Seventy-seven-years-old, Jimbo had a vending business selling pretzels, among other stuff, and worked at a factory making vent windows for Ford trucks. Like me, he has also washed windows, making a few bucks per job. In winter, water would sometimes freeze nearly as soon as it’s splashed on the pane, but thanks to global warming, this is becoming less of a problem.

A Chicago bus stop billboard: “I’m all for global warming if it will keep the city from being so damn cold.” Across the street is the Greenway Self Park garage, with a green VW bug emitting green leaves instead of ozone-killing exhaust on its very cool, I guess, sign.

Born and raised in Kensington, Jimbo still lives there. He gets $780 a month in Social Security, but his rent eats up $760. So much for piece-of-shit Kensington?! What in the fuckin’ UN is this world coming to? If I want to be chased around by goons toting submachine guns, then body slammed onto the ground, I’ll go to Chicago during the NATO summit.

With only 20 bucks a month to diddle with, Jimbo must beg, though he can also move to a cheaper neighborhood, such as the exburbs of Kabul or Baghdad, for example, but since he’s already well into his post-Cialis years, I don’t think Blackwater would hire him.

“Jimbo,” I said, “I keep hearing that black women are the most generous at giving money on the streets. Is that true?”

“Absolutely!”

“Why do you think that is?”

“I don’t know, but I think it’s because they’re more used to taking care of people.”

“Hummm. What about guys in suits? Do they give you money?”

“Those guys are the worst! Most of them won’t come near me because they think I might give them a disease or something.”

“That’s interesting.”

“The regular people, the working class people, are the ones who give me money. Black people give me money.”

“All black people, or just black women?”

“All black people, but, like you said, black women are the best. When I grew up in Kensington, I was told that black are this and that, that they’re no good, but now that I have to beg, I can tell you that black people treat me very nice.”

For over a century, Kensington had dozens of factories cranking out machine parts, carpets, textiles and glass. Now, it is an unholy mess, like all former industrial enclaves across America. Jimbo, “Many of my neighbors in Kensington get a government check at the beginning of each month, then a week later, they’re broke. You should go up there and see how it is.”

“I’ve been up there, many times.”

“You’ll see how how bad it is, the drug dealing.”

“And the prostitution.”

“Yes, that too. When people are broke, they’ll do anything. There used to be so many factories up there, but they’re all gone.”

In Kensington, a flyer is taped to a pillar of the elevated train, “HEALTH ALERT!!! THERE IS A prostitute By the name of SHERI Pitts that is HIV Positive. If you know her whereabouts please contact the Health Department. Description: 5’4” 95 lbs Blk Female. Tatoo on left Arm “Chocolate Sheri.” Tattoo on Right (Butt) Cheek “Sexy.” #173-60-6501. She NEEDS to be Stopped. She is spreading this Desease!!!”

The next time you’re in Kensington to help out the local economy, shine a flash light on her left cheek, and if you can make out “Sexy” in tribal, shaman, precious, voodoo or gothic script, just calmly smile and say, “I’m sorry, Chocolate, but it doesn’t look like our loving union can be gracefully consummated this night, or the next, or ever, though as a member of NATO, that master alliance of pale and well-armed people, I will try and try again. Oh, fuck it, let’s just fuck! Since it was me who made you sick in the first place! We’re destined for this death embrace, you maroon terrorist seductress!”

I’m sorry to use intercourse as an analogy for aggression, but I was railroaded into it by English itself, for what other language is so promiscuous with such couplings, as in I will fuck you up, fuck you over or fuck with you? In English, to fuck is to hate, if not kill, as in fuck Libya, Syria and Iran, or, if you prefer, fuck Israel, Wall Street, the CIA and the Pentagon!

In Chicago, white masters are plotting on how to fuck with us all, including the lower whites. As expected, they’ve framed a few white youths and locked them up on bogus charge of terrorism. This is to condition the public to see poor whites, especially those with tattoos, nose rings or dread locks, as also the enemy. Like brown foreigners and native blacks, young disaffected whites will be branded as indiscriminate mass murderers who just want to blow things up because they hate “our way of life.” Thanks to the FBI, they have been prevented from collapsing a bridge in Cleveland and torching Obama’s Chicago campaign headquarters, but they might go after your local strip mall or International House of Pancakes next. If not dealt with most severely, they’ll splatter corn-syrup all over your transfat-padded faces! Instead of getting a job giving blow jobs, for example, these confused whiners would rather enlist in Occupy, which, the gobblement will soon tell you, is actually an offshoot of Al Qaeda supported by Iran and a trust fund left behind by Bin Laden.

Meanwhile, Jimbo begs because he can’t pay his bills otherwise. He also admits that he likes to sit in a cheapo restaurant every now and then to enjoy a $7 hoagie or cheesesteak, some fried chicken or a plate of pork lo mein, “So I can live like a real white man!”

Sometimes, a movie “review” is a catharsis, or just both barrels aimed at the aimless prognostication of filmmakers co-opted by the growth paradigm and enamored by the so-called “creative class.”

I’ll tackle both hernia-inducing topics in several more stories to come, but first some observations while going to and leaving the film, Urbanized.

Irony: Going to see the film Urbanized, at the Northwest Film Forum in Seattle and witnessing in just a few miles of driving from Beacon Hill during the Snow-ageddon of 2012  tow trucks lifting hybrid autos onto flatbeds; Seattle PD patrol vehicles slipping and sliding; a few ice falls by pedestrians; the dull roar of Interstate 5 muted significantly because Seattle shuts down after three-quarters of an inch of snow.

Reality: City life, with pho venders literally raking the sidewalks with garden tools, kids using sled discs to get airtime on unplowed streets normally clogged with Amazon.com employees, and lots of people out and about taking snapshots of their snow-covered automobiles (only three inches of the white stuff!) in this rare winter wonderland.

Observation: Cool, hip Capitol Hill, with all the trendy coats, boots and Dr. Zeuss hats on a growing legion of lifestylism experts who yak it up about their love of Obama, how that civet defecated coffee is “so decadent” at $600 a pound, and how Thomas Friedman is really a smart guy. The only thing missing this night at the movies? The lower half of the 99 percent huddling in drafty apartments trying to keep down the obscene Puget Sound Electric bills; the homeless guys with pretty pun-filled “will wash your SUV for a fee” cardboard signs pissing off metro-sexual guys on their way to pedicures; the feral cats and dogs looking for out-of-date sushi dumped out back. Even the rats were smart enough to hunker down.

As a journalist who’s seen Tucson, Phoenix, El Paso, New Mexico and much of Southern California turn into  metastasized suburban sprawl nightmares;  someone who’s tried to crack the code of  less than creative bureaucratic, careerist city planners and engineers as a beat reporter; and a planning practitioner who ended up with a graduate degree in urban and regional planning emphasizing sustainability –  going to an 80-minute film about our urban world ( more than 50 percent of global population is living in cities as of 2011) is going to be wrought with skepticism.

The 2011 Gary Hustwit film, titled Urbanized,  has a few strengths and many gaps, not so much attributed to which cities were featured and not highlighted, but hobbled by how the filmmaker sheds light on the urban reality of city planners, architects, the Mayor Bloombergs or Dalys of the world, and all those developers and their sycophants in the Chamber of Commerce who are beholding to Wall Street and “the” banks.

That collective build-pave-raze elan is under-girdered in an undying faith in unsustainable growth (economic and population) paradigms in Hustwit’s  documentary. The confidence in the minds and motives of the vaunted few making decisions for several billion citizens’ well beings (or our increasingly impoverished lives) not just pertaining to the here and now or the immediate future, but seven generations out, is grotesque.

The film could have been oh so much more at this bizarre time of the vanguard still blathering on about incrementalism when it comes to planning cities around the inevitable – peak oil, food shortages, Diasporas, climate instability and resource hoarding.

It’s difficult for me to sit still in a film like Urbanized, or when viewing the PBS series, e² , what was touted as “a critically acclaimed, multipart PBS series about the innovators and pioneers who envision a better quality of life on earth: socially, culturally, economically and ecologically.”

It’s because I started out as a 16-year-old (1973) in Tucson working against the rampant scouring of the Sonora desert, all the way into the magnificent Santa Catalina Mountains, where I hiked alongside black bear, puma, mule deer, dozens of reptile and avian species in what has to be the most diverse and abundant desert in the world. We’re talking about canyons and season springs and caves and immense verdant miles and miles of ocotillo and palos verdes.

I began seeing the light when informed, well-spoken community groups hit stonewall after stonewall going to politicians and land use departments demanding an end to the bulldozing and fracturing of vital, abundant ecosystems (Center for Biological Diversity started in Tucson).

I’ve been on tasks forces looking at sustainability, peak oil, food security and climate change up in the Pacific Northwest.  I’ve had some killer guests on my radio show which ran on a community radio FM radio station, the last and largest population-wise license approved by “There is Yellow Cake” Colin Powell’s son the old FCC chairman, Michael Powell.

Folk like Richard Heinberg (Peak Everything) and Post-Carbon Institute’s David Lerch talked about sustainability and sustainability-lite. James Howard Kunstler (Geography of Nowhere and The Long Emergency) and Bill McKibben (The End of Nature) talked about the political realities of a one-party America never forcing the issue of true economic and urban development. David Suzuki (renowned Canadian author, environmentalist, and documentarian) and Tim Flannery (The Weather Makers) talked about how far away the average Westerner was to understanding the truly monumental problems cities will face because of climate change.

I’m seeing more and more limited sight and broken thinking tied to so-called renewable energy and climate change and sustainability initiatives by corporations and municipalities. But documentary-makers?

How can people with film-making credentials and the backing miss so much in a film? Those were the underlying questions I had throughout the 80 minutes of Urbanized. I could not stop thinking about what all the greenwashing cities and proponents of smart growth have done over the past thirty years, skewing even more the conversation about cities’ survival.

Hell, I was wondering where the dystopia of The Road could fit into Urbanized.

All these emotions flooded me in my frustration while watching the film, especially since I had just spent a week in Vancouver, Canada, attending what is called The UBC Summer Institute on Sustainability Leadership. It was there where I ran into the same kind of thinking – technology and the hyper-developers and architects will get us all out of climate change’s way.  That’s another essay in DV, soon to come.

The stuff I’d been working on tied to this idea of “the new black is green” that eco-pornographers and the corporate-modeled environmental groups like the Sierra Club are shilling I couldn’t shake while sitting through the film.

The film Urbanized is really looking at cities from the One percent/Twenty-nine percent perspective (I’ve come to come up with the Thirty Percenters as the dividing line in my frame for this Occupy movement). The fact is so much could have been learned by Urbanized’s director from the great trilogy by Austrian filmmaker Michael Glawogger.

Glawogger looked at the the underclass in Mexico City, Bombay, Moscow and New York in Megacities (1998); and then manual labor at the beginning of  this century through the blood, sweat and tears of coal miners in the Ukraine, ship dismantlers in Pakistan, slaughterers in a Nigerian stockyard and sulfur harvesters on an Indonesian mountain in Working Man’s Death  (2005); and then in Glawogger’s  latest feature, Whores’ Glory, he explored the streets of New York, Mumbai, Moscow, and Mexico City — the “megacities” in his three-punch uppercut to view the new realities of the 21st Century.

We’re turning into urban dwellers, human rats, farther and farther away from farming and what could have been intentional communities far and wide, sustainable, compact, supported by agrarian ingenuity and smaller and smaller human footprints with dynamic, active cultural structures.

Instead, we are in a rush to get wired-in, carting our families and belongings into the centers of employment, and some of the outfall is more anxiety  about being out in rural-scapes. The Thirty Percent has facilitated this uneven takeover of our lives. Small towns are drying up all over North America, and what were small towns near cities have turned into gated communities and suburban ghettos about to be annexed into bigger and bigger concentrations of people moving endlessly in cars to cobble together a living working two or three part-time jobs.

This is the 70 percent I consider the real defining group that the Occupy movement alludes to by invoking the 99 Percent jingo.

As an out of work planner in  Seattle – a city not very dynamic when it comes to outside the box thinking in terms of “urban and regional planning” – I understand one back story: throughout the 1970s and 1980s many city planning offices were gutted and the smart practitioners and innovators ended up in private development. So, it’s not so surprising to see how  developers have been setting the agenda for city planning,  especially in smaller towns or Sun Belt cities.

The film Urbanized is a broad brush stroke canvas expression of the design and development of urban centers, touching briefly on the hot button issues Seattlites know so very well – transportation, crime, public spaces, city planning, architecture, energy consumption. Hustwit adds to that the bastard child created from the union of  “free trade,” unbridled capitalism,  consumer-driven development, and corporatocracy – slums, both inner-city  and on the outskirts of the world’s most highly populated and growing cities.

Here’s the missing debate in films like Urbanized: while a total of 227 million people rose out of slum conditions from 2000 to 2010, thanks largely to policies in China and India, according to the UN Human Settlements Programme, also called UN-Habitat, slums are the biggest “impediment” for urban developers.

For some, this is a rare success in the UN’s Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). As such, MDG 7, Target 11, UN members pledged to “achieve significant improvement” in the lives of at least 100 million slum dwellers by 2020.

These incremental steps, or the one step forward, two steps back, looks pretty tough on the poorest of city dwellers:  from 2000-2010, the absolute numbers of slum dwellers increased from 776.7 million to 827.6 million.

“Cities are growing faster than the slum improvement rate,” said Gora Mboup, a Senegalese who co-authored the report, State of the World Cities 2010/11: Bridging the Urban Divide, issued two years ago.

Half of the increase of 55 million extra slum dwellers came from population growth in existing slum homes; a quarter by rural flight to the cities; and a quarter by people living on the edge of cities whose homes became engulfed by urban expansion. It’s this urban ballooning that both creates slums and threatens those slum dwellers who at least in some cases have patched-together roofs over their heads in these communities that end up taking hold, like the parachuting seeds of dandelions.

Along the US-Mexico border, they are called colonias.

UN-Habitat warned in March 2010:

Short of drastic action, the world slum population will probably grow by six million each year, or another 61 million people, to hit a total of 889 million by 2020.

We’ve been talking about these basic urban topics for decades in the planning and community development fields:

• in 40 years – 2050 – 75 percent of the world’s population will live in cities;
• infrastructure and city services in most cities were designed for people who were middle income or higher;
• cities have been prioritized for private space and automobiles;
• there is a movement toward greater citizen involvement – participatory planning;
• resiliency is key in order for civilization to shift into new living arrangements precipitated by resource shortages, climate change and pollution;
• progressive action and plans have to be contained in not only the planner’s toolbox, but in the politician’s and CEO’s as well; and,
• cities account for 75 percent of energy used/burned and 75 percent of global greenhouse gasses.

For a general audience, Urbanized might be news or compelling, though too much in the documentary comes from the mouths of architects, engineers, politicians and planners, and not enough from community groups and citizen participants in their cities’ designs.

Gary Hustwit understands the limitations of working on a film dealing with the “morphology of cities” with so much of the back story left out:

There are so many cities we couldn’t go to that are not in the film. Our approach with ‘Urbanized’ was not to look at specific cities. It was to look at specific, universal issues and then look at specific projects around the world. Universal issues that face all cities: We all need a roof over our head, we need clean water and sanitation, we need mobility and ways to get around, we need some place to work and we need places to relax. Whatever you want to talk about in a city, it all pretty much boils down to one of those five issues. Then we look at how different cities are dealing with them. In a way, we are making a composite city. I couldn’t think of any other way to structure it.

The film doesn’t look at the price of depopulating rural villages and towns. The concept of permaculture and permanent cultures tied to agrarian work, marketing and food processing is never touched upon. What about the price of urbanization around the absolutely astounding farmer suicide rate in India –  where a quarter of a million farmers have committed suicide in the last 16 years? Think of one farmer committing suicide every 30 minutes. Why? City life, city thinking.

Agriculture in India is subject to global markets in this push for  economic liberalization. Emphasis has been placed on building and retrofitting cities in India, so removal of agricultural subsidies and the opening of Indian agriculture to the global market have increased costs – through bigger and bigger farmer loans — while also reducing yields and profits for many farmers. Some of that is tied to seed and biotech fascism around such companies as Monsanto, or the heavy price pumping water from historically significant aquifers for bottling companies like Nestle and CocaCola?

In the film, we do see Paris, New York, the slums of Mumbai, the beaches of Rio de Janeiro, the bike lanes of Bogotá, Colombia, lighted walkways in Apartheid-cleaved townships on the outskirts of Cape Town, a new housing project in Santiago, Chile, the depopulating Detroit (once 1.4 million folk, down to 386,000) and the shame of New Orleans almost seven years after a category three hurricane hit..

It’s no criticism of the film that it was finished before the public power of the Arab Spring and Occupy Movement, but Hustwit in a recent interview ramified the impact of public participation in public spheres:

Attitudes about what the priorities of a city should be and whom city space should benefit are changing. And it had to come as a result of people literally taking the space back. All the public-private plazas in New York City are a perfect example of space being sold off to the highest bidder, when really the city should step in and preserve more of this space for public use.

It’s clear that Seattle should have tackled the issues Jim Diers brought to the fore as Seattle’s  first director of Department of Neighborhoods in 1988 and serving under three mayors for 14 years. His book, Neighborhood Power: Building Community the Seattle Way, is about community participation and organizing, Sal Alinsky-style. His book and philosophy has been scrutinized by other cities, including Austin, Texas.

Alas, community now is about defined locations of gentrification, gated communities, and the poor and lower middle class in the suburbs, making huge emotional, economic and sustainability sacrifices at the hands of sub-living wages, two or three jobs and a closed loop of driving from the hinterlands – those suburban ghettos – to places in the metropolitan areas for work.

