only now do we seem to be waking up to the absolute failure of this war – by any standard except that of generating mega-profits for certain “defense” corporations. Few, including our leaders, have firsthand knowledge of Afghanistan. Few can conceive of the tenacity of the armed  resistance, its willingness to risk, its willingness to sacrifice.

Few of us have any idea how the Afghan people suffer from our ten-year invasion and from our hamstrung occupation. Those of us opposing war need to better understand war and its toll on human beings.

Haunted by this gap in my own education, I went to Afghanistan  with a small Voices for Creative Nonviolence delegation. Among us were two vets – one, Jacob, a paratrooper and explosives specialist, had done three tours of duty in Afghanistan.

Nervous Armed Men

Early on we learn that, according to the Red Cross, security is worse here than it’s been in the last 30 years of war. In Kabul life is lived opaquely — except for the internal refugees’ mud huts, homes huddle in compounds behind thick metal doors and high walls topped with barbed wire.

Kabul is a city of sandbags and nervous, armed men, both on foot and in big, shiny, urgently honking vehicles. Approach the international airport and Afghan soldiers will have you out of your vehicle three times, patting you down before you even reach the parking lot.

Our delegation is restricted in our movements. Do we avoid venturing forth from the clipped lawns and rose gardens of our guest house compound? Hardly. But every morning until our driver arrives, we stay inside those high walls, never lingering together outside on the street. Then we scoot into his van. With preternatural reflexes, Imam plunges us into what must be some of the densest, scariest, least-regulated (no traffic lights) traffic on the planet.

We’re off to visit a primary school, a women’s co-op, a photo gallery, a de-mining museum, a refugee camp. Or we tour the Kabul zoo – with its pack of scrawny wolves and its flock of vultures. On one of the few occasions we stay out after dark, we attend a US Embassy-sponsored film festival showcasing young Afghan filmmakers.

We have 40 or so meetings with teachers, journalists, editors, social entrepreneurs, and with the staff of various NGOs — internationals, Afghan-Americans, and Afghans. Whether guarded or candid, perplexing or illuminating, each encounter provides a piece (a figment?) of the puzzle. We glimpse complexities and contradictions — and tragedies — some beyond our sheltered imaginations.

I journeyed to Afghanistan expecting to hear what Afghans think about Reaper drones. I think the Reaper is cowardly. Here in Central New York at Hancock air base, young technicians  pilot these robot planes – equipped with Hellfire missiles and 500-pound bombs – over Afghanistan, frequently killing civilians.

I expected to meet with drone survivors. But staff at Kabul’s no-questions-asked Emergency Hospital (Italian-run, specializing in war wounds) tell us that drone victims would be treated elsewhere – if at all – closer to where drones prey. And where we westerners dare not go.

One human rights NGO staffer allows that, yes, drones kill civilians, but—ta da! — they also destroy madrassas (Islamic schools). I wince at this functionary’s equanimity: rural Afghans may be rather less cavalier about such aerial terrorism.  But few of our contacts seem  interested  in drones. Instead they’re angered by the US military’s night raids on homes – terrorism stalking Kabul itself.

Malalai & Ian

Several of  those we meet with are inspiring. Malalai Joya (a pseudonym) is a young woman barely five feet tall. She was elected to Parliament from a remote region, but was drummed out of that august body for publicizing the war crimes of her parliamentary colleagues. While this notoriety led to international speaking tours, it also led to assassination attempts. Malalai only survives by moving with her guards from safe house to safe house.

To find her, we get our directions via several cell phone calls en route; we don’t know our exact destination until moments before we arrive. Through heavy metal doors, we enter one of those unmarked compounds on a nameless unpaved street (typical of Kabul) and are met by two armed men. One stands a few feet off, gun poised, while the other frisks us — and has us snap photos with our cameras and write with our pens to confirm that these aren’t disguised weapons.

Malalai comes out to greet us and invite us inside. Immediately I’m captivated by the care and courage she radiates.  Malalai’s remarks to us suggest why she is a marked woman:

~ If more US troops leave, one more enemy will be gone – no more bombing, no more white phosphorus….

~ The US military are expanding military bases here. They won’t leave us. They work for Balkanization….It’s a big lie that the U.S. will leave by 2014. [In fact, the US is quietly lobbying the Karzai government to agree to permanent US bases.]

~ When you are in the heart of Asia, you’re surrounded by other countries with oil and gas. From here these can be controlled.

~ Under the UN the Taliban have been replaced by the war lords.

~ Afghan and foreign NGOs are corrupt. [She refers to  them as “NGO lords.”]

~ Afghanistan has the second biggest copper mine in the world.

~ Under the Taliban 185 tons of poppy were exported; now over 4000 tons are exported. [Hmmm. Who gets the lion’s share of  drug traffic profit – Afghans or Americans?]

In her “Message on the Tenth Anniversary of NATO’s War and the Occupation  of Afghanistan,” Joya declares:

Ten years ago the US and NATO invaded my country under the fake banners of women’s rights, human rights, and democracy. But after a decade, Afghanistan still remains the most uncivil, most corrupt, and most war torn country in the world. The consequences of the so-called war on terror have only been more bloodshed, crimes, barbarism, human rights and women’s rights violation, which has doubled the miseries and sorrows of our people.²

Malalai, it’s clear, is not one of those who entwine their interests with those occupying her country. Check out her memoir,A Woman Among Warlords [Scribner, 2009].

*****

Ian Pounds is a long-term volunteer at one of the several orphanages we visit. Ian tells us that Afghanistan has over a million orphans. He notes that “the US is part and parcel of the drug trade.” He goes on, “The US has no intention of leaving Afghanistan. The US is here to pressure Iran….The US was ready to go into Afghanistan before 9/11; it’s not here to save the women.”

Now “80% of the girls don’t go to school and many end  up in forced marriages.” The women’s prisons here “are full of women who have been raped and therefore accused of having sex out of marriage.” (For an extended  report on Afghan women, especially those in prison, see Ann Jones’ grimly eloquent 2006 book, Kabul in Winter: Life Without Peace in Afghanistan.

Shortly after our visit Ian emails us some stats drawn from the Afghanistan section of Save the Children’s July 2011 report on the “State of the World’s Mothers.” Among them:

~ Fifty women die in childbirth each day.

~ One in five children die before age five.

~ One in three women are physically or sexually abused.

~ Women’s life expectancy: 44 years.

The report declares Afghanistan the worst country in the world to be a mother.

Staring Through the Keyhole

To begin understanding this harrowed land you must see its teeming capital. Yet Kabul provides only an incomplete and, indeed, distorted picture of the country as a whole.

From our too few day-trips outside the capital, it’s clear that Kabul bears little resemblance to the hinterland. One might as well try to imagine an elephant having only seen its trunk. Or one might seek to understand the US by visiting only Washington or New York…or Syracuse.

Swollen with internal refugees, Kabul is said to now have about a fifth of Afghanistan’s population. Kabul’s social structures are not those of the countryside. Nor do urban agendas and interests—or security issues—reflect those of the rural areas where most Afghans live.

I belabor this point because I’m taken aback by how many of those we meet in the capital seem to favor an ongoing US military presence (or do some – not knowing us – say what they think visiting US Americans must want to hear?) Perhaps some prefer the devil they’ve come to depend on to other, less well-heeled, devils? Many surely fear chaos if the US leaves and its corrupt puppet government dissolves – “within three days,” an academic and former US Embassy contractor tells us.

They fear the ensuing civil war — as if for years the invader hadn’t been making night raids, humiliating women, detaining and  torturing their male relatives, arming fundamentalist warlords, fostering corruption, promoting ethnic hatred, paying off the Taliban, displacing hundreds of thousands, waging air war…and  testing its high-tech weapons systems on the Afghan people.

Some, especially among the NGO strata, have a stake in the status quo. Why not? In a region where many earn less than $2 a day, the status quo seems to work well enough for those Kabulis with internationally-derived incomes. Without the invader such emoluments would vanish. But I keep wondering how rural Afghans — already savaged by the occupation and by those resisting the occupation — would see things. Mostly confined  to Kabul, how are we to know?

Reparation

My few weeks in Afghanistan reinforce what I already do know: US taxpayers must face our complicity in the terror of US militarism. As the war on Afghanistan is now into its eleventh year, we must overcome our chauvinism and uncritical thinking. We must get beyond our bubble.

This past century teaches that no war truly ends. Its consequences endure and ramify. As with the people of Viet Nam and Iraq,  the Afghan people – the orphaned, the widowed, the amputated, the displaced, the heartsick, the driven mad – will continue to suffer long after the last US soldier leaves, the last base is closed, the last drone is grounded.

Even then our responsibility to the people of Afghanistan will remain. We must provide reparation for the wounds we have inflicted. Dollars cannot compensate for the lives lost or the infrastructure devastated. Nonetheless, we must give our utmost. We must get out of the way of Afghans and (judiciously) provide the economic support they need to rebuild their country and their lives.

We must also begin the overdue reparation of ourselves. We must end our worship of violence. We must mend our hearts that have tolerated so long what we’ve been doing to the Afghan people. We must fully support the healing of our returned soldiers who, maimed in body and soul, are doomed to live out their days having experienced what we have done. And we must hold accountable those who conned us into invading Afghanistan and those who keep us there.

We must convert our war-besotted economy to one that profits from life, not death. We must dismantle our bloated military. To stop subverting and invading the Islamic oil lands, we must own up to  our Islamophobia and  break our addiction to oil. We must struggle to free not only Afghan children, but our own, from the destitution and killing that threatens to engulf us.

We must no longer avert our eyes.

1. 14 Sept. 11 Associated Press.
2. 7 Oct. 11, CommonDreams.org.

Without substantial social reform and redistribution of economic assets, representative institutions – no matter how ‘democratic’ in form – will simply mirror the undemocratic power relations of society. Democracy requires a change in the balance of forces in society. Concentration of economic power in the hands of a small elite is a structural obstacle to democracy. It must be displaced if democracy is to emerge.¹

All reformers, no matter how radical they thought themselves to be, could be (and have been) caught up in reform structures whose underlying purpose is to reduce the inharmonics of the existing social system.²

Even as attempts to curb protests through evictions and violence are conducted across the country, the movement is spreading – every day, more and more flock to their local  parks and city centers, rallying under the banner of “Occupy!” First it was Occupy Wall Street, a call put out by Adbusters, a quasi-Situationist organization that has been at the forefront of the “culture jamming” ethos since 1989. From there, it was Occupy Chicago, Occupy Los Angeles, Occupy Boston, Occupy Omaha. The movement has gone global, with protestors catching the Zeitgeist in London and Rome. Regionalized discontent led to international solidarity in Greece, as further austerity measures loom on the horizon – imposed by none other than a government that dares to call itself socialist.

The central concept of the OWS movement is populist in nature, harking back to those that resisted capitalism’s harsh realities in the earlier parts of the 1900s: there is a major disconnect between the 99% of the population and the 1% that acts as the center of wealth and power. At the core, this division is rooted in Marxist terminology, the proletariat versus the bourgeois and their exploitation. We demand democracy, the multitude is saying, from Lexington, Kentucky to Madrid, Spain. We demand freedom from economic exploitation, freedom from indentured servitude to the moneyed class, freedom to live our lives with a higher degree of autonomy than has been allowed by those who seek to manipulate and oppress for their own material gain. Be they students in the universities, underpaid workers who need government aid to live, or citizens horrified that a piece of every paycheck is going to bail-out reckless firms and to support foreign wars, the multitude is gradually realizing that they are the engine of this world, and that it is time for them to sit in the driver seat. But all is not right in the movement. It is in times of unrest and cries to social change that hegemony rears its ugly head. Since time immemorial, overt repression has been swapped for the far more subtle process of assimilation – the system acknowledges its defects, and then harnesses people power and guides it by hand into compromises that leave the primary mechanisms of domination intact. Radical change is exchanged for the more “mature” approach of working within the system. This is a very real threat to the Occupy movement, one that needs to be acknowledged and resisted by any member who truly believes in striving for a better tomorrow.

Egypt: The Inspiration

OWS’s genesis lies not just in Adbusters, but in the Spanish Indignants movement, a coalition advocating grassroots democracy in reaction to the impact of the international financial crisis on their nation. Leading the coalition is a group by the name of ¡Democracia Real YA! (Real Democracy NOW!), which called for international solidarity and protests on October 15th. Adbusters responded with a poster portraying a dancer atop the Wall Street bull, and request for people to join together to occupy the “second capital” of wealth and power in the United States – Wall Street.

¡Democracia Real YA!’s initial inspiration for the international protest was the shocking success of Arab Spring,³ the multi-country revolt that succeeded in toppling one of the world’s worst dictators, the US-backed Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak. The opposing coalition, consisting mainly of tech-savy youth organizations such as the Coalition of the Youth of the Revolution and the 6 April Youth Movement, has been a consistent icon and inspiration for the Occupy movement, and rightfully so – it is one of the rare examples of people pushing for social change and getting it. So often we see revolt being crushed under the wheels of power, organization shattered, and violence suppressing hope. But even with Egypt, questions must be asked.

Ideological solidarity is giving way now to direct ties being formed between these desperate threads that are disrupting the international order. Egyptian activist Mohammed Ezzeldin gave a rousing speech to protestors in NYC’s Washington Square Park, discussing the direct lineage between the two revolts. “”I am coming from there — from the Arab Spring. From the Arab Spring to the fall of Wall Street,” he said. “From Liberation Square to Washington Square, to the fall of Wall Street and market domination, and capitalist domination.”⁴

Wired magazine has also reported that Ahmed Maher, one of the founding members of the 6 April Youth Movement, has traveled from Egypt to Washington D.C.’s McPherson Square to directly interact with the Occupiers there and advise them on courses of action. For sometime now Maher has been communicating with the protestors in the multitude’s medium of choice – “We talk on the internet about what happened in Egypt, about our structure, about our organization, how to organize a flash mob, how to organize a sit-in, how to be non-violent with police”⁵ – but this will mark the first time that he has come face to face with the people he refers to as his “brothers.”

Behind and Below the Masses: the revolution factory

The Egyptian revolt, much like its counterparts in Tunisia and Libya, was a direct fall-out from the processes of globalization; namely, the domestic impact of US policies that were driving high the price of essential living commodities. As reported in the McClatchy Newspapers:

The Fed [Federal Reserve Bank] has been engaged in what economists call “quantitative easing,” buying U.S. Treasury bonds to attack the threat of deflation — the phenomenon of falling prices across an economy.

Quantitative easing has the effect of raising asset prices, whether they’re the prices of stocks or what traders are willing to pay for commodities such as wheat or corn. One of the side effects of this policy is that the dollar weakens against other currencies, and that’s helped push up the global prices of commodities.⁶

As the article notes, the Fed’s quantitative easing has led to wheat prices rising 70% over the past year, certainly bad news for the country of Egypt, which stands as the US’s eight largest export market. With an economy pried open by the International Monetary Fund to a flood of international products under the banner of benevolent “structural adjustments,” the skyrocketing prices in the US means skyrocketing prices in Egypt. With an oppressive leader under the thumb of the United States military, the stage was ripe for revolution. In other words, Egypt, like the other countries involved in Arab Spring, was on the surface revolting against domestic policies; at its core; however, the revolt was against the structures of Late Capitalism, the mechanics of what Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri refer to as “Empire” – the international monetary system that is rapidly rendering the concept of the “nation-state” obsolete.

So Mubarak is toppled and the Egyptian people seemingly liberate themselves. And what is the result? The country comes under the rule of the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces. Led by Mohamed Hussein Tantawi (a man described as “Mubarak’s poodle” for his loyalty to the disposed leader⁷ the Council has declared to honor all existing political treaties and agreements, as well as maintaining the neoliberal stance of its predecessor. “We are not moving back to a socialist past,” Egypt’s temporary government has declared,⁸ as the World Bank, the International Finance Corporation, and the European Investment Bank plan to descend upon the country with an “action plan” for foreign investment and “sustainable growth.⁹

Thus, Washington and the IMF’s program will go unchanged as it moves from Mubarak’s dictatorship to the new parliamentary democracy. How did it happen? How did we get from point A (the masses, infused with revolutionary potential) to point B (a cosmetic facelift of the prevailing economic system)? An analogous situation can be found in South Africa, where the spirit of the revolution was laid down in a document known as the Freedom Charter. In this document we can find declarations such as “the national wealth of our country, the heritage of South Africans, shall be restored to the people… the Banks and monopoly industry shall be transferred to the ownership of the people as a whole.¹⁰ Yet when the dust settled after 1994, a radically different picture emerged: the apartheid-era finance minister, Derek Keyes, remained in his position as head of the South African bank; the ANC signed onto the international General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade; the World Bank was free to impose restrictions on socialized business models; and the IMF exerted authority over the approach to issues such as minimum wage. In the words of one activist, “they never freed us. They only took the chain from around our neck and put it around our ankles.”¹¹

The dominant system will always resist widespread structural change, and the most common method of doing this is through the power of non-governmental institutions. Foundations constitute a main apparatus of this process – “everything the Foundation did could be regarded as ‘making the World safe for capitalism’, reducing social tensions by helping to comfort the afflicted, provide safety valves for the angry, and improve the functioning of government,” said McGeorge Bundy, the long-time president of the Ford Foundation.¹² There is also the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), a brainchild of the Reagan administration that seeks to provide a capitalist economic framework for developing nations, and ease former left-wing states into a financial and militaristic stance in line with Washington’s key values. The NED receives its funding from the State Department through the US Agency for International Development (USAID), and in turn funnels the money into four subsidiary organizations: the National Democratic Institute (NDI), the International Republican Institute (IRI), the Center for International Private Enterprise (CIPE), and the American Center for International Labor Solidarity (Solidarity Center). The NDI and IRI are allied with their respective American political parties, while the CIPE is affiliated with the US Chamber of Commerce. The Solidarity Center, on the other hand, is a program of the AFL-CIO labor union consortium. Other NED funds flow into Freedom House, a US-based human rights organization that has been described as a “Who’s Who of neoconservatives from government, business, academia, labor, and the press.”¹³ American libertarian politician Ron Paul has provided an excellent analysis and critique of the whole “democracy promoting” apparatus:

The misnamed National Endowment for Democracy is nothing more than a costly program that takes US taxpayer funds to promote favored politicians and political parties abroad. What the NED does in foreign countries, through its recipient organizations the National Democratic Institute and the International Republican Institute (would be rightly illegal in the United States. The NED injects “soft money” into the domestic elections of foreign countries in favor of one party or the other. Imagine what a couple of hundred thousand dollars will do to assist a politician or political party in a relatively poor country abroad. It is particularly Orwellian to call US manipulation of foreign elections “promoting democracy.” How would Americans feel if the Chinese arrived with millions of dollars to support certain candidates deemed friendly to China? Would this be viewed as a democratic development?¹⁴

After playing a role in the “color revolutions” of Georgia and the Ukraine, the NED’s attention then turned to Egypt. A recent New York Times article has revealed, citing WikiLeaks cables, that the disparate bands of dissident groups have been receiving “training and financing from groups like the International Republican Institute, the National Democratic Institute, and Freedom House.”¹⁵ Verification independent of the New York Times article can be found as well. Madeleine Albright, former Clinton-era Secretary of State and chairman of the NDI, appeared on MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow Show to give her analysis of the events in Egypt. “You mentioned that I was chairman of the board of the National Democratic Institute,” Albright says to Maddow in the interview, responding to the pundit’s questions concerning the post-Mubarak government. “We have been working within Egypt for a very long time, in terms of developing various aspects of civil society, and dealing with various and talking to opposition groups who are prepared to participate in a fair and free election.”