Movies about the welfare of culture, mankind, our organizing tools to stave off war, injustice, environmental calamity and die off should be long, provocative and from the heart. Urbanized seems 20 years behind the times in many ways, sort of a peek into the minds of rarefied designers, architects and planners.

Those planners and designers and wonks are living in a Richard Florida fantasy land of this creative class of high tech gurus and support engineers who supposedly make cities work, and make them interesting, artistic, bohemian, and where all the “cool, hip, liberal Obama-supporting types” create the great cities of the present and future.

This is not a film that posits much from Jane Jacobs thinking, either from her work in 1961, Death and Life of Great American Cities or Dark Age Ahead (2004).

In this latter book, her main focus is on “the five pillars of our culture that we depend on to stand firm.” Those pillars can be applied to most Westernized or non-Western societies — the nuclear family (but also community); education; science; representational government and taxes; and corporate and professional accountability. While Dark Age Ahead is pessimistic in a good way, her conclusion is more buoyant than all of her critique up to that point:

At a given time it is hard to tell whether forces of cultural life or death are in the ascendancy. Is suburban sprawl, with its murders of communities and wastes of land, time, and energy, a sign of decay? Or is rising interest in means of overcoming sprawl a sign of vigor and adaptability in North American culture? Arguably, either could turn out to be true.

We live in a time when on one hand a mayor like Chicago’s Rahm Emanuel may speak the new urbanism language of developers, architects, and strategic planners, but he is Occupy Chicago’s worst enemy, using mass arrests, suspension of the valued one phone call in prison and distaste for nurses and teachers to “plan his city.”

Emanuel is like many mayors in the US, tied to the machinations of developers, financiers, and  private planners: lots of talk about enterprise zones/urban cores, carbon footprints, sustainable jobs, green infrastructure, and smart growth, but also, as Emanuel is proposing, criminalizing the act of expressing dissent, minimizing the time and place where people can protest, giving police more authority to suppress protesters, and adding extensive rules and restrictions that bureaucratize the process of obtaining a permit and severely limits the “fluidity” of demonstrations.

Urbanized barely scratches the surface, and no matter how “cool” or technologically awe-inspiring some aspects of  mega cities of the world seem, a few billion people are protesting the toil, pollution, lack of wages, and unbelievably inhumane treatment galvanized by this  creative class Gary Hustwit highlights in his film who seem to think they have the final say in the plans for our world’s cities’ futures.

Hell, most places in the US are so broken more and more college graduates are lining up at food banks, a 100 million feral dogs and cats roaming the streets just might be subject to police shoot-to-kill policies as animal control units are gutted (see Harrisburg, Pennsylvania’s plan for stray dogs), and grand schemes like a $4.2 billion deep bore tunnel to replace the Alaskan Way Viaduct in Seattle get approved to placate the waterfront-lusting developers.

The irony behind Urbanized’s implicit ending, as illustrated in an October 2011 interview of Hustwit in the journal  Design Observer, is a  case study in  his next documentary, a subject caught in the shadow in the towering skyscrapers of our urbanized world – rural life.

When I went to interview Rem Koolhaas [world-renowned Dutch Architect] — and it took months and months for us to get him scheduled — we finally sat down, and we talked a little before the interview started. And I said we are going to talk about cities. And the first thing Rem says is: You know I’m not really thinking about cities anymore. Now that 51 percent of people live in cities, what I’m really interested in is all these spaces that we are leaving behind in the countryside.

This maybe a fun projection of the next movie to come for Hustwit, but the absurdity of our times are underway when it comes to the ultimate city, as Will Doig of Salon.com writes in a piece, “Science Fiction No More: The Perfect City is Under Construction”:

And so it will be with cities like PlanIT Valley, currently being built from scratch in northern Portugal. Slated for completion in 2015, PlanIT Valley won’t be a mere “smart city” — it will be a sentient city, with 100 million sensors embedded throughout, running on the same technology that’s in the Formula One cars, each sensor sending a stream of data through the city’s trademarked Urban Operating System (UOS), which will run the city with minimal human intervention.

We saw an opportunity … to go create something that was starting with a blank sheet,” said PlanIT Valley creator Steve Lewis, “thinking from a systems-wide process in the same way we would think about computing technologies.

Oh no, that’s a whole other essay-article I’ve got to get my arms around and pen, and soon. The entire creative class and knowledge worker saving the world mentality of our time, at least in many of the megacities and smaller ones like Seattle or San Francisco, ties into this PlanIT Valley hyper-homeland security, nanny-sitting, dead-creativity world of the blasé.

This is the very thinking that Jacobs decried and James Howard Kunstler dissects. Is this really the world’s attitude toward modern technology and city-building and city-living, as Mark Shepard, an architect and the author of Sentient City: Ubiquitous Computing, Architecture, and the Future of Urban Space, states?

“From a tech perspective, we’re not really selling products and services anymore. We’re selling lifestyles,” he says.

See Urbanized  after you rent the movie, The Age of Stupid. After you watch, The End of Suburbia. It’s easy to end a movie review about planning with a thousand quotes, but I’ll put two down from creative folks, real ones, and not planners:

Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell.

— Edward Abbey, writer, essayist, novelist (1927-1989)

A common mistake people make when trying to design something foolproof is to underestimate the ingenuity of complete fools.

— Douglas Adams, author, The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy (1952-2001)

This brings up the question: what made them dangerous? The underlying answer is simple: the dead were black. This is the same assumption made by George Zimmerman when he followed Trayvon Martin. This fact illustrates the nature of racism in today’s United States (and probably in much of Europe and the rest of the world). I believe Mr. Zimmerman and his family’s claim that they do have black friends. This fact does not eliminate their racism. It does mean that they are not necessarily prejudiced against African-American individuals they actually know. This seeming contradiction illustrates the particularities of racism in a “post-racial” society. So does a criminal justice system that not only targets people of color (especially young black men) in its pursuit of arrest quotas, but also tends to imprison those arrestees at a much greater proportion to their actual numbers in the general population. So does an educational system that under-funds schools in neighborhoods that are predominantly African-American. This lack of funding results in a poorer education, which, in turn, results in a lower employment rate and, when combined with the aforementioned policing and sentencing practices, a higher incarceration rate for this demographic.

That is just one aspect of a societal construct that allows a relative few African-Americans and other non-white residents of the United States a pass into the better life assumed by most white-skinned Americans. I recently attended an anti-racism rally in Burlington, Vermont, a small city in the northeaster US with a small African-American population and a somewhat larger Somali and Sudanese refugee population. This rally, held in the wake of the Trayvon Martin murder, featured a speech by a black high school student. This young man spoke about growing up as “the other” in a society that seemed to have it in for people like him. His talk wasn’t a lament, but a genuine attempt to express his fears, his frustration, and his refusal to play any role assigned to him that did not allow him to be who he wanted to be. He acknowledged that he lived among people who were afraid of him solely because he was dark-skinned; at the same time he acknowledged that the menace associated with that identity was part of what made being a young black man in the US “kind of cool”. He went on to state that entertainment like gangsta rap fed off this menace while also celebrating a lifestyle that limited too many of his friends’ambitions to a life that meant prison somewhere along the line. In other words, it could be argued that it perpetuated the racist system.

Discussing racism is always a tricky business. It seems even more difficult in today’s climate. While only a few far right fringe groups openly declare their racism in public, a common understanding exists that denies the historical effects of an economic and social system built on the systemic denial of a people’s basic humanity because of their skin color. This understanding continues to create clear lines of economic and social estrangement for a majority of the black residents of the United States.

The ripple effects of this phenomenon are also apparent in Latino and other communities composed of people not of European descent. Racism is something much deeper than individual prejudices; it is systemic and so pervasive it is just part of the general consciousness we exist in. Let’s get this straight, however. Racism in the US exists because of white people. Darker skinned people pay the most obvious price for this disease founded in ignorance and capital’s need to dominate, and white people benefit from the phenomenon even when they actively oppose it.

In 1970, a group of leftist organizations in the US held a Revolutionary People’s Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia PA. The convention was primarily organized by the original Black Panther Party. Although the convention’s audacious hopes to create a revolutionary document foundered, the fact that 15,000 people gathered to try and create that document stand as a unique moment in history. There were some important statements that came out of the discussions held that weekend, including identifying that anti-racist organizing by whites should take place in white communities. After all, it’s that segment of the population where racism still festers and it’s the same segment that prospers from it. The consensus of the convention was that since racism is white people’s problem, then white people need to oppose it in those areas where it is at its worst, such as the US Congress, most police forces, and various media outlets, not to mention many of their neighborhoods. Unfortunately, ignoring its existence does not eliminate it.

More and more individuals in the United States ignore the false separation of skin color and ethnicity, finding friendship, love and marriage across former lines of division. Individual acts of racist prejudice are rare enough that when they do occur they often make the news. Yet, a system designed within a racist paradigm continues to deny most African-Americans (and many other non-whites) a life comparable to their white neighbors. This occurs despite the presence of a black man in the white house.

Simultaneously, the inherent racism of this dynamic pretends to be something else, imprisoning black and brown people at an unconscionable rate, preventing their access to quality education, and limiting their opportunities via the mechanisms of an economy originating in the enslavement of Africans and the exploitation and colonization of brown people. By manipulating the desires of most US residents for a post-racial society, the contradiction between personal experience and the greater economic and social reality makes the continued domination of an essentially racist system possible.

Not from his high school where he dropped out after his freshman year.

Not from his job, where he worked as an auto body technician for more than 35 years.

Both of his marriages ended in divorce, but did produce two children, a 31-year-old son and a 28-year-old daughter.

June readily admits that for most of his life, beginning about 14 when he began drinking heavily, he was a drunk. Always beer. Almost always to excess. But, he will quickly tell you how many weeks he has been sober. It’s now 56, he says proudly.

In October 2008 he was in an auto accident, when he swerved to miss a deer and hit an oak tree head on. That’s when he learned MRIs showed he had been suffering from degenerative arthritis. Between the accident and the arthritis, he was off work for three months. Then, in May 2009, he was laid off when the company moved.

The pain is now so severe that after about 10 minutes, he has to sit.

Unable to work, surviving on disability income that brings him $1,300 a month, just $392.50 above the poverty line, he lives in the 12-acre Riverdale Mobile Home Village, along the Susquehanna River near Jersey Shore north-central Pennsylvania. The village has a large green area where families can picnic, relax, or play games, sharing the space with geese and all kinds of animals.

For most of the six years June lived in the village, he kept to himself—chatting with neighbors now and then, but nothing that would ever suggest he’d be a leader. The last time he led anything was almost two decades earlier when he was president of a 4-wheel club.

On Feb. 18, the residents found out their landlord had sold the park, only after reading a story in the Williamsport Sun-Gazette. The landlord, who the residents say did what he could to make their village safe and attractive, later came to each of the 37 families. He told the families he sold the park and they would have two months to leave. It was abrupt. Business-like. “We knew he was planning to sell,” says June, “but we all thought it would be to someone who would allow us to stay.”

Four days after the residents were ordered to move, certified letters made it official. The owner sold the park to Aqua PVR, a division of Aqua America, headquartered in Bryn Mawr. Sale price was $550,000. It may have been a bargain—land and industrial parks that have been vacant for years are going for premium sales prices as the natural gas boom in the Marcellus Shale consumes a large part of Pennsylvania and four surrounding states.

Aqua had received permission from the Susquehanna River Basin Commission (SRBC) to withdraw three million gallons of water a day from the Susquehanna; the 37 families of the mobile home village would just be in the way. The company intends to build a pump station and create a pipe system to provide water to natural gas companies that use hydraulic fracturing, the preferred method to extract natural gas from as deep as 10,000 feet beneath the earth. The process, known as fracking, requires a mixture of sand, chemicals, many of them toxins, and anywhere from one to nine million gallons of water per well, injected into the earth at high pressure. Jersey Shore sits in a northeastern part of the Marcellus Shale, which is believed to hold about 500 trillion cubic feet of natural gas.

Aqua isn’t the only company planning to take water in the area. Anadarko E & P Co. and Range Resources-Appalachia have each applied to withdraw up to three million gallons a day from the Susquehanna. While the Delaware River Basic Commission, and the states of New York and Maryland, have imposed moratoriums upon the use of fracking until full health and environmental impacts can be assessed, Pennsylvania and the SRBC have been handing out permits by the gross.

Most residents had only a vague knowledge of fracking and what it is doing to the earth. “They have a lot more knowledge now,” says June, as politically aware as any environmentalist.

Aqua had originally ordered the residents to leave by May 1, but then extended it to the end of the month. It dangled a $2,500 relocation allowance in its eviction.

However, the cost to move a trailer to another park is $6,000–$11,000, plus extra for skirting, sheds, and any handicap-accessible external ramps. But, most trailers can’t be moved. “These are older trailers,” says June. His is a 12-by-70, built in 1974, with a tin roof and tin siding (“tin-on-tin”); like others, it isn’t sturdy enough to survive a move. But even if it did, there would be no place to put it. The parks want the newer trailers, but most parks are full.

So, the residents began looking in the classified ads for rentals. Because the natural gas companies are bringing in thousands of employees to frack the land, there is a shortage of apartments, most with inflated prices to take advantage of the well-paid roustabouts, drivers, and technicians who moved into the area, and spend their money on local businesses eager to improve their own profits. During the past two years, rents have doubled and tripled. “None of us can pay a thousand or more a month,” says June. The current mobile home owners paid $200 a month for their lot.

Not long after he was served his own eviction notice, June had a dream. Some might call it a nightmare; some might see it as he did, a religious experience. “It was Jesus coming to me, telling me I had to do something,” he says.

June is constantly on the move, going from trailer to trailer to help the families who were abruptly evicted. Whatever their needs, Kevin June tries to provide it, constantly on the phone, running up phone bills he knows he can’t afford but does so anyhow because the lives of his neighbors matter.

There’s Betty and William Whyne. Betty, 82, began working as a waitress at the age of 13 and now, in retirement, makes artificial Christmas trees. She has a cancerous tumor in the same place where a breast was removed in 1991. William, 72, who was an electrician, carpenter, and plumber before he retired after a heart attack, goes to a dialysis center three times a week, four hours each time. They brought their 12-wide 1965 Fleetwoood trailer to the village shortly after the 1972 flood. Like the other residents, they can’t afford to move; they can’t find adequate housing. “We’ve looked at everything in about a 30 mile radius,” they say. They earn $1,478 a month from retirement, only $252.17 above the federal poverty line. One son is in New Jersey; one is in Texas, and the Whynes don’t want to leave the area; they shouldn’t have to.

There’s April and Eric Daniels. She’s a stay-at-home mom for their two children; he’s a truck driver whose hours have been reduced. Their 14-by-70 trailer is valued at $13,200; she and her husband were in the process of remodeling it, had already paid $5,000 for improvements, and were about to start building a second bathroom. April Daniels had grown up living in a series of foster houses, “so I know what it’s like to move around, but this was my first home, and it’s harder for me to leave.” Their trailer provides a good home, but can’t be moved. “We’re pretty much on the verge of just tearing down the trailer and living in a camper,” she says. They don’t know what will happen. They do know that because of what they see as Aqua’s insensitivity, they will lose a lot of money no matter what they do.

Doris Fravel, 82, a widow on a fixed income of $1,326 a month, has lived in the village 38 years. She’s proud of her 1974 12-wide trailer with the tin roof. “I painted it every year,” she says. In June, she paid $3,580 for a new air conditioner; she recently paid $3,000 for new insulated skirting. The trailer has new carpeting. Unlike most of the residents, she found housing—a $450 a month efficiency. But it’s far smaller than her current home. So she’s sold or given away most of what she owns. She may have a buyer for the trailer, and will take $2,500 for it, considerably less than it’s worth. “I can’t do anything else,” she says. “I just can’t move my furnishings into the new apartment,” she says. Like the other residents, she has family who are helping, but there’s only so much help any family can provide. “I never knew I would ever have to leave,” she says, but she does want to “see one of those gas men come to my door—and I’d like to punch him in the shoulder.”

Not only are there few lots available and apartments are too expensive, but most residents don’t qualify for a house mortgage; and there are waiting lists for senior citizen and low-income housing. The stories are the same.

No one from Aqua has been in touch with any resident. But, the company did hire a local real estate agency. The agency claims it has made extraordinary efforts to help the residents find other housing. The residents disagree. April Daniels says “some of the Realtors have gotten real nasty with the people in the park—they just don’t understand that we are all in a hardship, so we get mad and frustrated and take it out on them.” But there really isn’t much anyone can do. The natural gas boom has made affordable housing as obsolete as the anthracite coal that once drove the region’s energy economy.

The residents, with limited incomes, have lived good lives; they are good people. They paid their rents and fees on time; they kept up the appearances of their trailers and the land around it. They worked their jobs; they survived. Until they were evicted

And now it’s up to the residents to try to survive. They have become closer; they listen to each other; they hug each other; and, the tough men aren’t afraid to let others see them cry. “The pain in this park is almost too much at times,” says June.

If something goes wrong, the residents have to fix it; Kevin June is the one they call. If he can’t fix a problem, he finds someone who can. In this trailer park, as in most communities, there is a lot of talent—“we help each other,” says June. His job is to make sure the residents survive until they can move. I’ve had the Holy Spirit running through my veins a long time, but it’s running real deep right now,” he says.

A half-dozen families have already moved, but most say they will stay and fight what they see as a politically-based corporate takeover.

During the week Aqua PVR issued eviction notices, its parent company issued a news release, boasting that its revenue for 2011 was $712 million, a 4.2 percent increase from the year before; its net income was $143.1 million, up 15.4 percent from the previous year. But, for some reason, the company just couldn’t find enough money to give the residents a fair moving settlement. “They just expect us to throw our homes into the street and live in tents,” says June.