Freedom House also openly admits their role in fomenting the unrest. In a May 2009 report, the organization discusses their “New Generation Project” within Egypt, seeking to empower the nation’s “Youtube generation” by “promoting exchange” between “democracy advocates” and “emerging democracies” to “share best practices,” “providing advanced training on civil mobilization” and helping them understand the benefits of “new media.”¹⁶ In 2008, representatives from the organization attended the “Alliance of Youth Movements,” an activist summit funded by the State Department, Facebook, MTV, Google, and Youtube to provide a fertile meeting ground for ‘digital activists’ and the corporate leaders behind “new media.” The summit has subsequently been the topic of a set of leaked WikiLeaks cables, describing an ‘unnamed activist’ who there presented “his movement’s goals for democratic change in Egypt.”  This same unnamed activist then met with a series of US Congressmen, discussing with them an “unwritten plan for democratic transition” of Egypt into a parliamentary democracy, a plan that had been accepted by “several opposition parties and movements.”¹⁷

Disturbingly, this is the same milieu that Ahmed Maher, now an adviser to OWS, travelled in. As researcher Tony Cartalucci has reported:

This of course  isn’t Maher’s first trip to the United States. Years before the Egyptian revolution, the United States was quietly preparing a global army of youth cannon fodder to fuel region wide conflagrations throughout the world, both politically and literally. Maher’s April 6 organization had been in New York City for the US State Department’s first ‘Alliance for Youth Movements Summit’ in 2008. His group then traveled to Serbia to train under the US-funded ‘CANVAS’ organization before returning to Egypt in 2010 with US International Crisis Group (ICG) operative Mohamed ElBaradei to spend the next year building up for the ‘Arab Spring.¹⁸

CANVAS (Centre for Applied Non Violent Action and Strategies) was founded in 2003 by the Serbian youth organization Optor! (Resistance!), which utilized nonviolent methods of revolt to bring down Slobodan Milošević. Not surprisingly in the least, the organization had received millions of dollars in funding from both the NED and IRI¹⁹ while CANVAS itself has worked closely with Freedom House.²⁰ Given the close ties between these youth-based activist organizations and US State Department’s bureaucracy, perhaps it is distressing to note that former Optor! Member and leader of CANVAS, Ivan Marovic, has given talks at the OWS rallies in NYC.²¹

The Right’s Favorite Boogeyman – and a useful opportunity

Perhaps the centerpiece of the Egyptian Revolution was the individual Mohamed ElBaradei, a director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency and presidential hopeful for Egypt’s parliamentary democracy. ElBaradei, however, has ties of his own to suspicious Western interests – he sits on the board of trustees of the International Crisis Group, which has been described by Madeleine Albright as a “full-service conflict prevention organization.” Despite this astute observation, the membership rosters of the Crisis Group’s various chairmen, trustees, and directors shows a significant overlap with affiliates of the National Endowment for Democracy: Zbigniew Brzezinski, Morton I. Abramowitz, and Stephen Solarz are just a handful of Crisis Group members who represent the interests of both. Here we can find the favorite whipping boy of the right-wing media, the billionaire philanthropist George Soros. Vilified as some sort of a socialist by the likes of Glenn Beck and Michael Savage, Soros, in truth, is far from that sort of ideology. A key figure in the transition of former Soviet states into the world of globalized capitalism, Soros helped engineer the economic ‘shock therapy’ that thrust Poland into a financial tail spin as extensive structural adjustments rattled the already crumbling economy.²²

Soros, despite being a clear member of the 1%, has publicly stated his support of OWS:

Billionaire financier George Soros says he sympathizes with protesters speaking out against corporate greed in ongoing protests on Wall Street… Soros says he understands the frustrations of small business owners, for instance those who have seen credit card charges soar during the current crisis.²³

There are ties, albeit indirect ones, that can tie Soros to the fledgling Occupy movement. MoveOn.org, a regular recipient of Soros funding, has thrown its weight behind the protestors in an apparent sign of solidarity. As TruthOut’s Steve Horn writes:

On October 5, Day 19 of Occupy Wall Street, MoveOn.org sent out an email calling on clicktivists (as opposed to activists) to “Join the Virtual March on Wall Street.” “The 99% are both an inspiration and a call that needs to be answered. So we’re answering it today, in a nationwide Virtual March on Wall Street to support their demand for an economy that serves the many, not the few … Join in the virtual march by doing what hundreds have done spontaneously across the web: Take your picture holding a sign that tells your story, along with the words ‘I am the 99%,’” wrote Daniel Mintz of MoveOn.org.²⁴

MoveOn.org has a long history of left-wing co-option; as people flooded the streets of American cities in protest of the Iraq War, the online institution dove right into the populist fervor and proceeded to utilize people’s discontent with the Bush administration to garner support for John Kerry’s presidential campaign. The same process was repeated just a handful of years later, with MoveOn.org acting the second largest lobbying organization for Barack Obama (aside from the President’s own Organizing for America). Through a strategic ad campaign – one of MoveOn’s personnel is John Hlinko, a “social media marketing expert” – the organization managed to create a literal army of voters for Obama, reinforcing that the same “hope and change” imagery that was being pumped out by the campaign itself. Both MoveOn and Organizing America’s methodology was a foreshadow to the systems of new media utilized by the Arab Spring protestors; this tool is now being called “netroots,” the transporting of traditional grassroots activities into the virtual sphere.

MoveOn.org is not the only group chiming in to support for OWS. Rebuild the Dream, a progressive-style organization founded by former Obama White House adviser Van Jones, has championed the protestors – “Let’s all support Occupy Wall St.” reads a blurb on their website homepage. During an MSNBC interview, Van Jones directly linked the OWS movement to the Arab Spring, stating “you are going to see an American Fall, an American Autumn, just like we saw the Arab Spring.”

However, the institution changes that OWS is calling for contrast sharply with Jones’ vision of how to take America back: “We’re talking about U.S. senators who want to run as American Dream candidates – soon to be announced. We’ve reached out to the House Democratic Caucus; there are House members who want to run as American Dream candidates.²⁵ Simply put, Rebuild the Dream is an unofficial organ of the Democrat Party, much like how MoveOn.org utilized, mobilized anti-war protestors to generate a large sector of the Democrat’s voting base. In actuality the ties run closer than that – Jones had worked hand in hand with MoveOn.org to initially launch Rebuild the Dream. Furthermore, he had been a senior fellow at Center for American Progress; the progressive institution has received funding from both George Soros²⁶ and the Democracy Alliance organization, where Soros sits on the board of directors.

Co-option of social activism has always been the modus operandi of the Democrat Party. They play “’the role of shock absorber, trying to head off and co-opt restive [and potentially radical] segments of the electorate’” by posing as ‘the party of the people.²⁷ President Obama, riding the crest of the MoveOn.orgs of the country – and not to mention a well orchestrated propaganda campaign – has fit this concept to a T, something that has even been noted by members of the liberal establishment:

Two and a half weeks after Obama’s victory in the 2008 presidential election, David Rothkopf, a former Clinton administration official, commented on the president-elect’s corporatist and militarist transition team and cabinet appointments with a musical analogy. Obama, Rothkopf told the New York Times, was following “the violin model: you hold power with the left hand and you play the music with the right.²⁷

Liberal commentator Thomas Frank has observed the process of “voting for one thing, getting another” at work in the Republican Party:

The trick never ages; the illusion never wears off. Vote to stop abortion; receive a rollback in capital gains taxes. Vote to make our country strong again, receive deindustrialization … Vote to get governments off our backs; receive conglomeration and monopoly everywhere from media to meatpacking … Vote to strike a blow against elitism; receive a social order in which wealth is more concentrated than ever before in our lifetimes, in which workers have been stripped of power and CEOs are rewarded in a manner beyond imagining.²⁸

Is it really any different for the Democrat Party? Vote to end wars, receive troop escalation and change only years after the fact. Vote to allow workers to retain their rights, receive trade agreements that export jobs overseas. Vote to reign in the power of Wall Street, receive taxpayer-funded bail-outs that create moral hazards and prop up corrupt financial regimes. From the left to the right, the story is the same – the great violin keeps playing cheerfully as the world burns. It’s only the hands grasping it, not the system that change.

One of the clearest portraits of co-option in recent history would be the history of the conservative Tea Party Movement. In its infancy, the Tea Party was a movement launched by libertarian politician Ron Paul, a staunch opponent of the government’s infringement on civil liberties, its use of military force on foreign soil, the monopolization of the financial market by entities such as the Federal Reserve Bank, and the crony capitalism that eventually erupted into the bail-outs. Aside from certain economics view, there is certainly a great deal in Ron Paul’s – and the early Tea Party Movement’s – agenda that is entirely compatible with the demands of the Occupy Movement; it is for this very reason that libertarians have begun to reach out and join in solidarity with the protestors. Furthermore, given the anti-foreign aid and anti-Federal Reserve stance of the early Tea Party Movement, there can perhaps be observed an unspoken lineage between the Tea Party and the uprisings in Egypt and surrounding countries, triggered by Western support of the people’s oppressors and the monetary policies of the Federal Reserve.

Just as Soros controls the purse strings to disrupt and redirect leftist movements into positions aligned with the Democrat Party, the right can find his counterpart in the Koch brothers, the billionaire owners of the little-known Koch Industries. With their money bankrolling organizations such as Americans for Prosperity, David and Charles Koch were able to train torrents of so-called Tea Party activists whose espoused viewpoints far more in line with typical Republican dialogue than with Ron Paul’s libertarian ethos. The focus was shifted from attacking the Fed and ending the wars and towards union-busting, securing borders, and more often than not, reinforcing unequivocal US support for Israel – a direct clash with stance that Paul has taken on the topic.

This “astro-turfing” of grassroots movements, of course, requires multiple organizations and front groups to create the veneer of a unified public opinion, and operating alongside Americans for Prosperity is FreedomWorks. Perhaps it is worthy to take into consideration that when the organization was created from a 2004 merger between the Koch-funded Citizens for a Sound Economy and the neoconservative Empower America, several prominent NED officials sat on the board of directors of the former – including Vin Weber (an adviser to Mitt Romney’s ill-fated 2008 presidential campaign), Jeane J. Kirkpatrick (one of the most prominent of Cold War-era hardliners), and Michael Novak (an expert at the neoconservative think-tank American Enterprise Institute).

The Tea Party’s assimilation into the broader spectrum of the Republican political arena was marked by the establishment of the Tea Party Caucus, a coalition of House of Representatives and Senate members that represents perhaps the most powerful political body sitting in the US government – this consortium of leaders are essentially calling the shots when it comes to the right-wing of the American political system. Its members show utter disregard for the original protests of the Tea Party: Louie Gohmert has been a strong and vocal supporter of the war in Iraq, Steve King has openly supported the lobbying industry for their “effective and useful job[s]²⁹ and Dennis A. Ross was a member of the United States House Oversight Subcommittee on TARP, Financial Services and Bailouts of Public and Private Programs. Joe Barton eviscerated any ideological tie between himself and the early stages of the movement that he claims to rally behind (not to mention a disregard for any allegiance to the notion of really existing free markets) by arguing that the removal of subsidies to oil companies would act as a “disincentive” and result in the corporations going out of business.³⁰

Curiously, the place where this whole process of right-wing co-option began – the corporate-financed milieu of Americans for Prosperity and FreedomWorks – was intended to be a “powerful answer to the challenge presented by the Left and groups like America Coming Together (ACT), MoveOn.org, and the Media Fund.³¹ All three of these organizations are Soros-financed, revealing the hidden irony that ultimately, these seemingly opposing institutions are simply moving potentially disruptive individuals into an entirely compatible paradigm of power that sits in the dual capitals of Washington D.C. and Wall Street. However, this odd dialectic can be entirely useful. Realizing this process will allow individuals who yearn for legitimate change on either side of the aisle to separate themselves from the system, and hopefully, discover the disparate strands that are ideologically compatible between them and their counterparts. It is a rare opportunity for the discontents of “left” and the “right” to shake off the labels applied to them and create an open dialogue and eventual solidarity with one another.

Conclusions and Other Thoughts

Though it may certainly seem like it, this essay was not written to belittle the OWS movement, or attack the actions of those who stood in opposition to Milosevic, apartheid, or Mubarak. However, it was my intention to acknowledge the shortcomings in the aftermath of these fights – Serbia and South Africa both jumped into bed with the IMF, imposing austerity measures in their nations that allowed persistent poverty to fester and even continue to grow. Egypt is certainly following suit now, so even though the brutal fist of the American-backed regime is gone, the slow-burning fires of neoliberalism continue to carry on the torch. For Serbia and Egypt, their revolts, though brilliant displays of the potential of people power, were in no small part shaped by the technicians in State Department, operating through the long arm of the NED. For South Africa, money from George Soros ended up in the coffers of activist groups who quickly changed their tune from the ANC’s quasi-socialist demands to jump starting South African neoliberalism.³²  Not surprisingly, these same groups showed a willingness to work closely with the NED.³³

The NED, much like Soros’ civil society empowering programs, promotes a little known methodology called low-intensity democracy.

Low-intensity democracies are limited democracies in that they achieve important political changes, such as the formal reduction of the military’s former institutional power or greater individual freedoms, but stop short in addressing the extreme social inequalities within… societies. …they provide a more transparent and secure environment for the investments of transnational capital… these regimes function as legitimizing institutions for capitalist states, effectively co-opting the social opposition that arises from the destructive consequences of neoliberal austerity, or as Cyrus Vance and Henry Kissinger have argued, the promotion of “pre-emptive” reform in order to co-opt popular movements that may press for more radical, or even revolutionary, change.³⁴

Thus, it can be considered to be worrisome that individuals who were trained under institutions that implement this system are turning up at OWS rallies. While the NED’s agenda is to establish low-intensity democracies around the world, this is precisely the type of governance that we are dealing with in the United States, the very system that produced the antagonism found in both the Tea Party and OWS. To consent to it would be a rejection of the spirit of the protest and an embrace of what is opposes.

It is the Democrat Party that could possibly represent this system even more so than the Republicans. It is the party of Social Security, government-provided medical care, and other welfare programs. Does this function of the party not dim and obfuscate the fact that it is also the party of bail-outs and NAFTA? Realizing this simple fact is paramount to creating a movement of legitimate change in the world; we must seek deconstruct low-intensity democracy and replace it with Really Existing Democracy. We have already seen this functioning in a micro-sense at OWS rallies, where leadership positions are voluntary and voted in by the whole of the people. Decisions are made in a similar matter, putting the course of action and the direction of the movement in its entirety in the hands of the protestors, not in bureaucrats and moneymen with agendas of their own. It is organic and autonomous, and on an international level holds to be what Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari referred to as a ‘rhizome’ – “a nonhierarchal and noncentered network structure.³⁵

There are further reasons to be optimistic about the movement’s direction. The official OWS website hosts a petition with a “formal demand that MoveOn.org leaves” – “this is OUR movement and it is NOT Obama’s personal reelection campaign,” it reads.³⁶ The leftist online newspaper TruthOut has called attention MoveOn.Org and Rebuild the Dream’s attempts to cozy up to the protestors, while Michel Chossudovsky, the professor emeritus of the economics department at the University of Ottowa, has published a piece for his Centre for Research on Globalization detailing the arrival of NED associates at OWS rallies.

There is an opportunity here. We live in a time marked by crisis, catastrophe, poverty, and war, but it is in times of disruption like these that rifts open in the landscapes of the global system, providing people with a chance to take the wheel, if they so choose. For America, this time arises from the great disappointments of our so-called democratic process – the hookwinking of the masses by the left-right one-two punch by the back to back presidencies of George W. Bush and Barack H. Obama has led more people to step back, reconsider their presumptions about the world’s machinery, and begin to demand that their voices be heard. What happens from here, with the choices marked by the path to liberation or the well-worn roads of hegemony, is entirely contingent on the will of the people.

1. Barry Gills, Joen Rocamora, and Richard Wilson, Low Intensity Democracy: Political Power in the New World Order Pluto Press, 1993, quoted in Michael Barker “Do Capitalists Fund Revolutions? (Part 1 of 2)” Znet, September 4th, 2007.>
2. James Weinstein, The Corporate Ideal in the Liberal State, 1900-1918 Beacon Press, 1968, pg. 254, quoted in Michael Barker, “Liberal Elites and the Pacification of Workers,” State of Nature.>
3. Lauren Frayer “Inspired by Arab Protests, Spain’s Unemployed Rally for Change,” Voice of America May 19, 2011.
4. Matt Sledge “Occupy Wall Street Egyptian Activist Goes ‘From Liberation Square To Washington Square’,” Huffington Post, October 8, 2011.
5. Spencer Ackerman “Egypt’s Top ‘Facebook Revolutionary’ Now Advising Occupy Wall Street,” Wired, October 18, 2011.
6. Kevin G. Hall “Egypt’s unrest may have roots in food prices, U.S. Fed Policy” McClatchy Newspapers, January 31, 2011.
7. “‘Mubarak’s Poodle’ at Head of Egypt’s Transition,” CBS News, February 16, 2011.
8. Emad Mekay, “http://ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=54544″>Egypt takes a step back from IMF ways,” Inter Press Service, February 20, 2011.
9. “Multilateral banks join forces to aid Arab nations,” Yahoo! News, April 14, 2011.
10. Naomi Klein The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism Picador, 2007, p. 247-248.
11. Ibid., p. 256-257
12. Quoted in Michel Chossudovsky, “Manufacturing Dissent” Center for Research on Globalization, September 20, 2010.
13. Diana Barahona, “The Freedom House Files,” Monthly Review, January 3, 2007.
14. Ron Paul “National Endowment for Democracy: Paying to Make Enemies of America,” October 11, 2003.
15. Ron Nixon, “U.S. Groups Helped Nurture Arab Uprisings,” New York Times, April 14, 2011.
16. Freedom House, “New Generation of Advocates: Empower Civil Society in Egypt.”>
17. “Egypt protests: secret US document discloses support for protesters,” The Telegraph, April 23, 2011.
18. Tony Cartalucci “US State Department Funded Agitator in DC Advising #OWS,” Land Destroyer Report, October 18, 2011.
19. Roger Cohen, “Who Really Brought Down Milosevic?” New York Times November 26, 2000.
20. Peter Ackerman, “Skills or Conditions: What Key Factors Shape the Success or Failure of Civil Resistance?” Conference on Civil Resistance & Power Politics, St Antony’s College, University of Oxford, 15-18 March 2007.
21. Michel Chossudovsky, “Occupy Wall Street and ‘The American Autumn’: Is It a ‘Colored Revolution?’” Centre for Research on Globalization, October 13, 2011.
22. This topic is covered extensively in Klein, The Shock Doctrine, p. 215-229 and 241-243
23. “George Soros Says He Sympathizes With Occupy Wall Street Protesters,” Huffington Post, October 23, 2011.>
24. Steve Horn, “MoveOn.Org and Friends Attempt to Co-Opt Occupy Wall Street Movement,” TruthOut.
25. Horn, “MoveOn.Org and Friends Attempt to Co-Opt Occupy Wall Street Movement”
26. Laura Blumenfeld “Soros’s Deep Pockets vs. Bush,” Washington Post, November 11, 2003.
27. Paul Street, “Obama’s Violin: Populist rage and the uncertain containment of change,” ZCommunications May 2009.
28. Thomas Frank What’s the Matter With Kansas? How Conservatives Won the Heart of America Henry Holt & Company, 2004 pg. 7
29. Bara Vaida “Rep. King: “Lobbyists Are Useful,” The National Journal’s Under the Influence Monday, March 1, 2010.
30. Brian Beutler “Barton: Govt Subsidies Necessary To Keep Exxon From Going Out Of Business,” Talking Points Memo March 10, 2011.
31. “Citizens for a Sound Economy (CSE) and Empower America Merge to Form FreedomWorks,” Media release, undated, archived from July 25, 2004.
32. This topic is covered in Michael Barker, “George Soros And South Africa’s Elite Transition,” Swans Commentary May 31, 2010.
33. This is not the only case of NED/Soros collaboration; I have covered the role of both in fomenting unrest in Iran in “Soros and the State Department: Moving Iran towards the Open Society,” Foreign Policy Journal May 14, 2011.
34. William Avilés Global Capitalism, Democracy, and Civil-Military Relations in Columbia State University of New York Press, 2006, p. 18-19.
35. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire Harvard University Press, 2000 p. 299.
36. “Formally demand that Moveon.org leave,” October 16, 2011.