“I went to see a state representative to ask what he could do to help,” he says, “but his secretary just coldly told me there was nothing that could be done because whoever owns a property can do with it what he wants to do.” He never saw the state representative.

The Commonwealth of Pennsylvania—armed with an industry-favorable law recently rammed through by the Republican-controlled legislature and eagerly signed by a first-term Republican governor who received more than $1,6 million in campaign contributions from the energy industry—has decided that fracking the earth, threatening health and the environment, is far better for business than taking care of the people.

Kevin June and 36 families are just collateral damage.

These were the days before Ipods or even boom boxes. Hell, 8-tracks had barely made an impression on our youthful culture back then. The only source of music that was portable was the transistor radio. In the Baltimore-Washington DC area, there were three or four stations that played the songs people were listening to. WPGC-FM and WCAO-AM played the Top 40 hits of the day while WOOK and WUST played soul and R&B. While radio was not as divided into niche markets then as it is today, the fact is that the very few performers were heard on both stations. For example, Led Zeppelin and the Beatles were never heard on the soul stations, while Bobby Blue Bland and Joe Tex were rarely heard on the Top 40 stations.

There was one man, however, who was heard quite often on both formats back then. His name was James Brown. We would choose our teams and play pickup game after pickup game. Since there were usually more than ten kids hanging around, the odd guys out chose the music (unless we were convinced otherwise). Whenever the current hit by Brown came on the brothers would start vamping. Doing the slide step as they neared a basket or attempting a split at mid court. Then they would tell us lighter skinned guys to not even try. We knew we couldn’t dance like Mr. Brown That particular period of time was when James Brown truly was the king of soul, when he really was The One.

This was also a period when racism had very few shadows to hide it. Black men were subject to whatever wrath a white man felt like imposing on him. Black men with money and power like James Brown felt that wrath perhaps less often but in greater measure when they did feel it. When he released his single “Say It Loud (I’m Black and I’m Proud), Brown was making it clear: he didn’t really give a shit about racists keeping him from his music, money and people. Never much of a militant, James Brown was always proud, even as a street urchin cum hustler in Augusta, GA. A new biography of Brown, titled The One: The Life and Music of James Brown places that pride in the context of the black freedom struggle in the United States. It opens with the story of the 1739 Stono Rebellion in colonial Georgia that saw slaves killing slave owners and increasing their ranks as they marched through the area just south of Charleston, SC beating their drums, singing and dancing in rebellion. Forty slaves and twenty whites were killed during that rebellion and never again did Georgia legally import slaves from the African continent.

With the story of the slave rebellion as his jumping off point, biographer RJ Smith writes a tale that evokes Mr. Brown’s insistence on freedom, his pride, innate musicality, and the high-energy life that helped earn him the title of the hardest working man in show business. Smith gives the reader a fantastic story: from Brown’s roots in Augusta, where he entertained soldiers on weekend passes with his dancing while hustling them down to the brothel where he lived with his aunt, to his casket’s tour of three cities after Brown’s death in 2006. The text details the complexities of a man who, with his bandmates, created a signature musical style that many have used as inspiration but none have successfully imitated. It also traces the political journey of a black man in the United States during a time when the world of Black America underwent a sea change. Never a militant, but always an individual proud of his racial and personal identity, Brown’s politics included Martin Luther King and Richard Nixon; Elijah Muhammad and Strom Thurmond. His support for Nixon’s 1972 campaign led to a boycott attempt by several African-American organizations and individuals that had some success. Smith relates a tale of 10,000 seat arenas with less than 2,000 concertgoers. When I thought about seeing a concert of his in Frankfurt, Germany in 1972, my African-American comrades convinced me not to go because of Brown’s support of Nixon (it didn’t take much—I hated Nixon). They passed out leaflets in the parking lot discouraging attendance. At the same time, Brown’s singles were still being played on the radio and still selling.

At a recent anti-racism rally in Burlington, VT. held in the wake of the murder of Trayvor Martin, a black teen talked about his struggle to maintain a positive self-identity in a culture that insists on labeling he and other black males in as negative of a light as possible. I will paraphrase his statement here: I am going to be me.  Part of that is saying hi to my neighbors even if they won’t say hi to me. Part of that is dating who I want. Part of that is being black. I am going to be me. James Brown would have agreed with that young man. His political actions, his insistence on doing things his way musically and otherwise—all of these actions, writes Smith, stem from a combination of Brown’s ego, mistrust and determination.

To hear Smith tell it, James Brown definitely did not come from comfortable beginnings. He movingly describes just how tough it was. Anything that came easy made Brown suspicious. This didn’t seem to change as he grew older and developed into one of the world’s most well-known people—his fame in Africa rivaled that of boxer Muhammad Ali, while in the United States very few acts sold more records than Brown. Never one to rest on his laurels, Brown gave hundreds of shows every year, went through wives and mistresses almost as quickly as he did towns and cities when he was on tour, and spent money quicker than he could count it. The magic of Smith’s writing is that Brown’s life is told as captivatingly as it was lived. This is a classic rags-to-riches Horatio Alger story but with a twist: it’s Alger’s Ragged Dick as an African-American bootblack who rises above his station.

Smith, who is also the author of The Great Black Way: L.A. in the 1940s and the Last African American Renaissance, and a former music writer for the Village Voice and Spin magazine, has done a public service by writing this biography. His approach to the narrative does more than detail the life of James Brown. It captures the essence of a James Brown performance and manipulates that essence—its franticness, its passion and its sheer jubilation—into a story about one of the world’s greatest musicians and performers ever. In Smith’s telling, it becomes clear that James Brown’s myth was not only larger than life, so was James Brown himself.

This year the poverty meeting attracted a surprisingly large number of people, estimated to be well over a hundred. Many appeared to be ‘workers’ in the system – possibly on ‘company’ or taxpayer time.  There were also some interested private citizens.  A tiny number – maybe five or six – were real people, those who depend on the system for survival.

This article was inspired by the comments heard at the conference. Most showed a lack of understanding about the causes and effects of poverty.  The people meant well and were well-motivated. They were sincere and the compassion in their hearts was apparent, but many in our culture across the United States just do not get it.   Our culture is obsessed with a worship of wealth and material goods.  The bottom line is that we live in a very classist society.

In Bennington there are three very distinct classes.  First, there are the ‘fancy people’. They are the ones who rule and control everything. They are on the boards — the hospital board, the library board, the select board, the school boards.  They attend the formal fundraisers for the hospital and other institutions. They have the power — even the power over life and death. They, occasionally during a medical crisis in the hospital, make the decision to pull the plug or allow life to go on.

Then there is the large group of ordinary citizens. Some are blue collar workers.  Most work hard. Love their families. And have had family in Vermont for generations.  They acknowledge the class system in conversation often.   They call it the ol’ boys network – croneyism.

The third group consists of those who are in need. Those on the bottom of the economic pile.  At the conference some of the most impressive comments were made by a poor mother of two disabled children. She talked about the oppressive avalanche of redundant paper work required to get any tiny benefit.  The social services system is designed by nameless, faceless, unelected beaurocrats.  It is set up to assure maximum job security to the workers in the system. To a struggling family it often feels like an attack of the ‘paper churners’.   Being poor is a full time job.  Sadly, it often takes precious time away from the children.

Below are some observations, made during many years of studying the culture, not only in Vermont but across the US.

Poverty means living with shame.

Poverty means working three jobs, and still not ‘making it’.

Poverty means that you go to work when you are sick.  Worse than that you send your children to school when they are sick.

Sometimes poverty means that you skip meals so that your children can eat.

Poverty means that your housing is never secure.

Once in a while, poverty means that your child will be stereotyped and misjudged by his teacher.

Poverty means having no dependable source of transportation.

Poverty means that you will receive inferior health care – maybe no health care at all.

Poverty means that you have no access to dental care. Remember the death of Diamonte Driver – a 12 year-old Maryland boy.  His mother could not afford dental care for him. He died of a tooth abscess. An $80 tooth extraction would have saved his life.

Poverty is not like that described in The Waltons. Poverty can mean isolation from family and friends.

Poverty can mean missing your mother’s funeral because you had to go to work.

Poverty means you are invisible and voiceless.

Poverty means that no matter how hard you work, you will still be on the wrong side of the desk.

Poverty means that your hobby is not skiing or surfing.  It is surviving.

Living in poverty means that you will probably never hold elective office.

Poverty is declaring bankruptcy because your wife has cancer.

Being a low income father means that you will miss your son’s games because you have to work.

Living in poverty means that you have no options – no choices about where to live, what to eat.

Poverty means that you pay for the family groceries with a credit card – until it is maxed out.

Poverty means following all of the rules. Then graduating with oppressive student debt so that the president of UVM can be paid $447,000 per year.

Being poor means no access to gyms, fitness centers, etc.

Being poor means that you do not have equal access to the legal system.

Being a poor child means that you will be at increased risk of being bullied.

Being poor means that you dread the holidays. Your family celebrations are not like those depicted in Norman Rockwell paintings.

Being a baby in a low income family means that you might spend all of your infancy strapped to a plastic baby carrier in a day care center, while your mother goes to work.

Being poor could mean that you are the waitress serving Mothers’ Day dinner to other mothers in a fancy restaurant.

Being poor keeps you on the wrong side of the digital divide – no computer, no ISP, no cell phone, no Facebook, no Twitter.

Being poor might mean that you never get to see the ocean - never get to see your children playing in the surf…

Being young and poor in Bennington might mean that you never get to go to a library that doesn’t ban books.

Being poor means that you feel disenfranchised when there is so much focus on the middle class, and so little on the poor.

Living in poverty means that you care more about what is in your grocery sack than any news about Goldman Sachs.

Poverty means that your life-span will be shortened.

Even in death you might not escape the chains of poverty.  Being poor might mean that you have no say in the final disposal of your remains.  Cremation might be imposed, even if you would have preferred burial.

Being poor means that you carry the burden of the misjudgment of others.

Will the United States ever rise above the evils of classism and racism?   Is ‘poverty’ the new black?

The medics were already sentenced by a military tribunal (a military tribunal!) to up to 15 years in prison after months of being held in illegal detention, denied legal counsel and subjected to torture.

Moving their case to a civilian court is presumably meant to signal a concession by the regime. But what it illustrates is that the Al Khalifa royal rulers of Bahrain are unreconstructed despots who are implacably set against accepting any kind of democratic reform.

The persecution of the majority Shia population – 70 per cent of the island – by an unelected Sunni elite is business as usual as epitomized by the vindictive targeting of medics whose only “crime” was that they treated hundreds of people injured in the state’s brutal crackdown against the pro-democracy movement.

Recently, Washington has been doing its PR best to present the monarchy in the Persian Gulf kingdom as being belatedly open to reform – this after a year of unrelenting repression against a largely peaceful pro-democracy uprising.

Bahraini grassroots activists are concerned that sections of the official opposition belonging to the Shia Al Wefaq political society are being groomed by the US State Department to accept a “compromise deal” with the royal rulers that would effectively see the monarchy remaining in power and the status quo merely being given a facelift.

King Hamad bin Isa Al Khalifa has been praised in the US corporate media for overseeing “brave” moves towards political power-sharing and dialogue with the mainly Shia-led opposition.

Washington’s envoy on human rights Michael Posner and former national security advisor Elliott Abrams have talked up “important steps” by the Bahraini regime towards reform.

However, no amount of Washington spinning can conceal the facts of life: that the US-backed Bahraini regime will continue violating human rights and international law in order to maintain its stranglehold hold on political and economic power at the expense of the Shia majority.

For 280 years, the Sunni rulers, who invaded the country from neighbouring Qatar, have sat on the chests of the indigenous Shia, and they are not going to give up their privileged seats of comfort. The Al Khalifa dynasty has enriched itself through graft and corruption while the majority of Bahrainis struggle with unemployment and poverty.

The oil wealth of the tiny island has lined the pockets of the Al Khalifas, but for the ordinary Shia it has brought poverty, pollution and sickness. To add insult to injury, when the mainly Shia-led uprising last February peacefully demanded elected government to replace the unelected venal family dynasty, it was met with batons, bullets and brutality, with thousands incarcerated or fired from their jobs, several tortured to death while in prison.

Historically, to maintain this excruciating state of inequality, the Bahraini rulers developed a system of governance and state security apparatus that is “bullet-proof to reform”. Under American and British tutelage, the Bahraini rulers became adept at presenting the kingdom as a relatively benign monarchy. They may have acquired the modern semantics and appearance of political progressivism, such as referring to the kingdom as a constitutional monarchy with a (rigged) parliament instead of an absolute monarchy as in neighbouring Saudi Arabia and the other Gulf sheikhdoms. But not far below the surface, Bahrain’s institutionalized despotism was always the dominant reality.

For example, the kingdom’s prime minister is 78-year-old Prince Khalifa Al Khalifa, the uncle of the incumbent king. He is the world’s longest sitting prime minister, having first occupied the post in 1971 when Bahrain gained nominal independence from Britain. Prime Minister Khalifa – also known locally as Mr Fifty-Fifty – has never faced an electorate and is notorious for siphoning off Bahrain’s oil wealth to become one of the richest men in the world.

For decades, despite glamorous images of mirrored skyscrapers and Formula One Grand Prix, Bahrain has been run with an ironclad National Security Agency. The agency was, and is, a veritable “torture apparatus” headed up by members of the royal family and assisted in its nefarious conduct by ex-colonial power Britain.

Between 1968-98, the main architect of the NSA and its sectarian methods of repression against the Shia population was British colonel Sir Ian Henderson. Henderson, who had previously gained British government commendation for his role in efficiently, that is brutally, suppressing the Mau Mau revolt in Kenya during the 1950s-60s, oversaw the detention and torture of thousands of Bahrainis held for years without trial in the dungeons of Bahrain.

Former detainees told Global Research that one of Henderson’s sadistic methods of interrogation was to force them to sit naked on upright glass bottles, the necks of which had been roughly broken off to leave protruding jagged points. The detainees told how Henderson personally oversaw the torture of inmates.

Today, the British influence on Bahrain’s NSA continues. One of Bahrain’s senior police chiefs is Briton John Yates, formerly of Scotland Yard; another senior police chief is American John Timoney, who formerly ran the force in Miami, Florida. Both men have reputations of corruption and brutality from their previous commands.

Bahrain’s institutionalized despotism under a family dynasty is backed up with a military and police force whose ranks are filled by foreign expatriate Sunnis recruited from Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Pakistan and Jordan. The regime forces serve their Sunni masters with a vicious hatred towards the Shia population.

This fact is attested by the daily and nightly attacks on Shia villages by Saudi-backed regime forces, with massive amounts of tear gas fired into streets and homes. At least 25 people have died from suffocation with tear gas over the past year since Saudi-led forces invaded Bahrain to crush the uprising. The victims range from a five-day-old baby girl to elderly men and women who are too weak or infirmed to escape from their smoke-filled homes.

In the past week, mourners attending the funerals for two men who died from tear gas exposure were themselves attacked by riot police who proceeded to fire more tear gas.

So, on the one hand, we see the Bahraini rulers wearing a velvet glove offering “dialogue” and “reforms”, with Washington and London providing the positive-sounding script; while on the other hand, what is felt is an iron-fist smashing down the doors of homes, firing tear gas into houses, dragging suspects away in the middle of the night, detaining them without trial and torturing to death.

And this is all happening in a supposed new era of reformism and dialogue in Bahrain that Washington assures is underway.

The continued persecution of the Bahraini medics is another fact on the ground to demonstrate the despotic nature of Washington and London’s “important ally” in the Persian Gulf.

The medics were sentenced for up to 15 years by a military court last September on a range of outlandish charges, including “attempting to overthrow the government” and “spreading defamatory information” about the royal rulers.

That verdict caused international protests from human rights groups, who denounced it as a travesty of legal procedure, not least because the sole basis for the prosecution were the confessions of the defendants – confessions that were obtained under torture.

Then, as now, the response from Washington and other Western governments and media was muted.

The medics include world-renowned surgeons Ali Al Ekri and Ghassan Dhaif and his wife, Zahra, and brother and sister, Bassim and Nada. Also sentenced was Rula Al Suffar, the former head of Bahrain’s Nursing Society. These are individuals of impeccable medical professionalism and ethics, who refused to close the doors of Bahrain’s main public hospital, Al Salmaniya, when the regime began butchering protesters last February-March. Global Research can bear witness to the dedication of these medics and countless others who struggled in the wards and corridors of the hospital to patch people up with the most horrendous wounds as wave after wave of injured were ferried in.

Dr Al Ekri was assaulted while performing surgery and hauled into detention by Saudi-backed forces who had smashed their way into Salmaniya Hospital – a crime against humanity, just one of many following the Saudi-led invasion of Bahrain that was given the green light by Washington and London.

There was a faint sign that Washington’s recent talk of progress and reform in Bahrain may have somehow sent the hint to its favoured despots to quietly drop the embarrassing show trial against the medics. But with the continuance of the prosecution – albeit in a civilian court instead of a military tribunal – it seems that institutionalized barbarism cannot overcome its tyrannical instincts for power, even at the behest of its more PR-savvy patron in Washington.

One can only imagine the sanctimonious mouth-foaming reaction by Washington, London and the corporate media if such a travesty was perpetrated against medics in Syria.

But Bahrain is not Syria; it is an ally, therefore Western governments and media suddenly develop blindness and speech impediment in the face of blatant crimes against humanity.

According to the latest global poverty estimates, both the percentage of people living on less than $1.25 a day and the number of poor declined between 2005 and 2008, the first time that an across-the-board reduction has been reported since the World Bank began monitoring poverty. Not only that, but preliminary estimates indicate that the share of people living in extreme poverty declined between 2008 and 2010, even despite the global financial crises and surging food prices. By 2010, it appears that the $1.25 a day poverty rate fell to less than half the 1990 rate, which means that the United Nation’s first Millennium Development Goal (MDG) for cutting extreme poverty in half has already been achieved, five years ahead of schedule. This is surely a cause for celebration – or is it?

To answer this question, we first have to understand why the World Bank’s poverty statistics are so important, which is not only for what they tell us about the number of poor people in the world. The World Bank is the monopoly provider of global poverty figures, and it is no secret that they are often used to support the view that liberalisation and globalisation have helped to reduce poverty worldwide. In other words, a reduction in global poverty can usefully defend the Bank’s neoliberal policies that favour economic growth and free markets as the overruling means to combating poverty. Since around 2000 when the Millennium Development Goals were first conceived, the World Bank has consistently painted an upbeat picture of the global poverty situation. This is not a conspiracy, as some people might suggest, but simply an ideological justification for the current arrangements of the global economy and the status quo. So long as the MDGs remain in sight and global poverty is on a downward trend, then the Bank’s continued defence of neoliberal policies can be vindicated.

Controversy over global poverty measurement is nothing new, and peaked around 2003 when economists from both the right and left challenged the Bank’s income-based calculations. On the one-hand, devoted free-marketeers (most notably, Xavier Sala-i-Martin of Colombia University and Maxim Pinkovskiy of MIT) have argued that the Bank’s estimates are significantly overstated, in which case the effects of globalisation can be seen as far more beneficent than even the Bank itself presumes.

On the other hand, high-profile economists that lend their voice to the global justice movement (in particular, the economist-philosopher duo Sanjay Reddy and Thomas Pogge) have argued that the Bank uses such faulty methodology that their statistics are unreliable and possibly under-estimated by up to 40 percent. Although the chief economists responsible for the Bank’s poverty statistics have responded to these criticisms and modified their measurements over the years, many of the issues lay unresolved and cast a wholly different light on the reality of global poverty. With few critical blogs or articles being written about the Bank’s latest figures, it is worthwhile to again revisit some of the main issues.

The World Bank’s Positive Spin

Taking the Bank’s latest figures at face value, we might still question whether it is altogether good news for the fight against global poverty. As the report’s authors admitted, progress was mainly due to China’s rapid economic rise. But excluding China, the number of people living in extreme poverty in the developing world was about the same in 2008 as in 1981, at around 1.1 billion. Sub-Saharan Africa is hailed in the report for reducing extreme poverty to below half the population for the first time, reversing the long-run increase since 1981. To put this in context, however, the number of poor in sub-Saharan Africa almost doubled from 205 million in 1981 to 395 million in 2005. The extreme poverty rate in the region still remains at 47.5 percent — by far the highest rate in the world.

The Bank also admits that there was only a slight drop in the number of people living below $2 a day since the early 1980s, which remains at 2.47 billion people. A marked ‘bunching’ effect is noted just above the $1.25 a day yardstick, with millions of people caught in the poverty trap even if they are no longer classified as the extreme poor. This is the current reality of global poverty as reported by the World Bank: almost a quarter of the developing world (22 percent) cannot meet their basic needs for survival, while not far from half of the population (43 percent) is trying to survive on less than $2 a day. We may judge for ourselves whether this is “a fall to cheer” and “drops of good news”, as reported in the Economist.

Many critics have pointed out that the Bank’s poverty line, once fixed at $1 a day and now modified to $1.25 a day, is outrageously low by any standards. Living on this amount of money in the United States would be unthinkable, but according to the ‘purchasing power parity’ adjustment that the Bank uses – based on the differences in the prices of household consumption goods and services in different countries – this is effectively what this means. Contrary to popular perception, the world poverty measure is based on what $1.25 a day would buy in the United States, not in another country like Ethiopia or Peru.

Although there is nothing to prevent the World Bank from choosing a different level of income to define the extreme poor, it is essential to use a distressingly low poverty line if they want to give a positive spin to their global statistics. As we can see above, using $2 a day as the marker of extreme poverty would reveal a far less sanguine outlook. If a more realistic marker of $2.50 a day is used, twice as high as the current level, then the Bank’s own data showed a slight increase in the number of poor between 1990 and 2005 (according to their previous update released in 2008). The simple point to observe is that the dollar a day measure is fixed arbitrarily and far too low, and is not a reliable indication that life is improving for a majority of the world’s poor.

Miscalculating the World’s Poor

However, setting the poverty line at a higher level would not be enough to make the Bank’s calculations more accurate or meaningful. Measurement controversies continue to cast doubt on actual progress in fighting poverty, even though this debate is now widely overlooked in the media. Criticism centres on the Bank’s use of the ‘purchasing power parity’ (PPP) adjustment, which many economists argue is a flawed method for comparing households across countries or currencies. As Reddy and Pogge have consistently shown, these adjustments typically overstate the ability of the poor to purchase basic necessities. The way the World Bank counts the poor therefore grossly underestimates their actual number, and produces extremely unreliable data. This is not helped when the Bank recalculates its PPP exchange rates by using a later base year, wreaking havoc to their poverty estimates each time. Furthermore, income poverty is only one aspect of deprivation, and other factors such as under-nutrition, access to health services and a reasonable living environment or decent working conditions are not accounted for in the dollar a day approach.

If a wider definition of poverty is used that includes deprivation, social exclusion and other measures such as those adopted in the World Summit for Social Development in 1995, then the situation today may be much worse than suggested by a monetary poverty-line approach. For example, if you use national poverty lines based on the needs and means of each country, as Social Watch attempt to do in their Basic Capabilities Index, then the actual number of people living in poverty could represent the majority of the developing world population, and not only the ‘bottom billion’. Reddy and Pogge have long stressed the need for an alternative methodology, based on a ‘capabilities approach’ to defining poverty that relates to the possession of local resources sufficient to achieve basic human needs. Along similar lines, the economist David Woodward has proposed a Rights-Based Poverty Line that is based on an agreed set of indicators which reflect economic and social rights – such as health, nutrition and education – along with an agreed minimum level of each indicator that is considered morally acceptable. Such alternative measures may present a less simplistic picture of poverty than the headline-grabbing numbers generated by the dollar a day approach, but one that is more realistic and a better tool for policymaking.

The ‘Minimal’ Development Goals

We may also question the good news about reaching the first Millennium Development Goal well before the 2015 deadline. Only a couple of years ago, the MDGs on poverty and hunger seemed to be retreating even further out of sight, with the World Bank itself estimating that 50 million more people will be pushed into poverty as a result of the worst economic crisis since the 1930s – equivalent to almost 100 people for every minute of 2009, as Oxfam reported. The Bank does say that its new poverty estimates for 2010 are partial, with very little data for some regions where extreme poverty is most prevalent, particularly in sub-Saharan Africa. As we know, the main reason for achieving the MDG poverty target is down to the successes in a few countries, primarily China, Vietnam, Brazil, and to a lesser extent India. Many countries are well off track to meet MDG-1, again most notably in sub-Saharan Africa.

But even if the MDG on halving poverty is officially achieved (which was never intended to ‘eradicate extreme poverty’ completely, or even by half as Thomas Pogge has argued), we should ask if this is really a major success story. At the current rate of progress, the World Bank admits that this will still leave around 1 billion people in absolute poverty in 2015, equivalent to far more than three times the entire population of the United States. By setting the MDG poverty target to a universal poverty line of $1.25, we imply that it is morally acceptable for people to live at this level of income, so long as they don’t fall below it.

David Woodward has described the appalling living conditions this would lead to for someone trying to get by on the same amount of money in a rich country like Britain, equivalent to 35 people living on a single minimum wage without benefits of any kind. In the poorest countries, where welfare payments or free health care and education are often a dream, the reality is that millions of people will remain in a life-threatening condition of poverty even if MDG-1 is successfully achieved. In the meantime, at least 40,000 people will continue to die each day from preventable poverty-related causes. Is this a sufficiently ambitious and laudable goal for humanity to uphold and celebrate?

There are many other reasons to question the efficacy of the Bank’s poverty data and the virtues of the MDGs, but even a cursory analysis is sufficient to see through the political spin that surrounds global poverty reduction. The use of statistics to bolster weak arguments has a long history, of course, and other data that relates to the world’s poor can be held under similar scrutiny, in particular UN-Habitat’s controversial figures on slums and the MDGs on water and sanitation. This is not to deny the undoubted sincerity of poverty statisticians, or the notable success of the World Bank’s dollar a day benchmark and the United Nation’s MDGs in raising the profile of extreme poverty. The latest news of 663 million people moving out of poverty since 1990 is also a significant achievement that should be commemorated and not dismissed. But to properly appraise the sheer extent of severe poverty around the world, we should also judge such tenuous improvements according to what is really possible to achieve today.

No matter what the global statistics tell us, the fact remains that hundreds of millions of people remain caught in a state of abject deprivation, many of them in overcrowded and unbearable slum conditions throughout the cities of the Global South. For these people, who still constitute the vast majority of the world population, the distant promises of globalisation mean almost nothing in their daily struggle to survive. The problem is not a lack of global resources, as demonstrated by the trillions of dollars spent bailing out the world’s financial institutions following the economic crash of 2008. It would require only a fraction of the world’s income and assets to eradicate extreme poverty practically overnight, should the political will exist among governments to organise the necessary redistribution of power and resources to the world’s poor. This is where the real problem lies: in the continuing defence and propagation of neoliberal policies that preserve the interests of the already wealthy, at the expense of greater economic sharing that would mark the beginning of a fairer world.

But the structural causes of poverty are rarely addressed in the Western press. Why, for example, if capitalism is the best of all possible socio-economic systems, do most of the people on the planet live in poverty?

We are told that developing countries have dragged their populations out of poverty by opening up their markets to direct foreign investment. Rather than reining in the excesses of capitalism, then, intensifying its expansion is, many would argue, the solution to poverty.

But if that is the case, why is Haiti one of the poorest countries in the world? Haiti has had direct foreign investment for decades, yet standards of living have declined drastically. The same can be said for most Latin American countries who have sold their natural resources to foreign corporations.

Countries such as Venezuela, Cuba, Nicaragua, Ecuador, Bolivia have achieved socio-economic progress through nationalization not privatization. But there is a state at the other side of the world which has succeeded in providing almost full employment; is continuously raising wages; investing in education, scientific and technological research and development, and has achieved self-sufficiency in agriculture, creating an environment of social hope for its citizens. That country is the Republic of Belarus.

Venezuela and Belarus. Multi-polarity and endogenous development.

In 2007 President Hugo Chavez of Venezuela described the Republic of Belarus as a “model state”. Driving through the streets of Minsk, it is not difficult to see why the Venezuelan president would use such terms to describe Belarus.

Since the 1998 election of Chavez in Venezuela, the Bolivarian revolution has reduced poverty by half, eradicated illiteracy, and implemented radical reforms aimed at improving the standard of living of Venezuela’s poor majority.

However, much remains to be done; the hillsides of Caracas are still dotted with make-shift slum housing while the city’s economic elite on the Eastern side of the city live in sybaritic luxury. Driving through Minsk, on the other hand, one is struck by a vision of what Caracas could become. There are no slums in Minsk. The city’s inhabitants live in modern, European standard apartment blocks. There are plenty of clean open spaces with the excellent recreation facilities for children. Caracas has a major litter problem, wheras the streets and neighborhoods of Minsk are among the cleanest in the world.

The Venezuelan government has been implementing measures to reduce violence and social delinquency. But Caracas still remains a dangerous city. Minsk, on the other hand, is arguably one of the safest cities in Europe.

While decades of plutocratic dictatorship, corruption and neglect, Venezuelan agriculture remains underdeveloped and the population still depends on imports from the United States, Belarus is self sufficient in high quality food production.

Belarus has been able to help Venezuela develop its agricultural sector through the dispatch of consultants and the export of high quality trucks and agricultural machinery. The construction of agro-towns by Belarusian companies in Venezuela agreed in 2011 is a cogent illustration of progressive bilateral co-operation.

The bilateral agreement between Venezuela’s state oil company PDVSA and Belarusnef to create a joint-venture called Servicio Belovenezolana is another example of the advantages of a multi-vectored foreign policy for Belarus.

The Republic of Belarus has been able to decrease its dependence on Russia for oil through co-operation with oil-rich Venezuela, while Venezuela has been able to benefit from Belarusian industrial and scientific expertise. Both countries seek to diversify their markets. Venezuela wants to reduce its dependence on oil sales to the United States, while Belarus is trying to reduce its dependence on Russian oil. And both countries are dealing with fifth columns funded by Euro-Atlantic imperialism.

The advanced manufacturing sector in Belarus has also been an inspiration for Venezuela who have sent technicians to Belarus to be trained with a view to creating Latin America’s first national truck factory in Venezuela.

There are also many projects to increase further co-operation between Belarus and Venezuela such as increased imports and exports of agricultural products, medical technology and supplies, and joint state initiatives in the textile industry.

The increasing bilateral trade and co-operation between Belarus and Venezuela is a direct result of the commonalities in social policies of both countries. The five chief priorities of the Belarusian government are:

1 Maintaining equality and raising the standard of living of the working people.
2 Maintaining a full-employment economy.
3 Investment in education and scientific research.
4 The protection and development of a strong indigenous production base.
5 Inviolable national sovereignty

For Venezuela, Belarus is a model state because it has achieved what every progressive government in the world aspires to: near full employment and the elimination of extreme poverty. It has developed an impressive manufacturing base; maintained autonomy in the production of food; a consistently high rate of economic growth, and attained a standard of living and level of social equality unparalleled anywhere else in the developing world. This is precisely the dream of the Bolivarian Revolution and this is why the experience of Belarus since the fall of the Soviet Union is so important for the developing world.

Unlike Venezuela, which is emerging out of an extreme form of plutocracy where a tiny minority controlled the country’s wealth, Belarus has emerged from the Soviet Union where social classes had been eradicated during the construction of socialism in the 1920s and 30s.

In this sense Belarus has a distinct advantage over Venezuela as it does not have a super-rich bourgeoisie using its connections with the United States to prevent re-distribution of wealth. Belarus does, however, have the aforementioned fifth column, but they do not possess the obscene wealth and power of their Venezuelan counterparts.

President Lukashenko’s vision of a multi-polar world threatens the proponents of a New World Order, where the interests of the many are subordinated to those of the Euro-Atlantic financial elites.

Unlike neighboring states such as Poland and Lithuania, for whom “freedom” since the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 has resulted in mass unemployment, emigration, and the supply of troops for NATO’s foreign wars and occupations, Belarus has shown that the state has a vital role in regulating the market for the general good.

If global poverty is to be eradicated, then sustainable industries, endogenous development and planned economies will have to become the norm. Belarus, perhaps more than any other country, could play a leading role in the transition to a new global era of socially-oriented economies.

The Venezuelan ambassador to Belarus Americo Diaz Nunez recently told reporters in Minsk that:

The two countries are implementing joint projects to construct brick manufacturing plants, assemble tractors and trucks (this facility will open in Venezuela soon), construct agro-towns, produce oil and gas, build more than 20,000 apartments and trade in goods. It is impossible to ignore the fact that Belarus really helps change the life of the Venezuelans.

The constructive and creative relationship between two countries in different continents aimed at improving the living standards of the many rather than the privileges of the few, is in stark contrast to the belligerent and decadent kleptocracies of the West who mask their lucre-lust in high-sounding phrases about “human rights” and “democracy” while proceeding to kill the social hope of billions of people.

The Venezuelan-Belarus relationship is a unique example of what international diplomacy in a socialist world could mean for humanity.

The international media campaign of demonization, calumny, lies and disinformation about the Belarusian government has fooled not only die-hard proponents of neo-liberal economics but many so-called “leftists” and “progressives”, who have fallen for the double speak about “human rights,” “freedom,” and “democracy.”

The absence of solidarity by the European “left” with the Republic of Belarus is a symptom of just how corrosive and all-pervasive capitalist ideology has become in Western post-modern societies. This is a trend which will lead to social and political catastrophe if not is not reversed.

Ales Bialiatski: legally a convicted criminal, ideologically a “human rights activist”

On the 8th of August as plans for the siege of Sirte in Libya were underway, American senator John McCain was already signaling that Belarus would be America’s next target for regime change. McCain referred to the imprisonment of Ales Bialiatski, the so-called “human rights” activist arrested by the Belarusian authorities for fiscal fraud in 2011.

Bialiatski is the vice-president of the International Federation of Human Rights, (Fédération internationale des ligues des droits de l’Homme) a sub-organisation of which provided the United Nation’s Human Rights Council with false information in February 2011 accusing the Libyan government of “massacres” in Benghazi.

This false information served as a pretext for a war of aggression that led to the killing of tens of thousands of people, reducing a prosperous socially-oriented economy to rubble and imposing a corrupt foreign-selected dictatorship against the wishes of the Libyan people.

The barbaric destruction of the Libyan Jamahirya should serve as a sufficient lesson to any intelligent person of what NATO countries mean by “human rights,” “democracy,” and the “rule of law.”

Amnesty International’s condemnation of Bialiatski’s prosecution, without showing any proof of a miscarriage of justice on the part of the Belarusian courts, shows that the so-called “human rights” organization is more concerned with providing moral legitimacy for the foreign policy objectives of Western governments than protecting human rights.

Bialiatski was arrested by the Polish and Lithuanian police for fiscal fraud on intelligence supplied to them by Interpol. He was not arrested for his political opposition to the Belarusian government. This is not the first time Amnesty International has falsely accused Belarus of human rights violations and it is unlikely to be the last.

Since Bialiatski’s imprisonment, the Polish government has moved to prevent further Interpol arrest warrants issued from “undemocratic” countries. This is rather farcical coming from a state where wearing a Che Guevara T-Shirt could land you in jail!