BBC News reported the UN chairperson saying that the talks had ‘saved tomorrow, today’.

But nothing substantive had changed. Carbon emissions, already at their peak, will continue to increase for at least the next eight years, pushing humanity closer to the brink of climate collapse. Rather than address the madness of a global system of corporate-led capitalism that is bulldozing us to this disaster, the corporate media mouthed deceptive platitudes.

A Guardian editorial assured readers that the Durban deal is ‘better than nothing’, and that:

There are times when inching forward can look like progress [...] a moment when it is cheerier to think of how bad things might have been than to rate the success of the final outcome.

Adopting the standard, but discredited, establishment framework to explain the treacly mire hindering serious action on climate, this vanguard of liberal journalism opined: ‘There is an unvarying conflict of interest in the fight against climate change between developed and developing economies.’

No hint there that the conflict is, in fact, between the elite corporate 1% and the 99% of the global population that are their victims.

The Independent, another great white hope of liberal journalism, told its diminishing band of readers that the Durban outcome is ‘an agreement that gives new cause for optimism.’ Indeed, it ‘is an enormous advance on the position now.’

An editorial in The Times (‘A Change of Climate’, December 12, 2011) conformed along similar lines while also taking care to kick the forces of rationality in the teeth:

Scientists and activists will complain that Durban’s only commitment is to more talks and that any agreement will not become operational until 2020. But these campaigners have often proved poor advocates, either exaggerating or misusing data to make their case or showing an unwise disdain for the realpolitik and compromises essential for any deal.

Climate scientists will be dismayed that an ostensibly responsible paper like The Times would make a sneering reference to the unfounded ‘Climategate’ claims of climate data manipulation. But perhaps readers will appreciate the irony that The Times is itself, of course, an enthusiastic practitioner of corporate ‘realpolitik’.

‘A Crime Of Global Proportions’

We are not suggesting that critical comment was entirely missing from press coverage. That would take absurd levels of totalitarian media control. The Guardian managed to find space on its website, if not in the print edition, for the Guardian’s head of environment, Damian Carrington, to write in his blog:

Unlike the economic debt currently transfixing the attention of world’s leaders, it appears possible to them that we can put our climate debt on the never-never.

The loans in euros, dollars and pounds will be called in within days, weeks, and months. But the environmental debt – run up by many decades of dumping carbon dioxide waste in the atmosphere – won’t be due for full repayment before 2020, according to the plan from Durban.

This ‘ecological debt’, Carrington added, ‘will inevitably transform into a new economic debt dwarfing our current woes. [...] Cleaning up the energy system that underpins the global economy is inevitable, sooner or later. If not, true economic armageddon awaits, driven by peak oil, climate chaos and civil unrest.’

Friends of the Earth were permitted their token quote in the Guardian, scant reward for decades of soft-pedalling its criticism of the corporate media: ‘This empty shell of a plan leaves the planet hurtling towards catastrophic climate change.’

Unfiltered by corporate news editors, the Union of Concerned Scientists issued a statement pointing out that, in Durban, the world’s governments

by no means responded adequately to the mounting threat of climate change. [...] It’s high time governments stopped catering to the needs of corporate polluters, and started acting to protect people.

UCS added:

Powerful speeches and carefully worded decisions can’t amend the laws of physics. The atmosphere responds to one thing, and one thing only – emissions. The world’s collective level of ambition on emissions reductions must be substantially increased, and soon.

In a powerful article on Independent Online, based in South Africa, there were stronger messages still. The environment group Earthlife Africa said the decisions resulting from the Durban summit would result in a 4^oC global average temperature rise which would mean an average increase of 6^oC-8^oC for Africa. This would lead to an estimated 200 million deaths by 2100.

No wonder that Nnimmo Bassey, chairman of Friends of the Earth International, said: ‘Delaying real action until 2020 is a crime of global proportions.’

He continued:

An increase in global temperatures of 4ºC, permitted under this plan, is a death sentence for Africa, small island states, and the poor and vulnerable worldwide. This summit has amplified climate apartheid, whereby the richest 1 percent of the world have decided that it is acceptable to sacrifice the 99 percent.

Karl Hood of Grenada, chair of the Alliance of Small Island States, responded to the Durban deal with damning words: ‘Must we accept our annihilation?’

Aubrey Meyer, originator of the ‘contraction and convergence’ policy that would, if adopted by the UN, reduce greenhouse gases to safe levels, was also scathing: ‘The islands are being annihilated and we all are now become their assassins. We have informally known this but with this “Durban-Deal” we all have now formally crossed that threshold.’

Janet Redman, of the Washington-based Institute for Policy Studies, spoke the unadorned truth that is so painful, if not impossible, for the corporate media to acknowledge: ‘What some see as inaction is in fact a demonstration of the palpable failure of our current economic system to address economic, social or environmental crises.’

The Eightfold Nay: The Great Unmentionables Of Climate Coverage

In our book, Newspeak in the 21st Century (Pluto Press, 2009), we listed the key issues that would be at the heart of debate on the climate crisis in a truly free press:

1. The inherently biocidal, indeed psychopathic, logic of corporate capitalism, structurally locked into generating maximised revenues in minimum time at minimum corporate cost. Because corporations are legally obliged to maximise profits for shareholders, it is in fact illegal for corporations to prioritise the welfare of people and planet above private profits. How can this simple fact of entrenched corporate immorality not be central to any discussion that is relevant to the industrial destruction of global life-support systems?

2. The proven track record of big business in promoting catastrophic consumption regardless of the consequences for human and environmental health. Whether disregarding the links between smoking and cancer, junk food and obesity, exploitation of the developing world and human suffering, fossil fuel extraction and lethal climate change, factory farming and animal suffering, high salt consumption and illness, corporations have consistently subordinated human and animal welfare to short-term profits.

3. The relentless corporate lobbying of governments to introduce, shape and strengthen policies to promote and protect private power.

4. The billions spent by the advertising industry to sell consumer products and ‘services’, creating artificial ‘needs’, with children an increasing target.

5. The collusion between powerful companies, rich investors and state planners to install compliant, often brutal, dictators in client states around the world.

6. The extensive use of loans and tied aid that ensnare poor nations in webs of crippling debt, ensuring that the West obtains or deepens control of their resources, markets and development.

7. The deployment of threats, bribery and armed force against countries that attempt to pursue self-development, rather than economic or strategic planning sanctioned by ‘the international community.’

8. The lethal role of the corporate media in promoting the planet-devouring aims of private power.

One searches in vain for any sensible and sustained discussion of any of these issues in the corporate media; never mind all of them taken together.

No wonder then that, for all the warm words of political ‘commitment’, we are headed for unprecedented desperate times ahead.

It takes some chutzpah – or, at least, epic self-delusion – for Israel’s prime minister to be lecturing the Arab world on liberalism and democracy at this moment.

In recent weeks, a spate of anti-democratic measures have won support from Netanyahu’s right wing government, justified by a new security doctrine: see no evil, hear no evil, and speak no evil of Israel. If the legislative proposals pass, the Israeli courts, Israel’s human rights groups and media, and the international community will be transformed into the proverbial three monkeys.

Israel’s vigilant human rights community has been the chief target of this assault. Yesterday Netanyahu’s Likud faction and the Yisrael Beiteinu party of his far-right foreign minister, Avigdor Lieberman, proposed a new law that would snuff out much of the human rights community in Israel.

The bill effectively divides non-governmental organisations (NGOs) into two kinds: those defined by the right as pro-Israel and those seen as “political”, or anti-Israel. The favoured ones, such as ambulance services and universities, will continue to be lavishly funded from foreign sources, chiefly wealthy private Jewish donors from the United States and Europe.

The “political” ones – meaning those that criticise government policies, especially relating to the occupation – will be banned from receiving funds from foreign governments, their main source of income. Donations from private sources, whether Israeli or foreign, will be subject to a crippling 45 per cent tax.

The grounds for being defined as a “political” NGO are suitably vague: denying Israel’s right to exist or its Jewish and democratic character; inciting racism; supporting violence against Israel; supporting politicians or soldiers being put on trial in international courts; or backing boycotts of the state.

One human rights group warned that all groups assisting the UN’s 2009 report by Judge Richard Goldstone into war crimes committed during Israel’s attack on Gaza in winter 2008 would be vulnerable to such a law. Other organisations like Breaking the Silence, which publishes the testimonies of Israeli soldiers who have committed or witnessed war crimes, will be silenced themselves. And an Israeli Arab NGO said it feared that its work demanding equality for all Israeli citizens, including the fifth who are Palestinian, and an end to Jewish privilege would count as denying Israel’s Jewish character.

At the same time Netanyahu wants the Israeli media emasculated. Last week his government threw its weight behind a new defamation law that will leave few but millionaires in a position to criticise politicians and officials. Mr Netanyahu observed: “It may be called the Defamation Law, but I call it the ‘publication of truth law’.” The media and human rights groups fear the worst.

This monkey must speak no evil.

Another bill, backed by the justice minister, Yaacov Neeman, is designed to skew the make-up of a panel selecting judges for Israel’s supreme court. Several judicial posts are about to fall vacant, and the government hopes to stuff the court with apppointees who share its ideological world view and will not rescind its anti-democratic legislation, including its latest attack on the human rights community. Neeman’s favoured candidate is a settler who has a history of ruling against human rights organisations.

Senior legislators from Mr Netanyahu’s party are pushing another bill that would make it nigh impossible for human rights organisations to petition the supreme court against government actions.

The judicial monkey should see no evil.

At one level, these and a host of other measures – including increasing government intimidation of the Israeli media and academia, a crackdown on whistleblowers and the recently passed boycott law, which exposes critics of the settlements to expensive court actions for damages – are designed to strengthen the occupation by disarming its critics inside Israel.

But there is another, even more valued goal: making sure that in future the plentiful horror stories from the Palestinian territories – monitored by human rights organisations, reported by the media and heard in the courts – never reach the ears of the international community.

The third monkey is supposed to hear no evil.

The crackdown is justified in the Israeli right’s view on the grounds that criticism of the occupation represents not domestic concerns but unwelcome foreign interference in Israel’s affairs. The promotion of human rights – whether in Israel, the occupied territories or the Arab world – is considered by Netanyahu and his allies as inherently un-Israeli and anti-Israeli.

The hypocrisy is hard to stomach. Israel has long claimed special dispensation to interfere in the affairs of both the EU and the United States. Jewish Agency staff proselytise among European and American Jews to persuade them to emigrate to Israel. Uniquely, Israel’s security agencies are given free rein at airports around the world to harass and invade the privacy of non-Jews flying to Tel Aviv. And Israel’s political proxies abroad – sophisticated lobby groups like AIPAC in the US – act as foreign agents while not registering as such.

Of course, Israel’s qualms against foreign meddling are selective. No restrictions are planned for right wing Jews from abroad, such as US casino magnate Irving Moskowitz, who have pumped enormous sums into propping up illegal Jewish settlements built on Palestinian land.

There is a faulty logic too to Israel’s argument. As human rights activists point out, the areas where they do most of their work are located not in Israel but in the Palestinian territories, which Israel is occupying in violation of international law.

Privately, European embassies have been trying to drive home this point. The EU gives Israel preferential trading status, worth billions of dollars annually to the Israeli economy, on condition that it respects human rights in the occupied territories. Europe argues it is, therefore, entitled to fund the monitoring of Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians. More’s the pity that Europe fails to act on the information it receives.

Given the right’s strengthening hand, it can be expected to devise ever more creative ways to silence the human rights community and Israeli media and emasculate the courts as way to end the bad press.

Israelis are obssessed with their country’s image abroad and what they regard as a “delegitimisation” campaign that threatens not only the occupation’s continuation but also Israel’s long-term survival as an ethnic state. The leadership has been incensed by regular surveys of global opinion showing Israel ranked among the most unpopular countries in the world.

The Palestinians’ recent decision to turn to the international community for recognition of statehood has only amplified such grievances.

Israel has no intention of altering its policies, or of pursuing peace. Rather, Netanyahu’s government has been oscillating between a desperate desire to pass yet more anti-democratic legislation to stifle criticism and a modicum of restraint motivated by fear of the international backlash.

A cabinet debate last month on legislation against human rights groups focused barely at all on the proposal’s merits. Instead the head of the National Security Council, Yaakov Amidror, was called before ministers to explain whether Israel stood to lose more from passing such bills or from allowing human rights groups to carry on monitoring the occupation.

Deluded as it may seem, Netanyahu’s ultimate goal is to turn the clock back 40 years, to a “golden age” when foreign correspondents and western governments could refer, without blushing, to the occupation of the Palestinians as “benign”.

Donald Neff, Jerusalem correspondent for Time magazine in the 1970s, admitted years later that his and his colleagues’ performance was so feeble at the time in large part because there was little critical information available on the occupation. When he witnessed first-hand what was taking place, his editors in the US refused to believe him and he was eventually moved on.

Now, however, the genie is out the bottle. The international community understands full well – thanks to human rights activists – both that the occupation is brutal and that Israel has been peace-making in bad faith.

If Israel continues on its current course, another myth long accepted by western countries – that Israel is “the only democracy in the Middle East” – may finally be shattered.

• A version of this story was first published in the National, Abu Dhabi

On November 14th, two water wells were demolished in Baqa’a, east of Tammun, robbing hundreds of families of the ability to irrigate their land. On October 13, farmers received demolition orders on several water wells in Kufr al-Deek, a village in the town of Salfit near Nablus. In September, Israeli military forces demolished 6 water wells belonging to Palestinian Bedouin communities in the Jordan Valley, and have threatened to demolish six more. In all these cases, the unilateral IOF actions are explicitly illegal because these wells were built with full permission from the Palestinian Authority, in areas of the Valley supposedly under exclusive Palestinian civil and military control.

The injustice is especially pronounced in the Jordan Valley. On the 8th of September, 50 military jeeps, trucks and bulldozers sealed off Al Nasarayah as a closed military zone, and proceeded to illegally destroy 3 water wells and confiscate the attached water systems, the pumps of which cost $40,000 each to install. Five days later, the IOF returned to Al Nasarayah to demolish 2 more wells, stopping along the way to destroy another well east of Tamoun. The next day, IOF soldiers entered the village of Al- Fa’ara, near Nablus, to photograph and record the GPS coordinates of 6 more wells intended for demolition.

The IOF’s actions are illegal under Israeli, Palestinian and international law because these 6 water wells had permits from the Palestinian Authority, and operated in the 5% of the Jordan Valley designated after the 1994 Oslo Accords Area A, under full Palestinian civil and military control. The motives behind Israel’s actions on the ground, however, emerge into the light of day when seen in the context of other recent Israeli policy resolutions — a plan announced in September to uproot and transfer some 27,000 Bedouin out of Israel-controlled Area C in the West Bank (most Area C Bedouin live in the Jordan Valley), and a decision by the Settlement Division in early July to increase by 130% the land given to settlers for farming in the Jordan Valley, and to increase from 42 to 51 cubic meters per year the amount of water given to settlers to irrigate such farmland.

What do the destruction of Palestinian Bedouin water wells in the Jordan Valley, the transfer of Palestinian Bedouin citizens out of the Jordan Valley, and the expansion of land and water given to settlers in the Jordan Valley, all have in common? Together, they highlight the oppression and ethnic cleansing of the Jordan Valley that has typified Israeli policy since the Valley became occupied territory in 1967.

A focal point of this oppression — and a crucial locus of the Palestinian Bedouin struggle to resist the occupation and remain in their homeland — is the issue of water. For as Israel has seized absolute control over allocation and distribution of the resources of the 3 water aquifers under the West Bank for use on both sides of the Green Line, the Palestinian population of the West Bank and Gaza, and especially the Bedouin population of the Jordan Valley, have seen the steady drying-up of the once-flowing springs around which they have built their villages, have found themselves unable to dig sufficient wells of their own because of crippling Israeli regulations, and have watched themselves become dependent on the exorbitant prices of their oppressor for access to so basic and indispensable a human right.

Far more than in the rest of the West Bank, the struggle over water for the Jordan Valley Bedouin is a struggle between life and death. The ‘draining away’ of Palestinian water rights in the Jordan Valley — to borrow the title of a 2010 report by Ma’an Development Center — has a long and tumultuous history. When the West Bank became occupied territory in 1967, the Israeli army established a military order to the effect that all West Bank water came under control of the state, and Israel’s national water carrier, Mekorot, seized water aquifers and developed wells throughout the West Bank to serve Israel and its newly expanding settlements. Between 1967 and the 1994 Oslo Accords, the Palestinian Bedouin in the Jordan Valley saw first their land, and then their water, disappear behind the heavily-guarded gates of settlements, where settlers were granted ample supplies of the latter in order to make the former bloom.

The situation grew increasingly dire until a brief ray of hope in 1995, when Article 40 of the Oslo II agreements set an interim agreement, designed to be revised within five years (but still in effect to this day), whereby approximately one quarter of West Bank water resources would come under Palestinian Authority control, and a Joint Water Committee would be established, in the words of the 2009 World Bank report ‘Assessment of Restrictions on Palestinian Water Development: West Bank and Gaza’, “to oversee management of the aquifers, with decisions to be based on consensus between the two parties.”

However, Oslo brought with it new institutionalized systems of oppression. Since Oslo 1 in 1993 consigned 95% of the Jordan Valley to Area C status (under full Israeli and military control), neither the Area C Bedouin communities themselves, nor the Palestinian Authority, nor the constant swarm of international NGOs, can commence with unregulated construction of their own initiative, because, in the words of Jordan Valley Solidarity, a grassroots movement, “across Area C, access to basic services such as water is restricted through the debilitating permit system which is regulated by the Israeli Civil Administration. Obtaining a permit for any form of construction –even for water- is notoriously difficult, nay impossible. This prevents Palestinians from building new infrastructure, or from making improvements to existing facilities.”

Atop this blanket layer of oppression, which effectively and intentionally squelches all trace of community autonomy, the Palestinian Bedouin in the 95% of the Jordan Valley which is Area C are deprived of the ability to improve their access to water resources through three interlocking buereacratic systems of control — the Joint Water Committee, where a group of Israeli and Palestinian decision-makers permits or denies water access or rehabilitation projects proposed by the Palestinian Water Authority (for Areas A, B and C); the Israeli Civil Administration, which, if an Area C project is permitted by the Joint Water Committee, pulls that project through a thicket of bureaucratic, technical limitations and scrutinies, effectively crippling its implementation if not grinding it to a halt completely; and, last but not least, the Israeli army, which ceaselessly continues, as it sees fit and irregardless of law, to demolish water wells, tankers, and infrastructure on the ground in Bedouin communities across Areas A, B and C, even if the proper permits are possessed.

Thus, what was promised under Oslo II to be consensus decision-making regarding water resources is in reality institutionalized unilateral control of the oppressor over the oppressed, and due to this matrix of Israeli control, it becomes nearly impossible for the Palestinian Authority, as well as most NGOs, to commit themselves to meaningful, sustainable infrastructural development in Area C of the West Bank.

At the level of the Joint Water Committee, details Ma’an’s ‘Draining Away’, “the fact that decisions are arrived at through consensus effectively means that Israel can veto Palestinian projects… [also], the PWA is not consulted regarding extractions from the aquifer for Israeli use (settlers or otherwise), which is not in accordance with the governance rules under Article 40. Nor does the Palestinian Authority have the right to access data on Israeli use of water resources, whereas Israel reserves the right for continual access to water resource data in the West Bank… around 150 water and sanitation projects are still pending JWC approval for “technical and security reasons”, while only one new Palestinian well project for the Western aquifer has been approved since 1993. In contrast, Israel is able to construct pipelines to its illegal settlements without going through the mechanism of the JWC. Thus Israel effectively has full control of water resources in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.”

The World Bank’s 2009 report confirms the non-consensual reality of the Joint Water Committee’s supposed ‘consensus decision-making’ — “[the] JWC has not fulfilled its role of providing a supportive governance framework for joint resource management and investment… politics and policy issues have limited the number of project approvals…fundamental asymmetries — of power, of capacity, of information — put into question the role of JWC as a “joint” institution…Israel takes unilateral water-related actions outside the JWC… only one third (by value) of projects presented to the JWC 2001-8 have been implemented… (1) the process is in general slow; (2) the rate of rejection of PA projects is high; (3) the PWA has almost never sought to reject Israeli projects (only one has not been approved); and (4) well drilling projects and — until very recently -wastewater projects have had very low rates of approval… in order to solicit approvals on vital emergency water needs, the PA is forced into positions that compromise its basic policy principles. Such an asymmetrical power balance (one party, Israel, has virtually all the power and is not driven by emergencies), together with the observed track record of the JWC, have contributed to a loss of trust and confidence and to very poor outcomes (for Palestinians) that undermine the rationale for the committee as a de facto “joint” approach to water sector management.”

Deeb Abdelghafar, Director of Water Resources for the Palestinian Water Authority, relates how “we submitted our application two years ago to build two new production wells in the northern part of the Jordan Valley, [to supply] water for domestic and agricultural purposes, and we know that they have reviewed it, but up to now we have not gotten any response, and we are not optimistic… we have more than 80 agricultural wells that need to be rehabilitated in Jordan Valley, and we have had these wells in the JWC for more than 4 years, but unfortunately we could not get final approval from Joint Water Committee.”

Even if the Joint Water Committee approves a project, its effective implementation is crippled by the red tape of the Israeli Civil Administration. Abdelghafar continues: “the most difficult step in the process for us is the Civil Administration because there are more than 14 departments, and each department must approve on the project. So we can never get a project through the civil administration, because some departments approve and some do not.” Ayman Rabi, Assistant Director of the Palestinian Hydrology Group for Water and Environmental Resources Development, an NGO working to improve access to water and sanitation services in the Occupied Palestinian territories. echoes Abdelghafar’s frustrations that “there is a big problem now in implementing anything in Area C, and that is one of the major hindrances right now to our work in that area….we have to ask [for a] permit and this generally we do through Palestinian Authority, and then they are applying through the Joint Water Committee… [but] even if the Joint Water Committee approves any intervention or project, the Israeli Civil Administration requests more documentation procedures, the process is longer, they put more conditions for implementation in Area C, so you might end up not implementing any activity because of this long and complicated procedure.” The World Bank report quotes an anonymous donor who reports the same difficulties- “first thing we request is a letter from PWA approving the project. Then we go to the JWC. But then we have to go to the Civil Administration – and there delays of 2-3 years are normal. In fact, we have no positive outcomes for Area C.”

Since nearly every proposal for the construction of water infrastructure in Area C is shut down by the twin juggernauts of the Joint Water Committee and the Israeli Civil Administration, NGOs must focus their efforts, to quote Abdelghafar, on “civil emergency intervention — by delivering small water tankers, by supplying them with water tanks, by constructing rainwater cisterns — it’s emergency humanitarian relief.” While important, this small-scale aid is carried out in lieu of large-scale, long-term projects that would strike at the root of the problem, rather than merely seeking to alleviate its effects. Says the World Bank report, “in the light of the difficulty of implementing major projects, the reasonable response has been short term emergency projects, often small projects with NGOs, and these smaller projects have become a very large part of water sector development… however, the multiplicity of small donors and multiple projects are more difficult to fit within a planning framework… NGOs have a comparative advantage in a grass roots field presence and a certain demand-driven character…[they are] nimble… but are small scale and short term” (p.63).

In the village of Hamsa, near the Hamra checkpoint in the Jordan Valley, Abu Riyad, who has been living in Hamsa with his family for thirty years, must now travel long distances to get water for drinking and irrigation, after two huge water wells constructed for nearby settlements have dried up the springs upon which for generations the community of Hamsa has relied. Says Ma’an’s report ‘Draining Away’: “unconnected to the water network, Abu Riyad must now travel to Ein Shibleh for his water. Nor does the family know the quality of the water and if it has been treated. While he is fortunate not to have to pay for this supply, it costs 200 shekels to transport 10 cubic metres of water. As the water covers all of the family’s needs, from drinking, washing and drinking water for the animals, Abu Riyad must transport this amount every four days. With the price of fuel rising, this means that water represents an increasing financial drain for the family…the community receives little support. While several tanks and water coupons have been donated from local and international NGOs, this is only ever for limited amounts of time, and thus provides only temporary relief.”

Indeed, Abu Riyad is fortunate to receive water for free. Ayman Rabi of the Palestinian Hydrology Group laments that, regarding many of his organization’s aid initiatives, “[the recipients of water] are asked to contribute, unfortunately. Although we do not like this, it is something that has been agreed on by the [Palestinian] Water Authority. They have been asked to contribute by 10 shekels, though we are not happy with this arrangement, for each cubic meter. and then we refill them whenever they ask us to.”

Many organizations, instead of delivering water, deliver water tanks to imperiled communities, so that Bedouin may transport water from filling points. However, by delivering water tanks, instead of connecting communities to water networks, these NGOs, though well-intentioned, often compound the problem by forcing the Bedouin to drive long distances, through a myriad of checkpoints, to filling points in Areas A or B, in order to maintain a constant water supply. The World Bank report decries that “occupation checkpoints and curfews severely limit tanker access to communities… there are 36 fixed checkpoints across the West Bank, including the gates of the Separation Barrier, that seriously affect access of water tankers and maintenance teams to communities…. Given the risks faced by drivers for their physical safety coupled with the longer routes, the price of water through tankers has increased exponentially”.

The case of Abu Riyad illustrates how expensive this practice can become for Bedouin faced with no alternative. According to Fathy Khdirat of Jordan Valley Solidarity, “to use water tankers in this way costs the Bedouin 30 shekels per cubic meter of water, while their neighbors in Areas A or B pay on average between ½ and 3 shekels per cubic meter of water.” The perpetuation of this inequality works in the occupation’s favor, by encouraging Bedouin to move out of Area C into Areas A or B.

In addition, mobilizing short-term emergency relief is much more expensive for the NGOs than would be a project to install permanent pipelines linking the Bedouin to water sources. Fathy Khdirat estimates that a recent $700,000 initiative to accomplish the former could have achieved the latter with 10% of the budget. Between the Joint Water Committee, the Israeli Civil Administration and the IOF, however, the possibility of installing permanent water infrastructure for the Bedouin is practically foreclosed from the beginning, so that aid initiatives are forced to work within the restricting, oppressive parameters of Israeli law. Says the World Bank report, “at best, the PA role is reduced to improving water and sanitation services to Palestinian communities within the constraints laid down…stakeholders recognize the inefficiency and high costs of such fragmented and contingency development but see no alternative.”

The bueraucratic matrix of corruption and control, in which both Israeli and Palestinian political and civil organizations are enmeshed, causes on-the-ground human rights abuses in clear violation of The Right To Water, enshrined in General Comment no. 15 of articles 11 and 12 of the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights by the United Nations Economic and Social Council in Geneva, in November 2002. The document stipulates that “the right to water contains both freedoms and entitlements. The freedoms include the right to maintain access to existing water supplies necessary for the right to water, and the right to be free from interference… by contrast, the entitlements include the right to a system of water supply and management that provides equality of opportunity for people to enjoy the right to water.” The covenant goes on to list specific water entitlements — the right of “physical accessibility: water, and adequate water facilities and services, must be within safe physical reach for all sections of the population. Sufficient, safe and acceptable water must be accessible… within, or in the immediate vicinity, of each household, educational institution and workplace…”; the right of “economic accessibility: water, and water facilities and services, must be affordable for all. The direct and indirect costs and charges associated with securing water must be affordable…”; and the right of “non-discrimination: water and water facilities and services must be accessible to all, including the most vulnerable or marginalized sections of the population, in law and in fact, without discrimination”.

Ma’an’s report, ‘Draining Away’, clarifies that, in regards to the Right to Water enshrined in this document, that “while this right does not entitle people to unlimited use of free water or to household connection, it does mean that water and sanitation services should be affordable, that water and sanitation facilities should be in the immediate vicinity of the household, and that water should be used in a sustainable manner. This right exists irrespective of an individual’s ethnicity, gender, age, religious or political beliefs… it also stipulates that individuals and communities can participate in, and influence, decision making relating to water and sanitation services on national and local levels.”

Here are some quick facts taken from ‘Draining Away’, which should be measured against the UN-enshrined Right to Water-

In October 2009 Amnesty International noted that “180,000-200,000 Palestinians living in rural communities have no access to running water, and even in towns and villages which are connected to the water network, the taps often run dry.”

According to the WASH monitoring project, the cost of private tankered water in 290 communities in the West Bank has increased between 100-200% for one cubic meter since the start of the intifada.

40% of Palestinians in the Jordan Valley consume less water than the minimum global standard set by the World Health Organization, which is set at 100 liters cubed per day.

56,000 Palestinians in the Jordan Valley consume an average of 37 Million Cubic Meters (MCM) of water per year, as compared to an average of 41 MCM for only 9,400 settlers.

Palestinians are charged more than their counterparts in Israel for water: Mekorot charges Israelis NIS 1.8 per cubic metre, compared to an average of NIS 2.5 per cubic metre for Palestinians.

There is near-universal consensus that there exists in the Jordan Valley a systematic policy of oppression and ethnic cleansing, touching upon not only water but all aspects of life for the 15,000 Bedouin who are unconnected to any water network in the 95% of the Valley designated Area C. Says Deeb Abdelghafar of the Palestinian Water Authority, “the Jordan Valley is a unique area from the Israeli point of view. They are trying to [establish] control over this area, and they are trying to prevent any permanent water infrastructure in order to prevent the people to be there… they don’t want to support the existence of these people, they want to immigrate the people outside of this area.”

Advocates like Fathy Khdirat of Jordan Valley Solidarity, a grassroots movement that works to build infrastructure for the Bedouin of the Valley, are determined to encourage those under occupation to resist the oppression, and remain in their native land. “I spent all my life under the Occupation,” insists Fathy, “and I want to see a better future for my children. I am from there, and I will not shut up.”

You write (“A View from the Villa,” 29/10/11): “I was very much against the US wars in Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq, and very much in favor of the NATO campaigns in Kosovo and Libya. For me, the starting point of every analysis is what the people concerned want and need, and only after that do I wonder how the international schema applies to them.”

Setting the determination of whether your criteria apply to Libya aside, let’s look at a country about which your expertise is better. Since the people of the West Bank want the occupiers, your people, out, you would of course be very much in favor of NATO bombing all Israeli forces, armored vehicles, ammunition depots and command centers in the West Bank. And of course, you would be very much in favor of NATO bombing portions of the illegal settlements in the West Bank that are determined to be secret IOF centers and certainly would support strafing of illegal settlers who attack citizens in their olive groves and settlers who uproot or burn olive trees. And certainly you would support NATO F-16 attacks on bulldozers that Israel uses to demolish Palestine citizens’ homes as well.

“Maybe you in particular should do something to stop this homegrown madness, and if you are already doing something then maybe you should do more?” — Ken O’ Keefe

And since the people of the West Bank and Gaza oppose the Israeli Air Force’s control of their airspace, you would emphatically support complete destruction of the Israeli Air Force by NATO and the implementation of a no-fly zone over West Bank and Gaza. Then, of course, the Qataris and the French could fly ammunition into the West Bank and Gaza, and NATO special forces could provide training to the Palestinians for the eventual invasion of Ariel, Betar Illit, Maale Adumim, Modi’in Illit, the illegal Israeli settlements in East Jerusalem, and all the other 116 illegal settlements and 100 illegal outpost settlements in the West Bank–which of course would only be possible by NATO bombing clearing the way.

You write: “Also, I have never quite understood the dogma which seems to answer all questions: “it’s all about oil”. Gaddafi sold his oil on the world market, and so will his successors, on the same terms. International oil corporations are all the same to me. Is there much of a difference between the Russian Gazprom and the American Esso?”

More research would show:

1) The American oil companies left last year because Gaddafi was demanding extra payments to compensate for payments made to Lockerbie victim’s relatives and the damage done by the sanctions for the supposed bombing of Pan Am 103. With a Pro-American government put in power only because of NATO’s bombs, those companies will be back, and terms will be far more favorable for the European countries. John McCain, Lindsey Graham, and Marco Rubio explain it clearly in Murdoch’s WSJ.

2) “Gaddafi [had] progressively impeded the interests of U.S. and Western oil companies by demanding a greater share of profits and other concessions, to the point where some of those corporations were deciding that it may no longer be profitable or worthwhile to drill for oil there. But now, in a pure coincidence, there is hope on the horizon for these Western oil companies, thanks to the war profoundly humanitarian action being waged by the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize winner and his nation’s closest Western allies.”

3) The U.S. wanted to block Eni S.p.A., the Rome-based oil giant which is Italy’s largest corporation and one in which the Italian government holds a 30 percent stake, from acting as “stalking horse” for Gazprom. “Specifically at issue was an Eni deal that would have given Gazprom access to Libyan oil and would have had Eni help Gazprom build a pipeline across the Black Sea. This project would have competed with a similar project backed by the U.S. government that would have connected gas fields in the Caspian region directly to Europe, bypassing Russia and Gazprom…. Eni [is] the largest player in Libya’s oil sector, and Scaroni [Eni CEO Paolo Scaroni] publicly voiced concern that U.S.-led efforts to oust strongman Moammar Gadhafi weren’t in Italy’s interest.”

With all the work you do on Israel and Palestine, you missed this film. The Humanitarian War in Libya: There is no Evidence, directed by Julien Teil, shows how figures made up by the Libyan League for Human Rights whose members were in the National Transitional Council were not verified and then were used as justification for war. (Alternatively, watch it here: Part 1 and Part 2.)

French filmmaker Julien Teil’s film, lays out very clearly the truth behind the mountain of lies manipulated by NATO to justify its attack on Libya. In the film, the director of the Swiss-based Libyan League for Human Rights, Soliman Bouchuiguir, emerges as the key individual who initiated the UN action against Libya.

In February of this year, the Libyan League, along with the US Government-funded National Endowment for Democracy and 70 other NGOs, sent the initial petition to the UN for the suspension of Libya from the UN Human Rights Council. The petition was based on Bouchuiguir’s claims alone that some 6,000 had been killed by Gaddafi’s regime. Bouchuiguir provided the UN with lurid tales of Gaddafi’s “scorched earth policy” and his militia’s “massive attacks against civilians.” These acts are “crimes against humanity,” he testified to the UN.

On May 31, Bouchuiguir’s NGO reported a staggering 18,000 murdered, 46,000 wounded, 28,000 missing, 1,600 rapes, and 150,000 refugees at the hands of the Gaddafi regime. Asked in the film where he got his figures, he replied that he got them from the National Transitional Council — the rebels!

It was this petition and Bouchuiguir’s claims that were the basis for everything that was to come, culminating in the NATO destruction of Libya and today’s bloody murder of Gaddafi and his entourage. The United Nations did not investigate Bouchuiguir’s claims before they were used by the UN Security Council to bolster their efforts to pass UN Security Council Resolution 1973, opening the door to NATO bombs.

Looking further at your essay. You write: “My God, how much a people must hate its ruler if they treat him like that!”

Uri, if this President or that President was in the midst of a group of certain sectors of the population of their own particular country, he would receive the same end that Gaddafi did from the rebels.

On August 6 a unit of the 12,000 member United Nations Stabilization Mission in Haiti (MINUSTAH) based in the Central Plateau city of Hinche was caught dumping feces and other waste in holes a few meters from a river where people bathe and drink. After complaints by locals and an investigation by journalists, city officials burned the waste near the Guayamouc river. The mayor of Hinche, André Renaud, criticized MINUSTAH’s flagrant disregard for the community’s health and called for the expulsion of some foreign troops.

On August 21 the UN was again accused of improper sewage disposal fifteen kilometers from Hinche.

As is their wont, MINUSTAH officials simply deny dumping sewage. Last Thursday the UN released a statement claiming they had no reason to dump waste since the base in Hinche built a treatment plant and sewage disposal on June 15. “The United Nations Mission for Stabilization in Haiti (MINUSTAH) formally denies being responsible for the dumping of waste in Hinche or elsewhere in the territory of Haiti.”

For anyone who has followed MINUSTAH’s operations this denial rings hollow. Ten months ago reckless sewage disposal at the UN base near Mirebalais caused a devastating cholera outbreak. In October 2010 a new deployment of Nepalese troops brought a disease to Haiti that has left 6,200 dead and more than 438,000 ill.

The back story to this affair is that the waste company managing the base, Sanco Enterprises S.A., disposed the fecal matter from the Nepalese troops in pits that seeped into the Artibonite River. Locals drank from the river, which is how the first Haitians got infected with cholera.

Despite a mountain of evidence collected from local and international researchers, the UN refuses to take responsibility for the cholera outbreak. A November investigation by prominent French epidemiologist, Renaud Piarroux, pointed to the Nepalese troops as the probable origin of the cholera strain, as did a study published by the journal of the U.S. Center for Disease Control and Prevention and an investigation by Nepalese, Danish and Americans researchers at the “Translational Genomics Research Institute” in Arizona. Released last Tuesday, the latter study showed that the genomes of bacteria from Haitian cholera patients were virtually identical with those found in Nepal when the peacekeepers left their country in 2010.

A week ago MINUSTAH spokesperson Vincenzo Pugliesse said the international organization was aware of the new study but maintained that “we follow the recommendations of the report released by the group of experts appointed by the Secretary-General.” That report refused to pinpoint any single source for the cholera outbreak, concluding it was caused by a “confluence of circumstances.”

The debate over cholera’s origin takes places as the disease continues to ravage the country. In June, the beginning of the rainy season, there were a whopping 1800 new cases per day.

Despite the ongoing impact of cholera and widespread anger at MINUSTAH over the issue, the UN’s sewage disposal has been of little interest to the international media. Recently, the weekly Haiti liberté published a picture of a UN vehicle dumping sewage into a river on its front page, but an English-language Google search found no reports in the global press about the criticism towards the international organization’s waste disposal (aside from passing mentions in the leftist San Francisco Bay View and Truthdig).

Media indifference to the UN’s lax health standards is mirrored in the aid world. Supposedly concerned with Haitian well being, the innumerable foreign NGOs working in Haiti have said little about MINUSTAH’s waste disposal and disregard for public health. In fact, when the cholera outbreak began, various international humanitarian organizations belittled those calling for an investigation into its source. A few weeks after the outbreak Médecins sans frontières’ Head of Mission in Port-au-Prince, Stefano Zannini, told Montreal daily La Presse, “Our position is pragmatic: to have learnt the source at the beginning of the epidemic would not have saved more lives. To know today would have no impact either.” For their part, Oxfam criticized those who protested the UN bringing a disease with no recorded history in Haiti. “If the country explodes in violence then we will not be able to reach the people we need to”, an Oxfam spokeswoman, Julie Schindall, told the Guardian after the outbreak.

Rather than support calls for UN accountability, the NGOs jumped to the international organization’s defence. Highly dependent on Western government funding and political support, NGOs are overwhelmingly focused on a charitable model that fails to challenge the political or economic structures that cause the poverty and illness they seek to cure. But without political pressure the practices that engender poverty and illness will continue, a point driven home with the UN’s waste disposal and cholera. Without pressure MINUSTAH will continue to dispose of waste however they see fit.

To right some of what’s wrong MINUSTAH needs to immediately stop dumping sewage without concern for public health. They should also apologize for introducing cholera to Haiti and to make the apology meaningful the UN ought to compensate Haitians by making the country cholera-free through massive investments in the country’s sanitation and sewage systems.