The human rights charade is now becoming so ridiculous it is likely to backfire in the long term. Regime change specialists such as Canvas, a US funded colour revolution training centre based in Belgrade, are now orchestrating stunts involving the use of naked women protesting outside the KGB headquarters in Minsk. Behaviour of this kind would get one arrested in any country.

However, the point of the exercise is, in fact, to get arrested, film it and thereby embarrass the KGB. But the KGB, being an intelligence agency, have pre-empted their plans and the silly nudists have only succeeded in catching a cold and providing light entertainment for pedestrians, all in the cause of the “revolution.”

That Amnesty International should hold openly take sides in favour of US-funded pseudo-dissidents should not surprise us. After all, the head of Amnesty International USA Suzanne Nossel is a former assistant to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and the man they call Dr. Stranglove, former National Security Advisor, Zbigniew Brzezinski is also a former board member of the same human rights organisation.

The Threat of NATO and its minions

The war of aggression waged against Libya in 2011 and the current covert war being waged by NATO agencies against Syria have shown that the Euro-Atlantic powers have, as in the past, decided to use war as a means of securing a re-division of the world propitious to their geo-political interests.

The sophisticated disinformation campaign waged against Libya by social media and international satellite TV channels that saw Africa’s richest country bombed to ruins, should serve as a warning to the Belarusian government of the danger posed by NATO to world peace.

Thanks to the exemplary actions of the Belarusian security forces during the post-election riots of December 19th 2010, an unpopular Western-imposed dictatorship was averted. The Belarusian people have seen the horror and immiseration of Western-backed regime change in Serbia, Georgia, Ukraine, Kyrgystan and other countries. The US-funded colour coups have been smashed in the Republic of Belarus and they are not likely to succeed in the near future.

Given the failure of CIA-backed colour revolutions in Belarus in the recent past and the country’s proximity to Russia, it is difficult to imagine what strategy NATO will devise in order to place its puppets in Minsk.

However, a strategy of tension involving the use of covert mercenaries disguised as peaceful protestors such as we have seen in Syria, presents a real danger for the Republic of Belarus in the coming months.

Addressing the Belarusian Armed Forces on February 23rd president Lukashenko noted political and information technologies of Western NGOs effected regime change across North Africa. Belarus, he stressed, has the unity and technical ability to withstand such destabilization.

Conlusion

President Lukashenko once remarked that dishonest journalists can be worse than assassins. The centrality of mass media disinformation during the Libyan war and the ongoing demonization campaign against the Republic of Belarus have shown the danger which news stenographers to corporate power pose for humanity.

The clash between the politics of human endogenous development and the politics of cancerous greed is the internecine conflict facing our world today. If there is to be a future for the next generation, a multi-polar world based on Westphalian sovereignty and endogenous socio-economic development will have to built.

That is why those of us who stand for world peace, economic development and international law, must continue to expose the slanderous corporate media campaign against the socially-oriented domestic and foreign policy of the Republic of Belarus.

Honest and earnest criticism from those whose
interests are most nearly touched, — criticism
of writers by readers, of government by those
governed, of leaders by those led,– this is the soul
of democracy and the safeguard of modern society.

– W.E.B. Dubois, The Souls of Black Folks, 1903

At first blush, the recent imbroglio between Professors Cornel West (Princeton) and Melissa Harris-Perry (Tulane) appears to have burst upon the political landscape sui generis, unexpected and unprecedented. Au contraire, however. There is deep history here of divisive, rancorous debate among Black leaders, including scholars, artists , writers, business types, and within the masses of Black people themselves. I’ll lightly plumb that history shortly. First, though, how did we come to this present juncture (impasse?) where two prominent Black professors seem to revel in calling each other everything but a child of God and in full public view?

The first salvo came when author Chris Hedges penned a Truthdig column and quoted West as saying that this First Black President is a “black mascot of Wall Street oligarchs and corporate plutocrats.” West came thisclose to accusing President Obama of being an Uncle Tom. Uncle Tom or not, mascot or not, in West’s eyes Obama has shown himself to be a 21st Century version of an ever-present nemesis in the Black community – the common, ordinary sell-out. West offered as Exhibit A the President’s refusal to directly address record-levels of Black and poor peoples’ poverty, unemployment, and the sharply downward spiral of all Black socio-economic indicators except one: the unconscionable, blatantly racist, explosive rise in the mass incarceration of Black men. West allowed that both on paper and in the hard reality that is Black life today, these conditions have only been exacerbated since Obama took office.

Harris-Perry practically tripped over her outrage as she ran to her keyboard to defend the President. West, she wrote breathlessly in the Nation magazine, labored under obvious misconceptions about the President, the presidency itself, and most especially his (West’s) own (mis)understanding of his role in Obama’s 2008 election. The then President-Elect had failed to personally invite him to his history-making inauguration. Indeed, West, she said, felt personally aggrieved, personally slighted, personally snubbed, but even worse, publicly ignored and dissed. Well, in the Hedges piece West did admit that he totaled up the score of his 65 campaign events against his Dee Cee limo driver’s zero events. Yet, he lamented, the chauffeur, had received an inaugural invitation while he, the well heeled, well spoken, well traveled, socially conscious, and world renowned professor, had not.

West’s critique of the President broadened to include all “liberals” and “progressives”, black, white or otherwise, who continue to support the President’s silence and inaction on the poverty issue. West appeared on Ed Shultz’s MSNBC talk fest in April of ’11, and confronted the Right Reverend Al Sharpton about his role as the new H.N.I.C. (Head Negro In Charge) of the National Black or African American Nation-State (N.B.A.A.N.S.) and his coziness with the Obama Administration. West again hurled the “black mascot” sobriquet – this time squarely at Rev. Al. Actual sparks flew during that little tete-a-tete. Then West and best-bud talk show host Tavis Smiley promptly embarked upon a highly publicized “Poverty Tour” through several urban and rural areas, highlighting the deteriorating state of America’s poor and near-poor at each stop.

Both Rev. Al and Dr. Harris-Perry have since been awarded (rewarded?) by MSNBC with talk shows of their own. Unimpressed, West’s most recent indictment against Harris-Perry appeared in Diverse Issues In Higher Education magazine and conflated criticism of Rev. Al’s fledgling TV presence with Harris-Perry’s newborn show. In a sort of pre-review of her debut, he described the good doctor and her new media perch thusly: “She’s become the momentary darling of liberals, but I pray for her because she’s in over her head….She’s a fake and a fraud. I was so surprised how treacherous the sister was.”
This is getting deep. But it is not new.

During slavery there were Black people content to remain slaves, who supported their white masters and mistresses in every way imaginable, including most especially “snitching” on those who sought to escape slavery altogether. Indeed, a major reason why there were never any successful slave revolutions in America is that the plans were betrayed by the masters’ most trusted Black slaves every time. And, complicating matters even further, there were a few Black slaveholders whose twisted logic and supremely cognitive dissonance allowed them to oppress their own people.

The separation-versus-assimilationist argument garnered its widest audience during an ongoing debate between the two most ardent Black abolitionists of the 19th Century: Frederick Douglass and Martin R. Delany. Douglass’ efforts for the abolition of slavery and full integration into the body politic are well celebrated and documented. Less well known is that Martin R. Delany, a free-born Harvard trained medical doctor and the highest ranking Black officer during the Civil War, was the major proponent, personification and putative father of what today is called Black Nationalism and Pan-Africanism. He, along with African Methodist Episcopal Bishop Henry McNeil Turner and a handful of other “race men,” were unapologetic in their call for total independence from white America; for the establishment of an independent African nation-state; and/or for joining the already established “private” American colony on Africa’s west coast – Liberia.

Early in both men’s careers, Delany and Douglass had collaborated in publishing Douglass’ first newspaper, The North Star, later renamed Frederick Douglass’ Paper. But they soon fell out over whether to separate from this white American nightmare by emigrating en masse back to Africa or remaining here to fight the good fight, and keep the faith that the American white man and woman would someday come to their senses. Their disagreement descended into an ongoing, vociferous, personal fracas, every bit as loud and public as that of our own professors of today.

The epigraph which opens this essay is drawn from Dr. W.E.B. Dubois’ 1903 signature work, The Souls Of Black Folks. There his “Of Mr. Booker T. Washington and Others” answered virulent criticisms of his less than flattering comments about the then reigning H.N.I.C. – Booker T. Washington, creator and driving force behind what Dubois dubbed the “Tuskegee Machine.” The Washington/Dubois divide picked up where the Douglass/Delany schism had ended and indeed revolved around many of the same issues, particularly
assimilation/integration versus separation/emigration, and vocational/technical education versus “liberal arts” and the social sciences. Dubois promulgated that only the top “Talented Tenth” percentile of Blacks must be identified and groomed for leadership roles throughout the Black community, and thereby raise the intellectual consciousness and abilities of the whole race. (In today’s terms, think of this as a sort of a “trickle-down” of intelligence theory). But Dubois went further, much further. He demanded immediate political, economic and social equality with the white majority.

Washington was having none of it. He argued that the way forward was via agricultural and “industrial” education for the masses of Black folks in pursuit of more acceptable (by whites) occupations and vocations, which were, after all, more apropos of our needs – and abilities – at that time. “Equality,” most particularly political and social equality, were utterly anathema and had to wait until the Negro could support himself, his family and his whole people economically. And, yes, just like our own professors today, things got heated between Washington and Dubois… and very personal.

Washington died unexpectedly in 1915, but not before he had corresponded with a young Jamaican firebrand living in London named Marcus Mosiah Garvey, Jr. Garvey arrived in New York in 1916, too late to meet his hero, but full of fury against all things white. He had been an editor, printer, writer and union leader in Jamaica and Costa Rica; and had long been an admirer of Martin Delany and Bishop Turner, as well as Washington. All three men were dead when he hit the street corners of Harlem.

The Supreme Court had declared in 1897 that Blacks had no rights which whites were bound to respect and established “separate but equal” as a matter of law. Plessy vs. Ferguson would reign supreme for the next 77 years. In 1916, the two best organized Black organizations – the church and the N.A.A.C.P. – had no real answer for Plessy or a resurgent Ku Klux Klan and its lynching pogrom throughout the South. America was on the verge of entering another “Great War,” this time in Europe, but still seriously pondered whether Black men were necessary, trustworthy enough or even intellectually and physically capable of taking up arms in her behalf. It was within this toxic climate that Garvey abandoned Washington’s gradualist-assimilationist-accomodationist approach and discerned a leadership vacuum among Black people. He began filling it by preaching a new twist on Delany’s old gospel: “Africa for the Africans!” Inexorably, ever larger crowds and eventually massive throngs of Black folks flocked to hear this black-as-coal foreigner alternately urge, admonish or shame them to rise “Up you mighty race! You can accomplish what you will!”

Beyond his oratorical skills, Garvey was the consummate “community organizer.” He had already established his Universal Negro Improvement Association (U.N.I.A.) and African Communities (Imperial) League in Jamaica and London. And Harlem was more than ready for Garvey’s message. The U.N.I.A. quickly eclipsed all other Negro organizations, including even the Black church and the N.A.A.C.P. (whose Crisis magazine had as its editor none other than Dr. W.E.B. Dubois himself who had also played a large role in founding the organization). At its height the U.N.I.A. claimed a worldwide paying membership of 4.5 million souls, half of them in the U.S., making it the largest mass movement in American history. There were branches in Central and South America, the West Indies, Canada, and Europe.

Garvey led massive protest meeting and marches against lynching in the South, petitioned Congress and the President for anti-lynching legislation, set up businesses of all types, including the Negro Factories Corporation and the Black Star Line Steamship Company. One of its first ships, which actually did repatriate at least one shipload of Blacks to Liberia, was christened The Frederick Douglass.

Dubois was not impressed by Marcus Garvey, and in fact was resentful and jealous of his success. After waiting 25 years to step into Washington’s shoes after his death, Dubois felt upstaged by the young upstart Garvey. By virtue of his scholarly achievements and his prominence within the Black community, Dubois felt entitled to the premier role of leadership. The pattern of a single reigning Black “leader” had be set by Douglass’ triumph over Delany a generation earlier. Dubois felt it was his “turn.”

As petty as it sounds, he did not cotton to Garvey’s appearance. He just simply did not look like a Black leader was supposed to look. He did not have the regal bearing of a Frederick Douglass nor the steely-eyed military countenance and education of a Dr. Delany. Garvey was short, overweight, and much too dark to represent the likes of the cultured and sophisticated Dr. W.E.B. Dubois and his vaunted Talented Tenth. In street clothes, Marcus Garvey looked like a field slave. And when he donned his feathered, braided, and officious-looking “Provisional President of Africa” uniform, Dr. Dubois publicly called him a buffoon.

In the May, 1924 issue of The Crisis, Dubois had this to say about Marcus Garvey:

Marcus Garvey is, without doubt, the most dangerous enemy of the Negro race in America and in the world. He is either a lunatic or a traitor…. The American Negroes have endured this wretch all too long with fine restraint and every effort at cooperation and understanding…. Every man who apologizes for or defends Marcus Garvey from this day forth writes himself down as unworthy of countenance of decent Americans.

Not to be outdone, Garvey called Dubois an over-educated, pompous mulatto, who was out of touch with Black people. He ridiculed Dubois’ Talented Tenth idea as elitist, and scoffed at the notion that white people would ever accept Blacks on equal terms no matter how educated or “cultured” they might someday become. In the February 13, 1923 issue of The Negro World, Garvey made his objections to Dubois clear:

It is no wonder that Du Bois seeks the company of white people, because he hates Black as being ugly…Yet this professor, who sees ugliness in being Black, essays to be a leader of the Negro people and has been trying for over fourteen years to deceive them in connection with the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. Now what does he mean by advancing Colored people if he hates Black so much?… [I]t is in the direction of losing our Black identity and becoming, as nearly as possible, the lowest Whites by assimilation and miscegenation.

I’ll leave the historical comparisons here. But surely my point is made.
Drs. Cornel West and Melissa Harris-Perry’s disagreement is actually a healthy development in this so-called post-racial or “colorblind” era. These are not, as some suggest, petty differences. And, their approaches are not mutually exclusive nor to be viewed as an on/off, binary dynamic. Rather, they complement each other in the sense that many Black people still question this First Black President’s “Blackness.” “Is he Black enough?” Obama’s presence, his “pedigree”, and our professors’ disagreement over just what it all means should cause us to re-think the meaning of Blackness, indeed, the very relevance of Blackness. As a group, and if we wish to remain a cohesive group, we must come to grips with Obama’s Blackness or lack thereof, and then move Blackness forward and into the 21st century, independent of him if necessary. Is it enough to simply have Black faces in high places? Didn’t we learn anything from the example of Clarence Thomas? Oh yes, we knew before Bush I nominated him that he was toxic, but no one imagined him to be as eager a destroyer of Black people as he has turned out to be. Look, we have suffered, struggled, survived and thrived under 43 presidents before Obama. We cannot… we must not allow his presence to accomplish what all those past presidents could not – complete destruction of “the Black Community.”

The question of his authenticity has been updated: “Will this First Black President reveal his “true” colors in a second term?” Entertainer and civil rights giant Harry Belafonte says it does not matter what he might do in a second term. This first term has been revealing enough.

Some appeal to Michelle Obama’s presence as evidence of Obama’s authenticity. Here in Chicago it is well known that Michelle and Jesse Jackson’s oldest daughter were best buds and schoolmates. So for a young ambitious Black lawyer-politician in Chicago during the ’80s, what better way to join Chicago’s Black political elite than to date and then marry the best friend of the daughter of the most famous Black man in America? We did hope that Michelle Obama would hold his feet to the Black fire through some strategic pillow talk. After more than three years as “First Lady,” what should we make of Michelle Obama? Has she visited any homeless shelters or soup kitchens in Dee Cee? Any jails or prisons? Any of Washington’s crumbling public schools? Chicago contains the second largest Black ghetto in the country. Yet, when either of them come “home,” they never seem to find time to get beyond their fund raisers in the big hotels downtown. Has either of these two shown any concern for their “own” people beyond lip service? Yes, of course we fully realize that he is President of the United States, and not President of Black America. But aren’t we Americans, too?

Finally, a word about the “lesser of two evils” argument. It’s true that any one of the current Republican Party presidential candidates would be worse than anything this First Black President might do. The Republicans are driving us all over a cliff at 100 miles an hour. President Obama, the Democrats and their Black and white enablers, sycophants and subalterns are doing so at “only” 60 miles an hour. The lesser of two evils is still evil.

Our nation, so richly endowed with natural resources and with a capable and industrious population, should be able to devise ways and means of insuring to all our able-bodied men and women, a fair day’s pay for a fair day’s work.

– Franklin Delano Roosevelt, 1937

Millions of people in the US work and are still poor. Here are eight points that show why the US needs to dedicate itself to making work pay.

One. How many people work and are still poor?

In 2011, the US Department of Labor reported at least 10 million people worked and were still below the unrealistic official US poverty line, an increase of 1.5 million more than the last time they checked. The US poverty line is $18,530 for a mom and two kids. Since 2007 the numbers of working poor have been increasing. About 7 percent of all workers and 4 percent of all full-time workers earn wages that leave them below the poverty line.

Two. What kinds of jobs do the working poor have?

One third of the working poor, over 3 million people, work in the service industry. Workers in other occupations are also poor: 16 percent of those in farming; 11 percent in construction; and 11 percent in sales.

Three. Which workers are most likely to be working and still poor?

Women workers are more likely to be poor than men. African American and Hispanic workers are about twice as likely to be poor as whites. College graduates have a 2 percent poverty rate while workers without a high school diploma have a poverty rate 10 times higher at 20 percent.

Four. What about benefits for low wage workers?