Prachanda’s strange path

Chairman Prachanda and Dr. Bhattarai have gone from heroic revolutionary leaders to rather common high caste Brahmin politicians in expensive suits, watches and ties. They went from speeches about smashing the state and Cultural Revolution to promises about millennium development goals and private finance initiative. What happened?

Marxism-Leninism-Maoism-Prachanda Path was the official ideology of the Nepali Maoists, and was to be the union of the Soviet and Chinese models of revolution; the Maoist peoples war with Leninist urban insurrection. Prachanda Path was Maoism synthesised for Nepali conditions; Prachanda Path was said to be a zigzag path, one that goes from left to right to left to right to confuse the enemies and play them off against one another. So, the Maoists would play the royalists against the bourgeoisie and the bourgeoisie off against the royalists; play India off against China and China off against India, and then to play the UN off against the US. In the party itself, Prachanda would play the left winger Kiran against the right winger Bhattarai, one time supporting Kiran, another time Bhattarai, all the time advancing ahead. Prachanda was thought of as the master strategist, with a secret plan, and in some ways this is true.  But Bhattarai is now the Prime Minister, and it is his line the party are following, as they have been since the end of the Peoples War.

The ending of the Peoples War and the entrance into parliamentary politics was justified to the cadre by saying that the struggle had changed form, and that the new struggle would be in the urban centres. This was a change of form from a rural movement towards an urban one, from a secret and hidden leadership to an open leadership in the parliamentary system. The cadre were told that the outward form was electoral struggle, but the internal and true essence was preparation for urban insurrection.

This did indeed seem at the time to be an ingenious tactic, and one that might succeed. And if it had worked, it would have been truly glorious. That is, under the cover of entering into the parliamentary system, the Maoists would bring their troops into the capital and mobilise the Kathmandu proletariat for an urban insurrection. The cadre were told that at an opportune time, the reactionaries would attack and there would be the final conflict between the RNA and the PLA for control of Nepal. The PLA would leave the cantonments, and the YCL (Young Communist League) would take control of the streets in Kathmandu. And, indeed, this was possible; after the peace process when the YCL turned up in Kathmandu, they were organised as a paramilitary force which attracted many young people, their core leadership were ex-PLA, and the popular mood was for revolution.

However, the longer and longer the Maoists stayed in the parliamentary system; the less and less likely this seemed. The leadership said they were taking part in elections as a tactic, confusing their enemies and that their real purpose was to expose the parliamentary system. Unfortunately, it was not the electoral system that was exposed, but the Maoist leaders themselves who were exposed as just another bunch of corrupt opportunist politicians; it was not the enemies of the Maoists who became confused, but their friends and supporters.

The role and importance of the UN has been overlooked by many.  From the point of view of the ‘international community’ and the UN itself, the United Nations Mission in Nepal (UNMIN) must be judged a quiet success. The UN oversaw the transformation of the Maoists from a revolutionary party to a civilian party, and oversaw the dismantling of the PLA. The Maoist leadership agreed to the UN DDR program (Disarmament, Demobilisation, Reintegration) for the PLA, and this has been almost carried through; the handover of the keys is really only the last symbolic gesture before demobilization of the PLA. International donors will help reintegration by giving a pay out to the PLA soldiers to restart their life as civilians. As for the number of PLA to be integrated into the Nepal Army, it is really just a bargaining chip; it does not really matter much apart from to the soldiers themselves and their families. Some form of integration will take place; that much is agreed upon by all parties, including Kiran and the left wing of the Maoist party.

The UN allowed the implementation of those Maoist demands that did not conflict with the demands of the ‘international community’. These included the abolition of the monarchy and the widening of political participation of previously unrepresented groups, such as Dalits, as well as various social development programs-hospitals schools orphanages etc, generously aided by NGO money. It was indeed strange to see the Maoists get on so well with the UN, not wanting the UN to leave; it was finally the Congress and the UML that asked the UN to leave Nepal. The UN had done their job.

The Maoist leadership justified a lot of this international money coming in by saying ‘we are tricking the imperialists, we are taking the imperialist money but we will use it for revolution’. This excuse seemed plausible for a short time, but unfortunately it is not really possible to fool international donors, such as the World Bank, because they will certainly check how their money is spent. It was not the imperialists that were tricked, but rather the Maoist cadre and supporters. They took much of what the leadership was saying on trust, and did not have the money or resources to check what was happening.  The practice of emphasising the personality of the great leader Prachanda made it hard for ordinary cadre and supporters to challenge or question the great leader’s decisions.

There is another justification that has been coming from the leadership regarding the integration of the PLA into the Nepal Army. This justification suggests that the PLA integrated into the Nepal Army will subvert the army with their superior ideology, winning the ordinary soldier over to the cause of revolution, and thus suggesting that there are still plans for the coming urban insurrection. These types of justifications from the Maoist leadership are simply too hard to believe, there have been too many of them, all incapable of being verified and all in the end proved false.  The leaders of the Nepal Army are surely not that stupid to be tricked. Just as the PLA does not consider itself defeated, neither does the Nepal Army. Prachanda tried to sack the army chief when he was Prime Minister and he was forced to resign. The Nepal army is much bigger than the PLA, well equipped, funded and trained by Britain, US, and India; the leadership of the Nepal Army is controlled by the same people who were previously known as ‘royalists’, the big money in Nepal. The real power in Nepal has not really changed, despite the changes in government.

This was the final zigzag of Prachanda Path, as Prachanda turned from being the leader of the proletariat to being a ‘paid representative of capital’, his public persona changing from revolutionary leader to a man of peace and  great statesman speaking at the UN general assembly in New York, meeting Bush in the White House etc. This is what has been truly strange, to see how easy it was for Prachanda and Bhattarai to use the communist language to the communists, and the capitalist language to the capitalists, to both making promises and pretending to be in their camp. But whose interests do they serve, truly?

During the Peoples War, most of the Maoist political leadership were not in Nepal, but in India.  After 9/11, tough new policies were passed internationally to finish off groups on the ‘US terrorist list’.  In Sri Lanka the LTTE were finished off in an extremely brutal fashion; there was the likelihood of a similarly brutal war in Nepal.  The Indian government arrested several Maoist central committee members, including Com. Baidya and Com. Gajurel, the leaders of the left wing of the Maoist party. It seemed likely that Prachanda would be arrested soon, probably to face a similar fate to Chairman Gonzalo in Peru. The decision to end the Peoples War must have been made at this time, by Prachanda and Bhattarai, and a compromise was agreed upon. The strength of the Maoists and their depth of support among the people, as well as the mass movement (janandolan) led to a compromise on both sides. The revolution would end, the Maoist leadership would join the political establishment, and the monarchy abolished.

The PLA, however, were never defeated. The Maoists controlled a good deal of the country, and they had mass support in their base areas, where things such as the abolition of the caste system, the abolition of feudal barbarities around marriage; the abolition of the various forms of serfdom, the building and running of schools and hospitals, the giving of land taken from rich landowners to landless peasants, communal villages etc. had taken place. There was much that was achieved and much that could have been extraordinary. These things have more or less ended, and the base areas are swamped with NGO funded projects. We may say that the revolution was not destroyed by real bullets so much as by sugar coated bullets.

The party slogan and vision during the Peoples War was Nepal as a ‘base area for the world revolution’. During the elections, the slogan became ‘turning Nepal into Switzerland’. Again, not a bad idea in itself, Nepal reformed along Singaporean lines, but not a communist one. Likewise, the policies of the new Bhattarai led government are not bad as such, and may well create jobs and develop the country but they are simply neoliberal policies dressed up in socialist sounding rhetoric.

Unlike Prachanda, Dr. Bhattarai was always quite honest; he is an honest reformist. His honesty must be commended and is rare in the communist movement.  When he spoke of ‘leaving communism to our grandchildren’- he meant it.  He is also speaking honestly when he says that: ‘Even if some leaders and cadre may oppose or some splinter groups may move out, even then it won’t make much impact on the political line followed by the party’. The left wing of the party has been consistently outplayed and marginalised, and has been unable to challenge or present a viable alternative to Dr. Bhattarai’s line. The most they can do is split off and form a new party, and cause a little commotion.

Dr. Bhattarai probably does have popular support of most Nepalese at the moment, as most are sick of the bickering of the political parties and their failure to reach a consensus, write the constitution and provide jobs. Most Nepalese do not want a return to war, and Dr. Bhattarai is a man of peace.

Dr. Bhattarai is also telling the truth when he speaks of a ‘historical compromise’; the extent and terms of the compromise will no doubt become clearer in time. The Nepali revolution has been over for a long time. The Nepali revolution ended not in defeat, not in victory, but simply as compromise

The larger story of Canaraan is tightly linked to its neighbor, camp Corail, once touted as the very model for the international community’s humanitarian effort in Haiti.  The Corail experiment, and its dismal consequences, is well documented in a recent Rolling Stone article: In short, several thousand earthquake victims were relocated from urban Port-au-Prince to temporary shelters planted in an empty wasteland some distance north of the city.  Marked by the inefficiency, confusion, and high-handedness emblematic of Haiti’s stalled reconstruction effort, the Corail ‘model camp’ did not go as planned, leaving transplanted families far from economic activity and at the mercy of flooding, landslides, and hurricanes.  It is widely recognized as a failure.

Yet any major building project, even an ultimately unsuccessful one such as Corail, offers hope of something to those who have nothing, and soon enough Corail was surrounded by the sprawling series of unplanned settlements now known collectively as Canaan or Canaraan.  Like Corail, Canaraan residents are vulnerable to wind and water and find themselves cut off from the economic life of the city.  But lacking Corail’s official designation as a camp for internally displaced persons (IDPs), Canaraan residents are routinely dismissed as mere ‘squatters’ unworthy of assistance however pressing their need.  Ignored by both the Haitian government itself, and the 3,000+ international NGOs which function like a de facto shadow government, President Martelly’s visit to Canaraan was thus both a validation of  resident’s existence and a sign that perhaps their luck was about to change.

So far, at least, it has not.  Months after the visit, Canaraan is without signs of progress or construction, and residents’ former optimism is increasingly guarded, if not abandoned outright.  The future of textile factories in Canaraan remains a question without an answer, but it is worth asking why powerful actors, both Haitian and international, continually present them as a cure-all for Haiti’s many ills.  Factory projects have been a staple of USAID projects for a generation, and enjoy the prominent and high-profile support of figures such as Bill Clinton and Ban Ki Moon.  The Factory Solution predates the earthquake, and has not been shaken by it.  It now represents the single most significant international effort to impact the economic lives of Haitian people.

One need not dig too deep to find the dark side to this proposed answer to Haiti’s problems.  To make way for construction, for example, Canaraan families would be displaced from the flatlands into uncertain housing on the same treeless hills where landslides killed 23 people just two months ago.  It is unclear how many of the residents of the sprawling camp will find employment in the proposed industrial complex, but certainly fewer than the many tens of thousands of  people who currently live there. Even for those fortunate enough to obtain work, foreign owned textile factories in Haiti have developed a notorious reputation for unsafe conditions, workplace intimidation, union-busting, and wages so shockingly low that it is virtually impossible for even a small family to rely on them for survival. (Wages amount to approximately US $3 a day for textile labor, an in depth report on labor conditions in Haiti can be found here).  In this environment of kickbacks and sexual harassment, where nearly all employees labor without benefit of union representation or health insurance, the prospects for Canaraan residents will likely remain grim even if the President’s promises come true.

This is not to condemn all factories out of hand. Factory work is not inherently a social evil.  In many societies, including our own, factory labor has provided a pathway out of poverty.  For their part, residents in Canaraan express a desire for jobs above all else, and are even willing to accept eviction from their homes for factories that everyone knows will refuse to pay a subsistence wage.

Yet Canaraan residents’ desire for factory work must be understood against a backdrop of economic and political forces which have left Haiti’s poor strikingly boxed-in on all sides by bad options.  Physically, the choice between overcrowded slums, flood-prone plains, and denuded hillsides have left Canaraan residents perilously exposed to danger, whether they decide to remain in the city or flee to its outskirts.  Likewise, decades of US-driven trade policy has left families with few meaningful economic choices except factory work, effectively selling their labor to northern businesses at bargain basement prices.

Such a narrowing of options is not an accident.  It is the intentional result of express U.S. foreign policy.  It may come as a surprise to many Americans that the weight and prestige of their nation’s diplomacy was thrown into an effort to thwart raising Haiti’s minimum wage above 31¢ an hour, but this is precisely the sort of foreign machination that Haitians have been forced to live with for decades.  U.S. diplomatic cables, recently exposed by the group Wikileaks, detail the extent of this meddling, in which US muscle was engaged to sabotage parliamentary efforts to raise wages to a level capable of supporting dignified existence.

Against this backdrop, Canaraan residents’ approval of their President’s message emerges as a rational response to a set of artificially constrained options.  A house on a landslide-prone hill is preferable to a tarp on a flood-prone plain; likewise, a factory’s starvation wages are preferable to none at all.  And what other options are there?  Flooded with highly subsidized foreign food products, Haitians have watched the decimation of their agricultural sector.  Forced to open borders to ravenous (and sometimes predatory) foreign competitors, Haiti has seen its domestic enterprises left stunted.  As a result, the economic policies of the world’s powerful have effectively pushed Haiti’s poor into an ever narrowing chute — the only escape being into the arms of US, Canadian, or Korean textile corporations and their cut-rate sub-contractors in Haiti.  And with the wage increase successfully neutralized, it’s now impossible to earn a living even at that.

Yet beneath that surface enthusiasm, Canaraan residents voice a complex mix of hope and resignation, stoicism and anger, which is every bit as complicated as the geopolitical forces presently at work upon them.  Derided by the powerful as opportunists and squatters, Canaraan residents’ most simple acts of daily life — planting seeds for a dozen stalks of corn on a small plot of land, rebuilding the tarp roof of a Lutheran church, selling goods at market to send children to school — seem like acts of defiance against a global economic order determined to reduce people to a state of dependence.

No one, perhaps not even President Martelly himself, really knows whether the factory project will ever actually materialize, whether its promised employment will allow an escape from poverty, or if, instead, it will prove as illusory as countless other promises made to camp residents by politicians, diplomats, NGOs, and the international community.  But one thing is clear, until the powerful actors presuming to decide Haiti’s future put the autonomy, dignity, and well-being of Haiti’s poor majority at the center of reconstruction efforts, instead of simply instrumentalizing them as a pool of cheap labor, Canaraan families will not be able to break out of the trap of poverty, foreign factories or not.

Well, it’s this year’s Gaza solidarity flotilla.

It could be said, of course, that last year’s “little fleet” – that’s what the word means in Spanish, much as “guerrilla” means “little war” – is also a reasonable candidate. It never reached Gaza, but the commander of the Israeli navy could well repeat the words of Pyrrhus, king of Epirus, whose victory over the Romans was so costly that he is said to have exclaimed: “Another such victory, and I am lost!”

Flotilla 1 did not reach Gaza. But the naval commando attack on it, which cost the lives of nine Turkish activists, aroused such an outcry that our government saw itself compelled to loosen its land blockade of the Gaza Strip significantly.

The repercussions of this action have not yet died down. The very important relations between the Israeli and Turkish militaries are still ruptured, with Turkey demanding an apology and indemnities. The victims’ families are pursuing criminal and civil proceedings in several countries. An ongoing headache.

Flotilla 2 reached its end this week, when a huge naval action led to the capture of 1 (one!) little French yacht and the detention of its sailors, journalists and activists — all 16 (sixteen) of them. Even our tame broadcasters could not help themselves from sneering: “Why didn’t they send an aircraft carrier?”

The 14 boats that were prevented from sailing, and the one that did sail, not only kept our entire navy on alert for weeks, but also helped to keep the Gaza blockade in the news. And that, after all, was the whole point of the exercise.

What happened to the 14 boats which did not sail?

Incredible as it sounds, the Greek navy and Coast Guard forcibly prevented them from leaving Greek ports. There existed no lawful grounds for this, nor was there any pretense of legality.

It would be no exaggeration to say that the Greek navy was acting under orders from the Israeli Chief of Staff. A proud sea-faring nation with a nautical history of thousands of years (“nautical” even happens to be a Greek word) degraded itself to perform illegal actions to please Israel.

It also ignored acts of sabotage carried out by naval commandos — guess whose — against the boats in Greek harbors.

At the same time, the Turkish government, the defiant sponsor of the Mavi Marmara, the ship on which the Turkish activists were killed last year, prevented the same ship from sailing this year [See article in which Huseyin Oruç, deputy of the Turkish Humanitarian Relief Foundation, refutes the claim that Turkey prevented the Mavi Marmara from sailing. -- Ed].

Also at the same time, groups of pro-Palestinian activists who tried to reach the West Bank by air were stopped on their way. Since there is no direct access to the West Bank by land, sea or air except through Israeli territory or Israeli checkpoints, they had to travel via Ben-Gurion International Airport, Israel’s gateway to the world. Most did not make it: under instructions from our government, all international airlines blocked these passengers at check-in, using “blacklists” provided by our government.

It seems that the long arm of our diligent security service reaches everywhere, and that its orders are obeyed by countries large and small.

A hundred years ago, the secret police of the Russian Czar, the dreaded “Okhrana”, forged a document called “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion”.

(In those times, the secret police everywhere was still called Secret Police, before being dignified as “Security Services”.)

The document reported a secret meeting of rabbis in the old Jewish cemetery of Prague, to decide upon strategy to secure Jewish rule over the world. It was a crude falsification, which lifted entire passages verbatim from a novel written decades earlier.

In its pages, the real situation of the Jews was grotesquely distorted – they actually had no power at all. In fact, when Adolf Hitler – who used the Protocols for his propaganda – set in motion the Final Solution, almost nobody in the whole world lifted a finger to help the Jews. Even US Jews were afraid to raise their voices.

But if the authors of the falsification were to return to the scene of their crime today, they would rub their eyes in disbelief: this figment of their sick imagination looks like coming true. The Jewish State – as Zionists like to call us – can order around Greek naval authorities, get Turkey to climb down, instruct half a dozen European states to stop passengers at their airports.

How do we do it? There is a simple answer, consisting of three letters: USA.

Israel has become a kind of Kafkaesque doorkeeper to the world’s sole remaining superpower.

Through its immense influence on the American political system, and especially on the Congress, Israel can levy a political tax on anyone who needs something from the US. Greece is bankrupt and desperately needs American and European help. Turkey is a partner of the US in NATO. No European country wants to quarrel with the US. Ergo: they all need to give us a little political baksheesh.

To cement this relationship, Glenn Beck, the obnoxious protégé of Rupert Murdoch, visited us and was enthusiastically received in the Knesset, where he told us “not to be afraid”, because he (and, by implication, Fox and all of America) was supporting us to the hilt.

It is because of this that a few lines, which appeared this week in the New York Times, caused near panic in Jerusalem.

The NYT is, perhaps, the most “pro-Israel” paper in the whole world, including Israel itself. Many of its editorial writers are ardent Zionists. A news story critical of Israeli policies has almost no chance of appearing there. No mention of the Israeli peace movement. No mention of the dozens of demonstrations in Israel against Lebanon War II and the Cast Lead operation. Self-censorship is supreme.

But this week, the NYT published a blistering editorial criticizing Israel. The reason: the “Boycott Law”, passed by the right-wing Knesset majority, which forbids Israelis to call for a boycott of the settlements. The editorial practically repeats what I said in last week’s article: that the law is blatantly anti-democratic and violates basic human rights. The more so, since it comes on top of a whole series of anti-democratic laws that were enacted in the last few months. Israel is in danger of losing its title as the “Only Democracy in the Middle East”.

Suddenly, all the red lights in Jerusalem started to blink furiously. Help! We are going to lose our only political asset in the world, the pillar of our strength, the basis of our national security, the rock of our existence.

The result was immediate. On Wednesday, the right-wing clique that now controls the Knesset, under the leadership of Avigdor Lieberman, brought to final vote a resolution that would appoint two Committees of Inquiry into the financial resources of human-rights NGOs. Not all NGOs, only “leftist” ones. This was another item on the long list of McCarthyist measures, many of which have already been adopted and many more of which are waiting for their turn.

The day before, Binyamin Netanyahu appeared specially in the Knesset to assure his followers that he fully approved, and indeed had sponsored, the Boycott Law. But after the NYT editorial, when the Commission of Inquiry resolution came up, Netanyahu and almost all his cabinet ministers voted against it. The religious factions disappeared from the Knesset. The resolution was voted down by a 2 to 1 majority.

But one ominous fact emerged: Apart from Netanyahu and his captive ministers, all the Likud members present voted for the resolution. This included all the young leaders of the party – the coming generation of Likud bosses.

If the Likud remains in power – this group of ultra-rightists,[] will be the government of Israel within ten years. And to hell with the New York Times.

Fortunately, there are signs that a new phenomenon is in the making.

It started innocently with a successful consumer strike on cottage cheese, in order to compel a cartel of fat cats to reduce prices. This has been followed by a mass action by young couples, mostly university students, against the impossibly high prices of apartments.

A group of protesters put up tents in the center of Tel Aviv and have now been living there for over a week. Soon after, such encampments sprang up all over the country, from Kiryat Shmona on the Lebanese border to Beer Sheva in the Negev.

It is much too early to tell whether this is a short-term protest or the beginning of an Israeli Tahrir Square phenomenon. But it clearly shows that the takeover of Israel by a neo-fascist grouping is not a foregone conclusion. The fight is on.

Perhaps — just perhaps! — even the New York Times could be starting to report on the reality of our country.

Hebrew had been a dead language for many generations, more or less like Latin, when it was still used in the Catholic church. Then, suddenly, concurrent with the emergence of Zionism (but independently) it sprang back to life. This never happened to any other language.

Theodor Herzl laughed at the idea that Jews in Palestine would speak Hebrew. He wanted us to speak German. “Are they going to ask for a railway ticket in Hebrew?” he scoffed.

Well, we now buy airline tickets in Hebrew. We read the Bible in its Hebrew original and enjoy it tremendously. As Abba Eban once said, if King David were to come to life in Jerusalem today, he could understand the language spoken in the street. Though with some difficulty, because our language gets corrupted, like most other languages.

Anyhow, the position of Hebrew is secure. Babies and Nobel Prize laureates speak it.

The fate of the other miracle is far less assured.

The future – indeed, the present – of Israeli democracy is shrouded in doubt.

It is a miracle, because it did not grow slowly over generations, like Anglo-Saxon democracy. There was no democracy in the Jewish shtetl. Neither is there anything like it in Jewish religious tradition. But the Zionist Founding Fathers, mostly West and Central European Jews, aspired to the highest social ideals of their time.

I have always warned that our democracy has very shallow and tender roots, and needs our constant care. Where did the Jews who founded Israel, and who came here thereafter, grow up? Under the dictatorship of the British High Commissioner, the Russian Czar, the Dictatorship of the Proletariat, the king of Morocco, Pilsudsky’s Poland and similar regimes. Those of us who came from democratic countries like Weimar Germany or the US were a tiny minority.

Yet the founders of Israel succeeded in establishing a vibrant democracy that – at least until 1967 – was in no way inferior, and in some ways superior, to the British or American models. We were proud of it, and the world admired it. The appellation “the Only Democracy in the Middle East” was not a hollow propaganda slogan.

Some claim that with the occupation of the Palestinian territories, which have lived since 1967 under a harsh military regime without the slightest trace of democracy and human rights, this situation already came to an end. Whatever one thinks about that, in fact Israel in its pre-1967 borders maintained a reasonable record until recently. For the ordinary citizen, democracy was still a fact of life. Even Arab citizens enjoyed democratic rights far superior to anything in the Arab world.

This week, all this was put in doubt. Some say that this doubt has now been dispersed, and that a stark reality is being exposed.

Charles Boycott, the agent of a British landowner in Ireland, could never have imagined that he would play a role in a country called Israel 130 years after his name had become a world-wide symbol.

Captain Boycott evicted Irish tenants, who defaulted on their rent because of desperate economic straits. The Irish reacted with a new weapon: no one would speak with him, work for him, buy from him. His name became synonymous with this kind of non-violent action.

The method itself was born even earlier. The list is long. Among others: in 1830 the “negroes” in the US declared a “boycott” of slave-produced products. The later Civil Rights movement started with a boycott of the Montgomery bus company that seated blacks and whites separately. During the American Revolution, the insurgents declared a boycott on British goods. So did Mahatma Gandhi in India.

American Jews boycotted the cars of the infamous anti-Semite Henry Ford. Jews in many countries took part in a boycott of German goods immediately after the Nazis came to power in 1933.

The Chinese boycotted Japan after the invasion of their country. The US boycotted the Olympic Games in Moscow. People of conscience all over the world boycotted the products and the athletes of Apartheid South Africa and helped to bring it to its knees.

All these campaigns used a basic democratic right: every person is entitled to refuse to buy from people he detests. Everyone can refuse to support with his money causes which contradict his innermost moral convictions.

It is this right that has been put to the test in Israel this week.

IN 1997, Gush Shalom declared a boycott of the products of the settlements in the occupied Palestinian territories. We believe that these settlements, which are being set up with the express purpose of preventing the establishment of a Palestinian state, are endangering the future of Israel.

The press conference, in which we announced this step, was not attended by a single Israeli journalist. But the boycott gathered momentum. Hundreds of thousands of Israelis do not buy settlement products. The European Union, which has a trade agreement that practically treats Israel as a member of the union, was induced to enforce the clause that excludes products of the settlements from these privileges.

There are now hundreds of factories in the settlements. They were literally compelled, or seduced, to go there, because the (stolen) land there is far cheaper than in Israel proper. They enjoy generous government subsidies and tax exemptions, and they can exploit Palestinian workers for ridiculous wages. The Palestinians have no other way of supporting their families than to toil for their oppressors.

Our boycott was designed, among other things, to counter these advantages. And indeed, several big enterprises have already given in and moved out, under pressure from foreign investors and buyers. Alarmed, the settlers instructed their lackeys in the Knesset to draft a law that would counter this boycott.

Last Monday, the “Boycott Law” was enacted, setting off an unprecedented storm in the country. Already Tuesday morning, Gush Shalom submitted to the Supreme Court a 22 page application to annul this law.

The “Boycott Law” is a very clever piece of work. Obviously, it was not drafted by the parliamentary simpletons who introduced it, but by some very sophisticated legal minds, probably financed by the Casino barons and Evangelical crazies who support the extreme Right in Israel.

First of all, the law is disguised as a means to fight the de-legitimization of the State of Israel throughout the world. The law bans all calls for the boycott of the State of Israel, “including the areas under Israeli control”. Since there are not a dozen Israelis who call for the boycott of the state, it is clear that the real and sole purpose is to outlaw the boycott of the settlements.

In its initial draft, the law made this a criminal offense. That would have suited us fine: we were quite willing to go to prison for this cause. But the law, in its final form, imposes sanctions that are another thing.

According to the law, any settler who feels that he has been harmed by the boycott can demand unlimited compensation from any person or organization calling for the boycott – without having to prove any actual damage. This means that each of the 300,000 settlers can claim millions from every single peace activist associated with the call for boycott, thus destroying the peace movement altogether.

AS WE point out in our application to the Supreme Court, the law is clearly unconstitutional. True, Israel has no formal constitution, but several “basic laws” are considered by the Supreme Court to function effectively as such.

First, the law clearly contravenes the basic right to freedom of expression. A call for a boycott is a legitimate political action, much as a street demonstration, a manifesto or a mass petition.

Second, the law contravenes the principle of equality. The law does not apply to any other boycott that is now being implemented in Israel: from the religious boycott of stores that sell non-kosher meat (posters calling for this cover the walls of the religious quarters in Jerusalem and elsewhere), to the recent very successful call to boycott the producers of cottage cheese because of their high price. The call of right-wing groups to boycott artists who have not served in the army will be legal, the declaration by left-wing artists that they will not appear in the settlements will be illegal.

Since these and other provisions of the law clearly violate the Basic Laws, the Legal Advisor of the Knesset, in a highly unusual step, published his opinion that the law is unconstitutional and undermines “the core of democracy”. Even the supreme governmental legal authority, the “legal advisor of the government”, has published a statement saying that the law in “on the border” of unconstitutionality. Being mortally afraid of the settlers, he added that he will defend it in court nevertheless. The opportunity for this is not far off: the Supreme Court has given him 60 days to respond to our petition.

A small group of minor parliamentarians is terrorizing the Knesset majority and can pass any law at all. The power of the settlers is immense, and moderate right-wing members are rightly afraid that, if they are not radical enough, they will not be re-elected by the Likud Central Council, which selects the candidates for the party list. This creates a dynamic of competition: who can appear the most radical.

No wonder that one anti-democratic law follows another: a law that practically bars Arab citizens from living in localities of less than 400 families. A law that takes away the pension rights of former Knesset members who do not show up for police investigations (like Azmi Bishara.) A law that abolishes the citizenship of people convicted of “assisting terrorism”. A law that obliges NGOs to disclose donations by foreign governmental institutions. A law that gives preference for civil service positions to people who have served in the army (thus automatically excluding almost all Arab citizens). A law that outlaws any commemoration of the 1948 Naqba (the expulsion of Arab inhabitants from areas conquered by Israel). An extension of the law that prohibits (almost exclusively) Arab citizens, who marry spouses from the Palestinian territories, to live with them in Israel.

Soon to be enacted is a bill that forbids NGOs to accept donations of more than 5000 dollars from abroad, a bill that will impose an income tax of 45% on any NGO that is not specifically exempted by the government, a bill to compel universities to sing the national anthem on every possible occasion, the appointment of a Parliamentary Commission of Inquiry to investigate the financial resources of left-wing [sic] organizations.

Looming over everything else is the explicit threat of right-wing factions to attack the hated “liberal” Supreme Court directly, shear it of its ability to overrule unconstitutional laws and control the appointment of the Supreme Court judges.

Fifty-one years ago, on the eve of the Eichmann trial, I wrote a book about Nazi Germany. In the last chapter, I asked: “Can It Happen Here?”

My answer still stands: yes, it can.

I endorse this letter unequivocally. America has been the most warring nation since the end of WWII. It is time to stop this deadly habit that benefits only war profiteers.

Later, I began thinking of the research I had done over the last 10 years on America’s corpocracy and what I had written about “warfare welfare” in my new book, The Devil’s Marriage: Break Up the Corpocracy or Leave Democracy in the Lurch. The purpose of this article is to share with readers some of my views and proposals in that book and some additional thoughts I had about the letter after signing it. I will start with those additional thoughts.

My overall opinion of the letter is that while it is well intentioned and has certainly garnered a large number of signatures from luminaries and just plain people like myself, it cannot possibly achieve its aim of persuading President Obama and The Congress “—to end the current illegal wars and start a national dialogue about shifting U.S. foreign policy away from dominance through military might, and toward being a member of the community of nations” (quote from the letter). The reason for my pessimism is simply that America’s endless, winless, deadly warring will never stop until America gets rid of her corpocracy, what I call the Devil’s marriage between powerful corporate interests and all three branches of government.

The corpocracy absolutely depends on America seeking and starting covert wars (e.g., CIA orchestrated coup d’états and the many ongoing shadow wars in the Greater Middle East) and very visible wars. A huge war machine and endless militarism fattens the defense industry, including beefing up its sale of arms (the U.S. is the world’s top arms seller); gives military personnel, spooks, and the likes something to do for their pay checks; opens up, protects, and expands corporations’ foreign markets and exploitation of natural resources (oil and minerals) and cheap labor; keeps the corpocracy’s politicians in office; and distracts the American public from growing socio-economic deterioration at home (e.g., soaring poverty rate, joblessness, etc., etc.).

The changes America has undergone in 235 years have been phenomenal in their nature and impact, yet one constant always remains, war. America, after all, was born in the womb of war, fought by the colonists rebelling from King George’s corpocracy. The letter I signed concluded by stating that “George Washington urged Americans to “cultivate peace and harmony with all” and to “avoid overgrown military establishments,” which are “hostile to republican liberty.” While it is true that he proposed a “proper peace establishment,” it was in name only as he then went on to explain that it would have “a regular and standing force,” “a well-regulated militia,” “arsenals of all kinds of military stores,” and “academies, one or more for the Instruction of the Art [of the] Military.” Would we have expected a different utterance from a victorious army general?

Since the King’s corpocracy there have been four “homegrown” ones. The first was during the Robber Baron’s era. Abe Lincoln said “Corporations have been enthroned—An era of corruption in high places will follow.” It did, but public outrage and Teddy Roosevelt busted this corpocracy. The second was during the Flapper Era. The Great Depression, WWII, and FDR ended it. The third was during the Cold War. The warfare industry and fear mongering politicians helped sustain it. The fourth, is the current one, begun in the 1970’s with a “corporate revolution” triggered by the “battle plan” Lewis F. Powell, soon-to-be a US Supreme Court Justice, sent to the US Chamber of Commerce, a stauncher ally no corpocracy will ever know or find.

The corpocracy in all of its renditions has, in effect, and over time honed to perfection a culture of war in which Americans generally expect and accept America at war. The letter writer alluded to this culture in saying that “the military-industrial complex that President Eisenhower warned of in his final speech to the nation has become deeply embedded.” What the writer did not say is that Ike not only presided over that very complex but also authored the CIA, purportedly to stem the spread of communism but in reality to install dictators friendly to corporate America’s insatiable appetite. His Secretary of State, John Foster Dulles, more a hawk than a statesman, is quoted as having said that “In order to bring a nation to support the burdens of maintaining great military establishments, it is necessary to create an emotional state akin to war psychology. There must be the portrayal of external menace.” While making such a statement seems audacious and not unlike Joseph Goebbels’ sentiments, Dulles was merely speaking the truth of the corpocracy and its modus operandi: scare the American people with fear mongering, half truths and outright lies; evoke jingoistic patriotism (“my country right or wrong”); blather about building nations and spreading democracy; and slander peace seekers as weaklings soft on the enemy.

Neither Americans subjugated to its power nor the rest of world confronted,and sometimes devastated, by it has ever seen a more powerful force than America’s corpocracy, along with its myriad allies like the US Chamber of Commerce, the Business Roundtable, the numerous think tanks and litigation centers, the captive media, and a foreign enemy or two or three or more.

At the same time, the corpocracy’s opposition is pathetically weak and unorganized. There is nothing comparable to the massive demonstrations against the Vietnam War, and even if there were, they would be crushed (the Kent State killings would pale in comparison). There is no national leader of FDR’s stature or capability or viable third political party now or in the foreseeable future. The 150 or so non-governmental organizations (NGOs) opposed to the corpocracy that I researched are splintered, and I strongly doubt my ongoing petition drive aimed at uniting them will ever succeed (click here). Some of them seem to be already “corporatized,” and some, if not all the rest, are too territorial,

And more to the point here on opposition to war, the opposition is totally fractured. There are over 40 anti-war organizations in the U.S. and a smattering of them throughout the rest of the world. The oldest in the U.S. reportedly is the War Resistors League, founded in 1923. The largest in the U.S. reportedly is Peace Action, with over 100,000 members, a national network of 27 state affiliates, and over 100 chapters nationwide. Wars continue unfazed by these divided and conquered anti-war organizations. They need, says Lawrence S. Wittner, a professor of history and once a member of Peace Action’s Board, “a powerful national peace organization, with a mass membership.” Mr. Zeese’s letter hardly reflects such a powerful organization. Moreover, less than a month before he wrote about his new anti-war movement in Dissident Voice (July 6, 2011) Medea Benjamin and Charles Davis mentioned in the same outlet (June 15) yet another new anti-war movement, “A Call to Action – Oct. 6, 2011 and onward.” I do not see it mentioned in Mr. Zeese’s letter or listed among his letter’s endorsers. [It is mentioned in "The Revolution Will Not Be Deactualized," June 15. -- Eds]

If the corpocracy, let alone its warring arm, is to be ended before it ends America I am convinced it will take a unified network of NGOs, including anti-war NGOs, (let’s call the network the US Chamber of Democracy) carrying out a strategic plan of major political, legislative, judicial, and economic reforms that are backed up by a massive coalition of 20 or more segments of the populace most likely to abhor the corpocracy.

To appreciate the scope of what it would take to end the entire corpocracy I will close by listing without discussing what I think it would take just to end the warfare welfare component:

Waging War on War
Establish a Citizen’s Assembly for Peace.
Establish a Department of Peace Keeping and National Security
Establish a Peace Keeping and National Security Council.
Nationalize and reorient the defense industry.
Join the International Criminal Court.
Create a dual draft. (community vs military service).
End the propagandizing of the military and militarism.
Determine the lost opportunity costs of warfare welfare.
Impeach or prosecute officials who commit the U.S. to war on false pretenses or unconstitutionally.
Permanently ban and prosecute defense contractors who defraud the government.
Publish a detailed “name and shame” annual warfare welfare report.
Stop budget overruns in military spending.
Stop emergency and off-the-book defense budgeting and funding.
Include supplemental funding and nuclear weapon funding in the military budget.
Require open and competitive bidding on all contract bids.
Purge the GNP index of defense costs.
Prevent war profiteering.
Stop the manufacture and purchase of useless weapons.
Stop the sale anywhere abroad of arms from U.S. manufacturers.
Eliminate the privatization of the military.
Forbid military recruiting at public schools and colleges.
Eliminate college ROTC programs.

Lord Rothschild held court at another dinner, in Vienna. He didn’t issue sinister capitalist marching orders. His main concern was to debunk persistent uncharitable gossip about the family patriarch’s bets on Waterloo in 1815. Lots of spooks, too, behind every tree. Somewhere in their dusty archives is a photo of a military aircraft, the West’s first sighting ever. That’s me there, putting on an imbecilic grin of tourist innocence. That’s my crotch blocking your view of a crucial detail of the engine nacelle. Oops. I was just doing a favor for a pal. I did good turns for them all, American or not, they’re all alike. Lots of backscratching, poop for you and me. State secrets got traded like baseball cards. That’s what happens when discredited hegemons expire and decompose: everyone can smell the stink.

The stink can gag a maggot now again but it is not polite to say so. Everyone in power is resolutely breathing through their mouth. Nothing I care about comes up in public discourse, except as grotesque funhouse-mirror distortions. No party represents me. Nobody cares what I think in the cabals that run the world. It’s not just me. Unless you’re actively engaged in influence peddling, abuse of function, or looting, you don’t count.

Our state rots and blackens inside with some deep gangrene. Our disgust is now a crime against the state.  The only option is to euthanize this state, induce collapse. The Constitution’s gone. It’s not coming back. US institutions and protections bear no relation to the document that spawned them long ago.

The Congressional power of the purse is gone, washed away by trillions in government obligations unlawfully imposed by the bankers’ factotums at the Fed.  The war powers of Congress? Our Commander in Chief holds them in contempt. He sentences Libya to war in backroom deals at the Security Council, then breaches the authorizing authority, toppling rulers and propping them up, destroying vital public services, and dismembering the country.  The sole remaining power of the House is trading in influence, with leadership positions based on annual monetary goals for taking corporate graft.  The Senate now serves only to avert public consideration of questions forbidden by the state.  The Supreme Court is a cesspool of corruption and repressive caprice, with justices on the take debasing law to a tissue of absurdities.

If the Constitution is a dead letter, your Bill of Rights is a joke. The President has the power to kill citizens without charge or trial; to detain them arbitrarily for life; to torture them with impunity; to criminalize association, speech, and assembly; and to search persons or seize personal records and effects wholesale, on secret grounds. Torturer Brett Kavanagh preens in judicial robes, revoking the rule of law to hide his crimes. With corporate crime off limits, Federal law enforcement has degenerated into Israeli firms Narus and Verint conducting NKVD-style mass surveillance to blackmail and recruit informers.