Ten percent of US workers earn $8.50 an hour or less according to the US Department of Labor. About 12 percent have health care and about 12 percent have retirement benefits. Nearly one in four get paid sick leave and less than half get paid vacation leave.

Five. What rights do the working poor have?

Most workers have a right to earn at least the federal minimum wage of $7.50 an hour. Tipped employees are supposed to get at least $2.13 each hour from their employer and if the worker does not earn enough in tips to make the $7.50 minimum wage, the employer must make up the difference. People who work more than 40 hours in a workweek are entitled to one and one-half of their regular pay for each hour of overtime.

Six. What about wage theft from the working poor?

Many low wage workers have part of their earnings stolen by their employers. Examples include not paying people the full minimum wage, not paying required overtime, stealing from tipped employees, or fraudulently classifying workers as independent contractors. A survey of over 4000 low wage workers in Chicago, Los Angeles and New York conducted by university and non-profit researchers found: 26 percent of the workers were paid less than the minimum wage in the previous week, a majority were underpaid by more than $1 an hour; a significant number worked overtime the previous week and were not paid the legally required overtime; many were required to come early or stay late and work “off the clock” and were not paid for it; almost a third of the tipped workers were not paid the minimum wage and more than 1 in 10 tipped workers had some of their money stolen by their employer or supervisor.

Seven. What is a living wage in the US?

Dr. Amy Glasmeier of Penn State University has created a Living Wage Calculator that estimates the hourly wage needed to pay the cost of living for low wage families in the US. It breaks down the cost of living by state and locality across the nation. In New Orleans, a mom with one child needs to earn $17.52 to make ends meet. In New York, the mom with one child should earn $19.66 to make it. If we now realistically calculate the number of people who work and do not earn a living wage, the numbers of working poor in the US skyrocket to several tens of millions.

Eight. What about jobs for the unemployed and underemployed?

The US Labor Department estimated recently that 13 million people were unemployed. Another 8 million people were working part-time but wanted full-time work. Even more millions who are not working are not counted in those numbers because they have been unemployed so long.

A study by Northeastern University found that in the poorest families, unemployment is nearly 31 percent. Underemployment is also much more of a problem in poor homes, with over 20 percent of those workers reporting they are working part-time but seeking full-time work.

Our nation can do so much more. We say our country values work. It is time to do something about it.

If the US truly values work, we need to support the millions of our sisters and brothers who are low wage workers. Steps needed include: raising the minimum wage to a living wage; protecting workers from getting ripped off; making it easier for workers to organize together if they choose to; and creating jobs, public jobs if necessary, so that everyone who wants to work can do so. Many are already working on these justice issues.

For those interested in learning more about this, see the websites of Interfaith Worker Justice, the National Employment Law Project, and the National Jobs for All Coalition.

“Everything that the American troops have done in Iraq–all the fighting and all the dying, the bleeding and the building, and the training and the partnering–all of it has led to this moment of success,” Obama said. “[W]e’re leaving behind a sovereign, stable and self-reliant Iraq, with a representative government that was elected by its people.”

Such claims are a lie. None of this rhetoric can disguise the terrible waste of the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq–as many as 1 million Iraqis dead, millions more driven from their homes, along with 4,500 U.S. soldiers killed, 32,000 wounded and nearly $1 trillion gone.

Obama’s claims about America’s “extraordinary achievement” in Iraq are Orwellian. In reality, the U.S. war and occupation further wrecked an already devastated country, left it in a shambles rather than rebuild it and stoked sectarianism between Iraq’s three main groups–Kurds, Shia Muslims and Sunni Muslims.

The U.S. already precipitated one civil war between Sunnis and Shias in 2006. And now, sectarian conflicts are threatening to explode again.

Shortly after the U.S. withdrawal, Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki, a Shia, attempted to arrest Vice President Tariq al-Hashimi, a Sunni. Hashimi fled to the Kurdish region for sanctuary. Sunni Salafists, who view Shias as infidels, have launched a wave of attacks that killed scores of Shia during their religious holiday of Arbaeen.

Post-occupation Iraq may be poised to descend into three-cornered warfare.

In the 1970s, Iraqis–though living under the brutal rule of Saddam Hussein’s regime–had achieved economic development and living standards on a par with Greece.

Over the last three decades, the U.S. has wrecked the country.

The U.S. launched the 1991 Gulf War to prevent Iraq from becoming a regional power that could threaten American control over the Middle East and its strategic oil reserves. The first Gulf War killed 300,000 Iraqis and destroyed the country’s infrastructure. Afterward, sanctions crippled Iraq’s economy, prevented reconstruction of the country, and led to the deaths of as many as 1.5 million more people.

In 2003, the Bush administration justified its invasion of the country with fabricated claims that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction. In reality, Bush hoped the invasion would begin a series of regime changes in the region, including in Iran and Syria. With allied regimes in place in these countries, the U.S. would be able to dominate the region, control access to oil and thereby assert power over its international rivals, especially China.

The invasion quickly succeeded in toppling Saddam Hussein. But in short order, the Iraqi resistance to occupation destroyed Bush’s imperial fantasies.

Nevertheless, the U.S. occupation inflicted a terrible price on Iraqis. The Lancet medical journal estimated that between the invasion in March 2003 and June 2006, there were 650,000 civilian deaths directly and indirectly attributable to the war. Opinion Research Business, a British polling agency, used the Lancet‘s methodology to estimate over a million civilian deaths between March 2003 and August 2007.

Far from rebuilding Iraq as promised, Iraq remains in worse shape today, eight years after the invasion, than it was Saddam Hussein.

Outside of the Kurdish north, most Iraqis still go without regular electricity and don’t have reliable supplies of potable water. The Iraqi economy is in disastrous shape, with sky-high levels of unemployment and poverty. Journalist Juan Cole reports that the number of Iraqis living in slums jumped from 17 percent before the occupation to 50 percent today.

Instead of leaving behind a stable democracy responsive to its people, the U.S. established a corrupt state similar to that in Lebanon. Kurdish, Sunni and Shia ruling classes compete, via their political parties, in a three-way battle for the spoils of the national government. According to Transparency International, Iraq’s new government is the eighth-most corrupt in the world.

Perhaps the single-worst aspect of the entire legacy of occupation is the sectarianism and ethnic chauvinism that the U.S. consciously stoked and then used as the basis of the country’s new political system.

Iraq had a history of ethnic and religious oppression–though nominally secular, Saddam Hussein’s Baathist regime was predominantly Sunni. It repressed Kurdish aspirations for self-determination, and crushed Kurdish and Shia uprisings at the end of the first Gulf War.

Iraq, however, did not have a history of mass sectarianism and ethnic cleansing. But the U.S. occupation magnified and militarized these divisions, eventually triggering a full-blown civil war between Sunnis and Shias in Baghdad during 2006.

Iraq’s three major groups–Shia, Sunni and Kurds–reacted differently to the 2003 invasion.

The Sunni ruling class saw the U.S. war as an attack on its historic control over the country–confirmed by the occupation authorities’ “de-Baathification” program that hit Sunnis the hardest–and it went into resistance right away. The Kurdish ruling class, on the other hand, saw the invasion as a chance to consolidate its autonomous zone in the North, established after the first Gulf War.

The Shia ruling class and its religious parties Dawa and the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq (ISCI) tried to use the invasion to gain control of the new government. Since the Shia were a majority of Iraq’s population, Dawa and the ISCI pressed hard for elections to consolidate their dominance–which encouraged Sunnis to view them with hostility. Only the Shia nationalist Moktada al-Sadr and his Mahdi Army organized protests against the occupation.

When the U.S. targeted Sadr and his followers with repression, it raised the possibility of an Arab opposition uniting Sunnis and Shia against the occupation. In response, the U.S. turned to the oldest trick in the imperialist book–divide and conquer.

When the U.S. appointed up an Interim Governing Council, it used the Lebanese model, assigning each community representatives in proportion to their percentage of the population. But the pressure continued for elections. When they came, the U.S. had designed them in a fashion that cemented the religious and ethnic divisions in Iraqi society. As author Nir Rosen wrote:

Iraq’s election law itself seemed designed to promote civil war. Although the diverse country is divide into 18 province, it had only one electoral district…Ethnic and religious blocs preferred one district because they were nationally known, and they would be able to avoid challengers who had genuine grassroots local support.

Faced with impending defeat, the Sunni elite called for a boycott of the elections, which culminated in the victory for a succession of Shia-dominated governments. Sunni Salafist forces organized in various formations, including Al-Qaeda in Mesopotamia. The Salafists staged a series of bombings and attacks on Shia civilians. Even the Sadrists turned against the Sunnis then.

A civil war between Shia and Sunni exploded in 2006, with Baghdad as the chief battleground.

Instead of using its occupation forces to stop the conflict, the U.S. fueled it. Washington’s Ambassador to Iraq, John Negroponte, had made his mark during the Reagan administration, backing death squads in Honduras, El Salvador and Nicaragua against left-wing movements and governments.

Negroponte implemented the so-called “Salvador Option” of backing Shia death squads against the Sunni resistance. He encouraged the Shia ISCI party to incorporate its militia, the Badr Brigades, into the Interior Ministry’s security forces. He then encouraged them to target not only the Salafists, but also the Sunni resistance itself.

The Shia-dominated Badr Bridgades and sections of Sadr’s Mahdi Army launched a massive counter-attack against Sunnis in Baghdad. Entire neighborhoods were ethnically cleansed.

In the end, according to the UN Refugee Agency, the fighting drove 4.7 million from their homes. Over 2 million mostly Sunnis fled the country, half of them to Syria, and another 2 million were internally displaced.

“There is no national identity any longer,” Ghassan al-Attiyah, an Iraqi political scientist and commentator, told journalist Patrick Cockburn. “Iraqis are either Sunni, Shia or Kurd.”

Negroponte and the U.S. had another twist in store. In 2007, the U.S. made overtures to sections of the Sunni elite–as part of the so-called “surge” of troops into Iraq–with the aim of exploiting divisions between the broader Sunni resistance and the Salafist groups. Over the protests of the Maliki government, the U.S. hired 100,000 Sunni resistance fighters and paid them $300 a month to form the Awakening Councils to fight a proxy war against the Salafists.

U.S. policies enflamed the sectarian conflict not only in Iraq, but across the Middle East.

The U.S. had planned to move on from Iraq to take down the Shia-dominated regime in Iran and Iran’s allies in power in Syria. But bogged down by the Iraqi resistance and the civil war, the U.S. hand in the Middle East was growing weaker. Iran gradually became as influential in Iraq as the U.S. itself.

The U.S. responded by raising the specter of a “Shia Crescent,” headquartered in Iran and extending through a Shia-dominated Iraq to Syria and the forces of Hezbollah in Lebanon. As Nir Rosen wrote, “The Bush administration contributed to regional sectarianism, seeking to bolster the so-called ‘moderate Sunni regimes’ (dictatorships like Egypt, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia, viewed as moderate because they collaborated with Israel and the United States) against Iran or Hezbollah.”

U.S. allies like Saudi Arabia were only too happy to respond to the call for a network of Sunni states aligned with the U.S. against Iran and its influence in Iraq. The Saudis, along with the U.S. and Turkey, poured money into Iraqiya, an Iraqi party led by the secular Shia Ayad Allawi, but which had won 80 percent of the Sunni vote in recent elections. Iran, on the other hand, backed the Shia formations, from ISCI to Dawa and the Sadrists.

The battle over control of the Iraqi state came to a head in the 2010 parliamentary elections. Because of disagreements among them, the Shia parties didn’t put up candidates as part of a united slate, and Iraqiya was able to win the largest block of seats in parliament. Nevertheless, Maliki was able to unite the Shia parties to form a government.

The Sadrists agreed to participate–but on the condition that Maliki refuse to renegotiate the Status of Forces Agreement that the Bush administration had struck with the Iraqi government in 2008. Under the agreement, the U.S. was required to withdraw completely from Iraq by the end of 2011.

Despite pressure from the Obama administration to allow some number of U.S. military troops to remain in Iraq, with immunity from prosecution, Maliki refused to go along, and the U.S. was forced to pull its last soldiers out of Iraq in the middle of the night on December 18.

With the U.S. left with only a force of mercenaries in Iraq working for the State Department out of the giant Baghdad embassy, the situation in Iraq has reached a new stage–and the sectarian conflict threatens to explode once again into civil war.

Each of the sections of Iraqi ruling class is angling for full or partial control over the state, leadership of Iraq’s 900,000 military troops and police, and access to the country’s huge oil revenues.

The Kurdish ruling class, represented by Masoud Barzani of the Kurdistan Democratic Party, aims to consolidate its autonomous province and seize control of the contested city of Kirkuk, with its large oil reserves. Sunni politicians, represented in parliament by Allawi’s Irakiya party, want to establish a Sunni autonomous zone. Meanwhile, Shia leaders in Nuri al-Maliki’s coalition government aim to consolidate their rule over the country as a whole.

These schisms have detonated a political crisis.

Less than 24 hours after U.S. forces withdrew, Maliki, responding to an assassination attempt, ordered the arrest of Hashimi, the Sunni vice president of the coalition government, on terrorism charges mainly relating to the 2006-07 period. Hashimi fled to the autonomous Kurdish territory, where he remains. Maliki’s forces were able to arrest the vice president’s bodyguards, who were coerced into confessing to terrorist activities on national television.

Thousands of Sunnis have protested in various cities against the threatened arrest of Hashimi. The Iraqiya Party is now boycotting parliament and cabinet meetings to protest what it describes as Maliki’s attempt to consolidate dictatorial power, particularly over the security forces. Iraqiya is calling for Maliki to step down or face a no confidence vote.

At the same time, Sunni Salafist guerillas have launched a wave of attacks on Shia civilians and religious pilgrims. The Salafists have killed 145 Shias on a pilgrimage during the Arbaeen holidays. In one horrific attack on January 5, Salafists killed 78 pilgrims in Nasiriyah.

It is hard to predict whether the political crisis will descend into a full-blown civil war, but there are certainly dynamics driving in that direction.

For their part, the Salafists are intent on causing this. Leaders among the Sunni, Shia and Kurdish ruling classes also have an interest in playing the sectarian card to divert the anger of a desperate working class and urban poor onto other religious and ethnic groups.

The flashpoints are clear. Maliki’s attempt to consolidate a Shia state is a provocation to both Sunnis and Kurds. As Nir Rosen writes, “Government buildings are decorated with Shiite flags, banners and posters, and these can be seen even on Iraqi Army and Police vehicles and checkpoints. Not only is there no separation of church and state, there is no separation of state and sect.”

The Sunni elite’s demand for a Sunni autonomous zone could lead to another round of ethnic cleansing. Any such zone would contain a significant Shia minority who would be second-class citizens. No doubt the Salafists would take the opportunity to target the Shia, and this would provoke counter-attacks on Sunni minorities in predominantly Shia areas.

The Sunni Awakening Councils could also turn against the Shia government. The U.S., which had been bankrolling the Awakening Councils, has pressured Maliki into continue the payments and incorporating the councils into the Iraqi military. But Maliki has only hired one-sixth of these fighters. The well-armed Awakening Councils could be the basis of Sunni military attacks on Maliki’s ramshackle army.

Meanwhile, the long-simmering conflict between Arab and Kurdish rulers in Iraq could explode over control of the northern city of Kirkuk. Kirkuk sits on key oil reserves that would be a bonanza for whoever rules over it. A long-running, low-intensity conflict between Kurdish Peshmerga fighters and Arabs could reignite at any time.

On the other hand, there are interests and dynamics that could prevent the slide toward civil war.

The Shia, Sunni and Kurdish ruling classes have a stake in maintaining access to the national state and its oil profits. If the conflict goes too far, this would undermine their ability to continue to enrich themselves through state office. As journalist Patrick Cockburn wrote:

Disaster may come, but perhaps not yet. Iraqi politics can be misleading because, with the country so violent at the best of times, furious political confrontations do not necessarily lead to all-out conflict. Each side has a lot to lose from the final disintegration of the state.

Sunni rulers also recognize that they lost the last battle with Shia forces, and that they would likely lose any fight with either the Kurds, who have their own military forces in the Peshmerga, or the Shia, who control Iraqi military as well as a network of their own militias.

Among the Iraqi masses, there is also a deep weariness after three decades of war, sanctions, occupation and civil war. There is mass discontent with the entire government and distrust of national political parties that are widely perceived as corrupt, and only out to stuff their own pockets with government cash.

But no national political force has emerged to galvanize a united resistance among workers and urban poor against the government and the sectarian and chauvinist parties that dominate it. At various points, Iraqi oil workers seemed to point a way forward, but they have yet to create a national union movement nor a political party of their own that can break out of the stranglehold of communalist politics.

The U.S. and regional powers like Iran and Saudi Arabia will also be a factor in whether or not Iraq erupts in another civil war.

Each side in Iraq is weak in important ways, and so it looks to international sponsors for money and support. The Kurds look to the U.S. The Sunnis look to Saudi Arabia. And the Shia look to Iran and Syria. Thus, the growing schisms between the U.S. and the Sunni regimes it is allied with on the one hand, and Iran and its Shia allies on the other, will rebound into Iraq.

The U.S. remains the key player in all this. It has suffered a major defeat by having been forced to withdraw its military forces from Iraq. As a result, Iran has emerged as the principal victor of the Iraq war, with increased influence in the region. It now has a government dominated by Shia parties in control of Iraq to add to its historic relationship with the regime in Syria and Hezbollah in Lebanon.

The U.S. also faces a threat from below in the form of the Arab Revolutions, which have toppled two U.S. allies in Tunisia and Egypt and shaken other regimes in Washington’s network of Sunni monarchies and dictatorships.