Your vote gives this parasitic state a fishy sheen of popular consent but changes nothing. Aggression, repression and exaction proceed as privately agreed by agents of America’s proprietors. Two and only two parties coact to silence unauthorized expressions of the popular will. Electoral politics is pointless, sustained only by threats to vestigial state protections. Voters are driven down the party cattle chutes by attacks on their security in sickness or old age, or by fabricated threats to their livelihood or means – immigrants, socialists, unions, deficits, tax. Scripted competition for your futile vote chops up your rights and makes you fight the other faction for scraps.

But what’s the alternative? Reform proposals cluster at opposite poles of loony philosophy or scatter-shot technical adjustments. Corruption and repression outrun proposed reforms, but stronger responses are limited to wistful daydreams of resolute marches. A nation of dissidents gropes for overarching principles to focus its discontent.

A broader view shows that we are not alone in this. Our state is not the first state to go bad. States go off the rails all the time, and the world knows what to do. The international community has built and tested scaffolding to shore up rotten states and replace the ones that fail. The crucial principles needed to renew a state, painstakingly constructed by a line of thinkers from Rousseau to Kant and Mill and Rawls, have been codified and written into law. Our state bears duties. It is bound by obligations and commitments.

By international consensus, any sovereign state must meet world standards for governance. Our state is enmeshed in these standards abroad, and the international community continually confronts our government with its duties and derelictions. The US government defies the outside world with its armaments and wealth and populous heft. Advanced by weak and peaceful states, the standards are no threat. But if the US population took them up, these standards could demolish our criminal state. The American people would gain independent authority and institutional support for freedom, security, and peace.

Revolutions in the Moslem world coalesced around peoples’ demand for dignity, a term with objective legal meaning and accumulating case law under human rights compacts and the Convention Against Torture. Latin American democracy movements invoked self-determination, another fundamental principle of human rights treaty law. The words unfold to objective standards and concrete requirements. What Rousseau did for the French revolution, treaty law did for modern popular democracy movements: giving parallel government a clear source of legitimacy, uniting disparate groups with overarching principles, and mobilizing peoples in other oppressive states.

US government policy revolves around efforts to avoid the contagion of world standards. The state keeps Americans in the dark about its duties by a last-ditch campaign of suppression. Officials at home ward off legally binding instruments with glittering generalities stripped of content, such as liberty and freedom and justice. At the same time state officials fight to keep specific standards out of reach of the American people. Statist propaganda tars human rights law by association with foreign enemies such as demonized ‘dictators’ or ‘communist’ oppressors. Meticulously-nurtured folklore attacks the state’s obligations as an alien, despotic New World Order. Americans who apply universal standards for criminal aggression or willful killing “should have their head examined,” so our current President says. And what of Americans who cite evidence that our forces shot bin Laden when he had been rendered hors de combat by detention, at the President’s direction? What of Americans who question the legality of our classified assassination force? Let’s all examine their heads.

State indoctrination aims to keep us clinging to the toothless boilerplate of the Constitution. For all the good it does us in this sty of rancid institutions, we might as well be citing The Code of Hammurabi. Our Constitution, as interpreted by an out-of-control autocrat and nine sneering clowns, permits state terror and torture, enshrines corruption, and negates human rights.

So what’s our grievance, then, in fifty words or less? Our State is derelict in its duties. It has failed to meet its obligations and commitments. Our government doesn’t measure up. These are grounds for recourse to rebellion.

Duties, obligations and commitments: the world knows what that means. If Americans ever learn, the jig is up. The standards are written to be clear to everybody everywhere. They strip a failing state of its authority.

It’s not like waving signs in a tricorn hat. In this mode of discourse, claims of right must reference the authority by article and paragraph. Treaty law chapter and verse cuts the crap. Human rights bodies examine America’s state with a rigor never seen at home. Humanitarian law cuts through patriotic barbarity with X-Ray acuity. Just to know your rights is subversive. Citing state duties? That’s the next best thing to treason.

State secrets though they seem to be at home, the basic instruments are not hard to find:

- The UN Charter.  Supreme law of the land by Article VI of the US Constitution. The Charter defines peace. Invoked by citizens, the Charter would subject our war machine to independent legal authority.

- The Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR). Adopted by international consensus and binding on the US government as customary international law. The most-translated document on earth, the UDHR sets the standard of achievement for all states. It entitles Americans to know their rights through education. It specifies the duties of the state, including our right to the means of life. Invoked by citizens, it would loosen state controls that put our subsistence and our peace in the power of corporations.

- The Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (CCPR). Supreme law of the land. It provides objective standards for freedom from state repression. As binding treaty law it subjects our government to international review by independent experts. It defines democracy in terms that lay our corrupt elections bare. It expands our freedoms well beyond the Bill of Rights. Invoked by citizens, it requires compensation for government abuses.

- The Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (CESCR). The US is a signatory and must not act to defeat the object and purpose of the treaty. As binding treaty law it would hold government accountable for deficiencies in our living standards. The covenant defines self-determination to include environmental health; cultural integrity; and economic security including health, housing, livelihood, and education. Invoked by citizens, the covenant would hold our state to account for corporate predation such as mass illegal evictions, predatory denial of health care, adulteration and tainting of food, or usury and fraud in education.

- The Convention Against Torture (CAT).  Supreme Law of the Land. Enforces the right to dignity with criminal penalties for inhuman or degrading treatment. Invoked by citizens, the Convention grants universal-jurisdiction legal redress for US government brutality.

- The Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court. [16] In force, with jurisdiction over US officials subject to Security Council referral. The US was briefly a signatory, but withdrew its signature and has failed to ratify the treaty. Invoked by citizens, the Rome Statute challenges the impunity of US officials for unlawful brutality and war.

Everything everyone wants is there. There’s an article for every public good bad states withhold. Democracy, that’s CCPR Article 25. Environmental stewardship, that’s CESCR Article 12(2b). Labor rights, that’s CESCR Article 8. Food security, that’s CESCR Article 11(2). Privacy – not just freedom from search and seizure but broader protection from personal attacks by the state – that’s CCPR Article 17. Religious freedom, that’s CCPR Article 27. Are your gun rights fundamental? CCPR Article 5(2) protects them.

There is seldom any question what these documents mean. The basic compacts are defined by an evolving body of explicit agreements and case law. Humanitarian law – the UN Charter and Rome Statute – builds on the Geneva Conventions, the Nuremberg Principles, and the laws of war. The core human rights instruments – the UDHR, CCPR, and CESCR – are applied by UN agencies and regional or national tribunals. Other documents bind the standards into unifying precepts. The Declaration on the Right to Development applies human rights and humanitarian law to formally subordinate the state to its peoples. The doctrine of Responsibility to Protect makes a state’s sovereignty contingent on  human rights, humanitarian law, and inclusion. The Paris Principles specify the functions of a domestic human rights body.

But why wouldn’t these standards be ignored, as the Constitution is? The standards need teeth. To assert them takes push and pull: push by civil society from within states, and pull by principled blocs acting from outside. The documents are meant to work that way: they seem to summon all the foreign devils and possessing demons most feared by our state.

Civil society means Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs): voluntary nonprofit associations with a formal institutional existence, independent of public authorities and commercial entities, and not in pursuit of members’ commercial or professional interests. In some countries civil society includes the media, though not in the United States, where dominant media advance state doctrine (the New York Times and Washington Post,) partisan objectives (Fox News, for example,) or commercial interests of firms that own them (NBC and ABC, for example.) Civil society shames states. In an international order dictated by a domineering power, associations can accomplish things that subaltern governments cannot.

A civil-society coalition led 156 countries to ban landmine production and use. The coalition is applying the same approach to ban cluster munitions. The process that produced these treaties has become a promising approach for reforms that world powers might suppress. Private associations and like-minded governments are tackling small-arms proliferation both internationally and domestically – the Philippine Action Network on Small Arms is resisting the spread of gun culture there.

Each specialized disarmament campaign draws on the accumulated experience of the others. Campaigns amass evidence to shift the focus from gee-whiz military tricks to human suffering. In the seminal Montreux Meeting, the International Committee of the Red Cross brought military staff together with clearance experts, compelling recognition of the cost to noncombatants. Civil-society education and pressure is crucial, helping elective officials go over the generals’ heads with popular support. Civilian mutilées get a voice, personalizing facts that get suppressed in the ritual and argot of public military briefings. Campaigners can divert the state’s theater of threat from Why did they do it? to Where did they get that weapon? Weapons that are best at killing noncombatants come to light, and the focus subtly shifts from laundry lists of weapons to human security. The war machine feeds on enemies. These campaigns poison the war machine with victims.

The United Nations Association pushed for an international criminal court, assembled organizations worldwide when the idea gained momentum, and shaped the court’s  statute with technical assistance. The European Forum for Restorative Justice is nudging criminal justice practice from punishment toward redress and restitution. Restorative justice has legal recognition in at least sixteen European countries and pilot projects in another dozen. It has spread to the anglophone world and even gained a furtive toehold in the United States.  In France, civil society pressured parliament to convene the Quilès Commission to investigate the French government’s role in Rwandan genocide.

The World Social Forum is pure ferment, by design. It puts social justice activists and groups in contact worldwide. Like a funnel in reverse, the forums accentuate variety. Shoestring groups vie with established NGOs in a proliferating series of assemblies. It strengthens ties, that’s all – but ties may be the fundamental threat to statist domination.

One gauge of civil society’s importance is the US government’s hostility. At a UN Conference on Illicit Trade in Small Arms and Light Weapons, the United States’ UN ambassador listed measures unacceptable to the US government. Among the short and comprehensive list: no promotion of NGO advocacy – not even by NGOs. The US opposed civil-society advocacy not just within the United States but internationally. Our government will withhold cooperation on all agreed measures to silence voices it can’t control. That is a testament to the power of NGOs.  Domestic NGOs without international support are isolated and destroyed at home: bipartisan attacks on ACORN and Planned Parenthood fit a longstanding pattern of state conduct. The state tightened its grip on electoral politics by pushing the League of Women Voters aside for two-party debates with collusive rules.

NGOs are not our rulers’ only problem. The US government is increasingly beset by an axis that might be described as a rule-of-law bloc. Their name is Legion, you might say, for they are many. Americans are trained to see Iran as an outcast desperado among nations, terrorizing all decent people, dangerous, unreasoning, a cornered beast. So it’s jarring to come upon them presiding in elective honor over a bloc of nations comprising eighty per cent of all the people in the world.  The bloc is called the G-77. Unlike US diplomats, “trained as warriors” to “take a situation up to the brink of having to call in the military,” Iran’s representative, a former UN envoy, mediated and listened. In a cheeky rejoinder to our quasi-official “clash of civilizations” slogan, Iran initiated a year of Dialogue Among Civilizations.

The majority’s secretariat resides, invisibly and inaudibly, to Americans, in New York. The majority – the overwhelming preponderance of mankind – is setting divergent interests aside so they can act in concert. And it isn’t just little poor powerless states: our chief creditor China is part of this bloc. Most of OPEC belongs to this bloc. The G-77 actually numbers 133 countries. If we mean it when we talk about democracy worldwide, Iran was the legitimate leader of the world as our state tore up the UN Charter to wage illegal war in Iraq. Nothing shows our rulers up as liars more than this: if they brought about democracy as promised, this majority would have its way.

So what do they want? The vox populi of the world has been echoing for more than a decade, since Nigeria conveyed the Declaration of the South to the democratic sandbox of the General Assembly. Of it we Americans heard not a peep – perhaps because the document was drawn up in Havana, in Cuba, that fearsome dagger pointed at the heart of Sloppy Joe’s Bar in Key West, the maddening fly that still stampedes our ruling class after fifty years.

What do they want? Compliance with the UN Charter. Human rights for all…

Let’s stop right there and examine this from the viewpoint of America, a state that routinely contravenes the UN Charter, most recently with the highest crime, illegal aggression in Iraq and Libya. Let’s consider such state duties from the viewpoint of a state like America that denies its citizens’ core civil and political rights with obstructive reservations in breach of treaty law, and with emergency powers exercised in breach of treaty law and the supreme law of the land. Let us look at obligations from the viewpoint of our state, which refuses to acknowledge economic, social, and cultural rights binding in customary international law. Clearly, the G-77′s demands for rule of law must be put aside as an unacceptable infringement on US state sovereignty. To put the people first is beyond the pale for our state.

The G-77 pledges transparent, effective and accountable governance. They seek democratic decision-making within and among states. This is an overt threat to a state like ours, in which two approved parties carry out policies opposed by overwhelming popular majorities and coercively suppress electoral participation by unauthorized groups. In a country like America, with its institutionalized trading in influence and abuse of function, transparency is foreign subversion.

In its Teheran Consensus the G-77 pledges tighter ties among the global south, ties that are to bind at all levels of society: not just among ruling elites in ferociously-guarded secrecy, as in America’s sphere, but among civil society institutions and associations of all sorts – even including the people at large.

With the public will effectively negated by meticulous state control of the electoral process, civil society is a destabilizing threat to our state. America prefers to channel all public participation through state-controlled parties. Our state is not comfortable when foreign countries encourage too much freedom of association, or presume to give it voice. A UN debate on civil society shows our state’s approach to free association. The US delegation proposed to restrict NGO participation to the Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC). ECOSOC has no role in the US because the US government refuses to ratify the core economic and social rights covenant. Our delegate also played the traditional American trick of attacking NGO outreach funding while reiterating US support.

Perhaps it’s hard for our government to sympathize with the G-77. Some of their concerns are poor man’s problems. The G-77 stands for eradication of hunger, illiteracy, disease, and poverty. No one of consequence suffers from those things here at home. The bloc stands for national self-determination against exploitative resource extraction. But if some of their concerns sound like special third-world pleading, others hit uncomfortably close to home. With brutal candor, the G-77 majority shreds American self-deception about shared indignities.

The world majority speaks candidly of disparities between rich and poor, and pledges to reverse them. Here at home inequality is handled by a committee of bankers, the Fed. The committee of bankers forces down interest rates, punishing powerless savers to prop up bankrupt banks. It pays public money for worthless bank assets, and permits falsified accounting to lure more of people’s savings into bankrupt banks. Bankers take the various subsidies home in annual bonuses that would be a lifetime endowment for any of this country’s poor. We call them unemployed, not poor. Ejected from housing, or poised in stores at midnight waiting for their food allowance to be disbursed, or letting their diseases go untreated, they are no less desperate than their African peers. African governments in the G-77 hold themselves to the standard of their peoples’ well-being. In America we are induced to fixate on an abstraction we call the economy, which is defined to exclude all the arrangements that take from the masses to gorge a tiny ruling class.

Perhaps it takes a wholly different civilization to make the obvious point that corporate profit maximization has nothing to do with decent jobs or human well-being. The G-77 outsiders watched a tiny minority rig the rules to free capital for unrestricted global movement while penning most labor into national markets. They are not surprised to see capital pit fragmented labor pools against each other to drive down wages and standards. However much your country has developed, this trap works equally well, and it’s as evident here as abroad. But it takes a fantasy culture like America to attribute the result of this purposive predation to lack of skills or discipline.

For a derelict state, our rulers have exceptional faith in merit. Someday, when time has obscured America’s pervasive misery, we might see the humor in our fawning idolatry of a fatuous Magoo who refracted every datum through the portentous doorstop novels of Ayn Rand. Or the slapstick devastation of Alan Greenspan falling for a giant Ponzi scheme, our objectivist superman gypped by hackneyed D.P. tricks from the old country, and in housing, of all things, that most petit-bourgeois of assets. We have come to accept people with all sorts of ridiculous occupations who manage to identify with that fictional titan of industry, John Galt – but Alan Greenspan might be the most bathetic case of all. For now, though, amid the widespread ruin of blameless lives, it is best to be grave.

The G-77 knows all about debt. It probably takes someone with the gimlet eye of the destitute to see the two faces of debt for what they are. For the victims, debt palliates a mendicant life and persists as a means of control. For the victimizers, debt, retooled as ‘leverage,’ upends economies and makes hostages of populations. It works the same way here and abroad, but only less-developed peoples see it clearly. We have our peons just as they do. We call them homeowners. They are all part of the same meek and compliant working class. The world’s majority likely casts an empathetic eye on our bustling “entrepreneurs” and “professional staff” chained to their treadmill of debt. For most, their subsistence depends strictly on fealty and obedience to their employers. A few of them will be anointed as intelligentsia, in Lenin’s contemptuous term, taught to revere the new ways imposed, and allowed to vaunt distinction and taste privilege, if they keep in line.

We Americans are the naive ones. Elsewhere in the world, they’ve seen it all before. Through bitter experience, the world’s majority is not surprised to see emergency relief aid turn into armed repression, summary execution, and detention camps. They would not be shocked to see the murderous militarized helping hand put out to Hurricane Katrina’s victims. As services and infrastructure suffer more neglect, more Americans will get to know the third-world treatment.

The G-77 majority wants more democracy in economic decision-making. The world at large sees the UN’s economic agencies pushed aside for weighted voting in the Bretton Woods Institutions. They see firms consolidating assets and power, and dominating institutions as well as markets. For the underdeveloped eighty per cent here at home, the analog is more assured and blatant. Financial institutions install cadres in the White House and bankroll agents in Congress. Administrations of both parties host closed-door industry conferences to dictate industrial policy. The vote is weighted by money at home and abroad. The franchise is increasingly restricted to the owners, of the country and of the world. However rich you think you are, you don’t own enough to have a vote: you’re not a corporate person but a human.

America’s majority is much like the world’s. For the placemen, the retainers of the dominant firms, the populace is part of les damnés de la terre, an object of pity, or scorn. At most they are a threat, if they articulate their interests, in which case they’re brutally put down. Here at home the masses cling to a derisory dream of advancement and parrot mottoes of merit and hard work. They strive against others of their caste, and most importantly, comply. Abroad, with no delusory hope of redress, the masses act in concert. Here and abroad, helpless or united, they are the same degraded class, the wretched of the earth.

The Biblical Legion of devils was actually Gadarene resistance to Roman rule. Walpurgisnacht is May Day’s eve. The peoples are the most feared of all demons. There is good reason why the wretched are les damnés de la terre – they’re a threat. It is dangerous to invoke demons. That is what treaty law does at home and abroad, with human rights and rule of law. And sometimes America’s possessing demons, the ACLU, mass in legions with foreign devils – even with Europe, once safely bottled up – to expose the crimes of our state to the public at large worldwide.  The state wants the masses dispersed and unseen but now we’ve all been evoked. We’ll see if they can cast us out again with their patriotic spells.

It is clear that the Haitian people desperately need decisive action to be taken towards rebuilding the country. However, Martelly is an ardent proponent of neoliberalism and a supporter of the 2004 coup against former president Aristide, and remains a staunch opponent of Lavalas- the only political party in Haiti to attempt to improve the lives of the poor. Worryingly, he also has ties to the Duvalierist order and plans to reinstate the Haitian Army. His victory represents simply a continuation of the existing iniquitous order, with statements that Haiti is “open for business now” strongly suggesting that plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.

In order for the significance of these contemporary events to be fully understood though, they must be situated within Haiti’s history of subordination and exploitation and the context of global power relations, along with the influence that the international community has long had in Haiti’s domestic affairs. The problems which prevent real change in Haiti are arguably systemic, rooted in Haiti’s history of exploitation and exclusion, and corresponding lack of power within the world-system.

The Haitian people were given very little say in terms of the election itself. The international community pressured the Preval government to drop specific candidates from the race, in favour of positioning Mirlande Manigat and Michel Martelly in line for the runoff. This disjuncture between the Haitian people and the State is not new — few governments in Haitian history have obtained their position without the acquiescence of the US government. Such approval has always come with the requirement that Haiti’s government adopt specific policies in keeping with prevailing global economic orthodoxy. As a result, control over the State has generally remained strictly within the hands of the US (and the domestic elite) at the expense of the poor majority.

The neoliberal State building framework represents the contemporary manifestation of the historic inequalities of power between different States. First introduced to Haiti in the 1970s, it is based on the assertion that free-market reforms (a deceptive term given the need for heavy government interference to enforce such destabilising policy) and structural adjustment will generate economic growth, the benefits of which will eventually ‘trickle down’ to those below.

However, the majority of Haitians have experienced structural adjustment as spiralling social inequality and the further impoverishment. According primacy to the ‘free-market’ allows human life to be subjugated to the vagaries of the market and international capital. Statistics from a 2009 International Monetary Fund Report show that 76% of Haitians live on less than $2 a day- an increase from previous years. The drastic reduction of trade tariffs on rice during Clinton’s government left farmers unable to compete with heavily subsidised US products and set the country on a path towards import (and aid) dependence. This precipitated high rural-urban migration to seek work in export processing zones. Prior to the January 2010 earthquake unemployment stood at around 70% while wages fell in real terms below 20% of 1981 levels, while prices of basic commodities rose, culminating in riots in 2008. At the State level neoliberalism has continued to reproduce asymmetries in economic power between Haiti and the dominant States.

Despite the human cost of neoliberalism, and the very specific conception of ‘progress’ it is based upon, it remains hegemonic and continues to be promoted by the international community in the post-earthquake period. The Draft Private Sector Plan indicates that Haiti’s reconstruction will follow the same principles as previous international interventions in its economy. Haitian control over the reconstruction process is minimal: the Interim Haiti Reconstruction Commission (IHRC) accords fifty percent of the vote to Haitian members and the other fifty to international donors, naturally including the US, France, Canada, the IMF, the World Bank, and the Inter-American Development Bank, but the Haitian members of the ICRC have complained of their excluded from the decision-making process, and the expectation that they approve decisions that have already been made.

The privatisation of relief and reconstruction efforts in the wake of the January 2010 earthquake can also be viewed as a continuation and expansion of neoliberal policy towards Haiti. Statistics indicate the existence of a burgeoning disaster economy where $98.40 of every $100 awarded in reconstruction contracts by the US government is consequently recycled back to the US from the local economy through the salaries of international aid workers/contractors. Reports show that jobs are often outsourced to foreign workers despite unemployment rates of 85%.

The overwhelming number of NGOs in Haiti (approximately 12,000) combined with how they operate continues to undermine the Haitian government. This is despite an ECOSOC Report emphasising “the need to shift from an NGO-driven model of development to a State-driven model” in order for there to be a level of transparency and accountability. The absence of adequate regulation erodes government capacity by permitting funds to be channelled to a multitude of different projects without any coordination between NGOs themselves or through consultation with the relevant government ministries.

NGOs share the objectives and ideology of their donors and are by no means apolitical. Their proliferation in Haiti can be traced to the ‘rolling back’ of the State in the 1970s where they effectively lent legitimacy to the neoliberal reforms through replacing the State as service providers. Certain NGOs also played a key role in destabilising the Aristide government when his cautious efforts to implement agrarian and educational reforms came up against the domestic and international elite with a vested interest in the enforcement of neoliberal reform. As the head of USAid recently stated, aid forms part of a strategy to achieve the economic goals of donor governments.

The feasibility of a State-driven model has been questioned due to Haiti’s weak institutions and heavily damaged infrastructure. Of course, according greater responsibility to the State would still entail extensive international support: Haiti desperately needs aid and reconstruction assistance. However, such resources ought to be used in such a way as to support rather than undermine the State, as is happening at present. The international community could use the reconstruction efforts to improve state capacity and public services. Perhaps a first step would be to reapportion power within the IHRC, enabling the Haitian board members to have more than a token role with regard to reconstruction. NGOs could be subject to proper regulation and coordination by government ministries, and in harnessing the resources and expertise they bring, have a more sustainable and coherent impact. Haiti’s numerous civil society organisations, largely excluded so far by the international community, also represent a significant untapped resource and could be used to fill in the gaps or complement the State where it lacks capacity. Such groups already have much experience of collective organisation and service provision and provide an existing infrastructure for resource allocation.

A State-driven model has much to offer in theory, but of course it must be asked: what type of State is envisioned here, and whose interests would it reflect? At present reconstruction nonetheless remains subject to the approval of the usual powerful actors and thus trapped within the parameters of dominant development ideology. Even assuming that Haiti had a government that was willing to act in the interests of the majority of its people, it is hard then to imagine how it could be expected to bring about significant change because of the inherent difficulty in transforming Haiti’s peripheral position and relative powerlessness vis-a-vis other States and international institutions within the global capitalist system. This problem is self-perpetuating: only candidates who will toe the neoliberal line are permitted to stand for election, whilst those that represent real change are prevented from participating. This further marginalises those individuals and groups who have the potential to transform Haiti if given the opportunity, and supported — rather than undermined — by the international community.

Haiti’s lack of economic power, rooted in colonialism and dictatorial rule, has never been adequately addressed and this power imbalance continues to be replicated today through the international community’s insistence on the neoliberal model. Debates surrounding Haiti must move towards a deeper critique that connects crises at the State level with dominant economic and development frameworks, and examine existing power structures that prevent real change. In the meantime the ongoing impoverishment and suffering of the majority of Haitian people remains a stark warning of the failures of the neoliberal State building project.

Detroit is a city of high unemployment rates, empty neighborhoods, houses with boards over the windows and closed factories. It was once the crown jewel of the rust belt, home of the automobile engineering giants General Motors, Ford, and Chrysler – a booming industry that put countless citizens to work in the four thousand factories that dotted the area. But as the world modernized through the march of globalization, the global manufacturing economy became driven by cheap labor, resulting in the gradual close of a great many factories. Thousands were left unemployed and impoverished. Soon, the hundreds of closed schools gave way tens of thousands of empty homes, rampant crime, and a population that is 47% functionally illiterate – an urban wasteland crumbling away in degradation.

In the summer of 2010, something happened. From across the nation, droves of activists, speakers, and interested people descended upon the city to attend the US Social Forum (USSF), the American branch of the global World Social Forum. A “movement building process,” the USSF aims to bring people together for workshops, courses in grassroots fundraising, cultural exhibits, and assemblies to “provide space” in which to “strategize how to reclaim our world.” Anti-corporate activists, environmentalists, socialists and a vast array of leftists of every stripe met together, discussing how to build an alternative to the prevailing norm of globalized capitalism – “tear down poverty” to “build an alternative, solidarity economy.” The topics discussed ranged from the problems of modern day globalization to community outreach to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict in the Middle East.

Sitting on the USSF’s National Planning Committee, the administrative branch of the Social Forum, are two ardently pro-Palestinian organizations – the International Jewish Anti-Zionist Network and the US Palestinian Community Network. However, a strange anomaly can be found here; at the top of the National Planning Committee list sits the American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO), the largest trade union federation in the United States. While the Social Forum tosses around the idea of a Boycott, Divest and Sanction (BDS) movement aimed at Israel, hoping to pressure the country by targeting the nation’s exports, the AFL-CIO’s current president, Richard Trumka, has made clear his stance on the issue. Speaking at the 2009 Jewish Labor Committee awards dinner, Trumka said:

Given the traditions, the heritage, the commitment – and given the values – Jewish workers have always brought to the labor movement, I don’t think it ought to come as any surprise that the Jewish community here – and around the world – has never had a stronger ally than the AFL-CIO! And, tonight, let me tell you that, so long as I’m president, you will never have a stronger ally than the AFL-CIO! That’s why we’re proud to stand with the JLC to oppose boycotting Israel! Brothers and sisters, there is only one way we’re going to stop the violence in the Middle East – and it’s not by bashing Israel – it’s by supporting President Obama’s peace initiative!¹

The AFL-CIO has a long history of doing things that would seem contrary to the ideals of the US Social Forum. Under the hawkish presidency of George Meany the federation supported the Vietnam War on the grounds of anti-communism. Earlier still, the AFL-CIO’s international arm, the American Federation for Free Labor Development, provided training and funding to opponents of the democratically elected president of Brazil, Juan Bosch, who in two years would be ousted from power.² More recently, in the wake of Chavez’s tightening control of Venezuelan oil fields, the AFL-CIO worked with the State Department’s National Endowment for Democracy (NED) in organizing a massive general strike, alongside CTV, the country’s large labor union. The plans for the strike were drawn up in a closed-door forum, where CTV representatives met with the NED and AFL-CIO to “discuss the chances for a coup in Venezuela.”³

Throughout 1980s and 1990s, the top movers and shakers of the AFL-CIO were intimately intertwined with the leadership of the Social Democrats USA. By the time the labor union became affiliated with the Social Democrats, the large left-leaning organization had traded their commitment to building a participatory democracy for strangely neoconservative ideals, ranging from calling for aid to the Contra rebels in Nicaragua, to saber-rattling for regime change in Iraq, to unconditionally supporting Israel. The AFL-CIO, however, isn’t the only organization on the US Social Forum’s National Planning Committee to show support for American hegemony; listed after the AFL-CIO on the committee is Amnesty International, the global human rights advocacy organization. As Professor Francis A. Boyle, a former board member of the organization puts it:

Amnesty International is primarily motivated not by human rights but by publicity. Second comes money. Third comes getting more members. Fourth, internal turf battles. And then finally, human rights, genuine human rights concerns. To be sure, if you are dealing with a human rights situation in a country that is at odds with the United States or Britain, it gets an awful lot of attention, resources, man and womanpower, publicity, you name it, they can throw whatever they want at that. But if it’s dealing with violations of human rights by the United States, Britain, Israel, then it’s like pulling teeth to get them to really do something on the situation. They might, very reluctantly and after an enormous amount of internal fightings and battles and pressures, you name it. But you know, it’s not like the official enemies list.⁴

Funding a “smarter globalization”

One of the larger workshops held at the 2010 USSF was the “Historic Moment for Funding Social Justice Organizing in the 21st Century.” Attended by “community organizers, researchers, and a large number of foundation staff and board members,” the four-hour seminar primarily discussed “funding and how it impacts social justice work in a variety of formats, including small organizations.”⁵ It was held by several large grassroots organization, along with the Funders Network on Transforming the Global Economy (FNTG), “an alliance of grantmakers committed to building just and sustainable communities around the world.”

The FNTG would certainly seem at odds with the purported ideals of the Social Forum, despite their rhetoric about sustainable communities. Their mission statement never overtly condemns the globalization movement, but focuses instead on how new and different approaches can be taken to make international, integrated capitalism more acceptable to its leftist critics. “A vital issue to consider is that many civil society organizations perceived to be “anti-globalization” and “anti-trade” are neither,” the FNTG states, before commenting that “we must deepen our understanding of these issues” to help “shape a globalization” that reflects the ethics and values of the malcontents.

In short, they advocate an economic globalization based in international trade and the capitalist business model that wears the aesthetics of social consciousness. One needs to look no further than several listed members of the FNTG to understand the motivations of the group. There is the Ford Foundation, whose goal is “making the world safe for capitalism, reducing social tensions by helping to comfort the afflicted, provide safety valves for the angry, and improve the functioning of government.”⁶ Then there is the Open Society Institute, the philanthropy vehicle of George Soros that helped organize disconnected youths into grassroots coalitions that installed pro-Western, capitalist regimes in Georgia and Ukraine. FNTG’s next partner, the Rockefeller Foundation, seeks to make international capitalism’s bitter medicine a bit sweeter with the softer, gentler “smart globalization.” It does this by not only giving money to activist groups, but also working to further the goals of globalized economic integration; the foundation provides funding for the Council on Foreign Relations, a pro-globalization think-tank that attracts politicians, businessmen, and media figures from around the globe.

These same criticisms can be applied to the US Social Forum’s international counterpart, the World Social Forum [WSF], which is entirely dependent on grants from the Ford Foundation for the continued existence of the program. One could argue that just because the forum receives money from active, capitalist-oriented grant-making foundations, it doesn’t mean that the stated intentions of building an “alternative globalization” are compromised. Unfortunately, this line of wistful thinking is far from the truth:

Remarkably, an International Council member of the WSF [World Social Forum] reports that the “considerable funds” received from these agencies have “not hitherto awakened any significant debates [in the WSF bodies] on the possible relations of dependence it could generate.” Yet he admits that “in order to get funding from the Ford Foundation, the organizers had to convince the foundation that the [Brazilian] Workers Party was not involved in the process.”⁷

The WSF’s charter states that the forum rejects any “reductionist views of economy, development and history.” By disavowing this approach, Marx’s entire critique of capitalism, conducted by examining the individual functions of the system’s parts, is rejected from the processes of the forum. This, in turn, leaves a space to debate not a post-capitalist world, but simply how to build upon the existing capitalist structure to better suit the demands of its dissidents. This seems to be strikingly in line with the intentions of the WSF’s initiators, the French NGO ATTAC – Taxation of Financial Transactions for the Aid of Citizens. With the slogan “the world is not for sale,” ATTAC’s position is not one anti-globalization per se, but simply the ‘smarter globalization’ of the Ford and Rockefeller Foundations. ATTAC sees the key to this goal being the use of the Tobin Tax – an international “general tax for financial transactions.” Other organizations or individuals who have shown interest in the Tobin Tax (named for the economist James Tobin, a former board of governors member for the Federal Reserve Bank) include the Ford Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, the AFL-CIO, George Soros, and Joseph Stigltz – the latter of which spoke at the 2004 World Social Forum in Mumbia, India. While the Tobin Tax will certainly give the appearance of a pro-active government willing to tackle big business, it leaves the central most components of both globalization and capitalism unchanged. The top corporations of the Fortune 500 will still rule over the markets – an added tax charge of a mere 0.5% on transactions⁸ will do nothing to alter the business models of the giants because they have the financial capabilities to cope with such a proposal.

Furthermore, in Tobin’s own words, this tax plan is not built to be contrary to globalized capitalism in the slightest. “I am an economist, and like most economists, I support free trade,” Tobin said in Der Spiegel interview in 2001. “I am in favor of the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, and the World Trade Organization.” After stating that the “IMF has to be strengthened and broadened,” Tobin argues that the consortium of international financial organizations ought to have the power to prevent countries from engaging in protectionist trade policies: “the WTO ought to be able to prohibit the industrialised countries from blocking the imports of developing countries by putting up obstacles to trade.”⁸ For Tobin, the strengthening of these organizations is a must, for they are the organizations that would administer his plan, thus helping to maintain the status quo of the financial power in the world.

Co-opting Dissent and Ignoring the Problem

It is certainly a worrying overlap of organizations. Through the AFL-CIO and the assorted array of grant-making foundations, the anti-globalization left is fraternizing dangerously close with the same economic and political imperialists that they claim to be fighting. With the Ford Foundation’s desire to “provide a safety valve for the angry,” the Rockefeller’s calls for a “smarter globalization” and the World Social Forum’s banning of certain groups and viewpoints, this can be seen as nothing more than a corporate co-opting of the left. This tactic is nothing new. In 1966, Professor Carroll Quigley wrote about this same topic in his seminal opus, Tragedy and Hope: A History of the World in Our Time:

More than fifty years ago the Morgan firm decided to infiltrate the Left-wing political movements in the United States. This was relatively easy to do, since these groups were starved for funds and eager for a voice to reach the people. Wall Street supplied both. The purpose was not to destroy, dominate, or take over but was really threefold: (1) to keep informed about the thinking of Left-wing or liberal groups; (2) to provide them with a mouthpiece so that they could ‘blow off steam,’ and (3) to have a final veto on their publicity and possibly on their actions, if they ever went ‘radical.’ There was nothing really new about this decision, since other financiers had talked about it and even attempted it earlier. What made it decisively important this time was the combination of its adoption by the dominant Wall Street financier, at a time when tax policy was driving all financiers to seek tax-exempt refuges for their fortunes, and at a time when the ultimate in Left-wing radicalism was about to appear under the banner of the Third International.⁹

The tactic of cooption was utilized again during the Great Depression by President Franklin Roosevelt. With labor movements on the rise, and a sharp increase in the memberships of the socialist and communist parties, Roosevelt responded to this threat to the American system by “incorporating in his own rhetoric [into] many of their demands” and absorbing “leaders of these groups into his following.”¹⁰ After cutting off the heads of the leftist coalitions, and presenting the population with the sanitized corporate welfare package known as the New Deal, “Franklin Roosevelt succeeded in undercutting the growth of left-wing political movements” that made revolution appear imminent.

The “safety valve” aspects of this theory explains the repeated notions of “space” – the US Social Forum, the World Social Forum, and the FNTG all aspire to provide “space” for these ideas to foster and flourish. “Space” seems to have its roots in the concept of the Temporary Autonomous Zone (TAZ), first proposed by anarchist writer Hakim Bay. The TAZ would be a temporary space, free from the imposing constraints of the hierarchies of capitalist system– a momentary utopia where the individual can disassociate himself from the harsher realities of the global order. The problem with the TAZ concept is that the zone itself is illusionary; capitalism, exploitation and imperialism still persist outside its borders.

Furthermore, the illusion itself is integrated into the prevailing capitalist framework. The functionality of a commune in the modern world will still depend on goods manufactured in the capitalist production model, and if it’s an inner city commune, odds are that the water and electrical that its inhabitants use is provided by privatized companies. The chances are that a great deal of the attendees of the US Social Forum drove many miles to voice their disenchantment with globalization in cars made on foreign production lines by underpaid and exploited workers, their tanks filled with petroleum brought to them by imperialist wars and environmental plundering. The accountants of the World Social Forum are forced to become capitalist workers themselves, hunched over ledgers, busy balancing receipts for money bestowed upon them by their international capitalist grant-making institutions. Even as I sit here writing this my laptop is a result of capitalist production in some far off country, brought to me by nothing more than globalization.

It is almost impossible to break away from the global order to forge a new tomorrow and build a sustainable world that is better for its inhabitants. But what a great number of the left need to do is to begin to see beyond this illusionary world, to see that their temporary space is granted unto them by the ones that they are fighting, a safety valve to make sure that their efforts never go beyond mere rhetoric and the occasional instance of community empowerment. “Smarter globalization” is not the answer, for it still leaves workers exploited and nations ripped open, stripped of their assets and resources. The left has a great many numbers. They need to make their own means.

1. “Richard Trumka’s Remarks at October 2009 JLC Dinner,” Jewish Labor Committee.
2. Harry Kebler, “The AFL-CIO’s Dark Past Part 4: U.S. Labor Reps. Conspired to Overthrow Elected Governments in Latin America,” The Labor Educator, November 29, 2004.
3. Katherine Hoyt, “Concerns Over Possible AFL-CIO Involvement in Venezuela Coup Led to February Picket,” Labor Notes, May 1, 2002.
4. Dennis Bernstein, “Interview with Professor Francis A. Boyle” Covert Action Quarterly, No. 72, Summer 2002, pg. 9-12.
5. Walter Davis, “2010 US Social Forum Reflections,” National Organizers Alliance, 2011.
6. Ford Foundation president McGeorge Bundy (1966-1979), quoted in Michel Chossudovsky “‘Manufacturing Dissent’: the Anti-globalization Movement is Funded by the Corporate Elites” Centre for Research on Globalization, September 20, 2010.
7. “The Economics and Politics of the World Social Forum: Lessons for the Struggle against ‘Globalisation’,” Centre for Research on Globalization, September 5, 2010.
8. “James Tobin: ‘The antiglobalization movement has hijacked my name,” Der Spiegel, September 3, 2001.
9. Carroll Quigley, Tragedy and Hope: A History of the World in Our Time, Gsg & Assoc., 1966, pg. 938.
10. Seymour Martin Lipset and Gary Marks, “How FDR Saved Capitalism,” Hoover Digest, January 30, 2001.