But the U.S. is determined to shore up its declining influence in the region. It wants to maintain its power in Iraq itself. It still retains a large military base in the country, otherwise known as the U.S. Embassy. This facility is the size of 80 football fields and employs 16,000 staff, 5,000 of whom are military contractors. The U.S. hopes to be the broker between the various forces inside Iraq, using its alliance with the Sunnis and Kurds to prevent the full consolidation of a Shia state aligned with Iran.

Meanwhile, the U.S. is escalating its conflict with Iran, using the cover of Iran supposedly developing–does this sound familiar?–nuclear weapons of mass destruction. Washington’s allies Israel and Saudi Arabia are also important actors in a conflict that revolves around the same imperial interests at stake in the invasion of Iraq–control of Middle East oil and geopolitical dominance.

Thus, the sectarian conflict that the U.S. stoked in Iraq is being reproduced on a regional level–with the U.S., Israel and a network of Sunni regimes confronting Iran’s Shia government and its allies. The catastrophe that took place with the civil war in Iraq–and that threatens to break out again–could play out regionally, with horrifying consequences.

The hope amid this horror is working class solidarity across the ethnic and religious divisions. This is not a fantasy, but has been demonstrated at the high points of the Arab revolutions, such as the efforts to unite Muslims in defense of the oppressed Christian Copt minority in Egypt.

In reality, only the ruling class benefits from such communalist divisions. Sectarianism cannot provide jobs, electricity, food nor housing for working people and the poor. The working class in Iraq and throughout the Middle East will have to combat sectarianism, religious oppression and national oppression on the road to uniting the Arab working class in a struggle for a new Middle East.

Only such a struggle can stop the horrors that imperialism has unleashed in the form of ethnic cleansing, civil war, and regional war.

There would be no economy without a constant inflow of natural resources like the sun and the atmosphere, the soil, the seas, fossil fuels, minerals, etc throughput in the system. Most classical economists had their vision of a “stationary state” — the ontological destination of economic growth and development constrained by the planet’s population exploration vis-à-vis finiteness of arable land and the exhaustibility of non-renewable resources. Humanity does not produce these “fictitious commodities” but exploits them, as observed by Karl Polanyi in his pathbreaking treatise The Great Transformation (1944). Simply by holding title to a portfolio of real property, without any effort to increase their value, one could quickly turn a profit from social investments, as revealed in classical prudence. Karl Marx’s entire critique of political economy is based on the contradictions between use value and exchange value. Marx established that the soil had no “indestructible powers,” as it could be degraded leading to ecological destruction.

Marxism was never a major force in United States. The primary challenge to the classical tradition came from what has since come to be known as neo-classical economics. The classical tradition of economic thought was ably synthesized and represented by one dominant figure of the age in America: Henry George. His 1879 book, Progress and Poverty sold more copies throughout the world than any book till that time except the Bible. George propagated that conflating land into capital allowed land rent to be concealed and diluted and the undeserving windfalls accrued to “leisure class” speculators and led to depression of labour wages at the margin. Following the classical tradition, George recognized that there is no justification for the titleholders to reap the return of what society has invested. George advocated for a progressive tax because land was mostly concentrated among the wealthy. Mason Gaffney in his 1994 book The Corruption of Economics has described how most influential oligarchy in late nineteenth century America, the railroad barons exerted their manipulative power to preempt the possibility of any rent extracted from land use. Leading Economics scholars engaged in establishing the American Economic Association (AEA) were induced to change definitions and to initiate two-factor (capital and labour) neoclassical economics denying land and natural resources’ contribution in production process. To oppose and alienate George from the domain of economics had been the preoccupation to the founding members of the AEA that fetched a grand success.

Frederick Soddy, recipient of Chemistry Nobel Prize in 1921, considered economics a pseudoscience requiring a paradigm shift and offered an alternative perspective on economics, rooted in the laws of thermodynamics. Contrary to mainstream belief, economy used to draw energy from outside itself and thus incapable of generating infinite wealth. Sody’s critique has been furthered by Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen in his magnum opus The Entropy Law and the Economic Process (1971). Georgescu-Roegen considered the economy as a living system that used to draw from its environment valuable or low entropy matter and energy adjusted by equal quantity of polluting high entropy matter-energy back to the environment.

Classical economics was concerned about scarcity of savings as well as dangers of overconsumption. Thomas Malthus was a remarkable exception within the classical tradition who promoted the idea that underconsumption causes recession. Based on Malthusian conviction, J.M. Keynes came forward to reverse under-consumption and oversaving during the Great Depression of the 1930s in his The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money. (1936) that government spending and subsidized consumer spending can compensate for “demand deficiencies”. Keynesian revolution aimed at long-term growth of national income through consumption, investment, incremental capital/output ratio without considering physical and energetic realities. An American economist Murray Rothband observed that Keynes “possessed the tactical wit to dress up ancient statist and inflationist fallacies with modern, pseudoscientific jargon, making them appear to be the latest findings of economic science.” Keynes’ misrepresented Say’s Law as “supply creates its own demand” as if it were a quotation from J.B. Say. Paul Samuelson’s Foundations of Economic Analysis (1947) had initiated the mathematization of economics in a grand scale that provided the power to confuse the outsiders along with the economists incapable to cope with “competitive inflation of rigour”. The novelty of Milton Friedman’s essay, “The Methodology of Positive Economics” (1953), was in innovating the immateriality of background assumptions. According to another main proponent of neoclassical school of economics Robert Solow, technology has been the determinant factor of economic growth. Subsequent research has observed that Solow has failed to assess the energy processes of consumption, transformation, and depletion, though these factors are inseparable from the growth of industrial production.

Thus the treadmill of production, founded on the eternal law of capitalist circulation: supply creates its own demand, drives the expansion of production and consumption synergistically. The zero-sum game has its obvious tolls on wretched teeming millions mostly of the “other” world. Andre Gunder Frank elaborated his earlier “Development of Underdevelopment” thesis in a 2001 paper based on multilateralism and entropy on how the structure, process and transformation of the world-system generate the new wealth and poverty of nations. Entropy is dispersed from the more “ordered” regions and sectors of the global world economy to other less “ordered” regions that are obliged to absorb the entropy dissipated in their direction by the more “ordered” one. Global biophysical transformation engenders localized stresses in the forms of coastal erosion, ice melt, and infertile land and deteriorating water sources. Thus fast liquefying of Arctic cryosphere, causes matching rise in sea-beds that will result in submerging of several small-island states in Pacific and Indian Ocean by the end of twenty-first century. The catastrophic ecological crises manifested by growing human strive for higher per-capita consumption, the only indicator of economic growth, by deploying ruthlessly limited resources stored in a finite and fragile planet. Thus the project to divert Economics from the road to flourish as a disciplined study of humans’ economic activities in the broader socio-ecological context to a mere vocational training equipped with quantitative tools had been completed. A “boutique” or more aptly, a “comprador” economics had elevated to full-swing marginalising political and methodological plurality. Margaret Thatcher’s famous assertion that ‘there is no alternative’(TINA) and Francis Fukuyama’s equally famous verdict of ‘End of History…’ trumpet the advent of a particular political and economic system as the final destination of humanity’s socio-cultural evolution.

The global financial crisis surfaced in 2000s, apparently as a consequence of sub-prime housing mortgage practices in USA, has its root in growing disjuncture between the real economy of production and the paper economy of finance. As early as in 1920s, Soddy argued that the financial system could increase the public and private debts and mix-up this expansion of credit with the creation of real wealth. But growth of production and growth of consumption imply growth in the extraction and final destruction of fossil fuels. The obligation to pay debts at compound interest could be fulfilled either by inflation or economic growth. But economic growth is fallaciously measured because it is based on undervalued exhaustible resources and unvalued pollution. The myth of unlimited economic growth has all along been justified with unrealistic assumptions and “evergreen” predictions. Vested interests from late nineteenth century American railroad oligarchy to vanguards of Washington consensus have promoted the pseudoeconomics quixotically empowered to dominate academics and policy. Foucauldian knowledge-power discourse reminds us that if the values and political implications underlying the “growth business-as-usual” do not ensure how to protect the society, we can refuse to accept their imperatives and develop alternative epistemology.

But there I was, last Friday, in this hotel room in Atlanta, a city pretending there’s no Depression, chewing my complimentary morning donut, and Today is telling us about the “new face of American poverty.”

“More than 49 million Americans now live below the poverty line and a number of them like the family you’re about to meet propelled into bankruptcy by a one-two punch of job loss and a catastrophic health crisis.”

Wow! US television finally grabs the Big Issue.

This white suburban family called the Kleins have lost their home to eviction. They’re completely broke, because one of their kids got a tumor in her face. They have no insurance so the $100,000-plus medical bills wiped them out.

They live with neighbors and they hoped to at least get their kids a couple pair of underwear as a Christmas gift.

But if you think America doesn’t give a crap about the cancerous growth of poverty, just keep watching: The Today reporter takes the white family to WalMart where the bubbly journalist gushes, “The wonderful people of WalMart opened up their stores and their aisles and their hearts. The store is your oyster, Michelle!”

Then some WalMartian PR person tells the bankrupt mom to address the issue of long-term unemployment, “Let’s go shopping!”

And you thought America was cold-hearted, just because the Republicans tried to block unemployment insurance this Christmas for three million families.

On their free shopping spree, the Kleins got laptops and a Kindle, and a big-ass TV and all the good things that WalMart can provide.

And if you think WalMart has shown how selfless and caring Americans are, just wait until you find out what the Today show is giving America’s desperate poor: Simply the best-est gift ever …

“We saved the best for last!” The reporter tells the Kleins that NBC is flying them to New York, “to be on the Today show, to be on our set with Matt Lauer and Ann Curry!”

Matt and Ann! Both of them! Well, I bet they wouldn’t do that in North Korea or Sweden! Only in America!

Mr. Klein is so happy he’s meeting Ann that he doesn’t seem care anymore that he lost his job at Ford Motor. He just has his family. In some other family’s house, of course. But that’s a detail.

And if you thought this was just some cheap publicity stunt by WalMart, dig this, Mr. Cynical: WalMart is going to pay for all the Klein’s medical bills for a full year! And to pay for it, WalMart’s 1.4 million employees will not have all their medical bills covered for the year. Now, that’s generosity!

(This heartwarming segment of the Today show about the Klein kids, by the way, is sponsored by — no points for guessing: WalMart.)

But then I thought: wait a minute. What about ObamaCare? Once the plan is in place, no American can be denied insurance, even someone with a tumor in their face.

Americans love to hate ObamaCare. But isn’t that more valuable to the Kleins than a TV screen with no house to put it in?

Now, many of my friends will be surprised to hear me say this, as I’ve been quite skeptical about the accomplishments of the Pope of Hope. But let’s admit that Barack Obama tried to save the Kleins from medical-bill devastation, that he is trying to get them some unemployment insurance, trying (if on sketchy terms) to save the auto industry, all in the face of resistance of America’s hatred of Socialist Government.

Maybe we don’t need Santa Claus. Maybe we need Anti-Claus: A skinny ‘Muslim’ from Kenya squirming down your chimney!

America’s problem seems to be that it can only be cruel 364 days a year. Christmas is that time of year when the United States of Scrooge takes a vacation from heartless profiteering and the nasty joy Americans get, that “I’m-not-one-of-those-losers” frisson.

Listen to Rick and Newt and Mitt and Michele and Ron and what you get is the Great American F***’em! They lost their jobs? F***’em! Their kid has a tumor and they don’t have health insurance? F***’em!

Unless, of course, it’s Christmas and you have to look at the tumor on TV. Then, it’s like, Someone buy them a big-screen television so we don’t feel bad.

Santa’s erstaz elf, Bill O’Reilly, keeps talking about the “War on Christmas.” Because one day a year he has to dress up in Good Will to All Men drag. He can deck his halls with bags of bullshit make-believe kindness.

The rest of the year, he’s jerking off while talking dirty to his horrified female producers and raking in millions from the yahoos who haven’t lost their jobs yet.

So that’s it: for me, no more chestnuts roasting on an open fire. My chestnuts have gone down with my Lehman bonds, anyway. I’m declaring war on Christmas.

Don’t like that, O’Reilly? Then eat my shorts — with cranberry sauce.

Surgery for kids with cancer, a house to live in that’s not a relatives’ basement, and a job making something other than “financial products”… These are rights, not gifts. They don’t come down the chimney, they come from a community that can set aside its bred-in-the-bone meanness for more than one day a year.

And to all a good night.

Merry, um, Festivus, from the Palast Investigative Team.

Karl Marx may not have referred to the 1% and the 99% when he wrote of those extremes in the 19th century, but they certainly capture this moment in the 21st. Americans appalled at minority domination of national wealth as they pay for endless wars, increasing inequality and vanishing public services have joined a rising global movement for democracy.

65% of the planet’s 7 billion people are poor, bringing the 21st century still closer to Marx’s words of the 19th. Humanity’s call for another world is growing louder and more insistent. The forces of reaction are working to smother that voice through their private governments and media but also through supposedly public and even progressive political circles.

In a particularly sad irony, a budding form of anarchic democracy in America grows through the “Occupy” movement, while an attempt at such governance in Libya has been crushed, at least temporarily. The NATO attack succeeded in obliterating a governing force that tried representing a majority of the Libyan people. While Gaddafi’s regime made many mistakes after its initial socialist phase, perhaps most seriously in re-aligning with the treacherous west, its Green Book attempt to create real and not simply representative democracy was laughed at by cynics but in line with anarchist dreams of power coming from collective will and not individual leadership. Many in the Occupy movement may not know what really happened in Libya, but under thought control exercised by agents of the 1% relatively few have any idea.

More important, growing numbers of people are learning that minority ruled society is the root cause of most problems facing humanity. That these problems grow more severe each day makes the increased demand for change both timely and ever more necessary. The Climate Change meetings in Durban that found the 1% ruling powers standing in the way of any change threatening their fanatic worship of private investment and belief in the market deity only showed more conclusively that democracy of the 99% must become reality to end the hypocritical sham that has gone by its name far too long.

Occupy Wall Street’s General Assembly urged “the people of the world…create a process to address the problems we face, and generate solutions accessible to everyone.”

These solutions are impossible under the domain of private capital’s 1%. The un-regulated markets of obsessive profit seeking are like un-protected sex. Even at their best they can produce unwanted results and at their worst they may produce terminal disease, which is what present global market forces have created. We cannot opt for a temporary remission via private profiteering which carries the disease; the 99% need to consider the abolition of minority dominated market forces and the beginning of democratic control of global resources, in the interest of all the earth’s inhabitants and not just a tiny group of multi billionaires. In an alleged modern, civilized, digitized society, it’s time we end stupid mythology about hard work earning people incredible sums of money that bring them the power of gods.

How do people come by such wealth? How many packages must they deliver, students must they teach, patrons must they serve, miles must they drive, wounds must they bandage, legal briefs must they submit, floors must they sweep, children must they raise, to end up with a billion dollars? Ten billion dollars?

What sense does it make to have one human living on millions of dollars a week while billions of humans live on less than five dollars a day?

The imperial rulers maintain dominance only by virtue of military might. Without massive murder power such as was exercised in Libya and is threatened in Syria and Iran, they would already be gone and as global opposition grows that power will soon not be enough to dominate the planet. Newer threats to powerful nations like China and Russia only show the near dementia of rulers nearing the end of their reign.

But the madness of the diminishing cult, with nuclear weapons at their disposal, threatens our future, just as humanity shows signs of coming together to create a different world of peace, social justice and protection for the environment that sustains all mankind. Leaving control of social wealth in private hands would be suicide for the human race.

Henry Ford once said, “It is well enough that the people of the nation do not understand our banking and monetary system, for if they did, I believe there would be a revolution before tomorrow morning.” He was correct. We need to understand that system and transform it by creating federal, state and municipal public banks, owned, administered and investing according to the wishes of the people whose funds are held by these institutions. We cannot rely on some wealthy people investing according to moral principles unknown to most of their class. They should be taxed and their money democratically invested in the societies that created this wealth in the first place. We need to create a sensible maximum wage and a higher minimum wage that guarantees survival, with a social safety net that allows no one to go hungry, experience untended illness, or live without shelter.

There is far more than enough wealth to house, feed, clothe and benefit everyone, if we simply stop squandering that wealth on minorities who use it to perpetuate a system that is bringing us closer to social disaster. Capitalism is in a crisis which will get much worse before we make it better. In order to do that we need to end inequality and begin to recognize that the survival of one is dependent on the survival of all.

Happy New Year. 2012 could be a big one.

When I reflected on what I had witnessed and learned while researching in 120 countries (as well as at the World Bank and many UN agencies) and filming in 69 of them, I let commonsense be my guide. It led me to the conclusion that capitalism was not of itself the problem. It was the short-sighted and stupid way Western capitalism was managed.

Now I’ll put some flesh on that bone.

By the early 1970’s truly informed development experts were drawing attention to the fact that our one small planet was divided into two worlds – the Rich World containing about 20% of humankind (and known in development jargon as the North), and the Poor World containing about 80% of humankind (and known in development jargon as the South).

In the Poor World an estimated 15 million children under five were dying each year from malnutrition and related and easily preventable diseases such as diahorrea, measles and whooping cough – in a word poverty, abject poverty. And an estimated 300 million more were born brain damaged because of malnutrition in the wombs of their mothers. But those statistics told only a part of the story. The majority of the human inhabitants of Planet Earth were living on the margins of life, without some and in many cases all of the basic necessities for life – shelter, adequate nutrition, clean water, health care, education and work/job opportunities. On each and every continent I asked the poorest parents what was the one thing they most wanted. This was before the age of the mobile telephone and I expected many of them to say a television or some such gadget. What they all said in their various ways echoed one of the poorest Indian women. Her answer was, “Education for my children so they don’t have to live like animals as we do.”

The rich nations were creating their wealth by selling goods and services. It followed that if this wealth creating process was to have a sustainable future and Rich World citizens were to enjoy ever rising material standards of living as promised by their politicians, the global market place needed more and more consumers with the purchasing power to buy what the Rich World nations had to sell.

If the managers of Western capitalism (corporate chiefs, bankers and politicians) had not been short-sighted and stupid, they would have said to themselves something like the following. “If we don’t now invest in the development of the poor of the world and bring them progressively into the market place with purchasing power, we are going to run out customers in the numbers needed to buy what we have to sell in order to sustain our system.”

If the necessary investment had been made over 10, 15 and even 20 years, (it would have needed that amount of time in order to guarantee that the money and other development assistance provided could be absorbed and put to best use with minimum corruption), victory in the war against global poverty and underdevelopment – the only war that matters – would have been assured. To give just one example… The disastrous population drift from the rural areas where there was a future to the urban centres where there was not and is not a future for many of the drifters could have been halted and even reversed.

Making the investment needed on the necessary scale would have meant that the investing Rich World nations would not have grown so rapidly and their citizens would have had to accept a little less in the way of ever rising material standards of living, but that would have been a small price to pay for giving Western capitalism a sustainable future and all of our children wherever they live the prospect of a future worth having. (Whereas today they do not have a future worth having).

Instead of starting down the road to making capitalism work for the benefit of all in global terms, the system’s Western managers opted to keep things going by flooding the Rich World with credit cards to enable its citizens to live beyond their means and get deeper and deeper into debt. “I need” was replaced with “I want”. (My working class father used to say to me, “Boy, if we can’t afford it, we don’t look in the shop window.”)

There was bound to come a time when Rich World citizens simply could not afford to go on buying on the scale needed to keep Western consumer capitalism going.

Then, partly to fuel debt-driven consumer and government spending, the greed-driven, totally irresponsible bankers drove the final nail into Western capitalism’s coffin by playing their leveraging games, producing debt instruments with a face value of hundreds of trillions of U.S. dollars but which were not backed and supported by real assets. (A good friend of mine was the senior risk manager for one of the world’s biggest banks headquartered in London. She told me that for five years she and her team tried to warn top management that leveraging with Mickey Mouse instruments was creating a catastrophe, but top management didn’t want to listen. It was focused only on bonuses).

If Jeremy Clarkson had said that banking chiefs should have been taken out and shot in front of their families, I would have smiled and said to myself, “If only.”

And I would not have bailed out the banks with taxpayers’ money. I would have let them go bust. (The first rule of capitalism is supposed to be that if you get it wrong you go bust). But before making that decision public I (as prime minister) would have said to my people something like the following. “Don’t panic. The money we would have to put into bailing out reckless and irresponsible banks will instead be used to create a new national bank which, rather like the High Street banks of the old days, will exist only to serve the needs of their customers.”

There’s no question that banking chiefs were short-sighted, greedy and stupid, but… They were not the architects of what future historians will call the crash of Western capitalism. They, the architects, were the politicians who deregulated the banks and financial markets. The leading architect was Britain’s Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. On 27 October 1986, she initiated the “Big Bang” in the City of London, the sudden deregulation of the banks and financial markets. In the name of “financial liberalism” she truly believed that markets would work better, more efficiently, if they were free of rules and restrictions. In her view millions of decisions made every day by traders in a free market would be better for all of us than decisions that had to be made with reference to rules and regulations drawn up by committees of the great and the good.

Though I might be exaggerating to make a point and may be misrepresenting her to some extent, she seemed to be saying, “We need not bother too much with our old industries and ways of creating wealth, the banks and the markets will do it for us.”

Events were to prove that she could not have been more naive and more wrong, but before they did American presidents starting with Ronald Reagan had followed her lead.

My understanding of the situation today can be summarized as follows. The debts of Western governments are so big that no Western country will be able to generate the growth and so the money needed to repay them. On that basis I can see only two scenarios for the future.

One is that in order to repay the debts, governments slash expenditure across the board, cutting, cutting and cutting back massively on budgets for everything including state pensions and social welfare benefits and services. Unemployment rises to unthinkable levels and living standards plunge to unacceptable levels. Eventually the citizens revolt and violence escalates. What passes for democracy is shut down and martial law is established. Orwell’s 1984 finally arrives. (Soon after Edward Heath ceased to be prime minister, my wife and I had lunch with him. I asked him what his biggest fear for the future was. I expected it to be related to global poverty because he had been a member of the Brandt Commission which studied it. His reply, calm in delivery and matter of fact in tone, was, “That Britain will become the first police state in the democratic world.”)

In the other scenario all debts, including mortgages on homes, are written off and we all start again.

By definition a re-start would have to be based on a rock-solid commitment to fairness with a real intention to make capitalism work for the benefit of all.

This idiot is in quite good company. American Martin Weiss is the founder of the Weiss Rating Agency (WRA). In his latest presentation he makes the following claims about his agency’s astonishing success in predicting economic disasters of the past 40 years, a claim which is confirmed by all the major American newspapers and economic journals.

Months in advance WRA warned about the S&L crisis of the 1980’s; the great insurance company failures of the 1990’s; plus the great “Tech Wreck” of the early 2000’s.

WRA was the only firm in the world to warn of the financial crisis of 2008 more than a year in advance, specifically naming nearly every major company that later collapsed.

Today Martin Weiss says this:

Barring a miracle, an historic, world-changing event is about to end the American way of life as we know it. This monumental event will plunge vast numbers of families into the nightmare of poverty, homeless and hunger. In a worst case scenario you will see soaring crime, the confiscation of property, the suspension of civil rights, and even the enforcement of martial law by the U.S. military.

The world-changing event he is anticipating is a decision by China to stop buying U.S. debt, which will mean, he says, that America will no longer be able to borrow money; and that, he adds, will see the beginning of “America’s Financial Doomsday”.

My own biggest fear which I have been expressing to friends in private for a number of years is that the unfolding economic crisis may take us all the way to World War 111. It could happen for two related reasons. One is the need of governments to deflect the attention of their own people away from the mess within. The other is the need to have an outside party to blame. There’s a case for saying that some American politicians are already setting up China for blame.

We shall see…

Footnote

European plans to bring in tough budget controls are irrelevant, even a farce. They are designed to stop the present unfolding catastrophe from happening again, but they won’t do anything to solve the present debt crisis. European leaders are shutting the stable door after the horse has bolted.

Through the museum, community projects, fairs, workshops and media, CEDICAM educates the public and campesinos, or small scale farmers, about the history of the Mixteca’s land, belief systems, traditions, architecture and agriculture and how they can help remedy current problems. They promote the use of traditional and appropriate technologies (sustainable and affordable tech) such as reforestation, development of corn seeds through selective breeding, sustainable water and soil preservation techniques, green composting, and milpas, an organic agricultural system that produces large yields and mixes a variety of crops, usually including maize (corn), beans and squash. CEDICAM also works with groups such as Witness for Peace to share knowledge with visitors that can benefit communities in other parts of the world.

For 10 days in September I was a member of one of the delegations to Oaxaca organized by Witness for Peace (WfP). Our itinerary was loaded with experiences like our meeting at CEDICAM, focusing on global trade, food sovereignty, migration, indigenous rights and agro-ecology (the application of ecological principles to agricultural techniques). WfP is an international grassroots organization founded in 1983 in response to U.S. Government-supported violence in Nicaragua perpetrated by Contra soldiers. They advocate peace, justice and sustainable economies by changing harmful U.S. Government and corporate policies. The WfP Oaxaca office opened in the Summer of 2006. During this period state violence against striking teachers seeking living wages and improved working conditions led to many deaths and human rights abuses.

Carlin Christy and Tony Macias, our delegation’s WfP guides and interpreters, also shared a wealth of information about the histories of Mexico, WfP and corporate globalization as well as practical skills to improve our group’s cohesion and functionality such as anti-oppressive practice and consensus decision making. All of the delegates also had much knowledge and a diversity of experience to contribute to these discussions and to our conversations with Oaxacan farmers and activists.

As explained by Eleazar, Mixteca means “place of clouds” because long ago it was an environment with regular rainfall and lush vegetation. Today it’s one of the poorest regions in Mexico and one of the most eroded areas in the world. The importation of goats, sheep, pigs and construction methods by the Spanish led to mass deforestation and soil erosion. More recently, some farmers use chemical fertilizers, pesticides and machinery that damages and compacts soil leading to increased crop failures, water runoff and worsened erosion. Besides the ecological damage, a devastated local economy made worse by unjust free trade policies has forced many young farmers to emigrate. Eleazar and CEDICAM’s goal is to provide the community with hopeful alternatives to preserve the land and natural resources so that people don’t have to leave for the U.S. and elsewhere to support themselves and their families.

Before our arrival at CEDICAM we met with a variety of allied groups based in Oaxaca doing equally important and beneficial work on related issues but with differences in focus and approach. The first organization we visited was an NGO called Services for an Alternative Education (EDUCA). According to Miguel Angel Vasquez de la Rosa, a founding member of EDUCA, their focus is on two main goals, democratization of Oaxacan communities and the defense of rights of disenfranchised Oaxacans. One of their projects is “Our Rights Are Born From Our Roots” a campaign to train and organize communities through forums and media on the issue of rights; namely, self-determination, rights to land and resources, political rights of women and rights to education.

Another project, “The Initiative for Peace and Justice”, is a partnership with allied groups to create a truth commission for state-sanctioned crimes against activists. Miguel also shared recent data about Oaxaca State: its population is about 3.8 million people, it has over 500 municipalities, 16 indigenous groups and 8 major geographical regions. It’s the second poorest Mexican state after Chiapas with high child malnutrition and maternal death rates and approximately 76% living in poverty. The majority of work in Oaxaca is connected to agriculture and many farmers lost their livelihoods after the implementation of NAFTA in the 90s. He estimates that today about 60% of youth entering the job market are unemployed, forcing many to emigrate or enter the black market.

The next morning we visited Zaira de la Rosa Jiminez, Martha Miranda and Pete Noll of Puente a la Salud Comunitaria, a group promoting food sovereignty through cultivation and distribution of amaranto, or amaranth crops. Amaranth is a plant related to quinoa and is indigenous to Asia and Mesoamerica (in fact, it is one of Mesoamerica’s oldest crops). Puente views amaranth as an ideal crop to help overcome the problem of malnutrition. It’s higher in protein than rice, wheat and corn, contains more fiber and less carbohydrates and is gluten-free. Amaranth is a practical and affordable crop because it’s highly drought-resistant, easily harvested, grows quickly and is easy to cook. After having had a chance to try amaranth in the forms of breakfast cereals, snack bars, and drinks, I would add that it’s also delicious.

That afternoon we met with farmers in the milpa system where the amaranth plants are grown with corn, zucchini, and pata de leon, a type of red flower used in Day of the Dead celebrations. At the end of the day we travelled to the library in Mazaltepec to meet with town authorities, campesinos, mothers, and their families. We discussed our respective backgrounds and their struggles as a community including protecting crops from GMOs, inability to compete with cheap subsidized corn from the U.S., and how that has contributed to economic problems forcing people in the community to emigrate.

Following Puente, we joined a large contingent from Red Autonoma para la Soberania Alimentaria (RASA), an autonomous network of people working for food sovereignty through training workshops, urban gardening and sharing of knowledge and resources. Representatives including Aerin Dunford, Lydia Zarate Ubieta and Jorge Narvaes Perez showed us some of the current projects of RASA members such as mushroom cultivation, a rooftop garden, a cornfield and apricot orchard on the city outskirts, and even invited us into the home of some of the RASA members where we had a feast featuring some of the best tortillas and oyster mushrooms I’ve ever tasted.

From there we returned to the central district of Oaxaca City where we met with Wilfred Mendoza, a member of the board of directors of the Union of Organizations of the Sierra Juarez, Oaxaca (UNOSJO). They’re a prominent social organization which promotes sustainable economies, self-determination and respect for indigenous culture through media, technical assistance, fairs, educational workshops and conflict resolution for rural landowners. Wilfred sees agro-ecology as an ancient technology whose resurgence is essential for food sovereignty and a fundamental part of defending indigenous rights, a view shared by Beatriz Salinas and Esperanza Pilar Chagoya Minguer of the Center for Indigenous Rights Flor y Canto, whom we visited the next day.

Flor y Canto is a human rights center that promotes indigenous rights with a focus on women’s empowerment and the protection of natural resources through education, denouncement of rights violations, legal defense, and support of allied groups such as the People’s Committee for the Defense of Water. They see an extreme polarity between indigenous cultures that care for the earth and a capitalist system that commodifies and destroys the earth. Many laws are dictated by money and capital so one of Flor y Canto’s roles is to create spaces where solidarity and humanity are respected. By helping indigenous communities obtain water through well construction projects and legal defense of water rights, they’re also addressing the problem of emigration. The national water commission ConAgua charges for water at price levels beyond what many campesinos can afford. During drought years such as in 2006, waves of migrations occurred because farmers couldn’t access enough water to irrigate crops.

After our delegation’s meeting with CEDICAM, we travelled further out to the countryside to San Pedro Coxcaltepec where we had an opportunity to stay with a local family of subsistence farmers dealing with many of the issues we learned about throughout the previous week. While there we had an opportunity to speak to town elders, learn about different aspects of the local culture, learn more about the work involved in managing a milpa, as well as participate in the work by shoveling and mixing green compost. This was an especially valuable segment of the delegation because it gave us a glimpse into the daily experience of Oaxacan campesinos, revealed a sense of the beauty and challenges of life in the Mixteca, and gave us time to bond with the family. It’s one thing to read about struggles of farmers or even hear about them through allied advocacy groups, but to meet campesinos who express their concerns directly while sharing their hospitality (as we also did with Puente and RASA) is an empathic experience creating a personal connection to the issues we came to Oaxaca to learn about. This will undoubtedly inspire all of us in the delegation to make use of the knowledge passed on to us in our own lives and to share it with others. Given the current political and economic situation in America and most of the world, strategies for food sovereignty, education and community organizing will be increasingly important for all of us.

Two weeks after returning from the delegation I was at the Occupy Seattle demonstration where I had a chance encounter with a protester attending the rally because he was “tired of getting screwed by government.” I told him I was tired of everyone getting screwed by transnational corporations and financial institutions backed up by corrupt governments. He went on to say “Obama cares more about Mexicans than the American people,” to which I replied “I recently got back from Mexico where I heard firsthand accounts of how our government and Wall Street harms Mexican workers as much as American workers if not more. They wouldn’t need to migrate if they could support their families back home.” Rather than argue, he muttered “Well, they’ve been screwing all of us in the 99%…” before wandering back into the crowd, which wasn’t a bad outcome but sort of a letdown. I was ready to help him understand in greater detail how and why immigration and mass unemployment are both symptoms of neo-liberal policies at the core of economic crises in America, Mexico and around the world. It’s possible he simply didn’t feel like debating, but perhaps someone with a common but erroneous view that Mexicans (presumably immigrants) are a source of their problems was, in fact, with a few words and widened context, able to accept that they’re as much victims of an unjust system as ourselves.

Amidst the masses in Westlake Park, consisting of a diversity of ages, ethnicities, and socio-economic backgrounds, I visualized the Occupation Movement strengthening their solidarity, not only within separate communities but with the global 99% uniting against the wealthiest 1% who benefit most from the current system and are the true source of the most pressing social-economic-environmental problems of our time. If this were to happen we might stand a chance to ensure a better world for future generations. La lucha sigue! (The struggle continues!)

The above story sums up the actions of politicians thus far as they respond to the economic crisis engulfing capitalism worldwide.  The politicians are unwilling, unable, or both, to tackle the causes of the problem which are the lack of demand as a result of unemployment, cuts in real wages and soaring energy prices, with profits rising by 700% since June 2011. Instead, they continue to pump more and more billions into the banks, with the gap between the poor and the super-rich that lies at the core of the problem forever widening.

Jeffrey Sachs, a well-known American economist, interviewed on BBC radio 4 Today programme (October15, 2011) about his book The Price of Civilisation, made some very telling remarks:

International capital at the top is mobile, and is running circles around our government: this is the essence of globalisation.

Of course, this clearly implies that democracy itself is being subverted and corrupted.  The ordinary citizen is no longer able to effect change through the ballot box.  Is it any wonder that people are taking to the streets in the U.S and Europe, in actions that mirror the Arab spring to demand that they should be heard?

He continued:

One major Chairman of the Board of one of the world’s largest companies put it to me accurately a few months ago when he said to me: You have to understand that the big companies do not feel any national loyalty anymore, we are beyond that, we can pay ourselves gargantuan compensation packages that are offensive to the social norms of the host country because we do not feel part of the host country anymore

There you have it; judge the bosses of these global corporations by what they say and do.

He praised Northern European countries thus:

The countries that have done the best [under globalisation] are the social democracies of Northern Europe. They tax themselves heavily but then governments really perform, it is honest, it is not corrupted, and delivering services that the public want, and it is creating and ensuring an inclusive society, not one that is divided between the very top and the rest.

It is clearly possible for fairness, fair taxes, social justice and capitalism to exist together; more than that, these attributes are good for the economy too.  It also does not consign a large number of people to the scrapheap of the unemployed with its attendant misery and its detrimental effect on community cohesion.  Norway, for example, has an unemployment rate of 3.6%, compared to the U.S. — 9.1%, the UK — 8.1%.  All of that and the Scandinavian countries also have one of the best welfare provisions in the western world.

The demonstrations and the resistance worldwide to the immorality and the policies of governments in cahoots with global corporations and the “moneymen” are gaining in strength, and will eventually force politicians to address the real question; namely, that of reforming and controlling this corrupt form of capitalism.